Chapter Text
In Jabba’s palace, there is a mirror in every room. The grand hallways connecting each wing of the palace are also lined in mirrors, ornate golden frames bumping into each other and brushing fingertips as they hang, gathering dust along their tops. Even the ceiling of his room is decorated with a garishly large mirror, lined with what he can only assume are real pearls. It’s far too high to touch, to examine.
The message is implicit and yet incredibly clear. In Jabba’s palace, there are eyes on you at all times, even if they’re just your own.
It had been the hardest thing to get used to, the sight of his own eyes. Still two weeks into this new half-life, he finds himself startled at the sight of them, brought momentarily still when he forgets and catches his own reflection’s gaze in one of the mirrors.
It says something, probably, about the life he led before this one. It says something that the most difficult adjustment he has faced has been the return of his old eyes. That it isn’t the weight of the golden collar around his throat or the manacles around his wrists or the shimmersilk blue garments he’s been ordered to wear that loop around his arms and leave his chest and torso exposed, fasten at his waist and flow down his legs in the barest excuse for modesty he’s ever seen. That it isn’t any of the many and varied indignities he has been exposed to since arriving at Jabba’s palace with a blaster pressed between his shoulder blades. Since he has been made a slave.
It says something, probably, that being a slave feels less like the death of his entire world and more like a familiar outfit he has found himself wearing once more.
Except this time, for the first time in years, when he blinks awake in the middle of the night and stares at his reflection in the mirrored ceiling, blue eyes blink back.
In the years he had spent as Darth Solence, he’d forgotten that color, and now it startles him every time he catches a glance of himself in one of Jabba’s mirrors. It frightens him worse than the evidence of his new status that litters his body, that blue-gray color framed by long strands of auburn hair.
It’s like proof, each time he sees his own eyes in the face of one of Jabba’s slaves, reflected back at him in one of the ornate gilded mirrors that line the hallway he walks from his quarters to the cavernous hall that Jabba uses as his throne room.
Darth Solence had thought, once, that Falling would free him. That embracing the Dark side would set him free from the anger and betrayal he’d felt at his rejection from the Jedi Order, from every Master who could have taken him as their padawan and turned the other way. Joining the Dark side, accepting a new master and a new name was supposed to give his fury a focus, give his soul a taste of true freedom.
Instead, it is Obi-Wan Kenobi who finds himself prisoner now, who wears the collar and the outfit of one of Jabba’s schuttas, who washes the heat and grime of the desert off his skin every night. A slave once more, unable to outrun the question that dogs his every step:
Haven’t you always been?