Lost Part V

Author's Note: Sorry this one took so long, my brain hit a bump. I lied. There’s going to be an epilogue after this. And also, I apparently write better for whacked out people when I have a fever. 103.2 F. Family record, woo! Super duper ninja thanks for anyone who reviewed/will review, extra for people who already have.

Disclaimer: This product is not meant for human consumption. In case of ingestion, call paramedics immediately.

Part V

Coruscant, Two weeks later

She trudged down the loading ramp, silently cursing every footstep. She hated Coruscant. It was Nar Shaddaa with delusions of grandeur. The planet was only a fraction of the reason for her displeasure, though- she was still pissed at the stunt her brother pulled. She’d be damned if she was going to the Jedi, but she despised space travel and planned to crash in a real bed for a few days before taking off. She was thinking Ord Mantell, or maybe join up with her other brothers. They’d been on Onderon last she heard, checking out a rumor that their people were gathering in that sector. Her headaches would pass if she stuck them out, she was sure. As she stepped out of theScarlet Ribbons, she was overwhelmed by noise, only a fraction of it in her ears. Hope/despair/joy/anger/loss/fear/hate/love/pain. She flinched visibly, and lit her last cigratta. Taking a long drag, she relaxed as the emotions of those in the spaceport faded to a dull buzz. Shaking her head to clear it, Ankerra Ordo headed over to a public information terminal and looked up a cheap hostel near the spaceport.

She would have to take an airbus, a revelation which brought a twitch of a scowl to her face. Bad enough she couldn't wear her armor- it was better at attracting trouble than a sign saying “Pick a fight with me!” in glowing neon letters, especially in the heart of the Republic- but public transportation was something that kicked her paranoia into full gear. Oh, how she hated civilizaton. Give her a nice backwater with places she could walk to any day. She felt naked in the fiber jumpsuit, one she normally wore under heavier protection, despite being one of the better-armored sentients currently present. She scanned the area for the exit and-

Lost. The feeling punched though the grey t’bac induced haze in her mind like a blaster bolt. She reflexively looked for the source of the ‘noise’... and settled on a little girl not far from her. A wide-eyed, nervous thing with dark brown hair falling into her face. One that, Ankerra realized, she’d seen before. Not crying, but she looked like the waterworks were about to start. She was clutching an even more familiar battered bantha toy, the saddest thing you ever saw. No parents in sight. Ankerra wavered. It was probably nothing, she told herself. Any minute now, Bastila (or whoever the girl’s father was) would come rushing through, exclaiming “There you are, darling!” and sweep her off. But then Helena Shan made eye contact. A little bit of hopeful recognition sparked in her eyes, and Ankerra crumbled. Her maternal instincts demanded she at least make sure the little girl was alright. Damned if she was going to leave a kid left alone in the spaceport.

“Lost again, kid?” Ankerra called, closing the distance between them. Her chin went up in a stubborn pout, and Ankerra was reminded strongly of her mother.

"I'm running away." Deja vu all over again. This girl seemed to remind Ankerra of herself more than was healthy.

"Uh-huh. Any particular reason, or just a notion you had?" Ankerra said, walking over to a nearby bench, and jerking her head for Helena to follow.

"My mom doesn't like me anymore." Ankerra raised a sharp eyebrow.

"Mmm. So where are you going?"

"Ummm..."

"Thought so. It's nice there this time of year, I hear."

"Huh?"

"Never mind. Need a ride, kid?" She'd just ditch her at the Jedi Temple. Her mother was a Jedi, the runt was probably an apprentice there. No need for her to stay.

"Umm..."

"I'll take you somewhere safe."

"Alright." Mandalore's Helm, the kid was gullible. It was lucky Ankerra had found her instead of some chaakaryc scum. She tried not think of how equally foolish she'd been at four years older, letting some card shark on Nar Shaadda drag her off.

A short taxi ride later, they were at the Temple and Helena was none too pleased once she realized where they were going.

"No!" Helena remained glued to her seat, arms crossed in a miniature portrait of bad temper. "I won't go!" Was she actually used to these little fits working? If so, Ankerra had no respect for the girl’s parents.

"Yeah, you will." Ankerra paid the cab driver, then grabbed the wriggling girl by her waist, collected the toy -Ankerra couldn’t believe she’d kept it, though deep down she’d have been insulted if she hadn’t- and slung Helena over her shoulder. "Your mom adores you, kid. No matter what little spat you've had."

Helena went limp. "She hates me because I'll never be a Jedi."

"Nonsense. Stick it out, kid. You'll do fine." Ankerra was chucking platitudes right and left, and she knew it.

"No! I can't do the Force thing so they won't let me."

"Oh." Ankerra stopped. Were it even remotely possible, she would have happily traded places with the girl. “Pfsh. There’s plenty of worthwhile things to be ‘sides a Jedi. Soldier, for instance. Or a doctor. Believe me, everyone’s always happy to see a medic.”

