Parental Duties
By Rey]
Chapter summary: Now they are all anchorless, and T'ra has to re-anchor them, or at least find something that approximates an anchor.
Nicknames used:
Taré: Tarre Vizsla
Tre: Fay
Ýmska terms used:
Amma: parent, especially the one who carries and births the POV person, or the main adopter of the POV person
Ýteno: plural form of "ýto", "elder sibling", which can also be used to call an elder cousin and friend or a respectful way to call a stranger that is not a child but also not an elderly
Mando'a terms used:
Vet: (Rey-verse) origin of Vhett/(Clan) Fett
Viz: (Rey-verse) origin of (Clan) Vizsla
15. T'ra: The Anchor
Plantlife loves steadiness, stability, security. Loves the place they take root and grow and flower and fruit. Loves the present – the anchor, the nourishment, the brethren – and barely cares about the past and cares not at all about the future.
Sentient plantlife, no less.
T'ra, no less.
Or at least she did. Before her first grove – her original grove, her neti brethren – was burnt by the Sith for refusing to vacate the land. Before Taré and Tre blazed into her life, bringing another kind of flame with them that scoured her clean off her past, her expectations, her anchor.
They are the anchor, now, with the bond they have shared with her, stretching a dyad into a triad.
It was painful, at first. It still is, sometimes. Changes are painful. Anchorless changes. Not like the turning of the seasons. Not like the occasional visitors: there and gone again.
Taré so loves exploring, galivanting all over the galaxy and beyond, and Tre always follows in their wake faithfully, eagerly, cheerfully. This never changes, not even after she has been rescued by the two of them: a pair of lost and scared children frantically trying to save one remaining sappling from the dreadful, gruesome, torturous fate that befell her root siblings and relatives with their own hands and powers and nothing else. And, with the bond that then snapped into place, what else can she do but to trail after both like a kernel wafted about by the whims of the wind?
She gets a second and a third family out of this arrangement, at least: ones she could and would return to when Taré is called home to either, ones she could wallow herself in for a stretch of time until Taré wanders away again.
Well, she got them. Not now. No longer. Because she and Tre and Taré responded to the call of a lonely and scared and desperate young voice in-between skirmishes with the Sith, and they were subsequently dragged away, cut off from their families and anchors and homes, only to fall into a grim and dismall reality in which variously broken children are clumped together and hunted.
Taré is so very quiet now. Still the leader of their cohort, still doing their best to be the most responsible one despite being the youngest of the three in all that matter, still trying to care. But they – not Tre, not T'ra herself – are the root-child of someone alive, which matters to half of their species, and now the bond has been severed by the distance of a universe, and they have been made anchorless in turn.
A part of T'ra is vindictive that now Taré viscerally feels what she has been feeling all this time. Another part cares more about the other lost youths and younglings that the three have joined up with semi-willingly. Yet another part is too busy struggling with her own lack of anchor and mourning the loss of the two sets of families for her own sake, in her own way. And still, the deepest niche of her core is relieved and glad that she, at least, is not separated from the two that are by now part of her own root and trunk despite not being neti themselves.
The three of them just need to find a new family here, a new purpose, a new anchor.
And the mishmash of individuals trapped together in this little shelter under the relentless, driving downpour – from bubbly babe to weary middler – could be it. Could. Just not yet. All of them are still trying to find their own equilibrium, their own anchor, their own clarity, even after a while, and T'ra would rather her individuals leave themselves out of such chaotic mess.
Their physical position by the door, removed from the crowd, makes it rather easy to do so.
Although, slowly but surely, a few of the others have found themselves inching near, as if having the same idea of waiting this out or seeking an anchor, and T'ra cannot decide what to think of it.
Well, those three – two zabraks and one human, it seems, now added with a younger human and a nifl – are at least quiet? One of the adults has been bravely, tenaciously, smartly wrangling the rest of the upset universe-touched young, too, while the other two adults seem to prefer to stay out of it.
Smart move.
And T'ra counts it as a smart move, as well, when the wrangler – Fennec Shand forbids anyone from going outside when this bout of rain lets up some. Because Taré can feel that more storm is to hit them, Tre can feel unknown predators taking this chance to stalk prey nearby anyway, and T'ra herself can feel how treacherous the ground is outside the bedrock abutting the cliff that they have built the shelter on.
Taré has to speak up about it all when a few foolhardy youths try to sneak out anyway. But at least this way Taré is drawn out of wallowing in the severed bond with their origin?
Well, all three of them end up having to explain about each of their specialties, then, which is the base of their very-recent observations, which makes them the centre of attention and active participants in an impromptu teaching session, but this somehow draws all of them together, so T'ra takes heart in it.
What else can she do? She will take what she can – all of it – and persist. She can do no less than some dumb scraggle eking a life out of a slab of rock, after all.
A lesson in Mandalorians and Mandalorian Jedi follows suit, after sleep and another meal and the oldest four universe-touched leading the ten others in physical exercise, in reconnecting with the universe, in performing sword forms used by both cultures – by both families. Taré lags after a while, grieving and torn and overwhelmed, and Tre breaks away to comfort them, so T'ra shoulders the burden – the attention, the passing of knowledge, the intrusive and ignorantly hurtful and repetitive questions – for the rest of the endless-seeming session. It is all right, though. It is all right. The disparate, disjointed, sometimes quarrelsome group is so slowly and painstakingly knitting into one entity, just like a grove, just like a family in the closest, most intimate, most vulnerable sense.
This can help distract her from how gloomy the universe – this universe – feels, too. Gloomier than even the war-torn one she and Taré and Tre share, that they abandoned for the sake of a young one in need – seemingly in need, maybe, but she cannot judge him, not right now, not when she still knows so little.
The universe in which a trio of adolescents were knighted in the battlefield for killing someone, even though that someone was a Sith that had slaughtered his way through not a few star systems.
Not even their Mandalorian upbringing had prepared them for the consequence of that fateful fight. Not when Amma would rather have the three of them as scouts and healers and teachers and engineers and farmers, just like most of their elder siblings and relatives and friends among the Vizs and Vets.
And Amma is not even here now. Not here to soothe the three, to nurse them, to be there as they recover. Ýteno Faré and Baré, as well.
And, with that, T'ra has to bow out of teaching, herself.