Chapter Text
When she’s little, barely able to walk but already inquisitive, Kowhai hears the story of how she came to be a part of her family. Her buir Aura - Au’Bu, thanks to a child’s bumbling tongue - is the first one to tell it, mythologized into a fairytale.
“Once upon a time,” she begins, voice altered as it so often was by the rebreather her Kel-Dor physiology required, “there were a people who did not revere the Ka’ra.”
Kowhai had slapped her hands over her mouth, horrified. Even then, she’d understood the great importance that the Force had in their world, how much it could impact the outcome of events, of worlds. Au’Bu had nodded, face severe even as her eyes smiled.
“And these people thought that those the Ka’ra chose were dangerous, even demons. When children were born who were chosen by the Force, they would be left in the woods to die.”
Standing in the hallway and listening, her other buir Jasep had winced. It wasn’t as if her riduur was lying, but she’d expected some slight sugar coating to that fact. Inside the room, Aura pushed on.
“And on that world, that was expected, was the norm. But out among the stars, there were those who knew that what they were doing was wrong. A little boy had been saved from that fate, and there were many who thought that the planet as a whole should pay.”
Kowhai had, as her buire were so fond of telling anyone at all with little to no prompting, made a noise of violent agreement. Her first vocal expression of mandokarla, they would say, proudly, and it was for justice.
“But cooler heads prevailed, as they do so infrequently, and they sent some of the mando’ade to find those who had killed a child and to punish them for their actions. The Mando’ade searched high and low for those who had done wrong, and they punished them. But after they had found the last family, they realized they had made a mistake - they heard a child crying from within the house. So they found the child, who’s parents had been monsters, and they took her for their own. For it is true what we say, that it matters not who your parent was, only the kind of parent you will be.”
“Wha’ happened to d’ade?” Kowhai had asked, eyes huge.
“Well, the Mando’ade who found her took her home, and they raised her, and they swore to her the gai bal manda, and they became her aliit.”
Kowhai had thought it was a lovely story, and it was frequently requested at bedtime. Jasep would have preferred it to be requested less, or to tell a more direct truth, but the fact of the matter was that the fairytale version was better than telling your toddler that you’d been hired under the table by an (unusually) expressively angry Jetti to kill some fundamentalist Stewjoni fucks for trying to kill their force-sensitive son, and found their previously unknown infant daughter after the fact.
Kowhai grew like a weed, like the crops of kumara and taro, like the goat kids over a winter, with big eyes as blue as the skies over Concord Dawn and hair like copper. Aura taught her mando’a, and Jasep carved a training beskad from the trees with the amber sap that grew around their homestead. She’d been using it for two years when the Trouble began, and her mothers sat her down at the table in the kitchen. Au’Bu measured Kowhai for her first armor while Jasep explained the family creed. Clan Ikeni - Kowhai and her buire - were sworn into the service of a man they followed out of not only loyalty, but love. Kowhai’s buire served the Manda’lor, the Reformer, Jaster Mereel, and numbered themselves among his people, his True Mandalorians. Aura and Jasep served as something between bodyguards and an honor guard, and with discontent rising, they would be called upon to do so once again.
Kowhai had nodded with all the serious understanding she could muster at 7, and dedicated herself even further to her training. Jaster, when he came to meet with her buire, was a kind man, slighter than she’d expected but with a leader’s demeanor, who insisted she call him ba’vodu. A year or so later, Ko, starting to push towards five and a half feet and prophesying six, and wearing vambraces and a breastplate reforged from her ba’buir’s beskar, meets Jaster’s new child, a boy a few years older than her from the other side of the planet named Jango. The two of them, perched on the kitchen counter eating roasted kumara off the same plate, bond over a shared love of close combat and Jango’s proposed update to the sigil of the Haat’ade, and Kowhai is content with her place in the world, which will be at Jango’s shoulder.
***
Zhann gets her first knife when she’s six years old.
Then, her name isn’t Zhann - not really, because Iridonian-accented Basic makes Vs sound like Zs, and by the time she can say her own name, her father has long stopped correcting clients when they wonder why a child is on board the ship. She can barely keep the weight of the blade steady on her forearm, as she practices the ready position like her mother had shown her, over and over again like a ritual.
(Her mother, tapping the back of her neck to correct her posture - “Little one,” she tells her, “We do not bow our heads for anyone in this universe.”)
Six is young for many things, but not to learn how to fight, they tell her. Her parents are honed warriors who teach her many things. Her mother teaches her to fly at seven, in the clunky metal ship they call a home, when she can just barely reach all the controls. Her father teaches her how to paint the edges of her horns with poison if she thinks there’s a chance someone will grab at her, even the smallest ones on her brow. It’s not the kindest of childhoods, but they love her, and she takes to the life easily.
