Chapter Text
“And these two things here are the escape pods. I’ve never needed ‘em, we shouldn’t need ‘em, but if it was ever necessary, all ya gotta do is press this button here to open the door – don’t worry about programming the trajectory, in an emergency, it won’t matter – get in, press the top button to seal it, and pull the big red lever to manually launch. But don’t worry too much, ‘cause that’s not gonna be necessary. Ever. And if someone tried to sneak away in one… well, I gotta go all the way back to my homeworld to get replacements and tracking you down would be easier. And I have a blaster.”
That was how Greez had finished the tour of the Stinger Mantis. He’d clapped his hands and turned expectantly to Merrin, who said, “There are four of us on the ship and two pods. How –”
“Five,” Greez interrupted. “Don’t forget the droid… he and Cal both get annoyed when people do that.”
“Five,” Merrin allowed, “but he is small and would fit with someone else, so that does not change my question – how do we decide who stays and who leaves?”
“Not a problem. If we really had to abandon ship entirely, Cere sits on my shoulders, and you get cozy with Cal and BD,” he said slyly. She gave him an impassive look and he seemed to remember who he was showing around – at first, Greez had been visibly apprehensive at the prospect of being anywhere alone with a Nightsister, but he warmed to his topic very quickly, if not his audience. “Uh. Anyway. So that’s the ship.”
Merrin hummed, glancing around at the metal walls and metal floors and metal… everything on the lower level. She couldn’t identify most of what she was looking at. “It is the nicest ship I have ever been on.”
“Ah, thanks,” Greez said, puffing up a bit as he led her back towards the ladder. “The S-161 was a pretty big improvement over – wait a minute, is this the only ship you’ve ever been on?” he asked suspiciously.
“Yes.”
Sighing, Greez had begun climbing up to the engine room. “Well, thanks anyway… come on, no reason for anyone to be lurking down here…”
Merrin was not entirely truthful with him. She’s technically been aboard starships before. More often than not, they were devastated beyond repair, twisted metallic constellations strewn across Dathomir’s swamps and mountains. She had explored several wreckages with her sisters, climbing through the snarled remains of cockpits and cargo holds, wondering who could stand to live in a tiny tube with no warm rock beneath their feet? No red sun rising and setting in the distance, no burra fish to brush against their ankles when they waded in the shallow swamps, no ichor connecting them to their planet. Her older sisters told her those people came from other worlds, but she couldn’t imagine a world besides Dathomir. There was never a hint in the ships to help her, either – anything of use was swiftly stripped away by the Nightbrothers, who used the metal and machinery in constructing their villages. Only shells lingered.
Occasionally, some fool would ignore the warnings and come to Dathomir deliberately. They rarely left. Their intact ships were retained for mundane purposes – Merrin’s people rarely left the planet either, but in the event one of them had to, a functioning starship was a necessity. Those were off-limits to the younger Nightsisters, so she didn’t know what they looked like inside.
Besides, she wasn’t lying, either. Far from the claustrophobic box she’d imagined as a child, the Mantis is actually quite nice. It’s small, yes – she’s sharing a little cabin with Cere – and nothing like her home, but it’s clearly a home. On the way to Bogano, Cere had settled on the sofa with her eyes shut and BD-1 hanging over her shoulder while she played a number of floaty, lilting songs on that stringed instrument of hers, and Greez had bossed Cal through baking a loaf of bread in the galley. There was an easy camaraderie between them that Merrin was not exactly part of, yet, but not excluded from, either. She’d sat quietly and listened to Cere’s music, got to eat a delicious dinner full of ingredients she had never heard of (though Cal suspects the ‘rare vomiting gorg’ is probably not a thing, and Greez was just attempting revenge for the nicest and only ship I’ve ever been on comment), and was lent a pair of soft leggings and a shirt Cal apparently never wears so she doesn’t need to sleep in her clothing. She even has a toothbrush and comb from Greez’s large stock of spare toiletries.
As for Bogano… Merrin had never seen so much green and blue before in her life. She had seen a bogling, because there’s one living on the ship that Greez doesn’t appear to have noticed yet. The planet was beautiful in the same strange, alien way the Mantis is beautiful; she’d wanted to explore, once Cal opened the Vault and secured that holocron, but things hadn’t gone as planned, and that’s half the reason she’s lying awake in the middle of what they’re calling ‘night’.
