Chapter Ninety Seven

While the Jedi passing on felt nothing but bliss after being released, the Sith felt nothing but fear. Because at the bottom of the Dark Side was not hate, but arrogance and self-importance. They felt they were each singular, not part of a whole, and because of that could not rejoin the Force. For them death was an ending, whereas for the Jedi it was simply a merging into a greater whole.

Harry learned this as he decapitated the larger Master Glaive look-alike, while holding his side where a near collision had occurred. A Force Crush, or the Sith equivalent, anyway, had gotten through his defenses, breaking several of his metaphorical ribs. But Harry had dodged just enough of the blow that it hadn't crippled him. He was then able to concentrate through the pain to lash out with a Reducto to the large man's head, blowing is to pieces as he gaped in shock at Harry's survival.

How the heck is that even working, anyway? I mean, I know this isn't really my mind—I can feel the connection to the rest of my psyche out there, protected by mine and Aayla's shields—but I'm still hurting here! Shaking off such existential thoughts, Harry quickly brought up his lightsaber to batter aside Lord Kaan's once more, followed by ducking underneath a blow from the woman.

All along, all three of the Sith had been attempting to get through the bonded pair's defenses to attack Harry both verbally and physically, but it hadn't worked. Now angry and becoming fearful at the number of techniques the young padawan was using, the as-yet unnamed woman backed off, staring around them for a moment, fearing that this battle was going against them. Only the three of them plus the two Jedi thralls had been able form their bodies once more, and one of those thralls had somehow broken free of Kaan's power. The other was slowly being overwhelmed by the Twi'lek girl.

Looking around, she at last spotted the link between Harry and Aayla and scowled, her eyes once more flickering yellow. "You!" she said, pointing her light whip at him as it coiled in the air. "You! What is so special about you that you are allowed to remain within the Order if you love someone like that?"

"Is this really the time to ask me questions, miss?" Harry shouted back, yelping as a near cut from Kaan nearly scored his side. The heat from the near miss stung something fierce, despite all this happening somehow in his head-and-yet-not. Worse, Kaan was adapting quickly. Every time Harry used a specific technique against him he won some ground, but then Kaan would come right back and either use the same technique against him or simply allow for it with his Force Precognition.

"Answer the question, boy, or I'll join the attack on you or your little lover over there," the sultry beauty retorted.

"GAH, you've got a point. But it's easier to show you, miss," Harry said while dodging another attack. Anything to make sure she doesn't join in again!

With that thought Harry lashed out with a Force Light blast. He couldn't form actual constructs here for some reason, but the Force Light forced Kaan away screaming. He actually dissipated his physical form for a time, only to reappear several yards away. Sith Lightning lanced from one hand while the other sent another Force Crush at Harry, but Harry got up a shield in time before turning his attention to answering the woman's question.

With a wave of his hands Harry brought out the memory of the time he and Aayla had bonded, then the memory of their confronting the High Council. Throughout this the woman stood and watched while Harry and Skere Kaan dueled, moving around the area, even teleporting occasionally, both of them. Kaan's lightning was matched by Harry's fire manipulation, his greater speed and strength, and by his Force Light. Their Force Precognition abilities were too close in skill for either to have an advantage there. Even their lightsaber skills were equal, Harry's odd mix of Makashi and Djem So against Kaan's style, the style known as Juyo when the man had been actually alive.

"…children—dumb, foolish children—were able to, to create something so selfless," the woman murmured. Then, as the memory of the confrontation with the High Council played out around her, she grit her teeth, her eyes once more flickering yellow as she turned and roared, rushing toward Harry, who thankfully had moved well away from the woman during his fight with Kaan. "I was kicked out of the Order for less than this! I was forced to choose between my love and the Order! Chastised, thrust aside, and then left alone, and, and you are favored like this!"

"Left alone?" Harry asked, even as he fought with Lord Kaan, idly noting the woman had sort of ignored both the fact that the bond had let him save Aayla and his use of Force Light, which at the time seemed to have overawed the High Council. He thrust out another Force Crush, which was blocked by a hasty Force Shield, and then Lord Kaan once more was forced to dodge a fireball to the face, not noticing the Force Push coming right behind it until it slammed him up and away from Harry.

