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Omega flounces in as a storm, pushing past Crosshair as he leans against the counter, and, more hurtfully, ignoring Wrecker as he brightly calls her name from the living room. The pair of them lock eyes as she thuds up the stairs, expectantly turning to Hunter as he follows behind her with an aborted shrug and confused expression.
“What, you tell her she can’t have any candy anymore or something?” Crosshair teases, tone flat, as he pours himself a cup of coffee, the strong aroma making its way over to even where Wrecker is, in the living room.
“No,” Hunter says, setting his keys down on the dining room table and running a hand through his hair. “She wouldn’t tell me what’s wrong, but something clearly happened, and she doesn’t want to talk about it.” He gives Crosshair the side eye. “Wonder where she got that from.”
“You’re so subtle, Hunter. Truly a master of stealth,” Crosshair says flatly as Wrecker comes into the kitchen, sitting at the table himself, grabbing Hunter’s keys and playing with them. “Well, you two have fun. I’m off.”
They say goodbye, leaving the kitchen in an awkward silence as they consider what to do. Tech will be at work until late tonight, working on a project, Cross won’t be back till the morning, and Echo is…somewhere, Wrecker didn’t ask, so it’s between them to figure out what’s going on with Omega.
“I’ll do it,” Wrecker says with finality, standing up in his chair, once the silence drags on too long. Hunter sends him a grateful look, pouring himself some coffee from what Crosshair left over in the pot. “She give any hints?”
“None,” Hunter says, shaking his head and taking a sip of his coffee with a blissful sigh. Wrecker nods, and steps up the stairs as quietly as he can, knocking on the trap door to Omega’s room and calling her name.
Silence. He knocks again. More silence, and he creaks the door open, repeating her name and peeking his head in. Finally, he hears her croak, “Come in,” and he wastes no time pulling down the ladder and crawling up into her room, closing the trapdoor behind him.
She’s laying on her bed, clutching Lula and Trooper to her chest, back to the door, a blanket pulled up to her chin. Her shoulders shake under his hand as he sits next to her on the bed, and puts his hand on her shoulder. “What’s up? Hunt said you seemed upset.”
“It's nothing,” she mutters angrily, wrenching her shoulder away, and burying her face in the pillow. “I don’t want to talk.”
“Well, that’s okay,” Wrecker says, scooting a little away to sit on the end of her bed and lean against the wall. “Can I stay here with you, still?"
“Sure, whatever,” she mutters in a way so unlike herself that Wrecker just gets even more worried for her. He pats his pocket for his phone and nearly curses when he realised he left it downstairs. He shifts slightly, laying his hands on his stomach as he watches Omega, waiting for her to break the silence.
When they were much younger, in Mother’s home, and even in the early years of being at Ninety-Nine’s, Wrecker had been very good at this. Waiting and listening for someone to break the silence when they got the chance to be alone and to have the silence. Hunter, as the eldest, always was the one they all flocked to immediately, but sometimes he couldn’t provide the same level-headedness that Wrecker could.
Wrecker knows how people outside his family perceive him, however intentionally. Big and scarred, they almost always assume him a brute when they first see him. In the army, he’d been a bomb-head, the type of guy who knew enough about bombs it scared off other people. Coupled with his size, and the reputation of his older brother and his younger one, he’d been carefully and tactically avoided.
It only got worse after he got caught in the blast. Suddenly he was the big guy with a scar that made him look even scarier than he was, and a thousand-yard stare that could pierce into any heart. He didn’t mean to look that way, but he couldn’t help it. He glances at Omega.
When she’d met him, she’d looked at him like he was the first bit of sun after a rainstorm that tore apart the world. She’d looked at him and saw something warm and comforting, not a big guy who was scary and intimidating. She looked at him like family, and he thinks the thing that first made him love her.
She flops over onto her back with a sigh, her curls falling across her face. She huffs and they shift only slightly, her fingers playing with Trooper in her hand, Lula at her side. She’s got a familiar look of contemplation spread across her face, opening her mouth once before snapping it shut.
