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He does not feel the rain, of course. The clouds above him loom black, he hears the torrent of drops splatter on his helmet, the biosign monitors in the corners of his vision indicate some egregious amount of moisture in contact with the outside of the suit, but he cannot feel the rainstorm any more than a blind crawling cave-thing can feel sunlight. The city is dark, unusually so for a city even in the dead of night. This troubles him not; he touches a darkness somehow greater than mere lack of light, and it shows him the way.

He must concede, his quarry is skillful if she has evaded him for this long. Her shields are not perfect, but they are more than competent, especially for one who never completed her training. Every so often over the past sixteen years he would get a twinge, a niggling feeling at the back of his mind, the subtle awakening of a bond he had long thought broken, lost...but before he could pursue it, the connection would be gone, leaving him wondering if it ever existed. It is a dead man's bond, anyhow. It will actually be a relief to sever it permanently.

She is here, in this city, tonight. That is all he needs to know. He will catch her scent, he will track her pitilessly, he will find her, and when he does...He only hopes she has her sabers with her. It would seem an awful letdown if, after such a long hunt, she were to go quietly.

Slowly he gains on her. She doesn't panic, to her credit, but the tensions heighten nonetheless until the Force is taut like a stretched cord, ready to snap at the slightest provocation. That provocation comes at the turning of an otherwise innocent corner: he barely spots a lekku-tip flick out of sight.

The chase is on in earnest.

She leads him onto rooftops, through puddles and sleepy thoroughfares, around what might be every single blasted building in Corvala, in an effort to make him tire- but here her judgment falls short, for he is not the only one out of shape. He sees her boot-heels at every corner, and her shields falter more than ever as her strength begins to flag. Grudgingly he accepts that this drawn-out sprint is just as fatiguing to him as it is to her...but he is merciless, and she is not. She will be forced to face him soon.

Soon.

He assumes the fact that she continues to run means she would never join him. If she would, she would choose him over the slow death offered her by this futile foxill-hunt. Sad, that. He will try to Turn her, of course, but he shall be genuinely surprised if it works.

The other option is far more probable.

"Anakin."

"That is a dead man's name."

They face each other at last. He has her backed against a wall, a dead-end alleyway, no escape now that she is too tired to leap up the side of a building with any alacrity. Her chest heaves, the only sign that this is anything more than a sparring match, the eternal face-off for purposes of training only. How many times has he gone up against this same crouch, this same Djem So stance? How many times did they exchange taunts, verbal blows, before falling to with physical ones?

Her cocky grin is gone- as is his, he supposes. Now is not then. Things have changed, irreparably. The man with whom she once fought is dead.

The game is a deadly one now. And she has been dealt a losing hand.

Slash, parry, feint, turn, block. Step back, lunge, riposte, double block. Bind.

"So you would kill me." Not a question. The air burns with scalding arcs of radiance: one red, two inexplicably white.

"There is another option, as you well know."

Snort of derision. "An option I will never take." Force-shove. Regain balance, block, block, step in, stab.

"You are talented. What a pity that such talent should be wasted on a dying Light."

Snarl. Sharp teeth bared, an instinctual response. "Not dying. Not on my watch." Renewed attack: block, parry, step back, back again. Let her come.

"Your watch is almost over." Parry, feint, sneaky stab swept aside, flourish, another bind.

Primal hiss. "That doesn't mean it's over yet." Anger seethes beneath her faltering composure, kept viciously in control but close enough to the surface that he senses it easily. He might have misjudged her capacity for Darkness.

Disengage. Wary circles, hard fast agonizing breath. Raindrops scorch off their blades, filling the air with columns of obscuring steam. She is not foolish enough to let her saber-points drop even a centimeter. Nor is he.

"Join me."

"No."

"I sense much hatred in you. Think of what you could do, the people you could save, if only you used it."

"NO."

"Why blind yourself any longer? There is power there, in your hatred. Unlimited power. Join me, and I can teach you to harness that power. You will have a third saber: a blade of the heart."

Breath catches in her throat.

"Join me, and I can teach you...again."

"NO!" She leaps upon him, the fiercest attack yet. All sound dissolves into three discordant howls, all light into white and red, the blazing vergence, the shatterpoint.

"See, you are learning already. Feel it. Use it. Fight."

He doubts she hears him, so fast do the blistering cuts fall. Parry, riposte, feint slash block flourish, turn, cut stab block block slash twist feintstabturnparryslashparrybind-

"Use the dark side, Padawan."

Beware the dark side, Jedi.

Something snaps.

It is done.

In that moment, the moment when she made her choice, it was done. Even before her moon-white blades came up in the vertical salute, even before she got that little ghost of a smile and the blades slid back into their hilts, it was done.

Done. Gone. She is gone.

She is gone, and her Darkness - the sweet new Darkness she so nearly consummated - with her.

He takes the walk back to his ship at a much slower pace.

They will find her body, but not her lightsabers. Those he took; they now hang on his belt alongside his own Sith weapon, awaiting deconstruction and repurposing. What their new purpose will be, he doesn't know. His Master is in charge of such things.

Try as he might, he cannot get the incident out of his head. He has attempted to release any lingering emotion into the Force three times, all without success. The sensations chase each other through his mind in a neverending cycle: the rain, the darkness and the true Dark, the hunt, the fight, the shattered bond.

He had been so close.

And yet he feels certain this is not what bothers him.

No. What bothers him is her final instants, that single second stretching into eternity. The Darkness had fled before her, before the Light that turned her very signature into a dying star, a brilliant supernova. This in itself is a shame, that such skill as she possessed must be sacrificed upon the altar of the galaxy's greatest falsehood.

And yet that is not all.

No. Rather than attack him again, she had stumbled backward, drawn herself up tall, a pride that had nothing to do with self-importance. She had lifted her sabers until they were perfectly upright, twin columns of moonlight, the lie of peace embodied, in the universal posture of surrender. She had smiled- why, he couldn't say.

And whispered something into the red-white-black of the plasma-seared night, into the sempiternal moment of reckoning.

"Goodbye, Master."

He stops on the boarding ramp, aware of something very troubling indeed.

The biosign monitors now indicate moisture on the inside of the suit, just there on his cheek where he refuses to acknowledge it.

Sith Lords do not cry. He does not cry. Not now, not ever. And besides, neither do Jedi- so no one would cry for her. No one except her teacher, her mentor, her father, who was never an orthodox Jedi, who some said was never a Jedi at all.

But her father is dead. It is a dead man's tear. She was a dead man's daughter.

...Wasn't she?