Star Wars
The Hand of Thrawn: Penelope
by Violetlight
Author's Notes
This chapter features excerpts from The Odyssey by Homer, specifically from the Richard Lattimore translation from 1965 (aka the edition I used in university). If you've never had the chance to read this epic, 3200 year old poem, I strongly recommend it! There's a very good reason why it's lasted so long! Also, you'll soon know why I named this fic "Penelope"!
Huge thanks to Cyber-Glitch for her awesome beta! I'm so glad we met! Thrawn fangirls unite!
Part 4: Weave her own Wiles
29 years earlier - 10 BBY
"Mommy, where are we going?"
Xelarra squeezed the hand of the red-haired human child, who in turn held her little sister's azure hand as they made their way to one of the many landing platforms that dotted Coruscant's cityscape. A small bag of the children's belongings hung slung over her other shoulder. "We're going to see Daddy a bit early, Bright Star. Daddy's been helping his friends Captain Niriz and Commander Parck go exploring on a great, big Star Destroyer, and we're going to go surprise him."
"But I've got lessons with the Emperor tomorrow," the older girl fretted. "He'll be mad if I'm not there!"
Hearing the worry in her daughter's voice, Xelarra bent down to wrap both girls in a hug, and placed reassuring kisses on their foreheads. "It's alright; we'll be with Daddy soon. Then everything will be okay." She stood up, and lightly herded her children in front of her, towards the shuttle. "Let's get onboard, my little ones."
She had barely moved a metre when she stopped, the distinctive sound of his heavy breathing from somewhere close behind her freezing her as surely as a Csillan blizzard.
Slowly, she turned around, and pushed the children protectively behind her.
"Lord Vader," she said, attempting to keep her voice neutral.
"You were commanded to not to leave Coruscant with the child," he stated; his calm words did nothing to alleviate his terrifying demeanor. "The Emperor warned you to not get attached."
"She is my daughter," Xelarra said, steeling her voice. "She has been since he placed her in my arms and assigned her care to me." Her flame-red gaze met Vader's expressionless mask stoically. "I love her, just as much as her sister, and I won't let him – or you – take her!"
"Thrawn gave the impression that your kind was above such weaknesses," Vader said. "A pity he was wrong." The Sith Lord raised his hand.
It took barely a second for Xelarra to realise her mistake. She gasped as invisible fingers wrapped around her throat, and squeezed. Her body levitated off the platform, her feet futilely kicking the air below her, and sparks appeared in her vision; through the raging drumbeat of her heart she heard her children's fearful cries. All she could desperately think was, please, not in front of my daughters!
"Please, Lord Vader! Let Mommy go!" Xelarra saw a blurry shape suddenly cling to the Dark Lord's leg. "I'll – I'll go with you! I'll be good! Just don't hurt Mommy! Please!"
Xelarra was dropped suddenly to the duracrete platform.
Vader loomed over her crumpled form. "You are fortunate, Chiss, that your husband's loyalty is without question," he stared down at her coldly. "And that the Emperor does not want the other child … for now."
She could only watch helplessly, one arm hugging a sobbing Andorra against her chest, as seven-year old Mara Jade sniffed back her tears and left at Darth Vader's side, her tiny hand held firmly within his.
"Empress Xelarra? My lady?"
Xelarra awoke suddenly to the sound of her name being spoken. She blinked, lifting her head from the command room console she had fallen asleep on, her hand absently moving to her throat.
"Empress?" the trooper repeated.
"Malia?" Xelarra asked groggily, recognizing the stormtrooper's feminine voice without turning around. "Is it time for the night shift already?"
"Yes ma'am," Trooper Malia replied.
Xelarra kept her face averted from the trooper, wiping away the tears that streamed down her cheeks. With a subtle breath, she composed herself and faced the stormtrooper. "I think I've done enough for tonight. Please escort me to my quarters."
"As you command," the trooper clipped professionally.
"Oh, and Malia? Have someone retrieve my ysalamir for me."
Despite the five impressive towers that gave the Hand of Thrawn base its name, not much was actually located in the towers themselves, other than the turbolaser cannons at the pinnacle of each. As such, Xelarra and Thrawn had converted almost the entirely of the second highest floor of the fourth tower to be their personal quarters while they were at the base, as rare as it was that Thrawn had the chance to spend any time away from his various Star Destroyer flagships.
