#spiritassassin week

[profoundingly]

Day 2: Alternate Universe/timline

I know that modern day au is kind of vanilla but  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[ivory-leigh]

Luke lands on Dagobah in search of Chirrut Imwe the Jedi Master

and instead gets an old married couple who maybe have something to teach him about the Force. 

“Wait, you’re Master Imwe? But you’re so—”  “I’d be careful what word you use next, little brother.” 

“I am one with the Force, the Force is with me. I am one with the Force, the Force is with me. I am one with the Force—”  “Um, is the chanting... required?”  “I don’t even think it’s recommended.” 

“The Jedi aren’t supposed to marry. That’s why Chirrut left the Order: so he could be with me.” 

“Master Imwe, can I ask you... I mean, do you ever regret it? Leaving, moving here. Giving up your chance to be a Jedi. Don’t you ever wonder what kind of life you could have had?”  “Don’t be silly. There is no life if the person I love isn’t in it.” 

[kannibal]

Moon energy for writing into the night. Sun energy for sparring throughout the day. 

Daemon AU for SpiritAssassin week. (Daemon AU)

(Baze’s tiger daemon is Sunny, Chirrut’s bunny is Snow)

[kerriss]

Spirit Assassin Manip 25: Celebration 

[rafikecoyote]

day 2: au

[anagrammaddict]

Small Messages (bou din waa zuk)

Last fic for SpiritAssassin Week. Late as usual, because I kinda burned out yesterday & the day before, lol

Thank you everyone for reading. & many thanks to @fyeahspiritassassin for hosting. I had great fun doing this but man I’m so relieved it’s over. this was hands down the most difficult writing thing i’ve done lately.

SpiritAssassin Week 2017 Last prompt: celebrations

There are ghosts in Chirrut’s eyes.

He sees:

colour mostly, or the memory of colour. Jedha City, or the memory of it. When his eyes were still functional, when the world pin-bright broke into seven colours and flipped upright on the screen of his retinas. And that was sight for him.

Nowadays the only eyesight he has are old visuals. He sees with ghost eyes. Useless.

He remembers:

when he was still a novice at the Temple, when the Temple still stood, when his eyesight worked fine, and yet he kept missing things. Muddling up. And Baze would tell him where everything was, where to look.

Where are my prayer beads? In front of you.

Where is the datapad? You’ve been looking right at it for ten minutes.

Where did I put my shoes? You’re practically stepping on them.

I know I left my prayer beads here! You did, and they are still there. What is that saying you always use?

Gwai am ngaan! Ghosts covering  eyes.

When Chirrut lost his eyesight, he said: “Remember what I used to say?”

Baze never found it funny again.

***

The holopad powers up. A buzz. The harsh phosphorescence of the screen makes shadows spatter onto his grey featureless vision. Incoming message.

There is a crackle of interference and then the steady hum of a line. Connection. Nobody speaks. The silence is heavy with a familiar presence.

“You can start,” says Chirrut gently, “by telling me the time.”

“It’s early,” Baze answers. “Your time, that is.”

It’s strange that they’re far enough apart that they can split time between them. Yours and mine. Your half and mine.

“Have you eaten?” says Baze.

Chirrut remembers that he hasn’t. He hums a note in both reply and dismissal.

“Just because I’m not there,” says Baze, testily, “doesn’t mean you can forget to eat. Don’t pine too hard for me.”

“I was going to meditate,” Chirrut says. “There are other types of hunger besides the one that you speak of.”

“Who said anything about hunger? It’s basic self-care. But I forgot you know nothing about that.” There is a clatter of movement from the other side. A hiss and a sputter. Clacking. Something being dismantled. For cleaning. Perhaps a weapon. A shush of air, like an exhaust pipe.

“The Force--,” Chirrut begins.

“--will not feed you. You should eat something.”

Chirrut sighs. “It’s been three years. And you’re halfway somewhere across the galaxy. And you've gone right back to your nagging self.”

“I’ve lost count of the years,” Baze says. There is a lie in the falter of his voice. A flinty note of defiance.

“I’m going to meditate.”

“Wait,” says Baze.

Chirrut waits.

“Leave the connection running.”

“I don't talk much when I meditate.”

“You don’t have to.”

***

There is a festival (there is always a festival) going on in Jedha City and people have begun lighting tapers and burning sticks of incense in the many street braziers.

You’re supposed to do acts of compassion. Pray for the dead. Feed the hungry. People bake bread, boil vats of porridge, distribute food to the homeless, to the pilgrims, to anyone who asks for food.

Chirrut sits beneath an archway on a back lane, running his fingers along the worn beads of his prayer necklace. Sandals shuffle, the scrape of fraying leather. The hems of robes touch his knees and ankles, stray butterflies of fabric. The crowds move and he feels their wingbeats and their edges. The wake of their movement. The rotund vowels of a muezzin’s call. A minaret in the distance. The wind snapping the tarp. The souk, a heaving organic entity of commerce.

