Thank you for the feedback on part two. As in the first two parts, I own no part of the Star Wars galaxy and I'm writing this out of admiration. Imitation is, after all, the sincerest form of flattery.
Enjoy.
Part 3 Memento Manarai
The Manarai Mountains were touted as the most beautiful view on all of Coruscant. Rent was hiked several hundred credits based solely on that view. Potential tenants would survey leaky faucets, uneven floors, and tiny storage centres with a skeptical eye. One glance out the window and they signed the lease. Stories were circulated about marriage proposals accepted entirely on the promise of an apartment with a Manarai view. And yet nothing could be said of that distant view that would compare with what it looked like from the back verandah of Mon Mothma's summer cottage in the mountains themselves.
She'd been escaping out there more and more lately. Strictly speaking, escape might be the wrong word. She would admit to herself that there were few affairs of state or interplanetary crises that required her attention these days. Those events occurred of course but someone else always dealt with them. And yet her time in the cottage still seemed like an escape, time to herself. She had no Force ability but she'd done her reading. She knew the value of meditation and silence. What she couldn't understand was why she seemed to need more of it now than she had during the Rebellion. Surely, when her decisions had affected the lives of millions and ended the lives of thousands, she'd have felt more of a need for silence and contemplation than now that she had retired. But life rarely made the sense one expected it to, so it shouldn't surprise her that the most relaxing days of her life were becoming oddly unsettling, filled with the vague feeling that she'd forgotten something important, like turning off the oven. She couldn't figure out what it was.
The setting was perfect, the cottage had more than she could ever need and she had absolutely no obligations out here. Even the holojournalists didn't bother with her cottage – a blessing of the Force if there ever was one. Still, as she sat in the old fashioned rocking chair watching the wind blow through the trees, she couldn't shake that unsettled feeling, like something was missing.
"Don't be silly," she told herself, "at your age; it's too late to worry about what you don't have. Enjoy what you do. Who knows how long you'll still have it." Feeling that this must be better advice than she was giving it credit for, she grabbed one of her many holodisks and started to read it. Catching up on her pleasure reading was just one of the many things she'd planned for her retirement. She'd made remarkably little progress so far.
As Garm Bel Iblis crested the hill, he could see Mon Mothma in her rocking chair on the back porch of her mountain retreat. He'd never visited her here before. The fact that he knew where her cottage was was a point of shame for him. When he'd first begun his campaign against her, he'd sent spies out to follow her and find out what she did with her time. He was looking for the signs of a dictator biding her time. Finding this private retreat had helped him justify pulling out of the Alliance. The Emperor had planned most of his atrocities from a private mansion. The fact that Mon Mothma possessed such a place seemed to prove to him that she would indeed set herself up as an Empress someday. He referred to it as "the Fortress" and had his spies watch it closely. Seeing the peaceful little cottage now, he was freshly ashamed. It was painfully obvious to anyone that sometimes she just needed to get awayâanyone but him apparently.
She opened her eyes as he neared the verandah and regarded him with surprise.
"I didn't know you knew about this place."
His face reddened, most un-general like.
"I figured it was time to come clean about that. I learned about it while I was leading the group at Peregrine's Nest."
There was no surprise in her expression. Still, she seemed more than slightly wounded by his admission.
"So that little old man who always seemed to be out for a walk was one of yours?"
He nodded, ashamed.
She sat back in her chair nodding quietly to herself.
"I wondered. I'd thought he was an Imperial spy but he stopped coming around after Thrawn's death and he didn't seem to fit with Thrawn's subtlety. It made sense that he'd be one of yours."
His shame became embarrassment and sheepishness. So, she'd figured it out long ago. What an idiot he'd been back then.
His eyes met hers wondering which one of them was worse with apologies.
She nodded and got to her feet. Her manner shifted into a casual diplomacy. He wasn't sure how much of it was real.
"Well, welcome General. Would you like something to drink?"
"If it wouldn't be too much effort."
"Of course not," she moved towards the door, "Come, you can have a tour tooâunless you've already had one."
He hadn't expected the delayed jab, nor the quick wave of pain that washed across her features as she spoke but he only swallowed and squared his shoulders. He figured he deserved it.
"No, I've never been here before. I've only seen space photos."
She relaxed visibly and her hospitality seemed more genuine.
"Alright, we'll fix that situation."
He followed her inside and was amazed at how different this place was from her home in the city. There were no fluffy carpets and overstuffed chairs, no signs of wealth or power. The rooms were small and the decorations spartan but there was an elegance about the simplicity and he realized he'd always seen that reflected in Mon Mothma's eyes. He stood in silence as the implications of this reality drifted to him. The plush opulence of her life in the old Imperial Palace served a purpose. It impressed her authority and influence on those who might wish to challenge it and rounded out her image as a Chief of State. Like most politicians her life was showcased to the galaxy and as such nothing could be out of place. He'd always felt she was hiding from herself in that life and he'd hated that. Now he realized that she'd always known who she was. She just hadn't shared all of herself with the galaxy. She hadn't shared everything with him.
