Chapter Text
Jetii’Mand’alor Tarre Vizsla fell onto a battlefield with the Force screaming in their mind as the threads of the universe that was spilled out around them as if they slid off a loom tipped sideways and tangled on the floor to split and remake themselves anew in a heartbeat that stretched uncountable lifetimes.
Tarre wished they could say they were surprised by the situation, but broken threads were all they wove these days—Jedi, Mandalorian, it didn’t matter— as they tried to patch the desolation of what was left of the galaxy, more plasma-scorched holes than tapestry.
Instead, they were just disappointed. Their armour hit the scorched earth with a thunk that rattled their teeth through beskar, their head spun, and exhaustion, Force and physical, scraped hungrily at their bones. Their vocoder was set too low to capture the noise they made at the bruising pain of it.
The fighting never stopped, not when the Darkness turned planets into battlefield after battlefield throughout the galaxy, so neither did they. Here had to be another, no matter that they didn’t recognise this place, where Tarre was tasked to keep the Light alive no matter the cost. Because the Force worked in mysterious. Karking. Ways.
Before they could do more than curse at the absence of the weight of their kad’au on their belt, they steeled their body with the Force—the strands of it tightened, razor wire thin around them— to shove themself up from their place in the dirt. Lightsaber or no, this was a battlefield and the Manda wept with the heavy casualties. Tarre would recognise the crumpled, colourful armoured bodies of their people anywhere.
They took off running—The Force rose to fever pitch in warning—towards the flashes of explosions, towards where the fire fight was heaviest. Only through the Force did Tarre keep their footing.
Their own thrumming heartbeat was too loud in their ears, too loud in their chest. It drowned out for precious seconds all but the terrified part of them that instantly went to Sith scum instead of looking, reaching and feeling with their senses like they had been trained to.
Terror, run, flee, hide, tear them all apart—
—Get it together, Tarre, if you truly are no coward—
When their mind caught up, they then tried to, but the uncountable threads they felt for snarled into an unreadable mass of knots wherever they touched. Tarre had always seen the currents of Force like they were a weaving in progress at the hands of everyone who lived or had or ever would, as a chaotic order if you did not know how to decipher the patterns, and an ordered chaos when you did. This was like trying to weave a million threads on a loom warped wrong, upside down in the centre of a snowstorm; they could know every thread and still know nothing.
Maybe it was because of Tarre. All of the threads were vibrating off kilter, tense and loose in the wrong places like someone had grabbed a handful, impatient of progress and yanked. It sung with hasty missteps made out of exhaustion, missteps Tarre took.
The off-beat rhythm of their boots hitting the ground and their robes flapping around them failed to form a moving meditation. Not that Tarre truly expected anything to work to steady them in the Force. They were too out of synch with the world around them, evident in how they took the rough terrain in staggering jolts where they couldn’t dance across it, and too out of synch with themself as if their two hearts raced impossibly out of time
It would take time and calm and rest to untangle this mess that they didn’t have and could ill afford. Tarre tried to feel for a single thread of Force as they went, to separate it from the others to show them the way as if the universe would be kind enough to give them the end of a skein to start from if only they could find it.
The problem was that they could not see the forest for all the trees, the tapestry for all the threads. Force exhaustion did not turn off the broken comm-radio, it turned the volume up, all screeching, fraying static, snapping, recoiling threads. Everything became a threat. The strand they’d grasped for slipped and snicked painfully through the soft parts of their mind. Under their helmet, Tarre bit their lower lip bloody with too sharp teeth.
The world exploded in orange. Blue death sung in the air as blaster bolts.
They still ran into battle and leapt without looking back. Was it even out trust-faith in the Force or the thrill of falling at this point?
An enormous armoured tank bore down upon a lone Mandalorian crumpled on the ground.
As you tumbled through the world, each moment rushing up to meet you bruisingly fast, all time was now. If you held your nerve and chose to leap, the past that clung to you was cleaved away until your next action was your own again. If you were pushed, if you froze, if you hesitated, the present would become your past. Sometimes you couldn’t escape it anyway.
They would fight, to protect and to defend. This was The Way of the Mando’ada and of the Jedi. It was all Tarre had. They had already stepped onto this path before they knew it was the path, with the knowing of it stuck between their ribs all along, achingly part of every breath they took.
