Archive of Our Own ^beta

49 standard years before Scarif

Bazanis is 5 standard years and 10 standard weeks old when he joins the School. His mothers cry when he leaves them, but it is an honour and a duty, and Bazanis is more than old enough to understand both those words. The Force is strong in him. He will be strong in it.

He is greeted at the gates by an impossibly composed older girl. She’s wearing the same dull grey robes he was issued, and the Force swirls comfortingly around her, bright against her dark skin. She towers above him.

“We welcome you, Baze Malbus,” she says. He understands now that Bazanis was the child his mothers wept for; Baze is the student who will earn his place here. “May your hands be steady, may your heart be clear, and may the Force be with you.”

It will be. He knows that. He knows.

The girl is called Vash. She takes him to the First Garden, where all the new students must come to learn patience. Baze wants to tell her that he is already patient, but the words catch in his throat. He is Baze now, not Bazanis, and if Vash tells him he must learn patience, then it is his honour and his duty to do so.

The First Garden is a thousand smells and colours. Thick grass -- a strange, alien green, not the comforting blue of home -- coats the ground, flowers and trees and vines and bushes crowd against each other, invitingly dark blues and greens and greys, stark yellows and reds, even a bizarre splash of white creeping vine tangling its way up a blue-grey tree trunk. The Force flows powerfully through it all, in every rush of life and spray of colour.

It’s beyond imagining. Tears prick at Baze’s eyes.

“What are you feeling?” Vash asks him.

Baze doesn’t know. He wishes his mothers were here -- any of them. Ma-ni, with her strong arms and endless hugs and real, solid certainty. Ma-tl, who would have put herself between him and Vash however much it embarrassed him, shielding from the world even though he was Baze now. Ma-wen, who had cried and cried, whose tears now would have distracted Vash from Baze’s wet eyes.

He wants his mothers.

“I don’t know,” he says, because Jedis are brave and honourable and answer truthfully, even when it’s hard.

“Hold onto it,” Vash says. She sounds so wise, so certain. The distance between them stretches out like a chasm. “One day you will understand.”

46 standard years before Scarif

Chirrut is 8 years old when Uncle sends him to the School. 8 Jehda years old, he must learn to say: 5 standard years. But he doesn’t feel 5, he feels 8. He’s seen 8 winters and 8 storms, and he’s halfway through his ninth blossoming, even if he was too young to remember most of them.

A boy a few years older than him is waiting at the gates. He looks strong -- if they become friends, maybe he will let Chirrut ride on his back like Uncle does when they play at bantha herders. Did when they played, Chirrut corrects himself. Uncle doesn’t have time for him anymore. But he has sent Chirrut to the Tanfor Academy all the way in Tanfori, where he can make friends and learn to use the Force, and one day he can come back and help Uncle keep Jedha safe, and maybe all Chirrut’s new friends will come with him and they can protect Jedha together.

“We welcome you, Chirrut Îmwe,” the boy says. “May your hands be steady, may your heart be clear, and may the Force be with you.”

The boy stands there, studying him. Chirrut straightens up to his full height, all 19.3 collits, and studies him right back. The boy is wearing the same robes as Chirrut, but where they are new and ill-fitting on Chirrut, they look worn and comfortable on the boy, decorated with the faded stains and mended tears Chirrut associates with all his favourite clothes. Chirrut wants the boy to like him. They can go exploring together; Chirrut is small, he can get places the boy can’t.

“Is the Force with you?” the boy asks, then immediately shuts his mouth like he said something bad.

“The Force is with everyone,” Chirrut says, because that’s what Uncle told him. “And we are all with the Force.”

The boy frowns. “I’m Baze,’ he says. “I need to take you to the garden.”

Baze tells him everyone comes to the First Garden when they start at school. It’s to learn patience. Uncle always says Chirrut has the patience of a starving Loth-cat and none of the charm, but he laughs when he says it and ruffles Chirrut’s hair, so Chirrut has never minded. Loth-cats are cunning and loyal.

The garden is huge. Chirrut has never seen so many plants in a single place, not even during the blossoming. He wants to climb the trees and lie on the grass and jump in the pond all at once. This is where he’s going to learn patience? He wants to start exploring immediately.

He turns to grin at Baze, who is frowning again.

“What are you feeling?” Baze asks him. It sounds like the way he greeted Chirrut at the gates, like a test.

Chirrut thinks before he answers. He feels like he does before Uncle returns from a long trip -- happy-excited-nervous-now. But Baze is still frowning, and Chirrut doesn’t want to get this wrong, not now, not today.

“Patient?” Chirrut tries.

Baze doesn’t say anything. Stung, Chirrut feels his cheeks heating. He didn’t meant to get it wrong, and now Baze won’t be his friend and maybe he won’t ever get to explore in the garden, and he’ll have to go back to Uncle and tell him he can’t protect Jedha because he couldn’t even answer one question, and Uncle will pretend not to mind but he will, just like all the other times Chirrut has let him down.

Chirrut clenches his hands. He won’t cry. He won’t.

“Ah,” Baze says, and it sounds relieved. “Hold onto that feeling. One day you will understand.”

43 standard years before Scarif

Baze doesn’t mind that Chirrut is turning 8. Baze is 11 now, he doesn’t need Chirrut following after him, all clumsy and kind and just barely Force-sensitive enough to deserve his place here. Or, no, Baze wouldn’t mind that Chirrut is turning 8 if all it meant was that Chirrut stopped being his responsibility. But when Vash turned 8, she got Baze as her novice, and when Baze turned 8, he got Chirrut, and now Chirrut is turning 8 it means some poor tiny new novice is going to show up at the gates and instead of a serious, Force-appropriate introduction to the School, they’re going to get Chirrut.

The Force in Vash is golden and liquid, flowing through her molten and brilliant. She’s a padawan, has been for nearly a standard year, and when she comes into the Seventh Garden to look in on Baze’s progress, all the flowers turn towards her, drawn by her power. Baze is not Vash yet, but he will be. The Force has always been strong in him, stronger maybe than it was in Vash when she came here, and he has worked hard for the last six years, harder than anyone but Vash knows, to be worthy of it.

And then there’s Chirrut.

Chirrut didn’t leave the First Garden for two years. He coaxed flowers from the giltsuckle and brought the wilting ivy out of hibernation; he caught an outbreak of moss blight before anyone else spotted it; he weeded and tended and watered and planted -- but he was never patient. He never listened to the Force. He treated the First Garden as a garden, either not knowing or not caring about the Force flows he was disrupting with his careful pruning.

It had taken Baze well over a year to see there was a problem, and far too long after that to convince Chirrut of this. He was small but he was stubborn. He said he liked the garden, and if their teachers didn’t mind, why should he? Then he’d tried to get Baze to climb a tree with him, and when Baze had said no he’d climbed the tree anyway, and Baze had had to follow him, because what if he’d fallen, what would Baze have said then?

But eventually Chirrut let Baze teach him how to listen to the soil, how to be in the garden without changing it, how to accept his place in this crush of life and vibrancy and remain steady through it.

“Maybe,” Chirrut had said, “this is how the First Garden teaches you patience?”

Baze didn’t find that funny.

And now Chirrut is turning 8, without Baze’s consent or approval. Chirrut says he’s not turning 8, he’s already 13 Jedha years old, which is just another reason why Chirrut shouldn’t be allowed a novice of his own. He’s too young and too easily attached -- Vash was never like that, and Baze has worked hard not to be. But some poor novice is going to turn up at the gates and their first introduction to their new life isn’t going to be tall, elegant Vash, who can now bend a standard rod of steel with her mind, or solid, dependable Baze, whose greatest Seventh Garden struggle is not to take too much pride in the quality of his own work, but Chirrut, 8 year old Chirrut, who can barely be trusted not to trip over his own two feet.

Baze is sure he was never that young.

40 standard years before Scarif

Back home, Chirrut would be turning 18 tomorrow. Instead, he’s only 11 standard years old, and his own novice is about to join him in the Fourth Garden. Amtwe is a good student; ze has the same effortless talent as Baze and Vash, and Chirrut is happy for zir.

Chirrut is happy for zir, but he is sad for himself, and he knows that neither emotion has any place in the Fourth Garden. He is less and less sure that he has any place in the Fourth Garden, either.

There is something inside him he does not trust.

He pushes it aside and recalls his First Garden exercises. The Fourth Garden is a harsh place, sand and rock where the First Garden is grass and trees, but it is a garden, it is life. He places his palms flat on the sand, lets himself be one with the ground and the ground be one with him. Each grain of sand is a connection, a part of the whole, and he’s a part of the whole. He’s here, the ground is here, the world is here, he is here in the world.

