Chapter Text
The Temple is on fire. But it is worse than that. It is worse because the Temple is burning and that is not the worst thing happening.
It’s like the Force itself is on fire, too. When Ti reaches for it, she chokes on death, like smoke. Billowing, growing thicker, more acrid. It smells like burning bodies, and she cannot tell if the smell is coming from the Temple, or the Force, or both.
But she has no time to find out because the Temple is on fire and the Force is burning and behind her are the eight bright lights of seven younglings and their creche-master. The children are tired and, too young to comprehend what is happening, numb. Nala Tahl, carrying one of her youngest charges, is hanging on by a thread. She understands too well what the choking smoke in the Force is; why the lights of the Temple grow dimmer and colder and the fire in the Force blazes hotter, scalding those reaching for it.
Shaak Ti does not reach for it, she cannot feel its pain and still focus. She reaches deep into herself and pushes on, guiding the young creche-master and the stumbling children down a deceptively quiet hallway. Dust stirs at their movements in the formerly unused passage winding behind the Temple walls. The Temple has many passages, some more secret than others, that were rarely or no longer used. Shaak Ti doesn’t expect it to save them, they cannot stay in the passage with the Temple on fire.
Nala crumples to her knees with a cry at the back of the silent group. Shaak reacts before she thinks, pulling the younglings behind her with a surge of the burning Force, ignoring the burning pain lancing up her spine and into her head at the touch. She looks for the lasers shining in the air that cut the other woman down but the passage behind her is empty. Empty of the familiar, safe, deadly, white armored men killing her people.
Nala staggers to her feet, her face barely visible in the faint light of the passage, but Shaak Ti can sense the girl is crying, her pain only feeding the terrible searing of the Force.
“My… master…” Nala Tahl chokes out, scooping up the child she’d dropped as she fell with trembling arms. She settles the whimpering Nautolan’s head against her shoulder automatically as the young one flails her underdeveloped limbs helplessly.
Shaak understands. The young knight felt her former master die, whatever was left of their padawan bond being torn apart too suddenly and remorselessly, as though someone had yanked out her old padawan braid by the roots. But she cannot give Nala time to mourn, cannot stop to mourn herself. Everyone is dying, everyone is dead, but they are not dead yet and that comes with a responsibility to do their best not to die.
With a silent motion for the younglings to follow behind her, Shakk Ti hurries down the passage, leading the group again. Nala follows at the back, and if she is holding the youngling just a bit too tightly and her comforting shushing is interspersed by sobs, it does not slow the desperate group.
Shaak Ti finds the door she has been looking for. She had not known before where it was, only where she’d heard it should be, but it is unmistakable in the blue shadows of the silent passage. Black metal crusted in delicate twisting frost is set into a large, arcing doorway and opens at a touch from Shaak’s hand and a breath of the screaming Force.
A rush of moving air spreads into the still hallway, rustling Shaak’s thick robes. Behind the imposing togruta master several of the younglings shiver.
“It’s too cold,” a little twilek yelps as Shaak Ti moves into the dark opening, staring with wide eyes at the black passage beyond.
Ti turns back and picks up the youngling, tucking her under her outer robes.
“Then we must keep moving quickly,” she replies gently, and calmly. It is tempting to reach for the burning of the Force to combat the cold of the centuries-undisturbed hall leading through the depths of the Temple, but Shaak knows the Darkness there would only kill her quicker.
“Come,” still carrying the youngling, she sets off again, slowing her long strides a moment later for the stumbling, struggling children behind her. At a nudge of the Force, the door closes behind them extinguishing what little gray light the other passage had offered.
Several of the children gasp and Shaak stops at their untempered spikes of fear.
“I’m sorry little ones,” she forces herself to say softly, calmly though she feels the searing need to keep moving, away from the burning and the screaming death in the Temple. “We must close the door,” her voice echoes strangely in the hall, as though it is entirely made of metal not aged stone, and is smaller than she saw by the dim light of the Temple passage. “But you have learned to feel the Force even in the darkness have you not? Can you feel me, young ones?” she does not want them reaching into the Force but she broadcasts herself into it, allowing them to feel her presence around them as they clumsily open themselves up to it. “Simply follow the feel of me. The Force and I will guide you and all will be well.”
