Private One More Mile

[Rin Taal]

The humor in Rin's expression faded when Muad returned to what she had already done twice. Her gaze dropped briefly to their hands beneath his, and this time she did not have an easy answer waiting for him. The night they met had always felt different in her memory. She had found him dying beside the wreckage of his ship and reached for him because leaving someone to die when she might prevent it had never been a choice Rin could make easily. The road on Batuu had been different. By then he was no longer a stranger she happened upon beneath the trees. She had known the sound of his laughter, the infuriating ease with which he could make her ears change color, the feel of his hand around hers and the strange comfort of his presence at the edge of her thoughts. When his heart stopped that second time, she hadn't acted as a healer deciding whether a wounded man could be saved. She had simply refused to lose him.

His request for a promise settled heavily between them because Rin understood exactly what he was asking. After everything Marta had just told them, she understood the danger far better than she had either time she had reached for him. Yet it was the contradiction inside Muad that made her golden eyes rise slowly to his. Through the bond she could feel enough to know that the promise he wanted from her was one he could never honestly give in return. If their places had been reversed, he would have reached for her. If saving her required him to pour everything he had into their connection, some deeply rooted, stubborn part of the man sitting beside her had already decided exactly what he would do. There was no anger in Rin when she looked at him, only a painful tenderness and the faintest shake of her head.

"You just told me not to promise that I wouldn't try." Her thumb moved beneath his hand, tracing slowly across his fingers as she held his gaze. "You said, 'I'm not saying don't try.' Then you told me that if you're too far gone, I have to stop." Rin let his own words remain between them for a moment, because she wanted him to hear what he was asking when it came back in her voice. Her fingers tightened around his, and the emotion she had been holding carefully beneath the surface slipped through their bond with the touch. "So don't ask me to lie to you, Muad."

The words were quiet, without accusation, but there was no uncertainty behind them. Rin's eyes burned slightly as memories of Batuu pressed close, especially the terrible absence of his heartbeat beneath her hands and that impossibly faint presence she had still been able to find through the bond. "I can promise you that I understand now. I can promise that if it ever happens again, I'll remember what Marta told us and I'll listen for you instead of blindly pouring everything I have through the bond. I can promise I'll try to recognize the difference between you being somewhere I can still reach and me refusing to accept that you're gone." Her voice softened on the last words, because even imagining that distinction hurt more than she wanted him to know, although the bond probably made hiding it impossible. "But I cannot promise that if I can still feel you, if there is still some part of you answering me, I won't reach for you. You couldn't make that promise to me either."

For a moment, Marta said nothing. Her attention moved between them with the patience of someone who had watched countless promises made beneath the pressure of fear and understood how rarely those promises survived the moment they were meant to govern. Chek's low grunt carried neither approval nor criticism, merely recognition, and his black eye lingered upon Muad for a moment before returning to Rin.

"Then perhaps neither of you should make a promise you already know you would break," Marta said eventually. There was gentleness in her voice, but none of it diminished the seriousness beneath the words. "The better promise is that neither of you will make that choice alone. If you are the one reaching, listen for him as much as you reach for him. If he is still there, let him answer you. Let him fight his way toward you instead of trying to carry him across that distance entirely on your own. And if there is nothing answering..." Marta paused, her hand moving across the table to rest lightly over Rin's wrist. "Then you must remember what continuing may cost."

Rin swallowed, but she nodded. That was a promise she could at least try to keep. It did not require her to stand aside while someone she loved slipped beyond her reach. It asked her to recognize that saving Muad could not mean destroying herself, and that whatever this connection had become, its strength came from two people reaching toward one another rather than one consuming herself to preserve the other.

Chek leaned forward, broad forearms settling against the table as his gaze moved between them. "Works both ways, lad." His gravelled voice left little room for argument. "Can't ask her to stop before it kills her while planning to do the exact opposite if she's the one lying there. Either both lives matter, or neither does."

Something in Rin's expression softened at that, because Chek had reached directly into the contradiction she had sensed from Muad without requiring her to expose it herself. She turned her hand beneath his until their fingers fitted together properly again and gave them a gentle squeeze. "That one I can promise." A fragile smile touched her lips as she looked at him. "If I ever have to drag you back again, you meet me halfway. And if it's me..." Her smile faded into something warmer and far more vulnerable. "I'll fight my way back to you too."

That was as much certainty as Rin could offer about death, and perhaps as much as either of them should try to demand from the other. Her fingers remained intertwined with Muad's while some of the fear slowly settled. Then, as though the conversation had not just involved the very real possibility of one of them following the other into death, Muad asked Marta whether he might grow a furry tail.

Rin stared at him in disbelief for all of two seconds before laughter escaped her. The transition was so completely Muad that she should have expected it. "Of course that's where your mind went." She shook her head, amusement returning despite herself. "For the record, if you wake up with a tail, I'm sending you directly back to Marta before you decide it's somehow my fault."

Chek leaned back with his glass cradled in one broad hand. "Could improve him."

Rin's laugh grew warmer while Marta gave her husband a long-suffering look that suggested several thousand years had done nothing to discourage him. "No," Marta answered, turning back to Muad. "Not because of the dyad itself. A connection in the Force is not the same as exchanging biology. Rin will not become human and you will not become Zorren because your minds and spirits have become closely linked." The humor left her expression as Muad described the far less ordinary alterations he had accumulated over his long life, however, and she listened without interrupting until he reached the question beneath the joke. "That is more difficult. The bond could make Rin more sensitive to changes occurring within you because she may feel their effects through your connection, but that is not the same as those changes becoming hers. If something was deliberately transferred between you through the Force, blood, ritual or another mechanism, that would need to be understood on its own terms. I would not assume the dyad will amplify it, but neither would I dismiss the possibility without knowing precisely what was done."

Rin's amusement disappeared as the memory Muad carried rose near the surface of their connection. She remembered the forest, the spike buried in her shoulder and the bizarre method he had used to remove it, but more importantly she remembered what followed. Something had passed through his efforts to heal her that she had never fully understood. At the time there had been more immediate concerns than determining exactly what Muad had done or what strange collection of experiences made his body capable of doing it. Now the question felt considerably less academic. "There was something on Batuu." Her brow furrowed as she searched the memory. "When he healed me after the spike. I felt something change, but there wasn't exactly time to stop and study it." She looked toward Marta. "So that's something we should probably understand separately from this?"

"Yes," Marta answered without hesitation. "Do not make the mistake of attributing everything unusual between you to the dyad simply because you now have a name for it. You both had complicated relationships with the Force before you found each other." Her gaze lingered upon Muad with particular meaning after the list he had just provided. "Some considerably more complicated than others."

Chek took another drink. "That's a polite way of saying you're a mess, lad."

Rin covered her mouth, but it did very little to hide her smile. "I wasn't going to say it." Her eyes slid toward Muad. "I was thinking it, but Marta did just explain that we're supposed to have boundaries."

The humor lasted precisely until Muad asked about children.

Rin froze with her glass halfway toward her mouth. Heat rushed into her ears so quickly that she didn't need the bond to know Muad would notice, and for perhaps the first time since sitting down, she genuinely had no idea what to say. They hadn't even kissed. They had slept beside one another, held hands, shared thoughts and feelings that sometimes seemed considerably more intimate than either of those things, and somehow found themselves discussing a future neither had been willing to define yet. Children belonged so far beyond the next step that Rin's carefully ordered mind couldn't immediately find a path connecting one to the other.

Then Muad's memory crossed the bond.

She saw the old speeder through him, recognized herself sitting beside him with her hair loose and their hands intertwined between them, and then saw the two children approaching her side of the vehicle. Pointed ears. Bright eyes. Pieces of both of them blended together into faces that had never existed anywhere except whatever vision Muad had experienced. The embarrassment remained, but something deeper moved beneath it, because Rin had seen something remarkably similar only hours earlier.

Her free hand rose unconsciously to the medallion hidden beneath her clothing. The polished silver had not shown her Muad alone when she looked into it. It had shown them. Rin remembered the two of them standing together while indistinct figures moved around them, children rendered more as shadow and possibility than clearly defined faces. She had tucked the medallion away because she hadn't known what to do with that image, and because examining it too closely while Muad sat beside her had felt dangerously close to admitting how much it affected her. Now his vision had crossed their bond and placed another version of that same possibility directly before her.

Her golden eyes found his, and the embarrassment in them had become tangled with something far more vulnerable. "That's what you saw?" Her fingers remained over the medallion beneath her shirt. She hesitated before deciding that if they were going to have this conversation, hiding what Chek and Marta's gift had shown her suddenly seemed ridiculous. "Mine didn't show only you either." Her ears deepened another shade as she glanced briefly toward Chek, then Marta, before looking back to Muad. "It showed us together. There were children around us. I couldn't really see them, not the way you just showed me yours. They were more like shadows, but they were there."

Chek's black eye shifted toward Marta, and his brows rose with an expression that was entirely too pleased for Rin's comfort. Marta noticed it immediately and nudged his leg beneath the table before he could contribute whatever thought had clearly entered his mind. "Don't."

"I didn't say anything."

"You were going to."

Chek grunted and took another drink, which only made Rin's ears burn hotter. She lowered her glass and gave the pair a look that carried some of the long-suffering affection of someone who had known them since childhood. "Could we perhaps answer the question before Chek starts planning names?"

"I wasn't planning names," Chek replied.

Marta's eyes narrowed toward him. "Yet."

Rin closed her eyes for a moment and wondered whether throwing herself off the mountain would be considered an abuse of the dyad if Muad could feel her embarrassment on the way down.

Marta mercifully rescued her, although the warmth in the older woman's expression suggested she was enjoying Rin's discomfort considerably more than she intended to admit. "A child conceived by two people who form a dyad would still be a child of those two people. The bond does not create a third half of itself, nor would I expect the child to be born automatically joined to both parents in the same way you are joined to one another." She paused, choosing her next words carefully. "But the Force does leave impressions across generations. Sensitivity can be inherited, as can certain affinities. A child developing while surrounded by a connection as strong as yours might recognize both of you through the Force extraordinarily early. There could be an unusual familiarity with your presences, perhaps even an instinctive sensitivity to the bond between you. Beyond that, I would be speculating."

Rin listened despite the continued warmth in her face. Once the initial embarrassment passed, curiosity began replacing it. The question was theoretical, wildly premature and far too personal, but that didn't make the answer uninteresting. "So they wouldn't necessarily be part of the dyad."

"No," Marta said. "A dyad is specifically the relationship between the two of you. A child would have their own relationship with the Force and with each of you. You would need to let them become whoever they are rather than expecting them to inherit what you have."

Chek nodded once, his humor giving way to something quieter. "Children aren't continuations of their parents. Took us a few lifetimes of raising them to really understand that." His gaze drifted toward Marta, and something passed between the ancient pair that Rin recognized without needing the Force. They had buried children who had lived entire lives, watched descendants become old and leave children of their own, and somehow continued opening their home and hearts to others. Chek looked back toward Rin and Muad before adding, "You give them roots. Doesn't mean you choose which direction the branches grow."

That struck Rin more deeply than she expected. Her hand remained over the medallion for another moment before lowering to the table and finding Muad's again. The vision no longer felt like a prediction she was obligated to fulfill. Neither did his. They were possibilities, perhaps desires given shape, perhaps glimpses of something that could exist if a thousand choices eventually carried them there. Right now they were still learning what it meant to wake beside one another without becoming embarrassed by it, and there was something almost absurdly comforting about remembering they didn't have to race toward the ending simply because they had glimpsed one possible version of it.

Then Muad clarified that he definitely wasn't saying they should have children but also wasn't saying they shouldn't try, and every bit of composure Rin had recovered vanished. Her ears went crimson again as she slowly turned her head toward him. She could feel the amusement waiting inside him, and worse, she suspected he could feel exactly how effectively the remark had landed. "We haven't even kissed." The words came with an incredulous laugh, though there was no rejection in them. She leaned slightly closer, lowering her voice despite the complete impossibility of privacy at this table. "You are several hundred miles ahead of yourself again."

Chek's gravelly chuckle rolled across the table. "Could be worse."

Rin looked at him suspiciously. "How?"

The old smith glanced toward Marta before wisely reconsidering whatever answer he had intended to give. "I'll tell you when you've had another drink."

That earned a laugh from Rin despite herself, and some of the embarrassment finally loosened enough for her to look back at Muad without immediately wanting to hide behind her glass. His vision remained with her, laid now beside what she had seen in the medallion. She didn't know whether either would ever become real. For once, however, Rin didn't feel compelled to analyze every possibility until she found the safest answer. Her fingers threaded through his beneath their joined hands, and she let a quieter thought cross the bond where only he could hear it.

Maybe someday.

Her eyes held his for another moment before she lifted her glass, took another cautious swallow and immediately grimaced at Chek's terrible liquor. Whatever future waited for them, she decided it could wait until after she survived lunch.

Muad Dib

 

[Muad Dib]

His eyes closed for a moment, hearing her discontent at his desire for her to make a promise he was unable to make in kind. It wasn't fair to her. And just as Chek pointed out at the forge, taking her agency away wasn't love. It was selfish. He couldn't ask her to do something he wouldn't do himself. It went both ways. Either both lives were important enough to fight for, to sacrifice for. Or neither were.

His ear turned to Marta's words. It was better to remain silent than make promises they wouldn't keep. Hell, it's hard enough keeping the single promise. His eyes glowed faintly while his gaze dropped to her lips for a moment. Then he nodded his head in agreement. "We both keep fighting. For life. For a life together. Now that, I can do."

Rin's response to his impromptu question about a tail changed the atmosphere. He merely shrugged his shoulders as Chek talked about an improvement. A mock glare was sent his direction. "Whose side are you on anyway? And I guess the question is a moot point. I already have a tail. Sometimes." Then Marta's pointed look was further explained by her husband. A sheepish expression crossed his face as he glanced between the three Zorren. "I may be a mess, but my mess kept me around long enough to find Rin. I'll take it. I guess what happens on Drommund Kaas doesn't stay on Drommund Kaas."

"We haven't even kissed yet. You are several hundred miles ahead of yourself again."

Yet ...

Rin was speaking truthfully about the future. Many miles separated where they were and where they could potentially be. All he did was smile, his hand warmly in hers. "I've got no problem waiting, darlin'. Eventually you'll catch up in that speeder, and we can take the ride together wherever the road goes. However long it goes. As long as I'm with you." It wasn't a grand speech. Rather, it was an honest statement of his intentions. And Muad just wanted her to know. He was in for the long haul. Her words brushed along their bond, and he couldn't help but smile as he repeated her. Maybe someday.

Many different paths lay before them. While he was sure the 'remaining only friends' exit was long gone, kids were something that wasn't even a glimmer on the horizon. Though, if he was honest with himself, it was quite a pleasant possible future. Of course they would need to kiss first. However, somewhere between Batuu and Veradune, the possibility of a life without Rin in it became an impossibility. He would see something and wonder what she would see. Experience something and want to share it with her. And in the quiet moments, all he wanted was her. And in their journey together, she had gone from stranger to friend to someone he enjoyed spending time with, to someone he admired for her beauty of character and body, to someone he didn't want to miss another moment with. Bond or no bond, he would have pursued the thing growing between them with every ounce of strength.

They all enjoyed Rin's expression as she took another taste of the liquor. It was definitely an acquired taste. He raised his own to his lips and silently agreed. But his curiosity was piqued with the silent admonition from Marta to Chek. He glanced between them as he took another swallow from the glass. "Well, we've all had another drink. What is this other thing that demands our inebriation?" His smile curbed the worrisome tint in their countenance. But as his hand felt the warmth of Rin's, he knew they would be able to face whatever came at them. Together.

Rin Taal

 

[Rin Taal]

The seriousness couldn't survive Muad's response to the question of a tail. Rin's mouth opened slightly when he announced that he already had one sometimes, and memory immediately supplied the circumstances under which she had discovered that particular fact. The battle with Kurgan returned in fragments: violence tearing through the forest, Muad's body becoming something enormous and terrible, something that was part dragon and part demon and wholly unlike the man sitting beside her now. She remembered the spike buried through her shoulder and the transformed creature looming over her, followed by the distinctly unpleasant experience of his serpentine tongue curling around the obstruction and pulling it free.

