A Rough Start

The next day, Ahsoka awoke with newfound purpose. She'd been tentatively assigned to an organized crime task force, although Captain Ur'chip had told her to expect being loaned to other sections as often as she did work with her own.

"Before the war, we enjoyed the luxury of near-constant Jedi involvement by virtue of being on Coruscant. Now, no Jedi has had the time to help out law enforcement for years, even though the CSF polices a population larger than some sectors," he'd said, irritation showing through the wall of fusty professionalism she'd observed in the first half of her interview. "This shortage will inevitably result in some … competition for your assistance."

An hour after she awoke, Ahsoka hurried into the station with half a bagel gripped between her teeth. She wasn't late per se, but she wasn't the fifteen minutes early for a new assignment that had been drilled into her at the temple, and that made her more uncomfortable than she would like to admit. Perhaps Barriss's anal-retentiveness had rubbed off on her before the thing she was trying ever so hard not to think about happened.

"Excuthe me?" Ahsoka asked around her bagel, casting about for anyone who didn't seem to be in a terrible rush. This place felt as busy as the bridge of the Resolute. Eventually, she settled on an only slightly frazzled-looking junior detective who had a mere two empty cups of caf on her desk. "Do you know where I can find -" she glanced down at her assignment papers, unsure of her new CO's name, "- Inspector Odanne Elsarr?" The detective didn't bother speaking, instead simply pointing to a glass-paneled door at the back of the room with closed blinds.

Inspector Odanne Elsarr turned out to be a tall, thin Pantoran woman. Her face was deeply lined, but her piercing slate-gray eyes examined Ahsoka with an intensity that belied her years.

Ahsoka decided to go with the direct approach. "Hi!" she said, shrugging off the Inspector's glare. "I'm Ahsoka Tano, the new specialist?"

"Take a seat." Elsarr's voice was as smooth and detached as the manila folders that littered her desk, but Ahsoka had rode with the five-oh-first long enough to know an order when she heard one.

"Here's the deal," Elsarr began, opening a drawer in her desk and withdrawing an attache case. "We captured these ledgers in this morning's raid on the Moonlight Triad, but they're encrypted. I need to be able to dump printouts on the DA's desk at some point in the next" - she glanced at her chrono - "twenty-two and a half hours or Der Kleiner walks."

Ahsoka paused, trying to find the best way to tell her new boss that cryptoanalysis was not a standard course at the Jedi Temple. She decided to be blunt. "I'm afraid I don't know how to do that."

"Well what kind of cryptographer are you, then?"

"Um, I'm ex-Jedi."

Inspector Elsarr massaged her temples, rose, and stuck her head out the door. "JENKINS!" she bellowed, "WHERE IS MY CRYPTOGRAPHER?"

A distant voice replied, "Fifteen minutes out, Inspector."

"Hmpf." Elsarr flopped back into her swivel chair, slid the attache case back into its drawer, and picked up one of the folders on her desk. Opening it, she continued, "Junior Detective Ahsoka Tano."

"That's me!"

"I thought you'd be older." It did not appear to be a compliment. "Well, welcome to the force, kid."

Ahsoka grinned. "Boss, I've been studying it for years."

The other woman's lip twitched, but she pretended not to notice the pun, instead forging onward through a speech she'd clearly run through many times. "Here's your orientation packet; your partner's desk is six down from there; he'll show you the ropes. Good luck, run along."

Ahsoka's partner turned out to be a 1.9 meter hulk of gray scales named Vangar Waz who appreciated her puns. He was short for a Trandoshan, but still towered far above the tips of her montrals. As he began to explain how log in to the CSF mainframe, he commented, "I thought you'd be taller."

Ahsoka thought back to the last conversation she'd had with a Tandoshan, and decided not to mention it. "Master Yoda always said, 'Size matters not.'"

"I take it he didn't have much luck in the dating scene, eh?"

Ahsoka snorted. She could work with these folks.

Things moved swiftly after that. It didn't take long for Vagnar, and then the inspector, to notice Ahsoka had a knack for reading people, and she quickly earned the rank she had been given as the team continued to investigate the Moonlight Triad's activities in the undercity.

