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Chapter Text

I

Mon is twelve and seated at the breakfast table when her father first raises the subject of her society ball. It feels early in the day to steer Mon’s attentions to a matter that’s been touted her whole life as one of utmost import, and her mind is already preoccupied with the day’s examination in Chandrilan early-Republic history and politics that is rumored to be the single greatest determining factor in Senior Academy cohort placements for the next cycle.

It feels early, but early is the only time of day Mon can reliably count on seeing her father, and so practicality dictates discussions of family import in which her input is expected take place over the breakfast table.

Mon is twelve, and her thirteenth birthday is still a season away. The timing of her birth and academic cycles put her amongst the older students in her cohort, and social etiquette defers proper courting rituals and proposal inquiries as a matter for the Senior Academy which she will not enter for another half of a standard year after that.

But social norms also expect her society ball take place within a season of her birthday nonetheless, lest some signal be sent that there’s some fault to be found within her.

Immature, insensible.

Worse – rebellious.

Vel, eight months older, had stared at Mon all through Mon’s first class with the Elder until some inner turmoil reached some crisis point over some provocation unseen by Mon’s eyes, unheard by Mon’s ears, and she viciously pulled apart the braids in her hair and stormed from the room with more than a few uncouth words.

Mon is not ignorant of the weight of family expectation falling on her now, to salvage their collective reputation. One wayward child an aberration, a fluke, even if that child is the daughter of a senator. But two assuredly some sign of a deeper rot.

She’s been forbidden to speak with her cousin since the vaguely-named Incident, and Vel bears her social excommunication with her head held high in a way that Mon quietly admires. After my initiation, she wills Vel to hear her quiet apologies, excuses. After my betrothal.

She can bide her time, secure her family standing, and then court a little scandal by association when the family’s let out a sigh of relief and stopped paying so much attention.

Her parents are discussing the trajectory of the rest of Mon’s life and Mon is preoccupied with an examination in her morning module and contemplating on the side how long and how carefully one must follow the rules before a little indiscretion might be forgiven or ignored, when her father barks her name in a tone that tells her she must have missed it the first time.

She snaps her gaze up, spoon of spiced vaweli grains halfway to her mouth. “Yes, father?”

“Stand up, let’s have a look at you.”

It’s the first time she’s cognizant of having the value taken not just of her mind or her talents or her pedigree, but of that tangible vessel in which those things happen to come contained.

He motions her back down and her mother starts discussing dress fittings.

At the first suitable moment after, Mon asks to be excused. “I’ve told Adrine we can review together this morning.”

It’s a lie, but an innocuous one, and she stands and leaves the table without guilt, without offering any actual input into the ball that will mark her transition into adult responsibilities and expectations, and without finishing her meal.

II

Mon doesn’t know it at the time, but she is fourteen and newly betrothed the last time she enjoys her prided family hospitality as an honoree instead of as a hostess. As recreation of a sort, instead of responsibility.

As with most things done in the old ways, the ceremonial banquet is something of a spectacle, a carefully choreographed dance that begins with Mon and her intended sitting at opposite ends of a long table. An expansive list of courses, many of them little more than a bite accompanied by a sip of a spirit sourced from one of the nine Chandrilan prefectures, is also paired with an elaborate dance of a seating chart.

For a dozen courses, Mon and Perrin charm and court their ways through one another’s families, before coming together in the middle for the final toast given by the Elder, the affirmation that they’ve passed respective muster, and to serve up the traditional junimallow braid, slicing the long, intricately-woven pastry from opposite ends and passing the plates down the line until they meet in the middle and split the last piece.

When it comes time to plan the three-day marriage revelries with their vastly more expansive scope and guest list, how to plan and throw an event worthy of the family means and reputation becomes every bit as much a part of the preparation for her next stage of life as managing her own household or taking up the family seat in the Junior Legislators Program.

She’s looking at the menu with her mother and father and the kitchen supply coordinator when she catches sight of the last line and pulls a face. “Can we cancel the squigs?”

Her father lets out a dismissive little hm under his breath. “They’re traditional.”

“They’re ghastly.”

“They’re not for you, Mon,” her mother rebukes sharply. “They’re for your guests. A great many of whom might find themselves poised to wield significant sway over your future prospects.” Because it wasn’t to be a party so much as a performance. “Every difference, every last detail, it all says something.”

A performance, and a statement.

Mon glances sidelong at her father, but he’s distracted with a commpad. “And what does toasting sagrona without squigs in one’s glass say?”

“It says, darling, that one’s hostess holds her own tastes and opinions superior to those of her guests.” She leans in closer and adds: “Or worse still – it says she is ignorant in the ways of proper Chandrilan hospitality and unprepared to satisfactorily offer it.”

And so for the last drink of each night’s revels, Mon and Perrin toast sagrona with squigs in their glasses.

Perrin delights, and Mon pretends.

III

Marriage, Mon discovers in the first year of it, is not wholly dissimilar to that anticipatory holding pattern that was the period of negotiations and betrothal; in fact, she sees Perrin far less than they did as schoolmates, Perrin off at the military academy at Cratox Point and Mon in Hanna City for the Junior Legislators Program.

Perrin only has one weekend free for every four of hers. At first, she spends the other three back at her family’s countryside estate, gives her two-person staff in the city the time off, but the taste of freedom is seductive and once the intimidation fades, at a life lived away from constant surveillance and assessment, Mon finds other pursuits that keep her more and more in the capital.

Academic forays into the city’s central archives imbue in her a passion for history. She takes to spending her evenings there after session’s end, reading about the ebb and flow of Chandrila’s currents, and then the galaxy’s more broadly. A picture begins to form, the state of current affairs she studies in her coursework a puzzle, and its pieces, its solutions, to be found in the tomes of the past.

