17 is back! So stoked to hear your brilliant observations again. Your enthusiasm is infectious and came at a perfect time as my creative drive was dulling a little.

Here's a big long chapter. Our too-cute duo is back together again.

Chapter 4: An Outrageously Bad Idea

Korkie stumbled across Han a few days later in the disorderly queue for Coronet City's cheapest toasted sandwiches; with his new income, he had graduated from salvaging offcuts out of the fast-food trash compactors.

"You didn't tell me you were a kriffing famous fighter!" Han hissed, elbowing his way up the queue to reach him.

Korkie shrugged.

"Well… I wasn't."

"That was unbelievable, what you did in there."

Korkie snickered.

"I got a bit lucky, maybe."

"Rani put you up against Gansar as a kriffing joke!" Han protested, undeterred by Korkie's humility. "To get you off his back! Everyone knew it. He does it all the time against overeager up-and-comers. Puts them in their place. Gives everyone some light entertainment before the real fighting starts."

"Yeah. He told me that," Korkie conceded, with a chuckle. "Something about my accent."

"Gansar was undefeated against humans, you know that?"

"I didn't."

"That's crazy," Han concluded emphatically, before becoming circumspect, perhaps a little shy. "Did you, uh…"

"Make a lot of money?" Korkie asked, with an easy laugh. "No."

He'd made his eight hundred back but word had it that Gansar had made more than that just for showing up.

"I mean, I made decent money," Korkie amended himself, thinking of Han's comparatively meagre savings. "But Rani's undercutting me, I know it. You know that they had me as thirty-six-to-one? The few idiots that put money on me won big. Too big. I think he's mad."

"They'll have to pay you better against Razor," Han reassured him.

"I should hope so."

They made it to the front of the queue and bought their sandwiches, the paper already slicked transparent with grease. Korkie paid for Han's; the boy was either too grateful or too embarrassed to protest.

"All the skinny human kids reckon they can fight now, because of you," he told Korkie instead. "You're an inspiration to the young human trash of Corellia."

Korkie smirked.

"Yourself included?"

Han bristled.

"Sorry, that was rude," Korkie conceded. "It's just my new famous fighter persona."

Han tutted.

"It doesn't suit you."

Korkie grimaced.

I'm not the same person that I was.

"That's probably true," he admitted.

"Just know that it's a short-term career you've got yourself into," Han advised him sagely, as they elbowed their way through the early morning city crowds. "When you can't breathe through your nose and have early dementia-"

This was, Korkie silently conceded, a legitimate concern. He wished he was any good at Force healing but his father had been far from an expert himself and had never taught him. The nose had re-bled and tried to suffocate him four times already and the swelling from the glancing blow to his cheekbone made it hard to see out of his right eye.

"-I'll have a ship of my own and finally be raking in the big earnings."

Korkie laughed.

"Don't worry, Han. I intend to retire as soon as I can get a ship and get off-planet with a blanket and a few ration packs. Revolution calls, remember?"

Han rolled his eyes.

"There is no revolution, remember?"

Korkie shook his head stubbornly.

"Someone's going to have to start one."

Han looked at him with an oil-slicked grin, baffled but perhaps impressed.

"Huh," he mused. "You're unbelievably lucky, you know, that your air-filled head didn't fly off your neck when Gansar hit you."

Korkie nodded soberly. He agreed.

Razor Rex was apparently a bigger deal that the infamous, but ageing, Gansar Khan. Korkie supposed it would be arrogant to go into the fight without a little training. He performed his katas amongst the abandoned ship engines in the warehouse beneath his nest. The kicks and punches, knees and elbows, that Bo-Katan Kryze had taught him. The fluid leaps and turns that he had so admired in Ahsoka Tano. Those days of training in the gymnasium in Sundari, the sun-drenched mat warm beneath his feet, were impossibly distant now.

But he didn't mind the shadows. He grew taller every day but amongst the hulking machinery he felt smaller. Faster, too. Dangerous. An inspiration to the young human trash of Corellia. He liked the way the neon city lights slanted in through the cracks in the sheet metal.

