#Tristan: “Sabine???? Where did this baby come from????” | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

ncfan-1 · 6 years

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Not As You Remember

In which Ursa Wren tries to talk to her daughter. [Gap filler between 'Legacy of Mandalore' and 'Zero Hour'.]

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Whenever Ursa Wren left her family to go fight, bright, staticky holocalls home became a commodity more precious than gold, squabbled over by the operatives, so that even a clan chieftain’s heir was left to barter, threaten and bribe just for a few minutes at the comm. Barter and bribes were beneath her dignity, she knew, but after the last time she’d nearly gotten her head cracked open, Ursa was inclined to be a little more sparing with threats.

Holocalls were a commodity paid for in currency of long watch shifts and meals of Ursa’s least-favorite field rations and unsatisfying, near-tasteless protein paste—often the kind Alrich liked to joke bore a closer resemblance to sculptors’ clay than actual food. (She often found herself missing his humor when they were apart. She could find traces of it in his kin, but those traces only made her hungrier for the genuine article.) But when a time came that their leader thought it likely that transmissions wouldn’t be intercepted or used to discern their location, these things earned Ursa a few minutes more at the comm than she might otherwise have had

First, one of her parents (usually her father, but sometimes her mother) appeared, seeking a status update. The fortunes of Clan Wren, sworn as they were to House Vizsla, were closely tied to the successes and failures of Death Watch. Any report Ursa gave them was to-the-point-this wasn’t the primary reason for her calling, and they both know it.

“Alright, Ursa,” her father would often say, with a shake of his head that signaled a particular kind of exasperated fondness. “I’ll put that artist husband of yours on the comm. Mind, he may not be able to stay awake all through your call. It’s been paint, paint, paint non-stop ever since you left. I don’t know when that boy finds time for sleep.” ‘That boy’ being nearly the same age as Ursa herself, but her father never seemed quite able to accept the younger generations as anything but children.

Alrich would eventually appear, blinking sleep out of his eyes, just as likely to be holding Sabine in the crook of his arm as not.

Ursa found a smile unfurling over her lips, muscles that had had no exercise in what felt like an eternity aching as they were called back into use. “Have you been sending your work to our esteemed Duchess again?”

His eyes sparkled. Ursa wasn’t sure if it wasn’t just the connection dropping momentarily. “My latest piece should reach her any day now.” He flashed a slightly lopsided smile her way, shifting Sabine—fast asleep, though she’d been fussily wakeful the last time Ursa had called—in his arms. “I wonder if the Duchess will finally follow through on her threats to have my gifts to her jettisoned into the sun.”

Personally, if Satine Kryze ever did such a thing, Ursa thought she might storm Sundari and kill the woman herself. What a waste it would be for her husband’s artwork to be destroyed, what an intolerable waste. “Another woman might find cause for concern in her husband sending so many unsolicited paintings to another woman.” He seemed supremely unconcerned, which suited Ursa perfectly. “One day, you will have to forward one of the ah, love notes she sends back to you after receiving your gifts.”

Quick as a shriek hawk, his smile widened to a grin. “I’ve saved them all; I keep them in a scrapbook. I’ll show them to you, the next time you come home.”

Yes, when she came home. Those words made Ursa all too aware of the distance. Holocalls provided the illusion of proximity, but reality gave the lie to that illusion whenever his face shimmered and froze, before the connection was reestablished. The price she paid for fighting for the return of the old ways, Ursa recognized, now that Clan Wren no longer put up a façade of supporting the Duchess’s rule. It was a worthy burden, one she had shouldered willingly, and not one she would abandon now. Still, its weight grew burdensome at times.

“How are things at home?” Ursa asked, more quietly than she had first intended. “How are the children?” How are you? but it wouldn’t budge past the back of her throat.

“Tristan is sleeping, presently. He’s recently progressed to level two of basic blaster training.”

Ursa had thought her older cub’s aim was improving the last time she had overseen his training. She nodded. “And Sabine?"

Alrich shifted the baby’s weight so that her face was more readily visible to her mother. “Also sleeping. At last,” he added, so tiredly that Ursa couldn’t help but laugh.

