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Almost five years to the day after the liberation of Lothal, Sabine gets a visitor.
That’s not unusual. She gets lots of visitors, and this being so close to the five-standard-years since liberation mark, she’s busy setting up a celebratory festival (a real one, not like the farce of Empire Day), so as one can imagine, she’s fairly swamped with meetings, and the unexpected visitor is an annoyance.
What’s unusual is who the visitor is.
“General Skywalker,” she greets coolly. She greatly respects his contributions to the Rebellion, the Jedi, and the New Republic as a whole, but respecting actions is not the same as respecting a person, and Sabine is far too Mandalorian to ever truly respect rank for its own sake.
“Governor Wren,” he responds in kind, seeming to study her, brows drawn together.
She isn’t wearing her armor, or at least, not most of it. Her pauldrons she wears everywhere, as well as the vambrace embedded with her personal commlink — the one that very, very few outside of the Spectres have the code for, not her “personal” one — but other than that, she’s wearing the standard dress of a high-ranking Lothal official, as she has for years now.
“Interim Governor,” she corrects, standing up and holding out a hand out to shake, as was considered polite in higher-up Republican circles. He ignores it, eyes going instead to her waist, where he seems to be looking for something.
“My eyes,” she informs him frigidly, “are up here.”
He flushes, twisting his fingers. “Sorry, I wasn’t — I thought I heard — nevermind,” he mutters, gaze landing on the floor.
She clears her throat, offering her hand once more. This time, he takes it, and shakes it firmly, never quite looking at her, before sitting back in his chair.
“Now, then, General, what can I do for you?” she asks, bracing herself on the table and leaning forward until she knows her knuckles have gone white under her gloves.
“I heard,” Luke Skywalker says slowly, “that there is a Jedi Temple, here on Lothal.”
“It’s been gone for almost five years,” Sabine says, shaking her head.
“That’s okay,” Skywalker says, “I heard you were there when it was destroyed, and I just… wanted to see it, I guess? See if I could… find anything.”
Sabine’s first instinct is to tell him to rent out a speeder and see it for himself, or else hire a tour guide willing to take him there, but then her eyes fall on one of the art pieces hanging on the wall of the — of her office, and she sighs.
It was an abstract piece, even for her, just the orange-red of the Phoenix Cell symbol, overlaid by blue-green flames at its heart. It didn’t mean anything to more than about half a dozen people, but to those people, it meant almost everything to those people.
Skywalker is the same age as Ezra, and has eyes the wrong shade of blue, and if the holos are to be believed, his lightsaber is green.
It’s enough.
She picks up her datapad and swipes a few times, checking and then clearing her schedule.
“Theoretically, I leave at 1700 planet-time, but realistically, it’s more likely to be 1800. If you meet me in Transport Bay 1, I can show you to the temple then,” she tells him. She’d been planning on working late, but.
But just for a second , she thought she heard Kanan in her ear, saying ‘ It’s the right thing to do ,’, and.
And they may have not always seen eye to eye, he may not have always been right, but this felt like something he would have done, if he was still around, but he wasn’t still around, and that’s why Sabine was even here in the first place, making sure Lothal didn’t fall to pieces, instead of any of a hundred, a thousand more qualified people.
Kanan wasn’t here to do this, so she had to do it instead.
“Uh-huh,” Skywalker says, gaze having gone distant and distracted, like he was looking at something just over her shoulder. On reflex, she looks behind her, and then scowls when she finds nothing there.
Fucking Jedi, honestly.
“Get out of my office,” she tells him, managing to sound much more in-charge than she thinks she should be, Interim Governor of Lothal or not.
He scampers out of her office as though honestly afraid of her, which makes her chest do something she carefully wraps up and stows away so she doesn’t have to look at it. It was something that people just did, sometimes. It didn’t mean anything.
Gently, she fingers Kanan’s lightsaber, clipped horizontally to the back of her belt and mostly hidden by her thigh-length cape, like it usually is when she doesn’t want to broadcast that she has a lightsaber.
She opens a comm-line to Rex.
‘ You served under Anakin Skywalker, right? ’ she sends.
He responds almost immediately. ‘ Yeah, why? ’
‘ Any relation to Luke Skywalker? ’ she asks, confident she knows the answer. She’s seen Ahsoka’s old holos — cousins or nephews didn’t have that sort of resemblance, at least not in her experience.
Rex takes longer to respond this time, which Sabine is fine with. ‘ I’ve heard Luke is the General’s son ,” he says, which is a rather vague answer for Rex, but it more or less gives her the opportunity she wants, so.
