The Wolf Pack

Chapter 66

Obi-Wan wanted to tease his padawan to death, both out of concern and exasperation, but it wasn’t like it was going to do any of them any good. It was no use, and he probably would have got captured as well if he had been hit with the same voltage she had, he might even have died from it. Good thing it was nearly impossible for Zabraks to die from a heart failure, them having two hearts and all. So yes, he was kind of frustrated, but it was nothing that could not be solved with a little aggressive negotiations and blowing up some secret bases. Kriari understood what was going on as soon as she regained consciousness, but Satine was having a lot more trouble adjusting to being fired at. That and the two dead men at her feet, one of which was missing a head.
He loved his Padawan, but there was a dormant power and violence within her that scared even him.
But his dread for Kriari’s potential for murder did not last long when he realized just how much experience she had on the battlefield. He had rarely worked side by side with her in an active shootout, and whenever they had been deployed together, she usually had been leading the vanguard. Obi-Wan was very slowly realizing he was not a very present master in his Padawan’s life and, even more importantly, he was not giving her enough support with all the trauma she was undergoing. Yes Obi-Wan was an adult, but he was not so far removed from his apprentice that he didn’t notice her age. She was eighteen, an experienced army commander, a teenager with PTSD and a young woman very much in love.

She reminded him of someone…

He then made a conscious decision to be more present in her life, more supportive, to either guide her back into the path of the Jedi and get her knighted or help her figure out who she was or wanted to be after the war was over.
He cared, he wanted to care, and most of all he didn’t want to become a stranger to her, someone she should hide things from and sneak around to get by. No, Obi-Wan was going to be like a parent to her or he would be nothing, and as detached as the Jedi code urged him to remain, he could not bring himself to do it. He had tried and failed with Anakin, whom he considered his brother, he would not even try with Kriari, she was his child.

But at the moment he had to work with her and get both Jedi and the Duchess out of Concordia and into the senate. This was not a good spot for Satine to be in politically, she would have to fight with all her might to avoid Republic involvement, but the way things were going it did not seem very likely she would succeed.

Not that he had much time or focus to think about that as he tried his best to deflect blaster fire. Kriari was definitely much better at that than he was, he had always been a much more offensive fighter, he would probably always be.

Satine’s desperate attempts at getting him to not kill people were both admirable and a little irritating, but he was used to it, his padawan on the other hand seemed to be getting increasingly tired of the duchess' noble but very impractical beliefs. She had always been a “find cause of problem and get rid of it as efficiently and as fast as possible” kind of person, which made sense when one saw her fight. She always went for the jugular, always out for first blood, always last to strike. So having a pacifist very loudly protesting the loss of life while they were being shot at was not her Idea of fun, and Obi-Wan could tell.
He was willing to put up with Satine and even enjoyed their banter most of the time, but his Padawan had lived most of her formative years surrounded by military men. There was friend and foe and one did not let foe live long enough to kill a friend. She was straight forward in that sense, practical, methodical, quick. This was not a situation where she could unleash her full potential, not if she was trying to defend a civilian at the same time.

That is until Pre Vizla had no better idea than to bring a lightsaber to a fight with two Jedi. He went on an incredibly boring tirade on how he had obtained it and how he would add both Kriari and Obi-Wan’s lightsabers to his collection a la Grievous, which didn’t do much to impress either Jedi and only landed him in a duel with a very irate teenager. Had Obi-Wan had half a second to process what was going on he might have tried to stop his Padawan, but even thirty seconds into the duel, he realized it wasn’t really necessary.
Kriari was grinning.
That small detail told him more than enough. For one, Governor Vizla was totally fucked, second, He should really check on Kriari’s mental health because the way she was fighting, anyone would think she  wanted to kill Vizla. Something that wasn’t very Jedi of her.
But as he tapped into the Force, he realized there was no malice coming from her, simply an unshakeable, incredibly huge urge to put the man on his ass and humble him a little. He might have been a Mandalorian, and a legendary fighter at that, but the second he brought the saber out, he was done for. That moment, he had thrown himself into a stormy sea with only a paddleboard and the delusion that he could surf a tsunami. Kriari was that tsunami, and he was not getting out of the water alive.
Without outside influence, without surprise attacks and without anyone interrupting their duel, Kriari had the upper hand, so it did not take her long to disarm Vizla and leave him covered in dirt and breathless with his back to the ground. The man did not appreciate this in the least, and now without the Dark saber and without any real authority left, he ordered his men to execute the three of them.
Fortunately, for all her protesting of violence, Satine was neither slow nor stupid, while everyone had been distracted by the duel, she managed to procure two speeders that would take them back to Vizla’s palace and back to their ship. They would be able to leave the moon without being stopped if Vizla himself was at the military base with all his men. Having to explain his loss against a child to an entire army would have been fun to watch.