There are more unwelcome sounds now. Heavy boots. The presence of Imperials, their conversations in staccato, voices standardised into a nasal flatness by the inbuilt vocoders in their helmets.

Someone presses a roll into his hands and a flask.

“Eat and drink, uncle,” someone says, performing their act of compassion for the day.

Chirrut thinks of Baze. Of course he does.

***

“Are you asleep?” says Baze.

“What do you think?”

“Sorry,” Baze says. “I need sleep.”

His voice is thick, like textile, as though he’s lying in bed somewhere, one corner of his mouth pressed against rough sheets. Perhaps he has lain awake all night. Is it night where he is?

“Will you tell me where you are?”

“On a planet. There’s a lot of water here. Marshes. The speeders here are shaped like dragonflies. I haven’t been dry in days. When I took the job I didn’t know I’d have to become amphibious.”

“The job?”

“Like any other job,” Baze says, evasive.

The connection sputters. But it holds.

“Night time on this planet is longer than Jedha’s nights. About three times as long. People sleep three times as long, too.”

“You should get some now.”

“What is that?” Baze says suddenly. “There, on the side of your face. Turn your face to the left.”

It’s a cut. Healing, though. It must have been just a thin smudge in the holographic display of his face, but Baze’s sharp eyes had caught it.

“I was cornered,” Chirrut admits. “In a cul-de-sac. By five Imperials.”

Baze swears. “You took on five Imperials without backup?”

“The Force was with me.”

“Of course it was.” Baze scoffs. “So you had no backup. You idiot.”

“So says the true fool, who is faithless,” Chirrut shoots back. “So gwaa.”

***

Chirrut passes through the forms of zama-shiwo, ghost-eyed, with the slow silk movement of his arms and legs. There is no end or beginning to the forms. Perpetual transition. Keep your mind still. Absolute. Nucleatic. The body is not yours. The body is your environment. You are part of a larger body. Only the negligible pinprick of Chirrut’s mind shimmers, edged with feelers, hungry for messages, for a grid of sense.

The sun, he remembers, is frail and dewy, angling away like errant vapour from the domes and the glittering mosaics in the murals. Useless light:  the city’s solar dishes had to coax heat out of it, old, old dying light.

But now that his mind and his body are sharp with the recent practice of zama-shiwo, he can feel the sun’s heat, amplified. The sun is a hot salty coin at the back of his throat when he tips his face upward. Sunlight is swallowing metal. The scrape of thirst.

Where Chirrut is standing on this rooftop, he should not be able to feel this much warmth. Not at this time of the day, because this time of the day, the shadow of the Temple would have stretched over it, blotted out the sun.

The spire of the Temple is no more, though. And its shadow fled with it.

***

The holopad buzzes as Chirrut puts the porridge to boil on the portable stove.

“Look,” Chirrut says when the transmission comes through, “I’m eating. Or at least I’m going to.”

Baze makes a noise of approval on the other end. There’s silence for a bit.

“There was--” Baze begins. And then changes his mind. “This marshland planet, it’s got a very high evaporation capacity. Whole lakes can vanish in days. Then it will rain and rain somewhere else until there are floods, and there’ll be a new lake. All within such a short span of time. They call this the planet of Leaping Lakes.”

Chirrut imagines it. The transient landscape of it. The lakes leap faster in his mind, faster than Baze, slogging through marshes that dry out as he walks, his skin old and cracked from sand. Unamphibious. Dragonfly speeders zipping over dead reed beds.

“I had to--the job involved--,” Baze begins.

“You don’t have to tell me,” Chirrut says. “About the jobs that you do. I can hazard a guess. Or three.”

“What if I want to talk about them?”

“Then tell me how you’ve changed. How they’ve changed you.”

The porridge boils over. Chirrut hisses and Baze lets out a long, slow sigh. Too long and slow to be sincere.

“Your fault,” says Chirrut testily. The porridge has thickened into a layer that clings to the bottom of the pot. A skin of rice. Carbon bitter.

***

Baze fled not long after the Temple was sacked.

“I will never put on those vestments again,” Baze told Chirrut all those years ago. “They have been burnt.”

Chirrut reeled. He’d known the slow crumble of Baze’s faith. But still. “I won’t let you. You can’t go. You are the most devoted of all the Guardians.”

The words broke out of him, splinters of pleas.

“Then come with me,” said Baze. “The Temple is gone. The kyber crystals are gone. There’s nothing sacred here any longer.”

“The Force is still here.”

“Yes it is,” Baze started to walk towards the gates of the Temple. Across the half-uprooted courtyard. “The Force is here and there and everywhere and it is dead. We breathe in its deadness every day. We celebrate its death in the deaths of everyone else. So. Are you coming?”

