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In one world, Chirrut dies in Baze’s arms. Baze recites the prayers for him, presses fingertips to cheek, throat, the bloodied swell of his lower lip, all the softest spots of Chirrut’s razor-sharp body. He's always known that this is how it’ll end for them, he's under no illusions, their hands were built to catch blood splatters, but all he can think is that it's too goddamn soon –
“Find me in the force,” Chirrut rasps, clasping Baze’s hand tightly, and because Baze is listening for it, he can hear the thin note of fear in Chirrut’s voice.
“I will find you,” he says roughly, and bends to kiss Chirrut’s trembling lips. He keeps kissing him, hard, desperate kisses, until Chirrut’s body goes slack beneath him and he is, abruptly, alone.
Baze does not wait for the force. He finds Chirrut by throwing himself into the front lines with his teeth bared, the sun bearing down on his shoulders and his mouth full of blood. His back arches when he falls to the sand, left thigh and stomach burning from blaster fire, and the last thing he sees before the grenade goes off is Chirrut’s small body lying on the beach, Baze’s arm stretching toward him, reaching –
The force gives and the force takes away, and in another world, Chirrut flips the master switch and manages to dive back under the relative cover of their ship afterward.
“That was close,” he says, breathless, wide smile showing off teeth that are brilliantly white against his mud-streaked face.
“Too close,” Baze says. His heart feels bad in his chest, like someone took it in their hand and squeezed.
Chirrut pats his face with one bruised palm. “Breathe, dear one. Shoot a Stormtrooper, you’ll feel better.”
Baze shoots a Stormtrooper. He does feel better.
“Well done, Rogue One,” Admiral Raddus’s voice crackles over the radio. “Rendezvous at the base.”
“Solid copy, Admiral,” Cassian says, a touch breathless, grinning as he falls into the pilot’s seat beside Bodhi. “We’re on our way.”
“Cassian, he moved my seat up,” K-2SO complains, voice tinny as it escapes from the ship’s old speakers. “Tell him to move my seat back.”
“He shouldn’t have to until you get a body again,” Jyn says reasonably, squeezing Bodhi’s shoulder. “Right now it’s Bodhi’s seat.”
Bodhi smiles up at her gratefully.
“You’re just lucky you backed yourself up recently,” Cassian says, patting the console in front of him, and then adds “Big whiner,” under his breath.
K-2’s indignant squawk and subsequent tirade is almost comforting for its familiarity, as is Cassian’s empty threat to mute him.
In the back of the ship, Baze and Chirrut have their foreheads bent together, eyes closed as if in prayer. Baze is speaking in a voice low enough that only Chirrut can hear him, hoarse and wavering as he recites old poems in his native tongue. He knows Chirrut doesn’t understand the words, but he thinks he probably understands the tone, the desperation with which he has to reassure himself that they are still alive.
He touches Chirrut’s face, his neck, his hands, the familiar curve of his shoulders through his tunic, reminding himself of the shape of the man Baze has vowed to protect. Chirrut is breathing. Baze is breathing too, and he reminds himself of this fact, that he is still alive as well, that he and Chirrut are alive at the same time. That the force allowed them to find each other and cling like drowning men to driftwood.
Now is a hell of a time to find your faith, a small voice that sounds suspiciously like Chirrut whispers in the back of Baze’s mind.
Better now than never, Baze counters silently, and cradles Chirrut close.
Baze has the most medical experience, so he empties out all the medpacks stowed away in various compartments of the ship and sets up a makeshift medbay in the cargo hold. He sits down all the soldiers they’d managed to haul into the belly of their ship before they’d taken off, passes around a tin of painkillers, tears bandages into strips with his teeth. Everyone looks at him with half-open, tired eyes. His own exhaustion eats at him with hungry jaws.
Cassian keeps trying to get up and go back to the cockpit before Baze can get to him, so Baze sends Chirrut to whack him gently with his staff every time he makes to leave. Every so often he hears a soft thwap and Chirrut’s “I’m blind, not deaf,” and it makes Baze smile slightly to himself as he cleans the edge of a rather nasty blaster burn on the side of Bodhi’s throat.
