Turel Sorenn had failed a lot in his life.
Champion, they called him. Some champion he was. He'd failed to save anyone in the tournament that had first earned him that title. He'd failed to save his sister when they were young, allowed all the unspeakable things that happened to her. He'd failed his mother, becoming little more than a shadow of the husband who soured everything he touched, a shadow of his father. He'd failed New Tython, watched as millions and millions of people burnt and been powerless to stop it. He'd failed to protect Vorsa, his wife and goddess, failed to rescue Morgan, the both of them hurt or lost to Pravus' clutches. He'd failed to bring home men and women, agents and Padawans and servicemen, whose parents he offered a folded banner to clutch to their chests like the children they'd never hold again. He'd failed everyone. He'd promised to keep them safe, his family, his friends, his Clan, and he'd failed them all. Champion? Champion of ruining everything, maybe. Everyone and everything.
He made so, so many promises, but every time…every time…
He wouldn't fail again. He wouldn't.
Turel pushed down the sick, regretful dread knotting his insides and turned from his half-finished drink to squint through the drunken crowd and the typical, perspirant smog of Chute Town at a shuttered door across the scrapmetal street. He'd been casually scanning that door for the last four or so hours, between bouts of fake brooding, a few easy-shouldered sabacc games, and even half a bar fight, all normal fare for any watering hole around Murder Alley. The nameless storefront he watched was nestled next to a rusted shack whose Gand proprietor peddled used blaster carbines right alongside a couple sets of explosive charges, the causeway packed with a late crowd of milling, stinking bodies; pirates, merchants, bruisers, tradesmen, travelers, and urchins alike.
Nothing. The Sentinel sighed and took another swill from his glass — muja juice, reddish-gold like the whiskey he pretended to nurse — without having to play the part of a man weighed down by the thoughts running circles in his mind. His gut clenched. He needed that door to stay closed. He needed to see. He needed to be wrong about this, anything but this—
Quit it! he reminded himself, but still, the memories crept up, too nagging...
Sighing deeply and then inhaling, the Proconsul moved over to the shuttle's only sleeping compartment, tapping on the door before he slid the panel open. On one of the two cots sat Satsi, her back pressed against the wall, her rations pack untouched by her feet. She hunched over her knees, arms crossed, and her gloomy expression soured when she saw him. He gave an obviously forced, cheery smile in response, moving to sit on the other bed. They could talk without killing each other, right? He had to try.
"Hey there. Feeling any better?" A grunt. "...okay. How long have you been awake?”
“Dunno. While.”
“You're supposed to sleep more, rest and all that.”
The woman glared at him askance, brown eyes watery and bitter like battery acid. She sneered. “Frak off. 'How am I feeling?' I'd feel a lot better if you floated out the airlock and your droid turned us the frak around, but we don't all get what we want, now do we?" Her lips curled back from her teeth. "What do you even care?”
If he'd had the energy, the Sentinel might have crossed his arms in a huff. As it was, he just shot back, “That's not fair and you know it. I promised Uji I'd look out for you."
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the door move.
A lifetime of experience on the street and undercover work kept him from sitting bolt upright. Instead, the Odanite merely tilted his head to the side, watching the tips of long hair and and the heel of a boot slip inside the building he'd been monitoring. He waited a few minutes, intent, but no further movement came, making him hide a frown — that door was supposed to be the only way in or out of that particular hovel. He'd checked. It was firmly blocked in by Chute Town's vertical mess of cobbled-together infrastructure on three sides.
Brushing crumbs off his pants, the man stood, finishing his drink and tugging his worn, drab cloak tighter around him, flipping up his collar. With a slap of credits and a nod to the stereotypically grizzled, Rodian bartender, he made to shamble off into the night, seemingly a bit drunk but not so drunk as to be worth mugging. He only bumped a few elbows as he approached his target, stretching out his senses for danger but finding nothing more than the leery muddle of too many minds with too many agendas around him.
Breathing deeply, Turel concentrated harder as he slumped against the metal wall, blocking out what noise he could, searching for anything familiar...
“Satsi, stop it!” Turel yelled. “What the hell is going on?”
“WHAT DO YOU EXPECT ME TO DO?!” the Fade screeched, ripping out of his grip so hard he thought he felt his right shoulder pop. “This is me coping, preacherboy, and you can hang yourself before you start preaching to me. Get the frak out of my place. Now!”
“No!” cried the Proconsul. He glared right back. “I'm not walking out of here until all that booze is down the drain. What part of ‘you can't be drinking’ and ‘bad for the baby’ isn't getting through that constant freaking veil of psychosis in your damn head?!”
