Author's Notes at the end of this chapter.
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Are you kriffing serious!?
The swoop swerved violently to the side—Ashkhen slammed on the emergency brakes and jerked the handlebar to the right. Over-steering and controlled skids had always been her go-to remedies for when her trajectory didn't align with urban planning.
As of recent however, expectations rarely met her reality.
Not good!
On a theoretical level, an illegal drift around the bend would have been a last-ditch solution as good as any. On the 2649th level of the Capital, not so much. Jedi reflexes or not, traction was particularly scarce in the skylanes of Coruscant.
What an underwhelming way to end the story!
Danger screamed at her senses right before the patrol speeder rammed into her bike—the side wind, the flashing, the siren—but the Force seemed to have shrugged and thrown up its hands as though conveying, sorry, can't really do much about it.
No place to dodge in the one-way lane, barely wide enough to accommodate one speeder. No dropping down or yanking up the bike; the line on the level below was packed with huge cargo vehicles, standing traffic clogged up the one above. To the left—well, the Sith-damned police patrol came from the left. To the right—a narrow pedestrian walkway, momentarily deserted, thank the Force.
The swoop hit the edge of the walkway. The memory of her Delta-7's ejection seat flashed across Ashkhen's mind as she was catapulted into the air. Her shitty SkyBlade 300 didn't even have a seatbelt installed. The unforgiving grey duracrete pavement rushed to meet her—she thrust out both hands in an attempt to cushion the impact with the Force, then squeezed her eyes shut just in case.
••• ••• •••
Ow.
Ashkhen squinted against the brain-piercing beam of a flashlight.
"You're not dead?"
A leather gloved hand rested on her forehead, pulling up her eyelid with a thumb. Ashkhen brought the source of the voice into focus. A dull, dark grey full face helmet occupied the center of her visual field, the peripheries were still catching up. Dark grey uniform, matching the helmet. Yellow pauldrons and chest plate. Standard issue heavy blaster at his right hip. Her mind slowly put the pieces together—Coruscant Underworld Police.
As Ashkhen pushed herself up to a half sitting position, searing pain shot up her arm. Forward shoulder rolls were not designed to break a fall at such velocity—her throbbing right side was testament to that. The last thing she remembered was ragdolling across the walkway towards a pile of shipping crates. That was when her mind had sent her to her happy place.
"Would that have meant less or more paperwork?" she muttered through clenched teeth. A lifetime of self discipline kept her strained breathing even as she pulled her broken right arm into her lap with her prosthetic left.
The officer pocketed the flashlight and stood. He squared his shoulders to assume a more commanding posture.
"Keep smartmouthing, and it'll be malicious damage to police vehicle."
Ashkhen shifted her gaze to the patrol speeder, noticing the dent in its bumper cover. Her face fell at the estimated repair cost. "Yeah, or maybe a plain old hit and run? Works for me if it works for you."
The cop let out a long sigh. "There's a clinic a few blocks from here, we can drop you off there."
To his surprise, Ashkhen shook her head with such vehemence that it sent her headtails flying. "Like I could afford that! Look, just, uh… help me up on my swoop and I'll—"
"Rub some dirt on it and walk it off?" The cop nodded at Ashkhen's elbow. Ashkhen looked, only to add queasiness to her list of discomforts. Her elbow was bent in the very wrong way.
"Besides, your bike has been already towed."
The look on her face prompted the police officer to offer an assuaging shrug.
"It's totalled."
Ashkhen opened her mouth in protest, but couldn't form words. As the rush of adrenaline subsided and shock set in, her teeth began to chatter.
The cop looked from Ashkhen to his colleague who made an impatient let's-wrap-this-up sign with his hand, then back at Ashkhen. The full face helmet hid his expression, but his voice softened.
"Shitty day, huh," he said. "Tell you what, I'll call you an ambulance and have them bill the CSF."
That took her by surprise. Compassion and generosity were seldom exercised in the Underworld. Ashkhen's frown loosened at the unexpected goodwill.
