Saga - OT Lost and Found | Ronen Syndulla-Jarrus, Noemi Bridger |humor, fluff, kids

Title: Lost and Found
Author: Raissa Baiard
Timeframe: circa 15 ABY, in the Marzra-verse continuity
Genre: Humor, fluff, AU
Characters: Ronen Syndulla-Jarrus (OC), Noemi Bridger (OC), brief appearances of Chopper, Jacen Syndulla-Jarrus, Hera Syndulla and Kanan Jarrus.
Synopsis: Young Ronen Syndulla-Jarrus enlists his best friend Noemi's help when he misplaces half of his father’s lightsaber.

Thanks to @Findswoman for beta-reading.
——

Ronen Syndulla-Jarrus was in trouble. A lot of trouble.

Or at least he was going to be if he couldn’t find the other half of his dad’s lightsaber.

He’d only meant to borrow Dad’s saber for a little while, just while Dad was doing meditation group with the fourth-level initiates. He’d only wanted to take a closer look at how it was constructed, maybe make some notes and sketches. Ronen was going to build his own lightsaber soon—well, when he was thirteen, anyway—and he really liked the idea of having a two-part saber like Dad’s. Not only did it just generally look cool, there were some practical advantages. The separate pieces wouldn’t register as weapons on standard scanners, and it would be a lot easier to fit them in his satchel without anyone knowing that way.

But before Ronen had had a real chance to examine the interlocking connections, Chopper, in full noisy, pushy nursemaid droid mode, wheeled into his room uninvited. Ronen had only had a few seconds to stash the pieces before Chopper started bwopping at him that he’d left pieces of his model X-wing kit on the kitchen table. And, Chopper had promised darkly, if Ronen didn’t pick them up right now he was going to have to tell Mom and she’d…

Ronen hadn’t waited around to see what dire threat Mom would supposedly carry out. He wasn’t really afraid of what Mom would do. She might give him the Disappointed Mom sigh or maybe a speech on how he needed to be More Responsible with His Things, but the real threat was that Chopper would make the rest of his day miserable lecturing and haranguing him for it.

When Ronen had come back to his room with the half-assembled fighter and a box of assorted pieces, the emitter housing was right where he’d left it under a pile of flimsi, but the handgrip of Dad’s saber was gone. Once he’d finished hyperventilating and repeated the Jedi Code firmly to himself a few times, he searched his entire room. Twice. And then started to hyperventilate again, because Dad’s meditation group would be over in less than half a standard hour, and if his lightsaber wasn’t back where it was supposed to be by then…

Ronen stifled a little whimper. A Jedi’s lightsaber was like part of them; losing it would be like losing an arm or a leg—or maybe since Ronen had only lost half of the saber it would be more like just a hand. But anyway, it would be really bad, and he did not want to find out what a Jedi master did to the nerf-brained, moof-milkeracious kid who mislaid their hand—er, handgrip.

He needed help.

Ronen weighed his options. Chopper was just a flat out no. True, he had all those advanced sensors and stuff, but he was Chopper and even if he didn’t tell Dad, he’d definitely tell Mom. And Ronen would never hear the end of it. Every time he wanted to do something cool like visiting the Loth-wolves with Uncle Ezra or camping out in the jogan orchard with Caleb, Chop would bring up The Time He’d Lost Dad’s Lightsaber as proof that he clearly couldn’t be trusted on his own. Nope.

Jacen? He probably wouldn’t feel compelled to tell their parents—probably—but it would be prime big brother teasing material for years to come, because Jacen was way too cool and together to ever have done something this stupid. So, no, not Jacen, either. His older sister, Ayelet, was generally more understanding and less teasing, but she was spending the week at art camp with their cousin, Bellona.

Fortunately, there was one person who was always ready to help Ronen, no matter how stupid, nerf-brained and moof-milkeracious he’d been.

***

It was a beautiful, peaceful Benduday morning at the Bridger household. The jogan orchard was in bloom and the Loth-cats who lived there were frolicking merrily among the trees. A perfect, peaceful day for young beastwarden Noemi Bridger to spend some quality time with her fluffy friends... Until a panicked shout shattered the peace, sending skittish cats scattering.

“Noemi!”

Noemi sighed and looked down from her jogan tree to see her best friend, Ronen Syndulla-Jarrus, dashing towards her at top speed. His lekku were twitching out of sync with each other the way they did when he was upset or agitated. It was like they had a mind of their own, one that didn’t believe there was emotion yet peace or chaos yet harmony. She wondered if Ro knew that the way his lekku twitched, it looked like he was signing “no no no....yes...no no...yes?...maybe?...no nonono NO”. She knew without even having to ask that the next words out of his mouth were going to be—

“I need your help!”

