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“You’re not a prisoner, Satine,” Bo-Katan said for what must have been the tenth time that day. “You’re free to leave this tent whenever you wish.”
Satine gave her a look that would have been lethal against anyone with a weaker disposition; as it was Bo-Katan could not help but stand a little taller at the withering glare, even though she was on her feet and Satine was sitting on the ground, skirt laid carefully over her curled legs.
“Yes, it’s an excellent idea to go on a stroll through a Death Watch camp,” she snapped. “That’s definitely not going to result in my rape or maiming.”
“It’s different now,” Bo-Katan insisted.
“Right.”
“Tor’s dead, Satine, and Pre doesn’t tolerate that sort of thing.”
“How confidence-inspiring.”
Bo-Katan felt her blood pressure spike. “They will never respect you if you keep hiding!”
“I am not hiding,” Satine snarled, abruptly furious, stopping what she was doing with the jerkiness of a rusty droid. She set her pauldron aside—she’d been stripping the paint—and stood, crossing the tent in three dangerous strides so they were centimeters apart. Somehow, maddeningly, she still smelled of lilies and the Kalevalan moor. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but every time I step outside a battalion’s worth of cultists swivel their helmeted heads and start thinking so passionately about how they’re going to destroy me that one can practically hear it. Are you genuinely going to stand here and tell me they don’t want me dead?”
Bo-Katan inhaled sharply. Big mistake; her head was now full of Satine’s distracting flowery scent, which made her eyes more blue and the faint kiss of freckles on her nose irresistible. Bo-Katan would have kissed her, if she valued her front teeth less.
“Every person in this camp knows anything they do to you will get paid back tenfold,” she said slowly.
Satine gave a disbelieving laugh. “Really?”
“Yes, really.”
Satine raised an eyebrow. “I don’t believe you.”
Be the bigger person, said a loud voice in Bo-Katan’s head that sounded suspiciously like her late mother. She looked up at the tent’s ceiling, sending a silent plea for strength to her ancestors.
“Why are you repainting your armor?” she asked through gritted teeth.
“I got bored,” Satine lied. She was a good liar, but not so good Bo-Katan couldn’t see right through her.
“Does this mean you’re going to put the damn thing on?”
“I don’t think I have any choice in the matter.”
“That’s an accurate read of the situation,” Bo-Katan admitted stiffly.
Satine scoffed, quietly, a sound more defeatist than derisive.
“I’ll come to dinner,” she muttered.
“Satine…”
“I know, I know,” she said, turning away. “You saved my life. I’ll be less ungrateful.”
“Sometimes,” Bo-Katan said after too many breaths of silence, “I wonder if you wish I’d let you die.”
Satine didn’t respond.
True to her word, Satine shouldered her way into the dining tent to eat a silent bowl of stew next to Bo-Katan, looking at and speaking to absolutely no one, including Bo-Katan herself. It wasn’t like she didn’t understand Satine’s despair and frustration. The entire galaxy had been turned upside down—had been since the moment the True Mandalorians had descended upon Sundari in a fiery siege and Bo-Katan and Pre had found themselves defending New Mandalorian children from being ripped from their parent’s arms. Making off with Satine had given them a razor-thin advantage in a war she’d grown to fear might kill them all.
Bo-Katan would have wondered what had crawled up Jango Fett’s ass and died, but she knew. They all knew.
So, rather than needle Satine further, she bumped their knees together and glared the jeerful comments right off the tongues of the victorious, vicious little creatures that made up the Death Watch. It was a quiet meal, but not wholly unpleasant. The hearty, spicy stew improved Satine’s mood enough to smooth the furrow between her brows.
Or at least it did until a strong hand on the chest tipped Bo-Katan nearly flat backwards. Pre liked to sneak up on her, and while she should have hated the assault on her nerves, she couldn't deny the shivery-tingly feeling of the shock of being manhandled getting soothed away by a kiss. She hummed against his mouth, and, hearing Satine’s shocked breath, tugged him back when he tried to pull away, lingering just until she knew Satine's jealousy would start to give way to rage. Pre squeezed backwards onto the bench next to her, on the other side from Satine, reclining with one arm up on the table.
“Vizsla,” Satine said venomously.
“Kryze,” he replied with not much less contempt. “You came to dinner.”
“You came back,” she lamented flatly.
“How’d it go?” Bo-Katan interrupted before they could really get into it.
“Fett’s troops are dug in around Keldabe,” he said. His blonde hair flopped over his forehead as he spoke. “They’re rounding up the New Mandalorians. I don’t know for what. Can’t be anything good, that’s for damn sure.”
“Re-education?” Bo-Katan speculated, reaching out under the table to squeeze Satine’s thigh. It was surely cold comfort.
“Why would they waste time on that?” Pre scoffed. “Most New Mandalorians are common people, not verde.”
“Not to the Haat Mando’ade,” she reminded him. Jaster Mereel had believed the martial Way should be for everyone, not just those who came from families with ancestral stores of Beskar.
