Title Prompt: Worth it in the End
Dec. 6th, 2018 12:54 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sanerontheinsideoriginal post
A followup to Lost at the Beginning
There’s a moment after they break atmosphere that Liura feels suddenly, violently queasy, and nearly curls over in the copilot’s seat. Force-given warnings like this are godsdamned inconvenient, and serve only the purpose of making sure all that staggering, senseless loss of life isn’t packed into a single instant.
A mixed blessing, as usual.
“Master?”
Larom’s worried face floats up in front of her, and Liura forces a pained smile. Not your Master, she thinks, but cannot say, too busy swallowing down the constriction in her throat. It won’t be long, maybe just a few seconds, before Larom understands it all too well. Shield, now, Liura sends urgently, but that’s all the warning she can give.
Then Yinchorr’s little moon, the one that smugglers use for a safe haven and a port between jobs, crumbles away to nothingness.
“Well,” Liura says into the silence. “That’s bound to rearrange the gravity wells a bit.”
Larom gives her a reproachful look, but Liura knows they’re both thinking of the same thing. There’s no way to process a loss on the order of what they’ve just witnessed, and that isn’t just the loss of life. They’ve never had to plan for such a colossal setback—an entire delicate system of barter and trade and the complex tweaking of ship routes and systems, and they’ve just lost at least twenty crews. They’d even chosen this moon for one of their layovers, because it was remote, not likely to be anyone’s target.
The crew Liura and her not-Padawan are with now were only supposed to give them a test run to a nearby system, nothing fancy. Lia’s never had much room to be picky about the crews she works with, but she’s lost even that margin now.
“My girlfriend was on that moon,” a thin slip of an Iridonian Zabrak pipes up, voice small and quiet. Liura feels another sharp pain spike through her when she turns to look and finds herself staring at a girl, gods, she can’t be that much older than seventeen. Maybe the thought is a touch hypocritical, given that Lia was barely eighteen when she came into the beginnings of her smuggling empire, but Jedi aren’t really afforded much of a childhood. Larom lost her Master at fourteen, found Lia two years later, and now Li can’t help but see vulnerability no matter how hard people try to bury theirs.
“Data burst says they’ve taken over the Golden Nyss,” their pilot squeaks. Lia eyes the scarred Chadra-Fan, takes in the missing half of his ear, the hard gleam in his eye.
“You want to take the fight to them,” she says neutrally, exchanging a quick flicker of a glance with Larom.
“Hells yes,” a gravelled voice snaps, and the captain, a tall Falleen woman, steps forward to wrap an arm around the trembling Zabrak girl. “I want a Nyss ship for a prize, too.”
Larom hisses something under her breath, and Lia nods her agreement. “Just so I have this straight: you want to face off against a military that just blew apart a moon, do some not-insignificant damage, kill at least a few hundred, then either take back the shipyards or take just one ship as a prize. That what you have in mind?”
The captain purses her lips and nods tightly. “Yeah,” she deadpans, stubborn, but the dull look in her eye tells Liura that her point has definitely been made.
Liura is a moment late in stifling a completely inappropriate burst of laughter, but is far too shellshocked to even feign embarrassment. She’s just felt the destruction of a populated moon, and she knew twenty of those crews enough to trust them in her network. “Fuck,” she breathes, a prickling burn of smouldering rage behind her breastbone, “why not.”
The captain doesn’t get her wish for a Golden Nyss prize ship. Liura’s still surprised she talked them out of going straight for the shipyards, in favour of launching an attack on Yinchorr and Yibbikoror. If nothing else, the latter was a practical suggestion, and the former was the pure textbook way to get themselves caught in the crossfire when the Republic came to take back the shipyards.
“We can take ‘em!” the Zabrak insists.
There’s bravado and then there’s just asking for trouble. Never mind the fact that there’s no Force-damn reason for the smugglers to be pissed at Judicial. Not yet, anyway.
Liura glares at the kid. “What’s your name?”
“Zaphi,” she says, chin jutting out in defiance.
“Zaphi: with what firepower do you want to take both Judicial and the Yinchorri?”