Xelarra stepped out of the turbolift, into the small lobby area between the turbolift doors and the entrance to her apartment, her white-furred ysalamir draped comfortably over her shoulders. Surprising her stormtroopers, she walked not to the entrance, but to a smaller door off to the side as her guards took their positions. She punched a code into the keypad on the outside, opened the door, and checked the closet's contents.
"Oh good, Stent's housekeeping staff haven't "cleaned" in here. There are folding chairs, and I believe some magazine datapads on the top shelf. Could you check, please?" She gestured to one of the troopers to check the high shelf she could not reach, and moved out of the way so he could do so.
"Still there, Ma'am," the trooper reported.
"You have permission to send one of your number down to the galley at mid-shift, to bring back lunch for the squad, and the 'fresher's over there," she continued, and pointed to another door on the opposite side of the lobby.
"Ma'am?" one of the stormtroopers said hesitantly. He was obviously not used to such courtesy.
Xelarra smiled wryly. "Duty demands your presence, Trooper. It does not demand it be uncomfortable."
"Thank you, Empress," Malia clipped. "Have a good night."
"You as well." Her self-imposed duty to her guards complete, Xelarra stepped, alone except for her ysalamir, into her quarters.
Once the door closed, she moved her fuzzy, lizard-like pet from her shoulders to her arms and walked the short distance to the living area of her quarters. She sat down on the sofa, and finally let the tears she had been holding in all day flow.
Mara, my little girl … snatched away. And thanks to Palpatine's lust for control, Mara didn't even remember her family.
She had hoped, with the Emperor's death, maybe his grip over Mara's mind would break. But no, whatever blocks he had placed with that wretched Force of his were too strong. When she had the chance to talk to Thrawn, Mara had only seen the Empire's greatest Grand Admiral, not her adoptive father. She likely did not remember her mother or sister at all, and had never even met her brother. Mara's rejection of Admiral Parck's invitation to join the Empire of the Hand did little to alleviate Xelarra's fears. She wondered, as more tears dripped down her cheeks, if things would have been different if she had been there to talk to Mara, to the girl Palpatine had practically dropped into her arms, then cruelly taken back as soon as he wanted yet another Emperor's Hand.
Or would she have just had her heart broken again?
Like how it shattered at Bilbringi.
Thrawn … my dear, brilliant Thrawn, my bright star in the Chaos … dead. Dead for ten long years of loneliness … stolen from my side …
And for what?
For what?!
Only the thought of alarming the stormtroopers outside her door stopped her from screaming in rage. In sorrow.
Instead, she hugged her ysalamir to her chest, the comforting fuzziness and warmth of her pet helping her to calm; as were his little licks to her cheeks, even if they were just to taste the salt of her tears. It still helped.
"Oh Gandalf …" she sniffed after a few minutes, and looked into the albino ysalamir's double pair of ruby red eyes. Thrawn had saved the most distinctive ysalamir he had found on Mykyr especially for her.
She smiled sadly as she remembered how happy Thrawn had been to give her the fuzzy lizard, how excited he had been to explain how the unassuming, adorable little creatures could protect them from the Force and its insane wielders.
Their Force is nothing before the artistry of Evolution. Of Nature. No different from Gravity or Electromagnetism, and subject to the same laws of the Universe that govern all things. Ysalamiri are but one speck of paint on the canvas. Imagine what the entire painting looks like!
Just one word ... a small part of the story, yet that one word can make all the difference.
Indeed, my love … his lips brushed hers, softly at first, then crushed against hers passionately, so grateful, so relieved, so happy just to be understood, to not have to explain it, to have someone else just know …
Xelarra raised a hand up her lips and sighed as she remembered the taste of his kisses, the feeling of his arms wrapped strongly around her, the comforting weight of his body against hers. When she closed her eyes, she could almost feel him … Her heart ached at the memory, but it was a duller, more familiar ache than the sharp jabs that assaulted her during the first few years after losing him. She could live with this pain. She had been for so long. She had to.
For Andorra. For Shran.
For the Empire she must maintain, for it was all that stood between her children – all the Galaxy's children – and the Far Outsiders.