“You mean the Jehaat Mando’ade,” a lieutenant of the Paratroops sneered from the other side of the table. “What’re you thinking, boss?”
“I’m thinking Fett’s wasting time, troops, and credits on babysitting all those soft little monkeys.”
“The only monkeys in this situation are you and Fett,” Satine snapped.
Pre waved her off and gave Bo-Katan a sidelong what is she doing here look. She replied with a brief but sharp glare. They had not agreed on Bo-Katan’s choice to spare Satine’s life, mostly because Satine hated Pre and was a massive pain in the ass on both a personal and political level, even if protecting her gave them an edge with the New Mandalorians. He had always thought her a distraction for Bo-Katan, a lingering attachment that strayed her from the straight and narrow. If he’d noticed Satine’s jealousy when they’d kissed—that she too had a lingering attachment—it wasn’t obvious in his demeanor.
“He’s probably taking them to the old camps outside Keldabe,” Satine continued after a moment. “It’s where I wound up when our darling uncle occupied the city.”
Bo-Katan blinked and sat up, remembering the horrific bombardment that had wiped out most of the city, including Satine’s old squad. Tor, emulating their Crusader ancestors, had built sprawling concentration camps in the dead, sandy plain around what was left of the city and tried to press its emaciated former inhabitants into service. Anyone who couldn’t fight had been made a slave of House Vizsla. Satine had escaped and limped back to Kalevala after three months, half-dead and with a hollow look in her eyes that never really went away. Bo-Katan saw it now, though Satine was looking right past her at Pre.
Pre’s lips thinned until they nearly disappeared. He remembered those days, too. That had been the rift between elder and younger Vizsla: the destruction of the ancient capital with all its sacred wonders and sights and the subsequent brutality with which Tor had tried to break Mandalore’s will. That event had lit the fire of the New Mandalorian movement. It seemed Jango Fett now hoped a repeat would break its back.
“The more troops he wastes on this,” he said slowly, “the better odds we have of reclaiming Sundari. We can’t give him too much time to settle in if we ever want to get him out, and anything he sends to Keldabe will take hours to make it back to defend the city.”
Satine’s mouth twitched in a vicious little smile, the kind that could make you greedy just to look at it. Bo-Katan hoped her ancestors hadn’t noticed how badly she wanted to squeeze that bottom lip between her teeth.
“You’ve studied my tactics,” Satine said.
“They worked,” he replied. “Nite Owl.” He stood and rapped his knuckles on the table.
“Next time I see you,” he said, “you better be in armor.”
“Next time I see you,” Satine said, “keep your helmet on. Your face makes me nauseous.”
The next morning Bo-Katan woke to a light, gloved touch on her cheek. She opened her eyes to a distantly-familiar Kryze helmet: white face, black V, the cheeks painted gold.
“Satine?” she croaked.
“You don’t recognize me?” Satine’s voice sounded deeper through her vocoder. Bo-Katan shivered sleepily, not resisting when Satine set her helm at the foot of the bed and lowered her head to press hot, possessive kisses up and down her neck.
“I remember I used to do this before every mission I went on,” Satine murmured. “During the war. When I didn’t know if I was ever going to see you again.”
“Heaven forbid you had to find another sixteen year-old to ravish like a Crusader in a trashy bodice-ripper,” Bo-Katan sighed, tipping her head back and wrapping her arms around Satine’s broad shoulders, the beskar cool against her skin.
“I didn’t want another.” Satine tugged at the skin under Bo-Katan’s jaw with her teeth, a motion which sent a bolt of heat through her. She writhed, pressing herself against Satine through the blankets. “Besides, where would I have found another as needy as you?”
“Fuck you,” Bo-Katan gasped. “I’m not needy.”
“Yes you are,” Satine said mildly. “Look at you.” She tugged the blankets down, palmed one of Bo-Katan’s tits, squeezing it so hard Bo-Katan whined in some head-spinning mix of pleasure-pain. “You turn into a little slut at the first touch. Do you let any warrior tall enough handle you like this?”
“No. Just you.”
Satine’s hands were rucking up her loose sleep tank, worn leather gloves roaming her stomach. There was something about getting felt up like this by a verd in full beskar that was just unbelievably hot; Bo-Katan was embarrassed by how much she liked it, or she would have been if she’d had the brain left for such an emotion.
“And Pre, of course,” Satine said.
Bo-Katan opened her eyes, giving the tent’s ceiling an annoyed glare. “Is that what this is about?”
“No.” Satine sealed her lips around one of Bo-Katan’s nipples, making her keen. In the early dawn light, her hair looked silver, her skin deathly pale, like she was a ghost having her way with Bo-Katan before she was awake enough to fight it. Bo-Katan buried her fingers in the thick blonde waves, keeping her close and feeling every swipe of Satine’s tongue go straight to her aching clit.
“I, ah, I don’t believe you,” she panted.