‘ He was just in my office ,’ she informs him. ‘ Still in the building, if you want to meet him. ’
She shuts off her personal comms.
1700 roles around, and, just as Sabine predicted, her current meeting (scheduled several weeks in advance, as they are supposed to be ) is running long, and she has another one after that, and then she has a brief call with one of the Miners’ Union’s organizers, and-
She isn’t able to leave until 1805, and even then, she has a copious amount of paperwork she still has to go over.
The Governor's Palace is almost directly across the street from where the Capitol Building was, but the empty space where the old Capitol Building had been is a memorial garden, now, and the Governor’s Palace has been a homeless shelter for nearly as long as Sabine’s been on Lothal. The temporary Capitol Building is actually the old TIE-fighter factory, shoddily renovated and with most of the machinery removed or else buried in blocks of duracrete, chosen more by accident than design — after the Lothal Campaign, the Spectres had worked out of there because it had good security and nobody was using it, and Sabine had never really left.
So in practice, when Sabine ‘leaves the office’, so to say, it’s less actually leaving and more… going to a different part of the building. She pulls on the rest of her armor, holsters her guns and tucks a vibroknife into her boot more out of habit than any fear she’ll actually need to use it.
Skywalker is turned away from her when she enters Transport Bay 1, in earnest conversation with Hanna Miller, a brown-faced woman in maintenance whom Sabine had first met when they were pulling rubble from the streets together, after the Campaign.
She nods politely to Miller, who returns the greeting, and then taps Skywalker on the shoulder.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t know it was-” he stops short when he registers her appearance. Over his shoulder, Miller pinches her nose.
“Uh,” Skywalker says, “Why are you in armor?”
Sabine casts her eyes to the hidden stars, knowing he can’t see it behind her helmet. “Because I’m Mandalorian?” she says, disbelief permeating her tone.
“Yeah, but, we’re not going anywhere dangerous, right? ‘Cause I think my sister would be mad if I told her I was just making rounds to visit old temples, and then ended up losing my other hand, or something,” he says. Sabine can’t tell if his joke falls flat because he’s trying too hard for lightheartedness, or she just doesn’t think it’s funny, or something else, but whatever the reason it does not improve her mood.
Sabine ignores him, instead turning to Miller. “Skywalker here wanted to take a look at the ruins of the Jedi ruins, and asked me because I’m one of the last people alive who saw it mostly intact.”
Miller smiles kindly, not correcting the turn of phrase like Kallus had started doing, or getting one of those pitying Looks on her face like Ketsu did, whenever she said or implied Ezra was still out there. “Ah,” she says, “Well, then, you kids have fun with that. Mind the wildlife, now.”
“Of course, ma’am,” Sabine assures her, and they nod at each other again before Miller turns to leave.
She points Skywalker towards her landspeeder, and he doesn’t budge. She clears her throat, pointing again.
“You have a lightsaber,” he says dumbly.
“Yes, I do,” she tells him drily, very carefully not brushing her hand against where it was hooked, right next to one of her blasters. “We don’t have all day, so get a move on.”
Sabine had no problem with Lothal after dark, but other people tended to, that being when the Loth-wolves were more active, but they’d been a danger to her. In truth, she was much more worried about the Temple ruins — they were treacherous to navigate even by daylight, and it would be just her luck if Luke fucking Skywalker tripped and broke her neck on her watch.
“Where did you get that lightsaber,” he asks. “I know you’re not a Jedi, I would have been able to tell.” Sabine turns towards him, annoyance coupled with anger flashing through her entire body.
“That’s pretty fucking personal, don’t you think?” she snaps. I got it from my father , she wants to say, but can’t. “I didn’t kill anyone for it, if that’s what you’re asking. Come on , I wasn’t kidding about not having all day.”
The second they’re both situated on her speeder, she tears off, too fast for Skywalker to talk unless he yells himself hoarse in her ear.
When they’re out of the city and onto the highway, she pushes the speeder harder and harder, nearly to its limits, until the wind is so loud in her ears that Skywalker could scream and scream and scream and she wouldn’t be able to hear him at all, the sound ripped from his mouth the second he opened it.
She imagines she hears Kanan’s voice on the wind, soothing away the sharp, biting, furious prickle under her skin at the implications in Skywalker’s question.
‘ Lightsabers are worth a lot, New Republic or no, ’ he’d tell her, if he was here. ‘ People have always been willing to kill to get their hands on one. ’
‘ I know, ’ she’d respond, ‘ but I’m not a thug , I don’t kill people just to take their stuff. ’ She would pause, she thinks, and then say, quieter, ‘ I would never have hurt you .’
