Mandalore: Deja vu All Over Again

The return to Telos was a long and difficult one. The Ebon Hawk was a wreck--it was a wonder we made it out of the inferno around the death of Malachor V. Of course, that Rand kid never fought half so hard as when it looked like his loser's luck had caught up with him, so maybe he finally made up for all the crashing with a serious display of skills. Or maybe Rand stopped pretending he was only half as good as he really was. I was too busy trying to pull the wreckage of the swoop off the Zabrak tech to know.

There had been a lot of yelling and getting tossed around during the escape, of course. Things were exploding, sparks and parts flew everywhere: just like the first time I'd escaped that forsaken rock. But this time we were departing victorious, even if we were too busy trying to keep the ship in one piece to celebrate. Bao-Dur's leg had been mangled in the initial crash and he was having a hell of a time trying to get to the failing engines so he could help Revan's astromech droid shore them up for escaping the planet's gravity. I was near the garage door, harnessed up and tethered to the ship at the top of the loading ramp, ready to go help pull the Exile in as soon as they found her.

Rand's a mess, but he did a hell of a piloting job and kept Davik's old crate flying as steady as he could. It was his girl on the line, after all. At least, that's how he thought of her. But no one could have avoided every obstacle tossed their way by the death throes of a whole planet, and suddenly the planet tagged us good. I got tossed forward and hit my head so hard against the frame of the garage door that I blacked out for a minute. When I came to and got out of my mangled helmet, I could see that the swoop had slipped its restraints and pinned that tech to the wall. The bloody smear, the angle of Bao-Dur's body--it's not something I like to remember. Comm was still working, so I got the blond sap to take over in the harness while the blind Sith girl and I tried to free Bao-Dur. Once we did it was obvious there was nothing to be done, not even, when we finally got her on board, by the Exile.

Worst of it was, that Zabrak didn't die until later. An honest death in that chaos would have been fitting enough for the one who built such a wondrous weapon. The power to create a world killer, the ultimate trump card, would have served him well among the Clans, had he been born lucky. To fall while fighting, no matter the battle, was no failure at all: that was an honorable end. But the lingering, well, there is no glory in that.

It taught those newly minted Jedi a thing or two about price of combat for their kind, too. Not a one of those Jedi kids made it through both crash and escape without getting something broken, and they were all weak as day-old gizka afterwards. Even the Exile got half smashed up while helping T3 fix the engines on the fly, and didn't regain consciousness until after Bao-Dur died. Didn't help that they had to expend a lot of energy keeping it all together: the ship, the wounded, themselves. It was easy to see how it drained them, that burden. I've wondered since if Bao-Dur truly did slip away on his own, or if. . . . Well, it doesn't matter. All I'll say is, maybe one of them was still pragmatic. Even for a Jedi.