The first time Kaito left the bedroom under his own power, the world expanded in a dizzying rush of wrongness and wonder.
He took stock. His bundled shihakushō and asauchi were leaning in the corner, undisturbed. They saw a simple, if oddly crafted, sword and some black clothing. He left them there, a silent piece of his past.
For days, his universe had been the four walls, the window, the kind faces of Lena and Tef Trailer, and the endless, curious chatter of their daughter Mara. His body had mended from its most immediate wounds, the deep bruises fading, the cracked ribs knitting under Lena's careful applications of bacta salve. But his spirit felt thin, stretched over a frame that didn't fit.
Lena had guided him to the kitchen that morning, her hand firm under his elbow. The main room of the farmhouse was a space of warm wood and woven textiles, dominated by a large table scarred from generations of use. Sunlight streamed through the windows, illuminating dust motes dancing in the air. It should have felt peaceful. To Kaito, it felt alien. Every object was a question he couldn't ask.
"Sit," Lena said, her voice gentle. He obeyed, lowering himself into a chair that felt too solid, too real.
Mara appeared from a side door, her face lighting up. "You're up!" She dashed over, stopping just short of colliding with him, her energy a palpable force. "Do you want to see my tooka doll? Her name is Loola. Or I could show you the new baby shaak! It's really wobbly!"
"Mara," Lena chided softly. "Give him space. His head is still full of quiet."
"But I can help fill it up!" Mara insisted, undeterred. She pulled up a stool and sat facing Kaito, her elbows on the table, chin in her hands. "What do you want to know first? I know lots of things."
Kaito looked at her. Her eyes were the same warm brown as her mother's, but filled with a bright, unguarded curiosity he found strangely disarming. In the Seireitei, children were solemn, trained early for duty. This open, effusive joy was new.
"Everything," he said, the Basic word feeling true.
Mara beamed. "Okay! Lesson one! That's a cup." She pointed to a ceramic mug. "You drink water from it. Water is what falls from the sky when it rains and is in the river. This," she grabbed a round, red fruit from a bowl, "is a jorgan fruit. It's sweet. Do you want a bite?"
She held it out. Kaito took it carefully. The skin was smooth and cool. He had eaten food Lena brought him, but this was different. An offering, not a provision. He took a small bite. The flavor was a burst of tart sweetness. He must have made a face, because Mara giggled.
"Sour, right? The first one of the season always is. Here." She took the fruit back, deftly sliced it with a small knife from her pocket, and sprinkled a pinch of white powder from a shaker on the table. "Salt. Makes it taste better." She handed him a slice.
He ate it. The salt did something, balancing the tartness. It was a simple, profound piece of knowledge. Salt makes sour fruit taste better.
"Thank you," he said.
Mara's smile could have powered Theed. "You're welcome! Lesson two..."
Thus began his true education. Mara was his primary instructor in the lore of the farm and the immediate world. Lena taught him practical words and care. Tef, once he saw Kaito could walk without falling, began the process of turning his hands from useless things into tools.
The first tool was a simple hoe. They stood at the edge of the vegetable garden, the rich, dark soil smelling of life and damp.
"Like this," Tef said, his voice a low rumble. He sank the blade into the earth with a practiced twist, lifted, turned a clump of weeds. "Breaks the ground. Kills the stealweeds. The vegetables need room."
He handed the tool to Kaito. The wooden handle was smooth from use. Kaito mimicked the motion. It was clumsy. The angle was wrong, the bite too shallow. He over-corrected, driving the blade too deep, his new muscles straining.
Tef watched, arms crossed. "Again."
Kaito did it again. And again. For an hour, under the mild Naboo sun, he turned soil in a slow, inefficient rhythm. There was no kidō-like finesse here, no spiritual efficiency. It was pure, grinding physics. His shoulders burned. Sweat stung his eyes. But with each repetition, his body learned. The motions became less awkward, the blade biting with more consistency.
"Good enough," Tef grunted finally, inspecting the row. "Slow. But the weeds are dead. Slow and dead is better than fast and alive."
It was the first hint of approval Kaito had received from the man. It felt like a greater reward than any commendation from a seated officer.
Days settled into a pattern. Mornings were light chores with Mara—feeding the shaaks, collecting eggs from the nimble, colorful birds they called gullipuds. Mara's constant narration was a stream of essential data. "Don't stand behind the blue shaak, she kicks." "The gullipud eggs with speckles are for eating, the smooth green ones are for hatching, don't mix them up!" She treated his complete ignorance not as a burden, but as the most exciting puzzle.
One afternoon, she led him to a muddy bank of the small creek that bordered the farm. "Look!" she whispered, pointing.
Crouched in the reeds was a creature about the size of a large dog, but with slick, amphibious skin, large bulbous eyes, and four webbed feet. It was gnawing on a root, completely unaware of them.
"A frisk-frog," Mara breathed. "They're shy. If you move too fast, they jump into the water and you won't see them for weeks."
Kaito watched it. It was utterly alien. No Hollow mask, no malevolent spirit. Just a creature, living its life. He felt a wariness—the instinct of a predator assessing unknown fauna—but beneath it, a spark of pure, intellectual interest. What is its life? What does it need?
As if sensing his gaze, the frisk-frog stopped chewing. Its bulbous eyes swiveled toward them. Mara froze. Kaito held perfectly still, the way he would when observing a potentially dangerous Hollow from a distance. The creature stared for a long moment, then seemed to decide they were part of the landscape. It went back to its root, gave a soft croak, and waddled into the water with a surprisingly graceful dive.
Mara let out a held breath. "You're good at being still," she said, impressed.
"It seemed... cautious," Kaito said, finding the word.
