A;N: I spent all of Feb writing this thinking it would be 8k long, but it went on much longer than that. because I never get to the point. So sadly, had to split into 3 parts .
Anyway, I saw a headcanons post on tumblr about Michelle Yeoh being the faceclaim for a genderswapped Chirrut, and Ming Na-Wen for Baze (but with less perf hair), and I approved. The two are pretty much same age as Jiang Wen and Donnie anyway. OK let's face it, I just wanted to write more Asian lesbians in space.
Also, my first foray into Star Wars fandom - please forgive me. I read as much as I could from the SW wiki and the rest I just pulled out of my ass.
Thx for listening, now I need my life back.
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I.
One summer it rains in Jedha. The first rain in years. Palpitations of rain, heavy like blaster-fire, sheeting off the roofs and awnings.
Jedha, they say, is an old snake sleeping on a rock, growing a city of holy dust on its scales. Now the coils of its streets loosen, dirt unpacking into streams of silt. The drainage systems are overloaded; the water table soars through the mesa, swamping the primitive generators and circuits, plunging the city into darkness. The squatter settlements on the ledges below the city walls liquefy and sludge down the precipice, and their residents come scrambling for shelter in the many temples of Jedha.
In the compound of the Temple of the Kyber, the novices are sent to clear blockages in the drains, dig trenches and divert floodwater away from the main buildings.
Baze does the work patiently, thrusting her shovel deep into the muck, even as water slides down her shorn scalp, into her eyes. Her novice robes drenched with the weight of a second skin.
The third precept of the Guardians of the Whills is this: immerse the self in service.
"They should have automated maintenance for this kind of work," says Danang Sinmukh, a Togrutan off-worlder and Baze's fellow novice. Danang stabs his shovel into the waterlogged ground and leans his weight on the handle.
"Temple droids haven't been upgraded in years. They'll just get their circuits messed up. Can't handle this kind of weather," Baze says, shortly. She does not quote the third precept to Danang.
Danang is an off-worlder from the shipyards of Kuat. His family sold their thriving construction business and moved to Jedha after an incident in which an infant Danang tumbled through a maze of belts and cogs, and remained trapped for hours in the interstices of production machinery. Miraculously, he was pulled out alive, though maimed, his right lek severed, a stump at the side of his face.
"Where's your friend?" Danang says.
"Working the floodwater pump at the back," Baze lies. Truth is, she has no idea.
Danang snorts. "As if."
By the time evening rolls around, Baze's neck and shoulders are stiff, her muscles braided into taut cables. The downpour has thinned to a drip. The interior of the Temple is cell-bright with storm lamps and emergency lighting, bustling with people taking refuge from the rain and the flooded districts.
She finds Chirrut Îmwe behind the kitchens, sitting on an upturned tub. Chirrut has one knee pulled to her chin, and the other leg stretched out like tripwire. A bundle of longan on her lap. Next to her foot, soaking in a puddle, is a turtle, probably escaped from its usually bone-dry pond.
"There you are." Chirrut smiles beatifically at Baze. She peels a longan with her teeth, spits the tatters of brown skin out and offers the milky globe to Baze. "Where you go? I was looking for you."
She does not look like she has moved from her spot for hours.
"You're eating outside of mealtimes?" Baze folds her arms in disapproval, declining the fruit, even as her stomach leaps in protest.
"To meet the demands of the Force," Chirrut answers. "All is as the Force wills."
"You don't even believe that," Baze scoffs. She leans against the wall, beside Chirrut and tilts her face to the sky. A damp chill is burrowing its way into her skin. The air is turning cold and dense, much too cold for summer. "I heard Tallah say tomorrow we have to go out to the northern boundary and help with the pumps."
Chirrut folds her arms behind her head and turns her face up to look at Baze. Her cheeks are full of fruit. "You asking me to do something, is it?"
"Forget it," Baze says. "So I won't see you at the northern boundary, then."
"I'll go." Chirrut spits out a longan seed. It patters, an onyx eye polished by spit, to the ground. "But not because of any precept of the Guardians. Just for you."
