Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Sion Jissard has spent the last ten years of his life in the dredges of archives, digging through documents and testing fibers found between the flimsy, papery pages of old texts—scrounging for clues to recreate the conditions of the great conference halls and small, tucked away offices in which some of the most powerful people in the galaxy once gathered to whisper and shout over the fate of whole planets.

He has a hypothesis that the conditions in those rooms affected the decisions made in them. His hypothesis is strong enough that it has endured several rounds of peer-review and escaped those vulture-like clutches mostly unscathed in published form—both in journal and, his chest swells to recall, in book formats.

His book has sold several hundred copies and been cited in a plethora of upcoming article submissions.

The last eight years of tension in his marriage has eased in light of this. The salary from the professorship obtained in light of the book certainly hasn’t hurt it either.

His two doctorates are set on the wall of his office and when he receives word that a conference on ‘Intergalactic Unionism and Peace Negotiation’ is to be held in two months time, he opens up the speakers list and raises his head to gaze upon those two solid frames.

There will be jedi speakers at the conference. Several, actually. The whole thing is to be held on Coruscant, in the small visitors’ wing of the Jedi temple itself.

Sion Jissard pinches the fabric of his suit and then lightly slaps at his cheek to make sure that he is not dreaming.

He has only recently begun studying the jedi order’s material world and the role that world plays in their intergalactic peace-making practices. Prior to this, he considered the subject too on-the-nose. Jedi studies are rampant. Everyone wants a piece of that pie—the allure of it being that the jedi themselves, scholars in their own rights, refuse to partake in examinations of their culture.

They are notoriously obstinate. Their grandmasters refuse to let outsiders into their archives. Their masters shut down any and all attempts to obtain interviews or transcripts or documents with empty expressions or gentle, pitying smiles. Their knights blink with confusion at personal and personal-adjacent questions, and the little ones, the apprentices, are shielded behind all of these people as though the elbow-padded questioners are threatening their precious little lives.

In short, the jedi are happy to listen but loathe to teach. If you are not one of their soldiers or one of their fellows, they will lie to your face and tell you that it is their religion to do so.

And yet here they are, offering up a scholar’s wetdream and even allowing a handful of their own to present on their areas of expertise.

Sion Jissard will pass up this opportunity only upon pain of death.

He applies for the conference as a participant, not a speaker, and is delighted to receive confirmation of his place within mere minutes.

He puts the date on his calendar and starts looking into transit to Coruscant for the event in two months time.

Sion arrives on Coruscant, at the foot of the Jedi Temple itself, and stares up at it for so long that he begins to feel sick to the gills.

He fumbles for his confirmation at the little table set up in the interior courtyard behind a side-entrance door. He is distracted by the fact that the woman he is standing in front of is a Jedi. She is helped by two small children and holds a baby who is dead-set on unraveling the knots that decorate her thick waist band. Even the baby is dressed in double-collared cream-colored robes.

Sion has so many questions he wants to ask.

The jedi asks him for his name. She has a collection of name badges before her, but none of them are his. He gives his name and the master turns to the little girl sat at her right elbow with a brush in hand and instructs her to write it out.

The jedi child—not an apprentice, her robes are cream still, there are no additional earth-colors layered on top of it—writes Sion’s name in beautiful script on a little card and hands the card to the master, who puts it in a holder with a pin on it and places it into Sion’s hand.

She instructs him to go through the side door and enjoy some refreshments before the event begins. The baby in her lap looks up at her abruptly and bonks his sweet little head against her chin.

Sion forgets himself.

“How old?” he asks automatically, gesturing to the baby.

The master looks down into her lap.

“He is eight months and 75% lung,” she says affectionately.

“Ah. Mine was like that, too,” Sion says. “He grew out of it. He’s only 40% lung now.”

The master smiles.

Sion removes himself from her table before he embarrasses himself further.

There are enough people inside the front room of the jedi’s visitor’s wing to nearly fill it to capacity. The volume, though everyone is whispering, is great enough to be heard from outside the door. The room itself is earth-colored with a high ceiling. Its walls all contain niches with rounded borders. Columns with deep-cut creases in them arch high to the skylights.

It is all beautifully geometric, stoic, and clean. And even though the walls and floor are built from materials of warm tones, the skylights overhead and the surrounding addtion of books and holorecords set into the walls lend it a cooling quality.

What should have been imposing architectural feels more like holy space. The room is one that reverberates with reminders to respect all around you.

Sion’s fingers yearn to document this, but there is a sign right by the room’s entrance that asks politely for no recordings or holographs to be taken.  

“Professor Jissard,” a familiar voice says.

Sion feels his whole body droop. He turns to see Teo Detras stood before him in his obnoxious, roaring red robes.

“I’m pleased that you too were able to secure an invitation, sir,” Teo says as though he has not attempted to place Sion on the metaphysical chopping block for each of his premises since the time they began their academic programs.

Sion opens his mouth to point out that this is also his area of study and that Teo has no monopoly on the field of Jedi architecture when a quiet passes over the room. Sion watches the heads around him lift and searches for the source of the sudden shudder of silence.

He finds it in a tall master with dark skin standing at the very front of the space. The man has tucked his hands neatly into the mouths of his sleeves.

He is Jedi Master and General Mace Windu. Sion has read and reread his essays, not caring so much for what he is talking about but how he is talking about it. His metaphors and examples should have been insight into the common experiences of those living in the Jedi temple.

Sion has found, however, that Jedi Master Mace Windu does not especially care for eloquence or metaphor. He cares only to methodically destroy the argument (if it could be called that) published by a jedi named Qui-Gon Jinn many years ago. Though Master Jinn has not published for several decades now, Master Windu’s writings remain agitated by his interpretations of the jedi’s Spiritual energy, the Force.

Just gazing upon the man now, Sion would not think him capable of agitation.

Master Windu welcomes the academics to the temple and says that he regrets not having more time to speak with each of the attendees as individuals, but there is a war on and his clone troopers require his services. He encourages people to refrain from any recordings of the temple due to its sacred nature, and he asks that attendees be mindful of the jedi Initiates (the white-robed children) who are confused and intrigued by all of the non-jedi people inhabiting their usual playroom.

He cautions everyone that if anyone slips on a toy, he warned them, and the temple is not liable for their medical bills.

This is a joke.

People are unsure of whether or not to laugh. Some laugh awkwardly far too late. Master Windu gives no sign on his face that he appreciates or disapproves of this.

Instead, he steps from his space of honor and leaves in his place a young man with feathery blonde hair and a highly expressive countenance, who drops his armload of documents on the floor obnoxiously and flings himself down to snatch up only the conference program, as if this was the most efficient way of finding it.

People know to laugh this time.

The young man begins announcing panel topics and rooms and give his strong opinions on each of them.

More people laugh. It feels less like a sin.

“And that’s all, my dears and darlings,” the young man says, “Mind your step into the conference rooms, our predecessors derived joy from an unexpected drop.”

Sion has only one panel that he will kill at minimum three bodies to sit in on. It is the one on peace strategy and resource management. He is not here for the peace strategy or the resource management parts of the talk; his burning interest yearns instead in listening to how and if people talk about their space and things. He wants to write down the language they use. He wants to learn about the physicality of peace.

He thinks ‘The Physicality of Peace’ would make a very compelling title for another book.

So he slips through the arched doors of conference room 3 and finds himself in a tiered lecture theatre. There is a small balcony with rows of pew-like benches that hangs over a lower seating area. He takes a seat at the edge of the front pew and sets his datapad on his lap for note-taking. At the front of the room there is a long bench—not a quite table, but definitely a tall bench, and behind it, there is an enormous screen for displaying images and information. Someone has very kindly thought to place a jug of water and some cups at the center of the bench by a microphone.

Sion gets the impression from its awkward, dead-center placement that it is an addition that the jedi themselves usually forego.

He wonders what that means. He only wonders for about 15 seconds before a hand touches his shoulder and he jerks in alarm.

“My apologies, sir. We were just wondering if the space next to you is available?” says the smooth-faced, copper-haired man standing above him.

He is wearing white armor on top of his layered robes. The arms and legs that emerge from his long off-white tunic are dark in color, but his boots are hard and white and come up and over his kneecaps.

Sion is speechless.

This is General and Jedi Master Obi-Wan Kenobi.

General and Jedi Master Obi-Wan Kenobi has touched Sion’s shoulder and apologized to him.

He doesn’t have words. He can only make fish-mouthed motions and then point and nod.

General Kenobi accepts this with grace and stands up straight. He waves behind him to call his companions over to join him on the balcony’s edge.

They arrive as a pack.

Instead of coming around and staggering past Sion’s knees at the edge of the bench, General Kenobi climbs over its back and settles in. He then twists back over the row and holds his hands out; a Clone Trooper in full armor hands to him a strange bundle of woolen, brown robe. It produces legs and arms and then bright blue and white lekku once Kenobi has situated it next to him.

“Fooled ‘em,” the little Togruta that emerges from the cloth says brightly.

“Shh,” Kenobi says. “Cody, you next.”

“No, I want Rex to sit with me.”

“Ahsoka, shhh.”

“Rex.”

“Child, this is how people like me get banned from meetings; you’re not even supposed to see—”

“REX.”

“HUSH. Okay, okay. Rex. Pst. Cody, get Rex. Cody, oh for the love of—Wolffe, yes—no. Wolffe, look at me. Get Cody to get Rex.”

Sion cannot believe what he is seeing. General Kenobi appears to be sneaking half of his command into the balcony area. There are more than a few clone troopers there are at least twenty. They are somehow visibly excited despite their matching helmets. The General is able to tell them apart easily. He leans over the back of the bench again and crooks his finger at one of the troopers who leans forward. He tells them to throw something at their commander.

The Clone takes off his glove, stands, and nails a clone standing in the aisle in the head with it. The slap of contact makes this clone cease speaking in serious low tones with a clone decorated with blue edging in front of him. The first clone draws himself up perfectly straight and turns around with a fury that even Sion can feel the heat of.

His armor is painted yellow in places.

He holds the glove in his hand like a threat. The clone who threw it winces and points wordlessly to General Kenobi, then sits down in a hurry. Kenobi smiles wide and white. He has freckles on his face that do not appear on any of the images of him that appear on the news.

He’s also shorter than Sion himself, even sitting.

“Sir,” the white and yellow clone says stiffly.

“Rex,” Kenobi says through that threat of a smile. “Get over here.”

The Togruta child twists around excitedly as the clone in white and blue exits the conversation with the one in white and yellow and surveys the rows of his fellows piled into the space behind the General and the child. He has to squeeze past the line of knees and then climb over the bench to sit down next to the child, who immediately cuddles up to him.

“Hey, that’s my seat,” a new voice whispers.

Sion looks back to see General Quinlan Vos with his arms crossed over his chest, recognizable in any setting. Behind him is General Koon. General Kenobi slaps a hand to his forehead and grumbles, then shoos the blue edged clone and the child a few seats down.

The generals clamber just as awkwardly as the blue clone through the sea of knees of the troopers and then over the back of the bench.

Somehow, Sion has won the jackpot. He is now surrounded by jedi culture, literally.

“All of you, back,” Kenobi snaps down the bench when everyone is just starting to get comfortable. “Cody. Commander, come here.”

The clone trooper with the yellow edging does not want to play this game. He shifts his weight back onto his other heel as Kenobi pats the newly vacated space next to him. General Vos croons in a teasing tone something about Kenobi being especially fond of this clone.

Kenobi lurches out across the empty seat to punch him in the gut and then returns peacefully to patting the space over the sound of Vos’s moaning.

The Clone Commander has no choice. His general is giving him a directive. He gives in to the inevitable and makes his way through the knees and—much more neatly than the others—steps over the back of the bench to its seat and then into sitting. Kenobi beams at him, practically purring.

Sion needs desperately to take notes, but the subjects of said notes are right there and rudeness is intolerable in retaining his vantage point.

He fights the urge to vibrate in space as the lights begin to dim overhead and the panel chairman comes out to introduce the topic and speakers. It is only about a minute or so when a hand lands firmly on Kenobi’s right shoulder—the one by Sion’s arm. Sion jumps, but Kenobi resolutely stares directly down at the speaker.

“Obi-Wan,” Master Mace Windu’s low, low voice says right into the space between Kenobi and Sion’s ears, “Did you think I wouldn’t notice?”

Kenobi begins to melt but catches himself.

“You didn’t for a while,” he said.

“Get her out of here.”

“She has a right to see her Master.”

“What part of these orders are challenging for you?”

Kenobi still does not turn around to see Master Windu, but his eyebrows sink and his brow becomes more pronounced.

“No padawans,” Master Windu says. “Ahsoka. Out.”

The togruta, still bedecked in that heavy cloak, turns to stare owlishly at Master Windu while the person at the front of the room moves on to introducing the next speaker.

“But I’m not a padawan,” the child says. “I’m obnoxious. Master Kenobi said so.”

Kenobi holds his face in a hand.

“You can be both. Come,” Master Windu says, holding out a hand.

“But I’m a cloak,” Ahsoka tries instead.

Kenobi crumples further. Master Windu’s hand finds his shoulder again. Sion can feel its heat.

“If not her, then you,” he says.

“After,” Kenobi says.

“I’ll be waiting, Obi-Wan.”

Master Windu vanishes from behind them. Sion shudders. Kenobi turns to the side and hisses at Ahsoka,

“Now look what you’ve done.”

“You’re my co-conspirator,” Ahsoka hisses back. “My—my—Rex, what’s the word?”

Clone Commander Rex does not want to give her the word. Ahsoka tugs at him.

“Rex,” she insists.

“Enabler,” Commander Rex says with bitter regret coating his words.

Ahsoka beams over the laps of the other Generals at Kenobi. He glares back through a squint. He starts to say something, but General Vos tells him to shut up in a sharp tone.

Sion looks back to the front of the room and finds that a young man with dark hair has come out to the center of the front table-bench to speak.

He is a jedi. His robes, however, are dark in color. Blacks and browns with knee-high boots.

He’s very young. Very, very young.

And nervous.

Very, very nervous.

Even from the balcony seats, Sion can see his hands shaking. He is holding a stack of white paper. It is trembling like a branch on a windy day.

“Go, go, Master, go, go,” chants little Ahsoka.

Sion finds himself abruptly appalled by the realization that the child on center stage is the master of the child a few seats over from him.

General Koon gently shushes Ahsoka. Commander Rex helpfully wraps a gloved hand over the bottom half of her face to keep her distracted.

Sion looks from them to the young man and finds that he’s already knocked over the jug of water on the bench and looks about ready to sob about it. He gathers himself, though, and brings the microphone closer to him.

He is General Anakin Skywalker, Sion now understands. He is the first speaker and he’s never in his life presented a paper at a professional conference before.  

His voice shakes as he reads out the title of the article that he published (and that Sion has read) on battlefield surrender. After the second paragraph, Sion brings a hand to his lip to help him contain the emotions that come with the understanding that this boy is about to read his article, word for word, in front of a room full of academics.

He thinks now that he has been too harsh with his students.

General Skywalker is not a strong public speaker. Clearly, his expertise is in action. He stammers. He loses his place in his reading and accidentally rereads three whole sentences. Only twice does he look up from his paper, and each time it is not at the audience but at Obi-Wan Kenobi, sat next to Sion, serious as a plague.

Kenobi nods sagely.

General Skywalker is General Kenobi’s apprentice. Was General Kenobi’s apprentice. However, it is clear to all who are present today that General Skywalker is still General Kenobi’s apprentice. Desperate, the poor thing is, for Kenobi’s reassurance.

His confidence in reading grows under his former (current?) master’s approving eye until he turns a page and—horror of horrors—drops the stack of paper.

Sion’s whole body tenses in sympathy and second-hand embarrassment. Skywalker flings himself down and messily collects the papers. He hurriedly reorders them, all while stuttering ‘ums’ and ‘uhs.’

Yet, when Sion chances a peek down the line of Generals next to him, he finds that not a single one has winced. No one has laughed. Even the clone troopers all around them are as silent and steady as the night itself.

It seems like they are all listening intently to their young General on center stage. The only giveaway that sympathy is being had by any is the tiny gesture Clone Commander Rex is making with his hand. He is moving it almost imperceptibly in a circle, as if to say ‘come on, come on.’

Sion looks back to young Skywalker and waits patiently as he finds his place and carries on reading again, this time faster. This time he does not look up for his master’s eye.

He wants only for the torture to end.

He gets to the end of his paper without dropping it or repeating himself and is flushed red. He does not ask for questions. He merely says quietly into the microphone, “Thank you.”

The panel chair waits a beat before walking over to Skywalker and asking the crowd for questions on his behalf. Skywalker becomes even more luminous. Sion cannot decide whether asking a question would be more or less stressful for this poor boy.

No one asks a question.

The panel chair then starts to ask for applause for Skywalker, but before he can even finish the sentence the whole balcony breaks into uproar.

General Kenobi hoots and whistles piercingly in Sion’s ear. General Vos claps and shouts what sounds like ‘You FUCKING did it, kid. You FUCKING did it. Hip-hip—”

“HUZZAH,” the Clone Troopers behind General Vos finish for him in perfect unity.

“Hip-hip—”

“HUZZAH.”

More applause and congratulations erupts after this.

General Skywalker slams his paper into his face and bursts into tears at the front of the room.

He bolts for a doorway that Sion hadn’t even noticed was right next to the bench. General Kenobi whacks at his Clone Commander’s shoulder, and Commander Cody wraps hands around his waist and hoists him up so that he’s standing on the guardrail at the edge of the balcony. He leaps from there to the lower level then goes jogging out the same doorway his former apprentice ran through.

After another moment or two, Commander Cody stands up and snaps at the whole collection of troopers in their language. Everyone shuts up and sits back down. Commander Rex gestures for Ahsoka to put up her hood and takes from General Vos a small datapad which he gives to the child—presumably for her to occupy herself with for the next hour and a half of papers. She takes it and immediately becomes absorbed in its lightly-glowing screen.

The balcony is once again on its best behavior.

Sion doesn’t bother with listening to any of the other papers. He feels no shame at all in beginning to furiously take notes on his last twenty-five minutes with the jedi.

Upon leaving the conference room nearly two hours later, he finds himself swept up in the clone troopers’ swift and orderly exit from the space. They line up outside the hall in lines by regiment and they wait for their commanders and generals to arrive before marching back towards the visitors’ wing’s exit.

After two or three minutes, only two lines remain.

Clone Commander Rex and Clone Commander Cody stand perfectly at attention beside their lines of men. Clone Commander Rex has his jedi’s apprentice thrown over his shoulder; he has balanced her on one arm while she sleeps.

It’s very sweet. She obviously trusts the Clone Commander very much.

“Gentlemen.”

The clones snap to even tighter attention as General Mace Windu appears, walking briskly their way.

“You’re dismissed,” he says to them. “Commanders, you will remain. Obi-Wan and Anakin will join us shortly.”

“Sir,” both commanders say simultaneously.

There is a pause, and Sion sees that all of these people are now looking at him.

“Can we help you, sir?” General Windu asks.

Yes. And Sion will pay any amount of money to just know this one thing. This teeny, tiny detail.

“Sir?”

“Is that normal for you?” he blurts out.

The Clone Commanders stare. The general stares. The apprentice coughs lightly in her sleep.

“I regret to say that it is not only normal, but expected of these generals and units,” General Windu says. “Please vacate this area.”

Right.

“Thank you,” Sion says.

He stiff-legs it back to the crowd of other academics and hunts down a liquid to soothe his parched throat.

The new book’s title will not be ‘The Physicality of Peace.’ It will be ‘All is Fair in Love and War: The Jedi Order and Ideologies of Family, Part I.’

Chapter Text

Chera Las has been waiting for two years for this moment. The doors before her are wide and tall but ceremonial, apparently. Her name is called, and she turns her head to see her center’s director standing with a big, cheesy grin and a handful of lanyards shaking in her hand.

She stands slightly angled towards what appears to be a side entrance. A jedi with a wide, purple-ish waist wrap stands in front of it with their hands thrust into their sleeves. Her director glances back at them, points and bounces her eyebrows.

Chera is frozen for a moment as her colleagues hurry past her to join the director, not wanting to wait even a second longer. But Chera wants everything to slow down now.

She doesn’t want it to be over so soon.

Her director starts handing the lanyards out, however, and she is left with no choice but to join the rest of the group.

They enter the Temple.

It is cavernous and yawning. Their shoes clack loudly on the hard stone flooring. They follow the director like ducklings as the director makes small talk with the jedi with the purple waist garment. This jedi smiles lightly and admits that they do not know the answers to the questions the director seeks. They are only a guide to bring the team to the crèche to meet the masters there who looked after the children of the Temple.

The director very briefly explains that their team is there to interview these masters and some of the children as part of a project evaluating the application of jedi child-counseling techniques. The jedi continues to smile emptily. They say that this all sounds like very important research and they are sure that the crèchemasters will be happy to provide as much information as they are able to.

Their steps, for some reason, don’t seem as loud on their flooring as everyone else’s.

The jedi leads them into a much lighter, brighter part of the Temple that appears to be the hall used for jedi returning from off-world duties. It is surprisingly bustling with people of all species and plain robes of all colors sweeping through it like currents in a river. Some walk in groups, arguing with sharp gestures. Many walk in pairs, chatting and hiding laughs behind over-sized sleeves. Here and there, a lone jedi storms past with billowing robes and a grave expression like they are taking the first steps of a conquest.

The most endearing of all these passersby are, of course, the teachers.

Chera can see them spotted all throughout the crowd. The students—padawans, the books say they are called—tag along half a step behind their masters. They peek over their shoulder and spy a friend here and there, which breaks their studiously hollow masks into wide smiles and frantically waving hands. The receivers of these gestures notice them and begin wiggle right back.

The master jedi notice this, of course. Sometimes, they glance back at the energy behind them and surreptitiously begin move their trajectory sideways at an angle until they walk beside the master of the child theirs is reacting to. The other master gives a knowing look to the initiator’s and both parties pretend that they are the ones who wish to discuss affairs. Their children seize the chance to cuddle together, affectionately pulling at each other’s robes and bumping shoulders as they whisper into each other’s ears. They trip and gasp and jog after their masters to maintain that half-step of distance.

Chera’s cheeks ache just from watching them.

She is fascinated to see that the teenage padawans enact similar behavior despite their much stronger external masks. She has to move out of the way of one young lady tearing past her to launch herself at her jumping, tentacle-waving friend on the other side of the hall. The two embrace and throw each other from side to side.

Chera watches in awe and a hand gently touches her arm in apology. She startles and looks up to see master jedi’s wincing eyes.

“It’s been two months,” he says. “You’ll forgive the exuberance.”

Chera nods and gapes—she realizes belatedly. She snaps her jaw shut.

“They’re wonderful,” she says to the jedi.

He has started to step away from her but pauses with a thoughtful look on his face.

“I suppose they are,” he says, and then takes up his journey to go chide his apprentice on the other side of the hall.

Mari reaches around and beams wide at Chera as soon as he is gone. Chera smiles back.

It is all far more relaxed than she thought it would be. They’d been prepared for traumatized orphans not—

A scream breaks through the hall like lightening. All thoughts flee Chera’s head. She jerks back instinctively and searches for the source of the sound.

The jedi in the hall carry on, on their hasty paths as if nothing has happened. A second scream sounds out but cuts off barely a second into its invocation, and Chera’s heart stops when she realizes that the noise is emanating from the other end of the hall, from a child.

He is a human child, maybe eleven or twelve from the size of him, and he has balled, swinging fists flailing all about his person. His knees pedal hard in the air as he tries unsuccessfully to kick at the enormous man behind him who has one arm wrapped firm around the boy’s waist, keeping him hoisted up and close to his body, and the other hand splayed wide over the child’s face to muffle his shrieks.

Mari clicks her tongue.

“That’s more like it,” she says.

This is exactly the sort of trauma they’d come here to find.

The tall jedi struggles with his apprentice as the boy tears his head away from his hand and throws both of his own fruitlessly at one of the walls along the side of the corridor.

The adult jedi in the hallway passing the two slow their gait as they approach and the tall jedi holds out a placating hand the size of a bear’s.

“He’s fine,” he says. “We’re fine.”

The child in his arms starts sobbing. Chera’s heart burns for him, even as his master adjusts his grip into something both more firm and less uncomfortable for the both of them. He shushes his charge who reacts by trying to kick at him again.

“Qui-Gon,” a deep voice says.

Chera doesn’t turn fast enough to see its owner as they brush past. She sees only the back of their robes. They wear a dark outer cloak.

“He’s fine,” Master Qui-Gon emphasizes to this person as they approach.

The boy sees the other master with bleary, tear-filled eyes and ceases his wails. He hangs from his master’s arm, suddenly at peace, despite the flushed cheeks and tears.

“Put him down,” the other master orders.

“I think not,” Master Qui-Gon says.

“You’re making things worse,” the other master hisses.

“You don’t understand,” Master Qui-Gon says as his boy struggles in his grip. He doesn’t even look down as he moves to hike the child up higher.

“I understand plenty,” the other master says.

Master Qui-Gon gives this man a long, long flat expression.

“Fine,” he sniffs. “On your head be it.”

He drops his apprentice and before the other master can even step forward to welcome to little one into his arms, the boy’s off like a shot to the other side of the corridor. He latches his hands around what appears to be some kind of handle in the wall face and tears it down, revealing a chute set into the old stone.

He begins trying valiantly to climb into it.

Master Qui-Gon surges forward faster than all of the other adult jedi in the immediate area and expertly hauls the boy up back into arms before he manages to get a knee up onto the chute’s lip.

The child screams again, this time, Chera sees, in frustration.

The other master stands still, at a complete loss for words as Master Qui-Gon detaches his apprentice’s hands from the chute’s handle and closes the thing with a ‘clunk.’ He carries the boy back over to the dark-robed master.

The child begins to struggle once more.

The other master says nothing.

“Now if you’ll excuse us,” Master Qui-Gon says. “We have to debrief.”

His apprentice has begun trying to sink teeth into the sleeve of his robe.

“I see,” the other master says. “Yes. You—you see to that.”

“Hey, mind your manners. Say goodbye to Master Windu,” Master Qui-Gon instructs his ball of rage.

It pauses and looks up with a face full of freckles and big, wondering eyes.

“Goodbye, Master Windu,” the boy says, the very epitome of politeness.

Master Windu stares down at him, understandably bushwhacked.

“Goodbye, Obi-Wan,” he says. “You sleep well tonight, yes?”

“Yes, Master,” little Obi-Wan says.

He waits until Master Windu has stiff-legged it a few paces away before seizing the chance to launch himself again in the direction of the chute on the wall. Master Qui-Gon has anticipated this, however. He snatches the child up under the armpits and throws him over his shoulder before taking grand, long steps in the direction of the gate at the far end of the corridor.

As he sweeps past Chera and her colleagues, she hears a snippet of conversation.

“—behave for ten seconds in front of Master Yoda and then you may be a hellion wherever you please—”

Obi-Wan digs his fingers into his master’s hood and moans in utter despair.

The two get lost in the crowd moving forward after that, leaving Chera to watch after them with massive eyes.

“I want him,” Bolin whispers to the director.

“You will fight me to the first blood,” the director says.

They are taken to the crèche. There are no children in it, but a row of neatly robed jedi of various species who apologize that the children are not in a place to be interviewed at this time.

They are playing hide and seek.

Chera peers past them into a room that mixes old architecture with soft, blue and white padding on the floor and walls. There are multiple rooms that lead off from this central location, which is filled with some peculiar structures that appear to be, in one area, a pile of large sliced up industrial pipe pieces and in another, a similar stack of crates. Younger jedi, each with braids hanging from behind their ears, hurry around the room with arms laden with baskets. They bend down neatly at the knee to sweep colorful toys up from the soft pads under their socked feet.

Chera decides that this is the playroom.

“It’s okay that they’re out, we are in no rush,” the director says. “Is there a space where we can begin to set up our equipment?”

The crèche jedi are the softest, most gentle people Chera has had the pleasure of meeting in a long while. Their patience is endless, as is their willingness to accommodate. They are even happy to explain the structure of their branch of the organization.

They take the team on a brief tour through each of the crèche’s rooms. The first, a dim space with rows of floating cots, is for the littlest of the brood. The babies in the cots are attended by padawans who are assigned the task on a rotation. The room adjacent to this one is for toddlers, and the brightest one of all is for those who no longer need the same level of support and vigilance.

This is the current location for a boisterous game of hide and seek.

The director asks if it is possible to receive background information on each of the children the Order has cleared for interviewing. The masters excuse themselves to discuss this for a moment and then agree that a general biography can be provided.

Mari speaks up and asks if the other children approved for the study will be available today.

“I’m afraid that they are not,” the tallest master says through their voice modulator. “To support your efforts, many have been returned from off-world missions and so are likely not in states conducive to your work. Once they are again settled, we will call their masters so that you may speak with both parties as requested.”

Chera thinks back to the exuberance of the kids in the main hall and decides that yes, this is almost certainly the best way forward.

Chera did not come to the center to study babies and toddlers. They are not her preferred subjects, as sweet as they often are.

She knows one thing about them and one thing only: they hate her.

It isn’t their fault, she knows that many don’t recognize her as their species and so react with hesitance, but even the occasional humans and near-humans that make their way into the center seem to see her and promptly burst into tears.

Again: she does not place the fault at their stubby little feet, but at her own. Clearly, she has not yet developed the skills needed to placate this particular population.

Be that as it is, she prefers the older kiddos. The ones who don’t suck on things anymore; the ones who challenge her and initiate conversations about what they care about, regardless of what direction she tries to lead them in.

They’re much more fun, these ones.

Unfortunately, the ones here at the temple are also brimming with energy destined to crash them right into their beds.

She is here to study padawans.

She is here to see how their burning little minds are addled and rattled by the things they’ve seen that they can never unsee, by the things they have heard that they can never unhear.

Perhaps it is morbid or cruel to be so intrigued by the thought of a population of children who are, essentially, refugees from their own worlds—often rejected or ostracized by their communities and picked up or negotiated for by Jedi—who take that trauma with them into the blistering warzones and political situations their masters walk them to. But Chera has been called worse things than morbid and cruel.

She is confident in her pumping maze of a heart that she wants to help these young ones. The research will help them. If not them, then the ones who come after.

But the research must wait until it is has been fed and herded to bed. Instead, a baby is placed in her arms while the others begin to get to work. It rocks its round skull in her hands and cracks open a gummy eye to give her a long, withering look.

Then it begins to hiccup.

She applies a big grin to her face.

It begins to sob.

She is banned from holding the babies.

Their team stays the night in a beautiful dormitory with high ceilings and rugs under the beds to stave off the cold from the stone flooring. They are silly, the ladies who stay there. It is like a slumber party for them all. They gossip and the director sits back and stays out of it.

She asks Chera over the whispers if she is excited for tomorrow.

Chera thinks that she will not sleep for anticipation. The director tells her that she will regret that and tells everyone that she is turning out the light.

The morning greets them all with piercing light and fuzzy brains. Chera lifts her hand and paws for her datapad for the time. Its light is nothing compared to that pouring in from the dormitory windows.

It is not even zero-seven-hundred hours. She cannot believe that Coruscant people live like this.

She tosses the datapad back onto the small table by her assigned bunk and forces herself up to her elbows.

Doing so gives her the gift of seeing two heads peering at their group from the door. Both heads vanish in an instant and the door closes nigh silently.

Spies, she thinks with a grin. Some people are curious about outsiders.

She dresses quickly and makes herself look professional, but approachable. She can already feel that her dark hair is a disaster. She removes her bonnet and sighs at it before wrapping it up neatly in her customary scarf. It is orange with bursts of blue and white and turquoise stars. Her subjects generally enjoy its cheer.

She exits the dorm with her groggy colleagues. They find outside the jedi with the purple waist wrap from before. The jedi does a little bow and says that they are there to guide them all to the canteen.

The canteen is crammed with mostly young adults half-awake or bickering vociferously over what sounds like topics from music to politics to, in one particularly befuddling case, an insect trapped between hands that someone is swearing fealty to against the wills and wishes of their friends and loved ones.

Someone at that table threatens to sacrifice a limb if the devotee does not take back their oath to the insect.

The guiding jedi ignores these people and encourages Chera and Co. to take a tray and grab some food and caf. If Caf is not their preferred beverage, tea is available.

The guide says that they will return in thirty minutes time.

Chera tries to sit as close to the bug-talk as possible.

After breakfast, they are led to a new room where they are given permission to set up their equipment once again. This room is far less colorful than the crèche. There are six offices behind the two desks at the front of the room. Usually, Chera learns, this place is managed by two jedi who are in charge of handing off official documents to the owners of the offices for signatures. Outside each office door is a tall organizer with labels on its edges for different ambassador names. There are desk-sized trays that pull out from under each of these names and all have a different stack of paper in perfectly file-sized divots in the metal.

The guiding jedi says that the office owners have cleared out a tray for the use of the Center if they feel so inclined. They then bow again and say that they are going to go fetch the subjects now. Most of the children are awake and fed, apparently. It is the masters who are lagging behind.

Chera and the others wait until the guiding jedi has left the room to get to work.

They set up the recording devices, throw blankets across chairs and desks. They drag extra seats into offices for those subjects who don’t wish to speak on their own.

They bust out the jars of rewards—sweets for some, little figurines for others, rubbery chaotic bouncy balls for the last group.

The crèchemasters didn’t mind this reward system last night, so the center staff figure that these masters will be similarly lenient, and if they are not then they can be the ones who tell their apprentices to refrain from taking something after their interviews.

When the guide arrives again, this time with a crowd of excitable young people (followed by a mass of sleep-deprived, not-morning masters) everything is ready to go.

“Line up, line up,” the guide orders the youths.

