Chapter Text
In the morning, there were pancakes.
Arla squinted at them. “These look edible. Why do these look edible?”
Jaster sighed. “It’s because I didn’t make them myself. They’re from the commissary.”
“Oh okay.” She nodded, and sat down, digging into them with relish.
Jango came out of the room they had slept in a few moments later, looking exhausted, and rubbed at his eyes. “Pancakes?”
“Not mine.”
“Oh, cool.” He immediately made himself a plate and started drowning everything in syrup.
Arla was torn between surprised disgust and being impressed yet bewildered.
“Do you want some breakfast with your syrup?” Jaster laughed. “Be sure to brush your teeth, after this.”
Jango looked smug as he shoved a forkful into his mouth. “Don’t have to brush my teeth if I don’t have a toothbrush.”
The mand’alor paused, and his brow furrowed. “Yeah, that was an oversight on my part. When you guys go therapist shopping, I’ll be sure to get you toothbrushes.”
Ignoring her brother groaning in disappointment, Arla leaned forward. “Therapist shopping? What is that?”
“So basically,” Jaster gestured with his knife absently, “You get to speed date therapists and see if you connect with any of them. Wait, do you know what speed dating is?”
“No, but I can guess.” She said dryly.
Jaster set his knife back down. “Good, you’re thirteen. You don’t need to know what speed dating is. Unless you do. Do thirteen year olds date?”
Arla made a face, scrunching her nose up in distaste. “Ew gross, boys.”
He nodded. “Boys are gross, I agree. Glad to see we’re all on the same page.”
-----
Classes were boring, and Dackluc was right. The number of tests she had taken, just to prove that she knew how to do long division, and her sector neighbors' history, was exhausting. But now she was set up with the right courses and was making sure that she hadn’t missed anything important.
Jango was furiously coloring in one of the worksheets he’d been given. It was one of those puzzles where you had to solve simple addition questions, and then color the answers, to form a picture.
It looked like a loth cat, but she couldn’t be sure, because Jango was only up to the 7’s on answering.
She turned back to her module and sighed. History was never her favorite, and she really didn’t care about the child monarchs of Naboo. They weren’t even actually monarchs if they were elected, that was a civil princedom, Jaster had explained heatedly over dinner the other night. And then he’d elaborated for twenty minutes until all three of them had forgotten where the original point had come from.
Arla filled in the answer about the headdresses purpose, and moved on to the next planet's questionnaire, absently wondering about when Jaster would find them somewhere to say.
It was bitter, and maybe a little callous of her, but they’d been living with him for almost two weeks, and Jango was starting to latch onto him as a father figure. Arla grudgingly admitted that maybe she was as well, which wasn’t looking great.
Sure, they were in therapy, and had been given the resources they would need to grieve and move on with life, but Arla couldn’t help but think that when Jaster kicked them out it would set back at least Jango's progress.
Probably her own too.
Arla worried her lip with her teeth, and tried her best to concentrate on her school work.
-----
There was a girl in her class that kept staring at Arla, and she didn’t know what to do about it. At first it was just because she was new, but after a week or so, certainly the shine must’ve worn off. But still, she’d look up sometimes and be met with the purple eyes of the rodian girl who sat two desks away. She’d grin at Arla and then go back to her work, pink antenna flicking as she dropped her head back down.
After three weeks Arla was at her wits end. At lunch break, she walked over to the bench where the Rodian girl was and stood in front of her until she looked up.
“Hi?” The girl blinked, confused.
“Why do you keep looking at me in class?”
“Oh!” She sat up straighter, and arla noticed she had darker pink scales over her nose and her eyebrows, that almost matched her hair. Which wasn’t the point. “Because you don’t seem to have any friends yet, and I was waiting till you approached me so I didn’t scare you off!”
That was… Almost nice of her? “You’re sitting alone.”
She waved a hand dismissively. “Today, yeah. Flitz has a cold and Pheebs is helping aer buir out with some sorta tech thingy. It’s no biggy. C’mon sit down, I’m Sipho!” Sipho scooted over on the bench and patted next to her, clearly expecting Arla to sit down.
Arla took a seat and eyed her a little warily as she pulled out her lunch. It was yet another sandwich, because that was all that Jaster could reliably make. “I’m Arla.”