By eight, she speaks Basic better than either of them, practicing how to say Zhann in a near-perfect Coruscant-crisp accent so that she can butcher her own name before anyone else can. She’s the daughter of mercenaries, and she knows the power of being a step ahead the rest.
(The brush slips between her father’s teeth in his concentration. When she rears back in concern, he just laughs. “It needs to enter the bloodstream,” he says, “It’s not that easy.”)
They both die when she’s ten, on their way back to her after a job, a disgruntled client who then sent their competition after them. Their deaths teach her something else - that if anything that can turn on you, it will.
Zhann spends weeks on her own, clutching onto the dwindling supply of credits she’d fished out the ship’s secret compartment as she steals food from the port’s main supply store. Someone eventually realizes that Zabraks don’t age so differently from other near-humans, after all, and she wakes up one morning to find two droids ready to escort her to the authorities.
She’s sent off-world with all the other orphans her age, and that’s how, eventually, she finds herself in the care of the Mandalorians.
The Mandalorians, who apparently sought her out after finding out about her parents’ deaths, laying claim to her on some favor that they owned to her parents. These people take pride in taking in foundlings, that much is clear, even when Zhann is reluctant to believe their words.
Why her parents would leave her to the care of those people, she’s not sure. For all they speak of honor and duty, they hide their faces in battle yet wear their affiliations proudly as paint splashed across metal - telegraphing their weaknesses without a care. She’s supposed to learn from this, she knows - but what?
She does have a grudging admiration for the way that the Mandalorians dedicate even their children to training, despite her continued clumsiness with a jetpack. That much is familiar - the comfort of practice combat, of testing blades - and she can hold onto that for now. The young one tries to get her to spar outside of that - and Zhann turns away without a word. Let them hate her.
(At night, Zhann dreams of the dry Iridonian air - the way her father would press a kiss to her forehead - the first time she’d mastered a knife trick - the way her mother’s laugh would echo through the ship - and she would keep her eyes closed after waking, trying to keep the memory alive.)
When Kowhai is 9, she gets a sister. Zhann is reserved and independent and seems to expect that either Kowhai or her buire are going to stab her in the back. Kowhai, flat on her back after a sparring session with Jango, 17 and loud mouthed but the best sparring partner Kowhai could ask for, complains about her nervousness and tries to come up with a solution. They dance around each other for a long while, Kowhai and her armor and the Stewjoni swear words her ba’vodu Jaster had taught her, Zhann with her paranoia and her purple and blue patterned face and tiny horns.
Zhann thinks the young one, who goes by Ko, is the blood family of the other two, until she finds out that she was a foundling, too.
Ko speaks of the Mandalorians - calls them Au’Bu and Jasep, with a kind of familiarity that Zhann’s not sure she had even with her own parents while they breathed. Zhann keeps Ko at an arm’s length for near a year, because she doesn’t know what it means to have a sister, not yet.
One evening, Ko tells her how the Mandalorians had saved her in turn.
“They pledged to serve the Manda’lor,” Ko tells her, open in a way that Zhann both envies and admires, “One day, I”ll do too.”
She speaks of them as her parents, and she realizes that she means it, too. Zhann surprises herself by actually answering Ko for once. “He’ll probably die before you,” she says, flatly. “What are you going to do for the rest of your life, then?”
Ko doesn’t seem particularly perturbed. “I’ll pledge to Jango,” she says, “It’s an honor to do so. Our clan trains for that opportunity.”
Jango is like Ko - more often than not, an explosion of words and energy. Zhann has a hard time believing he’ll be the Mandalorian king one day, to imagine him as someone that important. Ko continues, “It’s what we can offer - “
“It’s what you can offer,” Zhann says, staring at the roughened, violet backs of her hands. “I’m not one of you.”
“You’re one of us as long as you fight with us,” Ko says, in another maddening Mandalorian phrase. “What’s so hard about that?”
“Plenty,” Zhann says, and she’s caught off guard when Ko snorts, daring to bump her shoulder against hers like they’re kidding around.
“You’ll be wearing the armor one day,” Ko says, with entirely too much confidence. “We all will.”
She’s right, in the end. Zhann’s loyalty grows like a stubborn weed peeking through the sand - first to Ko and her new family, then to Jango, and Jaster, until she realizes she’s as Mandalorian as the rest of them.