The youths stare at them.

“You heard me,” the guide says. “Backs against the wall.”

“You’re not taking me alive, I heard what you did to Eryes,” a boy around eleven years old threatens with a finger.

“Jonah,” someone at the back of the masters’ group says long-sufferingly. “No pointing. And we don’t accuse without evidence.”

The finger goes down, but Jonah’s suspicious squint remains. His master fights her way through the crowd and comes over to walk him back to the wall herself. The gesture breaks the masters’ group as a whole and they abandon their mass to come herd their individual apprentices into order.

Chera does not miss Master Qui-Gon and his amazing height bringing up the rear. She glances at the line of children for the man’s chute-obsessed apprentice and finds his gangly body lacking. Looking back, she relocates the boy.

He has buried himself in the side of Master Qui-Gon’s ribs, sleeping standing up. Master Qui-Gon doesn’t give any sign of waking him beyond walking them both to the wall.

He flattens his own back against it and slides down to sitting. His apprentice crumbles into his lap and wakes up with a snort.

Master Qui-Gon pats at him until he settles in and crosses his legs over each other like his master. Master Qui-Gon lifts his cloak like a bat and lets it fall over the boy’s head and again, he goes limp, this time with his head resting on Master Qui-Gon’s elbow.

It appears that one night of sleep has not replenished his energy.

They assign all of the children a number for which door they will enter. Chera cheers internally when Master Qui-Gon and his apprentice receive the number of her door. They will be her last set of interviewees for the day. She has high hopes for them.

The jedi youths are, much like other children, loathe to stay on topic, although they are, unlike other children, exceedingly articulate and polite about it.

Chera gets a set of twins—one right after the other—both of whom are fascinated with reptiles. They tell her much about reptiles. Their masters say without emotion that the boys despise each other and cannot be left alone without fighting. Chera latches onto this and asks the children about what their families look like.

One of the boys includes his brother begrudgingly in his mental map of his family. The other says that his family is his lineage.

This is an interesting thought because it leads Chera to learning what a ‘lineage’ is in jedi terms—after all, these are people who as a rule do not procreate.

A lineage, the twin tells her, is the line of masters and apprentices. The jedi keep track of the masters of their masters and the apprentices of their apprentices. The elders often step in to support the youngers and the youngers lend respect to the elders one or more generations beyond.

They refer to these people using familiar lingual structures around the word ‘grand,’ but they don’t use the familial terms. They say ‘grandmaster’ and ‘grandpadawan’ to indicate that this relationship runs through a school of teaching.

Or so Chera thinks until she gets to her last subjects of the day.

Here, with Master Qui-Gon holding young Obi-Wan by the scruff of the neck without admonishment, she learns that it isn’t a line of teaching that the forms of address serve to uphold.

“My master thinks I’ve lost my damn mind,” Master Qui-Gon says simply as Obi-Wan sticks his whole arm down his sleeve. “He says he understood Feemor and Xanatos, but he can’t see why I’ve decided to bring this one into our line as well.”

Obi-Wan lights up in pride at this statement and stops trying to fit his wrist into the bracelet Master Qui-Gon wears on that arm.

“Is that a bad thing?” Chera asks. “My apologies. I mean unusual? Is there something about Obi-Wan that is unusual?”

“I’m a problem,” Obi-Wan tells.

“His temperament is very different from the two before him,” Master Qui-Gon says. “They were fairly obedient boys.”

“Which I am,” Obi-Wan says with a big smile.

“You have a mind that I am going to trap in a cannister and shake,” Master Qui-Gon tells him firmly.

Obi-Wan stifles giggles in his palms. Master Qui-Gon looks up and shrugs a shoulder.

“He’s like me,” he says.

Chera does not know what to write down. The connections refuse to be made. If Obi-Wan is like Master Qui-Gon, but Master Qui-Gon’s master does not approve of Obi-Wan, does that not mean that Master Qui-Gon’s master doesn’t approve of his own student?

“Whatever you’re thinking, yes,” Master Qui-Gon says.

“I don’t care to meet him,” Obi-Wan says. “I’ve only got so much brainspace for rejection.”

Chera’s attention is now latched onto this boy.

Master Qui-Gon looks down upon him in what appears to be exasperation.

“Stop talking like Mace,” he says.

Obi-Wan pouts. He is the second most expressive child Chera has had in here today (the first being the twin who said he’d rather stuff his whole fist in his mouth than remember how he and his twin came to the Temple). He keeps saying alarming things like ‘abandoned in a mine,’ ‘got home from the civil war,’ ‘found a body.’

He is, without a doubt, the perfect subject for this study.

He is also, without a doubt, not inclined to help one bit.

Anytime Chera starts prodding at his little snippets of experience, he goes blank and asks her something about herself instead. Master Qui-Gon does not stop him. Before he was brought into the room, however, Chera was the one being interrogated about research and developmental responses, so the current situation is somehow an improvement.

She feels like she is holding a knot right here in her hands but can’t figure out which string to pull to start unraveling it. Obi-Wan is sure to start to become impatient soon.

“Why don’t we do this?” she says. “Why don’t we start all the way from the beginning? Can you tell me the story of you?”

Obi-Wan tilts his head to the side, interested now. Master Qui-Gon settles back in his seat. When his padawan looks to him, he makes a shooing gesture.

“Okay. I’m Obi-Wan,” Obi-Wan says. “I got here really, really late, and I fought some people and then got told off for fighting people and went to Bandomeer to be a farmer except Master Qui-Gon decided I wasn’t going to be a farmer and now I’m not a farmer and I’m here.”

Chera blinks.

She backtracks through her mental notes and comes to the conclusion that Obi-Wan has left out every important detail about his story. He is hostile to her, she realizes abruptly.

He doesn’t want to talk, doesn’t want to be here and is hoping that by being silly, his master will remove him from the situation.

His master, however, is not going to remove him from the situation. She can see it in the way that he watches his apprentice that Master Qui-Gon is leaving all decisions to Obi-Wan, which he either doesn’t understand or does not realize.

Huh.

“What was Bandomeer like?” she asks.

The question results in immediate silence and a mask of plain clay slapping itself onto Obi-Wan’s face.

“I don’t like Bandomeer,” he says mechanically.

“Why not?” Chera asks.

Obi-Wan’s hand finds his knee and starts picking.

“I just don’t,” he says. “It’s not for me. I want to be a knight.”

“Why do you want to be a knight?” Chera asks gently.

Obi-Wan brings his feet up into the chair with him.

Chera clocked him to be eleven or twelve, but he is thirteen years old, coming on fourteen. He is small for his age. He has scars on his hands and knuckles that bisect a few of his larger freckles.

“It’s the only thing for me,” Obi-Wan says to his knees.

“Obi-Wan’s talents direct him towards knighthood,” Master Qui-Gon finally interrupts in a lower tone than he has been using before.

His eyes carry a warning when they meet Chera's.

She has found the string, she realizes.

“You must have been happy, then, to meet Master Qui-Gon,” she says to Obi-Wan.

“Yes,” he says to his knees.

She smiles. He does not lift his eyes.

“When did you meet Master Qui-Gon?” she asks.

“Last year.”

“So soon? What did you do this year?”

Obi-Wan shuffles around to kneel in his seat. He places both hands on Qui-Gon’s left one where it is laid on the arm of the chair between them. He still does not look at Chera.

“Obi-Wan spent several months involved in the conflict on Melida/Daan,” Qui-Gon says.

Melida/Daan is half the reason this study received funding at all. Chera tries not to let her surprise or interest show on her face.

“That must have been scary,” she said.

Obi-Wan stands up and comes around behind his master. He presses his face into Qui-Gon’s shoulder from behind him and holds onto his robe. His knuckles show through his skin.

“Miss, please change the subject,” Qui-Gon says.

She startles back to reality.

“I’m so sorry,” she says. “We can talk about something else—”

Qui-Gon tips up his chin and leans his head back into his apprentice. He waits. Obi-Wan shakes his head tightly two times. Qui-Gon places a hand on it to push it back so that he can stand up.

“I do not think it wise to continue this conversation,” he says. “Melida/Daan presented a difficult situation for Obi-Wan and he does not wish to remember it at this point in time.”

She speaks before she thinks.

“May I speak with you then, sir?” she asks.

Her insides go cold and churn. Master Qui-Gon towers above her, above his small apprentice hiding now behind him. His silence stretches on and on and on.

“One moment,” he says.

Chera lets out a breath as Master Qui-Gon speaks to Obi-Wan in low tones outside.

He will not bring his apprentice back into this room. Chera cannot blame him. She wants to tell him to tell Obi-Wan to take a toy or a sweet from the jars in the middle of the room, but she wonders if doing so would feel like an insult to this boy who had left a still-blazing conflict with burns and slices in his knuckles.

She is surprised out of breath with the door of the room opens again. Master Qui-Gon closes it behind him and sits down in Obi-Wan’s empty seat. He appears far too large for it.

“You are asking about trauma, Miss?” he asks. “Well, the trauma, most simply, is that Obi-Wan witnessed more than his fair share of death on Bandomeer as an initiate. That has been amplified by his recent time on Melida/Daan. The most I can tell you of that ordeal at the present is that I made a mistake that has cost my padawan dearly. He acts out now to test me, to see if I will make the mistake again, because he no longer puts trust in other jedi to protect him.”

Chera lets her breath go.

“So you let him test you,” she says

“I am hoping that with time he will open up to me about the things which cause his nightmares,” he says. “But until then, he is not the only one on probation, Miss. I have decided that I don’t wish to lose a second padawan, and he has decided that I am the only way for him to become a Jedi knight—or, if you will, someone who he can rely on. It is, I’m sure you realize, a frustrating place for him to be in, given that so far he has only been scalded by the path of a jedi. And so here we are. The behaviors you have witnessed—the avoidance, touching, irrational impulses and so on—these are the results of the ‘trauma’ you are researching, there is no doubt about that. And although I am not keen to rehash my apprentice’s life experiences, I must thank you, since this is the first time that he has come to me since Melida/Daan to ask for assistance in ending something that makes him feel powerless.”

Chera winces.

“I’m sorry, Master Qui-Gon,” she says.

“It is no matter. You did not know the circumstances.”

“Is there anything I can do to make amends?”

“You making the amends will not help the scars,” Master Qui-Gon says. “I have much to atone for. But, if  you must know, I’ve recently learned that Obi-Wan has not experienced ice-cream before.”

Ah.

“A fitting reward for a big achievement,” she says.

Master Qui-Gon smiles.

“It’s a start,” he says.

It is the master that supports the trauma.

It is the master, acting as parent, that helps the apprentice learn how to move forward and keep moving forward.

The masters lead by example; they show the apprentices how to react and how to process, which is why the children are so attached to their masters.

Chera could write a book about surrogate families and individualized support systems in this place.

Right now, however, what she can do is give Obi-Wan a bouncy ball.

He is waiting for his master alone in the otherwise empty office and he looks so small there that Chera’s better judgement cannot help itself.

“Thank you for talking to me,” she says with the ball in her palm, held out to him.

He is captivated by this toy but does not move to take it.

None of the apprentices have taken a toy. Their masters let them take the sweets, but not the toys. These, she thinks, last too long and look too much like possessions. They should have brought more sweets.

“Go on,” Master Qui-Gon says.

Obi-Wan looks to him and then hesitantly takes the ball.

“You can do a lot a damage with it,” Chera promises.

Obi-Wan studies her with pale blue eyes.

Then lobs the thing with all his might at the nearest wall.

The effect is dramatic. They all take cover. Master Qui-Gon laughs as Obi-Wan scrambles out from under his table and comes to burrow into the space under his chest.

Chera understands better now why no one was allowed to take the toys.

“It won’t stop,” Obi-Wan says miserably.

“It will if you make it,” Master Qui-Gon tells him.

There is a pause. Obi-Wan lights up and wriggles out from under his master and the table and throws out a hand just as the ball comes rocketing towards his face. It freezes in mid-air.

He snatches it and holds it up triumphant.

Master Qui-Gon drags himself out from under the table and applauds. Chera cannot believe what has just happened.

“That isn’t leaving your room,” Master Qui-Gon says as Obi-Wan stuffs the ball into his waistband.

“Thank you,” Obi-Wan says to Chera, looking for all the world like he’s forgotten the pain she has put him through today.

“N-no problem,” she stammers.

“Bant’s going to love it,” Obi-Wan says.

“Your room. Nowhere else. Not the canteen,” Master Qui-Gon says.

“Garren, too.”

“Obi-Wan, look at me. Thank you. Not the canteen.”

“Kay.”

“Okay. You may go—but not to the—”

The boy is long gone. Orders have been followed almost to the letter.

Master Qui-Gon clears his throat.

“I suppose that’s our cue,” he says.

Chera is sitting in a chair in her office. Just sitting here. It has been days since she left the Jedi Temple, but she is still thinking.

Thinking.

Wondering about lineages. Wondering about intergenerational trauma.

Thinking about the person who scrawny, freckled Obi-Wan with his bouncy ball and indulgent Master will become. Thinking about who he will teach and how Melida/Daan will bled into that child’s life.

Thinking about the bouncy ball. Where will it go?

No one knows.

Chapter Text

There is a young man in the shop. He is familiar in all but his eyes; these, once so bright and mischievous have grown to be ringed by the colors of thunder.

He holds in his hands a cloak, one that Vani has made. It is too big for him; it gushes out on either side of his basket of arms and his eyes gleam and glint in their corners as he asks if Vani can take it in for him.

Qui-Gon Jinn is no more.

Obi-Wan Kenobi will now wear his master’s cloak for ceremonial purposes.

He is inches smaller on every side than Qui-Gon Jinn was. Vani tells him that it will be a few days. He needs to take some measurements. He will be back with his measuring tape.

Vani closes the door to all but a crack on his way out. He stands outside the heavy wood for a moment and, through the gap, watches Obi-Wan Kenobi press his face into his master’s cloak. His breath hitches. His shoulders shake. He appears to be moments away from calling for his master one last time.

But he does not.

He sniffs. He wipes his face and hugs the cloak to his chest, jaw set.

Vani feels approval swelling in the hinge of his own mandible and nods once to himself, to Obi-Wan, and to the spirit of Qui-Gon Jinn.

He goes to get his measure.

A small boy, nine years old, brings Vani an armful of brown. It is filthy. It is slick. He says that this is his master’s cloak and he wants it to be his one day.

Vani nods at this child with the gravity that such a declaration deserves.

The boy is Obi-Wan Kenobi’s apprentice. He also got to choose which of his master’s cloaks would be his for ceremonial purpose. He chose this one. Why this one?

It is not Vani’s place to ask. All he knows is that he needs to see this boy’s shoulders before he sets the woven cloth to washing.

A tall young man walks into the shop accompanied by the wearer of Qui-Gon Jinn’s robe. Obi-Wan looks distraught. His apprentice, tall—taller than him—stands awkwardly next to him with fingers too long for his hands and joints too heavy for his wrists. His braid trails down the side of his neck and he is distracted by all in the shop.

Vani once cut a cloak to size for him. Now, the boy is on the cusp of manhood, and Obi-Wan Kenobi has had no choice.

Anakin has outgrown him and his cloaks.

Obi-Wan holds out two cloaks that he has received from the Order over the years. They are approximately the same shade and material. They are the heavy winter cloaks Vani is so used to the jedi coming to his family’s shop to size and resize and take in and let out.

Anakin stands by his master with the original cloak given to him in his hands.

Vani accepts all three and holds up his tape against Anakin’s wingspan. The young man is proud in the chest and chin.

Vani will need to unpick the stitching and redye all of the cloaks to match each other. Obi-Wan tells him to do whatever he needs to.

His apprentice is going to become a knight.

Anakin brings a Togruta child to Vani’s shop only a few years later in the middle of the war. He hushes her while she talks over him and argues about what sounds like a desire for another jedi’s cloak. Anakin snaps at her that she will wear his out of respect to Obi-Wan Kenobi.

The child’s protests die off.

“Yours is Obi-Wan’s?” she asks.

“Yes, and the one you will receive will be part,” Anakin Skywalker tells her. “There are still some pieces left over from the time of mine’s making.”

The child’s name is Ahsoka Tano. She looks between Anakin’s heavy cloak and Vani. Her eyes are blue and her face is marked with white. Her lekku curl just past her shoulders.

Vani smiles and after a long beat, Ahsoka smiles back.

“Can I have gray?” she asks her master.

Anakin’s shoulders drop in the heave of his sigh.

“Fine,” he says, “But don’t tell Obi-Wan I said you could. Vani, you won’t tell him either, will you?”

Of course, Vani won’t. It will simply be a mistake with the dye.

Obi-Wan Kenobi does not return. Nor do the other jedi who used to walk into Vani’s shop—their apprentices startled by the sound of the bell.

Only Ahsoka comes and with her storms of anger. She speaks respectfully to Vani and lowers her eyes when she holds out a folded gray rectangle, soft at the edges, lightened where the tips of lekku and shoulders once took the brunt of snow and starlight.

She asks him if he remembers which parts of the cloak belonged to Anakin’s.

He tells her that stripping the cloak will not heal her heart. There is only one thing that will do the trick.

Her eyes spill tears as she throws the cloak onto the fire in the cramped open space behind the shop. He leaves her watching it smoke and goes inside to draw out a long pull of white cloth across his wide table. He brings out the shears and knicks the corner then takes both sides of the notch between his hands.

The tear sounds like the rending of a heart.

Vani is an old man now. His daughters run his business while he sits in the back and turns paper patterns into ones that his daughters feed into a glowing screen. The screen projects lines onto the cloth from high above, and his daughters can draw his patterns onto it by hand from that way. They use rolling blades that leave beautifully even seams. His shears look primitive in the face of their elegance.

Every now and then, a person from many years ago comes into the shop and asks if Vani can make their coat or shirt—it’s their wedding you see, or their child’s, or their mother’s funeral and so on and so on.

Vani always says that he is available, even though his hands shake these days. His daughters help him cut the cloth, but he is the one who sews it.

Many people learning about old styles of fashion come to his shop to watch him do this. He shows them where to crease, where to drape, where to put darts. He shows them his old ways of pleating and his system of colored pins that remind him which kinds of stitches go where.

He shows them how he gathers stiff cloth and how he stitches leather with waxed cord.

And then one day, a young man comes into his shop.

A gray-white cloak is his shadow.

Ahsoka Tano stands with lekku that hang over her chest and arc up into a crown as though she is a queen. She asks for Vani. She says when he gets there that this young man is her nephew.

His clothes do not fit him. They are cheap and charcoal and canvas. They are folded in the old ways of the jedi, coaxed into a semblance of those coarse, swinging clothes that used to grace this shop.

But these imitations are not this young man’s clothes.

They do nothing to bring out the white, feathered scars that trail delicately, like kisses, over his neck and cheekbones. They have no movement to them when he shifts his body.

Ahsoka Tano holds in her arms a frayed, sun-bleached piece of cloth.

“He is Obi-Wan Kenobi’s nephew. Yoda’s student,” she says.

Yes, and perhaps those things are true. But that is Qui-Gon Jinn’s cloak. Its wearer has died. Parts of it are charred; there are holes from moths. It is a shadow of the thing that it once was.

And this is Luke Skywalker.

He is a slight young man with shoulders little like his father’s. But he is a jedi and he needs a cloak, so Vani says yes, of course he will make one. He takes Qui-Gon Jinn’s, Obi-Wan Kenobi’s ragged histories into his arms and tells his youngest daughter to take this Luke Skywalker’s measurements. Vani needs to set up the dye bath.

But wait. The students from the college will want to see this.

The students from the college are buzzing to lay eyes on some of the last jedi, Ahsoka Tano and Luke Skywalker. Vani knows that Ahsoka does not associate herself with the old Order, but she will always be a jedi to him, and she brought the young one, did she not?

She did, indeed.

Luke Skywalker says that he doesn’t wish to trouble Vani and his daughters. He thinks that his clothing is good and serviceable as it is. He says that it is some of the nicest that he has owned.

Vani pities him.

He tells his daughters and the students upon Ahsoka and Luke’s departure from the shop that the young man will leave his presence looking like a true jedi. A proper jedi.

Vani has the old patterns and Ahsoka Tano has paid him for far more than the cloak alone.

She understands what the feeling of proper clothing does to a person.

They make the jedi’s clothes in the old way. The cloth is hand dyed. It is thick. It is coarse until they brush it into softness. They sew it with thread twice as sturdy as that they use for other projects. The students are perplexed by the additional pleats that Vani directs them to add here and there—on the sides of the legs, on each side of the groin.

They follow his crooked finger and gave him looks from the corners of their eyes as they build another double-collar. They do not understand fully how the piece comes together until the layers begin to go on the mannequin.

One by one, they begin to build a jedi.

They build one in light colors.

They build one in dark colors.

They build a high-necked shirt with long sleeves fitted flush to the body so that wide-mouthed sleeves can be layered over it without muddling themselves. This is duplicated into a longer tunic form with pleats in the front.

They build several sets of pants, all reinforced at the waist and the knee, where Vani’s experience tells him that jedi are most likely to fall and be dragged by.

They build out of leather two wide belts. The students are absorbed by this work. It takes time. It takes precision. They make the clips for lightsabers and fit them, then refit them into the leather until the whole piece is snug and stiff.

Then they turn to the cloak.

It is in poor condition. Obi-Wan Kenobi always took care of his clothes, but for twenty years, Vani has not seen him, and he knows that Obi-Wan would not trust anyone else’s hands with his master’s cloth.

Vani says a prayer to the dead and dunks the material into the hot vat.

They let it steep. Let it ferment. And in the meantime, they must find something to line the inside, for there isn’t enough material left to keep the new jedi warm.

It is somewhat sacrilege to give a jedi a fully new article of clothing. They are creatures of longevity and poverty. They save their scraps and bring them to Vani. Or rather. They saved their scraps and brought them to Vani.

Now, however, Luke Skywalker has empty hands. He has saved them all from the empire and he has no clothes to weave into this cloak or any of his other garments.

It is unacceptable. Vani must travel.

Vani does not travel much these days, what his old knees and grinding hips, but his daughters hold his arms and help him make his way through the crowd and into a transit vehicle. They sit, the three of them, in one bench until they arrive to a market on the other side of Coruscant.

The fabrics here are very good. All rolled tight, stacked up on great shelves over everyone’s heads.

Vani finds an old friend’s son and purchases a suitable black and, because he has the money to, a warm green and a soft mottled blue-gray-white.

These he brings home and the students gather around the next afternoon when water has stopped dripping from the edges of Obi-Wan Kenobi’s cloak.

Vani sets two students to darning the holes in the old fabric. He sets two to pinning the old patterns. He sets his daughters to winding bobbins. And everyone else, he has help him with other parts later on.

They cut. They seam. They smooth and iron and stitch and, at the end of the second day, there is a black cloak—once brown, it will fade to that color again in time.

Luke Skywalker, for now, does not suit that color. He suits black like his father. And then green like his master.

The last cloak is the color of snowy mountain tops. Bluish and white and gray like fog for the person who brought these students and Vani’s daughters the opportunity to learn what threatens to have been forgotten.

Ahsoka brings Luke Skywalker back to Vani’s shop, still looking like a cotton, scratchy facsimile of a jedi. She pushes him into Vani and his daughters’ hands, and they take him back into the fitting room and dress him.

He has never been dressed like this before; the wonder in his eyes brings a bubble of pride into Vani’s chest.

The first shirt goes on with its high collar and is wrapped into place, secured with hidden clasp. The tunic  goes on next with its doubled, high black collar. Luke lifts his head to let Vani adjust it. His shoulders are sharp and his tunic sits over them like a glove.

The pants go on next and then boots are replaced. The last of the leather is the wide belt, completed by the click of a lightsaber that dangles beautifully, like an ornament for the solstice.

Finally, Vani brings out the cloak. The first thing he sees is the surprise in Luke’s eyes, but once Vani has pressed the weighty piece into his hands, Luke understands.

He does not put it on right away. He crumples the whole thing to his chest, eyes closed.

He asks if this was how it originally looked. Vani says no. Vani says that that is not how the cloaks are passed along through the jedi. Each is made from the one before, but they are made according to the person they are made to adorn, not the old wearer. Those people have already had their time.

This cloak that Luke holds now is not an everyday cloak. He will wear this one for ceremonial purposes. The green one that Vani puts in his arms—a warm color so near to brown a glance would mistake it, but still living and growing like moss—this is the one that he will wear for all other occasions. It will bleach a whitish green on his shoulders in time and then it will need redyeing, but for now, it is ready to be worn for years.

Luke still holds the black cloak in his hands.

He thanks Vani on behalf of his uncle.

‘Ben,’ he calls Obi-Wan Kenobi.

Just ‘Ben.’

The boy may very well have been cradled in that cloak for his first breath in Obi-Wan’s arms. Vani’s throat thickens in the face of his gratitude and the tears that lighten Luke’s eyes.

Vani explains that he may not be around the next time the clothes need making or repairs, so in that case, Luke is welcome to bring them to his daughters. They know now how to build the garments. These students too.

Luke bows his head and thanks them all. It is not often that the young people meet such an old soul. Especially one now who moves with the grace of his people, swinging, billowing and graceful.

Vani tucks Ahsoka Tano’s new cloak onto her arm nonchalantly as she begins to leave with Luke. She is surprised by it and looks up to meet Vani’s eye.

He simply taps the side of his nose.

One day, she will need an old cloak to pass on like those before her. And in its place, she will need a new one.

Chapter Text

Her head is slipping off the seat of her palm for the third time when Kendele is struck with an idea so grand that all around her, the room darkens. Light erupts only from the powerhouse that is her brain. There is so much electricity, so many charged ions rubbing against each other, that she cannot contain it even if she tried.

The enormity of her genius, in longitude and latitude and at least four other dimensions, is so vast that the scholars of yore drop to their knees at her feet in her mind, throwing away their chisels and tablets. They prostrate themselves before her mere moments after her idea solidifies like the cheese in her dorm’s microwave oven that Yeseabb has securely and forever burned onto the plate.

She vibrates through the rest of the lesson and then nearly falls off her stool on her way out the door to tear Yeseabb’s off its hinges.

She doesn’t quite manage the dramatic entrance her fat, gorgeous brain deserves on account of forgetting that Yeseabb’s door’s hinges open inwards, not outwards, but the intention is there and the universe speaks through her now, so she knows that it will understand.

Yeseabb stands back with suspicion in every line of her body while Kendele flings herself onto her mattress and throws out her arms.

“I’m going to make perfume for the clones,” Kendele declares like the patriot that she and everyone in this beautiful republic should be.

Yeseabb snorts.

Kendele excuses her.

Yeseabb snorts again and clarifies this time that this is an intentional snort.

Kendele tells her to fuck off and die out of sheer reflex and Yeseabb laughs so hard that it takes her a whole minute to realize that Kendele is glaring at her infuriating head from her bed.

“AHEM,” Kendele says. “We’re making perfume for clones. Clone-logne if you will.”

Yeseabb stops her laughing now.

“We?” she repeats. “We are? You and me?”

Kendele gives her a grand, rolling gesture of supreme indulgence. Yeseabb makes another unattractive phlegmy sound.

“The clones don’t need cologne, Ken,” she says, “They need like, guns. Or food.”

“Listen to my genius, my genius is speaking,” Kendele says. “Imagine you have an army of a million men. All the same man. All living in close quarters, sweating in armor—think of the funk, Yesbie.”

“I’m thinkin’ of it,” Yeseabb says.

“Picture it. The pungency—”

“You’re really going with this.”

“The fragrance. Among them, little peaks of freshness from the jedi—”

“I’m pretty sure that the jedi barely believe in bathing.”

“Imagine the feeling—that first feeling—that first breath of fresh air when they take off their helmets.”

“Kendele. Please. These men live in funk and have only ever known funk. They probably like it. They’ve probably got favorite funks.”

Kendele rolled her eyes and then her head and then her eyes with her head.

“Of course they’ve got favorite funks, everyone has favorite funks. And I am going to create a funk so amazing that the jedi will have no choice but to distribute it among their ranks.”

Yeseabb blinks.

“You’re talking about the field trip,” she translates.

“We’re gonna go see clones,” Kendele emphasizes to her.

“Yeah, because Professor Qeelves wants us to learn how noses are grown in a fuckin’ lab, girl. Come on.”

“We’re gonna see clonesssss,” Kendele sings. “Giant men with bulging arms. Ripe with—”

“Please stop.”

“Potential.”

Kendele drops her arms and juts out her bottom lip as far as it will go.

“Fine,” she says. “You and your bad attitude can learn how a nose is cloned. I’m gonna sniff General Skywalker.”

Yeseabb’s neck straightens suddenly from behind. She turns her head slowly with fires burning like coals in her eyes.

General Skywalker is hot.

End of discussion. Anyone who has taste will agree. Kendele is one of thousands of girls who would love to get him flat on her sheets and unbuckle that thick belt of his.

For science. Of course. As a future perfumer, she needs to know how peoples’ skin smells. Obviously.

And what she and beautiful Skywalker with those dark wavy locks and those dark lashes get up to after that experiment is conducted will be between only them.

Yeseabb tells her that they are not going to see General Skywalker. They’re going to a bunch of barracks—no one is allowed to see the cloning process, but apparently, there are a few medical jedi who look after clones there who have prepared a lecture on odor and brain development.

They’ve apparently gotten a few troopers who have agreed to do a Q&A with the university’s students.

Kendele has checked the list of names twice. There are only three there and they’re all written in code.

General Skywalker’s name is not among them.

She sighs.

The whole class convenes in one excited, bustling mass outside the school, waiting for Professor Qeelves. He arrives in his customary mode with his green lekku trailing down his back. He looks down at them all and smiles and asks if they’re all prepared to meet some of the Republic’s greatest soldiers.

Kendele is very prepared to sniff them, yes. She nearly says so, but Yeseabb’s hand collides with the back of her head, and she remembers that this is her professor not a forum. She elects to stay mum and nods with everyone else.

Professor Qeelves shoos them all into the GAR transporter that arrives only moments later. He gets on last after taking roll on his datapad and tells the pilot that they are ready to go. The pilot asks him to input his verification code. As soon as he does, everyone on board’s datapad lights up with a green dialogue box. The pilot asks them all to upload their school IDs. It takes about five minutes for everyone to complete the verification, at which point the pilot nods and closes the door.

It is six hours to the army barracks. He advises them all to put on their coats; it’s going to be a little cold.

Kendele flattens her face against the windows of the transporter with everyone else in the craft as the Galactic City finally, finally comes into view.

Its buildings are towering. Its skyline is jagged. Nestled between all those arching teeth is a pyramid-shaped structure straight out of someone’s grandma’s backyard bog.

Yeseabb murmurs ‘woah, it’s huge’ next to her.

The transporter zooms past it and starts a wide, circular descent. It moves past the home of Anakin Skywalker and sinks down, taking all of them into the gaps between the gleaming glass and concrete teeth.

It lands in front of a series of stark-looking buildings that are tall, domed, and rimmed with windows. They seem to be stacked in rows next to each other, and, to Kendele’s surprise, there are clones milling about them in their white armor.

She stares as two guys in one group suddenly launch themselves at a defenseless third, who takes off running like his life depends on it. The chasers have blue marks on the sides of their armor. They get as far as the nearest building’s entrance before both stumble back and Clone Commander Rex steps out.

He is unmistakable, even without his signature helmet. There is someone with him, however, who is not.

He is also a clone, but his face is more square and his hair dark, curly, and shaped severely at the sides. Clone Commander Rex speaks to him with casual gestures with a gloved hand until he catches sight of the transporter and stops moving.

His friend stops a step ahead of him and looks back quizzically. He, too, notices the transporter. He then recoils and reaches for Clone Commander Rex who reaches back.

Just as the craft lands properly, the men half-stumble, half-run back towards the building entrance.

Kendele looks at Yeseabb who’s face reflects her own bafflement.

“Are they scared of us?” Yeseabb asks.

They can’t be. They’re clones. The greatest army ever created. They’re afraid of nothing.

“Maybe they left the stove on,” Kendele decides.

The clones have not left the stove on.

Kendele and her peers have been here for thirty minutes, and what has become clearer than anything else is this:

The clones are fucking terrified of them.

She is not having a good time.

She does not understand who came here before them and ruined the all-important first impression. It has gotten to the point where any room they are taken into is immediately abandoned by its inhabitants. Even Professor Qeelves is forced to clear his throat in front of some jedi in bland-looking robes in the medical bay of the facility. The jedi pause in their talking and guiding and give him interested expressions.

“Are the soldiers aware of our purpose here?” Professor Qeelves asks.

One of the jedi blinks fast and the other blinks slow.

“Yes?” the faster blinker says, almost like they’re nervous now.

Professor Qeelves tries to smile, but it’s shaky.

“I see, it’s just—it seems like the soldiers are a little skittish around my students is all,” he says.

The jedi deflate into calm again.

“Oh, it’s not you,” the slow blinker says. “That’s the 501^st. They’re reacting to their commander. It's the chasing that does it.”

Kendele tilts her head.

Clone Commander Rex was chasing people? He didn’t look like he was chasing people.

“Commander Tano,” the jedi says. “She’s stalking her company again.”

Kendele stared at him.

“Stalking?” Professor Qeelves asks.

Both jedi have suddenly become immeasurably exhausted.

The slow blinker opens his mouth but the clatter of armor fills the air and everyone turns and sees four clones shoving their way through the hallway, all talking in hurried, anxious tones.

There is an air conditioning unit at the far end of the hall. All four clones scramble on top of it, helping each other up and huddling where it meets the wall.

The jedi in front of them roll their eyes. One of them reaches over and presses a comm link button on the wall.

“Captain Rex, please report to medbay,” they say.

