Chapter Text
Age Four
The Room of a Thousand Fountains had nine hundred and seventy-three fountains, actually, but Serra Vey was the only person in the entire Jedi Temple who seemed to care about the discrepancy.
She knew because she'd counted.
It had taken her three days and she'd had to start over twice because Initiate Koric Tross kept stepping on her datapad, which she'd been using to keep a tally because she could only count to forty-three reliably and there were definitely more fountains than that. The second time it happened, she'd bitten him, which Master Jenu said was not how Jedi resolved conflict, and Serra had agreed — it wasn't — but she'd also pointed out that Koric had stepped on her datapad on purpose, which Master Jenu said was beside the point, which it wasn't.
The point was: nine hundred and seventy-three.
And tucked behind a moss-covered boulder near the east wall, where the afternoon light only reached for about an hour, was the smallest one. It sounded like it was laughing.
The big fountains sounded like important, serious water doing important, serious things. The smallest fountain bubbled up out of a crack in a flat stone about the size of Serra's hand, rose maybe eight centimeters into the air, and fell back on itself with a sound like heh-heh-heh-heh.
Serra sat cross-legged in front of it and put her chin in her hands.
"What's so funny?" she asked it.
Heh-heh-heh-heh.
"Is it the big one? The one that goes—" She puffed out her cheeks and made a low, pompous burbling noise. "Because I think that one's funny too."
Heh-heh-heh-heh.
"I knew it."
She sat with the fountain for most of the afternoon, telling it about the datapad situation and the biting and how Master Jenu had made her apologize to Koric but nobody had made Koric apologize to the datapad, which still had a crack across the screen. The fountain didn't have much to say about this, but it kept laughing, and Serra decided that counted as agreement.
When Master Jenu found her for evening meal, Serra was still there.
"Serra. You missed meditation."
"I was meditating."
"You were talking to a rock."
"I was talking to a fountain." The distinction mattered. "And then I was meditating."
This was technically true. She'd run out of things to say around the datapad's third crack (there were actually three, she'd recounted) and had just sat listening to the water. The Force felt different here — smaller and closer, like a blanket instead of a sky. She didn't have words for that yet, so she said: "It sounds like it's laughing. Can you hear it?"
Master Jenu paused and listened. The smallest fountain went heh-heh-heh-heh the way it had been doing, presumably, since someone had installed it, which had to be a very long time ago because nobody seemed to know it was here.
"I hear water flowing over limestone deposits," Master Jenu said carefully.
Serra looked up at her. "That's very sad, Master."
She went back every day after that. Not because she was lonely. She had friends, or at least she had Initiate Tessa Anh, who also liked counting things and didn't step on anyone's datapad ever. But Tessa liked counting things that mattered, like how many ships landed at the Temple dock per rotation or how many floor tiles were cracked in the east corridor (fourteen, plus two that were "thinking about it"). The fountains were Serra's project.
The smallest fountain didn't seem to mind company. It laughed whether she was there or not, which Serra found reassuring. Some things just kept being what they were regardless of whether anyone noticed.
She named it Lin.
She didn't tell anyone that part.
Age Six
The beetle was the size of Serra's thumbnail, iridescent blue-green, and it was stuck on its back on the meditation garden path, legs cycling uselessly in the air.
Serra crouched down. "Oh no. Hang on."
She slid a leaf under it and flipped it gently. The beetle sat there for a moment, stunned by its sudden return to competence, and then trundled off the leaf and directly into a groove between two paving stones, where it got stuck again.
"Okay," Serra said. "Okay, we're going to try this one more time, but you have to help."
She freed it again. The beetle, having learned absolutely nothing, aimed itself at the same groove.
Serra put her hand in the way. "No. That way is a trap. Go this way."
The beetle bumped against her finger, reconsidered its life choices, and veered left toward the garden bed.
"There you go. See? Better."
"Initiate Vey."
Serra looked up. Master Drallig was standing on the path with his arms folded, surrounded by a cluster of older Initiates who were clearly on their way somewhere important. Several of them were trying not to smile. Koric Tross, who was unfortunately among them, was not trying at all.
"Master Drallig." Serra stood up, brushing dirt off her knees.
"Are you directing traffic?"
"There was a beetle."
"So I gathered."
