AHSOKA TANO
"Your form is sloppy. You're giving me openings I shouldn't have."
"Master, I'm doing it perfectly," Kaya Ti retorted, letting the air resistance push the hilt of one lightsaber into a reverse grip as she lifted it to counter Ahsoka's.
Ahsoka knew Kaya was right, but she felt a childish impulse to keep that to herself. "You'll have to do better than perfect if you want to last against them," she said, and pushed back against Kaya's blades in hopes of gaining some more ground.
Kaya's eyes narrowed, and Ahsoka wondered what she was planning.
She didn't have to wait long to find out: it was then that, much to her surprise, Kaya twisted her blade back into the standard grip and forced Ahsoka's right out of her hand. Then she guided it back to her belt with the Force, all without lifting a finger or shifting her focus from the duel at hand.
Ahsoka was impressed, but Kaya Ti spoke before she could open her mouth to say so. "Well, then you're being a pretty poor role model. And excuse me for saying this, but you're so out of right now that the only thing keeping me from whooping your butt is that you have almost ten years' worth of experience over me."
Ahsoka considered firing back a stinging reply, but held back as a wave of unexpected tiredness washed over her. She hadn't been sleeping well, and she didn't feel like she had the energy to sustain her side of an argument.
"I just... It's just hard trying to balance teaching you what you need to know and what will keep you alive when they don't always coincide. I need more from you probably faster than you're able to give it. And... I'm going to tell you something brutally honest, okay?"
Kaya Ti nodded, her hazel eyes heavy with empathy.
Ahsoka sat down on a nearby crate and motioned for her apprentice to join her. "What happened to Janira a few weeks back scared me. We came far too close to losing her, and she wasn't even up against the worst of what the Imperial Navy has to offer. If you find yourself up against an Inquisitor you're not ready to face with no way out..."
"I'll be ready. I have you to teach me."
Maybe, but it's not like I'm the best you could have.
"Still, I wouldn't be able to live with the consequences; knowing that it was my fault you weren't ready." Ahsoka sighed, hugging her knees to her chest. "It's not easy having a Padawan."
"It's not easy being a Padawan," Kaya Ti retorted with a laugh. "But what is it with you always thinking you're going to let people down if things don't go exactly as you planned? You can let things loosen up a little, you know – having a little wiggle room and using it isn't a crime."
"No, but in this galaxy, playing it by ear can sometimes get you the same amount of jail time," Ahsoka said, exhaling a breath through her nose that she supposed could have been considered a laugh had she put more effort into it. "Especially with our next mission."
"Yeah. You've been holding that over my head for nearly twenty-four hours now. What's the big secret?"
"There really isn't one," Ahsoka said. "I just had to do some digging to make sure the source from my listening post was legitimate. But it turns out an old acquaintance of mine has come out of hiding to do some research, and he's found some leads that could be of interest to us."
"Where is he?"
Ahsoka hit a button on her wrist comm to project the image her contact "He'll be meeting us on Valunn."
Suddenly, Kaya Ti went as white as one of Ahsoka's lightsabers. "Valunn?" she choked out, her voice hardly rising above a whisper. "We're going to Valunn?"
"Yes. What about it?"
"Oh, uh, nothing. It's just, uh... shifty. It's the seventh stop in the Kessel Run, which would already make bad enough, but it goes without mentioning that the only real settlement is an old pirate town run by one of the big crime syndicates. And... let's just say I don't exactly have the best rep with the locals."
"You've done the Kessel Run?"
"Once or twice with Han, yeah. We managed to make it in sixteen and a half parsecs in the Bria. It's not exactly a record, but I guess it's not bad. He has a new ship, now, I hear; he named it something tacky like the Millennium Falcon, or something like that."
"You're changing the subject."
Kaya Ti shrugged. "Maybe I am. I just... I don't want to go back there. It reminds me of the person I left behind when I decided I wanted to start back down the Jedi path. It's the person I'm not anymore."
