Archive of Our Own ^beta

Somehow, this ship is more frightening than any part of Melidaan. 

It’s an awful thing to think. Terrible, really. There are no bombs hiding underneath the decking, no enemies waiting to ambush him, no hollow-cheeked faces and bone-thin hands standing just behind his too-thin shoulders because it is the only place that is anything close to protection. It’s spacious enough for a transport with nothing but gleaming silver panels and a gently-purring engine pulling them along through hyperspace. It’s nothing like Melidaan—nothing at all. 

And yet, Obi-Wan can’t seem to breathe. 

He walks through the ship, trailing Master Jinn—and how many times had he dreamed of this exact view? The fall of his Master’s hair down his back, the familiar color and texture of Temple-spun robes, and the feeling of serenity that permeates the air around a Master Jedi… Force, how Obi-Wan had dreamt of this exact sight—and swears that the walls draw closer together with each step. The only sound is Master Jinn’s footsteps. Obi-Wan has gotten very skilled at keeping his footsteps silent. He hadn’t realized how automatic it was to soften each step, to carefully roll into the motion and let each part of his foot relax onto the ground. He is the opposite of loud—silent, really—but each movement he makes feels as loud as a banging gavel.   

Master Jinn leaves him in one of the cabins with hardly more than a glance and instructions to “clean himself up.” He nods his assent but Master Jinn doesn’t look at him again before taking his leave. Obi-Wan hasn’t said much, really. He’s trying so hard not to make this worse than it already is. 

The cabin is spacious and clean with a double-bunk, a crate for storage of personal items securely mag-clamped to the wall, and a fresher. Obi-Wan doesn’t know whether he’ll be sharing this cabin with Master Jinn or perhaps even another passenger. He does not know who else might be on this ship. He doesn’t know when they will depart for Coruscant. He doesn’t even want to try and imagine what will happen when they arrive. The list of things he does know is short. 

I’ve karked up—I’ve karked up so impossibly bad. 

I’m so karking lucky. 

Somewhere in between the arrival of the Jedi and where Obi-Wan stands now, the relief that he’d felt to see them has turned to something that sits heavy in his stomach. His body flushes cold down from the top of his head through his extremities, his tongue falls numb and the lights grow impossibly brighter. 

I’m going to faint, he thinks in a detached sort of way. But he can’t very well sit down on the beds; he’s too dirty for that. Master Jinn told him to clean himself up. He has to manage that, first. Then he can sit. 

Maybe. 

Thankfully, Obi-Wan makes it into the fresher before he loses the meager contents of his stomach. It’s not exactly good that he’s vomiting nothing but bile, but it’s better than wasting food that could have gone to use in someone else’s stomach. 

After flushing his mess in the sonic toilet, Obi-Wan moves to the sink to rinse his mouth, only to draw to an abrupt stop. His breath hitches messily in his throat. The overhead lights flicker with his unrest in the Force. It takes a long, long few moments to wrestle control back over his emotions. 

Stop, he tells himself. Don’t. 

With trembling hands—dirty hands, hands with broken nails and more than one infected cuticle ripped open from anxious chewing and not enough medicine, hands that ache in the cold and grow stiff in the mornings to the point where Obi-Wan had begun to fear that they’d one day simply stop moving at all—he plucks a plasti-wrapped toothbrush from the standard box of travel amenities. 

Obi-Wan hasn’t seen a toothbrush in a long time. 

He brings the neatly packaged item to his brow and presses it there, folding over with a sound he won’t name. Obi-Wan breathes. Shakes. The lights flicker.  

No one comes.

Obi-Wan sleeps like the dead during their first night-cycle in transit. It’s a blessing and a curse. He has nightmares but they don’t wake him. At first, he wishes they had, just so he didn’t have to keep experiencing them. After the second night cycle when he wakes the whole ship with his screaming, he retracts that foolish wish. 

To sleep through the memories would have been so much more tolerable than the look in Master Jinn’s eyes when Obi-Wan had woken him. He’d spoken to Obi-Wan about proper meditation, about imbalance. Master Jinn is a calm man, an exemplary Jedi. He does not shout; he does not get angry. 

It makes it so much worse. 

Obi-Wan understands anger now more than he ever thought he would. As an initiate, he’d been volatile. Confrontational. A brat, really. That sort of “anger” wasn’t really anger. It was childish discontent. Surliness. A brat behaving like a brat. 