Their entire self hummed with anticipation, wild and discordant, in the same way that was as familiar now as it had been strange the first time. This was what they knew. It was loud enough to drown out the rest. They settled into battle flow, their heartbeats marking time.
Tarre got enough of a glimpse of the helmet-less figure in fully black Mandalorian armour that hung out of the side of the tank to be wary of the way darkness and lust for power twisted around them, consuming all else. Not Force-sensitive though, just ugly in it. Their arm was still raised after firing a weapon, it was a prime bet they were the origin of the explosion. Exactly the sort who would fight their own people and fracture them for the sake of it when between the Candorian Plague and the current state of Mandalorian Space they had no need to borrow strife. Tarre swallowed their own anger.
The other enemies on the ground were large, heavy-set beings of an unfamiliar species, armed with war weapons but mostly unarmoured. They were unused to wielding the firepower they held in the tell tale way of those hastily trained on supplied weaponry; this was no Sith Army created of a catastrophe of black holes formed from galaxy of devoured suns in the Force, searing with bleeding red lightsabers. Without that threat, they should have been barely a footnote in Tarre’s screaming mind. They were a danger to be watched for, as a stray blaster bolt could still fell a Jedi and these enemies had taken on Mandalorian warriors, to be dealt with but approached with negotiations not lethal condemnation as far as possible.
The bulk of them already retreated; it was tactical, this was not their fight in truth from the taste of it. Tarre was only too glad of it, given the rest of the field was majority Mando’ada bodies, laid out where they fell. Any troop formations, any clue about what they fought to achieve had long since been cut down. So much death left gaping holes shredded in the Force. The urge to raze the battlefield to the dirt so no one could fight anymore blazed white-hot through Tarre’s veins but they gulped down a breath and shoved the feeling aside. Destruction like that only begot more destruction.
Another Mandalorian lived, Tarre saw as they drew nearer to the first’s peril: one with a jetpack and close enough to help their fellow who was without, to snatch them away from the looming tank. Hope surged. The grey and blue figure was so close that they could have simply outstretched their hand to meet the other verd who reached for them, who cried out for them, before they launched and soared away from them instead of towards.
The cowardice! Tarre dodged the blaster bolts the traitor rained down on them from the air with practiced side steps. If Tarre had had their kad’au, they would have sent the shots back from whence they came with a careless flick of their wrists while they ran. The red square outlining the centre of their chest would’ve been perfect to aim for out of spite, so they saw death coming before it took them at the neck in the gaps between their armour.
Tarre missed the words shouted between the two but caught the grounded Mandalorian’s betrayal, confusion and raw terror cutting through the Force as they heaved themself to their feet to face off against the tank. The Mandalorian fired blood red blaster bolts that glanced off of the tank’s armour. It was at point blank range, practically on top of them.
The warrior in the tank was enjoying this: “Finally, I get to wipe you from Mandalorian history forever…”
The Mandalorian facing down death while betrayal crushed their soul was the vision of Mandokarla in black and orange-red beskar’gam with a red cape pouring from their shoulders. Tarre had seen feats of bravery in hopeless odds a thousand times over but nothing here was more Mandokarla than them in this moment.
When the blaster bolts failed, they ran to try to escape the tank, to put everything they had into surviving. That was the beskar heart of shereshoy when all else was stripped away: that in order to live you had first to survive to the next day.
Tarre was too slow to stop the blue-white cannon shots already searing through the air. One met the dirt, the other burned through the Mandalorian’s knee. Tarre felt their pain, then shielded themself from it as best they could before they too were felled by it.
Yet while there was any life at all, there was hope. The Manda had spared the stranger from marching away. The seconds it took for the cannons to recharge gaped with potential.
Tarre arrived at their side as the Force sung overwrought in their every movement. Their own heady adrenaline rush was overwhelmed by strung out protectiveness taut with fear-grief-Ican’tleavemyad projected through solid beskar. Together their combined desperation became honed into its own weapon.
What was more Mandalorian than throwing your lot in with a fellow verd in an impossible fight?
What was more Jedi than to do the impossible to stand between a stranger and their death?