“But Mother..."

"Will love you no matter what. That's what moms do, kid. Now, if I put you down, will you behave?" Ankerra took her silence as a yes and plopped her down. "Let's go, your mother will have worked herself into a state. She just got you back after all."

The Jedi Temple had obviously once been quite impressive, all steps and spires. It still was, but it also exuded an aura of being tired and somehow... lonely. Several years of neglect was apparent in the peeling paint, and it seemed to her that this quiet and almost abandoned cathedral belonged on busy Cosuscant about as much as she did.

She managed to find the public entrance, locked and deserted. It stood to reason, after all, there were very few Jedi left here. She rang the doorchime and waited. The place gave her uncomfortable chills. It was not the cold awfulness she had felt before, rather, the air in this place seemed thick with a sort of... electricity.

"Hello?" The door opened to reveal a young Twi'lek woman in clothing that was much more revealing than most Jedi attire.

"Hi. Um. I think someone here lost a kid. Do you know where I can find Master Bastila Shan?"

She blinked. Then it seemed as though she’d tripped some kind of mental switch for her. "Oh! This must be Helena. Master Shan is not here at the moment. Come in, and I will contact her, Miss..?"

"Ordo." She followed her down the hallway, not nearly as claustrophobic as most Coruscant architecture. Slowly though, she had the strangest feeling. She felt short of breath, as though the air was too hot or humid to breath properly. She had the sense of drowning in nothing at all, and the world exploded.

Some of it was her blood, and some had stained the Temple floors since time immemorial and the swirls and patterns formed shapes and pictures and some belonged to her and some were the marks a thousand visitors had etched into the Temple walls and she was four years old and her father loomed over her, teaching her to shoot a rifle at a rosebush and red flowers exploded in red light and a twisted man turned his red 'saber on his master and two young apprentices did something they weren't supposed to and a Jedi left the hall and did not return and it happened a thousand times over and she climbed trees with a dark-haired girl who she believed could do anything.

Everyone in the temple heard her scream, though the sound did not carry beyond the hall. The woman thumbed her comlink.

“Master! There’s a medical emergency in the north entrance hallway-“

“Who?” came the tinny response.

“A visitor, she just fell over thrashing all of a sudden.”

“I’m on my way.”

“The matter is closed. The Jedi Order will not go to war!” muttered Ankerra, curling tightly into a ball. The padawan looked at her nervously. Cautiously, she reached out to her and grabbed her wrist.

“The Jedi Order must go to war, Master Atris, if the Republic is to survive!” snapped the small dark-haired man, his pale green eyes flashing. "I've told you, the Mandalorians will sweep across the Rim. I can tell you how they'll do it-"

She pulled back sharply. What was the woman seeing? Her master arrived then, a lithe and muscular redhead who appeared about as much of a Jedi as her apprentice. Mira Kiskill bent over the Mandalorian's prone form and touched two fingers to her neck.

"Careful, master, she's having visions or hallucinations of some sort."

"...And if you will not take action, then-"

"Yeah, looks like." the former bounty hunter said unflappably. "Right, Kali, call Mical. Tell him we need him in the infirmary. We're going to carry her there." Mira then noticed Helena, small and frightened. "Come with us, kid, and then we'll sort where you're supposed to be." she said, not unkindly while her Padawan made the call.

She hoisted Ankerra's upper body, Kali grabbed her legs and...

...She was five and tiny, and she sat comfortably in a gnarled tree in front of weathered and unassuming house, and she knew she did so often. She had a sick feeling in her stomach, as she watched a speeder race across the dusty ground, though she felt that somehow she would normally be thrilled. And then only one grey-armored figure stepped out of the speeder, and her heart plummeted. There were a thousand explanations for why, but she somehow knew it was the very worst as the armored giant of a man approached her tree. He removed his helmet, revealing a weathered face and dark hair greying at the temples.

"An'ika, will you come down?" she shook her head and her father sighed. His eyes were bright with tears, and that was wrong- he never cried. "An'ika, darling, I'm afraid... your mother isn't coming home. She died, Ana."

She had the strangest feeling she'd already known.

"Set her down on the bed, gently. What happened? Who is she?" chattered the Coruscanti accent of Master Mical Drayan. Mira blinked. She couldn't recall the trip to the infirmary at all. She frowned at the young woman as they settled her on a cot. That vision looked to have been a memory of the girl's, the one before almost certainly wasn't.

Kali answered. "She's a visitor. Somehow she found Helena Shan-" she gestured to the little girl "and brought her here. I let them in, and suddenly she collapsed in the hall, screaming and thrashing. Then she curled up in a ball, and when I touched her, I.. saw things." she continued as Mical ran Ankerra over with a scanner.

"I don't want you to go." Ankerra muttered sullenly.

