Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
━━━━ ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ ━━━━
ARAMINTA SOLARII didn't believe anything happened for a reason. Her mother had been a realist, cold and harsh about the world and how everything worked, telling her three children that just because they wanted something, didn't mean it would come into fruition. As she had put it, something had to trigger an avalanche, no matter how destructive it was. Araminta had looked at her in utter confusion, but as she had grown older, she had theorised her mother had made some rough metaphor that nothing happened without action. Nothing happened for any reason other than action.
The Adanei believed in a Goddess of the Moons, a peaceful deity that spoke to them through the cycles and the way their tattoos lit up under the moonlight. Lunae guided them, like a gentle hand on their upper back, lighting up alternative paths and options, expanding the Adanei into creatives, a flexible people that always looked at the big picture. But they did not believe that Lunae, or any other gods, looked after their fate.
If that was true, they never would have allowed the massacre of Araminta's family, and the cruelty of men such as Octavian, who had scoured the corners of the galaxy for force-sensitive children– his future weapons. If the gods were real, that never would have happened, because how could that be for any reason? How could her pain be necessary?
Araminta didn't believe everything happened for a reason. She had stained her hands and clothes with too much blood over the years to believe that. But sometimes she believed the day she had been ousted from Octavian's ranks had meant to happen. She imagined if anyone other than Anakin Skywalker had been alongside the target, if she had been two seconds slower in realising she had been set up. Maybe some things did happen for a reason, but not all.
She rarely left Obi-wan's side after the events of Geonosis, never trusting him not to bury himself in something life threatening again, and the missions afterwards had been wrought with her keen eye and inability to release her hold on her knife. The weight of Geonosis had pressured her shoulders, given her a new responsibility that she had proven herself capable of. Anakin had never brought it up again– the fact that she hadn't run, she hadn't made her survival a priority, that she had stuck to the deal and protected. Obi-wan, too, had never brought it up, but she saw it in the way he looked at her, the way he slowly began to trust her out of sight, the way he didn't talk to her like a child anymore.
Araminta thought about that moment a lot. The feeling of the lightsaber in her hand as she had pushed it against Dooku, the way she had torn through the air with one goal in mind, how she had imagined the look on Octavian's face had he known she had become everything he had taught her to hate. She thought about how Anakin had looked at her, how for a few moments the blood that glossed her hands had felt faint.
That had been the moment before the war had broken out, as was predicted. They had never made her fight, but Araminta had found herself sticking by Obi-wan's side regardless, bound by an invisible contract that only the people in the room that day would ever know about. She imagined Octavia's face, over and over, if he ever discovered she was undoing all the polishing he had done to make her a weapon, cleaning off the blood he had gleaned her and every other assassin with. She found that kept her going, spiting the man that had taken everything from her.
