Chapter Text
The school is called the Sundari Mandalorian School, which is much simpler than he was expecting.
Korkie stands at the entrance for a moment too long, looking up at the pale, geometric face of the building. It's built in the same aesthetic as everything else in Sundari: clean lines, white surfaces, everything geometric and organized.
He tells himself the churning in his stomach is the unfamiliar breakfast.
It isn't.
Tani had walked him through the palace's lower transit hub, navigating the pod system with the ease of someone who has done it approximately ten thousand times. Korkie had watched everything carefully—the rhythm of the crowd, the route they took, how the transit pod worked—and filed it away. He does that compulsively now. Stores details.
The trip had been quiet. Tani was not a woman who filled silence with noise, which he'd usually appreciate, but this morning it left him alone with his thoughts for too long.
He'd spent the ride cataloguing what he actually knows about Korkie's life, which is: not much.
Name, age, aunt, approximate palace layout, the fact that he enjoyed tiingilar and apparently loved his studies and is the heir to somewhere called Kalevala, which he still hasn't fully processed. There are presumably other people in this school who knew his predecessor. Children who sat beside him in class and played with him at lunch and have very specific memories about who Korkie Kryze was before he got sick and nearly died.
That is the problem.
"You may go in," Tani says from beside him.
Korkie realizes he's been standing still for thirty seconds.
"Right," he says, and goes.
The interior of the school is quieter than he expects—not empty, but contained, voices carrying without being loud, footsteps muffled by the smooth flooring. Most of the students he passes are dressed similarly to him, pale structured uniforms, neat but not stiff. He gets a few glances. One longer look from a girl with brown hair who seems to recognize him.
He looks away quickly, pretending to adjust the strap of his bag.
The classroom is easy enough to find. His schedule is on his datapad, and the school layout is almost aggressively intuitive. He's actually in the building before the first bell, which at least means he can find his seat without an audience.
The classroom is mid-sized, arranged in a gentle arc rather than flat rows, which Korkie appreciates. Easier to see everyone without turning his head. The walls are partially transparent, looking out into a curved corridor, which means he can also see people approaching.
He picks the seat that gives him the best line of sight to the door and sits down carefully, setting his bag at his feet.
Then he waits.
The other students arrive in clusters, the way children always do, pairs and small groups trailing in together, conversations already in progress. He tries to watch them without looking like he's watching them, which is its own skill.
He counts three who look at him when they enter. Two with obvious relief. One with more guarded appraisal.
Then someone sits down directly next to him.
"You look terrible," the person says cheerfully.
Korkie turns. It's a boy about his age, shorter than him, with blonde hair and bright blue eyes, wearing the same structured uniform, though his is already slightly rumpled at the collar. Korkie stares at him.
The boy stares back, apparently undisturbed by the staring.
"Hello," Korkie says carefully.
"I heard you almost died," the boy says. No particular alarm in his voice, just childlike curiosity. "Did it hurt?"
Korkie blinks. "I was mostly unconscious."
"Oh." The boy seems to consider this. "That's less interesting."
"Sorry to disappoint."
The boy grins at that, wide and unconcerned, and Korkie has to revise his threat assessment immediately. This child is going to be a problem, but probably not in the way he was worried about.
"Do you remember me?"
The question is casual enough that it doesn't feel like a test. But Korkie's stomach still tightens.
"Some things are fuzzy," he says, which he's been practicing as an all-purpose excuse. It's technically true.
The boy tilts his head. "Your aunt really made everyone worry. Even the teachers."
"She worries," Korkie agrees.
"My mother almost cried when she heard. She wants you to visit again soon." He stops and goes briefly, very visibly awkward. "Oh, right. You probably don't remember."
"It's fine," Korkie says quickly. He means it to sound casual and it mostly lands that way.
The boy recovers quickly, grateful to be let off the hook. "Right. Anyway. My name is Amis. We're friends."
"Amis," Korkie confirms. He's a little surprised at how easy, relatively speaking, that conversation was.
