#batonn

Dr. Mitth'ali'astov's office was not in the Imperial medical complex. It was the first thing she noticed when the speeder stopped. It was a quieter address, the kind of building that existed in the upper-mid levels of Coruscant because the people who used it had sufficient resources to maintain their own infrastructure.

The waiting room contained two chairs and a plant that appeared to be genuinely alive. Usually on Coruscant, they were all fake.

Dr. Thalias came out to receive her herself.

Her skin was lighter than Thrawn’s and she had the red eyes that (Y/N) had been becoming more accustomed to over the past months. She wore a white medical coat over civilian clothes and carried no datapad. She looked at (Y/N) with the immediate, unmediated assessment of a woman who had been reading patients since before (Y/N) was born.

"Lady Thrawn," she said.

"Dr. Thalias," she said.

"Come in," she said simply.

The office was warmer than she expected. There were objects on the shelves that were not medical equipment. A star map of the Unknown Regions, physical, old, the kind that had been made before the Empire had decided the Unknown Regions were not worth mapping. Several texts in Cheunh, the Chiss language, their spines worn in the way of books that had been read rather than displayed.

She sat in the offered chair.

Dr. Thalias sat across from her, not behind a desk. The chairs were at the same level.

"The Grand Admiral contacted my office this morning," Dr. Thalias said. "He provided the Imperial physician's preliminary report and requested a specialist consultation. He did not tell me what to find or what to say. I want you to know that."

“Thank you. I appreciate that.”

"I thought you would," Dr. Thalias said. "He said you would."

Something moved in her chest that she chose not to examine at this particular moment.

"Then tell me what you know," she said.

Dr. Thalias told her.

She spoke for forty minutes without the administrative language and without the careful management of information that the Imperial physician had used.

The Chiss gestational process, she explained, was in most respects similar to the human. The significant differences were in the early weeks. The first trimester carried specific variables that a human pregnancy did not, primarily related to the Chiss neurological development pattern, which began earlier and proceeded faster than the human equivalent. This was not dangerous in itself. What it required was monitoring that standard Imperial medical protocols were not designed to provide, because standard Imperial medical protocols had been designed for human patients and had not been updated to account for the existence of a Grand Admiral who was not one.

"Has this occurred before?" (Y/N) asked. "A Chiss/human pregnancy?"

"Yes," Dr. Thalias said. "Rarely. The documentation in the Imperial archive is minimal.”

“I saw, uhm, three sources in the archive. One was an annotation about an outcome on Csilla but the outcome was not positive.”

"The Csilla case was complicated by factors that are not present in yours," Dr. Thalias said directly. "The mother received no specialist care. The pregnancy was not identified until the second trimester. The conditions were not your conditions."

"I want you to tell me the actual risks, not the managed version. The actual version."

"The risks," she said, "in the first trimester, are elevated relative to a standard human pregnancy. Not dramatically. But elevated. The primary concern is the neurological development window ,  it requires rest, adequate nutrition, and the absence of significant physiological stress. The Grand Admiral mentioned a travel itinerary."

“Yes, I’ll be going home to Batonn.”

"The travel itself is not contraindicated," Dr. Thalias said. "The concern is the specific activities on the itinerary."

“I think he was most concerned about the northern territories visit.”

"An active extraction zone, environmental contaminants, physical exertion, stress load." She was quiet for a moment. "I can clear you for the travel. I cannot recommend the northern territories visit as currently structured."

(Y/N)’s hand began to tremor, she looked down at it for a moment before looking back at the Chiss woman.

She thought about Irtur and Gret Virex and the water system and the seventy-five minute window and what the northern territories visit contained that was not on the approved itinerary.

“Okay how about this, I will not enter the extraction zone itself. The visit will be to the perimeter settlements only. The environmental exposure is limited and the physical demand is minimal." She held Dr. Thalias's gaze. "I need to go. I need my people to see me there. I need to see them. I need to know what I am governing for my planet is becoming very foreign to me."

“Perimeter only. You will sit when sitting is available. You will not exert yourself. If you feel unwell at any point you leave immediately without negotiation. And you will tell me truthfully when you return."

“Yes.”

"I will provide the travel clearance with those conditions noted."

"Thank you.”

"I will also, be providing you with a dietary protocol, a rest schedule, and a monitoring checklist that you will actually follow rather than read once and set aside."

(Y/N) smiled to herself.

"I will see you when you return from Batonn. Whatever you find there,  whatever your clan leader healer tells you , I want you to come to me before you act on it."

"How did you know about the healer?"

"I didn't," Dr. Thalias said. "But you are Batonnese and that is what your people do. I simply thought it was worth mentioning."

"I think," (Y/N) said, "that I will find you very useful."

"Yes," Dr. Thalias said. "I expect you will."

════ ⋆★⋆ ════

She was in her office at the eleventh hour when she heard V3PO in the corridor. She heard the voice before she heard the words and she was at the door before she had decided to stand.

Tannian was in the corridor in his uniform with his travel bag over one shoulder and the expression of a man who had been keeping something and was now in the process of revealing it.

"Your leave was approved," she said.

"Yesterday," he said. "I wanted to tell you in person."

He had the dark circles of someone who had taken the earliest available transport and had not slept on it. She crossed the remaining distance and held him the way she had held him at the wedding, with both arms and the full weight of it.

He held her back.

"You're coming to Batonn," she said. Into his shoulder.

"I'm coming with you to Batonn," he said.

She pulled back and looked at him. At their father's eyes and the uniform he had not chosen. 

"How long?"

"The leave authorization covers the full trip."

"Who approved it?"

"Well I know he arranged it, I had asked him to."

"The leave request was filed through the standard channels."

"Tannian."

"The approval came back in fourteen hours," he said. "Which is not standard."

"Come in," she said. "I'll have V3PO find you something to eat. You look terrible."

"You look tired," he said.

"I am tired," she said. "Come in."

She decided not to tell him of her state at this time. It was something she did not want to bring up right now or possibly ever. If she said it out loud, it would shift the shape of everything, so she held her breath and kept it to herself.

She sat across from him at the kitchen table and she watched him eat the food she had prepared. They caught up as siblings would and laughed as they planned out an entire excursion on their favorite spots from their childhood.

"Tannian," she said,"I'm glad you're coming.”

He looked at her with their father's eyes.

"I know."

════ ⋆★⋆ ════

Two days before her departure (Y/N) asked V3PO to assist with the packing.

V3PO stood at the foot of the bed with the manifest datapad, reading items aloud in the efficient tone it used for administrative tasks and which she had come to find, over the months of their acquaintance, almost companionable.

V3PO was, as always, thorough.

"The blue gown, Your Majesty? For the formal visit to the Sereth hold?"

"Yes," she said.

"The cream dress?"

"Yes. Fold it separately."

"The highland day dresses, I count three—"

"All of them," she said. "I don't know what the weather is doing."

"The weather in the highland region is currently—"

"All of them, V3PO."

"Of course, Your Majesty."

"The Senate documentation portfolio," V3PO continued. "Secured. The highland correspondence and the clan reports, is in the inner compartment as requested."

"Yes," she said. "Good."

"The medical provisions." V3PO's tone adjusted by a fraction "The specialist physician's recommendations have been packaged by the medical officer. Anti-nausea compound, morning formulation. The supplemental nutrition tablets. The hydration concentrates. The Grand Admiral was specific about the supplemental nutrition tablets. He asked that I confirm they are packed first, before any other item."

She looked at the small medical kit.

"They're packed."

"Confirmed," V3PO said, with the satisfaction of a droid completing a verification.

(Y/N) moved to the wardrobe while V3PO occupied itself with the folding. She reached to the back of it, looking for something very specific. The green dress was where she had put it, behind the two others, the deep green of the Geronh family's secondary color. She lifted it carefully, feeling through the outer layer to the inner, her fingers finding the hidden recess on the left side where the fabric folded over itself in the way she had fashioned it to fold.

The weight was there.

She pressed her palm flat against the recess for a moment, confirming the shape of it through the fabric, the specific weight and length of it, and then she let the dress hang from her hand and looked at it in the wardrobe light and thought about what she was carrying and where she was going and what she was going to do when she got there.

She needed to get the lightsaber off Coruscant without the luggage being searched.

She had a plan for this. The plan was the pocket of the medical kit, underneath the anti-nausea compound and the supplemental nutrition tablets, which were the first thing V3PO had been instructed to confirm were packed and which therefore would not be disturbed again before departure. She had checked the dimensions twice. The hilt would fit.

She was going to move it now. She began to ease the hilt out of the recess.

"Your Majesty," V3PO said behind her, "I wonder if the green dress might be better wrapped separately given the weight of the fabric…"

"I'll manage this one," she said.

"Of course. Now the…"

"V3PO."

"Yes?"

"Could you check whether the travel documents have arrived from the sector administration? They were expected at the nineteenth hour."

"Certainly, Your Majesty." V3PO moved toward the office with the self-important efficiency of a droid given a task it considered meaningful.

She exhaled and removed her hands from the dress and she straightened and she turned.

Thrawn was in the doorway and she did not know how long he had been there.

She did not know whether he had seen her hands in the dress or whether he had arrived in the doorway after she had straightened and turned and there was no way to determine this from his face because his face was doing nothing except looking at her with complete attention with his hands behind his back.

"I didn't see you there," she said with words arrived with the warmth she produced automatically for moments that required warmth

"I came to check on the packing," he said.

"It's nearly done.”

He looked at the wardrobe.

She looked at him looking at the wardrobe.

"Your  green dress," he said.

"I thought it should stay. I would prefer to travel light.”

She did not know what he had seen and she did not know what he was thinking and she breathed with the counting and the precision and she held herself with everything she had and she thought: if he asks me to open it I will have to think of something quickly.

"Yes," he said. "That is a reasonable choice."

"Your Majesty, I have the-”

“V3PO,” Thrawn interrupted  "The correspondence portfolio. Take it to the office for cross referencing with the approved communication list before it's packed. Bring it back when it's cleared."

"Of course, Grand Admiral." V3PO moved toward the door with the efficiency of a droid executing an instruction, the manifest tucked under its arm.

The bedroom door closed and Thrawn stepped in.

"Are you alright?" he asked.

"I'm nervous ," she said. Which was true. Which was true in several directions simultaneously and was therefore the honest answer even if it was not the complete one.

"About Batonn," he said.

"Yes," she said.

He came further into the room. He stood at the foot of the bed and he looked at the organized luggage with the attention he gave to things he was genuinely assessing rather than performing the assessment of.

"The northern territories visit is cleared," he said. "Dr. Thalias reviewed the itinerary this morning. She has no contraindication for the visit at this stage provided the duration is observed and you are not required to…"

"I know," she said. "She told me."

"Then you know the conditions," he said.

"I know the conditions," she said.

There was silence between them. The type of silence that made it so time went by very slowly and unwillingly. 

"Thrawn," (Y/N) finally spoke.

"Yes."

She looked at him.

"How long were you standing in the doorway?”

He held her gaze.

"Long enough to see that you checked the wardrobe twice," he said.

"I was looking for the ceremonial pins. For the highland arrangement. Uiona uses them for the formal braid and I wanted to confirm they were packed."

"Had she?”

"Yes.”

He looked at her and pressed his lips as he had always done when he watched her.

She was lying to him and he was reading her and she was holding the lie with everything she had because there were five days remaining and Clvtorig was in a cell on Nar Shaddaa and the plan was already in motion and she could not afford the truth of this specific thing right now.

She held the lie anyway.

"The pins are packed," she said. "Everything is nearly done."

He held her gaze for another moment.

"Come and sit," he said.

He had moved to the chair by the window , not his chair, the one she used when she was reading, the one positioned to see the door. He had not sat in it. He was gesturing to it.

She went to it.

She sat.

He remained standing, which was not the configuration she had expected, and he looked at the Coruscant morning outside the window for a moment before he looked at her.

"You have been managing something," he said. "For several weeks. Not only the pregnancy. Something else."

“I’ve been managing Batonn,” she said.

Thrawn did not move from where he stood, the light from Coruscant cutting across him in sharp, geometric lines that made everything about him look more deliberate than it already was.

“Yes,” he said. “You have. That is not what I meant.”

She held herself very still, sitting on her hand before it decided to move without her consent.

"You have been…" He paused. The selecting. "There is a quality you have when you are carrying information you have decided not to share. I have been observing it for the past month." He looked at her with complete attention. "I am not asking you to tell me what it is. I am telling you that I have observed it and that I want you to know I have observed it."

"Why?”

"Because," he said, "you are going to Batonn in five days. And whatever you are carrying, you will carry it with you. And I would prefer you to know that the option of telling me exists. If the weight becomes something you cannot manage alone."

"I know," she said. "That the option exists."

He held her gaze.

"Good," he said.

“But I believe you are reading into things, dear husband,” she stood up and kissed him on the cheek quickly, “I have been feeling blue since I’ve found out about … our blessing.”

He received the kiss with the stillness he received most things. She moved away from him toward the bed and the organized luggage and the ordinary business of the packing.

He did not move.

She could feel him not moving.

"Feeling blue?”

"It's a Batonnese expression," she said. She lifted the garment case and checked the fastenings with the attention of a person who was very interested in garment case fastenings. "When something significant happens and you don't yet know how to hold it. The weight of it before you've found the right position for carrying it. My aunt used it. When my cousin was born she said she felt blue for three weeks before she felt anything else."

"And what did she feel after the three weeks?"

"She said she felt like herself again," she said. "Only with more to protect."

"The blue," he said. "Is it only that?"

"Mostly," It was not a full lie but it was also not a full truth.

"Mostly," he repeated. Not as a challenge. The way he repeated things when he was trying to understand them.

“Yes,” She kept her attention on the garment case, aligning the edges with unnecessary precision.

Silence stretched before he said, “That is acceptable, for now.”

Thrawn stepped closer, not enough to crowd her, only enough to shift the balance of the room.

“And Batonn,” he said, “is an environment that tends to reveal things.”

“I do not doubt that.”

She was now sitting on the bed, running her left hand through her sheets in order to give it something to do.

“I would advise,” Thrawn went on, as if the conversation had shifted to something purely logistical, “that whatever you are carrying, emotionally or otherwise, you account for its impact on your decision-making once you arrive.”

“I always do.”

“Yes,” he said. “You do.”

He held her gaze one more time.

"A specialist will be at the departure gate," he said. "She will travel with the complement for the duration of the trip."

"I know," she said. "You told me."

"I am telling you again," he said. "Because the first time I told you, you were in the Senate clothes holding the document folder and your hands were shaking and I am not certain you retained it fully."

She looked at her hands.

They were not shaking now.

"I retained it," she said.

"Good," he said.

He moved toward the door.

He stopped.

"When you come back," he said. "From Batonn."

She waited.

"I want to hear about it," he said. "What it is actually like. What it looks like when you are standing in it."

"Alright," she said quietly. "When I come back."

He left.

She waited until his footsteps faded down the corridor.

She went to the wardrobe.

She moved the lightsaber into the medical kit.

She packed the kit.

She closed the luggage.

════ ⋆★⋆ ════

The night before the deployment, right after the Chimaera passed her final inspection, a gala was held for the officers and their wives to socialize and say their last goodbye’s in the formal space.The venue was the Imperial Navy's formal reception hall on the command level, the kind of building that had been designed specifically for occasions like this one. It was the last collective gathering before the fleet moved and the people in it became operational rather than social, before the grey uniforms stopped meaning rank and started meaning something more immediate.

It was louder than most Imperial functions. It wasn’t inappropriate  but controlled. The controlledness of men and women who were leaving in the morning and knew it and were carrying the knowledge in different ways. Some of them with forced relaxation. Some with the quiet of people who had already begun the transition in their minds.

She wore the deep Batonnese red.

The Geronh red, the formal color, the one that said what she was without requiring a caption. She had discussed it with Uiona for approximately thirty seconds before Uiona had said obviously and begun with the pins. It framed her body with feathers pressed against the bodice making her look like a red swan. A swan, the symbol of the Batonnese people.

She stood beside Thrawn in the Grand Admiral's white.

The officers came to them rather than the other way around, the gravity of Thrawn's rank pulling people into orbit rather than requiring them to be sought. She had learned to work within this configuration, she had seen her father handle it when he was still king of Batonn. It had certain advantages, the primary one being that she did not have to move through the room to gather information because the room came to her.

She was speaking to a senator's aide about the Batonn sector development report when she saw Yularen making his way across the hall.

She had met Wullf Yularen twice, once at the wedding receiving line and once at a Senate function where he had been precise and less courteous, a version of him that appeared in working contexts, which she had found considerably more interesting.

He arrived at Thrawn's left shoulder with the bearing of a man who had been walking in the direction of important meetings for so long that all motion had taken on that quality.

"Grand Admiral," he said.

"Colonel Yularen," Thrawn said.

Yularen turned to her.

"Lady Thrawn," he said. Something in his expression shifted with the specific adjustment of a man who had decided to be a person rather than an officer for the duration of a sentence. "I imagine this is not an entirely comfortable evening."

"I am quite used to uncomfortable evenings, Colonel," she said warmly. "I find I have developed a taste for them."

"I don't doubt it." He looked at Thrawn with the ease of two men who had been in enough operational contexts together that the social version of each other required less management. "You needn't worry about him, my Lady. I'll see to it that he stays out of trouble."

"I was not aware," Thrawn said, "that trouble avoidance was a concern."

Human humor went over him sometimes.

"It is not a concern for you," Yularen said. "It is occasionally a concern for the people around you. The Lothal campaign is a different kind of problem from Batonn. The rebel cells there have been more adaptive than the sector reports have accounted for. We'll need to hit them before they have time to…" He stopped. He glanced at her. The professional reflex, the ISB officer's instinct, the assessment of what was appropriate to say in front of whom.

She received the glance with pleasant composure and gave him nothing.

"Before they have time to consolidate their position in the Mykapo corridor," he said, with the slight adjustment of a man who had decided she was acceptable to continue in front of. "The supply chain they're running through there, we identified a secondary route last week. The primary route we already have mapped but the secondary…"

She filed Mykapo corridor, secondary supply route, identified last week in the column where she kept things she had not been told and had received anyway through the particular advantage of being the person standing next to Thrawn at official functions.

Thrawn looked at her and she met his gaze with the pleasant warmth of a woman following a conversation she was not particularly tracking. He held it for a fraction of a second longer than the conversation required.

She smiled.

He looked back at Yularen.

"The secondary route," Thrawn said, "will be addressed in the first briefing."

"Yes," Yularen said. "I wanted to flag it tonight so you had time to consider it before the briefing. At any rate." The adjustment again, back from operational to social, the shift she could see in real time. "Lady Thrawn. I heard you'll be returning to Batonn while the Grand Admiral is on campaign."

"Yes," she said. "For a few weeks."

"Your first visit since the consolidation?"

"Yes.”

Yularen held her gaze for a moment. He had the eyes of a man who had spent decades in intelligence work, which meant they were the kind of eyes that noticed what other eyes missed and had developed.

"I hope it is what you need it to be," he said.

She had not expected that. She had expected the diplomatic version, the political version, something that operated in the register of official courtesy. She had not expected the direct version, the one that acknowledged what the visit actually was rather than what it was described as in the sector administration filing.

"Thank you, Colonel," she said. "I expect it will be."

He inclined his head. He looked at Thrawn one final time with the look of two men communicating something through the specific economy of people who did not require words for it.

"Until morning, Grand Admiral," he said.

"Until morning," Thrawn said.

Yularen moved off into the hall.

"You told him I was acceptable?" she asked her husband.

"I told him," Thrawn said, "that you were the Queen of Batonn and the Senator of the Batonn sector and that you had a significant interest in regional stability. He drew his own conclusions."

She looked at the room.

"Thank you," she said. Quietly.

He said nothing. Which was its own kind of answer.

The chocolate cake was on the far table. The last time she had eaten chocolate cake was in the chow hall on Hosnian Prime, at a table with her roommate, the night before everything changed. Some other officer approached them but she excused herself before she could get dragged into another conversation.

She crossed the hall and stood at the table and picked up a plate.

She was still looking at the sweet when the voice arrived at her left shoulder.

"I thought that sort of symbolism was banned among you Batonnese."