She groans, abandoning Trooper to put her hands over her face and she groans again, before peeking through her fingers at Wrecker as he watches her from the foot of her bed. “Do you…” she begins, sounding uncertain. “Do you ever wish dad wasn’t famous?”
Ah.
He’s heard plenty about this issue of Omega’s. Her relationship with being a Mandalorian is so fraught and fragile, due to all her stupid classmates and their father’s status in Mandalorian society. Their family’s, as a whole, status is an odd thing, both high and lower than it was barely a generation ago.
“Like, I’m proud to be from Clan Fett, you get me? But I feel like sometimes people look at me and all they see is The Daughter of That Mando Guy, not me. They ask questions that are so freaking stupid, about Mandalore and Dad. Half the time when people talk to me, they’re just asking about dad. I feel like no one cares about me, only who my dad is.”
“And I love dad,” she continues, stressing the words. “I love who my family is, I’m proud of where I come from. But sometimes I wish we weren’t Clan Fett, House Meerel. People will ask me the most insensitive things–like, no, I don’t want to talk about how my grandfather and most of my dad's family were murdered and how my country’s been torn apart by war. I don’t want to talk about my dad’s past– people ask about that. ”
He nods, and speaks somewhat hesitantly. “I guess so. But back when I was in school, it was pretty different. People never really talked about Mandalore unless they were talking about Death Watch, but people would still ask those insensitive things from time to time. Especially if they knew about who our dad was–we kept that pretty under wraps.”
She nods along. “Some guys in my class keep coming to our table and asking all about Dad. I think they’re like his fanboys or something, or just really like the military. And they’ll talk about how my dad was exiled, without even thinking for one second about why, and how that might make me feel. And I feel bad, because I didn’t even know grandpa–” her words cut off as she sniffs wiping at her eyes.
“It’s okay to feel uncomfortable when people bring it up that way,” Wrecker says, drawing closer. He struggles to find the right words. He’s always been good at listening, but sometimes, the words don’t quite come, and he’s stuck in a perpetual loop of listening.
He sighs heavily, “You didn’t know them, yes, but they're still our family. You’re still aware of their absence, the place they should have had in their life. Growing up, and hearing people talk about Grandparents was always weird, because Ninety-Nine wasn’t really my grandpa,” he mocks the word really. He knows now that Ninety-Nine damn well was his grandfather, but teenage him was too caught up in realness and blood to understand that.
“I didn’t wanna know Mother’s family, and Dad’s family was dead. I could always feel what I didn’t have, and I’m guessing you do too.”
“But Dad’s exile,” she stresses. “I just–the way they talk about it. They always talk about how he gave up the throne, and how he couldn’t come home. But they don’t get what that means, to a Mandalorian. What dad gave up. They don’t even care how old he was. It’s a historical moment for them, but for our family, it’s completely different, isn’t it? It means everything.”
Sometimes, Wrecker finds himself blown away by this girl. She’s endlessly perceptive, always recognising pain and tension in the family, always seeking to soothe it. He doesn’t know why he’s surprised she’s so aware of how much that exile affected Dad’s life, affected the number of kids he had. Decades later, and the echoes still ring true.
In the end, it all boils down to a word, which can all be explained through the direct translation of a word. The name for the Mandalorian people in their tongue of Mando’a is Mando’ade, child of Mandalore. The belief is that all Mando’ade come from not just their parents, but from the very land. Manda’yaim is in their blood and bones, and coming from her love and light and legend defines you far more than parentage ever will.
To the Mandalorian people, the homeland is sacred, holy. It is said that all Mando’ade feel a pull to her when they are away, no matter where they are born. If they are born to any Mando’ade, they are a Mando’ade. Even foundlings feel the pull, for they were always destined to be one of the children of Mandalore.