"Everything is, out here," Mara said wisely, as if she were a hundred years old. "You just have to listen."
His lessons in stillness were about to be tested by something far less cautious.
The medic, Olwin, was not human. When his repulsor truck hummed into the yard two weeks after Kaito's arrival, the man who stepped out was a species Kaito had never imagined. He was tall and slender, with grayish, pebbled skin, large, dark eyes that held a sharp intelligence, and a crown of flexible, tentacle-like appendages that shifted around his head as he moved. A Rodian.
Every instinct in Kaito screamed. This was not a Hollow, but it was not human. Its form was wrong. Its movements were fluid in an unsettling way. The wariness he'd felt for the frisk-frog magnified into a cold, professional alertness. His hand twitched, reaching for a zanpakutō that wasn't there.
Lena stepped forward, smiling warmly. "Olwin! Thank you for coming all the way out here."
"Of course, Lena," the Rodian said, his voice a melodic, slightly buzzing Basic. "Any friend of the Trailers." His large, dark eyes immediately fixed on Kaito, who stood frozen by the water pump. "And this must be your mysterious patient. I am Olwin Drayson."
The medic approached. Kaito forced himself to stand his ground, to unclench his jaw. Not a threat. A healer. A different kind of healer. He repeated it in his mind. The Rodian's scent was unfamiliar, a mix of antiseptic and something earthy.
"Hello," Kaito managed, the word tight.
Olwin's head-tendrils twitched in what might have been a smile. "No need for nerves. I'm just here to see how you're mending. May I?" He gestured to the farmhouse.
Inside, Olwin's examination was thorough and dispassionate. He used a handheld scanner that emitted soft chimes, its light playing over Kaito's body. He asked simple questions, his large eyes missing nothing.
"What is your name?"
"Kaito."
"Do you know where you are?"
"A farm. On Naboo." He used the planet's name carefully, a recently acquired piece of data.
"Do you know what day it is?"
Kaito looked to Lena, who shook her head slightly. "No," he said.
"Can you tell me what this is?" Olwin held up his medical scanner.
Kaito looked at the sleek device. It was technology. It made readings. That was all. "A tool. For healing."
"Specifics?"
"I do not know."
Olwin made a note on a datapad. "Fascinating. Profound loss of semantic and cultural memory. You retain core cognitive function, language acquisition capability, and basic motor skills, but the database is empty." He put the scanner down. "The good news is, your physical body is healing remarkably well. The bad news is, the mind... the mind rebuilds on its own schedule. You may never get your old memories back. You are building a new person from the foundation up."
The diagnosis was delivered without pity, just clinical fact. It was, Kaito realized, the perfect cover. It wasn't a lie. He was building a new person. Just not from a foundation they could comprehend.
After Olwin left, promising to check back in a month, Kaito sat on the porch, the Rodian's alien visage lingering in his mind. The galaxy was not just humans and peaceful farms. It contained multitudes. Beings with different shapes, different biologies. The thought was overwhelming, but also, in a strange way, fitting. He was a new being here too.
His real struggle remained invisible. The scaffold. As his days filled with simple work and Mara's lessons, the moments of spiritual crisis still came. A feeling of his soul fraying, of the anchors that once held him dissolving into the void between worlds.
He found his solution at the rycrit tree. The massive, ancient thing stood sentinel at the northern border of the farm. Its roots were like gnarled fists gripping the earth, its branches a sprawling canopy of deep green leaves. And it pulsed.
It wasn't a sound or a light. It was a presence in the Living Force, a deep, steady well of planetary vitality. During a particularly bad episode—a wave of disorientation so severe he feared he would simply cease to exist—he stumbled to the tree and pressed his back against its rough bark.
Desperate, he did not try to call upon his shattered reiryoku. Instead, he did the opposite. He quieted his own spirit, let its frantic, fractured energy still, and then… he listened. He reached out not to take, but to perceive the immense, slow rhythm of the tree's life.
And then he leaned on it.
Not physically. Spiritually. He allowed the ragged edges of his own existence to align with the tree's immense, stable current in the Living Force. He didn't draw the energy into himself. He let his broken form rest against its flow.
The effect was immediate. The terrifying vertigo ceased. The feeling of dissolution receded, held back by the sheer, placid strength of the tree's life. It was like a collapsing man finding a solid wall to brace against. The wall didn't heal his injuries, but it stopped the fall.
He began practicing this in secret. He learned to find the quieter currents too—in the bubbling spring that fed the creek, in the deep, fungal networks in the forest floor, in the sleeping hive of insects in the meadow. He learned to temporarily brace his ruined spiritual architecture against these flows of external vitality. He built a fragile, invisible scaffold around his soul, using the world itself as support.
It was temporary. It was dependent on this planet's abundant life. It was not power. It was prosthesis.
One evening, after a long day helping Tef reinforce the barn roof, they all sat on the porch in companionable silence. Mara was half-asleep against Lena's side. Tef was cleaning his pipe. The sun was a molten coin sinking into the purple hills.
Lena looked at Kaito, her expression thoughtful in the twilight. "Olwin says you are building a new person," she said softly. "That is hard work. But you are not doing it alone."
Kaito looked at them—the tired farmer, the kind woman, the sleeping child. They had given him a space on their porch, a place in their rhythm. They asked for nothing but his presence and his labor.
His hands, once meant for holding a zanpakutō and shaping kidō, were now calloused from tools and soil. They were empty of the power he knew, but they were learning to hold other things. A cup of water. A hoe. A piece of fruit offered by a child.
The scaffold of Naboo hummed softly around his core, holding the fragments of his soul together. It was enough. For now, it was a foundation.
"I am here," he said, and for the first time, the words did not feel like a confession of being lost.
They felt like a promise to stay.