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ncfan-1 · 8 years ago

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In Screaming Color

Ketsu on color, life, and Sabine.

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“So you paint, huh?”

The students in Sundari’s Imperial Academy tended to have a much wider age range than what was typical of the galaxy at large, or at least Ketsu had been led to believe as much. Other facilities across the galaxy would be segregated by age, but here on Mandalore, all the best and brightest of all ages were enrolled into the same facility. It was occasionally kind of bizarre to see ten-year-olds in the same class as thirty-year-olds, but Ketsu had grown used to it, over time. You could get used to most things over time.

What Ketsu had not gotten used to was the sheer dearth of color in the Academy. She’d be lying if she said her life before enrolling was an easy one. She’d be lying if she said that living in Sundari in general was easy for anyone who fell short of the top of the pecking order. But there was plenty of color if you knew where to look for it—graffiti scrawled on walls in the slums, paintings stuffed away in back rooms, tattoos you only saw if someone rolled up their sleeves or took off their shirts, the flowers someone was growing in a window box, watered with blood, sweat, tears, and only occasionally portions of their rationed water. They were there if you could find them, splashes of red and yellow, green and blue and purple and pink and orange, though you might not see it at first glance.

In the Academy, tracking down color was like trying to grasp smoke in your hands. You caught glimpses of it, fleeting glimpses, and then it was gone again, swallowed up by white and gray and black. Ketsu had chosen the Academy over homelessness, had jumped through hoops, signed forms and taken entrance exam after entrance exam so she could fill the ever-growing hollow spot in her stomach. She didn’t regret it—she enjoyed the classes, and enjoyed a steady source of food even more. And at least she’d have a job lined up once she graduated, so she wouldn’t wind up homeless again. Ketsu definitely couldn’t complain about that.

But that still didn’t mean she was used to how drab everything was. Not at all.

So when it turned out her new roommate was a painter, well…

Sabine nodded, and glared when Ketsu tried to take another peek at her canvas. Ketsu wouldn’t have thought it would be so easy for Sabine to keep her from seeing the canvas—their dorm consisted of a single room with their beds pushed up against separate walls—but Sabine was doing a pretty good job. Probably because she didn’t have any misgivings about slapping Ketsu’s hands with the handle of her paintbrush it she got too close. “I’m entering in the Young Adults Competition,” Sabine explained. “And you can see it when I’m done,” she added pointedly.

Ketsu shrugged and sent back down on her own bed. She’d heard artists could get kind of touchy about letting people see their unfinished work. Ketsu’s experience with art was more appreciating it than making it, more longing for color than creating it, but she guessed she could respect the artist’s need for privacy. “Why enter it in a competition? Why not keep it?” she asked in mild curiosity. If Ketsu was any kind of artist, she knew she wouldn’t want to just hand her work over to other people.

“Because the Academy administration doesn’t let you keep art supplies in your dorm if you’re just creating art because you want to,” Sabine told her absently, her eyes fixed on her canvas. “Then it’s just ‘a waste of resources’—“ she rolled her eyes “—but if you’re making something for a competition, or a charity, or something like that, then it’s ‘getting the word out there’ and ‘representing the Academy to the community,’ and suddenly the monitors don’t care that you’ve got non-essential stuff in your room anymore.”

Now Ketsu rolled her eyes. “Figures it would be something like that. I can’t remember our overlords ever being too happy when we take our minds off our studies.” An unscheduled inspection in the dorms was usually the cue for all nine hells to break loose at once, as the students raced to hide any “contraband” that might be stowed away in their rooms. Contraband ranged from the older students’ bottles of booze to snack foods to unsanctioned literature to magazines that had probably been pilfered from a doctor’s waiting room to clothing that wasn’t the standard uniform. Ketsu’s last roommate managed to hide a jewelry box for the better part of a year before it was finally discovered. Sabine had a suit of armor packed in a box under her bed—her family had apparently pulled some strings to let her keep it, but that hadn’t stopped the inspector from trying to confiscate it during the last inspection, and wow, Sabine could be really scary when she wanted to be.

(Sometimes, Ketsu wondered what exactly the inspectors did with the stuff they confiscated. “Get rich” was probably the answer; there was a thriving black market in Sundari for just about everything you could think of. Maybe that was why the inspectors had tried to ignore the fact that there was an exception for Sabine’s—never worn—armor; a good suit of high-grade beskar could fetch a fortune on the black market.)

But Sabine didn’t seem to share Ketsu’s contempt for the inspections. “The handbook says what we are and aren’t supposed to have in our dorms,” she pointed out, as she dabbed her paintbrush in the little splotch of black paint on her palette. “It’s pretty clear-cut.”

“You’ve got no imagination.”

“Hey, I have plenty imagination, but the handbook’s still pretty clear.”

