Chapter Text
She stared down the length of her arm, making a tiny adjustment in the angle of the dart launcher on her vambrace before she squeezed her fingers into a tight fist. The dart hit the target with a satisfying splat of blue paint across the yellow center of the target. Two more followed in quick succession, nearly erasing the yellow bullseye of her target. Bo-Katan lowered her hand to her side and waited as the others fired the last of their darts.
“Range is cold!” an officer called out after the last shot.
Bo-Katan strode the 10 meters to her target and inspected the result. As she already knew, each of the three blue paint-filled darts had struck the bullseye. Satisfied with her handiwork, she stole glances at the other targets in the line. None of those to her left had come even close to her success.
“Father will be pleased.”
Bo-Katan swung her head around toward where her older sister Satine was examining her target. She’d already removed her teal and purple helmet, and Bo-Katan could see satisfaction in her blue eyes. Two of her three darts had hit the bullseye, with the third right on the line transitioning from yellow to red.
“Beat you again,” Bo-Katan said, not hiding the smirk in her voice.
“It isn’t a competition,” Satine reminded her with an edge of exasperation. “It’s just training.”
Though she may have been younger, Bo-Katan had never been one to back down from a challenge. “It isn’t a competition because you lost,” she taunted.
Satine rolled her eyes. “Think what you want, Bo-Bo. We train with rifles tomorrow.”
“We’ll see about that, Teeny.” Bo-Katan would never admit it, but her sister really was a better shot with the long-range blaster rifle. Bo-Katan wasn’t bad at it; Satine was just better.
“You have both done well.”
Bo-Katan turned to see the imposing figure of her father, Adonai Kryze, striding across the range to examine his daughters’ targets. She stood straight with her hands clasped behind her back and bowed her head, and Satine followed suit as he stopped beside them, carefully analyzing their targets.
“Still using the first dart as a test shot, I see, Satine,” he observed. “Remember that the first shot may be all you get. You must make the most of it.” He nodded sharply at Bo-Katan’s target. “Perhaps it is time for more of a challenge for you, evaar'la ad. Come.”
The other students were filing away from the range, but Adonai Kryze was not done with his daughters’ training. He was the leader of Mandalore, and they were his legacy. Therefore, being good would never be satisfactory; Satine and Bo-Katan needed to be the best.
Her father nodded at the safety officer as he led the girls back to the firing line. “This time, aim for the outer rim.”
“That’s the lowest scoring area,” Bo-Katan protested.
“This isn’t a competition, Bo-Bo,” he said, borrowing the nickname Satine had given her when she was a baby, and her older sister had struggled to say her full name. “This is training. I want you to hit the very edge of the target at the right. Range is hot!”
Never one to disobey her father—in training, anyway—she raised her right hand and took aim. The first was too far in, so she readjusted outward. She heard a gasp from Satine as it went wide but ignored it, flexing her wrist just so and sending the dart perfectly into the outer ring of the target. Satisfied, she turned to her father and sister.
A splotch of red paint adorned Satine’s chest. “You shot me.”
“That’s impossible unless you’re some sort of Jedi,” Bo-Katan scoffed. “Did you explode your own dart like Paz did last week?”
“You did this.” Her father’s voice was grave.
Bo-Katan frowned. “But…” She didn’t know what was happening. It was impossible for her to have hit her sister. “I’m sorry, I guess. It can’t have hurt that much, though, not with your cuirass…” She’d been very jealous when Satine was given their mother’s beskar breastplate for her birthday.
Her normally witty sister merely clutched at her chest. But there was no beskar to cover her heart. And when she pulled her hand away, there was no paint but rather sticky red blood.
“Satine?” Panic rose in her. Had the training darts somehow been replaced with real darts? “Teeny?”
Her sister could only gasp. “You did this!”
Bo-Katan Kryze woke with a start, launching upright with a blaster in hand. But in her cabin aboard the Gauntlet, there was no one there, no one but herself.
