bodhi rook week day 1!!!! the prompt was family, so i had some bodhi taking in young finn and teaching him how to make the bread his mother loved
Bodhi has always been prone to worrying but he felt like he was worrying about Finn a little too much. He couldn’t make himself stop, though. Was Finn eating enough? Did he like the house? Was he sleeping through the night without nightmares? Did he feel comfortable talking to Bodhi about anything? Did he like Bodhi’s cooking? Because Bodhi wasn’t sure he’d say so, if he did.
“Is that the same bread from last week?” Finn asked. He was standing at the counter, his posture still military-straight. Bodhi remembered instructors trying to get him to have ramrod shoulders like that during flight training too. He’d never been good at it. “I liked that.”
“It is!” Bodhi said. In the past couple of months, Finn had shot up, but he still had a round baby face and eyes too serious for a boy. He was only ten. “It’s my mother’s recipe,” Bodhi said softly. “She taught me how to make the bread when I was little, me and my little sister.”
Finn tilted his head, clearly thinking about something. Bodhi didn’t know what, because Bodhi didn’t know what the First Order had taught him about Jedha. Probably that their predecessors had reigned victorious over the monks there. “Can you find all the ingredients here?”
Bodhi shook his head. “I can usually find similar things though,” he said. He held out a bowl for Finn to sniff at. “These nuts go in the bread. They’re aren’t exactly what my mother used, but I added some sugar and berries to make them sweeter, like the nuts on Jedha. It still tastes good, huh?”
Finn took the bowl with careful hands and took a whiff. He took too deep a whiff, actually, and made an affronted face. “Can I help?”
Bodhi blinked at him, surprised. He shouldn’t have been, though. “I’d love some help,” he said. “Do you want an apron?”
Finn nodded, so Bodhi got him an apron. It was a little too big. Bodhi also got him a chair so that he could knead the bread next to him, so they were almost the same height. Finn approached kneading the bread with the same determination and care that he approached everything. Pretty soon, he was covered in flour, which was pretty adorable. Bodhi’s mother would undoubtedly have loved him, the way Bodhi loved him.
“That’s good!” Bodhi said, checking the consistency. “Okay, now we’re going to fold these nuts in, okay, like this.” He demonstrated. Finn watched and then did the same. “You’re a natural at this,” Bodhi said, and Finn beamed. Bodhi had been told by Leia, when he’d taken Finn in, that Finn was the brightest of his cadet class.
It kept Bodhi awake at night, sometimes, wondering what sort of horrors Finn would have faced being the brightest in his class.
That didn’t matter now, though, because Finn was here, with Bodhi. They had each other.
“Uncle Bodhi,” Finn said. The spiced nuts were almost fully folded into his bit of dough. “Can I ask you something?”
Bodhi looked down at him. Finn had an unusually serious look on his face. “Anything,” he said, because he wanted Finn to really believe that. Finn didn’t ask a lot of questions. Bodhi wanted him too, but he knew what the Empire was like. It was why Leia had asked him to take Bodhi in. So Bodhi didn’t push, yet. He let Finn come to him.
Finn looked back down at the dough and pressed a nut down with his thumb. “Does it hurt to think about your family?”
Bodhi’s hands stopped working at the dough. “Oh,” he said. He forced his hands to keep working. His hands knew what to do, they’d been doing this for years. “Yes, very much. Sometimes it’s overwhelming.”
“But sometimes it’s not,” Bodhi added quickly. “Like this, right now? My mother taught me this. And it hurts that she’s not around, but – she lives on in this recipe. It can be both, Finn. I can be sad they’re gone and I can miss them, and I do miss them, more than anything. But that doesn’t mean that I can only be sad forever. I want to remember that I can also be so so happy that I had them.”
It had taken him a long long long time to get this point. And he won’t lie to Finn, there were some days where he could barely get out of bed because he missed his family so much. Because he missed his sister’s laugh and his little niece’s smile. Because he missed the smell of Jedha and the clang of its marketplace and the cold desert, so seemingly empty and so so full.
But it’s been many years. Bodhi wanted to remember the good things more than ever.
Finn nodded, then said, “Can I miss people I don’t know?”
Bodhi paused. “Like your parents?” Finn gave a jerky nod, still looking down at the bread. He wasn’t crying, probably because he wasn’t sure he was allowed to. “I think so, Finn.”
“I just don’t know what happened to them.”
“I know,” Bodhi said. He gave Finn’s hand a clumsy pat. “And I’m sorry.”
“Well, we can fix that!” Bodhi said, tearing off a hunk of the bread and forming it into a little ball. “You have this one now, and I can teach you more.” His mother would be thrilled. “This counts, Finn. It might not be exactly the same, but I want you to have these recipes. My mother would want you to have them too, because we’re family now.”
Finn looked at him. “Really? Even though I made you sad?”
“Oh, Finn, you didn’t make me sad,” Bodhi said, and he reached out and pulled Finn into a hug. They were both getting flour all over the kitchen. “My family made me happy. And I carry them in my heart, both the love and the pain of missing them. But loss is just a part of life, yeah? There’s so much more.”
He felt Finn nod against his chest and gave him one last squeeze before releasing him.
“Thanks,” Finn said. “For everything.”
“Any time,” Bodhi said, and he meant it.
“You have flour on your face, Uncle Bodhi.”
Bodhi grinned. “My sister always threw flour at me,” he said, elbowing Finn. “That’s just family.”
