Sound came back first. Faint, faltering, at the edge of hearing.
Rhythmic beeps from a machine... A droid's treads whirred… Furious typing… A groan.
"Not yet," said a familiar voice.
…Master?
The hand on her forehead gently dunked Ashkhen back where time stood still and senses didn't work.
••• ••• •••
Beeping again, a different pitch this time. Ashkhen drew a ragged breath. The acrid, dry air scraped against her throat, filling her lungs with artificial coolness. The Force felt distant, dim. An oncoming headache muffled its elusive voice.
Wh…?
Thoughts died before they were fully formed. Eyes still closed, Ashkhen let out the lungful of synthetic air to expel the razor-sharp smell of antiseptics, disinfectant, and the traces of bacta seeping through sterile gauze.
Medbay. Not good.
She paused for a second before taking another breath. Her nose—both a blessing and a curse—had already started to overload her scattered mind with molecular specifics; she reached out with her other senses instead. Pillow beneath her head, blanket tented over her body. A toe wiggle confirmed she lay barefoot. The subtle hum of the hyperdrive reverberated through the surfaces.
Hold on.
Ashkhen's mind could barely register the gravity of being on a starship in hyperspace, her subconscious fled to the comforting presence beside her bed. She all but relaxed into the warmth of a decade-long familiarity, when she remembered—Master Balian was supposed to wait for her return at the Temple. Her eyes sprang open in surprise.
Lights were off.
Huh?
With colossal effort, Ashkhen turned her head in Master Balian's direction, and slowly pried her sandpaper tongue off the roof of her mouth.
"What are you doing here?" she ground out, forgoing any formality or decorum.
"I'm meditating." Master Balian's voice carried his unique blend of serenity and lightheartedness as though he asked, 'How else would a Jedi pass time in transit?'
"In the dark?"
Ashkhen, having just spent all her strength for moving her head, settled for glancing around in the pitch black room. Master Balian's alarm jolted through their training bond.
"I can't… see you."
"Focus on your breathing, Ashkhen!"
The attempt to help his Padawan recenter and came a moment too late—Ashkhen raised her right to pull up the bandage covering her face.
Panic rose and swept away Master Balian's encouragement. Ashkhen jabbed herself hard in the eye with her fingers. No bandage. Both eyes were open. Hysteria exploded.
"I CAN'T KRIFFING SEE!"
Master Balian's palms pressing down hard on her forehead and chest kept Ashkhen from bolting up on sheer adrenaline. The Jedi Master's soothing mind control wrapped around her terror and tamped her mind down.
The screaming stopped—Ashkhen fell unconscious long before the medical droid showed up with the next round of sedatives.
••• ••• •••
The third time she came to, a lazy column of bubbles swirled against her skin. Not water—a much, much denser liquid churned around her, its sickly sweet scent an assault on her nose through the breathing mask.
It's really that bad, huh.
The jarring novelty of breathing air through a hose preoccupied Ashkhen for a while. She mouthed a silent thank you to the unsung medical paragon who didn't just chuck her manifestly Nautolan self in a standing aquarium full of bacta without bothering to measure the oxygen concentration in the healing liquid.
After that shitstorm of a mission, accidental fish kill in the medbay would have been the kriffing cherry on top.
Never once in her life had she consciously thought about the instinctive switch between her respiratory systems: picking up oxygen from the water when submerged or the air when hanging out topside. Curiosity got the better of her, wondering about the technicality—did they tape down her gills, or was she wearing some sort of bonnet?
As Ashkhen raised her hands to her temples, her somewhat vertical bobbing up and down turned off-kilter. Dread crept back.
Her right hand bumped into her left elbow stump. The acute distress developed into shock. She reached up to find her headtails missing.
Many, many tears diluted the bacta, as she still remained hopelessly, harrowingly, absolutely blind.
••• ••• •••
The door to the Jedi's quarters opened with a hiss. Ashkhen sat still on her berth, wrapped in blankets and resting her forehead on her pulled up knees.
"I'm coming from the crewing coordinator's office," Master Balian said, voice carrying undertone of reproach. "He said a maintenance worker reported a huge dent in the chassis of a 3PO protocol unit."
"Hardly surprising, they don't do stairs well." Ashkhen pulled the blankets tighter to keep the cold out.
