There was going to be action in this chapter - but it has instead become a whole lot of FEELINGS. I love Bo-Katan too much.
There are some references in this chapter to Bo-Katan's involvement in Satine's revolution. If you want to be very much across things, you could read chapters 31 and 32 of The Last of the Clan Kryze (numbered 32 and 33 because I did a prologue and was an idiot). Otherwise, just know that in my universe of literary creations, Satine wouldn't be Duchess without her little sister having saved her life (and Obi Wan's too!).
"We've given nearly two litres of fluid already and it's running to our target of four litres in the first eight hours. Luckily there's no actual blood loss to contend with…"
Bo-Katan had not expected to wake up. She remembered lying on her back with Pre above her and the Darksabre against her chest. She remembered the beskar that had saved her life a hundred times before burning her under the heat of the blade. She remembered Ursa breaking ranks; she remembered the briefing room erupting into chaos. She remembered realising that she was about to die.
And yet here she was, afraid to open her eyes but very much alive, listening to a vaguely familiar voice somewhere above her. An engine droned in the background.
"We've given the antibiotics and the analgesia. The escharotomy and the dressings are done and she's saturating well. The neck's immobilised and T9's not worried about any bleeds. So from here it's all watching and waiting. The specialists will see her in Sundari if she allows it, I guess. The neck will do better with fixation."
A response in a man's voice, further away, that Bo-Katan could not make out.
Bo-Katan opened her eyes. She did not know where she was. All she knew was that she was alive, all but naked, unarmoured, staring at the ceiling of a ship she didn't know. Her torso, where her scorching armour had burned her, was wrapped in gel dressings. Someone had put some sort of collar on her; she couldn't move her neck.
"Ursa?" she croaked.
There was no way, no way in any kriffing hell of any kriffing religion in the galaxy, that Pre would have chosen to spare her. The only explanation was that he had chosen to be so slow and torturous about killing her that someone had intervened.
"I'm afraid not."
The male's voice. It came presumably from the pilot's seat.
"She and the Nite Owls are rather busy on Concordia. But they wanted you to get some medical attention."
She knew that voice but she had never heard it speak Mando'a.
"Kenobi?"
She struggled against the collar once more, trying to look at him.
"Get this thing off me!"
A face loomed into view.
"I'm really sorry, but your neck is broken. We have to keep it on."
Bo-Katan gaped. Perhaps she was dying and this whole scene was a hallucination conjured by her bleeding brain.
"Doctor…"
"Jerac. We've met before. You can call me Sewlen."
The doctor was holding her hand. Bo-Katan wanted to tell her that she was a blasted soldier and didn't need anyone to hold her hand. But her scrambled brain betrayed her; she squeezed the warm hand instead.
"Do you need any more pain relief?"
"I don't need pain relief-"
"You definitely need pain relief."
"I need-"
Kriff's sakes. What did she need? She needed her honour back. She needed another chance at Vizsla. She needed to know if Ursa and the Nite Owls were alright. She needed to carry on the fight.
"I'm sure you had good intentions, Jetii, but I never asked-"
"My son asked for me to come get you," Kenobi explained calmly.
Bo-Katan's eyes widened.
"Korkie?"
She could see the Jedi's insufferable smirk in her mind's eye.
"How many secret children to you suppose I have, Bo-Katan?"
"But-"
This concussion was like nothing she'd ever had before. Nothing made sense.
"I didn't call Korkie. I couldn't have possibly-"
"He sensed you in the Force. He's bonded very strongly with you."
Bo-Katan didn't know what to say.
"I didn't know."
"Nor did I, I'll confess."
How did the blasted Jetii always sound so serene? Bo-Katan's world was imploding. Her friends were presumably dying as they spoke.
"I'm not going to kriffing hospital in blasted Sundari," she gritted out, against tears. "What a karking disgrace."
Sewlen squeezed her hand.
"You've seen T9 and I perform surgery and a resus in the Duchess's study, remember?" she pointed out. "No hospital, no worries."
"I believe that Satine is setting up a spare bedroom for you," Kenobi informed her.
Bo-Katan screwed her eyes shut. She couldn't understand why the tears kept coming.
