Auntie Soka and Little Leia (and Rex) - phoenixyfriend (2024)

Chapter 1: End of the Line (Start of Another)

Chapter Text

Ahsoka dies in one moment, quick and mostly painless.

A quick death was the only kindness the man who had once been her master had left in him.

(In another world, perhaps, she’d have been saved by Ezra.)

(Perhaps, in another world, she’d have been able to save Anakin.)

(In this world, she is not.)

Ahsoka floats in death. She is not possessed of a sense of self, nor any true intent. She is not like the Force Ghosts she remembers crèche tales about. Ahsoka is the loosest collection of thought and memory that could be called a being.

If that.

The Force carries the entity she now is, limp and finished with life and personhood, having passed on her duties to what remains of her people.

Ahsoka lets herself start to come apart to join the spread of existence.

And then she doesn’t.

--

Duracrete is never fun to wake up on. Wet, smelly duracrete in a dark alley under the rain is worse.

Ahsoka’s montrals ring like she’s been hit. The sound is muffled and strange. The lights glitter like stars, though they aren’t.

This isn’t Malachor.

She leverages herself up from prone on her back to propped on her elbows, head spinning. Her clothes hang poorly, straps tugging in places they shouldn’t, loose and off-center. Blearily, she notes the beskar-and-plastoid tassets currently getting speckled in water on her thighs.

Her armor looks… bigger.

The fabric on her legs is getting soaked through, but her mind is still faintly buzzing, ugly with the press of too many minds. She shouldn’t be here, wherever it is. There are too many people.

Her hand goes to her hip. She has her sabers. They are warm to the touch, but oddly large, just like her clothes and armor.

Focus. Process. Body trauma check. Should have done it before sitting up.

Fingers responsive, nothing broken. Forearms, upper arms, shoulders. Toes, ankles, legs, hips. Torso. Neck.

She realizes by the time she gets to her shoulders that her lekku are too short, and reaches up to check her montrals after she confirms her neck is fine. They too are shorter and less defined than they should be.

It’s no wonder her hearing feels wrong. It’s not even worse, just… different. The rain isn’t helping.

“Soka?”

She rolls to the sides and up into a crouch, eyes wide. Stupid stupid stupid. Not even checking her surroundings.

A child. Fett clone. Blonde.

Familiar in the Force.

“You got shrunk more than I did,” she says. She stands, and tries not to swallow too visibly. “Hey, Rex.”

He unfreezes and barrels into her, unable to reach her head for a Keldabe kiss and thus settling in to hug her like his life depends on it.

“Okay, then,” Ahsoka mumbles. Something twinges at the base of her skull, a dirty little warning of a headache to come. “Rexter, you know where we are?”

“You’ve been dead for six years,” he snaps to her. The effect is somewhat lessened by how his face stays buried in the stiff leather of her cuirass.

Six years.

Rex had to live with her death for six years.

“I’m sorry,” she says, because there’s nothing else to be said. “I couldn’t leave him.”

“Ezra said.”

Of course he did.

Rex feels so small under her hands, and it’s a dizzying thing, really. If this were both of them getting turned back the same amount, she shouldn’t be quite so much larger than him. He’d been physically twenty… six? Eight? He’d been nearing thirty when she was in her late teens, which is what she’s estimating herself at now.

Even if his body were to go to the chronological age to match her, he’d be a bit older than this, wouldn’t he?

Or perhaps Fett had looked a little younger than he was, and none of the clones ever noticed due to their aging being so karked up already.

She pulls away from him, looks him up and down and clicks her tongue. His clothes hang on him worse than hers do, baggy like a child playing dress-up in daddy’s closet. He’s swimming in his uppers like a dress.

“You got pants?” she asks. “Armor?”

“Nothing that fits,” he says. He looks over her own armor, eyes catching on the straps that don’t quite fit. “Emotions later.”

“We need to get out,” she agrees. They know how to compartmentalize. They can cry on each other after they’re safely out of the rain and have an idea of what the hell is going on.

Ahsoka closes her eyes and tries to feel out a direction. There are too many lives, too many thoughts, too many—

There’s a bright spot.

It’s familiar.

Ahsoka turns and jogs, because it’s close and angry but not quite in distress, and Rex follows her. He curses as he does, loud clomps sounding off just how unpleasantly large his shoes are for him right now, but follow he does. Ahsoka rounds the corner, trusting him to follow, and sees a very small human girl in a white dress uniform that swallows her more than Rex’s does.

Familiar. Not immediately so. Ahsoka’s met this one, but doesn’t know her as intimately as she does Rex.

(He’s her other half. He always has been. She imagines he always will be, until one or both of them are dead.)

(…that already happened.)

(She should… shelve that thought for later.)

“Hello?” Ahsoka calls, slowing down as she nears the little one. She crouches down, balancing on her toes to keep from ending up even more drenched in the filthy street water than she already is. “Hey, hey, look at me.”

The little girl looks up from where she’s struggling with a belt, and blinks. Recognition, hesitant and doubting, lights her face. “Fulcrum?”

“Uh-huh,” Ahsoka encourages. “I’m afraid I don’t know you. If you got shrunk like I did, then I probably only recognize older you.”

“Leia.”

“Princess? Okay. Okay, right. You should… not be this age, if I’m back to being a teenager. Whatever time did, it hit us all differently.” She hesitates, and then holds out her hands in offer. “Let me carry you until we can get somewhere dry, and then we can figure out the clothes situation.”

Leia hesitates, but nods. They don’t have much of a choice, right now.

Ahsoka scoops her up, and then looks over her shoulder to Rex. “Eopie back?”

He isn’t happy about it, but he’s not going to run around barefoot, and he sure as hell isn’t going to be making time in the shoes he has. He climbs on and clings.

“Right,” Ahsoka says, shelving all horrible feelings into a little box for later. “Let’s get out of here.”

--

Neither Rex nor Leia seem to be particularly perturbed by Ahsoka using the Force to slip quietly into a hotel room she absolutely is not paying for. They’ve both lived their adult lives in the same outmatched war as she has, and they know that they can’t be picky. Snagging a hotel room for free doesn’t quite match up to the number of bombs they’ve planted, the number of corporate secrets they’ve smuggled, the lives they’ve stolen.

It's a very depressing line of thought. Ahsoka shoves it away in favor of hopping into the shower, fabric layers shoved into the attached laundro-sonic. Rex and Leia both insisted on waiting their turn. Ahsoka’s body-shyness is approximately in the negatives, and she’s shared exhausted cleanup with Rex before. Leia might be a bit less used to a soldier’s showers, though, and Rex definitely wants to keep an eye on her.

Ahsoka doesn’t know what happened after she died. She has the vaguest sense of a few things—she knows there was a massive loss of life at one point, something on the scale of billions in a moment—but nothing concrete. She doesn’t know what Rex’s life was like after she was gone. She has no idea what path Leia has followed from junior senator.

She ignores the scars she does not recognize. She finishes her shower. She exits. Rex darts in and starts up his own run in the sonic, and she has a feeling his clothes are going to spend more time getting cleaned than he is. Leia’s tiny form is wrapped in her uniform jacket like a dress, still wet and mussed and dirtied up by the way they all woke up. She pouts like a champion, and shivers.

“Let’s get you out of that.”

“I’m not a child,” Leia snaps. “I’m twenty-two.”

“…and I’m thirty-two,” Ahsoka says, trying not to wince at the reminder that she’s missed years of this girl’s life. “I’m also looking at someone too stubborn to get out of wet clothes.”

Leia glares at her, but starts undoing the various closures. Her fingers shake, both from the cold and from sudden lack of size. Ahsoka goes to one knee and brushes Leia’s hands out of the way, quickly undoing the zipper on the jacket, pulling off the jumpsuit and two or three layers under it, and getting Leia down to just the undershirt she’d been in when it all went down.

Rex comes out of the shower while Ahsoka is finger-combing through Leia’s hair, finally out of the braid she’d admitted it had spent the last six weeks in.

(“It’s not like we could take water showers on Hoth, you know, and sonics are murder on the hair.”)

(“I wouldn’t know.”)

(“What?”)

(“I’m togruta. I don’t have hair, Princess.”)

“Okay, get,” Ahsoka orders. “Let us know if you need help.”

“I’m not—”

“You might be too short to reach things, though,” Ahsoka reminds her, before they can get into another argument about her being Not A Child. “Go.”

Leia huffs and stalks off, dirty clothes in her arms for the fresher, and Ahsoka shakes her head.

“Plans?” Rex prompts, sitting down next to her.

She looks over at him, considers the actual knot he’s had to tie to keep his pants on, and says, “do you think you could fit into her adult clothes?”

“Not what I meant,” Rex mutters, but he obliges and puts some thought into it. “Organa’s tiny as an adult. It might not fit, but I don’t think it’ll be falling off the way mine are. Just cuff it a bunch and toss on a belt; we’ll be good to go.”

“That’s one problem solved,” Ahsoka says. She looks to the pile of dinged trooper armor and old shirt. She considers.

“I know that look,” Rex says, and it’s so odd to hear someone that knows her better than all the galaxy sound like a ten-year-old. “It’s a Kenobi look.”

“I don’t have a Kenobi look.”

“You do,” he says, utterly unconcerned. “It says ‘I just had an idea that the people under my lead are going to hate, but they can’t stop me because it will work and also because I’m in charge,’ just like he did.”

She shoves his shoulder. “Jerk.”

“He was smug about it, but not the same way General Skywalker was,” Rex continues. Her heart clenches. “Kenobi expected different kinds of arguments.”

“He did,” Ahsoka says, and then can’t keep going.

Rex waits. His hand—so damn small, though it already has plenty of blaster callouses—finds hers. “Soka?”

“Let’s not talk about Anakin,” she says. “I’m… not in a place to do that.”

Rex gives it a moment, and then says, “I know what he… I mean… I guessed… if you were worried about how to break it to me. I’ll leave the subject there.”

His pain radiates. She can’t bear it.

She closes her eyes and leans to the side, resting her shoulder to his. “Okay.”

“Okay.”

--

Ahsoka leaves the little ones for a spell. Rex does, in fact, mostly fit into Leia’s uniform; he changes into that while the princess herself wears his shirt as a dress. There’s nothing to be done about the undergarments yet, and Leia’s cold enough to spend most of her time under the covers of the room they’ve commandeered. Rex just spends his time scrubbing his armor and near obsessively cleaning and checking over the three blasters that they have between them.

They need to know more about where they are, and when.

It takes minimal work for Ahsoka to cinch and adjust own clothes until they’re workable. They aren’t great, but they stay on and don’t impede her movement more than a little.

She goes out the window. She drops down fifty stories to land on the street, silent and unnoticed despite the early morning traffic of what seems to be mostly delivery folk. She steals into the nearest alleyway, goes up a few streets to a market she’d seen, and starts hunting.

News terminal gives her the date. She hasn’t been born yet, and so the other two definitely haven’t. Anakin would be two right now. Master Kenobi would be… eighteen? Yes, eighteen or so.

She doesn’t recognize the name of the city she’s in. She grabs a spot at a rental data terminal when someone forgets to sign out and leaves some time on the meter. She looks it up, and finds that they’re on Terminus.

That’s… very outer rim. Trade port. Two major hyperlane routes: Corellian Trade Spine and Hydian Way. Either could get them to Coruscant, if they wanted to go there. They would need to transfer only once.

Ahsoka needs to warn the Jedi. Coruscant has to be the destination, whether she wants it or not.

Hydian Way, then. CTS dips too far towards Wild Space, and has bigger problems with piracy and trade disruption. She could make it work, but she’ll have two children with her, and she barely looks more than a child herself.

She doesn’t have money.

She does have… certain skills.

--

“Here.”

Rex catches the package she throws him. It’s underwear in approximately his new size. He doesn’t even ask before he’s going off to the bathroom to change into it. Leia also catches the package thrown to her. More underwear. A skirt. Socks.

“Shoes need to be tried on,” Ahsoka tells her. “So we’ll do that after we get out of here. Get dressed.”

“How did you afford this?”

“A deeply-held disregard for the bottom line of any largescale general store that’s actually a subsidiary of the Trade Federation.”

“…you stole it.”

“From a Spalmart. Get dressed as soon as Rex is done.” She does have cash now, but they’ll need that for the shoes. “We need to get out of here and eat.”

“Are you going to be stealing that too?” Leia asks archly.

“We’ll do as the Force wills,” Ahsoka says, just to see the way Leia’s face twists. Rex exits at that moment, already mostly dressed. He doesn’t quite fit into Leia’s shoes, but they’re only a little too big on him, rather than being so large his feet swim. He’s stuffing the toes with scraps of towel from the bathroom, leaving the way in clear for Leia. “Up and at ‘em princess, we need to get moving.”

Leia glares, and then shuffles her tiny form to the bathroom.

“Briefing?” Rex prompts.

“We’re on Terminus, intersection of the CTS and the Hydian Way. We’ll take the latter to Denon, switch to the Corellian Run to get to Coruscant. It’s almost twenty years pre-Empire; I’ll be born in two and a half. We’re going to the Jedi Temple to find someone that can help us prevent Sith plans from coming to fruition.”

Rex nods, and finishes stuffing the toes of the boots as Leia comes out. She sniffs, arms crossed, and says, “you’re lucky I was wearing the adventure boots.”

Ahsoka blinks, but Rex doesn’t seem surprised by whatever that comment is supposed to mean. “What?”

“I had lifts for when it was an administrative day,” Leia explains.

“She wore wedges when she was on desk duty,” Rex translates. Leia sticks her tongue out at him. He ignores her. Ahsoka’s confused worry is probably apparent on her face, because Rex follows up with, “we had months at a time on that one where nothing happened, so nobody was too concerned.”

Ahsoka would have been concerned. Wedges aren’t meant for war, no matter how much a girl might want some extra height. Just get some regular chunky heels, walking or riding or even cowboy, for pity’s sake. Why wedge? Why court a pointless sprained ankle for no reason with wedge?

Better not to obsess over it.

She cracks open the window and sets a timer on the ‘let’s not get a lawsuit because a drunk idiot fell out a fiftieth-floor window’ forcefield, once again carrying each of the other two. “Hold on.”

She leaps.

--

Rex is too used to this to scream, and Leia’s not the type to react to fear in that specific way. When they land, it’s nearly silent, and Rex immediately drops to walk beside her. Leia stays on her back, like a spitre monkey. The girl is very annoyed by this situation.

Time to hunt out a shoe store.

“Hey,” Ahsoka greets a store clerk, when they find a shoe shop. “My niece stepped in this… weird, gross puddle, and we didn’t bring any spare shoes on this trip.”

The clerk does not appear interested in Ahsoka’s prepared explanation for why Leia does not already have shoes. “Doing a lot of walking?”

“Plenty. Utility over aesthetic, please,” Ahsoka says, and doesn’t twitch as the clerk looks at her armor for a long, awkward moment.

“Yeah, okay. Follow me,” the clerk says. Rex wanders off alone at one point. He’s visually old enough that nobody’s going to be too concerned about him handling himself; he returns halfway through Leia’s trying-on process with a pair of boots from the clearance section. They’re not a very appealing color, and clash like hels with Leia’s Hoth uniform, which he’ll be wearing until further notice. Nonetheless, he claims that they fit and refuses to be budged when the clerk tries to upsell some other designs. Leia ends up with children’s sneakers, and Ahsoka forks over more than two thirds of her stolen money for the two pairs.

She doesn’t get new shoes for herself. Her own fit well enough. She keeps Leia’s boots from Hoth. She can pawn them. She does, children at her hip, and doesn’t know how to feel about the almost paltry amount she gets for them.

She can’t do a Knight’s Gambit. She’s too young for it to end well, especially with Leia and Rex. If she were older, more visibly competent, and alone, or with a fully-grown trooper at her side, it would be another matter, but as it stands… no. Whoever she plays with would try to take her out behind the establishment to beat the money back out of her, and she’d have to fight her way to safety and freedom, and the kids would be in danger, and then there’d be attention.

She can’t afford attention.

She needs another plan.

“I’m hungry,” Leia announces. “And I don’t think this body knows how to ignore that very well, yet.”

Right. Priorities.

“Noodles,” Ahsoka decides. “Let’s do noodles.”

She leads them through the city, vaguely in the direction of the spaceport she can see ships heading to and from, and feels eyes as they get closer. It’s a familiar feeling, and she sweeps Leia up onto her back after one too many looks. She doesn’t question it aloud, thankfully, and Rex just steps to slip his hand through a strap in Ahsoka’s armor, resting his other lightly on a blaster.

Outer Rim. Teenage-looking tog girl. Children: human, healthy, pretty.

It doesn’t matter that the Jedi aren’t being hunted, that Fulcrum is not in this time one of the Empire’s most wanted enemies. It doesn’t matter that clones aren’t the most famous face in the galaxy yet. It doesn’t matter that Leia is royalty from one of the most famous families in politics.

They are still wanted.

They can still be sold.

The noodle shop is Tholothian, and over half the soups have insects as an ingredient. Leia makes a face, but gamely eats as much as she can. Rex and Ahsoka don’t even hesitate. They’ve all lived through rationed meals and flimsiboard nutrient bars, and even the odd diplomatic meal with unfamiliar delicacies. They can deal.

It’s a nice place, at least. Half the kitchen is on display behind a counter, to watch the chefs at work. It’s pleasant.

“So, what’s a girl like you doing in a place like this?”

“Not looking for a hookup,” Ahsoka says, without looking at the guy. The chef on the other side of the counter looks up, frowning. The Tholothian woman meets Ahsoka’s eyes, and seems to decide she’s got it handled.

“Aw, come on, don’t be like that,” the man wheedles. Human, she thinks, and unwashed for at least a few days. Spacer, going by the edges of the jacket she can see from the corner of her eye. “You and me could get out of here, and find a place to get to know each other, what do you say?”

“I don’t have the time,” she tells him. “And I’ve got to look after the kids.”

Nobody’s trying to get at the two yet. The guy might not be a distraction meant to distract her from her charges. Probably.

“Plenty of places to put them,” the man says, and puts a hand on her bicep.

“Hands off,” she says, and brushes the hand away. One chance. One chance only.

His hand goes to her shoulder. “You’re so fei—”

She grabs his hand and wrenches it back and down, eliciting a shriek as his wrist bends far further back than it’s meant to. “I said no. Several times. I told you not to touch me, and I told you I’m not interested. Leave.”

He scrambles to his feet, cursing, and Ahsoka crosses her arms, co*cks her hip, glares. “You really wanna pick a fight with the bitch in beskar?”

He freezes. So do the other patrons. He looks her up and down, and past her to where Rex is no doubt fingering a blaster, and Leia’s watching with disdain. They don’t look like Mando kids, with their minimal resources, but they do look battle-ready and bored with violence.

“f*ck you,” the man spits, and then storms out.

Ahsoka sighs and slips back onto her counter stool. “I’m sorry about that.”

“Don’t be,” the chef tells her. “You’re Mando, then?”

“No. Sort of. Not really, but it’s complicated. Unofficial adoption and a lot of… it’s just complicated.” It really is. It’s hard to explain her connection to the culture that armed and armored her when the galaxy was falling apart, the culture that wasn’t hers but was an army of brothers’, except they weren’t allowed it either. It’s hard to explain the experience that is Bo-Katan Kryze in the wake of the Empire. It’s impossible to explain that without the context of the next thirty-five years. “Rex is, though, and he’s basically my brother.”

Rex himself waves. “Hey.”

The chef nods slowly. “I see.”

Does she? Ahsoka has no idea. “Yeah. Uh. Do you have any to-go boxes?”

--

Rex carries the food.

Right now, Ahsoka is the only one that can actually fight back if they’re attacked. She doesn’t think they’re necessarily likely to be attacked, now that they’ve hit the relatively populated areas around the spaceport, but it’s still a risk. All the knowledge in the galaxy on how to keep to well-lit, well-tread areas, with just enough attention that someone might interfere if there’s a scuffle but won’t stalk them through the city, will not keep them perfectly safe.

“That way.”

Ahsoka blinks, looks down at Leia, and follows her pointing finger. Nothing seems particularly special about that direction, but that doesn’t mean it’s not. “Yeah?”

“You’re busy being on high alert for danger,” Leia tells her, somewhat scoffing. “So I decided I’d listen for hints on how to get a flight. There’s something that way.”

The Force, without mentioning the Force.

(Goodness knows that would raise their prices on the black market.)

Ahsoka follows the directions. She feels them out herself, but they don’t seem dangerous and faked, so it’s probably not a Sith laying false security for them to follow.

She’s spent too long in the land of justified paranoia.

Large passenger cruiser, headed for Chardaan. It won’t get them all the way to Denon, but it’ll be close enough.

“We can’t afford those tickets,” Leia says. She doesn’t sound too worried. “But I guess the mighty Fulcrum can handle that much.”

Ahsoka snorts. Her eyes trace over the passenger liner, through the maintenance entrances and the support craft hangar, and yeah. Yeah, she can.

“Cargo bay,” she says. “Let’s go.”

--

It’s not as easy, after that. The maintenance droids are… loyal, it seems, unfortunately so. They have to ditch the passenger craft on the first pit stop they make, because the maintenance droids that they could usually count on to not care about them are… actually pretty annoyed by their presence. Ahsoka has to temporarily disable three to avoid getting caught.

Leia shifts. “This isn’t—”

“Optimal, I know,” Ahsoka says, grimacing. “It’s fine. I’m fine. I can make it work.”

“Ahsoka—”

“Don’t,” she warns. “Rex, I just… give me a minute.”

She’s got them up on a roof, tucked into a corner, waiting. She closes her eyes and breathes, and tries to ignore the growling of Leia’s stomach. She’s too young…

f*ck. She got co*cky. The passenger liner was too big, too expensive, too luxury for the kind of lax security she’d hoped to find. If she were alone, she’d have been able to make it, but she’s not. She needs—needs time and money, and ways to keep the kids safe.

Rex is older than her, now. He’s not a kid.

Fine. Plan B.

“This is gonna get ugly,” she tells them. “Just… work with me, yeah?”

They nod. They trust her.

They probably shouldn’t, honestly.

--

Ahsoka is unpleasantly good at many, many unsavory skills. She is a competent pickpocket, thief, abductor, and stowaway. She could be a very good assassin, if that were ever a type of work she felt she wanted to turn her life towards, or a bounty hunter.

When Ahsoka drags herself and her charges into the vent system of a ship that’s definitely being used to smuggle some kind of rare, exotic pet, neither of them are happy with her.

They are, however, safe.

Nobody will smell or hear them past the animals. They have cover if they move. There is food, even if it’s not necessarily meant for people, and the animals are large enough to not care if a handful or two goes missing. The feed is in a large enough quantity that the smugglers will not notice.

It is awful, but it is safe.

Ahsoka leads them through the narrow, overly dusty vent system, strips of fabric tied over their mouths and noses to keep out the worst of the dander. Her armor isn’t conducive to silence, and the backpack full of plastoid pieces that Rex is lugging around isn’t helping either.

(Only Leia had suggested leaving it behind. She had not repeated this mistake.)

There is a trick to knowing when to leave a vent system and use the facilities. That trick is mostly using the Force. Ahsoka’s had years upon years to train up her ability to quietly unscrew vents and drop out without a sound, safe with the knowledge that she will be left alone for at least half an hour. The Force will warn her, barring someone like Ventress, and a half-turned lock will delay them just enough for her to get the others back into the ventilation.

“I hate this,” Leia hisses, once her mouth is uncovered again. “That’s disgusting.”

“But it’s keeping you alive, princess garbage chute,” Ahsoka mutters back. “Yeah, you regretting telling me that story yet?”

She is, definitely.

“Wash up,” Ahsoka orders. “We don’t have forever.”

Just a few more days to the next port. Just a few more days.

--

“Name?”

“Sokari,” she tells the hotel attendant. She’s had time to think about this. There might be a younger her born in a few years. She cannot steal her own self’s name before she’s even born. This will do.

“Last name or no?”

“Torrent,” she says. She has options to choose from, but this…

This, she can share with Rex.

(He has ever been her second half.)

Leia has chosen her mother’s maiden name, because Antilles may have been the royal house of Alderaan for centuries, but it is also one of the most common surnames in the galaxy.

They make it to the room. Ahsoka—Sokari, now, she has to think of herself that way—Soka’s got the cash to put them up in something a little better than nothing for the night. It will do them good.

“And yet we can’t pay for a place on a ship,” Leia mutters.

“You know why,” Rex scolds, dropping his pack of plastoid and emptying it onto the carpeting, accounting for all of his pieces.

That vambrace was Gregor’s, once. The pauldron, Wolffe’s. Respect and remembrance of fallen family, just like her own. They cannot—will not—lose them.

“Things were easier when I was big,” Leia mutters.

Rex snorts. “You were never big, Princess.”

“You know what I meant!” Leia snaps.

“Clear,” Soka announces.

“Nobody knows to be looking for us yet,” Rex says. “We don’t really need to do a full sweep.”

She looks at him. She keeps looking.

“Fine, yes, we want to make sure nobody’s getting abducted for sale because they bribed a hotel employee to tell them when there’s easy pickings,” Rex sighs. “Still, would be nice to relax.”

“That, unfortunately, has never been any of our lives,” Soka says. “Leia, we’ve got privacy now. I want you to meditate.”

Leia’s irritation spikes. Soka doesn’t react.

“Fine,” Leia mumbles. “Are you sure—”

“You’re Force-Sensitive. We’re in a high-stress situation. Yes, you need to meditate in the Force, not just the normal way, and you haven’t since we hit the hyperlanes. Sit.”

“I’ll clean up,” Rex tells them. “Don’t let me disturb you coming out.”

Soka waves him off, and gestures pointedly at the wide hassock at the foot of the bed. Leia huffs and climbs up onto it, facing Sokari with her legs folded wide.

“You remember how to—”

“Yes, Fulcrum, I remember,” Leia says. “You only spent months teaching me this when I was actually a child.”

“A little politeness, princess,” Soka admonishes.

“I outrank you,” Leia sniffs. “Full general, here.”

“It’s cute that you think that,” Sokari tells her.

Leia blinks at her.

“The role of Fulcrum Prime was given full Rebellion high council status from three years into the Empire. Just because I rarely made use of that role does not mean I wasn’t given it. I had the highest classifications, Leia. I was the spy network. So yes, I have been your father’s equal in the Rebellion since you were three years old, for all that I joked that he was my boss.”

Leia flushes and looks down. “Nobody told me that.”

“Well, I was dead by the time you were in a position for it to matter,” Soka says, perhaps a little snide. “Now, are you going to listen to me, or are you going to act like a child?”

Leia glares at her, and it looks very much like a pout with her physical age being what it is.

“Eyes closed,” Soka tells her. “You need this.”

“Fine,” Leia grumbles, closing her eyes and settling herself.

Sokari does the same, and uses her own meditation to keep an eye on Leia in the Force. It’s a slow thing, full of stumbles and spikes of emotion, and Soka has to corral her when that meditation starts to balloon outwards too quickly.

Leia had been four, when Bail had first called up Fulcrum in a panic and asked for her help in making his daughter unnoticeable.

At the time, she’d been the only Force-trained individual he had any access to at all. Sure, others were alive, but she was the only one he could reach.

And so she’d come, and she’d taught, and she’d started to wonder.

Once upon a time, Bail had asked her leading questions to see if she’d known something about Anakin and Padmé.

Once upon a time, Bail had stopped picking at a thread when she hadn’t given him anything to work with.

Once upon a time, Soka hadn’t been aware that Padmé had been buried looking pregnant. That she’d been secretly with child for months.

(She had not been on Coruscant for so many months, after Barriss’s betrayal. She couldn’t have known.)

Ahsoka Tano had visited Naboo, to see if she could find anything of Palpatine’s secrets in his old home. She’d swung by Padmé’s resting place, unable to help herself, and seen the belly, and mourned.

She’d gone, two years later, to Alderaan at Bail’s request. She’d met Leia, meditated with this toddler who was in so, so much more danger than she would be able to understand for years and years. She’d stopped by again later, but it was in those moments…

She’d known Leia was adopted. Everyone did. It was public information.

It was not… she’d never gotten confirmation. She hadn’t asked Bail or Breha, unwilling to ask them for this much, but… but Artoo was there. Threepio was there.

Leia was Force-Sensitive, to a degree of power unheard of in children.

Anakin, who had been close to Padmé.

Padmé, who had died pregnant.

Padmé, who had been a close friend of Bail’s, enough so that her and Anakin’s droids were left to him.

The Organas, who were as desperate as any parent to hide their Force-Sensitive child from the Emperor.

A child who had been born just as the Empire had risen. Just as Padmé had died.

A child that had been, if not really a spitting image, more than a little too similar to Padmé in looks to really dismiss.

The dates were not exact, but such things would have been fudged for the records, to hide the girl from the Emperor, to hide just who her biological father was.

Ahsoka has never known, but she has long suspected.

Leia’s power is potent, moreso than when Soka had first met her, moreso than when they’d run into each other over the years. Moreso than anyone Soka’s met, except for Anakin and maybe Yoda.

(And the Mortis Gods, but they didn’t really count, now did they?)

There is something, someone, that Leia keeps reaching for, subconsciously. Soka has to hem her in, every time, because whatever the girl is searching out, it is not close enough to do so without hurting herself. Not yet. Not as untrained as she is.

She rouses from meditation. Leia follows her.

“Tell me about Luke,” Soka says.

Leia’s brow furrows. “Why?”

“I knew Anakin Skywalker,” Soka says, though Leia already knows that much. The reminder, at least, gives the girl pause. “And I have a theory, but I need some more information to get it really set.”

“What kind of theory?” Leia prompts.

“I think I know,” Rex says. Good, he’s here. “I thought the same, if it’s…”

Twins? He thinks, loud enough for Soka to hear it.

She nods to him. “Just so. Leia, tell me about Luke.”

Leia is still suspicious, but she cooperates. She talks about how Luke rescued her, brought there by Obi-Wan Kenobi and a no-good smuggler, one that Leia was transparently fond of nonetheless.

She talks about how she and Luke had just clicked, and she’d thought he had a crush on her, maybe, but they’d both settled into something more familial than that. She talks about how they’d had fun with being so close in age—just a few weeks apart, going by Artoo’s calculations on how much or little their respective locations in the galaxy had changed time for them—compared to Han, ganging up on him and calling him an old fart when they’d had the time and energy to actually act like teenagers instead of war heroes.

(That is a familiar refrain, and Soka has to try to not to remember her own teenage years doing just the same.)

Leia talks about how they’d both been mourning, when they met, and how she’d coached him through the same meditations that Fulcrum had taught her, once. How they’d been orbiting about each other in the Force like a binary star system. How they’d just… fit together like puzzle pieces.

Sokari exchanges a look with Rex.

That certainly sounds like Force Twins. Soka hadn’t met many other than Tiplar and Tiplee, but they’d been touched on in some classes, while discussing different kinds of Force bonds.

“Did he look it?” she asks Rex.

“Hell of a lot shorter than General Skywalker was,” Rex says. “Other than that… little things, mostly. The chin. Proportions in the face were more like hers, overall. Can’t say for behavior how much was environmental, so I won’t guess at that one.”

“Too much to dismiss,” Soka mutters.

“You should have seen them,” Rex says, wistful and distant. “In the same room. Visually, it really does… make sense.”

“What does?” Leia finally demands.

“I’ve suspected your birth parentage for a long time, but never asked Bail, just in case. If I was ever captured and tortured for information, it was safer that I didn’t know,” Sokari tells her. She does not hesitate to continue. “I think you and Luke are twins.”

Leia stares. This is, Sokari feels, going to be an ongoing theme.

“What?” Leia finally croaks out.

“You look like Padmé, enough that I wouldn’t be surprised,” Soka tells her. She’s trying to be gentle about it. “Your degree of Force Sensitivity is something I’ve only ever encountered in a handful of people, and only one human.”

“Does near-human count?” Rex asks.

Sokari frowns at him. “Which…?”

“Fay.”

“Oh, I completely forgot about her,” she realizes. “I… yes for power, not for the current conversation. I was going for the parentage angle, and Leia’s full human.”

“Noted.”

