For The Love Of Her Life:
As she finished dressing, Sabine was feeling very light and carefree. Possibly even a little giddy, and she was not one to be 'giddy'.
And it was all thanks to Ezra (wonderful goofball that he was).
She'd had no idea that falling into a romantic relationship could be so rewarding or soothing. None whatsoever. Perhaps she should have, considering that she had two loving examples of couples in both sets of her parental figureheads, but she'd been naïve and stupid, thinking that letting herself get attached to someone else would make her more vulnerable. Weak.
How wrong I was, she thought with a self-deprecating eye roll at herself in the mirror, strapping on her blaster belts with easy practice. Having a riduur to count on and stand by you makes one twice as strong, not the opposite.
And the sexy stuff is a definite bonus. Sabine smirked at her reflection as she used the comb from her utility belt to quickly pull the tangles out of her still damp hair. The dark roots were starting to show at the base of the cream dye, which made her frown in dismay. Because that meant it was time to choose a new hair colour and get another trim, but she knew there likely wouldn't be time for frivolous things like pampering her ego for at least a week or two. Kriff, I wish I didn't have to go do the Countess thing as well as rush right off to war. Staying in bed and playing house with Ezra sounds like a much better idea. Much.
"But we have to go to work first," she grumbled, all the little bubbles of happiness she'd been floating on bursting under her all at once and sending her plummeting back towards depressionville. Sabine sighed and tucked away the comb, glaring at her now frowning reflection before turning away to go find whatever bolt hole Ezra had disappeared into with every intention of dragging him out of it by a boot just for that crack about her parents getting frisky.
Wishing she could linger in the chastising of her cheeky brat of a riduur, but knowing there wasn't time, Sabine marched down the hallway to the next cabin with a closed door and banged on it with the side of her fist. "Ezra! Stop hiding! We have to…"
The door sliding open cut her off. A fully dressed Ezra poked his head out, arms braced on either side of the doorway, grinning and looking not one iota apologetic for putting images in her head that she really hadn't wanted to think about. "Udesii, cyar'ika, I'm ready."
Sabine huffed at being told to essentially 'chillax' in her own language. (When did he learn that word, anyway?) She grabbed his jacket, almost satisfied with the startled 'eep' he made as she pulled his stumbling form down the hallway towards the cockpit. "Don't 'udesii, cyar'ika' me, you nerfherder. You're lucky I'm not dragging you down the floor on your back right now with my whipcord."
Ezra dug his heels in, no longer half co-operating, forcing her to a stop as well thanks to his superior weight. She turned and glared at him.
"Hey!" he protested, raising his hands in surrender, which didn't do much to appease her. "It was just a little joke. What happened to the good mood I swear I felt you in a minute ago?"
Sabine crossed her arms over her chest and drummed the fingers of her right hand on her opposite bicep. "What happened is that reality smacked me over the head again and now I'm grumpy and I just want to tell the galaxy to go shab itself."
Ezra snorted in amusement, not perturbed by her mood swing at all. "Don't we all?" He then bravely stepped forward into her space, his hands cupping her upper arms and stopping her drumming fingers in a gentle motion. His caring expression and touch eased the anxiety and simmering grouchiness in her by a few degrees, somehow. "It's okay to be scared of what's coming for us. I know I am. And I'm not even the one who's going to be leading your clan."
"Thanks," she grumbled, heavy on the sarcasm.
He squeezed her arms a little tighter in admonishment. "No, I mean it. You've had a whole planet's worth of responsibility dumped on you with no warning, even if it is mostly empty of people, it's still your responsibility. And then there's Vader and the upcoming battle sitting over your head like a stormcloud as well. I get it. All I'm trying to say is that I have a pretty good idea how you're feeling and that it sucks, but I'm going to be right at your side for all of it. You won't be alone. Not as long as I can help it."
Sabine stared up into the most sincere, captivating, gem blue eyes ever created and felt herself trembling with the need to just fall into his arms and sob her eyes out yet again.
How did he do this to her every single time she was upset? How did he make her feel like the weakest Mando ever but stronger than she'd ever been at the same time? How did he always know the right words to say when it mattered?
And when the kark did he grow up into a responsible young man with the soul of a clan elder despite still being a teenager?
Was it a Jedi thing? Did Kanan teach him how to be so calm and rational and supportive? (Because Kanan had that same 'Wise Way Beyond His Years' aura going on.) Or was it just the constant struggle his life had been ever since his seventh birthday when his safe little world had been ripped away from him and torn into unsalvageable rags?
Sabine inhaled sharply as another alarming thought occurred to her while she stared up at Ezra.
What right do I have to pull him even further away from his world? A world he's fought so hard to defend? And is still fighting for.
