#sith training

The best tools the Allies had against the Grysk came from intelligence Thrawn himself had delivered over the years on the methods of the Inquisitorius and other Jedi hunters.  Ysalamiri, sluggish, small reptiles from the planet Mykyr, could produce a small Force-nullifying field.  The Chiss’ small colony had been distributed in breeding pairs to senior command officers, to ward off any telepathic surveillance of their tactics, and ensure their autonomy remained uncompromised.  

Still better and still rarer than Ysalamiri were the other resources Thrawn had delivered them over the years, the sentient resources.  Thrawn could not and would not save every Force Sensitive he encountered from the Empire.  Some he could not save without compromising his position, others he judged unwilling to leave the fight in the Republic.  But Skywalkers were precious in Wild Space, and Thrawn found the Emperor’s slaughter wasteful.

So he sent them to the Chiss.  Jedi Shadows who would have been his assassins.  The unregistered children of the Jedi that would otherwise been sent to their deaths at Vader’s hand.  Sith Acolytes of the fallen Darth Tyrannus, who feared Vader’s reprisal for their support of their rival, or who chafed under Palpatine’s restrictions.  He gathered them and sent them all.  When they found their way into Wild Space, they stumbled across the Sensitives there already, the Exploracorps missions that had lost themselves there in the Purges, Fallen Jedi, the smaller Sith Lords with their coteries.  

There were no rivalries in Wild Space.  They were all refugees here.  Some joined the Chiss at the start.  Others struck out on their own.  But when the Grysk began harvesting them, with the intent to dominate them to navigate their ships, and steal their children for their own, the Force Sensitives of Wild Space joined the Allies and fought back, which was how they made the crucial discovery of the war.  

A sufficiently powerful empath could displace a Grysk queen and take her forces for their own.  

There weren’t many empaths though, and still less willing to destroy the free will of another, even when, as in the case of the Grysk, it seemed only justice.  The Jedi shrinked back from such an action, and while the Sith were willing, few had the empathic ability to counter the stronger queens.

By this point, Thrawn and Ezra had been stranded together with the remaining crew of the Chimaera for three years.  Whatever the admiral might have felt about Ezra’s destruction of his ship and the subsequent loss of life, the man had never been known to waste resources.  Their communication tech had been largely damaged when they’d crashed, their medical supplies were limited, and many of the survivors were wounded.  Their crashsite teemed with hostile wildlife.  Their survival depended on Ezra Bridger’s cooperation, and Thrawn took every effort to coax it from him, appealing as much to his need for companionship as his guilt at the loss of life.

And Thrawn?

Exiled again from the Syndicate, from culture and society, he had been bored, and the best outlet for his idleness had been the conflicted young Jedi who’d done it to him.  As Ezra became more at ease among the Imperials, Thrawn focused on cultivating him.  Martial arts, first, because the boy would be comforted by the familiarity of the routines.  Wilderness survival, a necessity, and a skillset he would not have learnt in the city streets.  Their simple proximity forced them to speak and brought them into conflict.  This also was an opportunity.  Their arguments became debates, the debates became discussions. Thrawn began to teach him history, rhetoric, politics, and the boy quietly began to read the limited files available on the ship’s databanks to confirm Thrawn’s lessons.

When the Grysk answered the distress call then, Ezra had been prepared.

Despite Thrawn’s warnings, he’d tried to treat with the Grysk, that first time.  It didn’t work, of course, and after the first of their crew was cut down, Ezra overwhelmed the lesser Queen of that vessel.  They’d taken the ship.  He’d tried to give the Grysk back their individuality, but when another Queen emerged among them, and they’d attempted to mutiny, he was forced again to assert his dominance.  Then, they found the Chiss survivors, and the small coterie of Force-Sensitives among them, and all of them—Sith and Jedi—recognized Ezra as what they’d been waiting for.

They’d taken him for training.  For weeks, Thrawn only saw him in passing, in the canteen, slumped over his rations; in the showers, bruises and burns raked up and down his sides.  And each time, the gold slowly creeping further into the blue of his eyes.  The Jedi of Wild Space, renegades and survivors all, were indifferent; some said bitterly that this would be better, easier for him, than otherwise.  And around the time the yellow had entirely replaced the blue in his iris, they pronounced him ready.