Soka nods, and turns back to Leia. “It’s not impossible for that Force Sensitivity to have come from nowhere, but it’s… certainly a point in favor of your biological father being Anakin Skywalker. Granted, his mother wasn’t Force-Sensitive, and we don’t know about his father, but… yes. I find it very likely that you are his biological daughter.”

“That’s… no. I can’t be Luke’s sister,” Leia protests.

“And why n—”

“Because I kissed him!”

Soka shoots a look at Rex, who lifts his hands and looks, perhaps, a little panicked. “I didn’t know for sure, and we all thought she was angling for Solo! I figured Senator Mothma would have known and told them if it was true, and I was mostly on Lothal with Sabine and Hera; only really met the kids twice. Not really…”

She doesn’t know what her face is doing, but it can’t be anything good. Rex droops. “I was half-retired, Commander. My body was… not breaking down, really, but I was hitting my sixties, physically. The arthritis alone made me mostly useless on Hoth. I wanted to spend time with Anakin’s kids, obviously, but…”

“I know,” Soka says. She gets up and goes to him, pulls him into a hug and wishes he were taller, wishes he were of a height with her so they could both get the full comfort they needed out of this. “I know, Rex.”

“sh*ttiest hand in the galaxy, eh?” he jokes.

“f*ckin’ Kamino,” she agrees. She pulls back and sighs, rubbing at her forehead. “I’m not blaming you for not reaching out to them. I can imagine the kind of security risk people would have claimed it to be, whether contacting by holo or traveling to and from a base you couldn’t stay on. I get it.”

Rex shudders a bit. She holds him as tight as she can without it hurting.

“Commander?”

“Hm?”

“Ezra and Kanan weren’t sure, but… Darth Vader…” he pauses, and breathes in deep, like he can’t bear to think it, but has to force himself to say it anyway; he’d alluded to it earlier, but it was quite another thing to say it aloud and ask for confirmation, “you said you couldn’t leave him.”

“I did.”

“…Vader was General Skywalker, wasn’t he?”

Leia’s sharp gasp almost breaks them apart.

(What a revelation to be had about parentage. At least they are no longer in a time where it can matter.)

“Yeah, Rex. He… he was.”

Rex nods against her, and then he pulls back. She can’t look at him, she can’t, but he reaches up and takes her chin in his hands, and pulls her to look down at him. “Soka, you… on Malachor—”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“But—”

“I can’t,” she snaps, ripping herself away from him. “We are—we are in so much danger until we get to the Temple, Rex. I can’t afford to think about it. I can’t.”

“Alright,” he says, and follows her. He wraps his arms about her middle, and she belatedly realizes that she’s still dirty, while he just finished with his shower.

She should… something.

“My biological father is Darth Vader?” Leia demands.

“Let’s skip that part,” Rex says, despite being the person who brought it up in the first place. “How are we feeling about washing up? You should wash up, Leia.”

“You can’t just drop a bomb like that on me and expect—”

“It’s bath time,” Rex declares, picking Leia up and carrying her screeching into the bathroom despite not being much larger than she is. “Hup hup!”

Soka drops into an armchair and melts back into it. She presses her palms to her eyes and hopes, prays, that the headache will cease. She’s calling it a headache, and will keep calling it a headache, because acknowledging the truth isn’t going to help her here and now.

(The ghost of a scar she never grew, because she died before it had time to do more than cauterize, pulses at her breastbone.)

Leia’s shouting abruptly stops.

Sokari is pretty sure she knows exactly what Rex said to make that happen.

I won’t leave you.

Then you will die.

Coruscant. She just needs to get them to Coruscant.

(Leia lost her entire planet, and Vader made her watch. Of course this revelation means a lot to her.)

(Soka should… she should…)

(Sleep. She should clean up and sleep.)

Chapter 2: Legacy

Chapter Text

“I’m a human espresso.”

Soka looks down from where she’s been scanning the spaceport for a sign of where and how to get a ride to the next planet. She can’t afford to purchase a major leg of the trip, just a few systems in exchange for labor or… well, they’ve already stowed away a few times. They’ll be doing it again.

“What?” Rex prompts.

Leia looks up at him, and then at Soka. She frowns a little harder. It’s unfairly adorable. “I was already small and strong and bitter, like caff. Now I’m smaller, and still strong, and even more bitter, so I’m espresso.”

Soka purses her lips and looks back up, trying very hard not to laugh at the little girl. She feels… lightheaded. She’s too tired.

“Can’t say you look very strong to me, Princess,” Rex says.

“Strong in the Force,” Leia corrects, and then mutters under breath, “apparently.”

Cute. Soka can’t focus on that. She needs to find a—

“The Gamorreans,” she spots. She has a good feeling, or at least one that isn’t wholly terrible. “Bet they need a mechanic. With me, kids.”

“I’m not a kid!” Leia protests, far from the first time.

“I’m older than you!” Rex adds, though he at least is laughing through it.

“Yes, and?”

--

In exchange for Sokari fixing a chronic issue with their fuel lines, the Gamorreans take them as far as… well, it’s a barely-named planetoid, rife with crime and danger, that’s not even halfway to Eriadu. It’s still closer than they were two days ago.

Sokari gets to work, trying to find another ship to barter with. Another craft to stow away on. Another way out.

There isn’t one.

It’s not that there aren’t more ships going in and out. There are. They just… are mostly smugglers, slave traders, or Trade Federation.

She’s not betting her safety on the fripping feds.

(Besides, she can’t avoid their security with the kids in tow. Not without more tech, or at least a good night’s sleep.)

A day passes, and she gets them a hotel room. When morning comes, they have a tail, and she has to squirrel them away on a rooftop for the better part of six hours to lose it.

Slavers. They’re getting pinged as an easy target.

f*ck.

She doesn’t bother with paying the next night. She breaks in through a window, shoves the kids to shower and bed, and then stands guard until dawn, too jittery to sleep. The Force will carry her for a little while longer. She can do this.

They don’t have a tail, when she drags them back out, just as the weak sunlight is filtering past the clouds at the horizon. Her skin crawls with it, though, and she pulls them along crowded thoroughfares and past richer part of the ports, where there is at least a veneer or respectability. She bares her teeth and flashes her beskar whenever she can. Leia even lets herself be carried to make it harder for someone to snatch her.

Rex has a blaster in one hand and the leather of Soka’s belt in the other. It’ll be enough to give her warning to draw her blades if she really has to.

(Someone tries to pickpocket the sabers, but Ahsoka Tano learned that lesson in the dim, dank Coruscant undercity at age fourteen. It hasn’t happened since. It certainly won’t be happening again.)

“Auntie Soka?” Leia whispers, dragging her attention from the slightly-too-interested Twi’lek with the Pyke tattoo half-hidden under his shirt.

“Yeah?”

“I’m hungry.”

…sh*t.

She glances at Rex. He grimaces. He must be hungry too, then.

Soka thinks inwards. She is… also hungry. sh*t.

Her focus is slipping.

She can’t keep this up forever.

“I think that one’s safe,” Leia says, tugging on Soka’s pauldron and pointing once she’s gotten attention.

It’s a pub. It’s not any cleaner or grimier than any other.

Leia’s strong in the Force, though, stronger than Soka ever was. If she has a hunch…

They have enough money left for a warm meal. They need it. She’ll figure something out for passage.

(She can’t let them down, she can’t she can’t she can’t.)

“Alright,” she says. “Let’s go see if they let kids in.”

--

There is someone at the door that is, ostensibly, meant to keep out minors.

He doesn’t.

Soka does not grab a table before she grabs food. She refuses to leave the little ones anywhere without her, even if it’s just a few feet away, grabbing a plate of mashed tubers and braised nerfmeat.

(They don’t have anything raw, but she’ll… figure something out. She can work with cooked or grilled or whatever. Maybe fish?)

Her eyes are drooping, and she eats with them closed. She’s too damn tired to do otherwise, but her other senses are wide aware.

Someone reaches for Leia’s hand, radiating ill intent, and Soka stabs the dinner knife into the table just millimeters from their skin.

The person yanks their hand back, and observes. They feel awful and oily, and she’s sure they’re trying to decide if they can get away with another try from a different angle.

She opens her eyes a sliver, pulls the chewed bone from her mouth, and drawls, “Copaani mirshmure'cye?”[1]

The rodian’s eyes are hard to track in terms of where they point, but she knows they’ve just realized her armor isn’t for show. Sure, it could be faked, and it’s not like learning Mando’a is impossible for the layperson… but she’s already made her claim with the knife. She might not be Mandalorian. She also might be. They know better than to risk it.

Probably.

They sneer and wander off, and Soka closes her eyes and lets her head fall back.

She needs to sleep. She needs to sleep, or she’s going to lose her kids to some asshole that actually is the slightest bit competent.

That, of course, is when things get interesting.

It’s not… unexpected, entirely. It’s not the most expected, but it’s not a huge surprise. This planetoid is a ‘hive of scum and villainy,’ as some would say. It’s the norm to see pit fighters and slavers and yes, even bounty hunters.

So, really, it’s not a surprise that Sokari spots a Mandalorian.

She doesn’t recognize the armor. She does recognize the sigil; she’d spent too many years as a friend of Bo-Katan’s, dropping in and out of each other’s lives to share a drink and mourn all that they’ve lost, to not know at least a few major clans and factions. It’s a mythosaur skull, something she knows is associated with the True Mandalorians. The Haat’ade, a name that had rankled at Death Watch for all that the intent had been ‘Mandalorians striving for truth and honor’ and not ‘the real Mandalorians.’ [2]

She considers it. She’s too tired to really think it through, but… they’re more likely to help than some, probably. She thinks… hells, she can’t remember what year the Galidraan incident was. If it’s before, then she might be in luck; the Haat’ade were decent people overall, she thinks. At the very least, they’re enemies of Death Watch, which is… usually a good sign. Soka herself was an enemy of Death Watch. So was Maul, for a bit, but… it’s fine! The True Mandalorians have the same grudge as Soka does, right?

And Mandalorians like kids and Sokari hasn’t slept in five days and it’s fine. It’s fine! It’s fine.

“Oh sh*t,” Rex whispers, before she can suggest anything.“Oh f*ck.”

“Stop cursing,”Leia hisses, elbowing him. The two of them are sitting on the same bench, across from Soka in the booth. Why did she think that was a good idea?“People are going to notice.”

“That’s the Prime,”Rex panics, only barely managing to keep it quiet. Sokari’s heart drops, because f*ckis right. “That’s Fett.”

Leia isn’t impressed.

Sokari angles herself between Fett and Rex, and prays that he doesn’t see them.

Sokari is usually able to ensure she keeps awareness of potential enemies.

Sokari is in fact running on none sleep with left trauma.

She doesn’t notice Fett walking up and dropping into a seat across from them until he’s actually done so, removing his helmet to glare a little more efficiently.

“Wanna explain why your kid has my face?”

Later, Sokari will tell herself that he’s killed Jedi with his bare hands, and that’s why he can sneak up on her. She will say that she can be forgiven some slip-ups with the exhaustion being what it is, and that she’s obviously going to be dealing with some emotional instability in light of the sudden return of teenage hormones. She’ll tell herself that it’s all in the new forms of anxiety she’s got, ones that are markedly different from those she’d been struggling against just a few weeks earlier.

What Sokari wants to say is‘that’s kind of a long story,’ or‘maybe he’s a cousin,’ or‘kriff off, I don’t know you,’ or maybe even just‘he’s a clone.”

What Sokari actuallydoes is burst into tears. This is embarrassing for her, for Fett, for the kids, and for the entire rest of the bar.

It really is the straw that broke the eopie’s back. Even when she was actually this age, she didn’t exactly cry much. Objectively, Fett quasi-aggressively asking a valid question shouldn’t send her into a panic. She’s been through torture, through genocide, through actual death and worse. She shouldn’t be crying.

Yet, she is.

She is sobbing her eyes out with no control, and he’s just sitting across from her and looking uncomfortable while Rex wraps his little arms—oh Force, he’s so small, when did he even get around the booth table to her side, where’s Leia—around her,and she can feel it as both‘children’ glare at Fett.

She has to stop crying. She has to stop, what the hell is wrong with her?

She’s not this tired. She can’t be this tired, to be crying just because Fett showed up and—and—

Why can’t she stop?

(Her breathing evens out, but the tears do not end. There’s a cup of water set in front of her. She doesn’t know who ordered it, but Rex is nudging her to drink.)

(She wants Master Kenobi’s tea.)

“So… I’m going to take it she didn’t kidnap you from a loving family or do something illicit with a blood sample,” Fett says, after it becomes obvious that Soka’s not going to be ready to talk any time soon.

“She didn’t,” Rex says stiffly, with just the right emphasis for Fett to catch what’s implied. Sokari just keeps her head down, eyes pressed against the heels of her palms, trying to get her body to stop rebelling against her.

Fett’s eyes dart to Leia, who folds her arms and draws herself up, every bit the unimpressed princess.“My father claimed her as a sister, so she’s my Auntie ‘Soka.”

The man dithers a bit, the conversation clearly not going where he’d expected.“Right,” he says.“You—you’re all kids. I thought she was a little older, at least, but I didn’t have a good look at her face before.”

She isolder, but actually admitting that is only going to make this worse, both for her pride and for her chances of making it out alive.

“Where are you staying?”

“What?” Leia bites out.

“You’re kids, you’re alone, and you’re clearly not okay if you were trying to hide the one with my face as blatantly as you did, and then… whatever this is, when I confronted you,” Fett explains. Sokari lifts her head to glare at him, but it’s probably not doing much with the way her eyes are rimmed with red and still wet.He looks genuinely uncomfortable. “Don’t give me that look, ad’ika, your kids looked as confused and horrified by that as the bartender did. They obviously didn’t think the breakdown was normal either.” [3]

Well, kriff you too,Sokari thinks.

“And what do you mean by‘blatantly,’ here?” Leia challenges. It’s adorable, but Sokari watched this tiny girl shoot a man last week, and wonders when people are going to start taking that seriously.

“There are a lot of people in this galaxy, and I don’t exactly have the clearest memory of what I looked like at that age,” Fett says, slow and careful like he thinks they’re a little dim. Sokari decides to chalk it up as being because Leia’s seemingly six.“I would have thought it was just a coincidence if you hadn’t put in effort to hide him.”

Leia huffs, and Rex glares harder. Fett just sighs, like they’re all going to give him grey hairs.

“You can explain whatever the hell’s going on after you get some sleep,” Fett decides, rubbing a hand down his face.“I’ll let you stay on my ship; there’s some spare bunks and you’re all pretty small.”

“For free?” Rex demands.

“A night on a bunk in exchange for information,” Fett clarifies. He looks unimpressed with Rex’s aggression.“We can negotiate from there.”

Sokari takes a few moments, notes that both of the others are waiting on her for the decision, and cringes. She doesn’t feel steady enough to carry that. She has to anyway.

“Rex?” she asks, voice rasping after the breakdown of the past few minutes.

“Yeah?”

“How much?”

He looks up at her, eyes calculating, and grimaces.“We don’t want Order 66. A warning is better, even if we… share information.”

She nods, and turns to Leia.“Any premonitions, princess?”

Leia glowers, cute and furious.“No.”

“No, don’t tell, or no, you aren’t getting any vibes about sharing info one way or the other?”

“The latter,” Leia clarifies, huffy to the last.

“Right,” Sokari says, and then just… hesitates.She doesn’t want to. “Fett…”

“You’ve got conditions,” he guesses.

She bares her teeth in what could have, through a squint and perhaps a few drinks, been called an apologetic smile.“Just one, really.”

“Yeah?”

“No hurting, killing, or turning us in for bounties,” she says.“Any of us.”

“You’re children. I wouldn’t.”

She blinks at him, slow and careful. She hesitates. She reaches down, out of sight, sees him stiffen.

She unclips her sabers from her belt and puts them on the table.

His eyes are fixed on the weapons the second they enter his line of sight, and don’t move as he clearly realizes why she made the condition she did.

“I left years ago, because I couldn’t stay without it ruining me,” she says. Still slow. Still careful. She’s so tired. “But if I want to keep Leia safe, I have to get back to Coruscant.”

His eyes finally lift from the sabers, expression blank.“Just her?”

“Rex doesn’t have the same monsters coming after him,” she says.“If it were just me and him, I’d worry less. Leia’s a different kind of target.”

“You’re putting a lot of faith on the table by telling me that,” Fett says, voice flat and neutral. “Considering my occupation.”

“She’s a child,” Sokari says. She feels heavy and boneless and so, so, so tired.“Even with what I was and will be, even with what money you would get from the right buyer, you wouldn’t.”

She thinks. She hopes. She can’t discount what he agreed to with Kamino.

“There are other risks.”

“There are.”

They stare at each other for too long, probably, and then Fett jerks as Rex kicks him under the table. The boys glare for a moment, and then Rex says,“If she weren’t good, I’d still be a slave to those who grew me.”

Fett blinks, and then nearly growls the word,“What?”

“She freed me,” Rex reiterates.“While I was trying to shoot her.”

Sokari lifts a hand and puts it on his far shoulder, pulling him into her side. She doesn’t meet Fett’s eyes again, because part of her is back on Mandalore, dodging her own soldiers and crying out as her family dies across the galaxy.

Fett breathes in. Breathes out. He puts a hand to his head, visibly frustrated. “Fine. A good Jedi kid, and two smaller kids, one of which is apparently in some way mine.”

Rex makes a face, which is fair, but also not helping.

“To the ship,” Sokari says, putting her sabers back on her belt and sliding out of the seat.“I’m… I’m Sokari.”

“You already know my name.”

“I do.”

--

Fett watches her like she’s a predator, which has the benefit of being accurate and slightly flattering. She lets other two take care of most of talking, and then Fett tells her to sleep first, and talk in the morning.

“You’re dead on your feet, jetii,”he snorts.“And that crying jag didn’t do you any favors. Sleep.” [4]

She doesn’t have much of a choice anymore.

She sleeps, and Fett doesn’t even wakeher. He just lets her slumber like the dead. He keeps an eye on her in the way of a guard. She sees him when she gets up to use the‘fresher in the middle of the night, but he doesn’t even comment when she collapses right back into the mediocre cot she’s borrowed for the cycle.

Rex and Leia are safe, her hindbrain tells her, even in the depths of sleep. Her mind curls around theirs in the Force, and she trusts that they are here. They are not happy, but they are alive and unharmed, and that has to be enough.

When she stumbles her way to true wakefulness, groggy and loose-limbed, Fett greets her with caff.

“The kids wouldn’t let me near you,” he tells her.

“They’re good,” she says, cupping her hands around the mug. She feels wobbly, in every sense. Her body, her mind, her emotions, her connection to the Force. Nothing is on-kilter right now.“Did they tell you anything?”

“They waited for you,” he says.“But the little miss needed a nap of her own. They’re down in the other bunk.”

“I didn’t notice,” she admits. She should have. She’s Fulcrum.She’s a veteran of the Clone Wars. She’s… she’s supposed to be better than this.

“How long?” he asks, and then when she squints up at him, he clarifies.“How long did you fight?”

“My last fight—”

“No, whatever war you came out of,” he says. Her chest twists cold.“I don’t know if the Jedi sent you into it or if you waded in yourself once you left, but you move like a soldier.”

“I was,” she confirms.“But… but I don’t want to talk about the details. Not until the other two are here.”

He frowns at her.“Is there anything you cantalk about?”

She shrugs and looks away. She tries to take solace in the warmth of the caff she holds above the table, as if it can hide her, guard her, from the disgraced Mand’alor across the table. [5]

“Jet’ika?” [6]

“I’m not officially a Jedi,” she says, voice quiet.“Not anymore.”

“Then what do I call you?” he asks.“We’re not exactly close enough for names.”

“Torrent,” she says.“It’s not—I can’t claim my family name anymore. But I can claim Torrent, so I will. And if you want a title, I was a commander.”

“Bit young for that.”

“I got the rank when I was fourteen,” she says, and watches his face do something complicated and unpleasant.“Don’t. You were Mand’alor by fifteen. I know your own culture puts children on the field that young.”

“Not in command.”

Oh, banthash*t. She won’t call him on it. She shrugs.“Yeah, well… the soldiers were technically younger. Adults, but…”

Sokari can see the way he casts about to figure out what species grows at that rate. He guesses a few, and she shoots all of it down.

She won’t tell him. Not until Rex is awake.

This part of the story is his.

--

When Leia tries to sit alone, a foot away on the bench like a proper adult, Sokari refuses to let it happen. She pulls the younger girl to her side and quells protests with a glance. It’s a decent skill, but she’s not sure how long it’s going to work on her niece-in-spirit.

“Your body needs the chemical release of skinship,” she says, and Leia glares at her.“I spent way too much time with the boys to not know about this. Deal.”

Rex sits close enough to knock their knees together under the table, and his warmth is the old comfort she needs.

“Do you want the story you’ll believe, or the truth?” Sokari asks.

“What’s the difference?”

“One of them involves something so impossible that even most Jedi wouldn’t believe it,” she tells him.

Fett folds his arms and leans forward to rest them on the table, challenging but oddly open.“Try me.”

“Time travel.”

He blinks, just once, fully controlled.“That’s a tough one.”

“There were only three Jedi left alive when I died,” she says. Well, that she knew of. Apparently, Obi-Wan and Yoda were still around, but she’d only known of Cal and Kanan to survive Order 66 that long.“Or… whatever it is that happened to me. I think I died. All I know is that one moment, I was thirty-two and dying, and the next, I was… seventeen again, and had these two with me. All of us younger than we were. None of us have even been born yet.”

She refuses to look him in the eye.“They both outlived me by… six years, maybe. They got caught up while traveling instead of dying. Leia was twenty-two. Rex was thirty-five. I’m not technically the oldest anymore. I mean, physically I am, but that doesn’t mean anything, and it’s not exactly doing us any good, and—”

Rex bumps his shoulder to her arm. “I dunno, Commander. I’ve spent a long time looking older than I should. Nice to look younger for once.”

She shoots him a small, pained grin.“Could be worse, yeah.”

“Let’s say I believe you.”

Her attention snaps back to Fett, who’s looking damnably blank, and is broadcasting even less in the Force.

He waits a second for her to relax back into her seat.

“Let’s say I believe you,” he repeats.“How’s‘Rex’ connected to me? What’s so special about Leia there? And what war did you fight in that has you acting like a veteran?”

“Three years in the clone wars,” she whispers, glancing to Rex and forcing herself to not go for her sabers to defend against an attack that her paranoia says is coming and the Force says is not.“Then almost all the Jedi were wiped out at once, and I spent a year… drifting. Then black ops for the next fifteen.”

“Black ops,” he repeats, still damnably flat.

“There was a Sith Empire,” she says, and she can hear her own tone growing… somehow emptier. “Glassing planets. Enslaving entire species. Committing genocides all over. Of course there was a rebellion, and of course I joined it. I was one of the only people left with Jedi training. For all that I’d left the Order, I still had a duty to the universe.”

His eyes flit to Leia, who shrugs and tries to look prim.“I was adopted and raised by one of the founders of the rebellion, a movement built on the desire to instate freedom and democracy in a galaxy that had lost even the pretense.”

“That why you’re special?”

Leia smiles, thin and patronizing. It doesn’t fit on her little face.“I’m special because my biological father was one of the most powerful Force users in history, and hisFall to the Dark side and choice to become a Sith is why the Emperor’s rise was nearly uncontested. I do not likepower, but it’s in my veins and I can’t change that. Force users are… a lucrative trade, and I’m still the size of a child, so I can’t fight back. I’ll be safer in the Jedi Temple, even if I don’t want to bea Jedi.”

Fett looks to Sokari, makes to ask a question, and then shakes his head. Not the time, maybe.

“So, that’s all… very complicated and I don’t know how much of it I believe, but it doesn’t explain…” he trails off, and sighs.“My kid, or whatever you are. I heard you mention clones.”

Rex grins. It is not a kind expression.

“Let me tell you about Kamino.”

--

Sokari has no idea if Fett believes them. Either he thinks they’re telling the truth, or he thinks they’re delusional kids. Whatever the case, he still offers to take them closer to the Core. Sokari quietly suggests that she take a look at his engine in return, and then pretends not to notice when Fett awkwardly drifts to and away from Rex.

“They put chips in our brains to make us kill the Jedi we respected, cared for, even loved. I tried to shoot‘Soka, Fett. She was seventeen and risked her life to get that chip out of my head while I was trying to kill her. I have never hated myself more than when I woke up and realized what I’d almost done, and I was one of the few that were able to fight it. I heard the stories of dozens of brothers who woke with their chips having degraded, brothers who then chose to eat their blaster rather than live with the guilt of the orders that they’d followed without question because of a thrice-damned Sith slave chip in their head.”

“So no, I won’t call you father or acknowledge you as clan until you do something to prove you’re worth it, shared blood or not.”

What Sokari doesget out of the arrangement, for all that Fett’s route mostly takes them on a meandering path that isn’t faster than their previous system, is sleep. She gets to rest. She gets to trust that Fett won’t kill Rex, mostly out of guilt for something he hasn’t done. She gets to trust that he won’t kill Leia, because there is a very present worry that she’s just a delusional child, a realchild, not an almost-Jedi Sith-daughter. She even gets to trust that he won’t kill‘Sokari,’ if only because it would ruin any chance of gaining Rex’s favor, ever.

She’s not safe, won’t believe she canbe until she’s in the Temple and Sidious is dead dead dead,but she’s safer than she’s been in a long time.

Every night, Sokari wakes up and stumbles to the little galley, deaths and torture sparkling behind her eyes with the energy of a thousand lost Jedi, ten thousand mourned brothers and sisters.

She is not the only one of their little group to be a survivor of a near-total genocide, but Rex could not feel his brothers die in the Force, even if his nightmares featured what they heard of suicide missions by the emperor’s favored shock troopers, and Leia had…

Alderaan had more off-world survivors than there had been Jedi before the war began.

It’s not worth comparing their pain. It’s stupid to even think it. Part of her can’t help but do it anyway.

“Caff?”

She feels a lek twitch in response to the voice of the only other person on board who can reach the top shelf.“I probably shouldn’t.”

“Whiskey?”

“That’s a definitelyshouldn’t.”

“Hoth chocolate?”

“…please.”

She doesn’t lift her head from her arms until the mug clicks down in front of her, ceramic on plastisteel.

“Do I ask what it was this time?”

She shrugs.“It’s hard to explain to non-sensitives.”

“Try me anyway.”

Sokari twists the Hoth chocolate in her hands, takes a sip as she thinks.“The Force isn’t just one thing. It’s… energy and philosophy and spirit, a sense of being that ties the entire universe together. Sentient and inanimate and living and dead, empty space and lush forests and stifled cities. For those of us who are sensitive to it, it’s possible to feel the lifeof everyone around you, theoretically possible to feel entire systems. If you have a Force bond, like a master and padawan, that can stretch across planets, even systems if one or both are particularly powerful.

“So just… just imagine, for a moment, what it’s like to feel the screaming of all those Jedi in the Force as their trusted men shot them down.

“Some of them were close enough that I could feel them die,”she manages.“I… it’s horrible. It’s horrific. It’s not something I can ever forget, and I want to. I want to forget what that moment was like. Not that it happened, but…”

She can feel the tears. f*ck.

“You want to dull the edges.”

“Don’t we all?” she asks, scrubbing the back of her hand across her eyes.“Leia lost her entire planet,billions of people, and she was forced to watch. Rex… Force, I can barely imagine, and I was there for most of it.”

Fett watches her, measuring.“From what he said, they were as much your brothers as his, by the end.”

“No,” she immediately denies.“They could have been, maybe, but the ones I was closest to died earlier, and then I left,and by the time the Empire rose, all but a handful were… no. Rex, I will claim as a brother in all the ways that matter, but I don’t get to do that with the rest. I don’t have the right.”

“You’re hard on yourself.”

“Fate of the galaxy, my good bitch. Guess who’s got it on her shoulders.”

He snorts at her, and nods at the mug.“Drink your Hoth chocolate. We’re landing in eight hours, and you’ve got kids to look out for.”

--

Sokari is only there to overhear them by coincidence.

“This armor is… plastoid?”

Fett is trying so very hard to not be disapproving or disgusted. His tone is carefully clean of any censure or negativity, and that in itself is a sign of how disappointed and confused he must be.

“Sure is. Better than what the Imps had.” Rex is maybe needling the guy. She leaves him to it.

“You didn’t even have durasteel for your beskar’gam?” Fett presses. He’s still trying to keep his voice even. He’s mostly succeeding. “Sokari has beskar, why—” [7]

“I will fight and die in the same armor my brothers did,” Rex snaps. “Mass-produced armor for a mass-produced army, do you not get it?”

Fett does not reel back as though punched, but he broadcasts it in the Force.

“But you’re Mandalorian.”

“Not according to you,” Rex says, shoving away from the table and standing. He takes his armor pieces with him. He storms off.

Sokari drops into his place.

Fett is looking at the doorway still, and then drops his head into his hands and breathes out in the controlled fashion of someone who would very much like to sigh.

She takes sips of water as she waits for him to come to a decision.

He lifts his head and looks at her. “Why did I do it?”

It’s not something she’s ever had an answer to. Rex might have had slightly more of an idea, but she doubts it. She thinks that, if she were still in the future and had been asked this question, been given reason to hunt it out, she’d have been able to ask Boba Fett, seek out Mij Gilamar or Kal Skirata, hunt down the remaining Alpha batchers if any were still around.

But here and now, she doesn’t have those options.

“I don’t know,” she tells him. “There are so, so many things we never knew, and now never will.”

He rubs at his eyes. “You have beskar. That’s rare, even among Mandalorians, but I get the feeling you didn’t just steal it or… buy it off a black market. It looks forged the Mando way.”

“Bo-Katan Kryze,” Sokari says. His brow furrows. Soka does the math. “Yeah, she’s probably about ten right now. Still a kid.”

“Her family is entirely made up of ardent pacifists,” he says. “Why would she…”

“Her teenage rebellion involved joining Death Watch,” Sokari says. He jerks in his seat, head snapping up and staring in what might almost be rage. “Yeah, they’re still around. I can give you a few names of surviving or future members, later. Don’t kill anyone preemptively, though. Some of them are still young enough to not be radicalized yet.”

Fett clenches his jaw, and then very deliberately relaxes it. “Like your Kryze friend.”

“She’d reformed by that point, if barely. Needed my help with a Sith that took over her planet. I was about the age I look now, and sort of… drifting, after leaving the Jedi.” She snorts, dropping her head into the palm of one hand and playing with her half-full cup. “She was incredibly frustrating to work with. Never took responsibility for her mistakes, always acted like she was winning the war even if everything was falling apart around her. But she needed help, her people needed help, and even though I wasn’t a Jedi anymore…”

“You still felt the need to meddle.”

Her foot kicks out and hits his shin before she consciously processes the thought. He’s wearing armor, so it’s fine, but she’s just—so angry.

“Meddle? You think Jedi just want to meddle? I was invited to help. I was desperate to help, in a situation where the enemy was clear and I wasn’t involved in a galactic war that I’d stopped being sure of my place in,” she hisses. “You want meddling, Jango Fett? Rex and Leia and I are all some of the last survivors of our respective genocides, dwindling populations hunted to extinction or sent to their deaths, fewer and fewer of our own at every turn. Three different genocides, Jango, and you were central to two of them!”

He's leaning back. He’s afraid of her. She wants to be proud or pleased about that, but she’s not. The anger is already gone, and she’s just… tired. She’s tired.

She drops back into her seat. She hadn’t even noticed when she stood. She hadn’t noticed the floating cutlery, either.

She can’t get angry. Not here and not now.

Her control is too thin.

She won’t Fall.

She’d had a taste of the Dark against her own will on Mortis, and she’s never slipped after.

Ahsoka Tano had never, ever used the side of the Dark, and Sokari will maintain that status quo. There are plenty of Jedi who have, could, would be at risk, but…

Sokari’s background already includes dying twice, surviving a genocide, years in war and decades in black ops. She has fine-tuned her ability to separate her anger, her despair, her fear from her use of the Force.

