Another early chapter because I'm going away over the weekend. Enjoy a holiday on sunny Tanalorr :)

Chapter 31: Asteroid Boy

The fine silk suture slipped with a false move of Kix's needle-holder and the wound gaped open once more.

"Sorry."

Anara watched with interest as the curved needle dipped once more into her anaesthetised skin.

"No matter. It doesn't hurt."

This didn't seem much consolation to the clone medic, who frowned as he re-attempted his knot. His right hand shook with a coarse tremor as he looped the suture around the needle-holder, almost losing his knot a second time.

"Kriff's sakes."

He pulled the loop through and repeated the knot in the opposite direction. When he had tied off the knot three times, he cut the suture with trembling scissors and moved onto the next. Slowly but surely, the gash that a sharp mountain stone had torn in Anara's over-adventurous leg was closed by a neat row of purple ties. Procedure completed, Kix abandoned his tools and shook out the culprit limb in frustration.

"I'm sorry that took so long, Anara. My hand's starting to fail me. I'm getting a tremor."

"But you're so young," Anara protested.

Kix snorted.

"Seventeen-standard, technically."

And Anara, seventeen-standard herself, gaped.

"But I age at twice the rate of a normal human," he went on. "So more like thirty-four."

Anara fumbled for words. She hadn't known that about the clones. She hadn't had the faintest idea. And why hadn't anyone told her that she and her Master had been leading children into battle? For surely growth acceleration could only do so much. Surely there was no replacement for cycles around the sun, mistakes made and lessons learned.

"It's still far younger than a typical human would develop a tremor like this," Kix went on, speaking perhaps more to himself than to Anara. "A side-effect of my chip removal, I suspect. It was located in the basal ganglia where movements are coordinated."

"Chip removal?"

"Yeah. Inhibitor chip. The one that made my brothers kill Jedi."

Anara felt the colour drain from her face. Kix grimaced.

"Sorry," he scrambled. "That was too blunt. I-"

Anara shook her head, gaze unfocused. It was easy, sometimes, on Tanalorr, with the humming Force alive all around her, surrounding her and healing her like invisible bacta, to forget the terrors that she had survived. Sometimes glimpses came to her in nightmares that Master Junda soothed her through. And sometimes, in bad moments – in this moment – the images ambushed her in the daylight.

"It's okay. I…"

She lifted her chin, centred herself, found his gaze again. The sound of the blaster bolts faded away.

"I didn't understand why it happened," she confessed. "Why they did it. It's good to know, I suppose."

Kix nodded.

"It was in our programming," he explained. "The Emperor's plan from the start. When we discovered them, we fixed as many as we could, in secret, but…"

The Emperor's plan. Anara could not even begin to fathom that life. A life constructed, a life without choice. She had commanded the clones and then, after the Purge, she had feared them. But she had never stopped for a minute to know them and it hurt her deeply now.

Anara swallowed hard and spoke with low voice.

"I'm sorry for what was done to you and your brothers. For your agency having been taken away."

The clone managed a sad half-smile.

"I'm sorry for what happened to the Jedi."

Anara dropped her gaze to the tools on the blue plastic sheet between them. From the burning Temple to Grakkus the Hutt's Arena to the darkness of Arkanis. And now to this moment, with a friend, surrounded by the Force.

The galaxy perhaps wasn't so broken after all.

"How about you teach me how to do these fiddly jobs?" she suggested, taking needle-holders in hand. "I always wanted to be the Healer's apprentice."

Life on Tanalorr was better than Cere Junda deserved.

Everything grew here. The crops they had planted and the children to whom they were fed. And everything grew with ease, reaching for the sun, drawing water from the soil, breathing the life of the vibrant Force. Cere watched Eeth Koth's daughter – for there was no mistaking her; her father's Force signature was somehow alive in her own – take her first steps upon that dewy grass. She taught meditation and felt a connection that she had planned to forsake forever. To truly know a child. To hold them. To guide them as the stars had guided the ancient sea-travellers. To be the wind in their sails.

