STAR WARS REBELS || Her Wings Of Fire

CHAPTER NINE: A Pirate's Life For Me

Meanwhile, as Teri and the crew of the Ghost were consorting with the likes of Lando Calrissian and his associates to plot an escape off Lothal, Sorena was in a deep sleep. As she slumbered, her sedated mind relived the parts of her past that, since embracing the Dark Side, had become dangerous to her and demanded she do her absolute best to forget them...

But some things are impossible to forget.

"Hey. Conni. Wake up, Conni. Conni."

"Kriff off, Maddox..." Ahsoka murmured groggily. "I'm still sleeping."

As she spoke, she burrowed deeper under her three or four pillows and assortment of fuzzy blankets, only to let out a surprised shriek when one of the pillows was ripped from her and brought down upon her head.

"So this is where the throw pillows from the common room couches have been going," was all big Zabrak had to say for himself for such an offense. "Hoarder."

"I am a not a hoarder!" she said. "No one was using them, anyways. They weren't even on the couch. Cap'n Lei keeps them all packed away in a box."

"Yeah, to make sure people like you don't steal them." Maddox suddenly broke the most common air he projected – an unforgiving deadpan – with a smile, something he had only really did when she was around.

But he wasn't interested in her like that. He was just a very good friend – a bit like Anakin had been, only a lot more moody and sad... As if he were carrying some sort of great emotional burden he had long since grown used to living with.

But she wasn't going to think about Anakin. She couldn't think about him without worrying about his survival. Every since the formation of the Empire a year prior and the death sentence to all Jedi, the best she could to was hope that he had managed to avoid capture.

Captain Lei Shara of the Saberdart, the pirate ship Ahsoka had been traveling the far corners of the galaxy aboard for close to two years, had a habit of picking the strangest people to be her crewmembers. Rov, the medic, was addicted to hot chocolate. Maddox never slept more than two hours a night (and when he did, it was usually nightmares, which led her to suspect he had some form of PTSD). Kohra, the weapons specialist, was a space grunge aficionado with a tendency to go on long philosophical rants about the meaning of life and their place in the universe. Mikhan, the part-time cook, part-time muscle of the group, had an obsession with knives that had earned him the affectionate nicknamed of 'Sharp-fingers'.

And that was just to name a few.

Ahsoka's own weird quirk was that she preferred sleeping in the engine room in a nook near the ceiling just the right size for a mattress than in the barracks with the others. But as she slept, that mattress and a sheet of metal less than two inches thick were all that separated her from the reservoir filled with deadly tibanna gas.

Also, no one knew who she really was. Conni Akyfa was little more than a guise for the eighteen-year-old Force-sensitive Togruta whose heart was still allied with the fallen Jedi Order.

"So why the hell did you wake me up at such an uncivilized hour, anyways?" she asked him, stretching out her arms and working the kinks out of her spine.

"Captain's orders. Sent me to give the wakeup call. Some sort of meeting about our next trip." He began tugging on a corner of her blankets to pull her out of the corner and towards the makeshift ladder to get up onto the bed. (Not that she really needed it – it was just in case she had a little too much to drink some night and didn't remember her usual route for climbing up the engines and the boilers attached to them.) "So get up."