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Ketsu hadn’t expected to like Nar Shaddaa as much as she did. Honestly, she hadn’t known what she was going to think of Nar Shaddaa when she and Sabine had taken off in that stolen shuttle of theirs. The only tales she’d heard of Nar Shaddaa had come to her ears by listening to dock workers spill their secrets when they got drunk at seedy dives, and who could trust that? What she knew for certain: They could reach it before the shuttle ran out of fuel. It was in the heart of Hutt Space, which meant the ISC would think twice about chasing them there. It was a good place to get lost.
(They needed to get lost.)
She’d never really examined the way she felt about Sundari until the time came that she could either leave it behind or die. Sundari was the only home Ketsu had had and the only place she was ever going to live unless she could find a way to leave. That was what the Academy had been to her, on top of a way to ensure she wouldn’t starve to death in a slum somewhere. It was a ticket out of Sundari. For as long as she could remember, she’d been so eager to get out that Ketsu would have thought she’d find that she had no affection for the place, and that anywhere would seem lightyears better.
Still… She still wasn’t certain, just what she had felt for Sundari, cradle and cage alike. When Sabine had told all and begged her aid, Ketsu had known she couldn’t stay. (She felt Sabine watching her, sometimes, and she had an idea as to why. The axe was not going to fall, no matter what Sabine thought.) Not with everything Sabine had told her.
So they blew up the Duchess as best they could with their limited supplies and their limited time, and then they’d gotten the hell out of dodge. (Sort of. Sundari’s a hard city to escape from, and though Ketsu would never have thought it possible, it was two months between Point A—blow up the Duchess and make their defection official—and Point B—get out of Sundari, and off of Mandalore.) Ketsu couldn’t have stayed, even if the ISC hadn’t been out for her blood. With the kernel of new knowledge burning in her chest, the city had looked… sick. The whole place looked diseased, as if it had been dying for years and the living that dwelt beneath the dome were the maggots that swarmed on the body of the dying, feasting on flesh prematurely.
But it had been vibrantly alive in her eyes once, and Ketsu couldn’t work out how she felt about it.
Every time she catalogued away a detail about her life on Nar Shaddaa, she found herself comparing it to Sundari. The loud, at times blindingly bright array of colors to be found in the smog, the shop signs, the street art, the people, were held up against the faded, washed-out colors of Sundari. The black market that operated out in the open without a care was contrasted against the basements and backrooms of Sundari. A multitude of languages as opposed to just Basic, and two or three dialects of Mando’a (And you didn’t hear much of either, here, though considering the latter would likely have been the ISC casting fear of the Hutts’ anger to the wind, Ketsu wasn’t quite as upset about the loss of Mando’a in her ears as she could have been). A multitude of different species, where the population of Sundari had been almost uniformly human, and largely dominated by the pale-skinned, fair-haired and light-eyed people who had lived there when Satine was in power.
She liked Nar Shaddaa, but she could never decide whether she liked it better than Sundari or not. What Ketsu knew was that though Mandalore and Nar Shaddaa had both been occupied since time immemorial had passed into the dust of ages, Sundari felt ancient in a way Nar Shaddaa did not. Nar Shaddaa felt new and novel and glitchy as too-new things often were (Because if Nar Shaddaa had to be compared to a machine, you could count on its manufacturers not being the kind of people who ran beta-tests before putting it out on the market). Its bright, glittering edges were sharp enough to cut if you rubbed your skin on them the wrong way.
Sundari was possessed of the heavy quietness that only an old place could possess. History hung heavy on its shoulders and muffled its voice. Its edges were sandblasted smooth and almost soft, but there was more than one way to cut yourself on the edge of a city, and Sundari was full of pitfalls for the unwary.
Nar Shaddaa didn’t feel solid the way Sundari had. Where Sundari had foundations of stone, walking on the surface of Nar Shaddaa was like walking on a tarp pulled taut. It wasn’t quite solid, and you were never sure if one of the ropes holding it up would give, or if you’d put your foot through a hole. Ketsu wasn’t certain which one she liked better, for Sundari’s solidness had in her last few months living in the city taken on the weight of a tomb.
It felt weird, the sudden shift in perspective that had so violently upended her life. Your cradle wasn’t supposed to be your tomb.
