Dynasty

x. NO EXILE

x.
NO EXILE

✶

"What did I expect? / To leave a hemorrhage of violets wherever I walked? / No. A lost son is called prodigal. / A lost daughter is just called lost."
— Emily Rose Cole, Love & a Loaded
Gun; "Persephone Returns"

Fallon left the temple early in the morning, just before dawn could thread thin and gold through the Galactic City, before it could put Coruscant's lights—fluorescent and blurry like memory—to shame. A Mandalorian starship had come to collect her from the temple hangar, and from its passenger seat Fallon watched the city disappear, swallowed up by smog.

The vessel beat the sun to rising, daybreak coming mere moments after the ship shed the atmosphere, claiming Coruscant so swiftly it seemed it had been waiting in darkness for Fallon to depart. She was not so self-centred, however, so self-important, to believe that she truly had some sort of pull on the sun, some kind of power to rival it—despite whatever Hiro might have had to say about it.

          Maybe it's not so clear on Planet Fallon, where the world is perfect and at peace and pretty boys like Chrysaor Rook orbit pretty girls like you like you're the sun, Hiro had said, her spite burning a thousand degrees, bigger and brighter than any sun Fallon could ever pretend to be.

          So? Fallon thought to herself as she relived the memory, though even in her imagination what she pretended was her "scorn" barely even burned, barely even struck a spark. The only heat she could find was in the words she had said to Kil just a few days before, on-board the Faultless and en-route to Jalid: Maybe I want to burn.

She thought of Hiro again—then, shamefully, of Chrysaor. Maybe this is the only way I know how.

It was a different sun, one that was decidedly not Fallon, that greeted her on Mandalore. It swelled in the pale morning sky, quiet in its light and even quieter in its judgement—whatever it had thought of Fallon the day before had been forgotten, or perhaps, forgiven, during the night. Fallon, for the most part, was indifferent. She already had a celestial body of her own to worry about: Satine.

Satine, with her hair, her flowers, her family, always perfect, always in place.

Satine, with her power, like a weed that grew as it pleased, weaving and wending, reaching and taking root, never caring for what it ravaged in its exploration of the earth.

Her power, which she had used to exile her own sister.

As the starship descended upon Sundari, Fallon leaned her head against the window shield. She closed her eyes as she thought of what was to come, what she would say to Satine, how scathing she would try to be. Though her anger was still a knife in her chest, reopening the same wound again and again, Fallon found the blade dull, unusable: nothing she could think of seemed sharp—nor severe—enough to cut Satine.

And Fallon could not so easily forget what Hiro had said; Hiro, who carried words like weapons, who polished each with care, who could carve Fallon's heart out of her chest with a single sentence.

          How many words do you have in that mouth of yours?

Light pressed at Fallon's eyelids, eager. She opened one eye. They had arrived.

          How many more can you say until you run out?

Outside the window shield, the sky was mother-of-pearl: pale, beautiful, breakable—the opposite of what anything truly Mandalorian should be, Fallon thought treacherously. What a rebellious thought! If she voiced it, would she be exiled, too?