TAHLIA [JINN] DROSS
Tahlia was born in 55 BBY.
She was a child not meant to exist.
Her parents were Jedi, sworn to the Order rather than to each otherâthat, too, would one day shift, though far too late for either of them. It was not by intention but rather in a moment wrought from the aftermath of near-death on an Outer Rim world and in the burn of adrenaline dwindling down, that she was conceived.
The moment that her motherâJedi Master Tahlâdiscovered the pregnancy, she went through back channels to contact the would-be father: Qui-Gon Jinn[*].
The two met where Tahl was stationed.
After serious discussion, they chose to remain with the Order, though, Qui-Gon less decidedly so. [ Had Tahl said but one word toward leaving, he would gladly have done so, and they would have raised their child together. ]
Instead, when the time came and the baby was delivered, Tahl held her daughter for only a few momentsâtoo many and too few in equal measureâand then she relinquished her to Qui-Gon.
Because they could not raise her and remain in the Order, Qui-Gon took the girl and left her with trusted friends of his: an older couple living on an industrial, mid-world planet. Months earlier, when he had visited them to make the request, the two had agreed to adopt the girl, and yet, when the moment at last arrived, it was still all that Qui-Gon could do to leave.
Before he departed from them, he gave the girl a name: Tahlia.
Her adoptive parents were good people. Kind people. Hard-working people. Her adoptive father was a mechanic and technician, and her adoptive mother was a craftswoman who made jewelry and did metalwork. As promised, they raised her as though she were their very own. When she was a child, they played silly games with her. They doted on her as much as they were able.
Some of her earliest and warmest memories are of them beginning to include her in their respective trades. She remembers bringing small, safe tools to her father. She remembers handing smooth wooden beads to her mother.
She remembers the pride, even of contributing so little, in the repair of the droid or the creation of a necklace.
Also from an early age, she remembers a man named Quijin, a close friend of her parents, who occasionally came to visit and who brought her little trinkets that never failed to delight her.
She also remembers the day that she learned he was neither simply a friend of the family and neither was his name Quijin.
Despite being still quite smallâonly five years oldâshe had been helping her mother to wait on their guest, Quijin, who had stopped by once more.
Upon bringing over a steaming cup of tea, her hand made contact with his andâ
It was the first time her abilities manifested.
She did not understand it then. She knew only that the feelings were far too big and too many for her little body to hold. The teacup slipped from her little hands, and Quijin didn't even hesitate to knock it away, lest it fall on her and burn her. [It had burned him. She remembers. It had left an angry red mark on his left wrist that had scarred and still remained in later years.]
Even as tears sprang to her eyes and spilled over, she knew one more thing for certain: Quijin was not what he claimed; he was connected to her, as though by a thread... and there was another thread, too, that stretched and stretched and stretched, so far that she could not feel what was on the other end of it.
Or, rather, who.
But she knew, with the specific sort of absolute and unwavering certainty that belongs only to children and to fools: she had been lied to.
"Quijin", realizing that something had happened even if he did not understand what, spoke to her parents, and they decided the course of action amongst themselves.
They told her the truth.
In the following years, Qui-Gonâthe name he revealed to her that very dayâstill continued to visit. And though he taught her techniques here and there, he never took her from her parents. He never brought her to the Temple. He never set her on the path to become a Jedi.
She grew up a mechanic and a metalsmith's daughter. She grew up with a little droid as her dearest friendâa result of the efforts of her adoptive father and her birth father both.
She grew up knowing that she was a secret but never a mistake. She had been loved enough by one parent that her mother could not and did not reach out to her again, and she was loved enough by the other that her father could not entirely leave her, even from the beginning.
And then, one day, at 12, she felt the first loss.
It was a sharp pain, like a blade slipped between her ribs, and when she reached into her ability, as Qui-Gon had taught her, she saw a severed thread.
She knew that it had been severed and what that meant, though not the details of it.
Not long after that day, Qui-Gon visited, looking more heavy and sad than she had ever seen him. She knew, in her very being, the cause, even before he told her the truth of it.
He told her that her mother had been killed.
Qui-Gon gave her Tahl's kyber, which had survived the funeral pyre. He snatched it up when no one was looking for the sole purpose of making sure that Tahlia would have something of her mother.
It is the only thing that she has of her mother, and when she had received it, she had her adoptive mother to help her make a pendant of the kyber, which she wears hidden beneath her shirt.
Years passed, almost exactly a decade, in fact, when the next loss came.
