Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

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Planet: unspecified space

Year: present day (14 BBY)

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Agatha’s eyes don’t need to be open to know when someone’s invading her space, and she definitely doesn’t need to have her eyes open to know that her blaster is leveled precisely at their head the minute she feels the presence start to intrude. It’s so painfully like an intergalactic dive bar to be full of people who don’t know the concept of personal space, and who don’t seem to know what’s good for them. Then again, Agatha knows that the parts that make her the most dangerous are also the most invisible… and for good reason.

“Agnes O’Connor?”

She barely manages to grunt out something vaguely affirmative over the heavy sigh that tries to stifle the response. The voice sounds young, but in this part of the galaxy and especially inside a seedy dump like this, she figures there’s more interesting things going on than a dumbass teen poking into the wrong corner booth.

“So, confession, I know an egregious amount about you.” That does earn him a sigh. “I’ve been obsessed since I first read up on your Secu 5 days.”

“Hmm, those were good days,” she responds, and she knows it’s convincing even as she winces a little on the inside. Those ‘good’ days had been particularly brutal for everyone involved, fresh on the heels of a lot of personal stuff she usually doesn’t even think about. Actively avoids thinking about, as a matter of fact. But it had also been enough to put her name on the map, in this way, at least. As an enforcer, fixer, mercenary, thief – whatever she needed to be so she could keep moving, keep out of jail, and make a big enough fuss at being someone she wasn't so that no one would actually think to ask who she really was. But she has much more recent stuff on her resume now, and Secu 5 had been a few years ago, when this child was probably too young to be following the gossip in the criminal underground, so she does finally crack an eye open, interested enough to at least take a partial look at the idiot child breathing in her space. The single eye turns into two, as blue eyes take in a seemingly unassuming-looking human: young, more limbs than body, in a home-knit sweater that seems too innocent for his surroundings and enough eyeliner to partially make up for the sweater. 

“I have a job for you.”

“If you know as much about me as you claim, you’ll know I don’t work with, or for, children,” she responds, after one more lingering appraisal. She puts as much dismissiveness as she can into the statement, even though it’s not a lie. She has been largely indiscriminate in terms of what jobs she will take, has taken great care to remain aligned with only her own financial interests to both the benefit and detriment of basically every organized crime syndicate there is, but she’s always been open about her limitations and her own motivations. At least, to the extent to which those dealing with her needed to know about them.

“I’m 16.”

“Oh, sorry,” she says, not sorry at all. “Teens, then.” It’s an easy amendment to make, not convinced in any way by his overinflated sense of maturity. Children. Her moral high ground is somewhat ruined by the eye-roll she doesn’t manage to stop.

He sighs. “Listen, I’m with this group–”

“I’ve worked with every syndicate there is, Teen, and have established contacts with each of them. I highly doubt any of them have sent you. And I’m not dumb enough to work for whatever club your afterschool daycare has going, so if you’ll excuse me, I was having a perfectly nice time sitting here by myself doing absolutely nothing, and you’re ruining the vibes.” She lowers the blaster, though she doesn’t put it away or put it down (she hasn’t made it this far by underestimating anyone, even dumb kids), and readjusts the drape of the shawl she’s wearing. They’re favored by the locals here, and she had wanted to blend in, but she honestly can’t figure out if she likes it more as a cape, a wrap, or nowhere near her person. She’s leaning towards the latter, personally.

“I’m with the Rebellion, and we have a job on an Imperial base we want your help with,” he says, undeterred.

The words are enough to provoke her into actual engagement. “Do you have a death wish, Teen?” she snarls, moving finally from her nonchalant slouch to lean over the table between them, pressing into his space. “You have no idea who I am. No idea who I’m working for. No idea who else is listening.” She punctuates each point with a poke of the muzzle of her blaster to his chest; she hadn’t exactly meant to be threatening him like that, but it had still been in her hand and, well, maybe it would help make her point abundantly clear. “Highly recommend you leave delusions of grandeur to the grownups, because being this kind of stupid on the Rebellion’s dime is going to get you a one-way ticket to an Imperial prison.”

She’s mildly impressed that he doesn’t flinch too hard, but hopes it doesn’t mean she’s losing her touch. The ‘Rebellion’ he says he works for could be any one of several groups, but Agatha hasn’t been too keen on joining up yet with any of them. It’s impossible, she figures, for anything as heavy-handed as the Empire to go around enforcing its agenda without getting some push back. The groups have been sporadic, disorganized, and poorly funded, from what Agatha has been able to tell, but they have been growing in numbers, and the organization will likely come soon, if the Empire doesn’t get to them first.

“I know you’re Agnes O’Connor,” he says simply, “and I know enough to know that you’ll take almost any job you can find when the Empire is the one taking the hit.”

And, okay, fine, that’s at least half true. She does hate the Empire with an especially fiery passion, so sue her. And she can hardly be mad at him for knowing her only by her alias, when she hasn’t used her given name in years and hardly had attached it to the kinds of activities she took part in these days.

“Fine, then, Teen,” she says, stressing the nickname. “Why me? Rebels are about the only gig in town I haven’t worked, yet.”

“We thought it would be nice to have someone as capable as you, and your calling card wouldn’t hurt either.”

She notices that she’s stuck her tongue into her cheek, considering his words, too late to keep from doing it, and stops abruptly the next moment, grinding her teeth – hard – to keep the memories at bay. That particular habit is one that she picked up from… her, from before, and despite her best efforts, she finds herself doing it at the least convenient times. It’s always harder for her to stay detached on Empire jobs, but something about this child is making it that much harder. Bringing up her ‘calling card,’ as he called it, doesn’t help, putting the shadow of her second biggest mistake in a room already full with the ghost of her first. 

“Fine, let’s talk,” she says, grudgingly, “but not here. You might be content to get yourself killed with your own stupidity, but I’m not doing a hit on anything Imperial with plans made up in some dumb bar called the Flying Farthier or whatever the fuck this place is called.” He opens his mouth, like he’s really going to tell her the name of this Force-forsaken cantina, but she holds up a hand before he can. “Don’t care, Teen. Say, you got an actual name?” She would get some kind of perverse pleasure out of calling him Teen for the rest of, well, however long this job lasts, but she does figure that her sense of self-preservation should win out for at least as long as it takes to learn who she’s about to work with.

“Well, my parents call me W–”

“Never mind, don’t care,” she interjects quickly, as the boy clearly winds up for a story that is way, way too long-winded for the question that she asked. Self-preservation still gets to win, though, because she gets the impression that if she had to listen to his life story, she would be flinging herself off the nearest cliff. It’s undoubtedly something cliche and boring, with a dash of tragedy as befits a member of the Rebellion. She can already tell he has misguided optimism enough to make it an unbearable retelling; Agatha is allergic to both optimism and bonding, and only two people have ever called her nice in her whole life, and they’re both dead, or dead enough, so… that’s a no.

“Follow this tracking beacon tomorrow, and we can talk details,” she says awkwardly, realizing that he was just going to sit and stare at her if she let him. The beacon hits the table a minute later, the single red light blinking gently up at them. “Don’t try to follow me,” she adds, standing up in such a way that her frame takes up the bulk of the booth’s space even though she’s not the galaxy’s largest human. “And know that if you don’t show up alone tomorrow, I’ll assume this is a trap and kill everyone you bring, then you, and then everyone you’ve ever talked to.” 

The smile she levels at him is a little too full of teeth to be polite, a little too feral, but it seems to be the only thing she’s said so far that has penetrated the cloud of self-importance that seems to be acting in the place of his frontal lobe, because she sees him swallow hard, nodding, as she turns away with a soft scuff of her worn boots on the floor.

If he tries to follow her out, she doesn’t know; she’s gone before he even leaves the booth, just another faceless person walking through town on their way to somewhere else. She’d be lying if she said she actually enjoyed being in cities, even ones as small as this, but she had found a way, over the years, to get comfortable in the bustle of a place where being out in the open was its own way of hiding. In a way, it matched her own style – it was, after all, exactly how she was keeping her identity a secret. Maybe in another life she could have settled down on a farm or something somewhere out of the way where you maybe knew two neighbors and saw them almost never, but she had always been a little too restless for the kind of inner peace that sort of thing required. Not that she couldn’t have done it, wouldn’t have done it, for –

Nope.

She slams down on that thought ruthlessly as she punches a code into a panel and slides into the room once the door opens. It could have been almost any door in the galaxy, tucked away behind a few shops, down an alley no one would ever think to go down, in the kind of town you end up in by mistake. Or because of a mistake. It was the exact place you’d never expect to find someone of her reputation, or someone with a past like hers, but it was exactly what she needed. Bad enough she had been tracked down like this by the Rebellion; she didn’t need the Empire to start looking, too. 

A series of small beeps greets her as she enters the door, tossing the shawl indiscriminately onto the only chair in the room almost immediately. Maybe it made a better outfit for the nap she had been trying to take in the Cantina (though it was laughable to think that she would ever be able to actually rest in public like that), but walking through town with it tangling in her arms and needing to be tugged into place had been enough to convince her that, no, she wouldn’t be trying this particular way of blending in again. There was enough off-world traffic here that it wasn’t necessary, thankfully.

“Hi, Mister,” she said, responding to the small droid as she started to roll the cuffs of her shirt. Blessedly, one from her own closet, and nothing to do with the local fashion. She smiled as the droid rolled up against her foot in greeting before rolling deeper into the apartment.

It was a little ridiculous to have a mouse droid traveling around with her, given that the primary function the MSE-4 series seemed to be used for around the galaxy was carrying messages and she didn’t really have anyone left that she cared to send messages to, but Scratchy had been with her now for several years and was one of the only things from, well, before that she still had with her from before Secu 5, before everything had changed. At least his secondary functions kept her living area clean wherever she was, although he was painfully underutilized even in that sense, given that most of the places she stayed in these days were absolute dumps, and tiny.

She kicked her boots off, dropping them carefully but not too neatly under the chair before flopping onto the bed. She had originally been planning to stay out later than she had – it was barely even sundown, or whatever passed for it here – but had felt it better to leave the Cantina after her discussion with Teen. She freely admitted that she lived life a little more casually than most would have, if they were on a list somewhere of criminals wanted by the Empire and one blown secret away from being revealed as, actually, one of their very most wanted, but the level of carelessness that Teen had shown had spooked her, just a little. Not that she wouldn’t be able to handle the heat, and not that she hadn’t been made a few times in the last few years by some Imperial informants who were looking to bring in a semi-notorious affiliate of more than one of the galaxy’s most infamous crime syndicates, but if there was one thing Agatha hated, it was being boxed in. It made it more likely that she’d make a mistake, the kind of mistake that had unfortunately become somewhat of a calling card throughout the years. Although, better to make that kind of mistake than the kind that would bring too much attention from the Imperial Security Bureau. She could handle stormtroopers and planetary police, but the ISB were one step away from the Inquisitors, and she could not afford to become so big a target that one of those deranged monstrosities came after her with one of those stupid red lightsabers.

She rolled back to her feet, restless. Whatever happened tomorrow after meeting with the kid, she clearly couldn’t stay here anymore. Not if she had been so easy to find. Her syndicate contacts would always be able to find her if they needed a job, and there wasn’t anything tying her to this place. She had just been waiting around for a job to present itself – she wasn’t just a syndicate worker bee, after all. And she supposed a job had presented itself, after a fashion, but getting in with the Rebellion was a heck of a different thing from getting in with one of the syndicates. Better to be a criminal in an Imperial cell than a fucking Rebel. It hardly mattered what flavor he was, exactly, at this point. And she wasn’t too impressed with them so far, if Teen’s approach had been at all indicative of how they operated. What kind of operation used kids like this and didn’t even bother to train them? So now she would be moving on, with or without the Teen, and that meant preparations to make. Enough, at least, that she could stay busy until it was plausibly time to fall asleep.

And that’s exactly what she did, although by the time morning came again she had barely slept, instead staring up at the ceiling and dwelling on all of the memories and feelings she rarely let see the light of day. 

She had packed most of her things last night and made sure that each of her weapons was cleaned and put back together correctly. Some of those weapons had been packed away again, too much for routine carry, but her blaster and a vibroknife had been left out alongside some clothes. 

“Alright, Mister, time to go,” she said to Scratchy, after she’d dressed in something more like her usual style than yesterday’s shawl. The shawl would be left behind with no hesitation, but she couldn’t always wear her duster. The mouse droid beeped at her as she held a bag close to the floor. “I know you hate it, but it’s the only way I’m letting you make the trip back to the ship.” More beeping, this time in a more resigned tone, as Scratchy scooted forward, rolling with Agatha’s help into the bag, which she slung carefully over her shoulder. MSEs were not as popular in places like this as their manufacturers had hoped for, and while prevalent in military environments, they tended to stick out like sore thumbs in places like this. She couldn’t afford to be that memorable, nor would she dare risk someone getting greedy and trying to snag him. At barely a foot tall, essentially a rectangular box on wheels, Scratchy was insanely grabbable, although he was pretty fast when he wanted to be, and it had only taken Agatha one unfortunate incident with a Jawa to learn that she had to be more protective of Scratchy than she had been… before. 

She grabbed her other bag with her right hand, leaving her left free for her blaster just in case, as she made her way to her ship. It would have been too little time to locate her, had anyone tried after she had left the cantina, but not if they had known where she was before Teen had made contact. She wasn’t above thinking the entire thing was a trap, but she was confident enough to feel like she could take a mostly straightforward path to the docking bay where she had stashed her ship. 

Despite being a middle-of-the-line yacht, the starship she currently called home was mostly unassuming. An older model that didn’t draw too many covetous looks in the way a newer, flashier yacht would have with a deliberately rougher-looking paint job to really sell its age, it nonetheless was more than capable of ferrying her around the galaxy and getting her out of some tough spots, thanks to some handy after-market modifications she’d made with some help from the syndicates. Stealing ships was fine, if you were getting paid for it, but it got old after a while, so she’d made a ship a non-negotiable part of her payment to celebrate her fifth job for the Pykes. Or was it Crimson Dawn? It was hard to keep track these days.

Most importantly, it was somewhere she could safely leave Scratchy and her few personal items without too much worry that they would be grabbed, and without having to worry about circling back to pick them up on her way out of town if things got a little too hot and she had to leave in a hurry.

She spends almost no time on board, pausing only to let Scratchy out of his bag and sling her own belongings on the first horizontal surface that she finds before he can even scamper away with a series of indignant beeps. 

“I know, I know, you hate it, I’m sorry for trying to keep you safe!” she calls over her shoulder at the droid, hands raised as an additional expression of innocence that she knows that Scratchy won’t even see, and then she’s headed back out the door to go meet the Teen.

She had stashed the other half of the tracker beacon in an empty building on the other side of town, assuming that at some point she would need a secure meeting spot. She hadn’t guessed it would be a meeting with any one of those Rebel cells, but she was glad now that she’d been prepared, especially as Teen certainly hadn’t. She hadn’t bothered to secure it with anything nasty, as she typically did when she felt like she might be followed or in more physical danger than normal, which at least meant that the Teen wouldn’t blow himself up while he waited for her. She did not doubt that he had been sniffing around as early as he could while sticking to her instructions. The downside to not having rigged the place, of course, was not having any way of knowing if he had brought friends. Well, she was more than capable of dealing with whatever friends he might bring with him, and the space she had chosen was small, anyway.

Still, she exercised a small amount of caution, parkouring easily to the roof of a nearby building and crouching in the corner overlooking the hideout for long enough to satisfy herself that there didn’t seem to be too much activity happening, at least not enough to ring any alarms in her subconscious. Still, after she vaulted to the ground, she paused for a moment outside the door, straining her senses for a hint of anything she should be aware of as she ensured that her blaster was loose in her thigh holster before pushing the door open. 

A quick glance didn’t reveal anyone other than Teen in the room, sitting on a stack of pallets in the corner with atrocious posture and a somewhat sulky countenance. He brightened when she came in, and she didn’t waste more time looking around for anyone else, not wanting to come off too suspicious.

“Well, Teen, I’m impressed you can follow instructions,” she said, by way of greeting, hands shoved deep in her pockets in a show of relaxation. She did have a knife in that pocket – a standard metal one, as the vibroknife was tucked in her boot – but he didn’t need to know that.

“Does this mean you’re going to help?” Teen counters, scrambling to his feet.

“I don’t ‘help’ for free.” The quotation marks were obvious, but she did take her hands out of her pockets long enough to make them with her hands just for added flair. “And I don’t sign on to mystery jobs.” She’d done that once, and only once, and it was enough to last her a lifetime. 

Teen sighed. “Fine. I’ve been authorized to tell you some details about the job. The rest you’ll get en route.” She nodded for him to continue. “The job is to hit an Imperial base on Shourah. It’s in Imperial territory, but not a lot of civilization to speak of outside of what Imperial settlements they’ve managed to build. The base is really the only thing worth seeing unless you’re really into grass, but the Imperials have been using the planet for massive weapons stockpiles, and we’re thinking they won’t miss it if we help ourselves.” He gives a little shrug, and the whole thing is so casual that Agatha just knows there’s got to be more to it than that. But it doesn’t really matter how much more, because, sure, she’s pulled some jobs like this before, but she can tell that there’s no reason to hit up the kind of Imperial base that someone describes as having a “massive” weapons stockpile if you don’t intend to take a lot of guns home with you. And, most importantly, she really isn’t here to be hired to kill every single person in that kind of base without setting off intergalactic alarms in the process. 

“Sounds like the kind of job that needs a team, Teen,” she drawls. She doesn’t even know which group he represents, and doubts they have the resources to give her the kind of team that she needs, not if they’re scraping the bottom of the barrel by sending her this literal child. But there’s a reason they’re trying to bring her in on this instead of doing it themselves, and it might be the kind of reason that has the added benefit of hiding their true capabilities. They want it to seem like a syndicate job, or like her own greed, and if that’s the case, they probably won’t want to toss too many Resistance personnel into the mix. 

“That can be arranged.” It’s giving ‘we’re going to have to go knock desperately on some doors’ to Agatha’s ears, but it’ll do. Or, it’ll have to. She’s not above walking out on this job, even if that means walking out in the middle when it all goes to shit. 

“I won’t work with children, Teen. You get me a team of real adults who know what they’re doing, or I’m out. I can’t abide noxious mediocrity on the job, and I’m the only thing I care about saving is my own ass.” He nods, suddenly solemn.

She produces a small drive from her pocket, the one without the knife, and flicks it at him. It hits him square in the chest and bounces off as he tries, in vain, to catch it. He’s athletic enough to make contact with it before it hits the floor, but gangly and awkward enough that he mostly just fumbles it worse than if he hadn’t even tried, and she hopes to hell that he won’t be anywhere near this job. The Resistance is going to get this absolute dumbass of a child killed, of that she’s certain. 

“My comm code,” she explains, as he ducks down, already flushing a bright red, retrieving the drive as though doing so quickly will make her forget that he dropped it in the first place. “One of them, anyway,” she amends, seeing no reason for pretense. “Call me with coordinates when the team is on planet. I don’t want to be the first one there, and I hope I’m impressed with the team that Resistance resources can provide, or I’m walking right back out the door.” 

He nods again, and Agatha takes that as her cue.

“I’d get off planet before someone from the cantina calls in a tip about a blabby teenager organizing against the Empire,” she chirps, spinning on her heel and heading for the door without any effort to say an actual goodbye. “I charge extra for jailbreaks.”

And with that, she’s out the door and into the bright sun, on her way back to the ship. She takes a more roundabout route this time, even though she knows that Teen had once again been too slow to follow her out, stopping by a few markets and making some last-minute selections for provisions. She doesn’t know how long it’ll take Teen to scrounge up the crew that she will need, but she does know that she won’t be staying on-planet while he does so, and she’ll need something to eat if she’s going to be spending a lot of time on the ship.

She fires up the ship shortly after stepping back on board, securing her market finds in a nearby chair - she’ll stow them properly, and her belongings, when they make it to hyperspace - and plops herself in the pilot chair, flipping switches as she goes. 

“Scratchy, looks like your Mama got you a playdate with some Imperial MSEs,” she says to the droid as he comes into the cockpit, alerted by the rumble of the ship that they’re about to take off. After one or two particularly rough takeoffs, he had learned that he was safest when tucked snugly into a corner of the cockpit, where he was less likely to get accidentally thrown around the cabin. 

She grins in response to his beeps and grabs the controls, adjusting the throttle confidently with one hand as she eases the ship off the ground and towards their next destination. 

Chapter Text

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Planet: Coruscant

Year: present day (14 BBY)

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Rio exhaled again, a measured breath, struggling a little this morning to sink into the deep meditative state that she usually started, and ended, her days with. It was one of the few things that had been a constant in her life, a holdover from her very earliest Jedi trainings, and it was especially hard, here on Coruscant, to relax. 

A loud pounding on the door to her chambers made it even harder, and she sighed, resigned to starting her day without the benefit of a grounded start, as she rose from her position on the floor to answer the knock. 

“What?” she snarled, slapping the panel on the door to reveal a smug-looking Fifth Sister. 

“Thought I sensed some Jedi bullshit in here, Sister,” Fifth Sister couldn’t have been less subtle if she tried. “Sorry for disturbing you.” 

She very clearly wasn’t. Rio was well aware that she was the only member of the Inquisitorius who still maintained even this much of a connection to their Jedi roots – although not all Inquisitors had been Jedi, once – and it had not made her very many friends. As if there was such a thing as friendship among the Inquisitorius, anyway. They would all kill each other in a moment, given half the chance and a plausible excuse, but Rio had more than proven herself to be formidable enough that her Brothers and Sisters of the Inquisitorious stuck to stupid little hazing rituals and didn’t try anything. After all, she had been the only one devoted enough to this path to walk out of Inquisitor training wearing the blood of her fellow trainees. 

“What a surprise,” Rio responded flatly, resisting the urge to tug at the hem of her shirt: a currently-untucked, Imperial gray uniform piece that belonged under the shiny black armor that marked her as an Inquisitor. “I didn’t know you were good enough to sense your way out of your chambers, let alone try to find a Jedi.”

All it garnered was an unamused smile from the other woman. “We’re wanted by the ISB.” 

