As much as I would like to say I own Disney I don't so I don't own Star Wars, either.
Quill Bolera grinned, his excitement stirring as he piloted his ship down towards the latest settlement along the line toward whatever he'd sensed almost a week earlier after dumping the supplies he'd purchased at the last settlement in orbit. (He had to have some reason for visiting each town, after all, and he could pile up only so much in his hold.) He might not have had the sensor training that this kind of mission called for, but for the first time since his arrival on this Light-infest rock the Force was warning him that something in the rapidly approaching buildings was dangerous — and to him personally, not just something that was a danger to the common herd but that any half-trained Sith (and Jedi, he would admit to himself if no one else) could handle. And he could only think of one thing ... or rather one person ... on this backwater hole that could be that threat. Finally!
Then the ship was settled on a flat piece of ground on the settlement's outskirts. It only took a few moments to shut down the engines, get his speeder bike out of the hold, and head into town. Really, the town was so small going on foot would have made more sense, if his exit might not need to be ... expedited.
As he rode along the main street his grin returned. The power of the Light Side that seemed to permeate the planet might be swamping his senses, but the Force user he could sense in a nearby eatery was practically glowing with joy-permeated power of the Force. Whatever Ahsoka had found here, it had made her a very happy Togrutan indeed.
Quill smirked as he parked the speeder bike in front of the eatery. It was such a shame that he'd have to spoil everything for her...
/\
Ahsoka was not in proper form for combat. She knew her pursuer was coming, that in minutes she would be in yet another life or death struggle with innocent lives on the line (she had no illusions how her pursuer would act once he was revealed for what he was, she had seen too many examples of the ruin those that fell to the Dark Side — slaves of the Void, to use Jenni's poetic turn of phrase — left in their wake); she should have been preparing herself mentally, focusing on the battle to come, releasing her fears and worries into the Force so she could enter combat calm and in control ... she'd never been particularly good at it, any more than her master, but she should at least try.
Instead, in spite of the fact that it had been a day since their bonding, that she still ached to her core from Jenni's Force lightning she'd gotten in the way of, that she was about to fight for her life and the lives of others ... in spite of all of that, she could not keep the joy bubbling up from her heart and spreading a broad smile across her face. And it wasn't just because of Jenni's welcoming joy still blazing in her heart.
She had recognized how lonely ... how incomplete ... Jenni had been thanks to the loss of her Bond — in the life Ahsoka had seen when they bonded, family and close friends had been a constant and even when the Void Slaves' coup had driven the survivors of Jenni's new Bond (all two of them) underground shortly after her sixteenth birthday she had still had that Bond. But Ahsoka hadn't recognized how lonely she herself had been. She may not have been bonded mind-to-mind with anyone but Anakin — and that Padawan-Master bond like a candle to the noonday sun compared to this one — but she had still been a Jedi ... one among a united whole, with drive and purpose. She had lost all that when she had walked away from the Order, alone in a cold and hostile galaxy, more cold and hostile than she'd imagined. Now ...
Now I'll never be alone again, she thought as she once again focused for a moment on Jenni's presence in the back of her mind.
That presence 'laughed' back at her. "Time to pay attention to the real world, 'Snips', our target just landed," Jenni's mental presence announced.
"Like you're one to talk!" And it was true, Ahsoka's own joy was dim in comparison to Jenni's blazing happiness and gratitude.
"Maybe, but I have a bit more experience. When this is over, we'll need to talk about Barriss Offee."
The statement came like cold water to the face, Ahsoka's joy guttering from the shock of that statement, and the wave of bitter anger she still felt whenever she thought of how her former friend betrayed her swept through her yet again. She took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and released that anger into the Force ... and much of the joy that had been making her giddy.
"Better. And just in time, he's here. Showtime. Remember the plan, we need to make this fast before he has time to involve innocents in spite of the evacuation."
"Right." Ahsoka took another deep breath, and stepped out of the eatery to face her hunter with Jenni right behind her.
/\
Quill was surprised when two women stepped out of the eatery to meet him: his target, dressed in her usual skimpy, tight battle dress; and a Human dressed in a skirt with a loose top draped over her torso. The human's hair was dyed white and blue in a pattern that reversed the colors of Ahsoka's lekku and montrals.
He was even more surprised when an ear-splitting siren went off for several seconds, and blast shutters slammed down over doors and windows all along the street.
"That was a warning siren, to alert everyone that they need to evacuate the town," the unknown woman said. "Congratulations, you're considered as dangerous as a pirate raid."