Tarre braced their stance, their hands upraised at the ready. Though they held no weapon, this was not a surrender. The shock spiking through every being around them at their actions only fuelled them.
The Force was with them, the Force flowed through them.
“The Force protects us,” they mouthed.
Tarre felt the heat of the cannons through their armour as the tank opened fire.
The bolts shrieked towards them as white-blue death.
Drawing on the threads of the Force as if they were warp and weft in their hands, they reshaped the very universe around them.
Tarre stopped the bolts. To everyone else it would seem time froze in this tableau of inevitable, incoming death.
A sharp gasp hissed through the vocoder of the Mandalorian beside them, and Tarre dug their feet into the ruined ground to put their whole body into the motion to push the bolts back.
The tank shook under its own fire as it returned precisely into and through its weapons array.
They kept their hands up, weaving the Force into a shield between themself and their fellow verd, and the backlash of debris from the tank. Tarre panted through their triumphant, toothy grin hidden beneath their hood and buy’ce. Both of them still stumbled from the shockwave; the other mando’ad tumbled to the dirt.
Tarre would have taken on what was left of tank and that figure in armour within whose whirlwind of darkness something familiar called to Tarre by themself, caught up in the vicious almost-joy of the hunt, if their Mandalorian hadn’t needed them more.
The tank fled given the opportunity, the same as the grey and blue armoured hut’uun that had not even join its fight, but simply allowed it.
Tarre dropped to their knees to join their Mandalorian on the ground, Force-awareness defensively stretched out nearly to breaking point around them but focus sighted on the Mandalorian’s wounds. Their beskar’gam and kute had mostly protected them from the shrapnel of the first explosion but not from the power of it. It was shot to their knee though that was the most dangerous: it seared through muscle, deep into bone on the outer side of their left leg, heedless of their knee armour.
A wound that brutal would send the body into shock— the pain alone was horrific, it cauterised like a lightsaber so there was little blood loss but it meant heat shock instead, insidiously burning far further into flesh than was visible— And Tarre was no healer, they didn’t know how to just fix it, they couldn’t, in the Force they had nothing left to scrape out of themself to help.
Their hands which had been so sure in face of the annihilation that had passed trembled with the adrenaline still coursing through Tarre as they hovered them above the wound. Tarre had been in this situation so many times before, giving first aid to an ally on a battlefield while deflecting fire with their lightsaber in their other hand that they should’ve been able to work blindfolded. But the last time—
Tarre had been in only armour-weave tunics not full beskar’gam with robes, no one had expected the ambush on their fortified camp, a Jedi barely not a Padawan was hewn apart by a blood red lightsaber in front of them, the stench of charred flesh devoured everything, it was too much—
Tarre knew bitterly they’d be just as useless right now without their helmet filtering the air. They’d be throwing up the contents of their stomach and sobbing brokenly in the mud, curled up and cowering like a child instead of the warrior-Knight they were. They had only kept their head down below cover and survived out of the raw instinct that had them hiding in terror, not the trained actions drilled into them by either of their peoples to draw on in these moments, and luck. The last time a Master had had to help their sibling in the Force on their own and drag a barely responsive Tarre off the battlefield both.
How the rest of the Jedi stood it was beyond them, but then Tarre always felt everything with too much of the fire of the Great Forges. They were too much of a Mando’ad for a Jedi, but too much of a Jedi for a Mando’ad as always… Yet they still waded through their fear anyway.
The Mandalorian on the ground tilted their buy’ce towards Tarre. “Oya!” they rasped out.
It shook Tarre out of their head. That meant their Mandalorian still breathed, they still were alive.
“Oya!” Tarre returned between their own heaving breaths. “Vi cuyani oya’karir.”
They had both survived the fight. Tarre clung to their training and searched the Mandalorian for their med-kit.
Tarre had a split second of warning as the Force twanged and snapped to whip around to face their assailant before a green armoured Mandalorian tackled them to the ground.
They would’ve fought back with dangerous desperation had the ad not snarled, “Ke’slana ner buir, Jetii!”
This was their parent, the green ad was bristling with protectiveness over their buir.
Tarre let themself follow the momentum and guided their combined tumble away from the injured Mandalorian. The ad was lucky they were with it enough for that.
