17: Korkie is well and truly throwing his stress out the window, as you've advised.

Enjoy the chapter, dancing queens.


Chapter 20: Korkie in Love

Korkie had liked dancing at the royal balls in the palace of Sundari, twirling his Ba'vodu Bo-Katan beneath a chandelier. He had made do in the lonely desert cantinas on Tatooine. But Kawlan's idea of dancing on Yaga Minor was not something he'd ever tried before.

"The Yagai Hive is the best nightclub in this sector by far," Kawlan had told him. "I think I went twice a week for a whole year straight. Once to celebrate the end of the work week, and once midweek just to get through it."

"You don't sound like a very responsible worker," Korkie had told him.

And yet here he was, a hypocrite, threading the laces of his boots and winding his way through the still-crowded streets with the moons high in the sky on his way to The Yagai Hive on a kriffing work night. But tomorrow's refugee run was overstaffed. They would have Mace onboard. And it would be four hours of flying before they actually reached their pick-up point. Korkie could have a nap. It wouldn't matter if he was a little sleepy.

Because fine, maybe Kawlan had been right. Maybe he needed a hobby. Now that Korkie was no longer in a state of perpetual near-death, ricocheting homeless about the galaxy, his thoughts were getting a little out of hand. He was having all sorts of trouble sleeping at night, thinking about the enormous sprawl of the galaxy and all of the injustices he hadn't fixed and all of the places he should have been. He thought endlessly of all of the people he had failed: Padme, Relya, Hera. All of Mandalore, really. Everyone who'd ever looked up at him on that balcony with Darksaber in hand and called him the Mand'alor. He wasn't much interested in admitting it aloud but maybe some fun would do something for his mental health.

He trotted down the narrow wooden stairs to join the queue of young humans, Yagai, and scattered off-worlders who babbled with tangible excitement as they presented the security with their proof of age. Korkie laid a hand on the bouncer's burly shoulder and persuaded him that no, his identification card would not be necessary, and welcomed the thumping music as it filled his head and his chest. It was impossible, filled with this sound beneath swooping fluorescent lights, to think about anything at all, let alone his endless litany of failures. He followed the surge of patrons to the bar.

"One Sunriser, please."

Sunrisers were safe. He'd tested them well and knew his limits. He lifted the drink to his lips and felt a strange lightness that he had not known since the blasted war had begun. He felt a little apologetic for having told Kawlan that this was a stupid idea.

But he could apologise to him later. Korkie was ready to dance.


And he danced and he danced and he drank and he danced and time became liquid and strange. In this nameless universe he could look anyone in the eye, take anyone by the hand. He kissed anyone who wanted him. Men and women and everything else. They all tasted more or less the same. He did not leave the dancefloor for any of them. They flitted in and out of his consciousness like the stars in the sky he could not see. The world dipped and swirled and might have spiralled out of Korkie's grip entirely had his eyes not fixed upon an anchor: perhaps the most beautiful person Korkie had ever seen mixing drinks behind the bar. Korkie approached the bar what felt like a hundred times but always in vain; in the churning sea of people, with bartenders zipping back and forth and sloshing drinks over cups, Korkie was always somehow served by someone else.

Long after he had lost count, on what Korkie resolved would nonetheless be his final drink of the night, when the crowd queuing for the bar was finally thinning, Korkie stumbled over, point-blank refused the offer of service from an irritated Yagai bartender, and finally locked eyes with his target.

"Uh…"

Struck by the young man's beauty all anew, Korkie almost forgot what he had come for. He proffered his empty glass.

"Another Sunriser, please."

The bartender lifted his gaze and acknowledged Korkie's request with a curt nod. He filled the glass with ice and liquid from his array of taps but did not reach for the fluorescent bottle of liquor that sat on the shelf behind him. He slid the drink across the bar as though Korkie was perhaps blind.

"There's no shot in that!" Korkie protested. "That's just juice and water!"

The young man's lips quirked into a smile as he wiped down the bench between them.