Anger, real Anger, is what turns a boy like Nield into a warrior; a girl like Cerasi into a soldier. Anger is what drives a father to lob projectile explosives at his own children. Anger rips a whole planet apart and leaves nothing but scorched and salted ground behind. That is real Anger. Real Anger is madness, Dark. 

When facing Anger, Obi-Wan’s hands were steady. He knew what he had to do. It wasn’t always easy but it was certainly clear. If Master Jinn was angry—really, truly angry—it’d be easier. It makes shame claw at his throat to the point of choking him completely. 

He wants Master Jinn to be angry. He wants it because he knows it, now. Obi-Wan knows anger. 

But instead, Master Jinn speaks to him steadily and calmly about giving himself to the Force in order to find inner peace. It’s the same speech that every tantruming youngling in the creche has heard a thousand variations of. Every night cycle, it’s the same. Obi-Wan wakes screaming. Master Jinn rises from the bottom bunk, turns on the lights, and tells him to find balance in the Force. 

On the fourth occurrence, Obi-Wan has the urge to bite him. It’s quick like a viper, a there-and-gone again flicker of impulse. He could do it. He could lash out, get his teeth into Master Jinn’s arm or maybe his hand. Lock his jaw, put his whole body into it… Obi-Wan could draw blood. For a second, he wants to. 

But that would be unforgivable. It makes him burn with shame, with fear, with something else he’s afraid to name because he’s afraid to skirt so close to something Dark. 

He excuses himself to the ‘fresher to wash. It’s close enough to the day-cycle that doing so is acceptable, surely. He sits naked on the stall floor as the sonics drum at his skin, turned to the highest setting. He can just barely hear Master Jinn exit their cabin. 

Obi-Wan sinks his teeth into his upper thigh until he tastes copper. 

It tastes like kriffing relief. 

Returning to the Temple is even more difficult than he’d feared it would be. Truthfully, it all goes by in a blur. Most of the details are gone by the time the day has ended and he’s standing in his ‘fresher back home—his and Master Jinn’s rooms. 

Obi-Wan lowers himself to sit on the floor. He can’t think of Master Jinn’s rooms as their rooms, anymore—not without feeling like the worst sort of liar. The space itself did not get the memo. The apartment still smells exactly the same. Chai tea spices, the kind that burn his nose if he drinks it without milk. Wet earth from a handful of thriving plants. The Temple soap. 

Obi-Wan breathes it in and presses his thumbs into the bite-shaped scabs on his thighs until his vision clears and his breath comes steady again.  

It happens just in time to hear the knock on his door. 

He quickly scrambles to his feet, steadying himself on the doorway when his vision swims. It does that, now, if he goes from one position to another too quickly. He didn’t mention that to the healers who examined him with professional efficiency. They’d deemed him too skinny—malnourished. He’d had an IV. Some vaccine booster. Obi-Wan really hadn’t paid attention to the details. He was too busy being stupidly grateful that they hadn’t asked him to undress for his examination—he hadn’t wanted them to see the bites—and wondering anxiously what Master Jinn and the council were speaking of. 

On the other side of the bedroom door is Master Jinn. 

“Yes, Master?” Obi-Wan says. 

“Come have a seat, Obi-Wan.” His eyes don’t linger on him. Master Jinn turns to the living room space and sits in his customary position—a meditation mat by the window. 

Wherever Obi-Wan’s usual mat has gone, he can’t say. It isn’t here anymore. He simply sits in the usual place, sans-mat. He keeps his back straight, his posture professional. 

Master Jinn doesn’t say anything at first; he must expect Obi-Wan to start, only Obi-Wan hasn’t the slightest clue what he could possibly say. He chooses to wait. Eventually, with a sigh, Master Jinn speaks. 

“We have many things to discuss, you and I.” 

“Yes, Master.” 

“Where would you like to begin?” Master Jinn asks. 

Stop, Obi-Wan reproaches himself—his stupid racing heartbeat and his sweaty palms—and tightens his mental shielding as much as it will go. It is another thing he’d gotten very good at while on Melidaan. Sometimes, his nightmares had bled over to the other Young. He’d needed to learn how to lock himself down very quickly. The skill is serving him well. 

“I…” he keeps his breathing steady. “I don’t know, Master.” A heavy silence and Obi-Wan blurts, “I’m sorry.” 

