The Gardens

Kent, sir, Kent Austin. Yes I am better, thank you.
She was trying her best to be as respectful as she ever had. She knew she was totally out of her here with all of these powerful people. She was comfortable with people that looked tough. Rutil's appearance did nothing to intimidate her. She could see all of that, that she could know and account for. It was the stuff she couldn't see and couldn't know that worried her. She couldn't be her normal outgoing self without the information. She couldn't be her. But that could all change once she had information.
May I ask your name sir?

That... that is a good question. Where should I start... I am an orphan. I was living in the refugee sector on Nar Shaddaa. In my heart I felt someone calling for help, I don't know how to explain it. I am, was, not used to being overwhelmed by situations, my brain was able to get me through most things. This was different; Jedi, Sith, pirates, not things I have dealt with. I got over my head and accidentally brought down a building with the Force... I was scared. I apparently impressed people enough to get an invite after things settled down. Then all Hell broke lose again. My heart told me I had to stick it through and follow them. Then they brought me here. Meeting masters, training, eating right. All things I am supposed to be doing here I guess.

She could still get defensive. That was a skill she had developed very quickly as an street rat. Yes she would have to do it careful but she wasn't one to get called out like this when she didn't do anything.
Listen. I went to the Medical Center. There Addele released me, and said I had near free reign of the base. I learned i should avoid the detention are, and that wandering outside the compound. I haven't gone either of those place. I have been on my own long enough to know how to take care of my self. As far as being in a new place, know I am a quick learner.

She lets the defensive tone relax a bit. His next question was one she had been giving thought to from the moment Na'an had said there were better teachers for her. As to my purpose? I guess that depends on whose idea of that you want. Na'an wants me to find a master here. I just know I am supposed to be with her. It makes no sense, I know, but that is what it is supposed to be I just feel it. I guess that's why I am out here alone. Everyone here has one, it doesnt seem that I do. I would be with Her, but she doesn't seem to want me there now. Her voice raising again. Not at Rutil, but at the situation. It seems that everyone has a place here they are supposed to be, people they are supposed to be with, or things they are supposed to be doing. Everyone but me. If you have an Idea please feel free to tell me.

Her age showing in her eyes. She was fifteen even if she didn't quite look it, that and her time alone on the streets had done more to age her beyond her years. Her eyes now telling all of this.

It wouldn't wouldn't be the first time I have been left alone for dead. Not by a long shot. And every time I have made it. ON MY OWN! She had delt with, bigger and stronger people all her life. She had stared down a Wookie bounty hunter and hadn't blinked, been threatened by Trandoshan body guards and didn't move. The one nice thing about having nothing to live for, you never really feared death. Grabbing her chin was nothing, she faced worse often. She continued her own snarl, but slowly it seemed to be losing steam. You have made yourself clear sir, and up until this moment. Everyone I have encountered I have shown the up most of respect. In the firefight on Nar Shadda, i could have ran, I SHOULD HAVE RAN! But i didn't. I had met people that could use what I could do to help people. I stayed and fought. Risked my life for people I DIDN'T KNOW because I knew it was right. Na'an gave me instructions and I followed them. I showed respect, a whole lot of respect.

Then she said to follow her to her ship. Did I resist, did i struggle? No, I respected and listened to her and followed. Na'an needed me to do anything on the ship, I did it. All while she and her machine made it clear they didn't need me or really care if I was there. That once we landed I would get to be out of her hair. They were obligated to bring me to this base, for some reason. But still I did what i was told, and listened and made sure everyone was ok.

Then we land, and I am told I will be needed when we land. I don't question my orders, I fulfill them with a smile on my face. I explain what happened and answered every question to the best of my abilities, recounting events MOMENT BY MOMENT as if I had recorded it all! Then I get hit with something totally foreign to me. My MIND the one thing that has kept me alive for twelve years was attacked and there was nothing I could do to stop it. Clearly this was a likely possibility and everyone else seemed to be ready for it. Could anyone be bothered to let the Street Rat know to be ready, or at least know there was something coming? No! Let her get hit blindsided, let her world fall out from under her feet as all her memories and thoughts come into question.