Chirrut steeled himself. “A match.”

Baze laughed. “I’m not a Guardian. I don’t play with sticks any longer.”

“If you beat me, you can go. You can leave.”

“And you’ll come with me.”

Chirrut didn’t say anything.

“Fine. Just to humour you, then,” Baze said.

They sparred in that ruined courtyard and Chirrut won.

He brought Baze to the ground, kicked his knees in, elbowed his throat and slammed his staff into Baze’s abdomen.

Baze lay on the ground, panting. How Chirrut would have liked to straddle him, lick away the blood from his teeth. He’d hit Baze on the jaw.

“Well,” said Baze. “I guess I stay, then.”

Chirrut hated the hostility of his laughter. He put the end of his staff at Baze’s neck, tipped his chin upwards.

“No,” Chirrut said.

***

“Are you still angry at me?” Baze asks. The sound of thunder in the background. But not thunder. Just a downpour in the marsh planet, in some distant corner of the galaxy.

The generator in the room that he lives in is old. It rattles. It smells like breath. There are probably small dead things caught beneath its casing, things like rodents and moths, fossilised inside.

“No,” Chirrut says. “Are you?”

“Not at you. Never at you.”

***

There are countless things to be celebrated in Jedha City. Apart from the big festivals. There are weddings, births, engagements, various milestones of growth. Deaths, sometimes, depending on what you believe in. Seasonal shifts. Phenomena like rain.

The Imperials have put a damper on many of the Holy City’s festivals, and declared that permits need to be granted for the rest.

But here’s the thing about people: they remember. They remember when celebrations are due, when rituals start calling to them, feast days notched into their internal calendars. The secret way which they measure time within themselves.

And so people find other reasons for celebration. New acquaintances. Extra rations. Finding lost things. Finding lost people. And so on.

The reasons for celebrating anything become smaller and smaller. Until Chirrut finds himself rejoicing at coins on the street. Or coins in an alms bowl. A call of a bird far out beyond the city walls. Clean washing brushing against his face as he wanders through the alleyways and courtyards. A day without the sound of blaster fire in some quarter of the city or other. A memory, an old visual of the inner sanctum of the Temple, stored in his ghost eyes. Still vivid. Preserved even after the destruction of the building.

He goes home in the evening, his stomach a whorl of hunger. The pot with the burnt crust of porridge is still sitting on the stove. The smell is thick and disheartening. Outside, wind. Sand scours the window.

The sting of saline. There are ghosts in his eyes. And sometimes they weep.

But then. Then he remembers something. He reaches for the holopad. Trusts in the Force. Prays for connection.

A crackle and a hum. There is transmission. There is a line, the thinnest thread across the galaxy, but steady. It feels like a celebration.

***

“I was finally getting some sleep,” Baze grumbles. But it’s a glad sound. Relief to be woken from the lonely press of sleep.

“So,” says Chirrut, “when are you coming home?”

.

.

.

bou din waa zuk - literally translates to ‘boil telephone porridge’. means when you talk for hours on the phone. except there are probably no phones in R1

[safarikalamari]

We Are (a)

(version b on AO3)

Chirrut’s soulmark starts as a circle on the inside of his wrist.

He traces along the mark, imagining all the beautiful lines that will grow from it

He grins, wide and gap-toothed when his first big injury sprouts a jagged line and cries when the loss of his sister forms a small bird.

Other marks appear as well, but from where, Chirrut cannot say. Some seem random, others showing as they see fit.

By the time Chirrut enters his training at the temple, his mark has begun trailing up his arm

He shows it proudly when he can and the other trainees question every symbol and line. 

All of the trainees except for one.

A sullen boy who sticks to the corners, avoiding Chirrut’s eyes whenever they are near each other. 

Chirrut tries to reach out, but the boy remains distant and Chirrut gives up hope for now.

When the news of his fading eyesight comes, Chirrut breaks down.

He cries into his arms and runs his fingers along his marks, sobbing at the thought of those he’ll never get to see.

An arm wraps around his shoulders and Chirrut looks up to see the boy who had stayed away for so long.

The boy wipes away Chirrut’s tears before rolling up his sleeve, a small gasp leaving Chirrut.

The marks are the same, but the boy’s are raised, like small hills rolling along his arm. Chirrut feels over them and closes his eyes, the images still so clear.

“Baze,” the boy says.

Both stare at their arms as raised dots appear and Chirrut feels over them, already knowing their meaning. 

Chirrut manages to smile as he traces over his and Baze’s names, a new sense of strength growing within.

Yes, his eyesight will be gone, but he’ll learn, adapt, and always be able to see the new marks on his skin with the help of Baze, his soulmate.

