[CLOSED] Hands of Healing

[Andreus Makaryk]

(Continued from Love...Honor...Obey

OOC note: The events of Love Honor Obey would have only taken about fifteen hours in-character, but the RP got held up for OOC reasons. Therefore, this RP is retroactive to take place immediately after Love Honor Obey, i.e. long before Jhon Cordatus gets reassigned to temporary Galactic Alliance duty on Coruscant, and also before the Jedi Council reshuffling. Also received info/permissions from Bac and Den to sprinkle some flavor in.)

Deep within the basement of the Hall of Healing, a maelstrom of darkness swirled, attempting to swallow an unconscious padawan. For twelve and a half hours had that padawan resisted it, alone, before he could reach the help of the Sage Masters, or for that matter, any Jedi. Devoid of any training in mental resistance whatsoever, the now-unconscious padawan had subsisted on willpower alone, swearing he would die before he would allow the darkness to corrupt him.

The darkness, therefore, when it became apparent the padawan would not fall, willed that he die. The padawan knew not how to destroy the darkness; when he refused it entry into his will, consumed his body it had.

He had reached his assistance...just. And then he had fallen unconscious. He'd nearly died on the tarmac of the docking bay, even before the Sage Healers had loaded him onto a gurney. Jhon Cordatus himself had had to stabilize his pulse...which by the time he reached the stricken padawan, had fallen into the single digits as the padawan's body shut down. Or tried to. The patterned tattoos emblazoned upon the young man's face were still blackened and charred. They had literally smoldered, producing the occasional flame, upon admittance, when their temperature had been measured at one hundred seventy-three degrees Celsius, and that was after the wind-driven rain the padawan had conjured up had a moment to cool them.

The Sage Master wanted to treat whatever mental trauma the young man had experienced, but that could not be done until his patient had regained consciousness. The Loremaster wanted to find out why the man stank of darkness so, but too busy with his own duties to personally stand over the man for hours or days waiting for him to awaken, had left a trusted confidant in the Hall of Healing. That confidant was himself a healer, though his own Force signature would seem slightly off.

The Sage Master hadn't had the luxury of leaving someone else in his stead, for his patient was critical. No fewer than sixteen times had the head healer's hand cheated his patient's death. His patient had lost ten kilos of water and boiled-off blood when he was first admitted; now that seemed all but impossible to replenish, despite the Jedi healers pumping twenty-five gallons of water and electrolytes through him within a twenty-four hour period in a desperate, but seemingly failed, attempt to stabilize his hydration. The darkness still carried potent side effects; the patient's body seemed nearly completely unable to absorb the life-sustaining liquid. On no fewer than seven occasions did his pulse drop back into the single digits; on three occasions his pulse raced above two hundred, and on six occasions the broken man stopped breathing. The patient, unable to destroy the darkness on his own, had subsumed it into his body rather than allow it to corrupt his will. If even the Sage Master only seemed able to suppress it instead of eradicating it, what chance did the padawan ever have?

The patient would have to awaken, before the darkness could even become known.

After some twenty-nine hours, awaken the patient finally did. His eyes fluttered open, his vision was but a blur, and he felt drained. Incredibly drained. Like the Jedi Healers standing over him were in fact all Sith Lords draining his sustenance away from him, though in fact they desperately attempted to fill the black hole of the darkness' draining effects. Of course, the padawan realized that he had reached the counsel he so desperately sought. He had reached help, and the darkness didn't come from the Force presences standing over him.

It came from within. The padawan very much wished to learn how to confront it. He had seen the darkness, and turned away. The darkness, even now, attempted to consume him anyway.

He tried to speak, to ask where he was and who was treating him, but he was so weak his mouth simply hung open. He could not form a voice, not at all, and his vocal cords bled from the attempt. In spite of his severely depleted and exhausted condition, the padawan still felt better than he had before slipping into unconsciousness. At least the healers had stopped his face from burning off completely.

Lecchamemnon's surrogate would take notice of the awakening. As would Cordatus.

 

[Brandon Rhea]

Healing was the noblest of professions, but also one of the most difficult. Many patients lived, but far too many died. Lives were held in the hands of the healers, and too much was left out of anyone’s control. Nature would take its course one way or another. Luckily, today proved to be a success.

Jhon and the other healers spent a great deal of time with this one. It was long, tiresome, draining. The life force required to heal someone as injured as Andreus was significant, but not harmful to the healers. Jhon himself stood over the young man numerous times, healing him himself. He would reach out his hands over the boy’s chest and cup his palms, calling upon the powers of the light side. The world around him would swirl into pools of white light, and the Sage Master would allow its energies to drop ever so slightly from his hands onto the young Jedi’s wounds.