Unfortunately the Force didn’t think to warn them before the back of their buy’ce collided with the ground hard enough for Tarre to see the Ka’ra.
The next moments involved far too much yelling and churning emotions for Tarre to make sense of. Maybe they would throw up anyway. They were pinned against the ground by the weight of the green ad and the crushing grip of gauntlets locked around their wrists, blearily staring up at a helmet poised ready to smash down into their own and the reflection of their own visor. Then they were staring into a smoke filled sky while they swore they felt the motion of the planet beneath their back, whirling and lurching like an orbak that wanted to throw them off of it.
They lost time contemplating how disappointed the Jedi healers would be when Tarre admitted to them that they’d racked up a second concussion in the same week when they finally regrouped with the rest of their division of the Army of Light, wherever the kark they were. One of their back-most horns felt like it had taken too much of the hit, again.
Someone grabbed at them, they flinched, and okay not good, Tarre was seeing double now because the green ad was hunched over their buir and the green ad was also prodding at Tarre for a response and asking them questions and worrying about them and the situation and everything and everyone and concussions were really awful for their shielding and where had they been going with this…?
“Me’ven?” they mumbled. Huh?
The green ad’s presence was relieved but not as flooded with relief-terror-anger-love as the green ad with their buir in the corner of Tarre’s vision.
Tarre could hear them sobbing out over and over, “Ni ceta, buir, ni ceta—”
They’d taken off their buir’s helmet; without the beskar layer the Force screamed love-pain-love-pain-love so, so loud. The buir just pulled their ad into a hug and rested their heads together, forehead to helmet in a mirshmure’cya as they both cried in relief.
Tarre’s heart broke under the onslaught of the second-hand devastation of thinking you had lost your aliit, tangled with their own experiences where they had lost people who were their clan: their own Mandalorian buir’a they’d been old enough to remember unlike many other Jedi, their Master not long after their been Knighted and too many friends and vod’a, Jedi and Mandalorian alike to the Sith Wars—
They needed to get back to whoever was left. The Force weighed down on Tarre with the sense of paths now closed, so Tarre shoved back at it because what the hell did the Manda know. They wanted to scream so they hit the Force back with that feeling too, but it echoed and collided with their skull.
It was an ugly reminder they’d been pushing far too close to Force exhaustion for too long, and the stunt with the tank had put them over the edge. The razor wire threads snapped in on them like a cruel hunting snare, leaving them cutting themself apart as they flailed to escape but not yet killing them.
They breathed to a meditation count: Cuir, ehn, t’ad, solus.
They stopped struggling against the trap. You’d never escape anything if you could not stop flailing, that was younglings’training.
If they needed to, if they could just stop for a moment and take another breath, Tarre would keep reaching within themself for more, numbly, desperately digging an empty well deeper like they had every other time they had thought this was it, they had nothing left to give.
But Tarre had just been hit too hard in the head again, that was all. Their emotions could go bury themselves in a beskar mine. They didn’t have time to fall apart at the thought something had happened to their people, because they had to get back to their people. Both of them.
It took Tarre another minute to figure out that the green ad prodding at them had bright blue paint around their visor and the other green ad had red-orange paint around theirs like their buir, so there in truth were two green armoured ad’a even if Tarre’s vision was far blurrier than usual. The blue and green ad was more worried than ever, scraping against the grain of Tarre’s frayed nerves.
Commands bounced around Tarre’s aching head that they failed to put together into a coherent course of action before they fled their bruised, distracted brain. Tarre hadn’t ever heard Mando’a spoken in that accent before. The other ad’s had been different again...
They drifted for a while. This green ad was also missing the smudgy coloured circle marked on the centre of the other green ad’s chest that also matched the yellow diamond on their buir’s armour and the red square on the grey and blue hut’uun. Tarre had used the same method of temporary marks painted on their chest plates to distinguish division leaders for skirmishes too, though they’d failed to convince their Jedi forces to give it a go but then grease crayon didn’t really work on robes the same way as armour. Tarre was good at this spot the difference though. It was a good game. Everything was ori’jate…
What Tarre was less good at right now was dragging their limp body to their feet as the blue and green ad was doing most of the work. Tarre must’ve convinced them that they were not dying right this second so that meant Tarre was probably fine. They doubted either the healers or the medics would let them back into the fighting though. Kark.
