Chapter Text
Bodhi wasn't meant to survive— not really. He had survived so much already.
He'd risked it all to defect from the Empire, only to find himself jailed and tortured by those who were meant to help him. The supposed good guys.
He'd survived the first AND second firing of a super-weapon, crash landing a U-Wing, being on the wrong side of an Alliance bombing operation, and infiltrating a seriously-fortified Imperial base.
Everyone he knew had died in the process. His family. His city. His sanity. His friends.
All lost. But not him.
For as delicate as his mind had become, the quick-thinking and reflexes required to grab the thermal detonator, throw it away from him, and scurry up to safety in the cockpit seems almost an impossible feat. He should be dead.
But here he was, hiding in his newly-assigned bunk in the sweltering heat of Yavin IV. Utterly alone.
His incoherent muttering drew mostly sympathy from those around him— not that he cared— but it tended to keep the barracks near him clear when sleep wasn't required. But tonight the base was empty for a different reason.
There was a battle raging the sky; a battle that Bodhi was trying desperately to forget. He willed himself to sleep for hours and hours in the dark.
Bodhi didn't sleep much anymore. He'd always been restless, but since Scarif his dreams were filled with spirits and monsters who wreathed and prodded and tortured his subconscious. It had worn him thin, and he could feel it. Killing him. But he was never meant to survive anyway. So he endured.
He remained awake in his bunk when word came that the battle was over-- the Death Star had somehow been destroyed! He thought it would make a difference— that he would somehow be relieved of all the pain he'd been carrying.
He thought he might cry. Or scream. Instead he just sat there, in his bunk, eyes turned down toward his rough, white sheets. Just staring into nothingness.
He stayed like that for hours; his back aching and his mouth dry. He almost willed a tear, but they were all gone. All spent.
He flinched when the zooms of what little remained of the fleet woke him out of his daze. He heard yelling and cheers in the distance. Explosions. Maybe even fireworks. Every festival on Jedha had fireworks. As a kid, he had feared them. As a young man, he'd sat on a roof with his friends and watched them— their voices caring above the boom boom boom. As an imperial, he was trained to ignore them.
Bodhi had never been a good imperial. He did what he needed to survive, and in the end his friends had suffered and died because of it.
Fireworks reminded him of home.
Slowly, he crawled out of bed and toward the noise. Towards life. The red and green and gold glowed on his face as he walked in the dark. He didn't know it, but it was beautiful.
He saw them all on the landing pad. The pilots who had made it. The droids who chirped and beeped and spun in victory. The solitary soldiers who stood helpless in the dark, unable to move or feel the enormity of what they had won and lost.
A man he had never seen before rushed at him through the darkness. Bodhi flinched, bracing for impact, but the man only looked at him with wild eyes and shouted "He did it! That Skywalker kid did it!"
He pressed on. The fireworks began to slow. As he entered the interior, he noticed how empty the vast caverns seemed tonight. How much the Alliance had lost.
A crew of technicians passed by, carrying a beat-up R2 unit.
He followed them. Even if he couldn't celebrate, at least he could make himself useful. When he caught up to the rest of the crew, they stopped. Two of them just stared, mouths open. The other averted his eyes.
"N-need any help?" He asked awkwardly.
The crew remained silent for a second, but then the blue astromech beeped in the affirmative, somehow also conveying its annoyance at the delay.
That seemed to jolt the crew into action, and one nodded in the affirmative as the group silently moved toward the back of the ancient temple that served as Alliance headquarters.
Bodhi did his best to clean and repair the unit with the tools around him. A rather nervous golden protocol droid had eventually left him in peace after his worrying quickly became a argument with the astromech, who he learned was designated R2-D2.
He worked mostly alone, with the crew called off to more important work and clearly uncomfortable being around him. He wondered when he had showered last. But then he looked at R2 and decided he couldn't smell worse than the greasy, dirty, feisty droid in his care.
It was late when he'd nearly finished. R2-D2 made good company even in its flustered state, but Bodhi's artificial knee was beginning to ache.
A few minutes of silent buffing passed before R2 let out an excited beep as someone politely cleared his throat behind him. Bodhi looked back, and standing right above him was the most beautiful man Bodhi had ever seen.
"Hi, I'm Luke Skywalker."