AHSOKA TANO
As she left the safety of the New Hope behind, Ahsoka found herself floating in empty space for a moment. Her stomach lurched from the sudden lack of gravity, and she forced her air intake into conformity, breathing as deeply as she dared without wasting oxygen.
A moment later, Ezra pushed her towards the opening in the misshapen mass of durasteel with the Force. Taking care to avoid the fuel cells that were growing ever closer to the point of exploding, she pulled herself through, moving with her momentum and not against it to go further with less energy.
Finding her way through the pieces of broken machinery was like trying to find her way through a maze. For every open passage there were at least three dead ends, and even with Janira's presence to guide her, that didn't stop her from taking a few of them before realizing they led nowhere.
Nearly five minutes – at least two of which had been wasted on wrong turns – had elapsed by the time she found Janira.
Her tall form was draped over one of the fuel cells, one leg on an odd angle and a few unnatural points sticking up from her torso where ribs must have broken through the skin. Her suit was spattered here and there with crimson, and tiny rivulets of blood swam in the vacuum around her. They were a dark testament to the sheer amount of blood she must have lost.
Thankfully, her suit had mended itself around the tears, preventing the vacuum from taking its toll on her exposed flesh.
But that was when Ahsoka realized that the long, thin nozzle from one of the fuel cells had gone straight through Jani's shoulder. The fibers of her suit had mended themselves around it, and not only would any attempt to remove it risk opening the wound to the vacuum of space, but there was no way to remove it without breaking the seal on the container and permitting the deadly gas to escape.
And as Ahsoka drew closer, she realized that the situation was even worse than that.
The reader on the side of Janira's oxygen filter read that the composition of the container was over fifty percent carbon dioxide. She must have been breathing that, and not the pure oxygen she needed, for almost an hour now, and had been unconscious for far longer than that.
Ahsoka had to act fast.
Without hesitation, she traded the fuller of her two oxygen tanks for the one Janira was wearing. Then, sending a silent message through the Force warning Ezra to get ready, she ignited her lightsaber and cut straight through the tube.
Once Janira was free, Ahsoka wrapped an arm around her waist and used the other to pull herself back towards the ship, going as quickly as she possibly could without hitting anything. Now that the gas was free, she had mere minutes.
Despite the fact that it was faster going now that she knew which path to take through the wreckage, spots were beginning to dance in front of her eyes. Ahsoka did her best to blink them away and pushed on. She knew the ship was just around the next bend.
Only, it wasn't. At the worst possible time, she had taken a wrong turn.
Now almost delirious from the lack of oxygen, Ahsoka strained against her body's increasingly more painful urge to breathe in deeply, and tried to get her bearings. But it was to no avail – the fragments of metal and wires were beginning to blur together, making anything she could have used to find her way unrecognizable.
She just wanted to close her eyes, and...
No, she told herself. NO. I will not break a promise to Lux.
Summoning what little energy she still had, she pushed herself down the passageway she sensed through the Force was the right way to go. As soon as she was clear of the debris, Ezra latched onto her and pulled her back towards the ship.
As she and Jani fell to the floor in the cargo bay, Ahsoka tore off her face shield and hit the button on her sister-in-law's helmet to break the seal.
"Karabast!" Ezra yelled. "She has a metal tube going through her arm!"
"Not now, Ezra," Ahsoka stifled a coughing fit as her airways began to return to normal. "Kaya, Jani and I are on board, but this whole place is about to blow," she croaked, praying the comm was still online. "Get the ship out of here, now!"
"On it!" came the reply.
The engines rumbled to life beneath her, and as the New Hope switched into reverse and began flying out of the wreckage, Ahsoka caught sight of the probe droid Kaya Ti had mentioned. Its multitude of glassy photoreceptors swiveled around to study the ship as it went by, and Ahsoka could only hope that they were going fast enough to stop it from getting a good look.
