Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

Lio announced simply, “It’s her.”

There was no ambiguity as to who “her” might be. Not after the media storm of the past three weeks. Every newspaper, morning show, news report, legal podcast, and political panel had been taken over by the story. If the Outer Rim had voted to secede from the Republic, violence had flared up again on Ghorman and a banking panic had wiped trillions off the stock market, all three might have earned a ten-second mention before the ad break.

Orson Callan Krennic had spent much of the last three weeks thoroughly enjoying the circus and wondering if – or rather, when - Chancellor Mothma would call him.

After all, she had spent her entire career arguing that “justice ceased to be justice the moment it offered opt-outs for the powerful”; that it was time for a nation built for everyone, not just out of touch privileged elite. The line had played beautifully in campaign ads, donor dinners, and stump speeches. So beautifully, in fact, that the bleeding-heart idealist Senator - who herself happened to come from the same out-of-touch elite – had gone on to win the Chancellorship. True to her word, she had pushed through a package of judicial reforms, dispensing, among other things, with executive immunity.

And now, having spent decades insisting that no public servant should be above the law, Chancellor Mothma had suddenly discovered that the law was perfectly willing to take her at her word. Orson found the whole thing almost hysterical.

He was, at age not quite fifty, the top trial attorney in the Republic. He had been the first lawyer to charge four hundred thousand credits per hour, which for too long had been the unbreakable sound barrier of legal billing. There were, as Lio would remind him, half a dozen second-best trial attorneys, each of whom naturally considered themselves the top trial attorney in the land.

None of them, however, had made the cover of every weekly newsmagazine in the nation - a small token of gratitude from the Trade Federation after Orson got them off on charges of tariff evasion and labor-rights violations on Carmine, much to the displeasure of then-Senator Mothma. None had been subpoenaed by the Senate oversight Committee fifty times – then-Senator was nothing if not determined to make her displeasure known. None owned a professional smashball team – a solid investment venture, Orson insisted every time he caught Lio’s knowing look. And, to be fair, none had been a permanent fixture in the gossip columns, accompanied by a never-ending string of high-profile lovers. That he had still managed to avoid the shackles of marriage after three decades of incessant nocturnal carousing was perhaps the finest testament to his ability to make a persuasive oral argument.

Orson had successfully defended traitors, lobbyists, politicians, mobsters, blackmailers, toxic-waste dumpers, disgraced HoloNet tycoons, and even fellow lawyers. Justice Yoda, an imminent legal scholar and an eccentric living fossil with a signature green bow tie, once commented on a morning show that if Krennic had defended count Dooku after he had been brought to the capital and tried for treason, Dooku would have been not only acquitted, but awarded damages. It was not said admiringly.

To think that once – briefly, embarrassingly, and before he knew better – Orson had contemplated a lesser path: architecture. Building things. Permanent things. Useful things. Fortunately, he had come to his senses in time - thanks to the first lesson that “the nation built for everyone, not just out of touch privileged elite” was something one preached but failed to practice.

And now, three decades after his career began, the call came.

Orson reached for the button, then paused. He thought of asking Lio to tell her to call back, and ignoring an unimpressed look his friend would no doubt give him. He sometimes made new clients wait ten or fifteen-minutes before picking up. Softened them up. Made them imagine the alternative until they were sufficiently humbled and all the more eager.

Should he?

No.

He had waited thirty years. He was too impatient to begin this beguine.

He felt a drumbeat in his chest. Was his pulse actually quickening? He, who never broke a sweat, even while arguing before the Supreme Court, not even when Justice Windu methodically tried to verbally eviscerate him with a never-ending barrage of questions?

He picked up.

“Chancellor! What a pleasure.” Orson drawled with affronted nonchalance. “What’ve you been up to?”

“I need to see you, Orson.”

Composed even now, making a call that must have humiliated her, not a trace of begging or desperation in her voice. He’d have preferred a little more raw emotion, frankly, even a stifled gasp or a swallowed sob - though that had never really been her style. Well… Once, perhaps. Long ago. And, looking back at it now, Orson had to concur: she was right to have abandoned it. Tears did not change the choices – merely gave people an excuse to soothe their conscience and pretend they agonized over them.

Still. What Justice Windu failed to do over the course of the weeks-long Carmine trial, she managed in five seconds: showed him a stone in her hand and he missed a knife at his throat.

“Orson!” in mock outrage, stifling peals of laughter.

“Orson.” in the restrained tone that had never restrained either of them for long.

“Orson…” in a breathless whisper against his ear.

His pulse, traitorous thing, chose that very moment to shatter yet another supposedly unbreakable sound barrier.

He stiffened. That would not do. It would not do at all.

“I could see you tomorrow at fourteen hundred,” he said. “For half an hour.”

It had been a long time since anyone had spoken to the Chancellor like that.

And, because payback was the only moral principle Orson Callan Krennic stayed true to:

“In. My. Office.”

The two of them began the mental countdown to see who would blink first.

 … nine … ten … eleven …

“Fine,” she said.

“The Bureau can take the Expressway,” he offered.

As a Chancellor - well, de facto former Chancellor - under indictment she still retained the Bureau protection, another of the exquisite ironies in which she and the nation found themselves: heading the government, prosecuted by the government, protected by the government. Even if she had been temporarily replaced by Acting Chancellor Palpatine, who, out of his infinite love for democracy, had entrusted Acting Attorney General Tarkin with prosecuting the case.

Morning show guests were already betting on the possibility of a shoot-out between the Bureau and the execution squad if Mon Mothma were found guilty, and debating whether, fifty years from now, her reforms would be remembered as a triumph of democratic accountability or a spectacularly inventive suicide.

So many delicious questions were being posed these days.

“Fourteen hundred, then,” she said calmly, as if penciling down a hair appointment… and had the gall to hung up first.

Orson leaned back in his white leather chair and imagined the upcoming spectacle in all its many-pixeled splendor: hundreds of holo-cameras and reporters camping outside his office, clamoring, shouting questions over one another, thrusting microphones toward him like fetish sticks to an ancient god. And there he would be: gorgeously, impeccably tailored, greeting her. His face would be on every screen in the world tomorrow. Moisture farmers in Tatooine, celestial power researchers on Eadu, nerf herders in the Alderaanian highlands – all of them would know his name.

It was, after all, the most high-profile case the nation had ever seen.

No sitting Chancellor in the history of the Republic had ever been indicted for murdering a spouse. Mon Mothma, ever the overachiever, had managed to break both the highest glass ceiling in the land and her husband’s skull within a few short years - the latter, allegedly, with an antique Hanna star plate she had once given him for their anniversary.

Till death do us part, indeed.

Fleetingly, Orson wondered whether that was her usual way of passing the time after state dinners for party donors turned newly appointed ambassadors. Davo Sculdun, on this occasion.

The HoloPress had already dubbed it the Death Star trial, and tomorrow there he would be, at the red hot center of it. He would issue a brief, noncommittal statement that this was merely a preliminary meeting. He would smile, thank the media for its interest – letting Heert channel their enthusiasm off the record - and usher her inside.

How satisfying it would be, after all these years.

And maybe, just maybe, to make his revenge perfect, he would deliberately lose this one. But so subtly that even Justice Yoda with his bow-tie brigade would shake his head and say that no one, really, could have won this case.

Not even Orson Callan Krennic.

***

It was well past ten when Lio decided to stage an intervention and drag Orson out of his office. Given the publicity they were bound to attract tomorrow – a circus, even by their standards – this evening would be the last time they could enjoy a decent whiskey in public. After that, they would have to assume they were being bugged everywhere they went: by the press, by amateur conspiracy theorists, and, inevitably, by Lio’s former colleagues from the Bureau.

The bar, tucked into the top floor of a Federal District hotel, offered sweeping views of the capital, cabinets lined with dark Alderaanian wood, Naboo marble, and, most importantly, discretion. Usually kept off, a holo-screen above the bar was now running a panel of pundits talking over one another: naturally, about Chancellor Mothma’s marriage and her husband’s well-documented if discreet “friendships” with fellow trophy spouses of rich and powerful. In other words, Lio thought ruefully, motive.

“The Death Star trial,” he mused, glancing at the screen over the rim of his glass. “What a percipient turn of phrase.”

Orson’s piercing blue eyes fixed on the screen, taking in the commotion: this time, a segment on Perrin Fertha’s frequent “sightseeing trips” to Canto Bight.

“Oh,” he chuckled. “It’s beautiful.”

“So, you’re taking the case.”

Orson swirled the amber at the bottom of his glass. “Well, I wouldn’t go that far.”

Lio rolled his eyes, unimpressed.

“You sent her a bill for thirty minutes.”

“For a preliminary legal consultation,” his friend countered stubbornly, studying the golden flecks of light dancing in the whiskey. “I’m not giving advice pro bono. That’s what Galen is for.”

“You cleared your calendar for six weeks.”

“For all that you know I may be planning a holiday at Niamos.”

“You told Heert and Dedra to camp out at the office and called Galen back from his farm.”

“That,” Orson took a sip of his whiskey, “is because the man deserves a break from Lyra.”

“You’re taking the case.” Lio repeated the self-evident truth – so evident, in fact, that he had started discreetly pulling intel from his friends in the Bureau the day the news broke.

