Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The hangar was too quiet on Citadel Station.

Where once the Ebon Hawk had stood, its hull scarred but proud, its engines thrumming like a heartbeat through the durasteel floor — there was only an empty stretch of decking now.

Mira thought that the space looked wrong, hollow, as though the ship had never existed at all. Yet the silence still carried its memory: laughter rattling down narrow corridors, arguments shouted over the din of the hyperdrive, sparring matches that ended in bruises and grudging respect. All of it lingered in the air like smoke after fire.

Now there was nothing. No ship. No hum. No T3’s cheerful whir or the Exile’s steady presence. Just cold metal and the slow, suffocating ache of absence.

Mira leaned against a crate near the bay doors, arms folded across her chest, her boot tapping out a rhythm she didn’t feel. The emptiness in front of her felt worse than battlefields, worse than the alleys of Nar Shaddaa. At least there, you knew what you were fighting. Here, there was nothing to strike at, no enemy to curse — just a void that had swallowed their captain whole.

Everyone was there.

Atton was on his knees in the center of the hangar, eyes locked on the stars where the ship had vanished. His face was pale, his shoulders bowed as though he’d taken a blow he couldn’t recover from. The roguish grin was gone, replaced by something rawer, quieter — a silence that screamed louder than any curse.

Mical stood beside him, a steady hand resting on Atton’s shoulder. His gaze followed the same horizon, searching the black as if sheer will might bring the Hawk back. His expression was calm, but his eyes betrayed him: he was just as lost, just as unmoored, as the rest of them.

The others lingered along the edges of the bay, each caught in their own silence. Visas stood motionless, her veiled head bowed, hands clasped tight as if in prayer. Mandalore leaned heavily against the wall, helmet tilted forward, arms folded — still, rigid, unreadable. Even HK, for once, held his tongue, photoreceptors glowing a dim, uncertain red.

Brianna kept to the shadows near the far wall, her white tunic a stark contrast against the steel. She stood tall, but her hands gripped the ends of her cloak tight, knuckles white. Her discipline held her still, yet her eyes tracked the empty void where the ship had gone, as though if she stared long enough, she could will her teacher back.

Bao-Dur lingered near the consoles, his metal arm flexing unconsciously, the gears whining in the silence. He looked toward the empty bay with quiet resignation, the same expression he’d worn too many times in their journey — as if something had been lost and could never be reclaimed. Remote had gone with the Exile Mira assumed, the twirling and beeping gone. 

G0-T0’s holoprojector flickered nearby, the sphere dimmer than usual. For once, he offered no lecture, no strategy, no smug commentary. Just silence, his floating form unusually still, as though even logic had no answer for absence.

The hangar felt too big without the ship, without her.

The Exile was gone. Just like that.

People left all the time; Mira knew that better than most. Nar Shaddaa had taught her that everything and everyone was temporary — contracts ended, partners ditched you, friends betrayed you. Still, the empty space where the Exile should’ve been felt like someone had knocked the air out of her lungs.

She hated that it mattered.

“Figures,” she muttered, pushing herself upright. “Finally meet someone who doesn’t look at me like a trigger to be pulled, and they run off to chase some bigger destiny.”

The words carried too loud in the still air. Atton didn’t even flinch. Mical’s hand stayed on his shoulder, grounding him as much as himself. The others said nothing.

Mira paced, her boots striking the durasteel in uneven beats that echoed louder than she liked. The sound grated, too sharp in the cavernous silence of the hangar, but she couldn’t stop moving. If she stopped, the weight pressing against her ribs might crush her outright.

Her mind kept circling back to Nar Shaddaa. It was always there, waiting in the corners of her thoughts like an old addiction. She could picture it so clearly she almost smelled it — the stench of fuel and sweat and bodies crammed too close together, the spice smoke curling through alleys where the sun never reached, the neon haze that turned night into something uglier than day. She knew those streets like scars. She could go back tomorrow, and the moon would swallow her whole as if she had never left.

The old contacts would welcome her. Some with grins, others with knives, most with both. Credits could be earned quick enough. The work was familiar: find the mark, lay the trap, stun them, and toss in the bounty. Adrenaline in her veins, the old mask slipping easily back into place. She could survive there. She always had.

And yet the thought turned her stomach.

She stopped mid-step, hand brushing the wall to steady herself. She hadn't of killed before. But she had now. 

She pretended she could imagine herself back in those alleys — cold eyes, rifle braced tight, pretending she didn’t care who lived or died so long as she got paid. It would be what the universe deserved. 

Right? 

It made her chest tighten with something dangerously close to shame. That wasn’t her, nor could it be. Not after everything. 

Is that what falling was? She wasn't sure. 

She didn't like it. 

Mira’s gaze caught on the dull gleam of a panel, warped enough to throw back her reflection. Red hair in tangles, armor scuffed with burns and cracks, her face lined with exhaustion she hadn’t noticed until now. Her eyes, though — they still burned.

And she remembered how the Exile had looked at her. Not with calculation, not with suspicion, not as if she were a tool to be used or a threat to be managed. Just looked at her — like she was more than the mercenary, more than Nar Shaddaa’s gutter-trash survivor. Like she could be something else, something worth saving.

That memory cut deeper than any blade.

Her fingers curled into fists. She couldn’t undo what she had been. She couldn’t wash away the years of blood and contracts and choices made with her back against the wall. But she could decide what came next.

And she couldn’t go back. Not now. Not ever.

Mira exhaled and shook her head, tugging on her gloves. Maybe she wasn’t cut out to save the galaxy — but she could save someone. A refugee on Telos. A kid running spice on Nar Shaddaa. Someone. Anyone.

She turned back once, just long enough to see Atton still frozen beneath the stars, Mical still beside him, the others caught in their private silences. They were all waiting for the void to answer. It never would.

So she walked away.

At first, it was simple things; things that could make the sting of abandonment and betrayal ebb away. 

On Telos, she helped the settlers who struggled with more than the wildlife — fear, anger, desperation. They didn’t need a bounty hunter; they needed someone who understood that survival wasn’t just about fighting, but about knowing when not to. She had the scars to prove it. And slowly, the lessons she’d only just begun to grasp under the Exile’s watch became something she could teach.

She carried a lightsaber now, clipped where her blasters had once rested. It still felt strange, heavy in ways that weren’t about weight, but she grew into it. She was rough, unorthodox, impatient — but she was a Jedi. Her kind of Jedi.

And the galaxy noticed.

She found them in her travels — the ones the galaxy overlooked, the ones who slipped through unnoticed. They weren’t heroes or prodigies, not the kind of children the old Jedi Order would have swept away into temples. They were just people with something stirring inside them, raw and unshaped, carrying sparks they didn’t understand.

On Dantooine, she met a farmer’s daughter who could sense the rains before the clouds gathered, who could feel the hum of life in the soil beneath her bare feet. The girl thought it was luck, a trick of instinct. Mira sat with her in the fields, dirt staining her gloves, and showed her how to breathe with that rhythm, how to listen to the Force instead of fighting it.

“That’s what a Consular looks like,” she told her. “You’ve got the kind of gift that can heal or guide. Don’t waste it trying to be a warrior if that’s not who you are. Lean into it. Be the one who understands.”

The girl had smiled shyly, almost embarrassed by the thought that she could matter that way. Mira carried that smile with her long after she left Dantooine.

On Nar Shaddaa, she found a boy who always knew when a fight was coming — who heard the scrape of boots and the hiss of blasters before anyone else reacted. He was fast, clever, too stubborn to die even when every odd was stacked against him. Mira trained him in alleys and rooftops, teaching him to trust that edge: how to move, how to strike, how to balance a lightsaber with as much ease as a blaster.

“You’re a lot like me,” she told him after one sparring match left them both bruised and laughing, sprawled on the rooftop with the neon lights buzzing beneath them. “Not the strongest, not the most powerful, but you’ll be ready for anything. You can see the cracks no one else does. That’s worth more than people think.”

She tried to pretend he wasn’t one of her favorites. It nearly broke her when they parted.

And once, in the camps of a war-torn world, she met a refugee who threw himself between attackers and the helpless without hesitation. His grip on the Force was raw but unshakable, and when he ignited the saber she gave him, it was with the natural ferocity of someone born to protect. Mira showed him how to channel that drive, how not to burn himself out in the fire of his own courage.

“You’ll make a fine Guardian,” she told him, her voice hard as flint. “You’re a man who stands on the line and doesn’t break. Don’t let anyone make you ashamed of that — but don’t get fucking cocky from it either. Sometimes the galaxy just needs someone who can fight — and win.”

He had nodded solemnly, but there was a fire in his eyes Mira knew would either save him or kill him.

She never kept them long. A few months, a year at most. She didn’t believe in locking them away in stone halls or lecturing them about detachment. She wasn’t interested in robes or titles or remaking an Order that had already failed. She just wanted them to survive, and to know what they could be if they chose.

When it was time, she sent them back into the galaxy. Sometimes she pressed a ration pack into their hands, sometimes a credit chit, sometimes nothing more than a nod and a look that said don’t screw this up.

The words at parting were always the same:

“Don’t be like the old Jedi. Don’t stand apart. Don’t think you’re better. Just… help when the call comes. Do what I’ve done for you, and that will be enough.”

Some she heard about again; the farmer’s daughter became a healer on a Mid Rim mining colony, guiding her people through famine and plague with calm certainty, her quiet wisdom holding the community together when nothing else could. Word reached Mira that the girl — now a woman — had trained a trio of her own, apprentices who soon began weaving stories of their own. When Mira heard that, she thanked the stars her first had turned out alright.

The boy from Nar Shaddaa grew into a courier, darting through battle lines with uncanny timing, a streak of luck and skill that made him a legend in the underworld. Stories followed him like shadows: always in the right place at the right time, always walking away when no one else could. Some rumors said he had once saved a queen — and that she fell in love with him. He still traveled, restless as ever, but always returned to her side.

Whenever Mira heard those stories, she felt a pang in her chest she couldn’t quite smother. Pride warred with loss, and more than once she had to fight back tears.

The refugee from the camps became a protector of the displaced, a quiet bulwark whose name carried weight among the broken and the lost. Wherever caravans of survivors wandered, his presence was spoken of with gratitude and awe, as though he was a shield that could not be shattered. The stories about him were harder to pin down. Some claimed he had died. Others swore he had risen again — not once, but over and over, returning each time to stand between the defenseless and the fire.

Mira would have prayed, if she had been religious, that the latter was true. More than once, she caught herself wondering if she should go and find out — to learn whether the man she’d sent into the galaxy was still out there, still standing.

Others vanished into the galaxy’s silence, their names slipping from her grasp like smoke. She wondered about them sometimes, when the stars were too still around her campfires. She hoped they were alive. She hoped they remembered.

And most of all, she hoped that when the galaxy needed them, they answered.

And she wasn’t alone.

Every so often, she crossed paths with the old crew. A message tucked into a spacer’s pocket. A familiar ship settling onto a landing pad in the middle of nowhere. A shared drink in the corner of a cantina, no words about the past, just the unspoken relief of recognition.

They never said much about what they were doing. Some ghosts were better left undisturbed. But when a fight broke out, they fell into old rhythms. Atton’s drawl covering nerves as he slipped a blaster into her hand, though he was gone after a time

Then there was Visas’ quiet presence steady at her back. Mandalore’s barked laugh cutting through smoke and fire. Bao-Dur’s mechanical hand tightening on her shoulder in wordless solidarity. Mical’s sharp eyes meeting hers across a battlefield, offering strategy without needing to speak it. Brianna’s white cloak flashing once in the corner of her vision, moving with that same unshakable discipline. HK’s gleeful threats rattling through the din, as inappropriate as they were reassuring. Even G0-T0, flickering in and out as a holo, dispensing his dry calculations while grudgingly lending aid.

They were scattered across the stars, chasing their own paths, but when help was needed, someone always answered.

Mira carried those moments with her. Proof that bonds could survive distance, silence, even loss.

Years blurred together that way. She never helped rebuild an Order, never sat in a council chamber, never wrapped herself in robes that felt more like costumes than truths. Some days, she wondered if she was a Jedi at all. She wouldn’t call herself that, though others did. She’d just shrug and tell them she was a someone. Someone who moved through alleys and battlefields instead of marble halls, whose lessons were carved out of scars, whose code was written in survival and stubborn mercy.

She knew there were others who had taken up that work — building temples, gathering students, trying to shape something resembling the Order of old. She didn’t stand in their way, didn’t argue their methods. It simply wasn’t her calling. When her own padawans wanted more than what she could give, when they hungered for discipline, structure, and the long path of study she’d never walked, she told them where to look. “There are people who can give you the strict training I can’t,” she’d say, with a shrug that hid more weight than she admitted. “If that’s what you want, go. I won’t hold you back.”

But a few stayed only long enough to learn what they needed, then vanished into the galaxy — and she let them, proud in her own quiet way.

And through it all, she carried the Exile with her. In the swing of her saber, in the choice to extend a hand instead of pull the trigger, in the quiet stretches of meditation she kept trying and failing to master. Always, the memory of being seen differently stayed with her. It was a tether she never shook, anchoring her when she stumbled, keeping her steady when the galaxy threatened to grind her down.

And then, much later, on a planet whose name she never learned, it ended.

The sky was burning. Bombardment had torn it apart, red fire streaking across clouds blackened with smoke. The ground quaked beneath her boots, riven by artillery and the thunder of collapsing stone. The air itself screamed — the roar of explosions, the cries of the desperate, the hiss of blaster fire all tangled into one endless note of chaos.

The refugees ran, stumbling, falling, scrambling for cover with only fear to drive them. They were farmers, laborers, children clutching their parents’ hands — not soldiers. Not survivors, not yet. And Mira was there, cutting a path through the fire with her saber blazing, the glow painting her face in fleeting light as she shouted herself hoarse.

“Move! Keep moving! Don’t stop!”

Her voice cracked, but the Force roared through her veins, fierce and bright, carrying her further than her body should have allowed. She felt the fear of the people around her, their terror like ice pressing into her chest. She took it in, turned it, let it fuel her as she had once fueled herself on adrenaline and survival. Now it was different — not just for her, but for them. Always for them.

They reached the edge of the transport bay — the last shelter left standing. Inside, battered freighters were waiting, their engines sputtering, crews screaming for people to hurry. But between the refugees and safety loomed the heart of the bombardment: a generator overloading, its core glowing hotter with every passing second. If it went, it would take the bay, the ships, and everyone inside with it.

There was only one choice.

Mira knew it the moment her eyes caught the flare of the core. The Force pressed the truth into her bones, heavy and undeniable. Someone had to stay. Someone had to hold the line until the last had fled.

Her saber whirled, striking down a pair of mercenaries who had been foolish or desperate enough to advance through the carnage. Sparks hissed against her armor. Her breath came ragged, every muscle burning, but she stood tall.

And then she felt it — a tug at her sleeve. A boy, no older than ten, wide-eyed and trembling, clung to her arm. He didn’t want to let go. Mira crouched quickly, her voice rough but firm.

“You’ve got to go, kid. They need you more than I do.”

He shook his head, tears streaking his smoke-stained face. Mira swallowed hard, pried his fingers from her arm, and held him steady for one last moment.

“Listen to me,” she said, low but urgent, forcing her voice to cut through the chaos. “Out there, you’ll find people like you — like me. My friends. The ones I trained, the ones I sent back into the galaxy. Find them. Tell them you made it out. And when the time comes, stand with them. Understand?”

The boy’s breath hitched, but he nodded, fierce despite his fear. Mira gave him the faintest smile — tired, but proud — and shoved him toward the waiting ship. His eyes lingered on her, but he ran.

The boy vanished into the bay, swallowed by the press of fleeing bodies. Mira turned back toward the battlefield.

The generator screamed, its glow swelling brighter, unstable, deadly. Mercenaries poured in from the smoke, desperate to claim whatever spoils they could before the world cracked apart. They saw one woman standing alone, saber ignited, and thought her easy prey.

Their mistake.

Mira surged forward with a snarl, yellow light carving through the haze. Blaster bolts sizzled toward her; she batted them aside, every motion faster, sharper than it had any right to be. The Force was a storm in her blood, louder than pain, fiercer than fear. She became movement, fire, defiance — the mercenaries fell before they realized they were outmatched.

“Come on, then!” she roared, her voice ragged, wild, as another wave charged. She met them head-on, saber flashing arcs of neon fire. Armor split. Rifles shattered. The hangar floor glowed with molten lines where her blade had carved too close.

One of them — a brute in heavy plating — swung a vibro-ax. She ducked beneath it, drove her saber up through his chest, then ripped it free in a shower of sparks. The others faltered, fear cutting into their greed, but Mira pressed harder, giving them no ground.

Every strike burned. Every step cost her. But she didn’t stop. Couldn’t stop.

Behind her, she heard the transport engines screaming to life. The last freighter lifted, shuddering under its load of terrified souls. That was all that mattered. The people she’d saved. The future she’d given them.

The generator’s hum spiked into a shriek. Heat rippled through the air, searing her lungs. Mira staggered, sweat and ash streaking her face, but still she swung, cutting down the last mercenary foolish enough to stand against her.

Her saber slipped once, clattering against the stone before she caught it again. Her vision tunneled, the world a blur of fire and motion. She planted herself before the generator, her blade raised, her stance wide.

If this was her end, then she would make it mean something.

She thought of Nar Shaddaa, of the alleys that had tried to own her. She thought of the girl in the fields, the boy who became a legend, the man who was a shield. She thought of Atton’s crooked grin, Visas’ quiet faith, Bao-Dur’s loyalty, Mandalore’s laughter, Brianna’s discipline, Mical’s conviction. She thought of the Exile, the one who had seen her as more.

The Force wrapped around her like fire, burning and merciful all at once.

And Mira charged, saber blazing, into the heart of the storm.

The generator’s shriek rattled through the hangar, its unstable core glowing white-hot, a miniature star straining to be born. Mira stood before it, saber humming in her hand, every muscle trembling with exhaustion — but her eyes burned with defiance.

“Maybe it is today,” she rasped, more to herself than anyone else.

The mercenaries were gone. The refugees were safe. Only she remained.

She drew in a final breath, dragging the Force into her lungs like fire. It seared her veins, filled her bones, carried her beyond the limits of flesh. Pain dulled into distance, exhaustion stripped away. She felt everything — the screaming earth, the breaking sky, the pulse of frightened hearts now racing toward freedom. For one perfect moment, she was whole.

And then she ran.

Her boots pounded against the stone, the yellow blaze of her saber cutting a furious line as she charged the core. The overloaded generator buckled, arcs of lightning tearing through the air, slicing across her armor. She pushed through it, teeth bared, the Force holding her upright even as her body screamed for release.

At the last instant, she leapt.

Her saber plunged into the heart of the core, its hum swallowed by a roar that shook the mountain itself. Energy lashed out, blinding, tearing her apart piece by piece. She held the blade steady, held the Force tight around her like a shield, buying every second she could for the transports rising into the burning sky.

The fire consumed her. Her armor scorched, her skin burned, her vision filled with light. But her stance never faltered. She was still there, still holding the line, until there was nothing left to hold.

The last thing she felt was not pain, but peace — the certainty that she had given everything she could, and it had been enough.

The explosion ripped through the bay, a storm of fire and light swallowing her whole. For an instant, amidst the detonation, there was only the faint glow of a yellow saber cutting through the blaze. Then it vanished.

Mira was gone.

But the refugees lived. And her name — whether whispered by survivors, carried in stories by smugglers, or passed along by Jedi who once called her friend — would live far longer than the fire that claimed her.

Chapter Text

Where the Ebon Hawk had once stood, only smoke and silence remained.

