Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“Tabitha, how about we take a break-” 

“That’s not necessary, thanks.”

“I read the reports, Tabitha. I saw the casualty list. Everyone knows how close you two were. Losing a good friend is never easy, especially under such circumstances. I don’t want to put you under any more stress than you already are. A short break to breathe won’t hurt anyone-”

“I’d rather get this over with… if you don’t mind, ma’am. I’m fine; I don’t need a break. Let’s just continue.”

“ *sigh* If that’s what you want…”

“...” 

“Alright, after Krell fled the base, you went after him so that he wouldn’t evade capture. Continue from there.”

___________________

Feet pounding against the floor, a steady, quickening thump-thump-thump against the firm dirt, Tabitha runs – away from the base and the others –, ignoring the burn of her lungs, the pounding of her heart, the sting of her back, the painful pulsing in her muscles the further and faster she runs. 

She can hear blaster fire up ahead, growing less and less in frequency the nearer she draws, but that's not what has her ducking underneath branches and weaving through thick foliage at a neck-breaking speed. The slowing of a fight is not what has the soles of her boots slap against dirt and rock at an ever-quickening pace or the blood freezing in her veins despite the adrenaline trying to keep it going. 

It's the screams she can hear that do it, the pain, the split-second agony before the diminishing life force, and dimming of what little light there is left in this world. 

The fading presence of friends has her run faster, quicker than she has in a long time with panic seizing her heart, making it hammer but stutter simultaneously. 

She has to get there in time. 

They're dying. Krell is too dangerous, too wild, too violent, and too skilled. More than she thought. She realized it in the tower, when desperation and self-preservation drove him to take chances, should have known a Jedi like him isn't as simply arrested as that. 

Tabby misjudged him, overestimated their chances, had too much hope . She sent her men to certain death by making that plan and every scream drives that realization deeper into her heart, puncturing hole after hole in it in the shape of friends, of trusted soldiers, and men. 

She has to be faster. Get there in time. Help like she's expected to as a commander and a Jedi. 

Have Waxer's six like she had promised, like she always has before. 

She can't have abandoned him now. Not here. Not to Krell. 

Another scream, but this time the teenager stumbles, feels the sound down in her bone marrow as her heart comes apart right before her very eyes, a piece being torn off cell by cell, thread by thread until the excruciating agony and anguish of it nearly force a scream of her own to join the one in the distance. 

But she swallows it, ignores the cleaving pain that slices through her entire being, and drives red-hot tears into her eyes as she regains her footing. 

So instead of a scream, all that manages to gush from her lips is a quiet, watery gasp – a name she'd wished she'd never utter with such pain and fear. 

" Waxer… " 

Coercing her legs to carry her faster, to ignore their desire to buckle under the burden that is her everything right now, Tabitha keeps going, keeps running – keeps hoping against hope even when the void in her heart and her mind tells her differently. 

And that's when she stumbles across the first bodies, smells the stench of charred, coppery flesh and burning plastic, hears the eerie silence of the forest around her where it wasn't just moments before.  

Acidic bile crawls up her throat at the sight, the smell, the – everything . 

White armor is scorched, glimmering with embers still, streaked red in places where flesh and armor plates have become one, granting a view of gaping holes in bodies that Tabitha never wanted to see this… mutilated. Limbs chopped off, throats slit, chests diced up, heads nearly decapitated; with crimson blood in spots where blood still managed to spill before cauterization.  

Everywhere around her, corpses are strewn about; corpses of people she knows – knew . Ares, Ryder, Sigma, Nemo, Web, Skillet, Frost, so many more; all of them she knew, some of them she talked to not a few hours ago, a lot of them she laughed with days ago. Now, their eyes stare into the distance unseeing, hidden beneath (sometimes) busted helmets as their bodies lay unmoving in the shadows of a world that will forget them. 

Grief seizes her heart, wraps around her lungs like venomous vines, and squeezes, making it difficult for Tabby to suck in a deep breath. 

Or any kind of air at all.

