A/N: This was originally going to be the only chapter to take place on Taris, believe it or not. I've modified it since writing the others so that it ties in better and seems a little less superfluous, and I hope I've succeeded. At the very least, it introduces Bastila into the mix and should help kick off the next chapter, which will take place on Dantooine.

I would also like to apologize in advance for the delay in posting the next chapter. It's a lot further from finished than this one was, and things are about to get much busier in terms of coursework... but it'll happen.

Disclaimer: This awesome game still belongs to the people who made it.

Taris Apartment – Democracy and Dreams

I couldn't believe we were still having this conversation. Under normal circumstances, I would never yell "shut up" at my superiors—or my friends—but our civilized discussion was starting to escalate into a full-blown argument, and we were still getting nowhere. They left me no choice.

"Look," I said, lowering my voice again now that I'd gotten everyone's attention. "We managed to locate and rescue a captured Jedi in a Sith-quarantined, planet-wide city, and we did it in a matter of days. I'm sure we can figure this out."

Carth, Bastila, Mission, and Zaalbar all stared at me with varying degrees of doubt.

"And how, exactly, do you propose we do that?" Bastila snapped, her words dripping with cynicism. Normally this would have gotten on my nerves, but at the moment, I was just relieved that she'd overlooked my accidental slip about "rescuing" her for once.

"Well, the way I see it, we have two plausible options. One: we find another vacant apartment with a functioning lock on the door. Two: we set up a rotation and take turns sleeping in the beds. I think we should vote on it."

Silence reined for a heartbeat or two. I hoped that was a good sign.

"That… sounds reasonable," Carth said at last, albeit somewhat grudgingly. I didn't care. I could have hugged him, simply because it was the first non-argumentative thing anyone besides me had said in the last twenty standard minutes.

"All right, we'll put it to a vote," Bastila conceded, though judging by the look on her face, the mere thought of operating as a democracy was causing her physical pain. "All in favor of finding an additional apartment, raise your hands."

"I think it should be a secret vote, so nobody influences anybody else," Mission objected before any hands even went up. I noticed Bastila's twitch out of the corner of my eye though.

"And I don't need to participate in this," Zaalbar rumbled. "Human beds are too small for me anyway."

"What did he say?" Bastila asked me.

I closed my eyes, silently counting to five in Shyriiwook before I invented a false translation about how suffocating her need for control was.

"Zaalbar said he doesn't need to participate. He doesn't fit on these beds, so it's a moot point for him."

"Well, that will certainly make matters less complicated. If he did require a bed, we'd be three short, in which case we'd actually need to find two more rooms."

I was on the verge of blurting out that that might not be such a bad idea, because otherwise someone would have to share with her, but I held my tongue. The rational part of my brain recognized that I was cranky from lack of sleep, and still a little resentful that she'd refused to acknowledge the roll Carth, Mission, Zaalbar, and I had played in securing her freedom. It was just my wounded pride that was making things difficult. And possibly the fact that I hadn't eaten today. I'd given my last meal pack to Bastila several hours ago, figuring she needed it more than I did, having spent the last few days as a captive of the Vulkars.

If she had thanked me instead of wasting a good five minutes protesting that the Force was the only sustenance she needed, I might have forgiven her.

"All right, since Zaalbar isn't voting, he can do the counting," I said. Someone had to take charge, and I wasn't going to wait for Carth and Bastila to start that again. I wanted to keep the truce in their little power struggle going as long as possible. "Everyone, turn to face one of the walls and close your eyes. Zaalbar? Whenever you're ready."

"I'm ready. But you or Mission should do the talking…"

Oh. Right. Even after all the time I'd spent as a translator before I signed on with the fleet, I sometimes still forgot to take language barriers into account. After all, the words made perfect sense to me.

"I'll handle it," I said, for Mission's benefit more than his.

I turned to face the door and waited another beat to make sure everyone had followed my instructions before closing my eyes.

"Right, let's do this. All in favor of finding another apartment?"

I raised my hand, and heard a rustle of fabric that indicated at least one other person doing the same. Probably Bastila.

"All right," Zaalbar rumbled.

"All in favor of staying here and setting up a sleeping rotation?"

More rustling of fabric.

It suddenly occurred to me that with Zaalbar abstaining, there were four of us—an even number.

Please don't let it be a tie…

"All right," Zaalbar said again.

I opened my eyes, and all of us turned to face the Wookiee who would pronounce our fate.

"I'm afraid we have an even split," he said reluctantly.

My heart sank. And it had seemed like such a good idea… Now we were right back to square one. Damn.

Again, I was tempted to mistranslate… but Mission would know. I grudgingly relayed to Carth and Bastila what Zaalbar had said word-for-word.