The Force trickles into him. He lets it move through the patience of the First Garden, the joy of the Second Garden, the surrender of the Third Garden. He doesn’t push or demand, he doesn’t give or take, he simply is, and the Force is, and the Force is within him.

He-- No. The Force is honest and true. There’s something inside Chirrut that makes a liar of him. A disconnect, a barrier, a wrongness. He doesn’t belong here. Students come to the Fourth Garden to learn solitude, and he can’t. He won’t.

The Force is not strong in Chirrut. It can’t compete with everything else that spills around inside him. He misses his Uncle, even now, years too late to matter. He’s more excited to see Baze than he ever is to meditate. He knows it’s wrong, but he still sneaks away to play with the traders’ children outside the Academy walls. There’s a Barabel family here for the harvest, with twins, Tala and Haneo, who are very nearly exactly his age. He’d much rather play with them than listen to the Force, even though they always leave him with bruises. He cares more about Amtwe’s progress through the gardens than he does for his own -- except when he doesn’t, and even then, the way he cares is wrong, too caught up in measuring himself against others, too attached.

“Steady,” Baze says, appearing as if summoned by Chirrut’s frustration. Chirrut doesn’t flinch.

Baze may be a padawan now, but Chirrut will still be his responsibility, just as Amtwe is Chirrut’s. Baze wears his padawan’s braid with a simple comfort, never doubting that he deserves it. He’s easy to like, easy to be around. The Force flows through him, his setbacks and difficulties only serving to teach him more. Chirrut has toyed with jealousy here as well, but it slides off Baze, meaningless -- you can only really be jealous of things you might achieve.

Popularity is not becoming in a Jedi, but in as much as it is, Baze is popular. Chirrut supposes the buzzing in his bones is gratitude, that Baze still spends time with his former novice, even though he has so many better offers.

“Chirrut,” Baze says. He sits down, cross-legged, facing Chirrut. “The Force, I saw you fighting it. You know that’s not how it goes.”

Baze, Chirrut thinks with a flash of irritation, is only 12 in Falcon-5 years. What makes him think he’s Chirrut’s master?

Baze sees the irritation, because Baze is 14 in standard years and has been a padawan since before Chirrut made it into the Fourth Garden. He’ll probably be a fully fledged Jedi before Chirrut makes it out of the Seventh. But Baze has always been more patient than Chirrut deserves. Instead of saying anything, he just lets Chirrut sit there, lets Chirrut come to him in his own time.

Chirrut does.

Chirrut tells him. Tells him that it is one thing to be slow with the Force, to travel at a fraction of the pace of everyone else. Tells him that it is one thing to be forever the slowest and forever the last, to see your own novice about to outpace you. Tells him that the Force has never been a friend, only ever a concept, more real for its effect on others than its role in Chirrut’s own universe. Tells him that all of that is one thing, but it is another, quite another, to realise that you cannot and will not ever be who you need to be, and that all this effort is wasted.

By the end, Chirrut is not crying, but only because Chirrut is nearly 18 in Jedha years, and that is far too old to cry. Baze, who is 12 in Falcon-5 years, has nothing holding him back.

Baze takes Chirrut’s hands. “You are the strongest, stubbornest, kindest person I know,” he says. “You convinced wilting ivy to grow in the Fourth Garden. No one else has ever done that. Of course you aren’t like the rest of us.”

In silence, Baze takes Chirrut’s hands and places them flat on the sand, just as they had been before. He places his own hands on top.

“My mothers called me Bazanis,” Baze says. The calluses on his palms scrape against Chirrut’s knuckles. “It’s a joke. In my Ma-ni’s language, Fal’seen, Taze is short for Tazanis, Khaze for Khazanis. But I’m called Baze after my Ma-tl’s brother. It’s not a Fal’seeni name at all. No one here knows that. Not Vash. Not Master Qui-Nu. When I came here, I decided that Baze was my Jedi name, and Bazanis was the child I’d left behind on Falcon-5. I thought I was so grown up.”

It’s the most Baze has ever told Chirrut about his past. Chirrut only found out he was from Falcon-5 by accident. Chirrut feels something a little like warmth, a lot like hunger at this show of trust, but doesn’t understand what it has to do with this, with everything wrong with him.

“You decide who you are.” Baze’s voice is firm. “The Force will see you as I do, and know its own luck.”

He nods once, as if that settles it. Maybe in Baze’s mind it does. There is no answer Chirrut can make, anyway. Instead, they refocus their attention on the sand beneath their hands, and pick up the child’s chant that Chirrut still needs to focus his mind, long after he should be beyond it: “I am one with the Force. The Force is with me. I am one with the Force. The Force is with me.”

37 standard years before Scarif

Master Qui-Nu gives Baze the day off. It’s a reward, xe says, but Baze suspects it’s more of one for xem than for him. He will still continue to do his drills and forms, his meditations and reflections, his chores, just none of it under Master Qui-Nu’s watchful eyes.

Maybe he’ll go to the Sixth Garden. Chirrut is still making his steady, stubborn way through the Gardens, half the pace but five times the thoroughness of the School’s other students. The Sixth Garden is a water structure, built on ice and steam and spheres of water suspended in the Force. It teaches acceptance. Baze spent ten standard weeks there. He tended the spinning algae, marked the central holding of the sublimated ice, and let the Force teach him what he needed to learn. Chirrut has been there for forty-two standard weeks. He has adjusted the microgravity of the ice so it can host his favourite grey-yellow algae, blooming alongside the blacks and purples Baze had tended all those years ago. He listened to the vibrations of water suspensions and pushed, cajoled and nudged against them for weeks upon weeks until he found the exact position to keep them all in motion at once, adding a slow and stately counterpoint the the rush and dance of the steam. He sits on the grass he planted himself and flicks ice crystals into the air for no reason but the pleasure of the sound as they land.

In other words, his is the same bloody-minded annoyance he has always been. Baze finds it relaxing. Vash finds it amusing. Amtwe finds it inspiring. And Chirrut doesn’t seem to care what anyone thinks of it, as long as he is allowed to continue to garden.

Today, Baze finds Chirrut asleep in the shade of the curved ice, his snores drowning out the hiss of the steam.

Asleep, Chirrut is not in conflict with the Force. He breathes it in and out as naturally as any student who is not quite ready to become a padawan. It likes his hands. Which is an odd thought for Baze to have, but he has long accepted that he will never fully comprehend the Force, and this is just one of its many oddities, the way it wraps itself into Chirrut’s solid, square-fingered hands when he sleeps.

Baze does not have to watch for long before Chirrut blinks awake.

“You think too loudly,” Chirrut says. He rolls his shoulders back. He’s been growing in the same painful fits and starts as the rest of them, his body stretching itself out into adulthood. Chirrut would say he’s already an adult -- his 14 standard years are 22 Jedha years, and Jedha’s age of majority is 20.

“You snore louder,” Baze replies. He tries not to think about the fact that he can instantly recall Chirrut’s age in Jedha years, but would have to calculate to find his own age in Falcon-5 years.

“I heard Masters Qui-Nu and Ssar talking in the Fifth Garden yesterday,” Chirrut says instead of arguing. Of course Chirrut spends time in the Fifth Garden even though he doesn’t have to. Of course. “Master Ssar says --” He puts on Master Ssar’s deep voice and round vowels, “‘Your boy is exceptional. Driven, dutiful, and with a rare natural talent.’”

A Jedi is not prideful, so Baze is a little pleased and a little embarrassed, but neither to any great extent. “Perhaps they meant you.”

Just as he’d hoped, Chirrut laughs. A year ago, that might have stung him, but he’s found balance in the work of the gardens.

“It’s rare to find someone of my talents here, certainly.” Chirrut rolls his shoulders again. “But you didn’t come here to be flattered. Has Master Qui-Nu abandoned you again?”

Baze doesn’t answer.

“Fine,” Chirrut sighs, stands up, brushes flecks of salt from his robes. “What are today’s forms?”

There’s nothing new or difficult in Baze’s first routine today. It will be a stretch for Chirrut, because it’s always a stretch for Chirrut, but nothing he can’t do if he concentrates. Baze gives him the outline.

“But you’d rather spar,” Chirrut says. It’s not a question.

“But I’d rather spar,” Baze agrees.

Baze is one of the strongest hand-to-hand fighters in the School. Chirrut is not. Sparring between the two of them has become its own ritual, complex and arcane handicaps piled on top of each other for Baze, different rules and targets and restrictions placed on both of them to vary the challenge.