There are Barriak missiles in the cargo hold. Liura stares at the cargo, struck speechless for a second. “Are—are you—I’m confiscating those when we’re done here!”
The Zabrak kid smirks, but Lia doesn’t hold it against her all that much. Most people don’t know about the slave trade off in the Territories, near Wild Space—land sold to Barriak in exchange for missiles, and the people that land belonged to chained up as prizes of war and sold off at the markets. A few months ago, Gorzo sent her a compressed data burst full of evidence, witness accounts, verified and notarised transcripts—the entire thing took weeks to decrypt and to separate all the data layers. Gorzo occasionally betrayed a hint of Duro service training, but this was—the evidence he’d put together was impeccably organised, heavily encrypted, and craftily put together. This was veteran work.
Liura didn’t need to see the recorded message itself to know that it was a goodbye.
She used to think Gorzo would die recklessly. As the years went on she’d been forced to re-evaluate that; every now and then he’d uncover an altruistic streak light-years wide, and she really should have known, since he’d given her a start in the business. Liura should have realised, even then, that his streak of kindness always cost him.
The loss is still fresh. Avi, the captain, catches Lia’s expression. There must be some Force Sensitivity there, because she throws the kid a sharp look next. “We’ll get rid of them here,” Avi says, and Liura hears an answering note in the Force that says yes, actually, and try not to die while you do so.
Liura rolls her eyes—internally, so that no one but Larom would be asking her questions.
One thing that Lia never stops being grateful for, since acquiring an orphaned Padawan tail: her tail is damned useful, and Larom’s particular skillset amplifies her own in surprising ways. Where Larom got the schematics for Yinchorri battlecruisers, Lia may never know, but the schematics do give her a good idea of how to tune the homing beacon on the missiles to knock out navigation and power to weapons in almost the exact same shot. Most of the orbiting frigates are out for the count in under seven minutes, but one manages to hit atmosphere and get off a few shots back at them for good measure.
It doesn’t take much to leave the smugglers’ craft with heavy damage, to be fair. This ship isn’t meant for full-scale engagements with armed, angry, military-trained combatants, much less for frigates that carry at least twenty shuttles, about a hundred Yinchorri soldiers to each. Even if they have Barriak missiles at their disposal, the Barriaks are the only effective firepower they do have.
Lia shoves the others out into the escape pod and tweaks the navicomp one final time, kicks it for luck, then throws herself out of the cockpit. The Chadra-Fan pilot gives her a glare, but is at least grudgingly appreciative when he gets to see the result of her efforts: the wreck takes two shuttles along with it, and the delayed explosion of the Barriaks still in the cargo hold sends out a shockwave that knocks the frigate off course, sideways, and into oblivion.
At least one shuttle escapes that fate. That’s not a bad record.
The escape pod’s crash isn’t kind, leaving Liura to cut their way out. The smugglers are less than thrilled to realise they’ve been working with Jedi, which Lia thinks is rather petty given their recent near-death, and Larom openly says so. Liura hides a grin, privately thinking, Force and gods, I do love that kid.
Avi is fairly laconic about most things, but she’s damn pissed about losing her ship. “Could’ve been at the Nyss shipyards taking our pick of a prize, if it weren’t for a damn Jedi,” she spits, but there’s little conviction or heat in it.
“Relax,” Lia drawls, pulling in a breath of hot desert air and feeling her lightsaber hum in her hand. Kliks away, there are Jedi fighting the Yinchorri soldiers, and the sharp, predatory awareness of battle reaches out and sings in her.
“Shoot some scaly lizard assholes.” Lia grins back at them over her shoulder. “You’ll feel better.”
She hasn’t had need of her lightsaber in a long time. When Lia first started her smuggling ring, she’d been fairly diplomatic about things when possible, reasonably discreet when not—a blaster served her purposes just fine. She’d practiced with other weapons; staff had been a favourite, and after all, Liura had long ago sworn that she would never forget what Master Plo taught her. But the lightsaber had mostly been in her hands unlit, or for katas—never with a sparring partner involved.
Then she’d lost it at the moment she’d needed it most.