Suddenly, all air seems to have been sucked from Umbara's atmosphere, leaving it a vacuum that has her constricting lungs ('too small, don't work') sputter and falter, burn in their desire for air while her mind keeps repeating 'They're all dead. They're dead,' like a sick mantra that only makes the feeling of lightheadedness washing over her worse.

She slows to a walk, or a stumble more like, looking from helmet to helmet, armor to armor as she fumbles forward – the way the bodies lead – gulping down breath after breath that appears worthless to her stagnant, cramping lungs. 

Every corpse she looks at, skims over the armor markings, identifies, feels a pang of sadness, grief, anguish, regret, guilt shoot through her seemingly deadened limbs, urging them to move – to keep staggering, to keep searching.

To find him.

So she teeters over bodies, feeling more nauseous with each and for once not caring that Krell might be getting away right now. 

She has to find him, can’t leave him here. It’s more important. 

She calls his name, first only a whimpering whisper that gets louder and louder when there is no answer to her calls – her pleas for a sign of life. 

After only thirty seconds of it, she’d be surprised if her master didn’t hear it all the way back at the capital – not that he necessarily needed to hear her desperate cries to know something was wrong. 

Tabitha can feel his imploring touch at the back of her mind, the bond warm but tense, dimmed in its brilliance thanks to the darkness that seems to emanate from the padawan alone; darkness consisting of all the fear, the terror, the disgust, the pain, the regret… the underlying anger. She can sense him endeavoring to soothe it even across several clicks of distance, can see the warmth – the comfort – but can’t feel it. 

Tabitha ignores it all. Uncaring, she brushes off the sensations meant to make her feel better, disregards fortifying her shields so as to not worry Obi-Wan – to spare him the numbing coldness quickly enveloping her entire being –, and just walks, scrambles to find in the Force, yells for her friend.

Doesn’t stop.

Until she finally hears an answer, strained and weak and dying.  

“Tab- Tab’ika…”

And then she sees it – sees him . 

Slumped against the trunk of one of Umbara’s many tentacle-shaped trees, helmet slightly askew and panting, dragging in ragged breath after ragged breath with a wheezing sound coming from the back of his throat that has Tabitha wanting to tear her own ears off. 

She’s heard the sound of a dying soldier too many times to count, knows that wheezing all too well… Knows it’s the sound of life slowly slipping out of a person’s body, leaking out of crevices and holes that aren’t supposed to be there. 

She doesn’t need to see to know his wound is fatal, that Krell hit his lung and skewered it. 

She does it anyway. 

Stumbling over her own two sluggish and sloppy feet, Tabitha crashes down at Waxer’s side, for the first time this day letting the tears that had been building slip from her eyes and flow down her cheeks like waterfalls, uncaring – hardly even noticing.   

“Waxer…” the teenager sobs, terrified and horrified all the same as she finally takes in her brother’s condition, stares down at the burned and scorched, and slightly bleeding crater in his chest with dawing dread and devastation – desperation. 

More tears fall, the dam and whatever resistance it still offered breaking away as she gazes at the spot where Waxer’s right lung is supposed to be… where flesh and bones and inner tissue are now revealed, laid bare to the outside world in a grotesque show of what happens when going up against a crazy man, a crazy Jedi. 

A fitting show of what happened because of her .

This is all Tabitha’s fault; she let this happen, didn’t she? Didn’t think, wasn’t fast enough, didn’t do enough… wasn’t good enough. 

She could have stopped Krell at the tower if she had been better, could have caught up to him faster, spent less time talking, and more time acting.  

Waxer is dying because of her. 

So she has to fix it, can’t let him die because of her mistakes. 

Has to save him.

She’s a Jedi; she can do that (‘You can’t. Even the best healers can’t fix a dead organ, you know that.’). All those extra healing lessons have to account for something (‘They won’t. Not here’). They have to be enough to save him; she has to be enough (‘You can’t save him, Flux. Stop lying to yourself!’).   

