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“Professor Huyang, may I have a moment of your time?”
“It is the middle of the night.” Huyang retorted as he turned around, baffled to find a barefooted humanoid padawan in the doorway to the Quartermaster’s workshop. “I may not require sleep, but you do.”
“Sleep evades me, unfortunately.” The padawan replied, the corner of their lips ticking up, yet their eyes remained devoid of humour. “And I do not want to disturb you in your daily responsibilities.”
Huyang had a riposte ready, but a closer look at the padawan revealed a weight to their gaze and a seriousness to their expression that stopped him short.
“What can this droid do for you?” He asked instead, tilting his head at the padawan and running through his database while he waited for them to reply.
Obi-Wan Kenobi (he/him), Humanoid-variant (Stewjoni), sixteen-standard years
Current padawan of Qui-Gon Jinn Yan Dooku (Consular track)
“I returned from Ilum some weeks ago and I would like your help with constructing my new lightsabre.” The boy announced, taking the unspoken invitation and stepping properly into the workshop, though he maintained a polite distance between the two of them.
“A new one, so soon?” Huyang asked incredulously, mentally pulling up the data on the padawan’s previous lightsabre. Solid, if basic design, reliable, with a crystal that was neither inclined to combat, nor passivity. “Your lightsabre is your life, padawan. It does not do to lose it like a toy.”
“I didn’t lose it.” The boy denied immediately, the first waver in that practised politeness he’d approached Huyang with. “The crystal…well.”
The padawan levitated his ‘sabre in the space between them and used the Force to pull apart the casing around his crystal, letting it drop gently into his palm while he absently reassembled the hilt.
After a moment, Huyang understood why the boy had elected for the ‘show not tell’ approach; even from afar, even without being a Force-sensitive himself, Huyang could feel the kyber’s pain, its mournful song a dirge for the padawan’s soul.
He considered the boy anew in light of his kyber’s grief, updating his file on the padawan and distantly wondering what sort of horrors the boy’s lightsabre had seen for his kyber to cry over him.
“If it is only the kyber that needs replacing, your previous hilt should still serve.” Was what he chose to voice, however, but the padawan shook his head.
“It is…somewhat more complicated than that.” He retorted, and he seemed almost embarrassed now, though Huyang could not fathom why. “You see, on Ilum, I did not find one kyber, but two.”
“You wish to construct a multi-crystal blade.” Huyang concluded, his tone flat and factual despite his initial surprise.
It was hardly his first time encountering a multi-crystal blade, after all, though it had been centuries since he’d had a padawan come to him with the request.
“Yes.” The padawan confirmed with a brisk nod. “And I’d like to repurpose my old kyber into a shoto.”
Privately, Huyang approved of the boy’s determination to keep his old kyber near; so many forgot that the crystals were semi-sentient and had the capacity to heal themselves overtime. Exposure to their twinned soul, no matter how much it protested now, would serve the kyber far better in the long-run than being forgotten in the sock drawer, of that Huyang was certain.
“A multi-crystal blade will be perceivable to other Force-sensitives even when the ‘sabre is deactivated.” He warned the padawan, studying him intently. “Are you sure you are prepared for that scrutiny?”
“About that…” The boy began, and Huyang tilted his head, his model’s equivalent of a human’s raised eyebrow. “I would like to construct the kyber casing out of this.”
And so saying, the boy reached into his pocket and produced a hefty handful of metal, the shiny, not-quite-reflective surface familiar to Huyang even after all the years since he’d last seen it.
“Beskar alloy.” He analysed, carefully taking the metal from the boy and scanning it with his sensors. “Strong, but not as resistant to the Force as the pure form.”
“Will it mask the signatures of the crystals?” The boy asked, and Huyang glanced up from the beskar in his hands to the politely-curious expression on the padawan’s face and realised that the boy already knew the answer to his question.
“It will.” He confirmed regardless, then set his voice to stern, channelling his thousands of years of experience with wayward younglings into his next words. “But how did you come across it?”
But the boy didn’t react the way Huyang had expected, his posture remaining loose and relaxed and his face free of any worry or guilt as he admitted; “It was gifted to me.”
“By a Mandalorian.” Huyang concluded, because as unlikely as the notion of a post-Excision Mandalorian gifting something to a Jedi child seemed, the idea that the padawan before him could have stolen the beskar from a Mandalorian seemed even less likely.
“Yes.” The boy nodded, apparently seeing no issue with admitting to being in contact with a people who were now the enemies of the Jedi Order. “Rather than the vambraces that are typically given for one’s verd’goten, I requested the metal that would have been used for them, instead. It’s why I am only now constructing my ‘sabre.”