"It'll be good for you," he advised, gently. "Free of charge."

Korkie spluttered.

"I asked for a Sunriser!"

The bartender abandoned his dishcloth and stood properly upright then, folding his arms at his chest as he beheld Korkie properly. He had the most beautiful dark eyelashes that Korkie had ever seen.

"I don't have to serve you if you look intoxicated," he told him, levelly. "And if you haven't noticed, you are abundantly intoxicated."

Korkie groaned.

"Come on, the other bartenders-"

"Shouldn't have been serving you. Please don't make me ask for your ID," the bartender warned him, still with the shadow of a smile. "I saw you slink past our bouncer, you know."

Korkie grinned and retorted with Sunriser-fuelled confidence.

"Did I catch your eye?"

The bartender barked out a laugh and shook his head. His cheeks did not flush with the accusation but Korkie felt in the Force – or maybe simply with the alcohol – that he had a chance.

"What's your name?" Korkie pressed.

The bartender began to serve another impatient patron then, but spoke to Korkie over his shoulder as he selected two bottles from the shelf.

"Why? You gonna make a complaint about me?"

Korkie shook his head earnestly.

"I just want to be acquainted."

The young man rolled his eyes as he poured a fizzing green liquid into a clear spirit.

"My name's Mahdi," he told Korkie reluctantly, presenting the patron with his drink. "Now please, drink up. You need to rehydrate."

Korkie complied. He had to admit it tasted good after all those Sunrisers.

"My name's Ben," he offered, after sculling the glass. "Thank you for the drink. It's the best Sunriser I've ever had."

"I'll get you another, then."

Mahdi's fingertips brushed Korkie's hand as he took the glass from him. Korkie felt a throb in his chest.

"I love you," he blurted.

It was ridiculous and even Korkie knew it. Love was a choice and Korkie had not chosen this. This feeling had chosen him; it had clubbed him over the head and seized him. If he had been sober, he perhaps would have found a better word. But love was the name he gave to what he felt in that moment, and there was no filter between feelings and words anymore.

Mahdi watched Korkie with cautious dimpled-cheek amusement as he filled the glass.

"Are you going to throw up? You want a bag?"

Korkie gripped the glass tightly and endeavoured not to slosh any of his virgin Sunriser over the sides.

"What makes you say that?"

"When people start talking bantha-shit like you are right now, they're usually nearly ready to vomit."

"I'm not talking bantha-shit," Korkie retorted, sourly.

Mahdi turned to serve another customer. Korkie let his elbows thunk down onto the bar to steady himself as he sipped from the glass with two hands. He decided he'd had enough of dancing. He watched Mahdi's elegant hands pour deep reds and pale orange, sour green mixers and liqueurs as thick and dark as volcanic magma, before he disappeared into the kitchen.

"Eat," Mahdi instructed when he came back.

He presented Korkie with a slapdash sandwich of white bread and a dark spread Korkie didn't recognise.

"You'll feel marginally less shit in the morning if you do."

Korkie took a suspicious bite.

"It's salty."

"It's my favourite," Mahdi told him, smacking at an inverted tray of ice cubes. "One of those sandwiches is the best part of my whole shift."

Korkie took another few pensive bites before his mouth began to feel too dry for food again.

"Hey Mahdi!"

The bartender turned and Korkie proffered the remainder of the sandwich to him.

"For you."

Mahdi beheld him, dishcloth over his shoulder, hands on his hips, shaking his head with a reluctant smile.

"You're too kind."

He took the sandwich and ate in one bite what Korkie could not manage with three.

"You look ready to go home and sleep off all that poison, Ben," he advised thickly, between bites. "Trust me, I'm an expert."

"I'd rather talk to you," Korkie confessed.

"And clog up my bar?" Mahdi challenged, but his tone was light. "Besides, I thought you made lots of friends out on the dancefloor."

The understatement – Korkie had made friends by generous exchange of saliva – was obvious and teasing and made Korkie's heart race.

"You were watching me?"

Mahdi shrugged.

