Private Sal-Soren, Hardly Know Her

[Yul Kigsa]

Yul uncrossed her arms and rotated her left shoulder, feeling the slight pull in her upper back where her tunic had caught on a loader droid's frame earlier. She didn't look back at the stack of customs troopers hidden behind the cargo containers. They weren't going anywhere, and the guy under the blanket in the tower would have a headache for two days, but he'd live.

Her eyes tracked a mechanic walking across the landing grid twenty yards away. The man carried a hydrospanner in his right hand, walking rather unevenly which suggested he had sprained his ankle about two days ago and was immediately categorized as not a threat in her mind, letting him continue his mind-numbing work in peace without turning her head.

The bulky loader droids continued to work behind her, their joints making an irritating clank as the hydraulics moved up and down inside their chasis. They were responsible for stacking the crates of deluge, a well known illegal substance in the transport's cargo hold for delivery outside the system. It was work she found demeaning but Viceroy Lodd Grimmin advanced payment was already secured in her pouch.

Credits were credits after all, especially when it funded her search for Bunduki records. She shifted her weight to her forefeet, her eyes moving toward the north entrance of the hangar. The ambient noise of the hangar hadn't changed, but the subtle shift in the air draft suggested someone Briana Sal-Soren was approaching the side door.

Yul didn't reach for a weapon. She simply let her arms drop to her sides, fingers relaxed, watching the entryway at chest height. If it was another team of clones or a supervisor checking on the missing squad, she'd handle it before they could reach their holsters. If it was someone else, they had about five seconds to state their business before she cleared her space.​

 

[Briana Sal-Soren]

Coming home was supposed to have involved considerably less trespassing.

Briana had been back on Naboo just long enough to unpack her bags, sleep three nights in her own bed, which had smelled, faintly and reassuringly, of lavender and old queen's heart, and recall which floorboard outside the kitchen gave a shriek like a startled womprat if you set your weight on it wrong.

She'd even managed to contrive a few mornings that very nearly resembled normalcy: the kettle muttering on the stove while Sera puttered about, lounging in bed until the light came in gold through the vast open windows, Vizion warm and heavy-limbed beside her, sleeping with the abandon of a man who hadn't yet remembered that he had responsibilities outside of this place. She would lie and watch him until the last possible moment before he left, while the whole house seemed to breathe around them in that peculiar hush that belongs only to places where nothing bad is ever expected to happen.

Whether it was truly normal, she couldn't say with any real certainty. Given what she'd come back to, a brother in the wind, the horror scene she'd found Cybelle in the middle of, and the matter of the Vanguard still sitting in the back of her mind like an unanswered question mark, it all left her authority on the subject suspect, at best.

But it was normal enough, and she took it gratefully, the way a sensible person took a dry pair of socks after their own were soaked to the bone: without fuss, and without inquiring too closely into where they'd come from.

The problem was what to do with that peace, that normalcy, afterwards. Once you were alone long enough to consider what it would take to maintain it, especially when she already knew how fragile it was, and how much was already crumbled away from beneath her feet. It almost felt like she existed inside an illusion, and those questions, those realities, were much more difficult and uncomfortable to answer and sit with. It was easier when she was busy, when she had a lightsaber in her hand and an immediate problem to solve. It made everything else seem smaller, and a lot less insurmountable.

So when a message reached her that morning concerning an auxiliary customs facility outside Theed, she'd read it with considerably more interest than the situation probably deserved. A patrol had missed two check-ins. Not enough to justify an emergency response, but enough that someone wanted a second look at the place before deciding whether to escalate. There were, strictly speaking, other people who could go, but Briana was already pulling on her boots before she'd even finished reading the message.

She told herself it was because she was nearby. By the time she clipped her lightsaber to her belt and reached the door, she'd almost made herself believe it.

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The hangar was all noise.

Hydraulics groaned, droid joints clanked, and somewhere out of sight a crate hit the deck hard enough to rattle the rafters. Briana stopped just past the threshold and took it all in. Silent comms usually meant something dull. A failed relay, a dead power cell, a technician who'd forgotten to log in. If something more serious had happened like a firefight, she'd have seen the aftermath of one the moment she walked in, would have recognized the smell. But there was nothing like that here.

