Disclaimer: The Star Wars universe belongs to George Lucas, I own none of the characters or settings to be found herein. No profit is being made from this work of fanfiction.
A/N: A few people expressed an interest in hearing more about the Bane backstory hinted at in Good for What Ails You. This fic will be an attempt to elaborate. The intro chapter is set in Bane's past, but subsequent ones will feature a fair bit of past/present time skipping (I'll try to avoid confusion).
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There are moments when fate pauses on a knife edge and waits for a decision.
The young Duros knew instinctively that this was one of those moments. It wasn't just about taking the blaster, dull and worn, from its place in the bottom drawer; it was about what would come after. Leave it be and life would trundle on in the same trajectory as it always had been: a job at the ore processing plant like his father, a wife who'd gradually start to bear a disturbing similarity to his mother, a few sons for whom his greatest ambition would be a slightly better job at the ore processing plant. A small life, safe and predictable. Take it and he'd be hurtled off that course and into the unknown: the only certainty that the future – however long that might last for him – wouldn't involve watching his life pass by one oxide load at a time.
"Well?" Garu was nervous, his excitement, so strong a few hours ago, turning to fear as teenage fantasy began to look like it might actually start transitioning into reality.
He continued to stare at his late Great Uncle's most carefully guarded secret.
"Cad, maybe we shouldn't do this."
The younger of the two youths glanced up at his second cousin and was struck for the first time by the conscious realisation that while all their schemes seemed to originate with Garu, it was always left to him, Cad, to make the first breach in the barrier between possibility and actuality. Garu lived in his own head. If it wasn't for Cad all of the flights of fancy would stay there. No distilling spirits in a can under the bed. No selling the mildly toxic result to the other kids on the block. No sneaking out to that Togrutan titty bar. No riding on 'borrowed' speeder bikes. This time it would be no different. Garu had seen the Wanted poster and the words 'twenty-thousand credits' and had pictured himself as one of those anti-hero guns for hire you saw in Coruscant holos. A romantic daydream. Left to his own devices it would only be a few days before he was dreaming of life as a swoop racer or troubadour instead.
"Cad?"
He said nothing, his attention back on the blaster and the matter of his destiny.
On the floor below their mothers quarrelled about who was going to get the old man's crockery.
"It probably doesn't even work." Garu was pleading now.
Cad knew it wasn't true. He'd peered through the crack in the door while his Great Uncle had stripped down and cleaned the thing. You didn't do that to a broken piece of equipment, especially when it was a reminder of the bad old days before the family had made the leap from criminal underbelly to lower class respectability. No, the old man must have kept it out of some residual fear that a figure from the past might show up one day to settle some long hidden score.
"We could go to Arizio's," Garu said. "There's this new green girl there. Nobody knows what species she is, but Fin Mo says that she looks a bit like that Twi'lek from Palace of Sin without the lekku, he says that she'll do anything for a couple of deathsticks, we could go and see if it's true. Or we could go to the track, I heard that Jirana's racing again..."
Garu's prattling went on, but Cad filtered it out. He could not however filter out the squabbling women downstairs, the clank of the freight trucks, the whirring of the ore processing plant or the dreary rhythmic trudge of honest working men towards it.
Twenty thousand credits. It wasn't a fortune, but it wouldn't be that.
He made his choice.