Chapter Text
Something stirs the still water.
Asleep in the depths, he feels it, a ripple, a fracturing of the glasslike surface that brings awareness filtering back, only to settle with a jolt. A predator’s instinct for self-preservation bites, and he raises his head from the silty lakebed, thousands of years of mud and lakeweed spinning away into the slow current as he comes awake all at once, nerves singing, a sense of loss shrieking through him with broken-glass edges.
There's a hush, so settled it’s infected the whole world. A barren lifelessness to water that was once teeming with fish and aquatic beasts, now tainted with shadow, and instinct whispers a warning. Even with his heart racing in his chest, it takes effort for him to heave himself up from the mud that’s served as his bed since the lake was first made, and the water is shallower than it was before, darker with pollution and something else. Something burning.
Something taken.
Theft, he thinks, and surges towards the surface, clawing his way past stones and out from under waterlogged tree trunks. The urgency beats hard, adds speed as he arrows up through the water, and he can feel foreign hands on him, on his hide, lifting and stroking across the golden skin. Put aside, left hidden, left safe while he slept, but now—
He breaks the still surface with a snarl, sending displaced waves crashing over the rubble-scattered shore, startling birds from their branches. Hurls himself up, clawing, thrashing—
But even as he hits the sand, vast claws are already shrinking, fading. He roars, but it cracks, wavers, collapses into a ragged shout as hands hit the moss-covered ruins instead of muscled forelegs. For a moment he scrabbles at the slicked stone and fractured duracrete, the sensation of hands on his skin so close, so real that the fact there isn't someone pressed up against him makes his head spin, but with gritted teeth he drags his waterlogged body up, collapses forward on his knees beneath leaning veshok trees, horror and fury surging as he digs his nails into the moss and snarls.
But it doesn’t matter. Someone is still touching his hide, lifting it, donning it. He can feel another soul’s skin against his own, the heat of an unfamiliar body, the press of a callused hand before the connection snaps.
Someone else has taken his hide, his skin, his self. Someone else has taken him, and he can feel the ownership settle like a collar around his throat, so tight that each breath rasps as it rakes free of his lungs. He roars a denial, but it’s a Taung throat that makes the sound, not the one it should be.
The mythosaur form that he’s lived since the moment of his would-be death is gone, and Mand'alor the Indomitable tears at moss and stone beneath the evergreens, hisses and fights and hates with every atom in his newly-vulnerable body, but there’s no changing the fact that a stranger has his hide.
Somewhere on Mandalore, somewhere close, someone has taken his skin and married him, and now Atin belongs to them, body and blood and soul.
Nothing is like it was when Atin went into the water.
The veshoks are slow-growing trees, but though this place was nothing but grassland when the creeping tiredness came over Atin, it’s a forest now, tops stretching skyward to the point that he can't see anything but narrow gaps of blue-white between their scaley needles. Even the air feels thinner than it should, and if not for the familiar cluster of four mountains to the east, Atin might think he had been moved in the middle of his sleep, taken to an entirely new world only vaguely similar to Mandalore.
Veshoks don’t grow anywhere else in the universe, though. Only on Mandalore. Atin presses himself to a broad trunk, leans there as he tries to ignore the sense of skin sliding across his own, and—strange to stand on two feet. Strange to see the world in the colors he remembers. Strange to know that he slept for so long a forest grew up around him and the world changed.
Always Atin has changed the universe with his own hands, rather than waiting for it to change in his favor. But—
That tiredness. He’d known it would come, had seen it happen to the old guard of the Crusaders as his generation rose to fill their places, but still, it had been startling. An urge, clawing, climbing with every breath he took, to leave his hide somewhere safe and slip into the form of a mythosaur, to sleep. To sleep forever, buried in Mandalore's bones, hidden away and dreaming.
The exhaustion has vanished now, like it never existed, and Atin curls his claws against the mosaic bark, pushes himself up, and wonders at the ease of it, even with the anger at this theft riding him. It’s as if he can think clearly for the first time in an age, and he frowns faintly as he pushes upright, follows the taut-wire pull of his stolen hide to the south. Dry branches crack beneath his feet, too clumsy after so long asleep, and it takes more concentration than it should to remember his old skills, to summon up the practiced quiet of a hunter as he moves between the towering trees. The forest is too tight for a mythosaur to pass through it, and something about that prickles across Atin's skin, uneasy. He doesn’t know how long he’s slept, but—the city was close, only a few hours away when he went into the water, and forever expanding. Rhal had said that would make it easier to return, even though both of them had known the odds of him ever waking of his own accord.
