Before the Saga Mirror Stone (Davin Dor & Tara Tarindae - OCs)

Title: The Shadow's Index
Author: Kit'
Timeframe: 65BBY
Characters: Tara Tarindae (OC) Davin Dor (OC)
Genre: humor, gen

Summary: Master Dor knows that you can't become the perfect Jedi through meditation alone. However, is he willing to learn that sometimes the lessons you think you teach and what the student actually learns are two entirely separate things?

Author's note: I would have sworn black and blue that I published this here already, but I can't find it except for the truncated and unfinished version from 2005.

Also This is a reworking of a Buddhist story I've put it in spoilers for you to read after the actual story.

Spoiler

Huairang asked Mazu the reason for his long bouts of dhyana.

Mazu: "I want to become a Buddha, an enlightened being."

Saying nothing, the master quietly picked up a brick and started rubbing it on a stone.

Curious after watching the master for a while, Mazu: "Why are you rubbing that brick on a stone?"

Huairang: "I am polishing it into a mirror.'

Mazu probably knew by this time that he had been set up, but he had to follow through: "But how can you make a mirror by polishing a brick on a stone?"

The master: "How can you become enlightened by sitting in meditation?"

Hope you enjoy. Concrit welcome. Feedback adored!!!

 

Davin Dor strode briskly through the temple gardens, a drink in one hand, the latest trashy romance novel in the other. Somehow he’d made it to the arboretum without bumping into anyone. He had managed to time it just right. The normally busy halls had been quiet when he’d crept from the archive. He was glad of it. If he’d had to talk to anyone on his way to the arboretum he’d probably have melted down in tears. Three weeks of report writing had tired even his normally jovial nature to the point of snapping. He rounded the corner and sighed, his favourite tree was taken.

A small girl, wearing the normal mud brown and sand grey of the initiates, was sitting cross legged under his Arboray tree, her face a picture of deep concentration. Even her hands were folded neatly on top of each knee, in a perfect copy of the pictures used in Jedi texts. This wasn’t the first day that Davin had come down to find this little girl sitting under this tree. He didn’t blame her. The Arboray’s grooved trunk was comfortable to lounge against and the dappled light from its many hanging branches made it the perfect spot on a sunny afternoon. It had been his spot since he was a teen and, even though he knew attachment wasn’t part of the Jedi code, he was very attached to his tree.

He focused again on the girl beneath the tree.

She was so perfectly still and sitting in the same pose that it almost didn’t look real. In fact he was beginning to think that she wasn’t real at all, just a new garden ornament of Master Quillan’s.

Swallowing his annoyance, Davin went to walk out of the garden. As he turned, a twig snapped under his foot and the girl's eyes flew open. She looked guiltily up at the Jedi Knight before her, her long, loose and slightly frizzy brown curls bobbing as she did so.

“Youngling,” Davin said, using his “serious knight” voice as An-Lin liked to call it. He nodded his head briefly as a kind of greeting. The child squirmed. He knew that sort of squirm. She obviously knew she was doing something wrong and had just been caught.

“Sorry,” she whispered. She stood and brushed the front of her pants off before picking up the data pad that had been lying beside her. With a shudder, Davin realized it was a shiny new copy of Twenty-seven rules of the Jedi Order. He had a strong dislike of that book. Most probably from having it waved under his nose every second day while a master lectured him on which one of the twenty-seven rules he had broken that time. Last time he had counted, he had broken a total of twenty-six of the rules. Some of them multiple times.

He realized the girl had been blabbering on at him and he hadn’t been listening. He drew his attention back to the here and now.

“I’m sorry…I was…I was meditating,” she stammered.

“Meditating?” Davin raised an eyebrow inquisitively.

“Master Yoda said that you have to meditate to become a Jedi Knight. So I was.”

He nodded slightly in acknowledgement. “What else did Master Yoda say?”

