Chapter Text
Centax-3 was where Fy-Tor-Ana had been born 55 years earlier, but not where she died. The woman who had spent the last year of her life being known as Solace (setting up a refugee camp in the underworld under that pseudonym had been a lot more efficient and less risky than using the actual name of a wanted Jedi, and the nickname had stuck), had been eleven months old when her parents gave her to the Jedi Order. For the next 45 years, while she still drew breath, she'd never spent more than six hours at a time on the moon. And even those were just for brief transit stops on the way home from missions. Yet today was the seventh anniversary of her Force ghost’s arrival had spent on the moon, and she'd barely thought of leaving since she began providing company for Evan Asani in the caverns surrounding Centax-3's largest lake.
The lithe, short-haired, short-statured Solace hadn’t even heard of Asani before the Clone Wars began. In addition to being nine years her senior (his hair had begun turning gray three months after the Battle of Geonosis), he was a Corellian Jedi who had grown up away from the Temple. In contrast, aside from her padawan period, Solace had spent most of her life at the Jedi Temple, first as a youngling, then as an instructor training her peers in the Art of Movement. There had been the occasional mission outside to stay in sync with the Force and make sure her teachings were practical in the field, but she had tended to pick the kind of missions where one traveled the fastest who traveled alone.
Evan had bonded closely with three Padawans over his life and kept all of them alive through their apprenticeships (afterward was another story, given how the Clone Wars went). The closest thing Solace had come to mentoring a fellow Jedi outside the obstacle course was approaching Serra Keto and her friend Pix Calimondra at lunchtime after seeing how distracted they were and listening to them talk about their insecurities concerning the way several other younglings deliberately made them conscious of their glitzy and immodest wardrobes and their distant descent from famous Dark Side clans. She'd talked them through all of that and, between that bond and how they were already her star students, she'd been tempted to take one as an apprentice.
She couldn't choose between them, though, and instead of spending more time trying to solve that dilemma, had urged her friends Cin Dralling and Tyr to talk with the pair and consider them as Padawans. They'd liked what they saw and made the two their Padawans. That had gone well for both girls, up to a point. Pix was still alive and being sheltered by some fright-hauling cousin of Pix's slightly younger friend and classmate Rennax Omani, who’d been fortunate enough to leave the Order before Order 66. Serra wasn’t. She’d reached knighthood in record time under the Jedi Temple battlemaster, but their close bond, even closer than the one she'd had with Solace, had kept drawing her back to the Temple whenever possible between assignments, and she'd been there when the 501st Legion arrived in force with the traitor Skywalker standing at their front.
Evan had hugged her ghost as she cried over Serra twice as long as he'd hugged her during all the grim and emotional experiences they’d had throughout all the ten months they’d spent campaigning together in The Clone. Those months had seen them fighting notorious Separatist commanders and elite operatives like General Kleeve, Oro Dassyne, Mandalore the Resurrector, Harrigan Shunt, Tofen Vane, Tol Skorr, 'Big Shadow' Raines, Baron Edi Wedd, Agent Sixteen, and the tactical droid Kraken. Surviving dogfights against Vane and Raines, forcing Kleeve into a tactical retreat, and disarming bombs Agent Sixteen had left behind to cover complicated escape plans wasn’t fun and games. It had been a hard campaign even by Clone Wars standards, and required a lot of trust, cooperation, and mutual reassurances during frightening times.
But there’d also been starving villages of civilians, trusted officers dying of infection after battle, and more to bring one or the other Jedi down and make the other lend a shoulder to cry on. It was hard to ignore bonds like the ones Evan and Solace formed holed up in cramped fortresses or ships for months at a time while managing to keep themselves, 81% of their clones, and 97% of the regional civilian population alive for it all. Quite a few more Clones had been wounded but had survived thanks to a particularly accomplished MedStar unit that Evan had gotten assigned to their theater through the kind of compassionate yet wily political and bureaucratic acumen that would have made him a good Supreme Chancellor in another life.
Evan himself, who included starfighter missions in his wide array of talents, had needed some of that healing himself after a fire erupted in his cockpit while he was dishing out a rare defeat to Raines, Vane, and their respective squadrons. Nor had Solace avoided learning what a hospital bed felt like after two of Mandalore the Resurrector's best sharpshooters and a BL-Series Battle Legionnaire had walked in on her capture of Head Artillery Engineer Shunt. On each occasion, whichever of them wasn't hurt had visited the others sickbed with enough flowers, concern, and good humor that a few doctors had mistaken them for spouses despite the platonic nature of their bond and the lightsabers they openly carried.
