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Lonely shadows following me,
Lonely ghosts come calling
Lonely voices talking at me,
Now I’m gone, now I’m gone, now I’m gone
Jango couldn’t find any record of a ship arriving. And yet.
The woman wasted no time, striding through the halls, introducing herself to any and every clone she crossed paths with. General Organa, she said. Leia, if any of them wanted to address her informally.
Her shadows pressed the ‘informal’ aspect a little harder. Just call me Poe; it’s only Commander Dameron in emergencies. He smiled wide and joked easily, inviting the troopers to relax more smoothly than his superior. The other one stayed quiet, for the most part. Drifted to the edge, if they happened to meet a large group of clones at once. Managed to find the wariest soldiers, every time, and kept repeating the same words.
My name is Finn. I used to be FN-2187.
And each time, without fail, he got those same soldiers to loosen up. To look at him with awe in their eyes, and easily transfer it to Dameron, who’d offered him that name, and Organa, who never acted like he was anything other than a trusted confidant.
Jango didn’t think he was the product of a Kaminoan cloning vat. But. Wherever he’d come from, Finn carried himself like someone used to marching in armor, and said exactly the right things to make the troopers trust him, from those fully grown down to the smallest cadets. Even Dameron, for all his relaxed posture and open smiles, couldn’t manage it nearly so easily.
Neither of them paid Jango the slightest bit of attention as he stalked after their group, watching with folded arms at each stop. Organa, though. She glanced at him at least once per interaction, a single eyebrow arched in challenge.
And my mother told me son let it be,
Sold my soul to the calling
Sold my soul to a sweet melody,
Now I’m gone, now I’m gone, now I’m gone
Despite no record of the ship that dropped them off, the Kaminoans didn’t dither over assigning private quarters for the trio. Organa and Finn, after all, both carried lightsabers on their hips. Blasters, too, but the Jedi weapons stood out as more important. When Jango first tried to confront them, in the hall outside Lama Su’s main office, Organa looked him up and down, snorted, and flung Jango into the wall without lifting so much as a damn finger.
“Technically not a Jedi,” she told him, keeping Jango pinned in place with his feet dangling. “But my brother is. And I learned plenty from him.”
Clearly. He knew how some Force-users could make a phantom fist around their target’s throat, choking off airflow until they collapsed. Organa took that to a new extreme - it felt like getting flattened inside a trash compactor, with no room to move a limb or his head or even his lungs.
Only when the woman had walked halfway down the corridor with her two shadows did the pressure ease off, letting Jango drop to his knees and gasp for breath. And even so, he could still feel a sense of her watching him. Not malevolent, not amused, but assessing. And Jango liked that even less than he would if Organa acted like she was toying with him.
Oh give me that fire
Oh give me that fire
Oh give me that fire
Burn, burn, burn