Star Wars Swan Song

**A/N: Ok, so I have not written SW fanfic in a very long time. Let that be a warning to you. I dabbled very briefly in it years ago and never posted anything, so my SW writing skills are rusty as hell, to say the least. Anyway, this was an idea I got after watching a video on the SW: The Old Republic website. It is a battle scene between the Sith and the Jedi depicting an attack on the Jedi temple on Coruscant. I wrote this from the perspective of the Jedi fighting the Sith who is narrating the scene, because I thought it would be an interesting challenge. I have no clue who this man is, whether he is a central character or just cannon fodder for epic cut scenes and I know absolutely nothing about him, so I thought it would be a good challenge to try and take this character and get inside his head a little. I recommend watching the video, of course, although you don't have to; this is not a strict re-write of the scene. If you'd like to watch the video to know what I am basing this off, just do a quick search for SW: The Old Republic, and click on the very first link that pops up. Go to Game Info at the top, and from there select The Setting. It's the very last video. I'd include the link, but this site tends to eat links.**

Their weapons wink on like hyperdrives of starfighters.

The ship around them becomes blood-lit gloom, painting rubble-smoke in striations of red that are almost pretty. He can't even try to count them, there are so many.

His heart is a snarled clot in his throat.

In the masticated opening this shuttle's crash landing has ripped sawtoothed and smoldering into the side of the temple, he can see constellations of Coruscant traffic stream, river-flow constant and unchanging.

And this is the revelation that chews through his chest like scissor-snips of Kinrath mandible, crossing and uncrossing around his heart:

No one is coming to help them.

He has only a handful of Masters fanned out behind him, faint Force pulses at his back.

The rest are Padawans. Children.

And they are all he has. These round-cheeked youths that want to cower but do not, these brace-shouldered younglings who are trying so very hard to be brave, to breathe meditative focus into cold-stone certainty that they are going to die-

They are all he has.

They are all the _Republic _has.

He ignites his light saber.

Their charge through blood-lit rubble-smoke is a hematic smear.

And his Masters and these brace-shouldered Padawans-they all close around them like animal snare clanging shut, and now there are chain lightning snarls of blue and green and yellow among that hematic smear.

His first impact is a hammer blow that knocks black-robed intruder sprawling to the floor, putting him hip to hip with Master Dysar. She is a blur in his peripheral vision and in the Force, sideslipping and backstepping and leaping in this ballet that is her untouchable fighting prowess, and he can feel that scissor-snip of Kinrath mandible ease its steel-girder grip on his heart, just slightly. Around them embers of blaster bolt ricochet loop and whine and bounce singing off cross blocks of double blades to enfold them all in acrid, smokescreen gray. The vaulted arch of ceiling above him flickers shadow puppet theater replays of this battle they cannot lose.

He turns and turns and turns, each step a strike and each strike a step, and in his ears his blood is a tidal roar.

There is a wet scrape like pneumonia rasp somewhere in the background, and he is only vaguely aware that it is a voice, calling out orders.

He spins like he is delivering a backfist. His lightsaber comes up through a crescent that chews away a black-gloved fist half a handspan beneath a spray of incarnadine blade thrust, and sends it tumbling away across the floor. A fray of black-crisped wrist skin spits smoke like the fragments of wall rubble in front of him. Master Dysar beside him is a haze of green and oil-sheen blue of flying head tails, and this scissor-snip of Kinrath mandible-

It is gone, because they are _winning_-this black-robed roil of intruder front line pulls back like a surge of ocean tide going out and these children around him fighting and dying and in turn watching others die-

They don't _have _to.

Someone has unlocked his chest, and he can breathe again.

Beside him, Master Dysar sways like she has suddenly lost her balance, and he turns toward her with his lightsaber in guard position, reaching out to steady her by the sleeve of her robe.

Her death is an open toothless smile across her throat.

There's a hiss like pneumatics-sigh from that bloodless cauterization-sizzle that is the gape-lipped idiot's grin of her neck, and then she slowly folds down onto both knees. Deactivated lightsaber handgrip hits the floor with a clang that is the only thing he can hear, right now.

And he can only stand there, staring.

He is the gape-lipped idiot now, standing here with his lightsaber swinging loosely dangling from his nerveless hand, like he doesn't know what to do with it anymore. Her eyes are unfocused marbles in her head, still open.

