Afterglow | The Clone Wars

The Pirate King

His pencil hovered over the grey patch that he was shading in. Outlined on the notepad was the crashed Endurance, with, hand-drawn jagged lines capturing the broken hull where fire had gutted its insides. He pressed harder, dragging the graphite in uneven strokes, trying to capture the smoke that once billowed from its torn frame.

He sketched the twisted tower, leaning at an impossible angle towards the unshaded sky, coloring in the fractures that spidered across the cruiser's flanks. His hand faltered over the cratered ground beneath it, where debris had scattered like the ashes of a funeral pyre. It would take the entire day to capture the full essence of what he saw.

The lines blurred together, half-real, half-imagined, because no matter how hard he tried, the picture was never complete. It was missing something. Thoughtfully, he pulled the pencil away and tapped it to his chin. Then, with a few quick flicks of his fingers, he turned back to her sketch.

A frontal drawing— all gray, but done with great care. He knew her face even more deeply than he knew his own. Eyes both soft and stormy, full, plump lips and an arched nose, thickened brows, yet not a hair out of place.

He stared at the sketch. Not identically accurate— for nothing could replicate her, but his best work to say the least. Heat returned into his skin at the memory of her standing in these very same Captain's quarters, those ethereal eyes catching sight of the notepad that he doesn't let others see. Of course, she was the exception. What she wanted, she'd get. He'd make sure of it.

He gave the sketch of her countenance another long look before returning to the crashed Endurance. He wanted to draw her again, to add her to the scene. To add her to every page of his book so that each fiber of the paper was inked with her beauty.

At that thought— he shook his head, clearing his mind. Those were childish thoughts.

Out of the window, he spotted the Jedi Temple in the cloudy distance. He wondered what she could possibly be doing there that day, and if perhaps her thoughts were on him also.

💫

They weren't.

Dakota's finger scrolled slowly through the temple records, skimming lines of Basic that blurred into one another the longer she stared at them. The holo-display glowed pale blue against her face, highlighting the faint, sleepless circles under her eyes. Bounty hunter dossiers flickered past and she stared at them with boredom—names she knew, faces she'd fought, reputations she could still hear whispered in backwater cantinas across the Outer Rim.

But one in particular

Boba Fett.

The file was practically barren—just a note tagged to Obi-Wan's old mission report from Kamino all the way back before the war. His only "associate" that was listed was Jango Fett. His father. The original DNA donor to the clone army.

She pinched the bridge of her nose tiredly, recalling the mission to the rainy planet. The boy she had glimpsed once in the sterile white halls of Tipoca City had now tried to kill her Master aboard the Endurance. She tapped her thumb into the console, pulling up Jango's record.

A photo image popped up first. It looked like Rex, but also absolutely nothing like him, for nothing could look like him.

Lines of text scrolled down: mercenary work, alliances, kill counts. Cold facts that didn't explain the young, clone boy that carried his brutal legacy forward.