The People They Chose to Be
The Bad Batch: Captain Howzer x Maren (female oc)
This is my first Star Wars fan fiction. I'm hoping to post the chapters bi-weekly. Please take a gander. Any feedback is greatly appreciated! This is mostly a romance.
Trigger warnings apply (this is my first time publishing on Tumblr so I may not be doing this right, but read with caution, especially the later chapters). Also, this is for MATURE/ADULT audiences only.
Chapter Five — The Dancer
By the time the colder season came down off the ridges, Howzer had learned the inside of her house the way he’d once memorized military tactics.
The windchimes were always first, because he heard them before he even saw her gate. She had hung them in the window that faced her garden above the couch with the soft blanket – a few of simple shell and carved wood, but two of them were cut crystal, blue. When she lit candles in the evening the flames caught the light in them and fractured it across the walls. Across her. Then it was the scent. Green, faintly floral, it caught on the breeze and in her hair.
He’d started thinking the word home when he thought of the climb up her hill, and had decided not to examine it too closely, in case it stopped.
Maren had started watching his hands.
It embarrassed her how much. She had learned how to appraise a man and to perform exactly what he was looking for, without him ever asking. She knew the trade of admiration the way a smith knows steel. None of that was what happened to her when Howzer set his rough, scarred hands flat on her table and turned her cup in them while giving her an easy smile. That wasn’t appraisal. That was wanting, simple and unschooled, and entirely her own. It would rise from her lower abdomen all the way to her cheeks, when he would push his sleeves up, exposing the veins on his forearms, or the set of his shoulders. It was the way his mouth set when he was working up the courage to say something difficult. The novelty of it, of wanting something so honestly, undid her a little.
She kept that to herself. But she caught him, once or twice, watching her with what she thought was the same uncareful hunger she possessed. He would look away quickly, neck red, chew on his lower lip, and the cup would turn over his hands at a faster pace. That fact kept her warm on cold nights better than her blankets did.
She got a different side of him those evenings, too — one she suspected his brothers never saw.
He kept trying to help. That was the trouble. He was a captain who could hold a line and field strip his DC-17 blind, but he picked up a marsh root and set about chopping it like he was defusing live ordnance. After a considerable effort he produced a heap of mangled vegetables that clearly lost the fight.
“You’re massacring them,” she observed over his shoulder one evening. Maren couldn’t supress the grin that spread across her face, but she tried by pressing her lips together.
“I’m preparing them,” Howzer huffed, but he also had a little smile playing at the corners of his lips.
“You’re interrogating them. They’ve told you everything they know!” And then she laughed, a real but shy laugh, her hand flying up to her mouth too late to catch it. Howzer turned soon enough to see the pink spread across her cheeks. He set the knife down and rubbed the back of his neck, looking anywhere but directly at her.
“You’ve got a nice laugh,” he told the marsh-roots, the tips of his ears gone red. “You should — do that more.”
Which only made her do it again, worse, which made the back of his neck redder still, and neither of them got much more cooking done that night.
There were other things she shared with him those cold evenings.
She made him her favorite tea — the creamy, spiced one, dark and sweet, with bark she ground herself and a pinch of spices she saved up the credits for. She always made her own mix.
“What is that?” he’d asked the first time, peering into the cup as if it might answer, then handed her the mug to ask for more.
Every so often, on a whim, she baked. It was never her favorite activity, she much preferred cooking savory food, and baking was too much of a science for her to enjoy, but she found that the clones tended towards sweets. It was always a humble presentation, put together from a little flour, sugar, and citrus, eggs, a few spices. But it was bright and sweet. She set a slab of it in front of Howzer one night, expecting nothing. He went very still after the first bite.
“Maren,” he said, in a tone as serious as he would use for a field report to a general, “This is the best thing I have ever eaten in my life.” She laughed then, brushing it off, but she went warm all the way through and turned to hide her blush.
__________________________________________________________
She’d been helping Patch re-pack the squad’s med-kits one afternoon, two healers at her table sorting bacta-patches and sutures, and he’d caught her forearm to move it out of his way and then paused, turning it, looking at the smooth unmarked inside of it in the light. “Huh,” he said. “How long’ve you been at this? Field medicine, out here, no proper kit?” “Long enough.”
Maren had been helping Patch repack the squad’s med-kits when some of the styptic salve Patch requested from her. He’d nudged her forearm out of his way and then paused, taking it in his hand and turning it.
“Huh,” he said, looking at how smooth and unmarked it was, not a blemish on her pale skin. “How long’ve you been at this? Practically doing field medicine, gardening, working?”
“Long enough.”
“And not a mark on you.” He turned her arm the other way. “No burns. No little scars. Everyone I’ve met has got hands like a cutting board by your age. You heal clean.” He grinned, easy, and let her go. “Lucky. I scar if you look at me wrong.”
It was nothing. An idle remark, a brother making small talk over bandages. It went through her like cold water all the same. Because there was a reason she healed well, and for one silent second, with Patch’s easy grin on her and her own unmarked arm turned up to the light, she was certain he could see clear through to it.