"Wear a helmet next time, okay?" He pressed a few buttons on his wrist comlink then turned to leave.
"Never seen one fitted for Nautolans."
"Get creative," he called over his shoulder. "All you need is a holesaw."
••• ••• •••
"You're very late."
Mr. Varshik's eyes followed Ashkhen as she limped across the entrance, then narrowed as he noticed the cast and the sling.
Ashkhen lowered herself to the couch in a slow and controlled motion. Breathing out, breathing in again, stalling while she finished a quick mental flipthrough of all the bearer-of-bad-news situations she had navigated under Master Balian's tutelage.
"During the course of our mutually beneficial partnership, regardless of its brevity so far, I came to the understanding that you value honesty as much as I do. In light of that, I wou—"
"Not the kriffing casuistry again!" Mr. Varshik threw all four of his arms in the air. It wasn't the physical reaction that surprised Ashkhen so, rather the unexpected divergence from his vernacular, and the familiarity with applied ethics that it implicated. She had always thought Mr. Varshik's recreational interests were limited to downer drugs.
"That was the third swoop you've wrecked! You've any idea how much deficit I'm running because of you? I curse the day you walked in through that door!"
Ashkhen couldn't blame him—she shared his sentiment, albeit for different reasons. In her understanding, the three wrecked swoops signified three serious accidents in as many months in which she had been involved and injured.
What she didn't expect was a second vocational crisis so soon after leaving the Jedi Order.
Having had to discontinue her training left her a decent but not an exceptional pilot, a reasonably knowledgeable but not an expert mechanic, and a proficient but not professional level speaker of Ryl, Huttese and Sy Bisti—a jack of all trades, master of none. Unfortunately, none of the hiring agencies she had hit up in the first few weeks cared much for lightsaber forms or Force premonitions. From their point of view, half-cooked Jedi sorely lacked in the marketable skills department.
Mr. Varshik cared for neither backstory nor qualifications when Ashkhen had turned up at headquarters of the Flying Fathier Courier Company on Level 1906. The lanky, rather unkempt-looking Volpai dispatcher didn't even ask if she had a license—he simply handed Ashkhen a datapad to skim the terms and conditions. When Ashkhen signed on the dotted line, he tossed a swoop ignition cylinder over his desk and thus she was summarily hired.
"You're fired!" Mr. Varshik made the throat slash gesture with his right hand, and drew his other right thumb across his sternum. The more upset he was, the more his upper extremities seemed to move in tandem.
"I had a concussion and broke my one good arm, and you're giving me the boot?"
"What d'you expect, a paid sick leave?" he snarled. "Kriff off, Dakiis, I've got better fish to fry."
"Not cool," Ashkhen slowly shook her head, then switched tactics. "Please, this shitty job is all I have. If you let me go, my landlord's gonna kick me out by the end of the month."
Mr. Varshik folded all four of his arms. "Sell a heart. You've got more than one, don't you?"
Ashkhen visibly deflated. "I don't suppose there's any chance I could negotiate a full and final settlement?"
The dispatcher considered her for a moment, then patted his pockets. He tossed a small, screw-cap canister over the desk with his lower right hand—Ashkhen caught it with her cybernetic left. Pills rattled inside.
"I trust you didn't knock your head too hard to forget which wall is the door in."
••• ••• •••
Ashkhen let her head fall back against the plexiglass, feeling the low rumble of the hovertrain reverberating through her skull. Colourful streaks of light played on the opposite, badly scratched and tagged, window of the traincar. She thought of better days.
Play pretend could stretch only so far.
Right after turning in her figurative badge, Ashkhen had spent many nights meditating on how she, like most Jedi, had taken the simple yet extremely convenient life in the Temple for granted. Without the Temple as her base, she now faced the formidable challenge of building back her own pyramid of needs from the bottom up, starting with the basics of securing shelter, sustenance, safety and sleep. Self-actualization had to be put on the back burner for the meantime.
