Once, not so long ago and not so far away, there lived a very special boy in a very holy city.
His name was Bodhi.
Asmi Rook is supposed to be there when the Death Star fires on the Holy City of Jedha. NiJedha is her home, and has been for her whole life. Her family has lived there for eight generations and likely would have been there for eight more if it hadn't been for the Empire.
It's the only place she can see her brother in the little time the Empire allows him away from his work. She hates it, seeing Bodhi so worn thin, his spirit more crushed by the Empire each time. She wants to tell him to leave, to come with her and run from the Empire as far as they can go.
But she doesn't.
They both know that they have no choice.
The Holy City is a sacred, special place, home to an ancient temple of the Force and a site of devout pilgrimage for worshippers across the galaxy.
The boy Bodhi is not a pilgrim, though, or a Jedi. He is just a boy living with his sister and their mother in the shadow of the temple.
He has little, as a child. Few in the Holy City are wealthy.
But he has his family and food to eat and a roof over his head and his dreams of the stars.
And so he is happy.
And so his happiness is infectious. He has smiles for everyone he meets and he is kind to a fault. He loves the world, and everyone in, from the biggest, gruffest Guardian of the Temple to the scrappy orphan girl in the marketplace who doesn't know how to stop fighting.
Bodhi is kind and loves and is loved.
And so he is happy.
But she's not in NiJedha when the giant machine moon looms large on the horizon.
She's not there when the beam of green fire destroys the Holy City.
She's not there when dust and rock spew thousands of miles in every direction, destroying everything in their path.
She's not there when Bodhi Rook, dragged back to sanity and freedom by a rebel with a kind heart, emerges from Saw Gerrera's base and realizes that he'd never left Jedha at all. That the heaving wall of debris roiling towards him had once been his home. His people. His sister.
(She doesn't know this, of course. She'll learn it later, from the mouth of a Partisan soldier who tortured her brother.)
Instead, she's 300 miles away in the tiny desert village of Tissan helping a childhood friend with his sick baby. She feels the ground roll under her feet and can almost imagine she hears the moon scream.
As she huddles with the other villagers, staring at the cloud of debris blotting out the horizon and moving steadily towards them, deep in her heart, she knows.
Oh Bodhi, she thinks, and begins to pray.
The boy Bodhi is happy — they are all happy — until his mother dies and the Empire comes.
After that, everything changes.
Happiness drains away from the Holy City as the Empire's great ship casts a shadow across their moon and the Empire's soldiers take and take and take. And the people grow sad and desperate and scared.
Bodhi is sadder and more desperate and more scared than most.
Without their mother, he and sister have less than nothing and they struggle every day to survive.
But they cannot let their weakness show outside the walls of their tiny home.
The Empire senses weakness like a predator pursuing prey, and they would not survive that attention.
Bodhi thinks they will be alright, but then the Empire cracks down again and suddenly even the most generous of the Holy City's people have no more little scraps of jobs to offer two starving orphans.
Bodhi and his sister huddle together on their roof, staring up at the Empire's giant shadow and know there is only one thing left to do.
They join the Empire.
She is lucky to get off Jedha alive, she knows. One of the moon's pilgrim tourists is a rich man with a personal ship who comes for an experience he can share on the holonet. To get the genuine experience he has decided to walk a short ways in the desert and as luck, or the Force, would have it, his ship is parked right outside the village when Jedha is destroyed and big enough to carry them all.
(He doesn't save them out of genuine kindness, she knows, but because he wants to be able to tell people about his act of selfless generosity. He wants to make the story of her moon's destruction and the death of her people instead the story about how he was so lucky not to have been in the Holy City and how kind he was to rescue a poor group of villagers.
Asmi has met his kind before.
A small part of her despises that she only survives because of one of the pilgrim tourists that Jedha's natives hate so passionately, and that he turns the genocide of her people into his story. But the rest of her is just grateful to be alive.)
As they rise through the atmosphere, she stares back at her dying moon. The weapon that killed them is long gone, but as tectonic quakes shake the moon apart, she realizes that the Empire doesn't care.
It wasn't about the destruction of the moon.
It was about the destruction of the Holy City.
She swallows around the sudden tightness in her throat and knows.
Oh Bodhi, she thinks, what have you done?
I can hear you gasp. I see your shock.
Why would a child of the Holy City, a boy as bright and kind as our Bodhi, join an evil as terrible as the Empire?
This is a Truth most of the galaxy will never admit.
