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They have three days until they’re expected to be on board the Republic fleet and prepared to ship out. The Revanchists, as the news knows their group now, have already been hailed as heroes by almost every outlet and site reporting on the war, even though they have yet to actually join the fight, even though none of them, not even Revan herself, actually know if they’ll be capable of stopping the Mandalorians - it’s because they give people a ray of hope, Qatya knows. Something to cling to, that says that maybe the Core will be safe, maybe the Rim will be taken back, one world at a time.
She can’t entirely blame them. There was a Jedi enclave on Taris, after all; she understands, at least a little, what it is they feel.
Qatya folds a piece of her half-cloak through her fingers and shifts her weight, just slightly. They’ve been offered quarters with the military itself, to stay in if they want; most of the Revanchists aren’t exactly popular with the Order right now, even if more and more knights are joining up with each passing day. She’d been one of the ones to take the offer - after her argument with Atris, and with the fact that most of her friends are following her, staying in the Temple until she has the chance to board the cruiser she’s been assigned to had felt… awkward and strange in a way the Temple never has before. The huge building has been her home since she was a child, and all its warmth and beauty and gentle brilliance has remained a cornerstone of her life even after she began venturing offworld with Master Kavar; it’s the only home she’s ever had, the only home she’s ever wanted to have, and now that things are- tense with the Council, she feels off-kilter, like some essential piece of her foundation has been removed.
That sense will fade with time, she thinks, especially as she goes to war, but for now, stuck in an endless waiting loop, it’s difficult to deal with.
The barracks on Coruscant are a huge, sprawling set of facilities that take up an entire sector of the city and house more than just military personnel - equipment and civilian contractors often reside here as well, and the main headquarters for Coruscant Security Forces. The Jedi have been given an entire building to themselves, and eventually they’ll have to bunk together to save space, she’s sure, but for now she’s alone in the two-person room she’d snagged. It’s probably a good thing, gives her the space to pace, to meditate, to read without drawing attention from someone else, but it’s lonely, too.
But the war is going to be lonely, or at least completely different from her youth in the Temple. She’ll get used to it soon enough, hopefully.
(She doesn’t let herself wonder if getting used to it will be a bad thing.)
There’s a knock on the door and Qatya frowns, for just a moment - she hadn’t expected any visitors who didn’t comm first, hadn’t expected anyone at all who wasn’t a Revanchist or with the military. And she supposes it could be someone from either of those groups, but- they would have commed first, and when she reaches out into the Force, the person on the other side of the door is almost as familiar as her own heartbeat. She shouldn’t smile, likely, shouldn’t expect anything other than condemnation, because she knows the official stance the Council has taken on this war and none of its members truly have the space to let themselves be seen straying from that position, but Force, all the same, there’s a lightness in her step as she stands and crosses the room, sliding the plain durasteel door back into the wall with a press of a button.
“Master Kavar,” she says, and offers him a bow, smiling just a touch as she straightens. “Come in.”
Her master looks tired. It’s the first thing she notices, when she steps back enough to let him into the room; there are dark circles under his eyes and lines in his face and his blond hair is more disheveled than usual. She has to wonder when the last time he slept was. (She hadn’t thought, very much, about how difficult Revan’s declaration would be on the High Council. Hadn’t wanted to think about it, to see the story from both sides, even though that’s a betrayal of every lesson her master had ever taught her. It’s easier to avoid reading nuance into the situation, to see the Council as complacent and uncaring and wrong, even though the hours she’s spent at Kavar’s side during meetings directly contradict that idea. The Council has a reason for sitting back, she knows. They’re playing a long game, though she doesn’t know what their endgame is yet, and she hopes, sincerely, that they come out the victors.
She just can’t accept any reason for sitting back as enough to justify all the atrocities and death happening right now, without their interference. And that is her own personal right.)
“Don’t Master Kavar me, this isn’t a Council meeting,” Kavar says, his mouth curving just slightly, and she bites back a snort and closes the door behind him.
“No, but you are still my master, unless you’ve forgotten that in the four months since you cut my braid,” she teases. “I’m afraid I can’t offer you caf, unless you want to walk down to the mess, but you can pick a bed and sit on it. This one-” and she indicates the bunk she claimed as her own, “is softer, but that doesn’t mean particularly much in a barracks, I’ve found.”