Yep, she’d called that one.

The cream-colored Loth-cat she’d been chatting with was now crouched behind a thick cluster of jogan blossoms, his tail puffed out into a giant cacta bush of fur, eying Ronen warily. *I’ll be back,* Noemi promised him as she swung herself down from the tree. “What’s up, Ro?”

“I...I’m in big trouble,” Ronen panted. His house was on the other side of the Academy complex, which wasn’t that far, but far enough if you ran the whole way. He stood doubled over, hands on his knees, trying to catch his breath. His face was flushed and the stripes on his lekku were a bright meiloorun orange with a combination of exertion and emotion-not-peace as he stood up to clarify, “Huge trouble.” Ronen threw his arms wide. “Trouble of Galactic proportions!”

“Okay… what kind of galactic trouble?” Ronen was her very best friend and had been since they were both little kids—babies, even—so she didn’t doubt him, exactly, but sometimes....sometimes Ro could exaggerate just a teeny bit.

Ronen scuffed the toe of his boot in the fallen jogan blossom petals for several moments. “I borrowed my dad’s lightsaber,” he mumbled at last and then the words came tumbling out like pebbles rolling down a hill. “I just wanted to look at the connecting mechanism between the pieces! I was going to put it back before he finished meditation group!”

Noemi winced in sympathy. That was galactic-sized trouble, all right. Parents were so touchy about kids handling or touching or even looking really hard at their lightsabers. Like they were really going to impale themselves or their brothers just by looking. Like they didn’t know enough not to touch the activator switch. Noemi was seven and Ronen was eight, which was half as old as Mom and Dad had been when they made their first lightsabers. It definitely wasn’t fair that they didn’t trust them.

“How mad was Uncle Kanan?” she asked. Uncle Kanan was the master of the Very Stern Talking-to. Some combination of the voice and the eyebrows and the arms crossed over his chest just made you want to sink into the floor.

“He doesn’t know yet.” Ronen’s voice was just this side of audible.

“So what’s the problem?” What was that grav-ball saying that Caleb liked to use when he did something stupid that hadn’t gone quite as badly as it could have—“no harm, no foul”?

Ronen stared down at the petals littering the ground so long that Noemi figured he was counting them and that he’d gotten up to a hundred when he finally admitted, “I...lost the handgrip.”

“Ohhhhh....” That was beyond galactic-sized trouble. It was trouble all the way to the Unknown Regions and probably on to whatever came after that. Noemi couldn’t blame Ronen for not wanting to find out what happened to the kid who not only committed the unforgivable sin of Borrowing a Saber Without Permission but mislaid half of it in the process.

“I looked everywhere for it!” Ronen cried, and his left lek started twitching again—no, no, no, no, no. “Twice! The emitter shroud is right where I left it, but the handgrip is just gone!”

“Hmm…” It had to be there, somewhere, since it was pretty unlikely that a Force nexus had opened up and sucked it into the World Between Worlds or something like that. They just needed to come up with a good way of locating it. “It's too bad Grandma doesn’t have her pygmy roba anymore; robas’ sense of smell is like twenty times more sensitive than a Human’s,” Noemi mused. “Or a puffer pig! They can sniff out minerals. I bet one could track the kyber crystal—”

“Noemi! Where are we going to get a puffer pig?!”

“I don’t know! It was just an idea!” Really, she was trying to help him! The least he could do was not shout at her! “Okay, show me where you had it last and we’ll track it down.” Somehow...

***
Ronen’s older brother, Jacen, was sitting in the conversation circle, munching a meiloorun and watching the Five Sabers racing championship when Noemi and Ronen got to their house. Jacen looked over at them as the holo-feed switched to an advertisement for Fizzyglug TurboCharge, the official drink of the Sabers and the sponsor of Marcus Speedstar’s ship. “Hey, younglings!” He smiled and wiped a drip of meiloorun juice off his mouth with the back of his hand. “What are you two up to?”

“Nothing!” Ronen yelped and his lekku started going no, no, no again. “We’re not up to anything!”