"I never asked-"
"Ursa asked for us to take you," Kenobi reiterated. "She couldn't keep you alive on Concordia."
"They're fighting Pre?"
"The Death Watch has fractioned completely, as I understand it," Kenobi affirmed. "But you can't join that fight yet. You need to take the time to heal. And in the meantime, Korkie will be very pleased to see you."
The words were strangely comforting. Bo-Katan felt a wave of calm flow over her.
"If you're using one of your stupid Force suggestions on me-"
Sewlen came back into view, wielding a syringe and gifting her a crooked grin.
"Don't give him all the credit! That's no Jetii wizardry. That, brave soldier, is midazolam."
Satine's earliest memory was of the day that Bo-Katan was born. Her mother had laboured for three days while Satine was left in the company of Aunty Kella, harassing her endlessly with questions of when the baby would come and how it would come out and whether the baby would kill her mother. Unbeknownst to Satine, Martise and the infant Bo-Katan had indeed been stuck in almost-fatal combat; Bo-Katan's shoulder had become stuck and Martise's pelvis broken to allow the infant safe passage. But the young Satine was not to know any of this. Aunty Kella had ushered her outside to play in the snow and that was when she heard it: the hissing and cracking of fireworks. Golden light dancing against the bleached out winter sky. The arrival of the baby.
It was like meeting her sister for the first time all over again when she was wheeled in from the private hangar. It was the first time that Satine had seen Bo-Katan without armour since their parents had died. She wore white sheets and hospital dressings. She was so small. She was a stranger. She would change the family forever.
Satine walked over to meet the stretcher and did not know what she would say. She was gripped by a strange sort of anger. Had she not been so frail, Satine would have liked to grab her sister by the shoulders and ask her why in the hells she had spent the last decade being stubbornly loyal to clans of sadists who had once again betrayed her.
"Thank goodness you've made it," she managed.
Civil, calm. Her Duchess's voice.
"I was worried."
A gross understatement.
"I'm fine," Bo-Katan gritted out. "Except for the fact that your Jetii and your doctor have kidnapped me."
"Saved your life, you mean."
Bo-Katan scowled.
"I'm a little offended you're not crying, Vod," she countered drily. "Don't you cry at the drop of a helmet anymore?"
"Are you surprised to hear that I've changed in the decade we've spent apart?"
In truth, perhaps Satine was too shocked to cry. Too angry to cry. In the past hours she had contended with the first act of true terrorism on Mandalore during her reign. She had run into a burning building and carried her son from the wreckage and she had waited with bated breath in the hospital, fearing the worst. She had learned of her sister's defection from the Death Watch through her son's unprecedented intelligence and deployed a rescue mission. She had then, through curt comm messages from Obi Wan on his journey back to Sundari, learned that the leader Bo-Katan was rebelling against was none other than Pre Vizsla, her kriffing hand-selected Governor of Concordia.
"I'm sorry," Bo-Katan mumbled.
And she should have been sorry. Satine had tried to tell her sister only weeks ago, damn it, to stay on Sundari with her. She hadn't listened. This was all Bo's fault.
But she was her baby sister. She was twenty-seven standard but she was her baby sister and she always would be. Satine gave a heavy sigh.
"It doesn't matter, Bo," she muttered, wiping the damp hair from her sister's face. "Not now. None of it matters. I'm just glad that you're here."
The palace in Sundari did not have so many spare rooms as it had when Bo-Katan had last lived there over a decade ago. Satine, in flagrant disregard for what their late parents would have had to say on the matter, had pledged most of the spare rooms in the palace to an emergency safe housing initiative and had used the others to provide lodging for palace staff. The only remaining bedroom was the enormous space that had once belonged to their parents.
"You're kidding, Sati."
Bo-Katan didn't much like the palace in general but this room was too much. She had been born on this bed. Kriff, she'd presumably been conceived on this bed. But she had not set foot in this room for as long as she could remember. Bo-Katan and Satine had been raised on an entirely separate floor. Aunty Kella had dragged the children away from this closed door a hundred times when their mother was "resting and not to be disturbed". And after the coup, after her parents were killed, this was the room they had sent Satine to. Where they had presumably meant to rape her. This was the room Satine had escaped from, through the hidden compartment down into the crypts. The room through which Bo-Katan had chosen not to follow her.