Now the girl is screaming, we have to deal with her now. Take her to the med center and get her to calm down. Lets not really explain what happened but leave her guessing. Then tell her to wander the base. I wander learning the lay out, memorizing an unfamiliar place. Does anyone, anyone at all offer the lost looking girl help? NO, they are all too busy with their own things to help the girl that is all alone. I make my way to the dinning hall. I buy myself food and sit at an empty table, ALONE not joined by anyone. But I dont interupt people, because I want to show respect. I spend hours struggling to a accomplish a smaller version of something I can do when I am angry or truly frightened. Something everyone here can so as if its second nature, make something as small as a fork move. After hours without anyone even glancing at me I make it happen. I have joy, for the first time in nearly 5 years, but i share it with no one because it would be disrespectful to interject into what everyone else is doing.

Then I make my way to the garden, remembering the few instructions of direction I had been given. "Stay on the compound" I would take in something, I haven't experienced for 8 years 215 days and 9 hours! (remembering the moment her grandparents died and she was left alone on a ship bound for Nar Shaddaa from Naboo) Fresh air, not polluted by chemicals and air recycles. All this time still trying to stay out of everyones way, because I am unnoticed. I try to avoid getting in their way out of Respect! I do a good job of it to, until I turn a corner and bump into someone. I say I sorry, out of respect. Then I get asked who I am and why I am here. Then I get treated like a criminal, for not sitting in one spot outside the med center.

I would say I have shown more than my share of respect, and up until NOW, few have even looked me in the face. So if you want me to go back to where I came from, please show me the way! She had lost it, tears now filling her eyes. The years of loneliness coming back. She had fought off these feelings for years, they were all coming now. If I am destined to be alone and forgotten. To blend into what ever place I am in, I might as well do it someplace I know! Someplace I am comfortable. Being alone there makes sense. Not here. Not where it is supposed to be different! I thought she brought me along cause she cared! I was wrong. I thought she was bringing me someplace where others would care! I was wrong. I am as alone here as anywhere so I might as well be anywhere else!

With the last bit of control she had left she had left she finished the sentence, and let the pain take her again. The years of being alone tearing into her young psyche. She went limp. If he was holding her chin hard enough, he would be holding her up by the face. If not she would hit the ground. Either way, she was done with it. Her sobs and tears came without any sign of stopping.

:: Felucian Jedi Conclave - Gardens 17:30 Hours ::
Welcome Home - Andrew James North, Kent Austin, Rutil Iorek
"Stand at the crossroads and look; ask for the ancient paths, ask where the good way is, and walk in it, and you will find rest for your souls" - Jeremiah 6:16

---

A few beams of sunset poked their way through the dense, grey, Felucian sky, flickering orange against water pooling on the stone steps of the garden paths. Rain, the sticky, humid, jungle rain, coated the Conclave earlier, bathing one of the few bastions of light and sanity on a primal and dark world. Small bits of steam rose from the rocks against the sunlight adding to the usual wetness hanging about in the Felucian air. In late-afternoon sunset this gem of the conclave lived up to its reputation: beautiful, quiet, restorative, but humid - damnably humid.

Worn boots splash against the water, walking aimlessly through the gardens. Their owner still felt uncomfortable here, but then again, it takes years to get comfortable with Felucia - with a planet that tries very hard to eat you, with or without your skin on. He had the well-timed gait of someone used to moving economically, someone used to making every step, the placement of each foot count. Yet, the cadence seemed slower than it should, as if he were paying more attention to the dizzying Felucian flora than he actually was, or carried a weight on his shoulders that made him hesitate. Old solider. Guardian.

They belong to a lanky Echani, knifelike to the point of being gaunt. He stands tall, and in sharp contrast to the vibrant plants around him. He's pale, almost deathly so, with grey eyes that look more dead than alive - the same way anything grey really doesn't look alive. His hair is grey-silver as well, and blends into an equally unkempt, but short silvered beard. He looks all of his fifty years, and then some. Loose, faded, black clothes almost hang off him. A simple black shirt, with sleeves of a length irritating in the heat, and simple pair of pants. From looks alone, he doesn't really belong here. Too stark, too, distant. He didn't feel like he did either. For a long time, the Jedi resisted centralization and operated on their own, at least, they had for as long as he'd known. Wandering, healing what hurts they could, wherever they were. He'd come to the conclave out of duty, this would be the first time, and maybe the last time too.

It had been raining then too. His mind slipped back into memory to the cadence of slow steps on wet stone. The gardens seemed to welcome wandering minds as well as they did wandering feet.

