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melanie-ohara · 3 months

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A Hunt for Gold

Whumpuary2024, Bonus Day - Prompt: Flinching

Shin struggles to find her place with Sabine and Ahsoka

That's right, there's more! At this point I am mostly just using the prompts, this doesn't technically count as a challenge entry

AO3 Here

Sabine sat at the desk in Huyang's workshop and carefully soldered the powered plates back into her beskar's harness. She was right: the damage was too severe to be properly repaired and unless she could somehow build a forge out of twigs and shrubbery she couldn't reclaim the metal to start again. The remnants might give her enough protection from a glancing blaster bolt, but that was it. She had patched it together as best she could, and for now its appearance reminded her a little too much of Thrawn's reanimated storm troopers. She shuddered at the image. A new paint job would hide the scars, at least. Only her helmet and vambraces were still intact enough to stand up to a lightsaber - but now that Shin had started to settle in on the ship - uneasily, but it was a start - she wasn't sure how much she needed to worry about lightsabers any more. Sabine leaned back in the chair and her hand dropped to rest on her stomach, above the stab wound Shin had gifted her when they first met. Now we match, she thought to herself.

"I want to dye my hair."

Sabine jumped at the sound of Shin's voice. She had been so wrapped up in herself, she didn't even notice the door opening. Now that Shin had properly recovered from the surgery and didn't need the compression vest any more she had started wearing whatever she could find that was clean, which today was most of Sabine's training clothes with one of Ahsoka's robes draped artlessly over the top for warmth.

"Um… okay," she said, taken aback.

Shin paused and looked down at the workbench and Sabine's armour. "You're busy," she said, and turned to go.

"No," Sabine said quickly, standing up. "I have time, I mean." Shin didn't like being cooped up and it was rare to catch her in such a good mood. She was quickly learning to make the best of them.

"Your armour," Shin said, but Sabine waved her hand dismissively.

"It can wait." Shin stepped aside so Sabine could leave the room and lead the way back to her cabin. "Are we just bleaching your roots, or did you have a colour in mind?"

Shin touched the braid that hung down over shoulder, her fingers playing over the gemstones woven into it. "Green," she said.

Shin sat in the chair at Sabine's desk and talked more about how she wanted it to look while Sabine mixed the dyes and loaded them into applicator capsules for her spray tool. She got to work on her dark roots first. Shin shuddered a little as the first puff of cold pigment made contact with the top of her head and tensed as Sabine gently combed it in, but she settled in after a moment and let her work.

"What's with the gems?" Sabine asked, to distract herself from the strangely intimate feeling of carefully brushing bleach-white into Shin's hair.

"Baylan gave them to me," Shin said. "I didn't know what they were at first."

Sabine watched the teeth of the comb part Shin's hair and slip easily through the strands. "And what are they?"

Shin didn't answer for a long time, and Sabine saw her hand travel up to the crystals again. She rolled one between her finger and thumb for a while like she was thinking. "Something he gave up."

Sabine let her have the cryptic answer and backed off. She knew Shin didn't really like talking about Baylan - his leaving hurt much more than her stomach wound, and Sabine didn't want to push her. Instead, she slid the bleach dye out of her spray tool, replaced the nozzle and picked up the cartridge of green dye. She passed Shin a towel to put over her shoulders to protect the tank top she was wearing, though it belonged to Sabine and she wasn't too worried about it getting a burst of colour. With anyone else, Sabine might have draped the towel herself, but Shin didn't like to be touched.

"I'm surprised you're letting me do this," she said, and immediately wished she'd kept it to herself.

"Why?"

Sabine shrugged and fiddled unnecessarily with the settings. "I just… well, you don't like being touched, that's all."

Shin said nothing, and Sabine cleared her throat awkwardly. Just get on with it and shut up, she thought to herself, and started to carefully coat the lower strands of Shin's hair with a faint mist of green. She hadn't dyed hair this way since before the war, when she had given herself a purple ombré in the Ghost's refresher. Hera had been furious at the mess, but she had a lot more experience now - as well as better tools. While the dye was still wet, she back-combed it quickly but carefully into Shin's hair, varying the lengths of her strokes so the dye reached higher in some places than others, so the fading colour didn't look too neat. That had been her own idea: Shin was too wild for the Coruscant-salon perfect look Sabine had been trying for as a teenager.

Working on Shin's hair felt like painting. Like art. There was the same connection she felt to the canvas and the paint, only this time it was a living, breathing person under the hissing tool. She wanted to touch her, and comb her hair with fingers instead. To rub the dye into individual strands, one by one, until it was exactly how she envisioned it.

"I don't mind you," Shin said suddenly. It had been at least five minutes since either of them had last spoken.

"Sorry?"

"Touching." Shin's hands were in her lap and twisting over each other awkwardly. "It's okay, if it's you."

Sabine almost dropped the spray tool, and she was glad Shin was facing away and couldn't see the blush on her face. "Oh," she managed dumbly, and then, "good."

"Yes," Shin said. "Otherwise my roots would still be showing."

Sabine wasn't sure if it was a joke - Shin delivered every word with the same inflection, whether it was a death threat or asking for a drink - but she let out an awkward chuckle. She brushed at Shin's hair a few more times, and then put her tools down to examine her work.

