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The bandages came off a week after the attack on the temple, and the Elder insisted on doing it himself—the edge to his voice picking at the starts of a scab where he blamed himself for how the surviving Guardians fled and took any medical training with them. Or maybe Baze was simply projecting.
As the layers unwrapped themselves from Chirrut’s face, the gauze splotched brown. Not as badly as Baze had feared, but bad enough to crush against his windpipe. The last stretch fell away and Chirrut’s eyes crinkled like they always did when he smiled, even as the lines on his face crossed over the raging pink of future scars and undoubtedly stung at the pull.
“I knew the Empire would bring dark times, but I didn’t think that was literal,” he said. He held his palm in front of his face, waved it between his eyes. The shadow cast from the afternoon sun caught on his teeth, a spark glowing brighter with the size of his grin.
Jedha City had fallen. That was the general consensus among the locals when the smoke had cleared to reveal AT-STs perched on the rubble of ancient statues from the city’s founding, walls embellished in the Old Aurebesh. Stormtroopers blankly eyeing every patron that stopped at a market stall, down to the smallest, thick-cheeked child. They wanted the temple’s kyber store and they would get it—now, especially, since the only barrier that separated them was the bodies of the Guardians they gunned down, and even that didn’t last long. They had to be buried, after all. And Chirrut, from his mandated bed rest, had insisted.
Jedha City had fallen, bandages had been removed, and the Elder was sending them away.
“Not forever,” he said. “Îmwe, with what has happened and what will likely come to pass, I know of someone with whom you should speak. You should go as well, Malbus,” he added, offering permission for what he knew Baze was going to do regardless.
Atollon sat on the far opposite side of the galaxy, as close to the border of Wild Space as Jedha was—a planet Baze had never heard of, in a sector he recalled coming up one single time in the market two years ago when a pilgrim tried to explain where her pet cat was from. (The cat’s beady eyes felt friendly, but its teeth were not.)
“When we get there, who should we ask for?” Chirrut said.
“No one. There’s no one there to ask. You’ll find the Bendu yourself, I have no doubts.”
The Elder wasn’t joining them. He didn’t say as much, but the fatigue that dragged at his feet gripped more heavily than Baze had ever seen as he plugged the final preparations into a shuttle he’d borrowed from the last active port on the outskirts of town. Planet coordinates, hyperspace calculations, autopilot diversion plans, all narrated aloud and peppered with sighs that Chirrut mistook at first for being out of breath.
(And who could blame him for the mistake? It wasn’t as if he could see the Elder’s resignation deadening his eyes anymore.)
“You could come with us,” Baze said.
“Someone needs to guard the temple.” Chirrut tapped his arm with the back of his hand, chiding.
The Elder didn’t bother to respond but at that moment, Baze knew: the Guardians of the Whills were done. There was nothing to guard anymore. When they returned to Jedha from their cross-galaxy journey, the temple would be empty.
On Jedha, newly blind, Chirrut’s meticulous sleep schedule had been tipped on his axis, teetering for a couple seconds before crashing down in a heap. The first day after the attack, when he didn’t emerge from his room by first light, Baze’s stomach sank with the lead weight of another grave to dig, the one he dreaded the most—an unfounded fear, as Chirrut’s snoring echoed in the temple hall when he went to check.
The shuttle had picked up a hyperspace lane just outside the Mid-Rim, blurring the stars on autopilot. Despite this, they still sat in the cockpit, Baze ruminating on an alternate life where he’d taken up pilot lessons as an adolescent instead of hovering in the temple’s shadow. Chirrut fell asleep twenty minutes into the flight, feet propped up on the dash and arms wrapped around his staff like a security blanket.
“I think I only slept two hours last night,” he’d said, and he drifted off mid-speculation on Atollon’s climate.
Baze watched his face as he slept, resisted the urge to fetch bacta from the ship’s medical kit to dab on the cut that was still struggling to heal over. It ran deep, angling down from the outside corner of his eye; had he been merely leaning a few inches forward, the blaster shot would have not only blinded him, but taken out his entire eye.