There aren’t enough beds to go around, so Cassian and Baze lay out a bunch of bedrolls together on the floor.
“Are you building a nest?” Jyn asks dubiously.
“No,” Cassian says, but he's smiling.
“Sort of looks like a nest,” Bodhi says, and flops down on it. “Feels like one too.”
“Are you a nest expert, baby bird?” Cassian laughs, and sits down beside him, flicks his goggles. “Sleep in a lot of ‘em, huh?”
Baze and Jyn make loaded eye contact above the two men, and Baze has to look away and somewhat unsuccessfully stifle a laugh.
“You were young and smitten once too,” Chirrut chides him quietly, sharp elbow nudging Baze in the side. “Be kind.”
“I was young and married,” Baze replies. “There’s a difference.”
Chirrut just rolls his eyes and pulls Baze down onto the mat, and Baze allows himself to be manhandled with the bare minimum of grumbling. They sleep like that – the five of them all tangled up together – and Baze does not remember what he dreams, but it’s something gentle, he thinks. Gentle and warm.
In Jedha, the summers used to be so quiet they were near silent. Nothing dared to move outside in the heat, not even the wind, not even the powder-soft sand. Outworlders considered the moon dead three months out of the year, hollow with a missing heartbeat, but Baze knew Jedha was only quiet, not dead. Maybe sleeping. Maybe holding her breath. He could feel the Holy City’s pulse beneath the muscles of his back as he lay on his pallet on the floor, his scarred and calloused hand curled loosely around Chirrut’s narrow wrist. The heat made any other contact unbearable, but Baze took what he could get, eyes half open as he breathed with the city. His home was harsh, but it was alive, and it was his. This was enough.
In the morning, he and Chirrut moved through their daily routine, fetched water, meditated, sparred until they were sweaty and out of breath. They talked about nothing and Chirrut laughed as if he hadn’t already heard every one of Baze’s jokes a dozen times over, and Baze fed him dried berries with a tender hand cupping the back of his neck, just to kiss the sweetness off those lips that tasted like laughter.
When Jedha is gone, Baze still feels his dead city in Chirrut’s hands. Long summer and gentle winter live inside his long fingers. The holiest pieces of his home are here, beneath Chirrut’s skin, and when Baze kisses him, he feels familiar desert sunlight curl beneath his tongue.
“Jedha survives in you,” Chirrut murmurs against his mouth, hand warm where it rests on Baze’s chest. “I am sorry we had to leave her.”
Baze covers his hand with his own. “I am taking the most important part of her with me,” he says, and doesn’t even pretend to mind when Chirrut’s fingertips come up to feel his smiling face.
“Does it ever get any easier?” Bodhi asks, nervous hands fidgeting in his lap.
Baze follows the line of Bodhi’s anxious gaze to where Cassian is bent over a console, brow furrowed in concentration. The lights from passing stars turn his dark hair silver in streaks.
“No,” Baze answers. “But they make it worth it.”
The force gives and the force takes away and Baze wonders how the equation will even out, now that the force has given him a family.
Jyn is still sharp at the edges, but she softens a little more every time someone speaks to her kindly. Baze looks at her and sees himself in the lines of her body, the strength of her arm and the tension that twists between her shoulder blades. She still doesn’t seem to know whether or not she wants to run away, and Baze feels that pull as well, the urge to scoop up everything he cares for and flee before someone can take it from him.
Cassian holds his body carefully around the dark thing inside him, the one that Chirrut had sensed from the beginning. Baze had not seen it so quickly. He still thinks Cassian has the face of a friend, the man puts up a good front, it’s only when he thinks no one is looking at him that his eyes become haunted. Baze watches him out of the corners of his eyes, treats him with the kind of quiet respect only soldiers know how to give each other, wishes he could convince him, somehow, that he is forgiven for whatever it is that he’s done. That he isn’t actually full of holes.
