I Know Something About Pain You Don't

Tahiri had never been a fan of waiting, but she'd been doing just that for so long now it might have been days, and as she sat in the cockpit of her X-Wing (really, these boots could come off any time now), half listening to the comm chatter, she wondered how much time had passed in Fandom. She and her pilots -- who'd dubbed themselves Barefoot Squadron, much to her self-conscious amusement -- had trained and drilled for weeks on end both as a squadron and as part of the fleetwide Jedi Force-meld strategy. The past three months had been spent in a series of diversionary attacks against Yuuzhan Vong-held Core worlds, per Admiral Kre'fey's plan.

The concept was fairly simple: they'd hit a poorly defended planet and win by virtue of numbers, and in the process the novice pilots would gain experience, the fleet would build morale, and most importantly they'd cover up their ultimate destination of Ebaq 9. Jaina and Twin Suns Squadron had been on that hellish little asteroid for a while; although Admiral Ackbar hadn't outright said so, Tahiri knew the Yuuzhan Vong would do anything to capture one or both of the Solo twins and thus Jaina was bait in a trap. Tahiri was curious as to how she was doing. She worried about Jaina, maybe more so than she did about the one in Fandom, since her Jaina didn't have the same kind of support structure. She suspected the other Tahiri was in the same position.

( She was just extending her senses toward Ebaq 9 when a shockwave of horror lanced through the Force, and she knew where it was coming from. )

[OOC: NFB, NFI, OOC okay, pi to the fifteenth decimal point. Plot points of the Battle of Ebaq 9 taken from Destiny's Way by Walter Jon Williams, but guess who disappeared from this part of the narrative, forcing me to make stuff up? I shouldn't be allowed to make things up. One more later today and that's it.]

She was used to being pulled in two directions at once; she'd had to make the choice between her Jedi training and her life with her Tusken tribe seven years ago, she'd lived with Riina Kwaad's growing consciousness for months now, and she still had trouble with the whole concept of "moving on doesn't mean betraying Anakin." So -- used to it. That didn't mean she had to like the feeling. ( Which was why when Jacen came looking for her after dinner, Tahiri wasn't sure what to think. )

[OOC: NFI, NFB, OOC-okay, John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt, his acronyms are my acronyms too. Adapted, again, from Destiny's Way by Walter Jon Williams. Hey, I didn't have to make up this part either!]

This, Tahiri reflected as she adjusted her uniform for the fifth time, could be considered absolutely ridiculous. There was a lot that was absurd, actually: that she was in a New Republic military uniform (though insignia-free, since she wasn't actually part of the military) to begin with, that they let her get away without wearing regulation boots, that she was at this meeting in her new capacity as a squadron commander.

The cherry topping on the ice cream sundae of absurdity here was the fact that here she was, sitting in one of the leather armchairs in the Ralroost's conference room waiting for the strategic planning meeting to start, and her feet didn't touch the floor.

Seriously. Under less strict circumstances this would be hilarious.

( Tahiri had to revise that opinion fairly quickly, though, when Jacen took the seat next to her and gave her a smile, and she had to remind herself not to freeze up or move away. )

[OOC: NFB, NFI, OOC okay, insert gratuitous acronyms here. Adapted from (and dialogue taken from) the short story Ylesia by Walter Jon Williams, and WTF canon, WHY DO YOU HAVE A SEPARATE SHORT STORY SET BETWEEN TWO CHAPTERS OF THE BOOK?!?]

The good thing about being home, so far, was that Tahiri had been far too busy to speculate herself worried about what had gone on in the week before she'd left Fandom. After the Knighting ceremony on Mon Calamari, she'd gotten into her newly-issued X-Wing (her X-Wing, how weird was that?) and headed to Kashyyyk.

That had been over . . . she didn't know how many weeks ago, maybe three or four; nearly all her time since arriving here had been spent getting to know the eleven new pilots that had been assigned to her. That were, and this was the part that had been blowing her mind since she'd first learned this was the plan, under her command. Luckily, thanks to Admiral Kre'fey, she'd been assigned a competent executive officer, since Force knew she certainly didn't have the experience necessary to deal with the headache of military red tape, but most of her pilots were rookies, and the couple who weren't didn't exactly have their names near the top of the Flight Hours Logged lists. The time she wasn't spending in drills with her squadron was spent working with the other Jedi to develop the fleet-wide Force meld that they hoped would accomplish the same thing for them that the yammosk battle coordinators did for the Yuuzhan Vong forces. She wasn't a crack pilot, and she knew it; the only reason she was in this role at all was because she was a Jedi.

Which pretty much meant she'd do the best she could. It was all she really knew how to do.

Down time didn't come very often, so when it did she made the most of it, and with a couple of standard hours free Tahiri took the opportunity to wander off by herself, away from the constant crush of people and ubiquitous machinery that made Riina so twitchy. (Okay, maybe she was avoiding Alema Rar a little bit; she still hadn't forgotten all those times Alema'd tried to hang all over Anakin when Tahiri was right there and also Alema was crazycakes.) Running a hand through her hair -- cut short now for the sake of her pilot's helmet -- she fiddled with her comlink and debated whether she ought to check in with people back in Fandom.

. . . might be better not to.

[OOC: NFB, NFI, OOC okay, etc. Spacer post, la la la. You have to make stuff up to advance the narrative sometimes -- ah, the perils of a secondary character. Framing adapted from Destiny's Way by Walter Jon Williams with some details taken from the short story Ylesia by the same.]

When Tahiri had gotten onto the shuttle to head back home, she'd known the first thing on the agenda, before heading to Kashyyyk to join up with Admiral Kre'fey's fleet, was going to be the ceremony on Mon Calamari. To that end she'd spent much of the trip from Fandom reading up on strategy and going over everything she'd learned in Flight and Flying and in her lessons with Jaina. (All things considered, it was probably a good thing that she had no idea there'd been a debate over whether Knighting her was going to be an express ticket to the dark side. She had enough issues with that.)

( What she hadn't been expecting was to be standing on stage in a huge auditorium, staring up at a giant holoprojection of Anakin. Every time Tahiri had ever imagined what it'd be like when she finally made Jedi Knight, she'd always thought she'd see him there; she just never thought it would be like this. )

[OOC: Part one of . . . several. NFB, NFI, OOC okay, we all know this dance, right? Adapted from Destiny's Way by Walter Jon Williams.]

( Tahiri and her two Jedi Master companions had circled around the Yuuzhan Vong coralskippers that hovered outside the collapsed hole the construction droid had bored into the side of a ziggurat, and met up with Face on a floor half a kilometer up. 'Interesting . . .' )

***

( They dropped through a hole in the ceiling -- a dramatic entrance, but Tahiri was too preoccupied by using the Force to slow her descent to appreciate the theatrics of it. (Here there be fighty, lots of it, brief mention of torture, and more of that other person what lives in Tahiri's head.) )

[OOC: NFI, NFB, OOC-okay, and DONE! My apologies for spamming you all with this the past few days, but it was fun to put together. For the last time, contains a nod to Edge of Victory 1: Conquest by Greg Keyes, and dialogue and adapted narrative from Rebel Stand by Aaron Allston, with some tweaks by me and great POV-rewriting justice. Many, many thanks to tatooine_doofus for letting me borrow a version of Luke here and in the previous posts, as there was no way I could have adapted this otherwise.]