The trouble began on her first raid, a routine seizure of a stash of death sticks. Inspector Elsarr, probably trying to evaluate Ahsoka's skills, sent her in first. It was just a small warehouse, more of a storage unit really, and she could only sense one person inside, a skittish humanoid. Still, it was dark when she entered the room, so when a brilliant scarlet blaster bolt flared towards her, instinct took over and Ahsoka batted it directly back to its source. The blaster exploded, briefly illuminating a room filled with nondescript crates and a terrified human youth. There was a boyish scream, a thud, and then silence.

When Vagnar followed in with his stun blaster and a floodlight, Ahsoka saw the guard for what he was: a boy in his mid-teens with short, curly hair. His skin was marred by the occasional pimple, but those small blemishes paled in comparison to the long gouges left by the exploding blaster. The child's right hand and forearm would need reconstructive surgery, and the rest would need a long dip in bacta, a resource that had grown ever scarcer as the war continued. Ahsoka thanked the Force he was still breathing.

Jenkins patted her shoulder. "You did good, kid."

Ahsoka didn't say anything for the better part of a minute. When the words did come, they were querulous and faint.

"I'm used to droids." Even as she said them, she knew they were wrong. She'd fought and killed sentients before on half a dozen worlds, but they had always been adult soldiers, trained and armed and cognizant of the risk they were undertaking.

"He's going to be just fine," offered Vagnar, his words falling on empty ears. The kid couldn't have even finished high school.

Ahsoka slid through the rest of her shift in a stupor, mechanically outlining her report back at the station. According to the student id in his wallet, the boy was named Halin Pastorus. He was fourteen.

When Ahsoka got home, Asajj was slumped on the couch, watching some holodrama or other, but she looked up when she sensed Ahsoka's distress. "What are you beating yourself up for this time?" She inquired without preamble.

Ahsoka was silent. Asajj paused the holodrama.

"Out with it, kid. I don't have all day." It so happened that today was Asajj's day off, but that was beside the point. It had been a very good holodrama.

"I hurt someone today." Ahsoka had expected the words to hang in the air, full of shame and self-condemnation, but Asajj responded immediately.

"We've both hurt an awful lot of people. Why is this one different?"

This time, Ahsoka didn't bother with the line about the droids. "It was an innocent. Jedi aren't supposed to do that."

"How do you know?"

"He was a kid, Asajj. Fourteen years old."

The ex-Sith shrugged. "You were younger when we first fought."

Ahsoka rolled her eyes. "I'm a Jedi. That was different."

The older woman didn't let it go. "Was it? Did you know what you were getting into? I didn't when I first left the Temple."

That got Ahsoka's attention. "You were a Jedi?"

"Not open for discussion." Asajj's tone brooked no argument, but Ahsoka filed that tidbit away for later inspection. "Answer the question, Tano."

The surnames were out. Ahsoka dropped the subject. "I guess I didn't."

"Exactly. No one knows what war is really like until they're stuck in it. Now, what was this kid doing when you hurt him?"

"Um, shooting at me to protect a massive cache of death sticks belonging to his bosses in the Moonlight Triad?"

Asajj let herself fall forward onto a cushion.

"It wasn't like that! There was only one of him, and I'm a Jedi! I should have been able to take him down without hurting him!"

Asajj flopped back up and massaged her temples in exasperation. "Nobody's perfect, Ahsoka."

"But I could have done better!"

"Did you kill him?"

"No!" Ahsoka shuddered at the very thought

"Then you could've done a lot worse."

Asajj had her there. "I guess."

"I take it he's in the medcenter?"

"Yeah, he'll be fine, but that's beside the point!"

"Which is?"

Ahsoka paused. "I hurt someone when I didn't have to. That isn't the Jedi way."

Asajj met her eyes. "A lot of Jedi have been doing a lot of un-Jedi way things lately. Frankly, that you even noticed puts you in pretty good standing, if what you told me about the goings-on in the Order lately is true."

"But-"

Asajj continued over Ahsoka's protest. "You have to accept that you're not perfect, or you'll drive yourself insane." Ahsoka didn't have anything to say to that. "Look, if you want to make it better, you can go to the medcenter tomorrow and see how he's doing, okay? Maybe try to help him get out of the triad or something."

Ahsoka gave up. "Okay."

Relieved, Asajj resumed her original position and resumed her holodrama. "Now, hush. I have important things to be doing."