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"Master Yoda," the Emperor drawled. "You survived."
"Surprised?" Yoda asked.
"Your arrogance blinds you, Master Yoda. Now you will face the full power of the Dark Side of the Force!"
Lightning leaped from his fingers at Yoda - nothing so clean as pure energy, this, but hatred and malice given form. It struck the defenseless Jedi in the chest, picking him up and hurling him across the room, and the Emperor began to cackle.
Now, the flooring of the Chancellor's chamber - the Emperor's, now - was made of imported marble from Alderaan. It was nearly six hundred years old, emblazoned with the cog of the Republic - the Empire - and fitted so seamlessly that no mortar was required. A knife scraped across the joins between the exterior grey of the background and the deep black of the cog itself would have felt nothing more than the slightest of bumps as it touched that perfect union. It was meant to serve, at the base of the Chancellor's platform, as the foundation of the power and beliefs of the Republic itself.
It cracked.
Then it rumbled. Then it shattered, and a block of stone roughly the size of a power-supply droid punched itself out of the ground and flew in Sidious' face. The Sith dodged it - he was nothing if not wary - but he was more than slightly surprised at the sudden attack.
"What?" he demanded.
"You didn't think he came alone, did you?" a girl's voice demanded. The speaker was a child, twelve at most, wearing loose martial artist's clothes in cream and green and brown. Bracers studded with iron covered her forearms, and a leather belt of the same design was wrapped around her waist. She was clearly blind, with clouded pale eyes and an unfocused gaze looking a few feet to Palpatine's left. And she was smiling.
"Alone, against the Sith, you would have me stand." Yoda stated, climbing to his feet. "A fool, I have been. A fool, I might have continued to be. But a friend I have found, and together, we stand against you."
"Fools," Sidious said flatly. His lightsaber ignited. So did Yoda's. The girl didn't draw a weapon; she just stomped a foot, causing another multi-ton chunk of flooring to rip itself up. Almost as one, all three of them moved.
Yoda arrived first, his small frame and natural agility serving him best. He met Sidious blade-for-blade, his face a determined mask to Sidious' rictus of delighted rage. Something twisted between them, forces more fundamental than mere blades dueling in the space of their contact, before Sidious threw Yoda off in a snarl of effort and caught the girl's next boulder with a wave of his hand. In response, the boulder splintered into much smaller stones, which fanned out in a cloud before homing back in on Sidious. Those he simply dodged.
Yoda leaped back in, this time riding a small stone with impeccable balance. It orbited Sidious, its fellows battering at him, as Yoda dueled him and leaped from rock to rock; simultaneously, he was forced to dance out of the way as shackles of stone erupted from the ground and snapped at his feet. At length, he snarled in frustration and leaped for his command platform, tripping the switch there to make it rise into the Senate chamber itself while blasting into the cloud of rock with lightning. A green blade caught some of it, but somewhere in the storm someone cried out in pain, and the rocks stopped moving. Sidious cackled in glee and rode his command platform higher.
_-0-_
Mustaphar
"Cut that out!"
"Why would I stop?"
"So I can hit you!"
"Your sword is no match for - gah!"
"Hah! Boomerang!"
_-0-_
Yoda crouched beside his companion. Toph, a human with decidedly odd abilities, was crouched on the ground with both fists embedded in solid stone, groaning.
"Alright, are you?" Yoda asked.
"I'll be fine," she growled. "Man, that guy packs a punch. Not as bad as Azula, though."
"Hit directly, you were not," Yoda cautioned. "Careful, we must be. See his attacks, can you?"
"Sorta," Toph replied. She shook her head. "His chi is weird - I can sense it, but I'm not an Airbender or a Firebender, I don't do chi manipulation in pure energy form."
"Chi?" Yoda asked.
"Life energy," Toph replied. "We all have it. Some people use it to toss rocks or fire or whatever around, some people use it to throw a boomerang like nothing I've ever felt. Do we have time for this?"
"No," Yoda acknowledged. "Closing, the shutter is. Quickly, we must move!"
"Yup," Toph agreed, and stomped. A spear of rock kicked her and Yoda into the air, where she hit the underside of the shutter and clung like a burr. With more strength than her size and apparent leverage should have allowed, she dug her fingers into the shutter and pulled , wrenching the whole mechanism out of alignment around dents shaped perfectly like two small hands. Yoda stared.
