Saying Ketsu grew up in a powder keg was putting it mildly.
The girl was stuck in a difficult situation, and there was no way for her to get out of it. It seemed to worsen every day.
The planet her family lived on was far from wealthy. The decay was always present, everywhere. All kinds of species lived here... even though one could hardly call the daily strolling to work, getting back home and then tumbling over dead-alive to continue the same routine the next day living.
Maybe people were forced to live here as a punishment. Ketsu didn't know exactly, there was no one she could have asked since she wasn't allowed to go outside... but considering the conditions of living here, it seemed likely to her. Punishment was the only topic she was an expert in. She wondered if people brought her knew what they had done wrong, unlike her.
Ketsu didn't know what her mother was up to when she left the house, but she locked her daughter in when she left, leaving the girl all alone. Her father worked in one of the factories that were scattered all across the planet's surface and filled the air with so much smoke the girl found it hard to breath at times.
She didn't know what exactly was produced there – just that, whatever it was her father did, made very angry and aggressive.
When he lost it in the evening, he started breaking objects, but his anger never really seemed to subside until he beat Ketsu's mother.
"Whore! You're not fucking me over! I know what you did!"
He always yelled something along these lines.
Afterwards, her mother left the room – staggering and bleeding and smelling like alcohol.
"Fucking brute, fucking drunkard!" she'd curse while nursing her injuries.
Whenever she said that, Ketsu tried to run, because she knew exactly what would happen afterwards. The door was always locked, the windows too high for her to reach them. She hid, hoping her mother wouldn't find her, but she always did. And when she found her, she did to her daughter exactly what her husband had done to her not long ago.
She hit the girl until her small body crumbled, until her clothes were stained red. There wasn't a single day Ketsu wasn't covered in cuts and bruises.
She wondered if her father simply didn't care that her mother hurt her, or if he hurt her mother because she hit Ketsu. Not that it mattered. It was a vicious circle, anyway.
She never understood why her mother beat her. For some reason, she seemed to blame the child for everything that had gone wrong in her life... but the girl had no idea why.
Whenever Ketsu saw a couple outside her window, one of the parents lifting up a laughing child and hugging them – not that it happened that often, there really weren't a lot of kids around – she watched them blankly, wondering if that's what a parent's love should feel like.
She wondered if these kids took this kind of love for granted because they weren't familiar with how horribly some parents treated their children. How some parents made a massive fuss out of every little mistake their kids made – even if it was just standing in the wrong place or breathing in the wrong direction – so they didn't have to feel bad about hurting their children as a disciplinary punishment.
Ketsu knew her mother wasn't really beating her to punish her. In a way, she did punish her for her existence alone... but more than that, hitting her daughter was her way of relieving stress.
The girl crawled into her parents' bed to cry, her entire body aching, whenever they weren't home.
There wasn't even a glimpse of hope in Ketsu's life.
She had no chance to escape from the situation.
Her only bright spot was the nightly view outside her window, when she looked up to the dark sky.
The girl dreamed of traveling. She envied people that were able to fly across the galaxy. She knew these people existed because the things moving in the night sky couldn't just be shooting stars.
When darkness fell, she opened the blinds in the small room she called her own, though it really had the size of a closet rather than an actual room.
She didn't have a bed – she was either given thin or a thick sheets, depending on the temperature and her mother's mood.
She was just tall enough to reach the string for opening the blinds that was dangling next to the windowsill.
She could only look outside when she disgraced herself from the window as far as possible. When she saw a space ship passing by, she dreamed of being inside, flying up to the stars, away from this hell she called home.
During daytime, she didn't always open the blinders, but they stayed open all night, every night.
Ketsu loved the night as much as she hated it. She loved it for the beautiful night sky. For reminding her there were nice things in life, even if they were far away. And she hated the night because of the dreams she had when she fell asleep. She dreamed of what happened to her when she was awake. It never stopped, not during the day, not during the night. She lived in constant fear, in constant pain. The girl had no idea what love actually felt like. Her father ignored her... and her mother expressed her love thorough hits. She didn't want this kind of love. She wanted to run away... to never be loved this way again.
She was fed, just barely enough to survive. Her mother didn't want her to die because if she did, there would be no way for her to tel out her frustration.
Ketsu could have refused to eat, and if no one would do anything against it, she could have died... but she was just a little kid afraid of death that held on for dear life.
»Maybe the pain will be gone after I die,« she thought... but in the end, she always came to the same conclusion.
She would hurt her mother with her death, but not for long, and the pain of losing a punch bag wasn't nearly comparable to the pain of being said punch bag. She didn't want her mother to define her life like that. That the only kind of love she knew was what her mother did to her. She wanted to be picked up and hugged. She wanted someone to laugh along with her when she got up to nonsense. And more than anything, she wanted someone to help her up, to take care of her and tell her it would be okay when she fell down, instead of putting the boot in.