The Force Users, and Ezra most of all, destroyed the Grysk.  Ship by ship, they turned their own tactics and people against them.  Each successful attack brought another unexpected challenge: the liberation of captive Force-Sensitives.

Liberation from the Grysk Collective was never simple.

The Force Users, unlike the slaves, retained a measure of their free will, but their minds became more entangled with the Collective.  They became used to using the minds of nearby slaves and drones the way a central computer used external memory.  Even if the captive Force Users were willing to disengage from the Collective—and not all were—they had to undergo intensive mental and physical therapy with the Jedi Healers to relearn how to process their world within the single mind that belonged to them.  Even more difficult was relearning respect for the boundaries of nearby minds.

Almost invariably, they couldn’t release those who had been raised from infancy to adulthood as Grysk.  Those, they stranded together with their captors on the Grysk homeworld.  Captives who’d been imprisoned for less than a few years, or those who’d been taken as adults, were simpler.  

The children were difficult, in more ways than one.

There had been infants born to non-Grysk over the years, many with a Grysk parent.  The Jedi had balked at forcefully separating the children from their parents, while the Chiss had determined that the release of any number of half-Grysk into the galaxy ran the risk of future conflict.  Ezra considered both arguments and quietly made his own evaluations.  Many of the children did stay with their parents, but by that point, Ezra knew a handful of Force Users, mostly Sith, living in isolated locations who could be bullied into accepting a crècheling.  He took the most likely candidates for rehabilitation and matched them to Masters based on their psychic strengths.  

And while the Jedi would have been horrified at the prospect of raising children who’d already shown a capacity for dominating the will of others to the Sith, it had <i>worked</i>.  No Sith, least of all the curmudgeonly types living as hermits, would accept unsolicited psychic overtures from an apprentice, and all of them were wary of the Grysk.  The younglings had all received thorough lessons in respecting people’s privacy and autonomy.  Any that had shown signs otherwise would be killed in adolescence, either by their own Masters or Ezra himself.

Then, there were other children who had spent their formative years among the Grysk, but who’d spent those years fighting for their freedom.  They couldn’t help but internalize some of the Grysk’s practices but had enough individuality and moral sense to struggle with them.  Haster had been one of these.  She had been taken at the age of eight, along with her ExploraCorps mother and younger sister.  She’d been thirteen when Ezra had found her, already developing into an Underqueen, and entirely despised the Grysk.  She’d asked him for help.

He’d stranded her alone in a wasteland with a month’s worth of supplies near at hand, told her to meditate, and took her as his apprentice when she’d survived.

She’d understood.  Earlier, Ezra’s compassion had gotten civilians killed, when children incapable of functioning with only their own mind reached out in a panic and destroyed the will of any other nearby organisms with a functioning brain.

The early months of their apprenticeship hadn’t been no more easy.  Living with the Grysk queens had been a constant struggle for dominance, over her own mind and theirs.  Ezra was <i>the</i> Grysk Queen.  While he usually respected the privacy of her mind, he always anticipated when she was about to have an accident and invade the mind of someone else.  And in those cases, she’d always resisted, reflexively, when he gently and firmly blocked her attempts.  

It had become easier, in the past year.  Someday, he promised her, when all the accidents had stopped for awhile, he’d teach her how to do it the right way, gently, so that it didn’t harm the other person.  

Haster wondered how he’d retained that ability.  She wondered if, by the end of this war, if he would retain anything of who he’d been.

Mandalore was a pleasant place to live as far as Savage was concerned. The flora and fauna were not out to kill constantly. The climate was moderate. And thanks to Maul’s title as Manda’lor if Savage wanted, he could order the Mandalorians around as he pleased.

Not that he did that.

Savage was a simple man. He had grown up on Dathomir as an ordinary Nightbrother. All his material wishes were pragmatic and moderate. And most of his immaterial wishes included being left alone. He truly did not care for much. Or anyone.