Axe Woves had a big dick. The trouble was he didn’t know how to use it. Nor did she think he could find the clitoris even with a star map and astromechs to guide the way.
She’d wanted to work off some stress, wanted to erase the frustrations from the heat of battle with a good hard fuck and a few orgasms. Axe was there, and it had been a while since they’d gone at it, long enough that she’d forgotten how terrible it was.
It started out promising enough, a battle for dominance with lips and teeth and hands grasping flesh. They’d both have bruises in the morning, ones easily concealed by flight suits and beskar plates. But as soon as Axe took his massive schlong out of his flight suit and slid into her aching channel, he’d resorted to unimaginative thrusting and grunting. In and out, in and out. Like one of the pistons in the Gauntlet. Predictable.
“Harder,” Bo-Katan commanded, desperate to feel… something. It wasn’t unpleasant, but it wasn’t exactly doing anything for her either. They weren’t exactly young anymore, but they were both athletic and strong. Sex should have been adventurous and intense.
He managed to go harder for about two pumps before his hips relaxed into their previous rhythm. She stifled a sigh before pushing him away long enough to roll over onto her hands and knees. When she looked over her shoulder expectantly, he got the hint and grabbed her hips before thrusting in once again. One hand made a half-hearted attempt to find her clit, but she swatted it away and replaced it with her own fingers.
She’d had worse, she reasoned. There’d been a woman on Coruscant convinced that a single finger thrusting in and out should be enough to get her to orgasm. This was marginally more satisfying than that. Her fingers could do the hard work, so long as he could last a little bit—
Without warning, Axe grunted extra loudly and pulled out. A nanosecond later, she felt the warm wet splatter of his spend on her ass, followed by a smack across the cheek. She wasn’t opposed to a little pain to spice things up, but no one—no one!—smacked her ass without permission and lived to tell the tale.
He was, of course, summarily tossed out of her quarters, thoroughly chastened and clutching his beskar plates, having narrowly avoided being knocked out when she’d thrown a shin guard at his head. She wiped the cum off her butt cheek with the cowl he had left behind before laying back down on her bed. If Axe couldn’t make her come, she certainly could.
She had a drawer full of pleasure aids by her bedside, but she ignored them in favor of her own hands. At least Axe had left her thoroughly slick even though she was unsatisfied. One hand pinched and pulled at her nipple while the other worked at her sex, two and then three fingers thrusting in and out, thumb circling her clit. She almost—almost—wished Axe was there to at least give her the fullness she desperately craved. It wasn’t like he would have been able to press against that spot inside her channel that always left her quivering, though.
It was the press of her fingers against that very spot that eventually brought about her climax, her fingers still sliding in and out through her orgasm, drawing it out for as long as she could. Once she’d come down from her high, she was still restless. She’d needed more than her own hand could give, and Axe had been disappointing.
Her cabin felt too small. She balled up her flight suit and stuffed it in a drawer for the droids to clean later. She dressed quickly, layering her trousers, shirt, and flak vest over the soft shorts and breastband she wore underneath. The process of attaching her beskar’gam was almost therapeutic, the plates joining to her flight suit just so, their weight comforting. She’d grown up wearing her armor. Even before she’d earned her beskar’gam, she’d worn plates of durasteel that were less expensive to replace as she grew. It was an indelible part of her, almost as much as her own skin. She knew there were many women on other planets who adorned themselves in silks and satins, relishing the softness against their skin, but she was not one of them.
If it had been anyone else, Bo-Katan would have thought she looked beautiful. She was clad in pink and green satin with a large green jewel at the waist and white lilies in her white-blond hair. Her pale hands held up a blue satin dress.
“You would exchange your armor for… this?” Bo-Katan crinkled her nose at the dress her older sister held up for her, one Satine wanted her to wear to some state dinner now that she was Duchess of Mandalore. It was a garment most would associate with princesses, but Bo-Katan wasn’t just any princess.