Their population grew too, as the Hidden Path beyond Tanalorr began to deliver refugees again. Cody did not speak of the limb he had lost; he gave a stoic smile, lines carved deep into his face, and presented to Cere instead the latest convoy of wide-eyed travellers. It did not escape Cere's notice that Korkie did not seem to travel on the refugee runs anymore. She remembered his anger on the ship from Arkanis. On Tanalorr it felt like she could fix anything. But in the galaxy beyond their haven darkness still reigned, and Cere did not know how to fix that.

"Korkie doing okay?" she asked Cody on his next visit, when she couldn't ignore the absence any longer.

The clone shrugged.

"Yeah. Doing well. Keeping the Inquisitors off our tail."

Cere translated this quickly, silently. Korkie Kryze was out getting into fights with her lost Padawan. Paying for her mistakes.

She remembered still the late-night murmured conversations with Mace on Yaga Minor as the boy soaked up sleep on the rug on the floor in the way only adolescents could do.

He is too old to be trained as we were, Mace had said. And yet not to train him at all would be disastrous.

For Korkie loved. He loved bleeding-heartedly, recklessly. And when he had lost his parents he had released his grief not into the Force but into the wars he waged against the Empire, into the wounds he wore upon his body. He was, as the Council had warned of Anakin Skywalker so long ago, dangerous. But he possessed, as Qui Gon Jinn had insisted of that sandy-haired slave, a great capacity for good.

Mace had meant to train him. He might never have called him Padawan but Cere had understood his intentions. And Mace would have been the perfect teacher for him. He understood passion and anger and darkness, how to use it and hold it at arm's length, better than any other Jedi.

Cere would not be the teacher that Mace had been. But she understood something of darkness too. And what sort of Jedi would Cere be to leave the young man to fight her battles in that fractured galaxy now?

The population of Tanalorr had reached over a hundred Force-sensitive sentients now. A fledgling Jedi Order. And new leaders were emerging – not only the sparse Temple-educated survivors, but Force-sensitives parents, grandparents, who had never been Jedi, but who knew how to love.

They would manage on Tanalorr just fine without her. It was time to brave the darkness again.

Kawlan could admit that running the Hidden Path was a whole lot easier with Korkie's new occupation as a full-time antagonist of the Inquisitorius. He fiddled with his beloved radio, picking up frequencies from the Core to the Outer Rim, and let the galaxy's merchants and smugglers tell them at which ports and hyperspace lanes the Inquisitors were causing trouble.

"I think we'll swing back past Bracca," he told Cere, as he unloaded crates of supplies for their growing settlement. "Something came through this morning from the parts collectors about Imperial presence. They're all giving it a wide berth. Which probably means there's someone down there who could use our help."

Cere clipped her lightsaber to her belt and shrugged on a cloak.

"Have a few days' rest in paradise, Cody. I'll swap you out."

And thus Kawlan came, for the first time since Mace's death, to have a Jedi travelling in his cockpit again.

"Did you sense something? About this mission?"

"No. Only that I can't stay in that haven forever or I'll lose my grit."

There was the sense, as Kawlan often had around Cere Junda, that there was something the Jedi Knight was not telling him.

Whether Cere had anticipated it or not, their discovery on Bracca was a rewarding one. Kawlan had developed an eye for recognising rare Temple survivors by the inevitable blanch in their faces when they beheld the Faulties and this red-haired adolescent, the moment he was pulled up by Cere into their ship and out of the reaches of the hulking Ninth Sister, regarded Boil and Trapper with poorly-stifled panic, the sapphire light of his 'saber wavering before him, extended in self-defence.

"They're Faulties, Padawan," Cere advised. "Not controlled by the Empire. Here to help you."

The young man slowed his panting breaths, chest heaving still despite his efforts.

"Right."

"Put that weapon away," advised Greez. "We're flying here."

He gave a sheepish nod of his head, a long-removed relation of a Temple bow, and fumbled the lightsaber to his belt.

"I'm Cal. Cal Kestis."

"Cere Junda."

The two Jedi clasped hands.

"Forgive my memory, Cal – you're the Padawan of…"

"Jaro Tapal."

His voice fractured over the name, gaze dropping.

"You knew him?"

"Yes, Padawan."

Cal grimaced.

"Master Tapal saved my life when the clones turned. He was a hero. But I… I couldn't do the same for him. I failed. I-"

"Cal."

