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There were, it happened, some stories of men who had taken Aenar wives in the long-distant past of Andoria. Shran would never have sought them out on his own, but he had a distant cousin who studied folklore at some far-off university in the south. That cousin somehow heard through the family gossip mill what Shran had done and sent him the stories she had collected over a long career, along with a stern admonition to share them with no one because she had enemies who were always looking for ways to steal her material and sabotage her career.
Naturally Shran had read the brief letter that accompanied the stories, shaken his head at the foolishness of academics and their belief that their subjects of study should interest everyone else as much as they interested them, filed the stories away and forgotten them. He only remembered their existence late one night several weeks later, as he was laying awake on the sofa, banished from the bedroom after his first serious spat with Jhamel.
Of course he had known on some level that all would not be love and harmony between them forever. They'd had a few minor arguments well before the marriage was sealed, but always then their mutual care and respect had led those disputes to be settled rather easily. Generally after an argument had sparked, emotions ran high, and then after a relatively brief period explanations were offered by both parties and both walked away (or not, as the case most often turned out) feeling relieved, understood, and supported by their partner. Perhaps he had to reveal something about his thoughts or feelings that made him uncomfortable, or Jhamel, embarrassed, had explained that some aspect of her culture that she had previously dismissed had turned out to be more essential to her than she had expected. Either way, all discord was soon mended and peace restored.
The fight on this particular night had most definitely not followed the established pattern.
He couldn’t even have said exactly what caused the fight, now that they had parted. It had all seemed vital at the time, points he could not in good conscience back away from, dishonor to the character of the Andorian people. No doubt Jhamel had felt the same. Certainly she had been a great deal less inclined than in previous fights to seek for common ground and try to find a way for them to compromise. Tempers had run high, uncomfortable truths had been shouted, and before he knew it Jhamel was throwing a blanket and pillow at him and slamming the bedroom door shut behind her. And, since he couldn’t sleep, he had wandered aimlessly through the files on his data padd until he found the archive his cousin had sent over to him and, in a fit of annoyed and petty curiosity, opened it up.
The contents were certainly... enlightening, at least in some sense.
The first thing to be said was that many of the sources of the stories had clearly never so much as met an Aenar. They dwelled on ridiculous magical powers, some of them obvious exaggerations of the Aenar’s telepathic skills but others pure invention. Two stories claimed that the Aenar were, in fact, made of ice not flesh, and in a third the woman blew away into a cloud of snow after her lover failed to keep a bargain they had made. In fact, a great many of the tales revolved around some kind of promise that the unnatural but beautiful Aenar woman extracted from her captor-husband as a condition of their marriage, and which was inevitably broken by the hapless Andorian man, leading to the disappearance or death of his captive. When she didn’t dissolve into a snowstorm or melt into a puddle, she either vanished completely, wasted away, returned to her people in a bit of a snit (Shran thought the stories with that ending the most practical and realistic), or, in one memorable case, turned into pure white stone and then crumbled into dust.
In every instance the promise exacted by the Aenar woman was different, but in each it regarded an action on the husband’s part that at first seemed easily avoided, but which circumstances then somehow contrived to make inevitable and impossible to circumvent. The man who swore never to take her fur-trimmed cloak away from her mistook it for his own in the dark of night as he hurried out to fight an invading army. The man who had promised never to set a fire inside the house did so in order to save the life of his infant son during a blizzard, and the child then melted away along with his Aenar mother. In most cases the Aenar woman took the time to scold her husband for his barbaric and careless ways, and curse his future prospects in everything from war to love-making before taking her leave. In every case Shran had the irresistible sense that the stories were talking about something more innate than a cloak or a fire or a particular pearly white stone that must never be thrown away. They were talking about two people from completely different worlds, and the unavoidable fact that even if they loved each other, they were different creatures in their blood and mind, and their time together would always be temporary.
“Shran?”
He jumped, and immediately felt embarrassed for it. Quite the commander of the Imperial Guard - he hadn’t even heard the bedroom door open. And in the context of his reading, realizing the interruption came from his beloved new wife didn’t provide a great deal of comfort. “What is it? Is something wrong?”
Jhamel’s smile in that moment was so gentle and sad that for a moment he felt sure she would tell him that he’d broken some unspoken rule by reading the stories and that she had come out only to say her goodbyes. “Of course something’s wrong, Shran. You’re out here.”
“Ah. Yes.” He set aside the data padd with careful deliberation.
He’d hoped she might not hear the sound of it against the table, but her antennae honed in on the small click. “What were you reading?”
“Nothing. Foolish stories. My cousin...” He trailed off, trying to think how to explain without making it sound like he was looking to those stories for advice on their marriage. “It’s not important. I couldn’t sleep, that’s all.”
“I couldn’t either.” Jhamel crossed to the sofa - carefully, slowly, as she always did, though he made an effort after the first few awkward days of their life together never to move furniture or leave anything on the floor where she might trip over it - and sat down beside him. Her hands, folded in her lap, moved restlessly against each other. “I’m sorry,” she said at last. “Not for all of what I said, there were some things... but the way I said much of it was wrong.”
“I feel the same. It was... I believe some of what I said. But I regret more of it.”
“Good.” A slow smile tugged at her lips. “I thought this would be easy. I should have known...” She laughed quietly. “We have stories, you know, about people who have tried to marry Andorian men and women. They never end well. I thought they were just stories, just... warnings, to keep our people apart and make sure that we would all behave like good little Aenar and avoid your kind. But maybe there’s a little truth in them after all.”
Shran laughed.
Jhamel’s antennae flicked back in dismay, then forward with astonished curiosity. “What?”
“We have those stories, too. I was reading... my cousin, a folklorist, she sent me a collection of them after she heard about our marriage. I suppose it was her way of trying to be friendly. We’ve never been close, but her research is her life.”
“Really?” Jhamel laughed. “Will you read them to me?”
“Maybe later. Not tonight.” And, thinking about it then and there, with Jhamel sitting next to him, smiling and laughing and not at all like a mythic creature about to turn into snow or stone if he breathed on her wrong, Shran thought maybe he could read the stories to her someday in the not-too-distant future, and maybe she could tell him some of the stories her people told about his. Maybe they could both laugh at them together. “I’m sorry,” he said, “for everything. Some of it mattered and some of it didn’t, but none of it mattered as much as you do.”
“None of it mattered as much as you to me, either.” Her pale eyes gleamed at him as she stood up and held out her hand. “You are a strange, blue-skinned barbarian, Thy’lek Shran, but you are my strange, blue-skinned barbarian. Is that enough to mean you can come back to bed?”
“With my cunning white snow witch?” Shran gave a soft snort of laughter, then stood and took her hand. “Always.”