Hera said nothing else as the rebel shuttle descended back into the hanger bay underneath the sandstone column of her home, her former home. The thought was another dagger in her back. She said nothing as she and Fen collected their belongings. She was silent as she worked furiously on the ship, adjusting some modifications, finishing others, anything to make the former slave-ship space worthy again. Internally, she was not so reserved. All the things she had said, wished she had said, could have said were chasing circles in her head. But words were out of her mouth now, out into the world and out of her control, yet still in her mind she tried. Again and again she tried to articulate more clearly, to make him understand, to make him not hate her.
Fen remained at her side, following Hera's silent lead with downcast eyes, handing Hera whatever tools she needed with a middling success rate. Every so often as Fen handed her yet another hydrospanner, their fingers would graze one another and lightning would crackle between them. At least, she hoped it was. Fen's face revealed nothing, a study in mask-making. Slavery had taught her much, yet Hera still longed for some emotion from her, a smile, a twitch in her lips, a softening around her eyes. It was maddening.
Still she said nothing.
The day was nearly done by the time she finished the repairs, even with Chopper's aid. The bright-white flood lights of the hanger bay illuminated the distinct lack of other twi'leks, despite the changes that needed to be done to the other ships after the Imperial inspection. No one wanted to be around her, the traitor's daughter, as though her disloyalty was infectious. Hera shivered as grief tightened it's hold on her chest. If only she were better with words, more passionate about what she was doing. If only she could make them understand she wasn't trying to betray them, only trying to help more people.
"Why can't they see we can't do this on our own?" She whispered her most common thought out loud, sending it out into the world.
"See what?" Fen asked. Hera turned to look at her, curled up against a wall while Hera made her final checks, dark circles under her eyes, changed out of her shredded dress back into a turtleneck, black hair in a loose braid. Briefly, she wished she could stick her fingers into it, pull the hair free, feel the silken strands in her hands. It was a thought she did not voice.
"Huh? Oh," Hera turned her attention back to her work, twisting a spanner viciously against a stubborn bolt. "Ryloth defeating the Empire alone means nothing. If we drive them off, they'll just come back with a stronger force. If we can convince them that the planet is worth nothing to the Empire they'll just bomb it into slag to prove they can. The only way to do this, the only way to free Ryloth is to defeat the Empire forever. Only then can we be safe." She chucked the tool back into her box, shaking slightly.
"For the record, I think you're right." Fen sad quitely, then, when Hera didn't respond, "Is that everything?" She looked around, sleeves of her sweater pulled down around her hands.
"Yeah." Hera turned to look at the hanger bay. She was crazy to leave her home. It would be madness to stay. How could she live torn in two? A figure appeared in the doorway. Her father said nothing, staring at her, hands on his hips. Forcing herself to swallow the lump that had been developing in her throat all day, she turned and stalked on to the ship. He would not see her struggle in this, he didn't deserve it.
The ship took off and Hera didn't look down, refused to let herself look back, fearing it would break her. She hardly glanced at the navicomputer as she inputted coordinates to somewhere, anywhere away from here. The bright lights of hyperspace burst from nowhere as the ship accelerated around her.
In the silence that followed, Hera tried not to think, tried not to count the light-years she was putting between her and her culture, her life, the only people she had ever loved, the graves of those she had lost. Her hand rested on the break, only a moment of weakness needed to stop this ship, go back, beg for forgiveness, be a good daughter. Hera clenched her jaw, fingers shaking.
"I'm sorry." Fen whispered into the stillness
"For what?" She didn't need this meekness and self-pity from Fen. Not right now. "This has nothing to do with you." She spat, uncaring of the daggers she pulled from her own back to hurl at the only person she had left.
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Fen shake her head. "This is at least partly my fault."
"Stop it." Hera snapped, spinning to face her. "This isn't your problem, this isn't your home your leaving, your people you're…" She couldn't say the words, but her rage remained. "Just get over yourself. Not everything is about you!"
Fen gazed at her in silence for a long moment, tears glistening unshed in her eyes, Hera's chest heaving with unsaid accusations, filling with poison. Unusually, Fen held her gaze. She pushed herself out of her chair, kneeling in front of Hera, hunched over in the pilot's seat. Slowly, with the hesitation of the profoundly unsure, she reached up, carefully wiping away the tears Hera hadn't known she had been shedding. Fen left her hand in place, knuckles barely brushing against Hera's cheek, soft as a butterfly wing. "For what it's worth, I think you're making the right choice." She whispered. "You have the courage to do what you think is right, no matter what. That makes you braver than 're going to succeed. You're going to save more lives this way Hera, you know it, I know it, and one day, your people, your father will know it too." Warmth spread through Hera's chest, banishing anger, dissipating her trembling fingers, leaving guilt.