Only Maul, his brother and master, occupied a space in Savages heart one might even consider soft. So soft even that Savage was ready to endure Maul’s absurd idea of raising Irai as a future little sith lord.

“It looks like a blood bath.” Savage growled in annoyance at the picture Irai showed him. The little kid smiled proudly and started drawing on a new sheet of flimsi.

“I’m gonna draw you next, Savage.” Irai declared.

“Great.” The ocher Zabrak replied unenthusiastically and leaned back against the huge chest full of toys. Mentally he wished to be somewhere else. Not in the little child’s room Maul had arranged for in the palace of Sundari. Plastoid swords, toy blasters and beheaded dolls littered the floor where Irai was lying and drawing with their legs in the air and humming a melody.

“Do you like it?” Irai sounded concerned.

Savage glared down at the flimsi. A yellow man with horns and a red double sword was waving at a smiling flower with a face. He had been to places where flowers had faces. He hadn’t liked it there. Flower with maws tended to want him in said maw.

“No.” he said.

Irai looked hurt. Truly hurt. Something in Savage cared about that.

“It’s the colour. I am not yellow.” He tried to explain.

XXX

to be continued

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XXX

“Your name,” the Pau’an demanded, turning up the voltage on the panels of the Imperial torture chair.  

Ezra sneered.  “Jabba the Hutt.”

The Pau’an regarded him humourlessly and flicked a switch that shifted the panels up against his restrained body.  Unprepared for the shock, he grunted behind his teeth, and strained to channel his pain into tearing apart the voltage controls.

Even with the plentiful encouragement provided by the torture, he barely made a dent in the casing.  Still, the Pau’an’s brow rose, and his Presence emanated surprised approval.  

“Not completely untrained then,” the Pau’an mused, “and to reach so readily for the Dark… tell me boy, who is your Master then?”

Ezra glared defiantly and spat.  

The man shocked him for his insolence, though this time, Ezra was ready for it, and tried to strengthen himself to break free of his bonds.  They held fast.  The Pau’an tsked.  

“You’ll find the restraints in this facility specially made to hold Force Users.  Including those trained to use pain and frustration to augment their abilities.  In fact, we typically use this apparatus to teach the technique, and yet here you are, already familiar with it.”

Not familiar enough, in Ezra’s opinion.  His Master had introduced him to the basics of resisting interrogation for circumstances just like these.  To their equal frustration, Ezra could reliably use mundane methods to endure any kind of discomfort, but pain often disrupted, rather than strengthened, his connection with the Force.  

There were ways to overcome this disability.  His Master had promised as much.

“When can we start?” he’d demanded, time and again.

And always, the same sort of response, delivered with the same condescending good humour.  “When you’re older,”, or “When we have to,”, or “When you understand what you’re asking for.”

The last had sent Ezra to furiously working through his Master’s holocrons, most of which he couldn’t open or wasn’t supposed to know about.  He finally did learn what he was asking his Master for though.  After one mission that resulted in a dozen casualties, and before another high risk hit on an Imperial base, he knelt before his Master in the meeting room and asked.

“People are dying because I’m not strong enough,” Ezra insisted.  “They need me to be better.  <i>You</i> need me to be better.  I can’t be if you won’t train me properly.”

His Master had eyed him coolly.  “And in what sense do you find your training deficient, apprentice?”

“I can barely access the Dark Side!” Ezra retorted.  “Half the time, I can’t even draw from it directly—I have to connect to it through you.  Darth Plagueis says—”

“I do not recall giving you permission to speak with him—”

“Darth Plagueis says,” Ezra repeated, “it’s a failing of my Master.  That my Master,” Ezra curled his lip, and shielded himself against the shock and indignation resounding through the Bond, “his lineage to die out, if he can’t find the spine to create a new Sith.  That you’re less of a Sith than a Jedi if you can’t even will yourself to beat your own—”

He expected the first punch and dodged it, but not the second or third, and he reeled back, blood dripping from his nose.

