Summary:A pair of galactic drifters build their lives in the shadow of the Empire.
Notes:So a couple of years ago this was a wild idea, and then it was a fun project I kept getting side-tracked from, and then it was a fixation, and then it was that goddamn fic that I was going to fucking well finish and it would definitely not be more than 80k. Lies.
Enormous thanks go to Niamh, Brynn, and Margz, the most tolerant of friends, who put up with a lot of demented shrieking as I realised just what an enormous task I'd taken on, and Stitch, who took on this behemoth to beta it, gave me some incredibly useful notes, and engaged in many hours of talking through sticky questions. Thank you for all the support and discussion: it made this fic a better fic. <3
Chapter 1: AhsokaChapter TextAhsoka Tano is hunting through a forest on Tamsye Prime, looking for a man who murders the unexpected, and she only finds the bunker because there's a little spark of life inside it.
It's been years since Ahsoka stretched her senses thin to pick up on the slightest rustle of a droid or whisper of a forcefield. She's got much, much better at sensing her surroundings since then. The single presence in a bunker beneath the earth - hidden well, but not cunningly enough to fool someone half-raised by batches of clones with impeccable training, constantly-honed skills, and a relaxed attitude to young people getting involved in war and espionage - blazes in her second sight. When she presses her montrals to the entrance and listens hard, she picks up on the faint echoes of someone moving, regular huffing breath and hints of effort.
Push-ups, Ahsoka guesses. Or sit-ups. It's what she would do. From the little she can sense in the Force, the person in the bunker is young and lonely and wavering. The Force is with them, but Ahsoka can't tell in what sense; they're certainly no Jedi, and in any case, the presence of the Force is cold comfort. The Force has been with Ahsoka through many unlikely escapes and unexpected blessings, but everyone she ever looked to for guidance is dead or lost and she hasn't known more than ten minutes of safety since she was seventeen. This sentient, whoever they are, shares that rootless isolation.
They are also, Ahsoka discovers when she finds her way into the bunker, vicious. Only Ahsoka's enhanced reflexes save her from a knife to the gut, and there is a blaster pointed at her. In the near-total darkness of the bunker Ahsoka's vision is useless compared to the existing occupant's, but when she hums she can feel the sound bounce off metal, off crates, off bare walls and breathing human.
"Who are you?" snaps the human, and by her tone she's young and female and angry. Exhaustion and thirst have made her voice rough.
Ahsoka thinks it's like listening to herself. "Eilis," she says. It's a lie, but all the names she gives are lies now; Tano, Ahsoka, Fulcrum, Snips, they're wanted women. Eilis is at least one she's been using lately.
She takes a chance on her next words. "I'm looking for Saw Gerrera."
There's a long silence. The blaster doesn't lower.
"Why?" Ahsoka's new friend says eventually.
"I was told that if I wanted someone to blow something Imperial up, he'd be a good person to ask."
The other woman's silent, but there's a rustle of fabric, and when Ahsoka hums again - soft and low, too low for human hearing - the blaster has been lowered.
"He isn't here."
"But he was," Ahsoka says.
"Yeah." The woman retreats several steps. "Was he expecting you?"
"I doubt he knows I'm on planet," Ahsoka says, making it wry as Obi-Wan and light as Padmé. This woman needs careful handling. There are no more munitions that Ahsoka can recognise behind her, but there are crates, and Ahsoka has no way to know why she's retreated. "So, no."
The woman huffs. "He was here two days ago. Beyond that, couldn't tell you."
"You're a sentry," Ahsoka suggests. The woman sounds like an orphan: the edges of her voice are raw and bleeding, and her spirit is shivering with the compressed pain of abandonment.
His best soldier, Ahsoka hears, in a voice that isn't spoken aloud. It's full of a defiance that will turn to bitterness, and the very sound of it suggests this woman has the strength of the Force with her - just a little, though, just a whisper, not enough to account for the way the stream of the Force parts around her, bearing her up.
Or dragging her under.
Ahsoka selects a crate and sits down on it. "I'll wait with you. Is there a light?"
"It doesn't work well," the woman says harshly. "I prefer the dark."
"Flickering is very annoying," Ahsoka agrees, pretending to be oblivious to the edge of a nightmare in her words. Ahsoka hesitates.
Bearing her up. Or dragging her under.
Sink or swim, Ahsoka Tano?
The darkness presses in on the patterns of her montrals, even with the echolocation, and Ahsoka can only guess how afraid the woman is here: two days in the dark with no reliable light, and something about flickering that frightens her.
Ahsoka wedges one lightsaber into a crack in the floor and lights it up. She keeps the other in reserve, and smiles when the woman gasps.
"I'd prefer not to wait in the dark," she says, a curl of smugness edging around her voice as she sees the woman's wide eyes and dropped jaw and the way she hasn't gone for her blaster.
"That's a lightsaber," the woman says, edging closer. She might be younger than Ahsoka thought; it's hard to tell under the grime and the hard expression, but there's a softness to her cheeks and her skin is unlined. Late teens? Early twenties? Ahsoka's never been good at seeing age on humans; Obi-Wan and Anakin had lined faces in their twenties, but Padmé was five years older than Anakin and never had a single wrinkle to her name.
She died without any, too.
"Yes," Ahsoka says.
"The Jedi all died in the Purge," her new friend answers. She's close enough now that Ahsoka can see her delicate features, pick out the china-doll colouring and the green-grey eyes, but she doesn't get so close that she risks burning herself.
"No," Ahsoka says.
The woman meets her eyes, and Ahsoka revises her age estimate down a few years. Late teens, then.
"Carlin," the woman says. "My name is Carlin."
Ahsoka wonders what it is about learning she's a Jedi that makes Carlin trust her enough to offer a name. Saw Gerrera was never a religious man, and Carlin is so young he's probably half-raised her, even if he's also abandoned her. Carlin is old enough to remember a galaxy before the Empire, she's probably old enough that her parents spoke of the Negotiator and her friends took turns at playing the Hero with No Fear, but faith in the Jedi has been either hidden or eroded over the last ten years, and Carlin would only have been a child.
Ahsoka nods.
They wait together. Carlin's waiting for Saw, and Ahsoka's waiting for her to acknowledge that Saw is not coming back. She does have places to be - Imperial encampments to blow up, back-up plans to put in place. But the Force nudges at her almost imperceptibly every time she rises, Carlin's diffuse glow strengthens, and Ahsoka stays.
The Force hasn't spoken to her clearly for years. Ahsoka will take the slightest of hints.
Ahsoka teaches Carlin a few stretches and exercises she learnt as a padawan; she shows Carlin a lightsaber kata and shares her food. Carlin tells her everything she'll need to know to seriously inconvenience the Imperial garrison, and cries herself to sleep in the night. She's perfectly silent to human ears, but the sound wraps around Ahsoka like a cold smothering fog.