But then, their teachers weren’t supposed to ask them—just kids—to do the things they’d asked Sabine to do.
Maybe Ketsu didn’t know how to feel about anything.
What she did know was to keep a close watch on the alleys as she made her way back to the flophouse where she and Sabine were living. If there was one thing Nar Shaddaa and the seedier parts of Sundari had in common, it was that alleyways—unlit especially—needed to be watched, especially when you were carrying money. Their latest client hadn’t been too inclined to take the two kids who showed up about the bounty too seriously, but they took Ketsu a little more seriously than they did Sabine, so it had been Ketsu who had the most dealings with their client this time. Ketsu who told them the deed was done, Ketsu who picked up their credits, and who carried the credits back to the flophouse for them to divide amongst themselves (Once they’d appeased their landlord, anyways; he was making noises about rent payments).
And maybe the fact that Sabine had nearly jumped on their client when they’d made a smart remark about the kind of honor you found among bounty hunters played into Ketsu’s decision to deal with them by herself. That… They were going to have to talk about that, as little as Ketsu was looking forward to the conversation.
Sabine’s gonna have to grow a thicker skin, she thought uneasily, or learn how to pretend to be deaf for a few minutes.
The idea didn’t sit well with her, though.
Ketsu made her way down the narrow hallway of the flophouse, the wavy gray metal floor clanking dully under her feet—never shifting, unforgiving under anything that tread upon them. Entering their bare little room found Sabine sitting on the floor, huddled over something it took Ketsu a few moments in her own tiredness to recognize as a hot plate. One of the MREs they’d picked up from the nearby military surplus depot was sitting out by her right leg.
“Hey.” Sabine looked up briefly, didn’t quite meet Ketsu’s eyes. “Everything go okay with the client?”
Ketsu held up the bag with their credit chips. “It’s done. They paid us. That’s all that matters to me. They could’ve spat at me and I would have only hit them once.”
Sabine’s face darkened briefly. “That’s good of you,” she muttered. “It’s better than I would have done.” She went back to poring over the hot plate, and only when Ketsu put their credits down and sat down beside her did she say, abstracted, “I… This MRE’s for two, and it’s supposed to be cooked; well, we could probably eat it cold, but it would taste better hot. Cyriaca let me borrow her hot plate, but I can’t…” Her face scrunched up.
“You can’t figure out how to work it?” Ketsu supplied, tilting her head to get a better look at Sabine’s face.
“I can figure it out!” Sabine protested. “Give me long enough, and I can figure out how anything works.”
“Yeah, but I bet Cyriaca wants that back before ‘long enough.’ Move over. I’ve used a hot plate before. I had one kind of like this before I entered the Academy.”
The moment the word ‘academy’ left Ketsu’s mouth, she wondered if she hadn’t made a mistake. Of all the things they’d talked about since they fled Mandalore, the Academy hadn’t been one of them, not even in passing. Sabine stiffened, and Ketsu found herself watching her almost anxiously, not sure if she was ready for the talk they could have now, if Sabine found it in herself to want to talk about the Academy.
(Her pulse was racing, and she didn’t know why. She hadn’t done anything wrong. Those pallid days of fear when they’d hidden in the slums and back alleys of Sundari, dodging the ISC and never sleeping for more than an hour or two at a time, those days were done. They were never going to come back. Why did her pulse still race sickly under her skin whenever she thought about it?
She needed to talk about it. She didn’t know how she ever could talk about it.)
As quickly as Sabine had stiffened, she seemed to droop slightly, the tension fleeing her back and her head dipping slightly as she moved aside to let Ketsu get at the hot plate. Her shoulder-length fall of bright pink hair veiled her face as she watched Ketsu work.
“So… you’ve cooked for yourself a lot?”
“It wasn’t like there was anyone else to cook for me.” Ketsu fiddled with the knobs. “It was either cook my own food, go and get something from a stall, or starve.”
“I’ve never cooked before,” Sabine said, very softly. There was a brittle quality to her voice that Ketsu couldn’t quite pin down, and as their eyes met briefly, Sabine’s seemed… hazy.
