Chapter 43: CH-43
"Can you honestly tell me that he follows a dark path? A path that would lead to the ruin of civilization as we know it, upsetting the so-called balance of the Force the rest of the Masters prattle on about?" Ahsoka asked bluntly aloud.
Aayla hadn't come out and said it, but Ahsoka didn't believe in subtlety. She knew what lurked in the mind of the Twi'lek beside her. It was an open secret within the Jedi Order that Aayla Secura had once been kidnapped as a Padawan, fed glitteryll until her mind had figuratively oozed out of her nose, and had been turned into nothing more than an devout harem girl by her own uncle, and then, without her memories to teach her right from wrong, ended up serving a Dark Jedi that had recently been released from a stasis prison.
Aayla had been rescued from that literal hell, and the recovery she endured afterwarrds required most of her mind to painfully be put fully back together. Even now, a decade later, Aayla still feared the temptation of the Dark Side, as the memories of her own drug-induced fall still haunted her.
She turned her full attention on Aayla. "I'll be the first to admit that he's crude. He's blunt with no sense of tact. He gets entirely too much fun out of winding people up for no more than his own amusement."
Ahsoka's lips twitched into an amused smile. "It's even possible he's not entirely sane."
Harry himself had said several times over the past few days declared that sanity was boring, and only for people who accepted the reality constructed by others. He had gotten that faraway look in his eyes after he'd said that, and that wistful sad smile was once more on his face.
"And yes, I'm even willing to say he can be an asshole at times." Ahsoka said, "But you don't have to be nice to be a good person, and while he may have his own moral code… it seems to be working just fine for him… and those around him."
Letting that statement linger, Ahsoka set the ship she was still holding back into the bag around Aayla's arm, and then walked around the group of women on cots to head to the cockpit. She wanted to double-check to make sure the computer had been updated properly, as she knew they would depart the moon the moment Harry had managed to get the freed slaves secured..
Aayla didn't have a reply for that. She did however follow Ahsoka up to the front of the ship, though she didn't leave the hold, to follow the younger Togrutan into the cockpit. Instead she leaned against a wall, near where the protocol droid Minnie, stood motionless, charging in a wall socket. Aayla just watched Harry as he worked his way through the group, her eyes rarely leaving him. She watched as he and the Zabrak moved over to the second slave, and she felt more than saw a small shift in the Force as the second woman began to wake up.
Over the next few hours, the process began to repeat itself, as Harry moved patiently from woman to woman. Waking them up, calming them, reassuring them. Feeding them the first full meal some of them had probably had in a long time.
Ahsoka had come back out of the cockpit and joined her in her vigil, though neither spoke as they watched the process. The other slaves helped him made the process a little bit easier from the start but it was still painstaking. There was even a Devaronian girl, probably the youngest of the group based on her size, that took almost an hour and a half to coax to talk to Harry and the others.
After the women had each been woken, one by one, and Harry had talked to them all, they all moved to a group for comfort. However the stresses and the grief had taken it's toll, and they each were struggled to stay awake, perhaps for fear that if they went to sleep, they'd wake up and find out that their current situation was a dream.
Harry once more cast a slowly strengthening sleeping charm on the area, though far more slowly than he'd done in the slaver's ship. That took two minutes, this he spread out over the course of fifteen or so. But eventually, even the strong willed Zabrak succumbed to her own exhaustion, curling up protectively around the young Devaronian girl.
He slowly stood up, really for the first time since he'd sat on the cargo hold floor. Even when he had moved from cot to cot, he had crawled or remained crouched, which kept himself as nonthreatening as possible. He stood up and rolled his shoulders and turned his head from side to side, stretching out the kinks that his several hours of effort on the floor had earned him. Then he slumped and turned toward the cockpit.
Ahsoka was shocked by the look on Harry's face. She had seen him laugh, tease, intense, concentrating, and earlier he had been mad and then grim. However, now his expression was weary, and made him look like a haggard old man, well beyond the age his youthful face normally hinted at.
He walked toward the front of the hold where Ahsoka and Aayla had kept their vigil for the past few hours. He walked up to them and spoke quietly, his voice reflecting the fatigue in his eyes, though his voice was all the more intense for it. "Miss Tano, is the ship's computer back online?
When Ahsoka simply nodded in response, Harry cocked his head slightly in acknowledgement, "Good. We're leaving. Now. Minnie, prep the ship for launch."
The droid charging nearby, immediately sprung to life in acknowledgement. "Yes, Mister Potter."
"Dobby, as soon as Minnie says we're good to go, strip down the wards outside the ship. Leave nothing behind that's ours. As soon as I fire up the engines, we're out of here." Harry said, not even bothering to look around to see if the house elf was nearby.
The little house elf appeared the instant his name was mentioned and just nodded his head, disappearing as soon as Harry had completed his orders. He could tell the mood his Master was in.
Aayla had watched the orders issued by the exhausted man with a calm detachment that spoke of great leadership and combat experience. It was blatantly obvious the experience with the slaves had a massive effect upon him, and the mental fatigue that it had wrought upon him was in far excess of the physical attrition he had incurred.
When his final order had been issued to the tiny green being, he glanced for the briefest moment at her. Nothing was revealed in that look, but she felt an ominous foreboding that something subtle had just shifted.
Then, he headed down the access hallway to the cockpit, and there wasn't even a hesitation to his gait as he passed her and in the same weary but direct voice commanded, "Get the hell off my ship, Jedi."
Nothing further was said. The man didn't even glance behind him as he disappeared around a corner.
K̾o̾-̾f̾i̾
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