The Clone Wars Gets A New Victim

Chapter 39: The Deaths Of Heroes

She landed on the hellscape world, but did not yet exit the fighter. She stared out the viewport as her hands released the controls.

Despite never having been on Mustafar she had seen it many times. She had spent so many years dreading this moment, trying for so long to make it so this would never happen.

Still it did - for here she was on a quest to kill a man who was already dead.

She opened the roof of her ship and exited.

The heat of the mining world hit Grim in an instant. The hot winds caused her hair to flow behind her and as she marched in the direction of her dead brother the red rocks crunched under her boots.

When she approached the building Skywalker was in she found she could no longer feel him. He was empty, and so his warmth was gone. It had died when he became Vader.

A chill ran through her, but she did not flee.

Grim entered the building, and took a moment to realize the horrific sight. The ground was littered with the dismantled limbs of droids, mixed with the tangled mess of alien bodies of those who had once led them. The pungent aroma of death filled her nostrils, mixed with the fumes of smoke.

Even so she pressed ahead.

She had a goal to complete, one she would not fail. She couldn’t, this was the only way she could make up for her mistakes.

She only paused when there was a gross squelching sound, and she looked down to find she had stepped in a puddle of blood. She stifled a gag as she realized what she had stepped in.

  There had been no mercy for either side - and as much as she had despised the vile Separatists she could not help but feel that they had not deserved such a brutal end.

At last she reached the dead man.

  Grim drew her weapon from her belt, and ignited its blade. Casting the balcony in a purple glow.

Anakin’s hooded figure turned around at the sound. He seemed to regard her with a curious look, though his face was hidden beneath the shadows of darkness.

"Grim," he acknowledged after a long pause. "Why have you come here? Should you not be with the rest of the corpses?"

"I came so you could join them, Skywalker,'' she shot back.

  His name was like poison on her tongue as she spat it at him.

He did not respond to her remark nor the way she had said his name.

  It did not bother the ghost.

  Instead he only stared down at her as the wind blew between the two. For a moment it seemed as if he was studying the child, who only glared up at him with unmasked rage born of the grief that filled her broken heart.

"I had hoped this wouldn't happen after our talk last night. Clearly I was wrong," Grim admitted, the betrayal was clear in her voice. "You have betrayed us all. Although I already know the answer, I still have to ask: Why?"

"The Jedi are the traitors," was all Skywalker replied.

Grim shook her head, tears falling from her eyes as a humorless laugh escaped.

That was what he claimed? Is that what the younglings were to him?

She had seen the carnage of the Temple. The bodies of the Jedi, dead from those whom they had trusted and she had seen her ruined home.

The ashes of her family - their family.

"Children can't be traitors," she told him. She twirled the lightsaber in her hand and lifted it above her head pointing the weapon at him. "You, on the other hand, can be."