Baze bites back a retort, because she isn't sure exactly what to make of this. She turns away from Chirrut, even though Chirrut's gaze never leaves her. From the corner of her eye, she studies Chirrut, the smugness of her expression, the indolence of her posture. Her hair growing out, wisping and curling around her ears, defying Temple regulations. Defiant, always defiant, in the most nonchalant way possible. Any day now and a Guardian (probably Guardian Tallah) is going to cuff Chirrut on the ear and tell her to tidy up.
For a moment she wonders if it's possible to bridge that gap between them. Chirrut's smile is a challenge, complicated and elusive, something that prompts a spike of quite unexplained embarrassment in Baze. She says nothing.
Chirrut reaches down and picks up the turtle from the puddle at her feet. Its clawed appendages twitch.
"This one I'm going to call Ah Choy," she says.
Baze grew up in the eastern districts, in Amoy Quarter, the eldest grandchild in a family that grew and sold sunflowers.
Her family lives in a large compound, which Baze's great-great grandparents had built years ago when they immigrated to Jedha City. In the compound there are four houses and one large greenhouse. And in the greenhouse, their livelihood: a maze of substrate-filled troughs, irrigated with nutrient-enriched water and enhanced with her family's secret fertiliser recipe (which to Baze, seemed nothing more than the shits of various creatures mixed together). The sunflowers that bloom from the troughs are white and scarlet, huge floral discs haloed in petals. These are sold in bunches at the flower markets of Amoy Quarter, as well as the main souk in the central city. Greenery is always in demand in the sandy streets of Jedha.
Baze remembers pruning those stupidly tall plants in the greenhouse. She was the tallest of the children (still is, as far as she knows), so this duty always fell to her. She remembers sitting on the flat roofs of their houses with the comfortable chaos of siblings and cousins, gnawing on kuaci, cutting and drying stalks, or making satchets out of dried petals.
But there has always been a family tradition of sending a child to the Temple to become a novice for a fixed period: an offering of sorts to the Church of the Force, which her forebears converted to after settling in Jedha.
A belief that by doing so, the family will continue to be blessed by the Force for generations to come.
Several of her family members had served for brief periods at the Temple. Her tai kong, her chek-chim, her own Ah-Mak, to name a few. Some of them served for six months, some served for twelve, but they always came home in the end.
So when Baze turned nine, her mothers- her Ah-Mak and her Ah-Bu—delivered her, an awkward libation, to the Guardians of the Whills. Guardian Mahfouz Douma greeted them beneath the multi-tiered roofs of the entrance.
Guardian Douma grasped Baze by her shoulders and Baze stared back at the Guardian, at their dark kasaya robes, and the prayer beads wound around their wrist, beneath their sleeves.
"Welcome to the Temple of the Kyber," said Guardian Douma. They smiled in a manner that was cordial enough.
Fear clutched her throat. She studied the courtyard of the Temple, at the anarchic shapes of the paving stones on the ground, sliding and slotting into each other like a logical headache, at the huge braziers where people could light sticks of incense, at the clusters of clay jars like hollow sentries. So different from the noise and the rowdy colour and the smell of fertiliser of home.
A group of novices trooped past, staring at Baze. At her bright dress and the ribbons wound around her thick dark braids.
Ah-Mak was wiping her eyes. "Sayang, it's only for a year, ya?"
"No need to cry. Anything you need, you can still call or even visit sometimes if the Guardians will let you," said her Ah-Bu. "You're only a temporary novice after all."
"I'm not crying," Baze said indignantly. "That's Ah-Mak."
"May the Force be with you. And the Force bless our family," Ah-Bu said.
Both Ah-Mak and Ah-Bu kissed her and squeezed her hands until she reddened from all the attention and wished they would turn around and leave already.
And when they finally did, she wished she could go back with them.
Baze is woken in the middle of the night by a palm pressed over her mouth. Her eyes spring open, an oath against her teeth. It's only Chirrut, crouching on her bed, hissing at her to be quiet. Baze can still smell the fruit in Chirrut's breath, slightly sour.
"What?" she growls, when Chirrut finally removes her hand from her mouth.
"Oh, you're awake properly now."