The screen above the bar had moved on to a panel about whether a conviction would be good for the Republic, great for democracy and public faith in institutions, or bad for the future of women in power. All of the above, Lio reckoned, but most importantly - it’d be excellent for ratings.

“So, what’s the end game?”

“Acquittal.”

Lio raised an eyebrow at that. Not that Orson had ever lacked audacity in a courtroom, but even by his standards it was a stretch. Lio himself would have argued temporary insanity to secure a more lenient sentence, or else pushed for self-defense — the usual go-tos of marital spats.

“On the grounds of?”

“Reasonable doubt.”

Unfortunately, Lio Partagaz had twenty years of firsthand experience with the man in front of him, along with a finely attuned gut instinct for trouble, to know that the catch, as ever, was the adjective. Where Chancellor Mothma was concerned, reason did not so much fail Orson as permanently recuse itself.

The body had been found in the marital bed next to her, with a well-pronounced and thoroughly documented imprint of the Hanna star above Perrin’s right eyebrow. The coroner had ruled blunt-force trauma as the cause of death. A heated argument had been overheard by guests at the Executive Residence, as well as Bureau agents. Attorney General Tarkin wouldn’t even have to try very hard. Chancellor Mothma had finally managed to bring the nation together: by now, left, right, center, and the famously apolitical but fiercely loyal viewers of The Real Housewives of Coruscant all believed she had done it.

Lio found himself wondering whether, for the first time in his career, Orson was about to take a case only to lose it on purpose.

***

14:00 – Chancellor Mothma.

Orson, calibrate your enthusiasm and don’t be an asshole.

—   Lio.

Why Lio felt compelled to spell out the obvious in his agenda, Orson would never know.

Outside, the world morphed into an even bigger zoo than he’d expected: microphones bobbed above the crowd, holo-cams perched on collapsible rigs and shoulder mounts, their red lights blinking the live feed to the nation. More than three hundred reporters and camera people, at least twice that many onlookers, phones raised, craning for a glimpse of the client – attorney meeting of the century. The Bureau had been forced to block off two westbound lanes and part of the Expressway just to keep the crowd from spilling into traffic.

Even Orson was impressed.

“Chancellor Mothma!”  He said as soon as the door of her black Bureau-issued limo swung open.

“Counselor Krennic.” She mirrored his perfectly polite tone, as though they weren’t recorded by hundreds of cameras and broadcast live on HoloNet. “How pleasant to see you free of the witness stand.”

***

“That was truly humiliating,” Mon said as she entered his office, head held high and posture perfect. “Thank you.”

And just like that, Orson realized there was no point pretending it had not been he who leaked the news of their meeting. He only found himself hoping she had’t worked out to whom. Calliope Drouth, his current lover and host of the Law Channel’s late night talk show, whom he had met - accidentally, though definitely not regrettably - at the Republic Day gala the Chancellor insisted on hosting every year. He was usually adept at finding reasons to skip those, but that evening even he had run out of excuses… and into a rather charming silver lining to that particular cloud. There was nothing inherently wrong with mixing business and pleasure.

“You gave it to that woman, didn’t you? Calliope, the Law Channel?”

“That’s right. I wanted a big crowd down there today. I wanted to send a message to the Republic—”

“You did. It read, ‘Orson Krennic is a flaming egomaniac.’ ”

Mon crossed the room and settled into the visitor’s chair as if she owned the place and he were merely a guest pleading for mercy. She unfastened the high collar of her jacket, drew in a long breath, and closed her eyes for a moment – the only crack in an otherwise impenetrable façade, the one piece of the evidence that the impossible woman in front of him was not nearly as unfazed by the media circus and the murder charge as she wished to appear.

He knew he should offer an equally acerbic retort, but his eyes stayed fixed on the elegant line of her throat, and whatever suitably vicious point he might have made scattered just out of reach.

“Tarine tea, no milk, one sugar.” She, it seemed, had no difficulty whatsoever doing what she always did best: recovering faster than he did. “So, how are you, Orson?”

It dawned on Orson Callan Krennic - the top trial attorney in the nation, who had earned the title by vaporizing prosecution arguments in under twenty minutes and sidestepping the truth as religiously as he avoided marital vows - that in less than thirty seconds he had been demoted to the status of a waiter. In his own lair, no less, amid walls so thickly hung with testimonials to his greatness that every vertical and horizontal surface seemed to cry out under the strain. It usually made Galen and Lio roll their eyes whenever another honorific was added to the ever-growing altar of his ego.

Orson buzzed for the tea and, sitting down opposite her, said, “Not so bad. Haven’t been indicted for murder.”

Mon gave him the hint of a smile.

“Why,” he said, “didn’t you call me sooner?”

“I was waiting to see how bad it was going to get. I didn’t want to make it look worse by hiring a lawyer.”

Krennic shook his head in silent exasperation. How often he had heard that.

“Anyway,” she said, “here I am. On bended knees.”

He took that as an excuse to look at her knees for a few inappropriately long seconds. And then at the rest of her. From the immaculately styled molten-gold hair catching the light from the floor-to-ceiling windows of his office - as though the room and the sun themselves had conspired against him - to the hazel-blue eyes, marked by carefully concealed evidence of sleepless nights thanks to the recent media circus; to the lines of tension at the corners of her mouth, arranged now into that dry, slightly mocking smile of hers that had always driven him mad after their arguments, and that he could once have spent hours kissing away—

“The reason they’re bent,” her dry voice interrupted both his inspection and his rather undignified trip down memory lane, “is because I just spent an hour in the back of a Bureau-issued limo with three agents and the entire press corps breathing down our necks. But I could say they’re bent for your sake, if flattery still gets you going.”

“You must be in a world of hurt,” Orson drawled, “to come to me.”

“I’ve been indicted for murder. That’s one definition of a world of hurt, I suppose.”

“Words do still have meanings,” he concurred. “Though in your case, Chancellor, the operative one is murder.”

And that, at last, had the desired effect. Her posture shifted, almost imperceptibly. But Orson had always been an avid student of human tells – a necessity, given his line of work – and as for Mon… he knew hers, intimately. Or so he had once liked to think.

“On that note,” her voice carried an uncharacteristic hesitation - a sure sign she was about to venture where neither of them wanted her to go. “Before we continue, I’d rather know your state of mind. I don’t want to learn during closing arguments that your heart was never in it.”

“What makes you think I’ll take the case in the first place?”

“Orson.” Mon shook her head, that small amused tugged at the corners of her mouth.  “Whatever our baggage, I can’t believe you’d let this pass. The publicity. The chance to write your name into the history books… And I’ve yet to see you miss an opportunity to get one over on Tarkin.”

She was smiling. By stars, the woman was smiling and all he could do was pretend that he was the absolute lord and master of the corner into which she had just backed him.

“I think we established long ago that my heart is the least useful of my possessions. My mind and powers of persuasion are the things you should concern yourself with. And those are still sold to the highest bidder.”

Yes, he still held a grudge over her grilling him for the Camine trial in her little Committee.

Orson gave her his best glare, the one usually reserved for hostile witnesses and particularly stupid prosecutors. And she merely stared back at him until all he could do was try not to laugh at his own helplessness.

“Fine. I’ll take the case.”

“Thank you.”

“But I want it understood, understood beyond the shadow of a doubt, that I’m in charge.”

“Of course.”

She said in that tone of hers he knew all too well after years of testifying in her Committee – usually it meant she didn’t believe a single word of his.

“Oh no. Raise your right hand and say, ‘I do solemnly swear that Orson Callan Krennic shall be completely, wholly, totally, and one hundred percent in charge of my defense. So help me any god, gods, higher powers, ancestral spirits, or other forces and cosmic energy fields not herein specified. Do you swear?”

“I do.”

Speaking of the higher powers and their twisted sense of humor. Once, long ago, he had wanted to hear those words from her in altogether different circumstances, preferably with rather more enthusiasm and considerably more clothing on the floor. Now, thirty years later, fate had finally obliged. Over her husband’s dead body. How fitting.

“Don’t you want to know if I did it?” Mon asked, thankfully interrupting another pathetic trip down the memory lane.

Right. The dead body in question.

“The last thing I want to know from my clients is if they did it.” He waved a dismissive hand. “And even if I did, what good would it do me? Criminals love to lie. After all, who wants to die for lawless ineptitude?”

Chapter Text

8:00 – pre-trial briefing

Orson, don’t be late

—Lio

Why, after all those years, Lio still felt obliged to put a pre-trial briefing on his agenda, Orson would never know. Lio handled them perfectly well without supervision. Orson’s role, more often than not, was to arrive near the end, ensure their minions were sufficiently intimidated, and then unveil his trial strategy like some magnum opus twenty years in the making, usually with enough flourish to make the room bow before his legal genius. Everyone except Lio, that is. Lio usually just rolled his eyes.

So Orson silenced the alarm and turned his attention to a far better use of the morning.

The night before, he had told Calliope he would not be doing her show for a while. It wouldn’t look right. In response, she had informed him - with her usual matter-of-factness and an admirable clarity about exactly where he ranked on her list of priorities - that this was perfectly fine, in which case neither would sex. They had compromised: sex and highly selective, strategically curated leaks.