A shuffling of feet, a soft rustle of fabric—time and time again, Ashkhen had seen the Devaronian Jedi Master draw himself up to his impressive height, fold his arms and look down at his apprentice with an 'are you going to tell me, or are you going to make me make you tell me?' warning in his yellow eyes. She pictured Master Balian doing exactly that based on the previous several hundred occurrences over the past ten years.
"This particular unit was seen exiting our cabin," he said. "You wouldn't have happened to notice anything strange about it?"
"No, Master. Visual details are a little lost on me right now."
"Padawan."
Ashkhen pulled inwards—her shoulders tensed for a second, then drooped. Master Balian's intonation of that word, that title, that commitment hamstrung all defiance. The abashed apprentice sank further into despondency.
"I… may have tried to hurry him along his way," Ashkhen mumbled. She slid one finger between each decorative tuck on the blanket's edge and tightened her grip, making sure it still fully covered her de-tentacled head.
Master Balian waited patiently for further elaboration.
"And, well, given that I can't see, it's not entirely impossible that I, uh"—she swallowed—"missed the door and sent him into the wall instead."
A hiss of indrawn breath—a pause—exhaling for an eight count. Repeat. A moment later, Master Balian's weight eased onto the narrow bunk. A broad hand gave the bundle of blankets a squeeze on the shoulder.
"Republic ships may accept Jedi passengers on board gratuitously, but we still have to pay for any property damage."
"I'm sorry, Master."
"Now tell me, Ashkhen, whatever invidious provocation on the droid's part warranted such an explosive reaction?"
Ashkhen eased up a little. The humorous timbre of Master Balian's voice took the edge off the admonishment.
"He kept badgering me to have a look at the onboard menu," she said. "Told him I can't read. He asked if Aurebesh was the problem, in which case he could render it into over six million writing systems for me. Told him I can't read at all. Then he apologized for lacking the instrumentations to replicate Nautila."
"That's a relief to hear," Master Balian said. "If your freshly antagonized droid had the means to flood our cabin at the drop of a hat, I'd have to pull rank and claim top bunk for safety reasons."
The vaguely Padawan-shaped heap of textile turned towards Master Balian. "Then he had the audacity to apologize for assuming I was Nautolan, since his initial analysis only confirmed an eighty-one point seven percent visual match."
Master Balian slowly exhaled. "That was truly insensitive."
"Then he suggested that I take the turbolift to the Observation Deck and gaze at the marvellous Haldrion Nebula, truly a sight to behold, before we make the next jump."
"At which point you expressed your wish to be left alone."
"Not in so many words, but yes," Ashkhen concluded.
Master Balian's boots softly scuffed against floor, his weight shifted. Two telltale cracks of his knees—he now sat cross-legged on the berth beside Ashkhen.
"Need I remind you that Jedi don't throw things in frustration?" Ashkhen heard the tiny, exasperated huff the Jedi Master made when he exhaled through his nose—which, based on experience, meant his mouth must have been pressed into a thin line. "You should have grown out of that when you turned two."
"I didn't throw things when I was two," came Ashkhen's retort. "I let go and watched them either float to the surface, or sink to the bottom of the ocean."
"I wasn't joking, Ashkhen, this is serious."
"Yeah, well, I can't really read the room without my headtails, now can I?"
"Padawan!"
Master and apprentice took a few calming breaths in tandem. The Devaronian Jedi switched to a much gentler tone.
"We'll be arriving at Coruscant in four days. I know you're overwhelmed with your… predicament, but the Council is expecting a report. We need to work on the presentation."
The nondescript gray bedcovering shrank into a tight knot. "Is there a way to paint the arrant failure in a better light?"
"Ah, the heart of the issue at last."
Ashkhen's head snapped up, ready to launch into an argument, but Master Balian cut her off.
"You continue to dwell on what you've lost, Padawan. But remember, your focus determines your reality. What knowledge have you gained from all this?"
Ashkhen let her head drop back against the bulkhead. "That the Trials of Knighthood are no kriffing joke."
"Out of consideration of your current condition, I shan't have you run ten laps between the hangar bay and the bridge," Master Balian hit a warning tone, "but it's been a day and a half since you were released from the medbay. If you were wondering whether I had a limit on taking your attitude, we've reached it."
Ashkhen's mouth snapped shut. She took a deep, centering breath, then slowly folded her legs to mirror her Master's posture, and pulled the blanket off her face.