In the morning, Carlin announces that she will go to meet Saw at a fallback rendezvous point, and carry him a message about their strange new ally. She doesn't offer to take Ahsoka, and Ahsoka doesn't ask.
Ahsoka already knows Saw will not be there.
She thinks about asking Carlin to come with her. The girl hasn't the strength for a Jedi, might not even have been picked up as a youngling - depending on the searcher. If she were strong enough, she'd be dead; she's old enough to have fallen under the last rounds of searches, and to have been raised in the crèche if she'd been found. She would then have died in the Temple, with the vast majority of the younglings and padawans Ahsoka once knew.
Ahsoka looks at Carlin - wary, battered, abandoned, poised to run - and her stomach roils at the thought. There's still something there, though Ahsoka doesn't know what, but it's not a Jedi's power. Ahsoka could probably teach her a thing or two that might... help. That might bring a little peace.
There's no way Carlin will take charity, and there's no way Ahsoka can make her come along. Besides, it won't be safe, even considering the grave danger that Carlin will be in alone.
Carlin is watching her, wary again.
"The Force is with you," Ahsoka says at last.
Carlin blinks. "I thought it was may the Force be with you ."
Ahsoka nods. "But that was a statement of fact. Not a blessing."
Carlin balances on the balls of her feet, ready to run. "My mother told me to trust the Force."
Ahsoka's heart aches. "That was very wise of her."
Carlin shrugs gracelessly.
Ahsoka sets off in the direction of the nearest town. She hums a tune, casual, absent, and the echoes show her Carlin, running away.
That night is cold and Carlin was lightly dressed. Ahsoka worries, and in the poky room she's rented at the lowest price she could get she sits on the pallet and meditates.
The Force showed her clear visions, once. Sometimes right, sometimes wrong, rarely useful. Now Ahsoka's sight is clouded. She isn't sure if that's because the future is splintered or if it's because her foresight has got worse.
Maybe it's just that what she sees better reflects the accuracy of her visions.
Ahsoka sinks deep into the Force, deep into that bottomless blue hole cave, feels her breathing even out and her second sense uncurl, the lightest of touches on her perimeter. Light but sensitive: if anyone approaches the room, Ahsoka will know at once.
She collects Carlin into a sheaf of memories and impressions, and asks the Force for guidance.
She gets none, apart from a persistent - and inexplicable - confidence that she'll see Carlin again. And Ahsoka can't be sure if that's the Force or wishful thinking.
Chapter 2: JynChapter TextIf Jyn has her way then once she's out of here she'll never set foot in the Chollonian sector again. The only saving grace this fucking planet has to its name is that (although the rebel cell she has fallen in with have her spare clothes, her weapons, all her scandocs and her crystal) they don't have her real name. Every now and then, in the thin hours before dawn when she can't sleep, Jyn thinks about the moments of relief when she realised she'd fallen in with rebels, and hates a little more bitterly.
The hand of the Empire lies hard on the planet Glarean and its six moons. Jyn knew it and was wary of it long before she disembarked at the southern continent's major spaceport and started to answer ads for a deckhand. It was her only feasible choice to keep moving through the system, and it would have worked fine, if it hadn't been for a dockers' protest met with so brutal a response from the stormtrooper garrison that it turned into a riot. A massacre, even. Jyn had climbed out of a back window and fled, but she'd made an unlucky turn and found herself in a group of protestors being kettled in the dirty, rusty grey city streets. Over the passing months she has learned to reconstruct the memories of those hours, at least partially; she remembers the moment when the kettle closed in, and what her arm sounded like when it broke, and the way the stormtrooper laughed when she told him she was an Imperial citizen passing through Glarean South Intergalactic with a legitimate visa, and how his helmet cracked when the local rebel cell killed him and broke the kettle. After that she got hit or perhaps kicked in the head, and she still remembers nothing between the blow and waking up in a makeshift medical bay, her head and her arm throbbing with pain.
But the moment that fills her with burning resentment is the single clarifying second when Ives called her over and showed her a tally labelled Kestrel Dawn . Three hundred and fifty credits; more than she'd seen in years, at least in one go.
"What's this?" she said, flat, her healed arm aching again. Her tone of voice made Ives touch the hold-out blaster in his pocket, masking his sudden fear of her very badly. Be scared , she wanted to say. It's the smartest thing you've done lately.
"Your food and medical bills," he said, trying to be matter-of-fact.
"Oh yes," Jyn said shortly, thinking about the way his neck would snap under her hands.
"Be reasonable, Kestrel," he said. "We can't help you for free."
Jyn looked at him in silence, listening to the rebels around her waiting with the safety catches off their weapons. Too many for her to fight. They planned this from the start, or at least as soon as her fever broke. She turned around and walked away.
"You could always let us have that crystal you wear instead," Ives called. "That would clear your debt."
Jyn has tried to remember the next ten seconds, to no avail. All she knows is that Ives had a black eye later, and that (of all the fighters) he is the only one who's still afraid of her six months on. And that that is the point at which most of her belongings were confiscated, to be disbursed to her at carefully judged intervals, and taken back when she has no need of them. At first they made sure that someone else was armed whenever she was armed, but now they have stopped bothering, unless Ives is there. He almost panics whenever she looks at him.
Good , Jyn thinks. If the others are sloppy and stupid enough not to know that Jyn is a double-edged knife waiting to slip in their hand, at least their leader is not such a fool. It encourages her to believe she might actually live long enough to pay down her debt. By her calculations it should take another year, unless she gets injured again.
Another year. Jyn's lip curls and she kicks at the dust in the safehouse's feeble little courtyard; they're waiting for some kind of important visitor, whatever the hell that means in this forsaken backwater, and Jyn is not supposed to attract attention. Er'lin gives her a censorious look, which she ignores. She goes to lean against the jamb of the open door, looking past the stunted trees down the dirt road to where their contact ought to arrive.
She can see moving dust, and stiffens; but after a few seconds it becomes apparent that it's a single speeder, not an Imperial attack vehicle, and she relaxes and gives the signal to the others. They immediately start speculating about who could be so important; Ives has rolled out what passes for the red carpet around here, and is almost afraid of the visitor, cringing, but standing defiantly on his insistence that their presence means this unaffiliated cell in the middle of nowhere matters.
Jyn snorts.
"Got an opinion?" demands Er'lin, borderline aggressive.
"Several," says Jyn, without bothering to look back at him.
The visitor cuts the speeder's engine and dismounts. She unwraps the cloths covering her face and montrals, and suddenly -
I know you , Jyn thinks, before that should be possible. The bunker on Tamsye Prime, and the Togruta with the white lightsabers, the one who was looking for Saw. If she found him. Jyn certainly didn't. But Jyn knows who she is from the moment she sees the other woman move, even if she can't see the lightsabers, or the markings.
