Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

As far as tiny Mid Rim agricultural moons go, Peloxes-Areus is what Commander Drift calls mess-hall variety.  Quiet, temperate, sparsely populated, and quite poor, the Peloxes system is nominally aligned with the Republic, but doesn’t have the resources to contribute to the war effort.  It has no GAR presence besides a listening post monitoring the nearby hyperspace lane, and even that was all but forgotten once the Separatists abandoned the sector early in the war.  Were it not for the skeleton crew keeping the station running, the 13^th Battalion would have no reason to be dropping by.

The sky is breathtaking, though.

When their two larties had landed in an desolate field west of the village, Peloxes-Areus was at the tail end of its eight-hour rotation; Cal stepped off the transport into shoulder-high grasses that’d never known a clipper, glanced up, and his jaw smacked into his toes.  At night, the moon faced Peloxes, a massive, pale blue gas giant that seemed to swell straight out of the horizon and reach overhead towards the glittering stripe of the galaxy’s spiral arm.  The light pollution was nonexistent and the Peloxans, primarily ranchers and subsistence farmers, had no satellites or orbital stations to mar the view.  Cal stood there and stared until his neck ached.  Logically, he knew the arm was thousands of lightyears away, but from here, it glowed, so stark against the pitch-black night he almost thought he could reach up and sift his fingers through the stars like sand.  Then Spell came by and tipped Cal’s head forwards again, said, “Enough stargazing, Commander, and get a move on or the General’s gonna leave you behind.”

“Right,” Cal said, shaking himself out of his rapture.  “I’m coming.”  He gave the sky one last wistful glance.  The majority of his short life so far had been spent on Coruscant, where starlight was stopped before entering the atmosphere and asked for its transponder code, or aboard the Albedo Brave, often in hyperspace or windowless cabins.  He never actually got to stargaze.  But they had a job to do, and he didn’t want to be left with the troopers hanging back to guard the larties just in case, so Cal ran to catch up with his master and the rest of the men and tried to focus.

It's easier now that the sun’s climbing up to hide the starscape from view, and they’re busy traipsing through the thick old-growth forest separating the village and fields from the hilltop where their listening post is perched.  The Peloxans – short, hairless, wrinkly humanoids who come in every shade of yellow imaginable, though Drift just refers to them collectively as jaundiced – allowed the Republic to build the station on their moon, but they seem to have an innate distrust of technology.  The lonely hill in the middle of the forest, more than an hour’s walk from the fields, was the best site both parties found acceptable.  There’s nowhere near it to land the larties.  Given why they’re here, Master Tapal thought doing a flyover and just jumping might’ve been too conspicuous, so walking it is.  The sun can’t reach them beneath the heavy tree cover and the wind’s trying to suck the marrow out of Cal’s bones.  Wondering whether winter is coming or going, Cal draws the sleeves of his tunic down over his hands, tries not to shiver.  He hadn’t noticed the chill when he was gawking at the stars.  They’re long gone, but he does still like peering through the occasional gap in the trees and seeing if he can tell where the sky ends and the little curve of Peloxes visible begins. 

At the moment, he’s not looking at anything.  That’d break the rules of this game they’ve invented to pass the time.

“Okay, okay,” Lop says, audibly grinning, “we’ll try something easy.”  Cal rolls his eyes behind their lids.  It’s not fair to make him try to guess Hilt, whose gleaming armor was issued barely a week ago when he joined the 13^th.  The guy’s seen less active combat than his prepubescent commander.  He pads on through a carpet of moss and fallen leaves, Brook on his left ready to nudge him out of the way if he’s about to trip over a root, and waits until Lop places something in his hands.  Automatically, Cal closes his fingers around the plastoid and lets all his shields melt, and the echoes bypass his tunic-mittens like every other pair of gloves he’s ever tried and light up the insides of his eyelids.

– can’t believe you got away with that, you absolute nerf-herder!  You shoulda been swabbing toilets until you –

– we’re going to be overrun in minutes, I can’t raise General Tapal, they’re dead oh kark oh kark they’re all dead –

– Gem’s pulse is a bit too slow but still thumping steadily against his fingers, and he doesn’t meet his brother’s hazy, half-lidded eyes because if he does they’re both going to burst into tears.  If there’s any miracle in this kriffing galaxy it’s his batchmate’s survival.  They’re already the only two left –

“Easy,” Cal says.

Brook snorts.  “Good thing I didn’t have money riding on Lop’s shit-awful wordplay,” Salt remarks as Easy leans around Lop to take his gauntlet back from Cal.  “If you’re gonna give the guy a challenge, don’t tell him who it is beforehand just ‘cause you think you’re funny…”

“Ah, shut up,” Lop says cheerfully.  “And I’m hilarious.  Want another?”

“Yes,” Cal says.  “And Salt’s right – don’t make it easy on me.”  He pauses, trying not to laugh, for the obligatory groan from the clone in question.  “And there’s no point if I can’t get anything off it.  It’s usually important memories that leave imprints.  Strong emotions.  So if you haven’t done anything exciting…” He trails off, considers what he just said, and glances over his shoulder.  “Sorry, Hilt.”

Hilt, shining in his pristine white armor, heaves a sigh that sounds like it originated somewhere around his kneecaps.  “Don’t worry, Commander, I’m a big boy.  I can handle being told I’m boring.”

Cal shoots him an apologetic grin and turns back around.  Before he closes his eyes again, he notices Lop bump Spell, watches Spell bump back in a friendly sort of manner and shake his head.  Good.  The fighting, the horrific injuries, the deaths, the horrors of war that wake him up screaming – he’s been through it all before.  Heck, he’s participated in a few of those battles, because Master Tapal can only protect him from so much, and what are a few more nightmares, besides?  He’s slightly jaded for his age.  But he doesn’t want to see any memories the clones don’t want him to see, since that always feels like a horrible breach of privacy even when it’s accidental.  One time he’d made the mistake of picking up Phoenix’s helmet when it fell off the bench and suddenly somebody was lifting it off his head, pulling it a little too far forwards so it caught on his already unkempt hair, and he’d tilted his head with the motion to make it easier.  He got a moment’s glimpse of soft dark eyes and a mouth that quivered just the tiniest bit before the helmet was pushed into his arms and pair of hands cupped his face – he was so tired the only thought that went stumbling across his stupid mind was I haven’t shaved since we landed on Lonnaw, I must look like crap – and then he was being kissed with desperate reverence.  He sighed, sagged.  The hands slid around to the back of his neck, locked together, pulled him in like the two of them could merge and overlap and never be separated again.  And clone number two-million-and-something, no tats, no cool scars, no mutations, just another trooper bred to die… he felt holy.

Cal has never been kissed, because he’s not quite eleven yet, but the psychometry doesn’t care, so he’s also been kissed a few dozen times.  He doesn’t know if the echo ended because he dropped the helmet or if Phoenix dropped it in the echo and then Cal dropped it; either way, he was blushing to the roots of his hair and Phoenix figured out pretty quick he’d seen something intimate just from that.  They hadn’t been able to look at one another for weeks.  And now it’s been months, but he still wonders from time to time if it’s better or worse that the man with the gentle eyes and callused hands, the one he’d loved recklessly for those few seconds suspended in somebody else’s head, will never know exactly what happened to Phoenix.

Nobody puts a piece of their armor in Cal’s hands, and when the quiet chatter flowing around him abruptly hushes, he peeks.  Master Tapal, formerly at the front of the pack with Drift, has stopped walking – he gestures for the rest of the men to continue, but his eyes are fixed squarely on his apprentice.  Cal wilts, dropping his hands to his sides like Master Tapal doesn’t already know what he’s been up to.  The look on the Lasat’s face speaks volumes.  “Tell me, Padawan,” he says, “what I’m about to tell you.”

Ouch.  Nothing like a reminder they just had this conversation not too long ago.  Cal wants to shrink into the moss and let himself get chopped to slivers by the enormous razorblade ants scuttling around his feet, because that’d be less uncomfortable, but he’s not some youngling who’s going to hide the evidence of their wrongdoing.  He makes himself meet his master’s eyes and says, “Jedi are supposed to be humble.”

Master Tapal merely nods, having gotten his point across.  Lop, who says he had to be the best in his unit so every Kaminoan he pissed off wouldn’t drown him and not even bother making it look like an accident, butts in – “See, if I could do something like that psychometry stuff, I’d be obnoxiously proud of it.”  He hitches his pack up a little further on his back.  “Actually, I’d probably go on the road as some kinda fake mystic and make loads of money pretending to read minds.”

“Stick to scamming people at cards,” Brook mutters.

“It’s not like pride and humility are opposites,” Cal says to Lop as they start moving again.  “I’m proud of being a Jedi.  Honored, even.  That’s a good thing.  But we shouldn’t be arrogant, or go around bragging, or elevate ourselves and our abilities above everyone else.”  He looks towards Master Tapal, who’s already looking back.  “I was just showing off,” he admits.

Master Tapal nods again, not to agree (although he definitely does agree or else he wouldn’t have intervened), but acknowledging Cal understands what he’s saying and isn’t just mindlessly regurgitating what he’s been told since he was in the creche.  Now he’ll expect Cal to put it into practice.  He’ll also expect Cal to fail, eventually, and then keep trying.  “Stay alert,” he says, gaze sweeping over the troopers.  “We are not far from the station and we still don’t know what we’re walking into.”

Cal can already hear the dumb joke Lop’s no doubt concocting in his weird head – A clone walks into a listening post.  He says, “Ow!”  Suppressing a smile, he walks faster so he’s not quite so far behind Master Tapal.

Everyone here, up to and including his master, suspects they’re not walking into anything.  There are six clone troopers working the listening station – used to be eight, before two were lost to some kind of waterborne parasite – and they’d dutifully manned their posts right up until three weeks ago.  One missed weekly check-in raised a few eyebrows.  Two raised some concerns.  Three raised the alarm; the Albedo Brave was closest and not presently wrapped up in anything vital, so they were diverted to investigate.  But there’s been zero Separatist activity around these parts for over a year.  Peloxes and its moons have no strategic importance, Republic interests in the rest of the sector are well-defended, all the previous dispatches from the post have been excruciatingly mundane.  Master Tapal spoke to the few Peloxans in the village who knew some Basic and they had nothing unusual to report.  Even the Force feels warm and content on this quiet little moon, smoothing over the static still lingering in Cal’s head after the battalion’s last engagement.  On their way in, Salt had opined they were going to get to the station and find they’d had a massive system failure that’d knocked out their comms, that was all.  Drift was inclined to concur.  If it was something they couldn’t fix, they wouldn’t be able to rely on the Peloxans for assistance.  There are backup systems, of course, and maybe it’s not likely everything would go out at once, but tech always decides to die at the worst possible time in a war, so as Drift bluntly put it, it probably all just shit the bed.

Cal’s not supposed to repeat most of what Drift says.  The commander is unapologetically rude and as Master Tapal has pointed out many times, Cal doesn’t always think before he speaks.  He tends to take note of the less offensive phrases, though – rude or not, the man has a way with words.

Master Tapal’s slipped into a quiet conversation with Brook, who’s their communications expert and could rig up a working comm system from the contents of his rucksack and three potatoes.  Cal doesn’t bother them.  Next to him, Grim and Spell have their heads on a swivel and their blasters close at hand, and their conversation sounds a lot more interesting.  “It was the worst,” Grim’s saying.  “The one time I was practically begging the longnecks to crack down, and they ignored it.  I still kriffing hear ‘Agony of the Heart’ in my head every time we have to leg it…”

“I’d prefer whingy sparklebop over the anti-authority bantha-crap one of my trainers made us march to,” Spell says.  “If the guy in the song really mouthed off to his superiors like that, he would’ve been stun-batoned into a drooling vegetable inside of a day.  Gotta wonder if Sarge was just trying to provoke us.”

As someone who likes anti-authority bantha-crap but is also extremely respectful towards his master, Cal really wants to know which song they’re talking about.  He chews on his lip so he doesn’t interrupt.  “I can’t believe you guys had marching cadences past age three,” says Bell from Cal’s other side.

“I think our whole dome was just weird.”

“Or else we were really clumsy,” Grim suggests.  “Even after everyone else stopped, Spanner would mumble that stuff to himself to stay in time.  I know every word of ‘Droyk’ thanks to that guy.  And some roboto thing where all the lyrics were error messages.  And that song about the kingdom full of rats.”

He can’t help himself.  “Do you mean The Rat Queen?” Cal asks.  Spell and Grim’s helmets swivel towards him now.  “‘You look upon my glory,’ said the queen to the breeze, ‘my kingdom will reign to the crowns of the trees’?”

“That’s the one.”

He quickens his pace so the troopers with their longer legs don’t get ahead of him. “It’s not a song, it’s a poem.  I liked it when I was little.  Everyone knows the first three or four stanzas because they were in some classic holofilm half a century ago.  There was even this one wannabe politician from the Colonies who used it in his campaign speech.”  Cal hops up on a knobby arched root in his path, balances atop it for a second, jumps down.  “Practically every newscaster from here to the Core ravaged him for it.  Because after the beginning part everyone knows, the queen gets overthrown by her people for her greed and she has to go on a journey to learn how to be a better ruler.  That’s what it’s really about.  Not the sort of thing you want to quote if you’re trying to get elected… and he wasn’t.  Elected, I mean.  He was trying but he didn’t do enough research, obviously.”

“Hey, Commander,” Drift says, pivoting so he’s walking backwards, “got a question – who named you Cal?”

Cal blinks.  “Um.  My parents, I guess?  If I had them.”

“You’re not a tubie,” Spell says.  “You must have.”

“Yeah, but I don’t know if they named me, or if I was orphaned or something and someone else named me.  It might be in my file at the Temple.  I haven’t looked it up.”  It’s never felt necessary.  Even at his loneliest in the creche, he never wanted for family.  “I think I was born on Ringo Vinda, though.”

“Yes,” Master Tapal rumbles, “you were.”

This is the first time his master has alluded to knowing anything about Cal’s life before he came to the Jedi Temple.  Cal speeds up even more until he’s level with Master Tapal and Drift.  “Did you look it up?”

Master Tapal shakes his head.  “Not exactly.  I saw your record the first time I met with the Council to discuss you becoming my apprentice.”

“When was that?”

“Just after you turned eight.”  Master Tapal must sense Cal’s surprise, because he adds, “You were too young to be apprenticed yet.  It was only brought up as a possibility… but I knew.”  He’s silent for a few seconds, which gives Cal time to wonder if he would be patient enough to wait a year and a half for his future Padawan to grow up a little more.  “I don’t know anything else about your origins.  It was not the subject of conversation.”

He shouldn’t ask.  The words pop out anyway.  “What did they say about me?”

“I seem to recall the term ‘precocious’ being used liberally.”

“…in a good way?”

“Sometimes,” Master Tapal says wryly.  Grim and Bell both snicker and Cal grins despite the subtle rebuke.  ‘Precocious’ is probably a good word for it.  Things came easily to him when he was younger – he knew the answers to his instructors’ questions, got new lightsaber forms correct within a few repetitions, retained information well, had a large vocabulary because he liked to read.  Things that didn’t come easily to him, he avoided and pretended like it was his own idea.  Then he became a Padawan and (as he remembers with some embarrassment) spent a lot of time crying those first couple weeks, because for the first time in his life, he couldn’t do anything right.  Eventually, though, he caught on to the lesson Master Tapal was trying to impart – he was being set up to fail so he could learn how to.  Keep trying.  Keep failing.  Figure out how to fail in the right direction until you succeed.  He’s still relearning that lesson about once a month, and he doesn’t cry over it anymore.

There are a bunch more questions he wants to ask Master Tapal now, but it’s an unrelated one that cuts in front of the queue.  “Drift,” Cal says, “why’d you ask about my name?”

Drift shrugs.  “Just curious.  If you’d been a clone kid, your brothers woulda named you ‘Chatterbox’.”

“Hey!” Cal exclaims, laughing, and amusement ripples through the rest of the troopers, rebounding back to him like a hug.  Even Master Tapal’s clearly trying to hide a smile.  “I don’t talk that much.”  The disbelief doesn’t feel quite so warm and cuddly and he huffs.  “Fine, I’ll be quiet.”

“Five credits says you can’t keep quiet until we get to the listening post,” Brook challenges.

“You’re on,” Cal replies, then demonstratively clamps his mouth shut and fixes his eyes straight ahead.

Maybe he does get too talkative.  It’s hard to resist when he’s around so many people who want to talk to him.  He wasn’t exactly excluded or anything when he was back in the creche, but he wasn’t close to anybody in particular, either.  Bohta and Leem had been best friends since they were in the nursery, and Cris and Tazenthalay were always together, and Ollo and Miranda and Gen formed a tight trio, and so on and so forth until Cal was the odd man out.  And the psychometry made them uncomfortable sometimes.  And… Ollo, who struggled with everything Cal found so simple but had enviously beautiful handwriting, once called him an obnoxious know-it-all, and the others agreed, and Cal hadn’t said much for weeks after that. 

So, with some experience under his belt, shutting up for the last ten minutes to the station should be easy.  Cal blocks out everyone else’s conversations to avoid temptation and keeps walking.  Brook tries twice to trip him up with random questions – the first time, Cal gets as far as inhaling and opening his mouth before he catches himself, and the second, he just gives him a nice try sort of look.  The trooper retreats, but Cal expects a third assault, possibly from someone else if Brook can recruit to the cause.  That tells him Brook might not have five credits to lose, which is kind of sad.  Cal’s a Jedi kid with little use for money and even he has some stashed in his cabin on the Brave.  It’s supposed to be the same principle – the GAR provides everything the clones need, so they don’t get paid for their work – but it doesn’t sit entirely right with him.

He’s clambering over a mossy hump on the ground, mouth firmly shut, alert for danger he doesn’t expect and sneaky questions he does, when something pings in the back of his skull and stops him dead.  He had sped up to dodge Brook and everyone else is behind him; Spell asks, “What’s up, Commander?” as he approaches.

Cal doesn’t answer.  Five credits is five credits.  But he closes his eyes, pushes himself outwards, feeling, searching – “Master,” he says suddenly, spinning on his heel, “there’s something here.”  Without waiting for a response (or permission), he skids down the slope and off their course, letting the Force guide him to whatever it is he’s supposed to find.

Not fifteen meters away, he steps on something that rolls beneath his heel.  He yelps, manages to stay standing, hops on one foot as pain shoots through the other.  Then he looks down at the offending object and, stomach lurching, crouches down to touch it –

“Wait!”  An arm curls around his chest and yanks him up and away before his fingers make contact.  “Wait, sir,” Spell says, backing up to let Salt and Grim pass them.  “Could be a trap.  Let us check it out first.”

Cal’s no fan of that course of action, but it’s one he’s gotten accustomed to in a war.  He stands there, flexing his twisted ankle, as Grim and Salt sweep the area for bombs or a cadre of droids lying in wait, as Master Tapal and the others catch up.  Once Grim gives him a nod, Hilt seizes the boot and drags the body of a clone trooper out from the underbrush.

Someone groans faintly.  Master Tapal has too good a grip on his emotions for them to seep into Cal, and Cal can’t read his expression.  “‘scuse me,” Lop says, brushing past them and squatting next to the trooper.  The man is clearly dead – not only are there two scorched holes in his chestplate, moss is growing on some of his armor – so Lop doesn’t check for a pulse, just pops the seals and removes the filthy helmet.

They’ve all seen too many corpses to be shocked or disgusted by the decomposing face of a clone.  “Well, he’s definitely one of us,” Lop says, all business now.

“Uh, sir?”

As one, they glance over towards Brook as he and Easy pull another body from the brush.

After the whole mass of leaves, broken branches, bushes, and assorted undergrowth is excavated, there are six armored bodies lying side by side in the moss.  Cal knows what everyone’s thinking – they had six soldiers manning their listening post.  Most of them were killed by one or two shots to the head or chest, though one trooper looks like he was used for target practice, and the last one’s faceplate is completely smashed in.  When Lop starts to remove that helmet, Cal looks away.  Ruined faces make him squeamish.  He’s relieved to see Spell do the same.

“It’s been three weeks since we’ve had any communication from this post,” Lop says after a minute, tapping his finger to the cheek of his helmet like he’s deep in thought.  “We’ve got a problem, General.  These guys have been dead a lot longer than that.”