Merrin isn’t the only one. Cere’s been tossing and turning in the lower bunk for over an hour. She’s not sure any of them are asleep, except perhaps BD. The entire ship feels like an exposed nerve cluster. Nobody but Cere knows what they’re walking into, or even if their hastily-cobbled-together plan has any chance of working, especially since their entire plan consists of ‘Cere and Cal and BD take those escape pods Greez said they’d never need, infiltrate this fortress Cere escaped once on a moon called Nur, and find the holocron’. Greez handles the piloting. And whatever part Merrin plays in this… it will reveal itself, in time.
Right now, she isn’t accomplishing anything by lying here and staring at the ceiling. Too restless to remain in bed any longer, Merrin climbs down and slips out of the room, careful to be quiet even though she doesn’t need to worry about waking Cere. The ship’s regular lights have all been shut off, but there are buttons and indicators and panels glowing everywhere; if Merrin didn’t have excellent night vision, she would’ve still been able to navigate around easily. Lacking any other ideas, she wanders into the common area and studies Greez’s plants. It’s much easier when he’s in his own cabin and not watching her like he thinks she’s going to make them all grow eyeballs or something.
Some of the plants in the biggest terrarium are still small sprouts. Others, like one with tall green tendrils and another full of purple blossoms, appear fully grown. The only sprout she recognizes is the stem of a mushling poking out of the soil. Merrin touches her fingertip to the tiny nub. Like her, it is a child of Dathomir. Greez seems to take exceptional care of his plants no matter where they travel. Maybe they’ll both learn to thrive so far from home.
There are more plants flourishing down in the lounge. She pats the feathery red flowers, smells them, but they don’t have a scent. The blue blossoms do, delicately sweet, and their leaves are soft, almost fuzzy to the touch. She strokes one with her thumb and thinks this would be a terribly unfortunate time to discover she’s allergic to foreign flowers.
“That’s Bonnie.”
Merrin looks up. Cal’s drifting in from the corridor, rubbing his knuckles into his eyes and turning on one of the lights in the galley. “It’s Greez’s baby,” he adds. “We’re not even allowed to water those.”
“Hm.” Merrin inspects the leaf, which is no worse for wear, then turns around to watch Cal as he drapes himself across one side of the curving couch, curling up to fit. After a second, she mirrors him on the other side so their heads are almost touching at the sofa’s midpoint. If she tips her head back, she can look at his hair. She’s partial to the shade. Greez and Cere are not so unusual to her – Greez’s hair is only slightly darker than Merrin’s, and she’s met Nightsisters from other clans who had deep grey or black hair – but red is rare. Elza, one of Merrin’s elder sisters, had once mashed graveberries into a crimson pulp and coated her pale hair in it. When she rinsed the makeshift dye off, her hair was the brownish-red of old clay, and remained that color for two days until she bathed and it all washed out. Cal’s must be natural, though, because it matches his eyebrows and lashes and the fine hairs on his forearms.
Cal is… confusing. Likeable, certainly, now that they’ve reached an understanding. Brave, often stupidly so. Sincere. Trusting, almost to the point of naïveté; it would’ve been painfully easy to trick him into believing she was on his side, then lure him into a trap. Merrin had considered it, but discarded that as an option after they’d spoken. If Malicos tempted him, she would’ve simply killed him then and there, no subterfuge required.
He was understating it when he implied he didn’t usually talk, though. And overstating it. She’d spent quite some time watching him the first time he traversed her planet and Cal talked to his droid constantly. He just did so through an elaborate system of hand gestures, facial expressions, and body language, rather than speech. He does the same with Cere and Greez, but Cere only comprehends some of it and Greez does not appear to at all, so BD-1 translates into his beeping droid language, and then Cere translates that into Basic. When she’d first boarded the Mantis and witnessed this roundabout style of communication, Merrin had been something beyond confused she did not know a word for. Greez saw that, because he overcame his understandable but needless fear of her long enough to say, “What? You musta noticed the guy doesn’t talk… that gonna be a problem?”
Merrin had met Cal’s eyes over Greez’s head. He wasn’t even trying to conceal his sudden alarm, and she caught on – Greez, at least, didn’t know Cal could talk, and Cal didn’t want him to. “I noticed,” was all she said, and watched Cal’s shoulders sag in relief.
He does not speak to Cere and Greez. He will speak to Merrin (and he’s surprisingly talkative), but only if they’re completely alone or just BD-1 is present, and only sometimes. Other times he attempts communication through doodles, which is mostly futile as he’s a terrible artist. She wonders if he speaks to BD when they’re alone. She doesn’t know what he actually sounds like because he’s never spoken louder than a whisper. It’s weird and she thinks she’s right to be confused. She’s yet to ask about it, since they’ve been busy and she’s only caught Cal alone a couple times for short conversations. This may be her best chance, since Merrin assumes he will not want to route this conversation through Cere and they have no other options.
