Wedge Antilles knows the story of the destruction of the first Death Star. He should; he was there after all.
(And for the destruction of the second, its debris still lighting up Endor's sky above them. But who's counting.)
But as he sits at the back of a small band of rebels and ewoks listening to one of the Rebellion's support personnel tell the story of Bodhi Rook, he realizes that maybe he doesn't know the story as well as he thought he did.
The woman weaves the story with the skill of an expert, giving depth and colour to the footnote of martyrdom that Rogue One has become for the rest of the galaxy. Wedge has always known about the tiny crew that threw itself against the Imperial might at Scarif and, against all odds, pried the Death Star plans from their grasp.
But he'd never thought about them much beyond the hurried briefing he'd gotten before the Death Star's arrival at Yavin IV and in the aftermath their memorial had become just one of the many.
Now, hearing their story, hearing Bodhi Rook, fellow pilot and fellow Imperial defector, come to life as a real person, Wedge is ashamed by that ignorance.
So he sits at the edges of the light from the campfire and listens and feels a fierce regret that he never got to know any of that crew. He thinks he would have liked them.
He hopes they would have been proud of what the Rebellion has done with their work.
The Reconciliation Commission is marching into its third month, and for the first time Leia is sitting in the public forum instead of the formal judiciary space.
It had been Luke who'd suggested and then fought for the Reconciliation Commission to have space dedicated to allowing the general public to share their stories. Most of the Reconciliation Commission was hearing testimony from carefully selected sources — the Empire's victims and its servants. It was meant to provide a venue where victims could be heard and criminals could be punished, and the slowly growing New Republic could be reminded of the horrors that came before.
Luke had argued that the commission would never have the time to hear everyone's story and that the need to hear testimony from some of the most impacted and worst offenders would leave no space for the ordinary person to tell their story. The New Republic, he agreed, needed to hear the long, bloody history of the Empire.
But the people should have a space to tell their stories too — the stories too little for the formal judicial proceedings, the stories that didn't need cross-examination and visual evidence.
Leia, already feeling daunted by the weeks of scheduled testimony stretching out before her, had been reluctant to agree. But Luke had been so fierce in his argument and had asked for so little else in the wake of his victory over Vader and the Emperor, that Leia had given in. She'd convinced the rest of the committee organizing the commission to find a public space for Luke's forum, then left it in her brother's hands.
Three months later she was, for the first time, sitting in the back of the forum and listening to the stories being told.
And it's been a startling reminder that the Empire didn't only have heroes and villains. It had ordinary people with ordinary jobs, who were both cruel and kind, but on an individual, not galactic scale. The stories she hears are not of planets destroyed by superweapons or entire populations forced into slavery, but of the regular people who struggled to figure out how to survive and to live with themselves within the Empire.
Another woman gets up to speak and Leia finds her attention caught. The story that this woman tells isn't hers, but she weaves the story with beauty and emotion. And the more Leia hears of the story, the more it begins to sound… familiar.
The woman too looks familiar to Leia's eyes, but not someone she can name.
Maybe a rebel Leia has seen on one base or another?
Then the woman speaks of a terrible message, a rebellion that wouldn't listen, and a desperate quest to finish a scientist's mission, and Leia suddenly knows exactly what she's listening to.
This is the story of Rogue One.
She already knows it — of course she knows it.
But she has only ever known it in brief, in the hurried mission briefing Captain Antilles had gotten before their ship was dispatched from Alderaan, in the single line of background given to the Alliance's pilots before their run on the Death Star.
As the preface to her story, and Luke's story, and Han's story.
She feels a little sick.
Rogue One and Scarif and the theft of the Death Star plans was the Alliance's first major victory, but the story is only ever told as the opening to the bigger, grander tale of the destruction of the Death Star itself.
No-one tells the story of the people behind that mission and how they came to be running it.
Leia sits in the back of the forum and listens and burns it into her memory.
This, more than any other story she's heard is this space, speaks to its value. A value she had allowed herself to overlook.
It's a reminder that behind every line of the history they are writing, there are dozens, hundreds, thousands, millions of people whose stories aren't being told. There are ordinary people with ordinary lives who struggled to survive and to live in the Empire. Who had families and friends and faced hard questions about themselves. Who were people, not heroes and villains.
Leia vows never to forget that and never to forget Rogue One and Bodhi Rook.
