She walked a place she didn't want to be, a place that filled her with such disgust she had to fight the urge to vomit on the ground, and she had to fight the urge to turn around and run all the way back to her hangar. Places like this shouldn't exist anywhere in the galaxy, not even on a planet like Tatooine. She didn't sick up, but only on account of the little faces all around her. Doing something like that in front of kids had a way of setting them all off. She didn't run either, seeing as she couldn't come to depend on some Mandalorian to keep showing up with his wrinkly green womp rat. Some things you took care of yourself.

"Are you going to buy already, or are you going to hang about and stare? Come on, good stock over here, good prices. Years of use to be had in this one." The market seller accosted her impatiently.

Peli couldn't keep her face from twisting, but with effort she managed to act like it was on account of the suns in her eyes. She didn't come here to upset anybody. That was the truth, but she had to keep telling herself that anyway. There were people here that she'd love to upset plenty. Not the children though, the last thing she wanted was to upset a child. These kids had enough upsets in life as it was.

While she looked at the cluster of kids before her, they looked back at her in turn, but her searching gaze was met with listlessness. These children with their dirty bodies and ratty clothes had been left unloved and beaten down until they couldn't picture a better life if they tried. Tatooine had a lot of things you couldn't get in the core, or even the mid-rim for that matter. It even had more than its fair share of orphans, but what it didn't have was orphanages. This place was a slave market that specialized in children. For a minute she pictured herself with beskar and blasters and weapons she couldn't even name. She would shoot this place up and burn it to the ground until there was nothing but corpses and ash and children running free.

"I'll take that one." Peli gestured toward a greyish being hunkered so far down into itself it hardly looked like more than a bundle of rags.

She wasn't too sure what species it was, but it was small, and knobbly, and its skin hung on its bones like it needed feeding. The stall owner roughly grabbed it by the shoulders and hauled it forward. It opened and closed its mouth like it might wail in pain from the handling, but no sound came out. The poor creature hardly came up to her knees. She crouched down and swept it up against her shoulder, glaring at the seller's back as that monster counted her credits in his palm.

"What about the rest of them?" Peli asked.

"You want to buy them too?"

She walked away without answering. She never wanted to come here again. She never wanted to so much as look back here again. She didn't even want to remember this place, full of children who all had the same staring eyes and hungry faces and haunting silence. She stopped, clutching the child to her with both arms, and looked back the way she came, toward the slave market. She couldn't save all of them.

"At least I got you, huh, little one? At least we got each other."