This one was new. A shipment of crystals had passed her through her hands, and she’d claimed and been claimed by this one in particular; the fence hadn’t given a damn, as it wasn’t even one of the best of the lot. Now it hummed in her hand, sang in her mind, with a blade almost violet at its heart and glowing ochre at the corona. Liura missed this song more than she cared to admit.
(She wishes she’d known about the Cortosis, though, but she’s never been a slow study.)
By the (premature) end of her apprenticeship, Liura had already been a seasoned fighter. It wasn’t quite Larom’s gift, but Lia had set her a goal of ‘adequate defense’, and afterwards been extremely well pleased when Larom exceeded expectations. Larom, for a laugh, still insists that she’d been tricked into it.
All the same, they prefer to stay off the Order’s radar. Larom is a lost Padawan, and she’s never even told Lia what went wrong on her last mission. Lia doesn’t press, much, but she knows full well that it’s something Larom will have to face one day. Herself, Lia might well qualify for a pirate at this point, definitely ripe for charges of organising a crime ring. But aside from that… much like Larom, she doesn’t want to go back, and doesn’t want to examine the reasons for her reluctance.
Didn’t want.
In the end, several things are made very clear to Lia on Yinchorr. The first: the tiny smugglers’ crew they’d worked with are now sticking to them for good or ill, and there’s no getting rid of them. That’s fine.
The second: rebuilding her operation is going to be difficult. A touch more legitimacy wouldn’t hurt, and besides, something in the Force is rather insistent that she needs to get back to Coruscant, that there was something going on over the last year, something she’d missed (but what?).
The third: Lia misses the feeling of fighting alongside Jedi. She didn’t cross paths with anyone on Yinchorr, but she felt them, and even that was enough to lift her spirits.
It was enough to remind her of home.
Lia also felt their deaths. There was never a more effective summoning call, Lia thinks one night as she lights a candle for each of the fallen, whispers their name into the smoke. Liura isn’t entirely sure where she picked up this tradition of honouring the dead: a glass of water, a bit of bread for the journey (damned if she’ll ever do it with ration bars), and a candle to light their way into the Force. Not a Jedi tradition at all.
(The candle, Liura borrowed from the people she’s lived with and fought for, these last ten years, but it’s a common enough ritual. The bread and water… that is something older, something that lurks in her memories before she came to the Temple.)
It feels odd, living life by habits and rituals and traditions that would seem entirely alien to the people who raised her. It’s… almost terrifying, the thought of going home like this.
But maybe that was the trouble, after all, she gets around to thinking that night. So much of herself was buried, so much of herself wrapped up tight in silence, tiptoeing around traps and pitfalls set by another for her.
Before, the Temple had never really felt like home. Home had been with her Master, always full of invisible lines not to cross, not even to tread near. Liura had spent so much effort, contorting herself into a small space, pained with embarrassment at her failures—that no one saw as failures but she; seeking out other Masters for lessons that her Master would only ever teach with sharpness and words that cut deep. And when those cuts bled, she’d hated herself all the more for allowing herself to be hurt by mere words.
Ten years out in the wilderness, Liura had discovered a great deal about herself that she’d never really known, or liked. She liked trashy holonovels, loved fantasy holovids full of noble and naive tales. She cried—she could cry so much over books and vids and people and the sheer joy of feeling soft, small beastling’s fur under her fingers. Her anger, when it came, was not something to shunt aside or stomp on, and grief was also meant to be felt, not cut away and given short shrift, as though it would eventually shrink into nothing. She’d learned that sometimes her memories tricked her and showed her ill-meaning in innocent words, and learned to swallow back that unnecessary pain, soothing wounds many, many years old.
But she’d also learned that the Temple, full of Force Sensitive, trained beings—for all that her Master was in it, and that had the power to cloud her mind like nothing else—the Temple had always been the one place she’d felt whole. Larom had been her first hint: when this lost Padawan found her, something shook itself off in her heart and refused to lie still ever again. The first rejection of loneliness, perhaps. Which in itself was a wonder, because it wasn’t as though Lia was particularly familiar with anything else.
Maybe there were pieces of her that she could never reclaim or remember. Maybe Lia would never fit just right with other Jedi. But there were parts of herself that she could never let go again.
And the Temple, apparently, was one.
