Day 19 of the 30 Day Star Wars OC Challenge from @smuggler-captain that I’m doing with @lessdenied! Previous posts are tagged with #30dayswchallenge. Yay, I am back to my regular writing schedule!
This is another deviation from the questions-as-written, since Teh’s personal history doesn’t follow the canonical in-game storyline. So instead! A little bit about Teh’s feels on family, on friendship, and on feels themselves.
“What the hell does genetics have to do with family?!”
Teh’laen’s perspective on “family,” and what that word even means, is non-traditional at best. After all, the people who raised her didn’t contribute any genetic material to who she is and who she’d become. As a result of that disconnect between biology and bonding, she’s never really bothered to distinguish between equally-meaningful relationships depending on genetics. She was adopted into the Va’shuvrk family, fully and completely, and the bonds between her and her deceased parents and siblings remain a pillar of her sense of self.
As such, the idea of “adopting” people with whom she’s forged a deep, lasting connection into the web of relationships that she calls her family is and always has been a core feature of how she relates to others… Even if she doesn’t necessarily couch it in those terms.
Essix is Teh’s best friend and has been for nearly twenty years. She has, on multiple occasions, risked her life to protect him—and has instigated more fistfights than she can count in response to someone dismissing his importance to her as, “It’s only a droid.” Essix is family in Teh’laen’s mind; anyone who says differently is gonna catch these hands and possibly a stunbaton to the back of the knee. But she’d be hard-pressed to slap a label on the bond between them. “Brother” doesn’t really fit and “son” is too, well, parental. (That said, she does adore spoiling him with new upgrades given the slightest provocation.) Essix is family; why does it need to get any more specific than that?
The process of adopting someone into what she considers her family is gradual, but once Teh forms that kind of attachment to someone, she’s not shy about it. Lover, friend, protege… Whatever the nature of their relationship, Teh is open and enthusiastic about it. It may take a while for such a relationship to reach that point of trust and intimacy—after all, the sorts of people with whom Teh’s associated on a daily basis for most of her life aren’t the most trustworthy in the Galaxy—but once it does, Teh accepts it wholeheartedly.
Teh’laen’s formed more of these sorts of relationships in the very recent past—and formed them more quickly—than she used to over the span of years. Her relationship with Cassbria (”Cass”) Temar is by far the most notable attachment; Teh’s had lots of lovers and plenty of serious relationships, but the depth of her feelings for Cass is practically unprecedented, and the fact that Cass makes Teh want to look beyond the immediate future is entirely unprecedented.
There’s a notable exception to Teh’laen’s policy of not worrying over labels and distinctions: her friendship with Naga’se, a fellow Twi’lek whom Teh met almost by chance. Teh’laen’s bond with Naga’se—Naga for short—has very swiftly evolved to the point of blurring Teh’s concepts of friendship and family. The two have become sisters, in every sense that matters to either of them. Both Teh and Naga lost their sisters to tragedy at a young age, and the similarities between Teh’laen and Naga’s sister, and between Naga and Rai’laen, led to the Rutian and the Lethan becoming surrogates for the person the other had lost. Does the distinction between friend and sister matter at all to Teh’laen? Not in the slightest, at least semantically. But Teh’laen’s attachment to Naga fills the void in her life left by Rai’laen’s loss.
"Oooh, yeah, genetics, right. You know that I'm only marginally more closely related to you than I am to a grophet, right? If we're talking about genomes and shit?" -Teh’laen to Hirani, her biological fraternal twin.
Teh’s relationship with Naga as surrogate sisters is a stark contrast to Teh’s ambivalence (occasionally veering into antipathy) regarding her recently rediscovered biological family: Gnoxis, her Sith Lord mother, and Hirani, her fraternal twin sister. Hirani—having been raised from infancy by the Jedi—is eager to make up for the family she never had, as is Gnoxis, who was deprived of the family she wanted to have. Teh’laen had a family that she lost, and presently has the family that she found, and is deeply resentful of her blood relations’ implication that an accident of birth should make them more important to Teh than the bonds she’s forged of her desire and volition.
