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Ezra Bridger came and sat down next to Tristan.
He was a fidgety boy. His heels banged against the wall they were perched on, his hands played with his lightsaber. Despite the wandering quality of his movements, his eyes stayed locked on the training playing out below them.
Tristan watched too. Then he sighed. “She always was the prodigy, my sister,” he told the stranger next to him. It was polite to make conversation, and Bridger’s body language was as good as a question. “Languages, art, fighting, chemistry. It all came easily to Sabine. She was the perfect Mandalorian daughter, except for the obedient part.”
“She is hard to keep up with,” Ezra agreed, mouth twitching in a half hearted smile. “It’s only been a few months and I’m worried she’s going to beat me at lightsaber dueling.”
“You mean she hasn’t already?” Tristan joked and was rewarded by a pair of suddenly crossed arms, and a hint of a pout. He didn’t have a lot of room to criticize, he was barely out of his teens himself, but he’d forgotten how easy it was to wind an eighteen year old up.
“I can’t imagine growing up with her,” Ezra said, once his mood had passed. “Sabine as a baby just sounds weird. Even just undyed hair looks wrong on her.”
“She started painting it when she was four,” Tristan told him, in a tone of deepest confidence, aware that this was prime teasing material he was giving away. “Our parents couldn’t get her to stop and it would make her hair just this block of dried perma-paints. It was like a helmet on her, in these bright colors. When Mother shaved her head she painted her scalp. Finally when she was seven they gave up and got her proper hair dye, it was easier than trying to fight with her. Sabine always got what she wanted.”
Ezra laughed. “I believe it. She got spray paint in our friend Zeb’s fur once and it took a week to wash out.”
“That used to happen with my toys, and clothes,” Tristan sighed. “She was a menace, especially before she learned how to keep her art supplies in one place. We all loved her, of course. She was the future of Clan Wren, and she was so brilliant. Everyone always thought she’d make us proud one day.”
“And she is,” Ezra prompted.
Tristan nodded, politely. Down in the training yard below, the Kanan Jarrus and his mother were shouting at Sabine as she struggled to hold the Darksaber exactly how they wanted. Her stance looked flawless to him, but apparently it didn’t pass muster yet. Being the underachieving sibling looked attractive compared to being in the middle of that maelstrom.
He changed the subject.
“Is he really a Jedi, your teacher?” he asked. “A Jedi like from the stories?”
“I’m not sure even he knows anymore,” Ezra said. “But I hope he’s a Jedi. Otherwise he’s just a guy with a lightsaber and that’s much less useful.”
“Much less frightening,” Tristan corrected, “And much less at risk. I’d prefer a guy with a lightsaber. I hear they tend to get hunted down less.”
There was a choked laugh from the boy next to him. “Not sure where you’re getting that information, but it’s not a great scene for anyone with a lightsaber these days. I know a lot of non-Jedi whose corpses can attest to that. That’s why Kanan and your mom are so worried about Sabine, I think.”
Tristan glanced again at his little sister, now sparring with the warriors of Clan Wren, and holding her own, six-to-one. Someone else, seeing that, might have thought Mandalor .
He couldn’t shake the image of her crying the first time their mother had gone to the capital for a week and left them behind, but it was still an impressive scene.
“Sabine will be fine,” he said, eventually. “She’s always survived. She might be reckless and selfish, but she’s talented.”
The insistent thumping as Ezra kicked the wall stilled. “That’s not fair,” he protested. “Sabine is… she’s amazing. You shouldn’t say that.”
Already, Tristan regretted it, but he wasn’t about to admit as much to some non-Mandalorian kid just passing through. He held his ground. “She’s my sister. Just because you have a crush on her-”
“I don’t!” Ezra snapped, and held firm under Tristan’s judgemental gaze. “I like her, and I’m probably never going to stop liking her because she’s pretty great. But she’s more than that, she’s family.”
The word, even in Basic, softened the resentment already brewing in Tristan’s gut. He shook his head. “I’m not sure you understand what that word means around here.”