Her expression slowly changed.

"Actually..."

Rin's attention shifted toward Chek, curiosity beginning to replace amusement. "I have something for you." Her eyes flickered toward Muad before returning to the ancient smith. "After the fight with Kurgan, when he changed into that...dragon-demon thing, I collected some of what was left behind afterward. A few scales and fragments." She had gathered them partly because leaving pieces of an enormous supernatural creature scattered through the forest seemed unwise, but she had kept several because she had never encountered anything quite like them. Once she knew she was coming home, deciding who might appreciate them had been easy. "I brought some back for you. I thought you might enjoy figuring out what they are, or whether they can be worked into anything."

Chek's interest sharpened immediately, his black eye settling upon Muad with considerably more appraisal than it had possessed a moment earlier. "You left pieces behind?"

"Quite a few." Rin's lips twitched. "He was considerably larger at the time."

The humor lasted until another piece of the memory surfaced, one that made Rin's hand unconsciously rise toward the shoulder where the spike had pierced her. Muad hadn't merely removed it. Whatever he had done afterward had healed damage that should have taken considerably longer to mend, and she remembered the strange sensation of something passing from him into her. At the time there had been more immediate concerns than examining precisely what he had done to accomplish it. After everything Marta had just told them about the dyad, however, the memory suddenly seemed considerably more important.

"There is something else." Her fingers lingered briefly over the old injury before falling back to the table. "When he pulled the spike out, he healed me. But it wasn't only healing. Something from that form passed into me." Her brow furrowed as she searched for a better description and failed to find one. "Some part of whatever makes that creature what it is."

For the first time since the subject of Muad's various alterations had arisen, Rin looked directly at Marta with genuine concern. "Could that have infected me too?"

Marta did not answer immediately. Her attention settled fully upon Rin, studying her with the quiet concentration that Rin remembered from childhood whenever a question required more than an easy answer. Eventually, the older woman reached across the table and laid two fingers lightly against Rin's wrist.

"I would not call it an infection."

Rin's ears shifted slightly as she waited.

"An infection implies something foreign entered you and began acting according to its own nature, regardless of yours." Marta's fingers remained against her pulse while her awareness moved more delicately through the Force. "What I feel is different. There is something within you that did not originate with you, yes, but it has not displaced anything. Nor do I sense it consuming or corrupting you."

Chek grunted from beside her. "Would have noticed by now if she started growing scales."

Rin gave him a flat look. "Thank you. That's reassuring."

His black eye gleamed with amusement, but Marta remained thoughtful. "I would call it an imprint, perhaps. A small piece of what he was in that moment carried into you with the healing." Her gaze moved toward Muad and then returned to Rin. "Under ordinary circumstances, it might have faded or simply become part of whatever allowed your body to repair itself. But the two of you are not ordinary circumstances."

Rin's attention dropped toward their joined hands.

"The dyad gives everything between you resonance," Marta continued. "Thought answers thought. Emotion answers emotion. Life answers life. If some part of his altered nature already exists within you, the bond may reinforce it rather than allow it to fade."

That earned Marta Rin's complete attention again. "Reinforce it how?"

"I don't know."

There was no embarrassment in Marta's admission, only certainty about the boundary of her knowledge. "Perhaps not at all. Perhaps you heal differently now. Perhaps your body becomes more resistant to certain injuries. Perhaps, under sufficient stress, some characteristic of what he gave you answers the same characteristic within him." Her expression softened when Rin's concern sharpened. "Or perhaps nothing more will ever come of it. Do not invent a monster merely because you do not yet understand what sleeps beneath the surface."

Rin absorbed that in silence for a moment. Strangely, it was Marta's willingness to admit uncertainty that reassured her more than any absolute promise could have. Her thumb brushed slowly against Muad's hand before her gaze dropped toward the glass waiting in front of her.

She picked it up.

The first taste had been awful. The second had been marginally less offensive. This time Rin allowed the liquor to sit on her tongue instead of immediately swallowing simply to get rid of it. Beneath the vicious burn was something she hadn't noticed before, a deep sweetness carrying hints of dried fruit and something warm and almost smoky. Her eyebrows rose slightly as she swallowed.

The warmth followed more pleasantly this time. Rin stared suspiciously into the glass.

"Oh."

Chek's mouth pulled upward.

Rin took another, smaller sip, deliberately this time. The burn was still there, but now that she expected it, it wasn't unpleasant. It spread through her chest and settled comfortably in her stomach while the sweetness lingered behind. She rolled the glass gently between her fingers and glanced toward Chek.

"I may have judged this too quickly."

"Usually do," Chek grumbled.

Her golden eyes narrowed. "The drink. I meant the drink."

The old smith's expression made it perfectly clear that he knew exactly what she had meant.

Rin suppressed a smile and took another sip before Muad finally asked the question she had nearly forgotten beneath everything else. What was the other thing that apparently required them to be drinking?

The amusement in Marta's expression faded, although the warmth remained. Her gaze moved from Muad to Rin and lingered there before dropping briefly toward their intertwined hands. "The drink was never because what follows is terrible," she said. "It is because some truths become easier to carry when the body is relaxed enough that fear does not seize them first."

Rin's fingers tightened slightly around Muad's. She was beginning to recognize that particular tone from Marta, the one that meant the answer was unlikely to be simple.

Marta wrapped both hands around her own glass. "You have spent much of this conversation asking what the bond can give you. What you can share. What you can feel. What may pass between you, and what it might someday mean. Those are worthwhile questions, but they are only half of what you need to understand." Her golden eyes moved between them. "A connection this deep does not merely allow you to reach one another. It gives you somewhere to reach from."

Rin frowned slightly but remained quiet.

"If one of you is injured, frightened, lost within yourself or unable to touch the Force as you normally would, the other may become an anchor. You have already discovered pieces of that yourselves. But an anchor bears the strain placed upon it." Marta's expression grew more serious. "The stronger your bond becomes, the easier it may feel to pour yourself through it when the other needs you. Strength. Awareness. Life itself, if desperation drives you far enough. That does not mean you should never do so. It means you must understand that love, fear and desperation can make sacrifice feel limitless when your body is not."

Rin's gaze dropped toward their intertwined hands. She knew what Marta meant without needing an example. She had already reached for Muad when there should have been nothing left to reach. She hadn't measured the cost then. She hadn't even thought to measure it.

Perhaps that was precisely the danger.

Rin slowly lifted the glass again and took another sip. This time she actually enjoyed it, which was either proof that Chek had been right about the liquor or evidence that Marta's conversation was accomplishing exactly what the drink had been intended to help with.

"All right." Her thumb moved across Muad's knuckles as she looked back toward Marta. "I'm beginning to understand why you brought out the bottle."

Muad Dib

 

[Muad Dib]

"So don't overextend. Don't try to bring back the dead if they've let go. Don't lose your identity in the bond. Sounds easy." He smiled, trying to lighten up the mood. The atmosphere held a somberness that he felt in his bones. He raised his glass. "To new friends, the open road, and the freedom to choose whom we walk with." He took the rest of his liquor in a single draught, then set the glass down. He eased it around in semi-circles before his eyes lit up. "Rin teleported to me on Batuu. That's something. No more being stuck in traffic."

Then he looked at Marta and Chek and idly scratched the scruff on his chin. "Where did you pick up the smithing? And did you, Marta, ever train with a Force sect? Jedi, Sith, Shapers, Witches, Sages? Or are you self-taught in the Force? Or maybe you had your own Marta." Most of their conversations had revolved around Rin and Muad, and he was growing curious about the older couple he was developing a strong feeling for.

"Or you could tell me a few stories about what Rin was like when she was younger. Any ex-boyfriends I should be worried about?" He cast a sidelong glance at Rin and gently squeezed her hand. "I'm only kidding. But I am curious about Veradune. I didn't come here planning on finding her sitting in front of a fire, looking irresistible. I was actually coming to speak to your leaders about a potential interplanetary alliance between your planet and the Siskeen system. We're both in the High Republic. However, I've seen enough of large, multi-system governments to know that sometimes all the larger factions want to do is check a box and collect taxes without ever giving back to the people they say they care about."

"I don't want that for Siskeen. And, with how kind and considerate, caring, the people of Veradune are, I don't want your home world to be lost in the galactic shuffle. Especially considering everything the Zorren have had to endure and overcome in recent memory."

His mind went back to the many memories Marta had shown him. The different planets. The many cultures. The times of war and peace. He could relate. Well, mostly with the war aspect. But there was some form of emotion that was quietly eating at him from the inside. As he turned the memories over, both his own and Marta's, he finally found what it was. He was jealous, not in an angry sort of way. When he saw them, fighting, living, loving, raising kids, and starting the cycle over again, he realized he had a knot in his gut.

It was what he wanted.

Someone to share his life with. He had his brother, and his uncle with their kids. He had his own Clan with numerous members who were aliit, family. He had connections because of his role as senator. And the many close relations who were members of his House. The companies kept him busy, and even old friends who aged so much faster than he. It wasn't until that morning, when he looked at Corren and Maeve and saw a relationship that grew closer with every year, every decade, and every century, that he began to suspect something was missing.

And with Marta and Chek, they reinforced the idea that a love could not only exist, but last for centuries and then decades. Muad had never pursued romantic entanglements. They were fleeting. Even if he had tried to marry and settle down, in a blink of an eye he would have been forced to bury a wife. Or children, much like how Marta and Chek had done. He wasn't looking. Then he crashed headfirst into a random encounter that changed everything.

There was a connection between them before they knew they were both long-lived. A spark that grew from the first time he saw her. And every moment after that merely fanned the flames of the thing between them. He didn't want to say goodbye on Batuu. But he knew if he had stayed in that hospital room with her for any length of time, he would have been ensnared by the spell she had woven around his heart. On Veradune, the hope he had smothered as he departed Batuu rose back up. Their dance sent him to the edge. Under the willow, he surrendered to it.

Now, he looked on the older Zorren couple as something that may not be beyond his ability to grasp. And it was with Rin that he wanted it. Even as her fingers warmed against his own, he knew he was falling. And there was no safety net below him. But he didn't care. Rin was who he wanted to be with. In a year from now. In a century. In a thousand years. Yet he also knew this was fragile between them, needing nurturing. During their conversation, he had felt little tremors through their bond. Felt her trepidation at how quickly things developed. Sensing a worry about the possible future. As his eyes glanced into the golden pools he could easily drown in, he chose to slow down. They didn't need all the answers immediately. And Rin deserved the chance to get used to every progression without him tempting her with intimate touches and teasing.

He meant it when he said he would wait. And that included slowing down to whatever speed she was comfortable with. Even if it was a crawl. He had time; he could wait. And he would.

Rin Taal

 

[Rin Taal]

Rin watched Muad reduce Marta's warnings into a list that sounded considerably easier than any of it actually was, and the corner of her mouth curved despite herself. It was very much like him to take something involving death, identity and the possibility of accidentally destroying one another through the Force and make it sound like a collection of simple rules for the road. When he raised his glass, however, she followed, the sentiment behind his toast striking closer to everything they had spent the afternoon discussing.

"To the freedom to choose."

Her glass touched his before she drank. Rin no longer braced herself for the liquor. Somewhere between the first terrible swallow and the last several refills, she had begun to appreciate the warmth of it, even the initial bite before the deeper sweetness emerged beneath it. She let the taste linger before swallowing, then looked suspiciously toward Chek as though he were somehow responsible for changing her opinion. The old Zorren merely grunted around his own glass, looking entirely too satisfied with himself.

Muad's sudden recollection of Batuu earned a quiet laugh from Rin. "I don't think nearly killing yourself is a reasonable solution to traffic." Teleportation was still something she had no idea how to repeat, and after everything Marta had just explained, Rin was considerably less inclined to experiment blindly. She remembered the sensation of reaching for Muad and simply being there, distance folding away because nothing in her had been willing to accept that she couldn't reach him. "Besides, I don't actually know how I did it. So until I do, you're still sitting in traffic with everyone else."

The conversation finally moved away from them, something Rin welcomed after spending so much of the meal feeling as though she and Muad had been carefully opened and examined. She settled more comfortably in her chair while Muad turned his curiosity toward the older couple. Chek's attention drifted toward his hands almost instinctively when the forge was mentioned, thick fingers rubbing against one another as though remembering the shape of tools they had held for thousands of years.

"Picked it up from my granddad," Chek answered. "Third generation doing it. Learned before I was tall enough to use half the tools without standing on something." His black eye settled upon Muad. "First forge is gone. Flood took it."

His gaze shifted toward Marta, and something passed between them that immediately brought a knowing smile to Rin's face. She had heard the story enough times to recognize exactly which flood he meant.

"Flood I told you about," Chek continued, the words carrying the resignation of a man who knew perfectly well where the story was going. "Everyone with sense was getting uphill. I wasn't leaving the forge."

Marta's eyebrows rose. "He was going to drown with it."

"Wasn't drowning."

"You were standing in water up to your chest."

"Still standing."

Rin pressed her lips together around a smile as Marta gave her husband the patient look of a woman who had been hearing variations of the same argument for thousands of years. It was strange how easily Rin could imagine them then, Chek every bit as stubborn as he was now while Marta refused to let that stubbornness kill him. The story had become part of their family history, embellished differently depending upon which of them was telling it, but the important part never changed. Chek had refused to abandon the forge, Marta had refused to abandon Chek, and somewhere in the disaster that destroyed something his family had built across three generations, the two of them had found one another.

When Muad's questions turned toward Marta, the older woman's expression grew thoughtful. "I am a Wilder," she said simply. "So was the woman who taught me."

Rin's attention remained on her. She knew much of Marta's history, but hearing it now felt different after the memories Marta had shared with Muad and everything they had discussed about the Force. The older Zorren rested her forearms comfortably against the table, her fingers curled around the glass Chek had refilled.

"The Wilders are older than most of the names outsiders would recognize. We have traditions, but not the kind of structure you would find among Jedi or Sith. What we know grew from the wilds themselves and from generations teaching the next generation how to listen to them." Marta glanced briefly toward Rin before returning her attention to Muad. "There are different Ways. Some learn to strengthen the body until hands and feet become weapons capable of breaking armor. The Iron Claw. Others alter their own flesh, borrowing the shapes of beasts or changing bone and muscle according to need. There are Wilders who speak with animals, those who command plants, those who work through blood, and those who call upon fire, stone, water and storm."

Her expression became quieter as she continued. "My own path has always leaned toward the Whispering Wilds and the Trees. Listening before commanding. Every living place remembers something. An insect sees. Roots feel footsteps passing above them. Trees know what has moved beneath their branches, and a forest speaks between itself if you learn how to listen." A faint smile appeared. "There are places where I need only touch one tree to know what is happening many miles away."

Rin smiled softly. That sounded more like Marta than any title ever could. She could remember being young and watching the woman stop halfway along a path because something Rin hadn't even noticed had apparently told her they were no longer alone. Marta had never treated the forest as a collection of objects. It had always seemed more like a conversation Rin hadn't yet learned to hear.

"But Wilders are not all gentle forest mystics," Marta added, humor briefly warming her golden eyes. "Some follow the Savage Hunter. Some the Crimson Tide, the Shadow Path, the Verdant Voice or the Vitae. And there are times when even the quietest among us must fight. The Feral Rage exists for a reason."

Chek grunted. "She's being modest."

Marta gave him a sidelong look.

"Seen her tear through armored men with her bare hands."

"I was younger."

"Didn't say you couldn't still do it."

The affection beneath the exchange was unmistakable, but Marta's expression sobered when she looked back toward Muad. "Our history has not always been peaceful. Three Sect Wars. The Dark Plague War. Wilders have fought one another as often as we have fought outsiders, sometimes over differences that seemed terribly important at the time and foolish centuries later." Her thumb moved slowly along the edge of her glass. "You asked whether I was self-taught. No. I had a Marta of my own."

Something softened in Rin at the phrase.

Marta's smile carried affection and an old sadness that thousands of years had never entirely erased. "She taught me to listen before reaching. To know what I was asking from the world before demanding it answer. She taught me that power without understanding is merely another form of hunger." Her gaze shifted toward Rin. "And eventually, you discover you've repeated enough of your teacher's words that someone younger begins repeating yours."

Rin immediately thought of There you are.

