Descent [JK Act II Finale Spoilers]

[Meira_Arirai]

“Dr. Kimble,”

 

“Just call me Doc,” the addressee replied reflexively before opening his eyes. He'd been curled on his side in the narrow space that the Force-cage afforded him, ineffectually trying to sleep. A male Sith Pureblood dressed in black armor loomed on the other side of the energy field.

 

Doc propped himself up on one elbow and recognized his visitor as the Emperor's Wrath. “Oh. You. To what do I owe the displeasure?” He was almost too tired to feel dread. The activity in the hangar bay hadn't given him any clues as to how long he'd been there, but he'd spent most of it waiting for the other shoe to drop. He had expected torture, or at least a couple of good, solid beatings. So far he'd been ignored.

 

“It's Jedi Masani. Your mistress.” Lord Scourge leaned on the final word, making sure he caught the double entendre.

 

That, he hadn't anticipated. Doc lurched upright, cracking the back of his head against the one solid wall of his prison. He winced and rubbed at the spot, sure that he'd have a significant bruise there later. “Cymae? Where is she? How is she?”

 

“Medically, she's in fine condition. But her mind, her spirit have retreated, out of my reach and out of the reach of our best ritualists.” The Sith eyed him avidly, looking for a reaction.

 

Doc resolutely resumed his customary insouciant banter, despite feeling as if his heart had dropped into his stomach. “I'm a medic, not a mystic. What do you want me to do about it?”

 

“I want you to give her a reason to return. You do want to see her, yes?”

 

“Have you talked to Kira? Jedi powers aren't really my thing.” Of course he wanted to see her. He hadn't wanted anything else since the few surviving Imperial guards had pried her out of his arms. But if Scourge was telling the truth, Cymae was uninjured but being difficult, and the combined expertise of the Emperor's personal entourage wasn't enough to induce her to consciousness, he doubted he'd have better luck.

 

“Your second-in-command has flatly refused to come to terms. Under normal circumstances, that would be both understandable and wise. In this case, she would doom us all with her stubbornness.” That sounded like the Kira Carsen that Doc knew, alright. “No matter. Force-sensitivity will not be required for the task at hand. If your mistress knows that you are alive, knows you need her here, she will come back.”

 

“You seem to have an awful lot of insight into how she ticks for someone who spent your last meeting trying to carve her heart out.” And failing, he thought with grim satisfaction. There were few fencers left in the known universe who gave Cymae much of a challenge, and initially her duel with the Emperor's Wrath had looked to be an even match. Then, she'd steadily, methodically taken him apart. Watching her apply herself fully to a fight had been a thing of singular beauty, and he'd had the best vantage-point in the house. At least until the Emperor had showed up.

 

The mountain of a Sith stared at him and spoke slowly, as if to a non-native speaker of Basic, or a mental defective. “She loves you.”

 

“She loves me?” he squeaked, “I mean, of course she loves me.” All of a sudden, his position on the floor of the cage seemed overheated and airless.

 

“While battling the Emperor, her primary concern was for your safety. If she'd been free of that distraction, and if the other assembled masters had brought an ounce of competence between them, the battle might have ended differently.”

 

The man certainly knew how to pet with one hand and punch with the other. Doc sighed.

 

“What's your angle? If you really wanted her dead, you'd have accomplished that days ago. No need to involve me.”

 

“In short, she is the only being alive, the only one who has lived in centuries, who can destroy the Emperor. I have foreseen it. And if he is not destroyed, he will scour this galaxy clean of life instead.”

 

The medic was becoming so accustomed to apocalyptic pronouncements of escalating severity that Scourge's version barely gave him pause. On the other hand,“Wait, don't you work for him? You lost me.”

 

“ I am chained to him like a dog,” he replied bitterly. “and, though the Jedi Order and the majority of the Sith have somehow failed to comprehend this fact so far, total galactic annihilation cannot benefit any of us, least of all myself.”

 

Doc considered for a moment. “If I refuse?”

 

“You need an incentive other than averting the certain destruction of all life in this star system? The current plan is to retrain her as a Sith apprentice.” Scourge scoffed and rolled his eyes skyward. “When my Lord's idiot Inquisitors eventually accept that her will cannot be broken, they will resort to the expedient of destroying her body instead.”

 

“Now that would be a terrible waste.”

 

“I'm glad we agree. Shall we?” he deactivated the Force-cage's electrical field and walked away.