He let the young Jedi sleep, knowing he needed his rest, until finally the student began to awake. Jhon could feel it, the sensation of life washing over what could have been Andreus’ demise. The Sage Master rushed to the room where the Jedi was resting, watching as he tried to speak, but found himself unable to.

Jhon placed a comforting hand on his shoulder. “Rest easy, son. You’re in the Sage Halls. You’ll be just fine.”

 

[Andreus Makaryk]

"You'll be just fine."

Andreus promptly took notice of the future tense in that statement.

He was conscious, but still not stable. He knew it, too, as he felt exhausted. Depleted. The Force seemed utterly lifeless, in spite of all the energy Jhon and his students had poured into him. He felt as a capacitor wiith a severe energy leak, and rather than repair the leak, the mechanic just connected it to a source of current and left it to charge. Only the capacitor would never be able to fill, for it lost the energy to the leak as it absorbed the charge; the energy would simply pass straight through it.

Andreus still felt his life draining away from him, even as Jhon replenished it in a sick, twisted equillibrium not of the Master's doing. Slowly, he had been brought back from death, but if Jhon so much as took a restroom break, Andreus knew he would be unconscious with weak or no pulse by the time Jhon returned.

The darkness was still there. The pinata of Andreus' dark past had burst open nearly two days ago. It still corroded him from the inside, trying to undermine him. Andreus recognized it was his burden--not the healer's--to confront, that his physical condition was almost certainly a side effect of that. He desperately needed to extinguish his own darkness. He had no kriffing clue how.

Andreus tried to speak again, but once again, his throat produced no sound and he received nothing but painful internal bleeding for his trouble. His eyes desperately darted about, in search of a pen and paper, not that he would ever have a hope of standing up to retrieve it.

 

[Brandon Rhea]

The boy was in distress. Pain shot through him again. The injuries would still need more time to heal, and there was little Jhon would be able to do to help with Andreus’ troubles for the time being. The Sage Master placed his hand on Andreus’ shoulder, and through the Force came a wave of calm, peaceful feelings, aimed at helping him relax and rest easier as the rest of the healers continued to help.

He turned and said quietly to the healers, “Keep a close watch on him.”

The Sage Master looked back, hoping Andreus would relax. He could sense a heavy weight inside the young Jedi, a burden perhaps too great to carry—one that would have to be confronted head on and dealt with, lest it threaten to break Andreus completely.

“Rest now, Andreus,” Jhon calmly told him. “I’ll only be a short walk away. Can you tell me, somehow, if there’s anything you need before I go for now?”

 

[Andreus Makaryk]

Oh, how Andreus desperately wished to communicate. But he had no voice, and nothing with which to write. While normally he would have taken deep offense to the notion of a Jedi reading his mind, considered it a violation of the mind as physical rape violates the body, now he desperately wished for the Sage Master to read his thoughts. He had neither the slightest bit of training nor even a clue of how to utilize telepathy to make Jhon aware of this. Therefore, he remained deceptively silent, though he needed desperately to lift the burden from his mind.

Seemingly cut off from any form of communication, the young Jedi saw only one option of communicating before Jhon left to do whatever it was that Sage Masters did when they caught a bit of a break. He would have to break his voice--further--most likely just to get a single syllable out.

The darkness that hung suspended over him parched him. But determined to communicate somehow, when apparently the fact that his eyes had darted about in desperate search of a writing utensil had escaped the attention of the Master, he forced his taut and bone-dry vocal chords to vibrate. He squinted, his face contorted in pain, as the forced enunciation of a single syllable was enough to split his fragile and brittle vocal chords apart. The back of his mouth started to bleed...heavily.

Nevertheless, he managed to rasp out a single syllable before breaking his throat completely.

"Pen..."

 

[Brandon Rhea]

This was hard to watch. The young Jedi winced in pain, struggling just to let out even the faintest sound from his scared throat, and yet he overcame that struggle as he spoke just one word. Jhon motioned for a healer to bring a pen and a pad to write on, and the healer returned with one within seconds.

“Go on, whenever you’re ready” Jhon told Andreus, placing the items down beside him.

As he did so, a group of healers returned, circling around Andreus. With outstretched hands they called upon the powers of the Force and twisted the mystical powers of the universe into their control. White light emanated from their finger tips and the healing powers of the Force sprang forward, gently gracing the young Jedi in an effort to continue healing the damage he’d sustained, as well as what he was enduring now.

 

[Andreus Makaryk]

Andreus was weak.

The healers poured the Force into the young man, but their efforts were truly more like life support than actual healing, as the internal rot of the darkness corrupted Andreus' body so. It was this darkness that Andreus so desperately wished he could expunge. He had only been in the Jedi Order a couple of weeks. The poor padawan had not a kriffing clue how.

