yoshi p said to play other games

ekta actually wasn't the one to bring cele to coruscant, another master was. in fact, she'd been off world at the time, and came back a few years later to a child that looked ... eerily like her. she was pretty content to think that this surely wasn't the child that she'd given up for adoption.

cele however is LOUD in the force as a child. and ekta recognizes her as much as cele is aware of her presence. like any daughter, she's drawn to her mother, even if she doesn't understand why. the jedi allowed her to keep the medallion she gave to the twins, and her suspicions are confirmed once she sees it. her daughter had made her way back to her.

this was also how ekta found out the ariideks were dead. she'd been keeping tabs on the them because she (selfishly) kept tabs on them at the orphanage and was told a few years prior that zanya had been adopted out. she was devastated for months to find out her other daughter was dead -- and that she hadn't known.

that colors her relationship with cele a great deal. she wants to be protective over her, wants to build that relationship, but every time she even considers it, that genuine fear of responsibility to someone else rears its ugly head and she banishes the thought from her mind. considering zanya was already gone, she felt guilty for failing at being a mother (twice), and buried that guilt in work.

the sacking left major scars on cele as the eldest of the creche children at the time. her being able to misdirect soldiers and sith alike at her age meant that she could get the other children away from the fighting and hide them from the worst of their captors. she was looked up to afterwards by rhys, sylas and yoshiko as their elder psuedo-sister.

however, and what haunts her the most, is losing adamori. one of the youngest at the time, and because she had been trying too hard to calm one of the other children, she'd never noticed that he was gone. had never seen him taken, at least. for decades afterwards, she was convinced he was dead -- and that she let it happen.

(well. thats a strong word. a sith lord lured him away, which wasn't on her but she considers it to be her fault.)

cele is never quite the same afterwards, even if she acts like she is. her acts of heroism put her on the radar of the jedi at the temple, and when they resettled the majority of them to tython, cele was fast tracked into proper combat training. because of this, she molded to the expectations of someone far older than fourteen quite quickly ... and struggled in the aftermath because she refused to ask for help.

she knows the younger kids needed her at the time, and thats how she excuses not taking care of herself or her mental state. what's more true is that she was just afraid to face whatever lurked inside of her. she didn't want to slip backwards into those hours and days of terror. she didn't want to relive it all. so instead she separates her understanding of herself from the child she'd been and pretends to be older and more mature than she is. she doesn't want to let anyone else down.

little bit of parentification going on, since a lot of the creche children were split up to be on different worlds. these four stuck together, and cele became a mentor to them -- someone they could go to when they were scared and the like. it helps ... and is very detrimental because it just acts as a stopgap to keep her from facing her own problems.

cele really just wants to be enough for ekta to eventually take her on as a padawan, but by then ekta hadn't taken one in years. but she was a prolific jedi knight, and cele wanted to measure up to her more than anything. ekta kept pushing her away and this just made her even more determined.

she and ekta just don't see eye to eye a lot. ekta is far more straightforward, while cele will do anything to save someone else or prevent a mission from garnering too many casualties. she's a bleeding heart in a galaxy that wants her dead, and ekta has been trying to curb this behavior for years indirectly.

shes VERY strongwilled by the time she becomes an adult, and this does make her difficult with the masters who want her to remember her place. thing is, she has the ability to back up a lot of her plans. she also is very capable at a very young age -- and struggles to connect with her peers. she presumes this is just the price of being a jedi.

(she knows exactly what's wrong with her. has been to jedi therapy. keeps not looking at the real issues and assumes more training will fix her)

(doubly, she will do ANYTHING to control herself. even if it means encountering blackouts and ignoring her body and mind until it shuts down. control will make her a better jedi. control will make her more perfect. control will fix her. everything. surely.)

sacrificial lamb alert. she was like this even before the class story started, and while it wasn't malicious, the jedi knew she could be leaned on. depended upon. they kept pushing her, she kept meeting the challenges, and they never let up on her because she just never broke.

also added in a little bit about the force bond the twins have always had -- even if they don't remember experiencing it before corellia. because of what i was cooking for 7.9, there needed to be a way for them to actually be able to meld with each other like that and a realistic foundation for the feeling. when i mentioned during a drabble or two that when they fight together (or against each other) they would sometimes perceive what the other felt, this is why. that connection has always been there, they were just always too far away from each other to use it or fully understand what they were seeing. as children, they would sometimes "sleep walk" through the other's eyes.

cele wouldnt know zanya was there, nor would zanya know cele was there. they would merely be passengers in the other's body, and because of the sheer time difference between dromund kaas and coruscant/tython, it was usually easy to understand as just dreams through the force.