That was her duty as Empress. However, she doubted the extra-galactic invaders that she and Thrawn had dedicated their lives to preparing the Galaxy to face, would choose to strike that very night.
She gave Gandalf a few more pets, got up, and walked over to the potted tree near the living room window, placing the ysalamir safely in its branches. As Gandalf's claws sunk into the bark of the tree, she looked out the window, taking up a large portion of the living room's outer wall, staring over the inky blackness of the surrounding jungle below, then up to the stars above, the bright, milky band of the visible galaxy snaking across the sky. She lingered at the window for a few minutes, then turned back towards the interior of her quarters.
Besides the large picture windows (reinforced transparisteel, of course, as strong as Star Destroyer viewports), the living room was much as she remembered it from ten years ago. Aside from the regular cleaning that Stent's staff no doubt performed, the quarters had barely been touched. Modest, yet comfortable chairs and a sofa, with a holovid player's platform tucked against the side wall, the opposite wall lined with her bookcases. Some smaller holo-projectors were arranged around the room so that when turned on, they showed some pieces from Thrawn's art collection. The artifacts themselves had long since been moved to the Imperial Museum in Chakra City (Xelarra never had gotten used to that facility's new name – the Grand Admiral Mitth'raw'nuruodo Memorial Museum). Under the ysalamir tree was her favourite armchair, large enough for her to curl up in it. A reading lamp stood like a second tree to the other side of the chair, with a side table beside the lamp.
A leather-bound book lay on the chair, on top of a neatly folded fleece blanket. The Odyssey, read its title in stylised Aurebesh, a line illustration of an ancient sailing vessel, in the same gold as the title, decorating the cover.
Curious, Xelarra picked up the book. She did not remember this title – had she started reading it all those years before? She frowned; she usually remembered books instantly, no matter how long ago she had read them. She opened the book, and read the author's, no, translator's foreword. The Alderaanian scholar explained this was a story from so far back in human history, the exact details had been lost to time, but several scholars argued that it was possibly from the long-lost human homeworld itself, wherever that may have been (those who claimed Coruscant was the human homeworld were clearly delusional). However, the text itself had miraculously survived, and was one of the foundational stories of human culture, all human culture across the Galaxy, the ur-text for almost all adventure stories to follow, even if the story itself was a continuation from an earlier epic, a war story called The Iliad.
Interesting. She briefly wondered if Thrawn had ever read the "prequel". Regardless, this was no mere primitive adventure novel.
Despite her falling asleep at the command room's console earlier, and the general stress of the preceding day, she was not tired. How long did her troopers let her sleep there anyway? Her eyes wandered over to her night bag, brought up from her shuttle, sitting on one of the other living room chairs. Her datapad was in there. She should get some more work done, perhaps prepare for her weekly meeting with Prime Minister Vanto …
No. She had spent hours at that console, but had finally managed to restore the master archives program, and most of Hand Base's digital archives were intact, if a little scrambled. The emergency "bulkheads" that had slammed shut over the physical books, inspired by the weatherproofing techniques used by the CEDF library on Csilla, had likewise saved them from the floodwaters. As she had told her stormtroopers earlier, she had done enough for today. It would do nobody any good if she burnt herself out, as Eli often advised her. She pictured the native of Lysatra – the planet still a relatively new addition to the Empire of the Hand – his brown hair now streaked with grey, lightly complaining that he had already had decades of experience dealing with various workaholic Chiss, and he didn't want to add another one to that list.
It was the duty of a constitutional monarch such as herself to take her Prime Minister's advice into careful consideration.
A short time later, Xelarra, dressed in the comfortable flannel pyjamas she had brought with her from Chakra, set a steaming mug of herbal tea on the side table under the reading lamp. She settled into her chair, the blanket over her legs, and reached a hand up to scratch Gandalf in his tree. Comfortable, she opened her book, and began to read:
Speak to me, Muse, of the adventurous man who wandered long after he sacked the sacred citadel of Troy. Many the men whose towns he saw, whose ways he proved; and many a pang he bore in his own breast at sea while struggling for his life and his men's safe return. Yet even so, by all his zeal, he did not save his men; for though their own perversity they perished – fools! … Of this, O goddess, daughter of Zeus, beginning where thou wilt, speak unto us also.