If only there was some way to…
Maybe there is.
His brows furrowed in growing alarm as he rubbed her upper arms with caressing hands. "You're thinking awfully hard but shielding even harder. Do I even want to know?"
She blinked up at him, thoughts still whirling as plans and possibilities for the future were mulled over at lightning speed in her mind. Lothal needed help. Her clan – which she now ruled – consisted of many strong warriors. Ezra hated snow. Krownest was bound in snow. Lothal wasn't. And his planet had a serious Imp problem that could be eradicated with the help of said warriors and a better government in place. And Krownest… Krownest just didn't feel like home anymore. It hadn't for years. Not even when her mother and brother had been there with her. And now that they were gone? Sabine just couldn't see herself making the winter planet her long-term home whether she was the Countess Wren or not.
Perhaps it was time for Clan Wren to find a new home.
"Hmmm. Possibly. Just… Ideas. You know."
That mollified him. But only somewhat. He pulled her closer and kissed the top of her head, arms wrapping around her in a hug. "Well," he told her hair, "when you're ready to tell me, I'm here to listen." (Sooner than later would be good, cause I'm dying of curiosity, was left hanging unspoken in the air, but she got the point easily enough even without telepathic Jetti powers.)
"Thanks. I appreciate that." After rising up to press a kiss to his cheek, Sabine sank into the hard lines of his chest, wrapping her arms around his waist in return and resting her cheek on his shoulder, still amazed at how easy it was and right it felt to hug a person she used to think of as just an annoying boy she wouldn't let touch her with a three metre pole.
She sighed after taking a moment to just appreciate how comfortable and grounding this was. Because real life intruded yet again as her mental clock tick, tick, tick, ticked away. (Twenty-eight hours, more or less, before they were going to be engaged in the biggest space battle the galaxy had seen in years.)
And she was kind of amazed that no one was calling from the surface yet and demanding why they were just hovering in space.
Maybe whoever was on sentry duty was being nice. (Ha.) Or maybe her father had let them know to expect her and they'd been told to let her land in peace. (More likely.) Either way, she was grateful even if it was against procedure. What if she was actually an enemy in disguise? One who'd somehow managed to commandeer or copy Ezra's rather distinctively painted Maul-patterned Kom'rk? (Speaking of, she really needed to talk to him about giving it a new paint job. And a proper name. Soon. Very very soon.)
Sabine looked up at her riduur. How the shab did I end up married to him so quickly? "I wish we didn't have to, but we need to get moving. I'm amazing no one's hailed us yet or tried to shoot us down."
Ezra snorted in wry amusement, his arms tightening around her for a moment before he let her go, choosing instead to slide his hand down her arm and catch her hand and thread their fingers together as they mutually turned towards the cockpit again, passing through the command center. "I wish you were joking about that last part, but I know from traumatizing experience that you're not."
Sabine elbowed him in the side. "You weren't traumatized, you nerfherder. Take that back!"
Ezra laughed as they entered the cockpit, the doors hissing open automatically. "Okay, maybe only a little. Crashing still isn't my favourite thing, though, you know."
Sabine rolled her eyes as she pushed him into the pilot's seat. (It was his ship after all.) "I guess that's acceptable, considering that Hera isn't exactly prone to crashing things, so you aren't really familiar with it."
"Which I'm very glad for," Ezra said as he took control of the floating kom'rk and pointed it towards the nearly entirely white surface of Krownest. "Crashing is also expensive," he added teasingly, glancing at her sideways, the corner of his mouth twitching upwards.
"Hush," Sabine huffed, crossing her arms over her chest in a pretend sulk as they both remembered how she'd managed to have less than desirable landings with the Phantom not just once, but three separate times while on missions in the last year. (Stupid Imps!) And that wasn't even counting the last time when the Phantom Two was shot down right here on Krownest by her own idiot clan. Hera had taken the cost of the (minor!) damages to her precious ship out of Sabine's cut of their (already meager) earnings on all four occasions.
But…
Sabine straightened as she shot a smirk at Ezra. "At least I didn't lose an entire Phantom and get myself grounded for a month annnd demoted in rank."
"I earned it back!" Ezra protested as they descended through a thick cloud cover. He barely glanced at the control panel to ensure they were staying on course. (She really envied his Force enhanced sense of direction more often than not.) "And it was only two weeks of grounding by Hera. The last week was Kanan making me meditate with him for ten hours a day for ten days in a row!"
Sabine laughed at the memory of Ezra's epic moping fit when he'd first heard about his multi-leveled punishment (which he couldn't even serve at the same time just to make him learn his lesson a little better). "Your own fault for getting all Dark and angsty."