(both of them frequently have startlingly realistic lucid dreams as it is, so there was no real suspicion aroused)

lioran also may have been more aware of not only his first love considering the medallion that zanya had the entire time, but who really knows?

(osiris. osiris figured it out that lioran knew about ekta being her mother, but never connected the puzzle on zanya being his daughter. at least, from as much as he could piece together after his death. he ... never tells zanya about this himself. cele might. cele also argues with a dead man for keeping that information from his son.)

+ zanya has one holo of himself as a child and that was shortly after he was brought to the baize compound. funnily enough, lioran looked half pleased with himself. thara was there with osiris. his extended family wasn't present, but it was their "family". it was retired pretty quickly.

after that, the only other one that he's aware of/has is the one taken shortly before he was sent to korriban. the entire immediate family (himself and osiris standing behind the others, not fully members for one reason or another, plus kadasha, kivo, tadhg and lioran were in that one) had taken that holo to sit on the mantle of the family's sitting room.

it's the last time the family was ever together.

zanya was also never a baize. he always retained his adoptive family's surname. lioran was never able to get over the hurdle of not having a blood child at the the time in his mother's eyes to bestow him with it -- the next best thing was taking him in as a future apprentice.

lioran was far kinder when he was a child. he did care about him a great deal, selfishly because of ekta's medallion and often visited alderaan around then with zanya in search of her.

he KNEW ekta's surname wasn't ariidek, and the woman he killed in the ariidek estate wasn't her. he could never figure out how she ended up with them. he couldn't even track down her birth certificate (that didn't exist -- ekta never signed any paperwork for the twins).

(double interestingly enough, he recognized the wolf sigil before anything else on the medallion that zanya wore. it was the same one that ekta had on her armor when they were younger. it was also the same one tattooed just above her heart.)

(triple interestingly enough, and this is what he didn't quite pick up on, is that the wolf on the medallion was half of one. it was the left side of its face. cele had the other half).

his opinion only turned and soured when he didn't find her again after years of searching, and when he brought up his suspicions with his mother, she turned him against not only thara (and osiris), but also against zanya. ekta never loved him. she likely lived, died, and had a child with someone else.

lioran was too heartbroken to fight back against it when he still couldn't find her, and his resentment against zanya as a child only grew from there. he would make use of him as a sith then, and take out his frustration of never being able to have his (presumed) mother on him instead. him becoming the "wolf" of house baize was possibly mis-directed anger turned into revenge turned into ... whatever monster zanya was becoming.

so, lioran washed his hands of zanya pretty soon after he killed another acolyte. mauled him to death, snapped his neck. he was strong, there was zero doubt about that, and the dead look in his eyes was a surefire sign that zanya was going to spiral out of his control pretty soon. with kivo and kadasha coming up behind him, he pawned him off onto tremel as soon as he asked, and hoped he wouldn't have to deal with the consequences of creating a blade like that.

zanya has anger issues i need to discuss later. he's a good picture of control as an adult, but it truly is a miracle that he wasn't more of a problem as a teenager. i'll have future drabbles that touch on it surely, but it does stem from the fact he always feels he's right. he also was taught that violence made someone strong, and those that were strong stood at the top of sith society. he was only replicating what he was shown. and was given exactly Zero other outlets to deal with that anger.

re: his confusion over his identity as a teenager is mostly because he didn't understand himself. he had nowhere to really belong because that was also the same stretch of time where his relationship with lioran got way worse. he wasn't a baize, and considering his first major injury being his windpipe that nearly killed him, he may never have become sith either. i think he probably also had some unaddressed issues with being solely a woman that he couldn't explain in any way that truly made sense.