MOLLYMAUK
by DuchessKenobi and Lux's Sister
Hello everyone, and thank you for checking out Mollymauk. Before we get started, DuchessKenobi and I have a few announcements to get through.
If you've read DK's and my joint works Polaris and Candle on the Water, you will probably recognize some of the characters who appear here. However, Mollymauk is actually part of the While Others universe. Several characters who made their debut in Polaris were originally imagined for the While Others series but never got to have their moment in the sun, and I'm excited to present you with their alter egoes. So while you may recognize a character, their identifying details, or their relationships, that character won't be in the same situation they were in their signature work.
With that being said, let's get to the story! It's the end of the Clone Wars on Onderon, but according to our first protagonist it may as well be the end of the world.
Dalla Blackwell's eyes went huge as she realized the truth and she shrieked. "You're breaking up with me at a funeral?!"
Sixteen-year-old Lux Bonteri cringed at the volume of his girlfriend's outburst. "Not so loud."
"Why, because you don't want everyone to know what you're doing?"
"It's not what it looks like."
"Really? Because what it looks like is you dumping me just after we both put Steela in the ground." She glared at him with more venom than most fifteen-year-olds possessed.
Lux only slightly flinched under it, which was one of the things she used to admire about him. Now she just wished he would turn to stone like other people. "It's nothing to do with you," he said. "And I'm not going to pretend the timing is anything but terrible. It's just with the state of the galaxy and of Onderon we shouldn't be together right now."
Dalla didn't swallow it: "We got together because we were what Onderon needed, Lux."
The heyday of Onderon's nobility may have passed, but the names Blackwell and Bonteri still meant something. Honor, power, strength — a planet in limbo needed to have a thread of hope for its future. What could be better than a union between the senator and the northern lord's daughter?
For the first seven months they were together, everything was going to plan. Then Lux ran off to Mandalore to do something incredibly stupid and escaped by the skin of his teeth to join the rebels campaigning to remove the Separatists from Onderon. That was a hiccup for sure but things truly didn't get hairy until King Rash ordered Dalla's lord father to turn her over as a hostage. Then she was the one running to the rebels for refuge.
It hadn't been easy, but she and Lux had each other. Through insurgency and the close call at the execution, to all-out war and the siege of Iziz, they were at each other's sides.
And - Dalla's glare intensified as the realization came to her - Lux had Ahsoka.
Who he had been standing with right before he went to break up with Dalla.
"Are you serious?" she hissed.
"I know it's horrible, and I'm sorry but if there was any other way -."
"You keep talking about the good of Onderon when the reality is you're dumping me for a Jedi!"
Lux made a choking sound. "Excuse me?!"
"Maybe if you wanted me to believe your little story, you shouldn't make eyes at her! What does she have that I don't?" As soon as she said it, she knew. Ahsoka Tano was gorgeous, with her crystal blue eyes and the elegant swoop of her montrals.
Dalla was not a beauty. She was short and skinny with stringy dark hair and a crooked nose broken in an accident when she was a kid. Even though she couldn't hold a candle to the Jedi in the looks department, she thought she was smart enough to make up for it in Lux's eyes. Apparently not, if he thought she was going to swallow this puffer pig.
"Ahsoka and I are just friends; I'm not dumping you for her." He hesitated for a moment, then exhaled. "Look, I like you. Under any other circumstances I would stay with you, or at least not do this right here and now, but something's going on and it's big. I don't want you, your family, or the north getting dragged into it."
Dalla nodded. "I understand."
"Really?" Lux relaxed. "I'm so glad. I was worried -."
"I understand that you thought it was just fine to involve me, my family, and the entire north in the recent planetary insurrection, but apparently this is too big. After we fought and died for your southern asses."
She didn't know what she expected him to say, but she expected him to say something. Instead he just stood there, hanging his head.
"Did you only date me for the navy?"
"No." Lux didn't meet her eye. "It was real. I wish it didn't have to end this way."
"But it is ending this way. At our friend's funeral."
He just nodded.
"Nothing to say, huh?"
Lux shook his head. The nerve of him, being so calm when Dalla was about to explode out of her own skin.
But before she could scream, or pummel her ex, or spontaneously combust, someone came around the corner.
"Lux, Saw and Hero are looking for - woah." Sierra Bonteri stopped in her tracks when she saw Lux and Dalla. "What's going on here?"
"Tell her, Lux." Dalla ordered and stormed off the way Sierra had come. "Tell your sister what's going on!"