She feels their understanding in the Force, how several of them latch on to her Force presence as they might cling to her skirts. In the creche, such clinging would be discouraged, but Shaak does not brush away their pressing presences swirling with untempered emotion, confusion, and roiling fear at what they can feel of the Force, instead, she begins walking again. They follow behind her meekly. Silent but she can sense many of them still trembling from both fear and the cold.
They continue down, shuffling and invisible like ghosts in the freezing dark, surrounded by a profound and deepening silence broken only by occasional sniffling.
The younglings begin to tire, their pace slowing further, but Shaak knows she can not let them stop. When the youngling she is holding starts to doze off, Shaak puts her down and makes her walk despite some teary protests, picking up the child she senses is the most tired and carrying him.
Then the pitch-dark hall, which had been sloping downward, levels suddenly. Shaak stumbles slightly and her soft boots hit the flat floor with a clang as it changes from stone to metal.
“Stop,” she tells the exhausted younglings quietly. Putting the young boy she’s been carrying down, she steps forward, hand stretching out before her until she feels a rusting metal grate. A moment later she realizes she can see it; a black crisscrossing of lines against a barely lighter gray. They have reached one of the old Coruscant waterways, nearly as old as the Temple itself, now used most often by smugglers or converted into speeder-train routes.
“Stand back,” her voice sounds harsh against the cold silence they’ve walked in for so long. With a hiss her lightsaber ignites, blazing green, blinding in its sudden brilliance. Several of the nearest younglings stumble back. The little nautolan Nala holds buries her head in the creche-master’s shoulder, aquatic eyes unable to adjust quickly to the surge of light.
Shaak Ti cuts through the grate with a few deft strokes, leaving orange ends glowing cherry red in the darker blackness after she deactivates the ‘saber. One of the younglings whimpers at the loss of the vibrant light, but none of them say a word. Too cold and too tired, Shaak guesses as she waits for the molten edges to cool before letting the children near it.
After a few moments, Shaak ducks through the opening, carefully lowering her towering montrals to avoid brushing the still-hot metal. One by one she carefully lifts the children through the hole. Some of them are trembling from within throughout their whole bodies and the others are limp as she carries them and stand silently after she sets them down.
She pushes her concerns away. The Temple is burning, the Jedi are dying, the children are freezing, but they are alive and all she can do right now is try to keep them that way. She must keep them that way.
Shaak takes the nautolan girl, still more tadpole than humanoid at four years old, to allow Nala to slip through the now nearly invisible gap, then hands her back and cautiously takes the lead again.
The barely gray darkness around the little group hides the features of the waterway. Shaak draws back after a searing brush of the Force and reaches out with her other senses. She smells no water but can tell from the bouncing sounds of the group’s breathing that there is some sort of channel falling off to her right, probably where the water once flowed.
She can hear the echoes reverberating far ahead and, stretching out her left arm, can feel the pockmarked and rusted metal of the wall they have just come through.
As long as they stay close to the wall, they will not have to worry about the dropoff of the channel.
“Keep a hand on the wall and follow me,” she instructs the little ones gently, hearing several of the children catch their breaths as they grope for the wall.
Once all the children have stopped shuffling in the darkness trying to find the guiding wall, Shaak Ti continues. “You can all still feel me in the Force? Good. Follow the feeling of me.”
She does not need to reach out and touch the wall beside her, she can feel its unwavering, straight stillness, so folds her hands behind her and strides forward. Behind her, the stumbling children and tiring creche master, still carrying the young nautolan, hurry along as well, trying to ignore the pressing, featureless black and focus on the Jedi Master’s calm guidance.
The sounds were much the same as they had been before. Shuffling steps, stumbling and quiet, an occasional break in the monotonous noise as someone staggers or trips. Sniffling from cold, tiredness, and fear with the occasional whimper, both sounds get more frequent as time passes in the dark. The breathing behind her becomes louder, too, working its way up to panting from several of the young ones. The sounds echo less in the larger space, and Shaak has to strain her senses, listening intently to the noises reverberating in her montrals to get a sense of the surrounding space.