The comm hisses in response.

“Hard pass, medbay, over,” Clone Commander Rex says.

The jedi are now beyond exasperated. They hit the comm link again.

“That is an order, Captain,” the fast blinker says.

“Commander Cody says I don’t have to,” Clone Commander Rex replies.

The jedi leans their forehead against the back of the hand on the comm link. They stand up abruptly and produce a different comm link from their belt.

“Anakin, come get your padawan, she’s tormenting your company,” they say sharply.

There is a long pause. Kendele holds her breath.

The comm link hisses to life.

“Obi-Wan just banished her from the officers’ quarters,” a voice like heavenly trumpets says.

“So you inflicted her on your troops?” the other jedi demands.

There is a pause.

“I’m open to suggestions for other ideas,” Anakin says.  

“Come get her. We have visitors.”

There is a sigh.

“Alright, I’m on my way.”

It is hard to pay attention to the pleasantries and the beginning of a formal lecture when beautiful men are just outside, piling up on the AC unit and hiding in each other’s arms.

It’s all so very intimate. At one point, a ruckus out there starts up so noisily that the jedi pause in their lecture and lower the foam replicas of different species’ skulls in their hands.

The ruckus is marked by a yelp and a hundred people shushing all the same time.

The fast-blinking Jedi—Yo-Ty, he is called—plonks his fake foam head down on the lecture bench and stomps over to open the door. Outside, Clone Commander Rex has removed his helmet and is holding it out like a peace offering to a little Togruta girl who barely comes up to his chest.

There are now somehow more than ten clones behind him on the AC unit, crushed together like sardines.

The girl’s posture is weird. She’s sort of hunched over with only her face lifted, staring into Clone Commander Rex’s face. She does not acknowledge the helmet he holds out to her.

He shakes it and tells her that its hers.

She lunges for his face.

They are here to learn about perfume; what they have gotten instead is a lesson in Togruta biology.

The men of the 501^st are stalked by the youngest of their company. Her name is Ahsoka Tano. She’s the real commander of the company—clone titles be damned.

She has chased Captain Rex up onto the AC unit with his men. He is calling for backup. It arrives swiftly in the shape of someone snapping ‘AHSOKA’ down the hallway.

Anakin Skywalker has appeared, but it is not he who is leading the charge.

The other guy with the beard is.

“So. Help. Me. Force—” Ginger-beard says with each step.

Ahsoka’s whole demeanor explodes. She jerks her head his way and then, out of nowhere, goes tearing down the hallway.

Beard-man shouts “OH NO, YOU DON’T” and goes sprinting after.

The two leave in their wake Anakin who comes to a stop in front of the pile of white armor on top of the AC Unit. His feet plant themselves a shoulder’s width apart. His hands come up and set themselves on the hips at the end of a mile-long torso, and then, in heart-rocking moment, he cocks them to the side.

“Captain,” he says.

“General,” Captain Rex greets without shame.

“The more you all run, the more she chases,” Anakin says. “You can’t feed the instinct.”

There is a cry audible a few walls away.

“Yes, sir,” Captain Rex says simply.

Anakin drops his face to the floor and sighs.

“With all due respect, General,” one of the clones pipes up from behind Captain Rex, “It’s very hard not to react when she comes at your head.”

“I know, Hardcase, thank you,” Anakin says. “I’ll talk to her. Again.”

“Sir?” Captain Rex says.

“In the meantime, no one flinches, you hear me?” Anakin says.

His men are silent.

“That’s a ‘yes, general,’” Anakin says.

It is as though the clones all realize at once that he is giving them an order. They say ‘yes, general’ all out of sync.

“Carry on then,” Anakin says, turning towards the corridor.

He flies back hard, shoulders first into the ground. His assailant vanishes away down the hallway which he’d come from, leaving the poor guy flat on his back on the ground. He blinks in shock for one second before a new emotion takes hold.

Captain Rex launches himself at Anakin at the perfect moment to hook an elbow around Anakin’s neck.

“YOU LITTLE SHIT,” Anakin roars down the hallway.

Beard-man re-arrives to the situation with his hair flopping all over the place. He is panting. He tries to say something but has to hold up a finger and brace his hands on his knees first.

Captain Rex struggles to hold back Anakin’s flailing body.

“G-General,” he greets over the motion.

Beard-man throws out a dismissive arm.

“Just let him go, Rex,” he puffs.

Captain Rex looks between the skull trying to bust open his lip and Beard-man.

“If you say so, sir,” he says.

He lets go of Anakin. The guy is off like a shot down the hallway; the thud of his boots seems to reverberate after him. His absence is followed by silence.

“Are you sure this is wise?” Captain Rex asks.

“No,” Beard-man says as he straightens up. “But I’m too old for anything else.”

A blood-curdling scream echoes down the corridor only moments later. Captain Rex and the clones cringe together in many different shapes and sizes.

“OBI-WAN.”

Kendele covers her mouth. In terror, she inches her gaze back to Beard-man who throws his hair back and drops both hands definitively to his hips in a very similar gesture to the way Anakin had before.

“Now I’m wanted,” he says to Captain Rex.

“OBI-WAN, HE’S HURTING ME.”

“They’re children,” General Kenobi says.

“Sir?”

General Kenobi waves Captain Rex off. Another scream makes everyone wince. A door on the other side of the hall slams open. General Mace Windu stands there, radiating hate. Next to him is an equally tall Togruta woman with lekku that practically drip down her shoulders. She covers her mouth with a polite hand.

“Obi-Wan,” General Windu says like a storm embodied. “Control your youths.”

“I’m hearing ‘eat,’” General Kenobi deadpans.

“Control. They are making me regret the last year’s worth of indulgence.”

“Still hearing ‘eat,’” General Kenobi says.

General Windu’s friend touches his shoulder delicately.

“It’s nice to have such lively company in these halls,” she says.

“Your lineage continues to stand on my very last nerve,” General Windu tells General Kenobi. “If you hope to bring any kind of honor to yourself and those who came before you, you will teach them to mind their manners.”

General Kenobi blinks slowly.

“Master, I am afraid that what you describe would require more shame than our lineage is able to dredge up as a whole,” he says. “But, for your sake, I will revoke Caf privileges until peace is once again achieved.”

“It’s good for her to practice,” the tall Togruta interrupts gently.

“On the clones?” General Windu asks.

Ms. Togruta smiles indulgently.

“She will grow out of it,” she says. “Thank you all for being so patient with her.”

The clones settle in the face of this peaceful lady. They nod and climb off the AC unit and scuff their boots against the ground bashfully.

They like her.

A lot.

Kendele’s brain lightbulb goes off.

“You’re all dismissed,” General Windu says.

The lecture starts up once more and thankfully ends sooner rather than later. They, humble students, are released. Professor Qeelves gives them two hour to explore before they must meet back in the courtyard they arrived to.

Kendele grabs Yeseabb and drags her through the halls until she can’t anymore because Yeseabb has wrapped herself around a pillar. She demands to know what Kendele is thinking.

Kendele explains to her that another stroke of genius has come upon her, and she will not be questioned in the face of it.

“Let’s go,” she insists, pulling hard on Yeseabb’s wrist.

There are parts of this place that are clearly off-limits to visitors. One of these is a nondescript-looking door that each clone has to key into. They scan what appears to be their thumbprint and then push the door open.

Kendele hangs back behind a pillar with Yeseabb at her side, waiting for the moment of truth.

It comes when a single clone scans his thumb and walks in fast. Kendele throws herself forward and catches the door just before it closes. Yeseabb hisses at her to get away from there, but she points at it and bounces her eyebrows.

‘Once in a lifetime,’ she mouths at Yeseabb.

‘They will kill us,” Yeseabb mouths back.

‘Sisters for life,’ Kendele whispers. ‘Or are you a coward?’

Yeseabb straightens her spine.

Yeseabb tells her that they’re going to get killed as they slip through the door and emerge on the other side in a place bustling with activity. There are people of all different kinds here, not just clones in armor. Jedi walk past, surrounded by clones, all futzing around with glowing blue datapads. Younger people in cream robes hurry the other way, carrying stacks of datapads and old books with transceivers rolling chaotically across their surfaces.

Blocky stacks of crates roll past. A group of brightly-robed ambassadors here. Some people who look like refugees there.

Kendele’s mouth slips open in awe. Yeseabb gapes with her.

“This is where the war happens,” she says.

There is a map projected way up high on to the ceiling of the dome of the place. Messages scroll around the base of the projection in real time, giving out times and locations of deployment. Groups of clones come marching through the area, some with their helmets tucked under their arms. They stop around the perimeter of the room and stare up to the edges of the map before breaking away, donning their helmets as they go.

Kendele’s breath catches when she spots a dark shape moving fast across the middle of the room.

Anakin walks with purpose with the little Togruta chasing after him. He stops and spins around and snaps something at her that is absorbed by the crowd. The Togruta is only cowed for a moment before she gives chase again.

Anakin is headed towards a set of double doors.

“Come on,” Kendele says to Yeseabb.

They weave through the ruckus mostly unnoticed and find themselves at the double doors. They are closed, and there is no finger scanner outside of them. Kendele nervously puts out her hand and finds that the door gives way behind it.

She nearly falls through it. On the other side is a nearly empty hallway lined with automatic doors. A voice filters back from the other side of the corridor.

“—mean to get him in trouble—”

“It’s not him who’s in trouble, Ahsoka. It’s us. Windu already hates me like no other, the last thing he needs is more reason to.”

“Okay, okay. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t apologize, just—I dunno. Try to stamp it back.”

“But I can’t.”

“Have you tried?”

“No.”

“Ahsoka.”

“Master Ti says I don’t have to.”

“Master Ti isn’t the guy threatening to cut off Obi-Wan’s balls.”

“He doesn’t have balls.”

A thud rang out.

“I’m not here.”

“Where are you going?”

“Not here. I’m not here.”

Kendele does not fail to panic at the sound of heavy footfalls coming quickly their way. She suddenly wants to cry. There is no time to dart back through the doors. There’s no time to do anything but go stock still when dark hair and blue eyes appear in front of her.

Anakin Skywalker stands before her, only feet away.

He is beautiful. Up close, his face is a little broader than she expected.

He is frowning. Right at her.

Oh, god.

“Who are you? You’re not supposed to be in here,” he says.

There are no words; there is only stammering, only babbling.

“Who let you in here?”

The door flings open and reveals the shoulders and tight waist of General Kenobi.

“I hope you two are pleased with yourselves,” he immediately says.

Anakin holds up a hand. General Kenobi cuts himself off and follows his gaze to Kendele and Yeseabb who are cowering under it.

His forehead creases.

“Oh, I’m so sorry my dears. Are you lost?” he asks.

And then of course at that moment is when Yeseabb blurts out “We’re here to sniff you.”

“These are the officers’ quarters,” Anakin explains as General Kenobi tells Ahsoka to fetch some tea.

“Sorry, we didn’t know,” Yeseabb says.

Anakin blinks at them and then shrugs one shoulder.

“It’s alright, it happens,” he says. “It’s easy to get turned around in this place. Obi-Wan keeps thinking that the clones’ showers’ door is the one here.”

General Kenobi ignores them to join Ahsoka in digging through a cabinet by the door. Anakin watches them for a moment before standing up from his seat diagonal from Kendele and Yeseabb. He walks over to where the other two are fussing and reaches over their heads to pluck a box from one of the shelves.

Both stop and stare at him in offense.

He hands the tea over and removes himself from their mutually poisonous eyes. He sits back down and only then do the other two go back to their fussing.

“So you make perfume?” he asks.

Kendele nearly chokes on her tongue.

“Yes,” she says. “Or we will. We’re students.”

Anakin tilts his head to the side.

“You can learn to make perfume?” he asks.

“Well, yeah. It’s chemistry mostly,” Yeseabb explains.

“Huh. Obi-Wan, did you know perfume is chemistry?”

“Everything is chemistry,” General Kenobi says where he is now leaning his arms on Ahsoka’s shoulders. She doesn’t seem offended. They’ve set out a strainer filled with dried leaves and are waiting for water to boil.

“Physics isn’t chemistry,” Anakin points out.

“Ah, but chemistry is physics,” General Kenobi says. “The science of smell is fascinating. Your class must have come because of Yo-Ty’s studies of odor and the frontal lobe, yes?”  

Kendele realizes only now that that is exactly why they are here.

“I guess?” she says. “I just want to make a cologne for clones.”

The expressions she gets from the jedi at this statement can be described only as ‘wide.’

“Suggestion,” Anakin says, raising his hand.

Kendele isn’t sure what she is supposed to do, so she calls on him like a teacher. Anakin accepts this with grace.

“Rex will shove his face into anything that smells like butter,” he says. “Can you make a butter perfume?”

“To put on his pillow?” Ahsoka asks.

Anakin tells her to stop thwarting his evil plans. She covers her face. General Kenobi’s expression over it softens into something that looks like amusement.

“I think Rex is just tired of eating the same nutritional mash every day, as are we all,” he says.

The younger two stare at him like he’s just said that the whole galaxy can fit in a teacup.

“I made him two pounds of butter,” Anakin announces.

“I helped,” Ahsoka says. “It’s a surprise. Skyguy’s really good at milk things.”

Anakin tsks at her threateningly. General Obi-Wan’s lips quake with the effort not to laugh at them.

“I’m sure it will be appreciated regardless,” he says. “Where did you find cream?”

“Wouldn’t you like to know?”  

“It’s blue,” Ahsoka tattles.

“Will you shut—”

“Children. Company.”

They’re so normal, it makes Kendele start to feel sick. She knows what Anakin Skywalker was supposed to be. Stoic. Strong. Handsome and mysterious.

But so far, all he’s done is show her that he’s a guy. Just a weird guy. Like her. A lot like her, actually, with the bickering and the moodiness and the making things that no one else wants.

She doesn’t understand why her heart feels like it's sinking.

“Hey, are you alright?”

She forces herself to sit up straight and smile at those blue eyes.

“Yeah,” she says. “Yeah. I, uh. Just thinking about clones. Smells. Can you tell us more about what they like?”

The clones aren’t as clone-like as she thought they would be. They have a whole lot of variation in their preferences, despite sharing the same genes with everyone around them.

General Kenobi’s clone commander likes the smell of barley, for example. He’s only ever taken one sip of beer and he was so disgusted that the General almost felt bad for offering it to him, but he loves the smell of it. General Kenobi admits that sometimes, he will hand off a gift beer that he has no intention of drinking to his clone commander to ‘look after’ for him.

Ahsoka’s clone company is especially fond of the tall, adult Togruta who smells like a pungent white flower. Ahsoka says that she was once all wrapped up in Master Shaak Ti’s robes as a baby; she describes the smell as ‘fresh lily roots and new soil.’

This is what safe smells like for her and many of the clones that Master Shaak Ti has overseen the rearing of.

Anakin says quietly that safe smells like his mother. He has a hard time describing what exactly that means, though. He remembers something olive-y. Smoke trapped in her hair. Now and then there would be the smell of something herby on her neck. It was pine-like, but bitter. He describes it like a taste that sits for a long time on each side of the tongue.

They ask how Kendele and Yeasabb would make scents like these ones.

Of course, it’s all chemistry.

Chemistry and mixing. Layering and feeling. Feeling the scent in the front of the forehead and the back of the nostrils and in the saliva.

Kendele hasn’t really thought about how she knows when things smell right like this. It’s always been a matter of just adding a little bit of this and a little bit of that—chemistry yes, but the heartfelt kind. Now, she thinks, that maybe she does know what she is doing.

“Can we talk to a clone?” she asks.

The clones are delightful when they are at ease with their jedi officers. They talk over each other and they banter with their buddies and they are intrigued deeply by the idea of perfume and cologne. They’ve never had the opportunity to experience these things themselves. When Yeseabb produces a tiny vial of her latest creation from her pocket, the clones shape themselves into one perfect line with their wrists held up as directed.

They are vastly excited to experience how the scent changes from skin to skin.

They request that their officers get spritzed, too, and this sets off heckling and chatter as it becomes abundantly clear that General Kenobi does not suit Yeseabb’s flowery perfume.

He laughs at the announcement that he ‘reeks.’

Kendele asks the clones what smells they like, and it takes a little pulling but eventually they land on a handful of ideas that feel an inch closer towards right.

Windblown sage.

Tangy cream.

Warm laundry.

Tree bark.

The clones don’t have much variety in terms of taste. General Kenobi was right when he talked about their limited diets. They are more familiar with scent; far more familiar with those of places that they’ve traveled in line with their duties, smells around their barracks, certain chores, and deployment vessels. They can sniff each other and know exactly where the other has been in their more familiar spaces.

It’s fantastic and fascinating. But it’s the idea that they might all smell different from each other that really gets them going.

They want to be onlys and singulars. They want to be incongruous.

Kendele tastes guilt as she sits here with them and thinks about how she thought she was going to make one singular cologne to satisfy all of them.

A naïve thought, she sees now. So she asks a new question, one that gives the clones a much longer pause.

‘What do you want to smell like to others?’

“A badass.”

“A motherfucker you don’t want to cross.”

“You know how sunlight feels?”

“Like the wrong side of a rock.”

“A rock?”

“Did anyone ask you? Yeah, a rock.”

“Okay, but what kind of rock?”

“I dunno, man, you want to smell like a ‘cresting wave.’ What does that smell like?”

“Whale shit.”

“Are you fuckin’ serious right now?”

“Call me Ishmael, asshole—”

“Right so, we have recently acquired some literature,” General Kenobi soothes.

“I want to make a boat and throw myself into a heaving sea,” the clone says with a grand hand gesture.

His brothers stare.

“You gotta stop reading, Kix,” one of them says.

Kendele makes a cologne.

It takes her five months and actually paying attention in class to do it, which is painful but worth it when Yeseabb comes home with a crate and enough paper stuffing to fill in the holes in their collective conscious.

They hide glitter and paper confetti in between the paper. There is no doubt in their minds that the clones are going to lose their shit over it.

They stamp the crate with a logo that Yeseabb made in her graphic design practicum and brand it on the front with ‘fragile’ in scorched letters.

It looks so official that it makes Kendele teary-eyed. They take pictures and then ask their teacher to post it to the facility that their clones friends live at.

She and Yeseabb wait with bated breath as the tracking number gets scanned and inventoried step after step until it comes to a halt. They receive notification that their package has arrived at its intended destination.

There is no grand party. No confetti for them—but it doesn’t matter. Kendele is looking at the apples of Yeseabb’s cheeks as she holds one of the remaining teal glass cologne bottles up to the light. She tips it to and fro and watches the liquid slosh back and forth.

A week later a box comes to their dorm. Brandi brings it up and half the students on the floor invade Yeseabb’s dorm to see what the GAR has sent to little old Y & K.

They open the box.

There is a grenade in the box—it has the place of honor on top of the cushioning brown paper. This is a very thoughtful gift that is delicately set aside to be given to security with the understanding that it is a gift and should be detonated with respect by the explosives crew.

Under the grenade and the brown paper is butter.

So much butter.

A whole fucking wheel of butter more than three hand-spans across. Kendle thinks its cheese at first, but no, no.

It’s butter.

There’s a note laid on top of it that is written entirely in Mando’a and translated on the back in beautiful curling script.

‘Thank you for the perfume,’ the clones have written, ‘It is amazing. Everyone loves it. Ahsoka told us that you’re supposed to send a thank you when someone gives you a gift, so we made this for you. It took 5,000 years because it was hot as balls where we got the milk. We don’t know how long it’ll last, though, so eat it in the next couple of days, okay? Thanks again. – Your Friends at the 501^st/212^th’

Kendele sets down the note. Everyone stares at the wheel of butter.

“Days?” someone asks.

“Everyone get a spoon,” Kendele says. “This is what patriotism looks like.”

Chapter Text

There is a species that lives for a millennium, and Seadieg’s people have lived through three series of wars in as many decades. He is not afraid to say that his research and his experience of these wars are related. He’s never denied that he isn’t interested in immortality. It seems foolish and naïve to try to pretend, like so many others do in the literature, that he didn’t come to this research out of fear and curiosity for what lays beyond consciousness.

The species that lives for a millennium should not exist. They are short and hunched and their skin prematurely loosens around their bodies. They have small, button noses and large pointed ears that protrude from the sides of their heads and, with age, sometimes thicken and curl. That hair that they produce tends to be light or reddish-colored and wispy, and while some members of the species grow it in patches around their heads, others grow it along other parts of their bodies in thick layers like moss.

There have been famous examples of the species in the past. The old Jedi Order once boasted two of the species among its high ranks. But the Old Jedi Order is no more, and with its devastation has gone the most accessible means of studying the species.

Seadieg and everyone else who is interested now must sit in the midst of old paper journals and ancient drawings and holovideos of dead jedi projected on holograms all around them. Seadieg has gone through the same drawings and projections time and time again, cataloguing the species’ gait and their areas of interest and study, trying to find even the tiniest glimpse of the species’ origins.

Never has anyone been able to conclusively pinpoint a location.

It is infuriating.

Seadieg and his colleagues have received grant funding from the government and senate. They are not the only ones interested in the idea of a possibly-immortal species. A sample of organic material—blood, plasma, bone, whatever, would shed such light on the species’ aging factor and so, so many other questions—perhaps even an origin.

Until now, the possibility of obtaining such a sample has been a near impossibility.

What has changed is the same thing that makes Seadieg’s hands shake as he watches the same snatch of footage from yet another holo again and again and again.

Luke Skywalker, rebel pilot, Republic hero, stands in a market in swaying dark clothes with his arm crooked before his chest. In it sits a tiny, tiny bundle of cloth with wobbly, delicate pointed ears that turn with its head as it peers down onto the table of vegetables that Luke Skywalker gestures at while he speaks to a vendor. The holograph is grainy; it was shot via a datapad for some social media purpose. It was uploaded to the holonet for those fans of Skywalker—of which there continue to be many.

Seadieg’s fellow researcher Churno has never been so glad to have a daughter who refuses to speak to her family until now. For it was he who discovered this on her datapad at home.

The child in Skywalker’s arms is unmistakably of the correct species. He is in the possession of a jedi—a jedi who is, coincidentally, tied to a member of the senate known to be amenable to cultural and scientific research.

Seadieg watches his career shudder on the ears of the child as Luke Skywalker tilts his head and smiles down at him for the fifty-second time in an hour.

The child, regardless of wherever it had been before, is safe in the hands of Luke Skywalker. No one in the galaxy who is also in their right mind would set foot in front of Luke Skywalker with malice.

The man walks like a hurricane on its way to a harbor. Seadieg is desperate, but he isn’t stupid. He composes a painfully formal message to Senator Organa, Skywalker’s contact in the senate, and sends it with held breath.

No one gets back to him for one day.

Then two.

Then three.

A week. Two weeks.

He sends a follow-up message, gently bringing the senator’s attention to the first one, his credentials, and his sponsors.

Another week passes. Every night, he watches the video of Luke Skywalker smiling down at the child.

He sends a third missive and finally gets a response. It comes in the form of a recording:

"Mr. Fasson, I received your missive a number of weeks ago. Unfortunately, I am not in regular contact with Luke Skywalker these days, and even if I was, I would not pass such a request off onto him. The child that you note in your missive is one of Luke’s students, and Luke does not hold the rights of his younglings like the previous Jedi Order did. His way is different. He will forward your request onto the child’s parent, and it will be at their discretion whether they will allow you to study their child or not. If you don’t believe me and wish to try your luck for yourself, I cannot stop you from reaching out to Luke personally. However, please know that he is frankly a nightmare to get ahold of, and I have to call him for galactic emergencies. Good luck, Mr. Fasson. May the Force be with you."

As far as responses go, it is not the most vehement rejection that Seadieg has ever received. He knows better to reply with anything more than gratitude, however. He pointedly does not ask for Luke Skywalker’s contact information. For that, he has other plans.

Luke Skywalker occasionally appears on the holonet for different charity events. He has appeared in a gameshow raising money for refugees, and even run an obstacle course in his old rebel flight suit to impress a crowd on a show about incredibly athletic ‘warriors.’ In one episode of a popular scientific program, in which a team of engineers with less sense than fingers attempt various ridiculous experiments, he showed up to show the difference between the lightsaber produced by the hosts and the one he made himself.

In every instance, he has been perfectly amiable and even charming. He understands deeply how he has become a symbol of hope, peace, and strength in even the most remote corners of the galaxy. His carefully crafted persona is proof of this.

Seadieg knows that he will not reject an honest inquiry in the presence of a live audience, so he waits until one such audience presents itself.

There is a children’s show on the holonet that involves puppets made to speak and tell stories about current events and general life topics. The show has famous guests on all the time, from drama stars to scientists to politicians. The hosts must be shitting themselves to have booked Luke Skywalker for the occasion; little do they know that they, the Rubian Research Foundation, have infiltrated their darling audience with a mole.

Ian’s son is five standard years old. He has never been more excited in his short life than he is right now to see Luke Skywalker in person. He has a note in his pocket that he is going to put into Luke Skywalker’s hand on stage.

Seadieg’s sponsor has paid extra for this. They know what the consequences of failure are.

The mole-child both works and does not work. At the end of the program, when Luke Skywalker takes audience questions with the help of a puppet host, he is confused when Ian’s son clambers up on stage and hands him the note.

He asks Ian’s son if it is a bird.

“No,” Ian’s son says.

Skywalker asks him if the note is a ship that he is meant to fly.

“No,” Ian’s son giggles.

Skywalker smiles so wide that dimples form in his cheeks and make his face look curiously gaunt.

He asks Ian’s son if this is a note from someone who wants very badly to study one of his students.

The air is sucked out of the research commons as Luke Skywalker turns a gleaming white smile onto the camera.

It is a threat.

They’ve been found out. Perhaps from the senator, perhaps from a jedi trick that foolishly, no one thought to take into consideration with this plan from the start.

The result is the same. Luke Skywalker tucks the note into his cloak and thanks Ian’s son for bringing him such an interesting present. He sends him back into the audience and moves on to answer a little girl’s question next.

Dolmee turns the projector off and the research commons sits in collective silence for a long time.

They receive a formal message from Luke Skywalker the very next morning. It arrives to the official office’s receiver and is forwarded out to all involved staff. The message is surprisingly tolerant in tone:

If you were not funded by the senate, I would storm your facilities and burn them to ash. But given the circumstances, I will play along. I will submit your request to the child’s father and will forward his response to you as soon as I receive it. Please take care not to contact me in the manner you elected to last night ever again.

The thought of two members of the millennium-species in this part of the galaxy is enough to make Seadieg giddy. It makes it easy to swallow Luke Skywalker’s obvious ire.

Seadieg spends the better part of the day unable to keep his mind from flitting to an endless reel of possibilities. He imagines speaking to someone who has seen planets form. He imagines this person telling him, with a crooked, clawed finger where exactly the species originated. This imagined, wizened person offers to take him to the wet forest that he was born in so that Seadieg and his team can see it for themselves. He makes good on his promise and guides them onto a transporter ship into deep space, beyond even the stars of the Outer Rim. And there, in that rainforest, Seadieg and the team feel humid mist on their faces.

They follow the father of the child, eventually crawling on hands and knees into the neat burrow his family lives in. It is woven of still-green saplings and covered in debris from the canopy: giant, veiny leaves and rotting bark. It keeps the inside of the burrow dry.

In the very back of the burrow, there is a larger space that is built out with more permanent materials. The hearth is more firm than the tunnels’ floor and there is a stove built into the wall. In the corner of that irregular area, there is a nest with a child inside of it, glistening with recent birth. Its tiny hands curl open and close as it sleesp, occasionally squeaking and grunting. Next to its soft, already-wrinkled body is a pale blue egg that waits patiently.

Another child is due at any moment.

Seadieg and his team will see it born. They will witness the first moments of a creature whose life will span a millennium. The miracle of its birth will thereafter be marked with a discussion with its father and perhaps even a mother who remains hidden from the outsiders.

They will—

Luke Skywalker interrupts the fantasies around mid-day with a screenshot of a holochat exchange.

It is between two people, the first Skywalker, whose identity is indicated with a blue circle with his initials in the middle of them; the second is presumably the child’s father. Their identifying circle has been labeled ‘Mand’alor’ in Luke Skywalker’s datapad contacts.

The exchange reads:

LS: I’ve received a request from the Rubian Research Group. They are funded by a senate-sponsored initiative for biomedical research. They want to take samples of your son to study for anti-aging purposes. Do you consent to your son’s participation in the study? Yes or no?

Mand’alor: no.

LS: I’ll let them know.

Mand’alor: If they ask again, tell them that I will hunt each of them to the edges of the galaxy, and I will not stop until every body and associate’s internal light has been extinguished. If they have questions, they can submit them to the official office of the Mand’alor.

LS: I will pass along the message. Thank you.

Mand’alor: No, thank you.

Perhaps, Seadieg thinks that night with a drink in one hand and the crumbled remnants of a dream in the other, the reason that the species reaches the ripe old age of 1000 is because they either earn the protection of or become some of the most powerful beings in the galaxy.

Chapter Text

She’s come to this place to get the books that live in the glass boxes. She’s seen them time and time again: three tomes with ribs in their spines. They are old and cracked, two are stacked closed, set askew on top of each other. The third is suspended on a clear stand that holds it open. It looks like it is floating there.

The words inside breathe softly in the case. It is like a self-contained terrarium, making its own humidity; basking in it. Except these words are written in old script and there is a light shining down upon them from the edges of the case.

The tag by the books call them ‘Jedi recipe books.’ They aren’t that old, in the grander scheme of things. But they are hand-written on paper leaves. They are smudged with viscous stains and bulging with water damaged pages.

Tonbry heard their whispers in a dream she had two nights ago after a long day sat in front of an empty screen, waiting for lightening to strike.

Her chief editor told her to let her mind wander. She does her best work when she lets her heart go loose. Her chief editor wants this story to be as good as the one two times ago. The one that made her name appear on the numerous new channels.

They asked Tonbry then if she was writing a longer piece.

She was not.

They asked her how she’d thought to write about salt.

She does not, to this day, know the true answer. But one day, she’d gone to the market in hopes of something to take her mind off the heat and, from the hands of a fishmonger reddened with chill, a stone had been placed on her fingers.

It was a piece of salt. It was cold.

To put against her neck, the old woman said. Because Tonbry’s face was gleaming with sweat.

And so the spirit had taken her. And now it has come again, but the books are gone.

They cannot be gone. Tonbry has seen them here in this library every day for a month. They cannot be gone. The spirit has taken her; she needs those books.

The librarian at the front desk is useless—an old man who sniffs and tells her that she needs to talk to the archivist. The archivist tells her that there is nothing for it. The items have been checked out.

Tonbry supports herself with the back of a chair.

“By who?” she asks.

The archivist asks if she might be interested in the digital scans of the book. Tonbry hears her through her pounding heart, she does. But she knows immediately that the feeling will not be the same. The spirit will only speak through the physical books. The scrape of paper will be her music. She needs to trace those stains, those wrinkles. She cannot write if she cannot read the books the way they were meant to be read.

“Please,” she says. “Who checked them out? I won’t make them turn them in, but I’ll explain.”

The archivist gives her an arched brow.

She does not say. She points.

Tonbry follows her finger, follows her finger, follows her finger down to where the corridor’s row of pillars gives way to daylight, bright as lightening. A swath of fabric sweeps just out of view. Tonbry barely remembers to thank the archivist.

Her boots thud in time with her heart as she nears the end of the hallway; the rush of her pulse and hope is loud in her ears. She shouts before she even make it out.

“WAIT.”

Her feet finally stop. The back of a long pale gray cloak stands before them. It rises up into two peaks. Black boots support them from the ground like the towers of a great bridge.

From the cloak’s hand hangs a canvas cloth, wrapped over and then tied at the ends to make a sack.

This cloak is a snowy peak. A mountain. It turns around slowly and Tonbry sees, with salt suffocating her lungs, the blue, blue eyes of a Togruta. Her montrals loom skywards and her lekku fall down her shoulders and over her breasts; they hang like vines at her waist. She wears a wide belt with hooks on it, partially obscured by her cloak.

Tonbry knows immediately that she isn’t getting those books.

“You checked out the cookbooks,” she says lamely anyways. “I need them. For a project.”

The Togruta’s lips are the color of wine. The pale markings over her brow raise like they are eyebrows. She looks down at the sack in her hand and then looks back to Tonbry.

“Please,” Tonbry says.

“Do you know what these are?” the Togruta asks, lifting the books in Tonbry’s direction.

“I know,” Tonbry says. “Do you?”

The Togruta blinks slowly, almost as if the question is offensive.

“Who are you?” she asks.

“Tonbry Dahleah,” Tonbry says. “I’m a writer. I write for a living. I wrote the big piece about salt a few years back.”

“Salt,” the Togruta says.

“You—may not have read it,” Tonbry realizes.

“Salt,” the Togruta says again.

“It was a think piece. Kind of,” Tonbry says. “It doesn’t matter. I’m writing a story now and that’s my evidence.”

“This?”

The woman holds up the sack.

“Yes,” Tonbry says. “I’m going to—”

Cook from them. To see what holy tastes like. To understand what holy tasted like to a people lost to time and stardust.

“I want to write a book about faith and food,” Tonbry says.

The Togruta’s brows jump as one.

“Faith?” she says. “Faith from these things? Oh, honey.”

Oh, honey?

“These aren’t about faith.”

How can she know that?

“You can wait,” the Togruta says.

“How do you know that?” Tonbry blurts out. Her heart is still racing. She thinks she may be angry.

Yeah, angry.

Like, what does this lady need with some old books? Tonbry’s project is going to take months. She’s going to put her degrees to work. She’s going to break it down so that laypeople can understand how faith moves through bodies and gestures and taste. She’s going to take what she did with salt and make it better, deeper.