She wonders if the Togruta knows her. That question is answered when the Togruta meets her eyes and stops, like she's brought up short. There's some kind of a question in her face. Maybe she thinks Jyn might give away information she doesn't want known.
She needn't worry. Jyn has no interest in helping this motley lot do anything other than get off her fucking back, and in some obscure way she feels like she owes the Togruta a favour, for the light and her kindness.
What did she call herself, back on Tamsye Prime? Eilis.
Jyn inclines her head very slightly, and catches the slow blink of Eilis's eyes in return.
Well, this at least should not be boring.
Eilis is going by a different name, Mawar, and around the meal they take at night - Jyn careful not to take more of the stew than she's served; she found out the hard way that Ives likes to add a surcharge for extra helpings - Jyn bears bored witness to a lot of excitable whispers about who Mawar is and what she can do. Strangely, none of them approach the truth, or what Jyn knows of the truth. Nobody seems to have any idea that Mawar is a Jedi. They talk about the Alliance, which isn't a huge surprise to Jyn, and the possibility of increased support from the Alliance, which really would shock Jyn. From what she remembers, lurking and scowling behind Saw's shoulder as a teenager, the Alliance are miserly with their resources. And they scrutinise your workings before they share. She's not sure Ives's habit of indenturing fighters - Jyn knows she isn't the first - would pass muster. But then, who can tell?
Mawar spends long hours closeted with Ives. Jyn's wondering whether her arrival would mean something new and interesting might happen seems to have been fruitless; there's no change to the day-to-day round of slicing computers, petty theft, and minor cat-burglary that Ives uses Jyn's skills for. It's all boring, but she's not inclined to share what she can really do. And Ives is not inclined to allow her to speak with Mawar, or Eilis, or whatever her real name is, unchaperoned. According to Er'lin, the Togruta asked after her and her skills.
Jyn tries to look bored. Mawar keeps disappearing off to strange places on that speeder - the others are speculating about Clone Wars-era weapons caches, or secret Alliance dead drops, as if they knew a thing about resistance besides minor inconveniencing of local Imperial infrastructure. They'd be classed as petty criminals if their targets weren't Imperial. Jyn could teach them, if she were at all inclined to do any of them a favour after Ives' treatment of her. Instead she sits still, bites her tongue, and only spends her curiosity on what exactly Mawar is up to.
If they don't have the brains to know that any Clone Wars weapons caches would have been cleared out by the Empire - there's no local tradition of long-standing resistance, so caches won't have been moved, and the Empire doesn't leave caches that haven't been emptied for the convenience of armed insurrectionists - Jyn can't help them. If they're stupid enough not to realise that nobody puts a dead drop where visiting it will attract attention, Jyn's going to have to work hard to stay alive for the rest of her year.
What is out there, though? Old ruins and the ghost of a Jedi, according to the locals, killed not long before Empire Day with an entire regiment of clone soldiers. The thought gives Jyn the vague creeps. She doesn't believe in ghosts, she has plenty else to haunt her restless dreams, but the ghost of a Jedi…
Way too much is possible with the Force. Saw used to tell stories about that too. Back when there was a Republic, he'd fought alongside some Jedi, and he never seemed to know if he wanted to spit at or praise their memory.
Jyn finds herself grimacing at the blaster rifle she stripped down to clean. She doesn't know whether to spit at or praise Saw's memory either.
The weather turns hot, bakingly hot, and they hole up in the hills, closer to the ruins. The whole area was blasted to hell by the Separatists, so no-one comes out here except Ives' cell; they duck off the main road where there's plenty of cover, and disappear between one town and the next.
There's little for Jyn to do out here, since Ives prefers to use her for sneak theft and slicing (no doubt fearing that if he lets her let loose she'll kill him - and who is Jyn to say that he's exactly wrong?). It bores her and makes her nervous. She will never pay off her debt if she continues to eat without working. She begins to pace, and her fellow fighters' eyes watch her with distrust.
What happened, she asks herself, to the other people who fought to pay off debts? The cell has spies in the town who pass information and supplies in return for the reduction of a debt, but Ives has a lighter hand with them, maybe because they didn't respond to him with violence. But surely she isn't the only one who resents the position she's found herself in?
Maybe the others are just sufficiently conditioned to it to feel that they must draw together as a team, and it's only Jyn who reminds them that she's suffering this whole situation temporarily. Maybe their debts grow less relentlessly and they look at Jyn and fear being treated as she is. Jyn might know if she talked to them.
Mawar continues to disappear off into the countryside at unpredictable intervals. She usually takes a single guard with her, but when they talk they say they aren't allowed to see whatever it is Mawar's looking for, that she leaves them with the speeder and continues to hike. At first they were excited for the duty, but now they know there's little to be seen, and (if Ives' frustration is any guide) Mawar shows few signs of giving up the resources and influence he wants. Jyn takes a petty pleasure in that. He sets himself up as comparable to the Partisans, but in expertise, cunning, courage, numbers and efficacy he is so far beneath Saw he might as well be underground already.
Ives sends several people off to disrupt a convoy, but keeps Jyn close. Er'lin - him again - says Mawar has been asking more questions about Jyn. He seems to imply that if Jyn tells the truth she'll suffer for it, but Jyn feels only excitement at the thought of finally getting to take her woes out on someone who has earned the pain, and he clearly sees that, because he stops talking.
Why not send her away, if Mawar asks too many questions? Maybe Ives fears the conclusions Mawar will draw if she is sent away.
Jyn doesn't bother to keep her head down, and is sitting in the dirty and nasty main chamber of their hill-cave hideout, trying to forge a respectable set of identity scandocs that looks clean in the dubious light of the extensible lamp over her head, when the sounds of an argument - no, a discussion - spill out of Ives' office next door. The ancient cranky steel door doesn't shut properly, so Ives usually keeps his more important conversations to a confidential murmur; only the ones he actually wants people to know about are conducted in a loud voice.
Still more important discussions may be conducted in the safe room, which you can only get to by going through Ives' office. Jyn doesn't know. The door on that actually works. Works very well, in fact. Her possessions are in there and Jyn's been thinking about how to get them out for weeks. She didn't know where they were before, when Ives' cell stuck to the backstreets of the spaceport city.
"- no," Ives is saying. "I can't send Kestrel with you; not possible, not without a more substantial escort."
"Which you've also told me is not possible," Mawar says. She sounds calm, but not pleased.
"I can't spare an assistant for you from those who take the convoy," Ives replies. "And some will need to remain behind to support the base -"
"You don't count Kestrel in that number?"
"Kestrel… needs to be watched. She's violent."
Jyn lets a smile unfurl at the corner of her mouth, and tweaks the scandocs just slightly, so they don't look suspiciously crisp. She already knew Ives was scared of her, but it's nice to hear it again.
"Do you think I can't effectively watch her?"
Togruta are predators, Jyn thinks idly. Mawar sounds like it right now. She can practically see the lift of her lip over one of those sharp canines.