[sarkastically]

Smaller Than Himself

Spiritassassin Week 2017, Prompt 1: First Impressions

Baze Malbus is little more than one giant bruise when he is brought to the temple. A giant bruise and a mess of tangled, dirty hair. He has five broken ribs, a black eye, a split lip, and a twisted ankle that he limps on, hissing pain with every step but refusing to lie down, refusing to take it easy. He doesn't want to be coddled, he insists. He is not an invalid, not a child. He is just hurt. It is evident in the way he says it, quick, slapdash with no modicum of shame at all, that not only has he been hurt before, but that he is used to it, so used to it that he doesn't understand why the masters make tutting noises, why the healers frown and turn their heads when they find the seemingly never-ending collection of scars across his broad body. He just scowls at them, obviously annoyed by how much they care, unused to the that feeling, and repeats that he is not a child.

He is fourteen, still a child despite his size and his declaration, despite the bright flares of his eyes that show, in all the worst ways, that he knows things that children should not know, but this type of knowledge is common on Jedha. Jedhan has many words for child, many words for adult and all the layers in-between. They follow a range of innocence, a marking of how much one has seen and endured and felt. No one knows where to put Baze on the scale yet, and all he does is snarl, all bite, all teeth like something backed into a corner over and over again, like something that has never known a kind touch once in its life. He is so large for fourteen. He is so tall, and he is so broad. There are trees in the temple garden smaller and frailer than this boy who claims he is not a boy, never has been a boy, doesn’t even know what that is because he is just him. He is just him. And that is what the masters go with. This is Baze, they say and little else because everything that he is screams at the world around him in his clenched fists and his clenched face and the way he hisses words through his teeth as though they will be stolen from him otherwise.

He is a not a candle flickering low in the wind. He is not fragile. He is a blaster bolt in the night lighting up the entire city with its brilliance born of pain and heartbreak and anger.

The masters know that they are going to have their hands full with him. It will go one way or the other. They will heal him, tame him, uncurl his fists, unbreak his heart, lighten his soul. Or they will heal him and watch him slip back into the night to blaze the world around him with the fire spilling out of his chest, unfurling from his eyes, a streak of ruin, to burn himself out. They have seen it before, but there is no way of knowing which way the scales will tip. All is as the Force wills it, after all. All is as the Force wills it. It becomes a hard statement when they watch the burning children, the ghost fire children, limp into their circle and then rocket back out to meet what is likely to be an untimely end.

All is as the Force wills it sometimes becomes a hollow, sad mantra, a way of dealing with the fact that sometimes there is nothing that can be done, nothing that can be changed, sometimes even the softest hand, even the most well meaning attempt can fail if the person on the other side doesn’t want to accept it, doesn’t want to try. You cannot force someone to be saved.

All is as the Force wills it, they tell him, and Baze, bright eyes, sad heart, burning, a brush fire, a high pitched scream caught in the wind and echoing in the valleys, looks at them as though he doesn’t understand any of the words they are saying, as though he doesn’t know the Force when he drips with it, as though he doesn’t understand the concept of will as though he lives from one moment to the next without considering how, without making conscious choices, bouncing off the walls when he hits them to change direction.

It is a hinge point. It is a crux. It is a marking.

Something may rise or fail on this point.

When he speaks, he speaks in rumbles, the shake of the ground, the way that sounds reflect off the walls of the kyber caves and grow and swell until they are the only things that can be heard. Baze sounds like that. Sounds like someone meant for talking. Sounds like someone meant for prayers and holy scripture. He sounds like a Guardian.

Or a gun. Or ruin. It is so hard to tell, and there are so many ways in which the world can turn that they will never know until they know, until it is too late for it to be anything else no matter how hard they may wish for another outcome.

“What’s the Force?” he asks. For a moment there is a lull. For a moment there is a gleam. It is hope and sparkly bright and altogether everywhere like kyber dust in the air of the cutting room, everything illuminated. Until it dims. “And if it wills everything, why does it will the bad things as well?”

The masters dare not ask for definitions. They have them in droves, in the set of his eyes, in the scars across his body, in the three breaks the healers found that never set right but cause him no pain so they did not want to consider breaking them again, in the way that he holds himself smaller than himself and away, in his hair which looks like no one has ever combed it. In the way that he looks like no one has ever cared for him, ever loved him. Not once.

He is one of the cases that make even the most devoted of the masters wonder why the Force would will things like this even though they know better. They know better. But it still hurts, still rolls doubt over them like a wave of cold water crashing, sucking at their feet; undertow those from worlds with oceans explain when they sit around together and talk about the day.

Baze Malbus is an undertow. Strong, deceptive, dangerous, lurking and unseen until it is too late, until you have been pulled under.

