Chapter Text
“You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“Unfortunately, no.”
Over a dozen innocent, wide-eyed faces stared back at them. Aledi stood at Violet’s shoulder, face showing an expression of alarmed resignation that Violet knew was identical to her own.
“And we’re just supposed to...” Violet started again.
“Yeah.”
“Okay.”
“They are kind of cute,” Aledi pointed out, crossing her arms.
“True.”
It had all begun earlier this morning, when Aledi had forcibly accelerated Violet’s morning routine by first knocking on her door, then hardly waiting for Violet to open it before barging in. She had returned only three days prior from a diplomatic mission that (shockingly) went off without a hitch. Violet had spent the few days of her absence trying not to imagine her being skewered by a blaster bolt.
She sat heavily down on the bed while Violet refreshed her hair, a pleading expression twisting the tattoos on her face.
“You have to help me today, or I swear I will not survive.”
Violet eyed her quizzically through the mirror. “What’s up?”
“Master Fyr is making me tend an entire clan of younglings today. An entire clan. She thinks it will be good for my patience.” Aledi’s tone made it clear that she did not appreciate this kind of lesson.
“Oh my.”
“I do not know anything about children.”
Violet bit back a smile at the comical look of panic on her face. She agreed to help, reluctant to turn down any chance to spend time with her singular friend. Anyway, she’d babysat before, how hard could it be?
She was now having second thoughts.
Here they stood, the sole caretakers of sixteen small Force-sensitives who stared back at them as if they had just interrupted a secret ritual.
How do you simultaneously entertain a human and a whiphid? She had no idea.
An especially tiny purple Nautolan girl approached Violet. She looked up at her with huge, unblinking black eyes and held up her arms.
“Pick me up, please?”
Oh. Oh no, Violet thought.
She was in love.
A few minutes and several vaguely-fielded questions later, with the Nautolan youngling—Rrist—on her hip, she picked up the rear of the clan as they made their way to the Room of a Thousand Fountains. She and Aledi had decided it was the only location where the younglings would be sufficiently entertained without getting into trouble.
But they’ll probably find it anyway.
Aledi led the way, holding the hand of a Trandoshan boy named Skessh. He kept tugging on her arm, urging her to walk faster. She threw a helpless glance over her shoulder at Violet, who snickered. Half of her entertainment already was simply from watching the normally self-assured Aledi struggle to answer questions from three directions at once.
“Why are you here?”
“What is that?”
“Are you a Knight?”
“Do you think that—that you could jump sooooo high you could fly?”
She was glad she was stationed at the back.
“Come on!” Skessh whined for the eightieth time. The sound of water reached Violet’s ears, and she almost wanted to join Skessh in his eagerness.
When they reached the Room, he and a few others set up an intensely militaristic pretend training session. There was a lot of bellowing involved. Another group started up a more traditional game similar to tag, but the rule specifics weren’t anything Violet recognized. The aquatic species gravitated toward the fountains, and Rrist was no exception. Upon seeing the large artificial pond, she started to wriggle to get down, and as soon as her bare feet touched the ground, they promptly left it as she dove into the water fully clothed. She seemed much more comfortable there, unsteady steps replaced by a natural-born grace.
Violet watched her for a moment. She inhaled the smell of damp dirt and foliage that immediately eased any lingering tension in her body. Not for the first time, she wished she could bring just a little of this back with her if—no, when—she got home. Choosing a spot on a mossy bank where she could keep an eye on the majority of the kids, she eased down into a crisscross position.
We have gone two minutes without an incident, she wrote on her mental chalkboard. Aledi plopped down beside her, immediately yanking off her boots and socks to stick her feet in the pool. Violet was about to follow suit when a breathless boy ran up. There was a dead leaf in his messy red hair and dirt smudges on his tunic.
“Miss Violet! Archan ate a worm!” He pointed an accusing finger at an Ithorian child crouched in the dirt. Violet wasn’t entirely sure, but she thought she could see the tail end of a very large, very hairy caterpillar hanging out of one of his mouths.
Scratch that. We have gone zero minutes.
“Is that...allowed?” she murmured under her breath.
Aledi glanced at the aforementioned Archan and made a gagging face behind her hand. “I have no idea.”
But her growing smirk perfectly conveyed that this was Violet’s problem and hers alone. Violet reluctantly turned her attention back on the boy. “What’s your name?”
“Vellix,” he responded, still preoccupied by the matter of the worm, judging by his frequent glances in Archan’s direction. “It’s gross. Can you make him stop?” She got the feeling he would not be satisfied until the issue was resolved.