"No! No, it's not that," Ives says, hurriedly. "But you need someone you can rely on -"
"I'm happy to rely on her," Mawar says, like she's closing a door. Jyn can almost hear Ives wilt.
"As you prefer."
Mawar leaves the office first. Her steps pause near Jyn, who doesn't look up. She reaches up, and pulls the extensible lamp down closer to her work, knowing it will scrape and rattle loudly. In Ives' office, something falls over, and Jyn smirks at her scandocs.
Mawar's soft chuckle is so low Jyn doesn't believe she's heard it at first, and then the Togruta is gone. She moves so lightly Jyn has had to get used to listening out for the particular whisper of her tread, a trick many of this cell haven't managed yet, too used to heavy-footed humans or stamping stormtroopers. The indigenous inhabitants of Glarean are quiet enough to teach them a lesson, but they live in heavily protected enclosed - imprisoned - enclaves further north, and as they're non-human Jyn doesn't think much of their chances under Imperial occupation. This rebellion is in their name too, but so far as Jyn can tell, that's in name only, which is just fucking typical, isn't it.
Ives storms out and charges over to her workspace. Jyn ignores him until he leans over her desk and snarls " What did you hear ?"
She leans back, insouciant and unmoved, and crosses her ankles languidly under the table. "About what?"
"Just fucking tell me!"
One of the tools Jyn is using on the scandocs is a scalpel. There's no better way to mimic the little scratches picked up from credits, keys, household tools in a pocket. She lifts it to eye level and examines it minutely; brushes the edge with one of her gloved thumbs. (No sense in leaving fingerprints.)
"Tell you what?" she says, softly, and smiles into Ives' face.
It's not pleasant, exactly, but watching the blood drain from his overly ruddy cheeks is very, very satisfying. And Jyn has so few moments of joy right now.
The next day Jyn is on the speeder with Mawar, riding towards whatever it is Mawar's after. She has a blaster rifle slung over her back, a more conventional blaster cinched to the outside of her right thigh, and many, many knives. It's the best she's been armed in months, not to mention the independent, well-fuelled transport, and Ives made a point of reminding her that he held her crystal, with an unsubtle implication that if she didn't show up on time with Mawar it would go on the market.
Mawar did not look pleased with him. Her expressions are enigmatic, given the facial markings and Togruta differences in expressing themselves, but Mawar is both tightly controlled and clearly accustomed to spending large amounts of time with humans. She knows how to trip the predator instinct. After the months she's spent here, Jyn enjoys watching her do it.
To Jyn, Mawar is nothing but the best of company. Jyn's under her orders, but she's polite, considerate and professional. Though a woman of few words, she's not unfriendly. And though Jyn knows a very dangerous secret about her, one confirmed by a glimpse of the lightsabers that Mawar lets her catch, she doesn't threaten Jyn to keep it safe. Jyn feels as if she doesn't need to. And she doesn't just like Mawar better for that, she respects her better too.
They stop several hours away from the cell's mountain hideout, and Mawar insists they stop for a snack. Jyn's reluctant, tallying it up against the two hundred and thirty credits still to her name, but Mawar says it's necessary, and Jyn finds she's willing to trust her judgement. Saw said the Jedi could change the way you thought, but Mawar doesn't seem to do anything, and Jyn watches herself carefully. Mawar just lays out a whole bunch of practical arguments and then goes off to piss behind a thorn bush, which - if it's a mind-trick - is a very prosaic way of mind-tricking someone.
No, there's nothing strange here. Just the chalky yellow dust and the thorn bushes, and the bare, flaky red rock of the mountain. Jyn would worry about their tracks but the wind's forecast to whip up in hours; they have masks and scarves and gloves for the return. And stormtroopers don't come out here. The local garrison's corrupt, and the colonel knows there is no money to be had in these bare lands.
Mawar comes back wincing. "Never mind the bushes," she says, "look out for the gorse."
Jyn grins, and looks away, at the dusty grey bowl of the sky.
There's a pause.
"Are you here against your will?" Mawar asks, her voice the voice of a dispassionate judge, one that's not altogether pleased.
Jyn hunches her shoulders instinctively, then settles back into the sandy hillock she's sitting against. "You think I want to be here?"
"No, Carlin, I don't." An artful hesitation. "If that's your name."
Jyn rolls her eyes sideways. "Is Eilis yours?"
Mawar laughs, and Jyn feels a matching smirk tug at the corners of her mouth.
When the echoes die away, Jyn says: "Six months ago I got caught up in a riot. Broke my arm. Ives' lot pulled me out and had me healed. It went bad, so I wasn't myself for a while." She shrugs. "When I woke up they had most of my things, and they told me I owed three hundred and fifty credits. Plus whatever I incurred for meals."
Mawar gives a sharp intake of breath.
"If you're wondering what Ives isn't telling you about me," Jyn says flatly, "it's that."
"Understood," Mawar replies softly, and it's like she's a commander, taking on new information about a change in field conditions.
Jyn waits for a few long moments, then caps the water gourd and says: "Don't know if the Alliance will be interested in giving him money if he does things like that. There are others, I know, but I don't know what happened to them. If he sold them or something." There are slave markets beneath the surface, if you go far enough east; there's a smuggler's spaceport there, hidden from detection by unusual weather conditions. Or, more profitably, Ives might have had them turned in. Jyn is confident now that she's the only one who owes a debt larger than fifty credits, the only one with so much money to repay it might be worth violence instead.
"I'll bear that in mind," Mawar says, and stretches her legs out in front of her. Her cloak looks like a beggar's all-purpose blanket but her trousers are old-style under-armour blacks, the kind any veteran owns and might have sold off, or that might have been taken off a body. Common as muck. "But if you can keep one secret you can keep another. You know what I am."
Jyn nods slowly. She can glimpse the lightsaber strapped to Mawar's thigh from where she's sitting, but she knows no-one else has been allowed to see it.
"I'm looking for a Jedi artefact," Mawar continues. "At the site of a battle which took place here a few days before the end of the Clone Wars. There was no time for salvage, so the battlefield… took its natural course. The Jedi general who died there had a holocron in her possession, a sort of datacube, and it's never been found."
Jyn crosses her legs and leans forward on her knees. "What makes you think it wasn't scavenged?"
"It identified a list of people who had left the Order or its associate Corps as padawans or knights," Mawar says. "Some people who would have been on that list are personally known to me and are living relatively untroubled lives. The Empire has never gone after them individually. That wouldn't be the case if their status was known. Force-sensitives are hunted wherever they are found."
Jyn grits her teeth at the thought. "Right. So what's this holocron look like? And why do you want my help finding it?"
"Firstly, I wanted to get you alone and find out what Ives' problem was," Mawar says. "Human noses aren't great, so you wouldn't be aware that he stinks with fear whenever you're around." (Jyn grins.) "Secondly, you're attuned to related objects. He showed me your necklace."