Bodhi watches Cassian as well, but for a gentler reason. Most things about Bodhi are gentle. Chirrut likes to say that the force glows gold around him, and Baze would accuse him of picking favorites if he couldn’t almost see it with his own eyes. Bodhi is kind, soft until threatened, and then steel flashes out from beneath the cream and sugar and startles everyone watching. It is a revelation, every time this happens. Baze has noticed that Cassian is the only one who is never surprised.
Chirrut mutters “Makes you feel young again, eh?” to Baze, nodding at Cassian and Bodhi, who are bickering amiably in the cockpit while K-2SO sulks in the background and complains about Bodhi’s steering. “Reminds me of the year you were trying to get me to propose to you.”
“I proposed to you twice,” Baze says. “And you turned me down both times because you thought I wasn’t being romantic enough.”
Chirrut laughs. “You’re remembering that wrong.”
Baze snorts. “I’m not.”
Chirrut laughs again, that lovely, ridiculous sound, and Baze knows he has always been his family, but is more grateful than ever now that he knows what he could lose.
They disembark at Yavin IV, Jyn and Cassian leading them, and Baze makes sure that everyone gets off the ship before him so that no one gets left behind. Old habits die hard, he supposes, and brings up the rear with watchful eyes.
Cassian dismisses them all so he can go debrief with the council. “You know, the ones we told to go fuck themselves when we left,” he says, amusement clear in his voice. “But you all should go sleep. You look dead on your feet.”
“I’m coming with you,” Jyn says, a stubborn crease forming between her eyebrows.
Cassian shrugs. “I won’t stop you.”
“I – I could come too,” Bodhi offers, and Baze can see his hands twitching behind his back where he’s holding them. “I wouldn’t mind.”
Cassian’s face visibly softens. “Go sleep, querido,” he says, and touches Bodhi’s shoulder. “There’s no need for us all to stay up.”
“You are all soft and weak,” K-2’s voice comes out of a mouse droid at Cassian’s feet. Baze fights down the urge to kick it. “And I need you to know how undignified this is.”
“We’re aware,” Cassian sighs.
“Are you?” K-2 scoffs, with as much disdain as he can make drip from a mouse droid’s speakers. “I’m not entirely convinced.”
Cassian rolls his eyes and nods to Jyn, and the two of them walk down the hall with K-2SO hot on their heels, little wheels whirring to keep up.
Baze can’t sleep. Chirrut has been asleep for an hour already, head on Baze’s chest, soft puffs of breath fanning over Baze’s collar bones. But every time Baze’s eyes close, all he can picture is the moment after Chirrut flipped the master switch on the beach, and the words caught in his throat – Chirrut, come back! – his entire being filled with the dreadful certainty that as soon as Chirrut turned around, he would be shot down.
He knows that’s not what happened. He’d watched Chirrut dive back behind cover with his own open eyes. But his mind keeps turning that one moment over and over again, when he was helplessly watching Chirrut turn to face him, knowing in the deepest part of his soul that his husband was about to die and he was going to watch it happen.
He touches the dip directly between Chirrut’s shoulder blades just to feel the up and down motion of his back as he breathes. They were too exhausted to do more than a cursory wash-up; there are grains of sand in Chirrut’s shirt, and Baze is tired enough that the grit against his fingertips feels like home.
“You’re thinking too hard,” Chirrut says, half asleep, voice a rough rasp. “Go to sleep.”
“Can’t,” Baze admits.
Chirrut is silent for a moment. He feels around for Baze’s hand, and once he has it, he puts it to his mouth so he can kiss the backs of Baze’s scraped knuckles. “I’m here,” he says, and kisses the soft inside of Baze’s wrist. “I am alive,” he adds to the scar that ropes up Baze’s forearm, dragging his lips slowly upward. Baze knows what he’s doing but allows it, leaning back and sighing when Chirrut makes it all the way up to his chest.
“Come here,” Baze says, tipping Chirrut’s face up with a finger under his chin.
Chirrut does.
