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Glorious. Simply glorious.

The cracking of sabers grinding against one another fills the air, stark against the whistling of missiles and the inevitable boom of their landing that shakes the ground. His state-of-the-art sound receptors pick up the death-screams of clones, bones breaking under battalion after battalion of his army, forcing the feeble Jedi-led offensive on this rocky, cave-riddled Wild Space planet to retreat.

He cackles as he forces his opponent to move several steps back with his next strike. A vulture droid blows a republic bomber to smithereens to their right, showering them in smoke and ash and mechanical parts.

“Where is your loyal army now, general?” He taunts, nodding off to the screaming, running shambles of his enemies, leaning his entire weight into their locked blades.

His quickly-tiring foe doesn’t respond. He doesn’t get a chance to, as Grievous forces him farther back with two strikes that would’ve severed him in half had he been just a little too slow.

Glorious. He can taste the victory this time.

“Exactly where it needs to be,” General Kenobi replies as he dodges the next strike, out of breath. Grievous laughs.

“I see you’ve accepted your defeat, then.” He turns and forces the man to step around him instead of away.

He can hear Skywalker even from those hundreds of meters away, and has no intention to alert that infuriating little critter to this duel. Even less does he want for someone to try to help Kenobi.

No, much better to separate them. 

A whole battalion of droids moves in between Kenobi’s would-be-grave and the remains of his army. Good.

“Not,” a grunt, “particularly,” the general’s eyes flick in said direction, widening just slightly enough, but Grievous doesn’t even need the complex expensive software to recognize the man’s fear. He can feel it, its sweet scent; Kenobi, the prey caught in a trap, and Grievous, the predator coming to tear him apart.

He calculates his next strike, not particularly wanting to draw the battle out. The general seems to be losing his flowery biting words and Grievous finds that without them, the duel is getting oh, so achingly boring. He wants him on his knees. Singing like a little bird in the claws of a hawk, yes, a little charming elegy before he dies.

There. A breach in the general’s defense, too focused on the two sabers (just two and already he fails, how embarrassing) to notice Grievous lifting his clawed foot off the ground in time.

It surprises Grievous when he does attempt to dodge, and he briefly recalibrates his calculations thinking that maybe this fight will last a little longer, but then two of his claws meet resistance and the Jedi general cries out, falling to the ground in a half-spin as if shot. He lets go of his lightsaber and Grievous promptly pins it to the ground with the claws of his leg before he can reach for it, but he doesn’t. Much too occupied attempting to get to a kneeling position and—

Ah. Grievous lets out a boom of cackling laughter.

“Too slow, general?” His eyes trail over the two tears in the Jedi’s robes, one just above his hip and the other cutting a thick line over his thigh, both slowly but surely bleeding red.

The drinks in the terror and the pain as the Jedi realizes that he can’t stand— the panicked scream he hears carrying over the field from that wretchedly loyal attack dog of his. 

(He has a 13.67% chance of making it to them before his Master leaves the world of the living. Grievous doesn’t worry about it.)

The panic in the general’s eyes gets replaced by a sudden dangerous glint that Grievous has never seen before. The Jedi’s voice loses all charm and lowly forces out: “In your dreams.” as his empty hand, the one not uselessly holding onto his side, reaches for his throat, fingers curled.

Invisible force jerks him backwards. Force. Right.

Sinking his claws into the ground in expectation of being thrown, he briefly feels pressure; horrible pressure from the inside of his lungs and the metal and plastic of his neck searing and drowning— that ugly little cheat— before, miraculously, the spectating droids fire.

The pressure breaks just as quickly as it came with another cry of pain that doesn’t come from him and the fizzle and tear of blasters cutting through flesh, the faintest whiff of cooked meat. Grievous coughs, and with an inhale meets the general’s eyes.

He’s hunched over and his arm hangs limp, the robes seared black and smoking at his shoulder and forearm where the cloth burned away to show blackened flesh.

In his peripheral vision, a blue lightsaber cuts through the droids, slowly getting closer. Too slow. Much too slow.

“Indeed,” Grievous says, relishing the realization smoothing out the man’s features to leave only blank terror behind. “I was called the Dreamer, once.”

He twirls his lightsabers and picks up Kenobi’s own from the ground, testing its weight, activating it as he separates his two arms into four; savoring in those wide-open eyes reflecting its bright blue light.

Now, little bird, chirp your elegy.

That annoying pest of a Jedi that is Skywalker vaults into the air and lands much closer than Grievous is comfortable with, forcing him to recalibrate.

Maybe not.

“Now, you die.” He lifts Kenobi into the air by the throat, readying the man’s lightsaber for the execution, making sure to give a nice, full view to the incoming Skywalker. The ground quakes, the general’s cries and struggle almost lost in the sound of another explosion spitting soil into the air. 

The still-functional one of his hands wraps around Grievous’ uselessly. He weakly kicks at Grievous’ chestplate, drawing nothing but more laughter.

He spares a second to wonder what would be more traumatic for young Skywalker to see— the, ah, monster skewering his Master like a fish, or perhaps decapitation?

He angles Kenobi’s lightsaber between them, readying for a swipe.

Stabbing is for amateurs. Maybe he’ll bring his head to Dooku and finally prove him the fool he always was.

Of course, that is when a missile hits much too close and the ground cracks and gives and breaks apart.

—

Grievous doesn’t pass out. He just doesn’t. His programs aren’t supposed to fail in such a trivial way as losing consciousness. He doesn’t require sleep, doesn’t require that arbitrary period of calm that they said was reserved to let the mind settle and process thought the nature of dreams; his brain was half-neurons, half-circuitry, and he needed nothing as weak as sleep.

He wakes up anyway, and he wakes up to darkness, and the familiar feeling of not being able to catch his breath.

He coughs, and the sound of falling pebbles catches his hearing, along with the vague itching of dust on his face, drawing tears out of his ever-dry eyes.

Then, he tries to get up. It involves digging, and throwing rocks away from his legs, but finally he stands, claws digging into gravel.

His eyes— the eyes of a predator better suited to darkness than light— slowly adjust, and just how little he sees—  nothing but cold blue impressions of shapes— becomes a testament to how dark this unfamiliar place is.

He glances up, and to his great annoyance finds nothing but a few rays of light high, high above. Barely even worth mentioning.

Glancing around, he spots white, dimly shining mushrooms of all things, rooted into the wet, rocky surface of his surroundings.

Right. The caves.

He tries his comms and gets nothing but static, growling in displeasure.

More coughing— more wet heaves than anything else— comes from his right, and his eyes fall to another shaking form lying on the ground half-buried in rubble, only visible due to the light color of his clothes and the way he shines in Grievous’ thermovision.

That bastard is still alive? Good. 

Grievous lets himself feel a bit of relief when he realizes he hasn’t lost his lightsabers in the fall. He doesn’t have to search for long to locate the one he did let go of; the one that might become a problem if not taken care of.

He grabs and lights it, illuminating the small room in its blue-edged white-hot light that makes him flinch at its unexpected brightness at first, before his eyes readjust.

He can see the general’s head lift, his expression one of agony as he looks around with narrowed eyes; struggling to free himself from the rubble.

Oh, that won’t do.

“Now, where were we?” His plates move in a grin as the man freezes, as if not realizing that Grievous was still there with him. 

He notes the strange echo of his voice, travelling through the many pathways out of the cave, vanishing in the dark distance.

Getting out of here blind will be highly irritating, but, oh well. At least he gets Kenobi’s head in exchange.

Several rocks crumble beneath his feet as he stalks closer to the general, who flinches and attempts to wriggle away like a rabbit caught in a snare, before his bloodied hand lifts and Grievous freezes beside himself, the flash of memory momentarily overriding his calculations, even before the Jedi half-coughs half-whispers a strained: “Wait!”

Grievous humors him, lowering the saber. The man’s hand drops back to the ground, almost shining with warmth against the cold, faintly blue ground.

The scent of blood and fear is nearly overwhelming.

And the little bird sings.

A few hitching breaths, then: “For the sake of your health, general, I hope you’re not planning to—” he loses his breath, coughing, “to try to get out of these caves without guidance.” 

Grievous cackles, the sound echoing and returning to him through those many, many dark pathways. “Perhaps I am.”

He inclines his head, meeting the general’s glazed eyes. “Though I fear you won’t be here to find out.”

To his credit, Kenobi doesn’t respond to the threat, nor to the lightsaber moving higher and into position, simply locking his eyes with him, a certain kind of determination awakening within the weary, pain-filled depths. “I could lead you out.”

Interesting.

“A tempting offer,” Grievous says, letting the saber stay exactly where it is; hanging above the general’s neck, “do go on.”

The Jedi blinks and shakes his head, before he attempts to pull himself up using the one hand he has left, his voice betraying just how much it takes out of him. “This cave system goes through the entirety of the planet’s crust, positively endless,” he gives up, falling back down, his head hanging for a second until he lifts it again. “To traverse it blindly is suicide.”

Grievous lifts his chin. “Who said I didn’t have a plan?”

The general actually gives out a chuckle at that, though it devolves into a coughing fit that seems to exhaust him further. “We have no way to tell where we are, and my communications are dead. I imagine yours aren’t doing much better.”

That defiant spark briefly returns to his eyes. “Do not take this as an insult, general. I only find myself remembering you being more attached to your life than your revenge.”

Grievous growls, lifting the lightsaber higher and calculating the angle and strength and speed before the weary look in the man’s eyes forces him to reconsider. The bastard, even while literally dying and a second from having his head separated from his shoulders, has the audacity to look bored.

Disappointed. Something.

It burns in Grievous’ nonexistent bones.

“What miraculous solution do you offer then, Jedi?” Grievous asks instead.

It echoes, loudly, down the halls.

“Not a miracle, no,” Kenobi replies, his voice a little stronger, “a simple use of the Force to find the way.”

“Ah, of course, the Force.” He fills his voice with mockery. “Tell me, Kenobi, what do you get out of this...bargain?”

The man shrugs as much as he is able, wincing and yet somehow managing to make the gesture look nonchalant. “I like to live.”

He struggles again, and it doesn’t even take a second for him to stop, eyes shut tight and face twisted in pain. His voice is filled with it, rougher than Grievous has ever heard it be. “And I find myself in a...predicament.”

Grievous tilts his head.

A small grin shows up on the Jedi’s face, sharp and ironic. “You have no idea how much it pains me to admit this,” the effectivity of man’s charm lessens considerably due to his current situation, though not by much, “but you will have to carry me.”

Grievous stares. Then he laughs with his full body, making the Jedi duck under the still-lit lightsaber that goes sailing over his head.

The laugh devolves into coughing, but once he recovers, he leans down, only a few inches away from the general’s face.

“Are you asking a monster to carry you to safety?” Damn him, infuriating pretty little bird with his sweet, sweet song. Grievous can’t resist. “How the mighty Jedi has fallen.”

Kenobi grumbles something into the rubble that sounds like: “Wouldn’t exactly be the first time,” but then he lifts his head back up, his mouth slightly open with the breaths that Grievous can see aren’t coming as easily as they should. 

“Indeed, we have both fallen,” he tries to look behind himself with a hiss of pain, “And I seem to have broken a leg in the process. You understand.”

Grievous doesn’t, thinking Maybe try losing all your limbs and then come crying to me, but what he finds himself saying is: “I accept your offer, General Kenobi.”

For a few seconds, nothing answers him but for Kenobi’s breathing, loud and rough; inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale. Then, silky as always: “I am glad we’ve come to an agreement, General Grievous.”

Grievous cackles, and moves the lightsaber away, twirling it in his clawed hand, watching the light force the shadows of the cave to dance, noting the weapon’s perfect balance; just as all the others. All priceless.

He catches the general’s eyes flick to the saber’s hilt, and responds in a silky voice of his own: “However, I shall keep this as a...precaution.” He shakes it in a loose grip, the lit blade filling the air with its singing hum, inclining his head. “You understand.”

Kenobi sighs and there’s more emotion in it than Grievous can catch. “Yes.”

“Perfect!” He grabs it properly again, moving it upwards like a lantern to light the space better. “Shall we begin?”

—

The answer is no, at least, not until Kenobi can patch his irritatingly fragile human body into a good enough shape to not bleed out within a few hours. Grievous lets him know very, very well how much this annoys him, but the man is unfortunately much too busy to notice; trying to not faint from the agony as he slowly stitches the clawmark going down his side closed with the one hand he can move.

Grievous can’t stop the swell of pride at seeing how much the injury affects him, even if it hinders him as well, at the moment. It’s a testament; testament to how weak the Jedi are, how weak the great General Kenobi actually is, how easy they are to beat. One lucky hit makes game.

Of course, as time passes, he finds himself wishing the Jedi had less injuries to take care of. Waiting is getting a little annoying, and he doesn’t exactly desire to have to haul the man around, but from his inability to free himself until Grievous lifted him out of the rubble and from the fact that his leg is definitely broken, he knows he’ll unfortunately have to.

So Grievous provides light, listening to Kenobi’s labored, irregular heaves, and entertains himself by the thought of murdering Kenobi right after he leads them out. 

Yes. 

He doubts the man doesn’t realize this is an option. Probably foolishly counting on his loyal army to save him.

Grievous will have to prove him wrong.

Besides, he might’ve...slipped a little something that he’d loathe the Jedi Order knowing, touching, daring to hold on their tongues. 

Yes, right now, he’ll pretend to help the Jedi, but he’s not getting out of these caves alive.

Of course, that is if the man doesn’t die halfway through. Or even just a few hours from now, he thinks as he watches him become less and less able to even hold the hook and thread in his trembling hand. 

The general tries to sit, or maybe just to see what he’s doing a little better than he can by half-lying propped up against the rubble that trapped him, but that proves to jostle the injury way too much. 

He falls back down, wide eyes staring at nothing, and his rapid exhales come with a sound akin to the keening of a wounded animal. 

Grievous’ patience runs out.

“This is taking too long,” he admonishes the Jedi, ripping the hook and thread out of his too-weak grasp, and takes over. Ignoring the man’s shocked gaze that only lasts a second before that feeble high-pitched noise grating at Grievous’ nerves comes back as he stitches the man’s wound closed perhaps a little rougher than he should.

After he realizes that if the man bleeds out while they’re still in the caves, he’ll be left to aimlessly wander (how infuriating of this little bird of his to be right), he proceeds a little more carefully. He thinks the man still gets the memo, as he falls silent, his breathing controlled and forced out painfully slow.

At least he gets a little better when Grievous moves to the wound on his leg. 

Even recovering enough to lift his head and ask with an expression of mild confusion and a ghost of amusement: “Where did you learn,” he interrupts himself with a carefully slow inhale, “to stitch?”

Grievous doesn’t freeze, albeit the question almost has him do exactly that. Instead, he pulls at the next stitch much too hard, forcing out a little A-ah of pain from the man. He seems to get the hint, and doesn’t say anything else.

He figures out that leaving the man to rip up his own robe for bandages with his blunt human teeth and one hand would take too long and does it himself, not giving him any warnings. He doesn’t seem to mind.

He even is nice enough to not make too many noises as Grievous bandages the many different wounds; past faint hisses and a short cut-off ack as his broken limb shifts.

Well. That one might be a problem.

A problem for later, Grievous decides when he’s finally done.

He lifts the general up, the strangled cry the man gives out echoing in the caves.

“Be quiet.” Grievous growls.

The fact that Kenobi doesn’t react to the threat in any way whatsoever other than just quietly attempting to obey tells him just how much pain he must be in.

How annoying.

Only a few steps later; steps taken with the Jedi breaking his silence every few seconds even as he tries not to, steps during which Grievous realizes just how much taller he is, steps that Kenobi doesn’t even attempt to match; he realizes this isn’t working.

He hauls the Jedi up and with a not small amount of displeasure holds his frame against his chest with two arms on the same side, the man’s head resting near his neck.

He can’t see his face, but he can feel his surprise.

“Well?” He barks, “Lead the way, Jedi.”

Kenobi’s breaths even out, and his head moves, looking around for a second.

His still-trembling hand points to Grievous’ left. “That one.”

—

Human beings will die if they go without water for longer than two days. Same for food, if longer than two weeks.

Grievous decides to worry about all that later, but as the general becomes less and less responsive with every passing hour, it starts itching at the back of his head.

Afterall, the man lost enough blood it makes Grievous almost impressed how he manages to stay conscious, and he must be used to pain if he can concentrate in his current state, but even with all that, Grievous can tell he’s nearing the end of his line. From the dull scent of acceptance, he guesses the man probably knows as well that the chance of him making it out of here is much less than just slim.

The chance of him dying within the next 10 hours is still below 50%, though, so Grievous walks on.

The caves don’t change as they traverse their depths, every cave seeming both completely unfamiliar and exactly the same as the one they just exited, wet and cold and just so blue.

He doesn’t remember the last time he found himself appreciating the sight of something, but the water-dug rock formations, sleek and amorphous and so unlike anything he’d ever seen before, draw his eyes. He can almost see the river that must’ve made it, feels its thundering, unyielding force over hundreds, thousands, millions of years; the merciless onslaught of water.

The same water than now meekly drips down, somewhere, echoing all around them from what sounds like all directions and none. Grievous supposes that’ll come in handy later.

The man’s form held in his claws begins to tremble.

Oh, he’s cold. Embarrassing.

He ignores it for the most part, though he begrudgingly appreciates the warmth the Jedi provides him, seeping through his armor and into the last remains of flesh in his chest.

Those strange mushrooms and ghostly white grass, softly shining against the darkness, rustle and break under his feet.

Something far, far away collapses, the sound reaching them like a dying scream. Quiet tap-tapping filters in through the cold air.

Grievous is not afraid, but he finds himself unnerved.

From the smell of vague anxiety that seeps out from the shaking Jedi in his hold, he’s not the only one, and it’s motivation enough to clamp down on the fear trying to sneak into his systems.

He is not weak (like the Jedi.). He is not afraid of caves (like the Jedi in his claws). 

He walks faster.

He’d run, actually, but he rather likes not having to worry much about the battery his systems run on, the one thing that Dooku actually hadn’t lied about the efficiency of. It can last for days. Sort of. He hopes this place won’t give him more issues to worry about and inevitably postpone than he already has.

Like the broken leg of his navigation system, who is starting to check out with irregular breaths, offering nothing more but whispers of “Left”, “Right” or “Down” that Grievous can hear only with the help of his superior senses.

When the Jedi starts slipping into actual unconsciousness, he swats him awake, relishing in the brief panic that it causes every time.