Rio frowned, and in a rare show of solidarity, it was matched by Fifth Sister. On paper, the Inquisitors answered to no one but Lord Vader, and to Emperor Palpatine beyond that. In reality, they mostly prowled aimlessly around the galaxy without an actual job to be doing. Their entire reason for existing was to hunt Jedi down, but the Jedi were largely extinct this long after Order 66, the protocol that had turned the clone troopers – used heavily by the Grand Army of the Republic – against the Jedi that they had, up until that point, worked closely with. Order 66 had ended the conflict between the GAR and the Separatist Army overnight, but it had also absolutely decimated the Jedi Order in the process. All Jedi – save those who had turned, or had been turned – were either dead or high up on an Imperial wanted list. Rio knew for a fact that there were Jedi still out there, but the few that were left at this point, so long after the end of the Clone Wars, were well hidden and random patrols of random corners of the galaxy weren’t going to turn them up. But the Emperor, never one to waste Imperial resources, had realized that he could use the Inquisitorious for more sensitive projects, the kind of project for which an elite, but small, force was more warranted than a batallion of stormtroopers, and so the Inquisitorius had, in effect, become just another tool at the ISB’s disposal. To be used only when you needed something with the finesse of a rancor let loose in a crowded market, but a tool to be used nonetheless. 

Turns out, the only thing the Inquisitors hated more than each other, and Jedi, was working for the ISB.

Turns out, the ISB hated them right back.

“Fine. Meet you there,” she told Fifth Sister, actually barking and snapping her teeth at the other woman when Fifth Sister didn’t move fast enough. The resulting flinch was enough to put a smile back on Rio’s face as she slapped once more at the door’s control panel and the door whooshed into place between them. The Inquisitors were all more than a little unhinged, but Rio played that game better than most.

Only once the door was closed did Rio allow herself to slump forward, the cool metal of the door soothing the headache she already could feel forming. She wouldn’t have time to finish her morning ritual, not unless she wanted to get yelled at by an irate ISB Major, who would no doubt be feeling rather full of themselves for having been assigned to oversee members of the Inquisitorius. She had only been on Coruscant since yesterday, flying in late in response to a summons, and barely settled in. Especially so, when you considered how hard it was for someone like her to settle into a place like Coruscant.

Although Rio had spent most of her adult life in Coruscant, back and forth between the Jedi Temple and her various assignments, she had always felt more at home off-world, in more rural postings. Her particular skills with the Force had always been about connections, and on a planet this busy it had been near impossible to shut out the extra noise and focus just on herself, the Force, and what she needed from it. And while it had eventually gotten easier, with some help, the help was long gone and had left a mountain of memories heavy enough to cause a major backslide.

Practiced hands fastened plastoid pieces of armor into place on her body – as though any of it would do any good as armor against any of the actual threats that Inquisitors were there to face, when the lightsabers wielded by Jedi and Inquisitors alike notoriously could cut through just about anything, save for a handful of rare metals – and she paused only long enough to finish the rest of her caf before summoning her lightsaber to her hand and heading for the ISB Central Office, headquartered in the COMPNOR arcology deeper in the heart of the Federal District. It was walkable in a way that little on Coruscant truly was, given that the city was the size of a planet, only because her current quarters were already located within the Federal District. Having to take an air-taxi just to do a favor for the ISB would have been much too annoying.

Her fingers traced the too-smooth surface of the lightsaber hilt once in unspoken longing before holstering it firmly on her hip. 

When she had initially come to the Inquisitorius, a hopeful recruit ready to join their ranks, she had arrived, purposefully, without a lightsaber. After having proven herself, she’d been provided one, but it was a far cry from the one she’d had: a green kyber crystal enclosed in metal etched to resemble delicate vines, a slight nod to her homeworld, a planet no one but residents had even mapped, in Wild Space. That one was lost to her, now, but even after several years her hands had never stopped remembering its shape. Part of her was glad to not have it, if only so that she never needed to know if her use of the dark side of the force would taint the crystal. That part of her knows that she would have never made it through training without having been forced to bleed the green kyber that gave the blade its color into the red that marked a user of the Dark Side of the Force, and it might have broken her heart. No, definitely better to have been forced, instead, to kill her entire training class for the single spot on the Inquisitorius that was being offered. That she had been able to do with chilling ease, the fight hardly fair against half-trained Jedi and whatever other Force-sensitives had volunteered themselves to the Empire, and her success had been legendary enough to put to bed any lingering questions about her allegiance. No one would dare to question the loyalties of the Inquisitor they sometimes referred to as ‘Lady Death’, when they weren’t referring to her by her official Inquisitorious title: Eleventh Sister.

She assumed that there was supposed to be some sort of security that would have prevented her from walking right in to ISB headquarters without having to show any kind of identification, but whatever troops manned whatever doors and points of entry, and the scanners stationed at each of them, knew enough to recognize an Inquisitor on sight and let her pass by so smoothly that she almost didn’t catch the scent of their terrified obeisance. The closer she got to the middle rooms where the true operations happened, where eager Captains and Commanders hoped to do enough to prove worthy of a Major’s attention, without incurring their wrath, and where enough sensitive information was discussed that those allowed to remain within earshot could feel as though they were within the circle of trust. Not that there was any such thing, really, within the Empire, not within an intelligence agency that owed its very existence to its success at hunting down dissidents and stopping whatever pockets of organized resistance and rebellion they happened to find along the way.

Despite the purpose with which everyone was moving, closer to central operations, Rio slid through the crowds easily, navigating more by feeling out the undercurrents of the room than any actual knowledge of where she was supposed to be. Fifth Sister wouldn’t have been so helpful, after all, as to tell her where in the ISB building they were supposed to be meeting but the gift of Rio’s that Fifth Sister had so openly disparaged a short time ago made it easy enough to follow the flow of traffic back upstream, further and further in, to the place where a minor disturbance caused a small ripple effect in the office’s energy. Doing so was certainly utilizing the kind of Jedi bullshit they were supposed to despise, but Rio had learned long ago that the gifts of the Force should not be put aside just because of ideological differences, especially not when within enemy territory. A thing she could be killed just for thinking, but Rio hardly considered herself to be among friends.

The middle of the Force-ripple, sure enough, had Fifth Sister standing right in the middle of it, looking around in the lazy way that predators had when their prey amused them – that slightly feline something that said they were behaving themselves only for reasons that they themselves knew. The average ISB agent, even up to the higher ranks, always seemed to pass through space with an arrogant show of confidence that still somehow buckled in on itself as though the agent didn’t want to be perceived beyond the false front that was their certainty of belonging. The average Inquisitor moved through space like they wanted to pick up the very air they breathed and shake it until something interesting happened. It was, simply put, a disaster waiting to happen – every time an agent’s insecurity betrayed itself, it just made them look like a more tempting toy to the Inquisitors.

“You took your time,” Fifth Sister said in lieu of a greeting, as Rio walked up. Rio was tempted to slow her few remaining steps out of spite, but it was too early in the day to be giving in to such temptations. Everything was a game in the Empire, and she couldn’t afford to take more than minor losses. On a day like today – on this gigantic city that masqueraded as a planet and still sorely missing the grounding effect of her, uninterrupted, morning routine – she was already bound to take some. But not first thing in the morning.

So instead she picked up something that looked like a keepsake of some sort off of the nearest desk. Keen ears caught the smallest choking sound, as though one of the agents in the room had thought about saying something. Hmm, either a very sentimental keepsake or a very valuable ISB asset. The smallest tendril of power had it floating a few inches from her palm, suspended in mid-air by nothing but the Force. It was, at best, a parlor trick, but it would also serve as something to keep the ISB agents around her occupied (and stressed) and Fifth Sister amused. There was, after all, little that brought two Inquisitors together in moments when they’d rather be fighting each other than the torment of lesser beings.

“You just left my quarters, Sister,” Rio drawled, eyes widening playfully. “Don’t tell me you can’t bear to be parted from my side for more than a few moments. Think of the gossip.” The teasing in the Inquisitor ranks could hardly be considered office-typical, or even office-appropriate, but it was, somehow, what worked best. Inquisitors themselves were hardly office-typical, and Rio doubted that anyone would consider them ‘office-appropriate’ either, so this ribald way of teasing was really just an extension of their very way of being.

“As if anyone would believe I’d want you, when you’ve probably rusted shut,” Fifth Sister grumbled, but it wasn’t enough to win the verbal sparring and she knew it. Instead, she looked over Rio’s shoulder to avoid having to see how the brunette’s tongue pressed smugly into one cheek. Rio had never quite understood why all of the Inquisitors seemed to think it a weakness that she never showed romantic or sexual interest in anyone. Well, sexual interest, at any rate, as showing romantic interest around the Inquisitors seemed like a near-certain way to get your romantic partner killed, maimed, or otherwise disappeared. And it was fine with Rio, really, that they stay confused. And more fine, still, that she hadn’t shown interest in anyone; after all, she was married. 

Well, not married, not really. Jedi didn’t marry. 

But Rio wasn’t a Jedi anymore and, to be honest, neither was Agatha. The Jedi didn’t exist anymore.

It had been about five years since she had last seen Agatha, but she knew enough of herself to know that as long as the other woman lived, Rio would consider herself to be married. Committed. No matter how they had left things, before. Even if Agatha had said that she never wanted to see Rio’s face again. Even if… well, Rio was going to fix all of that. Or die trying. And, to be honest, as an Inquisitor, she wondered sometimes if this was too much emphasis on the ‘die trying’ part of her mission. 

Fifth Sister was saved from trying to make more polite, or whatever passed for polite from the other woman, chatter with Rio by the appearance of an ISB Major at their shoulder.

“Fifth Sister, Eleventh Sister,” he said, giving a careful nod of greeting to them each in turn. Rio would give the ISB this, they were good at pretending to be civil. Good at pretending that they didn’t hate the Inquisitors and wouldn’t take any oppostunity to see them fail. Probably because they were too afraid of the Inquisitors, with their notorious unpredictability and generally terrible tempers, to be tempted into poking the bear, but Rio would take it and be happy about it without asking too many questions as to why it was. After all, she didn’t want to be here either. 

“Major,” she replied sweetly, though perhaps it was a little too much like a threat because the man flinched. Although, for all she knew it was because she’d called him by the wrong rank - the little colored squares on everyone’s chest had always confused her, and she had never tried too hard to learn what they meant. Half the time she picked a rank at random and decided she was more than okay with the possibility of pissing someone else off to the point that it caused a fight. She knew her rank, the Grand Inquisitor’s rank, Lord Vader’s rank, and the Emperor’s rank, just like she knew that everyone else on the list was too far below her to matter too much. 

“We appreciate your help,” the man said carefully, as Rio returned the whatever-it-was to the desk next to her, not without a final, careless, spin in midair. Rio assumed he had a name. She also assumed that she was supposed to know it, but, well, she wasn’t going to learn his name if she couldn’t even be bothered to learn his rank. It was a decidedly new way of going about her business, and a far cry from how it had been when she had held the rank of General, as so many Jedi had, in the Republic’s army, but it was the way the Inquisitorius worked, and Rio was learning to adjust. “We’ve split the cases. Fifth Sister, if you could please take these?” He held out files towards the other woman with a tentative air that said he wasn’t sure if she would take them, ignore them, or throw them. In a move fast enough to make him flinch slightly, Fifth Sister reached out and took them, but to her credit didn’t throw them to the ground. “They’re incident reports from… oh.” He trailed off before finishing most of his sentence as Fifth Sister started to rifle through the files, too fast to really be reading, but she was already headed towards the door as though the discussion was over, head buried too far in the files to be looking where she was going. 

For a brief moment, Rio and the man watched her go, eyebrows raised in mirrored images of incredulity, as agents fell over themselves to jump out of the Inquisitor’s way. 

After a moment, the man cleared his throat and refocused.

“Eleventh Sister, these are yours. Incident reports from Shourah.” He paused, as if waiting to see if Rio would mimic Fifth Sister’s abrupt exit, but when Rio didn’t even so much as twitch, he continued. “The Bureau has been using it as a weapons cache for some time as it’s out of the way and the locals don’t cause much trouble, but the pattern of the breach referenced in the report fits some others we’ve been seeing across the Empire that we believe can be traced back to a mercenary the syndicates seem to mostly be referring to as “The Witch Killer”. Details are in the file. We’re grateful for your help.” With one curt nod in Rio’s direction, not quite a salute though clearly he had been headed that way by rote, he turned, leaving her alone with her files. 

She absently slapped the file against her palm as she considered her options. She didn’t really want to be here, in the ISB headquarters, but she also didn’t really want to be anywhere else. Not now that she was awake. What could possibly be worse than sitting in her quarters, impersonal and temporary, on this fucking planet with its stupid memories, trying to kill time until it was time to sleep or time to go off-world again? 

So, with one option crossed out, she instead headed from the room aimlessly, following that innate sense of things that the Force had gifted her, from room to room, down hallway after hallway, until she found what looked to be a small office. Did it belong to someone? Probably. Did Rio care? Absolutely not. 

The folder slapped quietly onto the table as she sunk gracefully into the chair, feet coming up seconds later to rest of the edge of the desk. Might as well make herself at home. She frowned briefly at the small collection of knick-knacks that cluttered one corner of the desk, contemplative, and then opened the folder to read. 

Although the ISB generally used the Inquisitors when they needed a smaller force, something akin to a strike team, they did sometimes pass along the kind of jobs that they couldn’t justify ISB resources to look into. It meant that the cases Rio had worked on for the ISB so far had been, primarily, low-stakes, low-urgency matters for which her combat skills were grossly over-qualified.

But this case, somehow, seemed to be one that would break the mold.

The Witch Killer was good, it seemed. Or the ISB on Shourah were very, very dumb. Probably both; Rio liked to be an equal opportunity supporter in that way. No real way of telling if it had been a team job or a single person – although the amount of missing ISB weaponry suggested a team was involved based solely on the amount of things a single being was able to carry at one time – as security feeds had been cut. Rio flipped a few pages back and forth, did some mental math; they had cut the feeds from local controls gradually, only the areas that were needed to mask their movements, and then cut the feed from the entire base once they got to the command center. It was probably better that way – if an alarm had gone off, it meant there weren’t video recordings of the ISB agents that manned the base losing their minds and being otherwise inept. 

More pages flipped with a soft rustle as she tried to piece the different parts of the report together. Almost no casualties. It had taken the ISB some time to realize something was amiss, and even longer to realize exactly what had happened. No injured and only a handful of dead; it seemed like they had managed to avoid detection in all but a few cases, killed those who were absolutely necessary and anyone who might have otherwise seen them. No one alive who could have described their attackers, and no video footage.

Just one, single, calling card.

A lone body, left in the center of the main command room, the very heart of the facility. Completely intact, with no obvious wounds, and somehow, impossibly, sucked dry like something left in the sun for too long. She wondered how that trick was done; it was certainly something Rio had never heard of before, but she was fairly terrible when it came to newer technology.

Intrigued despite herself, Rio flipped to the next report: a dossier of sorts on the Witch Killer. She could tell within seconds that the file was embarrassingly slim – the Empire really didn’t know much – but, helpfully, the Witch had that fairly distinctive calling card and had left a trail that could be followed by even the idiots of the ISB. What little else was contained in the file was linked by name, either the moniker that Rio had already heard, or another name. Rio squinted at the top of the page.

Agnes O’Connor.

It sounded familiar, but in a way that Rio couldn’t place. She didn’t like the feeling. 

She flipped the pages back and forth again, considering. The feeling, the name, nagging at her subconscious.

The door in front of her opened, to reveal an ISB agent gaping stupidly at her. Probably the owner of the office, or it would have been, except that she was the owner now, until she decided she was done with it.

“Out,” she ordered absently, flicking her fingers at him. It was enough to work, at least for the moment, but his appearance had broken whatever train of thought she had seemed to be on. 

Frustrated, she read through the reports again. All of them. Every page. Twice. Still, not a hint of the thread she had barely caught a glimmer of. 

She had to hand it to the ISB: this was not as boring as ISB work usually was. It was, however, enough to put her in a somewhat foul mood as she gave up for the afternoon, prowling around the ISB offices once more until she eventually found the exit in her aimless wanderings and stepped back into the Coruscant sun. Or whatever passed for it, given that most of it was obscured behind the hundreds of thousands of buildings that covered every surface of this planet. 

The rest of the day passed in a blur: meals, training, sniping and sparring with other members of the Inquisitorius, and intimidating whoever else she came into contact with. It was weird to have such free run of a massive city like Coruscant, and yet have nowhere to go. So she stuck mostly to the tower that housed her quarters, temporary though they were, and allowed herself to re-enter them only once she was ready to retire for the night. She had no hint of new orders and had not been asked yet to report on this ISB matter, so she could only conclude that she would be remaining on Coruscant for the near future. 

Sighing, she removed the plastoid and leather pieces that comprised her armor and piled it all onto a chair. A little messy, but Rio had always preferred her living quarters to be more lived in, even to the point of messiness, than she preferred living like she belonged in a military bunk. Inquisitors didn’t exactly get homey touches and keepsakes, not in temporary quarters and an unpredictable rotation of assignments that kept them moving from one system to the next, from planet to planet and city to city before they could grow roots, so she had to do with what she could.

The Imperial gray uniform, though a darker gray than that worn by Imperial military officers and ISB agents, followed – boots tossed haphazardly by the door, shirt on another chair, and pants tossed somewhere in that same vicinity – as she finally felt herself start to unwind. She could feel the day’s frustration still on her, the way she still felt off balance and uncentered, but lighter, freer, now that she was out of her Inquisitor armor. 

Slowly, but with her body more relaxed and movements more fluid, she re-dressed in some loungewear. Imperial issue, again, but worn from years of use beyond real recognition into a softness that felt more like home than anything else she had in her possession.

Tugging the pants into place, she returned to the center of the room and sat carefully on the ground, cross-legged, and extended her senses.

She started small, as she always did – cautious when around so many other Force-sensitives and former Jedi – sinking into the Force, the very essence of the universe, first within a single room and then creeping outwards: down the corridor, then through the entire building, and then beyond even that. Rio’s true power with the Force had always been this connection with the universe, her ability to sense life, and death, and the very threads of existence around her. She had become passable with the more common Force abilities, but when most of the padawans around her had begun to manifest their own signature set of abilities, Rio hadn’t manifested anything more than a minor, but relatively ordinary, skill in healing. It had been enough to earn her an easy place within the Republic Army as a Jedi Consular but not enough to be worthy of any particular note. What ever this sense of connection was, it hadn’t been seen as any ability worth nurturing by the Jedi during her youth. But now, five years after Order 66 had devastated the Jedi Order, remade the galaxy, and destroyed her family, Rio’s ability to stretch the threads of her consciousness through untold amounts of space and see, know, a little bit of what the Force had to tell her was easily her most treasured skill. 

A practice she tried to end every day with, and start every morning with. 

The little wisp of her consciousness found Nicky first, as it always did. Their boy, hers and Agatha’s, although not by blood, would always come first. Agatha would never have faulted her for it, especially not after…

Rio’s talent didn’t let her know much. A vague sense of distance, the spark of life, and not much else, but it was enough. Enough to reach out and feel, for just that moment, the connection with her son. To know that he was out there, when she had spent years convinced of his death. Had driven herself mad with the grief, the loneliness, for months, and then had driven herself madder still when her spirit had caught the first glimmer of his soul in the Force. It had come on a particularly low night; she had avoided reaching, at first, knowing that if she had to sense the empty, black hole of space where that thread of Nicky’s soul belonged in the fabric of the universe that it would do unthinkable devastation to her very being, but she hadn’t been able to help herself that night. The jolt of connection had been enough to shock her out of the trance, and she had spent the next several weeks, months vacillating wildly between an uncontrolled fear that if she reached out again she would realize it wasn’t real, and the equally consuming fear that if she reached out again she would realize that it was, very much, real.

But he wasn’t home yet. She had worked hard to find him, following whispers and rumors and the vague sense of distance and direction that she could manage to muster with her ability, and she had gotten close. Close enough to know that he was in the Empire’s hands, held by some sick and twisted part of the Inquisitorious, well-hidden, but alive. And that was all she had needed to know in order to know, in turn, that she would need to become what she hated, what had hunted her for months. There was not a lot a mother wouldn’t do for her son, after all.

A surprisingly short time later, a very different Rio had walked out of a training room covered in the blood of her training cohort and earned herself enough trust within the Inquisitor program to finally, carefully, begin searching for her son in earnest.

(It seemed counterintuitive that they trusted her only after she’d proven she had no qualms killing them all, but applying real logic to the Empire’s operations almost always ended in a headache.)

She mentally caressed the connection, trying to calculate by memory and the limited information available to her where he might be, but knew it wouldn’t be enough. She was more likely to find him now based on a lead in an Inquisitorious data file than she was by doing this, but she couldn’t, wouldn’t, stop trying anyway.

She noted a few possibilities, systems and planets, for later, wished him all her love, and then withdrew, letting her consciousness drift aimlessly in the way that it always did before ending up, with unerring accuracy, in front of the glimmer of life-force that she knew was her wife: Agatha Harkness.

Much like with Nicky, the connection gave her little to work with, but she didn’t try as hard with Agatha as she did with Nicky to find out where the other woman was. The women had their ways, if they were needed, of finding each other again. 

But Agatha had been adamant that she didn’t care to see Rio again, and Rio was willing to respect that, for the moment. Not until she had Nicky. Not when Agatha had blamed Rio for Nicky’s death, false though it had turned out to be, and had turned her back on the ruined Jedi temple and her equally ruined wife. 

Not when Rio still worked for the Empire.

Not when Rio would be duty-bound to kill a known Jedi on sight, or worry about getting strung up for treason sooner than she otherwise would. (Not when Rio knew she wouldn’t be able to, with the way Agatha fought. Rio had always managed to win their battles, her eternal patience outlasting even Agatha’s brilliant skill in combat, but Rio would never be able to finish the fight, now, and she could only hope that Agatha still felt the same. Would feel the same if she ever learned what Rio had become.)

So, no, Rio didn’t linger. Didn’t try and see where her wife was, didn’t guess the planet or the system. Just basked for a moment, the biggest moment of weakness in her entire day, in the presence, the memories, of her wife’s essence and then withdrew once more.

She kept going until she was fully within her body, within her temporary quarters in that Imperial building on Coruscant, and then she opened her eyes, stood from the floor, and finished getting ready for bed. 

Sleep had almost found her when she realized why the name sounded familiar. 

The possibility of being right was enough to chase sleep away for the rest of the night.