Cere's fingertips brushed his arm.

"All of us here have known terrible, heavy failures."

She mustered a weak smile.

"We will share your burden, young one."

There was something in her voice, Kawlan thought, of Master Windu.

"But all of us have chosen to keep fighting," she went on, finding stoicism now. "Welcome to the Hidden Path. We bring Force-sensitives to safety. We'll restore the Order, when the time is right. This is Kawlan, our founder."

"Half-founder," Kawlan protested, taking Cal's hand. "You'll meet Korkie…"

Whenever Korkie chose to return from his pursuit of the Second Sister, he supposed. Kawlan resolved quietly to comm him today. He wasn't exactly sure why he'd refused Cere's tutelage but it must have been something they could move past. He needed her. It was plain even for Kawlan to see.

"You'll meet Korkie sometime," he decided. "Sometime soon, I hope."

Cal frowned and looked to Master Junda.

"Korkie? As in…"

"The infamous son of Master Kenobi and the Duchess Kryze, yes," Cere affirmed, with a quirking smile. "It would have been fascinating Temple gossip had the galaxy not been falling to pieces at the time."

"Master Tapal used to boast he knew it from the start," Cal muttered. "Old news, he said, when the story broke."

Cere chuckled. It was good to see her smile again.

"As Kawlan said, hopefully you'll soon be introduced. But never mind that. You still have to meet Boil and Trapper and this is Greez, here, captain of the ship. We've got somewhere safe to take you. I think you'll like Tanalorr."

Korkie revelled in the bruises the Second Sister handed him in precisely the manner that Mace Windu, on Ryloth so long ago, had told him not to. They did not make him stronger; he knew that. But they did muffle the hurt of everything else. He stood before the mirror in his tiny on-board 'fresher and tried not to think of the body he wanted beside him. When Mahdi had told him that he hoped he found a therapist during his travels, the Second Sister was probably not who he'd had in mind.

He lived like an asteroid these days – drifting, colliding, chipping but never yet shattering. Never winning. Not that he knew, exactly, what it meant to win at all. Trilla was just as young and confused as he was and he wouldn't have known what to do if he had disarmed her. She didn't seem to know what she wanted to do with him either.

Two asteroids, he supposed, in some stupid kriffing dance.

And he did not know how to bring that dance to an end until the galaxy decided to end it for him. He'd kindly shrugged off all of Kawlan's previous comms – a smattering of don't worry, I'm doing fine, glad to hear from you, I'll see you when the job is done – but the one that arrived as Korkie beheld himself in the steam-glazed mirror was not one he could ignore.

"We're all fine, Korkie, I don't want you to worry, but I just wanted to let you know that whenever you're thinking of coming home… well, we don't have one anymore. There's been a big explosion – like, a big, big, massive explosion – at the ship factory. Three reactors went up. Like a full-scale earthquake. They don't know if it was intentional or accidental or what but just about the whole tenth sector is flattened, including our apartment. We obviously don't have the funds to rebuild so we're looking at…"

But Korkie had stopped listening. The whole of tenth sector?

"Did people die, Kawlan?"

"Thousands. We got lucky. We weren't on-planet. Coming back from Tanalorr via Bracca."

"Yeah. Right. Okay. Glad you're safe. I'll, uh…"

He was scrambling for his clothes, wet hair flopping into his eyes.

"I'll just head back past Yaga Minor, I think. Just to see for myself…"

There was a crackling silence before Kawlan spoke, his voice heavy with understanding.

"Have you heard from Mahdi?"

"I-"

Korkie nearly toppled as he hopped his way into his pants.

"Well, no, Kawlan. Not at all. But that's because we sort of broke up. So, I mean, he might be fine, but…"

"I understand. Travel safely, please. Don't rush. I can meet you-"

"No. Do what you have to do for the Hidden Path. Don't worry about me. I'll catch you all up soon. I'm getting nowhere with the Second Sister, so…"

He pulled on his boots and yanked on a shirt.

"Let me do this, okay? Then I'll come help you all again."

He was, he supposed, not quite so homeless and detached as he'd tried to kid himself.

