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One
The jungle on Yavin never slept. It chattered and croaked and rustled, an endless, wet-throated chorus of life. But tonight, for once, there was quiet inside the house.
Cassian was asleep, and he was sleeping deeply. For someone who never truly rested, it felt strange—unnatural, even. Usually, he tossed and muttered, pulled the blanket up then kicked it off, fingers twitching toward some imagined threat. But tonight… he was still.
Bix lay beside him and watched the steady rise and fall of his chest, the slackness in his jaw. The kind of sleep you only get when you're home, or something like it.
Maybe it’s because I’m here, she thought. A flicker of guilt passed through her. She wanted to believe her presence calmed him—but if that were true, what did it mean that she was about to leave?
She slid out from the bed, slowly, knees careful on the floor. The air was heavy, clinging to her skin as if trying to hold her still. Her coat was already folded on the bench by the door, and her bag sat packed beneath it—small, light. She couldn’t afford sentiment.
The datapad sat on the desk beside a stack of soldered components and a dented cup of caf that had long gone cold. She stared at it for a long moment, then turned it on. The faint light cast pale shadows across the wall.
She didn’t rehearse what to say. Didn’t even know if she could say it.
When she hit record, no words came. She let the silence hang.
Maybe he’d hear the jungle in the background. Maybe he’d know she’d made this choice gently, painfully, with the kind of love that couldn’t survive in the middle of a war.
She set the datapad down beside a folded strip of fabric—a rag from Ferrix, stained with grease, tucked in her bag since the day they fled. Something he’d recognize.
Her hand hovered at her stomach. She hadn't been sure, not at first. The signs were too easy to ignore, too easy to write off as stress or fatigue. But now…
Now it was unmistakable. A quiet life growing inside her while everything outside was always so loud, so dangerous. She hadn’t told him. Couldn’t. Not when he was already burning himself alive trying to keep everyone else breathing.
He needs to be who he is. I need to survive it.
And she knew where to go. It made sense, in a cruel kind of way. Mina-Rau. The place she had fled in fear, the place she'd left B2EMO behind when everything had gone wrong and the Empire was closing in.
She hadn't let herself think too long about the droid. About his blinking red eye, his glitchy speech, the way he used to hover anxiously like a worried old man. But maybe that’s what finally decided it. If she had to raise this child alone, she wanted one familiar voice with her.
She looked back at the bed one last time. Cassian had rolled onto his side, face turned toward where she'd been, hand stretched out just slightly—reaching, maybe.
I’ll come back, she promised silently. When the fight is over. When he’s ready. When I am.
She wrapped her coat around her shoulders and stepped into the night.
The base wasn't far, just past the treeline where the canopy opened into a clearing and the gravel path picked up. The guard at the outpost blinked at her when she arrived—young, probably newer than the dirt under his boots.
“Need a civilian transport,” she said. “Destination: Mina-Rau.”
He rubbed the sleep from his eyes, glancing at the log. “You're sure? Not many runs going that way anymore.”
“I'm sure.”
He handed over the clearance chip. “You got a contact there?”
“I'll manage.”
He didn’t ask anything else. No one did, these days. People gave her a wide berth—not out of disrespect, but the kind of cautious reverence you offer someone who’s lived through something worse than you can imagine.
She stepped back onto the path. The jungle hissed around her again, louder now. Awake.
This is what love looks like, she thought. Not holding on. Letting go.
She didn’t look back.
Two
Mina-Rau was dry. The kind of dry that cracked your lips open if you weren’t careful. Dust clung to every surface, settling into the fibers of your clothes, your hair, your lungs. Bix stepped off the shuttle under a high, searing sun, hand low over her stomach as if instinctively shielding it from the heat.
No one was there to meet her. Just the old landing pad, a wind-tattered flag, and a battered machine baking in the light.
She hadn’t told Cassian where she was going. Before leaving Yavin, she’d looked the night guard in the eye—Wil, who still spoke to her with a kind of reverent gentleness—and told him, “Don’t let him know. Not where I’ve gone. Not even that I left.”
