Chapter Text
Bly knew that the General was his soulmate from the very first second he saw her. It wasn’t hard to tell. She dressed in the exact sort of clothes his soulmate lost, she was a twi’lek, like his soulmate, and, more to the point, she looked at the ribbon he had tied around his bracer with recognition. He’d taken to wearing it for exactly this purpose, and he was rather gratified to know that it had worked.
“Bly,” he introduced himself, offering her his hand, the one with the ribbon attached.
“Aayla Secura,” she said, and gave him a smile that could have outshone whole galaxies. “I think you have something of mine.”
“A few somethings. And some that shouldn’t be shared around polite company.” Calling his brothers ‘polite’ was, perhaps, a stretch.
She gave him a rather wicked grin. “I could say the same for you, Commander Bly. Of course, I’d be perfectly willing to share them in my quarters later, if you’d like.”
He’d been waiting his entire life to meet this woman. “It would be my pleasure.”
“Then I look forward to seeing you there.”
--
Having Garen as a soulmate had always been one of the best things to ever have happened to Bant, but it was harder, now. They’d always known that there was a risk in having another Jedi for a soulmate. Growing up around Qui-Gon and Tahl made that fact impossible to miss. But there was a difference between the abstract risk and the knowledge that they were both going into a warzone every single day. And so were all of their friends, their family.
A list floated around in her head, of everyone she risked losing. Siri, Obi-Wan, Nahdar, Master Kit, Garen. All of them were in the war, every single day. A chance of losing any of them to it.
She reached into her desk, to retrieve a datapad and get her mind off things, and came up with a galactic standard six-function hyperdrive maintenance wrench instead. It was as good a reminder as anything that they weren’t dead yet.
--
They’d been walking for a few minutes when Bly thought to ask, “General Kenobi isn’t coming back with us?”
General Vos laughed. “No. I believe he’s biting his belt-buckle, so to speak, and going to do something he promised me he would do a long time ago.”
Since Vos had brought it up, Bly asked, “and what’s that?”
“Talk to the person who is, in all likelihood, his soulmate,” Vos said, as though this wasn’t shocking.
“General Kenobi’s soulmate is a vod?”
“Oh, certainly. The difficulty is in getting him to admit who.”
Bly was already running the population of the bar through in his mind. Neither Wolffe nor Fox. Not Rex, unless Kenobi had some very questionable and surprising taste in literature. Waxer and Boil were each other’s…
Well, there was one candidate among his closest brothers who everyone assumed had a Jedi for a soulmate, even if he was in denial about it. And from what Vos said, denial fit perfectly. “So he’s Cody’s, then?”
Vos stopped dead in his tracks and turned to look at Bly. “Does Cody know? The lightsaber thing isn’t very subtle, but Obi-Wan is convinced it isn’t reciprocal. He never finds anything in return.”
Cody always was too organized for his own good. Even Fox knew the value of allowing his socks to disappear on occasion, for his soulmate’s reassurance.
“Cody’s probably in denial about it. He never thought he had a soulmate, growing up.”
Vos shook his head. “Well, that makes two of them.”
A thought occurred to Bly that probably would have come sooner if he were less tipsy. “How the kriff did you get General Kenobi to promise to confess before he’s certain?”
Vos laughed. “Two words: Good bet.”
“What did you bet on?”
“Well, we’ve long debated which of us has the more troublesome padawan. It used to be who was more trouble, but now that they’re knighted and fighting a war we debate who’s less trouble. I finally decided to put a number on it and bet that Aayla would be married and settled down before Skywalker is.”
Bly had to run the sentence through his head a few times, and it still didn’t make any sense that Vos would have won that bet. “I thought Senator Amidala and General Skywalker were already married.”
“Oh, they are. Have been for years, I think. But Skywalker has more hang-ups than a holocall spammer, so he won’t admit that it’s reached that level of commitment. I think he thinks it keeps her safe or something stupid like that. Anyways, Obi-Wan was sure Anakin would admit to it, and he was sure that Aayla wouldn’t make that sort of commitment. Well, I know Aayla better than he does, and Skywalker is frankly worse than either of us gave him credit for, so I won.”
Bly had been surprised too, by the idea that Aayla would want to spend the rest of her life with him. They would always be soulmates, of course, but there was a whole galaxy out there, and Aayla could have had anything she wanted in it. He had nothing to offer someone as skilled and brilliant and beautiful as Aayla Secura. He knew that very well. She was a warrior and a pilot and a scholar, and she could make more ribald jokes than any of his vode, and he utterly adored her.
“Credit for your thoughts?” Vos asked, as they stepped into the shuttlebus and he paid the fare for both of them.
“Why the kriff is she marrying me, Vos?”
