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Their first few weeks with Greem are some of the most stressful of Aava’s life.
They get her settled in one of Zero’s old bounty hunting safehouses, a desert bunker on a dusty, remote planet called Seg 4 that neither the Empire nor the Rebellion seem to have an interest in. Synox is reported missing in action after he failed to return to the Bluebird weeks ago, so he’s staying in the bunker, too. Aava is astounded by how close Sy and Greem have grown, and how quickly, as though parenthood is baked right into Synox’s genes.
(Aava has seen how good Bacta is with Tamlin, too, as loathe as she is to admit it. So maybe there is something to be said for the parental instincts of clones.)
Aava and Zero take on as many solo missions as they can, slipping away to Seg 4 whenever they get the chance. It’s risky, of course—it would be smarter for both of them to stay away, to give the Empire even less of a chance of tracking down their secret child.
But there are rare nights when the four of them—Aava, Zero, Synox and Greem—can just relax together in the bunker, teaching Greem a children’s version of sabacc or rehydrating the ice cream packs that Aava squirreled away from an Empire cafeteria. And those nights are worth the risk.
She knows this life isn’t sustainable. The bunker won’t be secure forever, and it’s no place to raise a child. Really, Aava should be trying to find Greem a permanent home, somewhere she’ll be truly safe and truly cared for.
But it’s been a long time since Aava has felt the comfortable warmth of family, and she isn’t ready to give it up yet.
So she doesn’t shut Zero down immediately the first time he suggests bringing Blue into the fold of their new, strange family.
They’re sitting at the bunker’s single table when he brings it up, sipping terrible caf in the sleepy hours of the evening.
“We need him,” Zero says, stirring at his caf with a straw. “We need someone that the Empire trusts. You, me, Synox—we’re expendable. Blue has actual power to protect Greem—to protect us—if the Empire comes knocking.”
Aava sighs, setting down her cup. She looks across the narrow room to the bunk where Synox was putting Greem to bed. He’s fallen asleep beside her, his arm curled around her shoulders and her head pressed against his side, their chests rising and falling in gentle sync.
“And how do we convince him to protect us?” Aava asks. She runs a finger around the rim of her cup, tries to imagine these peaceful moments interrupted by Blue’s grating voice. She scowls. “How do we know he wouldn’t turn us all in the second he knows the truth?”
Zero shrugs non-committally. “Would you believe that he owes me a lot of favours?”
“I’d believe that he owes them. Not that he’d follow through on them.”
Zero shrugs again. “For me, he will.” Against all odds, Aava does believe that. “And he isn’t as loyal to the Empire as you think.”
Aava snorts. “Sure, because he’s only loyal to himself.”
“But isn’t that enough?” Zero says. “If he thinks that this kid is an asset to him, he won’t want to share that with the Empire.”
Aava’s gaze darkens, her hands tightening around the cup. “Greem is not an asset for Blue to use.”
“I know!” Zero says, lifting his hands defensively. “But we can let him think that to keep him on our side, right?”
It doesn’t sit well with Aava, but she also knows that Zero is right. The easiest way for them to avoid the Empire will be to continue playing by their rules, and to do that, they’ll need Blue. They can only keep sneaking around under his nose for so long.
“Fine,” Aava says, pushing her half empty cup away from herself. She’s done with caf for tonight. “I hope you know what you’re doing.”
“I trust Blue,” Zero says, painfully sincere.
“I don’t understand how you can.”
“Honestly? I don’t understand, either. I just know.”
That shouldn’t make Aava feel better, but for some reason, it does.
Aava keeps Blue away from Greem for as long as she can. He knows about her now, and he’s helping Aava and Synox and Zero stay under the radar with her, but he doesn’t actually meet her until a few months after Zero lets Blue in on their secret.
If it were up to Aava, Blue and Greem would never meet. She doesn’t care what Zero says—no matter how much Blue is helping them from the inside, she doesn’t trust him not to show up with a full guard in tow, ready to take Greem straight to the Emperor.
Besides, even if he shows up all alone, he’s a terrible influence. Aava doesn’t want Greem to grow up with even an ounce of his personality.
Unfortunately, Zero is persistent, and he’s the only person that Aava is bad at saying no to.
“He wants to meet her,” Zero insists, on another of those rare nights when all three of them are in the bunker with Greem.
These moments do come a little more frequently now that Blue can help them keep the Empire’s prying eyes away from the hideout, but it’s still a luxury they can’t afford as often as they’d like. Aava managed to bring some actual fresh produce and meat with her this time, and Synox is in the tiny bunker kitchen now, showing Greem how to safely wield a knife. Aava and Zero are perched at the table again, swiping through some encrypted intelligence that Blue acquired for them, double-checking that their hideout hasn’t come up on any secure channels.