She held her breath for just a moment, then composed herself. “Just being careful. And lotion every night,” she chuckled, keeping her voice light and breezy, playful. He laughed and the moment passed her by smoothly.
____________________________________________________________
Howzer opened up about Spar on one of the rare nights with rain, which felt fortuitous to Maren, as if the clouds had known what their conversation would hold.
He had brought up Kamino weeks prior – the rain, the white halls, rows of identical men. But it had been generalities, the overarching concept. This night, with the rain beating down on the metal roof and giving her garden the soak it needed, he delved into something much more personal. He told her about one of his brothers. Maren felt at her most relaxed with the sound of the rain and found herself asking him what or who he thought of on nights like this. He’d gone quiet for several moments, and she started to worry that her question was too forward.
Howzer looked over at her, curled in her blue blanket, the sound of the rain drowning out the windchimes and the candlelight casting a warm glow over her features. Her face tilted, curious and relaxed, comfortable in the silence while she waited for him to speak. He looked back towards the candle flickering on her low table.
“A brother of mine. Name was Spar,” he said. “Came up in my batch. Loud. Couldn’t shoot straight to save his life, which, you know — bad trait, in our line of work.” He let out a dark chuckle, and then his face turned serious again. “Lost him early. First battle on Geonosis. And what I keep —” he stopped, started over, voice a pitch lower. “What I keep coming back to is there’s ten thousand men walking around right now with his exact face, and not one of them is him. He was the only one of him there ever was. And the galaxy never even noticed there’d been a him at all.”
His eyes widened and his shoulders tensed, like he was surprised at himself for saying so much.
“Sorry. Don’t know where that came from.”
“Don’t apologize.” Her voice had gone strange, soft but with a crack. She was looking at him across the candlelight like she aching, tears pricked at the corners of her eyes. “He was real. They were all real. Whatever anyone decided to make you for — you are all real, and you noticed him, and that means he is remembered.” She had to stop and steady herself. She took a breath. “I’m — sorry. I don’t know why that -”
“It’s alright,” he cut her off, hearing the strain in her voice and giving her an out, and leaned back against the couch, content. Howzer turned his head and smiled at her then, not the loose grin like Patch, but relaxed all the same.
__________________________________________________________
He noticed the way she moved a long time before he found the nerve to ask about it.
He was a soldier; he knew bodies — frightened ones, tired ones, the half-second a body braces before it breaks from cover. He had never once seen anyone move the way she did. There was a fluidity, a refinement, that didn’t belong out here in the dust, deliberate and weightless at once, and the word that kept coming to him while he was watching her flit around in her garden, was beautiful. Not her face, though certainly that too, any man would acknowledge that, but the way she carried herself, the quiet grace of how she moved through the world.
It wasn’t the beauty that bothered him. It was that he knew trained when he saw it. And nobody moved like that by accident.
He mulled it over in his head for the better part of a week before inquiring about it.
“Can I ask you something?” he said one evening, “and you tell me if it’s none of my business.”
The rain had not made another appearance, and likely wouldn’t for some time. The crystals in the window had picked up the candlelight and flickers of blue danced across her small home. She was folding one of her soft blankets, and she looked over at him and stilled. “You can always ask.”
“The way you move,” he pushed through the awkwardness of it. “I’ve noticed it. It’s more pronounced when you think no one is looking, when you’re in your garden, or,” he paused and inclined his head towards her laundry, “folding blankets.” His neck reddened. “I know training when I see it. It’s been my whole life. And I’ve never seen someone move like, well, like you. It’s nice,” he stuttered just a moment before adding, “graceful. Who taught you that?”
He watched her set the blanket down very slowly, watched her hands fidget in her lap. She tucked a strand of hair back. She bit the inside of her lip. All the tells that she was anxious began to manifest, and Howzer worried he had uncovered a minefield. When she finally spoke, her voice wasn’t the smooth register he was used to. It was unsteady and she let out a higher pitched “umm” nervously.
“Yeah.” A breath, and her fingers reached for the ends of her hair, twisting. “Yeah, somebody taught me. All of it. How to walk into a room. How to hold my head, my hands. They started when I was little.” Her voice went thinner and had a shake he had never heard before, not even when she told him about her master leaving her defenceless. “There wasn’t a me before it. People always think there’s a real you hidden somewhere underneath, safe, that they never got to. There isn’t. They built me from the ground up. There’s no version of me they didn’t put their hands on.”
“Maren—”
“Let me, please?” A desperate croak escaped her voice. She pressed the back of her wrist quickly under one eye, almost angry at the tear that was there. He stood up, took two large steps to where she was, and guided her by the shoulder to sit down on the couch. “You know I was a slave but –“ another shaky breath, “you should know what you’ve been having dinner with.” She tried to make it light, but she broke instead. “There’s a soft word for what I was. Courtesan. It’s a nicer word for something a man owns and dresses up and keeps to himself to please him. Sometimes he would feel generous and hand one of us over to a guest. Or to sell if he tires of us. And we’re supposed to smile and be grateful, because the alternative is so much worse.” She was crying now, quietly, furiously, swiping at her cheeks, hating it. “And the grace you think is so lovely — it isn’t mine, none of it’s mine, it was trainedfrom practically a baby, for him, so that I’d be pleasing. That’s the word they used. Pleasing.” Her hands were just shaking now. “I’ve never said any of this to a living soul. I don’t know why I’m — I don’t know why it’s you.”