The tenth sector of Yaga Minor was unrecognisable from atmosphere, a slanting mess of grey and black surrounding an enormous crater in the heart of the shipyards. There were no landing sites to aim for, so Korkie landed instead in a field of scorched rubbish. It might have been the ship factory's spare parts yard, he thought, that Riyan was always wanting to visit.

Was Riyan here now? There were barefoot children combing over the rubble, surely finding nothing; the heat of the explosion had been enough to warp the twisted remains of the durasteel fencing and the ship parts could not have survived. But in the faces of the children Korkie saw no familiar dark eyes. Mahdi would not have allowed Riyan, he consoled himself, to go junk scavenging as day turned to night. He was probably safe at his protective brother's side. He clambered over the fallen fence and carried on.

How the Empire could have let this happen he could barely fathom. It was not the work of any rebellion; Korkie had sensed lonely dissidents but no malice capable of producing something like this in his time on Yaga Minor. Far more likely it was the carelessness of the Empire in their ravenous pursuit of technological dominance, the demand for star destroyer upon star destroyer to conquer system after system without regard for safety expenditure. It was easy, far too easy, to take such shortcuts when both people and planet were viewed as expendable.

Korkie strode through the field of rubble and towards the river, the only identifiable landmark besides the blown-out shipyards that Korkie had sighted from the air. Mahdi had lived between the shipyards and the river. He reached out into the Force ahead of him, searching for a distant glimmer of light.

He would find him. He had to.

The home of the new Jedi Order was both alien and heart-wrenchingly familiar. Cal watched Cere surrounded by a circle of younglings – children, normal people called them – teaching the meditations that he knew better than the creases of his own palms. And in the fields beyond their mountainside home the working adults were in their own quiet meditation within the Force. There was peace as glowing as he had ever known it in the Jedi Temple.

But there was something else too.

There was the mother holding her child in her arms, rocking the irritation from him, soothing him with the song in her voice and her fingers upon his dark, coiled hair. She was his every comfort. The centre of his galaxy. The Force flowed through them but there was no need of it. They had found their place already within each other.

There were the lovers who looked for each other across the fields, who heard the voice of the other above any other sound. They sparked with a smile that could only come from the other, a joy that was reserved for them, a precious gift shared. Cal watched a woman pull a splinter from her partner's hand a press a kiss upon the callused skin. The foreign movement stirred something strange within him.

He knew this place, and yet he did not know it at all.

"What do you think?"

Cere had risen from her meditation with the children – they were running and babbling with each other now, more or less in the same manner that the Temple younglings had, Cal thought, except a shrill few decibels louder.

"It's wonderful. To see all these lives saved. To be somewhere safe."

And this was the earnest truth. Cal had nearly sobbed, had felt the burning tears at his eyes and the tightening in his throat, when he sensed and then saw the surviving Padawans and Temple-trained younglings upon Tanalorr. He'd known none of them closely, all of them younger than himself. But he'd seen those faces in the dojo and the mess hall, known the way the Force danced around them. And he'd consigned himself to never knowing them ever again.

But it was not the whole of what he felt, observing this new community. He pondered the brilliant kaleidoscope of emotions in the Force.

"These many attachments…" he ventured. "Is this going to be the way of your new Jedi Order?"

Cere shrugged.

"I don't know," she confessed. "It was supposed to be Mace Windu who…"

She swallowed hard against the words and Cal grimaced. Kawlan had told him about Arkanis. Told him in a quiet, gentle way through which Cal had inferred that the death had cut both Cere Junda and the absent Korkaran Kryze terribly deeply.

"I'm sorry."

"It's alright," Cere reasoned, with a sigh. "I only wish I knew how to get it right. How to lead as he led."

"The Council did not get everything right," Cal pointed out.

He'd tried not to spare too much thought on the matter, in the years gone past. But he knew, standing upon Tanalorr, that they had made mistakes.

"The way we fell into that war. Put our Padawans on the frontlines. The way we were stretched bare, left vulnerable…"

"We were deceived," Cere stated.

"Yes."

"I don't know if there was way around it."

"Neither do I," Cal conceded.

They watched the children chase each other through the tall grass.

"I cannot enforce Jedi moderation upon those who have grown up beyond our Temple," Cere mused. "And I cannot deny that I have watched love heal those who were exposed to terrible darkness. But still…"

She grimaced.

