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kylostahp:
egregiousderp:
Minor headcanon post that’s not really fic–not quite.
I just…
Really really love giving Baze a shaved head when he’s a young, devout guardian.
Is all the art of him with the braids in his youth hella fine?
HELL YES.
Is the reasoning “well the Whills have aliens in it it seems kind of weird to have a mandatory head-shaving rule,” sound logically?
BAZE, ALSO YES.
BUT.
Picture a temple where everyone knows you don’t have to shave your head and Baze does it anyway because it’s supposed to be humble.
Picture a Baze who loves being a guardian but loves the ritual and demonstrative acts of it especially.
Picks the hardest possible paths for himself because of the challenge and the witnessed devotion of it.
I mean Bogan’s Balls, this man prays loudly over his food in public for like twenty minutes each day while the rest of the table sits in awkward silence.
He disrupts whole classes that aren’t used to him by dropping beside his desk and holding some impossible position of balance on his forearms that points his nose at the Kyber in the caves while he chants prayers under his breath, because some sutra somewhere talked about it as a true sign of reverence to the Force.
No one takes vows of freedom from attachments-
Except Baze Malbus.
No one follows all the fasts.
Oh. Except Baze Malbus. Who sits there next to you in the mess and doesn’t touch a grain of rice but instead calmly looks at you so that every grain feels like some sort of disappointment or test you failed where you were supposed to know this obscure religious observance or other.
And…the man is a nerd. Like. The biggest and most quietly extra nerd on the entire moon.
Tests for multiple Duans at the same time because legends did it that way and he wants to know if it’s possible. (All is possible through the Force, if you’re devoted enough, obviously, and isn’t he just?)
Peeps think he shaves his eyebrows too because pious, but no. That’s from backfires on attempting to make a lightbow when he’s sixteen.
At least two instructors have quietly left him alone in the workshop late at night because he’s chanting and praying over his bow.
Like, Malbus, you know you don’t have to worry about that for another decade, right?
Baze replies with the utmost patience and unruffled calm about some passage he was reading in some commentary you’ve never heard of, about how putting some poor antique weapon through engineering abuses it should never be subject to has X-level of symbolic value about the state of Faith in the believer and his trust in the Force.
There’s going to be a freaking crater in this little moon, and it’s going to have some bloody metaphorical value assigned to it, and his is all said with the matter of fact air that holds hat all things are connected and certainly a part of some great binding unity.
Like, okay, Malbus, but you’ll be dead.
“All is as the Force wills it.”
And. Like. What can you say?
It’s not like he’s wrong.
No one’s sure if he really believes or if he’s just a smug little dick.
(Both. It’s both. Why else do you take a vow against attachments when you’re a freaking teenager? The man refuses blankets in winter. The performance of faith is intrinsic to its process if you’re Baze Malbus.)
Somehow, out of all this slightly unsettling display of faith and piety, he manages to have one really good friend.
And it’s Chirrut Îmwe, the irreverent party-rock disaster, who slurps soup loudly in the middle of Baze’s very lengthy pre-meal prayers, flirts with every thing of every species, has that ridiculous tuft that always seems to stick up at the front of his poorly-cropped head, and tries to steal Baze’s fruit buns while he’s preoccupied.
Baze, as it turns out, can fight with his chopsticks and pray at the same time–with considerable strain.
Chirrut is delighted by this revelation and Breakfasts at their public table become immediately about a thousand percent more hectic.
Chirrut Îmwe would be a sign the Force was testing him if he wasn’t so irrationally charming-
(And that isn’t a thought he should be having. Because Baze, no, you made a vow to the Force-)
The scholar and the prodigy meet for breakfast every day, and argue contentedly together for the two thirds of the allotted hour left after Baze’s prayers. (Sometimes less, depending on how cheerfully obnoxious Chirrut is on a particular day.)
His irreverence should be grating but the thing is…Îmwe truly believes.
He feels the Force, with an instinctive grasp. Startles Baze into laughter sometimes with some outrageous quip that turns out to be an insight when he reflects on it later.
He expands them both without effort.