They weren’t allowed to cook for themselves at the Academy—it was all mess hall fare, and anyone caught with a hot plate, a mini-stove, or any kind of food in their quarters would regret it. Before… It wasn’t as though Ketsu and Sabine had discussed the goings-on of the latter’s kitchen at home in any detail, but Ketsu supposed it could have been servants. She tried to imagine what it was like to have people around whose whole job was to keep you fed and make your meals for you. Tried to imagine what it was like to always have enough food, and to never feel a tooth of hunger in your belly that you couldn’t get rid of in a flash.
Couldn’t. She couldn’t imagine it at all. Even at the Academy, there had been deprivation exercises—and come to think of it, Sabine had never done very well with them. Ketsu guessed she knew why, now.
“Watch me.” Little did Ketsu like the idea of admitting she could die out here, but she liked the idea of Sabine being truly on her own and unable to do this one thing to care for herself even less. Funny how that worked. “After all—“ Ketsu raised an eyebrow “—you don’t want it getting around that Sabine Wren can’t work a hot plate, do you?”
“I’m not that bad.” But Sabine watched her nonetheless, so Ketsu was inclined to count it as a victory.
The MRE was… Ketsu wasn’t sure what it was. The guy at the military surplus depot had sworn that those meals were safe for humans, and it wasn’t like Ketsu was puking her guts out, or even that she thought she would. But the meals in general, and this one in particular, didn’t taste as if they had their origins in any plant or animal under any stars. She could pick up the robust, savory flavor she’d learned after entering the Academy to associate with meat, but the texture wasn’t right; it was just mush. She shouldn’t have expected any better—MREs were made for longevity and maximum nutritiousness, not to appease the tastes of the gourmet—but it was still a disappointment.
They could have eaten out. Street food was a lot cheaper here than it was in Sundari, and you could even get fresh fruits and vegetables for prices that didn’t make you want to gouge your eyes out. Even Sabine had expressed interest in the street food when they’d first arrived, and Sabine was only now coming out of a state of being actively miserable every minute of the day. But Ketsu didn’t want to eat out nearly as much as she would have thought she would.
Everything was different. None of the tea tasted the same, and the very idea that Ketsu could enter a teashop without being directed to the ‘no vagrants’ sign and told to try the nearest stall instead felt like someone rubbing sandpaper against the grain of her skin. The spices were different—there was so great a variety that Ketsu knew she could live here her whole lie and never get bored of them the way she’d sometimes gotten bored of Sundari’s, but it meant that nothing tasted quite the way she expected it to, and that never failed to be jarring. There wasn’t even a sister of Sundari’s underground trade in mushrooms, and considering Ketsu didn’t even like mushrooms, missing them was frankly ridiculous.
She didn’t mind being able to try new foods. After a lifetime of the same foods over and over again, trying new foods was welcome. It was just that whenever she looked for something familiar, there was nothing. There was, it seemed, at least one way in which Ketsu knew exactly how she felt about Nar Shaddaa, as opposed to how she felt about Sundari.
She’d get used to it. (She hoped she’d get used to it.)
“Are you sleeping okay?”
“Mm-hmm.”
“Really?”
“Yes, Ketsu, really. Why do you ask?”
Ketsu’s eyes followed Sabine’s hand, the way she was picking at her food with her fork, and just how little of it managed to make the journey from fork to mouth. They lifted up to her face, where pleasant features were marred by dark rings under her eyes. Ketsu pursed her lips. “I haven’t heard you say one word about the art here since we landed. There’s plenty to talk about, and I’ve seen some stuff you might like, but you barely even look at it. Sometimes I wonder if you’ve even registered any of it.”
Sabine’s fork paused, dug deep into the contents of the bowl. She blinked once, twice, three times, as if she was just now realizing what Ketsu had pointed out to her. “It’s not the same as home,” she said quietly.
“No,” Ketsu agreed. “It’s not. You could try looking at it, though. You told me you’ve always wanted to see other planets, the art on those planets. Well…” She gestured at their little room, though it made for a poor representation of the best of Nar Shaddaa (Yes, there was a best. Even as ambivalent as Ketsu was, she wouldn’t deny the place that). “We’re on another planet. We’re probably going to be here for a while. I don’t see why you shouldn’t drink it all in.”
For a long time there was silence, broken only by the entirely too faint thumps of their neighbors above and on either side of them moving around in their rooms. Ketsu wasn’t certain the two of them warranted the attention, but it felt as though the whole moon was holding its breath as Sabine searched for an answer behind her frozen face.