The voice was of course referencing her gown which had red feathers pressed to her bodice and fitted at the shoulder with the overlapping layers of the skirt falling in the specific configuration that the Coruscant dressmaker had described as architectural and which she had thought, when she put it on, resembled nothing so much as the red swans that nested in the oases at night. Almost like a nightswan, who only sang at night. She had worn it deliberately and with the full awareness of what it said, because the Batonnese did not respect bans of their symbols.

She turned and placed her plate down.

She looked at him for a full second before she said anything because she needed the second, needed it to absorb the fact of him. The uniform, the insignia that was no longer an ensign's, the face that was exactly as she remembered it and was doing what faces did when they were trying to perform casually and the performance was failing.

Davio Langro.

"Then perhaps," she said, with the warmth she could always produce and the steadiness she was applying to it now, "we should switch clothes."

He looked at her. He had gone slightly pale.

"What are you doing here," he said. His voice was low. Not the provocation anymore. "Arlinya?"

She looked at the corridor to the left of the table and told him to follow her until they reached the faint residue of the evening's food. 

She turned when they were far enough in.

"You're her," he said. "You're actually …the Queen of Batonn."

"Yes," she said.

"Lady Thrawn," he said. The title arriving with the clarifying quality he had mentioned, she could see it , seeing her in the red dress beside the Grand Admiral's white and something slotting into place that the breakup had left unresolved. "You're …Arlinya was…"

"An alias," she said. "Yes."

"For how long?" he asked. "How long were you…"

"From the beginning," she said. "From the first gala."

He looked at the corridor wall.

He breathed once with the quality of a man absorbing something that was not what he had expected his evening to contain.

"The information," he said. "The things I told you. About the Chimaera, the deployment…"

"Yes.”

"You used me," he said. Not with anger. 

“No, Davio I did not. I promise you I did not. I am sorry… Davio. I am …I want you to hear that. You were kind to me and you were honest with me and I was neither of those things and I have thought about that. I have thought about it more than you would expect.”

"You broke up with me three days before…" He looked at her. "Before the wedding announcement."

"Yes." 

"You knew when you ended it."

“I didn’t want to end it like that.”

“Then why did you?”

“Because I didn’t have time,” she said. “Because I was told, and then it was decided, and then it was happening. And everything between those moments… Everything between those moments didn’t belong to me anymore.”

"You were protecting me?" he said. It arrived not as an accusation but as a clarification, as though he were trying to understand her.

"I had no choice," she said. "About the marriage. About any of it. And you had done nothing wrong and I did not want you to be…I did not want you to be caught in something you had no part in creating. That is all I could give you. The ending before it became something worse. It was real, Davio."

“I kept waiting after you ended it. I thought maybe… I don’t know. Maybe you’d come back. Or explain. Or that I’d run into you again somewhere that wasn’t…” He gestured again, helpless. “This.”

Her throat tightened and she said nothing. 

He looked at her for a long moment. He was twentythree. She had forgotten that, or had set it aside in the category of things that were not useful to dwell on. She had never forgotten his eyes, the way he treated her and the flowers he would bring her. She smelt them now, masking the food she could smell in the hall next to them.

"Are you…" He stopped. He started again. "Are you alright? With him."

"Yes," she said.

"You're certain."

"Yes," she said. "I am certain. I am alright."

He nodded once. The nod of a man filing something and accepting the filing.

"The Chimaera," he said. "I ship out tomorrow."

"I know," she said.

"He's my commanding officer," he said.

"I know," she said.

He looked at her with something that was almost laughter and was not quite. "That is extremely strange."

She smiled, “Everything in the empire is strange.”

“Yes, it is.” They stood in silence for some time, allowing each other to take in the moment.

"Arlinya," he said, and then stopped, and then said: "I don't know what to call you."

"(Y/N)," she said. "If you need to call me anything."

He received it.

"(Y/N) ," he said, testing it. "For whatever it is worth. The Saturdays. I don't , I'm not going to pretend they were nothing. They weren't nothing to me."

"They weren't nothing to me either."

He nodded.

"You should go back," he said. "Before someone notices."

She looked at him for one moment longer.

She walked back toward the light and the noise and the controlled warmth of the gala, leaving him in the corridor that smelled faintly of food and something else she couldn’t name.

She didn’t sleep that night. Guilt stabbed into her heart from every side, sharp and bleeding, until even the quiet felt calming. Every time she closed her eyes, it came back, so she didn’t sleep, ignoring Dr.Thalias’ medical advice. She wanted to get up, do something , anything. If she lived alone, she would have gone on a run. By the time the first gray hint of morning slipped through the window, she hadn’t slept at all. And somehow, the light made it worse.

Thrawn’s things were gone from the surfaces, not all of them, he would be returning, but the datapads and the specific personal objects that accompanied him on deployment had been moved.

She was in her travel clothes , the Batonnese day dress, the practical one. Her bag was in the corridor. The medical kit was in the bag. 

He was in the full Grand Admiral's white. He was checking the time when she came into the entrance corridor.

He looked up.

She looked at him.

He looked at her.

"The transport leaves at the eighth hour," she said.

"Yes," he said.

"Mine leaves at the ninth."

"Yes."

She held her outer wrap in her hands.

They stood in the entrance corridor of the apartment that would be empty of both of them within the hour.

He stepped forward.

He straightened the outer wrap in her hands with the precise care of a man who had noticed it was slightly misaligned and had decided to correct it, his fingers brief and certain against the fabric, and when he was done he looked at her.

She reached up and kissed him.

Not the brief corridor version. The other kind, the one that had a decision in it, the full commitment she brought to things she had decided, and his hand came to her face with the specific certainty she had catalogued and was still adding to.

She stepped back.

She looked at him.

"The itinerary," he said. His voice was even. It was doing the thing it did when he was applying the evenness with some effort.

"I know the itinerary," she said.

"Dr. Thalias recommended a specialist. She will be at the departure point," he said. "She will travel with your complement for the duration. Whatever she advises…"

"I follow her guidance," she said. "Not my own assessment of what I can manage."

"Yes," he said.

"You have told me this three times," she said.

"I am aware."

"Thrawn."

"Yes."

"I will be careful," she said. "I will take care of myself. And what I am carrying." She held his gaze. "I promise you."

He looked at her with the third expression.

"And you will tell me," he said. "When you return. What you find there."

"I told you I would," she said.

"Yes," he said. "I wanted to hear it again."

"Come back," she said. Quietly.

He held her gaze.

"Yes," he said. The same word she had used the night before, returned with the same quality, precise and without elaboration and entirely sufficient.

He picked up the deployment case.

He moved toward the door.

He stopped in the doorway.

She waited.

"The Mykapo corridor," he said. Without turning. "The secondary route. I want your assessment when I return."

She stared at his back.

He went.

The door closed.

She stood in the entrance corridor in her travel clothes and she breathed with the counting and the precision and she thought about all of it and she thought about nothing and she stood in the specific quiet of an apartment that had just changed configuration for the second time in twelve hours.

Then V3PO appeared from the sitting room.

"Your Majesty," it said, "the transport to the departure terminal will arrive in twenty-two minutes."

"Yes," she said. "Thank you, V3PO. Make sure Jankie gets love while I'm gone."

“Of course, your majesty.”

She picked up her outer wrap.

She went to Batonn.

Thrawn had always come and gone.

This was the structure of their marriage and she had accepted its structure early, he was a Grand Admiral and the Empire required its Grand Admiral continuously, and his absence was not personal in the sense of being directed at her specifically, it was simply the condition of what he was.

When he was present they were, she searched for the accurate word and found it, careful with each other. Not cold, not the cold of people who had nothing between them, but the careful of people who had something between them that neither of them had fully mapped and both of them were navigating around the edges of with the attention you gave to things that could be damaged by carelessness.

She did not trust him. She needed to be precise about this in her own accounting.

This time however, felt different. 

Maybe because there was a child now sleeping in the next room beneath a low lit mobile of Batonnese moons Uiona had commissioned quietly without asking permission. Perhaps because she had watched him hold their son with something dangerously close to tenderness and now could not fully separate Grand Admiral Thrawn from the image of blue hands supporting an infant with impossible care.

She shivered when she remembered the way Irtur now spoke to her like a woman standing near the edge of a cliff whether she recognized it or not.

Two months after (c/n)’s birth, Irtur decided (Y/N) was recovered enough to begin training. (Y/N) personally believed this decision had been made by a man who had suffered some form of irreversible brain damage in his youth.

“You are smiling,” she informed him as they stood facing each other in one of the unused private training halls. “Which means you are enjoying this too much.”

“I am,” Irtur admitted easily.

The practice staff in her hands felt heavier than she remembered. Everything felt heavier now. Her body still did not belong entirely to her again. Sleep came in fractured pieces between feedings and nightmares and late-night messages from outer-rim sectors she could no longer emotionally separate from the people dying in them. 

It was also hard to grip the staff in her left hand as she never fully got used to the prosthetic finger she had been forced to live with.

Irtur twirled his own staff once lazily. The hall lights reflected softly off the polished floor, creating a shadow’s outline of the staff. Outside the high windows Coruscant traffic moved in endless ribbons.

“Ready?”

“No.”

“Excellent,” He struck immediately.

She blocked too slowly. The impact jolted painfully through her wrists and he swept her legs out from beneath her with insulting ease. She hit the floor hard.

“Oh, I hate you,” she groaned from the floor.

“You say that every session.”

“Because every session feels like an assassination attempt.”

Irtur extended a hand. She slapped it away and forced herself upright on her own.

“Again,” he said.

Three minutes later he disarmed her completely. Five minutes after that he had her pinned against the mat with the end of the staff pressed lightly to her throat.

“Dead,” he announced.

“You are impossible.”

“You are distracted.”

“I had a child eight weeks ago.”

“Yes,” he said. “And now you are holding your weapon too high because you are compensating for weakness in your left side.”

“You can tell that?”

“I can tell you are exhausted before you enter the room.”

He stepped back and allowed her space to stand again. Sweat clung to the back of her neck. Her muscles burned already.

“This was a mistake,” she muttered.

“No. This is necessary.”

“For whom?”

“For the woman who once slapped Governor Restos in his own office.”

“That was different.”

“You aimed better then.”

They circled each other slowly.

“You’re hesitating,” Irtur said.

“I’m thinking.”

“You are overthinking.”

“Well forgive me for wanting strategy before you beat me unconscious.”

“You already think strategically. Your problem is that you stop yourself halfway through action.”

He lunged again. She blocked instinctively this time, twisted, nearly managed to catch his shoulder and then he flipped her cleanly onto the mat again.

She let out a furious sound into the floor.

“Oh, gods above.”

Irtur rested the end of his staff against his shoulder.

“You know,” he said conversationally, “for someone married to Grand Admiral Thrawn, I expected significantly more terrifying combat ability.”

She rolled onto her back to glare at him.

“I married him. I did not absorb him through proximity.”

“A missed opportunity.”

She threw her practice glove at him. He dodged it effortlessly.

Then his expression shifted, the teasing disappeared so gradually she almost missed it. He lowered the staff.

“Get up, (Y/N)!” The use of her name in Batonnese made her pause.

Slowly, she pushed herself upright again, breathing hard. Irtur looked at her for a long moment.

“You are stronger than this,” Something in his voice landed differently this time, it was expectation. The expectation he had for the queen of an ash world to know how to wield a staff, a primitive weapon used by the Batonnese for centries. 

“You survived Batonn,” he said quietly. “You survived Palpatine. You survived becoming a symbol for people who wanted to own you. You survived childbirth while your husband was halfway across the galaxy commanding a military campaign.”

She looked away.

“You are not weak because you are tired.”

The training hall suddenly felt very quiet.

“You think I do not see what is happening to you?” he asked softly. “You move through the Senate like a ghost now. You barely sleep. You hold that child like you are afraid the galaxy will steal him from you if you loosen your grip for even a second. And maybe that fear is rational. Which is exactly why you need to remember who you are”

She swallowed hard and tightened her grip on the staff.

“I don’t know who that is anymore.”

“Yes you do.”

“No,” she said sharply now. “I don’t. I don’t know if I’m a senator or a rebel or a mother or his wife or Batonn’s queen or just…” Her voice broke slightly from exhaustion. “Just something the Empire reshaped into usefulness.”

“You are all of those things,” he said as he stepped closer to her. “And none of them erase the others.”

Then he lifted his staff again and settled back into stance.

“Again,” he said.

“You just delivered an emotional speech.”

“And now you are going to stop feeling sorry for yourself and hit me properly.”

The second round went worse than the first.

(Y/N) came at Irtur too quickly, still angry from the last loss, the staff striking against his with enough force to sting her palms. He pivoted easily. The end of his staff caught behind her ankle and swept.

She hit the mat hard.

“Oh, come now,” Irtur said, not even breathing heavily. “At this point I’m beginning to take it personally.”

“You are annoying.”

“I am winning.”

“That does not make you less annoying.”

“It actually makes me substantially more so.”

Irtur spun the staff once between his palms.

“Again.”

“I hate you.”

“You say that every lesson.”

“And every lesson you continue deserving it.”

The staff cracked sharply against his. Once. Twice. Three times. Faster now. She drove him backward half a step and felt a sudden flare of satisfaction. Then he disarmed her completely. The weapon spun from her grip and clattered across the training floor.

“Oh, stars,” Irtur sighed dramatically. “That one was genuinely embarrassing.”

She opened her mouth to insult him properly when movement near the doorway caught her attention.

Someone stood there watching. Tall. Familiar. Her expression changed instantly.

“Tannian?”

Before she could think about dignity or sweat or the fact she was currently losing a sparring match in front of witnesses, she crossed the room almost at a run and threw her arms around him.

“What an unexpected surprise,” she breathed.

Tannian laughed softly as he caught her easily. “You say that like I appeared through the Force.”

“You were supposed to still be stationed in the outer Rim.”

“I finally got shore leave.” He pulled back slightly to look at her. “Though apparently I arrived in time to witness Lord Irtur humiliating royalty with a stick.”

“I was teaching her discipline,” Irtur said.

“You were enjoying yourself.”

“These are not mutually exclusive concepts.”

Tannian’s gaze softened as he looked at her properly now, taking in the exhaustion still faintly beneath her eyes, the slight changes motherhood had left behind. “You look well,” he said gently.

“That is a lie.”

“It may be.”

“Come,” she said, placing her staff back on the rack and walking back towards her brother “let us go see your nephew.”

In her residence, Tannian looked at the child and almost said nothing for a full minute.

"Can I hold him?"

"Yes," she said.

He held the child with the terrified carefulness of someone who had not held an infant recently and was aware of their own inexperience with the fragile things of the world.

"He's going to be remarkable," he said.

"Well, he has a lot to contend with," she said.

"All remarkable people do." Tannian looked back at the child. "He has your look about him. The eyes are going to be different but the, there's something in the structure of the face. The way he holds himself even now." He paused. "Stubborn."

“You know, everyone has been saying that and yet I don’t see it.”

“You will in time.”

She smiled at him then turned her head when she heard the pristine, perfect steps of V3PO as it entered the room.

“Your majesty, a gift has arrived from Lieutenant Commander Res Geronh.”

She knew it was from him before V3PO brought it to her, the formal wrapping, the Imperial seal, the handwriting on the card that she had known since childhood and associated now with specific memories she kept in the sealed room and visited rarely.

“How kind of our dear brother,” Tannian said as he placed his nephew back in the bassinet. 

Res. The traitor brother. The one who had stood before their fallen father in Imperial regalia and called his sister a destabilizing variable requiring containment. The one who had been at the front with the Imperials on the hot midsummer's day. The one who was alive and promoted and apparently writing congratulatory notes.

She looked at the card for a long moment before she opened it.

‘To the Grand Admiral and his Lady, on the occasion of the birth of their son.

The Geronh family extends its congratulations on this significant occasion. The continuation of the line is a matter of great moment for Batonn and for the Imperial administration of the sector. I have no doubt that the child will reflect the exceptional qualities of his father's distinguished service and bring honor to both his families.

With respect and in service to the Empire,

Lieutenant Commander Res Geronh’

Enclosed: A commemorative piece from the Geronh family estate's historical collection, chosen as an appropriate acknowledgment of this occasion.

“What the hell?” She whispered under the breath before handing the letter to Tannian.

It was a letter to a Grand Admiral from a junior officer who wanted the Grand Admiral to know that he existed and was useful and was very Imperial and had no inconvenient attachments to anything that the Empire found inconvenient.

She looked at the enclosed piece.

It was a historical artifact from her family's estate,  a small ceremonial object, pre-Imperial, the kind that appeared in the palace's formal records. It was genuinely valuable and genuinely historical and it was also precisely the kind of thing that would impress a Chiss Grand Admiral who had a documented interest in the art and artifacts of the cultures he encountered.

It had nothing to do with a newborn child.

"He sent a gift," Tannian said.

"He sent Thrawn a gift," she said. "And put the child's name on the card."

Tannian looked at the artifact. He picked it up and looked at it with the careful attention of a man identifying something. "This is from the royal gallery," he said. "Mother’s gallery. A ceremonial collection."

"I know."

"This was… mother kept this on the shelf in the nursery. She said it was from the third queen of the Geronh line."

She looked at the artifact in her brother's hands. She looked at it with the particular quality of looking at something that had been her mother’s.

"He's selling mother’s things," she said. Quietly. "To the man who ended the monarchy."

"I'm going to put it on the shelf," she said. "With the hawk and the naboo flowers and the other things. And it's going to be my son's because he is the Geronh line and everything that came from that line is his. Res sent it to Thrawn. I'm giving it to (c/n). Those are the only hands it needs to pass through."

════ ⋆★⋆ ════

The days came and went, and Irtur never let her miss a day of training.

At first she hated him for it.

Her body still ached from the birth in ways she had not expected. Some mornings (c/n) had cried through most of the night and she arrived at the training hall exhausted, hair hastily pinned back, hands still smelling faintly of the oils Uiona used on the baby’s skin. Irtur never accepted exhaustion as an excuse. He handed her the staff anyway.

“Again,” he would say.

And again.

And again.

Three more months passed like that.

At night she sat in the nursery with (c/n) asleep against her chest while Coruscant glowed beyond the windows in endless seas of light. She memorized him obsessively. His bright red of his eyes. The way his tiny hands curled instinctively into the fabric of her sleeves. The soft blue skin that made Imperial visitors stare half a second too long before remembering themselves.

Thrawn called irregularly from Lothal. Sometimes only for minutes at a time. And still, whenever the calls ended, she found herself missing him afterward in ways she resented. By the beginning of the sixth month, (C/n) had begun recognizing voices. He turned immediately toward hers. Toward Uiona’s. Toward Thrawn’s through holographic transmission with startling attentiveness whenever he heard it. That frightened her more than she admitted aloud, because children learned attachment before they learned politics. And someday imperial politics would come to take him from her.

New Year Fête Week approached slowly. The start of the new year was of course celebrated on Batonn since its creation but Fête Week was imperial. There would be a military parade alongside children carrying lanterns with clan markings painted carefully by hand on the streets of Paeragosto.

(Y/N) stood in the nursery holding (c/n) against her shoulder while Coruscant glowed beyond the windows. He was beginning to grow faster now. More alert. He looked almost entirely like Thrawn. Some days this frightened her so badly she had to leave the room for a few minutes just to breathe.

‘Selfishness surrounds my heart.’

She thought to herself.

‘And a noble Queen is never selfish’

She was in the sitting room reading when V3PO announced that “the Grand Admiral is requesting immediate transmission from Lothal.” 

She went to her office and accepted the transmission.

He resolved in the blue-white of the holographic quality, the Chimaera's office behind him. 

"Grand Admiral," she said.

"Lady Thrawn," he said.

She waited as he held her gaze through the transmission and she waited because she had learned over the course of this marriage that waiting was information and she was always gathering information.

"How is the child?"

“Well, he is doing very well.”

"And you?" 

"Managing," she said. "Dr. Thalias is satisfied with the recovery progress."

"The documentation she sent was conservative," he said.

"The documentation she sent," she said, "was accurate."

She thought: he is building toward something.

"I have been thinking," she said, before he arrived at whatever he was building toward, "about Fête Week.I would like to take (c/n) to Batonn, I believe it is appropriate."

The silence after was immediate. Thrawn looked down at the sleeping child in her arms through the holo before several seconds before answering.

“No,” He said with the word that sounded harder than expected.