The instructor comes in before Amis can speak again. She is a tall woman with silver hair pinned back, carrying a datapad tucked under one arm.
"Good morning," she says, and the remaining chatter settles.
Her name, he learns from the small name placard on the edge of the desk, is Instructor Marev.
She teaches Galactic Civics, which in a normal universe would have been his least favorite subject and in this one is probably the most important thing he could possibly be learning.
He pays attention.
The lesson is about Republic governance structures, which is—okay, it's dry. He won't pretend otherwise. But there are real things to learn in the dry parts: how the Senate is organized, how planetary representation works, what the relationship between the Republic and Outer Rim territories actually is in practice.
He copies notes faster than anyone else in the room.
About twenty minutes in, Amis leans over and squints at his datapad. "Your handwriting is worse than before," he says, very quietly.
"It's the brain damage," Korkie murmurs back, not looking up.
A beat. Then Amis snorts, muffled quickly into his sleeve.
Instructor Marev glances their way. Korkie looks back down at his notes with impeccable innocence.
"Problem, Amis?" she says.
"No, Instructor," Amis says promptly.
She moves on. Korkie exhales.
At his side, Amis is visibly vibrating with suppressed laughter.
Korkie stares firmly at the desk.
This is, unexpectedly, fine.
The problem with half-days is that they end.
Which means lunch. And lunch means the part where children gather in unstructured spaces and interact freely without the social scaffolding of a lesson to follow.
He trails out of the civics classroom with the others, navigating by instinct toward where the crowd seems to be going. The refectory—which here is a bright, open space full of natural light from the dome above—is already half-full.
He's scanning for an empty table in a low-traffic corner when Amis appears at his elbow again like a force of nature.
"Come on," Amis says. "Lagos and Soniee are already over there."
Two more names. Korkie files them immediately.
He follows.
Lagos and Soniee are sitting at a round table near the far wall. Soniee is a girl with brown hair and green eyes, the same one who'd given him that guarded look in the hallway. Lagos is blonde, blue-eyed, softer-featured, and greets him with the kind of relieved smile that makes his chest ache slightly for reasons he doesn't want to examine.
"Korkie," Lagos says, and the warmth in it is unmistakable. "You look so much better than last time."
"When did you see me last time?" he asks, then immediately wishes he hadn't, because what if she visited him during the early days and he just doesn't remember—
"Marev let us send a message to the palace," Soniee says, flat and efficient. "Amis wanted to visit but we told him you were too sick."
"I absolutely wanted to visit," Amis confirms, sitting down without ceremony. "For sympathy purposes. But Soniee said it was quote-unquote tactless."
"I said tone-deaf," Soniee says.
"Same thing."
"It's not!"
Korkie sits down.
For a moment, he just absorbs the texture of them. The rhythm of the conversation, the comfortable familiarity, the way they interact without thinking about it. These are children who have spent years together, whose friendships have the worn ease of habits.
He is not one of them. Not really.
But Korkie was.
And Korkie's face is his face, and Korkie's voice is his voice, and apparently Korkie's friends are people who sent messages to the palace and argued about what counted as tactless. So.
He will work with that.
"What did I miss?" he asks.
Three faces turn toward him, and then they talk.
It's mostly school things. A project Soniee apparently carried by herself because Amis kept getting distracted. A new elective on starship theory that Lagos had joined. Something involving a teacher named Instructor Parsin that causes all three of them to make identically disgusted faces, which Korkie files away as important social context without knowing any of the details.
He listens more than he talks. That's fine. That's acceptable. He's just back from near-death; he can get away with being quieter than usual.
But he notices Soniee watching him.
Not obviously. She's not staring. She's more careful than that. But every few minutes, her attention shifts back to him in a way that feels deliberate rather than casual, like she is cataloguing something without deciding yet what to do about it.
He eats his lunch—some kind of grain bowl with roasted vegetables and a sauce he doesn't recognize but enjoys immediately—and pretends not to notice.