"I'm wary," she confessed. "I have seen attachment heal and I have seen it hurt. I have seen it wreak terrible hurt."

And the hurt Cal felt in the Force around them was her own, muted now, but true. Like a scar that would shrink and fade but never disappear.

"You worry for Korkie," Cal observed.

Cere smiled sadly.

"He is Mandalorian at heart," she sighed. "But with great power in the Force."

"He doesn't travel with you anymore?"

"Sparingly."

Cal could barely picture him. He'd had bigger kriffing things to worry about when Korkaran Kryze-and-technically-Kenobi had been plastered all over the HoloNet. He could not pretend to know him. But he felt the truth of Cere's care for the young man, felt her worry for him.

"And you cannot bring him back?"

Her lips twitched.

"No one can make Korkie Kryze do anything he doesn't want to do. But…"

She sighed.

"You're right, Cal. It would be remiss not to try."

She ran a hand over her close-cropped hair.

"He trusts Kawlan most of all," she mused.

Cal did not ask why the runaway did not trust her.

"I'll comm Kawlan. We'll go together."

It was sunset by the river, with silver blue in the east and fading gold in the west. But in the moment that Korkie felt him the planet seemed to lurch and invert its rotation and the broken tenth district of Yaga Minor was blessed with a new dawn.

Mahdi.

Alive. Wearing the boots and coat he remembered, his hair grown to graze his collar. Working not behind a bar but in clouds of dust, amongst a scattered sea of sentients heaving chunks of rubble into some semblance of order at the river's edge. Korkie couldn't help it. He ran. He ran like a child and slowed only when Mahdi's dark eyes found his. He stood frozen, a piece of debris still propped up over one shoulder, as Korkie slowed in his ungainly strides and picked his way across the sea of rubble.

And with the flaring sun there was warmth, such warmth, alive in the Force.

"What are you doing here?" Mahdi managed.

"I heard about the explosion and I…"

Korkie took the hunk of painted stone that must have once been the wall of a building and helped Mahdi lower it from his shoulder onto the ground.

"Well, I had to come back and check that you were alright."

"Huh."

A slow grin was rising on Mahdi's face.

"So you do have feelings, then."

Korkie flushed.

"Well, obviously, Mahdi. No need to be a dick about it."

But they were both softening, the warmth flooding between them, and soon they were laughing, in giddy defiance of all this sea of tragedy that had them surrounded.

"Come help then," Mahdi suggested. "We've still got a lot of work to do."

They lifted the piece of rubble again and picked their awkward path to deposit it amongst similar pieces.

"This is for everything that can be re-used to build shelters," Mahdi explained, gesturing to the pile. "That one's for stuff that needs to be melted down. Textiles there, glass there, and unsalvageable stuff there."

Korkie squatted to lift a piece of debris from the water's edge and was glad to finally put his aching muscles to something that felt worthwhile. Already, his months of pursuit of the Second Sister seemed like a distant nightmare. His asteroid days were over; he had crashed to the cool soil and would never drift again. Had he truly felt that anger? Standing by Mahdi's side, there seemed to be no darkness left in him anymore.

"The kids are okay?" Korkie ventured.

"Yeah. The alarms at the shipyards went off before the big explosion. No one knew how seriously to take it, but you know me and my caution."

He laughed a little at himself.

"I dragged them down to the Hive. Riyan had just begun to whinge about missing lunch when the reactors went up. It took us a few hours to dig ourselves out, but we weren't hurt."

"And the apartment?"

"Flattened."

Mahdi scuffed the toe of his boot through the rubble.

"I keep wondering whether I'm seeing bits of our walls, actually…"

He shrugged and let the pieces lie, lifting his gaze back to Korkie's.

"Doesn't matter, I guess. How did your very-important-shit-to-do-off-planet-business go?"

Korkie sighed.

"Useless, actually."

He'd kept the Second Sister away from the Hidden Path, he supposed. But for all he knew she'd be back hunting them again now. Just like his father's stupid Council missions, like his mother's case in the Intergalactic Court of Justice falling upon the Senate's deaf ears. They knew how to fight their battles but never won the karking war.