The Order operated a few associated boarding houses for her ilk. Ashkhen had spent a week or so in the company of the aged-outs, bombed-outs and kicked-outs, with the majority on their way to their respective Service Corps posts. In the common lounge room, she had witnessed many an awkward trans-galactic call to estranged family, most of which resulted in either side dissolving into sobbing fits of regret and apology.
She briefly toyed with the idea of contacting any of the Dakiises she had stalked over the HoloNet, but reconsidered. Why disrupt the peace they've made with her leaving some twenty years ago? Besides, making a trip to Glee Anselm would have made as much financial sense as designing to rent an apartment with a sunlit—as in, lighted by the actual sun—bathroom, and a giant, freestanding bathtub in it.
Or any sort of mouse hole on the top three-thousand-and-change levels, for that matter. Her introduction to the Coruscant rental market had been harsh and sobering. The drop in visibility, she concluded, somewhat paralelled the decrease in the median rent price. Ashkhen had found the sweet spot in the eternal twilight of Aljood City, Level 1673.
Unfriendly neighbourhood. Narrow and filthy walkways, run-down shops and bars, and faces haggard with despair. Every breath felt like sandpaper rasping her lungs between the graffiti-covered, depressing, grey duracrete walls.
Ashkhen got off the train, passed through the vandalized ticket gate and headed towards the dilapidated residential complex she now called home. The invisible, prey-seeking and appraising eyes on her back made her skin crawl—Mr. Varshik's comment on organ trafficking had put a bug in her ear. The image of becoming one with the Force in a tub full of ice spurred her limping into an ungainly hobble.
The turbolift doors shut out the Coruscant night. Heavily recycled air blasted from the ceiling vents as Ashkhen ascended to the 47th floor, where her dingy studio apartment waited.
She thumbed in the access code, stepped inside, and landed a backward kick on the door before walking further into her room. The landlord had shown her the trick spot—with a little nudging of the faulty mechanism, the entrance door would croak shut.
Ashkhen tossed the contents of her pockets on the table and walked towards the kitchen alcove. Beneath her comlink, credit chits and the clinic's pamphlet, a tiny holocron lit up with a faint blue light. Master Balian had given it to her as a parting gift.
"Not now," Ashkhen muttered, turning her back on the Jedi artefact. The painkillers she had gotten at the ER had long worn off. Silent, inward contemplation on the wordly sensation of pain didn't have the same appeal as the quick and easy relief of medication.
Ashkhen poured herself a glass of water, then settled down on her low sleeping mat. Her eyes teared up when her elbow bumped against her knee.
Oh, how she longed for an encore of the healing trance Chief Healer Master Che had put her in after that clusterkriff of a Trial on Manaan! However, reaching that depth of restorative meditation without outside help had been, and still was, unachievable. Ashkhen shook out Mr. Varshik's happy pills from the canister and hesitated. It was now nearly impossible to focus through the throbbing clump of agony that once had been her right side.
Something hit the wall with a loud thud on the neighbours' side. Guttural noises and a muffled moan invaded Ashkhen's personal acoustic space—the only time the Weequays living next door weren't throwing punches at each other, and they were still so Force-damn loud. The bonding crescendoed until it culminated in a shriek so feral that it could have been elicited by either extreme pleasure or pain.
Ashkhen muttered a Sriluurian curse she had picked up from the very people she was cussing out. Right on cue, the couple started screaming bloody murder again. Something heavy crashed onto the floor next doors and shattered into a million pieces.
That was it.
The pills went down and so did Ashkhen.
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Author's Notes:
Dear Reader,
If you're new to Ashkhen's story, welcome! If you've already read Pathfinder, welcome back!
Originally, I planned to write Meander strictly as the second installment of the Pathfinder stories, but the more I edited the more I realized that it also holds up on its own—so jump right in, you won't miss anything.
In case you're interested in more details about Ashkhen's Jedi past, you can also check out Pathfinder, for both stories work as standalone, self-contained episodes in a chronological order.
Any and all kinds of notes, insights, opinions or constructive criticism is warmly welcome and appreciated!