"Such power..." he whispered.
"You ain't seen nothin', yet!" Toph boasted, still hanging upside down by the ruined shutter. "Come on!" With that, she wrapped her ankles and wrists with bands of metal and leaped into the Senate chamber itself, where the Emperor's podium was still rising. A Senate pod went flying at it, and Toph...didn't actually look at Yoda, but she cocked an eyebrow in his general direction.
"Inspired, I am," he informed her. Sidious screamed in anger above, and suddenly the both of them were too busy to converse.
_-0-_
"I have the high ground, Anakin! Don't try it!"
"And I have the even higher ground, so don't try it more!"
"You underestimate my power."
"And you underestimate my - oh, wait, what?!"
"I can't believe you thought that would work again."
"It did the first few times! Boomerangs always come back!"
"Not this ti - wait. Did you say boomerangs - gah!"
"Hah! Fooled ya! The old fake boomerang trick never fails."
_-0-_
Yoda was engaged, at this point, in a more classical duel with Sidious, himself on the edges of their current pod and Sidious in the middle. This had him at something of a disadvantage; most people were unaccustomed to striking at an enemy so much shorter than they were, and his blocks tended to be aimed above his head. With both of them at roughly equal heights, Yoda was having to rely much more on his superior agility to keep ahead of Sidious.
"Hey, Yoda?" Toph shouted.
"Busy, I am!" Yoda replied, and blocked a blow. While he was occupied with that, Sidious sent a streamer of lightning in Toph's direction, which seemed to mostly let her tell where to fire off a spinning sheet of durasteel.
"Why does he have rocks in his sleeve and in his sword thing?"
"What rocks?" Yoda replied.
"They're all vibrate-y and full of chi, but they're crying."
"Kyber crystals, they are," Yoda called back, realizing. "The heart of the blade, allowing them to channel their energy. Bleed their crystals, Sith do! More powerful, more obedient, but great harm this does!"
"It isn't bleeding!" Toph snapped. An ornamental ceramic pot went flying in two pieces, sliced in half by Sidious' lightsaber, and then clapped back together upside-down around his head. While Sidious used the Force to explode it into an effective localized fragmentation grenade, Yoda hopped back to where Toph was tearing a couple of pods to shreds for ammunition.
"Bleeding it is , Toph," Yoda told her. "In the Force. Feel it, can you not?"
"Of course I can feel it. And I think I can do something about it, but not if I have to keep dodging this guy. Can you give me an opening?
"How much of an opening do you need?" Yoda asked. He was tracking Sidious, who was making headway against the cloud of metal Toph had around them.
"A minute, maybe two? I don't know, I'm not Aang. I don't do spirit stuff."
"A window of opportunity, I will give you," Yoda said grimly. "Good luck." Sidious tore open the shell of metal, screaming, and Yoda hurled a control panel at him, then ignited his lightsaber and followed after. Toph dropped into a seated position, crossed her legs, and took a deep breath.
"I sure hope you were right about this stuff, Uncle..."
_-0-_
Republic Space, thirty hours from Coruscant
"AHHHH!"
"AHHHH!"
"Take it down, take it down!"
"It's water, sir! Shooting it doesn't help!"
"Then shoot the girl! She's a Jedi!"
"I am not a Jedi!"
"No one will tell me what a Jedi is!"
"WILL YOU IDIOTS STAND DOWN AND LET HER FIX YOUR HEADS?"
"You will serve me, Tano!"
"WHY DID YOU LET HIM OUT?"
"IT SEEMED LIKE A GOOD IDEA AT THE TIME!"
"Quit running away, Maul! Your fight is with me!"
"Where did you even get a fan like -"
"Sir, under the circumstances, I feel like a compromise is a good idea -"
"Good soldiers follow orders, trooper. Shoot them all!"
_-0-_
Toph focused. She was getting better at this, ever since Aang had explained some of the things he'd learned from the Monks: everything was connected. They'd meant it in terms of everything breathing air, but for Toph, things were a little more...fundamental, she thought. Especially since coming here. Earthbenders knew, instinctively, which direction was North, just like Firebenders knew where the Sun was and Waterbenders knew where the Moon was. Airbenders didn't seem to know anything like that automatically, but they could fly, so Toph thought it was probably a fair trade. But whatever sense let her know where to find the poles also seemed to apply to her space earth, now spinning with just a tiny point touching her hand, and had also been present in some of the not-there walls she'd encountered here. Yoda had mentioned magnets, lode-stones, very briefly when she'd asked on the way in. The connection was...