“What do you frakking care about the sprog?!” she shouted, throwing up her hands. “So frakking what?!”
“‘Sprog?’” Turel cried. He pointed at her still mostly flat stomach. “Satsi, for the love of the Force, that's your kid in there. That's his kid. Not some thing. Doesn't that mean anything to you?”
“I—you...” she trailed off for a moment, wilting in place. Her gaze dropped away. “Of course it does.”
“Then act like it!” snapped the Jedi. “Cause right now all you're doing is hurting it. Why do I care? Well I guess cause you don't! When Uji asked me to help protect his family, I didn't think it'd be from YOU.”
If she'd seemed to shrink before, she crumbled then. The woman sagged and dropped to her knees, palms slapping the ground.
“I…” Satsi choked out, and then her back started to shake and her chest slowly heaved. She keened, curling tight around her middle on the floor and knotting her fists in her hair hard enough that he thought she might tear it out. Turel's arms fell to his sides as he watched her wail.
Sighing, the Odanite approached stiffly and knelt down next to her, unsurely putting an arm on her shoulders. She half-fell into him, crying.
“I c-can’t do t-th-this,” she sobbed. “I can't, I… Without h-hi-him I, I I caaaaan’t.”
“You've got to,” he tried to assure awkwardly. “C'mon, hey. You've got part of him right there in the little oven, isn't that worth something? I bet you she’s even scowling already.”
That drew a mangled, snotty laugh, short and sharp. He tried to smile. She cried harder. Without anything else to think of, Turel just hugged her, sitting atop a pile of stained, ripped pants and crushed cigarra boxes while Kiast's second sun sank low outside her tiny window and left them in the dark.
There. Just a flicker, a ripple in a veritable sea of teeming auras, but something, something recognizable. Just a flicker. He could be wrong about a flicker, right? He had to be. He had to— know. He had to know.
Drawing the Force to him and trusting it should the need arise, the man tested the door, finding it unlocked. He pried it open and slipped in with just a sigh of sound. The interior of the single room was almost black, the only light from outside, bleeding neon through shoddy scrap seams. He squinted, tense and alert, but none of his senses revealed any danger, any sign of life. It was empty. Three blank walls and the door behind him.
Undeterred, the Sentinel moved forward, feeling carefully along the floor with his bare hands. He'd try the ceiling next if he had to. This ship had been an enormous smuggling hive for a decade, and when it came to smugglers and pirates, there was always—
His fingertips brushed the slightest divot.
"Another way," Turel whispered, digging his nails in and pulling up the hatch with a creak. A puff of hotter air that smelled like damp and oil greeted him, and he dropped carefully down into a cramped maintenance tunnel lined with piping and vent panels. Glancing both ways, wary of any of the Herald's crew patrolling the particular shaft, the Human began prowling as quickly as he dared to his left, something in his gut, in the Force, telling him it was the path to take.
His gut wasn't quite smart enough to navigate him any further than that, however.
The man swore softly. Pulling his datapad out from inside his jacket, he queued up the working holomap of the Matron's bowels that SenNet had managed to thus far piece together. He studied the ridiculous maze of lines and rooms for a moment, then muttered again and took another turn, hoping he wasn't getting hopelessly lost, nevermind losing his mark. Having no destination was a pain, but if he paused to focus every few turns, he could still feel that familiar presence, still tell he was at least moving in the right damned direction.
His stomach churned with a mix of urgency and stale bar snacks. He had to hurry, had to stop whatever was going to happen. The Force didn't need to feel sick inside him to warn him; he knew all on his own.
Turel took another turn, then pulled up short, jerking quickly back and pressing his back into the wall. He nearly let out a scream not a second later, biting down on his molars to hold back all but a whimper, the sharp hiss of steam filling his ears and the stink of burnt fabric his nose as pain flashed along his shoulders and he jolted forward.
Down the way he'd been about to go, the footsteps of a trio of pirates paused, then continued on. He heard a bit of their indecipherable chatter fade into nothing as he closed his eyes and let the Light soothe his nerves, exhaling through his teeth. Talking his way out or no, that had been a little too close.
The Jedi waited as long as he dared, a few seconds more, before he pulled his datapad up again and started off—
The Human froze.
He didn't know much of what was around him precisely or where his target was going, but there was one particular spot marked on his map not a hundred meters away: one of his Sentinel's safehouses aboard the ship.
He took off running. It couldn't be coincidence, and if he was this close, then that meant his mark was likely already there, and that meant…
He silenced the thought and sprinted harder. He wasn't going to lose anyone else today, no more. Discretion discarded, he barreled around corners, almost slamming into walls as he came up on a nearby exit. His hands slipped on the rungs of the ladder on his first try, but he clawed his way up...