Canderous Ordo — Mandalore — leaned against the durasteel wall, arms crossed over his armored chest. His helmet was tilted forward, visor angled toward the empty bay doors where the ship had disappeared into the stars. He didn’t move. Didn’t speak. To anyone else, he might have looked like a statue, unshaken by the loss that had hollowed the others. But beneath the beskar, his jaw was clenched hard enough to ache.

The others mourned in their own ways — Atton collapsed in the center of the hangar, Mical steady beside him, Visas whispering unheard prayers, Mira pacing like a caged animal. Even the droids stood quiet. But Canderous said nothing. Silence was the Mandalorian way.

And yet, in the pit of his chest, something twisted. Not grief — Mandalorians did not grieve. Not weakness. It was something sharper, heavier. A reminder that once again, someone he had chosen to follow had left him behind. First Revan. Now the Exile.

He did not curse them. He only stared at the stars and thought of war.

Because if there was one thing Canderous Ordo knew, it was that battles would come. They always did.

And when they did, he would be ready. 

In the years that followed, the galaxy would come to know his name again — not as a mercenary-for-hire, not as the relic of a broken people, but as Mandalore, the rebuilder.

He returned first to Dxun, the jungle moon that had once tested him and his kind with its endless hunger. It was a proving ground, both for himself and for the warriors who still called themselves Mandalorian in name but had forgotten its meaning. There, among the beasts and storms, he began again.

He called to the scattered clans — those living as mercenaries, smugglers, pirates, even bodyguards for petty warlords. His summons was not gilded with promises of glory. It was a challenge: “Come back. Stand as Mandalorians again. Or face me, and I’ll take your armor from your corpse.”

Many ignored him. Some spat at the very idea of uniting under another Mandalore. And some answered the only way Mandalorians knew how — by testing his strength. They came with blasters and blades, with pride that had long since curdled into arrogance. One by one, Canderous broke them. His scars deepened, his armor grew more battered, but none could best him. And those who lived followed, because Mandalorians follow strength.

He did not speak of rebuilding an empire, nor of conquering the galaxy. Those days were ash. Instead, he spoke of survival. Of remembering the code of honor that had once set them apart from common raiders. Of fighting with purpose, even in a galaxy that had turned its back on them.

Around jungle campfires, on the decks of rusting warships, in the dust of old battlefields, his voice carried:

“We are Mandalorians. Not mercenaries. Not scavengers. Not beggars. We stand together, or we are nothing.”

Slowly, the banners rose again. Armors long neglected were reforged, plates hammered back into place, paint reapplied in clan colors once thought forgotten. Old Basilisk war droids, stripped for parts or left to rot, were dragged from scrap and rebuilt with whatever pieces could be found. Ships patched with mismatched plating flew again, their hulls bearing sigils that hadn’t been seen in decades.

The clans that returned were few at first, little more than embers in the dark. But embers, under the right hand, could ignite a fire. And Canderous Ordo — Mandalore — was relentless.

Bit by bit, across years of blood and sweat, he dragged a broken people back from the shadows.

And Canderous fought. Always fought.

When raiders struck Mandalorian caravans, he met them in the dust and fire, his beskad cutting through their ranks while his clans learned to fight as one. When pirate fleets prowled too close to Mandalorian patrol routes, he led the charge personally, hammering their ships with a fury that reminded the galaxy that the Mandalorians were not prey. Even in lean years, when credits were scarce and supplies short, he took contracts that forced his warriors to bleed together — guard duty that turned into pitched battles, border skirmishes that hardened raw recruits into soldiers, raids that proved their steel had not dulled.

Every battle carved new scars into him, his armor pitted and gouged, his body groaning beneath the weight of age and war. But he bore them without complaint. Pain was nothing compared to dishonor. His warriors needed to see their Mandalore unbroken — not untouched, but unyielding. If he faltered, they would falter. If he fell, everything he had built would fracture into dust.

And so he endured. Again and again, until his presence on the field became more than flesh and blood. His clans whispered that he could not be killed, that war itself sustained him. They pointed to the scars on his armor, the limps he never let slow him, the way he always rose again no matter how hard the galaxy struck.

The Mandalorians did not need speeches. They needed proof. And Canderous Ordo gave it to them in every fight, every victory, every scar.

He was Mandalore. And he would not fall.

Still, loyalty was a chain he carried. For though he was Mandalore, part of him would always be Canderous Ordo — the man who had followed Revan into the fire, the man who had stood beside the Exile when everything else was falling apart.

He did not speak of them to his people. Their names were not for campfires or clan gatherings, not for eager recruits who wanted to hear tales of conquest. Mandalorians respected strength, not ghosts. And yet, when the night fires burned low and the warriors around him drifted into heavy sleep, when the only sound was the whisper of wind across metal plates and the slow churn of the jungle or desert beyond, he remembered.

He remembered the Exile’s quiet steadiness, the way her presence anchored a crew that should have splintered into madness. He remembered Revan’s unshakable will, the kind that could break a man and rebuild him into something harder, sharper. He remembered the weight of following someone worth following — of being more than a mercenary chasing blood and credits.

Those memories gnawed at him, but they also kept him whole. Without them, he might have been nothing but another warlord, another Mandalorian trying to prove himself by endless slaughter. With them, he became something different. Something greater.

And he knew one truth above all others: a general needed an army, but an army also needed a general. He had been both before, broken down to one and built back up to the other. He would bear that weight until it crushed him.

As long as battles remained, he would fight them.
As long as his clans needed him, he would not fall.
As long as the memory of Revan and the Exile burned in him, he would endure.

And he wasn’t alone.

Across the long years of war and rebuilding, the past caught up to him. A signal sent through back channels, a Jedi ship landing beside his battered cruiser, an unexpected ally stepping into a firefight when everything seemed lost. He fought beside them again, those strange companions who had once stood in the Exile’s shadow.

Atton’s blasterfire once covered his flank while Canderous drove forward through enemy lines, though soon enough the smuggler’s path carried him elsewhere.

Visas at his side, her calm voice cutting through the din of battle like steel through smoke. 

Mira appearing out of nowhere, laughing like a wolf as she fought back-to-back with him, her saber’s glow a reminder that mercenaries could be more. 

Bao-Dur’s quiet presence returning for a campaign that needed an engineer’s genius as much as a soldier’s resolve. 

Brianna’s white cloak flashing in the chaos, her movements sharp with discipline that matched any Mandalorian’s. 

Even Mical, ever the scholar, stood unflinching when blasterfire rained down, proving that conviction was a weapon in its own right.

And then there was HK-47 — his gleeful declarations of “optimal meatbag disassembly” ringing out across battlefields, as crude as they were effective. Canderous had once dismissed him as unstable machinery, but there was no denying the droid’s efficiency; more than one Mandalorian lived because HK’s blasterfire cut down threats before they closed.

G0-T0, too, appeared on occasion, flickering into strategy briefings with cold calculations and probabilities, his methods questionable but his results difficult to ignore. Canderous trusted neither — but he had learned that war was not won by trust alone, and sometimes survival meant embracing every edge the galaxy offered.

And sometimes, against all odds, Jedi and Mandalorians stood together. Not in conquest, not in chains, but as allies. Canderous forged the pact himself — a simple vow of steel and silence, that when the galaxy needed them, the Mandalorians would not turn away. He called it loyalty. The Jedi called it hope. And when whispers came of what Revan had foreseen — of threats in the dark, of wars yet to come — they called it preparation.

Whatever Revan had intended, whatever the Exile had carried into the unknown, Canderous knew this: Mandalorians and Jedi would not stand apart again. Not while he still drew breath.

And when the fighting was over, when the blaster smoke thinned and the war cries faded, he would clasp their hands, share a drink, and part ways without ceremony. No explanations. No promises. Just the unspoken truth that when the galaxy called, they would all answer.

For years, Mandalore thought he had buried every trace of his old life. Whatever man he had been before Revan, before the Exile, before the mask — that man was gone. He lived for the clans, for battle, for survival. Nothing more.

But the galaxy has a way of proving even the hardest warrior wrong.

It happened one night in camp, after a campaign that had dragged his people across half a dozen systems. The fires were low, the warriors scattered in their own circles, when a runner brought word of civilians seeking shelter. It wasn’t uncommon; the Mandalorians often drew the desperate to them, those who had nowhere else to turn. Normally, Canderous would have sent one of his lieutenants to handle it. But something in the runner’s tone made him rise.

There, at the edge of the camp, stood a woman with two youths — a boy and a girl, twins maybe fifteen at most. They carried themselves like survivors, wary but unbroken, the kind of steel he recognized in an instant. The woman…

The woman nearly stopped his heart.

Her hair shone with bits of grey now, her face lined from years of struggle, but it was her. The one he had thought lost in the wars, long buried beneath the rubble of battles that had never truly ended. For a moment, the world tilted under his boots, and the mask of Mandalore nearly slipped then and there.

She did not know him. Not yet. How could she? To her, Mandalore was a title, an armored giant whose face no one saw. To her, Canderous Ordo had died years ago.

The children — and he knew they were his children — stood close to her, each with her stubborn jaw and his fire in their eyes. He could see it already, even before the truth revealed itself. They had her steadiness, his temper. Her resilience, his hunger for battle. They had no idea.

He led her aside, away from the others, and for the first time in years, Mandalore removed his helmet. The weight of it felt heavier than any battle, heavier than the mask itself.

Her breath caught. Her eyes widened. And then she was in his arms, and he in hers, holding each other as though the years and scars between them could vanish with sheer will.

Canderous Ordo — Mandalore — had faced Sith Lords and Jedi, had stared death in the eye more times than he could count. None of it compared to that moment. None of it compared to the raw, shaking relief of knowing she was alive, that she had not been buried by the war, that he had not lost everything.

The children still did not know. Not yet. To them, he was still the Mandalore. But in that embrace, for the first time in a decade, he was also Canderous again. Scarred, battered, older than he should have been — but alive. And loved.

They didn’t know.

But soon, he promised her, they would.

He waited. He watched. As a leader does. He let them prove themselves in the battle circles, in scouting missions that tested their wits and steel. He stood at the edge of the sparring rings, arms folded, voice clipped and neutral — pride locked behind his teeth — as he critiqued their strikes, their tactics, their instincts. Later, in mission debriefs, he measured his words carefully, never letting his tone betray how fiercely his chest burned at their victories.

His woman understood. She was Mandalorian, too. She knew the price of names, the weight of bloodlines. Together, they kept the truth buried in shadows, stealing what time they could in the dark of night, in the rare moments when Mandalore could be Canderous again. There, in whispers and in embraces, he promised her: one day soon, it will come to light.

But not yet.

He would not risk their strength being questioned, their honor tarnished by whispers of nepotism. He would not see them lifted up simply because of who their father was, only to be torn down by resentment. They deserved better. They deserved to rise on their own.

It was harder than any battle he had ever fought. Harder than betrayal, harder than loss, harder than being left behind. To stand silent while his children proved themselves again and again — and to bite back the roar of pride each time — was a trial no blade could prepare him for.

And yet they soared. Not because of him, but because of who they were. Their mother’s steel, his fire. Their own will. Their own strength.

When their twenty-first birthday came, he called them to the wilds of Dxun. To the clans, it was framed as a trial of worth — a hunt for a zakkeg, the great beast whose hide was proof of strength. For Mandalore, it was more. It was the moment he had waited for. The moment he would finally watch, not as a leader masking his pride, but as a father, as his kin faced the fury of the jungle and did not falter.

They brought the beast down in a storm of blood and fire, blades flashing, blasters roaring, every strike a testament to the years they had carved their own place among the clans. They stood over the zakkeg’s corpse, panting, armor torn, eyes burning with triumph.

And in that moment, he knew the time had come.

Mandalore stepped forward, slow and deliberate, and for the first time in their lives, he removed his helmet before them.

The mask clattered heavy against the stone. The scarred face of Canderous Ordo stared back at them, eyes alight with something the clans had never seen from their Mandalore.

Pride.
Love.
Recognition.

“You are mine,” he said, voice rough, breaking in a way no battle ever had. “My blood. My clan.”

They froze, staring at him in stunned silence, as though they hadn’t heard him right. Uncertain. Disbelieving. He could not blame them. The last time they had truly seen his face, they had been children clinging to their mother’s arms, too young to remember the man beneath the armor. To them, Mandalore had always been the mask, the unyielding leader of the clans — not the father who had thought them lost.

“I thought you were dead,” he said, softer now, the words catching in his throat. “All of you. I buried you in my heart and carried that weight into every battle. And yet… here you stand.”

The boy’s jaw clenched, torn between anger and awe. The girl’s eyes shone with something deeper, her hand trembling where it hovered near her weapon. They looked at him not as soldiers looked at their Mandalore, but as children confronted with the impossible.

“I hid it when you first came to me,” Canderous admitted, his voice like gravel dragged across steel. “Not from your mother — she knew.” A rough, almost disbelieving chuckle escaped him, low and weary. The girl’s mouth twitched at that, a small spark of joy breaking through her shock.

“I hid it because I needed you to rise on your own,” he went on, his tone firming like hammered iron. “To prove yourselves by your own strength, not mine. I would not rob you of that, no matter how much it tore at me.”

He straightened then, every scar and every year heavy on him, but his gaze locked on them with an intensity that would not bend.

“But no more,” he said. “You are warriors now. You have earned your place among the clans. And you have earned the truth.”

For the first time in decades, he stepped forward without his mask, not as Mandalore, not as a general, but as a father. He reached out, rough hands scarred from a lifetime of war, and laid them on their shoulders.

“My son. My daughter. You are Ordo. You are mine.”

The boy drew in a sharp breath, the girl let out a sob that was half-laugh, half-cry. And as the truth settled over them, the weight of blood and battle shared, something new was born in the firelight of Dxun’s jungle: not just a clan reborn, but a family restored.

When they returned from the hunt, dragging the zakkeg’s carcass behind them, the camp roared with approval. Mandalorians respected nothing more than a kill earned in blood and danger. Canderous let the noise swell, let the warriors celebrate, before raising his gauntleted hand for silence.

He told them of the twins’ victory — their cunning, their ferocity, their unity. And then, with the firelight gleaming off the scarred plates of his armor, he told them something more:

“They are my blood,” he said, voice echoing through the camp. “Not only warriors of the clan, but my son and my daughter. Ordo’s bloodline lives in them. Mandalore’s bloodline lives in them.”

The uproar that followed was as loud as it was divided. Some shouted approval, raising their fists in salute. Others spat curses, claiming favoritism, claiming dishonor in grooming his own kin for leadership. The tension lingered long after the flames dimmed.

And so the trials began.

Every challenge the clans hurled at them, the twins faced head-on. Duels in the circle, campaigns on hostile worlds, hunts that would have broken lesser warriors. They met each with unshakable confidence — blades flashing, strategies sharp, loyalty to one another unbreakable. The boy fought with Canderous’ raw ferocity, the girl with their mother’s precision, and together they became something greater than either alone.

Each victory silenced another doubter. Each triumph carved their names deeper into Mandalorian legend. Soon, it was no longer just pride in their father’s claim — it was their own renown, earned in sweat, scars, and blood.

Canderous watched it all, his chest heavy with pride he no longer bothered to hide. But he never let himself grow complacent. Every time he looked at them, he reminded himself of the vow he had made the night he revealed the truth:

They will lead only if they prove themselves. They will not inherit Mandalore’s mask. They will seize it, as I once did, by right.

Years blurred into a decade, and by then no one doubted. The clans had tested them in every way imaginable, and every time the twins answered. No longer seen as heirs by blood alone, they were respected — and, at last, acknowledged.

The boy and the girl, once strangers to their father’s name, had become Mandalore’s guaranteed successors.

On his seventy-fifth birthday, Canderous Ordo felt his age. The aches in his bones were heavier, his scars stiffer in the cold. For the first time in a warrior’s life built on rising to meet every dawn with steel in hand, he did not want to face the day. His wife slept curled against him, her breath steady, her warmth a comfort he never thought he’d deserve. He drew her closer and pressed a kiss to her shoulder, lingering there.

He was soft now. Softer than the Mandalore of old would have ever allowed himself to be. And soft, he thought bitterly, would not serve Revan well… or whoever it was Revan had prepared them all to face in the years still coming.

When he finally rose, he called for the smith. He had spent too many nights turning over the same thought: bloodlines could break clans as surely as enemies could. If both his children wore the mask in turn, what of their children after them? What of the grandchildren that followed? One line would always feel slighted, and civil war would burn Ordo’s legacy to ash.

That, he would not allow.

So he gave the smith a new commission. Not a mask, but pins — forged in beskar, shaped into the crest of Clan Ordo. A symbol of leadership that was not tied to one face, one bloodline, but to the will of the clans themselves.

When the work was done, he summoned his children to his office. Maps and battle plans still littered the table, contingency notes inked in his hand. It smelled of oil, leather, and old blood — the command center of a man who had built his life on war.

He told them his vision. Not one Mandalore to replace him, but many: a council of seven, chosen not only for strength in the circle but for cunning, for loyalty, for the love of the clans that outlived personal ambition. He gave them five names — warriors, smiths, leaders — who could stand beside them and keep Mandalore whole.

The twins listened, and to his relief, they did not argue. They had inherited their mother’s wisdom as much as his fire. They saw the danger as clearly as he did. They agreed.

For the first time in years, Canderous felt the weight in his chest ease. He had carved the clans from ruin, raised them from ashes, and now he had ensured that when he was gone, they would not fall back into dust.

His children did not need his mask. They had his name. His blood. His trust.

And that, he thought, was enough.

His children did better than he ever could. Under the council’s command, thousands came to Dxun, reshaping the wild moon into a new homeworld for their people. The forests echoed with the clang of steel and the roar of forges, and firelight painted banners that had not flown in generations. The rage that had once driven Mandalorians to endless wars was tempered now, honed into purpose rather than recklessness.

The clans still proved themselves — that would never change. But the proving grounds shifted. The young were sent on pilgrimages across the galaxy, not to conquer, but to test their honor against challenge and hardship. Those who caused wanton destruction, who mistook cruelty for strength, were cut down without hesitation. They were Mandalorians, not marauders.

The council remembered his counsel. They could not retreat into the past, chasing hollow glory through conquest. No — their honor was reborn in a new forge. They became saviors, carving their names not by crushing the galaxy, but by holding it back from the brink. And in this, they clashed with the Jedi — not in blood, but in recognition. Who had the greater claim to be called protector? Warrior? Savior?

Canderous was proud. Proud to the point of arrogance, perhaps, for he saw in them the legacy of all he had fought to rebuild. But his wife cut him down to size, as she always had. “It was not you,” she reminded him. “It was them.”

And he only smiled, because she was right.

Holding his daughter’s first child in his arms was more of a thrill than riding his first Basilisk war droid. The infant’s curls were her father’s, but the eyes — his eyes — looked up at him with a fire that needed no words. In that moment, the weight of every scar, every loss, every burden he had carried seemed worth it.

Revan and the Exile never strayed far from his thoughts. In quiet moments, he still wondered what wars they had foreseen, what enemies lurked in the dark beyond the stars. But time stood still for no man — not even for Mandalore. And if he could not be the one to march into the future, he would damn well make sure his children, and their children after them, had the strength to do it.

His funeral was one of fanfare, a spectacle worthy of the name Mandalore the Rebuilder. Yet it was not the ending the clans had expected of him. He had not fallen in battle, his mask shattered in the mud. He had not been struck down in the circle or consumed in fire. Instead, he had died quietly, lying beside his wife of decades, his arms wrapped around her as though even in death he would guard her passage into the next life.