"Some lung damage. Minor chemical imbalances- a smoker, I'd guess, but otherwise a healthy teenage girl. Nothing that would explain hallucinations. I'm going to take a blood sample. Could be drugs." he rolled up her sleeve, stuck a syringe in, and was thrust halfway across the temple and back over a decade into one of the Jedi personal quarters.

"If the Council won't do anything, we'll act on our own!" The dark haired man shot a roguish smile at his companion, a bald young man with pale blue tattoos. "After all, Mal, since when has breaking rules bothered us?"

"This is different!" He protested. "It's not like charging off to rescue someone when we're told to stay put, or lying to the Council when it doesn't do any harm. This is big."

"But it is, Mal! It is just like that! If we'll rescue a few people but stand by while millions are slaughtered, we're as hypocritical as those old fogeys in there!"

"But Ren- what can two Jedi do?" 'Mal' said hesitantly.

"You think it's just us? Jaret Sigah, Raasi Myr- even dear Juli is chafing at the bit. I can name a dozen more who think this is wrong. All they need is someone to lead the charge, and-"

Mical swayed on his feet, and withdrew the syringe. "I don't know of any drugs that are catching." he murmured, placing the vial into one of the machines, setting it for a full-spectum analysis. That woman was almost certainly Revan, real as could be, but the when would make this girl a small child when it happened, so it couldn't be a memory... The machine pinged, and Mical frowned slightly at the results. "Well, that explains a little. Look at her midichlorian count."

"So she's having genuine visions?"

"So it would seem. Related to the Temple, perhaps? The one I saw was of Revan." But Kali shook her head.

"One of the ones I saw was in the Council chamber. But the other one wasn't even on Coruscant."

"Hmm. Perhaps a memory. I'm going to give her a sedative for the moment, until we know what to do with her.”

He rolled up her sleeve, ignoring the ghostly image he glimpsed as he administered the drug- blood on snow.

Ankerra dreamed, but they were not her dreams. She had the uncomfortable feeling of wearing someone else’s skin as she walked through foreign hallways with the familiarity of someone who had been born and raised there. She walked in the Temple when it was new and clean, and left it for memories of wide skies and gold plains, only to watch as they were burned to ash. She saw her sister and her brother, and they asked her why she’d killed them, after all, they were vode… And she wanted to go to them but someone was holding her down…

“Steady miss, calm down-“ Mical muttered to the thrashing Ankerra, trying to hold her down so she didn’t harm herself.

“I thought you sedated her?” said Kali nervously. The empathic Twi'lek was clearly uncomfortable here, even more so since her master had gone to see about getting Helena home.

“Unpredictable creatures, Jedi. I expected her to be out for a few more hours at least. Open that cupboard, farthest left on the bottom. There’s a neural dampener there, maybe that will stop her visions.”

Ankerra groped, and to the immense misfortune of everyone in the room, managed to grasp a laser scalpel sitting on the infirmary counter. Mical was blissfully unaware of this until a stabbing pain in his arm forced him to release his patient. Ankerra brought her feet up to her chest and kicked hard, sending Mical sprawling across the room. His head connected with a metal bedframe with an unhealthy thud, and he didn’t get back up.

She unsteadily pulled herself out of bed, and surged at Kali in a half controlled lurch. The Twi'lek fell under the weight of the much heavier Mandalorian, and found herself with Ankerra’s purloined medical implement at her throat.

“Vaii ner vod? Where is she, Jetii?” Ankerra’s bright grey eyes were glassy and unfocused. But one could not simply attack someone in the Jedi Temple and not expect any of the Jedi to know- particularly not those for whom sight was their area of expertise.

Master Visas Marr had noted the panic and commotion in the infirmary, and sensed a presence with which she was not familiar. Upon entering the room, she saw-

The woman walked like a dancer and gaped like a wound. She strode through the temple trailing blood, and no one dared try and save her. They looked away, or saw her and swore she should be dead. She stood there before five righteous old men and women with all the pride of a conquered queen, and told them that the awful things that had vivisected her soul and stained her with blood were absolutely necessary. She wore her tangled red hair like a tiara and her tattered Jedi robes like finery. She terrified them, and they told her to leave, like frightened children who wanted the Bad Thing gone. She looked at them one last time with dead eyes, thrust her blue lightsaber into the central pillar, and walked away.

-exactly what was wrong. She knew what it was Ankerra saw. She knew that woman, and that event, though details like red hair and blue lightsabers were meaningless to the sightless Jedi.

“Tell me where my sister is, or the Twi'lek is gone.” hissed Ankerra. Visas reached out, and wrapped the young woman in the Force- a wall, shielding her from the impressions of her surroundings. The effect was almost instantaneous. Her eyes cleared, and the tight stormy knot that was Ankerra’s impression in the Force cleared somewhat. The scalpel clattered to the floor.

“Oh, shab.”

End Part V