Ketsu resisted the urge to sigh long-sufferingly, and instead eyed Sabine with something closely approaching pity. Her new roommate was barely a month out of the auxiliary Academy on Krownest; it was the first time she’d ever been away from home. Her family was an influential one here in the capital, but they were also very, very traditional, and Sabine had been given what, to Ketsu, was a terminally sheltered upbringing as a result. ‘Imagination,’ sure she had imagination, just not the right kind. Knew six ways to kill a man bare-handed, and didn’t know where to go to get an ID card altered or where to go to buy contraband food.

No chance of her getting mugged if she ever winds up on the streets, but she still wouldn’t last long.

Sabine sure could get lost in her art, though. Minutes walked sluggishly by, and Sabine remained thoroughly unaware of Ketsu’s scrutiny, not even looking up from the canvas on the easel in front of her. Ketsu leaned back against the wall and pursed her lips appraisingly, watching her roommate at her work.

At eleven years old, Sabine was two years younger than Ketsu—not the youngest student in the Academy, but definitely on the far low end of the scale as far as age went. She’d been picked up by the Sundari Academy because of her skill in, well, just about everything; the rumor mill confided that Sabine Wren had blown her test scores clean out of the water. She spoke Sundari Standard Mando’a with a noticeable accent, and slipped into her home dialect, a decidedly old-fashioned-sounding thing, when she wasn’t paying attention. Whenever she was in class, she wore her long hair tied back or braided, but when she was in her room, she wore it loose, and she looked…

Pretty. Honestly, she did. The Academy uniform, white and gray, washed her out, made her skin look sallow-sickly, but Ketsu Onyo could not help but notice that Sabine Wren was really very pretty. Her fine black hair had a warm brown undertone, and it spilled over her shoulders like water when she leaned forwards. Her eyes were like amber, and they gleamed under light, two bright spots of color in a very drab world.

-0-0-0-

Two days later, after the hours that she was able to snatch from the jaws of classes and studying (and sleep, Ketsu couldn’t help but notice; if Sabine turned out to be the ‘neglects bodily needs’ kind of artist, Ketsu already knew what the intervention was going to have to focus on first), Sabine was done with her painting. True to her word, she let Ketsu drink in the sight of the finished product.

“…Huh.”

“’Huh?’ That’s it? Come on, Ketsu; I need real feedback, not just a ‘huh.’”

“Yeah, I know, Sabine. Just give me a moment.”

Ketsu’s very first impression of Sabine’s painting was of a riot of color. Nothing was dark or dull or even a little muted; everything was bright and vivid, occasionally verging on neon. Even the blacks and whites were rich and crisp. Her second impression was that it was, well, different.

Any of the art you saw in Sundari tended to be Navanist. The movement had been pioneered by Navana Tiran, an artist who had died about sixty years ago. Tiran had herself revived and modified a style of art that had been in vogue about four thousand years ago, which might explain its enduring popularity today. Mandalorians of all clans, planets and factions did like to talk up their glorious past; even the New Mandalorians on Mandalore, those who had ruled before the Empire, had adopted Navanist art as their own.

(People were always so surprised when Ketsu told them that her favorite elective class this term was art history. They really shouldn’t have been.)

Sabine’s style, whatever it was, was not Navanist. There was some trace of it in the black and white checker pattern in the upper left-hand corner, but otherwise, no, definitely not Navanist. The shapes weren’t as blocky, the lines softer and more rounded. In the lower right-hand corner, there was a starburst, electric blue at the edges and bright, piercing green at the center. The background was a deep, rich reddish-purple, speckled with pink and orange and crimson.

The subject of the painting could only be the woman who stood in the center of it all. Her hair was black and tumbled in curls over her shoulders. Her skin was bright brown, her eyes golden, her sweeping dress as red as human blood. She stood facing the viewer with a proud, stern expression on her face, and in her hands she held a broken sword.

“It’s not Navanist,” was Ketsu’s first, honest assessment, with all that that implied for how it would likely be judged.

Sabine hunched her shoulders. “I know it’s not Navanist; it’s something from home, and something of me. What do you think of it besides it not being Navanist?” she pressed.

“I do like the colors,” Ketsu replied immediately, and Sabine’s smile was so bright she seemed to glow. “I didn’t see much artwork before I enrolled here, but most of the stuff usually just used different shades of a single color—two or three, tops. This is full-spectrum.”

“I know,” Sabine chirped, still basking in that moment of praise. “I like using as much color as I can when I paint.” Her smile twisted into something a little nervous as she reached up and tucked a stray lock of hair behind her ear. “I think you’re the first person who’s actually liked me using so many colors at once.”