That, Orson reflected, was the advantage of entering any arrangement clear-eyed: no delusions, a mutually beneficial pastime, and no hard feelings when it inevitably ended. He had learned that lesson the hard way, all those years ago, but he had learned it all the same.

He should be at the office by ten.

Ten-thirty, at most.

***

“…Of all the things at risk, the loss of an objective reality is perhaps the most dangerous. The death of truth is the ultimate victory of evil. If truth is to survive in this Republic, it must not bend for the powerful, nor retreat for the connected, nor excuse itself for those fortunate enough to govern.

A Republic worthy of its name cannot ask its citizens to honor truth and justice while offering opt-outs—”

“Say what you will,” Heert chose this very moment to interrupt the replay of Chancellor Mothma’s inaugural speech, “but promises made, promises kept.”

Jung tried to hide his snort behind the rim of his coffee cup. Dedra did not dignify the remark with a reaction. Dee Shambo and Nisus Osar, both recently recruited from the Ministry of Enlightenment, just kept furiously making notes, no doubt trying to figure out how to spin it.

“So today, I pledge not only to defend our institutions, but to improve them: to reform our courts, to limit executive immunity, and to ensure that justice in this nation is not merely promised equally, but applied equally, that no servant of the Republic stands above the law that governs it—”

“Fifty seven seconds,” Heert announced, checking the time stamp for the segment. “A new record for digging one’s own grave, ladies and gentlemen.”

“Heert, I sense something eager in you this morning,” Lio paused the replay. “A desire to be reassigned to our pro bono docket, perhaps?”

The expression of utter horror on Heert’s face left no doubt as to what he thought of the firm’s pro bono legal-aid division - Galen Erso’s well-meaning sanctuary for lost causes and a sinkhole for credits and billable hours. With that out of the way, Lio went back to the briefing:

“Mon Mothma, former Chancellor, former Senator from Chandrila—”

“Sir,” Dedra, the newest addition to the group, fresh from the Bureau and formerly of the  Enforcement, cut in, “I’m sure we all know who Chancellor Mothma is. Wouldn’t our time be better spent walking through the game plan? It’s a clear cut case.”

“You think so, Miss Meero?” Lio handed her the clicker. “Then your thesis, please.”

She hesitated for a second - good instinct, that, recognizing a possible trap - then took the clicker and fast-forwarded to the case itself. The screen lit up with the footage that had gripped the Republic a few weeks earlier.

The stills of Perrin Fertha’s body in the marital bed, the livid imprint of the Hana star above his right eyebrow.

Previously, the Bureau had not made a habit of releasing crime scene evidence to the HoloPress. But Chancellor Mothma had pushed for greater transparency with the Freedom of Information act a few years earlier, much to the chagrin of Lio’s former colleagues. Naturally, in that particular case the Bureau had gladly obliged.

“Promises made, promises kept,” Colonel Yularen announced during the press conference, while sharing the images as well as the fact that the Chancellor’s fingerprints were all over the Hana Star plate.

Then, Captain Lagret stepped up to the podium to deliver a brisk, hour-by-hour account of that evening’s events.

Dedra skipped past the clip a bit too quickly - still bitter, perhaps, over her own dismissal.

“Cause of death,” she said, looking at her file, “epidural hematoma resulting from blunt-force trauma. Time of death, between three-fifteen A.M. and five A.M. The body was found in the bed next to the defendant when a maid brought in the breakfast. One of the agents on duty overheard a domestic argument the night before, followed by the sound of something being thrown.”

The next reel moved to the state reception the night before: a well-documented vanity fair for Davo Sculdun, prominent party donor turned ambassador, his wife Runai - socialite-philanthropist-actress (the usual portfolio of well-off women with nothing to do), and a hundred other guests.

For all that talk of “the nation built for everyone, not just out of touch privileged elite”, the Chancellor seemed to forget that change began at home. Judging by the sudden increase in furious note-taking from their spin doctors, they shared his assessment: the optics were, indeed, mildly disastrous.

“The account is confirmed by several overnight guests who reported hearing raised voices that night,” Dedra added.

The news bulletins moved to the Chancellor at the funeral: unnaturally pale and with red-rimmed eyes, true, but not a single tear in sight.

The composure of a female politician who had learned the hard way not to display too much weakness in public might have been admirable, had it not been her own husband of thirty years being laid to rest.

Then the inevitable montage followed: grainy shots of Perrin Fertha and his discreet companions entering hotels, resorts, leaving galleries, casinos, receptions…

“If there is such a thing as a textbook marital homicide,” Dedra decided to state the obvious, “this is it. Motive, opportunity, proximity.”

Even the Chancellor’s allies were not so much denying it as workshopping excuses live on air.

On the screen, Senator Bail Organa, his daughter Leia, the head of the Republic Organization for Women Vel Sartha all sang different variations of same tune: if Mon had done something violent, she had surely been provoked. After that, they diverged into mutually incompatible theories of what had actually occurred. So much for toeing the party line when the said line had become a curveball in form of a Hana plate hurled across the room.

“She killed him,” Dedra summed it up. “That’s the truth, pure and simple. If she pleads guilty—”

Lio rose to his feet, feeling as if he were back in the Bureau, training first-year recruits: eager, inexperienced, and unfailingly opinionated. Unsurprisingly, those attributes still aligned. He swept the room with one well-practiced look, just like in the good old days, and began pacing it in slow, measured steps:

“So, what do we do here? What is out purpose?”

When no answer followed, he pointed to the emblem stamped on every file in front of them: Lex.Rule. It was, of course, also engraved on the building’s façade and cast in towering silver letters across the lobby, because restraint, architectural or otherwise, had never been one of Orson’s virtues.

“The rule of law.” Lio rolled the words on his tongue. “The clue, as they say, is in the name.”

In reality, when Galen Erso set up the firm, he had a different parable in mind. Lexrul - or close enough to make the point - was the name of the backwater hole Orson had spent years trying to forget. Galen, being Galen, had tried to turn it into a statement about origins, pride, and embracing one’s past in order to move forward. Naturally, he had filed the registration papers before Orson could get hold of them. Unsurprisingly, when Orson finally did, an explosion of epic proportions followed, but by then it was too late to change anything. So Orson did what he always did: he dressed up his failure with a shining new plaque and pretended it had been the plan all along. 

“So, anyone?”

Heert and Jung, who had been with Lex.Rule long enough to know where this was going, refused to take the bait. Fortunately for them, Dedra took one for the team:

“The rule of law means protecting the innocent, upholding justice, and making sure the truth prevails, Sir.”

“Very good. This is verbatim from the civics curriculum… and wrong.” Lio folded his hands behind his back. “Truth is an illusion. You want truth and justice? Go to a temple. Courts do not discover truth, Miss Meero, they agree on a version of it. Judges and jury do not deliver justice; they settle on a story they can live with. Our work begins from that premise. We identify the pressure points in the case: a weak witness, a vain prosecutor, a compromised timeline. We pick one. That becomes our reasonable doubt. Then we keep chipping away at it. And if we do our job well enough, it won’t matter what happened in reality. The only thing that will matter is that the jury can no longer say it knows what happened… beyond a reasonable doubt.”

***

Orson stood in the blasting glare of cameras, trying not to blink – and ideally not to melt – while arranging his features into an appropriately dismayed-but-resolute expression he had elevated to an art form over three decades, and waited for the commotion around him to subside. He was used to HoloPress, but this was a turnout, even by his standards. The allure of the Death Star Trial was, indeed, immeasurable.

He gave a slight nod to indicate that the orchestra should stop tuning their instruments. The conductor was ready. The symphony was about to begin. And he had brought them a little something. He always kept them well fed.

“I’m here,” Orson said, affronted sincerity carried to operatic heights, “to assist Chancellor Mothma, one of the finest public servants the nation has ever had, in defending herself against a grotesque and politically motivated witch hunt.”

The HoloPress reporters - many of whom spent decades documenting  a rich history of mutual loathing between Senator Mothma and Counselor Krennic - displayed the uncharacteristically admirable restraint and tried to hide their snorts behind their microphones and recorders.

“With respect to the charges, I have this to say. Everyone knows that I personally admire and respect Acting Attorney General Tarkin. So I regret all the more,” Orson heaved a sigh, “that he decided, in the face of massive evidence to the contrary, to sacrifice an innocent widow on the altar of his own burning ambition.”

This would be the first of 121 mentions by Orson of the word widow during the press conference.

Acting Attorney General of the Republic, watching from the Justice Department Overbridge and sipping his morning caf from a mug bearing the Eriadu crest, choked on it.

“That asshole,” Tarkin spat. “That damned asshole.” 

“Finally,” Orson said, “I would ask the public to remember something in the days ahead. Yes, the Republic is facing an unprecedented constitutional crisis. But a grieving widow has lost her husband. She remains, of course, in a state of profound shock, and I would ask to grant her some measure of privacy at this painful time, as basic human decency requires. That’s really all I have to say at this time. Thank you.”

Orson always said this before proceeding to take questions…

***

Dedra, Heert, and Jung, observing the spectacle of their boss arriving 3 hours late for the pre-trial briefing and having an impromptu ego boost session downstairs, just exchanged long-suffering looks.

By contrast, Shambo and Osar looked as if they had just stroke gold.

“Oh, this is good. Dignified grief.”

“Grief sells,” Oscar muttered, and both raced to their offices to prove just that.