She felt the memory before she could stop it, countless moments across countless worlds when those three words had slipped naturally from her mouth. Sometimes spoken to an injured creature she'd finally coaxed from hiding, sometimes to a frightened child she had found, and more recently to the maddening man whose hand remained wrapped around hers. Rin had never consciously decided to carry the phrase away from Veradune. It had simply become part of her, one of the countless small pieces Marta had placed there over the years.

Her smile warmed. "Some things stick."

Then Muad asked for stories about Rin.

Her smile vanished.

"No."

Marta laughed, and Chek leaned back with considerably more interest than he had shown moments before. Rin looked between them and realized immediately that she was outnumbered.

"Absolutely not. Whatever you're both thinking, he does not need encouragement."

"She climbed everything," Chek offered. Rin closed her eyes. "Everything," he repeated. "Trees. Roof. Forge."

"I was curious."

"You fell through the shed roof."

"Once."

Marta's laughter softened into something warmer. "You were always curious. And impatient. If someone told you that you were too young to understand something, you immediately decided you were going to understand it before supper."

Rin could feel Muad's amusement through their joined hands without even looking at him. She squeezed his fingers in warning before he could become too pleased with this information. The question about former boyfriends was easier to weather, though it still brought a little warmth back into the tips of her ears.

"You don't need to worry about anyone." Her golden eyes slid toward him. "And that's all you're getting."

She expected the teasing to continue, but Muad's explanation for why he had originally come to Veradune changed the direction of the conversation. Rin grew quiet as she listened. Until now, his arrival at the festival had seemed like one of those improbable accidents that had somehow given them another chance after Batuu. Learning that he had actually come to speak with Veradune's leadership about Siskeen made that coincidence feel smaller without diminishing it.

His reasons mattered more.

Rin's expression softened when he spoke about Veradune being overlooked by larger governments. She had traveled enough to see exactly what he meant. Worlds joined alliances because they were promised protection, prosperity or representation, only to discover that distance made them easy to forget until someone wanted soldiers, resources or taxes. Veradune had survived too much to become another name on someone else's ledger.

"Then talk to them." Her voice was quiet but certain. "I can't speak for Veradune, and I wouldn't try. But if you came here because you genuinely want something that benefits both worlds instead of deciding what we need for us, they'll listen." A faint smile touched her lips. "Whether they agree with you afterward is another matter."

Chek gave an approving grunt. Marta merely smiled, though there was pride in the expression that Rin recognized immediately.

Rin's gaze returned to Muad and lingered there. Through the dyad she could feel something shifting beneath his curiosity and humor, an emotion quieter than the others he had worn so openly throughout the afternoon. She didn't pry. Marta's lessons about boundaries were far too recent for that, and Rin didn't need to know every thought that crossed his mind simply because the bond might allow her to reach for them. She only knew that when he looked at Marta and Chek, something inside him became wistful.

Perhaps she understood more of that feeling than she wanted to admit.

Marta and Chek had shared thousands of years. They had fought, raised children, buried children and watched generations pass beneath the trees they planted for those they lost. Rin had grown up with that kind of permanence around her. She had never thought it extraordinary because it was simply them. Sitting beside Muad now, however, she understood why someone who had lived nearly as long without ever having that constancy might look upon it differently.

His hand was still around hers.

Rin let herself feel that without immediately asking what it meant a year from now, or a century, or a thousand years. She had spent enough of the afternoon staring toward futures that frightened her simply because they were enormous. Marta had reminded them repeatedly that the bond did not choose for them, and perhaps Rin had been so concerned about where this road ended that she had forgotten the much simpler truth that she enjoyed walking it now.

Her thumb moved slowly across Muad's knuckles.

"You know," she murmured, warmth returning to her eyes, "for someone who came here to negotiate an interplanetary alliance, you became distracted remarkably quickly."

The teasing was gentle, but beneath it she allowed something quieter to travel through their bond. Not a promise of centuries. Not an answer to questions she wasn't ready to answer.

Only the certainty that she was still there, her hand in his, and she wasn't looking for the nearest turn away.

Muad Dib

 

[Muad Dib]

"I do not get distracted remarkably fast. I only get distracted by the remarkable. And you, my witch, are so far beyond remarkable I never had a chance." His smile stretched as he shared the warmth he felt. Then he glanced toward Chek. "I have no motives other than a symbiotic relationship. A bond that benefits both peoples. A strength of purpose forged through surviving the crucible and in times of harvest. In the plentiful seasons and the lean winters. Both our systems have done it alone before. And many times. But to have an alliance of like-minded individuals who can be a shoulder to lean on in times of distress or a friend at a festival. True friendship. That's all."

He listened with rapt attention to the details of Chek's understudies. It was a family trade, one learned over thousands of years. While Muad could in no way compete with the craftsmanship and skill Chek had poured into the many diverse items throughout the forge and mountain home, there was one area he was quite capable of. His interest piqued when his hand rose to the medallion beneath his shirt. "For the items crafted with the Force, is that Marta's doing? And how often do you ply that kind of work? I learned a few things at the forge on Tython a long time ago. Some of your work is similar."

He didn't elaborate on what he learned at the forge. But for a man of war, there was only one kind of item to learn. Weapons. Many months of laboring under tutelage had taught him how to create and imbue many types of weapons. Some of which were still in his possession. One particular sword was now carried by Tobias. Then the stories revolved around the forge, and he laughed at their sparring. Even after thousands of years, their love permeated every word, touch, and look. His hand tightened unconsciously.

Marta gave her answer to the Force tradition. Wilder. It wasn't his first time hearing the term. And the journal within his small pack told many tales of the Wilders. Including a ceremony that could transform many during the process. Which led to a certain number of them acquiring a tail. He wondered how many tailed Zorren were born with it, and how many inherited it through the ceremony. He did not need to ask the question now. Perhaps later.

As Marta continued, he found himself nodding along with her words. There were different aspects, or paths, among the Wilders. Many held a familiarity. Those who could wield the elements echoed within the Shapers of Kro Var. Those who strengthened their bodies mirrored the Matukai. The Greeners of Jast who communed with plants. The witches of Hapes and animals. The dathomiri and magiks. It seemed Veradune was a melting pot of varied Force traditions all located on a single planet. The Wilders were intriguing.

His gaze flickered to Rin as Marta described what she learned. Plants and animals. And how a single touch upon a tree could reveal truths from miles in all directions. And when Chek responded with her ferocity, Muad nodded silently. Rin was her heir. In wisdom. In knowledge. In the golden eyes within her face. His eyes narrowed as he looked between the women, noticing more similarities that chance could present. Marta and Chek, old friends of the family. Emphasis on old. The couple's interest in a small child, crawling and leaping around with an insatiable appetite. They had already revealed scores of children and descendants from millennia of life.

"Are you the ancestors of the Taal family?" The words just came out, unknowing if it was true, if it was open knowledge, or if it was secret information.

Rin Taal

 

[Rin Taal]

The question silenced Rin for a moment. Her golden eyes moved from Muad to Marta and then Chek, lingering upon the two people who had occupied a place in her life for so long that she rarely stopped to wonder where that place had begun. They had simply always been there. The mountain, the forge, Marta's kitchen, Chek's rumbling voice carrying through passages carved into stone were woven so thoroughly through her childhood memories that separating the people from the place felt nearly impossible. She knew they were old. Everyone did. She knew there were branches of her family whose beginnings reached so far backward that even the oldest stories blurred around the edges, but she had never looked at Marta and Chek and thought of them as ancestors. The word felt far too distant for people she could reach across a table and touch.

Chek had gone still, his black eye resting upon Muad for several long seconds before shifting toward Rin. Something changed in his expression then, subtle enough that someone who had known him only an afternoon might have missed it, but Rin didn't. She had seen that same look when she was little and brought him something broken, utterly convinced there was nothing in the galaxy he couldn't repair. She had seen it when she left Veradune for the first time and again every time she returned. His gaze eventually returned to Muad and he gave a slow nod. "Aye. Though not quite the way you're probably thinking. Marta married into the family. I was born to it. Taal was already mine when she decided I was worth keeping."

Marta turned toward him with the comfortable affection and exasperation of several thousand years together. "That remains open to review."

Chek's mouth twitched, though he continued before Marta could revise several millennia of family history. "Names don't work exactly the same for us as they do for most humans. Blood matters, but the name isn't something we force down through every generation simply because someone was born beneath it. Taal is carried by choice. Some of our children kept it. Some chose other names. Some descendants returned to it generations later, and there've been people without a drop of my blood who became Taal because this was the family they chose. Doesn't make the ones who chose another name any less ours."

Something softened inside Rin at those words. The family they chose. She had never needed the distinction explained because Taal had simply been Taal. It was the name her father carried and the name she had chosen to keep when she became old enough that the decision belonged entirely to her. There had been no ceremony demanding it of her, nor some threat that choosing another name meant abandoning the people attached to this one. Hearing Chek explain it to someone outside the family made her understand something she had taken for granted all her life. Perhaps Taal had survived for thousands of years precisely because no one had ever been chained to it.

Chek looked at her again, and this time the affection in his weathered features tightened something beneath Rin's ribs. "Corren comes from my line. Not Maeve. Your father. There are more generations between him and me than I care to count anymore, but the blood runs straight enough. The forge followed some of those same branches too."

Rin smiled before she could stop herself because that part she could see without needing a genealogy stretching back thousands of years. She could picture her father standing where Chek had stood earlier, sleeves rolled above his forearms and heat rolling across his face while sparks scattered beneath his hammer. Corren had never treated smithing as some solemn ancestral obligation. It was simply something he knew, something his hands understood. Rin had grown up with the ringing of metal and the smell of heated iron, watching her father make and mend things with a patience she had never possessed for the craft herself. She had learned enough to appreciate it and enough to understand the work that went into it, but she had never wanted the forge for herself. For the first time, that distinction felt important rather than incidental.

"So the forge goes back through the family?"

"Long before Corren," Chek answered, and there was unmistakable pride in the old smith's voice. "Didn't always pass father to son or mother to daughter either. Sometimes it skipped generations. Sometimes someone picked it up again because an old set of tools was sitting there and curiosity got the better of them. Your father chose it, same as those who came before him chose it."

Rin's smile deepened. Of course he had. There was something comforting in knowing Corren stood within a tradition that had survived floods, wars, migrations and thousands of years without ever becoming an obligation placed upon the next generation. Her father had taken something ancient and made it his because he loved it. Rin had been given the same freedom to look at that inheritance, appreciate it and choose something else.

Marta had remained quiet through most of the explanation, watching Rin with an expression that gradually became difficult for her to meet. There was too much history behind those golden eyes, too many versions of Rin preserved within them. Marta had known the child who crawled into places she shouldn't, the girl who asked endless questions, the young woman increasingly drawn toward roads leading away from Veradune, and the adult who still found her way back to this mountain no matter how long she had been gone. When Marta reached across the table and rested her hand over Rin's, the simple contact touched something unexpectedly tender.

"And before anyone decides that means Chek gave your family the forge and I gave them the Wilders, it isn't that simple either." Rin turned her hand beneath Marta's until their palms met, and Marta's fingers curled naturally around hers. "I brought my traditions with me when I became part of this family. I taught our children. I taught some of their children, and some of theirs. Others wanted nothing whatsoever to do with the Force and were perfectly happy that way. Knowledge was offered, never owed, just as it was offered to you."

The words were gentle, which somehow made them harder for Rin to hear. She looked down at their joined hands as memories surfaced with startling clarity. There had been lessons beneath trees when she was small enough that Marta's hand could nearly cover her entire back, afternoons spent sitting in damp grass while Marta repeatedly told her to stop trying so hard to hear what existed around her. The living world wasn't silent simply because it didn't speak in words. Rin remembered learning that much, but she also remembered her impatience and the restless need to move, to discover what waited beyond the next hill instead of spending another afternoon listening to roots beneath the soil. There had always been another road calling her somewhere.

Marta had never stopped her from taking it.

The realization struck Rin harder than she expected. Every time she had chosen the road, Marta had let her go without making departure feel like rejection. Every time Rin returned, whether months or years later, Marta had welcomed her without asking why she hadn't stayed. There had never been disappointment waiting at the door, only the familiar warmth of a home that expected nothing from her except that she enter when she wished.

"I didn't exactly finish learning." There was humor in Rin's voice, but she couldn't quite keep the emotion from slipping beneath it.

"No," Marta agreed, and the smile that followed held no reproach whatsoever. Her thumb moved slowly across Rin's knuckles as she added, "You started living. You weren't born to become me, Rin. Or Chek. Or Corren. You weren't born owing anything to people who lived thousands of years before you did. You took what helped you become yourself, and then you went out and made choices none of us could have made for you."

The answer caught somewhere painfully beneath Rin's breastbone. She had expected teasing, perhaps some reminder of all the lessons she had abandoned halfway through because something beyond the mountain had seemed more interesting, but there was no disappointment in Marta's face at all. There was only the quiet pride of someone who had never expected Rin to become anything except herself.

Chek gave a thoughtful grunt before adding, "Quite a few questionable choices along the way."

Rin turned an injured look toward him. "I was having a moment."

"Still having it."

A laugh escaped her, and some of the pressure behind her ribs loosened without disappearing entirely. Marta laughed with her, keeping Rin's hand within her own until the humor gradually faded into something quieter. "She left," Marta continued, looking toward Muad now. "That mattered. Children are supposed to leave eventually, whether they're twenty or two hundred. If you've given them somewhere safe enough to come back to, they'll decide for themselves whether they want to. Rin certainly did."

Her gaze returned to Rin, the corners of her eyes softening with a tenderness that made Rin's throat tighten. "This one keeps coming back."

For a moment, Rin couldn't find anything clever to say. The mountain seemed to gather around her in a way it hadn't before, every familiar detail carrying memories she rarely allowed herself to examine all at once. The forge where Chek had worked for longer than she could properly imagine, the kitchen where Marta had fed generations of children and descendants, the forests beyond the stone walls and the roads that had carried Rin away from them over and over again. She had spent so much of her life moving that she sometimes defined herself by the next place rather than the one behind her, yet none of those departures had ever severed this connection.

"It's home." Her voice came quieter than she intended, and her fingers tightened around Marta's. "No matter how far I go, I suppose part of me always knows where the road back is."

"I know," Marta answered softly.

That was all she said, and somehow it was enough. Rin let herself sit within the feeling instead of immediately escaping it with humor. Home had never meant she was required to remain here. That was perhaps the greatest gift these people had ever given her. She could disappear beyond the horizon, follow caravans across worlds, protect strangers whose names she might never hear again and return months or years later to find the mountain waiting. There was no tally of absences and no debt accumulated while she was gone. She had only ever been expected to live.

Chek allowed the quiet to linger before clearing his throat. "So if you're asking whether we're near the roots of the Taal family, lad, aye. We are. But roots aren't supposed to tell the branches where to grow. Corren inherited my blood and chose the forge. Rin didn't, and there's nothing wrong with that. She found something else worth doing."

Rin glanced down at her hands, remembering a time when she had quietly wondered whether her inability to love the forge as her father did meant she had missed something important. Corren had never made her feel that way. Neither had Chek. The insecurity had belonged entirely to her, born from watching someone she loved possess a certainty about his craft that she hadn't yet discovered for herself. Eventually she had found it somewhere beyond the mountain, walking beside caravans and standing between ordinary people and whatever threatened them. Her father made things meant to endure. Rin protected people long enough for them to reach wherever they were going. They had simply found different ways to leave something intact behind them.

"And she still has things she could learn from me," Marta said, drawing Rin's attention back toward her. There was no challenge in her voice and certainly no expectation, only another invitation that could be accepted now or centuries from now. "The Whispering Wilds you've barely touched beyond what you needed. There are things beneath the Way of the Trees you haven't begun. Things I didn't teach you because you weren't ready for them, and things I didn't teach because you weren't interested. There is a difference."

Rin's lips curved faintly. "I remember."

"I'm sure you remember telling me that sitting beside a tree for six hours was cruel and unusual punishment."

Warmth climbed immediately into Rin's ears. "I was young."

Chek snorted into his drink. "You were sixty-three."

"Young enough."

