Just one today, but it's a longer one. I'll be back to my established pattern by tomorrow.
Broken
The Wookiee funeral custom was, like most Wookiee customs, simple and put together within minutes. Master Plo had told her once that it was because of the very adverse conditions of the Kashyyk ecosystem; burials had to be held quickly and thoroughly so that the stench of a corpse would not attract predators. So, she had expected that the first order of business would be to build a pyre and burn every Trandoshan body and…hunting trophy in the place. Wookiees simply couldn't allow their dead to remain unburied, not even their dead enemies.
Still, she wished that the boys did not have to take part in the ceremony. She felt like they had had enough trial and torment over the past however many years on this Force-forsaken place; they deserved to get away from this ugliness.
She had voiced her concerns to Chewbacca, but he shook his head. Glass that is not washed breaks easily, he said, in a cryptic, poetic fashion that indicated he was quoting some old Wookiee proverb. Ahsoka's knee-jerk reaction might have been to reject the proverb and care for her men, her soldiers, in the way she thought best. But she had been Master Plo Koon's little girl long before she was Anakin's Skywalker's hotheaded child soldier apprentice, and, in the end, the old lesson of listening to Wookiee wisdom held out over the newer one of going her own way.
Though now, she questioned the logic of her decision. Jinx had told her about other Padawans who had come before her - who had died - but she hadn't really thought of their deaths as a real concept until they found one large back room filled to the brim with dozens of Jedi "trophies."
O-Mer went into the room, and, completely defying all stereotypes of Cerean calm, he blanched immediately, and scrambled out into the hallway to retch the nonexistent contents of his hungry stomach onto the floor. Ahsoka looked after him in concern for a moment, but, even before her eyes, the younger boy got over the shock. He wept without shame on the shoulder of a sympathetic Wookiee, and dared not look back at the doorway, but she could feel him eliminating the grief from his system, allowing a proper, Jedi-like calm to take its place.
Jinx, on the other hand…Jinx held his outward calm together by the force of sheer will. He stood, dry-eyed, before the many faces of his dead comrades, and swallowed back the bile that had to be rising in his throat.
And then, in a steady voice, he repeated the tales of horror that he knew. He had only personally met about ten of the cadavers in this chamber during life, but that was enough. A Corellian boy who had openly tried to romance the late Kalifa, who later died protecting her from an ambush. An Arkanian girl, a nature-lover who had enticed a convor to stay near their camp as a pet, who had been skinned while still alive at the age of ten. A Falleen teenager, unfortunate enough to be female and lizard-like enough to attract the interest of every Trandoshan male, dead by…well, he wouldn't describe what had killed her at the age of fifteen. A Zabrak boy, lover of the Falleen girl, driven to the Dark Side by her death and killed while trying to take the entire Trandoshan convoy out in a fit of rage. Kalifa herself, her hide newly-bloodied and still stinking of embalming fluid.
One by one, the horrible stories came out. Jinx did not shed one tear. Nor did he touch the pelts, or acknowledge his connection to any of them verbally.
Ten agonizing minutes of this passed until he finally paused, his eyes fixed upon the remains of a small Nautolan girl, killed when she was perhaps twelve years old. The Twi'lek reached out to touch one thin, shrunken green-brown head-tail on the corpse, but paused, and retracted his hand before he could make contact. He seemed to shrink into himself, biting savagely at one lip when the tears started to come.
Then, when he thought that he had regained his composure, he opened his mouth, as if to speak. The words would not come, and his spirit crumpled even more. Taking quick, halting breaths, he looked around the room, as if seeking some other face he could identify, someone other than this girl who had evidently meant so much to him.
And that's when Ahsoka saw it. He wasn't grieving; he couldn't cleanse himself. His mind, streaked with the pain and tears of half a decade of captivity, was becoming harder, but more brittle. For now, his mind encased his spirit, preventing him from expressing the emotions that clamored to be let out, but the mind wouldn't hold up under the pressure for long. What would become of him after it shattered?
She did not want to find out.
His dark eyes widened in surprise when she touched his shoulder. She didn't give him any more warning than that, but threw her arms around his chest, pressing her cheek to his collarbone. With an effort, she opened up her own mind, letting him feel her spirit, her Force presence. Bolstering the fragile crystalline walls of his spirit with as much strength as she had in her wiry little body, and providing an outlet of compassion and understanding for the emotions he was striving so hard to hide, she closed her eyes and braced herself.
Jinx faltered for a moment, torn; then, slowly, like the rusty old door of a water-gate on a backwoods farm planet, his spirit unlocked, releasing the anger and resentment and helplessness and despair that had built up over so many years on this world. Ahsoka accepted it, her eyes tearing from the effort of taking on so much weight at once; as quickly as was possible, she let it go, pouring it out of her own spirit so that it would not corrupt her like it had him.
Meanwhile, the boy in her arms collapsed, sobbing mutely on her shoulder. He trembled, threatening to fall, and slowly she knelt down, easing him onto the floor.
They sat there for too many minutes to count, both of them too wrapped up in this moment of healing to pay attention to the murmuring Wookiees in the background. She rocked him slowly, like a baby, praying to the Force that what she was doing was right.
Even if it wasn't, this boy, this little man, had suffered too much, had been too strong in the face of all this evil to break down now that he was finally free. She wasn't about to let him do so. She wasn't.