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After Lothal, Sabine stays.
It doesn’t surprise her, not really. She’s not like Hera, who’s best home would always be her ship. She had that same buzz under her skin, an itch that never let her sit still, but she needed firm roots to come back to. Hera lives for the sky — Sabine needs a nest.
After Lothal, after Kanan and Ezra and Thrawn, she looks from the sky to the sea and then down down down to the ground, and sees… people.
People, scared and hurt and hopeful , and… and a lot of destroyed homes.
“We need relief supplies,” someone is saying, “Water and rations and medical supplies. Prefab houses.”
Everybody is looking at her. Why is everybody looking at her?
It isn’t until Hera claps her on the shoulder that Sabine realizes that the words had come from her own mouth. Funny. She doesn’t remember thinking it.
"I’ll talk to command about it, see what we can do,” she promises solemnly. Sabine nods in thanks and clasps her hand in between both of her own, and then releases.
She looks out across the sea of the capital and almost wilts in despair.
They’d retaken Lothal, but how did they keep it? How did they make it a place worth living, better than before? It was so much… Sabine had been born into war, but what about what came after? She didn’t know how to do that.
Captain Rex comes to stand beside her. “May I offer my advice?” he asks. He isn’t looking at her.
“Please,” she said, adrenaline crash already tinging the edges of her awareness. When was the last time she had slept? ‘It doesn’t matter ,’ she tells herself. ‘ There’s still things to do.’
“Place like this, they’ll have tight knit communities, more used to relying on themselves than on the government. They might not trust you at first, but if you find the leaders and work with them, they’ll trust easier.”
“I don’t know what to do,” she tells him. “I’ve never done this before.”
He chuckles. “My advice?” he says. “Water, food, shelter, in that order. Just like you said.”
Sabine nods. “Okay,” she says, “Okay.” Louder, she calls, “Anybody got a datapad I can borrow?”
“Here,” someone says, and she accepts with a tight smile and a thanks, before getting to work.
She makes a circuit of the city, first on foot, then in a small hovercart marked with Imperial colors that some enterprising citizen had commandeered and offered to the Rebellion.
“Are you sure?” She’d asked, and they smiled at her, all sharp, pointed teeth. They looked mostly human, so long as they kept their mouth closed, but the teeth marked mixed ancestry — Togruta, maybe, given the coppery shade of their skin.
They’d given a lot of close-lipped smiles over the past nineteen years, if Sabine had to guess.
“I can get another, if I feel like it,” they’d said, and that was true enough. The Imperial docking bay was just filled with transports and speeders and hovercarts, practically begging to be taken by anybody who knew how to hotwire them, which in this day and age, was most people on the Outer Rim. “You need any help?” they ask.
Sabine nods. “Yeah,” she says.
“Cool,” they say, “I’m Diwata. I figure I know more ‘bout Lothal than you.”
“Figure you do,” Sabine says. “Lead the way.”
Diwata’s a big help, pointing out which districts were hit hardest by the Empire; which people were already hurting under the Empire and would be hurting even more with a new regime change, no matter how well-intentioned; which people were doing juuust fine under the Empire but would cozy up to the Rebels to save their skins; which people would help and which would hurt and which needed the most help of all.
Sabine manually notes all that and more: which districts were hit worst by debris, which districts had running water, which districts didn’t , how many homes had destroyed, casualties, which households were willing to double-up until a more permanent housing solution presented itself, which hotels were willing — and which were unwilling — to do the same, food depots, water reservoirs, how long each would last, water filtration systems for the sea—
It’s a lot. Sabine doesn’t realize she’s completed her circuit until Rex plucks the datapad right out of her hands and gives it to someone out of her sight.
“Good work, sir,” he tells her. “That’ll get to people who can do something with it as you rest.”
“I can keep going,” she insists, and then registers the sir . “And don’t call me ‘sir’, you outrank me.”
He makes a little hmf! noise, like he doesn’t believe that, and then says, “Keep going and you’ll pass out on the wheel, or in the middle of a conversation. Get a full eight hours, you’ve been up for more than a cycle.”
Sabine narrows her eyes at him. “Four,” she says.
“Six,” Rex counters, seemingly utterly unsurprised by this turn of conversation.
“Five,” she insists, “And that’s final.”
Rex nods and agrees with her and then wakes her up eight hours later with a mug of steaming caf and news of outbreaks of looting.