Noemi forced back a sigh. Ro was really not very good at this. She, however, had learned from the experts—Grandpa Doran, her dad, even Caleb—how to talk her way out of just about anything. The first rule was to stay calm. If you were as jumpy as a pocket hare, people would think you were up to something, even if you said you weren’t. Especially if you said you weren’t. The next thing was to have a good story, one that made sense. “I’m helping Ro with...a science project.” There, that was pretty good; Grandpa Doran would be proud of her for being able to come up with that off the top of her head.

Jacen leaned back on the sofa, took another bite of meiloorun and asked idly, “Oh, yeah? What kind of project?”

“What difference does that make?” Ronen shot back.

“Cool your thrusters, ace!” Jacen gave him a funny look as he swallowed his bite of meiloorun. “Just don’t want you blowing yourself up trying to build your own lightsaber or something.”

“What?!” Ronen yelped, jumping half a meter straight up like a spooked Loth-cat. “No! I’m not! I wouldn’t—“

Noemi sighed—Oh, that wasn’t suspicious at all—and shoved Ronen towards the stairs. “Just identifying minerals. Boring stuff. You wouldn’t be interested.”

Jacen didn’t look completely convinced, but fortunately for them the race had resumed and he was more interested in that than in his younger brother’s dodgy behavior. Probably he’d come running if it sounded like they were blowing themselves up, but right now Marcus Speedstar was leading by less than half a ship’s length at the bottom of the orbital sprints. “Don’t forget, it’s laundry day,” he called up after Ronen. “So Mom’ll be getting the clothes baskets. Don’t leave your smelly socks stuffed in the conversation circle to rot again!”

“Once! I did that once!” Ronen protested as Noemi prodded him down the hall.

“Come on, Ro…” They had bigger things to worry about than smelly socks. She opened the door to Ro’s bedroom. “Wow, do you actually live here?” She considered herself pretty neat, especially compared to her brother, Caleb, who definitely had several pairs of socks and probably a half-eaten tok-nut butter sandwich or three rotting in his bedroom, but her more-or-less orderly room was nothing compared to Ronen’s. She couldn’t understand how he’d managed to lose Uncle Kanan’s lightsaber; there was nowhere for it to be hidden! Ro’s bed was neatly made, his satchel and cloak were hung on their pegs, and the pile of flimsi on his desk was stacked with care.

“Okay…” Given the lack of hiding places, this couldn’t be that hard, right? She just had to approach it logically and use—what did you call it?—deductive reasoning. Like Grandma Raissa back when she was a prefect. (Noemi still wished she had Grandma’s pygmy roba, though. Deduction was all well and good, but you couldn’t fool an animal’s nose. Too bad the Loth-cats in their orchard had that feline independent streak…) “Tell me everything you did after you brought Uncle Kanan’s lightsaber in here.”

****

Ronen recounted his morning, from the time he’d furtively slipped Dad’s lightsaber from where he’d left it on his dresser and smuggled it to his room under his tunic—which hadn’t been as easy as he’d thought it would be. The pieces had been heavier and clunkier than he’d thought and had made his tunic sag and bulge alarmingly. He’d been lucky that no one had seen him; Jacen had already gone downstairs to watch the race while Mom read the HoloNet and finished her second cup of caf.

“I had the pieces on my desk,” he told Noemi. “And I’d just started to make a couple drawings, when Chopper came in, being all Chopper.”

“Mmm-hmm.” Noemi nodded, looking over the sketches he’d made. “And what did you do with the pieces when he came in?”

“I hid them in my flimsi.”

“Both of them?” She leafed through the stack. “It doesn’t look like there'd be enough flimsi here to cover them.”

“I, umm…” Ronen frowned, straining to remember exactly what he’d done in those panic-stricken moments when he’d heard Chopper’s strident BWOP from the hall. “No, you’re right! I stuck the top half under the flimsi, but it barely covered it, so I tossed the bottom…into my clothes basket!”

“What clothes basket?”

“The one right there!” He waved a hand to a spot by his dresser.

Which was currently empty.

The basket was gone and Dad’s lightsaber along with it. “Oh, no!” Ronen’s left lek twitched uncontrollably. He was so bantha fodder now.

“Didn’t Jacen say it was laundry day and your Mom would be collecting the baskets?”

“Oh, karabast!” Ronen had a pretty good idea that going through the wash machine would be unhealthy for a lightsaber’s delicate components. Of course, there was always the chance that Mom would find it before it got washed… “Oh, karabastical karabasts ! Come on, we have to find it before Mom does!”

