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There’s something significant about this day.
Bodhi knows it. He can feel it. There’s a pressure, behind his eyes, and his stomach aches, like it’s curling around a stone, but he can’t get at it. He tries. Force knows he does. Yet it dances away from him, leaving in its wake a residue of longing and guilt.
It was there, with him, in the fresher, and when he reported for duty, and when he launched. It was there with him out on the perimeter, lurking in the space between his ship and its nearest counterpart. An itch. Persistent, unreachable.
It happens often like this.
He levers himself up, grips the upper edge of the cockpit’s wall, helmet tucked under his arm. His R2 unit chirps at him. He turns and smiles back at her (he doesn’t know why he thinks of her as a “her.” Everyone else seems to think their droids are male).
“I know. Me too.”
She lets out a long, high note that has the cadence of a sigh. His smile broadens. He drops to the floor of the hangar bay.
There’s sweat along his hairline and on the back of his neck, and his hair clings to his skin. The fabric of his flight suit scratches against the backs of his knees and on the insides of his elbows. His patrol was long. But he doesn’t mind; he relishes it. Every moment spent in the cockpit, at the controls, in control, able to fly, truly -- not solely as a tool or a cog, but as an autonomous being, expected to call and rely upon skill, and in service of something good and decent -- feels like a gift. It’s what he’d dreamed about, when he was young.
He thinks. He thinks it’s what he’d dreamed about. He’s fairly sure. There was that speeder...
Dreams slip and slide around. Everything’s been slipping and sliding around, since Bor Gullet.
He makes his way across the deck. Home One hums beneath his feet. Its artificial atmosphere envelopes him, stale, but warm and comfortable. He’s off-duty, now, for a good handful of hours, along with most of his squadron, and he’s thinking about that pressure, and that ache. He’s thinking about the things that he forgets, as much as one can, given that they’re forgotten.
A member of his squadron nods and sort of smiles and moves closer to him. He’s had a few drinks with her, a few times. With all of them. It was awkward, at first, but there’s been...time, now, since Jedha and Eadu and Scarif (he has trouble remembering just how much time), and he’s on pretty good terms with them all.
“That was a drag, huh?” Lev says.
He shrugs. It wasn’t, to him. “Um...yeah, I guess.”
“Sometimes I wish we’d find some Imps, just to make things more interesting.”
He’s sort of glad they haven’t in a while, despite his aspirations.
“Hey, uh…” Her head dips. “A bunch of us are gonna be playing horansi later. You in?”
He looks at her. He is in, of course, because he’s always up for a game (and oh goodness, has that gotten him in some bantha fodder), but something suddenly clicks in his head, and he feels his pulse double. His hands flex and unflex.
“Sure.” Flex, unflex. “Yeah, sure. Definitely.” He’s not even interested in her. He has no idea why his anxiety is spiking. The stone turns.
He feels it, whatever it is. He feels it in the way that he feels every episode, every moment that cascades into the churning void that spins at the edge of his conscious thought. The heaviness, the weight that shouts to him that a part of him has been stolen, and that he must yank it back. But so many times, he can’t. In those moments, he wishes for the clarity of Cassian, Jyn, Chirrut or Baze, whose words and actions somehow anchor him. Or for Galen, whom he can’t forget.
What is today?
There are so many things that he can’t remember, and so many things that his mind can’t wrap around.
He’d like to find one of them. Their shifts don’t line up, most days. He wonders if this is one of the days they do.
Lev nods again. “Wedge’s quarters.” Her fingers briefly wrap around his elbow. “See you,” she says, and then moves away. It occurs to him that he should probably talk to her, lest she go on getting the wrong idea. His anxiety spikes again. He closes his eyes. It’s only for a second, but it’s long enough for everything to shift.
Past and present are such fluid things. He would never have thought so, before he was introduced to the Partisans, but they are. They flow together. They overlap. Most of the time, still (or more of the time, these days), he is where he is, and only where he is, and thinking only regular, grounded person thoughts. But there will be a scent, teasing at a fractured memory of Jedha City’s market; or a sound, like the ululations from the temple; or a texture, like fine, cold sand; or some small, seemingly insignificant thing that makes his heart beat faster. And he will then be tumbling, careening, and set adrift.
He places his credits on a table. They are the same credits he placed on a table in a tavern years ago. His fists wrap around a pair of sticks, pull back, and send him flying, and it is the same flight he took on his first round of practicals, back when his discomfort with and resentment of the Empire was a small bud that needed tending, and he’d thought joining up would help him take care of his mother.
His mother.
He hears his breaths. His strides lengthen, but he doesn’t know where he’s going. There’s a roar in his head, and there are images, so many, and they’re coming so fast, and he is where he is, but he’s also back, in that chair, in that dungeon, and the air itself is alive and coiling around him, and a great mass is moving and moaning and his flesh is slick with its backwash, with all of the matter and agony that it leaves behind. He is in a corridor on the Alliance’s mobile headquarters. He is being roughed into a cell. The pressure in his head is opening up, and a sliver of memory is seeping through.
He collapses onto a ledge in an alcove. He leans forward, elbows on his thighs.
It’s her birthday. It’s his mother’s birthday.