"Fen … I'm …" She didn't get to finished the sentence. Instead, Fen pulled Hera to the ground beside her, and she allowed it, collapsing into Fen, who pulled her in, resting her chin on the top of Hera's head, arms holding her tight. Behind her, Chopper laid a mechanical arm on her back. Whatever else she was, she was not alone.
"It's okay." Fen whispered and Hera let go, crying in earnest, a storm of emotion shaking her to her core. Fen didn't move, a rock in a tempest. They remained as such until the tears had crystalized onto her cheeks.
"When did we drop out of hyperspace?" Hera pulled herself up reluctantly, rubbing at her eyes, emotions calm, she was suddenly aware of the silence around them.
"A few minutes ago." Fen stood, reached out her hands, pulling Hera up to her feet. She didn't let go. "We can go anywhere." She said, looking out into the void of stars. There was an edge of fear in her voice, her perfect mask askew.
"Do you have anywhere you want to go?"
Fen shook her head. "No, there's nowhere in particular. What do you want to do?"
"I want to find another rebel group, someone doing something on a galaxy wide scale. There must be someone opposing the Empire out there." She tore her eyes away from Fen and looked out the viewport, dropping her hands to pace. "I'm not sure how to make contact or even where to find a group like that though. I don't remember having contact with other groups … before." The impact of words unsaid still stung, but muted slightly, the wound in her heart still raw but she was no longer in danger of bleeding out.
"We probably want to go somewhere populated then." Fen mused, worrying her bottom lip with her teeth as she thought. "Maybe somewhere a little less controlled by the Empire."
"How about Coruscant." Fen's head jerked violently as she turned to stare at Hera.
"Coruscant?" Her brows were knit with doubt, something shifting behind her eyes.
"I know, it's the heart of the Empire, but Fen, there are so many people there! There must be someone rebelling against the Empire! Besides if we go, we can stay in one of the deeper levels were the Empire's control is a little looser. Unless you would rather go somewhere like Nar Shadda, the Empire doesn't have much of a presence there."
Fen shot her a glare. "No, I don't want to go to Nar Shadda. Obviously."
"Well what were you thinking?" Hera asked, the idea of Coruscant already filling her mind.
"I don't know." Fen sighed. "Coruscant is just … probably not the safest for a Jedi."
"We'll be careful then. As long as no one sees you use the Force, no one will know. And that's true across the rest of the Empire too. Unless you can come up with a better world?"
"Okay." Fen said eventually, unconvinced. "Coruscant it is." Now it was her turn to pace as Hera sent the ship once again into hyperspace.
"We need to change our transponder codes before we get to Coruscant, just in case. Whe should we call the ship?" She looked around the cockpit. "Chopper, you got any ideas?"
She gave a laugh as he answered, the little droid gesticulating wildly. "We're not calling it the Chopper 2.0!"
"Maybe something stealthy, for good luck? Like … The Shadow?" Fen suggested
"Hmm, how about The Mist?"
"The Fog." Fen extrapolated, a smile around the edges of her eyes. "The Smoke."
"How about the Ghost?" At that moment, the ship gave a slight groan.
"I guess that settles it." Fen was grinning as she looked around. "The Ghost it is."
Hera punched the code into the ship "Sounds good to me." She paused for a second as she finished the reprograming.
Fen continued to pace, looking out the viewport, arms wrapped around herself. "Have you ever been?" There was an edge of wistfulness to her tone.
"No. What's it like?"
"It's...I don't know, you kinda have to see it." She shrugged not looking at Hera.
"What's wrong?" Hera asked a moment before a thousand things that could be wrong entered her mind. She was taking Fen back to her home, her invaded and conquered home where the destruction of her people had taken place.
"It's nothing."
"Fen." At the sound of her name, she looked over, shoulders hunched and eyes wide. "It's okay to be afraid. The Empire can't be everywhere though."
"It's not that." She started pacing again.
"Well, what is it then?"
"I haven't been there in so long, the last time I was there … I was a Jedi. It was home. Now…"
"You're still a Jedi though?" Hera inquired, confusion coloring her tone.