"Gotta watch something. I can mix my Half-Moons and Hyperdrivers with my eyes closed."

"I would have made friends with you," Korkie told him. "If you'd been on the dancefloor."

Mahdi slid a tray of drinks towards his latest customer and turned to Korkie with an exasperated sigh.

"How old are you, Ben?"

Korkie took this to mean he was in with a chance, and grinned.

"I'm eighteen."

Mahdi smirked.

"Then why didn't you show the bouncer your ID?"

"Line was too long."

"Right."

Mahdi, like any sensible sentient, did not believe him.

"Fine. I'm seventeen," Korkie tried. "And a half. Please don't kick me out."

Mahdi shook his head and turned down his gaze as he busied himself wiping down fresh glasses.

"How old are you?" Korkie pressed.

"Twenty," Mahdi muttered. "But I'm not sure that I believe you're even seventeen."

Korkie rolled his eyes.

"You're just saying that because I'm so beautiful."

Mahdi barked out a reluctant, but genuine, laugh of surprise.

"Kriff's sake, Ben," he pleaded.

Korkie liked the way he said his not-name.

"I admire the self-confidence, but that's really not what I'm trying to tell you."

Mahdi reached across the bar and pulled down a sign in red neon that took Korkie's tumbling mind a few moments to read.

Bar closed.

"Thirty minutes until clear-out!" a deep Yagai voice boomed over the loudspeakers.

"You got a safe way to get home tonight?" Mahdi asked.

Korkie brightened.

"You want to take me with you?"

"No," Mahdi intoned firmly. "I'm just making sure you're not planning to sleep in the gutter."

"In a bunk. Not the gutter. I live…"

Korkie waved a hand.

"…that way, somewhere."

"Okay. Good."

Mahdi swiped his dishcloth across the bar between them.

"My apartment's that way. I'll walk with you."

Korkie beamed.

"Just because you're so drunk you might get lost," Mahdi explained. "Or kidnapped. Or pass out in the street."

The words did not dull Korkie's happiness.

"I'll take whatever reason, Mahdi."


Ben's accusation had rung unfairly true. Kriff. He had caught Mahdi's eye.

But that was hardly his fault. No one had golden-blonde hair like that on Yaga Minor; it was the stuff of high-budget HoloNet romance films, of sweeping landscapes and miserable monarchs with their forbidden love. Of course he'd noticed him.

And then there was the way he moved. Easy, languid, self-assured. Mahdi couldn't quite figure, from his distant vantage point behind the bar, exactly how he worked his magic, but he knew he had some of it. How else could he possibly have made it past Elko, the bouncer known affectionately amongst the staff of The Yagai Hive as The Wall? Mahdi had presumed Elko was entirely immune to all sorts of bantha-shitting and flirting from the underage and blacklisted. He certainly hadn't picked Elko as the type to like men. And yet with a smile and a hand laid upon the bouncer's broad shoulder, the young man had waltzed through the doors without presenting the obligatory ID card for Elko's infamously close inspection.

And on the dancefloor he had been a force of nature – singing aloud in alien tongues, swirling imaginary skirts, sweeping his arms to the sky as his feet lifted him on rampaging, circuitous paths through the maze of static nightclubbers shuffling on the spot. He might have been a trained dancer, Mahdi thought, although the Sunrisers had instilled a rough edge to his movements. He did not loom over the women as the other men did; he took them by their hands, spun them, planted a chaste kiss upon a cheek or forehead and moved serenely on. He surely wasn't straight. Mahdi had berated himself for the faint flicker of hope that accompanied this thought. The flicker that erupted into flames as he watched the first of many kisses that night with furtive gaze, when he should have been watching his hands.

But kriff it. He could mix a Hyperdriver with his eyes closed. He could measure out his manager's mandated just-a-little-less-than-a-standard-shot in his sleep. He could watch the dancefloor if he wanted.

He could talk to him if he wanted.

He could walk him home if he wanted.