Before Orson had even made it upstairs, HoloTikTok was already flooding with edits of Chancellor Mothma at the funeral – dry-eyed, true, but beautifully tragic and stoic - set to a mix of beats, carefully selected to make most loyal – and famously apolitical - viewers of the Real Housewives of Coruscant weep.

Conveniently, later that evening, Dr. Gorst suddenly decided to dedicate a segment of his late-night talk show to the five stages of grief, with special emphasis on shock and numbness in denial. He also happened to helpfully point out “telltale signs” of all three on the Chancellor’s face at the funeral.

You can take men out of the Ministry of Enlightenment, Lio mused, but you can’t take the Ministry of Enlightenment out of them.

***

“So, where are Galen and STARDUST?” Orson asked, finally settling into his white leather chair. “Didn’t you call him in yesterday?”

“We did.” Jung suddenly found his cufflinks infinitely fascinating.

“And? It’s an hour flight from that farm of his.”

“Mrs. Erso asked me to inform you that they would be driving,” Jung carefully said, hoping against hope Orson wouldn’t kill the messenger. “Apparently they’re planning take a route through a national park to do some sightseeing and inform her research.”

Lio suppressed a chuckle. The tug-off-war between Lyra and Orson for Galen Erso’s soul – and, more importantly, his genius - was one of the firm’s worst kept secrets. And while decades-long friendship required him to side with Orson, he couldn’t help appreciating Lyra’s stubbornness: she opposed Krennic with the same righteous fury she usually reserved for mining conglomerates, environmental deregulation, and her ongoing campaign to add half the Republic to the protected national parks registry.

“Oh, Lyra… how considerate of her,” Orson said, with all the enthusiasm of a man being informed he required a root canal, but for once refrained from lashing out at the team. Lio assumed he was saving his fire for Mrs. Erso.

“Move the focus group to tomorrow, will you?” Lio said, and then steered them all back to more pressing matters. “The Council of Judges is set to assign the trial judge to the case by the end of the day.”

“Decided not to kick it up to the Supreme Court?”

“While that bench has more than a few of your long-standing fans,” Lio quipped, for there was no love lost between Orson and the Supremes, no matter how many victories they had been obliged to hand him, “they’ve ruled that this remains, at heart, a complicated domestic matter. So one judge and a jury will suffice. At least there is one silver lining to Chancellor Mothma’s reforms: she’ll be treated like any other spouse who killed her husband.”

Orson cleared his throat.

“Allegedly.”

“Dare I say, we’re cautiously optimistic,” Heert offered.

***

By dawn, standing on the steps of the Supreme Court, Justice Windu, in all his stately composure and wisdom, announced:

“Exceptional though the circumstances may be, equality before the law requires that this matter proceed through the ordinary course of justice. Given the gravity of the case, however, the Council has determined that it should be entrusted to one of the most respected legal minds of the generation, whose record is beyond reproach.”

He paused, clearly enjoying the suspense, then:

“Justice Yoda.”

“That silly old bastard,” Orson grumbled into his whiskey, as Justice Yoda, spotting a new electric-green bow-tie, stepped up to the podium.

Lio started humming the funeral march under his breath, “Dum dum de dum dum de dum de dum de dum.”

Galen Erso. STARDUST. A pre-trial motion strategy that now had to be retrofitted to accommodate Justice Yoda’s penchant for obscure precedent (which was really just one fossil paying tribute to another), and Orson’s client-attorney meeting with Chancellor Mothma.

Tomorrow was going to be a long day.

***

13:00 – client-attorney meeting with Chancellor Mothma

Orson, don’t push too hard

—Lio

The real miscarriage of justice, in Orson’s opinion, was that he received those silly little notes from Lio every day reminding him to be on his best behavior. The list of prohibited states included, but was by no means limited to, asshole, bastard, and son of a bitch. Naturally, Orson always ignored Lio’s requests but the point stood. He did get the memo. Every. Single. Day. While the woman sitting in front of him clearly did not. Orson wondered if it was worth asking Lio to expand the distribution list…

“Did you have to say that about the Acting Attorney General sacrificing me on the altar of his burning ambition?”

Barely five minutes in, she had already managed to turn what was supposed to be a client-attorney meeting – where the latter wept, professing innocence, and the former magnanimously pledged to leave no stone unturned – into a performance review.

“You missed the key word. Sacrificing a widow on the altar of his burning ambition.”

For a moment, Mon had that disarming, lost look on her face that Orson had seen only once - thirty years ago. But then, as quickly as it appeared, it was gone, hidden by a mildly exasperated expression she had so often reserved for his testimony before her committee.

Damn.

This, Orson realized, was going to be far worse than the last time.

Briefly, he considered addressing the elephant in the room now, if only to get it over with. But selfishness - because he was not sure he had it in him to endure a repeat of what had happened thirty years ago - and practicality - because they were on a tight schedule and he needed Mon at her sharpest - argued otherwise. So he let it alone.

Skeletons. Closets. Never open the door unless you’re ready for whatever comes leaping out of it.

“Why antagonize Tarkin, Orson? I imagine he’s ballistic by now.”

“Worried he might get really mad and indict you for murder?” Orson chuckled. “I want him mad. I want them all mad. Mad people make mistakes. And I need the other side to make mistakes, since you’ve made so many of your own so far.”

“Such as?”

“Where do I start? Speaking to the Bureau agents without a lawyer present. Even third-rate thiefs know better, let alone murderers.”

“Well, I am neither a thief, nor,” she stressed the word, “a murderer. So, how would it have looked? Hiring a lawyer.”

“Smart.”

“I was in shock. Have you ever woken up in bed with a dead spouse?”

“I’ve had the common sense to end my affairs before my lovers decide to kill me in my sleep. It’s called self-preservation, you should try it sometime.” Orson turned his attention to the case file his team prepared, stitching it together from both official and unofficial Bureau sources. “Why did you refuse a polygraph or a truth serum? It was the right thing to do, but since you did everything else wrong, I’m curious.”

“On principle. It’s a gross invasion of privacy.”

That woman. That infuriating, short-sighted, brilliant, hopelessly naïve woman. Of course she would not refuse it because it was a smart, expedient thing to do. She would refuse it in a second to defend some grand constitutional principle no one cared about.

“So let me get it straight.” Orson began in a deceptively calm, inquisitive tone he usually resorted to when asking a question to which he already knew the answer. “You claim you’re innocent… and then refuse the one interrogation tool that might have proved it… to make a point?”

“It is a textbook example of executive overreach from the Public Order Resentencing Directive. I fought hard to roll back the enhanced interrogation it authorized, and this is exactly that, just packaged differently,“ Mon said, with all the zeal of her best Senate speeches.

“Your outrage is convincing. I almost wish we could put you on the stand.”

“I want you to put me on the stand.”

Orson laughed. “Under no circumstances are you taking the stand. What’s the matter with you?”

“I want to tell the truth.”

“Clearly, you aren’t a lawyer. Truth has no place in the court of law. But while you have the impulse, tell me, how come you didn’t wipe your fingerprints off the Hana Star plate after you hit him with it?”

“Nice try.”

Orson mock-bowed in his chair and turned his attention back to the case file.

“We’ll use the fact that your fingerprints were all over the plate as evidence that you didn’t murder him, since a murderer, even a moron, would have wiped her fingerprints off the murder weapon. But forget taking the stand. Or I’m out.”

Judging by the silence that followed, he won this one.

“Moving on. Why didn’t you just tell the Bureau that you threw the plate at him?”

Her mouth tightened, the lines of tension around it cutting deeper and sharper than usual. She looked at a non-existent spot on the carpet before returning to him, guarded now, those hazel-blue eyes alert and assessing, as if the roles were reversed and it was one of those countless times she had interrogated him in her Committee. She was still deciding how much of that precious “truth” of hers he was entitled to.

For a woman who had recently claimed that she needed all of him on this case – mind, powers of persuasion, and what little was left of his heart – she seemed remarkably hesitant to offer the same in return. Part of him bristled at that. Here it was again: that even-handed hypocrisy of hers. Wrapped as Orson was in a prickling sensation of unfairness and wounded ego – old ghosts unfailingly reminding him of his place – he had forgotten that part of him actually still wanted to lose this case on purpose and, in that light, her caution was probably a sounder instinct – the very same self-preservation he’d just implored her to use.

“I was scared.”

Mon whispered, and he hated - truly hated - how her voice broke, because it slipped past the ten-thousand-credit suit and three decades of resentment, and tugged at something, deep in his chest. Orson knew that, given half a chance, it’d spread, as any infection did. He had to stop it before, and there was only one way to do that. Mon, none the wiser to his thoughts, went on, trying to steady her wavering voice.

“There he was in bed next to me… dead. If I’d told them what happened, it would have looked …”

“Like you killed him.”

“But I didn’t kill him. I threw the plate at him when he came to the bedroom that evening. But I have good aim, so I knew it would only graze him. It hit him on the forehead. He swayed but didn’t fall down. He swore, went to the bathroom, then got into bed, turned off the light, and went to sleep. Next thing I knew, when I woke up, he was… he was dead.”

Orson just stared.

“I’ve thrown heavier things at him, you know.”

“This was an interesting marriage you had.”

“Who are you to talk? Your affair before this one, with that artist, lasted how long? Three weeks?”