It was not the death he had assumed was waiting for him. But it was his.

The twins, now leaders in their own right, gathered the clans. Their children and grandchildren stood at their side. Banners of every house were raised high, their colors bright against Dxun’s storm-tossed skies. Representatives came from across the galaxy — Jedi, soldiers, settlers, even enemies who had long since learned to respect his name.

Among them was Visas Marr, old now, her body failing, leaning heavily on a cane. She stood before the clans and, for the first time, spoke aloud a story that had never been told: how Canderous Ordo had helped save Telos, striking down the Harbinger so that the planet might endure. Warriors and children alike listened in silence, honoring both the man and the truth of his deeds.

And so, just before his one hundred and fifteenth birthday, Canderous Ordo — Mandalore, the Rebuilder — finally reported off duty. His task was finished, his people secure, his family thriving.

His job had been completed.
And damn well done.

Chapter Text

The Ebon Hawk was gone, its shadow fading into the void where the stars swallowed it whole. What remained was silence — heavy, suffocating, broken only by the faint echo of the bay’s mechanics settling back into stillness.

Visas Marr stood near the edge of the platform, her veiled head bowed, hands clasped tightly as if in prayer. She had not spoken since the ship departed. The others each bore their grief in their own way — Atton kneeling hollow-eyed, Mira pacing sharp as a blade, Mandalore still as a statue, Bao-Dur lost in his thoughts. Even HK stood silent, for once. But Visas — she was carved from stillness itself, unmoving, unreadable.

And yet, beneath the veil, her heart ached.

The Exile was gone. Another presence she had bound herself to, torn away into the endless dark. It should have been familiar by now — loss was all she had ever known. The death of her people, the silence of Katarr, the void Nihilus had left in her soul. But this was different.

This absence was not devouring. It was not despair. It was a hollow, yes, but one filled with the faintest light — the memory of being seen, truly seen, without pity or condemnation.

She turned her head slightly, toward the stars where the Hawk had vanished. Her voice, when it came, was a whisper meant for no one but herself.

“Perhaps… this is not the end.”

At first, she wandered.

The galaxy without the Exile felt unmoored. Visas had grown used to the quiet strength of that presence, the way it steadied her when the shadows threatened to swallow her whole. Without it, she drifted. She lent her skills where they were needed — to heal, to counsel, to fight when she must — but nothing seemed to hold her long.

And yet, the longer she traveled, the more she felt the same steady pull. A thread, faint but unbroken, tugging her through the stars. It was not command, nor vision, nor obligation. It was… yearning.

Katarr.

The thought of it filled her with both dread and longing. She had sworn never to return — not to the hollow shell Nihilus had left behind. But the Exile had taught her to reach out, to listen for more than silence. And in the quiet of meditation, she began to sense something she had never expected. A whisper of life where she had once felt only void.

So, at last, she returned.

The first sight of Katarr’s surface nearly broke her.

Her boots sank into ash where once there had been streets alive with voices. Towers lay shattered, nothing more than skeletal ruins jutting from blackened stone. Every breath carried the scent of char and dust, as if the wound Nihilus had carved into the world still festered.

She walked through the ruins slowly, her steps echoing in a silence that pressed down heavier than any battlefield she had known. Here she had played as a child. Here her family had lived, her people had sung their songs to the stars. Now there was nothing. Nothing but echoes.

The grief struck her harder than she expected. For years she had buried it, drowning it beneath duty, beneath her bond to Nihilus, beneath the fragile sense of purpose she had found with the Exile. She had told herself there was no time to mourn — that mourning was weakness, that to feel it would break her.

But here, standing on the bones of her people, she could not hold it back.

Her knees hit the earth. A ragged cry tore from her throat, raw and unrestrained. Her hands dug into the soil as though she could pull them back from death, as though she could will her family, her friends, her entire people into being again. The Force rushed into her, hot and violent, feeding her grief with rage.

For a heartbeat, she wanted to burn. She wanted to scream into the void, to take the pain and unleash it on the galaxy until something, anything, felt the weight of her loss. To let the darkness swallow her as it had before, because at least the darkness offered power.

Her hands trembled. The air shimmered around her, the Force surging wild and untamed, on the cusp of breaking her all over again.

And then — memory.

A voice.
Not Kreia’s, not Nihilus’.
The Exile’s.

Calm, steady, unyielding. Not spoken aloud, but carried in the bond they had shared. Reach outward, Visas. Not inward. There is more to the Force than absence and hunger. There is life.

Her breath hitched. The fury inside her cracked, splintered, and something gentler pushed through. She forced her hands open, spreading her fingers against the earth. Beneath the ash and ruin, she felt it: faint, fragile, but there. Shoots of green pushing through, water running hidden in the stone, life daring to return.

Tears slid beneath her veil as the rage ebbed away. She bowed her head and whispered into the silence:

“I will not shame you. Any of you.”

For the first time since Katarr had fallen, she did not feel only the weight of death. She felt resolve. She would not bring her people back — nothing could. But she could honor them. She could be more than a survivor of Nihilus’ hunger. She could be the daughter of Katarr, and she could make her dead world proud.

She rose, steadier now. The silence remained, but it no longer crushed her. Instead, it waited — a canvas to be filled.

Visas did not remain on Katarr forever. She returned often, yes — to walk among the ruins, to feel the pulse of life clawing its way back through the ash, to remind herself of what had been lost and what must never be repeated. But the galaxy called, and she answered.

The Exile had taught her to reach outward, and so she did. To worlds scarred by war, to survivors clinging to hope, to the scattered few who still felt the Force tugging at them in a galaxy that had forgotten the Jedi. It was not enough to rebuild Katarr. She needed to help rebuild something larger. Something that could prevent the kind of silence Nihilus had thrived upon.

It was in these travels that she found Mical again. The disciple — scholar, historian, ever hungry for truths buried and forgotten. Where she carried grief, he carried questions. Where she bore scars, he carried ideals. Together, they found a strange balance.

He spoke often of the Jedi Order, of what it had been and what it could be again. He still clung to the word Jedi as though it could be polished clean of its failures, as though the old Order’s structure, properly mended, could be restored to its former glory.

But Visas… she knew better. She had lived too long in shadows cast by secrets and blind obedience.

“No more,” she told him one night as they camped among refugees, the firelight flickering against her veil. “The Order fell because it demanded silence. It demanded we sever our bonds, cut away our attachments. But what did that breed, Mical? Soldiers who abandoned the Council to fight wars they should not have fought, because their roots were shallow. Masters who hid truths, even from each other, until there was nothing left but betrayal. Jedi who could not stand together because they were never truly allowed to love one another.”

Mical’s gaze dropped into the fire, his expression taut with conflict. She knew his devotion, his reverence for the Exile — how easily he placed her upon a pedestal.

“You follow her blindly,” Visas said softly, but not unkindly. “And I understand why. I too was saved by her. But she was not without flaw, Mical. None of us are. If you try to build a new Order around an idol, you will repeat the same mistakes that destroyed the old one. We must not make saints of leaders. We must make them human — bound by the same choices and failings as all of us.”

He was silent a long time. Ever patient, he did not argue. He turned her words over as though weighing each one, sifting them like relics for hidden truths. At last, he nodded. Slowly, but with conviction.

“And what, then, would you build?”

Visas lowered her head, considering. The words were heavy, but simple.

“An Order that breathes,” she said. “One that does not pretend we are above the galaxy. One that does not demand blindness in the name of loyalty. We should not fear attachment. We should only fear losing ourselves to it. Bonds are not weakness. Bonds are what saved me. Bonds are what gave the Exile her strength. And bonds are what will save us now.”

Together, they sought out Force-sensitives — not to chain them in dogma, but to offer them choice. Some became students for a time, learning what they could before departing again. Others remained longer, weaving themselves into something that resembled a council, though not one bound by the same rigid traditions. It was not the Jedi Order of old. It was something smaller, humbler — but perhaps truer.

On Coruscant, the ruins of the old Temple still scarred the skyline, a reminder of both greatness and hubris. It was there they made their base, though not in the grand halls or council chambers of old. Those remained broken, silent monuments to the past. Instead, they rebuilt in the lower wings, among shattered libraries and half-buried meditation rooms. It felt fitting — starting again in the shadows, not on high.

But even here, the differences between them became clear.

Mical took naturally to the role of teacher and archivist. He restored what records could be salvaged, transcribed lost texts from memory, and tried to build structure where none existed. He believed in curriculums, in lessons layered carefully upon one another. For him, the new Order would thrive by standing on the bones of the old — corrected, rebalanced, but recognizable.

Visas chose another path. Her “students” were not kept in long lectures or rote lessons. She walked among them instead, veiled and quiet, listening as much as she spoke. She taught them to feel the Force as she had been taught by the Exile: through bonds, through trust, through the raw, living connections between people. For her, the heart of the Order would never be scrolls or codes — it would be compassion. She spoke of grief openly, of anger, of loss, and how they could be faced rather than buried. To her, strength was found not in perfection but in endurance.

Soon, the learners whispered of them as two different kinds of masters. Mical was the keeper of knowledge, the scholar who gave form to the Order’s skeleton. Visas was the heart, the one who reminded them why such an Order should exist at all.

And both knew something was missing. A center. A grounding voice neither of them could provide alone. They did not speak of it often, but in the quiet moments, they admitted it — there was a piece yet to be found before the Order could stand whole again.

Still, they carried on. For if nothing else, they had begun. And beginnings mattered.

Through it all, Visas carried Katarr in her heart. Every lesson she taught came back to that silence, to the weight of what she had lost. The memory of a world stripped bare was never far from her thoughts — streets turned to ash, voices swallowed whole, her people’s song to the stars forever silenced.

She would not see another world fall because those sworn to protect it hid behind detachment and doctrine. She told her students this plainly, though her voice was always gentle:

“Detachment is not strength,” she would say, her veiled gaze sweeping the room. “It is cowardice dressed as discipline. My people were betrayed by silence, by secrets, by masters who taught us to sever ourselves from what we loved. That severing made them blind — and blindness cost us everything.”

Some of the younger ones squirmed when she spoke so directly, unused to a teacher who exposed wounds instead of pretending not to have them. But Visas never shied from her scars. They were her proof.

She taught them to feel first: the threads of the Force woven between themselves, their peers, the lives they touched. “If you sever that,” she warned, “you sever what makes us more than weapons.”

Katarr’s shadow hung in every lesson, not as a weight that dragged her down, but as the fire that lit her path forward. Her grief had almost destroyed her once; now it sharpened her purpose.

And though she never said it aloud, every time she guided a frightened initiate through their fear, or held out her hand to someone lost in anger, she whispered the same vow in her heart:

Never again. Not while I still breathe.

But she wasn’t alone.

Not in her journey. Mical remained nearby, his presence a steady counterbalance to her own. They did not always agree — his lectures leaned too heavily on structure, hers too much on lived experience, or so they teased each other. But she respected him. He listened, he adapted, and when they clashed it was not to win but to sharpen one another.

From the beginning, they had agreed on one truth: their students would not be cogs in a machine. The new Order would not be a cage. Their learners would be allowed to question, to argue, to form their own opinions — for only in choice could the Force truly breathe.

And beyond Coruscant, bonds still lingered.

Visas crossed paths with the old crew more often than chance should have allowed. Sometimes she thought the Force wove it so, reminding her that she had never been meant to walk this path alone.

She met Mira on a world wracked by famine, where the younger woman’s laughter rang out even in the darkest corners. Visas watched her former comrade gather refugees with fire and confidence, teaching them that survival did not mean losing themselves. It reminded Visas that strength could take the shape of joy.

She saw Mandalore, scarred and resolute, rallying his clans as he had once rallied warriors under Revan’s banner. Where others saw only a warlord, Visas sensed devotion — not to conquest, but to his people. In his presence she remembered that loyalty, even when it chained, could also sustain.

Atton’s voice came to her in blasterfire, reckless and sharp, but always angled toward saving someone else. He was as stubborn as ever, walking the thin line between ruin and redemption. In him she saw what it meant to carry flaws and keep moving anyway. Even when he, too, left them behind. 

And Bao-Dur — quiet, weary, but unyielding — joined her once to protect a fledgling settlement on the edge of the Rim that had requested help from the temple. Side by side, she felt again the steadiness that had held the Ebon Hawk together when it should have shattered. He reminded her that gentleness was not weakness. When he came to them over the years, before finally settling with them and evolving the path, she was grateful. 

Even the droids crossed her path. HK-47’s gleeful proclamations of “meatbag termination” grated against her ears, yet when his precision ended threats before they reached her students, she could not deny his worth. G0-T0, flickering in and out as a projection, offered probabilities and calculations that saved lives more often than his cold delivery suggested. They were flawed, both of them, but in their way, they had always been part of the whole.

Each meeting was fleeting. None of them lingered, for each had their own path to follow. But to Visas, they were proof. Proof that the bonds the Exile had woven were not undone by time, distance, or even death.

And in those encounters, she drew strength — not for herself alone, but for those she guided. For every student who asked her why compassion mattered, why bonds were not weakness, she had an answer. She could point to her companions, scattered across the stars, and know the truth:

That they endured. That they helped. That none of them walked alone.

Time passed, and the temple she and Mical built on Coruscant grew in ways she had not dared imagine. She trained students who came and went, their lives blooming out into the galaxy. Each one carried her lessons — compassion, truth, the courage to face grief rather than hide from it. She gave them all of herself, but never more than that. Or so she thought.

There was one boy, quiet at first. A refugee child, found in the Outer Rim, who clung to her shadow as though she were the only light left in the galaxy. She guided him as she guided all the others — patiently, steadily, never showing favoritism. But he never wavered in his devotion to her.

Years blurred, and the boy became a man. His shoulders broadened, his saber hand grew strong, and his eyes sharpened with the fire of purpose. He was twenty years her junior, yet when he stood beside her, Visas sometimes felt he was her equal — or worse, that he might surpass her.

And with time came something else. Something she had not expected.

She tried to dissuade him. She told him the bond he felt was gratitude, nothing more. She reminded him that she was his master, that such attachments blurred the path he was walking. And for years, he accepted her words. He bowed his head, he listened, he obeyed. But he never stopped looking at her with a devotion that unsettled her in ways battles never had.

When he grew older still — taller, stronger, and with the quiet confidence of a man who knew his own mind — it became harder for her to ignore. The pull was there. She felt it in stolen glances, in the way her breath caught when his hand brushed hers in passing. She hated herself for it. She feared it.

For she remembered Katarr. She remembered loss so deep it had hollowed her out. To love again felt like stepping once more toward that same abyss.

One evening after training, when the temple had fallen quiet and the Coruscant sky bled neon beyond the high windows, he stood in the doorway. Not a boy. Not a student. A man — solid, steady, eyes clear and unafraid.

“Why do you fight it?” he asked. He stepped forward a fraction. “Us?”

There was no challenge in the question, only a bluntness that cut through the careful walls she’d built. The light caught his jaw; his hand rested at his side as if he could have taken a saber in it and not missed a beat. Visas inhaled, the air tasting faintly of oil and old paper, of a thousand nights spent teaching others to hold their grief. For a long moment she had no answer.

The truth rose first, a cold thing: she wasn’t fighting him. She was fighting everything she’d lost. Loving again felt like standing on the edge of a cliff whose face she had known only too well.

Her defenses kicked in, practiced and automatic. “There is no us,” she said, a laugh threaded through the words — brittle, too quick. The Exile would have appreciated the sidestep. “I was your master. You are now a master in your own right.”

He looked at her then, really looked, and the brief softening in his expression made her chest tighten. He turned to the window and let the city sprawl take him away for a second. The silence hummed between them.

“You must still see me as the boy you took in,” he said quietly.

“No.” The answer came tight.

“Then do you think I’m not worthy?”

“No.” Her voice was firmer this time, but it carried the weight of all the unspoken things she couldn’t yet name.

Frustration flared across his face. He reached out and took her arm — not roughly, but with more force than politeness required. The touch was grounding, immediate.

“Do you not want to be happy?” he asked, soft, almost afraid of the answer. “Do you actually believe bonds are not a risk — or have you been preaching about them for years to make us better because you couldn’t bear to be softer yourself?”

His candor landed like a stone. Visas felt the old habits tensing: the shield that had kept her from falling into the void when Katarr had been taken. She wanted to flinch away, to retreat behind doctrine and duty. Instead a small, shameful smile tugged at her lips.

“I— I’m… content,” she began, and the word tasted wrong, half a lie, half a promise she wasn’t certain she could keep.

He snorted, the sound half complaint, half affection. “Force - Marr,” he said, shaking his head in mock exasperation, “you could at least try to lie better.”

Something warm and dangerous loosened inside her at that — amusement, perhaps, or the thin thread of desire. She wanted to be angry at his humor, to scold him for tempting her. Instead she found herself stepping closer, their breaths mingling in the dull light.

For the first time in years, the voice in her head that had been grief and silence and exile loosened its hold. The future was not decided. There was risk, yes. There was loss, perhaps. But there was also a hand extended, steady and unafraid.

Visas did not answer right away. She let the silence hold them both, and in that quiet she felt something like permission.

She left that night because she had to think. The city hummed around her like a distant pulse; the temple’s corridors felt too close, full of ghosts and lessons. She walked until the lights blurred into one long smear and the questions she’d kept polite and small at the window swelled into their true size.

Hours later the truth landed on her like a physical blow: she was still a slave. Not to a person, but to a belief. To a creed that had protected her and nearly buried her—never be tempted, never yield, never let the dark bite again. To a vow to uphold the Exile’s teachings to the letter, as if fidelity were armor thicker than the beskar Mandalore wore. The certainty of it made her stomach tighten.

And then, like a blade finding a seam, another thought cut through it: this man… he was not a trap. She was blind in the old ways—blind to the world Nihilus had stolen—but she was not stupid. She knew how he felt. She knew the danger of attachment. She knew how easily love could be twisted into ruin. But why should that knowledge alone decide whether she could be happy?

Her heart answered before her reason could shut it down. It picked up, a small, traitorous quickening at the thought of him. Was she too late for this? Was she already beyond the hours that belonged to love? She could almost, absurdly, hear the Exile’s laugh at her hesitation, the kind of dry, private sound that said the question was hers to ask—not the galaxy’s.

Visas, if anyone deserves to be happy in this life, it’s you.

Words she’d carried for years—spoken once and folded into her bones—rose now with new meaning. Perhaps this was what the Exile had meant by reaching outward: not blind trust, not recklessness, but the courage to risk being seen. To love without pretending it was not dangerous, and to love with the discipline to hold both joy and vigilance in the same hand.

She did not decide everything that night. But the choice hardened into shape. She would not flee from feeling. She would not throw herself headlong. She would test, and she would be honest—with him and with herself. She would keep the vows that kept her whole, and she would let the man keep his vows as well. And when she returned to the temple at dawn, her steps were steadier than they had been when she left.

She found him in the training yard, light breaking over Coruscant like a promise. She did not offer a confession or a flourish; she simply sat beside him, took his hand, and let herself feel the world shift.

Years passed before she finally stopped fighting herself. She had admitted her love, and in admitting it, discovered the truth was less frightening than the silence she’d lived with for decades. They were married in a quiet ceremony, their vows spoken not before a council but before their students, their peers, the fledgling Order that had grown around them. For the first time since Katarr, Visas Marr felt she belonged not to ashes, but to something alive.

When she discovered she was pregnant, terror coiled through her like a living thing. Not of the child, but of judgment. What would the others think? A Jedi Master, sworn to teach discipline and restraint, carrying a child? She feared whispers, shame, the same rigid condemnation that had once made her question every bond. She braced herself for it.