Marta's laughter filled the kitchen, and Rin joined her despite herself. There was something wonderfully familiar about being reduced to the child she had once been without being treated as though she were still that child. She could travel half the galaxy, survive dangers that would have horrified the younger version of herself and return here only to discover Marta still remembered exactly how old she had been when she declared meditation beneath a tree an intolerable cruelty.

When the laughter faded, Marta's expression softened again. "If you want to learn more, you can. Tomorrow, ten years from now, a century from now. I'm not going anywhere unless we are called to. There are things I think you'd be very good at now that you didn't have the patience for when you were younger, but I'll never tell you that you have to learn them simply because I know them."

Rin studied her for several moments, feeling the extraordinary luxury contained within those words. Time had always seemed plentiful to her. Centuries stretched ahead so easily that delaying something by a decade barely felt like postponement, but recently she had begun to understand time differently. Having centuries didn't guarantee anyone the next morning, and loving the road didn't mean she needed to keep moving simply because she feared stopping would somehow change who she was. She didn't have to choose between the mountain and everything beyond it. She could return for a season, learn something new, leave again and carry that knowledge onto roads Marta might never walk herself.

Her eyes burned unexpectedly, though the smile that appeared was warm despite its fragile edges. "Maybe I'll stay long enough for another lesson next time."

Marta didn't seize upon the promise or ask when that next time would be. Her thumb simply brushed once across Rin's hand as her smile deepened. "Maybe you will. And if you don't, there'll be another time after that."

The certainty in it nearly hurt. Rin squeezed Marta's hand again, letting herself believe there would always be another return, another meal around this table and another afternoon beneath trees she had once lacked the patience to hear. She knew better than to believe anything lasted forever, especially after everything her people had endured, but perhaps home didn't require forever. Perhaps it only required people who kept opening the door while they were there to do it.

Chek leaned back, his attention returning toward Muad as though finally remembering who had asked the question that had opened several thousand years of family history. "There's your answer. Marta married into the Taals. I'm one of the old roots Corren comes from, and somewhere along the way the family got too damned big for either of us to keep track of every branch. That's exactly how it should be. We gave them somewhere to start, and they decided where to go."

Rin remained quiet for a while after that, her hand still held within Marta's as she looked between the two ancient Zorren who had occupied some corner of her life for as long as she could remember. She didn't know whether thinking of them as ancestors would ever feel natural. Ancestors belonged to stories, carved names and memories passed down by people who had never known them. Chek had put food on her plate, complained when she touched things in his forge and repaired whatever she inevitably brought home broken. Marta had taught her beneath the trees, held her when childhood hurts had seemed enormous and watched without complaint as the road slowly became too powerful for Rin to ignore.

They weren't relics of her family's past. They were living pieces of it, people who had watched generations arrive, grow old and disappear while somehow finding enough love left to welcome another child into their lives without holding back because they knew how the story would eventually end. The thought made Rin look at Marta differently, wondering how many little hands hers had once held and how many had eventually grown old within them. Somehow, after all that loss, those same hands had still reached for Rin.

Her fingers curled more securely around Marta's.

Perhaps that was the part of the Taal inheritance Rin understood best. It wasn't the forge, and it wasn't even the Wilder traditions waiting for her should she ever decide to learn them. It was the freedom to go without being loved less for leaving, and the certainty that coming home never meant admitting she had been wrong to leave in the first place.

For the first time, Rin understood that carrying her family forward didn't require becoming the people who had come before her. She could love the forge without ever becoming a smith, learn from Marta without following every Wilder path and carry the Taal name without allowing it to decide the shape of her life. Thousands of years of family history stood behind her, but none of it demanded that she walk backward.

It simply meant there would always be roots beneath her, however far the road carried her away.

Muad Dib

 

[Muad Dib]

It was one of those few times he wished he had thought more and spoken less. The pause carried a weight that extended as the three Zorren looked between themselves. And then, slowly, the story came out. Generations passing, family lines stretching forth like the roots of an ancient tree. Branches spread forth, and new limbs came into being. And near the origin of the many descendants lay Marta and Chek, beings with lifespans that entered mythical territory while remaining firmly in the present. Their love and caring touched so many lives it was impossible to follow all the ripples their lives had created. Awe-inspiring.

Muad thought of Corren, and he tried to imagine him next to Chek and Marta. He certainly didn't inherit Chek's height, but the size of his shoulders and the strength of the smaller man was reflected within Corren. Perhaps Marta was the source of his height. Or another somewhere along the distant lineage. For a moment he considered exactly how many descendants they had. And the number was truly mind-boggling. Thousands. Maybe tens of thousands. And yet the couple was quiet and humble, opinionated and with strong personalities. He smiled as he watched Rin follow their lines of conversation, finding that her old teachers and friends who were like family were even more than what she had thought. They were her family in sentiment, through choice, and by blood.

As they spoke of guiding without forcing paths upon their progeny, Muad remembered what Chek said. You plant them. You ensure they have strong roots, but you let them branch off where they will. If he took nothing away from his encounter with the older Zorren, it was that. All you can do is nurture and guide. The choices laid before others were theirs to make. All you could do was watch, be there for them when they returned, and never judge—a powerful truth.

He felt the words Rin thought, but didn't utter. The family they chose. It struck home. He was a prodigal of so many places; he considered himself a nomad. Then, through a series of events, he became a Mandalorian. Cin vhetin. Clean slate. And then he was given an opportunity to choose his own family. Not through blood. Or responsibilities. Through choice. And slowly his aliit grew as he found others. Not because custom demanded it. Just a simple choice, an announcement that they were now connected.

"Quite a few questionable choices along the way."

"I was having a moment."

"Still having it."

Muad's eyes narrowed as he smirked. "I'm probably one of those questionable moments." As the conversation continued, he was just happy to take part in it. The roots, the open paths, the many roads, the welcome, and always having a home to return to with people who loved you. That was what she had. And he was happy for her. For all of them. It was as it should be. Even the offer for more training was given, if and when she wanted it. That was what family does. The women's hands were still together in the center of the table, and he watched as Marta brushed her thumb across Rin's skin, and he felt the emotion in the gesture. One he knew well, for Rin had done the same many times to his own hand. Traditions, mannerisms, and mutual love passed through the generations, as they should.

"Aliit ori'shya tal'din." His smile widened at the murmured words. "Family is more than blood—a central tenet to the mando'ade. Many of our clans are not born through blood but chosen by adoption. And the reason my own clan is as large as it is." Muad looked between the three with a small smile. "The mando'ade gave me a clean slate when I joined them. I had no planet I called home. Manda'yaim became a place, just like many others in my life. But it wasn't home. And when I was chosen as an alor, that was what I wanted for my clan. A home. A place they could have roots before branching into the stars. Somewhere they could always come back to, with people who accepted them for what they were. Aliit, family."

The fact that he never called a place home didn't come up in his speech. But he made sure his people did. It wasn't until the first ride in the speeder, when Rin pressed her fist to his chest, that he understood that for some, home would never be a static place. Home rested with the people he cared for. She had a home to return to, and he was grateful. Many of his children were lost, without a tether to people or a place. He became a Marta and Chek for them, despite being a nomad. It wasn't a regret. It was what it was.

Rin Taal

 

[Rin Taal]

Rin remained quiet while Muad spoke, but the silence had nothing to do with uncertainty. There was simply too much gathered around that table for her to want to interrupt it. She could still feel Marta's hand around hers, the older woman's thumb occasionally brushing across her skin with an affection so familiar that Rin wondered how she had never noticed the echo of it in herself. She had done the same thing with Muad countless times without thinking about where the gesture might have come from. Now, with everything Chek had revealed, those tiny similarities seemed to be appearing everywhere. Not because Marta and Chek had secretly shaped every piece of her, but because people left traces upon the ones they loved. Habits passed between families as readily as stories, recipes, songs and names, until sometimes it became impossible to remember who had started them in the first place.

The discovery that Chek's blood existed somewhere far back in Corren's ancestry should have changed something. Rin kept waiting for it to feel enormous, for the knowledge to rearrange memories of sitting near the forge as a child or following Marta through the wilds while being taught to listen to things most people never heard. Instead, what struck her most deeply was how little the truth actually changed. Chek had been family yesterday. Marta had been family yesterday. They had been family when Rin thought the only things connecting them were affection, choice, and more years of shared history than she could easily count. Blood gave her another piece of herself, and she treasured it for that reason, but it hadn't created anything that wasn't already there. If anything, it only made her look at the two of them with a warmer sort of wonder, because apparently there were still entire pieces of these people she had known all her life waiting for her to discover.

Perhaps that was why Muad's words reached her so deeply when he spoke of his own family. Rin didn't understand the Mando'a when it first left his lips, but she didn't need to understand the language to hear the weight behind it. Aliit ori'shya tal'din. Family was more than blood. Once he translated it, the meaning settled almost perfectly alongside everything Chek had been telling them about roots and branches, about children who wandered and the home that waited whenever they found their way back. Muad had been given a clean slate by the Mandalorians, and when the opportunity came to build something of his own, he had chosen to give his clan the very thing Marta and Chek had spent thousands of years giving the generations that followed them. Somewhere they could belong without being trapped by belonging.

Chek's expression had changed almost imperceptibly when Muad first spoke the Mando'a phrase. Rin noticed the slight lift of his brows and the slow warmth spreading beneath that enormous beard, but she didn't understand why until he leaned back in his chair and answered Muad in the same language. "Ni kar'tayl gar darasuum, vod." The unfamiliar words rolled easily from him, without hesitation or the awkward care of someone repeating something memorized long ago, and before Rin could do more than blink, Marta's smile deepened as she joined him. "Bal aliit ori'shya tal'din. Ibic cuyir te ara."

For several seconds, Rin simply stared.

Her golden eyes moved from Chek to Marta, then to Muad before slowly returning to the older couple. Three people sat around the table with her, and somehow she had become the only one who didn't understand what had just been said. The realization was so absurd that the emotion gathering inside her broke beneath an incredulous little laugh. "Excuse me. You both speak Mando'a?" Marta's expression immediately became far too innocent to be trusted, while Chek's beard shifted around the beginnings of a grin. Rin narrowed her eyes at them. "How long have you known Mando'a?"

"Long enough," Chek answered, which was exactly the sort of answer Rin should have expected from him.

Marta gave her husband a sidelong look. "A very long time."

"That is not better." Rin looked between them again, amusement warming her expression even as she attempted to appear offended. There had been countless opportunities over the years for either of them to mention that particular skill, and somehow it had never happened. Then again, Rin was rapidly discovering that several lifetimes could pass before Marta or Chek volunteered information nobody had thought to ask for. "I'm beginning to feel like I'm being deliberately left out of the conversation now."

Chek regarded her for a moment before giving the most obvious answer imaginable. "You can learn."

The suggestion earned him a long look. Marta had already offered to continue Rin's Wilder training whenever she wished. Chek had revealed an entire branch of family history she hadn't known existed, along with the realization that his influence upon Corren and the forge reached considerably deeper than Rin had ever understood. Between them, the pair had spent most of the day demonstrating just how much knowledge remained hidden inside two people she had foolishly believed she knew exceptionally well, and now Chek apparently intended to add another language to the growing list of things she could learn if she stayed still long enough.

Rin sighed, though the sound dissolved into a quiet laugh before it could carry any genuine complaint. "I think I've been offered enough teaching for one day." Her fingers curled more securely around Marta's hand as she glanced toward Chek, already knowing she was going to lose the argument before she even finished making it. Curiosity had always been one of Rin's more exploitable weaknesses, and everyone at this table knew it. Her resistance lasted perhaps another heartbeat before a smile tugged at her mouth. "But yes, I want to learn."

Chek's satisfaction was immediate. "Thought so. I'll start with the insults."

That drew a brighter laugh from Rin, and she shook her head at him. "You know me far too well. That might actually move it higher on the list." Marta murmured something about being a terrible influence, which only earned a grunt from Chek that suggested he considered the accusation a compliment. The teasing wrapped itself naturally around the heavier revelations of the day, and Rin felt some of the tightness inside her ease beneath it. This was what she knew. This was what family felt like. Truths could shake the ground beneath her feet, and somehow there was still room at the table for laughter afterward.

When her attention returned to Muad, however, the warmth inside her changed. What he had said about his clan had settled far more deeply than she had initially allowed herself to examine. He had spoken of giving them roots, of building somewhere they could always return, and Rin understood that kind of home so intimately that for a moment she could almost smell Corren's forge and hear the notes of Maeve's lap harp drifting through the house. She had spent much of her life leaving Veradune. The road had called to her long before she was old enough to understand why, and her family had never demanded that she choose between loving them and answering it. Her mother worried, her father found some practical thing that needed checking before every departure, her sisters could irritate her within minutes of arriving home, but no one had ever made love conditional upon staying. She could wander because home remained behind her, not as a chain pulling her backward, but as something steady enough that distance couldn't diminish it.

Muad had spent centuries giving other people exactly that.

The realization tightened something around Rin's heart. He spoke of planets he had lived upon, peoples who had accepted him, clans and houses and children gathered through choice rather than blood. His life seemed impossibly full when measured by the people inside it, and yet he had quietly admitted that none of those places had truly become home. He had been given a clean slate and used it to make certain the people who followed him possessed something he apparently never demanded for himself. There was something achingly generous about that, and Rin found herself studying him with a tenderness she didn't bother trying to hide.

There was no pity in it. Rin understood wandering too well to mistake a life spent moving for a life spent lost. Muad had survived longer than entire civilizations and certainly didn't need her deciding there was something broken about the way he'd chosen to live. Yet she couldn't stop herself from wanting something for him. Not something she could provide or promise after knowing him for such a short span of his enormous life, and certainly not something she had any right to define for him. She simply wanted him to know the same certainty he had given his clan. Somewhere he didn't have to lead or save anyone. Somewhere he could arrive without needing a reason and leave without turning departure into farewell. Somewhere that remained his whether he returned tomorrow or disappeared into the stars for a century.

Marta's thumb passed gently over Rin's hand again, drawing her attention away from thoughts that were beginning to wander dangerously close to places she wasn't ready to explore. Rin looked toward the older woman and found that familiar patience waiting there, warm rather than knowing, as though Marta had all the time in the galaxy to let Rin work through whatever was happening inside her without demanding to be told. The affection in it squeezed at Rin's heart in an entirely different way. "Don't start."

"I didn't say anything," Marta replied, and there was enough amusement in her voice to make Rin's ears twitch.

"You didn't have to. You have a look."

Marta laughed softly. "So do you."

Rin might have argued if Chek hadn't chosen that moment to add, "You get that from Corren."

Her eyes immediately shifted toward him. "Please don't tell me Papa got that from you too."

"Some of it."

Marta's laughter deepened as Rin stared at Chek in disbelief. "This is going to become unbearable. Every time Papa does something, you're going to tell me which ancestor started it." Chek's answer that he would only do so when he knew didn't reassure her in the slightest, particularly when Marta added that he usually knew. Rin couldn't maintain the glare she aimed at either of them. It dissolved into laughter, carrying with it some of the overwhelming emotion of discovering that the roots beneath her family reached into the lives of people who had already been part of her life for as long as she could remember.

Eventually her gaze returned to Muad, and his earlier comment about being one of her questionable choices surfaced again. Rin's smile softened immediately. "And before you become too pleased with yourself, you are absolutely one of the questionable choices." Her golden eyes stayed upon his, allowing the affection behind the teasing to remain unmistakable. "Possibly one of the most questionable I've made in a very long time."

Her hand finally slipped from Marta's, but only because Rin reached across the small distance toward Muad and took his instead. The movement happened without deliberation, as natural now as it had become to seek him whenever they sat near one another. Her fingers settled between his, and her thumb moved slowly across his skin before Rin realized exactly what she was doing. It was the same little gesture Marta had given her moments earlier, unconscious and tender, an affection expressed through touch because sometimes words were unnecessary.

Rin's eyes dropped toward their joined hands before lifting cautiously toward Marta.

The older woman was smiling.

"Not one word."

"I didn't say anything."

"You're doing it again."

The deep sound of Chek's chuckle joined Marta's softer laughter, and Rin shook her head, though she couldn't keep the smile from her own face. She was surrounded by people who knew her in different ways and across wildly different spans of time, and somehow Muad had found a place among them without anything feeling forced. He had walked into Marta and Chek's home as someone important to Rin, and instead of remaining outside the warmth of the family gathered there, he had offered a piece of himself that they understood immediately. Different language, different people, different traditions, yet the meaning underneath them was almost identical.