This is research.

And this lady just wants to cook one recipe? No. Tonbry is sorry, but in the grand scheme of things, this work is important. This lady can go buy her meal from a vendor like everyone else.

The Togruta still hasn’t answered her, she realizes. She is just staring with a line between her brows. Her lips are sealed together, still stained and full. Her chest rises once, then she turns around.

She starts walking again.

Tonbry has never done something like this in her life. She is not courageous. She is not impulsive. She thinks everything out and triple checks her wallet and keys before she leaves the house. She never leaves her datapad where she can’t find it. Everything in her home serves a purpose, from kettle to stylus to slipper and yet this time, she runs.

She chases after.

She catches up to the Togruta again, but this time the woman does not stop. She keeps moving, making a metallic sound as she does.

Tonbry tries to reason with her. She explains that she is a researcher. She explains her degrees. She talks and talks until she is breathless and even then the Togruta doesn’t stop. She says nothing.

Her boots are machines of perpetual motion.

They...do not chase Tonbry away.

The rush in Tonbry’s ears returns. She looks up at the face next to her and finds no expression there. No comfort or sympathy, but also not hostility.

Perhaps?

Tonbry will follow?

Yes. She will follow.

The Togruta says nothing even when Tonbry falls in line next to her, thinking about all the things she left on the archivist’s counter at the library. Her lip balm and datapad. Her stylus and paper notepad. Her pockets hold only her wallet and keys, but something keeps her moving forward. It’s almost like the Togruta’s perpetual motion-boots have leeched power into her own.  

They walk to a transit s station and catch a train bathed in the orange light of twilight. Their feet stop in tandem in front of a half-full row of seats. The Togruta reaches up and holds onto a strap; she becomes a statue. Tonbry follows suit.

They hang in space and time and orange for more than five stops—Tonbry loses count. She doesn’t know where they are anymore; she can’t find the anxiety that would normally come with that thought, though. The woman before her grounds her.

The doors open. The Togruta finally moves and Tonbry moves with her. She steps out onto a platform, onto a scraped yellow line.

The station is empty and abandoned. It looks like it hasn’t been used for years.

A single footfall grabs Tonbry’s attention away from the defunct, empty droid kiosks, whose past residents that once served to refuel the train.

She follows the Togruta to the stairs.

“Watch your step.”

Tonbry stares at the lip of the ship.

She never flies. She never leaves Coruscant. Never. She is a city person. Her people are city people. Where there is no Coruscant, there is nothing. Just wasteland. Frogs croaking. Bugs buzzing.

She—

“What’s the matter? Are you afraid?”

She looks up and sees a curve in those lips.

“My name is Ahsoka Tano,” the Togruta finally says. “I was once a jedi.”

Tonbry’s breath catches.

“These are the recipes of my people before they were slaughtered,” Ahsoka Tano says, lifting her arm to bring the books up, and in the process raising her cloak enough this time to reveal two intricate, metal cylinders hooked onto her wide belt.

She was a jedi.

She is a jedi.

Maybe not in faith anymore, but in person, in culture. Those books are her books. They belong to her; the library will not be getting them back.

“I’m so sorry,” Tonbry whispers. “I didn’t mean any offense.”

“None is taken,” Ahsoka says. “In fact, I think we can help each other. Tell me, Tonbry, can you cook?”

Cook?

Yes. Tonbry can cook.

“Excellent. I can’t for shit.”

What?

“Come cook with me,” Ahsoka says. “And you’ll understand.”

She holds out her hand.

Tonbry looks at the books. She looks at the face.

She takes the hand.

Ahsoka takes them away from Coruscant. Tonbry has never seen the stars like this. Ahsoka says nothing as she flattens herself against the cockpit window with her hands cupped around her face to dampen the reflection.

“Where are we going?” she asks.

“A moon,” Ahsoka says. “My nephew lives there.”

“Is it far?” Tonbry asks.

“Yes,” Ahsoka says. “But we’re going to take a few stops along the way.”

“Oh? Why?” Tonbry asks, turning around to sit in the seat next to Ahsoka at the console.

She does not touch it; she knows her place.

“Hm? Well, knowing my nephew, we’re going to need some supplies,” Ahsoka says.

They touch down with a drop and a swirl a mile outside of a town teeming with non-city folk. They are somehow louder than city people, working their jaws and laughing and slapping and scolding each other at stall after stall along the street’s barely-paved sides. The stalls aren’t like those on Coruscant; they are caves with the brightest, shiniest offerings closest to their mouths. Pumpkins the size of babies, cracked open to reveal vibrant, crumbly flesh sit among forests of pungent herbs. Gleaming crab apples and cherries pour out from upturned crates.

Beyond these, just on the other side of the street, there are towers of spices, and great, gleaming, glass jugs of oils of all colors—one green, one yellow like egg yolk, one orange as amber.

Ahsoka walks through the market with the air of a mystical being, yet no one looks at her. They are too busy haggling or filling their mouths with the fried breads sold by a tiny stand that tear open to reveal steaming minced meat mixed with onions and garlics and strong earthy spices.

“How strong are you?” Ahsoka asks over her shoulder.

Tonbry startles and remembers her skinny noodle arms with their jiggly biceps.

“Enough,” she said.

Ahsoka turns back to her with jutting lips and a lifted brow as if she can smell Tonbry’s lie. Tonbry shrugs.

“Like a three on a one to ten scale,” she says.

Ahsoka snorts.

“You write about food but you don’t eat it?” she asks.

“I forget,” Tonbry admits.

“My grandmaster would sit on you for that sort of talk.”

“Your grandmaster?” Tonbry asks as she follows Ahsoka away from the street towards a person who leans up against a dolly surrounded by wooden crates upon wooden crates. Ahsoka gives him a chin nod. He straightens out and she holds up five fingers, to which he, himself nods. He starts collecting crates and around to fetch another old dolly.

“He’s something of a legend, you might say,” Ahsoka sighs. “But no one knows of the true struggle he endured, trying in vain to keep my master from eating wheat.”

“What was his name—your grandmaster, I mean?”

Ahsoka looks out at the edge of the market. Her eyes seem to go hollow for just a moment.

“Kenobi,” she said. “His name was Kenobi.”

The Kenobi?

Ahsoka huffs. Her eyes regain their sheen.

“We just called him Obi-Wan,” she teases.

“You were the student of Obi-Wan Kenobi?” Tonbry asks. “That’s amazing.”

“No, what’s amazing is how much of a mother-hen he used to be. Always in people’s faces. Always ‘no, you’re allergic to that. No, that’s bad for you. You’re going to make yourself sick—fine, have it your way, but on your head be it, padawan.’ No one talks about that, now do they?” Ahsoka says.

This is incredible.

“It was, I guess. At one point, anyways.”

Ah, right. General Kenobi is dead. Killed by Darth Vader. How tragic.

The crate vendor pushes a dolly stacked with crates their way. He holds out his hand and Ahsoka produces her wallet; she taps it to the man’s reader, and he lets go of the dolly.

“Shall we?” she asks.

Tonbry doesn’t mean to pry, but she is standing next to a student of a legendary jedi, one who knew the man personally, even. She can’t help but ask Ahsoka what General Kenobi was like.

Ahsoka sighs. She says that he was a good teacher, although not hers directly. He was her family nonetheless, the master of her master, before she left the order. There are good things to say about him, she explains, but there are also things about her time with him and the others that she prefers not to think about.

Tonbry knows better than to ask why.

Ahsoka tell her that they will start with the produce and end with meat.

There is garlic first, and then heads upon heads of bright leafy greens with teardrop-shaped leaves and thick, pearly stalks. Ahsoka inspects them for bugs, picks off a snail here and there, and drops them into the waiting bag of the vender before her.

After that, there are long tubular beans—as long as Tonbry’s arm—that are folded in half like a piece of fabric and tied with a piece of string. Ahsoka slings them on top of the stuffed bag of bulbous greens and sets out on the hunt for chili.

Quickly, Tonbry realizes that there is a question on her tongue.

“How many are we cooking for?” she asks.

“Many,” Ahsoka says. “Five.”

“Five?”

“And some for the children.”

“How many children?”

“And the staff—hm? Oh, I think maybe ten now? Four staff. We’ll figure this out and teach my nephew. Once he’s got it down, he will cook for them.”

Ahoska stops to consider a pile of tomatoes that are striped and blotchy with every color of the rainbow. Their skins are bloated, threatening to burst with their ripeness. She asks the vendor how much they cost and has Tonbry set the dolly vertical while she starts picking through them. After a moment of awkwardness, she waves for Tonbry to join her.

“You’re teaching your nephew how to cook?” Tonbry asks.

“Him and a friend,” Ahsoka says. “They grew up away from our people and so don’t know the tastes.”

“That’s why you need them,” Tonbry realizes.

Ahsoka lifts her head and tilts it.

“The books,” Tonbry says.

“Ah. Yes. It’s a good thing someone thought to write it all down—although it figures they did, what with all the apprentices on kitchen duty.”

Ahsoka comes upon a tomato that is yellow and striped from the bottom with green tendrils. Its pattern looks just like the blue markings on her lekku.

“I think we were destined to meet,” she croons at it.

Tonbry laughs.

Ahsoka is a carnivore. She tells Tonbry this while they stare into a vat of water protecting slabs of white protein blocks. These ones are made from beans. They are fresh and cold, so the vendor says.

Ahsoka hates them as a rule. She says there is only one way to make them more palatable and that is through the application of breading, oil, and spices.

“Is this the favored protein of the jedi?” Tonbry asks.

“Some of them,” Ahsoka says. “There were herbivores, obviously. Vegetarians. People allergic to anything you put in front of them.”

“How did the cooks know what to make, then?” Tonbry asks.

“The masters had their own kitchens; they could cook for themselves if they wanted to. Otherwise, the cook staff just made a whole lot of everything and we would eat it or it in different shapes until it was gone.”

“Do your friends eat meat?”

“Yes. But that isn’t the point of this endeavor,” Ahsoka says, still squinting at the bean slabs. “My nephew is raising a new generation. Some of them do not eat meat.”

Understood.

“I’ll take five,” Ahsoka says to the vendor. “From this side. No, not that one.”

The second to last stop is the meat. The impact of knives coming down onto the heavy wooden chopping blocks shakes the table underneath. The butcher shows no sign of noticing. Ahsoka pesters him with questions while he works. He must know her because he waves many of them off.

Tonbry thinks of how nervous she is to speak with her local butcher. He is much smaller than this man; he wears a clean white smock.

The last stop at the market is oil, spices, and vinegar. Ahsoka wants rocks of sugar. Tonbry wants to touch the powdery spice mountains on either side of her, but she can’t because Ahsoka has laden her arms with dark blue-glass bottles. The woman herself has loaded up with two jugs of yellow oil. She points over the tiny vendor’s head and asks if the brick on the counter is lard.

It is.

Ahsoka wants a pound of it. And then she has a list of spices she gives to Tonbry verbally. She doesn’t want to smell the spices herself; her sense of smell is more sensitive than others’ and Tonbry is human enough to be able to endure. Ahsoka tells her that she only wants spices that are freshly ground. She will buy nothing that is old—outside a few very notable exceptions. Certain brands of wine, of pre-made spice and sauce mixes, did not wither and die under the Empire. They had simply diminished, becoming the homely offerings of vendors such as those they had visited, as demand from one of their biggest customers vanished off the market. Which was, admittedly, an indelicate way to phrase what happened.

Tonbry would salute her new captain if only she had an arm free. As it is, she has to bend her back to sniff the little spoonfuls of spices the vendor holds up to her nose.

On the way out, they buy more garlic. For good luck, Ahsoka claims.

Oh, and some seeds. For texture.

Oh, and some of this, too. And that. As a gift.

And how could she have forgotten—

The dolly is as heavy as a train by the time they return to the ship to unload. Tonbry’s noodle arms shake as she hefts the crate handed to her by Ahsoka. Ahsoka doesn’t step up to help her. She tells her to take it back to the hold, no, no, keep going—keep going.

Tonbry decides that this is her fare for tagging along on an adventure she never dreamed could happen to her.

She lays on her back, panting, while Ahsoka goes to return the dolly.

There is little to do in her absence. Tonbry doesn’t have her datapad. She has no paper to take notes on. Her back lays flat against the floor of the ship and she suddenly understands with perfect clarity the many out-of-towner apprentices she sees around the city, come to sell goods with their parents and masters but left behind to mind the stock. They flop out on their backs and stare at the sky or the ceilings of their transport vehicles, they kick their feet and roll their bodies back and forth.

And now, Tonbry does those things, too. She feels more connected to real people than she has in a long, long time.

Ahsoka comes back and clambers up into the ship without bothering to use the ramp.

“Rice next,” she says. “Hope you’re good and rested.”

The rice is so heavy that Tonbry could weep.

Ahsoka waits until she has brought it halfway back to the ship before smiling wide enough that her elongated canines show. She holds out a hand with her fingers pressed together into a flat surface. It turns in the air until the palm faces the darkening sky at a forty-five degree angle.

Tonbry feels the bag shift. A shiver runs through her as it begins to lift and slip out from behind her.

She scrambles away in shock and stands, and there it stays, levitating at waist-height.

“You—you could have done that the whole time?” she blurts out.

Ahsoka winks.

“You were working so hard,” she says.

“You—you—”

“Come on, now, princess. We’re burning daylight. Its winter on our target moon.”

It is another many hours in Ahsoka’s ship to reach her nephew’s moon. Tonbry fills the hours with talking. She doesn’t know where she found all these words, but she talks about music and holodramas she’s never watched. She talks about her mother and her ever-working father who still only speaks to her about her latest projects. He perks up when she curses her editors and fades into the background when the conversation passes on.

Against her better judgment, she asks Ahsoka what it was like to grow up as a Jedi.

Ahsoka scoffs and says it was all she knew. She was brought to the Jedi Order at only three years old. She met her master, Anakin Skywalker, at fourteen, coincidentally the same time she met his master, Obi-Wan Kenobi.

They met in war.

Ahsoka does not want to talk about the war. So she talks about food. She laughs as she describes for Tonbry her master’s intolerance for wheat; his constant sneaking—trying to eat anything that wasn’t his designated rations bars, which allegedly contained both the taste and texture of the word ‘foul.’ She describes Obi-Wan Kenobi catching him in the act at every turn; his eyes would go wide like a livid owl’s and Ahsoka and her friends would be laughing too hard to catch any of his actual lecture.

Obi-Wan Kenobi himself had no food allergies, but despised caf with undue vehemence. He would drink it only under duress and when you caught him holding a mug of the stuff, Stars help you, you were about to be slapped with a version of Obi-Wan unfiltered.

He had a tendency to swear more when he was highly caffeinated or hyped up on the stimulants people used to use during the war. His swearing would get so blue and his bullshit threshold so low that Ahsoka and her master would have to shush him and talk over him in the presence of other, higher ranking jedi.

Ahsoka remembers one time, he was swearing and shaking too much to open a can of rations and he just sat down and pressed his hands to his head for nearly half an hour in silence.

It isn’t the kind of memory Tonbry expects her to mention.

It paints a different kind of picture of the war.

When they land, it is in a place dense with trees. The air smells of residual heat and the chirps of bugs vibrate the air around them. Tonbry looks around at the looming shadows before her; the sky beyond it has only the barest flickers of pink and orange left upon its horizon.

“Now we unload?” she asks.

“Mm, no. We leave that to the boys,” Ahsoka says. “It’s good for them to be useful.”

A little ways into the forest, the trees clear away and reveal a fence. The space beyond the fence has been cleared and a wooden shelter has been built along one of its sides. It is a large shelter—bigger than Tonbry expects out here in the middle of Nowhere, Bugs Chirping. There are canvas covers hanging down over the doors, probably to keep the bugs out. At the sound of their steps crunching in dirt and grass, one of the canvas covers is swept back and warm yellow light blares out from it. It vanishes quickly as the canvas falls over it once again.

Ahsoka’s boots stop and command Tonbry to follow suit. They wait in the dark until the shelter’s front door creaks open and a great rhombus of yellow light pours out in front of the shelter. It illuminates a row of barrels to the side of the door, getting smaller and smaller and turning into clay pots just before the wall turned the corner.

“Took you long enough,” a young man with dark hair says. “Who’s your friend?”

Tonbry’s mouth dries of words. She looks to Ahsoka, but Ahsoka’s lips remain sealed.

“Tonbry,” Tonbry says nervously. “I’m a, uh, writer.”

“A writer?” the dark haired man repeats. “Unlike you to pick up stowaways, Ahsoka. But okay, sure. My name is Ezra Bridger.”

It is a good name for him. She nods in greeting.

“Go get Luke and bring in all the shit,” Ahsoka says abruptly. “Did you get the pans I told you to?”

The inside of the shelter is a barebones schoolhouse. There are little desks for sitting and taking notes. There are crates full of toys that have spilled out onto a soft cloth rug. A clothesline slopes down from the roof from the nails it has been tied to and small clothes and children’s undergarments hang from it.

The yellow light comes from a series of lanterns hanging from lines that fall from the rafters.

It feels of another time, this place.

And yet there are no children.

Tonbry looks around here and there, but hears no giggling or crying. A woman comes through a wooden door with a basket in her hands and lights up in recognition at Ahsoka.

“He’s out back,” she says. “They got hungry. We’ll put them to bed and let you guy get on with your evening.”

The children are outside, gathered around a small fire that throws shadow all over. A man in loose, light-colored clothing leans over it with a single finger lifted. He moves it around in a circle so that it is in every child’s face for at least a moment.

They are all captivated, dinners in bowls in laps forgotten as the man tells his story.

Abruptly, he snaps his fingers and the fire turns blue and green for a thrilling moment. The children scream and shriek and just like that, the fire is again its normal colors. The young man laughs while the children burst into chatter.

“Nephew of mine,” Ahsoka says.

He looks up.

He is Luke Skywalker.

“Auntie, you’re back,” Luke Skywalker says as he stands up and beckons the children to keep eating. “Sorry that we started without you.”

“Not a problem,” Ahsoka says, smiling indulgently down at the few children who have turned to look at her and wave. “Go help Ezra with the shit. It’s heavy and you know how delicate he is.”

Luke smiles and he looks just like he used to in all the videos Tonbry used to curl up at night and watch when she needed a reminder not to give up hope. He is here and he looks to Ahsoka as his family. Because she is. They all are.

The jedi are here. They didn’t die after all. They’re here.

“Ezra didn’t answer me. Did you get the pans?” Ahsoka says as the Luke walks past her back towards the school building.

“We tried,” he says. “It was four smiths before someone knew what a ‘wok’ was. You may want to make sure it’s what you had in mind.”

Ezra’s voice shouts out inarticulately from a ways away. Luke and Ahsoka make prolonged eye contact.

“Delicate,” Ahsoka says.

“You told me you were bringing a real man,” Luke accuses.

“I meant Sabine.”

“You didn’t bring Sabine.”

“I tried to, but she said she needed a break from us ‘jedi menaces.’”

“So you lied.”

“Yes.”

“At least try to deny it.”

“My bad. Oh, how I have lied to my favorite—”

“—only—”

“Nephew. How terrible. Jail for me—”

“Whatever.”

“Jail for a thousand—”

“And what was your name?” Luke asks Tonbry with a famous smile.

She has completely lost the ability to speak in his presence. Her mouth opens and sound decides that it wishes to remain in the back of her throat. Ahsoka acts as though nothing is wrong at at all.

“Her name is Tonbry,” she says. “She is going to help us cook. She’s writing a book.”

“A cookbook?” Luke asks cheekily.

Ahsoka’s expression deadens. Luke’s grin widens.

“Go,” Ahsoka orders him. “Get. Shoo. Scram. Get outta here. Make yourself useful. You, Tonbry, come with me. We’ll see what these chuckleheads have brought us to work with.”

The school has a kitchen, a whole room with wood fires and ovens. There are plates and bowls for somewhere around sixteen people in the cabinets and two huge metal pans shaped slightly conically. They are woks, bigger than Tonbry has ever seen. Ahsoka is pleased with them. She brightens the overhead lanterns by twisting her fingers ever so slightly; as she does so, the dials on their sides rotate.

It is fantastic and intimidating and wonderful all at once.

The feeling grows as Ezra and Luke bring in the groceries and spices purchased. Neither appears to be breaking much of a sweat; Ezra only complains about the fragility of rice sacks. Luke tells him to set the bag over his shoulder in a large metal basin on the floor by the door or else he’ll be feeding the local vermin. Luke sets the stack of crates in his arms by the floor by the tall, tiled counter. Ahsoka asks him where he keeps his chopping block, knives, and basins and he directs their attention to wide cabinets at their knees.

“The tap works there, but there’s also a well out that door if you need more water faster,” he says already on route with Ezra back to Ahsoka’s ship.

“You best roll up your sleeves,” Ahsoka says.

They rinse and wash and liberate dirt from the stems and bulging bodies of vegetables as Luke and Ezra return from their second trip out to the ship. By then, the staff pass through the kitchens as they herd the children to bed. They’ve been outside eating with them. Tonbry finds her face filled with a grin as the little ones—and some of them are truly tiny—come in rubbing at their eyes and chattering.

There are between eight and ten of them, Tonbry doesn’t really do a headcount. She is overwhelmed by their smallness and their existence period. For so long, the Jedi have been spoken of like marble statues made by ancient people, and yet here they are, galloping and tugging at Ahsoka’s hip to see the whites of the vegetables in her hands.

Ahsoka isn’t here to teach just Luke and Ezra the taste of home. She will teach them and they will teach others. They will teach these babies what their culture, that thing that is so nebulous but unifying, tastes like.  

Tonbry will help. She will be a part of this process. She can’t screw it up.

As the last of the children’s sleepy kind bumbles through the kitchen entrance, she rolls up her sleeves even further.

The dishes are harder to make than Tonbry is expecting.

Deceptively difficult are the ones that require bright hot heat and no more than a few minutes to apply it. Too long, and the greens will be too soft and yellow. Too short and they might as well have never been cooked at all. There has to be the right amount of bone broth, of salt and white pepper, splashed in to season the oil.

There is never enough garlic.

Ahsoka isn’t a presence she can ignore while she works. After all, Tonbry needs her to taste-test. She isn’t used to cooking for an audience, however, and she is fairly certain it affects how much salt she adds to the first dish they prepare in the large, glistening wok—

Which she then had to re-do.

Twice.

The protein blocks are chilled and pressed, per Ahsoka’s instruction.

Luke is assigned to slice and dice the ingredients instead of just standing around, peering at the mess Tonbry and Ahsoka are making. He is deft with a knife, smiling and asking about the exact origin of the proteinous mass.

Tonbry can’t quite meet his eyes as she reads through the haphazard notes in the bloated books Ahsoka has finally placed in her hands for the specifics of the breading; she reads faster to avoid having to respond through dedicated nerdery.

“It’s a kind of bean. Can’t remember where they sourced it originally,” Ahsoka says. “I wondered if they synthesized something similar for the ration bars we had during the war.” A fang shows while the Togruta grimaces. “If there was one thing that tasted worse.”

“I dunno, it’s just bean,” Luke mutters, thoughtful. “How bad can it be?”

“You eat frogs with the bogcat,” Ezra’s voice floats in from outside. “Your opinion can’t be trusted.”

Ignoring Luke’s squawk of outrage, Tano draws closer to Tonbry’s assigned block of counterspace.

“What shapes can you make?” she asks.

Tonbry looks down at the cold block under her hands. She tests the first slice off the block, pressing into it gently with clean fingers. The first bloke’s texture is firm but crumbles when more pressure is applied.

“Pardon?” she asks.

“Can you cut it into shapes?” Ahsoka asks.

Yes, she can. But it will have to be a thick shape, whatever it is. Anything delicate won’t last through such softness. Ahsoka puts the tips of her forefingers and thumbs together, and her lips curled in pleading satisfaction.

“Triangle?”

S-sure. Yeah. Tonbry can do that.

One block of bean curd is done as the book’s first direction says so, dredged and battered. The other block is left unbattered. It is smooth like silk beneath her fingers—two entirely different textures. Tonbry nearly smushed the stuff unusable her first attempt in cutting it into thinner rectangles.

This silken curd is for another side dish, a cold-cut mix of the bean curd and preserved egg, drizzled in a fermented, salty dark sauce and roasted seed oil. The prepwork for that is so simple, Ahsoka herself completes the task according to Tonbry’s increasingly squeaky instructions.

The fresh-cut peppers and onions the books tell them to prepare make everyone’s eyes water, but for Ahsoka, who is delightfully untouched. Apparently, the things are rather sweet and sulfuric on her tongue as well.

Only these peppers, though. No other peppers.

(Some other peppers were basically like drinking lava, allegedly, but no further information was given on the matter).

Luke keeps prodding with his many questions throughout the whole process, innocent as a mooka, and receives, for his investigator efforts, a noogie of Togruta-proportions. Tonbry wonders if this was the softest she will ever see this woman, this reliquary, this once-jedi. It nestles itself in her memory like the brine of an ancient sea.

It is full dark outside as a splash of oil, diced garlic and salt sizzle brightly in the second metal wok, seasoning it. Then in go the onions and diced peppers. The floral scent of them in the oil is heady and fills the air fast.

The thin batter the first set of carefully shaped bean curd has been dipped into is seasoned with salt and pepper; it pops and seals quickly in the high heat of the wok with its peppery oil. Tonbry finally feels a sense of ease settle in after she deftly scoops one done curd cut after another out of the pan, curling her metal spoon around the edges of it to collect the caramelized and crunchy remains.

Two soups are selected from the books. One savory for the appetizer, one sweet for dessert. Tonbry has not had many soups that were also dessert, but new things are what she is here to experience.

The first of the soups is made from bone. Such broth is mellow, almost bland on its own; the flavor of simmered marrow hits the nasal passages with a brush of tallow’s natural fattiness. It is less salty than pre-made soup stock. More oily. Thicker by dint of its origins.

Most importantly, Tonbry is not assigned this task. The broth’s preparation is absolutely brainless work, and she has been reserved for the creation of the more complicated and sensitive dishes. Instead, Ahsoka has delegated this effort to one Ezra Bridger.

He acts very put upon. Ahsoka gracefully ignores his moaning and tells him to check on the pot every hour or she will find even less for him to do.

The threat holds. Ezra busies himself with a datapad while messaging the mysterious Sabine who truly cannot be rid of jedis, even for a single night. Over the tones of Ezra reading out her pleas for him to ‘shut the fuck up,’ tomatoes and cabbage are sliced up along with scrubbed tubers from the market. The dark, tear-drop leaved greens follow suit.

Apparently, that they were making was a common dish in the old times of the Order and all manner of left over vegetable were used in it—but Ahsoka had Preferences so those options were whittled down to four acceptable additions.

Just a little sour and acidic from the tomato, bitter from the dark greens, rich from the tubers and cleanliness from the cabbage; the soup, when finished, is incredibly reliant on the broth itself for most of its flavor. The rest, as Ahsoka so confidently insisted from the beginning, is window dressing.

Tonbry feels oddly nostalgic on first sip she takes of the finished product and can not for the life of her understand why.

The second soup is dessert.

They use a mortar and pestle to grind both kinds of rice flour; they add sugar, and from there they roll the meal up into little balls to boil. They will be placed in sweetened, heated rice wine. The taste is too sharp at first; alcohol burning the edges of the soup and the edges of Tonbry’s tongue. Ahsoka flips viciously through the cookbooks to a section on troubleshooting that makes Tonbry laugh. The book tells them that they are fools and their liquor-liquid hasn’t been boiled hot enough. In course correcting, it becomes too sweet.

Eventually Tonbry deciphers a note on the recipe hidden by water damage and the dog-ear of a page in the second book and they find a balance. Ahsoka approves with a hum. Tang from the wine makes the sweetness almost syrup-like in flavor. Yet the dish itself doesn’t sit heavy in the gut. Rice granules in the passed-around spoon are softened just so; they mash against Tonbry’s teeth with satisfyingly comfort.

“Sometimes they colored the flour for the crechelings,” Ahsoka says while Tonbry swirls in raw, mixed egg, which lightens the soup to an off-white color as it cooked. “Pink and white and blue. We would trade each other for our favorite colors.”

Somehow, the dessert is still not the most finicky dish to prepare.

It is, as it always will be, the meat that brings on the stress.

The short ribs from the market are dug out of the crates, and Luke goes away to fetch a thicker cutting board to work with as Ezra grimaces at the gamey smell. Luke reappears to tease him about being pampered. Ahsoka tells both of them that they are beautiful little daisies—the pride of their respective rebellions. Now, it is time for all daisies to get away from the counter.

There are ribs to break down.

The bones are cut away into manageable pieces and marinated in white cooking wine and lighter of the two fermented bean sauces they’d acquired. After fifteen minutes seeping in the salt and the wine, they are pan fried and set aside so the real work can begin on the sauce.

It is incredibly important to not just be the right flavor, but the right color—or so Ahsoka insists, shaking the book at Tonbry and declaring it afterwards a vessel of deceit and misinformation.

They have to do a little improvising with the listed amounts in the book to get the taste that Ahsoka can pinpoint as home. It is a sugary and sour taste that coats the tongue from tip to middle to side. Eventually, though—aided with just a little peeking—the dark red sauce has caramelized along the edges of the meat and bone, and the ribs themselves somehow retained a crunch when bitten into. It was nearly impossible to eat without using their hands, and yet, even with the rice to mop up the remaining flavor, one is left to lick fingers clean and longingly suckle the bone to avoid wasting a single drop.

They are supposed to eat all this as a single meal and probably not in the small hours before dawn, but the task of the night was never to prepare a singular meal, Tonbry realizes as the four of them ladle leftovers into clay vessels that are to be stored in the cold storage room for the morning.

The night was about the process. It was about sensation and learning and Ahsoka remembering how to make a wok dance in time with a stirring utensil. As a child, she was assigned to cook in the old Order kitchens, but she had forgotten the feeling of that chore. She remembers it now. Tonbry feels it too in her hands. Luke feels it. Ezra feels it.

The motion is one that their bodies will hold for when another occasion arrives. Just like the tastes.

The tang of wine-acid-bitter. The ring and hum of vinegar-sugar-salt-meat. Even the subtle wash of fat and depth from the bone broth—Tonbry doesn’t know what faith tastes like, but she can taste a culture that she has never experienced in these disparate dishes.

She can hear the sound of phantom people chattering as they shared these tastes in rounds and communal meals. She can hear them telling each other to try this or try that, complaining that something is so salty or sweet.

She can imagine Obi-Wan Kenobi catching his apprentice by the ear as he tries to sneak a bit of breaded bean curd. Ahsoka, as a child, hides her face as she giggles at his disappointment. When Kenobi isn’t looking, she passes Anakin Skywalker one of her own loathed bean curd blocks and he trades her one of Kenobi’s rib pieces.

Kenobi notices and sighs at the two of them.

Ahsoka takes her home, back to the city and the library gate that they first met outside of. She holds out the books with a wine-colored smile. Her montrals are not covered like snowy peaks this time.

“All yours now,” she says.

She takes them out of Ahsoka’s hands.

“I’ll check them out under my name,” she says.

“Good luck with your book,” Ahsoka says.

Tonbry smiles.

“Thanks,” she says. “I’ll make sure you’re in the credits.”

Ahsoka clicks her tongue and winks at her.

“You better,” she says. “See you around, chef.”

Her cloak swings as she pivots on her heel and leaves Tonbry in pinkening dawn city light.

Tonbry set out to do better than salt, but her next project isn’t a pithy cultural analysis. There is no discussion of faith or holiness. There are no profound epiphanies.

It is just a transcription. A translation of written word into a new, more legible format. She includes all the notes, scrawled in their original handwriting all over the pages, but they are labeled with tiny numbers and listed out underneath the neatly typed recipes like the annotations they are.

Anyone can read these books now. They will no longer breathe their words into a glass case one page at a time, collecting dust in their crevices and fading away into a death of silence.

People will read them and lay mugs on the edges of the annotated edition’s pages. They will look up key phrases in the digital edition, searching by an esoteric spice newly acquired or too much vegetable bought at the market.

People will taste the culture that almost died, but didn’t, with help from someone who didn’t have adventures, until she did.

Chapter Text

Cuortse hears the notification and almost rolls his eyes before thinking better of it and fishing his mini out of his bag. It’s buried under what feels like three metric tons of scarf and two metric tons of broken protein bar. He liberates it like the archaeologists two floors down do when they find a broken animal tooth.

He is only feet from his supervisor’s door when her battle cry nearly takes him out via sonic wave alone. He does not recover; his mini pad and the hand he holds over Prof. Lens’s door handle tremble in terror at what they might find beyond that protective shell.

He is not in his body when he cracks open the door.

He is not in his body when Prof. Lens’s single gleaming eye snaps to him from atop her desk, red latex boots and all.

“Pack your bags, Cuortse,” she says. “We’re going to Coruscant.”

He drops his mini.

Then closes the door.

He tries to run for it, but he’s not fast enough.

Coruscant is a planet made almost entirely out of streetlights and angry people. Cuortse has been there for two overnight conferences now, and he will die happy without returning for a third. He says this to the flight attendant, and she asks him if he would or would not like another drink.

He would not.

She leaves. He spills down into his seat and asks the ceiling and all that is holy why every major academic publishing house in the galaxy has dug its thorned legs into the foundations of Coruscant.

He just wanted to write a book with his old mentor and current nightmare.

He just wanted to pay her back for getting him through the last months of his dissertation.

At no point had he agreed to all this...urban shit.

He doesn’t know what else to call it. His father would have called it a cesspool of indecency, but Cuortse isn’t a prude like that; he is just a soft rural academic. A dying breed, he knows, but not he. No, not he. He is a simple man living with open doors and sunlight pouring in onto the steam wafting up from his cup of caf. He dreams of the lowing of cattle and summer nights buzzing with the vibrating bodies of insects.

