SW Gray Tales 42+43: Vasha's Fate (Combined Chapter)

The Luminara Street district was a maze built from depression and rust. Warehouses stood shoulder-to-shoulder like rows of silent, identical tombstones, mocking my helplessness. Vents hissed stale exhaust and damp rot into the air, which itself tasted of metal and soured engine oil. Every step echoed too loudly against the permacrete, announcing my presence to anyone who might be listening.

Which one had she gone into? If only Vasha had sent a location pin, even a simple "something feels off" code, I wouldn't be stumbling through this industrial graveyard like a headless fly.

But the moment I stepped onto the street, a strange pull grabbed me. It wasn't the clear guidance of the Force. It was more like... a pull crawling straight up from my gut. Like feeling that something was in that direction.

Was the Force leading me, or was I just having a full-blown panic attack? Who the hell knew. I was a fish on an invisible line, pulled along by the feeling.

I had no other roads to follow anyways, with so many identical warehouses there were, it was like finding in pin in the haystack, just if the pin was invisible.

So now I stood at the back wall of warehouse 12B-2. It felt right because the feeling was the strongest here, and it tightened my throat.

"Come on, come on," I muttered to myself, pressing a hand against the cold steel. "Work with me here."

I expanded my perception, feeling my way along the cold steel walls like a blind man.

Inside... dead silence.

The kind of quiet that makes your scalp prickle. No heartbeats. No living force traces.

My heart sank. Was this the best case or the worst case? No movement meant no ambush. But it also meant Vasha probably wasn't here anymore. Or she was, but she was...No, it can't be. I won't allow it to be.

I forced myself to look up. The windows were ridiculously high, the glass filthy from centuries of grime. A back door? The architect hadn't believed in them. That left one option: the front door. Walking right in like a perfect target.

I rounded the corner, the gauss pistol cold and heavy in my hand. Each step felt both weightless and like I was dragging lead weights. My throat was sandpaper dry. The recycled air in my helmet tasted of my own fear, sour and metallic.

What the hell was I doing? A half-baked Force user with a single prototype gun, walking into what was so obviously a trap? What if the door opened on her... body? What if I saw something I could never unsee?

Panic rose like a tide, threatening to drown me. My fingers trembled against the trigger guard. Turn around, a voice screamed in my head. Get help. Any help!

But another voice, colder, more desperate, crushed it: What if she is in a tight situation? What if those few minutes are all that's left?

Damn it. Damn it all to hell.

My hand shook so badly I could barely keep a grip on the gun. I took a deep breath and got a lungful of rust-flavored air that made me cough. Pathetic.

Finally, out of options, I reached out my left hand. Not to feel the lock—screw the lock—but just to stall, to press my palm flat against the cold door panel. As if I could feel the horror waiting inside before I saw it.

"Please be okay," I whispered. "Please just be okay."

The door wasn't locked. My weight against it was enough. Why? I couldn't know.

It let out a long, metal groan and slid inward a few inches, revealing a sliver of absolute darkness.

It felt like pushing open a coffin lid.

I raised the pistol, my heart hammering against my ribs like a trapped bird. Here goes nothing. Or everything.

The space inside was empty, vast, and deeply unnerving. My night vision flicked on, painting the world in a sickly, unsettling green.

I stepped inside, my footsteps absurdly quiet, like I was afraid to wake something. The floor was bare metal, clean in a way that felt deliberate, scrubbed.

Then it hit me. Not a smell exactly, but a sensation that registered like one. A weight in the air, pressing against my mind. Thick. Cloying. Familiar in the worst possible way.

Where had I felt this before?

The market. Last year. That speeder accident when some spice-addled idiot plowed through the crowd at midday. Two dead on impact. Three more barely hanging on. Blood everywhere.

But it wasn't the blood or the screaming that had made me vomit into a waste bin. It was this exact sensation in the Force. This... stench. The unmistakable weight of death.

No. No, no, no.

"Vasha?" I whispered, the name escaping before I could stop it.

The warehouse swallowed the sound. Nothing came back.

Dark thoughts started flooding my mind. Why hadn't I paid more attention? Why was it always her looking out for me, and not me? If I had not relaxed my vigil, this wouldn't have happened.

Despair and self-loathing wrapped around my throat like two strong hands.

"Okay. Fine. No other tricks left," I rasped, the sound barely audible, more a desperate command to myself than anything else.

I dropped to one knee, pressing my bare palm hard against the icy floor. I tried to focus, but my mind kept slipping away, pulled back to that market. The screams. The stench.