Poe Dameron first hears the story of Bodhi Rook as a child. At only six years old and full of energy, his parents often find it difficult to keep up with him. (He knows, because they've told him so many times, always with smiles and tickles.)
What he loves more than anything, though, is when his mamá takes him up flying with her.
So he's incredibly disappointed when his mother tells him that instead of going flying, they're going to listen to a story.
"¿Por qué, mamá?" he whines.
"Because mijo," she says, "it's a very special story about people who helped save the galaxy."
She must still see the mutiny on Poe's face because she tickles him stomach and says, "The hero of this story is a pilot."
Poe laughs at his mamá's tickles but thinks about her offer.
"Vale," he says finally, "I like pilot stories."
Mamá kisses his cheek and hoists him onto her hip and they set off for the town square where Poe is surprised to see how many people have gathered.
All other thoughts are quickly driven from him mind though as he listens to the woman weave a story of a brave pilot who helped steal the plans for the Death Star. As the story closes, he tugs anxiously on his mamá.
"You fought the Death Star, didn't you mamá?" he asks.
He's trying to be quiet, but he hasn't mastered what his papá calls the "inside voice" so most of the square hears him and turns to look. Poe ducks down to hide from the scrutiny, but mamá just laughs and confirms that, yes, she flew against the Death Star.
Of course Poe wants to hear the story. (And so does the rest of the square.)
So that's how Poe gets two pilot stories at once.
He can barely contain his glee.
He thinks, later, as he and his mamá are walking home, that he liked Bodhi Rook's story. But that his mamá's will always be better, because his mamá is the best.
(Two years later, Poe hears the story from Asmi Rook for the second time when she returns to Yavin IV for the ten-year anniversary of the destruction of Alderaan and the first Death Star.
His mother has been dead for only four months.
And this time, he doesn't hear it as a story about a pilot having a grand adventure. He hears a story about a man who lost nearly everything but carried on anyways. A man who made something triumphant out of tragedy.
If Bodhi Rook can do it, he thinks, so can I.
He still spends the night curled up in the Force-sensitive tree outside him home remembering his mother and wiping away the tears.)
Storytellers are rare on Jakku. While there are many who love to boast of their triumphs and skills, there are few who come with education and poise to weave stories of the stars.
The woman sitting under an awning in Niima Outpost is one such person. Behind her, a battered freighter belches dark smoke as a group of the crew crawl over and through her hull. Engine trouble, Rey diagnoses with a glance. She may only be as tall as Unkar Plott's waist, but she knows ships and that one is having engine trouble.
Probably something with the fusion actuator.
It explains why these people are on Jakku.
They must not have had any other choice.
For a moment, Rey wants to creep over to the ship and watch the crew work on her repairs, but the midday sun beats relentlessly on her exposed skin and the shade under the woman's awning looks cooler at least.
The woman isn't alone under her awning and her audience looks to be a mix of more of the ship's crew and passengers and Jakku locals (who are, of course, standing at the back and trying to pretend that they aren't listening).
As Rey creeps closer, Rey hears the woman mention a boy living rough on a desert world with only his sister and his dreams of flying, and her attention is caught. As the story unfolds, Rey is carried away by it and by the brave pilot who made difficult choices and found a family and helped save the galaxy.
I want that, she thinks, and just for a moment, her dream is not that her parents come back for her, but that something happens and she gets to fly away from Jakku, gets to race across the galaxy fighting to save it from evil, and finds a new family of her own.
The next moment, she is horrified by that wish.
Her family is coming back for her.
And wishing for anything else is… is… a betrayal of that and betrayal of them.
Rey is a good girl. She's going to wait and not dream of other things.
It's a beautiful story, Rey can acknowledge that, but she doesn't stay to try to speak with the storyteller.
(By the time she meets Finn and BB8, and fights rathtars and Knights of Ren, and travels to Takodana and Starkiller and D'Qar, Rey had nearly forgotten the story she heard as a child. It lingers only in the feeling, embracing Finn in the corridors of Starkiller and fighting a desperate fight to destroy it, that this is what she really wanted all along.)
Five days after he wakes from his coma, a small woman with greying hair and kind eyes sits down next to Finn's bed and introduces herself as Asmi Rook. She asks him how he's doing and tells him that General Organa sent her to answer questions about the history of the Resistance and the Rebellion before it.
He wants to ask, desperate to know a part of history that the First Order would rather see expunged from all knowledge. But there's something he needs to tell this woman first.