He doesn’t mind the sweat or the shit holonet connection out in the sticks if it means that he can wake up and do things the old-fashioned way, the way that his people had done things for centuries.

Yessir, he puts on one boot and then the other, and takes as long in the lacing as he likes. And that is fulfillment. Even for reedy nerds like him who ended up slipping in pigshit only moments later.

It is satisfaction. Calm. Serenity and appreciation of nature.

Coruscant, now?

Disgusting.

If Cuortse could file the publishing location off his future book, he damn well would. If he didn’t, his mother would buy a copy, open it to the front page and put it on display in the living room in a glass box. So proud, she is, that her boy is getting his brain squiggles published on Coruscant.

Cuortse swishes the bitterness in his mouth around at the mere thought of it. He continues to over the tell-tale squeak of Prof. Lens’s perpetually plastic boots as they clack furiously in his direction. She practically throws herself into the seat next to him.

“Did you get a drink?” she asks.

“No.”

“Get a drink.”

Fine. Twist his arm, why don’t you?

“I tell you what, I tell you what, Cuortse, this is gonna be the big one,” she says, shaking the draft copy of the manuscript down at Cuortse’s head.

“And I tell you, Professor—”

“I told you to call me Sarra—”

“And I tell you, Professor, they’re only doing this to break our wills,” Cuortse snaps.

“Silly man, into our laps, an opportunity has come and all you want to do is lay on the floor? Nay, says I. NAY. Not another day shall I stand here before you as an unintelligible person—”

Cuortse lifts a finger, then thinks better of it.

“Instead, I have gained the attention of the greatest, highest, most respected jedi in all the land,” Prof. Lens says, dragging her hand across a wonderous imaginary rainbow in the air before her. “All who come after shall tremble before me.”

Cuortse sighs.

“They already tremble,” he says.

“Hush. They are trembling. The trees. Can you hear them? Can you hear the saplings?”

Fuck this chair. Cuortse needs his spine to touch horizontal ground now before it loses its will to keep him upright.

They are, and Cuortse says this without a shed of decency or irony, meme scholars.

“Beg your pardon?” their newly assigned copy editor says.

“Meme scholars,” his superior repeats somehow without wincing.

“Meme?”

“The holonet jokes, Ivan.”

“Oh. I see. Uh. There’s a scholarship?”

“There is now,” Prof. Lens says, absolutely beaming. “It’s an offshoot of propaganda studies. Intersects with popular culture. We study popular representations of the Front and the effect they have on different population of youth. We were invited to present our findings to Grandmaster Yoda himself.”

Cuortse holds his face in his hand and tries to count back seconds to a happier time, before he got wrapped up in all this.

Prof. Lens slaps him on the back.

“It was Cuortse’s idea,” she says brightly. “He is simply a genius.”

A hand is not enough. Cuortse needs a full suit of armor and two sleeping pills to get through the next forty-five minutes.

“Right. That’s fascinating,” the copy editor says. He settles back into his seat while the senior editor smiles widely and nods at all parties across his red wooden desk. “My daughter is actually obsessed with those—those—what are they called, the clone-things? The Clone—”

“Clone memes,” Cuortse and Prof. Lens say at once, in their usual dueling tones of enthusiasm.

“Exactly,” the editor says. “She’s makes them her pad backgrounds. Every week there’s a new one, and she’s talking about some new guy. How she knows one from any of the others, I have no idea.”

Cuortse reaches over to stop Professor Lens from answering the question this poor fuck doesn’t know know he’s asking, but it’s no use.

“They have markings,” she explains sweetly. “On their armor. On their faces and in their hair, too. They’re actually remarkably distinct from each other when you know what to look for. And children are exceedingly accurate when it comes to telling them apart. The parasocial relationship there is—”

“In our book,” Cuortse sighs. “It’s all in the book.”

The room seems to grow colder in the silence.

“I look forward to getting it published, then,” the editor says. “You said that Jedi Master Yoda is interested in it?”

Prof. Lens shoots to her feet. Cuortse seizes the back of her coat and forces to her to sit again.

“He is,” she says. “I have a letter. Would you like to hear it?”

“He doesn’t need to hear it. Oh, he doesn’t need to hear it,” Cuortse says while Prof. Lens produces her pad from her bag and starts reading anyways.

“Dear Professor Lens—that’s me—Heard of your recent research, have I—isn’t it charming how he writes?—and of much interest, you will understand, this topic is to our order. Many articles, members of our council have reviewed in your name, however fear, we do, that nuance is being lost in our understanding. Welcome you to join our company, we do, in hopes to better understand those thoughts you and your colleague have developed. If acceptable, present our Clone Commanders will be, to hear and pass on your research to our public relations managers and to learn, no doubt, from the great knowledge and expertise that you bring.”

Cuortse doesn’t know how Prof. Lens manages to read this missive in the same sing-song voice every time, but by god she manages it beautifully. If only the thing didn’t give him heartburn.

If only he wasn’t sick to the teeth of clone memes and teenagers antagonizing each other on the holonet.

“That’s impressive,” the editor says stiffly. “Are you going there tomorrow?”

“Tonight,” Prof. Lens and Cuortse say/groan at once.

“Oh. Well, then you best be going. It’s nearly two hours to the Jedi Temple.”

“Ah, but we’re not going to the Temple,” Prof. Lens said. “We’re having a meal!”

Silence descends again, this time like vultures.

“A meal?” the senior editor repeats.

“Apparently,” Cuortse says. No doubt there will be utensils that don’t make sense and drinks with weird slimy bubbles and names like ‘Your Dad’s Last Wish’ present.

“I didn’t realize jedi ate,” the senior editor says thoughtfully. “Well, regardless. There are some bits in the manuscript that you may want to get citations for while you’re there. Here is the final mark-up from your late reviewer. He sends his apologies for the delay and thanks for your congratulations, Professor. It’s a girl, he would like me to tell you. You can submit all future edits to Pollis here. We’ll reconvene before the launch. Thank you for taking the time, Professor Lens. Doctor Meyor.”

Cuortse mumbles a thanks in time with Prof. Lens’s.

And the meeting is then adjourned.

In a hotel room swankier and more angular than any cube Cuortse has had the privilege of holding, he dresses and redresses and re-redresses until Prof. Lens breaks into his room with her key card and a hairpin and tells him to stop overthinking or they’ll be late.

Cuortse begs her to tell him what attire is toad-worthy. She tells him with a threatening finger that he will not call Jedi Master Yoda a toad to his face.

“He is not a toad, he is a troll,” she says. “And anyways, I just got word that your crush will be joining us.”

Cuortse turns around and grabs her wrist.

“He is not my crush,” he says. “He is your crush.”

“Cuortse Meyor,” Prof. Lens gasps, tearing her wrist away, “That is a twenty-two year old boy you are talking about. I’m a grown woman, Doctor. How dare you accuse me of—”

Cuortse grabs a tie and haphazardly put it on while pointing at her just as she points back at him.

“You say this every time. Every time you say this—”

“—thinking about a man as young as this. Why, he’s practically a baby—”

“—and then you blame it on me and you give me the pigswork of slogging through his profiles and the absolute nonsense he posts as it comes to him—”

“—and a subject of this research no less. I’m the one who submitted that ethics form, Cuortse. I am well aware of the duty we have to upholding the most professional standards—”

“—which never even makes sense. His brain is so tiny and yet that ridiculous order let him out of their temple without so much as a collar. No leash. No vaccinations, knowing their lot—”

A ping silences them both. All eyes drop to the mini pad stuffed in Prof. Lens’s elbow with her clutch.

The taxi has arrived.

They are enroute to a restaurant that the jedi order is apparently paying for somehow. Their financial situation is wild and complicated and their members live like impoverished monks through it all. Cuortse has never quite recovered from learning that even Anakin Skywalker, the heartthrob of what feels like every woman under the age of 50 these days, receives no more than thirty credits a week despite being one of the most famous people in the Republic at the moment.

Thirty credits. Cuortse cannot emphasize enough that his current footwear costs twice that and he’s only worn the damn things four times.

Any other organization would demand payment to fight a war, but the jedi do not—or maybe cannot. The senate is opaque on the topic. It does not disclose how it keeps the jedi fed, clothed, submissive and so on. According to the literature, in non-war times, jedi are often paid but seldom keep payment. They allegedly send all funds received to their Temple, which then feeds, houses, and clothes its members with the collective donations.

People say that the Temple is rich with credits hidden underground, and yet Anakin Skywalker’s WalRUS account has included a number of tutorials on how to make nutrimush taste less like the way the words ‘die trying’ sounds.

Then again, maybe they only give Skywalker his thirty credits a week because when they gave him a normal salary, he squandered it on booze and women. He looks like the type.

Cuortse thanks the taxi driver and opens the transporter’s door.

There are exactly fifteen billion stairs up to the restaurant’s front door. They huff and puff up them with the grace befitting their people. Prof. Lens takes off her heels when they finally get to an elevator and hurriedly stuffs her swollen toes back into them only moments before the door opens. From there, the two of them are gently chased out of the cramped space by the elevator operator, who immediately closes the door and takes his hellbox down its shaft behind them.

Cuortse stares up at the tall glass door in front of them. It has been set into an ornate wooden frame that has been polished so thoroughly that it reflects the light coming in from the skylight above. On the other side of the glass, the establishment is busy and glittering with chandeliers and wine bottles being carried to and fro in great, gleaming ice buckets.

Cuortse swallows and turns to Prof. Lens to find her digging through her clutch for a last minute spritz of perfume. He waits as she holds her breath and does the ceremonial misting.

As the particles clear and the bottles goes back into the bag, they gather themselves as professionals.

The door opens just as soon as they step forward.

A waiter steps out and asks if they are the doctor and professor.

There are even more damn stairs (this time on soft, velvety carpet at least) to get up to the balcony of the converted opera house. At the top, however, the chatter and gaudy laughter of the lower floor falls away, and Cuortse is presented with a large round table around which people in heavy, carefully brushed robes are gathered in bunches, speaking in low tones.

The jedi are wearing formal wear. These robes do not make an appearance on the battlefield and certainly not on WalRUS. They come only in warm tones—there is no black to be found. Only browns and creams and shining bits of metal here and there grace the body of those conversing politely with each other in soft tones.

Cuortse feels over- and under-dressed all at once until he turns his gaze and is met with more clusters of people, these wearing black and gray suits that are fitted within an inch of their lives. The lines of these uniforms have been drawn with a ruler, no doubt. Compared to the sweeping curves and warm earthy tones of the jedi, these people appear to be spades stabbed into the ground.

They can only be the Clone Commanders.

Cuortse is surprised by how difficult they are to distinguish in person; on WalRUS, each commander and many of the GAR’s individual men seem to be almost vibrantly distinct.

It isn’t until one head lifts and reveals a milky white eye bisected by a scar that Cuortse realizes that he’s looking directly at Commander Wolffe of the 104^th battalion. The younger-looking man next to him has hair shaved close to his skull that has been bleached to a light yellow—he has to be Captain Rex of the 501^st. It is shocking; they’re just standing there, breathing and touching arms; the leader of the famed Wolfpack and the most beloved clone of social media.

Both of them stiffen suddenly; their eyes slide Cuortse’s way and stop moving. Their lips join the standstill.

Cuortse doesn’t know what to do. His palms are sweating.

He is an idiot.

He beams.

The clones stare. First just Commander Wolffe and Captain Rex, but quickly the others stop speaking among themselves and join in on the fun. Commander Wolffe and another man at Rex’s other side—another—oh god, that’s Commander Cody—start to move in a strange way, sort of crowding Captain Rex between them. It’s almost as though they’re trying to protect their younger brother from Cuortse’s terrible, analytical gaze. Rex, for his part, defers to the Commanders’ authority and allows himself to be tucked between them, half-hidden from view by his brothers’ blocky shoulderpads.

The clone troopers say not a single word as they hold Cuortse’s gaze endlessly. It is the waiter who calls for the jedis’ attention and finally breaks the tension that has Cuortse’s teeth grinding against each other.

“Masters?” the waiter asks. “Your guests have arrived.”

Prof. Lens makes a tiny sound as the robes before them break apart and reveal faces of all species. Familiar faces, some. Others are completely unknown to Cuortse.

One of them, there in the back with his arms wrapped around a juvenile Togruta, is Anakin Skywalker. He stands up straight to a height somehow lessened by the lack of his usual coal-black tunic. And then, to Cuortse’s absolute horror, the shitstain of the last two years of his life bows his head in respect.

He—Anakin Skywalker—genuflects to Cuortse’s academic authority.

Him. The subject of Chapter 4 itself.

He has no idea what Cuortse has done.

The rest of the jedi follow that bow with a less severe angle.

“Professor Lens,” General Plo Koon says, emerging from the side of his peers, “It is an honor. Doctor Meyor, you too. Thank you both for taking the time to sit with us.”

Cuortse swallows back on a dry throat.

“No, thank you,” Prof. Lens says for both of them. “The true honor is to be able to sit among the brilliant minds of the Jedi Order itself.”

Cuortse shivers through the thought that Chapters 4 and 7 spit on this ‘brilliance’ with a vehemence that only a man who was watched hundreds of hours of teenagers emulating superhuman jedi bullshit could muster.

“Master Yoda is unfortunately caught up for now,” General Plo Koon says. “He has asked us to begin without him. I hope you don’t mind?”

“Of course not,” Prof. Lens says.

“Wonderful. Someone go fetch Master Windu from his lamentations over the stage,” General Plo Koon says. “I think its time we finally had a well-earned sit.  Commander?”

Commander Wolffe’s head snaps up from the little blobs of ink congregated on the other side of the round table. He salutes.

“At ease, Wolffe,” General Koon says.

“Cody, you as well,” Another voice calls.

“Bly.”

The names start pouring out, each as familiar as the next. Each head lifting among its brothers, almost as though its owner is eager for its general’s permission.

Until—

“Not you, Rex,” Anakin Skywalker croons with a smirk that is somehow ten times more boyish in-person.

Captain Rex’s eyebrows flatten. The face he gives Anakin Skywalker could be a threat in and of itself. Skywalker’s smirk widens into a beautiful, white grin. He rocks back and forth on his feet, swaying what appears to be his togruta padawan back and forth with him.

She...doesn’t seem to notice?

“Anakin,” General Kenobi’s voice warns. “Rex? Order overridden. Permission granted, Captain. At ease.”

“You can’t do that,” Skywalker whines over his shoulder.

“Oh, can’t I?” General Kenobi asks, finally coming into view.

He is shorter than Skywalker. His beard is trimmed into a shape that is terrified to be any other. His face is rounder that it appears in the reaction images online. His eyes are darker.

Skywalker cringes away from him.

“I asked you a question, Junior-General,” General Kenobi says.

He stares into Skywalker’s eyes. Cuortse has never seen a man more done with someone’s bullshit. Skywalker’s smirk falls into a much more pleasant smile that is lightly dusted with remorse.

“You can,” he says.

“Sit,” Kenobi orders. “I’ll be having no more of your cheek tonight.”

The togruta yawns. Both Kenobi and Skywalker drop their gaze to look at her. She blinks blearily.

“M’awake,” she mumbles.

One of the other jedi laughs and breaks the tension.

Cuortse counts his lucky stars to not be sitting anywhere near Skywalker or any of the other jedi he has spent the last few years of his life psychoanalyzing. Prof. Lens has instead seized her chance to plop her ass down right next to Skywalker’s seat—sans Skywalker, who has left temporarily to deliver his barely-conscious Togruta apprentice to a place where she can sleep through dinner. A couple other jedi have joined him, alternately herding and carrying young, fussily-dressed apprentices who have apparently been exhausted by a long day making war happen.

In their absence and in the smattering of small talk that took place to fill the gap, Cuortse has found himself awkwardly without a seat. That only lasts until one of the kinder jedi waves him over to the edge of the table that brushed up against an adjacent table, which it appears that the Clone Commanders had claimed as their own.

The back of Cuortse’s seat nearly bumps against the back of the one Commander Fox had been hailed to take upon his late arrival with a bandage plastered over his temple.

He’s only been sitting here for two minutes and already, Cuortse has become privy to a far more interesting conversation going on behind him. He can’t focus on nodding and smiling at the right times over the sound of:

“The fuck are there this many spoons for?”

“One’s for eggs,” Commander Fox hisses.

“Eggs? Eggs? I’m not eatin’ eggs. You can’t make me—”

“You’re gonna eat your fucking eggs and you’re gonna like it, Wolffe.”

“No, I’m not touching that shi--stuff. I’ve seen what comes out of those things. I’m not putting that in this facehole. My body is a temple.”

“I don’t think it’s the same kind of eggs,” Captain Rex whispers as Prof. Lens explains to General Windu about her time in the theatre and how that has informed her chapter on jedi aesthetics in recent fashion trends.

“What kind of eggs, then?” A commander whispers.

“S’A bird,” Commander Cody says definitively, not bothering to whisper. He’s shushed viciously. Cuortse almost chokes on his drink.

“Yeah, Kote, tell the nosebleeds why don’t you? Don’t you see where we are?” someone hisses.

“It’s a bird,” Commander Cody repeats at the same volume, with not a damn care for whatever anyone else thinks. “I’ve seen them. Squat, puffy. Got some kind of thing on the head.”

“A thing on the head? Like hair?”

“Yeah, but all in one piece.”

“That’s a feather, dipshit.”

“Did I say ‘feather,’ dipshit? No. If I’d meant feather, I would have said feather. I’m talking about a thing on a bird’s head. Shaped like a smashed hand. Same color, too.”

“Hand hair?” Captain Rex asks.

A moment of silence is taken to ruminate on this stunning description of a chicken’s comb.

Cuortse tries not to let his shoulders shake noticeably.

“What a stupid animal,” Commander Wolffe says definitively for his table. “It’s cruel to eat it.”

A waiter arrives and starts refilling drinks. The clone table goes dead silent, as though the commanders fear that this civilian will hear them trying to work out common Coruscanti livestock and will report their ignorance to the jedi all making polite interested faces at Prof. Lens.

Cuortse looks across the table to see Anakin Skywalker’s eyes threatening to close. His head is sinking. General Kenobi, next to him, notices and visibly stomps on his foot under the table. Anakin snaps awake in shock and turns where Kenobi gives him a meaningful twitch of his mustache. Anakin gathers himself and notices Cuortse watching him.

He inclines his head slightly, still bizarrely polite.

Perhaps the jedi teach their young to respect a doctorate regardless of its owner’s identity? Cuortse doesn’t know why else this would be happening to him.

He nods back. General Kenobi gives him a crinkly-eyed smile. He leans over to Anakin’s ear and whispers to him, pointing lightly back at Cuortse.

A bowl interrupts them. It interrupts Cuortse’s analysis of their gossiping about him when his lands in front of him, too. Their waiter moves on silent feet, it would seem. Their assistant has plonked bowls of broth down in front of the clone commanders. Cuortse hears one of their sharp intakes of breath. He also hears a rustle of calming voices telling someone at the table behind them that there is no threat.

It’s just...some kind of juice.

In a bowl.

Cuortse no longer cares about whatever the fuck Anakin and Kenobi were talking about. He cares only to know how the clones are going to react to something that is not nutrimush.

“Is this the egg? I’m not fucking touching the egg,” Commander Wolffe says definitively.

“It’s a big egg,” one of the other Commanders—Bly, a quick glance over Cuortse’s shoulder tells him—notes.

“This is not the egg,” Commander Cody says. “This is tea.”

An ‘ohhhh’ goes through the whole table back there.

Cuortse feels the need to become one of his subjects—his terrible teenagers who film everyone and everything indiscriminately on their mini pads and then throw the files online for fellow ingenious monster people to make endless inside jokes out of.

His mother would be ashamed of him, but he can’t help it.

‘This is not the Egg’ is a meme too good to pass up.

“Doctor, you’ve been quiet this evening,” one of the jedi council members who is a bigger version of the sleepy Togruta says. “I hear that you’ve written much about our young Anakin?”

Aw fuck. Cuortse downs half his drink.

“I have,” he says. “Er. I’m afraid it’s not—”

“It’s very interesting,” Prof. Lens says over him, smiling wide at Skywalker himself.

Skywalker, for some damn reason, looks almost entirely unaffected. Kenobi next to him looks from him to Cuortse like he’s pleased. Cuortse suspects he thinks that the Skywalker chapter is complimentary.

Cuortse hopes he doesn’t get the time to read the book.

“You must be intrigued, Anakin,” the council member says.

He looks up to her and back to his bowl.

“Sure?” he offers.

Several of the other jedi seem to smile at each other indulgently. Cuortse, however, is fucking floored. 

This kid—no, he is not hallucinating this—this kid is shy.

Cuortse has heard, of course, of Skywalker being inexperienced with academia. There are rumors that he only began to wade into the academic side of jedi-hood recently and gave an abysmal paper at a conference a little while ago. That, however, seemed to Cuortse to be either a publicity stunt or a moment of ill-preparedness.

But now, he’s thinking in a new light.

He’s thinking about Anakin Skywalker as a twenty-two year old man with an online persona that he has crafted specifically for his target audience of other eighteen to twenty-two year-old beings.

Cuortse is too old for this.

As he always is.

“I did write a chapter about you,” he says to Anakin, who has lifted his gaze from playing with his bowl of broth. “I think you and the troopers have been able to give the GAR personality and individuality through your social media and that this has influenced popular understandings of what war means among young people who feel disconnected from the Republic as a body. When they are asked about what war means, they will describe injuries they’ve noticed on the troopers in your videos; they’ll talk about how you play tricks on people with your prosthetic. In a way, it trivializes things. But in a more interesting, subtle way, the popularity of your holonet personality and the use of clone memes as visual shorthand in a vast array of online spaces suggests that you have been able to reach certain audiences that traditional propaganda struggles to make inroads with—namely, the youth and the self-declared apolitical.”

The table ruminates on this with a dignity that most professional organizations would fight to the death to replicate.

“Is that a good thing?” Skywalker finally asks.

“That depends on your point of view,” Cuortse says. “Do you think it’s a good thing?”

All heads at the table turn from him to Anakin in delight. Prof. Lens gives Cuortse big encouraging eyebrows as he stares Skywalker down.

“If it helps the Republic, it’s a good thing,” Anakin says. “But I have to be honest, Doctor Meyor. I didn’t—I didn’t mean to use the accounts and stuff like this. Like. We didn’t mean to make the clone memes a thing either. I uh, just accidentally posted to the wrong WalRUS account. And people liked it, so the guys at the PR office told me to keep doing it.”

Cuortse’s head comes to a screeching halt in the middle of the lane it had just been speeding down with the confidence of a charging bull.

“You have another WalRUS account?” he asks.

General Kenobi clears his throat and sits up in his sit.

“The younger generations asked very nicely for the use of the platform,” he explains. “Many of us, when our padawans were still young, saw no issue with them taking part so long as they only followed and messaged each other. Their accounts are all part of the one community board which is accessible only through invitation. It was important to them to be able to speak and share images with each other when on assignment. And so when a similar request arose among the men of the battalions, we again, saw no issue in allowing it. It has been incredibly helpful for morale. But, as you have probably now realized, occasionally, there has been the accidental mix up of content intended for different audiences. Which has happily resulted in your upcoming book, Doctor.”

Kenobi says this with such kind eyes that Cuortse could climb onto this table and stab him directly in the heart.

He has become paralyzed with the realization that the jedi and the clone troopers have their own social media. He is speechless in the face of the enormous wave in his head, gathering questions into its body as it prepares to crash down upon him and leave him stranded and helpless and dying to know what goes on in those spaces.

He wanted to be done with all this.

The book. The city. The urban-ness and busy-ness of it all. Social media studies have been his personal hell—the holonet is a city in its own right and he hates it.

But he can’t sit here and lie to himself and say that he is not consumed now with the need to experience the memeification of a centuries-old religious order like the jedi. He will never know peace until he sees This is Not The Egg in its natural environment on the clone trooper’s off-duty servers.

He has, like a fool, walked right into this trap set by a toad-troll who hasn’t even had the decency to arrive yet.

And behind him—

Behind him he has just glanced and found a pile of Commanders all crowded around Commander Cody’s mini pad, practically sitting in each others’, laps while he holds the thing in front of him with an expression that could wither trees. On the pad’s bright face, there is a chicken.

“Behold, a man,” Commander Cody says to his comrades.

There is no peace in this galaxy.

There will never be peace in this galaxy.

“I think they were very impressed with us, Cuortse.”

Cuortse will die before he will experience jedi memes.

What a life.

“Hey. Thank you for doing this. I know it was out of your—are you even listening to me??”

Cuortse leans down and takes his shoes off as the elevator slowly because to travel down, down, down. Back to the taxi, which will take him back to the hotel, where a transporter will take him home to the grass and the creaking of insects in the summer heat.

He will be safe there. From everyone but his stupid, endlessly greedy, perpetually inquisitive soul.

Chapter Text

The Armorer is aware of the scholars; she does not necessarily approve of them, but she is aware. They come from Mandalore and other planets and spaces. They say that they only wish to understand the old ways of life. The old interpretation of Manda and the Way.

In the face of this, the Armorer feels the need to pick pebbles out of the grooves of her boots.

There are more important things in the world than courting the questions of scholars.

Case in point: her child sits before her now, clutching the leather ball he has dug out from the place between her bed and the wall that she hid it in. She knows, staring into his bright-burning eyes that there are great battles within him, and this is one of them.

The scholar soon to be invading their home will take notes on this behavior, the Armorer has no doubts about it. And yet her child will not be reasoned with. He clings to the ball like it is the only object between him and terrific, inevitable torture.

“Din,” she says with as much patience as she can muster after ten minutes of this argument. “Give buir the ball. Buir is going to take him for a walk.”

Only now do her boy’s eyes light up with reason.

“Buir will walk him?” he asks in his fumbling, tripping, adorable version of Mando’a.

“Buir will walk him,” she promises. “Give him to me.”

She walks her child down to the kitchens with the ball stuffed under an arm. Two members of the covert see her and give her fingerguns.

Everyone now has witnessed her daily struggle. She is grateful that they find Din’s antics cute and not insolent. Armorers’ children are generally obedient in the face of all outsiders to the clan. But then again, Armorers’ children are seldom foundlings. They are raised, like her, from birth and by blood to be the keepers of all sacred knowledge. There is no room for shaky knees or stuttering.

Her child defies both.

She does not relinquish the ball as she taps on the metal table on the side of the common room’s wall until Din scrambles up onto the bench and sits where she has silently asked him to. The other children in the covert don’t do this, she has noticed.

Din hold out his hands for the ball.

The other children don’t do this either.

“Buir will walk him,” she reminds her boy.

Din stares.

“You will eat here,” the Armorer says. “He will walk with buir.”

Din’s fingers clench and unclench around emptiness on the metal table. He does not lower his gaze. The Armorer holds a hand to him as a gesture to stay where he is. Din flattens his hands against the table as she takes a step away. She jerks her hand back at him until he sits down properly, chastised now, and increasingly agitated for it.

She and the ball leave him for the kitchen.

“Goran,” one of the day’s cooks acknowledges. “You’re topside toda—” his words flee him in the face of the worn leather stuffed under her arm. “Uh?”

“Listen,” she says. The rest of the day’s cooks are already gathering, already giggling, “This is as far as I’m getting right now. Give me one and a quarter servings.”

“O-only a quarter?” the cook asks in a terrible façade of seriousness.

“And a spoon,” the Armorer says. “Please. For the gentleman.”

Someone is wheezing and shaking with mirth on the long counter to the right. The Armorer ignores her, safe in the knowledge that she, too, is a parent and has therefore dealt with similar levels of unwavering loyalty to inanimate objects.

Hopefully, anyways. Hopefully this isn’t just a Din-thing. The number of Din-things she has stored in her brain would require a whole filing cabinet if she were to write them down in the old way.

“A serving for a little soldier, and a saucer and spoon for the gentleman,” the cook says, offering her a tray.

“Thank you. I will allow you to live for another day, Ricta,” she says.

The cooks burst into bustling snickers.

“An honor as always, Goran,” Ricta says.

The scholar arrives two days later, the same day Din realizes in a stroke of genius that he does not have to be the one who removes loose teeth from his head.

The Armorer has not been privy to the negotiations between the scholar’s institution and the covert; that is work for the elders. She has been much occupied with repair orders and now, trying to find where Din has hidden his ball.

It is the only thing that will keep him sitting still in these conditions. With visitors sneaking around these tunnels, the Armorer cannot take him to Doc Illyiac for a patching up. None of the children are to be seen by this person. It is inappropriate. Dangerous.

But mostly just inappropriate.

She pokes her head into the armory and finds Halmar and Paulani holding the leather ball between them in absolute bafflement as to how it found its way to their bench. The Armorer hustles in to take custody of it.

She leaves the other two standing, now baffled for the lack of ball in their grasp, and hurries back to the forge.

Din’s mouth is still gushing fiercely, but this time, the Armorer manages to persuade him out from under the bunk with the good ol’ Bait and Switch. Din cries out and fights as she manhandles him back into the light and drops into a chair with him. She reaches for a cloth to staunch the bleeding.

Din tries to headbutt her.

The ball falls to the floor along with his consciousness, the stupid boy.

The Armorer sighs and hikes the now-limp form up further into her lap. They will deal with the bruise later. First, she checks for a broken nose.

No crunching.

He’s fine.

It is these proceedings upon which the door to the forge opens unexpectedly. Light from outside pours in upon the Armorer, stuffing a rag into the face of a limp and restrained child.

A strong impression, it is.

A good one? Well.

The scholar is a spindly person with black hair and dark brown skin. Their face is wide in every direction, all pointing in that moment, of course, to horror.

“Goran,” Elder Fayrz greets in great interest. “You seem very busy.”

The Armorer takes a moment to get her priorities in order. She tries to picture all this from the point of view of an outsider and then develops a game plan.

Step One is to hide the face of her child.

She gathers him quickly and presses his body tightly against her chest as she did when he was much smaller and more amenable to being carried and cuddled. She tucks his lolling head as best as she can into her neck, where it is held in place by the edges of her helmet.

Step Two is to plead ignorance.

“Not busy at all, Elder,” she says, standing without showing the effort that has become hefting Din around like a ragdoll. She approaches to stand and bow her head respectfully to the elder. She acknowledges the scholar the same way, but conveniently, Din’s head falls from its place; she is forced to catch it and stuff his mess of a jaw back into her furs.

The Elder’s posture gives nothing away, but now that the Armorer knows Elder Fayrz, she knows that he is shrieking with mirth behind his helm.

“Perhaps then, you might give our scholar a tour of your workshop. He has many questions,” Elder Fayrz says. “Would you like me to--?”

“To?” The Armorer asks, ignoring the barely-there raise of arms in Din’s direction.

“Nevermind,” Fayrz says. “Be at ease, Scholar. Goran is the heart of our covert. She is the interpretator of our Way. There is no question that she cannot answer for you.”

The scholar nods dumbly. The Armorer bows her head again at this praise. They both watch Elder Fayrz dismiss himself. The great forge doors groan as he closes them behind him. The space falls again into a darkness lit only by lantern. The scholar swallows loudly.

“Is he alive?” he asks, pointing at Din’s back.

Nomri scoffs and leaves him in the center of the forge.

She takes Din to put him down on the bunk in their sleeping quarters behind the forge. He starts to regain consciousness just as she gets the covers over him.

Two things happen, sadly.

Din remembers his fight and the scholar, just barely in view from the bunks, picks up the ball.

The natural follow-up to that insult is exactly what the scholar receives.

“He lost a tooth?” the scholar asks in disbelief as the Armorer passes him salve for his newly-scraped elbows.

The forge ground is not comfortable by any stretch of the imagination—to be thrown there by a child, one might even say, hardened the landing even further.

“He learns this behavior from the others,” the Armorer says. “He is not like this when we are traveling.”

Din protests the wet washrag scraping against the now-dried his face. He is full of bungled, angry insults that don’t make any sense; he clutches at the Armorer’s hands and tries in vain to liberate his head. She orders him to be still and quiet. In Mando’a she explains that there are outsiders here. And he has already failed make himself discreet.

This is a great shame upon them.

Din will hear none of it today. His usual mood for shaming has been punched out of him along with his tooth. He has eyes for one thing and one thing only and that is the ball sitting on the edge of the forge’s lip. The scholar glances at it when he notices Din reaching, reaching, reaching in its direction, despite all the scolding. Smiling and indulgent, he takes it, the cause of his pain, and holds it within Din’s reach. Din freezes.

Finally, he is not so high and mighty now that the undeniable evidence of an outsider stands before him. Din has learned well in the last few years that these people are nothing but trouble. He scrunches his face up and would have mimicked the spitting lizards he and Paz chase out around the cracking lava rivers outside if the Armorer did not quickly cover his mouth.

The scholar laughs, however.

“I thought Armorers didn’t travel,” he says. “I thought that the point of the covert was to create stability so that the Armorer has the time and space to interpret the creed.”

The Armorer raises a brow behind her visor.

“Perhaps you are thinking of another covert,” she says. “This Armorer is no better than any of the others; I travel as they do. Each has their turn. All must contribute to the covert’s finances or else there will be no covert to finance. Please sit. There is a stool...somewhere. There is a chair here. Sit here.”

The Armorer takes the leather ball from the scholar and gives it to her child so that he might calm the fuck down already.

It works like a dream. Din curls around it and again becomes his usual shy, agreeable self. She could sag in exasperation. She tells him to go lay down to ease his headache from his earlier nonsense.

“You’re from Sundari,” the scholar says. “I hear it in your accent.”