“Don’t believe me, then,” Satine muttered flatly, changing sides. She scraped her fingertips over Bo-Katan’s ribs in a way that made her suspect Satine had forgotten she was wearing gloves. Bo-Katan was torn between wanting to be covered in scratch marks and not wanting Satine to take a stitch of clothing off.
“I missed you,” Satine whispered roughly, kissing up her sternum. “Did you miss me?”
“Of course I did.”
“I could have given you a throne, a palace, an army.” Satine bit at her collarbones. Bo-Katan squeaked in pain. “But you only want me when I wear my armor.”
“Satine,” Bo-Katan said, “shut up and fuck me.”
Satine yanked her blankets to the foot of the bed, exposing Bo-Katan’s loose sleep shorts and bare legs to the morning chill. Satine’s helmet hit the ground with a dull thud. Bo-Katan felt gooseflesh bloom over her thighs at the cold and the rough, almost careless treatment, though she knew Satine was everything except careless. Her jerky touch was as much a disguise as those ridiculous dresses, or the freshly-painted beskar she wore now. Bo-Katan’s shorts and underwear were discarded in short order, and Satine folded her legs back until her knees pressed against her chest. Bo-Katan bit her lip to keep from whimpering.
“So wet already,” Satine murmured, dropping down onto her stomach and kissing the insides of Bo-Katan’s thighs. She felt Satine’s breath against her exposed cunt, so close that her hips twitched of their own volition. “Does he fuck you as well as I do, Bo’ika?”
“You're more jealous than a husband in a Chandrilan soap opera,” Bo-Katan replied breathlessly. “Do you really think I compare the two of you?”
“Honestly, I’m not sure what to think.” Satine almost sounded amused, though her eyes had none of that sparkle Bo-Katan knew so well. “Fucking our cousin seems an odd choice if you were trying to get over me. I always looked more like him than like you.”
Satine knew her too well, saying something like that. Jealousy blazed in her chest. “That is not true. You—you're—”
“Say it,” Satine ordered under her breath, a domineering, desperate little rumble.
“You're mine,” Bo-Katan said, digging her fingers into Satine’s hair and dragging her head forward. “You're mine.”
The first touch of Satine’s mouth was shockingly hot, and Bo-Katan let out a soft cry at the sensation, her sleep-dry voice cracking. She swallowed and moaned again as Satine took up a ruthlessly efficient rhythm. Bo-Katan clenched around nothing, her thighs trembling as that familiar heavy heat pooled deep inside her. Satine's tongue fucked into her like she’d been dying of thirst.
“Satine,” she whined. “I-I don't want to come so fast.”
Satine ignored her, as was her prerogative when she had Bo-Katan folded in half and spread open like this. She was so close that stars flickered in her vision every time she tried to open her eyes. She let herself be swept underwater by the mounting pleasure, her legs falling farther open, whines and panting turning into cries that she was sure echoed across the pre-dawn camp. The thought of being overheard was what made her come, cunt pulsing against Satine's tongue. Satine moaned against her clit like she had come herself, and Bo-Katan caught a glimpse of her bright blue eyes over her stomach, watching her all hazy with desire and inappropriate possessiveness.
“Good girl,” Satine praised, voice hoarse, as Bo-Katan flopped exhausted back onto her bed.
“You’re an animal,” Bo-Katan replied, voice muffled by the pillow. “Come here.”
Satine obeyed after a second’s hesitation, all at once giving the demeanor of a kicked Strill. She accepted Bo-Katan’s kiss, sighing softly.
“Maybe if you’d done that to me in one of those ridiculous dresses of yours,” Bo-Katan murmured against her lips, “I would have stayed.”
“Don’t lie to me,” Satine replied. “It’s degrading.”
“Kryze.” Pre stood in the entrance to the comms tent, his surprise betrayed by the way his arrogant footsteps had stumbled to as stop at the threshold. Satine didn’t turn to look at him, rotating the map of Sundari projected in front of her until its eastern port faced her.
“Vizsla,” she acknowledged once she was done.
“I’d ask who booted up the comms table for you,” he said, footsteps approaching once more, “but I already know.”
“I don’t see what the point of keeping me alive is if you’re going to attack my capital without me,” Satine said calmly, glancing briefly at him. Unfortunately, he’d been looking at her too; their eyes met like two magnets slamming together. He must have been fresh out of the baths. His cheeks were still pink from the hot water, and his hair was wet and curling on the ends, much like hers did. It made him look younger than he really was, which she found disturbing but vaguely attractive. After an uncomfortable few seconds, his gaze flicked down, taking in her armor and the rifle propped against the table beside her.
“There’s not much of one,” he said, somehow managing to turn agreeing with her into a kind of threat. “And have you planned an attack, Nite Owl?”
They stared each other down again, while Satine weighed her options. She lacked the leverage to make him negotiate for her expertise, but there were still elements she could keep for herself. Years as a politician had taught her there was always a way to get what she wanted, and it rarely, if ever, required violence.