That gradually gets weaker, too.

At one point, right after the Jedi gets quite woken up by Grievous having to jump over a ravine which seems to do the man no good at all, he tenses and the vague anxiety of before turns into fear that swarms Grievous, making him groan in irritation.

“Do you...hear that?” The Jedi rasps, the sentence separated by a tremor in his already weak voice.

Grievous, in fact, hears nothing but his own feet, dripping water, the scuttling legs of some critter far away and the annoyance in his arms.

“Scared of the dark, Kenobi?” It doesn’t come out as sarcastic as just bothered. He doesn’t have time for this. He asked for directions, not a lame haunted house commentary, and even if he did, Kenobi would be doing an awful job at it.

“I thought I heard…” the man trails off, ignoring his remark, and never finishes. Good. Grievous didn’t need to hear that anyway. Better keep it to himself.

At one point, hours and hours later (oh, how glad he is that he can’t tire), in the middle of a hallway with a ceiling of water-brushed stalactite, Kenobi falls unconscious and Grievous fails to rouse him. Not even trying to jostle his broken leg (on purpose, this time) helps.

That doesn’t fit within Grievous’ calculations; they should’ve had a few more hours, at least.

And he thought this couldn’t get more annoying.

He sits down and not-so-gently drops the man onto the wet floor, deciding to look around for water or something to use as a splint in the meantime, but finds nothing but rock and glowing moss and small bugs that shine like fireflies and run from the light.

He returns back to where Kenobi’s still form shines against the cold, blue floor, and sits down, waiting.

Little bastard. They have miles to go now, and after they’re done, then he can go sleep forever. 

—

It takes him an embarrassingly long time to realize why his calculations concerning Kenobi’s ability to function come back wrong. It’s not the injuries skewing his numbers, no, those he accounts for with a scorn for the weakness of the human body. 

It’s whatever the general does before he gives him the direction to choose in the maze of tunnels and halls and pathways.

The Force. However that works.

He’d always thought it wasn’t connected to one’s energy level and that the effort it always took was only momentary, but reality proves him wrong in that rude way only the entropy of the world can provide.

That being more waiting, as the general falls into sleep almost as deep as death much sooner than he did the day (night? Does it matter?) before. 

But, at least there’s water.

The moisture level in the caves never really lessens and the amount of stalactites and stalagmites; along with the dripping that always seems to come from only far away; stands as a testament to the caves having water.

But this is the first spring. Flowing, mesmerizing with the way its hue shifts from blue to faint purple with every ripple, the leaves of ferns casting shadows over it, moss covering its edges.

He uses it to get the dust out of his eyes and mask, to clean it. Only then notices his claws, the dried blood flaking off of them.

He cleans those too.

The Jedi lying precisely where Grievous dropped him; that is, between the ferns, face down in one of them; doesn’t stir.

Grievous sets out to find something to serve as a splint. Not that he cares about the man’s well-being beyond keeping him alive enough to lead him back top-side, but for the fact that the potential for further injury may prevent him from achieving exactly that.

He circles around the cave chamber, unwilling to stray too far off for how the sound morphs and almost on purpose deludes him; like the many times that Kenobi had to warn him to keep him from walking straight into a deep, whistling ravine; or all the short-lived arguments over the creeks that seemed to flow through the walls.

So he uses the plantlife to remember his way back. The ferns, growing only in the close vicinity of flowing water, make it easier.

He finds himself wondering how anything can survive this deep below, especially the inexplicably glowing greenery; fungi could thrive even in a radioactive oblivion, but the source of sustenance the plants must use escapes him.

Of course, he knows much about survival. But his people never strayed near caves.

That thought sends a jolt of pain through his spine, his circuits screaming in protest. His growl echoes.

Right.

He almost gives up, the clicking of his claws unbearably loud in the tense, living silence of the caves, before he sees a shape that doesn’t belong. Not smooth, nor glowing, nor twisted in that strange way some of the rocks are that makes them look like the skin of some great, petrified animal.

It’s bones. Probably of some poor bastard who, as Kenobi said, tried to go through the caves alone.

Well. The esteemed general would probably find vandalizing the long-rotten-away body to be distasteful. Grievous tries to be delighted about that, but something deep inside him, long forgotten and addressed exactly never, twists at the thought.

Doesn’t matter. Whoever it was, they’re long gone.

And Grievous doesn’t plan on following their example.

—

“I find myself remembering,” the Jedi starts, and Grievous already lets out a warning growl before he can finish the sentence, which the man steadfastly ignores, “stories about caves I’ve heard over the years, in our current...situation.”

Grievous sees the general’s hand make a vague all-encompassing gesture at their surroundings on the edge of his vision.

He tramples on.

After having some water half-forced down his throat (which Grievous finds himself both hoping it isn’t filled with all kinds of toxic substances so the man can actually provide what he promised, and that it is, so he’d at least be quiet) and with his leg supported as much as Grievous was willing to make it so, some life has returned to the Jedi. Which meant conversations.

Which were, unfortunately, not very good.

The general’s voice still sounds like he’d gargled glass and his breaths never hold steady for long enough to finish more than one sentence, but he’s happily exposing Grievous to it all anyway.

Grievous, who has the unwelcome realization that the Jedi might just be bored.

He can still smell fear off the man, though. A different sort of fear than just the unnerved scent of one exposed to the unfamiliar, but something concrete. 

It might be him. That thought delights him, though it doesn’t explain why he suddenly can’t just stay silent. 

“I think it was a few years ago that I’ve read of a certain,” shaky inhale, “expedition that aimed to find the deepest point of a cave system that had already broken records.” 

Grievous savors the few seconds of silence in between the single-sentence monologues.

The silence lasts a little longer than normal, then Kenobi’s voice rasps: “Left.”

Ah. So he is still prioritizing their bargain.

There’s a moment filled with nothing but measured breaths, long enough that Grievous wonders whether the man has forgotten about what he was going to say, but then he inhales almost like he’s drowning, and goes on.

“They had...struggled. Swimming through tunnels of cave water, hoping they’d be,” more gasping, a cough, “wide enough for them to pass. Knowing that if they got stuck, they’d drown.”

The almost-whisper ricochets off the walls with a haze-like wordless quality like the walls are a mumbling audience, listening intently and discussing what they hear among themselves.

Grievous keeps staring straight and doesn’t look around, even if he wants to.

“If I remember correctly, it took weeks of nothing but walking and scaling within the hollow rock before they made it deeper than anyone ever could, hitting a dead end.” His voice gets rougher with every word, strained by the longest sentence he’d said since Grievous picked him up. 

Another exhausted pause.

“All the way down. They named it Game Over.”

Grievous ignores him, turning left to a ravine that gradually tilts up, the stalagmites creating an almost forest, untouched until he breaks them during his ascent.

“There was a deeper one, they found out years and years later. But no one could make it through its entrance, so it remained unexplored.” 

Kenobi sounds like he wants to continue, but the sound of tumbling broken pieces of cave rock left in Grievous’ wake interrupts him and he doesn’t try to talk over it. Doesn’t say anything until they lapse into silence again, when he continues: “These caves go much deeper than those ever could. I wonder where they end.”

Well, Grievous doesn’t.

Even if the ever-present darkness of the caves seems to draw him towards itself too; the dripping of the water deep below, the whistling of wind even deeper, the echoes of things that sometimes sound like just rocks and sometimes like the feet of something massive, breathing and waiting, woken or dormant in sleep.

He has a clear-cut goal, though. A purpose.

His programming won’t let him forget it.

The advantage of an army with mechanized directives is that code is always reliable.

He isn’t afraid. 

“What I find myself remembering,” Grievous relishes in the man’s flinch as he speaks; he hadn’t expected him to do that, then. Interesting. 

“Is the phrase ‘to wring the neck of a canary.’” He finishes, low and dangerous.

The man chuckles, and the only reason Grievous can recognize it as such instead of assuming it to be further trembling is the faint whiff of amusement he gives off.

“Point taken,” comes the reply. Grievous notes how different it sounds and can’t discern why at first, before it dawns on him that the man hadn't sounded like himself— at least, to the limited knowledge of Grievous— ever since the first day of walking. First exhaustion, then these monologues which to Grievous sound strangely, annoyingly hollow.

Purposeless.

When the Jedi starts nodding off again, he at least gets to relieve some of his frustration in flicking him awake, not gently.

The man doesn’t complain and doesn’t chime in with a sarcastic statement, or joke or...anything. One half of the day talking about anything and all and the other silent almost to a cause. Like a bird shutting up when the steps of a predator draw near.

The caves are empty but for them, the water and the small bugs that twinkle in the distance like stars from time to time. Nothing else.

—

Something that he’d forgotten about over the years of having a mechanized body and serving an army of droids is the betrayal of flesh. 

Iron can rust, but that wasn’t a problem as frequently as he’d expected. Most of their ships and systems used steel—or even durasteel— instead of raw iron, and if not that, then they utilized iron chemically coated with chrome or zinc or whatever metal they currently had on hand. Standard procedure. 

Most droids never really had time to rust anyway.

Flesh, on the other hand, is always susceptible to infection.

He doesn’t know whether the Jedi just simply failed to mention this or if he’d himself forgotten, but he’s leaning towards the latter as the next time the man wakes— sort of wakes; burning bright and breathing coming up way too short— he doesn’t say anything else than a soft, quiet, useless: “Oh.”

Grievous knows the danger of infection, the quickness, mercilessness with which it kills if untreated.

He’d imagined killing the Jedi in a more dignified, grandeur way, but this will have to do. Maybe he’ll still get his chance.

In a quiet corner of his mind, Grievous has to admit surprise at the man’s ability to even last this long. He had no illusions about the Jedi’s durability, but that also meant he knew its limits. This is slowly starting to exceed his expectations.

Worthy foe indeed; only to be undone by bacteria, of all things.

“How much farther?” He asks slowly, enunciating every word, leaning towards to make sure the man’s clouded, bloodshot eyes can see him. It comes out more as a threat than anything else.

The general just shivers. Their eyes meet for a second, but Grievous can see no real recognition in them before they already slide away aimlessly, drawn towards the light of the saber and then the darkness behind the small off-shoot of the hall-like cave structure.

They stay there for a long moment. Grievous briefly wonders what he sees there, if anything at all.

He blinks, and Grievous is already growling and readying to ask the question again, with more force this time, before the trembling whisper of a voice breaks the silence.

“Not too long, I don’t think…” he blinks again, several times, expression briefly lost.

When he refocuses, his eyes finally find Grievous, and this time he knows the man sees him even if the look he gives him is strange; none of the steel or bravado. An almost serenity.

A corner of the general’s mouth lifts shakily in an attempt at a grin. “Let’s hope I live long enough,” a trembling inhale, “to know if I’m right.”

Grievous growls in response.

“I’ll admit, general,” the man continues, shifting, his face twisted in pain, “that this isn’t how I envisioned it either. Alas.”

He closes his eyes, taking long, measured breaths; or at least the semblance of them. Grievous wonders if it’s for composure more than oxygen.

“You will have to trust me.” 

The water doesn’t help, this time, though that could be caused by the fact that it sends the man into a coughing fit lasting long enough for Grievous to think that he might just choke and die at the spot, but he recovers, though he doesn’t say anything else until Grievous hauls him up and tramples on.

He shivers in his arms still, and the heat his body gives off almost burns. His blunt teeth chatter from time to time.

It passes in fits.

The next time the general goes dead to the world in his arms and won’t wake, Grievous drops him on the ground and rifles through the problems he’d put aside for later. 

He recalls the man’s inability; or unwillingness; to even move his head, the weakness and fatigue, and decides that maybe the starvation problem might be worth revisiting, if only for the sake of prolonging the inevitable.

They’ve been here for a long time, already. Maybe days. One of the things his systems for some reason don’t cover is time.

He doesn’t know much about the eating habits of humans beyond the certainty that anything even mildly poisonous would probably kill one. Caf didn’t, if he remembered right; which still confused him, as the naboo nightshade or the kaleesh nezraaj plant that Grievous has used as substitutes for caf many different times when he still could would definitely cause death even if they weren’t all that far apart from one another. 

Generally, humans seemed so...fragile. Laid low by the most ridiculous of things. Two days without water, two weeks without food, barely steamy weather, largely harmless plants or perfectly fine fungi, the venom of creatures and diseases that Grievous wouldn’t even think of worrying about. Trying to keep one alive felt like handling a ceramic that might spontaneously break at the smallest wrong movement.

He briefly wonders how humanity even managed to survive this long, before his eyes fall onto the stubbornly still-living form of his nemesis. 

Probably determination alone. Admirable.

If his systems weren’t trying to set themselves on fire at the thought, he might’ve found understanding in it, but reality is reality and Grievous is Grievous, separatist supreme commander, and he doesn’t have time for any of this.

He isn’t going to risk any of the plants, but because the Jedi was too busy sleeping to have any opinions, he couldn’t exactly seek advice, so he’d have to make the decisions. Educated guesses.

The only other thing that lives here seemed to be insects. He can start there.

Besides, he isn’t doing much of anything but waiting, and Grievous avoids waiting like the plague.

Too much time to think never did him any good.

—

Where previously he’d have to search around to spot any of the small, glowing insects far out in the darkness, he finds them easily now; on the walls, the floor, those veil-white mushrooms. He attributes it to luck, even if the way they group around them seems suspicious. 

They still steer clear of the light.

Catching them, unfairly, takes more effort than he thinks it’s worth.

They seem to have an acute sense of pressure change or maybe something to do with the wind; giving them the ability to avoid his swipes and claws with agility and speed that makes catching them feel like trying to grab smoke. 

Ergo, annoying and impossible.

At least, in the air.

If he waits for them to land and slowly lowers his claws above them, the blind bastards have no chance. It’s still annoying, but at least he doesn’t even have to move much before he’s gathered a few of them.

They look like a crossbreed of a beetle and a spider; two pairs of see-through wings hidden under elytras, ten clawed limbs, several strong mandibles and chelicerae that weakly wave as he moves the still-alive prey in his claws to examine it. At about the size of a human hand, it fits nicely into his claws, its abdomen twitching. He can almost imagine the pinching of its legs from the clicking they make as they hit the durasteel of his fingers, even if he can’t feel it.

Still, it doesn’t tell him whether they’re poisonous or not.

He recalls a tactical droid on a mission on a faraway Outer Rim planet saying Humans will not attempt to eat any bright colored species during planning a blockade and turns the bug around in his claws once more, inspecting the color.

He doesn’t have the color vision of humans; color wasn’t important on Kalee. Scent was. Temperature too. 

Not color; no use for focusing on the hues of creatures when the only way to tell if a basilaje snake waited within the grass was to look for the warmth it let out into the foliage. 

The Kaleesh also, in general, didn’t have to worry about poison. On Kalee, force and claw won survival.

Trickery. So like humans, so like his little bird.

That still doesn’t change the fact that Grievous can’t tell whether this will kill his human navigation system or not.

Besides, they're cave insects. He can’t tell if they shine to Kenobi’s eyes too, but if they don’t, then there’s no use for color in a cave, is there.

He traps the bug in his balled fist and goes to try to wake the Jedi.

Normally, he’d wait until the man’s pain did it for him, but he’s done with waiting. They have miles to go; then they can sleep.

He pokes the man in the face with his claw; when that doesn’t work, he backhands him with the same set of claws, and the sound hasn’t yet stopped echoing when the Jedi stirs with a flinch and a: “Wha—“

He starts coughing immediately after; wet and shaky hacking that Grievous can unfortunately sympathize with. Grievous doesn’t move, sitting to his right, and if his staring makes the Jedi nervous, he doesn’t show.

The fit eventually devolves into desperate gasping for air, and takes a long while before it calms enough for the man to audibly swallow and look at him with bright, feverish eyes.

Grievous still doesn’t move. The Jedi doesn't move either, closing his eyes and attempting to get his breathing under control. One of his arms spasms.

The other might be paralyzed, Grievous realizes.

But that is unrelated.

“Kenobi.” He says, sparing the man a few seconds to make sure his attention is secured on him. Then, for a lack of better (or any) words, he all but shoves the bug into his face, even being nice enough to not drop it on the Jedi; though that has more to do with the fact that if he did, the bug could’ve flown away and render all the effort that he’d put into catching it utterly null.

The man jolts backwards, hand lifting and freezing mid-motion. His eyes blink several times, struggling to focus; then, he frowns and his gaze travels up Grievous’ arm until he finds his eyes. “Why...why are you holding that insect?” 

His whisper is cracking and hoarse, but his confusion tinged with a little accusation still gets across quite well.

Grievous stays still. “Eat.”

It takes a thoroughly agonizing minute-long staredown for the single word to get through the Jedi’s thick skull. 

The still-alive bug wriggles in Grievous’ claws.

“Uh.” Ah, the general speaks. Finally. “No? What?”

Grievous simply shakes the hand a little, like baiting a small animal. The bug seems highly displeased by this. 

The general’s frown drops into faint shock. “You’re...serious.” 

“I am.”

The man tilts his head away from the bug as Grievous moves it closer with a simply hilarious kind of panic, wide eyes glued to the bug.

They flick to Grievous. “Why?”

“I recall you basing your part of the bargain on, how did you say it?” He pretends to have to search for the words with his perfect machine memory, “‘I like to live.’” He says, mimicking Kenobi’s voice to as much an extent as he is able (which is not much, but at least it makes for a good parody) and ends with: “So eat.”

For a man who doesn’t shy away from literal torture, Kenobi is suddenly wide awake and putting a lot of effort into making sure none of the flailing limbs of the insect come near his face. It’s not much per se, as the man’s general state doesn’t allow for much movement, but Grievous files the information away anyway.

“Oh, don’t tell me that you care.” 

“You’re stalling.” Grievous replies, not impressed.

The Jedi swallows. “Maybe I am.”

“So don’t.”

The man’s hand finally finds Grievous’ and attempts to push it away, revealing that even the bug has more strength to struggle with. “My general state is torture enough, no thank you.”

Grievous growls. Different strategy.

“Eat this or I’ll tear you apart.”

Wrong move. The Jedi’s eyes clear for a second; then the defiant spark he’s so used to seeing comes back.

One part of him is glad the man still has some life left in him. The rest of him curses.

“Now is not the time for threats, general,” it’s not the wittiest thing he’d ever said but Grievous is willing to give him a break in that regard. 

He sighs. “You,” he points to Kenobi, “are dying.”

He intends to immediately continue but the man’s comment of: “I am aware, yes,” interrupts him.