Huyang absorbed the information, processing all the things the padawan implied but refused to say aloud and resisting the urge to wake the Quartermaster.
Or march the padawan back to his Master like an errant tooka.
“You have been adopted?” He checked, wishing, not for the first time, that his next maintenance check would grant him access to all Councils’ records, rather than just his limited database on lightsabre construction.
“Informally.” The padawan confirmed, a quicksilver smile pulling at his lips when Huyang tilted his head again, resisting the urge to close his eyes in exasperation.
“As all Mandalorian adoptions go, I believe.” He pointed out drily instead, and that earlier flash of a smile settled more firmly on the padawan’s face, but all he said was a polite:
“Indeed.”
Huyang considered the child for a beat, then held out the handful of beskar he’d been analysing for the padawan to take.
“If you were familiar enough to agree to the gai bal manda, then you should know already that per the Creed, beskar should not be used to forge weapons.” He chastised, turning away from the padawan to return to what he had been tinkering with before he’d been interrupted.
“In the House I was adopted into, it is the intention of the weapon-wielder that matters more than the old dogma.” The boy replied, not taking Huyang’s response as the dismissal that it was, but standing his ground. “I do not intend to use my lightsabre for violence, but to defend and protect. That grants me the right to use beskar in its construction, per the head of my Clan and the current Mand’alor.”
Huyang could not feel amusement, and his status as a droid meant that few ever thought him capable of humour or feelings, but he had always appreciated a good back-and-forth, particularly if it didn’t end with him losing any parts.
“You are wily for your age.” He told the boy, then gestured to the small sitting space in the corner of the Quartermaster’s workshop and waited until the padawan followed. “Very well. Pay attention now.”
It took the padawan two hours and forty-three minutes to construct his lightsabre.
He did not break his meditation a single time.
Huyang could not feel the Force the way organic sentients could, but he could see the boy sink into it, could track the way his shoulders lost their tension, could sense the brief apprehension at the power of a multi-crystal blade, even with complementary kybers.
And it was a powerful blade, of that, Huyang had no doubt.
He had half an eye on the padawan’s progress and half on his own circuits, the crystals’ hum as they interacted with the padawan’s Force-presence making them almost vibrate in place.
And then, the boy slid the beskar casing on, and the crystals’ song was silenced, the new lightsabre as silent and innocuous as the hundreds of thousands of hilts Huyang had helped construct over the years.
“Go on.” He urged once the boy opened his eyes, having taken an extra few minutes to draw himself out of his meditation. “Activate it.”
When the boy hesitated, Huyang repeated the order, partly to see if the boy could indeed handle a multi-crystal blade, and partly for Huyang’s own records on the colour combination.
The padawan had found two…unusually-coloured kybers, to say the least; one Sentinel-yellow, and one of an orange so red-toned that, on its own, would have certainly earned him a few raised eyebrows if the boy were to use it in the Temple.
Carefully, the padawan picked up his lightsabre, his hands steady and sure around the hilt, though he gasped when he lit it, almost dropping the blade in his shock.
But Huyang didn’t pay the child much heed, focusing instead on the lightsabre and his notes. The padawan's new plasma-blade was the colour of the Coruscanti sunrise, a warm, yellow-orange hue that gleamed gold in the dappled light of the workshop, a soothing, if unusual colour in this Temple’s halls.
Huyang turned to the boy once he’d updated his file, only then noticing that tears had gathered in the padawan’s eyes, his wide-eyed gaze glued to his blade, something unnameable painted across his face.
“Does it mean something to you?” Huyang inquired at the reaction, and though the boy startled at his voice, the sudden movement causing his tears to spill down his cheeks, his eyes never once left his lightsabre. “This colour?”
“It would have, once.” The padawan replied quietly, his voice scratchy, his expression seesawing between joy and pain like his circuits had fried as he stared longingly at the plasma-blade. “Now, it is just a reminder.”
“Of?” Huyang checked when the boy didn’t seem inclined to continue, wondering whether he shouldn’t report the padawan to the Halls for a maintenance check-up, the unusual reaction to the successful completion of his lightsabre, the silent tears, and the cryptic answers raising concern even in a droid.
The boy finally met Huyang’s gaze, his eyes glassy with tears and full of an emotion Huyang didn’t have the coding to interpret. The trembling smile on the padawan’s face was yet another contradiction for Huyang to note, its wry bittersweetness as confusing and weighted as the trembling words that left the boy’s mouth a breath later:
“Of the fact that even the best-case scenario is not without loss.”