"Am I?" Fen finally stopped moving and stared at Hera. "I'm not so sure. I never completed my training, I should still have a padawan braid, a master." The rest of her mask was cracking, falling away, revealing the fear and anger underneath, written in her brows and the set of her jaw. "Besides, the last thing my master told me ... " She seemed unable to finish. Hera remained silent. "The Jedi." Fen made an effort to continue. "They weren't all good, they… they never came for me." The last words were a whisper, layered with desperate, almost childlike confusion. Tears were pooling in her eyes now. Hera stood still, placing her hands gently on Fen's shoulders.
"What do you mean?" She tried not to sound too much like she was prodding for information.
Fen shook her head, body tensing under Hera's hands. "Besides," She continued, ignoring Hera's question. "There are other reasons I don't think I want to be a Jedi anymore." She finally looked up, staring Hera full in the face, eyes searching for something, Hera didn't know what.
"What reasons?" Her stomach suddenly clenched as a possible flicker of understanding washed through her.
Fen opened her mouth and closed it several times without making a sound before forcing out :
"You know what I mean."
"I'm not sure I do." Hera said slowly, unwilling to assume, she needed to be sure she understood, she needed to hear those words.
Fen swallowed hard, looking for all the world as though she were going to war instead of just admitting how she felt. "I like you." She whispered to the ground, face a brilliant red. "A lot. More than a Jedi should."
She could not contain the smile that stretched across her face, pulling until it almost hurt. Loneliness and fear seemed a distant memory. "I like you quite a bit too." Carefully, she pulled Fen closer, heart trembling, pressing their lips together and Fen responded, joy dispelling both her nerves and anything like coherent thought.
Feeling lighter than she had it what must have been years, Fen leaned into Hera's kiss. A smile spread across her face as Hera's breath caught in her throat. Against her will, she interrupted it with a yawn, eyes heavy from too many short, interrupted nights. Hera pulled back, smiling, easily the most beautiful thing Fen had ever seen. "Let's see if we can't find a bunk in this mess of a ship.
Several minutes later, Fen stared at the bed in mild dismay. "I do not want to sleep on the top." She paused, considering. "Actually, no, I will take the top, then at least when it collapses I won't be squished to death."
"How thoughtful of you." Hera laughed and Fen grinned, immensely pleased with herself. "We'll just both sleep on the bottom then." She grinned shamelessly
"Is it going to fit both of us?" The dubious nature of the bed seemed suddenly less important than her imminent proximity to Hera.
"Only one way to find out." She pulled Fen towards her and together they crammed themselves into the lower bunk, faces a scant inch apart, both smiling. "This works for me."
"Me too." Fen whispered, briefly emboldened, she pulled herself even closer so that the length of her body was pressed against Hera, pulling her head under Hera's chin, she closed her eyes, safer than ever in her ams.
Fen woke with a start, a moment or an eternity later, shaking with feverish cold. Where she was, she couldn't say, fear cloying and stifling her mind, she tried to move and found herself retrained. Briefly she struggled against her bonds until she heard someone give the noise of a bothered sleeper and she tilted her head up. Recognition and warmth filled her, driving away fear. Immediately, she relaxed. She was safe here. In moments, sleep reclaimed her.
Several nightmares laters, it was the sound of the ship preparing to come out of hyperspace that woke her. Despite her dreams, she felt more rested than she had in a long time. Hera groaned and tried to sit up, bashing her head on the bed above in the process. Let's go."
The hyperspace lane continued around them and as Hera prepared for their approach, Fen's nerves reasserted themselves with a vengeance. If Hera's hands hadn't been occupied with controls, she might have grabbed one of them. She was going home. Finally, unfortunately, gloriously, she would return to the world that raised her. Was the Jedi temple even still there? Had the Empire pulled it apart, stone by stone, pretending that a thousand generations of history had never happened? Or had they left it a gutted ruin, a reminder of their power? It might be better if it was gone, she considered, better than abandoned, feral animals making their homes where once Jedi had mediated.
The weight of her loss hit like a freighter ship. She was alone in the universe, the Jedi existed only in her childhood memories, tinted and warm, growing bleaker with age, whether her skepticism or the times themselves had wrought this change, she could not say. The idea of the abandoned temple run a deep gong of foreboding her heart and briefly she considered telling Hera that she couldn't do this, but it was already too late.