"Are ya' really leavin' mister North?" the girl, no older than ten, looked up from under an overhang. She sat with her mother on the first floor of one of an untold number of tenements that marked the Refugee sector of the smuggler's moon. A place situated between the lower city and the seventh level of hell. You go to the refugee sector when no other world will take you, and you stay there until there's nothing left of you to take. There, in the refugee sector, the scarecrow was born. There, Andrew worked, and lived. Why the Nar Shaddaa? He couldn't really say. As a guardian, you worked with a sector and helped their law enforcement maintain order, and, well, keep the peace. Abigail had been very clear about that. Jedi are not warriors, she had said, and said often, "but keepers of the peace." She kept order in small corners of the smuggler's moon, and in those spaces, people could live normal lives. Well, as normal as life on the smugglers' moon gets.

He dedicated his life to Hutt controlled space as well, and for the last few years, walked the Refugee Sector. Nar Shaddaa's sector force was non-existent, or corrupt to the point of uselessness. The Jedi were all the Refugee sector had. And even then, it didn't always work out.

"Not forever, Jenna." He said, squatting eye-level with the brown-haired and dusty youth. Her family, Eric and Marie Rhiannon, gave him a bed when he started on the planet. They'd been old friends of Abigail's.

"But, who's gonna walk if you don't", Jenna had piercing eyes. The kind of piercing that only children who are adults on the inside have, a deep, probing, penetrating questioning. These children, the children of the Refugee sector, know you before you speak. They know, because of what's been done to them.

"Egy fecske nem csinál nyarat, Jenna."

Andrew smiled a bit. She knew what that bit of Nelvaanese meant just as well as he did. Egy fecske nem csinál nyarat, one sparrow does not make a summer. One man, cannot change the world, or even the block. North had become the law in that part of the refugee sector, at least, the most basic version of it - "thou shalt not... murder, rape, steal, hurt the children..." One man, barely able to keep a block of lower-city tenements in order. Yet, there were signs that things were changing. It wasn't so much law, these people needed, as hope. Hopelessness is the great motivator, if no one cares, then it's pretty easy to do whatever you want. In the Refugee sector, no one matters. Andrew wanted to change that.

"Why're you leavin!" She yelled, sharply. Marie's face darkened a bit too. "There won't be anyone here. No one who cares anyway."

"I'm sorry Jenna."

That had been a few weeks ago. He worried now about them. But, the Jedi had called, called for the order to return, and out of duty, out of the respect that Abigail Westrate gave him, he came.

Andrew's walk in the Felucian gardens took him to an open patio on the edge of one of the few ponds. To his left, and about fifteen or so feet away, sat an older-looking Zabrak in brown robes and a silvered breastplate. Guardian, thought Andrew, though less from the armor than from his bearing and the sternness on his face. Even a half-daydreaming Echani could figure that much out, at least. Andrew took brief notice of a smallish young woman, and kept walking to a path across the clearing. Lost in his thoughts, and worries, about the Refugee sector.

Yet something, something from that youth didn't feel right. It felt, oddly familiar, like a phantom pain.


An orphan. Nar... Shaddaa...

Andrew stopped, and turned toward the pair, stepping to them in his slow, quiet, cadence. That's what felt familiar, the feelings of someone who spent their life abandoned on the smuggler's moon. Alone on the streets between hell and death, alone on the footsteps of all that was so humanely evil in this universe. He winced, slightly, barely visibly, and the memories that her feelings awoke in his mind. He felt, almost as if they were his own feelings, what she felt. The empath's blessing and curse.

What had this child been through? Though, he felt he already knew the answer to that question. She carried the same feelings that every child on Nar Shaddaa carries with them. Hopelessness, loneliness, despair, anger, all locked beneath a thin, hard, crust of visible toughness. A callous put there by the moon itself. People talk, often, about the plagues of Nar Shaddaa. Diseases that will eat your joints, necrotic viruses that will eat whole parts of your body, viruses that will drive you insane. But they forget the worst of the plagues. Sheer hopelessness, a plague that saps the very core of humanity, reducing men to animals. Giving license to all manner of evil, because, "no one cares."

And on the smuggler's moon, no one did. No authority, nothing. Hell, the moon barely had shelters for homeless.


No. Don't push, don't push her. Not yet, and not now. Andrew's mind began to pick up some speed, and his step hastened a bit. If this got out of hand, the girl could do damage to herself. This wasn't the time to be stern. From what he could tell, she was still a trauma patient. At the very least, she carried with her all the broken, aimless, anger rooted in suffering on the smuggler's moon.