“I…” Her voice wasn’t cracked, not quite. It would have had to be louder for it to really come off as cracked. Sabine’s face twisted, a mask of pain and stress, before it smoothed out again, and she shrugged her shoulders. It wasn’t as convincing as she seemed to think it was, and Ketsu’s heart sank to see it. “I haven’t given it much thought. I’ve had other things to deal with; we both have.”
Here was a situation where Ketsu wasn’t certain if she would have been more alarmed if she thought Sabine was telling the truth, or if she thought she was lying. If she was lying, there was a roadblock to the conversation that Ketsu wasn’t certain she wanted to touch, let alone try and surmount—the roadblock was more touch paper than wall. If she was telling the truth… If she was telling the truth, then Ketsu had misjudged the situation. Severely.
It ought to be a therapist doing this, Ketsu thought to herself, and didn’t regard the fact that she almost managed not to sound hysterical to herself as any great feat. Not me. I don’t want to make things worse. I don’t—it’s already bad enough, and she’s…
“Why not?” she asked softly, more softly than Ketsu had even thought she could.
Sabine shrugged again, jerkily, like a puppet whose puppeteer was too harsh with the strings. Ketsu had seen a bit of puppet theater once, sneaking into an auditorium when she was a little girl, and some of the way Sabine had been moving lately reminded her of the puppets, her dyed hair and painted armor reminding her of how brightly they had been dressed. Mechanical and jerky, but those wooden puppets were never meant to be mistaken for flesh and blood. For flesh and blood to hearken back to them was incredibly jarring. “I… haven’t had time. We’ve got a lot to do here, and we haven’t got much spare time. It’s……… It’s not the same.”
“No, it’s not. But that’s what you wanted, isn’t it? Something new to look at?”
Sabine stared down at her hands, her eyes open a touch too wide, their surface a touch too bright. “I don’t think… I don’t deserve…”
There was something moving at the back of Ketsu’s mind. It scraped on the walls slowly and deliberately, like someone dragging a knife blade over brick—they didn’t care how the blade might be damaged; they just wanted to see the sparks fly, wanted to hear the awful screech of metal clashing with stone. “What do you mean, ‘you don’t deserve?’” And this time, Ketsu’s voice was sharper than she had ever thought it could be. “Looking at art isn’t about who deserves it and who doesn’t. Especially not street art; it’s out in the open for everyone to see on purpose.”
Sabine was stabbing at the bowl with her fork now, the mush emitting a thick, wet, squelching noise where the tines penetrated. “The last time I tried interacting with culture, it—“ She cut herself off, her throat visibly throbbing. The hand that held the stabbing fork shook ever so slightly.
The last time Sabine had thought long and hard about anything relating to culture, it had been to put the finishing touches on a weapon that targeted beskar exclusively. Or maybe it was when she thought about what it meant to be a Mandalorian who had been repudiated by her clan, her name struck from the rolls. Or maybe it was when she had confessed to her mother what she had done and begged her forgiveness, only for her mother—the person who had sent Sabine to the Academy in the first place, something Ketsu was unlikely to forget any time soon—to turn her back.
And the thing about the Duchess’s targeting system made Ketsu uncomfortable, sure. Handling Sabine’s armor for the first time about a year ago, that had been the first time Ketsu had even touched beskar, but even a street kid with no clan to claim her knew exactly what beskar was to the Mandalorian people. Second skin, some people called it, and in days when Mandalorians had more freedom they had painted it to show so many things—family lineage, clan allegiance, personal crest. Even when the rules, unspoken though they might have been, had constricted so that only clan allegiance was acceptable to most, the vital importance of second skin had remained. And Sabine, Sabine who was raised in one of the most staunchly traditionalist households Ketsu could imagine…
Sometimes, Ketsu wondered how Sabine could have overlooked all this, how she could have ever thought it would be okay to do this. But then she remembered how manipulated they had all been by their teachers, how many times she’d been admonished to never ask questions, and how easy it was to play on Sabine’s love of a challenge on a good day, and any anger or horror died tiredly within her. She could see it for what it was.
She wondered how blind Clan Wren had to be not to see it, too.
“It wasn’t your fault.”