With a rush, hyperspace collapsed around them and they reverted back to real space. Ahead of them, the brightest gem in the galaxy, the glittering throne-world of the Empire. Coruscant. It shone against the blackness of space, a miniature cold star, outshining its dim sun. Thousands of concentric rings dotted its surface, the etchings of giants, their language long forgotten, their beauty universal. Millions of ships like shining rivers into space streamed around it, ten thousand comet's tails. Beside her, Hera gasped in sudden wonder.
"It sure is something, isn't it." Her heart pulled her to this place, despite it all. Home. The concept resounded within her bones, drawing her in, like a fish on a line.
"Wow." Hera expressed, insufficiently. She piloted the ship towards the world, following countless others on their way to the capital. Neither of them could pull their eyes way, Fen scanning for features she knew, the topography both familiar and foreign.
"This is officer 11788531 to the frigheter Ghost. You have entered Coruscant airspace. Please state your business here and transmit a copy of your manifest. The officer sounded bored, whether that would be good or bad for them, Fen couldn't say. She reached out into space, trying to find the soul that matched the voice, but there were too many.
"Officer 11 uhhh… This is the Ghost." Hera answered, "We have no cargo, we're just coming to visit family."
"No cargo?"
"We borrowed the company ship."
Fen tuned out as Hera continued to navigate customs with a mixture of truth and lies, her eyes fixed down below, imaging the surface.
"Everything checks out, you're cleared to go. Please follow vector 23.077 to the surface."
Hera shot her a quick grin, delight at their ruse in her eyes as she angled the ship towards the planet. The tension allowed her a few minutes of respite as they descended towards the surface, until the details became truly visible and she began again her search for the temple. Here and there, the great buildings of Coruscant jumped out at her, interspersed with more unfamiliar sights than she had expected, the Empire was remaking the surface of the world in their image. Still, apartment complexes taller than mountains grazed thin clouds, old factories yet billowed smoke, brilliant flashes of green marked the handful of gardens that belonged to the ultra rich.
Her heart knew the way she wanted to go, the route long beaten into her mind and so as they turned, heading away from the direction in which the Jedi Temple lay, she almost protested. This was not the way home. Fen bit her tongue before the slip could betray her desire for that place. She had just rejected the Order, it had abandoned her long ago, and still, despite herself, that place exerted a pull, a gravity of its own, that only she could feel.
Trying to prevent tears, Fen reached out with the Force, feeling the life that weighed down around her, a pleasant pressure against her mind. She had forgotten what she had been missing. The whole world teamed with life of every description, a trillion beings going about their lives, sleeping, working, eating, playing grav-ball in the streets, dancing in elaborate rooms. She could feel them all, a sea of souls in which she could not drown, for she too was a part of it, the great cosmic dance of it all.
"Happy to be home?" Hera sked, interrupting her mental reunion.
"Not sure." Fen admitted because even here, especially here, the darkness in the Force had spread, a haze hung heavy over this place, deep red wine spilt over a brilliant tapestry. "The Empire is very strong here."
Hera nodded. Every second they dropped closer, the miniature, perfect illusion of a world fragmented into reality. Rust became visible on pristine metal, streams of traffic resolved into a million million ships and shuttles and speeders.
"We're going to have to go down a few hundred levels, maybe a thousand or do." Fen mused, dredging old memories back to the surface, bracing against emotional impact.
"A thousand levels down?" How deep is the surface?"
Fen shrugged. "I think five or six thousand, I don't think anyone really knows."
"Have you ever been all the way down?" Hera stared into the deep crevices between buildings, as though she hoped she would get a glimpse of solid land deep below.
"No." She laughed. "No one goes down there, stuff gets strange once you descent into the bottom levels. Weird animals and even weirder people. Fly down there." She gueistred to one of the shafts that bored a hole straight down past the buildings. "We probably can't afford the nice spaceports."
"Here goes nothing." Hera slipped into the flow of traffic with a skill that had the potential to soon become ease. Sunlight faded behind them as they descended first into twilight and then into shadow, their way now illuminated by lights. Further and further down they went until the lights started to flicker, most of them still functional.
"This should be good." Hera pulled up, sending the ship ito once of the levels, 863, Fen caught a glimpse of the number as they went by. The wide spaces between the levels in this shipping and export area were more than wide enough. In minutes, they had found a hanger bay with vacancy and Hera lowered the ship, settling lightly on the artificial ground.
Fen tried not to race out of the ship, long-lost youth in her step. The hanger bay opened and in wafted in the smells of the city-world in all its pungent glory, even from within the thick walls of the hanger bay, she could hear the sounds of street vendors and children. Even the way the air brushed against her skin was familiar. She was home.