“And I would have you do the same,” her sister told her.
“This is not the way of the Mandalorians. Our heritage is our beskar’gam. You know this. You wear mother’s armor. You know the armor we wear was reforged from—”
“Our heritage is war and blood and death,” Satine interrupted. “If we wish for our legacy to be anything else, we must lay down our weapons and seek to make a different path. You are my sister; I would have your support.”
Bo-Katan tilted her head defiantly and curled her lips into a sneer. “And because I am your sister, it is my duty to tell you that you’re being a fool! You will be laughed out of Sundari if you insist on this farce! Father would never approve of this.”
Satine’s expression was wounded, fingers clenching in the silk she held. Her chin tilted stubbornly, the way it always had when Bo-Katan wanted to race into the woods on Kalevala or practice piloting through the cliffs instead of studying, and Satine had been charged with keeping her younger sister in line. It had rarely worked on Bo-Katan when she was eight, and it certainly wouldn’t work almost a decade later. “If I cannot implore upon you as my sister, I will impose upon you as my subject. Lay down your armor.”
Hot fury rose in her. She wanted to launch herself at Satine and make her fight it out like they had many times before. But her sister was armed only with silk and satin; it would hardly be a fair fight. Instead, Bo-Katan snatched the dress from her sister’s hands. The blue shimmersilk rent easily in her hands, fluttering to the floor like the wings of some exotic bird. “Never.”
Bo-Katan didn’t realize how tightly she was gripping Axe’s now filthy cowl until she heard the door of the fresher hiss open and then close across the hall from her. She stared at the fabric in her hands. It was a rough gray hypercloth, not blue silk. She wondered sometimes what would have happened if she’d just donned the dress and gone to the party. Would Satine have come to her senses eventually? Or was the schism between sisters truly inevitable? She had a nearly infinite number of regrets, at least half of them having to do with her sister.
If her quarters had already been too small before, they had become claustrophobic. The hypercloth cowl didn’t tear nearly as easily as the silk had all those years before, but with a few sharp tugs, it came apart with a satisfying rip. She threw it on the floor and stalked out of the room, desperate to find something—anything—to distract her from the memory of Satine. Kriff, she’d settle for Koska beating her at sabacc if it would just get her mind away from—
“Princess Kryze.”
Her head whirled toward Din Djarin’s position, sitting at one of the tables in the common area.
“Don’t call me that.”
He inclined his head toward her, remaining impassive.
So that was how the insufferable tin can intended to play it. She’d not seen his face—it had seemed disrespectful—when he handed over his foundling to the Jedi. All she had seen was his dark, wavy hair and a hint of olive skin. The sense of loss had been etched in every line of his body. It hadn’t taken a genius to realize the man was crying when he swiped at his face before replacing his helmet.
And yet there he sat, his voice as calm as ever. Like nothing had happened the day before.
“Where should we drop you off?” she asked at last when he said nothing.
She almost thought he didn’t hear her, it took so long for him to reply. “I don’t know.”
“Where is your tribe? Are they no longer on Nevarro?”
He shook his head. “The Covert was destroyed. Few of us remain.”
Her heart twinged. She knew all too well what it was like to lose your tribe. Over and over and over again. “You could join us. Help us reclaim Mandalore.” The olive branch was extended, and she hoped that he would take it. They could always use more warriors. And there was something about him…
“I could.” The black T of his visor regarded her carefully. “Would your friends accept a Child of the Watch among their ranks?”
“Some of them would. Others wouldn’t, but they wouldn’t bother you so long as you were there with my blessing.” Axe would be another issue. The man was already trying her patience. Though he had not said anything, she could feel his malcontent at her failure to reclaim the Darksaber from Moff Gideon. He wanted her to challenge Din Djarin for the blade—or maybe even do it himself. For reasons she wasn’t entirely sure of, Axe seemed to utterly despise Din. Granted, she wasn’t exactly happy with the man either, at the moment…
Hatred curled in her belly like a venomous snake. She had saved the man’s foundling, and all she had asked—the one thing—was to finish Moff Gideon and reclaim the Darksaber she’d yielded to him years before. And the bucket head had taken that opportunity from her. Logic dictated that he hadn’t had a choice: defeat Gideon or die. But the viper in her struck anyway. “Can you even call yourself a Child of the Watch any longer? You removed your helmet.”