Simple words. They flowed out of Ketsu’s mouth so easily, one syllable after another, like water from a tap. But Sabine reeled back as if she’d been slapped, staring at Ketsu with something close to horror etched on her face. “Yes, it was!”
The almost-screech of her voice might have been funny if they weren’t sitting on the floor of their bare little room in a flophouse on Nar Shaddaa, light-years away from Mandalore. If they were sitting in a teashop in Sundari (there on the promise of Sabine’s good breeding, of course, and not because anyone thought Ketsu Onyo any more respectable than they’d considered her the last time she was ejected for a vagrant) arguing about some minor mishap over star-mist tea and jogan buns, maybe it would have been funny. People would have stared. They might have gotten kicked out even though Sabine was a Wren of one of the highest lineages any Mandalorian these days could boast of.
Here, the sheet-metal beneath them vibrated as a maglev train zipped by, and it wasn’t funny at all.
“How, exactly?” Her voice wasn’t shaking. It couldn’t be, because Ketsu had enough control over herself to keep her voice from shaking. “How was it our fault? I went to the Academy because it was away off the streets; you went there because you wouldn’t have gotten as good of an education anywhere else.”
“Some education,” Sabine muttered. “They lied to us in history class all the time.”
Ketsu blinked. “They lied to us, yes. They lied to us all the time. They lied to you, and they lied to me. They kept telling us over and over again that everything we did, we did for Mandalore. That everything we did would make Mandalore a better place.” A future that no one had ever pretended she’d have any part of, orphaned street kid from Sundari, until she herself had come to the Academy to be an architect of that future. Sabine shuddered at ‘better place’, and a part of Ketsu wished she hadn’t brought it up, but she pressed on, “It’s not our fault they lied.” An edge of something Ketsu preferred not to name clutched at her voice. “We didn’t do anything wrong. It’s not our fault they lied to us.”
She’d watched the video footage of the ‘test runs’ that Sabine had smuggled out of their teachers’ keeping. It was that footage that had convinced that she had to leave, that she couldn’t stay, that Sundari was a dead thing that lingered on in spite of its decay and that she had to help Sabine destroy the Duchess and flee as far away from Mandalore as she could. Once she’d finished throwing up. Once she’d finished crying. Once she’d put herself back together, she’d known what she needed to do. And nine hells, it wasn’t as if Sabine would have ever been able to get out of Sundari without someone who knew the city like the back of her hand to help her. She would have been caught—killed, or worse, brought back to the Academy to put the Duchess back together—within hours.
“You didn’t do anything wrong,” Sabine said mulishly, and Ketsu let out a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding for months on end. “But I did. I…” The fork fell out of her hands at last, tipping over the side of the bowl to fall with a clang to the floor. “…My plans overshot my aim. That’s… That’s something my mother used to say about me a lot.”
“Your mother hung you out to dry like you were nothing to her,” Ketsu said bluntly, a dull burst of anger growling in her stomach. “I don’t give a damn what she said about you before.”
“Well, maybe I do!” Sabine snapped. She sucked in a deep, ragged breath that Ketsu could tell just by looking wasn’t doing anything to calm her down. Then Sabine shook her head, her shoulders slumping; her thick, ragged breaths were quieter, but Ketsu could still hear them. “I’m sorry, Ketsu. I… know you didn’t ask to be dragged into this—“
It was too easy to be angered by any implication of that—and honestly, Ketsu didn’t want to be angry. Not today. Not with Sabine. “Hey, don’t ever apologize for opening somebody’s eyes.”
“—But you don’t understand!” Sabine burst out, and the words were so old and so cracked that Ketsu wondered if they had been burning at the back of Sabine’s throat for months. “I… my family… my clan’s honor depended on their representative in Sundari keeping the vows she took.”
Ketsu sighed heavily and leaned back a little, stretching her back and staring upwards. The ceiling was made of the same wavy sheet metal as the floor and the walls. Even with passages for ventilation, she was glad this part of Nar Shaddaa was only ever cold and wet. Their new home could easily turn into an oven, and maybe Sabine was feeling like enough of a martyr to be okay with that, but Ketsu wasn’t. “You’re probably right,” she said tiredly. “I don’t understand much about honor—not the kind your clan swears by. I’ve got no parents no family, no clan to claim me, and there aren’t too many ways a Mandalorian with no clan can ever gain the kind of honor people considers important.”
