Chapter Text
As any Star Wars fan could tell you: this fandom is neurotic.
People find their niches in Star Wars and they stick to it. They also fight you worse than a rabid dog if they think you’ve infringed on their territory; like saying something completely innocent like ‘Death Watch is a terrorist group’ or ‘the Empire was bad ; ’ because someone, somewhere in this fandom can and will take offense to your personal opinion (not that either of those are opinions, those are canonical facts , please stop yelling at me -). Fans, in their niches, go overboard and obsess over every single detail, which guarantees that unless you’ve asked what their niches are, you can’t expect to shove two Star Wars fans in the same room and expect them to carry a conversation about it, because one will probably love the Old Republic Sith and the other is fluent in Mando’a. At least, with every Star Wars fan that is anything more than slightly casual, they can probably tell you what happens in the canon movies and tell you what they would do if they had to write a ‘fix-it’ fanfic.
This is what keeps poor Maria from just giving up the second she wakes up in Star Wars.
That, and the fact that Jedi are in the ‘let them run wild and learn from their own mistakes’ parenting camp. She would have gone insane if she had to deal with helicopter or strict Creche Masters.
She was a bit everywhere with her niches so they weren’t as in-depth as most other fans’ obsessions, swinging wildly between the Mandalorians with the Haat Mando’ade and Din Djarin, and the concept of Tatooine Slave Culture with Luke Skywalker and Anakin’s… Anakiness. She was well-aware that that man was just a psychotic break and a shit-ton of trauma walking around, and she liked to poke at him through fanfiction only, thank you very much. At least this did have a bit of overlap where she knew a lot about the Clone Wars, but nowhere near enough for her current position.
Reborn too late to save Jaster Mereel and stop Galidraan, reborn too early to join the Rebel Alliance, but reborn just in time to join the rest of the younglings in asking Master Skywalker what they were going to do because there were too many of them.
Oh well, she had future knowledge, a tendency to be overlooked and forgotten about by the Creche Master, and the reckless abandonment of someone who knows when they die.
She wakes up in the Coruscant underbelly, looking like a half-starved toddler, and decides that her best chance for not getting shanked in a dark alley is to walk right up to the Jedi Temple and hope that they will give her a good meal and find her a nice social worker. She did not factor in the possibility that she, in fact, did not speak Basic or that she could be force-sensitive.
After a very long time of them trying to communicate with her in every language that the Healing Halls’ protocol droid had, and her responding in every language she vaguely knows ‘hello’ in, they give up trying to ask her anything other than “What’s your name?” “This owie?” “Hungry?”
Maria Rosa-Cortez, who was very stubborn about them spelling her name correctly on her paperwork (Thank the force she bothered to learn Aurebesh), got released to the Creche the very next day.
She was four years old, tiny, quiet, and couldn't speak any known galactic language. The Creche Masters, beyond encouraging her to learn Basic and nudging her toward the other Younglings, let her to her own devices.
So she plotted.
She had access to voice modulators, comm terminals, and a good amount of future knowledge. Sidious had nothing on a Maria determined to have fun.
She had ghost bank accounts and the force helped her choose the gambling numbers. She regularly ran wild on Coruscant, having the street kids tell her chatter and lurking in Little Keldabe for the good mando gossip. She alerted the Council about Master Kenobi’s Kaminoan discovery before the man had even gotten captured through some clever slicing. She had hacked the Senate’s big screen to display a ‘LYING LIARS WHO LIE’ text with Palpatine’s pic. She-
“MARIA!”
She wasn’t paying attention to her crechemates again.
“Yes?” She said innocently, as if Cal Kestis and Caleb Dume weren’t staring at her disapprovingly while she had one leg out the window.
The Clone War had started a little under a year ago, and while Ahsoka Tano and Barriss Offee are both already on the front lines, Cal, Caleb and Maria are all 10 and 11, so we weren’t going anywhere for another few months. She thinks Caleb will be a padawan within the next six months, and Cal within the next year and a half, but she isn’t sure.
“Where are you sneaking off to now?” Cal asked, crossing his arms across his chest.
“Planting a bug in a senator’s office?” She answered truthfully.
She had found out that the ‘limits’ and ‘rules’ the Jedi put on force use complete bullshit. Luke was right when he learned about the force through ‘Do or Do Not’ and decided to do things most Jedi think are impossible. She had figured out how to shield herself to the point of invisibility to any force-sensitive a few years ago and liked to utilize this skill to wander into Palpatine’s office through the vents and just watch him be cartoonishly evil from her hidden spot. That man loved to cackle evilly.
“That’s illegal.” Caleb hissed.
“Actually, since we’re in wartime, it’s treason!” She cheerfully corrected him.
“You’re going to miss Introductory Theoretical Living Force,” Cal, the absolute nerd , pointed out.
“Master Nuru has marked me present several times when I wasn’t. I’m fine as long as I hand in the homework.” She waved him off and started working her other leg out the window.
“I’ll tell Master Gigom that you snuck out,” Caleb threatened. As if their Creche Master would do anything more than assigning her extra meditation: the Tholian really didn’t know how to reign in children and should feel lucky her Creche Clan was all goody-two-shoes except for her.
“No, you won’t!”
“No, I won’t.” Caleb sighed.
“Can you bring me something back?” Cal asked, poking his head out the window to ask her as she made her way down the temple walls.
“Like a cookie or a blaster? Be more specific.”
“Would you bring me a blaster if I asked?” He squinted at her.
Caleb face-palmed, “It’s Maria. She’d bring back a bomb if you asked.”
“Right,” Cal nodded. “Can you bring me a smoothie?”
“Sure!” She had to shout to respond, already far down enough that the wind was threatening to kill her through a long fall.
Cal disappeared back inside, probably to go to class, and she took that as the conversation being over.
She took a few steadying breaths, and then reached out to the force with a friendly ‘What’s up my dude?’
The force seemed to laugh at her casual form of address, already used to her antics. The Jedi, as a cult, address the force way too formally whenever they do so, and she bet that the Sith, as a cult, were either far worse or downright rude, so she thinks she’s doing way better by just vibing alongside it.
‘I want to mess with the senator of Ryloth again, leak some of his conversations to the press, make it a bit harder to be corrupt. Y’know, just ruin his week a bit. You cool with helping me?’
The force just hummed along, and when she reached out to wrap her shields tighter around her, they strengthened easily.
‘Thanks, bestie!’ She cheered before jumping off the wall and landing neatly onto the closest landing pad.
The Council would totally have an aneurysm if they ever found out how she talked to the force.
Oh well. Time to hotwire a speeder and buy Cal his smoothie.