"I was a stormtrooper," he says, watching her face closely.
She nods and doesn't seem surprised. "I know," she says. "The General told me." She pauses and a tiny smile quirks the corners of her mouth. "I think the whole base knows by this point."
He grimaces a little and ducks his head. He's not going to hide his history, but he's not sure how he feels about that many people knowing him and his past.
(That's a lie. He knows exactly how he feels. Scared out of his kriffing mind. In the First Order, that much attention was very bad for a person.)
"You're not the only one, you know," Rook says.
Finn blinks at her and she smiles.
"You're not the only one who's ever defected," she says. "Granted, you're our first from the First Order, but by the end of the last war, half the Rebellion was made up of defectors from the Empire, and many of us are still around."
Us, he realizes. She said us. Is she…?
She sees his question and nods. "I used to work for the Empire," she says.
"Why did you leave," he asks.
"Not for anything as brave as you," she says. "They forgot about evacuating me when they destroyed my planet and killed my people. And I just… never went back."
She smiles at him, but Finn can see the old pain in her eyes.
"My brother, though," she says, "he was more like you. He defected from the Empire trying to save the galaxy."
Finn shakes his head. "I was just scared," he admits in a small voice. "My first mission, they wanted me to kill innocent people, and I couldn't. So I ran."
"Because it was the right thing to do," she says. "You rescued a Resistance pilot, completed his mission, and helped the Resistance destroy Starkiller. Seems pretty brave in my book."
Finn is… not sure he's ready to accept that, even if it's what Poe has been telling him, and the General, and everyone else he's met so far. He's maybe starting to believe it, but also thinks he's going to have to do a lot to be worthy of it.
"Your brother," he says, trying to get away from that uncomfortable conversation, "what did he…?"
"Bodhi," she says. "His name was Bodhi, and he helped destroy the first Death Star. Would you like to hear the story?"
Finn nods, then listens in awe as she weaves a story of bravery in spite of fear, hope in the face of sadness, and a desperate band of heroes who sacrificed everything for what they believed in. But most of all, he listens to the story of a man like him who tried to do what was right, no matter how afraid he was.
Bodhi Rook was a hero, he thinks. And not like many of the Rebellion heroes Poe has told him about, who stride like legends of light through the history of the fall of the Empire. A hero who came from somewhere like Finn, who did the right thing even though he was scared, and even though much of the rest of the galaxy has forgotten him
I want to be like Bodhi Rook, he thinks and doesn't realize he's said it out loud until Asmi Rook laughs beside him.
"He would have liked you," she says and Finn smiles.
Asmi Rook passes away peacefully in her sleep nearly a year after Snoke is finally defeated and the First Order dismantled. She'd been determined to live long enough to see it happen and defied her illness and every doctor's prediction out of sheer stubbornness.
But now the galaxy is finally settling into what she hopes will be a permanent peace and new people have stepped forward to tell the stories of the galaxy's heroes — big and small.
So Asmi lays herself down and finally stops holding so tightly to the mortal coil.
She's not expecting much.
The light and warmth that curls around her is a welcome surprise. She feels connected to everything in the entire universe and simultaneously an incredibly small speck within it. She is lost for moments on end in the light's joyous song.
Something — someone — coalesces out of the light wrapped around her.
She no longer has the senses to perceive as she did when she was in a body, but she knows who it is immediately.
"Bodhi." She's not sure if she speaks it (if she even can speak here) or somehow shoves the tangled memory perception of her brother out into the light spectrum, but he hears and knows.
"Asmi." It's a burst of light and sound and image that somehow conveys her and her name and everything Bodhi feels for her.
"I missed you," she says.
His laughter is a rainbow of light.
"I've been watching you."
And she sees a flicker of images, her always her, speaking and listening and speaking.
"You told my story," he says, and there's awe in dusky purples and gratitude in warm oranges and pinks.
"You deserved to be the hero," she says and the light curls around her.
"Come on," he says. "There's people you should meet."
She doesn't have to guess who. As she floats away with him, stretching her self across the stars, she bears little thought for what she's leaving behind.
Except…
"You have to tell me all the bits of the story I missed," she says and Bodhi laughs, because she knows her brother better than that, knows that no matter how many people she spoke to, how many versions of the story she got, Bodhi would always be the only one with all the pieces.
She'd done her best to tell it as best she could and now she can curl up in the light and let her brother tell his own story.