Master Apprentice
Archive
Stoicheia 6: Argon
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It must have worked.
All there is to do now is to wait. Wait for the inevitable, wait for the little pup to breathe his last, mercifully unconscious, and then you'll be free. Free to be claimed as mine, free to be freed from the ties that bind you to the Order, and the ones that bind you to this poor child.
Look, I made it easy on you, Qui. No prolonged agony, no great uncertainty or anything. He'll just fade, and you'll find yourself surprised at how quickly you'll have forgotten him. Love. Oh tell me more. You can't even feel freely inside the box of your Orderly thoughts, _Master_. You'll see. Probably in the morning, when you wake up and he... doesn't.
Amazing how easy this is, isn't it? So clean. No traces of dirt, a sorry misunderstanding, that'll be all. The message from Lauchumni Haad -- it could have been sent by the people of course. It'll probably take them a few days to verify that it wasn't, and by then they will have forgotten what it was about, and the Council will file it away as yet another mission call that had resolved itself by the time the Jedi arrived and put it down to embarrassment on the people's side. Yes, that message could have been from them. Let's just say it was, shall we? Let's just say the Transport Master's computer would have given you that ship number anyway, shall we?
And taking a scheduled ship out of the sky is so depressingly easy, Master. Think about it. They still make you turn your commlinks off, don't they? If that is all it takes... getting into the actual navigation mainframe was almost overkill, but one has to be thorough, Master, as you no doubt remember teaching me. Then, the rest was timing. The little dot traversing the planetary map just needed bringing down in the right place. And my footman could be relied on. The crew didn't give him any trouble, did they? Thought not. They don't even need to be bought, they're paid to be careless. Paid by someone else, I might add. Saves me the trouble. No need to interact with any of them, you see. I sit back, seemingly inert. Argon, if you will. You breathe it in every day, and it comes out unchanged, and nobody suspects.
He was the only life form I've had to rely on in this venture, you know? The only lump of organic material -- the rest was silicon, clean silicon. Information, not this crude matter. Well, him and you. I know you too well, Qui-Gon -- you still make your Padawans walk in front when crossing difficult terrain, don't you? The whites make for such an easy beacon to follow? More like their bums are easier to ogle that way, you dirty old man. I'm looking forward to taking my sweet revenge on yours, _Master_.
My footman says your sweet little Padawan looked tired. Bet he was, the poor pup. Too tired for a good leisurely late-night fuck, hm? Bet you let him go, let the child sleep, gentle as you are, Master. You'll regret it, regret not having fucked the living daylights out of him one last time. Because as you lie sleeping, resting your weary limbs in that untidy sprawl of yours, he'll be wasting away, his Force aura collapsing slowly, softly like wilting petals, and in the morning when you wake... he won't.
The poison is doing its work as we speak. Well, as I speak. You'll have enough time to hear me out, Master. Rage all you like -- I can keep you restrained indefinitely, chained and helpless until you succumb to my gentle persuasion. My iron will. You are mine, Jinn, you just don't know it yet.
The poison? Oh, don't tell me. You really didn't, did you? Well, what do you think I sent my footman for? Directions? I could have bribed or brainwashed any of those stupid transportline chicks into giving you those. Probably wouldn't have needed a brainwash at all, just a neatly stacked credit chip. Clean silicon, you see, from an unknown benefactor. No fingerprints.
No, he came with a payload.
Sand.
Bet you hadn't thought of that, eh Master? And you won't, won't even think of it as you'll sit in vigil over your former Padawan's cooling body because that's not the way you think, you Jedi. Sand, as simple as that.
You still make him walk in front, don't you? So who would catch all the grime and all the resin on the path through the forest that isn't really one? Precisely. Oh, and I needn't know your fine little Padawan personally to know that he abhors any stains on his pristine whites. Let alone a certain stickiness of skin. Well, let me rephrase that. A certain _grimy_ stickiness of skin, the little slut.
You don't do cold baths, do you Master? No, not even with your pretty Obi-Wan. All that long hair is such a pain to get dry, isn't it? And why have a wet Obi-Wan in the water when you can have him on land? See, I know you. And all it takes is a few minutes of water dripping off his baby-pale skin, seeping into the sand as you admire him generously, dissolving the agent and letting it permeate his skin. That would be quite enough. Of course, any grains stuck between his toes are an extra, and welcome.
Yes, it looked like sand. It was sand, if you define that as grainy minerals lying around shores. If you define it as grainy _silicate_ minerals lying around shores, that it wasn't. Just a leap along a kink in the periodic table... but I am sure the healers will tell you that once they've removed a tiny piece of tissue from your ex-Padawan's stiff corpse and run it through their analysers. I don't mind you knowing. You'll come round to seeing the truth, you'll come round to me. Just you wait.
All that's to do for me is to wait. Untouched, unsuspected. Inert but omnipresent.
Argon.
---The End---