When looking at the night sky, she could dream that this person existed, somewhere out there. That she could reach them when she managed to get away from here. Her longing to find them grew every day. She wanted to run away, as far as her short legs would carry her, because maybe, just maybe, she could find someone who treated her better than her parents did.
When Ketsu turned nine, she was finally tall enough to climb up to the windowsill. She waited for her parents to leave, and when she was sure they were nowhere in sight, she climbed up, opened the window and jumped out, to then start running as fast as her hurting legs let her.
After a while, she entered an environment she didn't recognize. The ground was covered in boulder, and she vaguely remembered her parents had had visitors a while ago who had spoken about some war responsible for the debris, but she had no idea whether or not that was true – she didn't even know what exactly a war was.
By now it had started to rain, and the nine year old hated the feeling of the cold rain soaking her clothing. It burned when it touched the wounds on her skin.
She didn't even know where she was going – she didn't know this area, and she didn't have any credits that might have gotten her anywhere. She knew, whatever credits were, they were apparently important because her mother always yelled at her that she had no idea how expensive it was to keep her alive.
She arrived in an area with warehouses. Ketsu wasn't really surprised there were so many, since whatever was produced in the factories needed to be stored somewhere.
She thought about hiding in one of the warehouses – for now. Wind and rain didn't reach her there. By now she was soaking wet and freezing. She decided to stay... and regretted it a couple of hours later, when she was rudely awakened from her short nap between the crates.
"Look at that. What are you doing here? Your mother must be worried sick."
It was a friend of her parents who found her. He usually worked in the factory alongside her father, and had just brought the last delivery of the day into the warehouse when he found her. By now, it was pitch-black outside.
"No, please, I don't want to go back!" she screeched when he picked her up, but he ignored her protest and brought her back to the place she was forced to call home.
Her mother greeted her with open arms and hugged her tightly when the man handed her over. Ketsu wanted to scream because it hurt so much. She knew her mother deliberately pressured the parts of her body that had been hurt most the other day.
"Have you gone crazy? You dumb kid. You could've gotten hurt," her mother said, smiling like a maniac when she put her back down.
Ketsu didn't understand why she pretended she had actually been worried, but it stopped as soon as the front door closed behind them. The girl crashed into the wall in a matter of seconds.
"You ungrateful little toad! Who do you think you are, you bitch?!"
The first punch hit her shoulders, the second one her abdomen. The girl doubled over in pain. Her mother didn't care. The third punch hit her in the lips, which immediately started bleeding.
"I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry," Ketsu screeched, time and time again, but her mother wouldn't listen.
When the fourth punch hit her chest, the girl was pretty sure she heard a crack, and it hurt so much she could hardly bear it. But it still wasn't enough. Her mother went on and on until the kid was unable to move and she laughed while she did it.
"It's useless to try and run away. The longer you stay away, the more I'll hurt you when you come crawling back at the end to make up for lost time. You can't stay anywhere else. Who would want you brat?"
Ketsu was almost passing out with pain, but she would have recognized the object her mother grabbed now anywhere and everywhere.
The acrid smell of alcohol filled the air. It had to be one of the bottles her mother had emptied on the same evening.
"Please... stop..."
The girl wanted to cry, but she didn't even have the strength for that. As much as her mother usually hurt her... she had never gone quite this far.
"You dumb child, you do nothing but causing me trouble."
The bottle found the girl's head. Ketsu screamed before the pain got the best of her. The loud chinking of the shards that hit the ground was the last thing she heard before her world went black.
The next morning, her mother dragged her to a doctor for the first time in her life because the girl had lost too much blood.
He also fixed the girl's rib, removed the shards of glass and gave her a medicine to help with the pain – but when he started talking about credits, her mother grabbed one of the larger scalpels from the operation table, and a moment later, the man was choking on the ground, while the woman kept cutting his windpipe like it was the most normal thing in the world, and then went on to stab him multiple times. His blood ran all across the floor.
"Look at this mess, Ketsu. This just happened because you ran away. You killed him, do you understand that?"
Her mother smiled, then pushed her daughter down to the ground next to the dead body. When the girl got up again, the picture blurred in front of her eyes. Her hands trembled, but as much as she wanted to look away... she couldn't.
It was the first time in her life that Ketsu's hands were covered in blood that wasn't her own.
In this moment, Ketsu's mother had had the upper hand... but she could just as little point this very same weapon at her husband as her daughter could point it at her.
No one ever investigated. Cases like this happened every day, but as long as the workers did what they were supposed to do, the controllers didn't care about the crimes of the natives. The doctor hadn't been a worker, after all, and even if he had been... to go through as much trouble as figuring out who was responsible wouldn't pay off. Really, the controllers only acted when someone didn't show up to work or if they didn't fulfill their quota.