“I’ve lived in worse,” he says, shedding his cloak and dropping down to sit on the empty bed, and she takes a seat on her own, facing him, tucking her feet up underneath her and leaning against the wall. She’s sure he has; he’d never told her about all the missions he’s been on, especially when he was younger, but his work as a shadow, venturing into Coruscant’s lower levels for short- and mid-term cover operations against the criminal underworld is well-documented in the Archives. Having been down to some of the lower levels herself, far below where the sunlight ever touches, she can picture some of the worse he’s probably thinking of. His face sobers as he looks at her, and he’s quieter, more serious, when he asks, “How are you doing?”
She shrugs one shoulder and takes a long breath in and out, willing herself not to start picking at her robes again. “I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t nervous,” she admits, because denying the feelings will do no good - only through accepting them will she be able to properly let them go. “Revan is so certain, and that certainty is easy to feel when I’m around her or the others, but when I’m alone I… worry. The reports coming in from the Outer Rim are so morbid.” She sighs, blows a rush of air out through her lips, and tucks a strand of dark hair behind her ear. “I don’t doubt my decision - that will never come into question, I swore my loyalty and I meant it - but I have to wonder if we can be the heroes the Republic wants us to be. And some of Revan’s followers are already looking to me, too - you know why, I know why, but it doesn’t make it less intimidating.”
Her unconscious ability to form thread-thin Force bonds with anyone she spends much time with has always been kept somewhat quiet, among the rest of the Order. There’s little she can do to stop it from happening, and the influence she can have on another person’s thoughts is staggering and a little terrifying. It’s one of the reasons she was trained by a High Councilor, why someone with that much responsibility would choose to take a padawan; if she’s anything less than steady in her convictions and her dedication to the Jedi way, she could accidentally twist too many people into following a new path. She’s spent half her life learning control, and she doesn’t intend to let that lapse now - it’s all the eyes on her in something so precarious that worries her, more than the connections she’s formed themselves.
Kavar sighs, his aura flickering with more of the same exhausting living in the lines of his body, but he’s as honest as he’s always been when he answers her. “You’re a good Jedi, Qatya, and I trust you,” he says, seriously, and the statement, the steadiness inherent in it, sends a small tendril of warmth curling through her chest. “This war was never going to be anything but a mess. If we fought, if we didn’t - either way, everything was going to go to hell. But this is your course to follow, and I trust you.”
“Thank you,” she says, softly, and her fingers find a loose thread at the edge of her cloak. She winds it around the first joint in her pointer finger, almost absently, then grimaces when his eyes fall pointedly to her lap before coming back to rest on her face. “You might be the only one who still feels that way about me. About any of us,” and the gesture is expansive, encompassing the entire building, everyone who chose to follow Revan after her first declaration, all the new knights trickling in now that the news has picked up their story, too.
Force, but she doesn’t want to think about Atris, or the argument they’d had. She probably should’ve been expecting her girlfriend to respond as she had - Atris has always been the one more concerned with the letter of the Code and the Council’s decrees, not that Qatya has any idea where she could have gotten her… occasional disregard for the written rule from - but some part of her had hoped that if Atris couldn’t find it in herself to come along, they could at least part ways amicably.
Apparently that’d been too much to hope for.
“You don’t give yourself enough credit.” Kavar leans back against the wall, some of the ever-present tension leaching out of his shoulders as he does. “Look, we’re all concerned about Revan, but- you’re not her.”
“I’m not,” she agrees. “But I’m also twenty years old, I’ve been a knight for four months, and if I fall I’ll take everyone I know down with me. I may be less at risk than she is,” and that feels almost blasphemous to say, Revan is a good Jedi and her anger is righteous, is compassion and determination made into a weapon, but Qatya knows that righteousness can be just as dangerous as its counterpart, in the end, “but I’m not sure which one of us would end up more dangerous.” Though, of course, wherever Revan goes, Alek will too, and that tips the scales solidly in one direction. Probably.
Force, what is the galaxy coming to? Even six months ago she wouldn’t have believed it, if someone were to tell her she’d be sitting here across from her master discussing which particular rebellious Jedi will be the most dangerous, in the event that they fall. Surrounded by military-regulation furnishings, in a building empty of the centuries of life the Temple holds, she feels farther away from her old life than she ever has when out on a mission, even when Kavar took her offworld.
“You’re dedicated without fanaticism,” Kavar says, and she can’t help but believe him. “Qatya, you’re one of the best Jedi I know.”