They sit there for a few moments more. The cadence of Master Jinn’s breathing never once changes. Obi-Wan is grateful for it, for the steady pulse it makes. 

“Well,” Master Jinn says. “I’d like you to start with a reflection. A written report. In order to grow, one must first confront one’s past mistakes. This is what I’d like you to do, Obi-Wan.” 

A report. A report of the mistakes I’ve made. 

Obi-Wan swallows down the overwhelming urge to laugh. There’s a part of him, a part of him that has adopted Nield’s dry and acerbic humor, that wants to ask, “Would you prefer an alphabetized list or would numerical ordering by casualty numbers do?” 

He doesn’t say that, of course. If Nield had made a joke like that where anyone else could hear, Cerasi would have slugged him in the arm as hard as she could. Her eyes would have gone glassy and she would have hissed, “Enough. Who does that serve?” 

Are they always going to haunt him, Cerasi and Nield? Perhaps they would serve as a good starting place. Mistake Number-One: the friends I failed so completely. 

“I understand, Master Jinn,” Obi-Wan says. He hopes the gravity of this task is audible in his voice. He wants Master Jinn to understand that he is taking this seriously. He’ll get better. He will earn a place back with the Jedi. 

“Good, Obi-Wan. At your own pace.” 

The street-facing window into the glass-blowing workshop was her buir’s idea. Joh prefers not to be watched when she’s working, thanks. Usually, when Joh is working, it’s personal. 

She hasn’t worked for the shop legitimately as a paid employee for a little over two Coruscant-standard years, just before her first official semester as a full-time student began. For starters, she’s way too karking busy with coursework to hold a job. And thanks to her scholarship, she doesn’t need to; for a bunch of aruetiise, CRU’s marksmanship team aren’t all that bad—it’s not their fault Joh has been shooting blasters practically since she could crawl.

When Joh travels to Little Keldabe on her days off of school she’s there to unwind—to do something just for herself, in peace and quiet. Her glass blowing projects are hers and hers only. 

Case in point, the piece her current gawker is watching her shape is an addition to the lamp in her dorm. The lamp throws colored light across the soulless construction that is her campus housing unit like a tree casts shade; each bulb is supported by twisting branches of metal with custom colored glass casings meant to resemble flowers. She’s making a new flower now—it’s predecessor shattered after her osik’la roommate knocked into it with her bag when coming home drunk off her tits. 

Fucking sorority parties. 

The kid has been lingering out there for a solid twenty-minutes, watching Joh pull orange molten glass into desired configurations like a confectioner would work sticky taffy. It’s unnerving. She doesn’t mind being watched when she’s competing for school. That’s a whole different sort of thing. But this is her me-time. This is free-therapy. Shoo, gawker. Shoo, shoo. 

Buir’s distinctive uneven footsteps alert her to their presence and Joh doesn’t bother looking up from her glass before saying, “That little creep has been watching me forever.” 

In Mando’a, her buir replies chidingly, “That ‘little creep’ is just a child. They’re just curious.” A beat passes. “Are they alone? Have you seen their parent?” 

Joh sighs, glancing up at the kid through the window. They are thin and pale with deep-set eyes and dark circles, copper red hair just peeking out from behind a sagging hat. They look pathetic, gazing up at the window display like that—all bedraggled and wide-eyed.   

“Buir…” 

Too late, her buir is studying the child closely through the glass—a frown spreading slowly across their face. Joh strips her gloves in anticipation, dropping them with a heavy thud onto the worktop. Her lekku curl and twitch in anticipatory annoyance. 

Sure enough, Buir has caught the child’s (rapt, vulture-like, and utterly unnerving) attention through their persistent parental stare, mediated by transparisteel as it may be. Buir waves and motions the child forward, gesturing to the shop door and then plodding away in that direction on uneven feet, instructions having been delivered.

Joh sighs and makes a mental note to call the neighborhood baar'ur, because if Joh doesn’t make sure Buir’s prosthetic leg gets regular maintenance, their prosthetic doesn’t get regular maintenance. 

Case in point: the plodding. 

The chime above the door sounds as the youngling pushes it open, expression wary. Joh would be wary, too. Buir is hovering. 

“Hello, youngling,” Buir greets in heavily accented Basic. “Interested in the glass?” 

“Hello,” the child greets back, nervous. Joh doesn’t blame them— Buir cuts an intimidating figure. 