Their usual spot is taken, so instead they find a chalked circle near the Third Garden. It’s shaded by bright yellow trees with plump, drooping leaves the size of Baze’s torso. Chirrut touches one on his way past, the subtlest brush of his fingers, and the Force swells at the contact.

“Eyes,” Chirrut says. Baze used to wear a blindfold, but this is harder, he has to remember to keep his eyes closed. He could open them at any moment, and only he would know he’d cheated. “And hands,” Chirrut adds.

Baze holds his hands out obediently, palms up, and Chirrut places some eggshell in each. Baze must keep hold of the shells without crushing them.

They step into the circle. Bow.

The Force sings around them. Chirrut’s breathing is soft and easy, his stance balanced, and the brightness Baze can sense around him might be anticipation. In his own hands, the eggshells are almost painfully fragile.

Chirrut swings at him on the right. His angle is just slightly too tight, and Baze can feel the attack before Chirrut himself knows where it will land. Baze blocks it with his forearm, absorbing the shock into his core. Chirrut is dancing back before Baze can go for his legs, his favourite trick when Chirrut comes in high. Chirrut has learned something, at least.

Baze waits, lets Chirrut take his breath, and is ready for him to go for the gut. This he blocks and then twists into, using Chirrut’s momentum to draw him close, getting in an elbow jab to his side as he tries and fails to mirror Baze’s turn. But where Baze’s elbow is expecting flesh, it hits bone -- Chirrut’s jumped as Baze has jabbed, and he brings his elbow down where Baze’s wrist was moments ago.

They both pull back. Baze can feel the path of Chirrut’s next attack in the Force, but there’s something not right about it, something bitter-pale where he would expect depth. Chirrut huffs a laugh and runs in again, his head down, and when Baze twists again Chirrut lets him, lets Baze pull him close enough that their breath mingles, that Baze can feel Chirrut’s chest moving against his own. Chirrut brings his bare heel down sharp onto Baze’s instep.

Baze moves into the pain, not against it, and lets it shudder through his body and into his forearm against Chirrut’s neck. He can hear Chirrut’s jaw click, and smells the blood on his breath.

Chirrut dances back again, light on his feet, and Baze lets him. Baze’s eyes are shut, his eggshells are safe, and when Chirrut goes for his left knee Baze will knock him to the ground with--

Chirrut goes for his left knee. Baze knocks him to the ground.

When Baze opens his eyes, Chirrut is looking up at him, laughing. There’s blood in Chirrut’s mouth and what will become a swelling bruise on his jaw. His eyes sparkle with amusement.

“Now, both hands tied behind your back,” he says. “And an eggshell between your teeth.”

34 standard years before Scarif

Chirrut isn’t going to be a very good Jedi. He struggles with the Force, he struggles with himself. He’s not who he should be, to walk the same path as all those who have gone before him. He can’t listen to the Force the way he should; he can’t renounce attachments the way he must.

But Chirrut doesn’t need to be a very good Jedi. That’s what people miss. That’s what Master Ssar sees in him, why Master Ssar has taken him on as a padawan. The galaxy is full of good Jedis -- generations of Bazes, Vashes and Amtwes -- and one day each of them will come across a challenge too great for them, Master Ssar says, and be thrown by that failure. The best of them will pick themselves up and be stronger for it, but for each of them it will be a time to regroup and learn, perhaps at a time when they can least afford it. Master Ssar says what Chirrut has that they don’t is that he has already failed. When he faces a challenge too great for him, he will know the feeling intimately. The time and ability that Baze, Vash or Amtwe will take to right themselves and try again, Chirrut won’t need.

Master Ssar lets him spend as much time as he likes in the Gardens, so Chirrut doesn’t really mind that he says things like that. He recognises the truth of it, and doesn’t mind that, either. There are worse things than not being exceptional.

What Master Ssar doesn’t know is that Chirrut was already at an advantage, has been ever since he put his will against the ice of the Sixth Garden and pushed. The Sixth Garden teaches acceptance. Chirrut has accepted that whatever he does, whoever he is, he will never choose to cut away the part of his heart that loves Baze, and so he’s never going to be a very good Jedi.

He doesn’t tell that to Master Ssar, and Master Ssar doesn’t ask, but Chirrut has been around Jedis for most of his life; he knows better than to think it’s a secret.

Baze is -- Baze is beautiful. He’s powerful, captivating, quite unlike the rest of the universe. His easy grace is in his every word and action. It sets a fire inside Chirrut that he has no interest at all in snuffing out.

Baze knows and doesn’t know, Chirrut thinks. It’s a neat trick of his, to see without seeing, and he has been using it on Chirrut since the first time he looked at slow, awkward failure and saw only potential.

Baze knows, because Baze once almost asked. It was nearly a standard year ago, and Master Ssar was considering taking Chirrut on despite his general Chirrut-ness. Baze was about to leave for the first of his Shili missions, and he’d not been able to look Chirrut in the eye when he said, “It might. Be easier.” Without me, were the unspoken words that made sense of his not-question. It might be easier for Chirrut to be who he was supposed to be without Baze around stopping him.

But Baze doesn’t know, also, in that maddening Baze way of his, because every time he returns from one of his Shili missions, he embraces Chirrut with his whole body, chest to chest, big arms wrapped tightly around him, cheek pressed to cheek, and whispers, “I missed you,” into his neck. And then he steps back, as if he hasn’t just poured rocket fuel on the fire inside Chirrut, and demands to see Chirrut’s latest drill or critique his form without the slightest hint that he understands what he’s doing.

The worst of it is, Baze is going to be an amazing Jedi.

31 standard years before Scarif

Baze returns to an Academy very different to the one he left. The Invasion of Naboo has shaken them all; there is a buzzing in the Force, a wrongness that cannot be righted by a single destiny. The Academy has troubles of its own -- a new disease has begun to spread on Tanfori, something creeping and painful that begins like a simple cold, and where the students are not training, they are tending to the sick.

Baze expects to find Chirrut in one of the make-shift treatment centres they have set up outside the school, but instead he finds him inside, practising his forms with a new kind of devotion.

There is a striking dummy set up in Chirrut’s bedroom now, a wooden post with three protruding lengths of wood -- arms -- around which to practice moves and blows. Three months ago, when Baze was last here, Chirrut’s practices followed Master Ssar’s almost exactly: each combination of moves slow, then fast, then slow, then as fast as possible.

There’s a small silver bell on the lowest arm now. It hangs on a black thread. Baze stands at the doorway and watches:

Slow first, hypnotically slow, Chirrut guides his hands through and over and round the arms of the dummy, each move steady and deliberate, flowing one into the other into the other as slow as treacle. The Force still loves Chirrut’s hands; some things don’t change. It dances over his fingertips, cutting a path for him through the stillness.

Time slows along with Chirrut’s hands. There is no need for a world outside this, no need for a universe that is not contained in these movements.

And then, so sudden it makes Baze’s breath catch, Chirrut switches pace. His hands flash between the arms of the dummy, in out through over, striking the sides in hard blows that ring out, flesh against wood. The central post is shaken with each blow, but the bell doesn’t ring -- each hit dampens the effect of the last, so fast and precise that the bell is near motionless.

The Force is alive around Chirrut. It breathes him in, luxuriates in his concentration and fierce, determined effort. There’s power in his every action, a power that comes only from him, a drive that has nothing to do with the Force and everything to do with Chirrut himself.

And Chirrut stops. Holds himself in position, one hand flat between the first two arms and the other about to strike the dummy below the third arm. His breathing is coming heavier. His hair is damp with sweat. He turns to the doorway, where Baze is still standing, and his whole face gives itself into a smile.

“My young friend,” he says. In every way that matters, Baze is 23 and Chirrut is 20, but in their home years, Baze is 20 and Chirrut is 32. It’s not a funny joke, but like most things about Chirrut, it’s persistent.

“My old friend,” Baze says, because he has always had a weakness for Chirrut’s stubborn nature. “I’d thought I’d find you in a treatment centre.” It’s not a reproach, just a question.

Chirrut spreads his arms, encompassing with a sweeping gesture Master Ssar, the Academy, and Tanfori itself. “I must find time for my duties, as well as the pleasure of tending to the sick.”

Baze steps forward before he can think about it, treating Chirrut’s open arms as the invitation they weren’t. He embraces Chirrut tightly for a moment, long enough to feel the goodness concentrated in him, the solidity of both muscle and soul. “I missed you,” he says, as he always does, and Chirrut, as he always does, does not respond.

Chirrut takes him to one of the treatment centres. There are rows upon rows of beds, grey-robed healers and students and Jedis moving among them purposefully. Chirrut gives him a bucket and mop, takes another mop for himself.