Jyn's hackles go up. There's a very still moment when she's balanced on the razor's edge between rage and outrage, and then she remembers what Saw always used to tell her about anger: no good, if not harnessed. It wasn't Mawar who took the necklace from around her feverish, heavily sedated neck.
"He had no right," Jyn says.
"I know," Mawar replies. "He recognised it as a kyber crystal, but he wasn't sure what exactly it was. I told him it was just a nicely shaped chip."
There's more information in that sentence, Jyn thinks, than Mawar is openly offering. She probes a little deeper. "Is it?"
This close, when she glances sideways, she can see all the points on Mawar's gleaming teeth.
"No," Mawar answers. "It's the perfect shape and size for a lightsaber blank."
Jyn blinks hard and repeatedly, looking down at her feet. This feels like more than she expected, and it scrapes away at a scar that aches. Her mother didn't tell her that, when she looped the necklace over Jyn's eight-year-old head and ran back to confront Krennic. Her mother didn't tell her anything. But what could you tell to a child of that age? She was probably safer ignorant.
"It was a gift," Jyn says. "I thought it was just a necklace."
"It's not," says Mawar.
They sit in silence for a few moments, and then Mawar picks up a thorny stick with a sigh. "This is what the holocron looks like," she says, and starts to draw in the dirt. Six sides, perfect geometric corners. "It should be a pinkish purple. It might sound like it's singing to you."
Jyn snorts. "Okay."
Mawar rolls her eyes, which seem a brighter blue out here than they do in the guarded confines of Ives' cave hideouts. "You'll know what I mean if you hear it."
They ride the rest of the way to the deep long-dried river bed where the battle was fought - an ambush, Mawar says, looking weary. The bodies were piled up and burned, probably by the locals rather than by Imperial forces that would have sought to reuse what could be reused, so all that's left is dust, charred plastoid, and the twisted, rusty skeletons of small gunships and troop carriers too damaged to recycle. But Mawar, if she was a Jedi, probably commanded ships like that, stood on those troop carriers, knew their specs and their solid floors. And maybe she feels some kind of echo in the Force, too. It can't be pleasant.
Mawar doesn't care about unpleasant, or at least she doesn't take much thought for it. She clearly quartered and searched parts of the river bed before, but now she has Jyn's help and can move over more ground. Her tactics, she tells Jyn, are guided by an estimated reconstruction of the battle, and where the Jedi in question should have been at the time when she was cut down. They know she never made it to formal medical help, so she must have died on the field, and her body was never recovered. Not even by the Imperials.
Jyn doesn't know any of this, actually, but Mawar does, and she supposes that's enough.
They search for what remains of the morning, and then take a lunchtime pause; Mawar scrapes out large areas of her map and eyes it consideringly. She gives off annoyance, even though Jyn knows this search must have been a long shot. Maybe it's actually worry. Jyn is surprised that she doesn't bother to hide it.
"We keep searching the open," Jyn says, eyeing the distant rock wall, far from the patchy shade they're sitting in. "Are you sure she didn't die under cover?"
Mawar blinks at her. "The entire command team was cut down at once and none of their bodies were recovered; I remember being told about it at the time. I assume that meant they were blown up."
Jyn points at the rock wall. "Plenty of landslides over that way. And this is an old river bed. Rivers make caves."
Mawar stares in the same direction, and her eyes widen slightly. "Good point."
After lunch they search along the wall. It takes a couple of hours, and Mawar looks less like she's searching for an old landslide and more like she's listening at a door, but then Mawar comes to a halt beside a slumped collection of boulders that have been there for so long stunted vegetation is growing around them.
"Can you hear it?" Mawar says, a new brightness in the orange of her cheeks.
"No," Jyn says frankly. Mawar doesn't even look that disappointed, she's so pleased about her find.
Mawar scales the boulders, ignoring Jyn's protests about not starting another landslide, and peers in through a dark glimmer at the very top, which Jyn took for a shadow. "This is the place," she announces, and pushes a top boulder out of the way.
Jyn steps smartly aside as it rolls to the bottom. "Can't you just move it all with the Force?"
"I try not to use the Force if it isn't strictly necessary," Mawar says, hooking her hands into a space under the roof of the cave and sliding into the darkness. "Getting caught at it is not a good idea."
"At least take a headlamp," Jyn yells after her. The sight of that small dark space fills her with unease.
A distant assent floats back to her, along with a considerable quantity of pale yellow dust. Jyn swears, and sets one boot sole to the first obvious foothold.
When she reaches the top of the rockslide - none of which, fortunately, has actually slid very far as she climbs it; some of the cliff-face must have been blasted down by the Separatists - she dons her own headlamp, and peers down into the cave. Mawar has lit up her lightsabers and is looking down at several bodies. Skeletons, really, still clothed but dry with the years and the climate; the cave is not damp at all. It must have been abandoned by the waters long years before. What skin is visible - mercifully very little - is dried to paper, tattoos stretched waveringly across hands and cheeks like children's drawings. The Jedi, easily identified by the cloth robes which have not yet crumbled with the passing of time, was of an exoskeletoned species Jyn doesn't know. Her skull bows heavily forward against the chest of a helmeted clone, who has his arms around her shoulders and his cheek pressed against the top of her head. Her left leg has stained and torn the robe, and Jyn can just about see that dark liquid has soaked into the sand and dried there, beneath a futile field dressing. The chitinous plates of her left thigh are all but shattered; she probably bled out fast. There is medical equipment scattered about her hips and legs.
There are other bodies, all clones; two half crushed beneath the rock fall, and one more curled onto his side, loosely covered by a medical blanket. Mawar's footsteps stand out clear in the dust of years, but there are other footsteps too, older, disturbing the sandy floor of the cave. Some rush over to where the clone beneath the medical blanket is, others to the place where the Jedi is. But overlaying all these is a single pair of clone's boot prints, circling the cave, from rock fall to where the Jedi sits.
"One died of their injuries," Mawar says. "Two died in the rock fall. The last…"
Jyn waits respectfully, or as respectfully as she can while hanging halfway over a boulder with a headlamp askew over her eyebrows. She hasn't been respectful of anything for years but Mawar deserves not to have her grief interrupted.
"He was a commander," Mawar says, and gestures with her lightsaber. "Look."
"At what," says Jyn.
"Come down here."
Jyn looks down into the cave, lit only by a pair of glowing white lightsabers and Jyn's own headlamp, plus the faint stream of light where Mawar removed a boulder, so easy to block, so easy to leave her trapped, and she has no back-up lamp because Ives is cheap with her, and -
What, is she afraid of the dark now? Or the dead?
Jyn snorts, clamps down tight on that secret craven part of her, and slings her body through the gap to grope her way down to the cave floor. The dust is deeper than she expected, and softer. It muffles her footprints until they're as quiet as Mawar's. Jyn does not shiver.