Stop it. Focus. Breathe.

I forced my clumsy, resistant perception to extend outward. It felt awful, like trying to feel something with a severely frostbitten hand—numb, prickling, the feedback blurred and nauseating.

The place was emptily hopeless. No nearby objects to hold memories. The crates were just too far away, and which one of the dozens were nearest to whatever happened?

It was best to try to "read" the building itself, to treat this cold steel floor like one giant, blank obituary.

Please, I begged the Force, or whatever was listening. Tell me what happened.

I squeezed my eyes shut, focusing every shred of will on the most recent layers of time, sifting through the past dust and silence...

But the stench kept pulling me away, scattering my focus. Every time I tried to sink into the floor, my mind kept jumping to horrible images. Vasha lying still. Vasha with her lekku limp. Vasha not breathing.

"Stop it," I hissed at myself, smacking my palm against the floor. "Focus, damn it."

I pressed both palms flat now, fingers splayed wide, as if I could grab onto time itself.

This time I managed to push through. The memories were there, just beneath the surface. Faint vibrations. Three, maybe four people. Alien minds, feeling cold, efficient, utterly blank. Then... a new disturbance. Two people. One felt slick, oozing a fake friendliness. The other...

The other's presence was a familiar lightning strike. Even the residual echo carried her stubborn resilience and... a thread of wariness. Her.

Vasha.

She was here. She stood on this floor.

There was no death stench when she arrived. Not yet. But as I followed the memory forward, that weight in the Force grew heavier, closer. Something bad happened here. Something final.

I wanted to yank my hand back, fear overwhelming my senses. My heart hammered against my ribs like it wanted out.

But no, I needed to know. I NEEDED TO FUCKING KNOW WHAT HAPPENED.

I took a shuddering breath, the stale air of the warehouse scraping my throat, and pressed both palms harder against the grimy floor. The cold seeped into my skin.

I needed to see, even if my eyes wept tears of blood, or my heart called for me to end myself for allowing this to happen, I needed to see.

But feelings were easy, visions weren't. I had used the former nearly all my waking hours for the last 2 years, but the latter, I had never felt need for. Why would you need to see what caused the problem in a droid when you can just find exactly what's wrong?

The continuous practice had improved my skill at tapping into the emotions imprinted in objects, but proper visions remained weaker, inferior.

But it was the only thing I had.

I squeezed my eyes shut, shoving every ounce of focus I had left down into the cold metal beneath my hands. The floor wouldn't suffice. I needed to tap into the very fabric of Force around me. Every bit of air, every particle, I shoved my consciousness into the temporal maze of existence.

The strain was instant, a sharp, hot pain blooming right behind my eyes. My head throbbed in protest. The stench of death grew stronger with each passing moment I pushed into, like I was walking toward a massacre in slow motion.

Was I seeing her death? Was that what the Force was trying to show me?

No. Please, no.

I squeezed my eyes shut, shoving every ounce of focus I had left down into the cold metal beneath my hand. The strain was instant, a sharp, hot pain blooming right behind my eyes. My head throbbed in protest.

For a long moment, there was nothing. Then, a chaotic jumble of sensory garbage flooded my mind. The screech of a landspeeder’s brakes from ten years ago. The ghost-image of a Trandoshan foreman screaming at a worker. The chill of a winter morning, the smell of ozone from a welding torch. It was like a thousand different holos all playing at once on the same screen, a roaring static of the past. I was drowning in it.

Focus, you idiot! I screamed at myself internally. Find her!

I fought through the noise, shoving aside decades of irrelevant crap, searching for the most recent layer, for a flicker of something familiar. The headache was turning into a migraine, a white-hot nail being driven into my skull. I gritted my teeth, tasting blood.

And then I felt it. A spark. A flicker of stubborn resilience that was uniquely her.

I latched onto it and shoved all my willpower behind it.

The world didn't so much as fade as it was violently ripped away. One second I was kneeling on a cold floor, the next I was…

…nowhere. And everywhere.

I was a ghost in the machine of the warehouse, my perspective floating somewhere near the ceiling. The space was still dark, but the main door was sliding open, spilling a jagged rectangle of harsh, midday light across the dusty floor.

Two figures stepped into the gloom.

Dust drifted in the harsh rectangle of light from the door, spinning lazy circles. The sound of the door echoed back on itself, then died. My ghost-self hung high near the ceiling, weightless and useless, the whole warehouse holding its breath.

