Backbone deleted scene -- the Hunt
Jan. 12th, 2019 03:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bedlamsbardI always like to post fic on my birthday, but I don't have anything new ready to go this year so I thought I would post a sequence that was written as part of the flashbacks for On the Edge of the Devil's Backbone. This was meant to directly follow the flashbacks in Backbone 17, but I ended up not using them because I thought they weakened the present-day narrative. I was going to use them for Down in the Devil's Lair, the sequel to Backbone, but I don't think they're going to work there either, and it's a sequence I've been asked about posting a lot. This is Kanan's first Hunt -- the occasion on which he earned his name.
About 5K below the break.
*
From above, the savannah below looked like a rippling purple sea.
It was such a striking difference from Mustafar that for a moment all Kanan could do was stare at it, shocked beyond words at the way the wind felt on his bare skin, at the cool, clean air and the waves of purple grasses stretching out into the distance. He had been at the Crucible so long that he had nearly forgotten that places like this existed.
As the gunship slowed to a hover, the other three Inquisitors stepped up beside him to judge their height and current position. Kanan didn’t look at any of them, intimately aware of the Hunter’s presence on his left and Patience on his right – one of her droids clicking quiet protest before she closed the face plates of her helmet and took a flying leap out of the gunship. The wind blew away the sound of its shriek.
Kanan didn’t want to be prompted and he didn’t want to be pushed out of the gunship by the Hunter, which he suspected would happen if he hesitated, so he backed up a few steps and then followed Patience out, spreading his arms and legs to slow his initial descent as he fell.
The wind streamed past him, raising goosebumps on the bare skin of his shaved head and flowing past the black mask he was wearing, which covered the lower half of his face. The Hunter hadn’t been joking about having him muzzled. Kanan kept his eyes open despite the pressure of the wind, layering the Force over them as protection. He tucked himself into a showy roll as the ground rose up towards him, bracing himself with an outstretched hand and the Force as he hit the ground and came up on his feet, one hand dropping to his lightsaber before he saw that there was no one else around besides Patience.
A moment later the Hunter landed a few feet away, then the Hangman, the fourth Inquisitor with them. Kanan glanced up to see the gunship angling away, leaving them alone in the savannah.
One of Patience’s droids – presumably the one that had been shrieking – had wrapped itself around her neck and shoulders, clutching desperately at her. The other two were already moving purposefully away, red lights flashing on their domes.
“She isn’t here,” the Hangman said. He was some species that Kanan didn’t recognize, a big male with rocky gray skin and a disapproving expression. He had spent the journey here looking at Kanan like he was thinking about throwing him out of the nearest airlock, though the Hunter’s presence had kept him from doing anything of the sort.
“Obviously,” Patience said, reaching up to stroke a soothing finger down the back of the droid clutching at her. She pried it loose with some difficulty, holding it between her hands and murmuring to it like a pet. “She hides herself in the Force like a coward.”
The Hunter flicked a glance at the Hangman and laid a hand on the back of Kanan’s neck. “Can you find our renegade, my Hound?”
The Hangman and Patience both turned their heads at this. “What good is your Jedi supposed to be, Hunter?” the Hangman sneered. “Do you believe he will have any more luck finding the traitor?”
The Hunter turned an unimpressed look on him. “The Jedi manipulate the Living Force as we cannot. He will be able to sense the renegade no matter what tricks the Fisher uses.” He stroked a proprietary finger along the line of Kanan’s throat. “Won’t you?”
Kanan bit his lip, his breath rasping against the inside of the mask. It was the first time anyone had used the rogue Inquisitor’s nickname.
The Hunter loosed his grip enough that Kanan could sink down to his knees in front of him, his vision of Patience and the Hangman suddenly obscured by the tall purple grasses. He shut his eyes, forcing himself to filter out the feel of the Hunter’s hand on his neck, the soft whirring of Patience’s droid, the sound of the wind in the grasses, the distant cry of some bird –
It left him with the Hunter’s rough affection, the Hangman’s disapproval, and Patience’s focus on her upset droid. Kanan forced them all aside, letting his senses spread out. There were dozens of Inquisitors on the planet at the moment; Kanan found and identified all of the ones he remembered from the Crucible, even if he hadn’t seen them as anything other than a face in the crowd. This was an inhabited planet, though not a heavily populated one; Kanan was vaguely aware of each population center, most of which were unaware of the predator in their midst. Most of them. Not all of them.
He tilted his head a little to one side, his eyes still closed, and licked his lips again. He could feel the tremor in the Force, like a rock thrown into a still pool – the ripples still radiating outwards. Kanan followed them back to their source, the shadow growing the closer he got to it.
The backlash knocked him out of his trance.
The Hunter caught him as he jerked to his feet, gasping. Kanan was in too much shock to protest or pull away and let the Hunter take his full weight instead, regaining his footing after a moment. He tried to wipe a hand over his mouth, but his gloved fingers brushed against the smooth plasteel of the mask instead and Kanan stopped, his fists clenching and unclenching.
He looked up to find both Patience and the Hangman staring at him.
“She killed them,” he mumbled, the words lost in the mask. The Hunter was close enough that he might have heard, but the other two Inquisitors were too far away. Kanan dropped his head, now more aware than ever of the Hunter’s grip on his neck, and waited for the Hunter to speak before he said anything else.
“Well?” the Hangman said eventually, sounding irritated. “Is your new pet actually any use, Hunter?”
The Hunter flicked an irritated glance at him, then bent his lips against Kanan’s ear. “Where is she?”
Kanan pointed. He had to raise his voice and enunciate each word for his voice to be heard through the mask over it, and what came out didn’t sound like his voice at all, harsh and alien to his ears. “She killed everyone in the village.”
“The child?” Patience asked.
Kanan hadn’t known there was a child involved, since his briefing on this op had been limited to “an Inquisitor has stopped responding to comms and all signs suggest that she’s snapped and gone insane.” “Everyone in a thirty kilometer radius is dead except her.”
