Moving Forward

[Zhi Jonan]

“You will forever look back on this day as one of great joy, but also one of great sorrow. It will help you to remember that, in life, the two are often closely linked.”
- Jedi Master Valenthyne Farfalla. Approximately 950 BBY
----
Tatooine, past the far outskirts of Mos Eisley.
Approximately 1,200 years after Master Farfalla.
(Continued from here.)

Zhi trailed a hand lightly on one side of the short hallway until he came to the second small room to the right with the door left slightly open. It was a small bedroom as best as he could tell. He had the sense that there was a chair and a desk in the corner, and an empty bed, but none of the specifics were important to him.

Entering the room, he found the control button and tapped it. The door closed behind him. Zhi Reverance took in a long breath and sat down on the floor. None of this was what he had hoped for, but he was the one here. Whether any pattern in the Force had planned it that way or not, he understood his skills and his purpose.

‘Thus is the nature...of life, Zhi. We don't always enjoy the tests we are given. You know that though.’

The healer replayed Luka's weakened voice in his mind. That crisis point day when his master and cherished friend had nearly died of the longterm tibanna poisoning felt like less than a year ago to him, but he understood that it had been ten times that for both of them. It seemed unlikely to Zhi that he would be the only one left alive... but realistically, he had no way to guess the survival rate of the others. The ship was cobbled together to begin with. Nomi wouldn't have had the shell of protection from a pod. Had his sister survived? Had her master? How many of the pods had kept their cryo-cycle integrity in spite of whatever had disrupted everything?

They knew before the cabonite that there were immeasurable possibilities. They had all known, but neither Zhi nor his teacher were frightened of reality. The logic was sound. They knew. Zhi understood with no need to agonize, that he would have agreed with the same decisions again. He’d spent the whole of his life practicing skill and steadiness and trust in the Force. There had been nothing to do before but to trust and to accept as much of the responsibility as he could shoulder. Even if the carbonite pods remained intact, with his mother gone, that left his eldest sister and the two most senior healers remaining in the Jedi Order... missing, poisoned, in unstable stasis, that would assuredly kill them without enough intervention. The needs in front of Zhi were clear to him.

What were the best steps to move forward? There were few things he could change, and a few challenges that he felt no obligation to keep holding.

‘You are nearly ready Zhi, and when the time comes.... I.... hope to be physically standing by your side to welcome you as a new Knight, but I'll be there regardless.’

Zhi smiled faintly and remembered the few debates they'd shared on that topic. On the two planets where he'd finished his childhood and come into adulthood, nuances like rank had hardly been relevant. Here that was no longer the case. Looking even at Alex and Sskveesh, he could already see the handicap. It wasn't a necessary burden for him to carry.

(Well, Master. I advocated that we should wait... But I wasn’t expecting so many complications. Please do your best to be alive until I've found you. I’m looking forward to discussing it with you.)

Breathing out through his nose, the senior padawan reached behind his neck and separated the longer student's braid from where he'd twisted it into the rest of his short tied-back hair. In the best of circumstances, he ​would have meditated alone the night before... Then his master would have joined him. They would have walked together to meet the others, and there would be a few words and a simple ritual. But in countless times through the ages, it hadn't been like that. He wasn't the first; he wouldn't be the last. It was fine. They all knew what they'd accepted. Zhi took a small knife from his pocket. After thumbing it open, he neatly clipped the braid off just behind his right ear.

He held the thin braid in his palm for a moment, briefly considering what to do with the symbol. What was ever done with it? He couldn’t think of any mention at all, actually.

Still seated on the floor, Zhi held his lightsaber hilt in front of him at careful angle and activated the blade with the simple snap-hiss they all knew.

His visual perceptions were still too damaged to make out much, but he did’t need them. He laid the braid neatly above the blade length with the Force and his fingertips, and let it fall. The weapon accepted the minor sacrifice in what he knew was the shortest flash of fire against consular green. There was a slight crackle of heat, and then the young healer and Jedi Knight deactivated the hilt.

He continued to sit straight-backed and in thought for an hour or two, and then rested until the the sounds of sandstorm died down from the walls. Before the suns were up, he quietly made his way back to the living area to find the others.