Sierra said something either to Lux or to her, but Dalla didn't stick around to hear it. She walked past the rebels filtering out of the palace, past General Tandin and the militia, all the way out of the main square toward Iziz harbor where her family's navy, and the navies of every other island on the north sea, were docked.
As she got closer she could hear the northern forces celebrating in the bars and pubs, strains of shanties and drinking songs bleeding into the streets.
Mush a ring-um-dur-um -
When he said he'd board her -
- ride the wind and go, white seabird?
Dalla stopped in front of the last pub and listened. It was off-key and slurred more than sung, but they were clearly singing the mollymauk song.
Ride the wind and go, mollymauk?
Right now she was in the mood for something with more blood and guts, but her favorite song would do.
"Dalla!" A familiar voice snapped her away from her favorite song and she opened her eyes to see Sloan Murphy crossing the street, adjusting his eyepatch as he went. Someone had placed a neat line of bandages to cover the scratches he'd sustained during the siege and disrupted the patch's usual placement. Dalla vaguely wondered if Sloan had flirted with the nurse who'd done it.
"I thought you were still at the palace." Her surrogate brother laid a hand on her shoulder. "How are you holding up?"
Dalla stared in silence for a moment, and then it was like a switch had been flipped and she burst into sobs.
Sloan's singular eye blinked. "Not well, I take it."
…
"It's been six months. You need to get yourself together."
Dalla rolled her eyes at Sloan in the refresher mirror. "Like you've never done anything regrettable after a breakup."
Sloan didn't take the bait. "I'm not the one who cut her hair with kitchen scissors."
"It seemed like a good idea at the time." She looked down to what was formerly the ends of her hair lying in the sink. It could be worse. She could have made the other bad hair decision of the day.
"What's that?" Sloan pushed past her and grabbed the empty container balancing on the edge of the sink. "You didn't..."
She sighed and lifted her now-uneven hair to reveal bright pink. "Luckily it's mostly confined to the underside."
"Salt gods and brylks below." Sloan cringed. "Just when I thought this couldn't turn into more of a mess."
"I'm not a mess!"
"Your hair is pink and at a visible slant, you ate cookies for breakfast, and last night you doodled Lux getting hit by a hovertram on your napkin at the pub. You're a mess." Sloan boosted himself onto the sink and patted the other side for Dalla to join him.
"What's going on?" He asked once they were both settled on the counter. "The Dalla I know wouldn't have blinked twice if some idiot who couldn't see what was right in front of him broke up with her. It would've rolled off her like water off a gull."
"Well that Dalla also hadn't been broken up with." She scoffed.
It was obvious from the look on Sloan's face that he didn't buy it.
"Dal," he said slowly. "You were in the palace for ten minutes before everyone else got there and we found you in the throne room. Rash's body was in the next room."
"I know where he was." It was burned in her memory, the exact position of Rash's body on the plush carpet, the rattle of his final words.
"He wasn't dead, was he?"
"He lived for three minutes."
Technically it was three minutes and eleven seconds, even if Rash had passed out around the two and a half minute mark and hadn't been grounded in reality for a bit longer.
"Did something happen?" The worry beneath Sloan's voice brought her back to reality. "Look I know he's already dead but I'll resurrect him myself if you need me to kill him. What did he -?"
"He didn't do anything." Dalla cut him off. "He talked. He couldn't do much else by the time I found him, but he did talk. He said he was sorry."
"Well he had a Dxun of a lot to be sorry for," Sloan snorted. "Throne stealing, kingslaying, attempted hostage taking…"
"Aye, that made sense, but then he said things that didn't. He was talking to people that weren't there, but he wasn't hallucinating. It was like he knew things that hadn't happened yet."
Sloan's brow furrowed. "How is that possible?"
"I don't know!" A fraction of her frustration leaked through and Dalla took a deep breath to compose herself. It wasn't Sloan's fault Sanjay had left her with a million questions. "I want to ignore it, but I can't. I can't explain it but I need to know what he was talking about."
"Don't think lopping your hair off is going to get you any answers."
"Thanks for the heads up." She rolled her eyes. "Lux's family knew his before the war. I thought Lux might know something, so I was going to talk to him after the funeral and then that happened. It's not like I need him to help me; I just don't know where to start."
"We have a voyage down to Iziz next week," he said. "I think the beginning would be a good place to start."
…
The beginning was an awful place to start.
