Who: Barriss and Ahsoka What: Meeting for the first time When: Mid Oct Where: A cafe Rating/Warnings: Probably low
Barriss arrived at the café first. Or she thought she’d arrived first. When she got there, she realized she didn’t know what to look for. Other that her name was Ahsoka, she grew up Buddhist. Which… informed her of nothing of what she should look for. But when she looked around the cafe, no one looked up, with a hopeful expression, like they were waiting for someone.
She decided to order and then pick a seat in a visible spot and hope the person she was there to meet… Barriss didn’t know what she expected Ahsoka to know.
She sat there and tried to look as if she, maybe, wanted information about a dreamers online support group.
***
Maybe she should have washed the car. Not that it really mattered but she really should have. At least the engine ran smoothly now which was a small favor thanks Anakin.
Maybe she needed a car where she and her best friend weren't too tall for.
Maybe she should stop worrying about her car and go inside to see the woman who's face she'd last seen had been green and also completely losing her mind. Even if, Ahsoka could acknowledge in hindsight, Barriss had been right. It was her methods that had been the problem and that was the danger of the Dark Side, and the allure. (then again what was the point of the Light Side if one did nothing to actually help people, sometimes Ahsoka wished she had someone she could have a good discussion with about all of that.)
Right, going inside, that's what she was here for. Fiddling with her glamour watch, she climbed out of the car and walked into the cafe. It actually wasn't hard to identify Barriss; even if her nose and cheekbones weren't dead ringers the way she was sitting would have given her away too.
Cautiously, like approaching a possibly cornered animal, Ahsoka approached. "Barriss?"
***
Barriss looked up from her coffee when she heard her name.
“Oh, hi,” she said, quickly putting the cup down. “Sorry, didn’t see you come in.”
She stood up, but didn’t know if she should offer her hand. That seemed very formal for the situation – which was just… a conversation about a network. Barriss wondered if she’d made the right choice to meet a stranger from the internet.
Though, so far, Ahsoka seemed non-threatening.
“Ahsoka- Did I say that right?”
***
“I can be sneaky when I want to be,” Ahsoka replied. Though she’d learned the trick of being unseen while being seen in her dreams.
And also from playing Assassin’s Creed games.
She smiled to try to put Barriss at ease, grateful that her glamour also kept her teeth from looking like, well, a predator’s. And hoped she wasn’t staring too much.
She gestured that it was okay for Barriss to sit again. “You said it right. Did I get yours right?”
***
“Oh?” Barriss was so used to people mispronouncing her name, she’d long ago taken to answering to a few different variants as if they were also her name. Most people made the mistake from lack of knowledge, rather than ill-intent that she just accepted it. To the point that she really didn’t register it unless they were doing it deliberately or the error was particularly egregious.
“Yes,” she said after quickly reviewing what Ahsoka had said. “You got it right in one. You know, I’ve never met anyone from the internet before, you’re already doing better than almost every teacher I’ve ever had looking at roll call for the first time.”
*** "I'm a bit of a polyglot, so names come easily for me." Ahsoka rubbed her chin. "Though I did have a southern woman teacher once who could not get my name right to save her life. But she tried."
Ahsoka pulled out her own chair and sat down in it in a way that was probably subconsciously a bit like Anakin might have. She smiled, eyes darting across Barriss's face like she was looking at something familiar and maybe a little heartbreaking. "Been waiting long?"
***
“Oh, no, I haven’t been.” Barriss shook her head and then blushed. Her original intent was to ask about a dream social network - which Barriss was beginning to think was a stupidly silly thing to ask about. She was feeling foolish on that front now.
Honestly, who tells a stranger they will meet with them to talk about the weird things people posted on the internet about their dreams?
She would make a mistake like this.
But she seized on one thing Ahsoka said. “So, you speak a lot of languages?”
***
Ahsoka found herself smiling again. Barriss was being awkward but it was a little endearing. She’d been thinking all day about how she wanted to handle the dream thing. In Barriss’s case she thought she’d maybe prove there was more to it and let her discuss and come to her with questions later on.
Even if she had a thousand conversations she wanted to have with Barriss about the Jedi…
“Four fluently.” Not counting dream languages, Ahsoka mused. “English, Spanish, Mandarin and French. A couple of others I’m okay with but not fluent.”
***
“Impressive,” Barriss smiled, nodding. She was impressed, truly. In her experience, most Americans didn’t embrace bilingualism, much less quad-lingualism. Or maybe it was because she was Latinx and most Americans just didn’t like that. Racism was a multifaceted beast in America.