She straightened slightly. “No?”

“No,” he repeated calmly. “You will not be returning to Batonn at this time.”

“The clans gather during New Year's Week,” Her exhausted voice sharpened instantly into anger.

“I am aware.”

“He should see his home.”

Thrawn finally looked at her fully then.

“Lothal is currently the more secure location.”

“What?”

“I am summoning you to Lothal.”

For one terrible moment she felt again what she had felt during Palpatine’s speech at the gala, the sensation of her marriage collapsing back into Imperial hierarchy without warning.

“Lothal is an active military theater. There are insurgent attacks almost weekly."

"Not within the Imperial sector where you would be housed. The situation on Lothal is otherwise stabilizing," he said.

"Stabilizing is not stable," she said.

"No," he said. "But it is sufficiently secure for the purpose."

"And what is the purpose?"

He studied her for a moment before speaking again.

"There has been discussion," he said, "within the Naval hierarchy. Regarding my household."

“Discussion,” she repeated.

“Interest,” he corrected.

“In me?”

“In the child,” Thrawn’s voice remained level, “the Empire is entering a period of instability within the Outer Rim. Symbolism has become strategically significant.”

“He’s a baby.”

“He is also the son of a Grand Admiral and the heir to Batonn’s surviving monarchy.”

“He is not a symbol.”

“No,” Thrawn said quietly. “But others will make him one regardless.”

"They want to use him and you let them."

"They want to use the image of him," Thrawn said. "There is a distinction."

"Is there," she said.

He held her gaze.

"From their perspective," he said, "yes. From yours, I understand that the distinction is less clear."

She turned away from him immediately, “I knew this would happen,” she whispered.

"The Outer Rim is restless," he said. "it has produced consequences that the Imperial communications apparatus is managing with decreasing effectiveness. The narrative of Imperial order requires  supplementation. A Grand Admiral with an outer rim wife and a child represents a specific kind of supplementation." He held her gaze. "Unity. Stability. The suggestion that what the Empire has built extends to the personal as well as the structural."

"We are a recruitment poster," she said.

"We are a symbol," he said. "Which you have always been. The specific content of the symbol is shifting."

"You knew this," she said. "When we married. You knew the child would become this."

"I knew it was possible," he said. "The Emperor's design for the arrangement included this possibility."

"And you are telling me now." 

"I am telling you now because the possibility has become the reality and you require accurate information."

"And Batonn," she said. "The answer remains no?"

"The timing is not appropriate," he said. "The celebration observance on Batonn in the current political climate, following Ghorman, with the ISB investigation still active, would be read as a statement."

"It would be a cultural observance."

"Nothing you do," he said, "is read as only what it is."

He was not wrong. That was the difficulty of the position, that he was frequently not wrong, that the accuracy of his assessments did not change what it cost her to receive them.

“The honesty is almost cruel.”

“I have found that you prefer it.”

“I prefer kindness.”

“Kindness,” he said carefully, “would be allowing you to walk unprepared into what is already occurring.”

“And bringing me to Lothal is preparation?”

“It is protection.”

“Protection from whom?”

“From what you are bringing yourself into, deviation from the empire,” he said.

The answer stunned her into silence. For a moment neither of them spoke.

Behind him, somewhere beyond the office walls of the Chimaera, alarms sounded faintly through the transmission before disappearing again into the machinery of military life. He did not react to them.

“You are speaking about the Empire as though you are not part of it.”

“I am part of it,” he said. “Which means I understand the mechanics of it more clearly than most.”

“And what exactly happens on Lothal?” she asked. “Do they parade us through receptions? Have me stand beside you while officers stare at the child and reassure themselves the Outer Rim can be domesticated if given enough time?”

“No.”

“Then what?”

“The sector governors assigned to nearby systems will be present within the capital during Fête Week,” he said. “Several Moffs. Representatives from the Naval command structure. There will be formal appearances.”

“There it is.”

“There is also security,” he continued evenly. “Isolation from Coruscant political surveillance. Distance from the Senate. Distance from the ISB inquiry currently developing around Batonnese associates.”

“What development?”

“A minor one presently,” he said. “Which is why I am informing you now rather than after escalation.”

Cold moved through her body and the room seemed to close in on her.

“Does this involve my ambassador?”

Thrawn did not answer immediately and that itself was answer enough.Her grip tightened instinctively around (c/n).

“What happened?”

“There was an audit request filed regarding several cultural expenditures tied to the Batonnese diaspora initiative.”

The credits. The art collection cover story.

“The request originated through routine financial oversight channels,” he continued. “At present it appears administrative rather than targeted. I am ensuring it remains administrative.”

“You’re protecting us.”

“I am containing variables,” he corrected automatically.

“Thrawn.”

His eyes lifted to hers again.

“Yes,” he said quietly after a moment. “I am protecting you.”

The words sat strangely between them. Too honest. Too exposed. She looked away first because it hurt less than continuing to look at him while he said things like that in the same calm voice he used to discuss fleet formations.

“You should hate me,” (Y/N) whispered suddenly.

“Why?”

“Because every time you protect me, I am lying to you.”

“I am aware,” he said. Her head snapped back toward the hologram immediately, “and I know you are not entirely aligned with the Empire’s interests.”

Fear moved through her so quickly it almost felt like cold blood.

“And yet,” he continued before she could speak, “you remain aligned with your people’s survival. Which is not always the same thing.”

“How much do you know?”

“I know enough to understand that forcing you further into a corner would be strategically unwise.”

“That is a very elegant way of saying you’re choosing not to look too closely.”

“Yes,” he said.

(c/n) stirred lightly against her chest. Instinctively she rocked him once until he settled again.Thrawn watched the movement with an expression she could not fully name.

“Come to Lothal, (Y/N).”

Not Lady Thrawn. Not Senator. Just her name.

And somehow that made it harder to refuse.

════ ⋆★⋆ ════

She sent the message to Irtur when she laid in bed still wet from her shower.

‘Walk with me tomorrow. Ninth hour. I need to tell you something.’

He responded within twenty minutes:

‘Alright.’

════ ⋆★⋆ ════

Irtur entered through the apartment door still wearing the dark formal coat from whatever Senate function he had abandoned to get there. The moment he saw her expression, his own changed.

“What happened?”

He followed her as she set out with the stroller, down to the gardens, the same garden she had once walked with Thrawn when they first married.

“Thrawn called from Lothal,” she began under her breath, “They audited the diaspora expenditures.”

“How much?”

“I don’t know yet. He said it still looks administrative.”

“Still,” Irtur repeated carefully.

“Yes.” She looked at him finally. “And he’s summoning me to Lothal.”

“For what purpose?” His expression darkened immediately.

“The child.” Her voice sharpened with bitterness. “Imperial unity. Outer Rim symbolism. Stability. The same performance as always except now they’ve added a baby to it. He says it’s for our protection.”

“And do you believe him?”

The terrible thing was that she did.

“That’s not the point,” she snapped.

“No,” he said, “It actually is.”

“This is serious now,” she said. “Do you understand? Before, if something happened, if the investigation expanded or the shipments were traced or the maps somehow led back to us…” Her voice caught briefly. “I would have been the first one to go down.”

“And now?”

“Now I have him,” she said gripping harder on the stroller, “I cannot survive an Imperial prison with an infant and I cannot disappear anymore. I cannot even run properly. Everything is different now.”

“This is exactly what they wanted.”

“What?”

The artificial flowers and bushes no longer distracted her as she looked directly at him, at the sharpness of his eyes.

“The Empire. Palpatine. All of this.” He gestured vaguely toward the stroller, the entire life surrounding them. “You think the child only became politically useful after he was born? No. The child was part of the architecture from the beginning.”

“That’s not fair.”

“It’s true.”

“He is not some Imperial strategy.” Her voice rose instantly. “He is my son.”

“I know that.”

“No, you don’t,” she said sharply. “You didn’t carry him. You didn’t spend months terrified of what he would look like and whether people would hate him for it before he even spoke his first word…”

“I am not criticizing your child.”

“You’re criticizing my life.”

“I’m criticizing the fact that the Empire has successfully tied your survival to theirs so tightly that now every decision you make must pass through the question of your child’s safety first.”

“Of course it does! You think I don’t know that? You think I don’t wake up every morning terrified that one day someone will look at him and only see the Empire in his face?”

“Oh, (Y/N).”

“I love him so much it feels like being skinned alive,” she admitted softly. “And sometimes I look at him and all I can think is that they’ve won.”

“They haven’t won.” 

“That sounds like something rebels tell themselves before they die.”

“Sometimes,” he said. “Sometimes it’s also true. I’ll go with you.”

“To Lothal?”

“Yes.”

“You can’t.”

“I can,” he said calmly. “The cultural attaché position gives me sufficient justification to accompany the Batonnese royal household during New Year observances.”

“This isn’t a cultural visit.”

“No,” he agreed. “Which is exactly why you should not go there alone.”

“Lothal is dangerous.”

“Coruscant is more.”

“This could pull you directly into military scrutiny.”

“I am already under scrutiny.”

“Fine,” she said “but we must be careful.”

════ ⋆★⋆ ════

They went to the hanger the next day, deciding that it would be better to leave earlier in order to avoid anymore ISB officers who were actively investigating them on Coruscant. At least the ISB headquarters were not on Lothal.

Both times the hangar had been the ordinary kind of Imperial facility, functional and grey and occupied by the maintenance staff and the standard two-person security rotation that the building's administrative protocol required.

It was not the ordinary kind today.

She came through the hangar entrance with (c/n) in the carrier against her chest and Irtur at her left with the diplomatic case and luggage. Uiona walked behind them with her own luggage case.

Eight Imperial security officers, not the standard residential rotation, in the full security detail configuration, the armoring, the ISB adjacent insignia that was not quite ISB but was adjacent to it in the way that indicated a mandate that came from above the building administration, from somewhere that had decided that the Grand Admiral's wife and infant son traveling to Lothal required a different kind of escort than the building's standard two-person rotation provided.

“Senator Gernoh,” The senior officer said as he stepped forward.

"Officer," she said. Warm. Even. "I was not informed of an escort."

"The Grand Admiral arranged it this morning, Senator," he said. "Through the household security office. Given what occurred on your last transit, the incident in the outer rim, the Grand Admiral felt it appropriate to ensure your journey to Lothal proceeded without incident."

"Of course. How thoughtful of the Grand Admiral."

The senior officer inclined his head.

The ship was not the transport she had been expecting — the standard household shuttle, the grey one that V3PO had confirmed through the household office two days ago. This was larger. Imperial configuration. The specific model she associated with senior officer transit rather than civilian household arrangements.

She looked at Irtur.

Irtur was looking at the ship.

"Ambassador Irtur," the senior officer said, "The Grand Admiral has also arranged accommodation for your party aboard the transport. The cultural attaché function during New Year observances on Lothal was noted in the household documentation."

"How thorough," Irtur said pleasantly.

"The Grand Admiral is thorough," the officer said.

"Yes," Irtur said. "He is."

"Shall we board," she said. To the officer. To the hangar.

"When you're ready, Senator," he said.

She walked into ship and found her own cabin and left her son with Uiona before knocking on knocked on Irtur's cabin door twice.The door opened.

Irtur was still in the formal coat. He had not sat down, which told her he had been standing in his cabin since boarding.

"This is not good," she said, closing the door.

"No," he said. "It is not. This is not a household shuttle, we are being watched."

The engine vibrations hummed low beneath the floor. Somewhere outside the cabin walls she could hear the muted movement of officers preparing for departure. (c/n) was with Uiona three cabins down. She hated being separated from him even by that distance now.

“He knows something,” she said quietly.

Irtur leaned against the edge of the table, arms folded. “The question is how much.”

“He told me directly that he knows I am not entirely aligned with Imperial interests.”

Irtur’s eyes sharpened immediately. “Exact wording?”

“He said forcing me further into a corner would be strategically unwise.”

“And you are only telling me this now? You should have started with it.”

“I know that now.”

“He’s either warning you,” Irtur said carefully, “or he’s informing you that he has chosen not to act yet.”

“Do you think he knows about the maps?”

“No.”

“The shipments?”

“No.”

“The bombing?”

“He may suspect proximity,” he admitted quietly. “Thrawn is not stupid, (Y/N). He notices patterns. He notices when financial audits appear around the same people repeatedly.”

“He said he was protecting me.”

“Yes,” Irtur said flatly. “I believe he probably thinks he is.”

“If he were cruel this would all be so much easier.”

The ship shuddered faintly as departure clearance finalized. Then Irtur spoke again, quieter this time.

“This marriage does not end with both of you growing old together. You know that.”

“I know,” she said quietly. Hearing the harsh reality made her look down at her feet before she looked back at him, “there is one more thing. Gret.”

The name sat heavily between them.

“He was questioned already,” she continued. “The audits are escalating. We are now under military escort. The ISB will pull Gret again…”

“He’ll break.”

Irtur closed his eyes briefly. And when he opened them again she already knew they had arrived at the same conclusion separately.

“We cannot move him again,” she whispered.

“No.”

“We kill him,” she said. The words felt unreal in her mouth.Not because she had never thought violent thoughts before. Batonn had burned those illusions out of her long ago. But because saying it aloud transformed it into something material. 

“Yes,” he said.

Her eyes closed.

“He cannot survive another interrogation,” Irtur said carefully. “And neither can we.”

“I hate what this is turning me into.”

“No,” he said quietly. “This is what occupation turns people into. There is a difference.”

She woke to the sound of a gentle knock on her door. 

She looked at her holo and saw that it was the third hour, Batonnese time. 

Irtur opened the door to find a disheveled (Y/N) with mangled hair and oily skin. Her only shield was the thick, wool blanket that laid on top of her.

“Irtur?” she called to him, “It’s three in the morning.”

“Would you like to go riding?” He simply asked, already in his riding regalia with his mask already filled and dripping with the residue water that had spilt over its leather.

"It is not on the itinerary."

"All the Imperials in this palace are still asleep," Irtur said. "No one will know."

She dressed and met him in the stable yard where he had already dressed the eopies in their saddles, avoiding the regalia that had marked them as the Queen’s eopies. 

“What if someone sees us?” 

"No one will," He handed her the reins of the second eopie. "We will return before the sun rises."

She took the reins.

He produced the bow from behind the saddle pack as though he had thought of everything and had decided not to announce that he had thought of everything. A highland hunting bow, the Batonnese compact design for riding, and the quiver with it, the fletching on the arrows in the Torvek clan colors which meant he had brought these from home and had brought them deliberately.

"Target practice?"

"The morning birds," he said. "They come up from the lowland grasses about an hour before full light. We used to do this. You and I and Tannian and Clvtorig, before…" He handed her the bow. "Before."

She had not held a bow since before the insurgency. The weight was familiar in the way of things that live in the hands rather than the mind.

She swung up onto the eopie and Irtur swung up onto his.

They rode out into the dark.

Paeragosto City before dawn had a quality that she had been trying to hold in her memory for two years and had not managed. The sand dunes were endless and the mountains grand.

They rode far.

The city fell away behind them and then the roads became the tracks between the highland farms and then the tracks became the open ground of the upper plateau where the morning birds gathered before their descent to the lowland.

She shot three birds.

She missed four.

Irtur said nothing about the four. He shot two and missed two and also said nothing, which was the grace of someone who understood that the shooting was not the point.

They turned back when the sky began to show the first pale line above the Varath range.

They were on the upper ridge, the one that looked down over the secondary plateau where the highland farms gave way to the territory that had been, before the insurgency, the Torvek family's northern grazing lands. The lands that had been resettled. The lands that the mining operations had come to.

She saw smoke, fresh smoke that was not the cooking kind.

Irtur pulled up beside her.

The camp was below them.

It was not on any map she had been given. It was not in the northern territories documentation that Irtur had compiled, not in this specific location, or it was new, or it had been deliberately excluded, and she filed both possibilities and looked. She did however, notice the imperial layout which was the same as the northern territories layout. She recognized the dual configuration of the workers' barracks and the overseer residential block. Even from this distance she could see the compression of people into space that had not been designed for the number of people in it.

The stormtroopers were already positioned.

She counted them. Twelve. In the formation that she recognized from the Imperial military documentation she had been accessing through the governance networks.

The miners were lined up.

Perhaps twenty of them. Men and women both, she registered. They were standing as though they had been arranged into a configuration they had not chosen and knew what it meant.

She knew what it meant.

She knew what it meant before the first shot.

She had the bow in her hand before she had decided to raise it.

The arrow was nocked before the sound reached them, the distant flat sound of blasters discharged in sequence, and the row of people in front of the stormtroopers went down, and the smoke from the discharge drifted upward in the still pre-dawn air, and she was drawing the string back and she was looking down the arrow at the white figures below and her hands were steady, steadier than they had been in weeks, the tremor gone in the specific way it went when the body had something immediate to do and the nervous system stopped its commentary.

"(Y/N)!"

His hand was on her bow arm, not grabbing, the contact of someone who needed her attention before she did what she was about to do.

"Now," he said. "Point it down now."

She did not point it down. Below them the stormtroopers were moving with the administrative efficiency of people for whom what had just happened was a procedure rather than an event.

"There are two of us," Irtur said. "On eopies. With hunting arrows. There are twenty of them with blasters and a camp of three hundred people who will pay for whatever we do next." He kept his hand on her bow arm. "Point it down."

She lowered the bow.

Irtur's hand guided her eopie's head away from the ridge, the animal following his lead without requiring her direction, and she let the eopie be guided because her hands were not entirely functional at this moment.

════ ⋆★⋆ ════

The palace was not asleep when they returned.

The lights were on which allowed her to see figures visible through the ground-floor windows. She walked through the side entrance with Irtur behind her and the bow still in her hand because she had forgotten to leave it with the eopie, and she came into the corridor and found Tannian. Irtur had given their birds to a child in the city, giving the child a blessing before returning. 

And Res.

Tannian had the expression of a man who had been awake for two hours in a state of controlled alarm.

Res had the expression of a man who had been awake for two hours in a state of anger and had not converted it into anything.

"Where," Res said, "have you been?"

"Riding," she said.

"Riding." He said the word as though he had prepared several versions of this conversation and had found that none of them had accounted for her arriving with a bow in her hand. "You left the palace before dawn without your security complement, without notification, without…"

"Let me go," she said. She walked past him toward the corridor.

He moved in front of her.

She stopped.

"This is not Coruscant," he said, and the pleasantness that he had been wearing since the landing platform was not present in this version of him. "You are not free to wander the highland at will. You are here on an approved itinerary under Imperial oversight and you have just spent…" He looked at the bow. "How long were you out there?"

"Long enough to get a good ride in.”

Tannian appeared at her left shoulder.

Res looked at them both.

He made a decision.

"Come," he said.

He moved toward the dining room.

The door locked behind Tannian. She had seen him move with a quick deliberate motion of someone who had decided he was going to be in this room regardless of whether he was invited.

Res turned.

"I am going to report this," he said. "To the Imperial entourage. The deviation from the approved itinerary, the unauthorized departure, the…"

"Res," Tannian said.

"I will be reporting it," Res said, "Within the hour, to the sector administration and to the ISB officers who are going to be very interested in…"

"Res, I convinced you not to report it. Remember."

Res looked at Tannian.

"You found her," Tannian said. Evenly. "Immediately. Because I found her. Because we both found her. And you have no obligation to report a queen's morning ride."

"She was unsupervised outside the approved…"

"She was riding," Tannian said. "On her own land. Before dawn. As she has done since she was a child." He held Res's gaze with the flatness of a man who had made a decision about how this conversation was going to go. "Let it go."

She was still holding the bow.

"You don't understand what you are doing here," Res said. To her now, the pleasantness entirely gone, the version of him that had sat in an interrogation room and put his hand in her braid while Kallus watched. "Whatever you think you are accomplishing with your clan visits and your speeches and your approved itinerary…"

"I am governing my planet.”

"You are a symbol with an itinerary," he said. "You are permitted to be here because it is useful for you to be here, and the moment it stops being useful…"

"Is that a threat?"

"It is a description," Res stepped closer. "Of reality. Which you have always had difficulty accepting. You were always like this. Even as a child. Father's favorite. The one who knew everything, who had the plan, who had already been three steps ahead of everyone in the room." His voice had dropped to something quieter and considerably more unpleasant. "And where did it get him, (Y/N) ? Where did it get all of them?"

