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Aayla knows she should be paying attention to the senator’s security captain. Really. This was an important mission, and the senator’s security captain was probably far more familiar with the situation than Aayla. But on the other hand, Bly. None of his mission briefs would ever be this much of a mess. Bly was a solid believer in presenting information in a clear, logical way.
When Bly runs all of his briefings the same easy-to-follow and controlled manner. He starts with the outline of the situation, of what they are going to walk into. It frames all future information within the appropriate context. From there, Bly then provides background information. Only the relevant pieces though, he always removes the extra information that won’t be relevant in the situation to prevent from causing information overload. From there, Bly goes on to explain what actions the unit is already is taking, and what actions will have to be taken. It’s clear, conscience, and easy to follow.
Aayla really wishes Bly was running this meeting instead of this senate-employed disaster. Instead, Aayla is being presented with what seems to be a suspected timeline of events, except she has no idea who any of the people involved are or why they matter. She finds herself longing for the slightly too cramped briefing room on her cruiser and the comforts of her men. Unfortunately, both her cruiser and her men are lightyears away, heading to their next deployment over Quesh.
As the security captain throws in yet another name Aayla has no context for, Aayla simply sighs and begins to tune the man out. There are several members of the Coruscant Guard here – She’s pretty sure that is Commander Thorn looking and feeling just as uncomfortable as Aayla does. Honestly, Aayla’s not really sure why she’s here. For all that this briefing is reaching its third hour, this seems like a run-of-the-mill assassination attempt on a senator, the kind of the Guard handles all the time.
When Bly leads a brief, Aayla can always tell that he’s spent hours pouring over the material on his own, committing it all to memory and deciding what is relevant and what isn’t, what their men need to know in order to survive their next battle. It is clear that the security captain here has not put in the same effort, as he checks his holopad again to correct something he had said. When that leads into a third tangent of the entire life story of another possible suspect, Aayla has had enough. She’s not a diplomat, so the council should be thankful it took her this long to take drastic measures.
“With all due respect, Captain, why exactly am I here?” She asks the question aloud, and the whole room comes to a sudden stop, the vibrations in the room stopping as everyone simply froze in response to her addition.
“I’m afraid I don’t understand, Master Jedi. There has been an attempt on Senator Mamzar’s life.” The security captain responds, and Aayla shifts, placing both hands on her hips in the way that she knows will give her an advantage in an argument because males, particularly near-human males are weak for a pretty Twi-lek face.
“Yes, there has been a single assassination attempt. Before the war, this likely would still be the purview of your team to handle, as even then, the Jedi did not get involved until it became clear that there would be multiple attempts on the senator’s life, that it wasn’t just a wild goose chase. Now, this is something that the Coruscant Guard deals with regularly, and have become quite skilled at doing so. So let me ask again, why was such a fuss kicked up about the need for a Jedi protector, when we are needed far more on the front lines.” Aayla doesn’t mince her words. She keeps her tone flat and level the whole time she speaks. The only outward sign of her irritation is the way her lekku twitch. If anyone else in the room was fluent in lekku-speak, they would have found that Aayla has very strong opinions about what she’s saying.
Senator Mamzar clears their throat, drawing attention to himself for the first time all meeting. Aayla’s not quite sure how the near-human came to be representing the both system – a system home to almost exclusively Bothians, but Aayla has been getting a slimy-slippery feeling from them all day.
“If I may speak to you in my office, Master Jedi, I believe I can shed some light on the situation at hand.” Aayla nods, eager just to end the briefing but not eager to spend time in the senator’s office, and subtly battlesigns follow at Commander Thorn. When he tips his head just to a side to acknowledge and then follows her, however, the Senator fixes him with a glare, and the wave of suspicion and hatred that crashes over Aayla is nearly overwhelming, and none of it was directed at her. “Alone, please Master Jedi.”