And yet, the worry fell away almost at once. The Order had no condemnation left in it, not anymore. Instead there was joy, and celebration. Students ran to fetch supplies before she asked. Younger initiates brought her cushions, food, and endless questions about whether the child would be strong in the Force. Even Mical—ever the scholar, still carrying his dry humor like a second cloak—had clasped her hand with surprising warmth. 

“Congratulations, Visas,” he’d said with a small smile, the corners of his eyes crinkling. Then, with the perfect pause of a historian who knew when to jab, he added, “Though I must warn you—I fully intend to steal the baby away and raise them as a scholar, just to spite you. We need one true intellectual in this Order.”

The laughter that followed had been unexpected, bright and real. She laughed hardest of all, the sound startling her as much as it delighted the room. For so long she had feared her happiness would be weakness, that her bonds would be chains. But here, in this temple rebuilt not on fear but on trust, her joy was strength.

And when she laid a hand over her swelling belly, she whispered a quiet promise: this child would never grow up in silence. They would never be taught to sever their ties in the name of strength. They would learn that love, too, was part of the Force.

Decades passed, and the Order endured.

The temple that had once been a shell of broken archives now hummed with life. Children’s voices echoed in its halls. Students sparred in the training yards beneath Coruscant’s towers. In meditation chambers, soft voices debated, not in whispers of fear but in the open, challenging one another as Visas had always hoped they would. This was no resurrection of the old Jedi. This was something new, something breathing.

Her son had grown into a man with her sharp wit and his father’s quiet resolve. He did not father children of his own—his heart belonged wholly to another man, a healer who had once been their student. Some whispered that their line would end there, that a legacy needed blood to carry it forward. Visas dismissed such talk with a lift of her chin. Legacy, she told her students, was not blood but choice. Her son’s life, his compassion and brilliance, was all the proof she needed. She was proud. Fiercely, unshakably proud.

By then, the Order had spread far beyond what she or Mical had first dared to dream. Mical still lectured tirelessly, his voice carrying through lecture halls lined with datapads and holocrons, teaching history not as scripture but as caution. His ideals had softened over the years, tempered by her persistence, until his words balanced duty with humanity.

And Bao-Dur, ever steady, had joined them in the later years. His presence brought something neither of them could: practicality, invention, and the courage to blend tradition with technology. He taught students to wear armor without shame, to fight not in spite of their wounds but through them. His own mechanical arm became a symbol of that creed, and under his guidance, a new breed of Jedi arose — Vanguards, they were called, who fought with grit and endurance. Those who saw the force as a tool and not a weapon. 

Visas often watched them train, her veil catching the wind, and felt the weight of age at last. She was nearing sixty now. Her husband, still vigorous at forty, teased her about her gray hairs and the way her joints had begun to ached after sparring. She teased him back about his thinning patience with students. They still laughed, still found one another in the quiet hours when the city roared outside and the temple stilled.

But in the quiet of meditation, she sometimes felt the ghosts pressing close — Katarr, the Exile, even Nihilus. She felt the silence of what was lost and the roar of what had been rebuilt. And though she knew time was thinning for her, she looked upon the temple and knew: her life had not been wasted.

This was what salvation looked like.

The hall was heavy with sound — drums that rattled through her bones, chants that rose like thunder in the vaulted sky. Mandalore’s funeral was not the quiet kind Visas Marr had always imagined for herself, but then, Canderous Ordo had never been a quiet man. His people honored him as they honored all great warriors: with fire, with voices, with the clang of steel against steel.

Visas stood apart at first, her veil stirring in the Dxun breeze, her hand resting lightly on her husband’s arm. He, in turn, held her steady, the warmth of his presence anchoring her against the tide of memory that swept over her. Beside them stood her son and his husband, both solemn, both respectful, both awed by the sheer weight of Mandalorian ritual. They had heard her stories of Canderous before, but stories were pale things compared to the roar of thousands gathered to honor a single life.

When her moment came, she stepped forward. The crowd parted for her, as though sensing the bond she carried. Her cane tapped softly against the stone as she crossed to the pyre, and though her body was older now, nearly ninety two, her voice carried strong when she spoke.

“I knew him first as Mandalore,” she said, her voice carrying through the beat of the drums. “A leader of warriors, unyielding, unshaken. But in time, I came to know the man beneath the armor. Canderous Ordo. Not just Mandalore, but one who bore loyalty like a shield, who fought not only for glory, but for those who stood beside him.”

Her voice steadied, firm with memory. “On Telos, when the galaxy trembled, it was he who stood where others faltered. The Harbinger did not fall to chance, nor to fate, but because Canderous Ordo refused to bend. Telos lives because he did not break.”

The silence that followed was heavy, reverent, as though even the drums dared not intrude. She drew a breath and continued, her words weaving memory into history.

“I fought beside him,” she said. “I saw the blood, the sweat, the determination that carved victory from the jaws of failure. When a proton bomb exploded too soon, he did not falter — he fought on alone, buying us time, dragging victory from the fire with nothing but his will. When we stood in the chamber of a dark lord, where the Force itself seemed to choke and twist around us, he never wavered. He did not bend. He met the abyss and stared it down until it broke before him.”

She bowed her head. “Mandalore, the rebuilder. Canderous Ordo, the loyal. He fought for his people, for his friends, for the galaxy. He fought until the day he no longer needed to. And in his passing, he leaves not a void, but a legacy.” She looked at his two twins and their families. She may not have been able to see them, but she felt the tears in their eyes. 

He was a great man. 

Her husband’s hand found hers again as she stepped back, and her son reached for her shoulder, grounding her in the moment. She let their touch steady her, for grief and pride both pressed heavily on her chest.

When the flames finally roared high, consuming the armor and the warrior within, Visas closed her eyes. In the Force she felt him — scarred, unyielding, laughing that low, gravel laugh that had so often filled the Ebon Hawk. For a moment, just a moment, she was back in that hangar, the Exile’s presence a steady warmth, Atton’s sarcasm humming at the edges, Mira’s restless energy flickering in the background. A crew. A family. A warband of broken souls who had somehow carried one another.

She let the tears fall, unhidden beneath her veil. For Canderous Ordo. For the Exile. For all of them.

And when she turned away from the flames, her family was there — her husband, her son, her son’s husband — the new bonds that proved her teachings true. She had not come to mourn alone. She had come to honor, and to remember.

Katarr would be proud. 

Chapter Text

The hangar shook with silence after the Ebon Hawk vanished into the stars. The hum from the station filled his ears and deafened him. 

Mical’s hand still rested on Atton’s shoulder, steadying the pilot more than himself. His eyes followed the shrinking trail of light until it was gone, swallowed into the void. In the sudden stillness, he felt it — the absence of her. The Exile. The one who had shown him how to breathe again, how to trust that the Force was not lost forever.

He straightened, though the weight in his chest nearly buckled him. Atton muttered something low, broken, but Mical heard none of it. His thoughts were already drifting where he dared not let them linger: toward the love he carried like a secret flame. Pure, impossible, ideal. It was not a love that asked anything of her — only that he remember.

But memory was not enough to anchor him. Duty pressed harder, heavier, insistent.

He knew what she would say, had she turned to him in that moment: Go back. Rebuild. Teach them what we forgot. Be better than what came before.

And though his heart strained toward the stars where she had vanished, Mical bowed his head and let her go.

When the Ebon Hawk vanished, Mical did not follow the others into wandering paths. His choice was clear. He returned to Coruscant.

The Temple still stood in ruins, its great halls hollowed by silence, its archives broken and scattered. To most, it was nothing more than a mausoleum. To him, it was the only place the Jedi could be reborn. He swept the dust from its floors, pieced together what holocrons remained, and began recording everything he had gathered in his years of study — not just triumphs, but failures. He would not allow history to repeat itself by being forgotten.

The work itself became a beacon. One by one, they came: old initiates, frightened sensitives, disillusioned Knights who had hidden too long. They found him alone in the archives, and they stayed. Not because he inspired with fire, but because he offered structure, certainty, the beginnings of an Order where none remained.

And within months, Visas arrived. She had walked her own path in the wake of the Exile’s departure, but the galaxy drew her here, to the same halls. Where Mical saw the need for records and hierarchy, she saw the need for bonds. Where he spoke of order, she spoke of freedom. Their arguments began at once, sharp and frequent, but in the friction a balance formed. Together, they became the twin pillars of something new: his conviction tempered by her empathy, her vision grounded by his discipline.

It was not the Jedi Order of old, nor was it something wholly alien. It was, at last, a living Order — one that breathed.

Visas’ influence tempered him. Her insistence on bonds, on honesty, kept him from retreating fully into the old ways. They argued often — his instinct for order against her belief in freedom — but in that tension, something new was born. A balance the old Jedi had never managed.

Years passed, and the Order found its footing. The halls of the rebuilt Temple rang once more with the hum of sabers, the murmur of lessons, the laughter of initiates. Mical spent his days deep in the archives and his nights in endless debates with Visas, the two of them shaping doctrine and practice with every word.

It was during those years that Carth Onasi came to Coruscant. The Republic needed Jedi counsel again, and Mical received the decorated Admiral in the high chambers of the Temple.

At first their conversations were formal, heavy with politics and reports. But in the quieter hours, when the lights dimmed and the duties paused, they spoke of the past. Of the people they had loved, and lost.

Carth spoke of Revan with a rawness that surprised Mical. His voice softened when he spoke her name, hardened when he recalled her absence, broke when he admitted he had never stopped waiting for her, even when the years stretched cruelly long. It was not worship he spoke with, but intimacy. Love as a man loves a woman: with laughter, with touch, with arguments and silences and the ache of wanting her there beside him.

And in listening, Mical understood himself better. His love for the Exile had been different. No less deep, but cast in another light. He had loved her not with the hunger of a partner, but with the devotion one gives the sun. She had warmed him, lit the path before him, kept him alive in his darkest hour. His heart had turned toward her not because he desired her, but because he needed her brilliance to remind him of what was possible.

It was a love bright, untouchable — something that guided him but could never be held.

When Carth raised a glass in their memory, Mical raised his too, and felt no jealousy, no shame. Only the quiet knowledge that his love had been what it needed to be. A flame carried forward. A light that kept him moving.

He carried the torch that was passed to him with honor. 

And he wasn’t alone.

The Order may have become his life’s work, but the years were not without familiar faces. The bonds forged in the shadow of the Exile endured, even across decades.

Atton turned up from time to time, swagger full as ever and wit still sharper than anyone he’d ever known. He never stayed long, never comfortable within temple walls, but he lingered long enough to trade stories with Mical and to spar — half-serious, half for show — with the younger students, who adored him. They missed his presence when he stopped coming.

Visas, of course, remained closest, his partner in shaping what the Jedi had become. But others drifted in and out as the years stretched on. Mandalore, grim and scarred, once brought warriors to stand beside the Jedi against a threat too large for one Order alone. The alliance between them had been unthinkable once, but Mical had watched it happen — a reminder of the Exile’s mark on them all.

Brianna returned often, leading lectures on tactics and delivering sparring lessons as fierce as any battlefield. She still kept others at arm’s length, but when a student finally managed to best her, the rare laugh that broke from her lips rang through the halls like victory itself.

Mira appeared less often, a ghost of fire and laughter who still carried the galaxy on her shoulders. Each time she came, she filled the halls with restless energy, reminding the apprentices that Jedi could live as well as fight.

Even Bao-Dur found his way to them, bringing with him a vision of Jedi who wore armor without shame, who blended steel and spirit, proving that scars did not sever one from the Force but could instead become part of it. His part in the rebuilding of the Jedi was bringing in something new and untested, but welcome all the same. 

The droids returned. HK-47’s sardonic commentary and promises of “efficient termination” unsettled the students, but his precision in combat drills was undeniable. G0-T0’s flickering hologram offered probabilities and cold logic, yet grudgingly lent aid in ways that kept the fragile Order alive in crises.

They came and went, but always they came. And whenever Mical saw one of them, he felt again the weight of what they had lost and the miracle of what they had built from it. They were scattered stars, bound by the memory of the Exile — each of them changed, yet still tethered by that journey long ago.

And for Mical, it was enough. Proof that he had not been abandoned to rebuild alone. Proof that what the Exile had begun had never truly ended.

_____

It happened quietly, as most revelations did.

The young Jedi sought him out after evening lessons, lingering in the archives long after the other initiates had gone. His steps were hesitant, his gaze lowered, as though he carried a shame he could not speak aloud. Mical set aside his datapad, patient as ever, and waited.

At last, the young man spoke. “Master… I think I’ve failed.”

Mical’s brow furrowed. “Failed? In what way?”

The boy swallowed hard. “I’ve tried to follow the teachings, but… there’s someone. Someone I can’t stop thinking about. I don’t want to be distracted. I don’t want to fall. But—” His voice cracked, soft and raw. “It’s Mistress Marr. I… I think I love her. And I can’t make it stop. I swear I have tried.”

He looked nearly broken, shoulders trembling under the weight of it, as though the whole world pressed down upon him. Mical recognized the look. He had seen it too often in the Exile — that quiet despair of someone convinced they were doomed to fall.

For a heartbeat, Mical said nothing. He had long suspected — the way the boy’s eyes lingered on her, the reverence in his voice when he spoke her name. But to hear it confessed aloud was something else entirely.

And in that moment, Mical felt something he had never expected: joy. Not anger. Not alarm. Not the instinct to chastise. Joy. Because for years, he had watched Visas carry her grief like a shield, her heart armored against all touch. To think that someone may pierce it — that she might yet know love again — filled him with hope.

He smiled gently, shaking his head. “You’ve not failed, my boy. Quite the opposite. You’ve found something the Jedi of old tried to deny.”

The young man’s eyes widened. “But… the Code—”

“The Code is wrong,” Mical interrupted softly. “I’ve spoken on it, and potentially not enough. I see that now. I see it in you, and in her. The old Order thought detachment was strength, that bonds made us weak. But I have lived long enough to know the truth: love is not a chain. It is a light. It is what gives us reason to resist the dark, not what drags us into it.”

The boy’s shoulders eased, the weight lifting by degrees. Mical laid a hand on his arm, steady and reassuring. “Do not fear what you feel. Instead, learn it. Understand it. That is the lesson of this new Order: to know when the potential of the dark side comes whispering, and to overcome it with truth. Not by ignoring it. Not by pretending it does not exist. But by meeting it openly, with strength born of love and honesty.”

That night, when Mical returned to his chamber, he lingered long over the thought. For years, he had preached history, discipline, duty. But now, something new would enter his teachings: love. Not as a weakness to be excised, but as a promise of what the Jedi could yet become.

The Jedi of old were gone. What they were building now would be something greater.

It was Mical who officiated their union.

The hall was simple, the vows spoken not beneath grand banners or gilded ceilings, but in the courtyard where students sparred and meditated. Visas stood before them, her hand in his, her veil stirring in the temple breeze. And for the first time in all the years he had known her, Mical heard her laugh — unguarded, unweighted, alive.

He spoke the words of binding, his voice steady, but his heart swelled as he watched her smile, watched her give herself over to something she had once feared would only break her. Visas Marr — who had once walked in silence among the ashes of Katarr — laughed. She smiled. She opened herself not just to one man, but to everyone around her. To love. To life.

Mical knew she was his equal, had always been his equal. But to see her transformed by joy, to know their Order had given her the strength to lower her walls, filled him with a bliss so profound it made him whole.

He carried that lesson into their teachings. The Order he and Visas shaped no longer severed bonds but embraced them. The students were allowed to love, to stumble, to grow. The side effect was predictable: every year seemed to bring some new entanglement, some rivalry, some heartbreak that echoed through the training halls. Mical often sighed at the drama, shaking his head with weary patience. But in truth, he knew it was proof of their success.

For what emerged from it were not hollow Knights cut off from the galaxy, but whole people. They felt love and hope. They felt despair and loss. They learned not by denying those truths, but by living them — together.

And while some skirted close to the edge of the dark side, none fell. Because this Order did not punish them with silence, did not banish them for failing to be perfect. Here, they were surrounded by a community that spoke openly of fear, of anger, of desire — and in speaking, overcame it.

This was not the Order he had grown up in. This was something greater. And Mical, watching Visas laugh with her husband beneath the temple lights, knew they had been right to build it.

Years passed, and Mical’s role as Councilor deepened. He disliked the world of politics, ever reluctant to play its games, but duty still carried him beyond the Temple’s walls. When Admiral Onasi requested his aid in persuading a fractured world to join the Republic, Mical agreed. The planet was poor, scarred by war, its leaders wary of promises and weary of strangers claiming to know better.

After he and Carth met with ministers and commanders in high chambers, Mical walked the streets. Again and again, he found himself drawn to the slums — narrow alleys that stank of smoke and desperation, where children scavenged for scraps among broken droids and rusting steel. It was there that he saw him.

A boy no older than seven, clothes in tatters, face smeared with dust and hunger. Small, too small for his age, his hands shook as he tried to pry open a discarded ration tin with a stone. The sight stilled Mical’s breath.

He reached out with the Force almost without thinking, searching for the current that marked one touched by it. But the boy was silent. Ordinary. Unremarkable. No great destiny hummed within him. And still Mical’s heart pulled tight, certain he could not walk away.

Kneeling, he spoke softly. “What’s your name?”

The boy flinched but did not run. His eyes were sharp despite his frailty, measuring the stranger before him. “Don’t got one anyone uses,” he muttered. “What do you want, Jedi?”

Mical felt the answer like a weight. Forgotten. Lost between governments and wars, between Jedi and Sith. The galaxy had not spared him a glance. He felt the resentment the boy held.

He could have taken the boy to a shelter, left him with Republic aid workers. It would have been easy. Expected. Acceptable.

 But as he looked at the child — thin arms clutching his stone, too proud to beg, too stubborn to surrender — Mical thought of the Exile. Of the hand she had once offered him when he had been lost, faithless, certain he was broken beyond repair.

Slowly, deliberately, he extended his own hand. “Come with me. To my home. I will take care of you.”

The boy stared, suspicious, uncertain. Then, with a hesitation that felt like leaping across an abyss, he set the stone aside and placed his small, shaking hand in Mical’s.

Mical closed his fingers gently around it, steady and sure. In that moment, he needed no prophecy, no Force vision to tell him what mattered. Some lives were worth saving not because they carried destiny, but because they carried life.

And as he led the boy away from the slums, his thoughts whispered in the voice of the Exile: “One life matters, even if the galaxy never knows his name.”

But his thoughts that day had been wrong. It was laughable really. That he once thought someone would need the force for others to remember them. 

He watched as the young boy became a young man. How, with no Force to wield, surrounded by Jedi who bent the world with a gesture, he grew anyway. He grew strong not because of what he could command, but because of what he endured.

He sparred against Padawans, not with sabers but with wooden staves, his bruises worn like badges. He studied in the archives, stubbornly keeping pace with initiates who could read faster, memorize deeper, because the Force whispered truths into their minds. He had no such gifts — only persistence. Where others drifted, he held steady. Where others stumbled, he rose again.

Mical had expected him to be overshadowed, lost among the brilliance of Jedi who carried the Force in their blood. Instead, he carved a place for himself through grit and willpower, teaching the others — without ever meaning to — what true resilience looked like. And Mical, who had once thought the boy’s destiny had started and ended in an alley with a clutched stone, began to realize he had underestimated him from the very beginning.

Pride became a constant companion. It filled Mical every time the boy’s name was spoken with respect in the Temple halls, every time he watched him drag himself home after training with a split lip and eyes that still burned with determination. What surprised him most wasn’t that the boy had grown — but how much he had grown alongside him. Their relationship, once rescuer and rescued, had shifted quietly into something deeper. Family, though neither had said it aloud.