She keeps her mouth shut instead of breaking the comfortable silence. Merrin’s been alone for so long. Well before she recognized his true intentions, she had known Malicos did not care about her. The Nightbrothers were present, of course, but they weren’t her equals, or even her companions; the mass murder of the Nightsisters mattered little to them except from a breeding perspective. They respected and obeyed her because it was required of them. She can’t picture herself lying on a sofa with a Nightbrother and watching the breeze from the ventilation system ruffle an unruly lock of his hair. It’s… intimate. Not in the more meaningful use of the term – not Ilyana’s cool fingertips tracing the curve of her cheek, Merrin prodding her jutting hipbones and telling her she has to eat more or she’ll never regain her strength, the awkward way their noses bumped because neither of them had ever kissed somebody before – just close. She is closer to Cal, physically and emotionally, than she has been to anyone in ages.
Merrin may not be part of this crew’s camaraderie yet, but they’ve left a door open for her, and he is the one beckoning her through it.
Cal breaks the comfortable silence by gnawing at one of his fingernails. Deciding the moment is ruined (that’s such an obnoxious sound), she says, “Are you nervous?”
He tips his head back too so their eyes meet. “Yup,” he says bluntly. “Terrified. And not just…” He trails off for a few moments, as he often does. “Of whatever we’ll find there. It’s how we get there. I… don’t like escape pods.”
Given the size of those things, Merrin wouldn’t be too thrilled about getting stuck in one either. Unfortunately, Cere had said the pods are vital if they intend to reach the Fortress without getting vaporized. “The Mantis will light up every scope they have,” she’d explained, “but the pods should be able to slip in unnoticed. Greez brings us as close to orbit as possible, we land in the water like any other bits of space junk, and we swim inside. It’ll be impossible for them to scan for individual life signs in the ocean even if they do notice something.”
“Unless they’re dumping toxic waste in the sea and nothing else is alive in there anymore,” Greez said.
“That’s a risk we’ll have to take,” Cere had replied.
There’s something refreshing about Cal’s candor. The Nightbrothers did not admit fear or pain, considering it a weakness. “At least BD-1 is coming with you.”
He huffs, smiling slightly. “That might not be good… he keeps trying to fight things that scare me. I wouldn’t put beating up the escape pod past him.”
An interesting mental image for sure. “I am nervous too,” Merrin confesses. “I have entertained thoughts of going out and exploring the galaxy, sometimes, but this is not how I pictured starting off.”
“Sorry.”
“I’m not complaining. This is important. It’s…” Vile slime he might’ve been, but Malicos did teach her a number of useful Basic metaphors; she casts around for what she thinks is the correct one and continues, “We are striking at the heart of the Empire, maybe?”
“Mm… not exactly. To do that, we’d probably need to hit Coruscant. The Senate. The Emperor, especially… and I don’t see that ending well.” Cal sighs, folding an arm under his head. “Not right now.” He’s silent then, breathing so deeply and evenly it has to be deliberate, which is another thing he does frequently. He can only project competence and confidence until he has to talk. “But nobody will expect us to break into the Fortress. Taking the holocron back will be seriously painful to them… kill their plans for their next generation of Inquisitors.”
“Oh,” Merrin says. “Striking at the testicles of the Empire, then.”
Judging by the way Cal laughs and cringes at the same time, Human males and Nightbrothers are not so different in anatomy. A tragic design flaw, really. Merrin rolls onto her back and laces her fingers together across her stomach. “Once we have the holocron, what will you do with it?”
“I told you,” he says, “we’re going to find those children… train them as Jedi. Restore the Order.”
He doesn’t seem quite as sure of that as he did the first time he claimed as much. Maybe he’s actually given what she said some thought. Merrin doesn’t know what it is to be hunted the way he does, but she remembers watching her people being slaughtered, weeping over her sisters’ bodies, preparing them for their burial pods all by herself. Mud and dried herbs beneath her fingernails, unwashed hair twisted into a knot atop her head to keep it out of the way. Racing against time to entomb her clan before Dathomir’s heat bloated them beyond recognition. It’s not an experience she’d wish on anyone... except, perhaps, those who'd inflicted it upon her.
“But before that,” Cal adds, “Greez’ll probably want to put more fuel in the Mantis once we leave Nur… so you can get hit on by another station attendant.”
