(Look, if you've seen the show, you know how this is gonna end for Jod's Jedi mentor, just letting you know.)
If it's a story that's been told once, it's a story that's been told ten times, a hundred times, a thousand times, a million, billion tragic, terrible times. It's not a happy story, it's not even a good one, but it is a story, and it was Jod's.
A dirty waif, wading through the rough sea of people, desperately paddling against the stream, snapping and grabbing at the waves rushing past. Dashed against purses and satchels and clutches, against rough hands and rougher shoulders, he could barely keep his head up, let alone keep himself from sinking to the bottom and being tread upon. But he needed food. A lowly bottom dweller like himself, need not the fancy morsels, meant more for pleasure than sustenance, but that did not exempt him from not needing it entirely.
And it had been a while since he had been able to snatch up scraps.
Wearily and warily he eyed the front of the shop. Rugged and grey as the sleet soaked clouds above, and in a distressing amount of disrepair, he stumbled and shuffled his way in, shoving the damnable port open when it couldn't even be bothered to complete it's shuddering journey from closed to open even a quarter of the way through.
“Ed’ilch! I have money this time!” His shouts echoed over the eclectic conglomeration of outdated cloaks and barely usable kitchen ware. “Therefore, I want actual rations. Not that deplorable excuse for food that you ‘found’ that you claim is edible.”
There were several seconds of silence, followed by the desperate screeches of a horribly abused ‘fresher, before a rather heavy set individual with significantly more wrinkles than brain cells, made his ponderous way over to the counter. Sometimes, Jod thought he might one day want to trace his way through that maze of wrinkles.
“It ‘as per~fectly edbl’,” the proprietor of the establishment yawned into his three thick digits.
Jod harrumphed quite loudly as he slammed his fist with tightly gripped credits onto the counter. “Is that so? Tell that to the corner of my cave that's no longer habitable.”
His beady eyes returned no empathy, no sense of regret. Just the generalized apathy of someone who had lived through so much, and yet had done so little. He might have smirked momentarily, though, and that just made Jod clench his hard-earned treasure even tighter, his teeth grinding. But he had to keep his temper in check. He was a bottom-feeder after all, and that was all he could be.
“Eh, edbl’, not mah problem ‘at your sto~mik' ‘an't ‘andle it.”
Taking the deepest breath his lungs could possibly handle, he simply said, “So, rations?”
“ ‘ow much ya got?” Ed'ilch asked, revealing the maw behind his big, fat chapped lips.
“Depends on what rations you have available.”
If his milky, seafoam eyes could have rolled, they would have checked on the smooth stone between his ears and stayed seated in his skull. As Ed'ilch was as incapable of that as he was incapable of more than two consecutive thoughts, he settled for a sneer as he slapped Republic sanctioned ration packets in front of Jod.
Glancing quickly at each bag to be sure that they truly were actual Republic sanctioned rations, and looking for the mark of the Republic, he opened his hand up. “I have three credits, so I'll take four ration packets.” Good, he could make that last six days, maybe eight depending on if they were intended for Republic Troopers or just the usual band-aid they handed out to cities they destroyed in the war.
His ever so slightly brighter mood quickly came crashing down against the bluff as he heard that obnoxious derisive huff. “Two pack'ts.”
Ignoring the sound of some other unfortunate soul struggling with the doorway, through clenched teeth and tensed shoulders, he cocked his head back slightly and pulled out a delicate piece of jewelry. “Three packets and this broach for good measure.”
A mean glint sparked in the old profiteers eyes. “One pack't, an’ I wan’ da broash.”
“What!” What a miserable piece of slimy, no-good, barnacle-bilge, nerf-herding-! A small, cold hand slapped itself onto his shoulder and, at the same time, a tin bowl behind them dropped to the ground.
“Now, now, Ed'ilch,” the small hand's owner had the voice of the ocean trapped in an echoy cave. “There's no need to be mean. What if I add an extra credit to the pile, hmm? Four credits, and at least 12 credits for the broach, which would make for a pretty good deal for four measly ration packets.”