There’s nothing playful or happy in the multitude of emotions that swell in the Force at that proclamation. Cal lets the feelings flow through him like water, tries to stay grounded.  So much for a simple communications failure.  Resisting the urge to ask then who’s been transmitting the weekly check-ins?, he takes a step forward, extends a hand.  “Let me look.”

Lop raises the first helmet he removed.  Master Tapal’s hand falls to Cal’s shoulder – less emotional support, more physical support in case he blacks out – and Cal takes the helmet in his hands.

There’s something wrong with the lights again.  He’s turned every single one in the facility on and he can still see too many shadows.

“We should go back to the mess,” Tig says shakily, trembling hands locked tight around his brother’s vambrace.  He’s going to dent the plastoid alloy soon.  “I keep telling you guys, we can’t be alone, that’s how it gets you –”

“I keep telling you that doesn’t matter, hut’uun!” he snaps.  He tries to yank his arm away, but fear is giving Tig a whole lot of strength.  “Otherwise we’d all be dead.  Or did you make Sixty come with you when you took a piss this morning?”  Tig doesn’t answer.  “We’ve just gotta keep to the lights.”

Cal blinks as the brightness fades from his vision.  Bewildered, he lowers the helmet into the first set of hands willing to accept it, shrugs off Master Tapal’s hand, starts patting down one of the other deceased troopers.  The blaster finally gives him something.

– it’s in the walls it’s in the walls IT’S IN THE WALLS –

Strange.  He tries another clone with no success.  The fourth is more helpful, as is the fifth; as he stands to try the man with the shattered helmet, his knees buckle and Master Tapal has to catch him before he hits the ground.  “Enough,” the Lasat says firmly, holding Cal up until Cal thinks his legs are going to support him again.

“But –”

“If you exhaust yourself now, whatever we find at the station may be too much for you to handle,” Master Tapal cautions.  He doesn’t mince words.  And he’s right, of course – Cal takes a few deep breaths and wills away the weariness pressing at the backs of his eyes.  “What did you see?”

Running his fingers through his hair, Cal glances at the bodies and shakes his head slowly.  “I don’t think we’re going to find anything at the station.”

“No tinnies?” Fifteen asks, sounding almost disappointed.

“I could be wrong, obviously, but… they were all scared of something different, and none of it made any sense.  One of them thought there was some… presence in the walls that’d drag them in if they got too close.”  He waves a hand towards the clone at the end of the row.  “That one barricaded himself in his quarters and then –” his voice falters for a moment, “I think he shot himself in the head.  He thought the others could read his mind and were plotting against him.  It’s like they all suddenly developed paranoid schizophrenia or something at once.  Droids can’t do that.”

“A biological agent, maybe…?” Bell murmurs.

“Wait,” Spell says.  “There was that parasite that killed the other two men here –”

“They thought it was a parasite,” Drift corrects.  “Not like anyone performed an autopsy on a pair of clones stationed in the middle of bumfuck nowhere.  I was looking through their communications while we were on the way – they’d just guessed ‘cause someone talked to the Peloxans and the symptoms matched a parasite in the water they dealt with sometimes.”

“Yeah, but they all drank the same water!  If it didn’t kill the rest of these guys, but caused some kind of – hallucinations or whatever later on –”

“This is merely speculation,” Master Tapal interrupts.  “We cannot know anything for sure until we reach that listening post.  Let’s move.  Keep your guard up.”

“I can have backup here in six minutes,” says Drift.  “It won’t be quiet, though.”

“Leave them on standby for now.  I’d rather have stealth on our side.  Padawan –” Master Tapal’s gaze fixes on Cal, who’s unwrapping a ration stick, seeking a fast jolt of energy.  He always has a couple on him, all the same flavor because he only likes one.  “Are you all right?”

“Yes, Master,” Cal says.  He wiggles his foot.  “I rolled my ankle a bit, but it doesn’t hurt much.  I’ll be fine.”

“Good.  And Cal?” Master Tapal waits until Cal’s finished chewing a mouthful of jitfruit-flavored calories and looking up at him again.  “Well done.”

It seems inappropriate to smile when he’s standing next to six dead men, but Cal can’t smother it before it steals across his face.  Getting used to failure has made genuine praise feel so much more meaningful, especially from his master.  He allows himself only a moment to bask in it, then shoves the rest of the ration stick in his mouth, squares his shoulders, and falls into line with the others, and they march on towards the listening post.

“I’m not doing you any favors, you know.”

Cal says nothing.  The woman on the other side of the desk scowls at her datapad, taps the screen a few times.  “This ain’t a job for a kid,” she continues, setting the pad down and sliding it across the desk to him, and he picks it up slowly.  “If I didn’t have a quota to meet, I probably wouldn’t be considering you at all…”

Drawing his knees up, Cal props the datapad against them so he can get a better look at the lines of miniscule print and starts reading the contract.  It’s the exact sort of hyper-exploitative nonsense he was expecting, with the occasional bone like free healthcare (if you were injured on the job and can prove beyond a shadow of a doubt it could not possibly have been your fault or in any way prevented) thrown in there.  But it pays something, at least, now that that’s an concern.  He’s survived the galaxy-wide massacre of his people; why not try his luck in a career with a fatality rate larger than some star systems?

He feels so sick.  The crowded words on the screen swim and he has to blink a dozen times to bring them back into focus.

“Not much of a talker, is he?” the recruiter says flatly.

“He, ah –” There’s a noise back by the door, skin scraping across fabric – Prauf tends to rub his hands over his knees when he’s nervous.  Cal chews at the ragged, bleeding mess of his thumbnail and keeps reading.  One day off in every ten-day cycle.  “He hasn’t actually said anything to me yet… wrote down his name and that’s about all.  But – that’s not gonna be a problem, right?”

“No velvet off my horns,” she says.  “Once his name’s on the contract, whatever happens to him is outta my hands, so I really don’t care.”

“Oh.  Okay.  I’m sure sooner or later, maybe…” Prauf doesn’t finish the sentence, but the implication hangs over Cal’s head.

He hasn’t spoken since he scrabbled out of the escape pod.  At first, he had nothing to say.  Then, after Prauf turned on the fritzy holoscreen in his apartment and Cal saw the Temple spewing smoke into Coruscant’s atmosphere, heard the Supreme-Chancellor-turned-Emperor vowing to rid the galaxy of any lingering pockets of the Jedi insurrection, words failed him anyway.  If he tries now, it feels like someone’s closing their fist around his windpipe and he can’t make a sound, so he doesn’t try.

Maybe it’s better this way, he thinks, pretending he’s still studying this contract he’s about to bind himself to.  He’s sure there are more survivors – the Council, hopefully – and someone will find him on Bracca eventually, but until then, he needs to disappear.  The Scrapper Guild is just a wet, smoggy cog in the machine.  He can fly under the radar here.  And… keeping his mouth shut until he’s among Jedi again is suddenly looking like a brilliant idea.  He can’t say anything incriminating if he never says anything at all.

There’s a spot for him to sign his name at the end of the contract.  Cal reaches for the stylus on the recruiter’s desk, but she puts her hand over it before he can take it.  He blinks at her.  “Look,” she says, very quietly, “I won’t stop you.  But you could go down to the spaceport, see if one of the outgoing cargo ships’ll let you work your way off-planet.  Lotta better places out there.”

He has nowhere to go.  Nowhere is safe anymore.  She lifts her hand and he takes the stylus, writes Cal on the line, pauses.  Using his real name is pretty stupid, but she’s watching him and erasing what he’s already put there would look a little suspicious.  “If you don’t got a surname, that’s enough,” she says, so he leaves it at that and returns the datapad.  “Welcome to the Guild –” she glances at the screen, “Cal.”  To Prauf, she says, “Get him tattooed and kitted before tomorrow night.  You know where to go.”  Then she looks back at Cal.  “Count yourself lucky, kid.  If he wasn’t willing to train you, you’d be starting in Hazmat.  Day after tomorrow, you report alongside Prauf for first shift at dawn, understand?”

“We’ll be there,” Prauf says, getting to his feet with a slight grunt.  The office is so small Cal only needs three steps to reach him and the door.  “Thanks.”  He puts his big hands on Cal’s shoulders, guiding him out, and Cal squeezes his eyes shut for a second so he can pretend it’s Master Tapal instead.  “Might as well see about getting you properly dressed first.  You’re tiny for a Human, but I bet we can scrape something up… hey.”  Cal feels him bend closer and opens his eyes, sees they’ve reached the lift already.  “You okay?”

Cal doesn’t say anything.  But he does nod, just a bit, and Prauf squeezes his shoulders like Master Tapal used to before urging him into the lift.

Chapter Text

Cal’s ribcage feels like it’s been pulverized into powder.

That’s… not the most useful or relevant thought he could have in this situation, but all the other thoughts vying for real estate in his brain at the moment are going to be even less so, and therefore he pins this one front and center.  The pain is a focusing crystal.  He concentrates on it, inhales.  The mass of bone shards that once protected his soft, vulnerable organs attacks them with a fury, antagonizing his starved lungs, his aching throat.  His heart.  Humans don’t die instantly when their heart stops beating.  He doesn’t know if it’s the same for – he’s not going to think about that.  There are more immediate issues at hand, like the fact he’s standing on an unfamiliar ship with a lit lightsaber in his hand in front of two people he doesn’t know (who saved his life) and he has no idea what’s going on.

He's not even sure any of this is actually happening.  It all stopped feeling real after a while.  His memory of the last twenty minutes or so is just a blur of adrenaline – identification ready just another contraband inspection devotee of the treasonous Jedi Order NO NO NO NO stop the train did they seriously bring in a karking gunship jump now hold on what Jedi gave their life so that you might live?  Any second, Cal’s going to lurch awake in his apartment, panting and shivering and what passes for safe in his life.  It’ll be warm, because his blankets are fifth-hand and threadbare, but he has enough of them to keep him comfortable.  He’ll grab some caf and a nutrient bar before it’s time to leave.  He quit smoking to afford more food, recently relapsed, but he’s been budgeting his crappy paycheck really carefully, so he treated himself to a box of Cardotan lentils last night – if they soak during his work shift, he can actually make himself a filling dinner for a change.  It should be a good day.

“Okay, shut that thing off and grab some seat.”

He isn’t waking up.  The pilot’s the one speaking; the woman sidles by silently and Cal backs out of her way on autopilot, feels his arms shake.  The small part of his brain that’s somehow still functioning properly notices they’re in hyperspace.  That’s a dangerous jump to make from atmo – either the pilot is really good or really desperate.

After another second or two of listening to himself gasp, Cal wrestles back enough control of his faculties to turn off the lightsaber.  The four-armed pilot relaxes slightly.  Latero, the functioning lobe of his brain supplies.  There are a handful of them working for the Scrapper Guild.  The woman is standing by a holotable when Cal turns around, watching him, unblinking and expressionless.  Slim, brown-skinned, dark-haired – Human, as far as he can tell.  He looks around, but that’s it.  Just him, the woman, and the Latero, who comes up behind Cal and moves over towards the woman until they’re side by side, presenting a united front.

They saved his life.  Cal doesn’t let go of his lightsaber.

The woman apparently realizes this conversation isn’t going to start itself, because she says, “My name is Cere Junda.”  She gestures to the Latero, not seeming to mind Cal wandering while she’s speaking.  “And this is my captain, Greez Dritus.”

“How ya doin’?” the Latero says.  Cal peers deeper into the ship, expecting reinforcements somewhere, because they’d have to be crazy to see a guy with a lightsaber being aggressively pursued by Imperials and think hey, let’s go and rescue him, just the two of us!  Even if they don’t know what he is, any idiot can swing a lightsaber around and separate a few limbs from his opponents.  Unless they don’t know what the lightsaber is.  At this point in the day, Cal’s willing to believe anything’s possible.  “Yeah, the Mantis is my ship, but you better pay attention to this lady here.”

Clutching his weapon like a security blanket, Cal turns towards them, then sidesteps so his back isn’t facing the doorway, just in case.  Then he just keeps moving, half-hoping the adrenaline never wears off so he never has to stop moving and think too hard about how he got here.  “So,” Cere says, eyes following him, “who are you?”

His gaze flits from her to Greez to the holotable and to Cere again.  She stares back.  "Helloooo," Greez says, waving a hand, "you deaf?  She asked you a question." 

Cal says nothing.  Greez shifts awkwardly as the silence lingers on.  Cere’s eyebrows draw together and, finally, she asks, “Do you talk?”

Cal shakes his head, relief punching an air hole in the maelstrom of panicfearangerconfusionpain trying to drown him, giving him enough breathing room to hook the lightsaber on his belt.  Some people take a ridiculously long time to catch on.  By now, he’s gotten used to the uncomfortable moments (or ‘uncomfortable six cycles’, in one memorable case) before the other person works out he’s not just being obstinate or ignoring them.  He hasn’t spoken in five years.  He might have screamed something by accident when – no.  Don’t think about it.

“You gotta be kidding me,” Greez says huffily, folding two arms across his chest.  “Oh, that’s just great…” 

Cere holds up a finger and heads into what appears to be the common area of the ship, towards a low table.  She sifts through whatever’s on it, then says, “Greez, what did you do with my datapad?”

Greez flings his other two arms in the air.  “Whaddaya mean, what did I do with it?!  It’s not my fault you keep forgetting where you left it!”  He sighs, shakes his head.  “Mine’s up in the galley somewhere, just use that one for now.”

These two are way too casual all of a sudden.  Cal’s not sure if they’re genuinely convinced he isn’t a threat to them, which strikes him as rather insulting, or if they’re trying to make him think he’s safe so he’s nice and compliant until they get to… wherever this ship’s going.  He takes one step towards the cockpit, intending to check the nav computer and find out if their destination is somewhere he absolutely doesn’t want to be, but Cere’s already coming back, holding out a datapad.  There’s a blank document open on the screen.

Cal hesitates, decides he needs answers more than he wants to keep quiet and keep them on their toes.  He pulls up the keyboard and types, Cal Kestis.  Giving his last name is a gamble.  He watches Cere and Greez closely when he flips the datapad around so they can read – Greez just makes a soft noise of acknowledgement, still put-out.  Cere looks at the words for a lot longer, her forehead wrinkling.  Cal tries, however weakly, to get a sense of her emotions, and only grasps a split second of bewilderment before it’s gone.  He doesn’t think either of them recognize his name, but if he’s gotten himself rescued by a pair of seasoned bounty hunters or something, they’d know how to act innocent and lure him into a false sense of security.  He starts typing again.  Thanks for the help.  Who was that back there?

Cere’s face goes stony.  “An Imperial Inquisitor,” she says.  “She’s a Force user hunting Jedi survivors.”

So they are aware what they brought on board.  Or Cere’s taking an educated guess and testing Cal the same way he’s testing them.  He sets the pad down on the holotable and probes at his right shoulder, not taking his eyes off Cere, as she’s the one carrying a blaster.  His shoulder doesn’t feel wrong, but it definitely isn’t quite right, either.  This one likes to pop out of the socket.  He probably dislocated and immediately reduced it without even noticing as he was running for his life or falling off trains.  “And now that she knows who you are,” Cere continues, “she will not stop until she destroys you.”

How do you know so much? Cal asks.  Suspiciously.  If there’s one thing he misses about talking, it’s tone.  And why’d you help me?

Cere and Greez glance at one another.  “We track Imperial communications,” Cere says.  “We heard the Inquisitors were heading to Bracca.  So we made our move.”

Oh, that doesn’t sound ominous at all.  He eyes them both for a second.  Right.  What’s the bounty on Jedi these days?

“That’s gratitude for ya!” Greez complains, jabbing a finger in Cal’s direction, as if he and Cere aren’t somehow managing to act even more shady than the fugitive Jedi on their ship.  Do they really expect him to believe they rescued him – painting a neon Imperial-cog-shaped target on their backs in the process – out of the goodness of their hearts?  He didn’t stay alive for the past five years by being that naïve.

“Look,” Cere says, meeting Cal’s eyes, “I get it.  You’ve been surviving on your own so long that it’s impossible to trust anyone, and it’s what’s kept you alive.”

The panicfearangerconfusionpain swells in his chest again, pushing up into his throat like he’s going to vomit from the sheer force of his emotions, like he might actually scream if he opens his mouth.  What does she know about everything he’s been through?  He was twelve years old and his master was dead because of him and the Empire would murder him without remorse if they ever found him, and he had to get up every day with that knowledge weighing him down, tear ships apart for a comically small salary, never breathe a single word of who he used to be.  And now his – no.  He takes the deepest breath possible, holds it in until his vision goes fuzzy from the agony in his ribs, then exhales.  The urge to scream recedes to lurk just below the surface with all the other tumultuous feelings he can’t deal with. The agony stays. He's getting nauseous from the pain.

“But this is about something bigger than just surviving.”

Cal looks at her and hopes his face conveys how little he cares about anything but survival right now.  Apparently not, since Cere’s expression has gone strangely earnest.  Like what?

“Like rebuilding the Jedi Order,” Cere says.

Cal’s mouth opens of its own accord.  Nothing comes out, as always; he just stands there and gawks for a minute.

She can’t be serious.  She has no clue what she’s even suggesting.  But she’s also radiating so much sincerity even a failed Padawan like Cal can pick it up, and when he peers at Greez, the Latero looks like he’s completely on board with this mind-blowingly insane idea.  Neither of them have a clue.  You two?  Anyone else?

“Oh,” Greez says, back to thinly-concealed hostility in a heartbeat, spreading two arms wide, “we’re not good enough for you?”

Cal ignores him, types, The Jedi Council? on the pad, deliberately angles the screen away from Greez so only Cere can read it.  He’s long past caring about being petty.

Cere lowers her gaze and that answers his question well before she says, “They’re gone.” 

On some level, Cal had known that.  He’d seen the news footage of the Temple after it was sacked, understood anyone who’d been there at the time was unlikely to have escaped.  He still tightens his grip on the datapad until his hands shake.  So I’m all you’ve got.  Sucks for them – should’ve held out for the next escaped Jedi, who probably wouldn’t be as useless.

Cere and Greez exchange another look.  “Captain,” Cere says, like she’s come to a decision, “set a course for Bogano.”  Cal’s never heard of the place, but evidently Greez has, since he agrees and returns to the cockpit.  “In the meantime, try and relax.”  She gestures towards the rear of the ship.  “Go.  You’re safe… for now.”  And then she joins Greez, leaving Cal feeling like someone’s cut the deck out from beneath his feet.  That’s actually happened to him, so he’s regrettably familiar with the sensation.

He drifts.  There’s a small lounge, an equally small galley, a bunch of terrariums.  The largest of them is bare and looking at it depresses him.  Nobody shouts at him to stop when he reaches the corridor, so Cal keeps going, eyeing the doors – two are sealed, but the door on his left, furthest from the engine room at the end of the hallway, stands open, giving him full view of a cramped refresher.  He turns the light on, goes inside, shuts the door behind him, and watches his reflection wobble in the mirror above the sink.

Oh, Cal thinks, my ribs really kriffing hurt.

Fumbling with the straps and buckles, shoulder hollering in protest every time he rotates it too far, he strips to the waist and takes a look.  His torso is quite the spectacle.  It’s only been half an hour at most since the first time he fell (that was through the roof of the train car, wasn’t it?), but his entire back is already a stunning red, and his left side’s threatening to invent all sorts of new colors.  Gasping through his teeth, Cal prods at his ribs as gently as he can.  The ones on the right are just badly bruised, he decides.  A number on the left are definitely broken.

At least he doesn’t feel like he’s punctured any lungs, and all his ribs move in the same excruciating direction when he breathes, so he probably isn’t going to die.  Hooray.  He regards the sopping pile of clothing on the deck with trepidation, thinks about how much putting those back on is going to blow so he doesn’t think about anything else.  There’s no need to revisit his thrilling escape from Bracca right now, or wonder how the Inquisitors had known he’d used the Force, or remember the woman that trooper called Second Sister, how she’d angled her lightsaber’s hilt towards Prauf’s chest and Cal knew what was going to happen a second before she ignited the blade and he didn’t do anything –

He opens the tap as far as it’ll go, letting the water splatter noisily against the metal sink so the others can’t hear him puking his meager lunch into the toilet.