Commander Thorn stops, but Aayla can tell he’s waiting for her move. So, she squashes the part of her mind that tells her that this is how Twi’lek girls go missing, and braces her hand on her lightsaber, nodding a quick affirmation at the Commander. He relaxes ever so slightly, and she follows Senator Mamzar into his office.
The first time Aayla had ever seen Bly’s collection had been about six months into the war, just after a short campaign on Klantooine. He’d invited her to join him for dinner in his quarters, as they found themselves doing frequently, even in those days before they confronted what they meant to each other. While they ate, Aayla could feel something weighing on his mind – a heavy kind of indecision that seemed to build in conflict the longer they spent together. Aayla considered asking about it, but she figured that given the gentle way trust floated in and out of the indecision, this was something Bly had to figure out on his own.
“Do you mind starting on the dishes by yourself, General? There’s something I want to show you.” They’d been making light small talk all meal, so the serious tone in Bly’s voice immediately clued Aayla in that this was Important.
“Not at all, Commander.” She rose from her seat, collecting her dishes and Bly’s, while he headed over towards the corner of the room where his bunk was. Aayla set about cleaning the dishes off, but she still followed Bly’s force signature as it moved through the room behind her.
When the dishes were clean, Aayla set them back where they belonged, and turned back to when Bly was sitting at the table again. In front of him was an actual notebook, with pages made of flimsy and a reddish-gold leather of some kind for the binding. It was the kind of thing Aayla hadn’t seen since she was a padawan writing reports on the experiences of Jedi long passed, and she had to read through their ancient journals in the archives. “What is it?” Aayla asked, sliding into the seat next to Bly.
“It was a gift from Ponds. He found it while we were still cadets, on one of the training missions they had us do. We were on some moon out in wild space, I think. I didn’t use it for anything until after the war started though.” Bly states, and then she opens the book to what looks like a random page to Aayla, although she’s sure that it wasn’t to Bly. When Aayla looked down at the flimsy page in front of her, any words she had been planning on saying caught in the throat for a moment, before she breathed out her surprise into the Force, allowing awe to take its place.
“Oh Bly, these are beautiful.” She said, gently reaching out to run a finger down the page. Pressed flat onto the page was a collection of four pale blue Millaflowers. They clearly had been pressed with great care – not a single petal was ripped or damaged. They had then been attached with liquid adhesive to the page in a circle, each one of the flowers facing away from the center of the page. In a flowing script that could only belong to Bly, facts about the flower had been written with black ink.
“I started doing these after our first campaign together – when we were stationed on New Holstice, one of the civies showed me how to do it.” Bly paused for a moment, and Aayla found herself looking away from what her Commander had created to look at the man himself, found herself tracing his golden tattoos with her eyes. “It helps. It reminds me of the beauty that’s out there, what we’re fighting to protect.”
“I think that’s beautiful too.” Aayla commented as shifted her chair a little closer, and, when Bly didn’t protest, began to gently turn pages through to book. About the first quarter of it had been filled with flowers. She recognized about half of them from the planets they had been to on campaigns. “I only recognize about half of these, though?” She commented. Bly’s face bled into a small smile that did funny things to Aayla.
“Yeah – Ponds found out what I was doing, and before I knew what was happening, the rest of the Shebs were bringing flowers back from their campaigns as well. Even Cody’s CT brings them sometimes.” Bly’s voice is soft and kind when he talks about his batchmates, although Aayla has to smother giggles every time she hears Bly refer to Skywalker’s captain like that. Bly gently takes the book and turns the book to reveal a familiar flower, although there was no writing on the page. “Cody brought this one back a couple of weeks ago, from Ryloth. He wasn’t sure what it was, though.”
“It’s a flower from a Conifer tree. They’re not native to Ryloth, but they grow in nearly all it’s major city centers.” Aayla says. “I’ve never seen one this color, though.” The flower reminds her of her home as well – of the Jedi Temple. There was a Conifer tree in the room of a thousand fountains, and when she was little, she and Quinlan would meditate under it together after a particularly long saber-training session. She felt Bly shift in the force, reaching for something out of Aayla’s sight. She tore her gaze away from the familiar flowers to look at Bly. He pulled the notebook back towards himself, and revealed he had grabbed an ink pen. Carefully in the corner, he began to make a note of what Aayla had told him.
