Blaire was gently nudged awake by a series of beeps and chirps from somewhere in the dark. She rolled over curling ever tighter in her bed sheets hoping that ignoring the beeps would make them go away.
They did not go away.
"What is it Four-B?" Blaire asked the droid without rolling over.
The droid chirped again.
"What do you mean a visitor?"
That doesn't seem right.
"Four-B, what time is it?" Blaire asked.
The droid chirped helpfully that
<on Coruscant it is presently three hours, fourteen minutes, and twenty-four seconds past midnight.>
Of all the things to survive what happened on Naboo and follow Blaire not only to Hapes but now here on Coruscant, the most surprising was probably Jaa but Four-B was a close runner-up. The droid was built from scrap parts scavenged and salvaged by her sister Briana and her brother Brandyn years ago when they were kids. It had been Blaire and Briana that had put all the parts together and gotten the droid working…well almost, their first try at making Four-B work ended in a literal cloud of smoke. Shiraya's Blessing, it had taken weeks to scrub the ceiling clean. The droid had mostly been abandoned after that but once Briana and Brandyn left, Blaire went and fixed the droid up herself. She'd named it BBBB or Four-B after herself and her siblings who all had names that start with B since they all more or less helped put the droid together.
"Four-B it's too late…or…too early for visitors," Blaire said through a yawn.
The little astromech managed to sound aggrieved as it beeped something about overrides
Blaire sat up. There was a very short list of beings that knew those overrides. She instructed Four-B to bring Blaire her robe and shrugged it on, slipped her feet into a pair of slippers, and followed the droid out of the bedroom where she found her unexpected visitor.
A man stood in the living area of her apartment, his back to her as he stared out the large picture window. He was tall and broad with thick brown curls and dressed like he was ready to start a shift loading crates at the docks.
"Some view you got." He said when she caught the reflection of his familiar blue eyes in the window.
A genuine smile spread across her face to see him. There was a time when she was unable to go more than a few hours without seeing Jaa Ardan(even if she'd wanted to.) and now this was the first she had seen of him in weeks.
"How's a senator's aide afford a place like this, anyway? Not exactly the highest-paid gig in the galaxy is it? It truly does pay to be born with the proper last name." He teased in a 'Must-Be-Nice' sort of tone. Well, she took it as teasing even though Jaa undoubtedly meant it at least a little. That's what he did. He would poke fun at her wealth, status, or the luxury those things afforded her, all so he could feel better about not having those things. Jaa practically grew up in the same estate she did and more than once had benefited from his association with her family, specifically her father. even as children no matter how hard anyone tried, Jaa, had been determined to keep himself separate from them. In his mind, he was the working class hero toiling away, set against the old money and the old names, in spite of that old name lining his pockets with their old money.
"Shut up." She said to him through her grin.
There had been a bit of a stir when it came out that Blaire, the ballerina with a famous last name was going into politics. Coruscanti politics was hardly salacious enough to last one news cycle and so Blaire traded in being the paparazzi target of the week for being an afterthought in almost every room she entered.
She crossed the room and Jaa turned just in time for Blaire to throw her arms around her former personal bodyguard. When she came to Coruscant she'd asked if Jaa could join the senator's guard but it turns out that while Jaa's record isn't as public as Blaire's it is a sight more…criminal. So Jaa now works for her father full-time.
She had to stand on the tips of her toes for her arms to reach around his neck and even then she just barely could. She was surprised at how sad it made her that he hadn't wrapped his arms around her waist and lifted her from the floor.
The muscles in his back and neck were hard as stone and now that they were close Blaire could see the dark bags under his eyes and he smelled. Not bad necessarily but oddly for sure, like burnt caf and hyperspace fuel.
"What's wrong?" She asked pulling away from him. At first, she had taken the hour and manner of his arrival as Jaa just being Jaa but there was now a pit growing ever larger in her stomach.
"They've got Brandyn. We've got Brandyn. The New Way has captured your brother." Jaa said from a million miles away as her heart fell into that pit in her stomach.
"I came here straight away once I found out."
"We have to go get him," Blaire said without hesitation.
"Why are you looking at me like that?" She snapped at Jaa.
"You know damn well we cannot just go and get him," Jaa said.
"First, I'm not even entirely certain where he is, I've got an idea but that's it. Second, your job is to be here on Coruscant in the senate building, networking, and information gathering—"
"So you go get him," Blaire interjected.
"No," Jaa said flatly.
"He's my brother," Blaire said flaring with anger.
"I know who he is but you think I can just go into one of our facilities and walk out with a Jedi, that Jedi in particular?" He asked.
"Probably," Blaire said.
"Not without someone dying and do you really think I should be going around killing our own?" He asked absurdly genuinely. She gave him a harsh and knowing glare.
"Blaire, blasting through an entire facility to rescue Brandyn is not the same as finding the cell members that bombed Coruscant. They hurt the cause."