"What the kriff are you talking about?" she says instead.
"Rank insignia." Mawar points out a set of bars on one of the clones' chestplates. "These were all experienced men with the same regimental history. You can tell from the armour markings."
A faint memory stirs. Saw said something about this once that was relevant, and then never a word again. "They painted them themselves?"
Mawar nods. "They had few choices, but they chose that."
Jyn assimilates this, and looks around the cave, seeing again the circling footprints, the two bodies propped against the wall - and seeing too, from this angle, soot splashes against the rocks, and an abandoned blaster rifle. She looks at Mawar, who isn't looking at her. There's an obvious story here, but Jyn doesn't really want to tell it to the last person living who knew these people. His men died, his Jedi died, he couldn't raise anyone with a distress signal, he had no way out, so he turned his face to the wall. Better than struggling with the last stale air in the darkness. Jyn understands that.
"Commanders also had a poison pill," Mawar says, as if she wants to be detached. "If they were captured they were required to take it."
Jyn says nothing. In their shoes she would have done just the same.
"As if they were slagging equipment," Mawar says, looking down at the floor.
Jyn folds her arms awkwardly and waits. Mawar murmurs something low in a language Jyn vaguely recognises as Mandalorian, and lets out a long sigh. It's weary rather than overtly grieved, but Jyn understands that, too.
"I can search the bodies for the holocron," Jyn offers, surprising herself.
"Thank you," Mawar says, smiling faintly. "That's kind. But it's not on them; either Chatter or Master Martha hid it. Presumably Chatter, given the extent of her injuries."
"What?" Jyn says, instead of how the fuck?
Mawar makes her way towards the back of the cave, shadowed and hidden from sight but opening up into a dim catacomb as Mawar moves forward with her lightsabers, turning her head and striped montrals this way and that like she's echolocating. Jyn remembers her saying earlier that the holocron might sing, and blurts -
"Are you listening for it?"
Mawar hums in response, shuts off one of her lightsabers, and kneels. Jyn can't help the tiny catch of her breath as the light diminishes, and from the faintest halt in Mawar's movement she knows the other woman heard. But Mawar doesn't comment, just digs around in a sandy niche until she pulls out something and sits there looking down at it for a long moment.
And suddenly Jyn can hear… what is it she can hear? Some soft distant noise, like a bell chiming or a stream running, somewhere a long way away in this land so dry and without sweetness Jyn's teeth are sticking to her lips.
"That's what I meant by singing," Mawar says, and deposits the holocron in Jyn's hastily cupped hands.
The singing doesn't get louder as such, but it does get clearer and sweeter, and Jyn is simultaneously horrified that someone would trust her with this and determined not to let it go. Her protests die in her throat, and it takes her several moments to realise that Mawar is holding something else as well, and that she seems strangely unhappy for someone who just found the priceless Jedi artefact they've been searching for for weeks, if not months.
"What's wrong?" Jyn asks, surprising herself again.
Mawar turns back towards her, eyes still on the other object she found. It's a plastoid vambrace. Jyn glances back, and sees that the commander clone is not wearing his right vambrace. Why abandon it in a dark corner of a cave, though? Some kind of protection for the holocron, maybe? But then why is Mawar looking at it so hard?
"It's a curse of sorts," Mawar says finally, turning the curve of the vambrace into the light. Letters Jyn can't read have been scratched deeply into its surface with the point of a knife. "He blamed the natborn commander of their naval support for not reinforcing them, and for not answering distress signals that came from clones."
Jyn's breath catches and twists.
"I curse you with the strength of my arm," Mawar says softly, and then stops. It sounds like a ritual formula. "A traditional Mandalorian curse. It used to mean the start of a blood feud."
"And now?" Jyn says.
Mawar doesn't answer, so Jyn tries another angle. "Who is it?"
"Grand Moff Tarkin," Mawar replies.
Jyn blows air out of her cheeks. Tarkin is the Emperor's creature, one of his most prized. Saw nearly got him once, at the cost of a squadron of X-wings the Partisans could ill afford to lose. "Bit of a tall order."
"You never know," Mawar says, sliding back behind that mask of unknowability. But when they climb back into the light and Mawar levitates the boulder back after them, she takes not just the holocron but the curse.
Jyn finally gets given something to do a couple of days later - disappearing an activist who's getting too bold before the Imperials pick them up. Ives has been watching her suspiciously since she got back with Mawar, but whatever report Mawar made must have been good because he doesn't give her any shit. And getting the activist out is satisfying, from a professional and a personal point of view. It'll wipe a lot of credits off her debt, it's not the shitty risky busywork she gets stuck with a lot, and it will really fucking annoy the Imperials. A good investigative journalist is helpful that way.
It's a punch to the gut when Jyn gets back and Mawar is gone. There's no explanation, of course, there wouldn't be, and Jyn walks out of Ives's triumphant speech about how they'll definitely be part of the Alliance and how they're a key part of the Rebellion in this sector and things are only going to get better when it becomes clear he has nothing of substance to say. She gets a few glares and mutters and jostles for that. She shoves right back and doesn't care, all the way back to the pitiful nook where she's graciously allowed to sleep.
Why the fuck does she care so much that Mawar just left? She doesn't know the woman, she's not her lover or her sister or her soldier. Mawar doesn't owe her anything, and as Jyn knows perfectly well, people always leave.
There's something askew in the wall. Jyn picks at it irritably to have something to claw at, and is shocked as all fuck when it comes off in her hand, revealing a scrap of flimsi wrapped around something the size of Jyn's thumb. Jyn grabs it, and the flimsi unravels around her crystal. She grabs at that too, like it will disintegrate if she doesn't, and stares at it like it could disappear if she isn't careful, like it might not be real. Her breath sticks in her throat and her heart feels uneven. She grips so hard the thong cuts into her palm, and when she strings it round her neck she does so with an almost panicked insistence of gesture. No-one is taking this away from her again.
Only then does she remember that there was a note. She picks it up more slowly and reads through it with care. Two strings of numbers and three sentences:
Had to leave quickly. Thank you for your help. Until we meet again.
One of the numbers is a set of coordinates, which lead to Mawar's abandoned speeder. The second is a combination for a lock, which leads to all Jyn's impounded gear.
Jyn is gone before dawn. She leaves behind the name Kestrel Dawn, and the memory of the holocron singing.
Chapter 3: AhsokaChapter TextFor someone Force-sensitive and trained, walking into Maz Kanata's one-stop-shop for the less-legal side of the galaxy is like accidentally taking spice. The first time she visited, Ahsoka spent the whole time trying not to twitch and stare. It's not the variegated (and psychically loud) crowd of sentients, or the way the strange rough grey stone of the temple creates echoes. Ahsoka spent her adolescence hopping across the galaxy; she can cope with that. No, it's the whispers that seem to come out of the walls, the strange aura that hangs around Maz in the Force like it's a live thing, the glints and flickers that probably derive from the building's history, and the strangely tangible presence of whatever the hell it is Maz is keeping in her secret cellars that gets Ahsoka. Like she stumbled into a patch of nettles, mixed in with innocuous plants, and keeps getting stung.