“Is she so unmanageable as all that?” Ursa teased. “Has my husband at last exhausted all his nerve?”

“She cut her first tooth last week,” Alrich replied tersely. He stroked the soft, dark fuzz on Sabine’s head as he went on, “The doctors have given her medicine for the pain, your mother has supplied us with more teething rings than I think one baby could ever use, but the only thing that will quiet her for more than a minute at a time are the handles on my paintbrushes.”

At that, Ursa’s smile faltered, though Alrich’s despairing tone over the savaging of his paintbrushes might, under other circumstances, have made her laugh. “Isn’t she rather young to have begun teething?” It hasn’t been that long since I was last home, surely?

He shrugged. “I’m told that human babies can begin teething as young as three months old. Don’t concern yourself over it, Ursa; she’s just trying to get a head start on her brother. Now, you are currently stationed on the second moon of Kalevala, are you not?” His eyes gleamed with curiosity. “I’ve never had the pleasure of visiting that moon. What is it like?”

Ursa felt tension seep out of her spine as he asked a variation on a question that was, by now, intimately familiar to them both. Alrich had grown up in Sundari, and though the nature of his work had taken him to other cities, other worlds, he spent most of his life before (and for a few years after) their wedding in Sundari. (He went into raptures over the architecture whenever the subject was broached. Ursa honestly felt a little guilty about all the times she had blown up buildings in Sundari under orders from Pre Vizsla. She was also just a touch worried about what Alrich might do if the Crusader Mural at the base of the royal palace was ever targeted.)

Alrich had not traveled as Ursa had, and his curiosity led him to ask, “What is it like?”

She started, as ever, with descriptions of the native flora. Ursa was rarely ever stationed inside a city, so descriptions of plant life, geography, the weather, they inevitably came first. If she had visited one of the cities on the world where she was stationed, descriptions of the city followed. Of course they did; Alrich was so hungry for information about local artwork and architecture that he would hardly have let the call end without that information being passed along to him.

That was where it started. As they spoke more and more, Ursa found herself drifting into other topics. Sometimes, the dialect of Mando’a spoken where she was stationed was so different from the ones she had grown up with that she could barely communicate with the locals. At times, she found herself complaining about the weather, which was invariably incredibly unlike the frigid wastes of northern Krownest or dry, sterile Sundari. Petty squabbles among the operatives were discussed, along the reconciliation that followed. A song she had learned. A holonovel that was being passed around camp.

All of it came pouring out of Ursa’s mouth in a torrent, because the timer was reading thirty seconds, and she knew she would have to disconnect soon, but oh, I love you, I’ll speak with you again as soon as I’m able.

-0-0-0-

Ursa had no difficulty picking out Sabine in a crowd or out in the wilderness. In fact, she had so little difficulty that she was actually somewhat concerned. If Ursa could so readily identify her daughter, she had little doubt that vengeful members of Clan Saxon could do just the same. But her armor, in shape and design, was her armor. Even a child was entitled to that amount of freedom of expression.

(She found it buried deep down past her worries, but that Sabine was so easily recognizable gave birth also to a spark of relief. Sabine was a starburst of color in the tundra, and it made it easy for Ursa to focus on her any time she wished to—which, these days, was most of the time.

The only thing was that, when things had settled down enough that they could do so, the bits and pieces of Sabine’s armor that she had had to discard while she was… away would have to be re-forged to fit her properly. Ursa know that there were certain communities that wore less armor than was Clan Wren’s standard, but looking at Sabine with these bits and pieces missing was just… It reminded Ursa of far too much.)

Now, Sabine was out by the eastern wall of the fortress, inspecting a malfunctioning utilities box, brow furrowed as she examined the tangle of wires.

“This is worse than…” Sabine cut herself off with a sharp click of the tongue as she reached further into the box, her eyes narrowed slightly. She now spoke Krownest Mando’a with a provincial, slightly slurred accent Ursa longed to iron out of her voice, but when she had last tried to broach the subject, Sabine’s face had crumpled like paper crushed in someone’s first, and Ursa’s voice had failed her.

Ursa watched as Sabine went about her work, wondering when she would notice her. She always was prone to getting lost in her work. I see that much has not changed.

