Chapter Text
Sabine was, in many ways, a typical Mandalorian. She was blunt. She liked to get to the point quickly, instead of adding useless words that didn’t say anything. Elegance, not opulence , as her mother would say.
However, just because she was blunt didn’t mean she was unable to use subtext and double meanings. That was one of the crucial skills of the artist, after all.
Artists use lies to tell the truth.
She and Ezra were in the Phantom II , working to fix a spot of faulty wiring that had made the control panel non-responsive. Ezra was checking the control panel itself for faults, while Sabine was digging around underneath, trying to find the bad wiring.
“Whoever designed this wiring was a fekking sadist ,” she grumbled. “Who the hell puts in eleven wires leading to one button?!”
“Which one?” Ezra asked, scanning the circuit board underneath the control panel for damage.
“The fekking interior lighting. I think. I’m not sure, because there are so many fekking wires!”
“There’s eleven wires for the lights? ” Ezra sounded incredulous. “There aren’t even eleven lights on this thing!”
“I know!” Sabine ran a finger down one of the yellow-covered wires, watching as it frayed. “Who the fek even designed this? We’d need to rip out half the shabla wires in here to fix it!”
Ezra sighed. “Considering I can’t see any damage on the controls themselves, I think we might need to.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Honest.”
“I’m going to fekking kill something.” Sabine sighed and extricated herself from the mess of wires. “Guess we have to tell Hera we’re going to be rewiring the Phantom II. ”
“She’s going to kill us,” Ezra groaned.
“ Mhi me’duni an .”
“What?”
“Oh. Nothing. Just… Mando’a,” Sabine answered. Osik. Osik, osik, osik. “I didn’t mean to say that out loud.”
“I guessed that much,” Ezra replied dryly. “What’s it mean?”
Sabine hesitated for a moment, and Ezra couldn’t quite tell why. He guessed Sabine was just being cryptic. He guessed very, very wrong.
“ We will share all,” she eventually answered. “It’s a… pretty important oath.”
Understatement of the century.
“Sounds like it,” Ezra nodded.
“Yeah. It is.” Sabine chose not to mention that it was part of the marriage vows she’d been taught. He doesn’t need to know that yet.
Wait, yet?!
Ezra tapped Hera’s frequency into his commlink and Sabine silently reprimanded her own thoughts. Get a hold of yourself, Sabine!
“Spectre Six to Spectre Two.”
“Two, receiving.”
“Sabine and I are going to be rewiring the Phantom II. It’s a horror show under the panels.”
“ Copy. Do you want help?”
Ezra glanced at Sabine. “What do you think?”
Sabine shook her head.
“Sabine says we’ve got it by ourselves,” Ezra reported, with a look in his eyes that said ‘your funeral’ .
“ Copy all. Have fun.”
“We won’t. Spectre Six, out.” Ezra turned off the commlink and glanced at Sabine. “That went better than expected.”
“I think Hera knows rewiring the Phantom II is going to be punishment enough.” Sabine grimaced. “Let’s get going. I’ll start stripping the panels from the left side. You go with the right.”
“At least it’ll go faster with both of us working together,” Ezra replied. “ Mhi me’duni an.”
Sabine felt her heart skip a beat.
In total, it took about an hour and a half to strip every interior panel from the Phantom II .
There were two main issues facing the two amateur mechanics. The first was that whoever had modified the Phantom II prior to taking it had clearly hated all after-market mechanics everywhere. Half of the panels had been welded on instead of bolted, which meant that Sabine had to “requisition” (read: steal) a pair of thermal torches from the on-base engineers, since Ezra couldn’t use his lightsabre to cut the panels without risking destroying the wiring underneath. The second was that the designer had also hated all electricians everywhere. Using her helmet’s EM-Spectrum scanner, Sabine had found at least two-hundred and sixteen places where wires weren’t supposed to be on a normal Sheathipede -class shuttle, and that two-hundred-and-sixteen number wasn’t so much an exhaustive count as it was the point where she stopped counting to preserve her own sanity.
Ezra, for his part, had learned sixteen different swears in Mando’a and all the conjugations therein.
“If they’re a droid, I’m removing their parts one-by-one. If they’re not, I’m going to weld metal to their fekking bones,” Sabine swore. Ezra mentally added two new death threats to the list of one-hundred and seventeen already made.
“And then, I’m going to cut off their hands and shove them down their fekking throat!”
One-hundred and twenty.
“Seems like a lot of work to torture a guy,” Ezra deadpanned, voice muffled by the rebreather he was wearing to guard against fumes from the thermal torches. Sparks reflected off of his polarized glasses like blaster flashes. “Why not just shoot them and be done with it?”