Chapter Text

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Planet: Coruscant

Year: present day (14 BBY)

-------------------------------------

Daylight filtered slowly through the windows as Rio finally allowed herself to rise from the bed she had been tossing and turning in all night. It was hardly the rest she had intended to get when she had laid down, but her thoughts, her suspicions, had been enough to change those plans. Now, sleep deprived and half mad with the burning desire to know if she was right, she rushed through her morning routine, fingers fumbling with the buttons of her shirt in her distraction as she attempted to dress and drink her caf at the same time.

She slowed only for as long as it took to send her thoughts rushing through the galaxy, nudging gently against the small spark that was her son’s life force. Still alive, still waiting for her… she was so distracted by her thoughts that she didn’t even stop to try, as she often did, to determine his location before rushing to repeat the process with his other mother. Still alive, probably still hated her, but… closer? Farther? Rio’s tired brain could hardly focus enough to parse the feeling, the instinct, that the woman had changed location. She did, regularly, and Rio noted the movement each time as though it was a message enough by itself. 

Her brain refused to move on, even after she had left her trance and begun to fasten her armor. 

But wasn’t that the story of Rio’s life? Impossibly hung up on Agatha Harkness.

It felt less liberating, this morning, than it usually did.

She double- and triple-checked herself before leaving her quarters, something she almost never does, just to make sure that she looked presentable. It wasn’t typically something she indulged in, vanity never having been her particular weakness, but she could tell that she was distracted, too distracted to trust that she hadn’t buttoned her shirt wrong. Maybe the average Imperial soldier could get away with a human mistake like that, but Rio couldn’t afford to be human. Not when she had to play Death herself, and not, on a day like today, when she was on a mission.

Her walk to the ISB had been relatively casual the day before, in the mood to make Fifth Sister wait a little bit, and the ISB wait even longer. It wouldn’t do to make anyone, short of those with actual rank above her, think that she would come running when they called for her. No, Rio Vidal was at the beck and call of exactly one woman and one woman alone. Well, one woman and the son they shared, that is. 

Today, though, the walk is different. Instead, she stalks through the streets of the city and breezes right through security checkpoint after security checkpoint with the kind of energy that dares them to stop her. Yesterday, she’d been curious to see if they would try, but today she is the very embodiment of a challenge that no one is stupid enough to try and meet. 

Her preference, driven entirely by the restless energy simmering underneath her skin, would have been to find the first office possible and get to work, but it wouldn’t do to show too much urgency, draw too much attention to what had been, just a few hours before, a mildly perplexing ISB case. A person of her rank deserves the trappings of the more inner parts of the building, and she can’t afford to go against that. So she continued on, bypassing meeting rooms and control rooms and following her little, inner Force-sense until she was tapping at a control panel and opening a door to a more secluded office, one more befitting someone of her station. 

Like yesterday’s, the office she had chosen clearly belonged to someone. Like yesterday, she didn’t much care, although she was mildly more respectful of the space as she sat down properly in her chair, feet remaining on the floor, as she tapped a few of the workstation keys to bring up a database search screen. 

Agnes O’Connor, she typed out carefully, trying not to feel like her entire world hinged on the results of this search. She wasn’t that great at pretending – looking away as she initiated the search as though it would feel less important if she didn’t look it in the eye while it happened. Fuck, was that a Gorman spider? She grimaced as she realized that, in her attempts to avoid looking directly at the screen while the system processed her request, she was staring right into the eyes of what was, definitely, a stuffed Ghorman spider. What ISB agent in their right mind was into fashion enough to have one of those lying around, or stupid enough to advertise an affiliation with the planet given all the, relatively recent, political unrest going on in Ghorman?

It was kind of cool-looking, though. Rio had always found Ghorman spiders pretty interesting.

A faint noise brought Rio’s attention back to the workstation, where the results had finally pulled up. Hopefully, the ISB wasn’t so useless that they wouldn’t have some idea of the next place the Witch Killer was rumored to be heading.

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Planet: Caixyss

Year: present day (14 BBY)

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Agatha slipped soundlessly through yet another door in yet another back alley, on some planet in some star system. Truth be told, they were starting to all feel kind of the same. 

Unfortunate, then, that this one’s distinguishing factor was the presence of the ragtag group of freedom fighters that she was working with these days.

“Ugh, you again,” Jennifer said from her spot at what appeared to be the kitchen table, her hands already cradling a steaming mug of... something. Normally, Agatha would have assumed it was some sort of tea, maybe a caf, but knowing Jen it was probably some miserable concoction for better hair, or something. Which would have been insane, since the woman was as bald as they came, but somehow wasn’t entirely implausible either. Agatha wouldn’t admit it under penalty of death, but the bald head looked good on her, as did almost everything else. But, damn, the woman was annoying.

“As if you could make it five seconds without me,” Agatha sniped back. She had hoped that somehow she wouldn’t have to see anyone when she first got on-planet, but clearly that wasn’t the case. 

“As if I wouldn’t celebrate if I could get even five seconds away from you,” Jen retorted.

Agatha changed angles, glancing pointedly at the woman’s mug. “I see you’ve made yourself right at home, Jen,” she sneered. “Glad to see you’re used to taking things that don’t belong to you. That’s really useful in this line of work.”

“It’s a safehouse, not your home, O’Connor,” Jen’s eyeroll was practically audible, “but sure, let’s pretend you’re queen of the castle just because you picked this one out.”

Agatha had picked this one out, much as she had picked out the meeting place for her meeting with Billy several weeks ago, but one safehouse was much the same as any other, to her. Maybe she was a control freak, but she also did have a little more to lose than the rest of the members of the group, not that they knew it, and after the somewhat ramshackle accommodations she had been greeted with on Shourah she had decided that she would need to be in charge of rooms if she was going to continue to work with this particular group. The first time had been her fault, for insisting that the team be assembled and ready to go before she even headed for hyperspace. She wouldn’t be making that mistake again.

(She had technically arrived here before the others, but she had been doing some reconnaissance on the base for much the same reason she had decided to take charge of the accommodations. She didn’t trust very easily in the plans of others, and this group had not yet proven themselves worthy of her blind trust. And now she was walking in, after the others, and hating every minute of it.)

Mouth open to respond, a noise from a small hallway just beyond the kitchen drew her attention, and she closed it again, deciding to leave it at that as Lillia stepped into the room. 

“Glad to see that a successful job has allowed you two to really bond,” the older woman observed dryly, causing Jen to suddenly appear very interested in her mug as Agatha tried to make her sudden interest in her surroundings seem very casual. It wasn’t that Lillia was the boss, or even that her being the oldest meant the others had to listen to her, it was just that somehow, when it came to their interpersonal squabbles, everyone seemed to be a little more deferential. It helped that the woman wasn’t half as harmless as she looked – the woman had been in intelligence for decades longer than most of the small group had been alive, and she probably had dirt on everyone. Or would be able to find it. 

For what could have been an entirely unrelated reason, Agatha was rather keen on escaping as much of Lillia’s attention as she could. 

As if she could hear the thoughts in Agatha’s head, Lillia’s eyes met Agatha’s with a sudden glint of intensity that made Agatha try not to squirm. “Agnes,” she said in greeting after a too-long moment, brown eyes softening again as though the moment hadn’t even happened.

And that was the other problem with Lillia: the woman’s uncanny ability to seem like she could see every thread in the universe one moment was completely balanced out by her inability to stay focused and in the present, making her vacillate wildly between scarily competent intelligence operative and kooky old woman. Agatha still hadn’t figured out which part of it all was an act, but she was starting to think that both things were genuine, which somehow seemed to be the most alarming possibility. 

One thing wasn’t an act: the woman’s sense of timing was absurdly accurate.

“Lillia,” she responded, the pseudo-greeting in the most level tone she could muster. “Where’s the rest of the Coven?”

The Coven, it turned out, was what this particular group of Imperial traitors was calling itself. Agatha hadn’t really managed to figure out, during the first job, where they had all come from, or why, but had been pleasantly surprised by the skills of most of the group once they had gotten down to business. Each person in the group was highly specialized, in a way that should have been suspicious for such a small group. It was the kind of group that you managed to get together only through careful curation; lots of research to get the best candidates and then selling the shit out of whatever pitch you gave. And based on that alone it would have been suspicious for such a small group if she didn’t suspect that someone with a larger network had recruited each one of them specifically to be part of this little task force. A task force that was, somewhat successfully, pretending to be an organically occurring rebel cell but was likely something more along the lines of a small mercenary band that was paid in hope and good vibes instead of credits. Agatha hadn’t quite worked up the nerve to ask, just yet, how everyone else had come to be in the group, and the group had not seemed keen to volunteer. Although, with how easily she had folded over Teen’s lacklustre pitch, maybe the puppy-dog pout had gotten to the others, too. She wondered, if that was the case, whether the others were still as confused by it as she was.

“Teen and Alice went to pick up Sharon at the repair shop,” Lillia responded, taking a seat at the table next to Jen. Her gaze flickered briefly to the other empty chairs, as though considering inviting Agatha to sit, but whatever thought she had, she didn’t voice it.

“Sharon?” Agatha asked, desperately searching her memory as though that was going to identify whoever this new person was. 

“Seriously?” Jen asked, snark regained.

“The droid, Agnes,” Lillia said, rather patiently. “We’re going to need her for this job, too.”

Other than Scratchy, who Agatha had snuck in and snuck back out again just in case she needed a little bit of help, Agatha could remember only one other droid that could have been relevant – a protocol droid they had taken in with them as part of their cover on the previous job – but the name still didn’t ring a bell. 

“Nice try, Lillia,” Agatha said, taking the bait and dropping into the empty chair that Lillia had just been eyeing. She told herself it wasn’t because Lillia had been, sort of, suggesting that she sit down. “I do actually remember that the droid’s name is Hart.”

“A temporary override on her memory bank,” Lillia dismissed with an airy wave of her hand. “Her real name is Sharon. We gave her a new identity for the duration of the job just in case we were caught.” Agatha tried not to take too much offense to what was between the lines on that revelation, which was that the team had expected the entire job to go poorly. Her first job with this team, as a matter of fact, when everyone else had met before. “But now that the job is done, they’re removing the block and she won’t remember anything except what she was told from before we made it to Shourah. She definitely won’t answer to Hart, so don’t even try.”

Right. Agatha was saved from having to figure out what the heck she was going to say in response to that as the door opened again – this time admitting Alice, Teen, and a silvery protocol droid.

The droid was the one thing about the Coven’s operations that really didn’t make much sense to her. Ordinarily, Agatha would have liked to claim that Jen, with her time-intensive concoctions, or Teen, with his youthful inexperience, were the weakest links. She still might, just because it was so fun to ruffle Jen’s feathers. But Jen at least knew how to use a blaster, as did the teenager, and so they weren’t entirely useless. Lillia’s abilities were beyond decent, and the woman knew how to hold her own. Agatha certainly wasn’t eager to go toe to toe with her, and that was enough by Agatha’s standards to practically be a ringing endorsement. Alice, too, was beyond capable; the woman had enough security background and weapons experience to make things go boom. But Hart – Sharon – was blaster-free, moved slowly as was common for protocol droids (being built more for diplomacy than for running from armed Imperial soldiers looking to apprehend them), and was a little slow on the uptake for a droid that had such extensive programming. Maybe it had been the memory wipe, but Agatha would bet that it wasn’t. Having Hart around had felt to Agatha like someone had accidentally invited their idiot neighbor, or idiot aunt, to join the Rebellion and hadn’t been able to tell them that they were going to get everyone killed. Considering that droids couldn’t die in the traditional sense of the word, there was really not a lot of incentive for the droid to get any better at any of their activities. At best, she lent some dubious credibility to the group as they traveled through Imperial bases. At worst, Agatha was pretty convinced a more serious clean-up job was in her future. 

“Agnes, you made it,” Teen said enthusiastically as he caught sight of her. It was like having a puppy, sometimes. 

“I’m a little wounded that you think so little of my reputation as a professional,” she drawled, slouching casually into her chair.

“Maybe he’s too busy thinking about your reputation as a professional pain-in-the-ass.”

“Maybe a woman is capable of multitudes, Jenny,” Agatha sniped right back, lashes fluttering dramatically. Lillia cleared her throat, once again stepping in to keep Jen and Agatha from getting too snippy. It was probably for the best that she was keeping an eye on them, as Agatha really wouldn’t put it past them to eventually escalate to something physical, but it was kind of a bummer since everyone else was so boring and it had been a while since she stuck around anyone long enough to get some good banter going. Something she would never be telling Jen, ever. 

So instead, Agatha looked away from Jen with just a small eye roll and gave Alice a small nod as the smaller woman sat down across the table from her. Agatha very pointedly didn’t acknowledge that the chair was the closest one to where Jen was sitting, or the way the dark-skinned woman’s attention was pulled almost immediately to Alice anyway as the other woman sat down. They were disgustingly in love, but also the only ones who seemed not to have noticed that fact. Or maybe they had, and were very terrible at covering it up. Agatha looked at them sometimes and remembered a different time, and wondered if she had been that bad with… well, it didn’t much matter anymore, did it?

She clapped her hands together once in an attempt to distract herself from staring at them. Or in an attempt to keep herself from wandering too far down memory lane.

“Well, now that everyone and their droid is here, do we get to know about the job?” That was enough to get everyone’s attention, but there was something weird about their looks as they turned to her that made her want to frown. She kept her brow smooth with a little effort. “Or are we leaving it as a surprise?” 

It wouldn’t be a total surprise – she did know that they were on this planet specifically due to the Imperial base located within minutes of their current location – but the specifics had not been mentioned to her just yet.

There was a brief pause, but the way everyone exchanged glances was enough to confirm that they had discussed it without her. She felt their distrust like a punch in the gut, tossing her hair airily to hide the way she had to swallow hard around the hurt. She was a mercenary, so she didn’t get to be in the inner circle, but that didn’t make it easier. 

She felt the way her tone got overly bright and brittle, more Agnes, less Agatha. “You know I usually enjoy presents enough that I wouldn’t even mention it, but my birthday isn’t even that soon.”

“It’s the same gig as always, Agnes.” Lillia was the one to break the silence for the group. Jen didn’t look apologetic at all, but Teen did look a little guilty: more kicked puppy than human teen. Alice was somewhere in the middle, soft understanding of her feelings (which would have been enough to make Agatha shudder if she thought about that too hard) mixed with the indifference of someone who did what the job demanded and didn’t apologize for the aftermath. “Different planet, different base. Intelligence target this time. Get in, get what we came for, try not to get killed or bring the entire galaxy down on us, and get out.”

Agatha really did appreciate Lillia’s businesslike mannerisms in much the same way she appreciated the way Alice didn’t show any guilt. Being treated like she was fragile was why she had never bothered to let anyone in, after, but Agatha had always been a professional, even before everything in her life had fallen apart, and sometimes it was just nice to be able to fall back into the type of conversations that people had when everyone around them was a capable adult. It didn’t even matter as much that Lillia had hardly told her much of anything, the Coven still clearly playing it close to the vest when it came to letting their newest gun-for-hire get too close to their plans. It was enough, for now, that someone had told Agatha all that they could. Better what Lillia had done than look at her with big, sad eyes as Teen was still doing.

(Part of her hated that she was so easy to read, that Lillia was able to effortlessly handle her, working around her emotions, at all. But, as she was quickly discovering, underneath the sometimes-spacey facade the other woman was sharp and much too adept at managing people.)

“Oh, that all?” Agatha could hear that her voice was still a little too chipper, still a little too brittle. It was the kind of thing that would give her real feelings away to anyone who knew how to read her well enough (not that she ever let anyone learn how, these days). “Well, in that case, I’m going to tuck in for the night,” she added, standing a little more abruptly than intended.

Alice called after her as she headed towards the hallway that Lillia had appeared out of before. “Last door on the right is yours, Agnes.”

Agatha nodded her thanks without looking back, without really looking at anyone in the room, and kept walking.

///

The ISB had not, as it turned out, had any idea of where the Witch Killer would be next. It had taken several days' worth of terrorizing a few of the agents in some intelligence department somewhere for them to be able to piece together anything intelligent at all, and even more for it to actually point back to a destination. 

If it hadn’t been such a frustrating endeavor, Rio would have probably found the experience a lot more fun. There was a certain art to her Inquisitor theatrics, and regardless of whether she was playing herself or ‘Eleventh Sister’ she would always enjoy fucking up the ISB’s day. So she had spent those few days sweeping into rooms without warning, lurking in corners, doing periodic rounds so that she could stare deeply into the terrified eyes of some low-level idiot, and basically ensuring that they were constantly on edge. If she had to be on edge, waiting for the information that she needed in order to finally know if Agatha was somehow connected to the Witch Killer, then they all got to be on edge right along with her.

Unfortunately for them, she was the only one who got to hold a lightsaber while going through some of the worst emotional turmoil in her life (though not The Worst. No, that definitely belonged to a different, agonizing day) and she was somehow managing to make even that their problem too. 

Rio had practically fled the moment the location came through, packing her few belongings and commandeering a starship like there was a war out there that she had to get to. As a general rule, no one asked too many questions when an Inquisitor showed up and said they needed a ship, and certainly no one got upset about it when said Inquisitor didn’t have written orders saying that they got to take it. Asking questions and getting upset while an Inquisitor was sitting in front of you, making demands, was a surefire way to end up maimed or dead. Rio could guess that the ship she had taken had been papered for some other use, but they would figure it out somehow. And if they didn’t, well, maybe that was just one way she could subtly say fuck you to the Empire.

It was probably a double inconvenience to the poor, random Imperial base which now had to house an entire starship that its officers hadn’t quite planned on having. Rio had taken a glance back after disembarking and had nearly laughed in the poor agent’s face – something that probably would not have smoothed over her surprise arrival. (Sure, it was rude to show up without warning but… the reactions were still amusing.) She had given them a few hours' notice, but that was never going to be enough to accommodate the fact that her ship now took up 80% of the existing hangar space. Nor, as it turned out, that the only room befitting an Inquisitor had clearly been assigned to someone else up until a few hours ago, and had been hastily cleared to make room for her. There was truly nothing like forcing the entire base to shuffle room assignments around to ensure that the troops were endeared to her presence.

To further her determination to be as annoying as possible – more to stave off the restless feeling that threatened to overwhelm her every time she stopped for more than a few seconds than out of any real desire to be a jerk – she hadn’t really told them much about why she was coming. She, really, hadn’t told them anything. But she had taken herself for a walk around the base after settling in; having turned down a tour, the sight of her walking around unaccompanied was probably enough to cause a more-than-mild panic in the ranks, but she had merely observed, poking around into weird corners, and moved on without a word. 

The soldiers who had probably expected more of a, well, inspection had been visibly confused, but she really didn’t care if their armor was being worn pursuant to regulations, or if certain materials were being stored correctly. That was really not something the Inquisitors cared about, generally, unless it suited their purposes and inclinations towards chaos and disruption, and she was much too focused on the Witch Killer to even bother much at all with any of the actual soldiers around her. Her inspections were mostly to familiarize herself with the layout and try to get an idea of where someone might try and break in. 

But she certainly wasn’t going to tell anyone that and risk them fixing it at the last minute. 

Was it traitorous to want to ensure that a known criminal would be able to break into an Imperial base? Probably. 

But it was also probably the only way she would ever learn, truly, who the Witch Killer was.

So, instead of engaging with the staff as expected, she mostly ignored everyone, wandering as it suited her, saying nothing at all, and letting them all figure out what, exactly, to do with her behavior. It wasn’t like people really thought much of the average Inquisitor’s sanity, anyway.

Having toured the base enough to satisfy her, she had turned after that to skulking around in weird places – the kind of places that required a ladder, or a Force-leap, to reach. The only good thing was that there were no soldiers on the roofs to bother her. A handful walked the perimeter, and there were perhaps one or two at lookout towers, but Caixyss was a relatively quiet planet, with a passive local population, and the retinue of soldiers assigned to man this particular base was relatively small and relatively unspecialized. The two snipers that she had noted were probably two of only a handful on the base who could hit anyone with an E-11s sniper rifle from any distance, but she doubted that even they had any true proficiency with hitting a moving target from long range. 

It probably wouldn’t matter, anyway. It didn’t seem like the Witch Killer ever attracted the attention of snipers. Anges O’Connor was clearly more of an up-close-and-personal kind of gal.

To be honest, Rio was, too. But she wanted, for tonight, to know that she would be able to have a clear line of sight and an unobstructed path forward in case anything went wrong.

Which was exactly why she was sitting in a darkened corner on top of a store-room roof when the smallest ripple in the Force caught her attention. She hadn’t been deep enough into any kind of trance to sense anything specific, just the small, nagging feeling that she sometimes got when there was something that needed her attention. It was never quite helpful enough to point her the right way, though, so she stayed put for a moment more, alert and scanning her surroundings for anything amiss.

It was the only reason she was still there, hidden by the shadows, when the armory door across the way opened from the inside and six figures walked out. 

By itself, that wouldn’t have been enough to really catch her attention. The armory was locked at all times, and so instead of having a dedicated set of guards assigned to it, it instead was very loosely guarded by a roaming patrol that, in addition to periodically walking past the locked armory doors, covered other parts of the base. It wasn’t ever going to be particularly effective, but it was an efficient use of manpower in a base that probably hadn’t seen action in, well, ever, so Rio hadn’t bothered to mention, on her own earlier patrols, that this was likely to bite them sooner or later. But something about the group did catch her attention. 

Six figures. All dressed in military-issue clothing, but not all dressed for patrol and some wearing cloaks with the hoods up – definitely not regulation. And several of them were walking as though they were on alert for something, odd behavior for soldiers on base, particularly one as quiet as this one was. Even more telling was the dead silence – a group that size, off duty or on, should have been chatting to themselves. 

Rio squinted – the area was barely lit, and it was harder to make out details in the dark. Was that a protocol droid?

She hadn’t seen one of those earlier today when she was wandering around. And it didn’t really make sense that a base as small as this would even need one? Protocol droids were used primarily as translators, but the local population on Caixyss primarily spoke basic, and it was unlikely that the few outliers on this planet were important enough to warrant the assignment of a droid.

Her suspicions were solidified as the group crossed to a random section of wall, removed the metal grate from what appeared to be a duct of some sort, and then started to step into it one by one. 

Rio stood, intrigued, but didn’t move to stop them. She was too interested in watching them to ruin anything by making her presence known.

First, a shorter figure with gray hair. Then, the protocol droid, by far the slowest of the group. Two more went in quick succession – a taller human whose cloak covered most of their appearance, followed almost immediately by a shorter woman with dark hair. Something about them told Rio that the two were pretty familiar with each other, given the way that they encroached on each other’s personal space, seemingly without really noticing that they’d done so.