Ketsu laughed. “Maybe I’m just starved for it after so much time here.” She peered closely at the woman in the painting, her eyes narrowed. For some reason, this didn’t feel like a random choice on Sabine’s part. It looked too deliberate, too weighty for that. Add into that the fact that the woman wasn’t painted in the same style as the rest of it—a lot more fine detail around the woman’s hair, her dress, the jagged edge of her broken sword than in either the checker pattern or the starburst—and something was nagging at Ketsu’s mind. “Sabine… who is this woman? Was she based off of anyone in particular?”

This question was met with a shrug and a decidedly evasive shift of body weight from one leg to the other. “Jain-adi. She’s just a story my grandmother used to tell me when she was still alive. It’s not important, Ketsu; I just thought it would look nice with all of the other colors.”

‘Jain-adi,’ whoever she was (probably a story native to Krownest or one of the other colony worlds; it certainly wasn’t a tale Ketsu had ever heard in Sundari) was pushed to the back of Ketsu’s mind as something occurred to her. “Hey, Sabine, come with me for a bit? I want to show you something.”

Color might often be difficult to find and difficult to grasp here in the Academy, but Ketsu knew one place where she could go to find that fleeting experience, and it just so happened to be active right now. There was a testing area where students who were being taught to mix chemicals for explosives were to try to set them off to see if they’d been successful. There were multiple observation ports available, and anyone who was interested was allowed to observe. Ketsu wondered if Sabine had gone before.

As it happened, she had not.

Today, the explosives were producing vibrant red and golden bursts of light, interspersed with undertones of pink and titian. Sabine’s eyes grew very round as she watched in rapt silence. For a long time, she was so silent, and stood so still, that she barely seemed even to breathe. Oh, great. I broke her, Ketsu thought, stifling a laugh. Even so, she couldn’t help but feel the wonder she saw slowly unfurling over Sabine’s face.

Then, Sabine turned to Ketsu, and the grin on her face as she half-whispered, “Do you think you could mix in colored powder to get colored smoke in the blast?” was quite possibly the most beautiful thing Ketsu had ever seen in her life.

ii.

Defecting wasn’t anything planned, in that Ketsu hadn’t been planning for months and months in advance. It wasn’t a case of growing more and more dissatisfied with Mandalore under the Empire over time. It all happened at once, and Ketsu didn’t plan any of it. If there had been anyone with a plan to defect, it was Sabine, and Ketsu wasn’t even sure Sabine had had a plan. Even more than with Ketsu, for Sabine, it had all happened at once. It happened too fast for plans, beyond your very basic “get off-world and try not to die in the process.”

(If they had known to prepare for it at the time, they might have planned against nightmares, Sabine especially—Sabine never slept all the way through the night anymore. They might have planned against memory burning too bright, against tears, against vomiting when they ate something heavier than air, against the screams that rattled in their ribcages until their ears were full of the sound of it, and they could hear no living sound. Might have planned, but didn’t know, and couldn’t plan.

Sabine was good at making things, but neither of them were any good at taking apart the things they’d built deep inside themselves.)

The next stage of the plan was “get off-world and go someplace where they can’t find us,” so Nar Shaddaa had seemed as good a place as any to make for. Nar Shaddaa was an easy place to get lost in, a great place to go if there was someone you were trying to outrun. Ketsu Onyo and Sabine Wren were trying to outrun an entire Empire, so nowhere short of Nar Shaddaa would do. And it did offer plenty in the way of employment opportunities for people with Ketsu and Sabine’s somewhat limited skillset.

“How does this look for a tag?”

“Okay, but Ketsu, why would you even want just one tag? I’d go nuts if I could only paint one thing.”

“It’s for recognition, Sabine. People who want to hire us, they need something tangible for us to base our reputation on.”

Sabine eyed Ketsu’s tag dubiously for a moment, before going back to focusing on what was fast turning into a full wall painting. “If you say so. Me, I’ll just let my style speak for itself.”

“Go right ahead. I could watch you paint all day.”

This had been Sabine’s idea in the first place, leaving a painted ‘mark’ in the general vicinity of an area where they’d nabbed a bounty, though Ketsu was beginning to suspect Sabine had suggested it more out of the need for a distraction than anything else. Ketsu didn’t mind so much, since Sabine had taught her how to use spray paint and now she could create art for herself, though Ketsu’s skill wasn’t anywhere near Sabine’s level. Not yet. Making art of her own was kind of heady (Ketsu couldn’t tell if this was going to be a permanent thing, or if it was just that the novelty hadn’t worn off yet), even if she was trying to ration the paint as much as possible, and only use it for her tags.

Sabine?

Sabine was showing no such restraint. If she was going to graffiti a wall, she was going to graffiti as much of that wall as was physically possible for her to graffiti.

