Work Text:
Darkness creeps through the camp, encroaching from the east as the sun slips below the horizon; shadows growing and lengthening as the torches are lit and gutter in the gentle breeze off the expanse of the lake.
It’s never quiet, in a military camp, let alone one as established as this; but still it comes with the nightfall. Voices dip as if hesitant in the dusk; the clatter and clank of armor silenced as the mighty war machine of the Mandalorians packs away for rest. Blacksmiths lay up their hammers and farriers their irons, and the sentries cry out the hour as they make their looping rounds on patrol.
The quiet settles and the shadows lengthen. Alex slips out of camp and into the jungle, tracking his missing partner. Alex doesn’t have to go far to find him. Any distance is far in the tangled growth of Dxun; but as the encampment grows and more of his people find their way back they start to carve out paths and beat back the wildlife. But Dxun is a wild place - and Alex knows that all he’s looking for is solitude, not to set himself against it; which limits where he might have gone. Alex doesn’t need to be Force Sensitive to know him. Not after everything they’ve been through.
He’s a silhouette against the dying rays, a dark spot atop the hill.
The jungle is never quiet beneath them, especially not now as the sun sets. Alex winds his way out of the greenery-choked trail to climb up towards the solitary figure of the Jedi standing at the head of it. He knows the Nicke hears his approach, that he felt him through the bond long before Alex was anywhere nearby; but he doesn’t turn from where the wind blows his curls away from his face as Alex comes to stand beside him.
The fauna of the Demon Moon scream in the steadily falling darkness, but the sounds barely puncture the silence that builds around them. Alex lets him have it. In the weeks they’ve been on Dxun since the devastation of Katarr, Nicke’s spoken little at all after he’d woken. Alex can’t begin to comprehend what he’s feeling. The image of Nicke’s terrified face just before he’d collapsed is seared into Alex’s brain, and the sensation of him in his arms barely breathing and all but dead is one that he will never forget. The loss of the Jedi in the galaxy - the destruction of the surviving masters of his Order all at once and the extinction of the Miraluka in one swift blow - it would fell any man. They are not his people but Alex too has seen the annihilation of his own.
And he felt that in his soul as he watched Revan destroy his people’s armor and weapons before their eyes in the wake of Ani'la Akaan - stolen the Mask of the Mandalore away from them. But not like this. Not the way the his Jedi lover does, every rictus of pain and suffering written into his every cell as the misery echos through the Force.
So he gives him silence. Waits and watches since Nicke woke from the bed Alex had carried him to here from Katarr’s orbit, and prays he has not lost him.
Nicke doesn’t turn to look at him, but Alex feels the soft brush of his fingers against the back of his hand in thanks; and he twists his hand to capture Nicke’s in his.
This far from camp, surrounded on all sides by jungle, it feels as if they’re the only people in the universe who live and breathe in this moment.
“I don’t know who I am any longer.” Nicke rasps, wetness pricking at the corners of his eyes. “Can I call myself Jedi, if I am the only one who remains? Am I still a knight of my Order if there are none more but I?” He turns his face away, shoulders rounded in grief, and there is nothing Alex can do but helplessly watch. He’s a stark silhouette against Dxun’s setting sun; the red rays that wash over him turning his face into a cruel mockery.
Nicke turns his face upwards towards the sky, towards where he knows Onderon is. “What am I, then, as the last of my kind? Worse, the last of my kind because I left, when tragedy began, rather than stand and fight it?” His face is a mask of blood in the dying sunset, features thrown in sharp relief. His arm is tense beneath the touch of Alex’s fingers. “I am tired of being a person. Not just tired of being the person I was.” Nicke whispers. “But any person at all.”
The Mandalorian says nothing, because he knows words are useless to assuage Nicke’s grief. They are two of a kind now - the last broken remnants of a people.
The sun slips below the horizon, the shadows growing long until the stars glitter bright against the night sky’s tapestry. Nicke still does not let Alex touch him beyond the careful press of their hands, but he unbends enough that he no longer looks as if the slightest touch will shatter him like spun glass.
“Mine.” Alex says when the silence grows longer and longer, long after the last light is gone from the sky. Nicke turns to him, startled, and Alex’s conviction grows stronger as he repeats himself. “Mine. You ask what you call yourself, and I say that no matter what else you may have or what the universe may hold for you; you may always call yourself mine and I call myself yours. Because even if we have nothing left, we shall always have one another.”
It's not enough, Alex knows. It cannot be enough, not for either of them - but it is something. And for now, with the galaxy broken around them and as the light gives way to spreading darkness, that is what they will have to take and hold and call themselves lucky for having.