Vasha came first, her posture tight, her head on a swivel. Her lekku were coiled tightly, a sure sign she was on edge. The guy from the cafe—brown jacket, average everything—was right behind her, a little too close. He kept half a step inside her space like he had practiced it.

“You said the fleet was here,” Vasha’s voice echoed in the vast space, sharp and suspicious. “I see empty space and a lot of dust. Where are the droids?”

The man’s friendly facade didn’t even crack. “Patience. They’re in the secured crates. This way.”

Vasha didn’t move. Her hand drifted subtly toward her toolbelt, probably toward the multi-tool I’d modded for her. Two fingers brushed the knurled grip and settled there. “I think I’ve seen enough. Send me the specs. I’ll give you a quote remotely.”

She started to turn, to leave.

And froze.

The man’s posture had changed. The casual slouch was gone, replaced by a predatory stillness. He didn’t move to stop her. He didn’t have to.

Because he already had a blaster pistol in his hand, its barrel now pressed firmly into the small of her back. The muzzle dented fabric. She didn’t flinch.

“I’m afraid that’s not an option,” he said, his voice losing all its fake charm, becoming flat and cold as sheet metal. “The tour’s not over. Keep walking. Deeper into the room. Now.”

Vasha’s head turned just slightly, her profile a mask of cold fury. “You have five seconds to get that thing off me before I introduce it to you sideways.”

A dry, humorless chuckle. “Brave. But your little shock-toy won’t help you here. Now move.”

He shoved the blaster harder, propelling her forward. She took a few stiff, reluctant steps, her eyes scanning the shadows, looking for an out that wasn’t there. Her breathing stayed even. Calculated.

Then, movement. From behind support pillars and stacks of empty crates, figures emerged. Four of them. Their uniforms weren’t the stark white of stormtroopers; they were the olive-green jumpsuits of the Lothal Planetary Garrison. Grunts. Local muscle. Patches on their sleeves, scuffed boots, rifles up but fingers not quite on the triggers.

They fanned out, blocking any possible escape route. One trooper checked his flank, then tightened the line without being told.

And then he stepped forward. An officer, his uniform crisper, his demeanor calm and utterly chilling. He didn’t smile. He just looked at Vasha like she was a interesting specimen under a glass. The lights overhead hummed once, then steadied.

“Vasha Syndri,” he said. His voice was quiet, but it carried effortlessly in the dead air. It wasn’t a question. “What a pleasure to finally make your acquaintance.”

The name seemed to echo against the walls. For a half-second, my vision stuttered, as if the scene glitched and replayed a beat out of sync.

Vasha’s eyes widened a fraction. She’d been expecting a shakedown, maybe a rival tech crew. Not this. Never this. Her weight shifted slightly—not backing away, but angling herself toward the nearest gap between the soldiers. Her eyes tracked the spacing between them, the distance to the exit, the shadows where more might be waiting.

“Planetary Garrison?” she spat, recovering quickly, her shock masked by a layer of hard-won defiance. “What’s this about? I’m a licensed mechanic. My permits are all in order.”

The officer took another calm step forward, boots clicking against the permacrete. He seemed to enjoy the sound, the way it owned the silence. “A pleasure to finally make your acquaintance,” he repeated, his voice smooth as synth-silk, as if he liked the way her name sounded under his control.

“You’ve got a kriffing weird idea of ‘pleasure,’” Vasha shot back, her gaze flicking to the rifle barrels still pointed her way. “You Imperial boys always greet mechanics at gunpoint, or am I just special?”

The officer’s smile didn’t reach his eyes. “I apologize. My associate”—he didn’t even glance at Tevan, who stood tense and silent—“got a little too... enthusiastic with protocol. I assure you, that wasn’t sanctioned.”

Tevan’s jaw worked silently. He kept the blaster low and close to his thigh, trying to look like he hadn’t just pressed it into a civilian’s spine.

“You think pulling a blaster on someone counts as ‘over-enthusiastic’?” Vasha pressed, her voice dripping with scorn.

“In hindsight, it was excessively direct.” He finally looked at Tevan, his mouth twitching with annoyance. “Mr. Tevan is normally better at subtlety... aren’t you?”

Tevan shrugged, not bothering to look sorry. “Didn’t want her bolting.” His eyes flicked to the troopers as if daring them to disagree.

“Oh, you could have done that without the blaster.” The officer’s polite mask slipped for a second, showing a flash of genuine irritation. “Well, what can I even expect from you, after all.”

