Chapter Text
Yaddle had been awake for twenty minutes before she decided the chronometer was lying to her. It wasn't, of course. It never had been. The thing was synced to three different Temple systems and kept in order by droids who probably would have been offended at the idea of it lying to anyone. Still, she looked at it a second time, like maybe that would change the number. It didn't. She'd meant to be dressed and moving five minutes after waking up. Instead she was still sitting on the edge of her sleeping alcove, robes bunched around her knees, watching the light change outside her window, and she honestly couldn't say where that extra time had gone.
She let out a small sigh. It disappeared into the quiet of the room almost right away.
Outside, Coruscant was starting another morning that would never really feel like one. The lower levels were already buried under their usual haze of traffic and smoke, while the tall towers were just now catching the first light from the city's artificial grid. From this high up, the planet almost looked peaceful. All those speeders became tiny points of light moving between buildings, and you'd never guess how many small disasters were probably already happening down there. Yaddle liked this hour precisely because of that. There was a short stretch of time, right before the Temple properly woke up, when the whole building seemed to remember it used to be a place for quiet thought before it became whatever the galaxy needed that day. She'd learned a long time ago to enjoy that window instead of being annoyed at how short it was.
She sat there a little longer than she really needed to. A maintenance droid hummed somewhere down the hall. A door opened and shut. Someone laughed at something she'd never know the reason for. Footsteps passed her door, one set hurrying, one set trying and failing to keep up. The Temple was properly awake now. She got up at last, because the day wasn't going to wait around for her the way the chronometer had, and went to get her diplomatic robes from where she'd left them the night before. Nothing fancy. Denon wasn't the kind of assignment that called for full Jedi ceremony, and she was glad of that. The dispute waiting for her there was about docking rights at some freight station. Not important. That was exactly why she'd been sent. Important disputes got Senators. Medium ones got administrators. The really boring ones went to Jedi, and Yaddle had never minded that one bit.
She fastened her robe, checked the chronometer again — eight minutes behind now — and said, "Fine," to no one in particular, grabbed her cloak, and decided, for no good reason, to take the long way to the hangar.
The long way went past the crèche.
She knew that. If she was being honest with herself, she'd known it the whole time, the way you know the real reason for a small detour before you admit it out loud. It wasn't responsible. She had a shuttle waiting and a schedule that was already falling apart, and there was no reason at all for her to stop by a room full of children who had nothing to do with freight schedules on Denon. She went anyway. In her experience, those little detours usually turned out to be exactly what she needed.
The crèche was in a quieter part of the Temple, away from where the Knights and Masters usually walked. The halls were a bit wider here, decorated here and there with youngling artwork, the kind where nobody had told the kid yet that a womp rat wasn't supposed to have seven legs. It sounded different too. No hushed talk about the Senate, no one rushing toward a hangar, no adults using that careful voice they used when they thought someone important might overhear them. Just kids. And kids, thankfully, were loud. Yaddle had always found something comforting in that kind of noise, the way some people liked the sound of rain.
She stood in the doorway and let it wash over her for a second. A few younglings were eating breakfast near the far wall — she spotted Bant Eerin among them, her gill-fronds twitching like she was trying not to laugh at something the boy next to her said. Closer to the middle of the room, an instructor was working with three kids on a shared telekinesis exercise, Garen Muln and Reeft among them, a little wooden training ball hovering shakily between their hands, rising and dipping as their concentration pulled against each other. Off to the side, Quinlan Vos had clearly already given up on the actual lesson in favor of poking at something on the floor like it held the secrets of the universe. One of the kids at the ball sneezed out of nowhere, and the ball shot sideways hard enough to make everyone scramble. The instructor caught it right before it hit the wall, without even pausing whatever she'd been saying.
"Good morning, Master Yaddle," she called over, not even looking away from her students.
"Good morning."
"Off somewhere?"
"Eventually."
"Important?"
"No."
The woman smiled wider, still not looking over. "Then you're exactly where you should be."
Yaddle laughed, quiet but real, and let her eyes wander the room while the lesson kept going behind her. She knew most of these kids by sight, if not always by name. Names tended to move through Council reports and training files without ever really sticking to the small changing faces they belonged to. It struck her, like it sometimes did, how fast the years went by in here. A kid showed up barely old enough to walk, and then, what felt like one visit later, they were gone, off to apprenticeship or the wider Temple, and some other kid had already taken their spot on the cushion by the wall.
Her eyes landed on one of the benches near the edge of the room.