“And if you die, I die,”

“Quite correct.” Can he stop?

“So forgive me, general, for wanting to keep you alive.”

This momentarily has the man at a loss of words. Then, “You are forgiven?”

Damn him.

Grievous finds it harder and harder to resist just throwing the bug into the man’s face with every second just to see him panic. But his self-control, contrary to the Republic’s evaluation of him, is carefully held.

“Eat.”

“You aren’t going to stop until I do, don’t you?”

“No.”

The man sighs— a trembling, weak noise— and closes his eyes with a very, very low: “Fuck.” that Grievous can catch only with his extremely sensitive hearing.

Then, the hand that had been holding on to Grievous’ wrist with a grasp both too weak and too shaky to do much of anything slides down. As he attempts to grab the bug in Grievous’ grasp, his expression twists with equal parts disgust and resignation.

“I’m doing this only,” gasping inhale, “because we’re enemies and Anakin would never believe you.”

Grievous tilts his head in interest, but the Jedi doesn’t answer, so he just files it away for further examination.

Meanwhile, the bug has successfully changed hands, and is attempting to wriggle its merry way out of the man’s curled fingers, briefly buzzing its newly freed wings.

Kenobi gives him a look that Grievous can only describe as nervous.

“I’m not eating it alive.”

More stalling? Fine.

Grievous growls in annoyance and reaches out again, snapping the insect’s head off with a flick of his wrist that jerks the general’s hand along with it, forcing a little ack out of the man.

The Jedi stares at the newly headless insect in his hand with dismay.

Grievous doesn’t move past for a little tilt of his head. “Well?”

An audible gulp, then a quiet (well, quieter than anything else he’d said): “I can’t believe I’m doing this.”

Grievous intently and attentively stares at the Jedi throughout the whole ordeal; both because it obviously unnerves the man and because the sight of him is simply hilarious, and Grievous hasn’t gotten any good helping of schadenfreude since he’d proven Dooku to have absolutely none technical knowledge with a combination of his thermovision and expensive (now very exploded, due to overheating) proton cannons.

The man keeps throwing him quick glances and then turning his eyes anywhere but at him, utterly mortified. Grievous is absolutely not going to make this easy on him. It’s simply too hilarious.

The crunching of broken carapace echoes mercilessly down the pathways.

Once the Jedi is done, Grievous just reaches for the next insect he’s holding in his other arm and swiftly decapitates it too, relishing in the man’s agonized protests.

It takes a while. 

Grievous savors every second of it.

—

Fortunately, it doesn’t take that long for the general to tire enough to stop complaining about the taste, his energy thoroughly spent. He still, thankfully, has some left for directions, so they abandon that nook in the cave and Grievous finds himself wondering if the Jedi is sending him into so many tight or low (or both at once) hallways on purpose as a petty revenge.

If he knows Kenobi well enough, probably yes.

Revenge was not the Jedi way, but neither was helping a separatist Supreme Commander out of a selfish want to survive, if he dared to guess.

They lapse back to normal.

It leaves Grievous time to think about the peculiarity of their shared, miserable normalcy; about how it settles something in him that has been out of place for years in the simple rhythm, the abstractly worrying fact that the caves have at one point passed the threshold from the unknown to the familiar.

A small, traitorous part of him never wants to resurface. Something about the caves, about this simple, endless, comforting dark just feels right, makes sense like the cosmos out there doesn’t. 

He wonders if that’s what killed those people, too. Not that they couldn’t find their way out, but that they didn’t want to leave.

But he has company and he has a goal, and even if his eyes linger on the pathways that go deeper, deeper into that pleasant, luring darkness, he doesn’t stray from the path even if he catches himself slowing above their gaping maws.

The man in his claws doesn’t have much time left. 

Yet, Grievous is starting to believe that he might just make it, against all odds.

He ignores the occasional bouts of confusion. The lapses in attention, the odd things the man starts to mumble under his breath.

He presses on, hoping.

—

Delirium sets in slowly and ravages fast.

—

Even when the man forgets his own name (and it’s a moment that chills Grievous’ long-gone bones when he says: “Kenobi?” only to be met with a hoarse: “Who?”) he still seems to remember what he’s supposed to do, even if Grievous has to wait for him to realize he’s being spoken to, repeating the request again and again with the sort of crawling discomfort he really hadn’t missed.

Grievous...Grievous tries his best at ignoring it all. 

At thinking that this was his enemy— his nemesis, no less— and he’d never planned on letting him get out of the caves alive, anyway.

How he dies doesn’t matter. Never did.

Do not empathize with the enemy.

But as the man trembles in his grasp and his disorganized, meaningless ramblings— the staircase yes the staircase it goes deeper and deeper and see, see, not a staircase a tower a tower but where does it end where does it go— drift and force their way into Grievous’ awareness time and time again, the memories locked away in his mind do the same. Pressing through the cracks around the vault door of their prison like water slowly sinks a ship.

Festering anger and stab wounds from scruffles over food that should’ve been available. Battle wounds treated with nothing but torn cloth and the hope that maybe, just maybe, the world would be merciful. Bacta and medicine nothing but a distant dream; tents swarming the grounds with the ever-present stench of cooked herbs, the same smell sticking to the controls of a ship that always trailed smoke; the ship with a cooling system that periodically broke and engines that lurched forward whenever they least expected it. It had a flower of flame painted at its nose and he wondered, sometimes, how it looked when the fire that came was real and sudden and—

Grievous can’t do this. He can’t do it again.

The systems that were supposed to protect him— no, to hollow him out, to disconnect, to bury— shatter. 

Shatter, break; over and done and dead, from how they’ve already been splintered by the call and routine of the caves. Only holding on by threads now snapped clean.

The inaudible breaking still feels like it resonates in the many mouths of the darkness.

And Grievous, standing in the middle of the darkness with nothing but an enemy’s weapon to weakly fight it, remembers.

He’d seen this before, more times than he can count. He’d been there through the disorientation, through people he considered family vanishing, splintering; his brother in arms holding him at knifepoint with panic in his eyes instead of recognition, the tip of the blade wobbling like a tree in a storm. 

He tried. He really did. For some of them, it never was enough; some of them never had a chance anyway.

He remembered the Republic ships coming into orbit and thinking that the red they carried was the red of blood the Republic stood for, what it truly represented; the red its politicians, its senators, its Jedi washed off their hands after they decided their divine Force-given intervention was needed no more.

Grievous stops walking.

The man in his grasp doesn’t appear to notice; just giggles with terror clinging to him like a second skin, pouring out of him in waves, and it’s not fear nor panic but horror overpowering and absolute.

“It’s endless,” the man gasps out, cackling, a breathless sound that hitches at its ends and reminds Grievous of ravens. “This is the end and it has no end.”

His form trembles against Grievous’ hold with something else than the spasms and the cold. Laughter or sobbing, he can’t tell. It causes a chill to crawl up his spine regardless.

He tightens his hold. 

Enemy or not, no one deserves to die like this.

He knew that the man would die; hell, he planned for it; but the reality of it now hits him differently, hits him with the force of a speeder or a veil ripped off. His nemesis will die in his arms in a few hours, maybe not even that; it’s not like Grievous imagined it at all. Not even close. 

It’s not a victory, this way, but simply a tragedy he’s lived through too many times to count. Proves nothing but that the world is as merciless as it was years ago, uncaring whether it took friend or foe. Death doesn’t discriminate; it takes and takes and takes.

It’s void. He won’t let it.

He needs to find water. He needs to do something.

Something more deserving of a nemesis besides a mercy kill.

As he follows the sound of something he hopes is a creek, the caves seem to lead him to it more than the sound. They pull at him, pull him towards their goal in a way he can't describe other than he feels watched, observed, lured. Vivisected, down to the bones, for all to see.

The Jedi starts humming after a while, scratchy yet clear and much louder than he expected, the humming deep like a purr, physical and grounding as much as utterly alien. It’s a melody that Grievous doesn’t recognize, yet still feels faintly, coldly familiar at his core.

A few tones attempting to arrive at a conclusion only to be thrust back to the beginning, a song that feels trapped within its own torturous infinity like a snake eating itself alive, always moving with nowhere to go but forward and back again and again. It drives Grievous up the wall, his nerves pulled taut, a fear of his own setting in the air and following him like a ghost.

The caves hum along. 

This time, he knows it’s not an echo; rather, a voice of their own.

—

The creek the caves lead him to turns out to be a thermal spring that shines bright red to his eyes, its entire surroundings filled with greenery, the softness of it muffling even the sound of his own feet to nothing but the rustling of his claws as they brush against the leaves. A strange, hidden, secret kind of beauty; the water pushing the living echo of the caves into background noise. His body sags with relief as the familiar sound replaces the eerie whispers and hum and drip-dripping, and if he closed his eyes and focused on nothing else, he could almost believe it was Kalee rain pelting down onto the roofs, falling down in rivulets.

He gently lowers the man into the plants. Kneels down. 

When he peels away the bandages, the injuries look as ugly as he expected. 

What he expects less, is how the sight of them sends him years and years back. 

Another advantage of commanding an army entirely made of droids was that the last time he’d been forced to see something like this up close, he hadn’t been a droid commander at all, and knew nothing of what the future would hold. 

If the mental block hadn’t fallen hours ago, he knows he’d be suffering its screaming and trashing against the memories attempting to break free. Or not. Or not.

Maybe it would've been better.

He cleans the injuries with as much gentleness as his claws made for violence allow, focusing on the sound of rushing water instead of the weak cries that the general gives out, the sound that makes the battlefields of Kalee keep forcing their way into his mind. Playing behind his eyelids whenever he dares to blink.

When he finishes, his claws fall to the moss and ferns and stay there, unmoving.

What now. Stars above, what now.

This won’t solve it. Won’t even really help, only on its own.

The kaleesh medicinal herbs flash through his mind, one by one. Barchsroot in the paste that he’d cover injuries with, the schreja lichen distilled in tea that tasted like liquid flame but brushed pain away into a distant memory, the yellow-flowered na’ansehraafi the nightwatch would chew to keep themselves awake, snakeskin sage to bring temperature down. He remembers them with a hazy living memory, clear enough to recall their preparation, the hours of searching and picking and cooking; entirely useless.

He’s a herb healer— he used to be a herb healer— yes, but the herbs he knows are planets away.

And Obi-Wan Kenobi is dying right here in these wretched, endless, living caves, delirious and terrified, at his feet.

He sighs. His metallic, mechanical knees can’t feel the wetness of the grass where he kneels in it.

The man mumbles something again; hisses from pain, the words clearing out to a weak, stuttering: “Pretender… why? What do you want?” 

Grievous stills.

The man’s eyes are slightly open, just thin slivers of bloodshot eyes turned to the ceiling. He doesn’t know if he’s aware of anything, much less of Grievous’ presence.

Pretender. Whoever he’s referring to, it almost sounds like he’s begging.

The General Kenobi Grievous knows has never begged.

It might be him he means, a distant part of his mind supplies; it might be him who only pretends to care to the eyes of the general.

(Does he?)

He brushes the thought aside. 

The greenery growing around him tempts him, frustrating in its unknown, unfamiliar nature; the man could die with a medicinal herb right next to him and Grievous would’ve never known. 

Even then, he’d need something stronger. Bacta, at least, if only—

He snaps back to reality, to the present of him instead of the past, the present of him made of durasteel and charred flesh with automatic emergency doses of bacta built into his metallic exoskeleton.

A system survey he runs reveals that one of the two has already been administered; possibly during his brief moment of unconsciousness during the fall, as otherwise he’d remember the rather painful, uncomfortable procedure; but one still remains.

Not nearly enough to heal all of it, but enough, maybe, for the way back. If they are as close as the general said.

(If they were ever going the right way in the first place.)

The caves hum over the noise of the stream, a low, constant drone.

He ignores it, pushes all thought aside as he reaches his claws under the plating on his chest and starts the meticulous, aggravatingly slow process of attempting to disengage the dose from his body, fighting against the fact that it was never meant to be easy to rip out; all that changed was the cartridges, not the mechanism itself, and he doesn’t particularly want to break it in the process of trying to remove it. His claws, made for murder and sharp enough to cut concrete, hinder him further.

(They’re an awkward shape too, he realizes; memories overlapping, he can remember the ones he used to have, crooked and nearly flat from the sides. How different they felt to move, to hold; steady and sure where the durasteel he has now slips and scratches.)

He’s briefly thankful for the Jedi slipping into another period of unconsciousness, but then the man shifts again, groaning, still very much awake. 

Grievous can almost sense the agony that keeps him that way.

He remembers his own; too closely, almost like the caves echo the explosion of the Martyr atop it all when it crawls through his memory and leaves trembling in its wake. So close, suddenly, after years of blissful nothing; or maybe years of too much that once removed, replaced by the monotony of darkness, caved in.

At least the syringe doesn’t shake in his claws. 

Even if he can’t feel the man’s skin beyond the vague sense of pressure, he can imagine it just from how he shines bright and sickly to his eyes. If he hadn’t gotten used to the overpowering scent of terror and blood over the hours and days of walking, it would’ve overpowered him as he leans close to administer it.

After it, he sits and waits. Like all those days before.

There is nothing more he can do. For someone who planned to kill the man the second he sees daylight, it feels like a failure, one that won’t let him wait in stillness, fiddling with his claws instead.

He tears out some of the ferns, ripping their leaves one by one in an act of meaningless destruction as he monitors the man’s seemingly unchanging condition. He thinks he looks calmer, maybe. It might be an illusion borne of hope, so Grievous tears off another one and wishes he could sleep as his mind supplies with every tear ka ri’yash, ka chara, ka ri’yash, ka chara. It ends on ka chara, so he rips out another one and begins anew.

He does this for hours. Like a machine performing a mindless task.

The man wakes to something more akin to consciousness than solely pained drifting when Grievous’ stops to soak his claws in water to wash off the stem and juice of the plants.

His eyes open into thin, shaky slits, and he doesn’t notice Grievous even when he calls his name several times, loud enough to echo in the dark for minutes.

He just stares at the ceiling again, a small, strange smile on his lips that unnerves Grievous more than anything. 

“Pretender,” he whispers, slowly like a threat, lingering on the first r and drawing it out, gasping before the next word comes. “Simulacrum.”

Each syllable separate, too stiff and sharp to be a word originating from Basic, yet muddled at the end.

The caves fall utterly, deathly silent.

Grievous’ awareness slides beyond himself as if seeing himself and the caves for the first time, as if just now waking; realizing his situation, his vulnerability and utter lack of defense against something, something in the dark just out of each, the never-forgotten instincts of an apex predator sensing a rival— or something greater— watching. Observing, biding its time.

He turns, sharply, as if something awaits in the cold, blue hallways. Nothing.

“Yes,” the Jedi continues, his eyes falling shut. “I know who you are.”

It sounds sure. Tinged with relief, with accomplishment, like a victory that escapes Grievous’ understanding.

“I know who you are,” the Jedi repeats.

Then, with a sigh, he passes out again, leaving Grievous to face the darkness alone.

—

The bugs start crowding them, crawling through the fern leaves torn to smithereens without fear nor care for Grievous’ presence. Many of them—most of them— actually aiming for the general’s still form on purpose, their tiny claws catching onto his clothes. Grievous starts flicking them away after one of them manages to get to the Jedi’s face, causing the man to stir.

He notices the way their chelicerae wave as he holds them, strong, almost beak-like mandibles audibly clicking on empty air.

They have the jaws of scavengers, not herbivores.

And they seem to be getting impatient.

He runs out of ferns in easy reach and moves to stand up; to walk, to maybe break something and wreck the caves’ eerie whisper-filled silence like a rebellion as even he is starting to feel them drown his mind and senses and muddle his thoughts, organic or otherwise. The creek no longer provides a respite; now, it whispers too.

It’s more the voice that stops him than the hand that wraps around his wrist. 

“Stay.” The general whispers.

He whirls around, the hand falling off from his own, accompanied with a quiet hiss that morphs and turns into another, more forceful this time. “Stay.”

When they meet eyes, he expects that feverish, mad gaze given the sheer ridiculousness of the request— why would he want Grievous to stay, and even then, it’s not like he can exactly leave if he wants to survive, the general should know that— but finds clarity.

It makes him go still; those lucid, exhausted, pleading eyes, the hand that shakily yet determinedly finds his wrist again, that barely-there voice with which he says: “Please, stay.”

Grievous does. 

He flicks away the bug perching on the general’s arm, its sharp buzz vanishing into the dark, and then, he settles his claws between the grass.

“Kenobi?”

He thinks the long, drawn out inhale interrupted with tiny gasps would be his only answer, the dread awakening yet again and swiping at his feet, but then: “In the flesh, regrettably.”

It sounds hoarse and tired and terrible in so many ways Grievous doesn’t even want to count them all, but it also sounds like him. Finally. At last.

He doesn’t manage to hide his sigh of relief in time.

It seems to have escaped the man’s attention— at least he hopes it did— as the next thing the man says is: “Talk to me.”

He leans away. “What?” 

And he thought the Jedi couldn’t surprise him anymore. Not just surprise; baffle.

“Tell me—“ a grunt “anything.” Kenobi shuts his eyes, face twisted in that ever-familiar pain, making Grievous wonder whether it’ll be strange to see him put-together the next time they meet after this.

The thought then stops him short.

Next time.

What?

The general, unaware of his dilemma, continues: “Anything...to drown out—“ inhale, exhale, inhale, each requiring more effort than the last, “that blasted… singing...” He grits his teeth on the last word; anger or frustration or fear, Grievous can’t tell for once.

“Singing?”

“Forgive me,” comes the general’s answer, and beasts, Grievous didn’t even know how much he missed that tone and that ever-dry agonizing humor until it’d been gone completely. “I find myself quite... sick,” a carefully measured inhale, then his eyes open to meet his own, “of these fucking caves.”

He finds determination in the general’s gaze, yes, a steel-strong endurance, but also terror; one beside the other, both present at once.

The grip of the Jedi’s hand weakens, slipping. Grievous catches it in his own.

Considering the general’s request, all that comes to mind are the battlefields of Kalee, the scavenger bugs (one of whom seems to have gotten stuck in the man’s hair), or the caves themselves. Questions which Grievous doesn’t know if the man could answer.

(If he wanted to answer.)

Kenobi makes the choice for him.

“You said, on the battlefield,” the Jedi’s voice comes again, eyes already closed, and if it weren’t for the trembling and the loud, shaky breaths Grievous could almost believe that he’s fallen asleep until he spoke up, “you said they called you a Dreamer.”