"I'd like to tell you about it, Mahdi," he found himself saying. "All about it. Because I've kept all these secrets, and it isn't fair on you, and I'm so happy to be with you again but I don't know if you're going to be happy to be with me if-"

Mahdi looked at him in the fading light, a bemused grin on his face.

"What are you talking about, Ben?"

Korkie cast down his piece of rubble into the appropriate pile.

"I don't know, really. Except that if I don't want love to be about lie after lie after lie then I should… stop lying to you, I guess."

Mahdi sobered. But he didn't flinch away in the way that he might have, once upon a time.

"Right."

"I can appreciate this mightn't be the best time or place."

Mahdi shrugged.

"It's getting too dark to work," he reasoned. "Let's knock off a few minutes early. The kids are safe in the big shelter in the Hive. And I've found a nice spot up-river."

They sat on the recumbent bough of an enormous fallen tree, swinging their legs over the rushing water. The river, now that they had removed the worst of the debris, was running again. It was cold with the fading light, Mahdi's feet damp inside the boots he had tracked in and out of the water today, and he huddled close by Ben's side. There were no streetlights to illuminate them. And even if there were, Mahdi wasn't sure he'd care. The Imperial soldiers had all but abandoned tenth sector; it wasn't worth their time or money to rebuild. And how could he be scared any longer of eyes upon him, of a stranger's hate, when this whole city had blown apart and thousands had died and every survivor just wanted to build a home again?

"Well…"

Mahdi had never heard shyness like this in Ben's voice. The young man who had always been too confident, too brash, too loud…

"I should probably start by telling you my name's not actually Ben."

Mahdi groaned but could not help a bubble of unwilling laughter rising from his lips. He'd fallen in love under the wrong kriffing name.

"Kriff's sakes. I've kind of got used to calling you that."

"I know."

Ben – not Ben – had dropped his chin in shame.

"I just use it for safety," he explained. "My real name's Korkie."

"Korkie?"

The young man straightened up.

"Short for Korkaran."

Mahdi leaned back, feeling the bark press into the palms of his hands, and tested the name quietly on his tongue.

"What language is that from?"

"Mando'a."

Mahdi's eyes widened.

"Oh. Shit. Right."

"You've heard the name before?"

"No. All I know about Mandalore is that the Empire ended it."

And had ended it badly. Like the explosions in tenth sector but extending across an entire planet.

"I was the prince," Korkie said.

Mahdi almost fell off the karking tree.

"The what?"

"The Crown Prince of Mandalore. My mother was the Duchess Satine."

"Holy kriff…"

Mahdi looked at his face in the darkness, so close to his own. Ben, getting into the club without ID and dancing like a hurricane. Ben, of burnt dindras and lazy mornings in that stupid bunk. Korkie. The Crown Prince of Mandalore.

"You know," Mahdi decided eventually, once he had found his voice again. "It kind of checks out."

"Are you being sarcastic?"

"No," Mahdi insisted. "It's your posture maybe, or the way that you talk, or-"

"You wouldn't believe how hard I've worked to butcher my accent," he groaned.

"You've always been princely."

Hadn't he? Even careening around the dancefloor of the Hive, drunk on too many Sunrisers, he'd had a way of moving that Mahdi had never seen on Yaga Minor.

"You're making fun of me," Korkie protested.

"I'm not."

Mahdi reached out to rest his hand upon the face of the young man he had known and not known. His thumb brushed a high-set cheekbone.

"Even your face is princely."

Korkie feigned offence.

"What's a princely face? Are you calling me ugly? Inbred?"

Mahdi shook with quaking laughter.

"Inbred? Are you?"

"No!" Korkie howled.

He shook his head in disbelief as he effortfully regathered his composure.

"My dad wasn't royal," he explained. "He wasn't even Mandalorian. And my mother's parents were really only very, very distantly related."

They collapsed into laughter again.

"My father was born on Stewjon," Korkie managed. "And then raised as a Jedi on Coruscant."

And with that word – that forbidden word, once sprawling in neon over every HoloNet broadcast and now appearing only on wanted posters – they fell silent.

"A Jedi?" Mahdi breathed. "Are you…"

Korkie nodded.

"Force-sensitive. But no Jedi. I was raised on Mandalore by my mother. I'm not the soldier that my father was."