Obi-Wan Kenobi. She placed the name without much trouble. She knew it from his file, the way names moved past a Council member's desk without ever really being remembered properly, though she was pretty sure she'd never actually spoken to the boy himself. He sat a little apart from the others, elbows on his knees, chin resting in one hand, watching the telekinesis exercise like he actually meant it. He didn't look lonely. That was the thing that caught her attention before she'd even decided to pay attention to anything. He looked like someone who had already picked his spot and was completely fine with it, which was a different thing entirely from being left out.
When the wooden ball dropped for the third time, he smiled, small and private, and it was right in the middle of that smile that he looked up and caught her watching him.
Yaddle expected him to look away. Most kids did, caught off guard by a Council member's attention. There was a kind of automatic flinch most of them hadn't unlearned yet, the sense that being noticed by someone that senior was some kind of small emergency. Obi-Wan didn't look away. He held her gaze for a second in a way that felt strange coming from someone that young, then looked down at his hands, then at the instructor, then back at her, some small decision working itself out in under three seconds, before he got up and started walking toward her.
He walked the way very small kids walk when they're trying really hard not to look nervous, which is to say, way too carefully, in a way that doesn't fool anyone and is kind of endearing because of that. He stopped in front of her at a distance that felt neither too close nor too far, like he'd measured it out, and looked up.
"Master Yaddle?"
"Yes?"
"I need to ask you something." A short pause. "It's important."
There wasn't any drama in how he said it. No kid's usual excitement about announcing something big. He said it like someone reporting a fact he wished wasn't true, and that, more than the words themselves, made Yaddle give him her full attention instead of the polite half-attention she might've given any other youngling's morning worry.
"That does sound important," she said, and nodded toward the low bench across from her. "Then sit, and tell me."
He climbed up onto the edge of it, feet not quite reaching the floor, and for a few seconds said nothing. Yaddle didn't fill the silence. She'd learned a long time ago that kids, unlike most adults, usually needed quiet more than prompting to get to a hard thing. Adults filled silence because they were scared of what was in it. Kids, if you just gave them space, usually walked through the quiet on their own and came out the other side with the words they needed.
Eventually Obi-Wan took a breath, small shoulders rising with it, and started.
"I keep having the same dream," he said. "I've had it a bunch of times now. More than four, I think. I stopped counting after the third one because it kept being the same. There's a place. I don't know how I know the name, but I do. It's called Korda Six. And there's a battle there. A big one. Lots of ships, and people fighting on the ground too, not just in the air."
He wasn't really looking at her anymore, more like looking through her, his face gone distant in the way people get when they're describing something they're seeing right now instead of just remembering it.
"There's a man there," he went on, "and he's important. Not important like a Senator. More like, everyone listens to him and would follow him anywhere, important. I don't know his name. I've tried to remember it every single time and I never can. It's like the dream just won't give me that part. But I know what he looks like. His armor's dark gray, mostly, with red on it. Red on the shoulders, and red around the edge of his helmet, right where the eyes look out. And he's got a cape. Red, like the rest. And on his chest there's a shape, painted on, yellow, kind of like a diamond turned sideways."
He only paused long enough to breathe, not really for her, just for himself, and kept going before she could've said anything even if she wanted to.
"There's other people around him too. I know things about them even though nobody tells me. Like I already just know it, before I know it, if that makes sense. There's a group flying above everyone else, with jetpacks, and their leader is jealous of somebody, another one of the man's soldiers, someone younger. Like he thinks that younger guy gets treated better and he hates it. And there's someone else, on the other side, who isn't fighting fair at all. He set the whole thing up to look like a real battle when it isn't. He tricked everyone into thinking they needed help, so the important man would come and walk right into it."
His hands had slowly curled into little fists while he talked, though his voice never got louder. If anything it got quieter, more careful, like he was working up to something.
"The important man ends up alone," he said. "Stuck somewhere, cut off, and he calls for the jetpack guys to come help, and they don't. The jealous one pulls them back on purpose and tells everyone it's too dangerous down there, that there's nothing left to save, so nobody even tries to look for him properly. And then the guy who tricked everyone finds him. While he's alone. And—"
He stopped there. His jaw tightened up, and for one second he looked a lot older than the rest of his face.
"He dies," Obi-Wan said, very quiet. "Every single time I have the dream, that's how it ends. I get there too late, or I don't get there at all, and I just see it happen. Or I wake up right after."
He went quiet after that, like he'd finally said everything he'd come to say, and sat there with his fists still curled up in his lap, looking, for the first time since he started, a little unsure. Not unsure about the dream. Unsure about what she'd think of it now that it was out.