“Well, he said that you need to let go because holding onto things was a path to the Darkside. He also said that…”

It’s a wonder she managed to get Master Yoda to be so eloquent, Davin thought as the girl began to prattle on again. He listened, nodding his head a couple of times and then bent down putting his drink and data pad on the grass and picking up a stone from the path. Slowly, he began to polish the side of the rock against his pants. As the girl kept talking, Davin kept polishing, only stopping every now and again to look at it. Finally the initiate stopped and there was an odd pause where Davin stared hard at the surface of the rock he had been cleaning.

“What are you doing?” she asked curiously.

“I’m making a mirror,” Davin replied, straight-faced and serious.

“You can’t make a mirror from polishing a rock.” The girl's face was scornful.

“And you won’t become a Jedi from meditating all day,” Davin replied back just as scornfully. The girl pouted and stared at the ground, her soft brown curls framing her face.

“Master Yoda said…” she began again.

“Stop!” Davin held up the stone. He was beginning to think that Master Yoda had a lot to answer for if all initiates were like this. “Listen, all the Jedi order wants from you is what you think up here.” He pointed to her head. “Temper that by what you feel here,” he said, pointing to her heart. “You need to be educated and you need to be focused but you always have to follow your conscience. Following what you know is the right path, that’s what makes a Jedi.”

Davin poked at the girl’s database, unable to bring himself to touch the reviled book. “And if you have to circumvent the rules to do so, then so be it.”

“You mean break the rules?” the girl said unconvinced. “A Jedi shouldn’t break the rules. That’s rule Number One.”

Davin had to resist rolling his eyes at the little rules lawyer that stood in front of him.

“No, I said circumvent, there is a difference,” he said patiently, “sometimes it takes someone their entire life to work that out.”

The girl looked up at him, her green eyes confused. Davin smiled at her and tossed the stone up in the air and caught it again. The girl opened her mouth, but a voice from up the path stopped her from speaking.

“Tara!” The voice sounded annoyed. A young crèche knight stormed up the path towards them, her arms crossed over her chest. Tara shrank looking chastised. “Tara Tarindae, you should have been in class. We’ve talked about that before. You won’t become a Jedi if you don’t know anything.”

“Ahh, rule number six. So you already broke the rules.” Davin smiled at Tara, oddly triumphant in his victory over the tiny, brown-haired initiate. She glared back at him, her eyes alight with indignation. Tara grasped her data pad tighter as the crèche knight approached.

“I’m sorry if she was disturbing you,” the knight apologized to Davin. He shrugged.

“She was teaching me about how to become a Jedi.” Davin smiled at the young knight and then at Tara. The crèche knight harrumphed and began leading Tara away by the elbow.

“Hey Tara!” Davin yelled as she was led away. She turned and he threw the rock gently towards her. She caught it and looked at him with puzzled eyes, an expression that was beginning to become a bit too familiar. “Think about what I said, and, when you make that rock into a mirror, come back and tell me how.”

She nodded and trudged off after the crèche Master.

As they rounded the corner, Davin gave a weary sigh, took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose before sinking down against the familiar bark of the tree. He took a sip of his drink, still marveling at the turn of events and opened the holo novel. A wry smile lit his features as a stray thought flitted across his mind.

Mirror rock. As if that would ever happen.

 

Love to see Davin interacting with the young initiate and telling her about the rules. Breaking them shouldn't be too bad

 

Thanks @earlybird-obi-wan! Breaking rules shouldn't be too bad, but sometimes Davin sees rules as an inconvenience that should be done away with - not a great way of fitting in within the Jedi Order.

 

Three weeks later


Davin Dor smiled to himself as he nestled back against the tree. He was exhausted but at least the report for the senate was in on time and his book on the Narvian customs was coming along nicely. Taking off his glasses, he closed his eyes and rested his head back against the tree reveling in the warmth of the flickering sunshine on his face. It had been three weeks since the incident with Tara and, although he had kept his eye out for the little initiate, he hadn’t seen her.