She held absolutely still.

"Do not cause trouble," he said. "You know who I report to. You know what I can say and what the saying costs. Stay on the itinerary. Stay in the palace at night. Stay where you are supposed to be and do what you are supposed to do and do not give me a reason."

"You betrayed our father and now you wish for me to respect you?" she probed.

It had been in her chest since the landing platform. Since he had looked at her bridal marking and said it was fading early. It had been in her chest for months and it came out now with the specific quality of something that had been compressed for too long and had found the moment.

"You gave them the access codes," she said. "You let them into our home. You stood at the front of their formation and you let them…He trusted you. You were his son. You were his son and you…"

Res hit her.

The sound of it was very specific.

She had not moved in time, she had been looking at his face and the face had given her nothing before the hand moved, and then there was the impact and the bright specific quality of pain at her left cheek and she was stepping back and Tannian was already moving.

He had Res against the wall before the sound had finished.

The dining room was very quiet.

Res looked at Tannian.

Tannian looked at Res.

She pressed the back of her hand to her cheek. She breathed. She looked at the window, at the Paeragosto morning beginning outside it.

Tannian stepped back from the wall.

He did not step away from Res. He stood at the distance of a man who had made his position clear and was not moving from it.

"(Y/N) is pregnant," he said. His voice was entirely even. The evenness of someone applying everything they had to the evening of it. "Let her be."

He was looking at Res with the flatness of a man who had said the thing and was waiting to see what was done with it.

Res's expression moved.

The shift disgusted her.

She could see him deciding what it was worth. She could see him placing it in the context of his relationship with Restos and Thrawn, with the Imperial structure, with the specific currency of information in the environment he had chosen.

"It is my body," she said. "It is my information. Not yours to manage."

"It is an Imperial matter," he said, sharper now. "Given the father."

She felt Tannian shift beside her.

"Careful," he said.

Res ignored him.

"You will return to the approved schedule," he said to her. "Immediately. There will be no further deviations. Not in your condition."

"My condition," she said, very evenly, "does not remove my authority."

"It limits your capacity," he said. "And it creates obligations that supersede whatever you think you are…"

"Res." Her voice was the one she had found the day she climbed into the fighter jet. "I outrank you. I will always outrank you. Whatever arrangement you have made with whatever Imperial office you report to does not change the fact that you are standing in my family's house speaking to your queen. And you will not speak to me again about my body, or my condition, or what it creates or limits or obligates. Not today. Not ever."

Something moved in his face.

He stepped back.

"This will still be reported," he said. "The unauthorized departure. All of it."

"I assumed it would be," she said.

He looked at Tannian.

He looked at him with the specific quality of a man who had lost the version of this conversation he had intended to have and was now looking for a place to put that loss.

"Control your sister, brother," he said.

Tannian looked at him.

The look of a man who had known another man since they were both born and had arrived, over the course of the past several years, at the complete and final assessment of him.

"Get out of this room, Res," he said.

The door closed.

She stood with the bow still in her hand and her palm pressed to her cheek.Tannian turned to her.

He looked at her cheek.

His jaw tightened.

She lowered her hand.

"I'm alright," she said.

"You are not," he said.

"I am alright enough," she said. "For what comes next."

He looked at her for a long moment.

"What did you see?" he said. "Out there. This morning."

"What I needed to see," she said.

She found Irtur alone in the courtyard and even though her boots were loud, he did not turn when she came.

The morning made it so there was a sharp glow to her gown that illuminated her against the orange stone. She approached him, standing beside him and looking at the fountain as he did.

"How many camps are there? The ones we don’t know about. That camp… it wasn’t in any of my reports."

"No," he said. "It was not."

“It is either undocumented or it is documented in a file I do not have access to. How many are there that I don't know about?"

“I don’t know. The records show that what we stumbled upon is an Imperial operational zone. No residential designation."

"I need to know what that camp is. Who authorized it. What the population is. Who is in charge of it and what they are reporting to Restos's office. Can you get it?”

He looked at her.

"I will send someone tonight."

"Tell them the queen is asking," she said.

"That will either help significantly," he said, "or complicate things significantly."

"Yes," she said. "That is generally what my involvement does."

The day was full. It was supposed to be a day of leisure before she had her day of travel. Of course, it wasn’t.

"How are you feeling?" Dr. Dajs asked, coming into (Y/N)’s cabin.

"Tired," she replied. "The anti-nausea compound is helping. It is not resolving the problem. It is helping."

"That is consistent with the stage," Dr. Dajs said. "How is your appetite?"

“Better than it was on Coruscant.” 

"Good." The physician made a notation. "The fatigue will persist for several more weeks. The first trimester in a Chiss/human pregnancy carries a higher energy demand than the standard human equivalent.Your body is doing more work than it would normally be required to do at this stage. Which is why the riding before dawn and the governance sessions until the nineteenth hour are…"

“I know.”

"I am going to say it anyway," Dr. Dajs said. "Because saying it is my function and knowing it is yours and the two are not interchangeable. Rest is not optional. It is structural. Whatever you are managing here, whatever the days require , you build rest into them as a non-negotiable. Not as a preference. Not as something you do when everything else is done. The rest comes first."

“Noted.”

“You will notice a heightened sensitivity to sensory information. Smell particularly. This is the Chiss neurological component , the development pattern is more active in the early weeks and it produces a cross-sensitivity. You may find things more vivid than usual. More present. The hormonal architecture of the early Chiss-human pregnancy is more complex than the human equivalent. The emotional responses you experience in the coming weeks may be more intense than what you are accustomed to. Not unmanageable. But more present. I’ll send my report to Dr. Thalias in the morning.”

"Thank you."

"Sleep," she said. "Before the midnight hour. Not after."

"Yes," she said.

The physician left.

She changed into her nightdress and she was sitting at the window with her hair loose and growing to reach her shoulders when the holoprojector on the side table activated.

The incoming signal designation was the Chimaera. She sat up straighter and pressed the receive button.

════ ⋆★⋆ ════

Thrawn resolved in the blue, white of the holo.

He was in his office on the Chimaera. It was undoubtedly his, the position of the desk and the secondary tables and the art on the wall. He was in the white uniform. He was looking at her at a level she had not seen since the morning of the first correction, the morning of the desk incident. 

She was sitting at a table by a window that showed the highland morning behind her and she was looking at the holo of her husband and she exhaled.

"Your Majesty," he said.

She registered the title. Not (Y/N), the one that indicated the private register. The formal one. The one for rooms that were not private.

"Grand Admiral," she said.

He looked at her.

"You arrived two days ago," he said.

"Yes," she said. "We landed on…"

"I am aware of your landing time," he said. "I was not aware that your first unscheduled action would occur within fortyeight hours of arrival."

"You've received a report?"

"I have received two.”

“Two?”

"Yes," he said.

"From whom?" she said. The question arrived before she had fully processed the implications of it, because two reports meant two separate sources.

"The first," he said, "was filed by the senior escort officer at oh-four-twelve. Reporting an unscheduled absence from the approved accommodation beginning at approximately oh-three-hundred. Duration at time of filing: one hour and twelve minutes. The officer noted that Lieutenant Geronh had provided assurance that he was aware of your location."

She said nothing.

"The second," he continued, "was filed by the household administrative office on Batonn at oh-six-forty-seven. Reporting a communication received from Lieutenant Commander Res Geronh indicating an itinerary deviation and requesting clarification of the applicable reporting protocol."

She had expected Res. Res had said he would report it and Res did what  served his interests and reporting this served his interests.

"I see.”

"Is there anything you would like to add to that account?" 

"No," she said.

He was quiet for a long moment.

"The itinerary deviation," he finally spoke. "The third hour departure. The failure to notify the escort."

"Yes." 

"We discussed the consequences of an itinerary deviation." 

"Yes," she said, feeling her heart drop.

"We were specific about them. I told you that if the itinerary was not followed, the visit ended."

"Yes," she said. "You did."

He looked at her.

She looked at him.

"I am not ending the visit," he said.

She waited for the catch.

"The governance function you came to perform is not yet complete. The clan meetings on the itinerary have not occurred. The eastern province documentation review has not been conducted. The northern territories community visits and speech…The ones on the approved itinerary. Have not been conducted. Ending the visit before those functions are completed would be a waste of resources."

"Yes," she said. Carefully.

"You will complete the itinerary," he said. "Every item. In the order it was approved. Without further deviation."

"Yes."

"The security attachment," he said, "is being adjusted. Effective tomorrow. You will have six officers. Not four."

She did not say anything about the two additional officers.

"The northern territories visits on the approved itinerary will have the eight-officer configuration we agreed upon. All of them. Including the community visits, which were previously approved at four."

"I understand," she said.

"The comm channel was not used."

"No." 

"We discussed the comm channel," he said. "Specifically. The requirement to use it before responding to anything unanticipated."

"Yes," she said. "We did."

"I will be in communication," he said. "Regularly."

She had not been certain what regularly meant from him until this moment and she was now fairly certain it meant something specific and consistent and non-negotiable.

"I will expect a report," he said, "at the end of each day. The day's activities. Who you met. What was discussed. What was decided. What was not on the itinerary and why. If the report is not received by the twentieth hour Batonn time, I will contact you."

"Is there anything else?" 

He looked at her for a long moment.

"Do not make me correct you twice," he said.

The call ended.

She sat at the table by the window that faced east and the highland morning was fully established now, the real light of the real sky doing what it did at this hour on this planet.

════ ⋆★⋆ ════

She dressed slowly in the morning, not because she was depressed, but because she didn’t want to leave the palace. She was too scared of the northern territories mining camp, too frightened for what she would see.

Before the security complement assembled in the courtyard, Irtur stood besides Gret Virex, Kaelor's youngest son. She walked over to them both and held out her ring. Irtur took it and kissed her signet ring. Almost as though he were saying: I serve this and I know what I am serving. He looked up at her with the eyes of a man who had known her since they were children playing in the palace gardens and who was about to do something that could not be undone.

"May destiny bend in your favor," she said.

"And yours," he said.

She then walked to her transport after nodding to Gret and watched them leave in their speeder.

Irtur occupied himself with asking Gret more questions about the contractor residential block, refamiliarizing himself with the building through his words.

“They control the water distribution,” Gret continued from what he was saying before  “Officers, guards—anyone Imperial drinks from the same reserve. It’s centralized.”

“And the miners?”

“They don’t.”

“I’ve armed them.” Irtur said unexpectedly, which was new news to Gret, “The blasters came in pieces. Hidden in shipments. Broken down, disguised. I alerted only those that I for sure trust in that god forsaken place.”

“Does the Queen know you’ve been planning an uprising?”

“It’s an exit, not an uprising.”

Gret held the poison in his hand.

“When the overseers start dying,” Irtur went on, “it won’t be immediate chaos. There’ll be confusion first. Orders breaking down. Command shifting.”

“What about the doonium?”

“It gets bombed. After the agent kicks in.”

“Bombed by who?”

“I know who.”

Gret ignored the snarky remark, “…Why do they need so much of it? Doonium. This much doesn’t make sense. Not for ships. Not for standard operations.” 

Irtur thought about the chip and the trouble he had ran into trying to get someone to crack it “I didn’t know either.”

It took them seven hours going full speed to reach the northern territories. Also once known as Clan Torvek’s realm. The contractor residential building was exactly as Gret had described it.

Irtur had listened to the description four times over the past two days and had mapped it in his mind, standing outside it now in the pre-dawn grey with the sounds of the camp on the other side of the perimeter wall he found that the map was accurate. Gret was good at descriptions. This was one of the things Irtur had learned about Kaelor Virex's youngest son in the past fortyeight hours.

"Seven," Gret said quietly, referring to the stormtroopers who acted as guards, beside him. He was looking at the building with the attention of someone who had been inside it and was comparing his memory to the current reality. "Two at the main entrance. Two at the service entrance. Three rotating the perimeter on a nineteen minute cycle."

"You timed it?"

"Twice," Gret said. "Yesterday and early this morning. Consistent."

"Good."

"The two at the service entrance are the problem. The main entrance ones we can take from the east shadow. The perimeter rotation gives us an eleven minute window after they pass the north corner before they come back around." He looked at Irtur. "The service entrance ones don't move."

"Then we move them."

Gret looked at him.

"I have a plan for that," Irtur said.

"Is it a good plan?" Gret asked.

"It is a plan that will work," Irtur said. "Those are not always the same thing."

Gret considered this.

"Fair," he said.

They moved.

════ ⋆★⋆ ════

The camp. She had been prepared for the visual, but the smell reached her before the visual and the preparation was not sufficient.

It was not a single smell, but the accumulation of many smells. The chemical scent of the extraction process, the mineral dust that the northern territories' doonium deposits produced when they were worked, the smell of inadequate sanitation infrastructure pressed beyond its capacity, and underneath all of it, underneath everything, the oldest smell, the one that was human and was not meant to exist at this density and this duration.

 The transport had stopped at the approved perimeter point. The security complement had established the configuration.

She stepped out of the transport.

She looked at the camp.

This is Batonnese land, she thought, Where the Torvek clan grazed their livestock and mined for hundreds of years. Where children grew up knowing the names of the mountains because they could see them from the windows of their homes.

The houses were gone.

What had replaced them was the Imperial administrative standard buildings. 

She walked toward it. Following the perimeter settlement,the approved boundary of her visit.

She saw the families as she came through the perimeter point . The faces that turned toward the transport and the security complement and then, as the recognition moved through the crowd the way recognition moved through crowds, toward her.

She felt dirty. Not because she was, but because she wasn’t.

The sound that came from the perimeter settlement was not the sound of the capital crowd. It was quieter than that. But it was there, the sound of recognition, the specific quality of people who had heard a name for two years and were now receiving the face that went with it.

She walked toward them. She looked at the ground beneath her feet. She looked at the mountains visible on the horizon. She looked at the children in the crowd.

"This is your land. What is being done with it is not permanent. I want you to know that I know that. And I want you to know that knowing is not comfortable, and I am not offering you comfort, I am offering you my word.” She said in Batonnese to the crowd, her voice shaking. 

She should not have said this. It was not in the approved itinerary. It was not in the speech. It was not the managed version, the diplomatic version, the version that fit within the Imperial oversight and did not produce ISB notation.

════ ⋆★⋆ ════

Gret and Irtur were not moving carelessly.

The stormtroopers at the main entrance were in the standard two man configuration, facing outward, and settled in their routine.  Routine was a vulnerability Irtur had been exploiting for two years.

He looked at Gret.

Gret nodded.

They moved.

They held up their blasters and aimed them at the stormtroopers.  It was efficient and it was quick and when it was done the two stormtroopers were no longer standing at the main entrance.

"Two," Gret said quietly. Accounting.

"Four remaining," Irtur said.

"The service entrance," Gret said. "What is the plan for the service entrance ones? The ones that don't move?"

"A noise," Irtur explained. "From inside the building. Something that requires one of them to investigate. The other holds position but now he is alone, which changes the geometry."

"What kind of noise?"

The kind that a building makes, when someone who knows where the external maintenance panel is adjusts the water pressure in the secondary system."

"You know where the external maintenance panel is?"

"You described it four times. I have a good memory."

"I described it because I thought you would use it later," Gret said. "When we were inside."

"We will use it now and later."

Gret considered this.

"That is actually a good plan," he said.

“I know.”

The service entrance resolved to one, and then to none, in the sequence that Irtur had mapped, and they were inside the building at the thirtyseventh minute, which was within the window.

The corridor was undoubtedly Imperial. Gret moved through it with the ease of someone who had been here before in a different capacity, his memory of the layout accurate in every particular.

"Primary filtration access," Gret said quietly. "Sub level. The maintenance stairs are here." He gestured.

They descended.

The sub level smelled of water and metal and the chemical smell of filtration systems, It had the infrastructure of a room that existed to be functional and was. The primary filtration point was a cylindrical unit, larger than he had imagined it with the access panel on the east face and the cycle indicator showing where in the rotation the system currently was.

"We have eight minutes before the next cycle."

“Good.”

He produced the agent from the interior pocket of his jacket. The container was smaller than he had expected when he had first received it, which was a consistent feature of things that were going to have large consequences.

He looked at the filtration access panel.

He looked at Gret.

"The secondary system is completely separate?" he said.

"Completely," Gret said. "Different line, different access, different pressure zone. I checked the schematic three times. The imp family residential units are on the secondary system. This line only serves the operational and administrative sections." He held Irtur's gaze. "Their families are not on this line."

Irtur held the agent.

He thought about Cristi. His sister, in the camp on the other side of the perimeter wall, with her children who were six and four and who had been eating inadequate food for over a year. He thought about Arv Alan buried in the northern territories. He thought about the queen on the ridge with her arrow drawn.

“Good,” Irtur said, “(Y/N) would never forgive me if they weren’t.”

“What about you, do you care?”

Irtur opened the access panel and administered the agent at the primary filtration intake point and he closed the panel, and it was done.

“No.”

Gret watched him.

"How long before it activates?" Gret asked.

"Forty hours minimum," Irtur said. "We will be gone. The Queen will be gone. There is no connection."

"And then?"

"And then the overseers who have been running those labor details die."

Gret nodded.

He was quiet for a moment.

"My sister is in that camp," he said. "On the other side of the wall."

"I know," Irtur said.

"She has been there for fourteen months," Gret said.

"I know," Irtur said.

Gret looked at the filtration unit.

"Good," he said.

They found the stormtrooper uniforms in the equipment room on the main level.

"We need to be in these when we exit," Irtur said. "The perimeter rotation will come back around in four minutes. We walk out of the service entrance in the armor and we are two troopers returning from an internal check."

Gret looked at the armor.

He looked at Irtur.

"You are too tall for that one," he said.

Irtur looked at the armor.

"It will be close," he said.

"The leg plates will…"

"We will move quickly," Irtur said.

"Lord Irtur," Gret said, with the specific patience of someone addressing a superior who was being optimistic, "We’re going to get killed because you chose a uniform too small.”

"It is sandy," Irtur said. "Outside."

"It is becoming more visible."

"We will move very quickly.”

Gret looked at the armor.

He looked at Irtur.

"If we die because your legs are too long," he said, "I want it noted that I noted this in advance."

"It will not be noted," Irtur said. "Because we will not die here."

"My father is going to be very disappointed if I die on a mission he didn't know I was on," Gret said, pulling the chest plate over his head. "He will be disappointed that I died. He will be significantly more disappointed that I kept it from him."

"Your father, keeps things from you regularly. It is a family tradition."

"That is a fair point," Gret said.

They dressed.

They looked at each other.

The gap between Irtur's leg plates and his boots was, as Gret had predicted, significant.

"Walk fast," Irtur said.

"I was already planning to," Gret said.

But first Irtur stopped.

He stopped in the corridor near the service entrance and he looked at the recording device he had been carrying since they entered the building and he looked at the perimeter wall beyond which the camp existed and he made a decision.

He had time.

Four minutes had become three but he had time.

He went to the wall that bordered the camp perimeter and he found the access point that Gret had described.

He was not prepared for this.

He had the documentation. He had the reports. He had been building the information picture for months, for (Y/N), for the clan records, for the thing he intended to do with it when the time came.

The documentation was not the reality of it. The camp in the early morning light was the reality of it. He activated the recording device.

He did not say anything. There was nothing to say that the recording would not say better by capturing what was in front of him. The faces of the people he could see, the early risers, the ones who were already moving toward the work assembly point with the characteristic of people who had been doing this long enough that the body moved without the participation of any of the parts that required hope.

And at the edge of the assembly ground, the thing that had been there before they arrived this morning. He had heard about it from the contact. Seeing it was different from hearing about it.

The grave was not marked. It was not managed. It was the specific quality of something that had accumulated rather than been arranged, the accumulation of people for whom the camp's administrative structure had ceased to require accounting.

Bodies upon bodies mounted in an unmarked grave, bound to feed the land once the imperial overseers had decided that enough of them had filled up that hole and it was time to dig another one.

He recorded it before returning to the access point.

"Ready?" Gret said.

"Yes," Irtur said.

They walked fast out of the service entrance and through the perimeter and into the pre-dawn grey and they were three hundred meters from the building when the rotation came back around and found nothing unusual and continued on.

They shed the armor behind the maintenance depot and threw it in the waste container and they walked in their riding clothes toward the rendezvous point and neither of them said anything for a long time.