Her adoptive parents had been away at the time on a job the next city over, and, at roughly 22, she was taking care of their little shop.
She was in the middle of a repair when the pain hit her, like a heart attack except that it wouldn't stop.
It was bad enough that she all but collapsed to the floor and curled up in a ball. As her droidâBittyânervously chirped and trilled at her and then settled beside her with concern, tears poured down her face, though less for the pain as for what she knew the pain meant:
She felt Qui-Gon's thread be severed. She felt his death.
She lost track of time, but likely a day or two passed where the shop stayed closed because she never got the chance to open it again. Tears had abandoned her. The pain had left. But she could not bring herself to get up from where she had fallen, could not bring herself even to get up and go to her room.
Which is where Kit Fisto[**] finds her.
As she learned, Qui-Gon had told exactly two people about his and Tahl's daughter, and they were his two closest friends: Kit Fisto and Plo Koon.
He had made plans with them, in the event of his death, thatâif possibleâthey would get his kyber to Tahlia as well that she would have the crystals from both of her parents.
With Plo Koon deployed shortly thereafter on a mission, Kit ventured to her adoptive parents' shop, intending to tell her the news of Qui-Gon's death and to give her his kyber crystal, as promised.
When he saw the shop closed, he almost left, intending to return at a later time, but something tugged at him, a feeling in the Force.
After looking around, he picked the lock, and went into the shop instead, where he found Tahlia still curled up on the floor, despondent.
She didn't look at him. Didn't respond to him being there.
Kit being Kit, his heart broke a little because he knew. He didn't know how she knew, but he knew that she had no need for him to inform her of her father's death.
So he picked her up off the floor and carried her to the couch, the little BN unit scurrying along behind them and then settling on her shoulder. Kit got her wrapped up in a blanket, and he made her some tea. And then he simply sat with her until she was ready to talk.
She asked a few questions about what happened, who killed him, and Kit answered that he was on a mission protecting a senator and that a Sith had killed them, but that the Sith had been killed by Obi-Wan.
She had not known or understood the significance of the word 'Sith'. At her request, he had explained it to her, and there was a small part of her that resented that what took her father... was the surfacing of an enemy to the Jedi that had not been seen in thousands of years.
Would that it had remained so.
Before he left, Kit gave her father's kyber crystal to her.
She did not set it down once over the following days until her adoptive parents returned home.
She relayed to them what happened, and her mother helped her to make the second kyber crystal a pendant as well, which she added to the same necklace carrying her mother's kyber.
By the time Order 66 happened, both of her adoptive parents had passed as well, having already been older and having ended up in poor health due to the world and their work. It was merciful that it was so.
Tahlia felt when Order 66 happened, and, for a second time in her life, her ability was utterly agonizing. There were so many threads being severed, that she didn't even need contact or personal connection to feel the devastation. It was like entire sections of the tapestry of the Force were being torn out[***].
Once she was able to function again, she had a "thought" that was felt in a voice that wasn't hers but was all too familiar. It told her to take only what she needed and to go into the capital city of the planetâwhich was dense and highly populatedâand to disappear into the parts of the city where people don't ask questions because they can't afford to have questions asked of them. The thought told her to lie low and to disappear.
She did it without question or hesitation. She took with her Bitty, some of her adoptive father's smaller tool kits, some of her adoptive mother's simple jewelry pieces, the small box holding the trinkets Qui-Gon had given her over the years, and a holo-projector of family pictures.
With Bitty on her shoulder and everything else in her bag, she left behind everything that she knew and disappeared.
By the time the Empire has fully settled into its power, she had moved between worlds several times, often due to that "feeling" of warning, and usually finding out later that Imperial presence had been brought to the planet she leftâoften not long after she had left it...
[*] In her default, baseline verse, this Qui-Gon Jinn is my own, @ofthelivingforce. On that note, however: If there are any other Qui-Gon Jinns who want a daughter, by all means, I'm happy to work out a verse and see what we build!
[**] As above, within a baseline verse, this Kit Fisto is my own, @fromxthexdepths. If there are other Kit Fisto's, similarly to Qui-Gon, I am always happy to work out verses!
[***] In a fully canon-compliant verse, she actually felt Kit Fisto's death as well, because he had taken to stopping in from time to time and checking on her, following her father's death, and thus their tie had strengthened. In my AU verse, however, she does not feel Kit die, because he is quietly rescued by one of the Senate guards, but that is a whole other story. ]