28 standard years before Scarif

Chirrut laughs as he delivers a side snap kick up and into Baze’s jaw. He may never see the expression on Baze’s face again, but he knows it well enough to last him a lifetime -- the affronted dignity at having been fooled into putting his weight on the wrong foot, the automatic calculation as he files this lesson away so as not to be fooled again, the faintest glimmer of pride that slow, clumsy Chirrut has come far enough to get a good kick in where so many others would fail.

He can’t see Baze rubbing his jaw, either, but he knows he’s doing that, too. Chirrut’s lucky he spent so long categorising everything Baze did while he still could; the inappropriate, unbecoming, un-Jedi-like love that burns inside him has given him this one gift, at least.

“Let me see your eggshells, old man,” Baze demands.

Chirrut holds his hands open. He knows he’s kept them whole and undamaged, just as he knows Baze will--

“You cracked them!” Baze lies.

“You’d lie to a blind man?” Chirrut parries. “Where is your honour now, Jedi?”

“Not just cracked,” Baze continues. “You’ve crushed them. They’re nothing but dust. They’ve blown away.”

His last few words border on indistinct -- Baze must have wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, which means Chirrut drew blood, which means Chirrut has won.

Chirrut takes slow, deliberate steps forward, trusting Baze to let him, and places his two -- whole, uncracked -- eggshells gently on the top of Baze’s head. “Truly,” he says, “they are lost to the wind.”

Since Chirrut lost his sight to the Aequorin sickness, they only ever spar as equals. Baze never blindfolds himself anymore, and any handicap he takes on -- eggshells in his hands, bells on his knees, robe tied backwards and knotted to his armpits -- Chirrut does too. There’s a joy to it, Chirrut wouldn’t have it any other way, but an earnestness, too. This is important. If he is to protect Jedha in this time of unrest and uncertainty, he can no longer wait for the Force to come to him. He must train until he is good enough to fight, blind and alone, with or without the Force to help him.

He thinks Baze is watching him. “What is it?”

“When was the last time you went to the Gardens?”

Chirrut doesn’t mean to laugh, knows that Baze will be offended, but he can’t help it. He never had a mother, only an uncle who left him to be raised in an Academy that never cared much for him, but this is what he imagines it is like. “Are you worried for me?” he asks.

“You know I am.” Baze’s voice may be deeper than it was in boyhood, may have acquired a roughness and weight that they could never have imagined when they first met, but in this moment, it sounds like nothing more than it did fifteen years ago, when Baze begged Chirrut not to climb the tallest trees.

Chirrut’s heart breaks for him. Baze must be 26 standard years old, now -- 23 Falcon-5 years, 37 Jedha years if that had any meaning for him -- and he still doesn’t understand what Chirrut has known since before he became a padawan. Maybe this is Baze’s truest strength, to ignore his emotions so honestly that even the Force can’t see them. But Chirrut hears them, recognises them for the mirror of his own, says nothing. This is love.

“I don’t want to go to the Gardens,” he says, but he takes the eggshells off Baze’s head anyway.

They go to the First Garden, which will always and forever be his favourite. Its lush, sprawling beauty would no longer overwhelm him even if he could see it, the trees would no longer look impossibly tall, and the pond is far too small to do anything but wash his feet, but it is home and hope to him, and it taught him patience of a kind he has used ever since.

The giltsuckle is not flowering anymore. There’s a smell to it that isn’t quite right. He rubs a leaf between fingers and thumb, scrapes a nail along the underside to hear the catch and give. He wants to lick it, but this is the wrong season for that -- Baze needs no more reasons to worry about him.

“Describe it to me,” Chirrut says.

“The giltsuckle? It’s blue.” Whatever Baze sees in Chirrut’s face is enough to stop this joke in its tracks. Baze continues: “The full stem is fine -- nothing different in the thickness or colour. The petioles --” The stalks that join the leaves to the stem. “-- vary in thickness and depth of colour.”

“How?”

Baze describes them. Some are swollen thicker than the stem itself, while others are too thin to support a leaf at all. The variance in colour is harder to describe, but Baze tries, reaching for likenesses in the skin, hair and eyes of people they have known, in robes and flowers, in wires and bruises. He talks through the leaves, their mottled colours and distended veins, slowly, methodically, carefully. He is learning to be Chirrut’s eyes.

It sounds as if there is something wrong with the soil, an excess of salts that-- Ah. Of course.

Chirrut laughs. “The novices are pissing on the roots.”

He can picture Baze’s amusement perfectly. He still misses it. He takes slow, deliberate steps forward, once again trusting Baze to let him, and places his fingertips on Baze’s smile.

Baze’s breath catches, but Chirrut cannot find any guilt for this. If Baze finds the moment erotic, that’s his burden -- another time, Chirrut might also, but today, here, now, the need comes from a different place, a place of connection and hope, a place the Force could surely not ask him to deny.

25 standard years before Scarif

Baze is working on a project of Chirrut’s when it happens, because of course he is. The Aequorin sickness has long left Tanfori, but the work remains. Baze is transferring a golden-blue liquid from one fist-sized glass bulb to twenty-four tiny vials. The liquid has the viscosity of warm zaffa oil; the colour is something like the blue of the shaded ice in the Sixth Garden with a dark gold sheen. The descriptions are automatic for Baze now. He has a full palette to hold in his mind, all the greens and blues and reds he might ever have to tell Chirrut about.

And then it happens. The thirteenth vial, he is calm and content, working steadily towards a greater good. It’s action he’s always enjoyed, the care and precision of the everyday. He is one with the Force and the Force is with him.

The fourteenth vial, he realises.

He doesn’t drop the vial, but he wishes he had. He would like to let it smash on the ground, watch the shattered pieces of glass reflect his own internal turmoil. But the work is important, these palliatives will help with the internal scarring left by the Aequorin sickness. He may be a fool, but he’s not a wasteful one. He carefully places the fourteenth vial in its holder, picks up the fifteenth one and begins the transfer.

This wasn’t meant to happen to him. He’s a good Jedi. He’s a devoted Jedi. He doesn’t form attachments. Only he does and he has and in the same awful moment that he realises this, he knows that he will never give it up.

Baze finishes transferring the palliative into its vials. He sets them to spin gently in an electromagnetic field, the next stage of the process, and carefully puts the original bulb to be cleaned.

And then, because he may not be a wasteful fool, but he is still very much a fool, he goes to find Chirrut.

Chirrut is in a practice ring, using his staff against a modified striking dummy. He has swapped the wooden arms out for hollow metal ones the colour of burnt clay, so that the sound of even the slightest error will ring out, and he has roughened, adorned and otherwise altered the deep brown surfaces of the central post so that he can pinpoint by sound exactly where his staff hits. He spins around the dummy, light on his feet and with a deliberate joy in every move, and strikes in a rhythm that sounds like Baze’s own fast-beating heart.

He whirls and ducks, dances and laughs, and the Force is with him in every action.

He lands on both feet, staff held loosely, and bows towards Baze. “Is it dinner time already? I had hoped to meditate first.” There is a faint smile on his face, satisfaction and amusement playing there together.

“No,” Baze says.

He has always been transparent to Chirrut, who at once drops the smile and comes to his side. “What do you need?”

Chirrut takes Baze’s elbow and leads him to the Second Garden, where they can sit with their backs against the sun-warmed rocks and let the chatter of the tree goats cover their silences. He doesn’t make Baze say anything until they’re there, and even then, all he does is tip his head back, the line of his throat suddenly meaningful to Baze in a way he’d never understood before, and say:

“Are you well, young friend?”

There’s a moment where Baze considers saying nothing. How can he burden Chirrut with this? What kind of monster is he, to find this sickness in himself and immediately seek to spread it? But Chirrut is strong where Baze is only powerful, steady where Baze is only skilled, and if anyone can help him now, it will be Chirrut.

“I have realised.” He stops. “I.” He tries again. “Jedi do not form attachments. But I have. For a long time, now.” For years. Maybe decades? When did this start? He remembers with shame his childhood possessiveness when the time came for Chirrut to take on his own novice, near twenty years ago. Surely this is not that.

Perhaps a part of him had hoped that Chirrut wouldn’t understand everything just from this. That Chirrut would have to tease it out of him, not suspecting for a moment his role in this disaster. But most of him had known, in that single heartbeat between the thirteenth and the fourteenth vial, that Chirrut has always known him better than he knows himself.

“My friend,” Chirrut says, too kind and sympathetic for Baze to bear. “I’m sorry.”

Baze says nothing.