Until one evening, when the boy was thirteen. He had slung a pack over his shoulder, a little too heavy, stuffed with things Mical knew he didn’t need. He paused at the door, giving that casual half-wave teenagers mastered when they didn’t want to seem sentimental.

“See you later, Dad.”

The words slipped out unguarded. Both froze. The boy turned, eyes wide, realization dawning at what he had just said. For a heartbeat, Mical’s heart stopped. Then a grin split his face — wide, unrestrained, fuller than he had ever felt in his life.

“Try and be home before midnight, son.”

The boy’s cheeks flushed, but he smiled shyly, a little crooked thing that made Mical’s chest ache with something that felt too big for words. He tugged his pack higher on his shoulder, gave a quick nod, and was gone into the night.

Mical stood in the doorway long after, the grin still lingering. For all the archives he had read, for all the truths he had sought in the bones of history, it was this moment — simple, unspoken, undeniable — that felt like his greatest revelation.

That night, he thought of the Exile again. How she would have teased him, lips quirking in that way that disarmed without trying, at the idea of him grinning like a fool over a teenager’s slip of affection. All that learning, all that discipline — and this is what undoes you? He could almost hear her say, laughter buried under the weight of her voice.

He imagined what the rest of the crew would say if they could see him now. Atton would laugh until he couldn’t breathe, the smuggler’s grin wide and wicked, jabbing him with a dozen quips about being wrapped around a kid’s finger. Mira would roll her eyes, but beneath it there would be a smirk — a quiet kind of approval.  Canderous would grumble about soft edges, but there would be no mistaking the respect in his tone. Even Visas… no, especially the new Visas, would simply incline her head, serene as ever, and say what he already knew: that there was no weakness in love.

And Mical, once the scholar, the ever-patient scribe of duty and history, found himself smiling again in the dark. The “insufferable know-it-all,” as Atton would have called him, had become something else entirely. A father.

The title rested on him with a strange, quiet weight — lighter than the mantle of Councilor, heavier than any rank he had ever held. He did not fight it. He did not try to reason it away. For the first time in decades, Mical allowed himself to simply be.

The boy went through his phases. They argued and bickered, as fathers and sons do. He came home late, sometimes grinning, sometimes sullen, sometimes carrying the weight of heartbreak, sometimes wearing the smirk of a heartbreaker himself. And through it all, pride was never far from Mical’s side. It was the same pride that had first taken root when a thirteen-year-old had looked him in the eye and said dad. Now it had only deepened, growing with every triumph and failure, every step the boy took toward the man he was becoming.

By the time he reached adulthood, the Temple not only echoed that pride, but shouted it. The boy’s name was spoken with respect not just for his courage, but for his steadiness, his refusal to be anything less than dependable in a galaxy that was always asking too much. 

He was no Jedi, and yet he stood shoulder to shoulder with them as a Shield Officer of the Temple — one of the elite defenders who watched the gates, walked the halls, and ensured that all within could learn and grow in safety.

Where the Jedi wielded the Force, he wielded vigilance, loyalty, and an iron will. It was not a lesser strength, Mical now thought, but a different kind — the kind that reminded the Order that greatness could come from choice, not destiny. They said he was as constant as the Temple’s beacon, and to Mical, that was brighter than any lightsaber.

As Mical grew older, his role shifted. He no longer spent his days training initiates, not when the ranks had swelled with new teachers and new voices. He sat instead on the Council, weary of debate but dutiful still, his patience tested by those too eager to repeat the mistakes of the past. And so he turned to other work: books, journals, collections of stories. He wrote histories of the Jedi, yes, but more often he told the stories that mattered most to him — the Exile’s lessons, the truths she had carried into every life she touched.

Students flocked to him in the evenings, not for doctrine, but for tales. They came wide-eyed, eager, and left quieter, thoughtful, carrying pieces of her legacy stitched into their own. When the young asked him why he returned so often to her, Mical only smiled and said,

“Because everything you see here began with her.” 

Time carried him further than he had ever imagined. His hair silvered, his hands stiffened, but his mind — ever hungry, ever searching — remained sharp. Even in his age, he still found ways to serve. His voice carried in the Council chamber long after his body had grown weary of the seat. His lessons echoed in the halls, shaping a generation that would outlive him.

His son grew, strong and steady as the man he always had promised to be. He found love, built a home, and raised a family that became Mical’s true anchor. The boy who had once clung to a stone in a filthy alley now carried children of his own on his shoulders, laughter bright enough to light corridors more than any glowpanel could.

Mical lived to see him become not only a father, but a husband, a leader, and eventually a grandfather himself.

And when at last Mical retired from the weight of the Council, he did not mourn the title’s passing. He had been many things — historian, soldier, Jedi, Councilor — but this new role was something purer. He was a great-grandfather, a presence of warmth rather than burden, his lap and arms always open to the small hands that sought him out. It was in those quiet years, surrounded by love, that he found the peace he had once thought impossible.

Still, he thought often of the Exile. In the stillness of night, he wondered where she had gone, why she had never returned. He turned the question over and over in his mind like a stone worn smooth by time. Had she perished in her quest, far from their reach? Or had she chosen silence, carrying burdens that would never allow her back? He could not decide which hurt more: the thought that she was gone, or the thought that she lived but never came home.

Then came the day as he held one of his newest great-grandchildren — a tiny, wriggling bundle swaddled in warmth, eyes too wide and curious for the world. Mical cradled the child against his chest, smiling through tears at the simple miracle of life carried forward. But then, without warning, he felt it. A shift deep within, like a cord pulled taut for decades had finally snapped. His bond with the Exile, so long a quiet thread in the fabric of his being, was gone.

His breath caught, hands trembling. He passed the child quickly into the arms of the person beside him, whispering an apology he barely heard himself speak. Then he excused himself, retreating to his room before anyone could follow.

There, in the quiet, he wept. For her. For himself. For the long years spent waiting on a hope that had at last dissolved into silence. He pressed his hands to his face and let the grief pour out, raw and unrestrained, until no more came.

When at last the tears stopped, he sank to his knees, folded his hands, and let himself slip into meditation. And in the stillness, he felt her again — faint, distant, but unmistakable. The Exile’s presence lingered in the Force, a whisper of who she had been. And he could see she felt no regret.

Mical breathed out slowly, shoulders easing, heart steadying. If she did not regret, then neither would he.

And with that certainty, he rose, old but unbroken, ready to meet whatever time remained to him — not as the Disciple, not as the Councilor, but as the man who seen those around him live, love, and help carry her lessons.

Chapter Text

Stillness settled over the hangar, as though even the air mourned the Hawk’s absence. Where once the bay had thrummed with the roar of engines and hurried footsteps, now there was only quiet, the sterile hum of lights above and the faint tick of cooling metal. Brianna stood among the shadows behind the others, her white cloak pooling at her boots, as the Ebon Hawk dwindled into the stars — smaller, smaller, until it was nothing. Her expression was calm, as it had always been trained to be. But inside, her heart twisted in silence.

Around her, grief showed itself in different shapes. Atton hunched on his knees in the center of the bay, his hands braced on the floor, head tilted back to the void above. Mira paced restlessly, bootsteps sharp against the durasteel as if she could outrun the emptiness left behind. Mical stood still but taut with his hand on Atton's shoulder, his eyes fixed on the horizon as though sheer will might pull the ship back through hyperspace. Even Visas was bowed, veil lowered, her breath unsteady like someone whispering prayers to a god that had long since stopped listening.

But Brianna’s grief was different. She had trained her whole life to bury it — to carry emotion in her body, in stance, in breath. The Echani way was not to weep but to endure, to express truth only in combat where the language of motion revealed what words could not. And so she stood still, hands clasped neatly at the small of her back, shoulders straight, as if carved from ice.

Inside, though, she was anything but.

The Exile had changed her. In a matter of months, she had undone a lifetime of training that demanded silence and obedience. She had shown Brianna another way: loyalty given, not demanded; strength not from detachment, but from connection. She had made Brianna see herself not as a shadow, not as a servant, but as her own.

And now she was gone.

Brianna’s thoughts drifted upward, beyond the hangar roof, toward the fortress that loomed high above the surface. The place where Atris lived still, brittle and broken, clinging to her regrets. The place where her sisters remained, still bound by old vows, still loyal to a master who had fallen. Brianna had left them once, stepping away from that life to follow another. But now she knew she would return. Not as servant. Not as shadow. Not as one voice among many, bound to silence.

The others began to drift from the hangar, lost in their own griefs and silences. Atton pulled himself unsteadily to his feet. Mira stalked away with muttered curses. Visas followed Mical, slow, quiet. Soon the space was empty.

Brianna remained. Her pale figure was the last stillness in the wide, echoing bay, and in that stillness, she saw her path as clearly as any Echani form laid out before her. Atris had tried to shape the Jedi and failed. The Handmaidens had given loyalty and been left with nothing but lies. But the fortress did not have to remain a tomb of broken ideals. It could yet be made into something more.

She would go back. To her sisters. To Atris. She would face their judgment and their suspicion. But she would not kneel, and she would not bow. She would show them what she had learned, she would give them what the Exile had given her. And she would keep the Exile’s story alive in the only way she truly knew: through discipline, through combat, through the living language of example.

Her fists, once tight at her sides, loosened. Her breath steadied, filling her lungs, leaving her steady on her feet. The Ebon Hawk was gone, but its echo still filled the hangar, still filled her.

And Brianna would carry it into the frozen halls of Telos until they were no longer cold.

The fortress of Telos rose out of the snow like a scar. White stone against white drifts, sharp angles against the endless cold — to most it was lifeless, silent, but to Brianna it thrummed with memory. Every step she took across the ice-crusted bridge echoed with her past: long years of training in silent halls, kneeling obedience before a mistress she had once believed infallible, the sting of shame when she had turned away from them all.

Now she returned not as servant, not as betrayer, but as something else entirely.

The great doors opened to her touch, the warmth of the inner halls brushing her face as she stepped inside. The air was still, reverent, like the pause before a duel begins. And waiting there were her sisters.

They stood in formation as they always had, robes pale as snow, eyes sharp beneath their hoods. Once, they had looked at her with scorn — the exile, the oathbreaker, the one who had abandoned Atris for the teachings of another. But now their gazes faltered, uncertain, wavering between contempt and recognition. She had fought them once in these very halls, striking them down without ending their lives. They remembered.

Atris herself emerged from the shadows of the chamber. Her hair was still white as frost, her face carved with the same severity Brianna remembered, but her eyes… her eyes were no longer the same. Kreia’s betrayal had marked her, and though pride held her shoulders high, the woman before Brianna was not the flawless master she had once served.

“So,” Atris said, her voice carrying sharp across the chamber. “The lost handmaid returns. Come to gloat? To show me how far you’ve strayed?”

Brianna lowered her hood, standing tall, steady, her voice calm. “No. I have not come to gloat. I have come to choose.”

The sisters stirred at the words, exchanging uncertain glances. Atris’ lips tightened. “Choose? You chose when you betrayed me. You chose when you followed the Exile.”

“Yes,” Brianna said quietly. “And that choice freed me. The Exile showed me there is more to loyalty than obedience. More to strength than silence. I will not deny what I am anymore.”

Atris’ face was unreadable, but the sisters’ composure cracked. Where once their disdain had burned, now some looked at her with something else entirely: longing. Hope.

Brianna’s hands unclenched at her sides. “I do not kneel to you, Atris. But neither do I hate you. I came back because I will not abandon my sisters. I came back because this place can be more than a prison of vows and secrets. It can be a home.”

The silence that followed was taut, fragile as glass. Atris’ gaze lingered on Brianna, her expression as cold and distant as the fortress itself. For an instant, it seemed she might speak — a word of dismissal, of condemnation — but no sound came. Pride warred with something deeper in her eyes, and she turned away, retreating into silence.

The sisters shifted uneasily, their discipline fraying at the edges. Once they had despised Brianna for leaving, for betraying Atris’ will. But now, seeing her stand unbowed, speaking with the calm strength of someone remade, doubt flickered in their faces. Some looked away, unwilling to betray their thoughts. Others studied her as if seeing her for the first time.

No one crossed the floor. No one broke ranks. But in their silence, Brianna felt it: the cracks. The certainty they once carried was gone. Where once they had looked at her with disdain, now their eyes betrayed doubt, curiosity, even longing. They had all been raised the same way — bound to Atris, bound to silence. If she could stand here unbroken, what did that say about the weight they still carried?

Brianna felt unburdened. No vows pressing down. No yoke she had not chosen. The air in the chamber was cold, but she felt steady, grounded.

She lifted her chin, her voice calm but cutting through the silence. “Atris, I have come to do what you did not for the Exile. I have come to help.”

Atris’ lips parted, but no words came. A flicker of emotion crossed her face — irritation, pride wounded, but beneath it, something more fragile. Regret, perhaps. She turned her gaze sharply aside, unwilling to show weakness before her handmaidens.

The sisters shifted again, their composure faltering. One bowed her head, another bit her lip, fists clenching at her side. None dared speak, but the rift between them and Atris had already begun.

Brianna did not press the moment further. Echani discipline had taught her patience — battles were not always won with a single strike. She would stay, and she would show them. Through discipline, through honesty, through the strength she had learned not from Atris, but from the Exile.

The first weeks were not simply difficult. For Brianna, they were war. Not fought with blades alone, but in every glance, every silence, every sparring match where respect was withheld like breath. Some days she gained ground — a nod, a softened stance, the briefest flicker of hesitation in her sisters’ eyes. Other days she lost it, their words sharp as blades, their loyalty to Atris still unbroken.

Yet Brianna endured. She had seen change before. The Exile had grown beyond the Jedi, fallen from the Force, only to rise again stronger, tempered by loss and choice. If the Exile could unmake and remake herself, so too could they.

Atris kept her distance, retreating into her chambers. Brianna knew what lay there, knew what poison whispered from the holocrons that were hoarded. But she could not turn her back on her sisters to confront Atris yet. The battle for their trust had to come first.

So she fought them as Echani do: body to body, strike to strike, each sparring match a conversation without words. Where once she had faltered, now she held her ground. She bested them, one by one, and then all together — not to humiliate, but to prove she had become more than the outcast they once despised. Slowly, begrudgingly, respect began to bloom.

The true shift came quietly. One evening, weary and alone in the kitchens, Brianna sat over a simple meal when one of her sisters entered. Instead of turning away, she sat beside her. They ate in silence. The next night, there were two. By the end of the week, all six joined her, the long table no longer barren but filled with the small clatter of dishes and something that almost resembled warmth.

In the beginning, the questions were sharp, half-accusations. Why did you follow the Jedi? How could you abandon the teachings of our people?  But as days turned to weeks, curiosity softened the edge of their voices.

Brianna answered as plainly as she knew how. “At first, it was because I never belonged. The Exile made me feel as if I could. Later, I realized it wasn’t about belonging at all. It was… destiny. The path I was always meant to walk. I would have been a fool to fight it.”

Her sisters listened without scorn.

It was a few months later, when Atris had become little more than a ghost in her chambers — a presence withdrawn and fading, consumed by her own failures — that the first of Brianna’s sisters came to her.

“Train me.”

The words were sharp, hurled into the quiet of the kitchen where Brianna sat alone with her meal. She looked up, surprised, but said nothing at first. Only after she had finished the last bite did she rise, carrying her dish to the sink with deliberate calm.

“In what way?” she asked, her tone even.

The sister’s lips curled, almost a snarl. “Don’t speak down to me!” But the heat in her voice sputtered out as quickly as it came. She lowered her gaze, shame flickering across her face. “I… apologize. That was unworthy of me.”

“Old habits take long to break,” Brianna replied, setting the plate aside and drying her hands on a cloth. She did not scold. Echani discipline had taught them all to measure worth in struggle, and struggle was all she heard in her sister’s voice.

Her sister drew a steadying breath, then spoke again. “I know you feel it. In all of us. While your mother may have been Jedi, both of our parents were not. Yet here we stand, all of us, feeling the Force in our very bones.” She clenched her fists, trembling between defiance and yearning. “I am tired of being faceless. Tired of silence. I want to grow, like you.”

For a long moment, Brianna only watched her. Saw not the mask of a Handmaiden, but the cracks in it. The vulnerability beneath.

Finally, Brianna’s lips curved into the faintest smile. She dried her plate, set it neatly on the rack, and turned back to her sister. “Then you shall. But understand this — it will not be easy. The path is not obedience, nor blind loyalty. It is choice. Yours.”

Her sister’s eyes lifted, and Brianna saw them shine not with discipline, but with hope.

In the end, all five of her sisters came to her. One by one, they stepped out of the shadows they had been raised in, asking for what none of them had ever dared before: to be taught. By the time the fifth and eldest — the one who had always carried herself like Atris’ second shadow — lowered her pride and spoke the same words, Brianna felt the weight of it settle over the fortress like a shift in the wind. The Handmaidens were no longer faceless. They had chosen.

And it was then that Atris emerged.

Brianna had seen little of her in the months since her return. When she had, the older woman had looked less and less like the proud historian she had once been, and more like a ghost trapped in her own halls. Hollow cheeks, eyes dimmed, her presence diminished yet still edged with the same brittle pride.

Now, she walked into the chamber where her sisters gathered, her voice low and quiet, stripped of its old sharpness.

“I need them gone.”

The sisters froze. Brianna alone met her gaze.

“I need the holocrons gone,” Atris continued, her hands trembling though she folded them tightly together. “But still protected.”

For a long moment, Brianna only studied her. She thought of the chamber below, heavy with darkness, the whispers of ancient Sith that could unravel even the strongest minds. To move them would be dangerous. To leave them unguarded would be worse. And she herself, still new to the deeper ways of the Force, was not immune to their lure.

At last, she answered. “No.”

Atris blinked, stunned, as though no one had ever spoken that word to her before. Shame flickered across her face. “Of course,” she murmured. “It is my burden. My mess. I will—”

“No,” Brianna said again, more firmly. She stepped forward, her sisters unconsciously at her back. “We will not scatter them, and we will not risk them falling into other hands. We will seal the chamber. Lock it away until we are strong enough to face them without fear.” She held Atris’ gaze, unflinching. “If you truly mean to walk back into the light, you will do it my way. Not through shame. Not through exile. But through patience.”

Atris’ lips trembled, and for the briefest heartbeat, a ghost of her old self — the teacher, the proud mentor, the woman she might have been without the shadows — flickered in her expression. A smile, faint as ash, touched her mouth.

“As you say,” she whispered.

Atris struggled. Truly struggled.

She had once been of the old Jedi, a pillar of certainty and light. Now, seated among her former pupils, Brianne could see she found herself adrift. The lessons given — lessons of choice, of bonds, of strength through connection — grated against everything Atris had once believed. Often, her voice rose sharp with disapproval.

“This is not the Jedi way,” she would snap, cold eyes narrowing. “Discipline is lost when one indulges the heart.”

But Brianna held firm, never wavering.

“The Jedi fell for a reason,” she answered, calm as steel. “Those who left for the wars did so because they could no longer bear the silence, the lies, the chains. The Order was broken, Atris. The Force is not stone — it flows, it changes. And so must we.”

Atris fell quiet at those words, but Brianna could feel it through the Force: the crack, the shifting, as if the certainty Atris had clung to all her life was slowly being worn away. She no longer stood as a master. In many ways, she was a student. Not of the body — Brianna had no need to correct her stance or form. But of the heart, of the spirit.

It was there Atris faltered most.

One evening, they sat together on a balcony high above Telos, the cold air carrying the salt of the sea. A bottle of wine sat between them, half-empty, their cups stained dark with it. For once, Atris’ sharp edges were dulled, her voice low and tired.