“I’m impulsive and loud, not stupid,” Bridger told him. “I’ve realized what it means to Sabine. Being loyal to one another, fighting for the same cause, sharing everything. Just because we weren’t her first family doesn’t mean we don’t matter. She’s not my sister, but she’s my- my-...” he floundered for a minute, looking for the right words, then gave up. “She’s my friend. You can’t say that about her.”
They watched the sparring for a little while. Sabine was back to drills, this time with the almost-Jedi Jarrus. Her bright hair kept falling in her face, and eventually Mother got frustrated and swooped in to pin it back with one of her own dark metal hair fasteners. She did better after that.
Tristan glanced at Ezra, who was watching him wearily. “Clan member. What you’re looking for is clan member. Not born blood, necessarily, but allied with you. You need to learn the language if you’re going to be staying here. And I know you care for Sabine. We appreciate that, we do. You and your crew gave her a home. But you don’t know her past or Mandalore’s. It’s complicated.”
Ezra waited, suddenly still and quiet as a grave. For such a fidgety boy, he could stop moving very fast when the wanted to. Even his breathing was shallow and his eyes barely flickered when Sabine set off a grenade far below them. His father had made statues that moved more, and it unsettled Tristan deeply. No wonder no one had trusted the Jedi of old, if someone only mostly Jedi could act like this.
“You have to understand,” Tristan said, haltingly. “She was very young. When the empire took her away. The Imperial Academy wanted the best and brightest from every house in Mandalore. They wanted Sabine, even though she was two years younger than all the others they took. I offered to go instead, but they weren’t interested in me. My test scores just weren’t high enough.”
“How old was she?” Ezra asked softly. “I know the Imperial Academy usually recruits from fourteen so she was…”
“Twelve.”
“Wow.”
“Mother thought it would be a good thing. We all knew Sabine was exceptional, and now she could finally prove it. She could bring our family back to prestige, bring honor to our clan and House Vizla. It was a chance for the wonderchild to pull us into prominence, and the Empire’s favor. For a while it seemed to be working. She was the star of her program, she seemed happy. After years of being bored, she was finally being challenged. Then she started getting more upset, more suspicious. She’d send us frantic letters in code, double encrypted and disguised to look like regular transmissions. Eventually one day she just disappeared from class and showed up at home two days later in tears saying she’d done something terrible-”
Tristan hesitated just in time. There was no reason to give even someone Sabine trusted the idea that a weapon like the one she’d built had ever existed. The idea alone was dangerous.
“She’d done something very bad,” he finished weakly. “Under the Empire’s orders, yes, but still something anyone should have considered unthinkable.”
(He remembered the way his mother had recoiled in fear as Sabine had tried to go to her for comfort, his father’s horror when reports of the mysterious weapons testing on the insurgent village had filtered in through a friend-of-a-friend a day later. Even he’d been too frightened to respond when Sabine had first described the monstrosity she’d built. The idea of his too clever, stubborn sister doing something so twisted, so… cowardly, had made him sick.)
Ezra eyed him with curiosity, but didn’t ask questions, which Tristan was grateful for.
“Our parents told her she had to make things right, whatever the cost.”
Now, he interjected, “But she was just a kid!”
Tristan crossed his arms, suddenly feeling the winter chill too sharply. “She was old enough to be responsible. She had to be, for Mandalore’s sake. She knew that.” It was what Mother had told him, afterwards when she’d found him in Sabine’s empty room, just staring. “No one else make up for what she did, or fix her mistakes, and someone had to. She went back to the Imperial Academy the next morning, and a month later we got a letter saying she’d blown half of it up and was on the run with a co-conspirator. You know the rest of the story. Saxon took it out on us.”
“And you didn’t go looking for her,” Ezra said in an accusing tone. “You let her think she’d been abandoned.”
His mother’s excuses rose automatically to his lips, but Tristan shook them aside. “I know. I wish we could have done better.”
Bits of story had spilled out since Sabine had come back. A brief stint with organized crime, nearly bleeding out before Jarrus and his captain had found her, getting arrested by the Empire several times. The Super-Commandos hadn’t been easy, but Tristan would take it a thousand times over the life of running and hiding that Sabine had described. At least Saxon, perhaps having learned from the last Wren child he’d stolen, had waited until he was seventeen to take him away from home.
