tritanopia | The Mandalorian

thirty-three

"Fae, I need to talk to you."

It was a peculiar way of wording it.

Usually people would say "we need to talk", instead. But that begs the expectance of a two-way conversation, with two voices, and two opinions.

And Mando knew he wasn't going to get that; seeing as he hadn't heard more than three words from Fae in the past week or so.

It had happened at possibly the worst time. As only the night before had Mando and Fae had a conversation, lasting well into the night, centred around the fact that he didn't see her any differently than before, and more importantly about how shouldn't she see herself differently either. The main reason for it occurred was simply because they were running out of food — and Mando was insufferably adamant that he wouldn't allow Fae and the Child to remain in the Crest alone while he made the journey to a local village. But she was, in turn, refusing to go with him out of fear of judgement from strangers.

Fae called him paranoid, and claimed he was overreacting, because of course she would. In fact, she almost went as far as to say that he didn't have the right worry about her so much...but she was smart enough to realise that saying such a thing wouldn't have ended well, and nor did he deserve it anyway.

And so that was how Fae ended up losing the argument and instead found herself trekking through the forest, with the Child strapped to her front by a shawl she fashioned when the kid made it clear that he didn't plan on waking up for anything at all. Oh, how Fae envied him.

Mando had kept his pulse rifle in his hands, rather than on his back, the entire walk. All the while making sure that Fae and the Child were never more than ten feet away from him; or outside his line of sight, for that matter. But he didn't tell them that. He didn't order them to 'stay close' the way somebody else maybe would have. Rather than that, Mando just silently followed wherever they went without so much as a single complaint.

They were in the centre of the village market when it happened. Up until that point, Fae had managed to ignore the unwanted looks of condolences, and the whispering behind cupped hands, fairly well by keeping her head low and practically hiding her face in Mando's cape as she restrained herself from grabbing onto it. But, despite her best efforts to avoid it, people in the crowd did eventually offer a verbal reaction. That is, if a group of small children pointing and screaming counted as 'verbal'.

Fae had sprinted away from Mando before he had the chance to even see where she went.

And it was the next hour and a half of his life which truly made it painfully apparent to him how unbalanced his brain still remained after the incident. Mando would never admit to himself, or to anyone else, that he was suffering from some form of post-traumatic stress disorder. But it was beginning to become an impossible task for him to ignore the way his anxiety spiked whenever Fae wasn't in his line of sight, or the way he still saw flashes of red light in his dreams.

Perhaps the worst of it, so far, was when she fell asleep in the co-pilot chair of the Crest one night. Which isn't directly a problem in itself, but there must have been something about the way the moonlight reflected off of the girl's face to make it look fatally pale that caused Mando to thoughtlessly reach out to shake her shoulder. Because he now knew what Fae looked like when she was dead. And that sight had presented him with an impeccable replica.

After spending the better part of an hour frantically searching for her in every back alley and dark corner of the small town, Mando eventually sprinted back to the Crest to thankfully find Fae curled up inside the sleeping compartment with the Child — who was trying to wipe away her tears.

He couldn't bring himself to shout at her.

And she hadn't spoken a word since.

In fact, Fae didn't even registered a thing going on around her for some time after that.