He landed on his feet and began to circle Harry's position, and Harry started to feel several dozen probes attempting to get into his mind: failing but doing far better than any mental assault he'd had to deal with before this. They got past the first line of protection, the imagined shield Aayla and Harry both maintained around their minds. There the probes were caught by the more active defenses, a series of animals that attacked the probes, tearing several asunder.

This allowed Harry to concentrate on trying to talk the woman down from attacking him again while he tried to use the Force to heal his injuries. "What do you mean, left alone? Surely if you were in love with someone, that other person left with you, right?"

"He chose the Order over me!" the woman's shrieked, attacking despite Harry's words. Her light-whip lashed out, switching this way and that, and Harry struggled to match it with his own lightsaber. A Force Push at Harry's legs nearly caught him off balance. Whipping her light whip around in a display of Makashi and Ataru, she pushed the now off-balance Harry back. Eventually he had to just throw up another Force Shield before she could finish him off. This opened Harry up to an attack from Kaan from the side, having stopped his mental assaults.

Even as he tried to fend the Sith Lord off, however, Harry replied to the woman. "I'm sorry to hear that," he said sincerely.

"What?" she said, actually pausing in her attack, much to Harry's well-hidden relief.

This opening let Harry shunt his power away from the Force Shield holding her at bay. Instead he locked blades with Kaan, then grabbed his legs with a Force Grab, hurling him into the air. Kaan righted himself mid-air, blocking both Bombarda that would've taken him in the chest with a Force Push which disrupted Harry's technique short of the target. He then blocked Harry's follow-on lightsaber attack with his own as Harry leaped after him. A high, overhead blow threw Kaan back to the ground, and Harry's follow up Push kept him there as Harry landed, pressing him hard, his Djem So finally beginning to batter the other man's defense down.

Kaan shouted angrily at the woman. "What are you doing?! Help me, Githany!"

"What do you mean," she asked instead, her eyes now normal rather than yellow tinged, "that you are sorry for that?"

"Well," Harry said, grunting as Kaan somehow got some momentum behind him and began to attack again. "I mean, it sounds as if your fall to the Dark Side could've been avoided if this guy, whoever it was, felt for you as much as you felt for him. I wish I could tell you the secret of how Aayla on I formed our bond, but I can't. I wasn't the one who forged it."

At that moment Aayla appeared, having finished her own fight at last. She was tired, one arm was hanging loosely at her side from a near miss from a lightsaber, and her leg was trailing. Her physical mental manifestation had taken several blows when her opponent proved to be able to use his hands and feet as weapons. But they were healing as she moved towards Harry, her eyes glimmering.

Harry quickly sent her the memory of the last few moments as the woman attacking him turned to her. At the same time Kaan lashed out with his own fireball, forcing Harry to concentrate on him again, his fingers searing from the heat of the blast behind a hasty Force Push which hit and exploded the fireball right before it would have hit him.

"And what do you think?" the now named Githany roared, moving to attack Aayla with her light-whip. "Do you think my fall to the Dark was preordained, like so many have? Or do you think it could have been avoided if Charny had loved me." She sounded almost desperate now, her tone that of a far younger woman, and Harry realized with a jolt that while she might not have fallen utterly to the Dark Side, she was just as insane as the other spirits trapped in the Thought Bomb.

"It certainly could've been avoided," Aayla said calmly, blocking the furious attacks with her own twin lightsabers. Jar'kai seemed to work better against the incredibly chaotic movements allowed by the light whip. This let Aayla concentrate on exchanging words with the woman. "And for that alone I blame this other person, Charny? Huh. Isn't there a planet named after him? Ugh, so wrong."

This won a laugh from the mad Githany, and Aayla went on, still calmly. In fact, she was channeling the same tone that Master Fay used when dispensing justice as part of her duties as a Jedi. "If he had been up front with you, if he had admitted that he did not love you like you loved him, perhaps your dalliance would've ended and your fall would've been avoided."

"However," Aayla went on sternly, batting a light-whip attack to one side with her both her swords, then lashing out with a Force Push that pushed Githany away from her a half step. "That does not excuse your actions after falling. While you might have fallen into the Dark Side because of the actions of someone else, everything else you did was your own doing. I can't punish you for that. I won't judge you and give you another person to resent and thereby absolve you of your guilt over all that. Your deeds are between you and the Force."