His father, watching from afar, arms folded, quietly proud. His mother, shaking her head.

If you teach this child to be a soldier, Obi Wan, one day he will run at danger…

They were so far away from him. Another life away, in another galaxy.

It was no good reaching for them. He had danger to run at.

Korkie was finally paid fairly, and scored an inconvenient flood of public interest, when he defeated the skull-tattooed human who called himself Razor Rex in three bloody rounds. Han did not wait for another serendipitous meeting but found him that very night atop the machinery warehouse.

"I've been searching every bloody rooftop in the district to find you," he scolded. "Your love of heights was the only lead I had."

Korkie squinted up at his unusually nervous friend in the darkness. He had laid down only a short while ago but his muscles were already stiffening.

"Help me up, would you?"

Han reached out a hand and brought Korkie, groaning, to sit upright. He came to sit opposite him, wiry legs tucked up against his chest.

"I assume you're not here to compliment me on my victory?"

Han grimaced and nodded.

"There's a problem."

"Yeah?"

"People are saying… things about you."

Korkie raised a brow.

"Things?"

"They say that it's…"

Han floundered.

"Unnatural," he decided, eventually. "What you can do. The way you move."

Korkie let out a long, steady exhalation of understanding.

"People are saying you might be a lost…"

Han did not want to say the word. He didn't need to.

"And- and I heard-"

Korkie had not long known Han but doubted he was usually one to stammer.

"-I heard from one of the bosses at the White Worms that there's some new program coming out of the Empire, this Imperial Inquisition, or Inquisitorius, or something, and that they've got these specially trained…"

He looked at Korkie, eyes wide with fear, as he all but mouthed his next word.

"Jedi," he breathed, with great difficulty, "to hunt other…"

"Jedi," Korkie murmured.

Hundreds of survivors, Anakin had told him, on that bizarre and bittersweet day of his reappearance on Tatooine. On that day that Korkie had vowed to fight for revolution, because Luke and Leia were no longer his to protect.

Hundreds of survivors who would now be hunted down not only by the Empire's soldiers, but by their own kind. Korkie thought of Luke and Leia, so bright in the Force. Of Mace Windu and the Faulties. Of Ahsoka, who he loved so dearly that he hadn't dared to look for her, who he would perhaps never dare to search for, because he couldn't stand to learn that anything bad had happened to her, or worse still, bring trouble upon her himself.

Han eyed him cautiously.

"Are you gonna throw up?"

"What?"

"You look like you're going to throw up."

Korkie shook his head tightly.

"No. And I'm not a Jedi, for what it's worth."

Han raised a brow.

"You're something."

"Sure. But not a Jedi."

Han drummed his fingers pensively against his shins.

"You got enough money to buy a ship yet?"

Korkie sighed.

"Not quite."

He was another fight or two away.

"What if I lose next weekend? Will that help?"

Han shrugged, nodded.

"Yeah, it'll help, I guess."

The boy gave what was intended to be a heartening smile.

"I'll keep an ear out for you, okay? Let you know if I'm worried."

He was obviously abundantly worried already. But Korkie didn't see much else in the way of options. He'd hitchhike as a last resort. He knew enough about pirates from his mother's own fugitive journey of the galaxy, so many years ago.

"Thanks, Han."

The boy rose to his feet and gave some mumbled protest – "Just don't want to get arrested after driving you 'round in my speeder" – and loped off, leaving Korkie to ponder exactly how he wanted to lose his next fight.

Losing was harder than winning. Korkie had spent his whole life honing the instincts that he tried to ignore now, as powerful Lasatian limbs were thrown his way. He'd told himself that he'd succumb to one of Maraki Cielor's famous chokeholds – the mode of defeat he figured would leave the least lasting damage – but couldn't quite bring himself, in the heat of the moment, to go to ground. What if Maraki pinned his arm and dislocated his shoulder? He'd probably vomit and through the unsightly spectacle lose commercial value.