"I think your Mandalorians and my family might agree on more than either side would expect." Rin's thumb continued its slow path across Muad's hand while she looked between him and the older couple. "Chek was family before I knew there was any blood between us. Marta was too. Knowing this doesn't make me love either of them more. It just gives me another piece of the story."

She let the words settle for a moment, her gaze wandering around a table that seemed to hold an extraordinary amount of her life within it. Marta, who had taught her to hear the wilds and had just quietly reminded Rin that there was still so much more she could learn if she wanted it. Chek, whose influence had traveled through generations until it reached Corren and shaped parts of Rin's childhood without her ever knowing where they began. And Muad, who had arrived in her life through blood, danger, and spectacularly poor timing, only to sit here now speaking about family in words two people she loved understood without translation.

"Maybe that's what roots are supposed to be." Her voice softened, the teasing finally giving way to the emotion beneath it. "Not something that keeps you in one place. Just something strong enough that you can go as far as you need to and still know there's somewhere you can come back to."

Her fingers tightened gently around Muad's.

Rin had always possessed that certainty without realizing what a gift it was. She could leave because Veradune remained. She could wander because somewhere beyond all those roads were people who expected her to wander back eventually, people who wouldn't demand an apology when she did. Sitting beside a man who had spent centuries creating that same gift for others made her understand her own home differently, and perhaps understand Muad a little differently too.

She couldn't offer him answers to questions neither of them had asked yet. She couldn't promise where the strange road between them would lead, and after everything Marta and Chek had told them that day, Rin had no desire to rush ahead and pretend possibility was certainty. There were too many miles still waiting for them, too many choices neither had made.

But her hand remained warmly around his as she looked across at Marta and Chek, and something inside her felt wonderfully full.

Blood had revealed another root beneath her feet today, but it had not created the family gathered around this table. Choice had done that, over and over again, sometimes across thousands of years and sometimes across a span so short it should have been ridiculous.

Rin glanced toward Muad, her smile growing warmer as her thumb brushed his hand once more. Whatever else he might eventually become in her life, she knew one thing already.

She was very glad this particular questionable choice had found his way here.

Muad Dib

 

[Muad Dib]

"Mando'ad draar digu." Muad glanced beside him and smiled at Rin. "A Mandalorian never forgets." His smile turned into a toothy grin. "And you think knowing I'm the most questionable choice you've made in a long time will dissuade me from being pleased with myself? You don't know me well enough yet." It was said teasingly. But the reality was glaringly true. They had only known each other for days. And while they were filled with talks, actions, healing, battle, more talks, and emotion enough to fill a holodrama series, the fact remained: compared to Marta, Chek, Corren, Maeve, Asil, and countless others, he was the outsider looking in.

With every moment together, they became more of something. She was Rin Taal with a long list of descriptions he knew her to be, having experienced them, meeting family and friends, and every intimate moment that grew them closer. But at the root of who he was, he believed his first description of himself to be true. I am not a good man. In a thousand years, he had been things he didn't want to remember. He crossed lines of decency all in the name of the greater good. He was a killer. A life of choices that made him so. When he talked to Chek in the forge, part of his desire to take away her choice in the relationship was from his desire to keep her safe … from himself.

On Batuu, when he had shifted into the Doashim, his base instincts were to take what he, Muad Dib, wanted. Just because he hadn't done so did not mean he wasn't capable of it. Perhaps it was the dyad that stopped him. His statement about a monster living inside him did not describe the pact he had made all those years before. When he told her to remove her hand from his chest that first night, it wasn't because of all the things done to him. It was because he knew the monster that lived inside of him. He saw it every time he looked into the mirror.

Lifespans of good couldn't erase the bad.

Perhaps that was part of why he was a nomad. No one could get close enough to see the monster within. But if there were anybody he would be willing to risk getting close to, it was Rin. It still didn't make it easy or dispel the fear of being laid bare before another person. All the imperfections and darkness given to the other.

His mind mentally shook itself, snapping out of his reverie. Yet he knew a final thought before returning to the present. One day she would ask how he had lived a millennium.

The smile returned as he locked away his misgivings and turned back to the elder Zorren couple. "Any other surprises we should be ready for?" He smirked while his hand played with the empty glass before him. "Although, I am curious about the Wilder ceremony. What would happen if a non-Zorren went through it? And how did it begin? I've read about the three main gods of Veradune. Are they part of it?" His brow arched as his inquisitive nature began to come out. "And any ideas for the Rin Taal sightseeing tour?"
Rin Taal

 

[Rin Taal]

Rin's mouth curved at the Mando'a, although the meaning remained completely lost on her until Muad supplied the translation. Apparently Chek's offer to teach her was going to become necessary sooner rather than later if Muad intended to keep slipping the language into conversation whenever it suited him. The translation earned him a small roll of her golden eyes, but his satisfaction at being called questionable brought the smile back almost immediately. He was right about one thing, at least. She didn't know him well enough yet. A handful of days, however extraordinary and impossibly full those days had been, could hardly compare with people who had known her for decades or more than a century. There were still enormous pieces of Muad she hadn't seen, just as he had only begun discovering the countless pieces that made Rin who she was.

Oddly, she found herself looking forward to that rather than fearing it. Whatever existed between them didn't require her to pretend they already knew everything simply because the dyad sometimes made them feel impossibly close. There were stories she hadn't heard, places she hadn't seen and pieces of Muad's life he had only hinted at. Some would undoubtedly be difficult. She wasn't naive enough to believe a thousand years could be neatly compressed into amusing stories over meals and adventures across unfamiliar worlds. But she wanted the chance to know him rather than whatever version of him might be easiest to offer, just as she wanted him to know more of her than the wandering musician and caravan protector he'd stumbled across on Batuu. Her fingers shifted warmly around his beneath the table. "Then I suppose I'll have plenty of time to discover exactly how questionable that choice was." Her smile deepened as she regarded him. "Although I'm beginning to suspect telling you you're questionable only encourages you."

His question about further surprises made Rin turn a suspicious look upon Marta and Chek. After everything she'd learned today, she wasn't entirely convinced she wanted either of them answering. There were apparently entire branches of her family history that no one had ever thought worth mentioning, revelations about the dyad that had required several glasses of something she initially considered barely drinkable, and offers of training she hadn't anticipated receiving when she walked through their door. Before Rin could advise Muad against inviting the universe to provide anything else, however, his curiosity carried him toward the Trial and its relationship with the Wilder traditions.

Marta considered the questions before answering, her expression settling into the patient seriousness Rin remembered well from lessons that had begun with a simple question and somehow consumed an entire afternoon. "The Trial belongs to the Zorren," she explained. "It was made for us, shaped by us and passed through generations of our people. That doesn't mean another cannot walk through it. You could." Her eyes settled upon Muad. "But you would still be Muad when you came out the other side. It isn't something that turns another species into Zorren."

The faintest hint of amusement entered her expression. "So if you're hoping to acquire a permanent tail that way, you'll be disappointed."

Rin's laugh escaped before she could stop it, and she made no effort to hide her enjoyment of that particular answer. "There. One mystery solved."

Marta continued before the conversation could wander too far into tails again. The Trial could still challenge someone who wasn't Zorren, and whatever Muad encountered within it could leave its mark in the same way any profound experience could change the person who endured it. But there was a difference between being changed by something and becoming Zorren. As for where it had begun, even Marta was careful about presenting ancient belief as absolute fact. The three gods were woven deeply into Zorren history and into the traditions surrounding the Trial, but the practices of the Wilders had grown and changed over generations beyond counting. Different sects had carried different understandings, and even among the Wilders there had never been one perfectly uniform interpretation of every tradition.

"You could spend years asking Wilders about where one tradition began," Marta added, "and come away with more answers than when you started."

"That sounds familiar." Rin glanced between the older couple with a pointed look. "I've been sitting here for hours and somehow have more questions about my own family than I did when we arrived."

Chek gave her an entirely unapologetic smile. "Then you're learning."

Rin narrowed her eyes at him, but there was too much affection behind the expression for it to carry any real complaint. These two had been teaching her in one form or another since she was small, and apparently becoming an adult had never exempted her from the experience. Perhaps she didn't entirely want it to. There was something comforting about knowing she could live another century, wander half the galaxy and still return to this table to discover there were things Marta and Chek could teach her.

When Muad finally asked about ideas for his Rin Taal sightseeing tour, Marta barely needed a moment to consider her answer.

"The forest."

The humor in Rin's expression softened immediately. Her golden eyes moved toward Marta, and for a few quiet seconds neither woman needed to explain which forest she meant. Veradune held countless forests, but there was only one Marta would have chosen after everything they had spoken about that day. Rin's thumb moved slowly across the back of Muad's hand as memories stirred of old trees, quiet paths and generations resting beneath roots that had continued growing long after the people buried among them were gone.

She looked toward Muad and found herself hesitating before explaining, not because she didn't want him there, but because the suggestion felt unexpectedly intimate. "She means the family graveyard." Her voice had lost the teasing warmth of a moment before, becoming quieter without turning somber. "The Taal dead are buried in the forest. Generations of them, scattered beneath the trees."

After everything she had learned today, even that familiar place seemed different in her mind. Rin had grown up knowing the forest belonged to her family and understanding that the names among those graves were part of the long road that eventually led to her. Now that road stretched backward toward the two people sitting across from her in ways she had never fully understood. Chek's blood ran through one of those sprawling branches. Marta had joined the family by choice and become as much a part of its foundations as anyone born to it. The name itself had survived not because every generation inherited it automatically, but because some had chosen to carry it forward.

Marta watched her for a moment before looking toward Muad. "You've met some of the living branches. You should see where some of the others remain."

Something about the words tightened gently around Rin's heart. The graveyard had never been a place of fear for her. Death was present there, certainly, but so was memory. As a child, some of the graves had only been names attached to stories told by people far older than she was. As the years passed, names acquired faces, voices and memories of her own. A long life meant the forest inevitably changed for those who survived, and Rin knew it would continue changing for her.

Her fingers tightened around Muad's. "I'd like to take you there." She held his gaze for another moment, letting the sincerity of the offer stand without trying to soften it with humor. Muad had been welcomed into pieces of her family today that even she hadn't entirely understood before entering this house. Taking him among the generations that had come before felt like another step along the same road, one she found she wanted to share with him rather than guard from him.

Chek allowed the quiet to settle naturally before supplying his own answer to Muad's original question. "The lighthouse."

Rin's head turned toward him, and the warmth gathering around the graveyard conversation shifted almost immediately toward wary amusement. "The lighthouse?"

"The lighthouse," Chek repeated, his expression far too innocent.

Marta's smile told Rin there was a story attached, although thankfully not one terrible enough to make her consider withdrawing Muad's sightseeing privileges. Chek explained that when Rin had been younger, she'd heard someone describe the sunrise from the upper gallery of an old lighthouse along the coast. That alone had been enough. She decided she wanted to see it and, rather than waiting for someone else to accompany her, packed food, water, her lap harp and enough supplies for what she considered a perfectly manageable excursion.

"It was manageable."

"It was," Chek agreed easily. "That wasn't the problem."

The problem had appeared somewhere along the road when Rin found an injured animal. Whatever schedule she'd created for herself ceased to matter. She stopped, tended to it as well as she could and remained until she was convinced the creature could manage without her. By the time she finally reached the lighthouse, the sunrise she'd left home early enough to see was long gone.

Rin could remember the disappointment even now, although it had lasted perhaps a minute before practicality took over. "It had hurt its leg. I wasn't going to leave it just because the sun couldn't wait for me."

"And you missed the sunrise," Chek reminded her.

Rin's brows lifted. "There was another one the next morning."

Chek's laugh filled the space between them. "Exactly what you said then."

Instead of turning around, Rin had climbed the lighthouse anyway. She spent the remainder of the day exploring the cliffs and shoreline nearby, watched the sunset from above and eventually decided there was little point in going home when the thing she'd come to see would happen again in a matter of hours. The keeper had found her later with her lap harp resting across her legs, quietly playing while she waited through the darkness for the eastern horizon to brighten.

The memory came back in pieces as Chek spoke. Cold stone beneath her, salt carried on the wind, the stars slowly disappearing as night surrendered to morning. She remembered the music too, not the exact melody but the feeling of playing simply because there had been no one else awake to hear it. Rin's smile softened with the recollection until Marta added, "Your mother was considerably less charmed when she discovered where you'd gone."

Rin's ears lowered slightly. "Mama thought I'd fallen off a cliff."

"Your father pointed out that if you'd fallen off the cliff, someone would have heard you complaining all the way down," Chek added.

A laugh broke freely from Rin, warm enough that she had to lower her head for a moment. "That sounds exactly like Papa."

The story wasn't particularly embarrassing, and she suspected Chek had chosen it for precisely that reason. Muad had asked about seeing Veradune through her, and Chek had given him somewhere that held a piece of the girl she'd once been rather than simply another spectacular view. Rin found herself unexpectedly grateful for it. So much of today's conversation had reached backward through thousands of years of family history that there was something sweet about being reminded of one small morning from her own.

Chek turned his attention toward Muad. "Take her there. She'll tell you she's seen it before."

"I have seen it before." Rin's protest arrived immediately, though the smile ruining any attempt at seriousness followed just as quickly. Her gaze moved toward Muad and lingered there as she imagined returning to that gallery after so many years, this time with someone beside her. "But he isn't wrong. It's worth seeing. Sunrise especially."

Her thumb resumed its slow movement against Muad's hand while she considered the two places they'd been given. One held generations of her family beneath ancient trees. The other carried a memory of a much younger Rin sitting alone beneath the stars with a harp across her lap, stubbornly waiting for morning because she'd refused to abandon something injured along the road. Neither was a grand monument or famous destination, and perhaps that was exactly why she liked the suggestions.

Rin's golden eyes returned to Muad with a familiar spark of humor. "So apparently your Rin Taal sightseeing tour now includes dead relatives and a lighthouse where I once worried my mother half to death." She squeezed his hand, her smile warming as she glanced toward Marta and Chek. "And considering what these two have managed to reveal today, I think that's enough suggestions before they remember anything else."

Marta lifted her glass, entirely unrepentant. "The day's not over."

Rin stared at her for a long moment before slowly reaching for her own drink, the liquor that had tasted nearly intolerable at the beginning of the conversation now carrying a warmth she had reluctantly begun to appreciate.

"That is exactly what I was afraid you were going to say."

Muad Dib

 

[Muad Dib]

Muad's eyes turned to meet Marta's as she said the first destination. The forest. He had already learned that the forest was the final resting place of the Taal bloodline. But with Rin's new found knowledge, a new venture into the forest would benefit her as much as the virgin voyage for Muad. It wouldn't just be a normal trip into the woods but a pilgrimage into uncharted territory. It would speak newly to Rin and greet Muad with a history that surpassed his own.

He nodded in agreement. Even if it was a haunted forest with creatures that would try to steal their lives, he would have gladly followed her into the depths. But this excursion would be personal. The weight of the Taal bloodline would echo through the trees. There were times in his past where he had visited cemeteries and memorials to mixed reactions. On Drommund Kaas the spirits of the dead were usually less than pleasant. On Dathomir they could be benign or benevolent. And on Geonosis he had experienced spirits who were kind in their apparitions. Something told him, beneath the green canopy of the Taal forest, it would bring a sense of peace.

Then the story of the lighthouse began to unfold and he grinned as it progressed. He could easily picture a grown Rin pausing to help an injured animal on the trail. A glance toward her was filled with an expression of bemused wonder. The healer in her extended all the way back to when she was a young kid. Was there no time or future when she wouldn't devote herself to things that needed help? It was just one of the facets that he loved about the woman. And proof, even when she was small, she had her witchy skills. He smiled as the story continued. There was no arguing with her logic. With dawn coming in a few hours it seemed the best course of action. But he could imagine Maeve shifting from worry to grateful to frustrated and back again with her little daughter returned. And Corren, being pragmatic, expressed the logic behind his daughter's choices while standing behind his wife.