The Jedi’s gloved hand was suddenly on his shoulder, steadying him as the vehicle lifted off. “You should ask her that. And you should call me Quinlan. As of tomorrow, we’re family.”
Bly had a family of millions. Why did the addition of one more feel so significant?
“Thank you, Quinlan.”
He smiled at Bly with a joy that was so much like Aayla’s. For two people who shared no blood, not even that of the same species, they looked remarkably alike sometimes.
“For the record, Bly, I think she married you because you’ve been making her happy since the day you left her your underwear.”
Not that again. Bly really never was going to live that down. “I didn’t do that on purpose.”
“No, but you did learn to embroider so you could return her notes. That meant a great deal to her at the time. And to me.”
“To you?” Bly asked him. He thought he detected surprisingly strong emotion, for a Jedi, but Quinlan had always been surprising, to Aayla’s frequent dismay.
“Aayla Secura is the person in this world most worthy of happiness. She deserved someone willing to do that sort of mad hare-brained romantic thing with her. When I learned how little you and your kin had to lose, that made me realize, even more profoundly, how much trust you placed in her, just from those notes. She deserves that love.”
Bly was keenly aware of how hot his face had grown and he would have buried his head in his hands if he wasn’t worried that he’d fall over if he let go of the pole. “I adore her.”
“Don’t worry. The feeling is mutual.” At a glance from Bly, he added, “Jedi intuition.”
--
“I cannot believe that Obi-Wan Kenobi upstaged our wedding! I absolutely cannot believe that man.”
“Yeah, but it’s sort of expected for him, isn’t it? He’s almost as bad as Skywalker on the battlefield. Imagine how I feel getting upstaged by Cody. Cody!”
“But it was worth it to see the look on Anakin’s face when they walked in together. That shock and then total glee.”
“And you haven’t even seen the footage Wolffe recorded of when everyone in 79’s figured it out the night before. The look on Fox’s face!”
“And is that something you have access to, Commander Secura?”
“Indeed it is, cyare.”
--
Satine loathed the war and violence that had become as much the sigil of her people as the Darksaber itself was. She loathed them with every fibre of her being. And yet as Maul ranted at Obi-Wan and she stood there beside his soulmate, blood running down her face, she wanted the Sith to die. For everything he’d done to her people, to her friends, she wanted him dead.
Satine’s soulmate had betrayed her a very long time ago. They’d both learned to stop sending any well-meaning gifts soon after, cataloguing every belonging of value with the utmost care. But in that moment where Cody nudged her and she glanced down to see the lightsaber resting at their feet, she thought she understood exactly what it would have felt like to have a soulmate who loved her.
“Ah!” She gasped, and fell to the floor, covering the hilt with her skirt.
“Get up,” the darjetii commanded her, and, when Satine didn’t move, there was a feeling like nails scratching across her face, opening the wound on the right side of her forehead further.
Blood dripped down onto her skirt and Satine wished, fiercely, that she was wearing something more practical than this. But it served its purpose well, letting her bring her cuffed hands to the hidden hilt without the darjetii noticing it. She hoped all her years of friendship with Obi-Wan had taught her enough to let her wield it.
“I’m getting up,” Satine told Maul, allowing the deep exhaustion she felt to seep into her voice. He turned back to Obi-Wan, never for a second imagining that the woman behind him was armed just the same as the Jedi before him was.
Satine found her fingers drawn instinctively to the button that ignited the blade, and, rising to her feet, she drove it through the heart of the man who’d tried to destroy her. Many, many people had tried to destroy Satine Kryze over the years, and all of them had failed.
Somehow it transpired, when all was said and done, that they left her alone, sitting in her walk-in closet with Bo-Katan. Satine wasn’t sure the last time they’d been alone together. The Darksaber sat, unlit, on the table where Satine usually did her makeup in the morning. Bo’s helmet lay beside it.
“Do you think it counts?” Satine asked her sister, and then hissed at the stinging sensation of her cut being sanitized.
“The darjetii was never worthy of wielding the Darksaber. He was no true Mandalorian.” Bo-Katan switched over to a bacta spray, trying to work it into the portion of the wound beneath Satine’s hairline.
“And me?” Satine asked, in no mood for further games or surprises. “Am I worthy, or should I be expecting a challenge from you in the morning?”
The Darksaber, the helmet, and all of Satine’s makeup shook as Bo slammed the spray bottle and her fist down on the table. When Satine looked up at her, she realized, with some shock, that her sister was crying.
“Bo?”
“Di’kutla utreekov,” Bo snapped, voice raw. “Why do you have to do things like this? Run around with jetiise. He isn’t even your soulmate.”
“He’s been better to me than Ty ever has. Better than you too, vod.”
