Chapter Text
Everyone believes they were meant for something more.
Greatness.
Happiness.
Love.
A life worth remembering long after the stars had forgotten their name.
People built futures in their minds the way children built castles in the sand, carefully, lovingly, convinced nothing could wash them away. In every version of tomorrow, they were the hero. They found love. They grew old. They buried their parents, held their children, and watched the sun rise one more time.
No one imagines unspeakable horrors were waiting just beyond the horizon. That kind of tragedy belonged to strangers. To someone else.
I knew better.
Maybe it was because I'd grown up knowing I was different.
Not better.
Different.
Dangerous.
That kind of distinction has a way of grinding hope into dust beneath the weight of reality. I learned too young that fairness was a comforting myth adults told children so they could sleep at night.
Life didn't owe you love. It didn't owe you tomorrow. Hell...it didn't even owe you family.
Some people spent their lives chasing dreams. I spent mine waiting for the next thing to shatter. Tiptoeing from one disaster to the next, hoping this time I might escape with only a few more cracks instead of breaking completely.
I wasn't a dreamer.
I was a realist.
Long before I ever stood beneath an alien sky or watched unfamiliar constellations stretch across the darkness, I carried a certainty so deep it felt carved into my bones.
Pain wasn’t simply part of my future. It was my future.
It was how I began and it was ultimately how I would end. I thought I understood what that meant. I thought I was ready.
I was wrong.
Because there are wounds that don't bleed. There was damage so complete it hollows you out until the person staring back in the mirror is little more than a ghost wearing your face.
Nothing could have prepared me for the day my world was ripped away from me. Or for the galaxy that found me in the ashes. I didn’t know it then, but that wasn’t where my story ended. It was simply the final chapter of the life I’d been born into.
My new life would begin beneath unfamiliar stars…
With a Mandalorian who had forgotten how to hope…
A child who would teach us both to love…
And a family none of us had been looking for.