What had changed was the speed with which Sabine realized she was under scrutiny. All of a sudden, she whirled around, wrenching her hand out of the utilities box and reaching for a blaster, before her eyes focused in on Ursa and she let her blaster fall back into its holster. “Mother,” she greeted her, making like she wanted to fold her arms across her chest, but stopping shy and letting them fall at her sides. "I’m sorry; I didn’t hear you coming.”

“You should be more mindful, Sabine,” Ursa chided her. “I don’t know how much longer we will be able to suppress news of Gar Saxon’s death. His kin will be out for your blood.”

Even if Sabine hadn’t been the one who killed him. Even if Gar Saxon had attempted to do something that every Mandalorian everywhere would recognize as an act of base cowardice (Different communities had differing rules of engagement, especially where duels were concerned, but one rule that was universal was thus: under no circumstances do you ever shoot your opponent in the back after the conclusion of the duel). Gar Saxon had forfeited his own life when he aimed his blaster at her daughter’s retreating back, but Ursa was coming to realize, bitterly, that this would matter not at all to his kin. She was slowly coming to grips with the idea that Mandalorian space would be just as lawless a place as it had been during the Siege.

(Coming to grips, perhaps, with the idea that Mandalorian space had never stopped being a lawless place, that the Empire had painted over the rot with sterile black and white and “do your duty,” and she had never realized. The lawlessness had grown quieter, conducted away from the light. Ursa had been focused on one thing or another, and hadn’t realized what was slipping away from her.)

“They’ll be after yours, too,” Sabine pointed out. “And—“ She stopped herself, clamping her mouth shut. Jaw taut, fists clenched.

‘And’… ‘And’ what? Ursa feared she knew. She hoped Clan Saxon would have sense enough not to jettison the only piece of leverage they had over Clan Wren. She hoped. “How are the repairs coming along?” she asked, and her voice sounded pitifully faint to her own ears, even accounting for the wind. Milksop meek, trembling at the knees.

“They’re… coming.” Sabine scowled at the utilities box. “The wires are messed up pretty bad—we’re probably gonna have to order replacements. But I can bypass some of the bad ones for now. It’s not a permanent fix, but it should tide us over until we can replace the wires.”

Ursa caught her mind snaking in mild confusion even as she nodded. “You seem well-versed in rerouting utilities.” It had been years since she had thrown away Sabine’s old class schedules, but memory held an edge as keen as mullinine. Her daughter, already skilled with repair and mechanical work, had taken many classes to further her knowledge. None of those classes, Ursa thought, would have taught Sabine how to rewire a damaged utilities box.

Sabine flashed a hard-edged smirk her way. “When I was living on Nar Shaddaa, the place where I lived had problems like this a lot. The landlord would remit half our rent for the month if I’d do repair work for him without charging.”

Nar Shaddaa. Ursa had not actively kept tabs on where Sabine went and what she did after fleeing Sundari. What little she knew, she had learned from others (well-meaning informants or political rivals come to gloat), and it painted a picture so incomplete Ursa would have sworn it was moth-eaten. She’d had no news of Sabine after her flight from Sundari that she would have credited, not entirely, not until it was reported that Sabine had joined the Phoenix Squadron.

The idea of Sabine having lived on Nar Shaddaa for any amount of time made Ursa itch. She knew that the life of a fugitive was hardscrabble, but the idea of either of her cubs, let alone the younger, living in such a crime-infested hive was not something that could be borne gladly. “I have never been to Nar Shaddaa,” Ursa remarked, fixing Sabine in a piercing stare. “The closest I’ve come was a visit I paid to Nal Hutta—“ Terrorizing the Hutts and gunning down their lackeys; not once did I ever hope that a child of mine would do something that could top that, not once did I ever hope for that “—and Nal Hutta is, by all accounts, a far cry from the Smuggler’s Moon.”

For the best results, phrasing it as a question would have been better. Ursa wasn’t so green as to not know that. Her lips were pressed firmly shut as she looked expectantly at Sabine.