“The eastern starport has three weak points,” she began. “Here, here, and here. It was never meant to be a permanent installation, so it relies too heavily on these beams. We were about to start construction that would have installed new supports…anyway. If we take these out, the entire port will essentially fall out of the biodome.”
“That’s the port Fett is using to coordinate with his troops in Keldabe,” Pre said, leaning closer.
“I know,” Satine said, rolling her eyes. “If we strike the eastern starport, there’s no need to find a way into the city. We can get into the electric tunnels here,” she tapped the auxiliary dome, her finger slipping through the hologram, “and take them all the way to the starport’s generator room, here. It’s a straight shot up to the support beams after that. A twenty second flight with a decent jetpack at most.”
Pre laughed. “You know, I’d forgotten how it was you won the war.”
“Really?” Satine turned back to Sundari, flickering and blue before her. Like any good traditionalist, Pre was oblivious to the suffering his warmongering generated, and if he wasn’t, he was quick to absolve himself of culpability. The things they’d done during the war must have been a blur to him, featureless and gray in every way they weren’t in Satine’s own memories. “I wish I could say the same.”
“I always thought you must have lost your edge since.”
Satine tipped her head, not looking at him. “Doesn’t that just mean you couldn’t beat me even without my ‘edge’?”
He was pissed again. Satine smiled, pleased in a way that felt vaguely wrong. This should have been beneath her. It was beneath her, just like being jealous was, but she could no more restrain the fire in her chest when she saw Bo-Katan and Pre together than she could help wanting to watch him turn red with rage.
“Strill got your tongue, Vizsla?” she needled, letting him see every tooth of her grin.
“It's incredible how quickly you can go from sulking to victorious,” he finally replied, regaining his composure.
“Why does everyone think I was sulking?”
“Why do we wear beskar?” he replied, an old idiom which roughly meant, why are Mandalorians so Mandalorian?
“You're looking at this all wrong, Vizsla,” she said. “I never thought myself conquered, certainly not by you.”
“I’m sure you didn't,” Pre said, leaning against the comms table. “I realize now you were doing some conquering of your own.”
Satine had to press her lips together to keep from outright laughing in his face. He kept that same light tone he liked to use with her, trying to make her think he didn't care what she had to say, but in one breath he’d laid all his cards out on the table.
It was unsurprising that her dear cousin was as prone to jealousy as she was. They were Vizslas, after all.
“I’m not sure what you mean,” she said easily.
Pre rolled his eyes. “Half the camp heard Bo scream for you last night.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Yourself included?”
He glared at her. He was almost handsome like this, white-blonde brows knit up in hatred. Almost.
“You wouldn't do that unless you had something to prove,” he huffed at last. He was clearly not used to having his authority challenged, or his toys taken away.
“Trust me,” she said, leaning closer, “you’ll know when I fuck with something to prove. I just thought she hadn't come properly in a while. She is my sister.”
“Your sister who wouldn't come home to you,” Pre reminded her. It was his turn to smile again, slow and a little painful even if that particular subject was low-hanging fruit.
“I wonder how much poison you had to whisper in her ear until she stopped trying to,” Satine said. She turned back to her city, memorizing what it looked like whole. She’d never see it quite like this again. Such was the nature of war.
“You wouldn’t like the answer.” Pre stepped away. “I’ll leave you to keep talking to the hologram.”
“I know children who insult better than you do,” she called without turning her head. She waited for his footsteps to recede before slowly, casually rotating the holo of Sundari until it showed its dish-shaped bottom. In the false flatness she could just make out the instantly-recognizable silhouette of the Governor’s Palace, eighty klicks northeast from here and hastily ceded to the True Mandalorians during the Death Watch’s retreat into the wilderness. The ancestral home of Clan Vizsla, gaining it should have been an unmitigated victory for the True Mandalorians. They had, of course, vastly underestimated just how popular Vizslas could be, and the edifice was half under siege from an inscrutable mix of enraged New Mandalorians and traditionalists alike.
Satine smiled, pulled her holodisc with the files out of the table, and snapped it in half.
Satine’s peace and quiet lasted another half hour, until the hologram of Sundari’s electrical tunnels fizzled out and the comms table began to beep sadly at her. Its diagnostics reported a faulty antenna. Just her luck. The antenna and generators were behind Pre’s tent, which was next door. Sighing heavily, she grabbed her helmet and stepped outside, hopping off the wooden platform that kept the comms table out of the dirt. She got a respectful nod from a passing Nite Owl as she walked towards the clump of generators and antennae, which she returned with what she hoped wasn’t too much hesitation.
Behind Pre’s tent, the two generators and three antennae that supplied power and signal to the comms table had been set out with no order or sense. Muttering that she would never have allowed tech to be set up this haphazardly in her camps, she knelt and wrestled the access panel of the central antenna off, revealing a knot of circuit boards and wires. This had always been more Bo-Katan’s wheelhouse, but she was capable enough. She cut the power, pulled a hydrospanner off her belt, and got to work.