The smells had changed, she notices. The first hall had been dusty, smelling of dry, crumbled age. The second had been strangely clean, cold, and metallic. Now the smells of Coruscant’s underworld met them, faint, but growing stronger as the waterway rose, sloping gently upward; grease, rust, the sickening sweetness of rot, and the overpowering bitterness of decay.
They simply kept moving.
The little twilek girl stumbles and, exhausted, falls to her knees unable to regain her balance. She scrambles up but does not move forward. Just barely, General Ti could hear the sniffles of her silent crying and sense her trembling form.
Her heart aches for the youngling as she silently halts the group. She is exhausted and cold, can see nothing in the dark, and feels too much from the Force. She is confused, and scared and is trying so very hard not to cry.
Shaak’s heart aches to pick the girl up and comfort her, but she knows she cannot. Nala’s knees are almost buckling now that they have stopped; the human woman’s full-grown strength is worn out from carrying the nautolan child who cannot walk. Shaak sweeps past the silent weary children and the crying little girl to scoop the nautolan girl out of Nala’s arms. She rests her hand on the twilek’s shoulder just long enough the feel her trembling breath slow, before moving back to the head of the group.
A humanoid boy with a kindly nudge of the Force takes the twilke girl’s hand and the group starts moving again. They are slow, but they are moving.
They continue to grow slower.
Though the dark world around them does not change, Shaak can somehow feel the nearness of dawn. Above, the black of the sky will be giving away to the barest hints of gray.
If she lingers on the thought she can see it from years of memories of returning to the Temple from a mission so late it was early. Seeing the spires black against the soft gray, pinpricked by windows of light, high above and untouched by the incessant light of the city below. She would be thinking about going to bed, pulling down all the curtains in her quarters so that the sun would not wake her, making a cup of rich, bitter cocoa, curling up on her couch, and falling asleep before drinking half of it. She would have woken to find that Plo had come in and covered her with a blanket without her noticing; he was the only one who could ever sneak up on her.
The smoke will be hiding the spires from the early gray light, so Shaak Ti does not linger on the thought.
The child in her arms grows heavy as the group’s pace grows ever slower.
Finally, the echoes of space around the numb, stumbling group bring back the fuzzy outline of something cut into the wall, slanting upwards, undulating instead of flat. Stairs, Shaak recognizes, they have found stairs.
She stops the group again and they stand panting in the darkness. She cannot let them rest for too long, though, she knows. They will cool and stiffen, making it harder to keep moving. Once everyone has just about caught their breaths, she speaks.
“There are stairs to my left, we must get up out of here. Follow me carefully.”
They start moving again despite trembling breaths, aching muscles, and still-burning lungs. The stairs are metal and clang at every step. There is no quiet way to climb them in the air stinking of rust with the flaking metal skin of the handrail rough under their fingertips.
Soon calves are burning and lungs are scraping roughly with each breath. The stairs will very quickly be too much for them, Shaak knows. She can feel it in the trembling muscles and shaking hands of the children behind her. The younglings have truly reached their limit now, soon they will simply sit down and go no further. She and Nala cannot carry all of them.
Then the little one in her arms pipes up sleepily.
“The light. ‘See the light?”
Shaak Ti does not freeze because they must keep moving, but something like frozen glass drops in her stomach and shatters. She reaches out with the screaming, crying Force, trying to feel the child’s warmth, ready to pour her own waning strength into making the girl’s heart continue beating. But the girl is still warm. Her breaths are even and her heart beats steadily. She is not succumbing to the cold and slipping away.
A moment later Shaak sees it too, her straining predator’s eyes picking up what the girl’s ocean dweller's vision has already detected, gray light filtering into the darkness. Up ahead, somewhere, is a light. It cannot be daylight, it is still too early for that and they are still far too deep in Coruscant’s underlevels to see it anyway. It is white and manufactured, but the sight of it gives the group new strength as they move toward its source and all the children realize it’s there.
