The air in the workshop carried the familiar tang of grease and hot metal, laced with the sharp, electric promise of oncoming rain. Sparks burst from the repair torch in her hand, each flash momentarily illuminating the curve of her goggles and the determined set of her jaw.
B4 observed from his self-appointed throne atop the counter, dome tilted at a judgmental angle as he released a long, unimpressed whistle. Briana barely spared him a glance, shoving her goggles up onto her head with the back of her wrist. Strands of dark chestnut hair clung stubbornly to her temples, having slipped loose from the meticulous crown braid she’d woven hours ago in a vain attempt to keep it out of her way. The bright, clean circles around her eyes stood in stark contrast to the black smudges of soot and grime coating the rest of her face.
With a quiet sigh, she blinked hard against the sting of sweat and heat, then fished a grease-stained cloth from the back pocket of her work trousers. The rag was stiff with use, smelling faintly of solvent and the remnants of a floral-cleaning agent she’d brought back with her from Hapes years ago, a scent that had somehow managed to outlast the bottle itself. It was sharp, sterile, and yet… oddly comforting. She pressed it to her face, wiping at her cheeks and brow, succeeding only in smearing the soot into uneven streaks.
"Yes,” Briana muttered, tugging the goggles back down and adjusting the magnifying lens until she had it where she needed it. “I’m finally getting it done.”
His photoreceptor blinked in exaggerated rhythm and another sharp whistle followed, clearly unimpressed. "Don't start," she warned, pulling up the filter mask and wagging a finger at him. "I mean it, one more sound out of you and I'll wipe that attitude right out of your memory banks." He'd been relentless for weeks now. Rolling into her quarters uninvited, beeping mournfully beside her bed in the middle of the night until she finally woke up and had to groggily kick him out. Interrupting meditation sessions with the younglings with his overly dramatic trills about SID’s “tragic dismemberment.” Parking himself squarely in her path, forcing her to either trip over or acknowledge him. If guilt tripping was an art form, then B4 was its undisputed master.
Indignant and unperturbed, B4 gave another trill and rolled his dome to call her on her bluff.
He was right, in that this had taken her longer than it should have. For months, she’d clung to the excuse of being too busy. Too many missions, too many duties waiting to collapse if she looked away for the span of a second. Too many fires to put out in the galaxy... too many: fill in the blanks, here. And while it was true that she'd been busy, it wasn't the full truth. The truth, in honesty, was much more simple, and far crueler: she hadn’t been avoiding the work. When the last piece she'd needed to fix him finally came in, she'd left it in a dusty part of her workshop for months, avoiding the guilt, the memories, and any of the grief attached to the task that it might dredge up.
It was always her first go to when she faced any terrible surge of loss, to store away her emotions and ignore them. Briana often blamed her ability to so thoroughly detach on her early experiences with war, and while some of that may have been true, looking back on how her own family — who'd been no strangers to conflict — dealt with their emotions, she'd come to the realization that all of them were a little lost on the coordinates. Forever concentrated on everything else under the hundred distant suns, rather than focusing on what was right in front of them. Just like she was doing, right now.
Unlike how many viewed them in the Galaxy, SID had never been just a droid to her.
SID was her proof, her answer to the question she’d been wrestling with since she was barely out of Padawan robes... could something built for destruction and war, be remade for something pure and good? When she'd first brought him to her work shop from that New Way facility a few years ago, everyone had told her it wasn’t worth the risk, that his coding couldn't be changed — it was hard wired into him, and he'd only ever be one thing. Weeks of her life were poured into those first days, until her hands were raw and covered in blisters, eyes bleary from the many sleepless nights she'd spent decoding Sith command strings. Every time he’d powered down in violent protest, every time the workshop had erupted in chaos, she’d refused to stop. Because that’s who she used to be. Impossibility wasn't a word Briana Sal-Soren understood.
When he’d first spoken her name, halting, broken, and almost childlike, it'd felt like some small sort of triumph of will over fate. When he'd been destroyed, and Zeriana taken, it'd been another notch to add to her belt of accumulated grief, another shattering of what little innocence she'd had left. Fixing him wasn't just a task to be done, it was the unearthing of everything he'd represented, of being forced to revisit the version of herself who'd believed that anything could be mended if she worked hard enough. Forcing her, in a sense, to reconcile with who she was now, as someone who'd grown and learned and understood that the galaxy wasn’t changed by idealism alone, but by ones ability to endure and hold steady. To take action, when required.
Briana stared down at the half-assembled torso on the bench, SID's old charred plating replaced with something much smoother, his exposed circuitry new and gleaming under the lamp light. “Alright..." she finally murmured, closing up the paneling for the final time and placing her tools aside on the bench. "Let’s see if we can do this again.”
Reaching out for the switch, Briana flicked it forward and stepped back a few paces — remembering well the chaos that had erupted the many times before, the first time she'd attempted this.
"Sid?" she called out, the nervous anticipation evident in her tone.
Silence filled those first tense moments, followed by the sound of lenses working to focus once more, the sharp glow of the visual receptors lighting up as the shutters mimicked a blinking-like action. His dark head swiveled slowly. The sound of actuators and gears warming as its gaze turned to focus on Briana before his head twitched slightly as if to regard her. "Briana." A warmth settled in her chest, landing somewhere between peace and surprising relief. B4 chirped loudly, SID's head swiveling in the patchwork droids direction. "The sphere appears to still be operational," he observed flatly. "Unfortunate."