“Because the shabuir needs to suffer for this,” Sabine growled. “One wound for every single problem they made for us. Actually, better yet–I’ll flay them alive, with one cut for every minute we spend fixing this fekking disaster.”
One-twenty-one.
The shower of sparks raining from the flame of the thermal torch ended as Sabine finished the final cut and let the panel fall.
“Heads up, Ez,” Sabine reported, catching the panel before it could fall further.
“Got it.” Ezra powered down his thermal torch and clipped it to his belt before turning to help Sabine carry the metal slab out of the Phantom II . They’d been stacking the panels to the side of the gangway as they worked. Sabine moved to the far side of the pile before setting down her end.
“Watch your fingers,” she warned. Ezra nodded.
“Wish I had gauntlets like you. Keep my fingers from getting crushed.”
“Maybe I’ll ask Clan Wren’s armorer to make some for you.”
“Isn’t that basically a proposal by Mandalorian standards?”
“No,” Sabine lied. “Where’d you hear that?”
“From Fenn Rau,” Ezra replied. “I was wondering if I could get a pair of vambraces, and you were off on a mission.”
“Okay, vambraces are one thing. Gauntlets are something else.” By the strictest of technicalities, Sabine wasn’t lying. Vambraces and gauntlets were different in that they were different parts of Mandalorian armor.
Gifting any piece of armor was akin to giving away your life.
“Please and thank you.”
Ezra tossed his canteen to Sabine. She caught it one-handed and took a drink as they headed back up the ramp and into the now-bare interior of the ship.
“I’ll be honest,” Ezra commented, looking over the mess of low-quality or outright-malicious wiring. “This looks terrible.”
“You don’t say?” Sabine replied, passing the canteen back to Ezra. “We’re going to need to run voltage tests to figure out how much power the ship’s systems actually need.”
“And figure out if this wiring is useful, or just rusted,” Ezra added.
“Don’t forget making sure all of the systems are actually properly linked with wires.”
“And making sure all the lights work.”
Sabine glanced at Ezra. “Why did we volunteer to do this?”
Ezra met her gaze and did his best to look sagely. “We do this not because it is easy. We do this because we thought it would be easy.”
“ Mhi me’duni an.” We will share all. She hadn’t told him that it was part of Mandalorian wedding vows yet. She was worried he’d figure it out and stop repeating it.
“Mhi me’duni an.” She both wanted, and wanted nothing less, than for him to find out.
They were up to three-hundred and twenty-two unique death threats, by Ezra’s count.
“But seriously! Who the hell looks at lighting, fekking lights on a shuttle , and thinks, ‘Yeah, this needs an individualized and dispersed wiring system.’ You’re just arbitrarily increasing the manufacturing cost at that point.”
“This shuttle was originally made by the Trade Federation. Their entire deal was arbitrarily increasing costs, according to Rex,” Ezra chimed in.
“Rex also spent most of his early life fighting the Trade Federation. I kind of doubt he has a… oh, Manda’s sake, what’s the word? Like when you can’t give someone a fair chance.”
“Do you mean ‘being honest’?”
“Not even. That implies he’s lying. I’m more thinking… biased! That’s the word. He’s biased.”
“Oh.” Ezra hesitated. “I mean… yeah, I guess, but everyone hated the Trade Federation. Besides, they were businessmen, right? Wouldn’t they want to lower manufacturing costs?”
“No, they did this to screw over people trying to fix their osik shuttles so if anything broke people would have to buy another shuttle instead of repairing the one they already had.” Sabine sighed. She’d found a copy of the original technical readout for the shuttle, and had spent a solid half hour trying to comprehend the logic of the design. It was more intelligent by an order of magnitude, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t dumb as the seven hells. “Fekking wish we could just buy another. Sell this one as scrap.”
“Yep,” Ezra sighed.
“Maybe we could go kill a Trade Federation exec and steal their shuttle,” Sabine offered. Ezra silently increased the death threat counter to three-twenty-three.
They worked in silence for a few minutes before either of them spoke again.
“Hey… when was the last time you ate?”
“About… 0700? I think?” Sabine shrugged. “Why?”
“It’s 1607,” Ezra answered.
“Oh.” Sabine reached a hand up to scratch the back of her head. “We should grab food.”
“Probably, yeah,” Ezra nodded. “Uh… Do you want me to grab something for you while you keep working, or…”
“I’ll just go with you,” Sabine resolved, clipping her thermal torch to her belt. “C’mon. Let’s go.”