Chapter Text
We weren’t allowed to talk. Or sit. Or slouch.
Occasionally we’d be called upon to perform tasks - announce visitors, serve drinks, dance, among other things. But our primary duty was to stand and look pretty.
We’d always assumed we were brothers. We both had gray hair, green eyes, no parents, and no names. We even looked similar, being about the same height and size. Maybe that was why they picked us to buy.
Our master was a run-of-the-mill Sith of some modest power. Lord something or the other - can’t remember his name. He kept a manor on Tatooine and he hated it there. We hated it even more for his presence. I learned very quickly to discreetly make myself invisible to his attention whenever he was around. To be chosen as evening entertainment usually meant lightning, choking, and nothing good. My poor brother - he tried to do the same thing I did, but he’d always been the more eye catching of the two of us. His silver hair and bright eyes worked to his disadvantage.
I would always feel guilty about making him suffer our master alone, but not nearly enough to share the burden.
Then one day my brother broke the rules and spoke to me.
“One day,” he said, “we’re going to escape.”
We daydreamed about it for months, and thought over everything: where we could live, what jobs we could get to make some fast credits, what names we should call ourselves - because it would hardly be right to keep calling each other ‘slave’ once we were free, yeah? We named ourselves Aro and Aidon, after two Jedi whose names we’d probably misheard from the Imperial newscast, and rehearsed what we would say if they ever came to rescue us; or even if they came to fight our master, which would have been much more likely. But they never came, so we decided to break ourselves out instead.
It was my brother Aidon who came up with the plan. He’d found a secret escape tunnel that led from our master’s inner chambers to his private spaceport. Such a tunnel would naturally be patrolled by surveillance droids, but Aidon was confident that the devices he cobbled together could hoodwink them. And he was right. One night, after getting our master drunk blind, we took out all the droids in the tunnel one way or another, our small bodies fuelled and pushed to the limit by the thought of freedom.
We managed to make it all the way to the spaceport, where several freight shuttles were luckily waiting just barely out of sight.
“There might not be hiding spots big enough for both of us,” I said, “so we should go our separate ways from here. Stay alive and don’t worry about me, alright? We can look for each other later when we’re out and safe.”
But really I was afraid that he would be noticed and I along with him. For all that he was clever in his own right, he was younger and weaker and just too conspicuous.
It was better for one of us to make it out than for both of us to rot there.
I went first and didn’t look back. I ducked behind crates, crept around the guards, and stowed myself away in one of the shuttles. The shuttle took off and eventually landed in a spaceport that I later discovered was Nar Shaddaa. I got myself inducted into a swoop gang and then a pirate’s crew, kicked about the galaxy with them for a few years, and fled when they got rounded up by the Imperial army. Then I joined Imperial Intelligence.
I never did find out what happened to the brother I left behind.