Chapter Text
Baze Malbus grew up on the stories, the romances, the fairy tales of people who had found their destiny in each other’s arms. He loved to listen to his mother tell them to him, just a whisper in the darkness as she rocked him to sleep at night, her voice a tender lullaby, her words almost lost to the sound of the city outside.
“Your grandmama found her soulmate when she was fifteen,” she’d say, and Baze would watch the way the firelight moved across her face, painting her eyes and lips with gold. “She was born with a name on her wrist all written in Mando’a, and when a boy with that name took up working on her daddy’s boat, she didn’t even know it. For years and years he worked and lived with them, and she had no idea that it was his name written on her in this language she couldn’t understand.”
“How did she find out?” he would ask, right on cue, because he loved to hear her tell the story no matter how many times he’d heard it before. “How did she finally realize that they were soulmates?”
“Well,” she’d start, with the relish of a storyteller. “One day, late in the summer of the year she turned sixteen, she fell from the prow of her father’s boat. Right into the ocean, she went, and this boy, Susek Anor Krek, he jumped right in after her, no hesitation at all. He grabbed her and swam her back to the boat, laid her out on the deck and got all the salt water out of her lungs, just about saved her life. And when she opened her eyes she saw it. Her name on his arm, written in the Clarimon she’d learned as a child. That’s how she knew they were soulmates.”
“Have you found your soulmate, mama?” he would ask her, even though he already knew the answer. His mother had never hidden it from him, the fact that his father was a soldier who had taken her as prisoner, the fact that in all her life she had never been in love. But the question always made her chuckle, made the joy inside her spark bright as she pushed the dark, curling hair out of her eyes.
“No, darling,” she would say, her voice gone soft, gone honey-sweet. “But do you know what?”
“What?”
“I found you.” And she would lean down and kiss him over and over again until he giggled with it, her skin warm against his, the feel of her smile so solid in his memories that it lasted long after she had ceased to exist. “Now go to sleep, bao bao . We have a lot of work to do in the morning and you’re going to need all your strength.”
For a while, that was enough. For a while, Baze didn’t question why he had no name on the tender inside of his wrist, no word under his skin gone soft-edged with age. For a while he didn’t question why all the other children in the village spent their time comparing letters and languages, trying to teach themselves to read the name of their soulmate while Baze was left with nothing but a handful of scars. His mother would kiss his wrist sometimes, tell him he was perfect, tell him the Force had made him just exactly how he needed to be, and for a while, that was enough.
He was seven years old when he finally asked her, when the sting of differentness and isolation had finally begun to hurt. “Mama,” he’d said, while she was standing at the stove making supper. He was clutching his arm, the memory of the other boys’ laughter still fresh and prickly in his memory, a pain he was only just beginning to understand. “Mama, why don’t I have a soulmate?”
His mother paused, sighed, set down her ladle, and when she turned toward him she looked as though she’d been wondering how to answer this question for a very long time. “Baze…”
“All the other kids do. The boys that I play with, and the girls, and the elders. It’s just me that hasn’t got one, and I don’t know—” He stopped, swallowed hard around the achiness that had suddenly lodged in his throat, a question he’d never dared to ask before poised on the tip of his tongue. “Am I not good enough?” he whispered, and he started to cry very quietly, his mouth tight with pain. “Mama, does the Force not want me to fall in love?”
“No,” she said, kneeling down, white apron on the packed earth floor. “No, no, Baze, that’s not it at all. You’re just different. Everybody’s different.”
“Then why—”
“Look at me.” She took his face in her hands and wiped away the water that gathered under his eyes, pressed her thumbs against his cheeks and held him gently, let him cry into her calloused palms. “Everybody in the galaxy is exactly the way they’re meant to be, Baze, perfect in every single way. Do you think the stars that put you together made a mistake?”
“Sometimes,” Baze sniffled, and when he looked up his mother was smiling and there was firelight flickering over the tears in her eyes.
“Baze Malbus,” she said, and she picked him up gently, his head on her shoulder, his breath hitching against her breast. “Baze Malbus, you are the most wonderful, beautiful thing the Force has ever made. Nothing about you is a mistake.”
“I just,” he started, and the next word was lost in a sob, his face buried in her hair. “I don’t understand! Why wouldn’t the stars build me to be loved?”
“Do you know what that is?” she asked, pointing out the window, and Baze looked up, looked at the way the red-gray orb of their planet had gone blurry with tears.
“NaJedha,” he answered, voice catching on the last syllable. His mother took a few steps forward, pointed to a different spot of light.
“And that one?”
“Rakada Prime.”
“And that big river of stars just behind it? What’s that?”
“The Namadii Corridor.”
“Baze, darling,” she murmured, “don’t you see how big the galaxy is? it's big and fragile, and mysterious, and if everyone met their soulmate on the first try there wouldn’t be enough love to get through all of it. Everyone would just find their one person and settle down and never bother looking at nobody else again, and that’s just not how it’s meant to be. We need to love lots of people at lots of times for lots of reasons, and if you never find your soulmate, well, you’re still going to be okay.”
“Is that why I don’t have a name?” Baze asked, clinging to her, studying the sea of planets he would never visit all spread out across the sky like spilt wine. “So that I can love lots of people instead of just one?”
His mother laughed and kissed him, leaned him up against her hip. “Yes, bao bao, I think that’s why. And do you know what?”
“What?”
She turned to look at him, her face lighted by NaJedha on one side and the firelight on the other, and forever after Baze would remember her like that, beautiful, ethereal—something that he never quite knew how to name. “When two people are meant to be together,” she said, and she leaned her forehead against his, her skin gone to shades of burgundy and bronze. “Really meant to be together, forever and ever and ever, the Force always manages to find a way.”
Whatever else happened in his lifetime, whatever great griefs and triumphs moved through him, some part of Baze would never stop believing that.
The Force would find a way.