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It was the end of a long, difficult day when the news reached Satine.
Another day of overrunning meetings, bitingly hard debates, and endless numbers that never quite added up to what she needed. Though the situation was improving, there still wasn’t enough food for her people, or medicine for her peacekeepers, or materials to rebuild after the destruction.
When she finally retired for the evening it was with some elation, and not just at the chance to rest; her Council had finally agreed on something that would at least protect the children and the elderly. It wasn’t perfect, but it was progress.
Her high spirits only made their fall that much greater. She took the news in her private chambers, sitting at her dresser as she let one of her handmaidens gently release her hair from the grip of the elaborate headpiece. The aide had been instructed to recite to her all of the messages she had missed during the meeting, as he did each night, and neither of them were expecting anything so grim. It struck her like a gut punch, knocking the air out of her lungs and leaving her winded for a moment.
Surely he couldn’t be...
“It says... They’re to hold a funeral on Coruscant in two rotations, my lady.” The poor aide could barely keep his voice steady as he finished reading, a mixture of sympathy and pity in his eyes.
She sat there for a moment, the sights and sounds of her surroundings vanishing into white noise as she sank into a mental pit of despair.
Obi-Wan... Her Obi-Wan... Her jetii...
Gone.
She snapped back to reality. She was still the Duchess of Mandalore. Her people needed her, and she would need that Mandalorian strength now more than ever.
“Well,” she said finally, in a strangled voice, “we had better leave immediately.”
The handmaiden removed the last of her hair from the headpiece and withdrew it, giving Satine the space to stagger to her feet.
“Ready my ship,” she commanded. “Bring my travel clothes.”
Perhaps if she focused on the journey, she could keep the pain of her destination at bay.
The flight to Coruscant felt like an eternity of silence, yet at the same time, seemed to pass in a blur. She remembered changing into her travel clothes, and then sitting down in her ship, and then Padmé greeting her on the landing platform with a warm, comforting embrace. She hardly felt it; after the initial shock had worn off, all she felt was numb. They took a meal together – it might have been lunch, but she had stopped paying attention to mundane things like time – and then it was time for the ceremony.
That was where she started to feel again. Seeing the ranks of the Jedi – all of his friends, his teachers, his students – gathered to say goodbye, it made it all feel so much more real. She could feel the echoes of his life and the impact he had made all around her, in these people.
An emptiness welled up inside her, a hole left behind by him, and she felt her eyes prick with tears. They tracked silently down her cheeks as her body trembled, grief threatening to break free, until she remembered his calmness, his serenity, his poise. She channeled that, maintaining her posture and her noble demeanor, allowing no more than those first tears to escape.
She was strong. She was Mandalorian. She would survive this.
She took deep breaths, barely listening to the words Master Yoda was saying. Opposite her, she could almost feel the despair radiating from Anakin in waves, nearly eclipsing Ahsoka who stood beside him. They were both so young to have lost so much.
The whole Temple was mourning, and whether it was its occupants’ connection to the Force or simply a reflection of herself, Satine could feel it. Beside her, Bail and Padmé grieved too, though she could tell there was more to the Naboo senator’s feelings – she was sharing in Anakin’s pain, too. Each time she glanced at the young man, the concern was written plainly on her face.
Unlike most of the Jedi she had encountered on this day, the members of the Council in attendance seemed perfectly serene. Perhaps they were just better at dealing with their emotions, as Obi-Wan had always said a true Jedi should.
Something niggled at the back of her mind, something that made her uneasy about the whole thing. She couldn’t quite put her finger on what was causing it, so she allowed herself to be swept along in the rituals. The ceremony ended, the blanket-covered body was sent down into the bowels of the Jedi Temple and she was invited with the other senators to a wake in Padmé’s apartments. Anakin, Ahsoka and the other masters remained in the Temple, and while she understood that her place was with the politicians, she still wished she could have stayed with them. Obi-Wan was a charming face for the Jedi in the Senate, but his true home had always been amongst the Order.