It has been a long time since the Clan Wars, but Buir carries the marks of the conflict across their whole body, from their prosthetic leg to their broad, blaster-worn and burn-scarred hands. They aren’t in full beskar’gam today—their buy’ce is probably somewhere in the back—but their heavy breastplate and armored arms are still a striking picture, for aruetti. For Joh, the sight of her buir in full beskar’gam could only ever be comforting. Good old Mandalorian-brand comfort: this person would stop a tank with their bare hands for me. 

It’s the little things. 

Joh removes her heavy apron, hanging it on the reinforced pegs beside the door to the workroom. The youngling makes eye contact before their attention quickly darts back to Buir, skittish like the stray tooka that hangs out around her dorm with the raggedy ear. 

“They don’t bite,” Joh assures the kid. “Promise.” 

“It’s very beautiful,” the child says, eyes flicking to and fro. “The glass. I didn’t know that it had… cultural significance.” 

Buir beams. “Mandos have been doing glass work since the earliest forge-fire was lit. Any good armorer starts their apprentices out with glass before moving onto beskar.” 

“Oh,” the kid says, thoughtful and shifty-eyed. 

As soon as they entered the shop, they moved to place their back against a wall—no chance of being snuck up on or startled in any way. Their eyes track even the smallest twitches of motion, like they’re expecting the small brightly-lit shop to have clawed shaddows, just waiting to strike. They’ve got a shoulder bag that they haven’t let go of. Thin wrists with bitten-down nails. 

Joh is majoring in social work , for fuck’s sake. She knows what an unhappy child looks like. 

“I could show you some,” Joh says. The kid’s eyes snap to her before jumping away again, back to Buir, the larger threat. If Buir is built like a mountain, Joh is built like a very tall, yet quiet little stream. Hence her fondness for blasters—stream or not, the person with the barking antique slug thrower as long as their lekku immediately becomes the most important person in the room.

Also, she’s in sweatpants . No armor (or adoption vows) to be found here, child. “Or, if you have somewhere to be…?” 

“No,” the kid says. “Well, actually…” the child takes a centering breath, stands a bit straighter, and tells them, “I’m looking for someone that might be able to help me with a report for school. It’s a post-hoc analysis of guerilla warfare tactics using a particular case study and I need a second set of eyes. I’m… terribly sorry if this is offensive, that’s not my intent, but I don’t know anyone who knows anything about war and so I thought…” 

“You thought you’d look for a verd,” Buir finishes for them, not unkindly. 

The child stares. 

“It means ‘soldier’,” Joh offers. “ ‘Verd’. You’re looking for a verd.” 

“Joh?” Buir begins, “Why don’t you offer our guest some shig? I’ll close up here and join you in the sitting-room.” 

“Close—? I—thank you, but that’s not necessary, I don’t mean to impose—” the kid stammers. “I really just had a few things—” 

But Buir is already going through the motions and Joh is already gently ushering the kid forward with what she hopes is an encouraging smile. For all the child’s hesitation, they do follow after her, and they even crack a smile when Joh says, “ Buir is an empty-nester; I’m the ‘baby’ of the family and I moved out for university a few months ago.” She lowers her voice to a conspiratory tone and watches a slow half-smile crack across the child’s face like a splinter in glass, her heart giving a little jump in her chest, “They just miss doting on someone smaller than them.” 

The child moves as if to start after Joh but stops themselves at the last moment, expression deeply thoughtful. Their hand holding their bag twitches around the strap. 

Buir is in the workroom and out of sight, probably making sure that everything which can’t sit unoccupied for the next few hours is turned off. Joh doesn’t crouch, like she would with any child younger than this. Past a certain age, the budding independence of tiny humanoids takes offense to such a thing. Many a child has looked Joh in the eye that way and proclaimed, loudly, “I’m not a baby!” Sure, she may be aiming for a career in social work, but Joh isn’t necessarily a fan of being yelled at. 

She’s aware that this preference is counterintuitive.

“You can say no,” she tells the child. “Buir is slow. I can sneak you out back.” 

This causes another little cracked-porcelain smile. The child closes their eyes for a brief moment, breathing in and out, visibly self-centering. They glance again at the workshop door, where Buir has disappeared to and then the shelves of glittering glasswork all around the storefront.

“No, that’s okay,” the child says. And then, flashing her the smallest glimpse of teeth in a real smile—or at least something close to it—“My name’s Ben.” 