Life on Yaga Minor was grey and miserable and if the galaxy chose to give him the tiny joy of a furtive, never-realised crush, he would take it. It's not like he was going to do anything stupid.


The river that snaked through the inner city, brown and polluted during the day, shone silver in the moonlight. Korkie had lost any ability to focus and sift through the strange feelings in the Force. He felt the presence of the sleeping birds in the trees and the rats in the laneways. He felt the great ache of the city, of all those hungry bellies and too-thin blankets. He felt warmth, beside him. Radiant. Korkie looked at Mahdi and couldn't say a single thing. He'd already told him that he loved him. He could say no more.

He reached to take Mahdi's hand. The bartender skipped a step ahead of him and chuckled.

"You've got game for a seventeen-year-old."

Korkie didn't want to be seventeen-standard and he certainly did not want to be sixteen. His childhood was so distant and Mahdi's rejection supremely unfair.

"I like you," he announced, by way of petulant explanation.

Mahdi grinned.

"I thought you loved me."

And Korkie wanted to be angry but that smile was so beautiful that he could not help but share in it.

"I might've been talking bantha-shit," he mumbled.

"I thought as much."

But Korkie knew, quietly, to himself, that he'd not been talking shit at all.


"You know," Ben tried, as they came to stand at the base of his ship, "my brother's wife was five years older than him."

Mahdi snorted.

"Good for her."

"And they met when he was only nine-standard."

At this, Mahdi raised a brow.

"I take it back," he decided, after a moment's consideration. "That's kind of messed up."

"It isn't!" Ben insisted. "They loved each other. They had beautiful children."

"Before or after he turned eighteen?" Mahdi challenged.

Ben gave a magnificent sulk.

"After," he admitted, before mounting another protest. "But I'm not suggesting we have any children, Mahdi, you know?"

Mahdi rubbed at his face – he was smiling, damn it, when he should have felt nothing at all – and sighed.

"Okay, Ben, let me make this clear. Regardless of whether you are too young for me, you are definitely, without a shadow of a doubt, too drunk."

Ben swayed slightly where he stood.

"I don't think I am."

Mahdi gave an apologetic smile.

"I know that you are."

"Mahdi-"

Ben reached a hand towards him. Mahdi caught it in mid-air.

"Hey."

He brought the young man's hand down by his side and released it.

"Sleep it off," he advised.

And then he said something rather foolish.

"We can revisit this another time."

Ben brightened instantly, his eyes shining in the moonlight.

"Can we?"

Mahdi could have slapped himself in the kriffing face. He'd told himself he wouldn't do anything stupid. There was no saving it now except to pray for amnesia in the morning.

"Yeah. Whatever. Sure."


Korkie staggered home and into bed – no vomit, despite Mahdi's predictions – and slept two hours before Kawlan woke him.

"Come on. Breakfast time, then we've got an hour to prep the ship."

Korkie righted himself with a groan. It felt like he'd not slept at all; he was more tired, certainly, than he had been when he walked with Mahdi through the laneways of tenth sector. He mumbled his response, dry-mouthed.

"Yeah'kay."

Kawlan looked inordinately pleased with himself.

"You had fun last night?"

"Yeah."

"Are you going to form any real words today?"

"Nah."

Kawlan chuckled and set to work preparing the caff.

"You want to go back to bed? We don't really need you. Mace and I can do the run."

"Nah."

"I'm not wasting any attention looking after you. If you start puking, you get a bucket and that's it."

"That's'kay."

"This will heal you."

A mug of caff and a handful of nutrient gels were presented on the table. Korkie found the strength in his impossibly weary muscles and clattered himself into the chair. He wondered how many laps of the club he had danced last night.

"You're the best, Kawlan."

"I know."

Korkie drank his caff and sucked down his nutrient gels and followed this breakfast of princes with three successive cups of water.

"I'm good now," he informed his travelling partner.

He stood himself properly upright for the first time that morning, so as to prove his point.

"Youth," Kawlan muttered, with perhaps both reproval and admiration.