The curse comes for every Taung in time, and never lets go willingly. There was little chance that Atin would return unless he was forced to by a stolen hide, regardless of what contingencies they planned for.
There's no break in the trees now, though, even as the land flattens out, the gentle hills around the lake spreading out into a low valley where fields of grain once grew. Atin slips through the trunks with unease knotting itself into his muscles, making every motion more cautious as the hours stretch without any sign of ships above or other Mandalorians among the trees, no matter how long he walks towards the closest city.
It’s quiet, he thinks. An unsettling hush, despite the fact that Kaabir is a smelting town, full of smiths and forges and the constant beat of metal on metal. One of the first Mandalorian cities, when the Taung settled here, driven off Coruscant in a wave of death and defeat. The forges haven't been quiet for a single day since it was founded, and the fact that the valley is nothing but the creak of trees and the whisper of the wind is strange.
Strange, too, that he can't smell ashes on the breeze, or hot metal, or see smoke rising. There's always call for armor, for weapons, because no matter what Mandalorians are still Mandalorians, and no smelting town should be left vacant, or even temporarily idle. Atin knew that when he went into the water, knows it now, but he still can't fight a trace of trepidation as it crawls up his spine. Something must have happened, that there are no people here.
A brush, light, then again more firmly, across Atin's skin by an invisible hand, and he loses his breath on a gasp, has to catch himself before he can stumble. His nerves hum with the touch, and the tendrils in his hair curl and twist, and just for a moment Atin wants, needs that touch in a way that’s entirely unfamiliar but so vivid he can't even breathe through it.
No one should have his hide. But this isn't the cruel, tight grasp he would have expected, if he’d known it would be taken. Atin closes his eyes, another shiver running through him at the brush of knuckles, and part of him is braced for the grab, the twist, the order that will come, but—
It doesn’t. Just the reverent slide of fingers, back and forth, back and forth, like the thief is simply admiring.
Something must have happened in Abesh’la Alor’a if a person were able to find his hide at all, given where he hid it, but—he can feel their fingers on it, impossible to shut out entirely. Stroking, sliding, caressing, and Atin grits his teeth, closes his eyes again, forces himself onward towards the pull of someone else’s possession of his soul. A lover’s touch, almost reverent, maddening, and when he gets his hands on whoever thought to wed a Taung, to trap them in service and devotion—
He’ll obey. He has no choice. But no Taung has ever taken such a wedding passively, and Atin is the Mand'alor. No matter how long it’s been, he will always be Mand'alor the Indomitable, and whoever thinks to tame him just by stealing his skin will have to fight for their victory if they want to keep it.
That’s the way such things have always been. Only a handful of Mand'alore before Atin were ever conquered in such a way, and then only by successive Mand'alore. The idea of changing that now burns with indignity, and Atin contains a snarl as he pushes through a thicket of berry bushes with long thorns—
The trees end as though cut cleanly off with some vast blade, and beyond the raw edge is only white sand and glass.
Atin stops dead, staring out at the devastation, and—all too easy to recognize a place that’s suffered orbital bombardment. He himself has given the orders for such strikes countless thousands of times. But this is Mandalore. What enemy would ever be able to reach the adopted homeworld of the Mandalorians, the Crusaders? How long could it possibly have been, that Mandalore itself would suffer such a thing?
Kaabir is entirely gone, even its sprawling outskirts turned to dust and glass. Not that old a thing, Atin thinks grimly, taking a step down into the white sand. The glass is still in fragments and long, shattered shards, hasn’t yet been worn away by the weather. And—
Up in the hills, towards the mountains, Atin can't see the gleaming, sunset-colored stone of Abesh’la Alor’a where it should be nestled like one of Mandalore's jewels among the green trees.
Atin dig his nails into his palms, staring at the place where the city he called home should stand, running up the slopes of the mountain in terraces that catch the light of the sun and glow. There's no sign of it now, though. No blast crater, no destroyed mountain as there would be if the same forces that had destroyed Kaabir had destroyed Alor’a as well, but in the fading light, he can't see any trace of the city at all, and that’s even more unsettling.
Alor’a couldn’t have been taken. It’s a cliff city, built into the mountain’s sides, and those cliffs still stand. None of its defenders would have given it up, the city that Mand'alor the First founded and built with plunder from a dozen conquered worlds. If Keldabe is the mind of Mandalore, its consciousness, then Alor’a is its heart, and no Mandalorian would have let it be conquered, no matter the cost.
