#ex:starter

Kal’s mind was still processing everything that happened on Jedha, and he was trying to focus on anything else. He knew there was absolutely nothing he could’ve done or any way he could have helped, yet he still felt there was something else for him. He wanted to do more, but he wasn’t exactly a Jedi and he wasn’t even sure if he wanted anything to do with that. 

Instead of working his thoughts away, he found himself walking through the farmlands, wandering farther and farther away from base camp. He always enjoyed how peaceful it was out here and how it would sometimes remind him of his home, and the thoughts of his childhood, before anything bad had ever happened, helped him feel relaxed. Kal hummed to himself as he walked along. As he walked to a clearing to take a seat and relax, he saw another individual there and he stopped, ready to turn back around to find solitude elsewhere. “Sorry,” he said. “Didn’t mean to disturb you.” 

Even in the morning, the Base isn't silent—blame the jungle, blame a war, blame the effects of one. (How do you ask children raised on wars if they sleep well at night?) The sounds of engines and the day beginning travel even up to the Temple and its weapons room.

“Did they already serve breakfast, already?” He gives when there’s a shadow from the archway a door should be—the original probably already rotted away. "You think they would have more knives in here, or maybe I was just wrong to think so," thinking more to himself, at the same time, pocketing one of the knives off of the table, not planning to place it back.

It’s one of the few mornings rain doesn’t pour from the skies and into the fields, drenching the moon, leaving way for the New Creche, small as it may be (made of up mostly lost children, the same as the Rebels, no where else to go, but here, needed) to run free. But they’re not the only ones seated on the grass. When Noa spots another shadow, she watches them for a moment without seeing their face.

The weight of the dual training swords feels comforting in his hands. Fein holds them slack, letting his body slide down into a comfortable stance. He spins them, hilt flat along his palms, as he lets his body follow the footwork that became second nature against sand.

After his clumsy work on the Gallows at Jedha, Fein found himself seeking out a new form of meditation. Quiet contemplation only led to him going over the events of the failed mission over and over, wondering how he could have improved, what steps he could have taken to ensure a smoother execution of their plan – and each and every time he only comes back to the same conclusion.

Lost in his own ruminations, he doesn’t hear the door to the training open. He’d have almost missed the second presence in the room, if he hadn’t caught himself on a stray quarterstaff and nearly fell head over heels – practice swords and all.

“Shit!” Fein stumbles, catching himself on his hands, wincing as the heavy weapons clatter to the ground around them, “I’m so sorry, I wasn’t paying attention.” He grins a bit, “That’s what we get for making the younglings practice indoors instead of out, hm? I was always more inclined to clean up with a bit of fresh air as the incentive.”

There's so many things he doesn't know—except as a feeling, except as the surface of an ocean, move too quickly and the water will fill his skull. He doesn't realize how long he's been sitting on this bar stool, slumped in a chair with long legs splayed out, the ice in the untouched glass has long since melted. (Was it his drink at all? Did he get it for him?) He doesn't realize he's been scratching at twenty year old scars long enough that blood has cracked at the end of his nose and collected at his cupid's bow. Maybe if he were human, he wouldn't have bled so easily.

He doesn't recover quickly when he notices another presence near, he recovers like he's blinking water out of his eyes, eyebrows knitted together, half of a hidden jolt in his seat. Because he ignored them, he thinks. Because he forgot them, he thinks. "Did you come here for a drink?" Already standing.

Dorian Valara has been missing for hours. He can’t say where—slipping between the veils of time, perhaps—and hears them calling for him in whispers. Their voices mix with the voices of ghosts calling to him; Younglings roaming the grand halls of the Temple, calling to him. Where are you? There-and-not-there. Nobody can see him.

Dawn breaks over the Upper Levels of Coruscant. 

Suddenly, he is in the Now again, standing in the very same spot from which he first vanished. Trembling. The whites of his tattoos seeming almost ghostly in the dark of the Vaults. He looks around. His bones are settling again, but his edges are still blurry.

He's still standing at the doorway, leaned against the archway, half in the room and half ready to walk away. Left hand flipping a Kyber Crystal in the air before catching it again, a nervous habit, and anytime the indigo hits his line of sight, its all he can look at, not the younglings making their first sabers, and him to the side making notes aloud. "That'll cause that shit to explode that first time you slap anything harder than a cotton ball." It’s as far as he’ll go to joining them. Eyes half train on the person next to him, acknowledging, without looking, without meeting eyes. “Think maybe we should have taken the blasters they were in instead?” It’s already wide news about how the Crystals had to be pried from them. “You gonna make you a new one?” He nods at the sabers beginning to form.

Exhaustion and grief both roll off of him in waves, spreading into a cesspool made of only what haunted dreams can create, night terrors when he is still awake, voices of the mind, whispering, begging for the turn of his head just to scratch at the place behind his eyes.  That's not all there is to his person, besides the bags under his eyes, there's a limp in his step that has been there long before the trip to Coruscant, but the night didn't help with not agitating the old injury, pain in his step. The cane he left in the ship now at his side. Upon arrival, his plans are to speak to no one, to keep his head down, to be nothing more than shadow, but this doesn't take away the softness of his voice when his attention turns to the newcomer in the medbay, the offices already in full swing for the day, “Are you here to see one of us?” The doctors.