His vocoder caught the sharp hitch to his breath. “I am .”
Was that an edge of desperation she heard? The vicious part of her—the one that had torn blue silk in two and later stalked off to join Death Watch—latched onto it. “By your own admission, your Covert is gone. You have forsaken your vows, and you are alone. You can join us, or you can walk alone.”
His gloved hands clenched into fists on the table. Good. She wanted him angry—needed a fight even if this man had done little to deserve her wrath. Part of her wanted him to stand and lunge at her so she’d have an excuse to throw a punch. They were Mandalorians; disagreements were worked out in battle rather than carefully negotiated in council rooms. Briefly, she wondered if he would be interested in a sparring session or a good hard fuck to break the tension between them, but she dismissed the thought. His tribe couldn’t even remove their helmets; she doubted they allowed sexual relations without bathing in the Living Waters before AND after the act. Or perhaps it was only allowed in the Living Waters themselves. Maybe that’s why they had so many foundlings instead of biological children…
“Glavis Ringworld.” The words were tense when he said them. Perhaps he wasn’t so unflappable after all. “There may be word there about the new location of the Covert.”
She raised an eyebrow. “I thought they were destroyed.”
“A few remain. The Armorer. Paz Vizsla. Perhaps others escaped. They will rebuild somewhere else.”
Her ears perked slightly at the names he offered. Vizsla was an ancient and noble house. And following the Purge, it was difficult to find someone capable of forging their beskar anew. Any Mandalorian worth their beskar’gam could perform basic maintenance, but entirely replacing a piece was becoming increasingly difficult. Nearly all beskar’gam was reforged from those that had come before, and it was difficult to rework beskar without the Great Forge. Perhaps they could… no. A group of religious zealots, many former Death Watch, would never join her.
“At the very least, I can pick up some bounties. My ship was destroyed by Gideon.”
“I wondered what happened to that old antique. I’m surprised it lasted all these years.”
“It was old,” he agreed. “But it served its purpose. It was off Empire and New Republic registries and had plenty of space for my bounties and my weapons.” He huffed. “Guess I’ll have to replace them too. All I had with me was what you see here.”
Weapons… that was a subject they could both discuss. “What kind of arsenal are we talking about here? What did you have?”
He snorted. “What didn’t I have? All kinds of thermal detonators, at least a dozen different blasters and rifles. I think I miss my Amban Phase Pulse Sniper Rifle the most.”
“Another antique,” she snarked.
His head tilted, and she could hear the smile in his voice. “I guess I like the classics. Hopefully, I can start replacing some of it on Glavis Ringworld.”
“Glavis Ringworld it is,” she agreed. “We will have a few stops to make before then. We must surrender Moff Gideon to the New Republic, but I will ensure that you are taken to the space station as soon as possible. You’ll be able to collect your bounties on Coruscant which should help with replacing some of what you’ve lost.”
“Thank you.” His voice was back to its usual level of impassivity, and it made her want to throw something at him.
“I hope you will be comfortable here in the meantime. There are plenty of bunks in the crew quarters, and if you have need of it, there are plenty of provisions as well.” She hoped he could hear the edge to her voice.
“Is there anything I can do?” he asked. “I will serve you until we are parted.”
Of course, he would. “Well, I’m sure I’ll think of something.” Like clean out the trash chute with his tongue. She turned on her heel and stalked away.