She flushes slightly, looking down at her lap. She’s barely more than a padawan, and Kavar is friendly with the entire High Council; it’s hard to imagine that she could be such a good Jedi, when she has so much left to learn. “You’re flattering me,” she says, and smiles at him, lifting her head again. “Trying to make me feel better, since I’m going off to war without you?” She shouldn’t make the offer, she knows, he can’t turn his back on the Council, there are too many other things going on, but- “You could come with us. Revan would accept you, if I asked her to, and we could use your knowledge and expertise.”
“I know,” he sighs, closing his eyes for half a second before opening them again, and he looks far older than his years. “Before this, I would have. But too many are leaving now.”
It makes sense. Force, it makes sense, she understands, and she can’t hold it against him - the Order will need him here, because their duties aren’t just going to vanish because of the war existing - and she’d known what his answer would be even before she asked, but there’s still something aching in her chest as she looks at him. “I understand,” she says, aloud, more quietly than she’d been. “It’s just that we could use you.” A pause, and she sighs. “I would feel a little less overwhelmed if you were there. But you have your duty, and as a knight of the Order, I won’t infringe on that. I won’t ask you to abandon the Order for me.” As much as some part of her wants to, wants to have her master along beside her as she walks into the unknown, it goes against everything that’s been ingrained in her since she was a child. And now that she’s no longer a padawan- she’s a fully adult Jedi, and when her padawan braid was severed by Kavar’s mainhand lightsaber, it marked her as ready to stand on her own two feet and uphold the Jedi Code across the galaxy, no matter the trials she faces. Kavar believes she’s ready to face them as a full member of the Order, and how can she betray that faith?
“You’re a knight now,” Kavar says, and the words are a reassurance rather than a condemnation. “There are people looking to you like you look to me.”
“I suppose I should think of this as training for when I end up with my own padawan, then,” she says, and curls her fingers further into the fabric of her cloak. “Do you have any advice for me? I may not be a padawan any longer, but I’d rather not walk into this war unprepared, and there’s no one in the Order I trust as much as you.”
He smiles, just a little, at the words. “Trust your intuition, and always remember that the people you’re fighting for are people, not numbers.”
It makes sense. And she’s never quite had an issue with forgetting that before, but she’s also never done this, either, gone off and embroiled herself in a full-scale war. She’s going to be an officer in the fleet, when she’s never done more than work with peacekeeping forces and law enforcement, and that- gods, it’s almost enough to drown her in it, if she thinks about it. The responsibility of it all, with all these people looking to her.
She’s going to have to be very good at control.
“I will,” she promises. “Or- I’ll do the best I can, that’s more honest.” She sighs, offers him a smile. “If you have the time, master- Kavar, would you like to meditate with me? For old time’s sake.”
“Of course,” he says, and she climbs up off the bed, reaches down underneath it for her well-worn meditation mat, unrolling it in the center of the room. She only has the one, but her former master doesn’t complain, just stands up and comes over to kneel down in front of her, a meter or so away.
He probably can’t stay for very long, she knows. He’s already risking things by coming to visit - the Council has to be impartial, neutral, has to be beyond bias where individual Jedi are concerned, or they cannot function properly as a governing body of the Order (and the members on it don’t always live up to that ideal, she knows - Vrook Lamar has always struggled with impartiality where Revan is concerned, seeing in her the shadows of Ulic Qel-Droma - but an ideal it remains, and she would never ask any of them to deliberately break it, especially not her own master). But his presence in the Force has always been steadying, an anchor for her, and she closes her eyes and lets herself sink into that feeling one last time.
The Force flows around her, around them, a river of energy rushing through everything, glimmering and brilliant and beautiful and close enough to touch. She doesn’t touch, just breathes deeply in a rhythm that’s been ingrained since she was a child and spreads her awareness out beyond herself, beyond this room, and lets go.
There is no emotion, there is peace.
Here, on Coruscant, the Force’s currents are filled with life, brilliant and blinding, with a warmth and a light that fills her to the brim. Billions of people call this planet their home, and all their rush of emotion blends seamlessly into the background noise of life that wraps her in a peace she has only truly ever felt here, on this world. A miniature galaxy around her, and her master a steady beacon of brilliance before her, and all the serenity of the universe in her bones, and this - this is what it feels like, to be a Jedi, immersed in the beauty of the living world, and there’s nothing quite like it. She may be leaving all this behind to go off to war, to fight against the most dangerous enemy the galaxy has seen in a long time (because how much of this- merciless marauding is just a leftover from the fact that thirty years ago, the Mandalorians went to war under Ulic Qel-Droma’s command and discovered a taste for facing the Republic across the field of battle?), but the Force will be with her no matter where she finds herself.