Her peers study the art of diplomacy; Mon studies the lessons of antiquity. Determined that the answer to any problem lies less in creative approach, in charm and enticement, so much as the understanding that in the vast annals of history, all that might happen had happened before, and facing the failures and sins of the past was the only way to ensure they were sidestepped in the future.

After the third unimpressed reception to her unconventional methods from the module instructors, the administrative director takes it upon herself to relay her concerns to Mon’s mother.

“She had no right,” Mon finds is her only stiff defense during the disappointed inquiry that ensues upon her next visit home.

“I appointed her,” her mother snaps back. “She owes me her present standing, and has an obligation to keep me apprised of threats to our own.”

She looks to her father; a negotiator, less constrained to the particular ways and wiles of Chandrila.

All he has to offer is: “It’s not just our family reputation at stake anymore, Mon.”

She’d almost forgotten she was married.

She thinks about the nights Perrin spends at their Hanna City residence, more often than not with a regimental mate or two, reveling in the brief reprieve from barracks restrictions and ending too deep in a bottle.

She wonders if he’s burdened with the same pressure.

IV

Nearly five years since she tore the braids out of her hair and stormed out of the Elder’s class, Mon finally sees her cousin Vel again.

It’d be a joyous occasion, were it not for the sense of eyes and ears everywhere assessing her commitment to holding the line.

It’d be a joyous occasion, were it not for the haughty sneer Perrin couldn’t keep off his face at the sight of Vel’s scowling visage.

It’d be a joyous occasion, were the occasion itself not the memorial banquet for Vel’s recently and quite unexpectedly deceased father.

“I was off-world,” Vel confesses, sounding very nearly bored when Mon finally finds a quiet time to join her in an alcove off the antechamber. She’s dressed well enough, traditional mourning wear, but the adherence to decorum stops there, sprawled across a window bench and picking idly at a plate of tendermeats with her bare fingers while she talks. “The old man kicking it while he was on Coruscant was probably the one accommodating thing he did in his life.” She pops a piece in her mouth. “Bit ironic, that.”

Mon’s answering laugh falls somewhere between incredulous and scandalized, however taciturn she’d likewise found her senator uncle. The corner of Vel’s mouth quirks up and she offers her plate over. Mon thinks about what her mother would say if she happened upon her with marinade-stained fingers, and declines.

“So – got you all married off, did they?”

“I’ve no doubt my aunt and uncle have taken every conceivable opportunity to point this fact out to you since the moment of my betrothal.” Something relaxes in Vel’s face with her dry words; like she can perhaps read Mon’s tolerance of their ways, more than any true commitment to them. “In truth,” she adds after a moment’s hesitation, “we hardly see one another.”

“By design, that.” Vel reaches for a glass resting on the window ledge, drains half the wine in it, and passes it over for Mon to share the rest. “It’s all about securing the legacy of future heirs; nobody wants them now, Dthala forbid.”

Mon drains the other half of the drink and grimaces.

The family mostly manages to behave until the private consecrative. Vel’s standing and staring over the lifeless form of her estranged father’s body when the first bitter taunt is thrown about her defiance costing the seat their family has held in the Galactic Senate for a dozen generations.

“She ought have finished her disquisitions a season past,” the matron Sartha sniffs in her errant granddaughter’s general direction, any grief for her son apparently already excised. “The timing could not have been more perfect.”

Mon’s parents exchange an awkward glance. Even Perrin looks uncomfortable at her bluntly clinical way of viewing things.

Vel appears supremely unbothered. “Not my fault the bastard got too drunk and cracked his head on the embassy floor before Mon could finish hers.”

The crack of her mother’s hand across her face echoes throughout the cavernous hall, as any remaining chatter fades away to silence.

The slights of the moment, Mon realizes, may be too much to overcome. The disrespect to both her grandmother and her father, even in death; speaking aloud that dirty little secret, airing his vices even in this more intimate setting.

Part of her wonders if Vel isn’t looking to sever that family connection once and for all, take the excuse to vanish utterly from their lives at last; the other realizes grief is complicated, and Vel would more readily have accomplished such a goal by not showing at all.

So Mon summons her courage, clears her throat, and distracts the room’s attention away from her cousin in the most outrageous manner she can imagine.

“I’ve actually been preparing my request to the head minister that I might sit my disquisitions early, and my appeal to the governor’s appointment committee that they might delay their selection until such a time as I have completed them.”

It’s a lie, and a substantial one, and one that will set her on a path riddled with unfathomable trials and heartaches in the decades that lie ahead. But she takes in the room’s stunned stares, Perrin’s blindsided gawping not least of all, pulls a delicate sip from the crystal tazze in her hand, sees Vel’s shoulders slump with relief, and cannot bring herself to regret it.

Chapter Text

V  

At sixteen, Mon leaves her homeworld to move into the embassy residence she’s known to date as her uncle’s home when he’s away.

She leaves her Hanna City flat and two-man staff and is assured of a seamless continuity from the host of attendants and cooks and drivers who have served her uncle’s whims, some of them for decades.

She leaves Chandrila with her husband dragged along in her wake and her parents somewhat grudgingly tolerated at her side, if for no other reason than that Chief Minister Chasla seems to expect it and Mon cannot figure out how to politely argue against the woman who just gave her the appointment.

She arrives on Coruscant and is greeted by her uncle’s personal aide who hands her a datapad with an itinerary.