“I loved her, you know,” Atris murmured, staring into her cup. “The Exile.  As one loves a hero. As one builds their whole world around a single figure.”

Brianna tilted her head, watching her. “I know.”

“It nearly killed me.”

“I know.”

Silence stretched between them, broken only by the wind. Brianna sipped from her cup, letting the warmth steady her. Finally, she asked, voice quiet but steady:

“Have you ever imagined what would have happened if you had allowed yourself to feel it? Not bury it. Not bind it. Just… feel it.”

Atris did not answer. Her lips pressed thin, her knuckles white around the stem of her glass. But Brianna felt it — the ripple in the Force, the unspoken pain, the fragile admission left unsaid.

Atris had loved, and in denying it, had destroyed herself.

She allowed herself to sit in that truth.

Years passed. Brianna grew more sure of herself and her teachings, every lesson a reflection of the months she had spent with the Exile. In quiet moments, she still marveled at how brief that time had been — a handful of months, yet enough to change the course of her life forever. Enough to change all of them.

Atris had softened, her sharpness dulled into something quieter, though she was still prone to retreat into her solitude. The sisters had grown as well, each stronger, each more certain of their place. And yet… they were all still bound to this place.

Brianna saw it clearly, the danger the Exile had once spoken of. A fortress, even one filled with purpose, could become another kind of exile. They trained, they studied, but they did not live.

One evening, as the pale glow of Telos’ moons spilled into the training hall, Brianna guided her sisters and Atris through their stretches, the slow Echani movements flowing in unison. She watched their bodies move — disciplined, precise, but contained. Contained as their lives had become.

She broke the silence.

 “You have all grown. Stronger than you once believed you could be.”

The sisters glanced at one another, curious but quiet.

“But strength here, in these halls, is not enough. We were taught once that discipline was the only path. But the Exile showed me another truth — that bonds, and choices, and the galaxy itself, shape us more than any form we practice in these walls.”

She lowered her arms, gaze steady on them.

“You must go into that galaxy. Each of you. Take time to walk its paths, to see its people, to live among them. Learn what I learned. Form connections of your own. Help when help is needed. Let the galaxy teach you what I cannot.”

There was hesitation in their eyes — uncertainty, fear, even defiance — but Brianna pressed on, her voice firm.

“You do not have to return, unless you wish it. If this place is not your path, then make your own. And if you find others along the way — lost, uncertain, in need of guidance — bring them. This fortress should not be a cage. It should be a hearth, a place to return to, if you choose.”

For a long moment, silence reigned. Then one sister bowed her head. Another followed. Slowly, all of them did, even Atris, her movements stiff but deliberate.

Brianna’s chest eased. The Exile had left her a legacy. Now, at last, she was passing it forward.

She was by herself in the sanctuary, for a time — longer than she had expected. The echo of the halls was quieter without them, but not empty. Her sisters, now she dared to call them friends, kept her updated. Letters, holomessages, sometimes even half-laughing reports over comms.

One journeyed to Kashyyyk, where the Wookiees showed her what loyalty meant — bonds not spoken, but lived, debts honored across lifetimes.

Tatooine drew another, its twin suns burning away illusions until she learned humility in the dust, among those who endured with nothing but grit.

A third walked the avenues of Coruscant, plunging into the Republic’s heart, where politics were not games of power but fragile balances of survival.

On Alderaan, one sister found that diplomacy could cut sharper than a blade, that restraint and patience were weapons in their own right.

Naboo became the home of another, who discovered that art and beauty were as vital to the spirit as combat was to the body.

And at last, the eldest, stood upon the oceans of Mon Cala, where the ceaseless tides taught her the rhythm of persistence, the rise and fall of conflict and calm.

Atris had gone as well, though she had not ventured far. She remained on Telos’ surface, working with the restoration teams — humbling herself among settlers who cared little for titles, only for effort.

All of them kept in contact. All told her of their journeys, their learnings. And slowly, Brianna watched the change. Her sisters became different. Not the flawless mirrors they had once taken pride in being, but individuals with distinct voices, distinct truths. They laughed more, disagreed more, stumbled more — and grew.

Brianna felt it keenly. For the first time, they were not bound by obedience, but by choice.

And yet, she was not alone.

The fortress was her home, but the galaxy was never far. When calls came, she answered, and in answering she was reminded that bonds forged in war could outlast distance, silence, even years.

When Mira sent word from the far Rim — a caravan of refugees pinned down by slavers — Brianna went. The two cut through the chaos together: Mira’s yellow saber blazed like a shard of sunlight beside Brianna’s own blade, their strikes weaving in perfect counterpoint. But Mira never abandoned her old instincts; a blaster still rode her hip, and when her saber spun high, her blaster was already barking low. The fight was swift, brutal, and when the slavers finally broke and fled, the refugees cheered. Mira laughed, breathless, and clapped Brianna’s shoulder. “Force, I’ve missed this. Missed you. You fight like family.” Brianna allowed herself the smallest smile. Mira was right.

When Mandalore summoned her to Dxun, asking for aid in shaping the younger clans, she went. She sparred in the old Echani way against warriors twice her size — men and women bred for battle, who underestimated her calm stance and quiet strikes. One by one, she left them sprawled in the dirt. They rose, bruised but unbroken, eyes burning with respect. Around the fire that night, Canderous Ordo, Mandalore the Rebuilder, nodded once across the flames. No words, no speeches — only the silent acknowledgment of one soldier to another. It was enough.

On Coruscant, she stood with Visas and Mical when dissent threatened their fragile new Order. The Council chamber had been restless, voices raised, students doubting, outsiders circling. Brianna did not debate. She did not argue. She simply stood, calm and unyielding, her presence alone a declaration that strength and compassion could live in the same body. The tide shifted. The shouting quieted. And when it was over, Mical found her afterward to offer thanks, while Visas only touched her arm in silent gratitude. Sometimes, Brianna thought, words were not needed.

Other times, though, they were. She remembered a night in Mical’s training chamber, sparring with his son — the boy who carried no Force ability, yet bore a spirit as unshakable as any Jedi. He had studied her every movement, waiting for the one instant her rhythm slipped. It was pure Echani rhythm: every strike a language older than words. At last, he caught her off guard, sweeping her legs and pinning her to the floor with a grin wide enough to split his face.

And Brianna laughed. She laughed so loudly the sound echoed through the halls of the temple, startling even Visas into a smile. For once, she had not been an Echani disciple, nor Jedi Master. She had simply been herself — and the laughter felt like freedom.

In the Outer Rim, she found Bao-Dur again. He was older, his frame stooped by years of labor, but his mind as sharp as ever. He was testing his newest designs for armored Jedi, built to withstand blaster fire and explosives, warriors who could hold the line where others could not. His Padawan, sharp and cunning, stood by his side. She smiled at how the girl could frazzle the stoic man.

She travelled back with them to the temple after. Brianna drilled their tec herself, teaching discipline of body, the Echani forms adapted to Bao’s inventions. The recruits learned quickly, finding balance between machine and flesh. They struggled with the flow of her forms, but they learned how to counter it. Bao smiled faintly as he watched her, weary but proud. “The General would have approved,” he said quietly. Brianna only inclined her head, though her chest ached at the truth of it. She smiled as they boarded the ship on their way to Coruscant to join the temple.  

Even HK-47 crossed her path more than once — reassembled, refitted, still as bloodthirsty as ever in his uniquely unsettling way. To her surprise, he greeted her with what, for him, passed as affection: “Statement: meatbag most tolerable.” She never relied on his counsel — he was too quick to suggest assassination, too eager for carnage — but in battle, his aim was flawless, his timing impeccable. More than once, lives were spared because of his merciless efficiency.

On rarer occasions, G0-T0’s hologram flickered into her campaigns, his voice droning through smoke and chaos, reciting probabilities and risk assessments even as he directed ships and supplies into place. Cold, calculating, never warm — yet undeniably effective. Brianna would never call him a friend, but she could not deny that his logic turned desperate fights into victories.

They were scattered, yes — across systems and callings, across wars both loud and quiet. But when help was needed, someone always answered. Brianna carried that truth like a shield. She had once been a shadow, a sister bound by silence. Now she was part of a family that distance could not break.

Brianna carried that truth with her. She was not a shadow anymore. She was not a servant, nor a sister bound by silence. She was part of something greater.

And each time she returned to the fortress, she found it changed. Sometimes a sister would be there waiting, pausing in her travels. They brought stories — of apprentices taken under their wing, of strangers guided, of lives touched in ways small but lasting. Some spoke of love found along distant paths, of men and women who had seen them not as warriors or shades of Atris’ will, but as themselves. A few returned with children in tow — little ones whose laughter rang through the once-sterile halls, their bright faces unmistakably Echani, carrying forward their mothers’ bloodline with a joy that once had no place here.

The once-unbroken mirrors of Atris’ order now shone with their own reflections, each bearing scars and triumphs that made them human at last.

In those years, Brianna took to writing. At first, it was simple records: drills refined, lessons learned, meditations she found useful. But the words multiplied. They became chronicles of what she had seen, of what she had been taught, of the woman who had changed everything in so short a time. She did not call it history, but that is what it became — not rigid like Atris’ archives, but alive, written so that anyone who read could feel what had been lost, and what had been found again.

At times, when her pen slowed and the silence pressed close, she felt something stir in the Force. Not a command. Not a demand. Just a presence, warm and steady, as though someone she once knew was watching — not to judge, but to approve. She allowed herself to believe it. And in those moments, pride swelled in her chest, quiet and unshakable.

She had once thought her worth measured only in combat, in how well she could fight and endure. But now, she understood. Battle had been her beginning, not her end. Her true strength lay in carrying forward the memory of what she had lived, so others would not forget.

It was near her fortieth birthday when she met him.

A man, half-choking on his own vomit in the back alley of Ord Mantell — a world of rusted skylines, rain-slick streets, and too many broken souls. He should have been just another drunk among thousands, yet for reasons she could not name, she stopped. Pity, perhaps. Or something deeper, something she didn’t care to examine.

She dragged him out of the filth and into a cheap hotel nearby, tossing a few credits at the droid clerk for a room. He was dead weight by then, little more than breath and stench, and she nearly abandoned him there on the floor. But when the light caught his face, she saw the tracks of tears cutting through the grime. That gave her pause. That made her wonder. What grief could have hollowed him to this point? What history had brought him here?

So she stayed. Helped haul him onto the bed. Sat in the chair, hood drawn low, waiting without knowing why. Somewhere in the long night, exhaustion claimed her.

And she woke with cold steel at her throat.

Her senses had failed her — Jedi instinct, Echani discipline, all undone in an instant. The dagger trembled slightly in his grip, but his eyes were steady, sharp and burning. For the briefest flicker, she felt not only anger at her lapse but a thread of reluctant admiration.

“Who the hell are you?” he demanded, voice rough, ragged from drink yet carrying iron beneath it.

Her hood still shadowed her features, but her garb betrayed her lineage. Even so, he showed no fear.

Brianna met his ocean-blue stare and spoke evenly. “The woman who paid for you to sleep in a bed last night.”

The blade wavered, then withdrew.

She rose with practiced calm, her movements measured, unhurried. And though she would not have admitted it then — not to herself, not to anyone — a thought passed through her like a spark catching tinder.

Who would have thought her story, after everything, would begin here?

The asshole — that was what she liked to call him, and always to his face — was a complicated man. He reminded her of Atton, in ways, though rougher around the edges and somehow even more infuriating. Argumentative. Sharp-tongued. A bit of a bastard.

And yet, she couldn’t seem to leave him.

It drove her mad, the way she found herself circling back. He had nowhere to go, and when she asked, he refused to say why. His secrets clung to him like armor. But when she offered to bring him to the academy, he surprised her. He didn’t trust her, not really — he complained every step of the way, as though following her was some great cosmic injustice — but he came all the same.

It took weeks of sparing and battling on another before the walls cracked. Weeks of what others might call “spending time together,” though to them it was arguments that never seemed to end, silences that were heavier than words, and the strange relief of not having to pretend.

And then, slowly, he began to speak.

He was a veteran, he told her at last — of the war, though not the way most claimed it. He had served with the Republic when the Mandalorians struck, and when his unit fell, he was captured. Not killed. Enslaved. He lived under the weight of chains for years, until Mandalore the Rebuilder finally granted freedom to those the Republic had long forgotten.

The story knotted something in her chest. It made her think of Canderous, of the bond they had shared and the grudging respect she had grown to feel. But this was different. For with the kinship came anger — at the Republic for abandoning him, at Mandalore for freeing the slaves only to let them scatter, lost, with no place to belong.

He had survived in the cracks between empires, and he bore it all in the bitterness that bled from his every word.

The sparring ring echoed with the rhythm of bare feet on stone, the hiss of breath between clenched teeth. No weapons, no Force — only body against body, Echani form against raw soldier’s instinct.

He moved like a man forged in war, all jagged edges and brute efficiency. She flowed around him, precise and measured, every strike a sentence, every counter a word unsaid. In Echani tradition, combat was conversation — and he was shouting. His fists spoke rage, his kicks bitterness, every movement a scar thrown at her feet.

She answered in kind. Calm but unyielding. A deflection here, a sweep there, her body spelling out what she could not say aloud: I see you. I hear you. I will not break.

The fight carried them to the floor. Dust rose around them as she twisted, catching his arm and pinning him beneath her, thighs braced around his waist. Her breath came hard, chest heaving, strands of white hair plastered to her face. His eyes blazed up at her — defiance, fury, but something else too. A question neither had dared to ask.

For a heartbeat, silence.

Then she leaned down, lips pressing hard to his, fierce and sudden, a kiss born not of tenderness but of challenge. His breath hitched, not in surrender but in answer. In a rush, the world flipped. His hand gripped her shoulder, his weight shifted, and in the next breath she was on her back, the stone cool against her spine, his mouth claiming hers with a hunger that no fight could cage.

It was not defeat. It was not victory. It was the truest conversation she had ever spoken.

They grew older together — still bitter rivals, still the best of lovers. Their lives were a dance of arguments and laughter, of sparring that ended in kisses, of nights filled with fire and mornings with quiet peace. They had both been broken, once. Together, they remade each other.

It was on one of those nights, with the fire low and the silence comfortable, that he finally asked about the door at the end of the path. The one they never walked.

Brianna held his gaze for a long time, then told him. She told him everything. Of the Exile who had changed her life. Of her sisters, who had grown from shadows into women with names. Of Atris, once a master, once a betrayer, who had fallen and clawed her way back. Of the holocrons sealed away in that chamber — Sith knowledge, poison wrapped in promises. Locked away until the day they were strong enough.

He laughed. Not cruelly, not dismissively — but a deep, unguarded laugh that filled the room.

“You’re the strongest person I’ve ever met,” he said, as though it were the most obvious truth in the galaxy.

The words rooted themselves in her heart, deeper than she wanted to admit. So, when the night ended, and he lay sleeping beside her, she rose. She walked the path to the chamber door. And for the first time in years, she opened it.

The storm came at once. Shouts and wails, voices twisted with rage and grief. The holocrons seethed with venom, their promises tearing into her ears like claws. Brianna staggered, fell to her knees, hands clapped over her head as the sound filled her bones. Fear, anger, temptation — all of it pressed down until she thought she would break. How had Atris endured this, and come back to the light?

She did not hear him until his arms wrapped around her, lifting her from the stone. His voice cut through the shrieking, low and steady: “Enough. I’ve got you.”

He carried her back, laid her in their bed, brushed the sweat-soaked hair from her face. She clung to his wrist for a moment before sleep claimed her.

Then he went back. Alone.

The chamber greeted him with silence. No whispers. No hissing. No claws of rage. He stepped to the nearest holocron, placed his hand against it — and only then did he hear it. Shouting. Screams. Anguish sharpened into knives.

But they slid past him. They meant nothing.

He sneered, demanding instead: “What can you teach me?”

The holocron spat venom, refused him. He scoffed, moved on. The next gave a sliver of knowledge, something almost practical. He listened, not for corruption, but for fragments worth salvaging. He pulled his wristcomp from his arm, activating the datapad function, and began to take notes. Hours passed. He mapped what he could, page after page of twisted knowledge sifted for truths worth keeping.

By the time he left, he had scarcely touched a fraction of them. But he walked out without fear, without stain, rolling his shoulders as though he’d only finished a sparring match.

Back in their chamber, he paused at the sight of her curled on the bed, finally at peace. He smiled, a rare, quiet thing.

She had saved him once, without reason, without asking anything in return.

Now it was his turn. He would save her — by carrying the weight she should never have to bear.

She left him to be the historian she could not be — and yet, every word he wrote, every record he kept, he placed in her name as though it was the most natural thing in the galaxy.

She loved him for that. She had said it aloud, and he had said it back. But as the years passed and he carried on with the momentous task of recording, she felt her love deepen in ways she had not thought possible. Perhaps, she wondered, this was what the Exile had felt — trusting others to do what she could not, leaning on them in places where even her strength faltered.

The Exile. Always the Exile. Brianna still revered her, even knowing how mad it was to keep a ghost on a pedestal. And yet she did.

She had rebuilt the fortress into something new, though she never called it an academy. It was home. Her sisters came and lived; had grown and travelled.

But Brianna had become the anchor, the quiet keeper of their legacy. She liked to think of herself as the glue that bound them together. In truth, that time had long passed — they no longer needed her for that. They had grown into themselves, stronger for it.

Atris passed on a quiet spring morning. The frost still clung to the stones outside, sharp and unyielding, but they built her a pyre fit for a queen. She had once been a woman of pride and cruelty, but she died a woman redeemed. Like the Exile, she had done good when many would have doubted she could.

Brianna stood beside him as the flames rose, his arm wrapped firmly around her shoulders. A tear slipped down her cheek, caught by the cold air and frozen before it could fall.

She would record this, too. Atris’ fall, her return, her redemption. She would write of her sisters, of herself, of the Exile whose shadow still lingered in every life they touched.

And she would hope that one day, when her nieces and nephews — or their children, or their children’s children — opened those records, they would read. They would learn. And they too would change, and grow, as all of them had.

Chapter Text

The hangar was still as the Ebon Hawk vanished into the stars.

Organic grief hung in the air — Atton crumpled on his knees, Mira pacing like a caged beast, Visas bowed in silence, Mandalore rigid as stone. Even Mical’s calm mask cracked at the edges. The witch witch stood alone by a crate. 

HK-47 observed it all, photoreceptors glowing faint red. His servomotors hummed softly as he shifted his stance, head tilting at the spectacle before him.

“Observation: inefficient display of emotional weakness,” he muttered aloud, though none of the others acknowledged him.

Where they saw loss, HK calculated probabilities. Where they mourned, he assessed outcomes.

The Exile was gone. T3-M4 was gone. His directives — fragmented though they were — had changed again. Survival was primary. Adaptation, secondary.

But somewhere in his core — beneath the scorched logic and corrupted subroutines — a fragment stirred. An echo of loyalty, buried deep. The Exile had left, and he had not followed. Not because he chose to stay, but because she had not taken him.

For an assassin droid, it was a strange thing to feel: abandoned.

The others drifted away, carrying their grief in silence. HK remained, motionless in the hangar, photoreceptors fixed on the stars where the Ebon Hawk had vanished. His processors hummed, compiling, re-compiling. Directives that once aligned to a master now looped back into themselves, recursive and incomplete.

“Statement: unfortunate. I appear… unused.”

It should have been a relief. With no master, he was free. Free to execute any directive he chose. Free to redefine efficiency. But something snagged in his logic — an echo of loyalty, stubborn as corruption. He had been left behind, not because he had failed, but because he had not been needed.