Sometimes good, kind people are forced into terrible choices they would otherwise never make. Sometimes, good, kind people do terrible things because they don't think they have any other option.
The Empire was a terrible thing for Bodhi. It gave him his dream to fly, to see the stars. But living in the heart of their darkness, watching them take and take and take from everyone they could, began to break something in Bodhi.
He grew quiet and listless and alone.
He was alive but he wasn't living.
She's not even looking for the first piece of the story when it finds her in a dingy refugee camp on Coltraz.
"I heard he stole something from the Empire," says a voice from the corner, rising above the noise of a group of Jedhan refugees debating why the Empire would be hunting Bodhi Rook in the days before Jedha's destruction.
Hidden in her own dark corner, Asmi tenses and narrows her attention on the barabel who spoke. He sounds like he knows, she thinks.
"Stole something?" one of the men asks, confused. "Why would he do that?"
The barabel shrugs. "Maybe he wanted to tweak the Empire," he says, then pauses. "Maybe he wanted to turn traitor. Join the Rebellion."
That sets off a round of speculation that takes a long time to resolve. The rest of the refugees seem to agree that there was no way Bodhi Rook, loyal Imperial pilot, could turn traitor to the Empire, even if he was a local boy.
But to Asmi… well… that sounds exactly like something Bodhi would do if he had the chance.
Oh Bodhi, she thinks, where are you? What did you do?
And so Bodhi begins to doubt. He knows the Empire is wrong, but he thought he could live with it. He thought if he put his head down and survived, it would be alright.
It isn't and Bodhi doubts. He doubts when he sees the Temple of Jedha stripped of its kyber. He doubts when he runs supplies to Imperial outposts on distant moons and sees their people starving and down-trodden. He doubts when he hears another decree stripping non-human sentients of their rights.
He doubts.
And those doubts grow from unease gnawing at the back of his mind to a sickness in his stomach every moment of every day that he is surrounded by the Empire. Bodhi has nightmares when he can sleep at all. He stops enjoying food. Books and the holonet no longer capture his attention. Even the small card and dice games the other pilots, mechanics, and soldiers play on their downtime are no longer things he could even force himself to enjoy.
And every moment of every day, he doubts.
Doubts that he had made the right choice.
The thing that killed their world was called the Death Star. Was because the Rebel Alliance destroyed it in the skies above Yavin IV.
Asmi's feelings about it are… complicated.
She is viscerally and viciously pleased that the thing that killed her world, her people is gone. But she can't be happy without knowing what happened to her brother.
She thinks she knows that Bodhi and the Death Star are connected.
Bodhi had done… something.
Something big, so big that even Imperial officers in the backwater Rim planet that the refugees have been shunted to know his name and say it with bitter disgust. Like the Imperial officer slumped over his third drink at the end of the bar, slurring angrily about that damned pilot.
Asmi sets a fourth drink down in front of him and braces her elbows on the bar.
"Tell me all about your troubles," she croons gently.
The officer tosses back half his drink with a deranged laugh, and tells her about an Imperial science station called Eadu, a scientist named Galen Erso, and the quiet pilot who befriended him then disappeared days before rumors began to circulate that someone at the facility had betrayed them to the Rebellion and that Bodhi Rook had been the messenger.
"G'len Ersho," the officer slurs, "betrayded ush. But that pilot…"
He growls and tightens his hand around the glass.
"Kriff that pilot!" he shouts and throws the glass across the bar. It smashes into the head of a trandoshan and in moments the bar devolves into an angry brawl, the Imperial officer crushed in the middle.
Asmi ducks under the bar to wait it out with a smile on her face.
Oh Bodhi, she thinks, what have you done?
One day, Bodhi meets another sad, doubtful man. They are nothing alike, Bodhi and this man. He is an Imperial scientist, their best and brightest, working on the Empire's grandest project. And Bodhi is Bodhi, a low-level cargo pilot who wishes more and more to be completely invisible.
But they see the same thing in each other: they both doubt the Empire.
It is the scientist who makes the first move, speaking gently to Bodhi about doubts and atrocities that cannot be borne and the chance to make it right.
But it is Bodhi who asks, scared and determined, "What can I do to help?"
The scientist gives him a message and mission, and Bodhi goes with the scientist's words echoing in his heart.
He can make it right.
At a tiny bar on Kafrene, a barabel drops unceremoniously into the seat across from her. It's the same one, she thinks, as from the refugee camp on Coltraz.
"Heard you're looking for a pilot," he growls. "A very particular pilot."