Sometimes, Ketsu wondered if the denizens of Nar Shaddaa appreciated the free art they were being given at such a generous rate. She certainly hoped they appreciated it, because Sabine could spent hours at a time in a single session, and replacing her paints when she ran out of a certain color wasn’t exactly cheap. Tonight, Sabine’s painting wasn’t even bound by a single theme—she seemed to be going for whatever popped into her head.

There was the shriek-hawk, done up in unlikely shades of green and pink. There was a helmet in the same design as Sabine’s, but done in bluish-gray—the helmet of a female Death Watch operative, it looked like. There was a small portrait of one of the big-shot bounty hunters around here, a Zabrak named Sugi. A Gauntlet-class Starfighter, a pink and gold starburst, simple slanting lines of blue and purple. And, in the midst of it all, a broken sword.

The broken sword had been showing up in Sabine’s wall art a lot lately. With each new time she saw it, the less convinced Ketsu was that Jain-adi was a simple bedtime story, or whatever Sabine might try to pass it off as.

Sabine…

The dull white and gray of the Academy uniform wasn’t what Sabine wore anymore. When she’d left behind the ruins of her old life, she’d also quite definitively walked away from the muted color palette home had restricted her to. Sabine had taken the armor she had made with her family (painted, asides from the helmet, white with pale golden accents) and spray-painted it the brightest colors their meager savings could buy, a full spectrum of colors, until you would never have recognized it at first glance. Her hair was short now (which was a shame, since Ketsu had thought it looked prettier long, but when she had found Sabine in the process of cutting it, she’d finished the job herself) and dyed it a shade of pink so bright it almost hurt to look at it. It was definitely a good look for Sabine—the armor didn’t was her out like her uniform had, and once it stopped being kind of painful, the hair dye was a pretty shade of pink—but there was something like desperation running under the surface of it. Like Sabine was trying to project an image of having always been like this.

Ketsu didn’t know what Sabine wanted. Hell, Ketsu barely knew what she wanted, beyond living, not starving or getting shot, and maybe getting picked up to work for somebody like the Black Sun. Some security would be nice; some certainty would be nice. But asides from that, Ketsu had no idea what she wanted; things were usually happening either too fast or too slowly for her to get a good handle on it. She couldn’t even begin to guess what Sabine wanted. She wasn’t even sure that ‘not dying’ was on that list.

(What Ketsu told herself, again and again, was that if this was true, she didn’t care. It didn’t bother her. It was Sabine’s life, and how she chose to live it or end it was her own business. But still, Ketsu found herself checking to see how much Sabine had eaten, whether she was even trying to sleep at night, what she murmured to herself in shadowed places when she thought no one was listening. Ketsu took special care not to examine her own motives, though when Sabine smiled weakly at her, Ketsu couldn’t help but smile back.)

“I’m going to head back to our room,” Ketsu said at length, her eyes fixed on the side of Sabine’s head. “Don’t stay out here all night, okay?”

Sabine didn’t look at her as she muttered, “Sure.” She was absorbed in her work, to be certain, but Ketsu couldn’t see any joy in her face. Just concentration and that desperate thrum thrown up against the wall. Her eyes were glazed over, her mouth quirked in a tight, downwards line.

Ketsu bit back a sigh, and started back for their shared room in the nearby flophouse. There wasn’t going to be any getting Sabine to talk normally when she got like that.

As she made her way slowly down crowded, dimly-lit streets, Ketsu reflected on how different Nar Shaddaa was from Sundari. It was much more crowded, for one thing—Sundari had plenty of people in it, sure, but the Siege had left it rather depopulated compared to what it had been like before, and Nar Shaddaa was bursting at the seams with people by comparison. You couldn’t go anywhere, at any hour, without bumping into someone; the Smuggler’s Moon never slept, and nighttime was merely shift change. This was the last stop for a lot of people, their last chance for any kind of life at all, and plenty of them never made it off the moon’s surface again.

It was also a lot more diverse than Sundari had ever been. Sundari, as well as all the other major cities on Mandalore, was populated almost exclusively by humans. The only non-humans you saw were dock waters, black market dealers, drug runners, exotic dancers and prostitutes, the half-shadowed dregs of society. Here, however, humans were a decided minority compared to the seas of non-human faces Ketsu was confronted with every time she stepped outside her door. Twi’leks and Rodians, she’d had some experience with. But there were so many she hadn’t had any experience with at all, Kiffar and Trandoshan, Bith and Aqualish and Toydarian, Zabrak and Devaronian and Togruta and Quarren and Ithorian, and some species Ketsu couldn’t name. She’d even seen a few Wookiees from time to time, though not many. Nar Shaddaa was an incredible mix of species, a quagmire of languages, Huttese being the only one that bound them all. It still made Ketsu’s head spin, sometimes.