There was a soft rustle from Pre’s tent. Glancing up, she saw one of the insulating panels above her head had been removed, leaving just the outermost fabric cover. In semi-permanent vheh’yaime such as the ones that composed this camp, removing a panel was an easy way to create a sort of “window” that would allow fresh air to circulate. The mesh outside wasn’t thin enough to see into the tent, but she could tell which panel had been removed by the way the fabric sank ever-so-slightly inward.
Another rustle. She heard Bo-Katan chuckle deep in her chest, a sound Satine had always found unfairly irresistible. “Did you miss me?”
“Something like that,” Pre replied, voice strange.
Satine wondered who had cursed her to do electrical work and listen to her sister talk sweetly to the most contemptuous man in the galaxy.
“It’s not my fault you didn’t trust anyone else to scout Sundari out,” Bo-Katan continued while Satine pulled the mainboard free, a handful of wires coming with it. No visible issues on the mainboard itself. Sighing again, and balancing the mainboard on her kneeplate, she started to dig through the wires.
“I’m not going to go up against something without having seen it with my own two eyes,” Pre replied.
“What is there to see? An ocean of Journeymen Protectors? Jango’s lumpy mug? Some old Gauntlets?”
“All of that and more, my dear.”
Bo-Katan laughed. “Come here, smartass.”
They kissed, very wet and very noisy. Satine wrinkled her nose and looked at her helmet, on the ground beside her. It would muffle the sounds around her enough to weather…whatever this was. However, it would also sharply limit her vision, and she was already squinting to make sense of all these blinking lights and soldered ports. She’d simply have to tune it out.
Bo-Katan moaned, very quietly, almost under her breath. “Pre…”
Satine’s fingers slowed in their work. She shook her head out and started up again.
Another moan, a little louder. “Stop,” Bo-Katan said breathily, then repeated herself, voice almost normal. “Stop.”
He lets her talk to him like that? Satine thought.
“Did you prep yourself like I asked?” Bo-Katan asked. Satine raised her eyebrows.
“Obviously,” Pre replied.
“Let’s see it, then.”
In the seconds of quiet that followed, Satine verified the last of the connections and tucked the mainboard back into place, screwing it down and securing the panel once more. She moved on to the auxiliary antenna.
“Good grief,” she muttered, prying its rusty service lid open. It squealed rather loudly, loud enough that she hoped it would startle Bo-Katan and Pre out of whatever the hell it was they were doing not two meters away. “This thing’s older than I am!”
“Now, that’s a pretty sight,” Bo-Katan said inside the tent. At Pre’s scoff, she added hotly, “now you know how cheesy that is.”
“I say it better.”
“You do not.” A slapping sound made Satine jerk her head. “Come on, head down.”
Satine was definitely not supposed to be hearing any of this.
“When did you put it in?”
“After my bath,” Pre replied, sounding closer and muffled at the same time.
“Did anyone see you?” There was a note of incredulity to Bo-Katan’s voice.
“No. I had the changing room to myself.”
“You’re lucky no one saw you stuff your own ass, alor.”
Suns and stars, Satine thought, nearly dropping her hydrospanner. When they’d spoken in the comms tent, he’d had—
The thought was paralyzingly obscene.
“One would hope they’d be impressed.”
“Impressed by how much of a bitch you are?”
“It’s easier to fuck than be fucked,” Pre said with the sort of irreverent wisdom Vizslas were so good at, and then moaned loudly. Satine inhaled sharply and looked at the circuit board in her hands.
Wires, she thought. Connections. Electricity. Interplanetary signal frequencies.
“More enjoyable to get fucked, too,” Bo-Katan said. “For you, at least.” Satine recognized that hungry, lighthearted voice a little too well. She shivered despite herself, unsure if it was from disgust or badly-repressed desire.
“That too,” Pre said, breathless.
Bo-Katan’s belt hit the floor with an also-familiar thud. Satine knelt beside the antenna, completely frozen, blinking rapidly at the sound of tearing flimsiplast.
“Knees apart,” she ordered, and Pre gave a long, deep groan that made Satine feel like she’d been set on fire. She could picture his obnoxious face flushed rosy pink, half-hidden by his forearms as he knelt, head down, ass up, sinking back against Bo-Katan’s hips. And Bo, well, Satine knew her beauty even better, that self-assured smile, the immobilizing grip of her hands, her steady rhythm that could pull anyone apart with vicious ease.
Or maybe Satine was just easy.
Pre was easy too, clearly; he moaned without seemingly a single worry about being heard, and she could hear him scrabbling on the bed for purchase, like he couldn’t even keep himself upright.
“Hold on,” Bo-Katan grunted, and there was a brief scuffle. Pre gasped, a sound that almost turned into a whine. If Satine hadn’t been having a damn heart attack, she might have laughed at his boyish noises. He sounded less the fearsome pretender to her throne and more like a skinny little verd’ika taking his first real warrior.