Rio took a single step closer to the edge of the roof, still in the shadows, trying to get a better look at the duct and at the remaining people, too. Below her, the remaining figures – a gangly male in officer garb and another person hidden underneath a cloak – froze. The male stopped awkwardly, halfway bent over as he started to follow the others into the duct, while his companion hadn’t moved at all: not a single twitch of their head or their hands to indicate that they were looking at something or had sensed a threat. 

The timing was curious, but Rio took another step, confident she was out of sight and had been more than quiet enough. Instantly, so fast that it was almost like they had moved at the same time she had, the duo below her exploded into motion.

The cloaked figure gave a small push to their companion as they pulled a blaster out from their cloak, and Rio didn’t get to see the man’s disappearance as she ignited her lightsaber, a reflex more than a conscious thought, to knock away the precisely aimed blaster bolt that came her way. Muscle memory helped her to block and dodge the three subsequent bolts, which kept her from freezing up in shock. 

No one should have noticed her up there. But this person had, and they had great aim, too. 

It had been a while since Rio had fought with her saber against a person with a blaster, but she knew she couldn’t stay on the roof just dodging around forever against someone with aim this good so, before she could overthink it too much, she threw herself off the roof, a casual flip and small amount of Force usage ensuring that she landed, harm free, on her feet in front of the cloaked figure.

Up close, Rio couldn’t make out much more about them. She would have expected the shots to pause as Rio got closer, if not stop altogether – a blaster was not much use in short range combat, and certainly not against a lightsaber – but a handful of bolts told Rio that the figure had tracked her jump and was not intimidated to be in closer range against an Inquisitor, but the bolts had missed, and she was able to deflect the few that were more on target once she hit her feet. Tired of getting shot at, she closed the distance and started swinging her lightsaber around.

Even at close range, she couldn’t see much and the light of her saber, that terrible Inquisitor red, was not especially useful as a flashlight, but what little she would have been able to see disappeared almost immediately as the figure moved, ducking under the blade like they’d done it a thousand times. 

Despite herself, Rio found herself impressed. There were not that many out there who would fight this fearlessly, or this capably, with a blaster against a lightsaber. She did know that not all Inquisitors had her own skill with the weapon, nor her own training as a Jedi, but they were all at least competent enough to hold their own against a single person with a blaster. That said, for someone with real practice fighting Jedi, maybe the average Inquisitor was considered a weak enough fighter to grant some extra confidence. 

Well, Rio was not the average Inquisitor.

She moved forward again, still confident, but found herself further surprised as she wasn’t able to easily get the upper hand in the fight. Occasionally, the blaster still fired – enough to keep Rio from staying too close, but Rio was determined enough to keep close quarters that the other person was still forced to dodge most of the time.

Rio forced herself closer just as her interest and surprise started to tip over into frustration, going for a large overhead swing that the other person wouldn’t be able to dodge. They were, however, able to twist just enough (closer, under Rio’s guard instead of trying to get further away from the incoming strike) to get their hands up to block the swing, dropping the blaster and gasping Rio’s wrist with the kind of precision that told Rio they had been up close and personal with a lightsaber before, and knew not to get their hands anywhere near the red blade.

With a soft grunt of surprise, Rio pushed harder, trying to out-muscle the now defenseless person, focusing intently on the top of their head where her lightsaber would inevitably make contact.

The person looked up as they pushed back, fighting to stand out of the slight crouch they were in.

The hood slipped back.

Rio’s eyes locked onto deep blue eyes she would know anywhere, even though they had darkened to almost brown in the red glow of her lightsaber, and her breath caught as her entire world narrowed down to the sight of her wife’s face. She dimly realized that she was just standing there, no longer trying to push down, but frozen in space as Agatha, clearly surprised as well, had also stopped any attempt to push Rio’s lightsaber away.

Rio had known that the Witch Killer was connected to Agatha somehow. Something in the back of her mind and the bottom of her heart had screamed that Agatha Harkness and Agnes O’Connor were somehow related. And Rio had come to Caixyss specifically to figure out what that connection was, but despite all of that, she had never truly thought that she would see Agatha. Hadn’t expected that the woman herself would be there.

Maybe that had been foolish.

Okay, that had definitely been foolish.

She opened her mouth to say something, although she really didn’t know what, but Agatha’s face cleared in an instant, any emotion hidden away completely as Rio watched Agatha’s walls rebuild between one heartbeat and the next. Agatha’s lips curved upward into a small smile, sad and a little brittle, and just as Rio was distracted by the way her heart clenched in her chest the Inquisitor was being thrown backwards as a massive Force push caught her right in the chest and sent her flying.

By the time she had popped back to her feet, the other woman was gone, the opening to the duct uncovered behind her as if left to intentionally mock Rio. 

Knowing it would be useless to try and go after the group, emotions too untamed to think it wise anyway, she instead put her lightsaber back on her hip, brushing her hair back into place and straightening her uniform. Despite the blaster fire, it seemed that no alarm had been tripped by the fighting or whatever activities Agatha and her team had been up to earlier. 

(And wasn’t that a weird thought? ‘Agatha’s team’? Even in their Jedi days, Agatha had been lukewarm at best when it came to teamwork. And Rio still didn’t understand why they had a droid? That definitely didn’t feel like an Agatha move.)

The Empire really made this kind of thing too easy, sometimes, with the sheer ineptness of most of the troops in its employ. 

Well, if they weren’t going to be observant, Rio certainly wasn’t going to help them out.

Appearance fixed, thoughts and emotions down to a simmer instead of a roiling boil, Rio stepped forward and replaced the grate over the duct and then headed for her quarters. She needed more answers, and she did not need some idiot pulling security footage.

Although, based on the previous incident in the ISB files, Agatha was pretty good at turning off cameras before she was detected.

Thirty minutes later, as Rio sat in her quarters, armor off and with an (ill-advised given the late hour) caf in her hands, the alarms finally started to shriek.

Chapter Text

-------------------------------------

Planet: Caixyss

Year: present day (14 BBY)

-------------------------------------

By the time the night is over, Rio is fairly glad that she’d had a caf so late at night. As out-of-the-way as this base was, it was clearly unequipped for something as eventful as whatever break-in had happened during the night, and Rio couldn’t help but feel like the only thing more terrifying for them than experiencing their (collective) first event of this magnitude was doing it alongside a curious Inquisitor who still hadn’t told anyone why she was here.

Before the week was out, she expected some rumors would be going around suggesting that she, herself, had done all of the damage.

Rio had not felt any particular sense of urgency as the alarm went off, having already expected the alarm and already known what it was for, so she had finished her caf calmly, instead of panicking, before putting her armor back on and heading back for the control room. Since it had taken her a little while to put herself together, she had expected that the officers would have some idea of what was happening, but a very cursory inspection of the scene when she arrived made it clear that this was not the case.

More points for Imperial superiority.

Several painful hours later, the officers had managed to sketch out the vaguest summary of events that Rio had ever heard in her life, although she supposed that this was to be expected given the thin state of the ISB file she had received previously on the Witch Killer. 

Fact 1: There were three dead on base, two killed by ordinary blaster fire while the third had been killed in that eerie way that was the Witch Killer’s signature. 

Fact 2: Logs showed that some data from the system had been transferred to an external drive. The logs failed to show what, exactly, had been transferred, and Rio was not insane enough to go digging through the entire database just to find what might have been useful to the Witch Killer.

Fact 3: No one knew how many people had snuck in, or how they had gained entrance, or how they had escaped.

Fact 4: Outside of the log showing the data transfer, they had no idea when these activities had actually taken place. Several cameras had gone offline, and those that hadn’t, as well as any recordings, didn’t seem to show anything suspicious. Rio had confirmed as much with her own eyes, having known what she was looking for in a way that the others didn’t.

In short, they knew next to nothing, and it had taken them hours to even make it this far.

(Rio had not volunteered the scant information that she would have been able to contribute. She had been hoping for a few more answers than questions, but if she was going to be stuck dealing with Imperial idiots, she was not going to do their work for them.)

It wasn’t that Rio was actively obstructing the investigation. She had, after all, reviewed the tapes with her own eyes (although she had not told anyone what she had been looking for) and she hadn’t prevented the alert from going out Empire-wide, connecting the Witch Killer to yet another incident.

If they could manage to find Agatha on their own, she figured, then Agatha deserved to be found.

But Rio could tell, after a few days of watching the Empire’s wheels spin uselessly, sending out search patrols and doubling up the guard on their base, that they were pretty far off the mark. 

They should have been looking for five people, not one, and a protocol droid, too. That kind of group would be more distinctive than not, if anyone cared to look. And, sure, Rio did care to look, but she cared more about not spooking her quarry. There would be time to track them down later, now that she knew what she was looking for. And better to do so with all of the information she could possibly gather. And since she had the unique means to know that at least one member of the party had not gone far, Rio knew already that it was likely she’d be in for another meeting sooner rather than later, and she needed to ensure she was not underprepared. Perhaps that was why no one could find them – no one would expect such a sophisticated job to be pulled off by someone not sophisticated enough to flee the system before being detected.

But she should have known that Agatha would be less patient than she was. (It had always been that way, but Rio had been moving along as though there wasn’t a clock over their heads, waiting for the engineers to figure out what data might have been transferred out, while Agatha, evidently, had been growing more and more frazzled as time went on.) Which is why she shouldn’t have been surprised when she was literally nudged out of her focus – looking too closely at some random set of monitors, which were showing more information about the missing data but never enough to be truly useful – and she looked down to discover a MSE-4 series droid blinking its lights up at her from her ankles.

For a moment, her past and present overlapped so precisely that she had to take a moment to remind herself what timeline she was even in. And then, once she had breathed through that moment enough that things became clear to her eyes again, she found herself blinking back unexpected tears as she noted the small, silver scratch on the top of the droid. The kind of flaw that would have been fixed by now had the droid in question actually been Empire-owned, as someone in maintenance surely would have requisitioned a new paint job for such a droid by now.

But not Agatha and Rio.

Not for Scratchy.

“Scratchy?” she whispered, allowing a small, tremulous smile to cross her face as the mouse droid beep-booped at her.

Scratchy’s presence in that base could mean only one thing: Agatha had a message for her and didn’t trust Rio’s surroundings. That was what Scratchy had always meant – was why Scratchy was even theirs in the first place. Agatha and Rio had been using him to pass notes along to each other, coded communications, almost since the very beginning, when they had realized that they could not expect their budding relationship to escape the notice of the Jedi Council, or anyone else, if they attempted to communicate more traditionally through holos or short-range radio communications.

(The fact that Agatha still had him with her boggled Rio’s mind, but, like everything else, was hardly a surprise. Agatha had always loved that droid a little too much for someone who tried so hard to act like he was a pest.)

“Come on, bud,” she instructed him softly, glancing around to see if anyone else had noticed. Mouse droids weren’t uncommon in Imperial spaces, even ones as rural as this, but there weren’t many of them around, and an Inquisitor receiving a clearly-coded message would draw attention and curiosity if anyone noticed. While mouse droids did perform some basic maintenance and cleaning functions, sending encrypted communications was really the key use case for them on military installations, and no one who saw her standing next to the droid would think that the occurrence had anything to do with janitorial duties. Rio had a feeling that the attention it would bring was something she wouldn’t be able to afford once she translated what Agatha had to say. 

So she put an impassive expression back on her face and straightened up, ignoring the droid as she would have ignored any other droid in a similar position, and walked casually from the control room, trying her best not to act too suspicious, or too normal, as she returned to her quarters.

She ensured that no one was around to see her wait for the droid to enter the room first, before following behind him, and found herself seated on the floor before she could really think about the action, smiling broadly at the little droid as he let out a long series of beeps and whistles. 

“I missed you so much, buddy,” she told him, reaching out to trace one of his edges with a finger. “Have you and Agatha been having a wonderful adventure?” Another string of beeps seemed to answer in the affirmative. “I’ll bet.” The response was fond, and she spent the next several moments enjoying the feeling of the cool durasteel under her fingertips and the warmth in her chest. 

But reality did eventually creep back in.

She looked over at him. “Guessing she has something for me?”

A whistle this time, and this time it was accompanied by the opening of a small window on the front of Scratchy’s hull, which allowed a small arm to extend a small datachip. Rio reached out to take it with little hesitation. She pulled her datapad over from where it lay on a nearby chair and, with a few taps, ejected the small chip that tied the device into the Imperial network. It wouldn’t be enough to erase the data, which she hoped was encrypted, from her device, but at least it wouldn’t automatically transmit her entire business to whatever ISB intelligence agent had drawn the shortest straw and was assigned to supervise Inquisitorious devices and communications.

Supervisory chip removed, she quickly plugged in the datachip that Scratchy had given her, and a few taps later, her screen was filled with the kind of encoded communication that she had never forgotten how to read. She had a feeling that it was the kind of thing she could never forget, even if she somehow forgot everything else.

The top of the message was nothing but coordinates. Following that was a single line of text: “blasters only. Leave your friends at home”.

Rio muttered a very quiet, “She can’t possibly think I’ll leave my lightsaber here,” that earned her a reproachful beep from the droid next to her as she tapped the coordinates into the datapad. She didn’t care much about going anywhere alone, fairly confident that she could take care of herself. But to leave her lightsaber? Even if it wasn’t her original one, the one that had seen her through so much, the red Inquisitor-issued lightsaber had seen her through enough, and the idea of going in without any kind of blade at all was more than a little strange. 

You can take the girl out of the Jedi Order, but you can’t take the Jedi Order out of the girl, or whatever.

But fine, it wasn’t like she didn’t know how to use a blaster. Although she definitely wasn’t as well practiced as Agatha clearly was, it would be enough to hold her own. And, if for some reason it wasn’t, she did always have her Force abilities to fall back on. Although if she was leaving her lightsaber at home, it likely went without saying that she shouldn’t be flaunting her Force abilities either. 

She would find a way to work with just the blaster.

The message didn’t specify a time, but it didn’t need to. Just as the code had been burned into Rio’s brain long ago and wouldn’t be budging, so too had the rhythm of their clandestine meetings. Unless otherwise specified, requests to meet up were always for noon the following day. 

Which meant that Rio had a lot of work to do before then.

Glancing down at Scratchy, she gave a small sigh of regret as she asked, “Do you get to stay a little longer, or do you need to go back?”

The short series of beeps that she got in response wasn’t especially conclusive, but the droid didn’t try to move, so she figured that this was enough answer.

“Let me know when you need to be let out, then,” she told him, reaching out again to trace random shapes on the top of his shell. It didn’t mean much to him, to be stroked like some kind of pet, but it was soothing to her in a way that she couldn’t quite describe, and definitely was helping keep her thoughts from spiraling. 

Readjusting her position ever so slightly, she returned her focus to the datapad. 

Step 1. She tapped in the coordinates that Agatha had given her. Nothing too far away, but away enough that she wasn’t likely to run into a stray patrol while she was out. Good.

Step 2. Rio had barely familiarized herself with the base, and was even less familiar with the neighboring town itself, so the next thing she turned her attention to was maps of the area, noting what areas were residential, which were commercial, and which were mostly for storage and other warehousing. She would plan her route towards the meet-up later, but it was better to learn the area now so that she could test herself on it multiple times throughout the day.

After all, the path in was hardly ever the hard part. It was getting back out – when things got rough and there wasn’t any time to think of where to go or how to get there – that was the hard part. 

Some time later, she blinked wordlessly, eyes somewhat bleary after staring at the screen so intently for as long as she had, at Scratchy, who had given a small whistle and started to roll back and forth. 

“Time to go?” she asked, getting to her feet at his response: an affirmative-sounding beep.

“I’ll, uh, see you tomorrow then, right buddy?” She didn’t wait for a response before continuing on, fighting the growing lump in her throat. “Love you. Love her too, if she asks.” 

The droid whistled cheerfully as it followed her to the door, bumping into her ankle once in farewell as she hit the control panel for the door, and then Scratchy was rolling out into the hallway and around the corner. The door closed behind him automatically with a slight hiss.

Rio stood, nose inches from the closed door, for several long seconds before stepping back across the room, scooping her datapad off the floor and settling herself down on a slightly more comfortable surface.

Time for step 3. 

Find Agatha. Not the coordinates she’d given or the crime scenes she left behind, and not even the vague sense of her that Rio could find in the Force, if she tried. No, if Agatha wanted to meet, then she was still nearby. And Rio did, in fact, already know that she was still on planet. And Agatha would never invite an Inquisitor, even her own wife (if Agatha even thought of them that way, still), to meet her in a location she was using as a safehouse. Rio wasn’t even sure if Agatha would have done so if Rio had just been, well, Rio. Agatha did still hate her, after all.

Step three was going to take some real work. 

///

Step three had taken her hours, but she had managed it, and had done so with enough time to spare that she was actually able to grab a short nap before she would have to head out. 

The nap was, realistically, probably the only thing that was keeping her somewhat sane, since she had switched to caf instead of water at some point when the hour got late and had, since then, lost count of the number of cups she had consumed. It was enough to know it had, probably, been too many. 

Okay. Definitely too many.

But the success was almost enough to wipe away every bit of tiredness. She had dug through every shred of records that she could find on the city and building layouts, strategically eliminating building by building and unit by unit based on whatever information ISB intelligence had managed to scrounge up and whatever local chatter had been recorded by the troops on the base, who did occasionally patrol the town. She’d had to rely rather heavily on the assumption that all four of the people that she had seen that night had stayed with Agatha, and had made a further assumption that they still had the droid with them. (The droid was still the one thing that Rio really had not been able to make sense of.) By the time she had finished making all of her assumptions and cross-referencing all of her notes and blueprints, she had found only one possible location.

It was the kind of thing that could only have been pulled off by someone who knew Agatha as well as Rio did.

It was the kind of thing that even Rio wondered how she had managed. And the kind of thing that Rio doubted she would be able to replicate. 

(Gosh, the Empire really was never going to get its hands on this woman unless they made a serious change in tactics.)

Rio tried not to think about what it meant that she had been successful, considering the years of distance and Agatha’s pre-existing, well-honed practice at staying hidden from Rio.

So, with the short time remaining to her, she had let the caffeine take over and had allowed herself to go crazy with what few materials she had on hand. She wasn’t much in the habit of dressing like a casual civilian; if her time as an Inquisitor hadn’t gotten her sorely out of the habit, her time in the Jedi Order before that would have certainly done so. But, then again, she and Agatha had always snuck out during those years, and she had eventually figured out how not to stand out. She had clung to that for the brief time where she was no longer a Jedi and not yet an Inquisitor, out of some feeling that blended her desperate longing for her wife and son with some kind of survival instinct. It had been enough to get her here, whatever it had been. And, luckily, she was not terribly out of practice - the Inquisitors didn’t much care what you looked like as long as you wore your uniform, had your red lightsaber on hand, and were suitably terrifying. 

She didn’t think a little bit of eyeliner would ruin that, and never had. 

She slipped out her own door and through the hallways of the base, making her way without notice to the vent that Agatha’s team had left through the other night. She’d had plenty of time since the break-in, of course, to investigate the little vent, but she hadn’t been in much of a rush and did have to time things so that her investigation wouldn’t be noticed. It just hadn’t worked out, yet, but she had been very curious still to know where the small passage led. Now seemed like a perfect time.

A short slide later, one that put a smile on her face despite herself, and she had been spit out into a gap between some bushes. Glancing around to ensure no patrols were nearby (likely the exact reason this duct had been an excellent find by Agatha’s team), she set off towards town with a jaunty little whistle, practically transformed into a new person in a bizarre blend of skintight tactical pants and a freshly mutilated jacket (originally military issue but hardly recognizable now that she had cut the bottom off and also added holes in the sides of the matching shirt) that she had ‘requisitioned’ for herself. With her hair out of its regulation bun and a bold face of makeup on instead of her more ordinary, neutral look, she stuck out like a sore thumb and would definitely be stopped on base if anyone caught her out.

It would be hard to identify herself as an Inquisitor without the uniform or the lightsaber, which she had, per instructions, left in her room. 

It didn’t stop her from packing a few additional weapons into her clothing, most notably a rather large knife that she didn’t bother to hide and instead attached directly to the waist of her pants in easy reach.

Rio had never been that great at listening to Agatha’s instructions. She had always gotten ‘close enough’ and then promptly taken creative liberties. 

Case in point: strolling right up to the safehouse door, uninvited.

This was not the kind of thing that Agatha would appreciate. It was the kind of thing that was designed to get under her wife’s skin. The kind of thing that Rio had, unthinkingly, designed because she was subconsciously, in a way she was now realizing with her conscious brain and no small amount of dawning horror, tired of allowing Agatha to partition their love as something separate from her life. Tired of not knowing where Agatha even was most nights, and tired of being kept so walled off that Agatha actually expected that their first intentional meeting in years would be some emotionless, military transaction in some neutral location that wouldn’t let Rio anywhere near whatever life Agatha had built for herself without her family.

Despite her confidence and the multiple cups of caffeine that had helped along the way, she did hesitate at the door. 

Long enough to almost turn back around and leave, at least three separate times.

Long enough for panic to begin to bloom, deep in her chest, as a distant sound resolved first into a significantly muffled conversation and then resolved further into the distinctive voice of her wife. 

Two seconds later, the door slid open before Rio could gather her courage enough to knock. 

Blue eyes met golden brown as Agatha stared at Rio in absolute shock, falling silent mid-sentence, mouth still open. Rio almost started to feel a little apologetic for the surprise; where the other night, Agatha had been a little coy once the shock had worn off, now she was clearly taking a little longer to adjust and, even worse, seemed like her brain was absolutely reeling between fight, flight, and freeze responses.

A young man’s voice came from inside. “Mrs. Hart, is that you?” 

Rio had no idea who that was, but clearly Agatha’s sudden silence had not gone unnoticed, nor had the fact that she had not managed to actually leave the safehouse yet. She was a little surprised to hear the obvious youth in the voice, without being able to put a face to it. It wasn’t like Agatha to put children, even older ones, in harm’s way. 

But his curiosity reminded Rio that the clock was ticking and she was going to have to either disappear, right that instant, or lean in, fast, to whatever persona she landed on first. She had not really planned for what she was going to say when she got here, which was a little foolish of her. 

There was no way she was going to run away, not after all of the work to get her wife in front of her again.

“Heard you guys were having a party,” she said cheerfully. Over Agatha’s shoulder, she could somewhat see that there were others in the room, but couldn’t see much of the space.