“Well met, Ben. I’m Joh.” 

While Joh prepares three mugs of shig, she gathers more information. Ben is fourteen—much older than she would have guessed based on size alone. Ben uses he / him pronouns in Basic. Ben claims he isn’t “the greatest” student, but one glance at the datapad he offers up from his satchel tells Joh that Ben has untenably high standards for himself; Joh’s roommate is twenty-four and couldn’t write half as well as this boy does. 

She glances at the first page—an abstract! What fourteen-year old is writing a paper with a fucking abstract?— and her lekku twitch in surprise as she settles onto the couch beside him.  

“I’ve never heard of this planet. Melida/Daan?” 

Ben blows carefully to cool the steaming cup cradled in both of his hands. His small hands are surprisingly battered with little healing cuts and marks. There’s a patch of shiny skin on his right thumb that strikes Joh as a familiar wound, but she can’t quite place it. 

“It’s small and doesn’t have many connections off-world. They only have one planetary array and no major space-port,” Ben tells her. He says it with the confidence of easy-knowledge. 

“And how long ago was the conflict?” she asks. She could very well just continue reading for an answer but Ben seems more relaxed when someone is speaking, especially if it’s himself. Less tense, overall. 

“What’s the date today?” he asks. 

Joh blinks. She tells him. 

“Thirty-five days.” 

Before she can follow up on that— kark, what the fuck kind of answer is that?—Buir comes in and Ben goes stiff. 

Joh’s own spine aches with how tightly the boy holds himself in picture-perfect posture. It makes her think of the Supercommandos, the ones who would give her shooting pointers when Buir was on a job, gently instructing her to unlock her knees and square her shoulders.

It strikes her then, what that little wound on Ben’s hand is. 

Joh was picked up by Buir when a mercenary job brought them in close proximity to a slave operation. At the time, Joh was too young to work, and stayed with the other children of the “indentured servants” (re: slaves) working for the Boss while the adults went to work in the factory. Joh never knew her biological parents because the children that lived on-sight were raised communally. She was too young to even think to ask. Hell, she can barely remember the place beyond the distinctive urine-tinged smell of it.   

When the verd came, she instantly took to Buir and Buir to her. She was raised among the Haat Mando'ade, practically nomadic until the conflict of Korda VI. After that, Buir and a few others permanently immigrated to Little Keldabe.  

She was raised among verd; she spent her days playing with weapons—under supervision, of course. But that doesn’t mean that mistakes never happened. Joh experienced her first burn from a misfired blaster when she was twelve. Instantly slathered in bacta and fretted over by a dozen Supercommandos, the little wound on her hand did not scar. 

Ben, it seems, was not so lucky. 

(A picture is forming in Joh’s mind and she does not like it.) 

Buir, bless their bleeding heart, notices how their presence causes Ben to go stiff with anxiety and flashes him an enormous and disarming smile. 

“Are you enjoying the shig, ad?” they ask.

“Yes, sir. Thank you,” Ben says.

“You’ll forgive me, Basic is… not my first language,” Buir tilts their hand in a so-so motion as they carefully lower themselves down into the big, overstuffed armchair across from the couch. They exhale a relieved sigh, no doubt happy to have the weight off their leg. “In my language , there are no gender-words. Kaysh only, lek?” 

Ben looks puzzled. Joh explains, “In the Mandalorian language, the only pronoun is gender-neutral and it’s kaysh. So, in Basic, Buir uses they and them. If you want to address them formally you’d say, ‘Jatne’vod’.” 

Buir huffs and waves a hand. “No need. Call me Omed, ad.” 

Ben bows his head respectfully, cheeks flushed in embarrassment and apologies quickly. “I’m Ben, he/him.” His gaze flickers to Joh and he adds, “Well met.” She smiles with approval. Clever kid. 

Buir takes a large gulp of their shig before saying, “Ask your questions, Ben. I will aid you how I can.” 

“So you’re verd?” He butches the pronunciation terribly, pronouncing it like “bird”. Neither Joh nor Buir correct him.

It’s cute.  

Buir has always been an excellent storyteller and they spend the next half-hour outlining the Clan Wars for Ben. They speak about the resol'nare —of which Ben had not the slightest idea—of little conflicts and bigger fights, of the da’kaadu and the Mandalore . Gradually, Ben seems to relax around them. When Joh is reasonably sure that Ben isn’t liable to bolt from the room if Buir so much as sneezes, she turns her attention back to Ben’s datapad. 