He’d nodded, slow. “He’s going to be hurt.”
“He’s going to be alive,” she’d replied.
Now here she was again. Returning not because it was safe, but because it was the only place she’d left something behind. She had never meant to come back to Mina-Rau. Not after what had happened.
But B2EMO was here. And the child deserved at least one familiar voice.
The walk to the village was longer than she remembered. Flat, wide fields framed by stubborn stalks of dry-farmed vegetables and low windbreak fences. Houses clustered at the base of a ridge—homes built from scrap and patience. She passed two workers bent over irrigation lines who barely looked up. Good. She didn’t want eyes on her.
The little shelter she’d rented was still standing: one room, metal roof, a porch just wide enough to sit on at sundown. She pressed her hand to the door. Cool. Dusty. Hers, for now.
She opened it—and stopped.
There in the corner, jury-rigged into a flickering wall socket, was B2EMO.
He looked rough. One panel sagged, and his eye blinked unevenly. His frame had been propped on scavenged crates, cables wrapped like vines around his lower base. But he was there. Still waiting.
“Bix?” he rasped. The voice warbled.
She crossed the room in seconds, kneeling beside him. “Hey,” she breathed. “I didn’t think you’d still be here.”
“You… left me,” B2EMO said, but without accusation. Only fact.
“I didn’t have a choice,” she murmured, hands brushing the dents on his side. “It was chaos. You wouldn’t have made it off-world.”
“I… waited anyway.”
She rested her forehead against his casing and let herself cry. Quietly. The kind of crying that didn’t change your breathing, just filled your chest and spilled over.
The first night, she didn’t unpack more than what she needed. She cleared a cot. Boiled water. Made a note of the village's routines: when lights went out, when the pump stopped running, who walked past and didn’t look twice. She slept with one eye open, like always. But it was different here. Less fear. More distance.
She stood on the porch the next morning and watched dust swirl through a patch of brittle grass. The land was harsh, but it made things grow. The people here knew how to survive.
And so did she.
This is where I put it all down, she thought, hand grazing her lower belly. This is where I protect him.
The memories came in flashes. Not every detail. Just the things she didn’t want to keep but couldn’t let go of. A voice. A gloved hand. The slow, heavy threat of someone assuming you had no power. The moment it changed. The noise he made when he hit the floor. The silence afterward.
She didn’t say his name. She never had.
She’d built her survival on silence.
Inside, B2EMO hummed softly. “Are you… unwell?”
“No,” she said, sitting on the threshold. “Just thinking.”
A pause. Then, carefully: “You’re… pregnant.”
She turned toward him. “Yes.”
Another pause. “Cassian?”
She nodded.
“He does not know?”
“No.”
There was no judgment in B2’s tone. Just the clicking of his internal systems, whirring through damaged circuits.
She leaned back against the doorframe, letting the dry air pull sweat from her neck. The baby stirred—just a flutter, too small to count—but it made her pause.
“You’ll be safe here,” she whispered. “You won’t be a weapon. Or a story. Or anyone’s burden.”
The wind kicked up, rattling the tin. In the distance, someone shouted across the fields.
Bix closed her eyes and listened to the silence between gusts.
Three
The sun was dipping low over the dry hills, casting everything in a gold so thick it looked like it would stick to your skin. The fields hummed with heat, the day’s last breath stretching shadows across the dirt paths that split the farming plots like veins.
Bix sat on the edge of a low stone wall, one hand resting under her belly, the other tracing the curve of her hip where the child pressed hardest. She watched the children play at the far end of the main road—four of them, barefoot and shrieking, chasing one another with bent sticks and no particular rules. They were always out around this hour, as if dusk was the only time the air didn’t bite.
She’d been watching them for weeks now. One of the boys reminded her of Cassian—not exactly in his face, but in the way he moved. Quick, strategic, like every turn was part of a larger plan. He didn’t laugh much, but he always won.
You’d have been like that, she thought, looking down at her stomach. Or maybe nothing like him. Maybe everything new.