Ketsu did her best to try and forget about the incident... but ever since, she could not stand the sight of blood. She also woke up screaming in the middle of the night, her mother's voice filling her head.
»You killed him.«
She needed to run away. She needed to run away, as fast as possible. The incident was supposed to scare her out of ever trying again, and her mother obviously thought it had, because while she did drag her around for a couple of days afterwards, she eventually fell back into the oils routine of leaving and locking her daughter in.
Of course Ketsu was scare because of what happened. And she did blame herself... which meant her mother had won again. But that was exactly what affirmed her to go through with it. She was tired of it. Tired of her mother winning, over and over again, She wanted to run away and never turn back. She wanted it all to be in the past, a past she never had to revisit. She would never let her mother win again.
This time, she prepared herself before she ran away. She needed to know where she was going because otherwise, she would just be getting nowhere again. She spent the next couple of days saving as much food as she could without starving herself. She stayed up most of the night to watch the ships, to find out where they were heading or where they came from. She memorized where the moving lights were the lowest. That's were she would run. When she could board one of the ships... she could get away from this place, and her mother could never reach her again, at least, that was what she hoped.
When she has figured out where she needed to go, she slept longer again. She had to save up all the energy she could before she left.
Then, on a morning when her injuries weren't quite as bad and it looked like it could rain – rain was, as Ketsu figured, actually a good thing, because while it was cold and hurt, it also made footprints disappear.
When she didn't stop again, she could make it. Ketsu wrapped the food she had saved in her thin sheets and waited for her parents to leave.
As soon as she was sure that they were gone, she jumped out of the window once again, and started running until her legs burnt and her lung felt like it could burst. And even then, she somehow managed to keep going, through the wind and eventually, the rain, the sheets tied together to a small back hanging over her shoulders.
When darkness fell, she could see the lights again, closer than she had ever been before, and then led her the way to the spaceport.
When she arrived, the girl was absolutely mesmerized. The building was huge, larger than anything she had ever seen – which really wasn't a lot, but she didn't know that.
No other building in the area was this well lit. And the living beings around here... one woman walked around on something that looked like it might have been more expensive than the entire building Ketsu grew up in.
She felt completely out of place in this environment... but at least it was way more comfortable inside the building than it had been outside. It wasn't wet, not was ist could, and despite the bustle kn here, it was way more tidy in here than in any place Ketsu had seen so far.
But she didn't have that much time to look around, anyway. She needed to board one of the ships, and fast, before someone realized she didn't belong here.
The girl had come too far to be caught now.
When she saw a couple of guys in uniforms passing by, she hid behind some crates that were standing around. Then, she spotted it.
It was a small ship, standing slightly from the other ships, and not as well guarded.
She quickly realized why: the owner was tall and broad-shouldered, a real hunk. He looked strong and menacing. Ketsu didn't know what exactly he was... only that he obviously wasn't human.
She should have been scared... but as scared as Ketsu was, nothing was as scary as imagining what woukd happen to her if her mother found her again. Sneaking into the ship meant never going home again. It meant freedom.
»This will work. It has to,« she thought to herself and waited for the guy to be distracted and then stole past him into the ship.
There might have been people who would think she was courageous for daring to do that... but in truth she was anything but. She was just a little girl that was so scared of going home, she rather put her fate in the hands of a stranger.
Inside, she opened one of the ventilation shafts and crawled inside. She was save in there. Her mother couldn't find her her... and yet, the irrational fear of her seeing her trough the walls of the ship and all of the buildings that separated them by now didn't leave her alone... pushed the air out of her lungs.
She took the sheets turned bag from her back and pegged to it. She felt so lonely, and she'd done nothing rather than to cry, but she was too scared someone could hear her, so she just took a chunk of bread out of the sheets and ate as quietly as possible.
Her rumbling stomach would have been more likely to be heard, she decided, but maybe the fact that by now, she was so hungry that it hurt her, also played a role.
One bite, two bites, three... the bread barely helped her with hunger, but since she had never really been seated before, she was used to it.
She swallowed another chunk, and another, and another, until it was all gone. She knew that probably hadn't been her smartest move since she didn't know when she would be able to eat for the next time... but she was soaking wet, she was cold and wanted to wrap herself in her sheets. The ship didn't seem clean enough to put food down in the ventilation shafts... so she decided it was better to use it up now than to get sick because of it later.
When she was done, she laid down, pulled the sheets up to her neck and fell asleep.
"No! NO! I DON'T WANR TO! I'M SO SORRY!" Ketsu screeched.