Her words seemed to prompt Agatha to respond. “How did you–?”

“I was in the neighborhood,” Rio interjected before she could finish the question. The fact that Agatha truly hadn’t expected this irked her just enough to galvanize her into taking a more antagonizing posture, making her words teasing as she widened her eyes dramatically. As if Agatha didn’t know that she would be around, when she was the very reason that Rio had come in the first place. She watched the realization click in Agatha’s eyes.

“Surprise!” Producing a small flower from a pocket, something that she had picked up on autopilot on the way into town, she offered it to Agatha, waving it under her nose provocatively when it didn’t seem like the other woman was going to reach for it. “M’lady.”

She thought she might have been a little too provocative as Agatha seemed to finally put her shock aside and settle on a response, ripping the flower from Rio’s hands like it was a red flag being waved in front of a rancor. Instinctively, trusting whatever part of the universe that seemed to have kept Rio in tune with Agatha even all these years later, Rio braced herself for Agatha to launch herself right over the threshold at Rio, as Agatha’s hands came up (ready to claw out Rio’s eyes, probably) with a yell of absolute rage. Agatha had no weapons in her hands but there was murder in her eyes anyway; it should have been laughable for any woman to try and fight a Jedi in hand-to-hand combat and expect to win, and especially the idea that Agatha, a fellow Jedi and consummate weapons expert, would be the one to give it a try, but Rio couldn’t consider it as a laughing matter considering that Agatha really was a formidable fighter.  

No, Rio wouldn’t bet against Agatha being able to pull her apart with her bare hands if she wanted (which she clearly did).

Just as Agatha started to launch herself forward, two different sets of hands appeared and grabbed one arm each, pulling Agatha further inside and leaving Rio, safe for now, still on the doorstep.

“What are you doing?” one woman exclaimed, dark skin and an elegant dress setting her apart from the woman holding Agatha’s other arm, whose hair had orange streaks dyed into it and who was wearing a bulky and battered jacket. Agatha hadn’t stopped staring at Rio, locked in like she was the only thing in the galaxy that mattered. 

Typically, Rio would have appreciated being the center of Agatha’s world. 

She batted her eyes coquettishly at the brunette, who gave one more wordless howl of rage but seemed to have come to her senses enough that she only shook off their grip and stalked further into the residence, disappearing from view down a hallway. 

Calling after her, a young man – the young voice that Rio had heard earlier – followed her from the room, which left Rio alone with the others. Awkward, but Rio was usually good in awkward situations. 

“What’s up? I’m Rio,” she said to the three women in front of her. An older woman had stepped forward to join the two who had kept Rio from being murdered in broad daylight by her own wife, and all three were looking at her with an unnerving amount of trepidation. Well, she had come in and blown their safehouse location, and none of them knew who she was. 

The older one gave a slight wave and a “hello” as the grungy one returned her “what’s up,” leaving the third to follow half a beat behind with a “hey”. Well, that was good enough for Rio.

“So, you’re an Imperial?” the grungy one asked, one hand coming up to fuss with her hair and clearly feeling more out of place than Rio.

“Uh, less ‘an Imperial’,” she started, the air quotes clear in her voice, “and more ‘The Imperial’.” She leaned in and growled the last few words a little menacingly, but didn’t elaborate, realizing that she was having a little bit of fun being this off-putting. It wasn’t too dissimilar to the joy she found in making Imperials scramble around, only she didn’t need to flaunt her lightsaber or her Force powers to make it happen. “So, this the safehouse?”

She said it loudly enough that the three practically fell over themselves to let her inside, and Rio brushed past them without much concern. She outranked everyone in that base, so if the worst-case scenario was that Imperials showed up at the safehouse? That wasn’t something she was very concerned about. 

She would have to wait for them to talk Agatha back into the room, and she had a feeling that would take some time, so she made herself comfortable in one of the chairs surrounding a simple but sturdy looking table, openly indulging in her curiosity and even making small little utterances and noises as she went, looking around the room and even into the half-drunk mugs on the table with undisguised interest while the three women stayed mostly where Rio had left them, although they had, at least closed the door. 

“So what do we think, can we trust her?” the taller one asked her companions in what Rio figured was supposed to be quiet enough that Rio wouldn’t be able to overhear. Rio’s hearing was fairly good even on her worst day, but she gave no sign that she had heard anything, continuing to look around with exaggerated interest at basically everything she laid eyes on. 

“We know nothing about her,” the grungy one replied, quietly enough, but her voice rose in pitch, betraying her uncertainty. 

“We know Agatha hates her,” said the older one, almost chuckling. Rio almost laughed too – it seemed like Agatha was doing a great job at making friends. “I’d say that goes in the pro column.”

There was a slight pause. 

“Honestly, I don’t know how to feel,” the tall one continued. “Do I hate her, or do I want her comm code?” Rio turned her head quickly to avoid the disgusted curl of her lip being too obvious, but as the others chimed in with their agreement, she couldn’t help but turn her head sharply, attention honing in on the three in a way that was unmistakable to them with how closely they were watching her. 

“Boo,” she said, more sound than word, but making it clear that they had been overheard. She wasn’t here to get anyone’s comm code, or to make friends, or anything else. She was here to see Agatha. Full stop. Everything else was extra, and until Agatha returned to the main room, Rio’s focus had to be on maintaining enough mystery to keep the others guessing about who she was, why she was there, and – most importantly – what she was capable of. 

The three women shrank back, suitably chastised and a little startled, but Rio didn’t let her attention linger on them for too long. It wasn’t sustainable, or necessary, to get into a stare-down with them. 

The three exchanged a look, and Rio caught one last sotto voce utterance from the older woman as the women finally headed back into the room, away from the door, to join Rio at the table.

“What a scary bitch.”

Chapter Text

-------------------------------------

Planet: Caixyss

Year: present day (14 BBY)

-------------------------------------

Agatha gets about thirty seconds to herself before Teen joins her in her room, walking right through the door she hadn’t bothered to close (some quiet bit of premonition telling her it would be useless) as if the threshold didn’t even exist. 

It had been a while since someone had so easily walked into her space like that.

It had been a while since she had met someone as dumb as this Teen, who sees her bared teeth and sharp edges and inexplicably snuggles in closer.

She’s sat on the bed, elbows on her knees, trying to fight the urge to cross her arms and anchor her hands on her biceps. Maybe if she can fake emotional stillness, she will manage to embody it for once in her life. Her mind goes, briefly, to the meditation techniques of her youth and then flits away before the reminder can manage to make her stomach churn.

Teen sits down next to her. “Do you wanna talk about it?”

Agatha very much does not.

How exactly would she even start, anyway? 

Just ‘oh yeah Rio and I used to be in a super secret sexy Jedi marriage and then our child died and we haven’t seen each other until the other night when she tried to take my head off with an Inquisitor’s lightsaber, but I brought her here to help with this job even though I’m not sure I ever really knew who she was if she’s willing to work for the Empire now, but I’m doing it anyway because I’ve spent years in the furthest parts of the galaxy trying to forget her and now that we are on the same planet I can’t keep away for another second’?

Yeah, that would go over great.

Instead of answering, she just tries to pretend that she’s not digging her fingertips deeply enough to put bruises into her own arms. 

“Are we in trouble, Agatha?” he asks after a pause, as though he knows that she isn’t willing to give him any verbal hint as to her emotional and mental state. 

And, yeah, that’s a fair question, but it’s also one of the stupidest she’s heard. They are a group of people who have actively infiltrated and robbed two different Imperial bases on two different planets, and have plans for more, with the specific aim to overthrow the Empire. Surely that would be enough to put them squarely into the danger column, and that’s all before they add in the fact that she, herself, is a secret Jedi and therefore on the Empire’s most wanted list.

Something in the look she throws him must convey at least some of this, because he amends his question fairly quickly. “Like, more than we were ten minutes ago?”

It occurs to her, then, that he isn’t really asking about their ‘mission’ (a thing she still can’t even think about without air quotes), but more about the fact that Rio had found them.

She hasn’t said much about Rio to the team. Had sat with the thoughts and the memories all on her own for a couple of days, unsure of whether that was going to drive her crazy before having to spend so many days in such close quarters with Jen would do it first. And then the team had started to discuss the next job, another base on another planet, like they sure had found their niche, and Agatha had found herself mentioning Rio without even realizing it. 

Just, “I know someone with decent security clearance that could help us get in,” like that wasn’t the most unhinged statement she’s ever made.

(Which was saying a lot, frankly.)

It’s not that she doesn’t know Rio. Not that she wouldn’t trust Rio with her life, unquestionably. And she was not the kind of person to really judge anyone for how they managed to stay alive, or to cope with grief. She was hardly a poster child for good mental health or emotional stability, after all. 

It’s just that Agatha would have bet that Rio would have hated the Empire as much as she did. For everything they did. Not just to the Jedi Order but to their family. And, yet, here Rio is: an Inquisitor. 

(Agatha has heard some rumors that the Empire has developed certain tactics that enable them to turn even the most peaceful Jedi to the Dark. Is that what had happened to Rio? But, then, why does Rio seem so, infuriatingly, the same?)

If Rio has become an Inquisitor of her own volition, then Agatha can hardly expect that Rio will help them infiltrate an Imperial base. It’s even less likely that she will even show up to meet Agatha without the means to bring her in, if that’s the case.

And here Agatha is offering Rio up as an asset. One that would increase the number of hidden identities up to a truly dizzying number.

But if Rio would do it, then it would be truly worth it. 

(It would be worth it even if only to get rid of the protocol droid.)

Agatha isn’t deluded enough to forget that she is the reason that she and Rio haven’t seen each other for years. She remembers very well the events of… before, and everything that had come after. Everything that had led with her shutting Rio out, and leaving, making sure that Rio couldn’t follow her.

But she also can’t pretend not to realize that she has missed Rio every second since then, too. Can’t pretend not to realize that she has been aching to find a way to reverse what she had done, to let herself soften and apologize. Or to realize that the only thing that could have softened the edges of her grief would have been to fall asleep in Rio’s arms at night.

And Rio hadn’t killed her. Hadn’t even made the first move, the other night. Fought, as she always had, because Agatha had prodded her into it. Had even shown up here, without an Imperial escort.

(Hadn’t followed instructions, and had instead given everyone a heart attack at the door, but… here was better than planets away, and Agatha could hardly find it in her to be mad about it.)

So, maybe.

“No, Teen,” she responds after a longer pause than intended, realizing the boy is still waiting for an answer. “Rio hasn’t brought the Empire down on our humble abode.”

She realizes, distantly, that her hands have relaxed, as though the words meant something even to her own ears. 

And then she realizes that while she’s been trying not to have a panic attack in front of a teenager, Rio has been left unsupervised with Alice, Jen, and Lillia. That’s almost enough to cause a panic attack all on its own, though she’s less worried, honestly, about what ill-advised thing Rio might say to blow their cover and instead realizes that she is mostly worried about what might happen to the Coven should Rio decide to get feisty.

Agatha is standing before she can even really register that she should get up and rejoin the group. 

“Come on, Teen,” she says briskly, brushing the creases and wrinkles from her pants more out of a desire to feign some kind of emotional equilibrium than out of the existence of any visible wrinkles. “Time to rejoin the group.”

The walk feels both too long and too short, through the short hallway and into the small kitchen, but even before she walks into the room, she can tell it’s too quiet. 

It’s easy enough to clock: Rio is draped casually across one of the chairs, looking around with poorly disguised, and perhaps deliberately obvious, nosiness while the other three sit in tense silence, like breathing wrong will get them arrested. It nearly makes Agatha laugh – winding the group up is a favorite hobby of hers, after all. 

“Sorry for interrupting such a riveting and lively discussion, ladies,” she says breezily as she enters the room. “Rio, I see you’ve met Alice, Jen, and Lillia.” The three women give somewhat sheepish acknowledgement as their names are listed off. Yeah, Agatha hadn’t really thought so. 

“Now, if you’ll excuse us, Rio and I have to go see a Rodian about a farthier race. Rio?” She didn’t even wait for the other woman to follow her, not really, giving Teen a reassuring brush of her fingertips against his arm as they both went separate directions – her towards the door, and him towards the chair that Rio was in the process of vacating. 

Well practiced, she keeps her hands casually clenched in her pockets as she strolls towards the location that Rio should have met her at. It’s the only safe secondary location that she has on this planet, other than her ship, but even though Rio has ruined the secrecy of the safehouse, Agatha is still too cautious to allow her anywhere near that ship. She wasn’t going to rush out and get the team another safehouse, not when she didn’t know if Rio was going to sell them out to the Empire, but that didn’t mean she needed to risk everything and give up her only other secret. She did need the ability to make a clean getaway, after all. 

(She hoped she wouldn’t have to.)

Rio lets her walk a good distance away before she makes any attempt to catch up with her. She instead spends the first several blocks practically skipping along about ten feet behind Agatha, gawking at every storefront and business they pass like she’s never been in a city before. (Agatha does her best not to turn around to watch her, mostly catching glimpses of her in the occasional reflective surface as they pass one, or out of the corner of her eyes as they round a curve.) At some point, Rio must grow bored with following along like she’s on Agatha’s leash, because Agatha hears Rio’s quiet little pants for just a few scant seconds, hardly enough for a real warning, as the other woman does a little jog to catch up to her, falling into step like it hadn’t been years since they’d last strolled incognito through a city together. Although Rio is undeniably closer, Agatha still does her best to ignore the other woman.

“So, you gamble, now?” Rio asked eventually, after several moments of silence where Agatha resolutely avoided looking over at her. 

Agatha scoffs before she can catch herself. “Hardly. But they’ll feel safer if they think you have a vice they can exploit, and I needed to get out of there.” Also, she’s spent too much time around the syndicates, who are always in the process of trying to fix a farthier race, that the excuse tumbled from her lips before she could even think twice about it. She’s surprised to be quite this open with Rio, especially as they haven’t made it where they’re going just yet. It’s just another bitter reminder of the way she will always be helplessly attuned to the other woman, and irritatingly pliant, too, no matter how much tragedy or how many years separate them.

If Rio is surprised that Agatha even answered, she doesn’t show it. Just pokes her tongue into her cheek and keeps walking.

When they arrive at the warehouse Agatha had originally designated for their meeting, she lets Rio into the space without a word, and the other woman walks past her to check it out, no fear or caution anywhere on display. Well, if Rio was always going to be Agatha’s weak spot, Agatha was always going to be Rio’s.

Agatha has always preferred empty warehouses for clandestine meetings. They are often roomy and unfurnished, which leaves plenty of room for ‘activities’ and makes the cleanup a breeze. It also means it’s less likely that someone will manage a trap, as there’s not much around to hide behind. There’s also fewer things that can be broken in a scuffle. More importantly, there’s always plenty of them in and around spaceports and other travel hubs, which means that she can still escape detection and avoid falling into too much of a routine (all safety precautions, in her current line of work) while still managing to have a little bit of stability.

The one she had chosen for today’s meeting was different than the one she had used when meeting with Teen – almost entirely empty but filled with light from the large row of windows that lined the ceiling. It made it somewhat less secure, as every window was a possible entrance and exit for a determined former Jedi or an Inquisitor, but they were grimy enough to deter snipers and well worth it for the aesthetics of the space alone. Agatha had not been prepared to spend a possibly tense meeting with Rio anywhere particularly unpleasant, so that meant nothing too small, nothing too dark, and nothing too cluttered. 

“It’s been a long time,” Rio says after another long silence. She doesn’t seem uncomfortable, exactly, but doesn’t seem to be in the mood for the silent game that Agatha is trying to play. 

(If Agatha had any idea how to start this conversation, even though it was one she initiated by sending Scratchy to Rio, she wouldn’t be playing the silent game either. It’s making her itch.)

“What are you doing here?” Agatha blurts out, not willing to go down memory lane with Rio just yet. Sure, Rio has come here alone. Has, terrifyingly, found the safehouse and proven that at any moment she could have ended them all, but has instead acted along with whatever scheme Agatha is in the process of cooking up and has followed Agatha to a secondary location on the other side of town without even a hint of alarm. 

Agatha would have once said that Rio would have never harmed her, nor any other civilian, in a million years. But Rio is an Inquisitor now, apparently, and that is beyond out of character for the other woman in the kind of way that makes Agatha want to double and triple check her double and triple checks before letting go of any more details than she already has.

Rio is infuriatingly calm and not thrown off at all by her outburst, though she does cast a few glances around, quick but unsubtle, as though she is expecting to be the subject of a prank in the next few moments. “My job.”

“As an Inquisitor?” Rio just arches an eyebrow at her. “So when should I expect the stormtroopers at our safehouse door?”

“Mmm, not really a fan of… those,” Rio says with a slight scrunch of her face. “But, no, I’m not here for them.” 

The ‘I’m here for you’ lingers between them, unsaid but somehow heavy.

“Speaking of, who are those people?” Rio asks, prodding the conversation along once more as Agatha stalls out. It’s almost seamless, the way she senses where Agatha falters and moves to fill those gaps. It had once been even more so, before everything had been ruined. That it’s still second nature to Rio makes Agatha wonder even more how this woman ended up an Inquisitor.

“Oh, they’re my new best friends,” Agatha responds, a little chirpy.

“And the protocol droid?”

“My my,” Agatha almost purrs, delighted to realize that she may finally have a path forward in this conversation, “you were watching me for a long time the other night. Too busy enjoying the show to help out your comrades? I bet the chain of command frowns on that.”

“None of those idiots are my comrades,” Rio says firmly, somehow managing to sound disinterested and bloodthirsty all at once, as though she would let them all die and not even think twice about it. It’s nothing that Agatha has ever seen on Rio before, but it’s at once as intimately familiar as everything else about the woman; Agatha knows what it’s like to feel that way about the Empire on the kind of innate level that can only come from feeling it in the very fiber of her being every second of the day.

Rio catches herself before she can continue along that vein, and her very posture changes between one breath and the next as she seems to adjust her course to a different topic. “My current assignment,” she tells Agatha, flashing her a pretty smile that reveals the slight gap in her teeth, “if you must know, is to track down the Witch Killer. Imagine my surprise when I learned her name and realized that I knew her. Even share a child with her.” 

She’s stepped closer, somehow managing to look up at Agatha despite the fact that Agatha is ever so slightly the shorter one out of the two of them, and Agatha would feel more comfortable calling it flirting if all of it – the smile and the proximity and Rio’s big, brown eyes – didn’t feel just a little empty at the center, if the smile wasn’t the fakest kind of pretty. Agatha is almost relieved to realize that, while they may be falling into old patterns, there is something behind the words that is too wrong for them to continue, because the mention of their son feels like a punch to the gut, and she’s not sure she would have been able to match Rio’s flirtatious energy with any real enthusiasm.

Her hand flutters vaguely towards her stomach and then away again, trying to hide the action as she tries to catch her breath. She’s almost managed, insanely quickly by her normal standards, when she realizes that Rio used present tense. ‘Share a child with her’, not ‘shared a child with her’. She feels heat rise up her chest as she goes from unsettled to furious in an instant, at the absolute insensitivity from this woman, this woman of all people, to bring up such a thing as though their child is still alive.

As quickly as the fury comes, it leaves. Rio is many things, but tactless and insensitive is not one of them. Agatha has heard, too many times, mothers refer to lost children in the present tense, not out of denial but out of the lack of language around it. How does a mother, even one whose child is no longer living, ever return to life as a maiden? How can a childless mother ever be anything but a mother in every single minute of their life, starting from the first recognition of their child?

And Rio has always been the more spiritual of them, anyway. They hadn’t discussed this particular topic much before, and Agatha had been in no state to try it after, but it wouldn’t be too surprising if Rio believed in all that woo-woo Jedi stuff about how the deceased lived on in the universe as part of the Force, and remained with you always in that way long after death, or whatever. 

It wasn’t like Agatha to give anyone that much grace, but, well, for Rio, she had done stranger things.

Rio continues, “So I guess you can say I’ve been enjoying the show longer than most, by about a decade. She never ran around with protocol droids, though.”

Agatha smiles wryly at her, a little too emotionally drained now (and embarrassingly early in the discussion, which she had actively tried to plan against and absolutely hated) to play more cat and mouse. Instead, she goes for unvarnished, if slightly exhausted, honesty. “I think the protocol droid is the dumbest part of this group, and that’s saying a lot because there’s a lot to complain about here.”

Rio smiles back at her, and for a second, Agatha can just bask in the moment, in the two of them standing there, close enough to touch again after so many years, and smiling. She ruins it for herself a few heartbeats later, clearing her throat awkwardly.

“So if you think your guys are idiots, and I’m still alive and not on my way to Imperial prison, does this mean you’d be willing to lend a hand to my idiots?” she asks somewhat hopefully. “Hypothetically, of course.”

Rio’s smile fades, but the look she has leveled on Agatha is still soft. If anything, it seems to deepen with Agatha’s question, which makes Agatha want to squirm away, just a little. It wasn’t that deep of a question, really, so it doesn’t make any sense for Rio to still be looking at her like she hung the stars in the sky. 

“What if we just call a truce?” Agatha continues, just to put some kind of distance between her and her feelings. Tries to inject her voice with something enticing, instead of the shaky, emotional tone she knows is right there waiting for her to let it slip out. “Just – I don’t know – just one more big adventure?” 

“Like old times?” 

“Work and play,” Agatha confirms. Like every mission they’d ever run together, during the war. Full business in front of the troops, but celebrating their success at the end of every day in each other’s arms. “It could be nice, right?”

“Okay, Agatha,” Rio responds, finally, after long enough consideration that Agatha has once again started to get a little itchy with impatience. It feels too much like a vow, and Agatha swallows hard, her mouth suddenly drier than Tattooine at midday. And then just as suddenly, Rio’s expression changes, no longer solemn and devoted, to something lighter and more playful. “But you have to explain about the droid.”

And Agatha laughs despite herself, helplessly pulled into Rio’s orbit just like she had always been, even snorting just a little. “They think it makes them blend in better on base. I haven’t had the heart to tell them that dragging a protocol droid around is not that subtle, nor is it that useful when trying to make a fast getaway.”

Rio grins, tongue pressing into her cheek again. “Well, luckily for you, the getaway doesn’t seem to be a huge problem.”

“And the droid won’t be one either, with you joining the team,” Agatha says firmly. It’s the only upside to having to be stuck with the woman she still hates too much to admit she still loves. 