 

Doc followed him to the medbay. He was accustomed to being surrounded by the dead and injured. For that matter, he'd patched Cymae back together when she was on the edge of dying a handful of times before. But the sight of her suspended in the kolto tank caused the breath to seize in his lungs. He was no more force-sensitive than a duracrete brick, but it didn't take Jedi powers for him to agree to Scourge's hypothesis that something was wrong. Her color was bad. Even assuming unconsciousness, she was too still. Without the benefit of monitoring equipment, he would've assumed that he was viewing a corpse.

 

In medical school, his instructors had emphasized the need for personal boundaries. It was better, they said, for a doctor not to come to know his patients as people, or accept people they knew as patients, because emotional involvement would torpedo his performance in an crisis. Doc had always assumed that, due to some lucky fluke, he was the exception to that pronouncement. With his insides turning to water as he watched her, he realized that he'd been wrong.

 

He checked the readouts and made a few adjustments. The medical care on the Emperor's flagship was reasonably competent, but they'd calibrated the kolto concentration, dissolved gas levels, and pharmaceutical compounds for a generic human female of her approximate weight. That dose of gylocal would have her clawing her skin off in no time, and the strength of the somatol drip certainly wasn't helping the goal of returning her to consciousness; he dialed them back and substituted another compatible dopamine agonist. The oxygen saturation was on the low side for someone with her muscle mass; he clicked it up a few points. The several months he'd spent in Cymae's employ had given him the opportunity to fine-tune a treatment protocol.

 

He talked to her as he worked, out of habit and out of the hope that it would help him keep his head on straight. “Hey there, beautiful,” he said softly, trying not to feel self-conscious about the Sith lord looming in the corner, scrutinizing his every move. “Been a while, huh? Miss me?”

 

The encephaloscanner threw a series of steep spikes. Had he just seen her eyes flash open?

 

“Hope you didn't think Ol' Doc was leaving you to hang. His Imperial Awfulness forgot to have a door installed in my Force-cage. Got here as soon as I could.”

 

“Keep talking,” Scourge commanded. “She's listening, I can feel it.”

 

“You remember Lord Creepypants over there from Quesh, right? He brought me to see you because he's got a job that needs doing. Seems the Emperor's gone so far off the rails that even his own right-hand man wants him taken out. And, stop me if you've heard this one before, sweetheart; he says you're the only one who can make it happen.”

 

“The Emperor intends to perform a greater version of the ritual that left Nathema a planet-wide wasteland and most of the Sith who survived the Great Hyperspace War in his permanent thrall,” Scourge elaborated. “Unopposed, he will consume all sentient life in this galaxy. Obviously, neither the Sith nor your Order stand to benefit from that situation. I have foreseen that you are the best candidate to end this madness, and I've waited centuries, bound to the Emperor's side, for you to arrive.”

 

“Pretty crazy, huh?” Doc turned a critical eye to the readouts. Assuming that he and Scourge weren't throwing off the instrumentation with their presence, her heart-rate, blood pressure, and encephaloscan numbers were slowly creeping toward levels that suggested consciousness. “I'll be honest. I don't know whether or not to believe him. I think you do, though.” He squared his shoulders, took a deep breath, and said the most blindingly audacious thing he could think of. “I'm going to leave it up to you.”

 

“What?” Scourge lurched forward, his scarlet eyes incandescent with surprise and rage. Doc pointedly ignored him.

 

“If you don't believe him, hells, if you do, but you're as sick of being treated like someone else's weapon to wield for the tenth time this month as I am of hearing people ask it of you, feel free to sit tight until the situation improves, or to check out entirely. Your Order...and your crew will manage, somehow.” He felt perversely proud of himself for getting that last part out without letting his voice break. Though he'd always hated it when medcenter visitors did it, he braced one hand on the glass surface of the tank. Countless patients had relied on those hands to be perfectly steady in tense situations. Now, they were developing a noticeable tremor.

 

His head involuntarily snapped backward, and he felt an invisible fist close around his neck. The Sith's intention was obvious, but Doc didn't even turn around. “You said it yourself, Big-and-Ugly,” he wheezed, “If you want her, I'm your only hope. “ The last Sith who'd tried to wring his neck had been ground into a bloody paste between her sabers and the Hoth permafrost. He was confident that, Jedi impartiality aside, she'd have no qualms about a staging a repeat performance. “No threats.”

 

Scourge made a disgusted noise and released his hold. Doc leaned a shoulder against the tank while he recovered. There, he saw her hands flex at her sides and her back arch. He allowed himself to hope.