She has never stopped feeling these things, in a galaxy set against her and killing every part of her family, but she has more experience than almost every Jedi Knight and Master alive in cleaving these two aspects of herself apart.

She rubs a hand over her eyes, and then says, “if you base all your thoughts on Jedi on the incident at Galidraan, then I am just as in my rights to base all Mandalorians off of the Death Watch members that tried to kill me when I was fourteen.”

“Most Mandalorians do not back Death Watch,” he argues. “The Jedi were acting with full authorization from—”

“I don’t care right now,” she tells him. “I don’t have enough information to argue Galidraan with you. I don’t know who shot first, or why, or if someone did or didn’t have evidence. I was never at that high of a clearance level, or in possession of enough free time to research incidents from before I was born.”

He glares, but crosses his arms and looks away. He’s angry, still, but she’s pretty sure her earlier comments on the multiple genocides his future self had been party to is still rolling about his mind.

“It wasn’t you,” she allows. She doesn’t meet his eyes. It would be awkward. “You haven’t… done any of that stuff, to me and Rex. And honestly, there were Sith involved in the Kamino project, so for all I know there was some mind control at play. I have no way of finding out. Rex doesn’t think so, but…”

She shrugs.

Fett is silent for nearly a minute, after which he scoffs and downs what remains of his beer. “Dank Farrick.”

Sokari smiles thinly. “Sucks, doesn’t it?”

“One way of putting it,” Fett mutters. “How many… how many survived?”

“Of which group?”

He makes a face. “Any of them.”

“Alderaan went from nearly two billion down to under a hundred thousand,” Sokari relates. “The clones… it’s complicated. They were engineered to grow twice as fast, and few if any had children, so a lot of them probably just died out of medical complications or accidents. Granted, a refusal to provide adequate medical care is historically a form of genocidal action, so… your mileage may vary, I guess. At any rate, I don’t know how many were still alive in the Imperial army at the time of my death. I know of less than ten that were alive and free. They originally numbered in the millions.”

Fett closes his eyes and swallows drily. She gives him the moment, because she’s fairly certain he’s trying to stop himself from crying.

“Demagolka,” he finally says, halfway between sighing and spitting the word. “My future is to become dar’manda demagolka.” [8]

She doesn’t know what to say to that.

“And the Jedi?” he prompts.

“Population at the start of the war was about ten thousand, all around. By the end, about six thousand; we took heavier losses per capita than any demographic except for the clones. Initial execution of Order 66 took us down to less than a thousand, and we… all Force-Sensitives were hunted, after that. By the time of my death…”

“Three,” he says. So he remembers that much.

“Apparently five, since there were two I was unaware of, but yes,” she says. “The number of Jedi that survived and hadn’t Fallen to the Dark, that I knew of, could be counted on one hand. Including the ones that survived, but no longer considered themselves Jedi due to being Dark, whether temporarily or permanently… two hands, with fingers left over.” [9]

Fett drops his head into his hands, breathing out heavily in a way that she recognizes from her own worst days. “I don’t want to believe this.”

“But you do, don’t you?”

He raises his head, and he looks so damn helpless that she almost comforts him the way she would have anyone with his face.

“Chin up,” she says instead. “It’s not like you’ve done any of that. Not yet, at least.”

[1] You looking for a smack in the face?

[2] Haat’ade – literally ‘truth children’, short for Haatyc Mando’ade (True Mandalorians)

[3] ad’ika – kid (also can mean lad, boy, sweetie, darling, son, daughter, or child)

[4] jetii - Jedi

[5] Mand’alor – rule of Mandalore

[6] ‘Little Jedi,’ generally just a diminutive of Jedi. Often used to mean padawan, but covers everything from crèchelings to teenagers.

[7] beskar'gam - armor; in this case, the usage of the term while otherwise speaking Basic is Jango’s way of emphasizing that this armor either is or should be Mandalorian armor, because his instinct right now is still to view Rex as a Mandalorian individual, as Jango’s own blood.

[8] Demagolka – insult derived from the name of a Mandalorian war criminal who did experiments on child. The word held the meaning of "someone who commits atrocities," a "real-life monster," or "a war criminal." This addition to the Mandalorian language came about due to the contempt later Mandalorians held for Demagol and his cruel experiments—some even on children—making him a figure of hate and dread for members of the warrior clans.
Dar’manda – someone who is no longer Mandalorian, generally meaning someone who has turned their back on Mandalorian values, culture, and identity so thoroughly that they are no longer Mandalorian. “Not an outsider, but one who has lost his heritage, and so his identity and soul.”

[9] This includes Trilla Suduri (who is by this point no longer Dark, but doesn’t necessarily consider herself a Jedi) and Darth Vader (who is still Dark)

Chapter 3: Old Friends

Chapter Text

Showing up in a seedy bar on a no-name planet is much less stressful in the company of a known, dangerous quantity like Jango Fett. Sure, there’s still a risk someone will try to take her charges—though they’d both object strenuously to being called that—but Jango’s implicit involvement in their safety does enough that she can relax.

The drinks for the younger two are just water. Adults in mind they may be, but their livers certainly aren’t. Fett gets a club soda, and Sokari is more amused than she should be that he refuses to drink on the job. The three of them certainly haven’t been a calming presence in his life.

“Torrent? Getting anything?” Fett prompts.

“She old enough to drink?” the bartender asks.

“Yes,” Fett says, an edge to his words that Soka isn’t entirely sure she likes. “Hey, what do you want?”

What does she— “Caff. Nerf milk, two sugars.”

What she really wants is tea, but she’s long since learned that trying tea in a back alley sh*thole will only make her wistful and miserable as she thinks about how much better Obi-Wan’s had been.

At least she’s used to caff being sh*tty, and covering up the taste with something else. The only times she’s ever had good caff were as a guest in a rich person’s home, which has mostly just meant grabbing a drink when she broke into Bail’s office once a year.

(He always got so tired when she told him about the holes in his security, but it had been a game. His annoyance was a farce. His fatigue was real, but the parts relating to her weren’t.)

(She’ll have to talk to Leia about her grief.)

(At some point.)

Fett grabs them a booth. It’s weird and she’s not a fan, but it’s… not terrible. If she tries, she can almost pretend the man across from her is just another middle-aged clone trooper. Rex’s complicated mix of emotions over the situation sure isn’t helpful, but he’s long since learned how to shut away distracting or distressing emotions behind mental shields so she can work.

Or just. Sit there. With caff. Trying not to have a breakdown.

Then you will d--

Nope. Not thinking about that.

“Your contact is late,” Leia mutters.

Fett makes a small noise. “It happens in this line of work.”

Leia scoffs. Sokari knocks an ankle to hers, but Leia just looks away. Rex isn’t going to be helpful, either.

Sokari really wishes they could have just stayed behind on the ship while Fett did his thing, but he doesn’t trust them that far. He doesn’t really trust them at all, and certainly not enough to leave them behind with his ship.

“The hell did you have a kid, Jango?”

The tension flees, mostly. There is a third—fifth, technically—party to take the weight of the conversation now.

“Hello, Silas,” Fett says. “Take a seat.”

The Mandalorian looks between Rex and Fett a few times, and then pulls his own helmet off and gestures. “What the frip?”

“Does he look young enough to be mine?”

The Mando’s face twitches. “I mean… wild oats do happen. Sometimes. You did get drunk a lot after Jaster died…”

Fett rolls his eyes. “Sit down, man.”

Silas sits down. He eyes Rex first, for obvious reasons, and then Leia—too small to register as a threat to a grown, fully-trained commando, so mostly just strange—and landing on Sokari.

“Slicer?” he guesses. “Or sniper.”

She raises a brow. “You think he hired me?”

“You’re old enough for the kinds of jobs he runs,” the Mando says. He glances at Fett. “Unless you finally picked up a droid that could do the kind of slicing you need…”

“Shut up,” Fett says. It’s oddly mild. “Torrent’s with the kids. I’m giving them a ride.”

The Mando’s brow furrows. “But that one…”

“Jango Fett,” Rex spits, “is not my father.”

Fett’s face does something complicated and ugly, and Ahsok—Sokari, it’s Sokari now—can’t help but pity him a little. Sure, he’s already done a whole lot of horrible things, but none of the ones that Rex is angry at him for. Soka’s done plenty of sh*tty things herself, in the pursuit of a higher goal.

“He’s blood,” Fett says, after a few moments of awkward silence where nobody quite knows what to do. “Beyond that… it’s complicated. His first loyalty is to her—” he gestures at Sokari, “—and she needs to get the little one to Coruscant. I’m… helping.”

“Without payment?” the Mandalorian prompts.

Fett glares. “He’s blood. I’m not—you know what happened to Arla, Silas. I’m not turning my back on that.”

Rex mutters something too low for human ears to pick up. Sokari, of course, hears it perfectly.

“Didn’t stop you from dropping the lot of us like bantha poodoo.”

Silas—she should probably call him by name, if only in her own head—looks like he’s trying very hard to ignore the web of complicated familial bullsh*t going on and only mostly succeeding. “Okay. So… business?”

Fett sighs. “Originally, I wanted to see if you’d gotten any information on a bounty I was looking into, but priorities have changed.”

Silas raises a brow. “Yeah? We taking back Mandalore?”

Fett slams a fist down on the table. “Would you quit it with that?”

Well, that escalated quickly.

“We need a Mand’alor—”

“Kryze is doing fine!” Fett snaps. “I may not like her, but she’s older than I was, and actually trained for the bureaucratic bullsh*t. She’s got popular support and knows the whole… agricultural, economic, education stuff. Kriff it, she wants the seat? Fine. She probably won’t kick off a fight that gets all her people killed because she panicked and started shooting.”

“You’d just come out of being tortured—”

“And,” Fett hisses, “I do not have the resources to do ‘take back’ Mandalore. I do not have an army. I do not have money. I barely have my ship and the armor on my back.”

“The clans would support you.”

“I don’t want their support,” Fett says. “Drop it.”

“But Mand’a—”

“I said drop it, Silas,” Fett grinds out. “I don’t have a plan. She does. If things start going downhill, then maybe I’ll give it another shot, but she’s barely been there a month, and she’s already fixing up the infrastructure Kyr’tsad took out. The Duke trained her for this.”

Silas doesn’t back down. “Every Duke and duch*ess in our history has done better with a Mand’alor at their side. You know that.”

“Kryze doesn’t want one,” Fett says. “For f*ck’s sake, Silas, I’m still recovering. Just let it go.”

Sokari tilts her head. Recovering? From what?

“Fine. For now,” Silas says. “Does it at least have to do with Mandalore?”

Fett doesn’t meet his eyes.

“That’s a yes, then,” Silas decides. “Please tell me you don’t want me to work for the Evaar’ade. I don’t have it in me to put up with the priss and pomp.” [1]

“Too bad,” Fett mocks. He rubs a hand over his face. “Kyr’tsad is still around.”

“She’s having all the warriors deported to Concordia,” Silas grouses. “They have someone to keep an eye on the situation. Even those with leanings are going to be under watch unless they leave the systems like we did, and you know they won’t be coming home if they were that dedicated to the lifestyle.”

Sokari remembers many rules from Satine’s reign. There are two specific aspects of the initial treaty that was written in the end of the latest civil war, she thinks, that they might be discussing here: [2]

19. Violence by Mandalorian people(s) or groups, against Mandalorian people(s) or groups, or within Mandalorian Space […]

19.a. Government-regulated careers and industries that involve violent action and the use or possession of weaponry within Mandalorian Space […]
19.b. Government-regulated careers and industries that involve creation of weaponry and sale to Mandalorian peoples […]

19.c. Violent action and use or possession of weaponry by Mandalorian individuals outside of Mandalorian Space:

19.c.i. Any Mandalorian who chooses to pursue a career in a violent field outside of Mandalorian space [see appendix E7] without government license must be based out of Concordia, if they choose to have their primary residence be in-system.
19.c.ii. Any actions taken without government pre-approval are understood to not reflect on Mandalore as a whole.
19.c.iii. All actions taken in pursuit of these careers that could result in intragalactic repercussions on a scale higher than the personal must be reported to the Mandalorian Interstellar Affairs and Trade office on a quarterly basis.

19.d. Violent action taken in defense of self or others […]

19e. Any Mandalorian who incites a war on Mandalore’s behalf will be stripped of their citizenship, excommunicated, and declared dar’manda. Attempts to return home will be met with arrest and trial.

Bounty hunter was one of those careers that Mandalore’s government accepted had a purpose—particularly when the bounty was a violent criminal, or slave trader, or drug lord—but insisted have high levels of regulation. Sokari has always respected the intent of that. Fett and Silas are both acting in that career, rather than returning to Mandalore to join law enforcement or security of some sort, and that means…

Well, she’s actually pretty sure Fett hasn’t been back to the Mandalorian systems in five years.

The Mandalorian tax and residence laws governing his profession wouldn’t really apply, if all his work was done elsewhere.

“What do you want from me?” Silas asks.

“Get to Mandalore, get evidence of whether or not these people are just paying lip to the party line while secretly trying to further Kyr’tsad, and then get your findings to the duch*ess.” Fett passes a data chip across the table. Presumably, all the names that Sokari gave him a day or two back are on there.

“Not to you?”

“She’s the one with the resources to make it happen.”

“Jango—”

“I spent three years on that damned ship, Silas!” Fett half-shouts, getting to his feet and slapping his hands on the table. “A year to get out of the piece of sh*t town on the piece of sh*t planet I’d ended up on, and I’m just now getting out of the hole I went into getting loans from frickin’ Maz Kanata to buy buir’s ship back. Let. Me. Be. Mandalore will be fine without me, and probably better off.”

What damned ship?

What damned ship, Jango?

“Galidraan wasn’t your fault.”

“Drop it, Silas. I mean it.”

Sokari wonders if they were always this comfortable with each other, or if it’s a matter of being…

Well, Galidraan wasn’t a genocide, by definition, but it was certainly a slaughter. They all learned about it, as a warning about how horribly a mission could go wrong based on bad intel. Sokari and Leia and Rex, if anyone, understood the bonds that could be forged by last survivors of such things.

Silas snorts. He claps a fist across his chest, and almost mockingly says, “thy will be done, Alor.”

“Shut the hell up and grab a drink, di’kut.”[3]

--

Sokari waits until they’re back on the ship, and the younglings—for all that Rex is sort of older than her, she cannot stop thinking of them that way—have gone to bed for the hyperspace journey.

This is not the Slave I. This ship is not a bounty hunter’s sleek and speedy dream. This is an inherited gunship meant for long flights and tens of soldiers, and definitely bought on someone else’s money. Old, but sturdy. Cargo holds and living spaces.

It’s too much for one person.

(It’s not nearly as old or rickety as the ship Leia had fondly, and a little brokenly, reminisced about her maybe-someday-not-anymore boy owning.)

She’s in the galley with a cup of tea when Fett walks in, and he stills when he spots her. Looks a lot like he’s guessed what kinds of things she wants to talk about.

She doesn’t say anything, yet. She just smiles, and waits.

He grabs a drink and sits. His ankle knocks against hers when he gets into the booth, but it’s fine.

“So,” she says. She isn’t really sure where to go from there. “How many others…?”

He’s disgusted by that being her opening question. That’s fair.

“Everyone in the Temple died in the first few days,” she offers. “Those in the field with their men, some escaped, but most didn’t. Those that were otherwise occupied, especially the ones undercover, they survived in greater quantities, though I can’t say anything for their sanity. I can’t imagine your entire faction was at Galidraan. Someone had to have been… on maternity leave, or visiting an elderly relative, or out with the flu, right?”

Fett glares at her, and then takes a sip of whatever bottle he grabbed. She thinks it’s mineral water. He sets it down a bit more harshly than necessary.

“Haat’ade numbered eighty-seven warriors, fifty-six combat support, and about fifteen clans that offered resources or political support, but those are harder to quantify.”

Sokari nods.

“There were only twenty-seven of us at Galidraan,” he admits. “And five of those were medics or pilots. Silas and I were the only survivors.”

“I see.”

“The Haat’ade fell apart without me, though,” Fett says, sitting back and rubbing at his forehead. “Death Watch remnants hunted those that went back to working solo. Of the sixty-seven warriors who survived Galidraan, including myself and Silas? There’s maybe a two dozen left. The combat support did better; they mostly transitioned to doing civilian-friendly work for the clans as private medics or transport.”

It’s nowhere near the ratios of living to dead that the clones, that Alderaan, that the Jedi had gone through.

“sh*tty luck,” she says anyway, because almost any deaths are worth mourning.

(It’s not very like a Jedi of her, but there are deaths Sokari would not mourn.)

(Sidious. Jabba. Scintel.)

(It is, perhaps, a very good thing that she is not a Jedi.)

Fett grunts, an acknowledgement with no real emotion to it. She gives him a few moments.

“I’m assuming,” she says slowly, “that your not being there is related to the ‘damned ship’ you spent three years on?”

The anger that pours off of him is… a lot. Not the most she’s ever felt, because she’s been around Sith, much as she doesn’t want to think about it, but a lot.

She has a feeling that the only reason he’s putting this much effort into not blowing up at her is because he doesn’t want to hurt his chances at gaining Rex’s favor.

“After Galidraan,” he starts, strained and so, so angry, “the Jedi handed me over to the planet’s government for criminal processing or what have you. Every planet calls it something else. Point is, I was meant to stand trial for the deaths I’d caused, even though he’d paid me to do them.”

That doesn’t match up to the story they hear in class at all. The governor had paid the Haat’ade? Why?

Fett grumbles, pressing the heel of a palm to his eye. “It was a set-up. He was working for Kyr’tsad.”

Ah, that would explain it.

“The governor did not have me stand trial for my supposed crimes,” Fett continues, and Sokari doesn’t comment on the ‘supposed’ part of it. “He sold me into slavery.”

“Shavit,” Sokari hisses. [4]

“Spent most of that working on a spice ship,” Fett relates. The look in his eye is still so angry, but it’s not at all far away like Sokari’s seen other people get when they talk about these things. “Processing the drug. Hate it. Hate even hearing about it. Someone offered me a hit in a bar a few months ago, and I nearly gutted them.”

Yes, that would track.

He looks up from his drink to meet her eyes. “Is that another thing you have more experience with, Jetii?”

She tries not to show how unimpressed she is with that.

“No, just some short-term undercover work,” she says. He scoffs, but it’s low and bitter and she cannot, in good faith, take offense to how he is feeling. “But my Jedi master was a slave in Hutt space until he was nine. And Rex… yeah. We already told you about that.”

He puts a hand to his face. “Is that normal for Jedi? Slavery as undercover work?”

Sokari shrugs. She plays with her near-empty mug. “Common enough. My grandmaster was… he was enslaved for real, when he was young, but it only lasted a few days. There was a thing later where he went undercover, got caught, and then that turned into real slavery, but… actually, Rex was on that one. It was the one where I went undercover, even, but I got rescued pretty soon after she dangled me over a city in a cage, and those two… didn’t.”

Fett eyes her, and then asks, “Who?”

“Hm?”

“You said ‘she’ dangled you over a city in a cage. Who’s the ‘she’ in question?”

“Queen Miraj Scintel of Zygerria,” she says, enunciating to the point of mockery. “What a bitch.”

He snorts. It’s not quite a laugh, but she’ll take it.

“I did more undercover work after I left the Jedi,” she admits. “I was a field combatant, before, but after the Empire rose… I took a year to mourn and deal with all I’d been through, and then spent the next fifteen years running black ops to help the Rebellion.”

He looks up at her, and then back down at his drink. He doesn’t comment.

They sit in silence. She makes another mug of tea, and an extra to give to Fett.

He drinks, and his voice is quiet when he says, “this is… very good. Lot better than I can manage.”

She smiles. “My grandmaster insisted we know how to make a good pot of tea. Time and temperature. After we separated, it felt important to remember how. Little things he taught us that didn’t just add up to survival.”

There’s so much more that Obi-Wan taught her, but… tea had always felt important.

“I can do shig too, if you want,” she offers. “Not tonight, but if you’re ever in the mood and too busy or tired to make it yourself, I can step in.”

“Thanks,” he says, rough and low and not at all what she’d expect as an answer.

Silence again. She waits. There’s something tight and heavy in the air.

“How?” he asks, finally. “How do I get him to see that I’m not the version he met? That I’m not the man I’ll become? How… how do I get somewhere he doesn’t hate me for something I didn’t do, but can…”

When he trails off, she picks up the sentence. “But can see yourself becoming, with adequate circ*mstances?”

He hangs his head. Got it in one, then.

“Time,” she says. “You haven’t been an asshole about the Jedi since we joined you, and that means a lot.”

“Because he was indoctrinated to love your people?” Fett challenges, just a little spiteful. She doesn’t think his heart is really in it.

They’ve discussed far too many deaths, and so many of them indirectly his fault, for him to hate the way he did even a week ago. Some hate, still, but less. It’s dimming.

“Because he’s my other half,” she says, “and has been for the better part of twenty years. In a galaxy where neither of us is hunted, and we are both hale and healthy? There is no question. Where he goes, so do I. Where I go, he follows. He’s my best friend.”

“Sounds more like you two are riduur’e,” Fett says.

She shrugs. She looks away. “Not quite, but close. It’s a moot point, anyway; Jedi don’t marry.”

Except for, perhaps, Anakin. She doesn’t know if he and Padmé were quite there, but… no. Best not to think about him.

“You might be able to ask for reparations,” she says, after a few more minutes. “From the Senate, for the mishandling at Galidraan. They are a member world, so they are beholden to the laws, and if you can produce evidence that you were a slave due to the governor’s very illegal sale…”

“I can manage, thanks,” he says. It’s crabby, and she relents. Not her business, then.

More silence. At least it’s mostly comfortable.

“You should get to bed,” he says. “You might be an adult in mind, but that body’s still growing.”

“Probably,” she says. “You?”

He looks over his shoulder at the co*ckpit. “Not yet.”

Maybe he’s the type to look at hyperspace passing by for calm. “Alright. Sleep well, Jango Fett.”

He makes a face. She laughs.

--

The next planet is bigger, and a little nicer, but still far from any major hyperlane.

Nonetheless, it is an important planet for them, if only for today.

There’s a twitch in the Force when they land, something pulling at Sokari in a way she barely senses. She’s had her shields up so completely for so many years that it’s natural to hide away what she is to the point where she can hardly tell what anyone else is, either. It takes more than a moment to remember how to let herself spread out across the world around her.

“Auntie‘Soka? Why’d you stop?”

She doesn’t have an answer to Leia’s prodding question.“I don’t know.”

It’s almost familiar. Old and half-forgotten, not the same as what she remembers, but—

“This way,” she says, and wanders off into the crowd. She keeps her steps light and easy, instead of running or—Force forbid—marching on through people.

Leia and Rex follow without question. Fett curses and rushes through the rest of his transaction with the docking attendant. The sound of him jogging after them is almost funny, with the armor, but she can’t focus on that.

Sokari slips between people with the ease of a career built on such habits, children trailing like ducklings. She knows this feeling, she knows this person, what is she missi—

“Oh,” she breathes, going stock still. She knows that face. She knows those braids. She even knows the presence, now that she’s connected the dots.

She is younger than Sokari had ever seen her, but this woman is unmistakably Master Billaba.

“Torrent, what the hell?” Fett demands, finally catching up.“You can’t just run off like that!”

“It’s Depa,” she says, eyes still fixed on the woman parsing through a datapad with an irritated vendor. She has a padawan braid, thinner than her loops, and hanging down straight over her shoulder. It doesn’t feel like Master Windu is on-planet, so this might be a solo mission, a… oh. Senior Padawan, Knight Elect. This is the kind of mission taken to test if she’s ready to be promoted.

Sokari feels light-headed.

Fett waits for her to elaborate, but she can’t. This was Kanan’s master. This was a member of the High Council.This was a woman who died and—

“You need to sit down,” Fett says, not a touch gruff. He puts a hand on her shoulder and guides her off the main walkway.“I’m… going to talk to the woman in the Jedi robes. You three just stay there and do not get kidnapped.”

She nods, feeling like she’s not quite inhabiting her own body.

It’s Depa.

Sokari’s eyes track Fett without conscious control, and her montrals pick up the low conversation that no human would be able to hear past the clamor of market.

Depa looks up when the glint of armor comes close enough, free hand tensed in a way that says she’s consciously stopping herself from reaching for her saber, in reaction to the heavily-armored individual standing several feet away.

“Mando,” the woman says.“May I help you?”

“Are you Depa?”

Depa doesn’t do anything so dramatic as gape or step back, but she does blink rapidly for a moment. She folds her hands down in front of her, tucked into her sleeves, and draws her spine up ramrod straight.“I am Jedi Padawan Depa Billaba, yes. May I ask why it is that you need to know?”

Sokari imagines Fett grimacing, or rolling his eyes, or maybe dithering. She can’t tell from this angle, and he has a helmet on besides. It turns his awkward silences into judgmental ones.

“I’ve had some Jedi kids on my ship, hitching a ride,” he says at length.“One of them recognized you and then just… froze.”

“You have our younglings in your care,” Depa says, carefully not accusatory, but close enough to be a warning.

“Not quite,” he says.“The one that actually came from your Temple is late teens. One of‘em isn’t Force Sensitive, and the last one is, but hasn’t been to Coruscant before. They’re trying to get the little one to the Temple for her own safety.”

Depa considers that, and then passes the datapad back to the vendor.“Lead on.”

It’s surprisingly simple, really. Fett did all the talking. Sokari doesn’t know how to feel about that.

And then Depa is standing right in front of her.

“Like I said,” Fett sighs. It crackles through his helmet.“She froze up.”

“Hello,” Depa says, fingers still laced together inside her sleeves. Sokari can see flashes where the hems don’t quite cover one another.“I don’t believe we’ve met.”

Sokari shakes her head.“I know of you. I’ve seen you spar. You’ve never spoken to me.”

All true. A little misleading, but it’s fine, it’s all fine.

Depa waits a moment, and then says,“You seem to have me at a disadvantage. You know my name, but I don’t know yours.”

“Sokari T-Torrent,” she manages. The words feel clunky in her mouth, the sound abrasive for all that it’s just her own voice, no different from usual. A little shaky, maybe. She can feel a cool breeze on her upper arms. Shouldn’t she have armor? She should have armor. She does have armor. It’s just not on her biceps. It’s on her shoulders, and forearms, and hips.“It… it’s been a long time since I’ve seen another Jedi. I’m having a hard time believing you’re real.”

“I see,” Depa says. She is gentling herself, which is odd, because Depa was already very nice, almost all of the time.“Perhaps we should take this somewhere more private? You seem a little unsteady.”

‘A little’ is putting it kindly.

Sokari lets herself be led back to the ship, in the company of Mand’alor Jango Fett, Jedi Padawan Depa Billaba, Princess-General Leia Organa, and good old Captain Rex.

It’s like the start of a sick joke.

--

Fett and Depa talk where she can hear, but they rarely address her directly. Both seem to realize that she’s not particularly useful right now. Leia and Rex press up against her at the little table in the galley, and Sokari lets them.

This is real. She can feel Depa in the Force, recognizes her energy even if it’s not quite what it will-was-could-have-been. This is happening.

It’s a textbook Traumatic Stress Response case,one of them says.

Fett has his helmet off. Sokari’s sure that’s wrong for some reason. She thinks he might already be on wanted lists. Should she worry about Depa trying to arrest him?

Depa asks about Rex at one point. Fett tells her that someone cloned him without his knowing, but the kid is more comfortable with Sokari, so they’re still working on what that means for him.

It’s more or less true. Rex squeezes her hand the one time someone suggests separating them. She’s not letting that happen unless Rex wants to leave for whatever reason. They’ve worked apart before. They can do it again. It has to be their decision, though.

“Auntie Soka? You’re shivering.”

Is she?

Leia cuddles in closer, and Sokari runs a hand over her hair. It’s an absentminded motion, and for all that she knows Leia’s hair is fine as silk, it feels like plastic in the moment.

“I don’t think I’m okay,” Sokari announces. The words hang in the air like lead balloons, and she can feel Depa staring at her.“I haven’t been for a very long time.”

“Yeah, we noticed,” Fett says.“Do you need to lay down, Torrent?”

Does she?

“No,” she says.“I… I don’t know what I need.”

“The spicy drink,” Rex tells them.“It’s grounding.”

Right. That.

Fett goes to grab it, and Depa continues to watch.

“How long ago did you leave your master?” Depa asks.“Or… did he die?”

Sokari closes her eyes and shakes her head. She can feel the shivers now, tremors in her biceps and a shudder she can’t control in the height of her ribcage. Her teeth grind together, her jaw like stone.

“You don’t have to answer that,” Depa assures her.“I’m… going to recommend you see a mind healer on Coruscant.”

That was a forgone conclusion.

A cup clinks onto the table. Fett’s back. “Drink.”

She does.

Depa and Fett continue discussing it as ‘the adults’ at the table. She is older than both of them. Rex is older than all of them. Sokari follows about half of what they say. She agrees with most of it. Rex bullies his way into speaking when she doesn’t, without her even asking, because he knows her mind as well as she herself does. Fett rolls with it. Depa takes his lead.

She is going to reach out to the Temple and see about getting them a ride back to Imperial Center Coruscant.

Fett makes Soka go to bed, taking Leia with her.

[1] Evaar’ade – lit. ‘new (noun) children.’ Short for Evaar’la Mando’ade, which would be ‘new (adj) Mandalorians.’

[2] This was initially a lot longer. See here.

[3] Di’kut – idiot

[4] An expletive used by the farmers of Pakrik Minor. Translates roughly as feces. Source language unknown.

Chapter 4: Shadows on the Ground

Chapter Text

She feels more like a person come morning.

Depa’s sitting at the table, datapad in her hands and caff on the table in front of her.

“Good morning,” Sokari says, rough and croaking, and Depa’s eyes flick up to meet hers. She nods a shallow hello.

“Feeling better?”

“Much,” Sokari says, and goes about gathering a breakfast. There’s definitely some dried meat in here. She can get something fresh when they stop by the market later.

“I was hoping to speak with you about your options,” Depa tells her, once she’s sat at the table.“Fett and your friend Rex took care of most of the negotiation, and I feel like I have an idea of what would work best for you.”

Sokari nods slowly.“Okay.”

“There is a Master-Padawan pair a few planets away,” Depa starts.“The Council informed me when I spoke with them about you and your wards. They’d be headed back to the Temple in a few days anyway, and the Council has agreed to extend an offer to Fett to handle the transportation. The presence of a Jedi Master on board will allow for him to get in and out of the Core unmolested, and we’d like for you and yours to have a Jedi escort, given what happened yesterday afternoon.”

Her complete spiral into nonbeing?

“I understand,” she says instead.“I suppose Fett agreed because he’s still trying to get Rex to like him?”

Depa shrugs.“That part isn’t my business.”

Of course it isn’t.

“Rex can stay with me for a while, right?” Sokari finally asks.“I know it’s not exactly protocol, but I’m…”

“In need of a support system until you’ve seen a mind healer, and against all odds, the child is part of it,” Depa summarizes.“Yes, I recognized as much. I think the Council will be able to allow some leeway there. I don’t know if he’ll enjoy it, given that all the others his age are Initiates, but we can adjust as necessary. On that note… Do you know Leia’s midichlorian count?”

“No,” Sokari says, and hesitantly adds,“But her biological father was my Jedi Master, and I’m told his count broke records even as a child. Given what Leia’s shown so far… it’s why I’ve been in a hurry to get her to the Temple.”

Depa frowns at her, clearly working through the implications of a Jedi having a daughter and still teaching… and then visibly dismisses the situation, eyes closing to breathe in the steam of her caff.

Biological fathercertainly implies a child that was raised by her mother or adopted out, so the Jedi parent could remain in their chosen career without a conflict of interest or duty.

She’ll tell the council the truth, or… at least Master Koon. Master Kenobi is still a padawan, but she can tell Master Koon.

She already told Jango Fett, of all people.

“Padawan Torrent?”

Her head snaps up. She hasn’t been a padawan in over fifteen years. It’s weird to hear.“I’m sorry, what?”

“I asked if you wanted some time to think it over before I presented the offer to Fett,” Depa says.

