Chapter Text
4 BBY
Aayla landed on Jedha alone, with the intent of retrieving someone from the rebellion here – and if possible, bring this rebellion back into the fold of the greater rebellion.
Fulcrum had been very explicit in her directions to find Garen Muln, and to bring him back to Yavin 4 and to an old friend, and Aayla missed the man. For fifteen years, she’d hidden from her past to escape the attention of Vader and the Inquisitors, first hiding among her kin on Ryloth and then with rebels, but after Obi-Wan had come out of hiding rather dramatically, which while it suited him, didn’t suit her, she’d decided it was time to find out if her old master was still alive.
Quinlan had spent fifteen years playing a game of chicken with Vader, but the rebels had heard nothing about him or his continued survival in several months – not since Vader had raided Ilum for him. He, like Garen, had been close friends with Obi-Wan, and that wily man had managed to be the single most-wanted man in the galaxy and yet not be found until he chose to reveal himself, so she knew no news wasn’t bad news. It was her hope that with Obi-Wan now with the rebels, though leading a whole different rebellion with clones of the 212 and 501 coming out the woodwork and deserting the Empire en masse, once she had retrieved Garen, it would draw Quinlan out of whatever hole he had stuffed himself into.
Her Master wouldn’t be able to resist answering Obi-Wan’s challenge to the galaxy if he was alive. He certainly had never been able to stop himself from trying to beat Obi-Wan in a drinking contest, and they’d all known it was a losing battle against Obi-Wan’s iron liver and ability to drinking like a fish.
It might have been a foolish hope that she hadn’t been able to kill, to think her Master was alive, but while in hyperspace approaching Jedha, there had been a whisper on their bond she hadn’t been able to deny was real.
<<Aayla . . ?>>
<<Aayla . . !!>>
She was out of practice in bond-speak – most of her Force-skills were rusty if she was honest – and her first attempts failed. She didn’t stop trying as she left her A-wing, trying and trying to just answer.
Aayla hardly noticed how things began to float around her as she tried to fall into the meditative space that had once been as easy as breathing to reach when just a moment to center herself in the Force was needed in the middle of a fight, but there was no peace to be found anymore.
It had been better somehow though, these last couple of months; a sense of hope filling the Force that the Darkness could not smother and that she could sense without thought was surrounded by Obi-Wan’s Light, battling it out across the galaxy against the Darkness with a fervor to protect that hope. Then there were the flashes of star-hot tempered Light that Aayla thought was Anakin, come back from the dead as if summoned out of the Force by Obi-Wan, tearing through the Darkness trying to get back to his Master.
The last couple of months she had watched how tens of people couldn’t help but look up into the skies, able to sense the four ultra-bright Lights breaking out through the Darkness and pushing it back, starting to stand up straighter and stop cowering. Hope whispered in her ears, and she hardly noticed how her own Light, so muted and dim from fifteen years of loss and war, started to shine in defiance, when with each moment, familiar Lights were starting to join Obi-Wan and Anakin. Friends and family that she’d thought lost to the Purge were alive.
Tears began to run down her cheeks from the sheer joy rebounding through the Force when she spoke across the strongest of her bonds.
<<Quinlan?>>