Suddenly, the vacuum just behind them lit up with a variety of colors. Soon, it began spreading as the explosion triggered one fuel cell after another, and before long, it had consumed the probe droid and was gaining on the Hope.
Ahsoka gritted her teeth and held Janira's unconscious form close, bracing herself for when the wave of fiery debris hit the ship.
But it never came. The guns reared above them, blowing a hole in the maze of twisted durasteel, and the ship shot through it just before the explosion would have reached them.
A moment later, they made the jump to lightspeed.
"Kaya Ti, you're one in a million," Ahsoka whispered. She fell back against the floor and closed her eyes to give herself a moment to rest.
Once she had recovered her breath, she sat up, gesturing for Ezra to help her pick Janira up. "Come on. We need to start treating her wounds before we can get to a bacta tank back at the fleet – she has carbon monoxide poisoning, and she won't be able to start healing on her own before it's treated." Then, her eyes narrowed. "Did Kanan teach you how to Heal, by any chance?"
"With the Force? No. But I can patch up a wound okay, I guess."
Ahsoka furrowed her brow. "That'll have to do."
Before long, they had reached the medbay. Taking care to avoid the worst of the injuries, they settled Janira on the cot. A moment later, Ezra secured a breathing mask to her face.
"Pure oxygen?" he asked.
Ahsoka nodded. "We don't have the means to treat the broken ribs and the... situation with her shoulder aside from a temporary fix, but we can bind her leg and start patching up the noncritical wounds. Get the bacta patches, would you?"
As Ezra crossed the room to fetch the supplies, Ahsoka leaned over to place a hand tenderly on her sister-in-law's cheek. "It's all going to be okay, nav'shyrri'jim," she murmured. "We're going to make you well again."
But despite her relief, Ahsoka couldn't help but think that this time, they had come too close for comfort.
*Too close for comfort, indeed... Although Janira is in good hands en route to the Rebel fleet, Ahsoka will begin, like her husband, to find herself wondering if Janira is truly as safe as she thinks she is flying with Phoenix Squadron. But could there be more to her promotion than meets the eye? If it's for the best, would she give her life as Phoenix Four up for something else? And if he knew, what would Kanan have to say about all this? You'll find out in the next thrilling chapter of The Unchronicled Adventures Of Ahsoka Tano!
Wow, they really dodged a bullet this time. BUT I TOLD YOU JANI WAS GOING TO BE OKAY DIDNT I :D
Well... as okay as you can be with three broken ribs, a broken leg, a bunch of nasty wounds and carbon monoxide poisoning. Hehe... he... he...
*runs*
About the whole pilot suits repairing themselves thing... that I came up with myself. I feel like it's been used a lot (maybe not in this fandom, but definitely elsewhere) but it worked with the context, because you can apparently only survive in vacuum for a few minutes without a space suit before a combination of factors kills you. And that's not even including if you don't have a source of oxygen.
I didn't want her to die in four minutes. I wanted to give people some time to come and rescue her :D
I also researched carbon monoxide poisoning, because even with Star Wars technology, I feel like that would be a thing after a while. No matter how high tech you are, you'll still eventually come to a point where the filters in the system can't keep the CO2 and oxygen apart, am I right?
On another note, here's your Togruti definition for the chapter. Nav'shyrri'jim translates into almost (nav) sister (shyrri, meaning sister-kin) of mine ('jim).
Oh, and by the way, keep the bit about the Imperial probe droid at the back of your mind. It might just become important in the next chapter or the one after that ;)
Anyways, it's getting late, so I think I'm going to turn in. Over the course of the weekend I hope to update HWOF and LB JK, but stuff might come up, so idk. But at least one of those will get updated, I promise.
Like I said a while back, I also have an update for L:ALS in the works, so I might be able to get some work done on that over the next little while and post it sometime next week or the week after that. We'll just have to wait and see...
Discover things you never knew about your father's role in the Clone War and may the Force be with you,
Sharron