Yaddle let a long moment pass before saying anything, letting all of it settle instead of jumping straight to a question. She'd listened to plenty of scared kids describe plenty of scary dreams over her long life, and she knew what those usually sounded like. Halting. Broken up. Circling back on themselves, looking for reassurance every couple sentences. This hadn't been that. This had been more like a report, told start to finish without hardly a breath spared for how she'd react, the kind of story someone tells after they've gone over it so many times alone that the telling itself becomes automatic.
"That's a lot to carry by yourself," she said finally. "How long has this dream been coming to you?"
"Months," he said.
"And it hasn't changed? The details stay the same each time?"
"The important ones do. Where it happens. What he's wearing. What happens to him at the end." He hesitated. "Sometimes I notice something new, but it's never anything that changes the ending. Just more of the same picture."
"You said you know things about the people around him that nobody tells you. The jealous one. The one who tricks him. How do you know these things, if the dream doesn't show you any of it directly?"
Obi-Wan's face scrunched up with the effort of trying to explain it honestly instead of just agreeably. "I don't know how to say it right. It's not like watching something and figuring it out. It's more like, I already know it, the whole time, kind of like how you already know your own name without having to work it out every time someone asks. I just know the jetpack guy is jealous. I know the other guy lied on purpose. I never see it happen anywhere in the dream. It's just already true before the dream even starts."
"And has the Force given you dreams like this before? This clear? This certain?"
"No." That answer came fast, no hesitation at all this time. "That's the part I don't get. I've had dreams before that felt kind of like the Force. A little strange, a little more real than regular dreaming. But not like this. This one keeps coming back exactly the same, and it just gives me all this information I have no way of actually having. I don't get why it's doing this now, when it never did before."
That last part, coming up for the second time now, was what settled cold in Yaddle's chest. Not the nervous uncertainty of a kid feeling out a new gift for the first time, which was common enough and usually nothing to worry about. This was something closer to someone who already had a solid sense of what the Force usually did for him, noticing, with real unease, that something was off. Kids didn't usually talk about the Force like it was a steady, familiar thing that could suddenly start acting weird. They talked about it like it was new, every time, every sensation a first. Obi-Wan talked about it like an old, careful hand talking about a tool that had suddenly started behaving strangely in his grip.
She didn't say any of that out loud.
"Have you told anyone else about this?" she asked instead.
"I tried. Once." He looked a little embarrassed. "They said dreams can be confusing sometimes, and that I shouldn't worry about it too much."
"That's often true, about dreams in general."
"But this isn't only a dream." No frustration in it, no hurt at not being believed. Just a flat statement of something he considered plain fact.
"No," Yaddle said slowly. "I don't think it is, either."
Something in his shoulders relaxed a little at that, even though he still didn't look completely at ease, and after a second he took another breath, smaller than the ones before, and asked the question she realized only then the whole conversation had been building toward.
"Master Yaddle." He looked up at her, uncertain in a way his voice hadn't been through any of the rest of it. "Will you go there? To Korda Six? Before it happens?"
The question caught her a little off guard, though she didn't let it show. She'd expected to spend the rest of this conversation gently talking him down from his own certainty, not being asked, this directly, to act on it.
"That's not a small thing you're asking," she said carefully. "Korda Six is close to Mandalorian space. If this battle is real, if the man in your dream is who I think a description like that might mean, then whatever's happening there is a Mandalorian matter, and Mandalorians don't usually take kindly to Jedi showing up uninvited in the middle of their conflicts. It's not the kind of place a Jedi just visits for no reason."
"But if you don't go, he dies," Obi-Wan said, and there was something close to pleading under the flatness now, the first real crack in his composure all morning. "And if he dies, it's not just him. That's what the dream keeps trying to tell me. It's not only about him."
Yaddle studied him for a while. Small, serious, way too sure of himself for a kid not even five years old, asking her to fly alone into someone else's war based on a recurring dream she had no way to check and no real reason to trust.
"I won't promise you I'll go," she said finally, picking her words carefully. "I already have a duty waiting for me, a diplomatic matter on Denon, and I can't just drop that because of a child's dream, no matter how much it bothers me. But Denon isn't far from where you say this battle will happen. If the Force gives me any real reason to think your dream is more than a dream, once I'm already that close, I promise you I'll look. That's all I can honestly give you right now."
It wasn't, she could tell, exactly the answer he'd hoped for. But he thought it over with a seriousness way beyond his age, and after a moment he nodded, slow, like he'd decided it was enough to go on.
"Thank you," he said.
"You're welcome, young one."