Sokari gets the distinct feeling that Depa is planning a report to the Council that has‘needs a mind healer’ underlined at least three times.

“No, I’m—I’m fine. That sounds like a good plan.”

“I’ll speak with him, then. Would you like to come with?”

“No, thank you.”

--

Fett agrees to Depa’s plan. Sokari’s pretty sure it’s all to do with Rex, though Leia also might be a factor; the guilt of ‘even the younglings… especially the younglings’ is probably getting to him, even though he hasn’t done any of the Jedi Purge setup, not yet.

It’s probably nothing to do with‘Sokari.’ She’s a Jedi, an adult in mind and in body, or at least close enough to count. She’s a damn sight more‘enemy’ to Fett than the other two are. Not as much as Depa, maybe, but Fett’s been playing nice with herfor Leia’s sake.

He plays nice with Sokari for Rex’s. That’s all.

They’re only a few planets over from the meeting point, and they have a few days to hang around before the escort meets them. Depa hadn’t given them a name—apparently it could have compromised the opsec for the Jedi team—but Sokari’s pretty sure she’ll be able to identify almost anyone. She gets the feeling that the Force is going to send her a familiar face, just as it did Master Padawan Billaba.

Sokari lets herself feel the world around her, after they reach the meeting point, but before the Jedi team does.

It’s dark and dreary, in the sense that the beaten-down port is full of petty crimes and less petty horrors, but it’s still lighter than most of the Empire had been. She sneaks away from the ship at night, ignoring Fett at her back, and performs a bit of vigilante justice while she can. She’ll be banned from doing so as soon as she’s reinstated as a Jedi, if she is, probably, but for now… for now, she can look at the drug cartels and‘they’re not slaves, really, we promise,’ workers and do something to help.

She doesn’t use her sabers. She doesn’t need to. It’s been a long time since she has, for small fry like these.

“What are you doing?” Fett asks her, landing heavily behind her back.

“Chip removal,” she says, hand pressed to the slave’s leg. Her eyes are closed, but she can hear him shifting.“Let me concentrate; I don’t have a meddroid for this.”

He’s silent until she finishes, and waits until the people she’s helped are on their way to the planet’s freedom routes. He doesn’t ask what she did with the owners.

“You’ve done this before.”

“Regularly,” she confirms.“You?”

He doesn’t answer that, just ambles over to the chains and stares down at them.

“Fett?”

“You go through this like it’s as easy as breathing,” he says. His voice isn’t strained, just… odd. Wistful, almost.“It’s… impressive.”

“I guess?” she hesitates to continue.She does anyway. “I’m… I don’t think of it that way. This is the easy stuff. It’s a time-waster that helps people. If I wanted to help for real, I’d been going after Jabba or Sidious or—”

“How old were you?” he asks, turning on his heel to face her dead-on. The vocoder of his helmet pulls the emotion from his voice, and the beskar hides most of it from the Force.“When did this… these missions, the slavery battles, when did that start for you?”

“Fourteen,” she says. She’s not entirely sure, really, what counted as a mission for ending slavery and what counted as just a part of war, but she can round down.“Maybe fifteen. It’s a bit of a blur.”

“And you just… kept doing it.”

“Of course,” she says.That was never in question. Half of her battle against the Empire had been for the sake of entirely enslaved worlds like Ryloth and Kashyyyk. “If I have the time and the energy, if I need to do somethingand there’s nothing official on my hands, why not?”

He doesn’t answer her.

--

Sokari does not involve herself in Rex and Fett’s circling for a while. She has done what she can, in speaking to Fett about the things that Rex is too angry to talk about without saying something he can’t take back. There are things she can’t speak for, of course, but… she’s done her part. There is more than enough that Rex and Soka did together, and she’s covered those topics.

The rest is up to them.

Instead, when she hears Rex’s voice raise, high and angry and disgusted, she leaves. She shuts down her datapad, tucks away her mid-afternoon snack, and goes to the room she’s been sharing with the little ones.

There are two beds. The ship has more rooms, but none of the three are comfortable with sleeping apart, not yet; it certainly isn’t worth moving the cargo that’s filling up crew quarters right now. Leia is already in here, in this room that feels a smidgen more safe, a touch more private, than most of the structure.

She has a datapad out. She is looking at a newspaper. It is from this morning, on Alderaan.

The news itself is not noteworthy. The main story is about some upcoming infrastructure budget distributions for rural speeder highways. It is pleasantly banal.

To anyone except Leia.

“Can I sit with you?” Sokari asks.

Leia looks up, face unreadable, and shrugs. “Okay.”

Soka sits next to her and, on a whim, pats her lap in clear invitation for Leia to climb up a few inches and cuddle.

Leia hesitates.

She climbs up and into Soka’s lap anyway, and goes back to staring at the datapad.

“You wanna tell me about it?” Soka prompts. “Talk about which part is bothering you?”

Leia shakes her head.

“Alright,” Sokari says. She strokes Leia’s head, because her hair is up in braids that mean she can’t play with the long locks. “Just… remember that if anyone understands, it me and Rex, okay?”

Leia blinks rapidly, tears building. There’s an anger in her, and it stains her cheeks a blotchy red, but she doesn’t take that anger anywhere. It just sits in her.

“I really, really want to say that you don’t get it, that nobody does,” Leia whispers. “Because I had to watch, because they did it to make me talk, but… that’s not… it’s…”

“It’s different, but not more or less terrible than what we went through?” Sokari offers.

Leia nods, miserable. “You do get it, but I just… my mind keeps replaying it. The moment everything blew up. I remember it so vividly, and it’s—it’s back, everyone is alive, but even my own parents wouldn’t know me, and I’m—I’m happy, but it’s not the same. It’s everything I wanted, but I can’t enjoy it without being bitter, and I’m angry at me for not just… being happy that it’s there. That people are alive again. That my home…”

“Which isn’t your home anymore,” Sokari finishes for her. “I can relate, sort of.”

“What?”

“I left the Jedi before the purge,” Sokari explains. Maybe it will help. “The Temple wasn’t my home anymore, but it was still painful to see it sacked and corrupted into the Imperial Palace, and know that I could never go home again. The order of operations is a bit different from your own experience, but it’s not… entirely different.”

Leia makes a face. “No, but it’s different enough. And you do get to go back, now. I… I don’t. Not really. The Jedi, your family, will take you. They’ll believe you, and give you a place. The royal family of Alderaan has no reason to recognize me as their own.”

There’s a lot that Soka could say to that.

“Have you taken the time to grieve?” Sokari asks. “Have you been given that time, with the war you just came out of?”

“Kinda,” Leia whispers. “I… found some of the other survivors. When we had a moment, we tried to organize something, but we didn’t… there was never time. We had no bodies. There were no religious authorities left to lead a service, not of any of our sects, not among the Rebellion. There were maybe a few out and in hiding, but…”

Sokari pulls her close, smooths her hair and presses a kiss to her forehead. “I’m here for you. I don’t know if there’s anything I can do to help, but I’m here. I get it.”

There were no pyres for her fellows. There were few survivors to mourn with. There were no Masters to lead a service.

There were no lightsabers she could safely recover for even those final rites.

“My parents won’t know me,” Leia whispers. “They won’t believe me.”

“I know,” Sokari murmurs, smoothing down the hair again, because there’s little else she can think to do. “I know, honey.”

“And even the Jedi probably won’t take me,” Leia adds, hiccupping through her tears now. “I’m too old, you said.”

“Maybe,” Sokari says. “But your circ*mstances are special. If nothing else, we will find a place for you. You are a ward of ours until then.”

Ours, she said. As if she’s still a Jedi. As if she’s a Jedi again.

She wants, but…

She didn’t go back, not in time to save her people. She abandoned them, didn’t she? What right does she have…

No. Not the time. This, now, is about Leia.

Leia cries herself to sleep, and by the time Sokari drifts off, she’s near tears herself.

--

Of the time travelers, Rex greets the escort team first.

In her defense, Sokari asleep at the time. It’s a restless sleep, but it’s enough that she doesn’t sense the nearing Force signatures until they’re almost at the ship.

She recognizes one of them.

“Auntie‘Soka?” Leia questions, when she lurches to her feet and starts pulling on her boots with all the energy of a zombie.“Where are you going?”

“Jedi,” Sokari grunts.“Here.”

“I see.”

Leia dresses to follow her, in a little coat that’ll withstand the chill of the outside air, and Sokari makes it to the cargo hold just in time to hear Rex saying,“I’m not shaking your hand until you put your gloves on, Vos.”

She laughs to herself, breathless with the knowledge of what she’s about to find. She jumps the railing of the upper walkway, drops down just in front of the Master-Padawan team, and keeps her back to Fett and Rex.“Hello, there.”

One human, one Kiffar. She knows the latter.

“Would you be Sokari Torrent?” the master asks.

“I would,” she says, with a slight bow. She can tell there’s a bit of judgement for how she’s dressed, but they’re covering it well. A Shadow and his trainee know the value of armor better than most Jedi bother with.“I’m afraid Padawan Billaba didn’t inform me of your names before we met.”

“And yet your friend knew my padawan,” the master points out.

“By reputation,” she says, as smoothly as she can.“I’ve encountered Quinlan Vos before, though I doubt he remembers—”

“I’d remember someone like you,” Quinlan interrupts, with a grin she’s sure is meant to be charming and rogueish.

He’s… very young for her. Mostly, she wants to pat him on the head, but that probably wouldn’t go over very well. She still lookslike she’s younger than him. He presumably assumes that she is.

She’s not going to touch that.

“Anyway,” she says, turning back to the master,“I’m afraid I still don’t know who you are, Master.”

“I am Tholme,” he says, with the bow that a Master gives a Padawan. She feels a little slighted, but it’s fine. She looks the right age, it’s fine.

It’s not like they know.

“It’s nice to meet you, Master Tholme,” she says.“My charges are Rex Torrent, the young man behind me, and currently coming down the ladder is Leia Antilles. I’m sure you’re aware of Jango Fett.”

“The Mand’alor,” Quinlan volunteers.

Sokari can almost hear Fett’s teeth grinding. “Don’t call me that.”

She’s sure he’s got a hand drifting for his blaster.

“There isn’t a whole lot of room on the ship,” she says, before the men can get into whatever weird contest she’s sure someone might start. Her bet’s on Fett.“Most of the old crew and commando quarters are full of cargo right now. However, Leia and Rex are small enough to share with me, so I’m sure we can make it work.”

“There’s spare rolls for anyone comfortable with sleeping in the hold,” Fett grunts.“Or on the floor in the passenger rooms.”

“Well, I guess I could ask for a little help fi—”

“Vos,” Sokari snaps, letting her voice take on the kind of‘obey me or get fresher duty’ irritation that she’d perfected back when the rebellion still had her managing people, before they’d realized she was more use in the field.“Do not.”

There’s a moment’s pause, and Tholme looks unimpressed with that raised eyebrow, but the kind of unimpressed that’s split between his own padawan and the stranger before him.

“Um,” Quinlan says.“I just—”

“No,” she cuts him off.“No flirting.”

It’s weird and uncomfortable and she’d have maybe been okay with it if she was actuallythe seventeen-or-eighteen-ish(?) that she looks, but she’s not. She’s in her thirties and Vos is… what, twenty? Twenty-one? No.

(It’s not his age that gives her pause, she knows. He’s old enough to make his own decisions. But he doesn’t know how old she is, and that… that is a problem.)

He stares at her, and she wonders momentarily if she’d gone too far. There is only so much one can politely do, in judging intentions in the Force and preempting actual flirtations.

“I’m sorry?” He offers, looking confused, but ashamed.“I, uh, I’ll keep that in mind.”

She definitely preempted the actual flirtation.

f*ck.

Sokari closes her eyes and breathes in. Breathes out. Opens her eyes. “Right. That was… I’m not sure how much Padawan Billaba told you about me.”

“Enough,” Tholme says. He moves forward and puts a hand on Quinlan’s shoulder. Sokari has no idea if it’s to comfort him or hold him back.“I didn’t share most of it with my padawan, but I have a general understanding of what’s going on.”

Quinlan darts a look at his teacher, but Sokari doesn’t acknowledge it. It’s fine. Everything is fine.

“Thank you for your understanding,” she says, and bows, and stiffly turns away to walk to the galley.

--

Leia squirms into the bench seat, shoving her way under Sokari’s arm like a particularly wriggly tooka.

“What was that?” Leia demands. All the authority of a rebellion general is rather useless in the squeaky voice of a child.

“What was what?”

“The whole thing with Padawan Vos,” Leia says. She gestures vaguely.“You blew up at him before he even did anything.”

That is a more than accurate summary of the event, yes.

She should explain. “I felt the flirtation coming before it happened, and reacted inappropriately because I panicked. I’m significantly older than him, but I can’t tellhim that, so it’s just awkward and uncomfortable and…”

Sokari trails off, trying to figure out how to explain, but she can’t. She can almost pretend she’s okay, when she’s talking to just Fett, because he’s f*cked up more than she has, but anyone else? Especially now, with reminders of all the dead she’s left behind?

It’s setting her off in ways she’s long since trained herself out of.

She falls back to the wall. “I’m not okay, Princess. I haven’t been for a long time.”

“Yeah, we can tell.”

Rude. “Leia.”

“What? I need therapy too! Captain Rex needs therapy! I’m pretty sure Fett needs therapy! You, Fulcrum, you reallyneed therapy. None of us are okay.”She huffs, wiggling impossibly closer.“I don’t likeit, but it’s true.”

“I know,” Sokari groans.“I just… I just need to hold out until the Temple.”

Leia makes a noise that would probably hold a bit more meaning if her voice were cooperating with her. She squirms away, and turns to face Sokari head-on.

“Will you be able to hold it together if you see someone you actuallycare about?” Leia demands.“What are you going to do when you see Kenobi?”

“Stop.”

Leia does not stop. “I’m serious, you—”

“Leia, that’s enough,”she snaps.“I was fighting that war before you were even born, and I’ve dealt with the consequences since. I knowthe risks, and I’ll thank you to remember who taught you to control your own mind.”

Leia stiffens, sucking in a sharp breath.“That was uncalled for.”

“You’re not the child you appear to be,” Sokari reminds her, sharp as a vibroknife.“You want to dish it out, be ready to take it. What will you do when we see Bail Organa? When we see the toddler that is Anakin Skywalker?”

“I get it.”

“I’m not sure you do,” Sokari mutters. She isn’t surprised when Leia ducks out of the embrace and leaves the galley. She lets the girl go, guilt warring with the memory of how Master Kenobi had more than once spoken that way to Anakin at the height of the war. The fact that Leia’s an adult in the body of a child isn’t an excuse for poking at Sokari’s open wounds. It was cruel and unnecessary, and unbecoming of a… not a Jedi. A princess. A politician.

Sokari rests her head on her arms and zones out. She should meditate, but that seems like… too much effort.

She can feel Vos and Tholme setting up in the room they’ve been assigned. Neither seems particularly angry. Most likely, Tholme’s given the absolute shortest explanation of‘child soldier, dead master, highly traumatized and emotionally unstable’ to smooth over the incident in the cargo hold. Rex is with Leia; he’s agitated, but less so than Leia herself. Fett’s annoyed, in the co*ckpit, but that’s not anything new.

There is a shudder at lift-off, and a few minutes later, they’re in hyperspace. It’s almost a straight shot for the Core, now. They’ll only have the one transfer from Hydian Way to Corellian Spire.

Fett finds her, falls into the other bench in full armor, and drops his elbows onto the table. The helmet clunks onto the plastisteel a moment later.

She doesn’t lift her head.“What do you want?”

“Do I need to keep Vos away from you?”

She does not have the energy to parse that. “What?”

“Vos. He made you uncomfortable. Was that him being someone that hurt you in the future, or just the interaction being awkward?”

She lifts her head. She stares at him.“What?”

He leans back and crosses his arms.“Do you need me to tell Vos to stay the hell away from you?”

She’s gaping. That’s not common. “You realize I’m thirty-two, right? I can handle my own battles.”

“You’re also traumatized as hell and everyone can see it,” Fett argues back.“If Vos himself is a trigger… I can handle it.”

“He’s not,” she tells him. This is strange. Fett’s being strange. Is he protective of her? She’s a Jedi. It’s not just that she can take care of herself; he hates her people, and is only putting up with her because she’s important to Rex. Why the hell is he being protective, of all things? “He was actually a friend of my grandmaster’s. I’m just uncomfortable with the flirting because I’m a lot older than he realizes, and I can’t tell him that.”

He nods sharply, and then looks away. The silence sits.

“Thanks for asking?” Sokari says, well aware of how her confusion over the offer turns it into a question.“I mean, thank you for… caring.”

I guess,she finishes in the privacy of her own head. Or at least pretending to.

Fett makes a face, still not facing her. He eyes the galley instead. She can guess where his thoughts are going. The galley is… not actually very big, since the high-occupancy parts are the gunship bit, meant for a few hours transportation at most. It’s cramped, especially with six people on board instead of one, but she’s sure they’ve stocked up enough. On the off chance they dogo through more than expected, on account of how many growing bodies are in residence, they can stop off and buy more. They have those resources now.

(Jango never did ask what she did with the slavers.)

“Who’s going to cry if I spice things properly?” he asks. The question is, thankfully, as neutral as can be.

“Probably Leia,” she says immediately. No matter the future, Leia is currently six, and her tastebuds reflect that. She tries not to let her mind tug down the spiral of their conversation from just half an hour earlier.“Vos will try to power through it even though he’s going to be overwhelmed. No idea about Tholme, but I think he’ll keep a straight face whether he likes it or not. Rex and I are fine;‘hot’ was pretty much the only flavor of seasoning the GAR had.”

“GAR?”

“Grand Army of the Republic.”

He finally looks at her.

“You already knew I was a child soldier, Fett. You knew about the basics of our war. Don’t act surprised.”

“That doesn’t mean I like hearing about it.”

“I was fourteen. That’s old enough by Mandostandards, Fett. Just think back, when did you get on the battlefield?”

“I take your point,” he says, lip curling unpleasantly. “It just hits different now that I’m old enough to look back and think of how damned youngfourteen really is.”

Sokari shrugs.“Yeah, well—”

“And, as you’ve made a point of telling me several times, the clones were ten.”

Well.

There’s the rub, isn’t it?

Of course, it was about the clones.

“…closer to seven, by the end,” she tells him. His expression twitches, but not in a way she reads. “Kamino was just making speedies at that point. Triple growth on the average instead of double, but… that’s averages, which don’t illustrate the reality. They’d been growing at double rates for six years, like early batches, but… then they got forced through so many growth cycles in a single year to beef up the army when we kept losing men.” She looks down at the table, picking at a scratch in the plastipaint with her nail.

Fett doesn’t say anything. He just waits for her.

“Rex and the rest of the ones from the beginning were basically twenty in mind and body, even if they’d only been decanted ten years earlier,” Sokari says quietly. “The speedies… I always wondered. They’d gone from functionally twelve to functionally twenty in a year.That’s not… even in Kamino, that can’t have been normal. They didn’t actlike adults, not the way the originals did. They tried. They did their best. But… they were kids, still. Gangly, muscley, deadly kids.”

Fett rubs at his face, groaning. He swears under his breath in three different languages.

She pities him, if only because he hasn’t actually done any of this yet.He’s paying, emotionally, for the crimes of a man he likely won’t ever become.

She kicks him under the table.“Wanna make tiingilar and see how long it takes Vos to start crying while he insists it’s fine?”

He does. She helps.

He doesn’t let the conversation rest, though. She’s chopping meat when he asks.

“You said there was one—just a—there was one clone. That I accepted.”

“Boba,” she confirms. “He was… twenty-eight? Maybe twenty-nine? When I died.”

“Why him?”

Sokari shrugs. “It’s not like future you went in and picked, from what I heard. One unaltered clone as part of the payment for the rest of the project. He came out without the genetic tweaks or sped-up growth the others had.”

“I thought you said there were… cycles or something.”

“Sort of,” she says. She focuses on the meat, because she doesn’t want to see his face for this. “There were periods of forced growth in tubes, but their bodies and genetic codes had been modified beforehand to make them more receptive to it without going… horribly wrong.”

99 was fine, compared to some of the horror stories Rex had told her about mistakes in the earliest stages. They hadn’t been able to survive outside the tube, even with surgeries to fix what their organs had become.

“And the clone I claimed… he didn’t have those.”

She shakes her head. “None of them, no.”

He clearly wants to ask more. She doesn’t know if he wants to know more about Boba as a person, or more about why he claimed this one clone, or how Rex and his brothers felt about the one lucky kid that go, for at least a few years, to be a kid.

“He followed in your footsteps, became a bounty hunter,” she says. “Teen years were… rough.”

“Rough?”

“He was ten when you got yourself decapitated,” she says, fake casual.

“Decapitated?”

“You ran, shooting, at a Jedi, in a fight you could have easily left without anyone caring,” she says. “I’ve seen footage of that battle. You—well, future you—literally could have just picked up Boba and flown off into the sunset. Instead… pointless charge at one of the best duelists in recent history. That’s the ‘got yourself’ part.”

Fett is staring at her. His emotions are complicated, a burning and bubbling mix of old anger and grief mixing with new curiosity and embarrassment.

“He never really recovered from that,” she says. She tries to keep her tone gentle, even if the words are harsh. “Got some fellow clones killed trying to get revenge. Ended up in judicial holding by the Republic… he was twelve. The Jedi that killed future you, he was head of the Order at that time, and we were mid-war; Boba was being used as a pawn by people with political motivations, and so that meant that he’d committed multiple war crimes by the Yavin Code. Master Wi—I mean, the one that killed future you, he argued for leniency. Tried to convince the judges that a rehabilitory program would be better, since he was just a kid, but… well, he got overruled by Judicial.”

Fett hisses out a breath, and she doesn’t even try to analyze it.

He wants to say something. He wants to pick at the Jedi, in this.

“Trust me,” she says, without looking at him, “I’ve heard it all before, and worse. We were always choosing the best of many terrible options, and I can see only in hindsight how neatly the Sith boxed us into those decisions. Whatever question you have, why the Jedi didn’t leave the Republic, why we accepted leadership of what was functionally a slave army, whatever it is, I have heard it before, and argued it at length, and I just… I don’t want to have that conversation again.”

There’s a spark of spite, but he swallows it down, along with bitterness and anger and irritation and a million other ugly little things.

“They…” he struggles for the words, “other people, they used those questions to justify the… death of your people.”

She nods. Her throat is dry, but she manages, “you can just call it the Purge. That was the most common name for it.”

“I see,” he says, and she thinks that maybe, now, he does.

Chapter 5: Getting to Know Each Other (Recovery is Not So Straight a Path)

Chapter Text

Dinner is when the questions start. Some are relatively easy. Others, not so much.

“My Master was Leia’s biological father,” is an easy truth to share.“She inherited his connection to the Force, so I need to get her to the Temple for her own safety, because home no longer is.”

“Yes, her adoptive parents were unfortunately killed rather recently. We’d prefer not to talk about it.”

“Rex is with me. Where he goes, I go, and vice versa.”

That one gets her an odd look.

“I thought…” Quinlan trails off, gesturing between Rex and Fett.

Fett keeps his face impassive, but his discomfort and guilt leak into the Force.“I didn’t know Rex existed until I ran into these three in a spaceport cantina a few weeks ago.”

Quinlan blinks at him, looks at Rex again, and then turns back to Fett with a grin that might have been described as‘saucy’ if he were less smug about it. Less awkwardly try-hard, too.“Wild oats, huh?”

“Are you sh*tting me right now,” Leia whispers, and Sokari elbows her.

“Language,” Sokari mutters.

Tholme coughs pointedly. “That was inappropriate, padawan.”

Quinlan’s grin fades as Fett just continues to eye him.

“Um, so—”

“How old is the kid?” Fett interrupts.

Darting eyes answer him, as Quinlan tries to gauge Rex.“Ten? Maybe twelve?”

To be fair to Quinlan, none of them are sure how old Rex is supposed to be, either. They’re going to say twelve, once official ages need to be given, just so he’s got a bit less time before he can be treated like the adult he already is.

“And how old am I?”

Quinlan’s still grinning, but it is oh so very nervous, now. “…early thirties?”

“I’m twenty-seven.”

Quinlan’s grin fades further as he does the math.

“I’d have been between fifteen and seventeen when he was born,” Fett says, tone flat.“Between fourteen and sixteen at conception. I know damn well I wasn’t doing anything that could have resulted in a kidat that age.”

That wasn’t what Silas had implied, but Sokari knows how to keep a secret, even one that doesn’t topple governments.

Quinlan rallies. “So, brothers?”

Tholme sighs loudly, hand over his eyes.

“I’m a clone,” Rex says flatly, and Sokari can feel the amusem*nt he gets out of Quinlan’s confused shock. Captain Rex and Padawan Tano had both held plenty of respect forMasterVos, but Padawan Vos? The boy is nothing but trouble.“Harvested genetic material, grown in a tube, inconsistent aging that means I don’t even know how old I am for sure, all the bells and whistles.”

“I broke him out,” Sokari adds, which is half true.

“There was a chip in my head,” Rex tacks on, with a bright smile that’s more than a little mean. Quinlan’s discomfort grows. It’s kind of funny.“Sokari got it out. Also, lots of brothers. None of them are… around anymore. The creators were trying to make an army. They came very close to making one that could take over the galaxy, if you can believe it.”

Vos and Tholme have no response. Fett looks like he’s been carved out of stone. Leia’s just ignoring them and picking at her food.

Sokari lifts a hand and, without looking, Rex high-fives her.

--

“Drop your elbow.”

Sokari tries to cover her smile at the dirty look that Leia shoots Fett. Fett remains unimpressed by the glare of royalty, just gestures for the girl to do as he said.

“I know how to fight,” Leia grumbles.“I took lessons. I was goodat them.”

“And I’m better,” Fett says, leaving no room for argument.“You want the Torrents to take over the rest of your time?”

The Torrents.Rex and Soka. She likes being referred to that way. Like they’re a team that never got split up.

Force, she wishes they’d never had to split up.

“Again,” Fett orders, and Leia moves through the Mandalorian kata with ill grace in her emotions and all grace in her sweeping limbs.

…as much grace as an undersized six-year-old can manage, at any rate.

“Think he’ll ask me to spar her again?” Rex asks, dropping down into the seat next to Sokari and passing her a drink.

“Maybe,” she acknowledges.“I think he’s wondering if it’s worth asking Vos to be her opponent for a bit, so she gets more experience with extreme size differences.”

“Hm?” Rex prompts.

“She flinched at Fett’s face again,” she tells him. She takes a sip of the electrolyte-laden fruity thing. It doesn’t taste good, but it’s not unhealthy. It’ll do.“The whole… thing with Boba, I guess. She still won’t tell me why Fett triggers her sometimes, but he’s not pressing her to spar with him, and there’s only so much she can get out of fighting me. Asking Tholme would be presumptuous, but Vos is just a padawan. I think it’d work out.”

“And you?”

She looks at him, already feeling a cresting wave of bullsh*t she doesn’t want to deal with.“What about me?”

“Are you going to spar with the Jedi?”

She should. She hasn’t sparred with a saber since she got tossed back into a body only half-familiar to her. She’s let Leia borrow her shoto to learn some basic blocking moves; the girl’s learned Shii-Cho and then, with hesitance, the first Soresu form. Another time, she loaned it to Rex to practice some attacks; they both know that the next time he picks up her saber in battle, having lost his weapons or she her grip, it will be neither the first or last time he wields a sword of light.None of that, however, is… sparring.

None of that is against someone who knows what they’re doing.

How long has it been since shesparred with anyone other than Kanan and Ezra?

(She hadn’t seen Cal in years before she joined up with the Ghost, and he’s the last she can remember.)

How long has it been since shesparred without the looming specter of Darth Vader in the back of her mind, without fear of the Inquisitors, without the knowledge that any saber held by someone other than her dwindling friends would be red as blood and twice as drenched?

(All that kyber, screaming.)

Would she be able to hold back as she fought?

(She’s managed so far.)

“I should,” she acknowledges, eyes on where Fett is nudging Leia’s feet into position for some kind of leveraging flip. She’s so small.“It would probably be a good idea to spar against a master at some point.”

“Do you think you can?” Rex asks, gesturing at Tholme.

“I never knew him,” she says.“And he isn’t Dark. It should be fine.”

Rex nods, taking her word for it. They watch as Leia stumbles on a final move, and Fett gestures for her to sit down and get a drink. She trudges over to the two of them, plops down, and grabs the drink that Rex opens for her.

“That man is a terror,” she declares.

(She’d once described him as a slave-driver. She had not made that mistake twice.)

“Least it’s not Kamino!” Rex tells her cheerfully. When Leia refuses to look impressed, he just snickers and ruffles her fraying crown braid. Naturally, Leia swats at his hand.

Sokari has a half-second’s warning before heavy boots thud to the ground next to her.“What’s Kamino?”

“Hello, Vos, it’s nice to see you too,” she drawls.“I’m good, thanks for asking, and yourself?”

The boy-not-quite-man rolls his eyes.“Hi, Torrents; hi, tiny one.”

Leia glares at him next.

Vos is unaffected. Most people are. “So, Kamino?”

“Planet by Rishi Maze,” Rex says.

“Why were you there?”

“They specialize in cloning.”

Sokari covers her mouth as the conversation drops like a stone into the same awkward gap that always happens when Quinlan stumbles into a subject he didn’t know to avoid.

“Like… you were made there, or you were researching how it works for your own—”

Sokari slaps a hand over his mouth.“Now’s a great time to stop talking.”

He licks her palm.

She bares her teeth and arches her fingers just enough to press nails into his cheek.

He bites at her palm, and she yanks her hand away.

“You’re all children,”Leia accuses, conveniently forgetting that Sokari and Rex are both over a decade older than her.

“I can throw you the length of a swimming pool,” Sokari tells her.“One of the fancy competition-ready ones that would make any Tatoo folk cry. You are absolutely the child here.”

“Using the Force is cheating, sir,” Rex informs her.

“Only if there’s a competition,” Sokari shoots back.“And proving that a certain princess is a small childis not a competition. It’s a declarative fact.”

Leia takes a large gulp of her sports drink, and wipes her mouth on the back of her hand like the child she is. “I’m going to rip open the seams on all your tops except the ugliest one.”

“Try me,” Sokari challenges.“Ad’ika.” [1]

A low, rough cough interrupts them.“Are you done?”

Fett has his arms crossed, and an eyebrow raised. Heknows they’re all adults here, and is entirely unamused. As the silence drags, the eyebrow climbs a little higher.

“Done with what?” Quinlan finally asks, thereby volunteering himself to spar in hand-to-hand with Jango Fett, as one does.

“Poor, poor Vos,” Rex laughs, watching as Fett barks out orders at Quinlan every five seconds to fix his footwork, to stop dropping his guard, to stop wasting energy on flips instead of just dodging the easy way.

“Throw him!” Sokari calls. To her delight, Fett obliges.

The thing is, Quinlan isn’t badat brawling. He’s got training, endurance, skill. The boy—young man, really—knows what he’s doing, on an objective level. He’s just not a match for Fett, and is used enough to relying on his saber that his hand-to-hand skills are rusty.

Quinlan and Tholme are perhaps less rusty than those Jedi who don’ttake questionable jobs in the Mid- and Outer Rim, and Sokari’s got a suspicion that Vos regularly gets into bar fights in his downtime. None of that is enough for him to actually do more than surviveagainst Fett without his saber.

Even the saber wouldn’t help, if Fett had his armor.

“Whose idea was this?”

Sokari cranes her head back and smiles.“Hello, Master Tholme. Vos… volunteered.”

“Did he know he was volunteering?”

“No comment.”

Tholme snorts, crossing his arms and eyeing the spar in front of him.“I thought Fett hated Jedi. Giving us a ride for the sake of you three is one thing, but why is he teachingmy padawan?”

Sokari shrugs.“Constructive bullying?”

There’s a small twitch of a smile, quickly gone.“My padawan stepped on some metaphorical toes, I’m guessing?”

“There was no way he could have known,” she dismisses.“We’re just, like, ninety-percent tragic backstories.”