Now all the others who were saved from utter ruin were at home, safe from both war and sea. Him only, longing for his home and wife … Nay, when the time had come in the revolving years at which the gods ordained his going home to Ithaca, even then, among his kin, he was not freed from trouble. Yet the gods felt compassion …
The night sky outside Hand Base was just beginning to lighten into shades of purple, orange at the horizon, before Nira's upcoming sunrise, when Xelarra closed her book. As interesting as following Odysseus' journeys from one monster-infested island to another had been, the character who really stuck in Xelarra's mind was his cunning, put-upon wife, Penelope, Queen of Ithaca, and caretaker of the kingdom in her husband's twenty (!) year absence. How Penelope fought off the advances of the suitors who thought her husband was dead, not through force, but how she "weave(d) her own wiles":
in the daytime I would weave at my great loom,
but in the night I would have torches set by, and undo it.
So for three years I was secret in my designs, convincing …
For years, decades, as her husband fought in wars he had no interest in fighting (but whose service was essential to victory) and travelled the treacherous seas, she governed her island, raised her son alone, and did all she could to keep both her kingdom and herself from falling prey to entitled, selfish, short-sighted idiots.
At least Xelarra didn't have to deal with sexist degenerates trying to marry her, and tiny Ithaca did not begin to compare to the Empire of the Hand. It was by no means a perfect match, but still. It was almost frightening how much she could relate to the ancient human Queen …
Xelarra mentally smacked herself for not seeing the similarities earlier. She must have been more stressed and exhausted than she had thought.
The Odyssey was not just a book. It was a message!
The whole story was about Odyessus' adventures, and his return home.
Just who had left that book on her chair?
Xelarra felt the blood drain from her face. If she looked in the mirror just then, she knew she would see the difference in temperature. She had heard the rumours, of course, no matter how much Parck, Stent, even Soontir and Syal tried to hide it. They were only trying to be kind to her, mindful of her feelings, of course, but if they thought they could hide a story from her …
The rumour that ten years after his death, Grand Admiral Thrawn would return.
She had not dared to believe it, not for a second. Pellaeon had brought him home. There was no mistaking the body in the coffin, even as she had to force herself to look … and Gilad, he did not, would not lie to her.
Thrawn was dead, and no amount of hopeful stories or wishful thinking would bring him back.
But wasn't that exactly what Penelope had thought of Odysseus? Even after he passed Penelope's test of the bow, and had killed the interloping suitors, she still had not believed it was him, until he had shared a secret only the two of them had known, that their bed had been built around a living tree and could not be moved.
Their intellect, their shared skill …
Xelarra rose from her chair, the blanket spilling onto the floor. Quickly, she walked to the office area of the quarters, to her desk beside Thrawn's, and the computer perched on top. The computer was hardwired to Hand Base's archival system, so she could do her datawork for the library alongside Thrawn during those rare times he had been with her at the base, back when they called it home, in the years before Chakra City had been built. From her personal, Chief Librarian's station, she could see any other computer terminal in the entire base, and know when they were being accessed. It was unlikely any were, at this hour. Nobody should be awake but the night crew guards.
Sure enough, a terminal was active, far below, just outside the small, secondary hanger, a part of the base that only she and Stent should have access to.
She did not think that was Stent at that console.
Could it be … or was it an elaborate trap, like the ruse those traitors in the Imperial Remnant had tried to pull with their false Thrawn? She really should just call for her stormtroopers …
She moved over to Thrawn's desk and reached into the middle drawer, into the compartment that held a holdout blaster. Just in case.
Taking a breath, Xelarra walked quickly to the other side of the office, to the elaborate bookshelf, and pulled on an unassuming and deliberately boring book, Pre-Clone Wars Tax Law of the Republic.
The bookcase slid aside, revealing the stone, spiral staircase leading down through the tower. Xelarra smiled wryly as she remembered giggling at the clichéd bookcase when Thrawn had first shown it to her (he had been quite proud of himself for setting it up), before they had both spent an hour climbing up and down –and making out like mid-agers – in the "secret tunnel".
She lingered for just a moment longer, then steeled herself, lit the glowrod attachment on the blaster, and stepped onto the stairs.