An entire step forward and the blaster fire would have seared a hole in his head, burned through one of his temples as stormtroopers razed the other.
The Elder had tried to tell Baze that they were lucky—surviving was lucky (look at our dead, Malbus, measure your own fortunes with care)—but Baze could find nothing lucky about bad aim. Those five missed shots gave up their ammo to their two targets in white masks like an offering and spat them back. And Chirrut, impossible steadfast Chirrut, held his shoulder while he worked to stop the bleeding and wrap his eyes away from the firefight. Stemmed the flow of apologies and self-flagellation pouring from his mouth with a squeeze of his long fingers.
“Baze, it’s all right. All is as the Force wills it.”
If the Force willed Baze to fail him, it wasn’t something he wanted anything to do with. This was a warning, surely. The next time it was in the Force’s will for Baze to fail, Chirrut would be dead. Would, not could, clear as any simple fact of existence could be.
(Not that he had said that much to Chirrut, nor in as many words.)
Chirrut’s snoring was the only undignified thing about him; otherwise his peaceful, charming aura extended into his slumber, holding the corners of his lips gently upturned no matter what ungodly noises crawled from his throat. The image curled into Baze’s chest and warmed it from the inside; and the longer he stared, the more overwhelming it became, rising into his mouth and solidifying into words somehow both new and familiar. Another clear and simple fact of existence, one he would hold there on his tongue until he learned the shape of it, how to hold it in the light.
Atollon was hot.
Jedha could get hot, too, but the rain didn’t stick around in the air. The ground was too thirsty, eager to tamp down the dirt and dust before they got whipped into storms in the desert. But Atollon—on Atollon the air held its sweaty hands to your face without a single cloud in the sky as an excuse, and Baze hated it as soon as they stepped off of the ship.
“This is different,” Chirrut said lightly. Already he was wiping a line of sweat from his brow. “What does it look like out there?”
“Not much.”
The expanse before them held vast grasslands dotted with massive rock formations with outcrops fanned out like the broad leaves of a tropical planet’s flora. Nothing was distinguishable enough to serve as a landmark, which maybe partly explained why the Elder didn’t give them one. Still Chirrut stood there, between the ship and the striking landscape he couldn’t see, without a muscle tensed in his lithe body. And then he was striding forth into the tall grass.
“Wh—Chirrut, where are you going?”
“To find the Bendu.” He didn’t stop, didn’t even toss the remark over his shoulder. “Aren’t you coming?”
Of course, he didn’t need to ask. He knew, just as the Elder knew—and one day, some day in the future, Baze would dedicate time to understand how he became so predictable—but for now he merely let himself grumble as he strapped the blaster Chirrut loathed so much onto his back and followed after him.
“How do you know this is the right way?”
“I don’t!”
“Why are you going this way?”
He didn’t answer immediately. Or soon, for that matter. The sun arced a noticeable path across the sky by the time he decided to pause, holding his staff at different angles against the horizon. One clicked, apparently, and he started off again.
It was the Force. With Chirrut, it was always the Force. It was the Force that assigned Baze as his mentor Guardian when they were students and it was the Force that aided them in their final Trial as the clock ticked down to zero and their muscles were all but spent. And it was the Force, Chirrut said before they landed on Atollon, that gave him the chance to know the galaxy unburdened by his sight.
It was the Force that almost killed you. It was the Force that slapped my wrist and told me to do better, because even thirty years later I’m still your mentor--in name, even if you do more of the teaching these days.
Chirrut stopped again when the sunset had purpled all but the edges of the horizon. They stood side by side at the top of a hill overlooking a sizable pit, dark holes pockmarking its walls with threatening depth. “He’s here,” he said. “I’m going to say hello. Um,” he added. “Do you want to find a good spot to camp out for the night? It’s too far to walk back.”
“You want to go alone.”
“This time.” The implied apology wove around every letter.