Padmé offered to allow Satine to stay with her for a few days, and Satine accepted, grateful for the support. They heard the news that the killer – a sniper, such a cowardly way to kill, the dormant warrior in her thought – had been caught, and was being taken to a high-security prison. There was no trial; apparently he’d confessed as soon as they’d found him.
Strangely, everything seemed to return to normal once the criminal was locked up. Of course she was glad they’d caught him, but once it was done no-one seemed to even acknowledge that Obi-Wan was still gone. She hadn’t expected anything drastic – it wasn’t as if the war was going to simply stop because one man had died – but from what she could gather, they weren’t even replacing his now-vacant seat on the Jedi Council. His clone legion wasn’t being re-assigned. He was even still scheduled to teach a class of younglings next month.
She stayed with Padmé for a further day or two, unable to puzzle out the mystery and feeling it slip away from her as the cloud of grief came back. Time blurred again, causing her to lose track of day and night. Eventually she would need to return to Mandalore.
Then, on the day she was due to leave, the news of the prison break came. Rako Hardeen, the bounty hunter, the murderer, had escaped.
And suddenly, she had a purpose.
She sent her ship and her entourage back to Mandalore with orders to take the long route. If anyone asked, she was on board. No, leave the box, but take everything else. Hurry along now, the Coronet can't miss its departure slot.
The captain of her guard seemed to understand what she was doing. From the glint in his eye, he was fully on board.
Left alone in some anonymous, rented apartment in Coruscant, Satine looked at her box. The tall, heavy container looked quite simple on the outside; no fancy decoration or ornamentation, just covered in the small dents and scratches that it had suffered in the years it had followed her. It was no secret that her aides hated lugging it around wherever she went, but she had always insisted on bringing it with her. She never knew when she might need it, after all.
It hadn’t been opened in nearly twenty years, and few besides her realised what was inside. The time had finally come to open it up once again.
She pressed her ungloved hand to the small panel in the center. It beeped quietly and a green light flashed, accepting her bioscan. The doors unlocked with a hiss, and as she pulled them open, the long-dormant warrior inside her flickered back to life.
You can remove beskar from Mandalore, but you cannot remove a Mandalorian from beskar.
She might be a pacifist, but she had never rid herself of her armour. Even after all these years it still shimmered, iridescent, shades of blue and green and purple glinting at her. The box had kept it from dust and dirt, and the beskar would never rust.
She removed her outer robe, letting it fall to the floor and revealing the black, skin-tight jumpsuit she wore underneath. She began to don the armour, piece by piece, slowly at first but quickly returning to her old pace. She hadn’t forgotten how to do any of this, and it still fit her like a glove. The helmet came last, the symbol of Clan Kryze proudly displayed on the forehead, matching the sigil on her shoulder.
It felt good to wear it again.
She slipped through the back streets of Coruscant all too easily, no-one paying the slightest attention to what was around them. She found the shipyard with the small fighter she had hired – untraceable to her, of course – and soon she was launching into the blue whorls of hyperspace. A transmission to the Chancellor from one of his many Outer Rim contacts had been intercepted, so she knew her destination: Nal Hutta.
She landed on the edge of the grimy bazaar and immediately set to combing its winding roads for her target, too focused on her goal to be repulsed by the foul conditions of the buildings or their residents. When she spotted Hardeen, calmly strolling down a narrow alley, her hunter’s instincts took over. The training that had never really left her allowed her to tread softly despite the heavy metal that cradled her body as she stalked her prey, carefully placing her footsteps around the debris littering the ground, her cape fluttering silently behind her.
Something seemed to alert him to her presence at the last moment, for he stiffened and cocked his head, but it was too late. In one swift motion, she sent a gauntleted fist to his side and followed it up with another punch to his gut. Never ceasing her movement, she pinned the winded bounty hunter up against the wall by the chest, wrist-blade extended from her vambrace and pressed against his throat.
“Rako Hardeen,” she growled through clenched teeth. This close, she could smell him; a mixture of sweat, swamp mud, engine oil, and something she assumed to be prison. With her free hand, she tugged her helmet off to stare him in the eyes.