“Me too, of course,” Chirrut continues, as if there were any ‘of course’ about it, as if he’s not now shattering what little hold Baze had on this whole disaster. “I’d like to tell you it gets easier, but it doesn’t. Less immediate, perhaps? Although even that has its moments.”

Chirrut is--? Chirrut feels--? Baze has had his entire heart cracked open and filled with lava in the space of a single conversation. But this is wrong. It’s all wrong. They can’t be Jedis and feel the way they do, no more than they can sprout wings and fly. The Force does not allow this, and quite rightly, too -- there isn’t room in a single person’s soul for the Force and a love like this. And the worst of it is, if Baze has to choose one, he won’t choose the Force.

“We need to leave,” he says, suddenly, urgently. It’s the only way forward. They have to choose now, before that gets take from them. “We need to get out of here. We can go to Falcon-5. My family will take us in. It will look strange, a pair-bond rather than a plural-bond, but my mothers are liberal.”

They are sitting side by side, their knees not quite touching, and Baze takes Chirrut’s hand in his. He can now. This is what he’s choosing.

“Oh, my friend,” Chirrut says again. There’s no joy there, no fear, only the same kindness and sympathy as before. “No.”

He doesn’t let go of Baze’s hand, instead holds it with both of his, gently, lightly.

Baze cannot breathe.

“Our place is here,” Chirrut says. “There is too much darkness in the Force. We must stay and fight. You are too valuable to be wasted on love. And I haven’t spent the last twenty standard years becoming the Force’s slowest Jedi just to come running when you finally call.”

Baze still cannot breathe, but the words come anyway: “You’re the stubbornest being I know. When have you ever come when I called?” And with the words is a kind of relief. This is why his soul has fastened itself to Chirrut’s, without his knowledge or consent. Because when Baze shatters, Chirrut will still hold him together.

“Welcome to love.”

“That doesn’t make it better.”

“I know,” Chirrut says, blandly serene in that most infuriating of all ways, as if Baze’s whole life and purpose haven’t just been pissed into the stars. It’s easier to take than kindness, which is of course why Chirrut is doing it. “But it’s funny.”

Baze lets go of his hand to push him over. Chirrut falls easily, and Baze knows, there and then, that this is not the end of everything.

22 standard years before Scarif

“No one cares,” Amtwe tells them. Amtwe is coordinating the defence of Jedha City, of high strategic importance in the burgeoning war, and if Amtwe says that no one cares, then perhaps it’s true. Chirrut would certainly like it to be. “You are good fighters, better together. The Temple needs guardians.”

Amtwe at 26 standard years (5 Haffen years) is young to be so high in command, but ze has earned it. While Chirrut was gently ambling through his training, Amtwe was all-but flying. This war has been long in the making, and Amtwe is a weapon, honed to protect the light side. Zir strategic insights have saved more than one Jedi stronghold.

“No one cares,” Baze repeats flatly. He has a point. They have been summoned by Amtwe to receive new postings, and ze begins the conversation by telling them no one cares they’re very obviously more attached than two Jedi should be, for all they have done nothing about it. That doesn’t sound like no one caring.

“Well, Master Vash cares,” Amtwe concedes. “She thinks your unconsummated love is sublimated into your fighting ability. But more broadly, now is not the time for separating those who work well together in order to maintain moral purity.”

Something in Chirrut twists. He is a stranger to this emotion, but he thinks it might be -- embarrassment? The discovery is itself a delight. What a strange, hot-cold feeling, like being knocked out of the air in the middle of a precisely executed spinning kick. He must remember this. “I hadn’t realised our friendship was a matter of such public interest.”

There is a silence.

“Master Amtwe’s left eye is twitching,” Baze says.

“Thank you, Master Baze,” Amtwe says. “You will ship out tomorrow. May the Force be with you.”

19 standard years before Scarif

“What can you see now?”

Baze wants to grab Chirrut and shake him. Wants to fight him, fight him properly, not sparring practice or recreation, but as enemies, every blow meant to wound, no restraint, no understanding. These are not the thoughts of a Jedi, and Baze cannot care.

“What can you see?” Chirrut repeats. His voice is strained now, like it was in those first months after he lost his sight, no certainty that Baze would tell him, no faith that Baze would help. “I need to know.”

Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. And they are both so, so afraid.

“They’re all dead,” Baze makes himself say. “I see bodies. More than I can count. Everywhere I look. I see broken bodies. Split open. I see scorched blood.”

They failed. They were meant to protect the Temple. They were meant to hold the city. They were meant to be Jedis.

“Baze,” Chirrut says. “Please.”

“The windward tower is gone. I can’t see its stump; there are too many bodies piled up against it. The leeward tower is burning. Some flames are the colour of white giltsuckle petals; most are normal. The sky is thick with Empire ships. I can’t see the sun.”

“And there?” Chirrut points to the right of the burning leeward tower. “The Force moves darkest there.”

The Force moves darkest everywhere. There is too much death. But Baze follows Chirrut’s direction, and--

“They’re searching the corpses,” he realises. “Twenty stormtroopers. They’re cutting apart the bodies looking for something. They’re treating them as if they were, as if-- I’ll kill them. I’ll kill them.” As he says it, he knows it to be true. He will kill them all.

Chirrut places a hand on his shoulder. “Listen to the Force.”

Baze wants to laugh. It is, it truly is laughable. He was once so proud. He believed he was a fine Jedi, a good Jedi; he believed the Force was strong in him. But what kind of Jedi is he? What use is he to anyone? He couldn’t protect Jedha. He couldn’t protect anyone. The light side is falling, and he’s done nothing to stop it. From the first moment he chose Chirrut, he became complicit in everything that has happened since, and now Chirrut is telling him to listen to the Force? What will the Force tell him, but that he has failed, completely and utterly, beyond the imagining of it? He was meant to protect Jedha, and now everyone is dead.

Chirrut’s hand remains on his shoulder. “No? Then listen to me: Jedha has fallen, but we are here. There is a reason. There must be a reason.”

To anyone else, Chirrut might sound wise. Steady. But Baze can hear the fear thrumming through Chirrut’s veins as loud as he can hear his own. What right has Chirrut to pretend anything will ever be okay again?

“I see the corpse of a little girl,” Baze says. “Her dress is the colour of the biggest boulder in the Fourth Garden. Her burns are the colour of Amtwe’s hair. Her left arm is pulled back from her body. On top of her is a torso. Do you want to know what colour its remaining skin is? Which bones are poking through?”

Chirrut steps away. He walks backwards until he hits the wall, then slides down to sit, hunched over himself, his cracked and bleeding hands clutching the torn robe at his knees.

They had fought so well together. Master Amtwe had seemed right to place them here. They’d been an asset to Jedha, a credit to their Jedi training, a valuable weapon in the Temple’s arsenal. They’d killed so many, they’d made decisions that killed so many more. And for what? What were they left with but the carnage around them, and more recrimination than either of them could hold?

There’s no reason, Baze wants to say. There’s nothing. He is listening to the Force -- he can’t shut it out -- and he can hear the war that echo around the galaxy. Jedha is not unique, there is nothing special about this massacre. Everywhere the Empire stretches, people are being slaughtered.

Chirrut’s knuckles are white underneath the blood and dirt. The Force is not dancing through his fingers today.

Baze turns his back to the window. He is not the witness these people deserve.

“Sit by me,” Chirrut says into his knees. “I won’t talk.” The cloth of his robes twists in his hands. “Please.”

And Baze longs. He longs to fall to the ground by Chirrut, to lean against him and take strength from him and be his strength in return. He wants to take Chirrut’s hands in his, to sit together and listen to the Force, to find a way through this, a way forward.

Instead, he shifts his repeating blaster pack into balance, checks its charge. They can’t rely on the Force anymore. If Jedha must fall, he will fall with it, and he will take as many Empire scum with him as he can.

“Ah,” Chirrut says. He uses his staff to get to his feet, picks up his lightbow from where he had let it fall, and holds his head high. “I see.”

“You always did.” Baze’s left knee will not hold him for long. He suspects Chirrut’s wrists are one good knock away from useless. “For Jedha.”

“For Jedha.”

16 standard years before Scarif

A passing stranger spits at Chirrut. It lands on the back of his arm, warm and weighty. “Fuck you, Jedi.”

There’s something strange about its acidity, something familiar-not-familiar. Chirrut thinks for a minute, then raps his staff against the side of Le Le’s stall. He holds his arm up to her. “What colour is it?”

Le Le is used to these questions on the days Baze isn’t around. Sometimes even when he is -- they’re not the unit they once were, after all. She doesn’t ask why, just says, “Grey. Dark.”