“You’d think the Force would warn him,” Rex notes.

“That’s not how the Force works,” Leia chides.

“No, no, he’s right,” Sokari corrects.“The Force does sometimes step in to stop a person from saying something stupid. However, Padawan Vos is at an age where people think they are veryrational, while being more irrational than they likely ever will be again.”

“Do I want to ask what youwere doing at that age?” Tholme asks.

“Running bla…” she trails off, then whips around to gape at him.

He smiles, bland and unassuming.“Does Fett know?”

f*ck.

“Know… what?” Sokari asks, wary as she can be.

“That you’re significantly older than you look,” he says, voice just low enough that the sparring duo can’t hear him.“All three of you.”

Sokari turns back to the spar, only catching Tholme out of the corner of her eye.“He knows.”

“Mm. Were you planning on telling the Council?”

“Yes.” That part was never in question.“How did you figure it out?”

“I ama good investigator,” he says. It’s dry.“And you rely a little too heavily on your physical forms to obfuscate. Were it just one of you, that wouldn’t be a problem, but the pattern repeated across three is a little easier to discern.”

“I hoped the whole‘child soldiers’ thing would be a bigger distraction,” Sokari mutters.

She glances at Leia and Rex. Both of them are used to being in charge to some degree, giving orders and making contingency plans, but in this… in this adventure, Sokari is in charge. They’d decided that at the very start. It didn’t matter that Rex had lived longer and had more experience, or that Leia had held the highest Rebellion rank by virtue of surviving Sokari and being fitter than Rex. Sokari had been agreed as leader, and they were relying on her.

They’re waiting on her orders. Stiff and unhappy, in Leia’s case, but they trust her.

“Will you be telling Vos?” She finally asks.

“No,” Tholme says.“Your secrets remain your own unless they endanger us, and I’ve a feeling they won’t be.”

“Don’t be so sure,” Rex jokes, smile not reaching his eyes.“I’ve been working with this family for too long to trust that trouble won’t find them around the next corner.”

“This family?” Tholme repeats.

“Sokari was telling the truth about her master being Leia’s biological father,” Rex says. He shrugs, falsely casual.“I worked with him, with his wife, with both of his kids, with his master and his padawan. All of them, to a one, are trouble magnets.”

“Ah, but that’s not the secret that’s putting us in danger,” Tholme points out.“Simply existence as a Jedi.”

Rex shrugs.“Fair enough. Don’t say I didn’t warn you, though.”

Sokari lurches to her feet, turning with a smile and dancing backward into the stretch of empty cargo hold they used for such things.“A spar, Master Tholme?”

He looks past her, to Quinlan, and raises a brow.“Would you not prefer to spar with someone a little closer to your level first?”

She barks out a laugh.“Master Tholme, I’m afraid I’ve spent more of my life fighting to survive than having normal friendly spars. My style is more lethal than the average, and you’ve already seen what war’s done to my mind. I ask to spar with you because, if I lose control, if I slip in time or react on an instinct that isn’t appropriate, I trust that you’ll be more able to stop me than a senior padawan.”

He smiles. A test of her reasoning, then.“Yes, I gathered as much. Still, better to ask. Shall we wait for them to finish up?”

Sokari shrugs, turns, and cups her hands around her mouth.“Clear the deck!”

Rex snorts behind her, and lowly mutters,“Sir, yes, sir.”

She smirks at him over her shoulder.“At ease, Captain.”

“That’s‘Commander’ to you; I got promoted,”he sniffs, chin held high.

Heavy steps herald Fett’s arrival at their little group.“The hells are you doing?”

“I’m going to have a spar with a Jedi Master, and I want you and Vos to notget stabbed.”

“I’m not that easy to injure in an actualfight, let alone by accident,” Fett grouses. He looks up and over at Vos, who is already significantly taller, if a fair shot less built.“This one, on the other hand…”

“Hey!”

Sokari laughs and backs into the center of the cargo hold, drawing her sabers.“Don’t worry, Vos. I won’t play dirty. You’ll probablyget your master back in one piece.”

He wrinkles his nose at her.“Getting a bit ahead of yourself there, aren’t you? He’s a Jedi Masterand former Watchman. You’re… what, eighteen?”

Sokari raises a brow and activates her sabers, tapping the blades together and watching as more than one person winces at the sound.“Wanna bet on how long I last?”

“No,” he says immediately, stepping back to join Rex on the bench.“You’ve already blindsided me enough. I’m not dumb enough to fall for whatever you’ve got up your sleeve.”

“I don’t have sleeves.”

“Armwarmers-slash-greaves, then.”

“Greaves go on the legs; these are vambraces.”

He throws his hands up in the air.“I’m just going to stop talking now!”

“Good plan,” Leia snarks, and then literally hisses when Rex ruffles her hair again.

Tholme ignites his saber and settles into an opening stance.

Sokari mirrors him.

--

She wins, but barely. She’s had a few weeks to practice her forms, has sparred hands-only with Rex and Fett, but this is her first real try at using her sabers against a person,instead of a blaster or thin air, since she arrived in the past. She’s only mostlyadjusted to her body.

Tholme is a healer and a watchman, not a duelist. Sokari held her own against Ventress, against Grievous, against Maulwhen she was truly younger than this body. Still adjusting to her body or not, her lineage is one of battle, and it has bled and bred true.

“You’re terrifying,” Quinlan tells her after they’re done, smiling like the sun as he hands her a towel.“Please never turn that on me.”

She laughs at him.“Would you believe that I’m out of practice?”

“Out of practice with what?”he asks, horrified and fascinated.“Fighting Sith Lords?”

“Among other things,” she says, and smirks when he chokes on his drink.She forces a laugh and waves it off. “Multiple darkside users who claimedto be Sith, at least. One being a full Lord, one that was disowned by his master, and one that was apprenticed to a Banite apprentice, so she wasn’t technicallyallowed to be a Darth because of the Rule of Two.”

Tholme meets her eyes past Quinlan’s shoulder, head tilted and eyes half-shut in consideration. He’s taking her seriously. He knows what she’s not saying.

“How…” Quinlan trails off and shakes his head.“You know what, no. Asking you people questions never ends well.”

“Good plan,” Sokari says, clapping a hand down on his shoulder.“Also, you need to spar with Fett more. Your footwork is sh*t.”

“It is not,”Quinlan gripes.“You’re all just scary good at this stuff.”

“You mean surviving?” Leia pipes up, and smiles innocently when Quinlan turns to pout at her.

“You’re getting bullied by a six-year-old,” Rex informs him.

“Yeah,” Quinlan sighs.“I know.”

Sokari laughs.

--

This is not a linear narrative.

Recovery never is.

When Sokari dreams, it is her reality. It is fifteen years of the same living nightmare, remixed and mucked up and shredded into something that isn’t even new. It’s the same damn thing, over and over and over again, and her mind simply chooses a highlight reel if she makes the mistake of shortening her meditations by even a few minutes.

Red sabers held by people who were once friends. Endless troopers, trying to shoot her down. A rotating list of names, Jedi who had fled, growing shorter by the day.

Bounty hunters who didn’t know her, trying to connect to someone they thought was one of them. High and mighty CEOs leering at her, the pretty tog girl they’d hired as a ‘secretary’ for just long enough that she got the info and got the hell out. Crowded clubs, air filled with the smoke of spice and deathsticks, floor sticky with alcohol, and an Imperial Moff so distracted by the bare skin on stage that he hadn’t noticed what she slipped in his drink.

Fighting the Empire had necessitated… some very particular methods. Fulcrum had been better at them than most.

Ahsoka had been a Jedi. Fulcrum… Fulcrum had been a spy.

(The Rebellion, especially in the early years, had not had the resources to hold an Imperial for very long. An interrogation and a memory wipe had been the best that Fulcrum could do, but some targets…)

(Bail and Mon had never asked her to kill someone this way.)

(She hates that she’d found it necessary to make that decision for them.)

Jedi weren’t meant to be soldiers, but at least there could be an honor in that.

They were never meant to become assassins, and yet Fulcrum had taken that role more than once.

Tonight is an amalgamation of a dozen memories of being in bars and hearing patrons jeer about the evil Jedi finally got what was coming to them, didn’t they? f*cking bastards, running up this war forever just so they could get a little more power out of it mixed with a dash of an Inquisitor—she can’t tell which one—coming in and declaring her a traitor. There are brothers at the broken-no-longer-Jedi’s back, troopers she knows are aging clones, handpicked to make her hesitate. Hardcase—even though he died on Umbara—and Jesse—lost on Mandalore—and Kix—disappeared, even the Empire didn’t know where—and Fives—tried to warn them and died—and Coric, who probably kicked it somewhere in the early years of the Empire.

When she wakes up, it is on her own choked begging, gazing into Commander Cody’s eyes as he dispassionately presses his knee into her neck, as she's lying on her back and scrabbling for purchase she just can’t get; the boys just letting it happen, the Inquisitor smirking down at her, the bar jeering as her life is squeezed out of her.

It’s not something that happened.

It’s something that easily could have.

She does not wake screaming. She does not wake sobbing, or shaking, or shivering. She just… wakes.

Her eyes are wet. That is the only sign of what her dreams have dragged her to.

She gets up. She rubs at her face. She looks at the kids.

She goes to the galley to get some hot chocolate.

[1] Child/baby/little one

Chapter 6: Scars of Silver

Chapter Text

Here is the thing about sharing a ship, and it is a thing that everyone aboard knows, because they’ve all served in one form or another, and they’ve all spent too much time in cramped spaces where people work up a sweat practicing the best way not to die:

There is a very high chance that you will be seeing your friends and fellow travelers in less clothing than you expect.

It’s not a hard and fast rule, but it’s… likely. This is especially true for those who come from cultures that are not body shy. The Jedi, for the most part, favored communal showers for communal areas, despite having personal showers in their own suites; they grew up from early childhood with their bodies and those of their fellows normalized.

Many Mandalorian sects were unwilling to share faces, let alone bodies, but Jango had belonged to a group that by and large dispensed with such things in safety, and also had communal showers outside of training rooms.

The clones, being identical and raised for efficiency, had never given the slightest bit of kark who saw them.

(Leia, being a princess, was very used to having her own space and privacy, and her time in the Rebellion had not been quite enough to make her comfortable with any of the boys seeing her. Sokari is the only one allowed in to help her reach the shower controls.)

What this means is that, while Quinlan and Tholme give them all space, they still… run into each other, here and there.

Sokari’s just grateful she’s got a towel on, when the door opens on her and Rex.

They have a moment. It is just a moment. There is a pregnant silence, as someone sees something, and processes, and realization dawns. It is only that one, single moment.

“What in all the Sith hells?” Fett demands.

“Are we not allowed to shower now?” Rex jeers, because he’s small and frustrated and Fett is, for obvious reasons, his favorite target of ire. “Or is the—”

“Your back,” Fett bites out. The horror and guilt and self-recrimination are all there in his expression. At least two of those emotions don’t belong.

Rex’s face does a few acrobatics, and then he growls out a swear and yanks on his underpants. “f*ck this. I’m not having this conversation in a towel. Shower and then we can talk.”

“Did I d—”

“No,” Rex snaps. “Not everything is about you, Prime.”

Fett steps back, defensive and startled and not at all willing to do anything about it. Sokari shrugs, unable to really do much, and his eyes catch on the ugly, shining strip of almost-white that carves down from her right shoulder, across her collarbone, and disappearing under her towel.

“I don’t want to talk about it.” She shuts him down instantly. “It’s… whatever happened to us kept scars from some things and not others, whether they make sense for our ages or not. This…” she traces it, “was my death blow.”

It doesn’t hurt, other than in her own mind. It doesn’t tug and impede her movement. It doesn’t seem to be any more sensitive or delicate than the rest of her body.

It’s little more than a visual reminder, but what it reminds her of is…

Not great.

Fett hesitates in leaving, but leave he does.

Rex bumps her elbow with his shoulder on their way out, and she gives him a weak smile.

“Does Leia have any?” he asks. She’s the only one who’d know.

“Not here,” she murmurs. “And… not without her there to give me the go-ahead.”

Because she does. Leia does have scars she shouldn’t, at this age. Tiny, near-invisible circles that remain from the drugging, the torture, she suffered at the Empire’s hands.

At Vader’s.

Her father’s.

Sokari doesn’t bother putting on all her layers, now. The Jedi are on the other side of the ship, and Fett’s aware of her big, ugly secret. A workout brassiere is enough for her modesty.

(She’d worn less at fourteen, after all.)

Fett is waiting in galley, the room they’ve all circled to treating as the communal space, when not training. Leia’s not here, but Rex got here before Soka did.

“You have scars from adulthood,” Fett says, once they’re sitting and quiet for too long to assume they’ll start the conversation for him. “So the ones on your back…”

“From when I was actually twelve,” Rex says, not meeting his eyes. “Physically and mentally twenty-four.”

Fett’s face doesn’t loosen, but the thoughts flitting across his expression are easy enough to decipher.

“I told you about Zygerria,” Sokari says. She nods to Rex. “He made out worse than I did.”

Realization dawns, and horror, and both are quickly stifled down. “Undercover, or captured?”

“Cover was blown,” Rex confirms. “So, the latter.”

“And those scars…” Fett says, and then presses a hand to his face and groans. “Electro-whips. Zygerrians favor them. I already knew that.”

“Sure you did,” Rex says, not a little mocking.

Fett goes to say something, but Sokari cuts him off. “Do we need to stay here, or are you satisfied with your answers?”

His mouth twists, and he looks between them. Finally, he says, “do you need scar-reduction creams or anything? I can’t imagine the whole reversed aging situation made it easy to tell if it’s still possible to do something about the damage.”

“I don’t think there’s anything you can do,” Sokari says. “But thank you for offering.”

“Then yeah. You can go.”

He doesn’t wait quite long enough for her to be out of hearing range before he drops his head into his hands and whispers, “f*ck.”

--

They land on a moon of Baroli for supplies. It’s not the cheapest place, but it’s a damn sight safer for Rex and Soka and Leia than one of the seedier ports. The air is clean, the people are relatively kind, and they’re all much less likely to get kidnapped.

They even shop a little. Sokari still has some money from her pickpocketing earlier in the adventure. Even if she didn’t, Fett himself is awkwardly offering to provide some discretionary funds.

An allowance. He’s trying to offer an allowance, because Rex is the right size and seeming age to have one.

It’s absolutely mind-bending, and Sokari enjoys their mutual discomfort immensely.

She ignores it all, though. She does her own shopping, first; it’s been weeks since she had a proper, quality, corduroy montral brush, and she’s finally on a planet—well, moon—that has a decent one in stock. [1] She finds fresh meat, too, and a few vitamin supplements she could use in space, that human-standard rations don’t provide enough of. There’s even a skincare oil she purchases just so she doesn’t have to deal with ship-flake again. [2]

She leaves it all on the ship, and lets Fett, as the only person there, know where she’s heading.

Sokari jumps to the nearest roof and starts hopping from building to building to get to the edge of the town as quickly as possible. There is no one to hunt her. There is no one to hurt her. The kids are safe.

The edge of town shades directly into a forest, with only a few meters of grass between the houses and the first of the trees. It’s exactly the sort of place she’s been hoping to find since she woke up on Terminus.

Quinlan is following her, but she doesn’t try to stop him. It’s not like she’s doing anything particularly secret.

She finds the tiniest of meadows, which is only a meadow by dint of the trees clearing enough to let a few shafts of sunlight hit the grass in the clearing that is, at most, three meters across. She sits, legs folding, and glances at Quinlan’s hiding spot so he knows that she’s spotted him. She closes her eyes and breathes.

It has been… so very long since she meditated on a planet that wasn’t contaminated by the Empire in some way. Everywhere she’d gone, it was either under Imperial rule, or under Hutts, or a Rebel base that was layered over with fear of discovery. This moon is in no way perfect, because all sentients create all emotions, but it is… kinder. It’s a more natural mix of all feelings.

And there is so much nature.

She sinks into it, the caress of life and sun, warmth and greenery. It carries her, holds her, swirls about her soul. She doesn’t think herself poetic, but the Force…

The Force is poetry, in its own way, isn’t it?

Faintly, she can feel Quinlan. He too is meditating. Good for him. This is—

Familiar. Oh. There is something much more familiar than Quinlan in this space, now. Small, and distant, but coming ever closer. Ever brighter.

Even Leia and Anakin didn’t shine quite like this.

Sokari tips her head back and opens her eyes. It takes only a moment for her to find the green dot that is spiraling closer.

“Torrent?”

“Not now,” she says quietly. Vos is not her concern. Not with this. She climbs to her feet and stands straight, arm aloft to greet her friend.

The landing is delicate. The claws do not pass through the fabric of the battlesilk arm warmers she normally wears under armor, simply grip well enough not to fall. Feathers brush to her face at the flutter of arrested momentum, and she cannot help but smile. “Hello, Morai.”

(Vos is staring.)

(That is his freedom, but she reserves the right to laugh at him later.)

Morai tilts her head, looking at her, at Vos, at the town where the others are.

“Now, do I want to know how you found me here?” Sokari murmurs, running fingers through the feathers on Morai’s crown.

“Why do you know a bird on this planet?” Vos asks, creeping closer.

“Because she is more than a bird, and she has always found me, when she wants to. The planet does not matter.”

Morai chuffs a bird-laugh at that, and steps closer, light and delicate, to rub her beak against the near lek-root. Sokari giggles softly at the odd tickle; this act is affection, a kind she holds dear.

Of course, of all creatures, Morai would follow her to the past.

“What do you need, Morai?”

The convor tilts her head, considering, and then leans in to press her forehead to Sokari’s.

Light.

Burning, godly, terrifying light.

It sprints through her, prickling every nerve she has like… like someone took a Sith and inverted it. Nothing can stop this. It’s not hurting, entirely, but it is—she is—

This is what coming to life feels like.

It fizzles from the tips of her montrals to the back of her neck, then down the sides of her throat to hook across her shoulder and trail down her back. It’s—it burns—it—almost hurts but—

“What the hell are you doing to her?!”

The sensation leaves her and she drops. Her knees can’t hold her up, and she can barely stay sitting where she lands, instead of flopping down and to the side. Her entire body is still lit up with that phantom energy, warm and terrifying and deific in all its glory.

Quinlan is here. He sounds scared. She manages to look up, and sees that he has put himself between her and Morai. His saber is in a ready position, and when he glances back to her, there is fear in his eyes.

“Y-you can…” Oh her tongue feels too large and unwieldy as a dental aftermath, and her jaw muscles refuse to cooperate. “s-stop. She’s a fr-f-friendtsah.”

Even the last sound plops out of her mouth like an uncertain bauble of a hissed sigh.

“She hurt you,” Quinlan says, not quite taking his eyes off of the convor that he’s decided might be an enemy. “You were screaming.”

“W’zz I?” Soka mutters. “Sssssssssssokay.”

“Torrent, I don’t know if—”

“She-e’s a friend,” she manages. “Ask-k Rex.”

“You,” Quinlan says, oddly careful, “were screaming, crying, floating, and glowing. I do not trust anything you say right now.”

Oh damn. That would be worrying.

“N…” for f*ck’s sake, “no. She’s h-healed. Before.”

Sort of. Morai was always a remnant of Daughter, but not the goddess herself. She’s always known that.

But Daughter had brought Ahsoka Tano back to life. And once Fulcrum died, Morai followed her to become Sokari in another time.

And Morai has always been Light in a way nothing and no one has ever matched.

“All due respect, Torrent—”

That’s the wrong word, she thinks. ‘All due respect’ ends with ma’am, or sir, or commander, or any of the dozen titles people had tried to foist on her as Fulcrum.

“—but you’re very likely not fully cognizant right now.”

She is. She is. It’s Morai.

The only individual she trusts more is Rex.

“She’s Light,” Sokari insists, trying to get him to understand just how literal she’s being.

A minor deity of the Force, and Quinlan doesn’t understand.

There is shouting. There are people. It’s only the rest of the group. Tholme heads straight for Quinlan, and Leia and Rex go to Sokari. Fett hesitates, but stands as a guard.

Maybe he’s thinking anything that scares a Jedi as carefree as Quinlan Vos ought to be taken seriously.

“What’s going on?” Tholme asks.

“Bird did something,” Quinlan says. “Floating. Screaming. Glowing. Now she’s got the weird scars.”

Scars?

Rex makes a small noise of understanding. “Hello, Morai.”

Morai hoots.

Everyone else is silent.

“You… know the bird,” Tholme says. He is very slow and deliberately non-judgmental about this. Sokari appreciates it.

“Yeah,” Rex says. It’s a ‘heavy sigh’ kind of word. “She’s been following Soka around for years.”

“Why?”

“Long story,” Rex says immediately, because not a single person here has been cleared to learn about the bullsh*t of Mortis. He knows her well.

“That doesn’t explain—”

“Don’t worry about the bird,” Rex snaps. “She’s fine. Ignore her.”

“But—”

“Padawan Vos,” Rex snaps. “Stand. Down. Do not attack the convor. She’s a friend.”

Quinlan steps back, eyes wide with the natural shock of getting snapped at by a military commander in the shape of a twelve-year-old.

“Does anyone have a mirror or other reflective surface?” Rex asks. He does not sound particularly optimistic on this front.

Tholme gestures at Quinlan. Quinlan, upon realizing this, digs into a pocket and manages to find a compact. He starts to walk over to give it to Rex, but Leia runs over to grab it from him and deliver it herself.

Morai hoots a laugh. Sokari appreciates that. It’s not exactly odd for a Shadow trainee to have a mirror on hand for emergency disguise application, but having the mirror stolen by the tiniest person here is actually fun.

“Alright, sit on up,” Rex mutters, propping her up a little straighter. “She left some kinda markings with whatever freaked out Vos so much. I don’t recognize ‘em.”

Rex takes the compact, flips it open, and holds it out to Sokari.

Being that he cannot, in fact, see out of her eyes, he thus cannot get a good angle. She has to take it herself.

It takes a few moments to realize what it is that Quinlan spotted. There’s nothing on her face, but she catches the edge of odd feathering on her shoulders.

“There’s more on your back,” Rex informs her, voice low.

Yes. Her tunic shows more behind and under her arms than in front. That was Quinlan’s angle when this started, wasn’t it?

“Rex, help me get my shirt off,” she says, pulling at her hem.

Quinlan flushes and turns away. Fett and Tholme do not blush, but they also turn. Leia does not. Rex rolls his eyes, and helps her maneuver out of a top that is difficult enough to wrangle around her lekku when she doesn’t feel like her body isn’t responding the way it should.

“Padawan,” Tholme starts. “What exactly did this bird do to Miss Torrent?”

“Floating, screaming, crying, and glowing. Her eyes, her markings, and what looked like a lot of her veins were all lit up.”

“Her veins?”

Her veins.

Oh.

Sokari looks up and meets Morai’s gaze. She doesn’t feel the way she did when she’d been corrupted. Morai hadn’t taken any of her freedom from the Son’s power. But…

She checks her eyes with the compact. Still blue. She can’t say it’s the right shade of blue, but that’s only because she never really paid that much attention to the color of her own eyes, let alone from fifteen years ago. It’s blue, and Togruta-normal, and definitely not yellow.

Rex gets her top off, leaving her in just her support bra.

“Oh,” he says, once he gets a look at her back. “That’s… yeah. Veins.”

Up comes the mirror again.

“She’s got a support bra on,” Rex calls. “She’s decent, it’s fine.”

Sokari ignores him. The ‘feathering’ is an inconsistent, silvery tracing of her veins. It fades in and out across her skin, much like the vaguest memories she has of Mortis, but so much paler. It could almost be mistaken for more markings, except a Togruta’s markings are solid. These are soft and shaded, faintly mottled, even. A tad glossy. They almost look like scars.

They start from the below the join of her arm and torso, at her ribs and just to the side of her breasts; she wonders if it’s only coincidence that has it tucking down and back to her lymph nodes. The procession of half-silvered veins crawls up her collarbone to slip up her neck and to the hinge of her jaw, just below where her lekku start, and sink back down like yet another chevron across her neck and shoulder. The new marks continue down on either side of her spine, slim tracks, and then jag right back up to her shoulder, and down again into a wider flare that tapers off somewhere below her waistband.

“Like wings,” Rex mutters. “You said…”

Sokari looks at Morai. “A reminder? Or is it a sign of her?”

Morai does not communicate in words, but there is a sensation of reassurance.

No. Sokari is not on the path to grow into the next coming of Daughter.

Thank goodness. Thank the Force.

(And thank all the little gods, Morai included.)

“These mean something to you,” Tholme says. He is still being so damnably neutral.

“There was an incident when I was fifteen,” she says. “It did something like this, but all over, in dark colors. Morai was… she’s a remnant of the woman who saved me.”

It’s more complicated than that, of course, with Anakin and the Father’s involvement, but… close enough.

“Two,” Rex says suddenly.

“What?” Sokari asks.

“Two incidents. Remember Naboo?”

…oh right, the Blue Shadow virus.

“I completely forgot about that,” she admits. “Two incidents, then, but only one was relevant.”

Quinlan is still shooting looks of distrust to Morai, but his saber’s back on his belt. When he isn’t looking at Morai, though, his eyes are fixed on her face. Given the exact location of his gaze the few times it slips, this has nothing to do with impropriety, and everything to do with what she received on Malachor. “You’re talking better than you were a few minutes ago, so… I guess the bird’s not terrible. Why give you the scars, though?”

To leave a mark of the Force’s influence on her life? To give her a reminder of the good she could do, and not just the scar of her brother ki—

No. Not there. Not yet.

“I don’t know,” Sokari says, pulling her shirt back on with Rex’s help. “But I’m sure she has a good reason.”

--

It is not the last time their scars come up in this leg of their journey. Most of these old wounds are innocuous, save for Kadavo, Malachor, and now Mortis. Quinlan’s not asked about the others. He knows better.

Leia does, though. Most of the stories are simple. A battle, in some cases. Being too close to a speeder blowing a part, in others. Tripping over a mouse droid, twice.

It’s all little things. Has to be, doesn’t it?

Sokari tries to convince herself of it.

“Fett helped me cut my hair,” Rex announces. Tholme and Quinlan are here, but Rex does not appear to care, when he beelines for Sokari. She’s cleaning her armor on the floor of the hold while the other two spar.

Leia is… probably napping. Her body is very small, right now.

“Uh-huh. He help you bleach your roots, too?”

“Hey.”

“I’m just saying, I remember how many of your blacks you managed to ruin trying to do it by yourself back on the Resolute,” she says. “Honestly a miracle you showed up on Terminus with a fully-bleached head of hair in the first place.”

“I’m sorry, sir, did I ask? I did not. Also, yes, he helped me bleach it.”

“Dye it blue again,” she suggests.

“This is not the conversation I came here to have,” Rex complains. He’s finally reached her. “Gimme your hand.”

“Why?”

“Because I said so,” Rex grumps. “Come on, hand.”

“Okay but why?”

“Because Fett found something,” Rex says. “Hand. Gimme.”

“Consider this: I don’t feel like it.”

She holds out her hand anyway. He rolls his eyes at her antics. He searches out a spot on his scalp, takes her hand, and presses her fingers to the patch of skin.

It’s barely tangible, but… there is, in fact, a small ridge. It’s almost too small to feel, but not quite. She wouldn’t know what she was feeling for, except she already knows what this little bump on the side of his head, just past the hairline, is meant to signify.

“Oh,” she says.

She doesn’t have to ask why, of all scars, he has retained the one from the removal of his chip.

Formative, she thinks. Important.

“When we get to the Temple,” Rex says slowly, “do you think we should do a scan? Just to be sure?”

“Yes,” she agrees. She doesn’t even have to think about it. “I don’t want you going through that again.”

“I also do not want me going through that again,” Rex says. His solemnity is mostly fake. They might even be able to laugh about this.

“I have a feeling I’m going to regret this,” Quinlan says, and Sokari knows immediately that he will, “but can I ask what it is that you’re hoping not to go through again? Feel free to tell me to piss off.”

She is tempted.

“Remember when I said the cloners put a chip in my head that made me try to kill Soka?” Rex asks, almost chipper. He really does like messing with Quinlan a little too much.

Quinlan’s face twitches, and he drops his head into his hands. There is a noise of frustration. “You’d think I would learn.”

“You would think that you would remember,” Tholme says drily. “They told us about those less than a week ago, padawan.”

“They didn’t say it made him try to kill her!” Quinlan protests. “I remembered the chip part!”

Tholme just looks disappointed.

“We’ve run into way more mind control than just that,” Rex says, as if that will help at all.

“One time the brother of the Force Goddess that saved my life corrupted me and used my body to try and kill my Master,” Sokari offers. “That’s how I met Morai.”

Quinlan and Tholme both stare at her.

“Brain worms,” Rex adds.

“Doesn’t count. I didn’t get infected,” Sokari dismisses. “…Rissi did, though. She was the only one that had a chance at really getting me, that time, so that sucked.”

“Brain worms?” Quinlan asks. “Is that—that sounds like a biological thing that could possibly travel. Is that something we should be worried about?”

“Have you been to any Geonosian catacombs lately?” Sokari asks. She does not wait for an answer. “Then no.”

“The thing on Teth,” Rex reminds. “I did manage to resist, a little, but she still got in my head.”

“Couple of the Inquisitors tried,” Sokari adds. “Didn’t work, but they tried.”

Quinlan puts a hand over the lower half of his face. He appears very concerned.

“What does it say about us that we can talk about it now?” Rex asks her.

“Just that we’ve been through worse sh*t in the meantime?” Sokari offers.

“When did you have the chance?” Quinlan asks, looking absolutely flabbergasted. “Rex, you’re like… I’m sorry, but you’re, what, twelve?”

“Or something,” Rex says. He sounds cheerful again. “We had eventful childhoods.”

“Speak for yourself,” Sokari snorts. “My sh*t didn’t hit the fan until I was fourteen.”

“Pirate kidnapping when you were a toddler,” Rex immediately says.

Well, sh*t. She had told him that story.

“I stand corrected,” she allows. “Still less eventful than my master’s.”

Quinlan looks like he wants to ask. He doesn’t, because he’s learned, but she answers anyway.

“He was podracing, since age seven, as a human,” she explains. “He won a race at nine. If you know anything about podracing—”

“Why did the crèche let him?” Tholme demands.

Sokari blinks at him. He hadn’t put it together? “He had an unconventional childhood in the Outer Rim. The Jedi were… not aware of him until he was nine.”

Both Jedi’s brows furrow in confusion at that, but she doesn’t tell them more. Let them wonder.

Sokari… isn’t triggered by this conversation. Neither is Rex. She considers that, because they’d touched on so many of her horrible experiences… and it’s fine. It’s all fine.

She laughs with the realization of it.

(This might be what healing feels like, when there isn’t a Sith Empire sitting on the galaxy’s collective back.)

--

Sokari loves Morai. She does, she really does.

She does not love Mortis.

She does not love talking about Mortis. She does not love remembering Mortis. She does not love thinking about Mortis.

Twice, she has died as a direct result of the dark side. Once, Anakin brought her back. Once, he—

Well, he didn’t.

When Sokari goes to sleep, after gaining scars for an injury that didn’t even take, she dreams.

There is a peculiarly awful element to losing oneself to the dark without even being the person responsible for it. It’s one thing to be selfish and greedy, or to be tortured into it, or to simply grieve so deeply that it twists what a person is to their core.

It is another, to be used as a channel for someone else’s dark and hate and anger.

She dreams, and those dreams are part memory, part not.

The sensation is what it was. There is a hate in her that isn’t hers. She is back on Mortis, saying cruel words in a voice she barely recognizes as her own, breaking her master down like the little asshole he is, mocking and sad*stic and loving it despite the part of her that screams this isn’t right. Her words hurt him, and he gets angry in return, and then he’s—

He’s Vader, standing in front of her in a building that isn’t quite Mortis and isn’t quite Malachor, armored and glaring through the crack in his helmet. He breathes, as Vader does, and then—

She is a vessel for his hate. She is a puppet for his rage. The Son is not here. There is only Vader, and an apprentice on strings, and they are not on Mortis or Malachor, but among the Rebellion she’s spent half her life building. She cuts down her armored brothers and she cuts down her fellow survivors and she cuts down people who only wanted to help save the galaxy.