The Hunter gave Kanan another of those fond little shakes, making Kanan clench his teeth. “Good,” he said. “Let’s go kill her.”
They weren’t so far from the remains of the village that the distance couldn’t be covered on foot, so the four of them loped easily through the high grasses, reaching the outskirts of the settlement by the time that the huge orange sun began to sink below the horizon. There they stopped, Patience sending her droids ahead to scout out the village.
Kanan crouched amidst the grasses, breathing hard as he scooped up a handful of dirt and rubbed it between his fingers. For all that everything around the village was tainted by the dark side – he could feel the murders of the residents resonating through the Force – it still felt cleaner than Mustafar did, unpolluted by the vergence there. Even though he couldn’t smell anything clearly through the mask, he could feel it in the Force: clean air, clean land, happy people. It had been a good place to live.
Had been.
Why was an Inquisitor sent here? Most of what Kanan knew about the duties of the Inquisition had to do with hunting Jedi and the members of other Force traditions, though there seemed to be a fair amount that had to do with internal policing of the Empire. But he couldn’t sense another Force-user here; the planet wasn’t even important enough to have an Imperial complex, just an outpost in the only major city. So why send an Inquisitor?
He started to voice the question, then thought better of it, wiping the dirt off his fingers and glancing up to find the three Inquisitors studiously ignoring each other. Kanan sat back on his heels, enjoying the feel of the setting sun on his face and bare head; he had no idea when the next time he would be allowed out of the Crucible would be, and chances were that it wouldn’t be anywhere like this. Not somewhere that felt so…alive, even amidst the death that had occurred in the village. The rogue Inquisitor, the Fisher, had only killed its inhabitants. Kanan could still sense the livestock and pets that lived in the village, some of them hungry after long hours without food, others miserable because they hadn’t yet been milked. A few herd-beasts had gotten loose of their pen and into their owner’s feed store; Kanan could sense their satisfaction in the Force as they glutted themselves on grain.
He hadn’t been this open to the Force since the Republic had still stood, not somewhere…normal. The Crucible was the Crucible, but this was a place where people lived, a place where neither the dark side nor the light held sway. The murder that had been done here was only a faint shadow on the surface of the Force: in time, it would pass, and life would recommence as it had been before. A tragedy, yes, but not the kind that would reverberate outwards on the galaxy the way some would. Not like the Force-echo on Mustafar, whatever it really was; not like the slaughter of the Jedi, which Kanan could still taste if he meditated too deeply, even in the depths of the Crucible.
He froze as a familiar hand settled on the back of his neck. “Enjoying yourself?” the Hunter said, leaning down so that his breath tickled Kanan’s ear.
Kanan bit his lip on a response. He didn’t protest as the Hunter dragged him back up to his feet, Patience and the Hangman only flicking disinterested glances in their direction.
“What do you feel, Jedi?” the Hunter asked.
Kanan squeezed his eyes shut, his breath rasping against the inside of his mask, and shook his head. He hadn’t been trying to find the Fisher. He had just been…being, forgetting for a few minutes that he was an Inquisitor and an abomination and the Hunter’s property.
They both looked over as Patience’s comlink suddenly beeped. She raised her wrist, her shoulders tightening as one of her droids reported in.
“What is it?” the Hangman demanded.
“They are dead,” Patience said. The face plates of her helmet slid back, revealing her scowl. “The Leviathan, the Songmaker, and the trainees they brought with them. They encountered the Fisher and she destroyed them.”
“You did not sense this?” the Hangman said, turning on Kanan. “Hound,” he added, his lip curling.
Kanan spat the words, unsure if they would be discernible through the mask. “I wasn’t looking.”
“Then what use are you?” said the Hangman. He turned away dismissively, reaching back over his shoulder for his lightsaber. “Let us go and kill that traitor.”
“Then you will die like the others,” Patience said.
“We gain nothing by waiting,” the Hangman said, and strode off in the direction of the village without another word.
Patience shook her head in disbelief. “I’m not hauling his body back to Mustafar,” she said, following him.
Kanan expected the Hunter to do the same, but instead the Pau’an remained still, his hand tightening on Kanan’s neck until he suddenly said, “Go fetch.”
He released him with a shove that made Kanan stumble forward, catching himself on the ground as he fell. He pushed himself upright, looking back over his shoulder at the Hunter.
The Inquisitor just smiled. “Bring me her head, my Hound.”
*
Kanan found the first body when he was barely five steps inside the village walls.
They weren’t much to speak of – a man-height barricade of thickly woven grasses that looked like it wouldn’t have kept out a particularly lazy nerf. But Kanan had felt electricity sparking through them before he had vaulted them; the woven grasses concealed a security system that would have given most intruders a painful surprise. It didn’t do more than sting the palm of his hand.
He landed in a roll and came up in a crouch, his hand falling to his lightsaber as he looked around. When nothing moved, he straightened upright, moving through the vegetable garden he had landed in.
There was a dead man just outside the gate. Kanan pushed it open as gently as he could, trying not to disturb the body, and squeezed through the narrow opening to crouch down beside the corpse. He was a Feeorin, a young man not much older than Kanan, and there was a single burned-looking cut down his torso that had clearly been made by a lightsaber. Kanan reached out to close his open eyes and then stood again.
He found more bodies the further he ventured into the village, passing pens of hungry animals and others that were roaming free – a tooka that came up to his feet as he pushed through an open door to find a mother and two children slaughtered at their dinner table, an anooba lying in front of a nerf-pen that growled at him. If he had been ten years younger, he would have gone to feed the animals, but as it was he merely gripped the hilt of his lightsaber and kept walking.
The Fisher was here, he knew. He could feel her, though she had hidden herself within the Living Force, layering her presence amidst that of the confused animals and the dead here, and it made it difficult for Kanan to narrow down her exact location. But she was here.