Turel threw his hands up to both ward off the furious pregnant woman whose invitation to feel her child's first kicks he had just declined. “Hey, hey, hey, hang on now, don't get all homicidal on me, crazy. I'd be happy to, really, nothing wrong with that at all, you're, uh, great, and baby's great, I'm seriously flattered.”
“Funny frakking way of showing it, speederkill.”
“I mean it! Come on, when have I ever lied to you?”
“Then what's your damage? What's so wrong, huh?” the Arconan demanded, some of her fury fading in exchange for a wobbly lip and tightly crossed arms hugging herself.
Turel slumped, then sighed. “Satsi, really, I'd be glad to, just… It's not right. I can't…” He straightened, lifting his chin and motioning at her. “I shouldn't be the first.”
Satsi’s mouth dropped open slightly and she blinked. Then, as the implication set in, she slapped both hands over her face, her body trembling.
“Oh, no, no don't cry. Hey, I'm sorry, it's just that it wouldn't be cool if I felt before him—”
“Turel,” Satsi huffed, and he realized as she pulled her hands away that she'd been laughing, a sweet, fond smirk on her lips. She rolled her eyes at him. It was actually kinda freaky. Him, getting a look like that from her. “Come here, stupid.”
“But—”
She lunged forward with impressive speed for someone as pregnant as she was, snatching his right hand and placing it on the swell of her stomach, her scarred fingers atop his. “Shh, shut up,” the redhead ordered, that little smile still on her face as she quirked a brow at him. “Feel it?”
Shuffling his feet, the Proconsul resigned himself to his position and focused on his hand. He didn't really feel anything special, just the uncomfortable warmth of her skin through her loose sweater. He tried to pull away, but her hold was vice-like.
“Look, I think she stopped, maybe later—” he began.
Thump.
Turel gawked, feeling another, tiny little thump follow. It was just the lightest tap, but it was there. Thump. Thump.
He squealed, grinning hugely. Satsi smiled back as their eyes met briefly before returning to the bump.
“Geez, think she likes you,” the woman murmured, almost cooing. “What godawful taste. Must not have all her brains done cookin’ yet.”
“You know, we were having a moment. This was a moment.” Turel pulled back as she released him, hand going to his chest in faux hurt.
The woman snorted, teasing, “Shuddit, preacher.”
The hatch he shouldered open spat the disguised Consul out into some dankly lit section of Chute Town he couldn't distinguish from any other, in a space almost too narrow to be considered an alley, filled with refuse. He gagged on the air and climbed over a pile of trash, leaving the tunnels behind. The safehouse was only a block down, and he hurried towards it, deftly moving in and out of the crowd and trying not to sweat at the noticeable number of weapons and armbands. Gang territory.
He couldn't pay it too much attention, though, no matter how risky. He just kept his head down and moved. She would be there, he knew it. Her presence was loud to his senses now, so close. And whether it was the press of everyone else around him or something else, he could tell something was wrong. She felt wrong.
How much of that was his own misgivings, he wasn't stopping to think about.
Turel ducked his head, crossed the street, and slipped into the dirt-cheap laundromat that was their front cover. The counter was unmanned, the store empty and washed out in the wane, sputtering glow of a single light fixed to the ceiling. A crash sounded in the back, and his nerves lit with lightning, heart skipping a beat. He vaulted over the partition and ran, down a short hallway, through a long room with rows of rusted washing units, and up a rickety set of metal stairs wreathed in steam. The damp cloud's musty smell, like mold and fake flowers, caught up in his lungs and for a heartbeat, he stopped breathing—
"Y'know, preacher— Turel. Turel, I ain't one to do the whole regret banthashit. S'pointless. Past is past, dead and gone, and ain't no amount of moping or whining gonna dig it up from six feet down. Ya take your shit, ya deal with it or don't, ya keep frakking moving. But," she paused, sighed, and actually, actually blushed. By the Force, he was going to die. No, he was already dead. Timeros must have smiled. Selika Roh joined a convent that saved orphans. A’lora sat down for high tea in a gown with a neckline up to her ear holes. Something. This wasn't happening. Was it? "If I could do it over again, with you, I would. I wasn't fair to you and ya didn't deserve even half the shit I gave you, don't deserve it now either. Yer a good man. One of the best damn ones I've known. If I'd just been good to you a lot sooner, my life woulda been that much the bettah for it."
Yeah, he was definitely either a Force ghost or dreaming. He pinched himself. She noticed, and smacked him over the head hard enough to make his teeth clack.