“Is that what you want, Apprentice?” his Master hissed.  “Shall I beat you, as I was beaten?” He would have kicked Ezra in the gut, except Ezra was already on his feet again and slipping aside the attack to land blows on the man’s ribs.  He ducked a blow and then the man kicked out and caught him in the chest, and he flew back against the wall.  A grasping gesture from his Master, and he found himself pulled up, choking.

“Can you feel the Dark Side now, Apprentice,” his Master snarled, and Ezra could, he swore he could feel it, but when he pulled, all he could do was feel his Master’s frustration.  Maul scoffed, tightening his grip, and Ezra could barely breathe.  “How about now?”

His Master blocked their bond, and there was nothing.  

Just Ezra, just his desperation for his Master, for their people.  Just his increasing desperation to breathe—

He locked into that feeling and <i>shoved</i> his Master away, but the Force answered sluggishly.

His Master tightened his fist, crushing his throat, and in genuine panic, Ezra thrust all his fear through the man’s shields.

The old man released him, and Ezra fell to the floor, gasping for breath.

“There,” his Master told him.  “You touched it.  You touched it, and you ripped through my shields.  Excellent,” he mocked, “Faster progress than we have made in months.  I should continue beating you, apprentice.  Perhaps then you would finally channel the Dark in combat.  Would you like that, boy?”

Ezra spat blood, and glared up into his Master’s gold-flecked eyes.  “<i>Yes</i>.”

His Master got up and turned away.

“Wait,” Ezra demanded.  “You can’t just leave—”

“Can’t I?” his Master taunted.  “Make me stay, apprentice, if you’re so determined for this lesson to continue…”

Ezra dragged on the old man with the Force, but his damned Master shrugged off his attack and slipped through the door.  “Wait—” he ran to the door just in time to hear the lock engaging.  “Really?  You’re going to stop here?”

“I am a Sith,” his Master enunciated coldly.  “I start and stop what I wish exactly when and how I please. Being as you’ve spoken with Darth Plagueis though, I expect you know this, apprentice.” A pause.  “Just as I expect you knew the only way to solicit this sort of <i>help</i> from your Master was to be so very provoking.”

Ezra cursed inwardly.  

“An excellent effort.  You didn’t even project your intentions.  The only problem, my apprentice,” his Master’s voice lowered, “is that I trust your motives too much to ever believe in the sincerity of such a performance.”

Ezra gaped.  

“However, you did access my private library.  Enjoy a day or two locked in the dark,” the old man sneered.  “My old master found it an effective training aid.  Perhaps afterwards, you’ll convince me of your resentment.”

His Master had left him there for hours in the dark, without food or water or a bucket, meditating on his anger.  When the lights had flashed on, he’d glared at his Master and promptly tried to attack him.  The damned man had batted his attack aside and bade him to take a shower and go to bed.

After that, Maul had hidden Darth Plagueis’ holocron, and none of the other Sith Lords had such good advice in how to manage his reluctant Master.

Once, Ezra had ordered Dryden Vos to help him, but given their mutual loathing, the session had unfortunately gone too well.  A few burns from Vos’ vibroblade, and Ezra had flung the man against the wall.  Vos ended that session with a fractured skull, broken ribs, and a newfound resolution to avoid Ezra.  Ezra ended it with no better way to become a Sith than continuing to stage attacks on his Master and steal his holocrons.

Until now.

He curled his lip at the Pau’an inquisitor.

“So teach me something new then,” he spat.  

The Pau’an’s brow rose higher.  “So eager.  Most of our inductees are considerably less receptive.”  He tilted his head.  “Very well then, boy,” he flicked a switch.  The voltage coursed through Ezra’s muscles again.  He spasmed, biting back a scream.  “Who are you, Jedi?”

And Ezra gathered all his pain, all the desperation of the past months searching for his Master and thrust through the Pau’an’s shields.  The man gasped, half collapsing, and Ezra caught a flash of images—other Inquisitors, Vader, but nothing of a red Zabrak—before the man threw him out of his head, wincing.

“Very good,” the Pau’an murmured in interest.  He held his temple as though it pained him, Ezra noticed smugly.  Ezra clumsily probed the man’s mind, but it was no use--the inquisitor expected it now.  “Oh, very good indeed.”