She’s not a believer in the Reformer mythology, not really, but she sees the honor in calling themselves the guardians of that name. Zhann becomes a warrior like her parents, but she’s guided by that mission, and it means that they will survive.
“There,” Ko says, with satisfaction, wiping a smudge of paint off the edge of the beskar. “Just like mine.”
The mark of Clan Ikeni - to serve the Manda’lor - is a bold assertion. Careful as to not smear the design, Zhann puts on the breastplate. She realizes that it’s not weakness to have paint over her hearts - it’s a warning to the rest of them. She’s sixteen, and she thinks she’s old enough to understand what it means to make that kind of threat to the world.
Kowhai - Ko, now, more often than not - and Zhann, with their beskad and their jet packs and the stag sigil of clan Ikeni painted in the blue of reliability across their breastplates so that the final points on the horns framed the kar’ta beskar, are rarely seen without each other. Jango calls them ner prudiise, my shadows, for the way they hover at his shoulder, but officially their squad is Jango’s Grunts, a name a delighted ba’vodu Jaster had given them. Jango rants in the evenings when they’re all around the fire with tiinglaar made using a combination of the Mereel, Fett and Ikeni recipes, expressing his frustration about the factions that now oppose them, about the New Mandalorians and their naive pacifism, about the Death Watch and their conservative fanaticism. Ko leans into the warmly furred shoulder of their squadmate Orum from Clan Atri’bat, a relentlessly cheerful Wookie, and makes pained eye contact with Myles of clan Briiga, Jango’s Pantoran second in command, while Zhann does knife tricks to amuse herself.
It’s during this halcyon moment just before her 18th birthday, where everything is good, that Kowhai meets Bo Katan for the first time. For the first time, Kowhai doesn’t think about the consequences or the considerations or anything other than the chemistry of it, and gives herself over to feeling. Bo Katan is funny and clever and strong and sneaky and Kowhai can imagine them fighting at each other’s side so very easily, and in the end all of it matters and none of it matters because she trusted Bo Katan and she shouldn’t have and it is, notably, possibly, quantifiably, her fault that Montross and Bo Katan fucking Kryze are able to kill her ba’vodu Jaster, her Manda’lor, in front of her and of Jango.
After Korda Six, after Jango was named Manda’lor, he tells Ko it wasn’t her fault and that he doesn’t blame her (At the time, she doesn’t believe him, or understand how you could look at someone making a stupid decision like that and forgive them. Many years down the line, watching Jango pretend to not watch the pretty Jetti knight with the core-world accent and Stewjoni-red hair, she’ll understand). She sits at the fire and watches her parents grieve both Jaster and their failure, and she paints the circle under the mythosaur (Jango’s design, now, the one he’d sketched for her at 14 while sitting on the kitchen counter at the Ikeni farm on Concord Dawn) in the gold of revenge and promises it won’t happen again.
She stays at Jango’s shoulder when he wants her there and runs missions - fact gathering, mostly - with Zhann when he doesn’t, wins the title prudii, shadow, for her efforts. She keeps Jango alive, keeps her Manda’lor, her hope, her way of life alive. The Senate doesn’t care that her people are ripping themselves apart, so she must, instead. They make a living, just barely. Jango leads them from job to job, the tiny portion of their people who are left, keeping their heads above water and their ships in the air, and he leads them the best way he is able. She hates them both - both the Death Watch who took her ba’vodu (and the Nite Owls who had taken her trust) and the New Mandalorians who believe that they can not fight at all and still win with the timely intervention of the same people who had spent centuries hiring Mandalorians to do their dirty work for them.
Then comes Galidraan.
Ko spends a great deal of the battle of Galidraan unconscious, the instantly cauterized lightsaber wound across her shoulders, across the place where she had removed her pauldrons so she could tend to the sunburn she’d developed while helping her Au’Bu pull up the kumara crop, taking her out of commission. After Galidraan, Zhann is there when they have to tell Ko that they’re all dead. Those blades of light, they had slashed through so many of them - she still smells the burning flesh.
She makes another say the words out loud - that Jango is missing. Ko is injured, but she pulls herself out of the bed, and then she’s making horrible, wracking noises in the devastation. She sits, keening, in the middle of the field of her people’s corpses, and tries to reconcile the jettise who would send her buire after someone who dared to hurt a child, and the jettise who would slaughter a people. She can’t do it, not when she’s looking at their dead, at her parents, at her people. She drags herself to the ship and looks through salt-misted eyes at her armor while she tries to clean it, tries to look at the blue stag that promised her service and still believe it. Zhann feels her mouth tighten even more, because she doesn’t know what sound she’ll make if she lets anything out, at this point. She makes a promise in her head - that they’ll find him. She’ll fix this. She’ll make it better ~
Her beskar is filthy, grime and stains on every piece. Zhann is meticulous in cleaning every crevice, until there is just blue paint underneath her fingers. She fixes every dent, in the days after, keeps the paint as a reminder of what she - what they all - once had.