Ah.

Grievous stills, completely; frozen in place and time.

He never thought he’d hear his title said by another living being, even less to be addressed by it as its rightful wielder.

Yet here, he is.

“I don’t...remember...anything about that from the Republic files.” The Jedi adds, frowning.

Well. 

He is dying; Grievous can indulge him, just this one time.

And perhaps, he’d asked for this too, on that ship of his flying over the planet Grievous suddenly cannot remember the name of.

Asked for his motivation. What are you to gain?

He’d never loved gloating, not like Dooku, no matter how much he’d tried to incorporate it into his presentation. 

He doesn’t have energy for any of it now. 

Just a plain accord. Just what happened.

It can’t hurt more than it did to live through it all.

The first words catch in his mechanical throat with a sort of finality, sort of fear; of making it real within the caves’ eager ever-watching darkness, of invoking the names of past horrors.

The Jedi takes a breath as if to take back the question, so Grievous barrels on, now or never; now. “How much do you know about the planet Kalee?” His voice falters before the name. It falls into the not-silence, heavy like a brick, the caves whispering it back and forth.

The Jedi considers it for a few seconds. “That’s...Wild Space, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“The Jedi were...sent there. On a mission. Many of them.” The frown deepens. “I can’t remember...why…”

Bitterness wells up in Grievous’ insides, and he lets it reign. “The Huk called them.” 

The name— the insult, blunt like a blow with a hammer— falls out of him with reawakened anger he’d almost forgotten. Which he had forgotten; systems separating him from his history, leaving only the barest thread of hate and purpose, and only that which suited Dooku and Sidious in their plans.

Dooku’s errant boy.

“The Huk…?” The general whispers.

“Ya’mri.” Disgust drips from his voice. “Soulless bugs.”

The man’s eyes find him, but he doesn’t say anything else, just watches with an expression between quizzlical and a strange kind of concern. A silent invitation to continue; Grievous takes it.

“For years, the Huk—the Ya’mri— had...exploited my people, the kaleesh, as slaves.” It crawls, slowly; the words wobbling over each other and quieter, somehow always coming out just slightly wrong, not enough. He misses— ferociously and agonizingly— the clarity, the intensity of the kaleesh language. Basic feels too soft and blunt and nothing-saying; he doesn’t know how to paraphrase it to give it justice, to portray it in a language that that has no word for justice-by-claw and only four for murder. “Selling them, all to expand their empire.”

The man says nothing, looking still.

“They considered us primitive. Good for nothing; our planet a hostile, empty waste of resources.” The growl snakes into his words, the translation coming out much too meek as his mind thinks i jneho, the anger a burning pit in his nonexistent stomach. “They exploited us. Ransacked our cities, destroyed our traditions, declared Kalee their colony. Their planet.”

His eyes slide downwards, to the claws of one his one of his hands digging deep into the rock. “So we fought back.”

It was a long war.

He recalls the media calling the Clone Wars too long, commenting on the war dragging on to seemingly no end, and he wants to laugh and knows that if he did, he’d never stop.

Forty years. A lifetime of war, several generations born and raised into adulthood to fight within it. 

So many lives lost.

But he made sure to balance the scales. Oh, he made sure that the Ya’mri knew how it felt to lose so much. 

“I became a general. A demig-d, destined to end the war and free our people, the one who dreamt of the other, who dreamt of the war’s end and rallied our people for his vision while the other allied them for its reality. Two demig-ds, side by side.” He says it with pride.

The jungle, ever-raining; scalding heat burning the leaves of unprepared flowers brown and gray, and within it she stood. Fierce. That sword in hand.

It hurts. 

“The Dreamer and the Dreamt.” 

His voice drops lower. 

He can’t say her name. He can’t.

He’d hear her voice reflected in those caves which do not deserve to know it.

“When she— the Dreamt— was...murdered,” slain, her body dragged to the murky sea filled with gray-brown algae that devours and hides anything that finds its way within it, so they’d never find her. Never bury her like she deserved. “I promised to avenge her. To destroy the Huk and make them feel our pain— my pain— to make them beg for our forgiveness knowing they were undeserving of such mercy.”

There’s a scraping noise and a hiss, and he looks down to where he holds the general’s hand in a deathgrip of his claws. He releases his hold, but doesn’t drop it. He doesn’t know why, but his mind won’t let him.

He has to find his voice again as the caves begin to hum once more. Just on the edge of his consciousness.

His other hand scrapes claw marks into the cave floor.

“I hunted them down. All of them, in all their colonies, back to their home world. Stole and adapted their technologies to use them against the Huk, forced them to flee to distant worlds to lick their wounds.”

A dark, humorless cackle escapes him. “So, of course, they went crying to the Republic.”

He spares a look at the Jedi, and expects some sort of anger. Disdain. 

Even he knows that wonderful, useless saying of revenge not being the Jedi way; they could afford it, afterall, not ever having anything much to take revenge for. 

But meeting the man’s eyes, he finds none of that. He finds acceptance, an odd kind of look that says to him the Jedi already knows where the story will go. 

A complete opposite of that thinly veiled fury with which he’d yelled What are you to show for all your power? what felt like years and years ago.

It trips up the words in his head.

“They got in contact with someone who had seat in your mighty Senate,” he growls, “and they lied to gain sympathy. How easy it was, afterall, to twist the story. To make us into barbaric warlords. To make themselves into,” he spits out the words full of disdain, “ peaceful colonists.”

What an oxymoron. An oxymoron the Republic seemed to love so dearly.

“And the Republic, of course, chose the only solution to its problems it knows; throwing Jedi at it.”

The man’s head turns away, teeth clenched and visible, his breathing ragged. He closes his eyes again, and Grievous can’t tell if it’s from pain or emotion, even if he can smell a faint, deep stain of anger hanging in the air like poison gas.

Interesting.

“Peacemakers.” Grievous scoffs, continuing. “They forced us to return all that we oh so supposedly stole, to begone from the lands we fought and died for.” He lifts his hand from the rock and clenches it hard enough for the durasteel to protest the pressure. “Allowed the Ya’mri to desecrate our burial grounds while the Jedi spouted word after word about tradition and peace and respect .”

He wishes, suddenly and irrationally, that he had his teeth, his fangs to show in a snarl instead of the unchanging voicebox built into this useless facsimile of a kaleesh mash.

His teeth. His tusks. His voice. 

A desperate part of his mind recoils. Trashes inside him like a wild animal caught in a snare.

What had he become? Beasts, what had he become?

Dooku’s errant boy, his weapon of destruction, a little monster to scare the Republic and make the Jedi children tremble at night. An army with no loyalty beyond the barest hint of it lost to the wind. 

He thinks of his soldiers, of his men, his brothers; thinks of the joking about that last voyage of the Martyr.

Because there had been joking.

He can’t remember what the joke was about, and the thought sends him to hysterics, no programs left to autoregulate his neurotransmitters and grind them into dust.

He can’t remember it. He can’t even remember it.

He doesn’t even have that much.

What were their last words?  

Nothing. Erased by time and the faults of organic memory.

What did they say when the explosion hit?

He only remembers screaming; wind and voice both, the shrieking of metal torn apart by the force of fire and pressure to reveal the yellow-grey of the sky that in a delirious split second made him think It’s going to rain.

The words lost to him, lost in the stench of smoke and sheer terror and an undercurrent of rage and then nothing, nothing at all that had spread and picked them off one by one as the ship listed and turned and spiralled out of control. The crash; burning, bleeding, begging. Water, cold and gray-white, rising and the terror of not being able to move and not knowing why, not comprehending. The sound of someone pleading, and he can’t remember those words either.

He only remembers himself. Sinking, sinking.

After, there had been another. 

Familiar claws dragging him out, the female voice coming back in rattled kaleesh and filtering into his consciousness as more drops hit his face and burning body, not soothing any of the ache. He can’t remember who it was who dragged him out, but he recalls what she’d said: Not you too, not you too. Fucking bastards. Ragged breathing as she’d dragged him over the sand and twigs digging into the scorched flesh of his back. It’ll be alright. I won’t let you die, brother.

A distant impression of smoke.

Rain. It’d been raining. The sky was grey.

Stay awake, idiot. Her breathing hitched. Her face muddled in his memory, a thin stain of blood flowing from her forehead to her golden eye; she had to blink constantly to keep it out, rubbing at her face with bloodied hands. His blood. So much of it. Stay with me. We’ll be alright, I promise.

He could only vaguely see the blue-red of the treeline at the edge of his vision. Had to fight to feel its scent of earth and flowers and rain through the pain and terror that crashed onto him like waves. Both from himself and her.

We’ll be alright. He remembers thinking if the mantra was meant for her more, to make herself believe it.

We’ll be alright. Her voice shook.

She stopped, suddenly, straightening; her bloodshot eyes staring into the distance and the foresight— his dreams, his visions— slammed into his mind at the same second with the impression of blasters, droid arms, mechanized voices, a cold body lying in the sand, a bloody trail next to it leading far, far away, the imprints of a ship. He didn’t see any other possible futures.

He remembers his terror, at that. The future was meant to be multitudes, but then and there, in that second, there was only one way it ended.

With her cry, the red-hot flash sharp to his eyes like the gamma spark of a dying star. Her body sinking, slowly; to her knees, then lying motionless beside him. The way it shook the ground. The shifting of the sand.

Not you too, not you too. He remembers thinking, he remembers trying to say, only getting as far as her name in his hoarse voice that felt so wrong. 

Rainé. 

The one who brings glory, his mind supplies. The one who descends with the rage of G-ds in a fearless display of claw-justice. Rainé. 

You said we’ll be alright. He begged; softly and with despair. Traitor. Traitor!

As they dragged him away, cold machine hands latching onto his limbs in greater agony. You promised!

Anger is the first stage of grief.

He never got to feel the rest.

Snapping of bones. Dark, dark, darker still. The whirr and shift of robotic arms, syringes filled with a fluid see-through and clear in its deception.

He’s standing on a chasm, he thinks. A chasm, a wide open mouth, swallowing and breathing with a constant disgusting wetness of saliva and teeth sharp and longer the longer it waits.

It’s hungry. It’s so hungry.

It’s patient, and it sings, a soft and warm wind reaching his eyes and caressing him with the softness of a lover.

Deeper. Go deeper.

There is no vertigo in the ever-deep darkness. No vertigo for the darkness has no end, for the darkness is not empty. Not like air, like falling off a cliff and hearing the gale howl an eulogy; no, like an ocean that sings and waves that play with his limbs as it drags him deeper and deeper, down, down, down.

Deeper. Sink some more.

Something waits for him in the depths. In more of those depths that lead to more after in a senseless and wretched exponential function, and he’s standing at the edge of it all and looks down and cannot give himself one good reason not to walk into its jaws with open arms. 

The voice of the darkness sounds so sweet.

So loving. He hadn’t heard anything like this, aimed at him, in years; he longs for it.

The song never ends; just repeats, like the caves do too.

It has no final notes, no dead-ends.

Deeper. Deeper still.

This is the end and it has no end.

Something lurches, shakes. Breaks.

He snaps away from the darkness in the cave opening ahead of him down to the source that interrupted him, dazed, ripped out of that comfortable, loving trance, ready to fight and scream and claw—

Only to find the general’s hand shaking his own weakly, his voice pleading, repeating his name.

“Grievous!” It doesn’t even have enough volume to echo, but he hears it anyway.

The world snaps. Falls into place.

“Grievous?” The general’s eyes bore into him, worried. 

Scared. For him.

(We’ll be alright.)

“Kenobi.” He repeats, his own voice still far away, half-dream. His arms tingle like his flesh ones would, the phantom aches of past injuries that took them dissipating only slowly. 

A smile, a pained one but still true and light in a way that snaps the world back the rest of the way appears on Kenobi’s face. 

Like he’s glad that Grievous is...what? Here?

Where did he go?

“Oh, good.” The general says, above a whisper but hoarse enough to sound like one. Grievous would almost prefer him to go back to whispering as his voice now sounds like he’d gargled glass and coal for days. 

But he’s smiling; a little bit wild, blood coating his blunt teeth, eyes wide with the remains of fear.

“Don’t listen.” He says, thoroughly tired out, his hand weakening. Grievous grips it like a lifeline. “Don’t listen to the singing.”

He remembers that sweet, sweet voice, still echoing somewhere in the dark like the quiet steps of predators sneaking in the foliage of a jungle; somewhere out there, always, biding its time.

The melody Kenobi sang, delirious and out of his mind.

No end. No end. No end.

Only repetition.

“Look at me.” Kenobi says, forcefully, less desperate than his Stay had been. “Grievous, look at me.”

He does, not even realizing he’d turned back to the darkness and was sinking into it again.

“Kenobi,” he starts, and doesn’t follow, his thoughts tripping over one another as he tries to rid his mind of the memory of that chasm, clear like something real he’d seen.

“Grievous,” the general says back. The hand in his own gives a little squeeze. Laughably weak, but there. Undeniable.

He remembers listening to recordings, preserved perfectly by machine memory for analysis and evaluation, and realizes where he’s heard that tone of voice before.

When Kenobi had been tending to his wounded. When he held a clone’s shaking form in his arms and said You’ll be as good as ever in no time, don’t worry and continued until the stretcher got there.

That one recording he’d watched over an over, thinking weakness, yes, a weakness I can exploit; Kenobi kneeling over the shaking, injured form of young Skywalker, and— himself trembling— giving him an endless litany of words of comfort ranging from useful instructions to empty promises he couldn’t know if he’d be able to keep, but he said them all anyway, somehow managing to keep his voice strong even through the hitching of his breaths and the tears just-barely-not in his eyes. 

The same voice, now, for him.

Grievous holding his hand tightly in his own, helping him.

He wants to laugh again, and he does, and it doesn’t do anything but widen the man’s eyes in confusion.

That look abates soon, though, going back to that fierce, determined concern that Grievous has no idea what to do with. Has no idea why .

“Talk to me, Grievous.”

He inhales; ends up coughing.

The song of the caves finally abaits into the background; the creek becomes just a creek, the caves just the caves, the darkness just the lack of light tinted softly blue with the cold.

“I am afraid, dear Kenobi,” he says, and he’d be grinning— a mid-battle grimace of pained, sarcastic, soldier’s humor— if he could, “I quite lost my line.”

The general chuckles, coughs; his eyes sliding to the ceiling and closing as another wave of agony seems to hit him, a hiss escaping clenched teeth. 

Grievous leans closer, not thinking, his other set of claws coming to envelop Kenobi’s hand and then moving further to lay on his shoulder.

He never really realized how small the man was. Little bird indeed; fragile and broken as Grievous looms over him, holding one of his tiny claw-less hands to his chest. It still trembles, the changing pressure quivering against the durasteel of his chestplate.

“The Jedi they sent,” the man says, and it’s voiced with just enough accusation on the word Jedi uttered like a curse to baffle Grievous further, but mostly urgency to fill in the silence again to not give the darkness time to catch on. “What else did they do?”

He has to think; think through the pain and haze of the past.

“They made us pay reparations, in the name of the Republic. Crippled us. Starved us, withheld medicine and machines and food and water, all orders based on the Ya’mri’s words, causing the deaths of thousands. Millions,” He forces out, and the anger that the caves have ripped from him crawls back like a wounded dog, always loyal. 

He lets it go with a sigh.

Closes his eyes. “In the end, I...mounted a last attack, betraying my bargain with the Banking clan.” The emotion leaks out of his voice and falls through his claws, down into nothing. “They— The Jedi, Dooku said— planted an ion bomb on the ship. Planned to kill us all.”

The water. The beach; the rain at the coast. That mantra, repeated and never finished. 

“I survived.”

For a few seconds, neither of them says anything. The humming is back.

“He...made you,” the general’s eyes meet his and nod at him, a movement brief and small enough to seem more like a tic, “this?”

Ah.

That.

I submitted to the changes willingly! Yes, but it’d been a giant smear in his memory thick with agony and darkness and loneliness that made him force tears out of burned, dry tearducts. It was that, or death; he’d been at their mercy, and they didn’t exactly wait for his permission.

If you’ll fight for the Separatist Confederacy, we will restore your body.

Pain, pain, so much pain. Grey walls. Sterile air so different than the jungle, the herbs, the smells he was used to.

Yes. 

It was a droid, a machine talking back to him, its voice looping between registers.

Very well.

They didn’t ask what he wanted to keep. They didn’t ask him anything; just changed him, remade him in their image.

Stole what he was.

Nothing but a bundle of pain, hatred and programming.

What is your mission?

His voice tainted the same reverb of theirs, ugly to listen to; he wanted to claw his throat out, but couldn’t, the programming attached to his mind like a parasite cutting the thought in half, focusing his anger to his answer, his assigned goal instead; his revenge made sterile and given purpose unrelated to him. To destroy the Jedi.

The droid nodded. 

A cloaked man stood off to the distance, half-hidden in shadow. Golden eyes, smelling of death and the vague sense of unease and power. 

Very good. The droid said.

A week after that, they declared his mind had been changed enough. 

“Yes.” He says, to Kenobi in the present. He knows who he means, the pronouns game empty and purposeless. 

“So that’s why...you wanted,” he gasps and the hand in Grievous’ grip clenches. “To destroy the Jedi.”

It’s said with no judgement; just an inquiry.

“Yes,” he replies again, not knowing how to phrase the rest; the part of the programming, the elimination of his memory. Isn’t quite ready to put it to words, yet.

The Jedi goes silent, eyes closed, breathing controlled and slow.

Then, he says: “I am so sorry.”

“For what?” Grievous replies, taken aback.

“For what happened to your people.” A shaky inhale, but not from hesitation, “For what the Jedi have done.”

“... what? ”

His eyes widen, and he briefly wonders if it’s not the delirium again, but the man just chuckles, coughs, turns to him. His grin speaks of wars clawed through inch by inch.

“I have no illusions about the destruction the Jedi can cause,” he says, chords obviously straining, “and neither am I surprised by the apathy and lack of justice that they displayed.”

Grievous stays silent, shocked, still.

Kenobi, the perfect model of a Jedi, the most famous of all in the Order—famous for his adherence to their Code and their tradition and their (empty) values—goes on: “So I am sorry, even if it,” a gasp, “doesn’t do anything. I am sorry for all of it. For whatever the words of a Jedi are worth.”

The lightsaber in his hand feels heavier, somehow, like a lead weight.

“I…”

The man’s eyes are still on him, clear and focused. 

“Why?”