 

“Your choice, beautiful. But, if it's all the same to you, hear me out.” Now his throat was constricting for a different reason entirely. He breathed a ragged sigh, rested his forehead against the glass, and screwed his eyes shut.“He wants you back so that you can neutralize another planet-killer, the biggest one yet. Noble and heroic and all the stuff that you make look effortless.” His voice dropped to a plaintive near-whisper. “I want you back because I want you back.”

 

He heard a metallic ping, followed by a hiss, then two more in quick succession. He looked down just in time to see a fourth bolt shoot out of the tank's facade and into the opposite wall. A fine blue-green stream of kolto arced out onto the floor.

 

Cymae was awake, gray eyes wide and staring, jaw set hard. A spiderweb of hairline fractures spun out from where she'd pressed her open hand into the front of the tank at the level of his chest. Her other fist was cranked back overhead, poised to break her way out. He felt dizzy, elated. She loves me. If he could breathe, he would've whooped like a schoolboy.

 

Scourge issued an inarticulate bark of surprise “If she dismantles that tank, the guards will be on us very quickly,” he hissed. “Stop her.”

 

Doc threw the emergency shut-off lever, grinning like an idiot while the fluid receded. “Easy there, sweetheart. No need for the fireworks; I believe you. Sit tight, and I'll have you out in no time.” He pried the door open with a few inches of kolto still in the tank. It sluiced out over his boots and onto the floor as he bundled her into his arms.

 

He deposited her on an exam table, stripped off his coat, and wrapped it around her shoulders, cursing inwardly at how she shivered. Sticky kolto residue would probably ruin the coat's hand-painted lining, and dry-cleaning would never quite remove the sickly-sweet smell, but he wasn't inclined to care.

 

“You came back for me,” she croaked as he wrapped his arms around her from behind and tucked her head against his collarbone. “Thanks.”

 

“I could say the same thing,” he murmured into her hair. He could say other things too, but the words that were coming to mind, that were practically clawing their way up his throat, frightened him. Also, there was an increasingly agitated Sith lord standing by. Scourge cleared his throat and stepped toward them.

 

She straightened, still leaning heavily on Doc. “Lord Scourge,” her voice was clearer this time. “I trust that you are healing well.” The medic had to stifle a chuckle against the top of her head.

 

“I am well, Jedi. You are-”

 

“Improving rapidly. I have a good medic.” she snaked a hand out of the front of the coat and rested it on Doc's forearm. “Where is the rest of my crew?”

 

“Caged in the hangar. Sleep-deprived and frightened, but as per my orders, unharmed.”

 

She nodded. “And Masters Sedoru, Braga, and Narezz, where are they?”

 

“Shipped elsewhere. I do not know what plans are in store for them.”

 

“Unlikely.” Doc couldn't see her face, but he had memorized the hard, cold-eyed gaze that went with that voice. It usually preceded a fight.

 

“The Emperor intends to have them retrained them as Sith, as he intends to retrain you. With them, however, his vassals will be be successful.”

 

“Then we have to rescue them.”

 

Now it was her turn to receive Scourge's dumbfounded stare. “First, you might want to concern yourself with the problem of your own captivity.”

 

“Right. And since you brought the Doctor to bait me out of a Force-trance, can I assume that you have a plan for that?”

 

“An escape attempt at this time, no matter how skillful, will be immediately noticed and halted by any means required. The Emperor will already be aware of your awakening.” He paused ominously. “My recommendation is that you undergo his curriculum for a time, and that we make an escape when it isn't expected.”

 

Doc jolted forward, protesting “Oh, you can't be se-”

 

Cymae gently put her fingertips to his lips to silence him. “Do you remember that briefing we attended in the Council chamber, Doc? How Jomar Chul lost his mind howling about his vision that the mission would fail and that we'd all be going to Sith school before it was over?”

 

“Wish I didn't. Ol' Doc's not the type to be jealous, but I'm going to jam a scattergun up the nose of the next idiot who goes off claiming he's been dreaming about you,” he growled. Would there be a time when his reveries about her would be true? Not even the crazy ones. Just the ones where she was free to truly relax or have a thought for herself. When they'd stopped at Carrick Station for a refuel, he'd managed to talk her into dinner out, and resolutely steered the conversation away from work. Picturing her slung sideways in her chair with boneless grace, and remembering her genuine, unforced laugh still made his heart skip.