Lia takes her time. She doesn’t go back to Coruscant in a day—nor could she, there’s too much to fix after that setback on Yinchorr. She trains Larom to keep the system running without their involvement, trains her to spot people who’ll make responsible deputies, reminds her that every planet needs to be invested in their own part of the Exchange.
Larom is, of course, anything but slow or stupid. If she doesn’t understand yet, she’ll understand in time, Lia thinks. At least they’ve discussed that Liura’s return to Coruscant is, ultimately, necessary for the Exchange to keep running. Lia just hadn’t quite mentioned that, rather than dive right into the Lower City and find the people she needs to see, she fully intends to turn the other way and brashly walk up to the Temple entrance, and request an audience with the Council themselves.
In a way—whenever Liura falters, and wonders how she could ever be accepted back to the home that she left, she reminds herself—it’s really a matter of warning the Temple of any potential conflict of interest. She knows there are Jedi tasked with monitoring the Lower Levels. She knows well enough that her business involves negotiating with Black Sun and Syndicat and other, lesser crime families, for fair wind and open space. Sometimes she’s even deigned to do them a favour. So really, while Liura is riding an existing problem and turning it to its best use, it is difficult to argue that she’s not also… feeding it.
More than that, Lia knows that should anyone learn of a Jedi involved in smuggling and black market trade, the Order would be right to bloody well have her head.
She curses herself thoroughly, standing at the Council Chamber doors with her heart in her throat. There’s a datachip in her belt pouch with enough material to cripple half the active dealers on the black market (but only the half that would benefit her own Exchange by being indiscriminately dead), and another chip that has (outdated) information on her own activities, with enough junk data to protect what remains of the Exchange in its current form.
She’s an idiot. But if this is the closest she’ll ever come to being home again… Lia is just enough of an idiot to walk right into the trap. Attachment, Lia thinks rather bitterly, is a stupid, stupid thing to ask someone to let go of, if it’s the very thing that drags you back home like a leash. Even after a decade.
Liura hopes the Council is self-aware enough to realise that. She hopes that, if this is the last time she sees this place, maybe, at the very least, they’ll give her a wide berth the way the syndicates do.
***
Lia waits five hours while the Council deliberates, and figures if they’re losing sleep over her ‘report’, the least she can do is keep herself awake out of solidarity. (At least, she convinces herself that’s what she’s doing, and it’s not the jangly tension of wondering if they’re going to kill a Fallen Jedi or just hand her right over to Judicial that’s keeping her awake.)
Bizarrely, none of that happens.
Master Windu sweeps out of the Chamber doors while the rest of the Council mils around tiredly within and takes her elbow, steering her down the hall to the lift and all the way to the Healers’ while saying something—instructions? Details? There’s too much, and Lia really is tired, but—
“As soon as Terza clears you, there is a mission we’d like you to take, if you’re willing—”
Lia stops short. “A mission.”
Mace turns to look at her, almost as though he’s trying not to look amused, and is actually failing for once. “You seem to be pretty good at figuring out how to deal with corrupt governments. We have a problem: the Eriadu courts seem to have stalled on the investigation of the assassinations at the Trade Summit—oh, you’re familiar with it,” he adds, now openly smirking, at Liura’s pained and not-quite-silent groan.
“House Tarkin.”
“Welcome back,” Mace deadpans.
Lia, however, doesn’t budge from where she’s standing.
“Something wrong?”
She bites her lip. “A bit. You’re giving me a mission before you’ve even had a chance to verify everything I’ve told you. If you ask me, that’s… more than a little suspect.”
Mace shakes his head. “Master Tet Wuq and Knight Nishika Ahnura reported of your decision to remain on a planet they’d been assigned to. Master Halcyon confirmed. Furthermore, your Exchange, as you call it, has had noticeable impact on the Mid Rim worlds some of our teams are assigned to. I’m sure we’ll need more time to confirm the correlation is more than coincidental. But then,” Mace adds, with the beginnings of a truly evil grin, “you’ve been on the Rim for a decade. You’re Terza’s new favourite now.”