“I know,” Sabine muttered, her eyes fixed on the floor. “Trust me, I know.”
And maybe Sabine had taken that into account when she’d approached her with the footage. Maybe it wasn’t just that they cared for each other; maybe Sabine had picked her because, by Sabine Wren of Clan Wren of House Vizsla’s standards, Ketsu Onyo of No-clan-to-claim-her didn’t have much in the way of a life to upend. Maybe Ketsu should be angry about that. Or maybe, she thought, something hard and hot lodging like a stone in her chest, she should be happy that a child of Clan Wren and House Vizsla thought a child of no clan at all had high enough standards that she wouldn’t stand for what was being done with the Duchess. She couldn’t sort any of it out in her head.
“It might be—no, I definitely see honor differently than you.” She could feel Sabine’s eyes on her face, so intent her skin prickled under the scrutiny. “What use is honor when your stomach’s empty and your bones show through your skin? What use is honor—“ and Ketsu couldn’t keep the bitterness out of her voice “—when you’re dead?”
“It’s your solace,” Sabine said, so automatically that it brought to mind images of her as a little girl reciting old codes of honor for her mother. The same mother who disowned her later, when Sabine showed enough courage to reject a power that could turn a weapon like the Duchess against its own people. Truly, the most honorable of Mandalorian warriors had odd ideas about what family obligations entailed.
But that was just street kid Ketsu Onyo talking.
“Sure, it’s a solace to the living, but what about when you’re dead?” Ketsu tapped her finger against her lips, grimacing. “A lot of the books I’ve read have this “your honor or your life” moment. I’ve never understood that. If your honor’s so important to you, you ought to know the only way to build it back up is to stay alive. You can’t do a damn thing about a bad reputation or tarnished honor if you’re dead.”
There came a mumbled, “You’re supposed to think about your family and your clan. When you dishonor yourself, they’re all dishonored, too. It gets worse the more closely related you are to the clan chieftain. The stains don’t wash out.” A long, labored pause. “People don’t forget.”
“Your family and your clan all did the same thing as your mother and hung you out to dry. Abandoning a kid to fend for herself isn’t dishonorable?”
“It isn’t when that kid’s already broken every oath she ever swore.” She sounded like a ghost of herself. Not the lopsided, crack-voiced ghost she’d appeared in Sundari just before their defection. There were shreds of anger seeping into the edges of her voice, but mostly, Sabine just sounded tired, and ashamed. “Ketsu… Some of the tests they ran with the Duchess, they were…”
“Your clan?” Sabine stared at her, white-lipped. Ketsu shrugged, and if the act felt like shifting the weight of a mountain range, well, that was her tale to tell to those she chose. “I know. I recognized the paint job on their armor.”
“And you…”
By now, Ketsu liked to think that she was reasonably well-versed in guessing what the ends of Sabine’s unfinished sentences contained. It wasn’t as if they’d known each other their whole lives, or even most of their lives. But Ketsu knew Sabine, and that knowledge came with certain small gifts of foresight. And this time, there were so many things that could potentially have come out of her mouth had she finished the sentence that Ketsu knew virtually nothing at all.
“They lied to us.” The track of those words was smooth and well-worn; they fell easily from Ketsu’s lips, now more than ever. “They used us to carry out their sick little games. It wasn’t our fault. They lied to us.”
It hasn’t been easy for me, either, dangled on the spoken’s heels, but something stopped them in Ketsu’s throat. She’d watched that video Sabine had smuggled out of some dusty office, and then suddenly the world she’d thought she knew was gone. Everything was different. Outwardly, Sundari had seemed the same, but to Ketsu’s eyes, everything was suddenly distorted, warped and ever-shifting like looking at something through a glass of water—or maybe she was seeing her world for what it truly was, for the first time in her life. Sundari was a corpse, and its people were maggots hat dove in and out of the lesions as they hunted for sweet flesh to devour. Or Mandalore was a diseased body, old and lumbering and carrying on despite the fact that something so feeble and so rife with pus and corruption should have succumbed centuries ago, and the cities, the domed cities that were all that was left of a planet wracked by war, they were the lesions. In either scenario, the people who lived there were the maggots, the soft, putrid agents of corruption and decay, and that was fitting. Books Ketsu had read described dishonor as a disease that infected all it touched. She had little grasp of what ‘honor’ was supposed to be, and if they could just turn their back and let the ISC and the Empire carry on as they were, she didn’t think that anyone in Sundari knew, either. Or they’d forgotten long ago.