A little ways off from the pit was another hill, distant enough from all the rock formations and whatever else the planet had in store that if he laid on his back, only the wide swathe of the galaxy crossed his vision. The whole of the Tingel Arm high above twinkling into existence as Atollon twisted away from its sun, and Baze tried to remember names of systems there, even if he couldn’t locate them. Ploo. Yavin. Dathomir. Telos. Mon Cala.
At some point, he drifted asleep, waking briefly only when Chirrut folded himself against the curve of his hips.
The next morning, Chirrut said nothing about the Bendu, and Baze didn’t ask.
On the other side of the hill where they’d spent the night was yet another rock formation--taller than the rest, and with its bottom fronds low enough to climb without much of a struggle. Baze led them there and watched Chirrut pull himself up, rolling the rest of his body over the ledge; he offered Baze a hand, his aim just off center of where it usually would land.
Not that he needed the help. But he would always take it, would always welcome the chance to feel Chirrut’s thin fingers wrap around his palm.
They came to the furthest end of the frond, tapering off twenty feet higher than where they climbed on for a view that was nice, though nothing spectacular. The Jedhan desert had better scenery, the deep red-browns of the mesas shifting against the changing sunlight and casting shadows on the old temples carved into the sides. On Jedha, though, there were no grasslands, and the wafting waves pulsing over the hills in the wind laid a reassuring hand on Baze’s shoulder. The motion made an airy hiss, and that must have been what Chirrut was grinning about.
“Tell me, Baze,” Chirrut said. “Have you ever seen anything like this planet?”
Baze tried to think about the other planets he had been to, all that he could count on barely two hands. None of them held too much in common, much less this particular type of growth towering over the fields of grain. In the distance the grasses rustled against the wildlife, tall thick oval bodies cresting over the surface, but he hadn’t gotten close enough to determine what those were. Nor did he want to.
“No. I don’t think I have,” he said finally.
“It’s peaceful.”
“You could say that.”
“I am saying that.”
Baze sighed, stared up at the clouds he could see around the fronds fanning out above them. They had sat themselves at the ledge, feet dangling, and every so often Chirrut’s foot would tap against his ankle. Maybe on accident, maybe not. It was light enough to be deniable but present enough to grab his attention, twist a corner of his lungs until his chest tightened.
He would not put a name to this. He couldn’t. On one side of it, something as humanly fallible as a name would fall short, parsecs short--Baze was no poet but the sun falling on the lines of Chirrut’s cheekbones would have stumped even the mystics hunched over their scrolls in the alleyways back on Jedha. But he still wanted to try: Baze, the most tacit of the Guardians when their ranks were still standing, whose commitment to the tersest of remarks was the constant butt of jokes throughout the temple, was reaching for metaphor. Flowery language he had cast aside as a waste of breath.
Chirrut squinted his cloudy eyes at the sun and grinned, and that same something in Baze’s lungs twisted harder.
There was a name for this but he would not use it.
Night after night Chirrut trekked to the Bendu; and night after night Baze stayed behind.
Atollon sunsets blazed the same pattern of pinks and oranges, though in hues he had never seen grace the sky around the high reaches of the temple. When Chirrut left each evening, the sun would just start to press up against the horizon and Baze would find a rock in the grasses to sit and watch. Usually there was one around that would leave his head over the dull green-brown sea before him, a perfect view of the inky dark melting over the colors.
Night after night Baze told himself that he would wait up; and night after night he realized he had dozed off only after his back grew warm with a familiar presence. After that, it was easy to keep himself awake.
Chirrut’s nose flattened itself against the back of his neck, the knob at the top of his spine. When he mumbled in his sleep, his mouth pushed at the cloth there, reaching toward the skin. Baze ran the old mantras through his head to level himself, throwing his gaze up toward the stars instead of the insides of his eyelids, tossing the words away in favor of the rhythm. The words didn’t hold anything for him anymore but the rise and fall could make a convincing argument for the merits of the Force. If he were to listen. Which he wouldn’t.
Ten days after their arrival, Chirrut announced his return in the middle of the night by stretching out on the other side of Baze, latching hold just below his wrist with a feather-light touch and squeezing until his eyes opened. “Baze. Are you awake? I can’t tell.”