Lia opens her mouth. Closes it. Then—“I can still run, you know,” she says, dejected, but shakes her head and starts walking again.
ladyteldra said: Title Prompt: Worth it in the End
A followup to Lost at the Beginning
There’s a moment after they break atmosphere that Liura feels suddenly, violently queasy, and nearly curls over in the copilot’s seat. Force-given warnings like this are godsdamned inconvenient, and serve only the purpose of making sure all that staggering, senseless loss of life isn’t packed into a single instant.
A mixed blessing, as usual.
“Master?”
Larom’s worried face floats up in front of her, and Liura forces a pained smile. Not your Master, she thinks, but cannot say, too busy swallowing down the constriction in her throat. It won’t be long, maybe just a few seconds, before Larom understands it all too well. Shield, now, Liura sends urgently, but that’s all the warning she can give.
Then Yinchorr’s little moon, the one that smugglers use for a safe haven and a port between jobs, crumbles away to nothingness.
“Well,” Liura says into the silence. “That’s bound to rearrange the gravity wells a bit.”
Larom gives her a reproachful look, but Liura knows they’re both thinking of the same thing. There’s no way to process a loss on the order of what they’ve just witnessed, and that isn’t just the loss of life. They’ve never had to plan for such a colossal setback—an entire delicate system of barter and trade and the complex tweaking of ship routes and systems, and they’ve just lost at least twenty crews. They’d even chosen this moon for one of their layovers, because it was remote, not likely to be anyone’s target.
The crew Liura and her not-Padawan are with now were only supposed to give them a test run to a nearby system, nothing fancy. Lia’s never had much room to be picky about the crews she works with, but she’s lost even that margin now.
“My girlfriend was on that moon,” a thin slip of an Iridonian Zabrak pipes up, voice small and quiet. Liura feels another sharp pain spike through her when she turns to look and finds herself staring at a girl, gods, she can’t be that much older than seventeen. Maybe the thought is a touch hypocritical, given that Lia was barely eighteen when she came into the beginnings of her smuggling empire, but Jedi aren’t really afforded much of a childhood. Larom lost her Master at fourteen, found Lia two years later, and now Li can’t help but see vulnerability no matter how hard people try to bury theirs.
“Data burst says they’ve taken over the Golden Nyss,” their pilot squeaks. Lia eyes the scarred Chadra-Fan, takes in the missing half of his ear, the hard gleam in his eye.
“You want to take the fight to them,” she says neutrally, exchanging a quick flicker of a glance with Larom.
“Hells yes,” a gravelled voice snaps, and the captain, a tall Falleen woman, steps forward to wrap an arm around the trembling Zabrak girl. “I want a Nyss ship for a prize, too.”
Larom hisses something under her breath, and Lia nods her agreement. “Just so I have this straight: you want to face off against a military that just blew apart a moon, do some not-insignificant damage, kill at least a few hundred, then either take back the shipyards or take just one ship as a prize. That what you have in mind?”
The captain purses her lips and nods tightly. “Yeah,” she deadpans, stubborn, but the dull look in her eye tells Liura that her point has definitely been made.
Liura is a moment late in stifling a completely inappropriate burst of laughter, but is far too shellshocked to even feign embarrassment. She’s just felt the destruction of a populated moon, and she knew twenty of those crews enough to trust them in her network. “Fuck,” she breathes, a prickling burn of smouldering rage behind her breastbone, “why not.”
The captain doesn’t get her wish for a Golden Nyss prize ship. Liura’s still surprised she talked them out of going straight for the shipyards, in favour of launching an attack on Yinchorr and Yibbikoror. If nothing else, the latter was a practical suggestion, and the former was the pure textbook way to get themselves caught in the crossfire when the Republic came to take back the shipyards.
“We can take ‘em!” the Zabrak insists.
There’s bravado and then there’s just asking for trouble. Never mind the fact that there’s no Force-damn reason for the smugglers to be pissed at Judicial. Not yet, anyway.
Liura glares at the kid. “What’s your name?”
“Zaphi,” she says, chin jutting out in defiance.
“Zaphi: with what firepower do you want to take both Judicial and the Yinchorri?”
There are Barriak missiles in the cargo hold. Liura stares at the cargo, struck speechless for a second. “Are—are you—I’m confiscating those when we’re done here!”