Three flights of steps up and the group stands panting before a simple, hinged metal door. Around its edges white brilliance seeps to meet light-starved eyes and glint on dirty faces. In basic script barely discernible in the near blackness around them are painted the words “DLTS Track 74.8 Maintenance Tunnel 23” and beneath that “Authorized Personnel Only”.
The door is predictably locked. The younglings back up as Shaak Ti unlocks it with a deft cut of her searing blade, cradling the nautolan girl against her chest, then kicks it open. For a moment, all anyone can see is white, the light overwhelming their darkness-attuned senses, sending flashes of pain along the wires of their optical nerves. The nautolan buries her sensitive eyes in Shaak’s shoulder with a whimper.
General Ti blinks rapidly, feeling her pupils retract and adjust. Then the new area comes into focus. In truth, it is not all that brightly lit. Evenly spaced rings of white lights encircle the metal tube they are standing in, with about 25-30 ft between each ring shedding just enough light to see by, but not much more. The limping, blinking group moves out onto a narrow raised walkway parallel to the anti-grav tracks in the bottom of the tube, fingers and toes tingling with the sudden warmth generated by the track’s anti-gravity field. They have found an underground train track, and, bless the Force, Shaak sees a maintenance lift fifteen feet to the left across the tracks.
All they have to do is get there.
Nala Tahl looks up at her with tired eyes as Shaak Ti hands her the nautolan child back.
“We must cross,” the master explains shortly.
She tugs at the screaming Force, gritting her teeth and it churns like crushed gravel through veins, scraping and grinding. A graceful leap carries her across the tracks, swishing her skirts as she straightens and faces the little group across the gap.
Closing her eyes against the howling flames in the Force, Shaak reaches out a hand, gathering the whipping energy around the little twilek girl. Space and reality shift as the girl slowly rises in the air. A moment later another presence presses into the moving pulsing Force, Nala cutting herself on razor-sharp icicles of loss as she joins with Shaak Ti, wrapping her energy around the girl and pulling her through open air across the tracks.
The girl settles gently on the other platform beside Shaak, staggering then sinking to her knees as gravity suddenly reapplies itself, almost as though angry at being defied.
Blinking away rising tears as a scorching breath of the Force lashes out at her, Shaak wraps her will around the next child, pulling him through thin air to her side.
Then the next, and the next.
At one point, the humanoid boy tries to join the effort, pushing through the lapping flames and icy spikes to pull at the next child, soft, pale hand extended in concentration. With a gentle nudge, Shaak pushes him out of communion with the Force even as another scathing lash of pain burns in her mind and heart. His connection to the Force is so strong and so pure, but he is too young to handle this cutting, bleeding fire.
Finally, she levitates the nautolan girl back into her arms as Nala breathes in a shaky breath and, supported by the Force, flies across the gap and lands trembling.
The group shuffles across the chalky duracrete to the lift door. There is an electro-lock on its operating pad. Shaak lays a red hand on it and pushes the clawing Force into its mechanisms, flowing in energy through it until she feels it relent and call the lift.
Nala has already withdrawn from the Force and Shaak too releases her tight grasp. The pain of her constant companion will only cloud her senses where she usually relies on it more heavily than sight. It has been many years since Shaak has been out of deep communion with the Force; without its constant humming in the background, its living presence in all things reaching eagerly to greet her as its child no matter where she wandered in the whole galaxy. As she has grown older, her connection only deepened.
Now she feels like a youngling herself as she ushers the children into the lift, everyone crowding in and blinking in the brightness of the lights set in the ceiling of the small space. General Ti leans against the corrugated metal wall of the lift and ignores the empty hole in her chest, the sudden stillness in the back of her mind. She must save the younglings and Nala, even without the Force.
The lift begins to rise.