After the war someone had gotten the idea to turn the Rash estate into an art museum. It worked, mostly. The Rashes had been fond of massive rooms that converted well to exhibition halls and since no one had lived there for years even before Sanjay's death, there weren't any personal items inside.
While it made for a great museum, it also meant the answers Dalla was looking for were erased.
Defeated, she plopped on a bench in front of the most personal-looking exhibit she could find: a portrait of the man himself. Someone had put up a ray shield to deflect the litter angry patrons had thrown, but if anything the red glow added to the mood. Sanjay's painted expression was almost as pitiful as it was when she saw him.
"I don't suppose you can talk," she said to the painting. If he could, she'd have asked her questions and ended her quest already. "Salt gods, how did you know those -?"
She almost jumped out of her skin when a male voice asked "Did you know him?"
Dalla spun around. A boy about her age with shaggy dark hair and sad eyes sat on the other side of the bench.
"Sorry if I startled you," he said. "Nobody ever pays much attention to this one unless they're trying to throw things, and you don't seem to have any."
"I didn't really know him, but I met him once," she admitted. "What about you? Most people wouldn't ask."
He nodded. "Lord Rash was a patron of the arts. That's why we've chosen to display his works here."
His works? Dalla's gaze swept around the room to the rows of oil paintings dotting the walls. "These are all his?"
"Every one." The boy gestured to the portrait. "That's one of his early works, when he was still learning the art. The one to the left is more recent; I think he did that one a few years ago, and on the right is Girl With Mandalorian Lilies." He swallowed hard. "That was the last one I saw him paint."
He blinked tears from his eyes, looking at the portrait.
"I didn't know he painted," Dalla said by way of breaking the silence. "He was more interested in talking about the people he missed when I met him."
"When was that?"
"At the end of the Siege." His eyes widened and she hastened to make sure she hadn't given him the wrong idea. "I got separated from the rest of the northern forces and decided to meet them at the palace. I thought I was alone there, but I guess I wasn't."
The boy chewed his lip, obviously weighing a decision, and then his teeth released with a soft sigh.
"Bernard Wallace," he said and extended his hand. "I studied under him for four years."
"Dalla Blackwell." She shook.
"Dalla?" Bernard repeated, his eyes widening like he'd seen a ghost. "Sanjay said…"
"Sanjay said something about me?" Her heart rate sped up. The portrait couldn't talk, but it seemed like Bernard was willing to. Maybe she would actually get the answers she was looking for.
"Dalla?" Someone called from across the room.
No.
Dalla's hopes crashed to the ground as a wild-eyed Lux Bonteri made a beeline for her bench.
"I almost didn't recognize you since you changed your hair," he panted.
"What are you doing here?" She demanded, ignoring the sudden compulsive need to make herself look like less of a disaster in front of him. "You're not the art type."
"I came looking for you." At least Lux wasn't his usual suave self. He was sweaty and out of breath, and there were obvious bags under his eyes. "Hutch tracked your comm, said you were in -."
"You had Hutch track me?!" She yanked her comm unit out of her pocket as if she could shake the rebellion's hacker out of the device. "What is wrong with you, Lux?"
Lux raised his hands in either surrender or self-defense. "It's not like that!"
"Don't think I'm going to come crawling back. I'm over you." She threw a look over her shoulder to her new friend, who was watching the exchange with eyes like saucers. "Right, Bernard?"
"...Right," Bernard said unconvincingly. "So, you two are friends?"
"Yes," Lux said at the same time Dalla rapped out "No!"
Her ex coughed. "What? Since when are we not friends?"
"After you dumped me at a funeral!"
"To be fair, it wasn't actually a funeral."
"What?"
"I should probably get going." Bernard stood up from the bench and made his way to the exit with all speed.
"Wait, Bernard, don't go!" Dalla protested but it was too late. Bernard was halfway out the door, along with all the answers she sought.
Under her breath, Dalla swore like the salty sailor she was. Back to square one, again.
Lux hadn't seemed to notice: "I would explain, but those things I told you I couldn't explain before are still going on and I don't have time. I need you to get rid of something for me." He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a string of purple gems. Heirloom jewels, Dalla recognized, much like her family's own.
"Sierra and I can't keep this with us and I don't want them where the crown can get their hands on them. I need you to get rid of it." Lux thrust the jewelry into her hands before she could protest and backed away. "I'll explain everything later, I promise!"
And then she was alone in the exhibition room with no answers, no Bernard, and a fistful of Bonteri gemstones.
"You want me to get rid of this?" She whispered through clenched teeth. "Fine. I'll get rid of it."