Once his stomach is empty, Cal shuts off the faucet, sits on the lid of the toilet, and cradles his head in his hands.  Throwing up with broken ribs is an interesting experience.  Passing out in the ‘fresher aboard a ship crewed by two people he doesn’t trust in the slightest would also be an interesting experience.  He breathes through the pain, considers Cere and Greez.  Upon giving it more than three seconds of thought, he concludes they’re most likely not planning to turn him straight over to the Empire.  They just rescued him from Imperials.  Trying to collect an Imperial bounty after that would be a fast track to execution.  Doesn’t mean they don’t have some kind of plan worked out to give him to somebody else, who collects the bounty and then splits it.  That’d be a massive risk, even for one motherload of a payout – the Inquisitor almost killed all of them.

Cere sounded like she really believed what she was saying when she told him they wanted to rebuild the Order.  Why, though?  What’s the connection there?

Cal’s still mulling it over when someone bangs on the ‘fresher door, making him jump.  “Hey, you!” Greez calls.  Then – “Ah, I didn’t think this through; how am I gonna know he’s listening…”

Rolling his eyes, Cal heaves himself to his feet and thumps his palm twice against the door.  “Oh, that works,” Greez says.  “Okay, you see that big box overhead?”  Cal turns back towards the rest of the ‘fresher.  It’s hard to miss the large metal cube mounted to the ceiling above the toilet.  “That’s the launderer.  If you switch it to ‘dry’, turn the dial one click to the right, and hit the green button, your clothes should be just a little bit damp in about fifteen minutes.  Enough time to take a shower, if you want.  Then you can stop sogging all over my ship.  Cot in the engine room’s yours.”

With that, he walks away.  Cal listens to his footsteps fade, looks at his soaked clothes, at the solid crimson stripe across his side where he bounced off a barge, and does as he’s told.  He uses the sonic instead of wasting more water.  The vibration tries to quake his ribs apart and it feels like a punishment.  The pain (and nothing else) actually brings tears to his eyes; a few squeeze out through his lashes and he quickly dashes them away before the sonic can take care of it.  He’s not going to think about it, he’s not going to fall apart.  His breath hitches and he shoves his knuckles against his mouth until his teeth cut into his lips and he’s under control again.

He stumbles out of the shower dry and dizzy, spends the last six minutes of the launderer’s cycle slumped on the deck, trying not to black out.  Cal has a ridiculous pain tolerance, but this has gone well past ridiculous – he got jumped and stabbed in the kidney with a vibroblade when he was fifteen, and even that hurt less, yet he still makes himself get completely dressed once his clothing is just that little bit damp.  If Greez and Cere have anything sinister in mind for him, he’s not walking into it naked.

“Cal?”

Speak of the devil.  Cal lifts his head off his knees, watches the ‘fresher blur and double before his eyes.  “The bottom compartment to the left of the sink is the medical cabinet,” Cere says.  “We have plenty of supplies, so take whatever you need.”  She pauses.  “Knock on the wall or something if you’re conscious.”  Cal double-taps the bulkhead.  “Thank you.”

If they don’t have anything sinister in mind for him, he’s kind of glad Cere, at least, isn’t being too weird about Cal not talking.  He’s not normally shy, but people kicking up a big fuss over it makes him want to crawl into a hole.  They don’t understand – silence is safety.  Nobody in five years has been able to make him talk and he takes comfort in that.  Lightheaded to the point of spacesickness, Cal scoots across the deck on his rear, unlatches the compartment Cere indicated, and rubs his eyes, trying to get a good look at the contents.  Not a whole lot can be done for broken ribs without a bacta tank.  They have bacta gel, though – three tubes, so he doesn’t feel bad about using several handfuls of the stuff on what’s left of his ribs – and some painkiller hyposprays, one of which he pumps directly into his sternum.

And then he can breathe without wanting to pass out.  He leans his forehead against the cold metal of the compartment door for a few minutes and shuts his eyes.  Without the pain filling him up, he is hollow.  He wants to go back to his leaky tenement flat, where he only ever turns on one lamp because the other buzzes like a migraine, where the water in the shower doesn’t pressurize past ‘slowly being drooled on by a Gungan’, where he has tools and blankets and caf and lentils.  He wants to go home.  He wants his closest friend to be alive, to meet him at the train station and thump him on the shoulder, asking if Cal’s ready for another thrilling day of rain and scrapping.

Since he isn’t waking up from this nightmare, Cal stands, grabs the datapad from the edge of the sink where he left it, and exits the ‘fresher.  He trails his fingers along the bulkhead as he enters the engine room.  Greez loves this ship, wholeheartedly, violently, possessively.  She’s his life.  She’s an extension of his own body, even.  The echoes are emotions more than memories and Cal gets swept up momentarily, gives the doorframe an affectionate pat without thinking about it.

He can’t figure out how to close the door from the inside, so he leaves it open.  Just like Greez said, there’s a cot along one side of the room.  More interesting is the workbench at the rear, which is simple and utilitarian and still about twenty times nicer than anything Cal could’ve afforded.  There’s actually enough room to work.  Whoever inherits Cal’s apartment (and his lentils, and his blankets) is going to be real upset by the condition of the kitchen countertop.  The tools in the rack look pretty standard – hydrogrip, magna-driver, multitool, a handheld arc probe, hyperdrive attenuator, two different wrenches, laser caliper… another multitool is lying loose on the bench and Cal picks it up to put it away, and the engine room goes dark.

There are, by his estimation, two solid handspans’ worth of clay separating him from the thruster he’s supposed to be tuning.  He doesn’t typically mind maintenance duty – every student at the Academy rotates through it, and it’s useful knowledge, besides – but he doesn’t typically have to service a fighter that looks like it went belly-first into the fretching Koppa Badlands.  He can’t even get started on his actual job until he can see the thruster.  Sighing (and immediately regretting it when a piece of clay chips off and falls in his mouth), he keeps scraping at the dry clay with his old multitool.  Doesn’t matter if the cheap hunk of junk gets ruined, he has another.

“Having fun?”

“No,” he grunts.

Faina, his partner on tonight’s maintenance roster, slides beneath the fighter too.  Her shoulder bumps his as she offers him something; he points his torch towards her long enough to realize it’s an actual chisel.  “You’re probably gonna need this,” she says.  “One of the rookies had a rough landing in the Badlands.”

“Yeah, kinda figured that…” He sighs again and starts chipping with both tools at the same time, which speeds the process up a fraction.  Faina doesn’t offer to help, but if she was in his boots, he wouldn’t either.

For a few minutes, there’s no sound except his tools hacking away at the clay.  Then, out of nowhere, Faina asks, “What are you going to do after you graduate?”

“Fly,” he says simply.  There was never another possibility for him.  He lived fifteen years with his feet on the ground, got accepted into the Academy, and didn’t look back; Lateron might be his home, but he’s more than ready to get out of here and see the galaxy.

Well.  Maybe there’s one thing he’s still looking back at.

“I don’t really care where,” he adds, since Faina’s not saying anything, “or who hires me.  Just gotta get some actual experience under my belt, right?  If there’s ever an opening in the Diplomatic Corps, I might try to snag it – they pay obscenely well and the beauties Lateron Spaceworks is providing their pilots with these days… I’d kill to get my hands on one of those.”  He finally spots a glimmer of metal beneath all the clay.  “How ‘bout you?”

“…I got offered a post with the Minister’s Air Guard.”

The multitool slips out of his hand and smacks him in the teeth.  Wincing, he snatches it up before it falls off and rolls away, turns his head to look at Faina, but it’s too dark to see her expression.  “Are you serious?!”  He feels her nod.  “They never take anyone right outta the Academy… damn.”  Something in his stomach knots, a familiar snarl of jealousy and frustration – why couldn’t it have been him?  Other people have gotten all the luck his entire life. 

If she was somebody else, he might’ve let those feelings loose.  Faina’s been his friend since they were the rookies crashing ships in the Badlands, though.  He locks his envy up tight and tries to inject a shot of cheer into his voice.  “Well, I guess if it’d be anyone, it’d be you, huh?  You’re the best in the class – I mean, I am a very close second-best, and you still haven’t beaten a couple of my records in Professor Pate’s sims, but…”

“I’m not taking it,” she says in the flattest tone he’s ever heard.

He almost drops the multitool again.  “Are you serious?” he repeats.  That is a dream job.  Six years in the Guard and she’s set for life, could go anywhere she wants –

“Don’t spread this around,” Faina says.  “I don’t want pity.”  She takes a deep breath.  “My father’s dying.  He’s got weeks – won’t even see me graduate.”  Her voice quivers on the last word.  “I have four siblings at home, and three of ‘em are still in grade school.  If I don’t go look after them, nobody will.”

He can’t argue with that.  Lateron’s social services are questionable at best.  No one ever seemed to notice what was going on in his house when he was still a munchkin, and his great-grandmother took him in with zero legal entities involved.  “Oh,” he says.  “Shit.”

“Yeah.”

“I get it, though,” he says quietly, and hears her hair whisper against the floor as she turns her head.  “My great-grandmother’s just about the last person in my family still around, and she’s getting real frail.  I don’t know how much longer I’m gonna have with her.  That’s kinda why I’m not looking at off-world jobs just yet.”  He sighs, lowers his hands and the tools to his chest.  Screw water conservation – he’s getting the sprayer.  “Family’s all we’ve got, right?”

“Mm.”  After a moment of silence, she loops her left arms through his right.  “I’m gonna miss you, Greez.”

“Aw, Faina,” he says, pressing a free hand over his heart, “same, but it would never have worked out between us.”  She bursts out laughing and jabs a pointy elbow into his side, and maybe he does love her, a little, but the spark isn’t there.  Grinning, he adds, “Listen, though, when your sibs are grown?  Come find me – I will definitely be extremely rich and powerful by that point, and I’ll hook you up with a nice gig.”

“Sounds good to me,” she says.  He can hear her smiling.

Cal lets the multitool slide out of his fingers and clatter to the workbench.  Knees watery, shivering as the last of his adrenaline finally evaporates in the face of utter exhaustion, he pours himself onto the cot and tries to find a comfortable position.  As soon as he does, he regrets it.  No matter what anybody claims, he’s not about to believe he’s safe enough to sleep on the Mantis yet; the cot is a lot softer than his crappy mattress at home and the engine room’s pleasantly warm and it’d be so easy to let himself drop off and leave reality behind for a while.  And then he might wake up with a blaster to his head, if he woke up at all.  He rolls onto his back so the pain punches him to full consciousness, regards the datapad he’s still carrying.  He ought to give it back to Greez.  Or… not like he has any other way of communicating with these two.  They won’t understand anything he says.  He’s not sure he really wants to communicate with them more than absolutely necessary, but if it is absolutely necessary…

Cal puts the datapad on the deck next to the cot, folds an arm beneath his head, and stares at the ceiling.  What he can see of the readouts on the monitors overhead are all well within normal parameters and they don’t distract him for more than two minutes.

Family’s all we’ve got.  The Jedi Order was destroyed.  Unless Cere’s hiding a few hundred Force-sensitives behind those doors Cal didn’t check, he can’t see it being restored from ashes.  Not by someone like him.  And the closest thing he had to family on Bracca is dead because Cal was too weak to act.  By Greez’s logic, Cal has nothing.

Footsteps in the corridor rip him out of a half-doze he didn’t intend to slip into, and he lifts his head slightly.  They’re too light to be Greez’s.  While Lateros are short (by Human standards), they’re built solid – he knew one Latero Rigger who had a blast door fall on his leg and it didn’t even break the bone.  Cere doesn’t bother him, goes into one of the other rooms instead.  Now there’s an idea… Cal closes his eyes, exhales.  He won’t meditate.  That’ll end the way it usually does and if he has to watch two people he loves die in one day, he’s going to dissolve into a flood of tears and then he’ll be no good to anybody.

A few hours ago, Cal used the Force for the first time in five years.  He didn’t think about it, he just did it.  He opens himself to it again and that aches like a neglected muscle, and he feels something pushing back, almost a physical obstacle standing in between him and the Force, but it’s there.  It envelops him. 

Immersed, he utilizes the infinite, incomprehensible potential of the Force to poke around the Mantis without being noticed.

Greez is still up in the cockpit.  Cere’s right next door in what Cal assumes is her cabin.  Neither of them are making any effort to shield their emotions – they may not know that’s possible, or necessary when there’s a Jedi aboard who doesn’t care too much about their privacy at the moment.  Cal shamelessly pries.  Greez feels conflicted, the glowing embers of his irritation still smoldering and smoking.  Strangely enough, that seems to be fueling his happiness instead of choking it.  He’s pleased because Cere is pleased, and the heady, buoyant sensation keeps him afloat above the nerves.  Maybe he’s the kind of guy who’s not happy unless he has something to complain about.  Cere… she’s not just pleased, she’s downright ecstatic, and Cal has to wonder how long she’s been trying to find a Jedi for whatever purpose she has in mind.  Her joy is neon.  She could literally light up a room if she so desired.

She’s also in unimaginable pain.  There’s something dark and writhing inside her, something that’s been strangled again and again and still continues rearing its ugly head.  He sees himself there – focusing on whatever will keep her from thinking about this emotion that wants to consume her.  It’s crushing guilt and taffy-flavored regret.  He shouldn’t, he knows better, but he dives deeper, trying to reach the core of whatever’s making his stomach hurt so terribly…

Then, for just a second, Cal’s standing next to Cere.  She turns her head towards him, and her expression – stars, she looks just like Master Tapal when he had to lecture his Padawan for getting into trouble, but was clearly so amused by the circumstances Cal knew the punishment wouldn’t be harsh.  Cere hikes an eyebrow at Cal, gives a huff that’s nowhere near as aggravated as it’s trying to sound.  Out, she says, without moving her lips or even opening her mouth.

A door slams somewhere.  Cal opens his eyes, groggily realizes he must’ve fallen asleep.  He doesn’t remember what he was dreaming about.

Stay awake, he orders himself, blinking into the work lamp mounted over the bunk.  It’s like staring at a sun; the headache that’s been brewing since midday explodes in his temples and starts hammering at the bridge of his nose.  Cal sighs in lieu of groaning aloud, covers his eyes with one hand, reaches up blindly with the other to feel around the light for a switch.  He can’t find one.  Screw it, then.  Keeping his back to the bulkhead, he turns over onto his side – even pacified by the painkiller, his broken ribs hate everything about that – and tucks a hand under his cheek.

He has to stay awake.  Only a fool would leave themself vulnerable in front of two unknown and quite possibly hostile variables.  Lightsabers are great for defense, but he’s so tired.  Cere or Greez could be waiting to steal it off him the instant he dares to sleep.

Stay awake, Cal thinks again, blinking hard.  Anything could happen when they come out of hyperspace.  He doesn’t trust them.  He doesn’t know them.

He doesn’t…

Chapter Text

The first time Cere dropped out of hyperspace before the ridged, pockmarked, dull green sphere that was Bogano, she’d been a Knight for a scant few years and hadn’t yet even considered mentoring a Padawan of her own.  She wasn’t impressed, or, honestly, all that interested in the sight.

“That won’t be necessary,” Master Cordova had said as Cere stuck the receiver in her ear and skimmed several highly-trafficked comm frequencies.

She shrugged, still automatically scanning for any incoming or outgoing transmissions from the planet they were approaching.  “You never know,” she remarked.  “I’ve been to at least one supposedly uninhabited moon and picked up some rather interesting encrypted codes on a former geological survey channel normally used planetside.  That’s how I discovered the Pyke Syndicate was running spice through the system.”

“I would be very surprised indeed if you found anything like that here,” Cordova said with a cheer he usually reserved for fragments of primitive Wroonian agricultural tools.  Cere flipped through a few more channels just to be contrary, then accepted his word as fact and turned off the communications system, sagged against the back of the copilot’s seat with a sigh.

She was exhausted.  Receiving a message out of the blue asking if she would be able to come to Xibariz right away and pick up a Force-sensitive infant was one thing; being lured there under false pretenses and then blindsided by a barrage of baseless and outright offensive accusations was quite another.  As a Seeker and thus the person most likely to be faced with confused, frightened, and sometimes misinformed caregivers, she’d heard all the vitriol before.  The Jedi had stolen Xibariz’s children, they’d deprived them of the chance to choose their own paths in life, they were brainwashing them, et cetera.  Prince Van Zee was barely out of his teens and had a chip on his shoulder that could be seen from orbit, and Cere had known immediately he didn’t believe a word of what he was saying.  But his advisors (who zealously believed what they were saying) persuaded him this was the best course of action, he had his people’s support, and he’d made his decision long before Cere arrived.  There would be no more Jedi from Xibariz or any of its colonies.  It’d taken every drop of diplomacy Master Cordova had instilled in her to convince the Prince his other demand was a tad… outrageous.  Only two Jedi were of Xibarizzian descent and she doubted they’d appreciate being ejected from the Order and sent ‘home’ at the Prince’s whim.

He did back off, to her relief.  Instead, she sent a message back to the Temple that both of the Jedi in question were being offered the choice to leave the Order and return to Xibariz.  The older Jedi, already a Master, was on long-term assignment in the Outer Rim and currently could not be contacted.  The younger was only seven or eight years old.  She’d actually sent a response to Cere herself, asking for it to be passed on to Prince Van Zee and the councilors.  It turned out to be a very polite refusal.  In fact, it was so deliberately, painstakingly polite it bordered on being the rudest thing Cere had ever heard.  She’d chewed the inside of her cheek raw so she wouldn’t laugh when one of the prince’s attendants read it aloud in the throne room.  Then there’d been arguments about brainwashing again, as she’d expected, but the little girl – Trilla, she’d said her name was – would be remaining in the creche of her own volition.

Her amusement carried her home and up to the Council chambers to make her report, and then she deflated all at once.  How many Xibarizzian children would now grow up knowing they were different somehow, never able to put a name to it?  Was there anything more she could’ve done to make the Prince change his mind?  The Council praised her handling of the situation, but she’d felt wrung out, and the depression rolled over her like a fog.

For three days, she slept little and ate less and struggled to meditate.  Master Koon actually stopped her in the hall and suggested she take some time away from Coruscant to relax.  Cere had just been away from Coruscant, and she’d felt very relaxed before setting foot in that throne room, so it seemed unnecessary… and then a Human-shaped whirlwind blew into the Temple.  Master Cordova never stayed long, always looking ahead – or back, in a manner of speaking.  He spoke to the Council, took tea with Master Nu for several hours (they were such gossips, honestly), and dropped by Cere’s quarters to invite her along on his next jaunt.  She didn’t even remember agreeing.  Suddenly, she was aboard his little cruiser, listening to air traffic control chatter as they left Coruscant’s atmosphere.

That little cruiser, the one with fuel logs and flight logs that were all inaccessible without the proper codes, settled on Bogano with a thump.  “Watch your step,” Master Cordova cautioned as he lowered the boarding ramp and opened the rear hatch.  “Bogling holes are sometimes difficult to see.  And do watch out for sinkholes…”

Wondering what a bogling was, hoping it was not some kind of local spider because Cordova knew how she felt about those, Cere stepped out onto the mesa and breathed deeply through her nose.  The air smelled so clean.  She loved Coruscant, but it smelled like an ecumenopolis.  Pure, unspoiled nature was something she’d learned to value.

“Ah,” Cordova said, “we have company.”

‘Company’ turned out to be droids.  Three of them, in fact – two came scuttling or flying right over the ravine, chittering up a storm.  The third, a rather battered astromech, stayed safely on its side of the gorge, squealing indignantly.  “I was not gone that long!” Cordova called to the astromech, and laughed, reaching up to pat the droid buzzing around his head as the one with too many legs for Cere’s tastes skittered around his feet.  “I’m sure it’ll be impressive, R4.  Your work is always exemplary.”

For someone who’d always struck her as more comfortable around artifacts and ruins than other people, Master Cordova did love his droids.  Cere smiled for the first time in days, watching him fuss over them and promise to fix a damaged servo as soon as they reached his workshop.  Then she felt something bump against her calf, glanced down, and spotted a fourth droid, which looked up at her and warbled.  “Hi there,” she said, wracking her brains for all the Binary she’d learned as a child and mostly forgot.  “My name’s Cere.  Nice to meet you, BD-1.”