Quill focused on her — he already had the measure of the former Padawan — and frowned. She was confident, supremely so, but she was weak. He could barely detect her presence in the Force at all. Certainly she was too weak to be a Jedi, even if the metal tube in her hand was a lightsaber. (Lightsabers weren't exactly standardized, one could never be sure until they were used.) He smirked, this was going to be fun. Ignoring the fact that they'd obviously known he was coming, and the way the Togrutan that was the only one that was remotely a threat was shifting to one side, he asked, "And you think you're up to dealing with a threat as dangerous as a pirate raid?"
"We shall see, won't we? I'm Jenni, by the way." The Human hefted the metal tube in her hand, and a bright white blade sprang humming from its end. As Ahsoka copied her — her blade also a pure white, unlike the shorter green blades of the pair she had typically wielded before — Jenni chanted,
For ten years I have been polishing this sword;
Its frosty edge has never been put to the test.
Now I am holding it and showing it to you, sir:
Is there anyone suffering from injustice?
A complete lunatic. Where did the runt find her, and why is one of the oh-so-noble Jedi letting her die pointlessly? Are they lovers? She wouldn't be the first Jedi that ran wild after leaving the Order. Not that it mattered — the additional Human meant he was facing two instead of the one he'd been expecting, but he'd long since learned that if you knew what you were doing, multiple opponents that weren't trained to work together made it easier, not harder. Two Jedi working together could be dangerous, the Force helped them coordinate, but Jenni was hardly a Jedi. Still, he supposed she could possibly be a distraction, best not to take unnecessary chances.
Without a hint of warning he sprang toward her, his own lightsaber leaping into his hand and its fiery red blade springing to life as it swung straight for Jenni's torso — and she took a step back as she parried his actual strike for her neck instead of the feint ... and the follow-up strike that would have taken off an arm, and the strike that would have sliced her in half at the waist, and the one that would have done the same from neck to groin ... and at the Force's warning he whirled and stepped to one side as he parried Ahsoka's attempt to drive her blade through his back, so that the combatants formed three points of a triangle. This might be harder than I thought.
Quill knew other Hunters liked to taunt their prey as they brought them down, but he considered it rather pointless to waste the effort on the dead. So without a word he stepped toward his target, red humming blade shrieking as it impacted the Padawan's glowing white blade again and again, before spinning away to block Jenni's attacks as she came to her friend's defense ... to easily block Jenni's attacks, and he frowned.
He wasn't surprised that the Human's skill with a lightsaber wasn't up to a Jedi Knight's level, or even a Padawan's — a new Padawan's. What he did find surprising was she didn't even rise to the level of her defense against his first assault. But why? Who was stupid enough to focus purely on defense? It had to be some kind of trap, but he couldn't see how.
It doesn't matter what kind of trap it is if they don't get a chance to —
He leaped back away from Jenni as suddenly blaster bolts started to rain down from the roofs of the buildings around them. Most of them slammed down into the synthecrete street around the pair, but both he and Jenni whirled their lightsabers above their heads to deflect multiple bolts ... and several hammered into his speeder bike, dropping the sparking, smoking ruin to the roadway as flames began leaping from its engine. Bastards! He had liked that bike...
Even as he cursed his ambushers he saw his opportunity, shifted position to place his back to a wall and Jenni between him and Ahsoka running toward them through the hail of blaster fire (knocking aside a few bolts of her own as she came), and used the Force to activate the wrist shield he'd taken off a Mandalorian he'd killed as he used his lightsaber to deflect bolts toward Jenni at point-blank range.
She whirled to face him and deflected the bolts, several back at him, and he used the wrist shield to reflect them straight back. They hammered into her chest even as another shot from a roof hammered into her back, and the Human dropped limply to the road as her presence in the Force vanished like a snuffed-out candle.
"Jenni!" his target screamed as she leaped over the corpse and slashed blindly at Quill. He grinned as he parried her strikes — apparently they had been lovers, and nothing made a target as furious ... and as vulnerable ... as the death of a loved one. And someone on a rooftop was shouting for them to cease fire. Once Ahsoka was dead he could take to the rooftops to make his way back to his ship, and kill a few of his ambushers on the way.
He'd won. His only regret was that he wouldn't be able to grab some women to take with him, and since they'd apparently been tracking him since his arrival he couldn't drop in on another settlement instead to pick some up there. But he'd definitely be giving this settlement a gift from orbit before he left.