She laughs as she kills. She laughs, and it hides a scream, and she wakes up with her heart in her throat and her sabers in her hands, glowing and spitting, and this. This is why she refuses to share a bed with Leia, even with space at a premium.

She puts her sabers away. She puts her face in her hands. She ignores Rex watching her silently and waiting to see if he needs to stop pretending he’s asleep.

She gets up and goes to punch her adrenaline away on the punching bag.

--

“What are you so mad about?”

For f*ck’s sake, girl.

Sokari looks up from the mouse droid she’s been trying to brute force a fix on, and meets Leia’s eyes. The tiny girl is unimpressed.

“Nightmare,” Sokari tells her, short and not very sweet. She goes back to the droid. “Bad one. I’m not good company.”

“What was it about?”

Sokari looks up again. She doesn’t bother to hide her irritation. “Are you going to tell me about your nightmares, Princess?”

Leia’s glare hardens, and she lifts her chin. “Alderaan. The Death Star. Bespin. Usually, it’s about Vader, but that’s been going on for years. Recently it’s been about Vader realizing I’m his daughter, and things going someplace awful from there, but last night was just a normal Vader dream.”

Sokari snorts. She manages to dig a piece of lint that is mostly comprised of hair out of the droid’s roller. That had been a major jam. It’s a good thing she’s gotten it out. “Well, we’ve got something in common, then, princess.”

“Vader nightmares?” Leia prompts.

“Yes,” Sokari says. She focuses on the mouse droid. “Among other topics, but yes. Vader. I don’t want to talk about it.”

“You should.”

“Not here. Not now. Not with you.”

Leia’s giving off waves of irritation now. Bully for her. “You never want to talk about it.”

“Because I don’t.”

“You still refer to him as your master!” Leia shouts, boiling over with all the suddenness of a real child. “You still talk about good things he did and how much you loved him! How?!”

Sokari drops the part. The mouse droid bleeps in fright.

“Princess—”

“How can you just—forgive him?” Leia demands. She may be on the edge of tears. “After everything he did, you still act like he’s just—just someone who made a few mistakes—”

“That is enough, Leia!”

The little princess takes a step back in shock. Sokari can’t te—can’t s—she can’t.

She can’t.

“The way he betrayed us all later does not make the happier moments of my childhood, even in the midst of war, disappear,” Sokari says. She fixes Leia with a harsh look. “You do not get to tell me how to feel about someone that featured so heavily in my life. I do not forgive him, but I mourn who he used to—I can’t talk about this.”

Leia sets her jaw mulishly. “You can.”

“I really can’t.”

“What, you think I’m not old enough to hear it?”

Sokari closes her eyes and takes in a measured breath. “Not everything, Princess, is about you.”

“He’s my biological father and the biggest figure of my nightmares,” Leia argues. “He made me watch Alderaan be destroyed. I should get to know why you—why you do this! Why you still love him!”

“Because he was my brother!” Sokari snaps. “Betrayal does not make a person stop loving!”

Leia struggles for words for a few moments. Perhaps her child’s mind is struggling to put together the words her adult self would know. Sokari doesn’t care.

The girl releases an inarticulate screech and storms out.

Sokari lets her head drop on the work table and stifles a scream of her own.

--

For a week, everything holds steady. It’s not great, but it’s fine.She trains, she laughs, she works through the nightmares. She and Leia are… well, Leia apologizes. Sokari forgives her. They try to be aunt and niece again, and are mostly, mostly, there.

Then f*cking Denonhappens.

[1] Not a brush for corduroy, which has bristles, but a brush with corduroy on it, for exfoliation. It mostly closely resembles a fabric lint brush.

[2] Being in an enclosed space that has a lot of air conditioning/recycling causing dryness results, unsurprisingly, in dry, cracked skin on the hands and other areas. For Star Wars, I’m calling it ship-flake.

Chapter 7: Bad Boy Bad Boy, Whatcha Gonna Do When He Comes for You

Chapter Text

Denon is a city-planet on the intersection of two major hyperlanes. It’s the kind of place where they stop for two things:

1. Fuel.
2. Paperwork.

Legally, there’s a whole mess of paperwork they have to fill out to continue along this specific hyperlane. They aren’t official Republic ships, and don’t have the licenses to just pass through with a quick check-in like ships that are pre-registered to the Trade Federation or the like. They couldsneak past—literally all of them know smuggler’s routes—but it’s honestly less of a pain to do things legally. They have a Jedi Master. They have cash. Some of that cash wasn’t quite legally acquired, but nobody needs to know that.

It’s supposed to be a pit stop. That’s all.

It’s just a pit stop.

But no, the galaxy isn’t that kind, and Sokari’s luck is currently being compounded with a Skywalker, two Fetts, and Vos, which means that they run into trouble.

There was never any other option, was there?

“Motherf*cker,”Sokari snaps, head snapping up and slamming her drink on the table.

The glass is empty. That’s good. They’re in a restaurant right now, a little splurging after weeks with only each others’ company, and spilling the sugary child-friendly juice with that move would have drawn way too much attention from the servers.

“Language,” Tholme says, voice idly unconcerned.

“Sir?” Rex asks, kicking Sokari under the table.“What’s wrong?”

“What’s wr—that jackass,”she hisses, getting to her feet.“Rex, grab a blaster, I’ve got shebs[1]to kick.”

“Okay,” Rex says, stealing a blaster out of Fett’s holster and scooting out of the booth before anyone can tell him not to.“Whose?”

“I didn’t even know that he was… osik,I don’t have jurisdiction,” she realizes.“I don’t have any record of wrongdoing. I can’t arrest him since we don’t have evidence of criminal activity…”

“Are you two going to explain what’s going on?” Vos asks.“Or sit down, maybe?”

Sokari makes her decision. She eyes the window—the restaurant in question is a little dingy, but it’s also several dozen stories in the air.“Rex, remember the thing we did on Geonosis that you hated?”

He pauses, and then sighs heavily.“Yes, sir. I remember the… yeeting.”

Hah. That slang doesn’t even existyet.

“Great. With me!”

It’s a good thing the windows are forcefields instead of transparisteel. A bit of a twistto the energy and they’re gone.

She only hears a littlescreaming before the wind tears all noises away while they plummet.

They land lightly—of course—and Sokari wraps them both in a don’t notice meaura. Nobody even registers that they’ve just come from above. It’s great that she can just do these things again, and have it brushed off as Weird Jedi sh*t instead of worrying about the Empire. She’s missed being able to jump out of windows without fear.

Rex follows her as she starts running through the city. Rex doesn’t have a comm, and he’s still so small,which means he can’t keep up with her, not even if she runs at normal speeds, without Force enhancement.

“Should you carry me?” he asks, before she can figure out if it’s worth suggesting. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time, these past few weeks.

“It’s not… urgent,I think,” she says. She hesitates to speak, even as she keeps jogging with Rex at her heels.“Honestly, I’m trying to figure out if there’s anything I can ding him for so we canattack him. It’s all well and good that I can beat him right now, but all the crimes I know about haven’t happenedyet, so it wouldn’t be legal…”

“Commander?”

“Hm?”

“I have no idea who you’re talking about.”

She scrolls the conversation back mentally, considers, and says,“Oh.”

“Who’s getting steamrolled?”

“Maul’s here,” Sokari admits.

“Ah,” Rex says. He makes a face.“I understand the desire to jump out a window, now. I don’t agree with it, but I understand.”

Sokari laughs. “I mean, I just… every time I’ve seen him for almost twenty years, it’s been… on sight, yeah? We’ve never not attacked each other, except when I needed him to cause problems on Mandalore. However, I always knew I was in the right, then.”

“So… what do we arrest him for?” Rex prompts.

“Um… carrying a lightsaber without a license?” she hazards.“We’ll need Tholme for that one. Hopefully I can just shout at him and he’ll attack me, but I think he only went full nutjob after Master Kenobi cut his legs off. He might be too controlled to try to kill me just for yelling at him.”

“…Soka, do we have to stalk him?” Rex asks, sounding like he’d most likely sigh if he weren’t mid-run.

She scoops him up and swings him around onto her back before she answers.“I think we have to stalk him, Rex’ika.” [2]

“Don’t call me that.”

--

Maul is… exceptionally sneaky, actually. Either that, or he hasn’t done anything wrong yet. Sokari’s betting on the former, because she’s seen this particular skocha kungtake over a planet before anyone realized he was the most dangerous person around. [3]

Or maybe he’s not committing crimes, and is in fact justhere to buy groceries.

He’s assessing a papaya.

She fantasizes about jumping across the market and greeting him with an armored heel to the cheekbone.

“Are you imagining a flying kick, Sir?”

“Yeah…”

“He’s examining a papaya, Sir.”

“I know…”

“Does he know we’re here?”

“I don’t know. Maybe? Do you think I should go hit him?”

“No, Sir.”

“Should I hit onhim?”

“No, Sir. I would not advise that.”

“He’s looking at the neloms.”

“I can see that, Sir.”

“Why does he have to be so bor—did he just f*cking bite a nelom?”

They both stare in fascination.

“It appears so, Sir.”

“Like… like rind and all. Just bit the little f*cker.”

“Seems it.”

A scuff of metal.“What the f*ckare you two doing?”

Sokari tips her head around to peer up through the grate.“We’re spying, Fett, what does it looklike we’re doing?”

Rex cranes his head.“We’re hanging upside-down from a fire escape to get a look at a suspected Sith Apprentice, who is currently shopping for various fruits, Mand’alor.”

Fett makes a face.

Sokari waves.“Hi, Master Tholme.”

“Sokari,” the master greets.“This seems a very conspicuous way to spy.”

She shrugs as well as she can from this angle.“Yes, but you see: this way’s more fun.”

“Is it now?”

Rex shifts. “He’s on the move!”

“To kill someone?!”

“No, to the deli meats.”

“Kriff.”

--

Apparently, Tholme and Fett had told Quinlan to take care of Leia, as Leia had wanted to finish her juice and refused to get involved in the Torrents’ nonsense. According to her, if they couldn’t be bothered to explain said nonsense, they didn’t need her.

This was true and accurate.

They are still stalking Maul when Quinlan shows up. The four have moved to a low rooftop for a decent vantage point with less likelihood of being spotted. The padawan is giving Leia an eopie-back ride, and the pout on her face at needing it is adorable. She scowls harder when she sees them.

“Are you even trying to hide?” Leia scoffs.

“Not really,” Sokari admits. She’s got Fett’s binoculars out.“I’m not sure he’s caught wind of the fact that we’re here yet.”

“Or he has, and he’s just biding his time to escape while we’re distracted,” Tholme points out.

“Meh,” Sokari says, avidly devouring the visual that is a teenage Maul glaring at leafy vegetables.“I just want him to dosomething so I have an excuse to beat his ass.”

“Do I get to know who?”Quinlan asks, setting Leia down on the roof.“Or are we going to keep being completely unwilling to share information?”

“Baby Sith Lord,” Sokari says.“He’s fifteen. A child.”

“A baby,” Rex agrees.

“You’re… that’s… ugh,”Quinlan groans as loudly and as dramatically as he dares, flopping down to the rooftop.“Master Tholme, please tell me this isn’t a real Sith.”

“He’s Dark,” Tholme confirms.“Sith is… up for debate until we have evidence.”

“He’s a bitchis what he is,” Sokari mutters. She observes the teenager in question stop to poke at some pink tomatoes.“E chu ta, break the law, already!” [4]

“Does he have a lightsaber?” Quinlan asks.“If he has a lightsaber, and no Jedi ID or specialty license, we can probably arrest him.”

“Auntie Soka doesn’t have a license or ID,” Leia points out.

“She’s got a Jedi escort,” Tholme says.“And if our supposed Sith is polite and plays nice, we can probably escort himto the Temple as well.”

Rex snorts derisively.

“Do you know whyhe’s on Denon?” Fett asks.

“No clue,” Sokari admits.“Evil reasons, probably.”

“You’re useless,” Leia tells her.

“Thanks, princess, how’s that attempt to open the jam jar by yourself coming?”

Leia says something very inappropriate for a princess, for a child, and for a lady. It’s fairly appropriate for a soldier, which is admittedly what she’s been for a few years now. Sokari sticks her tongue out at the little girl like the mature operative she is.

“I wish we could still get him to lose his sh*tby just showing up and insulting him,” Rex mutters, low enough that Quinlan probablycan’t hear.

“I would love to punch him in the face,” Sokari confesses.“I want him to try to punch mein the face, and fail.”

“Don’t bully the baby Sith,” Rex admonishes.

“He’s a Sith.”

“He’s fifteen, it’s tacky.”

“But it’s Maul.”

“I know, but you’realmost twe—ha, significantlyolder than him.”

“But… but it’s the motherf*cker himself.”

“…you can bully him a little,but only because he’s a Sith.”

Fett steals the binoculars, bonking Sokari in the montrals with it as he tugs it away.“You can borrow them again when you stop acting like children.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” Rex says, dry as Ryloth.“I’m twelve.”

“Pretty tall for your age,” Sokari mutters, and then giggles.

“Don’t steal my jokes,” Rex says. He elbows her, hard. He slips it past her arm and behind the leather breastplate.

“You know,” Quinlan says, slow and tired.“Master Tholme and I aretrained investigators.”

Sokari and Rex look at each other, and then up at him.

“Okay?”

“…do you want me to find actualevidence of this guy doing something criminal?”

“Oh,” Sokari says. That certainly would make more sense. “…yes, please.”

--

Quinlan, as it turns out, is not overselling his skills. He doescatch Maul doing something illegal later that day. It’s a little more‘stealing corporate secrets in the dead of night’ and less‘torturing people for kicks,’ but it’s still enough to legally arrest him. Quinlan attempts to do so.

Quinlan does not succeed. He is, in fact, forced to jump out a window to avoid getting cut in half. Maul follows, steals a passing speeder by throwing out the driver, and takes off. Someone—looks like Tholme—drops back to save the driver, but the rest of them give chase. Sokari gleefullytakes point on that, of course. She’s the best pilot by far.

(Rex looks bored, but the others… someone is likely to puke by the end of the night. She hopes it’s not Leia, who insisted on coming for some blasted reason.)

“How the kriffis a teenager that good?!” Quinlan yells, clinging to the edge of the speeder to avoid getting tipped out as Sokari swerves around a corner with a wild laugh.

“He’s a Sith!” Leia shouts over the wind.“What do you think?”

Quinlan is not impressed by their continued claim that this teenage boy is an evil monster from his childhood fairy tales.

Sokari screeches as she drifts across four lanes of traffic and into an alleyway to pursue Maul. This is met with swearing, on account of Togruta screeches being a pain to basically everyone with eardrums.

(The joke, Sokari is normally happy to explain, is that Togruta do not have eardrums.)

Maul is decently good at dodging cross-building walkways in a stolen speeder. Sokari’s better. It gives her the slightest edge in gaining on him. She bares her teeth, hissing, and tries to pick a plan.

“Vos, how’s your aim with Force throws?” she calls to the backseat.

“Uh, decent?”

“Great! Fett’s the projectile!”

Vos takes a second longer to process that than Jango does.

“I’m wh—”

Fett cuts off, screaming in a way that is probably manly under the vocoder, as he is flung forward by Quinlan to crash headfirst into a scrawny Sith.

“Take the wheel!” Sokari commands, not waiting to see who follows the order, because Fett and Maul are both getting to their feet, and the other speeder is about to crash. She’s not sure who’s going to win that fight, and so she cannot hesitate.

She jumps from the speeder they’ve been violently maneuvering around Denon, and lands feet-first on Maul’s… shoulder.

Hm.

That definitelydislocated something.

“You should wear armor!” she chirps at him, drawing both sabers and grinning as he whirls to face her, eyes wide with hate.

Maul is utterly silent.

That’s disturbing. Expected, but disturbing. His tattoos are the same, at least. It helps her stay in the mindset that this is, in fact, a Baby Sith.

“Did you justthrow me?”Fett demands, higher pitched than she’d normally expect.

“No, Vos threw you.”

“Because you told him to!”

“Yeah, it’s a good strategy!”

“It is not!”

“Why not? Throwing people was standard practice in the GAR.”

She can’t see his face, but she’s pretty sure he’s about ready to strangle her.

Sokari cannot, at that point, continuesnarking with the sort-of-father of her best friend, because there’s a red lightsaber coming for her throat, and she should probably worry about that. Maul’s very good at killing people, and she’d like to avoid becoming part of that statistic.

As she is quickly reminded, he is… fifteen. And shorter than she’s used to. And already injured.

It’s really, really easy to take him out, actually.

At some point, the other speeder was safely recovered before it caused property damage. She probably should have noticed earlier. Their own lands a few meters away with Vos and the kids.

“You have Force-negating cuffs, right?” Sokari asks.

“No, Master Tholme has them.”

“Oh,” she says, and grimaces.“I guess I’ll just… keep sitting on him then.”

Maul snarls, and she raps him on the skull.“Stop that, it’s uncivilized.”

Rex snorts.

Jango makes a noise that is incredibly frustrated with the lot of them, and turns on Rex.“Was she telling the truth?”

“About?”

“Throwing people being standard practice for the GAR.”

Rex’s expression goes pained.“It was in the five-oh-first. And a few others.”

“What’s the GAR?” Quinlan asks.

“None of your damn business,” Fett snaps.

Quinlan throws his hands up in the air again.“Come on! I just proved I know what I’m doing!”

“And their tragic backstory is none of your business, prudii!”

Quinlan blinks at him, and then glances at Sokari.“Um.”

“He called you a shadow since your training, um, seems to be pointing in that direction,” she says as carefully as she can.“We were theorizing.”

“Wh… you actually paid attention?” Quinlan asks, looking horribly confused.“I thought I was just annoying you.”

Sokari laughs at him.“Oh, Vos… I’ve been running black ops for… much longer than most would guess. Trust me, I know another spy when I see them.”

She smiles as kindly as she can, because she hadn’t actually meantto make him feel left out or unwanted or… well, she’d been pretty patronizing, especially for someone seemingly younger than him. The smile does not work. Quinlan just looks kind of a little sick about how young she just implied she started spy work.

Granted, she’d been sixteen for Zygerria…

Hadn’t the incident with Morai settled the air about all these things, though? She can’t remember how much she told him, and how much had been reserved for Fett or Leia.

Deciding to ignore him for a bit, she shifts on Maul’s back and pats him on the cheek.“Don’t worry, Baby Sith. We’re going to get you lots of nice therapy. Mind healers, no Sith tortures, all that fun stuff. Maybe some plushies.”

“You’re also getting therapy, right?” Quinlan asks. “Please say you are. I’m required for the specifics of my training, and if anything you’ve said is true, I feel like you really need it, I’m scared of what’ll happen if you don’t.”

Sokari laughs, knowing exactly how empty it sounds.“Oh hell, if I didn’tget therapy, I imagine Kix would rise from the grave to force me into it.”

The name means nothing to anyone except Rex, and… ah, yeah, she told Fett about Kix a few weeks ago. She can’t see his face, but he sure is radiating something.

“No more throwing me without warning,” Fett grumbles, dropping to sit on the ground next to her.“Especially not at baby Sith Lords.”

“I am nota child!” Maul spits.

“He speaks!” Sokari cheers.It’s maybe more of a coo. She taps at his cheek in a way that is almost fond. “Aw, I knew you could do it.”

“Soka, I told you not to bully him,” Rex complains.“It’s tacky. You’re being tacky.”

“I’m allowed to be tacky,” Sokari declares.“I’ve died twice;that’s essentially permission from the universe.”

“You’ve died twice?”Quinlan asks, back in‘fascinated horror’ territory.“Wait, no, I shouldn’t ask—”

“Too late! The first time was on a planet that doesn’t exist and my Master lost his mind, killed a god, and used the good favor of another god to have me brought back to life at her expense. Not in that order. You have met the results of that incident.”

“I—what? No, that’s—what?”

Sokari smiles brightly.“You asked.”

She doesn’t explain her second death.

(Tholme finally shows up with the cuffs.)

--

“I don’t like having him in here.”

Sokari looks up from where she’s doing her second examination of the exterior hinges on the door to Maul’s cell. “I mean, we don’t really have anywhere else to put him. Honestly, I’m counting myself lucky that you have a brig at all.” [5]

Fett makes a face. “One that’s filled mostly with cargo.”

She shrugs. “We got the boxes out of this cell. You’ll probably get paid as if he were a regular bounty. Don’t see a huge issue.”

“The rearrangement of brig cargo is not the problem I have here,” Fett mutters.

Sokari tightens a screw. Maul glares at them from inside the sh*tty little room he’s been confined to. She can’t be assed to care.

“Then what is?”

“Having a hels-damned dar’jetii on my ship,” Fett snaps. [6]

Well, that’s not exactly something she can change.

Sokari snorts. “I’d love to know what your other options were. Letting him go wasn’t one, for the record. Not if we want to get a head start on preventing future atrocities.”

She can practically feel him biting back the comment that other people’s atrocities are not his problem. Rex is living proof that they are, after all. She doesn’t feel particularly conflicted about using his guilt about his future crimes against him.

“I don’t have a lot left of my buir,” Fett grumbles. “I’d like to keep what I do have intact.”

Sokari pauses in her assessment of the door’s keypad, considering.

If she’d had anything of Anakin or Obi-Wan’s, anything of Plo’s or Master Ti’s…

“I get that,” she says.

“Do you?”

She looks at him askance. “Intimately.”

He makes a face, but doesn’t press. He’s well aware by now that if he does, she will give him enough details that he will be uncomfortable, and that it’ll most likely be at least a little bit his fault.

“I still don’t want him here.”

“Too kriffing bad,” Sokari mutters. “He’s our best chance at sniffing out evidence of the current Sith. If Sidious’s master is still alive, then direction is crucial.”

“I’m aware,” Fett grits out.

She doesn’t know what to tell him.

“We’ll compensate you for the risk,” she reiterates.

“I know, Torrent.”

What else can she say? She’s not going to apologize for wanting to keep freakin’ Maul Opress under supervision, and it’s not like she had anywhere to put him other than Fett’s ship. Maybe a subject shift, then. “He’s young enough that we can probably lead him back to the light.”

“We?” Fett challenges.

“As in the Jedi, not as in you and me,” she clarifies. “Unless you want a really weird apprentice to bounty hunting?”

“I’ll pass.”

He doesn’t leave. He doesn’t help, either, just… hovers.

For at least fifteen minutes.

“Can I help you?” she finally asks.

“I’m just thinking,” he tells her.

“Don’t hurt yourself,” she mutters. The wiring is a bit iffy, in the next section, and she starts hooking in a diagnostic tool.

“Ha ha,” Fett says, dry as Geonosis. “If I ask you a question, can you give me a direct answer? Or just tell me to f*ck off, I guess, but politely.”

She’s polite. Usually. “You can ask, but I promise nothing.”

“Has anyone ever been brought back from the Dark like you said?”

She stills.

Revan, technically, but there was mind-wiping involved in that, if she remembers her histories. Depa and Quinlan, sort of, but they’d only Fallen for a very short while.

“There was a woman, in the clone wars, from the same planet as Maul,” she finally says. “I heard… rumors. She’d been a Sith acolyte, apprentice to an apprentice, for most of the war, and then she just… vanished. Someone said she’d returned to the light, or at least broken with the dark…”

“Unsubstantiated,” Fett says.

“I was gone by then,” she tells him. “I didn’t exactly have my finger on the pulse of these things.”

He nods, looking past her, and then asks, “are you going to try to bring this one to the light to prove something to yourself?”

“Why would I do that?” she asks.

“I’m not stupid, Torrent—” She bites back a retort. “—and neither are you. Do me a favor and don’t act it.”

“Don’t know what you’re talking about,” she manages, strained.

Fett makes a noise, shifts, and turns to leave. “Fine. Think on it, though.”

She won’t.

--

“You think you can save me, Jedi?”

No. “Save is a strong word,” she says instead. She keeps it as airy as she can.

“I heard your conversation with the Mandalorian,” he says. His voice is oddly even, but not yet as smooth as she remembers him. “What is it that you’re looking to find in undoing the monster of your nightmares?”

She snorts. “Not my nightmares, thanks. Somebody’s. Not mine.”

“Not me,” Maul says. “The Sith as a whole.”

Somewhat more accurate.

“I’ve been touched by the dark before,” she says, because it’s true, in a vacuum. It’s not true as an answer to his question. “I know how awful it feels, to be mired in it with no sense of escape. I don’t want anyone to go through that, and you’re young enough that I can even tell myself you haven’t had enough control over your own life to make that choice knowingly and willingly. If I have you in my custody, then don’t I have a moral and ethical obligation to try and help you come to a happier place?”

“Touched by the dark,” Maul parrots back, mocking as he can. “Just a touch?”

“Temporary infection, let’s say,” she offers. His brow wrinkles. “Oh, come on, you know there are artifacts that can force a Fall on even the steadiest of Jedi.”

The Son wasn’t exactly an artifact… but he was as old as one. That could count.

“How did you return to your precious light after that?” Maul asks, disbelief obvious. “None who truly Fall are salvageable, and those forced to it by the weapons of the Sith war… I’ve heard suggestions that they can return, but not easily.”

“I had help,” she says. She doesn’t clarify just what echelon of help was needed to bring her back from the brink. “And I died, a little. Not long. A few minutes. Great reset button for the moral center, you know.”

What is she even saying?

“Anyway,” she distracts, “my case was weird for many, many reasons. You… well, I knew a girl with some similar stuff going on, once. She was in the Dark for… ten years? And then she clawed her way out, and… kinda just f*cked off to do her own thing instead of joining the Jedi or the Sith.”

“A friend?” Maul asks, his voice practically a coo.

“Uh, no, not really. She tried to kill me…” Sokari tries to count. She really does. “Okay, let’s go with ‘at least a dozen times over the course of two and a half years,’ but that’s because we were involved in opposite sides of a war, and she kept getting pointed at my Master like a laser-guided Sith-lite missile.”

“Sith lite?”

“You know. Not quite officially a Sith. Apprentice to an apprentice, since the Banites are all…” she gestures vaguely. “Like that.”

Maul glares at her.

“What, no comment?”

He keeps glaring.

“Is this because I indirectly called you Sith-lite for being apprentice to an apprentice?”

He glares harder.

“Right, okay. Silent treatment it is.”

She might as well get some meditation done, if he’s not going to talk to her.

It’s only hours later that he speaks again, and she gets the feeling that he’s being guided by the darkest dredges of the Force, when he does.

“Whoever it is that betrayed you, Jedi, they are lost to you. They will never return to your light. They will never again love. You cannot save them. You are not enough to save them, and you never will be.”

[1] shebs – ass

[2] Rex’ika – Little Rex

[3] Skocha kung – burnout scum (Huttese)

[4] E chu ta – generic, very insulting Huttese interjection, often used as an insult

[5] Jaster’s Legacy has specs on Wookiepedia that include ‘six prisoners’ in the passengers listing. I’m taking that to mean there are six individual cells in the ship, but that Jango is currently filling it up mostly with boxes of rations or other cargo, as he does freight work to build up enough money to buy some better weapons and start on his reputation as a bounty hunter and otherwise dangerous warrior.

[6] While the literal meaning of dar’jetii is ‘former Jedi’ or ‘one who is no longer a Jedi’, the term actually means Sith or other darksiders, and is used regardless of whether they were once Jedi.

Chapter 8: Shatter Me

Chapter Text

Sokari’s Sith-watching shift ends.

Quinlan comes to trade off.

She goes and gets something to eat.

She does some forms in the main hold, and works with one of the punching bags for a bit. She doesn’t dwell on Maul’s words, except for when she does.

She cleans up. She goes to the galley for another snack.

Quinlan finds her.

“So, baby Sith just… clammed up, huh?”

Apparently, his shift is over, too.

“He doesn’t like being called ‘Sith-lite’ because he’s not an official apprentice,” she offers. “Not even indirectly.”

Quinlan tilts his head. “What makes him not official?”

“Apprentice to an apprentice, Banite rules, that whole… shebang.” She gestures vaguely. “I was talking about that other Sith acolyte that I’ve… probably mentioned?”

“You did,” Quinlan confirms. “So, you called her less than Sith, explained why, and even though he never told us he was apprentice to an apprentice…”

“He took offense, yes,” Sokari says. She sips at her tea, which has by now cooled enough to be mildly underwhelming, at best. “Did he say anything to you?”

“Some bantha kark about how playing at being a Shadow would only lead me into the Dark,” Quinlan says. He shrugs. “Same thing I’ve been hearing for years from teachers trying to warn me about how difficult the job is, basically, just a lot less polite.”

“Didn’t aim for your deepest and darkest fears, then.”

“Well, no,” Quinlan says, a little slow. “Was that a concern?”

She shrugs and looks away again. “He did for me.”

“Aimed… and hit?” Quinlan asks.

Sokari keeps her eyes fixed on the wall. “Not quite a bullseye, but… very close, yes.”

Because she wasn’t enough to bring him back.

(And when he first Fell, she wasn’t even there to stop it.)

Then you will die.

She shudders and tries to drag herself out of her thoughts.

“Do you need, like… a distraction?” Quinlan asks.

She turns to look at him. Her mind is all afuzz, and something about the question pings… oddly.

“What?” she asks.

“Just… something to get your mind off of it. Sabacc? Sparring? A holoshow, if Fett has a connection to the net?”

“I don’t think he does,” she says, feeling a touch too blank to really respond in a way that would be… sensible.

Oh.

She’s dissociating again.

It would be nice if she could stop doing that, but right now, she doesn’t quite care. She can’t care. It’s beyond her.

“Spar?”

“Just finished.”

“Cards?”

Maybe.

She imagines holding cards, and trying to do the math or the pairings or any of the thinking that a game would require.

It’s. It sounds like a lot of effort. She doesn’t want to.

“No,” she decides.

Quinlan casts about, visibly comes to an idea, and winces. “We could… fool around?”

She blinks at him.

He’s not talking about shenanigans.

He means— “No.”

“Right,” he says, flushed and uncomfortable. “You already—”

“I don’t want to have sex with you.”

“Yep, got it, that’s—”

“Or anyone,” she continues. “I think I’m wired tight enough that I might lose sense of where I am and accidentally try to kill my partner if I forgot when I was.”

Quinlan pales, inasmuch as a man of his skintone can. “Oh. Goodie.”

“So even if I wanted to—”

“I got it,” he cuts her off. “I do not want my throat accidentally slit while going down on someone. I’m not that desperate.”

She tilts her head. “I didn’t say you were?”

Quinlan stares at her. He stares a bit more.

Soka may have forgotten to blink.

“Okay,” Quinlan says. “So, you and I are going to find Rex, because you seem to know and trust him better than basically anyone alive, and then you are going to… take a nap, or something.”

“I don’t want to stand up,” she tells him. It seems prudent to be as honest and blunt and literal as possible right now. She needs… sleep.

“Right,” Quinlan says. He sits down across from her again. When did he stand? Was he even sitting, before? “Okay. I’ll comm Master Tholme, and he’ll find Rex, and I’ll wait here with you.”

This seems reasonable. She shrugs.

Quinlan gets up again, and starts digging around in the cupboards. He puts the kettle on.

Rex arrives before it boils, Tholme ghosting along behind him.

“Commander,” he greets, though she hasn’t been one for decades, and in some ways now never has been. “Heard you were worried about a violent stress response?”

“I don’t feel like a person right now.”

Rex’s attempt at almost joking disappears. He leans in closer to her, brow furrowing, and asks, “how bad?”

All the bad.

“Empty,” she says. “Hollow.”

“Soka—”

“Worse than Tribunal.”

His worry wipes away. He is showing as little emotion as she feels.

“Bad, then.”

There’s a tingle on her skin, skittering across the outside of her thighs, the backs of her arms, the rear curve of her montrals. Rex takes her hands, and she realizes they are shaking.

She stares at him. She doesn’t know what… or how… or…

“Let’s go to bed,” he murmurs, tugging her out of the booth and towards the crew quarters they’ve commandeered with Leia. “Sleep will help.”

Probably.

It probably will.