“Is that the only reason you wanted me here?” Rio asks, and it could have been a loaded question, but she asks it so gently, in a way that Agatha just knows means that she can be honest with her answer. If only she actually knew what the honest answer even was.

“It’s definitely not a downside,” she admits, a little too carelessly for what Rio had been holding space for. But, well, Rio knew Agatha much too well to be surprised that Agatha was choosing to dodge the more emotionally charged discussion with levity. Realistically, Rio should just be glad at this point that Agatha is choosing humor rather than violence as a coping mechanism, although Rio’s always been able to absorb both options harmlessly.

(Except for the last time they were together on Coruscant, anyway.)

“Okay, Agatha,” Rio says again, and this time it’s not some galaxy-shattering utterance, “Tell me what I need to know.”

And Agatha does.

They run through the details one by one, Agatha giving Rio the brief on the situation like it’s a battle they will both have to win, and Rio listens. Neither of them comments on the fact that Agatha weaves the details together in just the order that Rio prefers, adding extra color around the pieces that Rio is most likely to question. They also don’t comment on the way that the discussion falls immediately and easily into strategy once the details are all on the table, each of them seamlessly arguing both for and against their own positions in favor of the other’s like they are almost more confident in each other’s skills than in their own.

Not commenting on it doesn’t make it any less obvious, but they have years of muscle memory to fall back on that not even those few years of distance could take away.

It feels like coming home.

Once they’ve turned over every detail at least a few times over, knowing their stories need to be airtight if they are going to avoid revealing themselves or each other as former Jedi, and Rio as an Inquisitor instead of some mid-level ISB person, they head back to the safehouse to do it all again, but with a larger audience. They walk side by side the entire way back, Agatha glancing over just the once as Rio falls into step with her from the very start this time. 

“Enjoy the farther races?” Jen asks as they come back through the door, her tone making it clear that she thinks the entire thing was just a ruse. 

“Is there some unknown law of the universe that requires you to stay in this kitchen at all times, just so you can bother me every time I walk in, Jennifer?” Agatha throws back, somehow not at all surprised to see that Jen isn’t alone. Even after the job they had all just pulled together, and the one before that, Agatha was still not in the inner circle. Agatha had no doubt that after Rio’s surprise entrance, and the odd behavior from both of them, the group had spent the entire time they were gone discussing the pair in much the same way that Agatha and Rio had discussed the Coven just minutes before.

Either there was more to talk about than Agatha would have assumed or the team was just terrible at debriefs, because Agatha and Rio had managed to fit in a decent amount of weighty silences and a small amount of other discussion, plus the shop-talk, in the same amount of time; it almost seemed like the Coven could have used a few extra minutes to wrap things up. Amateurs. 

Alice’s hand on Jen’s arm stops the dark-skinned woman from rising to Agatha’s bait, which means that Agatha remains unharassed as she crosses the room and slumps dramatically into a chair. Rio follows behind her wordlessly, sitting down with much less flair than Agatha had. 

“So, is she in?” Teen asks almost immediately, trying to sound calm but failing miserably at hiding the anxious-excited bouncing of one knee under the table. 

“Yes, Teen, she’s in,” Agatha drawls before Rio can answer. They had decided it made the most sense for Agatha to act more like Rio’s handler, so that no one in the group got any bright ideas about trying to contact her or get to know her too well. The fewer people looking, the better. Luckily, Rio seemed to have made an odd enough impression on the group that no one else was likely to try and volunteer for that job, anyway.

Keeping Rio somewhat siloed from the group would add a small amount of mistrust from everyone, more than likely, but that was better than the alternative. As if it mattered much, with trust being at an all-time low for Agatha, anyway. 

“If only any of you had told me what exactly we are ‘in’ for,” she adds sourly. “This will be our only opportunity to talk securely with Rio for long enough to actually strategize, so I hope you’re more forthcoming on details now than you have been with me.”

And just like that, they’re diving back into her second strategy session of the day. It’s definitely not as smooth as the first one – the details are a little more scant, the plans a little more rigid, but it does slowly come together as everyone around the table begins to add their expertise.

Four rebels, a Jedi, and an Inquisitor in a safehouse, plotting against the Empire. Sounds like the wind-up to a very stupid joke.

Agatha can only hope that she doesn’t end up as the punchline. 

Chapter Text

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Planet: Coryo

Year: 39 BBY (25 years before "Present Day")

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Humidity hits Agatha like a slap to the face as she steps off the transport ship in Coryo, making her wish (and not for the first time) that the Jedi Order wasn’t quite so strict in its choice of uniform. She had certainly been on more than one of the galaxy’s more frigid planets in her time as a padawan, but, even still, she would never understand why Jedi were still expected to wear a tunic, with its long sleeves, and sometimes robes, even when travelling to the desert planets or, like Coryo, the ones that were primarily rainforest.

She wants to stop a few feet off the ship to try and get her bearings, but that’s the kind of thing that Padawans do, and she’s a Jedi Knight now. Never mind that this is her first solo assignment, or that she has barely been a Jedi Knight for more than a few weeks. The Jedi Council had given her just enough time to barely get her bearings, to make the adjustment on Coruscant after completing the Trials, and then they had shipped her off to this fairly distant planet, more untamed nature than any kind of civilization, without much in the way of instructions. Perhaps they figured that she had gotten herself this far – both into the Trials and then out of them – and didn’t need the help.

So, no, she doesn’t stop to get her bearings. Doesn’t even slow up enough to let the troopers that rode in with her disembark and somewhat lead the way. Just tries to remember the exact tilt of her Master’s chin as they had walked into every assignment they’d ever gotten and imitate that same posture as she walks confidently towards what she is desperately hoping is the central command center.

Evanora had been a hard Master to please, but no one had ever said that she was incompetent. 

It’s the first time since she’s been gone where Agatha has actually wished that the woman was there to guide her, but that kind of weakness is inexcusable, so she does her best to squash that thought as it bubbles up. 

Thankfully, she has ended up in central command, presenting herself to an older Jedi who barely looks at her before assigning her to some quarters and calling to another Jedi nearby to show her around base. 

“Jedi Harkness, was it?” the woman asks as she approaches, the older Jedi having already dismissed them the instant he had handed Agatha off. Agatha nods stiffly at the other brunette, whose much darker hair just brushes her shoulders, unlike Agatha’s long and somewhat wild chestnut curls, unsure of exactly what else to say. The other woman smiles at her, perfectly at ease, and gives her a very short bow, which Agatha returns. “I’m Jedi Vidal. Welcome to Coryo.”

“Thank you.” The words are a little awkward – Agatha’s Master had always done most of the talking when they were stationed anywhere. And since Agatha had not exactly been allowed to spend a lot of time with other Padawans outside of training, as Evanora had always had her doing some sort of training or some sort of meditation, she’s not very accustomed to having to make polite conversation. 

(Agatha had always been terrible at meditation.)

“No problem,” Vidal responds, somehow relaxed and easy in a way that makes Agatha feel out of her depth. “Most of the Jedi are quartered near each other, so you’re going to be by me. I’m here mostly to help out as a healer – what are you here for?”

“I’m a combat specialist, mostly,” Agatha responded with a small shrug, not feeling the need to elaborate. She doesn’t even really know how she would elaborate – Coryo is by all accounts very peaceful, and she doesn’t really know why there is a base full of Jedi here in the first place. She very intentionally does not mention to Vidal that it was her first assignment, and Vidal blessedly doesn’t ask. Agatha doesn’t want to spend time talking about herself, risking with every second the possibility that she will end up talking about how out of her depth she is. She doesn’t have the luxury of feelings, or for inadaquacy – things that normal people can afford to have but that Agatha, who will never be normal, can’t. Vidal just nods a little to herself, like the answer was expected, sticking her tongue into her cheek and smiling at Agatha. 

“Cool,” she said finally, “Well, let me show you to your quarters so you can freshen up. If you’re going to be out there, I’m sure we will end up well acquainted in no time.”

Agatha rolled her eyes, but didn’t respond, just following Vidal quietly, trying her best to commit the small base to memory as Vidal pointed out important areas as they went. The med bay got another eye roll as Vidal took great care to point that out along the way, and then, finally, they were standing awkwardly in front of Agatha’s quarters. 

“Thank you,” Agatha said, clearing her throat ever so slightly, resisting the urge to fidget with the strap of her pack where it’s digging into her shoulder. 

Vidal smiles at her again, and Agatha finds herself suddenly breathless as her blue eyes meet honey-brown. She shakes herself out of it within seconds, her Master’s voice, scolding (always scolding), practically ringing in her ears. Evanora had always hated when Agatha got distracted, but now that she was gone, it was, even more so, something that Agatha could definitely not afford to indulge in. And certainly not on her first day of her first-ever assignment as a Jedi Knight.

“Happy to be of service, Jedi Harkness,” Vidal says, giving her another short bow and turning to go. 

Agatha inexplicably finds herself wanting to keep the other woman around for longer, with no idea what she would even do with anyone else’s company for more than the short minutes they had already spent, but by the time she works up the courage to possibly try, the brunette Jedi is gone.

Agatha enters her quarters, immediately starting to unpack and get settled into the new space, chastising herself the entire time.

She skips dinner, not feeling up to more company as she tries to get her bearings, but the feeling of waking up hungry at dawn is familiar enough that she barely even registers it. Evanora had always insisted on waking up early to run through her lightsaber forms before the day could get started, before she started training in earnest. While her Master, before her untimely death, had been incredibly well-known for her skills in combat, she was also infamous for having discipline strong enough to make beskar look weak. Agatha could attest to both; she, herself, didn’t have half the skill or discipline that Evanora had boasted (based on both her own admission and the persistent assertions of the Jedi Master for the entire time Agatha had served as her padawan) but the habit died hard anyway, and she had been waking up like clockwork with the dawn even though Evanora hadn’t had any control over her routine for weeks and never would again. It would have to be enough for Agatha to control it, and therefore herself, just as rigidly as Evanora ever had.

During her walk into the base yesterday, she had noticed a small clearing off to the side of the flight pad, tucked behind the parked spacecraft that sat in front of the small base in lieu of having to clear space for an actual hangar. It wasn’t ideal, but by this point Agatha was more than familiar with the way the Jedi, and the occasional accompanying diplomat from the Galactic Senate, had to make do with what they could on the various planets they ended up on. She hadn’t even been sure why this particular base on this particular planet even warranted a combat specialist, even one as green as herself. The people of the galaxy were mostly peaceful when Jedi arrived, and it felt highly improbable that anything untoward could possibly happen that would actually warrant a Jedi taking arms against civillians. But, regardless of the reason, she was grateful for the layout of this particular base and lucky enough that it would mostly hide her from view, and therefore discovery, while allowing her to remain inside the perimeter. 

Coryo’s dawn was unusual, Agatha noted as she stepped outside, glad she had forgone her cloak again as the early morning hours proved to be no cooler than yesterday’s afternoon weather. The planet’s sun was improbably close, but fairly weak, taking up a significant amount of space in the sky while leaving an about-average level of light and warmth on the planet’s surface. The handful of moons in orbit around the planet were small by comparison and barely worth noticing next to such a large celestial body.

Not that it mattered, as she wasn’t there to take in the sights.

She rounded the curve of a starship’s hull, feet away from the clearing she had noticed, and stopped dead in her tracks.

“You didn’t strike me as an early riser,” Vidal said, floating cross-legged in the middle of the clearing. Her eyes were closed, but Agatha didn’t doubt for a second that Vidal knew exactly who she was. ‘Only when the eyes are closed can you truly see,’ or whatever.

“I practice my lightsaber forms in the morning, before the day begins,” Agatha explains, “like my Master did before me.” 

She does not say that she is not a morning person, and has often wondered what it would be like to sleep in even another hour, but that is not the kind of luxury that Evanora’s padawans got to enjoy and it was not one that Agatha was in the practice of experiencing. 

Vidal hummed an acknowledgement, but didn’t open her eyes. She doesn’t seem at all surprised by Agatha’s voice, so she must have been accurate in guessing whose presence had infringed on her meditation.

Sensing the presence of an unfamiliar Jedi with enough accuracy to determine their identity after just one meeting with them was definitely a skill beyond Agatha’s ken, but the fact that the other woman, a healer, was one of these kinds of Jedi for whom the skill came easily hardly surprised her. She hadn’t asked, but Vidal’s presence on this base, one engaged in diplomacy rather than active warfare, coupled with her position on base, suggested that Vidal was a Jedi Consular, or on the path to becoming one. Agatha didn’t know much about Consulars, never having been much inclined towards that path, nor exposed to it very much given the fact that her own Master had been a Jedi Guardian, but she did know that they were more inclined to mastering the mental side of the Jedi arts. Diplomats, healers, peacekeepers. The calm in a storm. Slow to physical aggression.

Just about everything Agatha wasn’t.

Agatha is still frozen on the edge of the clearing as Vidal slowly lowers to the ground, takes a single deep breath, and opens her eyes. 

“Don’t let me stop you,” she says as she stands, brushing her pants off needlessly. “I start my mornings early as well, but there’s space in this clearing for us both.”

“I wouldn’t want to disturb,” Agatha finds herself saying softly, in utter opposition to everything her Master had ever trained her to be.

“You won’t,” Vidal says dismissively, stepping towards her now. She looks like she wants to stop, to talk, but turns the hesitation smoothly into another step as Agatha takes an involuntary step backwards. The morning air feels charged with something more than humidity, but Agatha isn’t ready to face it, or human connection, just yet.

“See you around, Jedi Harkness,” Vidal says instead, as though she can somehow read all of that on Agatha’s face with just a glance, just as she pulls level with Agatha’s position.

The brunette is just about to disappear out of sight when Agatha finds herself saying, “It’s Agatha.”

Vidal freezes, then turns very slowly as though dealing with a spooked animal. It may not be too far off the mark. Agatha clears her throat. “My name, I mean,” she adds, voice a little stronger. “Call me Agatha.”

“Okay, Agatha,” Vidal says, voice a little shaky in a way that seems to exactly mirror how Agatha is feeling. She doesn’t wish that she could take the words back, is absolutely self-assured about it in a way that should surprise her but doesn’t, but Agatha does wish that her heart, hammering away in her chest, would get the message. “I’m Rio.”

“Rio,” Agatha repeats, hardly more than a whisper as she tries the shape of the word on her tongue. Rio nods.

“See you around, Agatha,” Rio says, partially repeating herself but correcting the address. The words seem to warm something in Agatha’s soul.

“See you around, Rio,” she returns with a slight nod of farewell. They lock eyes for one heartbeat, then another, and then Rio is turning the corner and disappearing, leaving Agatha in the clearing alone.

And Agatha does see Rio around, quite a lot for someone supposedly just there to lend her healing skills to whatever mission they’re supposed to actually be focused on here on Coryo. It starts small – Agatha sees Rio nearly every morning in passing, trading places with the other Jedi who spends her mornings meditating with the sunrise in the small clearing just outside the base. And then Agatha starts seeing Rio more around the base, too, in the hallways, in the command center, in the med bay when Agatha does (in fact) get herself into scrapes doing training exercises. 

If Agatha goes to the med bay for the kinds of injuries she would usually just rub dirt in, just to see Rio, that’s no one’s business but her own. 

(It’s just another hit to her lauded self-control that she pretends not to notice.)

Rio, it turns out, is freakishly brilliant, with an eye for strategy and a brain built for combat even though Agatha has never once seen her so much as touch her lightsaber. She’s good enough that her input is valued by most on the base despite her alleged specialty, and Agatha is starting to wonder if perhaps the galaxy is playing some kind of cosmic joke on her in which she will discover that it’s been Rio, all along, who is the combat specialist-in-training and not, in fact, Agatha. And unlike Agatha, who is caustic and biting and inflexible in a way that perhaps Evanora would have been proud of but which does not and never will make her any friends, Rio is easy-going and friendly. Relaxed where Agatha is tense, which Agatha is more and more around Rio as the two inevitably become closer. Agatha has never had friends before, and certainly has never met anyone like Rio, who seems to think that Agatha’s hard edges are… funny? Who laughs whenever Agatha says something a little mean, or at least gets a little crinkle between her eyebrows like she wants to laugh.

(Has anyone ever thought Agatha was funny before? If they had, Agatha is unaware of it. All she can remember is her Master’s reprimands about appropriate behavior, and certainly no one had been laughing at Evanora O’Connor for saying something a little mean.)

So Agatha finds herself sucked further and further into Rio’s orbit, helpless to stop it and helplessly a victim to the feeling that she would rather chew off her own arm than lift a hand to even try and stop it. (Where, now, is the control that she has told herself is crucial for her survival?) Instead, she just channels all of the feelings she has into her morning training, leaning more and more on the movements of more aggressive forms like Makashi and Ataru even when something a little more meditative, contemplative, like Soresu would have been a little better suited for the moment. But Agatha had not gotten this far through meditative practices, and could not imagine truly practicing a lightsaber form that would allow her to root her feet, immovable, when she clearly had been born with an innate need to keep moving at all times. Maybe it’s trying to outrun the inevitable, but the aggression she bakes into her morning ritual is the only thing that makes her feel, most mornings, that she’s holding on to herself with more than just her fingernails.

Halfway through her assignment, she finds herself sitting cross-legged across from Rio in their clearing, which is practically in pitch dark due to the truly pitiful amount of light that reflected off of Coryo’s numerous, but tragically tiny, moons. Agatha has never been one to meditate, but Rio, she learns, does it twice a day, at one with the Force and her environment, centered and whole within it, in a way that is so foreign that Agatha can barely even imagine what it could be like. But that night, Agatha’s first time joining Rio in her practice, Force floating inches apart, listening to Rio’s guiding voice, Agatha can imagine how wonderful it might be to experience that every day.

(Rio’s voice should raise Agatha’s hackles, guiding her through the meditation like a Youngling rather than a fully raised Jedi Knight, but she finds it so soothing that she barely even remembers she is supposed to mind it.)

(Rio’s brow crinkles with unexpressed amusement at Agatha’s half-hearted attempt to pretend she resents it.)

It’s like the meditation unlocks something in her, and Agatha finds herself teasing Rio for never wielding her lightsaber, for never training with the troopers that are stationed with them. Agatha, she tells the other woman, has stepped into her world with the meditation, and now it’s Rio’s turn to give Agatha’s hobbies a try.

Agatha expects Rio to be bad. Rusty. Unpracticed. 

She finds a passive, but unconventionally effective, sparring partner instead.

And on the final day of Agatha’s assignment, as she laughingly locks sabers with Rio (Rio, who, true to form, is immoveable and defensive like a mountain and no less Agatha’s equal for all the difference in their styles), she is utterly shocked to realize that the mood has shifted between them.

The lightsabers crackle against each other, but the hum in the air, the feeling in her very bones, is something more elemental. It’s the restless, weighty energy from Agatha’s first morning on base, when Rio had paused before leaving Agatha to her practice. The same one that had caressed the syllables of Agatha’s name for the first time with such reverence. The one that tugs at the edges of her self-control, already fraying after months of a silent, unseen assault, tempting her to take the leap into unknown territory that could lead to her utter ruin.

Agatha’s eyes dip down to Rio’s lips, slightly parted with exertion, the remnants of a small smile fading as Rio seems to catch the more serious direction Agatha’s thoughts are hurtling in. When blue eyes raise again to meet Rio’s, neither of them are laughing anymore. 

And then, somehow, both lightsabers are switched off in unison as they are unceremoniously dropped from hands that are already reaching for each other, as Agatha’s lips meet Rio’s in a kiss that steals the breath from her lungs and turns the entire galaxy on its head.

Rio kisses exactly like she does everything else, with a calm competence that somehow manages to catch Agatha off guard. Agatha sinks into the feeling, her hands coming up to cradle Rio’s face as Rio’s lips glide against hers. Agatha gasps into the kiss, Rio’s fingers grasping her wrists tightly, though the other Jedi makes no move to pull Agatha’s hands away from the healer’s face. Instead, Agatha feels like Rio is conveying only reverence through that simple touch, as though she needs to ground herself in the thump of Agatha’s pulse underneath her thumbs as they both disappear inside the kiss, as though that faint heartbeat is the only thing that reminds her that this is real. (As though that is the closest that Rio can get, right now, to holding Agatha’s heart in her palms.)

In a reflection of every duel they’ve ever had, they coax soft moans and breathy sighs out of each other with lips, teeth, tongue, and hands – Rio patient and steadfast as she slowly drives Agatha into pitiful, restless need, while Agatha’s own tactical spontaneity manages to surprise answering surges of passion from Rio.

Agatha doesn’t pull away, doesn’t even consider it, until she feels the very last thread of her control start to waver. When she finally does shift, leaning back ever so slightly, it’s a feat of absolutely herculean effort. It would be so easy to give in to Rio, to lose herself and forget every bit of instinct and training that warns her how dangerous that would be, but she can’t bring herself to be quite this careless.

Rio’s lips chase hers, pulling away with a small frown when Agatha evades her. The question remains unspoken, but Agatha hears it clear as day.

“I,” she starts, falters, tries again, voice raspy. “We can’t do this, Rio.” Her hands are still cradling Rio’s face, fingertips tracing the soft skin of Rio’s cheeks, unable to let go despite her words to the contrary. She knows it’s the weakest excuse she could have used, but it’s the only thing she could possibly vocalize right now.

Rio must sense something in the juxtaposition between the words and the love letter that Agatha’s fingers are tracing on tan cheeks, because an ordinary person would have shown some sort of hurt over the words, words that should have been a callous dismissal if Rio didn’t somehow have the ability to read Agatha with the same proficiency that she shows for everything else the galaxy throws at her. But Rio’s fingers only tighten over Agatha’s pulse point, honey-brown eyes gazing steadily into Agatha’s blue ones, before releasing their grip. Agatha sweeps one thumb across Rio’s kiss-swollen lips, unable to help herself from indulging just a little while longer, and then she, too, is releasing her grip and taking a small step back. 

“Okay, Agatha,” Rio says, and it’s steady, grounding, in a way that makes Agatha suddenly want to cry, the kindness of it almost too much to bear. Rio is still looking directly at her, not shying away from eye contact, and Agatha can’t help but wonder what Rio sees in her eyes, in her face, when she looks at her.

“I,” Agatha starts again, and the words get stuck in her throat even quicker than they had before, and she has no idea what she could possibly replace them with. Luckily, she never needs to find out, as Rio’s eyes soften just a little and she takes her own, small, step back. Just enough to remove the slightest bit of pressure on Agatha’s psyche.