And there seemed to be a great bitterness in his words then.

"It might have been useful, in retrospect, to have been trained properly. But I was raised for a life of peace. I was going to succeed my mother and rule Mandalore as the Duke."

But there was no system left for him to rule and no Jedi Order to welcome a lost son. Mahdi understood, as they sat with their shoulders and thighs pressed close, why he had so petulantly insisted upon his adulthood in those stupid arguments they'd had. He had, years ago, lost every place that could have ever been his home.

"So what do you do now?"

Korkie shrugged.

"What I try to do," he answered, "is help Force-sensitives escape from the Empire. And it's mainly been going well, all things considered, but…"

He shook his head.

"I won't bore you. I feel like I've lived a whole decade – more – since the Republic fell. I'd be talking all night."

Mahdi laid a hand on his.

"I'd listen."

Korkie snickered.

"You're stupid."

"I know."

There was a glint of sparking moonlight in those blue eyes.

"We've got better things to do, Mahdi, than talk all night."

"Do we?"

Korkie grinned, his teeth bright in the darkness.

"I can hear you thinking about them."

Mahdi flushed.

"What do you mean you can… that's not fair!"

Korkie shook his head.

"Nothing in this galaxy is, I'm afraid."

And he was still smiling but there was sadness there, too.

Trilla's incessantly annoying personal bounty hunter had chosen to leave her alone. And she knew she'd not injured him well enough – some scattered bruises, if anything – to earn this reprieve. Which meant, Trilla had originally assumed, that his slippery refugee-freighting friends had needed him.

Except that she'd tuned in to the Empire's intelligence channels – despite her fall from the Emperor's favour, her network codes still worked – and got word of her former Master causing trouble rescuing an Inquisitorial target on Bracca. No mention of Kenobi's son by her side. And Korkie really wasn't one to keep his head low.

The dispatched team had lost the fugitives as they'd left Bracca. Trilla couldn't help but feel faintly pleased. She would not suffer the indignity of the Ninth Sister killing Cere Junda when she had been unable to and the Emperor would have to accept that Trilla was far from the only Inquisitor to ever lose a target. (Or, admittedly, several targets, many times over.) There was still time for Trilla to claim the victory herself.

Where they had gone, however, proved difficult. Trilla was certain there was something happening in the galaxy's south-east, far distant from where the group had first run their refugees through Mapuzo in the galaxy's north. She went back to her old data logs and the mission that had started it all: Relya Roken on Dantooine. An untrained Force-sensitive, of modest ability, but flagged as problematic with rebel tendencies by local stormtroopers. She'd fled from Yaga Minor with her husband, who had fled, in turn, with his rescuer Korkaran Kryze.

She'd searched for them on Yaga Minor once before. The Roken property long sold. No unusual freight patterns or civil disturbances flagged by the local patrols.

But that did not mean they hadn't returned. Sentients had a traitorous inclination to return home. And the initial refugee routes – the routes that Trilla had been so close to unearthing completely, before they'd gone and made kriffing new ones – would have centred well around Yaga Minor.

Supposedly secret dissenting media was full of outrage and whining about the explosion in Yaga Minor's tenth district, where the Empire had apparently taken some short-cuts on factory safety. (Perhaps not an isolated incident. The occupational-health-and-safety-loving rebel media would have gone wild with the way the Academy on Arkanis had gone up in flames.) The explosion had occurred in the very district that had once been the home of Kawlan Roken. Who might have connections on-planet, still. Who might have had a home or a headquarters in the region.

If Roken was working with the young Kryze-Kenobi, and Kenobi was working with Cere Junda…

It wasn't much to go on. But it was better than nothing. Trilla had nowhere else to go.

And besides. Trilla had an unusual sense of optimism about her as she re-fuelled her ship. It felt a little like the Force might finally be on her side this time.

They walked a long time down the river that night, as shadows flitted upon the riverbank and amongst the fallen trees. The few surviving buildings and underground dwellings left in the tenth sector were almost overflowing with freshly-forged communities and there was nowhere left for lovers. Korkie steered Mahdi past whispering teenagers on scavenged mattresses upon the sandy banks and couples huddled beneath shared coats until they reached a place where the rubble had not yet been cleared and the swooping grav-cabs avoided the wreckage. The Force was quiet here. The moonlight was silver upon the water. And Korkie felt that all these months behind him had been one long black night and somehow tonight was not so very dark after all.

