tea time
SHIRAYA'S SANCTUARY
THE GARDENS
Naboo was quite different to the worlds that populated the broad swaths of Sela Basran's life. Nethira had been arid and dry, with hearty ground-covering that was functional rather than beautiful, low and tight and scrubby rather than lush. Coruscant had been a city, skyscrapers rising in all directions, more air traffic than birds, and never a natural lake or mountain or canyon or meadow to be found.
It had not originally agreed with her.
The sound of rushing water, constant, was a distraction at first. The birds, flying and casting shadows and calling in ways that mimicked her brain's interpretation of an urgent comm message, made her wary. The way there were seasons and weather had been an inconvenience. She never did allow it to upend her tranquility, the serenity that she wore like a cloak, but it had always been there, right under the surface.
But now, as she knelt on a small paver near a raised garden bed in the gardens of Shiraya's Sanctuary on Naboo, Sela thought of Naboo as home. She was considering purchasing a property there of her own, more out of some notion that she would retire, one day, and it would not do to place herself as a burden on the Jedi Order, if indeed they remained when Sela did retire, than any great delusions of herself as a property magnate. A little villa outside of Theed might suit, or a townhouse in the city limits.
The water now soothed her, the birds delighted her, and the weather -- well, winter still irritated her, but she had to admit to a certain fondness for springtime showers.
Other things had risen to take the place of those irritants. The steady drumbeat of bad news from the Core, from her former colleagues and friends. Every week she received word, by way of an official notice or some through-the-grapevine chain of gossip that linked the various Force Orders of the galaxy, of another former colleague, former teacher, former student, or friend, dead in the war. Dead defending this temple or that enclave. Dead protecting this civilian shelter or when that defensive line collapsed. Missing in action.
Perhaps most painful of all was the death of Corvin Vell Coras, the silver-tongued Corellian, who could have talked a Hut onto a diet, whose banter was sharp and funny but did not hide a serious dedication to duty beneath it. They had come up together in the old order. He, a man of action, a man of impatience, the kind of Jedi who would be as comfortable flashing his sword as he was flying a starfighter, and as uncomfortable in a diplomatic mediation as he would in a Sarlacc pit. Sela Basran was the opposite. That's what made their frequent partnerships work. He used to call her his conscience. She used to call him her hero.
They hadn't lost touch, exactly, over the years. She was Made a master a year before Corvin, and had been happy to stand in support of his own Masterhood the following year. But as wars raged, Sela found herself drawn to teaching and diplomacy, and there was no one in the galaxy -- man, woman, fish, fowl, droid -- that could keep Corvin Vall Coras out of the thickest action. Their relationship became mostly epistolary, continuing even after she left the New Jedi Order to follow the Force's calling to the Shirayan Code. She met his Padawan once,
Reid Brimarch
, a nice boy who she seemed to remember being distinctly uninterested in tales about the dreaded old days.Corvin had said, loud enough for Reid to hear it, that youth was wasted on the young.
The report was almost inevitable. Corvin had died exactly the way everyone who knew him had always been certain he would: fighting for the Light. The assurance of his righteousness to the very end, the bravery he was reported to have displayed, nor even the fact that he had foreseen his death -- not the whens and wheres, for the Force was seldom so clear in its communications -- had been a cold comfort. It did not dry Sela's tears, nor balm the jagged ache, where Corvin's death made ragged another part of her heart. For Sela, it was more than just Corvin. He was the latest in the long line of personal reminders of the cost of war, and the worst part was knowing he would not be the last.
It wasn't an inheritance, exactly. Reid Brimarch was entitled to go where he wanted, to find his own Master, his own Order, or none at all. But Corvin had told her, more than once across their letters, that if something happened to him, he would feel better -- rest easier -- if he could count on Sela to guide Reid on his path to becoming a Jedi Knight. He had even, in his later letters, confessed that there was something to the Shirayan Code, something to its treatment of attachment, that felt more right than the Code he had sworn too.
"I'm too old to learn a new trick," he had written, and Sela could hear his Corellian twang in it. "But if something happens -- maybe you can teach it to the boy." The boy. Never dismissive. Never out of hand. Sela heard it as my boy, but sanitized for the Order he served. Something paternal in his words when he expressed a frustration, moreso when the computer screen she read his messages on could not contain the pride he felt in Reid's accomplishments. "He might argue, but you could never resist an argument, so that's perfect. Say you'll try."
"I will," Sela had promised. And so she had.
It was not the beginning of an easy bond, but Sela found that she had plenty in common with Brimarch. Both had entered the Order later than was typical. Both felt they had had a lot to catch up on compared to their contemporaries, those born to the Temple or to Force lineages that could teach them early. Both remembered Master Corvin Vell Coras as a towering figure in their lives. Both grieved him. Not an easy bond, but an honest one, which was after all the only kind Sela Basran was interested in forging.
Free time was -- not rare, exactly, but it felt like a treat in these days. Sela's scholarship on historical interpretations of Jedi Codes had run into a brief snag as her requests for copies of ancient documents from other Order archives were stuck in review hell. And Reid had finished his classes for the morning. Rather than spend time in the common rooms with the other Padawans, he had followed her into the garden. She didn't look up from her task; it was a critical moment for the roots she was attempting to graft, her gloved hands holding the filthy things in place. But she knew she had forgotten something. Her tool basket sat by the bench where Reid had deposited himself.
"Reid, would you mind bringing those tools over here to me?" she asked him, her tone conversational. "I would simply levitate them here myself but I am presently concentrating on knitting the graft of these roots together with the Force, and I am afraid if I try both, I might end up knitting the trowel and the little rake together... again." Sela let the moment hang together. "This was the cause of the anxiety you felt Keeper Hillop broadcasting into the Force as we passed him on the pavilion. It was three years ago, but -- some wounds take longer to heal than others."