He paused as he saw another pair of bodies in the street ahead of him, these ones not matching the settlers he had seen before. He slowed his pace as he approached them, his hand on his lightsaber, then let it drop as he got close enough to recognize the Imperial symbols on their black armor even in the twilight gloom. The trainee he knew, a Togruta male whom Kanan had fought with in the Crucible before; he had been bisected and his legs lay a little apart from his torso. The other Inquisitor, a Trandoshan, was a stranger, but he knew from what Patience had said that he had to be either the Leviathan or the Songmaker. Their lightsabers lay on the ground beside them, one cut clearly in half but the other intact.
Kanan couldn’t see a wound on the Trandoshan, but even though he couldn’t feel a spark of life in him he reached out to feel for a pulse anyway, his fingers resting against scales hours cool.
“You,” said a female voice from behind and above him, “I don’t know.”
Kanan rose slowly to his feet and turned around, looking up to see a black-clad human-looking woman standing on the roof of the nearest building, her arms crossed over her chest. The white Imperial cogs on her pauldrons caught the moonlight, as did the black metal hilt of the lightsaber on her hip.
“You’re the Fisher,” he said, but he had spoken too softly and the mask made the words inaudible.
She leapt down from the building and landed in the street in front of him; from here he could see that the lower half of her face was covered by some kind of cloth, leaving only her eyes and a strip of dark skin visible. “Is the Whip just sending trainees after me now? Where’s your master, apprentice?”
Kanan stiffened. “My master’s dead,” he said, this time managing to make the words clear enough to be audible despite the mask. “Your masters killed her.”
The Fisher hesitated for an instant, her eyes narrowing, before she said, “I can feel the Hunter on you. He’s been looking for a pet for a long time now. I’m sorry to deprive him of one.”
“I’m no one’s pet,” Kanan said, pulling his lightsaber off his belt. Her gaze flicked to the hilt before he ignited the blade, bringing it up in front of him in a salute before he shifted to the opening stance of Form Five. “And no one else is dying today.”
“Now that,” said the Fisher, igniting both blades of her own lightsaber, “hardly sounds like something an Inquisitor would say.”
“I’m full of surprises,” Kanan said, watching her eyes, not her blade. He shifted his position, his steps soft on the packed earth of the street, and saw her gaze flicker as she tracked the movement.
“Did they name you yet, apprentice?” she said. “Do you even remember the name you had before?”
“I remember,” Kanan said. “Do you?”
“Why do you think I went mad?”
“I don’t know,” Kanan said. “Why does anyone kill this many innocent beings? They never did anything to harm you.”
“They’re better off where they are now. This galaxy isn’t kind to innocent beings.”
“This galaxy’s not kind to anyone,” Kanan said. He licked his lips, glad for a fleeting moment that she couldn’t see the nervous gesture.
“Did they name you?” she said again. “Did you earn your name?”
“What does it matter to you?” Kanan snapped, irritated, and in his moment of distraction she attacked.
He swung his lightsaber up to parry the blow, darting under her outswept blade as she disengaged and drew back, her lightsaber behind her. Kanan flipped his hilt around into a reverse grip, his free hand clenching into an empty fist. For a fleeting moment he wished for his blaster, but that wouldn’t do him any good against an Inquisitor. It would be a hell of a surprise, though.
The Fisher’s head went slightly to one side in something that might have been surprise, then she flung her free hand up.
The Force sent Kanan flying backwards, crashing into the wall of the nearest house. He dropped his lightsaber as he hit the floor in a wild tumble, but he was already reaching for it when the Inquisitor’s foot took him in the jaw and everything went black.
*
Kanan came to an indeterminate amount of time later, blinking blearily until the world swam into focus. He was still alive. Somehow he hadn’t expected that.
When he put a hand down to push himself upright, he found that he wasn’t bound either, his fingers pressing against coarse-grained wood – he was in one of the houses in the settlement. Grimacing, Kanan pulled himself into a sitting position, looking around for his lightsaber and spotting it on a table on the opposite side of the room. The Fisher was perched beside it, her legs folded in front of her as she watched him.
There was a lamp on the table beside her, illuminating the room with soft yellow light. Kanan looked at it, at his lightsaber, at her lightsaber sitting on the table next to the light, and said, “What do you –”
The words came out clearly, and he was so startled that he clasped a hand to his mouth.
The Fisher held up his mask so that he could see it, then put it down beside his lightsaber. She hopped down off the table and paced towards him, reaching up to pull down the scarf wrapped around her face. “Hello, Caleb Dume,” she said.
Kanan stared at her. “Tai?”
Tai Uzuma crouched down in front of him, resting her hands on her thighs. “I thought you were dead, out there with that jinx and her clones, until I saw your name on the list the Crucible keeps. But they caught you too, Dume. I’m just surprised you survived this long.”
“Yeah, you thought I’d be killed in my first battle,” Kanan said automatically. “You were in the Temple. Why aren’t you dead?”
He had been so certain that everyone in the Jedi Temple had died, from younglings in the crèche to the Temple Guards that renounced even their own souls to the defense of the Order. Everyone said that every Jedi in the Temple had died that day; Kanan had never heard of a survivor. And he had been the only member of his cohort chosen as a padawan. Tai and the other member of their cohort, Sammo Quid, had both been in the Temple when Darth Vader and his clone troopers had come for them.
“We ran,” Tai said. “There are tunnels in the lower levels that lead out into the city, do you remember? Sammo and I were down there exploring them when it started. There was nothing we could have done,” she added, with the air of something rote. “We had to run.”
“What happened to him?”
“He went back to check on the Temple, walked straight into a clone trap.” Her lip curled. “He was the lucky one.”
It was on the tip of Kanan’s tongue to ask how she had ended up in the Inquisition, but she would probably turn the question around on him, and Jedi or not, he didn’t want her to know about Hera. Not if there was any chance that he wouldn’t be walking out of this room alive. In the Temple they taught that there was nothing more dangerous than a fallen Jedi, and this close to her Kanan could taste the dark side in the Force, the way she had lost herself in it. He had seen what was left of the villagers. He couldn’t chance turning her loose on Hera.