BD-1 chirped hello, then scurried towards Cordova, stopped halfway there, and looked back, clearly expecting Cere to follow.  She did, slinging her small bag over her shoulder.  She reached him just as he sent the other two droids over to join the astromech.  “So this is what you’ve been up to all this time,” Cere said.  The pure, unspoiled nature was actually studded with cables and bridges and control panels, and there was an enormous tower of sorts stretching up towards the sky in the distance.  Still smelled clean, though.  “Who else knows this place is here?”

“You and I,” Cordova said.  “And the droids.  This planet is otherwise unknown, and I would like to keep it that way for now.”

“You can trust me,” Cere said quickly.

“I know, Cere.  That’s why I brought you here.”  Master Cordova crouched and placed his hand on BD-1’s head.  “This BD unit is a very dear friend of mine.  As is she,” he added, looking from BD to Cere and back.  “She was my Padawan.”  He’d straightened up and set his other hand on Cere’s shoulder.  BD was trying to use his as a perch.  “Come.  I’ll show you around.”

When Master Cordova passed mere months before the end of the Clone Wars, he, Cere, and BD-1 – the sole remaining droid – were still the only ones who knew Bogano existed.  Some part of Cere is thankful her master did not live to see how the war ended.  He would’ve survived the Purge, alone on Bogano, but what’s come afterwards… he didn’t deserve that suffering.  And perhaps she does, but the young man they plucked out of the Second Sister’s clutches probably doesn’t either.

It must be spring or autumn, judging by the number of boglings Cere can see gallivanting around the surface from the Mantis’s cockpit.  They spend summers in the cool, damp caves and tuck into their burrows for the winter.  Either way, the weather’s nothing short of gorgeous.  She’s probably wasting it, sitting in the copilot’s chair with her mug of caf, but she’s been in the same position for twenty minutes, lost in thought, and doesn’t want to find her way back yet.

There was a time Cere wouldn’t have believed she’d be willing to kill her own Padawan to save a scrapper she’d never met.  Trilla was too strong, too clever, too brave to fall to the dark side.  Perhaps any Jedi’s faith could be shaken by their experiences during the war, and she was no exception, but she didn’t stew in those feelings.  The ones she felt she could not bring to her own master, she discussed with her friends, other Knights, or Master Koth, who’d developed a bond with her while she was still a youngling.  The favored lures of the dark side – power, strength, glory – didn’t tempt her.  Trilla’s interests fell more on the academic side of things; in fact, in many ways, she reminded Cere of Master Cordova, though she preferred studying art and literature (not music, to Cere’s disappointment) instead of lost civilizations and ancient cultures.

Cere had been so arrogant.  She hadn’t noticed the cracks forming.  And then… what she did… she hastily sloshes some caf into her mouth and the liquid sears down her throat, distracting her from her darker thoughts.  Shaking her head, she wipes a few stray drops off her chin before they dribble onto her shirt.  Trilla may have reminded her of Cordova, but Cal does not remind her of Trilla, and that helps.  As they’d sped through hyperspace, chasing a single Imperial transmission and hoping they wouldn’t be too late again, there had been a moment where Cere’s hands froze on the comm terminal and her breath stopped short.  If they beat the Inquisitors to Bracca, and the suspected Force-sensitive was a young Human woman with straight dark hair and piercing eyes… Cere was worried she would crumble.

Thankfully, it isn’t an issue.  They’re both Human, and fairly young, and that’s where the similarities end.  She can look him in the eyes without seeing all of her failures.

…and it’s only just occurring to her now, as she blows on her caf instead of burning another layer of skin off her tongue, she should’ve asked if Cal understands Binary.  For some reason she’d simply assumed he did.  Oh well.  Cere doubts it matters – BD-1 could rival a Wookiee in sheer obstinance, so if he has to bully Cal into getting where he needs to go via multiple headbutts to the shins, that’s what he’ll do.

Cere tips her mug and drinks most of the caf in five or six gulps, trying to wake herself up after a night cycle spent mostly sleepless.  For four years after the Purge, she’d kept her distance from Bogano, and when she finally chose to trust Greez with the coordinates, BD-1 did not remember her.  That, more than anything, convinced her she was on the right path.  A man who built a memorial for the droids that’d been damaged beyond repair wouldn’t have erased BD’s memory without a very good reason.  Whatever Master Cordova secreted away in the Vault – and Cere thinks, prays, she knows what it is – BD-1 is the key.  All Cal has to do is trust in the Force.

“Shit!”

Cere hears a hollow wooden clunk and the familiar melodic sound of her hallikset being grabbed neck-first and she startles.  Speaking of people who do not trust in the Force and also don’t watch where they’re going… she swivels the chair around as Greez moans, “Cere, you gotta stop leaving this thing here.  Sooner or later I’m going to step on it, or knock it over, or both.”

She’d met Greez in the most squalid, smoke-choked gambling hall imaginable, so discovering he was actually fastidious to a fault was a shock.  Every surface in the Mantis except possibly the deck is clean enough to eat off of.  He truly does live by the adage a place for everything and everything in its place.  “Sorry, Captain,” she says, heading into the lounge and picking up her hallikset before it can come to a grisly end.

Shaking his head, Greez mutters, “It’s fine, it’s fine…” and lifts the jug he keeps to water Bonnie (the Zelosian Lily) and Daz (the red flowers he grew from a cutting, courtesy of his great-grandmother’s garden).  Cere puts the hallikset in her cabin and returns, sits on the sofa, watches him tend his plants.  He’s still scowling instead of cooing over them like normal. 

Greez has been in a funny mood all morning.  She’s not sure if it’s merely a passing cloud, if he’s rattled by what happened on Bracca and grumping around as a balm for his nerves, or if something about Cal’s presence is grating on him.  It was just her and Greez aboard the Mantis for a long time – Cere’s never really considered how adding another person to the crew might disrupt the dynamic, despite their whole mission revolving around that outcome.  Maybe she didn’t truly believe they’d find a living Jedi until one was standing in the cockpit, shivering and soaked to the bone, so wild-eyed Cere thought he would’ve bolted were they not in hyperspace.  But he’s here now, and if that’s going to be a problem, she intends to address it before it festers.  “What’s eating you?” she asks.

“Nothin’.”  Greez screws the cap on the jug and slides it back underneath his large and conspicuously empty terrarium.  He had something growing in there when Cere hired him, but apparently it didn’t like the conditions.  “Thanks for reminding me I’m hungry, though…”

I should have had him eat before sending him out there, Cere realizes suddenly.  Who knows how long it’s been since Cal got a proper meal?  He certainly didn’t eat during the night – she’d suspected he was going to crash hard once the adrenaline wore off, and sure enough, he slept like the dead for almost the entire trip to Bogano.  And he’s taller than her, more muscled, broader across the shoulders, but there’s a fine line between wiry and skinny and he’s tiptoeing along it.  Chiding herself for being overeager, she says, “I’m sure nobody’ll say no to breakfast if you want to throw something together.”

“Yeah.”  Greez glances at the galley.  Instead of moving, though, he rubs two hands together and says, “You got a read on the guy yet?  Seems kinda shifty to me… and that psychiatry thing, I don’t like that at all.”

“Psychometry,” Cere corrects absently.  He’d looked appalled when the caf was brewing and she was giving him a run-down, and his unease is understandable.  She has a lot of memories she doesn’t want Cal seeing just because she decided to wear a different jacket and he accidentally brushed against her sleeve.  “If it helps, I think he’s more afraid of us than we are of him.”

“Scared people do dumb things, and he’s got a lightsaber, so no, that doesn’t help.”  Sighing, Greez kicks a box out from beneath the terrarium and plops himself down on it.  “I really gotta say it?  Fine.  He doesn’t talk, Cere.”

“Oh?” she says, lifts her eyebrows in a mockery of surprise.  “I hadn’t noticed.”  He just rolls his eyes at her.  “It’s not that big of a deal.  We’ll manage.  Writing is working well enough for now.”  In the long term, she hasn’t given it much thought yet.  They have to get over the initial hurdle – opening the Vault – first, and then she’ll worry about it.  And if he can’t open the Vault, if he’s unwilling or his connection to the Force is too impaired… they’ll cross that bridge when they come to it.  She’s trying to be optimistic.

“Okay, it could be worse – I thought for a minute he was deaf.  I know, I know that’s kinda rude,” Greez says quickly, catching the look Cere sends him.  “I don’t mean it’s bad.  I’m just saying we might have some communication issues in the field.  The Mantis only has standard commlinks, no text capability.”

Cere knows.  She’d given Cal one and gotten the most incredulous expression in return.  At least this way, they can contact him if necessary and he can just tap the mike to let them know he’s listening, and he must’ve run into BD by this point.  Her rusty Binary has improved by leaps and bounds over the past year or two, so the droid could keep her posted.  The mutism really isn’t an insurmountable obstacle.  “Might be something to look into eventually,” she says.

“Mmm…” Greez gets back up and she hears him start rummaging around in the galley.  She can tell there’s something else he wants to say, so she waits, and after a minute, he asks, “Any chance the kid could be scamming us?  Like, I believe you when you say he’s got the Force.  But what are the odds he’s just some guy with the Force who found a lightsaber in that junkheap of a planet?  He might not really be a Jedi, that’s all I’m sayin’.”

“I did consider that,” Cere admits.   Especially after last night.  She’d been changing into something more comfortable for sleep, bolstered by the feeling of success for the first time in her self-imposed mission, when she’d sensed it.  She did not need the Force to recognize the feeling of someone intruding in her head.  It was weak, a surface-level skim of her emotions, and she was content to ignore it.  Cal was obviously scared and had more than enough reasons not to trust her or Greez; she might have done the same, were she in his position.  But then it began to feel more than surface-level, intrusive, threatening to unlock a torrent of bad memories she preferred not to review.  She tightened her mental barriers, effectively kicking him out, and that was the end of it.

Still, as she’d settled into bed, she started to wonder.  Jedi were taught as toddlers that their empathic abilities had to be handled delicately, and sinking too far into someone else’s head was not only a severe violation of privacy, but potentially dangerous for everybody involved.  Was it possible Cal had never received that training and didn’t know what he was doing?  “No,” she says out loud.

“No, he might not be a Jedi, or no, he’s definitely a Jedi?”

“The second one,” Cere clarifies.  “I’m certain of it.”  Which means she is going to remind him of that lesson in the near future before he gets himself into trouble.  Peeking at your so-called rescuers’ emotions to get a feel for them is fine, digging into their memories is decidedly not.  “I spent hours tossing and turning, trying to figure out why I recognized his name.  Took forever for it to click – I used to know his master.  He mentioned Cal by name a few times.”

“Oh,” says Greez.  “Didn’t mention the whole mute thing?”

“No, but… we usually had more urgent matters to discuss.  Not much time for small talk.  It never came up.”

“Hah!” Greez exclaims triumphantly.  He pops back into view with his own mug held to his lips, tendrils of steam framing his vindicated face.  “I knew it.  It never came up because the kid’s a liar.”

The caf goes frigid in Cere’s stomach.  Greez may gripe a lot and have some questionable priorities, but his heart’s in the right place and his instincts are good.  He knows something she doesn’t, he’s itching to tell her, and she isn’t sure she wants to hear it.  “How so?”

Greez sets his mug down right in the terrarium.  “When I went to wake him ‘cause we were getting close to Bogano, I could hear him muttering from the hall.  He talks in his sleep.  Sounds perfectly normal and everything – kept saying no, apologizing to someone, and it was starting to creep me out, so I shook him.  He woke up and went dead silent again.  So he lied when he said he can’t talk.”

…is that all?  For a moment, Cere feels lightheaded, has to suppress the desire to laugh.  She was waiting for Greez to tell her he’d overheard Cal talking to Imperials on a comm he’d snuck aboard, and this whole debacle was just a complex scheme to capture Cere and bring her back to – she has to suppress a shudder, too.  “Oh,” she says.

Greez’s eyes narrow.  “You don’t sound surprised.”

“It does knock ‘physically incapable’ off the list, but that was only one possibility.”

“What are the others?”

Holding up three fingers, she says, “One, psychological trauma – he would’ve been fairly young during the Purge, and Bracca’s not exactly a resort planet.  We have no idea what happened to him there.  Two, he’s extremely shy, to the point he actually is physically incapable of speaking to anyone.  And three, there are any number of religions and cultures that take vows of silence for myriad reasons, and like I said, we don’t know what he’s been up to on Bracca.”

“You forgot number four, he’s pretending for some purpose we don’t know yet,” Greez says waspishly.  “And five, he just really likes annoying me…”

“I’ll give you four,” Cere replies, choosing not to address number five, but she does tuck it into the back of her mind in case Greez’s irascibility over the issue is going to make it a real issue.  “I’m not saying we should blindly trust him – I certainly don’t, not yet.  But technically, he’s not lying… I didn’t ask him ‘can you talk’, I said ‘do you talk’.”

“Don’t start getting pedantic on me,” Greez grumbles.

“Did you tell him?  That you heard him talking in his sleep?”

“Nah.”  Greez picks up his mug again, contemplates the contents.  “I was gonna, but I changed my mind at the last second.  Figured if he is trying to pull one over on us, then he won’t know that I know, and I want a card up my sleeve.”

Cere laughs.  “You can take the gambler out of the game…”

Greez flashes her a sly grin.  “That’s right.”

They split up after that, Greez disappearing into his cabin, Cere sitting down in the cockpit to await Cal’s return.  She glances at the comm terminal, considers calling him just to make sure he’s okay, maybe see if BD-1 is with him, then decides not to.  If he went directly to the Vault and back, he would be returning right around now, but he may have gotten sidetracked or decided to explore a bit.

She doubts his silence is part of some nefarious plan.  It just… is.  They’ll adjust to it (even Greez, though he might protest the entire time), figure out how best to accommodate him, and if Cere’s correct about what’s hidden in that old vault, she hopes he’ll be on board with her plans, too.  Cal isn’t Trilla and he isn’t Cere, either, a forsaken ex-Jedi who severed her connection to the Force for everyone’s safety.  He’d told her his is damaged, that he loses control of it when he meditates, and – well, he didn’t say it outright, he just alluded to having flashbacks to the Purge.  That’s all fixable.  He’s young and he’s traumatized, but with a little support, he can heal.

Unless he isn’t ready to heal, regardless of Cere’s wishes, and pushing him will just cause him to retreat.

Careful, Cere, she warns herself, tracing a finger around the rim of her second mug of caf.  There are boundaries she cannot cross.  Pressuring Cal into this quest to restore the Jedi Order – a cause she sincerely believes in, and also one she’s well aware she pursues to ease her guilt – is too much.  It’s hard enough to face her own reflection already; she won’t use Cal like he’s Greez’s favorite all-kit tool.  He has to make the choice for himself.  She knows better than most how important choices are.

For about half an hour, she stays in the cockpit and ponders alternatives in case Cordova’s preparations turn out quite a bit different than what she expects, and she’s still empty-handed when she spots movement in the distance.  The last couple disturbances have all been boglings, but she straightens up and looks anyway.  Either that’s a very large and shockingly ginger bogling, or Cal’s climbing up out of… she’s not even sure where that particular hole leads, honestly.  Cere finishes off her cold caf before putting the mug on the console, so Greez doesn’t have a coronary if he comes to the cockpit now, leans forwards to get a better look.  No way to tell whether or not he’s made it into the Vault, but – yes.  The sunlight glints off something small and metallic bounding alongside him.  He’s not alone, at least.

Smiling, Cere props her chin in her hand and watches Cal and BD-1 wend their way towards the Mantis.  They’re in no hurry.  Cal keeps pausing to inspect things, and more than once they both vanish along some passage she can’t follow from here.  Then they stop entirely, Cal kneeling in the grass and making some kind of gesture at BD.

Neither of them get up for several long minutes.  Cere fetches the electrobinoculars from the locker, not bothering to tell herself she’s concerned rather than simply being nosy, and tries to see what they’re up to.  “Oh, come on,” she mutters when the binocs refuse to zoom.  Huffing, she flips them upside-down and then they sort of work, as usual.  Piece of junk.  But she can see Cal and BD a bit more clearly and figure out Cal’s scraping letters into the dirt, and… what else is he doing?  “Come on,” Cere repeats, impatiently tapping the side of the binocs until they relent and let her zoom slightly further.  Cal’s holding out his hand to BD-1 now, making another odd one-handed gesture, then another, then another.

Almost unconsciously, Cere takes a hand off the binocs and mimics him, the dusty, faded memory clawing its way out from wherever it’s been hiding.

Aurek.  Besh.  Cresh.  Cherek.  She’s six years old, perhaps seven, sitting on a pillow in a sunlit classroom with Kep and Lysa and Master Eiloc.  Dorn.  Esk.  They and all the other students in the room have at least four fingers, which is why they’re currently learning this variant of the aurebesh, Master Eiloc had told them.  Next week they’ll rejoin the rest of the younglings, the ones with fewer fingers or no fingers at all, and teach each other.  Enth.  Onith.

The electrobinoculars choose that moment to glitch out, focusing on a blurry image of an insect spattered against the viewport while the upside-down HUD informs Cere she’s looking 378 kilometers in the distance.  Cere tosses them onto the copilot’s chair and laughs to herself.  “I should have known.”  Aurebesh, but in Galactic Basic Sign Language.  If he’s never consciously spoken or stopped at some point prior to the Purge, he would’ve been taught alternate methods of communication.  And all the Initiates learned the fundamentals of Basic Sign as children, so even if he stopped after the Purge, he would’ve had a springboard to teach himself.

Well.  This changes things.  Cere’s not sure she recalls much besides how to fingerspell (and she’s not sure she remembers how to fingerspell the entire alphabet, either), but she can brush up.  In the meantime, she does know enough Binary to get by, so maybe they can work this out with BD functioning as a kind of translator.

As soon as Cal stands and starts walking towards the Mantis again, Cere heads in towards the holotable.  “Captain!” she calls.  “They’re on their way back.”

She hears Greez’s door whoosh.  “Cool,” the Latero says, emerging from the corridor.  “You know, I think you’re right.  I’m gonna retch if I have to eat one more nutrient bar.  I could whip up a good, filling breakfast – lunch, brunch, whatever – in fifteen minutes or so.  And we – wait, wait, they?  I thought you told me that Jedi guy who used to live here was dead!”  Cere just smiles at him, opens the hatch, and walks out on the boarding ramp.  When Cal notices her, he slows from a jog to a walk, and BD-1, on his heels, shoots into the air and lands on the back of that climbing harness Cal wears.

“You passed the test,” she says once he’s in earshot.  It’s not a question.  The way he carries himself, the expression on his face, the lightness to his steps… he did it.

Cal meets her eyes for a second, looking the closest to genuinely happy she’s seen him yet, then peers over his shoulder at BD and lifts his hands so he can see.  Cere gets the gist of what he’s signing, since it’s pretty obvious, but BD-1 still chirpily informs her she’s being accused of knowing the droid was here all along.  It’s also pretty obvious that’s not exactly what Cal said.  She hopes he’s okay with his new interpreter having quite the personality.  Chuckling, she says, “Come on board,” to them, inclining her head towards the hatch.  “We’ll talk inside.”

Chapter Text

“So how’s the foot?  Holding up okay?  It’s not locking up or feeling too loose?”

It’s fine, BD-1 pipes.  Cal’s a good repairman, even when he has practically nothing to work with.

“I’m still surprised Cordova didn’t have a spare scomp link lying around in that workshop of his – looked like he collected everything else.”

BD whistles jauntily.  Turns out that was the spare scomp link he used to sport – his original was damaged in a grudge match with an astromech that got a little… out of hand, necessitating a replacement approximately eight years ago.

“Hang onto that thought, I want to hear that one sometime.  You see that big brown lump up ahead?  Tell me that’s a dirty rock and not another oggdo… I don’t want the species to go extinct or –” BD abruptly buzzes.  “Extinct,” Cal spells out with one hand, repeating the sign with the other so BD can catalogue it.  Once he gets the go-ahead, he says, “I’d rather stay away from it.”