The image drew forth a chuckle as he shook his head. "So the forest and the lighthouse. I wonder what Maeve will think if we stay out all night to watch the dawn?" His eyes flashed mischievously as he winked at Rin. "I think I'd follow you anywhere, Rin." There was teasing in his words and yet there echoed a truth. He was attached, and he knew it. And he liked it. He gave Chek and Marta an appreciative nod. Rin wanted Muad to see Veradune. He wanted to see her home through her own eyes and experiences. And the two suggestions did both. While embarrassing stories were definitely fun, he wished to know more about who Rin was and what shaped her into a woman who had captured his heart. And the locations would certainly do just that.

Chek took the bottle and refilled all their glasses. Muad took another swig and turned his head slightly. The burn was noticeably less this time. He wasn't sure if he was growing immune to the burn, adapting the the flavor, or slowly finding the warmth a bit more palpable. Either way he gave a nod of thanks. Then his eyes cut sideways to Rin to echo Marta's sentiment. "The day isn't over yet."

His attention returned to the elder couple. "In what you have already shared today, why don't the two of you travel anymore? Does the wanderlust eventually get satisfied? And you did pique my interest. When did you learn the way of the mando'ade?"

Rin Taal

 

[Rin Taal]

Rin caught the look Muad sent her at the mention of staying at the lighthouse until dawn, and the corner of her mouth curled upward. She remembered that night far better than she remembered many things from childhood, though naturally Chek had chosen the version that made her sound considerably more sensible than she probably had been. There had been an injured creature, certainly, and she had refused to leave it. There had also been a young Zorren who had convinced herself that because she knew precisely where she was, nobody had any reason to worry. Maeve had disagreed rather spectacularly with that conclusion.

"Mother might be more forgiving now." Rin swirled the liquor in her glass before taking another drink, discovering with some surprise that the sharpness she'd initially disliked had begun to become something pleasant. The warmth remained after the burn, rich enough now that she could taste something beneath it instead of merely enduring it. Her golden eyes slid toward Muad over the rim. "Although if we disappear until sunrise, I'm not taking responsibility for explaining it to her." His admission that he would follow her anywhere softened the teasing in her expression. She didn't answer it directly, but the warmth in her gaze did. The forest and lighthouse had suddenly become more than places she wanted him to see. One belonged to a history she had only just learned was hers by blood as well as choice, while the other held a little piece of the girl she had once been. Taking Muad to either meant letting him farther into her life, and instead of finding that frightening, Rin realized she wanted it.

When Muad turned his questions toward Marta and Chek, Rin settled comfortably into listening. She had heard pieces of their lives over the years, but today had made it painfully clear that pieces was the important word. Thousands of years left a great deal of room for lives within lives, names that vanished from history and places that no longer existed except in memory. His question about whether their wanderlust had finally been satisfied drew a shared look between the old couple before Chek gave a quiet chuckle.

"We travel if we need to, lad," Chek said, his broad shoulders shifting as he leaned back in his chair. Age had done remarkably little to diminish the impression of strength about him, though there was an acceptance in his voice that hadn't been there when he'd spoken of younger years. "Never stopped wanting to see what lies over the next hill. You simply reach an age where wanting to see it isn't always reason enough to put your boots on and go."

Marta's smile deepened beside him. "And at our age, it becomes increasingly difficult to justify wandering off simply because we can. We're far from decrepit, before you get that idea, but we're not young like the two of you anymore." There was humor in the admission rather than regret as she lifted her glass toward Muad before taking another small drink.

Rin made a small sound into her own glass and glanced toward Marta. Being called young by someone who had lived thousands of years was technically reasonable, but it still sounded strange when Rin herself had watched more than a century and a half pass. Marta caught the look and smiled with the effortless confidence of someone who knew precisely what Rin was thinking, but Chek continued before she could protest.

"Need changes things. When the drums of war come haunting our door, we answer. Always have." The humor eased from Chek's expression without disappearing entirely, leaving something older beneath it. "If our family needs us, we go. If Veradune needs us, we go. If there's something only these old hands can do, I don't much care how comfortable the chair is."

"He complains about his knees afterward," Marta supplied, earning a wounded look from her husband.

"In private."

"Not nearly as privately as you think."

Rin's laughter slipped warmly into the space between them. There it was again, the thing she had been noticing throughout the day. Thousands of years had somehow failed to sand away the playfulness between Marta and Chek. Their bodies had aged, their journeys had become fewer, and their reasons for leaving home had changed, but they still found each other amusing. There was something almost painfully beautiful about that. Rin lowered her eyes to her drink for a moment, thinking of all the lives the pair had shared and all the versions of each other they must have known along the way.

Muad's second question changed Marta's expression. "The Mando'ade?" Her golden eyes settled upon him, and Rin recognized the distant quality that entered them a heartbeat before the Force moved. She had experienced enough of Marta's memories by now to know what was coming. The older woman's hand reached across the table and rested lightly over Muad's, and Rin felt the faint brush of power as memory ceased being something described and became something offered.

The mountain home disappeared, replaced for an instant by another sky and another age. Wind carried dust rather than the clean mountain air of Veradune, scraping across a frontier settlement built from stone, durasteel, and necessity. Beyond its walls stretched a harsh landscape broken by distant mountains, while above them hung the unmistakable silhouettes of Mandalorian ships. The memory shifted, and Marta stood considerably younger, though unmistakably herself, armor fitted over her body. Beskar caught the hard sunlight in worn planes rather than polished ones, scarred from use and painted with markings belonging to a clan whose name had been lost from common memory.

Chek stood beside her, enormous even by Mandalorian standards, his beskar'gam built around his frame rather than forcing him into a conventional shape. A helmet rested beneath one arm while figures surrounded them, warriors whose faces carried the easy familiarity of people who had stopped regarding the two Zorren as outsiders. Children darted between armored adults. Someone laughed beyond the edge of the memory. Another warrior struck Chek's shoulder plate with a gauntleted fist before receiving the same gesture in return, and amid all of it came words that had survived long after the people who had first spoken them were gone.

"Aliit ori'shya tal'din."

Family is more than blood.

The memory moved again. A helmet was placed into Marta's hands. Chek knelt while an older Mandalorian adjusted something along his armor. Meals were shared around long tables, patrols crossed frontier country, and damaged beskar was repaired beside a forge. Rin caught flashes of battles too, but they weren't what Marta lingered upon. The memory was about belonging, about two wanderers being accepted into something that had not begun with them and choosing, for a time, to call it theirs.

Then the faces began disappearing. Years folded into decades and decades into centuries as the clan grew smaller. Some died in battle. Others had children who scattered beneath different banners, married into other clans, or simply chose lives elsewhere. A banner Rin didn't recognize appeared one final time in Marta's memory, faded and carefully folded, before the vision loosened its hold and the mountain home slowly returned around them.

Marta's fingers remained over Muad's hand for another moment before withdrawing. There was sadness in her eyes, but it was the old kind, softened by enough time that gratitude had grown around the grief. "We were taken in," she said simply. "Long before most of the names you know today meant what they mean now. We lived among them for a time. Learned their language, wore their armor, fought beside them and buried some of them."

Chek's expression had quieted during the vision. "They called us family, so we became family." One thick finger tapped lightly against the table. "Clan's gone now. Not all the blood, perhaps, but the clan itself. Time does that. Banners change. Names disappear. People scatter." His eyes settled upon Muad with a warmth that seemed to recognize something they shared. "Doesn't mean what they gave us disappeared with them."

Rin had gone very still. She knew Marta and Chek had traveled. She knew they had fought wars, crossed worlds, and lived entire lives before even her grandparents' grandparents had existed. Yet seeing them in beskar'gam had struck her differently than hearing another story. She found herself looking at Chek as though some new piece had been added to a picture she'd known all her life.

"You two really have been everything."

"Hardly," Marta replied with a soft laugh.

"I'm beginning to question that." Rin took another drink, and this time the liquor went down with barely a wince at all. The warmth blossoming through her chest was becoming genuinely pleasant now, enough that she looked down at the glass afterward with mild suspicion. "I think I'm starting to like this."

Chek looked entirely too pleased, and Rin pointed at him before he could say anything. "Don't." That only made Marta laugh again, and Rin found herself smiling with her. The afternoon had become something she hadn't expected when she'd followed Muad up the mountain. She had come intending to introduce him to two people she loved, perhaps show him the forge and let him hear a few stories. Instead, she had discovered another piece of her own family, been offered more teaching than she could possibly absorb in one day, and watched Muad find strange points of connection with people who had helped shape her long before he'd ever entered her life.

Her gaze settled briefly on him as she thought of the forest and the lighthouse, two more places she would show him when they had the time and two more pieces of herself she was willing to place into his hands. Rin wasn't certain where their road ultimately led, but she was beginning to understand that she didn't merely want Muad beside her for the exciting parts of it. She wanted him to know the quieter things too. The old stories. The people she loved. The places where she'd once been a little girl who stayed out all night because leaving an injured creature alone had seemed unthinkable. For someone she'd known such a short time, she was already giving him an astonishing amount of herself, and strangely, that thought made her smile rather than retreat.

Muad Dib

 

[Muad Dib]

The grin on his face was entirely too amused. "So that means you want me to explain to Maeve why we didn't return until the next morning. Have you forgotten how well I explain things? Just ask Chek." His grin grew wider as his point was made. He would do it, but he feared one day Rin would die of embarrassment. Then he'd have to use the dyad to bring her back. A suggestive wink was tossed her way before he turned as Marta and Chek answered his question before sharing more memories.

He was swept away to new planets and landscapes. Then a familiar mountain range in the background called to Muad, and he instantly knew they were on Manda'yaim. When the memories unfolded, he watched the clan grow smaller and smaller until they were all that remained. Only a banner with the clan's sigil remained. Other than memory. He felt the heaviness of their memories even as the images retreated. His eyes closed as faces and armor flashed through his own memories.

"Nu kyr'adyc, shi taab'echaaj'la. Ni su'cuyi, gar kyr'adyc, ni partayli, gar darasuum. I have lost allies, friends, and family in the clans too. Watched as whole lines have died. Entire clans wiped out because of war." He took his glass and tipped it back as he silently recited a litany of names. It was one thing to lose people to time and old age. Something completely wrong to lose them to battle. Especially when many of the wars were unnecessary, the empty glass settled on the top again while he turned shadowed eyes toward Rin.

"Not gone, merely marching far away. I'm still alive, but you are dead. I remember you, so you are eternal." His smile was filled with melancholy. There were hundreds of vode gone. Hundreds of warriors with families that never came home, with the drums of war sounding. When the Mand'alor called the banners and the clans, it was expected, no, demanded that they answer—one of the six tenets of the resol'nare. And when they had a good Mand'alor, it was easy to answer. He wasn't so sure of the current one.

Muad had known his father, considered the man a brother. Their clans had even intermarried. But Muad knew there was darkness in Isley Verd, known as Metus. It didn't matter then. They were all stained with blood and tainted in darkness. And what they did made the galaxy a better place. Now his son, Aether, ruled the mando'ade. And Muad did not know how he felt about the youth. The most recent outing had the mando'ade confirming the new Hapan royal figure. And at the same time, the mando'ade worked with Sith to destroy a Jedi temple and kill everyone—master, knight, and youngling alike.

The images of battle within a temple flashed in his mind. Fallen Jedi from children to ancient beings strewn along the halls, dead eyes staring vacantly. And Muad Dib answered the call of his Mand'alor and walked the halls and corridors.

He blinked away the memories and visions of death. "The worst part of a long life isn't watching those you care for die. It's seeing their lives snuffed out by the trivial, the unimportant, or the commands of people who should never have been in charge. It's the waste of a life cut short. It can haunt."

He grinned at Chek, then looked at his glass, feigning shock that it sat empty. He shook the morbid reverie away and gently squeezed Rin's hand. "I'd be honored to walk in the forest, remembering those who have gone before. Then a sunrise sounds nice."

Rin Taal

 

[Rin Taal]

The laughter that escaped Rin at Muad's answer came easily, although she gave him a look over the rim of her glass that suggested he had just made an excellent argument against himself. She didn't need to ask Chek how well Muad explained things. She had been sitting right there that morning when he'd taken it upon himself to explain to her family that the two of them had slept together, and Rin had already learned precisely how dangerous an innocent truth could become once Muad Dib started adding context.

"Oh, I remember exactly how well you explain things." The warmth in her golden eyes ruined any attempt at severity, particularly when his suggestive wink brought a little more color into the tips of her ears. She pointed lightly toward him with her glass. "Which is why, if we stay at the lighthouse until sunrise, I will explain it to my mother. You are going to smile, agree with whatever I say and provide absolutely no additional details." There was no real concern behind the declaration. Maeve knew her daughter well enough that Rin doubted an overnight stay at the lighthouse would cause anything approaching the worry it once had, particularly when Rin was no longer a little girl who had wandered off alone. Still, the thought of Muad standing in front of her mother and enthusiastically explaining why the two of them had spent an entire night together was enough to make Rin take another drink. "Consider it an exercise in restraint."

Marta's laughter joined hers, but the humor faded naturally as Muad answered the memories she had shared. His first words came in Mando'a, and Rin glanced between the three of them with the familiar realization that she had once again become the only person at the table who didn't understand what was being said. She caught none of the words, but she didn't need language to recognize remembrance. It lived in the way Muad's expression changed and in the stillness that settled over Marta and Chek as people separated by centuries of experience nevertheless found themselves standing on familiar ground.

Chek lifted his glass toward Muad. "Nu kyr'adyc, shi taab'echaaj'la." Marta's followed a heartbeat later, her expression carrying the quiet weight of far too many names remembered across far too many years. "Ni su'cuyi, gar kyr'adyc, ni partayli, gar darasuum."

Rin lifted her own glass with them despite having absolutely no idea what she had just joined. Fortunately, Muad translated the words soon afterward, and understanding settled over her as he spoke of those who were not gone, merely marching far away, and those who remained eternal because someone still carried their memory. Her gaze lowered briefly to the dark red liquid in her glass. It wasn't so different from what Marta and Chek had spent the afternoon showing them. People disappeared. Homes vanished, banners fell, families branched apart and entire cultures could become something different from what they had once been, but memory carried pieces of them forward. Perhaps that was part of what a long life eventually became: carrying enough pieces of the people who had touched yours that some small part of them continued walking beside you.

The images that followed through the dyad were harder. Rin didn't chase them, because she had already learned that bonds sometimes offered things that hadn't been intentionally shared, and there were places inside Muad she wouldn't enter simply because a door had momentarily opened. Yet flashes reached her regardless. Corridors. Bodies. Armor. Jedi. Some heartbreakingly young. The grief in Muad's words afterward gave those fragments enough context that Rin's fingers curled more firmly around his when he squeezed her hand. A thousand years could leave someone with an impossible number of ghosts, and she was beginning to understand that Muad carried more than most.

Marta's expression had grown solemn as she listened. "A long life gives you more time to remember," she said quietly. "It doesn't always give you more answers for why something had to happen."

"No," Chek agreed, looking into his glass. "And sometimes there wasn't a reason worth the life that paid for it."

There was no attempt to soften that truth, and Rin understood it too well herself, even if her years had accumulated nowhere near the number of losses sitting around this table. She brushed her thumb slowly over Muad's hand, offering nothing grander than her presence. His admission that unnecessary deaths haunted him wasn't something she could fix, and she suspected trying would diminish the very lives he was mourning. Sometimes remembering was supposed to hurt. Sometimes the pain was part of refusing to allow a person to become nothing more than a name spoken once and forgotten.

The silence might have remained heavy considerably longer if Chek hadn't looked toward Muad's empty glass. His eyes narrowed slightly, then shifted toward the bottle before a slow, deeply suspicious smile appeared beneath his beard. Rin knew that expression. She had seen it on him shortly before being challenged to things at various points throughout her childhood, and the sight immediately made her straighten with interest.

"I dare you to stand, lad." Chek gestured toward the door with one large hand, his solemnity abruptly replaced by something much more dangerous. "Walk to the door and back."

Rin's eyebrows rose before her gaze dropped toward Muad's empty glass and then her own. She had stopped counting exactly how many times Chek had refilled them, which suddenly seemed like information she probably should have been tracking. The liquor had settled into a comfortable warmth in her stomach, its flavor becoming more pleasant with each glass until she was no longer merely tolerating it. Zorren physiology tended to be frustratingly efficient about such things, requiring considerably more alcohol than it took for most humans before the effects became particularly noticeable, but individual tolerance still mattered and Chek's particular creation was hardly a mild table wine.

