Chapter Text
There is only a husk of what used to be the Duchess of Mandalore. A chasm that began when she lost her family to their own need to conquer grew and grew and grew. Sometimes she wonders when all she has is her thoughts, and considering she has been alone for nearly a decade her thoughts are her only companion as if it’s her fault. Sometimes she wonders even without Obi-Wan, her Ben, by her side if she ought to have run off to be a farmer on Tawl like they daydreamed. Sometimes she does; sometimes she is eighteen years old, belly full of child, taking her little sister with her and she lives and raises her son and little sister in a world that is ignorant of war and death. They always have a bountiful harvest in her dreams and Korkie, her Kor’dika, grows up knowing her as buir than auntie. Bo grows up thinking for herself, confident in herself, and wears the same brilliant smile that Satine remembers appearing on her face whenever she used to sing her to sleep.
When she wakes up, she is met with bitter disappointment.
Bo lives. She hasn’t heard from her son since her granddaughter’s birth, but surely, he lives. She may not have the force, or know anything about the force, but a mother would know in her very marrow if her child no longer drew breath. The sun of the Empire is at its highest, bearing down on her cruelly, while she stands in an assembly line drawing needle and thread as Alyse with calloused digits, but with each day she remembers that he lives, and it makes it bearable. Bo lives and her son lives. She can only hope the same is true for her daughter-in-law and her granddaughter.
Mara. Fire. Fitting since her hair reminded Satine of a flame, lighter than Bo’s was, and more vibrant than Korkie’s who was a brilliant mixture of her own and his father’s. One clandestine comm call is the last time she had spoken to anyone. She remembers how bright her boy shone; tears pricked his eyes with pride as he held up the bundle so she could see clearly, beaming brighter than any star she’d ever seen in her lifetime.
“Now you know what it’s like to hold the galaxy in your arms,” she had told him with a watery smile.
He gave a nod and puffed out his chest just so. “I know it’s dangerous, auntie, but…” his grin was sheepish. “I wanted you to meet her.”
What kills Satine, what absolutely guts her, isn’t the fact that it’s the last time she’d see either of them, or that it’s the last time she’d ever hear from either of them, but something much worse–the husk of who she used to be was only on autopilot even then. The watery smiles and the overbright eyes were true, but there was a deep disconnection that seemed to crumble like a house of cards ever since Maul drove the Dark Sabre into her stomach.
Sometimes she moves a certain way, much like now to pick up the remaining thread from the steel floor, and winces. Sometimes lifting her arms makes her cry out.
Sometimes she longs for those reminders that she’s still alive because more and more she forgets.
“It’s easier for you to fade into obscurity,” Breha had told her, clasping her hand in hers as if they were teenagers sharing a dorm on Coruscant all over again. Her eyes were red and puffy– mourning . Satine had been mourning, too. It was Padme’s funeral and while Bail went to pay his respects, she, on account of the child they had recently adopted and her own health, had stayed behind on Aldara where Satine continued to heal. “Bail has promised to keep an eye on Lord Kor, as will I, but the Chancellor–”
“Emperor,” Satine corrected with venom. “To think I thought he was just a corrupt and stupid old man.” The acerbic barbs weren't toward Breha, who she gave a warm squeeze in support, but toward herself for being so blind.
“We were all fools,” Breha had allowed. Tears spilled from those warm brown eyes as she forced a smile to appear on her face. “It’s our job to make sure the next generation isn’t.”
As most days go, this isn’t special. The husk of the last remnants of an ancient family sits on a speeder alongside other humans and aliens alike, staring down at her callous hands, numb to the humidity of Tawl. She steps off the ledge and onto the pebbled ground once it arrives at a settlement of hovels, and Satine makes her way quietly towards the last one to the very right.
This is when she ducks into her small, spartan home. Only the necessities. She showers because the factory is without air conditioning and only one window, so she is bound to sweat. She wears her sleep clothes, eats stale stew and bread, and looks out at the skylight that rests over her bed.
She remembers when she first kissed Ben.
Laying side by side amidst wildflowers and under a starry night sky, she grasped his collar and pulled him on top of her, pressing her lips against his. It wasn’t her first kiss. That went to the date she had with one of Breha’s cousins when she was fourteen in an overpriced cafe in Coruscant; he didn’t enjoy how she was taller than he was, and Satine didn’t enjoy how he practically bathed himself in cologne. Breha, when she was simply known as the Princess Royal, had nearly fallen from her bed in laughter as Satine had recounted her date with displeasure. She had kissed a few others, but nothing made her jolt with electricity like with Ben.