She spends the next three days having a whirlwind introduction of the household staff in the residence and the political advisory staff in the embassy below with little apparent consideration of the notion that she might like to bring on anyone new. She spends an afternoon with the state-appointed decorator, who spends most of his time telling her what she cannot do, and offers the opportunity to select new plants growing in the foyer or switch out the style of dishware for formal affairs.

Perrin eyes the grand banners looming just inside the main doors of the residence and asks, “Is there anything we can change about the place?”

Mister Letva informs him quite keenly, “On your personal devices you’ll find an expansive catalogue of Chandrilan fabrics and patterns to select a variety of seasonal duvet covers for the bedchambers.”

Perrin nudges Mon with his elbow. “Great, yeah, you hear that, Mon? Expansive variety,” and she glances sideways at the mischievous spark in his eye and bites her lip around the laugh that threatens to bubble up.

This could be good for them, she thinks, watching the way her husband she still feels like she barely knows absorbs the chaos around them. A joint adventure, away from the watchful and constantly assessing family eyes. A place where he can explore those passions he used to express at the academy, find a cause to support or a foundation to chair, in between his trips back home to keep up with his militia obligations.

On the third day, her mother sends her the list she’s been working on unbeknownst to Mon of the best tailors and salons and jewelers and the introductory appointments she’s arranged at each while her father visits his Coruscant office.

Her aide (for now), Mister Gantha, finally escorts her to the Senate to show her where she’ll come to commence the next orientation session in two weeks’ time. It’s a perfunctory, obligatory sort of process that ends with yet another file being transmitted to her personal device. A schedule.

“What’s this?” she asks as she thumbs through.

“List of upcoming measures and Chief Minister Chasla’s indication of how you’re expected to vote.”

She bites her tongue, hard. Perrin must read some of the pressure building inside her, because he suggests as Mister Gantha starts to lead them out, “Perhaps Mon and I can find our own way back to the embassy, explore the district a little.”

Mister Gantha’s brow furrows. “Why would you do that?”

“To… learn our way around?”

The response only deepens the confusion. “Your driver knows his way around anywhere you could ever wish to go.”

Watching Perrin try to find his way diplomatically through the conversation at least distracts from the mounting tension. “Billions of people do it every day.”

“Yes, but those people aren’t -” The aide cuts off, frustrated and with the beginnings of distress starting to color his face.

Coolly, Mon prompts him: “Aren’t what?”

“The responsibility of the Chandrilan government, Senator.”

She lets out a slow breath and yields; lets Perrin put a tentative hand at her back while they return to the landing berth.

A fight for another day, she promises herself, while trying not to linger on how very much she suspects what Mister Gantha truly meant was property of the Chandrilan government.

VI

There’s a brief period of Mon’s life where she feels at peace, or something like it.

That period between finally feeling like she’s got her head comfortably above-water in navigating the Senate – the galactic politics, and the personal ones – and the galaxy’s descent into a brutal war that will upend the lives of trillions before it upends the very fabric of galactic governance right down to its core.

That period where she’s found her political confidantes in like minds such as the joint senator and viceroy of Alderaan, or the new young senator from Naboo who stormed onto the galactic stage as a queen under fire and took up arms in defense of her people when the Senate dithered and defaulted to the quagmires of bureaucracy.

That period where she’s found her personal confidantes, in Lona, who she finds to replace her uncle’s Mister Gantha after much careful consideration, who helps keep her busy schedule organized and helps nudge her into not overextending herself; and in Vel, who settles on Coruscant for a time with a partner she refuses to bring around on one of her embassy visits until at last one day she does when Perrin is off-world and Mon quite suddenly understands a great deal more about their diverging paths in adolescence.

That period where her marriage has developed into something fond and Perrin occupies a space in both worlds; the brief span of their young lives where the two of them and Vel might sit up late drinking wine from home or spirits from a thousand other worlds readily accessible on Coruscant if you know where to look – and Vel enjoys the freedom to learn the city in a way Mon is denied. That time between finding her footing and the descent into mayhem where Perrin’s ideals shine brilliantly in any room, with any audience, and her colleagues tell her how lucky she is, how lucky to be young, in love, and supported.

Vel doesn’t trust him with those fiercely protected, intimate parts of herself, but she wonders privately, when the two of them can jealously seize unobserved, unguarded moments: “Do you love each other?”

It’s a loaded question, though perhaps not in the way Vel might expect.

She’s grown fond of Perrin, and theirs is a pleasant existence in between the pressures of the performance of their lives. There is protectiveness there, they are allies, certainly.

And yes, around the constraints of her schedule or sometimes in spite of it, a much-needed outlet for the stresses of the day-to-day, they have felt their way towards a comfortable intimacy.

But love?

“Don’t you think,” she eventually answers Vel, slow and considered, “that part of the purpose in marrying us off so young is that we’d never know the difference?”  

VII

War teaches Mon three valuable lessons:

First: that the illusion of normalcy is to be maintained at all costs, for those who can afford it, as they throw their parties, more lavish than ever.

Second: that the sense of safety is prized far more than pursuit of freedom, for those who feel they sit comfortably above the reach of consequences, as they sit back and watch the chancellor run roughshod over every supposed check to his power.

And third: that for those who can afford it and feel comfortably above the reach of consequence, the primary benefit of wealth in the face of unfathomable tragedy and suffering is in the pursuit of distraction and oblivion, as Perrin disappears for yet another weeks-long gambling retreat.

VIII

Mon has been a senator for thirteen years when she is arrested for treason against a government that did not exist two days earlier.

“Play along,” Bail Organa urges her quietly in between the news that Padme Amidala is dead and that Bail and Breha have adopted a baby girl at the most baffling of times. “If you die now a martyr, the only thing you’re serving is the comfort of your own conscience.”

Which feels meaningful, for all that they’re the last words the two of them share for years.