"No thanks to you."
"Come on, get up lah," says Chirrut. "Walk with me a bit."
"The senior Guardians will not be happy if they catch us."
"Don't so pessimist like that, okay. Remember the eighth precept," says Chirrut.
"Eschew all forms of entertainment, including music, art and literature." The answer unspools from Baze's lips, an automatic code. "That what you had in mind?"
"Hmm." Chirrut frowns. "Maybe I mixed up with the fourteenth precept or something."
"There are only thirteen precepts."
"Anyway, you go back to sleep. Sorry for disturbing." She steps off Baze's bed and pretend-slouches her way out of the dormitory.
That stupid girl will be caught and punished once again by Guardian Tallah, who's on the warpath for ill-disciplined and insubordinate novices. Ten strokes of the cane to the palm in front of all the other novices, a standard punishment from Tallah.
Chirrut was once subjected to public caning, but she accepted her punishment with a serenity that no doubt annoyed Tallah even more. Baze, on the other hand, felt her insides contract, her fingernails curving their way into her palm each time the rotan swished downwards, as though trying to inflict upon her own hands the same pain Chirrut must be suffering. But Chirrut never resented anyone. Even after the caning, she clasped her hands together in a gesture of thanks toward Tallah.
Baze swears and tosses off the blanket, struggles into her robes, and runs after Chirrut as quietly as she can.
"Alright, alright. Fuck's sake."
Chirrut brightens, but says with some reproach, "Language. We're still on holy ground."
"How someone like you can walk on holy ground, I'll never know."
Chirrut takes her hand and leads her along the passageways of the Temple. They slip out into the cloister, skirting the edges of the courtyard and the clay gardens, to a side gate in the Temple walls. Chirrut keys in the access code (of course, she would know it), and before Baze can make any word of protest, drags her outside, beyond the walls.
The streets are silent around the temple, patched with shadows. The ground is still slimy from the rain.
"I am going to ask a very obvious question," says Baze at last.
"Before you do," says Chirrut, "the answer is just behind that shoplot. Just in that alley. You'll see."
The answer appears to be an abandoned speeder bike parked against the wall. Hardly a standard Jedhan repulsorlift vehicle, probably scavenged parts and scrap metal welded together into the semblance of a working transport. One turbine is exposed, bundles of wires poking through the remains of a polymer shell.
Chirrut turns and faces Baze and spreads her hands out.
"No," says Baze.
Chirrut appears to misunderstand. "What, you scared someone will come looking for it? No one's claimed it for days and besides, we're only borrowing."
"That's not what I'm worried about."
But Chirrut is already hauling it upright and gunning the engine, which whines to life. The speeder bike jolts forward and she swings herself onto it.
"I can't wait for you," she yells. "No idea how to control this thing, so jump on or go back!"
Baze leaps easily onto the seat of the speeder bike, behind Chirrut. She grips Chirrut's shoulders as the speeder slants around a corner and scoots down the street.
"Siao, ah? What you doing?" Baze shouts into Chirrut's ear when they narrowly miss a comms tower.
"I'll get better with more practice," Chirrut calls back, her face wild with glee. "Just hold on and don't fall off."
It is awkward for her to hold onto Chirrut because she is taller and broader, and also because Chirrut is terrible with manoeuvring the vehicle.
The speeder tears through side streets, looping around blocks, before Chirrut finally directs it out of the city's western gates, and they descend the ramp cutting down the slope of the mesa, and head out into the tablelands.
"You crazy! Why are we going into the fucking desert?"
"Show you something mah."
"I don't like riding pillion by the way."
"Too late." Chirrut veers the bike for no reason, swings them side to side like a drunken podracer. "But don't worry. We're not going far."
The desert flashes past them, crags and dunes and scree. She stops the speeder by a large sandstone outcrop. Behind them, the huge mesa looms, and on its tabletop plateau, Jedha City gleams, a staticky, fitful entity. Half of it still blacked out. NaJedha is larger than ever, an unfinished globe blotting out the margins of the night sky. The desert is tinged green by NaJedha's glow.
Chirrut stares up at the hulking planet. "Look at that."
