Vaya Mer'darrow wrote: ↑Tue Jan 28, 2020 10:30 pm
She could never remember, later, why she and Petrus had been out of doors. Was it an errand? Were they just taking a walk?
They heard it before they saw anything. The Imperial war machine was many things, but not quiet. The clank of walkers, the scream of TIE fighters and dropships. Then they saw the smoke.
Vaya smugly considered herself quicker on the uptake than most people, but she hadn’t realized until then the vast gulf between
understanding what was happening and
reacting. It didn’t matter how much earlier than Petrus she had put two and two together to make four, quickly correlating the evidence of her keen senses with all of her knowledge about how the world worked to understand, with terrible clarity, that what she had tried to warn Sister Hulia about the other day was coming true, at an awful magnitude.
What mattered was
Petrus, running off in the direction of the Enclave, to
do something. Even given the horror of the occasion, Vaya found herself smiling as she sprinted to catch up. She’d lamented, in her darker moments, that Petrus seemed an unlikely vehicle for the advancement of her spiritual enlightenment. Sometimes within his earshot (“If the Force was going to reach out and knock my whole life afterburners-fore-cockpit, couldn’t it have given me a fated encounter with a Padawan who
wears pants?”). Those doubts were distant, now.
Before he outpaced her, she panted something to him that Hulia had said only yesterday. “The Empire is Sith,” she said. “All the stories… the Sith thrive on fear. They use it as a weapon.” It seemed important. That was all she had breath for before she waved him on ahead, but he nodded like it meant something to him.
Up close, the sound was overwhelming. She’d always hated the way TIE fighters grated against her antennapalps, and each blaster shot was like getting a stylus jabbed at the base of them. Worse were the noises of the people, even the safest of them torn by fear and grief.
She had, on more than one point in her life, been accused of being like a mynock fleeing a crippled ship. She always thought mynocks got a bad rap -- they were survivors, and she respected their hustle. She looked for the ‘mynocks’ that had hung around the Enclave, hoping to guide others through whatever secret ways they used to avoid official notice, even using her infrabinocs to check for sewers or aqueducts. There was nothing, nothing that could save anyone near enough, even if she could convince the terrified residents to follow a strange laowai underground.
Her body wracked by the chemicals of stress and fear, she found herself no longer trying to help in any grand sense, but instead caught up in the maelstrom of the fleeing Anzuri. Together they tried to merely survive, and, perhaps, offer each other small kindnesses: a hand to lift the stumbling, a gesture towards a place presumed safe, a swallow of water from a bottle.
There came a moment when, at least where Vaya was, the attack ebbed, and an account of an ancient plague came unbidden to her mind: “
...as if its energy was flagging, out of exhaustion and exasperation, and it was losing, with its self-command, the ruthless, almost mathematical efficiency that had been its trump-card hitherto.” She would be amazed when she took account of her injuries later, an array of burns, bruises, abrasions, blaster grazes. She remembered receiving none of them.