"Lord Irtur," Gret said finally.

"Yes."

"Was it…" He stopped. He started again. "The recording. Was it what you expected?"

"No," Irtur said.

"Worse?"

"Yes," Irtur said. "Considerably."

Gret was quiet.

"Good," he said.

"Yes," Irtur said. "Good."

They walked toward the rendezvous.

Irtur looked at the clock in his speeder and noted that (Y/N) should be ending her speech soon.

════ ⋆★⋆ ════

The speech podium was at the edge of the extraction site.

She stood at the podium and looked upon the open wound of it all.

The workforce had been assembled before her arrival. It was pretty obvious that the crowd that had been organized rather than gathered, the security presence at the edges, the specific quality of people who were present because they were required to be present and not for any other reason.

She placed her speech down, breathing heavy and she looked at the faces before her.

looked at the faces before her. It contained the: The acknowledgment of Batonn's role, framing the work as participation in something larger. She read it with the voice she had been developing since she first stood in front of a room that required her to fill it. She watched the faces as she read and she watched what was in them. What was in them was not what the speech was designed to produce. They heard this speech before in different forms.

She stopped and looked at the faces. She turned the speech over.

"I was given these words. I want you to know that. I was given these words by people who needed me to stand in front of you and say them, and I was told not to change them, and I am changing them."

The crowd shifted.

The ISB officers at the perimeter shifted.

"What you are doing here matters. Not in the way the speech says it matters. Not as contribution to Imperial stability or sector development. It matters because you matter. Because what is extracted from this land is from your land and your labor and your bodies and none of that is invisible to me. I want you to know that your queen has stood on this ground and seen it with her own eyes and it is not something I will note and set aside.The Empire-"

A voice from the crowd.

"Will fall!" the miner screamed. "We are suffering here! My family has been here for…my son cannot…they take our…"

The stormtroopers moved before she could speak.

She saw it happen with the specific slow-motionless of things that occurred faster than the mind could process and slower than the heart could accept. The two troopers at the crowd's edge moved through it, the man's voice cutting off not because he had stopped but because they had reached him, and then he was on his knees and the crowd had become still. As though they had seen this before and knew what came after the kneeling.

"Stop," she yelled. Into the podium with the voice she had found the day she climbed into the fighter jet. "Stop…"

The shot was flat and immediate.

She was not standing at the podium anymore. But she did not remember moving towards the crowd, toward the man who had been kneeling, and then something was around her ,an arm, the security complement, the senior officer, and she was being moved, not gently, and she was saying something that she could not hear herself say because the sound of the camp was in her ears and the smell of it and the specific quality of what had just happened in front of her face in broad daylight on Batonnese land.

She was in a room.

Grey walls. Imperial construction. A storage room of some kind.

The door closed.

She looked at the grey walls.

She looked at her left hand that began to tremor.

No longer will I be a symbol. Something they can use to control.

She did not plan to sit on the floor. Her legs made the decision without consulting her and she was pressing both hands flat against her abdomen and she was shaking and she was crying. She had made a promise to herself in an interrogation room a long time ago. She had kept it through everything but lost it now.

She pressed her hands against the place where something was growing that did not yet know what it had been born into, and she wept with the specific quality of someone who had been holding an enormous weight for an enormous amount of time

"I know," she said. Quietly. To the grey room. To the mountains she could not see. "I know what you are being born into. I know it is not what it should be. I am going to fix it. It will not be fixed when you arrive. It will not be fixed quickly. But I am going to spend every day between now and the day you are old enough to understand what I am telling you working toward the fixing of it. I am going to leave you a better planet than the one I inherited. That is my promise. That is the only promise I have made in my life that I will not allow anything to compromise."

She received a ding on her portable holoprojector from Irtur, and she opened to see what he had been recording.

════ ⋆★⋆ ════

She didn’t remember her ride home. She remembered being shoved in the vehicle, the door closing. She remembered the desert landscape moving past the viewport and not looking at it.

Her legs moved her towards Restos's office, but she made the conscious decision to open the door.

Restos looked up from his office when she came through the door. He looked at her face and something moved in his expression , not concern exactly, the recalibration of someone who had been in enough volatile situations to recognize the approach of one.

"Senator Geronh," he said. "I was about to send someone to—"

"What was that?"  her voice was not the queen's register or the senator's register or any of the registers she had been building and maintaining on Coruscant. It was simply her voice, undressed, with the two hours of the grey room still in it and the smell of the camp still in it and the flat specific sound of the shot still in it.

"The situation at the site was…" he began.

"What was that?" she asked again.

She was not entirely certain when she had crossed the room. She was standing in front of his desk and she was looking at him and she was crying, she could feel the crying, and she was not managing it because she had used the managing in the grey room and this was what was left when the managing was gone.

"He was speaking," she said. "He was speaking and they…he was on his knees and they…They are people. They have names and families and they are working on their own land under conditions that…Do you understand what I saw today? Do you understand what is happening in those camps? There is a grave, Restos. There is a mass grave at the edge of the camp and no one has filed a report on it because no one is required to file a report on it because the people in it are not…"

"Senator!"

She pushed him.

Both hands, flat against his chest, the full weight of everything she had been carrying.

He stepped back.

He looked at her.

He looked at his hands, which had come up instinctively, and he looked at her face, and then he looked at the door.

"Guard," he said.

The door opened.

Two of the Palace security came through the door. They were not rough. They were efficient, which was its own kind of rough, and she was in the chair in front of his desk before she had decided whether to resist it.

She sat.

The guards took their positions at the door.

Restos straightened his uniform.

"That," he said, with the controlled patience of someone managing a situation they had managed variations of before, "was a disciplinary response to an individual who disrupted an authorized Imperial function. The protocol was followed correctly."

"The protocol?”

"Yes," he said. "The protocol."

"He said the word fall," she looked up at him. "One word. He was frightened and hungry and he had been working in an extraction zone on his family's land for over a year and he said one word and they…"

"He incited disruption at a public function," Restos said. "In front of the Queen of Batonn and her security complement and two ISB officers. The response was proportionate to the…"

"Proportionate?"

"Lady Thrawn." He leaned forward, looming over her, placing both his hands on the arm rests of the chair she was sat in "I understand that today was distressing. I understand that you have not been on Batonn for an extended period and I understand that the visit produced an emotional response. What I need you to understand is that your emotional response is not something I can build an administrative structure around."

She moved her face away from him, cringing at the new title he chose to use.

"You are not," he said, "making my job easier. Your function here is specific. It is defined. It is the function of a symbol, of continuity, of legitimacy, of the governance structure that keeps this sector from requiring the kind of military enforcement that would be considerably more costly for everyone involved. When you deviate from the speech, when you make unauthorized statements to the labor force, when you appear in front of ISB officers weeping and assaulting a Governor…"

"I pushed you.”

"...you compromise the function and when the function is compromised, the question of whether the function is still being served by the current…" He selected the word. "Arrangement."

She held very still.

"You are not a very good symbol," he continued. "Today was evidence of that. A symbol does not go off speech. A symbol does not push Governors. A symbol does not stand at a podium and tell a labor force that what is being done to them is visible to her, because visibility is precisely what the arrangement is designed to…A symbol that cannot be controlled is not a symbol. It is a liability."

“Then do something about it,” she spat in his eye, causing him to stumble back and produce a handkerchief to wipe himself.

"Do not think that your marriage protects you. The Grand Admiral is on campaign in the Lothal sector and the Emperor's arrangements have been revised before. You are not  indispensable."

"Then kill me," she said.

He stared at her.

"Kill me," she said again. "Go ahead. Add my name to the list. Do you know how many names are on that list, Restos? Do you have the actual number? The people in those camps who have died under conditions that no one has filed a report on. The people in that grave at the edge of the extraction site. Add my name. See what happens."

The room went silent.

"You told the Emperor," she said, "and the Emperor told the sector administration and the sector administration told the briefing room that there are no more insurgents in the Batonn sector. That the consolidation addressed the instability. That the symbol function is working. I stood in front of two hundred people today. Labor force workers, resettlement families, people who have been in those camps for over a year. I stood in front of them and I watched a man be shot for saying one word. I want you to look at those faces in your mind, if you remember any of them. I want you to tell me what you see in them. Because what I saw was not a pacified population. What I saw was not the absence of insurgency. What I saw was two hundred people who are one more death, one more bad harvest, one more inadequate food allocation away from becoming exactly the thing you have been telling the Emperor they no longer are. You say there are no more insurgents in this sector. I say you have a camp full of people who will soon become them. And when they do you will not be able to hand them a photograph of their queen and tell them she is alive and well and stop the riots. Because they will have watched her be disposed of, and they will know exactly what that means, and there will not be a symbol left to manage them with."

She was still crying. She had not stopped crying. She had been crying through all of it ,the pushing and the guards and the scolding and the threat and the response to the threat.

"You will return to the approved itinerary," Restos said. The flatness of a man who has run the calculation and arrived at a position he is not entirely satisfied with but intends to hold. "Immediately and without further deviation. The northern territories visit is concluded it will not be revisited. You will conduct the remaining days of the Batonn trip within the approved parameters or I will file the incident report from today with the ISB and you will spend the remainder of your visit in this building under administrative supervision." He looked at her. "Is that understood?"

"It is understood," she said.

He looked at her for a moment longer.

"The guards will escort you back to the family wing," he said.

She walked out.

The guards fell into step behind her and she walked back through the corridor of her father's palace that smelled of the wrong things and looked at the wrong walls, and she breathed with the counting and the precision and she thought about the promise she had made in the grey room.

She thought about Irtur.

She thought about the recording.

She thought about the Mykapo corridor and the secondary supply route and the conversation she was going to have when she returned to Coruscant.

She was not done.

She was nowhere near done.

════ ⋆★⋆ ════

Four weeks later, the message did not arrive as a report, but as a disruption.

Pryce stood at Thrawn's left and Thrawn looked at the holoprojector showing Batonn’s northern territories extraction site . The one that had been, until approximately thirty-seven hours ago, the Empire's primary source of doonium in the sector.

The door opened and Agent Kallus walked in.

“Grand Admiral. Governor.”

Thrawn did not turn.

“Report.”

“There has been an incident in the Batonn sector,” Kallus said. “Northern territories. An Imperial extraction site.”

“What kind of incident?” Pryce asked, her gaze sharpening.

"The explosion occurred at oh-three-twenty-two Batonn time," Kallus explained. "The origin point has not yet been confirmed. The initial ISB assessment identified three possible causes: a structural failure in the extraction infrastructure, a deliberate detonation of the doonium deposits themselves, or a combination of both. The facility has been destroyed. Completely. The doonium reserves stored on-site were ignited in the blast."

Now Thrawn turned.

“Destroyed?”

“Yes, sir.”

A slight shift in the projection as Thrawn adjusted it. Batonn resolved into focus, the northern territories highlighted in a precise grid.

“The total yield?” Thrawn asked.

“Preliminary estimates indicate full loss,” Kallus said. “The Empire’s primary supply line from that sector is no longer operational.”

"The distinction matters," Pryce said.

"Yes," Kallus said. "It does. The preliminary analysis suggests the detonation pattern is inconsistent with standard structural failure. The dispersal signature indicates multiple simultaneous initiation points, which is…"

"Deliberate," Pryce said.

"Consistent with deliberate," Kallus said. "The investigation is ongoing."

"The doonium," Pryce said. She said it with the flatness of a woman who had been building the TIE Defender project on Lothal through the specific combination of political maneuvering and resource acquisition that had required most of her professional attention for the past eighteen months and was now processing the specific arithmetic of what the explosion meant for that project. "The reserves."

"Destroyed," Kallus said. "The full accessible deposit. The survey indicated approximately…"

"I know what the survey indicated," Pryce said. "I commissioned the survey." She breathed. "What is the timeline for alternative sourcing?"

"Unknown," Kallus said. "The alternative sources in the sector have been partially developed but are at significantly lower yield levels. The Batonn deposits were…"

"Irreplaceable," Pryce said. "In the short term."

"Yes.”

The briefing room was quiet.

"The TIE Defender project," Pryce sighed. To Thrawn. "The timeline is…"

"I am aware of the timeline," Thrawn said. He said it without inflection. He was still looking at the display. "Agent Kallus. The senator."

Kallus looked at him.

"Senator Geronh," Thrawn said. "Her activities in the forty-eight hours preceding the explosion. And her response to it."

"Senator Geronh completed her visit on schedule. She departed the northern territories on the day of the approved itinerary visit to the extraction zone. She returned to the Restos administrative complex that evening. The following morning she conducted the remaining clan meetings on the approved itinerary. She departed the extraction zone within the authorized window."

"And her response to the explosion?" Thrawn asked.

"Senator Geronh has not yet made a public comment on the explosion."

"Has not?" Pryce looked at him.

"Her office issued a statement of acknowledgement," Kallus said. "Noting that the Senator was aware of the incident and that her office would be monitoring the situation. No further statement has been issued."

"The speech," She turned to the display and pulled up the ISB report from the northern territories visit. The incident documentation, the off-itinerary remarks, the incident with Governor Restos. She had read this report three times. She found something new in it each time. "She went off-script. In front of the labor force. Off-script from the approved speech. And forty-eight hours later the extraction site explodes.”

“That has been noted,” Kallus said. “However, there is no confirmed link between Senator Geronh’s presence and the explosion or any evidence of Rebel fleet involvement.”

“No evidence,” Pryce said, quieter now. “Or no trace.”

"The project timeline," Thrawn said, "is not the primary concern."

Pryce looked at him.

"The primary concern," he said, "is what the explosion communicates. About the current state of the sector. About the organizational capacity of whoever planned it. About what additional operations may be in development."

"You think it is part of a broader…"

"I think that the explosion at this specific site, at this specific time, following this specific visit, is not a coincidence. And I think that whoever planned it is not yet done." He looked at the display for a moment longer. "What is the assessment of the Batonnese population's response to the explosion?"

Kallus checked his datapad.

"Mixed," he said. "The ISB monitoring in the market districts suggests…The language being used is consistent with the language that has been appearing in the Batonn monitoring for the past year. The Veil designation. The protective framing. Some of the communications express what the analysts have categorized as satisfaction. At the destruction of the extraction infrastructure."

"Satisfaction?"  Pryce squinted.

"Yes," Kallus said.

"She is not controllable. She has never been controllable. Whatever the arrangement was designed to produce, whatever message the emperor wanted to convey, will not happen.”

Thrawn looked at the display one final time.

"The investigation," he said to Kallus. "Every available resource. The origin point. The planning chain. The organizational structure behind it. I want to know who. And I want to know what they intend to do next."

"Yes, sir," Kallus said.

Thrawn walked to the door.

"The doonium," Pryce said. "The project…"

“We will adapt,” Thrawn said.

He left.

Pryce stood in the briefing room with Kallus and the display and the explosion and thought of the girl she probably should have just killed herself.

════ ⋆★⋆ ════

(Y/N) was at the desk when the call came, sitting in a desk that didn’t feel right in a palace that was once Clvtorig’s.

Irtur was in the chair by the window. His own datapad on his knees and had been working with (Y/N) on filing the requests of the clan leaders. The explosion had not been mentioned by either of them, which in of itself was its own communication. She did not want to know if he was responsible for it, or if he knew who was.

The comm unit activated and the designation on the incoming signal was the Chimaera.

She gestured to Irtur, a small contained motion they had developed, the one that meant stay and be still and do not be visible. He shifted in the chair, moving to the position that would place him outside the holo's field of view and she accepted the call.

Thrawn resolved in the blue white.

She had been expecting this call since the explosion was reported. She had been preparing for it with the precision she brought to things she knew were coming.

"Grand Admiral," she said.

"Your Majesty," he said.

"You have seen the reports?"

"Yes," he said.

"The doonium loss is…"

"Doonium is not what I am calling about.”

Her hand tremor was starting. 

"Your speech," he said "The northern territories, the approved itinerary visit. The off-script remarks to the labor force. The explosion occurred fortyeight hours after the conclusion of that speech."

“Go on.”

"You were sent to Batonn in part to perform the governance function of stabilizing the sector. Of communicating to the Batonnese population that the arrangement is functioning. That the symbol is present and that the present symbol is contained. The speech you gave at the extraction zone was not that communication."

"No, it was not,” She crossed her arms over her chest.

"You changed your prewritten speech in front of ISB officers. In front of the security complement. In front of a labor force of two hundred people and fortyeight hours later the doonium deposits that have been supplying the primary materials for an Imperial project of significant strategic value were destroyed."

"Speeches do not cause explosions."

"No, they do not. But they communicate things to people who are listening for communication. And the people who were in that crowd, or connected to people who were in that crowd, received a communication."

"They received the truth," she said. "Which is that their conditions are inhuman and I am not going to pretend that…"

"They received a signal," he said. "Whatever your intention, what was received was a signal. And someone acted on it."

"I understand the connection you are drawing, but you must remember dear husband that there is no connection to those miners and the explosion. But I understand that the speech created…"

"But?" he asked.

"But," she said. "What I saw at that site was not something I could stand in front of and deliver the approved speech as though I had not seen it. I am aware of what that costs. I am aware of the consequences. I went off-script because the script was not honest and I made a commitment to you that I would be honest and I could not honor that commitment and the script simultaneously."

He was quiet for a moment.

"The explosion," he said. "Your office issued a statement of acknowledgement. No further comment."

"No," she said.

"You are going to investigate it," he said. Not a question.

"My office will be looking into it," she said carefully. "The origins are unknown. The investigation is ongoing. I intend to have my governance network produce whatever information is available about the…"

"(Y/N)," he said softer, shifting the conversation to become more intimate. The shift from formal to the specific form, "What do you know?" 

“I know that my people are dying and that my planet is being overmined. I also know that there is nothing I can do about it.”

He was quiet.

"About the explosion," she said. "My office will investigate."

"The conversation," he said. "That we agreed to. When you returned."

"Yes," she said.

"It is scheduled for next week," he said, “I am summoning you to Lothal.”

She abruptly arose from her seat, “Lothal? But I am meant to be on Coruscant, this would disturb my schedule. I have Senate obligations, the sector administration review, the clan documentation I need to file through the governance channels before the end of the month…”

"Your Senate obligations," he said, "can be managed remotely for the duration. The clan documentation does not require your physical presence on Coruscant." He held her gaze through the projection. "I am not asking you to cancel your obligations. I am asking you to fulfill them from a different location."

"And the specific location is the Lothal campaign deployment?"

"Yes."

“Why?”

"Governor Pryce, has organized a gala. In celebration of the new manufacturing facility that has been constructed on Lothal. It will be attended by governors, senators, and contractors from the outer rim planets that supply the facility's raw material inputs." Thrawn held (Y/N)’s gaze. "Given that Batonn has been and remains the Empire's primary source of doonium in this sector, the explosion notwithstanding, your presence at a function celebrating the infrastructure that doonium supplies is appropriate."

“You want me at a celebration of a factory that is built on Batonn's extracted resources?"

"I want you to be visible at a function attended by the people who make decisions about outer rim resource allocation. As the Senator and Queen of the planet that supplies those resources. Your absence from that room would communicate something. Your presence communicates something else."

"And what does my presence communicate?"

"That Batonn is stable, that its governance is functional. That the arrangement is intact and the primary resource supply, despite recent disruption, remains under reliable administration." A pause. "That the Queen of Batonn is present and cooperative."

"You want me where you can see me?"

"I want you," he said, "where the relevant people can see you. That is not the same thing, though in this case the geography overlaps."

Irtur, in the chair by the window, had not moved. 

"There is also," Thrawn continued, "the matter of the facility itself. The manufacturing capacity of the Lothal installation and its relationship to Batonn's extraction output is significant. You have been building an assessment of the doonium supply chain. The facility tour that Pryce has arranged would give you direct access to the destination infrastructure.That is information you have been trying to acquire through other channels for several months. What you observe in the course of fulfilling that function is within your discretion."

She exhaled, as though she had been holding in her breath.

"The assessment," she said. "That I promised you."

"Bring it when you have it. Lothal gives you more to bring."

She looked at Irtur's chair, which was empty of its visible occupant, the specific emptiness of someone who was there and was not appearing to be.

She looked back at the holo.

"Alright," she said. "I will see you there."

He held her gaze.