Events have moved too swiftly and she understands little, save that all their worst suspicions, all the accusations that were met with criticism ranging from paranoia to Separatist sympathies, fell well short of the mark.

Her political allies are scattered – imprisoned, dead, hiding away and biding their time – and she doesn’t dare burden her personal confidantes with her suspicions, her deductions, her futile hopes and dreams. You wanted an end to the fighting, she can hear the placations, verging on mocking, rattling about inside her own frantic mind. This is what it took.  

As it turns out, she doesn’t need to hear such platitudes from her colleagues, her watchfully wary family, the Chandrilan chief minister who summons her home after her arrest and subsequent release.

Instead, she gets them from Perrin.

Yes, she thinks bitterly at his retreating back. The war is over, at the steep cost of the galaxy’s future.

She lashes out at him in the only way she can fathom. The only weapon she has to cut deep enough for her satisfaction. “I’m cutting off your access to the family accounts.”

The satisfaction would be sweeter if taking away his ability at escapism didn’t mean they had to sit and stew in their bitter resentment together instead.

Chapter Text

IX

Vel returns to Chandrila during the last of the three months Mon spends there licking her wounds, keeping her head down, getting the lay of the strange new land. She returns home semi-regularly, Mon knows, but it’s the first their paths have crossed there since the fateful day of her uncle’s memorial, and the first words from her cousin’s mouth are:

“You shouldn’t be here.”

There’s something hard about Vel now; challenge in her eyes where once lived resentment. Daring the lot of them to target her with those cutting old weapons in the family’s arsenal, tradition and legacy and honor.

She last saw Vel soon after the spark caught on Geonosis that would envelop the whole galaxy in flames. “Where have you been?”

They’re roaming the Garren groves on Vel’s family grounds on a brisk and bright morning, edges of winter chill seeping into the air. Mon wraps her shawl tighter about her shoulders; Vel’s abandoned style for comfort, and she shoves her hands into the pockets of her battered coat, presses her lips together, and pulls in a deep breath through her nose.

“There’s been a war on.” Mon looks at her sharply; Vel casts her gaze restlessly around the dappled shadows being thrown by the rising sun. “You’ve fought it in your way, I’ve fought it in mine.”

On which side, she can’t bring herself to ask. Not least because, “And we all lost.”

Vel shifts, turns to murmur low by her ear, “Haven’t lost until you’ve given up, Mon.”

But she has, Vel knows she has; swore her allegiance to a fledgling government at odds with every ideal she’s ever supported in order to avoid the firing squad. “There’s no one left, Vel.” Her voice catches and her eyes burn; the first she’s felt safe to even hint as these agonies. “Disappeared, dead, hiding away and hoping they’ll be forgotten.”

“Is that your plan?”

“What should I be doing instead?”

Vel catches her eye and states firmly, “Your job.”

“How?” Mon pleads. “How do I go back to that chamber and bow and scrape before a tyrannical snake with all the rest of them?”

“You don’t; that’s the most suspicious thing you could do. They know you don’t agree with them – so don’t.” She shakes her head, uncomprehending. “Find the loopholes in their laws.”

“They’ll just close them.”

“Be an irritating thorn in their side; a pebble stuck in their boots; a flitnat buzzing in their ears. Fight the lost causes and do it with all the performative pageantry Chandrilans excel at, cousin.”

“To what end?”

Vel holds her gaze, and there’s fear underlying the determination and the hate in her face, in her voice. “So that when the rest of them are ready to say enough, they’ll have somewhere to go – to the person who stood up first.”

X

The sharp ache of a mother’s grief is, of course, the mirror to and the complement of the deep warmth of a mother’s love.

The only moment she’ll look back on in the undeservedly long years of her life and feel damned for her words is the night they return to Coruscant after their Chandrilan exile and she’s weighing the options laid out before her, contemplating the faces she’ll wear and the performances she’ll put on –

When she’s contemplating that period of her life where she felt at peace, or something like it, when her charmingly brash husband was his own sort of weapon in her arsenal –

When she considers the wreckage of war on that fleeting taste of happiness, thinks about the plans they talked over and soon after tabled in light of the cataclysm taking over the galaxy –

She turns to her husband in the middle of a mostly silent dinner – smiles – and asks:

“Do you still want to have a baby?”

XI

Mon looks at the baby girl Perrin carefully passes into her shaking arms and thinks, amidst the chaos and calamity constantly surrounding them, This I can protect.

Mon gets back to work too soon, picks fights she cannot possibly win, takes up causes that are assuredly doomed, woos money for futile charities out of deep pockets on the arm of her politely engaged husband with none of his old spark, and thinks that of all the acts she puts on, the only genuine face she wears is that of a mother.

And that of a cousin, she privately amends, as Vel seizes on the easy excuse to visit more frequently and get to know Leida even when Leida does little more than sleep and fuss, even when Leida is clinging and drooling and crying more than sleeping as she cuts her first teeth, even when watching Leida is exercise in its own right as she learns the ability to move and explore and get into any and every which thing she oughtn’t.

Mon’s parents restrain themselves for some years before making their desperate last gasps for the old ways apparent. Suggesting when Leida is four and Mon and Perrin are starting the search for private tutors, that she might relocate to Chandrila when she’s of age to attend the junior academy where Mon and Perrin first met at the tender age of nine.

It’s the same visit back home when Perrin’s mother rattles off a whole host of highborn families with young children around Leida’s age, and it just so happens that all of the young children who come to mind are boys.

When they’re safely ensconced on the yacht for the trip back to Coruscant, Perrin looks at Leida playing games on a tablet, lets out a long, low sigh and grumbles, “Well that’s going to be a disaster in a few years’ time, isn’t it?”