No doubt Sabine had had a similar moment of disorientation, that terrible moment of upheaval when what you thought was your polestar was ripped away from you, and everything around you became different, despite remaining the same. After what she’d been through, it was impossible that she hadn’t felt it. But it was such an intensely private thing. Ketsu couldn’t bear to speak of it.
They sat there, silent, their supper of maybe-meat-mush forgotten. Sabine looked drained and, oddly, more fragile than she had looked even through the worst of their time as new defectors in Sundari. A nervous, pulsing energy raced up and down Ketsu’s limbs, growing stronger and stronger until finally, she had to sate it.
“Hey.” It was no effort to be casual; really, it wasn’t. “I was asking you about the art here earlier because there was something I wanted to show you. I didn’t know if you’d seen it, yet.”
Some of the glass-brittle fragility left Sabine’s face, if only because curiosity was indeed her constant companion. “What is it?”
Ketsu leapt to her feet, shaking her head. “Oh, no. That is not how this works.” She pushed down a sudden jolt of giddiness. “You want to see it, you follow me.”
Sabine quirked an eyebrow, but got to her feet anyways. “Okayyyy. I wasn’t all that hungry, anyways,” she added in a mutter, sparing one last glance at the bowl before following Ketsu outside.
They’d both wandered the streets on their own before. They’d both collected minor bounties that only called for one bounty hunter, and even if Sabine hadn’t been all that curious about her surroundings, hadn’t been too eager to drink in the sight of Nar Shaddaa’s street art, Ketsu had been. As Ketsu followed the path to what she wanted to show Sabine, she felt an uncharacteristic turn of abashed uncertainty. Maybe Sabine had seen it and had simply chosen not to express interest to Ketsu. Maybe Sabine had seen it, and hadn’t been interested in it at all.
She’d find out soon enough. Ketsu wasn’t someone to shy away from something like this, no matter the possible outcome. If that outcome happened to involve rejection, well…
She’d left for Sabine. That wasn’t the only reason she’d left. If rejection came into play tonight, Ketsu thought she could live with it. The thought of it was like the tip of a knife digging into her skin, but she thought she could live with it.
A long walk down narrow stairwells and through dark alleys (which were much less daunting to traverse when there was two of them, they were both armed, and neither of them were carrying large sums of credits—though Ketsu kind of wished she’d at least thought to give their rent payment to the landlord, in case they came back and found their room broken into) turned to a long walk down streets thronged with people, and shops, and street art. The street art was very different on Nar Shaddaa than it had been in Sundari, as different as night and day. For one thing, Sundari street art was purely Mandalorian, and in the melting pot of Nar Shaddaa a multitude of people produced a multitude of different street art traditions. It was a feast for the eyes, and someone with even the slightest interest in art would never grow bored from looking at it (And in this case, Ketsu thought she was done with traditional Mandalorian art for a while).
The other thing was that Nar Shaddaa had developed an art tradition all their own—at least, Ketsu hadn’t heard of anything similar while she was taking an admittedly myopic art history class at the Academy. It just figured, didn’t it, that a world like Nar Shaddaa would take to making three-dimensional artwork with neon lights, didn’t it?
But Ketsu liked it. She liked to see sculptures that emanated light, liked to see the swirling glitter and the pulsing color. She just hoped Sabine would like it, too.
Ketsu looked back over her shoulder to see Sabine looking at her surroundings with more active interest than she thought she’d seen in her since well before they’d defected from the Empire. Even in those last weeks in the Academy, before Sabine had learned just what use the Duchess had been put to, there had been a… narrowing. The scope of their worlds had narrowed so far, and the only thing their teachers had wanted them to see was a duty to serve the Empire with their eyes closed, to do what they were bid and never think about what they were doing.
She smiled a little, the quirk of her lips coming unbidden. Sabine caught her eye then, and Ketsu looked hastily away.
Eventually, they came to a large market square open to the sky, and to what Ketsu was increasingly thinking of as a moment of truth.