The man gestured a couple officers forward.  “Call and arrange the boy to be brought to his cell after this session, then continue for the remaining time allotted.  Don’t stop for anything.”  He stepped closer to Ezra, and stared him in the eyes.  “And you, boy,” he murmured, “if you’re wise, you’ll tell me who you are and where you came from, because one way or another we’ll find out.  Your Master isn’t coming for you.” He stepped back and toggled the voltage switch.  “You belong to the Inquisition now.”

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Notes:

1. Not posting anything to AO3 until I figure out what’s happening here, but I’m pretty sure sure this is going to end up being somehow consistent with the Maul-raises-Seventh-Sister nonsense I also have going on.

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In most ways, when compared against Savage and Feral, Metane seemed helpless.  Where even at four years old, Feral could shoot a waterfowl from a hundred paces, the girl had never handled a blaster in her life.  A Nightbrother learned to fight before they could walk, and no sooner could they walk, than they had to walk, for hours at a time.  

A half hour of exercise usually left his apprentice gasping for breath.

She was soft, in a way that had been impossible for both Maul and his brothers.  Neither Sidious nor Dathomir tolerated weakness.  The galaxy did not tolerate weakness: not in ordinary sentients, and still less, now, in a Force Sensitive.

So Maul, watching his Apprentice stumble through the basics of Shi-Cho, ordered her to do them again, and again, and again.

It wasn’t as though there would be anything more urgent than her training, for a time.

After the troopers went missing, Imperial blockades would no doubt be set at the re-entry points on all hyperspace lanes leading from Murkhana.  

Unfortunately for them, Maul did not need a hyperspace lane to reach his destination.  

Spacers used official hyperspace lanes because they were reliable.  Planetary governments and trade syndicates cooperated to keep them clear of debris, and fatal accidents were exceedingly rare.  There were other routes to travel though, if you were a good navigator, or not in a hurry, or, if the chance of hitting an asteroid at lightspeed was less terrible than your other prospects.  Maul, given the Force and three months worth of rations for himself and his apprentice, considered himself in the former two categories.

Besides.  Having run clandestine missions for Sidious, worked with pirates, and studied the few holocrons Sidious deemed harmless enough to gift his apprentice, Maul knew more than a few ways through the galaxy the Republic had forgotten.

Such as the trade network of the millennia-gone Xim Empire.

The routes were… reasonably safe.  Whatever rivalries might exist between smugglers or crime syndicates, they cooperated to keep shared hyperspace routes clear.  Sabotaging a shared route to try to kill a rival was dangerous as selling them defective ammo: there was always the risk of killing an ally by accident.  It still happened, but when it did, the syndicates demonstrated brutally why it shouldn’t.

Given the photos of the last saboteur’s corpse still circulated the depths of the Holonet, the Xim lanes should be safe for at least another couple months.  Maul expected to make it to Cophrigin in about two weeks.

And during that time…

He stopped Metane again.  “Feet apart, knees bent,” he chided.

“It’s fine!” she snapped.

He sneered and swept her feet out from other her.  She sprawled to the deck, and—yes, those were tears.  She clambered to her feet.

“Like this,” he demonstrated.

“I hate you,” she stamped a foot.

This, being a common sentiment felt if not expressed by Sith apprentices towards their Masters, did not surprise Maul in the least.  She turned away.

“We’re not done yet,” he warned her.

She ignored him.  

Well then.

He picked her up and brought her back.  She shrieked and struggled and bit, clawing clumsily against his mental shields with her Force.

“Let me go letmegoletmego!”

“No,” Maul said simply.  “Until you can make me, you’ll learn what I teach you, girl.  And,” he raised his voice over the sound of her screaming, “you won’t be able to make me or anyone else do anything unless you learn what I’m teaching you.”

It was, he thought, an appropriate paraphrase of the Sith creed.

<i> Through victory, my chains are broken: the Force shall free me. </i>

The girl calmed, by degrees, and then bit him.

He backhanded her as gently as he could, and she tumbled to the floor, arm raised against a second blow.

