cal kestis, to ahsoka while on a long hyperspeed drive: "you've never told me about what your old master was like." (platonic.)
The blue-white blur of hyperspace whirls past them, the hum of the ship fading into the background. Cal is meditating—frustrating, how he always seems to be able to do that. A half-quiet place and no immediate threat and he’s gone into the netherworlds of the Force. Ahsoka wonders what that’s like, sometimes. Not the letting go—she’s good enough at that by now—but reaching out. Diving deep.
When Ahsoka meditates, she feels the breath of the world around her kyber-sharp. She’d been taught meditation—really taught, not the crèchling tricks of quitting your mind—by a man who felt like a sun dying. The first time he’d sat down with her taken her hands in his, she’d felt a roar of ravenous hunger in the atoms of his being, waves and waves of breaking and forming until there wasn’t even a memory left. Not like Jaro Tapal, she guesses, though she never met the man. Not like Jaro Tapal at all.
Cal’s eyes blink open, focusing on her, and she shrugs. “What’s up?”
“Your master—” she starts, but she doesn’t really have the words for it. Instead she shrugs, and lets the hum of the ship overtake everything.
Cal frowns at her, shifting so that he’s sitting with his back against the wall of the Mantis, one knee bent up and the other sprawled out. “He was a good man. A good Jedi.”
She almost smiles at that—a tight, sad, tiny thing. Behind her in the vents, Boggy chirps and skitters by.
“You’ve never told me about your master,” Cal says. Boggy’s footsteps echo, then disappear. “I heard the stories. We all did. But—“
“It’s not the same thing,” Ahsoka agrees. She sighs, and looks up at the dull gleam of the metal tubing above her. “He was—he was my master. He was my friend.” There ought to be more words for it. Basic is a poor language for this sort of thing—never intended to be more than a trader’s tongue—but no other language she knows has the words for it either. “He was my friend,” she repeats. There’s nothing else to say