"How long until you're back full days?" Lagos asks.
"A few weeks," he says. "Whenever the doctors clear me."
Amis leans forward on his elbows. "The droids or the actual ones?"
Korkie pauses. "...Both, I think."
"Hm." Amis seems satisfied with that. He leans back again, stealing a piece of something from Soniee's tray without looking at her. She moves it out of reach without looking at him. The whole exchange happens like a reflex.
Korkie watches it happen and feels, suddenly and unexpectedly, something very specific in his chest.
He wants this.
Not just the information, not just the cover it provides. He actually wants it. The ease of it, the thoughtlessness, the way it exists without being constructed. The kind of thing that only exists after years of someone being there.
He looks down at his bowl.
Years, he thinks. Which means I have to make them.
That's okay. He knows how to be patient.
"You should come to the viewing platform after recovery," Lagos is saying now, speaking to him directly. "There's a market that runs on the weekends and they have the best fried flatbreads—"
"I know a good market," Korkie says before he can stop himself, thinking of the one Bo-Katan had taken him to. "In the lower city."
Lagos blinks. "You've been to the lower city?"
Amis immediately perks up. Soniee goes very still.
"My aunt took me," he says, because that's true and it's a clean explanation. "Bo-Katan."
"Bo-Katan Kryze?" Amis says, with the specific tone of someone repeating something they've heard adults say. "My father says she's trouble."
Korkie's brain catches up slowly. Trouble. Right. That tracks with the arguments, at least, and the way Satine's ministers go tense whenever Bo-Katan walks into a room.
"She's my aunt," he says finally.
"Well, yeah," Amis allows. "But she's also kind of—you know."
"She showed me a market," Korkie says. "She bought me food."
"Trouble can buy you food," Amis says thoughtfully.
"Amis," Soniee says.
"I'm just saying."
"Stop saying," Soniee says.
Amis closes his mouth.
Korkie exhales slowly.
He glances around the table. Lagos is looking at him with a slightly worried expression, the kind that suggests she isn't sure if he's upset and is preemptively sorry in case he is. Soniee is watching him again, more openly now, and her expression is harder to read.
"Well," Amis says, after a beat. "My mother says she's complicated. Whatever that means."
"My mother says the sisters argue because Lady Kryze can't decide what she believes in," Soniee says. Flat. Not unkind, but not warm either.
Korkie thinks of the argument through the cracked door. The specific kind of tired in Satine's posture after Bo-Katan left, and the rougher, rawer thing underneath Bo-Katan's certainty.
"I think they both believe in Mandalore," he says slowly. "They just don't agree on what that means."
Silence.
He looks up.
Lagos is looking at him with a slightly open expression. Even Soniee's eyes have shifted slightly from watchful to something more attentive.
"That's... very diplomatic," Amis says.
"My aunt is a diplomat," Korkie says, and the words feel more natural than he expects. Not performing. Just true.
After a beat, Lagos smiles.
Soniee finds him in the hallway afterward, while Amis is theoretically retrieving his forgotten bag from the classroom and actually probably talking to someone about the starship elective.
Lagos has already left for home. They'd said their goodbyes by the doors and she'd hugged him briefly and without warning, the way small children do, and Korkie had gone very still and hadn't known what to do with his arms for a second before patting her back carefully.
He's still not sure if he'd gotten that right.
Soniee stops beside him, falling into step for a moment before speaking.
"You're different," she says.
No preamble. Just the statement, clean and direct, like she's been holding it all lunch and has decided she's waited long enough.
Korkie doesn't panic.
He processes it first—takes a breath, lets the words sit, considers the angle and what she actually means and how much she actually knows—before he says anything.
"I was sick," he says.
"I know," Soniee says. "I don't mean—I'm not saying it like it's a bad thing. Just that you are."
He looks at her sideways. She's walking with her hands clasped behind her back, posture straight, green eyes forward. She does not look like a child about to accuse him of being a supernatural body snatcher, which is something.