Onwards they danced. Korkie told himself he was making it to the fifth round to ensure the spectators got their money's worth, to ensure himself another well-paid fight after the loss, but he knew that he was procrastinating. He'd thrown himself before Gansar Khan's fist once before, when he perhaps hadn't truly known what pain felt like. The trouble was that he knew now, and couldn't seem to find the grit to do it again. Korkie grumbled beneath his breath as the fifth round blurred into a sixth. He should have chosen to fight in a league where a winner could be declared by decision. But Rani Talapa's Iron-Cage Super-League demanded pain.

The fight might have gone on forever had a young voice not risen over the din of the crowd.

"Come on, Maraki! Knock that posh-talking smart-alec skinny-legged pretender into tomorrow!"

Korkie knew that voice. He was jolted first by surprise and then by indignation and his eyes darted to find the heckler, pressed up against the very mesh of the cage, flushed with the effort of fighting through the seething crowd.

"Take him to the ground, Maraki! This idiot acrobat doesn't know the first thing about-"

Han never had the chance to finish his taunt, or perhaps he did, and Korkie simply never heard it. He paid for his lapse in focus as Maraki's kick found his knee. Korkie felt the ligaments strain and cartilage pop and thought of his mother and the childhood skiing accident, of Bo-Katan and her long-distance sparring advice in the very first correspondence that aunty and nephew ever shared. In the flood of memories – separated completely now, from a Jedi's beloved present moment – the knee crumpled beneath him. Maraki drove Korkie hard into the ground and before he could remember to breathe, the Lasat's arm was around his neck and it was all over.

Han caught Korkie easily on the long walk back to his homeless home.

"Don't look so mad," he admonished. "I was helping you!"

Korkie barked a laugh.

"Helping?"

"You weren't going to lose. I saw it in your eyes. You were too scared."

"I was not."

"You were."

Han showed no sign of backing down. Korkie sighed and conceded the point.

"How in the hells did you even get to the front?"

"Elbows."

Korkie raised his brows, looking pointedly at the rising bruise on Han's cheekbone.

"Did you really go through all that just to heckle me?"

"You deaf? I helped you."

"Sure."

"Maraki was good to you," Han pleaded. "You were out cold real quick."

Korkie gestured, with a frustrated wave of his hand, to his swollen knee and hobbling gait. Han's expression finally sobered.

"I guess you can't really fight on that, huh?"

"Rani told me I'm not getting another fight for at least two lunar cycles," Korkie sighed. "He says I'll disgrace myself otherwise. He wants me back fit and healthy and ready to wow the audiences again."

"The revolution can't wait two cycles?"

"I'd rather it didn't."

Korkie was ready for Han's lecture on the timelessness and inevitability of injustice but it did not come.

"You wanna do a job with me?" he suggested instead.

Korkie wrinkled his nose.

"A White Worms job?"

"Nah. My own job."

Han took Korkie's right arm and slung it over his shoulders, hauling Korkie close beside him so as to spare some of the weight through his knee. Korkie looked to his friend – for they must have been friends, now, embracing like this in the rain-slicked street – with faint suspicion.

"Do you often do jobs of your own?"

"This'll be my first," Han admitted.

Korkie read his suppressed anxiety easily. The White Worms wouldn't take kindly to facing competition from their own scumrat.

"Is it a bad idea?" Korkie asked. "Or an outrageously bad idea?"

Han rolled his eyes.

"I'll give you fifty percent."

Korkie laughed.

"A fair cut? Holy shit, Han, it must be really outrageously bad."

Han conceded the point with a wry grin.

"It'll pay better than the fight against Razor."

Korkie sighed and rubbed at his forehead with his free hand.

"Well?"

"Well what?"

"Are you going to tell me the plan?"

"Are you going to do it?"

Korkie shrugged.

"Sell it to me."

Han grinned properly now.

"I'm going to sell it to you with the first line. You ready?"

"Hook me in, Han."

"We're stealing," he articulated proudly, "from the Empire."