Marta looked at her husband, then at Muad, and her mouth slowly curved. "Oh, now that's hardly fair."

"Never said it was."

Rin leaned forward slightly, golden eyes moving from Chek to Muad as the realization made her smile widen. "Wait. How much have you been giving him?"

"The same amount I've been giving you."

That answer made Rin look down at her glass again before a soft laugh escaped her. She couldn't decide whether she should feel guilty or become invested in the experiment, but Chek had already reached for the bottle. Apparently there would be no mercy either way. He refilled Muad's glass first, then Marta's and Rin's before finally pouring his own, returning the bottle to the center of the table with the satisfaction of a man who had just arranged everything precisely as he wanted it.

"After your walk," Chek clarified, lifting his glass but making no move to drink yet. "Wouldn't want to interfere with the integrity of the test."

Marta laughed warmly and lifted hers as well. "Now you care about integrity?"

"Deeply."

Rin shook her head as she raised her freshly filled glass, the solemnity from only moments before having eased into something warmer without truly disappearing. That, perhaps, was another lesson hidden inside the afternoon. Marta and Chek could remember people dead for centuries and still laugh afterward. Grief didn't demand that every moment following it remain solemn, nor did laughter diminish the people who had been lost. Remembering the dead and enjoying the lives still gathered around the table weren't opposing things. If anything, after everything Marta and Chek had endured, their ability to still find reasons to laugh seemed like its own quiet act of defiance.

Chek turned his glass slightly toward Muad, the gesture becoming a toast. "Oya, vod."

Marta echoed him with a quieter warmth. "Oya."

Rin stared between them for half a second before lifting her own glass anyway. She had learned aliit earlier and retained precisely none of the rest of the language being casually exchanged around her. At least this time she knew from their expressions that nobody had suddenly declared war, but she was still grateful for Muad's earlier translation. One of these days she really was going to have to accept Chek's offer and learn Mando'a, if only so the three of them couldn't keep having conversations around her while she sat there trying to determine their meaning through tone and expressions.

"Whatever they just said, I'm going to assume I agree." Her gaze settled on Muad, amusement brightening her golden eyes as she nodded toward the door Chek had indicated. "Go on, then. Apparently you've been challenged." Rin settled more comfortably into her chair, glass held between both hands while she waited to see whether the alcohol had affected him nearly as little as it had the three Zorren. "And if you manage that, perhaps we'll work on keeping quiet while I explain things to my mother."

The forest and lighthouse remained waiting beyond this room, and Rin's expression softened when she remembered Muad's final words. Walking among the Taal dead with him felt different now that she knew how deep the roots beneath that forest truly ran, and that Marta and Chek belonged somewhere near the foundation of the family whose lives were remembered there. It would be more than sightseeing. Rin would be returning to a place she had known all her life carrying knowledge she'd never possessed before, while Muad would be entering it for the first time beside her. She found herself unexpectedly grateful for that. There was something comforting about the thought of discovering a new part of her own home while showing it to him.

The lighthouse promised something different afterward. It belonged to memories of a much younger Rin, to worry and stubbornness and an injured creature she had refused to abandon, but now she could imagine sitting there beside Muad while darkness slowly gave way to dawn. Perhaps they really would stay until sunrise. Perhaps Maeve would raise an eyebrow when they finally returned and Rin would have to make absolutely certain Muad remembered his promised silence. The possibility brought another quiet smile to her lips.

For now, however, Rin was perfectly content where she was, surrounded by people she loved, warmth from the liquor spreading pleasantly through her and Muad's hand still close enough to reach whenever she wanted it. The afternoon had moved between laughter and grief, old memories and new discoveries, and somehow none of those things felt out of place beside one another. She raised her glass toward Muad once more, the challenge sparkling openly in her golden eyes as she waited to discover whether Muad Dib could still walk in a straight line.

Muad Dib

 

[Muad Dib]

The smile stretched as Rin decided against Muad explaining anything to Maeve. The tips of her ears warmed, drawing his attention as his eyes flashed with humor. He knew exactly what his way with words did to a casual, innocent conversation. It was one of his many talents. A brow arched. "But just a moment ago you told me it was my responsibility to explain why I kept her daughter out all night ... If you wish, I'll be as silent as a ghost. And as you well know, I'm incredibly adept at all kinds of restraint." The innuendo floated between them as he shared a knowing smile as his eyes flickered to her neck. "I have absolutely no problem letting you choose the time and place my 'restraint' ceases to be mutually beneficial."

The somber mood that settled after his remarks was reinforced by Marta and Chek. They understood the loss that came with long lifespans. And they were intimately aware that sometimes there was no reason for the loss of life. His eyes closed again as he saw the many bodies of the Jedi younglings lying on the cold, marble halls of the temple. That particular mission wasn't somewhere in the distant past, smothered by decades or centuries. Instead, it was recent, just before Batuu. However, the dead that fell by his hand didn't haunt him. It was the dead that fell by the hands of his vode, upon the order of their Mand'alor. A man he had yet to meet. And he wasn't sure if he wanted to.

His eyes flickered from Chek to the bottle, to his newly refilled glass, and back to Chek. "Chek'ika, gar etyc shabuir." He cast a sideways glance at Marta as she echoed Chek's sentiments with oya. Then he turned to face Rin. "I'm sensing I was lured into a trap. Let's see how much the human can drink without passing out." He smirked as he turned back to Chek, who wore a very satisfied expression on his stern features. The challenge was to see if he could stand, walk in a straight line to the doorway, then make it back. Under normal circumstances, it would be relatively easy. If war was his first gift to the galaxy, draining bars of their liquors and ales was a close second. Nearly everywhere he went, he found himself in some establishment catering to an effort to kill his liver. Thus far he had been unsuccessful. From drinking the mash liquor in the treetops of Kashyyyk to purchasing an old Corellian distillery that produced the potent and smooth Whyren's Whiskey, to drinking the rotgut brew on battlefields across the galaxy, to sharing a mug of ne'tra gal or tihaar with vode, to the spice-infused Flameout capable of burning the tongue and seizing the throat as the body attempted to stop the ingestion, Muad was well versed in highly potent alcohols.

But as his mind went to the way his thoughts had begun to drift, Muad recognized that, perhaps, he had underestimated the way the old bottle and its contents had affected him. While he was seated, the effects were mildly benign. There was definitely warmth in his body, and he was certainly more relaxed than he had been before taking a seat. Exactly how far the ramifications of drinking multiple glasses of the liquor went, he wasn't sure. With a sigh, he offered an amused glare at their hosts and smirked, "Cheeky bastard." The gauntlet had been laid, and Muad, if he was anything, was a stubborn, mule-headed individual who never turned down a challenge. "Oya, ner vode."

He placed his hands on the top of the table and tested his balance before straightening his legs beneath him. That wasn't too bad. Knees didn't wobble, and the room didn't spin. That was nice to know. He arched a brow at Chek and tossed Marta a wink as he took his refilled glass and tossed it back. Then he turned and began walking toward the door. Toward was the operative word. With the first step, he realized that while his hands were planted on the table, there was still a modicum of stability lent to him. Now that he moved away from it, the room was less steady.

Determination made him continue his walk to the doorway, even if he didn't quite make it in a straight line. One hand rested against the doorframe of stone as he turned his head back to the three Zorren watching from the table—the table which seemed exceedingly farther away. Cold sweat appeared on his forehead as he forced the room to stop spinning through sheer force of willpower. It worked, to a degree. The room had ceased its spin, though now it felt as though he was standing on the deck of a ship while a storm raged all about. First a tilt to the left, then a tilt to the right. But he'd made it this far, and he wasn't quitting yet.

His return to the table was decidedly slower with smaller strides. His left knee almost buckled with one step, but he managed not to drop flat on his back. Instead, he paused as he forced the world to stop moving. Finally, he made it back to his seat, hands braced on the table as he sat harder than he intended. His eyes closed so he could control the motion of the room, but that was a mistake. Immediately, his eyes snapped open, and he wiped the sweat from his face before looking at Chek again. "You, sir, are an ori'shabuir." His glowing eyes turned to Marta with a lopsided smile. "I could have used several different things to negate the effects, but that would have been cheating, eh?"

His head shook slowly, side to side, before he pointed at his glass. "Well? Did I pass?"

Rin Taal

 

[Rin Taal]

Rin's eyes narrowed over the rim of her glass as Muad immediately found the flaw in her decree about Maeve. He was right, technically. She had told him only moments ago that explaining why he'd kept Maeve's daughter out all night ought to be his responsibility, but that had been before she'd remembered exactly what happened whenever Muad was entrusted with an explanation involving the two of them. She had already survived one breakfast with her family while he explained that they had slept together. She wasn't particularly interested in discovering how much worse he could make we stayed out together all night sound, especially when she could already imagine the expression that would slowly appear on her mother's face.

"I've reconsidered." Rin took another small drink as though that settled the matter completely, although the warmth climbing into the pointed tips of her ears made maintaining her dignity considerably harder. "I've heard you explain things to my family once already. I think I've earned the right to handle the next one myself." His promise to remain as silent as a ghost earned a skeptical lift of one brow, but the rest landed very differently. His gaze drifted toward her lower when he spoke of restraint, and the warmth in her ears immediately spread lower as memory supplied entirely too much context for what he meant.

Rin refused to look away. If anything, her golden eyes settled more firmly upon his while something warmer than embarrassment curled through her stomach. There was an invitation hidden beneath the innuendo, but more importantly, there was a choice. Her choice. Time and place, whenever she decided that restraint was no longer something she wanted from him. Only days ago the implication might have frightened her with everything it represented. Now it awakened something altogether different, something that left her pulse a little quicker even as she slowly lowered her glass. "I'll remember you said that." The answer was quiet and almost deceptively mild, but the look she gave him promised she absolutely would.

The warmth of that moment faded when Muad's thoughts turned somewhere darker. Rin felt the change before she understood any of it, the easy playfulness between them giving way beneath the sudden weight that settled through the dyad. She didn't reach after the images or try to make sense of what wasn't offered. There were things in Muad's past she knew only in fragments, and she was beginning to understand that some of those fragments were wounds rather than stories. Whatever he saw when his eyes closed belonged to him until he chose otherwise. Rin simply let her fingers move nearer his on the table until the side of her hand rested against his, offering contact without demanding it.

There was something painful in watching a man who had lived so long still carry losses recent enough to bleed. Marta and Chek understood that in a way Rin couldn't yet. She had lived longer than most humans ever would, but compared to the three people around her, she was still young enough that centuries remained something she imagined rather than remembered. She had lost people. She had buried people. Yet she hadn't accumulated the weight she had glimpsed in Marta's memories or heard beneath Chek's words, and she hadn't lived long enough to understand what it meant to remember entire generations after everyone else who knew their names had disappeared. Perhaps that was part of why the forest suddenly mattered so much to her. Memory was how people remained when time had taken everything else.

Then Chek decided the proper cure for melancholy was apparently to see whether Muad could still walk.

The Mando'a exchanged between them drew Rin's attention away from those heavier thoughts. She understood precisely none of Muad's first remark, although the expression on Chek's face suggested it hadn't been complimentary. Marta's answering oya didn't help matters. Rin stared from one to another with a slowly growing expression of betrayal. Somehow, during an afternoon that had begun with Chek taking Muad to the forge and Marta teaching both of them about Wilders, she had become the only person at the table who didn't speak the language currently being tossed around.

While Muad accused his hosts of deliberately trying to discover how much liquor a human could survive, Rin glanced toward Marta. The older woman's eyes found hers with the ease of someone who had known her since childhood, and Rin hesitated only briefly before reaching toward the familiar connection between them. There had been enough Mando'a around her for one afternoon, and if everyone else intended to keep using it, she was going to start collecting pieces for herself.

How do you say mine?

Marta's expression changed almost imperceptibly.

Rin immediately regretted allowing her eyes to flick toward Muad.

The warmth that came back through the connection carried considerably more amusement than the answer required. Ner.

Ner.

Rin turned the word over silently, storing both sound and meaning. It was wonderfully simple, which made it even more dangerous. Her ears warmed again when she realized Marta was still looking at her, and Rin gave the older woman a narrow-eyed warning that hadn't worked on Marta when Rin was a child and certainly wasn't going to start working now. She didn't explain why she'd asked. She didn't need to. Instead, she tucked the word somewhere private and returned her attention to Muad before Marta could make her regret the question any further.

Muad stood, and for the first few seconds Rin wondered whether Chek had badly miscalculated. He seemed steady enough while his hands remained planted against the table. Then he took his first unsupported steps toward the doorway, and the smile that had been threatening at the corners of Rin's mouth finally escaped.

She had seen Muad injured. She had seen him fight. She had watched him endure things that should have put anyone else on the ground, and somewhere along the way she had begun to build an image of a man who could simply force himself through almost anything through stubbornness alone. Apparently ancient Zorren liquor had finally found the limit of that particular talent. His route toward the doorway was technically successful, provided no one cared very much about the route he took to get there, and by the time his hand found the stone frame Rin had pressed her fingers against her lips in a futile attempt to contain her laughter.

"You're doing wonderfully."

The words dissolved at the edges beneath her laughter, and Rin's heart gave a small, ridiculous squeeze when Muad looked back toward them. There was something endearing about seeing him like this. Not wounded, not fighting, not carrying the fate of planets or the weight of a thousand years. Just Muad, stubbornly attempting to cross a room because Chek had dared him to do it while three Zorren watched. For all the extraordinary things surrounding him, this was somehow one of the moments that made him feel most real to her.

His return was slower. Rin's amusement softened the instant his knee nearly gave beneath him, and her body shifted forward before he recovered. She didn't rise. He was still moving under his own power and would probably never forgive any of them if they denied him the victory now. Still, she watched him more carefully until his hands finally reached the table and he dropped into his chair with considerably less grace than he'd begun the challenge.

The laughter returned, gentler now, carrying relief with it.

"You walked there and back, lad," Chek observed, his satisfaction almost unbearable. "Never said you had to look pretty doing it."

Marta's smile softened as she regarded Muad. "And you didn't cheat. I'd say that counts for something."

Rin looked at him for another moment, taking in the sheen of sweat across his forehead and the slight disorientation that remained behind those glowing eyes. The urge to tease him was still there, but something softer won first. She reached across the small distance between them and brushed a damp strand of hair away from his forehead, her fingertips lingering against his temple. The gesture was instinctive, almost thoughtless, and it struck her only afterward how naturally touching him had begun to come to her. Somewhere in these few impossible days, reaching for Muad had stopped requiring a decision.

"You passed."

Her hand slipped from his temple, but instead of withdrawing completely, she let it settle over his where it rested on the table. Her thumb moved slowly across his knuckles while her attention shifted toward Chek and, inevitably, the bottle. Mischief returned to her golden eyes as she considered the evidence before her. Muad was conscious. Mostly upright. He had even managed the entire journey without hitting the floor.

"I think he needs one more."

Chek's hand moved toward the bottle with such immediate enthusiasm that Rin laughed.

Marta intercepted him before his fingers reached it. "Or we could cut him off while he's still capable of remembering where he is."

Chek looked from his wife to Muad. "He's still talking."

"That is not evidence he needs another drink."

"It's evidence he can survive one."

Marta stared at him.

Chek's hand slowly retreated from the bottle.

Rin's laughter warmed until she had to lower her head, and for a few moments she simply sat there with Muad's hand beneath hers and the sound of Marta and Chek bickering affectionately across the table. Something about it reached unexpectedly deep. The afternoon had carried revelations about family, ancestry and thousands of years of lives woven together. They had spoken about war, the dead, choices, children and all the ways people found their way home again. Yet this felt every bit as important. Marta stopping Chek from poisoning their guest. Chek pretending another glass was perfectly reasonable. Muad sitting beside her, thoroughly defeated by alcohol after everything else he'd survived. Rin laughing until her cheeks and stomach hurt.

This was what she'd wanted Muad to see when she'd brought him into her life on Veradune. Not monuments or grand histories. This. The people. The warmth. The ridiculous little moments that became memories without anyone realizing it at the time.