If Tai noticed his hesitation, she didn’t show it. “I threw out my lightsaber in the nearest trash disposal,” she said. “I couldn’t get off Coruscant, though. Do you have any idea what it was like on Coruscant then?”
“The closest I ever got to Coruscant was the airspace, before I got Master Kenobi’s message,” Kanan said. “I never made planetfall.”
“Hmm. Lucky. How did you survive, Dume?”
“My master,” Kanan said.
Tai looked at him for a long moment, then nodded. She straightened back up, pacing in front of him. Kanan watched her, rubbing at his jaw for the first time in what felt like days, even though he knew that it truly hadn’t been that long.
She turned back to him so suddenly that he flinched. “So they sent a Jedi to hunt a Jedi,” she said. “You know it’s a test, don’t you?”
“Wouldn’t be the first time this week,” Kanan said. “And I’m not a Jedi, not anymore. No more than you are.”
The corner of her lip curled. “Tell that to the Force.” She hopped back up onto the table, kicking her heels. “We’ll always be Jedi to it, Caleb Dume, to the Force and our masters. No matter how much we pervert ourselves for their amusement, they’ll never see us as anything but Jedi.”
“They told me all the Jedi were dead,” Kanan said. “That all the others before me had died.”
“That’s true,” Tai observed. “From a certain point of view. I wouldn’t really call this living.”
Kanan blinked slowly. “How many of us are there?”
“A few,” Tai said. “Most of the others really are dead.” She tapped the side of her head. “What we are, what they made us, no one was ever meant to be. You can’t be the Force made flesh and an Inquisitor and stay sane. I didn’t.” She grinned at him. “You won’t either.”
Kanan glanced down. “Why kill the villagers?”
She shrugged. “Because I could. Still asking questions, Dume.” She picked up the mask and wagged it at him. “The Hunter doesn’t like that, does he?”
He looked aside, hearing the soft click as she dropped it back onto the table.
“Better that I kill them than anyone else,” Tai said. “Because they would die. Them and the child I was sent here for, sooner or later.”
“Child?”
“Hasn’t your new master taught you anything?” Tai grinned without humor. “In another life that little boy might have been a Jedi. Now he’ll never be anything – not the weapon of the light or the dark. He’s free in the Force now, along with all his people.”
“Tai, that was murder.”
She kicked her heels again, leaning forward as she said, “Murder’s what we do now, Dume. Murder is what we are. Haven’t they taught you that yet?”
Kanan gritted his teeth and looked away. There was a small round window set high near the ceiling, and through it he saw the gleaming red eye of one of Patience’s parrot droids. He looked back at Tai, swallowing, and said, “What are you going to do to me?”
“What we are we cannot be,” she said, slipping down off the table and stepping over to him. “The Force won’t allow it.”
Kanan pushed slowly to his feet; feeling the ache in his body from everything he had been doing today. He was taller than Tai now, he saw. The last time he had seen her, less than a month before Order 66, he hadn’t been.
“You’re going to kill me,” he said.
“We’re both dead already, Caleb,” Tai said. “You just haven’t admitted it to yourself yet. Believe me, this will be better.”
She held out her hand for her lightsaber, but as it came flying across the room to her Kanan was already moving, throwing himself sideways into a roll and grabbing for the Force. Tai was swept backwards and Kanan grabbed for his own lightsaber, the hilt slapping into his hand and the blade igniting even as Tai launched herself at him.
Her blade glanced off his and she flipped over his head, already spinning as she landed to thrust up at him. Kanan parried the blow, moving backwards as she straightened up, forcing her attack, their blades a red blur between them.
“Tai, this isn’t right!” he said. “Tai –”
“Tai Uzuma is dead, Caleb Dume,” she spat, rearing back as Kanan dodged out of her way and hooked a chair with his foot to knock into her path. She swept it aside with a slash of her blade and moved forward, circling to cut Kanan off from the door. Kanan backed up, keeping his blade in front of him. “What are you trying to do, kid? You think your master will lift a finger to save you?”
“He’s not my master,” Kanan said, sweeping aside another stroke of her blade, wary of the place the unignited second blade on her ‘saber could erupt at any moment. “Tai, listen to me, we can –”
“What? We can what?” A shift in the Force sent Kanan stumbling backwards, straight into the wall. Tai was there in a second; he barely got his lightsaber up in time to keep her off him, the red blades sparking between them as she pressed forward. “There’s no we, Dume. The Empire saw to that. There’s just you and me. And what you and I are cannot be.”
“Tai –” He shoved forward with his greater strength and forced her backwards, slamming a kick into her stomach as soon as he had the space to do so. She turned a little so that it caught her across the ribs, stumbling aside. Kanan followed it up by slamming the hilt of his lightsaber into her wrist, making her drop her own lightsaber. He kicked it aside the moment it hit the floor, though that couldn’t keep it away from her for long.
Her gaze flicked to it, then back at him. She rubbed her hand over her wrist, watching him with yellowed eyes.
Kanan felt the shift in the Force, looking at the door even before it started to slide open. He wasn’t looking at Tai as she leapt suddenly at him, his lightsaber coming up automatically.
It went cleanly through her chest and out her back as Kanan yelled in pure shock. Tai’s mouth had gone wide, but all the amber leached out of her eyes as Kanan deactivated his ‘saber and caught her, lowering her to the floor. “Tai, no, Tai –”
She lifted her hand to her wound with what seemed like great effort, her breath rasping in the air. Distantly, Kanan was aware of footsteps, of more presences in the room, but he didn’t look to see who it was.
Tai looked at the blood on her fingers, then touched his cheek gently. “Thank you, Caleb,” she breathed. “Thank you –”
Her hand fell back against the floor as her body went limp, her eyes staring empty at nothing. Kanan bent his head to her chest, tears pricking at the corners of his eyes, and laid her down as gently as he could despite the way the Force was screaming in his head.