It is quiet inside as breaths even and exhausted younglings begin to drift off, leaning against the walls of the lift and their creche-master. The nautolan girl in her arms slips into sleep, her steady heartbeat echoing up Shaak Ti’s lekku and into her montrals, a deep, comforting rhythm. The near-human boy and the twilek girl fall asleep leaning against each other, his silvery white hair glistening against her reddish purple skin in the white light of the lift.
It is only now, in the cool quiet of the lift, that Shaak realizes that she smells like smoke. She swallows back rising bile in her throat and ignores the heavy, sickening scent of it just as she ignores the ever-screaming Force.
The rise, according to her rough internal clock, lasts around half an hour, enough time for even Nala to drift off and jerk awake several times. Long enough for them to have risen nearly to the top layers of Coruscant, probably at the bases of the rising skyscrapers that glimmer silver and pierce the sky like knives.
The lift stops with a hissing jolt that shakes all the dozing younglings awake, several with panicked gasps and a wincing surge of fear in the Force before Nala and Shaak brush it away and wrap the children in comfort. The door slides open with a soft whir on the opposite side than they’d entered, revealing a plastoid and plastisteel hall, much newer than the tunnels they’d left behind below. The building is obviously in use but currently closed, as they usher the children out of the lift. Recessed overnight lights dimly shine along the walls and floors, the occasional cleaning droid whirring by without the slightest reaction to the presence of the fugitive Jedi. They pass several closed doors, marked by painted labels in both basic and huttsese as offices or various maintenance departments.
Whatever level they are on, they are not high enough to be in the zones where everyone is expected to speak Basic as dictated by the preferences of Republic high society, Shaak notes as she leads the group, following exit signs and the faint directions she allows herself to carefully skim off the Force. They need to get out of the building before the day starts and the employees will be arriving in droves.
They come to a door with the word “exit” in basic and Huttsese flashing yellow and red. Nala reaches for the handle, but Shaak snatches her wrist before the flagging human woman can touch it. Nala had never been in the war trying to take a fortified building, so she had not realized the significance of the red-painted metal pieces on the hinges; not without a warning from the Force, which she did not have.
“Open it like that and an alarm will go off,” The Jedi Master replies to her younger counterpart’s questioning look. “Allow me.”
She passes the nautolan girl to the creche master, then once again withdraws her ‘saber, igniting it and using its light to closer examine the doorframe.
Her experienced eyes follow the nearly invisible wire along the edges of the old-fashioned door to the little red box perched above it. Making full use of her Togrutan height, Shaak Ti reaches up to the box and unclips the wire with a deft twist.
“Now we may go,” she gathers up the nautolan crechling once more. Nala scoops up the tired twilek girl as Shaak pushes the door open.
At first, the world outside of the building does not look all that different from the inside. The metal floors are grimier and occasionally rise or fall in ramps and steps. The metal walls vary in material and color as building connects to building and are occasionally pierced through with glowing windows or closed doors. The metal roofs vary as well and are decorated with bright neon or holo signs advertising a variety of items - including several that make Shaak grateful that the children are too tired to look anywhere but their feet - and strips of white lights bright enough to let them see the world around them. Whatever level they are on, it is apparently too low for sunlight or even open skies.
Eventually, the streets become a little busier, rough passers-by slipping up and down the street and appearing or disappearing out of and into shadowy side alleys. Through her exhaustion, Shakk Ti wraps her presence around her group, projecting a simple see-me-not command into the shrieking, wailing Force, surrounding them all with a slight cloud of anonymity. No one seems to notice them as they work their way down a wider thoroughfare with brightly lit shops and loud music playing despite the early hour, along with the lingering scent of alcohol and deathsticks drifting from every shadowed corner.
Too tired to think where to go, Shaak and her group are swept up in a sudden surge of people moving up a wide ramp in the street, rising to the first open-sky level, where glimpses of the starless blackness surrounding Coruscant can be caught between over-hanging rooftops, sky-bridges, and the already snarled speeder-lanes. The bustle and crowd grow immediately. A little togruta boy squeals as he tiredly drifts a little too far from the group and is nearly run over by a hurrying Frenk.
With both physical and Force nudges, Shaak Ti guides the stumbling group out of the crushing crowd and into the still safety of a dead-ended alley that stinks of refuse and yet more stale alcohol.
