Padme lives. She runs. -- Leia is growing in fits and spurts, eating greedily and crying loudly. She stays in a sling on Padme’s chest when they move, Luke held snug in a sling around Obi Wan’s. Luke gets a whole head of thick brown hair while Leia’s is still patchy and bald, but he never matches his sister’s powerful lungs. When Padme had been sitting in her high senatorial apartment on Corsucant, holding Anakin’s sweaty hand, she had never imagined she’d be murmuring desperately soothing noises to her fussy daughter while she shot around a corner at stormtroopers, while R2D2 meddles with a ship’s blast doors behind her. Luke starts teething on a hot jungle planet where they hunker down for three weeks, sleeping in an abandoned old temple and catching the local wildlife for dinner. Leia takes her first steps in the belly of a Corellian freighter they’ve stowed away on. She wobbles between Padme’s outstretched hands and Obi Wan’s knees and boxes of smuggled luxuries. When she falls down, Obi Wan surges forward, heart in his throat, but Leia laughs.

Cool, smooth leather touched his jaw—gloves. Because of course Obi-Wan had thought of that as well. “Quin,” Obi-Wan said, voice quiet, from somewhere on his left. “Are you ready?” “I thought you’d never get on with it,” Quinlan complained, but in truth he was already feeling more at peace. These moments together with Obi-Wan felt more akin to meditation than most might realize, or at least he’d always thought so.

When the Jedi pulls him out of the darkness, it feels like sunrise. There's no sense of coming awake, just light, just a brightening world, and when Hardcase opens his eyes there's a supernova standing above him, the wreckage of the facility drifting around her and catching the glow.

“Too slow, kid,” a voice calls, half a second before a pebble bounces off the top of Jon's head.

I know you,” Jaster says, low, and Jon freezes, halfway to his feet in the snow.

Depa takes one step into the council chambers and stops dead, clapping a hand over her mouth.