Baze spends a lot of his young adult years waking up in cold sweats and arguing with himself long into the evening. He prays for guidance a lot.
The Force doesn’t answer, but okay, the Force is complex. And probably busy managing a lot of unified things… it’s the duty. The dedication. The discipline that’s important. Someday all things will fall into place and he will be wise…
…It would be so much easier if he could convince himself Chirrut really didn’t like him. Or, barring that, that he doesn’t like this reckless, cocksure, grinning mess of a human being right back.
Young Baze Malbus is a picture of order and devotion.
And all that still doesn’t inspire the Force to be any more merciful to the Temple of Jedha.
It’s only when all the devotion in the world isn’t enough to stop the world from crumpling around him that Baze lets go of every self-imposed rule he put on himself, and he gives up, dares the Force to punish him for breaking the little rules, and then the big rules.
It never does.
Or, he thinks in his increasingly long meditations of blasphemy, because one does not simply stop thinking just because one ceases to believe, it already has.
What more could it take?, he asks at the start of every day.
Chirrut is beside him now. There’s no point in pretending he doesn’t want him there. No point in refusing attachment when he’s been wrapped up around Chirrut almost as long as he can remember, when Chirrut once brought him joy and insight in the Force that no one else ever could. Even as he wonders if this is going to be the thing, if this is it…
Chirrut rolls over next to him and continues snoring.
Chirrut has never denied his heart a single thing it has ever wanted. The Force delights in him. And he, finally, has learned, it seems, to delight in it as well. In the chaos, in the rubble, he has learned discipline.
Baze waits for him to finish praying at their shared meals in sullen, stubborn silence.
Baze is bitter, but still, at his core, unable to wish ill for it. Especially not for Chirrut, who he loves. Painfully. With great, weighty shackles of attachment.
He thinks of the Jedi.
The Force has always had its favorites.
And, more blasphemously still, how much good did the Force do them, exactly? When they gave it everything?
He feels old. And tired when Chirrut stirs enough to lazily push the hair out of his face and smiles sleepily, with a quarter-inch of blue visible from under his eyelids.
His hair is long now. Daring the Force to punish him further. To punish them both for the way Chirrut tangles his hands in it and draws it to his lips, smiling.
You look good like this.
Chirrut, you can’t see anything.
So? Chirrut grins. You still look good.
At least Chirrut’s hair is kept even, Baze reflects, the full bristle of his head kept that way by Baze’s steady, gentle hands with the buzzing razor. His hairline’s drawn back, but the brush beneath Baze’s fingers is still soft and full, vigorous in all the ways Chirrut is.
He wonders what it would have been like to bury his hands in it when they had both been younger men, if he had not lived such an ascetic way.
Baze reflects on certain dark evenings, where he still wakes up in a cold sweat and reaches for the thing he believes in, rubbing his palms over Chirrut’s short, perfectly even, perfectly humble hair, that he is, to some extent, still given to demonstrations of devotion.
He still follows his rules and his codes even as he rages against unjust ones that give nothing back.
One his good days, he has himself very nearly convinced he will never go back, and will never give the Force that satisfaction. He has Chirrut, who shines like a beacon in a City that has lost all Hope, who grins and crafts sermons out of thin air like the prodigy he is. Chirrut, for whom nothing is difficult, but who has grown a hard core he sees at times when he is not quick enough, when he isn’t there to soften him.
Chirrut, who is soft bristle, and bright grin, and coiled skin under his fingertips, who still jokes about turning out the lights before they unite “I’m shy, you know?” squinting his grin so hard his sightless pupils vanish.
“You have never been shy about anything.”
“Aah. Well. My husband is a humble man. Perhaps he’s rubbed off on me.”
And Baze doesn’t argue the old argument of whether or not those devoted to the Force could ever claim to be one with anything else.
Some days he can’t tell if he married to get back at the Force or out of love. He isn’t sure which urge is more base in the eyes of the Force, which is still silent, is silent still when Chirrut is in his arms, praying rapturously against his mouth, his skin.
He holds onto him.
He doesn’t need anything else to believe in.
…On his good days.
YES GOOD AND ALSO FUCK THE ENTIRE WAY OFF
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