It is only then that she notices that Nala is trembling violently. The twilek she is carrying squirms out of the creche-master’s unresisting arms and hurries to cling to Shaak’s dress as Nala’s muscles spasm and her limply hanging hands twitch.
“Knight Tahl,” Shaak Ti lowers the nautolan child to be supported by her creche-mates and crosses to the unresponsive woman. Nala stares straight ahead, not seeming to see Shaak or the children or the rusted wall in front of her, simply continuing to shake.
“Is she prone to visions?” the Jedi Master turns to the little Jedi. “Has this happened before?”
“‘T’s not visions,” the silver-haired boy speaks up carefully, hugging the smaller Togrutan boy who had almost gotten run over with one arm. “It's her son. She feels his hurt.”
Shaak does not ask “Son?” despite her confusion. She pushes her questions away to focus on the more relevant information, letting everything else fall aside into the burning Force. Nala had some sort of Force bond with her son that allowed her to feel his pain. If he was a Temple child then… well, she is probably feeling her son’s death.
Almost as soon as Shaak has come to that conclusion, Nala crumples silently to the ground, her body simply folding up and falling to the grimy floor. She lays for a moment completely still, hands pressed to her stomach. General Ti drops to her knees beside her fellow Jedi and reaches out into the clawing, screaming Force to feel Nala’s pain.
Something cold wraps around Nala’s soul; a broken bond made of youth and hope threaded through freezing horror. The coldness moves slowly and silently in the Force, like oil lapping and sticking to Shaak’s soul as she wades into it reaching for the insensate creche-master before the woman is lost completely in the Force.
Nala gasps as Shaak’s presence wraps around her’s, insulating her from the creeping, sticky cold in the heart of the Force. Only then does Shaak realize that Nala hasn’t been breathing. A trembling hand wraps tightly around Shaak’s supporting arm, Nala digging her fingernails into the older Jedi’s flesh as her eyes fly open and she begins breathing again.
“Skywalker,” she hisses like it a curse.
Shaak Ti does not spare a moment to wonder about that either.
“Can you stand?” she asks the young woman, sensing the sniffling, shuffling crechelings behind her, frightened by the collapse of their caretaker.
Nala’s other hand clutches Shaak’s shoulder, wild green eyes staring into Shaak’s, squeezing hard enough that it hurts more than the nails still digging into her other arm.
“How… how could he?” the shaking woman demands halfway between a sob and a scream.
“Nala, focus, can you stand?” the Jedi Master asks again, pushing away questions and suspicions until a better time to deal with them. The sticky coldness in the otherwise screaming, burning Force is still around them, not breaking up or falling away from her soul in furious and disrupted eddies like the rest of the pain. This is something worse and more permanent than the Force burning with the deaths of its children and Shaak does not understand what it could be.
“Nala,” Shaak begins again, then there is another voice in the alley.
“Generla Ti?”
Heart in her throat and thundering in her montrals, Shaak Ti whirls, her sudden fear pouring into the force like gasoline onto a fire, the flames of its pain leaping into her soul, pressing into her body like blows.
A speeder is stopped at the mouth of the alley; a young boy in an oversized Senate uniform is at the control, staring at Shaak, Nala, and the younglings with wide eyes. Halfway out of the speeder, watching her hesitantly is a familiar face. Senator Bail Organa of Alderaan, perhaps the only politician Obi-Wan Kenobi had ever told her he trusted without reservation.
The dark man looks over the Jedi master, the still prone and trembling creche master, and the wide-eyed, exhausted children with a sharp glance. Then he finishes climbing out of the speeder and holds out both arms to Shaak.
“I can hide you,” he says simply and without hesitation. “You must get off the streets. The clones are hunting down Jedi all over Coruscant.” He glances back at the child piloting his speeder, then back to Shaak. “Will you come with me?”
Still supporting her fellow Jedi and reaching the ends of her own strength, Shaak Ti simply nods, praying to the bleeding Force that she is right to trust Bail Organa.