Ed'lich finally dragged his eyes from the fallen bowl in the back of his shop, to the ratty and ruined pair in front of him. “Fine. Take ‘em an’ go.”
Jod quickly dropped his credits and the broach and gathered the packets into his arms, attempting to shove them into the inner pockets of his much too large, once expensive, jacket, stumbling backwards as he went. He had not even noticed the stranger had released him to pay their credits until he had escaped outside the dreary shop.
“I hope you don't mind sharing?” the voice of the hand interrupted his panicking.
Freezing and finally looking past the cloak and into the almost unnaturally shadowed maw that hid their face and into the eyes of his savior, what he noticed first was their smile. It was wide, full of teeth, and despite the sallowness of the skin, the protrusion of the cheekbones, and the sunken eyes, it was a smile filled with delight. “Share…what?”
A small giggle bubbled up and washed ashore. They were a she. She continued to smile and proceeded to poke playfully at his shoulder with dirty stringy dark hair escaping the confines of the hood. “The rations, though, if you have a pad I could crash in, that would be much appreciated. I'll pay for the bulk of the rations next time, and then I'll be out of your hair.”
“Oh uhh, mmm,” for once in his very short life, Jod was utterly speechless. On one hand, this was an incredibly sketchy situation that would likely result in this stranger either taking advantage of him, or perhaps just outright murdering him, but on the other hand, he had the feeling he could trust this stranger. It was an odd feeling, but over the years he'd learned to trust his odd feelings like that. They were usually little, like finding a credit or two in unexpected places, or like the broach that his hands should've missed, but didn't. “Sure, we're not too close, though. Hope you don't mind a trek.”
If anything, the odd smile seemed to widen at those words. “Sounds like an adventure!”
Weird. “O~kay, follow me, then.”
Together the destitute pair of derelicts traversed their way across the city, scraping between narrow alleys, and giving a wide berth to any outer-rim scoundrels that seemed to grow in clusters the farther they were away from the city, and the closer they came to the cave riddled, cliff covered edge of the land, overlooking the dark, deadly waters beneath, easily accessible by any individual to be three sheets to the wind with just a couple of missteps and a couple of well- aimed blows to the face.
After delicately making their way down a well-worn, if shoddily made, rope ladder and pasing a handful of entirely uninviting cave-dwelling abodes, Jod carefully, if forcefully, shouldered his way into one, allowing the strange woman to come in with him and gawk at his meager, if many, belongings. Ignoring her slack-jawed mouth, and wide-eyes staring rather impolitely at his cave, which happened to have a nice hole that illuminated the cave, even if it let in rain, he started preparing half of one of the ration packets by pouring it into a small pot with a bit of rain water on his portable stove. He was so hungry. She sat nearby with a little smile on her face, while he tried to ignore that they were both opposite of the uninhabitable corner.
“Who even are you?” He eventually asked. It wasn’t a polite question, his mother would’ve made sure he’d sunk to the briny depths if she had ever heard him ask that. She wasn’t there to correct him, though, wars and coups had made sure of that.
A sly smile bounced jauntily across her face before she glanced conspiratorially around his abandoned cave before she whispered into his ear “A Jedi Master!”
The only sounds that had the gall to continue were the boiling, and quickly burning, rations and the handful of drunks staggering away from the completely legal Moonshiners joint nearby.
The next sound that had the gall to appear was the loud and raucous laughter that erupted from her. “Of the Library!”
Smelling the now burning only meal of the day he had, Jod quickly shut off his miniature stove. Now perplexed, his eyebrows met in committee and his mouth quirked into an annoyed and suspicious frown. “I always heard that the Jedi were warriors.”
“The Jedi were peace-keepers.”
“And clearly understaffed,” he sniped, pointedly looking at the brawl over some booze occurring outside his crudely hewn door. And referring to, well, the whole empire-conquering-the-known-universe thing.
“There are billions of planets, and only thousands of us. Being Force sensitive is a miracle of incredibly impossible odds,” she chuckled before taking a couple delicate bites of her stew.
Jod squinted at this oddly joyful woman. “Therefore, the odds of us meeting should've been impossible.”