They begin to believe that he will flee, fly again on the winds, as soon as he can. This is no Jedha bird rising from the ashes. This is no resurrection. This is just another lost cause child who will burn himself out. They begin to say farewell prayers in the night. They begin to make a bundle that maybe they can persuade him into taking with him, one that might keep him alive a little bit longer.

He is fourteen, but he is much older.

Chirrut Imwe is thirteen, but he is much younger.

Born of the temple, raised in the temple, soft in the Force, which is not the same thing as weak. Chirrut is not weak, never has been, scraped in the temple gardens when he was six years old and scrawny and small for his age, fought with the older, bigger children to prove that he could match them, that he could best them, that he was not to be looked over, passed over. Soft in the Force, a phrase used for one who sits in it, surrounded by it, a rock in a stream, hands in the water, feeling everything, disturbing nothing. Chirrut is Force inundated. It flows in him, around him, through him.

Soft in the Force people cannot be Jedi, cannot bend the universe’s energy to their will because they are more cognizant of it, of the way it works, flows. They understand where it needs to be, what it needs to do. They let it be what it is instead of what they want it to be.

Baze Malbus, the masters know, could have been Jedi, could have been Sith. Everything about him screams wanting, a need to make things different by any means possible, and his energy is strong enough it crackles into the air around him. He makes everything too bright or too dark or too loud. Static. Thunder. Lights behind eyelids. Earthquakes.

Their meeting is inevitable. Their meeting is the crash of a drum in the middle of silent meditation. Their meeting is a mountain falling down, a city burning, a sea pitching out of its bed.

Their meeting is two boys in the middle of a garden.

There are flowers on the tree in the center. Baze stands under it and stares up as though he has never seen flowers before, and his eyes are wide with something like awe, something gentler than everything else he has ever been before. It is a rare moment. It is a young moment on the face of someone who has obviously not had many of those. He stands, dirty face tipped up, hair a tangled mess on his shoulders, mouth open and stares as though trying to memorize every petal, every leaf, as though trying to absorb it all inside of himself so that he never loses it because he knows that it too will soon disappear as everything lovely disappears, sucked away into the giant hole of wanting that is the world.

Soft soft soft. He is soft in this moment. He is rounded edges. He is a dirty giant with flower petals in his hair, and joy in his eyes. He is all those layers peeled down to the heart of him, to the quick, to something that he has never been before. And this is the Baze Malbus that Chirrut sees. This is the moment that burns itself into his mind, that never fades, that lingers on the tip of his tongue for years to come like a word that can never be fully remembered, like something that can never be spoken.

Chirrut is thirteen and very young, but he loves this boy under the tree in a way that he doesn’t understand. It hits him like a foot to the chest in training, it knocks all the wind out of him like a fall he did not quite prepare for because he was laughing, it makes his head spin like dipping his fingers too far into the Force. He doesn’t understand it. He will not understand it for years to come.

(In truth, he will never quite understand it because those who think they can fully explain love know nothing. He will never quite understand, but he will always trust in it. The same way that he trusts in the Force, he will trust in it, because it surrounds him, and he can feel it. Even when his sight wanes, dims, disappears to leave him in a world of Force sense, he will know it. He will see it. And this memory, long distant, long over, never to be repeated because there is no longer a temple, no longer a garden, and this tree burned--he remembers it burning, remembers the tears in the thick of Baze’s voice when they found it and he howled like something very large wounded, something that would never be healed again--will always be there, will always be in his mind and before his eyes. His Baze, dirty, forgotten, harsh, covered in petals and looking up in awe. So very much a child for a moment. That boy who never learned to be one, who was never given the chance. Who seemed to have crawled out of a hole in Jedha with his fists clenched and blood on his face from the start. That boy not a boy never a boy, smiling.)

All of that is to come. All of that is the future, a future that tugs at his hand, fingers twined around his own, waiting to see if he will close them, if he will hold it or let it fall.

It is a hinge point. It is a crux. It is a marking.

May the Force of others be with you, it rises unbidden to the front of his mind.

There are many mantras in the temple. There are many lessons. There are the hard ones, the training, putting his body through form after form, getting faster, getting stronger so that even though he is lean, even though he is all arms and legs and skinny, he cannot be caught unless he wills it, can defend himself against anything, against everything. He might not win, but he can fight. His body is like kyber, hard and strong.

Chirrut likes the hard lessons; he likes the training. The Force is just a thing that is there for him. It has always been there, and he feels that it always will be, lurking, questing, bumping into his ankles in the middle of the night because something, something is happening somewhere and it needs to tell him. The Force is a lot like the younger initiates in this way only Chirrut cannot shoo it away when it gets too annoying. He has to listen to it and the way that it prattles. And if he talks a lot sometimes it is only because he is tired of listening always, wants someone else to listen for once, wants the sound of his voice, his own thoughts to be prevalent.