The Jedi’s eyes are warm, red in Grievous’ vision; but the little he sees of color is blue and soft like the walls of these blasted caves all around them, cold and sleek and elegant.

He swallows, and shakes his head; probably in an attempt to get the hair that had fallen over one of his eyes away, unsuccessfully.

Grievous does it for him with a single claw.

Then, after a few more seconds of silence, he speaks. Rough, and slow; not hesitant. “When I was thirteen, me and my master got sent on a mission.”

He blinks, and his breathing turns quieter.

“A planet, torn in two by war. A simple mission, in and out to retrieve a Jedi that had been wounded as a side-casualty of the conflict. There’d been a third group warring, though.” A breath.

“Children. The Young, sick of the war.”

The pause following that is longer, filled with pain and something else Grievous doesn’t quite grasp; the memory.

The Jedi’s eyes slide to the ceiling. The hand in his hold shifts, fingers brushing over his claws.

“I thought the Jedi were...peacemakers, first and foremost. When they brought me in, I thought our job would be to...end wars. To help people.”

Grievous listens in silence.

He’d heard this side of the narrative more times than he can count. 

He’d also, unfortunately for the people who claimed it was right, seen the true peacemaking, the helping the Jedi did.

“I thought we’d be helping the Young, or at least forming some sort of negotiation, anything— but once Qui-Gon found the Jedi,” Grievous doesn’t miss the bitter ring to Kenobi’s voice as he says the name, though he can tell he’s just skimming the surface of something wretched and deep, “he declared the mission over. Wouldn’t hear any protests, just. Done. All good. ‘They have to solve their own problems or die, young Padawan.’” 

He’d never heard Kenobi sound like this.

He’d seen him angry— mostly at him, the sort of tightly held righteous fury— but never this sort of...resentment. Bitter and cold, entirely unbidden and free of constraints. Disgust with which he whispers: “I told him I couldn’t leave without lending those people— those children, children with guns, slugthrowers, leading their own offensive— a hand, so we argued. Badly.”

A brief pause. A ghost of an ironic grin.

“I left the Jedi Order, then. To fight in the war.”

Grievous freezes. Again.

Kenobi laughs at his shock, a weak, hitching cackle that sounds more like choking. “Shocking, I know.”

Then he calms again, his expression falling; hunted, the shadows in his eyes ones Grievous knows much too well.

“It took... long...for me to come back. A year, before I gave up, and came crawling to the Order spewing apologies. Haunted by everything. So many dead.”

His eyes find Grievous’ again, wide and distant. “Sometimes I wish they hadn’t allowed me back.”

He drops it between them and Grievous can almost hear it hit the ground, like an audible phantom of realization shattering within the soft, torn leaves.

He imagines it. Briefly.

The war without Kenobi, without this annoying, undying, foolishly determined Jedi that would not leave him alone, without his little bird to cut through his battalions of droids right to him to sing about justice.

(The only one who asked, who seemed to care and try to understand.)

Grievous, in these caves; alone, or maybe with someone else far less eager to save their own skin if it meant the Supreme Commander of the Separatist Army would perish. 

None of that strange normalcy. None of that detachment from the war that felt like a distant nightmare they struggled to wake up from.

No voice, no hand to pull him from the maw of whatever entity possessed this place.

He still doesn’t know how to process this. His systems silent and screaming about everything at once, an oxymoron that feels as true as the fact that he’s holding the hand of his nemesis close to his chest and the fact that it feels— somehow— comforting.

“They abandoned me in that war. Left me, a teenager only five years into training, alone to deal with it and washed their hands off of it.” That sarcastic grin comes back, flashing just briefly. “I can almost imagine what they’d say, had I died.”

The man sighs, lets his expression drop back into a pained, exhausted nothing. “It was the first sign. The first...time that I realized what I’ve been told were mostly lies, but I tried...to bury it.”

Grievous can sense regret, now, heavy and clouding. Like fog. Swelling with grief, unprocessed, buried alive.

Their eyes meet, and the Jedi gives him a small, sad smile. “And look at us now. Generals at a forefront of a war.”

Two sentences, yet Grievous can feel a cargo ship in them that he’d have to unpack to finally find the bottom of it all. Of the feeling that swirls around the general as he, dying, tells Grievous all of this in the sort of voice that makes him think he’s the first person whom he’d ever said this to.

Peculiar. 

Terrifying, with its implications.

Like he’s been handed something enormously fragile. Important, though he can’t exactly gleam why, other than that every single old instinct that he’d developed amongst his brothers and sisters in war, amongst quiet conversations in the rain-filled darkness so similar and yet worlds different from this one, tells him to care for it. To keep it, not drop it carelessly.

“Isn’t this heresy?” He says, and he meant it as a challenge— the Jedi had just confessed to...treason, almost, treason of thought seemingly without care in the world, afterall— yet it comes out breathless and slightly hollow, edged with concern.

Him, concerned for a Jedi? 

No. Never.

(Yes.)

He wants to think it hilarious, but his mind spins too much. It all feels so heavy.

“Oh, yes.” The general laughs, and the humor in his voice only surprises him further. “And that’s not even all of it. They’d throw me out if they knew.”

A slight incline of his head, widening of his eyes. The smile doesn’t waver, yet it turns slightly absurd and crooked with the sort of laugh in face of danger. “Maybe worse.”

“Then why…” Grievous starts and doesn’t finish, trailing off into the wet, cold air. Why tell me this?

And to think that before the caves he’d been so sure he knew this Jedi. Perfectly.

Now he feels a little like a stranger.

(Like a stranger he could’ve fought alongside, and not against.)

Treason, his mind screams. Too far.

“I don’t know, to be honest.” The Jedi answers, his shrug a tiny, shaky gesture. His thumb brushes over Grievous’ claws again. “I’m dying. Maybe I wanted at least someone to know that I didn’t want any of this.”

He closes his eyes, his inhale a quiet, drawn-out thing. “That I loathed it all.”

“The war?”

A sigh. “Always.”

Silence settles after that, not tense but compassionate in a way Grievous would’ve never expected to experience in the company of a Jedi. Calm, unhurried and weary, filled only with their mutual ignorance of the caves and their whispers.

Grievous’ mind drifts, one thought to another like a raft lost at sea that the currents play with. From one war to the next. 

He sighs, and turns his head at the Jedi, whose eyes open to give him a look of inquiry.

Then, he says. “I do, too.”

The man frowns, at first, before his expression smooths to a small, almost mischievous grin. “Then, I suppose we’re even.”

Grievous assumes the conversation is over, but he keeps looking, keeps watching him like he wants to say something else but isn't sure if he ought to.

“What?” He asks, with only a little annoyance.

He himself has to admit that he feels better when the caves are filled with their voices instead of the hum, like a campfire that chases wolves away.

The general doesn’t avert his eyes. “Thank you.” Softly, quietly, truly.

“For what?”

A slow, light inhale. “For this.”

—

He stands at the edge of the maw. 

Again, both the weary and the terrified parts of his mind supply at once before being squished down and ground into the dust by the ever-devouring gravity in the darkness. Tendrils of it, invisible, binding him in place, dragging him toward it like one of those Umbaran ground monsters. Bigger, worse, and all-encompassing.

It seems calmer.

There is no voice singing, luring, the breaths it gives out long and even, the air still; it still wants him to enter but not desperately, like something had been fulfilled and done, like it had been fed and now just wishes him to be its audience, free to go once it has its fill. A voyeur to the way it devours, to pass the message and call for more, or just to know what will happen to him once it finishes and goes hungry once again.

He stands at the edge of the maw, not alone.

He can’t see the other being present, somewhere, almost in the depths, almost fallen; but he can feel their fear like the sharp scent of ozone that clings onto the nozzles of blasters.

There is someone else here, and the maw wants them more.

And he, for a reason as visceral as the instinct of survival, envies them. He doesn’t want the darkness’ approval, he doesn’t want its love.

(He does.)

That other presence is shrouded in it, no, it’s a different kind of darkness; void-ish like space itself and tainted with a yearning, broken, starving, headless kind of hunger, that feels unexpected for a reason he can’t quite determine. He thinks— knows— it should be light, but it isn’t. It’s two kinds of darkness that try to bond together in the same breath as they attempt to tear each other apart, sizing the other like apex predators of different lands meeting for the first time, and he stands there as a witness as neither speaks, just a rumbling splintered growl and an answering, deep hum, and when he opens his eyes, both of them vanish.

—

Grievous doesn’t pass out. He just doesn’t. His programs aren’t supposed to fail in such a trivial way as losing consciousness. He doesn’t need sleep; not anymore, his powers long gone to dormancy, maybe even death. Somehow, he’d still managed to fall into it. 

Rest doesn’t come for him, though; he feels more exhausted than he was before he’d lost consciousness and his eyes ache with it in a way he really hasn’t missed. He moves to rub at them and stops, noticing the...something he holds in them, warm and pliant.

He remembers.

He thinks of the other presence facing the caves with its own fractured, spiralling kind of darkness and a sharp, clicking growl that could only belong to a beast, and looks at Kenobi, not comprehending.

The man is awake. He doesn’t seem surprised to see Grievous be too.

“Grievous,” he just says, softly, but there’s a hint of something else, a continuation. Something about him feels steadier, resolved; and Grievous worries; still stuck at the memory of the maw and its rival.

“You have machine-perfect memory, right?”

Grievous first thought at that question; one that feels like it came out of nowhere; is You should know that, you do know that, before he figures that it wasn’t all, no, just more introduction, assurances. “Yes.”

“Good.” A shaky breath. “Come here.”

“What?” He’s sitting right next to him; the warmth of the man soaking into his unfeeling knees where they touch. There’s not much closer he can be.

“Just...listen. Carefully.” The Jedi’s hand tugs him closer, and he looms over the man even more, his face just a foot away from his own.

“For what?”

“It...told me. The directions. And unlike you, I don’t have a perfect memory and I’d rather relay them to you before I inevitably forget.” 

His hand slips out of Grievous’ grasp and goes for his face, his touch there light as a feather as he pulls him closer by one of the panels on the sides of his mask until their faces are almost touching, and Grievous lets him. “Listen.”

Grievous does.

The man’s eyes close with a frown as he carefully and slowly rattles off directions, sharp and sure even with the tremor in his voice; still a General even if dying, even when saving the man he’s supposed to kill.

Grievous has the faint idea Kenobi wants him to know the way out, a breach of their deal where he gave all he had to offer away in one fell swoop, because he truly doesn’t expect to survive.

But; somehow, someway, wants Grievous to make it out.

His hand wraps tighter around the panel, then shifts to hold his actual face where the warmth seeps through the ruined skin underneath, and Grievous finds it hard to focus on anything besides that and the voice that gives him a way out like a sacrifice.

He doesn’t want it to be this way either.

To fight the rest of the war knowing it’s at a cost he can never repay to the one who gave it.

The man stops with a ragged inhale, gives the last of the directions before he says: “And then you’ll be out,” with a distant wistfulness, and Grievous finds himself thinking about it as well, about leaving these caves, about sunlight that feels as abstract— as wrong— as the concept of the war itself, too loud and flashing and gritty and meaningless. About Dooku’s hologram, or his face in person, perpetually stuck in that expression of damning disapproval even if the only thing that blasted idiot ever did for the Confederacy was to have the wealth and greed of a capitalist, about having to face that man and say...what? That they’d won? That they’d lost? (What does it matter?)

If (when?) Kenobi dies, would it be a victory?

It stops him, freezes him whole as he realizes that he doesn’t think so. 

He tries to imagine what the Count would say, and can’t decide if he’d be disappointed— the Sith was a fool and a sentimental one at that, and knew nothing of sunk costs except for the times he reprimanded Grievous for existing— or if he’d rejoice, and Grievous can’t even imagine what he’d say. Good job, general, maybe; it makes him feel angry and sick, leaning into the warmth of the hand of the man to whom he now owes nothing, and everything, at once.

The Republic would lose a High General, a Jedi Councillor, one of their favorite poster boys and the only thing that kept their other iconic figure in check; to them, it’d be a loss, a catastrophic one. And not even in battle, in a way they could make him into a martyr— the word stings in his mind— to rally behind. No, they’d lose him somewhere under the surface of a meaningless planet that nothing lives on anyway, unable to even retrieve the body; the bugs will devour him and leave only the bones. They’ll lose him slowly, an undignified demise that’d be too real, too raw, too ugly for the comfort of their shiny, sheltered Coruscant.

The Confederacy would lose an enemy. One of the best. 

His little bird’s song gone, choked to silence by the greed of war; killed by him. 

Who would he fight, after? Skywalker, determined to avenge his master? His child soldier of an apprentice? More endless waves of clones whose screams his programs made him enjoy like he did the cracking of Huk shell so many years back in a war that was actually fought for something worthy?

“I’m sorry,” the man tears him out of his spiralling thoughts, and it sounds light; weightless from acceptance, not from the lack of guilt; like his voice never did before. “I didn’t...realize it was deceiving me.”

“What was?” He asks, even if he already knows.

“The simulacrum. It pretended...to be the Force,” he frowns just slightly, “I’ve never seen anything like it, they said it was impossible.”

Grievous leans back a little, one of his own clawed hands saving the General’s from slipping away. “What do you mean?”

“There is no Force here, only the End. That’s what it calls itself; the End. The name of this planet and its power, that...voice, and its song, and the nightmares; it’s all the End.” His eyes slide to the mouth of the cave just briefly, blinking. “It just lured me—us— deeper, pretending to be the Force, and I let it happen. I realized...too late.” 

His gaze settles back on him, his thumb stroking his face and drawing a line of warmth under one of Grievous’ eyes. “For that, I am sorry.”

He inhales and lets it out slowly, looking off to somewhere behind Grievous’ shoulder, and continues before Grievous can assemble together a reply that doesn’t reveal his inner crisis. “I can’t feel them here. Anyone. Not even you or myself or any of these—bugs and worms and ferns. It just...nothing else exists, now, here, not even the Force.”

Grievous doesn’t have the Force, but the feeling is familiar to him regardless, even if the cosmic nature escapes him.

“I was right, you know?” The man states to the open air between them.

“About what?” Grievous replies.

“When I wondered where the caves end. They do go deeper. So much deeper. They just...don’t end.”

Grievous tilts his head. “Everything has to end.”

“Not the End itself.” The man says, as if it makes any sense; his eyes sure and still, meeting Grievous’ own; still glazed over with pain and exhaustion and fever but not the wildness of delirium. 

Grievous falls silent, and waits.

“This...this planet,” Kenobi tries again with a gasp at the start, “it’s...hollow. It’s a tower, and it leads down, to the center, to the planet’s core as hollow as everything else, and then the caves just...continue on, deeper; the tower leading to a space that isn’t...physical, not really, not ever, it’s real but unrestrained. Infinite, endless. We are at the threshold of the End, the whole universe as we know just the railing of the tower. The world down there, its dark infinity, is the rest.” His voice doesn’t shake, and it’s distant wonder that coats its edges, the edges sharpened by fear. “Boundless. Hungry. Ever-repeating.”

A weak laugh. “We’ll find no Game Over here.”

“That is...not possible.” Grievous forces out after a moment of silence. “Nothing can be limitless.”

“Then only nothing can.”

“And these caves are…?”

“Nothing. Everything. I don’t know,” the man attempts a shrug but only ends up wincing. “I find myself wishing I paid more attention to black hole astrophysics, now it feels...relevant.”

Grievous thinks, and tries fruitlessly to stop thinking, about the maw of the darkness, about its ever-repeating song, about its greed and wants to ask What does it want? but he’d heard it, he’d heard it beg him to sink and dig and go deeper clearly enough for the first real question that remains to be Why. He doesn’t think either of them can answer it, though. 

There is a second one he can ask. 

“Why did it tell you...how to leave? ” 

It doesn’t make any sense. It doesn’t make any sense for an entity so adamant on trapping them to suddenly let them go unscathed; for a beast starving as painfully as this one to open its jaws and let them just leave. 

“I don’t know. It...makes no sense, but it. It did.”

He nods, and he remembers the second beast that had been smaller but no less fierce, flickering like a dying light with its own darkness but still ready to fight, warning growls forces through the impressions of sharp teeth, and wonders.

The general continues. “I’m definitely going to take that chance, however. Or, you are. I hope.”

The correction has him shifting, his head snapping to meet the man’s tired gaze. 

His brow frowns at the motion. “What?”

“We,” Grievous corrects him back. “We are.”

The man’s frown only deepens, and Grievous feels something slipping away from him, a concrete presence he didn’t realize surrounded him until it pulled away and left him feeling cold for the first time in years. 

Then, his eyes widen, and a spike of fear fills the air before it’s smothered by something else, thick and concealing. “I’d think you’d be happy at my demise, with how ready you were to execute me a...week ago.” He weakly guesses at the end, but the fire in it still stands, and Grievous wants to shiver and shrivel up and for some reason, it makes him want to cringe and fight even if he knows it’s absolutely, factually correct. Perfect machine memory and all.

“Our bargain still stands,” he counters instead.

“Our bargain is broken. I broke it.” 

“Not to me,” he replies, unthinkingly, in a rush; and it’s not Grievous, for second, who says so; it’s Qymaen, who navigated bargains with a religious devotion of a worshipper to their absolute completion because the Kaleesh valued respect and the Kaleesh hated nothing more than betrayal, and the Kaleesh understood better than anyone else the subtlety that a change of terms could take and the nuance of their nature. 

And this one is simple, like a children’s example made real and horrible; I get you out, and you get me out, and both of us win ; and the fact that he’d ever meant to betray it (yes, after, after it’d been complete, but the nuance still stands) burns and boils in his insides like oil. He still owes him. He owes him much more than he knows, that he’d ever even realized; some of it things he’d not yet even put to concrete thoughts, much less to word. 

Kenobi just sped it up for his side, yes. Gave it up early.

Grievous should probably hurry, then.

“We should go,” he says, quickly, but the man still stares at him with something between distrust and confusion. “We should…”

“Grievous.” Kenobi stops him, a certain finality to his voice. “I won’t make it.”

The words twist his insides, and his reply makes a nice parallel to the ones that still echo through his mind with the mercilessness of the darkness that dug them out and left them to fester.

“You will.”

“For you to cut me down at the entrance?” Even as a whisper, the bite— coated with sarcasm— leaves no mistaking its intentions and rips into Grievous with the nasty surprise of Why, why does it hurt so much for you to not trust me, why does it hurt that we’re enemies. Like an aching, cold wound in his metal ribs where the still-flesh heart beats, unhealed and just-now-remembered, attempting to heal by tearing itself open.

