miner miracle
It was difficult to see it as anything less than a punishment.
Following her extracurricular excursion to Irvulix V and its cataclysmic failure, Andromeda had faced the consequences. She couldn't even be angry and sullen about that; she had slipped curfew without so much as a note, flown to a hostile planet at the edge of the galaxy, encountered a Sith, and killed two innocent people, to no great effect. There seemed to be some debate as to whether she had been lured there by a vision planted by the Sith, or if her dream vision had been genuine, but either way it would not excuse the crimes she had committed. She bore her punishment with as much grace as she could muster and took the lesson to heart.
Perhaps too much to heart.
Then she had been sent to Jedha, to help with cleansing the place of Mawite remnants.
Was it to demonstrate that she had so much left to learn, that she had been foolish in the extreme to try to face a Sith on her own, that she was a stupid child in a sea with only the New Jedi Order to cling to as a life raft? That was something she came to realize each day. Hard-fought victories with her fellow Jedi left her battered and bruised, exhausted. Jedha was an unforgiving desert, and the sand -- coarse and rough and irritating -- got everywhere. Her eyes. Her ears. Her mouth. She hated it. Message received, day after day, when she settled into her bedroll at the end of a day of combat or excavation or even travel. She knew acutely that she was out of her depth.
The upside was that Andromeda was too tired to dream. It felt like no sooner had she laid her head down on the insufficient pillow that she jolted awake at the bark of one of her betters.
In the third week of her expedition, Andromeda lost sight of the others in her party. Separated, she had been quickly isolated by the Mawite remnants, a pair of them that cornered her. She killed one with a second borrowed lightsaber -- the remnants of the first being tucked safely in her kit bag -- but in so doing she had tired herself out. Barely able to defend herself from the savage onslaught by the surviving Maw fighter, she had made the mistake of getting backed into a corner. Blow after blow after blow, and Andromeda's lightsaber came perilously close to her body, threatening to cleave herself from left shoulder to right underarm.
She tried a kick, managed to buy herself some room to breathe, but was rewarded when the Maw fighter harnessed his rage into a blast of the Force that slammed her into the rough brickwork of the corner Andy had been trying to get out of. She saw stars, and just before dropping unconscious into a heap, she thought she saw a blur of something, but then --
Andromeda became aware of the pain first, a dull throbbing in the back of her head like she had slammed her head into something hard. She didn't remember at first, and squinted away from even the dim light assaulting her eyelids, squeezing them shut. She heard -- nothing. No thrum of a lightsaber blade, no cackling of a Mawite, not the relieved voices of her companions having found her. Nothing.
Then, not nothing.
A ringing, a high-pitched squeal. She felt, rather than heard, footsteps, and forced herself to open her eyes although the pain of the light entering her eyes was unthinkable. Someone was there, in her doubled, blurred vision. No amount of blinks made it better; she felt she was only rubbing sand into her eyes. Her fingers groped for her lightsaber, but found only sand. "Who -- ?" she began, before coughing painfully. The convulsion of the cough set pain off in her head and neck, and she tasted blood.
A fine mess Andromeda found herself in.