“Nngh, Bo,” he moaned. “Harder.”
Satine tugged at the mainboard in her hands and felt a snap. Out of reflex more than anything her hands found the two broken wires, narrowing her eyes at the too-clean break.
“You know what I think?” Bo-Katan panted. “I think you can come from just this.”
“Wh—no, Bo—” Pre gave a punched-out sound. “No, come on—”
“You come on,” she said smugly. “What more do you want me to do, alor? You asked me to fuck you, and that’s exactly what I’m doing. If you wanted me to jerk you off too, you should have been more specific.”
He groaned, a sound distinctly more frustrated than aroused. “F-fine. Pull my hair.”
Satin should have left. She should have shoved the antenna’s components back into its access hatch, slammed it shut, and went back to her tent to masturbate or cry or punch something. Instead she stayed right where she was, chest a knot of jealous heartbroken hatred, cunt throbbing, the mainboard digging into her thumb so hard that it would have cut her had she not been wearing gloves.
She was going to fucking throttle Pre, if only to take his place. She could take it was well as he did, and probably looked better too. And—and she didn’t need to break their comms antenna on purpose to lure him into listening to her and Bo-Katan!
Cursing her immediate ancestors, her Taung progenitors, and the Galactic Republic for good measure, she fixed the cut wire with electrical tape and the tip of her vibroblade. Pre, who was six feet away and bent into a pretty little C, was panting and half-sobbing like a common whore. Satine pressed her thighs closer together, eyesight blurring.
“Gonna come,” he choked out, and shouted, quickly muffled by (presumably) having his face shoved into the mattress.
“I forget I have to keep you quiet,” Bo-Katan said, perfectly out of breath. Satine stood and gave the tent a good kick, right by where she thought Pre’s head was. By the gasp and swear, she was nearly spot on.
“I fixed our antenna, you useless sack of rotten gourds,” she snarled, and stormed away.
Bo-Katan spared her the indignity of sharing a tent for the next week, during which Satine took her meals and trained with the Nite Owls she had been unceremoniously attached to.
They were good warriors, even if only about a third few were real Nite Owls. When Satine had renounced the old ways, most of the Nite Owls, that was to say, the elite commandos of Clan Kryze, had followed her, integrating themselves into nascent New Mandalorian society in a dozen different professions. The Nite Owls of the Death Watch were by and large not Kryzes, save for two who were Bo-Katan’s age and had been bright-eyed new recruits when Satine had been named commander. Still, Bo-Katan had maintained the culture of the commandos remarkably well. Satine slipped almost immediately back into her old habits, dizzyingly and uncomfortably easy.
The two Kryzes resented her—no surprise there—but the others were more fascinated with her than anything, and even that fascination quickly softened into the usual admiration of a verd’ika towards an ori’verd as Satine joined in on their casual sparring. She flung another skinny little Wren into the sand, putting her hands on her hips as she tried to catch her breath. Four rounds against all these bendy kids was starting to take its toll.
“Shit, Kryze,” one of said kids, Rook, drawled from where she was standing nearby. “You’re used to this, aren’t you?”
“I used to spar with the Protectors for exercise,” she said. “They’re tougher, ladies. Much tougher.”
“Really?” Rook said, sounding skeptical.
“Yes, really,” she huffed. “You think I choose just anyone to watch my back while I sleep?”
“She has a point,” the little Wren said from the ground. “Those Protectors are the reason we hadn’t managed anything in Sundari in the first place.”
“Shut up!”
Satine helped the Wren up. She was a cousin of her clan’s heiress, a twenty year-old named Kala.
“You’re too clever to be hanging out with these people,” Satine muttered to her.
“It would be nice if we had a choice,” Kala replied.
“That can be arranged,” Satine said. Kala didn’t respond, but she saw the spark of curiosity in her dark eyes. Stars, these kids were so impressionable. It was hard to think of herself as one of them.
“You can’t just ignore me!” Rook said hotly.
“Swallow my boot, Kast,” Kala said.
Definitely Nite Owls, Satine thought. Ignoring the girls’ argument, she stepped out of the circle, ceding her spot to get a drink of water.
“Enjoying yourself?” Bo-Katan’s voice was distinctly bitter.
Satine’s insides twisted violently, the satisfying ache of victory replaced instantly by the bubbling stew of self-hatred and heartbreak that had been simmering in her chest since her little “repair” of the antenna. Bo-Katan’s lovely red hair made her want to claw her eyes out.
“Yes,” Satine said bluntly, spun on her heel, and stalked back to her tent, aware the entire time of Bo-Katan’s footsteps behind her.
“I need to talk to you,” Bo-Katan said as soon as the tent’s flaps closed.
“Really?”
“Yes, really!”
Satine swallowed the sour aftertaste of déjà vu. “I don’t have anything to say to you.”