“You are not going to die.” He retorts, stubborn to get that something back. 

“What, you care now? Go.” The general says after he chuckles humorlessly. “Save yourself.”

He turns his face away, staring at the stalactites hanging from the cave’s ceiling; twice-blue in Grievous’ own vision, while Grievous sits, his mind asunder and thrown by the sudden...hatred. The finality. Clean like a knife.

“I am not leaving you.”

“What’s,” his voice cracks, and he coughs, “your plan then, general.”

Call me Grievous , he thinks with an almost desperation, as something about this isn’t right; he doesn’t know why, doesn’t know what, but something hides from him here; or he hopes it does. Call me by my name.

Years ago, a hundred thousand planets and languages over, a night at a campsite, the steel of a rifle cold against his knee he’d said: Name’s Qymaen, but friends call me Mae, and the memory twists like a knife already embedded in a wound.

“Getting us both out, Kenobi.” He says, using his name out of spite, or maybe to prove a point.

Does he remember? Does he not? 

He still holds the man’s hand in his own, face missing the warmth of it. 

He tries to think back, but can’t do it soon enough; not before Kenobi says, his voice thick with pain and dark amusement, as if laughing at him. “That’s a lost cause.”

Mostly, like he’s angry; and he is, a quiet kind of frustration that swarms over him now instead of the serenity of before, and Grievous doesn’t know what the fuck any of this is about and wants— needs— to find out. 

Kenobi turns back to him when he doesn’t answer, his teeth showing as he forces out in a harsh tone: “Leave.”

His hand slips out of Grievous’ grasp.

The caves stay quiet and still and dark, and become so numbingly cold as he does so, and Grievous reels from all of it; mind recoiling into the dark, and he thinks of the tower and he thinks of the maw and he thinks of that other beast, growling, splintering, singing, conversing—

“Kenobi,” he starts, and his voicebox can cough but it cannot crack, “what did you do.”

“Me?” The man snaps back, somewhat incredulously.

“Did you,” the cold presses further as he interrupts himself with a breath, searing through the remains of his lungs. He shakes his head, starting over.

“You know why it gave you the directions, don’t you?” He says, and maybe his own frustration shows through the notes of anger that spark at the edges of the sentence like thorns. 

The man falls quiet.

“Did you make a deal,” he presses on, “with the End?”

He meets the general’s widened eyes, and then he feels it. 

Fear, again. Anger always hides fear. 

“Even if i did,” the corner of the man’s mouth quivers slightly as he says: “That’s not your business, is it?”

“You…” The shock that pours over Grievous’ form feels like a physical blow, a cold gale ripping through him, and his next words echo loudly within the cave halls; loud enough to make the man flinch. “Sarje. Kisaar.”

Fool . His perfect, idiotic, foolish bird who listened to the caves’ singing and sang back. 

“Why?” He has to search for the word in Basic as part of him wants to claw Kenobi for doing this, for making a deal with a cosmic horror, and all it makes him wonder is What did you promise it. What did it want in return.

This self-sacrificial ass who made a deal and threw the one that was theirs away in a heartbeat.

(You wanted to betray him too and he knows it.)

“I don’t know. I don’t know if I did, and if you’re right, I didn’t realize that’s what it was,” the Jedi says, and Grievous growls in response but the lack of a bite in his voice stops him short. The lack of a bite that vanishes with: “But even then, I’ll confess to wanting for the last thing I do in my life to be helping someone else, so, I ask you kindly, please don’t waste it?”

He holds his gaze. His hand, lying on top of his chest, flexes in a trembling jerk of a movement. “Leave.” He repeats. The whisper splinters off the walls.

“No.”

“What?”

“Don’t lay your death at my feet and say it is kindness.” he growls. “I am not leaving you.” Plainly, firmly, like a foundation. Because he isn’t. Because it never even crossed his mind. Because even if the general didn’t seem to understand the likes of cosmic horrors, Grievous had enough kaleesh stories buried deep in his mind that spoke of their treachery; because, well, he cared. 

However much he tries not to. However much that feels like his own private brand of treason.

Instead of dealing with all of it, he shuts it away, and like every day they’ve been together in this hell, picks the general up from the ground, ignoring the way he tries to squirm and protest.

Leaving behind the torn ferns and the creek and the quiet ghost of their conversation (Thank you. For this), the caves begin to hum anew.

Discontent.

Grievous doesn’t listen to it any more than to the whispers of harsh words that Kenobi gives him to make him leave, because the fear that had only been there for the lifespan of a mayfly returns and stops and stays. 

Eventually, though, he quietens; nothing but ragged breaths, and Grievous wonders if he’d see tears, were he to crane his neck and meet his eyes.

After a long period of silence that would’ve unnerved him if he didn’t hear every breath the man made come and go, he says, quietly: “You actually care, don’t you?”

Disbelieving; said with not a small amount of shock, but a question he can answer. Soft, soft again; gentle.

The something they’d had coming back in hesitant steps.

“Yes.”

“Why?” 

Well, he can’t say he didn’t see that one coming. Not that he knows how to answer it; how to put it to words.

“Because I still haven’t truly beaten you,” he says, and he doesn’t explain why it matters because to say Only I can kill you would betray the sheer selfishness that had gotten hold of him, to say the truth and wonder aloud Who else would I fight? would reveal a thought not yet processed for all its consequences. Because it is, it is selfish, but also it’s true; and he hadn’t realized how much in this nonsensical war it started to matter who he fights more than why. How thrilling it was to clash with a worthy foe again and again amidst the chess-perfect slamming of two manufactured armies into one another; the only piece of the world that felt real, that made sense, amongst the war too clinical and almost dauntedly fake like a fever-dream of a warlord who lost his mind.

Only I can kill you, he’d say, and he wouldn’t say that it meant that he’d hold this monopoly in order to never do so. To keep his enemy alive, to let him run at every future encounter in order to someday return and fight him again; because his machine-self cared only by scratching the surface but his kaleesh-self now cares so deeply it breaks him. The little bird he’d named so, for a reason.

He’d never realized how lonely he’d become— weakness, weakness— until the programs that kept him from feeling it failed. He’d never dreaded coming back from this all more than now; coming back only to find weak facsimiles of his past brothers, with their capes and lasat double-spears and void in their being. 

There was an abyss between them and the ones he used to know. The ones that called him Mae, the ones whose claws lay heavy on his shoulders, whose tusks brushed against his own, the voices that rang at his side and over the comms and around the campfires in the cargo hold that the ‘filters can manage, no worries.’

You miss her , one of them said above the sight of a gray-white world; Adrei (one-who-is-free, the bringer of freedom, the light summer wind that brings peace), sitting down next to him on the bridge of the Ambersun, his irises thin black slits drowning in a sea of gold. 

I’m afraid that we’ll fail, now that she— now that she’s gone . He’d said back. I don’t know if I can do it without her. 

You can. Adrei said, leaning shoulder to shoulder, and he’d always smelled of northern razhan conifers, the needles of which he ground up and put in their tea, grinning as he defended their health advantages when they all inevitably grumbled and cursed the bitter-sharp taste. And you have us.  

His fist play-punching his shoulder weighted heavy with armor, and below his skull bearing the marks of claws and the sun and a pack of birds he’d had a wide smile (not with his fangs, but with his eyes) that added much more to his next words. All of us. 

In the present, Grievous’ shoulder cramps with a phantom ache.

(With yearning.)

He can feel the disappointment at his answer from the Jedi, knows the man has seen through at least part of his obscured wordplay, and before he can retreat back to himself, Grievous adds with the weary ache settling in his bones: “Because you did.”

“Did...what?”

“Care.”

He sighs, and meeting the general’s eyes as he looks down, he knows that’s not enough; that a word so loaded deserves an elaboration.

If only he’d knew. If only he could take the kaleesh phrase that flies through his mind— I zeir, jneho il lah— and have it be understood.

He tries. He does. The man deserves that little, and so much more.

“About Kalee. About...me.”

What he had to gain indeed, what he had to gain that had always been understanding in the end. Or maybe something deeper. Something he had once had but wasn’t allowed to keep.

In the end it will all be worth it, he’d said to a young soldier, their tusks cold against the nooks between his thumb and palms, his claws brushing against the cracked, ash-covered surface of their mask that had the sigil for wheat and millow painted in green around the left eye. They knelt, the bodies cooling all around them, as his mates and brothers walked the fields counting the dead and the muttered rites and songs wavered in the wind of the evening sky that wouldn’t rain. 

How—how can you know? they asked, and his shoulders stung with the burn of blasterbolts and his mind shook from overuse; his foresight wild and horrid; but he’d looked at the silhouettes of his brothers, at the fire and tents that they started setting up and the graves that they dug while singing songs of lovely bones being laid to rest, and his reply had been easy and difficult and above all, felt. Because we fight for us.

There is no us to fight for now. 

Just programming. Loyal, not allowed to evolve like he knows it can, like he’s seen those droids and AIs do when they said Fight with us. Fight for yourself, for your own. 

A loyal army marching towards destruction; a futile quest for power that had no sense for a foundation. No mercy, and no meaning. 

A war fought for nothing and no one; he wasn’t blind to the Confederacy’s council as Dooku thought he was. To the plight of the world to whom another war meant only more piles of bodies.

The man’s only answer comes out as a soft, clumsy: “Oh.” cut short as it comes right before the fall of one of Grievous’ feet.

He seems to ruminate on it still, thinking, eyes aimed forward. “I thought you told me because it’d die with me.”

“At first, yes.” Grievous replies. It’s the truth; even he doesn’t know when that shifted to the complete opposite, to wanting someone, anyone else to know . Somewhen after, somewhere in the dark; where their status as enemies became less important than their ties as survivors.

“Ah.”

He falls silent. Grievous watches him, checking his face shadowed with the type of exhaustion that comes with constant pain, and tries to not let his own fear show as the man holds onto his life even as the caves hum and shake. The noise of a rockslide tramples over to them like an echoing scream, a gust of cold wind.

The stalactites that hang above them; some of them longer than Grievous himself; tremble like a threat. 

Grievous presses closer to the walls, and hurries.

“Talk to me,” he says when he notices the man nodding off, and where the other times he’d let him sleep, or be forced to do so, he won’t now. He might not wake up; Grievous cannot let that happen. 

He forcibly turns his mind away from the story that flies through his conscious, a ballad about a strange beacon in the mountains and the rejdyné; the not-awake, not-sleeping; whose golden eyes closed to its flashing light and opened different. He doesn’t need nor want the image of a blue-white, starving gaze to haunt him atop the gaping maw, the endless tower and its deal.

He focuses on nothing but the way forward, and the man in his arms, and finds that the caves; unbearably loud even in their drip-dripping silence where he’d hear even the drop of a grenade ring; make it much harder than before.

The man responds with a confused, blunt noise; like the opposite of a cat’s mrrp; but no words. 

“Don’t,” Grievous stresses the word, “fall asleep. Talk to me.”

“About what?” Kenobi mumbles.

For a brief second he entertains the thought of asking some of the things he’d wondered about like a revenge, or something entirely, vulnerably personal, but ultimately doesn’t choose either, or anything at all. “Your choice.”

A scoff.

Up, up, up. Grievous hopes the caves can’t change their layout; that the crashes and breaks haven’t been that all along.

“Do you ever…” Kenobi begins before his chords betray him, and his voice is undeniably, worryingly softer; like the brief hatred of their conversation no more than an hour ago was his last hurrah. “Do you ever feel like there’s something worse coming?” He whispers, and adds: “After...after the war.”

A chill in his circuitry, cold like the caves.

Grievous inclines his head, and says nothing.

“Like a shadow looming over the galaxy. It...gets closer, the longer we fight. Falling.”

A stalagmite splinters off to Grievous’ right, off-beat to his steps.

“What do you mean?”

The Jedi pauses, briefly; Grievous can feel it in the air. 

With a voice hoarse and thick, he asks, like he’s putting the words together for the first time and worse, like it’s a relief: “Have you ever considered how... nonsensical this war is?”

Grievous can’t tell whether he’s stalling an explanation or whether the question is the explanation, but he gives in anyway. A drop of water slides into his eye from the ceiling, leaving a trail of cold. “In what sense?”

“No one is fighting...right. There’s no stakes. No reason.”

He looks over at the Jedi in confusion. That’s to put it lightly, as a more fitting expression would be bafflement.

Kenobi notices. His words stumble over one another, weary and gentle, yet hurried. “I mean, what’s. What’s the motives here. The strategy. Why are the separatists not defending? Why...the droids?” He rasps. “Why you?”

“Me?”

His eyes stare at him, through him, down to his remaining splintered bones that the caves exposed in their loving vivisection. “What stake do you really have in this war, Grievous?”

It’s not an accusing question. The man’s eyes meeting his own, flickering from his left to his right as if searching, but he can find no threat in there. 

There hadn’t been one before either; only desperation, where now that burnt away with the last of his strength. He’s a torch that had burned bright like a sun but now weakly smokes and his voice sounds like he’s inhaling it; his own slow death, leaving him, coating his lungs and throat.

“Kalee is...Wild Space. The Separatists are Outer Rim. They have...their own generals. Their own people.” 

A hitch in his breath. Something cracks and falls and splinters behind them. “Why aren’t they fighting?”

Grievous growls, low and bothered. “Because they are cowards.”

He knows what the Senate thinks of him; the Republic and the Separatists could easily bond over their shared hatred, their disgust of the beast that Dooku let loose onto the battlefield. Machine, alien, all the way from Wild Space that they liked to call the cur-pit of the galaxy. 

“That’s not it,” Kenobi whispers.

Grievous scoffs.

“They’re fighting for their own freedom, Grievous.” The man says next, in response, and Grievous can’t help but consider why the man feels the need to spend what could be his dying moments trying to rationalize his opposition in a war that is far enough away to not matter at all. 

“I...know how worlds like those look. And it doesn’t include cowardice.”

“From your Jedi missions?” He says, because the idea is hilarious; before he remembers the world, the world he’d learned of the day before, and turns his head away; forward into the jagged corridor slowly snaking upwards. The light of the lightsaber in his hand; that fits almost comfortably now, a familiarity of a weapon clutched in survival for days without end; shimmers against wet walls. A weak current of air flows within them now, smelling of wet ground and something richer. Like a catacomb, destroyed by nature. Rotting. But unlike a catacomb, it’s inhuman, and even more than that, alive.

“No.” Kenobi says. Absent-minded, like he’s considering something, trying to find logic within it. “Just...think about it. For a second.”

Grievous readjusts his claws on the saber within them.

“You will need to elaborate.”

A soft sigh comes in response, shaking at the very end, the Jedi’s body still pulled taut in his grip from pain and sheer habit.

“A year ago,” he forces out, coughing, “Dooku told me...a Sith controlled the senate. The Republic Senate.” He clarifies, redundantly.

Huh.

Grievous falters in his steps for a millisecond. His systems awake for no other reason than to evaluate, to count, to consider and the numbers that come out bring no peace.

The war as an excuse for two warring Sith lords?

The manufactured armies. Jedi becoming generals, slowly being wiped out in bloodied fields far from the Core, drained; a slowly depleting finite resource Grievous himself claimed many of. The downright strange political machinations pulled by the senate at both sides; illogical, naive, bold; never genuine.

Fire burns in his bones. It feels...right. It makes sense.

“I didn’t believe it at first, but now…”

“It makes sense.” Grievous finishes, repeating his own conclusion.

The Jedu shifts in a weak jerk of a motion. “Possibly. I don’t know.” A sigh. “Yes.”

The claws of his free hand clench tight, the fire cutting through his circuits.

He shouldn’t be surprised; he doesn’t even know why he’s angry, per se, it doesn’t change anything about his situation and he doesn’t have love nor any real emotion towards the Sith— Hach Irizdu jai Zilee, he knows so little of them— but somehow, it still burns. Somehow, by some logic, he burns.

“There’s always two, there’s always been two…” the general mutters, nonsensically, weakly.

“That is...the dark shadow?” Grievous asks instead.

“Yes. Maybe. I don’t know.” He finishes. It sounds defeated and exhausted; it bleeds off of him in waves.

“It just...frustrates me. All of this. How wasteful it is. Senseless.” Shaken inhale, “I’ve been in wars before and this is—not it.” His hand pats the side of Grievous’ neck, at least, the part of it that the man can reach from his position, and it’s a strange, endearing gesture. “You’ve—you know what I mean. Right?”

“Yes,” he says, without hesitation.

Kenobi replies nothing, doesn’t react, except for Grievous’ trailing thought that he’d probably nodded but Grievous wasn’t there to see with his eyes letting the dark of the caves carve a permanent shadow into his retinas, and then the man picks up again, where he’d left off, and Grievous has the repeating realization, the thought that comes and says You are the first. You are his confidant.  

Like an exchange, a weird layered sequence of bargains they make thoughtlessly for no other reason than that they cannot stop because the last one always has to be theirs.

“And they...just—just rant. Unhelpfully, like, ‘the Dark Side obscures everything, Kenobi, however would we know’, like— we have brains, do we not?” With emotion, his voice gains pitch, a lowly-shrill whistle more than a whisper. “Are we—have we swooped so low to rely on the Force for—for basic common sense? For logistics? It’s—refusing to even look that it’s, that it’s wrong, like the Force is a verifiable source for war-time political corruption and I can’t— “

His voice cracks, in anger or a hundred other reasons that Grievous can think of, while he himself saves the rant and plays it over and over in detached wonder. Confusion laces it too; running analytics, trying to parse together the words even when the emotion of them trips them over.

“I didn’t— need the Force with the Young. My people didn’t need the Force to tell when the chē’ta trayr’vē were coming because, because we had eyes.” 

He says it in righteous, hardened frustration, but Grievous’ focus is on something else.

The two words smashed together, sharp to a point. The accent, completely different, jumping into a thing rough and cut-throat where the t’s have the blunt force of a mace and the r’s a knife’s edge. 

Grievous freezes, because he knows it, or he doesn’t, or he hasn’t heard it in— in years, in so long, and he doesn’t know what it is, just that he’d heard it, even those two exact words, before; off-road and at the side, out of his main focus. Somewhere, on a street of brown tarps and gray metal roofs, where the sky was orange and hazy with dust that promised a storm with no love for outsiders. Somewhere in Wild Space; in the dozens of planets that his warpath touched.

It’s not a language from anywhere within the Republic. 