Ko doesn’t sleep, and when the others wake from the exhausting sleep of those still in shock, her stag is the bright red of honor for one’s family, edged in the gold of revenge.
***
They know Jango isn’t dead, all of them. They know it because they refuse to believe it, refuse to imagine a world in which he is dead. Ko remembers the keldabe kiss from after Korda, remembers Jango crying with her while telling her it wasn’t her fault. Zhann remembers the warm but fleeting side hug after the first time he saw her painted armor. Orum remembers staff fighting and jokes and a warm smile combined with a reminder of the pledge of cin vetin. Myles remembers a strong smile and a shoulder to lean on and a leader who was learning and willing to lean on him in return.
They split up, not because they want to, but because there’s a lot of galaxy to cover. Myles and Orum take Myles’ ship, and Ko and Zhann board the ship that had belonged to their buire and fly away from the only family they have left in search of their king. Zhann does the flying, because Ko has always hated it, and Ko sits in the opposite seat and paints. She paints her mamma Jasep’s montrals onto her helmet, along with a stylized version of her Au’Bu’s rebreather, all in the deep blue of reliability, and straps Au’Bu’s blasters to her thighs. She paints the gold of revenge and anger onto her jet pack, and she swears that whoever was behind Galidraan - be they jetti or someone else - will pay for her people’s death, will pay for the suffering she is sure Jango is enduring.
She finds Bo Katan on Corellia, while she and Zhann are chasing down separate leads. She means to kill her, but the fight ends in a bedroom rather than a grave, and she slinks back to the ship to lick her bruises and deny to herself that it was just what she needed. She and Zhann bounce from the inner rim to the outer, always avoiding the Core for their own safety, taking jobs enough to keep flying, always within the bounds of the Codex, and find nothing of Jango. Once, they risk returning to Mandalore, to Keldabe City, the new stronghold of the New Mandalorians. Ko takes a feral pleasure in hearing their exploits spoken in scared whispers in reactionary coffeehouses by rebels who believed in returning a punch if it was thrown at them. Just to be spiteful, she tumbles into bed with Bo Katan’s pretty politicking sister, and wonders who it is, precisely, she reminds Satine of that she’s willing to take that risk. It’s dizzying, being a ghost, both to the New Mandalorians, and to Satine.
***
“There’s a job,” Ko says, “He’s with the Black Sun,” as Zhann runs her thumb over the hilt of her knife, the gesture familiar. “They’ll get us that money, and then some.”
“And probably kill us,” Zhann points out.
“Probably,” Ko says, considering, like she doesn’t know that Zhann knows that she knows it’s true. “So we’ll do it?”
Zhann runs her finger along the very edge of the sheath. “Obviously,” she says.
Both Ko and Zhann are sure it will cost them their adherence to the Codex, despite their research, but the boss is a considerate employer, never pushing them beyond their bounds and paying them well. Ko doesn’t expect to ever meet them, based on the stories they’ve been told about how the syndicate runs. The second job is much harder, full of twists, three identity-changing surgeries, two off-planet hunts and about five people paid to kill the two of them. It gets done, both because that’s the Codex and they’re Haat’ade, and because they’re Grunts. Their employer is - they are told second hand through a flunky - pleased, and they’re more than happy to take the next three jobs the boss throws their way - they pay well, believe in additional hazard pay, and don’t seem to mind that Ko and Zhann have a more pressing job that calls them away sometimes. It’s after the fifth that they get the first gift - it’s the tech they need to upgrade the ship’s filters, expensive and difficult to obtain. After that, they show up periodically - weaponry, extra money, the kind of spices and tea you can’t get when you’re wanted by the New Mandalorian government, long range transmission tools that let them communicate with Myles and Orum - and money. Money, even without a job to earn it. It makes both of them nervous, but the slightly awkward messages that accompany the periodic gifts give the impression of someone deeply uncomfortable with any form of affection - even if it’s just to favored employees. Ko finds it endearing, in the same way she found Jango’s insistence on redesigning the mythosaur sigil endearing. The boss sends her paint in Ikeni blue, and Ko doesn’t know what to make of it - or even how they know.
They work for the Boss - not for Black Sun, for the Boss, who turns out to be a Dathomiri zabrak with red and black patterning who calls himself Maul - for five years.
They don’t find Jango.