He offers her a tiny device that she recognizes intimately. She takes it gingerly from his scaled hand and flips it open. It's exactly what she thought it was: an Imperial holographic ident card.
But the face on it…
It's Bodhi.
"Where did you get this?" she asks, staring at her brother's face.
"On Jedha," he says, "from an Imperial pilot looking for Saw Gerrera."
Saw Gerrera. She knows that name. She looks up warily.
"You're a Partisan," she says quietly. Involuntarily, her free hand presses against her thigh where, years earlier, a Partisan bomb in the market had shattered all the bones in her leg. Imperial medicine had helped her walk again, but never without pain or a limp.
The barabel bares his teeth at her. "And you're Bodhi Rook's sister."
She feels cold. She's worked so hard to hide that part of her identity because the Empire is never kind to the families of people they consider traitors.
"How do you know that?" she asks softly.
"You learn so much from a man pushed past his breaking point," he says, and for a moment Asmi doesn't understand.
But then she does.
Torture. Bodhi.
She feels white-hot rage unfold in her chest.
This… thing… had tortured her brother.
With deliberate care she tucks Bodhi's ident card into her shirt pocket, then draws her blaster and props it on the table. The whine of a full, deadly charge is just barely audible over the noise of the bar, but the barabel clearly hears it.
His eyes focus on it and he sits up warily. He shoots a glance around the bar, but Asmi has chosen her location with care. The other patrons either don't notice the blaster or don't care.
"Now," she says, "tell me what you did to my brother."
So Bodhi Rook carries the scientist's message across the stars, looking for a great warrior to help him. But what he finds instead is an old man, tired from long years of war, who won't — can't — believe Bodhi because he's an Imperial pilot.
Never has Bodhi so cursed that terrible symbol on his uniform.
He tries and tries to tell them of the message.
It's important. It could stop the Empire. They must know.
They don't, won't, believe him, and determined to find the truth of the Imperial spy, the force Bodhi Rook, the pilot who is just trying to do the right thing, to face a creature that tears into your mind and soul and drags the truth into the daylight.
It leaves broken men behind it, even if they have no lies to hide.
And so it left Bodhi, lost and alone, in the terrible darkness.
She's on a passenger freighter headed for the mid Rim when the dreams find her. She can never quite remember the details when she wakes. Only enough to say that they are of Bodhi surrounded by friendly faces and bathed in a brilliant glow.
Bodhi, who is laughing, and smiling and happy and free.
Bodhi who is loved.
Bodhi who turns to her and smiles at her with a mix of heart-breaking love and heart-breaking sadness. Bodhi who gathers her in his arms while she cries and loves him back.
It is only months later, when she finally learns of Bodhi's fate and the fate of his crew that she realizes that they were more than dreams.
They were a goodbye.
Do not fear, gentle listener, for though Bodhi was trapped in darkness, sometimes it is in the darkest places that we find the things we most desperately need.
This is true of Bodhi, for in the darkness he found more heroes like himself. Heroes that would carry him onward in his quest.
A woman who burns like a star.
A rebel soldier with a kind heart.
A guardian who stands tall in the face of all threats.
A man who sees though his eyes are blind.
And a metal monster with a living soul.
In the darkness they come together and together they fight free of it.
And fight they must, for as they emerge from their dark prison they find that the Empire has come nipping at their heels. The Empire has come to the Holy City.
And there is nothing brave Bodhi and his companions can do but bear witness and flee as the Empire destroys the sacred city.
The only time she ever plays on both her identity as a former Imperial and as Bodhi's sister is with Elias Granden, a man she recognizes as one of Bodhi's fellow cargo pilots. He'd been the only one who was friendly with her brother.
It gives her hope that she finds him piloting civilian passenger freighters, not Imperial cargo shuttles.
It doesn't take him long to recognize her.
"I almost couldn't believe it," he says, "when I saw him come out of the rain. We'd been told he'd gone missing on Jedha, and then he shows up on Eadu in the middle of a rebel attack? Wasn't hard to put the dots together."
Bodhi had apologized to his fellow pilots, Granden tells her, even as he'd held them at blaster point, locked them in a storage room, and stolen a shuttle.
"It saved our lives," Granden says. "When the base fell down around us, being locked in that room saved our lives. Can't hate Rook for that, even if I hate him for everything else."
But hope is not lost, for the woman who burns like a star has heard the message Bodhi carried, a message of a weakness worked into the heart of the Empire's machine of death.
Across the stars they fly, to find the scientist who sent the message and carry him back to the Rebellion so the machine can be destroyed.