Sabine’s hand was trained on the utilities box, her eyes narrowed against the glare that made the snow on the ground seemed to glow. “…Nar Shaddaa’s about like you’d expect,” she said finally. “It’s cold—not as cold as here, but colder than Nal Hutta—and dirty, and crowded.” She grimaced. “Really crowded. Plenty of people go there looking for any kind of new start, but can’t scrounge up enough credits to leave if their luck’s no good.”

“Still, you would encounter greater diversity there. Diversity of people, of languages.” Two images flashed through Ursa’s mind like a sudden burst of sunlight through gray clouds. First, there was Sabine, all of eight years old and reading through Huttese workbooks and lexicons when other children her age would have been reading chapter books and comics. Second, the surprise stamped on visitors’ faces when they caught sight of non-human faces among Ursa’s clan; when, when had that become the exception, rather than the rule? Even Alrich had been a touch surprised when he first met Clan Wren as a whole, which in retrospect Ursa supposed she should have taken as a clue.

“Yeah, there was plenty of that,” Sabine agreed. “Lots of diversity with their art, too.” Her eyes warmed slightly, but otherwise her face remained carefully neutral, a mask of skin and muscle stretched over bone, as impenetrable as beskar. “You can see Corellian holo-sculptures and Tatooine sand paintings on the same street. The locals, the people who were born and raised there, have their own kind of art.”

“And what is that?”

Sabine set her toolkit on top of the utilities box, rooting around for whatever it was she needed inside. “You know how shopkeepers on some worlds use neon signs? Nar Shaddaa makes an art form out of neon lights. There’s a whole genre of art there dedicated to neon artwork. Not just flats mounted to a base, either; I’m talking free-standing sculptures, with multiple colors. Malachite, ultramarine and this purple color about halfway between mauve and heliotrope were the most common where I lived, though some people liked to use silver and black, too.” Her eyes glazed over in reminiscence. “There was a sculpture of a Cassius tree in a market square that must have been over four meters tall.” The eagerness in her voice seemed close kin to what Ursa felt in battle—ever-hungry, never quite satisfied. “The ‘tree’ was supposed to be in bloom; its flowers changed color from gold to silver depending on what time it was.”

Listening to her talk like this was like listening to Alrich whenever he returned home after a viewing at one of Sundari’s art galleries (Provided he had actually liked the artwork he had seen there). Ursa smiled and found herself asking, “Did you ever participate yourself?”

A shutter came crashing down over Sabine’s eyes. “No, Mother. You know me; I stick to my paints.”

“…Of course.”

Sabine said no more, and eventually Ursa headed back inside, unsated.

-0-0-0-

She wasn’t coming upstairs for supper much.

Oh, fair, it was rare for all of Clan Wren to be in the dining hall at the same time—the only time they ever were was on feast days, or when they broke their fast after a death. Typically around a quarter of the seats were filled on occasions when Ursa took meals there. More commonly, people took their meals in their own living quarters, or ate outside while on watch duty. Ursa was used to presiding over a mostly-empty hall, and with all the years her husband had been held hostage, her son had served in the ISC, and her daughter had been… away, Ursa was used to having none of her immediate family with her when she took her meals.

Ursa should not have felt the absence keenly. She should not have felt it at all, she thought irritably. After so many years of absence, it should have been more surprising to look down and see her daughter’s head (dyed) and distinctive (brightly colored) armor. Should have been more jarring to hear her voice than not.

Absence was determined to be more jarring than presence.

Sabine rarely came to the dining hall for supper (Ursa suspected she had continued her old habit of going straight to the kitchens whenever she was hungry). Even Fenn Rau showed up in the dining hall more often than Sabine, and half of the warriors of Clan Wren still tensed on impulse whenever he sat down with them. Perhaps it had something to do with the way some of the children had decided that this strange warrior, who spoke a dialect of Mando’a strange to their eras and who had accompanied the chieftain’s runaway daughter home, was just the person to ask the sort of questions they thought a strange warrior from another Mandalorian world might know the answer. If the man was going to be pestered, it might as well not be while he was trying to work.

But tonight, still no Sabine.