“You leave tomorrow,” Rio says, with a head tilt that Agatha knows by now means that she’s trying to feign a more casual demeanor, “and I’m not ready to say goodbye, just yet.” Agatha’s eyes widen in surprise at the easy way that Rio takes this fully onto herself, opens her mouth, and lets the words fall out. Will Agatha, herself, ever manage to be so free with her own thoughts and feelings? She doesn’t think so, nor does she think that she deserves to, after what her loss of control has done and could easily do again. “Come back to my quarters, just to sleep?”

Agatha hesitates. She wants to say yes more than she’s ever wanted almost anything else in her life. But she can think of little that could be more ruinous than that, if she actually let herself fall.

“It doesn’t have to mean anything,” Rio adds, as though she can read the underlying fear even though she should have no way of knowing the true root of it. 

Despite herself, Agatha finds herself nodding, drinking in Rio’s relieved smile like it’s the last good thing she will ever get. 

That night, she climbs into bed and tries not to question how Rio’s arm around her, warm body slotting in behind her as though they’d done it a thousand times, can feel so right, for something that is so utterly disastrous.

She doesn’t sleep.

Too early the next morning, she gently untangles her limbs from Rio where the other Jedi has inexorably moved closer throughout the night, and rises from bed without waking the healer. It’s the most difficult test she’s ever tried her skills against, and by the time she’s out in the corridor on her way back to her own quarters, her heart is pounding like she’s been in full-scale battle for hours.

Methodically, she packs her belongings and makes her way to the transport, tucking herself into a quiet corner, cloak on and hood up for privacy, as she does her best to project Jedi detachment instead of bursting into tears.

She’s gone, off-world, before Rio wakes up.

It’s for the best.

Chapter Text

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Planet: Umbiry

Year: 30 BBY (16 years before "Present Day")

-------------------------------------

Umbiry is a desert planet, and so Rio is reminded, rather unpleasantly, of every bad experience she’s ever had with sand the moment she lands. She’s been sent all over the galaxy in service to the Jedi Order, and now has added another handful of postings under the general auspices of ‘peacekeeper’ since the Invasion of Naboo, but desert planets are always, and have always been, her least favorite. It doesn’t have much to do with the planets themselves; it’s more that, even after decades away from her home world, she still has never managed to adjust to planets that are so rural and yet have no jungles, forests, or rivers. Most of the worlds she visits are nothing like home, a small little planet so far beyond the Outer Rim that only a few people here seem to even know it exists. Most of the people here barely even seem to know that the Outer Rim exists, let alone anything beyond it. Regardless, it’s the kind of distant location that she is not likely to ever return to.

Rio’s purpose here is ostensibly for healing, as that is, after all, what she has trained to do, but on a peacekeeping mission she really isn’t certain what purpose she would actually serve. In prior postings, she has been sent into the towns and villages, trying to buy goodwill towards the Jedi and the Galactic Senate through humanitarian efforts. But on Umbiry, the planet is restless in a way that Rio can feel every morning and night as she meditates, and she knows that it’s only a matter of time before the people, chafing under the pressure from the same Galactic Trade Federations that had blockaded Naboo and the general sense that the Galactic Senate is not doing much to protect them, take some kind of action. 

She brushes sand off her pants (even though she is meditating inside, as nowhere outside is particularly well suited for the activity, the sand still gets everywhere), and stands, checking the chrono. They are supposed to have a transport ship incoming today, adding more personnel to this diplomatic mission that feels less and less diplomatic with every transport, and that means a busy day ensuring that no one gets too lost or causes too much trouble. 

The transport, when it lands, comes with more bodies than Rio had anticipated; maybe more modest numbers would have been more reasonable and in keeping with the overall mission, but it seemed instead like the powers-that-be were looking to increase the overall presence of the Jedi and other Senate peacekeeping forces on this planet. 

So, rather than wandering aimlessly around the base waiting to come upon anyone who was obviously lost and confused, she headed for the command center. Surely, with this many people freshly landed, there was likely at least one or two people of important rank that she should probably acquaint herself with.

“Good timing,” the Senatorial lead of this particular peacekeeping mission comments, as she slips into the room to see that most of the base’s current staff of officers – a couple of Jedi interspersed with a few captains and lieutenants from the peacekeeping troops – are already present, sitting around a large briefing table. Outside of one or two faces, everyone looks familiar. “We’re just waiting for one more.”

As if summoned, the door slides open just as Rio is about to sit down in an empty chair, and a woman that Rio has spent years trying to forget walks through. Icy blue eyes meet her own brown gaze, as if drawn together by magnets, and Rio is treated to an unfiltered look of surprise before Agatha’s gaze shutters into a blank mask of neutrality.

“Agatha Harkness, meet –,” her commanding officer starts.

“Jedi Vidal,” Agatha interrupts smoothly, but there’s no emotion in her tone at all. “We’ve met.” The way she says it, it doesn’t sound like a compliment. It doesn’t really sound like much of anything at all, which somehow seems worse than any alternative.

Rio hides the hurt behind a curt nod of greeting, unsure how to match whatever energy Agatha has brought to the base today, and sits down, unwilling to let herself get overly distracted by the wild-haired brunette.

What follows is one of the most contentious briefings Rio has ever been part of, and it’s almost impossible for her to avoid being distracted by Agatha when Agatha’s presence is the entire reason the briefing is such a struggle. It’s clear that the other woman has finally found her stride as a fully fledged Jedi Knight and has managed to become the kind of Jedi that would have made Evanora O’Connor proud. 

Rio hates the change immediately. 

Not that the other woman is inherently wrong about anything, which is all the more infuriating. Agatha is now cool and competent, and unafraid to assert herself, insert her opinions, and offer up her expertise. Long gone is the young girl who had been capable, but stiff and unsure how exactly to show it.

Unfortunately, Agatha seems to have picked a single target on which to flex her talents, and it happens to be Rio. By the time the meeting is done, Rio is clinging to her Jedi calm by the tips of her fingers and feels more wrung out than she has in quite some time. She has always known that Agatha was sharp, with an amazing tactical brain to match a more than adequate physical proficiency with her distinctive purple lightsaber, but she had not exactly prepared herself to have it directed at her, determined to shred everything she had to say to absolute pieces.

It feels personal, as does the way the other Jedi barely looks her in the eye the entire time. It’s not a shrinking, embarrassed kind of avoidance, but a more dismissive one. Rio’s out of her seat the instant the briefing ends, and it’s not because she’s trying to avoid Agatha (except that it is), which is good because she takes two turns outside the door and Agatha is right there in front of her as though they’d both had the same idea about making a quick getaway. 

Their eyes meet again, as Rio pauses, crackling electricity reminiscent of two lightsabers crashing together, and then the moment breaks as Rio exhales a sharp breath through her nose and brushes past the other brunette without another word.

It goes much the same for the next several weeks. Rio hardly has to see Agatha, and is thankful every morning that her meditation rituals take place inside on this base because it means that she won’t have to run into Agatha during the other woman’s own morning ritual. What little she does see of her is more than enough, with Agatha somehow simultaneously dismissive and combative in a way that is obviously and increasingly personal. And Rio knows that it’s getting on her nerves, that she is subconsciously matching Agatha’s tone rather than letting the attitude roll off her back, but the months of pining after Agatha years ago on Coryo had proven to her that she was utterly incapable of not matching the other Jedi’s every move. Even now, when they were clearly at odds, there was a harmony to the way they fit together that called to her, and made it impossible for her to resist. Just as she had found Agatha impossible to resist from the very first moment they met, matching even the most toxic of energy feels more natural than breathing.

Despite herself, Rio finds that she is almost enjoying it, in a terrible, savage way.

It’s the only possible explanation for why she delights so much when, a few weeks in, she is added onto one of Agatha’s patrol routes. The other Jedi has been taking a few squads out and doing periodic sweeps of the area and neighboring town, verifying that all is well within the surrounding area and ensuring that the people there see the Jedi and the peacekeeping troops that the Senate has sent to aid them, a job that Rio had helped with previously when the other Jedi were busy elsewhere. Rio, unlike Agatha, has experience with the locals and with the town, primarily due to having been there longer, and has enough experience with the patrol route that she could probably do it in her sleep. And so when a forcibly cheery Rio shows up for patrol to an icy, but utterly fuming Agatha, she can’t help but feel like she’s finally winning at something.

Agatha immediately begins to take charge, assuming the position that she has grown accustomed to from more recent postings, but Rio has been on just as many patrols as she has and is not particularly inclined to give up her own customary position as the leader to the woman who left her behind without a word, years ago, and who seems determined to somehow make that Rio’s problem. After what is likely the least coordinated first few minutes on patrol that any of the clone troopers with them has ever seen, Agatha turns to Rio with a snarl.

“You want to take control of my unit?” she asks through gritted teeth, barely managing to feign civility. It’s clearly not a question – Agatha sounds like she would rather chop her own arm off than allow Rio to take charge, but it’s not exactly the Jedi way to openly fight over something as pithy as the leadership of a single patrol squad. 

“Your unit?” Rio can’t help but be a menace, not when Agatha has been one for weeks. She gives the brunette a wide-eyed, faux innocent look that she hopes will convey the falsest surprise that Agatha has ever seen. “No.” She drags the pause out, considering, happy to let Agatha think, for just a few moments more, that she is denying the other woman’s control over the unit. “If you want to be in control,” she sucks in a breath suggestively at the implication, dragging her eyes deliberately from Agatha’s blue eyes to her lips – flattened in irritation – and then slightly lower before pulling them back up, “you can be.”

Agatha is flustered – Rio can just tell from the faintest of pink flushes to the other woman’s cheeks, although she doesn’t know if that’s due to the statement or to the delivery – but she doesn’t waste any time in taking control, leaving Rio to trail after her like a particularly disruptive puppy. She does an admirable job of ignoring Rio entirely while they’re out there, but Rio makes sure that everywhere the other brunette turns, Rio is there and ready to be slightly annoying. Whatever is going on with Agatha, it’s definitely brought out the worst in the both of them, and Rio is loath to admit that she’s having fun with it. Maybe in another life, she would be free to shed all of the training and dignities of the Jedi and instead exist like this: a thorn in everyone’s side. 

At least, it’s fun up until she’s being slammed up against the wall in some random corridor on her way back to her quarters.

(Who is she kidding – that part is kind of fun, too.)

“Are you out of your mind?” Agatha practically growls in her ear, fingers still fisted in Rio’s tunic where she had grabbed hold to throw her into the wall. Although Agatha is strong and already braced for Rio’s probable struggle, they both know that a single use of the Force could separate them in an instant, if they wanted.

But Rio doesn’t want that at all.

Heck, Rio doesn’t even try to struggle.

She should.

Instead, she smiles at the other brunette, somehow relaxed in the face of Agatha’s obvious rage, her blue eyes sharp and shining, and her face slightly flushed. “Why hello, Rio, nice to see you, too, Rio, thanks for keeping me company out on patrol, Rio,” she prompts the other woman, not hiding the slight mocking in her tone.

It’s enough to release Agatha’s grip, as the other Jedi recoils with a scoff. “You’re impossible,” she mutters, but it’s still fully venomous underneath the quieter volume.

“And I suppose that’s usually your move, right?” Rio bites back almost immediately, watching in satisfaction as Agatha’s eyes darken in anger.

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

Rio fearlessly closes the gap between them, scant as it is, to go toe to toe with the other woman. There had been a warning in Agatha’s tone, just then, but Rio has never been afraid of Agatha a day in her life, and is, frankly, in the mood to be bad at following instructions. 

“You tell me, Agatha,” she says, plain as she can. “You just show up here after years of not talking to me, not seeing me, and then act like I’m the problem.” A mirthless chuckle escapes her lips, but something from the shove earlier must have jostled some words loose because she finds herself continuing, emotion growing as the words continue to tumble faster and faster from her lips. “I didn’t ask for you to be here, and I certainly didn’t ask you to leave Coryo without a word, and the last thing I need is for this entire situation to get out of control, so if you could tell me what the fuck I did to make you hate me, that would be super.”

Barely two feet away, Agatha has gone still, shock painted over every feature. For a moment, Rio feels vindicated, feels triumphant as she takes several heavy breaths, practically panting from spitting the words out that have been rattling around in her mind for weeks now (some of them for years). But then something in Agatha’s expression changes, shifting from shock to something empty and nameless, and Rio feels the change in the pit of her stomach. 

Agatha takes a step back, bland emptiness still on her face as she brushes at the hem of her tunic. It’s clearly just a move to keep her hands busy, but Rio reads through it in an instant.

“You’re right,” she says, and even her voice is flat as she looks up at Rio with dull, expressionless blues. “We wouldn’t want this to get out of control.” She nods, almost more to herself than to Rio, as though that settles everything, and turns to go.

Rio has reached out to grab her wrist before she can even register the thought to do so. She’s not entirely sure what has happened in Agatha’s mind, but nothing about it feels right, and Rio has always trusted her intuition on things like this. 

“Agatha, wait,” she says, tugging lightly to try and entice the other Jedi to turn and face her again. Agatha has frozen mid-step at Rio’s touch, but is visibly stiff, and she hasn’t made any kind of acknowledgement of Rio’s hold on her wrist. Rio wants nothing more than for the other woman to soften under her fingertips. 

“I can’t do this, Rio,” Agatha says lowly, still not turning. It’s an echo of what she had said to Rio back on Coryo, in their clearing, before everything ended. 

“Agatha,” Rio starts, but she doesn’t even know what words should come next, only knows that the one word she does manage to utter comes out half-pitiful as she pleads with the other woman.

Agatha’s head turns, finally, eyes cutting to the side just enough for Rio to see her full profile. 

“Don’t,” she says, words desperate and quiet. Rio can see that the flat expression has been wiped from her face, but it’s been replaced with something more haunted, as blue eyes shimmer with what might be the beginnings of tears. Don’t what, Rio wants to ask, earnestly, but she never gets the chance as Agatha utters one more, “Don’t,” sounding defeated this time, and then continues down the hallway, her wrist falling from Rio’s grasp before Rio has even realized she’s let go. 

And then Rio is alone in the corridor, wondering if this is somehow her destiny in life to keep watching Agatha Harkness slip from her grasp and leave her with nothing but the memory, and the heartache, to show for it.

///

It feels like nothing has changed in the weeks that follow, but some part of Rio recognizes it as a gigantic shift. Rio had already done her time processing what it was like to be left behind, hurt and confused, by Agatha Harkness, so this time should not have felt any different. 

The Rio of ten years ago, the Coryo Rio, had, as it turned out, had it very easy by comparison. Because that Rio had been alone, with space and time to work through her feelings. Had not had to talk to Agatha while still trying to make sense of the world – though she had tried, for months after, to contact the other woman through pretty much every possible technological means she had at her disposal – and so had eventually been able to process the loss, as much as one could process unexplained loss, without having to see Agatha in the process.

But the Rio of today gets to see what it looks like as Agatha slowly falls apart, and that doesn’t feel as good as the angry Rio of yesterday, the one who had risen eagerly to Agatha’s challenges and had so readily gone toe-to-toe with her in the hallway, had thought it would feel. 

The following day, Rio sees Agatha only in passing, blue eyes rimmed in red. The other Jedi looks like she hasn’t slept, and the sight inexplicably makes Rio’s heart ache. They don’t speak, they don’t make eye contact (in a way that Rio knows is deliberate), and from what Rio can tell, Agatha is practically subdued.

Agatha somehow makes sure that she and Rio barely cross paths.

It means Rio only gets glimpses as Agatha slowly spirals over the next two weeks. It’s not the kind of thing that anyone else would notice, but Rio knows Agatha better than anyone else on this base, even though there are so many years missing between them. No, the combat specialist ensures that she does her job, and with a level of proficiency that would ensure that no one looks too closely at her, and not a single bit more than that bare minimum standard. 

They stop arguing in meetings. Rio wonders how no one else comments on it.

The first week, Agatha seems sad every time Rio catches a glimpse of her, as though weighed down with some unnamed emotion. It explains the way her eyes still speak to sleepless nights.

The second week, whatever emotion had brought Agatha down shifts into something a little closer to mania. It looks almost familiar to Rio, who had definitely noticed, though not understood, the way that Agtha had, on Coryo, abruptly begun training as though the galaxy itself were after her and the only way she could regain control of her troubles was to wrestle them, physically, into submission. This time, Agatha looks less hunted, but hardly more in control of herself. 

In almost every way, Agatha continues to maintain standards with distinction, to the point where even the Jedi Council would have been hard-pressed to find fault with her performance.

Emotionally speaking? Rio can sense an impending breakdown, like a crackling thunderstorm growing larger and larger on the horizon. Her abilities with the Force have always been geared towards having a certain sense of things, though nothing half as consistent (or as useful) as true empathy, or premonition. But whatever skill she does have is enough for her to sense the undercurrents around her, when the galaxy deigns to allow her.

Right now, letting Rio know that Agatha is about to lose it seems to be the galaxy’s top priority.

So when Rio answers the knock on her door and finds a visibly frazzled Agatha on the other side, she’s only halfway confused, knowing deep in her bones what had driven the other Jedi to her door. The surprise, though, is nothing that any amount of foreknowledge could have saved her from, and she knows that her brow is slightly furrowed as she looks, truly looks, at the other woman for the first time in two weeks. 

Rio would have much preferred to have whatever discussion they’re about to have in the daylight – she has just changed for bed, wearing a slightly rumpled shirt and pant combination that has significantly less aplomb than her Jedi uniform, and she’s tied her hair carelessly into a loose bun – but one look at Agatha tells her that this discussion can’t wait. The other woman’s typically wild chestnut hair is even wilder than usual, in a way that tells Rio that Agatha has spent a long time (possibly hours) running her fingers through it in the way that Agatha usually only does when she is distracted. Blue eyes have a subtle, frantic look to them, though it eases as Agatha seems to take in the sight of her, seems to gain reassurance by Rio’s actual presence in front of her.

But Rio’s not going to speak first. Uncharitably, she would like for Agatha to do some of the heavy lifting on her own.

“It meant everything,” the other woman blurts out after a lingering moment of silence where they just stare at each other. That seems to be the end of Agatha’s courage, though, because she doesn’t elaborate at all for several seconds. The words echo in Rio’s ears, but she very studiously avoids the urge to turn them over and over again in her mind as if examining them will reveal any specific meaning. (As if she will find, if she looks hard enough, the meaning that she hopes they have.) “You said it didn’t have to mean anything,” Agatha clarifies hurriedly, as though only just now realizing how long the silence had stretched, and Rio’s heart lurches into her throat. 

Rio remembers, rather vividly, having said those words before. She had regretted them for a long time, actually, half convinced that the ludicrous idea that spending the night together, even platonically, could have ever not meant anything to Rio, had been the thing that had eventually driven Agatha away. That maybe the other woman had read the falsehood in the promise, and had run from it. 

“– but it meant everything,” Agatha finishes in half a mumble, as though the vulnerability is too much for clear enunciation. Not that it matters, as Rio hears every word as clearly as a bell, as the world comes to a screeching halt as her brain struggles to process. “That is, uh, that’s why I left.”

Rio somehow claws her way through the mental fog that has accompanied the surge of emotion those words bring, and finds herself studying Agatha closely. The other woman’s cheeks are pink, likely from embarrassment, and Rio realizes instantly, as she always has, that she will have to tread carefully if she wants Agatha to continue, to keep opening up. 

Rio has always been attuned to the other woman, after all.

So she looks up at her – barefoot, the scant inch that Rio has on Agatha is erased, and then some, by Agatha’s boots – and carefully weighs her options, tongue pressing briefly to the inside of her cheek as she thinks. 

“Okay, Agatha.” Simple. Like it’s easy. 

Only, clearly, nothing is ever easy with this woman because Agatha just sighs, a little frustrated, like Rio’s plain statement was not exactly what she was looking for. Rio barely keeps her expression neutral.

“Look, can I just –” Agatha starts, gesturing behind Rio before quickly carding her fingers through her hair, as if realizing too late that she had reached out at all. Then, as though changing topics entirely, she says, a little stiffly, “What do you know about my Master?”

And, well, Rio knows enough to know that this is a loaded question. 

She had looked the woman up, once, when they had gotten word that the padwan learner, though a full Jedi now, just past her Jedi Trials, of the late Evanora O’Connor would be joining them on Coryo. She had wanted some idea of what the woman would be like, where she had travelled to, and what skills she might favor. After all, Jedi Masters tended to choose padawans that mirrored them in some way, whether that was for better or for worse. 

But Rio also knew, in hardly more than drips and drabs, a little bit about Evanora from Agatha’s own lips, and Agatha’s own mannerisms. And Rio, who usually enjoyed puzzles and enjoyed trying to intuit things about the world around her, had found that her own observations of Agatha did not appear to match the file that she had read. It was a small amount of dissonance that had bothered her, like a gnat she couldn’t squash, for years, even when she should have long since let the matter go.

“Enough to guess that this isn’t a conversation for the hallway,” Rio says in answer Agatha’s question, trying to keep her tone gentle as she steps aside to allow the other woman past the threshold. It’s clear to her that this had been what Agatha had started to ask for – no, practically demand – before she had thought better of it, but Rio doesn’t miss the way that Agatha wipes her palms discreetly on her pants before stepping inside, as though the very idea that she had gotten her wish was enough to make her nervous. 

Once inside, Agatha prowls immediately towards the empty space at the foot of the bed that Rio assumes is intended to act as a living area, though it boasts only a single chair in the corner. Rio closes the door with a press of a button and takes a seat on the bed, allowing Agatha the option of joining her (an unlikely possibility) or taking the chair. Cross-legged and in her nightclothes, amid slightly rumpled sheets, she hopes that she looks suitably relaxed, and trusting, to soothe Agatha’s nerves.

By the way the other woman doesn’t sit, glancing once at the bed and then once at the chair before refusing both, she’s not sure that the gesture lands. But the idea that it had, and Agatha is just this tense, is viable too. Agatha had always been the more active emoter between the two of them – much like their personalities and fighting styles, Rio had always been more grounded, calm, and steady, while Agatha had always been fiery, passionate, and expressive.

Rio wonders, not for the first time, how a woman like this had ever spent years being trained by the, reportedly, nearly-robotic Evanora O’Connor. Wonders what the Jedi Master had seen in a younger Agatha, to make her take the then-youngling on as her Padawan.