It takes her a moment to grasp his meaning, her own tensions bottled up and compounding precipitously for the very long three days of their stay. And when she does, she can’t help but laugh.

Admittedly, she finds little to laugh about these days when she’s not playing games with the daughter she wants nothing more than to shield forever from the evil around them. Perrin’s reaction is therefore, understandably, a bit bemused. “What?”

Relief, she doesn’t say, that she won’t have to fight this battle with him as well.

Irony – that the one aspect of their lives in which they might find steady common ground is in sparing their daughter from the upbringing that brought the two of them together.

“I’m sure there’s still time,” she teases instead, “to get a comprehensive list of eligible prospects from your mother.”

“Sorted and ranked, I’m sure,” he agrees drily, and they smile in their shared amusement and laugh when Leida catches on to their good spirits and wants let in on the joke.

The joke is, of course, as it ever was, on Mon. When the years at once crawl and fly by and, “There’s someone who wants to meet you,” Vel tells her one day in little more than a whisper despite the fact that they’re alone. When the lies grow more elaborate as Vel’s early prediction comes to pass, new faces with shifty eyes showing up for policy meetings on her useless cause of the moment, lingering after with contrived excuses and so begins another dance, feeling one another out, gauging intent, gauging trust.

She hosts her parties and sweet-talks votes, toasts sagrona with the squigs she despises while she pretends she’s won something, and gathers her true allies in jealously-guarded secrecy.

The only genuine face she wears most days is that of mother, and the pressures on her time pain her even as she vows that Leida will grow up differently than she did, better than she did. And for all that her marriage is something of a performance, Perrin is an attentive father, if perhaps an indulgent one. It soothes the sting of her own guilt.  

In the long nights she lies awake wondering where it went wrong, as though understanding that could help right the course, what she deduces is this:

That avoiding bringing her work home, refusing to discuss politics around the dinner table in the effort to spare Leida the pressure of growing into the family business, in the effort to leave her mind free to follow whatever pursuits were sparked in the course of her studies, had the unintended consequence of making Leida feel detached from her mother, alienated from her world.

That fiercely guarding Leida’s exposure to the traditional ways of their own youth, the ways their respective families still clung to, the ways the stubborn holdouts of high society back home still inflicted upon their children, had the unintended consequence of shutting Leida out of any sense of belonging on either Coruscant or Chandrila amidst the chaotic pace of their lives.

Not a unique phenomenon, by the number of girls who quietly collaborated in the cultural coup Leida sprung on them when she was twelve.

Everybody has their own rebellion, Mon realizes as she stares in stunned disbelief at the table of young girls reciting the old chants of her childhood. And in the effort to spare Leida from anything to push back against, all they did was give her something to run towards instead.

XII

There is something heartbreakingly mundane, Mon realizes, in slowly sensing, seeing, feeling one’s family fracture apart while the galaxy crumbles apace around them.

Leida’s adolescent hostility – attitude that would never have been tolerated from Mon, that would have shocked Vel even – grows in perfect synchrony with Perrin’s resentment.

Leida pushes; Perrin watches and smirks; Mon retreats to her work.

Mon organizes her life around a set of simple rules to bring the scantest structure to the chaos and the contradiction.

The echoes of her own youth howl and rattle at the bars of whatever cage she’s locked them in at the back of her mind as she lays down one absolute in their family life: the three of them will sit together at the breakfast table every morning, as the only time of day they can reliably count on being unconstrained by other obligations.

Once Leida is off to school, she turns to work. There is always some demand on her attention; Lona is long gone and Mon hasn’t dared bring in a new personal aide, and Perrin has given up asking why not.

The answer is, of course, she can trust no one in such proximity to her different fronts and faces and accounts, save perhaps Vel, and Vel has slipped off again, likely at Luthen’s behest, and a corner of Mon’s mind stays forever reserved to fret about her cousin, ever more the rebel than she and ever more fearless.

If Leida has no obligation on her evening, then Mon will be sure to carve out time to return to the residence for dinner. If Leida is occupied with school or with friends or with the damned classes with the Chandrilan Elder, more often than not Perrin will find some excuse for a social outing, and Mon will send a message to the kitchen and cancel dinner, working late into the night fueled by caf and hydration tablets.

A frantic sort of desperation has begun to settle over her efforts. Fear that the façade is fracturing, as the Empire begins staffing auditors for the banks.

As Luthen dismisses her fears and discounts her solutions with cold practicality.

As Vel remains unaccounted for, month-after-month.

As she smiles for her guests who delight in this dance, indulging in their little word games over votes and criticism and Imperial overreach, no one ever quite saying precisely what they mean and Mon the worst of them all, all on the backdrop of the spectacle, her lauded Chandrilan hospitality.

She lobs the mildest jabs at the Emperor’s audacity within the hearing of the grand vizier’s spies at her parties, in her coalition meetings, and feigns vapid indecision in Luthen’s shop in order to get a scant two minutes out of the ISB’s earshot.  

And the thing about one’s life being a series of lies, fronts, projections, is that the work never ends. She sleeps little, eats less, until it seems like the physical exhaustion matches the mental.

Even the parties she eventually pushes through armed only with a glass of wine, stomach turning with the obscene indulgence time and again.

One night though, on a thoughtless whim, she refuses the squig added to her drink.

“You used to like it,” Perrin notes.

She cocks her head, pulls a taut smile, and fires back, “I was just better at pretending.”