She shot up, bathed in sweat. Her mother had found her again, and she had beat her again, much worse than she ever had before. Her breathing was fast. She felt her arms, her head, her legs. No blood. It had just been a dream.
Her entire body was shaking with sobs. It took a while for her to realize she wasn't in the same place where she had fallen asleep. She was lying on some kind of folding bed, underneath an actual blanket.
»What...?«
Then, the ceiling light was activated. She needed to cover her eyes for a moment so they weren't dazzled. She opened them again after a while, blinking,
"You're awake, I see." The deep voice had to belong to the owner of the ship. His arms were crossed and he looked at her in a serious way. "Who in the galaxy are you?"
"I-I'm the new mechanic," she stuttered, using one of the words she had heard at the spaceport earlier.
She had no idea what a mechanic was, or what they did. Ketsu tried to show a simple smile to be more convincing, but that had never been one of her strengths. She had never had much of a reason to smile, and nobody ever smiled at her, so she had no idea what a simple smile was supposed to look like.
"Are you joking?" the owner of the ship asked, raising an eyebrow.
He seemed less menacing or angry than he seemed confused, but Ketsu still covered her face protectingly.
"I-I don't know much, but I can learn, and fast. I promise."
"Break it up, kid. What are you doing here?"
"I-I'll work for free. I'll do whatever you want me to, but... please... please don't send me back there, I... she'll kill me..."
Now she started crying and it felt like her mother would beat her right this moment. Even though it wasn't really happening, she still felt the pain.
"Family can be terribly cruel folks, huh?" He mumbled, eying her. She nodded. "Listen, I'm not a good guy and I'll definitely not help you, but... I know who can. The imperials are definitely one of the worst things to ever happen to the galaxy, but... if you want to survive in a world like this, you need to learn to defend yourself. And there, you will. There's no fee to go to their schools because they want to get as many cadets as possible, and you'll be fed, and you'll be safe. Before I send you there, you stay here for a couple of days, so you can heal up. They might nit take you in if you're to damaged. You're too young to go to an academy yet, but there are schools to prepare people like you. I don't have you around my neck for long, you don't have me around your neck for long, sind's like a plan?"
She was surprised how soft his voice sounded at times when he spoke, no matter how tough he tried to seem.
Maybe she did manage to smile correctly this time. Her heart was fluttering in excitement. She didn't have to go back. If she did well, she would never have to go back.
"Yes. Thank you. I- Will you tell me your name?"
He shook his head.
"That would be a little too personal, wouldn't it? At the end, people might think I was an important part of your life or something like that," he replied, failing to hide his amusement.
"What will I call you, then?"
He thought for a moment,
"»You« will be okay for now, there's nobody around but the two of us, kid", he said.
The girl shrugged.
"Okay. If you can call me kid, am I allowed to call you big guy?" she asked shyly, earning a laugh from the alien.
"Okay, go ahead and do it. I like you. And now, you should try to go back to sleep."
"Your ship is really beautiful, big guy," she mumbled as she closed her eyes.
He started laughing again.
"You little flattered. This old piece of junk looks like it could fall apart any minute. Rest, I will go buy us something to eat. Stressing the 'buy' because I can't cook really well. What do you like to eat?"
She had fallen asleep again before he finished the sentence.
For the next couple of days, Ketsu slept on the folding bed. It wasn't really soft, but it was way more comfortable than anything else she had ever been allowed to sleep on. Because she hadn't had a bed back home. Because here, she didn't have to be afraid.
The lasat looked after the girl that disappeared towards the imperial facility.
"Karabast...," he mumbled, realizing that maybe, just maybe, he had grown a little attached to the girl.
He hoped sending her there wasn't a mistake.
She was a smart girl, wasn't she? From what he'd seen in the past couple of days, she definitely was.
She wouldn't buy the lies of the Empire. She wouldn't believe what it did was good for the galaxy.
Maybe he should have asked for her name, after all. Even if she might not remember him for long... she had influenced his life a lot more than she knew. She reminded him of someone, and that reminded him that maybe, just maybe, it was time to go home, after all.
A/N: It's nowhere explicitly mentioned whether or not the person that took her in is Zeb, but it is.
This takes place 11 BBY, which is, at least in my headcanon, before the purge on Lasan takes place.
The idea of Ketsu and Zeb meeting was actually a spontaneous one because I needed someone to get her off the planet and at first I thought it could be a bounty hunter, but then I came up with this and liked it better.
The planet this takes place on is at least slightly similar to what Corellia is portrayed like in "Solo: A Star Wars Story".
Might just be me, but I always thought Ketsu was a pretty interesting character with a lot of backstory left to explore, so that's what I'm doing with this.
In case that wasn't clear enough in the story: I DO NOT SUPPORT THE WAY KETSU'S PARENTS BEHAVE. AT ALL.
Thank you for reading.