He turned back to Vasha, clasping his hands behind his back as if resuming a pleasant business meeting. “Anyway—Ms. Syndri. Let’s speak plainly.”

“Oh, let’s. Because so far, I’ve loved this charming tour.”

“You’ve built a rare reputation. Your name has come up in the right circles.” He paused for effect. “Or the wrong ones, depending on your perspective.”

“I’m a mechanic. I fix sodden droids and reroute melted joints. That’s hardly a proficiency of note.”

“Except for the kinds of droids you’ve repaired. Models listed as decommissioned. Unrecoverable.” His eyes narrowed slightly. “Yet somehow, they run again.”

Vasha’s shoulders tensed, just barely. She took another small, sideways step, testing if the soldiers would track her movement. They did. One adjusted his stance to mirror hers, a half-step, nothing more.

“The Empire needs talents like yours,” he continued, his tone turning persuasive. “There’s opportunity here. Recognition. Resources. Official contracts.”

“And that’s your pitch? Drag me into an abandoned depot at blaster-point and offer me a job fixing junk?”

“We didn’t drag you. You walked in willingly.”

“Willingly, my ass.”

A muscle in his jaw twitched. The polite veneer was wearing thin. “You’re a citizen of the Empire, are you not?”

“Is that a real question?”

“Just a reminder.” His voice carried an edge now, the silkiness fraying to reveal steel wire. “We all do our part. Some responsibilities are just... understood.”

Vasha gave him a long, flat stare. “Not interested.”

The silence stretched. His smile grew thinner, uglier. The troopers shifted, armor fabric whispering. Safeties clicked off with tiny, practiced noises that made my stomach knot.

“You don’t strike me as a dissident,” he said, starting to pace in slow circles around her, like a predator sizing up its prey. “And with Ryloth’s current... situation... I would hate for you to be mistaken as being affiliated with all that noise.”

“Kriff you.”

His expression soured completely. The pretense of civility vanished. “Really? I thought your type of people had better manners.”

“We also don’t like being blackmailed by bootlickers.”

The mask dropped entirely. His eyes went cold, calculating, and a cruel, sadistic light entered them. “It’s not just you we’ve looked into. You have company. A boy. Ezra, wasn’t it? No surname. No registration.”

Vasha went very still.

A cold point blossomed under my sternum and spread, thin and sharp. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t make a sound.

“An unregistered minor under your roof. That’s a federal violation.” He was enjoying this now, the power of it. “Could even be an illegal off-worlder. Who knows what kind of threats he could pose?”

“You so much as say his name again—”

“Oh, we’re not monsters,” he interrupted, grinning now. A cruel, vicious grin. “If anything were to happen to him—well. That wouldn’t be our responsibility. So many incidents on Lothal. Accidents. Assaults. Child trafficking rings.” He shrugged, a theatrical gesture of helplessness. “Tragic, but common.”

She spat at his feet. The glob hit his polished leather boot and splashed, a tiny, ugly starburst on black.

He didn’t even blink. He just smiled wider. “Feisty. Reminds me of your brother.”

Vasha froze completely.

“What was he... thirteen? Fourteen?” He tapped his chin, mock-thoughtful. “You remember what happens when you go against the Empire, don’t you? Wouldn’t want your new boy to end up like—”

“Do you know how long it would take me,” Vasha said, her hand moving to her belt in one smooth, impossibly fast motion, “to jam four thousand volts through a bastard’s spinal cord?”

I wanted to shout. No sound came. The urge tore through me and left only a ringing silence.

The officer barely had time to open his mouth.

The arc burst out with a sickening snap-hiss. The prongs of the modified multi-tool buried themselves in his ribs before anyone’s brain could even register she’d moved.

He didn’t scream. He convulsed once, a full-body shudder, and dropped. His head hit the concrete with a wet, final crack. He didn’t twitch. Didn’t move.

Didn’t breathe.

Even Vasha froze for half a second, blinking at the smoking tool in her hand. A curl of scorched cloth lifted, then fell. The hot, metallic stink of ozone crawled across the floor.

“Shit,” she muttered under her breath. “Too much charge.”

One of the garrison troopers flinched. Another, a guy with sergeant markings on his sleeve—Tevan—reached for his blaster, but he was a heartbeat too slow. Vasha was already in motion, kicking a nearby crate of rusted parts into the path of the others and bolting for a side exit half-hidden in shadow.

She almost made it.

Two of the troopers finally got their rifles up, barrels swinging wildly, rattled. One shouted something half-formed and useless.