He was Obi-Wan to the rest of the world and would resume as Obi-Wan when the night ended, but for that moment he was Ben. He responded back clumsily before both would break apart on account of needing to breathe.
It was innocent. Chaste, even. Far from the cave in Draboon where their son would be made, where each of them learned that sex wasn’t exactly like the holo novels described it as. And yet, as they would look into the other’s eyes, their faces scarlet, it felt far more intimate.
Absentmindedly those calloused digits press against her chapped lips and a ghost of a smile paints her face–only for it to disappear quickly.
Another ghost haunted her. Ghost of what could’ve been. Ghost of a man who was reported to have fallen while battling General Grievous.
I hope he is dead. Satine remembers thinking as she saw the Jedi Temple burn. I hope that he is given this grace, so he never has to see his home in flames.
And then the Republic set and the Empire rose and took its place.
She remembers thinking, hearing Emperor Palpatine declare the Jedi as enemies, and how the thunderous applause was deafening as she watched from her bed in horror– I hope he is dead, so he won’t spend the rest of his life in hiding . She doesn’t ask Bail or Breha. When she hears of Padme and her unborn child’s death, of Anakin’s death, she thinks that’s enough sad news for quite some time.
There is a chest beneath her bed. Inside the chest, besides some mementos she could not part with, lies a communicator. It’s practically out of use; the charge is something she changes readily, even if she wonders why she wastes the money on it, when all there has been, is static. She knows nothing happens. She knows the routine doesn’t allow for anything to happen.
She bends down, unlocks the chest, and checks her comm for the millionth time. Nothing. Places the comm back inside the chest, locks it, and shoves it back under her bed like so.
She sleeps.
Sometimes it’s just general restlessness; sometimes her bones ache, or her body is too tense to relax, so she makes do with simply laying on the bed for five to six hours at a time ‘til the sun rises and it’s ready to begin anew. Sometimes she dreams; there are dreams that are so sweet, so beautiful, that when she wakes she covers her mouth to prevent a loud sob from spilling through, and then there are the dreams–memories–that cause her to jolt up in bed with that same hand to cover her heart as if to keep it from escaping her chest.
This isn’t living, Sat’ika.
When she wakes, sometimes she sees her big brother–forever twenty-something, with those auburn curls of their mother, peering at her with sad, kind eyes. She dares not to reach out to him because she knows he will fade away as soon as she does.
“I don’t have much of a life, Donny,” she tells the apparition, and she knows it isn’t real because Adonai II hated the nickname. Well, baby Bo did, and Satine only encouraged it with equal measure. Not that he very much cared for the name they shared with their father, but it was better than Donny in his exasperated opinion. “I don’t know why I’m here.”
Pathetic. Absolutely pathetic.
You will find a reason, vod’ika, the apparition tells her kindly. His face is pink and golden amid freckles that dot his body like constellations, just like hers do, with a dimpled grin. Gold and blue splendor are the only color of the tans and browns and whites of her little hovel, of her own attire, and for the corsage are wildflowers and a lily amid them. He looks as he did at his wedding feast all those years ago. The ghost plucks the lily and hands it to Satine imploringly.
“I don’t want you to go away,” and suddenly she isn’t nearly fifty, but fourteen and heading to Coruscant from the landing pad in Sundari. She remembers how she held onto him, shoulders shaking as she sobbed. Mother was having one of her many moods that confined her to her rooms, while father was busy doing whatever he did. Only Donny had said farewell to the girl who had never left the Mandalorian system, much less been to a Core world. “If I move, you’ll disappear. I’ll remember you’re truly gone like everyone else.”
He makes a tsking voice, much like he did all those years ago. Nu kyr'adyc, shi taab'echaaj'la, he corrects.
Not gone, merely marching away.
She reaches out to take the flower.
When she opens her eyes, her pillow is wet with something other than her drool. Tears.
Every day is the same.
She wakes up. Drinks a juice that isn’t suitable for consumption on at least three systems, dresses, and waits for the speeder to pick her and others up.
The Duchess of Mandalore would glide with grace, poise, and a steel spine that came with hard-won confidence. Satine Kryze, in her private life, held the same poise, but with every fumble–stars knew she wasn’t naturally graceful; it was hard-earned–she would pick herself back up as if the stumble never happened.
Alyse Freyis slouches. Alyse Freyis stomps. Alyse Freyis doesn’t look anyone in the eye. Keep your head down and make it through the next day, she tells herself.