Bo-Katan regarded her sister carefully, trying to assess the slant of her shoulders for signs of weakness. Her father had always told her to evaluate her targets as carefully as possible and use any information she could to press her advantage before moving. From her position behind her, Bo-Katan observed the delicate hand carding absently through her white-blond hair, tugging lightly as she sighed. Oh yes. Satine was vulnerable.
“I can feel you staring, Bo-Bo,” Satine said, not looking up from the datapad in front of her. Their father had recently granted Satine her own private study where Bo-Katan wasn’t supposed to disturb her. Bo-Katan had never been one to let silly things like rules stand in her way.
That Satine used the diminutive she had coined when she was three and Bo-Katan was born meant she was feeling very much like a responsible older sister. It would be trickier than she thought.
“I can’t today, Bo. I have all this reading to do,” Satine groaned, seemingly reading her sister’s mind. “Father wants me present when the representatives from the Republic Senate are visiting next week. They are rumored to be bringing jetiise protectors.”
Bo-Katan didn’t especially want to sit through boring meetings like Satine had to, but she was definitely jealous of her chance to see the infamous Jedi. As the second born, there were some opportunities Bo-Katan just didn’t get. At the same time, she didn’t get the responsibilities, so she wasn’t sure which one of them got the better deal. Still, in this case, she needed Satine to be a little less responsible. “So that means you won’t have time next week either?” She added a little whine to her voice.
“Princess Bo-Katan of House Kryze, you are twelve years old. Do not speak to me like a petulant four-year-old.” It was the voice Satine used when she wanted to sound authoritative.
She needed a new tactic. “I’m pretty sure you know more about the Galactic Senate than anyone on this planet. We’re an independent world. What do we care about them?”
“If we are to remain independent, we have much to learn,” Satine said, turning in her chair to face her. “We need change. Our planet is dying, and our people are in constant war.” Her fingers absently caressed the heart piece of her cuirass. Though their mother’s breastplate had been reforged for Satine, the heart piece remained original. “We must consider making changes. Our warrior traditions are bringing us nothing but death and destruction.”
“Like mother.” Bo-Katan’s voice was flat. She and Satine had often had this exact argument without a resolution. For all that her sister advocated for peace, she certainly argued a lot.
“You’re too young to remember, but I do,” Satine continued. She was in lecture mode. “You know that when Mandalorian women are with child, they are confined to their strongholds once their beskar’gam no longer fits. Mother was so confined when Clan Saxon attacked Sundari, but she left the stronghold to join the battle.”
“She had to defend our people!”
“ We were her people, too, Bo-Katan! She left you and me in the care of our nurse to join the fray. She never should have left the palace at all!” Satine’s voice was thick with emotion.
“She was a Mandalorian, Satine! This is our heritage. It was her duty to defend Clan Kryze from attack! You are so quick to denounce the traditions of your own people.”
“She chose to fight when she knew that she was risking the life of the child she carried. She chose to leave behind two daughters without a mother. We needed her.”
Even in the midst of their disagreement—the same one they’d had a dozen times—Bo-Katan still reached out for her sister’s hand. She could feel the callouses on her fingers: the curve between thumb and forefinger where her blaster rested, the tip of her finger where she pulled the trigger, across the palm from gripping the hilt of a sword or a staff. She also knew that if she gripped her sister’s forearm in the traditional greeting of Mandalorians, she would feel the muscles and sinews born from years of combat training. For all that Satine tried to pull away from the traditions of her people, she had certainly trained as a warrior. It made it harder and harder for Bo-Katan to understand what her sister really wanted.
Satine stood and reached out with her free hand to tuck a lock of Bo-Katan’s coppery red hair behind her ear. “I want a better world for us, Bo.” She cast a glance at the datapad on her desk and sighed. “I suppose this can wait until later. The reading is boring enough to be an excellent sleep aid. Did you want to race to the shore? Or shall I best you at flying the Fang Fighters again?”
Bo-Katan scoffed. “You wish you could best me. Come on. Last one to the port is a bantha’s sheb’ika!”