“Come on,” Zero needles when Aava stays silent, staring impassively down at her datapad. “Blue’s risking his neck to keep her safe and he’s never even seen her.”
“Does he want to meet her or do you want him to meet her?” Aava asks, looking up from her datapad to raise an eyebrow at him. Blue has never struck her as a fan of kids.
“A little of both?” Zero admits, shrugging apologetically. “Please, Aava. Let him come here. I want them to meet.”
When Aava remains frosty, he adds, “And I miss him, okay? I’m spending a lot of time here with you guys, and I love it, but I want Blue here, too.”
That’s what finally sways her. She’ll never understand what Zero sees in Blue, but for better or for worse, they’re two halves of a whole, and they’re not used to being apart. Zero deserves to share this new part of his life with his partner.
“Fine,” Aava says eventually. “One meeting. If Sy agrees. And then we’ll see.”
Aava expects to get a hard no from Synox. He didn’t care for or trust Blue even when the chip in his head was forcing him to be loyal, and he certainly doesn’t trust him now. But to her surprise, he agrees almost as soon as Aava brings it up.
“I won’t believe he’s on our side until I see it with my own eyes,” Synox says, his expression hard and unreadable. “And I want him to see her. I want him to know exactly who he’s betraying if he ever goes back on his word.”
Aava can’t argue with that.
There’s been a cold distance between her and Synox ever since she destroyed the chip in his head, but she can’t blame him. He spent five years serving the Empire against his will, not just a cog in the machine but a slave to it, and Aava is, for better or for worse, a part of that machine. The first time that Aava and Zero left Synox and Greem alone in the bunker, Aava half expected them to be gone by the time she came back, expected Synox to have taken the kid and run.
(She wouldn’t have blamed him. Honestly, a tiny part of her wishes he had run. She and Zero don’t deserve to keep coming back here, to keep playing at domestic family life when they’re still doling out the Empire’s twisted justice as their day jobs.)
But Synox stayed, and Aava can only assume it’s because Synox thinks that Greem is safer here than wherever he would take her. Where would he take her, anyways? It’s not like a clone who’s spent his whole life serving the Republic and then the Empire has any outside contacts to turn to.
So they’ve continued to orbit around each other, each taking care of Greem as best they can, talking as little about the future—and about the past—as possible. And it hurts—Aava always liked Sy, always thought they got along well, always felt like there was more to him than what he let the world see.
And of course, now, she knows that there was so much of him that was locked away behind a chip in his brain. And now that that part of him is free, she wants to get to know him for real, truly and fully. But she doesn’t even know where to begin.
So when he says that he wants Blue to meet Greem, she doesn’t fight him on it. If nothing else, she trusts him to always, always have Greem’s best interests at heart.
The air in the bunker is thick with tension when Blue steps inside.
Zero follows him and stays in the doorway, as though he’s keeping Blue from bolting back outside. Aava raises an eyebrow at Zero, who gives a quick nod and an electronic thumbs up on his faceplate—their signal that they haven’t been followed, that Blue came alone.
Aava relaxes minutely.
Blue sweeps inside with his usual flair, baby blue cloak fanning out behind him. He’s gotten used to the cane in the past few months, and although his limp is still very pronounced, he moves a lot less like a wobbly giraffe now. He leans into the cane with purpose, and actually manages to look somewhat refined as he tosses his cloak onto the back of a kitchen chair and surveys the room with a pinched expression.
“You quote unquote rescued a child only to have her live in squalor?” he asks, sniffing.
Aava is tempted to send Blue right back out the door, and now she’s thinking that Zero stayed in the doorway to prevent Aava from tossing Blue outside.
“If you don’t like the accommodations, maybe you should find us something better, oh great Minister,” Aava says, rolling her eyes.
“Hello to you, too, Aava,” Blue replies. He pulls out the same chair he tossed his cloak onto and sits down heavily, stretching his legs out in front of him and rubbing at one knee absently. “And hello to you, mystery child.”
He’s looking at Greem, who’s sitting on the other side of the table, blinking up at him with her shining eyes. Aava and Synox are both standing a few feet behind her, leaning back against the bunker wall, flanking her like bodyguards.
The scene almost reminds Aava of a meeting between mafia bosses, each seated across a table with their guards behind them, and she has to swallow down the laugh that threatens to bubble up in her throat.
This is serious.
Greem cocks her head, regarding Blue curiously. And then she opens her mouth, and asks, “Why do you have a stick?”
Blue looks briefly affronted. He looks up at Aava and Synox. “Did you forget to teach her manners?”