May the Force of others be with you is buoyant, a bouncing ball on the stone streets, falling but always rising again. It speaks less of the great universal power in everything and more of the way in which that energy manifests itself through others, through everyone, everything that lives. You are not alone in the Force, and the Force is not only in you, it preaches. Learn to see the Force in others, learn to see their beauty and their darkness and the way they fit into the pattern. Learn to look beyond yourself.

It is Chirrut’s favorite mantra, the one that spins from his lips when he has done something to displease the masters, when he is in trouble, when he is being, as they say, a child and not serious at all. He says it flippantly, lightly, as though the words are of no consequence at all, as though they are as weightless as his own great heart in his chest which fills and empties inside the cage of his body without him even considering that it happens. His heart is a truth. His heart is a constant. Like the Force.

(Baze Malbus is an undertow someone will warn him in two years when he is fifteen and pining painfully without realizing the truth behind the feeling. He will suck you down, he will drown you in the dark waters of himself without even realizing it. You will never rise again. Chirrut, you’re a bird, and you won’t survive that. You won’t swim to the surface. You’ll just sink with wet feathers, slip beneath the surface and no one will see you again.

There are birds that pluck fish from the water, Chirrut will answer, fifteen and head over heels and unable to listen to sensible suggestions. There are birds that swim. There are birds that rise again. I’m a bird, but I’m the Jedha bird.)

That, too, is part of that future in his hands, on the tips of his fingers, still not quite clenched, still not quite decided.

The Force of others.

Baze is still struck by the petals, standing still, eyes closed, flowers all over his face like he could just stay there forever, like he could turn into a tree himself and be happier with his life than he ever has been so far. In this moment, forgotten, peaceful, carved out of something that is not rock, that is not stone, that will not cut his hands to ribbons, that will not hurt like so much else has hurt in the past, like so much else that will hurt in the future. Baze is full size, not curled in on himself, not lurking, not hiding. The Force on him is bright, which he cannot see, cannot feel, cannot know, has never known really except that he is lucky. He is Baze, and he is lucky because no matter what happens, no matter how bad the situation, no matter how hurt, he always gets better. He always gets away before it gets worse. Luck is sometimes the Force in disguise. Luck can be how it bestows itself to those who do not have the eyes or the knowledge to know it for itself.

(I don’t need luck; I have you.)

Everyone’s Force is different. Different on everyone the way that ears are different and smiles. Unique and pleasant and wonderful to look for, wonderful to spot the subtle ways in which they are not the same. Chirrut learned that early on as a child with Force eyes, with Force sense, soft in it, surrounded by it. All he had to do was look or listen or feel. It was just. There. Always. Like his heart, like his feet, like his hands. Taken for granted and underappreciated.

There are flower petals falling, there is a soft breeze in Jedha, there is the sound of the city rising over the stone walls and the scent of jasmine heavy in the air, and it is serene. There is no drum. There is no avalanche. There is no fire. There is no heavy sea. There is nothing hard or harsh or broken in the moment. Just two boys, one lost in the first real softness he can remember, the other lost in watching him.

Their meeting is inevitable.

His hands clench and now everything is decided. “May the Force of others be with you.” Chirrut knows nothing else to say.

Baze curls inward, shoulders hunching reflexively, defensively, everything in his body tensing as he looks toward the sound. But there are flowers in his hair, stuck to the dirt on his face, trapped in his collarbones, and he does not look menacing. He looks frightened. He looks like everything he has been hiding.

Their meeting is soft.

[fyeahspiritassassin]

A little over a week until SpiritAssassin Week kicks off! If you need a reminder of themes and topics, please visit this link.

As for posting, please do not post for a theme or topic before its assigned day. You are more than welcome to post anytime after that day if you happen to miss one. Also, when posting, please be sure to include ‘spiritassassin’ and ‘spiritassassin week’ within the first five tags so that your post will show up in the tracked tags. Any other questions, just ask!

[archiveofolives]

APRIL 28: SHARE SONGS THAT REMIND YOU OF BAZE AND CHIRRUT → Here and Now by Blondefire and You by Keaton Henson

lol seeing as i was the one that suggested this theme i figured i ought to send some in. these are just two of the many songs that give me feels and they’re the ones that work for the canon. the rest are songs for the headcanon feels lmao. also the edits aren’t exactly my style anymore? but the fun part is that they were made entirely on the mobile pixlr app so if the quality turned out to be poor, i apologize as i didn’t check this on the pc prior to posting ❤️

[profoundingly]

Day 1: First Impressions

So I did this! I’ve never done one of these ‘x’ week things, so this was super fun!

Bonus:

[ivory-leigh]

There is an award ceremony held to honor the brave heroes who risked their lives to transmit the Death Star plans. Baze and Chirrut don’t attend. 