The Armorer’s shoulders stiffen.

“But your little boy isn’t?” the scholar asks.

“He is going to sleep,” the Armorer says.

“In this heat?”

“We all are used to the heat.”

The scholar watches her with lips pressed together. He breaks his gaze to look up at the high ceiling of the forge and then to take stock of the benches and tables the Armorer has set up. Each station serves a singular, specific purpose. Din knows them well; he is a mighty hider and knows just how deep the darkness under every bench is.

“He is your apprentice,” the scholar says.

This is not at all the case, but this man needs to know as little as the Armorer can give.

“What is it that you seek in this place?” the Armorer asks. “Are you a Mandalorian?”

“No,” the Scholar laughs. “No, no. I’m—a distant relative was once. But not me. I’m just here to research. Your elders rejected all of my colleagues’ requests.”

Well, that was no business of the Armorer’s.

“You can’t be the only one with a child here. Someone had to knock out his tooth. How many children live here?” the scholar asks.

“There are no children here,” the Armorer says neatly, now that Din has scurried away to go nurse his wounded pride.

The scholar’s eyes stop wandering and turn back upon her in surprise.

“Your boy just went to bed,” he says.

“I have no boy,” the Armorer counters.

“Your son.”

“No son.”

“Apprentice?”

“I’m afraid that you must be confused, Scholar,” the Armorer says. “There are no children at this covert.”

The scholar’s brow works through this information. He produces a mini datapad with a glowing face. He begins typing on it with vigor. The Armorer allows this. She has hidden now what needs to be hidden—belatedly perhaps, but this is not damage that cannot be mended through sheer force of will.

The scholar is apparently not offended by her backtracking. He peers into the unlit center of the forge.

“Did you have specific questions?” the Armorer asks.

He jerks back and smooths his shirt.

“Yes,” he says. “Yes. Theologic ones if you don’t mind.”

“I do not,” the Armorer says.

“They’re of a matter that you may not know of. It’s pretty esoteric stuff.”

“I am a shepherd of esoteric information,” the Armorer says. “Perhaps even a repository. Ask your question, scholar.”

“I have a name.”

“And a purpose,” the Armorer says. “Ask your question.”

The scholar takes a moment to remember himself and then gestures a few paces away at the stool that Din appears to have overturned in rebellion when the Armorer left him unattended to fetch his ball. She strides over and rights it; then brings it to the scholar to place on the ground where he pleases.

The scholar accepts it with grace and sets it down about a foot away from the forge. He sits and after a beat, the Armorer realizes that he is waiting for her to join him in the chair she was just tormenting Din in. She obliges.

“I have a new question,” the scholar says when they are both seated comfortable. “Is that alright?”

“It is all the same question to me,” the Armorer says.

“Why do you hide?”

“Because we are both prey and predator here,” the Armorer says. “It is important to remain humble or else courage sours to pride; it is pride of this type that carries us to early death.”

“But you don’t fear death,” the scholar remarks. “That is part of the religion.”

“Part of who’s?” the Armorer asks. “What fool’s Creed have you read?”

The scholar’s eyes widen, but then he sinks slightly into his seat in enormous interest.

“Not yours, ma’am,” he says.

“Sir,” the Armorer corrects. “The Creed here is one that suffers no fantasies such as fear of death. It is only natural for the living to fear the end of that condition. Respect for the before and respect for the after is what drives our feet forward from this place. That respect may come to us in any number of forms: fear, awe, joy, regret, and so on.”  

“So you believe in a timeline that exists all at once?” the scholar asks.

The Armorer tips her head to the side.

“’At once’ meaning that the after and the before are present in the now?” the scholar clarifies.

The Armorer wishes to touch a finger to her bare cheek, but she does not.

“We believe in linear time,” she says.

“Yes, but it’s altered by—”

“There is no altering,” the Armorer says. “Time is linear. It stretches before and after with no heed for those clinging to it with grand ideas of slowing it. Why do you ask about time?”

“Because I’m interested in generations,” the scholar says in a hurry. “There were many coverts that cropped up after the war, but some existed before then. What’s more, there are pockets of Mandalorian coverts all over the galaxy; each more different from the next. Mandalore has been blown to glass, and increasingly people are abandoning it to create off-world communities. To be a Mandalorian now, more than ever, is to be part of a diasporic people. Our research group’s question is, at its heart ‘what is a Mandalorian?’ And by looking at coverts, we are hoping to tease an answer out of continuity and difference alike.”

The Armorer could snort.

“The Creed unites us,” she says simply.

“The Creed is one of the greatest points of variance between coverts,” the scholar argues. “And yet the other two that I have been to have stated the exact same thing. But they haven’t worn helmets the way that your people do. What inspired you to make this call?”

“It was not mine,” the Armorer says freely. “When I arrived here, I bore my plain face. But that is because I was not ready to embrace the understanding of our elders.”

“Which is?” the scholar prompts.

“Which is,” the Armorer mimics, “That the face one is born wearing is but another type of name. It is a part of a body which one might choose to share with another. But to share it is to give someone great power. The moment someone knows a name, they might call it, and, in that moment, a body may turn around on instinct only to receive a finishing blow. To know a face is to allow yourself to no longer meld into the world around you. What good is it to stand apart from others, scholar?”

“You make a case for collectivism?” the scholar asks.

“I make a case for a people who are always first a people,” the Armorer says. “The face and the name do not define us. It is not the person you are who matters; it is the person you will become. This visor reminds us of who we will be after each step forward. It brings comfort in that way.”

“And yet your visor is gold,” the scholar says. “Does that not set you apart from the others?”

“You mistake our dedication to our people as a dedication to the death of individuality,” the Armorer says. “All can coexist alongside the helmet.”

“So this isn’t a matter of modesty, like the Tusken people?” the scholar asks.

The Armorer considers it.

“There is an element of modesty,” she admits. “But it is my belief that this arose after the fact.”

The scholar has been taking notes. He nods deeply at this last statement and continues scrawling furiously. His writing brings a welcome break to these rapid-fire questions. The sound of his stylus clicking against the pad leads the Armorer to take stock of her surroundings. She traces the line of the forge all the way around until she catches the flutter of the heavy cloth that separates her and Din’s sleeping space from the rest of the forge.

Her brow twitches.

The barest outline of the leather ball is visible over there.

Din is eavesdropping.

“Sir?”

She jerks back to attention. The scholar’s jaw shifts slowly. Smugly.

“Checking for children?” he asks.

“Vermin,” the Armorer corrects.

“Why do you hide them?”

“They hide themselves. They know what happens if the likes of us see them.”

“The children, sir? Is that an issue of modesty, too? This is a continuity between the communities we’ve studied. They hear us coming and stuff their kiddos into the nearest closet. Why is that?”

Ah, yes. The most burning question, surely.

“The only other alternative would be to eat them,” the Armorer says.

The scholar grins.

“They do seem hungry,” he says. “Does he speak Basic?”

“The only person who speaks Basic in this forge is myself,” the Armor says.

“He did tackle me for a toy earlier. It’s silly to keep up this game, isn’t it?”

If only this poor man knew that the ball was not a toy. It was a weapon. The Armorer was waiting for it to explode every moment of every day.

“Do they have other toys? Do you believe in toys?”

She rolled her eyes.

“They have whatever it pleases them to,” she admits. “Lizards. Goats. Bracelets they make from the red reeds around here. They of course have each other to torment.”

“My kids are like that, too. Minus the lizards and goats.”

What luxury. The Armorer would minus a goat any day.

“Do they play with other children? Or just other Mandalorians?”

“It depends on your sect, scholar,” the Armorer says. “Ours are not yet old enough to wear their metal faces. Until then, they might socialize with other children in our travels, but otherwise we leave them to each other.”

“A lonely life for a child,” the scholar notes.

Oho. Not if one has a ball.

“If I didn’t take notes, could I meet him properly?”

Hm.

“I’m not going to cite my own memory in a book. I would just like to see him properly is all. He looks a little like my brother’s son.”

Mm.

“Is that a no?”

“Din,” the Armorer says sharply over her shoulder in Mando’a. “Just for a minute.”

Her eavesdropper wastes no time at all bursting forth from his canvas prison and galloping up to shove his ball into the arms of the newest, unknowing party. The scholar is alarmed at first, then amused.

“You’re really into this thing, aren’t you?” he asks.

He takes the ball into his hands, and Din immediately goes to work in trying to pry the ball loose. The game has already begun for him. He is a little uncoordinated after his battle with the Armorer’s helmet, but it hasn’t hindered him to the point of actual clumsiness.

“Do you want me to throw it?” the scholar asks.

Din stares at him.

The Armorer translates, and, at Din’s sudden rush of intensity, she explains, “He wants you to kick it with him.”

The scholar blinks and takes a long look around the forge.

“It’s fine,” the Armorer says. “There’s nothing in here that that thing can break besides my patience.”

Din gets behind the scholar and attempts to push him out of his seat by sheer force of nine-year-old will. The scholar stands with trepidation and Din sets to crowding him off to the makeshift goalpost he and Paz set up on the side of forge. It consists of two over-turned water basins. Exactly opposite of this set up on the other side of the forge is a balled-up piece of canvas and a rail spike half-hammered into the ground. This is the other goal. Din abandons the scholar at the first goal to guard his own. He spreads his gangly body out as wide as it will go and hunkers in ready to leap.

The scholar defers again to the Armorer.

“You’ve given him hope now,” she says. “Don’t worry. He’s not made of glass.”

The scholar’s eyes fall to the ball in his hands. He winces as he begins to lift it to drop.

The ping of the ball ricocheting off metal table legs and the thud of it landing on the forge walls fills the air for a good twenty minutes or so, by the end of which, the scholar has thoroughly endeared himself to the Armorer’s ridiculous child. Din latches himself around the man’s waist when the forge door creaks open to signal the arrival of another being.

The scholar, unsure of how to react, places a hand on Din’s head and looks up into the black, shining T of Naseem.

The Armorer is not half as surprised to see him as he is to see the forge full of activity in the middle of the day. He stands there, bulky and awkward and outlined curiously in silver. Din releases the scholar in sudden concern.

“I did not know we had guests,” Naseem apologizes gravely in Mando’a. “Forgive me. Another time.”

Wherever he has been, he has been dragged through gravel rough enough to sand the blue paint from his armor. It is nearly comical how pale his backside is when he starts to turn around. Din drops his ball upon seeing it.

“We were just finishing here,” the Armorer decides. “Come, let me look at this mess. Where have you been?”

Naseem halts his retreat, and stiffens again like a cat with wet feet. His helmet does not move, but the Armorer knows what his eyes are doing behind it. He is looking from Din to the stranger and back. Already calculating. Already moving slowly in Din’s direction.

As ridiculous as her child is, this man is four times more anxious. Five times more anxious.

“He is safe,” she says for his benefit.

“Din, come,” Naseem demands in his soft way. “Don’t play with others we don’t know. Come here.”

“He’s safe,” the Armorer repeats.

“I didn’t mean any disrespect,” the scholar says. “It was just a game. Are you his father?”

Naseem, bless him, looks up at this but struggles to understand fully what is being asked of him. His Basic is poor. He is stronger in Huttese and prefers to spend his time hunting in those territories. The money is better by far, even if the terrain is unkind.

“This is one of our primary beroya,” the Armorer informs the scholar.

Naseem seizes the moment to sweep Din up off his feet like he is a squeaking mouse. His great muscled arms make it look easy. Over Din’s shoving, he attempts to remove the strap of his chestplate so as to stuff Din behind it—as if he’d fit.

“I see,” the scholar says kindly. “It’s nice to meet you, beroya.”

Naseem halts his Din-tormenting at this. He grows even more awkward.

“Hello,” he says back.

The scholar evidently understands better now what is happening. He fights a grin.

Naseem’s embarrassment skyrockets.

“I’ll take this one for a bath,” he tells the Armorer in Mando’a. “Where is his friend?”

Naseem consistently refers to both Din’s ball and blanket as his friends. The Armorer is filled with nothing but affection for this every time it happens.

“Be calm,” she tells him.

“He can’t be seen—”

“Be calm.”

“What will this man do? Who is he? He will tell someone.”

“Naseem. You are tired and stressed.”

“So you two are an item, then?” the scholar says cheekily. “That’s the cutest thing I’ve ever seen. It’s okay, sir. I’m done here. I’ll leave you to your work. Thank you, Goran, for your wisdom and patience.”

Naseem balks. Din successfully slips out of his grip to the floor for nearly .005 seconds before Naseem grabs him by the back of his soft leather backplate and thwarts all hopes of escape.

“You are very welcome, scholar,” the Armorer says. “May your journey from here be successful.”

The scholar leaves them, and Naseem finally stops fretting enough to allowed Din to fling himself down onto the floor to escape him. They both watch as he studiously and impressively field-crawls away from them to the safety of the canvas covered room behind the forge.

“What was that about?” Naseem asks when the last of Din’s boot has vanished beyond the veil.

The Armorer gestures dismissively.

“Academics,” she says. “Again trying to fit us under their microscopes. I fear that we have become a ‘field of study.”

“What does that mean?”

“That we ought to shoot one or two of the next few that come,” the Armorer says. “Sit and take it off, you look like a skinned tank.”

Chapter Text

Asme’s mother places into her hands not for the first time a small, lacquered box with dark brown wood and a many-pointed star on the top of it.

Within the star are seeds which have been stained or perhaps in-laid with red material. The star around the red gleams with pearlescent, polished shell set with enormous care into the space carved out for it.

The box as a whole is perhaps the size of a large deck of cards. It opens its jaws with the help of a set of old, once-gold, hinges, and inside there a few beads that roll around the bottom of the unpolished wood.

This is probably the third or fourth time Asme has held this box and the beads in her palm. As a child, she recalled digging them out of a drawer once to peer and poke at those beads, admiring the uniformity in their clarity and the shine that they seemed to produce no matter what light was available.

It has been years since she thought about the beads, however; she only remembered them recently when her colleague Ilyaji returned from his fieldwork with a box of carefully labeled envelopes in hand. The whole room had gathered around as he began opening them in the lab and setting them out so that the students who would soon come in could see what he’d found at his latest dig.

Among the rubble of carved utensils and broken statues, there had been a little box exactly like the one Asme now held in her hands.

Hers is in much better condition. The one Ilyaji found is burnt, as most jedi artifacts were. If there had been beads in that one, they are long lost. Asme’s, though, still contains some, and understanding of what they are—what they truly are—now, sinks into her stomach like an anchor.

Her mother says that these things were her cousin’s beads and box. She received them when her auntie had passed away. Her other cousin was given them first but said that she didn’t know their owner and that they didn’t mean anything to her, so she handed them along to Mama to play with.

And now she hands them to Asme. To play with.

“You’re looking so serious,” Mama notes as Asme places the beads with their sickening clarity and gleam back into the box.

“Mama,” Asme says, slowly setting the box onto the counter. “We need to have someone at the museum of history look at these.”

Mama tips her head to the side and blinks her big eyes twice.

“What’s the matter with them?” she asks.

“Nothing,” Asme says sadly. “Nothing. Will you come?”

Mama watches her with her lips pressed together.

“Yes, I’ll come,” she says. “But first you must tell me, since you are so smart: what are they?”

What are they?

Padawan beads.

Their family has always boasted that one of their relatives was once a jedi. Asme believed for the longest time that it was a load of shit dreamt up during the Empire as some sort of pre-war nostalgia. The archivist at the International Museum of Arts and Letters, however, sets the beads out on a piece of white paper that has little cartoonish images of a number of beads printed across its face.

It reminds Asme of a placemat for a child at the table, except the attributes of each bead here is not written in a way that a child could understand. There are dates below them. Types of materials are listed. Common ages of receipt, cultural meanings and symbols.

Every bead means something different, and the number of beads given depended on the padawan and their relationship with their master, so the archivist explains.

The ones in Mama’s box come from a period about fifteen to twenty or so years before the genocide of the jedi. The archivist asks if they would like the beads taken away to be dated more precisely.

Mama folds her hands in her lap and says that she doesn’t need that.

The archivist shows them the beads with a light behind them and explains where it would have been placed on a padawan braid.

Mama interrupts her and points that that Mon Cala people don’t grow hair. The archivist accepts this an explains that many jedi were not of species that grew hair; the braid was symbolic. Those that did not grow hair wore synthetic braids, some made of metal fibers, delicate chains, or threads woven and unwoven to create little tassles or ropes.

Mama’s cousin, whoever she was, would have worn one of these faux-braids at the side of her head, behind her ear orifice. It may have been secured there with a loop through pierced skin or perhaps through a headband.

The archivist produces a replica braid on a head-model and shows them with the first clear, sunset-colored bead where it would have sat.

This bead symbolizes trust, she says. Traditionally, they are warm tones, reds, oranges, magentas, yellows. Traditionally too, they are clear, although occasionally, the archivist explains, a master would select a bead with a bubble in it. The bubbles are said to have represented the padawan at the moment of their receipt of the bead, and as the bead of trust was usually the first bead given, the bubbles often represent children.

The archivist picks up the next bead strewn along the length of the paper.

It is oblong and pearlescent and of a similar material as the star-shape set into the top of the box that the object came in. It has had holes drilled into each side of it which are big enough for a few threads or perhaps an especially thin chain link to fit through.

The archivist matches this to a similar shape on the paper.

The shape is labelled as a symbol of hope, she explains. There is a passage underneath the little block of description that has been taken from a recovered jedi journal. The archivist helpfully asks Asme if she might read it aloud.

She does, feeling like a child in class at school.

“In the moment my master gave me Hope, I found that I had, well, not lost fear, but rather that the fear that I had felt up to that point in so many parts of my life had dampened as whole. I know now that this was my own doing; my training taught me to balance the anxiety of an unwanted outcome with curiosity and openness to what any outcome may bring, but back then, when my master gave me the bead, he didn’t tell me that I had trained well or gotten over a childish fear. He told me that I’d found hope and now that I’d found it, I would never forget where it lives.”

It is a beautiful sentiment. The jedi were a profound people, whose symbols were as poetic as their written word.

Mama sheds a tear, however. Asme takes one of her hands into her own and lets its webbed fingers curl around her own.

There is one more bead in the box; a blue one that shines no matter what angle. It seems to have some sort of coating on one of its layers it that gives it a shimmering appearance underneath its gloss.

Asme’s eyes have been searching the paper before them for a similar drawing, but the other bead examples are tapered and bulbed in all the wrong ways.

The archivist too, sees this. She picks up the blue ball between two delicate fingers and rolls it around in her palm for a long time before standing and excusing herself to go consult a colleague. Asme and Mama nod and watch her go out through the glass door behind her desk that leads to the hallway. Through the glass, the archivist knocks on her colleague’s door; it opens almost immediately. She disappears inside into the darkness of that cave.

Asme and Mama run out of things to look at in the room after a little while. Yet neither speaks for some time. Waiting. They are waiting.

Asme picks up the wooden box and looked at it more carefully.

“What was her name?” she asks

Mama takes a shuddering breath.

“I don’t remember,” she admits. “I never asked.”

This is not unusual in Asme’s field of study. Family members disappear. The owners of objects are forgotten. The objects develop pedigrees in their wake. They shed identities as possessions and become symbols of someone’s mother’s sister’s daughter.

The cousin. The grandmother. No, not that one. The other one, the kind one.

It is different to sit in front of an object with her own family pedigree, Asme must say. She is so used to handling others’.

“Maybe they can find a holo,” she says.

“I don’t want that,” Mama says immediately.

Asme looks at her and feels sadness licking the insides of her ribs. She could tell Mama that maybe she doesn’t want that, but Asme does. She could tell her that thousands of people would be proud to have a jedi in their family—that their family is proud to have a member who was once part of that culture. She could point out the hypocrisy in keeping the beads and forgetting the name of the person who wore them.

But she doesn’t.

It is not uncommon with jedi artifacts for them to be given to collections without names attached. Works of art once given in trades for peace and diplomatic relations in the Old Republic are so rare now, that those given to families in old times can now make those families rich—or if they already are rich, even richer. Collectors and museums alike ask fewer and fewer questions when these artifacts slither into their hands; Asme has seen it.

She has stood by and watched Ilyaji plead with the Maritime Museum of the Inner Republic as their agents wrapped pottery in paper and told him that there is nothing to be done.

The art of the jedi is priceless. It must be preserved where all may see it, so that all may see and study and gawk at this part of the galaxy’s history.

Mama has been poor her whole life. Everyone their family knows is. That Asme has gone on to become an academic—an archaeologist—is one thing that her family will never understand. They see her degrees and ask her how she is using them. They ask her what she does and then nod without follow-up questions when she explains.

It’s okay. (It’s not.)

She’s used to it. (It still aches. All she wanted was for Mama to be proud of her.)

These beads are priceless.

They are not scorched, not inside or out, as many of the current collections of padawan beads are. They have been kept in their original assemblage, in a box undamaged by the devastation of the old jedi temple.

The box in itself is sure to be worth thousands of credits. The star-shape on it, with its little red teardrops, is one that Asme has not seen on other items. The holonet has shown her ones of similar styles, but most of them are covered with motifs of bunches of perfectly round golden berries that, it is said, the jedi once favored in their perfumes and their teas and on their tables.

No doubt, there is an art historian out in the galaxy who would whimper at the very sight of this little box. Each moment here, however, is making its past owner more and more real to Mama.

It scares her. Asme can see her fear growing.

The guilt towers like the ceiling of an underwater cavern.

Asme swallows as the glass door opens and the archivist returns. She sits down clumsily in a hurry and carefully sets the bead back into the bed of its box.

“Mrs. Wibb,” she says, “Please, if you don’t mind me asking, is Wibb the name of your father and husband?”

It is. Mama says so.

The archivist gets a look in her eye that Asme has herself produced when two fragments from digs on opposite sides of a continent align right on her theory.

“May I ask, is your family name Eerin, by chance?” the archivist asks.

Mama’s lips go tight. Asme looks at her. Mama shuffles her legs and crosses her ankles.

“It is,” she says.

“My god,” the archivist says. “Just one moment.”

They don’t even ask for a holo, but they are given one. Asme mimics Mama’s posture at the little blue projection in front of her. It is a young Mon Cala who looks almost exactly like herself but wearing robes and talking to someone out of frame.

“I didn’t ask for company,” the woman in the projection huffs.

“Perhaps you will find it in your heart to forgive me,” a man says behind the transceiver.

“Maybe I won’t. Maybe I’ve had enough of you. Did you ever consider that?” the woman demands as she opens and closes drawers all around her, fishing little jars out of them with sharp precision.

The person who recorded this holo laughs.

That is it. That is all the footage that there is of Mama’s cousin. The original transceiver and its messages are housed at the Municipal Library of the Galactic City on Coruscant; it will never leave that place because the person who recorded it is the General Kit Fisto.

Mama’s hand lifts to hold her breastbone as the archivist explains that research shows that when jedi masters had multiple padawans, they usually gave each child similar types of beads for their braids. General Fisto’s lineage of padawans each had a final bead made out of the bone of a great, translucent whale, whose body was still, to this day, decomposing on the bottom of one of Glee Anselm’s oceans.

Mama’s cousin was one of his last padawans. And she and General Fisto were, judging from the holo, very close. What is more, the archivist says, is a person by the name Eerin was recorded in the wartime records of General Obi-Wan Kenobi as a one of his ‘dearest childhood friends.’

The archivist has an excerpt, even, from one of the transcribed volumes that Luke Skywalker, the last known jedi, has generously donated (Asme has doubts here) to the Galactic City’s Library. She pulls up an electronic copy on her pad and lays it on the table so that Asme and Mama can read.

“Attempted to speak to Bant today and was prevented from doing so by Master Fisto,” Kenobi writes, “He still has not forgiven me for the crimes I ‘dragged’ her into when we were children still. To this, I would like the record to show that we were hardly children. She was fifteen and I was seventeen at the time of our greatest accomplishments. We were both fully capable of choosing the path of delinquency when it presented itself to us.

Further, she was the one who dragged me into crimes against decency just as often as I dragged her—not that anyone cares about that. I have chosen to forgive her for times past, and she has chosen not to forgive me, and I think that that is very mature of both of us. Master Fisto has NO grounds to intervene in our mutual shenanigans, is what I am trying to say. Without Bant, I am at a loss. It takes two to hide a ladder convincingly, and my padawan is useless here.”

Asme fights the giggle bubbling up in the back of her throat. Mama, however, becomes even more sober.

“What happened to her?” Mama asks the archivist.

Asme already knows what’s happened to her. There is no sense in asking, but if Mama needs to hear it from this woman, then so be it.

“She was killed, I’m afraid,” the archivist says. “Her padawan, however, has never been found. So I think the only conclusion that we can reasonably reach is that she was able to help him escape the massacre at least for a time.”

Bleak.

“How old would he be now?” Mama asks. “She was older than me, so—”

“Probably in his late-thirties or forties,” the archivist says. “If you’re thinking about trying to locate him, there is a foundation that helps former jedis’ families connect with those who are willing to come forward.”

This, Asme has not heard of, and she cannot contain the sudden, eagle-screeching inside of her this time.

“Have many come forward?” she asks.

The archivist shrugs lightly.

“Around forty or so,” she says. “More than anyone ever expected. Many of them were once padawan learners whose masters helped them escape the genocide. We have been trying to encourage them to participate in an oral history project, but almost all have refused an interview.”

Asme is listening with every fiber of her being.

“They’ve refused outright?” she asks. “I thought they would have wanted to preserve the knowledge?”

There is a pregnant pause.

“The survivors are, as a whole, quite orthodox in their faith despite being children when they were separated from it,” the archivist explains. “Many of them believe that objects owned or handled by deceased jedi retain the memories of those people, especially when the people in question have experienced great trauma, including death. This, as you might expect, has caused some tension between those who maintain and preserve the objects and those of the culture who remain living.”

Asme can feel even the webbing between her toes growing colder. Her lips close tighter and tighter around her teeth.

Mama frowns next to her.

“They don’t want their culture preserved?” she asks.

It’s not that.

“So her name was Bant Eerin? And she was General Kit Fisto’s padawan?” Asme asks.

The archivist is getting visibly nervous. Asme clears her face of all expression but coolness.

“Yes,” the archivist says. “And the beads belong to her. She would not have given these to her padawan, they are—”

 “Ma, how did we get these?” Asme interrupts. “Who gave them to Auntie and then Grandma?”

Mama looks at her as though she is frightened.

“I don’t know,” she says. “Your aunt—”

“The padawan did, didn’t he?” Asme interrupts again. “He went and found them in the rubble and sent them to Auntie, didn’t he? Only he would have known where they would be, and only a jedi would have tried to keep them out of others’ hands. He must have not had anywhere to keep them. Maybe they hurt him, so he gave them back to us so that this part of Auntie Bant’s spirit could feel safe. That makes sense doesn’t it?” She asks this last question to the archivist directly.

There is a long, long silence in the office.

“It would make sense, yes,” the archivist says.

“Who can dispose of them honorably?” Asme asks.

“Miss Wibb, to dispose of them would be losing a part of history that we will never be able to recover.”

“I know that,” Asme says. “But she is my aunt. And after all that she lived through, she deserves to rest. Who can we take them to, to release her memories? Or where can we take them and keep them so that her memories can be at least rest with peace?”

The archivist swallows and looks down to her desk without seeing it. She blinks rapidly. Asme does not look at Mama now. Her education, her doctorate, everything she has worked for—it is as though it has all been for this moment.

She knows the contradictions and politics here. She’s been on digs and held bones in her hands. She’s estimated the ages and genders and species of hundreds of partial skeletons.

Many of them, she apologized to as she held their fragile skulls. They were not meant to be laid out in cold labs, but left curled in the dirt and peat and sand like babies in a womb.

These beads are as good as those bones: not meant to be tucked in a cupboard or rolled around the palms of someone as good as a treasure hunter.

“The only person who may be able to help you is Luke Skywalker himself,” the archivist says. “His number is on file at the GCL. I believe he is Security’s mortal nemesis. I can call them for you.”

“Thank you for doing that,” Asme says before Mama can speak. “We’ll be in touch.” 

Mama is angry on the ride home. She doesn’t say it outright, but Asme can feel her fury spreading.

They will never speak of money in their household. It isn’t right. It isn’t done. But the frustration remains along with the sound of the rolling and rocking beads in the box. Asme holds it carefully, wrapped in cloth in her pocket. She thinks at it more than she did on the way to the library.

She thinks about fields of tiny yellow flowers that she hopes the woman in the hologram might have enjoyed. She thinks about sunsets—purple and orangey golds—setting over sloshing, glowing water.

She tries to remember the old GAR posters with General Kenobi on them; maybe the memory of his face would bring Aunt Bant some calm—or if not that, then at least a laugh.

Mama closes the front door loudly behind both of them when they get home and huffs off to her room to brood in a tidying-up frenzy. Asme peeks into her pocket when Mama has cleared the downstairs.

“Soon,” she whispers to the box like she once apologized to the bones. “We’ll get you somewhere safe soon.”

There are several flurried arguments over the dining table in the next few days. Asme’s brothers and father and aunts don’t understand why the box is not in the process of being turned over to a curator. Her uncles point out that it would be an honor to have Auntie Bant’s name attached to a box on display at the GCL.

Asme asks if they would have Auntie’s mummified corpse on display, too. She is told that this is not the same thing. She is told that she, as an archaeologist, ought to know this.

They don’t understand. It’s not their fault. They only know what archaeologists are from the holonet and dramas. They haven’t submitted ethics form after ethics form to gain approval to set foot in a grave. A tomb. A homeland now buried in brackish water and decaying vegetation.

The best she can do is compare their current situation to that which she knows her family will understand: a murder victim. They listen to these true crime stories all the time. They’ve heard victims families talking about their lost one’s possessions.

Auntie Bant is no different from those butchered victims, she explains. The only significant detail here is that her child—maybe her son, who knows really what the padawan-master relationship is equivalent to outside that culture—was the one who found her body and dug her remaining affects out of the plundered debris in the Jedi Temple before it was transformed into a tower of oppression. He had no other way of protecting her. And so he gave her remains to them. Her family. His savior.

Mama mumbles that, whoever this padawan is, is part of their family.

“He should decide what is to be done,” she determines.

“Ma,” Asme groans, “He may not be alive. Or he may be hiding. Look how people treat those who’ve come forward. They treat them like they’re artifacts themselves: poking and prodding them. If there are more, we aren’t giving them any incentive to come forward.”

“That’s his decision then,” Mama says. “We have to do what is best for the family.”

“What about her, then?” Asme demands. “Is she not part of our family?”

Voices fall away.

“Of course, she is,” Mama says.

“Then does she not deserve the honor of our death customs?” Asme asks. “Or, actually, her people’s death customs?”

“So you think we should sink her?”

“No, Mama. Listen to me. Auntie Bant was a jedi. She was Mon Cala, yes. But her religion, her everything, was jedi. She needs to be honored according to her beliefs, not ours.”

There is great fuss over this. More and more of the family adopts the view that Auntie Bant’s padawan ought to be the one to decide, with less and less openness to Asme’s painfully thorough, step-by-step explanation that Auntie Bant’s padawan may very well be dead. And if he’s not, then coming forward could jeopardize the life and identity he’s built for himself after indescribable trauma.

The family believes that this is irrelevant and that Asme is being stubborn and indecisive.

Asme can take no more of it. She slams her hands down on the table and leaves for her room, ignoring the shocked silence that follows her outburst.

She nearly collapses at her childhood desk and lays the side of her face down against its flat surface. The box sits in the corner, practically humming. Asme cannot help reaching out to stroke it. She lifts her eyes to stare out the window and remembers how the world felt during the war.

Everyone was waiting for the rebellion to arrive.

Everyone was waiting for Luke Skywalker.

The call does not come for another week at least, and by then, Asme has settled all familial arguments by taking Auntie Bant’s box and beads with her to the university, where she has told her family that she will consult with the professors about what is the best thing to do.

She doesn’t necessarily lie. Professor Kan-yo takes one look at the box and tried to grabs a fire-extinguisher before realizing that it was not Exorcism-In-A-Can.

It is her esteemed and professional opinion that the box be returned to its people for proper burial, which aligns with what Asme has been saying this whole time, Mama.

The whole lab, however, leaps at the trill of Asme’s datapad where an unknown frequency appears on the screen. Everyone knows who’s call she has been awaiting. They all gather around, professor included, as her shaky hands answer the call.

“Hello?” Asme says.

“Hello? Hello?”

Holy shit. Holy fuck. It’s Luke Skywalker. Asme remembers this voice from Liberation Day. He sounds tinny now just as he did then, calling over comms that the war was over.

It was over. We won. We won.

She feels that soaring all over again.

“Hello? R2, the damn thing’s fine. Leave it alone—hello?”

Asme shakes herself.

“Hello, is this Luke Skywalker?” she asks. “My name is Asme Wi—”

“ASME. Asme. I told you that’s how you say it, but does anyone around here listen to me?”

The lab anxiously giggles as one jittering mass. Asme cuts off a high-pitched half-moan-half-laugh before it leaves her mouth.

“Th-that’s me,” she says. “You’re Mr. Skywalker, yes?”

“Hm? Oh, kark. I’m so sorry. How rude. Yeah—yes­, of course. I got a call from the GCL. They said that you have an artifact?”

“I do,” she says. “It’s a box with some beads in it. It seems that they’re from my aunt—”

“What did you want done with it?” Skywalker cuts her off. “Is it haunting you? Things knocked off tables? Mirrors with the wrong faces in them?”

Asme forgets every conversation she has practiced with an imaginary Luke Skywalker in her head over the last week.

“Haunting?” she repeats.

There is a long pause.

“Or not?” Luke Skywalker asks back just as awkwardly as she feels.