Having made herself comfortable, Rio goes back to watching Agatha with what she hopes is a quietly supportive expression. The brunette has stopped in the middle of the room and turned to face Rio and the bed, but is standing with a stiff stillness that betrays, to Rio at least, the way she must be forcing herself to stillness. It’s not the calm of relaxation, of acceptance, of tranquility, or anything else that members of the Jedi Order strive for at all times. No, this is definitely the seeming-calm of fear and anxiety.

“I’ve, uh, been around enough Jedi since Coryo to know for sure that my training wasn’t the most typical,” Agatha says, grimacing faintly to herself before finally breaking the silence. Rio nearly quirks a brow, and then remembers that she’s trying for impassive support. The healer isn’t exactly sure what Agatha means by typical – the plethora of cultures, species, races, and abilities have always made the Jedi Order an interesting sea of possibility, where the Force, and the Order itself, are just about the only certainties. “I mean, I guess it was typical enough? I learned how to fight well, passed my Jedi Trials without dying, so, I guess there’s that.” The smile that Agatha flashes her is tight and more than a little self-deprecating.

“She told me every day until she died that I was a disappointment to the Order, that I lacked control, that without her to keep me in check, I was dangerous.” That comes all in one breath, and Rio can already see that Agatha is breathing hard, as though fighting something just to get the words out. She swallows hard and then says, like it’s a perfectly normal utterance, “Evil.”

Of all the things that Rio had thought Agatha would say, that was not anywhere on the list. She barely contains her flinch, sensing from the matter-of-fact delivery that this needs a gentle touch. 

The Jedi Order is, of course, fairly invested in the dichotomy of light and dark; specifically, they are invested in upholding the ideals and teachings of the Light Side and defying the Dark Side at every given opportunity. Rio can fathom a scenario in which a strong Jedi Master could take on a padawan specifically to keep them on the path of the light, but when she compares the idea in her mind of what that padawan would be like with the young Agatha that she had met as a freshly raised Jedi, she doesn’t see any similarities. And, personally, she finds it hard to believe that such a padawan would be convinced away from the Dark Side by being told they are a disappointment to their Master. 

After all, what better way to breed the fear, anger, and hate that lead someone to the Dark Side than to berate it into them every day?

It’s a marvel, Rio thinks, that Agatha didn’t turn to the Sith. And, frankly, a marvel that none of Evanora’s prior padawans hadn’t done so either.

That she hadn’t is just a testament to how wrong her Master had been. 

“I don’t believe that about you,” Rio says, carefully, when Agatha doesn’t continue. It’s not a lie. She imagines, briefly, what Agatha would have grown to be like had she gotten the kind of tutelage that Rio, herself, had gotten. Then, because Agatha doesn’t seem inclined to continue, she asks, “Do you? Believe that about yourself, I mean.”

“I didn’t,” Agatha answers, though it’s not as reassuring as it should be. Past tense, Rio notes. Wills herself to exhale and relax a fraction as she feels herself tensing up, a little distressed that Agatha could feel this way about herself. “She, um, died while we were out on some mission.”

It feels like a non sequitur, but Rio notices as Agatha starts to shift her weight like she wants to start pacing but feels like she shouldn’t. 

“I killed her.”

Up until that point, Rio had very successfully been hiding her reactions, but the instant Agatha drops that detonator, she knows her reaction can’t be, and isn’t, hidden. 

It should be repulsive, the idea of a padawan killing their master. And part of Rio half believes that this is an exaggeration of some sort; although Evanora is clearly dead, perhaps Agatha is just expressing guilt, some feeling of inadequacy or blame over the death and not actually expressing culpability. But that certain sense of things is back, and it’s telling her that Agatha is telling the unvarnished truth. And for as terrible as that truth is, she’s not particularly apologetic about it. 

“Does the—“

“No,” Agatha answers before Rio can finish the sentence. “Just you.”

Okay. 

“Okay,” Rio says, sitting up just a little straighter and taking a breath. “Tell me.”

And Agatha does. 

Chapter Text

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Planet: Umbiry

Year: 30 BBY (16 years before “Present Day”)

-------------------------------------

Agatha starts to wander around the room as she starts to explain the entire, terrible, story to Rio. She had assumed earlier, when first entering the room, that she would be pacing back and forth in a more energetic manner, half-frantic, but the movement, when she finally does allow herself to move, amounts to something more akin to fidgeting. She hopes that it is a sign, even if only to herself, that she is more relaxed than she had thought she’d be – that instead of feeling like a storm she can barely contain, she’s stabilized her thoughts and feelings enough that her movement is more to keep the words and thoughts flowing, rather than to burn off the excess stress.

(Or maybe she’s just resigned herself to whatever terrible thing is likely to happen next.)

A lot of that, she thinks, is due to Rio’s very patient listening style. Everything might fall apart in the next few minutes, but at least Rio will hear her out until the very end. That is, at the very least, something she can make her peace with.

She glosses over, as much as is possible, her training. She, like most Jedi, doesn’t really remember her youth, or her home planet, although she intellectually does know where she comes from and what planet she used to call home. She knows that, if she cared to look, there might be something of her old life left there for her, but she also knows, somewhere deep in her soul, that the life she could have had there is forever lost to her. She could always return to that planet in the Colonies, but she could never again make it her home. 

Her time as a youngling had been unremarkable, and her time as a padawan under Evanora had been hellish. Evanora was a harsh taskmaster, rigid, exacting, and sometimes cruel, but Agatha had known nothing different. Had not known until too late that this was, perhaps, abnormal for the Jedi Order. She still, some part of her, wished that she could have been a better pupil for her Master’s teachings.

She will never understand how someone so vile could be so revered by those around her.

She will never know, probably, the true amount of damage that this, alone, did to her.

She explains, woodenly, much the same as she had to the Jedi Council, how she and Evanora had arrived on Ordra. It had seemed like an ordinary mission, though at the time Agatha hadn’t known much about its purpose or what to expect. She and Evanora had made frequent trips to various planets for various reasons – by the time Agatha had turned 15 (by the Coruscant way of measuring such things), she had been to more planets than she could count for practically every reason one could name, and she had long since stopped trying to remember them all. They blended together anyway, more or less, given that Evanora had always preferred her to be seen, rather than heard, unless explicitly spoken to.

It hadn’t been until Coryo that Agatha had realized how lonely she had been during those years. With no frame of reference for it, and no comparison, she truly hadn’t understood. She had thought that whatever she had felt was just part of the padawan experience, or something that everyone went through as they grew. It had been logical, somehow, that being a padawan would feel different from being a youngling. She hadn’t realized that it wasn’t supposed to feel this different.

(Surely if she had, Evanora would have considered it a weakness, anyway.)

But Ordra had been different, somehow. Had been the perfect storm of means and opportunity, she guessed, that had led to her Master’s death. That part, as she had told Rio, she had not mentioned to the Jedi Council.

She barely remembers some things, and vividly remembers others in exact detail. The purpose of their mission there? Not worth her recollection. She vaguely remembers touching down on a relatively desolate planet, one whose rugged landscape she does remember in painstaking detail. Sometimes, she sees it still in her dreams. 

They had walked far from their ship and ended up in a cave system of some sort. They should never have been caught unawares, but by the time they realized that there were unfriendly creatures in the caves with them, the numbers were relatively overwhelming. 

Say what you want about Evanora, but neither she nor Agatha were ones to back away from a fight, and even against a group of creatures (something with long fangs and sharp claws that Agatha had never identified, not that she had cared to, anyway), her Master was sure that the two Jedi (rather, a full Jedi and a relatively well-trained padawan) would manage just fine. At least would manage enough to make it out of the caves, or scare the creatures off.

That pride, the arrogance of it, was Evanora’s first sin. Jedi superiority complexes, of course, aren’t always a match against sheer, oberwhelming, numbers.

Agatha does not remember much of the fight. Just remembers bits and pieces of it, trying to stay unscathed and unseparated from her Master as they fought, but the creatures were more clever than Evanora had given them credit for and the location was too tight to allow for as much fighting space as they needed. By the time it was very clear that the two humans were being squeezed into an increasingly tighter space and they had barely made a dent in their attackers, Agatha had started to give into her panic.

She remembers focusing inward during what she thought was her final moments. Remembers trying to make peace with herself. Remembers falling, somehow, into the Force, into the kind of trance that she had never been able to reach during her meditation practices, remembers thinking that she surely must be almost-dead when she looked around and realized that she could see the Force around her, the ebb and flow of the life forms. Remembers feeling indescribably angry that she would never get to see something so beautiful again, that she was never going to have the life she had wanted. That she had tolerated Evanora for years and would have nothing to show for it.

And then a little voice inside her head, more instinct than words, had told her to reach out and grab the Force, and she had listened.

When the most indescribable head-rush ended, the creatures were dead around them and she and Evanora were left standing amongst a handful of corpses.

Surprise would have been an understatement. 

What happened next was a tirade unlike Agatha had seen from her Master before. It had taken a moment to get going, of course, as both women had stared at the corpses for some time before Evanora had, inevitably, rounded on her padawan. The words were relatively familiar: evil, reckless, dangerous, selfish, etc. The level of vitriol that came with it, though, that was new.

As was the resolute expression on her Master’s face when she casually, too casually, informed Agatha that the Jedi should have abandoned her, or killed her, when they had the chance. Before she could become a blight on the Order. Before she could become Sith.

“I will be celebrated,” Evanora had said, not a single flicker of emotion on her face, “when I return to Coruscant and tell them how I struck a great blow to the Dark Side by killing you, a practitioner of the darkest of arts under our very noses, before you could inflict greater harm.”

And before Agatha had been able to ask questions, of which she had many, the Jedi Master had attacked, the blue lightsaber coming to life in her hand as she struck. Sheer instinct saved Agatha as her own purple lightsaber ignited in time to deflect the blow, but the older woman was relentless and Agatha had been reluctant to, truly, fight her Master. Had not been willing to try and deal a more devastating counterstrike, to face reality and fight beyond what they had done before in training sessions.

She remembers begging, pleading with Evanora to stop. Asking questions, promising that she had only ever practiced as the Jedi taught, denying her Master’s words that she had always been evil. Renounced the Dark Side, most importantly, although she at the time had not even been aware of what behavior she was renouncing. She had been desperate to stop the other woman, to hit upon the magical combination of words that would help her live to see another day.

Agatha had trained for several years, and under such close instruction from Evanora that she knew the woman’s style better than anyone’s, but she also knew that she was unlikely to win against the more seasoned Jedi.

And then Agatha had gotten mad. It wasn’t the first time that Agatha had tried to fight back against her Master when the verbal abuse had gotten to be too much. The two had never fought like this, not physically, not for real, but they had definitely fought like this verbally. Evanora had always found a way to make Agatha regret it, to make her walk away to lick her wounds, to make her think twice about it the next time, but it was the single un-Jedi-like trait that Agatha had never managed to quash. She had always had a temper, and Evanora, in her cruelty, had always known where the trigger was.

This time, as she stared at her Master through the threads of the galaxy’s lifeforce, when every instinct in her body told her to pull that lifeforce in, she welcomed its instructions like an old friend. Within seconds, Evanora was dead without Agatha having had to land a single blow with her lightsaber.

Agatha had slumped to the ground almost immediately, utterly exhausted. 

She doesn’t remember how long she had sat there, bone-weary in a way that could not be explained by the physical toll of the fighting, nor the emotional toll of everything that had come after. She had stood up again much too quickly, but had known she didn’t have much time before something else found her in the cave system. Had taken one look at the bodies of the creatures on one side of her and her Master’s body on the other, and had known that they looked too unnatural to pass any kind of inspection. Had noted, but not quite understood, the way they had appeared to be sucked dry.

Had paused only long enough to remove a locket from Evanora’s belt pouch and then had taken every single body and thrown it off of a nearby ledge, one that she hoped had a long enough drop that the bodies would never be found by anyone looking for them. She’d taken Evanora’s lightsaber with her, unsure of what its use would be but knowing that a Jedi would never willingly leave their weapon behind – for Evanora to be without it now could only lend credibility towards whatever story Agatha would tell.

She remembers staggering back to the ship in the dark, and realizing for the first time how long they had been gone. She doesn’t remember exactly how she managed to get back, but is grateful to have succeeded.

She looks haggard enough when she makes her distress call to the Jedi Temple that no one questions her when she tells them her Master had disappeared and she feared for the worst. The tears that she managed to conjure up certainly help her case, though they’re more from exhaustion than any kind of grief or guilt. By the time a ship arrives with help, two Jedi, she has fleshed the story out a little further and no longer feels quite like she is going to drop into a dead faint.

The official story goes something like this: the pair had split up. Agatha, nearly ready for her Jedi Trials, was more than capable of exploring the caves on her own, and Evanora had determined that they would cover more ground that way. Agatha had, unfortunately, gotten rather turned around and had ended up with a long journey back, but Evanora had not been at the meetup spot when she had returned. Thinking the woman had gone looking for her padawan, Agatha had set off as well, looking for her Master. She had wandered for hours, but hadn’t found any sign of her except for the abandoned lightsaber.

The two Jedi do their best, but they aren’t able to find Evanora either. They don’t have the skills necessary to disprove her story, and although Agatha knows that they do their best to read her, with both Jedi mind tricks and ordinary observation, her continuing tears do enough to throw them off. Tears of guilt and frustration they may be, but the other Jedi don’t know her well enough to know they are not tears of mourning or distress. With not a single trace of Evanora found, they fly back with Agatha to Coruscant, where she dutifully recounts the tale to the Jedi Council.

Days later, she successfully makes her case to the Council, and they agree that she should not be paired up with a new Master. At her age, it would have been ridiculous. Instead, she is allowed to take the Jedi Trials, which she passes. As she had known she would. The Council keeps her under a closer-than-usual watch for the first few months, and then, satisfied that she isn’t going to implode under the weight of too much responsibility too early, they ship her off to Coryo when the opportunity presents itself. 

She finishes the story with her time spent in the Jedi archives, searching for any hint on what ability she had displayed that day. Recounts how she had tried to sneak around as best she could while investigating rare Force abilities.

Can barely put into words for Rio the way her stomach had sunk when she realized that what she had done, Force siphoning, was a Dark Side ability. Explains her determination not to use it, the absolute terror that drives her pathological need for control.

“Thank you for sharing that with me,” Rio says, when she finishes, as though she had shared something as simple as a childhood crush. Agatha gapes at her wordlessly as the shock of the response freezes her in her tracks. 

Agatha has, over the course of her story, walked across every available inch of floor in Rio’s quarters, but the brunette is still sitting on the bed, cross-legged. As though nothing has happened. 

“You’re welcome?” Agatha says, half a question, by absolute rote as she continues to stare at the other woman. “Rio, what –”

“Do I make you nervous?” Rio interrupts her to ask, and it’s still too calm for someone who has just heard a murder confession. Too calm for a Jedi who has heard someone confess to using the Dark Side.

“I –” Agatha doesn’t even know what to do with that question, except that there’s only been one option when it comes to Rio. “Yes.” Although it’s the truth, that doesn’t stop the wry twist to her lips as she utters it. She doesn’t like being nervous, and she likes admitting to it even less. Even to Rio, with whom Agatha generally feels safe being vulnerable. 

“Because you feel out of control?” Rio presses on, unhurriedly unfolding her legs and standing so that she can look Agatha in the eyes from a relatively level height. 

“Yes,” Agatha whispers her response that time. Then, more strongly, “I’m dangerous, Rio.” That, too, is accompanied by an unhappy twist to her expression that she can’t stop. 

“Do you want this? With me?” Rio asks her, stepping closer ever so slowly, although Agatha feels each step etch itself into her brain. 

“Of course I do,” Agatha answers immediately. It doesn’t require thought, because she already knows the answer in her very soul. She just has to get out of her own way enough to admit to it, and after exposing her darkest secret just moments before, she is fresh out of boundaries to lean on. She’s not yet sure whether that is a good thing or not. “But it’s not safe. I can’t… we can’t… stop coming closer, Rio, I’m serious!”

That last utterance does get Rio’s attention, as the other woman stops walking immediately. 

“I am not afraid of you, Agatha,” the healer says with the utmost seriousness in her tone. She doesn’t move closer, but each word feels like a physical caress. “I don’t think you’re any more dangerous than anyone else on this base.” She holds up a hand as Agatha opens her mouth to protest. “I do think that if your Master were still alive, I’d like to make her wish she was dead,” she practically growls, and the surprise of it is like a small spark in the pit of Agatha’s stomach. She licks her lips, her focus narrowed down to the woman in front of her.

“I want this,” Rio continues. “I want you. And if you want me, too, then I want you to stop finding reasons to put distance between us. I will follow you to the ends of the galaxy if I have to, but I want us to have tonight, and the next, and the next, without you running and without me chasing. Can we do that?”

Agatha’s mouth feels as arid as the land outside the base, but she finds herself nodding in the affirmative. The world has narrowed down to Rio, standing in front of her, her heart pounding in her chest, and the warmth blooming behind her ribs as the words stun her into utter silence.

“Can I touch you?” Rio asks, and Agatha nods again.

Rio’s hand finds her jaw like it never left, like there weren’t years between the last time they had touched in Coryo and that very moment. 

When Rio whispers, “Can I kiss you?” a hair’s breadth from Agatha’s lips, Agatha is the one who desperately closes the distance between them, unable to take it any longer. 

Immediately, the heat in her chest begins to make its way lower as their lips move against each other, as hands delve into hair, fist into collars and shirts and waistbands, and as lips and tongues and teeth begin to suck, lick, and nibble.

“We can take this as slow as you need,” Rio says breathlessly, breaking the kiss to look Agatha in the eyes. The light brown has grown darker, pupils expanding, and there’s a smile on her kiss-swollen lips that tells Agatha that Rio is, truly, not upset to be offering. Agatha pulls her back into a kiss in answer.

As the two move back towards the bed, Agatha knows that she will never stop wondering just how she got lucky enough that Rio responded so perfectly to the night’s revelations.

///

Agatha wakes the next morning to find Rio already awake, gazing at her steadily. She’s never been a morning person – her early mornings are a force of habit and a long-entertained bid at maintaining control – but it appears that the reason behind Rio’s own early rising may be because Rio is actually a morning person herself. 

“Have you been watching me sleep?” she mumbles groggily, face still half buried in the pillow. It’s something she probably should have felt self-conscious about, but she wasn’t quite awake enough to bring herself to even pretend it. 

Rio just hummed, vaguely affirmative, reaching out to brush some of Agatha’s hair from her face. It reminds Agatha that the rest of her hair must be out of control, another thing that she should probably feel self-conscious about. She doesn’t reach for it, too unbothered to try and fight the way her limbs are still heavy with sleep.

“Weirdo,” she mutters instead of thinking too hard about what she should and shouldn’t be self-conscious about. It’s utterly lacking in any kind of bite, so Rio just smiles back at her. Agatha does her best to hide the affectionate smile that springs to her face in response. 

Agatha can’t help but marvel at just how easy this is, how it feels like they’ve been doing this forever. It’s a domestic kind of comfortability that the Agatha from that last morning on Coryo could not have imagined. Between that and the fact that she’s still partially asleep, she’s a little surprised when Rio says, out of nowhere, “So, does this mean we’re in a relationship now?”

That is enough to wake Agatha the rest of the way up. It’s not exactly something she had thought about before, an actual relationship, but the moment that Rio utters the words, Agatha finds that she wants little else more than she wants that with Rio. 

But Agatha is almost allergic to feelings, so instead of saying ‘yes’ she says, “I think relationships are the exact kind of attachment usually frowned upon by the Jedi Order.” She hopes that the faux casual tone of voice will cover the fact that she’s suddenly ten times more alert than she had been mere seconds ago, or the fact that her heart is pounding.

Rio laughs at her, and it sounds good-natured enough that Agatha doesn’t tense up. She does care about whatever this thing is with Rio, enough to know that it’s fragile enough that she could still ruin it, if she tries. She hopes that she will be able to resist her own inclination towards destruction long enough to build something more steady. 

“I’m fairly certain that the Jedi Order frown on quite a lot of the things that we’ve done, and surely a romantic relationship would be the least of them.”

Agatha sighs at the reminder of all she had told Rio the night before, but the guilt never hits her as she notices Rio’s use of the word ‘we’. She’s not sure what Rio has done, but appreciates the feeling of not being alone in all of this. 

“How are you so relaxed about all of this?” she asks. She really doesn’t want to be so obvious about her lack of trust, but she truly could not have imagined a response as favorable as Rio’s had been last night, and then for it to continue on in much the same manner this morning seems to be stretching the boundaries of credulity. 

Rio rolls onto her back, staring at the ceiling above them as though she’s searching for a hidden message. Agatha lets her move away, take the space she need. Force knew that Rio had allowed her plenty of space the night before, and had only shown her endless patience. The least that she could do was return the favor. 

“My family comes from a small planet in wild space,” she says eventually, voice contemplative. “I don’t remember much, since I was so young.” Agatha nods at that; that much is a shared experience among Jedi. “I don’t even really remember how the Jedi found me, but I do remember Coruscant, even just the Jedi Temple, being a tremendous adjustment. Things are different out there, where I came from. I guess when you’re so far beyond the Outer Rim that your planet isn’t even on a map, you can afford to be a little different,” she adds wryly, eyes flicking briefly towards Agatha before fixing back on the ceiling. Agatha’s gaze flits over her profile, soft in the dim light of pre-dawn, tracing from her brow to her impossibly tempting lips, as she waits for Rio to continue. 

“Fitting in was the most important skill I could learn, back then, but I don’t think I ever forgot what it was like to live that way. Don’t think I ever outgrew the part inside me that knew the truth of things, the good of things, no matter what anyone tried to say about it.” Rio turns her head to look at Agatha this time, pinning her with a more weighty stare. “I believe that there’s good in this, if we let ourselves make it good. And I don’t believe that something like this shouldn’t be allowed, when the Order’s idea of good included Evanora O’Connor for as long as it did. And maybe that makes me less of a Jedi, but it’s the truth.”

And what can Agatha say to that except, “Then maybe that makes me less of a Jedi, too.”

She sits up, a little more sure now that she can encroach on Rio’s space, enough to lean forward and place a soft kiss against the healer’s lips. She tries to pour every emotion she has into it, desperately needs Rio to understand the awe, gratitude, understanding, and reverence she has for the other woman. It’s more than just lust, and it always has been. After the night before, and their discussions this morning, she doesn’t see how it ever could be anything less than the deepest of attachments. 

“I would love to be in a relationship with you, Rio Vidal,” she whispers into the kiss, and then kisses her again to seal the deal.