Sipho seemed to have some sort of fruit pouch which she was sipping through a straw. “I know, don’t worry. What do you do for fun?”
“Oh.” She had to think about it for a second. “Well, I used to go shoot cans off fence posts with my friends. And then sometimes we’d go explore the creek beds and see if we could find fossils.”
“Did you ever find any?” Sipho leaned forward.
Her eyes had galaxies in them. “Um, well one time we found something that we thought was a fossil but it turned out it was just Stephs older brother burying things in the woods for us to find. So, no. Not really, but it was pretty fun to try and figure out what kind of rock was which.” Arla explained, frustrated that she kept seeming to trip over her words.
Sipho seemed to either not notice or politely ignore her messy phrasong, and instead nodded enthusiastically. “My dad- he’s a zeltron, he’s why I’m pink- when he was on Zeltros getting his degree, he took a geology class, and he still has the textbook. You should come over and we can look at it! I wonder how different the rocks there are to the ones on- um, wherever you’re from-”
“Concord Dawn.”
“- Concord Dawn, thanks, are to each other!” She finished cheerfully. “Plus I think we have cookies, and my mom and I can’t eat that many of them, so you could help us out and eat them before they go stale.”
“That sounds nice. Um, where do you live? I can ask Jaster-”
“Don't worry about that, it’s okay, I’ll just wait for you after class today and we can walk together! Mand’alor Mereel is pretty cool, so you can just comm him, and tell him I bet.”
“I’ll trust your judgement on this one,” Arla shrugged. “But if I get in trouble I want extra cookies.”
“Deal!” Sipho laughed, leaning towards her bag, and pulling out a bedazzled folder. “Check out these cool pictures of dogs I found on the holonet and printed out. This one’s wearing
sunglasses.”
-----
Jango collapsed to the ground in a huff, laying on his back and staring up at the ceiling. “Ow.”
“Oh c’mon,” Myles giggled. “I didn’t hit you that hard, we’re just training.”
“Do you do this
every
day?” He groaned, pulling himself up into a sitting position.
Myles offered his arm out, and when Jango took it, hauled him off the floor. “Not every day. Some days we get to go practice at the range instead of doing hand to hand.”
“That rules. Can you show me how you did that leg sweepy thing?”
Myles stepped back, getting a good distance between them. “Okay, sure!” He stood straight, with his hands loosely at the sides, “So, it’s all about momentum, and Vert says it's totally different in full beskar, but that it’s still important we get the basics down early, or something like that.”
“You’re not… momentuming, though. You’re just still.” Jango pointed out.
“Well duh, you gotta
watch.”
Myles rolled his eyes. “You gotta start with your arms, right? So you can throw a punch with your right,” he demonstrated, “and then while you’re doing that, you pull your left arm towards your right shoulder, so it’s almost like a circle.”
Jango watched, and saw the quick shift of movement between Myles’ arms, where his left hand seemed to trail after the right.
“And then-” Myles suddenly dropped down, his left arm going above his head, right parallel with his leg. “So I keep my right leg outstretched, right? And my left bent.”
“Right.”
“No, left.”
Jango stuck his tongue out at him.
He grinned at that. “Anyway, my left heel? It’s off the ground, I’m on my toes.”
“And you’re right one has the outside towards me.”
“Yeah, I’m not really sure what it’s called, but it's like how in bolo ball, you’re only supposed to kick with the side of your foot.”
“I’m not very good at bolo ball.” He grumbled. “Ori’buir said it was because I would point my toes.”
“Weird!” He said cheerfully. “Okay, now here's the tricky part, the whole circle bit. I can’t do it slow, sorry, but it's kinda obvious what I’m doing.” Myles stood up out of the low crouch.
Jango watched carefully as he did everything he’d demonstrated and then pulled the momentum of his arms with him, his left hand swinging down to be a pivot point on the ground as his right came to his chest as he spun, leg extended to knock someone down.
It looked simple enough to Jango. “Can I try?”
“Sure! Wanna try and knock me over?”
Jango beamed. “That’d be really fun, actually!”
Myles stepped back with sparring range, and stood placidly, purposefully making himself easy to knock over.
Following the mental steps Myles had walked him through, Jango started doing the kick. And as soon as he made contact with Myles’ leg, he lost his balance and pitched forward, arms flailing and barely saving him from the embarrassment of face planting onto the mat.