Someone nearby spits a moist hack of a cough into gloved fist.

It takes him a moment to realize it is not a cough, but a laugh.

Insectile vocabulator scrambles the pneumonia rasp voice he heard earlier into something dispassionately droid-like:

"You were trusted to lead the Republic." He is not sure if it is a question or a statement, but there is something mocking in that vocabulator-scrambled declaration, and it starts a low vibration of thunder roll in his chest.

It is something he is not supposed to feel, something he is not supposed to _succumb _to-

But he does anyway.

He lets its smoke crisp the edges of his shriveled aching heart, and gather between his ears.

They say anger is the path to the Dark Side-and he doesn't give a _damn _right now, and all his years and years of training and hours long sessions of meditative contemplation and carefully-cultivated Jedi calm-

They're all leaking out of him like the trickles of blood from that Padawan's lips, angled toward him like they're trying to get in one final accusation.

He lunges into a riposte that's going to take that insectile vocabulator and its pneumonia rasp voice right through the center, and this anger in his gut and this sick cringing certainty in his heart-

They are all pushing him forward, with a scream that is a wordless animal roar of pain.

He is knocked casually stumbling with a swipe from that incarnadine blade that is so nonchalant it takes him only a second to understand that he is not going to win this fight.

He engages anyway.

Through jagged sprays of crumpled transparisteel like snapped-off teeth that form the far wall of the temple now, Coruscant is a dawn-lit haven. Everything is just as he left it this morning, with his elbows on the top floor balustrade and his lungs full of early-morning air tinged pollution-bitter. There is a part of him that is out there in it right now, a part of him that is detached from this whirling dervish of green and red and red and green. This fist clench of pain in his chest is an abstract, next to that sweep of skyline he has spent his whole life gazing out over.

He remembers what's going to happen to it, and the fingers of this clenched fist in his chest squeeze tighter, until his breath in his throat is a broken, winded wheeze. He ducks and slashes and sends a ripple of sizzling tear along robe hem that swirls back away from him-

But this is all just fancy cinema. Smoke and mirrors.

He knows it, and this _thing _in front of him knows it.

His fate is already written in the crumples of Padawan and Master that litter the temple floor like piles of refuse.

And his Republic before him-

There is nothing he can do to save it.

He understands this, but he does not accept it. And this is why he keeps tirelessly pressing forward, whirling and jabbing and willing feedback ripples of Force through his arms and legs and whip cracks of endlessly twirling weapon. Their blades weave patterns of multi-colored energy that flash signal flares of red-green around them.

He wonders if it looks like he is winning from that unchanging Coruscant traffic stream.

The smoke stings tears from his eyes. Or maybe it's that fist, squeezing them loose.

He is halfway through a pirouette when it happens. He does not see it coming; he does not even _feel _it coming, at first.

And then it is already there, and there is nothing he can do about it.

Tarnished metal handgrip winks up at him from his chest, coiling up the light from the city and the battle around them in its surface and throwing it back in his eyes.

It doesn't hurt much, and this is what surprises him most. The fist clench on his heart is gone, because there is no more room for it. His lips flap like the gills on a beached colo claw, and there's a little flicker of fire in his chest, finally.

He keeps trying to breathe around it.

Insectile vocabulator looms right in front of him.

He wonders if this is how Master Dysar felt, in the semi-second of awareness that is the moment just after the death blow. He imagines his throat peeling open around exposed vertebrae, and he wonders which of them got off easier: Master Dysar smiling up at that vaulted ceiling arch and its soot-smudges of blaster scuff mark, or this slow strangle of blood filling his lungs one gradual creeping millimeter at a time.

There is a tidy little wrist flick of a twist, and the blade inside him turns.

His gasp is a hiccup of air he can't quite force down his throat.

The sky before him is the color of blood. His head sags broken doll limp onto his chest, and streaks the same color as the sky shine phosphorescent red in the dust underneath his boots.

There is too much of that color around him, right now. As far as his limited, dimming vision can see, there is nothing else.

There is a voice like wet invalid cough, speaking through the dull blood-pound roar of the ocean that is his pulse in his ears.

And these are the last words he hears:

"You were deceived. And now, your republic shall fall."

These are the only words he will hear, forever.


End file.