“No one ever taught you manners and you seem to be doing just fine,” Aava says.
Blue looks like he has to physically swallow down whatever comeback is burning on his tongue. He looks back at Greem and musters up the most patient tone that he’s capable of.
“Because it’s very hard for me to walk without it,” he says, tapping the ground with his cane for emphasis.
Greem tilts her head. “Why?”
Blue looks back up at Aava desperately, like he’s hoping she’ll rescue him from this conversation. She shrugs unapologetically. Kids are curious—if he’s going to be around Greem, he’s going to have to get used to it.
“Because I hurt my legs very badly,” he finally says, looking back at Greem. “And even with the work of the Empire’s finest surgeons and plenty of bacta, they couldn’t heal completely.”
Greem scrunches up her snoot at the mention of the Empire, but Blue either doesn’t notice or doesn’t care.
She seems to brighten when Blue says his legs didn’t heal completely, though.
“Oh!” she says. “Me, too!”
She hops off of her seat and takes a few steps to demonstrate. Her limp is not nearly as pronounced as Blue’s, but it’s there. Aava hopes it’ll go away with time, but she isn’t sure. The break seemed bad, and she’s sure that taking Greem out of the bacta tank when it was only half healed was a bad choice. It was her only choice at the time, but it was definitely the wrong one for Greem’s bones.
If Aava had managed to get her back into a bacta tank quickly, things might have been okay, but the ship they escaped on with Synox had no bacta tank on board, and even if they could find a bacta tank now, the bones in Greem’s left arm and leg have already settled into whatever crooked, wrongly healed shape they were in when Aava took her out.
Greem seems to be taking it in stride, at least, which is Aava’s only comfort. She watches Blue’s eyes as he watches Greem parade around the room for him, and she’s not sure what she sees in them.
When Greem gets back to her seat and plops down again, she beams at Blue. “See?” she says. “We match.”
Something dark passes across Blue’s face for a moment, and Aava is prepared to intervene if he says something terrible. But the expression clears and he actually smiles at Greem.
“I suppose we do,” he says. “Do we need to get you a cane?”
He seems to be saying it mostly in jest, but Greem pauses to seriously consider the possibility. Then she reaches for Blue’s cane, making grabby hands at it. Aava expects Blue to snatch it away from her grasp, but instead he hands it over easily.
Greem stands up with the cane and begins tromping around the room again, the tip of it clicking loudly against the floor. It’s much too big for her, but she seems to be enjoying herself.
Blue watches her, still smiling, and Aava relaxes just a bit.
By that evening, Blue seems to be just as won over by Greem’s boundless charm as the rest of them. He’s pulled a chair up to the narrow kitchen counter and is watching with rapt attention from his perch as Greem shows off her cooking abilities. Rehydrating cold powdered rations is the only kind of “cooking” that Synox lets her do without his direct supervision, and he’s still hovering nearby as she carefully measures out her water and pours it into the ration packs for Blue’s amusement.
“I think she can handle it,” Aava says, nudging Sy gently with her shoulder.
“I know,” Synox says defensively, but he finally tears his eyes away from the kitchen and gives Aava an almost guilty look. “I just like to be sure.”
“You’re good with her,” Aava says, not for the first time. “She’s lucky to have you.”
Synox shrugs, his eyes wandering back to Greem almost against his will. “We’re lucky to have her,” he says.
They haven’t talked about what their long-term plan for Greem is, not really. Early on they asked her about her parents. The quiet, factual way that Greem told them her story chilled Aava, although it didn’t surprise her. Greem doesn’t remember her parents, not really. They died before she was old enough to truly remember them, although she tells Aava and Synox that she thinks her parents would have liked them, and that warms something deep in Aava’s core.
Whoever Greem’s parents were, they left her with a friend before they died—Greem knows this friend only by the name Uncle, although he was a human, not a Rodian, so Aava imagines they were not truly related. Although Greem doesn’t say as much, Aava suspects that Greem’s parents and her mysterious Uncle were, if not Rebels, then at the very least staunch anti-Imperials. They knew that Greem was special, probably understood that the Empire would want her from the moment she first started to show her powers as an infant. Greem was raised with one firm mantra—that the Empire is bad, and that she should never, ever let someone take her to them.
Aava doesn’t doubt that Greem’s Uncle tried his best to protect her, but she was taken from him months before Aava found her. The timeline isn’t entirely clear—Greem’s too young to have a solid sense of time—but what Greem does tell them is that her Uncle died.
“I saw the bad people kill him,” she says, with the calm bluntness that only a child can truly muster.