He took the pen and paper, his hands shaking from weakness, the poor man drained of so much vitality that he grasped the pen just barely, like a man four times his age. Andreus wanted to write down the full account of what had happened, to seek advice on how to deal with it, but he had scarcely written a word before he realized how weak he truly was. His hand, his wrist, had no endurance whatsoever. Slowly, he drew a shaky line through the word he had written--it was unimportant in the scheme of things.

The next three words, however, were important. The inexperienced Jedi had to direct every ounce of strength he could muster--which even with several healers pouring the Force into him wasn't much--into the wrist of his dominant right hand even to slowly scrawl three trifling words with any tolerable degree of legibility:

READ

MY

MIND

He had expended his strength; the point of the pen drifted down the page as he was unable to close the final consonant. The pen dropped from his incredibly weak hand and clattered to the floor; his left hand had held the notepad, which now fell to his chest. Both arms went limp to his sides; now the young padawan was so exhausted he was in danger of losing consciousness all over again...

 

[Brandon Rhea]

As Andreus began to collapse, Jhon reached out with the Force and entered into his mind, sensing the darkness and fear that was within it before prodding deeper into the boy’s mind.

-----------------------------
OOC note: I'm going to expand this since it says very little, but I wanted to get a temp post up so you can put your post up. You won't need anymore information than what's there.

 

[Andreus Makaryk]

Immediately upon the first scintilla of a probe into Andreus' mind, one overarching, putrid emotion showed itself: fear.

Given what Andreus Makaryk had just been through, that should come as no surprise to the wizened Sage Master. But just what he feared might. Would the padawan be exiled so soon after joining the Jedi, and then executed? What had he done? Did his crimes have a statute of limitations? That might be a surprise--the young man had come into the Jedi with no criminal record. Yet, he deeply feared judgement, doubted severely his worthiness to become a Jedi. Andreus deserved nothing more than death, and he knew it. For he was not just the commercial pilot he had two weeks ago claimed to be.

But why? Jhon had to know. He had to.

Andreus had yet to learn telepathy, but with the Sage Master already reading his mind upon the written instruction, he scarcely needed to know it. He needed only to consciously form a thought in his mind, for Jhon to receive it, for the Sage Master would easily find something as clear as an instruction upon the tip of the padawan's mind. Andreus formed a thought in his mind for Jhon to receive--that his mind should be read completely. The troubled padawan wished to hold nothing back. He feared very much the ramifications of what he had done, but he would not attempt to evade them.

But why was Andreus so afraid? What had he done that was so abominable?

As Jhon probed deeper, he would find such memories preserved in chilling clarity. The padawan's immediate forays into learning Force Navigation from the most basic knowledge of sense had all but required the rapid development of photogenic memory, for figuring out how to replace the instrument panel with the Force required all manner of constantly-updated calculations upon data gathered only a second ago. The result formed something like a nearly-fourteen-hour cockpit voice recording, nearly as clear as it might have been pulled from the wreckage of a crash itself.

It started simply enough. Andreus had simply been meditating over Kamino, practicing the refinement of his senses by flying through the planet's perrenial storms. Innocent enough. His memories preserved the data so well that fuzzy, ever-changing numbers would flicker through the Sage Master's mind as he retrieved the padawan's memory--as if he was literally reading a flight data recorder. But Andreus' meditation had suffered a peculiar interruption.

"Juliet-Sierra-Niner-Whiskey, turn left heading two-niner-zero, expedite landing, cleared to land Docking Pad Thirteen-A."

"Juliet-Sierra-Niner-Whiskey, say again?"

"Turn left heading two-niner-zero, expedite landing, cleared to land Docking Pad Thirteen-A."

It had been an unusual deviation, but Andreus had been bound to follow traffic control's orders, no matter how out-of-place they seemed. He had done so. The numbers that flickered through Jhon's mind like the instrument panel of Andreus' starfighter shifted to reflect the change in course; altitude and airspeed suddenly decreased.

Then the numbers suddenly became a lot clearer.

Andreus began to feel uneasy. He started to sense something, something very dark. He didn't know what yet, but it seemed vaguely familiar. Not long-ago familiar, but recently familiar. A bad feeling permeated his stomach, which would normally have been nigh impervious to the turbulence Andreus had to fly through. Not anymore. His stomach wrenched with every bump of turbulence now.

He was getting closer. Only a couple more minutes. Andreus lowered his landing gear.

The bad feeling intensified, the darkness grew more well-defined. Like Andreus was flying into the well-defined eye of a very strong hurricane. A hurricane of darkness. Wait a minute...that would explain the unusual instructions from Traffic Control. Perhaps they had been compromised.

One nautical mile, sixty knots, two hundred feet. Andreus was using the repulsorlifts to brake for landing, by now, but he was unsure of whether he should. Suddenly, all doubt in his mind vanished, as he realized that 1) this was the same dark presence that had tried to kill him and more than six hundred others on Flight 391, and 2) that dark presence was present on his landing pad. He was just certain that dark presence was still hunting him, that it wanted to kill him.