The last part isn’t true, of course, the two of them having gotten into too many screaming, spitting fights with each other, flinging barbed words that cut deeper than any blade ever could, trading physical blows hard enough to bruise in training spars, and the Kanan in her head knows that, but he doesn’t care, because he knows what she really means.
‘ You know that, and I know that, ’ Kanan would have told her, ‘ but does he? ’
Sabine would have sighed, and shook her head, and he would have given her a one-armed hug and scratched his stubble along her airline so it itched , and- he would have liked to meet Luke, she thinks. Him and Ezra both.
Ignoring the sting of tears in her eyes, she presses on, faster, until the wind is loud enough to drown out all of her thoughts.
They come to a screaming stop just meters away from where once, the Lothal Temple had stood, now just a massive hole filled with what were generously called ruins but was more accurately described as rubble.
She disembarks without looking back, coming to the edge of the hole and sitting down, legs swinging into the abyss. She unloops her pack from her shoulders, pulling out a datapad and a stylus, and, almost absentmindedly, begins to sketch.
“Uh,” Skywalker says from behind and above her, “how am I supposed to get down there?” he asks.
“Officially, the ruins are dangerously unstable, and you are strongly advised not to enter, as we don’t have the resources to spare to keep people out, and no way to know if anyone’s trapped down there. Unofficially…” she cranes her neck to catch a glimpse of him from the edge of her visor.
“Unofficially,” she says again, “I’d say jumpings your best bet,” she says flatly
“Uh…” he says, “You know I don’t have a jetpack?”
You have the Force, dumbass , she thinks, exasperated. Sure, the drop was more than enough to break a normal human’s legs, maybe even kill one, if they happened to be spectacularly unlucky, but she’d seen Ezra take falls that height and more without so much as a scratch, and if Ezra could do it, then surely the great Luke Skywalker could, too.
“That sounds like a ‘you’ problem,” she says instead. “Look, I don’t really care what you end up doing, so long as you’re done by sundown, because that’s when I’m leaving, and I don’t care if you’re in the middle of something, I will drag you out by the feet.”
If he verbally responds, she doesn’t hear it, because she’s turned off her bucket’s audio-sensors in favor of loud rock music. She keeps half an eye on him as he picks out a path down, mostly on the incline that stormtroopers had used, five years ago, to bring men and supplies in and out, and watches him until he hits the bottom.
She considers comming Wedge, to tell him that his boyfriend is stupid, but decides against it on the basis of that being juvenile, instead occupying her times by putting together a datapacket.
It doesn’t take as long as she thought it might, for the amount of information she’s digging up that’s been archived for years. During her Rebellion days, she would probably have been bored to death by the prospect of sitting down and putting together datapackets and dossiers for hours on end, but now the motions are mindless and rote in a way that’s almost comforting.
She finishes well before sundown, and opens up her art program again, filling out and defining the sketch until it was something more easily recognizable.
A figure in orange, in front of a mural of three figures, haloed in yellow light.
She’s so caught up in art and memories that she doesn’t realize it’s dark until Skywalker is standing over her, and makes the bad decision to tap her shoulder.
Without realizing it, she’s stood up and spun around, her blaster locked and loaded directly at the face of the Hero of the Rebellion.
He stares at her with wide eyes. She holsters her blaster and switches off her music.
“Sorry,” she says, actually somewhat meaning it. “You startled me.”
“I should have known better,” he says.
“Really,” she says, “I should have kept track of the time.”
She doesn’t make to move.
“… We are leaving now, right?” he asks, after a few minutes of a fruitless staring contest.
Sabine considers, scooping her datapad and stylus into her bag and re-shouldering it, then cocking her hip and just looking at him as she thinks.
“Yeah,” she says eventually. “But I have something for you, and there’s something I want to show you before we go back to the city, if it’s alright by you.”
Skywalker seems somewhat taken aback at that. “Uh, sure? I mean, if you want.”
She holds out a datachip to him.
“What’s on it?” He asks, taking it from her and putting it in his pocket.
“Imperial holos and 3D reconstructions of the Temple, from when they were studying it,” Sabine says, adopting something like parade rest. “Copies of training holos your father made during the Clone War”—a sharp intake of breath from Skywalker—“and de-classified copies of every mission report concerning my father and brother that I have access to. There’s some other stuff, too, but those are the big things.”
Skywalker furrows his brows. “I don’t understand,” he says. “How? Why?”
