Warrior ◊ Star Wars

chapter seventeen; trust is a very heavy word

Four days. The longest time Armitage had ever let his sister stay in some sort of captivity before retrieving her was four days.

Back in simpler times before she'd joined the First Order when the word 'criminal' sounded like an apt title to a young, scrappy pilot, her older brother would appear outside whatever cell she'd managed to wake up in within the planet's first rotation. He'd always greet her with scathing words that berated the lifestyle she'd fallen into, pay whatever fine she'd racked up for herself, and insisted that there would come a day where she'd have to get herself out of her own messes because he'd be too busy doing nefarious things abroad a star destroyer in Wild Space.

("You're only here for all that civic shit. I take care of plenty messes that you never have to deal with." Mara had retorted one time before brandishing a large cut across her right shoulder. The slash had been inflicted by a Ryyk blade in the midst of a fighting match she'd joined on a dare. Winning the skirmish hadn't stopped the Batuu peacekeepers from restraining her on charges of aggravated assault.

Armitage gave her a tight-lipped look, "How noble of you to spare me from your other pointless excursions.")

If she had been imprisoned somewhere in the Inner-Rim, she'd wait three standard days at the most. In the one rare occasion when she got arrested on a Core World, only a few hours passed before some operative Mara had never seen before came to free her. Her brother vowed never to venture that far into the galaxy's center while the New Republic was in power and he kept true to his word. That still didn't spare Mara a lecture as the unknown man played a recorded holovid of Armitage giving his usual spiel on how purposeless her life had become. She never knew how he would manage to find her each time, but he and those self-righteous speeches always did.

Takodana, a forest planet on the edge of the Mid-Rim, was the only time she'd doubted him. The girl had spent four days in a cell nursing a broken rib, staring at a paint-splotched ceiling waiting to hear the obnoxious accent the Hux men shared cut through her train of thought. In the last hours before he appeared, she wondered if maybe her brother had truly given up on her. Maybe he thought she'd perished in the fire set by the Gauvian Death Gang that had destroyed her personal starfighter months earlier. Maybe he finally had given up on her like he always threatened.

Yet he did show up eventually, bringing news of their father's passing and offering her a position in the First Order. She guessed that he'd waited longer to come as a method of wearing her down or a type of punishment.

Stranding her on a deserted planet after her squadron had been completely decimated had to be a punishment. Mara was sure Armitage was coming for her, but not after she suffered just a little due to her failure.

And Maker be damned, she was suffering. She was being forced to scale over odd rocks and listen to the Resistance man make small talk with his droid every few minutes. Only every so often would the two of them exchange words.

"For goodness sakes, stop humming!"

"And why would you want me to stop singing? Doesn't singing lighten the mood? Make everyone happier?"

"Now that's hypocritical. You said you didn't like humming."

"I said I didn't like your humming. There's a difference."

It'd been hours since they left that dreaded cave and Mara was tired. She was tired of sand, tired of heat, tired of the amount of optimism the man beside her continued to express every fifteen minutes like he'd been programmed to do so. As she kept climbing over large, bleached red rocks, an ache began to persist in her legs and her throat began to dry. Her lips became chapped and her hair stuck to the back of her neck in a sticky, sweaty mess.