Chapter Text
Jedi Master Plo Koon breathed.
On its surface, this wasn’t a strange thing. Like most sentients in the galaxy, Plo’s body needed some form of breathable atmosphere to function, even if his species’ particular biology required a very different sort than most; as such, he needed to breathe to live.
But that was just the issue, Plo thought as he jolted out of what his body identified as a deep meditation, his mandibles shuddering and clicking as he loosed a sibilant sound of distress. He shouldn’t need to breathe because he shouldn’t be alive. He should be dead. More than that, Plo was very certain he had been dead, the faded echo of a burning phantom agony from his ship exploding around him pulsing with every beat of his heart.
Plo curled inward where he was settled on a meditation cushion (he was somewhere he should be at peace), head ducking into his chest and hands raising to touch at his own bared face (he was in a room with a controlled atmosphere and likely alone), eyes snapping open to dart unseeingly at the many lights that surrounded him in his Force senses (lights that he had just felt extinguish, along with those of his men, his Pack, where were his sons). He gasped another breath, feeling like he couldn’t take in enough air to make his lungs properly function.
He had been dead.
He was positive that he had been dead!
‘Y’need to breathe, General,’ a whispered memory cut through his overwhelming anxiety, gruff and worried but steady and familiar and reassuring. There was the phantom sensation of a broad-fingered Human-or-near hand covered in blaster calluses gently touching his neck along where his mandibles met the base of his skull, firm and grounding despite the careful pressure. (His heart ached.) ‘In four, out five, on my count…’
Plo sucked in a breath, ‘two, three, four, hold, General, you’re doin’ fine—’ then shakily exhaled it, ‘two, three, four, five, the Pack’s got the watch, sir, just focus on this—’. It took ten repetitions before he once more felt steady enough to take stock of his situation.
A glance around the room revealed that it was his meditation chamber at the Temple on Coruscant, a place he had not returned to in nearly six standard months due to the unexpectedly brutal campaign over Neimoidia and its Purse Worlds (he very carefully did not yet allow himself to think of how that had ended). The lilac walls and scattered Dorin plants, normally soothing, left him feeling unnerved after so long on his ship, even discounting the fact that it was not where he last remembered being (he refused to think about it). More carefully than he had earlier, Plo began to stretch his Force sense, breathing out harshly when he encountered the presences of his fellow Jedi.
There were so many of them. If his species were capable of crying, he was sure there would be many tears; as it was, his mandibles quivered and his lips curled back from his palates and his eyes closed on their own as he simply took them in. There was Master Drallig, running drills with tired but determined Initiates in the salles; there was Crèchemaster Prie and her Vulptexpaw Clan, the younglings’ excitement over the day’s field trip bleeding into the air; there were a few scattered groups of nervous Padawans and studious Knights researching various projects under the piercing supervision of Master Nu in the Archives; and there—
Plo’s breath hitched and hissed again, this time not in stress, but instead an expression of hopeful awe. There was the familiar feel of Little Soka, her presence bright and unburdened as it hadn’t been for so many years. She was radiating a faint level of boredom where she sat in a class that he distantly thought might be Master Yaddle’s basic Healing course, but perked up at his attention and sent him the equivalent of a cheerful wave. He barely had the mind to return it before he drew back into himself, the niggling thought that had been passing through his mind since he found himself breathing after he had most assuredly died (don’t think about it) after his men’s presences disappeared from his senses (don’t think about it) roaring back to the front, the Force near-dancing in Its eagerness to assure him of the truth of it.
Somehow, some impossible way, Jedi Master Plo Koon had travelled back in time.