Hit on is a new phrase to Merrin. Its meaning is easy to guess, since that was mere hours ago (Greez refused to go to Nur on anything less than full tanks) and her first brief but fascinating trip to a fuel station convenience store is fresh in her memory. It was violently, almost overwhelmingly colorful. Not one of the many bright packages on display was familiar and Cal had been no help in identifying anything, refusing to open his mouth no matter how many questions she asked. She’d finally given up, since the helpless looks he kept sending her were getting kind of pathetic. Then the lavender-eyed and heavily pierced person cooking some kind of fried meat in the shop offered her a sample – “Just to tempt you into buying more,” they’d said with a wink – so she’d tried it. It was both tantalizingly savory and so spicy her mouth hurt. Merrin liked it and actually paid for another one, so their sales technique had worked very well.
She can tell he’s trying to change the subject, keep both their minds off what’s coming, so she takes the bait. “I think they were more interested in selling me expensive snacks,” Merrin says. They’d had a fried fruit, too, but she’d only been given a couple of credits to spend. Money – what an odd concept.
“Merrin, when we walked in I thought they’d trip over their tongue,” Cal says. “And they were looking at you, not me. Last person who thought I was good-looking was Sorc Tormo… you know, while he was making me fight to the death in his gladiator arena.”
“I do not know, but now I would like to. Later, perhaps.” She ponders the encounter on the fueling station for a second more, then says, “Well, I was flattened, but –”
“Uh,” Cal interrupts, “you mean flattered.”
“Flattered,” Merrin corrects. Basic has significantly more words than her native tongue and many of them sound almost exactly the same to her. “But I would prefer someone with less –” she double-checks the word she wants this time, “perforation.”
Cal laughs again. The moment of levity descends into silence. Merrin watches shadows flow across the ceiling as the Mantis speeds through hyperspace and the blue landscape outside the viewports ripples endlessly. Cal’s tracing little spirals on the sofa cushion with a fingertip. She turns her head to look at the top of his again, then, deciding she might as well, says, “May I ask you a personal question?”
He nods. He noticeably doesn’t commit to answering this question.
“Why will you speak to BD and me, but not Cere or Greez?”
Cal sighs, like he knew this conversation was coming and did not look forward to it. He is quiet for a very long time before he says, “After the Purge – when the Jedi were massacred… I stopped talking. Entirely.” She hears him swallow. “I didn’t stop, actually. I couldn’t talk.”
“Oh,” Merrin murmurs. She had screamed. She raged, wept, pleaded – Merrin had never believed in a higher power, but if she’d come across just one of her sisters alive, she might’ve converted instantaneously. There were none. And so her voice was still needed, to chant the spells and speak the rituals as she laid her entire family to rest until they too were needed again.
“I wrote everything down at first,” Cal says. “Then learned sign language with a friend of mine. BD could memorize it fast, so that made it easy when we met… and Cere knows his Binary... but you saw.” He cranes his neck so they’re eye to eye, and there’s a hint of amusement in his expression. “Not really convenient. And I got frustrated with being mute, so…”
Merrin waits. When it seems nothing more is forthcoming, she says, “That does not answer my question.”
“Right. Um.” Another pause, and then he laughs faintly and says, “It’d be weird, that’s all. I’ve never spoken to them… except that one time when I got drunk with Cere. Greez doesn’t even know I can talk. I’m going to tell him, I’m going to talk to them, I just…”
“But why me?” Merrin persists. The droid she understands – he and Cal are clearly inseparable. Merrin had sent her sisters and the Nightbrothers to kill him. In her defense, she was misinformed… and her first thought upon seeing someone on her planet with a lightsaber was not Jedi, but a brief, vivid flashback to the moment she’d peeked out of her hiding place and saw that droid-like warrior use two of those weapons to cut off Synthra’s head.
Cal shrugs, says, “You didn’t know I couldn’t. Figured I’d try. I wasn’t sure it’d work… my backup plan was writing.”
“That wouldn’t have worked either,” Merrin says, though he must already suspect by now, especially after their adventure to the convenience store. “I learned to speak some Basic from my sisters and Mother. The rest I learned from Malicos, but I cannot read it. All I know is there are two different alphabets which are also the same, somehow.”
“Three. There’s also Outer Rim Basic. And like… two others I don’t know the names of.”
To think, Dathomirian has one simple, phonetic system of glyphs that varies little, even between distant clans. And they have the nerve to call this ‘Basic’. “I can’t read those, either.”
“You could learn.” He squirms so he can see her without having to wrench his neck. “I’ll teach you, if you want. You already speak Basic, so it shouldn’t be hard… all you have to know are the letters and what sounds they make. Don’t ask about all the alphabets, though. You’d only need aurebesh to get by most of the time anyway.”