Bo squeezed her fists tight, but didn’t hit anything. A moment later, she grabbed the edge of the table so hard the wood creaked. “I don’t understand you at all. You devote yourself to that jetii and then you take up a weapon to save his soulmate? You preach peace and then you kill a darjetii?” Satine sat back and let her finish. It was cathartic, in a way. Bo was expressing all of that day’s fear and anger and trauma for both of them.
“You almost died today, Satine. And for what? For your dream of peace. And you didn’t, and you killed a darjetii, and now you have the Darksaber, and I don’t want to lose you.”
There it was. Bo’s voice cracked, and Satine stood, shakily, to pull her sister into a hug. Even with most of her armour still on, Bo was good to hug. She was strong, and she held Satine up as her muscles trembled with exhaustion.
“I wanted to kill him. He hurt me, and he hurt Obi-Wan. And he hurt our people. I wanted him dead and the lightsaber was there and I was the only person who could do it and I–”
“You did the right thing,” Bo assured her, words comforting in spite of their source. “You’re Mandalorian, vod, whether you like it or not.”
“You and I will never agree on what being Mandalorian means.”
“Probably not. But I think today has more than proven that we both know what it isn’t.”
“Does that mean I won’t be receiving any challenges from your terrorist cell for my ill-gotten accessory?”
They both pulled back from the hug and looked at the weapon on the table. Bo’s hands were still on Satine, holding her steady by her shoulders. It was probably a testament to how worried Bo had been that she didn’t contradict Satine’s use of the word ‘terrorist’.
After a moment, Bo said, “The Vizslas shared it among aliit without bloodshed.”
Satine gave her her best scolding sisterly look. “We are not going back to the old way.”
“And I think the last week has more than shown that if you continue trying to change Mandalore all at once, you will die. You need me. Take up the Darksaber and bring us home. My way didn’t stop Mandalore from falling into civil war and losing our own to the wars of the jetii and darjetii. Neither did yours. We need something new. Together.”
Satine was entirely too exhausted to consider overthrowing her own government. “Tomorrow, Bo. Please.”
Her sister’s grin was cunning and wicked both. “Whatever you say, Mand’alor.”
“Don’t call me that.”
“Sith-slayer.”
“No.”
--
She was quiet, Obi-Wan’s sort-of daughter. Satine recognized so much of herself at that age in this lonely, traumatized girl. She watched as Ahsoka carefully counted every one of her belongings, tied the most valuable things to her body with string, created labels for where every item in her room belonged.
“It gets easier,” Satine assured her, on one of the rare occasions where Ahsoka was willing to speak about their mutual wound. “I’ve been doing this longer than you’ve been alive, and I promise it gets easier. There are more things to be happy about. More people in the galaxy to love.”
She scuffed her heels on the floor. “At least I don’t have a lightsaber to lose anymore. They almost arrested me after I was found innocent to make sure I wouldn’t find a way to leave her with weapons or contraband. I’ve asked Rex to make sure nobody gives me anything she could use as a weapon.”
Satine had been forced to do the same, once. She was lucky, profoundly, that there was no chance of her losing the Darksaber to him. Bo-Katan’s sources suggested that Ty was dead, and Satine trusted her sister. There was, in point of fact, a part of her that wondered if Bo might be the reason that Ty was dead. She had certainly had the opportunity, and she was one of few people living – Satine, Bo, Obi-Wan – who knew exactly what he had done.
“That will get easier, too. There are things in this world of greater value than the ability to swing a blade.”
“But I was good at that. I was a good Jedi.”
Satine wanted to strangle everyone on the Jedi Council except for Obi-Wan. “Yes, you were. And you didn’t deserve this. But you can be so many more things than a good Jedi, Ahs’ika.”
“I didn’t want to be anything other than that.”
Death to the Jedi Council, Satine decided. Bo-Katan would be thrilled by her new protective and murderous streak. In addition to hating the Jedi and advocating murder on principle, Bo had developed a somewhat-ironic affection for Ahsoka. “You’re allowed to grieve, you know. For the person you wanted to be.”
“You sound like my therapist.”
“That’s because she was my therapist too.”
Ahsoka let out a watery laugh, and let Satine give her a protective side-hug.
--
“You’re not allowed to die.”
Kit flicked his eyes open. The light from the skylight, filtered through the blue-green of the temple’s saltwater pools turned Bant’s orange skin a reddish-brown colour. The trouble with having trained Mon Calamari padawans was that being underwater didn’t actually provide any retreat from them. Next time he was going to take on a padawan who didn’t know how to swim at all, out of sheer spite.
“Bant…”
She crossed her arms and glowered at him. “Not until you get as old as Master Yoda. I stood by the pyre of one master already. You’re living to be 900.”
