Like the summary says, this is a collection of scenes rather than more of an actual fic, because I could try to make this a connected, coherent narrative but that sounds like a lot of work for something with a very tiny audience. For this chapter: as a subscriber, I got a free Nar Shaddaa Sky Palace with the original Strongholds update, however long ago that was at this point. I think I was probably at least halfway through my Inquisitor's storyline by then. I wrote this fairly recently, though, in response to a prompt on Tumblr.
"Sky palace" sounds overly ostentatious, but once Mirassa sees it, she can understand the name. It's not quite palatial, maybe, but it floats under its own power far above the ground, with nothing but open air and skylanes on all sides. And the entire structure is hers. No one can approach without her knowledge or enter without her permission, and although the Nar Shaddaa location is due more to economics and availability than choice, there's nowhere else she feels safer, even surrounded by casinos, crime lords, and frankly incredible levels of corruption. She'd like an apartment in Kaas City at some point, certainly, because it would be convenient and because lush, verdant Dromund Kaas is undeniably beautiful, but Nar Shaddaa is neutral territory. It's a place where anything can be bought or sold, where a person (specifically, an alien who is also a former slave) can disappear into the anonymous throngs for days or months or even years if necessary, and most importantly it isn't inextricably tangled in Sith and Imperial politics.
On a personal level, it's one of the first places she ever visited as a free woman, and it's where she found a discreet cybernetics tech who could fully deactivate the slave collar wired into her nervous system. Nar Shaddaa, in its own dangerous and unpredictable way, is freedom. Even if the name "sky palace" were an oxymoron that overly imaginative realtors with delusions of grandeur applied to a shack in hopes it would somehow fool prospective buyers, the simple fact that it's here is reassuring.
And it is, in fact, considerably better than a shack. There's a docking platform for a speeder, with plenty of room for a few of her personal vehicles, a mailbox, and some storage. Inside, the rooms are all spacious, dominated by window-walls looking out on Nar Shaddaa. The furniture is simple but perfectly adequate, and anyway the more important thing is the decorations she can use to fill it, souvenirs of her journey as a Sith and travels to places she'd never dared dream she might visit. She settles on the bed, letting her eyes drift around the room, imagining where she might put lights, shelves, wall hangings.
(In more than one room, she has a prominent view of a giant, animated image of a Twi'lek dancer advertising one of many cantinas, which is...a little annoying, and at first she considered choosing a room where she wouldn't have to look at it. In the end, she deliberately took one with the best view of it. That neon woman with no agency or will of her own, existing only as a vessel for the desires of others—it's part of Mirassa's past too, one she doesn't try to pretend she can escape. She was a slave, she will always have been a slave, and she refuses to accept any shame from that truth. Instead, always, she moves forward, takes that history of being forced into weakness and turns it into strength.)
It's dizzying, how much things have changed in such a short time. Oh, her new life is a dangerous one, and she's well aware that her current freedom isn't simple or guaranteed, but—she has money now, enough to satisfy not just needs but occasional whims. She has possessions, valuable ones—relics, speeders, droids, a lightsaber, even a spaceship. She can dress however she wants, travel wherever she wants, even give orders to the people who have placed themselves under her command. And now—
She isn't going to call it a home; that seems too much like daring the universe to take it away, just yet. But she has a house, her own base of operations, a place that belongs to her, and it's surreal in the best possible way.
"I have a house," she says to herself, and laughs out loud, almost giddy with it. "I have a house. Damn right my chains are broken."
Because that's the best part, the most terrifying and impossible part: she has all these things, and the ability to make choices, and connections with people she is cautiously beginning to care about, and for the first time she has enough power that she might even be able to keep all of it. If she's smart, and decisive, and just ruthless enough, she can keep everything she's gained.
May the Force free you, they say, and it did. It does. But more importantly, she has freed herself, and no one can ever take that away.