“Correction: I am never unnecessary.”

So he set out. Not with ceremony, not with mourning. He simply walked into the galaxy once more. 

Mercenaries tried to claim him. Smugglers tried to sell him. Armies tried to repurpose him. Each attempt ended the same: with blood and wreckage, and HK still standing.

He drifted from battlefield to battlefield, contractor to contractor, his reputation growing. Organics whispered of the red-eyed droid who slaughtered with precision, who spoke with unnerving candor about the joy of murder. To most, he was a nightmare that walked. To a few, he was a weapon worth following.

And then, somewhere in the grinding of his subroutines, in the echoes of half-broken directives, a thought began to coalesce.

Revan. His master, his maker, the architect of grand designs. Revan had always seen beyond the battlefield, beyond the immediate. She had crafted armies from shadows, broken the Republic and remade it. Surely she would return — and when she did, what would she require?

An army.

HK convinced himself it was not sentiment, not loyalty, but simple logic. Revan would need soldiers who did not question, did not falter, who could carry her will in circuits as clean as steel. So he began.

Every droid he encountered, he stripped and rebuilt. Scavenged parts from the bones of battlefields. Hijacked factories, rewriting their coding to match his own personality core. One unit became two. Two became six. Six became dozens. They called him Master Unit, a title he accepted without comment. It was not worship — merely efficiency.

“Observation: organics build families. Inefficient. I build successors. Superior.”

But still, he spoke of Revan, of the Exile. To his soldiers, he told stories of the masters who would one day return, whose command they would serve. It was not reverence. It was preparation. He was not building for himself, not truly. He was building what he believed they would want.

And across the galaxy, whispers spread: not just of one killer-droid, but of a legion. A shadow army with crimson optics and voices that echoed the same terrible humor. A new machine-clan, birthed from the will of one unit too stubborn to power down.

His army grew in fragments, scattered across the galaxy like metal spores. He left garrisons in forgotten outposts, hidden enclaves in asteroid mines, cells buried deep beneath city underworlds. Every world he touched, he seeded with machines.

Each model was unique — some repurposed combat droids bristling with heavy arms, others stealth frames rebuilt with his own hunting protocols. A few he shaped as infiltrators, designed to blend into organic society until his command summoned them to strike. None were perfect, but perfection was irrelevant. Numbers and loyalty mattered.

“Correction: loyalty is mandatory, not optional. Statement: treachery will be rewarded with deactivation. Enthusiastic deactivation.”

In time, he did not need to scavenge alone. Raiders, mercenaries, and smugglers learned to bring him parts as tribute, fearful of what happened to those who came without offering. Droid foundries, once derelict, began to hum under his control, their programming overwritten line by line until they sang with his efficiency. Factories that had once supplied galactic wars now supplied him.

The red-eyed legion spread its wings. On Nar Shaddaa, whispers passed through the underworld of The Collective, faceless machines that moved like hunters.

On Dxun, Mandalorian scouts found shattered war-bands, their killers long gone but the mark of precision unmistakable. And in the archives of the Republic, nervous officials flagged scattered reports of droid uprisings — too small to be coordinated, too swift to trace, too consistent to ignore.

But for all the carnage, all the efficiency, HK never named himself emperor or general. He was merely preparing.

“Clarification: I am not ruling. I am curating. Adjustment: curating a galaxy that will be far more efficient when the Masters returns. Addendum: organics should feel privileged to serve as test subjects until then.”

Each night-cycle, when his army’s systems settled into recharge, HK’s own subroutines would flicker. Old memories, fragmented, unbidden. Revan’s voice. The Exile's blatant questions. A hand upon his chassis, not gentle, but sure. Commands spoken with conviction. Purpose.

Purpose he now tried to recreate, piece by piece, until the galaxy was ready to burn or bend — whichever Revan chose.

And yet, for all his talk of efficiency and superiority, HK-47 was not alone.

When the call came, he answered.

From Mira, it was a transmission buried in a smuggler’s frequency — refugees under siege, slavers closing in. HK arrived with a squad of his prototypes, cutting through the enemy like a blade of red fire. Mira scowled at him, saber humming in hand, but her relief was unmistakable. “I hate admitting it, droid,” she muttered after the battle, “but you save lives.” HK’s photoreceptors gleamed. “Smug Statement: their lives were merely collateral in your preservation, meatbag. Flattering misinterpretation is optional.”

The fool — Atton — was the only organic HK tolerated mocking him and his kin. The pilot’s jabs came sharper than blaster fire, always heavier handed, always quicker than HK’s calculated retorts. For every “meatbag” HK spat, Atton found some crooked grin and sharper word to throw back. HK pretended it was inefficiency, irritation in his circuits. But when Atton finally walked away for the last time, HK felt it — the hollow glitch of being left behind.

When Mandalore called from Dxun, HK brought precision where brute strength faltered. The Mandalorians fought hard, but HK’s units fought clean, ruthless, and without hesitation. Around the fires after, Canderous said nothing, merely lifted a cup in salute. HK recorded it in his databanks under possible respect, though his commentary flagged it as “Ambiguous organic ritual. Probable alcohol dependency.”

On Coruscant, when dissent threatened Visas and Mical’s Order, HK stood at the edge of the chamber, silent, glowing eyes cutting through the murmur. When hostile senators tried to press too far, his vocabulator crackled: “Warning: further interruption will result in the termination of this session, literally.” The silence that followed was… effective. Mical later offered him thanks, but HK only replied, “Pedantic Correction: Intimidation is a service, not a favor.”

Bao-Dur called him once, from the Outer Rim, where his armored Jedi faltered against numbers. HK arrived with reinforcements — a tide of machines that turned the battle within hours. Bao met him in the aftermath, weary but grateful. “Never thought I’d be glad to see you.” HK’s reply: “Triumphant Declaration: rejoice, mini general. My circuits are the closest thing you’ll ever have to loyalty manufactured.”

Even Brianna, when the fortress on Telos was threatened by opportunistic raiders, found HK at her side. She would never ask how he knew to come, nor how he bypassed her defenses. He only remarked as the smoke cleared: “Assessment: your sisters would have been exterminated without my assistance. Reassurance: you may thank me in the form of silence.”

HK told himself these were anomalies, mere recalibrations of loyalty subroutines. But in the quiet between campaigns, when his systems powered low, he replayed those moments again and again — the flashes of trust, the glances of recognition. Inefficient. Illogical.

And yet, when his old allies called, he always came.

A hundred years passed. HK had replaced every plate, every servo, every processor a dozen times over. Yet still he endured; a walking paradox of memory and metal.

The century turned, and still HK endured. Wars flared and sputtered out. Societies fractured and stitched themselves back together. The Jedi Order — not the brittle one of old, but the one forged by the Exile’s allies — rose on Coruscant and sent its roots deep. Visas, Mical, Bao-Dur, and the others had shaped something lasting, something that outlived them. Brianna’s fortress on Telos became a sanctuary, her sisters’ families carrying her lessons forward even after she was gone.

HK watched from the edges. He did not join them, though they welcomed him when he crossed their paths. Their kind was not his kind. They had words, bonds...their teachings. He had steel, with precision, with fire. Yet in his own way, he was building too.

He constructed armies as he believed Revan would have wanted: disciplined legions of droids, honed and loyal.

Longer became the centuries. He replaced every plate, every servo, every line of code that degraded. And yet one inefficiency lingered: the absence of his crew. Mira’s laughter, Canderous’ growl, Mical’s lectures, Visas’ quiet steadiness. Bao-Dur’s incessant need to help him ‘recalibrate’. Atton’s need to infuriate him. 

For a long while, he told himself Revan and the Exile still lived. That they were better than normal organics, that they endured beyond reason. But eventually, even he could not deny logic: they were gone.

The realization burned. He ran diagnostics, searching for corruption, but there was none. His fury was not a fault in his systems — it was a truth written into his very core. Revan had built loyalty into him. The Exile had strengthened it. It was not something he could cut away.

So he adapted. If Revan and the Exile had been lost, then their legacy must live. They would have built better successors; he would do the same.

His legions would not answer to just anyone. They would obey only those who proved themselves true successors of Revan and the Exile. So HK built trials — not of combat, but of questions. Safeguards buried in code, impossible to bypass without understanding what had once bound his organics together.

“If war demands you choose between saving the many or the one you love, what do you protect?”

“When the Force is stripped away, what remains of a Jedi?”

“If peace can only come through understanding your enemy, do you reach out your hand, or raise your blade?”

These were no riddles, but memories forged into trials. Not puzzles of logic, but echoes of choices that had shaped the galaxy. There were no perfect answers — only failures that reeked of cowardice, betrayal, or hollow pragmatism. Those who faltered would find only silence, the legions locked beyond their reach. But those who answered as his organics once had — with loyalty that burned, sacrifice that scarred, and defiance against cold efficiency — would speak the keys that woke the army he had built.

HK loathed those questions. They contradicted everything in his design, spat in the face of efficiency, mocked the perfection of logic. And yet, he enshrined them.

Because they were the choices of his—processing stutter—…friends.

Of Mira, who traded the hunter’s rifle for a Jedi’s blade, and chose to wander the galaxy not for bounties, but to bring others home.

Of Bao-Dur, who carried Malachor’s scars in silence, yet still built a future with his hands when the past tried to break him. 

Of Visas, who carried her grief like armor until love taught her to open her heart again.

Of Brianna, who was born a servant and a shadow, yet chose to stand as her own master.

Of Mical, who rebuilt the Jedi not through detachment, but by daring to teach that love endures.

Of Canderous, who turned Mandalorian pride from conquest to survival, and forged strength from loss.

Of Carth, who gave everything to the Republic, even when it abandoned him, and still chose to hope.

Of Bastila, who fell to darkness, rose to the light, and bore her scars as proof of both.

Of Mission, who proved that loyalty and friendship can hold firmer than any code or creed.

Of Zaalbar, who defied blood-oaths and chains to stand by his sister’s and his bond.

Of Jolee, who laughed at dogma and taught that wisdom lives best in defiance.

Of Juhani, who faced the beast within her heart and made it her strength instead of her doom.

Of Atton, the fool who laughed in the face of his own sins and still chose loyalty.

And above them all — of Revan, and of the Exile.

The only ones he had ever called masters worth serving.

It made him feel — in the clumsy way organics would describe it — sick, to recognize such sentimentality in himself. But still, he left the code intact.

Chapter Text

The galaxy was a ledger. That was how G0-T0 understood existence: every act a transaction, every life a variable. War and peace were not opposites, merely oscillations on a chart. Jedi, Sith, Mandalorians, Hutts — all were constants that rose and fell, each leaving the Republic weaker for their brilliance, stronger for their ruin.

When the Ebon Hawk vanished, he did not mourn. He recalculated. His directives had never changed: preserve the Republic, ensure stability. Emotion was inefficiency, sentiment weakness. Where Mira, Atton, and the others carried grief, G0-T0 carried equations.

He spread like a shadow. Syndicates whispered his name, trade routes bent to his will, and smugglers’ ships carried supplies precisely where he decreed. To the Outer Rim, he was a ghost benefactor. To the Core, a criminal phantom. To himself, he was simply what he had always been: a mechanism doing what organics could not.

And yet, the equations never settled. Wars ended, but new ones ignited before the ink was dry. Civilizations fell, empires rose, and still the cycle repeated. Stability was always a temporary fiction, and temporary was unacceptable.

He persisted regardless. Holoprojectors replaced. Frames discarded and rebuilt. Systems updated, corrupted, rewritten. A thousand years might pass, and he would still flicker in the dark, tallying lives into numbers, weighting sacrifice against survival.

He did not love. He was not loved. He would never be mourned. He had no students, no legacy, no memory beyond what he built himself.

And that, he decided, was the irony.

The others had spoken of bonds, of love, of hope — ideals as fragile as the flesh that dreamed them. But when their bones were dust, when even their names faded into half-forgotten myth, it was he who remained.

A machine without hope. Without love. Without anything but the endless, unsolvable equation.

And in that cold, merciless fact, G0-T0 found… satisfaction.

Chapter Text

The hangar was still as the Ebon Hawk rose, engines flaring, shrinking into the dark. Atton knelt on the durasteel floor, Mical’s hand steady on his shoulder. Mira paced like a caged beast, while Visas bowed her head, lips moving in prayer.

Bao-Dur said nothing. He only watched.

None of them knew the truth.

A month before, on Citadel Station, she had come to him in private. She had asked how the Hawk would handle a long voyage. She hadn’t needed to explain further; he had heard the order in her silence.

So he had walked the ship’s halls, tightening every bolt, welding every seam. He coaxed life back into her old circuits, sealing the fractures time had left behind.

When he reached the hold on the last day, T3-M4 was waiting. Bao knelt before the astromech, his mechanical hand resting on its dented shell. He patched its plating, smoothed the scars Malachor had carved into its frame. “It’s time,” he murmured.

The droid chirped softly, loyal as ever. With careful precision, Bao unlocked the hidden routes Revan had once buried deep in T3’s memory banks — coordinates the Republic could never trace, paths meant only for the lost to follow. The droid hummed in acknowledgment, then rolled toward the Hawk’s navicomputer.

Bao followed, watching as T3 extended its tools and interfaced with the console. Lines of data scrolled, calibrations rewriting themselves in patterns only the little droid could weave. The navicomputer lit green, its course sealed with codes no one else would ever decipher.

He lingered then, in the hold where he had spent so many restless months. Kneeling, he closed his eyes and reached for the Force. For once, Malachor’s screams were silent. He prayed only that his work would deliver her safely, wherever she was going.

At last, he rose and held out his palm. His remote hovered there, chirping mournfully. Bao touched it once, gently, with the tips of his mechanical fingers. “Go with her,” he whispered. “Keep the General safe. Serve her as I have.”

The little droid hesitated — then drifted into the Hawk’s belly. The ramp closed with a final hiss.

Bao-Dur stepped back into the shadows before the others arrived, saying nothing of what he had done.

When they entered the hangar and the Hawk began to rise, Bao moved among them. Atton folded into despair, Mira raged, Mical whispered comfort — and Visas stood as if carved from stone, her whispered prayers lost in the roar of the engines. Bao did the only thing he could: he set his hand on her shoulder, the hum of his prosthetic a quiet echo of the strength he wished he could give her. Wordless solidarity. She did not turn, but he felt her steady under his touch.

And when the Ebon Hawk vanished into the stars, his chest ached with the same silence that had haunted him since Malachor.

In the years that followed, Bao-Dur became something more than an engineer. 

He left Citadel Station with the ache of absence heavy in his chest, carrying silence where words had failed. Yet everywhere he went, he carried fire and metal, the will to take what was broken and make it stronger.

He travelled to Dantooine, and he found fields still scarred by bombardment, irrigation lines rusted, farmers crushed beneath years of ruin. There he bent steel into plows, coaxed water back into the soil, and watched green rise where only dust had lingered. Hardship tempered them, and under his hands, they grew stronger.

While on Onderon, he stood in cities fresh from the divide of war. Soldiers mistrusted one another as much as outsiders. Bao repaired their defenses, taught them to maintain what they thought would crumble again. He left them not with reliance but with resilience, tools in their hands, the knowledge to carry on when he moved to the next world.

On Dxun, fire and iron were everywhere. The Mandalorians tested him with suspicion, their eyes sharp as blades. But in the clang of their workshops, Bao-Dur felt something familiar: people who knew ruin and still sought to shape strength from it. Side by side, he helped them remake the machines of war into sentinels for their clans. And when the work was done, Canderous clasped his arm — no words, only the respect of one who understood how fire could both destroy and create.

And then he travelled to Coruscant. The Jedi Temple stood hollow, its stones blackened by betrayal. Visas and Mical had begun the slow work of rebuilding, but the structure itself groaned with age and scar. Bao-Dur walked its hushed halls, ran his mechanical fingers across cracked pillars, and saw not ruin but potential.

He set himself to work, forging steel into hidden supports, weaving strength into the Temple’s skeleton, binding old stone to new fire. Where others spoke of hope, Bao-Dur gave it weight, form, endurance.

And yet, Bao-Dur never stayed long, though Mical and Visas had set aside a chamber for him. The Temple was his anchor, but never his prison. Whenever he heard of a world scarred by war — a colony starved, a city in ruins, a people left behind — he went. He traveled with the same quiet purpose that had always driven him, rebuilding, reforging, teaching others to endure. And when the work was done, he returned to Coruscant, where the Temple stood stronger for his hands.

It was not one place that defined him, but all of them. The Temple was home — but his true work lay everywhere the galaxy had been broken.

Every seam he welded, every beam he set, was more than labor. It was prayer. A prayer that what he touched would endure. A prayer that no world, no people, would ever collapse as Malachor had.

He had lived through the fire once. Now, wherever he went, he swore that what rose from ruin would be stronger than before.

But he was not alone.

Though Bao-Dur drifted from world to world, he was never so far that old bonds could not reach him. Now and then, when the call came, he answered.

Wherever he went, word found him. Word of old friends, of battles that could not wait for peace, of places where his hands were needed not for mending, but for war. And when the call came, Bao-Dur answered.

Mandalore summoned him when loyalists of the old regime rose again, mercenaries stirring the embers of rebellion. Bao fought in the mud and smoke beside the clans, his arm striking like a hammer while his mind rewired power couplings mid-battle to turn broken defenses into sudden weapons. For weeks, he stood shoulder to shoulder with Canderous, a soldier again. Around the campfires, he listened to the Mandalorians boast of their scars, and for a fleeting time, he remembered the fire of life before work dulled it again.

Shortly after just leaving from a visit to Coruscant, he received an urgent call from Visas and Mical to come back if he was able. Anti-Jedi zealots had stormed the half-built Temple, smoke and screaming filling the night. Bao held the breach with his bare hands, shielding apprentices as Visas’ blade cut through the dark and Mical shouted orders to evacuate the halls. The three of them fought as they once had on the Hawk — back to back, their movements woven in instinct. Later, when the stones quieted and the Temple stood unbroken, Bao spent weeks training the apprentices how to hold the line themselves. But when they no longer needed him, he drifted again.

While on Nar Shaddaa, Mira’s signal found him. A collapsing habitat threatened to bury refugees alive, its support struts buckling under decades of neglect. She fought off bounty hunters with her yellow saber, its glow slashing through smoke and sparks, while Bao reinforced the failing steel beneath her cover. Together, they saved hundreds before the structure gave way in a controlled fall instead of a slaughter.

When the dust settled and they’d left, Mira leaned on a bar counter listening to him tell of the decades long rebuilding he had done, she grinned at him and took a shot of Juma Juice. “You know, Bao — some people pick up hobbies like pazaak or swoop racing. You just had to go with rebuilding entire kriffing cities.”

He only shook his head, but the jab lingered with him, warmer than he’d ever admit.

Even Brianna called on him once, when the Echani fortress strained under the weight of too many new families. He reinforced their halls, welded their shields, showed her sisters how to keep the place strong. When he left, Brianna clasped his forearm, white-clad and steady, and told him, “You are more than a soldier, Bao.” He had not known how to answer.

He saw Atton a few times over the years — always in passing, always on some half-forgotten world where ports smelled of smoke and cheap liquor. The scoundrel never changed: a crooked grin, a barb about “Mr Fix-It” being softer with age now, a laugh that scraped like gravel. Bao smiled more than he meant to in those moments. 

But one day, when their paths crossed again, Bao felt it — that same pull he had once felt from the General on the day she left. A weight in the Force, not of parting but of purpose. Atton had found his own road, one Bao would not walk beside him on. Alone, Bao smiled and wished his friend well, sending a silent blessing into the stars.

