Committed to Memory: Vasil Dorne

[AnisaBadgett]

This is a chapter from my KOTFE AU where, if I get back to it, all of our missing companions will be brought back between KOTFE Ch. XVI and the end of KOTET.

 

[Points to me: I did have Quinn and Elara Dorne come back together, just under much different and less contentious circumstances.]

[AnisaBadgett]

A flashback. A journey. A memory of things to come.

 

Vasil Dorne searched for her face for years. He couldn’t believe his girl, his Elara, had left. He couldn’t even say the word. Defected.

 

It had cost him, dearly. Vasil Dorne could have done what others did when their children snuck off, said she’d died. Hint the Sith were involved. No one would have checked, no one would have complained. His smart little girl. But he told the truth, and he paid.

 

When his son Aleksei left, too, the damage had already been done. He’d been put at a table in Intelligence HQ and forced to fill out forms. He was harmless now, so hemorrhaging family members to the other side no longer mattered.

 

But he was not one for forms, or tracking data or measuring compliance. That had been his daughter’s specialty. Something she could do while cleaning and reassembling a blaster. Something she could do while discussing the merits of a BlasTech DL-44 vs a Merr-Sonn Flash 4.

 

She was the smartest person he had ever known and once upon a time, he had known many smart people. He wondered if the Republic cared how good she was. How smart and brave and strong. He wondered if the Republic valued how crafty and street smart his son had been. His son. He could have been a general if he stayed. Or Minister of Intelligence.

 

Both of his children could have easily enrolled in the Imperial Military Academy. But first Aleksei and then Elara declared they were enlisting. They would make their way on their own. The Empire rewarded those who were smart and loyal and neither of his dear ones needed to have a commission handed to them. Others whispered about it, but Vasil was proud of his hard-headed, independent offspring. Even after they left, though that he could never say out loud.

 

Vasil didn’t care about his own career after that. Commander suited him. They hadn’t cut his pay. He tried to maintain some illusion of normalcy, though it was doomed not to last. His wife suffered the most, so much that her heart gave out six months after his son left.

 

Then the war started up again. Some called it a new war, but he knew better. It was the same war, the same war there would always be. Republic vs. Empire, Jedi vs. Sith. Neither side could simply leave the other alone.

 

But someone remembered him, the forgotten commander, and called him back into service. He was given even more resources for training agents for the new Sith Intelligence. The name didn’t matter so much, that was good.

 

Someone else filled out his forms now.

 

+++++

 

Then the galaxy turned itself upside down. Darth Marr, the only hope the Sith had of restoring sanity and order, gone. The Outlander, The Emperor’s Wrath, gone. An unknown enemy, their new reality.

 

When the bombings started, no one blinked when he demanded to be put in charge of a forward bunker outside Kaas City. Whoever these invaders were, this False Empire, he would not let them take his home. They could have his tired old body, but not his home.

 

+++++

 

He woke up, two weeks later, in a crude hospital in the Mandalorian Enclave. Most of the mercenaries had either joined the fighting elsewhere or moved on. They didn’t need to be beholden to the Sith anymore, so why should they stay?

 

Except one stayed longer than the rest. Flame haired, beautiful. By the time he recovered enough to walk around, she’d been named Mandalore.

 

“We’re getting you out of here,” she told him. “You’re too injured to keep fighting, but you still have a job if you want one.”

 

He flew out of Kaas City the next day.

 

+++++

 

He already was not a young man, but the next five years made him feel ancient. Still, he persisted. On any given day, he might see as many Republic faces as he did Imperial ones and it didn’t take that many armed Mandalorians to keep the peace among them. No one was more surprised than Vasil Dorne that this refugee colony on Vanjervalis 4 was working. They even managed to get a crude stim factory up and running.

 

Displaced people, especially during a war, needed to keep busy. So they made combat stims and medpacs of appreciable quality. The Zakuulans thought nothing of the place; on the surface, it appeared to be doing nothing but sending weak medicines, practically placebos, to sick civilians on various Core worlds.

 

Vasil had never even been this far into Republic space and here he was, thumbing his nose at his oppressors and the Republic at the same time. Of course, they knew he was an Imperial, but he had a new identity, thanks to the flame-haired Mandalore. The Pubs couldn’t shut the place down; they needed its output too much. What the Senators and their lackeys and the dregs of the Republic military and the SIS didn’t know was that this enclave, this Mandalorian stronghold, was helping to build a resistance to Zakuul, one that was not beholden to either Republic or Sith Empire.