They scrambled downstairs, ignoring Jacen’s startled calls as they tore through the conversation circle to the laundering unit off the kitchen. Mom was there already, baskets of various family members’ clothing in a line in front of her. She was leaning over Ronen’s basket. He skidded to a stop with a strangled squeak; he could see the dull glint of something metallic under the bantha-print pajama bottoms she was reaching for.

Fortunately, Noemi retained her presence of mind. “Hi, Aunt Hera!” she said brightly. “You look like you could use some help!” She reached for the clothes basket and slid it towards Ronen.

“Well, thank you, Noemi. I certainly could,” Mom said, giving her a bemused smile and eying them as if she didn’t quite trust this sudden helpfulness.

Ronen arranged his features in his most trustworthy Jedi expression. I’m innocent. Totally innocent. I didn’t do anything; I definitely didn’t lose Dad’s lightsaber. I just want to help. Mom couldn’t sense emotions the way Dad could—though she came pretty close to it sometimes—but Ronen figured it couldn’t hurt to project the right image anyway.

Suddenly, there was the sound of the back door opening. “That must be your dad,” Mom remarked, tossing a tesh-tunic into the washer.

Ronen’s stomach dropped to his boots and he gave another strangled noise that was almost but not quite a nervous laugh. He snatched the lightsaber hilt from his laundry basket and stuffed it up his tunic while her back was turned. “I…uh…have to use the ’fresher. Now,” he said dashing out of the laundry unit, ignoring her expressions of concern as he ran. He figured he had maybe a minute to get up to his room, reassemble the lightsaber, and put it back where it belonged. He put every bit of Force speed he could manage into his frantic flight.

And somehow, he did it. Even though his hands were shaking, Ronen screwed the pieces back together and sprinted to Mom and Dad’s room, where he carefully laid it on the dresser with a sigh.

“Ronen?”

Ronen jumped and spun around at the sound of his father’s voice. But, oh, karabast… he’d been so close, but now he was really and truly in for it. “Dad…Hi… I wasn’t…I was just…uh…”

Dad stepped across the room, laid a hand on Ronen’s shoulder and gently steered him towards the door. “Ro, I understand you can’t wait to use a real lightsaber—I felt the same way at your age. But for now you need to stick with the practice sabers in class, okay? If you want to take a closer look at my saber, ask and we’ll do it together.”

“I didn’t…” Ronen began, shaking his head, before it hit him. Dad didn’t know. He thought he’d caught Ro just before he’d borrowed the saber, not in the act of returning it! The bantha that had been sitting on his chest skipped away, leaving Ronen feeling like he could spontaneously launch into hyperspace.

“Right. Yes. Got it.” He nodded fervently. “I promise I won’t ever touch your lightsaber ag—uh, at all! But I, uh, promised Mom I’d help her sort laundry! Bye!” He scrambled away before Dad could comment on his little slip. He’d never been so glad to have extra housework to do, and he promised the Force he’d sort every single sock and microgarment, even fold and put them away.

It was a small price to pay to have gotten out of the Galactic-sized trouble he’d almost gotten himself into.

+++

Notes:

This story builds on an episode that was mentioned in (Not) The Ballad of Ronen Syndulla-Jarrus

The Five Sabers is a series of races first mentioned in Bloodlines. Marcus Speedstar is a racer who won it three times by 34 ABY

 

Young Ro and Noemi -- WHAT A TREAT as he gets himself in galactic sized trouble and she bails him out. I loved his musings on who he could ask for help Her composure with Jacen and "Aunt Hera" was marvelous and quite the contrast with flummoxed Ronen

Whew! I'm glad they found the handgrip and Kanan's none the wiser--Ronen was just caught being "extra curious and eager."

 

This is such a fun, light-hearted story (well, not for Ronen, obviously, but this reader certainly enjoyed it.). There was enough character development and background information that even someone who had not met these characters before could follow the events and empathize with Ronen and Neomi.

I do love the way Neomi seems to instantly see animal characteristics (ruba's hyper-sensative nose, puffer pig's ability to sniff out anything) as solutions to Ronen's problem. Thankfully, her personal approach of deductive reasoning is up to the task of finding the missing piece.

A few favorite bits:

Next time I have a dentist appointment, I'll have to try this.

Really like this insight into Twi'lek communication -- appropriately non-Human.

Is is me, or do most teenagers have the ability to work their problems up into "trouble of Galactic proportions?"

How much d'you think would he'd charge me to organize my office...?

Thank you for such a delightful little story. I'm glad Ronen got everything back in place in the nick of time.