Date Night

Looking over the table set before her, Ahsoka realized this date was a huge mistake. Miralukans were culturally vegan. Togrutans were biologically carnivorous. So the wide spread of carefully crafted cuisine, seasoned and spiced to perfection, which Satell and his father had spent all day preparing, contained not an ounce of nutrition that Ahsoka's body could digest. Ahsoka had hoped that Satell's familial career in fishing might have made them exceptions to the rule, but no; apparently their prey's scales could be crushed for their medicinal value. All of their food had a plant-based source.

In her days as a Jedi, Ahsoka had occasionally and fruitlessly regretted the circumstances of her birth, thinking that a vegan lifestyle, one which did not in any way profit from harm caused to another life-form, simply made for a more holistic and consistent Jedi. Do no harm to sentients, do no harm to non-sentients. It was a ridiculous idea, as many plants were demonstrably sentient, so eating them is just as morally questionable as eating any animal, and even if it was logically sound, Ahsoka was still a carnivore. A fact she'd wholly failed to communicate to Satell. Or any of the Miraluka.

Ahsoka had eaten plants before. It was rather like eating dirt: not a particularly bad taste, just a really weird texture and a stomachache to follow. Would it be better to make things awkward now by refusing their food on her first visit to their household, or to posture pleasure and only reveal the deception when their relationship might have grown stronger?

Opting towards honesty, Ahsoka said, "I'm sorry, I should have seen this coming. My species can only digest meats. This meal looks delicious, but...I can't eat it. I'll go."

Satell's mother responded in hazy, warbled gibberish. Ahsoka internally cursed her lousy hearing, focused, and asked her to repeat herself.

"That really isn't necessary dear, you can stay, it's no trouble."

"Mum, I'm sure she doesn't want to sit hungry, watching us eat," Satell said. "I'm sorry for the miscommunication. Do you mind if I find you after supper?"

Ahsoka nodded emphatically, "Thank you, yes, that sounds wonderful." Was that too enthusiastic? "Meet you at the surface in an hour?"

Satell smiled slightly, probably at his success in diverting the awkwardness without making anything super awkward. Miralukans were incredibly subtle in expressing their emotions through tonal inflections, but their faces were often goofy in how uninhibited their expressions were. A side effect of blindness, perhaps.

Ahsoka rose from the table and grabbed her lantern before leaving.

The Miralukan village was built into the side of a deep canyon. Caves were carved into the rift's sides, and from these caves were built a vast tunnel system. The predictable problem with a mostly underground society of blind people is that visiting sighted people don't have any light. Anywhere.

Asajj managed to track down a flashlight somewhere in the Banshee's hold, and Ahsoka managed to get it into operational shape.

They'd both prefer to use a lightsaber's glow, but they lacked both the technology and the materials to make proper use of the kyber crystals they'd found. Their fencing practice had consisted of swinging appropriately sized durasteel pipes Ahsoka scavenged from the Banshee's fuselage, which simply wasn't the same. A proper lightsaber had a balance all its own, with its force-resonant hilt and weightless blade, and they both wondered sometimes if their practice might simply be reinforcing bad habits. Though, if they weren't leaving the planet, and the war was over (or would be soon), what harm was there in practicing for fitness or fun instead of function?

"Hey." Satell had caught up, "Listen, I'm sorry that didn't work out the way we wanted it too, but I still want to get to know you, and I've been looking forward to this night all week, and I'm not patient enough to wait any longer. So let's skip dinner and go straight for the fun part."

Ahsoka cocked her head, thinking she must have misheard. "Come again?"

"I want to spend time with you." Satell said simply. " Now. Dinner be damned."

Ahsoka stifled the way her heart fluttered at his admission and gave him a sharp look he couldn't see. "Second biology lesson about togrutas for the night: we get cranky and irritable more easily when we're hungry. Doesn't seem like ideal conditions for a first date."

"Increased honesty and compulsive behavior? Sounds perfect to me," he said with a playful smirk, "Come on, there's something I want to show you."

He held out his hand.

Ahsoka immediately thought that this was a bad idea...

Grinning, she took his hand in her own.

With confident steps, he led her deeper into the cave network, quickly emerging into a cavern far too large for Ahsoka's small light to illuminate the far walls. As they continued through, Ahsoka realized that many of the walls they passed were not natural parts of the cave, but full buildings, one after another, built within this cavern. An entire city, buried underground, drowning in silence and darkness.

