Chapter Text
The worst part wasn't getting a Jedi.
The worst part was that Command clearly thought they were doing him a favor.
Jet stood in the hangar of the unnamed Venator, arms crossed, weight shifted onto his back foot in the posture his brothers called "pre-verbal disagreement," and watched the Negotiator’s shuttle settle onto the deck. Two troopers flanked him—Torque and Scar, because Torque was dependable and Scar didn't care enough to be nervous, and Jet needed at least one of those things beside him right now.
"Relax," Scar said, not looking at him. "She's probably fine."
"I'm relaxed."
"You've been grinding your teeth since we left hyperspace."
"That's a medical condition."
"It's called anxiety, Commander."
"It's called jaw tension. There's a pamphlet."
The shuttle ramp lowered with a hydraulic sigh, and Jet straightened without meaning to. Old habits. Parade rest for the new boss, no matter what the new boss turned out to be.
He'd read her file, what there was of it. Service Corps reassignment. Infrastructure work. Refugee camps. Four years of what the Temple politely called "alternative service" before the war yanked her back into the field and dropped her into the 212th. Some kind of combat record since then. Solid, if unremarkable. No commendations that screamed prodigy. No scandals that screamed liability.
She was, on flimsi, aggressively average.
Jet didn't trust flimsi.
What came down the ramp was a woman of medium height, brown hair pulled back in a practical twist that was already losing a fight with humidity, carrying a pack that looked like it had been repacked twice in transit. She wore standard-issue Jedi robes that fit her the way standard-issue anything fit anyone (which was to say, badly) and she paused two steps from the bottom to look around the hangar.
Her gaze found him, and she smiled.
It wasn't a command smile, that careful, measured expression of authority that Jet had learned to read on Jedi officers who wanted to seem approachable. This was quick and genuine and slightly uncertain, like she hoped they would be glad to see her but wasn’t counting on it.
Something in Jet's chest went huh.
He ignored it.
"General Vey." He snapped a salute. "Commander Jet, acting CO of the 17th Legion. Welcome aboard."
"Commander." She came the rest of the way down the ramp, shifted her pack to her left hand, and extended her right. "It's good to meet you. I've heard—" She stopped. Recalibrated. "Actually, I haven't heard much of anything. They gave me the roster and a set of nav coordinates and told me the rest would sort itself out."
Jet shook her hand. "That sounds about right, sir. We're not exactly high priority."
"We're a newly formed legion with equipment shortages, personnel from eight different shattered units, and a ship that doesn't have a name." She said this with cheerful directness, like she was reading off a grocery list of disasters. "I'd say we're exactly the right amount of priority for the amount of attention we're getting."
Behind him, Scar swallowed a laugh and turned it into a cough.
Jet studied her for a beat longer than was strictly polite. She didn't flinch from it. She didn't puff up, either. She just stood there, pack in hand, letting herself be looked at with patience and the understanding that trust was not assumed.
"I'll show you to the bridge," he said. "Fair warning—the turbolift on deck four sticks, the mess serves everything lukewarm, and Hotfix has been running the ship's navigation from a terminal he built out of parts that may or may not have been ethically sourced."
"Define ethically."
"He swears he only stole from ships that were already decommissioned."
"Were they?"
"One of them was."
She laughed and fell into step beside him.
Huh, went the thing in his chest again.
He kept ignoring it.
The first briefing was a masterpiece of low expectations.
Jet had assembled the senior staff in what passed for a conference room—really a cargo bay with a holo-table shoved into it and chairs that didn't match. Torque and Anvil from the veteran contingent. Scar from medical. Hotfix from technical, already elbow-deep in the holo-table's access panel because it had been flickering since Tuesday. Gauge, sitting in the back corner with his arms crossed and his expression carved from something harder than duracrete.
And Pebble, because Pebble had somehow gotten himself designated as the company's logistics liaison, which Jet suspected was Torque's idea of a joke.
Serra—General Vey—walked in, set her datapad on the table, and looked at each of them in turn. Individual eye contact, brief and steady, like she was filing faces.
She lingered a fraction of a second on Gauge, who was radiating hostility. She didn't smile at him or try to disarm him. Just acknowledged him and moved on.
Good instinct, Jet thought.
"I'll keep this short," she said, "because I think we've all sat through enough speeches from people who didn't know what they were walking into, and I'd rather not add to the collection." She pulled up the legion roster on the holo-table—the one Hotfix hadn't quite finished fixing, so it rendered everything in a faintly seasick green. "Two thousand troops, give or take. Our equipment is secondhand. Our ship doesn't have a name. Our armor came in the wrong color because someone in logistics entered a procurement code backwards, so congratulations—we're teal now."
"Could've been worse," Hotfix said, without looking up from the access panel. "Could've been pink."
"I checked. Pink wasn't an option."
"Shame."
Serra's mouth twitched. "Here's what I know about this unit. I know we're not anyone's first choice. I know some of you have been through things that would've broken lesser soldiers, and I know some of you are so new you still have the manufacturing seal on your armor. I know that Command put us together because they needed a number on a spreadsheet, not because they thought we'd become something." She paused. "I think they're wrong. But I'm not going to stand here and promise you that, because promises from Jedi are—" She glanced at Gauge, and Jet saw something careful in it. "—worth exactly as much as the actions that follow them."
Gauge's expression didn't change, but his shoulders dropped a millimeter. Jet noticed because noticing was what kept him alive.