Slouching like a crustacean as she sits in between a human and an alien on the speeder to take her to the factory like every day. She steps off onto the pebbled ground, blonde curls always tied back in a tight bun and probably inches worth of dead-ends to contend with, and makes her way into the factory. Sometimes she is standing for long periods of time. Sometimes she slouches over a sewing machine. It’s loud, stuffy, and completely monotonous.
Thirty-minute lunch break. She speaks to no one. She’d much rather take her lunch at her workstation so she could continue her work, but she knows that will make her stand out. Satine remembers this dance well. Do well enough to get by, but not too well to be noticed and stand out.
She did it once when she was a teenager on the run with a master and a padawan; now she does it three decades later without companionship. There is no one who waits for her after her work shift to needle her for responses, get under her skin for a reaction, nor are there any nuggets of wisdom, be it straightforward or frustratingly vague, at the end of the day.
Routine is all there is.
There she sits, this husk known as Alyse Freyis, in wool of tans and browns and whites, on a filthy rock as she all but devours the bread in her hands. Bread and stew. Honestly, she is living a life of luxury compared to the last time she was in exile as a young girl; they lived hand-to-mouth and mostly on stale and tasteless ration bars.
She’d eat a thousand stale and tasteless ration bars if it meant an end to being so...adrift. Unmoored. Lost.
“I miss Coruscant,” she remembers Ben telling her. It was the first morning in the cave and they lay together, skin to skin, underneath his brown robe. It would be another day until the weather would let up and, thankfully, they had enough supplies to last ‘till then. Her fingers absentmindedly mapped the pathway from the bobbing of his throat down to his chest. It was bare, then. Bare save for the auburn curls beneath his belly button. “I miss the Temple. I even miss Master Yaddle reminiscing what a terror I was in the creche–”
“Was?” She teased, snickering, earning a soft pat on her bare backside.
“As I was saying,” but he’s snickering, too, the same hand that gave her the pat was holding her to his side, while the other propped up behind his head to act like a pillow. As for her, she was comfortable simply resting her head against his beating heart. “I was a terror. Kept Master Yaddle up all hours trying to soothe me when I was little; eventually, she just let me talk myself down as she stayed up with me listening until I fell asleep.”
It was a sweet story. Yaddle sounded almost maternal, but Satine remembered Ben explaining the Jedi were more communal than nuclear. “So you talked yourself to sleep?”
A pat became a swat, which led her to pinch one of his ribs in retaliation. “Wicked woman!” Then he rolled on top of her, still basking in the post-coital euphoria with all the eagerness of youth. She was the same way, since she distinctively remembers wrapping her legs around him daringly. “Must you be so divisive?” He crooned, lips brushing against her neck, and she could feel how awake he was against her thigh. Nipping the flesh of her long neck, she felt him chuckle against her skin as his mouth trailed downward. “Thank the stars I know a way to keep you–”
Even if she did her best to keep her own amusement at bay– and failed miserably! –a fist full of his auburn hair was bunched up in her fist, causing him to look up from where he was at the time, to where she wanted him most. Between her bare thighs. “Shut up, Ben.”
“Back to work!” Three protocol droids chorus, ushering the employees back inside.
She stuffs the remaining bites in her mouth, dusts off the crumbs, and makes her way inside.
It’s the last day of the week. Once the bell chimes and it’s another day ended, credits are placed into her hand by one of the red protocol droids. She places the credits in her satchel and makes her way to the speeder that will bring her to her temporary home. This is where Alyse Freyis will duck inside the hovel, shower, eat, check the comm only to see no messages, and sleep with ghosts.
This time, the ghost is her sister. Not the angry teenager that freed her from imprisonment. Not the woman she imagines in her mind, probably covered with beskar, keeping her auburn hair short and easy to manage as she commanded troops. She sees the three-year-old who sits at the end of her bed, swinging her chubby baby-ish legs to and fro, giving a big smile.
“I’m sorry I wasn’t there to protect you,” Satine whispers.
The toddler’s smile fades.
And Satine, or Alyse , falls asleep.
After six years of nothing, of pure silence, it’s on her day off as she sits, mindlessly stirring her tea, the comm beeps. The routine is interrupted and it’s a jolt to her system.
With both fear and excitement, she places the mug aside before falling to her knees–wincing, stars, she isn’t young anymore–to quickly unlock that chest.
One message. Unknown.
Licking her lips, she pauses, this very well could be a trap. She was quite vocal in Delegation 2000 during the twilight of the Clone Wars. To put it lightly, Palpatine, even when she only saw him as a corrupt and stupid man, no different than the rest, was not someone who she rubbed shoulders with. The whole reason why she was urged to bow out was because she wouldn’t know how to bow her head and keep her thoughts to herself. It would be too suspicious.