“Do you know who I am?”
His eyes widened as they landed on her face. Few recognised her out of her headdress, and fewer still would know her beskar’gam on sight, but a fellow Mandalorian should be able to piece it together.
“Satine,” he choked out against her grip.
“That’s Duchess to you,” she spat, disgusted, jerking her arm up another few inches. Her anger gave her strength and now his feet were barely brushing the ground. How dare this filth use her name?
He was making no move to free himself from her grip, but unfortunately, before either of them could say anything more, they were interrupted.
“Hardeen?”
She snapped the helmet back on before looking to see who it was; two more figures had joined them in the alley. A quick glance over them told Satine that it was Moralo Eval and Cad Bane, the other two criminals Hardeen had escaped with. They seemed more wary than concerned for their companion’s safety, however; typical bounty hunters. No loyalty.
“What’s going on?” It was Eval who was speaking, and he warily raised his blaster to point at her. She responded by raising her free hand in a fist. Though the hand was empty, her vambrace held more than enough weaponry to do some damage.
“This is none of your business, ge’hutuun.”
He obligingly lowered the gun, pointing it to the side and opening his other hand in a gesture of surrender.
“Now, Hardeen,” she said, turning back to her target. “You are going to come with me, and you are going to come quietly, because it will not be pretty if you resist.”
She reached for her belt where she had clipped a pair of electrocuffs, but before she could pull them off he managed to croak out a few words that stopped her in her tracks.
“Urmankalar ni.”
It wasn’t the Mando’a that arrested her – the Marksman of Concord Dawn surely spoke his mother tongue. No, it was the accent .
She was intricately familiar with all forms of her own language, able to distinguish the slight twang of Mandalore and the smoother drawl of Concordia from the received pronunciation of Kalevala. The Concord Dawn accent was more clipped, but the way Hardeen spoke... Even just those few words, it sounded like a non-native speaker imitating an instructional video. A Core Worlds speaker, from those flat vowels.
Hardeen was Mandalorian. She'd read his file; it was known that he had been raised on Concord Dawn. The only explanation was that this was not Rako Hardeen.
So why was someone from the Core wearing his face, and asking her to trust him?
“Gedet’ye, cyar’ika.”
Please, my love.
Everything clicked into place. There was too much to make sense of now, but somehow – impossibly – it was Obi-Wan. He was alive. There was no time to ponder his face, or the funeral. She had to act fast to maintain his cover.
Fortunately, quick thinking was her specialty. It was unlikely that either Eval or Bane spoke Mandalorian, and certainly not well enough to understand Obi-Wan's mangled pronunciation.
“Fine.”
She released her hold on him suddenly; suddenly enough that anyone without any precognitive ability (say, granted by the Force) would have stumbled. Only she saw that his fall to his knees was deliberate, but then, no-one else knew to look.
“You have one standard week. If you haven’t come to me by then, I will find you, and you will regret ever leaving that Coruscanti prison. Tayli’bac?” She hoped he understood that she was serious.
Hardeen’s face watched her performance impassively, but with his back to the bounty hunters, only she saw the wink he gave her as she turned away to stalk back down the alley.
Even if he did meet her deadline, she thought to herself, he was going to have a hell of a time explaining this to her. Someone should offer him some beskar.
***
“What the hell was that?” Bane growled as the Mandalorian vanished around the corner.
“An old contact,” the man wearing Rako Hardeen’s face replied as he watched her go, rubbing at his neck. “I owe her.”
Fortunately the blade hadn’t broken the skin, or the metal glint of his voice modulator might have ruined the whole mission. As it was, the mission was still on, but it had yet another time limit. He was not looking forward to his next conversation with Satine, even if he did want to ask about her beskar. He hadn’t failed to notice how good she’d looked in it, either.
Moralo Eval interrupted his internal musings. “Let’s get off this rock before any more old contacts show up, hm?”
Right, the mission. Focus, Kenobi.