“Can you introduce me to, uh, Archan?”
Vellix nodded, trotting over to where the Ithorian youngling sat in the middle of a patch of ferns. Violet followed at a more leisurely pace. Archan’s elongated neck rotated slowly in their direction. She tried not to be unnerved by the double mouths.
“Hi, Archan,” she began, crouching in front of him.
“Hello.” His voice was oddly modulated, and Violet noticed the translator collar at the base of his neck.
“Um, so...” she hesitated. What if it’s a crucial part of his diet? “Are you hungry?”
Archan nodded.
“Did you eat breakfast?”
Another nod.
“Can you...wait for lunch?”
Yet another nod, this time accompanied by a slow blink.
“Okay, so, maybe let’s not eat bugs just yet. Sound good?”
“Yes.” How could a kid with two mouths and eyes on stalks still manage to look petulant?
At some point during the conversation, Vellix ran off, apparently less interested in the actual resolution than in being the accuser. Violet left Archan to his own devices and returned to the bank, where Aledi waited with badly stifled amusement. Violet could swear she saw Archan furtively stuff a large black beetle in his mouth as soon as he thought she wasn’t looking.
She sighed. “You don’t happen to have any snacks with you?”
“No,” Aledi replied. “But I could probably find something at the refectory.”
“Rock-paper-scissors for it?” Violet suggested, realizing her mistake too late.
“What?”
“It’s this thing we do on my planet—”
“Which, by the way, you still have not told me about,” Aledi interjected.
“—to help make small decisions.”
“Show it to me.”
She was halfway through a description of rock-paper-scissors when Aledi interrupted excitedly—
“This is just like Five Hands!”
And then they were even further off track than before while she attempted to show Violet all fifteen different animals that one could portray in the game of Five Hands. Violet was thoroughly lost.
There are definitely more than five hands involved here.
It was nothing like the much simpler Earth version. But on the bright side, it attracted a fair bit of attention from the nearby younglings, enough to distract Archan from his insect-slaughter.
(Aren’t Ithorians supposed to be peace-loving?)
Soon, a small crowd of eager children had gathered around them, some asking what game it was, and others clamoring to be next regardless.
“Can I try?”
“Me next!”
“Can I play?”
“Ooh, ooh I know that one! That’s a rancor!” The Togruta boy who had just spoken proceeded to bare his teeth, roar at the top of his lungs, and lunge at the girl next to him, who shrieked.
While Aledi refereed several simultaneous games of Five Hands, Violet turned to the quieter trio who crouched to her right. She smiled encouragingly.
“I know a different game. It’s from my planet. Do you wanna learn?”
All three nodded in rapid unison. It was adorable. Violet shifted onto her knees to face them more fully.
“Alright. It’s called rock-paper-scissors.”
She explained the rules. All three were surprisingly attentive despite the excited shouting from the other younglings around them. There was a Pantoran boy—Kiko—who watched her with inquisitive focus, a human girl—Eena—who smiled at everything, and an Iktotchi boy—Semdueth—who spent most of the time trying to copy everything she did, stubby horns bobbing.
“Got it?” Violet finished her explanation with a double thumbs-up.
Kiko’s pale brows wrinkled in confusion. “What’s paper?”
Oops.
Violet bit the inside of her cheek to keep from laughing at her own mistake. She didn’t want him to think she was laughing at him.
She hastily corrected, “Um...it’s like flimsi. Sort of.”
“Oh, okay.”
“Why?” interrupted Semdueth.
“Why what?”
“Why is it paper?”
“Ummm...that’s just what we call it on my planet,” Violet said. “Ready?”
She squared up with Kiko, Semdueth with Eena. And for the next few minutes, she was involved in the most intense rock-paper-scissors battle of her life. There was a lot of squealing and wiggling. Violet had to mediate when Eena insisted that she should have won her round, since paper was like flimsi and her rock was a wet rock specifically, so it would dissolve the paper and...
Violet tried very hard not to laugh.
However, by her seventh loss in a row to Kiko, she was beginning to get suspicious.
Of course. She narrowed her eyes at him, grinning sharply.
“You little cheater!”
The blue-skinned boy dissolved into giggles. “I know! I know which one you’re gonna do!”
This is quite possibly the worst game to play against a baby Jedi. Or...the best?
“Let’s see if you can win the next three,” she challenged, leaning forward. A mini training exercise of her own creation.
“Okay!” He nodded enthusiastically and sat up straighter. He then won all three rounds and was exceedingly proud of the fact.
“Good job!” Violet reached her hand out for a high five, realized he probably didn’t know what that was, tried to go for a fist bump, remembered that probably wasn’t a thing either, and settled awkwardly for patting him on the head.