Baze becomes impatient. The air is even colder and more condensed out here. "Are we here to look at stars or something, because we could have just done it back at the Temple."
Chirrut dismounts from the speeder. "There is a place that I've heard others speak of."
They round the corner of the rocky outcrop and Baze's breath catches in her chest. A line of dunes, greenish in the light, fringing the sky. Before them, however, is a luminescent sickle of a pool. Flat and reflective as the weapon.
"They call this place Khaokhun Oasis. The nearest oasis to the city. All that rain has filled it up and made it grow."
"It's-," Baze struggles with the word beautiful.
Beauty is a luxury in the life of a Temple novice. The Guardians say: do not seek beauty. You find it in what you are given. In bare walls, in dead machines, in repetition, in the hundred-year hush of the clay gardens, in the words that run the circuits of prayer beads. Give up your search for fulfilment and find it in what you already have.
Chirrut pokes her in the ribs. "What are you waiting for?"
She unties the belt from around her waist and peels off her robes.
"Oh. You're going in," Baze deadpans.
In response, Chirrut drops her undergarments, the material hitching on her knees before falling to her ankles. She stands completely naked in front of Baze, who tries her hardest to put on her most detached expression. (Chirrut is wiry and ribbed and mostly flat-chested, her breasts pointed and uneven, and her arms are thin but taut with muscle from all the training. Unfamiliar hipbones, a dark fuzzy patch between her legs). Too much air pools in Baze's lungs and she exhales very slowly.
"Not coming?" Chirrut says, an eyebrow raised.
"In this freezing temperature? Not really, no. But I wish you a happy death, anyway. I will light incense to your memory."
"The say the water is warm thanks to thermal heating. You know, members of the Elderly Anomids Arts Association make regular trips here during winter to soak in the warmth."
And without waiting, she runs into the water and plunges in, whooping. She raises her arms above the surface and brings them crashing down. The noise is explosive, euphoric.
"I was right!" she crows. "Warm as your auntie's lap! You can stand there and take the cold, or you can take a leap of faith!"
"Wah look who's giving big lecture on faith."
But Baze undresses carefully and steps into the pool. The water is warm. The sands shift beneath her soles. The muscles in her body unknot slowly as she submerges herself. It's a welcoming sensation, at least until Chirrut swims up to her and blows a stream of bubbles against her bare shoulder.
"Kia si lang!" Baze shouts.
"What do you think?" Chirrut ignores her, mischief in her eyes.
"I think we shouldn't be doing this."
Chirrut only laughs and swims away in indolent strokes, towards the centre of the pool. The ripples of her movement reaches Baze; the surface of the water is tentative, skirting around the interruption of her body. She doesn't follow Chirrut. She floats on her back for awhile, drifting as though the water is a heated cradle, convectional currents of warmth swirling upward from the bottom of the pool.
Vapour begins to curl from the surface. At first, Baze dismisses this as the rising thermal heat, steaming from the depths.
Until the vapours begin to sting her throat and nasal passage, striking painful tears, pinpricks of fire, from her eyes. Her limbs stiffen: first the extremities, then a speedy paralysis grips her thighs and arms and torso, and her body is switched to lockdown mode. She coughs out a cry, perhaps a cry of help, but more likely a warning for Chirrut, who seems to have swum away too far. Water sears her eyes and tips into her frantic mouth as she starts to sink. Her arms are heavy and useless, and the bottom of the pool seems to have fallen away. Her feet and arms come into contact with nothing substantial.
"Chirrut." Chirrut's name turns to froth from her lips. It is pitch dark beneath the surface of the water.
Baze reaches upward in a burst of strength, and a pair of hands grabs her outstretched arm. Nails sink, grappling-hook fierce, into her forearm, and a different force hauls her upwards, against her drowning weight and the burden of gravity, toward air, toward the surface, algal-green in the glow of NaJedha. She breaks through that sickly sheen and her lungs heave, but her strength is gone. The hands that have pulled her up now lock themselves around her chest like bands, and her head tilts backward into something solid. Chirrut's chest. Chirrut's chin digging into her shoulder.