Grievous turns back to the Jedi, to this assortment of half-truths and revelations, and hears his next bitter words clearer than ever even if they’re not said to him. Even if he has the feeling that the Jedi might be only abstractly aware of his presence at this point, lost in his own head. “Zalis’tor, zu sni te.”

Beyond his head spinning just slightly, the blue light of the saber in his hand swirling along the blade like it’s underwater, Grievous thinks that one is a swear.

For a few steps, he says nothing. He hears nothing; nothing but the ambience of the caves that have decided to abate like the tide before a tsunami abandons the shore. 

Kenobi says nothing either. Just shakes. His breaths come in quick and weak and weaker.

“I—I,” he tries, and if Grievous wasn’t diverting a part of his brain to focusing on him, he might’ve missed the soft hitch of a noise. 

The anger long gone; not that it was even strong enough for anger, but as close as possible, like he’d been going through the stages of grief for something that hadn’t happened yet. Or maybe for himself and using the universe like a veil to hide behind.

He shakes, cold and small, in Grievous’ arms, who does his best to hold him well even as the corridors turn challenging and treacherous.

“I only...I don’t want to see it,” it leaves him like a confession with the weight it deserves, even if his voice becomes and stays unbearably light. Grievous had heard voices like this before, too. He chases away those memories; for his sake if not his own. 

He chases them away by focusing on the man’s trembling form, gently shifting his grip so his head would lay closer to his, to listen. Here and now, it says for himself. I am listening, it hopefully says to him.

“I don’t want to be there when it...when it comes,” the mighty High General Obi-Wan Kenobi whispers with the anguish of a child that fears the dark and the same level of sincerity, “but I don’t want to die.”

Grievous holds him tighter. His heart beats heavy; thrumming within his head, but the General’s heartbeat pounds next to it, close enough he can hear its languid slowness.

“Does that make me selfish, Grievous?”

The eyes that search his face for answers are bloodshot and wet and not entirely clear. Glassy. 

Desperate, and so, so afraid.

Grievous doesn’t know how to answer.

There is a whole universe in that question; a whole piece of being that makes it feel like his answer will shatter the force of destiny one way or another and he has to choose. He has to make that choice. 

Humans are social sentient creatures who seek comfort from others as they are dying. (Kaleesh seek to be alone.)

Only the first few choices he got to make freely and he’s already tiring of it.

He knows it’s not something he can just crack a book about and say it clearly; he wonders if that’s why he asked, as he thinks of the Jedi and their exactness about things that have never been exact nor clear or convenient. 

The question is a river to an ocean, deep but deeper still; like these caves that he’s going to carry this man out of even if it kills him so that neither of them ever has to know if the choice he made was right or wrong.

He says “No,” and means it.

The shaken sigh of relief; its quiet catharsis; breaks something warm and pliant within all the steel of him.

Kenobi’s hand finds one of his claws and when his fingers wrap around his own, it holds.

He holds back.

He holds back stronger as the Jedi’s grip weakens, with more corridors and more of the bugs and the darkness. 

He’d fought with a group of Gywneaskori once, the sieges of a ringed world with the bluest skies he’d ever seen overlooking a surface riddled and broken by sentient slime like a dramatic juxtaposition that something so beautiful could ever exist right next to something so ugly; and they had legends they spoke of eagerly, that they joked about with even more vigor. They had one of a man who failed to save his lover; for when the cruel mayfly G-d of Life— reaching out its chelicerae, its head a fever-bright halo— told him to not look back to the whispers of soft and gentle Death, he did. It took them both. The G-d of Life did not mourn. The G-d of Life moved on, and those Gywneaskori cheered and said, That’s why we never look back in battle.  

The soft and gentle Death here grew ferns, fed bugs and created art from the starved chipping away of stone with the age of a billion years, and he doesn’t look back either.

“Grievous?” 

He says it so softly. Still keeping his unsaid promise to speak.

Grievous turns his head to him, humming in acknowledgement; it turns to static instead of the soft noise his living mind of flesh expected to make. It burns in his lungs and he stops to cough; the man in his grip hisses with pain as Grievous loses control of his strength amidst the fit.

“I...apologize.”

“Not your fault,” Kenobi whispers back, rougher, and almost displeased by something; but his brow smoothes soon enough.

They just look at each other for a moment, wordlessly, searching each other’s faces.

Then Kenobi wets his lips and asks, “Did your people have songs?”

“What?”

“In kaleesh. Idle songs. Stories. Ballads, whatever.” He swallows, closes his eyes for a brief moment. “My people...we sang more than we spoke, and these caves are so loud, and I just want...sing to me, Grievous. Something of yours.”

It takes a second for the revelation— his little bird asking him to sing— to absorb, for him to find the words.

“I don’t think I am,” able, he intends to say, but he’s never tried, has he. Never had the reason to. Until this request that tells him he ought to stop getting surprised by the man in his grasp and just expect the strangeness outright and given. “I don’t know if I can,” he rephrases it.

“Try.” Simply, softly. 

“Very well,” he says after a pause. The caves are quiet to him; eerily so, like a moment of solace between two hells separated only by a timeline, like the calm that surrounds the storm both before and after. 

Kalee had song. Idle noise of joy, the marching cadence of a battlecry; he hadn’t even thought of how much he’d missed it until the man asked and peeled another layer of the past to fester raw in his mind with so much kindness.

It is a relief to find that he remembers the words. Much greater relief than he expected, much greater than a few random texts of no other use than singing should deserve but it’s his, it’s his and kaleesh, a further, living, tangible proof that they hadn’t taken everything, that his mind was truly his own if the Supreme Commander of the Separatist Army had space in his mind for lullabies.

He chooses one that’s slow, one that doesn’t change pitches too much and comes into his mind whole.

It’s a campfire song, one of those written in kaleesh where a Basic translation always sounded horrible and clunky. One that would suit the pitch and sound of an ajreh and a sharava; a well-liked song between the young of them.

“In the woods a chajra bloom,

Shines above those thorns of doom,

Of the flesh-eater plant that starves,

Long-depleted are its reserves.”

His voice crackles and echoes strangely. Machine voiceboxes were not meant for singing; but the Jedi doesn’t shy away. Rather, he relaxes, focuses. 

He won’t understand the kaleesh; Grievous wonders what he’ll find in it.

“A small bird lands there, crashes, breaks—

One of its wings and it shakes,

Now within the hungry grasp,

Of the beast that has caught food at last.”

He falters, realizing.

Realizing what the song is about, and wants to laugh, as, well...just well.

At the man’s glance— his little bird, he’d named him first with mockery, and oh, where did that go— he goes on. 

“The bloom, it senses so much fear,

From the little bird so dear,

So it cranes its neck and lo,

Comes its voice so sweet and slow.

‘Hush, little bird, don’t you cry,

It won’t be for nothing once you die,

From your feather I’ll make my leaf,

By your meat I’ll sate my grief.

On your flesh the bugs will feast,

On scraps left-over by the beast,

Your bones the snow will cover well,

So none could tell where you fell.’ ”

It’s slow enough for his steps to synchronize to its beat; fast enough not to hinder him. His attention starts to split; voice faltering whenever he has to remember which direction to choose, the words falling away, but it picks up regardless as he goes on with confidence, with repetition where he doesn’t have to think of the words, where he just knows them.

“Its leaves then move, the snare draws closed,

The plant finds itself unopposed,

For the bird’s voice comes so sweet;

Weak and silky, with pain meek.

‘I have seen such awful things,

As the wind held tight my wings,

I have seen much lies and wrong,

As the wild held tight my song.

I have seen much ends so bleak,

As the wind held tight my beak,

I have seen death with no cause,

As the wind held tight my claws.

I have heard such shriek and wail,

As the wind held tight my tail,

I’ve cried, I've lied, I’ve tried, I’ve died,

As the wind held tight my hide,

I have seen too much, no more;

Please eat my flesh, my hollow core,

Settle me into your depths,

Where the wind won’t reach my legs.

Settle my bones into your hold,

Where no more will I be cold,

Settle my mind and love it well,

I give you all; my soul, my shell.’”

The damn caves start to hum. Low at first; like they think he won’t notice. Like they think he won’t hear it over Kenobi trying to hum along too, testing the rhythm without the words in a scratchy barely-there rustle of a voice that makes Grievous feel a bit better about his own.

“The flower holds him, loosely still,

Not yet aiming for the kill,

The bird’s warm blood colors the thorns,

Red, the hue of that which warms.

The flower holds him, gentle still,

Not yet aiming for the kill,

With love it tightens its embrace,

The thorns sink deep up to their base.

The little bird, the bird so small,

Without struggle takes the fall,

The lonely bird, the bird so frail,

Lets all their tips pierce its shell.

Its beak opens then one last time,

A eulogy to sweetly chime,

A eulogy on its behalf,

The words of his own epitaph.”

Kenobi’s humming vanishes to uneven breathing. 

The caves quieten. Awaiting the end.

“The flower holds him, lets him sing,

The words that peace to its stems bring,

The flower holds him, gentle, loving,

The blood on soil so freely flowing.

The flower holds him, painted red,

The little bird it holds is dead.”

He stops. The echo dissipates into whisper, splinters into a wordness rustle, dissolves completely in the dark.

The silence crashes onto him anew.

He focuses on the sound of his steps— the splashes of water, the breaking of rock, the scratches his claws produced and left. The buzzing, tap-tapping of bugs that still haven’t left them.

The man’s breathing shifts, then: “How is it—“ a cough, “called?”

When Grievous doesn't answer immediately, he quietly adds: “I liked it.”

“It’s... Aj terenni pasar ekrrah. The Epitaph written in the thorns.”

Silence, but for a hum of acknowledgement, maybe interest, and a cut-off rapid buzzing noise of a bug getting itself stuck somewhere in the general’s clothes.

The man breathes out a quiet “ Beasts, why—“ and the buzzing vanishes off into the distance before Grievous has a chance to see; then the man refocuses. “What is it...about. If I may ask, of course.”

They’re well-beyond pleasantries by this point, Grievous thinks but doesn’t say. 

“A bird— a little bird— that falls within a carnivorous plant and dies.” 

He stares at the ground, trying to recall what she said about it— it hadn’t been her favorite, she liked the fast ones more, but she’d said this one had poetry, such wonderful irony, that— “The flower tries to comfort the bird that his death isn’t wasted, and the bird begs for it after a life of misery, and the...the point is that neither can understand each other. The flower thinks that the bird is in terror, and the bird believes that the flower is unfeeling.” he explains. “Even in company, the bird dies alone.”

The general sighs. “Oh.” He lets out, high-pitched.

“I suppose I should’ve expected that— that it’d be similar. The stories. Those.”

Grievous makes a noise of question that the vocoder betrays him on once more. It is still understood.

“We had— one with a magpie, and a rose, and there was—“ he holds his breath, trying to remember. “I can’t— I can’t recall.”

His exhale that follows sounds like a defeat.

“I just remember I used to...it’s so— so silly to think of it,” he chuckles with nothing more than a quickening of his breath, unheard ends, “as a child, that when the war raged outside I thought that I was the magpie, trapped within the thorns. I wished to break them— I wanted to fly away, like it, like it did in our version,” a pause, “if you can call it that.”

Only a few miles to go. Only a few. 

“In that story, the magpie breaks away as the rose tempts it to give in.”

Inhale, exhale.

“In yours, the bird dies.” 

He hums once he finishes, thoughtful. Grievous plays with the details he was given and tries to remember when was the last time the war hit Stewjon; how could’ve something from Wild Space— a whole language, no less— find its way into the world that he knows (because, unlike what Dooku thinks, he researches his enemies properly) prides itself on peace.

Half-truths and revelations and where does it end.

“Kenobi?” He intends to ask, and only makes it a name in before the: “Grievous?” the general tries to offer in response snaps and dies into quiet.

The gasp that comes next is much too loud, the nothing, nothing, a breath in, and— “I’m afraid,” more strained than ever, quieter, “my time is...well.”

The twin-exhale weak facsimile of a chuckle. “Game over.”

The caves turn colder; or maybe that’s just him.

Not now.

“What do you—“

“I can—“ gasp, “feel it.”

Quiet, shaking. “‘s slipping.”

Miles to go. Miles to go.

It seemed to be going so well and only just now—?

“Grievous,” a whisper of the wind, a chatter of the caves, would beat him in the amount of decibels. If Grievous wasn’t between one step and the next, he’d have missed him.

“Stop.”

He does.

“Listen.” 

Again.

This time, he doesn’t resist the hand the pulls him close, only having to shift for it to be feasible, comfortable; the touch is a fleeting thing like the brush of a wing and it’s more Grievous that’s guiding it based on a guess than Kenobi himself, but even then the moment that their foreheads meet— a strand of Kenobi’s hair brushing against the sensitive skin near his eye— he jolts imperceivably to all but himself.

“An epitaph, you said?” The Jedi tells him with his eyes closed and a smile that’s only there as a ghost, “let me have mine.”

“You will not— “

“Grievous.”

His eyes peer into his own, dark and cold and blue. “Let me.”

There is no choice, is there.

At his silence, he takes a breath, and Grievous learns the reason for their closeness as his voice crackles and breaks in a way that would have him miss half the words were they just a few inches farther apart. He commits them to memory— he sears them, next to the place the End will inevitably occupy one way or another, next to Kalee, to her.

He also knows poetry when he hears it.

“Akniz ta’ral ta’herrah v avatu lasjave lo iba cal’takyrna,” the words scrape their way out, like it hurts and like it’s a relief, another one, again , and then keep going. “Akte deveb a amal zep...giriil mal; giriil mal,” he takes a pause, eyes shutting closed.

“Amal oyacien val akaas.”

Grievous nods against the man’s brow; a mark of trust, of a message received and marked and saved, and says, stupidly: “It doesn’t even rhyme.”

Kenobi only smiles. “That...was the point.”

He passes out (not away, not yet) without giving a translation; for which Grievous, in his folly, forgets to ask.

—

Miles to go. Miles to go.

The maw sits before him, behind him, and with a crooning, wandering voice it asks: Where are you going? Where will you go? and he lets the softness of it waver out in the length of the halls. 

It doesn’t sound angry; not hungry, either, not exactly, but something like the reverence with which one may watch a bug skuttle into unexpected places like it knows a destination the sentient mind cannot understand as well as the straightforward and simplified neuron pathways of an insect. A surprised curiosity; almost concern.

Echo of a dream, beast of grief. 

The walls glint cyan and white, colorful ripples of geologic layers bleeding into one another like only an endless span of years can cause, and their smoothness looks like the skin of a great glass-shore shark. The melting calcium will smooth even that over once whole planets die and galaxies burn out and the End remains as ever.

Do you think there is a place in the world for you?

He walks through a creek once, the water steel-cold and slow as if it knew there is nowhere to hurry for it even if there is for him; and it’d been full of fish which didn’t flinch at his claws sinking into the rock and the splashing of water. It’d reached up to his waist at the deepest part and the weak yet clinging flow he’d felt was the only reason he wouldn’t call it a lake if asked, and in the sparks of light the waves reflected he could see the ones that jumped off of a fish's eye instead. 

Their bodies kept bumping into his legs, their jaws and little teeth pinching and scratching at the metal before they figured out he wasn’t made of anything edible, and then swam away and the next ones tried a few meters over, and in the whole of it he kept seeing their eyes (empty, white, sight-less eyes) glint in his light like coins of gold taunting him to join them in the dark. 

He’d done it, then; turned off the lightsaber for just a few minutes and closed his eyes, knowing exactly how many steps he’d have to take and how fruitless the light was anyway given he couldn’t see below the surface of the water; and it felt freeing. Suffocating yet freeing at once, to wade through the water in a world that had no light in it, nothing to interrupt it, like those fish and bugs must know and see it; but the pressure of its awareness, of its gruesomely intimate closeness grew until he cave in again and turned to the light once more, unafraid to admit he’d been panting in fear.

Fear of the dark developed for a reason, afterall; he couldn’t have complete darkness without his eyes shut, unlike humans which became unable of perception embarrassingly easily, and yet in this they were equal.

He thought of the fish too. Of the little splashes they made when he waded through the water more silently than not; what they were doing, where were they going, why.

Thought of how all of the creatures they’ve met and seen have been those that outlive extinctions, thrive in oblivion, survive war and corruption and annihilation even if nothing else does. Ferns, grass, fungi, moss. Bugs, worms, and now, fish. 

They, like the End, will outlive them, uncaring of their machinations and armies and power. They live forever, where their Empires fall every day the universe lives so they can rise again the day after from the same ashes with a different spin, and they pay them no mind.

Is there a world fit for you?

Promises to keep and miles to go.

The maw of the caves breathes slowly, cold and humid, wafting and curling around the panels of his face and as he nears the end of the list his heart begins to beat louder, thundering in his chest with every direction he crosses out, with every corridor he passes that seems both unique and ever-repeating. There is no sense of progression other than the countdown in his own head; time has stopped, time is ended now, and it is neither solace nor a danger but a fact. He wonders how long they’ve been gone; whether seconds, weeks or years, if any time at all. 

Is there a you to live?

The death of his companion seems both immediate and a distant future, and the world could’ve gone and ended since they were gone and he can’t honestly bring himself to care. Cold and decay swarm the halls.

Halls. Corridors; precise crossroads, four or three maws at a time. Oddly precise angles. Ravines that felt more like alleys or unwelcome tears, cracks in the walls.

This place is too precise to be just caves.

Who are you?

He nears the end; however contradictory it is in his current state of being; no longer miles to go to reach but rather, miles to go in a different sense; time is ended now but won’t be forever, and the blue-black caves stretch on, the lightsaber humming over the maw itself as it whispers again. Where are you going? Where will you go?

The End, he thinks. I am going to the end.

The maw goes silent; his senses cry in warning at the tension that quivers the walls of the End’s house, of its labyrinth.

Echo of a shriek, beast of hunger.

It ricochets with a deep hum that reverberates in his machinery, falsely registering as touch by the pressure it generates.

Do you think there is space in the world for you?

The song that endlessly repeats can only progress three ways; to quicken, to heighten or to layer, and he thinks the caves embody all three.

He has promises to keep. Five more turns to go.

—

Five; a corridor he takes on a left turn, and it slopes upwards like a ramp, interrupted by little hills and cracks formed from the calcium-rich water drip-dripping and wandering its ceiling in the shape of lightning frozen in time yet constantly in motion. A showcase of the path of the least-resistance that all that is sane and rational takes, and that which has no mind is perhaps the most sane of them all.