He feared nothing. For the first time in so long – for the first time without the artificial courage of a Sunriser in his hand – there was no fear. So how could the Jedi say that love led to the Dark Side?

They sat on Korkie's old worn cloak upon the sand. He would not think about who it had belonged to, tonight. There were scant droplets of rain upon the breeze but Korkie was not cold. He was in love.

Mahdi's fingers traced his crooked nose and Korkie, with crashing relief, did not have to lie anymore.

"On Corellia," he murmured. "A cage fight. For eight-hundred credits when I had no money at all."

The burn upon his cheek, now.

"Ryloth airspace. General Grievous. His lightsaber nearly-"

Mahdi gave a sharp intake of breath but said nothing as Korkie guided his hand.

"A blaster bolt on Corellia. On the very first Empire Day. I stole a TIE fighter."

He brought Mahdi's fingers to the front of his shoulder.

"An Inquisitor on Dantooine. She nearly got me here too."

His freshest scar, high on his abdomen.

"And your set of five…"

Korkie lifted his hand to imitate a set of claws.

"General Grievous's stupid mechno-foot."

Mahdi shook his head in stunned disbelief.

"You've been fighting against the Empire all these years."

"Yes."

"And what are you going to do?" he asked. "Now that you've come back here and seen that I'm alright?"

Korkie hadn't taken a single moment to think about it since Kawlan had commed him and he'd dropped his pursuit of the Second Sister without any semblance of rational thought.

"I don't know."

Mahdi's hand was still on his chest, flush against the scarred skin beneath his winter clothes.

"Would you stay here a while?" he asked. "You could give yourself some time to rest. Help rebuild the city."

"I-"

"You could stay in the shelter with us. With Lana and Riyan and everyone else. I think I've stopped caring who knows, Korkie."

There was still a deliberateness in the way he said his newly-learned name.

"I'm not scared anymore. Thousands of people died here last week and I could have been one of them and I never would have been with you in the way I wanted to because I was scared. But I'm done living like that."

Korkie felt a welling tightness in his throat.

"Mahdi, I-"

The vision was so beautiful. Days and nights by his side. Simple work and aching muscles but no more bruises. No more scars.

"I'm trouble, Mahdi," he managed. "To be with you, like that, I don't want to bring…"

He'd left the Second Sister barely injured in their latest scuffle on Agamar and done a fair but perhaps not rigorous job in concealing his tracks as he hurried back to Yaga Minor. She would take advantage of the reprieve, most likely, and return to the galactic south-east to hunt the Hidden Path again. She would not chase him in the way he had pursued her; all she seemed to be interested in was finding Cere Junda.

"Maybe for a short while," Korkie found himself murmuring.

He was aware of his heart thudding against Mahdi's hand. His briefly rising fears seemed so flimsy against the warm body beside him.

"I think I could rest with you here for a short while. If you'll have me."

Mahdi nodded and there were no more words. There were cool hands on warm skin and breath shared between flushed lips. And the darkness of the galaxy was so distant, as between them welled such a profound, impenetrable peace in the Force. A connection that flowed like the river and turned the two young men to one. A connection that touched everything. Korkie was Mahdi and he was the falling rain and he was the broken city and he knew that it would be reborn.

Korkie collapsed against the Jedi cloak upon the sandy riverbank and closed his eyes and breathed that peace. He might have had a dream where he had glimpsed this feeling. Years ago. In the drifting months after Corellia. A dream of peace, of floating in the pond in the gardens of the palace in Sundari. It had left him aching when he woke, its bittersweet taste upon his lips. Tears on his face because it had slipped from him and he had thought he would never get it back. That he would never know this feeling ever again.

He would have liked to tell Mahdi that he loved him. But he fell asleep in his arms, breathing in the air of him, before his lips could form the words.

They're so beautiful they make me cry. Have a listen to Thinking of a Place by The War on Drugs and cry with me.

Hope you liked seeing Cal! Would love any thoughts or tips about his character (I don't know him well).

xx - S.