But, Ahsoka thinks, as her eyes adjust to the twin pressures of the gloom and the atmosphere, she's not here to try poking around the cellars again; Maz got mad enough last time, in her circular, enigmatic way. She's here to look for work.
Nobody really reacts when she walks in. She's good at not being noticed, and if anyone who wants to pick a fight they won't do it here. Maz doesn't like that. Even Boba Fett, who Ahsoka could feel sliding along the sick edge of deciding whether to kill her just because she was once a Jedi, had lowered his knife and said they fucked you over, too , against every single one of his instincts. Ahsoka still avoids that corner of the bar and the memory. She hadn't been able to disagree with him.
Maz still doesn't light the cavernous rooms properly and she still tends bar herself. Ahsoka's only currency here right now is that she knows Maz, so she makes her way over to the small orange figure wrapped in jackets and headscarves, and catches her eye.
Maz's own brighten - or at least Ahsoka thinks so, behind the many lenses. But she doesn't call Ahsoka loudly by name, exuberant or accusing, as she does to others.
"Ah! Come to see your old friend?" Maz grins and makes her a drink - a cheap one, Ahsoka notices, and she doesn't immediately ask for payment. Ahsoka hands over credits.
"I was in the area," she says. "Couldn't leave without seeing you."
"Ha! Do old Maz a favour and don't pick a fight with the Ohnaka boy again."
Ahsoka smiles. Hondo's at least twenty years older than her, and the last fight they had was staged, but they did break a few windows so she supposes she's earned the rebuke. "No, ma'am."
"What you looking for?" Maz demands, pouring her own, more expensive drink and getting straight to the point.
"Work," Ahsoka says, equally blunt. "I need to get out to the Outer Rim, towards the westernmost edge of the Savareen sector. And I want to go quietly."
Maz nods slowly, consideringly. "What licence?"
Ahsoka shows a Level II piloting licence for Class VI freighters and small craft: they would laugh her out of the room in the Core, and the more respectable firms in the galaxy would hire her as a back-up at best, but the kind of people who come here will accept it for a copilot. Ahsoka has a story all lined up of bribes at her local testing center, official interference, the steep price of more valued qualifications. A hundred people in here could say the same. And probably very few of them can fly anything at all as well as Ahsoka can.
The name on her licence is Sonera Beris, which is another good reason to show it. Maz hasn't seen her use this name before.
"Piloting?"
Ahsoka shrugs. She needs to get out towards the cells in that sector; it doesn't really matter to her how she gets there. "Ship work. You know the kind of thing."
"I'll ask around," Maz says, and pats Ahsoka's hand like she's her grandmother. "Take a seat. Finish your drink. You look tired." She pushes a bowl of nuts at Ahsoka. "And eat something. You're too skinny."
Ahsoka smiles out of one side of her mouth. There's always an extra weight to it when Maz tells you she can see something, but this time she's not saying anything Ahsoka didn't know. "Tired" is becoming a way of life for her: sometimes, she could sell her soul for someone to count on, to take the second watch or share the burden. But life doesn't work like that, and she has work to do.
She takes herself off to a quiet corner where she can observe the people around her without making herself stand out too much, either by her conspicuousness or by obvious attempts to avoid scrutiny. She doesn't stand out too much, in and of herself; Maz's bar is majority nonhuman, unlike a lot of other gathering places, because the Imperials don't bother it. So she doesn't swathe herself in layers to disguise her montrals, but she has dyed her skin to alter her patterns. A lesson she never managed to learn from Obi-Wan before; caution pays off.
Thinking of them is painful. She lets the thoughts slide from her fingers like water, and takes a sip of her drink, looks around. After a moment she casually drops her gaze, and fans through her scandocs as if checking they're all in order. Best not to look too focused.
She looks up because there's movement flickering on the edge of her peripheral vision, and is very surprised to see a face she knows: the artist formerly known as Kestrel Dawn, better dressed, armed, and generally looking less like a feral tooka that has had it up to here with being kicked but is going to wait until she can reach your eyes before attacking The woman's face is a little more refined than it was when Ahsoka met her on Tamsye Prime, but it's less sallow than it was on Glarean, so this is probably the effect of her growing into her bones rather than poor nutrition; if Ahsoka has to guess, she must now be in her early twenties, ten years younger than Ahsoka herself. She's still wearing the kyber crystal; Ahsoka can't see it but it sings around her neck, louder here in the echoes of Maz's bar with its strange grey stone. And, most surprising of all, she recognises Ahsoka, even in the shadows, montrals dyed, and having lost a significant amount of weight. Her tells are not unlike Saw's; that slight pause that's more in the movement of the muscles than the whole body, that slight widening of the eyes.
Ahsoka lifts her chin slightly and almost smiles.
Kestrel makes her way over and takes a seat. "Been a while," she says. "But I think we've met."
"A while back," Ahsoka agrees, though it doesn't seem so long to her. "Sonera. You're looking better."
"Tanith. You're looking worse." There's a slight crease between Tanith's eyes, and it looks like it's been there often before.
Ahsoka shrugs. "Ups and downs. You know how it is."
"Do I," Tanith mutters, not like a question but like a confirmation. She forks her hair - longer than it was before, dyed blonde, and badly enough that that's likely all that would show up in a description of her - out of her face and looks at Ahsoka. Her eyes are hard but not unkind, and there too Ahsoka sees Saw. She must have fought with him for years to pick up so many mannerisms, which means she was a child. Ahsoka's saddened, but not surprised. Saw was always ready to lay weapons in the hands of the young and angry.
"What are you looking for?" Tanith says, after a pause just long enough to be awkward.
"Work," Ahsoka says. "Passage and food towards the Outer Rim, in the direction of the Savareen sector."
Tanith nods. "What kind of work?"
"If it's on a ship, I can handle it," Ahsoka says. "Except maybe sanitation engineer, but hell, I could learn."
Tanith almost cracks a smile. "I'm signed on as a ship guard for the Zabirliss , going that way. Final stop on this route is Lessu, on Ryloth."
Is she trying to help Ahsoka? There's some kind of clumsy, wary extension of kindness that doesn't sound much like the half-feral, isolated, and deliberately frightening young woman Ahsoka met on Glarean, but does resemble those few awkward sentences of comfort she offered in the cave where Hila Martha, Chatter, and three other clones unknown to Ahsoka died. It's heartwarming; Ahsoka's smile is small but real. "That sounds good to me."
"You might have other offers," Tanith says. "The pay's all right, but it's not great."