Well, that was who she used to be.
And yet, even with the threat of an Imperial tracker, her finger presses a button, and an outline figure appears.
“Su’cuy, Auntie.”
She covers her mouth with both hands. The outline of the man who she still sees as a little boy appears. A perfect mixture of herself and Ben, standing tall, with dark circles under his eyes. Gaunt. Gone are the bright eyes and full cheeks of the young man who held his newborn daughter during their last comm call, but all she sees is a ghost.
She knows ghosts. She carries ghosts with her. Sometimes she thinks she’s nothing more than a ghost, herself.
“It is unfortunate that I must ask this of you,” she hears how his voice cracks, and even with the glitching image she can notice how his eyes are tear-stained. Red. She wants to reach out to him and hold him, kiss his head like she would when he was a little baby, and ask about what troubles him. He is her only child in the entire galaxy, the only one fate granted her, and while she may have daydreamt of more once upon a time, she always came to the realization that loving her Kor’dika made it nigh impossible to breathe, she wouldn’t be able to handle anymore. “You deserve to be safe. You’ve been asked so much at such a young age, but I fear I do not know who else I trust.”
A pause.
“My daughter was—she was taken years ago, and only recently has been found. I cannot ask Auntie Bo,” another pause, “and I am afraid that my time seemingly in the Empire’s good graces is at an end. Attached to this recording are the coordinates that will lead you to ... I can't say. Just ask for H.O. I know... I know, I am asking you to give up your anonymity; I know I am asking you to be in the line of fire, but I trust no other with my child, Auntie. I thought she had been dead for years. I cannot—”
The recording ends.
Six years of nothing and now… this.
It could be a trap, one voice says.
It could be something you’ve been hungry for since Mandalore fell, a second voice pipes up.
“What is that?” She asks the second voice. It’s fine to speak to yourself, or even respond, if no one is around to witness it, and all there is, is herself, a mug of tea that is bound to be cold, and flashing directions that came with Korkie’s transmission.
Maybe the spider roach that skitters under her bed could count, but she hardly thinks it’ll judge her.
Hope, the second voice says, and Satine thinks it sounds awfully a lot like Padme.
“Cyare,” she is still half asleep, in a cacoon of wool blankets as fingers comb through graying strands of wheat-colored hair when she feels lips press against her temple. “It’s time to wake up.”
She answers by snuggling into his body heat, her head hiding in the crook of his neck, ignoring how the rumbling of amused laughter causes his body to quake, stirring her from the comfort of sleep. “You will wake the flying banthas,” she grumbles, stubbornly doing her best to keep her eyes closed. “They’ve spent all night fighting for their right to be independent of the nerfs.”
Satine.
“And a noble fight it was,” the voice allows, strong arms holding her tightly to him as if they are too frightened to let go. “The purrgils still need their fearless leader; you did promise them that Mandalore would support them—”
“Only if they give the yearly tribute of chocolate!” She grouches.
Satine.
It’s like a fly hovering near her ear. She raises a hand to swat it away, but it only grows louder.
Satine.
“I’m afraid the purrgils still request your aid, chocolate or not,” the voice tells her, and suddenly she is sitting up in her bed.
She thinks she’s an idiot for doing this. No. No, she knows she’s an idiot for doing this. A hooded scarf to obscure her appearance—as if she’s arrogant enough to think the Empire would focus solely on her, no, no she isn’t; she also isn’t arrogant enough to think she is safe enough to declare who she is just to anyone—that matches the beige jumpsuit. The same clothes she has worn for a decade, but the only difference is the brown satchel.
She carries only what she needs: rations, a pouch inside that carries her credits, and the mementos that lived inside the chest underneath her bed for the past decade.
Towards the end of town, where the shuttle drops her and her colleagues off after a day’s worth of work, there are the communal swoop bikes. A single credit, which is already resting in the palm of her hand, is needed.
“Where to?” The woman, a Mon Calamari, asks, not even bothering to look from her data pad.
“Around,” comes the evasive answer, but the woman only huffs. She’s got the payment needed. No more questions asked.
The coordinates bring her to a cantina at the city’s port, nearing the outskirts. Forty-five minutes drive and, ka’ra , she has been so out of practice with any sort of activity her thighs are burning. It’s embarrassing. It’s age. It’s an inevitable part of life. Doesn’t ease her ego that once she eases off the swoop bike she just has to stand there for a moment or two. The fact that she, in the middle of the road, has to bend down and rub those thighs of hers while patrons enter and leave through the revolving doors is... something.