“Good,” he approved.  “Biting an opponent is an excellent distraction.  It will not help you when you are cornered though.  Now, the Shi-Cho, again.”

Glaring at him, tears glimmering in her lashes, his apprentice struggled back into the first stance of one of the katas.

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In most ways, when compared to Feral and Savage, Metane seemed helpless.

Not all.

The boys, even while angry, always held back when sparring with their peers, with their elders, even with Maul.  They would never purposely have broken skin.

Whether because she was so much weaker and conscious of that vulnerability, due to her circumstances, her temperament, or a consequence of all three, Metane never held back.  

Generally, Maul didn’t keep prisoners.  Providing them sufficient freedom to tend to their own needs without prompting notions of mutiny was inconvenient.  However, Sidious had considered them to be essential teaching tools, and Maul did have an apprentice sorely lacking in survival skills.

He’d had her heal the one she’d shot.  

She’d stared incredulously up at him, and, as usual, protested his lesson plans.  “He’s bad.  I don’t want to heal him.”  

He stared right back at her until she shifted uneasily.  

“Learning first aid will save your life,” he told her flatly.  “When you’re shot somewhere important, either you’ll be able to save yourself, or you’ll go to a hospital.  And the first thing they’ll do at the hospital is check for identification.  If they don’t realize what you are then, they’ll figure it out when they run a blood test and look at your midichlorian level.”  

She swallowed.  

“If it’s any consolation,” Maul waved a hand, “we will not be using anaesthetic on the bad man, and he will likely not find this process pleasant.”

“… Oh.”

They had not healed him immediately after that.  Instead, Maul had taken her to the cargo hold and set her to focus on what she could sense from the gagged prisoners.  

Most sentients failed to defend themselves to the full extent of their abilities.  Even among soldiers entering armed conflict with the intent to kill, without conditioning, only a quarter would ever actually do so.  Without conditioning, and with their empathy, most Sensitives were even less likely to injure others.  

With conditioning…

Jedi made their students cripplingly aware of every little thing alive.  The death of a flea could distract them, let alone the desires of other sentient minds.  They suffered in killing.  Little wonder Sidious had destroyed them.  They had probably been too busy meditating on the lives of trees to realize their own time was about to be cut short.  

The Sith focused more pragmatically on their own lives.  They cultivated an awareness of the energies of others for the purpose of manipulating or haring them.  He’d long been able to bolster himself by feeding from the rage of his combatants.  Sidious, with his hoarded secrets, could do more, could draw the lifeforce of other beings through simple proximity, slow aging, reverse injury.

A Sith accepted that one life required another’s death.  That was balance, that was the nature of things: the starvation of Tuskens and krayt dragons that drove each to compete for the others’ flesh; the eradication of the Jedi for the flourishing of Sidious’ kingdom; the destruction of Sidious’ kingdom, for the life of Maul’s apprentice.

So, when Maul pulled out the man who she’d shot in the shoulder, he bade her meditate on how it had felt to do it.  How terrified and helpless she had felt, how angry she’d been to be in that position.  And now, exactly how the man felt, under the hands of the little girl he would have taken.

 He showed her to pack the wound sparingly with bacta, above the place where it almost pierced the lungs.  To sew the wound shut and cleanse the site with alcohol, while the man swore behind his gag.

She didn’t flinch to feel the man’s pain.  He laid an approving hand on her shoulder.  

She poured more alcohol onto the wound.

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Hands bound behind him, Creel clumsily tapped out the phrase with his foot in binary for the hundredth time in as many hours.

BOOT KNIFE CUT BOND AIR SHAFT KILL WHILE ASLEEP

He waited a breath for Stelkin’s response.

BOOK TRIPE U BORED … ASLEEP?

He ground his teeth.  His broken hand throbbed.

It was not Stelkin’s fault, he reminded himself.  It was amazing a kid from Murkhana knew binary at all.  Most of those recruits were the desperate children of spice and gambling addicts, or natives who’d only just realized they didn’t want to die with their planet. When you couldn’t pay for any other passage off Murkhana, you joined the army.