There is the Force.
Qatya exhales and opens her eyes, studying her master for a moment, watching him with the added awareness of being not-quite all the way back into her body. The exhaustion that seems permanently engraved into his bones is lessened, like this, and there’s a calmness on his face rarely seen except for in the training salles when he’s fallen so deeply into the serenity of lightsaber katas he hardly seems to know she’s there. She knows that some of the other masters in the Temple consider him to be unorthodox, but Force, there isn’t another master she’d rather be like, when she finally is awarded that title. She isn’t sure she could picture anyone but him, if she were asked to visualize the ideal Jedi. And that, combined with the thought she’d had earlier-
“Kavar?” she asks, softly, and he opens his eyes to look at her. “What… what would you do, if I fell? Or if I simply- went far enough the Order felt I couldn’t come back?”
Kavar pauses, for a long minute, something sober and serious flickering over his face. “I don’t know,” he says, finally, “but… I think, if you ever got to that point, it would be because you’d had no other choice.”
“I’m afraid,” she admits, quietly. “Of losing my way and not realizing it, not even noticing I’ve lost something until it’s already gone. I don’t think that Revan has properly… realized just what going to war, having positions of authority, will mean, but how can I not think about it? I’m going to have to feel everyone I interact with die. And almost none of our followers are masters, we have no one watching to make sure we stay true, and- one only has to look at recent history to see how dangerous that can be.”
She’s hardly even admitted it to herself, but gods, she wants to come home, when this is all over, and pick up the life she’s leaving behind. She wants to have the chance to be a Jedi in an era of peace, and if she falls-
She doesn’t think she’ll fall, but who ever does?
“It’s dangerous,” he agrees, and she curls her fingers into her palms. “More dangerous than anything since Ulic Qel-Droma, for the Jedi. But your way is inside you, and as long as you remember that, you can’t fall.”
Qatya takes a long breath, in and out, and then again, and she wills the tension to fall from her shoulders. “If you believe in me,” she says, “then how can I not believe in myself? I couldn’t live with myself if I betrayed your trust in me.”
“And what about your trust in yourself?” he asks, and he smiles, and the Force is warm and reassuring around him. “That’s more important than anything I can think about you.”
“It is the master’s responsibility to trust their padawan when their padawan is unable to trust themself,” she quotes from a long-ago lesson in the Temple, “with the intention of encouraging the padawan to develop their own personal faith in themself. In this way, by the time a padawan has faced the Trials and stepped out from under their master’s shadow, they will look forward to the future with confidence, and will be able to extend that confidence to the rest of the galaxy.” She returns his smile and adds, “I do trust myself, master - but it was your faith in me that let me develop that trust, and it still helps, when I find myself doubting.”
“I’ll always have faith in you, Qatya.”
“I’ll hold you to that,” she says, and lets out a sigh, climbing slowly to her feet and bending to roll up her mat. “I know you probably weren’t really supposed to come see me - I appreciate you taking the time to do so. It’s… good to remember that there are people important to me here who don’t hold my choices against me.”
Kavar gets to his feet with a bit of a grimace, waving away her offered hand and taking a couple of steps towards the door. “We both had to make difficult choices,” he says. “Even if they weren’t the same ones, you need to do what you think is right.” He smiles, then, and offers her a proper Jedi bow - a rarity from him - and when he straightens, she takes two quick steps forward and wraps her arms around his chest. For a moment, she’s a child again, as he squeezes back, and then she takes a deep breath and straightens her shoulders and steps away from him, letting her arms fall back down to her side. “May the Force be with you, kid.”
“And with you, master,” she says, softly, and bows back, more deeply than she really has to, now that she’s a knight. By the time she straightens and tucks her hair out of her face again, he’s gone, and once again, she’s alone.
The loneliness of the military barracks doesn’t feel as crushing now as it did before, though. Because no matter what happens, out in the greater galaxy - she will come through it herself as long as she stays true to herself, and there will be someone waiting to welcome her home. Maybe not the person she most wishes would - maybe things with Atris have been broken beyond repair, she won’t know for certain for some time - but Kavar is the closest thing she has to a father, and his respect and care for her are more than enough of a reason to return home. And maybe, when she does, she’ll have the chance to properly engage with him as a proper knight, instead of as a padawan looking to impress her master.
There is an entire future spread out before her, once this war ends. And she cannot wait to properly seize it.