“Sabrine Wren. And we were blissfully happy the first two. But that’s beside the point.” Orson turned his attention back to the file. “This Bureau agent on duty that night, Syril Karn, who claims to have overheard an argument between you and the decedent—”

“Why don’t you just call him Perrin? It’s not like you didn’t know him.”

Orson ignored the question. “Was there an argument? Or throwing things at your husband is your usual pastime?”

Because he’d known Mon once – or, rather, a version of her thirty years younger, complete with smashball, dreams, and the lingering insecurity of a girl waiting to be reprimanded for not holding her back straight, not controlling her voice, or otherwise failing to fit into a role pre-scripted for her. That was before a marble statue of Senator, and later Chancellor, Mothma had overtaken her. But even that younger woman, still unafraid to show her emotions, had not been prone to throwing things at people. The Senator and the Chancellor - infamous for her demilitarization push - even less so. Then again, Orson reckoned, it might simply be one more instance of Mon Mothma declining to practice what she preached.

“We had an arrangement,” her terse voice, carrying a touch of embarrassed, brought him back to reality.

“What sort of arrangement?”

“He did what he needed to do, on Canto Bight or elsewhere, with those… friends of his. As long as the HoloPress didn’t find out, it was perfectly fine by me.” She was determinedly not looking at him as she added. “Runai Sculdun was one of those friends. And he just came back from… entertaining her in one of the guest bedrooms.”

“So. You were jealous.”

And for some reason, the sheer banality of that stung – that she might allow herself something as ordinary as jealousy over Perrin’s affairs – they were nothing but a reflection of her husband’s insecurities after thirty years of being reduced to a plus one. Jealousy also implied feeling – and that stung a bit more.

Mon let out a small laugh at that.

“No. Why would I be?”

If asked, Orson would have denied it vehemently, under oath if necessary, but he did, in fact, start breathing a little easier at that.

“But we had an arrangement. Perrin wasn’t to sleep with her when I was in the residence. That evening, her husband was there as well. Davo Sculdun is a major donor for the party. It was irresponsible and plain stupid… Imagine the scandal—”

“Okay, so why not join them? You could do a threesome or a foursome.”

His last line did exactly what he intended: it killed the last traces of tremor in her voice, and they were back on safer ground – trading jabs meant to wound, not to kill (that’s what vulnerability was for).

“Screw you, Orson.”

“You actually did.”

“Do not lecture me on how to maintain a marriage.”

“We still have to sell it to the jury. You had an arrangement. Perfectly acceptable in your social circle, but somewhat unusual by the standards of the wider public, you may admit. He breaks the arrangement and the next thing you know, he’s dead. Forgive me, but we have some explaining to do.”

“I didn’t kill him. I know I did not kill him.”

She said it with such conviction, such fire in her voice, such profound sincerity that even the most jaded jury might have believed her. Yet, Orson Callan Krennic was not a distant juror. He had seen, firsthand, how adept Mon Mothma was at convincing herself of whatever she most needed to believe to survive - and then living under that delusion for decades.  

“Fine, but you whacked him with that antique plate and next morning he’s Mr. Hoth. Reasonable beings, including the Bureau, the Justice Department, the HoloPress—”

“The HoloPress? Reasonable?”

“—and, the majority the public think you killed him.”

“Whose side are you on?”

“For a four hundred thousand credits, yours. But you want to start with the jury’s worst suspicions. It’s always the best baseline. So he could have slipped in the bathroom and gotten back into bed and died. But that’s not much in the way of an alternate narrative. For one thing, there’s the Hanna star mark they found stamped on his forehead.”

Orson studied the photograph of Perrin’s forehead. Noted a receding hairline with a bit of schadenfreude. His inner Lio reminded him that it was petty, especially given Perrin was six feet under, but Orson never listened to Lio anyway. “It’s kind of pronounced.” Both the mark and the receding hairline, though Orson had enough common sense not to add that aloud. “We’ll do some image enhancing … we can probably make it look ambiguous.” He grunted. “Maybe if we showed it upside down.… Well, we’ll figure something out.”

Orson turned the page to the Bureau’s medical examiner’s report and the Naval Hospital autopsy report in front of him:

“Cause of death, epidural hematoma resulting from blunt-force trauma. Time of death, between three-fifteen A.M. and five A.M. Tell me this: After you ki— After you both went to sleep, did you wake up in the middle of the night to get a drink of water? Work on urgent briefings? Wash the blood off your hands?”

“No, and I don’t appreciate your last question, however gratifying you may have found it.”

“This is going to be such an easy sell to the jury.” Orson groaned. “You didn’t kill your husband, despite the fact that he was humping the guest down the hall, as well as half the capital’s socialites. What really happened was he got up in the middle of the night, consumed with remorse for his cheating ways, decided to commit suicide by smashing himself in the forehead with an antique plate, and just before dying, tucked tucked himself back in bed. It’s so obvious. We’ll move for summary dismissal.”

He could see her nails digging into her palms where her hands lay folded in her lap, but instead of throwing a retort his way, Mon went very still. In that subdued, subtle way of hers, as though she were gathering every loose thread of herself back into one whole, while all cameras in the world were trained on her. Metaphorically speaking, given the predicament she and the nation found themselves in, they were. It was a bit frightening – had Orson still cared which he absolutely did not - how good she had became at burying herself alive over the years. By the time she looked at him again, the flash of temper was gone, locked away behind an impenetrable, composed mask, and her voice, when it came, was cold enough to make Hoth seem like a summer camp.

“Is sarcasm included in your four-hundred-thousand-credit fee, or do you bill separately?”

“Separately. Though for old times’ sake, I’ll waive the first hour.”

Even as he said it, he regretted pushing too far for the petty satisfaction of rubbing the failures of her marriage in her face. The feeling, however, was not born out of some infinite goodness of his heart. As Orson turned the page, he realized he was about to level one more low blow and go somewhere he very clearly did not belong. It would have been much easier to do if he had not already antagonized her.

He closed the file. Then leaned closer, trying to keep his voice as neutral and even as possible.

“What about the child?”

“Leida. Her name is Leida.” Mon corrected sharply, almost defensively. “What about her? It’s not like you to—”

“I just want to know,” Orson said, quieter now, because even he understood he had to thread carefully here. He could mock her late husband all he liked, but Mon wouldn’t take kindly to even the faintest hint that he was slighting her child. Not that he intended to. For all those years, her daughter had been little more than an abstract concept to him. Yet now that the concept had drifted into his orbit, he had to know what to expect. “What are the chances of her going to the HoloPress, or to her friends, or to anyone at all, and saying she believes you did it.”

For a second, Mon did not move.

Then another crack run through the porcelain mask – hair-thin, almost invisible to most people, perhaps, but Orson had never belonged to that category. He saw the way the corners of her eyes tightened, and way the brilliant hazel-green dulled under a sudden strain and hurt. She did not look angry or outraged. That would have been easier. Welcome, even. Either would’ve meant he had missed the mark, the shameless, cynical bastard that he was. Instead, looking at her now, he understood clearly – cynical bastard or not, he had hit right home.

“Mon,” he said, more carefully than before, “I’m not asking to be cruel. I’m asking because if she says it once, just once to the wrong person… it will damage the case beyond even my ability to save it.”

“Leida and I haven’t…” She stopped. Started again. “She’s angry. And lost.”

“Yes,” Orson said. “Most children who lose their parents usually are.”

And some of them make life-altering decisions in a vain attempt to finally earn approval from a ghost.  

That remained unsaid. Their thirty-year-old skeletons and closets were better left alone.

Orson turned his attention back to the file: medical examiner’s report, the Bureau’s time log - anything but the woman in front of him. Mon, meanwhile, studied his Wall of Ego.

“She might say it,” she whispered at last. Four little words that seemed to drain her more than the previous forty minutes of his interrogation. “I don’t know if she believes it. But she might say it.”

Then, before he could come up with a response, the door of his office slammed open and Lyra barged in.

“Galen asked me to tell you that STARDUST is ready.” Her voice left no doubt as to whether she enjoyed running this particular errand.

“Lyra!” Orson drawled with exaggerated politeness. “What a pleasure.”

For the first time in his life, it actually might have been. Well, not a pleasure exactly, but certainly the lesser of two evils.

“What’s Stardust?” Mon asked, her eyes darting between the two of them.

“Strategic Trial Audience Response, Decision, and Uncertainty Simulation Tool.” Lyra answered automatically, clearly intent on scoring a point in one of her endless arguments with Orson and not quite mindful of their audience. “Designed by Galen….”  She stressed, looking straight at him.

“Sadly, he usually wastes it on his pro bono cases.”

“While you waste it getting the worst of the human race off the hook.”

“Well, you have to start somewhere,” Orson shrugged. “Which reminds me. Where are my manners? Lyra, meet Chancellor Mothma, the latest addition to the worst of the human race as you so aptly put it.” His faux-innocent smile didn’t fool anyone – he was unabashedly enjoying the mortified look on Lyra’s face. “Chancellor - Lyra Erso.”

Contrary to what he expected, Mon extended her arm to Lyra, as if greeting a dignitary during a state reception.

“Nice to meet you.” She smiled. “I think I read your piece on national parks and resource preservation. You made some good points there…”

Orson felt, for the first – and definitely not the last - time that day, unfairly outmaneuvered and outnumbered.