But stang, he’d kill for Moakes to be awake right now.

The back of the older man’s head though was a bloody gash where the red alien had bashed him against the wall.  Creel, who’d been in the ducts chasing after the little Jedi, hadn’t seen it, but Stelkin had stammered and sobbed about the last time the red man had taken out their gags and let them get a drink of water.  Stelkin had started screaming hysterically though, which apparently interrupted the apprentice’s sleep, so the man had gagged them again.

Which left tapping in binary their sole mode of communication.

The door some metres above the cargo bay clanged open.  The red man appeared, the green girl trailing after him.  The little Jedi had a blaster in her hands again.  The red man paused and murmured something to the girl, and she sat down on the edge of the platform, legs swinging over the side.  The man—the Jedi, he thought--continued on to the lift and descended to the cargo bay floor.  

He sauntered towards them, crouched down, and ungently ripped the gag from Creel’s mouth.

“Now,” he murmured, “will you concede to behave and clean up after yourselves if I untie you?”

“Yes,” Creel huffed, jaw aching.

The red man smiled, as though something amused him, and unlocked their bonds.  Stelkin shook as soon as the red man touched him and didn’t stop shaking.  Moakes slumped forward once there were no longer bonds to hold him in place.  Creel rushed to catch him.

“He needs help!”

The red man had turned his back to him though, walking towards the back wall of the ship.  He bent over and picked up a can of spray paint left on the side panel and drew a large X on the back wall with it.  

“He’ll keep,” the red man said mildly.  

Creel stared after the man’s back and contemplated his odds of strangling him.

“Your broken hand is much more interesting, at present.”  He crouched down to examine it, and sithspit, Stelkin could easily have taken the knife from his boot and stabbed the man, if the kid had only known it was there.  “Apprentice,” he called up.  “Standard rations, water, and bring the medical kit.”

The girl scuttled off while the man indelicately jabbed at his hand, and then descended in turn.  She eyed Creel warily, depositing the kit next to her master and half hiding behind the man.

“Now, apprentice.  Take his hand.  I want you to feel what I’m doing.”

The girl hesitated.

The man sneered, grabbed her hand, and laid it below Creel’s.  She was shaking too.

“Hey,” Creel protested.  “Whatever you’re doing, do you really have to involve the kid?”

The red man laughed softly.  “You would have shot her and dragged her away, and you object to her involvement?” He turned to the little padawan.  “Now, the bones of the hand are very delicate and need to be reset, if broken, within approximately twenty-four hours of an injury, or it’s unlikely you’ll recover full functionality.  It can be difficult to manually position the bones, but as you gain other skills, that will pose no problem.  Observe,” he grinned.

The bones moved on their own.

Creel bit back a scream.

“All done,” the red man smiled.  “Now, to fix a splint—”

He could reach for the knife in his boot, Creel thought, as the man lectured.  With his left hand, he could reach the knife, and hold it against the girl’s neck, and…

Right, he thought sarcastically to himself.  Because trying to take the girl hostage had ended so well last time.

“All done.”  The girl shifted away from Creel as quickly as possible.  They remounted the lift to the platform.  

“Please,” Creel tried again, glancing at Moakes.  He still bled sluggishly from the back of his scalp.  “Help him.”

“I am not the one to whom you should appeal,” the red man curled his lip.  He handed the gun back to his apprentice, murmured some words, and gestured to the X on the wall.

Creel had a sudden vivid flashback to the girl’s haphazard shooting earlier.

Oh kriff no.

“You’re not letting the kid shoot in here!  It’s all metal!  It’ll ricochet everywhere!  What if—” he thought of an argument that might sway this mad Jedi, “what if she gets hit?”

“Then she’ll have learnt a very valuable lesson,” the man told him, though he handed the girl a visor clumsily cut down from a clone helmet to shield her eyes.  “Of course, you might give her suggestions on how to aim in such a way as to minimize accidents.”

The mad Jedi passed back through the door to the galley, leaving the target—and the troopers—to the little Jedi they’d tried to kidnap just a few days ago.

Creel swallowed.

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Maul: This is good parenting, yes?