#it keeps repeating

“And hair,” the courier glanced over his shoulder at the guards, and then abruptly reached out and stroked a quick, furtive hand over the baby’s dark, fuzzy little head. The midwife watched him closely, because some of those allowed to pass between the camp and the factory up the hill were as two-faced as that job implied, but she also allowed it, because on Vallt, touching a newborn was not just good luck for the adult, but it was a tiny promise to the baby - I shall not harm you. May the world follow my example. 

Then the courier was off, through the gate and up to the factory, where presumably the babe’s other parent was laboring under the Separatists’ beady little eyes, may the Force curse them all with anal worms. The midwife spit twice and turned to settle the squalling little babe against her exhausted mother’s chest. “It’s done, then,” she said as quietly as she could and still be heard over the high, furious screams.

“He’ll get it,” the mother asked, her face still pale and her voice faint but her arms coming up to wrap around the babe as tight and strong as any new mother. “Galen. He’ll get the holo, he’ll know?”

“You paid the price,” the midwife reassured her, which was as close to saying yes as she was willing to do. After all, one never knew with the couriers, or the Separatists for that matter. “He’ll know his daughter.”

“She really does,” the mother said quietly, looking down at the baby, who was still crying, but fitfully now, as if she wasn’t sure her complaint was worth the effort but she also wasn’t willing to let it go so easily, either. “Her hair,” the mother clarified, or attempted to. The drugs that one of the other prisoners had managed to smuggle in for her yesterday were finally taking effect, pulling her under and giving her body a chance to recover from a birth done in a thin, open-sided tent in the middle of Vallt’s brutal winter. “She gets that from my side of the family,” the mother whispered as the midwife tucked more ragged shirts around them and sat close, lending her body warmth as she could. “We were all born...hair...she’s like me, I was...”