***

Normally, Orson did not invite his defendants to these sessions. Often, being in jail, they were unable to participate. Nor did they know it was an option – Orson had an iron-clad rule about that: the existence of STARDUST was to be kept secret.

But Lyra, troublesome as ever, had blown that to pieces. Predictably, Mon had asked to attend.

She did so in a calm, infuriatingly reasonable way, arguing that if her freedom was going to depend on what strangers thought of her, she had every right to hear it herself. That as a politician she was no stranger to focus groups so nothing said there could possibly rattle her. Then she added that surely someone as certain of his methods as Orson would have no reason to object to an audience. Orson’s vanity did the rest.

Orson, this team, Mon, and Lyra stood together behind a one-way mirror while, on the other side, a team of pollsters prepped sixty six people for the focus group that was about to begin. Galen sat off to one the side, adjusting STARDUST controls.

Part one consisted of a pollster reading aloud a series of statements about Chancellor Mothma. The participants responded by pressing buttons on the consoles in front of them. Galen’s biometric sensors tracked sweat, breathing, and heart rates to asses the honesty of their responses, far more accurately and intelligently than any Bureau polygraph ever could. Later, STARDUST would consolidate the data, identify patterns, weaknesses, and subconscious biases that could be manipu—  could be channeled to let justice take its course.

The first question was simple: “Do you believe that Chancellor Mothma killed her husband?”

Mon looked at the computer screen in front of Galen. A bar shot upward, all the way to 91.1%

“Is that—” Her breath hitched and Orson saw a faint tremor pass through her.

“That,” he whispered, “is where we start.”

Then he glared at Lyra.

There. This is what happens when you break the rules just to spite me.

It was going to be a very long day.

Chapter Text

Six hours later, after the last person had been unhooked, thanked, handed a check, and reminded about an enforceable confidentiality agreement forbidding them from revealing even that the session had taken place, Mon looked as if she had just been sentenced to death.

Though, to an outside observer, perhaps not obviously so. She was only paler than usual, the tiny freckles across the bridge of her nose – stubborn things the Chancellor had always carefully masked until they were all but buried under porcelain white – now stood out in stark contrast against the skin gone almost ghost-gray. Her eyes fixed on a spot on the opposite side of the mirror – where an old, non-functioning clock hung, forever stuck at quarter past four. One of Lio’s tricks from his Bureau days: let a witness or a suspect lose the track of time, and the mind would follow. Her lips had lost what little color her carefully chosen – after numerous focused-groups, Orson suspected - neutral lipstick had given them. 

She remained upright. And unnaturally still, posture perfect. An epitome of calm serenity under pressure. That’s when he knew she was anything but.

“I think we could both use a drink,” Orson offered, picking up his notes. “Galen and the team can wrap up the rest.”

He touched the small of her back, lightly guiding her toward the exit, as Mon stared straight ahead.

***

Luckily for him, Lio had thought that one through decades ago, back when they landed their first truly high-profile case and needed to avoid accidental eavesdropping. By now, Lex.Rule’s rooftop terrace was always on standby, complete with a glass-walled privacy canopy, a mini-bar stocked with alcohol carefully calibrated to accommodate every emotion, from mild irritation to rage and despair, and a panoramic view of Coruscant - their usual reminder of the dangers of flying too close to the sun. Given the commotion and media circus surrounding this case, their favorite bar had been ruled off-limits for the foreseeable future, and the terrace was conscripted into service once again.

For the first time since taking the case, Orson felt a genuine stab of pity for the woman sitting next to him. There had been a time when crowds cheered whenever Mon Mothma took the stage. On Chandrila, in the capital, in convention halls and press-conference auditoriums after peace talks with the Separatists. She had spent decades burning herself in the insatiable flame of the public eye, sacrificing privacy, peace, and most of whatever softer parts of herself had once existed in order to justify the faith others had placed in her.

And now she had just spent an afternoon listening to sixty six strangers call her a murderess and, into the bargain, a scheming, manipulating, power-grabbing hypocrite. One might have thought that once an aspiring historian would have remembered, before giving every last piece of herself away, that bread and circuses had always been more compelling than hope and change, and that no mistress was more fickle than public sentiment. Orson spoke from considerable – and, in both cases, far more pleasurable - experience with both.

“I thought you were no stranger to focus groups,” he said, handing her a glass of whiskey.

He refrained from adding I told you so and I have rules for a reason, and that alone ought to have counted as an act of remarkable personal growth.

One small step for a man. One giant leap for Orson Callan Krennic, as Lio liked to say.

“Erskin…” she took too large a gulp, coughed, and had to set the glass down on the table between them. He caught the brief moment her eyes glistened before she blinked it away.

Still a lightweight.

She drew a few slow, deep breaths. “My Chief of Staff. He usually gives me a summary,” she admitted.

Which meant numbers, patterns and carefully selected, sanitized quotes. An ivory tower version of public opinion: enough to warn of an upcoming fire, but not enough to feel the flame licking your skin. Not until it was too late. Orson swore inwardly at – well, not himself, naturally, since he remained beyond reproach in this mess – but at Lyra, Mon, and this Erskin guy for forcing him into precisely the situation he had been determined to avoid.

The dying Coruscant sun spilled across the terrace in long bands of amber, catching in Mon’s hair and turning it to molten gold. Lio would surely call him dramatic, but sometimes Orson did wonder if nature itself had conspired against him. The light - or the alcohol, or perhaps both - softened the edges of her face, blurring the ever-present lines of worry until the Chancellor was overtaken by a ghost thirty years younger: a woman from another life, when evenings like this ended in arguments that dissolved into laughter, laughter that dissolved into kisses, and kisses into discarded clothes on the floor.

“I tried…. I pushed through the Freedom of Information act. The Equal Justice. Child care. Trade. Peace talks. The environment...” she looked down at her hands, reciting the list with the dutiful air of a student presenting her assignment to a tutor, not understanding why she’d been graded poorly.

Her sympathy for Separatist holdouts had never played well with key demographics, but Orson refrained from mentioning that. He took a sip of his own whiskey and felt the smokey bite burn the roof of his mouth and settle over his tongue.

There were, broadly speaking, two ways to handle this.

Lio once said that one could choose to be nice or to be kind. Nice was anesthesia. Kindness was surgery. One spared feelings; the other one hurt but cut out the disease. Since Orson had rarely practiced either, he had never given the distinction more than a passing thought. Until now.

He could try playing it nice, he supposed, but her own staff seems to have done that often enough, and here was the result: sitting beside him, a delicate creature suddenly frozen in amber, clutching the glass for dear life. Once, she had also tried being nice - one day, thirty years ago, complete with tears, regret and platitudes that changed nothing.

In the grand scheme if things, being nice had never done either of them much good.

Which left kind. In his own way.

“As well as Ghorman amnesty program and so on. I know,” Orson said. “The bastards ought to be grateful instead of getting all bent out of shape just because you killed your husband. So shall we dispense with the self-pity and get to work?”

And that did it. Chancellor Mothma returned, and the ghost from thirty years ago was put back in its grave.

Good. Ashes to ashes, or so they say.

“How characteristically charming of you, Orson.” She took another sip. “Yes.”

“We heard some bad news today. But we also heard some good news,” Orson looked at his notes – Galen would send STARDUST report later, but he always preferred to get his thoughts first, “Quite a few think you’ve always been a polite, sometimes-indecisive Chancellor who spent her days fighting and failing to protect Separatist do-gooders. In other words, exactly the sort of irritation Palpatine and the rest government would hate. Your reforms are perceived as too high-minded to improve their daily life, but still sufficiently annoying to the rest of Coruscant. I’m very pleased with that.”

“You are?”

“Yes. I can build on that.”

“By build, do mean demolish my record as Chancellor and head of state?” Mon bristled. “Perhaps it’s best you never became an architect then. Not sure the Republic would’ve survived it.”

Chancellor just proved how perfectly willing she still was to meet each of his low blows with her own. Admirable, but actually not what he had intended. Orson swore under his breath, realizing – belatedly - that the same words carried entirely different meanings for both of them.

“Make them pick whom they distrust more,” he explained, pausing to adopt his best conspiratorial whisper, “You… or the deep state.”

“Wonderful. You’re betting my freedom on getting sympathy from unhinged conspiracy-theorists. Any other brilliant observations you care to share?”

“You didn’t score well with pet owners.” Orson picked a random line. “They didn’t like the fact that you didn’t have a cat or dog in the Executive Residence.”

Mon blinked.

“You want me to go out and buy a Loth kitten?”

“We could, but it’s kind of late, HoloPress will see right through it.” Orson said regretfully, and then, before he could stop himself, asked. “You always wanted to, how come you didn’t?”

“Perrin had an allergy.”

“Well, he turned out to be allergic to antique plates, and that didn’t stop you.”

“Very droll.”

He looked at his notes again.

“You did not do well among the former military. Not at all. No surprise there, given you pushed for disarmament and lifted the blockade of Separatist holdouts.”

“The blockade was a boot to the throat of the people requesting their basic rights, and multiple fact-finding missions proved—”

Orson cut in before he was treated to a rerun of the Chancellor’s impassioned performance during the Ghorman debates.

