#ursich

Moonlight and shadows surrounded him as he slowly moved through the slumbering stronghold. It was silent save for the barest hint of his footfalls.

At the end of a very long day, their lightness belied the heaviness of his heart.

He was in no rush to lay down to an elusive night of sleep, so he took his time, reflecting on the events of the past month and wondering uneasily what the future held for his family. With a sigh (and a determined effort to ignore the bad feeling he had), Alrich opened his bedroom door, stepping inside carefully and allowing it to close behind him again. Then he froze.

Illuminated by a sliver of white moonlight, Ursa sat on the bed, facing away from him and towards the window, her hair loose and cascading down her back as her arms wrapped around her protectively. 

“You’re home early,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper and hoarse.

As if she’d been crying.

Alrich slumped back against the door behind him, scrubbing his face to distract himself from the way his heart had sunk even more. 

Fiery Ursa was one thing. Quiet Ursa was quite another.

This particular anguish hurt all the more because it was - in a way - all his fault; and yet, there was nothing he could do. No way to fix it. No apology to make.

They would just have to…accept it. Move on.

So he summoned his courage. “Yes," he replied. "It’s done. It’s all taken care of.”

“Hmm,” she hummed. Several minutes ticked by before Ursa took a deep breath and asked, “So…how is she?”

Peeling himself up off the door, Alrich stepped towards his wife. “Oh, you know Sabine. She’s fine. Seemed to settle in well. She…uuhh…didn’t want me hanging around too long,” he said with a smile in his voice, and Ursa huffed. “So I left her to it.”

“I see,” she said with a nod, but her gaze was trained on the snowy peaks beyond their shared room. Alrich arrived at the foot of the bed, unsure if he should sit or not. Unsure of everything. 

“For what it’s worth,” he offered with the tiniest shrug, “she looked…happy.”

At that, the thin ice cracked, and Ursa folded in on herself as she sobbed. 

Alrich gingerly sat beside her then, and when he dared to reach out an arm, his wife thankfully took comfort in it, in him, laying her head on his chest as she cried.

“I said so many awful things,” she whispered through her tears.

“I know,” he whispered back, running his fingers through her hair. “So did she.”

Ursa shook her head. “She’s just a child. She doesn’t know any better.”

“She’s capable of more than you give her credit for,” he replied which earned him a glare.

“We shouldn’t have let her go. We should have kept her here,” she said, anger and bitterness igniting out of her fear.

“To what end, Ursa? That she only grow in resentment and frustration? That she leave at sixteen anyway when she could enlist herself?” Alrich asked, and not for the first time.

Ursa grumbled unintelligibly, so Alrich continued his side of the argument they’d been having for a month. “Many of the families we know send their children to the Academy now. They’ve gone on to have successful careers while maintaining their ties to Mandalore. Why should Sabine be any different from them?”

Unable to predict the future and all out of fight, Ursa laid her head back on his shoulder in defeat. They sighed together.