"There is one further matter," he said. The shift in his voice, not colder exactly, but more deliberate, the specific quality he used when he was returning to something he had set aside and was now picking back up.

She waited.

"The explosion," he said. "Your office will investigate."

"Yes.”

"You will submit your findings to me directly, whatever your governance network produces. The origin assessment, the planning chain analysis, whatever information your investigation develops. It comes to me. Before it goes anywhere else."

She held very still.

"Before it goes anywhere else," she repeated.

"Yes.”

"My investigation findings," she said carefully, "will be submitted to you as they are developed."

"Your performance on this trip remains under evaluation. The northern territories speech. The incident with Governor Restos. These have been noted. They are part of the record. What you produce from the investigation and how you conduct the remainder of the Lothal function will be weighed against them." He held her gaze with full attention. 

"I understand.”

He looked at her for one moment longer.

"Travel safely," he said.

"Goodbye, husband," she said.

She cut the holo.

The room was quiet.

“This complicates things significantly,” Irtur said.

“What about Clvtorig? We still need to get him.”

“And now we only have a week if we leave tomorrow.”

"How long," she said. "From Lothal to Nar Shaddaa."

"Direct?" He calculated. "Seven hours. But the direct route from Lothal to Nar Shaddaa is through the Hutt trade lanes, which are monitored. ”

“We can’t leave him.”

"The diversion plan," he said. "The rebel incident that forces the ship off the approved route. The refueling port. All of that was predicated on the return journey being Batonn to Coruscant. A route we knew. A route my rebel pilot had coordinates for, timing for, security pattern for. A route where the nearest viable port in the case of an incident puts us in proximity to Nar Shaddaa." He looked at her. "The return journey is now Batonn to Lothal."

"And once we arrive and somehow manage to escape my imperial entourage, we would be in a Hutt fighting circuit on Nar Shaddaa carrying a Jedi weapon. Which the Inquisitors are actively looking for."

“Alright,” Irtur sighed, rubbing his hand on his eyes, “Somehow we have to do this in a week... I will get him, I’ll take Gret with me.”

“No, I’m coming.”

“No, you’re not. It’s too dangerous.”

“Too dangerous,” she repeated.

“Yes.”

“You mean inconvenient.”

“I mean dangerous.”

“You have never once confused those two things before.”

“You are pregnant,” he said. “You are under active Imperial observation. You are the queen of a planet held together by ceremony and threat. You are carrying a child whose father is the most strategically dangerous man in this sector. And you would like to accompany me into Hutt space to retrieve a wanted Jedi from a fighting circuit while Inquisitors search the moon and accomplish it all before you are expected on Lothal.”

“I need him,” she walked closer to Irtur, her cheeks turning red and her left hand clenched, “And I would rather die trying to find him than sit idly playing it safe while you do. I have not been playing it safe recently as you can tell, and I would like to take one more risk.”

He was silent for a moment. She loved him, that much was plain as the rising of the sun, and no counsel, no caution, no chain of reason could unmake it.

“(Y/N), This is not a hunt before dawn. This is Nar Shaddaa. You’ve never been to Nar Shaddaa.”

“I have been to Coruscant politics,” she said. “I assume the smell is different and the morality comparable.”

“This is not amusing.”

“No,” she said. “It is not.”

He moved away from the desk and crossed to the window, looking out over the palace courtyard as if the stone might offer better counsel than she had.

“If something happens to you,” he said quietly, “everything fractures.”

“If the inquisitors get to Clvtorig first,” she said, “we lose him forever. He went and got me, he told me I was Queen, he risked himself for me. He gave me a fighter and a chance and he believed I would matter later. I am later.”

“That debt does not require suicide.”

“It requires action.”

He turned back sharply. “Do not make this noble. I know you too well for that.”

“I am done being escorted from rooms while men decide what risks are acceptable for me.”

Irtur stared at her for a long moment.

“You think I am trying to control you?”

She said nothing.

“Gods, (Y/N),” He exhaled through his nose, “And if blasters start firing?”

“Then I will do what I always do.”

“And what is that?”

“Adapt faster than the man who underestimated me.”

Then, still staring at her after a minute of silence he said, “If this goes badly, I reserve the right to be insufferable about it.”

“It would comfort me to know some things remain constant.”

A small sound escaped her then, not laughter entirely, but the shadow of it, brief as light upon water and gone as quickly. Yet when it passed, the room seemed no easier for it. And still she felt cold. There are moments, rare and grievous, when one becomes aware of another soul not by touch nor by voice, but by the shape it has left upon one’s days. So it was with him. She felt Thrawn then, though he was far from Batonn and many planets removed. Not in body, nor in any mystic manne, but in the fashion of winter felt before the wind arrives. In the sense that some great mind, cold and wakeful, moved its pieces upon a board she had not yet fully seen.

I can feel him watching

But I will not be careful

The lights of Coruscant never went out.

(Y/N) had learned that in her first week here , that this planet had forgotten the dark, smothered it beneath a trillion artificial suns until the sky glowed like a wound that wouldn't close. On Batonn, the nights had been real and wanting. Black and deep and full of stars you could name. She used to stand on the tower balcony of the Geronh palace and trace the constellations her mother taught her, the ones older than the monarchy itself.

She did not let herself think about the palace often.

"You're doing the face," Uiona  said from beside her, tugging at the hem of her borrowed gown.

"I don't have a face."

"You absolutely have a face. It's the one that looks like you're mentally composing a funeral dirge." Uiona  glanced sideways at her, dark eyes bright with nervous mischief. She was small and quick and had been (Y/N)'s lady-in-waiting since they were both fourteen years old , and she was the only person in this entire city who spoke to the Queen of Batonn like she was still a just a woman. 

"We don't have to go in."

"We're already in."

They were, technically. They stood in the sweeping marble corridor that fed into the Grand Atrium of the Sienar Estate, one of a dozen private venues on Coruscant's upper levels reserved for Imperial galas of sufficient importance. The invitation had belonged to a minor ISB officer's wife ,  a woman who had accepted a bribe of Batonnese wine and asked no questions, because the silk wine very old and (Y/N) had learned, in the years since her imprisonment, exactly what imperials wanted.

She had learned many things she wished she hadn't.

"Remember," (Y/N) murmured, accepting a glass of pale gold wine from a passing service droid without looking at it, "we are here to listen. Nothing more."

"And if someone recognizes you?"

"No one will recognize me."

 She had dressed carefully for invisibility,  a gown of deep cream that was fashionable without being remarkable, her dark hair arranged in the high Imperial style she despised, cosmetics that softened the sharp lines of her Batonnese features into something more generically elegant. The Queen of Batonn, when she appeared in public, wore her crown and her colors and the cold armor of her title. Tonight she was simply a beautiful woman at a party, and beautiful women at Imperial parties were furniture.

That was, in fact, precisely what made them useful.

She stepped through the archway into the atrium.

The room was extraordinary in the way that all Imperial architecture was extraordinary , designed not to inspire but to diminish, to make every person standing within it feel like a small and replaceable component. Vaulted ceilings soared forty meters above a floor of black-veined white marble. Chandeliers like frozen supernovae cast light that was somehow both brilliant and cold. Officers in grey and black clustered in configurations (Y/N) had learned to read ,  rank, favor, alliance, rivalry , and between them moved women in silk and jewels who were performing their own calculations beneath carefully pleasant expressions.

There where so many people. Some she had recognized, others she did not.

She recognized three Moffs. Two senators whose survival had required a flexibility of principle that impressed even her. An Admiral whose name she knew from the Batonn reports , the ones she was never officially shown but had acquired anyway through channels she would not describe to anyone.

She was cataloguing, always cataloguing, the way you learned to do when information was the only currency you were permitted to hold.

"There's a great deal of Corellian brandy at that table," Uiona  murmured. "I think we should investigate."

"You think we should drink."

"I think you should drink and I will heroically supervise. Hey, we need someone to drive the speeder home"

(Y/N) allowed herself a small smile. It was the realest expression she'd worn all evening. She let Uiona  steer her toward the refreshment table, and she was reaching for a replacement for her already-emptied wine glass when she felt it , the specific quality of attention that had weight to it. Not the casual sweeping gaze of a man assessing a room. Something more precise. More deliberate.

She did not look up immediately. She had learned not to react to being watched. Instead she completed the motion, lifted a glass of the brandy Uiona  had promised, turned slowly as though simply surveying the room with the mild curiosity of a bored socialite.

And found him immediately, because he was not pretending not to look.

He stood apart from the nearest cluster of officers by perhaps three meters , not isolated, not awkward, simply separate in the way of a person who has never required the validation of proximity. He was Chiss, which was itself remarkable enough in this room; the blue of his skin was deep and cool against the stark white of his Grand Admiral's uniform, which (Y/N) processed a half-second after she processed everything else about him. The red eyes. The absolute, unnerving stillness. The fact that he was watching her with an expression of composed interest that suggested he had perhaps been watching her for longer than the moment she'd caught him.

He did not look away when her eyes met his.

Neither, after a fractional hesitation, did she.

It lasted only a moment , a breath, a heartbeat , and then (Y/N) turned back to Uiona  with the smooth ease of long practice and said, very quietly, "Don't look immediately. Grand Admiral. White uniform, Chiss. North side of the room."

Uiona  reached for a glass with the practiced nonchalance of someone who had been helping (Y/N) gather intelligence for three years. Three seconds. Then her gaze swept the room with admirable casualness. She returned her attention to the brandy.

"Oh," she said. Very softly, “I have never seen one of those before.” She said, referencing his near-humaness. 

"Me neither, I do not remember if I ever have."

"He's looking at you."

"I'm aware."

"He's still looking at you." Uiona  joked “Maybe you attract alien men. Just like that Twi'lek from two nights ago.”

(Y/N) kept her voice pleasant and her eyes on the middle distance. "Do you know which one he is?"

Uiona  was quiet for a moment in a way that meant she was thinking hard. Then: "There's only one Chiss Grand Admiral."

The name landed in (Y/N)'s chest like a stone dropped into still water.

Thrawn.

She had read everything available to her about the Batonn insurgency. She had read it the way you read an account of a wound  , with a kind of sick compulsion, needing to understand every detail of something you could not change. She knew the casualty numbers. She knew the names of the settlements. She knew that the operation had been commanded by a Chiss officer whose tactical efficiency had made it something that Imperial military historians described as decisive and that (Y/N), in the privacy of her own mind, described with words she did not say aloud.

She had never seen his face. She had not wanted to.

"We should go," Uiona  said quietly. The mischief had gone out of her voice.

"No." (Y/N) took a slow sip of brandy. Her hand was perfectly steady. She had made sure of that years ago, the same way she had made sure of her voice and her posture and her face  , she had simply decided that her body would not betray her and had enforced it through sheer stubbornness until it became true. "If we leave now, it looks like flight. We stay. We finish our drinks. We leave when we intended to leave. Besides, I want to party."

"(Y/N)—"

"I didn't recognize him," she said softly. "Remember that. I didn't recognize him, and he is merely a remarkable-looking Imperial officer at a party I am attending for entirely innocent reasons." There was mischief in her voice, as if it had traveled to Uiona  to (Y/N).

Uiona  exhaled. "And if he comes over?"

(Y/N) turned, very casually, to let her gaze drift across the room again. He was speaking now to a pair of officers who had approached him ,she could see the subtle hierarchy in how they held themselves, the angle of deference , but even as she watched, his red, piercing eyes found her again across the atrium with an ease that suggested the conversation he was having required approximately none of his attention.

Something moved in her chest that she chose not to examine.

"Then we will be charming," she said, "and unremarkable, and he will have nothing interesting to report."

She looked away first. She made sure of it.

But she could feel his gaze on the back of her neck for the rest of the hour. She wondered if she should be angry, or nervous or both.

Across the ballroom, Grand Admiral Thrawn accepted a glass of wine he did not drink and said something that made the two officers excuse themselves, and then he stood alone again in that particular stillness of his, and watched the woman who did not know that he knew exactly who she was.

He had studied the art of Batonn for three weeks before the insurgency. He had seen her portrait , the  formal, the crown and the colors, that particular expression of composed defiance that she was apparently able to maintain even in borrowed clothes at a party she had no invitation to.

He found this, as he found most genuinely interesting things, worthy of patient consideration.

There would be time.

There was, after all, going to be a great deal of time.

She was preparing to leave.

Thrawn could see it in the small adjustments , the way she set her glass down with the particular finality of someone completing a task, the almost imperceptible shift in how she angled her body toward her companion, the slight gathering of attention that preceded motion. She had decided on a duration and she was honoring it. Disciplined, even here. Even in this. 

Her companion had not left her side, but was flirting with two junior officers who both seemed to be more interested in her menial conversation than it would seem.

He set his own glass down and moved.

He did not hurry. 

She didn't see him coming.

That, in itself, told him something. She had been watching the room all evening with the systematic attention of someone conducting a survey rather than attending a party, but she had been careful not to watch him , too careful, in the way that deliberate avoidance always revealed more than idle observation would have. She was disciplined about it. But discipline had a cost, which was the blind spot it created.

He came to a stop beside her at a comfortable conversational distance , close enough to be intimate in the context of the party's ambient noise, far enough to communicate no threat , approximately two seconds before she would have excused herself.

"The Corellian brandy," he said, in a tone of mild observation, "is somewhat better than the Alderaanian white they're pouring near the east colonnade. An interesting choice for a gala of this particular political flavor."

(Y/N) went very still after nearly jumping from the strong, even voice.

It lasted less than a second , she was almost certain of that , before her training reasserted itself and she turned with the unhurried ease of someone responding to a pleasantly unexpected conversational opening. She had been caught mid-motion and she converted it smoothly into a half-turn, one hand resting light on the table's edge, expression settling into something warm and mildly curious.

Charming, she reminded herself. Unremarkable.

Up close, he was more unsettling than he had been across the atrium, which she had not anticipated. The red eyes were the color of deep rubies, and they were doing to her face what she imagined a very precise instrument might do to a document , reading, categorizing, finding the things beneath the surface of what was presented. She had been looked at by Imperial officers who thought her powerless. She had been looked at by men who wanted things from her. She had been looked at by the Emperor himself, once, which had been an experience she kept in a sealed room in her memory and never visited.

He was not looking at her the way a man looked at a woman. He was looking at her the way one looked at something they were in the process of understanding.

She found it, despite everything, more respectful than most of what she received. She hated that she found it that.

"I didn't realize the brandy's political implications," she said. Her voice was warm and lightly amused , "Should I be concerned about my allegiances?"

"Only if you have any," Thrawn said. "Which, in a room like this, is the more dangerous condition."

Uiona  made a small sound beside her that she had to actively not look at.

"Then I'm perfectly safe," (Y/N) said. "I have no allegiances whatsoever. I'm here entirely for the brandy."

"As are the most honest people in this room." His head inclined very slightly,  not quite a bow, something more like an acknowledgment. "I don't believe we've been introduced."

And there it was. Polite, almost gentle, and absolutely without any avenue of escape.

She produced a name she had prepared for this evening the way one prepared tools before a job , not her own name, something adjacent, plausible, nothing that could be immediately disproven. "Arlinya Veth . I'm attached to Senator Colvane's office." A pause. Then, with the appropriate measure of impressed recognition: "And you're ,  forgive me, the uniform is rather, " She let her gaze touch the white Grand Admiral's insignia as if she were only now processing its significance. "Grand Admiral Thrawn."

"Yes."

"I've heard the name," she said, which was such a profound understatement that she felt something dangerous move through her, something that was almost laughter. "An honor."

"The honor," he said, with a quality in his voice she couldn't quite locate, "is an interesting word to use."

She held his gaze. "Is it?"

"Most people in this room use it reflexively. A social lubricant. You said it," he paused, and she had the acute sensation of being measured, "as though you were choosing it very carefully from several available options."

She was taken back by his response, as if he were challenging her. The atrium noise continued around them and (Y/N) stood in the small quiet between herself and this man and understood that she was not going to be able to be furniture. She had calculated wrong. Not in coming here , coming here had been right, had yielded three pieces of useful information before she'd even reached the refreshment table , but in the specific nature of the risk. She had accounted for recognition of her face. She had not adequately accounted for this.

"I think you may be reading too much into my word choice," she said pleasantly. "I'm a secretary's aide. My most demanding intellectual exercise this week was organizing correspondence."

"Mm." He accepted this with an expression of polite interest that communicated, very clearly, that he accepted nothing of the sort. He glanced , for the first time , at Uiona , who received the full weight of his attention for approximately two seconds and to her credit did not visibly wilt. "And your companion?"

"Lera," Uiona  said, having apparently decided on a name in the last thirty seconds. "A colleague. Also not politically interesting in the slightest."

"Of course," Thrawn said, with a gravity that was almost certainly amusement. He returned his attention to (Y/N). "The brandy is from the Cloudshear Valley vintage," he said, shifting without warning into what appeared to be genuine small talk. "Three years old. It had a difficult growing season .  You can taste a certain mineral austerity in the finish that is either a flaw or a character, depending on your preference."

(Y/N) blinked. Then, almost against her will, she lifted the glass and took a more considered sip.

He was right. There it was ,  something underneath the warmth of it, a clean hard edge like the smell of rain on stone.

"It’s something."

"I thought you would say that." He said it quietly, and there was something in his tone that made it feel as though he was not talking entirely about the brandy, and she didn't know what to do with that so she chose to do nothing with it, to stow it away in the back of her mind where she kept things that required more information before she could use them.

"You thought?" she said lightly. "We've spoken for three minutes."

"Two and a half," he corrected, without any particular emphasis. "And I find that a reasonably sufficient interval, in most cases."

"To determine someone's preference in alcohol."

"To determine," he said, with a precision that was almost delicate, "certain things."

She looked at him. He looked at her. Across the atrium, a cluster of officers laughed at something and the sound washed over them and retreated and the small quiet between them remained undisturbed.

He knows, she thought, He knows that I am the Queen of Batonn. He had known when he approached her. Possibly he had known when he first saw her from across the atrium and did not look away.

The question ,  the only question that mattered , was what he intended to do with her.

She smiled. She made it real, because the very best performances always had something true in them. "You're quite unnerving, Grand Admiral."

"So I've been told." There was something there , not quite warmth, but the shadow of it, the shape of warmth might leave behind. "Does it bother you?"

"Not particularly," she said, and that was also true. She had been unnerved by worse things and survived them. "I simply prefer to know what's being assessed and why."

"That," he said, "is a very direct thing to say for someone who is here entirely for the brandy."

"It's very good brandy," she said. "It's making me candid."

The corner of his mouth moved. It was a very small movement and she catalogued it with the same reflexive precision she catalogued everything. She was not sure she had ever seen him smile in any of the Imperial reports she wasn't supposed to have read.

"Then perhaps," he said, "you would allow me to show you to the balcony. The view of the city is considered one of the better vantages on this level, and the brandy there is the same vintage. And we would be," he added, with a quality she could only describe as deliberate, "somewhat less observed."

Uiona  pressed very gently against her elbow. Don't. She could feel it without looking.

She looked at Thrawn instead. At the composed patience of him, the absolute absence of performance. Whatever he was, he was not performing right now. She was almost certain of that, which was its own kind of dangerous information .

She should say no. She should make a graceful excuse and leave and return to the apartments the Emperor had provided her with the same gilded-cage irony he applied to everything, and she should sit with what she had learned tonight and not add to it by walking onto a balcony with a Grand Admiral who almost certainly knew her name.

"Show me," she said.

Uiona 's elbow pressure became briefly frantic.

(Y/N) set her glass down on the table and turned toward the balcony with the composure of a woman making a perfectly ordinary choice, and Grand Admiral Thrawn moved to her left , not behind, not in front, beside , and they crossed the atrium together, and she was aware of the exact number of eyes that followed them, and she did not look at any of those eyes, only ahead, toward the tall glass doors and the bleeding Coruscant sky beyond them.

She did not know what he intended.

She was, she realized with something she refused to call anticipation, about to find out.

The doors opened onto a terrace that ran the length of the estate's eastern face, and the city swallowed them.

That was the only word for it. Coruscant at night from this height was not a view so much as a consumption ,  light in every direction, above and below, the traffic lanes like luminous rivers flowing between towers that vanished into the haze of the upper atmosphere. There was no horizon. There was no sky, not really, only the gradient from dark to darker interrupted everywhere by the evidence of human habitation stretching in every direction to the edge of sight.

