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When Satine Kryze chose pacifism, she never thought that she would live past 20.
There had been other pacifists in the history of Mandalore, and history had not been kind to them. They were decried—as cowards, as dar'manda. Satine knew what she was choosing. She knew the risks, knew the often grisly ends of her forbearers. But she chose anyway.
Mando'a was Satine’s first language. She had learned how to wield a blade starting at age 6, a blaster at age 8. She had been a warrior once—she had been. Her father, who was both a Duke and a warlord, had been too proud a Mandalorian to not teach her the ways of their people.
But what had that gotten her? A dead father. Dead friends. So much dead family—Clan Kryze was left massacred. Little Korkie, orphaned at age 2, her younger cousin who she called nephew, was all the family she had left.
(Satine also had this—a sister who was worse than dead, whose name she couldn’t even speak at Remembrance.)
After her father was assassinated, during the year on the run with Master Jinn and Obi-Wan, (Obi-Wan—another thing she knew she couldn’t have) death on their heels, she found that others wanted it, too. They were tired of war that had made their people’s name a curse across the galaxy, that left their lands scorched and barren, that caused them to die fighting in pointless wars, to waste their lives, often when those lives had hardly even begun.
It was not easy, not by any means. But Satine had supporters, and when it was safe enough for elections to be called again, she was reelected as Duchess of Mandalore, in her own right rather than as her father’s heir. Some said her idealism was born of a youthful naïveté. Satine knew otherwise: she spent her days full of rage and grief. She was oftentimes so unspeakably furious—at her people’s losses, and how many of those losses were self-inflicted.
Satine learned to work alone. Master Jinn left her. Obi-Wan left her, and she chose to let him go. She faced betrayal, she faced corruption. But despite it all, there were eighteen years of peace on Mandalore. For eighteen years, her people were allowed to prosper. Satine resists the urge to laugh when people claim she doesn’t have the support of the people. She wouldn’t have lasted for twenty minutes on Mandalore as a pacifist without allies, without those who believed that there was a better way for their people than destruction and slaughter.
She hardly even hears the jeers anymore—stuck-up aruetii from Kalevala who won’t even call herself Mand'alor. But she knows the history of that word, the pointless wars of conquest begun, the peoples destroyed on the order of the one who held that title. Satine doesn't want her people to kill for her. She wants her people to live for her.
In the end—in the end, pacifism, and the ways of the New Mandalorians left Satine alone. Betrayed again and again by men she thought she could trust, then finally deposed.
(Perhaps it was a mercy, then—that she was killed before she had to go in front of the Senate and beg for help from the same Republic she’d worked so hard to deny intervention from not even a full year prior. Before she saw what that Republic would become and what it would do to her people.)
Satine felt a terrible, bitter sort of satisfaction when she saw Maul with the Darksaber. A symbol of violence, which had brought destruction to Mandalore over generations. It had now brought violence to Death Watch, to the ideals they claimed to hold dear. Pre Vizsla was dead, they had helped terrorize and murder their own people, and a man who did not even consider himself Mandalorian was their leader.
Satine had always thought, in a morbid sort of way, that she would probably die on the Darksaber. When Clan Vizsla stole it from the Jedi, made it a symbol of power over others, they had forgotten—no, they had warped its original purpose. She had heard it from Master Jinn and Obi-Wan often enough: the true purpose of a Jedi’s weapon is, above all else, to keep the peace. Tarre Vizsla had known that. He had been Mandalorian and Jedi both. She had always found the man fascinating when she had heard stories about him as a girl. Satine had found it interesting that, in the end, he had chosen to leave his weapon to the Jedi.
She had an idea of what Maul intends to do to her as soon as they’re captured. If she’d had time to think about it, in that moment—it would have rankled, a bit, that she was not even allowed to die for her beliefs. Satine had never been afraid to die a bloody death. Even after years of peace, years as Duchess, she had never allowed herself to imagine another fate beside dying for the peaceful future of her people.
Satine hadn’t been afraid, even as Maul choked her. She tried to look at Obi-Wan one last time and not think of the petty revenge of a twisted man about to be enacted on her body. She knew that she loved Obi-Wan, that she had never truly loved another beside him and Mandalore. And she knew that he loved her. But Satine had never thought that she would die for that love.