“Thank you.” Then, pitching his voice so the stranger can here: “Hey. You. Barabel.” The Barabel stops. “You have a lung parasite. Eat more scaly herbivores, and try not to go into any mines.”

The Barabel hisses at him.

“You’re welcome.”

It takes him a while to get the Barabel mucus off his skin. There’s no rush, but it’s important to be thorough if he wants to keep full use of his arm. While he picks at it with the tip of his knife, he thinks about Baze’s latest mission. The rebel forces are in-fighting again -- if Baze cannot convince them to attack the landing pads before their next inevitable schism, the Imperial forces will likely find the vulnerability on their own, then fix it before any one new faction has the chance to regroup.

“Tell your fortune?” Chirrut asks the market around him. “May the force of others be with you.”

Two more strangers spit on him. One hits the back of his head, the other misses, gets the ground by his feet. There’s nothing to indicate either of them is unwell, so Chirrut lets it pass without comment. There’s a lot of anger in Jedha, and it hurts no one for him to absorb some of it.

He uses the edge of his robe to wipe the back of his head. Human spit, no risk of damage, but still unpleasant. He scrubs the damp patch of robe against the ground.

“Hey, blind man,” Le Le shouts from the other end of her stall. “Catch.”

She throws him a canister of hot, sweetened nerf milk.

“You are the light of my days,” Chirrut tells her.

Her laugh becomes a hacking cough. He tips the canister to her, and she bangs her own canister against the side of her stall in response.

The Force moves sluggishly in Jedha City. The killing did not stop with the Imperial victory, and those who survived, those who keep surviving, do so in a city of mass graves and ruined buildings, Imperial ships always overhead, Imperial boots always on the ground. Chirrut is suspects he’s lucky not to see it; whatever his imagination gives him, the reality is probably worse.

“Tell your fortune? May the force of others be with you.”

He is one with the Force, and the Force is with him, and he has a duty here, in Jedha City, to the people he failed, to the Temple that is no longer, to the kyber being stripped from the planet for whatever vile Imperial purpose. It doesn’t make it easier.

The Barabel comes back four days later.

“Jedi,” the Barabel greets him.

“There are no Jedi here,” Chirrut answers. It is one thing to be spat on in passing, but if they are to have a conversation, they must be clear on terms. “My name is Chirrut Îmwe.”

The Barabel hisses. There are -- Chirrut listens, hears what is there and what is not -- there are three adult Barabels now, and two children. Chirrut cannot sense their paths in the Force.

“My spawn is sick,” the first Barabel says. “You will cure it.”

“He will?” Le Le asks. She has stepped out from behind her stall. “What will you pay?”

There is the sound of coins. Le Le and the Barabel argue like the cracks of a thawing glacier, haggling on the life of the Barabel child.

At Chirrut’s gesture, the two children come forward. They close their eyes and let Chirrut feel the ridges of their faces, the lines where their scales meet skin. They are perhaps three or four standard years old, halfway to maturity.

Le Le’s “Hah!” indicates a price has been settled.

They wait for Baze to return. Chirrut will need his best eyes for this; he is not a healer, though there were enough Barabel passing through Tanfori to learn the basics. Even with Baze, his chances of success are not great.

When Baze arrives, he’s filthy with engine grease, badly in need of a hot meal and a refresher. When he finds instead five impatient Barabels and a half-full canister of what was once yev-cheese, he doesn’t pause, doesn’t grumble, just swigs the yev-cheese in one and waits for instructions. This is how they are now, a little distant, a little careful with each other. Chirrut badly misses being reproached. And yet, the walls are helping. They would collapse into each other with grief and rage if they could -- but Baze keeps them apart, and with it, keeps them upright.

Chirrut has his suspicions about the Barabel children. Their claws are not fully developed yet, and the fleshy pads where the claws are sheathed are harder than he would expect, near-calcified on the sick child and not much better on the ‘healthy’ one.

“What colour is the skin here?” Healthy skin should be a light green, something three or four tones darker than the claw itself. None of these Barabels, adults or children, are eating well, and there is a good chance there is something seriously wrong in their diet.

There is a pause that stretches out. It shouldn’t take that long for Baze to answer -- they’re neither of them new to this game. But no, of course, of course, this is why he couldn’t sense either child’s path in the Force. Oh.

Before everything, this might have been a time when Baze put his hand on Chirrut’s shoulder, silent support for the task ahead of him. Chirrut might have leant against him, just slightly, allowing him to bear some of the weight.

“Practice chalk grey,” Baze says at last. They do not touch. They will not touch. It is far from the greatest tragedy of the day.

Chirrut doesn’t accept any money for the advice he gives them. He hears Le Le all but silently press some cloth into the hand of one of the adults, something clean and soft to bind the children’s hands and feet when the time comes.

That night, the gap between their sleeping pallets seems wider than ever. Chirrut lies awake, listens to Baze’s heavy breaths, and feels comforted all the same.

13 standard years before Scarif

Time spins out in missions and trades, winters and storms, desperate insurgence and brutal counter-insurgence. Baze and Chirrut stand their ground, but nothing more than that.

It’s Chirrut who breaks the one holding pattern they have any control over.

“I’m 61 today.”

Baze is in the middle of soldering a new power module to his third best blaster. He doesn’t have time for this. “No.”

“Yes.”

“No. You’re 38. Which is 35 years too old for this nonsense.” Technically it’s his fourth best blaster, but since Chirrut has repurposed his real third best blaster for training and shows no inclination to give it back, it’s got a promotion. And, consequently, a new power module, if this cursed wiring will just behave.

“I’m 61. That’s an important year in the Jedha calendar.”

They’ve been living on Jedha for almost nine years -- standard years, not nonsense years -- now. Baze is almost entirely sure Chirrut is lying.

“You’re 38. If you want to live to 39, you’ll be quiet and let me fix this blaster.”

The silence is not a surprise. They are trying, they’re both trying, to remember how to be around each other, to relearn ease and rudeness. But they don’t always manage.

When Chirrut speaks again, he sounds as if he’s thinking out loud, working something out as he says it. “I do. It’s funny. I forgot, for a while. But I think, perhaps, I do. I want to live.”

That pulls Baze away from his blaster. Chirrut didn’t-- No. He can’t even finish the thought. Baze knows, with far more certainty than he’s ever known anything else, that if Chirrut dies, he will not be far behind. Chirrut is his beating heart. Chirrut is the blood in his veins. Chirrut matters.

“You.” Baze stops. “I.”

“Oh,” Chirrut says softly. “No. I didn’t mean that.” He grips his staff tightly. The Force doesn’t dance in Jehda anymore, and Chirrut’s hands are only hands, no more or less than that. They are beginning to line, the skin no longer quite as elastic as it once was. There is a scar on the back of his left hand that did not heal well; it pulls the skin just under his thumb taut. “Do you remember?” One nail on his right hand is black from a misplaced blocking move. “I used to be on fire for you. Our forbidden love.”

Baze remembers. But they don’t get to want things anymore. Jehda fell. They let it.

“Do you remember how it felt?” Chirrut continues. He takes one slow, deliberate step towards Baze. Baze thinks -- hopelessly, helplessly -- of sparring back at the school, of eggshell handicaps and laughter. “Do you remember when our hands brushed and it was everything?”

Baze remembers. He remembers wanting without knowing it, wanting without understanding the consequences. He remembers that day of realisation. He remembers Chirrut saying no.

“Do you remember when I said no?” Chirrut says. He takes another step. Baze has stood without realising it. They’re an arm’s length apart.

Baze can’t speak. He doesn’t want to speak. He doesn’t want to move. They let Jedha fall; they don’t get to have this.

“I was not,” Chirrut says, “entirely right.”

This step brings Chirrut a hand’s span away. If Chirrut laughs, Baze will be able to feel his breath against his own lips.

“You were so handsome,” Chirrut says. “You had this smile that made my heart stop, every single time. I used to look at you and the rest of the universe would fall away. You had such grace.”

Chirrut has stopped moving forward. His feet are planted on the ground. It is up to Baze to decide.

“And your legs. I remember how the muscles in your legs used to--”

Baze kisses him.

It’s just the press of lips on lips, nothing and everything like he’d imagined. Chirrut’s mouth moves against his, a softness, a moment of heat. Baze brings his hands up to touch the side of Chirrut’s face, and Chirrut puts his hands on Baze’s waist, holding him there, breathing steadily. They draw back enough to see each other again, to check that this is real, that this is possible, and Chirrut is smiling, oh, Chirrut is smiling so gently, as if he’s been given a gift.