There is no name for this feeling in Mando’a, for it is so innate it needs no name. Perhaps the closest word is probably yaim’la, the word for the feeling that burns when you are home and with your blood once more, but beyond that, the word does not exist.
The Welsh have a word similar to it, that concept they call Hiraeth. But this feeling burns brightest when away, not when you cannot return. It comes when you are apart, not severed. For the inability to return is a new feeling, a grief that tears one apart until they burn hotter and brighter and angrier than ever. This is what makes their father's exile ache, what makes it so tender.
For most of time, the Mando’ade who didn’t live in Mandalore could come home whenever they wanted, feel that sense of peace when they did so. They could satisfy the itch. But after Death Watch took over, they banned travel in and out. Those who escaped, did so knowing they would never be allowed home while The Watch held power. Tens of thousands of Mando’ade across the world were suddenly facing the fact that they would never be allowed their homecoming, their yaim’ol, the thing that all Mando’ade crave.
And for their father, for Jango Fett, son of the Manda’s favoured line, the separation was particularly bitter. His family was destroyed, his physical home and tether sawed clean with a single strike of a blade. But he was also denied his right, declared an outsider through exile, told he would never return to the country that gave him birth.
It’s going to always go over non-Mandalorian’s heads. How could a country you’ve never been to mean more to you than your own family? How could a country whose mountains and large fields of grass and seas of sand have been scorned by centuries of war, be the siren song in your heart? Why does that severance hurt so much?
What do you mean that the waters of the rivers of Mandalore are the blood in your veins, the sweet wind in her valleys is the breath in your lungs, or that the sand that shifts in the southern deserts is the beat of your heart? How could a country be your sire? How can you be born of a country? How could you be the child of a place, not of a person?
Wrecker looks at Omega, at her familiar gaze. It may not quite reach a thousand yards beyond, but it pierces far and wide. “Think of it this way,” he says, “To them, they are the children of their parents, and they are citizens of the United States. To them, to leave the country would be like leaving a place without setting down deep roots. Thus, they don’t understand that to us, being forced out of Mandalore is like pulling up roots that have been growing since the dawn of time. It hurts.”
“You can’t make people understand, Omega,” he says, and she nods slightly, and he continues in earnest. “What matters is that you understand and you honour what happened. That you don’t let their stupidity ruin what you are in your heart. You are a Mando’ade, you come from a great place.”
He continues to speak as she pulls closer, pressing to his side, “We don’t forget what happens to our lines, don’t forget what we came from or what we lost. It is not our way to move on without honouring what was lost in the process. Dad may be redeemed, may be able to return home, along with us. But that does not lessen the ache of the separation, does not heal the wounds of what happened. It does not mean that the loss of our family is any less painful.”
She sighs heavily. “Do you ever wish you knew them?”
“Sometimes,” he admits, “When I was younger. I would imagine that whoever my dad was, he’d come down with his whole family and save us all. Of course, I didn’t know at the time, but even after I knew, I’d sometimes imagine that Grandpa was watching in the eternal march. In the military, I always pretended he was just over my shoulder, watching me work, and I had to honour his name.”
“I think you’ve all done a good job of that,” she says earnestly, and Wrecker can’t help but laugh, throwing back his head. Omega pouts, “I’m being serious!”
“I know, kid,” he agrees, tucking her into his side. “You’re just so…wise. When I was your age, I was a dumb teenager who spent half my time wrestling with my brothers in the living room.”
“You still do that.”
“Not the point,” he says quickly. “I guess so, yeah. Would be nice to know them, I think, but so much would be different too. We wouldn’t be us, you know? We’d be someone different, because everything would be different. It's hard to know.”
If Jaster and Arla and Sha survived, where would he be? Would Wrecker even exist, would dad have as many kids as he did? Or was his existence always assured, in some way or another? How tied is his life to their deaths, in the long run? How tied is Omega’s life?
He looks down at her, silent as still clearly somewhat upset as she gazes out at her room. A child of Mandalore, just like him. A child of a lot of bloodshed, all the same, really.