Joh finishes the introduction. Then, she reads it again. 

The words make no more sense to her the second time. She glances up at Ben, listening rapt to one of Buir’s more entertaining mercenary stories—it’s the one about a group of Weequay pirates led by an eccentric matriarch and some client’s family heirlooms—and considers his profile; his small hands, bitten nails, and blaster burn scar.

She reads the introduction again. Her breath leaves her in a shuddering exhale and she scrolls to Ben’s index. 

1. Organizational Shortcomings:

• Leadership Structure

• Intelligence 

• Logistics 

• Terrain

• Supply (Raids & Scavenging Operations)

2. Failures in Combat:

• Scouting Parties (Captured)

• Ambushes - Attempted & Encountered

• Skirmishes

• Tactical Overview 

She has to stop after section three: Review of Casualties with “death due to exposure” as one of the subcategories. The final section is titled: Ethical Dimensions. 

Joh sets the datapad on her knees, her lekku twisting anxiously around her hands. 

What the fuck? What the fucking fuck? 

Adrenaline kicks to a painful beat in her chest. Her teeth buzz with the rush of stress-chemicals. Fight or flight. 

“Ben,” she says, her voice a distant croak. She interrupts Buir, who was mid-sentence, and feels both pairs of eyes snap to her. Joh realizes that she is trembling. She might be sick. “Ben, did this really happen?” 

Please say no, she thinks.

Ben’s hands curl into little fists. He’s long since set his shig aside, his cup empty. He bites the inside of his lip and quickly breaks eye-contact with her, staring resolute at the carpet between his simple boots. 

She knows the moment he breaks her stare. 

The silence is so heavy that it might precipitate at any moment and fall like rain around them. Joh has brought a hand to her mouth without conscious input from her body or brain, pressing flat against her lips as if she could hold in all the sounds that are banging around in her throat.

“I did that bad, huh?” Ben murmurs at the floor, his face a rictus of pain. 

Fuck, kid. No. That’s just— no.  

Joh sobs. 

“Joh,” Buir gentles, concern and shock plainly written across every feature. Joh wants to throw herself into her buir’s arms and be held. Joh wants to drag Ben with her. 

She thrusts Ben’s datapad out towards Buir before they can rise from their seat.

“Ben, Ben, where were your parents?” she gasps, rising up on her knees, trying to control her reaction. He wrote of himself as an outsider in this grim war of children— literal children. He wrote of himself as among the oldest. He wrote of a girl that he clearly adored, a girl who his mourning for drips plainly off of the page, whose own father— 

Ben is squeezing at his leg through his trousers, knuckles white and eyes clenched shut. His lips are pressed tightly together and he shakes his head once, harshly. 

Buir curses and Ben flinches backwards at the sound, knocking into Joh on accident. He moves to flinch away from her, too, and she knows she shouldn’t—knows she absolutely should not grab a traumatized and terrified child— but she wraps both arms around him and tucks him into her side. 

Like a prey animal sensing danger, Ben goes still. Deathly still. His body is as unyielding as beskar in her arms. But Joh doesn’t let go. She can’t. She’s no forgemaster, but she’s worked the fires. Even beskar yields to heat. 

She rubs his back like Buir would do for her after nightmares, gentle pressure and steady rhythm. Somehow, when she pulled him into her lap, his hat got knocked off. Joh can feel soft human hair tickling under her chin. 

His voice is so quiet she thinks she imagined it at first. 

“‘M sorry.” 

Joh squeezes him harder. “Shush. Shush,” she hisses back. Fingers find and grip her shirt, ever-so-gently. Testing. Trying. After a moment, they clutch harder. 

Her heart breaks.  

Buir is kneeling in front of the couch, their hand steady and warm on Joh’s shoulder. She has not seen an expression so grieved on her buir’s face since the immediate days after their immigration. 

“Ben’ika,” Buir murmurs, soothing and low. “Do you live at the Temple?” 

Ben’s breath hitches. He jerks in Joh’s arms and she can feel him begin to hyperventilate. The lamps in the room begin to flicker. Joh cups the back of his head gently and makes soothing noises. His fingers clench so tightly into her shirt that she thinks it might tear. 

“It’s okay, Ben’ika,” Buir soothes. “You’re in no danger, here.” 