Davin let the warmth wash over him and tried to resist the urge to fall asleep. He knew he shouldn’t. He knew that the data pad was waiting for him at home and that as part of completing his trials he had also sworn to finish writing that sith spawned thing, but leaning against the tree it was almost too hard not to just relax and go to sleep.

Just as Davin was drifting off there was the crunch of booted feet on gravel. He hoped they weren’t looking for him. The last thing he wanted was to be found by a knight with an errand in the archive or a broken data pad.

The crunching noise stopped just in front of him and Davin sighed. It was a knight and a broken data pad, he just knew it. Davin groaned and went to pick up his glasses.

Just as his fingertips brushed the ground, a blinding light flashed across the back of his eyelids, turning his world into a swirling distorted pattern of red dots. Davin screwed his eyes up tight, trying to stop whatever it was. The light flashed again rather erratically until it finally settled on his right eye.

Shading his eyes with one hand, Davin searched frantically for his glasses with his other. Finally he grasped them and he slipped them on. Hand still shading his face, he opened his eyes and spent a few bewildering moments blinking furiously to combat the little red dots that were threatening to blind him. Finally the young Jedi Knight could mostly see again.

Releasing his anger at the practical joker to the Force before he did something stupid, Davin looked around. Tara stood in the path, bouncing slightly on her toes, her face an odd mixture of triumph, studiousness and excitement.

“Davin Dae,” she intoned seriously, “experienced Archivist within the Jedi Temple, studied under Master An-Lin Nikkia. Spent most of his padawanship on the outer rim studying the Nyriaan peoples. Was thought by some to be unsuitable for knightship due to the limited amount of time he spent within the Jedi Temple and worse his seeming inability to attend classes when he was here. Also has a bad reputation for breaking the rules, and a fondness for liquor and spicy food.” There was a slight grin on her face as she finished. It was a grin that Davin didn’t much like.

“Who told you that?” Davin growled unbecomingly.

“It’s amazing what you can find out from asking,” Tara replied, the grin still firmly in place. “I wouldn’t have guessed that you would be responsible for that dint in the archive wall. That made for quite an interesting story. Master Yoda said…”

“Are you here for a reason?” Davin snapped trying to push away his irritation but not quite succeeding. He didn’t want anyone to talk about the ‘library incident’, especially Master Yoda.

“I was thinking about what you said and I realized that you’re right. You don’t become a Jedi by meditation alone. You don’t become a Jedi by thought alone. You don’t become a Jedi because of your grip on the Living Force, because of your focus on the here and now. You become a Jedi because of your compassion for others and because you realize that there is a greater good outside of yourself.”

“You grasped all that in three weeks by yourself?” Davin asked incredulously.

“No, I researched it in the library and then made up my own mind.” Tara’s voice sounded like she was trying to explain something simple to a three year old initiate who was at least one bantha short of a herd. She threw what she had been holding to Davin, who caught it easily. He stared at it for a moment not comprehending what it was.

“It’s a rock.” He said softly, not quite grasping the meaning.

“It’s also a mirror,” Tara replied. “If you turn it over you can see yourself. It makes you look weird but it works.”

Davin turned the rock over in his hands. It had been cut smoothly down the middle, revealing oddly formed blue and white crystals. Holding it up to his face he realized he could actually see himself in the stone.

“It’s not the rock I gave you,” he said accusingly. She shrugged, an eloquent gesture.

“I circumvented the rules,” she said smiling, "I saw it in the archive and I asked to borrow it."

For the first time in many weeks Davin laughed, a throaty chuckle escaping from his throat. He had been bested at his own game by someone barely old enough to tie her own bootlace.

“So Mistress Knight, what else do you want?” he asked smiling. There was a long pause in which he got the idea she was summoning the courage to ask something momentous.

“Well, I know that you don’t have a padawan,” she began. "I mean there was something in the archives that alluded to the fact that you'd had one, but I couldn't find any information about them." The words tumbled out of her mouth in a rush and her face started to glow a deep red. "But you don't have one now."