Ahsoka wasn't afraid of the dark, but that was still just creepy enough to send a chill across the nape of her neck.

"Careful," Satell said, tugging Ahsoka out of the way of a pothole in her path.

"Thanks. Um, how did you do that?" Ahsoka asked. "You can't see that hole, obviously, it isn't making any noise. Have you tripped into it before and you just remember, or could you somehow smell it?"

Satell laughed at that, "Time for a Miralukan biology lesson! Our senses of hearing, smell, tough, and taste aren't significantly better than yours. If the old records are to be believed, they're actually worse, on average, than a human's. But our sight is way better."

Ahsoka chuckled politely at his joke, "Satell, I'm not sure how to break this to you, but you don't have eyes."

"Oh? Then how do I know that you don't have hair or ears like mine? That your sleeveless shirt shows off the frankly incredible definition of your arms? That when you scrunch your nose up like that it's totally adorable?"

"You're using Force sight." Ahsoka realized. It was a skill every youngling was trained in, a very early step in learning to trust the Force. What Satell was doing, what all Miralukas could do, apparently, was something on a whole different level.

Practice has benefits.

"Exactly! Force Sight you call it? Way better than light-sight. I don't need light, and I'm not limited to see just in front of me, and I don't have to worry about line of sight. I can see around or through anything, if I focus."

"Through anything?" Ahsoka asked, both intrigued and very creeped out at the possibilities and implications.

"Yeah, not as sexy as you might think. Looking through clothes is easy, sure, but looking through skin is just as easy. Looking at skin is...appealing, yeah, but you can just as easily get an eyeful of lung, or liver, or intestines, or bladder, which, you know, isn't so fun."

They continued to bicker amiably on the relative virtues of light and Force-based vision as they walked on. Ahsoka found it to be surprisingly easy to just talk, to relax, to laugh with this boy she barely knew. So far, romance seemed indecipherable from friendship, just with the strange quirk of acknowledging how much each enjoyed looking at the other.

Ahsoka chided herself for ignoring the obvious, that it wasn't only looking that she wanted when she was around Satell. She felt her cheeks warm, and decided not to bring up the particular failing of Force Sight which prevented him from witnessing her blush or notice her drifting gaze.

Satell led them out of the underground city, through a series of rather clean tunnels. The last of these opened upon a vast column of emptiness, a cavern whose floor fell away into darkness, whose ceiling disappeared into nothingness, and whose far wall may not yet exist for all Ahsoka's eyes could see. That faint sense of nauseous euphoria which reminded Ahsoka of piloting a fighter seized twisted Ahsoka's intestines, urging her to both back away and jump in.

"So what is it that we came to do?" Ahsoka asked.

"Not do," Satell answered mysteriously, "See."

"Alright," Ahsoka rolled her eyes, "So what is it that we came to see?"

"Nothing."

Ahsoka fired up, her patience "I skipped supper and you aren't even going to show me anything?"

"No, I'm not going to show you anything," Satell teased, "I'm going to show you nothing. Can't you hear it?"

"I can't hear anything," Ahsoka admitted. "My montrals were damaged a while back. I can only understand you because I'm using the force to enhance my skin's sensitivity a whole bunch. I don't hear your voice, I feel it. Force hearing, I guess. I'm not great at it, but I'm getting better."

Satell seemed dumbfounded, "You can hear me through your skin? You can increase your sensitivity that much?"

Ahsoka shrugged, "It's less like hearing and more like reading lips. Different sounds have a different, I dunno, tecture. I figured, I can use the Force to make my muscles stronger or faster, why not my nerves?"

"So you just invented a whole new way to use the Force?" Satell asked, "And got good enough at it to carry on a conversation without my even noticing? You're incredible."

Ahsoka couldn't keep a smile off her face. She hoped Satell was too busy looking at nothing to notice. "Words and speech are pretty easy. Ambient noise is much harder. Hold on." Ahsoka let the Force flow through her more freely, channeling it through her skin. She became aware of a kind of buzzing, a white noise far too quiet and garbled to be understood at all.

Ahsoka frowned. The Force didn't seem to be powerful enough. No, of course not, the Force is infinite, it's never the problem, it's a matter of how you use it. Ahsoka was the one who wasn't powerful enough.