They embrace. Chest to chest, arms tight around each other, the cool skin of Chirrut’s cheek against Baze’s. One of Chirrut’s hands is in Baze’s hair, drawing him closer, holding him so they breathe together, nothing but this, nothing but now.

They’re kissing again. There’s a gentleness to it still, a spark passing between them, too precious to crush. Each brush of Chirrut’s lips against his is a thrill that travels through his entire body, a joy that can’t be taken away from him whatever happens next.

They pull back again, just barely, and there it is, the smile that Baze has missed so badly for so long. The smile that tells him Chirrut is laughing at both of them, laughing at the universe, and he may even let Baze in on the joke.

“Did you?” Chirrut asks. Sex. He means sex. “On any of your adventures? Your missions?”

Baze shakes his head minutely. “Did you? While I was gone?”

Chirrut pauses, makes as if to consider. Even though he knows he’s being teased, Baze is surprised to find he wouldn’t mind if Chirrut had. Chirrut has always deserved every happiness.

“So we’ll learn together.” Chirrut’s smile is still there. “Though you will of course learn five times faster than me.”

“And you’ll practise every hour until you overtake me.”

Chirrut kisses him again. They don’t quite know what to do with their tongues -- for one awful moment, Baze thinks Chirrut might be trying to coax him into a very localised fight, before he realises that the quiver of Chirrut’s breath is not passion but laughter.

“How else can we decide dominance?” Chirrut asks, and Baze has to cuff the side of his head, so Chirrut has to -- try to -- knock him off his feet, and they tussle, laughing and pressing together, Chirrut’s thigh sliding hot between Baze’s legs, Baze’s breath catching and his hands tightening around Chirrut’s solid, sculpted upper arms. Baze is on fire wherever Chirrut is touching, ice cold wherever he has let go.

Baze wants nothing more than to rut on the floor like the carefree young men they never were. “Bed,” he says instead.

They push their sleeping pallets together, closing the gap of self-denial. It might almost be enough to give Baze pause, even now, but Chirrut is no fool, and once they’ve adjusted their pallets to Baze’s standards, he takes Baze’s hands in his.

“I love you,” he says, so simply, so easily. He presses a quick kiss to the side of Baze’s mouth. “We don’t have to do this.”

They strip quickly, efficiently. They’ve lived side by side for so long, this new thing cannot break all their habits. Chirrut’s body is as it as has always been, hard muscle and scar tissue, beauty found in the stamina and dedication it took to make. Baze is not overwhelmed by the sight of it, but by the possibility, by the fact that this time, this time he will be able to touch, to taste, to hold.

“The same to you,” Baze says. If Chirrut regrets starting this, better to stop now.

They take each other to bed.

10 standard years before Scarif

The kid isn’t a bad pickpocket. Ze has a knack for being just where no one suspects zir to be, for not being there a moment later. It’s four days -- nearly 20 credits’ worth of loot -- before zir luck gives out and Chirrut has to intervene.

The kid has snuck up behind two passing traders -- not locals. One of the traders stumbles, the other pauses to help, the kid’s hand jerks back with just the wrong trade off between speed and skill. The shorter trader, the one who paused to help, feels something, snaps his own hand back in time to catch a glancing blow against the kid’s mouth. In the resulting scuffle the tall one gets the kid’s wrists in an achingly tight grip.

The kid is in pain -- real pain -- and ze uses this, faking that the problem is in zir knee, not where zir wrist bones are being ground together. Zir voice sounds younger than Chirrut would have guessed from zir movements, ringing out thin and reedy, a cry for mercy designed to tug on even the least tender of hearts.

The traders aren’t in the mood for mercy. They’ve been on edge since long before they got into Chirrut’s earshot, and the Force around them moves in a way he doesn’t like, not at all.

The whole thing took less than a minute from stumble to capture. If Chirrut does nothing, the rest may be just as efficient.

“Le Le?” he calls out. He uses his staff to get to his feet, leans on it heavily, in every aspect the helpless blind man. “Le Le, you wicked child, is that you?”

He sweeps the staff in front of him, playing his part in full. The traders are in silent communication with each other. Both have a hold on the child now, neither of them inclined to be gentle.

“Excuse me,” Chirrut says. “Have you seen my sister’s child? So high --” His vague gesture hits the kid’s face, what a happy coincidence. He explores the kid’s face clumsily with his hand, tapping the kid’s neck just out of sight of the traders. “Le Le? Is that you?”

Even if he’s guessed right, the kid might decide to try zir luck with the traders, an angry but known quantity. Strange old men calling out the names of long-dead stallholders are anything but a guarantee of safety.

“Uncle!” the kid cries. “Uncle, I’m so sorry, I tripped and hit this man and he’s angry, uncle, I’m so sorry.”

Chirrut assumes an expression of benevolent understanding. “Ah now, I see. Just like your mother, always making trouble.” Then, to the trader: “Are you hurt?”

The trader says something angry and insistent about the kid being a thief, but the tone of the Force has shifted, Chirrut the kindly blind uncle is able to defuse the situation easily enough. The kid sheds a couple of tears, Chirrut laments his late sister, the tall trader offers some stern but not unfeeling advice, and the traders move on.

“Sit by me until they’re gone,” Chirrut tells the kid quietly. “I won’t help you again.”

The kid lets zirself be towed back to Chirrut’s spot, but draws the line at sitting by him.

“I didn’t ask for your help.” Zir voice is still thin and reedy, even now ze isn’t playing at childhood.

“And you owe me nothing,” Chirrut agrees easily. “But your grandmother was a good woman, and I won’t see her grandchild’s life run out just yet.”

The kid softens at that. Ze still doesn’t sit, but zir slouch becomes slightly less deliberate and, perhaps, slightly more comfortable. “They told me she died two years ago.”

“Her lungs.” It’s always the lungs in Jedha City, if it isn’t the blaster or the knife or the bomb. Every rebel attack, every Imperial retribution results in burning buildings, burning bodies, a burning world. They breathe in death with every moment, and it’s the rare species whose lungs are designed for such things. And that’s without the byproducts of the kyber mining -- what the Temple had controlled, filtered and paced, the Empire simply releases into the air, all the better to quiet the population. “Tell me, are you Ki Ki or Potoo?” Le Le had mentioned four grandchildren: one boy, one girl, two neither.

“Only Ana Le Le calls me Potoo,” the kid says. “I’m Potoni.”

Chirrut sketches the smallest of bows. “Potoni, then. A pleasure to meet you.”

“She never told me about you. I won’t trust you, not just because you interrupted those nerf-herders before I could think of something.”

“I won’t ask you to.”

Chirrut is no stranger to love. Master Ssar always told him there were no weaknesses, only different ways of coming to strength. Chirrut loves Baze, of course, and he loves the Force, and he loved Amtwe and Vash and Master Ssar, and he loved Le Le, and he loves Jedha City, and he loves everyone who tries and everyone who tried. He is easy with this aspect of himself. Love is not a flaw in him, not something that needs to be fixed or fought. But even for him, it is perhaps a little embarrassing how quickly he has started to love this child.

“What did Ana Le Le tell you about me?” Potoni asks.

Maybe this is how all children are. Potoni must be somewhere between 13 and 16 in Jedha terms, not much older than Chirrut when he was given Amtwe as his novice. The age that needs responsibility to go with love. “Ki Ki, Potoo, Le No and Karn,” Chirrut says. “She was very proud of all of you. She said you were the loudest one.”

“Do you want to hear my bantha noises?” Potoni asks.

Chirrut really does, but the market may not be the place for it. He’s saved from this most difficult of decisions by the arrival of Baze and his disapproval. Chirrut’s heart dances at both.

He can feel Potoni try not to shrink away from Baze. Potoni is not nearly naive enough to see no threat in Chirrut, but Baze is something else, a mountain of angry muscle and heavy weaponry, looming over the pair of them, probably wearing his most forbidding scowl.

“It’s Le Le’s grandchild,” Chirrut says. “How was your trip?”

“Le Le’s grandchild,” Baze repeats. He kicks gently at the sole of Chirrut’s bare foot. “My trip was. Frustrating. And I return to this.”

“You always return to this. Say hello, Potoni.”

Potoni straightens. “Who are you?”

Baze doesn’t laugh, but Chirrut knows there is amusement close to the surface. “Le Le’s grandchild indeed. I suppose you both need feeding.”

They both do. Baze heats up the last of the pickled yev-cheese, serves it with a quarter ration each of whatever they’re using for essential nutrients this month. It’s good enough for them; from the way Potoni gulps it down, it’s a sight better than what ze’s been eating since ze arrived at the city. Baze even digs out a couple of memories of Le Le to share, times she’d scolded him behind Chirrut’s back for not taking good care of him.