Time to end this. He parried Ahsoka's last wild slash and riposted, fast enough that the Padawan was only barely able to parry it ... and his next strike, and the next, and the next. She backed up, trying to break contact, but he pressed her. She stepped back again and her heel caught on her lover's corpse, tumbling her backwards onto the synthecrete of the road. Quill stepped over the corpse, batting away a few blaster bolts as some of the men on the roofs opened fire again — and staggered as the worst pain he'd ever felt in his life pierced through him, up through his torso and into his chest. He looked down, gaping at the sight of the corpse he was straddling glaring up at him, leaning up on one elbow. Her other hand held her lightsaber, its blade stabbing up through his groin. She yanked sideways, the lightsaber's blade burning through heart, lung, and rib cage as it ripped out of his torso, and as the world went dark his last emotion was stunned amazement that according to the Force the Human that had killed him didn't exist.
/\
Ahsoka was gasping as she rolled to her feet. She'd been right on both counts — the damage she had suffered from Jenni's Force lightning that the bacta tank hadn't had the time to heal hadn't hindered her at all, but that didn't mean it hadn't hurt. But the flash of pain she had felt from Jenni just before her bondmate had vanished from her Force sense had given the former Padawan a nasty shock — it had felt just like all too many clone troopers that had died around her during her two years at war, and only the fact she could still sense Jenni's presence in her mind had kept her from panicking. Though that presence had had an odd feel to it, even after the less than a day since their bonding ... muted, distant somehow. It must have been the effect of Jenni fully 'immersing herself in the current of the Tao', as she would put it.
But that muting effect was gone now and Jenni's pain was back, burning across back and chest. But Jenni didn't seem to notice it — she simply stood over the man that she'd killed, staring down at his corpse with the oddest mix of emotions ... a sort of singing emptiness mixed with worry. She looked up as Ahsoka approached and silently asked, "Shouldn't I feel something?"
"Feel something? Oh!" Ahsoka remembered the piece of poetry Jenni had recited just before the fight started, and realized that not once throughout her vision of Jenni's life — not a single time — had she seen any combat. This was Jenni's first kill. Or at least the first face-to-face, she thought as she remembered the ritual that had ended with Jenni trapped in a Force vortex of some sort, and with the deaths of every single person on Trey with a significant connection to the Force. (Terra, the colonists were debating changing the planet's name to the original, and the yeas were winning.)
Ahsoka laid a hand on Jenni's shoulder. "You will. You'll have nights you spend in meditation because you can't face your dreams. Believe it. I'll be there with you."
Jenni nodded, but flinched at the new weight on her shoulder as her burning pain jumped. Ahsoka's eyes narrowed and she hastily tore open Jenni's charred top, checking the improvised armor she'd worn underneath it. "What's wrong? Didn't the armor hold? Weren't the blasters set to half strength? Thel, Ghent, get over here, Jenni's hurt!"
By now the blast shields over windows and doors had risen, and as Thel and Ghent ran over Ahsoka scrabbled at the armor's clasps. The armor fell away, and the medtech hissed. "Crap, we forgot about the heat transfer! You're going into the bacta tank right now." He shouted for the bystanders gathering around to fetch a stretcher.
"Yeah," Ghent agreed, staring at the strips of skin that had pealed away with the armor. "Jenni, why aren't you screaming?"
"I definitely know the pain is there," Jenni said, "but we Dancers can immerse ourselves in the Tao's currents enough that the pain doesn't interfere with whatever needs doing. Ahsoka?"
Ahsoka nodded. "Jedi can as well, through a kind of walking meditation. It does require us to split our attention, though." She looked over as one of the deputies she'd met the day she'd gone into the bacta tank herself hurried up, pushing a stretcher hovering on its own repulsor ahead of him. "Let's get you in the tank before your Tao decides you feeling your pain won't get in the way of anything."
A Jenni beginning to tremble from shock nodded. "You're beginning to figure out how it works for the Dancers. Yes, let's." She lay down on the stretcher, and the clean pad Thel had yanked from the foot of the stretcher to its head, and Thel and the deputy guided it toward Thel's office.
Ahsoka and Ghent began to follow, when another deputy ran up to them. "Marshal, Cort's on the com, he says another ship is coming into orbit!"
The poetry is a translation of "The Swordsman" by Jia Dao, a poet from the Tang dynasty (roughly the early 7th century A.D. to the early 10th), and nicely sums up the Youxia spirit of knight errantry.