Chirrut's words, urgent but reassuring against her ear. "I got you, I got you, don't fight, don't fight me okay! Baze Malbus!"
The desert air is freezing against Baze's bare skin. The ground, hard against her back. A terrific pressure in her lungs. Chirrut's fist comes down hard on her chest and she vomits water, spluttering.
"Just-just lie down for a moment." Chirrut sounds visibly shaken. She's kneeling beside Baze, her hands are cold on Baze's face. Still naked, water droplets on her goosefleshed skin. In fact, Baze realises stupidly, they're both naked in the middle of the freezing desert. And that they're both idiots.
"You fuckwit." Baze coughs. "That is not how you resuscitate someone. And. You could have drowned yourself going so far out!"
Chirrut drapes Baze's robes over her shivering form. "I'm sorry. This is my fault."
She sounds genuinely upset. Seeing Chirrut vulnerable is a new thing. Chirrut is never vulnerable.
"Huh," Baze says, gruffly. "Don't worry too much about me. I'm not that fragile."
Chirrut retrieves her own robes lying in a heap at the water's edge. The pool glistens with venom. Fumes unfurling into the atmosphere. When she sits down next to Baze, she passes her a small satchel.
"I found this in the speeder's compartment."
Inside, an assortment of musty-smelling smoke-pipes, an antique lighter, and a pouch of desiccated heilong leaves.
Baze suppresses a groan.
"It's cold," Chirrut says, lighting a pinch of the heilong leaves in the receptacle of one of the pipes. She passes it to Baze. "This will keep you warm a bit."
She lights another pipe for herself. After the needle-thin fumes of the lake, the gritty, almost nut-like flavour of the smoke is comforting. Baze coughs twice before she gets used to it.
The tenth precept of the Guardians: do not comfort yourself with the intake of substances that neither nourish the body nor the mind.
Guilt crawls through Baze's thoughts.
"What happened in the water?" she says at last.
"Don't know. Natural chemical phenomenon of some kind. I saw you go under and I tried to pull you out. You must have breathed in far too much of that stuff while you were floating about." Chirrut blows smoke through her rounded lips. She nestles her head against Baze's shoulder. Her hair is wet and prickly on the skin of Baze's neck. "Huh, the Elderly Anomids Arts Association never mentioned anything about these gases."
"So, a poison pool in the desert. Only fools like you know of this kind of place," says Baze. "Anomids clearly have different biological tolerances to us, by the way."
NaJedha has shifted slightly, or Jedha itself has turned away from it. The planet is a disc tipping into darkness. Patches of high density gas on its surface, visible all the way from where they are. Chirrut slips her hand through Baze's and the gesture is startling. Baze does not respond, does not know how to.
"Let's go," says Baze.
Neither of them move.
Baze remembers her first day at the Temple of the Kyber clearly.
After Ah-Mak and Ah-Bu left. After Guardian Douma led her to an austere dormitory to set her belongings down. After passing through the cloister, the passageways with narrow triangular windows cutting sunlight into gold spires on the walls.
She was taken to the inner courtyard and made to sit on a stool while Guardian Douma cut her hair. They were unsentimental about shearing off Baze's braids; they held her head still, and the pressure on her scalp was trustworthy but unconsoling. Hair fell in wisps, snagging on her eyelashes, clinging to the corners of her mouth. Red and white ribbons came fluttering down to her lap. Guardian Douma had snipped them off her braids.
A few novices stopped to gawk. When Guardian Douma was done, they dressed Baze in the pale grey robes of a Temple novice.
"As long as you wear these robes," they said, "everything beyond the teachings of the Whills is renounced. You will eat with your fellow novices, learn with them, train with them. Every moment of the life that existed before you put on these robes now ceases to exist. Remember this, Novice, because one day you may choose to complete the challenges of the duan, and take up the path of the full Guardian."
Baze pressed her hands together and bowed her head.
"Do not be late for the evening meal."
That night, she learnt her first lesson, listening to a lecture delivered by Guardian Douma to the novices: before you seek the Force, first, learn to disengage.