“I am,” he sighed. “Do you want to tell me why?”
Chirrut grinned at him, but it faded back to nothing almost as soon as his heart managed to stutter from the sight. “You’ve retreated from the Force. The Bendu can sense it.”
“Did the Bendu also say this couldn’t wait until morning?”
“What happened to your faith?”
Baze sighed, and as his eyes adjusted to the dark, Chirrut’s face rose into focus--all grey-blues dipped in shadows, unfamiliar trenches of concern lining his forehead. Close enough that were he to pull his hand from his grip, he could trace those edges and throw the light into another pattern, one that wouldn’t demand hard answers or force his fingers to dig disappointment into Chirrut’s heart.
The corner of Chirrut’s mouth ticked up, wavering there sadly until it fell back to a frown. They were thinking of the same memory--and it wasn’t the Force that told him, but the concrete history he can hold and vehemently confirm as truth. At every crossroads of opinion, they both end up digging back to that moment. Three weeks after Chirrut joined the Guardians. With rain drenching Jedha City and blowing into the entrance of the temple, Baze had led them away from Chirrut’s favorite perch at the top of the entrance steps to avoid further distractions--one year apart but they might as well have been ten the way Chirrut fidgeted through meditation and couldn’t keep any joke he thought up to himself. Nothing and no one was safe.
Except: the moment when their robes stuck to their limbs, dripping and plastered there by the rain, they sat behind a pillar along an inner hall, Baze taking special care with the ancient parchment between his thumb and first finger to find where they had left off with the Tenth Mantra.
“‘The Force binds the galaxy together and thus binds me with my brothers,’” Chirrut quoted as Baze continued to search the text. The grin that played at his lips would have been smug in any other context, with any other set of his eyes. Softness played at the corners, growing softer when he propped his chin up with his hand.
“You pay attention after all,” Baze said.
“Hard not to.”
“Fooled me.” He paused. “Fooled everyone around me, too.”
“‘The Force is my gateway to knowledge of not only them, but myself,’” he continued, the grin curling further up his face, and it was the first time he made Baze laugh.
(Every time the moment came up, Chirrut asked him why he laughed, and he never could tell him the reason; though if he were to ask again, right now, Baze would give the same answer though it’d be the first time he knew it was a lie.)
When Baze blinked, he found himself back on the hard ground of Atollon, Chirrut’s face holding none of that old mirth.
“What happened to my faith…” Baze sighed. “The galaxy has changed so much.”
“No. Not the galaxy. The beings in it. Just the beings in it.”
“Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten the rest of the Tenth Mantra.”
Chirrut frowned at him, gripped his wrist tighter with his one hand and then with the other.
(The Force binds the galaxy together and thus binds me with my brothers. The Force is my gateway to knowledge of not only them, but myself. All living things keep the galaxy breathing; our ancestors burn in the stars and drop meteors across the night sky. We are the fabric of the galaxy and the stars knit us to each other.)
“I think… for once,” Chirrut said slowly, “that wasn’t what I was thinking about.”
He let go of Baze’s wrist and turned over, shoulders hunched in the way they did when he still needed to hold onto something when nothing was there, how his arms wove around each other until he could pretend. Deep in his gut, Baze wanted to curl up behind him but the moment when it was right was long past.
Above his tugging gut, his chest ached. He still refused to say what it was.
By the time Baze found himself squinting against the sun, it was already high enough in the sky to tell him that he had grossly overslept; yet despite this, Chirrut had not moved. His snoring melded with the hiss of the grass in the wind, and all the groaning and grumbling Baze could give while sitting himself up was not enough to pull him from his slumber.
It was about time he spoke with this Bendu man himself.
He set off in the direction that Chirrut arrived from each evening and after cresting the second hill, the guilt had started chattering in his fingers. They fidgeted in the grip hovering over the blaster at his side, ignoring his every attempt to talk them down.
