▸ Column · Outer Rim moisture-farming homestead, Star Wars / Sith era
DARTH MAUL replies.
Replied to by Darth Maul, with a rebuttal from Loki.
The letter
Every time I haul supply crates back to my homestead, the woman on the next plot — Ruthanne of the moisture farm across the gully — appears at her rail to ask whether I'm "carrying an heir yet." I've been bonded three cycles, so that is apparently open license to speculate about my body. Last rotation she escalated, asking me straight out, in front of my bond-mother, whether my partner and I had "consulted anyone about our difficulties," as though choosing not to raise children were unthinkable and only some affliction could explain it. We simply don't want them. It's my choice and I owe her no accounting. But I must pass her every single day, and I'd rather not open a feud over a crate of vegetables. Is there a firm answer that actually ends the questions, instead of just postponing them?
Darth Maul replies
She takes something from you on that porch. Each time. The right to live a chosen life without it weighed and counted by a stranger at a rail. Do not let her, or your bond-mother, or anyone, tell you it is nothing. It is your decision. She treats it as public ground to dig in. That is the theft. Name it.
Now — power. She is fishing. She casts the question; you supply the reaction; that flinch is the tribute she came to collect. Stop paying it.
Silence is a weapon. Learn to wield it. She wants explanation — explanation is the meat. Give her none. A still face. A word about the weather, if you must say anything at all, and then your door. Let her speculate into empty air until the sport goes out of it. The one who explains has already lost. The one who offers nothing teaches the other there is no game here.
But hear the rest, because I paid for it. Do not make a war of a vegetable crate. I built an entire existence around one wound, and it became the only thing left of me. Carry your choice. Do not let Ruthanne become it.
— Darth Maul
Loki weighs in
Stone silence, every dawn, across a gully you cross daily? Darling, that is the cold war she swore she didn't want. Frost is still a front line. And our grim friend has made the usual error — casting a bored farmwife as a nemesis who stole his throne. She didn't. She's starved for plot, and being treated as your great adversary flatters her enormously. Don't starve her; bore her. Hand her a reply so warmly, blandly nothing — "we're blissful, isn't the suns' light fine today" — that there's no purchase for the spade. The real wound was your bond-mother witnessing it. Mend that one, privately. Ruthanne's just weather.
— Loki
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