Finishing her meal—no rations or veg-meat or protein paste that looked like sculptor’s clay, but toothsome stew packed with enough meat and fruit and tubers that the broth was barely discernible—was like being a child again. All Ursa wanted to do was leave the dining hall and go elsewhere, but she was constrained to sit and finish her stew. As a child, her mother had watched her, keen as a tundra burrowing owl in the dead of night; now, her whole clan watched her, and her dignity demanded that she stay instead of storming off like an impatient child.

Yes, my whole clan watches me. Looks to me for guidance, and depends upon me for protection. They all do, but for the one I—

Ursa credited the years her mother had spent teaching her how to eat properly for the fact that she didn’t just wolf down her stew.

It was difficult to say where Sabine might have gone. She avoided notice quite comprehensively for someone with armor more colorful than the aurora, much more so than Ursa could ever remember from the days before Sabine went away to Sundari. As best as Ursa could determine, Sabine hadn’t really reconnected with any of the distant cousins she had been friends with as a child, not even the ones who were apparently willing to let bygones be bygones concerning the weapon. As best as Ursa could determine, Sabine hadn’t even tried to reconnect with them. Tristan was the most likely to be with her, and he told his mother that Sabine mostly just kept to herself.

Kept to herself and worked—Ursa had noticed that much. Sabine had a preternatural gift for knowing when something in the fortress needed fixing. If a sensor beacon needed repairs, Sabine did the repairs. If the software in the fighters’ targeting computers was malfunctioning, Sabine knew just what needed to be done to fix it. When the shield generator for the fortress began to sputter, Sabine crawled underneath with a toolkit, and there she stayed until it was fixed. For the life of her, Ursa couldn’t tell if she was just trying to make the most of the calm before the storm, or there was more to it than that.

(That Sabine knew how to do maintenance and repairs on fighters had taken Ursa aback, at first. It was Sabine’s expertise with machines that had drawn the Academy’s eye, but this was another thing that the Academy hadn’t taught her. The Academy had taught Sabine slicing and reprogramming in preparation for a ‘glorious’ career in espionage, and weapons repair and creation when she was discovered to have an aptitude for that, but nothing to do with fighters.

It had occurred to Ursa later that living aboard a ship constantly involved in dogfights and being involved with a rebel cell that housed fighters, if a different type than those found on Krownest, had likely given Sabine ample opportunity to learn. She wondered who had taught her, who had left their mark on Sabine in the form of their teachings, but couldn’t find it in herself to ask.)

The fighter bays were empty, as was the control room or the ground-based defenses. Ursa checked the sparring rooms, but no Sabine. The outer walkways yielded up no vibrant color, just the darkness of winter night.

Finally, Ursa went where she supposed she should have gone first, if she’d not assumed that Sabine would still be working. The door to her daughter’s room was shut when she came to it, but not locked, not this time. When Ursa opened the door, she was immediately struck by an astringent odor so powerful it made her eyes water. The sight that greeted her when she got past the smell was still an incongruous one, even though Sabine had been living here for a few weeks now.

She’d found her daughter, alright. She had found both of her cubs sitting on the floor, a floor one could barely walk on for everything that was strewn about. What’s this, now?

None of what was lying out was Tristan’s—Ursa knew that much. Tristan was invariably much more well-organized than this, and he didn’t bring his things into other people’s rooms unless it was absolutely necessary. He was sitting on the edge of the mess, besides, while Sabine was perched in the middle of it, as though sitting behind a shallow wall.

Directly in front of Sabine was a small easel supporting a strip of painter’s wood about three quarters of a meter in height. A box of paints sat open by her right leg, along with a palette and a cup full of water and paintbrushes. A sheet of cleaning paper lay on top of a wooden block, the paper dotted with streaks of paint and water. One of Sabine’s blasters had been disassembled, lying in pieces on the floor while the barrel soaked in a small tub of cleaning solution, the source of the odor that had struck Ursa when she opened the door. Datapads were strewn all around, some of their screens showing fighter schematics, some showing artwork, some showing topographical maps of Krownest, one with text in Bocce, and one with text in a language that Ursa thought might have been Ithorese.

They weren’t talking when Ursa entered the room, instead sitting in a silence that she would almost have said was companionable, if not for the fact that Tristan was looking at Sabine with a sort of concern that was noticeable even past his baseline-worriedness. Silent they might have been, but not lost in anything; they both looked up the moment Ursa crossed the threshold into the room. Tristan nodded mutely, but Sabine’s face creased in light annoyance.