Baze is looking for his knife – the one that he usually carries in his boot, but lost somewhere in the scuffle – when he hears hushed voices coming from the cargo hold in their ship and frowns. He reminds himself that he is among friends, that nothing bad can happen to him here, but the distrust still bites into him. He moves down the hallway on silent feet, peering around the edge of the doorframe, and sees the sharp angle of Cassian’s shoulder first. Cassian is leaning against the wall. It isn’t until Baze sees Bodhi’s boot that he understands what’s going on, who’s pressing who into the ship’s wall.
Cassian says something Baze can’t hear and Bodhi laughs, a rare and delightful sound.
Old fool, Baze thinks. Don’t interrupt them, even accidentally, or Chirrut will have your hide.
This is an amusing enough thought all by itself, so Baze carefully backs away from the doorway with a smile on his face.
Jyn disappears for long periods of time and doesn’t seem to want to tell anybody where she goes. This would not be concerning in and of itself if it isn’t accompanied by a guilty sort of shifting around that she denies when confronted about it. For someone with so many secrets, she truly does seem to hate carrying them around, and Baze is still working out how to get it out of her when Chirrut beats him to it.
“The force moves differently around those who are about to run,” he says, sitting next to her, and Baze wants to call bullshit, but it seems like a moment that would be best served by his remaining quiet.
Jyn looks at her hands, which are palm-up and open on her knees. “I wasn’t going to leave without saying goodbye,” she says.
“Why are you leaving at all?” Chirrut asks gently.
She shrugs a shoulder. “We did what we came to do. I’m not… cut out for this.”
Chirrut’s eyebrows arch. “For protecting the galaxy? You have a good record so far.”
Baze knows what she means, though. He’s felt restless and detached since they returned from Scarif. Chirrut is here because he truly believes, but Baze is here because he truly believes in him, and this distinction feels important. If he didn’t have Chirrut – if he, like Jyn, was untethered – he might be tempted to leave as well, to disappear and leave good memories behind before someone asks him for something he is not able to give.
“Little sister,” he says, and puts his hand on the top of her head, ruffling her hair when she looks up at him with eyes that hold a strange kind of longing. “You belong with us.”
Jyn covers Baze’s wrist with her hand, quietly hanging on.
“Okay?” Baze asks, thumb smoothing over her forehead.
“Okay,” Jyn says. She smiles.
Baze can feel Chirrut’s affection blooming beside him like sunshine, beaming.
“If I was in an astromech droid, I could be up there with him,” K-2SO says. “I still think there must be at least one on this base that isn’t using very much of its brain, you could kick it out and put me in so fast – ”
Cassian nudges him with the tip of his boot and K-2 subsides with a grumble.
Baze tips his head back, squinting as he watches Bodhi put the X-Wing through its paces. He loops effortlessly through the sky, flipping a barrel roll that makes Cassian wince and Jyn clap her hands together in delight.
“How does he look?” Chirrut asks. His hand is on Baze’s arm, fingers tucked into Baze’s elbow, a rare public display of his affection.
Baze puts his hand over Chirrut’s. “He looks good. Like he belongs up there.”
And it’s true, he does. All of them have done fine jobs of adjusting to their new roles on the rebel base – which mainly amounts to going where directed and beating up people in white-plated armor – but Bodhi is so at home in the rebel ships, like they are an extension of his small body. When he is inside them, either to take them up or fix them in the dead of night when the rest of the base is asleep, he does not hesitate or stammer. The ships do more than house him.
Cassian is watching Bodhi effortlessly hover the ship back to the landing pad, glowing. When Bodhi disembarks, Cassian braces himself to catch the armful of pilot that all but launches himself at him.
“You did great!” Cassian laughs, a hand on the back of Bodhi’s head to clutch him closer.
“Yeah?” Bodhi asks, but his voice is muffled by the crook of Cassian’s neck.
“I gladly await death,” K-2SO says.
Jyn’s mouth is twitching toward a smile. “Stick around long enough and you might just get your wish.”
Baze feels Chirrut squeeze his hand and squeezes him back.
“There is lots of work to be done,” Chirrut murmurs, just loudly enough for Baze to hear.
“I am one with the force and the force is with me,” Baze replies quietly, and means, I have you and am not going anywhere. “I am not afraid.”