He turns right. Kenobi’s breathing shifts into an unsteady gasp in his unconsciousness but stabilizes soon after. Still alive. 

Four makes for a straight, long hall that drags on for much too long. A couple of mushrooms grow in clusters closer to its end, white and tall and thin-necked, climbing to some unfixed point in a lightless space. The shape of the corridor is an almost exact hexagon, like the separatist wildflower; they chose it after the Kiriyehan flower of the salt-wastes, a small durable bloom of blue-gray that withstood heat and misery and still bloomed in its small sign of beauty at the sun which destroyed it as much as it brought it life. Its blooming, its survival, it all was a rebellion. 

It has six white-gray leaves arranged carefully exact, a dark blue center, bleeding into light blue edges. Grievous had seen it once, on the siege of Kiriyeha when a Republic force had broken through the blockade and the sky to seize the planet for it’s position along the Nimm-Terrah run. His troops, their troops, trampled the blooms, ground them into the golden-white sand, uncaring at the time. 

Some of his droids in the downtime that they were provided by the strategic folly of the now-dead Jedi kneeled into the sand and observed the flowers up close with an almost child-like clumsy gentleness. He’d reprimanded them for it. 

They said they just wanted to touch them, was all.

Three announces itself and starts with a fissure cracking it in an uneven fracture from one side to the other, opening it like the surface of an egg to reveal a ravine underneath, cutting through other hallways and other corridors that all look the same yet differently positioned like peeking through the structure of an uneven layered labyrinth. Crossroads and straight lines and the fissure breaks through it all like lightning, and it will grow and grow until it will fill and be mended by time that both heals and wreaks destruction in one breath, only to be cracked and killed with another of its kind somewhen in the future.

It’s not wide enough to force him to jump, but neither narrow enough for stepping over it to be worry-less, and he does so carefully, each of his claws clicking individually on the other side like the safety of a squad’s slugthrowers pulled off. 

His heart beats faster as he rounds the corner once more, and two, he should see light, but he doesn’t.

Darkness as always, darkness that greets him and other corridors that tempt him to stray off the way and they all look the same yet unique and he’s tired of how much it scares him. 

The maw speaks still, but quieter, more far away, under his feet rather than over him, like the rock itself croons and whispers.

Two is wide and dry, the rock shaped almost like a throat with the erosion that chaped off the weakest ores first. He briefly wonders what mineral the End even makes itself of beyond the calcium of its army of stalactites and stalagmites. How old the rock is, whether asking is even worth it, whether knowing is possible. He doesn’t see light. He doesn’t see light.

One slides downwards into an uneven mouth-like hole in the ground with pillars of stone for its teeth.

The sky. 

The sky is full of stars.

So many of them. He laughs like a madman as he cranes his neck up to see them all.

Of course they’d resurface at night. Of course the caves would spit them out to see another void, another darkness of a different sort. 

He laughs and it draws tears. Of what, he can’t quite tell.

The sky is full of stars, and they shine so brightly.

He doesn’t even know the name of this planet. Untouched, uncolonized, oxygen produced by some unfathomable coincidence even if it had no oceans or life to speak of that showed on the scans, effectively worthless. Untouched by the dirtiness, clinginess of sentient life; marked by war, but its skies are clear like nowhere else he’d ever been, like nothing he’d seen outside of the cockpit of a spaceship and he wonders, just briefly, how the End can claim to be so much when really it’s so little, so tiny, a planet to that endless dark watercolor pock-marked with a billion stars arranged with the loving entropy of no greater power than chaos for its own sake.

The sky is full of stars and he kneels on the dry rocky ground and lets himself be taken by it.

Just for a second. 

Just for a little while.

He cannot read them, but he thinks if he could, he’d see Kalee hidden somewhere in their midst. Kalee’s star; Aeleen, one-who-wakes, one-who-creates-life.

He can’t tell it apart from the billions of other identical-yet-not stars, and so he only imagines as he stares tear-eyed at the sheer expanse stretching above him.

It feels like hours before he peels his eyes away, blinks, turns to the general’s form and his closed eyes, unaware that they’re out, that it’s ended, that the maw isn’t there to breathe inquiries into their ears anymore or sing songs with no endings. It has ended and they are free, but the man he holds in his claws doesn’t know it and thus remains trapped, and Grievous can’t free him. 

He wishes he could. To show him the stars, for a start.

He shakes his head, runs his fingers over his face with a faint scraping sound of steel-on-steel. Inhales and lets it out with a weak cough. His eyes slide to the sky again anyway, to the twirls and turns of the orange-green-golden Wyrm nebula that hosts a number Wild Space smuggler routes he himself took more than once and a pocket of irradiated wild worlds with life that defied all rules of logic and was better left alone. On Kalee, they saw the Wyrm from a different angle, one that smushed its imaginary tail and head together in a front-side view, compressed like a harmonica. It was jagged and bright and towering, but not sprawled over the sky east to west like it is here. They called it Hiri ya zen, the kaleesh word for aurora— the northern lights— lanterns-of-G-ds. 

Eyes still sliding over its length, to the other he can’t identify and to the edge of the galaxies’ reaching arm, he digs out his comms and finds them working. The little piece of technology hums in his hands, announcing its existence and signal connection with a weak beep he normally missed but which now rudely interrupts his serenity, and he almost presses it before he catches the thought that has snuck into his mind while his rational side slumbered in sight of the stars.

He can’t take the Jedi with him. He shouldn’t, and he can’t, and not only because he doesn't have the medical supplies he so urgently requires on his backup fleet as, well, droids, but he can’t do it to him. No matter how hidden he’d be, Dooku would learn eventually and then Grievous would’ve done better to just kill the man while he could as he knew what fate the Sith had ready for him and knew all too well how losing oneself could be worse than death in more ways than one. 

But he can’t, and won’t, imprison him. Can’t cage his little bird just because he doesn’t want to let him go until all his debts are paid and all the knowledge between them spent and shared.

He has to let him go. He has to see, to trust him, has to let him return to him of his own will.

And besides, he has to worry about Skywalker again. He doesn’t want to worry about Skywalker.

He puts his own comms aside and locates the Jedi’s own, and pauses, looking at the man, thinking and finding himself empty of words to say.

He knows how it’ll look, him kneeling with the man helpless, injured and unconscious in his firm grasp, but he doesn’t have it in himself to lay him down fully. He at least lowers the man’s legs so he’d be lying stretched; his legs on the ground and his torso in Grievous’ lap, head resting against one of his metallic thighs; in a way that he hopes is more comfortable, as metal and rock can be.

The idea, the possibility, of this being the moment where he’d kill him feels laughable where it doesn’t ache with heresy. To do so under something so beautiful and after something as changing as the End that chewed them up and whose jaws they had crawled out of afterwards.

In some sense, he feels reborn. The Grievous who fell down is not the same; he wouldn’t have collapsed under the weight of the sky’s vastness, wouldn’t’ve searched for Kalee in its void.

He would’ve just gone and killed and left, and that would be it. Such a meaningless way to live.

He forces himself to think of a sentence, or two, as his claws brush the softly beeping comm not at all that different from his own but carrying a different history in the grooves and marks and scratches on its surface. This isn’t about him.

When he presses at it, it goes staticy and wavy with an unrequited request and in the privacy of his own thoughts he begs Someone better be awake because it wouldn’t do for Kenobi to be done in by his own people catching an ill-timed nap.

It goes through. The sound of the entire process fascinates him after the sensory deprivation and yet overload that the caves had been. 

It blips and whirrs and with the latter the emitter at the top sparks into life and spits out a blue buffering hologram of none other than Jedi General Mace Windu. A pleasant surprise; Grievous has had the pleasure of fighting him only once before.

The Jedi definitely doesn’t share his sentiment, even if he doesn’t jump, yell nor flinch; but Grievous has gotten quite well acquainted with the variety of emotional expression and so even with the doubtless many shields the Jedi pulls up, and even if he can’t taste it in the air, he immediately recognizes his shock for what it is. 

The part of him that relishes it doesn’t rule him anymore, though. He has a mission vastly more important. This isn’t about him.

He looks at his charge, at his little bird. He knows that the Jedi currently staring at him in anticipation can see the whole display; his eyes widened, unsure, angry. 

“Your dear General Kenobi appears to be gravely...incapacitated,” he says, in a tone of voice he hopes is cold and firm and serious and yet taunting. “I would suggest you hurry.” The call is long enough for them to track it, now, if they even needed to.

The Jedi doesn’t say anything, and not because Grievous doesn’t give him a chance; several seconds drag on before he finally shuts the comm off. It flickers out into pillars and then sparks of blue and vanishes like a ghost. 

He lays it down on the cold, dark rock like an offering.

He doesn’t call his own troops until hours and hours later, watching the night sky turn into gray and red and gold from the east, the red giant this planet orbits a moon on the horizon brighter than most.

The colors of sunrise bleed into the sky, stealing the stars away, hiding them behind the sheen of gray and azure that comes with oxygen, and under them, he mourns, for the Jedi cannot see it.

She loved sunrises. She never said so, but he knew, because she would come out of camp early every morning she could just to see the bright rays of Aeleen reflect off the bone-white lichen or fight through the layers of leaves and stems of the jungle, searing them thick-skinned and leaning. She’d polish her swords absentmindedly, cleaning them of blood with her eyes watching the same color stretch behind the mountain ridges or the dark blue of the sea in contrast. She said she just liked getting up earlier, that they were made to wake with sunrise and sleep when the sun vanishes below, that stars were a secret for those who wander and those who yearn. The temptation of seeing other worlds, of sailing through the stars, eluded her. We already have a star, she said with humor when Rajyn tried to explain to her the thrill of seeing new worlds. We don’t need another.

She never once left Kalee in her life. Died by what she believed; knowing only one world, only one star, and Grievous went on to see hundreds and love none of them. He can’t count the many different worlds he’d set foot on as a kaleesh warlord and neither as a separatist general; it’s been too many, and that wonder wore off long before he could feel it with her body sinking into the sea under the starry sky of sunset.

The sun was already mourning her when he found out.

Have you thought...what you’ll do, once, he had once stammered, eyes at her mask, half in shadow and half glowing with the gold of Aeleen’s east, once this is over?  

Her eyes narrowed in mirth, her weapon white and brown and that rag and stones she used to clean and sharpen it blue and black in comparison. She fiddled with them as she spoke, not looking at him; at the weapon in her lap first— the this, the this that would end, when they wouldn’t need to carry weapons— and then into the glory of the sunrise.

Maybe I’ll be a photographer, she laughed as she found it funny, that she could ever be anything but a warrior. What about you?

She was always good at that, at turning difficult questions at the one who asked, at asking them in such a way that simply required an honest answer as anything else would’ve felt like a betrayal more than a lie.

I don’t know, he said. He’d asked because he kept thinking about it, turning a knife in his claws the day before and watching the candlelight dance across its surface. Because she was always so sure in life, in herself, in what she wanted; where he wandered; sure of war but not of himself, of what he could— should— be once the battle was over. He had no doubts that Kalee would be freed and that he would die to make that true, but if he lived, he did not know how to free himself. I thought you would have an answer that could...enlighten me.

The depth of her eyes shone like the deep rich brown of moonshine, copper unmarked by the reality of time and rain and oxygen. Her mask had only one sigil; always only one, and it was of the sun. A large ring that crossed both her eyes, the ray-lines of it stretching upwards, done in red; I worship Aeleen and I carry it within me, it said, to face me is to face its wrath. 

His own had many, once upon a time. Many, because he liked their meanings and liked to collect them; like he did weapons even if he mainly ever used only one, like he collected packs of cards with which they could play palalisha. He’d had the birds for freedom, the writhing form of the sirzen for one who was sly and wise, the claws for justice, the teeth for ferocity, the wheat and the hands which gave it for dedication and compassion through action. He’d earned each of them.

After she died, he scraped each and every one off the surface of his mask— a lengthy, agonizing process that felt like reducing all he was into nothing but small scraps of colored bone in the grass— and replaced them with twin dark lines of grief.

That day is in the future, she’d said, and she’d been so sure of it. You have enough time to figure it out. We all do.  

With a sigh, she watched the sun rise. The sky was clear. 

He closed his eyes, allowed it to warm him; he doesn’t feel it now, that red giant here in the present, as too much of him is steel and too little is flesh, but it soothes a kind of primal ache knitted inside him, smoothing it out into layers of unprocessed emotions that he can finally breathe through, even if uneasily. She’s dead, and Kalee is free, and he is neither. He is Grievous; but not because he brings tragedy, but because he lived it. He is Grievous for he is grieving, and so, he grieves.

In the quiet of it; of the soft wind and the hand of his little bird held in his own, he reaches out with his foresight like he hadn’t done in so long it feels like a century. Like the rest of Kalee, an entirely separate life that only belongs to him by the thin strands that he reaches through, but is still there, strong and waiting.

He reaches out and sees light at first, so much of it, the thundering noise of cannons and the shrieks of ships breaking apart, images too fleeting for him to grasp anything clear like his foresight is trying to compensate for the many years it’s been silenced; but they slow down eventually, slow into a weary descent, like a trained animal waiting for orders, waiting for him to ask. 

What will become of me?  

The cave’s questions that he didn’t care to ponder about at the time push at the edges of his mind and memory; and he rephrases, Where will we go?

Rain-washed steel, dark grey sky and debris filled with shaking bodies of droids like the grubs of an insect crashing into a raging sea; a planet of plants purple and clinging, where the vines snatch at any passing feet with a mindless yearning for touch, a sky so red and thick it looks, always, unfailingly, like it’s bleeding. The wrath of a green caged G-d shrieks over the prairies aching to learn the word for light and nothing shrieks back.

The word for storm carries over a mechanized world as an old and weary collection of souls rises from within. Its many hands stretch out through the hallways to wave, its heads grinning, grinning, grinning though no one but the sun returns it as the once whose many hands it has are long gone; in another, a six-legged crowned wolf stands on a hill and when it howls it shatters the horizon into black-green-gold shards of fragile glass transcending years and years of light and age.

The further he pushes it, the less clear they become, the more they multiply; the future is always in motion and it shows him all of it and it rushes through his mind like water. A cyan and dark ship the shape of a ray and bigger than any ever made before, flying as smoothly as it lays waste to their meaningless conflict and conquers both the weakened sides in finally a war that’s real and carried with purpose, but one that they lose; a fool carrying the name of a red desert bird who awakens the consciousness of the cosmic Force by will and wish alone, and it culls both sides as simply as the wave of a scythe and then smiles and says that this is balance, can’t you see?

He tries to narrow it, reign it like the horse of Kalee, a reptilian beast dangerous from all sides that huffs hot like a volcanic breach with the power it keeps within itself. It doesn’t want to listen as no divine power does, but he grabs it, twists it, narrows the we into the pair of them, and lets it run once more. Where will we go?

Narrow alleys; ships chasing each other through the murky colored haze of a gas giant that their headlights barely breach; the possibility of Kenobi dying here, on the surface of the End, because the Jedi they sent spent too long checking if Grievous’ call was a trap, and another where he lives. He pushes further and with a gunshot it shows him a quiet land where the killing blow echoes and the Jedi’s body hits the sand without anyone but the mistaken hunter to know and no one to care, or another where Grievous himself falls to an accident that thunders with the sound of a wreckage flattening him steel against rock. 

One where they fight and Grievous kills him, followed by the reverse with Kenobi picking up a blaster of all things and setting his remaining insides alight; and the last of the bunch, where vultures with the tips of their wings soaked in magenta fly over the field as they kill one another, both of them landing lethal blows, and collapse side by side onto the wet ground and red-tipped ferns that glow in the night. In that one, they talk like old friends for that is all that remains for them; they share their secrets and regrets and dissolving dreams as the birds shriek overhead like they did before and will after even if they will not be there to hear it. Their last words are to one another and only one another, colored with a certain kind of grief at their nonexistent legacy, but relief as well, for they had been said; once their troops find them, it is morning, and it is too late, and the birds with their beaks coated red shriek, spooked by the intruders, and fly away.

More of it, but indistinct, vague and fleeting; them dying in this war— apart or together, at their own weapons or someone else’s— of the war ending with more of it or ending with a peace borne out of suffering and there is no place left for them, no place in the world they could occupy, and so it purges them out violently and with disgust. So much of the future proves to be painful, to be blood-tinged and bright and darkened with so much smoke that he chokes with it, forced into miasmic order or destructive entropy or a combination of these two as its unholy spawn; but there is more. More for him to see, for the world to offer, as the End showed him a different way and expanded the possibilities.

Many of those path stalks that wolf, a crowned beast of four blazing eyes whose howl is a broken chime, and in one future he’s told of its death while in another it towers over him and at his side as it pulls ships clean out of the sky with the mercilessness of gravity and yells life into their being. 

A future in which, by some curse or luck, him and Kenobi are no longer enemies.

Unaligned bases, a third flag, a fourth, a slugthrower whose ring of reloading clicks different than his own and whose range is worthy only of one who knows, truly, how to hit a mark without fault. 

A figure that waits for him in a gray world where the trees lean towards the ground in grief; the Wyrm Nebula, there, in that darkened sky only a few shades lighter than the gloom of Umbara, faces the other way than it does on Kalee— the head of the Wyrm staring into that Void instead of at them, like it beckons them to follow— and shines just as bright.

It overlays the one he sees when he opens his eyes, and in that state of half-awake and half-dreaming he can see the End, the future of the End, where at sunrise a ship bigger than the Malevolence stretches in its sky and blocks out the stars with its reinforced hull of brutalist geometry, and it is not one made for battle. Someone may return here, one day. 

Someone will.  

Its gold-smeared shadow vanishes, the future fading away like wisps of smoke and his eyes clear to face the red-hot sun climbing further as the dream still races through his mind. They will come soon, he hopes. He has to get ready; he has to leave.

He stands, losing that warmth, laying the general gently on the cold ground that the sun warms up only slowly. 

Abandons the dream, coming awake under the morning sun.

Blinking slowly, he taps his comm and watches it sizzle awake, glitching in pillars of red, but the connection unhindered, and orders the droid on the other side to send him a ship before they even finish proclaiming their surprise. Walks away, shutting off the lightsaber, its blue hum vanishing into silence in his claws; he stares at it for a few seconds, before he decides to keep it; like a trophy or a challenge, he thinks, between enemies. To give him a motivation to come back, maybe, to get it back by trick or pry it off his corpse or for Grievous to become worthy of it, because that is what they are, he thinks with a sigh, no matter what the future is capable of; enemies.

He is no Dreamer anymore, afterall.