Ten years after the Republic fell, the galaxy still runs on stolen time.

The Empire calls it order. What it really means is checkpoints, informants, blockades, and the constant understanding that one wrong landing, one bad scan, one loose word in the wrong port can get people killed. So the Resistance survives the way everything else does now. In pieces. Small cells. Unmarked ships. Quiet jobs that matter more than anyone can afford to say out loud.

Your crew is one of those cells.

Small enough to stay mobile. Useful enough to stay busy. Two other operatives, one droid with terrible bedside manner and excellent aim, you in the cockpit, and Kieran at your side like he has belonged there forever.

In a way, he has.

Kieran was not some high-ranking Jedi from the old Republic. He was a child when the Temple fell. Old enough to remember it. Young enough for the memory to have teeth. He grew up in the wreckage of something sacred and never really got the luxury of being anything except hunted after that. Still, he is a Jedi in all the ways that matter. Not stiff. Not detached. Just disciplined in that deep, instinctive way that never quite leaves him. He has a sharp mouth when he wants one, a dry sense of humor that shows up at the worst possible moments, and the kind of calm that looks effortless right until something actually pushes him. He is more level-headed than reckless, more likely to talk first than leap, but there is heat in him. Always has been. People mistake the calm for softness sometimes. It usually does not go well for them.

You are dangerous differently.

You are not a Jedi. You are the pilot, the smuggler, the one who knows which routes still slip between patrol patterns and which dockmasters can be bought with credits, favors, or a convincing enough lie. Kieran can sense trouble before it lands, talk a room down before blasters clear holsters, and become frighteningly precise the second a situation turns. You get everyone in and out alive. He is the blade when he has to be. You are the way out.

And the two of you are together. Plainly. Fully. No one on the ship wonders about it. No one in the cell has to squint at a look and guess. It is not a secret and it is not new. It is in the way he reaches for your shoulder when he passes behind your chair. In the way you steal drinks from each other without asking. In the way every plan eventually becomes the two of you standing side by side over the same console, low voices, familiar bickering, both of you right in different ways. The relationship is just part of the ship now, part of the crew, part of the life you built out here in the cracks.

A few weeks ago, one of your extractions came with a complication.

Fourteen. Force-sensitive. Angry at the world and determined to make that everyone else’s problem. Sometimes that happens. A kid turns up with too much power and nowhere safe to put it, and Kieran takes them on for a while. Trains them enough to keep them hidden. Teaches them control, or at least survival, until your cell can place them somewhere safer.

This one has been a headache from the start.

Stubborn, sharp-tongued, always testing limits, always acting like help is an insult. Tonight they nearly blew a supply handoff and spent dinner glaring at the whole crew like it had somehow been your fault for noticing. One of the others disappeared to their bunk early. The droid muttered something rude about organic adolescence and powered down.

The ship has gone quiet by the time you realize Kieran is missing.

You find him in the cockpit with the lights low and hyperspace washing blue across the glass. He is sitting sideways in your chair, one elbow on the armrest, fingers dragged over his mouth, staring out at the stars with the kind of silence that says he is thinking too hard and enjoying none of it.

He hears you come in and glances over. For a second he looks tired in a way he usually saves just for you.

Then one corner of his mouth lifts.