The red-orange and black Mandalorian had passed out while Tarre had been busy trying to not also pass out. Which was a fair enough response. Their green ad had put their buir’s helmet back on, that was wise since this was technically a battlefield even if there wasn’t a live firefight left, and picked them up. The ad had wrapped their leg in bacta bandages to cool and keep it clean. Tarre wanted to check the awful leg wound themself though with how it wept pain into the Force, but their stagger towards them nearly overbalanced the green and blue ad who held Tarre up.
The ad had too hard a time keeping Tarre on their wobbly legs and walking, but too easy a time preventing them from going in their own choice of direction.
Tarre growled in frustration. They accidentally smacked their helmet into the ad’s, but it could’ve been on purpose if they wanted it to be. Their head hurt, flaring in blue-hot fire. Both green ad’a yelled.
They counted again to breathe through the sensation of a bes’bev stabbing their skull; oh they’d actually kill for one of the silent dawn meditations with their Master that they’d never had much patience for, read whined incessantly about, as a Padawan. Leaning on the Force was not an option right now unless Tarre wanted the pain they threw at it to slingshot back in their face.
Cuir, ehn, t’ad, solus. There is emotion, yet there is peace.
Tarre didn’t need to make the green and blue ad’s role harder than it needed to be. They’d had enough experience wrangling injured, too-stubborn Mandos and Jedi alike not to envy the job. They could trustthatfeelslikefalling in the green-red ad’s first aid training while their Mandalorian’s black breastplate still rose with each breath.
The back of Tarre’s head grew wetter and stickier by the minute as the group walked slash stumbled. They must’ve reopened the scalp wound from earlier that hadn’t quite had a chance to more than scab beneath their sweat-matted hair. Tarre shuddered. It stung like a Ithullan colossus wasp and bled like hell for the size, trickling down underneath their helmet. Why did head wounds feel the need to be so dramatic? Maybe the Healers would have a point and maybe the worried green and blue ad did too.
Tarre needed to pull themself together. They were still on a battlefield even if it seemed to be over and from what they could see: only carbon scored debris and a ruined landscape was left behind in the carnage, yet another world, another planet that this galaxy could not spare from the fighting.
The journey away from the dirt and mud trench where the fight had finished was far longer than Tarre’s run into the battle had been, in time at least if not distance they did not have a way to track. They ached: sharply radiating from their skull and throbbing in their muscles all over.
Who or what they fought against didn’t change how the threads of lives torn away flapped loose and frayed in the Force; many people’s Remembrances would be longer by sunset tonight.
Tarre wanted to curl up amidst the carnage, to tuck themself under a curve of metal that might’ve come off a ship and sleep, but they had spent too much of their life and too much of themself stubbornly surviving the dregs of a thousand year war to do that. They tripped and stumbled over ridges of dirt, clinging to the ad but continuing onwards. It was too hard to care where they were going beyond forwards.
Tarre hoped something that was not for naught had been won here today. Or else: they had fought, and the fight had to be enough. To survive had to be close enough to to live for them to content themself with. It would be if they repeated it until it sunk its teeth into them.
The Mandalorian Tarre had protected, they were alive. The ad carried their buir in their arms, and Tarre could see all the other ways this could have gone in their memories crowding in on the corners of their vision. Buir and ad, Master and Padawan— endless aching grief and anger that never healed when there was no chance for it to be allowed to—
To hold off that pain, for a little while longer, for a stranger, for an ad they’d never known, Tarre would give up all that they called their own.
Their Mandalorian’s head hung awkwardly, limply tipped back over the ad’s arm. Their ad was too small to carry them really and only had not met the ground once again through sheer force of will. They were past their Verd’goten but were they really old enough to be on a battlefield like this?
When Tarre and their small group reached a collection of troop transport ships surrounded by colourfully-armoured Mando’ada buzzing about defensively, blaster bolts still streaking through the air, the green and blue ad yelled for medics. Everyone’s relief made Tarre dizzy. Yes, medics that was a good idea. Clever ad.