BD fires his boosters, propelling himself a couple meters above Cal’s head and coming down safely into Cal’s waiting arms.  The grasses are too high to tell, BD reports.  Shrugging, Cal deposits the droid on his back again and troops a bit closer, one hand on his lightsaber.  As soon as they’re near enough to make out the spines, he veers to the right and gives the oggdo a wide berth, and they avoid another confrontation that won’t be kind to Cal’s ribs.  BD loudly announces his general dislike of the creatures – once, an oggdo got him with its tongue, even sucked him into its mouth, but spit him out when it realized he wasn’t organic.  His joints had been sticky and clogged for days afterwards.

“Gross,” Cal says.

Very, BD agrees.  He did get some really nice close-up scans of an oggdo’s dental structure, however, if Cal ever wants to see them.

“I won’t lie to you, buddy… that also sounds gross.”

Suit yourself, says BD, managing to affect a singsong tone of voice in Binary.

He is so cool.

It’s been years since Cal’s had any friendly contact with droids.  Astromechs and maintenance droids and cleaning droids and chef droids were all over the Albedo Brave.  Bracca was stuffed full too, but with foremen, barge pilots, security droids, and worse.  He avoided drawing attention from the Imperial probes like his life depended on it.  If he dares let himself think too far in the wrong direction, he gets a sinking feeling he knows how the Inquisitors found out what Cal did in the shipbreaking yard.  Stupid.  They should’ve disappeared immediately, made their way back to the city through the wastes, which would’ve taken years for the Empire to thoroughly search.  Or Cal could’ve done it alone and told Prauf to just tell the Imperials whatever they wanted to know, and thereby keep himself safe while Cal got a message out to Tabbers and hopefully escaped.  Believing he had time and boarding that train cost Prauf his life.

BD beeps again and Cal shakes himself out of his thoughts, runs a hand through his hair.  “Sorry, what?”  The droid patiently repeats the question.  “No, not much further.  I just felt like wandering.”

To think, a couple days ago he’d huddled in the engine room and figured he was fucked, as far as communication went.  There was one other person in the whole galaxy who fluently understood Cal’s ramshackle, half-made-up sign language – who helped him piece it together in their limited free time, well aware he wasn’t getting anything in return – and he was dead.  Nobody to talk to besides himself, no point in talking at all.  It was like those first few months on Bracca, writing when he had to, otherwise just nodding or shaking his head or shrugging.  Being silent made him feel safe.  And it was comforting to fall back into that; Cere and Greez don’t know his language, he doubts they care to learn, and he hadn’t trusted them in the slightest at that point anyway.  Nice little barrier between him and them.

Then he met BD-1 and opened the Vault.  Suddenly, Cal had a purpose, proof Cere’s aspiration to rebuild the Jedi Order isn’t just a pipe dream, and he felt like he’d awoken after a five-year sleep plagued with nightmares.  There is hope.  Now, he’s not certain a failed Padawan who can’t use the Force properly anymore is the best person for the job, but he appears to be the only person for the job, so.  He’ll give it a shot.  He just can’t fail, in spite of everything Master Tapal taught him about failure, because if the holocron falls into Imperial hands, every child on that list is going to suffer a fate much worse than death.

No pressure.

Fortunately, Cal won’t have to fumble through this alone.  While he isn’t 100% convinced Cere and Greez are being completely upfront about their motivations, he’s accepted they’re otherwise legit.  And his determination to keep at least Cere at arm’s length has already cracked – she’s too easy to talk to if he doesn’t always stay on his guard, and that’s so tiring.  And, of course, there’s BD-1, who’s as gleefully willing to be Cal’s partner in crime (this mission is definitely illegal) as he is to pick fights with oggdos who won’t leave the boglings alone.  Since they’re in this together, giving him a quick overview of the alphabet was practical.  Cal could fingerspell a message, BD could relay it to Cere in Binary, Cere could tell Greez in Basic, and that commlink she’d given him would finally be useful.

He'd forgotten he was instructing a droid.  BD only needed to see the aurebesh twice, once for each hand, and it was his forever.  There were some simple conversational signs he ought to know too, Cal had thought, and stuff that’d be useful in the field or if they got into trouble, and… he just hadn’t stopped.  It was slow at first, BD constantly interrupting so Cal could spell the word the droid didn’t understand and BD could save it to his memory banks.  Now it feels like talking to Prauf.  It’s taken two days for BD-1 to memorize half of what took Cal two years to learn (or invent).  Another two days and Cal can probably consider him fluent.

Out here, in the empty grasslands well beyond the Mantis and the Vault and Master Cordova’s workshop, nobody except BD would hear if he actually decided to say something out loud.  He doesn’t.  He’s not sure he even remembers how.  Instead, he clicks his fingers to get BD’s attention; the droid’s head swivels away from the boglings and towards his hands and Cal says, “I think this is far enough.”

BD asks why, exactly, they’ve come all the way to the middle of nowhere.  He doesn’t mind, he just knows there’s nothing in this direction for a few hundred kilometers. 

“There’s something I want to try.  If it goes wrong, stuff sometimes gets… broken, so I can’t do any damage out here.”

Oh, says BD, yes, good idea.  Cal is broken enough already.

Cal winces.  Half of his ribs are still a catastrophe, and he’s gotten through the past two days on Bogano with a liberal application of painkiller hypos, but they’re running low and he doesn’t want to use them all.  He’s attempting to get through today on just the one he took last night, hence the nice, quiet walk across the plains.  That’s all BD means by it – he’s physically battered.  It feels a little too on-the-nose for Cal’s tastes, though.  “When we get back,” he says slowly, dodging a few boglings as they try to use him as some kind of slalom course, “we should tell the others to take off.  I don’t think we’re going to get anything else done here.”

Clambering up onto Cal’s shoulder proper so he can look at the boglings, BD gives a derisive buzz.  “I know, and I’m going to make him happy… we’ll go to Zeffo, first, and leave Dathomir for when Greez is feeling a little braver.  That place is supposed to be dangerous, and I wouldn’t be too good in a fight right now.  But –”  He breaks off, leaps aside as a bogling nearly bounds headlong into his knees.  “What’s wrong with these guys?”

Watching two more scatter to the winds, BD suggests a predator.  Or a rabies outbreak.

He’s probably joking, but Cal still freezes mid-crouch, hand outstretched to pat a small one who’s taken refuge behind his boots.  Another bogling shoots by, snatches up the baby in its mouth, and flees into the feathery grasses.  “Rabies?” Cal repeats, both as a question and so BD gets the sign (which Cal frankly wishes he’d never needed to make up).

Well… maybe not, BD admits.  He’s never heard of a bogling with rabies – in fact, he’s fairly certain the virus doesn’t even exist on Bogano.

Sighing, Cal stands up, scrubs his bare hand on his pants, and says, “Not funny.  Do you have any idea what rabies shots are like?”  BD, naturally, shakes his head.  “I can’t even describe it.  They’re agonizing – it’s very slow so one injection takes forever, you get like five in a row, and the syringes they stick in your stomach could be used as drinking straws.  I went into the clinic completely unfazed by needles.  When I had to get the last few shots a couple weeks later, I passed out.  Did I mention the echoes in those needles?  Not funny,” he spells for emphasis.  BD gives an apologetic burble.

A moment later, Cal trips over a bogling burrow.  BD leaps clear and Cal manages to catch himself on his hands before he goes chest-first into a nice heap of dung.  Wrinkling his nose, he settles back on his knees and regards the dark tunnel suspiciously.  “Think they came from here?”

BD turns on his spotlight in response.  “Careful,” Cal warns, taking his lightsaber into his hand just in case.  He’s far too large for the hole, so BD creeps inside alone, sweeping the light from side to side.  “Don’t go too…” Cal starts, then trails off, since the droid’s not facing him anymore.  He resigns himself to being the lookout.

It’s only about thirty seconds before a series of muffled beeps and chirps reaches him.  Another thirty seconds and BD comes skulking out of the tunnel, loudly put-out by the muddy strip of red fabric he’s gotten himself tangled in, and Cal huffs, amused.  Removing the material from the droid smears dirt on Cal’s fingers and presses a strange, pervasive sense of terror into his belly.  He has to fight the urge to leap to his feet and run.  Echoes left by animals always feel weird.  “I don’t think these boglings have ever gone as far as the Vault,” he says to BD once he’s folded the offending fabric into a fat square.  “Not too familiar with manmade objects.  It blew into their den and they didn’t know what it was, so they panicked.  Nice job rescuing them.”

BD knows when he’s being teased.  He grumbles while Cal grins at him, climbs up the gentle hill until they’re at the top, and sits again.  “This should do,” Cal says.  “I won’t be too long, I promise.”

Then he meditates.  Or tries, at least; his last couple attempts have been wishy-washy, because he keeps jerking out of them as soon as he feels himself slipping.  But, minor injuries aside, he’s felt better for the past two days than he has in the last five years, and every time he’s tried to use the Force here on Bogano, he’s succeeded.  He really feels like he can do it now.

Normally, Cal focuses on the sensation of breathing deeply, imagines exhaling every thought in his mind until he’s empty and cannot hear himself, just the Force.  That doesn’t work so well when intrusive thoughts like ow ow ow shit that karking hurts keep sneaking into his head.  He’d better get this done before the painkiller completely wears off.  He pictures sinking into a pool instead, the chill of the water soothing the ache in his ankles from all the wall-running, the bruises on his knees, his tortured ribcage, the headache that keeps breeding little baby headaches whenever he touches someone else’s memories…

And there’s nothing.  There is only the Force.

It feels like an embrace.  He thinks he – or the body that belongs to Cal Kestis, a thousand parsecs away – is smiling.  It’s not perfect, there’s still a pressure that shouldn’t be there, that obstacle he can’t get rid of, but it’s good.  He breathes Bogano in and his anxieties out.  Some of them are so silly when they’re looked at objectively – is he seriously still worried this whole holocron business is a ruse?  That’d have to be the most convoluted, pointless ruse Cal could envision.  The more moving parts a system relies on, the more likely it’ll catastrophically fail the second one tiny component shifts a millimeter out of place.  The Empire already has Inquisitors and stormtroopers for intercepting escaped Jedi.  They don’t need to cook up an intricate scheme like this.

If the Empire already knew about the holocron, if they arranged for Cere and Greez to ‘rescue’ Cal from the Inquisitors, take him to Bogano, and befriend BD-1 in hopes of getting whatever information is encrypted on the droid’s hard drive… yeah, that’s stupid.  They would’ve just hunted BD down, brought in the best slicers money and threats could buy, broken him into microchips until they had what they needed.  And the Second Sister would’ve put an end to Cal on Bracca, because there would be nobody to save him.  Nobody to die so that he might live.

“Cal, hurry!”

He’s trying, he’s trying, his hands are shaking so badly he can barely hit the buttons, and his mind is blank.  He doesn’t know what’s happening.  Why is this happening?  Did they do something wrong?  Hurry, hurry, hurry!  The troopers must’ve anticipated he and Master Tapal could reach the pods, they deactivated the standard controls and it’s taking way too long to engage the manual overrides.  He has to close the blast door or –

Master Tapal gives a sharp grunt.  Cal’s head snaps around automatically and he goes numb all over.

“Master!”

That can’t be him screaming.  He doesn’t sound like that – terrified and anguished, watching the bolts connect, flinching back into the corner with his arms protecting his head.  He’s getting over a cold, still spent most of last night with his nose all stuffed up, that has to be the reason. He can't sound like that. That's a scared little kid, not a Jedi.

There’s a bang as several troopers hit the ceiling, and another shot catches Master Tapal square in the chest, sending him staggering back, toppling into the escape pod.  Cal’s screaming again, he needs them to stop, and the fire on the side of his face floods through him and spills out his palms where they’re pressed against something smooth and warm and… moving?

Cal opens his eyes with a gasp.

He’s not on the Brave.  He’s sitting in a field, in the center of a two-meter circle where the grass has been flattened as though by a strong wind, breathing so hard it’d hurt without the fractured ribs.  The warm metal thing is still there.  He looks down and BD-1’s tucked his head beneath Cal’s limp hands, bouncing like a child who needs to use the ‘fresher.  Cal blinks at him six or eight times without comprehending.

As soon as BD realizes Cal’s back in the present, he jumps up onto Cal’s thigh.  Cal’s hands slide off BD’s head and land in his lap; he watches them fall as if they aren’t even connected to his body.  Something weird happened, BD tells him.  Cal was quiet and still for a while, and he started making this funny whimpering noise –

“I didn’t.”

BD tilts his head to one side.  Cal squeezes his trembling hands into fists for a second, then says again, more firmly, “I didn’t.”  He doesn’t.

Maybe it was the wind, BD allows.  But he got concerned, and then suddenly there was a sort of ripple – the grass blew out, BD hit the dirt a few meters away, and he decided he should wake Cal up before anything else happened.  He’d done the second thing he could think of: tried to give Cal something to ground him in reality.

“…what was your first idea?”

Shock prod, BD says casually.

Cal laughs, soundless, slumping backwards until he’s facing the clear blue sky.  He sinks his palms into his eyelids and watches the fireworks burst.  He supposes he should be grateful the flashbacks are mostly restricting themselves to his meditation these days.  For a while, it was like everything set him off.  He froze when he heard blaster shots.  Prauf referred to him as ‘the little one’ and Cal flinched so badly he dropped his welding torch, and Prauf never did it again.  Someone once triggered the emergency klaxons on the Venator they were scrapping – Cal pretty much blacked out, came back wedged in a vent definitely not intended for Human habituation.  He’d gotten himself in there so tightly he could hardly move, much less free himself.  Luckily, he had just enough range of motion to kick at the side of the duct; the confused scrapper who cut a hole in the bulkhead was vocally disappointed to discover she wouldn’t be snagging a nice bonus for finding a functioning droid, but he was grateful nonetheless.

“I’m okay,” he says when BD asks.  He still can’t meditate without seeing it.  Wonderful.  He stares at his hands for a moment, flexes his fingers – they feel like his own again, mostly – and adds, “While we’re here, I’ve been meaning to ask… are you all right with acting as a translator for me?  I mean, I know you’re an explorer, not a protocol droid.  You don’t have to if you don’t want to.”  Cal hates it when people treat droids like they have no thoughts or opinions of their own.  BD gets a choice in this too.

BD immediately says he does want to, though.  It makes sense to cover each other’s weaknesses – BD can’t deal with oggdos on his own, and Cal can’t crawl into bogling holes to figure out what’s scaring them off.  BD translates for Cal, Cal helps BD with maintenance.  They work together, they help one another out, so they’re partners, right?

“Yeah,” Cal says.  He sits up, ruffles his fingers through his hair to get rid of the grass.  “Yeah, we are.”

His commlink abruptly beeps, and Cal turns it on and flicks a fingernail against it twice so they know he’s listening.  “Just in case you haven’t noticed,” Cere’s voice crackles over the line, “we’ve got a storm rolling in from the west.  Looks like it could be a bad one.”

Cal gets to his feet and shades his eyes with a hand, squinting west.  There is a dark grey smear on the horizon, broken in half by the Zeffo Vault, which he can hide with a finger if he shuts one eye.  He walked further than he thought.  “We’re pretty far away from it,” he says, and BD rapidly converts his signs into Binary, “but we should be headed towards the ship soon, so thanks for the heads-up.  We’ll be careful.”

“No problem,” Cere says.  The line closes.  Cal tucks the commlink into his belt, BD springs off ahead of him, and they start walking back.

He makes it ten steps and the ground buckles beneath his feet.

BD screeches in panic.  Cal doesn’t scream, because he doesn’t do that anymore, just chokes awake from his nightmares with his jaw clenched into a headache and his throat closed around a howl.  He freefalls four or five meters and then, before he can fling his hands out and slow his descent, slams into solid ground.  His ribs do scream.  His shoulder’s not too happy about it either.  Winded, vision flickering like a cheap holoscreen, he flops over to his back, watches a shower of pebbles and dirt clumps and grass drizzle around him, and thinks, I would love to catch a break sometime, maybe.

The burbling and trilling from overhead and air reluctantly flowing into his lungs (cue the ow ow ow shit that karking hurts thoughts) ease him away from unconsciousness.  Pity – a couple minutes senseless might feel nice.  Cal blinks the world into focus, sees BD teetering on the edge of Bogano’s newest cliff like he’s about to jump down, and makes himself sit up again.  He’s in a hole wide enough to hold his entire apartment, and about of the third of the Mantis as well.  Scree is still spilling down the steep, jagged edges.  “Did I do this?”

Not exactly, BD-1 says, since Bogano is covered in sinkholes.  Cal’s just had the misfortune of stepping in the wrong spot at the wrong time.  Lucky for him, this one didn’t open into the planet’s vast, mostly uncharted network of waterlogged caves, or else he would probably be injured and very, very wet.  And lost.

“I wouldn’t be lost,” Cal argues, and BD makes a disdainful noise in reply.  Okay, so Cal’s not that great with directions.  If someone asked how to get to his flat from the nearest train platform, he would’ve said walk a few blocks straight ahead, take a left at the droid graveyard.  There’s a cantina with a bunch of neon eyes in the window; go right through the alley next to it and try not to get stabbed like I did that time.  Another left, keep going straight, past the wall where someone’s graffitied genitalia from like two hundred different species (stop and appreciate it at least once; if Bracca got tourists, we could market it as an erotic art installation), and one more right at the caf place with the yellow overhang.  I’m in the big tunnel beneath the old chemical processing plant.  He’s lived – he used to live – in that apartment for four years and never knew any of the actual street numbers.  BD’s map of Bogano is a lifesaver.

Cal scrabbles his way up the most forgiving side of the hole one-handed, his other arm hugged to his ribs, staggers a few meters away, and slumps flat on his back again.  BD dances around him nervously.  “I’m fine,” Cal says.  If any of his ribs started knitting in the past two days, he just ruined it.  “Been better.  Side hurts.  Give me a minute.”

BD hunkers down next to him to wait while Cal clutches his side and wheezes.  And here he’d thought he might actually be able to get some work done on Zeffo without agonizing pain.  Well, he’ll have to suck it up – wasting all the painkillers is a good way to ensure he gets shot or something and then doesn’t have any relief.

As soon as he can stand, he does.  “Come on,” he says to BD, grimacing and supporting his ribs with his left arm even though that makes conversation a lot harder.  “Maybe we can beat the storm to the Mantis.”

If not, BD-1 says, they should at least reach the workshop again.  He knows all the best places to hide during inclement weather.  He’s made it through many thunderstorms safe and dry, as well as what sounded like a twister one time, though if it was, it didn’t do much damage.

“I was in a tornado, once,” Cal recalls.  He eyes a suspicious-looking depression in the ground just up ahead and loops around it at a safe distance.  “Right after I became a Padawan.  It was terrifying, but also really, really cool.  The troopers and I had to take shelter in an abandoned diner – I mostly remember Commander Drift rolling on top of me when half the roof tore off, because he was afraid I’d get blown away.  And he yelled at me once it passed and I got up to look outside and watch it in the distance.”  And then he’d looked gobsmacked when Master Tapal arrived and ordered Lop to quit fussing over Cal (who’d gotten cut up pretty nicely by broken glass) and tend Drift’s leg first.  His femur had snapped like a ration stick when a piece of the roof fell on it.  Drift’s expression clearly stated he’d never expected anyone, least of all his General, to prioritize him over a Jedi.  Cal had decided then and there he didn’t like the Kaminoans very much.

Despite his aggravated injury, they make decent time back to the Vault.  It gets sketchy from there, though, with the dark, swollen clouds looming above them and faint rumbles of thunder growing louder and louder – Cal runs the rest of the way, BD clinging to him, reaches the base of the boarding ramp as the wind starts seriously picking up and a few cold drops of rain hit the back of his neck.  Then he bends double, hands braced on his knees, and waits to see if he’s actually going to be sick from the pain.

Nothing happens.  He breathes, eyes squeezed shut, gags once, twice.  He’d rather get it over with out here instead of risking the nice clean deck, or else he might be traveling to Zeffo strapped to the top of the ship.

“What are you doing?”

Cal makes himself cough one more time, but the acid harrowing his stomach has apparently elected to bully his ribs instead, so there’s no point in forcing it.  He straightens up and rubs his mouth on the back of his glove.  From the top of the ramp, Greez watches him suspiciously.  “Are you sick?” 

Cal shakes his head.

“Hurt?”