"I'm not looking to attract attention," Ahsoka says. "Or take too many risks." Well-paying jobs of this kind are always too close to the Empire from a paperwork perspective or very dangerous. "And working with at least one known quantity is advantageous."
Tanith also smiles slightly. "The previous guard was chucked off for drunkenness," she says.
"I'm not really one for parties," Ahsoka says dryly, and wins a lightning-flash grin from Tanith. "Are they looking for a range fighter or close in?"
"Close in, mostly for protection work on the ground," Tanith says. "But if you can man a ship's guns - short-range laser, you know the kind of thing you get on a freighter - that'll be a bonus."
Ahsoka nods. "I can do that."
For the first time since the bunker in Tamsye Prime, Tanith looks truly curious - a well-hidden flicker and then it's gone. "Good. They'll expect you to fight me as a trial."
"Don't go easy on me," Ahsoka says, with a perfectly straight face.
There's a very small twitch of Tanith's lips. Ahsoka gets the feeling that once upon a time it would have been a brilliant - and dangerous - smile.
"I won't," Tanith says.
When Maz swings by with a plate of spiced meatballs Ahsoka didn't order - Ahsoka wonders what she wants a favour for, but is far too hungry not to accept - she has several options to suggest to Ahsoka. Most are dangerous, or even more heavily Imperial-controlled than Glarean. Maz seems agnostic about all of them, which is more likely to indicate that none of them involve her competitors than that they are all equivalent.
She mentions the Ryloth run, too, and gives a decent bill of health to the captain and crew. "You were talking to their new guard, I think," she says as if off-hand and uninterested, but her eyes are gleaming behind the lenses.
"Tanith," Ahsoka says. "We've met."
"You like her?" Maz says, and gives Ahsoka temporary pause. Nomadic as she is, she doesn't have time to like anyone, to view people from any other perspective than threat-ally-neutral. On that scale, Tanith is in the neutral category right now; not a threat, for her work in the river bed northeast of Glarean spaceport, almost an ally for her silence on the subject of Ahsoka's background, and not really known enough to be either.
"She knows what she's doing," Ahsoka says finally. "One to watch."
She could mean that Tanith will end up captain of her own profitable ship, a high-level enforcer for Crimson Dawn, an Imperial governor on some planet where she can join the power structure and take control; Tanith, unless she disguises it, speaks with a Coruscant accent Ahsoka hasn't heard the likes of since Obi-Wan. She could fit right in, if she wanted to.
Ahsoka doesn't mean any of those things.
"She does have something about her, that one," Maz says, and Ahsoka's pretty confident that she means the kyber crystal around Tanith's neck. "Watch out; they'll expect you to fight her."
"Is she a brawler?" Ahsoka asks, only half serious. She saw Tanith spar on Glarean, poorly fed and unarmed, and she was very good; in better physical condition with her chosen weapons to hand, she'd be dangerous. But probably not a serious danger to Ahsoka, who is likely faster, has a longer reach, and has the benefit of the Force. Still, Ahsoka overheard Tanith call herself Saw Gerrera's best soldier, and she doesn't seem to be one for exaggeration, even in her thoughts. It's a title she would have earned the hard way.
Maz cackles. "She's sharp. Very sharp."
"I look forward to working with her," Ahsoka says pleasantly.
Maz grins at her. It's a grin that knows more than it's telling. "The same eyes in different people! I always know."
"That doesn't make sense, Maz," Ahsoka says, ignoring a weird frisson that is more likely related to Maz being superbly strange than the Force.
"Never mind that," Maz says, and smacks her wrist with a dishcloth that only theoretically polishes the bar. "Eat your meatballs."
The captain of the Zabirliss likes the sound of Ahsoka. Predators, he thinks, are always good value for guards. That's dumb and stereotypical, but they don't live in a galaxy where Ahsoka can call him on it. And anyway, none of that actually came out of his mouth.
He requires a trial and offers Ahsoka a selection of weapons and a space near the lake, out of the way of Maz's patrons but not too close to the soft ground of the lake shore. Tanith lingers close by, idly swinging a pair of truncheons. Ahsoka would have expected knives, but that was simplistic.
Ahsoka chooses a staff, and quickly discovers Tanith is good enough to make anyone sweat. Faster than she seems, hits harder than she should be able to, difficult to predict and fearless - but with a solid defence and a few obvious, aggressive tells. Someone taught her well. Ahsoka lands a few hits, but not many, and takes a hit to the upper arm that would have made her drop the staff if she hadn't locked it in her grip with the Force. The key is to get Tanith out from close quarters, where she plainly excels, and into a space where Ahsoka's greater reach and longer weapon can tell.
Not an easy ask. Ahsoka has just twisted one of the truncheons out of Tanith's grasp and been kicked in the gut for her pains, when the Zabirliss 's captain whistles sharply, the signal to call a halt to the bout. Tanith immediately backs off, gasping for breath and shoving a loose hank of blonde hair out of her eyes, and Ahsoka retreats a pace or two, assessing the damage. Bruising and a few microcracks only; she heals the deeper hurts, lets the simpler ones bloom.
Silently, they look at the captain. They've attracted a crowd and some betting; Ahsoka sees Maz refereeing and wishes she'd arranged to get a cut.
"Well, she didn't nearly kill you, unlike that zabrak yesterday," says the captain, scratching his head. "What do you think, Ms Ponta?"
Tanith gives Ahsoka a considering look, but Ahsoka can tell it's for show. Tanith made her decision five minutes ago, when Ahsoka didn't drop the staff.
"She's good," Tanith says curtly. "And our styles will mesh well. I say we take her on."
Ahsoka can't help smiling, but that's okay; Sonera would be smiling right now, if she were more than just a name on a licence.
"Good," the captain says. "It's taken long enough to find someone that meets your standards."
"It's worth waiting for quality," Tanith says, without a flicker of an expression. "We won't lose this one to drink three weeks in."
The captain glances between Tanith and Ahsoka. "Good to know," he says finally. "Welcome to the crew, Ms Beris. This is my wife, Filyns, she's our quartermaster and will get you settled." A Twi'lek with lilac skin dressed in practical leathers raises a hand in greeting, and Ahsoka bows her head in return.
"We leave at 2100 hours," the captain declares.
"I'll be ready," Ahsoka promises.
The captain nods and strides away through the crowd, leaving his wife to deal with the formalities.
Ahsoka glances sideways, and finds Tanith looking at her with a strange crooked smile.
"You're faster than I expected," Tanith says.
"You're stronger than I thought," Ahsoka answers.
Tanith holds out a hand, and Ahsoka clasps it. She has a tight grip, too, and blaster callouses that mesh with what Ahsoka knows of her history but not the accent or the well-hidden lightsaber blank round her neck.
"Looking forward to working with you," Tanith says. Those grey-green eyes are not unfriendly but they are totally opaque.
"Likewise," Ahsoka replies.
Well, she thinks. Let's see how this goes.