Chapter Text
Prologue
The moment the blast doors close around them, Paz knows his time is here.
On the other side of the thick windows, reinforcements pour out in waves behind Gideon. Any second now, the doors will open. The slaughter will begin and his thinly held restraint will end.
The smile comes to his face unbidden. A grin no one will ever see.
Anticipation builds and it’s only his training that stops him from shaking or his heart from racing. He forces his mind into stillness, starts tracking his targets. The cannon in his hands becomes weightless, an extension of his will. He plants his feet a little wider and waits for the inevitable.
There’s a thud as the Lady kicks her way through the doors blocking escape. Barely a second later, the doors in front of him open again. Paz moves forward, through the retreating ranks, and the world falls away. Instead of laying down supporting fire from the middle of a formation, he becomes the formation. He becomes his own army.
In his peripheral, he senses the others ducking through the hole, one by one, until he’s alone with the enemy. Behind him he hears the Lady shouting at him, but he stands his ground.
Her shouts grow louder and she must realize he has no intention of running. She closes some of the distance between them.
Paz hazards a glance behind him and sees her intention. With one fist he hits the controls next to him, denying any attempts to stop him. “Go, there are too many.”
“No!” she raises both pistols, furiously shooting at the door. He smiles again.
“This is the Way.”
A blaster bolt hits him squarely on the side of his helmet, and he turns back to his task. The moment he looks away from the Lady, he forgets her entirely.
The fight blocks out every stray thought, every bit of the doubt and uncertainty he usually feels melts away. The bite of blaster bolts finding the gaps in his armor are minor annoyances. The heat from his cannon builds, and builds, until he can feel it through his gloves, the metal turning the color of dying stars. The calm detachment begins to fail alongside his primary weapon. By the time it jams the blood is rushing in his ears and his rage, so sweat and familiar, has taken his reason.
He tugs at the line connecting the cannon to his pack, coils it in a fist, and roars, hurling the weapon at an approaching trooper. The man screams as burning metal finds his flesh. Paz charges and overpowers one man, wrestling his rifle from his hands before using all his strength to throw him into a wall. He steps forward as the man struggles to his knees and reaches for him again, snapping his neck in one swift twist of his head. The next one he sends to the ground before bringing his forearms down on his back, breaking his jet pack before clutching his backplate in his fists and throwing him off the platform. More shots ping off his armor as he sprints at the last two, slamming into them and sending both of them to their deaths.
He stares after them, wishes he hadn’t thrown them so fast. The battle is over, but he’s not ready to let it go.
The calm he works so hard to maintain, the watchfulness he brings when working in a unit, always disappears when he’s alone. Moments like this make him long for the trenches of Mamdan, choked with smoke and blood, waves of swamp troopers dropping before him. He yearns for the dusty mountains of Ryloth, Imperial’s screams echoing in forgotten canyons.
The platform is silent except for his breathing and the clink of his boots as he steps back. He doesn’t get the chance to catch his breath before he hears footsteps behind him.
Eyes catch on the glossy red armor. His heart begins to beat faster in anticipation, in the joyful cadence of a life about to end.
Paz had imagined his death often. Dreams full of last stands and honorable ends. When he sees the three praetorian guards approach with the earned confidence of killers, he knows glory is finally within reach. Today, he will die on Mandalore, fighting an opponent with the Force at their backs. Just like his father before him.
Maybe now, his name will be woven into the song of Mandalore. Maybe now, he’ll finally be free of his past. He roars, charges again. When the blade pierces his side he pulls it deeper, embracing death for one final chance at killing his foes, before more sharp edges find vulnerable flesh and he falls, beskar meeting weaker metal with a final resounding note.
The guards drift away, silent as they came, and he’s left to bleed out on this platform alone. The warm blood running between the layers of his armor, going sticky against his rapidly cooling body before being replaced by more wet blood.
Time starts to move in hazy circles. One moment, he’s on this platform dying, the next he’s seven years old, hearing the songs of Mandalore for the first time. He tries to hold onto the music, the way it had moved him as a child, but is slips away. When the next song comes to him it’s not the one he wants. It’s a melody that doesn’t belong to Mandalore.
It’s a memory so distant, so faded from a lifetime of being buried, that he doesn’t immediately recognize the humming as his mother’s. The edges stay soft even as her sad smile gets sharper, a light slowly growing from darkness. She’d been in the kitchen. Washing dishes, unaware that he was watching. This woman had been a stranger to him. None of the bitterness or the indifference she normally regarded him with. She’d looked young, beautiful. Staring out the window as the blossoms fell outside.
The platform begins to vibrate. His mother’s song replaced by the song of another Mand’alor. The song of his father. The chorus of battle approaching like an oncoming storm. With one final effort he turns his head to look out across the chasm. The skies light up with hundreds of his brothers and sisters, returning with a fresh wave of reinforcements.
A fresh wave of pain makes him close his eyes tight. The noise starts to fade again.
Knowing Woves had made it back to the fleet, gives him some comfort now. His eyes slide shut again reaching back for the small kitchen from his childhood.
“Weak.”
The memory slips through his fingers. He’s still a child and his face is throbbing with the cut that would leave him scarred the rest of his life. His father looks down at him, the disappointment cutting worse than the blade had.
The platform shakes beneath him as something lands close by. For a moment he can still see his father’s face above him and he fights to look past him toward the familiar arc of the Darksaber. The blade that might’ve been his, in another life.
He’s distantly aware that he’s watching Bo-Katan and Djarin fighting Gideon, but his vision keeps tunneling and going dark around the edges. The echoes of the battle around him ebb and flow. His mind flashing to his father, the constant tests. The consuming need to prove himself only to watch his father die, shackled to his violent convictions.
The pain is starting to become sharper, breathing gets harder as his lungs slowly fill with blood. He envies his father’s quick death as his mind spins. He’s tired, and part of him wants to let go, but his mind wanders to Ragnar waiting for him on Nevarro. The last flicker of his rage becomes a whisper, then nothing. Doubt begins to plague him as the memories of his parents shadow his memories of his charge. He’d done his best to give him the support he’d never felt, but now, he wonders if it was enough. Not for the first time, he feels afraid of the legacy he was leaving for Ragnar. It sinks in that he won’t see him grow into the warrior he knows he’s capable of being. He won’t be the one to teach him how to fly or to help him build his armor.
Those memories would belong to someone else.
And he knows now.
It doesn’t matter how often he dies for the Covert. He could do this a hundred times and never truly be worthy. It didn’t matter if he was in the songs. He knew, and his father knew, at his core, he was unworthy.
With a growl he struggles to get his arms to move. He manages to plant his hands under his shoulders, but when he tries to push himself up the shoulder he’d been stabbed through and the wound in his side screams with a pain that makes moving impossible. He must black out for a moment. The next thing he’s aware of is heat and a blinding light. He wonders if this is death, surrounded by a wall of flame. Someone is touching him, shaking him.
“Paz? You still with us?”
“He’s bleeding bad. We need to get him back to one of the ships.” He wants to tell them to take care of Ragnar, to tell him that he didn’t mean to abandon him, but all he manages is another painful, choking breath. The voices fade, the flames die. The last thing he hears is his mother’s humming and his father’s laughter.