Coercing her leaden limbs to move, to let her shaking and twitching hands fall onto the stab wound in his chest – which isn’t moving enough anymore, only takes in shallow breathes that grow weaker and weaker already – from where they hovered before, Tabitha is blinded by the tears blurring her vision but it doesn’t matter. She doesn’t need to see; she just needs to heal .

Therefore, she pushes every last ounce of energy that she possesses into the process of knitting together blood vessels, tissue, muscles, flesh, anything and everything that is damaged.

But nothing happens. The Force pulls and tugs at strings that just won’t move, tries to move blood back to where it belongs, only to have it slip through its grasp – her grasp , and- 

Nothing works. No matter how much she concentrates, how much power she transfers into healing, the wound stays open, his lung doesn’t fill with air, and blood keeps seeping into parts of his body where it doesn’t belong.

Another sob rips through Tabitha’s own chest, tearing a hole into her heart that fits the one beneath her hands, and she’s about to push more, give more energy despite the exhaustion she can already feel hazing the edges of her presence, making her dizzy and faint. 

But then, a hand, gloved but calloused, wraps around her right wrist, and tugs (‘Too weak. It- he shouldn’t be this weak.’) . Away from the injury, from the slim (delusional) possibility of saving her friend.

And Tabby lets it, finally looking up to meet the visor that has been staring at her intently since she collapsed next to Waxer.  

“Don’t,” he croaks, voice wet and low, fragile, and hardly heard over Tabitha’s heaving breaths and Waxer’s rattling ones. 

“But I can-”

“No, you-” A hacking cough jars Waxer’s chest, and Tabitha flinches at the painful, wet sound of it, pictures the blood leaking from his mouth under that helmet as he does his best to suck in just one more breath. Hold off death just for one more second so that he can continue his sentence in a gravelly, slurred voice, “you can’t. Krell is getting away…” 

The wheezing man lowers both their hands to his lap and yet again, Tabby finds herself unable to press against the frail resistance holding her back, frozen and unable to breathe properly, with puffy eyes and salty tears on her lips. Even when her friend detangles his fingers from her wrist, the limb stays unmoving where he left it, twitching and trembling as Tabitha fails to make it move. 

All she can do is stare at her friend’s helmet, even as the hand he freed rises to point deeper into the foliage to her right – the direction Krell presumably fled. “You need to go!”

Tabitha doesn’t follow his motion, already shaking her head vehemently before Waxer even finished his sentence – his command –, the movement shaking more and more tears loose from behind her eyelids.

“No! No, I- I can’t leave you. I won’t!” She all but exclaims, something red-hot and scorching filling up the hollowed-out cavity that is her chest at the mere notion of abandoning Waxer – again. 

A sensation doused swiftly by a cool tidal wave, leaving it colder than before when the hand Waxer used to point comes back and settles on her tear-stained cheek, thumb caressing the spot just beneath her eyes where moisture had been pooling in a futile attempt to wipe it away. 

Unconsciously, the padawan leans into the shaky touch, her own hand coming up to cover his, clinging to its fleeting warmth even as the understanding, the sympathy in that one little gesture – in his entire presence – shreds what little pieces of her heart still remain.

Isn’t she supposed to comfort him? Isn’t she supposed to make dying less scarier for him rather than the other way around?

And he is dying, isn’t he? No matter how deep into denial she drives herself, Waxer is dying and there is nothing that she can do anymore; he’s accepted that while she flails like an idiot for a solution, a cure for death that doesn’t exist, refusing to see, to let go.  

The thought has her deflating instantaneously, breath punched from her lungs in small hiccupy gasps as her entire body curls in on itself and her head slides from Waxer's hand, falling onto his chest (the undamaged part). 

His hand follows the motion diligently – or maybe it doesn't have the strength to stay afloat on its own anymore. Either way, unsteady fingers card through her dark, somewhat greasy hair, stroking her scalp in a weak mockery of a motion that often soothed her. 

Now, all it does is make her soul ache. 

A pain only worsened when a whisper squeezes itself past the confines of Waxer's helmet, soft and sluggish. 