When a four-year-old Korkie had presented his mother with the effortfully repaired Kryze vase she had become a little tearful, kissed him on the head, and spent the rest of the afternoon telling him stories of her life before the Winter Coup – of her aunties and uncles and cousins, of her grandmothers and grandfathers, of her parents, and of summers spent by lake on Kalevala and winters effortfully constructing piles of snow to make some sort of ski course from the flat, snowy desert beyond Sundari. Korkie had loved those stories. There was a fairy-tale quality to them. Satine would always begin her recollections in the same way.

In my first life, Korkie'ad…

Obi Wan never articulated it with the same eloquence, but Korkie understood that his father's life, too, had been changed irretrievably on a singular day, when the man who had made him a Jedi was struck down before him, leaving him with the promise he would give his life for. On the same day, star systems away, his son had been pulled from the haemorrhaging womb.

Korkie then had perhaps simply followed the fate of his lineage when his life had been violently separated into a Before and an After. The transition was to be conveniently commemorated for him with a new galaxy-wide public holiday.

"Empire Day is going to be the perfect time," Han explained, as they eyed the preparations in the streets below them from their vantage point at Korkie's nest. "They're all going to be busy policing the celebrations, dealing with your likeminded idiots who want to make a show of refusing to salute for Glory to the Empire…"

"My likeminded comrades," Korkie corrected him.

"Whatever. Point is, there'll be minimal security at the shipyards because the workers will all have the day off anyway. I've heard the talk on the streets, they're wanting to make this a million times bigger than Corellian independence day or any other holiday anywhere across the galaxy. They want everyone to remember exactly who's in charge and find anyone who happens to think otherwise."

"You still think propaganda means nothing to them?" Korkie prodded.

"I still think your billboards were a waste of time," Han corrected him. "But that's not the point. We are going to be celebrating Empire Day by admiring the ingenuity of their new twin ion engine starfighters being manufactured over there."

The boys turned to face the shipyards in the distance against the backdrop of steel-grey ocean.

"Specifically, they're already working on a more efficient engine, the series 4, with a new particle energiser that I think the merchants of Corellia will have some interest in."

"You mean the smugglers of Corellia."

"Commerce is commerce, Ben."

Korkie rolled his eyes and conceded the point.

"Do you know how we're going to get our hands on them?"

Han handed Korkie his pair of macro'nocs.

"My best guess is that they'll be manufactured in that square white building there…"

"Best guess?"

"I haven't hung out there since I was a kid. But that's the only part of the complex with enough insulation for the fusion process. From there, they'll go to the main conveyor belt in that tall dark grey building next to it and be fitted into the rest of the engine. We'll just have to pick them up in between."

Korkie lowered the macro'nocs and raised his brows.

"You make it sound so easy."

Han shrugged.

"Should be. We don't need too many of them. The smugglers will make their own once they've got the model to work off. That's why we'll be able to sell them at such a good price."

"Because we're stealing the Empire's intellectual property?"

"Yeah," Han affirmed. "Problem?"

"Not at all," Korkie reassured him. "It's the least they deserve. But how are we going to get over there on the galaxy's biggest holiday when we're supposed to be singing our praises of the Empire in the streets?"

Han grimaced.

"I thought I'd let you come up with that bit. Help you earn your cut."

Korkie laughed.

"To be clear, you've thought out far less than fifty percent of this plan."

"It's going to be a simple plan."

"Is it?"

The boys gaze into the distance, pondering.

"If we can't walk through the streets and we can't fly…"

"We could fly," Han suggested. "I could steal the speeder off the Worms again."

Korkie shook his head.

"We'll get way too much attention. There'll be barely any air traffic. What about the sewers?"

Han groaned.

"It's more than an hour's walk!"

"But no one will be down there."

"Because the fumes are fatal."

"Do you have a better idea?"

Han muttered mutinously but managed nothing.

"What about once we get there?" he asked instead.

"Let me talk to the troopers," Korkie resolved. "I'll trick them if I can, fight them if I can't."

"And I'll grab the parts?"

"Yeah."

Han nodded pensively.

"It is a simple plan."

Korkie grinned.

"As you requested, scumrat."

These two are trouble. I hope you're all looking forward to the outrageously bad idea in action next week as we approach the end of our Corellian arc (the pacing of this story, I fear, will be a complete mess).

Much love,

S.