Bo-Katan groaned in frustration. “Why must you always sulk?!”
Seventeen separate retorts lodged themselves in her throat. “Get out,” she snarled instead.
“No. Listen to me!”
“What could you possibly have to say to me that you have not already said?”
“What the hell does that even mean?”
Satine rounded on her, feeling somehow more miserable at the way Bo-Katan startled and backpedaled at the motion.
“Bo-Katan,” she said, voice shaking, “since you were eighteen years old you have called me a coward, an idiot, a heretic, and worse. You told me to my face I was an insult to our mother’s lineage. You told me to my face that you were ashamed to even be seen with me. I know that you think me a sulky waste of perfectly good Beskar, but could you at least do me the favor of not rubbing it in my face?”
Bo-Katan’s eyes were huge, and Satine didn't like the look in them.
“Oh, stars,” she breathed. “You’ve been having a breakdown this whole time, haven't you?”
“I—” Satine’s voice cracked. She cleared her throat roughly, looking up at the ceiling in the naïve hope her eyes might stop burning. “Heaven forbid I have feelings.”
Bo-Katan was quiet for several moments, and the tent took on a suffocating silence, making Satine feel like she was being squeezed. When Bo-Katan finally spoke, it was little more than a mumble.
“I came to say that I’m sorry,” she said. “For all of it. Everything.”
Satine blinked rapidly, then looked back at her. “What?”
“I’m sorry I abandoned you, okay?” Bo-Katan exclaimed, throwing her hands up in a characteristic—if unexpected—display of emotion. “You were right. It's…I like it here, I’m not a fucking Pacifist, but look at where we are. Look at what this got us.” She hunched her shoulders. “Pre doesn't have what it takes to rule Mandalore, and everyone knows it except him. It has to be you.”
“Jango?” Satine asked.
“Jango would sell his own children for ten credits and a Sabbacc deck if he had any,” Bo-Katan replied bluntly. “No.”
Satine considered her, crossing her arms. “You know,” she started after many hesitant moments, “This isn’t what I thought you were going to say.”
Bo-Katan sighed, ears going pink. “You expected this to be about the…thing. In the tent.”
“I was outside the tent.” That earned her a glare. “Would you rather I’d been in there with you?” Satine said, pouncing on an easy opportunity to rile her up further.
Bo-Katan’s face turned nearly as red as her hair. “Satine!”
“Ah, so he can gloat and leer, but I need to watch my tongue?”
“I’ve barely spoken to him in a week,” Bo-Katan said flatly, surprising her. “Except for those torturous strategy meetings he’s holding.”
Satine smiled thinly. “Without me, I see.”
She had not expected him to keep his word of allowing her on the mission to Sundari. It made no sense. She was a liability, and too difficult to control given she had already had a tantalizing taste of what it was like to truly rule Mandalore. The politics of the Death Watch seemed brutish and simple in comparison, and his gamble that she would not challenge him directly had failed when she’d repainted her armor and commandeered his comms tent. He was probably worried she was going to shoot him the moment he turned his back on her.
“It bothered him that the whole incident pissed you off more than it humiliated you,” Bo-Katan explained.
“I’m aware of how fragile his ego is, vod’ika.” Bo-Katan’s lips thinned into nearly nothing, but she didn’t argue the point. Pre, like most men of that side of their family, were easily emasculated.
“He’ll leave in three days,” Satine guessed. “When it’s the new moon. He’s going to use the cover of darkness to sneak into the electrical tunnels I showed him to try to blow out the buttresses on the Keldabe-Sundari starport.”
Bo-Katan didn’t look exactly startled, but she did stand a little straighter. “...What did you do?”
“Nothing,” Satine said. “Yet.”
Her sister studied her face, stepping forward as the silence grew long and awkward. She laid a gloved hand on Satine’s cheek, letting her thumb brush back and forth. Satine pressed into her palm.
“I don’t know why it is,” Bo-Katan murmured, “but whenever you talk about going to war, you look impossibly lonely.”
Satine’s throat closed up. She tried for a chuckle anyway. “I am impossibly lonely.”
“How am I ever going to prove that I’m not going to leave,” Bo-Katan said miserably, “if you never really let me?”
Satine paused, studying the golden flecks in Bo-Katan’s green eyes. She had shut her out. Once, five years ago when Satine had been freshly named Duchess and Bo-Katan had seemed more a distraction than any sort of comfort, and now…
“Am I letting you in?” Satine asked. “Or am I letting you and him in?”
Bo-Katan didn’t pull away, though she did grab Satine by the collar plate and shake her. “Why are you two obsessed with making me choose?!”
“Life is a series of increasingly painful choices.” Satine felt the tangle of heartbreak again, trapped stubbornly in her throat. “I suppose it’s hard to share when I remember being the only one.”
Bo-Katan huffed. “Well, learn. You sound like a six-foot toddler!”