Well, with all the metal and the flying, it was about her only way to tell where anyone was. Normal seismic sense was useless here. Somewhere in this gigantic room - so huge she was practically outside - those lightsaber weapons clashed again, and she allowed the sound to guide her senses.
Magnets. Magnetic...fields, maybe, if that word meant what she thought it did in the screwey language she'd inexplicably learned to speak here, flexed and buzzed against each other. Each field led to a metal hilt, relatively easier to sense, but so complex it felt like half the contents of a war balloon's engine compartment packed into a piece of metal the size of her arm, if that. And not a little balloon, either - the big ones. But in that mess of wires and bits of what felt very much like glass, at least from this distance, those tiny little rocks sang and sang and sang. Yoda's single crystal was a haunting melody of age and wisdom and power and authority.
Sidious' two crystals felt a lot more like the broken sense of the annihilated villages she'd encountered while chasing some of the war's more heinous generals.
But she could feel how they were broken, fundamentally, and begin to feel how they might be repaired. It was all about resonances, vibrations at the right frequency; in an earthquake, the vibrations of the planet itself caused shaking that could shatter something as huge as the Earth Palace in Ba Sing Se. Here, it might just begin to bring a pair of heartbroken crystals back into shape, if only she could get a grip on their chi.
Man, she missed Sparky. He was good at this sort of thing.
_-0-_
"How is he doing that?"
"Less questions, more shooting!"
"He's catching lasers , sir!"
"I don't care if he's crapping gold, trooper! Get Billaba and the child!"
"He's breathing fire now, sir!"
"Then get the foam cannisters!"
"Seriously, what did you do to make these guys so mad?"
"They aren't in their right minds, my friend. I've no idea why, but there is darkness in their souls - can you feel it?"
"Is that what that is?"
"If our senses are anything alike, yes."
"Um. Master Zuko? What's going on?"
"Why do people keep asking me that?"
_-0-_
Sidious could feel the Jedi tiring, slowing. It was not an accident that he and his had waited until Yoda was so truly ancient to make their move. Other factors had played their part - but that was one of them.
Sidious could also feel his lightsabers. A lightsaber was rightly called a Jedi's life, and while Sidious had not lived or died on his skills in that area for many years, they were near to his soul. They were not, however, commonly acknowledged as such; one didn't spend a great deal of time thinking about one's hands. Of course, if one's hands suddenly turned green...
Sidious felt the kyber crystals change. He had bled them decades ago, stolen them from a young Jedi padawan just returned from his first Search and the fool's master, then broken their wills to his own. They had sat, unused except for training, for decades as he worked towards this day, and he had only drawn them to serve that will, as he now did against Yoda. But now the crystals remembered some of the joy of their first wielders, the possibility of choice so long denied to them. They remembered that they were strong.
A lightsaber's detonation is a powerful thing, but not a subtle one. Sidious was able to hurl both blades away from himself in time to prevent that from relieving him of his arms, though he was hurled away from the pod he was in as he went. Yoda took advantage of his distraction to launch another strike, this time with his own blade instead of another pod, and Sidious was forced to use brute-force telekinesis to throw him away. Yoda landed in a crouch beside the girl, who - the girl.
The girl was grinning at him. Her eyes were no more focused than before, but she could hardly have been more clearly smiling in his direction. Orbiting around her clenched fist were his lightsaber crystals , now the kind of deep green of an old-growth forest the likes of which were so common on Naboo. Sidious snarled, raising his hands, reached for the Dark Side and let it take him as deep as he had ever gone in his wrath, and unleashed a wave of lightning terrible enough to turn the Senate chamber to so much slag.
_-0-_
She is barely able to breathe.
She can see - nothing. The memory of her love's face, twisted into a rictus of fury by forces neither of them can understand, is seared into her mind, but she cannot see.
She can feel.
She is lying on something that just barely qualifies as soft - the emergency medical cot from her ship? But the energy needed to act would be titanic, and to open her eyes more than she has to give.
Her body clenches in a spasm, and she realizes that she is going into labor.
Warm hands caress her shoulder. They are an adult’s, broad and calloused but gentle; they feel like a farmer's hands, or a laborer. They are warmer than they should be, in fact, but it doesn't feel dangerous. Only comforting.