Blaire knew that her father had had Jaa travel through the galaxy trying to find those responsible for the attack on Coruscant. They'd all wisely gone to ground after but Jaa was resourceful, all it would take is time and then the rest of The New Way would see what happened to those that crossed Baros Sal-Soren.
"And what about Bran?"
"That is the cause!" He snapped frustratedly.
"I know it isn't fair—" he began softly.
"Don't." She told him, clenching her fists and trying to will back the tears slowly rolling down her cheeks.
"What if my father told you to go?" She asked.
"I'd tell him what I told you, change comes at a cost."
"And if he told you to go anyway?"
"I'd go."
She laughed at his honesty.
"Well, I'm telling you to go anyway." She said,
"You're not your father."
"I refuse to believe daddy would just leave Bran." She stated forcefully.
"I haven't been able to get in contact with Baros for over a week. I've tried all the traditional methods and even some less-than-traditional ones and still nothing. Your dad is in the wind. Why do you think I'm here telling you about Bran."
Blaire didn't think her heart could fall any further but hearing that her father was unreachable, unable to make things right, dropped it through the bottom of her stomach pit and right down to the planet's core.
"Jaa," Blaire said with a gasp of realization
"Jaa, they could use the cure on Bran. Jaa that could kill him. Shiraya's Breath." Panic was beginning to set in. "Jaa we have to go, please, please, Jaa, please."
Jaa tried to calm the full-blown panic attack that was bursting from her, but where once he wouldn't have hesitated to pull her close, he took a half step and stopped.
"Jaa…" her voice was barely more than a whisper but the plea was unmistakable.
"I can't go." He said.
"Can't or won't?"
"Both. Either. Does it matter?"
Somewhere in the planet's core, her heart broke.
"You can't go either." He said.
"You are a senator's aide and that's all. You wanted to be involved, to help me, to help your father, to help the cause, well this is it. You help by being here. I'm sorry."
"Fuck you."
Good. She thought when she saw the sting of her words land.
Jaa headed for the door. Blaire made no move to stop him and to Jaa Ardan's credit or perhaps credit to his thickheadedness he left without so much as a glance.
Blaire took a moment to rage and to cry but only a moment, time was her enemy. Once her moment was over she busied herself with changing into a more appropriate outfit and she packed herself a gear bag.
Half an hour later she was stood outside Briana's door, greeted by her droid, and an hour after that they were in hyperspace.
"Mistress?"
A tinny mechanical voice said from the doorway. She glanced up from her seat on a rather large bed in one of the cabins of the luxury yacht. There staring at her expectantly was her astromech Four-B and Briana's protocol droid. It was the bronze-colored protocol droid that had addressed her.
"What is it?" Blaire asked, maybe a bit sharply.
Four-B chirped helpfully that her sister was asking after her. Blaire managed not to roll her eyes. Well, almost managed. It had been three days of relative silence between the sisters with Bri's droid doing all it could to fill the silence with its mechanical voice. It had taken some convincing before Briana had agreed to let Blaire tag along but in the end, she had conceded after Blaire reminded her of this very ship they were now in and Bri had mentioned something about a message from Brandyn that he'd sent the two of them. At first, Blaire hadn't a clue what message her sister had been on about but eagerly claimed to have received it so that Bri would quit arguing with her.
The droids led Blaire to where her sister was and Briana greeted her presence with a nod.
"I think I have a lead," Briana said, drawing up an image of her star map.
"What do you know about the Vizcarra system?" She continued on, not waiting for an answer, pointing out a lone world at the far corner of the Outer Rim regions.
Blaire listened to Briana's history lesson. Her reasoning was solid. No one could accuse her sister of not being smart. Habitually overconfident and criminally overpraised, perhaps, but Briana was no dummy.
At the very first mention of Vizcarra Blaire removed a palm-sized datapad from her pocket and connected it to a port in Four-B. The droid chirped something about 'permission' and Blaire ignored it.
She scrolled through a set of files only the droid could give her access to until she found what she was looking for.
The Vizcarra facility was listed as decommissioned over a year ago. Blaire reasoned that could only mean a handful of things: either they were following a dead end, Bran was being held by a rouge faction of The New Way– another rouge faction– or there were clearances amongst the group that even she didn't have. She found none of these to be very appealing.
The glance Briana spared toward her sister would clearly catch the concern she felt. The reason for these concerns would remain a mystery though it would be easy to presume it to solely be her worry for Brandyn.
"I know it's a long shot, but we can't wait around anymore." Bri said to her.
"Surprisingly, I agree," Blaire said tucking the datapad back in her pocket without so much as an acknowledgment that she'd ever taken it out at all.
"This is the sort of thing you do, right? Like you're good at it?" Blaire asked her sister trying to sound conversational. She might have meant Jedi in general but both sisters knew she was asking if Bri specifically was good at this. This was a far cry from their conversation at Breha's bedside. Blaire was not being confrontational but rather searching for any bit of light in her world that had gone suddenly and dramatically dark.
Blaire Sal-Soren
,
Brandyn Sal-Soren
,
Jaa Ardan