He must have looked pathetic, because Ezra put a hand on his shoulder, “I mean, it’s not your fault either. You were just a kid too. I don’t claim to be in charge of what Hera and Kanan make us do, especially not when it’s stakeouts.” The way he said it reminded Tristan too much of when he’d been little, and Sabine had said, ‘I’m not the boss of you, but…’ and then proceeded to boss him around. He suspected Ezra Bridger got his way more than he realized.
He snorted. “You and Sabine even talk the same way. I don’t envy your Ghost crew having the two of you.”
“Hey, we make it work,” Bridger joked. “Especially since Hera started making us leave explosives in a locked crate in the cargo bay during off hours.”
The image of Sabine begrudgingly handing over thermal detonators at bedtime like she’d had to do with her charcoals when she was young was all too easy to imagine. Tristan laughed again. “My mother would have a heart attack. Sabine was enough to start her hair greying, you’d make it a white as old dead Pre’s.”
(Father had said Sabine had started giving Ursa Wren the best kind trouble early on, first by refusing to be delivered for almost two weeks after the date medical droids insisted she was due, and then by being so sickly after the fact their mother had missed the rise and fall of the Death Watch. In all truth, it had probably kept Ursa Wren from being killed, and then had kept her out of the eyes of the monster called Maul- even in infancy, Sabine’s intuition had been excellent- but the Countess Wren resented being kept from a battle by something as simple as an over term breech baby trying to strangle herself on her umbilical cord. Sick children were difficult, shooting people to make a better world for them was easier.)
A more amiable silence settled over them, as the combatants in the yard below took a breather for water. They watched as Sabine experimentally dunked the Darksaber blade first into a canteen, prompting a scolding from parent and Jedi alike.
“Is that dangerous?” Tristan asked, only a little curious.
“Only if you get the circuitry wet, and even then most of them are made to just fizzle off,” Ezra said, offhand. “I’m not sure how it works with antiques though.” Suddenly he looked mildly concerned.
“She has a lucky soul,” Tristan assured him. “And a brain more brilliant than either of us. She’ll be fine.”
“That’s rude,” Ezra yawned, though he did seem relieved. “You taught me how to use a jetpack the other day, even Sabine hasn’t been able to do that. You’re not bad.”
It was as much a forgiveness of his fraught sibling relationship with Sabine as a compliment, but Tristan took it to heart. With a little sister who could easily become Mandalor, if she wanted, it felt nice to be appreciated.
He suspected that was something they both understood; just how overwhelming Sabine’s bright colors could be at times. Next to her, anyone could look dull.
Tristan scooted closer, and Ezra took that as an invitation to rest his cheek on his shoulder, regardless of the metal armor there. He seemed comfy, somehow.
“Oh, kriff,” he whispered after a few minutes. “Are they pointing at us?”
Ezra’s Jedi master and Tristan’s mother did seem to be gesturing at the two of them, and mouthing something. The message was clear, they needed to get down there. Sabine’s tired blur of a face and the wreckage of training around her suggested what they were being summoned for.
Tristan tensed to rise, but before he could Ezra grabbed his upper arm. “Don’t. Pretend you can’t see them. We’re looking at clouds or something.”
Ezra was staring determinedly at the sky when Tristan glanced at him.
It was a ridiculous scheme. No one would believe they hadn’t come up here to watch training, and they’d looked right at Kanan and Ursa.
On the other hand... the chances of anyone actually climbing up to fetch them were slim.
It was the sort of thing Sabine would do, Tristan reflected as he let himself settle back down. Bold and bullheaded at the same time.
Though he didn't dare look back down at the training yard, he heard a shriek and the sound of crashing metal as someone far older and more deep-voiced than Sabine went hurtling into a tree.
“I missed her,” he said, mostly to himself, as he stared into the bright winter sky.
“Yeah,” Ezra muttered into his shoulder, “Me too.”