"So here's what I'm going to do instead of making promises," she said. "I'm going to learn your names. I'm going to walk every deck of this ship before the end of the week, and I'm going to talk to your people about what they need, and then I'm going to fight like hell to get it for them. And if I make a mistake—and I will, because I'm new here and this is a lot of people to learn—I expect you to tell me. To my face."
"And if you don't like what we tell you?" Gauge said. First words out of his mouth, and they landed like a thermal detonator on the table.
Everyone went still.
Serra looked at him. She met the hardest stare in the room with something that looked almost like respect.
"Then we talk about it," she said. "And if we still disagree, you tell me why I'm wrong, and I listen. And if I'm still wrong after that, I expect you to keep telling me."
Gauge held her gaze for a three-count that felt like thirty. Then he looked away.
Jet exhaled through his nose. He hadn't realized he'd been holding his breath.
"Right," Serra said, and her tone shifted—lighter, practical, moving on. "Now. Someone please explain to me why our ship's registry says 'TBD' and whether that's intentional or just how things are going for us."
"It stands for To Be Determined," Pebble said helpfully. "Because they hadn't decided on a name yet when we shipped out."
"I know what TBD stands for, Pebble."
"Oh. Right. Sorry, sir."
"It's fine." She looked around the table. "Anyone have strong feelings about the name?"
Silence. The holo-table flickered from green to a momentary purple. Hotfix swore under his breath and stuck his hand back in the panel.
"Great," Serra said. "TBD it is. For now."
She kept her word about walking the decks.
Jet knew because he walked them too—always had, always would, the way a good XO kept his finger on the pulse of two thousand men who were supposed to be one unit but were actually eight separate sets of grudges, trauma, and survival habits stuffed into matching armor.
He'd hear about her from the shift reports. General came through Deck Nine. Asked about the air recyclers. Stayed thirty minutes. Or General sat in the mess with Third Platoon. Didn't eat—just listened. Knew Sticks' name without checking. Or, from Hotfix, with the kind of grudging admiration that was the highest compliment in his vocabulary: She found the coolant leak on Deck Twelve by ear. By ear, Commander. Walked right up to the panel and said, "You're not happy, are you?" to the pipe.
That last detail nagged at him in a way he couldn't quite place. It was odd, but it also meant something that she was the kind of person who talked to broken machines like they had feelings.
It meant she thought everything deserved gentleness. Even the things that couldn't hear it.
Stop it, he told himself. She's your CO.
It was the end of the second week when the thing in his chest graduated from huh to a full and deeply inconvenient oh no.
It happened like this:
Gauge's platoon had drawn cleaning duty on the lower armory. It was one of those garbage details that existed purely because someone had to do it and Gauge's people had pulled the short straw. Jet swung by to check progress and found the General already there, on her knees next to a disassembled weapons rack, helping a shiny whose name Jet didn't know yet reattach a bracket that had sheared off at the weld.
She wasn't supervising. She wasn't making an appearance. She was on the floor with grease on her hands, showing the kid how to brace the join so the weld would hold, and she was explaining it like a good trainer explains things — by showing, and then handing the tool over and letting him try.
"No, you're fine," she was saying. "You had the angle right, you just need to—here. Feel that resistance? That's the bracket seating. You want to press through it, not against it. Like this."
The shiny fumbled the tool, caught it, and tried again. The bracket clicked home.
"I did it?"
"You did it."
"I did it." The kid looked at the bracket like he’d just negotiated a peace treaty.
Serra smiled at him, warm and quiet, like his small victory was something worth being happy about. And then she stood up and wiped her hands on her robes and noticed Jet standing in the doorway, and the smile shifted. Became something slightly more guarded, more aware of rank and audience and the professional distance between a general and the commander who was still making up his mind about her.
"Commander," she said.
"General." He nodded at the weapons rack. "Didn't realize that fell under your purview."
"It doesn't. But I walked past, and the weld was bothering me, and—" She shrugged. "Service Corps habits. If something's broken and you know how to fix it, you fix it."
"Most generals would've sent a work order."
"Most generals didn't spend four years rebuilding irrigation systems."
She said it without pride or defensiveness. Just fact: I know how to do this because I spent a long time doing it, and if that surprised you, the surprise was yours to manage.
Jet looked at her, really looked, the way he'd been carefully not doing for two weeks, and thought: Oh no.
Because the problem wasn't that she was beautiful. She was—the green eyes, the sharp-angled face, the expressive mouth, the hair perpetually escaping its tie—but Jet had served with beautiful people before and managed perfectly fine. The problem was that she was good. Good the way that mattered. Good in the details, in the small choices, in the quiet moments when no one was watching or keeping score. Good on her knees in a dirty armory, teaching a shiny how to fix a bracket, because it was the right thing to do and she knew how.
Oh no, said the thing in his chest, and this time it didn't feel like a warning. It felt like a door opening.
"Commander?" Serra was looking at him with slight concern. "Everything all right?"
"Fine," Jet said. "Just thinking."
"About?"
Fourteen different safe answers presented themselves. He picked the one that was actually true, because he'd never been any good at the other kind.
"About how much trouble I'm in."
Serra blinked. "I'm sorry?"
"Nothing, sir. Carry on."
He turned and walked out before his mouth could make the situation worse, which was a genuine risk, because the thing about being direct was that sometimes you were direct about things you hadn't decided to be direct about yet.
Behind him, he heard the shiny ask, "Is Commander Jet okay?"
And Serra, after a pause: "I have no idea."