Aava suspects that the “bad people” in question were bounty hunters. There’s a standing bounty in the galaxy for any Force-sensitive child, and kids like Greem get traded around the galaxy like merchandise, being bought and sold, traded and killed for, until they can get turned into the Empire for a clean profit.
Greem herself isn’t sure how many hands she was changed between before Aava found her. It doesn’t truly matter.
What matters is that Greem is here, now, and that she has nowhere to go from here, no one out there waiting for her to come home.
If Greem were a normal child, the smart thing to do would be to find an orphanage or a sweet couple, and leave Greem with them. Aava tries to tell herself that the only reason they’re holding onto Greem so desperately is because she wouldn’t be safe living a normal childhood, not with the strength of her Force presence.
The honest part of Aava admits that she can’t imagine sending Greem away. For a long time, Aava was angry with the Mynock crew for hauling Tamlin around with them on every wild mission, even angry with Grizelle before that for letting Tamlin grow up on a Rebel base. Now, though, she thinks she understands.
At least they’re not taking Greem along on dangerous missions, Aava tells herself.
But how long can they keep a kid cooped up in here, alone with Synox and the occasional visit from the rest of them?
“Perimeter’s secure,” Zero says, stepping into the bunker and latching the door behind him. A gust of cold night air follows him into the room, and he stands in the doorway for a moment, kicking sand off of his boots.
This is no place to live.
“Just in time!” Blue says brightly, looking over his shoulder at Zero. “Greem just finished making us a gourmet meal.”
Zero snorts good naturedly and steps into the narrow kitchen. He rests his chin on top of Blue’s head for a brief moment, wrapping his arms loosely around Blue’s chest. It’s such a casually fond gesture that something warm wells up in Aava’s throat, and without really thinking about it she leans into Synox’s side, seeking that warm comfort instinctively.
Sy stiffens for just a second, and then his shoulders relax and he actually gives her a quick, affectionate squeeze. Aava isn’t sure if it’s the weeks Synox has spent in here with Greem, playing the role of father instead of trooper, or if it’s the removal of his chip, but Synox’s stiff, toy soldier mannerisms have been softening into casual comfort.
“C’mon,” Synox says. “Let’s eat that gourmet meal.” When he pulls away from her, his hand slides down her arm, linking their fingers loosely to pull her towards the table that Greem is eagerly setting.
Zero pulls Blue to his feet and brings the chair he was using over to the table. They sit across from Aava and Sy, and Greem takes her place at the head of the table, sitting on her knees to be tall enough to reach. With eager excitement, she points out what each “dish” is, making most of it up as she goes.
When they dig in, it should taste like every other meal of rehydrated rations that Aava has ever been forced to sit through, maybe a little bit worse because Greem’s measurements weren’t the most precise. But whether it’s the company, or Greem’s enthusiasm, or the way that Blue compliments each bite with more sincerity than she thought he was capable of, for some reason, it tastes so much better.
Greem is curled up in Synox’s lap on the couch, listening with wide-eyed enthusiasm as Zero tells her a bedtime story. Zero has insisted more than once that he never wanted kids, that he’s helping Sy and Aava out with Greem because he’s a good friend, not because wants anything to do with the kid.
He’s either lying to them or to himself, because Aava never sees him more in his element than when he’s telling Greem stories, piling on the absurd details just to see Greem gasp and clap.
Blue is watching the three of them fondly from the kitchen table, where he’s spread out half a dozen datapads, trying and failing to get some work done while the others get Greem ready for bed.
Aava slides into the seat across from Blue, and he pulls his eyes away from the living area.
“What do you want?” he asks, more suspicious than rude.
“I’ll admit it,” Aava says airily, crossing her arms and leaning towards him. “You’re better with her than I expected.”
Blue gives Aava a bitterly offended look. “What are you talking about? Of course I’m great with kids.”
Aava rolls her eyes. “I’m complimenting you, Blue. Don’t ruin it.”
He huffs, but he doesn’t say anything else. His eyes find Greem again, and Aava actually sees his face visibly soften. Part of Aava wonders if this kid has some kind of magic touch—she seems to be able to thaw even the hardest of hearts.
“She seems like a good kid,” Blue says eventually. His eyes return to Aava and he waves a finger at her sternly. “I’m still here for Zero, not for her or for you guys. But if you had to betray the Empire for something… this kid doesn’t seem like a bad choice.”
It’s the nicest thing Aava could expect out of Blue, and it’s actually comforting. Ever since Aava agreed to let Blue into their little Greem protection crew, she’s been on edge, certain that he would betray them at any moment. She still doesn’t trust him, not fully, but hearing him admit that Greem is worth the risks they’re taking… it’s nice to hear.
“She is,” Aava agrees. “I think she’s the best choice I ever made.”