Two other hands touch hers. Her spirit wants to give out; they are small, but rough like a warrior's hands. She's felt hands like these - Anakin has hands like these, calloused from countless hours with a lightsaber in his hands. But these are child's hands, strong though they may be, and the thought of Anakin saps her will to live. She has lost him. He tried to kill her, and she has lost him.
Nothing matters.
No, a voice murmurs in her soul. No, Queen of the Naboo, She who Stands Strong. Nothing but this matters. Breathe.
She breathes. A voice murmurs by her head - coolness on her throat, where Anakin had choked the life out of her. The next breath comes easier.
Good. Breathe. Don't stop breathing. They need you more than ever.
Who? The baby?
The babies, Padmé. Twins. And the galaxy. And your husband, lost though he is. He is being found, now.
Who could bring him back from that edge?
His brother could. And mine.
Who are you?
Names are important, Padmé. Mine is Raava. And Aang, and Roku, and Kyoshi.
Raava is a pretty name.
So is Luke. So is Leia. Did you know what they mean?
Anakin had told her. She told him, too. They'd laughed. She wants him to laugh again.
They will break chains, Padmé. Help them.
She will. She can. She must.
Good. Wake up.
_-0-_
At the center of a storm of lightning, Yoda stood strong.
Behind him, Toph controlled the two crystals. They spun with blurring speed around him, building such a potent magnetic charge that he could almost feel it. It drew all the power of Sidious' strike into them, drinking it as if in revenge for the decades of torment he had caused them. In his hands, Yoda held the raging center of that inferno of lightning, a blazing ball that caged power enough to bring down a capital ship in a strike. Without the crystals, without the presence of Toph, he would have been overwhelmed - but two together were always infinitely stronger than one alone.
Above them, Sidious began to panic. He had drawn so deeply of the Force, throwing everything into the attack. Without his blades, he was terribly vulnerable; he had hoped to destroy his opponents in a final, titanic strike before retreating to safety.
But the Dark was a hungry mistress, and Sidious had taken too much of it. It threatened to consume him. It would, he knew, draw him in and leave him a hollow shell, unable to act save by drawing further upon its might. That had been the fate of not a few Sith masters, in ancient days. Their hubris had taken everything from them.
The lightning stopped. Sidious fell, gasping, to his knees, and Yoda -
Yoda -
Yoda stood unbowed. In his hand, crackling with potential, was enough power to destroy Sidious so utterly that he would never rise again, even for all his Sith magics and evil tricks. Vengeance, victory, hope - the Galaxy would never need fear this Sith again. This monster.
"End this, I can," he panted. "End the Sith forever, perhaps, if victorious, the others are. And with his own power, do this I can."
"Ending the threat is a good idea," Toph said. She kept the crystals spinning, but didn't try to act on her own just yet. "Is ending it with that power the right thing to do?"
"Matter, does it?" Yoda asked. "For the sake of the Galaxy, much I would give up."
"What about your own sake?" Toph asked. "I'm not - this isn't my thing. You want Katara or Aang for this. Or Sparky. Or Uncle, really. But - everything has a cost. And if you pay this one, it might become easier to pay it again."
"Right, you are," Yoda murmured. The universe balanced on a knife's edge for a moment...and then the ancient Jedi mastered himself again, as he had uncounted times before, and released the energy. Bound and contained by the crystals and his intent, it faded as if it had never existed. Yoda sighed, and seemed to collapse into himself a little. The crystals ceased to spin.
At length, he called his lightsaber back to his hand and turned to the wheezing Sith Lord.
"Finish this, we must," he said. "But not in our reach, is justice. The courts, corrupted they are. Broken. And much suffering he has allowed - the Clones, he has made his pawns. For their sake...end this, I will." He ignited his blade.
A comm unit chirped.
"Yes?" Yoda asked, annoyed, tiny holdout comm to his ear. "Ahsoka! Good it is, to hear from you. A friend, I have -" He listened for a moment. "Hmm. Judge this, we must. To Senator Amidala, we must go, and with luck Master Kenobi and your old master. A...terrible truth, we must explain." He glanced at the broken form of the Sith on the pod above them. He was unconscious, possibly braindead. Yoda nodded. "Better, this way is. The Emperor, we will bring. Already traitors, the Jedi are; what difference does kidnapping make?"