Ahsoka bit back a grimace. Her apprentice was as stubborn as they came, and Ahsoka had a feeling she wasn't going to take what she said next very well. "Well, for the sake of the mission, it might be the person I'll need you to be again. At least for a little while. If we run into trouble with these... locals, I want to be sure I have someone who knows how they operate by my side."
Kaya leaned forward on her elbows, deep in thought. She was silent for a long moment before she finally turned back to face Ahsoka. "Fine. If you need someone to scare the ruffians off, I'll try my best."
Ahsoka smiled and put a hand on her Padawan's shoulder. "Then that's all I can ask for."
"But I need you to know going in that I might attract more trouble than I repel," Kaya told her. "Like I said, I don't exactly have a great rep there."
"Well, we'll work something out. Play it by ear, as you're so adamant I start doing." Ahsoka inclined her head back in the direction of the cockpit. "Now come on. I need a copilot."
Kaya Ti chuckled. "We both know you can fly the ship just fine on your own."
"Sometimes I get lazy and decide I don't want to spend half my time flying reaching across the cockpit for some hard-to-reach keypad."
And with that, Ahsoka started off towards the cockpit. When realized Kaya Ti wasn't following her, she looked back. And what she saw caught her off-guard.
Kaya had a look on her face Ahsoka felt like she hadn't been supposed to see. It spoke of a sense of pity and helplessness that came from the revelation of an unwelcome but unchangeable eventuality. It reminded Ahsoka of the anguish she had only ever seen in people who were already mourning the loss of someone close to them when the person was still yet living, but could not escape the painful awareness that their loved one was on death's door.
But it was gone in a heartbeat, and with a smile a little too strained to be believable, Kaya Ti was making her way down the hallway after her.
But try as she did, Ahsoka could not put the image of Kaya Ti, mourning her as if she knew it was only a matter of time before she lost her, out of her mind.
*Although she doesn't know it yet, Ahsoka has begun seeing signs of what Kaya Ti has seen in the Force. But how could she be destined to fall on Valunn, as Kaya believes, when her fate has already been decided? Is there more to the vision than she originally thought? And in a galaxy where friends are so hard to come by, who could this old acquaintance of Ahsoka's be? More awaits our heroes on Valunn than one would initially expect, and now it's only a matter of time before old bonds and secrets begin to rise to the surface... You'll find out how in the next thrilling chapter of The Unchronicled Adventures Of Ahsoka Tano!
SURPRISE THIRD CHAPTER WHOOP WHOOP
So anyways, this happened because I initially planned for the call with Lux last chapter to be the first half of one chapter and not an entire one. This would have been the second half, and seeing as it was sitting half-finished on my desktop, I couldn't stay away...
This puts us officially three chapters into the story arc that will focus most strongly on Kaya Ti's character and her dynamic with Ahsoka. And let me tell you, there are some interesting things waiting for them on Valunn, that I think will bring them closer together... provided it's not to late, of course, if we take Kaya's vision into account.
What I wanted to show with the beginning of this chapter is that despite the fact that she's technically had only about ten or eleven years of Jedi training, Kaya Ti has become very skilled in certain forms of combat, while she let the practice of others fall to the wayside. When she was a kid and on her own after Order 66, she focused mostly on improving what she was good at, since she didn't exactly have anyone to teach her what she had more trouble with.
That's why she's very good with lightsaber and hand-to-hand combat, but not as strong with using the Force in ways as complex as creating shields: she never really learned how when she was young enough to best absorb it.
And yes, I know, that thing with the Millennium Falcon was silly, but Kaya Ti badmouthing Han and his ship is almost as funny for me as Leia doing it. I saw the opportunity, and once I did, I knew I had to take it XD
Okay. Tomorrow (provided I am not eaten alive by homework, which is what's looking like is going to happen) I'll update TISS, and then maybe by Wednesday or Thursday next week I'll have that HWOF update ready. Gods know they're both insanely overdue.
So yeah, wish me luck, guys... thank the Maker March break is only one week away...
Be mindful of your thoughts and may the Force be with you,
Sharron