One of the older Initiates — a Mirialan girl whose name Serra didn't know yet — made a sound that might have been a cough.
"It was stuck," Serra said, because this seemed like relevant information. "On its back. It couldn't get up."
"And now?"
Serra looked toward the garden bed. The beetle had found a nice patch of soil and was doing whatever beetles did when they weren't being rescued by six-year-olds. "It's fine now."
"Excellent. Then perhaps you could make your way to lightsaber fundamentals. You're twelve minutes late."
"Oh." Serra blinked. "Was that today?"
The Mirialan girl made the sound again. Definitely not a cough.
"Lightsaber fundamentals," Master Drallig said slowly, "is every day."
"Right. Yes. I know that." Serra did know that. Just like she knew the Temple had nine hundred and seventy-three fountains: with absolute certainty that somehow never translated into practical action.
She gathered her things — a datapad, a small bag of smooth stones she'd been sorting by color, and the leaf with a damp spot where the beetle had been — and hurried past the group. Koric mouthed bug girl as she passed. The Mirialan girl, whose name turned out to be Luminara Unduli, caught Serra's eye and gave her a look of such precise, measured sympathy that Serra felt worse than if she'd laughed outright.
Being pitied by someone almost your own age was its own specific kind of terrible.
She was late to lightsaber fundamentals.
She was not, it should be noted, bad at lightsaber fundamentals. She just wasn't exciting at them. She had decent form, reasonable reflexes, and absolutely zero of the crackling competitive energy that made certain other Initiates vibrate like plucked strings whenever they were handed a training saber. Serra held a lightsaber like she held a hydrospanner — with steady hands and a workmanlike attention to where the dangerous end was pointing.
"Good guard, Serra." Master Drallig walked the line, correcting grips. "Feet wider."
She adjusted. Practiced the same Shii-Cho sequence she'd practiced yesterday. It was fine. She was fine at it.
Across the salle, Koric Tross was sparring with a Zabrak boy, and they were doing something athletic and showy that involved a lot of spinning. Both of them were grinning.
Serra ran through the sequence again. Guard, strike, recover.
Fine.
Age Eight
The thing about the Jedi Temple was that it was full of extraordinary children.
It was like gravity, an ambient condition that shaped everything without requiring Serra’s conscious attention. The Temple selected for extraordinariness. It cultivated it. The crèche masters praised quick learners and natural talents and the ones who burned bright, and they were right to, because the galaxy was going to need those children someday, and what was the point of a Jedi who wasn't exceptional?
Serra was not exceptional.
She was good. She absorbed information like soil absorbing rain — steadily, unglamorously, with no visible drama. She read voraciously and remembered most of it. She was kind by default, which was different from being compassionate by effort, though at eight she couldn't have articulated the distinction. She could fix things, had been fixing things, since she was old enough to hold a hydrospanner, and she talked to the things she fixed, and the things she fixed seemed to work better afterward. Though that was probably coincidence.
She was, in the parlance of every evaluation she'd ever received, "a solid Initiate with a reliable connection to the Force and good interpersonal instincts." Which was the educational equivalent of "nice wallpaper."
Tessa Anh, her best friend since the datapad-counting days, had been moved to an advanced mathematics seminar. They still ate together, but Tessa now had other friends who also liked advanced mathematics, and they talked about things Serra didn't understand, and Serra was genuinely happy for her, and also she ate alone three nights a week now.
This was fine. People grew into their gifts. Tessa's gift was numbers. Serra's gift was... being reliable?
She went to see Lin.
"It's not that I'm jealous," she told the fountain. She was sitting in her usual spot, knees drawn up, back against the mossy boulder. The afternoon light was turning the water gold. "I'm not. Tessa's brilliant. She should be in that seminar."
Heh-heh-heh-heh.
"I just wish there was a seminar for—" She stopped. For what? For being adequate? For having no particular specialty beyond a willingness to show up? "For people who are good at caring about stuff, I guess."
Heh-heh-heh-heh.
"That's not a discipline, Lin."
The fountain continued to disagree.
It was around this time that Serra found the others.
Maybe not found, exactly. Accumulated. The way the smallest fountain accumulated moss — slowly, without anyone planning it, until one day you looked and there was a whole ecosystem.