(Y/N) walked to the railing and looked out at it and felt, as she always felt on this planet, the specific loneliness of a place that was never empty.

Two other couples occupied the far end of the terrace. Far enough. The ambient sound of the city below provided its own privacy , a constant low roar, like the ocean, like the crowds that used to gather in the market squares of Batonn's capital on festival days when she would watch from the palace windows and her father would stand beside her and name every family he recognized in the crowd below, because a good king, he said, knew his people by their faces.

She did not allow herself to think about her father often.

"The city doesn't have an edge you can see. Or can’t see I should say," she said. She hadn't planned to speak,  she had planned to wait, to let him establish the terms of whatever this was , but the words came out of her with the particular tiredness of someone who has been performing for several hours and is briefly, dangerously, lowering the instrument. "On Batonn, you could always see the edge of things. The city ended and then there was farmland and then there were mountains. You always knew where you were in relation to everything else."

She felt him come to stand beside her at the railing, not close enough to crowd, close enough to talk quietly. "You've been to Batonn," he said.

It was not a question. His voice was entirely neutral ,  not the careful neutrality of someone concealing a reaction, but the genuine neutrality of someone waiting to see what she would do with the opening he had made.

She turned her head and looked at him directly. The Coruscant light made strange colors of his blue skin, warm golds and cold whites moving across him as the traffic shifted below. His red eyes, in this light, were almost dark.

"I'm from Batonn," she said.

She watched him. He did not react , not with surprise, because there was no surprise, she had known there was no surprise , but something in the quality of his stillness changed in a way she couldn't immediately name. It became, perhaps, more careful. As though he had been holding something loosely and had chosen to hold it with more attention.

"I know," he said.

It was, she realized distantly, a relief.

She hated that it was a relief.

"How long," she asked, "from across the room?"

"From across the room," he confirmed.

"The portrait."

"Several portraits. The formal one, primarily. Though there is a smaller study done by a Batonnese artist named Lord Pell Monrke,  a relation of yours, I believe , that I found more instructive."

Her chest did something complicated at the mention of that name. Cousin Pell, who had been fifteen and had painted her in the palace gardens with the mountains behind her and had given it to her father as a gift, and her father had hung it in his private study rather than any of the formal galleries because he said it was the most honest likeness he had ever seen of her. She had not known it still existed. She had not thought about it. Now, he is dead. Killed by a stormtrooper during the insurgency.

She gripped the railing and felt the cool metal and kept her face composed.

"Instructive," she repeated. "In what sense?"

"In the sense," he said, with the same deliberate precision he seemed to apply to everything, "that formal portraits reveal how a subject wishes to be seen. Informal work reveals how they are seen by someone who knows them. The comparison is useful." A pause. "You seemed happy in that painting."

She said nothing for a moment. Below them, a freighter moved through a traffic lane, its running lights blinking slow and red.

"That was a long time ago," she said.

"Eleven years."

"You did considerable research."

"I do considerable research on most things," he said. "On some things, more than most."

She turned to look at him again. He was looking out at the city, his profile clean and still against the light. He had not looked at her when he said that, which she thought was deliberate ,  a form of courtesy, giving her the information without requiring her to receive it while being watched.

"Then you know," she said, keeping her voice even, "that we are not strangers, exactly. Even though we've never met."

"No," he agreed. "Not strangers, exactly."

"You commanded the Batonn insurgency suppression."

"Yes."

"The casualty estimates I've read," She stopped. Started again with more care. "The numbers were significant."

He turned his head then. He looked at her with those cardinal eyes and she held the gaze the way she held everything , through will, through the decision that she would not be the one to look away. "They were," he said. "The station , the civilians , that was not my order and not my preference. I want to be precise about that."

"Governor Pryce."

Something moved across his expression. "Yes."

"I know," she said. "I read the reports. The ones I shouldn't have." She watched him for a reaction and got only that same quality of attention, that sense of being read carefully. "It doesn't absolve the operation, Grand Admiral. But I know where the specific fault lies."

"No," he said quietly. "It doesn't absolve it."

She had not expected that. She had expected defense, justification, the architecture of excuse that Imperial officers built around the things they did. She had sat across from men who had described the destruction of her world's sovereignty with the satisfied language of efficiency, and she had smiled at them and catalogued their weaknesses and waited.

She did not know what to do with the absence of that. With a man who simply agreed with her.

"Why did you come over?" she asked. "Across the room. You knew who I was. You knew I shouldn't be here. You could have had me quietly removed, or reported,"

"Yes," he said. "I could have."

"So why didn't you?" She then looked at him directly in the redness of his eyes. “And I bet your little friends are wondering why the Grand Admiral is speaking alone with a young woman.”

He was quiet for a moment. Not the quiet of someone constructing an answer but the quiet of someone selecting, from several true answers, the one they intended to give.

"I was curious," he said at last.

"About what?"

He looked at her, and it was the most direct he had looked at her all evening, without the social softening of the party context or the mediation of small talk, and she felt the full weight of it like a change in air pressure. "About whether the portrait was accurate," he said. "About what remained of what was in it."

Her breath stayed even. She made sure of it. "And?"

"The composure is a construction," he said, not unkindly. "Extremely well-made. You have had practice with it. But underneath it," He paused, and his gaze moved over her face in that precise cataloguing way she had catalogued herself, and she had the dizzying sensation of being met with the same instrument she applied to everything else, of being read rather than reading. "The woman in the portrait is still present. She has simply learned to stand very quietly."

The city roared below them. Somewhere on the far end of the terrace, one of the other couples laughed and their laughter was taken immediately by the wind and scattered.

(Y/N) stood in the particular silence he had made and felt something she had not felt in a very long time , the specific vulnerability of being seen accurately. Not assessed for usefulness. Not catalogued for threat. Seen. It was worse than almost anything else he could have done to her. She was not sure whether she wanted to thank him or push him off the railing.

"You're dangerous," she said. Her voice was steady and she put nothing in it.

"So I've been told," he said again. But this time it was different than when he'd said it inside. This time there was something underneath it , the same mineral austerity she'd tasted in the brandy, that thing that was either flaw or character depending on your preference.

"Why are you telling me this," she said. "What I look like underneath. Why say it."

He was quiet for three seconds. She counted.

"Because," he said carefully, "I think you have spent a considerable amount of time in the company of people who prefer the construction to the woman. And I find that," Another pause, briefer. "I find that a significant waste."

She stared at him.

Grand Admiral Thrawn, conqueror of Batonn, most precise military mind in the Imperial Navy, looked back at her with an expression that was composed and still and offered her nothing she could easily dismiss.

"You don't know me," she said. Quieter than she intended.

"No," he agreed. "Not yet."

Not yet. Two words. She turned them over and examined them and found in them a patience that was not the patience of Imperial inevitability.

She did not know what to do with that either. She was accumulating things she didn't know what to do with at an alarming rate, and she had come here tonight for information and she was leaving with something else entirely, something that had no clear category yet.

From inside the atrium she could hear the shift in music that suggested the formal program was beginning ,  the sequence of speeches and presentations that meant the unstructured portion of the evening was ending. The couples at the far end of the terrace began drifting back toward the doors.

(Y/N) straightened. She gathered the composure he had correctly identified as a construction and she put it back on with the smooth practice of long habit, and she watched him watch her do it, and neither of them pretended that he hadn't seen.

"I should return to my companion," she said.

"Of course."

"And you should," She paused. "You should return to whatever a Grand Admiral does at one of these events."

"Accept credit for things I find tedious," he said. "And observe people who are not performing for the benefit of the room."

She felt the near-laughter again, that dangerous thing. She contained it.

"Goodnight, Grand Admiral," she said. She held out her hand, the formal Coruscant gesture, not the Batonnese one, which was to press your palm to your own heart first , and he took it, and his hand was cool and dry and held hers with a pressure that was precisely calibrated to be correct for the context and nothing beyond it.

"Goodnight," he said. And then, quietly, with only the city to hear it: "Your Majesty."

The title landed on her like a bell struck close.

She did not freeze. She did not react. She was very proud of this, afterward.

She simply met his eyes one final time and then turned and walked back through the glass doors into the warmth and light of the atrium, where Uiona  found her in approximately four seconds and gripped her arm.

"What happened," Uiona  whispered. "You were out there for some time… Tell me everything!"

"Later," (Y/N) said.

"(Y/N)—"

"Later." She picked up a glass from a passing tray and kept moving and did not look back toward the balcony doors. "We're leaving. Calmly. And then later I will tell you everything."

"Was it terrible?"

She considered the question with genuine attention, which it deserved.

"I don't know yet," she said honestly.

Behind her, through the glass, Grand Admiral Thrawn remained at the railing a moment longer, looking out at the city that had no edge you could see, and the expression on his face was not one he wore in public, which was why he had waited until he was certain she had gone to let himself wear it.

Then he straightened his uniform and went back inside to be tedious.

The departure terminal on the Imperial command level was not designed for comfort. 

She had been through it once, briefly, for a Senate function on a neighboring level that had required the formal transit documentation and the security complement and the full machinery of being the Queen of Batonn in public.

She knew what the terminal looked like.

She had not yet been through it with luggage and a medical kit and a lightsaber in the medical kit. Tannian walked next to her.

The entourage was assembled at the gate.

There were six security personnel in the Imperial complement, the grey uniforms and the specific bearing of people who had been assigned to her detail rather than having volunteered for it. Two administrative staff from the sector office, young, precise, carrying the documentation portfolios she had reviewed and approved the previous week. The specialist that Dr. Thalias recommended Dr. Dajs, standing slightly apart from the rest.

And Uiona.

She saw Uiona before anyone else.

"Your Majesty," Uiona said.

"Lady Uiona," she said warmly, giving her a wink that meant I am glad you are here and I cannot say that in front of all these people.

Uiona's expression did the thing it did.

(Y/N) introduced herself to the security personnel with the warmth she brought to these occasions. She got three names. The other three gave her the formal acknowledgment without names attached, which was information about which of them she was going to need to manage and which would be straightforward.

She was shaking hands with the senior administrative aide when Irtur appeared at the edge of the terminal.

She walked to him.

"Ambassador," she said. Formally. 

"Your Majesty," he said. He inclined his head in the Batonnese form.

He looked at her for one moment longer , at the travel clothes and the medical kit bag and the composed warmth she was wearing for the terminal , and then he inclined his head once more. 

"Safe travels," he said.

"And you," she said.

He turned and walked toward the private hangar bay that was handling his own departure in his own ship. She watched him go before turning back to her entourage.

The senior security officer ,  the one who had given his name as Lieutenant Orok, the one she had already identified as the managing challenge , had moved to the luggage station. He was looking at the bags with the expression of a man who was about to do his job and was not going to be deterred from doing it.

"Standard security protocol," he said. "All luggage and personal effects are subject to inspection before boarding."

"Of course," she said pleasantly.

He moved to the first case.

She held her composure.

He moved to the second.

She held her composure.

He reached for the medical kit.

She felt the specific quality of the morning shift, the way things shifted when something was about to occur that required immediate management and the available management options were limited.

"The medical kit as well," Orok said. He was already reaching for the clasp. "Standard protocol covers all personal effects including…"

"I beg your pardon."

Tannian's voice.

He had stepped forward from beside her with the quality he brought to things he had decided to insert himself into .

Orok looked at him.

"Lieutenant Geronh," Orok said. The careful neutrality of one officer addressing another officer of adjacent rank.

"My sister," Tannian said, "is a Senator and a Queen and is traveling with a medical kit that contains personal medical provisions." He looked at Orok  with the look he had developed in sixteen months of conscription, "Is there a female officer present who can conduct that specific inspection?"

Orok looked at the complement.

Six security personnel. All of them the same grey uniform, the same bearing. None of them, female.

"There is no female officer currently assigned to…"

"Then the medical kit," Tannian said, still pleasantly, "presents a logistical difficulty. Do you genuinely believe, Lieutenant, that the Senator is hiding a blaster with her medicine? Please."

Orok looked at the kit.

He looked at Tannian.

He looked at her.

She looked back with the composure of a woman who had absolutely nothing unusual in her medical kit and was waiting patiently for this administrative matter to resolve itself.

"The remaining bags have been cleared," Orok said, after a moment that had several things inside it. "You may board."

"Thank you, Lieutenant," she said warmly.

She picked up the medical kit herself.

She walked toward the boarding corridor with the specific unhurried ease of a woman making an entirely ordinary departure and she did not look at Tannian and she did not look at the kit and she did not allow herself to feel any of what she was feeling until she was through the boarding door and the corridor had closed behind her.

Uiona appeared at her left shoulder.

"Your Majesty," she said quietly, in Batonnese, in the register she used when there were ears nearby that she was accounting for. "Are you alright?"

She looked at the ship corridor ahead of her. At the end of it, the boarding ramp, and beyond that the transport that was going to take her off this planet and toward the one she had been trying to get back to for two years.

"Just get me off this planet," (Y/N) responded.

════ ⋆★⋆ ════

Coruscant disappeared through the viewport in the way it always disappeared. Not gradually, not the way Batonn's horizon had receded when she left for Hosnian Prime all those years ago, the slow farewell of a planet that was genuinely round and had actual distance between its surface and its sky. Coruscant simply became smaller, and then smaller, and then the city-light of it was indistinguishable from the rest of the stars, and then it was gone.

She felt something release in her chest that she had not identified as tension until the moment it left.

The transport was not large : the security complement occupied the forward section, the administrative staff had their own cabin, Dr. Dajs had established herself in the medical bay. Uiona had found the cabin that had been designated for the Queen's household and was, she suspected, already reorganizing it according to how she knew (Y/N) cared for things.

She found Tannian in the narrow corridor outside the main cabin, leaning against the hull with his arms crossed and the expression of a man who had been waiting for her to find him.

She came into the cabin and pressed a button so the door closed behind her.

"The medical kit," he said.

"Thank you," she said. "For that."

"Orok  was going to open it," he said.

"Yes," she said.

"What's in it?"

He looked at her with their father's eyes and gave her the look that conveyed that he had been patient about a question long enough and had decided the patience was complete.

"Tannian," she said.

"You have been acting strange since I arrived on Coruscant," he said. "Not Batonn-nervous strange. Something else. You weren't eating when I came to dinner last week. You went pale when Uiona mentioned the highland fish at the market. You sent V3PO out of the room three separate times for reasons that didn't require V3PO to leave the room. And you nearly had a crisis over a luggage inspection."

She looked at the hull.

She looked back at him.

"I am pregnant.”

The ship moved around them. The transport's engines had the low consistent hum of something in transit, the sound she had been hearing since she was a child on Batonnese navy vessels during the formal seasonal crossings.

Tannian was very still.

"How far along?" he said.

"Five weeks," she said. "Approximately."

"Is it…" he started, and then stopped, and then the rest of the sentence arrived with the specific quality of a question a brother asked when he was trying to understand everything at once and had selected the most direct route to the center of it: "Is it his?"

"Of course it is his," she said.

"I didn't…"

"Seriously, Tannian."

"I didn't know," he said. "I didn't know what the situation was. Between you. I didn't know if it was…"

"It is his," she said. "There is no question. There has been no one else. There has not been anyone else since…It is his. Yes."

He ran his hand over his face, the gesture he had been making since he was twelve years old when something required more processing than the immediate moment allowed.

"A Thrawn heir," he said. Quietly.

"Yes," she said.

"(Y/N)..."

"I know," she said. "I know what people will say. But I needed you to know. Before we got there. So you knew the shape of what we were walking into."

He crossed the cabin and he held her.

She held him back.

"A Chiss heir," he said, into her hair. The way he said things when he was processing and the processing was not yet finished.

"Half Chiss," she said.

"Half Chiss heir to the Batonnese throne," he said.

"Yes."

"That is…" He stopped.

"I know," she said.

He pulled back and looked at her. 

"Are you frightened?" he asked.

"Yes," she said. Simply.

"Of him? Of what he…"

"No," she said. "Not of him. Not in that way." She looked at the viewport, at the stars that were actually stars rather than Coruscant's administered approximation of them. "Of what it requires. Of what comes next. Of whether I can be…Of whether I am enough for all of it."

"You are the most capable person I have ever known," he said. "And I have met Grand Admiral Thrawn."

She looked at him.

The laughter came before she could stop it.

"Don't tell anyone," she said. "Not yet. Not until after the healer. Not until I have more information."

"I won't," he said.

"Not Uiona," she said.

"She already knows," he said.

"She knew before I did," he said. "She has been watching you not eat the highland fish for three weeks. She knows."

"Everyone knows.”

"Not everyone," he said. "Just the people who have been watching you carefully. Which, given your life, is a significant number of people."

She looked at the stars through the viewport.

Real stars.

"We are going home," she said. Quietly.

Tannian came to stand beside her at the viewport.

"Yes," he said.

They stood in the narrow cabin and they looked at the stars that were real, and the transport moved through them toward Batonn, and she held everything she was carrying with the careful hands she had been developing for years and she thought:

It will be enough.

She did not dream often.

When she did, the dreams were rarely kind. They were dreams of her back in the facility with no windows and only pain. She had developed, over time, the ability to surface quickly from the bad ones, the trained wakefulness that brought her up before the dream completed itself.

But in this dream, she was in the oasis, letting its breeze hit her skin. She was young and the water was cold and someone was holding her hand and she could not see who it was but she knew, with the specific certainty of dreams, that it was someone she loved.

She did not surface from this one, until someone knocked on her cabin’s door. It was a gentle knock, but loud enough to wake her.

"(Y/N)."

Tannian's voice. The one he used when he was trying not to startle her.

The cabin was dim. The transport's running lights gave the viewport a faint blue and she lay still for a moment with the dream still close, the oasis water still present in some cellular memory of cold and green and someone holding her hand.

"(Y/N)," he said again. The door opened a fraction.

"Let me sleep," she whined.

He came in.

He was already in his travel clothes, his hair combed in the regulation cut that she had still not fully reconciled with the brother she had known before the conscription, the one whose hair had fallen across his forehead in the highland way their mother had never managed to correct.

"We're here," he said.

She got up faster than she had gotten up for anything in two years.

Batonn.

She pressed her hand flat against the viewport glass and she looked at it and she could not immediately speak. It was morning on the highland side. She could see it from here. This was the morning that came up over the Varath mountains and turned them the color of pale fire before anything else was lit, the morning that her mother had woken her up to see when she was four years old and said: look. Remember this. This is yours.

She had remembered.

Batonn is beautiful, she thought. It has never not been.

Not in the way of things that were beautiful because they were arranged to be. Not the Imperial reception halls with their calibrated chandeliers, not the Coruscant upper levels with their administered elegance. Batonn was beautiful the way things were beautiful when they had not been designed for it, when the beauty was simply the consequence of existing fully as what they were. The mountains that had been mountains since before anyone had named them, the lowland plains that turned gold in the dry season and green in the wet, the Renneka river cutting through the capital in the specific blue that was not quite any other blue she had ever seen, and the highlands rising behind all of it like something that had decided where it stood and had not moved since.

She had been trying to hold this in her memory for two years.

But it was better than she remembered. It was always better than she remembered.

"Aren't you excited?" she said to Tannian. Without looking away from the viewport. "To be back."

He came to stand beside her.

"Yes," he said quietly, "Though it does not look the way it looked."

"No," she said. "It doesn't."

She knew the differences, she had been shown them on the holo.

"There is something I need to tell you before we land," He said, adjusting his expression. 

She turned from the viewport to look at him.

"Res is on Batonn," he said, "I received the sector administration communication this morning. He arrived two days ago. He is, he has been assigned to the Governor's office in a coordination capacity. Restos's office. He will be at the landing reception."

She looked back at the viewport.

"(Y/N)," he said. "You need to be careful. Especially now. Especially given your…Your current state."

"I am always careful."

"You are always managing," he said. "That is not the same thing. Res reports to Restos and Restos reports upward and anything he observes goes into a file that goes to people we do not want reading it." He held her gaze. "Be careful. Not managed. Careful."

"I’ll dress before we land," She turned from the viewport and Tannian left the room. She rubbed kohl on her eyes, awaiting the sandy winds that she remembered from when she was a child.