Quinlan gives her a mug of hot chocolate on their way out. There’s a lid, just in case.

She cannot muster the energy to thank him.

--

Sokari wakes to a foul taste in her mouth and an ache that roots itself in the base of her montrals. There is a warm body, smaller than her own, pressed along her front. She’s a big spoon, then.

Rex shifts. She presses her forehead into the back of his skull and does not whimper.

“Feeling better?”

“Feel like sh*t.”

“But more like a person?”

Well. Yeah.

“I need to punch Maul.”

“Well, he’s fifteen and in the brig, so that would be child abuse and prisoner abuse,” Rex notes, “so maybe, just maybe, let’s not do that.”

She snickers, and he pulls away so he can roll over and face her.

He looks very serious. Hesitant, too.

“Do you need to talk about it?” he asks.

Yes. Soon.

“I can’t do it here,” she says. “I’m. It’s not. I can’t.”

“Tholme is healer-trained, isn’t he?” Rex asks. “He could manage you.”

The thought has crossed her mind more than once, yes.

Tholme, however, isn’t going to be at the Temple consistently. Tholme isn’t going to be her permanent mind healer. Tholme is going to be one more person that knows about the future, and she doesn’t want that information spreading farther than the council agrees to.

Fett was already a stretch.

“I can make it to the Temple,” she says instead. “I can make it that long.”

“Soka—”

“Rex. Please.”

He doesn’t look pleased about this, but he doesn’t press. He climbs out of bed and pulls her with him. Soka distantly notes Leia is asleep in the other bed.

“You need food,” Rex tells her.

She does.

They meander to the galley. Quinlan’s there. She waves limply.

“You look… better,” he offers.

“I look like sh*t,” she says flatly. She needs meat. There’s a haunch of something in the freezer. She knows because she put it there. She can flash reheat it. It’ll taste weird, but she’ll be able to eat it, at least.

“Yesterday was rough,” Quinlan says.

“Oh, you’re telling me,” she mutters, digging through the freezer. “Kriffing Maul and his fripping comments.”

“You really hate him, huh?”

“Hate? No. Me and him got problems, though.”

Quinlan makes a noise, and she shoots him a look as she finally digs the haunch out.

“Nothing,” he says, before she can ask. “The way you talk just shifts around more than I expect, sometimes. You go from pretty formal to slang-heavy, and I can’t really figure out how you choose when.”

Sokari shrugs. “My mood. Whether or not I’m trying to turn it into a joke. Company. Lots of reasons.”

“I guess,” he says, oddly doubtful.

It ticks at her. Pricks. Just outright bothers.

She closes the door to the flash-heater with a tad more force than necessary.

“What did I say?” Quinlan asks, and she whirls on him.

“Can you please stop trying to psychoanalyze me?” she asks. It comes out as more of a demand, angry and bitter, than an actual request. She can’t bring herself to care.

“I’m not—what?” Quinlan manages. He sounds genuinely baffled. It somehow only makes her angrier. “Psychoana—no! I’m just—jeez, Torrent, I’m just trying to get to know you. Make friends.”

Rex’s hand is at her elbow before she can bite out a response on instinct. She closes her eyes, and breathes in and out and does not think of how the Dark would love to have her.

It took her once, on Mortis, and never again. She will not let it.

No matter how scattered and shattered her mind might want to be right now.

“I need to go meditate,” she says, pulling her meal from the heater. “I’ll… see you around, Vos.”

If he responds, she doesn’t hear it. She’s already gone.

--

She has another fight with Leia about the Vader situation.

Things are. Not great.

--

“You should eat something.”

Maul glares at her.

“Baby Sith Lords need to eat.”

He keeps glaring at her.

“Maul, you’ll never get big and strong and ready to kill if you don’t eat your vegetables.”

He bares his teeth. The door opens behind her, but she ignores it.

“No, I don’t eat my veggies, but I’m a Togruta, so if I eat too many vegetables I throw up.”

Rex kicks her thigh, right on the faulds.“What did I say about bullying the Sith Lord?”

“Not to.”

“And what are you doing?”

Sokari grins. “Making him eat his vegetables.”

“Soka.”

“Rex’ika.”

He kicks at her again.“Get up, we’re swapping out the watch.”

“But I wanted to hang out with my favorite little criminal mastermind.”

Rex drops to the floor and presses his forehead to her shoulder.“How the hell is being around this guythe first thing to make you properly cheer up in weeks?”

She considers this. She’s had less-terrible days, recently, but he’s right. She’s actually almost having fun, here. “I’m allowed to be mean to him.”

“He’s going to bite you.”

“I’ll bite back.”

Rex jabs a finger into her ribs, and she squeaks.“Go get something to eat, Fulcrum.”

Ooh, official names. Fun.

“Fine,” she huffs, rolling to her feet and moseying along to the galley. She walks in on Tholme and Fett having an argument about the ways in which Jedi and Mandalorians differ. Quinlan’s on the side, watching with wide eyes, and little Leia’s drinking a juice box at his side. She’s tucked up under his arm, and occasionally saying things to fan the flames. Sokari assumes she’s enjoying herself.

She opens the cooling unit, looks over the contents, and pulls out a raw leg of eopie mutton. She leans against the counter, bites into the chilled-but-not-frozen meat, and uses the back of one hand to wipe the blood off her chin. The‘real adults’ don’t notice.

“I’m like ninety percent sure you’re doing this to mess with me but also…” Quinlan trails off, staring at her with horror.“Why?”

“A girl’s gotta eat.”

“Yeah, but all the obligate carnivores I know are like… generally holding to basic rules of courtesy when it comes to not grossing people out,” Quinlan says.“Like, I don’t chew with my mouth open. You don’t… eat in the most intimidating—did you just crack the bone with your teeth?!”

Sokari smirks at him, using her free hand to take away the shard of bone so she can suck out the marrow without eating the bones themselves.“I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but this isn’t polite society. We’re in a galley on a bounty hunter’s ship, and I’ve been living on the run or in an army for most of my life. Table manners are optional.”

“No, they’re not,” Leia orders, little voice huffy.“Fett, it’s your ship, tell her to—”

“—and another thing!”Fett snaps at Tholme, clearly paying less than no attention to the food argument.

Sokari keeps on eating, trying to catch wind of where the discussion’s at. Mostly, it seems to be at‘talking past each other.’ Neither of them seems to have fully grasped more than the absolute most basicparts of the other culture, and that’s only enough to insult each other, not actually have a constructive conversation.

She’d have expected more out of Tholme, at least. He’s not exactly young.

“Hey, quick question,” she says, in a moment where both of them have paused for breath and the opportunity to seethe.“Fett, when’s the last time you worked witha Jedi, or any member of a Force-based religion, before I popped into your life?”

His nose scrunches. What a face.

“And Tholme, when’s the last time youworked with anyone from the Mandalorian system?”

Tholme’s reaction isn’t any more gracious than Fett’s.

“Yeah, that’s what I thought,” she says.“Vos, were either of them actually interestedin that conversation, or just looking for an excuse to yell?”

“Now listen here, jet’ika—”

“Fett,”she snaps.“I am nota child.”

“And neither am I,” he growls right back.“This is my ship, and I damn well do not need you treating me like a misbehaving youngling. You’ve got a problem, you bring it to my face, not get all smug about people’s tempers blowing over.”

Well, then.

She smiles thinly.“Of course.”

He stands with his arms crossed, in full armor save for the helmet. She puts aside the eopie meat and wipes her hands, smiling ever-pleasantly, until she can put her hands on her hips.

The smile drops in challenge.

“You know, I’m just—I’m just gonna go,” Quinlan mutters, pulling Leia out with him, the girl hanging from under one of his arms.“This, uh, this looks like a problem for… you folks. Um. Yeah.”

He sidles out.

Tholme doesn’t.

Fett rubs at the bridge of his nose, and then gestures at the table.“Sit.”

“I’d prefer not to.”

He drops his hand and glares at her.“We have another week on this ship together. We aregoing to have this conversation. Sit.”

She sits. She right on the warm spot left behind by Quinlan and Leia. She crosses her arms, lifts a brow, and waits.

Fett takes the seat across from her. Tholme leans against the counter.

“We all know you’re older than you look,” Fett says. He is keeping his voice deadly even.“I heard Tholme mention it, so I know that much has been shared. You’re acting like an actual teenager,and I’ve… I’ve put up with a lot. I am tryingto keep things civil, particularly with you. I’ve tried to be friendly, even.You’ve been f*cked up since we met, fine; everyone’s got trauma.”

“But this? The thing where you’ve started talking sh*t to our faces for what seems like your own amusem*nt? That has to stop. You’re older than me, Torrent. f*cking act like it.”

She blinks at him, slow and not exactly happy, and turns to Tholme.

The man shrugs.“I was planning to put up with it until we arrived to the Temple and handed you over to some mind healers. Fett doesn’t have that kind of time.”

There’s a curdle in her stomach, defensive and angry and guilty.

“You’ve been… a bitch,” Fett finally says.“You know that. I’m not going to mince words. Sure, some of it can be explained away with things like the Barolian moon incident, but you came out of that less messed up than the rest of us. You’ve been holier-than-thou and rude and condescending; aiming that at Antilles is one thing, when you’ve apparently known her since she was a toddler and taught her things. Aiming that at the rest of us isn’t going to fly. We’re all adults trying to share a space. Stop acting like… just like you have been.”

There is no defense to be made that they aren’t both already aware of.

She closes her eyes and tries to strangle the burst of irrational rage.

Their accusations aren’t unfounded.

They deserve an apology.

She is in the wrong.

Here on Jaster’s Legacy, she’s felt freer than she had in years. In that freedom, she’s allowed herself too much rein, let herself lace her words with barbed wires and poison instead of sparks and spices, comments that were cruel instead of just joking.

Too familiar. Too comfortable.

She shivers, shudders, and stills.

She was an asshole. An apology is warranted.

“My behavior’s been inappropriate,” she finally says, the words clumsy and too big in her mouth. Her anger is twisting in and down.“You’re right about that. I’m sorry, and I’ll endeavor to keep a tighter rein on my less pleasant behaviors in the future.”

At least she’s only lashed out with words. It could be worse.

She opens her eyes, fixes her gaze on the wall behind Fett, wrestles her expression into stiff neutrality.No anger, no spite, no bitterness. Empty. Blank. “Am I dismissed?”

“…uh, no, not after that,” Fett says, sounding just a little horrified.“What the hellwas that?”

Tholme hisses out a breath. He’s noticed.“Let her go.”

“No, this needs to be discussed, that’s not a healthy rea—”

“Fett, let her go,” Tholme insists, low and heavy.

Fett looks between the two for a moment, seems to come to a realization he doesn’t like, and then gestures almost violently towards the door.“Fine. Go.”

She walks out, doesn’t sprint. She’s stiff. She’s controlled. She’s the one that f*cked up, so it’s fine if she doesn’t feel great right now. Getting called out on one’s own failings as a person isn’t something to get upset about, if the failings are real. Her feelings are real and understandable, but this was her fault, and so it’s up to her to fix it, and she can’t let them know it hurt her, because this was hermistake. Letting them see how much it bothers her would just be manipulative.

She goes to the cargo hold.

--

Sokari works out her frustrations on Fett’s punching bag. She does not augment herself with the Force, just uses raw strength and technique, ignoring the tears that press at her eyes.

She’s fine.

It’s not weird. It’s not odd. It’s not strangeto not notice she’s been kind of a bitch since her mood came up with the whole Depa thing, and then Maul. She’s been mean, mostly to Vos and Fett, and nobody’s confronted her about it until now. They let her have room for her trauma, and she hadn’t reined it in. She’s just gotten worse.

‘Snippy’ she’d always been, but age apparently hadn’t f*cking tempered it.

“Um.”

Sokari catches the punching bag, breathing heavily and covered in sweat. She hasn’t driven out all the twitchy, nervous energy yet. She presses her forehead to the punching bag.

“Vos,” she greets, once she’s caught herself enough that her voice won’t waver. He’s on the other side of the bag, but she knows his voice. “Do you need something?”

“You’re kind of… projecting,” he tells her, drifting to where she can actually see him.“Not self-loathing, but, um, recrimination? You just don’t feel very good and I was hoping to help.”

Why in all the Sith hells does he have to be nice?

“I got called out on my behavior and wasn’t ready to face the fact that I’d kriffed up,” she tells him. Her voice somehow manages to stay mostly even.She stands up straight, and staggers away from the punching bag. “I’ll be fine. And I’m… sorry. I haven’t been fair to you, and was using you as an easy target for some of my ruder comments. Overreacting, too.”

“I mean, I kind of figured,” he admits, coming closer.“I’ve been tutored by Shadows before, and a lot of them act like you. I just assumed it was more of that.”

“I still shouldn’t have let myself run loose like that,” she says. At least he doesn’t seem to have taken it personally.“I’m… it wasn’t appropriate. I shouldn’t have let it happen.”

He shrugs, not meeting her eyes.She appreciates it. “Do you want to talk about it?”

“No,” she says.“Not with… not with you. Or anyone other than Rex and a mind healer, really. Most of it is…”

She trails off, distantly noticing that her eyes are tearing up enough to blur her vision, and her nails are digging into the bag in a way Fett won’t appreciate.

There’s so muchthat beat her down, never quite breaking her, that she doesn’t even know which or what of it made her act the way she does.

“Want to spar?”

She looks over at him, wonders what he sees that makes him want to fight herwhen she’s visibly unstable.

He smiles, kind and easy, and it doesn’t quitereach his eyes. It’s genuine in intent, if not in energy. He wants to help.“You all keep saying I could work on my hand-to-hand. Just take off the armor so I don’t break a finger, maybe.”

“You’re serious.”

“No, I’m Quinlan.”

She’s going to wipe the floor with this boy. She manages to crack a grin.“You sure you wanna fight me?”

“You won’t be able to meditate until you do,” he says. He’s right, damn him.“The other option is that I go get your… vod, I think? I go get Rex and you two can talk it out since you trust him with more. I don’t want to do that, though, he’s still a kid.”

She eyes him, lips pressed together and mind still awhirl with emotions and thoughts she’d tried to beat out of her head and into the bag. “Ever fought someone without the Force?”

“…yes?”

“Was it cuffs?”

“Oh, you meant menot having the Force,” he realizes.“Er, no. Is… is that something you’ve done a lot?”

She smiles at him.“You’re planning on Shadow work. That means getting captured and stripped of everything you are at some point, Force included. Unfortunately, the cuffs are in use on a very annoying Dathomiri Zabrak right now, so we’ll have to make do. Time for shielding like your mind’s a Kessel Spice Mine.”

“…do I want to know how often you’ve been captured?”

“No,” she laughs, unpleasant as the noise is, utterly mirthless, “you don’t.”

They set up. They take their stances.

When he comes at her, it’s like breathing, to dodge.

It’s easy to tap him on target points, little pokes that show she couldtake him out, but isn’t going to until he’s learned something.

He stays grinning throughout, letting her take the lead, and he treats her like… like a knight. Like a teacher. He’s stepped back and gone from trying to impress her as a fellow padawan, to proving himself to a Jedi knight.

She’s not sure when that change happened, or why or how, but it makes things much smoother. She wants to think that it would have even if she hadn’t gotten a wakeup call from Fett. Her mind is too shaken right now to really put thought into it.

So she treats him the way she treated Ezra, for the year she’d spent traveling with Kanan. She treats him as a student that’s willing to learn, good but not yet great, competent but not yet ready to survive. She draws him into the kind of chest-heaving exhaustion that tells a fighter just how much energy they waste.

(Sokari may have had her own style, but her grandmaster had been the pinnacle of a Soresu user. She’d spent years on the frontlines of a war. She knew the worth of conserving energy, and she’d teach it to any who stepped in to challenge her.)

“Who taught you to fight like this?” He breathes out, when they’ve taken a handful of moments to circle each other. His steps are heavy, sure, planted. Her own are light and ready.

“Soldiers,” she says. It’s true enough.

“Not your Master?” he asks, just as he tries to kick for her upper arm. It’s a safe question. For anyone else, it would be a safe question.

For Sokari, it’s another chink in the armor, after a maelstrom of emotion, a storm of self-loathing, a dervish of instability.

She doesn’t break right away.

She spirals. She fights Quinlan, but doesn’t quite see him. Her strikes get sloppy, and her feet stumble. She can’t make herself meet Quinlan’s eyes, not when the scrape of his heel against the metal sounds like the rasp of a breathing machine. Her shields get fuzzy, she knows, and she’s pouring what she feels into the air, drenching it sour and thick. She doesn’t notice, really, because all she can see, all she can—all she can hear and feel and—

She drops to her knees and grabs at her head, trying to make it stop.

“Sokari?”

She breathes. In and out, harsh and jagged but naturalin a way that the damned respirator wasn’t.

Her master her teacher her brother the traitor the hound the executioner

Her face is hot. Something prickles. It might be tears.

She tries to say something, tries to say a name or a request, tries to make anythingcome out of her mouth that isn’t the broken wail of a woman who hasn’t let herself think about how she died.

She feels her body pulled into someone’s arms, and she can’t quite tell who,but they’re bigger than she is, and they feel warm and worried. They care. They don’t understand, and they’re scared,but they care.

Her hands shake, clutched to her chest and she can’t breathe she can’t make herself take in enough air todo a Force-damnedthing the empire is going to feel her her shields are down and broken and her emotions are spilling and the empire is going to findHER ANAKIN IS GOING TO FIND HER AND—

“COMMANDER!”

Rex.

Rex is here.

Her breath is coming so fast that she’s hiccupping more than she’s actually inhaling. She feels small hands in rough gloves on either side of her face, and then her forehead presses to something warm.

Rex. A Keldabe kiss. Her captain, her partner, her other half. He’s here. He’s calm. If he’s calm, then things are fine.

“What happened?” Light voice, high voice, small and distant. Leia. Little Leia little princess Leia she’s in danger she’s in trouble Anakin will—

“Commander.”

No. Here and now. She needs to focus on here and now. Her throat feels cold. She breathes too fast, still. She can’t stop it.

“I don’t know.” That’s Vos. He was… they were doing something. He was here. Talking to her.“We were sparring, and she just—”

Right, sparring.

“I don’t know if I said something?” He offers, voice pitching up, unsure and worried. Is he the one holding her? He’s the one holding her. That’s embarrassing.

“Commander?” Rex prompts.“Commander, can you open your eyes?”

She tries. She can’t. She shakes her head.

“Soka?” he asks, voice quiet.“Where are you?”

“F-F-Fett,” she manages. It’s enough.

“And where were you?”

His voice is so soft. So worried. She held him the same way after Mandalore, after Order 66, after all his brothers, all her friends…

“Soka.”

Her mind is spinning, and suddenly all she can hear is that damned respirator and Anakin Skywalker is dead. I destroyed him.

Her breath hitches, and she wails.

“Commander,” Rex tries again, but her head is a vortex of Then you will dieand Perhaps this childand not the Jedi way.

Our long-awaited meeting.

I destroyed him.

Then you will die.

She can’t breathe she can’t breathe she can only see that yellow eye that’s too familiar but belongs to a stranger can only hear a voice that shouldn’t exist can only mourn and break and—

“Soka?”

“Malachor,” she manages.“I—h-he—I died.”

“What did you say?” someone asks. A vod. It’s the right voice, almost, rough and business-like, not accusing anyone yet, and… and… no. No. Not one of her boys. It’s Fett.

“Um, right at the end? I asked her who taught her to fight like this,” Quinlan says, nervous.“And she said it was soldiers. And I joked, I asked that it wasn’t her Master, and she didn’t answer that. A couple minutes later, she just started…”

“Oh, Soka,”Rex whispers, pulling her closer. He’d already guessed, probably.“Commander, just breathe with me.”

“H-h-he, he just—R-Rex, he j-just—and I c-c-couldn’t—”

“I know,” her captain whispers.“I know, just breathe with me.”

“He k-k-k-killed me,”she sobs, falling out of the Keldabe and into too-small arms.“I l-loved—he was my broth-ther and—and he just—he killed me, he didn’t even stop.”

“I know,” Rex whispers.“Soka, I know.”

Of course he does.

Chapter 9: Glue the Pieces Back Together

Chapter Text

“It was just bad timing,” Rex says, once they’re in the room she’s been sharing with her little family, curled up under a blanket and watching the floor like it has all the secrets to how she lost her world three times over.

“Is there anything we need to keep in mind?” Fett asks, gruff and uncomfortable. She wonders if he’s angry that she took his necessary confrontation and turned it into this mess. All about her.

“Don’t bring up her Jedi Master,” Rex says, and pulls her in when she shivers. Her eyes squeeze shut before she can stop them, tears beading up again.“Just… don’t. It’s too soon.”

“He’s—”

“He Fell,” Sokari interrupts.“I thought he died, but he became a Sith. And fifteen years later, we ran into each other, and I refused to join him in the Dark, so he tried to kill me.”

Fett swears, low and muffled. She thinks he has a hand over his mouth.

Quin and Leia aren’t there. She thinks they’re keeping an eye on their Baby Sith prisoner. That’s good. It means Quinlan isn’t here to do the math.

“Soka,” Rex whispers, and she buries her face in his shoulder. She’s too old to be this kind of mess. She’s thirty-two. She’s Fulcrum. She’s…

She’s in need of a lot of therapy.

“We can avoid that subject unless you bring it up,” Tholme promises.“Definitely until the Temple. Is there anything else we shouldn’t talk about?”

Sokari can practically feel Rex’s deadpan look.“Sir, we’re a trio of child soldiers ripped from everything we know. Every other sentence is a risk. We’re just… working our way through.”

There’s a knock at the door. Oh. Quin and Leia.

“Just figured we’d drop this off before we went down to visit Mr. Grumpy-Face,” Quinlan whispers. He still thinks Leia’s a child. He’s trying to make things less terrible for her. That’s nice of him.“We decided he’ll be less angry if he tries Hoth chocolate, and made some for everyone.”

They definitely made it for Sokari herself, and Maul was an afterthought. Still. It’s sweet. Literally, even.

“Commander?” Rex prompts, jostling her a little to try and get her to sit up.

“Gimme a sec,” she manages. It takes longer than it should to push herself away from him, to accept the mug that Leia gives her.

There is a too-serious worry in the furrow of her brow and in the twist of her soul.

She doesn’t look six. She doesn’t even look twenty-two. This girl was always too old for her skin, forced to grow up in the hostile fear of the Empire.

“Thank you, Princess.”

She sips.

She can barely taste it beyond the ashes she imagines coating her tongue.

I destroyed him,her memory echoes. His slightest hesitation before he made the final move, it haunts her. She almost reached him. If only she’d tried harder, yelled louder, been better…

She shivers.

Maul was right.

“Do you need help falling asleep?” Tholme asks.“I’m a regular healer, not a mind healer, but…”

She probably should.

She takes another sip of her drink, willing herself to taste it. It’s good. She likes it. She knows she does.

“Can you make it dreamless?” she whispers.

“It doesn’t always work, but I can try,” he tells her.

She nods.“When I finish the chocolate.”

“Of course.”

--

Everyone’s careful around her for days. The whole decision to be nicerdoesn’t mean anything when she’s walking about in a daze of too few emotions, drained of everything she could feel in favor of a grey cloud of fluff in all she does.

She does forms. Single saber and Jar’kai. Ataru and Djem so and Soresu. Reverse grip, regular grip, partial reverse on either side.

Again. Again. Again.

She loses herself in the motions, not meditating so much as just empty.

Rex worries. Fett worries. Vos worries.

Leia and Tholme keep their shields locked up tight, and she doesn’t know how they feel. She thinks Leia might be judging her. She thinks Tholme might be pitying.

Maul simply hates. It’s an old and familiar sensation to walk into, and she takes unthinking comfort in his rage. She’s silent instead of snippy, when she plays the role of guard, and they stare at each other in the quiet. His eyes burn, and she wonders how much he’s heard of her nightmares.

“You need to talk,” Rex tells her, when he finds her with a cold cup of caff, eyes fixed somewhere beyond it all. She lifts her head.“Soka.”

She just stares at him.

He sighs and pulls her into a hug.“Commander, please.”

She can’t.

Sokari stares at the wall behind him, resting her chin on his head. Her neck itches under the lek at the back of her head, just where the new scars start. It’s just a little tingle of a feeling, but it’s one that she can’t bring herself to do anything about. The pale light of the galley is sharp against the chipped paint of the metal that surrounds them. It hurts her eyes to look, but it’s not the deep and dark lit only by red—

Then you will die,her memory growls.

She flinches.

“Breathe,” Rex tells her, too-small hands clinging at her back.“Just breathe,‘Soka.”

She curls in tighter and tries to just breathe.

--

“Tell me something good.”

Sokari blinks. She looks at Leia. She doesn’t have the energy to parse that.

Leia chances a look at Rex, who isn’t leaving Sokari’s side any more than he has to, and Fett on the other side. Tholme’s asleep and Quin’s on Baby Sith duty. It’s just people who know,right now.

The little girl across the table, the child senator, the spy, purses her lips and huffs in irritation.“You knew my biological father before he became one of the worst people in the galaxy. Both of you did. Tell me something goodabout him.”

Good things.

About Anakin.

“You fought a war as a Jedi,” Leia prompts.“Surely you must have done some good things with him, or at least thought you were.”

Did they?

Every mission ended in tragedy or was just a ploy of Palpatine’s. Every saved life was just…

Wait.

“He built Threepio,” she finally says.“Your father—I mean, Bailwiped Threepio’s memory after the Empire rose, for your safety, but Anakin was the one who built him.”

Leia sits up, eyes brighter.“I didn’t know that. I… was Artoo involved? Did he build R2D2, or…”

“No,” Rex cuts in,“But Artoo was his favorite astromech, and they always pushed each other into some real stupid stunts. We risked a hell of a lot to save that droid, more than once. I didn’t find out until you started working with the Rebellion full-time, but Artoo and Threepio were the witnesses for your bio-parents’wedding.”

Leia gapes at him. So does Sokari. She hadn’t known that.

(Fett doesn’t know enough to care.)

Rex grins, and if it looks a little forced, that’s fine.“He had a holo recording. I was one of the few people left around that even knew about the marriage and might have wanted to see, so Artoo offered. It was… sweet.”

He waits, probably for Sokari to add something herself, but she has nothing.

“I think that’s when they swapped droids, since Threepio was more useful to a politician and Artoo did his best work when we set him loose on the enemy.”

“He never changed,” Leia muses.“Did he always swear that much?”

“Yes,” Sokari answers, as Rex laughs.“Always. All the binary I learned started with the best swears.”

She tries to think of another good memory, something else that Leia might appreciate. Her mind ticks back to saving Stinky, which is just a terrible option, because that mission started with Hutts and ended with the Battle of Teth.That was a massive loss of life, all for the son of the creature that had put Leia in chains.

She wonders if she has anything in her memory that doesn’t end in blood and graves.

“Soka.” Rex.

“Hm?”

“Remember that time Fives and Echo got lost in the undercity their first time on leave, and we had to get the General to help us find them?”

She does.

He’s right, that is a good story.

“Okay, so what you have to understand,” Sokari says, already digging the faint details out and dusting them off,“is that these boys were ARC troopers. They were top-notch commandos, terrifyingly competent once they got through specialty training, and loyal as hell. Echo had memorized the reg manuals front to back, and Fives was… well, Fives ended up being the only person to figure out the chips before they went into action. Point is, the Domino twins were good…eventually. Just like everyone else, though, they started out shiny.”

--

“Tholme’s hiding something.”

Sokari wonders if Leia will just leave if she ignores her enough. Probably not. This was the girl that got kicked out of boarding school for leading a sit-in at age seven. She’s got patience.

“His job requires him to hide a lot of things,” Sokari says instead.“Not as many as Vos will have to, eventually, but a lot.”

“He’s hiding something from us,”Leia insists, visibly frustrated that Sokari isn’t as upset about this as she is.“Something important.”

The way she says‘important’ is clumsy and impacted by the missing baby tooth. She can’t say the resh properly.[1] It comes out as‘im-poh-ten,’ which is adorable, and if Sokari comments on it, she’s probablygoing to get punched by a six-year-old.

“The Force doesn’t care,” Sokari says.“I trust his intentions, if not him as a person.”

“If you don’t trust him, then why trust his intentions?”

“Leia, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I trust one and a half people in the galaxy,” Sokari points out.“Me not trusting a person isn’t a sign of anything except my paranoia. The only person I trust fully and without reservation is Rex. Even you, I only mostlytrust, because my brain starts screaming if I think too hard. That’s why you’re the half.”

“Okay, whatever, paranoia aside,”Leia barrels on,“He should tell us. Whatever it is that he’s hiding, we deserve to know. We’re not childrenthat he can just hide things from for our own good.”

Sokari presses her lips together.“Leia. Princess. I know you’re used to holding all the cards—”

“This isn’t about me being a control freak!”

“It is, though,” Sokari soothes, and smiles.“Your mother—the bio one—was the same way. You spent years as one of the leaders of the Rebellion, so obviously you’re used to having all the information, and people reporting to you… but Tholme is a Jedi Master. He reports to the Council and the Republic. Do you know how many people I kept secrets from while I was a padawan? We’re an unknown, Leia. They have no proof that we’re on their side, especially since we’re traveling with Fett.”

Leia crosses her arms and glares as hard as she can.

“I’m not going to bother him,” Sokari says.“I’ve already had, like, five unrelated mental breakdowns. I’m putting this on hold until we get to the Temple and I can trust that there’s a healer on hand to sedate me or something.”

The younger girl stares. Sokari’s struck by how young she is, even without the body taken into account. Soka’d already been almost an adult when the girl was born. “You… wantto be sedated?”

“Leia, this… really should be obvious, but a Force-Sensitive losing their sh*tthe way I have been isn’t actually safe. I knowI broke a weapons rack last week.” Sokari gestures vaguely.“If the Jedi Master isn’t telling me something for reasons that might relate to my clear and obvious mental instability, I’m going to assume he’s got a point.”

“So he should tell me or Rex.”

“We’ll be on Coruscant in four days,” Sokari soothes.“Just… let it be. They won’t hurt us.”

“You don’t know that.”

Sokari shrugs.“I don’t have to. The Force leads me in all things, including this.”

Leia isn’t impressed by that, but Leia isn’t impressed by much in the first place.

She strides off in a fit that is, perhaps, more influenced by her six-year-old emotional control than she’d like to admit. Sokari lets her. It’s not worth the argument.

It’s only a few minutes later that Fett strides in, takes the seat Leia was just in, and asks,“What would it take for you to teach me how to use a jetii’kad?” [2]

She blinks at him.“You want to learn how to use a lightsaber?”

“Yes.”

“…why?”

“Viszla.”

“I see.”

She actually does.

Sokari taps her fingers against the table, eyeing him with the kind of interest she copied from Master Kenobi, years ago. Fett doesn’t fidget, but she thinks he might want to. He just looks back, waiting for her judgement.

“You’ll need to justify it,” she finally says.“It’s a significant difference from what you actuallydid, so I need to know your reasoning for doing it, and your plans for once it’s done.”

“That’s all?”

“That’s step one,” she corrects. She tilts her head, considering.“My standards for you aren’t built in a vacuum, and you know that. Explain to me what you plan to do and how you plan to do it, and if I approve…”

“You’ll help me achieve it.”

“Maybe,” she allows.“A lotof that depends on Rex.”

“I expected as much,” Fett says.“He is… an admittedly large part of the reason.”

“He would be,” she says. She gives the silence a few more seconds to sit awkwardly between them, and then stands up.“I’d guess you’ve been brainstorming already. Do you have it written down or is it mostly just in your head so far?”

“I’m still… debating options, so to speak.”

She grins, and the shape of the predator’s smile, the baring of teeth… thatalmost makes him step back. She can see it in the twitch of his muscles. Smart man.

“Follow me,” she says, and doesn’t wait for him to stand. She strides out with tooka-light steps, hears the heavy beskar tread behind her, and goes to the cargo hold. Fett’s confusion grows tangibly behind her, especially when she tosses him a wooden quarterstaff. She picks up the other and spins it in one hand.

