nonelikemesince

Anakin had barely gotten back from Fandom when Corran Horn tracked him down and asked if he'd be interested in tagging along on a routine supply run. It took no consideration at all for him to agree; going back and forth between here and Fandom took some of the edge off his restlessness (and the family night at Caritas had been weird but in a good way) but his classes and the flight sim weren't quite the same as taking a real ship on a real mission. So here he was, in the hangar bay of a bright red Star Destroyer, finishing up a few last preflight adjustments to the transport he and Corran were planning to take.

That was, until he spotted a familiar pair of bare feet walking toward him, followed by an even more familiar face peering beneath the ship and demanding, impatiently, "Come out from under there, Anakin Solo."

Whoops. He should've checked in with Tahiri at some point between talking to Corran and prepping the ship. The older Tahiri and Jaina from Fandom would both be giving him such looks right now. "I was going to tell you," he tried to excuse himself once he'd crawled out from beneath the trasnsport, but as soon as he said it he knew he wasn't convincing anyone.

"Uh huh." Definitely not convincing Tahiri, the way she was glaring down at him, where he was still lying on the deck. "Sure. When was that going to be, exactly? Right before you smoked jets out of here?"

"I'll be back! Corran and I are just going for supplies, that's all!"

That answer was clearly not acceptable, since her response was to punch him in the shoulder hard enough that he yelped. "Ow! What was that for?" He was so going to have a bruise there.

"What do you think?" she asked, and despite the clear annoyance in her expression it was the recently-healed scars on her forehead that he noticed the most; they were a reminder of what had happened to her, but also a reminder of why he was spending so much time here, and he understood.

"I know," he said quietly. "I promised I wouldn't go back out there without you, but this won't take long, and it's just a boring old supply run. Nothing serious."

"Anakin Solo," Tahiri began, and waved a hand to cut him off when he opened his mouth to object. "Sure, it's nothing serious, but so what? You've been back and forth between here and that other school you've been going to a bunch of times, and I know that's you following Master Luke's orders, so there's nothing I can do about that, but this? Who cares? Doesn't it ever occur to you how I feel?"

He understood her well enough to know that this wasn't about him leaving again; she was really getting at something else. Standing and brushing his hands off on his flightsuit, he stepped closer and asked in a low voice, "Come on, Tahiri, what's really the matter?"

"They don't like me here," she answered, equally quiet. "They all act like my skin is about to split open and a krayt dragon will step out."

"Everyone understands you've been through a rough time," Anakin offered. "They don't really --"

"Have you even been around enough lately to know that for sure?" Tahiri countered. Anakin had no reply for that. "No one understands, not really, except you. Maybe not even you. Everyone else is either afraid of me or repelled." Genuine hurt and frustration rolled off her Force-sense in waves.

In retrospect it was not his best idea to suggest that she consider having Booster's MD droid remove the scars, so they wouldn't be a visual reminder to others, but at least she didn't go off on him for it the way he thought she would. "I don't understand," he finally admitted, because while he'd been right about her being upset about something other than his absence he still couldn't figure out exactly what it was. "You want me to stay here with you?"

"No, dummy." There were few people who could talk to him as if talking to a small child and actually manage to make him feel like one, but Tahiri was on that list. "I want to go with you."

"Oh." He was so confused. "You, uh, sure you're ready for that?"

"For what?" she asked. "It's just a supply run, right? Minimal danger? Nowhere near Yuuzhan Vong space?"

"Right, but there's always danger."

"And you just said it was going to be boring and nothing serious," Tahiri scoffed, and whoops, she had him there. Again. Bitterly she added, "Especially when you don't trust everyone on your ship."

Oh. "Okay, now you're being dumb. You know I trust you," Anakin replied.

She turned away from him, dropping her gaze to the deck. "Really? I almost killed you back on Yavin Four, you know."

"I know," he tried to reassure her. "And I know that wasn't really you."

"I'm not sure," Tahiri replied, with a look on her face he couldn't decipher at all. "Sometimes I don't know who I am anymore."

"I do." Anakin wiped his hands off on his flightsuit again and reached out to grasp her shoulders lightly. "You aren't the same as you were before the Yuuzhan Vong captured you. Neither am I. But you're still Tahiri."

She huffed, disbelieving. "Sure. Whatever that means. Look, I've spent enough time crying and curled up in a ball. You think you're the only one the walls are closing in on? Whoever I am, I'm not going to figure it out moping around here. Let me go with you, Anakin."

"Okay," he said, ruffling her hair, only he felt weirdly self-conscious about the gesture, not at all like when Jaina did it to him, and the tips of his ears were getting warm. "Next time just ask, though. You don't always have to come after me like I've done something wrong. We don't have to fight everything out."

He was relieved to see her actually smile. "Sorry. You never mean to do anything wrong. But most times it just turns out that way."

Okay, Anakin couldn't really disagree with her there.

[OOC: NFI/NFB, OOC-okay, TBC. Dialogue borrowed with some tweaks from Edge of Victory 2: Rebirth by Greg Keyes, whose overwrought descriptions of people's eye color I will absolutely not be borrowing.]