Something had changed. It hadn't changed overnight, but it had been crawling along until very recently, but then, it had all just...snapped. and Mundi could not put her finger on exactly what it was. It was different, yet terribly familiar. It reminded her of something. Or some when.

She felt awake...again. More aware, more focused? A weight had been lifted away, a weight she hadn't even been aware she was carrying?

This is not natural.

No, worse, she knew it was all too natural. Or it had been, before. Back when she had worked shoulder to shoulder with one of the greatest Jedi ever born. But it couldn't be. Amasri was gone, and then, dead. Everyone knew that. And now, the whispers were beginning to flow that Alek was also gone, and now, dead. If only Mundi could believe that, trust in that. This felt like...which one? Alek? Amasri? If she was lucky it was neither. There were others; many, many other Jedi alive and well. Just because Amasri and Alek had been the best didn't mean that they would always hold that untouchable pinnacle of power and ability. Great Jedi had come before, others would come later. Bastila? Much more likely. Definitely more plausible. From what Mundi understood, Bastila was still alive. She'd been involved in whatever this great battle that the rumors were chewing on was. The best scuttlebutt was that Alek had been killed during this great battle, that Bastila had turned the tide with her battle meditation, but again, this was only a rumor. Once, she had been at every great battle, she had been Amasri's chosen captain...up until something had twisted deep inside of that one.

I still don't understand.

And for the life of her, she really didn't. Amasri had seemed both invincible and incorruptible, but in a more pragmatic and flexible way than Alek had been. He'd been so shiny, yet so...breakable. Amasri had bent and flowed, picking her battles, always maneuvering, shifting for just the right angle.

Until she took a wrong step.

If it was anyone else, Mundi could easily believe that. Maybe she should just accept that. For everything that she had been, Amasri had been mortal and fallible. She had been beyond gifted, but she'd had flaws. Deep, real flaws. She'd been all too human, all too often. Why was it so difficult to believe that this had been a mistake, a slip up, even hubris? Amasri had often displayed an ingrained streak of unthinking arrogance, only mitigated by the fact that she was so often right about her own abilities and judgment. She'd known she was great, and she had been.

So great, until suddenly, she wasn't. And it had been an overnight thing, one day Amasri had been the center of Mundi's world and the next day, Mundi had been looking for some way, any way, out. Even after all of this time, that didn't make sense. No matter how much Mundi looked back, and she certainly had, she couldn't pinpoint exactly what had caused it. Amasri had not been any more objectionable in that moment, Mundi had followed her lead to Malachor, had not turned away there. No, she'd turned away from Amasri after that, in that period between celebrated Jedi General Amasri Idarn, the Revanchist...and Darth Revan. She'd turned away at the beginning of that period, before Amasri and Alek had gone to wherever they'd gone to, and fallen to whatever they'd fallen to.

Cut off.

Well, if she'd been cut off from Amasri, it hadn't been Amasri's doing. Or at least not actively, Mundi had been around Amasri and Alek for long enough to realize that Amasri, at least, was not always in control of how she molded those around her. She had always had a certain look, an expression that wasn't an expression, when things had gone in a different way than what she had been expecting. And that had been the look she was wearing when Mundi had told her it was over, that she was taking Scintillate and her crew with her, back to Coruscant. That part of it had been a bluff, she had hoped that she could get herself out of it, but the idea that Amasri would let her leave with the ship and the crew was a dream. The idea that the crew would leave Amasri was a dream. But all she had done was pause, nod and walk away, never even looking back. It was as if she'd forgotten Mundi's existence in that moment. That had been the last time that Mundi had seen her, and the separation orders had come five hours later. Return Scintillate to Coruscant with crew. And then, just like that, it had been over. Everything.

She'd done it, and at the beginning, it had felt right. On paper, to the Republic, it had been more than right. There had been questions, questions from the Admiralty, questions from the Jedi, questions from SIS, every one had their turn, and they'd all agreed... Captain Ayala had done the right thing. Even history upheld that. Alek had gone bad. Amasri had gone bad. Their fleets and people had gone bad. And Mundi had escaped it all. She should be proud, she should be relieved. She hadn't gone down like Karath had, twisted to the point of committing atrocities, devastating the population of an entire planet. She'd been spared the terrible fate that had befallen most of Amasri's inner circle. She should be eternally grateful.

But she wasn't. No matter how hard she tried, she just...wasn't. Even understanding that staying with Amasri would have been a death sentence, it still felt...wrong... to have left her. But what other choice had there been? Stay and die or leave and live?

I want things to be like they used to be.

And that was impossible. It had been highly unlikely the moment that Amasri had fallen. Now she was dead. Now Alek was dead. The only survivor was Bastila, left behind just as Mundi had been. Except, judging by the (rumor?), Bastila was still in the thick of things. As difficult as it was to believe, she'd been on both teams...the team sent in to kill Amasri, and now, the team sent in to kill Alek.

Things could not go back to the way they used to be, not without Amasri. Mundi had what she had, and she needed to just accept it. At least she'd survived. Others had not been so lucky. She still had her commission, she'd left Amasri early enough to have saved her career. In the grand scheme of things, she was unscathed. She should be relieved. She should be grateful. But she wasn't. She felt lost, adrift, not quite dead inside...but asleep inside. And she was tired of it. Somehow, some way, she needed to wake up again.

AN-

TLDR version: I moved. It was a big move that turned my life on its ear (in a good way!) and it's taken me awhile to get back into a place where I'm able to settle down and write again.

The wordy writer is wordy! Version:

A few years ago, my husband and I made one of those statements to each other while on vacation/family event trip: "Wouldn't it be cool if we could live here one of these days?" We've all made those comments before, and at that point, it was definitely one of those 'yeah, right, sure, uh huh.' daydreams. Somewhere along the way, wouldn't it be cool morphed into what would it actually take to make this happen? Then we made a decision, we were actively going to try to make this happen. Our children were adults, out of the house, time to put our money where our mouths were. Took awhile but we sold our rural house, downsized into a much smaller place close to my husband's work...no more commute...and used that time to get all of our ducks in a row. Our original plan was to move May 2020. (Yes. That. Hahahahaha.) However...our older son asked us if we could push it back a year and handle his stateside affairs while he was deployed overseas. We agreed and signed another lease. The day after that son's going away ceremony, received the first text from other son...he was hospitalized, in the ICU. So again, thank goodness we were not in a place where we were committed to leave, and we were in a fairly secure position once Covid hit, lockdowns began, etc. We pushed back to May 2021.

And in late April, we packed up everything we still owned, put our very anxious cat in the back of our vehicle and began the trip from Wisconsin to Mexico. There were stops along the way, family, etc, but we crossed the border in June. Stayed in a couple of Airbnbs for a month until we found a place we wanted, and pretty much, here we are.

HA