I killed a Jedi. I killed a Jedi –
When he lifted his hands from her, they were shaking. I killed a Jedi, I killed Tai, I killed another Jedi –
He was barely aware of the steps that crossed the room to him, not until he felt the Hunter’s hand on the back of his neck. When he raised his head, it was to see Barriss standing in the doorway, watching them with something unreadable in her eyes.
“Now,” said the Hunter, sounding pleased, “you’ve earned your name, my Hound.”
About 5K below the break.
*
From above, the savannah below looked like a rippling purple sea.
It was such a striking difference from Mustafar that for a moment all Kanan could do was stare at it, shocked beyond words at the way the wind felt on his bare skin, at the cool, clean air and the waves of purple grasses stretching out into the distance. He had been at the Crucible so long that he had nearly forgotten that places like this existed.
As the gunship slowed to a hover, the other three Inquisitors stepped up beside him to judge their height and current position. Kanan didn’t look at any of them, intimately aware of the Hunter’s presence on his left and Patience on his right – one of her droids clicking quiet protest before she closed the face plates of her helmet and took a flying leap out of the gunship. The wind blew away the sound of its shriek.
Kanan didn’t want to be prompted and he didn’t want to be pushed out of the gunship by the Hunter, which he suspected would happen if he hesitated, so he backed up a few steps and then followed Patience out, spreading his arms and legs to slow his initial descent as he fell.
The wind streamed past him, raising goosebumps on the bare skin of his shaved head and flowing past the black mask he was wearing, which covered the lower half of his face. The Hunter hadn’t been joking about having him muzzled. Kanan kept his eyes open despite the pressure of the wind, layering the Force over them as protection. He tucked himself into a showy roll as the ground rose up towards him, bracing himself with an outstretched hand and the Force as he hit the ground and came up on his feet, one hand dropping to his lightsaber before he saw that there was no one else around besides Patience.
A moment later the Hunter landed a few feet away, then the Hangman, the fourth Inquisitor with them. Kanan glanced up to see the gunship angling away, leaving them alone in the savannah.
One of Patience’s droids – presumably the one that had been shrieking – had wrapped itself around her neck and shoulders, clutching desperately at her. The other two were already moving purposefully away, red lights flashing on their domes.
“She isn’t here,” the Hangman said. He was some species that Kanan didn’t recognize, a big male with rocky gray skin and a disapproving expression. He had spent the journey here looking at Kanan like he was thinking about throwing him out of the nearest airlock, though the Hunter’s presence had kept him from doing anything of the sort.
“Obviously,” Patience said, reaching up to stroke a soothing finger down the back of the droid clutching at her. She pried it loose with some difficulty, holding it between her hands and murmuring to it like a pet. “She hides herself in the Force like a coward.”
The Hunter flicked a glance at the Hangman and laid a hand on the back of Kanan’s neck. “Can you find our renegade, my Hound?”
The Hangman and Patience both turned their heads at this. “What good is your Jedi supposed to be, Hunter?” the Hangman sneered. “Do you believe he will have any more luck finding the traitor?”
The Hunter turned an unimpressed look on him. “The Jedi manipulate the Living Force as we cannot. He will be able to sense the renegade no matter what tricks the Fisher uses.” He stroked a proprietary finger along the line of Kanan’s throat. “Won’t you?”
Kanan bit his lip, his breath rasping against the inside of the mask. It was the first time anyone had used the rogue Inquisitor’s nickname.
The Hunter loosed his grip enough that Kanan could sink down to his knees in front of him, his vision of Patience and the Hangman suddenly obscured by the tall purple grasses. He shut his eyes, forcing himself to filter out the feel of the Hunter’s hand on his neck, the soft whirring of Patience’s droid, the sound of the wind in the grasses, the distant cry of some bird –
It left him with the Hunter’s rough affection, the Hangman’s disapproval, and Patience’s focus on her upset droid. Kanan forced them all aside, letting his senses spread out. There were dozens of Inquisitors on the planet at the moment; Kanan found and identified all of the ones he remembered from the Crucible, even if he hadn’t seen them as anything other than a face in the crowd. This was an inhabited planet, though not a heavily populated one; Kanan was vaguely aware of each population center, most of which were unaware of the predator in their midst. Most of them. Not all of them.
He tilted his head a little to one side, his eyes still closed, and licked his lips again. He could feel the tremor in the Force, like a rock thrown into a still pool – the ripples still radiating outwards. Kanan followed them back to their source, the shadow growing the closer he got to it.
The backlash knocked him out of his trance.
The Hunter caught him as he jerked to his feet, gasping. Kanan was in too much shock to protest or pull away and let the Hunter take his full weight instead, regaining his footing after a moment. He tried to wipe a hand over his mouth, but his gloved fingers brushed against the smooth plasteel of the mask instead and Kanan stopped, his fists clenching and unclenching.
He looked up to find both Patience and the Hangman staring at him.
“She killed them,” he mumbled, the words lost in the mask. The Hunter was close enough that he might have heard, but the other two Inquisitors were too far away. Kanan dropped his head, now more aware than ever of the Hunter’s grip on his neck, and waited for the Hunter to speak before he said anything else.
“Well?” the Hangman said eventually, sounding irritated. “Is your new pet actually any use, Hunter?”
The Hunter flicked an irritated glance at him, then bent his lips against Kanan’s ear. “Where is she?”
Kanan pointed. He had to raise his voice and enunciate each word for his voice to be heard through the mask over it, and what came out didn’t sound like his voice at all, harsh and alien to his ears. “She killed everyone in the village.”
“The child?” Patience asked.
Kanan hadn’t known there was a child involved, since his briefing on this op had been limited to “an Inquisitor has stopped responding to comms and all signs suggest that she’s snapped and gone insane.” “Everyone in a thirty kilometer radius is dead except her.”
The Hunter gave Kanan another of those fond little shakes, making Kanan clench his teeth. “Good,” he said. “Let’s go kill her.”
They weren’t so far from the remains of the village that the distance couldn’t be covered on foot, so the four of them loped easily through the high grasses, reaching the outskirts of the settlement by the time that the huge orange sun began to sink below the horizon. There they stopped, Patience sending her droids ahead to scout out the village.