The landing platform was in Paeragosto City, the one that had been built onto the palace's eastern face during the occupation, the Imperial addition to the Geronh structure that she had seen in the documentation and had not yet seen with her own eyes.

She saw it now.

She breathed through the seeing of it and she kept her face composed and she descended the boarding ramp with the bearing she had maintained through everything, the posture that was the Queen of Batonn's posture.

Irtur was there, he had landed first, of course.

Beside him, Lord Sahir who was older than she remembered. He was the senior of her father's remaining advisors, the man who had served the Geronh administration for thirty years and had survived the consolidation through the specific combination of political caution and genuine loyalty that the Empire had found useful to retain. His hair was fully white now. He had not been white-haired when she last saw him.

Beside him, Lord Nazeer.

Younger than Sahir, darker in coloring. He had been her father's cultural advisor. He had been the one who ensured the palace traditions were maintained through the early consolidation period, the small acts of preservation that the Empire had permitted because they did not yet understand their significance.

They were what remained.

Of all the men who had stood in her father's council chamber, these two. She had known there were losses. She had read the names. Standing in front of what remained was different from reading the names.

They knelt.

Both of them. The full Batonnese way with one knee and a hand to their chest, head inclined. 

The door held shut and she looked at Sahir and Nazeer and she thought: you are still here. You stayed.

Irtur inclined his head in the Batonnese form.

She inclined hers in return.

And then she looked at the figure standing in front of them all.

Res had not knelt.

He stood with his hands clasped behind his back in the Imperial naval posture, his uniform precise, his expression doing the thing that it had always done.

He looked well.

She had noted this at the wedding and she noted it again now, the type of man for whom the Empire's arrangement had produced comfort rather than cost, the unstained bearing of someone who had been on the winning side and had not forgotten it.

"Your Majesty," he said. "Lady Thrawn." A slight pause between the two titles, deliberate, the pause of a man selecting the hierarchy and placing it where he wanted it.

"Res," she said with warmth.

He stepped forward.

He took her hand in the formal greeting, the Batonnese one, and he looked at her face.

His eyes moved.

To her cheeks.

To the place where the engagement marking had been, the thin line of ceremonial ink applied by the keeper of traditions, and beside it the marriage line, the second mark, both of them fading now in the way that Batonnese ink faded , in the gods' own time, returning the skin to itself.

"Your bridal tattoo is fading early," he said. Lightly. With the pleasantness of a man making an observation about a domestic matter at a formal reception.

"Good," she said.

She held his gaze for precisely the length of time required and then she turned to Sahir and Nazeer and she greeted them in Batonnese.

He led them through the palace.

It was not the main palace, but the palace that belonged to the Tronstad family before the insurgency and now belonged to Governor Restos. He had even renamed it to Resots’ Palace as was noted on official imperial maps of the city. She wondered what else he had taken besides her mother’s tiara and the Tronstad family estate.

The entrance hall was intact. The bones of the palace were intact,  the highland desert stone, the vaulted ceilings, the windows that caught the sand dunes light at the angle Clvtorig’s great-great-grandmother had specified when the palace was built.

The bones were intact.

Everything on the bones had been changed.

The Geronh banners were gone. The portraits of Clvtorig's family were gone. The furniture had been replaced with the Imperial administrative standard, the grey surfaces and the geometric correctness of people following a floor plan. The smell was wrong. She walked through it and noticed all these things.

She did not let her pace change or her left hand tremor or her face do anything that the security complement or the administrative aides or Res, walking at the front of the group with the ease of a man conducting a tour of a facility he had access to, could read as difficulty.

Tannian walked beside her. She put her hand briefly on his arm. He did not look at her so she took her hand back.

Res stopped at the corridor that led to the family wing. 

"The family wing has been designated for your use during the visit. The primary suite at the end of the corridor. I took the liberty of ensuring it was prepared."

"Thank you, Res," she said.

The group dispersed. The security complement to their assigned positions, the administrative staff to the working offices, Sahir and Nazeer with the quiet dignity of men who were going to allow her to arrive before they required anything of her, Irtur moving down the corridor with the efficiency of a man who had things to do.

Tannian peeled off toward his own room with the look he gave her when he was giving her space and would be available when the space was done.

Uiona walked with her.

Res walked with her.

They reached the suite at the end of the corridor. The door was the same door — the highland wood, the Geronh crest carved into the upper panel with the Tronstad family crest carved under it, the specific handle that she had been reaching for since she was tall enough to reach it. At least they had left the door.

Res opened it for her.

She looked into the room.

He had done something to it. Which was removed anything that was remotely Batonnese.

"The arrangements meet your requirements, I hope," Res said.

"Yes," she said. "Thank you."

Uiona moved inside with the efficiency of a woman who was going to have an opinion about the arrangement and was reserving it for a private moment.

Res did not move.

(Y/N) turned to look at him.

"Sister," he said, avoiding her name.

The title in his mouth the way it had always been , too familiar, the familiarity that was not warmth but possession, the specific entitlement of someone who believed proximity conferred rights it did not confer.

She waited.

"You should know," he said quietly, with the pleasantness fully in place over whatever the sentence was going to be, "that Governor Restos's office has taken a particular interest in the success of this visit. The speech. The northern territories. All of it. And what happens here is reported. Comprehensively. To people who will determine what happens to you next. To your planet. To your…" His eyes moved, briefly, to her midsection, and she held absolutely still and gave him nothing. "To your arrangement."

She looked at him.

"Whatever you are planning," he said. "Whatever you think you are here to do beyond the approved itinerary." He smiled the smile she had known since they were children, the one that was not a smile. "Don't."

She held his gaze.

"I appreciate the concern," she said. "I always do."

She held his gaze with everything she had and she let the silence be what it was, which was the specific silence of two people who each knew exactly what the other was and neither of them was going to say it in this corridor.

"Goodnight, Res," she said.

She walked into the suite.

She closed the door.

She stood on the other side of it with her hand flat against the highland wood and the Geronh crest under her palm and the smell of the palace that was wrong and the door that was the same and Batonn outside the window where the mountains were still the mountains.

"Your Majesty," Uiona said, from somewhere inside the room. Quiet. Batonnese.

"Give me a moment," she said.

In the morning as scheduled per the itinerary , a parade was held. Not the standard military parades that had graced Paeragosto’s streets many times before. No, it was a parade, for the Queen.

Uiona rubbed kohl on her eyes and oil on her hands, the Batonnese version of sun protection. She wore a veil of indigo and a crown of gold with heavy gems that had been mined in one of the many mines that Batonn had given her people.

She looked at herself in the mirror.

I never wanted to be queen. 

This crown is too heavy.

She had wanted to be the northern province commander. She had wanted to marry someone who came for the harvest seasons and brought her books she had not read, someone whose hands were warm and whose voice she knew before she was required to perform anything for it. She had wanted to watch the hawks in autumn and she wanted to play her double viol until her fingers hurt and then play it a little longer and have no one require anything of the playing.

She had wanted to be young in the ordinary way, the way that was allowed to end at its own pace.

Instead she was this.

This morning she would stand in front of a city full of people who had been waiting for her and who deserved better than what she had managed to give them and who were going to cheer for her anyway because that was what her people did — they cheered for what they loved regardless of whether the love had been earned or simply inherited along with everything else.

I am afraid I have failed you.

She thought it at the mirror. At the woman in the crown.

I am afraid that every choice I have made has been insufficient and that when I stand in front of you today you will see it, that the composure will finally crack under the weight of what it has been asked to hold, that the Queen you have been waiting for will not be equal to the Queen you needed.

She picked up the scepter Lord Sahir had brought it.

She had looked at the scepter.

She had known it all her life ,her father's scepter, the Geronh ceremonial piece, the highland silver with the Varath stone set at the handle and the line of clan markings running down the shaft, four centuries of her family's history in the specific weight of it.

She had reached for it and then she had stopped.

The tip.

The scepter had always been ornamental.

The tip had been sharpened.

Not recently, the sharpening was old, the edge worn in a way that suggested it had been done and then used and then not restored, and along the shaft near the tip there was the darkening of something that had dried and hardened and had not been cleaned. She did not need to be told what it was. She had seen enough of it in the past three years to know the color and the texture of blood that had been on metal long enough to become part of it.

Her father's scepter.

Someone had used her father's scepter. She looked at Sahir and she said nothing because there was nothing available to say.

The noise reached her before the doors opened.

She had been prepared for noise. The sound of it was different from everything she had heard in two years.

It was not the measured Imperial applause of a receiving line or the controlled social noise of a gala. It was not the Senate's procedural murmur or the administrative quiet of the meetings she had been sitting in. It was the sound of people who had been waiting and had stopped waiting.

After this she had the clan meeting, but for some reason, this was scarier. 

They were calling her name.

Her name. Her actual name. Not Lady Thrawn, not Senator Geronh, not the conditional regent of the Batonn sector under Imperial administrative oversight.

Her name in the Batonnese register, the full form of it, the way it was said at the harvest ceremonies and the highland chapel dedications and the clan presentations when she was ten years old and her father had stood behind her and named every face in the crowd.

(Y/N) Varath Geronh.

She came through the doors.

The crowd rushed the barrier.

She understood, in the first second of it, the word rushed in a way she had not understood before. It was not aggressive, she could see that, could see the faces at the barrier and the hands reaching toward her and the quality of the reaching, which was not threat but the specific desperation of people who needed to confirm with their hands what their eyes were telling them. But the understanding did not make it less overwhelming. The sound and the movement and the press of the crowd against the barrier created a space that was too full of feeling for her to navigate without cost.

She smiled at the faces she could reach, she inclined her head, she placed her free hand over the hands that reached through the barrier and she felt the specific physical reality of her people.The roughness of farming hands, the calluses of the mining communities, the fine-boned grip of an old highland woman who held her fingers and did not let go for a long moment and looked at her with eyes that had been waiting and were now done waiting.

She felt the specific suffocation of being loved by people you were afraid you had failed.

In front of her, an eopie was ceremonially dressed and was ready for her to mount.

She had not ridden since before the insurgency. The animal's specific warmth beneath her, the highland breed, the ones that moved through the desert terrain with the patient certainty of animals that had been doing this for longer than anyone could remember. She lifted herself into the saddle with the muscle memory of a girl who had learned to ride before she learned to read and had not forgotten it.

“(Y/N),” Tannian said below her, “I was supposed to help you. It’s not lady like.”

She laughed and he did too.

She held the scepter across her lap and she looked at the capital and she let herself look at it. 

The streets of the capital that she had run through as a child with her brothers, the ones she had traced on the maps she was not supposed to have acquired, the ones that she had looked at in the documentation from Lord Virex and Irtur and had translated from numbers into streets with the specific ache of someone who loves a place they cannot be.

She moved through it.

The crowd moved with her.

She was looking at the faces, moving through the capital on the ceremonially dressed eopie with the clan thrones assembled on the palace steps ahead of her and the crowd pressing at the barriers, and she was finding faces and receiving them and holding each one for the half second available.

She found the man three faces back on the left side of the road.

He was standing still in the moving crowd, which was itself remarkable, the specific quality of stillness in a space that was all motion. He was middle-aged, Torvek clan bone structure, the dark coloring of the lowland families mixed with the highland in the way of people whose families had moved between the clans over generations.

His face.

The burn mark began at his left jaw and ran upward toward the temple and disappeared into the hairline, old and settled in the way of burns that had long since finished doing what they were going to do and had left their record in the skin. Not recent. Two years or more.

The insurgency.

She did not know his name.

She held his gaze.

He held hers.

He did not rush the barrier. He did not call her name. He simply stood in the crowd that was moving around him and he looked at her with the eyes of a man who had survived something and was still in the process of understanding what that meant, and she looked back with the eyes of a woman who understood that the surviving was not the end of it and never had been.

She inclined her head to him.

He inclined his.

She moved on.

The palace steps.

The clan thrones were arranged in the semicircle behind the speaking position. The ironwood chairs with the clan markings, each one bearing its lord or lady. She could see their faces from here.

She was three steps from the top when a little girl appeared, holding white summer flowers in her hands.She thrust them forward.

(Y/N) stopped.

She looked at the girl. The girl looked at her with the complete seriousness of someone who had something to say and had been preparing it.

"When I grow up," the girl said, in Batonnese, "I want to be a starfighter pilot. Like you."

The crowd had quieted in the specific way that crowds quieted when something was happening that required quiet. She was aware of all of it,  the clan lords behind her, the security complement, the administrative aides, the ISB officers she had not looked at but had catalogued when she dismounted , and she was aware of none of it.

She was in a docking bay on the Chimaera.

She was in a fighter jet that she did not know how to fly at the level the situation required, with a D on every simulation exam she had ever taken, with the specific recklessness of someone who had decided that dying for a thing was the only adequate substitute for knowing how to do it.

She was in the tractor beam.

She was being carried in.

She had done that. This child wanted to be her.

She looked at the girl.

"You will be a better pilot than I," she said quietly. Just for the girl. Just for the six years old and the serious expression and the highland flowers. "I promise you that it is not difficult."

(Y/N) pressed the finger to her lips once more, the secret between them, and the girl's serious expression broke into something that was entirely and completely a six-year-old's joy, the specific brightness of a child who had been given something real.

(Y/N) bowed and faced the crowd and they made a sound that was not describable. Then she raised the scepter and the sound settled and she stood in front of her people for the first time in two years and she spoke.

"Batonn has bled," she said loud enough so that her voice carried "I do not stand before you today and tell you otherwise. I do not stand before you and tell you that what was lost was not lost, or that the grief is small, or that the account of what this planet has been asked to pay is balanced. It is not balanced. I know the names of your dead. I have carried them. I will carry them until I have no more carrying left in me."

She exhaled.

"My objective as your queen," she continued, "is this, and it is only this: to keep you safe. To ensure that what happened here may never happen on this soil again. Not to any family. Not to any clan. Not to any child who is standing in this crowd today and who will grow up to be a doctor or a miner or a healer or a clan lord or something we cannot yet imagine." She looked at the mountains. "Batonn will not fall. Not while I draw breath. Not while there is a Geronh name to put to the throne and a people to stand behind it."

She looked at her people.

"I am home," she said. Simply. Without the formal register. Without the ceremony. "I am home."

Batonn will never fall.

The clan lords behind her rose.

The crowd answered.

She turned around and rushed into the building to the left, where Irtur had led her to. It was not the Geronh palace, as she was not allowed there yet. She calmed herself then revealed herself to Irtur who nodded and escorted her back to Governor Restos’ palace.

“Let us go riding soon, my Queen.”

“Yes, I would like that.”

════ ⋆★⋆ ════

She heard them before she opened the door.

The council chamber’s walls carried sound the way water carried current. She had known this room since she was a child sitting outside it while her father held his sessions, pressed against the wall with her ear to the cold stone and Tannian beside her doing the same thing.

She had learned more about governance in that corridor than she had learned in any formal instruction.

What she heard now through the door was not the controlled deliberation of her father's council sessions. It was considerably louder than that. Lord Virex's voice was unmistakably loud. Lord Torvek responded to him, sharp and direct. Lord Veyruun saying something she couldn't quite catch that produced a burst of laughter from at least three people. Lord Draxil's voice cut across the laughter, he had an opinion and intended to deliver it before the room moved on.

Then something that sounded like an argument began.

Then what was definitely an argument.

She looked at the door.

Behind her, the two ISB officers that Restos's office had assigned to the session stood at their distance. They were here to observe and record. 

She opened the door and the room went completely quiet when she did. Six clan lords and their advisors, the room full of the specific energy of a gathering that had been building toward something and had been interrupted mid-build, and every face in it turned to the door.

She looked at the room.

The room looked at her.

She walked in.

And she sat in the Geronh throne at the head of the chamber.

The room sat with her.

Irtur, was at her near right, looking at her with the eyes of a man who had been managing this room for the past twenty minutes and was relieved to hand it back.

"My lords," she said. "My lady."

She inclined her head to Lady Sereth.

Lady Sereth inclined hers in return.

"It is good to be here. Even if here is not entirely what it was."

"It is nice," Lord Rhyss said, with the dry precision of a man selecting each word like a stone from a riverbed, "to see you finally on the planet you rule, Your Majesty."

"My lord," she said pleasantly. "I appreciate the sentiment. I was on a rather extended holiday for fourteen months. Imperial hospitality, very exclusive, no windows , and then some time in an apartment on Coruscant. So yes. It is very nice to be back."

The room did something.

It was the noticeable ripple of people receiving something they had not expected to receive, which was their queen making a joke at her own imprisonment. Veyruun's expression shifted first, the recalibration of a man who had been prepared for composure and was encountering something more complicated. Draxil looked at Virex. Sereth's eyes moved briefly toward the door , towards the ISB officers.

Torvek made a sound that was, she was fairly certain, the involuntary beginning of a laugh that he had caught before it completed itself.

"And what of the Grand Admiral?" Draxil asked, "Not joining us today?"

"The Grand Admiral is on campaign," she said.

"Of course," Draxil said. " Very important business. Don’t bring him here ever." 

"Lord Draxil," Irtur said, mildly.

"I'm simply noticing…"

"Too scared to bring your husband, Your Majesty?" Torvek said.

Then Rhyss laughed.

The laughter broke something loose in the room,  not the tension exactly, something adjacent to it, the specific pressure of a gathering that had been managing itself carefully suddenly finding a point of release. Draxil laughed. One of Virex's advisors, a young man who had been doing his best to be invisible, made a sound he immediately suppressed. Even Veyruun, did something with his mouth that was possibly the shadow of a smile.

"I thought Batonn could manage a meeting without him." She said.

"Barely," Veyruun said.

More laughter.

Virex looked at her with the eyes of a man assessing something he had not expected to be assessing. 

"Alright," Virex said. The word that meant he had decided the room had had what it needed and was now going to work. "We have things to discuss."

"We do," she said. "Let's begin."

She started with the itinerary.

Not the full itinerary , not the parts that were not in the approved version, not the parts that contained Irtur and Gret Virex and the water system and the seventy-five minute window. The approved itinerary, the one that had been filed with the sector administration and that the ISB officers standing near the door had already read.

"Day two," she said. "The Sereth hold."

Sereth sat forward slightly.

"I will be bringing documentation," (Y/N) continued. "The labor review submissions for the southern districts. The agricultural transit tariff appeals. The cultural heritage reclassification petitions for the four clan artifacts currently held in Coruscant administrative storage. I want your advisors present. Not for ceremony. For the working session."

"They will be there," Sereth said.

"Day three," she said. "Virex hold."

"I heard you requested the palace visit," Draxil said. "Day six."

"One hour," she said. "Approved through the cultural heritage channel."

"And the northern territories?" Rhyss asked.

The room shifted.

Not obviously , the ISB officers near the door did not move, the administrative aides did not look up from their documentation. But the quality of the air in the room changed.

"Day four," she said. "The perimeter settlements. Four hours I am going. The visit is approved. The security complement is finalized. I want reports from each clan on the current camp conditions before I arrive. I want the updated figures before day four."

Virex looked at his advisors.

"The speech," he said. "Day five. The extraction site."

"Yes," she said.

"What is in it?" Draxil asked.

She looked at the table briefly.

"What needs to be in it," she said, "to get me where I need to be."

Irtur looked up from the table for the first time in several minutes. He met her gaze for exactly one second.

She moved on.

"And the marriage," Rhyss said.

The room went to the particular quiet it went to when Rhyss spoke after a period of silence.

She looked at him.

"What about it?" 

"There are people," he said carefully, "in the eastern dunes. Who have feelings about the arrangement. About what it represents. They ask me what to tell them."

"Tell them," she said, "that their queen came home."

"That is not an answer," he said.

"It is the answer I have today," she said. "The rest of it is being built. You will see the building when there is something to show you."

Veyruun looked at her with the assessment that was always present in him, the calculation of a man who had survived by reading situations accurately and had arrived at the age he had through the consistent accuracy of those readings.

"The Veil of Batonn," he said. Quietly. "That is what they call you."

"I know," she said.

"A veil must eventually be lifted," he said.

"I am working on the lifting."

The ISB officers near the door had not moved. She was aware of them in the specific constant awareness she maintained for things she could not change and needed to account for.

"Is there anything else before we move to the secondary agenda?" she asked.

"No," Virex said. With the weight of a man who had several things he was choosing not to say yet and was acknowledging the choice by not making it.

"Good," she said, "Then let's continue.”