“Or, it may well be that you didn’t do well with the veterans since you ki— since they think that you killed one of the nation’s great military heroes. Which, by the way, must make you feel good about all those credits you poured into turning Perrin’s service into the stuff legends are made of. Mission accomplished, as they say.”

Had Orson believed in a higher power, part of him might have mistaken this for divine revenge undertaken on his behalf. There was an uncanny symmetry in watching every one of Mon’s choices return now to wreak havoc on her life. Oh, he remembered that Academy firebrand version of Perrin all too well, along with his regimental friends, who had dined out on it ever since. Lio – the only one in his orbit entitled to speak to war experience - usually merely rolled his eyes whenever HoloNews trotted out the Chancellor’s devoted husband and decorated veteran.

“My campaign needed military credentials. And he did serve.”

“I hear the beaches of Scarif are especially unforgiving in summertime.”

However, because karma was an equal opportunity offender, it was Orson who had to deal with the mess now. Which meant that, however satisfying the collapse of Perrin’s myth might have been in theory, revealing the true nature of his service was out of the question. So: dignified military record it was.

“If you’re still brooding about Perrin, I think you owe it to me to say so.”

“Owe you?”

“Orson, we’ve been through this.” Her voice carried restrained patience a parent might use with a stubborn child. “I’m going to need all of you in court. Not just all of you minus the ten percent that’s still seething.”

“If I were still seething, why would I have taken this case?”

She looked at him, in that infuriating way of hers, cutting through his performance.

“First, so you could finally get the whip hand in this relationship.”

“I always have the whip hand in the attorney-client relationship.”

“I said in this one.”

Mon gave him a small, self-satisfied smile, and the terrace felt, for one deeply irritating second, warmer than it had any right to.

“Second, to show the world how magnanimous you are – enough to defend the woman who dump—” she caught herself, “who spent years interrogating you in the Senate. And third, to lose the case on purpose. But in such a way that everyone would say, ‘Oh, even the great Orson Krennic couldn’t have gotten her off”. And then I’ll end up in Narkina Five or on death row. And you get even with me.”

“I cannot believe,” Orson said with a perfect mix of wounded dignity and theatrical regret, “that you think that I’m capable of something so petty. Is this what politics does to a person’s soul?”

And damn her and her uncanny ability to see right through him.

Mon laughed. “Oh dear, that’s good.”

She took another sip of whiskey.

“Orson…”

She really should stop doing that, Counselor Krennic would’ve served perfectly well.  

“I need to know. Are you in or out?”

So much for the whip hand. It was his turn to take a sip of whiskey and feel dry, smoky burn spread across his tongue and down his throat.

“I’m in.”

She opened her mouth to ask something, and that was his cue. If she had recovered enough of herself to pry, then the worst of the shock had passed. Orson set his glass down with more force than was strictly necessary and glanced at his watch. She had always been good at reading signals; and that one was blatantly clear, bordering on rudeness, perhaps, but he knew at once that if she asked whatever it was she meant to ask, he might answer it too honestly. That alone made it time to end the evening. 

She did read it right. And went still in her chair, pressing her lips back into a thin line, her gaze fixed somewhere over the cityscape, where the glittering towers cut through the evening haze and the red-amber wash of the dying sun.

“I’ve got to check on Galen and Lio, and then we’ll call it a day. Are you—”

“My detail is downstairs. They have enough experience getting me— well, to the house.”

Since, thanks to her, the Executive Residence had managed to become both the home of the head of state and an active crime scene, it now stood empty for the first time in centuries of the Republic’s history. Though Orson suspected Palpatine was already mentally measuring the drapes, while Mon - along with her daughter and her Bureau detail - had been moved to a temporary residence.

“I’ll be down in a few,” she said softly. “I just… want to sit here a little longer.”

His desire to flee – to another floor, another building, possibly another planet – clashed with his inner Lio who reminded him that leaving Mon alone out there was not, strictly speaking, wise. Not that she was likely to do anything reckless and stupid. Still. Until a few weeks ago, he would also have said she was not stupid enough to kill her husband and leave the evidence behind.

Then, just as he stepped back into the office, he spotted an answer to his dilemma.

“Lyra! It’s a miracle! Just the person I wanted to see!”

Lyra narrowed her eyes on instinct and crossed the room toward him with the expression of someone approaching a suspicious ticking device.

“What.”

Orson jerked his chin toward the terrace. “Go and fix what you’ve broken.”

Lyra’s eyebrows shot up. “What I’ve broken?”

“You’re the reason she found out about STARDUST, and you insisted she sit in on the focus group.”

“She asked to sit in on it.”

“You planted this idea. Indirectly. Ergo, you’re the culprit.”

“That’s not the same thing.”

“It is when I’m assigning blame. Now go.”

“You know, your people skills leave a lot to be desired,” Lyra folded her arms.

“And yet people persist in needing me.”

“Well, it’s either you or a firing squad. And trust me, if it were up to me, I’d take my chances with the firing squad.”

Then, she finally glanced past him, through the open terrace doors, toward Mon. Her face changed slightly, a shadow of regret, and possibly pity, crossing it.

“Fine,” she grumbled. “But I’m not doing it for you, are we clear?”

“Crystal.”

Orson watched her step out onto the terrace and pause beside Mon’s chair. For one alarming second he thought Mon might reject the company out of sheer wounded pride. Instead, she tilted her head, looked up, and said something too quiet to catch. Lyra answered. Mon’s mouth moved again. Then, after the brief hesitation, Lyra pulled out the chair opposite and sat.

Good.

Orson exhaled once through his nose and turned away before the sight could become more intolerably human.

***

Inside, he found Galen, Lio and Dedra exactly where he expected.

Galen fussed over STARDUST outputs, wearing a profoundly disheartened expression. The man had just spend six straight hours - and the better part of the last two decades - translating human vices into data and still managed to be surprised that people inevitably ended up being disappointing.

His friend had begun his legal career with touchingly naïve faith in logic, justice, and merit. With his exceptional mind and memory for clauses and precedents, he had assumed the better argument would always win. What he learned instead was that justice was served based on perception, grievance, vanity, and whatever story twelve strangers found easiest to live with. And, unlike Orson, Galen had never been good at reading a room to exploit any of the three. So he built something that could. STARDUST began as a way to defend underprivileged clients whose cases others had already written off as hopeless. Orson, naturally, funded it at once and then used it on to get off the highest bidder.

“How bad?”

“Worse than we’d like.” Galen sighed, scanning the columns of demographic breakdowns and response clusters. “Even her supporters think she did it.”

Lio sat off to the side, sleeves rolled up, going through Galen’s charts and making notes in his case file while Dedra handed him the pages she found most promising.

Orson came to stand beside them, “Anything actually useful in this buffet of bad news?”

“They don’t trust her, but they do believe she is being singled out.” Lio carefully said. “The government’s zeal in prosecuting the case comes off as personal and disproportionate. If you can make the other side look vindictive enough—”

“Not that Tarkin needs any help in that department, but I’ll do my best to let his natural charm shine through.”

Lio pined him with an unamused glare.

“Then some of them will start resenting being asked to do his dirty work for him. I don’t think you have a shot at acquittal, Orson. Don’t even try that. However, the jury may be more charitable about the degree of murder than Tarkin would prefer.”

Which was a good start. Only not good enough for Orson’s ego. A lesser conviction was still a conviction – ergo, Tarkin’s victory - and he couldn’t afford that on principle.

“Can we move them?”

“We’re sceptically optimistic, Sir.” Dedra stepped in when Lio pretended he didn’t hear the question.

“Can we move them enough, Lio?”

“That depends on whether, by the end of the trial, they end up resenting you more than Tarkin.”

“I’ll be on my best behavior.”

“Because you’ve done such an excellent job so far…”

Two more hours passed as they worked through jury theories and potential witness vulnerabilities. By the time they were done, the dusk had fully settled over the capital. Orson would have wagered that even the crowd of HoloPress reporters now permanently camped outside his office had dwindled from hundreds to a few dozen.

Galen was the first one to rise to his feet.

“I’ll call it a day, Lyra must be tired of waiting.”

That, Orson reflected, was what marrying one’s midlife crisis did to a man. In years past, he’d have worked straight through the night.

“Ah,” Orson drawled, suddenly remembering. “About that...”

***

They stepped into the terrace together. True to Orson’s prediction, the city had been almost swallowed by dusk, and even motley artificial lights and neon banners seemed to give up the fight against the encroaching dark. The half-finished bottle of whiskey on the terrace table caught Orson’s eye first. Then the second one - fully empty - beside it. 

Then Mon and Lyra.

Instead of sitting unnaturally straight, as usual, Mon was now folded inelegantly sideways in her chair, her heels kicked off somewhere beneath the table. Her pristine white, high-collared jacket had been flung over the back, leaving her in a blouse too thin for the night chill but she was clearly far too drunk to notice. Across from her, Lyra lounged with one arm thrown over her seat, laughing with the unguarded abandon of someone who should’ve had passed out three drinks ago but inexplicably still clung to consciousness.

Mon was in the middle of saying, with extraordinary care, “—and then he actually said, ‘Words do still have meanings, I’m sure we agree on that.’”

Lyra snorted into her glass. “Oh, he would.”

Mon nodded with grave drunken authority.