He starts to shake his head again, pauses, tilts his other hand back and forth to say maybe, kind of, a little.  Greez sighs and beckons him over.  “Get in here, then, before you get drenched…”  While Cal walks up the ramp and slips past Greez, the Latero stays put, gazing out at Bogano with a frown on his face.  He shakes his head a bit.  “I dunno,” he says, more to himself than Cal, “it’s pretty, but all those pits and cracks… sorta reminds me of Kuloxipi after the TIEs bombed it into oblivion.”  Then he sighs again and joins Cal inside, closing the hatch.  Cal drags himself over to the lounge and slumps on the sofa, rubs his side.  “Hey, Cere?”

“Just a minute!” she calls from deeper in the ship.

“All right.”  Greez cants a look at Cal and BD, the latter of whom is abiding by Greez’s wishes and standing on the table instead of the couch.  “Did you at least have lunch?”

Crap!  Cal claps a hand to his pocket, snaps it open.  He takes out the first two things he finds – a crumpled carton of cigarras and the keycard to his apartment – and tosses them on the table, and then his fingers meet the plastoid clingfilm of his lunch.  Greez had stopped him on his way to the door this morning and said, “That’s for you,” jerking his head towards something on the galley counter.  “Better for you than all the ration bars.  There’s actually a vegetable in that… it’s lettuce, but still.”  Cal had walked over and stared at it.  “What, do you need an engraved invitation?” Greez muttered, so Cal picked up the sandwich and stuck it into his pocket for later consumption.

It'd looked a lot better before Cal’s tumble into the sinkhole.  Whatever condiment was on there has oozed out of the sandwich and all over the inside of the clingfilm, staining the bread orange.  “Okay,” Greez says, stepping closer, “two things.  First –” he tosses the cigarras back to Cal, who catches them, squeezes the sides of the carton so it pops back into shape.  There are only five or six left – looks like he’s quitting.  Again.  “– you take it outside or I’ll splatter you like a bug, ya hear?  That smell never comes outta the upholstery.”  Greez picks up the pathetic sandwich.  “Second, if you didn’t want lunch, you could’ve just said so.”

“I did want it,” Cal says without thinking, hears BD translate.  “I’m sorry, I fell.  It’s fine, it’s not inedible, I’ll eat it later.”  He can cope with smushed, squashed, soggy, sticky, slimy… anything short of outright rotten.  There’s no cure for picky eaters quite like Bracca.

Greez just looks from him to BD, and then Cal remembers who he’s talking to.  “I don’t understand a thing either of you are saying,” Greez says, flat as Cal’s sandwich.  He walks up to the galley without another word.

Over the past two days, Cal’s gotten the impression Greez doesn’t like him.  He’s nice to Cere, and he seemed pretty pleasant in that echo Cal pulled from the multitool… wouldn’t be the first time he’s gotten the wrong idea from an echo, though.  Making a face at the Latero’s back, he tugs off his boots and lays on the sofa and shuts his eyes.  Not moving for a while sounds great.  The guy using the bore-driller on his ribcage has to clock out eventually.  He doesn’t sleep, just listens to BD poking around the stuff on the table for a minute, then hop down and wander off to parts unknown, and hears Cere come in and ask Greez what he needs.  “Kid’s hurt,” Greez says shortly.

A moment later, there are footsteps, followed by someone sitting next to his head and a touch on his shoulder.  Cere guards her emotions well and Cal does not pry into her again to see what he’s in for, if she’ll be pissed that he’s still getting knocked on his ass by a couple cracked ribs.  He already sat through one gently-delivered-yet-blistering lecture.  “Are you awake?”

He opens his eyes.  BD’s nowhere to be seen, but Cere finally found her datapad this morning and has it in hand; she gives it and the stylus to Cal, who turns on the screen to see a list of books she’s read, written neatly in small, precise handwriting.  Cal dimly recalls making lists for no reason except the fun of it when he was a child and something deep in his chest aches.  He draws one knee up, braces the pad against his thigh.  In his own far less tidy nuna-scratch, he writes, I’m okay.  It’s not new, just the ribs I busted on Bracca.  He lets her read that, erases it.  I think we should head to Zeffo.  I’m not getting anything else useful accomplished here.

Cere nods slowly, lips pursed.  “How bad are the ribs?” she asks, then adds, “Seriously.”

It feels wrong to lie when she’s unambiguously asking him not to, and she doesn’t sound upset, so Cal only hesitates for a second.  Pretty bad.  If I’d done anything worse than a few breaks, though, I would probably be dead.  I’ll be fine, I promise.  Made it more than half the day without any painkillers.

“You don’t need to do that.”

You’re running out.

“We can get more.”

Can we afford that? Cal writes, and only realizes he’s adopted the we after he holds up the datapad for her.

“Yes,” Cere says, looking down at him with her eyebrows knit.  “Listen, most of the money I pay Greez goes right back into the Mantis – fuel, maintenance – so those aren’t a concern anytime soon.  As for the other stuff… I know a few people who occasionally need things done and are willing to pay.  And I don’t skimp on medical supplies.  You don’t have to worry about money right now, okay?”

From the moment he had to start worrying about money, Cal hasn’t stopped.  There’s no such thing as a poverty line on Bracca because they’d all be staring up at it from a distance.  At the beginning, he hadn’t understood what made everyone in the Guild obsess over credits like they were getting paid to do that, but then he compared his first few paychecks to the cost of living and caught on. 

Cere stands, says “Wait there,” and heads towards the corridor.  Fine by him.  He hasn’t moved a millimeter when she returns and hands him a hypospray.  “Take that.  I’m sore just looking at you.”

Shrugging, Cal injects the hypo into the side of his neck, and his next breath is blissfully free of glass shards.  It only feels like being punched in the ribs now.  “And on the subject of Zeffo…” Cere sits back down.  “Let me ask a question I’ll probably hate the answer to – how often did you get days off on Bracca?”

Weeks were ten days long, so it was nine days on, one day off.  Cal pauses.  More like 19/1, most of the time, so I could afford rent and food.  Cere’s expression is just tragic, so he tries to lighten the mood.  On the upside, I used to hate lentils as a kid and now I’m really excited when I get to eat them.

“What’d you do if you were sick or hurt?”

Worked anyway.

“Yeah,” Cere sighs, “I hate that.”  She shakes her head.  “Right, so this is not Bracca –”

“Damn right it’s not,” Greez mumbles from the galley.  “That place was a dump.”

“– and Greez will get upset if we pretend otherwise.  You’re officially off for the rest of the day.  We’ll talk about Zeffo tomorrow.”

That holocron is important.

“Yes,” Cere says.  “You are too.  So far, the Empire doesn’t even know Bogano exists, much less what’s hidden in that vault out there.  And until you or I or the Mantis pops back up in the greater galaxy, the Inquisitors are going to have a hell of a time figuring out where we’ve gone.”  For a moment, she looks far away.  “This is a long-term goal, Cal.  Very long-term.  I can’t even be sure I’ll live long enough to see it come to fruition.  One or two more days… they’re not going to make a difference to us or the Empire, and I think your ribs will thank you for the break.”

Cal swallows.  If he keeps busy, he doesn’t have to think about the events that led him here.  Any of the events.  He can’t even meditate without seeing his Master die again and again.  But he suspects Greez will take direction from Cere and ignore any of Cal’s suggestions, so he writes, Okay, and leaves it at that.

“Okay,” Cere echoes.  She sags against the back of the sofa, rubs the space between her eyes, and says, almost under her breath, “Nineteen days.”

I had nowhere else to go.  Cal doesn’t give her the datapad, though, pushes it and the stylus onto the table and closes his eyes.  He thinks she sees the message anyway, because – only for a second – her hand touches his head, strokes his hair, then pulls away abruptly like she just remembered who he is.  He wonders who she thought he was.

Cal lays there with his eyes shut for so long he falls asleep.  When he wakes, the storm’s come and gone, leaving the Mantis full of orange early-evening sunlight.  BD-1 is sitting next to his feet… which are covered with a blanket.  Rubbing his eyes, Cal sits up, and a bunch of fabric slips down his chest and pools in his lap.  “Wasn’t me,” Cere says, somehow intercepting his questioning look without taking her attention off her datapad.

Oh.  That explains why all the characters in his dream were Lateros.  Either BD stole a blanket or Greez isn’t actually too mad about that whole mess with the sandwich.  Cal gathers the material in his arms, stands, and goes up to the galley, where Greez is stirring something in the cooker.  Whatever it is, it smells amazing.  Greez is an excellent cook.  He glances at Cal, glances away again before Cal can figure out how to communicate his gratitude.  “Take that with you,” Greez says gruffly, waving a spoon in the direction of the engine room.  “It gets cool back there when the thrusters aren’t running, and I don’t wanna hear any complaints.  And then get your rear back in here; dinner’s almost ready.”

Cal leaves the purple blanket on his cot.  Between that splash of color, his poncho thrown across the railing, and a bunch of scraps he scavenged from Cordova’s workshop lying on the bench, it almost looks like someone lives in here now.

Chapter Text

There are a lot of things Greez wants out of life.  Enough money to retire comfortably on, for starters.  A really nice kitchen with all the bells and whistles.  Another jacket just like his favorite – he does have a spare tucked away for when this one inevitably falls apart, but the company that made them went out of business almost a decade ago now and he’d really like to stumble across a spare spare someday.  Maybe a wife and a few munchkins before he gets too old, if by some chance fate pulls him in that direction.  The Empire to fuck all the way off Lateron and never come back.  Lateron’s actual government to step up and do some governing and maybe fix a couple of the problems that made it so easy for the Empire to run roughshod over them.  A nice bottle of Silver Bay Rum from Niamos (good for cooking and drinking).  Oh, and everyone in the Haxion Brood to drop dead from cholera.  Most of those things aren’t too likely, and Greez knows it, so he’s learned to be happy with what he’s already got.  That’s his beautiful Mantis, his health, a chance for his tiny contribution to someday help royally screw over the Empire, and a passenger who looked at her options and decided she could be his friend too.  All things considered… he’s got a lot.

The droid is an unwelcome presence, though.

“What – are – you – doing – in – here?!” Greez hisses, furiously flapping his blanket at the little demon.  BD flings himself off the upper bunk where he’s been lurking for stars-know-how-long, dodging Greez’s improvised weapon by a hair, and hits the deck with a clang that rattles through Greez’s legs.  The droid’s feet skitter wildly for a moment – he’s not getting much traction on the metal deck – and then he motors out of the cabin an instant before he’s snatched up.  “And stay out!” Greez whisper-shouts after him.

Fretching piece of junk.  How’d he even – okay, no, that’s a stupid question.  BD’s already proved himself capable of slicing every door on the Mantis.  Greez closes and locks it again anyway and grumbles over to the narrow wardrobe built into the bulkhead.  No point in going back to sleep now.  Too bad he couldn’t catch the bucket of bolts.  He gathers his clothes for the day, fantasizing about trussing BD up in the blanket like a spit-bird in a sack, then delivering him to Cal with strict instructions to get that pain in the ass under control or else he’s going to be used for spare parts.

Nobody’s in the ‘fresher or looking to get in there anytime soon at this hour, so Greez doesn’t hurry through his shower.  When he emerges into the corridor, the droid’s peeking at him around the corner; as soon as their eyes (optics?) meet, BD ducks out of sight and Greez hears him scurrying away towards the lounge.  “Yeah, you’d better run,” Greez mutters under his breath.  ‘Stay out of the Captain’s quarters unless you’re invited, and definitely don’t sneak in and watch him sleep’ is rule number one aboard a starship.  He starts to tug his jacket on and then stops with two out of four arms in the sleeves, realizing he’s not the only person here mumbling to himself.

“No – no, stop –”

Greez hesitates, but he’s not that mean and heartless, so he tiptoes into the engine room.

For a guy who showed up on Greez’s ship with a lightsaber and must’ve pulled off some absolutely insane parkour to escape that train on Bracca, Cal looks very young when he sleeps.  And in general.  But curled up small with a hand cradling his cheek, snuggled in the blanket Greez made him borrow… once Cal had wandered away that first night, moving like someone who hadn’t quite processed anything going on around them yet, Greez had mentioned it to Cere.  “Cere,” he’d said, as calmly as he could when not ten minutes ago a kriffing Inquisitor had tried to hijack the Mantis, “that is a kid.”

“He’s not a child,” Cere said distractedly, feeling for her seat without looking at it and sinking into the chair once she found it.  “Humans are adults at age sixteen, most places.”

“I didn’t say child, I said kid.  ‘Kid’ ain’t an age, it’s a state of mind.  And a state of being much younger than me.”  All that time, Greez envisioned them recruiting a Jedi of indeterminable species and gender, always assuming they would be at least Cere’s age, if not closer to his own (he’s still holding out hope for Yaddle, honestly).  He’d not pictured a scrawny, skittish little scraplet who couldn’t have started shaving before last week.  “I’d go ask how old he is, but I think he’s gonna stab me if I walk up behind him unannounced.”

A hint of a smile touched Cere’s face.  “Human Initiates are – were – almost never apprenticed before they turned fourteen or fifteen,” she’d said.  “It’s possible there were extenuating circumstances in his case… I’d guess he’s around twenty and just looks younger than he really is.  I had a friend who could convincingly pass for a teenager well into her thirties.”

So here’s Cal, currently in the same category as BD-1 – things Greez has but isn’t sure he actually wants – looking so kriffing soft and angelic it’s almost sickening.  The mumbling ruins the whole tableau, luckily.  As does the faint Huttese song blaring from the deck, emanating from Cal’s fallen headphones, which Greez takes, turns off, and sets on the side of the bed.  Abysmal taste in music.  The kid scrunches his face up, tosses his head like he’s trying to yank it out of someone’s grasp, and, clear if not loud, says, “Don’t.”

Greez almost replies, “Okay,” turns around, and leaves the room.  But he’s the only one who’d get a kick out of that.  It’s tempting to do it anyway, because Cere should be awake in an hour or so and if she hears Cal yammering away in his sleep, maybe she’ll be more inclined to consider Greez’s point of view here.  Cal keeps pleading with someone not to do something, though, sounding more and more distressed, starts squirming and twisting to escape the blanket he’s got himself mummified in, and again, not that mean and heartless.  He doesn’t want the guy cracking any more ribs, either.  Greez grabs Cal’s shoulder, shakes it hard, and says, “Wake up.”

Cal’s shoulder jerks beneath his hand and he gives… sort of a strangled gasp.  Not exactly.  It’s damn near the worst sound Greez has ever heard, like he’s trying to scream but somebody’s got their boot crushing his throat, and it sends a chill down Greez’s spine.  Then the boy’s eyes pop open, focus on Greez, the hand under his cheek plunges under the pillow instead – Greez backpedals so fast he smacks into the bulkhead, because he’s never been on the business end of a lightsaber before and he sure as hell isn’t going to start now.  Raising all four arms, Greez says, “Hey.  Just me.  You kept thrashing around like you were in a bad glimmik vid, so I figured you weren’t having a good time.”

He could tell the kid the jig’s up, too.  He knows Cal can talk.  Cere doesn’t want him nagging Cal about it, though, and like any good gambler, Greez prefers keeping his cards close to his chest.  So he doesn’t say anything more, just stands there with his heart beating a little too fast as Cal struggles to sit up, clutching his side, so pale even his lips have gone bone-white.  He leaves the lightsaber behind, possibly because he needs both hands to sign… whatever he’s trying to tell Greez.  “Still don’t understand you,” Greez reminds him, trying to keep the frustration from his tone.

Cal stops midsentence and his hands droop into his lap.  Under different circumstances, it’d be kind of funny.  Then he just sits there silently, glassy-eyed, panting, and Greez takes pity on him.  “It’s early,” he says.  “I’m only up ‘cause your droid doesn’t get the concept of a private cabin… so you might as well go back to sleep if you want.  Sounds like it’s pouring rain, anyway.  And if you’re thinking of wandering off anyway, don’t.  Cere’ll flip if I let you disappear without an actual meal again.”

He leaves the engine room after that.  Not much point in waiting for an answer, after all.

Bogano’s just blurry rivulets of green and grey through the thin viewports in the common area.  Greez toggles the lights on, yawning and scratching his head, and putters through the typical morning routine out of habit – check the scopes, check the comms, put on the electric kettle, get a pair of mugs.  They may or may not be leaving the planet today and it’s been a while since their last supply run, so Greez gives the real caf a longing look and grabs the canister of the instant stuff.  Two scoops in his mug, one and a half in Cere’s for whenever she gets up, a bit of sugar in both… it’s all automatic, and Greez’s mind wanders.

He doesn’t know what to do with Cal, that’s the problem.  Greez is an extrovert, a conversationalist, a storyteller.  He loves talking to people.  And not just in the ‘washed-up old spacefarer spinning endless yarns’ sort of way (though he has his moments); he loves the give-and-take of it, someone else meeting his tale with one of their own, leaving a piece of themselves with him, and maybe years down the line remembering that weird Latero from the dive bar who once told them all about falling off the back of his neighbor’s speeder bike and breaking half his arms.  That’s how he connects.  Even right after he and Cere met, when she was still lying to him about who she was and why she’d hired him, they sat down and had a nice chat over dinner the night she came aboard.  She’d listened more than she talked, but she tossed him a few stories of her own – he'd found out later they were true, just had all the Jedi parts edited out.  She didn’t feel like a ghost to him.

Cal… well, the first thing Greez found out about the guy is that he doesn’t talk.  That might’ve colored his entire perception somewhat.  In this thruster fire of a galaxy, sometimes the only power a man’s got is the ability to open his mouth and scream until somebody listens; Greez can’t imagine willingly giving that up, no matter what might happen to him.  But maybe Cere’s right and Cal has something else going on in that ginger head of his.  Either way, Greez anticipates it being an issue in the future.  Every comm the kid sends has to go through two translators before it reaches Greez.  What are they both going to do if something goes wrong and Cere’s in the ‘fresher, or that droid runs out of juice?  Are they going to have a climactic holofilm moment where Cal gets over it at just the right time?  Probably not.  That junk doesn’t happen in real life.

It just bugs him.  It bugs him that Cal’s always quieter than a clawmouse, that this kid’s perfectly capable of talking and doesn’t, that he’ll at least try with Cere and apparently never shuts up around BD, that Greez can’t make any progress with him.  And it bugs him that it bugs him, because he’s thought whatever, if he won’t talk, that’s his problem, I’m not gonna coddle him eight or ten times in the past two days, but he still gets annoyed every time he tries and nothing.  He might get a three-word reply to a question in the worst handwriting Greez has ever seen (seriously, it’s like someone gave a drunk seven-year-old one of those wobbly trick pens Greez’s uncle pranked him with once), and that’s all.

The kettle beeps and Greez sighs, rubs a hand over his head, pours water into his mug and stirs until the gritty powder dissolves into something he’ll generously call caf.  One of his great-grandmother’s favorite sayings was ‘it is what it is’.  He’ll live if Cal doesn’t want to talk to him, at all, ever.  But Cal’s not getting any more sandwiches made special, that's for sure.

While Greez is sipping his caf, Cal comes drifting out of the hallway, dressed and presumably loaded up on painkillers and fiddling with that little package of cigarras, so he’s elected not to go back to sleep.  He’s still got the empty-eyed expression.  Involuntarily, Greez recalls that horrible suffocated noise Cal made right before waking, and almost shivers.  Maybe Cere should add number six to her list – somebody forced Cal to be quiet, and he hasn’t snapped out of it yet.  They really don’t know what happened to him on Bracca. 

At the top of the steps, Cal glances out the viewport and stops dead.  He gives Greez a very strange look, to which Greez says, “What?”  Cal gestures at the viewport.  Greez regards the wet transparisteel with confusion and repeats, “What?”  And he’s not much of a lip-reader – especially when it comes to Humans and their tiny pink mouths – but he recognizes the word Cal mouths incredulously as pouring.  “Look, I’m from a pretty dry planet, okay?  This is pouring to me!”

For a heartbeat, he thinks Cal is actually going to laugh at him.  Then the moment passes and Cal wanders through the lounge, opens one of the hatches, sits on the threshold.  Greez almost follows him just to nag, because he was dead karking serious about doing violence if the kid smokes in here, but he comes close enough to get a good peek at Cal’s face, realizes he’s trying not to cry, and promptly pivots on his heel and walks back to the galley.  Breakfast isn’t going to make itself, anyway.