The baby shifted beneath her ribs, pressing outward as if responding to her attention.
“You want to meet him, don’t you?” she whispered. “I don’t know if you ever will.”
She hadn’t said his name in weeks. Not out loud. Cassian. It was too sharp. Too unfinished. She didn’t know where he was—probably off-world, maybe still on Yavin. Maybe in some cold bunker on a planet she'd never heard of, planning something impossible with people who needed him more than she did.
He didn’t know he had a child coming.
She’d made sure of that.
Wil had honored her request. Vel hadn’t pressed. B2 hadn’t said a word. This secret belonged to her, and her alone. It wasn’t shame. It was protection. For the baby, for Cassian, for the parts of herself that still felt fragile and half-formed.
Still, sometimes, she imagined what it would be like. If he walked through the dust with that tired smile. If he knelt beside her and pressed his forehead to hers like he had, once, after Ferrix burned and they’d both stopped pretending they didn’t need someone.
Would he be angry? Would he understand? Could he?
She closed her eyes and tried to breathe through the weight.
Wilmon had sent her a note last week. Short, encoded. Just two lines: "Still fighting. Still watching the skies." She hadn’t replied. She didn’t know what she could say. He’d stayed behind when she didn’t. He still believed in something bigger.
So had she, once.
Bix shifted on the wall. Her back ached. Her ankles were swollen again. She felt like gravity had doubled its pull just on her. She hadn’t picked a name yet. Nothing felt right. Everything sounded like a headline.
She didn’t want her son to be a symbol.
She wanted him to have dirt under his nails and scabs on his knees and a life that belonged to him, not the galaxy.
A breeze passed through the trees behind her and she turned to look.
That’s when she felt it.
A sudden warmth. A shift. Pressure gone strange and lightness in its place.
For a second, she froze. Not with fear—just with certainty. This was it.
The stone wall dug into her palms as she braced herself to stand. Her knees buckled slightly, and she hissed through her teeth, breath coming fast. There was no pain yet, not really. Just the sense that her body had decided, and there was no negotiating with it now.
She looked around. The children were gone, scattered home. The road was empty.
She pressed a hand low to her stomach. “Not here,” she muttered. “Give me a little more time.”
Inside the house, her bag was already half-packed. She’d known it could happen any day. She’d washed the linens, boiled the water, checked the comm line in case the healer couldn’t reach her in time.
She took one slow step. Then another.
The wind kicked up behind her, carrying dust across the road in small spirals.
She gritted her teeth. “Okay. Okay. We’re doing this.”
She didn’t look up at the sky. She didn’t ask for help.
She just walked, slowly, steadily, back toward the house. Toward what came next.
Four
Bix had boiled water before Vel arrived. Not because it was needed, but because it gave her something to do with her hands.
The baby had gone down early, heavy with heat and sleep, tucked into the sling across Bix’s chest. His breath warmed the space between them. She sat on the porch with one bare foot propped on the rail, listening for the shuttle.
When the sound came, it was expected. They’d arranged this two weeks ago—short, careful transmissions. Vel would come alone. No records. No questions. Just one afternoon, and then gone.
The shuttle settled at the edge of the fields with a puff of dust. Vel emerged slowly, wearing plain clothes, hair loose, shoulders squared as if she were walking into a briefing.
Bix didn’t get up.
“You’re on time,” she said as Vel reached the steps.
“I try not to disappoint,” Vel said, soft. Her eyes dropped to the bundle against Bix’s chest. “He’s... he’s real.”
“He’s a lot,” Bix replied, brushing the boy’s fine hair back. “But yeah. He’s real.”
Vel nodded and sat without being asked. The two of them sat side by side in the warmth, looking out over the quiet prairie beyond the treeline.
“I haven’t said anything to anyone,” Vel offered after a minute.
“I know.”
They didn’t speak for a while. The baby made a soft noise in his sleep and shifted. Bix adjusted the sling with a practiced touch.
“You made all this work,” Vel said.
“I made it quiet,” Bix answered. “That’s something.”