There was Teo Marn, who was eleven and should have drifted out of the younger initiates' orbit a year ago but hadn't, because Teo did very little drifting in any direction that required effort. Serra had met him by literally tripping over him. He'd been stretched full-length across an aisle in the Archive stacks, datapad open on his chest, eyes shut. "You're the one who talks to the fountains," he'd said, without opening them. No cruelty in it, just mild, sleepy interest. By the time he actually looked at her, he'd decided they were friends, and Teo's decisions had a quiet permanence. He collected the Temple's odd, overlooked children without seeming to try, and was the closest thing their loose little group had to a center.
There was a Twi'lek boy named Bemmo who stuttered when he was nervous, which was often, and who drew the most beautiful mechanical diagrams Serra had ever seen. His lightsaber work was worse than hers, which she hadn't thought possible, and they'd bonded over their shared position at the bottom of every sparring ladder, where at least you couldn't fall any further.
There was a Mirialan girl a year older named Zozo Pell, who read more than anyone Serra had ever met and had opinions about everything and was, crucially, completely unbothered by what the talented kids thought of her, which Serra found aspirational and slightly terrifying.
They didn't have a name for themselves. They weren't a clique. Cliques required intention, and this was more like sediment settling in still water. They just kept ending up in the same places: the quiet end of the refectory, the archives on off-peak hours, the Room of a Thousand Fountains on days when it was too cold for the popular spots in the upper gardens.
Serra never took them to Lin's fountain. That was hers.
But she took them to the ventilation shaft.
The one on the fourth-floor terrace, where a stubborn vine kept growing into the intake because that's where the light was, and the groundskeepers kept cutting it back, and it kept growing again, because the vine and the groundskeepers had been having this argument for longer than any of them had been alive and neither side showed signs of conceding.
Serra had been monitoring the situation since she was six. She'd tried mediating once. She’d explained to the vine, in a patient tone, that the intake was not a suitable growth direction and that the trellis two meters to the left offered comparable light exposure with significantly fewer consequences. The vine had ignored her completely, which Serra respected. Conviction was conviction, even in a plant.
"It's back," she told the others, crouching beside the intake housing on a cool afternoon while Bemmo sketched the vine's growth pattern on his datapad and Zozo read aloud from a botanical reference she'd found in the archives. Teo was supposed to be helping but was instead lying flat on the terrace stones with one arm thrown over his face, which he described as "holding the perimeter" and which was, observably, a nap.
"Third time this quarter," Serra continued, gently unwinding a tendril from the fan housing. "Look at this — it grew through the filter mesh. How did it grow through the filter mesh? That's a two-millimeter gap."
"Determination," Zozo said, without looking up from her book. "Also, cell elongation in response to phototropic signaling. It says here that certain Coruscanti creeper species can narrow their growth tips to less than a millimeter when—"
"It's not narrowing. It's pushing through. The mesh is deformed." Serra held up the filter. The metal was bent outward around the vine's entry point, stretched by slow, patient, vegetative force. "This vine is stronger than the housing."
"You sound proud of it," Bemmo said.
"I am proud of it. It's the most determined organism in this Temple." She set the filter down and looked at the vine — healthy, green, stubbornly committed to growing in the wrong direction for the right reasons. "I'm not cutting it. I'm rerouting the intake instead."
"You're rerouting Temple infrastructure," Zozo said slowly, "for a vine."
"I'm solving a recurring maintenance issue by addressing the root cause instead of the symptom. The vine was here first. The intake can move."
"The intake has been there for three hundred years."
"And the vine has been growing into it for three hundred years, and the groundskeepers have been cutting it back for three hundred years, and nobody has ever once considered that maybe the intake is in the wrong place." Serra was rummaging through her tool bag, pulling out a hydrospanner and a coupling adapter. "I need about two hours and someone to hold the light."
"I'll hold the light," Bemmo offered.
"I'll provide commentary," Zozo said.
"I'll hold the perimeter," Teo said, from the floor.
Serra looked at her strange, accidental, sediment-layer friends, arranged around a ventilation intake on a fourth-floor terrace on a cool afternoon with nowhere better to be, and felt… steadier.
The vine kept growing toward the light, because that's what living things did.
She picked up the hydrospanner and got to work.