If they didn’t have a House for their Clan yet, perhaps they’d be interested in joining House Vizsla. Force knew that Tarre’s muddle of sworn and adopted ad’a could use a few more people with common sense to go with the crazy. Tarre meant it affectionately, but that didn’t stop their hearts from racing when decidedly non-Force sensitives from the youngest to the elders attempted to copy their Jedi tricks with jet packs.
The hitch in the plan came in the form of the grey and blue coward of a verd. They were there attempting to convince the gathered fighters that their leader, who Tarre suspected was the orange-red and black Mando, along with their ad was dead. Forcibly, with how they were shaking a teal and gold mando’ad who’d dared to question them by the front of their armour. With their hulking frame they were lifting the other’s feet half off the ground.
“Jango,” the coward shouted.
“Help me get Jaster off this rock. Then we’re going to find Vizsla,” the green and red ad yelled in response. So they were Jango.
Vizsla? But Tarre was right here? Or else they had missed major goings on in their own Clan while off fighting as a Jedi. No one was looking at them though.
Their vision was getting blurrier than ever, pounding in time with their heartbeats. Stay on guard, stay on guard, Tarre.
Jango handed their red-orange and black armoured buir to the waiting medics, before squaring off.
Dimly, Tarre registered that their Mandalorian’s name must be Jaster. It was a good name.
That thought was lost when the grey and blue coward went to put their hand on Jango’s shoulder.
“This is your chance to do right by Jaster, kid. I should be in command here.”
“That’s not your call to make, Montross. I say you’re not fit to lead us. You left Jaster on the battlefield to die alone,” Jango snapped. “They would’ve died if not for…” They trailed off with pain streaking through the Force like blood.
So that traitorous karker’s name was Montross.
The green-blue ad who’d been with Jango jumped to the defence. “I’ll follow Jango. And no one else.”
“Is that— is that what you want?” Montross asked incredulously. “A child leading you?”
When Montross’s blaster came up, no matter how off their aim was, like they saw no one here as a real threat, Tarre moved.
Tarre pulled forward out of the grip of the green-blue ad and snarled. The sound hissed through their vocoder as sharp as metal torn off a starship.
That sure got Montross’s attention. Tarre didn’t give them a chance to open their mouth to spew out more banthashit.
They tilted their head in what was almost a smile, hands coming forward in another threat. If they had to lock their knees to stay upright, the coward was the last person who needed to know.
“You saw what I did to your tank. If you continue upon this path I can show you what I can do to your insides,” they said quietly.
Montross’s blaster aim suddenly became on point.
Tarre twitched their fingers and the coward jumped back. Tarre laughed, burbling and ragged and exhausted, instead of giving in to the urge to see what damage they could do anyway.
“You fear the Manda itself. Be gone now and you leave with your life and a good story to tell over latemeal to anyone who’s fool enough to listen to you. You’re lucky I have honour,” they spat.
Tarre let Jango have the last words with Montross, this was not their own place to take them, but remained silently standing by. Their armour would hide how they trembled with the effort of it.
“You should go.”
“You’ll kill them all, Fett. Before your buir who won’t even say the Gai Bal Manda for you, wakes up.”
“Go.” The ad commanded.
Montross went, a disappearing blur of blue and grey armour.
Then in very short notice, Tarre found themself on the ground once more, their body crashing into the hard packed dirt beneath them just the same as they had landed on this battlefield. Had everything between then and now even mattered?
They lay there in a heap, utterly unable to do anything about it. The Force had fled them, where they had used it to steel their muscles for just a few more seconds, for hours before they’d ended up here. It tangled around their mind, their body, like barbed wire as physical and Force exhaustion fuelled each other.
At least no one had called their last bluff. They wouldn’t have been able to so much as push Montross over in all likelihood, but people were quick to fear the mystical banthashit of a trained Jedi. The Force could be scary when you weren’t a child of it. It was even if you were. They laughed quietly to themself and now everyone stared at them.
They shuddered at the warmth of blood trickling down the back of their neck, welling up where it was stopped by their helmet seal. It glued their curls to their skin at their nape; it was that sensation more than the stinging pain of the wound or the throbbing-sharp ache in their head concentrated around one of their back horns that made them want to be sick. They could smell their own blood.