(This, ironically, was an area in which Sabine was doing somewhat better than Ketsu. Krownest being a colony world meant that they did tend to have a little more trade with outsiders, and Sabine’s clan being high class meant that Sabine tended to wind up in situations where she interacted with these outsiders. There were even a few non-human adoptees in Sabine’s clan, and though they might be from near-Human species, one Mirialan and two Kiffar, Sabine had still been brought up thinking of them as kin, rather than “Other.”

Not to say she wasn’t having problems, too. Sabine did occasionally just seem to grow overwhelmed with her surroundings, standing still in a street where everything else was moving, and staring around, huge-eyed and silent. And when there wasn’t the silence, there were the questions. One of the people living nearby them in the flophouse was a Miraluka, and Sabine had managed to make her extremely nervous by pestering her about how exactly she could see if she didn’t have any eyes. Ketsu would have thought it was funny, if she wasn’t afraid Sabine was going to get shot later.)

And there was the color.

Here was where Nar Shaddaa contrasted itself against Sundari most brilliantly: the color. You didn’t have to go digging in back alleys or condemned buildings to find color here—it was present everywhere you went, intense, screaming color. Ketsu feasted on color every time she stepped outside her door. Glowing neon signs in every color, though red and pink and golden were most common. The walls of buildings were done up in rust-red or deep blue or crisp black or orange, though the acid content in the rain tended to leave the paint jobs pretty uneven after a few months. The peoples’ clothing came in every hue imaginable, and so did their skin. Where humans’ skin came in shades primarily of pink or brown, non-humans were not nearly so restricted. In the Twi’leks Ketsu came across, just by themselves, she saw rich crimson, vivid blue, creamy yellow, warm orange, pale pink, bright green, and even striking violet.

This planet, these people, they were a bit like Sabine. There was some fast-flowing undercurrent of desperation to this performance, a plea to look at the surface and look no deeper. They girded themselves in color and were holding it up as a shield against, what, exactly?

Ketsu didn’t know. Even the armor she’d picked up from a non-quite-black market dealer had paint speckled on it, from standing too close to Sabine when she painted, and from her own endeavors. Maybe if she ever figured out what she wanted in life, she’d figure it out then.

Ketsu went back to their room in the flophouse. Waited for about an hour, and nothing. Told herself not to worry, and failed. Waited half an hour more, then strode back out her door.

She didn’t have to go all the way back to the paint site to find Sabine. She barely had to leave the flophouse proper to find Sabine. Sabine had taken perch at one of her favorite spots (or so Ketsu guessed; it was hard to tell with Sabine these days), the railing just outside the flophouse. The railing overlooked one of the major ship routes, but when there were relatively few ships to disturb the smog, the lights sparkling in the smog banks almost looked like stars.

The high wind whipping through the catwalks and the roar of nearby ships and speeder, they were enough that Ketsu didn’t hear it until she was close. When she did, she paused, frowning in confusion.

Sabine Wren could do just about everything you could think of. She could paint, could write eloquently and read and understand easily materials that had people ten years her senior scratching their heads in confusion. She could understand complex equations like other people understood 2 + 2 = 4. She could take things apart and then put them back together better than before. She spoke half a dozen languages, could mix chemicals to make her own explosives, and most impressively, knew six ways to kill a man bare-handed. One thing Sabine could not do was sing on-key.

Ketsu had teased her about it in the Academy. Sabine’s perpetual inability to sing properly was pretty funny, and her flustered reaction to being teased about it was even funnier. Sabine was nothing if not the galaxy’s biggest perfectionist; being confronted with something she couldn’t easily master was either the cue for her to work night and day trying to master it, or just not try at all. Singing had, after a trial period, fallen squarely in the latter category, and Ketsu rarely ever heard Sabine sing after that.

She was singing now, though, so quietly that Ketsu had to draw near to make anything out, and so quietly that you almost didn’t notice it was off-key. Her eyes were unfocused as she stared out over the city, and she noticed not when Ketsu came to stand beside her. She was singing not in Basic, nor Huttese, nor Sundari Standard Mando’a, but in her home dialect, and there was such a slow, heavy quality to her voice that Ketsu barely recognized it.

‘And she said “Where is my husband? Where are my sons? Where are my kin that raised me? Where is the home that sheltered me? It is gone, and I forsaken.” “Oh,” Jain-adi cried, “O broken land, Where must I wander now, So far from any welcoming arms?”’

Ketsu said nothing, and Sabine mumbled over the words of the song, so low that Ketsu couldn’t make anything out at all. She felt helpless, and hated it.

-0-0-0-

Leaving Sabine behind wasn’t anything Ketsu had planned, in that she hadn’t exactly been plotting it out for months and month in advance. It was just something that happened, a decision made on impulse during a job gone wrong. There had been no malice in it; Ketsu had just been trying to survive, like she always did. It had happened all at once, the instinct that told her ‘Stay alive!’ drowning out the instinct that said ‘Protect Sabine!’ like a scream drowned out a whisper.

