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The Empire was, and always had been. That was the way most of the galaxy felt. One day they were there, in charge, and it was as if it had always been that way. Boots, marching, orders. There was order, as if there had never been chaos.
Chaos teemed below the surface, on faraway worlds, but even on Coruscant. Chaos, meaning life. History, traditions, love.
He didn’t set out to trade in historical goods, but there was a market for it. Even on Coruscant, especially on Coruscant, where there was simultaneously a perverse desire to own what wasn’t theirs and a kind of nostalgia. The Empire had always been, but there was also a sense that it hadn’t been.
Running an antiquities business was an excuse for passes off world, to places so remote they had no names on any common star map, but places where allies could be found and operatives could be cultivated.
He had money to start, would need more. He indulged in Ghorman silks and dressed Kleya like a doll. She pretended to resent it, to prefer rough-hewn linen, to voice that preference every time he brought her something new. But she glowed in her finery, and it lent her a confidence that steadied them both in the worst times.
Importantly, it attracted the right attention as often as the wrong.
-
The Empire was new, and there were many who knew perfectly well how things had once been.
Or, maybe not. Maybe they were remembering a fantasy, woven from stories of the High Republic. A vision of hope, of peace and unity that stretched even into the Outer Rim.
Mon looked at a portrait in Luthen’s shop. This was her first visit, and there were secrets being cultivated even then. Ideas about what they might do, how they might break a system they couldn’t even see at work. The Empire simply was, after all.
But Mon knew better, and at a party for a diplomat a month before, she’d met Luthen Rael, and the press of his hand and glint in his eye told her, he knew better, too.
The portrait Mon was drawn to was that of Lina Soh. Lina, legendary supreme chancellor, a leader every little girl in Mon’s circle had looked up to. She was a popular source for masquerade parties. To this day the primary hospital on Coruscant was named for her, though Mon was fairly certain it would bear Sheev Palpatine’s name before long. The portrait was old, framed in gold, a style that hadn’t been popular for decades or longer. Clearly painted by hand, one could see the brush strokes that had made impressive, realistic eyes.
“She was beautiful, wasn’t she?” Luthen came up beside Mon.
“Mmm. She must have been.”
“What do you know about Chancellor Soh?”
Mon smiled thinly. “What everyone knows. Starlight Beacon, the disaster at Hetzal. She maintained power through some of the worst known disasters, but she never imposed rule where it wasn’t accepted and she kept her head through it all.”
“Democracy had quite the run there for awhile.”
“It did.”
They stood facing the portrait. Behind them, Kleya entertained a customer interested in Mandalorian pottery.
“I want to buy this,” said Mon, before she realized what she was saying.
“A fine choice. Her likeness is hard to find these days.”
Impossible, really, as vestiges of the High Republic had been removed before the first day of the Empire even dawned.
“I like to think we can keep it alive.”
Luthen frowned. “Quieter, Senator. Quieter,” he whispered. Raising his voice to a conversational tone again, he began the bargaining process, and Mon met his challenge.
The portrait of Chancellor Soh hung on the wall behind Mon’s desk in her Senate chambers, and the money she used to purchase it funded the first daylight attack on an Imperial transport carrying what they all thought had to be beskar, and was actually khyber.
-
On Coruscant, on the highest levels and in the highest circles, you could forget there had been a war. You could forget there was a totalitarian regime in charge of the galaxy. Many did; many either accepted it or decided to wait it out. An entire generation was born and dead before the Empire fell, but yes, some decided to simply wait it out.
You could not do that in the mid-rim planets, star systems where mining and manufacturing took place, or those where all the advancement and opportunity of the Republic had never quite been successfully sown. The Empire showed itself to its best advantage in those places. One morning you might wake up to find your job gone or your loved ones missing. Your planet picked apart for scraps or used as a dumping ground. Perhaps it was stormtroopers doing night patrols or your child’s textbooks disappearing. It happened all at once, everywhere, so that you couldn’t find a safe place, somewhere to discuss history or dissent.
But on Coruscant, history thrived and dissent was cultivated, and Luthen Rael was at the center of it all.
-
Mon began to hold parties and salons for history buffs, and Luthen Rael received an invitation to every single one. She was careful; there was an overbalance in the numbers, so that the Empire’s brightest jewels were always in force at these events. Her radical views, so-called, were forgiven, her dissent in the days of Palpatine’s first rise forgotten.
Lina Soh looked out over negotiations in Mon’s office, long nights of legislative strategy, and she recorded it all, messages sent back to Kleya Marki for review. Mon suspected but never questioned Luthen on this.
The glamour of Coruscant made Luthen’s skin itch and he began to travel more off world, a ready-made excuse coming from how Mon Mothma’s friends kept buying what he sold. He was in search of the rare finds, Jedi sarcophagi and ancient religious relics. When he brought back a Kalikori, his dedication was praised by the collectors in his guild, and suspicion of his motives silenced for a time.
-
Was it worth it, buying up relics of a dead galaxy, selling them at premium prices, some of them bugged and others simply given up so as to keep the cover real?
-
The Empire had always been.
The sale of family heirlooms, some so precious that they were often buried with the dead, was survival.
It was worth it.
-
“Do you think this is sustainable?”
It was six, or maybe seven, years before the Battle of Scarif. A late night, after a party that had gone extremely well, connections solidified to make Vel Sartha’s next mission an impactful one.
They could not meet much in public, and it was difficult to meet in secret. She was being watched, had been from the first moment. She’d shaken her detail that night with the party and plenty of booze; bureaucracy can be unwieldy, and when no one is around to wield it at all, well.
“I don’t know.”
“I can’t do another one like this, not for awhile. There is talk…”
“There is always talk.”
“No, listen. There is talk of shutting down the collectors guild, of simply shutting down the shops.”
“Driving us underground, which we have always known could happen.”
“Do you really think I can be of help at that point? What makes you think I can keep this up forever? There is only so much money…”
She was near tears. Luthen sighed. It was hard to remember that even the staunchest of rebels would tire, when there was so little to show for their work.
“Listen, Mon. You know that is just talk; rumors have always abounded about the death of my line of work. Who wants a bunch of old junk anyway? But inertia will keep us going, and the Senate has other things to worry about.”
He said this last so pointedly that Mon looked him in the eye. “What do you know?”
“I can’t tell you, you know that.”
She rubbed her face and nodded. “I can make sure any bill to make changes to the collectors guild goes in a drawer.”
“Of course you can.”
That thin smile, so rare, appeared again. “You have too much faith in my abilities, Luthen. This may all yet fail, and you and I hung in the square for all to see.”
“You often make the same mistake about me. We are stronger together, you know. Less likely to fail.”
-
The Kalikori never sold.
Pointedly, it wasn’t for sale. Luthen always laughed when asked, claiming a kinship to the object.
“If the Empire has always been, this Twi’lek treasure means nothing. But sirs, if I may, suppose the Empire hasn’t always been. Assume for a moment, if you will, that this treasure has meaning because the Twi’lek have always been.”
The group of aristocrats in his shop that day stood shocked for a heartbeat or two, breath was held, and a good laugh brought them all back.
“Rael, you are a card! Keep your treasure then. Show us the Soh headdress, I heard you have the very one she wore the day Starlight Beacon fell.”
“A myth, Starlight Beacon, but I do have something you might find intriguing….”
-
Mon had a handful of treasures from those heady days on Coruscant, attempting to build a rebellion she was never sure she would see succeed.
Luthen Rael never did, but his central idea, that perhaps the Empire hadn’t always been, but the people had…that idea lived.
Mon treasured that above all.