He pulled his nose up, reached for his throttle and put power on. Lots of power on, including his afterburners. His engines rumbled, then roared, a deep, thundering bass that violated every noise abatement regulation in the book and made the ground vibrate a hundred feet below. The engines strained to gobble up all available power; they sucked it out of the ship's capacitor when the reactor couldn't quite produce enough to feed them. Windows on the ground shook. Andreus went from sixty knots to sonic boom in six seconds. It didn't take his engines long to give him a beastly vertical airspeed of eighteen thousand feet per minute.

"Juliet-Sierra-Niner-Whiskey, executing missed approach, docking pad incursion!" The controller would have to strain to hear his voice over the roaring sound of the engines, but that was true. Darth Oseth wasn't supposed to be on Andreus' docking pad.

Only the dark presence hadn't come to kill Andreus, as Andreus had feared. Not at all. It wanted him to land, but Andreus had been afraid. Very afraid. But he had a problem: Master Avara had told him the day would come when he must confront his past. The past that he didn't know. The past that had occurred before his earliest memory--of fleeing from a dark place after his mind had somehow been destroyed. Andreus hadn't expected that day to come so soon after he had begun training. He had expected to have time to learn the Jedi ways beforehand, to learn how to calm himself, to use the Light Side as an immovable anchor from which to summon the strength not to drift.

But that day had come early, much too early. Andreus had turned around to face this Sith Lord. To face his past.

He had landed. He had stalled for time as much as he could, but the reckoning could only be put off for so long. For destiny could not be forever evaded. Darth Oseth knew Andreus' past, and he would share. Andreus was not who he thought he was, not at all.

'There was a Sith Lord once, years ago,' he said. 'That Sith had the idea to create his own powerful weapon. A soldier of the Dark Side, who would be forever loyal to him and who would carry out certain tasks. Dark tasks, things the Sith Lord could not do himself because he was too busy... or perhaps for other reasons.

'The soldier wasn't a soldier right from the start. No, in the beginning he was a boy, raised by the Sith Lord. In the beginning he saw the boy as nothing more than a tool, that would be—when grown up—the greatest assassin ever lived in this wretched galaxy. However, he learned to love the boy and soon he saw the boy as his own son. The Sith Lord actually cared for the boy, and called him Leonidas.

'Leonidas grew quite fond of his father as well,' Oseth continued, 'and the two spent lots of time training together; with as well the sword as the Force. They talked a lot and Leonidas slowly began to understand what being a Sith meant, and he probably would have made a great Sith Lord if his father didn't keep him a secret. You see, Andreus, if the Lord would've told the other Sith about his son, they probably would have killed the boy. The Sith Lord wanted to protect the only thing he cared about. The only thing in his life that was worth at least something to him.

'One unfortunate day, another Sith Lord found out about Leonidas and as the father had expected, the other Sith wanted to kill Leonidas...'

Of course the father had tried to track down his son, but he never found him again...

'You are Leo,' Oseth said slowly. He looked the pilot straight in the eye. 'And I, Leo...'

Thunder roared in the sky at the same time as he spoke the four words. It was as if the thunder emphasized it. But even though the thunder and lightning flashed and roared, lighting up the entire landing pad, and the rain still kept on pouring down, the words were loud and clear. They were like pounds from a warhammer. They were the truth.

'I am your father.'

But Oseth had only known Andreus' story up until the point he had escaped that other Sith. Up until the point he had disappeared, up until the point father fruitlessly searched for son. Perhaps Andreus had been naive, but he had found little to do with the information other than acknowledge it, at the time. Denial would have served no purpose. Perhaps the padawan had been naive to think the Sith Lord could be turned to the light, but if his father had ever known love for anything, perhaps he could try? Andreus had responded by telling his father--a kriffin' Sith Lord--what he had done with himself since. The padawan's account had culminated in his successful landing in the wake of his own father's unwitting attempts to kill him, first by bombing, then by a Force Storm. The Sith Lord should have been proud his son outflew his own misguided attempts to destroy him...and he had been.

Andreus had asked the Sith Lord how he was made, and learned he was the product of Sith Alchemy. He wasn't a clone; he was custom-bio-engineered, from a single cell infused with darkness. He'd been made to kill, and the two had parted ways...

...The padawan had immediately known he was ill-prepared to sort out the ramifications of this. Once the two had parted ways, the padawan had immediately declared an emergency to his Master and made best speed for the nearest Jedi Temple, which just so happened to be Empress Teta. The flashburn over his memories--over just what being the son of a Sith Lord meant--had been ripped off and exposed, the lid of his dark core ripped off, that the darkness might corrupt him if he failed to reach counsel in time.

And those newly resurgent memories waited; they were just a bit further down...