Ahsoka had always thought of using the Force like a mill using a river. You can grease the mechanisms, replace components with upgrades or one's of a higher quality, change the mill in any manner imaginable to help the wheel turn, but you can't make the water flow faster. It will come in torrents during a flood, or may slow to trickle during a drought, but no amount of effort can make the river stronger at the miller's whim.

But was that really true? Could the miller not clear the river of obstructions, fill the banks and carve new furroughs to narrow the path and make the Force flow?

Ahsoka tried.

She gasped as a ripple of sensation coursed across her skin. She'd grown accustomed to increased feedback she received while Force listening, how a cool breeze suddenly felt like a freezing gale, a scraped knee like flayed skin, a comfortable shirt like a lover's caress, but this was something else entirely. She could have counted the threads of material in her leggings through her knees, could feel the gentle slippery scrape of her own muscles against her bones.

And she could hear wings.

Thousands, millions of nigh-silent wings flapping in complex rhythmic concert.

"Moths?"

"Dustings," Satell whispered. "This chamber is right under the mountain. They say the dustings are responsible for the things people see up there. Or maybe whatever it is up there attracts the dustings. I've never thought it made any difference."

He turned to Ahsoka, and something in his face was different, mature, desirable, desiring. "I heard you went up there. Heard you've said there are other places like it out in the galaxy. I'd like to go, you know. Away. See other worlds. Maybe those places have their own dustings. Sharing their minds with each other. Sharing what they see with us. Close your eyes. Look at them."

Ahsoka felt her eyes flutter shut almost of their own accord, and in that new darkness, she remembered how to see.

The dustings swarmed in consistent chaos, tiny black patterns on glowing white wings. Hundreds of millions of them, diving, rising, swerving, swooping in and out and among one another. The patterns would all align for the briefest of moments and Ahsoka could see for the briefest of instances a scene, a place, a person she knew, a person she'd not yet met, and then the moths would flap again, falling apart into a beautiful nothing.

A touch. Fingertips upon her shoulder. Satell was behind her, near her, so close.

With the Force rushing through her, his almost innocent touch was electrifying, igniting her nervous system, more sensual, more pleasurable, more distracting than any touch she'd ever known.

"I saw you in here," Satell said, speaking words she couldn't pay heed in her state, "Months ago. The beautiful girl with the horned head. I don't know why they wanted us here, together." He ducked his head toward her, hot breath excruciating, wonderful, all-consuming against her ear, hands at her hips. "But I know what I want. Do you?"

Ahsoka couldn't answer. Couldn't think. Couldn't stop seeing. Scenes that had never been. Things she'd wished for. Her and Lux. Lux became Satell. Satell became Asajj. Asajj became Anakin.

Something had changed. Satell's arms had enfolded her, trapped her, constrained her.
"No...No…"

Anakin became Rex. Rex became Wolffe. Wolffe became Plo Koon. Wolffe killed Plo Koon.

"No!"

Ahsoka snapped the Force out, and reality came rushing back. Satell had sprung away, looking concerned. The moths were gone, invisible once more. She couldn't hear. Couldn't stop thinking.

Satell was saying something. There was fear in his expression, fear he'd overstepped his bounds, that he'd offended her, scared her, hurt her. How could she explain that she was more scared and hurt than he was imagining, but that it had nothing to do with him?

She couldn't.

"I have to go. Now."

He looked offended, insulted, hurt. But he opened his arms in a gesture that spoke more clearly then his lips, "Then go."

Another time, in another state of mind, Ahsoka might have adored him for his willingness to give up what he wanted for her sake, might have done everything in her power to assure him that he had done nothing wrong.

But today his touch was wrapped in her mind with what he had shown her, with what she had seen, with her father's death. So she went.

When Asajj found her twenty minutes later, Ahsoka was still heaving with exertion from her dead sprint back to the Banshee from the Dusting's chamber. Flat on her back under the atmospheric shield system, Ahsoka explained the situation to Asajj, mentally projecting her words at record speed. "Had a Force vision. My dad is in danger. I have to help him. Stay with me, please?"

"Do we have time for explanations?" Asajj asked.

"No."

"Then yes."

"Thank you."

"How can I help?"

"Get us in the air," Ahsoka said, slamming the reconstructed shield system back into position. "I'll yell when the light speed is ready."

"You have a solution for the Nav computer?"

"Same solution and and cause as most of our problems," Ahsoka said, scrambling over to the hyperdrive. The Force."

"What?"

"It'll work. It has to."