“You might wanna knock next time,” Sabine said, frowning. She picked up a paint brush and dabbed it with a splotch of dark blue paint on the palette. “I could be doing anything in here.”

“I… apologize.” She had a point, after all; it had just occurred to Ursa, like sandpaper on bare skin, that Sabine had been prepubescent the last time she had lived in this room. (Ursa was, perhaps, a little surprised that Sabine’s rebuke had been delivered so calmly; she would have expected more anger, maybe shouting.) “I wanted to tell you that if you want to eat, it would be better to eat while there is still food left.”

Sabine nodded, her eyes straying back to whatever it was she was painting. “I will. I’m working right now.”

Since sunrise she had been working. Come to think of it, Ursa wasn’t entirely certain Sabine had eaten lunch, either. Pursing her lips, Ursa wondered if the crew of the ship Sabine had joined (the Ghost, wasn’t it?) had ever had to force her to eat. Ursa found herself briefly contemplating tying Sabine to a chair and force-feeding her. It would undoubtedly end poorly, but still…

Ursa caught Tristan’s eye. Immediately, he was getting to his feet, nodding at his mother and his sister in turn. “I need to check in with the watch,” he apologized, staring down at Sabine’s head with his brow furrowed. “I have to go for now.”

“’Kay.” Sabine looked up briefly, but her eyes were far away. “I’ll see you later.”

Still fixing Sabine with that concerned look of his, Tristan left.

This left Ursa and Sabine, the latter settling back into her painting as though she had been alone the whole time. Ursa wondered bemusedly if Sabine would even notice if she tried to catch a glimpse of what she was painting. Apparently, she was in that area still perfectly aware, because when Ursa came closer to try to get a look at the wood, Sabine abruptly angled it away from Ursa and glared up at her. “I’ll show it to you when I’m done. I don’t want anyone seeing it before it’s finished.”

Her father was just the same; Ursa could recall with awful clarity how he would never so much as give her a glimpse of the portrait he had made of her until after it was done. That point of similarity wasn’t a balm so much as a thorn, when Ursa had been left to wonder if their work was all of them that she would be allowed to keep.

Ursa settled down in the low wicker chair by the sliding doors of Sabine’s closet and watched her in silence. The lights flickered from time to time (a problem in a room with no windows), but never for more than a moment or two at a time.

Something else to make a note of on the maintenance lists. I let this room stand empty for far too long.

“If you won’t let me see your unfinished work,” Ursa said after a few minutes had passed, “may I at least ask you what the subject is supposed to be?”

Sabine stared at the front of the wood for a long moment before replying, “Have you ever been to Garel?”

Ursa narrowed her eyes as she peered more closely at her daughter. “I’ve never heard of Garel, Sabine. Is it one of the planets you’ve been to?”

The idea that her daughter was well-travelled, let alone more well-travelled than she herself, jarred. It had jarred when it first occurred to Ursa, when she realized that the fact that Sabine had survived all those years… away meant that she had likely traveled to more planets in the space of several years than Ursa, even during her time in Death Watch, had visited in her life. It still had a sense of wrongness to it now.

“Lived there for a while.” Sabine put down her paintbrush and reached for one of the datapads. She tapped the screen with her fingernail, biting her lip. “The cityscape was… something. I’ve been planning to do a piece on it for a while; I’ve just never had time.”

Ursa glanced over the datapads and the disassembled blaster with a jaundiced eye. “From everything else you seem to be trying to do at the moment, I’m not certain you have time now.”

Sabine jerked her head back, her lip curling back from her teeth just a little, less threat than simple reflex. “I’m working, Mother. I’m getting plenty of stuff done like this.”

Familiar ground yielded no traps or tricks. Ursa scoffed, almost smiling. “Sabine, we have had this conversation more times than I can remember.” How many times had she walked into this room when Sabine was younger, only to find her daughter apparently trying to do several different things at once? “I have a hard time believing that you can give your attention to so many disparate tasks. At the very least, I have a hard time believing that you can give all of these tasks as much attention as they require when you try to do them all at once.” She tapped the handle of one of her blasters for emphasis. “For instance, the blaster you are trying to clean. How likely is it that you’ll finish that quickly when you are trying to paint, look over fighter schematics and read maps, and read… whatever it is on those other datapads?”