"Well, let's talk it out then," Carth suggested, taking the complication in stride. "Maybe if we all explain why we voted the way we did, we can come to some kind of consensus."

I just stared at him. Was he not remembering the twenty minutes we'd wasted trying to do just that?

"Or… at least sway one person to change their vote," he amended.

"I'll change mine right now, just to avoid another argument," I volunteered.

"No, I think we should talk," Carth said seriously. "We don't know how long it's going to take to find a way off this planet, and until then, we're going to have to function as a group. We can't just avoid every conflict that comes up."

I had to admit he had a point. If we couldn't even resolve the trivial issue of who was sleeping where, how were we going to escape a Sith-occupied planet with number one on Malak's most wanted list?

"All right, fine. Who would like to start us off?" I asked—and instantly regretted it. That was opening the door for another argument.

But Mission saved me.

"I'll start," she said at once, mimicking Bastila's impeccable posture—consciously or otherwise—now that all eyes were on her. "As most of you know, me and Big Z aren't exactly used to a life of luxury. We pretty much just crash wherever we can find a safe spot, so as long as the Sith haven't come snooping through here, I don't see what the problem is. And I'd rather stick together than have some of us bunking down a couple of blocks away where it might not be safe, ya know? We don't have any way to get a hold of each other if something happens."

Wow. The fourteen-year-old had put a lot more thought into her vote than I had. But then again, she and Zaalbar had probably been dealing with this issue for years. For the first time since we'd joined forces, I wondered where they had been staying. But I didn't ask. If it was one of the cheap, easily-broken-into apartments in the lower city—or worse, out in the streets— I wasn't sure I wanted to know.

"And I'm with Mission," Carth said. "The Sith haven't come poking their noses into this apartment in all the time we've been planetside, but we don't know if the same can be said for another one. And now that we have Bastila, avoiding detection is more important than ever. I think it's best if we just stay here."

I turned to our resident Jedi, who had been watching with an inscrutable expression throughout the whole exchange.

"And how about you?" I prompted. The reasoning behind my vote was essentially just that we'd be more comfortable with more space (physically and emotionally), which couldn't hold a candle to Carth's and Mission's concerns for our safety and the success of the mission. They already had me sold on staying here, and I just wanted to know if there was any conceivable reason we shouldn't.

After all, it wasn't the beds we'd been fighting over. Our twenty-minute argument had mostly consisted of everyone trying to talk two of the others into taking them while he or she slept in one of the chairs or on the floor. In theory, we could avoid the problem altogether by leaving the beds vacant, if it really came down to that. It just seemed stupid.

"Well," Bastila said briskly, "I simply thought these accommodations were too small for the five of us, and hoped that finding additional space would allow us to avoid having this argument again in the future. But if we can all be professional about this and work out a suitable arrangement, I would rather we didn't waste valuable time searching for another apartment when we need to focus on escaping Taris."

Perfect. It was practically unanimous, and I didn't even have to change my vote.

"It's decided then," I said. "We're staying. And for the first night, I think Bastila and Mission should take the beds. Carth and I had more than our fair share before we found the rest of you."

"But I'm the—"

"No arguing," I said, cutting Mission off. "Unless Carth is willing to trade with you."

I glanced over at my fellow soldier, hoping belatedly that he hadn't taken offense at my speaking for him. But he didn't look upset about it. If anything, he looked smug.

"Not a chance," he said, dropping into a chair and yanking off his boots.

Mission scowled, but didn't say anything more. She chose the bunk that had formerly belonged to me and curled up on top of the sheets, probably in protest.

Bastila took the other without a word. Zaalbar found a spot on the floor—on Mission's side of the room, of course—and I decided to follow suit. Cushioned or not, the small, low-backed chairs didn't look all that comfortable.

I crossed to Bastila's side of the room and lay down with my back to the wall, cushioning my head with my standard-issue pack.

This isn't too bad, I told myself. The crick I would have in my neck in the morning was a fair price to pay for the peace and quiet.

"I'll get the lights," Carth said, and a moment later we were plunged into darkness. I couldn't even make out the outline of the table less than a meter from my face. Carth's footsteps finally ceased on the far side of the room—Mission and Zaalbar's side—but I knew better than to take it personally. If I was him, I wouldn't want to sleep anywhere near Bastila either… except that I was doing just that. But it would have hurt her feelings if we had all chosen the far side. And besides, we were going to spend the next several hours unconscious. How bad could it be?

I closed my eyes and wondered if this would ever feel normal—sharing space with people who weren't just soldiers assigned to the same post as me. Carth and Bastila were too important to the war effort for me to think our paths would run parallel for long, but Zaalbar's life-debt to me ensured he and Mission would be sticking around for a while. Unless I released him from it when we left Taris. And that was assuming we even found a way to break the blockade…

I sighed. There was no point in dwelling on our problems now. We could deal with them in the morning when we weren't so burned out from fighting—with and without weapons.