"I don't remember everything," he says. Careful. The usual defense. "It's coming back slowly. But not all of it."
Soniee nods once, like she already expected that.
"You're quieter," she says. "And you were watching everything today like you were trying to memorize it."
He really needs to stop doing that so visibly.
"I missed a lot," he says.
"And you said that thing. About Duchess Satine and Bo-Katan."
Korkie waits.
"Before you didn't really—" She hesitates, the first crack in her directness. "I mean, we knew you had an aunt. But you didn't really talk about her at all, and you never would have thought about her side against the Duchess."
He looks at her.
"You don't sound like you're complaining," he says.
A very faint thing happens to the corner of her mouth. Not quite a smile, but adjacent. "I'm not," she says.
They walk for a moment in silence.
"I won't tell anyone," she says finally.
Korkie goes still.
"Tell anyone what?" he says carefully.
Soniee shrugs, fractionally. "That you're different. Amis doesn't care if you change, you know. And Lagos won't notice unless it hurts her feelings, and even then she'll feel bad about noticing. But some people would care. The kind of people who'd go to Instructor Marev about it, or your aunt."
He keeps walking. His legs feel faintly unsteady and he's not sure it's entirely physical.
"Why?" he asks.
She's quiet for a moment.
"Because you're still you," she says. "Just... different. And different isn't bad."
Korkie processes that.
He doesn't know what Soniee knows, or suspects, or has simply decided to treat as true because it's kinder than the alternative. He doesn't know if she's a perceptive child or if the change was more visible than he thought, or if she's simply the kind of person who notices things and chooses thoughtfully what to do about them.
What he does know is that she is not asking him to explain himself.
She is offering him something much rarer: the right to simply continue.
"Thank you," he says, and means it in a way that goes past the words.
Soniee looks at him directly. For a moment her expression is softer than her voice usually suggests.
"You're still Korkie," she says, like it's a conclusion she's arrived at. "That's what matters."
He lets that land.
Quietly, unexpectedly, it does.
The afternoons, after the half-days, belong to the palace.
Satine is usually in meetings. Bo-Katan is unpredictably present or absent, appearing at meals and then disappearing for stretches of time that no one explains. Tani is there, reliable and steady, but she isn't the kind of company that fills a room.
Korkie spends the post-school hours doing several things at once.
He reads. Obsessively. The datapad lives in his pocket now, and he has a rotation of topics: Mandalorian history, Republic governance, galactic geography, biographical entries on anyone whose name he recognizes from his fragments of Star Wars knowledge. He reads about the Jedi more carefully now, less afraid of what he'll find and more focused on what is actually useful.
He practices Mando'a.
This is partly because of Bo-Katan, who has been teaching him things in offhand moments that he suspects she doesn't entirely realize she's doing. A word here, a phrase there. She teaches the way someone does when language is not a lesson but a reflex, and he absorbs it the same way, listening for the texture of it rather than forcing it through the mechanics of memorization.
Su cuy'gar. Hello. Literally I'm still alive, which he finds darkly funny given the circumstances.
Vor'e. Thank you.
Ner ad'ika. My little one. Satine says it sometimes when she's tired and not paying attention to herself.
He writes them down. He practices them under his breath when the hallways are empty.
He also, quietly and without any particular announcement, starts paying attention to the thing that has been happening to him.
It started as a suspicion, half-formed and tentative. The way tension moved through a room toward him. The way he'd known Satine was afraid before her face told him. The way the arguments between sisters had left him feeling hollowed out and drained afterward, like the emotion in the air had passed through him instead of around him.
He had pushed it aside, because in his universe, feeling other people's emotions wasn't a real thing, and admitting to it felt like the first step toward something he wasn't ready to name.
But he's in Star Wars.
And in Star Wars, things like that have a name.
The Force.
He is deeply, profoundly unwilling to say this out loud. He turns the thought over privately, testing its edges in the way he does before he'll let himself believe something.