The laugh at the back of her throat is now verging upon hysterical.

“It’s not haunting me,” she says. “In a spiritual sense anyways. In an ethical one, though? Yeah. Major haunting.”

This is not how she’s supposed to talk to Luke Skywalker. This is not how she’s supposed to talk to Luke Skywalker. This is not how she’s supposed to talk to Luke Skywalker—

“Like on a scale of one to ten, how major?” Skywalker asks like a man at a bar, rolling around a tumbler.

“An eight?” Asme tries.

“Woah.”

She could scream right now.

“Yeah, okay. I’ll bring gloves. Where are you?”

“Just a minute,” Asme says, and puts the call on mute. Someone shoves a labcoat in her hands without needing to be asked. She muffles her scream into it for as long as her lungs last, then releases it and hands it back with a nod of gratitude.

She unmutes the call.

“I’m at Lan-Nho Memorial University,” she says. “I’m a fellow here.”

“Where??”

Bless him.

“Mon Cala,” she says.

“Mon Cala? Aw, fuck. What the hell—it’s going to be ages—R2, leave him be. I need—no, honey. Not right now. R2, call the Mand’alor. Now, please. Call him until he picks up. Ms. Wibb?”

“Yes?” she asks.

“I’m clear around the galaxy. It’s going to be a little while. Do you mind if I save this number for now?”

“No, no. Go ahead. If you get lost, just give me a ring,” Asme says. “I’m here, uh, most days.”

“Amazing. Fantastic. You are wonderful. I’ll—Grogu, you can’t stand on my feet, kid, where is your kitty? Go get me your kitty—I’m sorry I may have to bring a few stragglers.”

“We’ll hide the sharps,” Asme says. “Thank you so much for doing this.”

“Ah. Don’t thank me yet. I’ll thank you, though. Thank you, thank you. No one ever calls me for this kind of thing, it’s always ‘Mr. Skywalker, get out of our foyer. Mr. Skywalker, you don’t have sufficient ID. Mr.’—you get it. If the artifact gives you any trouble in the meantime, put it in a safe or a tub of water. Don’t touch it if you can help it. See you soon.”

The call ends. Uncertainty flutters about the lab like dry laundry.

“We have to clean,” Professor Kan-yo suddenly realizes.

Luke Skywalker arrives looking exactly opposite to how he sounded on the call. Asme doesn’t see him disembark from his ship, but she sees him now. He is a human shadow. He moves like the world moves around him. The fabric of his cloak and tunic sweeps and fans as he walks. His boots seem to make no more noise than they were ever intended to.

The lab feels shabbier and shabbier as he rounds the corner of their dingy hallway and approaches the glass automatic doors. He stands before them, suddenly still, and everyone on the academics’ side of the glass holds their breath at once.

Luke Skywalker scans their faces without moving his head. His eyes land on Asme. They lock in and slowly, his chin dips in greeting.

Asme’s chest sinks in with the gesture. Her head reciprocates his dip like it has always known this motion.

“Open the door,” she tells the others.

The glass shifts, but the door doesn’t get stuck as it often does at the least opportune moment. Skywalker stands before them all now, with no barriers between them.

It is peculiar. In that moment, Asme is stuck by the absurd thought that he is short for the masculine type of his species. His cheeks are nearly gaunt. For all the fabric that gathers around him like he himself is a black hole or a magnet, his body—his bones—strike Asme as slight.

If she had only them and no flesh, she might think at first that she was handling the bones of a teenager. But no. she and Luke Skywalker are the same age.

Still, he has fought tooth and nail for the life that she lives now, and he stands before her looking immeasurably saddened.

“My apologies for the delay,” he says in a surprisingly light voice. “I had to put my army to sleep.”

“Your army?” Asme repeats.

“My students,” Luke says.

Right, of course. Why shouldn’t he have students? Why shouldn’t he—dear god, there are more jedi.

“Thankfully, I’ve lost them,” Luke says with the flicker of a smirk. “You have a box?”

Asme hurries to collect it. She brings it to Luke with both hands. He considers it for a long time before pulling a black-gloved forearm from the recesses of his shadow-cloak and accepting it. He holds it up and, one-handedly, flicks it open. The sound of the beads rolling greets him.

Asme’s chest expands as he says nothing.

“Do you, by chance, have a name for the owner?” Luke asks, closing the box and tucking it neatly into the shadows with his hand.

A swallow. A moment of truth.

“Bant Eerin,” Asme says. “She is an aunt. Or a cousin, I guess. My mother’s cousin. We think that she was murdered during the massacre. We think that maybe her apprentice got these to us somehow.”

“Bant Eerin,” Luke repeats with a nod. “Thank you for bringing her closer to peace. I’ll speak with someone who can read these beads for any distress. If there is none, do you have any preference for what I should do with them?”

“Whatever you think is best,” Asme says. “I just want her to be able to rest.”

Luke’s slack face lifts in the cheeks into a smile.

“Rest, I can promise,” he says. “Thank you, Miss Wibb.”

“No, thank you, Mr. Skywalker.”

“Luke.”

“Asme,” Asme says. “You are always welcome to Mon Cala.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure about that,” Luke says with a growing curve to his lip. “We will meet again soon, Asme. May the Force be with you.”

A shiver runs down her spine.

“May the Force be with you as well.”

It feels so wildly right and wrong and liberating and exciting to say it back.  

The departure from there is anticlimactic. Luke turns the hallway’s corner, realizes he doesn’t know where he’s going and comes back with enormous, sad eyes. Professor Kan-yo walks him back through the maze of corridors to the exit. She comes back and has to sit down for a few minutes.

Asme, meanwhile, stares at her hands and tries to think about if they feel different now that she’s done what, for all intents and purposes, should be the right thing.

Auntie Bant’s things will be taken away and burnt until they crack. The box will be reduced to ash. The beads to sand. That is the way of the jedi: cremation.

But if it is the right thing to do, why does her body want to collapse in on itself?

An arm drapes itself across her shoulders. A tear falls. Another arm lays onto another shoulder. Bodies pile on.

Life goes on with empty drawers and the anger of relatives who cannot understand. In the news, a jedi journal is discovered, and it is all that people want to talk about everywhere Asme turns. Her relatives brag to their friends that one of their cousins was once a jedi. It could very well be her journal. There is no knowing until it is translated.

Asme seethes.

She hopes to every god on every planet and asteroid and moon that the journal does not belong to Auntie Bant. If it does, Asme will simply slam her fingers in a door and declare to all family members that she is too injured to look into it further.

Because they’ll ask her to, of course. Only this time, they’ll be there with her with opinions.

Ugh.

She loves them, but she’s already spent the last two months with a stomach doused in guilt. She’s not sure anymore if she’s done the right thing.

What if Auntie Bant wanted to be with her family the whole time she was a jedi? What if she’d felt out of place among those people, and her last wishes were to be with people who she felt closer to?

Every night Asme goes to sleep hating Luke Skywalker, and every day she awakes, reminding herself that the reason that her family is poor is because of the Empire that he helped ruin.

She hopes that time will ease all these emotions or that another dig and more bones will provide enough distraction to keep her from thinking about them.

What she does not expect is to receive a message on her datapad. It isn’t a voice message, it is text.

“Hello Asme,” it reads, “This is Luke. I am going to need a few more days. But I was wondering if you and your mother might be available for a meeting?”

Her and Mama?

She takes her pad downstairs and asks Mama when her days off from work are. Mama, who is seasoning Dad’s cooking when he looks away, is caught in the headlights. She asks why. Asme offers her the pad and tells her to see for herself.

Luke Skywalker wants to meet with her.

Mama then breaks out of her chrysalis and reveals her tertiary form: a typhoon.

Asme takes cover.

Mama has invited every relative they have to the house for the date, but no one is allowed to sit or stand in the way. No one is allowed to touch any counter or stir up the still waters in the hearth. There is to be no screaming, no crying—not even from the littlest cousins. Everyone must be on their very best behavior. Luke Skywalker could knock on the door at any moment.

Mama tells Asme for the fourth time to go put on some rouge. Asme, for the fourth time, goes to the refresher to pretend to.

She arrives back to a flurry of activity. It appears that someone knocked on the door in her absence. Mama marches everyone back and scolds them into position. She smooths down her tunic and checks her collar, then opens the door with dignity, and lo, standing before them against the backdrop of the typhoon Mama called down to the city, is the human shadow.

Luke stands like he is ready for battle. His chin is lowered, his eyes are set straight ahead, and at his side, on a thick belt, a silver hilt gleams.

Asme steps forward.

“Luke,” she greets.

Luke’s eyes leave Mama to meet hers. His posture relaxes in the shoulders.

“Asme,” he says.

“Welcome to our home,” Asme says. “This is...everyone. And this is my mother. Everyone, Mama, this is Luke.”

Luke surveys the abundance of relatives and dips his wind-swept, water-speckled head in grave greeting. Mama, stars save them all, curtseys.

“I have my own guest,” Luke says suddenly. “I hope you don’t mind me bringing someone along.”

He moves aside to reveal a man who is approximately his same height. He is older than Luke, but not by so much as to be considered ‘old.’ for a human. He might be, from the ratio of smooth to wrinkled skin on his face, between thirty-six and forty-five stand years old.

“This is Cer-Ami Nasben,” Luke says.

Nasben’s eyes are dark with a monolid, and his hair is voluminous. His curls are not tightly coiled, but are thickly layered, and, Asme notices from the set of thin hands that he has tightly entangled in front of his stomach, he is missing a finger from one hand and a knuckle from the top of the opposite hand’s pinky.  

He wears a high-collared tunic and a wide wrap around his waist that is reminiscent of the tunic style that Luke wears at his side, but it is not quite right.

It is not quite on the mark.

This was the closest that Nasben has to the clothes that he once wore.

“Master Nasben wished to thank you in person,” Luke says gently.

And just as he says so, Nasben untangles his wreath of fingers to reveal the box of beads. His eyes gloss over with liquid.

He cannot speak, Asme realizes, he is overcome. So instead, he begins to lower his body, down, down, to his knees.

“No,” Mama says, rushing forward to catch his elbow.

He shakes her off furiously. And takes a terrible, shuddering breath when he is finally kneeling. He bows his head so slow that it touches the box in his hands. Asme’s eyes fill with tears.

Through the blurriness she watches as Nasben lifts his head and shakily opens the box to reveal the beads, only this time they are not the only inhabitants.

A braid plaited from nearly black hair and unevenly hacked off on one end fills the space around them. It bears two beads a few inches apart from each other. One is a bubbly red. The other is the whitest piece of stone Asme has ever seen. It could be light itself in mineral form.

“She was my master,” Nasben manages to whisper. “Thank you for bringing her back to me. May the Force be with you, always.”

What is unsaid are those words that the archivist once spoke: Auntie Bant saved her padawan. Her child. Her charge. Her hope.

She did it.

She had hope.

“Welcome home,” Asme says. “We missed you both.”

Asme finds Luke outside away from the commotion going on in the house. He has folded his legs up and is watching the wind shake the trees out in the storm. She settles down next to him far less gracefully.

“So,” she says, “That journal.”

“It’s endless,” Luke says. “Do you know what I have to go through with the GCL every time they get their hands on shit like this?”

Asme snorts.

“I can only imagine,” she says. “They mean well.”

“Perhaps they do,” Luke says with an unmistakable twang to his accent now. “Or perhaps they are money-grubbing monsters who are targeting me personally.”

He is so furious about it that Asme has to laugh. Luke watches her from the corner of his eye.

“You’re not like them,” he points out. “What course did you take that gave you a conscience?”

“Oh, you know. ARCH 799 and 803,” she says. “They’re seminars in ethics.”

Luke lets out a blustery huff.

“I’ll hold all of them hostage if you can get one of them teachers to do a presentation in their fancy offices,” he says.

“Pretty sure that’s against the law,” Asme says.

“Well, according to them, I don’t have ‘two adequate forms of identification,’ so I guess they won’t catch me.”

He’s a funny guy, Luke Skywalker. People don’t give him enough credit for the spite.

“Thank you. For finding him, I mean,” she finally says. “I know it can’t have been easy.”

Luke shrugs.

“It wasn’t as difficult as some of the others,” he says. “There’s a guy who thinks he can out-run me, and I’m starting to think that maybe he’s right. But it’s not all generosity. Finding them for things like this helps me in the long term.”

Asme understands now.

“How many have you found?” she asks.

“Spoken with nearly fifty now. My aunt believes there may be as many as a hundred survivors. She once knew of twenty who lived, but they’ve gone to ground. They don’t trust anyone, and who can ask them to?”

“You,” Asme says.

“Well, you got me there,” Luke says, swinging his body around towards her. “One day,” he says with a lifted finger so that she knows he’s serious, “There will be somewhere where we can all gather without fear of all this attention.”

“Are you making it?”

“No. It turns out I’m a terrible carpenter.”

“Were you this funny during the war?” Asme asks.

Luke winces and looks away.

“Maybe not,” he admits. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to be so familiar.”

They sit and listen to the sound of rain.

“She wasn’t suffering here,” Luke says abruptly. “I spoke to a person who can see the memories of those jedi who are gone. I asked him to make sure that she wasn’t reliving something terrible as a force echo attached to that box. She isn’t. She’s passed on safe and sound.”

Finally. Closure.

“I’m beyond relieved to hear it,” Asme says. “I doubted myself.”

“Me, too,” Luke says. “Nearly had a pyre ready and everything. I believe Master Nasben would like to keep the box, though, if that’s okay.”

“Definitely okay. I’ll fight my mother with my own fists if it comes to it.”

Luke nods.

Another silence falls across their laps, but this one is like a blanket. Asme breathes in the humid smell of the storm. Then a little light flickers on in her head.

“Hey, just one last thing,” she says. “There is a kind of star-thing on the top of the box. Do you know what star it’s supposed to be?”

“A star?” Luke asks.

“Yeah. On the top of the box. It’s got these red things in the middle—”

“You mean the durian?”

The.

Durian?

Luke stares at her like she’s the one who’s said the most batshit wild thing that evening.

“Spikey fruit? Smells like sweet death? Tastes like it forgot the death?” he supplies for her edification.

“I—I know what durian is,” Asme stammers. “But why—why would they put that on top of a jewelry box?”

Luke continues to gawk at her without embarrassment.

“It’s a joke?” he tries. “Like a kid’s box type of thing. ‘Oh hee-hee-ha-ha, you smell like shit. I got this box for you because you stink.’ I think Obi-Wan gave it to her when they were literally kids. I see them all the time; you know which stuff belonged to kids because it’s all just covered in durians. I think it was the height of eight-year-old comedy for that generation.”

All that mooning. All that mystifying. All that work and she’d just been waxing poetic over what ultimately amounted to an eight-year-old padawan’s memorialized fart-joke.

Luke beams at her and jostles her shoulder.

“It’s all in a day’s work,” he says.

“I’m saving your number,” Asme says ruthlessly as she stands. “I’m texting you pictures of every jedi thing I find.”

“Oh, how awful for me.”

“I’m sending you four hundred pictures of other people’s ears.”

“Veering into weird territory. I’m into it. It’s speaking to me.”

“This is the start of a beautiful friendship,” Asme snaps over her shoulder. “Your uncle. My aunt. We were meant to carry their bullshit forward.”

“I’m hearing you and not arguing,” Luke says. “This is me, not arguing.”

“GOOD.”

“This feels like arguing now. You wanna go, short-stuff?”

Asme breaks off in a run. She hears the scuffle of someone scrambling up to follow.

It feels right.

Chapter Text

The children lay on the floor in the main room in the dark, murmuring and whispering the way that children do. Their ears and lips don’t know their true volume. The act of substituting the voice from the throat with one from the palate is enough to convince them that a veil has been drawn over them and all is now private.

Shmi can hear her son reaching for details, details, more details of the world outside this one of sand and sun. He is more or less polite about it, so she remains where she is, holding her breath in the dark.

The children wear a whisper as a veil. She stands in true silence, absorbed in the squareness of the fingers half-curled from the palm laid on the floor of the room.

She has seen no human with a body this long. The jedi sleeps on; his shoulders are wider than the sleeping mat Shmi lent him. His head rests heavily on the padded pillow of his own muscle—his arm. The rag-filled pillow Shmi offered him lays stumpily to the side of the mat, placed neatly. Intentionally.

Just as the jedi sleeps.

Neatly.

Intentionally.

His hair is nearly as long as hers, streaked through with lines of grey. For a man of such strong features, its length seems out of place. His clothing, too.

The jedi are said to be an austere people. Shmi has heard of their self-made robes. Handwoven, handstitched, flax and wool. In another life, this jedi might have worn expensive, machine-stitched trousers dyed blue or purple or soaked pure black like ink. But here, he lays carelessly on thick, coarse-woven fibers.

The skin of his hands is so calloused that it appears discolored and stiff, even in the dim light in these quarters.

He is a handsome man, this jedi. The girl he brought with him is handsome, too.

There is no ring on his finger, nor any outline or indentation of one recently removed.

Shmi has heard it said that jedi do not marry; she wonders, in a vulgar way that blows puffs of air against her ears like reprimands, if that means that this jedi has never laid with another. All that hair. Does he grow it on purpose or is it as careless a process as his resting?

“It is difficult to sleep when one is haunted.”

Shmi recoils and covers her face in shame.

“My apologies, Master Jedi,” she says.

The jedi cracks open an eye to observe her with.

“Jinn,” he says.

“Master Jinn.”

“I take no offense; a strange man has come into your house. I ought to be grateful for your generosity.”

Shmi’s gaze refuses to raise from the ground a few inches from Master Jinn’s prone hip. It is as if her eyes have been fixed on that singular point.

“I will leave you,” she says.

“To sleep? Out there with those thundering rascals?” Master Jinn asks in a stage-whisper that mimics the children’s attempts so closely that Shmi squeaks with laughter despite herself.

“I’ll manage,” she says.

“No, it shouldn’t be. I have learned just now that it is not written for me to rest this evening,” Master Jinn says as he pushes his wide, wide shoulders off the ground with the heels of his palms. Without his wool robe, he is much more lithe. His tunics taper in to his waist. His boots, set neatly together by the door, have revealed feet just as studiously kept as their outer shells.

“Perhaps you will join me in contemplating the energy in this city?” Master Jinn asks.

Shmi hesitates.

“It is not appropriate,” she says.

“To who?”

“To...us.”

“Oh, I see,” Master Jinn says. “My apologies, but you need not concern yourself over such matters. I am not seeking that sort of comfort this evening.”

He sounds like he means it; Shmi swallows past the dryness cracking the edges of her throat. Haltingly, she lowers herself until she is sitting on the sleeping mat in the residual warmth of the Jedi’s body heat. Her hands automatically link around her knees and her ankles feel as if they are bony and awkwardly thick all at once.

“You are contemplative,” Master Jinn says in a rumble. “Might I ask what occupies your thoughts?”

“Something crass,” Shmi admits.

“Oh? How wonderful.”

“I am wondering if you have a jedi wife, Master Jinn,” Shmi says. “And how she feels about you laying down in another woman’s room.”

The cut-off huff catches her off-guard; the smile even more so. Master Jinn hides both behind a flattened square palm and looks away. Shmi watches his bashfulness with surprise.

“Is something funny, sir?” she asks.

“No, no,” Master Jinn says with a shake of his head. “Only good memories. Jedi do not have a cultural equivalent of marriage.”

“So you are not married, sir?”

“No need for formalities, this is your floor, madam.”

That’s true. Shmi’s elbows release some of their tension.

“Ani loves that girl,” she says. “He says she is the most beautiful person he’s ever met. And I wonder if there would be someone just as beautiful among your people.”

Master Jinn’s eyes are calm but quizzical. His brow pulls downward and the center of his lips upward as he tries to make sense of the implication.

“You are asking if there are female jedi?” he asks. “Yes, there are many genders. Many species of people. I cannot say myself if there is anyone who will be as beautiful as our young lady in Anakin’s eyes, but I have been told that our people are often attractive to outsiders.”

“Are you?”

“Beg your pardon?”

“Are you attractive? For your people?” Shmi asks.

Master Jinn looks away, not bashful this time.

“My partner passed away many years ago,” he says.

“I see. I shouldn’t have asked something so painful.”

“It is no fault of yours. Curiosity is a virtuous trait. Many outsiders believe us to be celibate, however for the majority of jedi, that is not the case. Some prefer to spend their time with outsiders, some prefer the company of those within the culture,” Master Jinn explains.

“And you?” Shmi asks.

Master Jinn breathes in deep and shrugs.

“I have no preference either way,” Master Jinn says. “If you are referring to romantic inclinations, however, then I must say that the prospect of something like marriage with an outsider is....” he trails off.

Shmi’s heart sags in her chest with relief.

“Repugnant?” she asks. 

Master Jinn shakes his head.

“Not that,” he says. “It is a poor fit.”

“I’m relieved.”

“I did not mean to cause you distress. Here, allow me—” he begins to stand, but Shmi lays a hand on his arm.

“It isn’t you,” she says. “Not specifically. Just—”

“Men,” Master Jinn says for her. The tension in his limbs relaxes once more. “I understand.”

They sit in prolonged, awkward silence.

“Have you had a partner?” Master Jinn asks.

“Nothing long-term. Not for many years,” Shmi admits.

“I see.”

“Ani is going to grow into a boy of a thousand crushes. I can see it in him already; for the longest time I have been trying to prepare myself to cope. He is so different from myself, you see.”

“Exuberant,” Master Jinn agrees. “It is endearing.”

“Yes,” Shmi says. “But I suppose now I will not have to contend with his future rejections.”

“No, you shall not. Master Ali will mind him; he is a professional of all things early-crushes. You need not worry.”

Shmi’s lips curve slowly. Her forehead brushes against the tops of her knees.

“Are you comfortable in those clothes?” she asks.

“Hm?”

“Is that linen?”

“Oh, yes. I am quite used to them. Haven’t burned or buried this set yet. I cannot say the same for my padawan; his cloak was unfortunately shredded on our last mission, and he has been requisitioned one a size or so too big. It reminds me of when he was a child.”

Shmi’s heavy eyelids jerk back.

“Your?”

“My apprentice.”

“You have an apprentice?”

“Yes. He is just turned twenty-five standard.”

“My goodness. And how old are you, master?” Shmi asks.

Master Jinn laughs and does not try to muffle it this time.

“Older than I appear,” he says. “This is my third apprentice.”

“Your third? And when are they apprenticed?”

“The present one? Thirteen standard to the day. The one before him, eleven. The one before him, fourteen.”

“So many,” Shmi breathes. “I fear I am sharing a room with an elder now.”

“That you are, that you are,” Master Jinn says.

“You must be exhausted. How long do you keep them?”

“Until they are ready to fly on their own,” Master Jinn says with a sweeping hand gesture.

Shmi does not know what that means, but she can only assume that there is some exam that these apprentices must pass to prove that they are ready to take flight.

“Thirty years is a long time to spend raising children,” she says.

“Anakin will be well taken care of. We raise and are reared in communities. He will always have others around who care about him and will see that he is not cold, hungry, or too terribly miserable with crushes,” Master Jinn assures her.

“Will I see him again?”

“That, I cannot tell you. This is the sacrifice that only a parent can weigh.”

“Did you ever see your family again?”

“No.”

Shmi’s heart shrinks in on itself.

“Well,” Master Jinn suddenly amends. “They did not know that I saw them. They did not see me.”

She twists her head to the side.

“What do you mean?” she asks.

Master Jinn rubs the top of his knuckles under his bearded chin.

“It is not proper,” he says, “But I was an ornery child—fearful of my master’s disapproval. And one night I could bear his company no longer, so left home to see what there was out in the city to see. My people—we are not Coruscanti people by choice, but by necessity. My family immigrated as refugees. I found their community and watched them, but never approached. My youthful courage was outweighed by the terror of failing to meet their expectations as well as my master’s. I watched for some time, came back a number of others but ultimately returned to the Temple once my anxiety was assuaged.”

He pauses and drags the pads of the left hand over the roughen knuckles of the right.

“Joining the jedi now does not mean that one cannot decide later to leave,” he says as if truly reading Shmi’s mind. “My second boy and master have left us, one in perhaps better straits than the other, however neither were not forced to stay nor go. If Anakin comes with us, he will have his freedom. He will keep it regardless of if he stays or not. The true conflict here, if I might say Ms. Skywalker, is what you will do. Is it safe for you to be childless in this city?”

No one has ever asked this question. That it comes from the lips of a man about to take Shmi’s child, the only thing that has kept her from descending into screaming, soot-stained despair for the last nine years, feels like cosmic irony.

She has worked so hard to keep Anakin despite every danger that an unpredictable, additional body has posed to their peaceful existence. Shmi’s heart lurches with phantom terror at the memory of him making mistakes in front of Gardulla and Watto, snatching him behind her own body, fixing the issue with a bandage of pleas and promises, and later talking to him more sharply than her conscience can bear. Ani understands now what missteps masters are willing to overlook and what situations contain enough laxity that his precocious nature will be interpreted as endearing rather than subordinate or ungrateful.

He is growing wise the way that so many slave children eventually become. As their limbs stretch towards the sky and the land, they emerge from their shells as experts at reading body language and tone and knowing the velocity and dimensions their own flesh and bones can make if the need to disappear presents itself.

Without a child, the potential for angering a master is reduced. But without a child, proof that Shmi is fertile—is valuable to a master in that way—also vanishes.

“Every parent wishes that their child lives in a better world than they do,” she says. “You have had three boys yourself, have you not?”

Master Jinn sighs and cards a hand through his hair.

“I am not their parent,” he says.

“Maybe not. But they are yours, aren’t they?”

“It is more complicated than that, but I understand the metaphor,” Master Jinn says. “My apprentices are not slaves. I am not one either. This is why I am asking; I cannot empathize with your circumstances, so I wish to sympathize and soothe where I am able, if it does not offend you.”

’Offend’ isn’t the right word.

“I will make do, Master Jinn,” she says. “This is an opportunity for Anakin, and I understand that on this planet, opportunities are always double-edged blades.”

She pauses.

“What might comfort me,” she admits, “Would be to see, er. I mean—”

The request grows leaden on her tongue. Somehow, Master Jinn understands. He twists around and fumbles through his robe for a small datapad, which he powers up and begins flicking through. After a few moments of futzing, he offers the screen to Shmi with one hand.

The pad feels much bigger in her own dry hands.

“This is O’Ben—Obi-Wan, my youngest—from a few years ago.”

The pad shows a holo of a gangly teenage boy with light-auburn hair, silver-blue eyes, and a braid trickling down his shoulder. He is sprawled on the wooden floor of a clean, brightly-lit room and drowning in a brown cloak identical to the one that Master Jinn wears. Around him on a short table and the floor are stacks and heaps of opened books, trailing scrolls, and datapads. The most endearing part of the image is the dripping pink ice treat the boy is holding by its wooden stick.

“He was studying for his senior exams. This is Feemor, my eldest,” The holo swipes away to reveal another human, slightly younger, with hair and a complexion so fair that he appears to be a fairytale character, except for the blotchy redness over his nose and cheeks in the image. He wears robes the same color as his master’s, but transparent in places to match the wet, dripping cloth hanging limply over his head.

“He is quite sensitive to sun,” Master Jinn says. “He was a boy here, but he is nearly forty standard now.”

This former-apprentice is close in age to Shmi then. Master Jinn is much older than he appears.

“I have no images of the middle apprentice on this device,” Master Jinn says. “Our parting was not on good terms. We began our journey on stronger ones, but in the end, he was cruel to his padawan-brothers, my partner, and myself. I have been advised by my master and grandmaster not to dwell on his behavior, though I must admit that at times I find that advice quite difficult to follow.”

“So Jedi are a mixed bag just as other people,” Shmi says with a smile at the pale boy her age.

Perhaps in another world, she would have met him. Perhaps, in that other world, they would have shaken hands and shared long, lingering glances. He is just as handsome as his master.

“Guilty as charged,” Master Jinn says.

“Your apprentices are well-cared for,” Shmi says, handing back the datapad.

“I can assure you they have always found things to complain about.”

The thought that Anakin could be so spoiled brings tears to her eyes.

“Take him,” she says quietly.

Master Jinn’s hand lands on top of hers; it is just as rough and thick as it looks. Warmer, though.

Outside, the heat is dissipating.

It has only been a matter of hours, and Shmi cannot climb out of the ditch that the absence of her child, her baby, her only son, has left her in. Her friends gather around her, wiping away tears and pleading with her to stay with them rather than in her now-empty quarters for the night.

She cannot bear the thought.

Everything feels pointless, and she can do nothing but kneel here, helpless to hold back the agony. She pleads to the sky and its twin sisters for apathy, but all she receives is the shushing and pressure of flesh arms and chests wrapped tightly around her own.

It takes a few days, but finally the edges of the wound begin to numb.

In two months, she can wake up without enduring crusting and burning around the edges of her eyes.

In three months, she meets someone. A new master.

In four, she no longer lives in Mos Espa.

She receives a message from the Jedi Temple when the sixth month begins. It starts, “Ms. Skywalker, I regret to inform you.”

But it isn’t about Anakin—at first, anyways.

The message explains that the night Shmi spent with Master Jinn was one of the last Master Jinn spent alive. Her heart seizes.

The shock feels too large for her to bear—especially for a man she only knew for matter of hours. Still, she appreciates the message.

The people rearing her son are considerate if nothing else.

That much is proved further in the next paragraph which contains information about how Anakin has been adjusting to life in the jedi crèche, which she assumes is a type of nursery. It goes on to say that he already (and they specifically use the word ‘already,’ which Shmi cannot help but feel proud about) has a master. Master Jinn’s apprentice. Which one—the younger or the older—the message does not say.

Shmi understands.

This message is pointed and probably an anomaly for the Order. It is a formal request on behalf of the jedi overseeing Anakin’s care for more information about allergies. They are concerned because he has been having strong reactions to the food they have given him—in a less than positive way.

Even if the message really is a perfunctory one, Shmi saves it to her pad to read over and over. She writes back that Ani does not digest wheat well and is met with a message that is a single exclamation point at first.

Another message comes through that says ‘Aha!’

She laughs.

She cries.

But she laughs.

The jedi’s final message says ‘Thank you so much. We’re on it.’

And the last thing she says back is ‘No, thank you.’

That’s it. There is no follow up. But that is okay. She knows now that she and Anakin are both where they are meant to be.

She sees him—Anakin—after five years. His brow and dimpled chin appear in a blurry recording taken by a newsrecorder. His hair has darkened to Shmi’s own color and he wears robes in black and brown instead of white. In the image, which Shmi has saved to her pad alongside the letter from the crèchemasters, he stands with his head bowed next to a tall auburn-haired man with silver eyes.

The younger apprentice, she thinks in a bubble of joy.

She replays the news clip over in a loop. It only lasts fifteen seconds or so, but it is enough to see the Younger Apprentice turn and gesture to Ani, who looks up—puppyish and earnest—to see what the matter is.

The Younger Apprentice speaks for a moment, then turns to leave the frame. Anakin waits a beat before following him. At his hip is a silver saber hilt. On his feet he wears clean, polished boots.

He is well-cared for, just as promised. From the looks of it, satisfied with his teacher. Respectful, even, in a more confident way than Shmi could have taught him here in the desert. She blinks tears from her eyes as she looks upward to praise the sky and sun twins she thought for sure had forsaken her.

Praise be. Praise be.

Shmi Skywalker’s son is a jedi, fat, happy, and healthy.

Shmi Skywalker’s son walks free in leather boots and sandless linens. Even if abandoned by his mother, he has at least a community of people who have taught him to be more than anything she could have hoped to.

Praise be. Praise be.

The memory of holding his warm, ruddy infant body and considering whether it would be kinder to kill him now before the carnage began leaks out of her pores. It chatters around her feet; hard decisions finally turned to rain.

She is not sorry that she asked to see those holos in Master Jinn’s final hours. Selfish as she was then, the faith the gesture gave her has carried her through to this moment when she can finally see for herself that she was not sold a lame cow.

Cliegg comes in and goes still in the doorframe. He asks her why she is crying; she cannot answer him even when he comes forward to gather her in his arms.

Finally relief.

After all these years.

Chapter Text

Auten’s eyes become glued to the arc of plastic-y blue cleaning fluid. The liquid’s glugging turns into rattling. The edges of the droid’s tank overflow. Its side panels gleam with a coat of slimy blue that drips.

Drips.

Drips.

He puts the bottle down and crouches in front of the droid. Its sensors blare in muted yellow blazes under the film of blue. Auten considers, for a moment, wiping them off. But he doesn’t. He can’t.

He has to watch as it struggles and cries for help over and over. The fluid has gathered beneath its wheels on the tiles. It tries to move back, tries to move forward.

Its helplessness used to make Auten feel something. Now he just stands and tilts the jug of fluid forward. He pours it empty and drops it on the floor. It clatters hollowly, taking its sweet time to go still on its side.

Someone slips in the fresher; Auten rubs his nails against the glass counter as Gabe gives him all she’s got. She tells him to get out of her fucking store. Her knuckles slap against the counter; she tells him to give her her apron and to take a hike.

She doesn’t mean any of it, but it pisses him off. The apron strings get caught around his ears and leave a red burn when he yanks them off. He slams the shop door hard enough that the security bells rattle.

Nothing breaks.

Outside, the pavement is littered with couples laughing, lit by neon lights from the theatre sign next door. Advertisements slide across its huge screen one after another. Birdshit drips down the side attached to the building.

Auten kicks the chainlink fence under it. Hard, hard, harder, until a window next to it opens and a frog-faced man tells him he’s gonna call the pigs. Auten tells him to fuck off and die.

The man sneers and slams the window shut. Auten can see the shape of him reaching for his comm unit through the frosted glass. He stuffs his hands into the rough mouths of his pockets and walks fast enough that his shins ache. When he checks over his shoulder, no one is following him.