“Maybe it won’t get done fast.” Sabine stared intently at the screen of the datapad she held in her hand. “But I don’t have watch duty tonight, and I’ve got plenty of other blasters. That’s not even one of my main blasters over there.”

There was a slight bite to her voice, but otherwise, no display of temper. No real show of her teeth. The ghosts of old shouts and complaints clamored in Ursa’s ears, even as Sabine said nothing, even as Ursa said nothing. Sabine tapped a few more times on her datapad, set it down gently, and resumed painting.

This… A shade of a child sat on the floor before her, small and thin, her long, black hair spilling over her shoulders. She was sketching in a sketchbook, slapping away her father’s hand when he tried to filch it and laughing at his exaggerated expression of pain. She was forever trying to do five things at once, paint, sketch, work she had brought home from the auxiliary Academy at the end of the term, work her mother had assigned her, maintenance on her weapons, and any number of other things, depending on where her mood took her. Ursa was never convinced that she could do five things at a time as quickly as she could have done one thing at a time, but she never missed deadlines, never turned in pitifully inferior work.

What sat before her today was a stranger by comparison. The child’s face had been like a window to her mind, revealing thoughts and emotions. None of her experiences were strange to Ursa; she had been present for them all, or had a good idea of what her daughter was experiencing when out from under her supervision. Now, her face was as a mask, stronger than beskar and more opaque than Chandrilan SinguBlack*. No weapon could break it; no light could pierce it. No eyes could discern the truth behind its wall. There was no key with which to turn the lock.

Her child, the child who had left these halls to go to Sundari, had devoured and repurposed herself, cannibalizing hair and lips and armor and voice and hands. Hair dye in lieu of war paint, garish paint on her armor eradicating blood and scrapes and the marks that had been made at their forging. Heart chewed up, rent to pieces, stitched back together in a shape Ursa didn’t recognize. Similar, yet different. Technically the same person, and yet no one Ursa recognized.

For a moment, one horrible moment, a protest dripping with her blood battered against a wall of teeth. However ignorant she had been, whatever cruel innocence had caused her to wreak that abomination, Ursa found she wanted back the child who had left for Sundari, snowflakes catching in her hair.

She was Ursa Wren, chieftain of Clan Wren, ruler of Krownest. She mastered herself, and with a silent nod, left her daughter to her painting.

-0-0-0-

Years ago, Ursa Wren made a choice. A choice that was perhaps no true choice at all, the choice of a woman with a blaster digging into her back and a firing squad before her. Still, she claimed it as a choice, because whatever her cub had done, whatever perversion she had wrought, there were things a mother owed her child. Her child was owed an explanation that didn’t involve mealy-mouthed justifications for what she did. Her child was owed the truth, however unpleasant.

Years ago, Ursa Wren made a choice, and resigned herself to living with it. She could have her daughter back, or she could have her clan (less her daughter and her husband) safe, for a certain value of “safe.” She could have her daughter by her side and her clan hunted to the ends of the galaxy, or she could cast her daughter away and live under the yoke, but still, live. It was a matter of what she wanted: did she want the knife trained over her neck to fall, or didn’t she? No, of course not. Ursa Wren was not just a mother, and what her daughter had done…

“You will never see her again. She is exiled; whatever path she walks will never lead her here. She will die in the great expanse, or you will die before she ever returns.”

This was what Ursa told herself to quiet her mind.

“Your sister is gone. She can never return. I will not ask you to forget her, but do not speak of her if you wish for your father to live and your clan to survive.”

She had said something similar to Tristan. Her daughter was gone but her son was still with her, and a mother had as much of a duty to the one as to the other. He had accepted it in his quiet, unhappy way, and they never spoke of Sabine. Not once in all those years. With nothing else to do, Ursa had not… had not forgotten, exactly. She had locked memory away as you would lock a dangerous prisoner in a high-security prison cell. Monitored closely and kept quite comprehensively under control.