"I can't- It's just that- this room is kriffing… haunted, or something, no?"
She must have sounded completely mad. But Satine didn't laugh. Perhaps she understood.
"The only other room is mine."
Bo-Katan scowled.
"You, me, and the Jetii in bed together? No thanks."
Satine snorted.
"Obi Wan will be sleeping in the guard's quarters. He's technically here on a Republican mission, remember? I'm not completely shameless."
Bo-Katan in fact remembered very little of the recent days.
"Whatever. I'll sleep anywhere but here."
Side by side, back to back. They had not shared a bed in perhaps two decades. Satine watched the glowing outline of Kalevala through her bedroom window and remembered the nights they had spent together imagining the future.
"You'll be the Duchess and I'll be in charge of the Peace Corps. So you get to wear pretty dresses all day and I get to climb trees."
"I'll be doing many important things, Bo. Not just wearing pretty dresses."
"We'll build a really big treehouse on Kalevala. That can be the Peace Corps base."
"You'll need to put the Peace Corps base on Sundari, Bo-Katan. So that you can protect me."
"Protect you from what?"
"Insurgents."
"What are insurgents?"
"You're too young to know about insurgents, Bo-Katan."
Satine watched the glowing outline of Kalevala through her bedroom window and listened to the soft beeping of Bo-Katan's bedside fluid pump. She was quite certain that her sister was still awake. But she did not know what to say to her.
"I know you're angry," Bo-Katan muttered eventually. "You should say it."
Satine groaned.
"I'm trying to sleep, Bo-Katan."
"You didn't fall asleep in the hour we lay here in silence."
Satine sighed and rolled over to face her sister.
"I'm not angry, Bo-Katan."
"You are!" Bo-Katan retaliated. "As you obviously should be."
She gave a frustrated sigh, trying to roll without disrupting the bandages wrapped around her torso, tugging futilely at the uncomfortable fixed collar at her neck.
"Drop the gracious Queen Mother act and just tell me what you really think, damn it."
"But…"
Satine couldn't find the words.
"I mean, of course I'm angry, Bo, but that doesn't mean-"
Tears were pressing suddenly at her eyes.
"That doesn't mean you deserve my anger!" she protested. "Yes, you chose to leave me, Bo-Katan. You chose to leave me again and again and again and it broke my heart but…"
Kriff it. She could cry, if she wanted to.
"But that obviously means I did something wrong. So I'm angry but I'm…"
She sniffled and shook her head with the hopelessness of what she was trying to say.
"I'm angry, but I'm not truly angry. You know?"
Bo-Katan gave a wry smile. Perhaps it was a trick of the moonlight but Satine could have sworn she saw rare tears in her sister's eyes.
"Yeah, Sati. I know."
They paused and then spoke at once.
"I just don't understand why you would choose your precious weapons and armour over me."
"I don't understand why you would choose our father's failed legacy over me."
They stared at each other, silent, at a loss.
"Why do you think my weapons and armour are so precious to me?" Bo-Katan challenged.
Satine threw up her hands.
"How am I to know? You've always, ever since you were a child, you've-"
"Liked fighting?" Bo-Katan interrupted, with a harsh bark of laughter. "Kriff's sakes Satine, you think I'd abandon you because your laws infringed upon some karking hobby of mine?"
Satine didn't know what she'd thought. She'd never given it enough thought.
"I don't wake up every day with a burning desire to kill people, Satine," Bo-Katan spat irritably. "My weapons and armour are precious to me because when I was fifteen-standard a group of armed men marched into my home and killed my whole kriffing family, except for you."
Satine stared dumbly as though seeing her sister anew. Bo-Katan didn't seem to mind her silence. She was rapidly gathering momentum.
"I watched my family's corpses strung up against the wall of that palace, Satine, and I knew that they died because they refused to kriffing defend themselves. Our father's head was always going to end up in Iadon's hands from the moment that war started. We all knew it and no one did anything about it!"