His shift wasn’t supposed to end for another four hours. It’s a long time to waste on this level with nothing but a zero balance on his credit card for company.

Jheua isn’t answer his texts anymore. The last one, telling him that she hopes he has a nice life, makes his hands shake and his shoulder burn with the urge to throw the damn pad into the ground until it shatters into pieces that won’t bust the soft soles of his shoes to stomp on.

But then he’d have no pad and no money, and a man can’t get on in a world without one or the other these days.

So he pulls his yellow hood on and zips the front all the way to the top. The tram station is just as yellow. It’s got benches covered in stickers and tags and the crumbs of food someone got bored of eating. There’s a trash can there, and sometimes people leave aluminum cans in the top.

Thoughts begin to turn like cream in dark soup on the surface of his brain.

He goes to the station and finds a couple crunched canes and a bag—two bags, actually, and a glove someone left behind that’s only kind of grody on the outside. It’s better than touching nasty-ass cans with his bare hands, though, so he puts it on and flexes his fingers until the inside isn’t as cold as the outside.

It’s one of those chef gloves. The kind that don’t let knives slice through. There are a lot of restaurants around these parts; a lot of fish and flesh and the like. Auten uses its grippy fingers to pinch the lips of the cans chucked deep into the bottoms of the trashcans on either side of the tram station, and when he’s got all those ones, he takes himself and his new glove out on the town back to the can in front of the theatre.

There are some at the kids’ park couple block in and to the right, on the other side of the fenced-in school.

There are a bunch of old drunks there, smoking and coughing and talking about nothing. They see Auten coming with his bags in hand and hold out their empties—bottles and cans. He takes them without thanks and moves on.

Even the drunks in this city have more money than him.

The recycling center’s shop droid rattles $21 credits into its cup-shaped hand. It holds the chips out to Auten and retracts it when he asks if he can have it on card instead.

He inserts his card into the slot in its chest and pulls it out.

The droid malfunctions. It can’t read his card. It offers to ring a manager, but it’s not fucking worth it, so Auten just takes the handful of chips.

There’s a liquor store nearby; he dumps them into one of their cash-points and loads the balance on his card. It’s not enough for much, not even dinner really, but whatever. It’s better than mopping up a ‘fresher by hand for now like Gabe would have him do for the rest of the night.

He buys a cold can of red-lime soda and goes back to stand outside under the awning. There’s another tram stop down the street. It’s a dark one on the other side of a tunnel. Auten can see its yellow railings shining in the light of an oncoming carriage.

He digs through his pockets with the awkward glove until he finds his transit pass.

He’s not 18 yet, so he still rides for free.

The tram car is way warmer than outside. Streaks of water roll down the foggy windows here and there, only to have their trails covered up by more fog right away.

He rubs a circle into the cold window and watches the city blur by until the tram goes into a tunnel. Then, all there is to see is blackness. He distracts himself by watching the ads scrolling in a long line over the car’s row of windows. A notice up there keeps threatening to prosecute people who don’t pay their transit fees.

Someone’s written their initials under that corner. Someone else has draw a hairy dick and balls. And someone who came after both of them covered half of both up with a giant sticker that says ‘give me money, give me death. Don’t let me die in the Army, Dad.’

It’s a pretty good sticker. It’s got a picture of a clone trooper’s helmet with a badly cracked visor at right side.

Auten takes a holo of it to show Gabe when she’s stopped being mad at him.

The tram conductor comes down and tells everyone to get off the car at the last stop. The tram system gave him a heavy stick to wear at his side. The top of this guy’s is scraped and shit, so Auten shuts his mouth and jump step by step onto the wet pavement. The tram doors creak closed behind him. His hair ruffles as it speeds away, leaving him all alone in the dark, sucking briny air into his nostrils.

The bad water here goes out as far as the eye can see. Beyond that is just fog and tiny blips of ship-lights.

Auten can already hear the docks rocking. Their glugging reminds him of the park-drunks’ glass bottles. He walks, making sure each toe kisses the opposite heel, all the way to the end of the street, where the thick guard rail goes away. A single chain on a few stakes here and there replaces it. Water drips from the bottoms of each link in the chain all the way down to the restaurant at the base of the lighthouse.

He doesn’t go in.

He goes around back where the smell of fish seems to have dug instead into the old planks and plonks himself on a plastoid crate outside the back kitchen door. He lets out a breath that looks like smoke and keeps doing that until the old door creaks and Dad leans out and asks him if he’s run away from home again.

He hasn’t.

Dad tells him that he has to go back to his mom.

“I didn’t run, though,” Auten says.

“She’s gonna ask me where you’ve gone, and I’m gonna have those people in my place all over again, Auten. Go back. To. Your mom.”

What a guy, this old piece of shit.

No better than the drunks. Actually, worse than them.

They at least gave him their bottles without needing to be asked.

Dad seems to sense that he’s not going anywhere. After a long time, he says something over his shoulder and closes the door. His workshoes make weird sounds when he walks on the planks. He drags over another crate and sits down on it like it hurts all the muscles in his flabby belly.

“Son,” he says, once he’s good and leaned over and comfortable, “Your mom needs you.”

Auten’s nose is so cold, he can feel an icicle growing from the tip of it.

“She’s gonna die whether I’m there or not,” he says.

“Son.”

“I asked Mr. Braz if I could be emancipated or something, and he said I don’t have a case. So I’ve gotta keep living on with that corpse until she really becomes one.”

“Son.”

“You don’t treat the others the way you treat me. You don’t make ‘em go off and live with their mom.”

“Auten, if you keep talking like that, we’re gonna be having a different conversation.”

He’s always saying shit like this, pretending to be someone he’s not for his other kids and wife. Pretending he’s changed.

“Forget it,” Auten says as he pushes his stiff joints into motion. He dusts off his ass and wipes his nose on the back of his hands.

“Go back to your mom,” Dad calls after him as he stomps back towards the docks.

“FUCK you,” Auten snarls back.  

He stuffs his hands into his pockets and keeps going until he can’t hear anything over the glug-glug of the water.

There’s a chapel that’s always open to the dockworkers at the other side of the bay. The doors are oiled so they don’t squeak when Auten pushes them open.

The air inside is warm and dry. The walls are lined with a bunch of candles, although only a couple of them are lit.

He doesn’t have a lighter, so he holds the one he’s picked out of the line-up over the one next to it until its wick catches. He’s supposed to carry it to the altar, but he doesn’t. People don’t. He puts it right back where he found it and walks down a few rows to drop into a pew.

The pews don’t creak here either. They’re clean and warm. The flooring is heated by boilers that run water under the tiles. Auten sinks into the wooden and breathes easy for the first time in ages.

After a while, one of the holy men comes in wearing his thick white robes. If he notices Auten, he doesn’t poke at him. He just sways his swishing robes from one side to the other all the way down the center aisle to the altar.

Auten watches him unclick the silver cylinder latched to his waist-belt and hold it up with both hands to the big, crumpled-looking glass chandelier over the covered table. Auten flattens his body to the side to see into the center of the chandelier, where a book has been suspended in a protective clear energy shield. It seems to have some sort of gravitational pull, as it lifts the silver cylinder out of the holy man’s hands and pulls it up, up into the folds of the light.

The holy man bows and begins reciting a mantra.

    Emotion, yet peace.

    Ignorance, yet knowledge.

    Passion, yet serenity.

    Chaos, yet harmony.

    Death, yet the Force

He says it three times, all the way through, then holds his hands up just for the chandelier to float his cylinder down to him. It lands in the scoop he makes of his hand and clanks in the quiet room when he latches it back onto the ring on his belt.

Auten stay leaned over, but the holy man notices him on the way out and offers him a smile.

“Are you alone, youngling?” he asks.

“No,” Auten says. His throat is suddenly full of phlegm. He sit up, clears it, and says again, “No.”

“No,” the holy man says. “No is right. There is always the Force.”

His steps echo in the chapel on his way to the door. Auten cranes his neck to watch him go and turns back to the altar.

He gets up and shuffles over to the table to look up at the book suspended over it. It’s just a book.

He goes back to his pew and brings his heels up onto the seat. That brings his knees close enough to lean his forehead on.

If he sleeps here, no one will care.

He wakes to the hush of voices and the sudden drop of his feet. He stands right up and finds himself surrounded by people wearing robes like the holy man from the night before. They don’t seem alarmed by his panic. One of them smiles.

They look like—

“Jedi?” Auten asks.

Many eyebrows raise in amusement.

“Close,” one of them says. “But I’m afraid it’s not so. I don’t know you. Did you follow the Force to this place?”

“No,” Auten says. “My—my dad works down at the lighthouse and it was cold, so.”

The holymen exchange weird smiles.

“So it was cold,” the one speaking to Auten says.

He’s so fucking weird. If he was on a tram, Auten would look at his pad instead of making eye contact.

“Yeah. Sorry. I’ll leave now,” he says.

“There’s no need,” the holy man says. “You’re welcome to stay. All are welcome here. There are warm beverages for the congregation. You can help yourself if you’re still cold.”

He gestures to the back of the chapel where a folding table has been set up and covered with a rough-looking cloth. Plates piled with dry-looking biscuits have been arranged on it, but Auten’s eye is drawn to the tall, steel thermoses.

“It’s alright?” he asks.

“Of course,” the holy man says. “Have as much as you like. You can stay through the meditation as well.”

Auten does stay. He drinks hot, bitter caf and hangs around in the back of the chapel while people file in and fill in the seats. The holymen move the altar at the front of the room and throw velvet cushions into a circle around the floor. They all sit down and do the thing that the guy the night before did with their cylinders.

The hanging book pulls all them up into the chandelier. The holymen chant in a foreign language and the people who’ve come to watch them apparently take that as their queue to hold each other’s hands and close their eyes.

It’s all weirdly soothing. No one tells anyone else what to do. People just sit and think and let all the sounds wash over them. Auten finds himself sleepy again, even though he just woke up and downed like, three cups of caf.

He wakes up more when the thrumming is done and the holymen call their cylinders back to them. They stand up and do a dance of sorts, inviting members of the congregation to join them here and there.

It’s really slow. Someone beats a drum to keep them all in time with each other.

The whole thing takes about an hour or so because there’s a sermon at the end of the session.

The holy man from the night before stands in front of the replaced altar and starts talking about how the spirit of the Force moves through everyone. He says something about how every action has a reaction and how people think that that gives them permission to hurt others.

He says that the way of the Force is to curb the animal instinct and to replace it with contemplative movement towards the greater good.

Auten chews on his thumb and thinks a lot about the ache in his cold toes.

He kicked a lot of fences on the way to this place.

He thinks about Mom’s lumpy hand holding the remote channel-changer; her face is always half-lit by the blue light of the holoscreen these days. She doesn’t get out of her chair unless Auten’s there to help her.

He left her alone last night.

The holy man at the altar tells everyone to breathe in and think about all of those things that are troubling them, and he tells them to pull them in, tight and tighter, and then, when Auten’s lungs are crushed with the effort of clutching Mom’s hoarse laugh to his heart, the holy man says to let it go.

And just like that, she pulls away. The smell of stale sweat and death sticks goes with her. The scratching of Dad’s chef’s coat on itself leaks out of Auten’s ears and the scent of old beer goes with it.

Someone rolls a heavy rod around the inside of a bowl that makes a sound that sounds like freedom.

No body moves until it’s floated up into the air and turned into nothingness.

And just like that, Auten is hooked.

Transit to and from the docks is free, and so is an apology to Gabe for acting like a jerk in the ‘fresher. She tells him that she knows he’s going through a lot with his mom. She taps against the counter as she says it.

He promises her that it won’t happen again and she can take the droid repairs out of his week’s wages. He’s never done that before, but it feels right, so it must be.

Gabe gives him back his apron. He asks if he can change his hours to ones during the week, and she raises an eyebrow and asks,

“Don’t you kids live for endweek bullshit?”

And yeah, maybe he used to, but he sort of feels like he should spend that time getting his mom out of the house.

She gives him the hours. He goes home.

He goes to chapel. He keeps going to chapel. He goes to chapel so often that the holy men learn his name and tell him that he’s becoming one of their most dedicated apprentices.

No one ever says things like that, not to him.

He stops talking to Dad. He told Master Oakej about their last conversation, and Master Oakej said that a man who will not take responsibility for his past cannot be relied upon to take responsibility for his future.

“You must resist the urge to escape the present,” he tells Auten.

The reality of the present is that Dad is a jerk.

The reality of the present is that Mom is dying from the twisted multiplication of a gazillion cells inside her bones.

“You must always prioritize the greater good,” Master Oakej say. “Remember, apprentice, there is no try.”

People all over the chapel say this. The correct response is to bow, even though no amount of time riding trains has made it make any more sense. This is the point of meditation though, Auten figures.

The point is that things get better. Mom likes to go outside, and the chapel people buy her a hoverchair. She starts coming with Auten to chapel and spends less time staring at the holoscreen when they come back. They eat together more nights than not. Auten’s gotten another job; the chapel helped him get it. He gives tours of the docks to people who don’t live on Coruscant, but who want to take recordings of the ‘funny accents’ and ‘culture’ down there.

The money helps.

Dad doesn’t.

Dad actually gets worse. He starts calling people and calling mom and leaving all kind of messages for Auten. It’s like he can’t bear the thought of them doing okay without him in the picture.

Auten blocks his frequency. He tells Mom not to answer the voice memos.

They die off after a while, and things are even better after that.

The chapel starts to get busy with the upcoming festivities. They’re making everyone robes and big, colorful displays of paper which every tier in the chapel will elect someone to carry all the way to the Jedi Temple when day time of remembrance begins.

There, Auten will meet the flame of the Force, the galaxy’s Chosen One: Anakin Skywalker.

Every year, the Jedi Temple puts on an enormous fête. Thousands and thousands of them return to the grounds to man stalls selling sour, spicy foods in bowls and napkins made out of leaves that smell like humid soil. Auten’s gone a few times—once with his class, when he was little. Another time with Dad, before he and Mom split.

It isn’t necessarily hard to get in because the jedi don’t believe in things like money, but there is a sort of atmosphere to being there because at sunset, while everyone outside is running around, riding lit-up fun rides and licking oil from their fingers, the jedi go into their Temple and do a huge group meditation.

It’s said that they summon ghosts caught up in the Force and honor them with offerings.

The whole thing is a festival for the dead.

Every year, Auten learns, the chapel goes to lend their assistance where they can—usually by explaining what is happening to civilians so that they know to pay their respects at the south wall of the Temple, where the jedi light the pyres of their deceased. This year is going to be especially important because the Jedi have suffered many losses from the war, so they may be burning the bodies of the dead in real time.

They’ll probably say their mantras outside. Many of the chapel masters say that even they haven’t gotten to witness such a ritual yet.

Out of respect, the chapel prints thousands and thousands of fliers to bring with them, so that everyone can take a stack to hand out to civilians who don’t know about the Force or why the festival is important. The fliers are palm-sized and fit easily in pockets. The stacks that Auten gets are all white. The text on them is black and fancy, with a line drawn all around the edges so that the square is unthreatening. It’s just an invitation to think more.

On the back is the mantra. Auten knows it by heart now. He’s practiced it in the jedi language so that he can join in when the jedi begin honoring their dead at the pyres.

The fliers come home with him on the night before the fête. He ties them up in red cloth the morning of and stuffs them in his bag for him and Mom to grab if they run out of the ones in their pockets while in line for entry.

The circle train is as full as it’s ever been when it stops at the station closest to Auten and Mom’s apartment. The people inside grumble when they see Mom’s hoverchair on the platform. They give Auten nasty looks when he asks the group of girls wearing coordinated earmuffs to stand up so that he can fit her into the space for people needing accommodations.

He stays close to Mom so that she can’t see faces and offers those around him a flier, since they’re all going to the same place.

A tall, blue nautolan with gold rings around his lekku tells Auten not to do that shit on a tram. Auten says he’s not doing anything wrong. People hawk goods on the trams all the time. All he’s offering is a piece of paper for nothing in return.

The nautolan narrows his eyes. Others take the fliers. Auten holds his head high the whole ride.

They get off at the 4050^th level and transfer to another tram. The higher they go, the cleaner the pavements become and the bluer the sky.

There are four more transfers to get to the top. By then, Auten’s run out of his first stack of fliers. Every transfer refreshed the people around them. Mom opens up one of the red bags and tells him to hold back from giving them out. They aren’t even at the Temple yet.

Finally, they reach the foot of the Temple, where a line of bodies forms a maze. Around and around each other, it winds. There are already chapel members walking along the edges of the lines, offering fliers to those standing in it.

A lot of those that begin in hands end up on the ground. Feet trample them as they shuffle forward one after the one after the other. It is an inevitability, Mom says, which may be true but that doesn’t mean that Auten has to like it.

Most of these tourists aren’t even here to see the jedi; they’ve got their pads out or their recordidroids floating around them. They’re posing in front of the line and snapping holos from cheesy angles, swinging gaudy fake saber-hilts from their hips. Some have covered their heads out of respect, but the vast majority seem be here to cosplay as jedi, what with the vibrant colors of their hoods and cloaks and the outlandish sparkle of sequins all over their bodies—even in the corners of their eyes.

Auten wants to shout to the sky that this is not a music festival. It’s a remembrance ceremony. A funeral.

But no one can hear the scream trapped in his throat. They’re too busy staring up at the banners waving from the Temple’s spires.

Order gives way to chaos as Mom and Auten enter the Temple’s courtyard. Four rows of stalls manned by people in masks take up a full quarter of the grounds. Tables have been set up around the bases of bronze statues with bright-colored cloth thrown over them to hide the folding legs underneath. Those working at these stalls aren’t jedi, they wear casual sweatshirts with names painted across them.

Unions. Charities. Shelters and relief centers. Trinkets are stacked high on their table displays along with wheels that visitors can spin in exchange for prizes.

Beyond all these booths is an old fashioned ocean-ship that swings in an enormous half-circle from side to side. A mushroom as tall as an apartment building whirls riders hanging from swings in a circle. Screams echo over the courtyard.

Wind that does not touch Auten’s face rushes in his ears.

The people in masks serving food aren’t jedi.

The people spinning wheels and holding out credit buckets aren’t jedi.

He wants to rush at them and topple over their tables and stands and their stupid, fucking wheels and to shout until he’s hoarse. But Mom is laughing and pointing at the gleaming streamers overhead. Her eyes are full of kites in the shapes of enormous jellyfish with long, trailing tentacles against a sky that has never been bluer.

Auten takes in a breath and recites what he knows the Chosen One would.

Emotion, yet peace.

He must let it go.

The flocks gathered here will see the truth in their own time.

The sun simply needs to start setting.

The chapel members gather at the sight of the first star on the horizon. The masters begin counting heads and, once they are sure that no one has been left behind, they call for a march to the south. Master Oakej leads the way with his ceremonial hilt held up over his head.

Auten and the others have practiced this march. They stride in step with their hands tucked into the wide mouths of their sleeves and their hoods pinned to the very tops of their heads.

They march on and on, until they reach a wall burnt golden, red, and orange by the falling sun. And true to form, there are the jedi. Real guards in real gold and white masks stand in a stiff line in front of three sets of closed doors. Their arms are held out in front of them, each one clutching the hilt of a double-sided lightsaber.

The sabers blaze white at their cores like suns that bleed out into yellow beams. Auten’s eyes water just looking at the bands that the tight lines of them form with the guards standing elbow to elbow.

Smoke begins to rise from the Temple roof, first in white tendrils, then clouds. Like thunder, a chorus of drums rises from what appears to be the guards’ elongating shadows. The sound gathers and grows until even the tourists cannot ignore what is unfolding before them.

Auten’s breath catches in his throat.

The guards’ shadows split into three each, and the shapes of young jedi—padawans—bearing white drums bedecked in tassels begin to move with graceful, sweeping arches of legs and steps.

They beat both sides of their drums and shout all at once, startling Auten back to reality.

Again, the padawan-drummers shout, then dip towards each other from one side then the other. Right on beat, the guards, as one, shift their sabers into a horizontal line.

The dance goes on, now shared between the guards and the apprentices, until at the peak of sound and motion, everyone arches their bodies and pulls back.

They freeze in place once more.

Smoke billows over the Temple, creating clouds in the purpling sky.

The crowd applauds with clapping and whistles, and then the doors of the Temple slowly swing open. Auten’s pulse beats in his neck.

And from the darkness of the Temple begins a procession of jedi dressed in somber white. On their shoulders they carry a dark, stone box. Its slate exterior drags on for at least twelve shoulders on each side.

The sound of their march is muffled by white, soft boots made out of long strips of bleached leather. These wrap up the legs of their wearers until they touch the four dozen knees of two dozen warriors carrying the base of a pyre.

The fireproof vessel is set down in the center of the circle of frozen apprentices and their drums.

Again, Auten’s breath catches; he pushes himself up to his toes and strains his neck as high as it will go to see the Chosen One unfold himself from the ceremonial pyre stone.

But the pyre stone, he realizes with a frown, is empty. Those who carried in it begin a dance with the drumming apprentices which is good and fine and super elaborate. But the sun is nearly set now; the longer they carry on sashaying around, the less time there is for the Chosen One to hop on out here and ignite the torches of remembrance.

Maybe they are building anticipation, Auten tells himself.

The jedi, of all people, will know when the final moment has come. They’re playing a game with the audience.

He laughs because it feels like he’s part of it; this wonderful game of knowing what all these other people don’t.

Soon the purple hues of the Temple’s south wall darkens to navy. Mom’s hands become cold. Auten lays her winter coat on her shoulders and presses his fingers to the warm skin on the undersides of his wrists.

The jedi have finally finished their dance. Relief threatens to jelly his knees.

Now, the Chosen One will emerge.

He doesn’t.

He fucking doesn’t.

Instead, the Grandmaster of the Order comes out surrounded by torches. He’s tiny, and he waddles more than he walks and Auten keeps getting distracted by the people around him. Master Oakej raises his arms, however, which is a cue for all of them to do the same. They bow in unison.

The Grandmaster bows back. The wind that was in Auten’s ears turns to bells.

Euphoria rises in his heart.

This is it.

The Grandmaster rises and when Auten does, he realizes that everyone in the audience rises with him, not just the chapel members.

He opens his mouth, unsure of what to say to express his indignation, only to see the Grandmaster turn around and begin a slow waddle back to the Temple doors. He didn’t even give a speech. The jedi in white fill in the space and the apprentices begin to rapidly beat their drums. The sound grows louder and people begin stomping their feet until the whole courtyard is shaking and, as if taken by that great, thrumming power, the jedi in white surge forward and heft the ceremonial pyre stone back up into their arms. They lurch back with their arms wide open and the pyre stone hangs there in space.

Floating.

Rotating.

Like the Masters’ cylinders under the Chapel’s chandeliers.

Awe sweeps through the onlookers along with a chest full of something that sends Auten staggering back. Just as quickly as it came on, it is gone—like a gust of wind that blew right through the gaps between his ribs.

It takes with it the air in his lungs; he’s left panting and grasping at his chest. People around him guffaw and cheer.

“The Force,” Mom whispers.

Auten jerks back upright in time to see the ceremonial pyre stone slow its spinning; the jedi in white come towards it and allow it to land gracefully back onto their shoulders. They turn as one body so quickly that the stone does not fall from their shoulders. And then they begin to march after the Grandmaster, back into the depths of the temple. The apprentices slink forward and playfully peek around the sides of the guards. When the Temple door shuts, they vanish into the guards’ shadows once more.

The line of sabers snaps back to its original position.

And just like that, it’s over.

The crowd goes wild.

When Auten and Mom finally get home, he helps her out of her robes and into her thin, flannel pajamas. She trembles as he holds her hands and helps her back to her chair in the living room. Her body all but collapses in front of the holoscreen.

She is too exhausted to turn it on, so Auten does for her. He leaves the remote channel-changer on the table at her side.

He enters his room and closes the door behind him. He closes his eyes like he closed the door and slams his foot into the wooden side of his desk over and over and over until the bolts holding it in place rip out of the wood, and the split that cracks up the middle of the panel snaps the whole thing in half.

He can feel blood soaking through the toe of his sock. He can feel the edges of the nail inside throbbing against broken flesh when he throws himself down onto the corner of his mattress.

His hands grip the sides of his face and pull and smash, trying to separate the skin from the muscle from the bone.

Out of the corner of his eye, he sees the blinking light of his shitty, shattered pad’s face. He lunges across the bed to grab it. His fingers shake as he keys in his code and opens the voice message from Dad’s blocked number.

For the first time in months, he holds the pad to his ear and listens.

“Baby boy,” Dad’s exhausted, hoarse voice says. “Baby boy, you know what? I did leave you. I talked to Mklara today—she’s my therapist—and I told her about you. Where you’d gone. Where you’d found people where I couldn’t follow.”

Auten’s toe throbs and tears bead in the corners of his eyes as he draws his knees up to his chest.

The pad is a lifeline.

“She told me that you’re not the first to be drawn in by Them, but honey, I know you went to the Temple today. Those people go every year. Every single year. You were too little to remember them when we went—Do you remember when we went?”

“Dad,” Auten sobs. “Dad.”

“I know they’re gonna tell you something about some Chosen One, Aut. And you’re gonna see this, but I don’t want you to go without having heard it first from someone who loves you. He’s not coming, baby. He’s just a kid. He’s just a kid like you, and he’s out fighting a war and I’m looking at him right now on the news and—he’s not coming. He’s not that important to the real jedi. Those people at the Chapel—the jedi fucking hate them, Auten.”

Auten rocks back and forth, limbs not close enough to protect himself from this hurt.

“I wish I could stop you from going,” Dad pleads, “But those people have got you good and square. So I know you’re going to go, but also know this: you aren’t alone. When your mama’s gone, you won’t be either. You’re never alone, you’ve always got me, as long as you’ll have me. Hand over heart, kisses in your hair. We’ll go to the Temple and ride the teacups—whatever you want to do. Every year. Every year. Just please come back.”

Snot's dripping all over the pad, making it too slippery to hold. There’s no need to, though. That’s the end of the message. The pad falls to the bed, clatters to the floor. He leaves it where it is to heave miserable into his knees.

They lied.

They lied.

There is no savior.

There is only the Force.

And it doesn’t care about some snotty kid on level 4999.

Dad is waiting outside the lighthouse at 15:00 with a deathstick hanging from his lips. His lighter won’t catch, it’s too windy.

Sleep threatens to take Auten against his shoulder.

Dad watches the jedi dance on his pad; some influencer recorded the whole thing with their hovering droid. It’s a much better view than the one Auten had.

Dad’s thick fingers comb through a tangle in Auten’s hair. It hurts, but not as bad as his newly-splinted toe. The thick boot on his foot is a reminder of that.

“They come down here sometimes,” Dad says.

“Who?”

“The jedi. That one they call Chosen does now and then.”

“You’ve met him?”

“He came here with Windu. They were trying to lease a boat for a training exercise. He’s not as old as they make him look on the news.”

Auten squirms closer to his father’s warmth. Dad wraps an arm around his waist to help.

“He’s older than me,” Auten mumbles.

“Yeah, maybe a couple years. Nothing special, though. All them Chapel people showed up here and started grabbing him—trying to touch him, you know. He got scared, you could see it in his eyes. Like a wild horse like this.”

He moves his hand to hold open his eyelids and lets go of them when Auten huffs a small laugh.

“What’d you do?” he asks.

“Not a damn thing,” Dad says. “Like I said, he’s still a baby, just like you are to me. Those people are protective of their kids; Windu snapped just like that. Scared the shit out of all those freaks.”

Apathy feels like laying on the seat of a fishing boat. Auten blinks with the waves rolling in.

“They think he’s gonna save everyone,” he says.

“Yeah, well. If they really wanted him to save people, they’d let him do his thing in peace.”

Auten sits up and really looks at the side of Dad’s face until Dad looks back at him.

“You think he’d talk to me?” he asks.

Dad smiles and shakes his head.

“I wouldn’t let him,” he says. “He’s already broken your heart. But you know what we could do?”

“What?”

“Just you wait and see.”

Master Kit Fisto is the size of a house. When he shakes Dad’s hand, he grins like he’s the one holding a death stick in his teeth.

Auten can’t get up too fast because of his toe, but Master Fisto gives him all the time in the world to stagger over.

“This is my son,” Dad says.

Master Fisto bows. Auten knows how to bow back. That, at least, wasn’t one of the Chapel’s lies.

“You—you fish here, Master?” Auten stammers when Master Fisto rises again to his full height.

“Fish is generous,” he says with a wink. “We’re really here to throw our shiny in the water.”

“We’re here to wh—” one of the troopers pipes up.

He doesn’t get to finish. The guys on either side of him pick him up by his arms and do the damn thing right then and there.

The troopers busts a gut over it when he bobs up cursing.

“Commander, you may do as you see fit,” Master Fisto says.

“Roger, roger,” the guy in the subaquatic helmet with the green visor says. “You’re Buoy now, my friend. Welcome to your permanent assignment.”

“You’re fuckin’ renaming me?”

Master Fisto brushes the tips of his clawed fingers against Auten’s back; when Auten looks to Dad, he waves him on and gives him a thumb’s up.

“Your father has been generous over the last two years,” Master Fisto says as they walk as slowly as Auten’s toe will allow them to.

The planks sound hollow beneath their steps.

“He says that your mother is gravely ill. Do the pretenders bring her comfort?”

“Do they—do we offend you?” Auten asks.

Master Fisto doesn’t answer for several paces.

“Anakin is quite wary of them,” he says. “Since his coming to Coruscant, he has been subject to more than his share of scrutiny by their organization, which made his integration into our culture even more challenging than it was. We explained to him then that belief systems like this are possibilities anywhere the jedi go—hope is a powerful thing. So powerful that sometimes, it overcomes reason.”

They’ve driven away their own chosen one. And Auten nearly gave everything he had to them for the chance to drive him away even further.

“They made me better,” he says. “Like, a better person. I cared for my mom more.”

“You have always had this capacity for great love. Having stood once in your shoes, I can promise you that there is no graceful way to watch a loved one die.”

Auten can’t walk anymore. There’s an iron bench with wooden slats across its seat. Its legs are bent, so when Master Fisto sits next to him, his side lifts, and Fisto’s side grates against the bolts keeping people from stealing it.

“What am I gonna do when she’s gone?” Auten hiccups. “Dad’s got—Dad’s got all these other kids. I don’t make enough for rent.”

An arm wraps around his shoulder. Master Fisto is not his father, but somehow he feels like someone’s dad, and the pressure loosens the ever-present knot hiding under Auten’s sternum. He sniffs hard and rubs at his leaking nose.

“You will find yourself in a market one day, and you will see something that reminds you so much of her that you fear you have forgotten how to breath,” Master Fisto says. “You will buy it. You will hold it. You will use it and will weep when it breaks and you again begin searching for that feeling of home.”

He pulls Auten’s fingers away from his face.

“It is a feeling you will only know when it is gone, and that is its beauty,” he says.

“Even when I don’t want it to go?” Auten asks.

“Especially when you don’t want it to go.”

He swallows and remembers that he can, so he does it again. The tip of his foamy black boot looks so bulky from between the bench slats.

His chest shakes when he breathes in and when he breathes out.

“Okay,” he says.

Master Fisto looks out at the gray-green water and says nothing. His smile has gone away. Auten picks at a line of pills in the seam of his sleeve.

“How come you guys don’t go over there and set everyone straight? They’ve got these fake lightsabers they gave us, and they told us all this shit that didn’t even happen—I think they’re just making stuff up in there,” he says, gesturing with his chin.

The chapel is not so far away that he can’t see it from here, despite the fog. The sharp edges of its two spires feel more like a threat than ever.

“Oh, well, they’re much better preachers,” Master Fisto says. “We actually gave them a primer that one of our members wrote for the children, so that they’d have a better idea of what we were trying to get at through our teachings and so on, but it seems that they’ve, er, taken things a bit too far.”

The book in the chandelier.

“You ever thought about sneaking in to steal it back?”

Master Fisto laughs so hard he has to lean forward.

“You have no idea what Mace dreams of doing in his spare time,” he says. “How is your toe?”

“Super broken.”

“Alas. Shall I carry you back to your father?”

“Yes.”

The clone troopers have procured two inner tubes by the time Master Fisto and Auten return to the lighthouse. Dad is watching them try to clamber through both to be the tallest trooper above the waterline. They’re slippery, though, and covered in algae.

The troopers don’t seem to care much. Master Fisto doesn’t either. He says that the ship they’re usually confined to tends to be dropped in water too violent to splash around in. He asks Dad about the restaurant’s oyster shell mound. Dad says that they’ve got about two hundred kilos, but he knows the other folks working around the bay have more.

“You building a seawall with all them things, Master?”

“A reef.”

“No shit?”

Master Fisto grins with all his teeth.

“You ever wanted to wreck a ship in the shallows?” he asks.

Dad raises an eyebrow.

“Is it a ship I’m paying taxes on?” he asks.

“Of course not.”

“Then sure. Why not. I’ll call ahead for you.”

Master Fisto puts his hand on his heart and bows in gratitude. He whistles for his soldiers who leap out of the water and form a line behind him. They’ve brought the inner tubes.

“Commander, take us home,” Master Fisto says.

The guy with the green visor salutes and tells everyone that they’re not going to embarrass him on the tram. Auten laughs when the ones holding the inner tubes exchange a look that says, without a doubt, they’re going to embarrass him on the tram.

He almost offers to go with them but thinks better of it. He’s ridden the tram too much lately. Dad says that he’s trying to turn into it, what with that jacket of his.

So instead, Auten waves and blames his boot for his reluctance to leave the lighthouse.