Orson stood there for a beat, taking in the spectacle of Chancellor Mon Mothma and Lyra Erso, both remarkably drunk and just as remarkably united by a single deeply-held principle - their mutual, undying commitment to making Orson Krennic’s life miserable.

Then Mon noticed him. Her gaze climbed up from his shoes to his face with the exaggerated concentration of someone trying to force two or three blurring images back into one from deep inside a whiskey fog.

“Oh,” she exclaimed, saluting him with her glass. “There you are.”

Lyra turned in her chair, saw Galen, and smiled brilliantly.

“Hello, husband.” Then her unfocused gaze landed on Orson, “Hello, bastard.”

“Lyra,” Galen asked carefully, “how much have you two had?”

She considered the question with visible seriousness, then held up two fingers.

“Glasses?”

Oh, Galen, Orson ruefully thought, terribly naïve, hopelessly optimistic Galen.

“Bottles.” He cut in. Then, because new evidence presented itself on the floor, “Actually, two and a half. I sent you out here,” he fully turned to Lyra, “to repair the damage.”

“I did,” Lyra said confidently, a touch affronted he didn’t appreciate her efforts

“You got the Chancellor drunk,” Orson spat out.

Now, Lyra looked truly offended. “We got each other drunk.”

Mon lifted her glass in another salute.

“Mutually… mutually beneficial cooperation.” She uttered, somehow managing not to slur, against all logic and reason.

Then she laughed - an actual laugh, full and warm and so painfully alive, so familiar, Orson felt punched in the chest. He had hoped, briefly, that the ghosts had finally been put to rest. Instead, here came Lyra, troublesome as ever, and had dragged them back into the light, and Orson found himself standing there, absurdly unprepared for the sound of a laugh he had once known too well.

Luckily for him, Lio chose that very moment to join them on the terrace.

“The Chancellor’s agents are wondering—” He stopped short. After decades in the Bureau and the military, very little still had the power to surprise him. Even so, his eyebrows lifted a fraction.

Dedra, only a few steps behind him and still carrying folders, walked straight into Lio’s back, and only great natural instincts, honed further in the Enforcement and the Bureau, kept her from dropping the files.

“Never mind,” Lio muttered.

Orson took in the surrounding commotion and promised himself that Lyra Erso would be banned from Lex.Rule’s premises forever. For one blissful second, he allowed himself to imagine the world without Lyra in it and revel in the fantasy before returning to the disaster at hand.

“Reporters?” Orson asked.

“Fewer than before,” Dedra gathered her wits with remarkable speed. Truly, the Bureau lost a great asset, dismissing her over her obsessive hunt for that Separatist mastermind Axis. “But Shambo and Osar were just getting traction with the dignified grief narrative…”

“So enough to ruin us if they get a picture of Chancellor Mothma needing to be carried out of her lawyer’s office.” Lio finished for her

Mon stirred at that. “I can walk.”

“That,” Orson said, rubbing his forehead, “is a matter of perspective.”

Then, as always when backed into a corner, Orson Callan Krennic came up with an incredibly daring, elegant and, strictly speaking, not even illegal plan.

“Here’s what we’ll do. Lio, call in your Bureau chums and have them split her detail. Leave a few agents with the Bureau limo at the main entrance and move the rest to our basement parking. Galen, take Lyra home through the front. Lyra, be your charming and outspoken self. I need the reporters distracted.”

Then he turned to the one unsuspecting woman who had just been assigned a leading role in the evening’s improvised farce.

“Miss Meero,” Orson said, making a visible effort to sound polite, though this was not, in any meaningful sense, a negotiation. He stepped closer to Mon’s chair and picked up her discarded jacket. “How do you feel about a little fieldwork?”

Dedra’s expression left no doubt as to what she – once a top Bureau agent - really thought of being forced to participate in this charade. Fortunately, since both Orson and Lio paid her salary, she was quickly reminded of her place in the chain of command.

***

A good thirty minutes later, the semi-drowsy HoloPress found itself treated to a domestic dispute involving a devoted husband trying to maneuver his clearly drunk wife into the back seat of a car. So engrossed were they by the spectacle and drama, rivalling the best episodes of the Real Housewives of Coruscant, that they nearly missed the Chancellor, who had chosen to wear sunglasses and a headscarf at night as she slipped into her Bureau limo. If that was her idea of cloak-and-dagger, it was no wonder she had forgotten to wipe her fingerprints off that Hana star plate. They snapped the mandatory shots of the limo leaving the premises and called it a day.

Unbeknownst to them, in the basement parking garage, a few mortified Bureau agents were averting their eyes and struggling to keep neutral expressions while a disgruntled lawyer swore under his breath and guided a visibly inebriated Chancellor toward a waiting car.

Lio, observing all of this from the security monitor in his office, concluded that it had indeed been a very long day, and that none of them would remember it in remotely the same way the next day.

***

Mon was asleep by the time they arrived, or rather - if Orson were less inclined to use euphemisms - properly passed out, all the fight, stress and pretense gone out of her. The temporary residence turned out to be a heavily secured Federal townhouse in an old, quiet row originally built for high-profile diplomatic workers. Orson waited for the agents to open the car door and help him deal with an intricate choreography of getting Mon out. Even half-conscious and catastrophically intoxicated, she was lighter than she ought to have been. Her temporary residence opened before they reached it, warm light spilling across the front hall, where a girl stood barefoot on the polished marble floor in an oversized nightshirt.

The child, Orson presumed. If he had any doubt left, her red-auburn hair and the familiar look of exasperation erased it at once.

She looked first at her mother – slung over his shoulder; Orson would be damned before he carried her in his arms ever again - then at Orson, then at the Bureau agents next to them. He carried Mon into the sitting room, while one of the agents hurried ahead to clear the sofa.

“Is she drunk?”

Orson did not break stride.

“No.”

The girl’s eyes narrowed with impressive speed. “That’s a lie.”

“She was under a great deal of stress. Our staff doctor had to give her a sedative.”

Which, Orson told himself, was a perfectly reasonable way to describe the evening’s events. Not that he cared about the child’s feelings, or about ruining whatever mental image of her mother the girl still had - he’d wager an antique plate flung at her father had already done a fine job of that. But he had no desire to antagonize the teenager more than Mon already did. Orson had meant what he said that morning: if the child said, even once, to the wrong person, that she believed her mother had done it, the case would be damaged beyond even his ability to save it.

He laid Mon down on the sofa more carefully than he intended to, pulled a throw over her, and straightened. The agents took that as their cue and quietly disappeared. When he turned toward the doorway, the child was still there, leaning against the frame with her arms folded and her chin lifted, trying very hard to look older than she was and succeeding only in looking lonelier and angrier.

“You’re him.”

“An astute observation.”

“You’re her lawyer.”

“Orson Krennic,” he mock-bowed, “at your service.”

“Do you think she did it?”

Orson leaned one shoulder against the opposite side of the doorframe.

He should lie to her. Children were lied to and manipulated all the time, and who was he to defy one of the long-standing traditions of the Mothma household. She was, for all intents and purposes, the one weak point in the structure he was trying to build: a tiny fracture, a forgotten exhaust port, a misplaced brick – one of those small details too easy to miss until the whole thing blew apart.

“No.” She looked away first. “No, don’t answer. You’re her lawyer. You’ll say whatever.”

“I’ll say whatever it takes to win the case. Yes.” He let that sit for a beat. “But… Mo— Chancellor Mothma is many things. A murderer isn’t one of them.”

Orson studied the child more carefully now: the rigid posture, so reminiscent of her mother; the keen perceptiveness, too advanced for her age – the sort children developed when they had been living too long in the orbit of adults who barely tolerated each other. And then, another emotion he recognized instantly, for he’d lived with it far too long: the anger, barely masked, directed at the world and herself for still caring.

Possibly, because another ghost had chosen that moment to rear his ugly head, Orson went on:

“Whatever happens next, remember this: anger is a bad advisor.”

That, he assured himself, was nothing but a precaution. One mitigated risk where one found it, and the child was exactly that.

“How would you know?” She bristled at that. “Have you lost a father?”

The question hit close to home, so close he nearly smiled.

“Yes.”

Her expression shifted, losing a shade of hostility in favor of wary attention.

“I have. But that was the luckiest day of my life. The only thing I was angry about was that it hadn’t happened sooner.”

“Then it’s different! You hated your father.”

Kids those days. Orson had almost forgotten how blissful it was to see the world in black and white.

“Would’ve been easier if I did.” He winced faintly: that impossible day couldn’t end soon enough. “But you have a point. I’m not the right person to ask. Just remember this: nothing you do will ever help you win the approval of a ghost. She tried, once.” He nodded toward Mon, “Didn’t work out that well.”

The girl stood silent a few seconds seconds, pensive now, clearly filing away the fact for future use.

Orson moved past her, thinking that some days he truly did earn those four hundred thousand credits to the last one.

Then a voice, younger, smaller now, called after for him from the threshold:

“If she wakes up and asks whether she was drunk, I’m telling her you said no.”

“And, if years from now, she starts lecturing you about staying out past curfew… you can always use tonight for leverage.”

“You mean blackmail her?”

Orson, despite himself, almost laughed.

“A bright young thing, aren’t you?

“Good night, Mr. Krennic.”

“Good night, Miss Mothma.”