"How do I look?" Shin asked, shaking her hair out and then rolling her neck to ease the tension from sitting still for so long.

Sabine stepped out from behind the chair and looked at her. "Beautiful," She said. It was the truth - the green highlights had an ethereal gleam amongst the pale blonde that made her eyes shimmer and her skin shine. The pale flush her words brought to her cheeks made for a very pretty contrast too. Sabine shook herself and picked up a hand-mirror to show Shin the back, and she nodded approvingly. Her oh-so-rare, oh-so-endearing smile spread on her lips and it was so infectious Sabine couldn't help smiling back.

"I like it," Shin said.

Before she had even thought about it being a bad idea, Sabine had leaned over her head and gently placed a kiss on Shin's forehead. She flinched like Sabine had just slapped her and almost tripped over her feet in her rush to get out of the chair and then out of the room.

"Wait!" Sabine called out, but by the time she had followed her out Shin had disappeared down the ship's ramp and into the Noti camp below. She was about to run after her when Ahsoka cleared her throat. Sabine hadn't even noticed her, but she was once again standing in the doorway of her room.

"Trouble?" she asked, one of her not-quite-eyebrows raised.

Sabine made a face and awkwardly clasped her hands in front of her. "I may have done something," she admitted.

"Like what?"

Sabine braced herself. "Like kiss Shin."

She didn't know exactly how she expected Ahsoka to react. Anger seemed unlikely, but not disappointment or frustration. She had taught her the Jedi code, and how it forbade attachment, and Sabine knew this looked like another of her arrogant rebellions.

Ahsoka smiled with a strange, almost knowing look in her eyes. "Are you going after her?" she asked.

Sabine frowned. "You're not… annoyed?" she asked. "The code - "

"My Master was married," Ahsoka interrupted. "His Master had a son nobody knew about, and I… well, let's not go into that now."

"Oh, we're going into that now," Sabine said, a little stunned by the idea that the stoic Ahsoka Tano might have dalliances in her past.

Ahsoka shook her head. "Not now." There was a hint of sadness in her gaze that convinced Sabine to drop it. Instead she dropped into a chair at the centre table and put her head in her hands with a sigh.

"I scared her off," she said, pulling her head up to look at Ahsoka. "I don't think she'll want to see me."

Ahsoka pushed herself off from the doorframe and started towards the exit ramp.

"Whoa, hey!" Sabine said, getting up like she was going to stop her somehow. "What are you doing?"

Ahsoka didn't say anything, just dropped down off the ramp to the ground below.

She thought Shin might have walked off, maybe down towards the river or out towards the mountains, but Ahsoka instead found her sat almost exactly in the middle of the Noti camp. They had all shut up their pods and powered them down, making her seem like the only living thing for miles around.

"Everything okay?" Ahsoka asked as she approached.

"They're all afraid of me," Shin said. Ahsoka looked around at the deserted camp and nodded a little. The Noti had locked themselves in as soon as they saw her.

"You were trying to kill them not long ago," she pointed out as she sat down next to her.

"Not them," Shin said. "That was the bandits. I only wanted Sabine."

Ahsoka looked across at her, taking in her new hair colour and the regret in her pale eyes. "Well you've got her now," she said. "Maybe not the way you expected."

"I didn't mean to run," Shin admitted. She picked at the scrubby ground in front of her and sighed. "I wish I didn't."

Ahsoka resisted the instinct to lay a hand on her shoulder, the way she would have done for Barriss all those years ago. "This isn't training," she said. Though she wasn't sure how Baylan had brought up his padawan, she knew he was a dyed-in-the-wool temple Jedi, and suspected he had driven her just as hard as Anakin had her. Or Luminara had Barriss. "It's hard to see at first, but it's different."

"I don't know what you mean," Shin said.

"You don't have to push yourself," Ahsoka explained weakly. She was not the person to be giving this talk, and she could imagine the infuriating way Anakin would smirk at her inability to communicate. "Whatever is between you and Sabine isn't a challenge to overcome, it's not… a trial to endure." Ahsoka sighed. "I'm no good at this," she admitted.

"No," Shin agreed, and Ahsoka smiled. Her honesty was refreshing, and reminded her not to try and make everything a lesson.

"Sabine doesn't want to rush you," she said. "She just doesn't know how not to rush herself."

Shin plucked a blade of grass and flicked it away. "I don't know how to feel this way," she admitted. "It's never happened before."

Ahsoka felt a sad smile creep over her face. She knew how that felt: there had been nothing in her training to prepare her for how it felt to see Barriss smile at a joke, and her training was all she knew. Before she had understood it, everything had changed. "Sabine knows," she said. "And you'll get the hang of it."

Shin stood up and stretched. "I'm going for a walk," she announced. "Tell Sabine…"

She trailed off, unsure, but Ahsoka nodded. "I will," she said.

Shin stared off at the ship for a while, and Ahsoka wondered what she was thinking behind her glassy, green-blue eyes. Without another word, she turned away and walked off.

#fanfic #writing #whumpuary2024 #shin hati #wolfwren #star wars #ahsoka #sabine wren #whumpuaryno14 #look at these idiots #sapphic star wars

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