Evidence for: the emotional resonance thing has been consistent since he woke up. Growing stronger, if he's honest, becoming more precise. He can feel anxiety before he can see it. He can feel when a room is charged. Earlier today, at lunch, when Lagos had smiled at him, something warm had moved through the air and against his skin and he'd noticed it before his brain had even processed her expression.
Evidence against: he might simply be getting better at reading people. He was not an emotionally illiterate person before this. He is operating on heightened alert in a completely unfamiliar environment, which tends to sharpen perception.
Counter-argument: he had felt these things through walls. Through doors. Across rooms.
He pulls his blanket up to his chin and stares at the ceiling.
"This is fine," he says quietly.
The ceiling says nothing.
"I don't know what I'm supposed to do with this," he says.
The ceiling remains uninformative.
The thing is, he knows what Force-sensitivity can mean in this universe. He has pieces of it—not the full picture, not the depth, but enough to know the shape of it.
The Jedi find Force-sensitive children. They train them. They take them. He learned that from the wiki page.
And in the future, the future he's living ahead of, all of those trained Jedi die. There's a reason Yoda was in a swamp in the middle of nowhere.
He does not want to go to a place that is eventually going to be destroyed. He does not want to be trained into something that ends in massacre. He does not want to leave the only family he has, thin and new as it is, to go live in a temple on a planet full of politicians, even if that temple has answers.
But.
He also cannot just ignore what is happening to him.
He rolls over, pressing his face into the pillow.
Because the thing about the Force—what he does know, what he has absorbed from three movies and fragments of pop culture—is that ignoring it doesn't make it go away. That's not how it works. The people who try to ignore it usually end up in worse situations than the people who learned to work with it.
And he is someone who, fundamentally, does not like being in a situation he doesn't understand.
He lies there for a while, thinking.
The option he keeps coming back to is still the Jedi Temple. Not to join, not to be taken anywhere, just to be examined. To have someone who knows what the Force is look at him and tell him what is happening. That seems achievable without giving up everything else.
But Coruscant is still months away, maybe. Something Satine had implied without stating directly.
So until then.
He turns the thought over slowly.
Until then, he can keep learning. He can keep paying attention. He can figure out what it is that he feels, document it the way he documents everything else, and accumulate enough data that when someone does look at him, he can give them something concrete to work with.
He is not helpless. He is just uninformed.
He can fix uninformed.
Slowly, some of the tension in his chest eases.
From the other side of the palace, muffled and faint but audible, comes the distant sound of Satine and Bo-Katan's voices. Not raised into argument tonight—something else, lower and less combative. He can't make out words, only rhythm.
The vibration of it reaches him like a distant tide, familiar now in the way all recurring things eventually become familiar.
He closes his eyes.
He is Korkie Kryze. He is nine years old and extremely dead in one universe and extremely alive in another. He has a cool aunt with armor and a diplomatic aunt who smooths his hair and three classmates who are, cautiously, becoming real to him. He may or may not be able to feel things through walls.
Things could be worse.
He decides, firmly and with no small amount of effort, to sleep.
Two weeks pass.
He gets stronger, in increments. His legs stop shaking. His hands do what he asks of them. He can walk at a normal speed without a second thought now, which is a relief so profound he hadn't realized how much he'd been rationing it.
School becomes, if not exactly natural, at least navigable.
Amis remains a force of chaotic good. He talks constantly and means well, and once Korkie stops bracing for the moment he says something that goes too deep, it becomes genuinely enjoyable. Amis has opinions about everything—about the school canteen food, about starship designs, about the political situation in a way that he clearly absorbed uncritically from his parents and has not examined further. He is good company.
Lagos he likes quietly and instinctively. She notices people. Not the way Soniee notices things, with that clinical precision, but in a softer way—she notices when someone's expression changes, remembers what people said weeks ago, brings small things to people's attention in ways that make them feel seen. She is, he thinks, exactly the kind of person who should be protected from the future.