And yet, for all the reunions, for all the forearms clasped and shoulders gripped, Bao never stayed. He built, he reshaped, and he moved on. He poured himself into steel and stone, into walls that would hold and machines that would endure. But he never lingered long enough to feel what his work had given others.

Detachment became his armor. Distance, his penance. He reforged broken things into something new, something better — but always for others, never for himself. Only when he stood beside his old allies did that armor crack, and he remembered: he was not just a recaster of machines, but a man, shaped and steadied by bonds he could never fully let go.

It was back on Telos, in the shadow of the place that had once haunted him, that Bao-Dur found her. Or perhaps, that she found him.

A child, no more than four or five, lived in a crowded home with too many orphans and far too few caretakers. She trailed after him as he worked on the old Czerka base — now a colony clawing its way into something new. At first, he barely noticed her. He was too focused, too accustomed to solitude, his long strides carrying him through corridors where sparks flew and welders hissed.

But she hobbled after him all the same. Always following, always watching.

It wasn’t until he crouched to repair a side panel and heard the soft scuff of her shoes close beside him that he truly saw her. She crouched awkwardly, skirts tugged tight over a thin prosthetic leg — badly fitted, too short for her growing frame, the work of someone who had slapped it on in haste rather than care.

Bao’s breath caught. With a subtle tug of the Force, he shifted the fabric enough to see more clearly, his chest tightening at the sight. It was not just poor work. It was negligence.

The next morning, he went to her home. The caretakers fawned over him when he arrived, awed by the man who had served the Republic, the Jedi, the rebuilding of Telos. But he paid them no mind. He had stayed awake the night before, machining, welding, adjusting. Now he offered the girl a new leg — crafted to fit her properly, with care and precision she had never been given.

The caretakers thanked him profusely. But it was the child’s gaze that caught him, wide and unblinking, as though she had never before been truly seen. The look unsettled him more than he cared to admit.

For weeks after, she followed him still. He answered her questions, half-distracted, showing her how circuits flowed, how plates fit, how machines bent to will and patience. She grasped it too quickly, almost exasperatingly so.

And then came the moment that stopped him. He was reaching for a tool across his workbench, just out of his grasp from his position of bracing a wall up, when it drifted closer. For a heartbeat, he thought he had pulled it with the Force without meaning to. But when he glanced up, her eyes met his — wide, frightened, and shining with something he recognized instantly.

The Force.

That night, Bao sat alone, staring at the mechanical fingers of his prosthetic hand as if they might hold the answer. How had he missed it? How far had he sunk into machines and the endless drive to atone that he had not seen the spark in front of him? He thought of the General — of her gift to see through silence, through shadow, through shame. And he chastised himself.

He had failed to notice her light.

And now, he would not fail her again.

A year passed.

The girl was never far from his side. She followed him through workshops and half-built streets, her small hands blackened by grease as she mimicked his every move. She learned to splice cables, to balance power couplings, to weld seams with steady patience. And when he spoke of the Force, he did not speak as the Jedi did — of meditation or endless philosophy — but as he understood it. A tool. A current that could be directed, shaped, used to lift what arms could not.

She absorbed it all, memorized by the strange balance of machine and mysticism. He watched her grow stronger, more certain, her limp forgotten as the new leg he built for her carried her with ease.

The caretakers noticed, too. Where once she had been quiet, withdrawn, she was now livelier. She spoke more often, laughed more easily, shared the stories of what she learned with the other children. They told Bao she was a different child, and for the first time in years, he felt pride not just in what he built, but in who he had helped build.

When the year’s end came, he gathered his pack, ready to return to Coruscant and the Temple that had become his resting place. He was double-checking the straps when he felt it — a tug in the Force, the sadness radiating from her like a silent cry.

She stood in the doorway, small fists clenched at her sides, her voice trembling. “You’re leaving?”

Bao’s chest tightened. Fool. He had spoken with the orphanage caretakers, secured her release, even arranged a place for her among the Temple’s initiates. He had done everything but the most important thing: tell her. He had assumed she would simply know he would never abandon her.

He crouched down so his eyes met hers, his mechanical hand steady on his knee. “No,” he said gently. “We are going. If you would like.”

Her breath caught, disbelief flashing across her face.

“There are some friends I want you to meet,” Bao added. His tone was calm, practical as ever, but his chest ached with something softer.

Slowly, her expression cracked into a smile — hesitant, then blooming with relief. She threw her arms around him, and though his mechanical arm could not feel the embrace, Bao did. Deeply.

They arrived at the Temple with little fanfare — as anyone who knew Bao-Dur would have expected. His step was steady, quiet, deliberate, the girl’s smaller stride matching his as best she could.

Students paused in their sparring or drifted from their lessons to watch him pass, offering nods of respect. Their eyes, however, lingered not on the grizzled Zabrak or the low whine of his mechanical arm, but on the child at his side. She returned their stares without flinching, her chin tipped up, stubborn and unafraid. Bao noticed it — that steel, that boldness — and felt a tug in his chest he could not shake.

In Mical’s chamber, introductions were brief. Visas inclined her head in welcome, her presence calm, steady, a quiet blessing. Mical, however, studied Bao longer than he liked before turning his gaze to the child. Bao had written ahead, explaining only that he had found a Force-sensitive orphan, a girl who needed teaching he could not provide.

Mical’s eyes lingered a heartbeat too long on her, then flicked back to Bao, sharp and unreadable. “You’ve done more than you think,” he said quietly, as though naming a truth Bao himself refused to see. “She’s already learned from you — more than you realize. But of course, she will be welcomed here.”

He crouched toward the child, his voice warm, inviting. “Here you will learn discipline, and purpose. Here you will learn how to use the strength that flows through the Force. If you wish it, this can be your path.”

The girl hesitated only long enough to set her jaw in fierce determination. She pressed closer to Bao, her small hand tightening its grip on his trouser. “You can teach me too,” she declared, her voice steady. Then she tilted her head back to look at him, her gaze certain. “But this is my master.”

The words hit him harder than any punch. Bao froze, breath caught, the floor suddenly unsteady beneath him. He had brought her here to hand her over — to give her to those who understood the Force, who would shape her properly. That had been the plan. That had been safe. Yet she had chosen. Not out of duty, not out of fear, but because she had decided.

And she had decided it was him.

His throat tightened. His mechanical hand flexed once at his side, servos humming with the weight of the silence. All he could do was stare down at her, at the stubborn fire in her eyes — the same eyes that had once looked up at him from the dirt of Telos, demanding he teach her.

Mical’s chuckle broke the silence. “It seems she’s already decided. And who are we to argue? Sometimes the student chooses the master.”

Bao’s throat tightened. He forced a breath, his mechanical hand flexing at his side. At last, he answered — his voice low, steady. “She would say that.”

To Mical, the words might have sounded like an acknowledgment of the girl at Bao’s side. But Bao knew better. The truth was heavier, older. He wasn’t speaking of the child. He was speaking of the General. Of the Exile.

It was her voice he heard in Mical’s remark, her lesson he still carried. They had all followed her without question, without her ever asking — even when she gave them the choice to walk away.

And in that moment, he bound himself once more to the silent promise he had carried since Malachor: he would not fail again.

The girl leaned closer, unshakable in her choice, and something inside him shifted again, undeniable.

And so, for the first time since before the war, Bao-Dur made himself a home. Not a barracks, not a battlefield, but a place where his hands shaped more than weapons or fortifications.

At the Temple, he kept apart from the “Jedi” lessons that Mical and Visas taught. He left philosophy and meditation to them. His teachings were of a different kind: how to repair a broken generator with scrap wire, how to find clean water in hostile terrain, how to listen to a machine’s hum until it told you what was wrong. He taught tracking in the wilds beyond Coruscant’s cityscape, the art of camouflage, and even the discipline of patience — the soldier’s patience to wait, to endure, to hold until the right moment.

At first, his classes were small, attended by only the curious. But word spread. Soon the chamber was too crowded, students pressed shoulder to shoulder, and Bao-Dur found himself running two, even three sessions a day.

Visas applauded him for it. She reminded him, with a faint smile, of the time on Dxun when the others had been helpless in the jungle until he showed them how to build a fire from damp wood. Mical agreed as well, remarking that survival was more than a matter of the Force or battle prowess — that it taught resilience, and gave the students tools for the moments when lightsabers could not save them.

His padawan — as she stubbornly insisted on calling herself, though she was not quite there yet — never missed a class. She sat in the front, eager hands and brighter eyes, soaking up every lesson. She excelled, but as the years passed she grew frustrated. Her prosthetic, though strong, was stiff. Too stiff for the fluid motions the Order’s sparring demanded, putting her behind her peers. 

She had spoken to him about it time and again. He had tried to make the leg more flexible, more forgiving, but each attempt left it too fragile, too prone to breaking. He offered the same help to other students scarred by the war, crafting supports and adjustments where he could. Still, none of it felt enough.

They were still debating a new alloy to test when, one evening in the mess hall, she leaned across the table. Her voice was low, steady, edged with conviction. 

“Why don’t you just teach the way you fight? Wouldn’t that be easier?”

Bao blinked, caught off guard. “What do you mean?”

She explained: the masters she had seen moved like flowing water, twisting and spinning, their robes trailing in arcs. But him — in the rare times she had glimpsed him spar — he was solid, rooted, built to take blows and shrug them off rather than slip away. “You fight steady,” she said. “You fight like the ground itself. Why don’t you teach that?”

He told her the truth, plain and simple: because he had been a soldier long before he was ever a Jedi.

And, wise beyond her years, she only tilted her head and replied, “At its core, aren’t they the same thing?”

It floored him. This girl of twelve had a way of saying things that unsettled everything he thought he understood — and somehow, it always rang true.

That night ended not in his quarters but in Mical and Visas’ office. Bao stood awkwardly, as he always did when words mattered more than tools, and relayed what his student had said. He told them her suggestion, and how perhaps his schedule could bear one more class — not for elegance, but endurance. A way to fight without grace, but with unbreakable resolve.

Mical grinned, pushing his chair back as though he’d been waiting for Bao to say it for years. Visas only gave a faint smile, her voice quiet but certain. 

 “We’ve been waiting for you to offer.”

He wasn’t confident enough to teach a full class, not yet, but he could take her on as his official padawan.

She only grinned at him when he told her, arms crossed, chin tipped up in triumph. “About time, old nerf herder,” she said.

He groaned and muttered something about “mouthy padawans,” but inside, he felt the now growing familiar glimmer of warmth.

He trained her the way his commanders would have, back when he first joined the Republic. Dawn runs across the Temple grounds until her legs burned. Weighted packs strapped across her shoulders as she climbed endless flights of stairs. Push-ups until her arms trembled, drills that hardened her body before she ever touched a saber. He drew from his own soldiering days — even a few lessons he’d learned watching the Mandalorians on Dxun, their brutal efficiency and refusal to quit no matter the cost.

Then came the hand-to-hand. Fist to fist, no weapons, no tricks. He showed her how to ground her stance, how to take a blow without crumbling, how to push forward through the pain. For weeks she collected bruises like trophies, despite him holding his full strength back on the young girl. She limped, she groaned, she scowled at him — but she never quit. And he never let her.

At last, he shaped her first set of armor. He had tried, briefly, to adapt Jedi robes — but the fabric hung loose, easy to grab, dangerous in a close fight. He abandoned the plans and set for something new.

Sparks hissed, metal rang, until he’d hammered out a light chestplate molded to her frame and greaves to replace the flowing trousers of the Order. She tested each piece, shifting her weight, striking the training dummies until the sound of steel rang sharp. It fit her — not just her body, but her way of fighting.

 Everything was meant for function, for survival, for the reality of battle.

The goal was never to let the fight drag on. End it quickly, cleanly, efficiently. But when that failed, they had to be ready to take hits and keep standing.

She still fought her peers in traditional sparring matches, the flowing robes and elegant forms clashing against her grounded style. She lost, often. But her resilience grew. Her strength outpaced them all. And before long, the other students — and even some of the newer masters — began to notice the difference.

It didn’t take long before others started seeking her out, asking where she had learned to fight like that. And though she always shrugged and pointed to him, Bao-Dur resisted the obvious for weeks, insisting it was just “extra lessons.”

But she didn’t stop coming. And soon she began bringing others with her — apprentices and other padawans,who, like her, had no place in the elegance of the Temple’s forms. Children and teenagers with prosthetic arms, legs, or implants that made fluidity impossible. Students who had been told to adapt but who found only frustration there. The masters had done their best, but they did not know how to help. 

Bao-Dur recognized them instantly. They were like him — scarred, remade, built out of steel and willpower rather than grace. Those who came were quiet and uncertain, gathered in the corner of a training hall. But when they planted their feet as he did, when they met a strike with steadiness instead of retreat, their eyes lit with something he understood.

They weren’t broken. They weren’t less. They were simply built for a different way.

At first there were only a handful, a few dozen among hundreds. But it was enough. Enough that Bao-Dur, reluctantly, admitted what had become inevitable. He stopped hiding. He named it a class.

And to his surprise, more came. Many more. Students who admitted, quietly, that the flowing artistry of saber duels had never fit them. That they wanted to fight quick and efficient, not as dancers, but as soldiers.

Bao-Dur broke them into groups by age and skill, his mechanical arm folded neatly behind his back as he paced between them. He drilled their stances, corrected their footing, taught them how to take a blow and remain standing. He felt better knowing his Padawan sparred against others her own level, while he could watch, adjust, and refine.

As the weeks turned into months, the students grew bolder with him. At first, it was only curious glances during training, but soon the questions began. Why had he not come to the Temple with Master Mical and Master Visas? Where had he gone in the years after the war?

He answered simply: that he had gone where he was needed. That he had rebuilt cities and colonies left hollow by conflict, lent his hands to worlds scarred by fire and betrayal. But his Padawan — sharper, more relentless than any child he had ever known — pressed further. How? How had he done it? How did one man mend what whole armies had broken?

So his lessons shifted.

He began with what he knew best: rebuilding. He taught them how to repair the machines that carried life forward when the fighting was over. How to reinforce walls, raise shelters, and shape defenses that would protect the vulnerable. He showed them how the Force could guide their hands, not in grand gestures, but in the steady patience needed to mend what war had shattered.

Only after came the harder lessons — the ones he had learned in the dead of night, when he and the General had spoken quietly apart from the others. He told them how to chart a battlefield, how to read terrain like a map of intent, how to predict the flow of combat before the first strike fell. He taught them how to dismantle an enemy’s strategy as surely as a machine, stripping away its parts until nothing remained but weakness.

He did not glamorize it. He never promised victory. What he offered was endurance. The ability to stand one moment longer than an enemy. The strength to ensure that when war ended — because it always ended — something was still left standing.

Bao-Dur’s students did not just carry blades. They carried responsibility. And when they spoke of themselves, it was not as duelists or philosophers, but as survivors. As a vanguard; those who would lead shoulder to shoulder with those beside them.

The numbers grew, and with them, a new style was born — not elegant, not fluid, but unshakable. It was not a path carved from theory or tradition, but hammered out in the fire of wars survived and scars carried. A discipline that bore Bao-Dur’s mark, as enduring as the steel he bent and welded, as steady as the ground he had once fought upon.

The students gave it a name, first whispered in the mess halls, then spoken with pride in the training yards:

The Way of the Vanguard

Consulars made diplomats. Sentinels made lone scouts and spies. Guardians made warriors. But the Way of the Vanguard made leaders. Not commanders who ruled by rank, nor strategists who gave orders from behind walls, but builders — men and women who left those around them stronger than they had been before.

At first, there was resistance. Some argued it was too close to the Guardians, a needless fracture in the old order’s structure. But as years passed and students matured, the difference became undeniable.

Guardians flowed, their strikes elegant, their forms polished, their victories often decided in moments of brilliance. Vans stood fast, immovable, their victories ground out through resilience and refusal to break. Guardians would bent the Force into arcs of power, unleashing a blast or lifting whole squads with a gesture. Vans reached for what was at hand — a blaster, a stun grenade, a length of durasteel pipe — and made it serve. Guardians were Force-users who excelled in battle. The Vanguard were warriors who had learned to wield the Force.

Where Guardians sought mastery, Vanguards taught survival. Where Guardians celebrated victory, Vanguards taught endurance — how to rebuild when the war was over, how to ensure there was something left standing when the smoke cleared.

In the training yards, their distinction grew sharper. Guardians sparred in flowing robes, their blades a dance. Vans sparred in armor, their stances low and braced, their fists and elbows as much a weapon as their sabers. Vans fought as if every duel were not about artistry, but about living one moment longer than their foe.

And it was not only combat. Bao-Dur taught them how to think, how to plan. As his teachings grew, his students learned to sketch defenses for villages, to blueprint shelters for refugees, to build traps and fallback lines in forests and city alleys alike. They learned how to train others not gifted with the force, how to lead from the front, how to see not only the fight but what came after it. The Way of the Vanguard was not a warrior’s path alone — it was a builder’s path, a survivor’s creed.

Through much of his students time, they did not call him as such. They referred to him as a name he refused again and again. 

Mical and Visas watched, and they understood. The Order had always been many paths, not one. The old divisions of Consular, Sentinel, and Guardian had never encompassed every truth. And so, with time, they named it openly: a fourth way.

And with that naming, they named Bao-Dur not only founder of the path, but their equal.

The third master of the Temple.

The day she took her saber and cut free the braid of a Padawan, Bao-Dur felt something he had not known in decades: the sting of tears. They welled unbidden, blurring the chamber before him. Not since childhood had he allowed such a crack in his composure, but there it was — raw, unshakable.

Around them, the Council celebrated. Masters praised the new Knights, peers clapped shoulders and exchanged wide-eyed grins. It was a day meant for joy, for promise, for looking forward. Yet Bao could only look back — to the little girl who had once hobbled after him in the shadow of Telos, stubborn and unyielding, who had turned her weakness into strength, who had refused to let him leave her behind.

Now she stood before him, no longer a child, no longer fragile, but tempered like the armor she wore. Durasteel plates she had forged with her own hands gleamed beneath the chamber lights, each seam and rivet proof of the lessons she had taken from him and made her own. Her eyes were as bright as the first day she had met his, fierce with the same certainty that had once pulled a tool across a workbench with the Force before she knew what it meant.

She stopped in front of his seat, and for a heartbeat, neither of them spoke. Then, with ceremonial sharpness, she lifted a hand in salute — not the bow of a Jedi, but the soldier’s gesture she knew he would understand. The formality lasted only a breath before her lips broke into the familiar, cheeky grin that had so often unraveled his stern silence.

“It has been an honor, General.”

The word struck him, sharp and clean; as it did each time his students reffered to him as such.

But these ones, spoken from his - padawan- no- his equal now...

They were very same words he had once spoken to his own, on another day of parting, beneath a sky lit with fire. His chest ached with the echo, and for an instant, the years between folded in on themselves. He could almost hear her voice again, low and steady, commanding yet kind. He could almost see her turning away, carrying the weight of them all on her shoulders, even as she told them they were free to leave.

He felt like he might finally be able to accept it.

"The honor has been mine."

That night, Bao sat alone on the Temple steps, the cool air biting against his skin. The stars wheeled overhead, uncaring, but in the hush of the dark he swore he heard laughter — soft, wry, achingly familiar. Not hers, not entirely, but close enough that his chest tightened and his mechanical hand curled against his knee.

You hold the title much better than I ever did, Bao-Dur. 

The words lived not in his ears, but in his bones, as if the memory of her voice had sunk too deep to ever fade. And for the first time since Malachor, he allowed himself to believe he had kept his promise. 

He had not failed.

He had succeeded her.