For someone who has suffered so much, Cal still wears every emotion on his face. He looks so earnest Merrin doesn’t have the heart to refuse, and it’s a good idea, besides. She wants to see the galaxy beyond Dathomir. That’s a bit difficult when she can’t read the price signs on the fried-snack stands and spends all her money on one piece of meat. “All right,” she says. “But you’ll have to come back from this Fortress, first.”
He grins at her. He doesn’t respond, though, and a second later she realizes why – all the lights in the galley snap on at once, making him wrinkle his nose and squint, and then Greez is leaning around Bonnie’s terrarium to peer at them suspiciously. “Am I interrupting something?”
Just a secret ritual to suck out your life force and make myself immortal. She chooses not to say it. By this point, Cere would probably laugh, but Greez takes her very seriously. “No,” Merrin says, sitting up; Cal does the same, yawning. As they were lying on the sofa together and whispering (she’d matched his volume without thinking about it, since it felt right), she can understand where Greez’s confusion might stem from.
“Oh,” Greez says. “Well, as long as none of us are sleeping the night before our massive mission to the hidden evil base full of dangerous Inquisitors and Imperials who want us all dead, I thought I’d make some tea.”
Cal, standing now, gives him a thumbs-up and heads into the corridor. Merrin follows him, but only as far as the galley, where she watches Greez a moment while he gets some mugs down and turns on the kettle. Then she turns towards the terrarium. “Do you name all your plants, or just those flowers?” she asks.
“Huh? Uh – all of ‘em, usually, but not most of those, yet. Too young. I gotta get a feel for them first, you know?”
She does not. Greez is much stranger to Merrin than Cal could ever hope to be. “So you have not named the mushling.”
“No, but… with that being from Dathomir, and you being from Dathomir… I guess if you’ve got any ideas, I’m open to suggestions.”
Merrin looks at the mushling pushing up through the soil. “Koret,” she says.
“What’s –”
“It’s a rebirth,” she explains. “A fresh start… the beginning of something new.”
When she turns back to the galley, Greez is looking at her with an expression she’d almost call soft; he quickly startles and looks away, as she expected, fumbling a teabag. “Right. Yeah. Yeah, that works… my only other idea was ‘Clyde’, anyway.” He dusts two hands off on his shirt, then, just slightly nervously, beckons her over. “Okay, as long as you’re here, you need a mug.”
Merrin joins him at the counter and stares at the half-dozen empty caf mugs stacked in the compartment he dramatically opens. “I don’t care,” she says blankly. “It’s only a cup.”
He shrugs. “Sure, but everyone has one, right? See here –” Greez holds up one of the mugs he’s tending, which is grey and mostly featureless but for a delicate, faded line of flowers printed just beneath the rim, “this is my favorite. Was the last one my great-grandmother still had handed down from her grandmother, since all the others had broken. Technically this one broke too, but just the handle, so she glued it back on. She gave it to me after I graduated the Lateron Space Academy, just a couple months before she died. That –” he points to the white one with a complicated black pattern of lines and dots, “is Cere’s. She brought it on board with her when she hired me. And this –” the pale mug with the sunset, “is Cal’s. Your turn.”
She almost grabs the closest cup and leaves it at that, but now Greez is the one being earnest, even though he probably thinks she’ll turn him to stone at the slightest provocation, so Merrin actually looks. Instead of the red one, it’s the black mug that catches her eye; she takes it down and inspects the picture, which is just a bunch of neon lines forming what she guesses are buildings. “What is this one?”
Greez glances at it between scooping sugar into the other cups. “Skyline of a planet called Canto Bight.”
“I like it,” she decides, puts it down on the counter, and closes the compartment.
“Ah, good choice… yeah, that came from my crappy hotel. Shouldn’t have gone there, didn’t end well, but the mug was free.”
Merrin raises an eyebrow at him. “Why did you keep something if you don’t have good memories attached to it?”
“Because I never get rid of anything,” he says jovially, as if that’s a quality to be proud of. He takes another teabag from the box. Out in the corridor, she can hear Cere’s voice, presumably speaking to Cal. BD-1 is beeping away, too. It seems everyone’s coming to their middle-of-the-night-before-the-critical-mission tea party. The Mantis is a peculiar place, and Merrin finds herself enjoying it. “So,” Greez continues, “you like your meat so rare it tries to gore me when I turn it over, and you like your phraig sweet, because you’re a normal person… now, how do you like your tea?”