He slid down off the bench, hesitated, then gave her an oddly formal little bow, more like something a Padawan would do than a crèche kid, and Yaddle bowed back just as seriously, and watched him walk back toward the others, where Bant scooted over without a word to make room for him. Within a minute he'd folded himself right back into the noise of the room, like he hadn't just said anything stranger that morning than asking for more breakfast.
Yaddle stayed a little longer than she meant to, watching him without really watching him, turning the whole conversation over in her head. There was nothing about it she could point to and call proof of anything. A really vivid, oddly put-together recurring dream in a Force-sensitive kid wasn't, on its own, something to panic about. She'd heard a hundred versions of visions and premonitions over her centuries at the Temple, and most of them turned out to be nothing more than a growing mind testing out the strange new range of its own senses. Still, she couldn't quite set this one down the way she'd set down all the others, and when she finally got up to head to the hangar, way later than she'd meant to, some part of her stayed behind in that room, with a boy who talked about the Force like someone much older, and who'd gone very still describing a stranger's death.
---
Denon turned out to be exactly as boring as she'd expected, and she was grateful for that in a way she didn't think too hard about at the time.
The orbital station wrapped around the planet in a huge, busy tangle of docking arms and cargo platforms, freighters coming and going nonstop, their engine trails bright against the dark past the station's thin artificial air. Loading crews yelled at each other in a dozen languages while automated systems moved cargo containers along tracks with more patience than any of the actual people around them seemed to have. The dispute itself, once she actually sat down to hear it, turned out to be a lot less complicated than the people arguing over it. Two shipping companies had both been given the same docking priority by mistake, and each one was completely convinced the other had rigged the schedule on purpose. Both of them were technically right. Neither one had actually lost any money, they'd just lost the chance to make a little more than they'd hoped, which wasn't quite the same complaint either side seemed to think they were making.
She sat through hours of representatives insulting each other in very polite, very technical language. One called the other's scheduling practices "creative." The other called the first one "unusually flexible with the truth." The station administrator, sitting between them, looked like a man calculating how far it was to the nearest airlock. When Yaddle finally asked to see the original manifests instead of either side's summary, the whole thing fell apart within the hour. A clerical error from three months back, made worse twice over by scheduling systems that didn't talk to each other properly, made worse again by an administrator who'd tried to quietly fix it himself instead of telling anyone and had only made it worse. No conspiracy. No bad intentions. Just ordinary bureaucracy left alone too long, which Yaddle found weirdly comforting, like she usually did in these situations. The worst betrayals in the galaxy rarely showed up first in paperwork errors.
By the time she left, both companies had agreed to a new schedule, with the particular chill of people who'd each gotten most, but not all, of what they wanted, and the administrator thanked her so hard he nearly teared up, which she accepted as gracefully as she could manage.
She boarded her shuttle for the trip back without thinking much about Korda Six at all. There was no reason it should've followed her. The job had been about freight schedules and clerical mix-ups, nothing to do with Mandalorians or battlefields or armored men dying in trenches, and for most of the flight back she thought about neither, her mind stuck instead on the small, satisfying feeling of a minor problem solved properly.
It was the navigation display that ruined that peace, updating itself with the quiet chime that meant a new star system had come into range. Her eyes drifted to it out of habit more than anything, tracing the route between Denon and Coruscant, and there, close enough to the path to catch her eye without her even looking for it, sat a small labeled dot she recognized before she'd even finished reading it.
*Korda Six.*
She leaned in a little. It wasn't directly on her route. But it was close. Close enough that a small detour would cost her a few hours, not days. Close enough that nobody looking at her flight log later would think twice about a slight change logged as a courtesy stop.
There was no real reason to go. She reminded herself of that plainly, the way she might've reminded a Padawan about to make a bad call. She had no Republic business at Korda Six, no diplomatic reason, no intelligence report suggesting anything was even happening there. The battle Obi-Wan described might not be real at all. It could just be an unusually vivid nightmare dressed up with specific-sounding details a clever young mind had pulled together from half-remembered bits of Temple lore about Mandalorian conflicts. And if it was real, if it was exactly like he'd said, a Mandalorian matter playing out right on Mandalorian space's doorstep, then it was exactly the kind of conflict she had no business getting involved in at all. Jedi didn't go uninvited into Mandalorian wars. There was too much bad history between the two groups, enough blood on both sides that even a well-meaning Jedi showing up out of nowhere in the middle of one of their battles was just as likely to get met with suspicion and hostility as gratitude. More likely, if she was honest.
And yet.