Her thumb continued its slow path across Muad's knuckles as she looked at him, affection softening the amusement in her eyes. "I think Marta's right. You're done."

"If you are staying here tonight, the room at the end of the hall is made up," Marta added with the casual certainty of someone for whom the matter required no discussion. Her gaze moved to Rin. "Both of you are welcome. You know that."

Chek nodded as though there had never been any other possibility. "Speeder will still be there in the morning."

Something inside Rin warmed at the simple offer. Of course they would give them a room. She had slept beneath this roof before, had eaten at this table and learned from both of them. Their home had always possessed that quality. Doors opened. Food appeared. Beds were found. No one made a ceremony out of caring for you because they didn't believe it required one.

"Thank you." Her smile toward them carried far more than the two words could comfortably hold.

She turned back toward Muad and squeezed his hand. They didn't necessarily need to stay. The speeder was outside, and Rin had barely been touched by the liquor compared to him. She could drive them back whenever they wished. But suddenly she wasn't in much of a hurry. The mountain home was warm; part of the afternoon still stretched ahead of them, as well as the night, plus she liked having Muad here. Liked watching him become part of conversations that had existed long before he entered her life. Liked seeing Marta smile at him and Chek challenge him and knowing, somehow, that Muad was being folded into a place that had always mattered to her.

The realization made the little word Marta had given her return.

Ner.

Rin looked down at their joined hands. For one dangerous heartbeat, she almost let the word slip through the dyad, wanting to know how it would feel to call him that and have him understand exactly what she meant.

She stopped herself.

Not because it frightened her. That was the surprising part. She held it back because she wanted the first time to matter. She wanted to look into his eyes when she gave it to him and see the moment he understood. After everything that had happened between them, one small word shouldn't have carried so much weight, but somehow it did.

So Rin tucked ner carefully away for later and lifted her gaze toward Chek, her smile returning as she nodded toward the bottle.

"Besides, if you give him another one now, you'll ruin the experiment. We already know he can make it to the door." Her golden eyes gleamed as they returned to Muad. "Next time we need stairs."

Marta laughed. Chek looked as though Rin had just presented him with an excellent future challenge, and she immediately realized she might have made a terrible mistake.

But with Muad's hand warm beneath hers, Marta and Chek across the table and laughter filling the old mountain home, Rin couldn't bring herself to regret it.

Muad Dib

 

[Muad Dib]

"I don't think I've ever been accused of being pretty, or doing anything pretty. Now style … nope, that would be Derek. But what I lack in pretty and style I more than make up for with personality and flair." He winked at Rin as the trembling in his legs finally subsided. When her fingers brushed across his forehead, pushing a lock of his hair back, his eyes closed, and he released a silent sigh of contentment. At her declaration that he passed, he adopted a hurt expression. "You doubted?"

The smile removed any barb from his words as the pout on his features morphed back into humor. Marta and Chek argued over him having another drink, and he merely shrugged. "I've learned the line between 'could' and 'should' is very narrow. And it often moves." One thing that didn't come out was a request for another round. And while the mad man could hold his liquor, the wisdom of should he was a more prevalent voice.

As the conversation flowed around him, he found it intriguing. Although Rin and he had known one another for a short span of time, the invitation for them both to stay in the single room was more than he expected. Especially since he was a relative unknown, but then again, after a deep conversation, working alongside Chek, lunch, the attempted assassination of his liver, and finding out they shared more than the trifling amount in common, it made sense.

"I take it there isn't a set of bunk beds in there. I guess I'll have to make sure I remain a Paragon of Virtue, despite the wily temptations Rin is sure to throw at me." Even as he grinned, he wondered if his verbal blunder was par for the course or potentially enhanced by the liberal amount of alcohol he had consumed. He tried to correct the statement. "I didn't mean to imply she would try to take advantage of me, though she was the one who slipped into my bed barely clothed while I was sleeping clothes-free. I mean, not that I knew what she was planning … in just getting me hot, because she wanted skin-to-skin contact … I mean nothing happened last night other than, uh, just some torment that was very mutual and wanted … no that sounds worse … Rin, assistance? Maybe I should have another drink that way I can forget this entire conversation …"

His eyes were closed as he shook his head in exasperation. All he could do was squeeze her hand. "Or maybe we can try the stair test. Check, would you be so kind as to push me down them?" His smirk still held elements of sheepishness. Shoulders shrugged as he leaned back into the chair, another episode of Muad says the darndest things wrapping up.

After the fact, he looked at Chek and raised an eyebrow. "What about you, vod? Are you a Wilder attuned with the Force or just naturally ornery with a streak of humor a kilometer wide? And why didn't I see the two of you at the festival last night? Not that either of us stayed long; we were busy …" Mouth closed as he considered his next words. "Talking." The sideways glance at Rin almost shouted, look at me; I didn't make it worse this time.

"And now that Veradune is officially a member of the High Republic, what are your thoughts on the grand government we all fall under the umbrella of?" Muad was truly curious about their thoughts on the mighty Republic. Eyes flicked to Rin as an eyebrow included her in his question. Not to ask questions without being willing to add his input, he braced an arm against the counter, purely for comfort reasons and not because the room almost spun again.

"The Siskeen system hasn't really seen much difference between autonomy and being a member. Oh, the taxes are certainly not enjoyable, but I do understand their necessity. I guess my question is what does being a member of the Republic really profit us? We're far enough south that we don't bring much clout to a system that leans heavily on bloodlines, positions, and a form of showiness. We're several systems away from the threat of Sith or Mandalorian space. And all it seems to do is make us beholden to answer the call to war, a war that many of our leaders and prominent Jedi are clamoring for."

His shoulders shrugged again as he smiled wistfully. "If I'm being honest, the Republic gains a great many things while my system doesn't really get a quid pro quo."

Rin Taal

 

[Rin Taal]

Rin's attempt to look sympathetic at Muad's insistence that he possessed both personality and flair lasted only a moment before amusement won. The sight of him sitting there after his decidedly imperfect journey across the room made the claim considerably more entertaining, although there was a fondness beneath her smile that had very little to do with the alcohol. "Oh, I would never question the flair." Her fingers lingered briefly after brushing his hair away from his forehead, tracing lightly toward his temple before she withdrew her hand. "And I only doubted whether you would make it back without introducing yourself to the floor."

Marta's quiet laugh joined hers while Chek regarded Muad with the unmistakable satisfaction of a man whose liquor had thoroughly proven itself. Neither elder seemed inclined to press another glass upon him now that he had demonstrated exactly how much the bottle had affected him, and when Marta offered them the room for the night, Rin wasn't remotely surprised. Marta and Chek had always treated hospitality as something that didn't require discussion. It would never have occurred to either of them to send guests back down the mountain after drinking, particularly when there was plenty of room beneath their roof.

What Rin was not prepared for was Muad's response.

By the time he reached Paragon of Virtue, one of her brows had already climbed. When he progressed into wily temptations, her ears began warming, and somewhere around barely clothed, Rin closed her eyes and slowly covered her face with her free hand. There was an awful familiarity to the experience after what had happened with her family that morning, except this time Muad somehow managed to make each attempted correction worse than the statement preceding it. Skin-to-skin contact entered the explanation. Then torment. By the time he finally appealed directly to her for assistance, Rin lowered her hand just enough to stare at him through her fingers.

"No." Her answer emerged with remarkable composure considering the brilliant warmth in her ears. "I tried helping you explain us to my family this morning, and you still managed to tell them considerably more than they needed to know. You're on your own this time." The severity lasted perhaps two heartbeats before the corners of her mouth betrayed her, and she squeezed his hand in return as laughter finally escaped. "Although for the record, I wasn't planning anything. We were cold."

Chek's expression remained impressively grave throughout the entire disaster, though the twitch beneath his beard suggested he was enjoying Muad's suffering far too much to rescue him. "Stairs wouldn't teach you anything, lad. You'd only blame the drink."

"And we're not wasting good liquor helping you forget," Marta added, her smile considerably less restrained.

Rin's laughter warmed again as she leaned a little closer to Muad. "Besides, if you forgot it, I'd only remind you." The promise was delivered sweetly enough to make the threat considerably worse, but she spared him any further torment when his attention shifted back toward Chek. The question about whether the older Zorren was a Wilder earned the faintest lift of Chek's brow, followed by a glance toward Marta that seemed to contain an entire conversation accumulated over centuries.

"Naturally ornery," Marta answered before her husband could.

Chek gave her a flat look. "She's been saying that for centuries." His attention returned to Muad as one broad shoulder lifted. "I've touched the Force in my time, lad, and learned enough to respect what I don't know. Wilder isn't a title I'd claim for myself. That road wasn't mine."

Rin listened quietly, familiar with enough of Chek's history not to interrupt, though Muad's next question brought another smile when he asked why they hadn't been at the festival. Marta's expression immediately brightened with amusement. "The festival was larger than you saw, lad."

"We were there," Chek added. "You two simply weren't."

Rin's eyes narrowed slightly at the wording before she caught his meaning. Muad and Rin had only remained at the festival for a relatively short while before wandering away together, and Veradune's celebration had stretched well beyond the small portion they'd experienced. "We were there," she protested mildly, although her expression softened almost immediately. "Just apparently not long enough to find everyone else." Her gaze slid toward Muad when he carefully selected talking to describe what had occupied them afterward, and the obvious satisfaction in his sideways look made her lips twitch. Through the dyad came unmistakable amusement. I'm very proud of you.

The conversation changed with his question about the High Republic, and the humor around the table gradually settled into something more contemplative. Rin listened rather than immediately answering, her fingers remaining loosely intertwined with Muad's while he explained the position of Siskeen. She understood his concern. Membership in something as vast as the Republic could look very different from a distant system than it did from one of the worlds near its political heart, and the imbalance he described wasn't difficult to imagine. Taxes and obligations were immediate. The benefits of representation, security and collective strength could be considerably less tangible when danger wasn't presently sitting on one's doorstep.

Chek listened until Muad finished before leaning back in his chair. "We're not part of the leadership here, lad." There was no apology in the statement, merely a deliberate distinction between his opinion and the decisions made by those actually responsible for Veradune. "So don't mistake anything Marta or I say for the position of the people who chose this road for the planet."

Marta nodded her agreement. "Nor have we ever had much interest in deciding what everyone else ought to do. We've lived under enough governments to know that promises made when alliances are formed and what those alliances become aren't always the same thing." She rested her forearms lightly against the table, studying Muad with the same thoughtful warmth she'd carried through most of the afternoon. "But there is value in having neighbors. Trade. Aid when something goes wrong. People willing to answer when you call. Whether the Republic proves worth the obligations it asks of Veradune is something we'll learn with time."

"And if those neighbors call?" Chek asked rhetorically, his expression becoming more serious. "Then you decide what you're answering for. A banner isn't enough reason for me. Never has been." His eyes briefly dropped toward the table, perhaps remembering the Mandalorian clan that existed now only in memory, before returning to Muad. "Protecting people is a reason. Defending your home is a reason. Someone important deciding they want a war isn't."

Rin's thumb moved slowly over the back of Muad's hand as she considered where she stood within all of it. Unlike Marta and Chek, she hadn't watched governments rise and disappear over thousands of years, but she had lived long enough to know that the name over a world rarely mattered as much as what changed for the people beneath it. Veradune was still Veradune today. The forests hadn't changed because someone had formally declared the planet part of something larger, nor had the lives of most people suddenly transformed overnight.

"I think I'm somewhere between all three of you." Her gaze moved around the table before settling upon Muad. "I understand why Veradune joined. Being independent doesn't mean being untouched by what happens beyond our system, and having allies matters when something finally does reach us. But I don't think joining the Republic means Veradune should stop asking what it's receiving in return, either."

She paused, her expression growing more thoughtful as her tail curled comfortably around the leg of her chair. "And I certainly don't think belonging to something larger means every war it chooses automatically becomes ours. If someone threatened Veradune, I'd defend it. If people needed help, I'd answer if I could. But if someone expects me to fight simply because politicians somewhere decided there ought to be a war..." A faint crease appeared between her brows before she shook her head. "I'd need a much better reason than that."

Her gaze remained on Muad, and something gentler entered it as she remembered what he'd told them about Siskeen, the home he had deliberately created for people who needed somewhere to put down roots. "So maybe that's the question your system should keep asking. Not whether the Republic profits from having Siskeen, because it clearly does. Whether being part of it helps you protect what you built there without demanding you sacrifice it for somebody else's ambitions."

Rin's fingers tightened around his briefly before relaxing again. "And if you haven't found an answer yet, that doesn't necessarily mean there isn't one. It might simply mean the Republic still has something to prove to you."

Chek gave a low sound of agreement and reached toward his own glass rather than the bottle, while Marta settled comfortably beside him. None of them possessed the authority to answer Muad's question for Veradune, and Rin suspected that was precisely why the conversation interested her. Around this table there were no senators or governors deciding policy, only four people who had lived long enough, in three cases exceptionally long enough, to understand that governments could call themselves whatever they pleased. In the end, they were measured by what they did for the people who trusted them.

Muad Dib

 

[Muad Dib]

He listened silently as the elder Zorren couple spoke. Then Rin expressed her thoughts on the matter. Slowly he nodded. "I never wanted leadership. I was fine merely being part of it. Then things changed. Sometimes fast. Sometimes as slow as a valley being carved by a river. But I've learned that most people want to be told what to do. Where to go. How to live. And how to die. Most planets and species look to an alpha. That was how the first chieftains rose. How presidents, kings, and queens came to prominence. Corporations climbed to new heights; governments and empires stretched across the galaxy. And people continue to follow. But their ability to follow and their thoughts and opinions about what they want are two very different things. Too many civilizations don't listen to their people. Veradune is not one of them. Neither is Siskeen. Our leaders are proxies for our people. So what our people think has influence and power with our governments. And knowing your thoughts helps me to understand your leaders."

His fingers lightly tapped the glass as he offered a small smile. "When you look for something, and don't find it, how long should you keep looking for that reason? I've heard the platitudes, the promises, the contracts, and the goodwill intent from the Republic. But those are just words. Their actions speak an altogether different truth. We're only as important as our worth to them. And the moment we don't line up, we will be replaced. I've seen it. And so have you two." While he believed what he said, he understood the value of waiting for character to be revealed. "Politics has its place. Family and friends have theirs. And neighbors. And if you think you can get out of the Republic unscathed, you're wrong. The High Republic is a machine designed to use what it can, take what it wants, and expects you to toe the line. There's no changing these facts. That's what most governments do, regardless of the flag flown or the color of your lightsaber."

His grin turned sheepish as he tightened his hand around Rin's. "Sorry about that. I guess I get worked up a bit. I don't want my people to have to experience the things I did." He gave an apologetic nod to Chek and Marta before cocking his head. "So, exactly how widespread was the festival? While we didn't stay long... I assumed it was just a party of sorts, which would have allowed me to speak to some of the leaders. Was it more than that? And if so, what was the purpose?" Muad tilted his empty glass side to side before he smirked. "And if I've been cut off, can I get some water at least?" His mouth was beginning to feel like the Dune Sea, dry without the hint of moisture. As his gaze rested on the couple, he shrugged.

"Next time you get the itch to travel, or a little wanderlust, you should come to the Siskeen system. We've got a few forges that my ad'ika operate. They could use a drop of wisdom from an experienced hand. And I think a few places might interest you too, Marta. Possibly the same places that Rin would find entertaining. And it would give me the chance to return your hospitality. Not to mention for me to find an alcohol even stronger than this to subject you to." Humor colored his words, but there was sincerity beneath it. And as Rin predicted, he found himself liking the couple more than he anticipated.

It wasn't very often he found himself connecting with others. But their ease and matter-of-fact way of life, and how they viewed the galaxy, was something he appreciated. And then there was the way the couple interacted. Jokes and one-liners poked at each other. Centuries of different opinions and views gave them ideologies of their own. But the love and affection they shared couldn't be ignored or unseen. Each minuscule look or even brief touch communicated a depth of love that transcended time. Small gestures, like the forged flower, could easily be attributed to young love. The barest of glances spoke of such length that you knew they had been together for eons. And both made him look to Rin and want what they had with the woman sitting next to him—the passion of the new and the steadfastness of the old.

Rin Taal