“I just also speak Spanish.”
***
“Cool,” Ahsoka replied. She hadn’t wanted to assume anything. Assumptions just led to hurt feelings, like the time she’d assumed Barriss was trying to help her instead of frame her.
Wow, okay, so there were some unresolved issues there. Ahsoka tabled them for the time being, since they weren’t exactly the fault of Barriss in front of her and she’d long ago come to the conclusion that, methods aside, Barriss had been right. If only she’d tried to talk to her…
“I could teach you French or something sometime. If you wanted.”
A waitress passed by with a tray full of plates, her foot catching on a raised part of the rug. Ahsoka bolted out of her chair, catching the woman with one arm and the tray with the other, subtly using the Force to prevent anything from crashing off and onto the floor.
And then, because she had after all been a student of Obi-wan and she was a lot better at this then she had been when she was younger, flashed a charming grin at the waitress as she straightened her out. “Careful, the floor is out to get you.”
She left her with a wink and sat back down. “Uh.. where was I?”
***
“Oh!” Barriss was startled by the waitress tripping, and Ahsoka stepping up to save.
“You just-!” She said, and then she paused, thinking it all through her mind again, checking things. Did she actually see that? No. No, she didn’t.
“French?” ***
“I do a lot of training,” Ahsoka said, waving her hand like it was no big deal. She nodded. “If you were interested. My only other skills are mechanical in nature, and.. people skills, I guess. I work helping the less fortunate.”
***
Huh, well, Barriss thought, she supposed that was a good explanation. Though a part of her brain was sure she’d seen something more. But Barriss was all too willing to just fit the explanation to the situation because nothing in her life had prepared her for the possibility that the supernatural was real.
She decided to move on.
“Just good at surgery, but… I could use more people skills. How do you- does someone get better at people skills?”
***
“Well…” Ahsoka tapped her chin, then leaned her elbows on the table. “You can get better at people skills. I used to have to deal with a lot of angry and … kind of stupid people over the phone, but you have to be polite and maintain your cool. It’s mostly practice, though I’m sure I can find something online. My old job had actual courses you could take in what was called ‘soft skills’ though most of that was common sense.”
***
“I… Hmm... “ Barriss frowned and then smiled. “I don’t know social media all that well, but I have a feeling if I tried googling ‘soft skills,’ that won’t take me to sites teaching me the kind of people skills I'm intending to learn right now.”
***
Ahsoka blinked, then rubbed the back of her neck. "Eheh. Well, uhm. You're probably right. Those are completely different kind of skills but they're not bad skills to have or anything they're actually really... they're more for fun private time practice and uhm..." She snapped her mouth shut before she did something stupid and impulsive like offer help with that too.
Honestly didn't know how to deal with that kind of joke coming out of Barriss and it left her flustered. "Customer service skills would.. probably get you what you want."
***
Barriss immediately regretted making this awkward. But she was finding that that was really easy to do.
“Sorry, my mind just went there… I’ll try... that word search instead.”
Okay, they needed a change in topics.
“So… does your… father live here?”
***
“I .. don’t mind,” Ahsoka said, before she could stop herself. If she was honest with herself, she wasn’t exactly the best at making friends. Hell, her relationship with Li had been several accidental dates at first. So that was a thing with her.
“Uh. Yeah he does. He runs a local temple. I probably should… call him more often.”
***
“That must be nice,” Barriss said, and she said it with meaning. “My family is all down in Florida. My dad and stepmom aren’t the type who travel. My younger sisters or brothers might come out to visit over the holidays this year. I haven’t seen them since I started my residency.
“My family is really big and loud, and sometimes they are hard to take all at once. But I’d like to see them sooner rather than later. Maybe I’ll see them altogether again when I’m done with my residency.”
***
“Well, residencies are supposed to be really really busy so they can’t really blame you for being too busy to see them.”
They probably would, but hopefully in the good natured teasing way. But with how stiff Barriss seemed, maybe not. Ahsoka had also decided to not initiate Barriss into the truly crazy things about the OC just yet. Best if she didn’t know about aliens until she started dreaming about it.
***
Barriss couldn’t argue with that. “It’s good to make friends while I’m here, then.” Even if the conversation had turned awkward for a moment and she’d completely forgotten her original intent - to ask about this dream network. Her smile was genuine, Ahsoka seemed like a nice person to get to know here.