She closed her eyes and reached, gently, into the Force around her. Not looking for anything specific. Just listening, the way she'd listened every day of her long life. At first she thought what she felt was just memory, the morning's conversation replaying in her head. Then she realized it wasn't memory at all.
It was hard to put into words, even to herself. The Force was always there, of course. She'd spent centuries steeped in it, long past the point of noticing its presence as anything special, the same way a fish probably stops noticing water. There were moments when its currents got sharper, when a feeling arrived strong enough to feel almost like certainty. This wasn't quite that either. It felt like the whole field of what could happen had suddenly pulled itself toward one single point. Not a voice. Not a picture. Not even really a warning.
A place.
She opened her eyes. Korda Six sat right there on the display, an unremarkable little dot among a thousand others, and for one strange, stretched-out second she felt like she could sense, faintly, just how much weight some unresolved moment there carried. Not what was happening. Not who was involved. Just the plain fact that it mattered, the way you can sense someone holding their breath in a room without needing to see who it is. A place where something could still break. Or maybe already had.
She thought, distantly, about old stories she'd heard from Jedi with senses she'd never had herself. Talk of shatterpoints, moments where the Force showed exactly where a future could crack. She'd never had that gift. She didn't have it now either. Whatever this was, it was smaller and stranger than that, and a lot less sure of itself.
It was just a pull. A pressure. A direction.
"All right," she said out loud, to nobody, and changed course, telling herself, without much real conviction, that she'd only look from a distance, quietly, and back off the second it looked like her being there would cause more harm than good.
---
The battle was still going on when she dropped out of hyperspace above Korda Six, and she knew it a full second before her sensors even confirmed it, the same wordless, pressing way she'd known, hours earlier, that this detour wasn't optional.
An ion cannon strike caught her shields at a distance, jolting the whole ship sideways hard enough that she had to physically grab the controls to keep from losing control completely. Warning lights lit up red across the console.
"What in the Force," she muttered, correcting course, and brought the ship lower through a sky already smeared with smoke and the bright, ugly bloom of explosions on the ground below.
This wasn't the aftermath of something. Obi-Wan hadn't described a memory to her. He'd described something that was happening right now, and whatever careful plan she'd had about watching quietly from a distance fell apart the second she felt, through the Force, just how much was happening down there. Too many people in too much pain, all at once, for caution to survive contact with it.
She landed the shuttle behind a low ridge and was out of her seat and moving before the engines had even finished powering down. The scene past the ridge was chaos, the specific, awful kind you only get on a battlefield falling apart in real time. Mandalorian armor flashing through drifting smoke, blaster fire cutting bright, senseless lines across scorched ground, a transport further off already fully on fire and past saving. She felt the wounded before she even saw them, pain pressing in from a dozen directions at once, and didn't let herself pause to think about which way to go first, or about what these men were probably going to think of a small green Jedi showing up out of nowhere in the middle of their private war.
The first man she found was pinned under the crushed frame of a downed carrier, one leg trapped, breathing already shallow and wet in a way she didn't like. She lifted the wreckage off him with the Force and he dragged himself free, staring up at her with a look that was half disbelief and half real alarm, the look of a man who'd just watched something out of an old story step directly into the worst day of his life and didn't know yet whether to be grateful or scared.
"Jedi?" His voice cracked on the word, and one hand twitched toward the blaster on his hip before some faster instinct stopped it.
"Yes," Yaddle said, already moving past him. "I'm not here for you or your fight. Only to keep you from bleeding out in the middle of it."
He didn't answer, and she didn't wait for one. She worked through the wreckage fast and steady, the kind of calm that comes from doing this exact thing too many times over too many centuries to let panic slow her down, hers or anyone else's. A soldier with a shattered leg, stabilized and dragged behind a rock. Another bleeding badly from the throat, slowed but not stopped by the time she moved on. A third pulled half-conscious from under a smoking pile of durasteel, burns spreading up one side of his armor where the plating had failed. More than one of them gave her the same wary, startled look the first guy had, that little flicker of suspicion underneath the relief, the old inherited wariness of people who'd learned across generations to expect very little kindness from Jedi and a lot more interference. She let it slide. There wasn't time to earn their trust properly tonight, only to be as plainly and obviously useful as she could manage, so the wariness would just have to wait its turn.
She'd barely finished that thought when another explosion rolled across the valley, and something tugged at her attention, sharp and sudden, not toward any of the wounded nearby, but east, toward a patch of ground still wrapped in smoke.
She froze for half a second, feeling it again, that same strange narrowing feeling from the shuttle, sharper now, more insistent, the Force pulling itself down toward one single point the way water pulls toward the lowest spot in the ground.