"I'm truly sorry, Master." She dipped her head in Master Balian's direction. "This is… hard."
"You're not the first Padawan to have failed their Trials, and indeed not the last. Surely the Council will permit you to face them again once you're ready."
Ashkhen gave a soft snort. "I don't see that happening anytime soon"—her hand shot up in defence—"no pun intended."
A gentle tug came through their training bond, an invitation to probe deeper into the tension. Ashkhen—purely out of habit—closed her eyes and tried to clasp her fingers, a sharp reminder that her left arm now ended at the elbow. She humphed out the annoyance into the Force, and dropped her right hand into her lap.
Master and apprentice sat in silence. Ashkhen slowed her breathing to match Master Balian's, and turned her mind inwards.
"Whatever happened, is in the past now," Master Balian said. "But there's a lot we can learn from the ordeal if we're willing to look at it from a different angle."
"Now you're doing it," Ashkhen muttered, barely suppressing a smile. She sank deeper into the joint meditation and let the memories cascade forth. On Master Balian's subtle prompting, she tried to examine the details of the mission from a more analytical point of view.
"The first two days after arriving at Manaan were uneventful," she said. "We landed in Ahto City, made out descent to Hrakert Station and set up camp. It's been long abandoned, we didn't spend too much effort on discovering its buried—I mean, flooded—history. We started checking out the trails leading out of the Rift instead."
"Trails?" Master Balian sounded surprised. "In the ocean?"
Ashkhen's mouth curled upwards at the corners.
"It's not like they are blazed for tourists," she said. "It's hard to explain. You know how migrating birds know where true north is? It kind of works like that. Hrakert Station had been built and used by Humans—it's not as deep so it would get really dark down there, but we don't normally use visuals to gauge distance on the ocean floor anyways. It's more about reading the deep currents or the changes in temperature, pressure and salinity. Well, sure, one can always use larger pieces benthic litter as landmarks."
Master Balian hmmed. "Most insightful."
"Master, you forget that Padawan Khosrovi and I are both—"
Ashkhen snapped out of the meditation with such a start that she yanked Master Balian's focus along. How in the Force could have she been so kriffing self-absorbed? Their bond relayed Ashkhen's mortification so acutely, the Jedi Master's face turned a deeper shade of red, as though he had forgotten about the merry and mellow Chagrian Padawan.
"Is Khosrovi around?"
Master Balian tightened his mental shields against the intensity of his apprentice's volatile emotions.
"In a sense," he said quietly.
Shock seized her hearts. If Ashkhen hadn't been sitting, her legs would have given out. "She's dead?"
"It took us nearly sixty hours to get to your last known coordinates," Master Balian pointed out. "We found you not far, but there was no trace of Master Zenvu's Padawan."
"And her PLB? We synced them in case things got turbulent."
Master Balian shook his head, only to remember Ashkhen wouldn't register body language.
"The signal was lost," he said.
"But… You didn't…" Ashkhen reached up to run her fingers through her headtails, a habitual tic that ended abruptly sans fingers or headtails. "She could have been…"
"Ashkhen, you forget our time is very limited down there, wearing enviro-suits—doubly so behind enemy lines."
Ashkhen sprang off the narrow berth and started pacing around the cabin in circles.
"If you didn't find her body… could still… when we got separated…" She spun around, facing in Master Balian's general direction. "We have to go back!"
Master Balian was taken aback by her sudden vehemence. "We can't."
"We must!" Ashkhen pressed on, resuming her furious pacing. "I'll go down to the Station, retrace our movements and—"
"Ashkhen."
"—a couple of sonic detonators, too, then set up a perimeter—"
"Ashkhen!"
"What!?" she cried, then remembered to add, "…is it, Master?"
Master Balian set his feet down, leaned forward and picked up Ashkhen's discarded blanket off the floor. He folded it up and put it down on her recently vacated seat.
"Do you remember what happened to your arm?"
Ashkhen shifted uncomfortably. "A Firaxa."
"You told me you believed the community had control over the animals."
"It appeared that way," she shrugged and continued, "but it's hard to tell, Firaxae won't attack Selkath anyways. Now that we actually know what we're up against—"
"We can make the educated decision to retreat and leave them be." Master Balian's tone brooked no argument. "They made it very clear off-worlder contact is not welcome."