"Oi! Quit it, 'ey, 'm avin' a heart to heart here an' least you can do is listen polite, ya sleemo. Anyway..." She shook her head then grabbed him by fistfuls of his shirt, pulling tight, so they were eye to eye. "I'ma say this once so you bettah remembah it. I was wrong about you for a long time. You're my friend. You're family to me. No jokes here, no crap, just that. And anything, anything that fraks with you and yours, it fraks with me, it fraks with Uji, it fraks with its frakking self cause it just signed its frakking death warrant. Savvy? You're my family, and family doesn't get left behind. I promise you that."
He actually felt his eyes watering a little. The man sniffed, grinning.
"Aww, Satsi, that's...nice," he replied a bit helplessly, at a loss for much else. "And you know the same goes for you and Uji."
"Yeah, yeah, whatevah," she said, a little too flippantly. Then, her weirdly sweet expression melted away, replaced by cold and certain murder. "But if you ever, ever, ever tell anybody I said a word of that, even Vorsa, I'll tell them that it was the damn hormones talking, and then I'll hunt you down, rip off your favorite bits, and mount your head on a pike in the frakking park beside a tiny one fer yer littler buddy. Got that?"
"Crazy psycho."
"Dumb choirboy."
—and leapt up onto a landing. Turel pushed on, the Force shouting to him like an old friend. Another hall, this one longer and lined with tiny rooms, took him back around. He glanced into each one as he passed, catching glimpses of basic furnishings, crates with supplies, a comms array, junk.
Half a cry came from the end of the hall. A woman's, by the tone. Then steps, a bang, half a gasp of, "No, don't, please—"
The Jedi burst through the last door, his blaster free, armed and held high.
"Stop!" he shouted, even as he took in the scene.
Two figures amidst a wreck of equipment and furniture turned towards him: one, a casually dressed Human woman, bruised, bloody, and slumped on the floor, the other an Inquisitor in full garb, masked and hooded save a shadowed slit to see by. The Inquisitor had a pistol in her grip, not yet out of its holster. The crouching one's good eye widened with recognition when she saw him, tears slipping free, and he gave the slightest, tight nod back at her, trying to reassure.
His blaster stayed trained on the Inquisitor.
"Get away from her."
The hooded figure pivoted just slightly more, torso twisting his way. Gloved fingers twitched on her gun.
"You are interfering with business that does not concern you. Leave, now," came a slightly muffled, smoothly accented voice from behind a black mask.
Turel's eyes darted, for just a second, to his companion on the floor, meeting terrified brown eyes before they flashed back up to the present threat—
"Thanks again. For this. Feeding her," he said, gesturing at his daughter where she nuzzled to his friend's chest. It had become routine not long after Nayru's arrival, as Luna pointed out just how poorly the synthetic milk substitute they had on hand compared to the volunteer already nursing one of her own.
"Don't go thankin' me, just remember that Auntie Satsi bettah be the favorite godmomma." Her almond eyes narrowed, as if daring him to contradict her with some sensible statement about his own blood sister.
Turel almost laughed at that, but couldn't quite muster it. Satsi's expectant expression grew more concerned, and she furrowed her brow at him. "What's really botherin' ya, hon? C'mon now. Don't go all holodrama on me and sit on your problems."
"It's just…" the man sighed deeply, rubbing at his head again. He really was tired. His gaze found its way back to Nayru. Looking at the infant Togruta made everything he did feel like it meant something. Like hope. He found himself whispering, "I want to be good enough for her."
"Turel Sorenn, if you're gonna get all worked up over nonsense, then you are getting your ass out of my house this second."
"It's not nonsense, Sats, I—"
"No. Don't you go all hypocritical on me again, not after everythin' we been through and all you done. You're freaking out when you've got no reason to. Turel, you're a dad. Karkdamn, you were a daddy before you even had a kid to dad over. It's in you. You're good inside like that, good to people and good at helpin' 'em too. We didn' ask ya to be one of Sammy's goddaddys for no reason. She's here because of you. I'm here because of you. You got that? You saved us. Now you're gonna save Nay, and you're gonna raise her best of all. That's just what you do. Act like hot shit, tell jokes you think are funny, and save people."
"My jokes are funny," he defended lamely, half out of instinct, not knowing how else to respond right then.
Turel flicked his Westar to its stun setting and kept his glare level, tone grave and merciless.
"Get away from her, right now, or you'll be dead before you can even draw."
The Inquisitor tilted her head slightly, and he caught sight of the gray-blue gaze that stared back at him. She looked at his face, his belt, her eyes lingering on his right hand and the blaster held there. Those eyes narrowed, crinkling in...frustration? Amusement?
The masked woman took a single step backwards.