Remember, your grace, she remembers Qui-Gon telling her when he bent down to catch his breath after a pursuit. Love your knees when you’re young.
She laughed then.
She isn’t laughing now.
Releasing a groan, she stands up, holding the satchel close to her, she enters the cantina. It isn’t lively by any means, nor crowded, but just enough hustle-and-bustle to keep the waiters and waitresses busy, so Satine, feeling her age and so out of her depth, saunters towards the bartender.
Ask for H.O. That is what Korkie had told her.
“Excuse me?” The bartender, a human male around her age, maybe older, looks at her. “Is there an... H.O. here, by chance?”
The bartender shakes his head.
Well, kark.
The jizz playing in the background is lively enough, but the anxiety is what makes her heart racing, and soon the music drowns out and all she can hear is her heartbeat. This is a mistake, she tells herself. This is a stupid mistake. The recording could’ve been doctored. You could be walking into—
“Looking for H.O., right?”
Satine turns around and a weequay, possibly male, and younger than she is, touches her shoulder and with a nod of his head beckons her towards the back. Dimly lit, secluded, and for all intents and purposes shady.
What have you gotten yourself into, ad’ika?
Satine is nothing if not brave; a nod and she follows the man, keeping her head down and her satchel to her chest, she makes her way through the sparse patrons and behind curtains. Very discreet, then. She wonders, with how loudly the music is playing, if they shoot her or stab her or if anyone would hear her scream.
Ka’ra! When did she become so fatalistic?
She dips into the room, and in front of her is a circular booth. Weequey, human, and two twi’lek women flanked at either side, some sitting and some standing, of what she presumes to be the leader who sits in the very middle. He wore goggles, and a green helmet to match his leather vest over a shirt of what used to be white, but now stained with sweat and grime. He sits, lounging really, with a tooka-like grin over his stained teeth as if he’s been waiting for her all his life.
“Ah, yes!” A performer then, Satine notes dryly, biting her lip to not flinch as his wide eyes size her up quickly. It isn’t the act of it that bothers her—mostly because there isn’t anything inherently sexual about how he does it—but the fact she feels he can see through her when she’s spent a better part of a decade doing her best to be invisible is disquieting. If he notices her discomfort, he says nothing. “It is a rare and truly glorious occasion to be graced by radiance such as yourself!”
Theatrically he pops up from where he sat and stands on the circular table, arms outstretched as he’s about to deliver a show-stopping soliloquy. “My name is Hondo Ohnaka!” A glove-covered hand is placed over his heart. “Friend to the downtrodden, the perilous, and those with a generous pocketbook!”
“Alyse,” Satine deadpans.
And then his attention is solely on her. The theatrics forgotten, he bends down to sit on the edge of the table, so close to where she has been standing, and he gives her another once over. Satine notes it isn’t until now, until she has given the alias she’s used for the past ten years, does the smile he wears finally meets his eyes. Dread fills her. Dread, but also determined, because of this shebb had touched a hair on her son’s head— “ Of course ,” he allows, “of course, Alyse , I and my friends have been expecting you. You see, I am a fair man; I never go back on a deal. It is a good thing, too, since a certain Mandalorian prince in exile has enlisted me to keep the end of... let’s just say, a mutual business arrangement.”
Oh, no.
“Never fear! Hondo Ohnaka’s Transport Solutions will help you! No need to pay—yet—either!”
Maybe it says something about her age, but her patience is thin. Before he could speak for another half-hour, she supposes he enjoys the sound of his own voice, she cuts in as she raises a hand: “The child!” She bites back, hooded eyes narrowing, “I am here for the child, Mr. Ohnaka, and nothing more.”
He pauses. He studies her and, for a moment, she can see those dark eyes of his soften at the mention of children. Good, Satine thinks. Maybe he is a crook, but better a crook with a conscience. “Do you have everything you need, dearest Alyse ?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Good . Yes, well, I normally enjoy a drink or two, some small talk, but I can tell you are a woman who doesn’t appreciate foreplay.”
Without thinking, “only if it’s with someone not prone to fumbling.”
Hondo tilts his head back and lets out a bark of a laugh. It goes on for some time, his colleagues joining in with subtle snickers, before he regains his composure and gives Satine a nod of approval. “Of course!” He slides off the table and clasps his hands together. “I like you, Alyse , so please understand this next part is nothing personal. There are things bigger than you and I, no?”
Her vision goes dark when she feels a stinging sensation in her neck.