Bo-Katan was crying now. Crying hard and ugly like a child.
"And you escaped, Sati, good for you, you kriffing escaped and ran about the galaxy with your Jetii boyfriend while I was trying to do good here on Mandalore and you came back and tried to win back power and you know what kriffing happened, Satine," she snarled. "They captured you! They were going to kill Obi Wan and they were going to kill you and the only reason that didn't happen, Satine, is because I fought my captor and I stole his blaster and I marched into that room and I shot those soldiers dead."
"You didn't need to kill them, you only needed to-"
"The vibroblade was at Obi Wan's throat, Satine," Bo-Katan gritted out. "The soldier holding you had a blaster at his belt."
She had closed her eyes against them but still the tears pressed through.
"I saved you, Sati. And I saved him. I saved him for you. But it had to be done in two perfect shots. There wasn't time for anything else."
"But you-"
Satine couldn't make any sense of this. Her sister in tears before her, her sister in armour with a blaster at her hip.
"You weren't protecting anyone by detonating a bomb in Peace Park, Bo. You can't pretend that your hell-damned terrorism was in any way-"
"Everything you do, Satine, everything you have done in this war… I swear you're asking to be killed like our parents were," Bo-Katan appealed. "You banned lethal weapons, you cut the military back to almost nothing. You pick fights with the traditionalists here on Mandalore, you pick fights with the Republic and their psychopathic Chancellor-"
Satine scowled.
"Don't tell me you'd have me suck up to the Republic, Bo."
"What I am saying, Satine, if you'd stop interrupting me," Bo-Katan gritted out. "Is that Mandalore's not strong enough under you."
Bo-Katan had hazel eyes like their mother. Trained on Satine with such disappointment.
"We were going to save lives, with our new government. We were going to protect Mandalore."
Satine shook her head, her glare stony.
"You took four innocent lives at the Memorial, Bo-Katan. And the lives of twelve school-children at the Academy."
Bo-Katan sighed.
"I know that wasn't right, Satine, the bomb at the Academy. That's why I challenged Pre. That's why I left."
All this honesty between them, finally, after all this time. And yet still no answer. Only pain.
"I don't accept your excuses, Bo. I don't accept your violence."
"And I don't accept your suicidal, piss-weak leadership."
"Then stay here and make my government strong!"
Satine had never planned to say those words. She was surprised to hear them, loud and raw, from her lips.
"Strong and non-violent?" Bo-Katan challenged, with a deranged smirk.
"All that I'm kriffing asking, Bo, is that you don't kill anyone!"
They stared at each other, shell-shocked. Softening.
"I want you here with me," Satine finally articulated. "I want to make it work. But I want peace on Mandalore, Bo."
"I want..."
Bo-Katan seemed to lose her nerve, and sighed.
"We should talk about this in the morning," she mumbled. "I'm not thinking straight."
She reached for the button on her fluid pump that gave her pain relief. Sewlen had insisted on hanging a bag of pain medications despite Bo-Katan's insistence that she would not use it.
"Unfortunately, I think it is the morning," Satine mused, squinting at the clock in the moonlight.
"In the second morning," Bo-Katan corrected her.
The "second morning" was a childhood Bo-ism; Bo-Katan had once distinguished the first morning, when the sisters woke up and talked to each other before any of the adults were awake, from the second morning, when Aunty Kella came in and announced breakfast time.
"Good idea," Satine agreed, settling back down under the covers. "In the second morning, Bo…"
She broke off with a yawn. One never slept so well as they did after a good cry.
"In the second morning, we'll figure something out."
I have very much enjoyed bringing Satine and Bo-Katan (and Sewlen Jerac!) back together again. Their moment of forgiveness in The Clone Wars is so beautiful - but I wanted to see it happen before everything falls to pieces. So here we are.
Scarease was right - Bo's not the only one who won't accept Pre's leadership. Next chapter, we'll see the fallout of the conflict on Concordia and we'll see exactly what Satine and Bo-Katan mean when they pledge to "figure something out". Korkie comes home from hospital. Everyone's back together.
I hope you're all still having as much fun as I am. I love hearing from you!
xx - S.