Myles sat down where he was sprawled. “You wanna go do something else?”
“... Yeah.” He admitted.
“We still haven’t snuck into the vents, we could try that? I bet if we worked together we could stack and get up to the high ones.”
“Okay!”
-----
When they entered the forge the first thing Arla noted was just how hot it was in the room. She absently wished she was wearing short sleeves or shorts. The second thing was the tall woman hammering a sheet of metal atop an anvil, shaping it into a long taper. Jaster waited patiently in the [foreway?] for her to stop hammering, which took a few minutes when the metal had gone from red hot to the color of normal durasteel.
“What?” She sighed, looking up.
“Calluna, this is Arla. She needs her first set of armor.”
Calluna moved the metal to what appeared to be a metal cooling rack. “Beskar work, huh? What do you do, kid?”
“Um- I don’t-” Arla began to stutter, suddenly struck by the fact that this woman was even more buff than her mother, and easily six foot two. It wasn’t intimidating, she didn’t think, but she was definitely impressed.
“She’s ranged.” Jaster said smoothly, covering up for her sudden nervousness.
“So, heavy elbow pads, knee and thigh, light on the ghet’bur for more upper movement?” She hummed thoughtfully, gloved hands crossing in front of her chest. “Do you have an opinion on styles, kih mando'ade?”
She was being addressed again, “No?” she managed to squeak out.
“That makes it easier for me, I have a design in mind.” She walked over to one of the wall length cabinets and leaned in, pulling out a bundle of beskar bearings, and armor scraps. Calluna then walked over to the central forge and pulled it open, seemingly immune to the heat radiating from it as she set it into a recess to be heated, and become malleable.
Arla wondered if that was a devaronian trait, but assumed it’d be rude to ask. Instead she watched mildly worried as Calluna approached her, brandishing a measuring tape. “Um- what's that for?”
“Measurements.” She said dryly, “Lift your arms.”
She shot a panicked look towards Jaster, who just shrugged in a ‘what can you do’ kind of way. Arla raised her arms and stood still awkwardly, moving when she was told to.
Eventually Calluna stood up, satisfied with the measurements she’d gotten, and quickly jotted them down on a pad. “I’ll get everything nice and melted, do the easy parts first, and get your chestplate and helmet done last, after I’ve finalized the draft design.”
Jaster nodded at that, “How long?”
“Eh, three days give or take? I have other projects so I can’t devote all my attention to getting this done quickly, or otherwise it’d be rushed and shitty. And what kind of alor’goran would I be then?”
“A Vizsla’s!” Jaster beamed, and from the way the devaronian woman snorted at that, it was clearly a longstanding joke between them.
“Do you have any family beskar?” Calluna asked, turning to her. “While the other bits are melting I can incorporate it easily.”
Arla frowned. “Uh. no. I don’t. We uh. I think they- they probably took it off my dad-”
Jaster put a hand on her shoulder, squeezing reassuringly. “It’s okay. It happens. You carry them with you anyway.” He offered quietly.
“Yeah. Yeah I guess.” She said, voice cracking, suddenly aware of the both of them looking at her. It burnt even more than the flames that had licked at her heels only weeks earlier, and continued to smoulder in her mind.
Calluna cleared her throat a little bit, picking up on the tension. “It’s not really a big deal, plenty of foundlings start their legacies with cin vhetin armor. It all has to start from something-”
Jaster nodded. “Of course, that’s true. But, you know what? This
is
House Mereel, so,” He began to detach one of his pauldrons, “You’re one of us now, one of my house, and one of my
clan
at this point. So. You can share everything I have to offer. You and Jango. As long as you need.” He coughed a little, clearly realizing he’d started down the path of a dramatic speech. “I needed my armor reforged anyway.”
Calluna took it, ignoring the way Arla began to protest and set it in the forge.
The beskar took a brilliant red glow on, and melted into white, incorporating into the melted beskar that was already pooling from the scraps and the ingots that had been placed in the heat.
From what Arla had learned about Jaster, that had been as good as saying outright that she and Jango could stay for as long as they needed. Now she just needed to convince Jango that they wouldn’t be thrown out, not now, and not ever.
The way her eyes stung was definitely from the heat, and the heat alone.