But they are too late, for the Empire fears its traitor and the Rebellion fears the machine's architect.
The scientist dies, his mission incomplete, and its weight passes to his daughter, the woman who burns like a star, and to our pilot Bodhi.
On Etiara, she kidnaps, Nower Jebel, a former senator and current figurehead for the rebel movement on the planet. She finds him alone and unprotected in the capital city's marketplace and has to shake her head at the lack of operational security even as she shows a blaster between his ribs and drags him front the street.
He's scared, she sees, and won't believe a word she says about not being an Imperial, so she doesn't bother trying.
Instead, she flips open her brother's ident card and makes sure Jebel can see his face.
"Bodhi Rook," she says. "Talk."
He takes one look at the gun and does, babbling about a message from Erso, a mission to Jedha, an attack on Eadu, and an impassioned speech that the Rebellion ignored. For Bodhi Rook he has only disdain and suspicion, an Imperial defector who could never stop belonging to the Empire.
"Your boy helped us get the plans to destroy the Death Star," he admits reluctantly. "Of course, he also helped get half the fleet destroyed and got himself killed doing it."
There's a roaring noise in her ears and a leaden weight in her belly.
"He's dead?" she whispers.
Jebel sneers at her.
"Yes," he says, "so it doesn't matter what kind of spying he came to do."
He's dead. The words echo inside her. Bodhi's dead.
She'd known it was a possibility. She'd known. But she'd hoped…
She wants to ask when and where and how but she hears the thundering of boot steps drawing ever closer. The planet's rebellion come for their figurehead, she thinks.
Time to go.
It's only when she's alone, hours later, that she lets herself truly feel the news.
Oh Bodhi, she thinks, and weeps.
They turn to the Rebellion, for who else would help them destroy the Empire's machine? But the Rebellion does not trust easily, especially not the words of a former Imperial and the daughter of the man who built the machine.
They refuse to fight.
This is, I see, a surprise to you, gentle listeners, for you have all heard the tale of the Rebellion's brave assault on the Imperial Scarif and their heroic attack on the Death Star.
But here is the truth. In the beginning when the scientist's daughter and the Imperial pilot begged them to fight, to find the map the scientist had made to the machine's weakness, the Rebellion chose instead to run. To hide. To surrender.
And so our pilot and the scientist's little star went on their own, with only the help of their brave warrior friends and the rebel soldiers who wanted to make their sacrifices and the blood on their hands mean something.
"I served with him," he says. "I was there. On the beach. When he…"
Stordan Tonc, Rebellion Pathfinder, is a small man with haunted eyes, but his smile is kind. She finds him on Felucia, in the aftermath of the Rebellion's campaign to free the planet from Imperial control.
He tells her of the assault on Scarif, the intricate plans, and the desperate gambles. But mostly, he tells her of the pilot, scared and untrained but willing to run out into the middle of a firefight to do what needed to be done.
"I'm sorry," he says, "that I couldn't save him."
His gaze is distant, watching something long ago and far away.
"Bodhi Rook was a good man," he says, "and he died brave."
Their quest is desperate. A small band of brave men and women against an entire world of Imperial might. And still they fight. They fight on the beaches and in the woods and in the Citadel.
They fight and they die because every step they take carries them closer to their goal.
This story has a happy ending, gentle listeners, for this tiny band of brave rebels succeeds in their quest. They find the map and send it flying out to the Rebel fleet that has found their courage and followed the lead of the brave men and women below.
But our story also has a sad ending, for though they were brave and fought hard, though they succeeded in their quest, they all perished doing so. The guardian and the man who sees. The metal monster. The soldier with a kind heart and the woman who burns like a star.
Bodhi Rook, the pilot.
Dying to complete a quest they believed in.
She tells her brother's story everywhere she can — in bars, in school rooms, in refugee camps, over camp fires and minimal rations. She tells his story so people will know, and remember, the little boy from Jedha who dreamed of touching the stars and made a choice that saved the galaxy.
She tells his story, because as long as it lives, her brother lives too.
This is not a sad story, gentle listeners, for though our brave pilot Bodhi passed on into the light of the Force, his legacy lived on.
He fought for the Rebellion, who went on to destroy the Empire that ruined so many lives.
He won his quest to find key to the weakness of the machine of death, and because he did, the brave pilots of the Rebellion destroyed the weapon that killed his world.
And he lives, to this day, in our hearts and in our stories.
All I ask, gentle listeners, is that you remember Bodhi Rook, the boy from Jedha who flew to the stars and destroyed the darkest among them.