Ashkhen leaned against the doorframe and tried to fold her arms with a clumsy jerk. The past couple of days were plenty to realize how thoughtlessly she had taken them for granted in the past twenty years. Her right hand curled into a fist, but her Master's presence deterred her from punching the wall in frustration. The calm breathing intensified for a moment.
"It must have been such a beautiful world once," she said quietly. "Now everything's contaminated. Do you know how much toxic waste we had to wade through? It's like altitude sickness, but worse."
Master Balian said nothing. He had already heard a few hazy versions of what went down, but new memories and details emerged with every recount.
"Khosrovi wanted to abort mission. She was getting sick and negotiations stalled. I wanted to push on. We had a disagreement." She let the events unfold before her mind's eye. "There was something different about the Force, it was so… so elemental and heavy, Master, you went down there, you must have felt it too! But I thought… I was afraid if we came back without having anything to show for it…" She searched for the right words, but found none.
"The Council would have said your Trials were incomplete," Master Balian finished her thoughts. "But it never occurred that locating the Force-sensitive community and leaving them in peace would have also been an option."
Ashkhen's back snailed down the wall. "And now Khosrovi's dead."
••• ••• •••
Navigating through Coruscant Spaceport main concourse without sight and weaving her way through the perpetual flood of passengers scurrying hither and thither proved a lot more challenging than Ashkhen had anticipated. People who assumed she would get out of their way bumped into her, others kept treading upon the hem of Master Balian's oversized robe dragging on the ground behind her.
"Watch it!"
"Look where you're going!"
After three strenuous hours of intense negotiations, Ashkhen had convinced her Master to yield the voluminous garment up, so she could pull its hood over her disfigured head. However reluctantly, Master Balian obliged, later remarking that a Jedi Master disembarking with an oversized Jawa in tow must have drawn thrice as much attention.
"E chu ta!"
"Are you kriffing blind?"
A mouse droid rolled out of nowhere—small and silent, it left absolutely no trace in the Force. Ashkhen stumbled over it, got her feet tangled in the robe, and promptly reconciled to the fact that sans both arms to break her fall, she would faceplant into the duracrete pavement. Master Balian's steadying hand on her shoulder saved her from crashing into a group of Gotal travelers.
"Do you think I could apply for a guide akk?" Ashkhen happily let Master Balian shepherd her through the crowd, all the way to the upper levels air taxi station of the Spaceport. "People would allow me a little more space, I wouldn't fall off any ledges, and I could sic it on rude people."
Master Balian offered no comment on the preposition. He opened the passenger door for Ashkhen and waited for her to clamber inside. She turned to the viewport and let out a despondent sigh. Trying to imagine the breathtaking skyline of the Republic Capital hadn't nearly the same effect as looking at it.
"Master, is it day or night?"
"It's past sunset in this sector," Master Balian said. "As we're travelling east, it will be late at night when we arrive at the Temple. We'll head straight for the Halls of Healing."
Master and apprentice flew in silence. Utilizing the Jedi passengers' diplomatic immunity, the driver droid overrode a series of traffic laws, shortening their journey by a significant margin. Ashkhen twiddled the frayed edge of the sleeve, both longing for and dreading the return to the Temple.
"You're awfully quiet," Master Balian said. "That's never a good sign."
As the speeder commenced its slow descent in preparation for landing, Ashkhen's stomach sank. Repulsors revved up—her heart rate increased—and the taxi finally touched down on the landing platform jutting out from the tower that housed the Temple's hangar bay.
"We're home," Master Balian announced. He got out of the vehicle and strode across the platform, only noticing his apprentice's absence halfway through. He turned around, walked back to the taxi, and peeked inside.
"Ashkhen."
"Yes, Master?"
"Come now, this is unbecoming for a Jedi."
"In a minute."
Master Balian waited patiently for a ten-count. Ashkhen didn't move a muscle.
"Padawan Dakiis." He slowly exhaled through his nose. "Alight. Now."
One lengthy internal battle later, Ashkhen climbed out. She stood before him, lowered her hood, and in an unnerving coincidence, met Master Balian's eyes.
"Master, I wish to speak with Master Zenvu before the Council hearing."
And Master Balian understood that the Padawan before his eyes, broken and diminished, downtrodden with failure and guilt, was every bit of the Jedi Consular he had ever hoped to train.