Chapter Text
As the air is ripped apart by screams and blaster fire, the one who should never have been here runs to the ship she should never have been on to escape the battle she should never have seen and return to the safe, solitary life she should never have been born into. And that’s when the dust erupts. The sandy earth fills her eyes and lungs as the starship she stowed away on to get here crashes to the ground in front of her. She stumbles back into a long, cylindrical piece of metal debris. She scurries further inside.
The blasters are still firing. People are still screaming. A ship lifts off. A rocket is fired. Finally, the sound of engines whirring and sand whooshing out from underneath a fleet of departing speeders. And all is quiet in the world outside the safety tube. The dust continues to irritate her eyes. She closes them, lowers her head onto her hands, and lies against the cold, dirty metal. Everything that’s happened fades into a wash of shadow and rust. She sleeps.
Her dreams fracture her very mind with familiar, bleak images. A dim apartment, an eeking of moonlight slipping through the shrouded windows to glisten off the rust of an out of commission nursery droid gathering dust in the corner. All is disdainfully silent, save the occasional muffled taxi speeding through the air outside, as she waits. If it were possible to stifle her hope, she would, but still, she finds herself glancing toward the door. She doesn’t want to miss the moment it slides open to reveal her mother returning from the Federal District, something she seems less frequently able to do as the war drags on.
The dream shifts. Her mother is there, standing in silhouette across the apartment. The shadows of her flowing tendrils drape from her head to the shoulders of the long, flowing robe that marks her membership in her precious order. The sleeping mind cruelly replays scenes from the recent past.
“I have to go,” the shadow says.
“No, you dont!” says the child. Her cry echoes in the void of dream, or maybe against the bare walls of the dwelling. The mother continues her attempts to assuage the child.
“Young one, these foes must be stopped. As a Jedi, it is my duty to-”
“They are killing Jedi!” says the girl.
“Yes. And while I have the chance to end it, I must take it. We Jedi are too few in number to allow this onslaught to continue. The brothers must be stopped for the good of all of us.”
The mother’s words hang in the night air. She turns to leave, the door swings open, but she stops as her daughter speaks.
“Not all of us.”
The mother bows her head, dons her hood with a sigh, and leaves.
She wakes to the sound of speeders. The pirates return. Master Kenobi’s doubt that the sith were destroyed is obvious. By instinct, the young Tholthian girl makes her way out of her resting place and begins to follow the Jedi to a new shuttle, but she stops in her tracks as he kneels down to retrieve her mother’s corpse.
The sight of horns atop a yellow head charging toward her flashes in her mind’s eye and the girl stumbles backward with a gasp. She wonders what exists for her back on Coruscant now that her mother is gone, now that the Sith have proven their might and monstrosity to devastating effect.
She stands in the remnants of battle and watches quietly from the shadows. The shuttle lifts off, ascends through the atmosphere and is gone. Once again, left by her mother and forgotten by the Jedi. She looks around. Pirates remove dead and debris and reorganize their crew. She decides to help. Elsewhere, the pirate leader assesses the situation.
“Hondo, the dead are being taken care of,” says a pirate scrolling on a data pad, “and the Jedi has been billed through discrete channels for use of our shuttle, along with our standard hospitality and hardship fees.”
“Excellent! Finish cleaning up this mess and we’ll all have drinks.”
An unusual sound catches Hondo’s ears. He turns toward the accumulating bodies of dead men as the source of the noise is found. What he thought was the labored grunts of a little girl attempting to move something three times her size is actually…well it’s….yeah, that.
Pirates on all sides raise their weapons at the child, who freezes in her attempt to drag the body to the pile. Hondo approaches her, signaling his men to lower their blasters.
“Well now,'' he says with a chuckle,”two Tholothians is certainly a record seen for this planet in one day. Where have you come from, little one?”
The young girl bows her head, her hands shaking.
“Ah,” says Hondo as he kneels down to face her. “I understand. What is your name, miss?”
She looks up at him with uncertainty painted against her slacked jaw and disbelief swimming in the tears forming in her eyes.
“Foli,” she mutters. “Foli Gallia.”
“Well, Miss Gallia, how would you like a tour?”
With a gentle guide and a kind smile, Hondo Ohnaka leads young Foli into the rest of his base, her new home.