Ben is so, so quiet and tense. His chest moves rapidly, like he’s sobbing and running at the same time, only he doesn’t make a sound. He clutches at Joh like he’s trying to disappear into her. 

“Buir,” she warns. 

Buir’s first and oldest hobby is discarding warnings. 

Apparently, Ben is a Jetti'ad.

Ben cries for a long, long time. Joh holds him. He clutches at her like he’s afraid she’ll remove him at any moment. This is absurd. Joh loves her little barnacle. She hasn’t yet figured out how she’s going to throw hands with a Jedi while Ben remains attached to her, but that is a problem for later. 

Buir’s questions regarding Ben’s stumpy and scraggly little braid ended in hysterics. A vase shattered spontaneously and Ben squeaked out a litany of sobbing apologies. I’ll be better, I’ll do better, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, and Joh had squeezed him and said, “We are in the most perfect place in the galaxy for glass to break. No apology needed.” 

She’s not sure if he heard her. 

Jetti panic attacks are wild. 

Ben has slowly calmed down while Buir went upstairs to have a no doubt very fun conversation with the Coruscant Jedi Temple. Joh can hear the distant rise and fall of her buir’s raised voice. The sobbing has slowed to the occasional hiccuped breath and Ben’s death-grip on her shirt has eased to a mere clutching. She has been stroking Ben’s back for so long that she’s hyper aware of the skin on her palms. It feels new and fresh. 

“Are you back with me, Ben?” Joh asks him when the time between one hiccuped breath and the last stretches on for a minute. 

A nod. 

Despite not being very inclined to let him, when Ben starts to pull away from her very damp shirt, Joh lets him. His eyes are red and puffy. His bottom lip is bitten raw and angry. He wipes at his face ineffectually with his hands for a moment before Joh leans forward and snags the box of tissue that Buir had strategically left on the caf table before going upstairs to make her call. 

Ben takes a moment to wipe his face and blow his nose before he returns to giving the carpet the full weight of his truly pathetic expression. He looks hopeless. Lost. 

War will do that, Joh supposes. 

“I’m sorry,” Ben says. 

She blows out a breath. “You asked me if you’d really ‘done that bad’,” she begins. “No, Ben. You didn’t do badly at all.” When his eyes jump to her, they’re watery again and the expression in them is something very, very tired. “We reacted the way we did because we are angry for you. Jedi or not, this is not a situation you should have ever been in, kiddo. These aren’t choices that you should have ever had to make. Especially not as a child.

“Don’t apologize. Certainly don’t apologize to me, or to Buir. What you’ve been through it… it’s so unthinkably traumatic. You’re allowed to cry. Fuck it, you’re allowed to break things.” 

He makes a little huffing laugh at her profanity and Joh smiles. “Here’s what’s gonna’ happen now, okay? Buir is making a call to the Jedi and we’ll figure out how to get you back home. In the meantime, we,” she gestures between the two of them with her thumb and her pinky, “are going to have uj cake.” 

“Uj cake?” he asks, blinking big wet tooka eyes at her. 

“All the uj cake, vod’ika.” 

They eat their cake out of the cast-plast tupperware it’s stored in, sitting flat on the ground with their toes stretched towards the conservator. When Buir comes downstairs, Ben has crumbs of the sticky cake stuck to his cheek. He looks sheepishly away. 

“We’re eating your cake,” Joh announces to break the tension hanging like a shroud around Ben’s thin shoulders. 

“I can see that, ad,” Buir replies, smiling. 

“How’d the call go?” she asks around a mouthful. Joh knocks her fork into Ben’s, which had gone still as soon as Buir came in. He starts moving it again. 

“We’re going to give Ben a ride back to the Temple. Ben’ika, how does that sound?” 

Ben glances at Joh. He glances back to Buir. “You don’t have to,” he says. “I’ve caused you enough trouble.” 

“We want to,” Joh says just as Buir replies, “No trouble. None at all.” 

They take a hover cab, Joh squished in the middle between Ben and Buir. Buir types quickly away at their mobile com while Joh scribbles her comcode on the underside of the tupperware lid. She packed up the rest of the uj for Ben.

All breakdowns deserve heaping quantities of uj cake. 

There is a very tall man with very long hair waiting outside of the Jedi temple alongside a green being who is equally as small as this man is tall. As the cab draws to a stop, Joh whispers to Ben, who has gone nervous and shaky on the ride over, “Is that a wookie?” 