“One condition.” Bo-Katan looked to the heavens for strength. “Come, now,” Satine protested. “What kind of Mandalorian would I be if I didn’t negotiate my terms of surrender?”
“What?” she snapped impatiently.
“When I come back from Mandalore,” Satine said, “I want you to fuck me at least as hard as you fucked Pre last week. I can take it better and prettier, and I want you to know it.”
And I want him to know it too, she thought, vaguely ashamed.
“I hate you so much,” Bo-Katan replied, giving her the kind of glare that made her feel like she was being devoured.
Bo-Katan didn’t know what Satine was planning and she didn’t want to.
“Promise me you are not going to do something completely insane,” she begged two days after they made up, watching Satine pack a bag. Satine stopped and turned to her, blinking once before speaking.
“I am not,” she said, slightly defensive. “Give me some credit. I’m not going to start a second civil war in the middle of the first one.”
“Then why are you packing to go on a mission you weren’t chosen for?”
Satine sighed. “Bo…”
“Satine,” she replied with the same tone. Struck with uncertainty that she was being too demanding, she added, “please.”
“Pre isn’t going to get into Sundari without me,” Satine said. “He can’t.”
A mild, creeping horror. “You fed him false information, didn’t you?”
“And I replaced his plans of Sundari with maps from three years ago.” Satine shrugged. “Did you really think I was going to trust him with a city of seventy million people?”
She had momentarily forgotten that nearly two thirds of Mandalore’s population lived under that sprawling, annoyingly-perfect dome.
“So you’re going to stop him from blowing up the spaceport?”
“No,” Satine answered, surprising her. “That’s why I need the Wrens.”
She had recruited the two Nite Owls in question the day before. Bo-Katan should have been furious at how eagerly they’d jumped at the opportunity to go behind Pre’s back, but she suspected their decision had more to do with the presence of Gar Saxon on the strike team than Pre himself. He was mystifyingly oblivious to such dynamics within their organization.
“If what Pre said is true and Jango is putting the New Mandalorians of Keldabe into concentration camps, it will only be a matter of time before he has to send more troops to Keldabe, and before he attempts the same thing with the Sundarians,” Satine explained. “Blowing the spaceport will severely complicate both matters. The ideal is if he is struck two blows in quick succession. That’s where you come in.”
“Fuck no,” Bo-Katan said automatically. “Leave me out of this.”
“Come on, Bo, humor me.” Satine smiled with an inappropriate amount of teeth. “I bet your boyfriend will be delighted if he comes back to Concordia to find you, say, recaptured the Governor’s Palace.”
Bo-Katan stared at her. “H-how?”
“The Protectors are striking tomorrow,” Satine said. “If you can guarantee I won’t lose any of them to a Death Watch blaster bolt, I’ll tell them you’re coming.”
“How?”
“Let me keep my one secret, vod’ika.”
The next morning, Bo-Katan met Pre at the foot of his Gauntlet’s ramp.
“Any parting thoughts?” she asked with false lightness, sliding her hand into his.
“We’ll need to keep up momentum,” he said, perfectly serious and perfectly fearless. Sometimes, Bo-Katan could see the Crusader of her mother’s storybooks in him, merciless and driven and bound up in his honor. “I trust you can come up with something to increase the pressure on Fett’s forces.”
“I have a few ideas,” she replied, thinking of Satine’s Protectors gathering their forces outside of the Governor’s Palace.
Pre beamed. “I knew you would.” He pulled her close, kissing her just long enough to leave her breathless. “I trust this means I’m forgiven?” It would have been too easy if he had let her change in demeanor slide.
“If you can pull this off, you can consider yourself forgiven,” Bo-Katan replied, feeling a prickle of annoyance. Of course he would treat this like another one of his little stunts, not like something that had genuinely complicated things for her. That was the kind of person he was. Satine hovered and fussed like a mother hen, he dug his claws into her like a nexu with a favorite ball.
“Very well,” he said. “I expect a full briefing when I get back.” He winked at the end, blue eyes bright and mischievous.
“Wait,” she said when he tried to pull away. She ran a hand through his hair, cognizant of Gar Saxon’s side-eye and Satine on the other side of camp, playing Cubikad with Ursa. “Be careful, Pre. We already underestimated Fett once.”
“Do you really think I would give that chakaar the satisfaction of killing me?” Pre replied, raising his eyebrows.
“Obviously not on purpose,” she said sourly.
“I’ll be careful,” he conceded, pressing out the furrow between her brows with his thumb. “Though I don’t need to be.” He shot Saxon a dirty look, sending him scrambling up the ramp. “Now. Time to make Fett bleed.” He stepped away, fixed his cape and the way the Darksaber sat at his hip.
“Good hunting, my dear,” he said.
“Good hunting, alor,” she replied, and watched him stroll up the ramp. When she turned back to the camp, she saw Satine looking at her with a carefully-neutral expression that was unlike her.
Bo-Katan couldn’t shake the feeling they were going to get each other killed.