Sabine blinks away tears. “As Interim Governor of Lothal, I have access to highly-classified military records, and can grant access to those records as I see fit. The training holos were given to a—friend, by a spy who happened to come across them, and I took some liberties.” She trips over the word ‘friend’, not wanting to give away more than she has to. It’s almost even not a lie. Ezra is her friend, and Ahsoka had been a spy who coincidentally had also been Anikin Skywalker’s padawan, and thus had the holos in the first place.
“But why ?” Luke asks again.
“My…” Sabine starts, and then stops again. “What do you know about the Liberation of Lothal?”
“Honestly? Not much,” Luke says. “I heard about it some as it happened, but the file is really highly classified, and you need — needed — clearance from General Hera Syndulla to access it, and it just felt kinda stupid to ask clearance to see a file about the liberation of some, no offence, backwater farming planet, just ‘cause someone on the holo said they saw a Jedi.”
“No offense taken,” Sabine tells him, almost laughing. “You should have asked her. We chased less substantial leads, back in the day, and she would have given you clearance.”
“Well I didn’t know that!” Luke huffed, and Sabine sobered. He followed suit.
“To answer your question, though… there were Jedi during the Lothal Campaign. Two of them,” She says, swallowing around the lump in her throat.
“Oh,” he breathed.
“Their names were — they were Kanan Jarrus and Ezra Bridger. I fought with the two of them for almost five years, even longer with Kanan,” Sabine says. Abruptly, she rips off her helmet and scrubs at her eyes, wiping tears all over her face. “They were my father and brother,” she tells Luke, who looks panicked, like he can’t decide whether to embrace her or give her space.
“I’m sorry,” he says.
“Ezra’s still out there,” she tells him firmly. “I know he is. He said he would be back. He wouldn’t lie about that.” She knows she must sound half-crazy, without context, and at this point enough people thought she was crazy even with context, but Hera and Zeb and Rex and even Wolffe agreed with her, because they knew what Jedi were like, so maybe he wouldn’t think so.
Luke just nods solemnly. “You said you had somewhere you wanted to show me?” he asks quietly, after a long moment.
Sabine puts her helmet back on, glad for the shield between herself and the world, and mounts the speeder again, waiting for Luke to get on behind her before taking off again, this time at a more sedate pace than the one she had been at earlier. It’s full dark out, vast grassy plains illuminated silver by the twin moons of Lothal.
“You know,” Luke says, not even having to raise his voice to be heard at this speed, “I’m from Tatooine, and I don’t think I’ll ever get used to seeing so much green in one place.”
Sabine hesitates, considering her words. “My brother went to Tatooine once,” she tells him. “Took our astromech, Chopper. Chopper says he passed out from heat exhaustion and the only reason he didn’t die is because General Kenobi found him before he had the chance to.”
Luke is silent. “General?” he asks.
Sabine nods, unsure if he’s even able to tell from his position. “Yeah. Chopper was made during the Clone War, and all the Jedi Knights and Masters were given the rank of General, courtesy of the Republic. Chop still uses the titles, sometimes.”
Quieter, she says, “Padawan Learners were Commanders, even the young ones. They had kids as young as eleven on the front lines, and they weren’t even given a choice about it, because their other option was… well, it was to leave. And the Jedi were the only home and family they’d ever known.”
“Stars…” Luke swears behind her.
“From the way I understand it,” she tells him, “Many Jedi weren’t fans.”
“I can imagine.”
They ride on in silence, until Sabine sees an outcropping of rock come into sight, at which point she slows down and stops, thirty meters from it’s base, in a small clearing of grass.
Sabine takes off her helmet and sets it in-between the helmet of the speeder, and waits.
“Be quiet,” she whispers to Luke. He mumbles some protests along the lines of how he wasn’t even doing anything, and she ignores him. It’s something she’s coming to find she’s very good at, for all that she’s known him less than a day.
Finally, she sees them. A trio of baby loth-wolves come tumbling head-over-tail into the clearing, not seeming to notice the speeder and the two humans that are also occupying it.
“Sabine,” Luke hisses at her. She ignores him, removing a glove and stretching out her hand to the closest of the pups — a grey one, with blue-silver markings and yellow eyes.
“Sabine…” Luke says again, sounding a little panicked. She can feel the heat from his hand, hovering over her shoulder.