Kanan crouched amidst the grasses, breathing hard as he scooped up a handful of dirt and rubbed it between his fingers. For all that everything around the village was tainted by the dark side – he could feel the murders of the residents resonating through the Force – it still felt cleaner than Mustafar did, unpolluted by the vergence there. Even though he couldn’t smell anything clearly through the mask, he could feel it in the Force: clean air, clean land, happy people. It had been a good place to live.
Had been.
Why was an Inquisitor sent here? Most of what Kanan knew about the duties of the Inquisition had to do with hunting Jedi and the members of other Force traditions, though there seemed to be a fair amount that had to do with internal policing of the Empire. But he couldn’t sense another Force-user here; the planet wasn’t even important enough to have an Imperial complex, just an outpost in the only major city. So why send an Inquisitor?
He started to voice the question, then thought better of it, wiping the dirt off his fingers and glancing up to find the three Inquisitors studiously ignoring each other. Kanan sat back on his heels, enjoying the feel of the setting sun on his face and bare head; he had no idea when the next time he would be allowed out of the Crucible would be, and chances were that it wouldn’t be anywhere like this. Not somewhere that felt so…alive, even amidst the death that had occurred in the village. The rogue Inquisitor, the Fisher, had only killed its inhabitants. Kanan could still sense the livestock and pets that lived in the village, some of them hungry after long hours without food, others miserable because they hadn’t yet been milked. A few herd-beasts had gotten loose of their pen and into their owner’s feed store; Kanan could sense their satisfaction in the Force as they glutted themselves on grain.
He hadn’t been this open to the Force since the Republic had still stood, not somewhere…normal. The Crucible was the Crucible, but this was a place where people lived, a place where neither the dark side nor the light held sway. The murder that had been done here was only a faint shadow on the surface of the Force: in time, it would pass, and life would recommence as it had been before. A tragedy, yes, but not the kind that would reverberate outwards on the galaxy the way some would. Not like the Force-echo on Mustafar, whatever it really was; not like the slaughter of the Jedi, which Kanan could still taste if he meditated too deeply, even in the depths of the Crucible.
He froze as a familiar hand settled on the back of his neck. “Enjoying yourself?” the Hunter said, leaning down so that his breath tickled Kanan’s ear.
Kanan bit his lip on a response. He didn’t protest as the Hunter dragged him back up to his feet, Patience and the Hangman only flicking disinterested glances in their direction.
“What do you feel, Jedi?” the Hunter asked.
Kanan squeezed his eyes shut, his breath rasping against the inside of his mask, and shook his head. He hadn’t been trying to find the Fisher. He had just been…being, forgetting for a few minutes that he was an Inquisitor and an abomination and the Hunter’s property.
They both looked over as Patience’s comlink suddenly beeped. She raised her wrist, her shoulders tightening as one of her droids reported in.
“What is it?” the Hangman demanded.
“They are dead,” Patience said. The face plates of her helmet slid back, revealing her scowl. “The Leviathan, the Songmaker, and the trainees they brought with them. They encountered the Fisher and she destroyed them.”
“You did not sense this?” the Hangman said, turning on Kanan. “Hound,” he added, his lip curling.
Kanan spat the words, unsure if they would be discernible through the mask. “I wasn’t looking.”
“Then what use are you?” said the Hangman. He turned away dismissively, reaching back over his shoulder for his lightsaber. “Let us go and kill that traitor.”
“Then you will die like the others,” Patience said.
“We gain nothing by waiting,” the Hangman said, and strode off in the direction of the village without another word.
Patience shook her head in disbelief. “I’m not hauling his body back to Mustafar,” she said, following him.
Kanan expected the Hunter to do the same, but instead the Pau’an remained still, his hand tightening on Kanan’s neck until he suddenly said, “Go fetch.”
He released him with a shove that made Kanan stumble forward, catching himself on the ground as he fell. He pushed himself upright, looking back over his shoulder at the Hunter.
The Inquisitor just smiled. “Bring me her head, my Hound.”
*
Kanan found the first body when he was barely five steps inside the village walls.
They weren’t much to speak of – a man-height barricade of thickly woven grasses that looked like it wouldn’t have kept out a particularly lazy nerf. But Kanan had felt electricity sparking through them before he had vaulted them; the woven grasses concealed a security system that would have given most intruders a painful surprise. It didn’t do more than sting the palm of his hand.
He landed in a roll and came up in a crouch, his hand falling to his lightsaber as he looked around. When nothing moved, he straightened upright, moving through the vegetable garden he had landed in.
There was a dead man just outside the gate. Kanan pushed it open as gently as he could, trying not to disturb the body, and squeezed through the narrow opening to crouch down beside the corpse. He was a Feeorin, a young man not much older than Kanan, and there was a single burned-looking cut down his torso that had clearly been made by a lightsaber. Kanan reached out to close his open eyes and then stood again.
He found more bodies the further he ventured into the village, passing pens of hungry animals and others that were roaming free – a tooka that came up to his feet as he pushed through an open door to find a mother and two children slaughtered at their dinner table, an anooba lying in front of a nerf-pen that growled at him. If he had been ten years younger, he would have gone to feed the animals, but as it was he merely gripped the hilt of his lightsaber and kept walking.
The Fisher was here, he knew. He could feel her, though she had hidden herself within the Living Force, layering her presence amidst that of the confused animals and the dead here, and it made it difficult for Kanan to narrow down her exact location. But she was here.
He paused as he saw another pair of bodies in the street ahead of him, these ones not matching the settlers he had seen before. He slowed his pace as he approached them, his hand on his lightsaber, then let it drop as he got close enough to recognize the Imperial symbols on their black armor even in the twilight gloom. The trainee he knew, a Togruta male whom Kanan had fought with in the Crucible before; he had been bisected and his legs lay a little apart from his torso. The other Inquisitor, a Trandoshan, was a stranger, but he knew from what Patience had said that he had to be either the Leviathan or the Songmaker. Their lightsabers lay on the ground beside them, one cut clearly in half but the other intact.
