She had never anticipated as a child, the sort of life she'd end up living. If she would have known ahead of time what it would entail- the Jedi lifestyle, the Mandalorian Wars, her subsequent exile and the fact that she was currently standing outside a force cage in her underthings being ogled at by possibly the only living person within her immediate vicinity- she might have gone and hid when the Jedi came around to collect her when she was four years of age.

Unfortunately, the past is unchangeable and Meetra Surik didn't even bother replying to the prisoner's off-the-cuff comment about her current state of dress. If it had really mattered, she would have said something, but at the moment, she had other things on her mind, such as the throbbing migraine she had woken up with, the dead woman (who wasn't dead) in the morgue, and how in the name of all things living she had ended up in this place.

The reality of the matter was not lost on her; this was not simply the morning after a weekend of spice-binging. Something had happened to her, and she was quite determined to find out what.

She didn't even hesitate letting the prisoner- Atton, he called himself- out of captivity. There was no doubt in her mind about his loyalty... for the time being at least. If what she was beginning to suspect was true, he needed her help as badly as she needed his, and shooting her in the back would likely seal his fate. He struck her as the type who still had a decent bit of debauchery to live for; he wouldn't be stupid enough to jeopardize his own chances of survival, so for the moment, his presence was advantageous to her ends.

She did keep in mind, however, to be mindful of the fragility of such loyalty once they found a certain escape. It was the prisoner who told her of the bounty on those like herself, so despite his disinterested explanation of the topic, she remained on guard.

There was something else troubling her too, as they orchestrated their strategy and worked their way past security protocols and malfunctioning mining droids in what was revealed to her to be the Peragus Mining Facility.

In her period of years severed from the Force, and her time in exile that followed soon after, she had become comfortably aware of the unique sensation of detachment from it. Not emotional and physical detachment like the Jedi Order taught. The detachment she had become accustomed to was a detachment of obligation: When the Force left her and she travelled to the distant planets on the edge of known space, she slowly lost the formerly ever-present inclination to lead and connect with the universe around her.

She did hard jobs and small kindnesses in her travels as a way to pass the time, but never anything extravagant, never anything heroic or particularly inspiring... never did she feel the call to do more.

In the Order, it was give, give, give, from an empty chasm in which the Force theoretically flowed through. That was how bonds formed, that was how people were turned to the cause, recruited, and consequently killed. Murder by cause of charisma.

What troubled Meetra, was that the very same feeling was returning.

It was less of a physical sensation, and more of a neurological reflex: After almost a decade free of the craving and resulting rush that came with connecting with another person, the distantly familiar feeling of working with that other person to achieve a common goal, wanting to protect and be protected by them, along with the challenge of coordinating strategies on the fly was hardly unnoticeable.

Camaraderie, it was called she supposed, clumsily bonking her plasma torch into the circuits of another mining droid.

She hummed quietly, low in her vocal cords as her companion activated a grenade and tossed it to her. She caught it with ease and lobbed it down the hallways. They were nearly at the Ebon Hawk and the easy way that combat returned to her and filled her with tenuous excitement that bemused her.

She felt like she was watching herself from another perspective, strapped to a comet, screaming through space, entirely out of control.

By the time they had slogged their way through a fuel line, reunited with Kreia, and fought their way to the hangar, she felt positively ill with the over-stimulation: Her equilibrium was faltering and her eyes were watering. Her head felt ready to burst with pent up pressure, and her ears rang continuously.

She stumbled towards the Ebon Hawk at full speed, following Atton, Kreia and the droid as they neared the loading ramp, but lurched to a halt with a screech of boot soles on duraplaster. The fuel fumes of Peragus poured off the uniform she wore and assaulted her nose; danger was coming, hard and fast. Sound; her own heartbeat and the roar of the ship's engines firing to life filled her ears along with breathing, running feet, the clink of Sith armour on the muzzle of many rifles...

The world lurched around her and she bent forward and was sick. She didn't waste time to recover properly or groan in agony despite the insistence of her spasming abdominal muscles that she do so. She picked herself up and began sprinting across the remaining expanse between herself and the ship.

She tumbled up the deck just as the first pair of Sith soldiers ran across her periphery.

She slammed her handover the ramp controls and somehow managed to blunder into the cockpit, wiping sweat and strings of saliva mingled with bile off her face without even thinking about it. "Guns?" She asked, and her pilot answered with a nod. Before she left, she wiped her forehead with her fuel soaked sleeve and said, "Bet we make it out of this."

"Yeah," The pilot said sarcastically, "Tell you what, if this doesn't end with us being turned to dust, I owe you a strong drink."

His words were already fading as she ran down the corridor to the guns.