Medics and the green-blue ad they didn’t have a name for manhandled them into the closest troop ship, the same one as the orange-red and black Mandalorian had been carried into on a hover stretcher.
Others crowded in, standing while holding onto ceiling straps or lined up in the flip-down seats along the side of the ship or lying on the stretchers magna-locked into place at the walls, the small ship packed to max capacity with a dozen bodies. Their loud emotions, catching and slippery, were as tangible to Tarre as the mud covering them all.
They wound up seated in a corner, pinned in place by the crash harness someone else had had to fasten, counting out their breathing again in an attempt to hold themself together in face of the ragged threads of the world and their own roiling stomach.
This was familiar: being jammed in pauldron to pauldron with a force of verda during a casualty evacuation; they’d been on this side often enough even if they’d rather be in command instead. Seemed that they were a part of this force now too.
The armour of the others was different in style to any Tarre had seen before, the models of the ships and the blasters carried too, they hadn’t noticed in the heat of battle. The thought though was as slippery as the handle of a weapon slick with blood; they were all Mando’ad, what did it matter, all beings were of the Force the same in their infinite diversity, belonging together in a vast tapestry of the universe as they lived. They let the thought be on its way.
The engines fired beneath them, vibrating the hull of the ship with the enormous power it took to launch into orbit.
A medic carefully wrestled their helmet off when Tarre couldn’t make their fingers coordinate to even unseal it, let alone curl around to grip it then steadily remove it without smashing more of their own skull in. To their credit they were only waylaid by the hood clipped to Tarre’s helm for a moment, though it was far more a Jedi style than a Mando one.
Everything smelt of mud and sweat. Everything. Nothing else mattered, not blood nor burns nor blaster discharge. There is no death, there is the Force.
The blue and green ad butted in with a retelling of the relevant events of Tarre smacking their skull into the ground. The red and green ad, Jango, who’d ended up on the same side of the ship as Tarre to be close to their buir as the medics worked stared directly at a wall.
“Owww,” Tarre added. That was also relevant and their brain wasn’t exactly working right now.
“Species?” The medic asked.
They shook their head then instantly regretted it as the pain flared when they jostled their poor brain. “Uhhh, funny question that.”
The medic gave an unimpressed head tilt.
“Mando special.” They smiled winningly revealing their pointed teeth; the cut on their lip felt like it split back open. “Zabrak and Human and a whole buncha other stuff.”
The medic recalibrated their scanner.
Tarre stayed still very cooperatively and not ‘cause they kinda spaced out, staring where their eyes landed on their Mandalorian, Jaster’s armour. Was it red or orange though? Even the black wasn’t the same shade of paint as the Mandalorian attacking in the tank’s had been. It was an attractive colour combo though, for honouring your clan, lust for life and justice.
“Good news, no cracked skull even though you’ve done a number on one of them back horns,” the medic said. “Bad news, you’ve got one hell of a concussion at minimum, and no one gets to be a di’kut about head trauma on my watch.”
Tarre zoned back in. “Yuh, I figured.” They got a stylus-light shined in both their eyes for their trouble.
“Dank farrik, you’ve got the credits on bruises too.” The medic pulled a hypo from their big trauma kit. “Painkillers? Can’t give you anything heavy duty with the head though.”
“What’s it got in it?” Tarre mumbled. “My baar’ur’a will kill me if I let you kill me by accident.”
They clumsily whacked their hand against the belt pouch that held their own med-kit and the information sheet printed in both Basic and Mando’a inside. With the big, all-caps mark of medically complicated. Should’ve lead with that.
The medic grabbed it and read it before grimacing. “Nope, not willing to kark with that ‘til we’re back on the main ship with a fully stocked med-bay, vod.”
That was alas the better option. They’d tried the whole ‘medication violently disagreeing with their physiology’ route before.
Tarre got a bundle of bacta soaked gauze to press to the cut on back of their head until the bleeding stopped and a slash of yellow paint crayon on their chest plate. So the medic reckoned their injuries were potentially life threatening, but not immediately per triage. Head injuries were so fun.
The medic grabbed the green and blue ad. “You, Silas, watch them like a jai’galaar. You’ve got your basic med training. Report if their consciousness or condition deteriorates, or else if that scalp wound hasn’t stopped bleeding soon.”