He's in the middle of measuring out the phraig and mixing some spices when Cal comes back his way, looking tired but no longer on the verge of tears.  And Greez has never known when to stop (not a great quality in a gambler), so before he can think better of it, his jaw flaps open and he’s saying, “If you want breakfast before lunchtime, you could come give me a hand.  I know I’ve got four of them, but I’m a small guy, right?  Limited reach.  Long as your hands are free, might as well lend ‘em to me.”

Hm.  That came out creepier than I meant it to.  Judging by the slant of Cal’s mouth, he’s having the same thought.  Apparently he doesn’t value his hands that highly, though, since he joins Greez at the counter, and Greez is feeling charitable enough to add, “There’s caf.  Instant stuff.  Mugs in the compartment on your left…”  He isn’t even sure Cal likes caf.  Guy’s yet to take anything that hasn’t been explicitly offered, and this is the first time Greez has offered.  His poor great-grandmother would be swooning over Greez’s terrible hospitality.  She taught him better than that.

Cal opens the compartment and blinks at the little stack of caf mugs Greez has collected over the years, reaches out, and goes still as soon as his fingers touch the first one.  Right, Greez recalls with an unpleasant jolt in his stomach, Cal puts the ‘psychic’ in ‘psychic wizard with a laser sword’.  Please don’t let him see the breakdancing competition.  Or Uttili dumping me in public the day after she gave me that mug.  Whatever Cal sees, he isn’t forthcoming about it; he runs his fingers across the mugs, sometimes pausing, sometimes not, until he’s touched them all.  The one in the bottom corner – cream-colored with a blocky, stylized sunset (or sunrise) painted on it that Greez can’t remember acquiring – elicits a trace of a smile.  He picks that one.

Greez lets him make his caf and take a couple sips, then nods to the cutting board, upon which he’s already laid out a mepple, some dried chorbas, and a couple Red Nebula onions.  “Wanna chop those up for me?”

Cal eyes the assortment of two-fruits-and-some-onions with distrust.  Snickering, Greez says, “They don’t go together.  For some unspeakable reason, Cere likes her phraig savory, so she gets the onions and the sane people get the fruit.”  He extends the knife to Cal, withdraws it again before Cal can take it.  “Wait, wait.  You know how to use this thing, don’t you?  Correctly, no fingers in the mix?  I’ve already had to ban Cere from the galley; don’t think I won’t do the same to you.”

He gets a nod in response, and he hands over the knife.  His own work is well underway, so Greez keeps one eye peeled while Cal chops up the mepple excruciatingly slowly, to the point Greez can’t help but wonder if he’s slogging on purpose.  But he is helping and seems very intent on his task, so Greez forgives the speed and the uneven knife cuts.  The silence, however – that grates on his nerves.  Fine, he prefers proper conversations, but he’ll talk at the kid if he has to.  “We used to do a lot more actual meals around here,” he says, “but that kinda fell by the wayside when we were spending loads of time looking for – well, not you in particular, you in general.  I practically had nutrient bars coming outta my ears.  And I guess that’s good sometimes, saving time and money and all, but after a while I never wanted to see another one of those kriffing things again.  I don’t care how ‘nutritionally complete’ they are; there’s no substitute for actual fruits and vegetables and fresh meat and grains that haven’t been compressed into a brick.  So I’m getting back into the habit of making at least one real meal a day – two, if I can swing it, although that’ll depend on supplies and whether or not we’re getting shot at.  Which we’d better not.  I just scrubbed the Mantis within an inch of her life, had her lookin’ real spiffy, and then we went to Bracca.  And got shot at.  I’m not blaming you, I’m just saying, if you’ve never had to take carbon scoring off doonium alloy – maybe you have, I dunno – it’s a serious pain in the ass.”

Greez doesn’t know if his audience is listening.  Cal’s moved on to dicing the chorbas with a focused lack of precision.  He’s not wearing that leather glove of his, and there’s a nasty scar circling the base of his left thumb, like it was reattached or something; Greez wants to ask, but this kid doesn’t tell stories.  He jabbers on.  “Hah!  Wanna know something funny?  Those dry chorbas came in a sack almost as big as I am.  Had to toss a Besalisk at the fuel depot a few creds to carry it back to the ship for me – Cere looked at me like I’d gone bonkers when she saw it.  There used to be some kinda restaurant there, but the owners got into trouble and skipped out and the place closed – the guy running the station was selling everything off for pocket change.  Not only did I get that monster sack – seriously, it sat under the terrarium until a couple weeks ago ‘cause I had nowhere else to put it – I snagged a whole unopened case of vitajuice and four, four nice cuts of scyk.  For pocket change.  Same amount of meat woulda cost me an arm back at home.  Guy threw in a bottle of Revnog for free, too.  It tasted pretty stale when Cere and I opened it, but for free, I ain’t complaining.”

Cal is still silent.  Greez can get over him not talking, but would it kill him to make a little noise now and then, just so Greez knows he’s paying attention?  He does eventually present Greez with a board of chopped fruit and onions, at least.  Unkindly, Greez thinks he could’ve done it faster himself and had the same amount of conversation.  But he keeps that thought locked behind his teeth where it belongs, says, “Thanks,” and scrapes the fruit into two-thirds of the phraig-and-spice mix.  And then, never learning, tries again.  “So, as long as you’re gonna be hanging around and I’m trying to make more meals, what do you like?”  Cal blinks at him over his caf.  “I mean, Cere’s not into sweet stuff.  Hence the onions.  I do think she’d murder a man for kajaka root, though.  We had it at a tapcaf once and I was honestly afraid to get between her and the plate.  Me, I eat a lot more red meat than I probably should, but it’s hard to come by on Lateron and so easy to find practically everywhere else.  How ‘bout you?”

Cal looks like he’s considering the question, which gives Greez hope he’ll get an answer in some way, shape, or form… and then the kid shrugs with a sort of apologetic half-smile and Greez wants to hit him with the divider for the cooker.  Instead, he puts the divider in the cooker (thank goodness he sprang for the deluxe model) so the fruit phraig and onion phraig don’t mingle and cranks up the heat.  “Fine,” he mutters.  “Whatever.  Guess I should be happy you know how to handle a kitchen knife without hacking off any fingertips.  If Cere’s anything to go by, Jedi don’t teach their kids to cook…”

Finally, one hand occupied with the caf he’s drinking, Cal lifts the other and flicks through a few incomprehensible signs, then stops, scowls into his mug.  He puts that on the counter and starts looking around.  There’s a torn bit of flimsi on the table, a recipe Greez had scribbled down weeks ago and meant to throw out now that it’s in his datapad; Cal grabs it and flips it over, and Greez rolls him a pen someone not named Greez left lying on the galley countertop.  Cal’s handwriting sucks and he doesn’t write much faster than he dices fruit, but at this point, Greez will take it.

I lived alone for four years.  If I didn’t figure out how to cook a little bit, I would’ve starved.

Praise the ancestors, a sign of life!  “Ahhh,” Greez says, nodding, “the Sink-or-Swim Culinary Academy, got it.  Wasn’t sure how much actual cooking was possible on Bracca – I didn’t get a great look at the place, but what I did see kinda looked like crap, and you can’t eat metal.”

The Ibdis Maw ate metal.

“What the hell is that?”

The massive superorganism that lives beneath Bracca’s crust – all of its crust – and pokes its mouth through the surface to eat the trash and scrap metal the Guild can’t sell.

He genuinely can’t tell if the kid’s screwing with him or not.  There are no tone indicators in writing and Cal’s expression has gone funny, distant.  “Okay,” Greez says, “well, sounds like I’m never going back there again for the rest of my natural life.  It’ll have to live without the pleasure of my company.  Or…” He trails off, another question sparking in the back of his head.  “Hey, it’s been five years, hasn’t it?  Where’d you live the other year?”

For a moment, Cal is completely still.  Then, even slower than usual, he writes, I don’t want to talk about it.

“Okay,” Greez says again, opening the cooker and giving the phraig a stir.  Who says he doesn’t know when to stop?  Kid could’ve cohabitated with a girlfriend or someone else he had to leave behind and misses.  He keeps thinking about it, though, and his train of thought rapidly loops back to number six and something sour blooms in the pit of his stomach.  Hopefully Cal wasn’t living with someone bad.  Cere could be wrong about the guy’s age, he might’ve been a lot younger than they think when the Republic fell… and a little boy all alone on that junk pile with nobody to turn to would make an easy target for certain kinds of people…

Oh no.  He can’t do this.  He can’t start getting protective of this tiny fictional version of Cal he just cooked up in his head, because then he’ll feel protective of the real deal, and the real deal is a twenty-ish scrapper with a lightsaber and more muscle in one arm than Greez has in his entire body.  He isn’t a child.  And if Greez had wanted children at this point in his life, he would’ve looked into it a lot sooner.  No, he tells himself, very firmly, dropping the cover back on the cooker.  Cal’s just a crewmate.  A means to an end, as far as Cere’s mission is concerned, though she’d never see him that way.  He’s not somebody who needs Greez.

Besides, Greez is no fool.  Once they’ve got this holo-whatsit in hand, Cal and Cere are going to go off looking for Force-sensitive kids and doing Jedi stuff and then Greez will be alone again, so why get attached?  It’s bad enough he already considers Cere one of the closest friends he’s ever had.  She might keep in touch, maybe, if it won’t put Junior Jedi School at risk, but he’s not stupidly optimistic enough to believe either of them will really want him around after this is over.

“Listen,” he says, just to distract himself from that rather miserable thought, “if you –”  He breaks off at a plasticky crinkling sound, looks over his shoulder.  The flimsiplast is a crumpled ball in Cal’s hand and he’s glaring at it like he’d love to torch the thing.  “So that’s it, then?” Greez sighs, turning back towards the cooker.  “We’re done talking?  Fine.  Never mind, dunno why I bothered in the first place.”

He wishes he hadn’t said it the second the words leave his mouth.  Sure enough, he promptly hears Cal walk out of the galley and down the corridor until his footsteps fade into the engine room.  Groaning, Greez turns the cooker down to low and knocks on his forehead, hard, then slouches at the table and fusses with plate settings while he waits for the phraig to finish cooking.

He's kicked out of his sulk by a clank somewhere off to his right.  There’s nothing to his right except the bulkhead and viewport and… the piping for the ventilation system.  Greez narrows his eyes at that and abruptly realizes he hasn’t heard from the droid in way, way too long.  Seizing a spoon from the table, he hops up to stand on his seat – something he’d never do otherwise, his boots are grubby – and hammers on the side of the duct.  The BANG from inside tells him BD must’ve jumped and bashed his square head.  “Get outta there!” Greez bellows.  The droid goes skittering off, probably to the safety of the engine room, because Cal lets him get away with everything.  “The vents are so us organics can breathe; they ain’t tunnels for annoying little droids!”

Huffing, Greez sits back down at the table and rests his chin in a hand.  It’s very quiet again.  Cere’s not awake (well, since that duct runs through her cabin, she might be now) and he has a bad feeling Cal isn’t going to join him for breakfast.  Who said I don’t know when to stop?  It was probably me!  They’d been doing good and Greez had to go be snide and he’ll bet Cal’s going to ignore him again for the foreseeable future.  Fantastic.  Maybe he should take a page from the kid’s book and just shut up.

Chapter Text

Cere doesn’t meditate anymore.  Sure, she’ll go through the motions, finding a space as quiet and free of distractions as possible (her cabin, for the most part), shutting her eyes, clearing her mind… but she cannot, will not open herself to the Force.  It’s at its closest during her pseudo-meditation, teasing at the fringes of her mind.  She could let it in.  She could allow the Force to flow through her again, take an active role in finding this holocron and rebuilding the Jedi Order, feel truly whole –

“Trilla.”  No.  No, Trilla – Trilla, look at me – this isn’t you, you aren’t their pawn – don’t – you are Trilla Sudari, you are a Jedi – I’m sorry – you’ve read every volume of Anchoroni poetry you can get your hands on and I thought you’d die of joy when they revealed that exhibit of reliefs from Bardotta at the Museum of Galactic Cultures and you keep telling me you’re terrible with the younglings, but you’re the one they looked to for protection and comfort – I’m so sorry – no – “No, no… NO –”

– and she doesn’t.  As long as she can resist, she knows she hasn’t completely fallen.

She opens her eyes and stretches out her arms, arches her back until it pops.  Even if she isn’t actually meditating as the Jedi used the term, some time alone to process her emotions still feels beneficial.  And for the first time in five years, since she and Trilla tried to disappear with as many children as they could (not enough, not nearly enough) and it was all for nothing, Cere has hope again.  Solid, tangible hope in the form of that holocron Master Cordova hid in the Vault.  Her guess was correct.  She can’t let herself get too wrapped up in that giddy rush of joy, though, no matter how intoxicating it feels.  They’ve only just begun and she suspects all of them, even Greez, will be tested before this is over.

But she is happy.  She thinks it’d be impossible for someone in her position not to be.  Shutting the door of her cabin behind her, Cere pushes her sleeves up to her elbows and heads towards the common area, pausing in the corridor only a moment upon hearing music. 

Well – music is perhaps the wrong word for it.

As she anticipated, when Cere peers over the galley table and down at the lounge, Cal’s sitting on the sofa with Cere’s hallikset in his lap.  It’s not the first time she’s caught him at it – he seems wholly unaccustomed to having much free time, and when he wasn’t exploring Bogano, disassembling his lightsaber for the heck of it, or doing all the maintenance BD-1 wasn’t able to perform on himself, he spent a lot of time wandering aimlessly around the Mantis and making Greez nervous.  She’d left the hallikset in the lounge again just to see if he’d take an interest, and he did, often, with a fascination that surprised her.  She doesn’t mind as long as he treats it gently, which he always has.  Maybe, she’d thought once, there was an instrument he’d learned or wanted to learn at the Temple, and either the war or the Purge had pulled him away from it…

If he does know how to play something, it’s definitely not the hallikset.  The psychometry helps – aside from random snippets of songs Cere recalls playing frequently, she’s also heard him attempt an exercise she uses to warm up, stumbling through the stair-stepped notes like he can’t always get his fingers in the right places at the right times.  Otherwise, he plucks away with the enthusiasm of a kid who just got a mandolin as a Life Day present and has no idea what they’re doing, but is having a good time nonetheless.  Seems the echoes cannot actually teach him how to play unless he’s lucky enough to pick up an instructor’s instrument.  It’s still very weird to hear the first few measures of Lady Spira’s Waltz – a very complex piece Cere’s still trying to master – from someone who probably doesn’t even know what notes the open strings make.

Trilla had never been interested in learning.  She had an excuse even Cere couldn’t argue with, as she’d been confirmed quite tone-deaf while she was in the creche.  That didn’t exactly stop her – sometimes, in that hazy place between awake and asleep, Cere expects to get up and walk to the cockpit and see her sitting in the copilot’s chair with a holobook, singing along off-key to her favorite jatz songs – but she’d never cared for music that didn’t have lyrics for her to grasp onto.

“Tell you what,” Cere says, descending the steps.  Cal’s head pops up and he blinks at her a couple times, like he didn’t sense her approaching or even remember she was on the ship.  He gets absorbed in music, from both those battered headphones of his and the hallikset.  "I'll make you a deal.  I'll teach you how to play that properly."

Cal looks from her to the hallikset, then up towards the cockpit, where BD is hanging out with Greez (who’s no doubt tolerating this through gritted teeth).  He sets the instrument aside and Cere puts it on the table so she can sit next to him as he picks up the datapad.  I don’t think I have anything you’d want in return.  She’s barely digested the words before he suddenly brightens and types, Unless you know a good buyer.  Then I’ll teach you the basics of scrapping and we could probably disappear the Mantis in less than two weeks.

“Do not let Greez hear you say that,” Cere warns, smiling.

Cal shrugs.  Just thought I’d offer.

“Thanks, but no thanks.  It’s not wise to get between a Latero and his ship.”  And the Stinger Mantis is the first place that’s felt like home since the Purge.  A starship and her ornery four-armed pilot who makes the best redspar tsiraki sauce Cere has ever tasted and who went all-in on her search for a surviving Jedi because what else am I gonna do on a Taungsday afternoon?  “Actually, I was watching you talk to BD-1 before we took off, and that reminded me… it’s been a long time since I learned some Basic Sign at the Temple, and I’m not sure I recall anything beyond a few letters, but if you’re willing to teach, I’m willing to learn.”

It's sort of fun watching his brain crash in real time.  He gapes at her for so long Cere starts suspecting nobody’s ever asked to learn before, which strikes her as rather sad.  He must’ve had someone on Bracca to talk to, right?  Or has he simply cloistered himself away entirely for the past few years?  Cal wields his silence like a shell, a shield.  Maybe he resents her trying to break into it.

“It’s a yes or no question,” she prompts, gently, when he makes no move to respond.  “And either way, I will teach you how to play this –” she nods to the hallikset, “if you’d like.  We’re going to spend a lot of time traveling, I think.  It’ll keep us both busy.”

Cal wakes from whatever stupor he’s descended into, gazes at her another second more, then takes the datapad again.  I’ve never taught anyone.  Except BD, but he’s a droid with perfect recall so I don’t think that counts.  I’m not sure I’d be much of a teacher.

Despite struggling with his connection to the Force, he made it off Bracca with two Inquisitors, a lot of stormtroopers, and at least one gunship on his tail, all willing to destroy anything in their way if that was what it took to kill a Jedi, and he only required minimal assistance from the Mantis.  Cal would be well within his rights to be the most insufferably overconfident pain in the ass this side of the Core… and yet he’s gone in the opposite direction.  It worries her a little.  If he assumes he’s going to fail at everything before he even tries, he probably will.

She doesn’t know him well enough to know how to help him.  But, if he agrees to this… “I’m not asking for a university-level instruction, Cal.  I just think it’d be useful to learn the fundamentals.  Or review them,” she adds.  “When I was a youngling, I had a friend who was an Ithorian and took to Basic Sign very quickly.  She preferred it to an electronic translator.  I tried to keep up with her for a while, but I never progressed too far and I haven’t thought about it in… decades.”

Cal sighs slightly, bites at a fingernail.  Okay, here’s the thing.  I don’t actually know Galactic Basic Sign Language.

“So… what are you using, then?”

A small amount of it is probably Basic Sign.  I think I learned the same stuff in the Temple as you did.  But there was no way to learn anything else on Bracca, and when Prauf finally tracked down someone who could teach us, it was a woman from Tatooine.  She’d gotten in trouble with the Hutts and they sent an assassin to slit her throat.  She lived, obviously, and she taught us, but her sign language was all Huttese.

All right, Cere thinks, nodding slowly.  She can handle that.  She sticks the name ‘Prauf’ into the back of her head for later reflection, and also notes that whatever caused Cal’s mutism, it most likely happened during or after the Purge.  Not much of a surprise, there.

Then after a couple months she disappeared suddenly – I don’t know if she died or just got reassigned or what – so most of the more complex stuff I learned from Niona later.  A lot of this is probably Aqualish too.

…all right…

Everything else we just made up.  He glances at her for a second, visibly hesitates.  It’s honestly a total mess.  The grammar isn’t even close to right; I follow spoken Basic because that’s all I know.  This is not going to be useful to you anywhere else in the galaxy.

Pushing away her mild consternation (so much for reviewing the fundamentals buried somewhere in her subconscious), Cere says, “It’s useful to me here.”

You don’t have to learn it just for me.

“I’d like to anyway.”

Cal sighs again, raking his gloved fingers through his hair.  Then he contemplates the glove for a moment before taking it off and tossing it onto the table.  “For the record,” Cere says, “you’d have less trouble with the hallikset if you weren’t wearing that.  It’s not meant to be played with gloves on.”

I’ll keep that in mind.  He toes off his boots too – he’s taking Greez’s warnings about the couch seriously, it seems – and turns so he’s sitting cross-legged, facing Cere, cracking his knuckles.  Okay, we’ll start with the alphabet.  If that doesn’t scare you off, I’ll show you some other stuff.

“Just demonstrate for me the first time,” Cere says.  “I want to see how much of this I remember.”