He followed thoughtfully as she led him through the sitting area, kitchen, dining space and the large upper floor which included a desk, her bed and several shelves full of holodisks, He looked at the titles and found himself staring at a mélange of galactic historical accounts, minority literature, the occasional mystery or romance as well as multi-disk philosophical and religious tomes most of which looked untouched.
"One of the wonders of retirement is the fact that I now have time to do all the reading I should have done years ago."
"Quite a perk," he said and he looked at her knowingly, "and what have you read lately?"
She walked over to the shelves and ran a finger along the multi-disk collections. She rubbed her fingers together to wipe off the dust and sighed. She looked over at him with a vulnerability that actually frightened Bel Iblis.
"I've been afraid to read a lot of them," she admitted quietly, defeat in her eyes, "afraid that I will discover a way I could have run the war that's better than what I did, that could have"
"Prevented deaths? Made it shorter and smoother?" he finished for her.
"Or prevented it altogether." She sighed, "but I suppose we all have to face our mistakes eventually."
"I suppose we do." he said looking at her strangely for a moment, and then her words found a reverberation inside him and he walked to the window and looked out to where the sun was beginning to sink towards the nearby mountain peaks.
"Arianna used to tell me that I jumped to conclusions too quickly, that I picked sides too readily, without thinking about the consequences. That kept me out of the rebellion for a long time. I kept trying to find the good in the Empire that she seemed convinced I was missing. I wonder sometimes if she was thinking more of what a war would do to the boys, what they would grow up in, or how she'd explain it to them when it was over.
"Maybe she was thinking of what could happen to you. She wanted her sons to have their father." Mon Mothma suggested quietly. She'd spent many years trying to understand the motivations of Garm's heiress wife.
He glanced at her briefly, and then looked back outside.
"They were her life so much more than mine. I was never around." He chuckled with a bitterness that was aged and carved into his soul, "and when I wasâour marriage was never what I'd hoped it could be."
She looked wistfully at his faint reflection in the glass.
"But you loved her."
He returned the look, the setting sun throwing his face into shadow, "with all the youth, hope and idealism in my soul. I wonder sometimes if they died with her."
She had no words for that. When she'd met him all she'd really paid attention to was his inability to commit to the rebellion. Then when he was reeling from having his life ripped out from under him she saw him as yet another reason to be doing what she was doing. She had to keep such a tragedy from happening again. She'd watched his pain, unable to touch it and unable to understand why he'd waited so long to take his stand.
She understood now. She'd understood years ago.
"I wanted to be right, you know."
She looked at him quizzically.
"About you. I wanted you to be corrupt, to be another emperor in disguise. I wanted to prove to myself that I was smarter than a blind follower. I wanted to prove that I really did have a good reason for abandoning the cause that had cost my wife and children their lives.
"I wanted Arianna to be right."
Mon Mothma nodded.
"Maybe she was."
He looked stunned and took a step towards her as his mouth fell open and his eyebrows knotted across his forehead.
"Garm, I've travelled to so many planets, heard so many petitions. There are places in the galaxy that were devastated by the rebellion. For every Alderaan there are twenty planets full of cities reduced to rubble and citizens left with nothing when they were 'liberated' by the Alliance. Sometimes I feel as though the war hurt at least as many as it helped. It's hard to tell people that they're better off when you've just destroyed their livelihood and left them with nothing."
"Then maybe it's time they grew up and learned to fend for themselves, became independent." His voice was firm and angry.
She looked away, "And the rich planets grow richer and stronger as the poor ones grow poorer."
"Maybe that's the way it's supposed to be."
"And maybe not."
He walked over and took her by the shoulders.
"You can't regret it. You've done so much for the galaxy. The Empireâthe empire enslaved and massacred millions of sentient beings, destroyed the jedi and reduced the average independent citizen to a tenant who had to earn their keep. People disappeared in the middle of the night and were killed randomly!"
He closed his eyes and shook his head as though to clear it.
"You know this stuff. You told me this stuff, repeatedly. You can't say that the Emperor, or anything that came from him was good."
"And you can't say that none of the rebellion was bad, that we didn't kill innocents or devastate lives. You were right, I was a dictator, a rebel dictator. In the end the decisions were mine and even the right ones cost so many lives and destroyed so many others. I'm not blameless, Garm."