Instead they wander around the city together, standing by the tall windows as Baze describes everything he sees: rain forest, jungle, the ruins of the Massassi temple overgrown with climbing ferns and glowing orchids. It’s dark and beautiful and so very different from their cold, desert moon, and maybe, just maybe, one day it could be home. 

They head back to their little apartment and Baze plays the silver flute he learned as a child while Chirrut kneads their bread. They talk in quiet voices. They keep their memories alive. 

Jyn and Cassian come to deliver the medals they’d won and they find them sitting at the table together, holding hands. There’s a pot of strong coffee brewing on the stove, dark and sweet the way they made it back on Jedha, and the bread is baking and the cheese is sitting on the counter, waiting to be spread. The lights have been turned off. The rest of the planet might not exist. 

“You didn’t want to celebrate with us?” Cassian asks, setting the medals down on the table between them. Chirrut touches them with absent fingers, traces the way they glint, dull and metallic in the firelight. 

"This is our celebration,” Chirrut murmurs, and Baze nods slowly, his mouth gone tender at the edges, gone warm. 

“Everything that matters is at this table,” he says.“What else could we need?” 

[triplestardraw]

This lil comic is day 1: first impression

[kannibal]

They rescued each other. That’s how they met. 

Day 2// Spiritassassin week // Hurt Comfort

[kerriss]

Spirit Assassin manip 23 

[anagrammaddict]

About A Plant

Still chasing the prompts. ^.^ This one is dialogue-heavy.

For SpiritAssassin Week 2017, hosted by @fyeahspiritassassin Prompt is: confessions

Baze is a skilled fighter, fast and tenacious, but there are too many ravagers in the fray.

They knock away his knives and the pair of blasters he’d surreptitiously brought to the mission. The Temple Elders had sent him to bring resources to an outlier settlement that had been plagued by ravager raids, but instead, he’d run into the ravagers themselves.

One of the ravagers strikes the back of Baze’s head with the butt of a blaster rifle; another kicks his knees in, and the third smashes their boot into his jaw. Baze hawks out a gurgled stew of blood and curses.

“Throw him in with the other one. We’ll decide what to do with him later,” sneers the first ravager.

He’s hauled off to one of the crawler units in the middle of the ravagers’ caravan, the rustiest, dankest unit of all, smelling of piss.

“You’re in for a good time with your new cell-mate.” The guard at the doorway of the prison unit bares fangs at him. “Fuckin’ Force-botherer.”

They put restraints on his wrists and slam the door behind them. Light slants in from the barred skylight in the ceiling. The locks click and seal. They don’t sound too secure; if somehow he can free himself, he’ll be able to kick the door down and escape this shithole.

Baze’s eyes adjust to the rank gloom of the unit, and it is then that he realises that there’s someone shackled directly opposite him.

Wait. He knows that silhouette, that chuckle–

“Well,” says Chirrut, “Fancy seeing you here.”

“What,” says Baze, struggling (and somewhat failing) to draw a deep calm breath, “in the name of all things holy are you doing in here?”

“Waiting for you.”

“I will--ignore the implications of your last statement for awhile. I’m sure I’ll understand things better the longer I sit here in the dark listening to you.” Baze grits his teeth, tries to move his wrists within the cuffs. He’s still seeing the odd star from the blow to his head. “And how did you know I was going to wind up here in this cell? And no cheating answers!”

“I didn’t. But The Force did.”

“I said no cheating answers!”

“The Force,” says Chirrut calmly, “does not play by your rules. There are no cheats in the Force.”

“Chirrut.”

“Fine,” snaps Chirrut. “If you must know, I’m here because you owe me something.”

“I owe you something?” Baze raises an incredulous eyebrow. Good thing he’s all shackled up secure like this, or else he’d have leapt across the space between them and given that entitled bastard a good shaking.

“Yes. A confession.”

Baze breathes. “What do I have to tell you that I haven’t already told you? You know that I don’t keep secrets from you.”

“We’ll see.” Chirrut shifts in the dark. Baze can hear him moving his neck, straightening the cricks out of his bones. “In our shared quarters in the Temple, there is a single window. Do you remember what used to sit on the windowsill?”

Baze is really wondering if he’s indeed having this conversation. Sometimes talking to Chirrut can be such a surreal experience. Not always in a good way. “Yeah. I don’t know. Some old carvings from the souk. A plant.”

“That’s right. Think about the plant.”

“Still don’t where you’re going with this.”

“The plant.”

“I’m thinking of the plant, Chirrut.”

“What kind of plant is it?”

“Uneti seedling. Found it growing somewhere and put it in a pot and gave it to you.”

“Describe the plant to me. And just do it. Don’t ask why.”

Might as well play along. “It’s green. Ish. Long leaves. Actually no. It’s dead.”

“Ha!” Chirrut shouts, suddenly. “Have you got anything to confess?”

“About the plant,” says Baze, deadpanning.