The Zabrak kid smirks, but Lia doesn’t hold it against her all that much. Most people don’t know about the slave trade off in the Territories, near Wild Space—land sold to Barriak in exchange for missiles, and the people that land belonged to chained up as prizes of war and sold off at the markets. A few months ago, Gorzo sent her a compressed data burst full of evidence, witness accounts, verified and notarised transcripts—the entire thing took weeks to decrypt and to separate all the data layers. Gorzo occasionally betrayed a hint of Duro service training, but this was—the evidence he’d put together was impeccably organised, heavily encrypted, and craftily put together. This was veteran work.
Liura didn’t need to see the recorded message itself to know that it was a goodbye.
She used to think Gorzo would die recklessly. As the years went on she’d been forced to re-evaluate that; every now and then he’d uncover an altruistic streak light-years wide, and she really should have known, since he’d given her a start in the business. Liura should have realised, even then, that his streak of kindness always cost him.
The loss is still fresh. Avi, the captain, catches Lia’s expression. There must be some Force Sensitivity there, because she throws the kid a sharp look next. “We’ll get rid of them here,” Avi says, and Liura hears an answering note in the Force that says yes, actually, and try not to die while you do so.
Liura rolls her eyes—internally, so that no one but Larom would be asking her questions.
One thing that Lia never stops being grateful for, since acquiring an orphaned Padawan tail: her tail is damned useful, and Larom’s particular skillset amplifies her own in surprising ways. Where Larom got the schematics for Yinchorri battlecruisers, Lia may never know, but the schematics do give her a good idea of how to tune the homing beacon on the missiles to knock out navigation and power to weapons in almost the exact same shot. Most of the orbiting frigates are out for the count in under seven minutes, but one manages to hit atmosphere and get off a few shots back at them for good measure.
It doesn’t take much to leave the smugglers’ craft with heavy damage, to be fair. This ship isn’t meant for full-scale engagements with armed, angry, military-trained combatants, much less for frigates that carry at least twenty shuttles, about a hundred Yinchorri soldiers to each. Even if they have Barriak missiles at their disposal, the Barriaks are the only effective firepower they do have.
Lia shoves the others out into the escape pod and tweaks the navicomp one final time, kicks it for luck, then throws herself out of the cockpit. The Chadra-Fan pilot gives her a glare, but is at least grudgingly appreciative when he gets to see the result of her efforts: the wreck takes two shuttles along with it, and the delayed explosion of the Barriaks still in the cargo hold sends out a shockwave that knocks the frigate off course, sideways, and into oblivion.
At least one shuttle escapes that fate. That’s not a bad record.
The escape pod’s crash isn’t kind, leaving Liura to cut their way out. The smugglers are less than thrilled to realise they’ve been working with Jedi, which Lia thinks is rather petty given their recent near-death, and Larom openly says so. Liura hides a grin, privately thinking, Force and gods, I do love that kid.
Avi is fairly laconic about most things, but she’s damn pissed about losing her ship. “Could’ve been at the Nyss shipyards taking our pick of a prize, if it weren’t for a damn Jedi,” she spits, but there’s little conviction or heat in it.
“Relax,” Lia drawls, pulling in a breath of hot desert air and feeling her lightsaber hum in her hand. Kliks away, there are Jedi fighting the Yinchorri soldiers, and the sharp, predatory awareness of battle reaches out and sings in her.
“Shoot some scaly lizard assholes.” Lia grins back at them over her shoulder. “You’ll feel better.”
She hasn’t had need of her lightsaber in a long time. When Lia first started her smuggling ring, she’d been fairly diplomatic about things when possible, reasonably discreet when not—a blaster served her purposes just fine. She’d practiced with other weapons; staff had been a favourite, and after all, Liura had long ago sworn that she would never forget what Master Plo taught her. But the lightsaber had mostly been in her hands unlit, or for katas—never with a sparring partner involved.
Then she’d lost it at the moment she’d needed it most.