And then, with a crack of glass breaking underfoot, bodies come over the edge of a crater.
Instantly, Atin ducks back, catches a wide limb, hauls himself up into the closest veshok. He goes still, hardly breathing, and the fact that he has no weapons, nothing at all to fight with except his fists, burns like fury as the invaders come closer—
Except they aren't invaders. They're Mandalorians.
Their armor isn't any that Atin is familiar with, strange and sleekly fitted, slick in the sunlight in a way that metal never is. Their helmets are more familiar, as is the decoration on their kit, though it’s wilder and more intricate than any Atin has seen before. The soldier in the lead is almost entirely in red, with heavy black kama and bold white greaves, holstered blaster pistols on his hips and a much larger blaster braced against his shoulder as he turns his head, taking in the glassed white sand with cautious sweeps. Behind him, the other soldiers are just as cautious, moving like they're in enemy territory as they advance through the space where Kaabir used to be.
One of the soldiers, holding the lead of a huge massiff in one hand and a blaster pistol in the other, pauses for an instant as the beast huffs, and says, “Commander Fox.”
Instantly, the man in the lead turns back, glances down at the massiff, then up. “Not that bastard’s scent,” he says, and it’s not a question.
The massiff handler shakes his head. “Something else,” he says. “She hasn’t smelled anyone close in hours, though.”
“Witness, maybe,” one of the other soldiers offers, and Fox flicks a look at him, then nods in agreement.
“Spread out and search,” he orders. “Watch for traps. The Death Watch has been a little too nice to us so far.”
Up in the tree, Atin mutters a curse, judging whether he’ll be able to get deeper into the forest without leaving a trace. Massiffs have excellent noses, though, and even if he keeps off the ground, she’ll likely be able to track his path. Fighting when he’s thoroughly outnumbered and unarmed feels about as stupid as trying to face a Sith on equal footing, and Atin already learned his lesson there thoroughly. There's no Ulic this time, probably, but picking his battles is a wiser choice than simply throwing himself against an opponent.
And then, like a fishhook catching, something pulls.
Atin goes still, alarm cracking through his chest. His hide is close, even though it should have been hidden away in Alor’a, buried in the heart of the city. He can feel his skin, though, somewhere amidst the squad below, can feel the weight of someone else’s skin against it.
One of these strange soldiers has his hide.
He finds himself moving before he can even weigh the implications, dropping from the tree and rising to his feet. The closest soldier wrenches back with a cry of alarm, even as Fox surges forward with a snarl and his blaster raised—
Atin holds out his hands, takes a half-step back and goes no further. One of them has his hide, has him, and he can't tell which, but—he’ll find out.
“Peace,” he says, meeting Fox’s gaze through the dark slash of the visor, and doesn’t mean it for a moment. “You startled me, or I would have announced myself earlier.”
There's a pause, long, careful, and then Fox lets the tip of his blaster dip, just slightly. “You're a local?” he asks, wary, and the sweep of his gaze is almost tangible as it drags over Atin's still-wet hair, his tunic, the light pteruges that were all he bothered to wear for that final change. There's suspicion in his voice when he says, “Not a lot of people living outside the domed cities in the desert.”
Domed cities. If the air is thin here, in the midst of a vast forest, Atin can imagine it’s almost impossible to breathe elsewhere. But—Mandalore has few deserts. He has no idea where such cities would be.
Unless what happened to Kaabir happened elsewhere, and to such an extent that no forests or plains could regrow.
Unease curls tight, but Atin makes his voice as even as possible when he says, “Not all of us care to live in cities that do the breathing for us.”
Fox snorts, and he drops his blaster, slings it over one shoulder. “Local,” he confirms, sounding amused. “We’re looking for a kidnapped politician. There’s a reward if you help us rescue him. Courtesy of a grateful Republic.”
Mandalorians, working for the Republic? Atin can hardly imagine such a thing, and he pauses, eyes narrowing as he studies the squad. “A politician? What Mandalorian would want anything to do with a Republic politician?”
“The new Death Watch Mand'alor, apparently,” Fox says, and there's an edge to the words, an undercurrent Atin doesn’t have the context to read. When Fox curls his fingers around the grip of one pistol, though, his gauntlets creak, a quiet threat, and there's tension in it when he says, “The Nightbrother who took up the Darksaber. We’re hunting him, and if you help us, we’ll make it worth your while.”