“About the plant.”

Baze breathes deeply. His headache is getting worse. The smell of the place isn’t helping, and he’s really straining his eyes trying to see Chirrut’s expression, trying to see if Chirrut has been hurt by the ravagers.

“I killed it,” he says. “I spilled battery acid on it by accident.”

The unit begins to rumble as the engines start firing. The ravager caravan is on the move.

“Thank you,” Chirrut says. “For confessing.”

“That’s all you wanted to know.”

“It is.”

“Good,” says Baze. “Now. Would you please tell me why. The fuck you are locked up in this shithole cell? I thought you’d gone to visit the Cadera Monastery.”

“I was on my way there,” Chirrut answers. “But the Force pulled me off my path. I felt disinclined to go to the monastery. I just kept being bothered by something. Then I thought of you. Then I remembered something I wanted to ask you. So I went to find you out in the desert. I came across the ravagers and decided to wait with them until you arrived.”

Baze tries to process the nonsense of Chirrut’s story. He can’t quite manage it. But then again, this is Chirrut. The more he tries to explain something (and he does it in a way that makes his logic sound like the only obvious thing in the galaxy), the less sense it actually makes.

He will make a good candidate as future Venerable Master Guardian of the Temple.

“So the thing you wanted to ask me was about the plant.”

“It was,” Chirrut agrees. More silence. “Baze?”

“I’m here.”

“You’re hurt. I can hear your breathing. They hit you hard.” Chirrut’s voice goes tight. “They won’t get away with this.”

“And the ravagers didn’t hurt you?” says Baze.

“I didn’t fight them. While waiting for you, I thought I’d talk to them about the Force, and how we are all equal in it, and that there is purpose to be found if we sought it in the Force. Sadly, they were less than eager to listen.”

“So you went up to a bunch of bandits and started preaching at them. No wonder they called you a Force-botherer.”

“I was making small talk,” says Chirrut indignantly.

“Next time,” says Baze trying to be conciliatory, “next time you want to go out and preach the scriptures of the Whills around the desert, I’m coming with you.”

“Why?” Chirrut’s voice is suddenly sharp. “Why is it so important that you go where I go?”

“What d’you mean ‘why’? Why even ask such a stupid question?”

“Because apparently I am a stupid person and a fool,” snaps Chirrut. “So tell this fool why.”

“Because.” Baze is going to need a lot of air in his lungs for this. So he takes the deepest breath that he can, like he’s preparing to enter into a deep meditative state. Except he is nowhere close to meditating. Then the rant blows out of him. “Because I care. I care about you and what happens to you. Do you honestly think that I enjoy being such a nag? It goes against my very nature, and my god, Chirrut, sometimes I wish I can just abandon you to all the ravagers of the world. But I can’t. Because I can’t. So instead I wish a sinkhole will open at my feet and then I’d get flushed down and out through the asshole of the galaxy. I wish I’d get eaten by wolves because because because. Because you’re so fucking infuriating sometimes. You know why? Because! That’s why!”

“You can just say,” Chirrut’s voice is unperturbable. A serene note that somehow makes some of the anger leach out of Baze. “You can just say that you love me.”

“I love you,” says Baze. “And I always have. That’s why. Because I love you.”

The minutes inch past like flies. The ravager caravan must be crossing stony terrain, because the unit jerks and jolts and worsens Baze’s headache.

“Baze,” says Chirrut.

“Still here.”

“About that plant. I really liked that plant. I know you grew it specially for me in the back garden of the Temple. When it flowered you transferred it into a pot and gave it to me. You didn’t just find it. You grew it and tended to it.”

“It’s just a plant. I’ll grow you another. Takes a long time for the seed to germinate, but I’ll manage.”

“I am glad that you are here with me. And I love you too.”

The unit begins to slow down. The ravagers are stopping.

“I think,” says Chirrut, “that the Force is done with us being here. It’s time for us to go home.”

There is a clink of metal, the sound of unlocking. And then Chirrut shakes the restraints off his wrists and crosses the unit to where Baze is. He holds up a tiny device that looks like a many-pronged star. It’s an old unlocking gadget that is only ever handmade these days. An antique. But it will definitely be able to unfasten the cuffs.

“You had an escape means all this time,” says Baze in the deadest, flattest tone that he can muster.

“Surely you didn’t think that I wouldn’t have a backup plan.” Chirrut works the mechanism on Baze’s cuffs. They click open and Baze drops his arms to his side in relief, rolls his shoulders, cracks his neck.

“One day you’ll be the death of me. Mark my words.”

Chirrut kisses the chafed parts of Baze’s wrists. Wipes Baze’s face with his sleeve. “Until then, I’ll be your life.”

“Let’s go,” says Baze.

As the unit grinds to a halt, he kicks down the door and they burst out, the pair of them, into sunlight.

.