Author's Note: I wrote this chapter a while ago and forgot about it until now, when I reread it and decided I actually really liked it. I think I may continue it just because it could be interesting. This will be a pretty basic KotOR rendition, FemRevan (Alignment to be determined!), from Carth's point of view. I've been afraid to write a fic sans OCs up until now because I hate trying to write characters that aren't my own creation--it's limiting in what I can have them do. But this is pretty fun and I'm looking forward to it.

This will NOT be a verbatim dialogue-copied-from-the-game fic (one of the worst sins a fanfic can commit in my opinion); I will be using game dialogue as a guide but not something to stick to word-for-word. Reviews are welcome and ENCOURAGED, as I haven't played the game in, oh, forever and wouldn't put it past myself to get some things wrong. Let me know in particular if people sound out of character.

That being said, I must make the usual disclaimer that Star Wars: KotOR is copyrighted to Bioware and LucasArts and I make no claim to any of it.

Enjoy!

I Don't Want to Talk About It Right Now

Chapter One

It all started a few months ago—damn, has it really been so short a time? I feel as though years have passed since that fateful day when the Endar Spire fell and heralded the beginning of an adventure I never imagined happening to me. To be fair, everything began a short time before that, when all I knew was that I was being shipped out on yet another mission in the ever-intensifying war effort against Malak and his endless Sith fleets. The Jedi had been crucial in the victories the Republic had taken against the Sith, but my personal experience with them had been mostly limited to providing backup to their efforts. That might have been why I was a little doubtful about the news I received during my briefing a few weeks before the Endar Spire was to leave its station outside Corellia.

"You're putting who in charge?"

"Calm yourself, Onasi. Bastila is calm, experienced—she helped take down Revan, for goodness' sakes!" Admiral Greysing crossed her arms and gave me an admonishing stare. Normally I wouldn't have dared such an outburst in front of a superior officer, but considering I had been assigned to this mission as an advisor, I felt I was fulfilling my duties.

"She's a Jedi, not a Republic officer—"

"And that's precisely why she's being trusted with this position. And it's also why you're one of the ones I've chosen to advise her in military matters. If there is anything that she neglects to take into consideration, I have no doubt in your ability to bring such matters to light. Have a little faith in her, Carth. We wouldn't have been able to achieve what we had against the Mandalorians if it weren't for the Jedi, you know."

"I know," I sighed. There was no one in the Republic who wasn't grateful to the Jedi for their aid in turning the tide of the Mandalorian war. And so far, Bastila's reputation preceded her by far; though young, she was already famous for her skill in Battle Meditation. But it made me uneasy to have a nevertheless inexperienced individual placed as the Commanding Officer of a ship like the Endar Spire. Many of the Jedi I'd heard about seemed more than capable of the position, but I decided to reserve my judgment of Bastila until I met her.

Meeting her and her team a few days later to go over crew manifests and other matters forced me to admit that Admiral Greysing had been right to place her trust in the young Knight. Though she didn't look old enough to be set loose on her own without a Master, I had to admire the efficiency with which she got things done and her confident demeanor; when Bastila wanted something, she got it. This included special Republic strike teams that would be incorporated in her plan to regain control of Taris, a city-planet on the outskirts of the galaxy that had been overrun by Sith, and a very late addition to the crew roster—far past the time when everyone else who would be on the ship had been drafted in already. This in itself wasn't too unusual, but the fact that the Republic's favorite Jedi had requested one individual in particular made me sit up and take notice.

"We need to add someone to the manifest," the pigtailed Jedi mentioned offhandedly as I thumbed through the list in question, checking backgrounds of the crew. I liked to be able to recognize the faces I would lead, and it boosted morale when you called soldiers by name rather than rank.

I glanced up at her, the last few words of her comment filtering through my mind. The first thing that came to mind was another Jedi. "I thought you'd already picked everyone who would be on your team?"

"We have," a Twi'lek Jedi on Bastila's team assured me. "This is a Republic recruit."

"She's new, but talented," Bastila added before sliding a datapad across the table to me. I picked it up and scanned it. "We believe we can put her skills to good use on this mission."

"Talented is right." I let out a low whistle as I looked over the information. "Fluent in more than forty alien languages? Extensive training in ranged and melee combat, including two-handed weapons… some background with droids… and only thirty-two years old. Where'd she come from, anyway? Someone like this has gotta have some renown, with the kind of skillset she's got."

Bastila smiled thinly. "She's just one of those unknowns, I suppose. We're lucky to have picked her up. I'm assuming you don't have a problem with adding her to the manifest?"

"None at all." I picked up my own personal datapad and made a note to myself to add her into the ship's computer later. "That done, is there anything else I can do for you today?"

She shook her head, moving her chair out from the table to stand up as her team members did the same—then paused. "One last request, Onasi…"

"Yes?"

"Is there any way we can change those… ah, unique uniforms the soldiers must wear?"

I gave her a blank look. "What, you mean the orange and red ones? All the Republic soldiers wear them."

"That's the problem."

One of the other Jedi tapped Bastila's shoulder and rolled her eyes at me. "You can't have everything, I'm afraid. Maybe it's for shock value to the Sith, you know?"

Bastila chuckled as she got up, gathering the datapad she'd brought in to the meeting. "We'll have to look into whether the Sith visors protect them against colors that bright…"

I plucked at the sleeve of my own Republic-orange flight jacket as the three Jedi left laughing to themselves. It wasn't that bad, I thought. A little lurid, maybe, but what did they expect? Pastels?