She ran.
The Force carried her faster than her own legs could've managed, across broken trenches and around wreckage, blaster fire passing close enough overhead that she felt the heat of it more than saw the light. Someone shouted something behind her that she didn't stop to hear.
Then she saw it. A heavy repulsor tank sitting right over a trench, its cannon lowering slow and mechanical toward whatever was waiting below.
She saw the man in the trench a half second later and knew him right away, not from his face, which she couldn't see under the helmet, but from the armor itself, exactly like it had been described to her that morning by a four-year-old sitting on a bench with his hands folded in his lap. Gunmetal gray. Red across the shoulders. Red trim around a T-shaped visor. A yellow diamond, half-covered now in scoring and blood, on the chestplate. A cape, torn and filthy, unmistakably red.
Standing across from him, weapon already up, was another armored figure whose whole posture made her stomach drop before she'd even worked out why.
The Force didn't so much warn her as scream, wordless and total, and she was already moving before the thought had even finished forming.
The other man fired.
She caught the bolt the only way there was time left to catch it, not stopping it outright, which was more than even she could manage in half a second, but grabbing hold of its momentum through the Force and yanking it sideways, off its line, so it tore into the trench wall a meter wide of its target instead of straight through the chest of the man it was aimed at. The ground exploded in a spray of dirt and melted permacrete. The man in gunmetal gray staggered but stayed on his feet.
The attacker's head turned. Even through his helmet she could feel his surprise, and under it, almost right away, something colder and more calculating, the reaction of a man far less rattled by a sudden Jedi than any regular soldier would've been, like he'd already planned for the possibility of interference and just hadn't expected it to look like this.
Yaddle dropped into the trench between them before he could raise his weapon again.
"No," she said. It wasn't loud. It didn't need to be.
The Force knocked him off his feet and threw him back hard into the trench wall, his weapon skidding away. Above them the tank's turret started, slowly, to turn back toward them.
She didn't wait to see if he'd get back up. She turned to the tank instead, reaching through the Force and grabbing hold of its turret mechanism like closing a hand around a wrist, and twisted. Metal screamed. The cannon wrenched sideways on its mount and fired a second later into empty ground well clear of them both, and Yaddle pushed again, harder, feeling the whole heavy thing rock unsteadily on its treads before it finally tipped over with a long grinding crash. A hatch popped open somewhere on its side as the pilot scrambled to get out. She sealed it shut again with a small, distracted gesture, more worried, right now, about the man behind her than whoever was stuck inside.
He was worse off than she'd first thought. His armor had failed across the chest in at least two spots, one side of his helmet scorched black, blood already showing along a seam in the plating.
"Can you walk?" she asked.
"I can fight." His voice, muffled through the cracked helmet, was rough but steady, the voice of a man for whom admitting weakness probably cost more than enduring it did.
"That wasn't my question."
A pause, and then, somehow, almost a laugh. "Yes. I can walk."
"Good. Then don't move fast."
"I have men out there."
"I know. We'll find them. Slowly."
She reached into him through the Force, feeling out the damage under the armor with the same careful attention she'd given every wounded man on this field. Bad. Really bad. But not, if she moved carefully, beyond what she could hold off for now. She couldn't knit shattered ribs back together, not here, not with everything else still pulling at her attention across the valley. She could slow the bleeding. She could steady lungs that were starting, dangerously, to struggle. She could lend him just enough borrowed strength to stand on his own, which she suspected mattered a lot more to a man like him than being carried would have.
His breathing eased, slowly, under her hand. She pulled back. "Now."
He got up. His knees nearly buckled right away, and she caught the fall before it happened, an invisible hand under him that he could feel but not see.
"I said walk," she told him.
"I am."
"With help."
"I noticed."
They climbed out of the trench together, the man who'd attacked him left behind where he'd fallen, forgotten for now in the more urgent business of the wounded and the living. Around them the shape of the battle had already started to shift. The Mandalorian line, which had been close to falling apart when she first got there, was starting to hold together again, small pockets of soldiers finding each other across the smoky ground. Whatever the trap had been meant to do, it hadn't quite worked. Not anymore.
She found more wounded as they went, the armored man limping along beside her no matter how many times she told him to slow down, stopping for each one in turn. A soldier with a crushed chest, breathing wet and rattling, stabilized just enough to survive being moved. Another with a cut artery in one arm, bleeding stopped before it could take him. A third pulled half-conscious from under a wrecked supply carrier, more scared than hurt once she'd checked him over properly. There were more survivors than she'd expected, scattered and dazed across the field but alive, and word about the man walking beside her started spreading faster than either of them could keep up with, and along with it, she noticed, a wariness aimed at her that didn't fully go away even as more men lowered their weapons. She'd expected that. Gratitude and suspicion rarely showed up one at a time, in her experience.