I can’t believe you left him alone--he’s not helpless, and he’s been making the trek by himself so far. What are you going to do if you come back and find him dead--he’s not helpless, he’s not helpless--then why are you worrying?
The silence stagnated in his head for a beat before tumbling back down into the noise. He didn’t fight it. Too much energy spent pushing it back meant less for his legs climbing the hills--and, in particular, the steep slope leading down to a crater dotted with boot prints and the round impression of the end of a staff. His gear couldn’t carry itself.
“Bendu!” he called. On the other side of the crater, the round bodies of the wildlife he still had not identified scurried away from his voice; but aside from their clicking and the rustling of the grass, nothing answered. “Bendu, you don’t get to talk to just one of us.”
The ground shifted under his feet, the lip of the crater crumbling until it pushed him forward, sliding down the incline--he blinked and the green blaze of TIE fire burned through his eyelids, the mechanical clank of the walkers before their legs stamped down into sand echoing so close in his ears that it might as well have been right behind him. And when he collected himself at the bottom, wiping the dirt and twigs from his face, he saw no man.
The Bendu’s body cast Baze and the rest of the side of the crater in shadow, the sunlight peeking past the top of his head and horns in an attempt at holiness, however offset it was by the dark glare in his eyes. His nostrils flared with a clipped snort--and for the first time in the long seconds since the Bendu revealed himself, Baze had a grasp of what he reminded him of.
(A bantha. A very large bantha with a considerable intellect on the other side of his brow. But this was a thought unwise to voice.)
“You are the one he calls Baze Malbus, aren’t you?” he said. The anger Baze expected wasn’t present, replaced instead by a tired frustration.
“I am.”
“What is it that you want, Baze Malbus?” His head stretched further toward the sky and the entirety of him seemed to stretch, doubling his size as easily as he took in breath. “You were so eager to gain an audience--you must have something to say.”
Baze pulled himself up but did not move any closer, forcing a couple rough swallows down his throat to buy time for the rest of him to catch up. He hadn’t thought this far ahead. Hadn’t planned. Had only expected to find a wise old man with an ear to listen, wrinkled by the sun. Conversation that flowed, even if it wasn’t easy.
“You came quickly after I told your companion of your lost faith,” he said. “He passed along what I said, I take it?”
“That’s something you can tell?”
“I know the Force--its two sides, its middle. The Guardians of the Whills always had hands pressed up to the side… many hands. Then there were three. Then two.” The Bendu’s eyes rolled down to meet Baze’s, squinting. “You have distinctive hands. Their absence is noticeable.”
“They weren’t doing much before.”
“Is that what you think?”
“It’s what I know.”
“Hm.” He dipped his head down, leaving only a few feet between Baze and the end of his nose. “You still haven’t answered my first question.”
The Malbus family had a bantha once. Their house stood at the end of the row and its perimeter property wound around the side in an leth-shape, enough room for the beast to stretch its legs amid their meager flock of chickens someone had brought in from Endor. Every feeding time, the banta would splutter and whine in Baze’s face, spittle wrapping around the braids at his temples. The odor of its hot breath still wafted past his nose occasionally when the wind shifted on Jedha--and here, too, but only a hint of it.
A hint of that, and a hint of something older that he couldn’t place outside of how the Elders meditated in the sun on the holy days.
“I’m only here for Chirrut,” he said finally.
“Here meaning Atollon, I assume, because I don’t sense him nearby.” The Bendu frowned, an unmistakable twitch of muscles through his thick mane.
“What exactly did you say to Chirrut? About me,” he added. “He was--”
“Upset? Imbalances do that. You losing your faith in the Force…” he sighed, visibly fighting against rolling his eyes. “The galaxy has suffered worse and will continue to suffer worse--this I can see. He will find his footing again. And besides,” he said, “I didn’t say you lost your faith completely. Only that it shifted to something else.”
They stared each other down, the quiet between them thick and solid until Baze could no longer stand to meet the gaze of his warped reflection in the Bendu’s pupil.
“Or…” the Bendu said, “I should probably say someone.”