Tevan didn’t shout. Didn’t hesitate. He raised his blaster, aimed, and fired.

A single stun shot, blue-white and low-powered, caught her square in the back.

A spark of energy crackled over her body like a python of lightning before she dropped. Completely limp. Like a puppet with its strings cut.

The sound of her body hitting the concrete seemed to take a year to arrive.

I couldn’t breathe.

Couldn’t think.

She was shot.

She was down.

The world stopped.

My vision tunneled. The edges blurred. The only thing left was her body on the floor, her lekku limp, her fingers twitching once before going still.

No.

No, no, no.

The stench of death was there, thick and suffocating, but it wasn’t coming from her. It was coming from the officer. The one she’d zapped. The one whose body was already cooling on the floor.

I forced myself to look closer. To feel.

Her presence in the Force wasn’t fading. It wasn’t gone. It was still there, stubborn and bright and alive.

She wasn’t dead.

She was stunned.

The realization hit like a physical blow, knocking the air back into my lungs. My chest heaved. My hands trembled against the floor, but I didn’t care. I couldn’t stop grinning.

She was alive.

She was alive.

I wanted to cry and scream and laugh all at once. The pressure in my chest ripped me open from the inside.

Alive.

Again—again—again, I reached inward, desperate not to lose the thread, not to let this fade.

The vision kept playing.

Tevan walked over, blaster still raised, his boots scuffing on the dusty floor. He stopped first to stare down at the officer’s stiffening corpse. He nudged the body with his toe.

Very much dead.

“Huh…” he muttered to himself. “Well.”

Another beat of silence dragged by in the vast warehouse.

“…good riddance,” he finally muttered with what I felt was a slight sense of satisfaction. “Finally shut him up.”

He moved toward Vasha without urgency, stepping over the cooling corpse of the officer—his former commander, I guessed.

Behind him, one of the younger troopers fidgeted, his helmet swiveling between the body and their unconscious prisoner. "Sir… what do we—"

Tevan knelt slowly beside Vasha. Checked her pulse with two fingers. He then took the tazer from her hands, shifting it between his hands. 

"Clever tricks," he said to no one but himself before pocketing the thing. 

“Clean it up,” Tevan said, his voice flat as he stood up. He finally holstered his blaster and gestured vaguely at Vasha. “Cuff her and get her to the transport. You both know the detention site location, right?”

“Y-yes, sir,” the two other troopers chimed in, already moving. They snapped a pair of reinforced plasti-cuffs over her wrists with practiced efficiency. One checked her pulse without thinking and seemed relieved when it thumped against his fingers.

“And the… uh… the Commander, sir?” the first trooper asked, nudging the body with his boot.

Tevan didn’t even look back. “Dump him offsite. Somewhere messy. A refinery overflow pipe. The lower market alleys. I don’t care. With how busy command is, nobody is gonna question, a fatso died giving his recruitment pitch is nobody's concern anyways.”

The troopers hesitated, exchanging a look. Tevan turned slowly, his expression bored.

“Do you want to be the one to explain to Command why a civilian mechanic killed our lead officer with a prototype shock-tool right in front of us, and we all stood here watching it happen?”

“…no, sir.”

“Exactly. Erase the local cam logs. Drop a report that insurgents stole uniforms and ambushed us. Add a casualty. Put some drama in it. You know the drill. Now go.”

The others rushed off to their grim tasks. A helmet cam light winked out. Someone started pulling cables from a wall box with jerky, guilty motions.

Tevan walked back over to the officer’s wide-eyed, frozen corpse. He gave it one last, long look—and then a quiet, humorless chuckle escaped him.

“Honestly…” he muttered, shaking his head as he turned away, “…should’ve happened years ago.”

He walked toward the door, pulling out a commlink. As he went, he kept muttering, just loud enough for me to catch the gist. “…died with his kriffing quota still incomplete. Hoping the next one they send isn’t such a preening shit-head…”

The vision flickered. The warehouse dissolved around me, the edges blurring, the colors bleeding back into the present.

I was still kneeling on the cold floor, my palms pressed against the metal, my breath coming in ragged gasps. My face was wet. I hadn’t even realized I was crying.

But it didn’t matter.

She was alive.

They took her. They cuffed her. They moved her.

But she was alive.

The relief was so overwhelming it was almost painful, a wild, jubilant rush that made my hands shake. I wanted to shout. To laugh. To collapse right there on the floor and sob until my throat was raw.

She was alive.

And that was all that mattered.