Geez, he’s not a dog.
He was beaming anyway.
At that moment, a soaking wet Rrist decided it was a good time to come wobbling over and attach herself like a spider monkey to Violet’s torso. She took one look at the chaos that was the other children and loudly announced,
“I’m being calm.”
“Yes, you’re being very good!” Violet said. “But you can join them if you want! It’s okay.”
Rrist shook her head. “Master Sinube says I will break all my bones!”
“Does he now?” Her voice was half-choked by a startled laugh. Now that she thought about it, hadn’t she read about Nautolan tadpole development? Something about them not developing full skeletal strength until later in childhood. She supposed it could be like ossification in human embryos, just slower. “Well, you must be very special to be out of the water so soon!”
Rrist nodded proudly and settled on her stomach in Violet’s lap, hanging off the edge to play with pebbles.
Violet looked up at Aledi, whose game of Five Hands had disintegrated into a bunch of kids pretending to be fearsome creatures, and grinned. Aledi’s mouth curved up in a half-suppressed smile. She shrugged ruefully and mouthed: I tried.
It took the two of them almost half an hour to round up everyone for lunch, mostly because Blash’n, a Mon Calamari, kept throwing himself into the water and refusing to get out. Finally reaching the refectory, it was painfully obvious that their clan was muddier and much more hyperactive than any of the other clans present. Aledi met Violet’s eyes with a look that said, “how many years of training did we negate in one day?”
How many indeed, Violet thought. She eyed the crèche-masters nervously, looking for signs of disapproval. Instead, she caught several fond looks and indulgent smiles directed at the enthusiastic younglings. She looked at the cackling, chattering younglings, at the quiet pride in the crèche-masters' eyes, and something warmed inside her chest—the part of her that had held onto the idea that there was real, true good in the galaxy.
Take that, Jedi-haters.
Here it was, as small and full of life as the younglings bouncing around her.
What kind of monster would hurt them?
Nope. Not thinking about that.
Shutting it out, she squeezed between Rrist on her right and the Togruta boy, Halene, on her left. The food was delicious, as always, but somehow more enticing because Violet found herself tragically unable to fully sit down and enjoy it. While she frantically multitasked between bites of her own food, helping Rrist safely cut her fish into bite-sized pieces, and keeping Halene from throwing his food at someone else, Aledi tried to calm an increasingly cranky Vellix.
Kids. Kids get grouchy when they’re tired, right?
“Aledi!” Violet hissed across the table.
“Yeah?”
“Naps.”
“What?”
“Naps!”
Aledi’s mouth made an oh shape, and she looked down at the watery-eyed Vellix. In one swift move, she hefted him off the bench and cleared his empty dishes. Violet stood and helped each child take their dishes back to the tray return. Slight panic ensued when one overeager youngling decided it would be a good idea to try using the Force to float his tray and nearly dropped the entire thing. Violet shot out a steadying hand just in time.
Fortunately, they made it back to the younglings’ sleeping quarters with minimal incident, and even the most energetic submitted willingly enough to their beds.
Skessh put up the most resistance, planting his clawed feet and refusing to budge until Violet accepted his terms.
“I want to go to the park!”
“What park, Skessh?” They had been going in circles like this for a few minutes now.
“The park! I want to go after naps!”
“Yes, alright, fine.” Aledi brushed past from behind Violet and rushed him into bed. Once outside, she turned to Violet and asked, “What did he want?”
Violet groaned, pushing her tangled hair out of her face. “You didn’t hear?”
“No.” Aledi said guiltily. “I just wanted him to go to sleep.”
“Oh no.”
“What?”
Violet flopped down on the floor of the hallway. She looked up at her friend. “Apparently, we just promised we’d take them to the park.”
“Oh no.”
“Do you know what he’s talking about?”
Aledi nodded, sliding to the floor next to Violet. “There is a park in the city that the crèche-masters take the younglings to sometimes. I remember going there when I was an initiate.”
“So, we’re leading a field trip?” Violet said, less a question than a statement. It would cause a riot if they backpedaled now.
“Yes.” Aledi leaned her head back against the wall and stared up at the high ceilings above them as if questioning her entire existence.
Violet almost laughed at the absurdity of it all. They were very underqualified to parent anyone, much less so many tiny Force-users. There were so many ways this could go wrong.
It’s fine. Everything’s fine.
“How bad could it be?” She willed optimism into her voice.
“How bad could it be...” Aledi echoed with much less enthusiasm.
Violet wished she had some wood to knock on.