Something close to nausea and anger, but more ferocious, moved up Howzer’s chest that he couldn’t keep off his face – cold, complete, and total fury at the man that owned her, at every guest he’d handed her to like a dish off his table, at the whole obscene arrangement. He swallowed thickly, his Adam’s apple bobbing, fists closed so tightly his knuckles white. He wanted to break something with his hands. He’d felt this exact emotion weeks ago, up on the ridge with his blaster trembling in her grip. Howzer understood, as he did then, that his rage wasn’t going to help her right now. So, he settled his face and bottled it up, storing it for later, promising himself he’d get to use it when the time was right. He steadied his hands.
He didn’t ask. He didn’t recoil. He didn’t go soft and pitying. She had given him knowledge of herself, a secret, that she had been carrying entirely alone. And she had shared it with him.
Howzer did the only thing he was sure he could do right. He reached across the cough, unhurried, giving her time to recoil, waiting for the flinch. It never came. He took both of her shaking hands in his two rough ones, ones that were twice the size of hers and held them. He didn’t wait for her to look up at him.
“Hey,” he whispered, voice low and certain. “I’ve got you. I’m not going anywhere. You’re safe.” He wouldn’t tell her it’s alright, because that would’ve been a lie. It wasn’t. But he could tell her she was safe. He could show her she was.
She broke all the way, then, and gripped his hands.
He added his other hand to hers and let her grip as tight as she wanted, resisting the urge to pull her the rest of the way across the couch and into his arms. When the worst of it had passed, when she was down to shudders and wet, ragged breaths, he let go of one of her hands and reached for the soft small towel folded with her laundry and brought it up gently toward her face.
For Maren, a hand coming toward a crying woman’s face had only ever meant one thing in the whole of her life. She had been struck for tears — slapped quiet more times than she could count, backhanded for the crime of letting them show, taught before she had the words for it that weeping was something you did silently and invisibly or else paid for in bruises. Her body knew the lesson even now, when her mind had begun to forget it. She braced.
And he only dabbed, soft as anything, at the tears under one eye. Then the other. Slow and clumsy and unbearably careful, a big rough soldier’s hand gentling a scrap of cloth across her face as though she might tear. As if it had never once crossed his mind that her crying might be an offense to be corrected instead of a wound to be tended.
No one had ever done that for her. They had wanted her pleasing and smiling, and when she failed they had punished her, and not the man who had owned her, nor any of the ones he handed her to, had ever reached toward her tears with anything but a sneer or a closed hand. Or, if she was desperately unlucky that day, arousal.
She stared at him while he worked. This strong, dutiful man frowning in concentration over the business of drying a woman’s tears, and somewhere in the deepest, most bricked-over room of her, a door she’d sealed so long ago she’d forgotten it existed came quietly, frighteningly loose.
“There,” he said when he’d finished, low and a little awkward, setting the cloth aside and gathering her hand back into his. He had no idea what he’d just done. He never would, not fully.
She did. She would remember that small, gentle nothing of a gesture for the rest of her life.
He didn’t say anything more. He wasn’t a man for speeches and he knew it. He just kept her hands in his until the last of her tearful hiccups abated and the candles burned down.
When she could speak again, she voiced the fear she’d been circling all night. “You’ll look at me differently now.” It wasn’t a question. “Every time you see me, you’ll know what I was. What I was kept for. I won’t be a healer to you anymore. I’ll be — that.”
He was quiet a moment. Then he tipped her chin up, coaxing her puffy eyes to look at him. His brow furrowed, angry and sad, and for a moment he almost gripped her chin too hard.
“You keep talking like it’s something you did,” he said gruffly. “It isn’t. You were a slave, Maren. Somebody owned you and used you and you didn’t get a say in a single minute of it. That’s not something you did. It’s something that was done to you. There’s a world of difference between those two.” His voice came flat and sure but didn’t lose the rough edge. “I don’t think less of you for living through it. I think more. And if you’re sitting there bracing for me to go cold, or pitying, or to start handling you like you’re spoiled goods — you can stop. It’s not coming. Not from me. Not ever.”
She stared at him. “You really don’t care?” she asked, barely a whisper.
“I care that it was done to you,” he said, voice raising in volume, but deepening in pitch, gravelly. “I care that anybody ever got to put a hand on you that you hadn’t chosen. I’ll care about that till the day I die.” He shook his head slowly. “But whether it makes you less, to me — no. There’s nothing you could’ve told me tonight that would’ve done that. Nothing.” And then, quieter, the tips of his ears going red the way they did when feelings outran him, “You’d have a hard time finding the bottom of what I—” He stopped. He couldn’t finish the sentence.
Maren nodded, resting some of the weight of her head into his palm. He, this steady man with no graceful words, had earned her trust. Held her without wanting anything back. He earned all her secrets, and she realized that she was going to give them all to him, because she could not love him fully from behind a locked door.