I was just starting to relax when a sound of disgust from Mission broke the silence.

"These beds aren't even comfortable! Why in space didn't one of you two mention that half an hour ago? You actually wanted the floor, didn't you?"

I heard Carth's distinct chuckle from across the room and couldn't help but grin. I hadn't mentioned that particular detail simply because it had never occurred to me. I was used to the bunks on the Endar Spire, which were just as uncomfortable as these, if not worse.

But it was more fun to pretend it had been a conspiracy.

"I'm sure I don't know what you're talking about, Mission. We gave you a bed, and it's the thought that counts, right?"

"I'll let you know in the morning," she grumbled. I pictured her scowling at me in the dark.

"Don't worry. Tomorrow we get to fight over who gets the first turn in the 'fresher," Carth reminded her.

"And don't forget breakfast," Zaalbar added. "We're out of meal packs."

"All right, that's enough, guys," I said. I was interpreting Bastila's conspicuous silence as her being too polite to ask us to shut up, though I couldn't have explained why. It was just a feeling. "Good night, everyone."

"Good night."

I closed my eyes, but to my dismay, shutting down my brain proved to be considerably more difficult than putting an end to the chatter.

I didn't know if it was the Force or just the fact that I couldn't tune out the sound of her breathing, but whenever I tried to let my mind go blank, my thoughts inevitably found their way back to Bastila.

I remembered with particular clarity the almost physical shock of recognizing her as the Jedi from my dreams. As I'd squinted at her jarringly familiar face through the bars of her cage, I had honestly thought I was still dreaming. And even now, whenever she spoke, I half-expected everyone else not to hear her. It was going to be a while before she felt like a real person, and not a figment of my imagination that had somehow crossed over into the real world.

Watching her take on the Vulkars hadn't done anything to shatter that illusion, either. Seeing the Force in action was… impossible to put to words. It was as if the laws of physics had suddenly become optional, but only for Bastila. All she had to do was lift her hand, and a full-grown man two meters away would go flying across the room. It took a good thirty seconds and a lot of equally surprised Vulkars to convince me I wasn't going insane.

Needless to say, once I established that this superhuman being was not a hallucination brought on by my lack of sleep, I was no longer a skeptic when it came to the Force. But that only made what she told me later that afternoon even more terrifying.

Bastila thought I was Force-sensitive—that I could have the potential to do all those… impossible things that were second nature to her. She'd been far from confident in her assessment, but according to her, it was the only explanation for the visions I'd confessed to having, not to mention the fact that I'd managed to find her in the first place.

While I resented the casual way she took it for granted that a non-Jedi couldn't have accomplished what I had without the aid of the Force, I knew she was at least partially right. I'd chalked our uncannily good fortune down to the Force myself. And what were the odds of my imagination conjuring up a Jedi who happened to look identical to Bastila all on its own, down to the ornate detail on her robes? I was Force-sensitive. I had to be.

I just wasn't sure what that meant for my future.

I craned my neck to look up at the dark outline that was Bastila Shan, the hope of the Republic, and wondered whether she ever regretted becoming a Jedi. They took most of their potential candidates in infancy, so it probably hadn't even been her choice. It was strange to think that the only difference between her and me was that her potential to use the Force had been discovered at an early age, and mine hadn't. I wondered whether I would have become as uptight and overbearing as Bastila if I'd grown up doing… whatever Jedi did in place of schooling or a normal career. And whether I would have been any good at it. Would growing up without a family have made me lonely, or simply more independent? Would I have viewed Carth and the others merely as assets, rather than something very close to friends? Or would I never have met them at all? What would I have been doing right now, in this very moment, if I had been raised as a Jedi?

But it was all empty speculation. There was no way to know what I would have become. I didn't even know whether I had enough of a connection to the Force to lift a data pad, let alone master Battle Meditation like Bastila had. Maybe my Force-sensitivity was only ever going to manifest itself in the form of strange visions, and I wouldn't have had the potential to become a Jedi even if I had been discovered.

I rolled onto my back and closed my eyes again, trying to get comfortable.

It was stupid to compare myself to Bastila, I decided at last. Whatever my life could have been, it had no bearing on the person I was now. Even if the Jedi Council confirmed her theory that I was Force-sensitive, what would it matter? They wouldn't make me a Jedi—not at my age. It was pointless even to entertain the thought. Why should I beat myself over the head with something I could never have? I was quite content with my life already, putting my talents to use for a worthwhile cause. That was more than a lot of people could boast. I was happy. I was.

But all the same, I wouldn't have minded getting another taste of what it was like to be a Jedi in my dreams.

To be continued…