And he perhaps wasn't truly good but he was awake enough with the passing minutes to perform the routine pre-flight checks: fuel stores, comms, rations, drinking water, medi-kit supplies, checking the seals and the ventilation in the hidden compartments. He managed three more nutrient gels and another litre of water. And as the nutrients soaked into his body and his dry and scratchy eyes regained their clarity, the cloud abated from his gaze and a feeling of warmth in his chest came back to him. Memories of a warm hand and dark eyelashes.

We can revisit this another time.

Part of him would have liked to accept Kawlan's offer of a return to bed. But just because he was now an adolescent who had fun occasionally, Korkie reminded himself, it did not mean he didn't have important things to do. He would see Mahdi as soon as they returned.

"Mace! Good morning!"

Their flight companion, boarding with a bag of fake identity cards slung over his shoulder, looked at Korkie with suspicion.

"Why are you…"

Probing Korkie's Force-signature, it took a few moments to find the word.

"Why are you beaming like that?"

Korkie grinned, settling into the co-pilot's seat to prepare for take-off.

"I met someone."

Kawlan, in the pilot's seat, looked appalled.

"You didn't tell me that!"

"I was too sleepy to tell you."

"Ha! And you said you weren't interested in kissing."

Mace looked at his companions with faint confusion.

"What's going on?"

"Korkie went to The Yagai Hive last night," Kawlan explained. "He promises me he's sober for the journey."

"I am. The handsome bartender switched me to water."

Mace did not share in the levity as he strapped himself in.

"Did you encourage this?" he asked of Kawlan. "He's sixteen-standard!"

Kawlan after flicking the ship into life, gave an apologetic shrug.

"There's nowhere else to dance around here."

"I won't drink next time," Korkie resolved, and admitted, "that was stupid."

The drag of lift-off undid the good work of the caff and his breakfast; his headache surged once more. Mahdi had probably been right when he'd called it poison and he did have a brain to grow, after all.

"But that wasn't the fun part, anyway," he went on, turning to Mace. "As I said. I met someone!"

Mace looked at him, nonplussed.

"You're supposed to be excited. Ask me questions."

Korkie remembered the days of furtive Academy crushes, of passed flimsi-notes and Amis's insistence that he liked but did not like Lagos, despite the absurd excuses he found to stumble into her in every hallway.

"Right," Mace said, but offered nothing.

Korkie provided some examples.

"How did you meet, what does he look like, what does he do, does he like you-"

"How did you meet?"

The question was delivered in a flat tone that suggested Mace had only spoken to interrupt Korkie's ceaseless stream of suggestions. But he was not discouraged.

"Great question, Mace. As I said: the handsome bartender. I kept going back for more drinks but it was so busy I could never reach him. I kept getting served by someone else. And then when I finally met him he made me a Sunriser with no shot. Wouldn't serve me alcohol. So you'd like him, Mace."

Mace hummed his vague approval.

"You're supposed to ask more questions."

"What's his name?" Kawlan volunteered.

"Mahdi."

"And what does he look like?"

"Beautiful. Exquisite. Gorgeous. Olive skin. Dark eyes. Beautiful eyelashes. Lovely hands. A little taller than me, but not-"

"This is an illness," Mace decreed solemnly. "An affliction. You're unwell."

Kawlan cackled at the controls. They had emerged from the atmosphere and into the stillness of space.

"Sorry, Mace. My fault. I told him to go be a teenager."

Korkie unbuckled his seat belt and stretched his legs.

"Whatever," he sighed, rising to stand. "Let's say I give you a break, Mace, and go have a nap before we arrive on Ketaris. Then once our refugees are safely on board I can tell you all about how he walked me home."


Korkie has entered his hot mess era.

Please note: I certainly don't advise or endorse underage drinking or falling in love with men who are too old for you. But I felt a bit nostalgic writing that teenage messiness. Haven't we all kind of been there? (Maybe just me.)

For all the non-messy adolescents reading along - indulge me one more chapter, then we'll get back to business.

xx - S.