Boxed in by Imperial eyes and Luthen’s recklessness, nervous for the inevitable scrutiny of her accounts, heartbroken for her daughter, scared for her cousin, marriage in tatters and the galaxy suffering worse than ever before  –

However trite and superficial, like she’s stamping her teenage foot against her mother’s snappish rebuke, it’s the only sort of rebellion she dares display.

Chapter Text

XIII

The end of the assorted fronts and faces Mon wears, the particular parts she plays, comes with an abrupt, shocking finality.

One moment, she is an Imperial senator; the next, she is not.

One moment, she is a wife; the next, she is not.

One moment, she is a well-meaning and ineffective nuisance of mild interest to the Empire, and in the next, she is the subject of every bit of tracking and surveillance they can call to hand.

Her only consolation is that the part of mother was willingly, if agonizingly, yielded some months back with Leida’s marriage and move to Chandrila; or perhaps it was ripped from her, a raw and well-deserved wound only a child could inflict on a parent. Perhaps the distinction is semantics when the pain is one and the same.

These facts are rattling around somewhere in the back of her horrified mind when another quick burst of finality robs her of the one consistent piece of her heart through the long years since she announced her political aspirations –

One moment, she has a cousin, ever more the rebel than she, whose strength and bravery gave Mon the courage to carry on in the darkest of hours – and in the next, she does not.

A young man runs up and snags her hand, tugs her urgently around and away – no use, no help, no hope – and it occurs, idly, as reflexive adrenaline sets her running, that she has no idea who he is, why he’s here, what his intention.

What difference could it possibly make now?

By the time she’s catching her breath in the backroom of a long-abandoned shop tucked away in the chaos of the lower mid-levels, on the edge of run-down and ramshackle, she’s gathered that he’s one of Luthen’s agents.

The place is stocked, a planned and prepared safehouse or a drop-spot. Scrambled comms, water and rations, bedrolls, portable power cells, holomaps of the undercity.

Spare cloaks and an assortment of multipurpose garments that her rescuer starts to pick through while Mon stands in the middle of the dingy room with her arms wrapped around her middle while her brain tries to catch up and cope with the events of the past hour.  

Eventually he sorts out a pile of dark fabrics and nudges it in her general direction. “Refresher through there,” he jerks his head to her left. “It’s not exactly glamorous, but.”

She considers and then discounts almost as quickly the thought that he intends it as a pointed jab. By the time she shakes herself back into the moment enough to step forward and collect the proffered clothing, he’s moved on to fiddling with the comms.

The shoes are a mismatched problem she doubts he has a solution for, but she steps out in a worn and drab shift that will blend well-enough with what she saw of the beings in this part of the city and a grey scarf wrapped around her hair.

He’s made quick work of things in her absence – two of the bedrolls opened, a rations kit on the one deeper in the room he gestures her towards. “Get comfortable, Senator; we might be here a while.”

The other is just inside the door, prompting her to look around and confirm – no windows. Surveillance sacrificed for security, a single point of entry. The calm, collected young man tapping at the comm her last line of defense. “What’s your name?” The blank look he spares her way reads easily enough – Does it matter? But she persists. “Please.”

He visibly deliberates and seems to come to the same conclusion she’s already reached – they’ll live or die together. Little use for operational security at this stage.

“Cassian Andor.” He nods at the rations. “You should eat something.”

“I really don’t think I can.”

He grunts, lays down the comm, and starts rummaging through packs he must have tugged free from some unseen hiding place while she was changing. Comes up with weapons, more weapons than he can possibly conceal on his person, charges, signal scramblers, monoculars, before finally locating a stack of identichips.

“Let me put it another way,” he murmurs while he sifts through them. “You look like you’re about to pass out – understandable. You’re in shock. But I’m committed to getting you out of here or die trying, and I’m not going to haul your unconscious body through the depths of the undercity if they find us, Senator. So. You should eat something.”

In any other circumstance, any other day, any other reality, she’d drum up a laugh at his cheek. Today, all she can muster is a quiet, “You make a compelling argument, Agent Andor.” He pauses and shoots her a sideways look. “Cassian.”

While she’s sorting through the contents of the rations pack and doing her best not to look like she’s never touched one before – she’s failing, but the humor behind his exhausted eyes is more gentle than mocking – he asks her, “Weapons?”

“I can handle a sidearm.” He slides two across the floor. “And perhaps of more limited use –” She pulls her left sleeve up enough to show him the dagger sheath around her forearm.

“You never know.”

She flatters herself to imagine he looks marginally impressed. Wistfully, she tells him, “My cousin gave it to me.”

“Smart thinking,” he offers without a spark of recognition.

They’re preparing to vacate the hideaway early the next morning, get lost in the work rush, connect with Kleya near a hangar bay happy to alter some customs docs for the right price, and she watches him trace out their route on the holomap projected from the puck in his hand and wonders aloud, “Where are you from, Cassian?”

“Why?” he asks, low and guarded.

Because Ghorman is burning, she doesn’t say. Because Chandrila will be bracing itself against retribution. Because the calculation of all you risk in the fight doesn’t stop at your own life.

“Because… I’ve never been allowed to know.” His brow furrows. “And now the veil is stripped away and Luthen will thrust me into a new role for a rebellion that’s existed as little more than a hypothetical, an ideal, while I’ve been trapped here at the heart of the galaxy’s evil.”

Still, he watches her in cautious silence.

“I want to know who fights for that dream for the future.” And perhaps more to the point – “I want to know who’s vowed his life to safeguard my own.”

Cassian opens his mouth, but whatever he’s about to say catches on the tip of his tongue and he pauses, reconsiders.

Mon’s accepted the fact that she won’t get an answer, her curiosity over the line, against his rules, and she’s already turned away when he murmurs so quietly she almost misses it, “Kenari.”