This one was new. A shipment of crystals had passed her through her hands, and she’d claimed and been claimed by this one in particular; the fence hadn’t given a damn, as it wasn’t even one of the best of the lot. Now it hummed in her hand, sang in her mind, with a blade almost violet at its heart and glowing ochre at the corona. Liura missed this song more than she cared to admit.
(She wishes she’d known about the Cortosis, though, but she’s never been a slow study.)
By the (premature) end of her apprenticeship, Liura had already been a seasoned fighter. It wasn’t quite Larom’s gift, but Lia had set her a goal of ‘adequate defense’, and afterwards been extremely well pleased when Larom exceeded expectations. Larom, for a laugh, still insists that she’d been tricked into it.
All the same, they prefer to stay off the Order’s radar. Larom is a lost Padawan, and she’s never even told Lia what went wrong on her last mission. Lia doesn’t press, much, but she knows full well that it’s something Larom will have to face one day. Herself, Lia might well qualify for a pirate at this point, definitely ripe for charges of organising a crime ring. But aside from that… much like Larom, she doesn’t want to go back, and doesn’t want to examine the reasons for her reluctance.
Didn’t want.
In the end, several things are made very clear to Lia on Yinchorr. The first: the tiny smugglers’ crew they’d worked with are now sticking to them for good or ill, and there’s no getting rid of them. That’s fine.
The second: rebuilding her operation is going to be difficult. A touch more legitimacy wouldn’t hurt, and besides, something in the Force is rather insistent that she needs to get back to Coruscant, that there was something going on over the last year, something she’d missed (but what?).
The third: Lia misses the feeling of fighting alongside Jedi. She didn’t cross paths with anyone on Yinchorr, but she felt them, and even that was enough to lift her spirits.
It was enough to remind her of home.
Lia also felt their deaths. There was never a more effective summoning call, Lia thinks one night as she lights a candle for each of the fallen, whispers their name into the smoke. Liura isn’t entirely sure where she picked up this tradition of honouring the dead: a glass of water, a bit of bread for the journey (damned if she’ll ever do it with ration bars), and a candle to light their way into the Force. Not a Jedi tradition at all.
(The candle, Liura borrowed from the people she’s lived with and fought for, these last ten years, but it’s a common enough ritual. The bread and water… that is something older, something that lurks in her memories before she came to the Temple.)
It feels odd, living life by habits and rituals and traditions that would seem entirely alien to the people who raised her. It’s… almost terrifying, the thought of going home like this.
But maybe that was the trouble, after all, she gets around to thinking that night. So much of herself was buried, so much of herself wrapped up tight in silence, tiptoeing around traps and pitfalls set by another for her.
Before, the Temple had never really felt like home. Home had been with her Master, always full of invisible lines not to cross, not even to tread near. Liura had spent so much effort, contorting herself into a small space, pained with embarrassment at her failures—that no one saw as failures but she; seeking out other Masters for lessons that her Master would only ever teach with sharpness and words that cut deep. And when those cuts bled, she’d hated herself all the more for allowing herself to be hurt by mere words.
Ten years out in the wilderness, Liura had discovered a great deal about herself that she’d never really known, or liked. She liked trashy holonovels, loved fantasy holovids full of noble and naive tales. She cried—she could cry so much over books and vids and people and the sheer joy of feeling soft, small beastling’s fur under her fingers. Her anger, when it came, was not something to shunt aside or stomp on, and grief was also meant to be felt, not cut away and given short shrift, as though it would eventually shrink into nothing. She’d learned that sometimes her memories tricked her and showed her ill-meaning in innocent words, and learned to swallow back that unnecessary pain, soothing wounds many, many years old.
But she’d also learned that the Temple, full of Force Sensitive, trained beings—for all that her Master was in it, and that had the power to cloud her mind like nothing else—the Temple had always been the one place she’d felt whole. Larom had been her first hint: when this lost Padawan found her, something shook itself off in her heart and refused to lie still ever again. The first rejection of loneliness, perhaps. Which in itself was a wonder, because it wasn’t as though Lia was particularly familiar with anything else.
Maybe there were pieces of her that she could never reclaim or remember. Maybe Lia would never fit just right with other Jedi. But there were parts of herself that she could never let go again.
And the Temple, apparently, was one.