It was nothing personal.

She hadn’t looked back, had willed herself over and over again not to look back, both in the sense of physically looking back, and later, in looking back upon memories. She’d willed memory to go fuzzy, and imagination to go dead, so she wouldn’t remember with clarity, and wouldn’t imagine what sort of face Sabine must have worn when she realized that Ketsu wasn’t coming back. Ketsu wasn’t so lucky, there.

But it didn’t matter; none of it mattered, now. There was no Sabine Wren in Ketsu Onyo’s life anymore, beyond what phantasms waited in her dreams. There was no one for Ketsu to care about but herself, and she had to focus on surviving. On not starving. On not getting shot, or stabbed. What room was there for anything else, when she had all of this to worry about?

Eventually, Ketsu did manage to get picked up by the Black Sun. She was good at her job, after all, and prided herself on never letting herself grow complacent like some of the older bounty hunters around the galaxy. The Black Sun liked that, and they liked Ketsu’s low failure rate even better. Now, Ketsu found herself with all the security and stability she had ever dreamed of when she lived in that flophouse on Nar Shaddaa, when she had fended for herself in Sundari before enrolling in the Academy. She had all she had ever wanted in life.

So Ketsu almost didn’t notice when she began living that life with an edge of quiet desperation, when she began rushing through it, when ‘Don’t look back’ and ‘That’s ancient history’ became things she told herself so often that she heard it in her head every day. She almost didn’t notice when the food she ate started tasting a little blander, when tracking down a bounty lost a little of its savor. She almost didn’t notice when every bit of color around her started looking a bit desaturated.

(Ketsu had picked up a new set of armor with the money she’d gotten from her first job with the Black Sun. She’d painted it bright, loud pink, nearly the same shade that Sabine’s hair had been dyed on Nar Shaddaa. It gave her some comfort, some reassurance.)

It didn’t matter, and when Ketsu told herself that, she could believe it. If the galaxy was a somewhat duller place, she was at least surviving in it.

iii.

(She met Sabine again, after the passage of many years. Ketsu found that something she’d thought dead inside of her was merely sleeping, and slowly waking up.)

iv.

Out of sheer embarrassment that her intel had been wrong and the Yost system wasn’t safe for Sabine’s cell of rebels after all, Ketsu brought in supplies for them on Atollon when she could. Starship fuel, rations, spare parts and the like; she might not quite be ready to pick a fight with the Empire, but she remembered her and Sabine struggling to get by on Nar Shaddaa, and memory was as keen as a vibroblade’s edge, these days.

“So what are these things again?” Ketsu asked Sabine, as they watched the giant insectoid creatures outside the line of sensor markers try to get at them where they were perched on empty crates. Apparently, the rebel base had a bit of a pest control problem, and though the rebels might have found a solution, the sheer size of these things still made Ketsu a bit leery. Especially since Sabine had confided that literally their only real weak spot, the only instant kill spot, was their eyes.

Sabine rolled her eyes. “A big problem,” she groused. “Thanks to them, nobody can go outside the base without a sensor marker, and we’ve gotta use a ton of sensor markers on our perimeter just so they won’t overrun the base.”

“Wouldn’t the weapons on one of the blockade runners be enough to kill them?”

“Don’t know, don’t wanna find out. They weave webs strong enough to ground the Ghost; I don’t want to know if they can do the same thing with the blockade runners.”

“They did what?! You’re joking, right?!”

“I wish; we all nearly ended up lunch for these things!”

Ketsu eyed Sabine disbelievingly, her eyebrow twitching, just a little bit. “…You know, I know a world with great beaches if you ever decide you don’t want to live on this hellhole anymore.”

Sabine laughed, and Ketsu tried not to think about just how long it had been since she had last heard Sabine laugh (Before they left the Academy, more likely than not; on Nar Shaddaa, Sabine had barely been able to summon the will needed to smile). “No thanks. With our luck, it would probably turn out a Star Destroyer was letting its crew take shore leave there.”

“You’re probably right. Even if they’d never know what hit them, once we were done.”

Eventually, Atollon’s pest control problem got bored with trying to find a way around the sensor markers and left. Ketsu relaxed a little, leaning back with her palms planted on the empty crate she was sitting on. Sabine had picked out a spot at the very edge of the base, still within view of the ships, but not exactly within shouting distance. It was quieter out here, with only the wind to break the silence.

