Chapter Text
There is a garden in Eadu, deep within the Imperial base, hid behind a hermetically-sealed steel barrier. The glassy white sheen of the Empire’s sedate architecture bleeds into dry grass. Long threads of foliage wrap along chrome lattice, stretching through the edges, strangling the long pipes fencing the space in. The sight is a sweeping verdurous dome, breathtaking and strange.
The moment Bodhi Rook steps in, a cool mist shoots from the corners, masking the garden in a thick haze. The fumes mean nothing by it, he's certain, but somehow the thick cloud mirrors the confusion gripping him fully, keeping him still. He’s been to bases built around greenery, but never greenery built within the bases. It is a strange but not unwelcome sight. He almost forgets about Eadu’s craggy, blackened terrain.
He takes a few careful steps until he’s in a clear patch. “Uh, is Galen Erso here?” He calls. A minute passes in silence. He clears his throat and tries again. “Galen? Galen Erso?”
“I’m here,” a tired voice answers from the other end. “My apologies. I wasn’t aware I was meant to be receiving anything today. Certainly not at such a late hour.”
The mist is still a little thick but Bodhi can hear footsteps crunching on the grass. He spots Galen Erso ambling closer and scrambles to collect the right package from his case.
“Yeah, uh, that’s totally alright. Here you go, this here, that's for you,” he stutters, holding out a small, heavy cube in one hand, a haptic manifest in the other.
The mist clears a little and Bodhi can spot the series of expressions shifting in Galen Erso’s face as he clicks on the manifest and reaches for the package in one motion. Galen inspects the cube with mild suspicion, holding it up at a careful distance and squinting at the small inscription printed along the edge.
“That’s not an explosive is it? It’s not anything bad?” Bodhi asks nervously. He chuckles to try to pass it off as a joke, but Galen shoots him a look that’s a mix of worried and grave.
“What makes you think that?” He asks, and something in his voice strikes Bodhi as a little tense.
“That was a joke. I mean. It’s just you look kind of… you made this look, with your eyes.” Bodhi gestures to his face helplessly. “Sorry I don’t think I should be asking all these questions. Please don’t report me to my CO.”
“There’s absolutely nothing to worry about,” Galen answers simply.
“All right then,” Bodhi says, with a salute. Galen salutes back. Bodhi torques to face the door but stops halfway and turns to Galen again. “If you don’t mind me asking, why does your division have a garden?”
Galen looks up and far, with a soft fondness at the silvery, virescent whole. “A little more than a decade ago, I was plucked from a tranquil life of farming. I sorely missed it, so I built this in my spare time.”
Bodhi only nods and carries on. The crunching grass and the mist and the foliage stay stuck in the back of his mind. It’s there when he lands on rusted ports and desert moons. It’s there when he walks through the sterile steel stretches leading up to his quarters. It’s there when his designated cargo ship pulls into the interminable black of space.
A week later, he finds himself back in the same garden. This time there is no mist, but a wind blows hard, blades of grass, fronds and vines whipping at the whitened shell of the space. This time, Galen Erso is ready to meet him. He collects a package almost identical to the last. Bodhi asks about the breeze, and Galen makes a joke about missing the inconveniences of an unpredictable ecosystem—the forces of nature, not unlike the Force of old lore. (No, that was just a malfunction, he will clarify in the coming weeks.)
“Have you ever heard of the Force, Bodhi Rook?” Galen inquires, holding the cube up to the light, eyes squinting to inspect an inscription at the side, as he did before.
Bodhi shrugs. “Only from fanatics.”
“Would you be surprised to hear that the Force has material underpinnings, then?”
“Really? I thought the Force was…” Bodhi mimes the vague flailing of the galaxy’s ubiquitous manic preachers. “Ineffable,” he says, mocking their breathy reverence.
“Have you ever thought about what agent binds each atom in the human body together? The body is made up of particulate matter, finer than the smallest grains of powder, and yet we remain whole, intact as we go through the course of our days, unknowing.”
Bodhi looks at his hands in wide-eyed dread. For a moment, he imagines his cells splitting apart and floating like dust in the wind. “No, not really,” he answers, mildly horrified.
Galen thanks him for the packet and lets him go. Time swells and contracts as he goes about his days. The world ahead looms large and ever stranger. The garden spills into the clatter of his background brain activity, long vines thrashing in a steady beat as if to nudge something out of his thoughts. He thinks about that and the baffling upwelling of grains fusing his body together, whatever it is that keeps him from disintegrating, Force or not. He looks out into a dark field and wonders if it’s reasonable to feel vertiginous over something without any measurable depth.
A week later he is back making the same delivery to Galen Erso. And then the week after, and then the next. There are usually rules against repeat deliveries to curb rebels from stealing significant operations intelligence, but Bodhi’s designated droid informs him that the Imperial scientist leading a principal project asked for a personal courier. He makes no further inquiries, only carrying on, just as he always has. Galen tells him a bit about the greenery each time, about his brief time in Lah'mu, sometimes a bit more about the Force, as hokey as it is enthralling.
On his sixth delivery, the garden is gone. Bodhi steps into the same steel door and expects to be met with another one of its strange inconveniences—from the mist to the gale to the rain to the heat. Instead, the sedate chrome stretches all the way to the edges of a once lush dome.
“You look disappointed,” Galen observes. “If you must know, the Empire’s project is currently undergoing a critical development stage. Any distractions… well, they had to go.”
“I liked it. I hate this,” Bodhi says, a little bitterly.
“So do I,” Galen admits.
Bodhi tries to shrug it off. Instead, a shaky laugh bubbles out of him. They make the usual exchange, Galen inspecting the case as he always has, Bodhi departing after a salute. In the days leading up to the next shipment, he learns about Galen Erso’s history: a defector with ties to the rebellion; a wife and a daughter lost to the cause. (Whether family is a burden or a luxury, he’s never quite sure—his instructors were always hazy on that. Whatever the case, he’s never known of family. That this information upsets him deeply is a little absurd.) He learns that the Empire’s superiors have always kept the Eadu sector under microscopic observation. That there is talk of the garden being used to smuggle unsanctioned items. That he has always been regarded with some air of suspicion. Bodhi wonders if he’s been put under microscopic watch, by association, and starts to peer a little too closely at every corner he passes, every droid he’s assigned, every tile he steps past, growing more and more neurotic as it eats at him slowly. In his ship, he looks out at the dark vacuum of space, at its unblinking stars, the glow of distant planets hovering far, and wonders if the rest of his life will always be like this, now.
One day, during a routine delivery, the back of his ship explodes. Sirens wail. White floods into his eyes.