 

He kept searching for her face. Every new ship, he quizzed the crews. Did they know her, had they seen her? A wounded soldier from Taris thought she looked familiar, based on a crude holo that was all Vasil had left of his former life. The soldier died before he could say any more.

 

A blonde Sith with haunting gold eyes came to visit, to quiz him about the resistance. She promised to keep an eye out for his daughter. Months passed, then years. Nothing much happened, nothing much changed.

 

+++++

 

When the bombardment began, Vasil Dorne was deep within the manufacturing compound, half a kilometer below the surface. It was clear there was no fighting it, so he ran around ordering calm and got everyone he could to the lowest levels. They shut themselves in behind a large vault door. They would just have to ride out this storm.

 

Six hours later, the all clear was called. He sent scouts to investigate. There was no longer an elevator or even a staircase to the surface. It took the party two hours to make their way through the debris but when they did, there was nothing left to see.

 

There were plenty of supplies, Vasil had seen to that, and so the survivors waited.

 

Two weeks later, the flame-haired Mandalore returned with at least a hundred of her kind in tow. They got a crude tunnel system built within four days. She was the first one through the vault door.

 

“We’re shipping you out,” she told him.

 

All he could do was nod. “Keep these people safe, Mandalore. Keep my people safe.”

 

+++++

 

Vasil left with the final group, clutching the last remaining supplies in their arms. He could see the entrance to the surface when the galaxy came tumbling down around his head.

 

He woke up this time on a ship, in a haze from the stims he had probably been carrying. The flame-haired Mandalore was the first face he saw.

 

“You’re pretty hard to kill, old man,” she said.

 

“What … happened?”

 

“Cave in. Kriffin’ Zakuul did more of a number on your planet than we thought. Engineers couldn’t secure everything. But you’ll be fine. Broken leg is all. Two others had concussions, couple more broken limbs, that sort of thing. All of your people made it out alive.”

 

Thank the Maker for that. “What’s next, Mandalore.”

 

“Please, call me Shae. Shae Vizla. You’ve earned it. And we’re packing you all up and shipping you to Rendili. You should be able to get back to work on those stims in no time.”

 

+++++

 

Vasil learned on the flight that five worlds had been bombed to dust by the tyrant Arcann and his sister, the High Justice Vaylin. Looking for a rebel base, it was said. Looking for the Outlander.

 

The Mandalorians took them to Rendili, one of the founding worlds of the Republic. The irony was not lost on him even after all he’d been through. There, he met a young woman, Theanna. She had clearly been Republic military, though she said nothing of her past. She, too, was looking for lost loved ones but by now, wasn’t everyone? He knew not to press any further.

 

He needed help getting around until his leg healed. There were no hover chairs, but someone rigged some valve wheels onto a frame and welded the contraption to a durasteel chair and with help, he could get around. Mandalore, Shae, he reminded himself, assigned Theanna to be his aide.

 

He’d lost everything on Vanjervalis. He didn’t even have his holo of Elara anymore. But Theanna liked to draw. She took stones and ground them into dust and made paint out of them, “Ink,” she called it. Then she took a trimmed down flutterplume feather and drew up the ink and drew on pieces of bark peeled from the birchant trees.

 

He didn’t mind that these drawings took all her attention when she wasn’t wheeling him around their new base of operations. He enjoyed watching her work. It was the only time he ever saw her smile. After she’d created the 10th version of the same Cathar male in Republic armor, he had an idea. It was worth a shot. He would ask.

 

“If I describe someone to you, can you draw them?” he asked, sounding more like a penitent 8-year-old begging forgiveness than a seasoned military commander and intelligence expert.

 

“Can’t hurt to try, sir,” she said.

 

It took a while, but he talked her through the features of his daughter’s face. She looked so much like her mother, he recalled. But her own girl. Her own woman now.

 

When she was about 2/3 finished, Theanna stopped and stood up, the drawing in her hands, her arms stretched out.

 

“I know her,” she whispered.

 

Somewhere, deep in his fragile bones, he had hoped she might.

Edited July 27, 2017 by AnisaBadgett

[frauzet]

Love it!

I did some rapid blinking at the end.

[alaurin]

I love this! It was interesting to see Elara and Alexi's defection from their father's perspective. Awwww, love the end and can't wait to read more.