Baze’s chest burned and the gap that he wouldn’t fill with a name whined under the heat. His chest burned and his face burned under his beard and if he let his thoughts lay on the matter any longer, surely the tips of the Bendu’s hair would start to singe.
“You should go,” he said as he sank back into the earth. “He’ll be wondering where you’ve been.”
Upon arriving back at their makeshift campsite, Baze was greeted by a grinning Chirrut perched on a rock--a half-eaten Jogan fruit dribbling down one hand while the other held one otherwise untouched. He raised it toward the sound of Baze’s footsteps as he approached. “Hungry?”
“I guess.” He took the fruit and nudged at Chirrut’s shoulder to scoot over. The rock was barely big enough for the two of them to share but they made do; they pressed up against each other, a heated line from shoulder to knee baking in this oven of a planet. Another chunk of the fruit crunched past Chirrut’s teeth while Baze traced the electric lines on the skin with his thumb.
“You’re not eating. He didn’t scare you, did he?”
“No,” he said quickly. “That obvious that I went?”
Chirrut shrugged. “Not really. But it was the most likely.”
Silence fell and the sun rose higher. Fruit rinds soaked up dirt at their feet and Baze followed the path of every drip of sweat down his back; and every so often he would glance to Chirrut, looking for any hint at what he was thinking or feeling. Anything. But all the while his eyes squinted against the heat of sun’s rays out of habit, the light catching the raw pink scarring along the edges.
His hands looked so empty without the fruit there.
“The Guardians of the Whills are no more, are they?” It was the first thing spoken between them in hours.
“Chirrut…”
“No, it’s all right…” he said. “These things have consequences.” He sighed, laid one of his empty hands on Baze’s knee. His first finger ran along the knotted seam of his pants, pushing into his skin. “The Force will survive without the Guardians. And I can keep the Mantras on my own… but maybe not all of them.”
(A chill burst through Baze’s memory: years and years ago, still within the first six months of Chirrut joining the Guardians, and he was fighting Baze on the archaic wording of the Twenty-eighth Mantra, how it was impossible to learn word-for-word as it stood and the Elders should understand if he missed a few complicated adverbs.)
“In particular… the Third Mantra seems so outdated.”
I am tied to the Force before any living being and the needs of the flesh.
Chirrut’s sweaty palm pressed against Baze’s face, turning it until their noses were touching, breath stuttering in their throats. He could feel it in his own, hear it in Chirrut’s as his other hand found his ear, then the corner of his eye. “The Bendu knew the Mantras,” Chirrut whispered. “I don’t know how, but…” He cut himself off. Closed the distance between them, soft against Baze’s lips even as his fingers dug into his skin. And when he leaned back, Baze chased him, every system in his body clicking on and reaching for whatever piece of Chirrut it could find--the back of his head, the jutting bone of his hip, loose tethers wandering and searching outside his whirring head.
(Maybe it was the Force that let him find those tethers, but he let his faith rest in ribcage of the man he could hold here, in this plane.)
Chirrut pulled back to catch his breath, ran his hands over every line refolding itself in Baze’s face, and his touch found those gaps, the places in his chest that twisted without a name and the words burst forth before he could recognize what he was saying: “I love you, I love you--Chirrut, stars, I love you--”
“Oh, am I glad,” he said, pressing another wet kiss against his mouth. “I think it would have been pretty uncomfortable otherwise.”
The sun sank under the horizon as they pressed each other into the dirt, tested the mix of their voices melded against their teeth, reveled in how much history they could mine for the ways their fingers held their bodies together. Lost time provided ample fuel, stretched the hours they had--because Jedha was still waiting. The Empire and all that hurt was still waiting.
Chirrut straddled him, ran a hand over his mouth before leaning down to hold their foreheads together, kiss the bridge of his nose as reverently as he approached the Guardians’ daily rituals. More so, even. His touch trailed light sparking up everything the galaxy had left for dead in the wake of the Empire’s rise--but he couldn’t think about that now. There would be plenty of days for that later, when Chirrut wouldn’t be fanning the new faith humming under the skin.