During Order 66, Evan had gone into hyperspace to escape an attack by his clones in the Ootmian Pabol. He’d returned to Coruscant to answer the emergency beacon at the Jedi Temple barely an hour before Obi-Wan Kenobi and Master Yoda had disabled it. A star destroyer and two fighter wings had been waiting for Evan and shot him down over Centax-3 after a merry chase. He was presumed dead by the Empire but had dragged himself into a cave near the wreck of his ship, and had been existing off mineral springs, moss, and the occasional flying rodent since.
Solace had been on a mission behind enemy lines with two platoons of clone troopers when the legions of nearby B1 battle droids received the order to stop functioning and the clones received the order to execute Order 66. They had chased her up a hill and charged up together until she repelled them with deflected blaster bolts and hurled rocks. The survivors had split up and spent the next few hours slowly crawling up from different directions and taking shots at her. Six hours later, all of them were dead and Solace was still alive, albeit with blaster wounds that took a two-day healing trance to recover from. Upon getting out of that trance, as much as she'd wanted to bury her former comrades and try to understand what they’d done, she hadn’t wasted a second in racing to where their ships were hidden and took off in her starfighter right as reinforcements arrived in a vain hope of adding her to the list of dead Jedi.
After a brief stop at Ilium, she had returned to Coruscant. Having weeks longer to assess the danger than Evan, she had arrived in the Corusca System more covertly than he had. She had taken the name Solace while providing aide and refuge to fugitive soldiers, politicians, Jedi Temple employees, actual Jedi, and even petty criminals. Her group had played a large role in defying Palpatine for as long as it could remain undetected in the metropolitan planet's underworld. That hadn't been as long as she'd hoped, although it had felt long enough at the time. She was surprised she'd only had to kill anyone once, to rescue the lone Padawan who'd avoided being exposed and executed along with her protector Senator Sanver and several other Jedi, leaving that girl's pursuers dead before sending her to Wild Space. Maybe asking her to stay would have been smarter. All but one of the other Jedi she'd worked with or helped had gone off world by the time things fell apart and the lack of their lightsabers made a crucial, crushing difference.
Solace had barely escaped the bloody massacre at her sanctuary to go into hiding onboard an asteroid refugee that seemed safe from the Empire. It wasn't, and both she and the asteroid had been blown apart by a star destroyer. Solace and two other Jedi survivors had stoically awaited that fatal barrage while consoling themselves about the absence or escape of a few friends. Now, she was one with the Force, but the Force needed her to help Evan from falling to the dark side out of confusion, loneliness, and fear. She was the only company he'd ever had in the caves besides a short and terse visit by the assassin Falcon Sang. Sang been on the hunt for someone completely different and had been prepared to kill Evan before Evan had used Force-persuasion to make him forget the whole encounter.
Solace had urged Evan to leave the caverns for somewhere with more people. At first, Evan argued his face was well-known enough that he would be spotted and killed in short order and probably get a lot of people who’d been trying to help or had just been minding their business nearby killed with him. Solace had struggled convince him how much his new lifestyle had altered his appearance (as he wasn't saying it in the same arrogatn vein as Anakin Skywalker at his worst, she was too tactful to suggest that fewer people knew him in the first place than he thought). He hadn't believed her until Sang, a regular viewer of wanted posters, hadn't recognized him. Just as Evan had finished packing his belongings into a knapsack packing to leave for sunnier pastures, Evan had experienced a visit fro mthe Force ghost of his old master who, before departing for what lay beyond for the last time, told Evan some greater destiny needed him to stay in the tunnels for at least another two years.
Now his life consisted of a routine. Two hours of meditating before breakfast, then talking with Solace until lunch. An hour of practicing telekinetic lightsaber combat: a form of combat he had only ever seen employed once before (and for only twelve seconds), while on a mission with a young Jedi architect and engineer named Tohno and had later seen himself using in his vision. Then he'd spend forty minutes scratching murals on the wall of the cave while getting input from Solace. The next hour and a half were devoted to using some stone tools to mine a small vein of lucryte jewels, thought to have been completely mined out on Centax-3 before Evan had noticed a few flecks of it in his refuge. Then they'd talk until bed time for him.
Their talks had been grim lately. Evan had been having strange, blurry dreams they couldn’t decipher and wondered if they were true visions or merely brought on by his fear from his master's words. An older Obi-Wan Kenobi being solemn rather than exalted while staring out the cockpit after a trip to Alderaan with some important cargo. Grand Moff Tarkin landing a ship on top of a large crowd to break up a protest on a planet Evan didn't recognize. Master Yoda being too ill to get out of bed in a desolate swamp. Worst of all, though, was the dream of Evan in telepathic ligthsaber combat, unsure if he was winning or losing and Solace’s ghost looking overcome with emotion as they listened to an argument between two shadowy figures. It sounded like one was mocking the other before an execution or duel.
"I had no thought at all about my own reward."
"And yet, you still came to them of your own accord."