Kanan couldn’t see a wound on the Trandoshan, but even though he couldn’t feel a spark of life in him he reached out to feel for a pulse anyway, his fingers resting against scales hours cool.
“You,” said a female voice from behind and above him, “I don’t know.”
Kanan rose slowly to his feet and turned around, looking up to see a black-clad human-looking woman standing on the roof of the nearest building, her arms crossed over her chest. The white Imperial cogs on her pauldrons caught the moonlight, as did the black metal hilt of the lightsaber on her hip.
“You’re the Fisher,” he said, but he had spoken too softly and the mask made the words inaudible.
She leapt down from the building and landed in the street in front of him; from here he could see that the lower half of her face was covered by some kind of cloth, leaving only her eyes and a strip of dark skin visible. “Is the Whip just sending trainees after me now? Where’s your master, apprentice?”
Kanan stiffened. “My master’s dead,” he said, this time managing to make the words clear enough to be audible despite the mask. “Your masters killed her.”
The Fisher hesitated for an instant, her eyes narrowing, before she said, “I can feel the Hunter on you. He’s been looking for a pet for a long time now. I’m sorry to deprive him of one.”
“I’m no one’s pet,” Kanan said, pulling his lightsaber off his belt. Her gaze flicked to the hilt before he ignited the blade, bringing it up in front of him in a salute before he shifted to the opening stance of Form Five. “And no one else is dying today.”
“Now that,” said the Fisher, igniting both blades of her own lightsaber, “hardly sounds like something an Inquisitor would say.”
“I’m full of surprises,” Kanan said, watching her eyes, not her blade. He shifted his position, his steps soft on the packed earth of the street, and saw her gaze flicker as she tracked the movement.
“Did they name you yet, apprentice?” she said. “Do you even remember the name you had before?”
“I remember,” Kanan said. “Do you?”
“Why do you think I went mad?”
“I don’t know,” Kanan said. “Why does anyone kill this many innocent beings? They never did anything to harm you.”
“They’re better off where they are now. This galaxy isn’t kind to innocent beings.”
“This galaxy’s not kind to anyone,” Kanan said. He licked his lips, glad for a fleeting moment that she couldn’t see the nervous gesture.
“Did they name you?” she said again. “Did you earn your name?”
“What does it matter to you?” Kanan snapped, irritated, and in his moment of distraction she attacked.
He swung his lightsaber up to parry the blow, darting under her outswept blade as she disengaged and drew back, her lightsaber behind her. Kanan flipped his hilt around into a reverse grip, his free hand clenching into an empty fist. For a fleeting moment he wished for his blaster, but that wouldn’t do him any good against an Inquisitor. It would be a hell of a surprise, though.
The Fisher’s head went slightly to one side in something that might have been surprise, then she flung her free hand up.
The Force sent Kanan flying backwards, crashing into the wall of the nearest house. He dropped his lightsaber as he hit the floor in a wild tumble, but he was already reaching for it when the Inquisitor’s foot took him in the jaw and everything went black.
*
Kanan came to an indeterminate amount of time later, blinking blearily until the world swam into focus. He was still alive. Somehow he hadn’t expected that.
When he put a hand down to push himself upright, he found that he wasn’t bound either, his fingers pressing against coarse-grained wood – he was in one of the houses in the settlement. Grimacing, Kanan pulled himself into a sitting position, looking around for his lightsaber and spotting it on a table on the opposite side of the room. The Fisher was perched beside it, her legs folded in front of her as she watched him.
There was a lamp on the table beside her, illuminating the room with soft yellow light. Kanan looked at it, at his lightsaber, at her lightsaber sitting on the table next to the light, and said, “What do you –”
The words came out clearly, and he was so startled that he clasped a hand to his mouth.
The Fisher held up his mask so that he could see it, then put it down beside his lightsaber. She hopped down off the table and paced towards him, reaching up to pull down the scarf wrapped around her face. “Hello, Caleb Dume,” she said.
Kanan stared at her. “Tai?”
Tai Uzuma crouched down in front of him, resting her hands on her thighs. “I thought you were dead, out there with that jinx and her clones, until I saw your name on the list the Crucible keeps. But they caught you too, Dume. I’m just surprised you survived this long.”
“Yeah, you thought I’d be killed in my first battle,” Kanan said automatically. “You were in the Temple. Why aren’t you dead?”
He had been so certain that everyone in the Jedi Temple had died, from younglings in the crèche to the Temple Guards that renounced even their own souls to the defense of the Order. Everyone said that every Jedi in the Temple had died that day; Kanan had never heard of a survivor. And he had been the only member of his cohort chosen as a padawan. Tai and the other member of their cohort, Sammo Quid, had both been in the Temple when Darth Vader and his clone troopers had come for them.
“We ran,” Tai said. “There are tunnels in the lower levels that lead out into the city, do you remember? Sammo and I were down there exploring them when it started. There was nothing we could have done,” she added, with the air of something rote. “We had to run.”
“What happened to him?”
“He went back to check on the Temple, walked straight into a clone trap.” Her lip curled. “He was the lucky one.”
It was on the tip of Kanan’s tongue to ask how she had ended up in the Inquisition, but she would probably turn the question around on him, and Jedi or not, he didn’t want her to know about Hera. Not if there was any chance that he wouldn’t be walking out of this room alive. In the Temple they taught that there was nothing more dangerous than a fallen Jedi, and this close to her Kanan could taste the dark side in the Force, the way she had lost herself in it. He had seen what was left of the villagers. He couldn’t chance turning her loose on Hera.
If Tai noticed his hesitation, she didn’t show it. “I threw out my lightsaber in the nearest trash disposal,” she said. “I couldn’t get off Coruscant, though. Do you have any idea what it was like on Coruscant then?”
“The closest I ever got to Coruscant was the airspace, before I got Master Kenobi’s message,” Kanan said. “I never made planetfall.”