Of course, there was inevitably more than a little dust in that wind. Ketsu wondered how anyone managed to live here without choking on the dust; she certainly didn’t see anyone wearing face masks over their mouths and noses. Whenever she was here, Ketsu found herself keeping her helmet on, unless she was dealing with Sabine. It was hot, too, in a way that neither Sundari nor Nar Shaddaa had ever been. It might have been a dry heat (which sure beat the alternative; Nar Shaddaa might have been humid, but at least it was also cool), but the sun still managed to beat down hard on everything it touched. Between the heat and the dust, Ketsu knew these people must have been having a hard time keeping their ships in good shape.

They wanted somewhere remote, somewhere the Empire wouldn’t think to look for them. They never said anything about ��hospitable’; there wasn’t exactly anyone in the Yost system I would have called paradise.

Still, the sunsets here were nice.

Night was fast approaching. Give it maybe two hours, and the skies over Atollon would be dark. For now, the horizon, the plateaus and the strange coral-like rock formations, were touched with gentle light. The sky was golden, and shone pink and lavender, tinged orange.

The lavender matched Sabine’s hair, actually. She’d changed her dye since last Ketsu saw her, switching out a bright, electric blue for a softer, gentler-looking lavender—though Ketsu noticed that ‘lavender’ seemed to veer towards ‘white’ closer to Sabine’s roots (She wondered if that was a deliberate choice, or if the dye had just been low-quality). Changed her haircut, too, so that her hair was shorter now, tapering off around her chin instead of clinging to the back of her neck.

Her hair wasn’t the only thing about Sabine that had changed. Her arm and leg muscles were noticeably leaner—she’d always been trim, but it looked like she’d been stepping up her strength training lately. Her face had lost the last of its childish roundness, cast now in narrower, more angular lines, the sharp line of her cheekbones finally fully revealed. Sabine was, mercifully (it would have been a little embarrassing to have to explain herself), unaware of Ketsu’s scrutiny, instead staring off into the wilderness, with a look on her face that defied definition. A type of regret Ketsu refused to define curdled in her stomach as she looked at her.

Maybe… but no.

“So… how have things been around here? Asides from your pest control problem?”

It seemed as good a conversation starter as any. Nice and safe, with nothing that could even remotely be defined as a leading question. Sabine could talk so much more freely, but Ketsu found herself barely able to spit out anything more personal than ‘I’m good.’

Sabine kicked her crate with the back of her foot. “About the same as the last time you were here,” she said noncommittally. Last time, Sabine had been nervous and snappish, and though she’d never explained her behavior, Ketsu had gotten the impression that there was a bit of a situation on the Ghost. Apparently that situation was still ongoing, though maybe not as bad as last time, if Sabine could be calmer now. A small smile appeared suddenly on Sabine’s lips. “You remember what I told you last time? That Commander Sato was trying to track down an illegal still?”

“Yeah, I remember.” Apparently, drinking alcohol, let alone brewing it, was a big no-no on the base. Ketsu didn’t get it—it seemed to her that these people needed a way to unwind if they were risking death every day—but that was still the way things were around here. A boring place, as well as hot, dry and dusty. “I take it he found it?”

“Oh, yeah, he found it, alright.” Sabine snickered. “He found it in the hold of his own ship. We all thought we were gonna have to peel him off the ceiling.”

Ketsu snorted. “I’ll bet; he seemed like a bit of a hardass when I met him. So what, are the perpetrators kicked out of the rebellion?”

“Uh-uh. We… can’t actually afford to toss people out over stuff like that; we don’t have enough personnel for that. They’ve just been put on maintenance duty for the next six months.”

“Well, that’s one way to discourage a repeat offense.” Ketsu rolled her shoulders and quirked an eyebrow. “In their place, I probably would’ve done the same thing. It’s not like there’s a lot around here for entertainment; I’d take your worst homemade booze over sitting around on off-hours doing nothing any day.”

Sabine wrinkled her nose. “Ketsu, we have to be ready for an attack at all times. It’s kinda hard to be ready if you’re drunk or hung-over.”

A sudden burst of laughter escaped Ketsu’s throat. “You’re still so strait-laced, Sabine!”

“Only compared to you!” Sabine retorted, but she was smiling.

-0-0-0-

“Jain-adi…” Sabine sighed lightly, staring out at the dark sky. It was night now, and Atollon’s remarkably clear skies showed a canvas of billions of twinkling stars. “…I never told you about Jain-adi, did I?”

Ketsu didn’t answer. She stared at Sabine in silence, wishing she could see in the dark better, so she could see her face.

But Sabine seemed to take Ketsu’s silence for uncomplicated assent, for she went on, “Jain-adi was a story my grandmother taught me when I was little. It’s a poem, as long as the epics we learned about in the Academy, but it can be sung, too.