The days moved into weeks, into months. Baze adapted. She learnt to disengage, to renounce, to work in the established sequence of the novices' routines. The others no longer directed their curious looks at her now that she ate the same food as them, learnt the same concepts, uttered the same chants, now that they witnessed how she fell and bruised during training. Just like all of them.
Once a month, the Guardians would perform their Rebuttals in the Disquisition Hall. They sat on long benches facing each other, and the novices would sit on the floor and listen as the Guardians began their debates on the esoteric teachings of the Whills.
Some of the novices dozed off but not Baze. Baze listened to every word, wrestled with comprehension. To understand the Force, the crux of the entire Whills Canon. She was supposed to serve the Temple. The Force was supposed to bless her family.
Just for one year, she told herself. Just this one year and then I'll be home.
That was what she'd thought.
This is how Baze and Chirrut get caught: they stumble back into the Temple compound through the side gate, shivering and smelling of heilong leaf smoke and the stinging bleach-like odour of the desert pool, and nearly walk headlong into Guardian Tallah.
"Guardian," Baze says, horrified. Her teeth chattering with cold, but it sounds like a clicking of fear, a loss of control, and she hates it. "We-we didn't mean to-,"
"You were missing from your dormitory for hours," says Guardian Tallah, coldly. "The Guardians have been scouring the Temple premises and surrounding area for the both of you."
"I thought you just did a check of our rooms earlier in the evening," Chirrut blurts out. Baze groans inwardly.
Tallah's eyes narrow. Her hands are clasped into a knot across her waist. "You are missing the point, Novice Îmwe."
"I made Baze come with me. It's not her fault." Chirrut drops her gaze to the ground.
"I'm sure that you really are a terrible influence," says Tallah dryly, "but Novice Malbus is not a child."
"I went on my own choice," Baze retorts. To Chirrut: "You don't have to protect me."
"There's enough punishment for the both of you to have double rounds," Tallah snaps. "Once you're changed out of your wet clothes."
Early the next morning, Chirrut is called into a disciplinary council with a few of the senior Guardians.
Baze, on the other hand, is assigned by Tallah to do extra work with the floodwater clean-up around the Temple. And when she finishes around midday, Tallah sends her out with a representative of the Elderly Anomids Arts Association to help with their bookkeeping.
"When you've finished, make your way to the Que District and help with the pumps there. One of them is faulty," Tallah calls after her as she slouches off.
At the end of the day, Baze trudges back into the novices' quarters, mud-splattered and starving, her boots encrusted with effluent. The other novices are still in the midst of the evening chanting session, except for Chirrut, of course.
Chirrut is waiting on Baze's bed, lying on Baze's pillow with her arms behind her head as usual. She hasn't bothered to take her shoes off. Baze leans forward, scoops up Chirrut's ankles with one arm and flings them off the mattress. Chirrut flips upright, scowling, to stop herself from rolling onto the floor.
"Shoes off.".
"You know or not," Chirrut says, "what I would be instead of training to be a Guardian?"
"A beggar on the streets. What else?"
They both laugh at that. Chirrut has the habit of sneaking out of the Temple during the day and pretending to be a mendicant at the souk. Pilgrims and tourists give generously. Who wouldn't, especially if they saw a girl with a beatific smile and a shaved head, clad in the coarse robes of a novice? Chirrut has always tried to share some of her credits or food offerings with Baze, who never fails to decline out of respect for the Precepts.
"Actually I want to be like your second auntie."
"Li Ee? The fortune seller?"
"That's the one."
"She's regarded as the crazy auntie of the family."
"I like her. She damn good one. Always give me food when I see her."
"When do you even see her?" Baze splutters. "We're not even supposed to visit family or friends unless we get permission from the elders. Actually, never mind. I don't want to know."
Chirrut smiles. "I like your Li Ee. She trades in mysteries. The more mysterious you are, the better you get paid."
"Oh, so that's why. You just want to cheat a whole bunch of people."
"Eh where got lah."
Baze pulls off her sodden robes and shoes and stands there, barefoot and in damp undergarments, rolling the tenseness out of her shoulders. She rubs her neck and her palm is stained with grime.