When she looks back in surprise, he’s busy doing a final check on the weapons concealed beneath his cloak. Preparing once more to lead her through the abyss.

XIV

When they arrive over Yavin 4, exhausted and bruised, Mon is nursing a headache that fades into the periphery of her awareness upon catching sight of the great stone temple, and a heartache that will be her constant acute companion for the rest of her life.

Cassian is sharp-eyed as he scans the jungle filling more and more of the viewport, determined in the hard set of his jaw, the tension in his shoulders. His duty nearly discharged, mission success, the losses left in their wake secondary considerations until he’s seen it thoroughly through.

Kenari, he’d said. Admitted, confessed. She wondered if that’s why Luthen wanted him. If that’s why he found himself here, standing at the last. His life wholly formed by Imperial atrocity, and no delusions as to their capabilities to exact further still. A feral instinct for survival her own life could never fully impart, cushioned by status and wealth and connections.

When the ship settles down, Cassian toggles a couple of switches, reaches for the ramp controls, but pauses and glances sideways at her.

She can read the unspoken question well enough in his dark eyes. “A moment,” she begs, sucking in a deep breath and closing her eyes.

A moment to let the relief wash over her to have arrived in one piece.

A moment to mourn.

A moment to put away an old life, an old face, an old performance, and prepare herself for the next one.

Gone is the dithering, indecisive, do-gooder senator from Chandrila, with her nuisances and her causes and her outreach programs.

Now there is only the Cause, and the steady conviction that has brought them all to this point.

Now there is only the fight – not for Chandrila, or straggling, struggling systems, but for each and every one of them now. The burden never greater, the stakes never higher, the climb never steeper.

She swallows back the nerves and the grief, opens her eyes, and nods calmly. Cassian presses the button and the hydraulic hiss of the mechanism echoes up to the cockpit. “Are you going to take me in, Agent Andor?”

A fleeting smile tugs up one corner of his mouth, there and gone again. “You don’t need me for that.”

And, indeed, as the ramp completes its descent and falls silent, a new sound takes its place. Voices, several, watching and waiting for them.

For her, she corrects inwardly, Cassian making no move to rise and follow in her wake. His job relegated to the background, doing the difficult and dangerous tasks and slinking back into the shadows while she is the one who emerges triumphant, to be ushered inside and fawned and fretted over as she assumes her new role, her new reality.

So she offers one last quiet, “Thank you, Cassian,” as she rises, lets out a slow and steady exhale, sheds the long years of Imperial Senator Mon Mothma of Chandrila, and takes her first step as Councilor of the burgeoning Alliance to Restore the Republic.

XV

She doesn’t see Cassian again for some months, not even in the hours after their arrival at Base One.

Base One, she learns in those months, is its own sort of prison, just like any other into which she was born or which she was thrust or which she created for herself and carried around during her every waking moment.

This one, she perhaps stepped more willingly into; and there’s simply an element of physical necessity. She can never leave because she is needed here, because she is amongst the most wanted criminals in the galaxy, because she is not well-trained in the art of evading detection. The most basic equation.

The performance, likewise, is born of more sincerity than the ones she’s affected over the years. She is steadfast in her conviction, determined that the only measure of victory is in the Emperor’s defeat, in tearing down the whole apparatus of his power and the terror it inflicts at the faintest whim about the galaxy.

But Rebellion demands steady leadership and unwavering decision and acceptance of sacrifice. There is no room for the agony that assaults her heart with every fallen soldier or pilot or spy; there is no room for those bouts of reckless rage at the suffering inflicted on helpless civilians, only forging calmly onward, content in the belief that it’s in search and service of a better future.

There is no room for the sharp heartache at all she has lost to make itself known. She wears her grief tucked tightly away, lest anyone begin to doubt her capacity to shoulder more, as they all will inevitably do ‘ere the end.

And so her life carries on, a collection of rules and responsibilities, as it was ever thus. She is calm and collected and constantly cognizant of the part her bearing plays in the collective perception. She follows the regimented military routine; up early, long days, meals and sleep governed by the clock or, during those tense, high-stakes moments when there’s some news of yet another incident, or an operation underway, ungovernable in the slightest and to be seized at any available interval.

Generals and sergeants and technicians alike jealously seize scant hours here and there to doze, slip away for ten minutes to grab a rations pack if the canteen will take too long.

Mon pops hydration tablets, maintains her calm, collected, quiet vigil in the war room, and only sleeps when the room begins to tilt around her.

When she sees Cassian Andor again, he looks like she feels, frayed and spent, and gaunter in the face than when they’d made their escape, the months since clearly taken their toll.

She sees Cassian Andor again after months, making his report to General Draven with only the faintest rasp in his voice betraying his overtaxed state. Draven dismisses him, and Mon detours to intercept him near the door. “Agent Andor.”

He blinks at her once, twice… inclines his head and acknowledges her with a quick, “Excuse me, Councilor,” and carries on his way. When she turns back, Draven is eyeing her with an edge of wariness and she understands: she’s breaking the rules, flouting decorum. His job to dirty his hands so that hers might remain unsullied.

They all have their own parts to play.

Mon contemplates how long and how carefully one must follow the rules before a little indiscretion might be forgiven or ignored, glances around the room at the ragged lot of them, and wonders at the point of revolution.

XVI

Several more weeks pass, another month and then two, before she sees Cassian again.

She suspects she’ll see him more regularly from this point forward: Luthen is dead, the shop ransacked and razed, Kleya gone to ground.

On one sleepless night in the days that follow, as she wanders and weighs the conflicted sort of regret that tries to find purchase amongst those deep-seated griefs, she spots Cassian Andor sitting vigil at a comm station and can guess who he’s listening for.