“You’re going to fight me,” she tells him, stretching and letting the staff help with the process.“And while we fight, you’re going to tell me what your plans for Mandalore are.”

He mimics her, but there’s a frown on his face.“And why staffs?”

“You and I, we’ve only sparred bare-handed,” she says.“I need a feel for how you fight with a weapon anyway. These are a good start.”

“Not the beskad?” [3]

She grins, and the twitch is back.“No. That can wait. We start with the staffs.”

He takes a stance, and she mirrors him. She lets him strike first with a weapon, but she’s the one that asks all the questions.

(He is the only one on the ship that can fight her one-on-one right now, and he can win.Still, she makes him work for every inch, and what she doesn’t win in bruises, she wins in words.)

(Fett might yet be a proper Mand’alor, but Sokari learned war from her brothers, negotiation at the knee of a general and in the shadow of a prince, and government at the side of duch*esses and queens.)

(If he wants her help uniting his people, he needs to prove that he can hold them together once she’s gone.)

--

Sokari’s interrogation of Jango’s plans is thorough, and she’s not the only one involved. She brings Leia in, and has her join in on the grilling. She maybe laughs as the twenty-seven-year-old survivor of Galidraan, the Mand’alor, a man who has killed Master Jedi with his bare hands, gets lectured on various government structures by a tiny girl that’s missing several teeth and needs to sit on books to see the table properly.

Still, Leia knows this betterthan any of the rest of them do. The girl might have grown up heir to a monarchy, but she got a classical education, the kind that meant she was drilled on democracy and all associated forms of government. Where Sokari knows military protocol and law enforcement, intersystem relations and defensive measures, Leia knows agricultural subsidies and welfare programs, infrastructure and education.

Sokari may know how to find out if someone’s breaking a zoning law, but Leia knows why it exists in the first place.

(“And I grew up in a cult,” Rex says, when an argument on that topic breaks out. Everyone that hasn’t heard the joke-that-isn’t-a-joke stares at him. “The Jedi grew up in a religious meritocracy; Leia grew up in a monarchy; and I grew up in a cult.”) [4]

(Sokari elbows him. He’s not wrong, but still.)

Unfortunately, Sokari is about forty-seven percent sure that Leia willput her foot in her mouth when it comes to Mandalorian culture, blunt as the girl is. That prefrontal cortex isn’t anywhere near as developed as it should be, either, so impulse control for the princess isn’t great. Sokari refuses to let Leia and Fett talk about ways to mend the cracks between tradition and the pacifism of the New Mandalorians without either Rex or Sokari herself as a mediating presence. Tholme sits in a few times, but while he knows that Leia isn’t really six—though not about the time-travel, yet—Quinlan doesn’t.

They admittedly end up doing this while he’s on Maul-sitting duty.

“It’s like he doesn’t even careabout making nice with the people that, at this point, make up the majority of his culture!” Leia grumbles one night, as Sokari kicks over a step stool so the girl can brush her teeth.“He may not like the New Mandalorians, but from what I understand, it’s still early enough to prevent the majority of the cultural bleaching he claims is happening. If he stays this stubborn—”

“Leia,” Sokari says, and the girl’s mouth snaps shut.“I’m aware of your reasons for not trusting his intentions. But if I may say? Chill.”

“He’s not even trying!”

“He’s trying a hell of a lot harder than he did in the original timeline,” Sokari reminds her.“Brush your teeth.”

“I’m not a—”

“Teeth.”

It’s a little worrying, how the child’s brain affects Leia, but… well. That’ll pass in time, hopefully. Until then, Sokari gets to be the aunt she should have been. This includes tucking Leia in, which the girl grumbles about despite the fond waves of comfort that enter the Force around her. Sokari doesn’t call her out on it, just brushes back wisps of hair to plant a kiss on Leia’s forehead, and then does the same once Rex stumbles in, grumbling about the limitations of a cadet’s body, but far more ready to follow the protocol that is bedtime.

Rex doesn’t pretend to not like getting tucked in, for all that he’s sharing with a grumbly, already-asleep princess. He smiles up at Sokari, lets her hug him, and pretends they can be a normal family for five seconds.

Quinlan’s making a late-night snack for himself in the galley. Tholme is guarding the Baby Sith. Fett…

Sokari goes to the co*ckpit, takes the copilot’s seat, and watches hyperspace pass them by.

It takes long minutes before either of them say anything.

“You don’t actually hate her, do you?” Sokari asks.

“Antilles?”

“No, not Leia. Satine.”

Fett doesn’t meet her eyes. He stares out at the dark and empty passing of space, and she waits. He does talk, eventually. “No. Not hate.”

Soka nods. “I figured. The stuff you’ve been saying today doesn’t really match up with that argument you had with Silas.”

He sighs. “Figured you’d remember that. Wasn’t sure why Antilles didn’t, but she’s…”

“Got a leaky memory at this size?” Sokari suggests.

Fett shrugs. “If you say so.”

She does say. Still. “Fine. Why keep playing Sith’s advocate today, though? What had you choosing to tell us that Satine’s got a reputation for driving out Mandalorian tradition when you know most of that is Kyr’tsad propaganda?”

“I don’t like her, and I sure as hell don’t like some of her main officials, but…” Fett struggles for words. “I have to work with her, if I do this. She’s got a handle on the civilian populations. She’s got all that stuff that Antilles goes on about, the agriculture and medical and fiscal and education and… all of that. Kryze has that in hand. If I want in, if I want to wipe out Kyr’tsad properly, then my main use to her will be getting the clans under control.”

Sokari nods. She’d guessed as much. “Most of them are likely to buy into at least a little of what Death Watch is saying.”

“Exactly,” Fett says. He’s glaring at the stars. “People aren’t going to believe that I don’t want to just rip the entire bureaucracy from her, unless I can argue for it. They definitely won’t believe I want to work with her. Part of that is just facts—she isn’t wiping out Mando’a just by adding Basic signs at trade ports so merchants from the Core can figure out where customs is—but part of that is being able to see things from their angle, and build an argument they’ll actually respect out of the bits Antilles gives me. Ideals of peace and prosperity won’t mean anything to them the way re-terraforming Mandalore does.”

Ha.

“And re-terraforming requires Jedi Agricorps, which you can’t get until Satine’s not worried about traditionalists attacking us, and she can’t be sure they’ll be left alone until she has you to get them to stand down,” Sokari summarizes.

Fett lifts his mug of… shig? Probably. He lifts it in a salute of sorts, acknowledging the point. “Among other things.”

“Not the worst reason to be arguing from their side of the game,” Sokari allows, “but it’s doing a lot to piss off the little princess.”

“She’ll get over it,” Fett dismisses. “She’s the type to bounce back.”

“You barely know her.”

“Weeks on a ship and pointed commentary about my future crimes have done plenty to teach me what kind of person she is,” Fett mutters.

Soka shrugs. “I guess. I’m mostly just relieved you don’t hate Satine, or believe the propaganda.”

She turns her attention back to hyperspace.

There is a sound of pouring water, and then warm metal presses to her arm. Fett’s giving her some shig. It’s not yet cooled enough to lose its appeal. She thanks him quietly, and looks again at the stars.

The ship thrums about them.

“Do Jedi believe in souls?”

His shields are up, locked up tighter than the innermost chambers of the Imperial Palace. She has no idea where he’s taking this question. She has to cast about for an answer.

“That depends on how you define a soul,” she finally says.“Leia told me about Force Ghosts. A Jedi Master who underwent the right meditations and training could pass into the Force upon their death without losing their sense of self. They could remain themselves, to an extent, and interact with force-sensitive individuals. I don’t know if they could last that way indefinitely, but depending on your definition, I could argue those ghosts were evidence of a form of soul.”

Fett considers this. He speaks slowly. “So you believe that the dead pass into the Force, and that whatpasses could be a soul… by some definition. Something must exist for a sense of self to disappear at death in a way that impacts the Force as you understand it, and many would use the word ‘soul’ for that something.”

“Mm,” Sokari considers it.“I’d say that’s pretty accurate. You’ve put a lot of thought into this.”

“What about those not yet born?”

Her fingers feel cold, and she finds herself no longer able to watch the passage of hyperspace as passively as she had, and her eyes catch on streaks and motes of what is notdust, her vision unable to keep any more still than her heart.

“Oh,” she hears herself say.“The clones.”

It’s a long time before he answers, but the walls come down. He carries a confused sort of grief with him, guilty and a mite resentful. His questions have been building for longer than she’d thought. His voice is rough.“I’ve taken plenty of lives, but I’ve never known the name of someone I erased from existence before they were even born.”

“The stories we told Leia about the brothers.”

There’s a grunt of agreement from Fett, so those dots at least connect.

“I take it my answer wasn’t helpful,” she manages to say.

“Will they still exist?” Fett asks.“Will they be born elsewhere? Or is… is a soul something that only comes into existence after the body does?”

“I have no idea,” Sokari admits.“I want… I want to think that I’d be able to find them eventually, to recognize them, if their souls are still born into this world elsewhere.”

“And if your Sith finds someone else to build his army out of?”

Sokari’s head snaps to the side, and she looks at him, sharp and pointed.“You wouldn’t.”

He huffs a laugh her certainly doesn’t feel. “They’ll be doing it anyway, if their plans are as ironclad as you say.”

“You’re already associating with Jedi,” Sokari says, fighting the urge to break his nose. “They wouldn’t approach you, not now. They can’t leverage your anger against you. They won’t know everything, but they’ll know that you have friends among the Jedi.”

“You think they can’t come up with better lies?”

He has a point. He has more than one point and she hate hate hates it.

A Jedi does not hate.

I am no Jedi.

“You’re going to have to convince me,” she says.“Especially if you want to somehow balance this with the darksaber thing. I won’t teach you how to fight with it if you’re not planning to take up your title again.”

“That’s how they’d sell it,” he says.“Retaking Mandalore. An army ostensibly for the Jedi, and ultimately for me to…”

She really wants to hurt him. “You’d build an army of slaves.”

“No,” Fett argues. “I’d be the inside man for when they build that army anyway.”

She holds his gaze.

She also looks away first.

“Torrent?”

“I’m thinking.”

He lets her.

“I’ll need to talk to Rex. Probably Leia.”

“Understandable.”

“I don’t like this.”

“I’m only just considering it. It’s an idea, not a plan.”

“That’s the only reason I haven’t ripped your throat out with my teeth.”

“Hyperbole doesn’t suit you.”

She glares at him, and leaves, her mind chopping up and laying out every possible angle on Fett volunteering to do the exact same thing as last time, but somehow worse.

Great. Just what she needed.

[1] Resh – letter R in the Star Wars alphabet for Basic, Aurebesh

[2] Jetii’kad – lightsaber, lit. ‘Jedi-sword’

[3] Beskad – (metal) sword

[4] This is a joke but also… not. Kamino and its specific attitude towards the clones fits into several models of cult thought policing. The number of boxes ticked off for the BITE model? Yeah. Military cult, right there.

Chapter 10: Homecoming

Chapter Text

Sokari isn’t there for the shouting match between Rex and Fett, but she doesn’t have to be. She can hear it from clear across the ship. Even if she couldn’t, Rex comes to her afterwards. He’s been crying, which isn’t as surprising as it could be. These bodies are still prone to such things, and will be for years. She doesn’t comment.

“Do you want to talk about it?” she asks.

“We need to take out Sidious before he starts anything on Kamino.”

“Agreed,” she says.“It’ll be hard, though.”

“I don’t care.”

She hums idly. “What did Fett say?”

“That if it wasn’t going to be my brothers, it would be someone else’s. Either we stop the cloning from happening at all, or we mitigate damage by being there.”

We, he says. It’s telling.

“I don’t think Sidious is going to tap him for it,” Sokari admits.“Not unless you’re willing to stage that kind of fight publicly enough for Fett to claim the Jedi poisoned you, family, against him. It could work, but it’s a gamble.”

He knows all of this.

“I miss them,” he says, and she cards her fingers though the curls he’s managed to grow in the past weeks.“I just… even at the end, I had Wolffe. I knew Boba was out there; I wouldn’t be surprised if the beskar let him survive a Sarlacc. I had brothers. Not as many as I used to, but there was always someone. I miss them all, so much it hurts.”

“It wouldn’t be them,” she reminds him. She pulls him closer, puts her cheek to his head.“It would be the same process, the same faces, the same training, even, but the boys themselves…”

He clings to her and shudders.

“Rex?”

“I can’t force them to grow up the way I did,” he says, not quite at a whisper. “I want them back. Sidious is going to make the army no matter what. Someone’s going to suffer, and I don’t want it to be my brothers, but they won’t existotherwise, and…”

“And it’s an impossible choice,” she summarizes.“And it sucks.”

“It’s sucks Gungan balls,Soka.”

She laughs, and feels him smile against her shoulder. Good. He needs to smile more.

“He’s still trying to get me to like him,” Rex says."He’s still making an effort, and he never did that for anyone except Boba, and it’s weird.I don’t know what to do with any of that.”

“Gain a brother,” Sokari whispers, and she feels him jerk against her.“If that’s what you want.”

“He’s notvod.”

“Same blood as all the rest, and you’re older than him, so he’s not really in a position to be a parent to you like he was to Boba,” she says carefully.“You don’t have to do anything, if you don’t want to, but… I think he’s trying.”

Rex doesn’t seem inclined to respond. That’s fine.

She keeps going. “I think this means a lot to him, and that he isn’t any more sure of what to do than you are. You don’t have to forgive him for what he did in the future, you don’t have toacceptwhen he reaches out. You don’t have to ever talk to him again after we reach Coruscant if you don’t want,but I think… I think it’s worth at least considering what you have to gain. I think there is worth in looking at what he’s trying to give you.”

Rex huffs.“Why couldn’t he just be theshabuirI knew in training?”

“Something happened between now and then?” she offers.“I don’t know. I never met him in the original timeline. I just know the guy that keeps trying to get on my good side so you’ll like him.”

He outright scoffs.“Soka, that’s not the only reason he’s trying to get on your good side.”

“…I’m a former Jedi who talks trash to his face,” she says slowly.“And I cried on him. There isnoreason for him to be nice to me, other than you.”

“He thinks you’re cool and a good person and wants you to be his friend.”

“Bantha poodoo.”

Rex grins in a way that goes straight to smirking.“Soka, I’m not joking. Jango Fett wants you to be his friend.”

“Kriffing why?”she asks, more than a little horrified.“I’m a mess, look like I’m ten years younger than him, have gleefully kicked his ass in front of an audience; I even told Vos to throw him at a baby Sith Lord.Putting up with me is one thing, but I’m… I’m only barely not a Jedi. I’m a historical enemy of Mandalore, and part of the community he hates more than anything, and—”

“And his reaction to you kicking his ass was pure Mando,” Rex says.“In that he now thinks you’re a badass, and thus worth being friends with.”

“I can’t believe that. I physically cannot.”

“Soka, just accept it. The Mand’alor wants to be friends with you.” He scratches at his scalp.“I mean, he met you while you were protecting what appeared to be children, and it’s apparently still early enough for him to care about that. Especially family.”

She leans back in her seat, eyes on the wall ahead of her and back against the cool metal of the other side. Rex falls back with her. She wonders if Rex changed the subject so they didn’t have to talk about deciding how many of his brothers get to exist, and whether or not he can swallow the bitterness of his history to have a connection with at least one member of his blood. She doesn’t ask. If he wants to change the subject, that’s his right.

“I don’t… no.” She denies it as well as she can, and then the implications dig a little deeper. “Is this me accidentally signing up to be the Jedi Order’s official liaison to the Mand’alor?”

“I mean, this point in time… they’ve got Kenobi for the duch*ess, yeah?” Rex shrugs.“Good relations with the system are probably a positive, and you’ve got a stronger connection than Tholme and Vos.”

“Ugh,” she says. She rubs a hand against her head, and then lurches to her feet.“Fine! Fine. If it’ll get him to move on the Mandalore situation beforethe Sith decide to bribe him with an army he doesn’t get to keep, I’ll teach him how to fight for the kriffin’ Darksaber.”

“That’s what makes the decision for you?”

“Well somethinghad to!”

They only get one lesson in before Coruscant, but the lesson lasts a full day, and Soka’s got his comm number. Fett’s a quick learner anyway, and Tholme is there to give pointers where Sokari can’t.

He won’t measure up to a Jedi in saber-to-saber combat, but he doesn’t need to. He just needs to learn enough to turn all those skills with a beskadto something that works with a jetii’kad.

(The balance of a saber is wrong to those used to a physical weapon. The inertia doesn’t work the way anyone expects. There’s no need to worry about damaging the blade.)

(Fett is good. Sokari is better. Bless his heart, he knows it.)

(She will mold him into the shape of someone who not only can, but shouldhelp rule a system with a history like that, and he damn well knows that too.)

--

“Dropping out of hyperspace in T-minus twenty seconds.”

Jaster’s Legacy is not, in fact, a Venator-class starship, or anything else near the size and smoothness of the ships that Sokari grew up on. This is a bounty hunter’s inherited mercenary vessel, and the drop to real space jolts like nothing else. Sokari’s in the copilot seat for the return, but Tholme’s going to swap with her as soon as they’ve got confirmation that there are no problems with exiting hyperspace, and nobody’s shooting at them.

“We’re not going to get shot at,” Tholme had assured her.

“I always get shot at,” she’d told him.

“I have our clearance,” he reminded her, seeming more amused than frustrated.“There’s no need to worry about getting shot at.”

“I also always get shot at,” Jango had thrown in.

“Okay,” Tholme had allowed, after several minutes of his trust in the Temple warring against Sokari and Jango’s learned paranoia. The looks Quinlan had darted around the room when Leia and Rex alsoclaimed‘chronic getting-shot-at disease’ had been a treat. The paranoia of a Watchman and a future Shadow was great, but the paranoia of three revolutionaries and a galaxy-wide criminal was greater. “You can take us in close enough to get in radio contact, but the second we have to ask for clearance and a vector, I’m in the seat.”

She’d agreed, of course. She was paranoid, not inexperienced.

“We’re much less likely to get shot down by ground control if you tell them we’re with you,” she’d said, to his hilariously apparent metaphysical exhaustion.“Obviously.”

“Good enough,” he’d sighed.

What that means is mostly just that Sokari gets to watch the distant star at the center of Coruscant’s system grow rapidly brighter. She can pick out the constellations she’d grown up with; these are the stars the crèche had projected onto the ceiling every night, the ones that she may not have seen from the surface, but had greeted her and then sent her on her way every time she left, off on yet another campaign that lost her men their lives for a Sith Lord’s wretched plans. These were the shapes and stories she’d never seen again as Fulcrum, a woman so hunted that to come within a dozen subsectors of the planet was to court her death.

For sixteen years, she hadn’t ventured closer than Alderaan, save for a single trip to Chandrila.

Now, maybe twenty minutes away at this speed, was the Temple. It was home.

A home that didn’t know her, that had indirectly sentenced her to death, that had hosted the murderous rampage of her former master… but home nonetheless.

“Stable?” Fett grunts.

“Thrusters are good,” she confirms.

“I meant you.”

Ah.“I’m… fine. As good as I could be, anyway.”

She hesitates, but manages to speak before he does.“You?”

“I’m not the one walking into an entire building of triggers.”

“Only because you’re not entering it,” she says.“It’s the home of your ancestral enemies who, bad info or no, self-defense or no, killed off a whole lot of your friends.”

“I get to leave,” he says.“You don’t.”

She plans to needle him a bit more, maybe on something a little less based in both their traumas. She needs to talk, if only to fill up the silence and keep herself from reaching out to all the lights in the Force. It’ll be too much, she knows.

Tholme enters the co*ckpit.“Change of plans.”

“Better be a good reason,” Jango says, voice flat.

“Leia’s crying.”

Sokari’s unbuckling herself before she can process the words fully.“What?”

Leia doesn’t cry for no reason. Her emotional control is as difficult as the body makes it, but she doesn’t just cry.There’s always a cause.

“I don’t know. Rex said to get you,” Tholme explains.“She was saying a name. He seemed to recognize it.”

Not good not good not good. If Leia was feeling the Emper—No. She cuts the thought off there. No catastrophizing. Information first.

“What name.”

“Luke. Mean anything to—and she’s gone.”

Sokari ignores him, just sprints to where she knows the‘young ones’ are. They’re all in Maul’s room, because nobody wants to be alone with him now,but it’s the worst time to leave him without supervision. It’s not the worst option; he mostly refuses to talk, still.

This holds true, because he definitely isn’t talking when she bursts in. He’s sitting on the bench, in a corner, hugging his knees and watching Quinlan try to calm Leia down.

Sokari knows whom to prompt. “Captain, sitrep.”

“Vos and Tholme attempted to show Leia how to reach out to feel the Temple from a distance. They felt that it would be a good use of the time, and an interesting exercise at this distance. She attempted to do so, struggled for several minutes, and then reacted with shock. She has repeated the name‘Luke’ several times since then, and we’ve been unable to fully calm her down. I asked Tholme to get you, as you are the only Force-Sensitive on board that understands the situation in full.”

“Understood.” She nods to him, and then goes to nudge at Quinlan.“Vos, move.”

“Torre—”

“You can sit behind her, hold her in your lap like you did when we had lunch the other day, but I need to get in her face.” She waits for him to comply, and then drops to her knees and takes Leia’s hands in her own. She radiates calm and assurance, even though she knows Quinlan’s probably been doing the same since this started. She dips her head enough to get in the girl’s line of sight, waits for her to meet eyes.

“Princess,” she says, and meets Leia’s eyes.“What did you feel?”

“Luke.”

From this distance… they’ve got half the system to go, at least, and Leia’s training shouldn’t reach that far for anything more than most basic fact that the Temple is there. Sokari could feel unshielded individuals from here, if she focused, but she’s also been doing this much, much longer. The twins theory holds more water than ever.

“Can you show me?” Sokari asks, instead of asking for more clarification. She squeezes Leia’s hands and smiles. “In the Force?”

Leia nods, and closes her eyes. It’s not the first time they’ve done this, but it’s the first time in a while that Leia’s needed Sokari to guide her through.

Luke’s light, for all that it’s unfamiliar to Sokari, is brilliantamong the rest of the signatures in Coruscant. Like Anakin and Leia, he’s a star in his own right, but he’s brighter. He doesn’t have Anakin’s bitterness or Leia’s righteous anger, just… light. Sokari had asked Leia to show her instead of looking for herself because she’d expected to not recognize the boy, but she needn’t have. He’s unmistakable.

He’s so bright that she almost misses the other signature that she doesrecognize. She shies away, knowing that it would be there, but… but it’s almost twinned with another nearby. Not identical, but different in a way that comes with age, with trauma, with… death.

Leia hadn’t arrived alone, after all.

Why would Luke?

Her eyes snap open, her hand coming up not-quite-fast enough to clap over her mouth as she gasps. She feels a shudder, one that starts in her shoulders and reaches deep into her ribcage, finds a home in her chest and doesn’t stop.

“Oh f*ck,” Quinlan whispers.“Torrent? Um, Sokari?”

Rex steps closer. “Commander?”

“That shabuirfaked his death again,”she manages.“Three times, Rex!” [1]

He blinks at her.“…I know way too many people who fit that description, Soka.”

“Master Ke—” she cuts herself off. He might have changed his name, just like she had. There’s already an Obi-Wan here. Rex seems to be figuring it out, but she needs to give him another hint.

“He pulled a Hardeen,”she stresses, and Rex’s eyes snap shut with a tired groan.

“Who?” Leia asks, her own tumult of emotion paused in the wake of Sokari’s shock. There’s a hope and relief to her, and Sokari belatedly realizes that her main worry had been that she’d misidentified what was going on, that she’d given herself a false hope. Sokari’s internal reaction, her approval and awe at Luke’s presence, had trickled over enough to give Leia the reassurance she’d needed.

Unintentional as it was, Sokari was glad that she’d succeeded in helping her charge.

“Er…” she trails off.“I don’t know what name he’s going by, right now. We’ve spent so long in hiding…”

“The man Luke knew as Crazy Old Ben,” Rex says, and Leia’s eyes light up.

“Oh,” she breathes.“General O—no, names. The High General, then.”

“Yeah,” Sokari says, not a little soft.“Yeah, I guess death didn’t stop him any more than it stopped me.”

“I could have told you that,”Leia says, smiling far too widely. She squirms where she still sits on Quinlan’s lap. “He was… he taught you, right? As much as, you know… him.”

“As much my master as the official one,” Sokari confirms. She glances as Quinlan, feels Maul’s gaze on the back of her head. She’s already told Leia this, but it does no harm to repeat. “Your f… my official master was very young when I was assigned to him. He wasn’t ready to teach, wasn’t even ready to be a knight, entirely, so my training was split between him and hismaster.”

Quinlan pops in at that moment,“Your grandmaster was military, too?”

We all were,she thinks. Even you, in your own way.

“I landed in their care mid-battle,” she says carefully.“It was a complicated situation.”

He nods, and she vaguely notes that he’s still got his arms wrapped around Leia, and his chin tucked on top of her head. She isn’t sure if Leia’s noticed; Quinlan’s picked up‘baby’-sitting duty so often recently that Soka’s fairly certain he’s all but declared her‘little-sister shaped.’ It doesn’t matter that Leia’s older—she’s still taking the juice boxes and gummy snacks that Quinlan shoves at her every single snacktime.

“Do you think…” Rex trails off, something uncomfortable twisting in the Force, even though his face keeps it mostly hidden.“My brothers. If the General survived and… and made it back…”

“I didn’t feel any,” Sokari says, because she knowsshe’d have noticed if it was anyone she’d met, and likely any clone at all. Each felt different in the Force, yes, but they all held a spark that made her know it was one of them.“I’m sorry, Rex’ika.”

“A long shot,” he says, that dash of hope shriveling up. He must see something in her face, because there’s a curl of warmth in him, even if his smile is brittle.“It’s fine, really. I have you,‘Soka.”

Rex and Sokari. Two halves of one whole.

She can’t wait to hear the lectures on attachment, the way people who haven’t seen her wars try to criticize her for clinging to any chance at still having a will to live. She can’t wait to see them justify telling her that it’s selfishto hold her sanity in her hands and refuse to let the grief take it away. She can’t wait to stare someone down for asking her to‘learn to let go’ after she’s lost her family, her life, her universe three times over.

(This is not sarcasm. She is truly excited that someone will be pressing a more orthodox interpretation of the code on her, because there will be someone alive to do so.)

Most of the Jedi are more sensible than that, are reasonable enough to see those shades of grey and how to approach rules in the spirit they are meant instead of the rigid letter, but there will be some.

There will be more than enough telling her she is wrong to hold her oldest, closest, best friend as dear as she can.

Attachment, they’ll say.

What they’ll mean is‘codepedence.’

They won’t be entirely wrong.

She reaches out for him, lets him fall into her side and stay there. She closes her eyes and reaches out for the man she’d not quite calledfather,when they’d still been in each other’s lives.

This time, past the deafening flare of surprise-love-hopeof the little star next to him, she can feel him reach back.

--

The second the ship has landed, even before Tholme and Fett are done with the checks, Sokari’s waiting at the exit. She strains her hearing so she’ll know the moment the hydraulics will let her open the massive door of the cargo hold.

Leia clings to her side, and the boys stand to her back.

Quinlan’s stressed enough that she can feel it like a cloud. She is very much not trying to feel that stress. Quinlan’s stress levels, back where he’s got Maul so he can keep an eye on Sokari and the Baby Sith at the same time, are so low on her priorities list that it’s a little sad.

It doesn’t take long for her to be able to punch the button and open the damn door.

It opens slowly. She bounces on her toes, because there’s a beacon of light and a steady, familiar glow on the other side, and she’s so, so close. She can’t see through the crack yet, because it’s day in this part of Coruscant, and the sunlight is blinding against the dark of the hold. So close. She’s so close.

“The hell’s wrong with you?”

Fett? Fett. He’s already here to get off? This door’s slow.

She doesn’t answer him, because the door is finally open enough to let her out, and she leaps through the gap.

She lands on a pourstone floor, feels pebbles and grit compress under her boots, frantically looks around as her eyes adjust to light and—

The High General, the Negotiator, Master Obi-Wan Kenobi, looking just as he did when she first met him, if a little less armored and a little more nourished. The hair, the beard, the crinkle in the corner of his eyes. His spirit is a little older, his smile a little more strained, his posture a little more tired, but it’s him.

He spreads his arms, low enough that she could have dismissed it if she’d cared less for hugs.

She’s almost as small as shewas when they met. Every other hug she’d given back then had been, functionally, her being a living missile aiming her montrals for someone’s organs.

She’s a littlemore aware of how to avoid stabbing her friends in the intestine now.

“Master!”

She sprints for him, collides and sobs, feels him stumble back and then sink to his knees on the too-hard floor, and can feel the tears pouring out of her already. Her breath hitches, and she wails like a child, and that last part of her that couldn’t even grasp at safety shreds itself. His arms are tight around her, warm and strong and Master Kenobi don’t you dare leave again.

It doesn’t matter that Sidious is out there, that the Republic’s been building towards war for a century, that even now someone’s kicking up the Trade Federation. Her grandmaster is here.

“I’ve missed you too, my dear,” he murmurs. He presses a kiss to the side of her montral, the bristles of his beard scratch along the skin of her forehead. Off to the side, the binary stars that are Luke and Leia grow brighter in proximity, so shining she can barely bear it.

(“Fett, why the kriff are you reaching for your blaster?!”)

(“Torrent said her master tried to kill her.”)

(“Different guy, that was a different guy,put the blaster away.”)

(“You could have just warned me, Jet’ika.”)

(“I didn’t expect you to go for a shot on sight!”)

(”Calm down, Vos. If I was going to shoot on sight, we’d already be in a firefight.”)

She ignores everything.

“If you fake your death one more time,I swear I’m going to kill you myself.”

He tries to pull away to talk to her more directly. She does not let him. He apparently resigns himself to this, because he just adjusts how he’s sitting and pulls her in closer.

“In my defense, I was far from the only one presumed dead that took advantage of that status, by the end,” he says, letting her slump into his lap and cry herself dry.“I’m proud of you. You know that, I hope.”

She nods against his chest, smearing tears and snot across the linen and wool. She doesn’t care that they’ll need a thorough washing. She can have her public breakdown, and it’s fine, because Master Kenobi is here.

He doesn’t even know what she’s spent the past fifteen years doing. Luke wouldn’t have known. He doesn’t know she’s thirty-two and broken, beyond a Shadow and cut down by her own master. There’s so much he doesn’t know, but the Force rings with the truth of it: he’s proud of her anyway.

“I’m going by Ben, now,” he mutters against her montral.“There’s already an Obi-Wan here, after all. Still, I remain a Kenobi.”

She can’t make the words come out of her mouth. She’s overwhelmed, so much so that speech is a mite bit beyond her.

Sokari Torrent,she presses along the frayed bond that’s knitting itself back to life with every breath they take. Leia was already calling me Auntie ‘Soka, and Rex and I both took Torrent, for…

“For the men you lost,” he mutters.“Yes, that’s fitting.”

He smells like sapir tea and a spiced beard oil.

Activity whirls about her, greetings and‘a Sith apprentice?’and introductions. She distantly notes when Fett almost shoots some unfamiliar Jedi that he recognizes—not Dooku, but someone else from Galidraan—before Rex shuts that down and advises the Master to leave the area, so things don’t spiral out of control. She doesn’t need to lift a finger about it.

She feels Ben stand, and she stands with him, clings to his side like a child and trusts that whatever happens, whatever needs to happen, he’ll take care of it until she can stand on her own two feet without swaying.

Rex grabs her free hand, and she feels herself settle back into her skin, bit by bit.

She’s back at the Temple. The twins are safe. Her grandmaster is here. She has her other half.

They can save the galaxy this time.

She’s alive she’s home she’s okay.

She’s okay.

Everything’s going to be okay.

[1] Shabuir – intensely rude way of saying ‘jerk’ or otherwise insulting someone. There’s no exact translation, but the word probably breaks down to ‘shabiir’ (to screw/mess up) and ‘buir’ (parent). That said, it’s not used in a very literal sense; much like motherf*cker or bastard in English, the literal meaning is rarely applied.