Clone Wars Oneshots (and some Bad Batch)

#8: The Sergeant and the Unjedi

   Morgana let out a breath she hadn't realized she'd been holding in. A lump rose her throat and she suddenly realized why Darman trusted him so much; he was kind, supportive, and every bit the inspirational father-figure Omega Squad had described. And he wasn't like Krell at all; the darkness within him...it was different. She wasn't exactly sure how, but it was. She cleared her throat and fought down another instinct to push him away.

   "Delta Squad seems a little...different from Omega," she said awkwardly, side-stepping his half-order, half-suggestion to rest; she'd rest when she could, but with all the recurring nightmares, who knew when that would be. Skirata wasn't the only one who could play "need to know". "I take it you have confidence in them."

   "Oh, they're good lads," Skirata said, fumbling in his jacket pockets. He pulled out credit chips, scraps of flimsi, and a nasty-looking metal device crested with a row of short, savage spikes and that appeared to have holes for four fingers. She stared at it as he placed it on the table. She didn't know what it was called, but she did remember when Krell had used a similar device on her once; she was still surprised that her face had ever healed, but then again, the Force could do wonderful things when the mood struck it.

   "The hormone that makes them hard fighters is the same one that makes them a bit of a handful, too," said Skirata. The contents of his jacket continued to pile up on the table; a coil of thin wire, a fifteen-centimeter knife with a tapering three-sided blade, a stubby custom blaster, and a length of heavy sharp-edged chain joined the cache. "Not that the poor ad'ike are ever off duty, of course. But when you say the word, they're on the case like that." She winced almost without noticing as he loudly snapped his fingers to make the point of immediacy. Yes, she'd seen that.

   Skirata took off his jacket, and he hung the garment over the back of a chair. He had surprisingly broad shoulders and an underarm holster that held what looked like a modified Verpine shatter gun. Morgana decided he was still extremely fit in the wiry way of small men, and continued to revise her view of him as a man who could only train others to fight.

   But there was still a lingering sense of wariness rooted deep in her chest, and she assumed it was because she hadn't seen so many instruments devoted to injury and destruction in one man's possession since her last "training session" with Krell. She subconsciously cocked her head as memories of pain and fear and misery and desperation flooded her mind.

   Skirata suddenly paused, one hand raking his short gray hair.

   "What?" He asked, looking bemused. Kriff. She hadn't realized that she must have been making some strange expression, but he certainly had. She thought up a quick lie.

   "The...kit," she said; he was a walking armory, so it made sense for her to want to know why he was carrying all those weapons. At least, she hoped that was the case. "The weapons."

   "Oh, don't worry." He clearly didn't understand her unspoken and fabricated question. "I don't carry many tools when I'm in civilian areas. Don't want to be too conspicuous. Ordo looks after the rest of it. We'll be properly cannoned up when we deploy. Guess what? Got six Verpine sniper rifles. Custom-made and EMP-hardened. Exquisite. Not really 'rifles', 'cos they don't have rifled barrels, but..." He grinned suddenly, apparently distracted by a thought, and she had a brief and sudden vision of another man entirely. One whose occupation didn't remind her of the galaxy's biggest psychopath. "You haven't met Ordo yet, have you? He's a fine lad. Pride of my heart, really he is. Him and his brothers."

   Morgana was completely disarmed by his candor, which seemed both incongruous and yet in keeping with a man who had gone to such extraordinary lengths to equip his young charges to survive.

   He was still a killer; she knew that. She knew that his people had a long history of killing not only Jedi, but all kinds of Force-users, sometimes even fighting for the Sith. She knew exactly what he was. But–and this had been her worst fear and one of the only things running through her mind when she first saw him–he wasn't like Krell. She suddenly became aware of the fact that she liked him, and that he would be very, very important to her for the rest of her life. She supposed she could blame Darman for that.

   But her certainty was also in the Force, and she knew what was coming in the days and months ahead would take her beyond her limits. She added another thing to the long list of reasons why she was happy she was no longer a Jedi; because if she was, she would have no peace or understanding in the Force.

   And she believed that Skirata did understand her decision to leave the Jedi Order; she even got the feeling he was proud of her for it.

A/N: What can I say? I got impatient and wanted to write Morgana meeting Kal lol

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