Chirrut gestures to a bowl of water and a sponge on the floor, next to the bed. Instead, Baze's eyes fall onto the covered tray next to the basin.
"Is that food? I'm starving."
"At least wash your hands and face first."
Baze glares daggers at Chirrut, who doesn't flinch. Chirrut sighs. "Let me."
Chirrut dips the sponge in the basin, squeezes out excess water and dabs it against Baze's forehead and cheeks. Her face is hard to read, devoid of the usual affection and friendship, always so evident in her easy smile. The water is cool on Baze's skin and some of it trickles down her neck. She closes her eyes as Chirrut sponges her eyelids.
"You haven't told me what your punishment was," Baze says at last. "You got the rotan again, did you?"
"Don't be stupid. You think I'm what?"
"Then?"
Chirrut puts away the basin and sponge. She reaches for a rough towel and throws it at Baze's face. "Dry yourself."
Baze dries the water off her face and neck.
"I had a disciplinary hearing with a few of the Senior Guardians. Nothing much, though. They asked me to rethink my life choices."
"The Senior Guardians asked you to rethink your life choices," says Baze in disbelief.
"That's right."
"Huh," says Baze. "And there they had me cleaning muck and drains and spending hours looking at the datasheets of the records kept by the kriffing Elderly Anomids Arts Association. Don't laugh, okay."
Chirrut straightens the grin out of her mouth. Then her eyes glaze over and she looks past Baze.
"The Guardians asked me if I wanted to continue with the way of life here at the Temple. They said the life of a Guardian is not suited for everyone and that I do have a choice."
Baze suddenly forgets to breathe. Her syllables are cable-tense. "And?"
"I only stay for two reasons."
"Master Ilzah?" Baze says.
A curt nod.
"And the other reason."
Chirrut throws her hands up, irritated. 'The other reason is your stupid face. The food will get stone cold. Cold food gives you wind, or something. So start eating already."
She picks up the tray from the floor and sets it on Baze's bed. There's a bowl of lukewarm rice, overlaid with a mesh of pickled cabbage. A dish of cut chilli at the side.
Baze feels that old twang of guilt in her chest as she shovels rice into her mouth. Like the rice has gone down the wrong way, blockading her oesophagus and lungs. She's fifteen now and will be ready for her third duan testing soon (Chirrut is still struggling to qualify for first duan). And while she's still far from becoming a fully-fledged Guardian, the Elders often encourage novices who are further along their studies to start observing the practices of full Guardians. And one such practice is to abstain from eating between midday and midnight.
"You're still a novice," says Chirrut, not helpfully, and that's all it takes for Baze to finish scoffing down the rice.
So why did Baze stay on at the Temple?
She herself isn't sure.
But on what was supposed to be her last night at the Temple, during her last meditation session, she closed her eyes and contemplated her family.
Ah-Bu and Ah-Mak and her siblings and cousins and grandparents, all waiting to welcome her home. Waiting to thank her for doing her part, for bringing to the family the continued blessings of the Force. Baze Malbus, the good granddaughter, bringer of blessings and pride, welcomed back into the tangle of her family.
Her family that was going to grow sunflowers until the end of time. They were never going to leave that home compound in Amoy Quarter.
And she would go back to all that, back to pruning plants and selling flowers at the souk. Jostling with her siblings, basking in comfort, having her mothers close by always. She had always been content to do that, but now the thought filled her with dissatisfaction.
Perhaps she had found some measure of comfort in the sparse and regimented life of the novice. Perhaps all the lessons, chores and training had altered her somehow, all that cryptic talk of the Force.
Or perhaps it was because that Baze had grown to love the Force.
The knowledge that it sang in resonances circumnavigating the scope of her human ears, moved in enigmatic wavelengths around her body and mind, impelled her along pathways pre-established and purposed for her, long before the galaxy disgorged the amount of dust needed to craft her form into existence.
Perhaps within the confinement of the Temple, there was purpose to be found. And so she stayed, seeking this purpose in the ever-deepening circles that was the calling to the life of a Guardian.
Thanks for reading. There are 3 parts to this - all written, so remaining 2 will be posted soon.