Chirrut lives with sorrow, but he’s normally able to put aside regret. Today, though, now, with Baze talking easily to this child, making space in their lives for no more reason than that he arrived home to find Chirrut already attached, he can’t quite shake the might-have-been. Master Baze taking on an apprentice, passing his knowledge and skill down the generations. Master Chirrut coaxing the youngest students into listening to the Gardens’ needs, treating the plants with the respect all life deserves, not because they must but because they can.

“Are you really blind?” Potoni interrupts his thoughts, pushing away the might-have-been with the here and now. “I need to piss.”

7 standard years before Scarif

Like Chirrut, Potoni reckons zir age in Jedha years. Unlike Chirrut, Potoni is still just about young enough that it’s acceptable. It’s zir 19th birthday next week -- of course, ze will also insist on celebrating zir 12th standard birthday when it comes around, because ze’s no fool, and knows exactly how much Chirrut will let zir get away with.

“How much I let zir get away with?” Chirrut replies when Baze makes the mistake of voicing this last thought.

Baze considers arguing, but Chirrut’s smile is right there, and it’s easier to lean forward and kiss him, press him down onto their joined pallets, undo his robes and kiss the spot under his chin that always makes him laugh.

“Potoni says there’s grey in your beard,” Chirrut tells him, but he’s undoing Baze’s belt, holding his own hips as still as he can, the tension in his body a joyful effort. “Show me.”

Baze lets him finish with the belt first, then guides his hand to the slightest patch of grey that’s growing into the beard. “What does it feel like?”

Chirrut kisses him. “Love.”

Everything feels like love to Chirrut.

Afterwards, they lie together, Baze’s head on Chirrut’s chest, Chirrut tracing a nonsense pattern on Baze’s back.

“I spoke to Kalasta,” Baze says. Kalasta has friends and trading partners across three systems. If there’s a place for Potoni, they’ll find it.

“Good.”

“This city isn’t good for zir.”

“I know.”

“There are no chances left here,” Baze pushes. They’ve been talking about this since Potoni got caught lurking near the newly fortified Imperial landing pads. By one of Saw’s rebels, fortunately, one who owed Chirrut a large favour, but still. A part of Baze enjoys seeing Chirrut have to grapple with a stubborn, irrepressible child who simply won’t see the danger staring zir in the face, but these are not tall trees and disappointed teachers, they’re Stormtroopers in an increasingly fractured city.

“I know.” Chirrut stops touching Baze’s back. Baze doesn’t have to look to know he’s trying not to clench his fist.

That’s enough for now. Baze kisses the patch of skin where he’s been resting his head. “There’s talk of trouble in the mines again. Three more deaths last week.”

It’s what passes for an easy topic. Chirrut allows it.

4 standard years before Scarif

“Tell your fortune? May the force of others be with you.”

A gob of spit lands between Chirrut’s feet.

“Well met, Jedi scum.” It takes Chirrut a moment, but he’s been hoping for a Barabel visitor ever since they sent Potoni off with Kalasta’s cousin. Kalasta’s cousin trades near exclusively with Barabels and similar carnivores -- it seemed like a good match for Potoni, dangerous enough to keep zir attention.

“There are no Jedi here.”

The Barabel hisses, and Chirrut recognises him from years ago, whose children deserved better than they got. The Force moves in mysterious ways.

“I hate scaly herbivores,” the Barabel says. Chirrut realises he doesn’t know the Barabel’s name. And why would he? But it seems incongruous, nonetheless. “But my lungs breathe twice as easy as they once did.”

If there are any Imperial spies still wasting their time on Chirrut after last year’s problems, perhaps they will lose hours trying to interpret these cryptic phrases.

“I’m glad of it.”

The Force moves carefully around the Barabel. Chirrut isn’t sure his lungs are as healthy as he thinks.

“I met a humanspawn not long ago,” the Barabel continues. “I told it I was going to Jedha City, and it gave me the most fascinating message.”

“Indeed?”

“It told me to find the ugliest, laziest, most useless blind man in the whole of the city, so of course I knew who it meant.”

“I’m glad you got along.”

The Barabel hisses again. “It said, Yes, No, Yes, Yes.”

Are you happy? Are you safe? Are you healthy? Are you learning? Well, three from that list is more than good enough, and there’s nowhere in the galaxy safe enough for that child.

“Ze’s a good child,” Chirrut says. “How did ze seem to you?”

The Barabel spits, this time just next to the base of Chirrut’s staff. “Alive.”

A part of Chirrut wants to know if the other adult Barabels he met with this one have survived, but the rest of him, older and wiser than he’d like, doesn’t want to hear the answer. This way, he still has hope. “Thank you.” And then, because too many lungs have already been ruined by Jehda City: “If you can find fish livers, try to eat them at least twice a week.”

The market is not busy today. Once the Barabel leaves, Chirrut lets himself sink back into the Force. He chants under his breath: I am one with the Force; the Force is with me. I am one with the Force; the Force is with me. He allows the worries of this little life to float away from him, the wants and the hopes, the fears and the insights. He is with the Force.

This is his garden now. The stalls are his soil, the wares his flowers, the traders and thieves his running water, his birdsong, his breeze. The Force flows through them, through the thick air and broken walls, over and around and in every beating heart. He is one with the Force and the Force is with him.

He is a child, climbing trees and laughing at Baze’s frustration. He is a padawan, practising his forms with determination and endless stubbornness. He is an adult, fighting for his life and the lives of those around him, failing and falling, left behind. He is a lover, he is a revolutionary, he is a citizen of this broken, occupied moon.

He is one with the Force. The Force is with him.

“Hey! Hey! Notajedi!” The Barabel is back. “I forgot.”

Whatever it is, the Barabel didn’t forget. Chirrut wonders what made him change his mind.

“The humanspawn gave me this.”

Chirrut catches the pouch the Barabel aims at his face. “Thank you.”

The Barabel doesn’t even hiss as he leaves.

Inside the pouch is a freeze-dried cube of yev-cheese. They haven’t been able to get it in Jedha City for years now. Baze will be pleased.

1 standard year before Scarif

“What would we be, in another life?” Chirrut is in one of his moods. They sparred earlier, and when Baze very nearly took off Chirrut’s nose, he just laughed like they were back in the Academy.

“Banthas,” Baze says. “Fat, happy banthas.” It’s nearly time for them to set out. The explosives in his bag are packed tightly, but he can’t resist one last check. They’re good. Secure.

“I would be an assassin,” Chirrut tells the ceiling. He’s lying on his pallet stretching out a muscle in his leg. Age is catching up with them. “You could paint vases.”

“You’d be the fattest bantha.” The top strap on his powercell needs replacing. Not now, but sooner than he’d like. Is he putting strain on the wrong places? He puts it on, shucks it off, tries to see whether the give is. “I’d be the happiest.”

Chirrut pulls his leg towards his chest, winces just slightly. “I could be a dancer. You’d be my wealthy patron.”

Maybe he should replace the strap now? Chirrut will never let him forget it if it breaks mid operation. “We’d work on a moisture farm. You’d eat anything they put in front of us. Here, let me.” The last is in response to Chirrut’s latest stretch. “It’s easier with two.”

Chirrut lets him grip the offending ankle, holding it at the necessary angle as Chirrut pushes. “Ah! That’s better, thank you. You would make all your credits from something dreadfully immoral, but I wouldn’t care.”

“One day the farmer would leave the wrong gate open, and you’d eat all her prized giltsuckle.”

“Only if the children hadn’t pissed on it,” Chirrut says, straightfaced.

Before they leave for those thrice-damned landing pads, they kiss, a quick, happy thing, not a prelude but a conversation. They may not be assassins or painters, banthas or dancers, but they are this, and they are together, and it is enough. If they live out the rest of their days in Jedha City, gnats biting at the skin of the Empire, it will be enough. They don’t have to go out in a blaze of glory, to lead an army or change the course of the rebellion. They can remain here, doing this, sabotaging landing pads and giving succour to those in need, small things that mean something to someone, guarding the city that is their home. It is enough.

2 standard years after Scarif

The Force barely moves at all on Scarif. It is a place of death. A place of anger. A place of sacrifice.

But there’s a patch of island, no different from any other patch or any other island, where the Force is a little lighter. It doesn’t dance, because the Force dances nowhere on Scarif, but it moves stubbornly, surely, with a determination that can outlast death itself. And in its stubbornness, in its sureness, there is something else, too. Perhaps Chirrut would call it love.

###
END
###