He doesn't like thinking that.
He thinks it anyway, more and more often.
Soniee watches him and says nothing, and in the saying nothing proves herself. He trusts her more than he expected to.
One day three weeks after his first day back, he finds her in the library working on a history project and sits down across from her without being invited.
She looks up. Looks back down at her work. Says nothing.
He pulls out his datapad and keeps reading. The article is about the Mand'alor, the historical singular ruler of Mandalore, and how the title was disputed and ultimately disused in the current political framework.
After about ten minutes, Soniee says, "What are you reading?"
"Political history," he says.
A pause. "For what class?"
"None of them."
She looks up again. He doesn't look away.
"You read things that aren't assigned," she says. It isn't quite a question.
"I like knowing things," he says.
She watches him for a moment. Then she slides her datapad across the table. "Then look at this. I've been trying to get the trade blockade section to make sense but it's gibberish."
He looks at her. Then he looks at the datapad.
He picks it up.
"Here," he says, after a moment, pointing. "They're referencing two different things but calling them by the same name. You need to differentiate them."
Soniee looks at the screen. Her expression shifts fractionally—surprise, then something more careful and considering.
"You're good at this," she says.
"It makes sense to me," he says. Which is true, because he's an adult and this is elementary-level work.
Soniee nods once and pulls the datapad back. She works for a minute, adjusting the entry, and then stops.
"Why do you want to go to Coruscant?" she asks.
He goes still.
"I heard you mention it to Amis," she says, not apologetically. "You said you were hoping your aunt would take you."
"I want to see the Jedi Temple," he says. The same answer he'd given Satine.
Soniee is quiet for a moment. "Why?"
He considers the honest answer and all its problems. He considers the deflection he usually reaches for. He considers Soniee, who has been given a version of the truth before and handled it better than most adults would.
"I think something happened to me," he says finally, low. "When I was sick. And I think the Jedi might be able to help me understand what."
Soniee doesn't react with alarm. She sits with the information for a moment, like she's weighing it.
"What kind of something?"
He hesitates. "I can feel things I shouldn't be able to feel," he says. "From other people. Through walls."
A long pause.
He waits for alarm or disbelief. He gets neither.
"Like emotions?" Soniee says.
He blinks. "Yes. Exactly like emotions."
She is quiet for a moment, expression unreadable in the way it gets when she is thinking hard.
"My mother's cousin can do something like that," she says finally. "She didn't know what it was for a long time."
Korkie stares at her. "Is she—"
"She never tested for it. She didn't want—" Soniee stops, and for the first time there is something personal in her face, something guarded and briefly visible. "She had reasons."
He lets that sit.
"I have reasons too," he says quietly.
Soniee looks at him directly. "But you still want to go."
"I want to know what it is," he says. "I want to understand it. I don't want to—I'm not asking them to take me anywhere."
Soniee nods. It's not agreement, exactly. More acknowledgment.
"That's probably smart," she says. "Going somewhere with some knowledge rather than none."
He exhales slowly. "Yeah."
She picks up her stylus again and turns back to her project. The library is quiet. Through the transparent wall of the room he can see the corridor outside, students passing in ones and twos.
After a moment, quietly, she says: "I won't tell anyone this either."
He looks at her. She doesn't look up from her work.
"You keep doing that," he says.
"You keep giving me things to not tell people," she says.
He laughs before he can stop it. It comes out surprised, shorter than he means, but real.
Soniee's mouth moves slightly. Not quite a smile.
He looks back at his datapad.
Outside, the light through the dome is starting to take on the different quality it gets late in the afternoon, something that isn't quite sunset but gestures toward it. He can feel the school around him, the low hum of it, many minds and moods in one building, all of them generating something that brushes against him in uneven rhythms.
He has learned to let it wash past, mostly.
Mostly.
"Thank you," he says. Meaning it, again, in the way that goes deeper than the words.
Soniee nods, and says nothing more, and he thinks that maybe that is exactly what friends are.