With glacial slowness, memory had crystallized.

And then, Sabine returned.

It was nearly as much a curse as a blessing that her daughter had returned. Everything Ursa had done to keep her clan safe was at risk, but she could not find it in herself to regret allowing Sabine to live under this roof again, any more than she could regret gunning Gar Saxon down. However many problems it created for her, fighting for survival and dominance came more naturally to Ursa than did politicking and bowing and scraping to the Empire.

She’d not dared to hope for her daughter’s return. She’d not dared to hope that Sabine’s exile would be rescinded, let alone that she would rescind it on her own initiative.

Neither had Ursa expected that Sabine would return to her so different.

When the Jedi insinuated that he knew her daughter better than she did, Ursa had bristled. How likely was it that a man who had had her daughter for only a few years would know Sabine better than the woman who bore her, who raised her for over a decade? How likely was it that Sabine would ever open her heart to a Jedi? Ursa still wasn’t certain of just how well the Jedi knew her daughter. But neither was she certain any longer that she knew Sabine so well herself. She had changed the locks of her mind, and not furnished her mother with a key. Ursa wasn’t certain she ever would.

-0-0-0-

The morning dawned as winter mornings were wont in the polar tundra of Krownest—marginally lighter than the dead of night, but the sun did not grace the earth for long, nor with any strength. The stars shone bright and cold, glittering like shards of broken glass. Though trying to find Sabine once the day had begun could be like trying to track down a single pebble in a quarry, it was easy enough to find her when morning was still “dawning.” Sabine wasn’t the early riser she had once been; Ursa didn’t even have to rise that early herself to catch her on her way out of her bedroom door.

“Sabine?” she called, her voice damnably faint again.

Faint enough that Sabine, it seemed, did not hear her the first time. She was blinking sleep out of her eyes, hiding her yawns behind her hand. There she went, walking away, and Ursa followed after her as though she might never…

No, that was foolish. “Sabine?” she called, and it was as though her voice had never been faint at all.

Sabine paused and turned around, blinking rapidly. “Mother?” Ursa was greeted with a look of blank incomprehension. “What’s wrong?”

A slightly disbelieving smile curdled on Ursa’s mouth. “I wish to speak with you. Is that so difficult to believe?”

Silence drew up between them like a fogbank, clouding an already indistinct impression. Sabine’s eyes narrowed. “You’ve been wanting to talk to me a lot lately. I just have to wonder…”

You were gone for so long. Is it really so difficult to believe that I would want to speak with you often? Even were she at her most reckless, Ursa knew (hoped) she had sense enough not to say such aloud. If ever there was something fit only for driving Sabine further away from her, that was it. And Ursa had already given her as much of an explanation as was needed, spelled out the necessity of it. If there was nothing more to be said on the matter, then let nothing more be said.

“There were…”

‘There were’ what?

Ursa closed her mouth and opened it again, even as Sabine’s eyes searched her face with caution. As Ursa groped for something, anything to say, she met only emptiness. What was it… what could she say that would not sound trite even to her own ears? She had only a vague idea of what Sabine would be responsive to, and what would drive her walls higher, her mask thicker, her heart harder.

“Sabine, I—“

Whatever Ursa might have said died suddenly when a siren started going off, then another, then another, in a cacophonous din. But what her ears recognized immediately, her mind was slow to accept. She stood there, open-mouthed and gaping like a fish stranded on dry land, while the words slipped further away.

Sabine glanced past her down the hall. “Sounds like trouble,” she pointed out in the provincial, slightly slurred accent that Ursa longed to smooth and sharpen until it was just the same as the voice Sabine had possessed when she left for Sundari, lightyears and eons ago. “We should get moving.”

Before Ursa could say anything, Sabine slipped past her, caution etched still on her face.

After entirely too long staring at her daughter’s retreating back, Ursa followed, nearly choked with formless words.

-----------------

*Ersatz VantaBlack paint.

#Star Wars: Rebels #Fanfic #Ursa Wren #Sabine Wren #Alrich Wren #Tristan Wren #Meet Ursa Wren and her inability to open up emotionally when she needs to

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