"Um, Aayla, are you sure you know what you're doing?" Harry sent, wincing as some kind of wind cutting technique got through his defenses and cut into his leg. Kaan was getting better the longer this fight went on, his Force Precognition better anticipating Harry's attacks, and Harry found himself severely hampered by his inability to use transfiguration or conjuration. Kaan's experience facing Force users so often in real life or death combat was beginning to tell, only Harry's sporadic use of Force Light still throwing him off, but Harry couldn't sustain the technique for very long here for some reason. The light just faded away after flaring brightly in his hands.

"Trust me, Harry. Remember, I'm the empath here. Even wherever the hell we are I can sense Githany's emotions. There's a lot of guilt in there along with rage, fear, and jealousy. I need to acknowledge that guilt while also giving her a way to believe that she alone wasn't at fault for her becoming a Sith. Her leaving the Order and this Charny are at the center of her hate for the Order. Take those away, and she'll be more susceptible to actual discussion," Aayla replied.

"You don't judge me for falling," Githany asked, stepping back, the look of madness fading from her face. Aayla noticed that the woman had been stunningly beautiful before she had fallen to the Dark Side.

"I don't judge you for falling," said Aayla, shaking her head, her lekku twitching with the movement. She stood back too, her lightsaber at her side, utterly defenseless, while she kept one eye on the ongoing battle between Kaan and Harry. "I won't even tell you that your actions afterward were without cause. It is up to you and the Force to judge your actions. What do you think of them now, looking back on them?"

Githany stared at Aayla, then turned to look at Harry. "And if either of you were told you had to end your relationship, sever your bond, or leave the Order, what would you do?" she asked softly, not acknowledging Aayla's last words.

"We'd say, screw the Order!" Harry and Aayla said as one, while Harry continued to fight the mad Lord Kaan.

He'd just stabbed the man through the chest, but instead of dissipating like the other Sith had after taking a mortal wound, Kaan had slammed a hard Force Crush into Harry, hurling him away. Harry winced as he felt more ribs cracking, and one of them had also punctured something inside him, but his attention was on Kaan, whose image had begun to heal itself almost as quickly as Harry had hurt him.

"Harry!" Aayla exclaimed, racing towards Lord Kaan and engaging him while the woman stared at them both. She lashed out with a blast of air which caught his hasty Force Push, following up with a series of air cutters, her specialty, which nearly caught Kaan flatfooted, cutting off an ear and a hand as he met her Jar'kai style with his own feverish Juyo.

"We're nearly winning this, woman!" Lord Kaan shouted at the woman Aayla had just left behind. "Don't let up! We kill these two, we can control their bodies and live again!"

"Is this what I want…?" Githany said aloud, more to herself than anyone else. "To snuff out that which I never had; am I really that, that petty? Are the Sith truly that's petty? Are we truly evil as we have always been painted as?

"The Sith might be," she said at last as Harry rejoined the fight. "But I am not."

With that she moved forward quickly, her light whip suddenly grabbing Lord Kaan's arm from behind, searing through it instantly. This allowed both of the padawans to stab him in the chest.

Where before his sense of self had been able to deal with the damage, this was simply too much, and his body began to come apart. "NO!" Kaan screamed, backing away and staring at them, the mad red and yellow tint in his eyes disappearing for a moment. "I, I don't want to die!"

The next instant Harry decapitated him with a Force Light beam. Kaan's body disappeared before it could fall to the ground. For a moment there was stillness, the three of them staring at one another while they started to hear the thunder and lightning and booming of Lily's fight in the distance fade.

Then Githany smiled. It was an honest and warm smile which tore away years from the woman's face. "Treasure one another," she said simply, "and remember my name, the tale of Githany. That is all I ask." With that she somehow disappeared, a Sith Lord returning to the Force as a whole at the last instant.

A second later Lily floated into view, quickly moving toward the two of them, having dealt with all of the spirits who had attacked the two padawans but had not been able to form actual bodies. "Well, that was interesting."

"Your British understatement is beginning to annoy, Mama Lily," Aayla said with a chuckle, before all three of them found themselves back once more in the material plane.