"Agent," the Odanite snapped, not lowering his weapon. The girl on the ground jerked, and he softened his voice. "Come on. We're going to get you home. Come here. You," he addressed the Inquisitor, "don't move."
"I cannot allow you to take her," replied the Inquisitor, though she didn't take any further action as her captive scrambled to her feet and darted over to him, ducking behind him. "Desist now, and you may be allowed your life. All that you must do is leave the girl and go."
"And what's she to you, Rosa?" he spat, straightening to further shield his charge. Under her hood, those navy eyes widened.
The Sentinel Network and the agents he had stationed aboard the Matron, agents just like the young lady behind him, had very carefully garnered what they could about the woman across from him over the last half a year. They didn't have terribly much, not even a good look at her face, just a name, a string of murders, security breaches, and bad intel, and notes on her observed habits, style, skills, connections to some cult onboard. Yoi Rosa. Female, suspected Human or Near-Human. Infiltrator, spy, assassin. Highly ranked. He recognized the knife at her hip, and exactly what it meant, a more damning brand than the armor she wore or any tattoo on her skin. He knew, because he'd stolen one just like it from the corpse of one of the most trusted Inquisitors in the former Voice's coterie when Pravus' purge had first begun.
"You know who I am?" the Inquisitor asked, and there was something more to the question, a weight to how she said it.
His grip spasmed on the trigger.
"I know exactly who you are," Turel replied, and he couldn't keep the heartbreak out of his voice. "Agent, get out of here!"
The woman didn't need to be told twice. She fled, her footsteps pounding and fast over his shoulder. Yoi gave a snarl and darted forward a step, lifting her blaster, but Turel stepped to the left and got in her line of fire.
"MOVE!" the Inquisitor screeched, trying to get around him, but the Odanite just snapped his arm down and shot a salvo at her feet, making her yelp and skip backwards. "Damnation, you imbecilic cretin—" and right then, like a switch flipped in the middle of a sentence, her voice, her everything, changed "— stupid frakking scumsucking, nerfbrained…gah! Turel! Dammit, Turel, move! Move!"
"Why?! Huh? Why should I? So you can kill one of my people?!" His voice cracked, and he raised the blaster again, pointing it at her chest.
"So I can do what I frakking have t— I don't have time for this banthashit, Turel, get out of my way!"
"Am I Turel now? Are you you, or are you whatever crap you're trying to pull? Are we done karking playing dumb? Are you done playing with me? WHAT ARE WE NOW, SATSI, HUH?!" he demanded. She growled behind her mask. Her arms half-lifted, and he knew, from months and months beside her, from long, sleepless, haunted nights spent in front of a holoscreen and rollercoaster days of beebleberry ice cream for breakfast one morning and pickle juice in the caf the next, that it was in a habitual gesture to pull at her hair. She did it when she was nervous, or angry, or upset, or ten other things.
"We're— Shadows and yer frakking Force take you, churchmouse, we can't do this now, I can't do this kark now, she's gonna get away. Move, before I have to make you." He didn't so much as twitch, and she gave a strangled cry of frustration, tearing her mask downwards to reveal a completely unfamiliar, speckled face as she shouted at him. "TUREL, MOVE!"
They both just stared at each other. Their respective disguises didn't matter. The threat of discovery or worse didn't matter. Right in that heartbeat, it was just them and something between them breaking.
In any other situation like this, at any other time, they would have been melodramatic as the holonovelas they watched together. They would have parodied heartache and tragedy, tilting as if to faint, hands clasping their chests and screaming to the heavens: WHY?! They would have railed and wailed and laughed, laughed long and deep with fast, secret smiles just for one another, an inside joke.
They weren't laughing now.
The silence stretched, until he broke that too, and his voice broke again around the question: "How could you?"
Satsi didn't answer. She looked away from him, dragged a hand down her face, looked past him, then looked back. Her stance coiled.
His senses screamed at him even before she spoke.
"Sorry, sugah, really, but I don't have time for you right now," she said, hand darting for her belt, and the man bit off a curse and dove to the side. He landed behind a chair with his hands over his head just as the slim cylinder she threw sailed towards him, and Satsi sprinted past, bursting through the doorway.
Nothing happened.
The room, and the Force, were silent. No explosions of any kind. Turel craned his neck, gaze landing on...a...a... He reached out, cautious, and grabbed the device, peering closer at a few buttons. An audio rod? Dammit, Satsi—
Springing to his feet, the furious Jedi went running yet again, tramping down the stairs, back out the front of the shop, and into the streets of Chute Town after the best friend that had, beyond any doubt or excuse he could muster, betrayed him.