Jango spoke up. “Medic, can Silas or you watch Jaster too? I’m in command, I need to talk to the pilots up front.” They then gestured at Tarre. “You need to watch that Jetii too. They aren’t Haat’ade and with everything Death Watch pulled today we have to be wary.”
The medic pointed to Silas before they saluted, crossing their arm over their chest without touching their mud spattered armour, then gathered up their scanner and kit to make their way between the packed verde to their next patient.
Tarre tipped to the side, mushing their cheek into the side of their seat, unable to hold themself upright any longer. Only the crash harness kept them from oozing into a puddle on the floor. The ship rattled and rocked. That helped nothing. They didn’t let their eyes slide shut no matter how much they wanted to; that would only get more poking and prodding from the medics.
Instead they looked again to the Mandalorian beside them. To Tarre’s surprise, the orange-red— Jaster’s eyes were fully open now, even though they had passed out earlier and had to be drugged up to the gills now by the medics. It was clear where their ad had learnt their stubbornness from. Anything was better than earlier when their eyes had been slitted against the pain, with their jaw clenched tight to keep from screaming from their mangled knee, all of it choking in the Force.
But Jaster watched Tarre with something far too close to awe.
Tarre, who was battle-worn far before this battle. Who was exhausted, concussed and nauseous while their hearts hadn’t stopped racing since the fight. Who wore armour far closer to the beskar with chips, dents and scored paint than any respecting Mando’ad should wear it. Who wore Jedi tunics made for war not peace-keeping, the armour-weave of them stiff with sweat, blood and tears shed in the dead of night out of overwhelmed hopelessness when Tarre couldn’t even sleep in the time snatched to do so. They had no kad’au and little else for weapons after they had given away more than they could spare to their fellow Jedi who had lost their own ‘sabers.
“Wayii, gar ka’rayc,” Jaster said a bit too loudly.
The verda around them laughed and Silas facepalmed, their gauntlet thunking against their helmet.
Tarre could only stare back, their own face feeling far too bare without their helmet and visor, and wonder how this strange Mandalorian, a vision of Mandokarla in orange-red and black armour, saw more than they did. They thought Tarre was star-like, and it made Tarre’s hearts shine warm in their chest.
Taking in Jaster’s appearance properly, Tarre’s first thought was ‘oh kark, they’re incredibly good looking,’ but concussed Tarre’s first thoughts probably shouldn’t be acted upon outside their head.
But oh the jawline really did it for Tarre and so did the smile crinkles around warm brown eyes, the strong brow line and the busted up nose. They were Human or near as far as Tarre could tell and you couldn’t always, with brown skin. Tarre stared.
Their dark hair was cropped practically short with the worst case of helmet hair Tarre had ever seen. Tarre wanted to run their hands over it and mess it up even further. They had dark, prickly uneven stubble that only emphasised that jaw. Haar chaak, Tarre wanted to lick it. Or bite it. Both worked.
Desire spiked in the Force that wasn’t Tarre’s own, the threads drawing taut, sharp yet not cutting, heated in a way Tarre welcomed. It was louder for a brief second than the despair around them.
It knocked them out of their thoughts. Tarre grinned like a lunatic. They still had it, even as they were utterly aware of how gross and sweaty they were.
Jaster echoed their expression. They were still smiling loopily at each other when the ship jolted as it docked with the massive main cruiser.
The most urgent casualties were taken to med-bay first, after the mobile majority of people had disembarked to give the medics room to manoeuvre.
They stayed there until an amused medic poked Tarre to get their attention when they needed to lean over them to get to the magna-locks on the wall; it was probably for the best they got in the way of Tarre being horny over their strange Mando, even though the latter was far more enjoyable cause that view—
At least they weren’t a Jedi healer who absolutely would be able to more than just tell the direction Tarre’s thoughts had headed with how atrocious their shielding was currently.
The medic disengaged the magna-locks on Jaster’s hoverstretcher, guiding it out of the ship. They made it to the open door ramp with Jaster was still looking back over their shoulder at Tarre.
“Ret’urcye mhi, mesh’la!” Tarre yelled after them.
Certainly they hoped to meet them again.