 

She laughed again at his suggestion, this time dry and devoid of mirth. “Jomar didn't see how sincere I had to be in my “conversion,” how long I would have to keep up the act, or how this would end. And so far, I can't think of a better idea.”

 

He tipped his face against the side of her head, lips almost brushing her cheek, and used the low, soft voice usually reserved for talking his way into bedchambers.“Are you sure? No way I can talk you out of it?”

 

She squeezed her eyes shut, inhaled audibly, and settled more firmly against his chest “I'd love to let you, but no.”

 

She turned to Scourge and said, “I'll do it. On one condition. You will guarantee that my crew will not be harmed, and in the event that I am killed, you will secure their safe passage to Tython.”

 

The Sith temporized “I will take every reasonable care, but-”

 

“No excuses, Scourge.” she snapped. “My place in your design is not reasonable. I expect the same consideration. And I'm sure I don't need to remind you of how crucial you swear I am to your proposed mission.”

 

The Emperor's Wrath clearly was not accustomed to having others dictate terms.“I disbelieve that any Jedi would prioritize the fate of a few loved ones over that of the galactic biosphere,” he hissed.

 

“You do? You said it yourself, when we met on Quesh. 'Strong in the Force, and touched by darkness.' Both attributes are vital to the mission. Until now, I would disbelieve that the Emperor's Wrath would be lecturing me to choose duty over passion. It seems we both need to reconsider our beliefs about each other.”

 

“So it seems,” he replied sullenly. “On my honor, your crew will be preserved until we can make our escape, and will be conducted to Tython in the event that your escape is not an option. I will escort Dr. Kimble back to his cell. After that, you will be presented to the committee of Lords and assigned a Master.”

 

“I'd like a moment alone with the Doctor before he goes.”

 

“Be quick,” he said, and stalked out of the medbay.

 

Doc stepped around the exam table to face her head-on, cradled her face in both hands and kissed her softly. Her arms slid around him and crawled up his back, Fingers tangled in the hair at his nape. He felt the heat rise in his body, and saw her skin flushing to match. There were not enough curses in any language he knew to express the unfairness of the situation.

 

“If anyone can descend into the belly of the beast and carve her way out in spectacular fashion, it's you,” he said as he disengaged, “But please, be careful. Wouldn't want to muck up all of my fine-tuned work.”

 

“At least not before your favorite test-subject is examined and independently verified by a panel of experts. Hey, you always wanted to be famous, right? You just nursed a lone Jedi through a fight with the Sith Emperor. And soon, you'll get to do it again.” Her expression turned serious. She rested the heel of her hand against his jaw, fingertips brushing his cheekbone. “I will not abandon you,” she said, her voice low but fierce. “No dark-side power can change that. You found me once- a coven of the most powerful ritualists the Emperor can gather couldn't call me back, and you did it. Don't doubt that, when it's time, when you call, I will come back.”

 

He realized, after a few beats, that she was waiting for an acknowledgement. He dropped his forehead against hers and took a deep breath. He couldn't make himself say the words he was thinking. They wouldn't come out. He settled for the next best thing. “I believe you.”

Edited April 13, 2012 by Meira_Arirai

[RepublicGurl]

Oh my Force. This is amazing! Doc's already one of my fave characters of all the companions, and- surprisingly -I'm finding myself having a soft spot for Scourge. (He was my fave character in Revan and made me a bit biased in his favor when playing JK.

 

Also- voice is hawt.)

 

Anywho, I loved this! The character interactions seem authentic, and the feel of setting actually made me feel... sad, made me smile a bit (Doc's there- need I say more?), showed that fine line between Scourge's Sith tendencies (Force choking, anyone?) yet willing to help them out, and the end of that read was pure awesome.

 

... Um, I'm not sure if you are continuing or making this like a short story, but you have my vote! Hope for more!

[Meira_Arirai]

Thanks! I'm pretty new to the fanfic scene, so I appreciate the vote of confidence. I think Doc, in particular is a really underrated character, and I enjoy moments in stories where non-action guys who are usually used for comedy are allowed their turn to be quietly awesome.

 

Getting everyone's "voices" right and striking the right balance with Scourge's character were two of my big concerns in writing this, and I agonized over a few decisions in it for a long time, so I'm glad you enjoyed how I handled it. (And agreed, I had Andrew Bowen and Joseph Gatt's voices in my head when I wrote the dialog, which I highly reccomend ) I intended this as a standalone, but it is likely that I'll write more of my version of these characters in the future.