The grey pup darts forward, sniffing at her hand. It stretches its muzzle out, almost nosing at her hand—
“Sabine!” Luke says, jostling her shoulder and sending her crashing to the ground, sending the pup scurrying back to it’s siblings with a yelp as she rolls on the ground to face him with a glare—
Only to find herself mere inches away from the yellow eyes and white face of a loth-wolf easily five times her size by bodyweight.
“Hey, Snowbird,” Sabine greats breathlessly. The wolf leans forward, and she leans up to meet her, closing her eyes briefly as she wuffles her hair.
Seemingly satisfied that the two of them don’t pose a threat to either her or her pups, Snowbird bounds over to her cubs and licks the grey one’s fur until he scrambles to his feet, at which point she grabs him by the scruff and deposits him directly into Sabine’s lap.
“This is what I wanted to show you,” she tells Luke quietly, smiling at the pup. “The mom’s name is Snowbird. This one’s Phantom. The black one’s Ghost, and the white pup’s Spectre.”
Snowbird had been named for the birds that inhabited Krownest, massive white four-winged creatures that had a way of looking directly into your soul, and finding it wanting. Phantom, Ghost, and Spectre were named after Hera’s ship and their crew, the place where she’d found her second home and family.
She can hear Luke slowly dismount the speeder, the gentle crunch of his boots as he lands on solid ground, see him sitting next to her out of the corner of her eye.
He offers a finger for Phantom to play with, and the little pup jumps, trying to catch it in his paws.
“They’re not dangerous?” he asks.
“Hard to say,” Sabine says, and Luke’s entire body goes rigid and still. Without looking at him, she can almost imagine the incredulous look on his face, the sort of thing that says ‘ You brought me this close to a mother-predator and you’re not even sure if she’s dangerous ? ’
“Some of the livestock farmers have trouble with them going after the herds, but it’s nothing a couple of electrofences won’t fix, but mostly they keep away from sentients,” she says. “But before five years ago, everyone thought they’d been extinct for a Lothal century, maybe longer, so records are… not great, and ecologists aren’t sure how they came back or if their behaviour has changed. I haven’t yet heard of them attacking anyone unprovoked, but they can hurt you” She shrugs. “Hard to say,” she repeats, “and it depends on your definition of dangerous.”
Kanan had theorized that they were a manifestation of the Force, but that answered exactly one question, and brought about ten or more in response.
“This isn’t exactly keeping their distance,” Luke states matter-of-factly, having relaxed somewhat. Phantom catches his finger in his mouth and starts to chew on it, and he doesn’t even flinch. Sabine raises an eyebrow. “Prosthetic,” he explains. She nods. That made sense.
“I think it’s the lightsaber,” she tells him. “It was Kanan’s.” She doesn’t explain right away, waiting for Phantom to realize that metal and plastic and whatever else Luke’s hand was made of wasn’t really all that fun to chew on. He lets out a whine and then scampers away to his siblings and mother, where she’s laid down, head on her paws, keeping a watchful eye on her litter and the two humans.
She brings her legs up to her chest and drops her head back, back, back, until her vision is filled with stars and she can feel the skin on her throat stretching tight enough that it almost hurt.
“He was able to talk to them, when they re-appeared. Ezra saw them first, but both of them were able to talk to them, and the rest of us weren’t even able to see them, so something was different about them, but I guess enough of whatever Force shit that let them have entire conversations with people and come back from the dead is left in them that they can tell I have it now,” she says, letting a few tears slip out of the corners of her eyes at the memories.
“You said they were extinct? For a hundred years?” Luke asks.
“Best us plebs without degrees can figure,” Sabine confirms. She releases her knees, letting gravity take hold and falling back into the dirt.
“But we don’t even know for real. For what it’s worth, I think they really were extinct, but mainstream scientific opinion is that they found a natural haven in the mountains or something, and hid there. Most STEM types are taking a while to warm up to the Force being able to do things that should be impossible. There’s more detail on the chip I gave you.”
“Either way,” Luke says, “That’s really something.”
“Yeah,” Sabine agrees with him, “It really is. They’re such an iconic symbol of Lothal, it really brought hope back to the people, no matter how it happened.”
“And that’s what rebellions are built on, right?” he says.
“Society, really,” she corrects, “It all comes back to hope, I think. Hope that tomorrow will be better, or next week, or month, or year. Hope that you made the world a better place for the people that come after you.”
“That’s a nice way of looking at it,” he tells her. She props herself up a little to get a better look at him.
“What, you don’t agree with me?” she asks him. He shrugs.
“I dunno. I’m trying to figure it all out, really. It’s kind of a lot.”
Sabine hums. “Yeah,” she says, “Yeah, it really fucking is, huh.”