----------

Demands from the Jedi aside, once the Endar Spire and her crew got underway, things ran pretty smoothly. Bastila preferred to let the Republic officers under her run most of the main operations rather than micromanage everything herself, an arrangement that worked well for most of us. As a result, I didn't get to know her as well as I probably should have, being an advisor to her. Something told me she liked it that way, though. As one of the first Jedi I had ever known personally—well, as personal as I could get, considering that we only ran into each other once or twice a day at most—she left me with the impression that Jedi as a general rule were cold and distant.

Two weeks into the mission, we arrived at Taris, the crowded city-planet famous for its ale and little else. We knew the Sith had taken over and enacted martial law across the planet, and we hoped to weaken their grip—if not force them out altogether—using a combination of strike teams led by Bastila's Jedi and strategic placement of troops in key spots. We were ready for marginal resistance on the surface, owing to the fact that Sith troops had been spread thin. What we weren't ready for, however, were the swarms of Sith fighters that seemed to come out of nowhere as we neared the planet.

The air of confidence that had previously permeated the bridge vanished as alarms began shrilling to alert the first hits scored by the Sith. With Bastila gone somewhere in the starboard section of the ship, everyone turned to the Jedi left in charge of the bridge for directions. He glanced in turn to me, an expression on his face that I never wanted to see on a Jedi: fear.

I waved him toward the door, silently cursing the fact that our commanding officer had chosen to vanish at the most inconvenient time possible. "Go find Bastila!"

He turned and rushed out of the bridge without needing to be told twice, and I took over the rest of the men manning the controls. "Steady on!" I yelled over the alarms. "Get power to the shields! We'll be alright, what's a few fighters to a ship like this?"

"Sir! Shields are down to sixty-three percent!"

Apparently it was more than a few fighters. "Divert power from auxiliary systems—we don't need much more than life support and turrets!" I stepped forward to get a better look out the viewports and immediately wished I hadn't. Taris loomed large before the ship, and silhouetted against it were the darting shapes of countless Sith crafts.

"Shields at forty-seven percent!"

The ship shuddered and groaned as an explosion rocked it from some other point. A new, louder alarm screamed above the others. "Starboard hull breach, venting atmosphere! Sealing off third-level cabin section!"

"Sir! We're being boarded! We—aaagh!" The entire bridge shuddered as the control panel Lieutenant Halkins was sitting at exploded in a shower of sparks and flame. I seized an extinguisher from the wall to halt the fire, but it was too late for Halkins, who slumped on the floor in a motionless heap, a twisted scrap of metal rising from his chest.

"Hull breach to the fourth-level medical bay! Sealing the area!"

"Shields at twenty-eight percent!"

"Terrano!" I continued as soon as the harried lieutenant turned around to look at me. From the looks of things, we didn't have much time. "Can you rig life support to show me how many people we've got on board?" He nodded and turned back to his console as I punched my access code into the ship's communicator system. I sincerely hoped the boarding parties were small and had been taken care of already, but my gut told me that was about as likely as snow on Tatooine. We would have a better chance if we gathered our forces at one point rather than risk being spread too thin across what was left of the ship. "This is Carth Onasi. We're being overrun by the Sith, and we can't hold out much longer against their firepower! All hands to the bridge! I repeat, all hands to the bridge!"

As if on cue, Bastila—escorted needlessly by two soldiers—pushed through the door, lightsaber in hand and a stony look on her face. "You've allowed us to be boarded," she stated, obviously trying to maintain a neutral tone but hardly succeeding. "We can't allow the Sith to compromise—"

"It's too late for that!" I snapped, incredulous she could think of the mission at a time like this. "It'll take a miracle to get us out of this. Look, is there any way you could use your Battle Meditation?"

She shook her head doubtfully, for a moment seeming less the confident commanding officer she had been and more the nervous young woman faced with a situation that was spinning out of control. "I need time to focus and a quiet place to meditate. Right now, the Endar Spire has neither of those things, and I fear there are Dark Jedi on board."

"Sir, I've set up life support tracking for you and sent it to your datapad." Terrano moved back to his station just as the bridge shook again, sending Bastila stumbling into my shoulder. She righted herself hastily and watched in silence as I pulled out my datapad and scanned it, able to identify Republic soldiers and Jedi from the comm signals that accompanied their lifesign signals on the small map that represented the ship.

"No, no, no. This can't be right." I flicked through the different levels of the ship, counting friendly signals as I went under my breath. The numbers were alarmingly small, and dropping: I counted one, then glanced back a second later only to find it had vanished in the wake of a small group of Sith signals moving along. There were fewer than twenty Republic soldiers and Jedi left.

"We must stay to fight them," Bastila decided just as I glanced up to inform her of our dwindling troops.

"No," I rejoined, "you need to leave. Now. If there are Dark Jedi on board, we can't risk them taking you—it's too dangerous."

Her eyes widened in consternation, but any remark she might have made was interrupted by a flash of red across the viewport and an immediate explosion from the front of the bridge. Bastila piled into me, sending us both sprawling across the floor to avoid the spray of shrapnel. "We need to go," I informed her, climbing carefully to my feet and motioning her toward the far door.

For once she didn't argue.