"Neither am I." he replied, clearly frustrated by her guilt. He rubbed her shoulders briefly, agitatedly before dropping his arms. "Don't take my guilt away from me. My job was full of 'strategic moves' that treated sentient beings like numbers to be juggled till the casualty percentage was acceptable to the general populace. I sent people in knowing in my heart that they wouldn't come back, and I called it right. Yes, I know you wrote the condolence note but you can't take all the guilt yourself, I won't let you."
She swung around to face him and fire glowed in her eyes, "You won't let me?"
He matched her glare with one of his own, "No, I'm as much to blame as you are, maybe more."
"You're hardly to blame."
"You illustrate my point well."
She looked at him in shocked anger for a moment and then her face cracked into an ironic smile.
He took a deep breath.
"If you're going to bog yourself down in guilt, I will force you to talk me out of mine."
She raised her eyebrows.
"That's a promise. Every time you get like this, I will remind you of the hundred things you did right for every one that went wrong, the thousand people you saved for each pilot who diedâwho volunteered to risk his/her life and lost; and then I will suggest to you that my decisions weren't nearly so good. You will be as frustrated with that as I am with you right now."
"Every time?" The expression on her face was a combination of hope, nervousness, and something unreadable.
"Every time."
'Then we'll have to spend a lot of time together."
He just looked at her and the silence that ensued had an odd new texture to it, or maybe it was an old one.
She found herself seeking that prompter again.
What do I do now?
After a long pause, she ran a hand through her short grey hair.
"Would you like that drink now?"
He nodded and followed her back downstairs. He watched her move around the kitchen carrying out simple tasks. He could see the pleasure in her movements, the lightness in her hands as she poured and chopped. The decision of lemon or lime didn't have lives in the balance. Normally he would have asked if he could have helped but he wouldn't give up this chance to watch her like this. He wondered if he'd ever been given the chance to know this simple woman before. How could he have come so close to never knowing her?
Her gaze met his as she brought his drink over to him and he saw a light in her eyes that he was sure he'd never seen before. It made him smile as he took the glass from her.
They carried their drinks back to the porch and sat on the old wooden swing just outside the window. The sun was drifting towards the mountains and the sky was aflame with its light.
"I'm glad you came," she said quietly, not looking at him.
"Are you?" he replied questioningly. She'd never said anything like that to him before. They'd never exchanged declarations of friendship. But then, he'd never really been social with her before. Occasionally he'd seen what could have been joy, or at least relief on her face when he'd shown up but neither had ever before told the other that they enjoyed each other's company. He was surprised that she'd said it first.
"Yes," she continued, "I'm glad you had the chance to see that I don't spend my time here building super weapons in the cellar."
"You never showed me the cellar." He said with a touch of playfulness in his voice.
"The outside doors are around the corner." She returned smoothly, "I wouldn't recommend it. It's low and dark and very dusty, but if you'd like to be sure"
"It's okay," he said smiling, "I trust you."
She became suddenly serious. "Do you then?"
He looked her in the eyes and could see fear there.
"Yes, I do. I took much too long but I do trust you," he sighed, "and do you trust me?"
"Yes."
"Good."
They turned back towards the sinking sun for awhile, holding a comfortable silence. There was no ebb and flow of distance now. That seemed to have ceased at last and relaxed both of them, left them at home in one another's presence for the first time.
"If anything," he said into the silence, "I'd say this place itself is a super weapon."
She looked puzzled and slightly concerned.
"You find your clarity here," he explained. "I can see it in the way you talk about this place. Coming here refuels you. It reminds you why you do what you do and helps you make difficult decisions. A leader with clarity of purpose is dangerous to those who oppose her. You are the most dangerous woman I know."
She smiled uncertainly.
"And I'm glad to know you." He added at her look.
Her smile became solid and grew to match his. Then she turned back to the view.
"I wonder," she mused, "Is it the fate of a military man to see weapons everywhere?"
"Is it the fate of a politician to find a political statement around every corner?"
"Maybe."
She looked down the mountains into the giant city.
"I've spent so much of my life dealing in war; I've started to wonder if peace truly exists orssss if it's just that brief moment while enemies prepare for battle.
"Have you felt at peace at all since the war started?"
"Not really, I was always on the lookout for the next battle." She looked at him wistfully.
"So was I," he admitted, "until now."
"Yes, there is peace right now, at this very moment."
She returned her gaze to the mountains as the last few rays of the sun washed over the porch bathing them in a rosy glow. She then turned to look at his face, lined with age and care, and yet still noble and strong, his eyes, clear and bright.
"At this moment," she said quietly, "I feel I've succeeded. The peace is real. It's part of me."
He reached out and brushed his fingers across her cheek, no longer as smooth and clear as it once had been.
Beautiful.
"Then here's to this moment." He said.
And he kissed her.