“I didn’t really mean for the Sith to get as close as he did.”
She spun a jet of water at him with the Force, sending his head-tails waving. “Well, too bad. Depa and I have decided that we’re starting a coup. You and Master Windu aren’t allowed anywhere near that level of danger ever again.”
He could have admitted to her that none of the Jedi who had faced Darth Sidious were likely to see field combat ever again. Possibly not even Knight Skywalker, who was physically unharmed in the confrontation. But pointing that out would have been depressing, and teasing Bant was fun.
“Oh? How are you planning on enforcing that?”
“Have you seen Depa’s padawan? We’re not going to have any trouble enforcing it.”
Kriff, that was a good point.
--
“There’s a part of me,” Padmé confessed, voice low as if she carried the most terrible secret, “that wishes he wasn’t dead so I could kill him.”
“I know exactly how you feel, Senator,” Fox said.
They were both standing at the doorway to the Chancellor’s office, unable to enter.
“I’m going to have to go back in at some point.”
So much of her world was tainted already, with Palpatine’s careful fingers having left their prints on everything, on Anakin and on the Republic and even on these last few days of her pregnancy, which should have been happy ones.
“I don’t think anyone would blame you if you didn’t.”
“I would.”
But neither of them went in. They stood there and stared at the closed door until approaching footsteps alerted them to the presence of two more supplicants, coming to stare at the altar of their collective failure.
“Padmé.” It was Bail, of course. “Fox.”
He put his hand on his Commander’s shoulder. It was generally understood that Fox was soulmates with one of the Organas. Even Padmé didn’t know which, which led her to suspect that it might, in fact, be both. Or perhaps it didn’t really matter which it was. Regardless, she was sure the match was a good one, proven by the way they stood close now, Bail acting almost as a bulwark between Fox and the world. After everything, Fox deserved someone who would fight to protect him with the same resilience and courage that he fought with to protect them. Bail and Breha could do that.
Padmé had to turn around to see that the second pair of footsteps belonged to Obi-Wan. She knew that he felt as grief stricken and angry with the universe as she did, but he hid it better.
“I thought you were with Anakin.” Padmé left her husband in Obi-Wan’s care, and her children in Sabé’s, to come here and check up on her work. She hadn’t meant to be swept into the sinister orbit of the chancellor’s office.
“I was,” Obi-Wan admitted. “But Quinlan – Master Vos – is with him now, and I thought it best to give them both some privacy.”
His words would probably have been more impactful if Padmé had room in her head for the names of all the Jedi. “Remind me?”
“We almost lost him in deep cover with Dooku. He’s a very dear friend of mine, and Aayla’s teacher.”
Of course. “So, that’s why you aren’t there, but why are you here? Unlike the three of us, you aren’t going to have to walk into that office ever again if you don’t want to.”
“I have to,” Obi-Wan said, gravely, “because I am a Jedi and I cannot let him haunt me.”
And he stepped past all of them, and opened the door to a very normal office. Someone had replaced the broken transparisteel window, had straightened the furniture and even cleaned up the papers on Palpatine’s desk. Padmé had seen it after the fight, when she’d gone with Anakin to find Master Windu, and it had looked nothing like this.
Her stomach churned and she felt ill in a way that had nothing to do with her recent pregnancy. When she looked down at the floor, she could still see the bodies of each of the four Jedi Masters as she rushed from one to another to see if they were breathing. She still remembered dragging Windu away from the open window while Anakin called for the healers and had a panic attack in the doorway.
“I hate him,” Fox whispered. It was, perhaps, the only volume appropriate for this moment.
They’d discovered, after Palpatine’s death, his true plans for the Clones. It was, from an objective perspective, the most sickening part of this whole affair. Even if Padmé’s love for Anakin was more immediate to her, she could recognize the objective monstrosity of this meticulously planned double-genocide, which would have killed the minds and spirits of the clones as much as the bodies of the Jedi.
“So do I.”
Obi-Wan, standing just across the threshold, said, “I can’t hold on to hating him. That is not the Jedi way.”
No, it wasn't. And the last thing Anakin needed right now was for the rest of them to be stewing in their anger. It would be bad for the twins, too. Anakin and Obi-Wan both agreed that Luke and Leia were force-sensitive enough to pick up on strong emotions, even at such an incredibly young age.
Fox surveyed the group and said, “do you all want to go to the Guard’s training room and do something a bit more productive than this to relieve our anger?”
Sparring probably wasn’t the best post-pregnancy activity, but Padmé was absolutely aching to hit something and doing it in a controlled environment, without Anakin, Luke, or Leia there to see it, was most likely the best possible approach. They must have had a punching bag she could use.
“Yes, please.”
And so Obi-Wan allowed the door to swing shut behind him, and they did.