"Mand'alor!"
The shout went up from somewhere off to their left, and heads turned across the field in a ragged wave. The man beside her raised one hand, a small, economical gesture, and it was answered right away, soldiers breaking cover and moving toward him with an urgency that had nothing to do with orders and everything to do with plain relief.
Yaddle felt something else shift in the Force as they gathered, quieter than the sharp break she'd felt and answered back on the shuttle, more like a held breath finally, carefully let go. A future that had, until very recently, seemed set to close itself around that trench for good, opening instead onto something else. Something not yet written.
The armored man looked out at the men gathering around him, and something in his posture went hard.
"Montross," he said.
Nobody answered.
"Where is Montross?"
Still nothing. He turned slowly, looking over the faces around him, and Yaddle watched understanding move through the group in stages. First confusion. Then a slow, uneasy dawning. And finally, on more than one face, something that looked a lot like guilt.
"He pulled Vertigo Squad back," someone said finally, not meeting his commander's eyes. "Said the position was overrun. Said there was nothing left down here to save."
"It wasn't," the man said. His voice had gone very quiet and very flat, in a way Yaddle guessed was a lot more dangerous than shouting would've been. "I was down there the whole time. It wasn't overrun."
Nobody had an answer for that either. The silence that followed felt different than the one before it, heavier, more final, the sound of a suspicion turning, all at once, into a fact everyone already knew.
"Vizsla was here," the man went on, and it was only now, hearing the name out loud, that Yaddle understood exactly who she'd thrown against that trench wall less than an hour ago. "In the trench. Himself."
Several of the men raised their weapons at that, a quick, angry motion, murmurs of *Death Watch* moving through the group like a current finding its level. Yaddle stood a little apart from it, watching the betrayal settle over all of them, a truth that would've, in some other version of this same afternoon, been buried right along with the man now standing in front of her, left to die quietly in a cut-off trench with nobody left alive who knew enough to ask the right questions.
She looked down at her own hands and found them shaking, just slightly, from everything the last hour had asked of them. She closed them into loose fists until it passed.
The Force hadn't brought her here to win the whole battle, or to undo whatever violent history had been circling this system for years before she'd ever heard the name Korda Six from a small boy on a crèche bench. It had brought her to one trench. One man. One narrow moment where a killing blow that should have landed, by every reasonable measure, hadn't.
That was all, for now. It would have to be enough.
---
The survivors put together a rough perimeter as the light started to fail, and the man she'd pulled out of the trench wouldn't let her treat him any further until he'd accounted for most of his surviving men himself, a stubbornness Yaddle found a little funny, honestly, given everything else she'd already learned about him in one afternoon. It was well past dark before she finally got him to sit still long enough to finish what she'd started in the trench, and later still before the wary looks from the men around their small fire settled into something closer to grudging, uncertain trust.
"You are a remarkably difficult man to heal," she told him, working the last of the deep bruising out of his ribs with careful pressure through the Force.
"I've been called worse."
"That wasn't meant as a compliment."
"I figured."
He sat very still, which clearly cost him something, watching her work in the dim light of a portable lamp someone had rigged up nearby, his helmet finally off, showing a face that looked, right then, a lot older and more tired than she guessed he usually let anyone see.
"You were close to dying," she said, once the worst of it had eased under her hands.
"I know."
"You remember it?"
"The tank. Vizsla standing over me." His jaw tightened at the memory. "I remember thinking that was it. And then you were just there. A Jedi. On Korda Six, of all the places you could've picked to show up." There was an edge to it, not quite hostile, but not exactly trusting either. "Forgive me if I don't just take that at face value."
"You're owed an explanation, and I plan to give you one," Yaddle said. "Though I'll warn you now, it isn't a very satisfying one."
"I've had a long day. My standards for satisfying have gone way down."
"The Force," she said. "And a youngling."
That got her a sharper look than before, more skeptical than confused. "A child sent a Jedi Master into the middle of a Mandalorian civil war."
"He didn't send me anywhere," Yaddle said. "He told me a dream. I chose, on my own, to act on it, and I'll tell you honestly, I very nearly didn't. Jedi don't make a habit of getting involved in your people's conflicts, and I didn't come here lightly, or with any kind of Council approval behind me. I came because a four-year-old initiate described you to me this morning in more detail than I could easily brush off."