Aayla watched Bly write with borderline fascination, as the words became a part of the art he was creating. Her eyes met his, and she saw the way the emotions he was feeling swelled up inside his eyes, and the contentment in the force around them, and Aayla realized just how much she wanted to kiss him.
Aayla follows Senator Mamzar through the door into their office, and then takes no steps further, crossing her arms.
“Now then, what did you have to say that you couldn’t say in front of Commander Thorn.” She bites out, keeping her voice a controlled tone of mild aggravation. The senator heads over to their desk, plopping down in the seat there. They beckon Aayla forward, but Aayla has planted herself where she is and doesn’t move.
“I requested a Jedi protector because I can no longer trust these… clones to protect me.” Oh boy, here we go. Aayla carefully doesn’t shift her posture, even as her lekku begin to twitch into the foulest swear words she knows in lekku-speak. She silently blesses the human-centric senators that don’t bother to learn lekku-speak. “I have reason to believe that they are plotting my downfall, and possibly my murder.” The senator continues, and really, hasn’t anyone ever told them that the first step to getting out of a hole was to stop digging?
The senator continues talking, but Aayla has tuned him out. She knows Quinlan would scold her for it, but really, she doesn’t do politics, so she has tried. Besides, if this senator is convinced that the Vode are behind the attempt on their life, Aayla official is of the opinion that this senator is dumb as bricks, and she and the Coruscant Guard will have to investigate this all on their own. After they get blackout drunk laughing about this.
Instead, Aayla’s attention is on the frankly gorgeous Valor Lily that’s growing behind the senator’s desk. The bush is larger than any she’s ever seen, and it has four giant blossoms – far more than any she’s ever seen on a single bush before. Usually, they only bloom once or twice.
Idly, Aayla wonders if Bly has ever seen a Valor Lily before. She doubts it – she knows there isn’t one in his book, and they’re a rare species in the wild because of how delicate they are. Aayla resolves to take a flower back to Bly for his book. Not only has she made a habit of bringing flowers back to him whenever they take missions apart, this is a Valor Lily in particular, and Bly has always seemed connected to anything that involved Valor. Aayla had only brought it up once, and the sharp stab of pain in the force followed by an evasive answer had prevented her from asking since then.
Aayla shifts a little as she notices the senator take a deep breath, and then launch into another rant about how some Commander stationed on Coruscant has had it out for them since day one, and how they didn’t know why or how they had provoked ‘the republic’s dumb flesh droids’, and Aayla was barely resisting stabbing the near-human. Also, really, dumb? That is one of the least witty insults Aayla has ever heard come out of a politician’s mouth. Finally, Aayla can’t take it anymore.
“Hold on, Senator, I think the Force is trying to tell me something. I’m going to go follow it’s lead.” She straight-up bullshits before running across the room, using the force to throw the window open. She throws herself out the window onto the balcony the next floor down. She’ll start her own investigation – maybe she’ll poke around the Senator’s apartment, maybe she’ll try to track down the Commander the Senator is convinced is behind this, because said Commander might actually know something about this situation.
It turns out that the Senator is corrupt, and the assassins are coming from the system they represent. It takes Aayla exactly twelve hours to figure this out, and another 11 days to finally prove this to said senator and their security team.
Aayla ends up taking the whole Valor Lily bush with her back to her flagship. It’s for Bly, she knows Ponds will cover it up for her. Bly loves the thing, puts it in the middle of the Rec room. Aayla names it Boc’ara. She hasn’t told Bly what that means yet.
(She doesn’t know how to tell Bly she named their Valor Lily “Smart as a Rock” after its previous owner.)