The loaders hauled cargo, the crates stacked up on schedule, and the whole hangar ran like it was just another day. The only thing missing, unsurprisingly, was the patrol. Replacing them, though, stood one lone woman near the cargo.

Nobody had mentioned her in the briefing, she wore no uniform.

Briana's head cocked, and her brows furrowed, recognizing the way the woman braced, how she held herself. Weight on the balls of her feet, hands loose and open, eyes already on the door when it opened. It wasn't the stance of someone caught off guard. Whatever the woman had been doing a moment ago, Briana had interrupted it, and she was not too happy about it.

Through the Force, she felt a soft hum of warning prickle at her, just enough to make the back of her neck itch.

A slow, easy smile tugged at the corner of her mouth. "Good morning," Briana said, as relaxed as if she'd wandered in for a cup of caf. She hooked her thumb into her utility belt, her hand hovering an inch or two from the hilt of her lightsaber. "I'm guessing you're not with customs, and that you know where my patrol went." She let her gaze drift to the stacked crates and back. "We can talk about it, or I can start opening those. I'd rather talk than have to do this the hard way, it's been a long week."

TAG: Yul Kigsa
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[Yul Kigsa]

Yul watched Briana Sal-Soren walk into the hangar, though her attention was immediately drawn to the silver hilt hanging at the woman's hip. It was a lightsaber, the traditional weapon of the Jedi and Sith, and highly dangerous with its plasma blade, where a single slice was more than enough to sever a limb. Still, she didn't want to presume the woman standing before her was actually a Jedi.

After all, there were plenty of lightsabers on the galactic market given the constant war, and Yul herself had picked up a trophy or two over the years. So, when the woman mentioned opening the crates, Yul simply yawned and gestured toward them.

"You're more than welcome to open one," she replied with a soft smile. "Just don't expect to have a hand left after you take the lid off." Her tone shifted from friendly to venomous in a mere instant as her eyes narrowed into thin yellow slits.

Then, before the woman's reply could even be considered, Yul was already moving across the hangar floor. She dropped low, planted a hand on the deckplates, and kicked into a fast cartwheel right into the woman's space. The moment her feet hit the ground inside the woman's reach, Yul drove a elbow straight up toward her chin.​

 

[Briana Sal-Soren]

The warning in the Force had started as a hum. Now it was a shout, and her body answered before her thoughts could catch up. She saw the woman drop, saw the hand meet the deckplates, and rocked back on her heels just as the cartwheel swung a pair of booted feet far too close to her face for comfort. She got her chin out of the way, mostly. The elbow that should have taken her clean under the jaw clipped the edge of it instead, hard enough to snap her teeth together and send a bright, ringing flash across her vision.

“Ah, shit,” Briana hissed, stumbling back two steps, then three, boots skidding on the grit of the deck until a stack of crates pressed against her flank. She kept her prosthetic arm raised in a guard and thrust her left hand out, the Force gathering behind her palm in a short, concentrated shove of pure force energy aimed at the woman’s torso.

The moment she had a breath of space, Briana touched two fingers to her lips and drew them away to find crimson on the tips. She worked her jaw side to side, wincing.

“That’s a no on the talking, then,” she said, a little thickly. “Shame.”

Her eyes flicked over the woman again, no longer idly. The speed, the economy of the movement, the ease with which she’d gone from a yawn to violence... all pointed to training, and a lot of it.

Briana's hand drifted toward her hip out of habit, the old reflex of someone who’d settled a lot of problems with a blade, and she stopped it halfway. A lit saber in a hangar full of unmarked cargo, with a woman who’d warned her about the lids? There was no telling what those crates held, or what might react badly to a plasma blade passing through it.

Fine.

A push of her shoulder took her off the crates. With her weight settling onto the balls of her feet, Briana reached for the Force again, drawing it through her legs and along her spine. The ringing in her ears hadn’t quite faded when she drove forward.

Low. Fast. Prosthetic arm tucked close until the last moment.

A planted foot and a sharp turn of her hips sent the metal fist sweeping toward the woman’s ribs, the Force lending speed to the weight behind it. Her left followed with a short, vicious jab, meant to disrupt whatever guard came up to meet the first.

TAG: Yul Kigsa

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