“You’re not going to leave me, Tabby," he says, and the padawan in question can hear the reassuring smile in his voice even though she can't see it. "You’re going to stop him. You’re going to save people… You’re good at that.”

Tabitha's breath hitches in her chest at that and, at her very core, she can't help but disagree. 

The proof of that is lying all around her, lifeless and gaunt.

She can't be good at something she seems to be failing at quite a lot lately; something she fails at just as she needs to succeed. 

“But,” the girl croaks into his chest, grief settling so deep in her voice that it splinters apart at the seams, allowing it to spill from the cracks like watery fluid. “But then why can’t I save you?”

The sigh underneath her brow is nothing more than a shallow but long exhale whistling through Waxer's chest as his fingertips press just a little harder against her skull. 

“Because it’s too late for me now…" Another shaggy breath; another stab at her heart. 

'You were too late for him.'

"But it’s not too late for those Krell will kill if he escapes.” 

The hand in her hair slides clumsily over the side of her head, down to her cheek before settling shakily under her chin, pressing ever so lightly against it in a clear prompt for her to look up. 

"Look- look at me, ad'ika…" 

So Tabitha does, lifting her head from his stuttery chest, not bothering to wipe the tears from her puffy cheeks. Not when her hands are already moving towards the rim of Waxer's helmet when she sees his free one trying in vain to remove it himself, too weak to do anything but jerk it up uselessly. 

Slowly – gently –, the girl tugs it off his head revealing the ghastly sight underneath. A sight that makes nausea swirl in her stomach, no matter how expected it is. 

The blood pooling in his mouth, flowing down his chin; the hollowness of his cheeks and eye sockets; the pale hue of his normally tanned skin; the glassy sheen to his eyes. 

It's the appearance of a dying man on his last legs, breathing his last breaths. 

Whispering his last sentences, filled with reassurances made for the last person he'll ever see.

“It’s gonna… be okay, ad’ika. Eventually.”

In an instant, Tabby drops the hands that have been frozen in the air after taking off the helmet, letting them fall into their laps – bucket still in hand – with horror and disbelief contorting her features into a teary mess. “No, it’s not. It’ll never be okay. Boil-”

“Will be taken care of by you and the others." He wheezes, his own hands slipping down to cradle hers where they're clutching his forgotten helmet on their touching legs. "He’ll have his friends to support him. As will you. Together, you will be okay.”

Tabitha doesn't say anything after that, not for a long minute, unable to grasp how Waxer could possibly think she and Boil could ever be okay – be normal – again without him at their side, having their backs at every turn. 

But she can't say that, can she? Can't mention how the galaxy is ending as his heartbeat slows, how tomorrow already seems so impossible to reach or imagine when he isn't there too, how even the next five minutes are enough to make her shrivel up in anguish. 

She can't say any of that unless she wants to make dying all that more painful for him. 

But-

“I can’t do this without you…” she all but whimpers, feeling the gloves of his hands tighten just a little around the prickly skin of hers.

“I never wanted you… to have to.” Waxer breathes sluggishly, and Tabby can already hear what's about to happen next; can also feel the weakening of the grasp on her hands and the helmet. 

Waxer is slipping away – life force dulling rapidly –, and with his dying breath he whispers a quiet, “I love you, vod’ika .” before his eyes slip closed and his heart stills forever.

Leaving her in utter, soul-shattering silence, broken only by her heaving but quiet cries.

“I love you too, ori’vod ,” she sobs just as his jaw slackens and his hands fall away limp, leaving hers freezing in the stale air of Umbara. 

'I’m sorry,' she doesn't add, no matter how much her heart longs to say it whilst she stares down into the lifeless, black visor in her hands.

(Something dark stares right back.)

___________________

“Tabitha, are you sure you’re al-”

“I’m fine. I’m okay… *ragged breathing* ”

“Can we get some more water in here and something to eat perhaps?”

“ *muffled sob* ”

“Tabitha-”

“Can we take that break now?”