“Well?” She sounded flippant. She shouldn’t have sounded flippant; she’d wanted casual, not to sound like she didn’t care at all.
Sabine stared, open-mouthed, and Ketsu wasn’t certain she’d heard her at all.
The tree was, without a doubt, the largest neon sculpture Ketsu had seen thus far during her time on Nar Shaddaa. It must have stood more than four meters tall, and it suffused the entire square in its soft glow. Its braided trunk was a grayish-green that was subtler and softer than Ketsu had ever thought neon could be, though it shone still, glimmering in the misty sunset. The branches were the same color, and its leaves a glowing green so dark they almost hurt to look at.
The flowers were different than what Ketsu remembered. The last time she’d been here, they had been gold, brighter than any jewelry Ketsu had ever seen. Now, though, they were silver, twinkling like stars come to earth, each crowned with a hazy nimbus.
They definitely didn’t have anything like this back in Sundari. Judging by the look on Sabine’s face, they hadn’t had anything like it on Krownest, either.
“You’re right,” Sabine said at last, her voice slightly choked. “I haven’t seen this before.”
Ketsu nodded, feeling absurdly relieved. “I didn’t think so.” And just ignore the fact that that was a blatant lie. “Do you like it?” And now the anxiety was back, excellent.
“It’s beautiful,” Sabine murmured, an almost dreamy look softening the angles of her jaw and cheekbones, her amber eyes reflecting the light until they glowed. Not as bright as the neon stretching out over their heads, but the stolen light was easier to look at, easier to drink in. “How long do you suppose it took to make this?” she asked, wheeling around as she stared up into the branches.
“No idea. It’s huge, though; even if a bunch of people collaborated on it, it would have taken ages. We could ask someone, if you want?”
Still distinctly abstracted, “Maybe later… What’s this?” Sabine reached up for something Ketsu hadn’t seen before—a slip of paper tied to one of the lower branches by a bit of purple string. The fact that it was paper and not flimsi was enough to make Ketsu take a step forward, but Sabine’s startled laugh stopped her. “Seriously?”
Ketsu raised an eyebrow. “What?”
Sabine’s eyes glimmered with sudden mirth. “Come read this.”
A little perplexed, Ketsu came to stand beside her, casting her gaze up so that she could look more closely at the slip of paper. It was thick and soft, and colored in grains of red and pink and golden that swirled like stardust. Written there—
Ketsu tore her eyes away immediately, not sure whether to laugh like Sabine had done or just roll her eyes.
Whoever the writer was, somebody needed to tell them that as far as languages went, Huttese was neither poetic nor erotic. At all.
“Their poetry needs work,” was all Ketsu could think to say.
“No kidd—look, there’s more.” Sabine waved her arm around, and Ketsu saw that, sure enough, there were more slips of paper tied to the tree. There must have been dozens of them dangling there, some rich and thick, some nearly translucent and visibly brittle, and all in an array of bright colors. “Ketsu…” She wasn’t laughing, not exactly, but there was laughter in her voice, sweet to hear. “Did you seriously drag me to a kissing tree to make me feel better?”
“I… Well, I didn’t see these before, but yeah, I guess I did.” And when you put it like that, all of a sudden this all sounded kinda dumb. “I just thought you’d like to look at it.”
“Well, maybe you were right this time,” Sabine said softly, and slid her hand behind Ketsu’s neck.
Ketsu didn’t spend much time imagining what it would be like to kiss someone, no matter what her relationship with them was; she had no expectations. Cracked, dry lips against only slightly less cracked, dry lips. Soft puffs of breath, no real pressure applied, and Sabine pulled back at the first clink of their teeth. You couldn’t keep some things past their time to end, no matter how you might have liked to. Ketsu raised no protest, with only a dull pang in her chest to signal that a protest had ever lived at all. It was a small voice, after all, and in her life she had grown used to ignoring it.
“We’re in this together,” she said instead. “Try to talk to me if you need to.”
“Okay.” Sabine’s gently smiling face was belied by the slightly choked turn of her voice, the tight, taut pull of her lips. “Only if you do, too.”
Ketsu nodded, and tried to pretend she didn’t have anything to talk about at all. They had been lied to, after all. They’d been lied to, and fled a dead world for one that was, if not alive, then at least not so obviously dead. It wasn’t her fault.