Lia takes her time. She doesn’t go back to Coruscant in a day—nor could she, there’s too much to fix after that setback on Yinchorr. She trains Larom to keep the system running without their involvement, trains her to spot people who’ll make responsible deputies, reminds her that every planet needs to be invested in their own part of the Exchange.
Larom is, of course, anything but slow or stupid. If she doesn’t understand yet, she’ll understand in time, Lia thinks. At least they’ve discussed that Liura’s return to Coruscant is, ultimately, necessary for the Exchange to keep running. Lia just hadn’t quite mentioned that, rather than dive right into the Lower City and find the people she needs to see, she fully intends to turn the other way and brashly walk up to the Temple entrance, and request an audience with the Council themselves.
In a way—whenever Liura falters, and wonders how she could ever be accepted back to the home that she left, she reminds herself—it’s really a matter of warning the Temple of any potential conflict of interest. She knows there are Jedi tasked with monitoring the Lower Levels. She knows well enough that her business involves negotiating with Black Sun and Syndicat and other, lesser crime families, for fair wind and open space. Sometimes she’s even deigned to do them a favour. So really, while Liura is riding an existing problem and turning it to its best use, it is difficult to argue that she’s not also… feeding it.
More than that, Lia knows that should anyone learn of a Jedi involved in smuggling and black market trade, the Order would be right to bloody well have her head.
She curses herself thoroughly, standing at the Council Chamber doors with her heart in her throat. There’s a datachip in her belt pouch with enough material to cripple half the active dealers on the black market (but only the half that would benefit her own Exchange by being indiscriminately dead), and another chip that has (outdated) information on her own activities, with enough junk data to protect what remains of the Exchange in its current form.
She’s an idiot. But if this is the closest she’ll ever come to being home again… Lia is just enough of an idiot to walk right into the trap. Attachment, Lia thinks rather bitterly, is a stupid, stupid thing to ask someone to let go of, if it’s the very thing that drags you back home like a leash. Even after a decade.
Liura hopes the Council is self-aware enough to realise that. She hopes that, if this is the last time she sees this place, maybe, at the very least, they’ll give her a wide berth the way the syndicates do.
***
Lia waits five hours while the Council deliberates, and figures if they’re losing sleep over her ‘report’, the least she can do is keep herself awake out of solidarity. (At least, she convinces herself that’s what she’s doing, and it’s not the jangly tension of wondering if they’re going to kill a Fallen Jedi or just hand her right over to Judicial that’s keeping her awake.)
Bizarrely, none of that happens.
Master Windu sweeps out of the Chamber doors while the rest of the Council mils around tiredly within and takes her elbow, steering her down the hall to the lift and all the way to the Healers’ while saying something—instructions? Details? There’s too much, and Lia really is tired, but—
“As soon as Terza clears you, there is a mission we’d like you to take, if you’re willing—”
Lia stops short. “A mission.”
Mace turns to look at her, almost as though he’s trying not to look amused, and is actually failing for once. “You seem to be pretty good at figuring out how to deal with corrupt governments. We have a problem: the Eriadu courts seem to have stalled on the investigation of the assassinations at the Trade Summit—oh, you’re familiar with it,” he adds, now openly smirking, at Liura’s pained and not-quite-silent groan.
“House Tarkin.”
“Welcome back,” Mace deadpans.
Lia, however, doesn’t budge from where she’s standing.
“Something wrong?”
She bites her lip. “A bit. You’re giving me a mission before you’ve even had a chance to verify everything I’ve told you. If you ask me, that’s… more than a little suspect.”
Mace shakes his head. “Master Tet Wuq and Knight Nishika Ahnura reported of your decision to remain on a planet they’d been assigned to. Master Halcyon confirmed. Furthermore, your Exchange, as you call it, has had noticeable impact on the Mid Rim worlds some of our teams are assigned to. I’m sure we’ll need more time to confirm the correlation is more than coincidental. But then,” Mace adds, with the beginnings of a truly evil grin, “you’ve been on the Rim for a decade. You’re Terza’s new favourite now.”
Lia opens her mouth. Closes it. Then—“I can still run, you know,” she says, dejected, but shakes her head and starts walking again.