That seemed to land more honestly than any reassurance would have. He didn't say anything for a second, watching her with the same careful, sizing-up look he probably gave most things that didn't explain themselves right away.
"His name is Obi-Wan Kenobi," she went on. "A crèche initiate at our Temple, not even five years old. He described a recurring dream, the same one, several times over a few months. Dark gray armor. Red at the shoulders. A red cape. A yellow mark, here—" she touched her own chest, lightly, where the diamond sat scored into his plate, "—shaped like a diamond."
He looked down at himself, at the armor now stripped off and set beside him, streaked with blood and scoring, the yellow shape still faintly visible under the grime. "That's a lot more specific than a bad dream."
"I thought so too."
"And he told you I'd die."
"He told me that if the man in his dream died, the Force showed him a galaxy that burned." She let that sit for a second before going on. "I don't know exactly what that means. I'm not sure he does either. But I didn't think it was smart to just ignore the warning, so I changed course, and found you exactly where he said a man in your armor would be, dying exactly the way he described."
He was quiet for a while, turning that over with the same careful attention he seemed to bring to everything. "A child," he said finally, "knew about this. About Korda Six. About Vizsla. About all of it. Before it happened."
"So it seems."
"How?"
"I don't know," Yaddle admitted. "I asked him the same thing, and got the same answer you are about to give me."
That got a rough laugh out of him, unexpectedly, one that clearly cost his bruised ribs more than it was worth, judging by the wince that followed. "Neither do I," he said once he'd recovered.
"Then maybe," Yaddle said, letting herself smile a little, "the two of you have something in common."
He held out a hand, and she took it, his grip a lot steadier now than it had been an hour earlier. "I owe him my life," he said. "This kid."
"No," Yaddle said, gently, letting go of his hand. "You owe the Force that, if you owe anyone at all. He was just the one who listened to it."
He thought about that, and nodded slowly, something working itself out behind his tired eyes. "What'd you say his name was again?"
"Obi-Wan Kenobi."
"I'll remember it."
"I imagine you will."
He looked out over the battlefield then, at the gathered survivors, the wounded being carried off toward whatever shelter they could find, the grim work already starting of accounting for the dead, and then back at her, and something in the way he held himself shifted, more formal now, like he'd only just remembered they hadn't properly introduced themselves.
"Jaster Mereel," he said.
"I know who you are," Yaddle told him.
"That makes one of us with less reason to be polite about it, then." Something that might've, on a less exhausted face, turned into a real smile touched the corner of his mouth. "Master Yaddle, was it?"
"It is."
Neither of them said anything else for a moment. Around them, Korda Six kept doing its slow, grim work, the dead gathered up as carefully as anyone could manage, the wounded looked after, the truth about Montross already spreading through the survivors in hushed, angry whispers that she suspected would follow him a long way, wherever he ran off to next. And Jaster Mereel, against every reasonable expectation the day had started with, was alive to hear it spread.
Yaddle looked up. The sky over Korda Six had gone fully dark now, stars starting to show through the last thin traces of smoke, and none of it looked any different than it had the night before, or the one before that. Coruscant was still out there somewhere. The Republic was still there. The galaxy, as far as she could tell from where she stood, hadn't burned.
Not yet.
Maybe, she thought, that was the part that bothered her most. Obi-Wan had never told her that saving this one man would fix everything, would smooth some huge disaster away with one tidy save. He'd only told her what would happen if she didn't try, and she'd learned, the hard way, over a very long life, that the Force rarely spoke in such neat, satisfying lines. Tonight it had given her something stranger than a clean ending. It had given her a moment. A choice. One narrow crack in a future that had, until she showed up, seemed completely decided.
She thought about a small boy on a crèche bench, hands folded carefully in his lap, trying to explain why he already knew the name of a world he'd never had any reason to visit.
Korda Six.
She closed her eyes for a second and reached again into the quiet currents of the Force around her. It didn't give her anything dramatic back. No confirmation, no big reveal, no clear voice telling her she'd done exactly and only what needed doing. It just felt, in a way she couldn't have explained to anyone who hadn't stood exactly where she was standing, a little different than it had that morning. Not transformed. Not fixed. Just adjusted, somehow, in some small way she figured she wouldn't fully understand for a long time yet, if she ever did at all.
One life saved, on an unremarkable border world, because a very small boy hadn't let a very old woman brush off his dream as just a dream.
Sometimes, Yaddle thought, watching Jaster Mereel push himself carefully to his feet to go stand with what was left of his men, that was exactly how history got started.