He snorts in surprise and lets out a strangled laugh. Some of that terrible tension leaves him. 

The three of them pile out of the car, Buir’s walking stick clicking obnoxiously on the pavement in a way that Joh knows is fully intentional. 

“Master,” Ben says softly. “Grandmaster.” He bows, deeply. Joh and Buir stay upright. Joh crosses her arms and tosses a lekku over one shoulder imperiously. 

“Padawan,” the Master—the not-wookie—returns.   

“Grateful, we are, for Obi-Wan’s return,” the small green Jedi croaks. 

“Obi-Wan?” Joh asks, archly. 

“I—Ben is what…” his voice goes quieter for a moment before he takes a steadying breath and says, at a normal volume, “‘Obi-Wan’ was difficult for the younger children to say. So I went by Ben, sometimes.”  

Fucking nerf herding frip. 

The Not-Wookie opens his mouth when his companion speaks again, cutting him abruptly off before he can begin. “Concerns, you had, when spoke with the Temple Guard, you did?” 

Buir hands Ben’s datapad to Joh, who is able to easily bend to the green Jedi’s height and offer it.

“The account of events given in this report is disturbing to say the least, Master Jedi,” Buir says. Their accent is sharp in contrast to the strange speech of the little Jedi and the High Coruscanti tongue of the other Master. Their face is unflinching. They’re fucking pissed. “Anyone who can read Basic should have concerns.” 

Joh has always had a temper. She’s be a terrible fucking Jedi. As she straightens up to stand, the little Jedi having accepted the datapad, the other man speaks to Ben, “This was not exactly what I had in mind for this assignment, Padawan. We were all very worried when we discovered you had left the Temple grounds.” 

She explodes. “You gave him that sadistic fucking assignment? What were the directions? ‘Chronicle the fucking war you’d just survived, against all the odds, reliving each moment in painfully traumatic clarity?’” 

“No—” Ben interjects, looking scared and upset just as the green Jedi’s ears droop downwards and he croaks, “Deeply regret, we do, what young Obi-Wan has experienced. Change what has occurred, we cannot.” 

“But you can damn sure support him,” Joh snaps. 

“Continue this conversation, we will. Return to your friends, you should, Obi-Wan. Worried, they are.” It’s probably the smart move, to get the kid out of here. It can’t be comfortable to be talked about like this, surrounded by authority figures and near-strangers. Joh can recognize the intelligence in it, the thoughtful care. But she’s still furious. Her anger boils like glass in the forge. She wants to fashion herself into a shield and stand between this boy and the world. 

He damn well deserves some fucking protection.

Obi-Wan bows, deeply. His cheeks are flush with embarrassment. “Thank you, Grandmaster Yoda.” He turns to her, biting his lip. “Thank you—” 

She cuts him off and pulls him straight into a tight hug. After a beat, Ben—Obi-Wan—returns it, squeezing her hard in return. Joh whispers, “Stay in touch, vod’ika. Please. And remember,” she pulls back just a fraction and taps their heads together in a gentle keldabe. “You are not alone.” 

Ben’s blue eyes well with unshed tears. He smiles. It is a slightly less-shattered expression than it was just hours before. 

“Thank you,” he says. Turning to Buir, he adds, “And thank you, too, Omed.” 

Joh gives his small hand one more squeeze before he heads towards the Temple, greeted by the imposing masked sentries that guard its grand entrance. A stupid ache in her chest demands that she follow him. 

Joh makes sure she gets the first word as soon as Ben is gone. “Do you know what he told me while he sobbed in my arms?” she addresses the taller man, the one who looks at her with haughty suspicion, the one that Ben avoided eye contact with at all costs. “He told me, over and over again, how sorry he was. And he promised, over and over again, that he'd do better. That he wouldn’t be ‘rash’ or ‘emotional’ or ‘stupid’— his words. That child thinks nothing of himself. Traumatic experience aside, that sort of self-worth doesn’t just appear out of a vacuum. That’s taught— that’s learned.  Likely over years.  I’m not going anywhere until I see a plan to address it.” 

A hand—wide, scarred, heavy, comforting— lands on her shoulder. Buir smiles at the Jedi as if butter would not melt in their mouth. 

“Well said, ad’ika." They turn to the Jedi Masters. " Let’s take this conversation elsewhere, shall we? We have much to discuss.”