Chapter Text
“You are weary of him,” his wife sat beside him in the shadows of the fire and the moon. They were hidden here in this odd inbetween place. “Why is that so, my beloved?”
“My wife,” Tarre turned to face her.
She smiled so sweetly at him, and he did not say anything more. He lifted his hand, tracing her teardrop markings with his fingers, and he ached because he could never truly touch her again. Not like this. Not until they both passed on into Kad Ha’rangir halls. Until they stopped clinging to this place.
“He is not like them,” she said softly.
She was so beautiful.
“My wife. My Shailke,” Tarre said her name so softly. He always spoke her name so softly. “My lover, my heart in the sky—I cannot forget so easily. I cannot forget the cries of my people, of the Clan we buried. I cannot forget what those who I called family did to my kingdom.”
His wife leaned into the phantom touch, closing her eyes that had once been as deep and dark as the caverns far below the beskar mines, but were now only a pale imitation of Mandalore’s once mighty ocean. Shailke lifted her hand to place above his, and for a moment Tarre would swear he could feel her warm touch.
“I am not asking you to forget, Tarre, my husband,” if they could touch. If only they could touch. “I am asking you to not push their sins onto him. He already shoulders far too much for this lifetime.”
Tarre looked at the Jedi.
His smile was as sweet as Shailke’s when he looked at Din Djarin, and something in Tarre ached.
They were swaying lazily in time to the music, like honey fed flowers drifting along the breeze. But for even how fluid and graceful the Jedi was in this moment there was still a tenseness and worry buried deep in his bones. The Jedi’s stance was not unlike Tarre’s own when he left the Council and the Order, final in his decision while knowing it would not be long before the consequences came to his home and his hearth. And when they did war had followed and Tarre became Mand’alor the Forsaken, and he had spilled his brothers’ blood while drowning in his own.
Shailke had found him, and he had just enough life in his heart and air in his lungs to tell her the ve’vut buy’ce was gone, to settle the Darksaber into her hands, to press his temple against her’s and tell her he loved her one last time before Kad Ha’rangir took him and the Force asked him to stay for just a while longer.
And he had stayed, watching with a heavy heart as his wife led a kingdom with the weight of her grief drowning her as she became the Lady in Mourning, as she became Mand’alor the Last because it was what her people needed her to be. She had been beautiful in her fury, divine in her righteousness, haunting in her sorrow.
Their story couldn’t have been anything but a tragedy, the very thing that the Grandmaster had thought was worthy of war.
And yet for all his weary hesitance now, for all the sorrow he had carried, Tarre didn’t regret it.
He would rip every star from the sky if Shailke asked.
He would count every grain of sand on Mandalore if that was what she wanted.
Tarre would rip his own heart from his chest without a thought. Without hesitation. And in the end, hadn’t that been what had happened?
“Yes,” Tarre said softly, an odd fondness and nostalgia coating his tongue and teeth as Din Djarin placed his hand on the Jedi’s waist and pulled him closer, as the Jedi tilted his head back in a pretty laugh, as they held each other closely with the same sort of nervousness Tarre had that first night his wife pulled him to dance around the fire. “I suppose he does.”
He and Din Djarin’s Jedi did not differ all that much in the burdens they carried.
A kingdom was not so different from a child.
Tarre could only hope that the Jedi’s consequences had a far kinder outcome.
“Tarre, my husband,” his wife truly did smile as sweetly as the sweetberries. “How long has it been since we’ve danced around the fire?”
“Centuries, my lover.”
They could not touch. They could not hold one another. But they could be close enough to pretend, for Tarre to imagine Shailke’s warmth and the winter flowers that she always smelled of. They could lead one another in the dances neither had forgotten, could smile and laugh and let themselves be swept up in the celebration of the Moonless Nights.
And that was enough.