“Jain-adi was a Mandalorian who fought during one of the great clan wars about two, two and a half thousand years ago. No idea if she really existed or not; I just know that the poem dates to about eighteen thousand years ago. Jain-adi was a warrior who fought for House Vizsla. She made…” Sabine paused, and even in the dark, Ketsu could see her tense, could see her lick her lips. “…She made weapons for her kin to use.”

I can see why that would hit a little too close to home.

“But the plans for her weapons were stolen,” Sabine said, very softly, “and the enemy turned her creations against her, and all that she held dear. Her homeworld was attacked, and most of her clan was killed, including her husband and their children. She was beaten; her sword was broken. Jain-adi was forced to go into exile, carrying her broken sword with her.”

It was a long time before Ketsu could say anything in response to that. Finally, she managed, “That sounds… familiar,” in a voice that was only a little choked.

Sabine nodded. “Yeah,” she replied, in a voice that was only a little choked, too. “There were times when I felt like I was living…”

Stories had their power, but that power wasn’t always a force for good.

“But,” Sabine said suddenly, and her voice was as crisp and clear as a winter morning with no clouds, “up until recently, I’d forgotten how the story ends.”

“With all the major characters dead and the spoils being sorted out amongst whoever managed to live to the end?” Ketsu asked skeptically. That was how most Mandalorian epics tended to end.

“No, Ketsu.” Sabine drew her legs up on the crate and turned to face Ketsu directly. “Jain-adi wandered the Outer Rim for about twenty years, but eventually, she went home. She gathered an army, and she went home. She routed House Vizsla’s enemies and freed her homeworld. She won.

“I… I don’t know if I’ll ever go home.” Sabine looked away briefly, saying quietly, “I don’t know if there’s anything left for me there,” before turning her attention back to Ketsu. “But I believe we can beat the Empire. I believe we can get rid of them. I’m not saying I think it’ll be easy, but I know I can try, and I know I can keep fighting until we’ve won.”

She spoke with such blazing certainty, and with none of that edge of desperation that Ketsu had discerned in her on Nar Shaddaa, or in Sundari by the end. It was like… like she really believed they could do it, her and the other rebels. Ketsu stared at Sabine, stunned. When did this happen? When did she get like this?

When Ketsu finally found her tongue, she couldn’t address this directly. Not quite yet. Instead, she leaned in a little closer to Sabine, and asked curiously, “Whatever happened to that first painting you did for that competition? The one with Jain-adi in it?”

Sabine let out a choking, exasperated laugh. “It didn’t even place. The judges said it was ‘amateurish’, which is hilarious considering every one of the contestants were my age, so it wasn’t like any of us could have been professionals. I sent it home to my family. I wonder if they even kept it, after…” She trailed off, and there was no mistaking the undercurrent of bitterness in her voice.

Ketsu’s heart began pounding too hard, too fast in her chest. There was something she found herself longing to say, but still, she couldn’t find it in herself to say it just yet. Instead, there came something that had been a long time coming, something that had spent the better part of a year festering in her chest. “…Sabine, for what it’s worth… I am sorry for what happened.”

“I already said I forgave you,” Sabine replied swiftly, looking away and hunching her shoulders.

“Yeah, you did.” Ketsu shifted her weight uncomfortably. “But I never said I was sorry.”

She was. It surprised Ketsu more than probably anyone else, but she was. She’d done it to survive, but that still didn’t mean… The more she thought about it, the more it screamed in her, deep inside.

Sabine drew a deep, whistling breath; she folded her arms over her chest. Still avoiding Ketsu’s gaze, she muttered, “We… we were both really screwed up, weren’t we?” An uneven sound that wasn’t a laugh, wasn’t a sob, wasn’t much of anything tore from her mouth.

“Yeah.” Now it was Ketsu’s turn to look away. “We were.”

This was still too easy, but it would have to do.

…

“Sabine, listen.”

“What is it?”

“It’s gonna be a while before my contract with the Black Sun expires. But when it does… I was thinking. You guys need all the people you can get, right?”

At that, Ketsu had Sabine’s full attention. Even in the dark, Sabine seemed practically to vibrate with excitement as she demanded, “Are you serious?”

Slowly, very slowly, a smile unfurled over Ketsu’s lips. “…I think so, yeah.”

She’d always been looking for something she couldn’t find. She’d always been trying to figure out what she wanted to do with her life. Ketsu still wasn’t sure about those first two points, but lately, she’d been wondering if just surviving was really what she wanted after all. Maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t, but just looking at how the rebellion had given Sabine her sense of purpose back, her sense of joy back, Ketsu wondered if maybe it wasn’t worth a shot. She’d never know if she never tried.

It was too dark to see if Sabine smiled or not. But her amber eyes shone like stars in the darkness, and that was enough.

#Star Wars: Rebels #Star Wars #Fanfic #Femslash February #Ketsu Onyo #Sabine Wren #Ketbine

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