Vel looked at her out of the corner of her eye. “He’s different without you. Cassian.”
Bix’s jaw twitched. “He needs me less than you think.”
“That’s not how it looks.”
Bix turned her gaze forward. “I only slowed him down. You saw what happened when I didn’t.”
Vel didn’t argue. The wind moved across the grass, low and dry.
Inside, B2EMO shuffled a little in his dock. The house was cool and still.
“He looks like him,” Vel said, meaning the baby.
“I know,” Bix replied.
Vel didn’t ask about names, and Bix didn’t offer one. There wasn’t one yet. Nothing fit. He was a person, not a statement. Not a memory. Not a myth. Just this: warm skin, hungry eyes, a soft cry when he couldn’t find her heartbeat fast enough.
Vel leaned forward slightly. “You did the right thing.”
“I didn’t do it for the cause.”
“I know,” Vel said.
The baby stirred and let out a small protest. Bix shifted him gently, placing a kiss to his head, and he quieted again.
“You want to hold him?” she asked after a beat.
Vel blinked, then nodded. “Yeah. I do.”
They made the transfer carefully. Vel’s arms were awkward at first—she hadn’t held many babies—but the boy settled into her chest with a little grunt.
“Stars,” Vel murmured. “He’s heavier than he looks.”
“Stubborn too.”
“Must run in the blood.”
They both smiled, faint and worn.
Inside the sling, the baby sighed and fell deeper into sleep.
Five
The lantern flickered low against the far wall, casting long, gold shadows over the floorboards. Bix sat cross-legged on the bed, her back resting against the cool wall, the baby asleep against her chest in the sling. His breath came slow and warm, a soft rhythm she’d come to match without thinking.
She hadn’t spoken out loud all day. Not really. Just small sounds—shushing, humming, the occasional whispered curse at a stubborn jar lid or B2’s new habit of announcing every single battery fluctuation. But now, in the hush of evening, something inside her shifted.
She looked down at the boy. His cheeks were flushed from sleep, one hand curled into her shirt. A drool-slick line marked the fabric where he’d been chewing earlier, teething and grumbling like a storm in miniature.
“You’re not so little anymore,” she murmured, just above a whisper. “You’ve got your own opinions now.”
He didn’t stir. She liked that about him—how deep he sank into sleep when he felt safe. How he didn’t flinch in his dreams.
“I think about who you’ll be,” she went on. “If you’ll like machines like B2, or if you’ll hate noise and crowds like I do now. If you’ll be quiet. Or loud. Or if you’ll ask me, one day, why you don’t have a father here.”
She paused.
“I don’t know how I’ll answer that.”
Outside, the wind had picked up, rustling the fields with a dry whisper. She listened to it for a while. Let it fill the space.
“Your father,” she said, carefully, like laying out something delicate, “is out there. Somewhere. Fighting for something bigger than either of us. Bigger than even you. And that’s what he has to do. It’s who he is.”
She shifted, adjusting the sling to keep him close.
“I used to think I had to stay close to him. To be useful. To prove something. But I was wrong. I don’t have to be useful. I just have to be here. For you.”
Her voice shook, but she didn’t stop.
“I left because I wanted you to grow without fear. Without orders. Without being turned into a symbol. I left because I didn’t want anyone—not even him—to make you into a reason for war.”
The baby twitched in his sleep and she stilled, pressing her hand to his back until he calmed.
“I never wanted to name you after anyone,” she said. “I kept thinking I’d wait until you did something that told me who you were.”
She smiled faintly.
“But you’ve already done it. You made me stay. You made me soften.”
She looked down at him again, eyes warm and tired.
“I think your name is... Kian.”
She let it sit there, let the word settle into the room like a seed in soil.
“Kian,” she whispered again, and this time it felt like a promise. “You’re mine. Not the rebellion’s. Not the past’s. Just mine.”
He sighed in his sleep, as if answering her.
And for the first time in months, Bix laid her head back against the wall and closed her eyes with nothing left unsaid.