Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

“Alas, that these evil days should be mine. The young perish and the old linger. That I should see the last days of my house… No parent should have to bury their child.” –JRR Tolkien, The Two Towers

Their hair was long before.

The younglings liked to braid it, or try to, at least. Nashad often spent long stretches of time in the evenings running a comb through the tangles. Not for themself, they didn’t care about the knots and tangles much. But so that it was smooth again for the younglings to braid the next day.

One youngling, Caoimhe, used to run her fingers through Nashad’s hair to drag it all to the front so that it draped in front of their face like a curtain. And every time it would pull giggles from her. She had been Nashad’s youngest.

At the Council meetings where they would report who was ready to be an initiate—to be a padawan—Nashad wore their hair tightly braided and tied up under a scarf.

As their hair grew longer, the padawans grew younger. And more and more were lost to the war.

But at least those who had left to fight and die hadn’t been there at the Temple when the End came.

I raised younglings for nineteen years. From the time they first came to the Temple—some as young as only babies, some nearly teens—through the stages of becoming initiates. And I let them each go when they were chosen as a padawan in their early teens.

I showed them love and compassion and was always there for each and every one of them. Children need love, they need support. They need a steady presence in their life. They need to know that someone is there for them who they can go to, who they can trust, who will listen, who will offer a hug, who will offer their bed after a nightmare, who will help them with their studies when it doesn’t click. And for nineteen years, that person was me. There were others, of course. There were too many younglings for me to raise on my own. But I got to see nearly a fifth of all Jedi for that nineteen year period grow up from younglings to initiates to padawans. And from afar I got to see them bloom into Jedi Knights.

I loved being a crèche-master, I loved watching each child grow into their own person, I loved helping them along where I could, I loved supporting the next generations of Jedi.

I would have continued to be a crèche-master for many years to come, the rest of my days, I’m sure. But…

A rare few days off. Yet even halfway across the huge capital of Coruscant, Nashad felt the Temple shake under them as if they were there. They were moving before they even noticed. Running across the city-planet like death was behind them, instead of before them.

There were only cooling embers and silence when they arrived.

Nashad knelt in the room their younglings had been in. Training in. Training for a war that they weren’t supposed to see for at least another few years. They knelt in blood. Their knees hitting the floor between the bodies. Nashad’s eyes were wide and unseeing. The Force was deadly quiet. There was no answering ripple in its current. All five of Nashad’s current younglings were in this room, but not a single thread of Force answered theirs. It was empty of life. Empty. With nothing but the vacuum of death.

Nashad’s younglings… Theirs. It hadn’t yet been time for Nashad to let them go. So many Force bonds severed at once leaving silence echoing in their ears. Before their time.

They couldn’t feel one.

They reached within themself, within the Force, there on the floor of the training room.

They reached for their Master; even if they hadn’t seen her in years, they needed her now. That strength, that stability, that calm. They reached forward, searching for that warmth, looking for the unbreakable thread between master and padawan.

It… it was severed. They had been so deafened by the screaming of the Force around them, of their fear for their younglings, that they hadn’t felt it break. They hadn’t felt her die.

They screwed their eyes tighter shut against tears and searched further in the Force. Surrounded by their now-younglings, they searched desperately for their before-younglings.

The thread of Force connecting master and padawan might be the strongest, but other bonds existed too. Force bonds might fade with time and distance, but they never really went away, and if one tried hard enough, you could still feel them, like a candle flame in front of your face with your eyes closed.

They reached forward again, stretching further, searching for that warmth, any warmth, and they found more strings of younglings dangling, severed. A spear stabbed through their sternum at each new one they found. They gathered the severed threads to themself in the Force, feeling tears fall from their closed eyes running down their cheeks to their chin. And still Nashad searched. And still they found more threads severed, more lights snuffed out. They’d nearly given up until—

There!

A thread still intact. Relief and hope shot through them like agony. Their first and oldest youngling. Lasa. She was a Jedi Knight now, no longer a padawan or a youngling. There she was. Alive. Her light in the Force still connected to Nashad’s by a thin thread. She was still alive, alive, alive, she was—

A gasp tore out of Nashad as the thread snapped in their hands and darkness crashed over Lasa’s light like a storm’s wave. They fell forward, their head and hands hitting the floor as they wailed.

Gone. Gone. Gone. They were all gone. Every single one of their younglings. Every Jedi, padawan, and youngling they had ever been bonded to. All of their lights snuffed out in one day.

They screamed in pain and horror, their hair pooling around them in the ash and the blood, their heart ripped from their chest still beating.

I cried as I carried each of their tiny bodies, one by one, out into the younglings’ favourite spot in the garden. My stomach churned as I lay them out. I burned my hands on the funeral pyre and the ground cracked around me. Why had they been slaughtered and then left forgotten? Left how they had died? A tree cracked straight through when I saw that it was a lightsaber that had done this.

I raged against anyone I could find, my lightsaber cutting through troopers that had once been protectors, droids that had no place in this temple of peace and serenity and life. I found none with a lightsaber. Not a Sith, not a Jedi. Just remnants of a battle finished before I had arrived, the fighting ripped elsewhere, if there even was still anyone left to fight.

When I was the only moving thing left in the Jedi Temple, I screamed against the empty air. I punched the archway into the younglings’ wing, bloodying my fists. But at least I was doing something. When the cold marble didn’t so much as crack, I swung my saber at it. I hadn’t been here, I hadn’t been here, everyone was dead and I was alive and I couldn’t do anything. The hilt split on the corner of the archway and the crystal inside cracked.

Outside the oppressive silence of the empty temple, broken only by the crackle of a funeral pyre, there was turmoil and disarray. ‘The Jedi are dead’, people screamed. ‘They betrayed the Republic,’ they cried. I wasn’t supposed to blame the people on the street, but anger sparked anyways. They hadn’t seen what I had inside the Temple. What crime could warrant the slaughter of children?

I shaved my head.