“Ah ah, never tell me the odds-” she took the last bite of her stew and gently floated the bowl and spoon off to the side, “I just go where the force leads me. This time, to you.”
Jod was momentarily taken aback. “Me?”
Slowly random, yet entirely worthless, trinkets from his humble abode began to rise. “Yes, you-” they gathered together before separating- “Don’t think I didn’t notice your little trick in the shop.”
“And I’m sure you have these little feelings, a push or a pull, something tugging you towards something, towards someone. Inexplicable, unexplainable little nudges that take you to what you need or help you avoid danger.”
Instead of answering the words that were pricking at his chest, memories converging to a point he had never wanted to consider, he simply pulled his knees to his chest and held his breath. The dead man’s float could keep even the worst swimmer from sinking to the depths, even if it could not ultimately save them. But he would wait it out, even if he was drowning. Trinkets oscillated to and fro beneath the ceiling.
Eventually, he began to breathe, quietly and shallowly, and her pitying gaze drifted from the floating objects to him.
“I'm sorry,” the ration packets spun above her hand and her head in mesmerizing patterns that swayed and flowed and bobbed. “You should have been found as a youngling and brought up in the temple. We were blind; blind to the enemy who was undermining us at every turn, and blind to the silent suffering of our allies.”
They spent days like that, grasping whatever meager enjoyment and sustenance that could be gleaned from their rations, and learning and teaching, respectively. To her it must've felt like she was finally finding a piece of familiar flotsam out in the ocean, but to Jod, he felt like he had finally discovered the ecstasy of bobbing at the surface of the water as delicate rain drizzled and dusted his skin, his eyelashes, his soul. And by the end of those few days he could feel the ebb and flow of the force and he could make the little bits and bobs that he had collected bob around his little cave. It was miraculous, it was wondrous; it was all thanks to her. But like all good things, it had to end, and their rations had run out. So out of desperation, they made a rations run to Ed’lich’s, but they hadn’t realized that the store keeper had noticed Jod’s little outburst. That Ed’lich still remembered what new Jedi were like. That he had seen Padawan’s lose their temper before. And that he knew the ridiculous reward that could come with turning in a Jedi to the Empire. So when the two unsuspecting force users came stumbling into his shop once more, despite their bad feeling, they hadn’t realized the extent of the trap set for them
“Dere ‘e is! Da jedi!!!” came his traitorous roar, as a multitude of troopers stormed out from the storage room behind the counter. Horrified by this they dashed back out of his shop, only to be greeted by more storm troopers and a massive crowd waiting for them
“This boy is no jedi!” She cried, stepping in front of him, and then without warning, she whipped out the mythical weapon of all jedi. The buzz of a thousand insects screamed to life, encapsulated in a bright, fizzy green. “I am the jedi.”
But there were so many well-fed and well-rested stormtroopers, and only one of her, and she had neither of those small, basic, comforts, and before Jod could even attempt to think about staying with her, she had force-pushed him with the strength of a tsunami back into the crowd. That moment of strength and kindness was her undoing.
For in that split second of saving a wretch like him, one trooper got just one lucky shot in, and she was a death row inmate before the rifling squad, and her beautiful sword clattered against the dirty stones, her corpse soon following. She was just a librarian.
She was good and kind and noble. Despite every horrible thing she'd survived, she'd smiled and laughed and shared with him.
All he'd done was watch. He had watched, right at the front of the crowd. The tide of people behind him tugged at his heels, clamoring and dreading to see what was the fuss. What was the storm that erupted over their banal doldrums. All he could do was drown as the riptide carried him away. But what was he supposed to have done? He wasn't a Jedi; he didn't have a lightsaber. All he had were a couple of lessons in “the Force” from some outdated religion that practically only equated to some vaguely useful parlor tricks! He tripped farther into the sea of people, drowning in their rip current, getting as far away from her as he could. He stumbled, unable to tread.
He would never try to keep his head above the waves again.
After all, why fight the surface of the ocean, when all it ends up getting you is dashed across the rocks?