Mon thinks about a frantic night spent under the cool calm of his watchful protection, thinks about his rigid deference to her station and the act ending the instant he perceived a threat to the successful completion of his mission, wonders what revolution is if not the determination that the old ways must either change or die, and wanders off to see if her access codes will work in the canteen storerooms.

Half an hour later and she’s not naïve enough to assume he fails to register her presence, but he doesn’t actually look up until she’s almost at his elbow. That familiar edge of wary caution settles behind his eyes – she’s crossing some unseen divide, breaking the unwritten rules. “Good evening, Agent Andor. Good morning,” she corrects.

He lays down his headset and rises to his feet, eyes never leaving her face. “Councilor. What can I -?”

“Come take a break with me. It seems we are the both of us restless tonight.”

Cassian clicks his tongue, glances between her and the radio. Considering his part to play, his projection, his front. He opens his mouth, excuses poised on his lips –

She lays a hand overtop his as he reaches for the headset again. “Cassian.” He swallows it back, waits her out. “A very wise young man once told me we endanger ourselves more when we run ourselves ragged.” A bemused half-smile quirks up one side of his mouth at her diplomatic recall. “The corporal on-duty will call for you if there’s any word.”

Around the corner in the command suite, she leads him to the private briefing room where she’s made her slapdash preparations and he can’t quite contain the soft chuckle when he catches sight of the spread. “Chandrilan hospitality?” he asks while they sit, while she pours two tin cups of vinefruit juice from a carafe, while he peers curiously at the random assortment of snacks she grabbed off the surplus supply shelf in the stores.

“Hm.” She tears open a package of viwwi seed cake, breaks it in half, and passes him a piece on a plate. “Truth be told, Cassian – Chandrilans aren’t particularly hospitable people. They just put on a good show about it.”

He rather tactfully opts to offer no comment on that assertion.

“This,” she tells him while he takes a bite of the cake, “comes from Alderaan but is made from a seed harvested on Dantooine that became something of a favorite during the base’s time there. And here,” she grabs a long, slim package and gives him something of a warning look before tearing it open, “we have a spiced seaweed jerky from Mon Cala that the canteen can’t serve because a number of species lack the requisite enzymes to properly digest it.”

A sharp, distinct scent and an acquired taste – she takes one out and passes the bag over. He sniffs curiously at it first before withdrawing another, face betraying nothing as he samples a small bite.

The third package is a sweet honey wafer the base has accumulated in abundance, distributed between the makeshift tapcaf, the pilots’ and soldiers’ lounges, stashed in a spare drawer in the control room for those long nights run on little more than stubbornness and caf. “For a long time, our rations supply chain was centered out of Taraz Ten and our distributor always snuck in a crate of these wafers.” A cheap, local treat easily acquired. “Recent activity in the Razul Sector has forced a rebalancing of that supply chain, so I’m not sure if we’ll keep receiving them.”

Cassian dutifully crunches a sample bite of that, too. Humoring her, perhaps, something distracted in his shifting posture, the way he won’t quite settle in his seat – but then he picks up the cup, peers at the deep burgundy liquid so dark it looks like Chandrilan alberwine at first glance, and surprises her by asking, “And the juice?”

She smiles. “A delicacy unique to Yavin 4. Vinefruit. The plants are a tenacious nuisance, but people have found what advantage in it they might.”

“Ah.” He takes a cautious sip at first, and then a deeper one. Some of the fidgety distraction fades from his expression, his poise, as he takes in the full spread, as his eyes rove across her face. “Rebel hospitality,” he corrects his earlier assertion, holding out his cup.

“Yes, I suppose it is.” Mon picks up her own and taps it gently to his. “To absent friends?”

“And absent family,” he adds with a look at once meaningful and restrained. Offering up the opening, or giving her the opportunity to leave that door firmly closed.

He hadn’t known at the time, she’d been quite confident. “I became senator on something of a whim, if you can believe,” she tells him while they eat, his preference for the jerky become clear as he relaxes. “Vel’s father held the seat, but she was always more the rebel than I. I committed to carrying on the legacy to spare her the reproach.”

“You were young.”

“Hm,” she finishes her drink and lets him pour her another from the carafe. “Sixteen.”

He mulls that a moment before confiding, “I, too, left a prison at sixteen only to be flung straight into a war. Mimban.”   

The comparison takes her aback, takes her breath away. “I wouldn’t dare compare.”

The way he shrugs in response, unfussed, nonchalant, tells her well-enough he’d take his own prison and war a thousand times before her own. “What did you want to do instead?”

Her recollection of those long nights in the archives is bittersweet, entangled with her parents’ disappointment, the uncertainty of her new marriage. “I rather fancied myself a budding historian; something of a philosopher.”

“And what,” he asks her with a hint of wistful distance in his voice, eyes fixed on the cup in his hand as he swirls the liquid around it absently, “does history tell you about the need for leaders who fight wars with words instead of weapons?”

A soft huff of reluctant laughter escapes her, but he doesn’t seem to notice. She can’t help but wonder what conversation or argument he’s reflecting upon, whose words, but there’s something guarded and wounded in the tightness of his eyes, the terse set of his jaw, and she lets it lie.

It’s a strange sort of validation, and one that takes her some time to accept. A life built on undeniable privilege weighed against one formed by cycles of loss and suffering.

But during those conflicted moments in the long, brutal, bitter days into years to come, when she struggles to wear the face, put on the front, play the part – it’s to that night when they crossed that unseen divide, broke those unwritten rules for a moment of shared remembrance and camaraderie – and yes, of rebel hospitality – that she casts back, steadies her nerves, stays the course –

– and smiles.