Andrew winced, this time visibly. When her voice rose, so did her temper, and that shot through him. Loneliness. Few things cut worse than feeling alone, and out of place. She'd probably never felt one, or for that matter had a place or people to call home. He'd just about reached the pair by now, and then, another blow, another set of emotions took hold. Anger, a sparking, superior, anger. An emotion that had no place here, especially not now.


'The hell are you doing! Andrew stopped for a moment, complete stunned. What did the Zabrak think he was doing? Yes, the girl wasn't exactly being pleasant, yes, she wasn't acting like the rest of the order's initiates. But at this point, after the life he knew she had on the moon, and whatever event brought her here, now was not the time for a dressing-down. She couldn't take it, not in her state. He shook his head, walking toward the pair as the Zabrak circled back in front of the youth. Jedi should know when to apply mercy, and when to apply discipline.


Enough. Enough! Andrew paused for a moment forcing his own anger down. Two raging emotions would do more harm than good for the youth. This is not how we treat people who come to us for help. This is not what we do. He bit his lip, quelling his own roiling center. Abigail taught him that much at least. When someone comes, looking for asylum, looking for help, you offer them a cup of cold water. You offer them mercy, you tend to their needs. Then, and only then, will the listen to you, will they understand what you stand for.

Enough people had treated the youth roughly, enough people had made her feel less than them, enough people hadn't offered her a home. The order, no, Andrew, was not going to let that happen, not to another child of the mechanical, disease-ridden hell that was Nar Shadaa. "Here there is peace?" What are you showing her but, here there is order? Here you will not step out of line? How is she to learn respect if we don't tend to her wounds first, if we don't give her time. We do not, regardless of how we're treated, send people back to the hell they were rescued from! He steadied himself again.

And then came the storm.


The loneliness, the sheer hopelessness that deflated the fight in her words cracked something in Andrew. His composure broke for a moment as he took a step back, physically responding to the emotional cascade. It wasn't that it was powerful, just too damn familiar. Jenna. He'd seen this all before, on Jenna's face, on every child's face that walked on that moon, that walked abused in the lower cities. We've failed this girl, he thought, at least failed to welcome her. She's fighting because that's all she knows how to do. A child her age shouldn't know what fighting is.

Water creeps into the corners of his eyes. There were too many people like her, like Jenna. Üres hasnak nem elég a szép szó, hanem a czipó. Fine words are not enough for an empty stomach. It needs bread, so the Nelvaanian say. The Zabrak, and everyone else in the whole enclave could talk about respect, and peace, and calmness, but if they didn't offer what she really needed, how could they expect her to respect them? She didn't need a lecture, she needed a family. He shook his head, and walked forward, facing the Zabrak and dropped down onto his knee as the youth collapsed, sinking into a loneliness that he knew all too well.


He felt cascades of pain, pouring out from her life, pouring out from what had been done to her. He felt it, as he always did, as his own. Andrew's face never seemed happy, always slightly tinged with mourning, the mourning of a man far too well acquainted with human suffering. The Echani knew the weight that held her their, he saw it on the face of everyone on the smuggler's moon. He placed a hand on her left shoulder, and looked up, eyes sad, but stern at the Zabrak.

"That's enough."

He spoke calmly, hiding the amount of force he may have wanted to put into those two, simple words. Turning to the youth, eyes shifting from mournful to a quiet warmth, he spoke.

"You are not alone," he said the words slowly.

If there was anything Andrew wanted her to know, it was that the order, he, had not rejected her. He could feel the weight of loneliness, and he needed to lift it. Jedi talk about the end result of anger as suffering, the end result of the dark side as suffering. Andrew didn't see it the same way, anger lead to hatred, then to suffering, but suffering lead to anger, and began the cycle anew. Beings turn to darker powers only when they are suffering.

"I know. I know what that hell-hole has done to you, and what you've seen and what been through. But you're not there anymore. Where you are, fiatal nő, is home."

*Iella had been thinking about finding a little spot to try a little meditation when something bumped into her. Looking down, she saw two little girls there, the one who bumped into her apologizing and the other standing quietly off to the side. It was starting to feel that everywhere she went, there were children there. True, this was only the second time, but still...

She smiled and shook her head.*"No harm done, right?"

"Pleased to meet you. I'm Iella, and yes I'm very new here."*Now that she had had a minute to get a good look, Iella couldn't help but notice that Morgan seemed to bear an uncanny resemblance to Jake. He had mentioned sparring with his sister, but hadn't mentioned her by name. Or maybe he had and she had forgotten already, which wouldn't be out of the realm of possibility. There was a lot on her mind from recent events after all.*