Ezra made a sound that could almost be called a legitimate growl as his fingers tightened around the controls until they creaked in protest. The hairs on her nape literally stood up as the mood abruptly shifted along with a sudden drop in temperature in the cockpit like they'd suddenly been tossed out in space. "You try not going Dark when you're an emotional wreck of a teenager thanks to your world going to hell via Vader and a Sith planet, and Maul being in your head when you try and sleep, and an evil holocron whispering promises of power all the other times, and the closest thing you have to a father retreating into himself and closing off your Force bond, and the girl you worshipped beyond anything thinking of you as nothing more than a pesky younger brother at best, and everyone is expecting you to work miracles on missions just because you have the Force, and it would have been so easy to just give in and be bad in the name of protecting what I loved, and no one who should have been there to stop me was even paying attention, caught up in their own grief – which was caused by me - and their missions, and, and…"
Ezra stopped spewing words as he ran out of air, sucking in an audible breath to recenter himself as he concentrated on landing his ship behind the Wren stronghold beside a neat line of similar ships (with much better paint jobs, thank you very much) and powering down the engines. The chill in the air disappeared as if it had never been. (Except the full-body goose-bumps she was covered in gave proof otherwise.)
Sabine stared at him, eyes wide, barely breathing from the shock of his revelations. He'd come so close to falling to the Dark for real and she hadn't realized. How had she not realized? How did no one else? She'd known he'd been in a weird place after the Malachor debacle that had taken Ahsoka and Kanan's sight, but he'd never talked about it to her. Not like this. She'd thought she'd understood, more or less, why he'd been acting like a cold, emotionless bastard, having her own share of traumatizing experiences that made her hate the galaxy and everyone in it, but she hadn't really gotten it, not like this. Not like a punch to the face that made the lights dance before her eyes before everything finally became clear. They'd almost lost him. Forever. No wonder Kanan spent so much time just meditating with him after the Reklam Station incident. "Ezra… Kriff. Why didn't you tell me before?"
Her precious, incredible, resilient, determined riduur stared straight out at the evergreen forest that surrounded the stronghold, a nearly invisible shrug his only answer and every muscle in his body looking clenched in place.
It broke her heart, because that tiny motion practically screamed with remembered loneliness and helplessness that he never should have had to feel.
She rose to her feet and stepped over to his chair, curling herself around his tense shoulders and resting her forehead against his temple. "I'm sorry. So sorry I wasn't there for you the way you needed me to be. Sorry it took me so long to understand my own feelings and work through ingrained issues that had nothing to do with you. Sorry our lives suck and are anything but ideal. But I promise you, Ezra, that I will do better from now on and that I'll do everything I can to make this galaxy – or at least our little corner of it – a better place for us and our families. Okay?"
Sabine waited with baited breath as Ezra shuddered hard in her hold, and then he inhaled slowly before he turned his head to meet her eyes. His royal blue irises swam a little behind unshed tears, but the look in them was everything. He trusted her. Loved her. And had just as much resolve in him as she did, if not more. Ezra grasped one of her hands and raised it to his mouth, kissing her knuckles before holding her hand against his cheek and nuzzling into it. He gave her a wobbly little smile that solidified into a true one as he reached up with his other hand to comb his fingers through her hair lovingly. "Okay, cyar'ika. But only if you let me do my half of the work too. Just cause you're a year and half older doesn't mean you get to be the only responsible one."
Sabine huffed in amusement, bumping her forehead against his gently. "I should hope not, babe. Galaxy saving and being my moral compass is practically your Jedi job description, so I fully expect you to deliver."
He laughed, sounding and looking like his normal calm and carefree self himself again, thank kriff. "I'll do my best."
"I know you will," she answered, suddenly serious. "And I also know I never have to worry about you letting me get too lonely or stuck in my own head. If there's one thing I've always appreciated about you, it's that you're completely and totally incapable of letting me stew in my own angst no matter how angry I might act about it."
He shrugged again, but the movement was a million times different from the earlier motion, easy and exaggerated. His eyes danced with fond amusement as he pulled her hand back down to his mouth to kiss again. "What can I say? I'm attracted to one very specific, crazy, colourful, dominant Mando girl who likes to beat my ass and toss me in the dirt whenever possible. There might be something a little wrong with me."
Sabine giggled as she slid onto his lap, hugging his neck tight and sharing warmed oxygen with him. "It's a good thing, then, that I have a power kink in at least three completely different ways and that you somehow manage to check every one of those boxes."
"Go me," he murmured against her mouth just before he captured her lips in a sweet kiss that lasted for a perfect eternity.
By the Manda, do I ever love this Jetii boy.
I would do anything for him.