“Hmm. Lucky. How did you survive, Dume?”
“My master,” Kanan said.
Tai looked at him for a long moment, then nodded. She straightened back up, pacing in front of him. Kanan watched her, rubbing at his jaw for the first time in what felt like days, even though he knew that it truly hadn’t been that long.
She turned back to him so suddenly that he flinched. “So they sent a Jedi to hunt a Jedi,” she said. “You know it’s a test, don’t you?”
“Wouldn’t be the first time this week,” Kanan said. “And I’m not a Jedi, not anymore. No more than you are.”
The corner of her lip curled. “Tell that to the Force.” She hopped back up onto the table, kicking her heels. “We’ll always be Jedi to it, Caleb Dume, to the Force and our masters. No matter how much we pervert ourselves for their amusement, they’ll never see us as anything but Jedi.”
“They told me all the Jedi were dead,” Kanan said. “That all the others before me had died.”
“That’s true,” Tai observed. “From a certain point of view. I wouldn’t really call this living.”
Kanan blinked slowly. “How many of us are there?”
“A few,” Tai said. “Most of the others really are dead.” She tapped the side of her head. “What we are, what they made us, no one was ever meant to be. You can’t be the Force made flesh and an Inquisitor and stay sane. I didn’t.” She grinned at him. “You won’t either.”
Kanan glanced down. “Why kill the villagers?”
She shrugged. “Because I could. Still asking questions, Dume.” She picked up the mask and wagged it at him. “The Hunter doesn’t like that, does he?”
He looked aside, hearing the soft click as she dropped it back onto the table.
“Better that I kill them than anyone else,” Tai said. “Because they would die. Them and the child I was sent here for, sooner or later.”
“Child?”
“Hasn’t your new master taught you anything?” Tai grinned without humor. “In another life that little boy might have been a Jedi. Now he’ll never be anything – not the weapon of the light or the dark. He’s free in the Force now, along with all his people.”
“Tai, that was murder.”
She kicked her heels again, leaning forward as she said, “Murder’s what we do now, Dume. Murder is what we are. Haven’t they taught you that yet?”
Kanan gritted his teeth and looked away. There was a small round window set high near the ceiling, and through it he saw the gleaming red eye of one of Patience’s parrot droids. He looked back at Tai, swallowing, and said, “What are you going to do to me?”
“What we are we cannot be,” she said, slipping down off the table and stepping over to him. “The Force won’t allow it.”
Kanan pushed slowly to his feet; feeling the ache in his body from everything he had been doing today. He was taller than Tai now, he saw. The last time he had seen her, less than a month before Order 66, he hadn’t been.
“You’re going to kill me,” he said.
“We’re both dead already, Caleb,” Tai said. “You just haven’t admitted it to yourself yet. Believe me, this will be better.”
She held out her hand for her lightsaber, but as it came flying across the room to her Kanan was already moving, throwing himself sideways into a roll and grabbing for the Force. Tai was swept backwards and Kanan grabbed for his own lightsaber, the hilt slapping into his hand and the blade igniting even as Tai launched herself at him.
Her blade glanced off his and she flipped over his head, already spinning as she landed to thrust up at him. Kanan parried the blow, moving backwards as she straightened up, forcing her attack, their blades a red blur between them.
“Tai, this isn’t right!” he said. “Tai –”
“Tai Uzuma is dead, Caleb Dume,” she spat, rearing back as Kanan dodged out of her way and hooked a chair with his foot to knock into her path. She swept it aside with a slash of her blade and moved forward, circling to cut Kanan off from the door. Kanan backed up, keeping his blade in front of him. “What are you trying to do, kid? You think your master will lift a finger to save you?”
“He’s not my master,” Kanan said, sweeping aside another stroke of her blade, wary of the place the unignited second blade on her ‘saber could erupt at any moment. “Tai, listen to me, we can –”
“What? We can what?” A shift in the Force sent Kanan stumbling backwards, straight into the wall. Tai was there in a second; he barely got his lightsaber up in time to keep her off him, the red blades sparking between them as she pressed forward. “There’s no we, Dume. The Empire saw to that. There’s just you and me. And what you and I are cannot be.”
“Tai –” He shoved forward with his greater strength and forced her backwards, slamming a kick into her stomach as soon as he had the space to do so. She turned a little so that it caught her across the ribs, stumbling aside. Kanan followed it up by slamming the hilt of his lightsaber into her wrist, making her drop her own lightsaber. He kicked it aside the moment it hit the floor, though that couldn’t keep it away from her for long.
Her gaze flicked to it, then back at him. She rubbed her hand over her wrist, watching him with yellowed eyes.
Kanan felt the shift in the Force, looking at the door even before it started to slide open. He wasn’t looking at Tai as she leapt suddenly at him, his lightsaber coming up automatically.
It went cleanly through her chest and out her back as Kanan yelled in pure shock. Tai’s mouth had gone wide, but all the amber leached out of her eyes as Kanan deactivated his ‘saber and caught her, lowering her to the floor. “Tai, no, Tai –”
She lifted her hand to her wound with what seemed like great effort, her breath rasping in the air. Distantly, Kanan was aware of footsteps, of more presences in the room, but he didn’t look to see who it was.
Tai looked at the blood on her fingers, then touched his cheek gently. “Thank you, Caleb,” she breathed. “Thank you –”
Her hand fell back against the floor as her body went limp, her eyes staring empty at nothing. Kanan bent his head to her chest, tears pricking at the corners of his eyes, and laid her down as gently as he could despite the way the Force was screaming in his head.
I killed a Jedi. I killed a Jedi –
When he lifted his hands from her, they were shaking. I killed a Jedi, I killed Tai, I killed another Jedi –
He was barely aware of the steps that crossed the room to him, not until he felt the Hunter’s hand on the back of his neck. When he raised his head, it was to see Barriss standing in the doorway, watching them with something unreadable in her eyes.
“Now,” said the Hunter, sounding pleased, “you’ve earned your name, my Hound.”