Davin's shifted uncomfortably. Obviously there were things he needed to take care of. “No, I don’t. What does that have to do with the price of Lepana fruit on Belsavis?”

“I just thought…I thought….” she tried again, stumbling over her words. “I thought since I won your challenge that you might take me as your….as your…as your padawan.” She finally blurted out.

Tara took a huge breath at the last word, her eyes boring into him. Davin was amused at her forwardness. Closing his eyes he concentrated on the Force letting it fill him to the core. Releasing his emotions, he centered himself.

He didn’t feel ready for a padawan, but somehow this felt like it was the right thing to do. Davin opened his eyes and smiled at her, confident in his own decision. Despite his choice, he couldn’t resist teasing her one more time.

“What made you think that I’d choose you?” he asked. “What if I had another initiate in mind?”

The girl wavered and for a moment looked like she was on the verge of tears. She swallowed a few times, before answering in a tremulous voice.

“But Master Yoda said…”

Yes, Davin decided. That small green Master had a lot to answer for.

 

Tara is really getting to him with her investigations

 

So Padawan Mine led me to the stories about Tara's recovery from her ordeal, which I read and was planning to beging reviewing tonight (I just love Saelyra and I need to flail over her in her own thread), but then the list you put in the OP of The Shadow's Index led me here, and I very much regret that I hadn't read this story back in January, because Tara would have gone up as Most Wholesome Character in the Fanfic Festival.

So, in case it wasn't obvious yet, I absolutely loved everything about this story, from Tara's tendency to behave like Hermione Granger to her habit of quoting Master Yoda to Davin's apparently troubled history that left dints in the Archive walls (?!?) to his unconventional teaching methods that include telling initiates to circumvent the rules. This pair is really one of a kind, and they're clearly made for each other.

I could quote the entire story, so I'm limiting myself to two favourite bits:

And just like that, we know everything there is to know about Davin (well, not everything, I suspect that there's a lot more that wasn't available to Tara either through the archives or through hearsay) and you inserted it into the story flawlessly.

I laughed out loud here. Look at little Tara, already displaying those mad archivist skillz as a kiddo!

It makes me sad to think that this bright little girl is going to go through so much hardship, but having read this particular series to the end I know that it will be a happy one. Plus, I expect to meet Tara again in further stories of the Kit'verse that I haven't read yet!

 

Nice snark. Davin sounds like someone who sees the rules as something to work around or through to reach a goal not as something to become restrictive. Tara is forthright and quick with her words and wit.

 

I saw the flurry of 'likes' as you were reading them which made me really happy. Tara and Davin are some of my favourite OCs (along with Kit, Taeyn, Essie, Nicco, Bryer, Zallie, Kirsh, and Heilan....so...um...oh and Caleum), but Tara and Davin have been around for a really long time so they are extra special.

Aww, I can't really express how happy this makes me. I really, really need to write more Saelyra stories - she's quite a bit of fun although it takes quite a lot to get into her head.

I will take this as an amazing nomination as it makes me just as happy

I should get around to writing more of Davin as a padawan - he does have rather interesting tastes...although at this point Tara has no idea about his obsession with romance novels.

Definitely! If Davin was unconvinced before, the fact the girl has done her research properly should give him little choice except to take her on.

She might even appear in your epic Greek Island prompt (but no promises).

You're right and in some ways this whole thing, plus a couple of other stories about Tara and Davin before the whole incident with the Doctor actually makes the whole issue and recovery somehow worse because you can see all the potential and all of the bright future before it get just gets ripped away. Luckily Saelyra is there to pick up the pieces for all three of them.

Thank you so much for reading it and for working your way through the stories - it's really made my week (both when I originally read this comment and also tonight when I finally got around to replying).

That's my girl! Glad you enjoyed Tara's snark and Davin's ability to circumvent any rule (or try to!). Thank you so much for reading