Something about the way Cal’s mouth twitches and is quickly pressed back into an emotionless line concerns her.  He lifts his left hand to eye level and, slowly, starts fingerspelling the alphabet for her.  Aurek.  Besh.  Cresh.  Cherek.  Just like he’d done with BD.  When he reaches enth, he pauses and waits, and Cere nods.  “Yup, got all of those.”

Cal continues, but this time she stops him after four letters.  “Wait, wait,” Cere says, repeating the last two letters she was shown.  “I thought this –” she folds her ring finger and pinky in so her thumb, index, and middle fingers are extended, the former perpendicular to the latter two, “was grek and this –” now she curls her thumb in, folding her other two fingers so they only extend to the first knuckle, “was herf.  Or do I have it backwards?”

I probably have it backwards.  But it’s habit by now.

Well, she’s sure she can figure it out from context.  He raises his hand again; instead of telling him to continue, Cere says, “You’re right-handed, yes?”  Cal hikes his eyebrows, nods.  “But you sign primarily left-handed.”

That’s habit too.  If I had to talk to someone while I was working, I usually didn’t have my right hand free.  I can do either.

“I know.  I’ve seen you with BD.”  Last night, after they’d made the decision to leave in the morning, Cal and BD-1 went back outside and laid in the grass and just looked up at Bogano’s clear starscape for a good two hours.  Cere had watched them through the open hatch for a little while, seen how quickly and easily he could communicate with BD, and figured someone else on this ship needed to get on their level.  And it won’t be Greez, at least not yet.  There’s a chill in the air between him and Cal.  “Just please don’t switch hands mid-sentence like you do with him or you’re going to lose me real fast.  Keep going.”

Cere doesn’t interrupt again, letting Cal proceed through the rest of the aurebesh at a steady pace.  Once he gets to zerek, he lowers his hand and waits.  His expression tells her he knows what she’s thinking (something along the lines of oh, spirits, what have I gotten myself into?), so she doesn’t disappoint him.  “Cal,” Cere says, “I’m pretty sure only half of those are real letters.”

She gets an actual grin this time.  I told you, what I didn’t remember, I just made up.  You’ve still got time to back out.

“Oh no,” Cere says immediately.  “Not a chance.  I like a challenge.”  She may have to recruit BD to help her, though.  He could probably pull up images of the more esoteric letters that’ll take her a while to memorize.  “Okay, can you do it again?  Let me see if I can follow along.”

They’re on their fourth repetition of the aurebesh when Greez calls, “Hey, we’re gonna be dropping out in a minute!” from the cockpit.  Cere pauses on krenth, wincing slightly – she can play her hallikset for a couple hours without batting an eyelash, but her fingers are not used to this kind of positioning – and Cal types one word on the datapad.  Zeffo?

Cere glances up front.  “Greez didn’t tell you?” she asks.  Cal shakes his head and his entire expression closes off at once.  Before he can start panicking, Cere stands and says, “That’s next.  This is just a very quick supply run.  Come on.”

Cal still looks suspicious, but he gets up and jams his feet back into his boots and follows her to the cockpit.  They’re barely in their seats before the Mantis reverts to realspace in front of a ringed ice giant with more moons than it knows what to do with.  “We’re headed to that one,” Greez says, pointing (rather unnecessarily) through the viewport at an oblong moon studded with struts and supports for the docking bay ringing it.  “Not much else in the system, but Chorros sits right on the hyperlane so you can get just about everything you need here.  And if things go horribly wrong on Zeffo, which they probably will because –” he lifts the two hands not on the controls, shrugs, “you know, they usually do… if we need to disappear completely for a week or two, I don’t want to run outta anything important.”

“And you should have some extra clothing,” Cere adds, putting on the headset.

Cal stops in the middle of whatever he’s signing to BD and looks at her, big-eyed, begins to shake his head.  Greez interrupts before Cere can say anything – “You’ve got one set of clothes, kid.  You planning on washing them ever?  You’d better.  And if you’re gonna sleep in that getup all the time, you’re stronger than I am.”

Cere tosses Cal the small pouch of credits she set aside earlier.  “There are half a dozen secondhand shops on the station.  Get some clothes.”

BD translates Cal’s response as an indescribably awkward expression of gratitude.  Cere does not snicker, just says, “You’re welcome,” and prepares to transmit one of their many falsified transponder codes to the docking controller.  Greez and the Mantis haven’t been on the Empire’s radar yet, but there’s no doubt the Second Sister got a good look at him as they tried to leave Bracca; she’ll be keeping an ear out for Latero pilots and Lateron starships now.

“Okay,” Greez says once he’s set the ship down in the crowded port, clapping both sets of hands in quick succession, “we’re good on fuel, so I’m gonna top up the water tanks and grab some extra food quick.  Cal gets clothes.  Cere…”

“Medkit,” she says.  They are out of heavy-duty painkillers.  Cal seems to be doing all right on just the regular old ibuprofen now, at least.  “And ‘fresher stuff.  I won’t be long.”

“Then we all meet back here in an hour, got it?” Greez starts the process of shutting the Mantis down.  “Comm if you’re gonna be late.”

Cal’s the first one over to the hatch, so he’s the one to open it and lower the boarding ramp; he doesn’t go out right away, however, hovering on the threshold and gazing out into the docking bay with an unreadable expression.  Wondering if the psychometry makes diving into crowds of people an unappealing prospect, Cere comes up behind him and says, “Hey.”  He glances over his shoulder.  “This place is a little too diverse for the Empire’s tastes –” she nods towards a nearby group of Gamorreans and Ugnaughts who appear to be haggling over starship parts, “so we shouldn’t run into trouble.  That said, there’s a tapcaf over on the far left side of the station called Sixth Star – the owner’s a pretty vocal Imperial sympathizer.  If there are any stormtroopers or officers on leave around here, that’s probably where you’d find them.  You’re best off avoiding it.”

Cal nods.  BD leaps up onto his back and chirps happily, more than ready to go exploring Chorros, and that’s enough to spur Cal off the Mantis and into the throng.  Cere watches him go, then heads back to the lounge to put her boots on and grab the rest of her money.  Greez is there as well, checking the grocery list he keeps on his datapad.  “You should’ve told him we were stopping here,” Cere says.  “He’s starting to trust us, but it’s fragile.  Don’t withhold information from him.”

Greez looks up with an unimpressed expression.  “Right, sure.  So what do you call what you’re doing?”

Frost fills her stomach.  “Excuse me?”

“Come on, I’m not stupid – this little side trip was your idea in the first place.  Chorros is the best place in the sector to find a ride out of the sector.  Strong, healthy kid like him – well, mostly healthy, with the ribs and all – he wouldn’t need ten minutes to find a ship that’d hire him long enough to get the hell away from here.  And now he’s got some money, so he could probably at least pay his way to the Hapes Cluster.  Not like we’re gonna notice until he doesn’t come back.”  Greez sticks the datapad under one arm and folds two others.  “What are you up to, Cere?”

Exhaling slowly, she slips one boot on, then the other.  “If he’s going to run out on us,” she says, “I want him to do it now, before I get my hopes up.”

It’s on that thought she leaves the ship and the docking bay, drifting through the wide corridors and chambers of the station, which are set up as something of an open-air market.  There are some actual shops, including a place that functions both as the local clinic and a pharmacy.  It’s of questionable repute – Cere wouldn’t want to undergo any medical procedures in its grimy theaters unless she had absolutely no other choice – but the drugs, regardless of their origins, are legitimate.  She walks out with a handful of fresh painkiller hyposprays she’d need a prescription for on Coruscant, as well as a few other things to pad the medkit.

Then she meanders for a while.  She buys a basket of charred veghash strips from a corner stand, douses them in stone pepper sauce, and mostly fails to eat them without making a complete mess of her hands.  A boy tries to pick her pocket by the public wash fountains; Cere just gently steps on his foot to warn him off, because he barely comes up to her waist.  Someone so swaddled in shawls she can’t even begin to guess at their species attempts to coax her into attending some kind of ‘revival’ in the ‘Soaking Pool’, whatever that is, but they back off when she repeatedly declines (thinking the whole time that Trilla would have gone, simply out of curiosity).  A stand near the docking bay actually carries a very small selection of hallikset strings.  They’re not exactly high-quality, but her B-string is wearing thin and if she’s going to be using it more and teaching someone else… she waffles for a bit, then decides to buy it.  No telling when she’ll get another chance.

She doesn’t think about Cal or even permit herself to look too closely in the direction of any red hair she spots until she’s almost back to the Mantis.  If he’s gone, he’s gone.  She’ll have to live with whatever he chooses.  Now, if he’s gone and BD-1 went with him, she may have a problem.  Greez has already returned, though he’s not on board – Cere sees him talking enthusiastically with a dock worker who has greyish-brown skin, no hair to speak of, and four arms.  He rarely stumbles across any of his own people, yet it always seems like they’ve known one another for a lifetime the instant they meet.  She isn’t sure if most Lateros are that way or if Greez just has some sort of magnetism to him.  Her guess would be the latter.  Whatever it is, he’s too busy to notice her.  Cere climbs the boarding ramp with no clue what, if anything, she’ll find inside.

She finds Cal sitting in the galley, writing on what she hopes for his sake is not the tabletop, BD peering curiously over his shoulder.  Keeping her sigh of relief internal (her hopes were already too high), she deposits her bag on the sofa and says, “Find some clothes?”

He nods, folding the sheet of flimsiplast he was writing on as she climbs the steps.  BD beeps something so soft Cere can’t pick it up, but Cal glances at him, shakes his head slightly, then tears another piece of flimsi off the pad next to him.  You wanted to see if I’d disappear.

“Cal,” Cere begins, sitting down at the table. 

He’s already started writing again, though, scrawling the words out as fast as he can until they’re hardly readable.  I already told you, we’re in this for the long haul.  You could

“Cal,” she repeats, a little more firmly, so he stops and looks up at her.  “I said you had a choice, but you were on a remote, uninhabited planet with no other way off it except a couple of people you had a lot of reasons not to trust.  We didn’t exactly give you any other choices.  Frankly, I wouldn’t have blamed you at all if you’d agreed just long enough to give us the slip.”

He looks slightly mollified by this, though he still has a mulish expression that suggests he might want to argue about it anyway.  Sometimes Cere thinks her estimate of his age is wrong, but in which direction, she can’t tell – Cal often seems too young and too old to her at the same time.  I’m not being coerced or manipulated or anything like that.  I think you’re right about rebuilding the Order to stop the Empire, and I want to find that holocron as much as you do.  And I don’t want to go off and try to disappear again.  Did it once already and I’m tired of living like that.  But you could’ve just told me.

“If I’d said you could leave,” Cere says, “no questions asked, we wouldn’t pursue you or try to contact you again or turn you in… would you have believed me?”

Cal doesn’t hesitate for an instant.  Yes.

It’s such a blatant admission of trust that she’s caught off-guard by it, and can’t scrape up a reply before he keeps writing.  I’m not going anywhere.  Neither is BD, so you’re stuck with us.  Just no more tests, okay?

Cere raises her hands.  “Okay,” she says.  “No more tests.  I trust you.”

Should we go rescue whoever Greez is talking to, then?

She laughs at that, standing up from the table.  “They looked pretty into it, honestly, but… we are about fifteen minutes past that one-hour time limit he imposed on us.  And I’m not a bad pilot, but I’m short about two of the limbs we’d need to steal this thing.”  Before Cere gets more than three steps away, BD chirps at her to wait, and she pauses, turns around.  Cal’s holding out that folded piece of flimsi.  She takes it and unfolds it.

It's the aurebesh, written somewhat neatly in two columns, with each letter accompanied by a little doodle of a hand forming the letter as Cal fingerspells it.  Cere doesn’t know what Cal sees in her face, because his goes rather pink as soon as their eyes meet.  He signs something to BD quick – the droid tells her Cal is not a good artist.  Also, BD adds, if she has a negative opinion, she can keep it to herself.  He is the only one allowed to make fun of the horribly deformed flipper-hands Cal’s drawn, as BD’s already acknowledged he himself could not actually do better, what with lacking hands of his own.

Cere laughs again.  “Thank you,” she says to Cal.  “I guess now I don’t have any excuse for not practicing.”  He’s still blushing, but he gives her a bit of a smug smile and nods.  She tucks the flimsi into her pocket.  “All right.  Let’s go drag Greez on board so we can get out of here.  We’re only a few hours away from Zeffo.”

Chapter Text

Most people would not be in a good mood after standing in the crosshairs of an AT-ST’s blaster cannons. 

Most people would also not be especially thrilled by the prospect of infiltrating a planet that’s been under Imperial siege for years.

Cal isn’t most people.  He feels great.

He doesn’t sleep after they leave Zeffo, though not for lack of trying.  Once the Mantis is in hyperspace, on the course to Kashyyyk – a fairly short trip, by galactic standards, yet long enough to grab a decent night’s sleep – he heads straight to the engine room.  He leaves the stuff he collected from Zeffo on the workbench, checks over BD-1 for any damage before letting the droid settle in to charge, strips off everything extraneous until he’s left in his shirt and pants and a pair of heavy socks.  The spare clothes he bought at the station, some of which could function as pajamas, languish sadly in the crate beneath the cot.  No point in changing entirely for just a nap.  Greez was making noise about putting together dinner in an hour or two and Cal’s adjusting to actually being hungry again, so he doesn’t skip meals anymore.  Who knew the cigarras would kill his appetite?

…okay, he knew.  That was half the reason he started.  They were cheaper than food.  But in the meantime, Cal crawls into bed and burrows in the blanket and sinks his head into the pillow, sighing.  He’s physically exhausted, every muscle aching like he’s twelve again and unaccustomed to pulling ten-hour shifts in the shipbreaking yard, and it’s a good ache.  It’s the sensation of doing something real instead of just keeping his head down and hoping he will never be noticed.

Problem is, he’s only physically exhausted.  Mentally, spiritually, he is wide awake.  The same thing happened often before the Purge, when Cal’s head would stay behind after they left a planet despite Master Tapal’s admonishments to focus.  As soon as he closes his eyes, he’s back on Zeffo, ears full of wind and chimes and the occasional rocket launcher.  It’s a beautiful place the Empire ruined – he’d walked through the village and every other thing he touched tugged him forwards and backwards through time until he got turned around, and then he would be drop-kicked into reality by yet another stormtrooper shooting at him.  The cold, eerie desolation was tangible.  There was something here.  It’s gone now.

He can relate to the desolate feeling.  Before he began relearning what he’d known as a Padawan, Cal didn’t fully appreciate how much he’d lost when his connection to the Force shattered.  He’d stood before thresholds clogged with rubble, knowing he was once taught how to use the Force as an extension of himself, push things he couldn’t move with sheer strength alone, but not knowing how anymore.  There was something here.  It’s gone now.  That skill laid behind the obstacle he encounters whenever he tries to meditate, and he’s beginning to believe the obstacle is him.  The vision or flashback he’d had in the caves, just like the one on Bogano… it hurt.  For a minute, Cal was in the training room on the Brave again, Master Tapal was alive and well, the clones did not want them dead and the Republic still gleamed and the Force wrapped around him easily and lovingly – and then it was gone, leaving him with the pain and yet also a little more whole than he’d been a minute earlier.  All he has to do is reach out and push.

Whatever the obstacle is, it’s something he’ll have to chip away at, gradually erode, instead of just shoving it out of his path.  And right now, he’s pretty sure if he uses the Force one more time today, he’s going to give himself the grandmother of all migraines.  Better to stay in bed and sleep.  He just needs to stop thinking.  Inhale, relax the sore muscles.  Exhale, release the pain, both the emotions from the flashback and the actual pain.  Scazz bites to both the right forearm and left shin resulted in some nasty punctures – he’s already cleaned them up good, and scazz probably don’t carry every disease in the region like scrap rats do, but he took the precautionary antibiotic Cere tossed him anyway.  Inhale.  He got doused in skungus juice, too.  Exhale.  At least none of those things blew up directly in his face.  Inhale.  The chimes were nice, though…

He's on the brink of dozing off when the blade of the wind turbine he’s crossing drops, his stomach plunges, and he jolts awake.

Karking hypnagogic jerk.  A sure sign he hasn’t been sleeping enough, and part of the reason he doesn’t sleep enough.  Huffing, Cal rolls over onto his stomach and watches BD charge for close to forty minutes, then gives up and gets out of bed.  He scavenged a whole bunch of junk on Zeffo, which is currently getting intimate with the whole bunch of junk from Bogano; he may as well sort through it all and decide what might actually be useful in the future.  So he sits atop the bench with two crates on the deck in front of him and tosses everything into one or the other, listening to faint Corellian wreckpunk through the headphones slung around his neck so he doesn’t aggravate his headache.

Almost all of his junk collection goes into the trash box except parts that could conceivably be used to repair his lightsaber or BD-1.  Seriously, why did he pick up a broken micro-probe?  Intact, it might be worth hanging on to, but he doesn’t have the faintest idea how to fix it, so he chucks it.  He takes the last of the detritus – a decent-sized piece of slivian iron – and inspects it, decides it falls under the ‘repair’ heading, and puts it in the other box.  One of these days he’ll have to fix the broken end of Master Tapal’s lightsaber.  It’d be simple if he could just graft another emitter in place of the old one, but the likelihood of coming across a working, discarded lightsaber is almost nonexistent.  Fabrication is his only viable option, and Cal suspects Greez won’t want him doing that in the engine room.  At least the workbench is tidy enough to meet with the Latero’s approval now… though he probably won’t want Cal sitting on it, either.

Well.  That ate up twenty minutes.  BD is still charging, so Cal leaves him alone, heading down the corridor and dragging a hand through his rumpled hair.  He finds Greez messing around in the galley, Cere nowhere to be seen, and (perhaps more importantly, when Cal has nothing else to entertain him) Cere’s hallikset nowhere to be seen either.  She may have put it in her cabin so she can use it for a change.

“Huh,” Greez says, giving Cal a cursory once-over when Cal turns towards him.  “You actually look like a normal guy who just rolled outta bed, instead of… I dunno, like you’re about to head for the construction site any second now.”

It was a shipbreaking yard, but he’s not far off.  Twice on Bogano Cal woke up in a panic because he thought he had overslept and missed his train.  “Anyway, if you’re not busy, I’d like some help,” Greez continues, knives in two hands, his Good Spoon in another.  Cal’s not sure what makes that one different from Greez’s six other spoons exactly like it.  “You wanna knead that for me?  Wash your hands first.”

Since he’s been handling scrap metal of unknown origin, Cal does so, then peers in the bowl Greez indicates.  The pale, round mass of dough is soft and springy when he pokes it with a finger.  He presses his entire hand into the dough and the resulting imprint slowly swells into nonexistence.  He presses his name into it, too.  After about thirty seconds of amusing himself, he notices Greez watching him and his ears go hot.  “You have no idea what I’m asking you to do,” Greez guesses, correctly.  He doesn’t wait for a response, as usual – he glances from the dough to the topatoes and chando peppers he’s cutting up and back to the dough, puts his knives down.  “Okay, look, it’s pretty simple.  Watch.”  He dumps the dough ball out of the bowl and directly onto the countertop, where he’s already spilled a bunch of flour, smushes one hand through the dough it to stretch it out, folds it over on itself, turns it ninety degrees, does it again.  “See?  Easy.  Just give it a quarter-turn every time and keep doing that until I tell you to stop.”

It is easy.  It’s also kind of fun.  And, predictably, Greez starts chattering away as soon as he’s back at the cutting board, so there’s no silence for Cal to bury himself in and Greez to detest.  “See, it was actually an aunt of mine who taught me how to make a decent bread in a cooker like this one,” he says, knocking his knuckles against the side of the appliance.  “My great-grandmother had the full cooktop, oven and all, but Aunt Shenny lived in the loft above the garage for the shuttle she drove around Antan.  No room for anything but a simple cooker.  It's not hard, but you’ve gotta get the heat exactly right or you’ll end up with a scorched crust and an uncooked center.  She coulda built herself a proper house with the bricks I made while I was trying to get it right…”

Cal still isn’t certain the Latero likes him, but they seem to have reached a delicate truce where Greez doesn’t expect any replies and Cal doesn’t try to give him any.  His hands are occupied, anyway.  “We’ll have the rest of the leftover bread with the stew, or else it’ll go stale.”  Greez checks his progress, nods, says, “Little longer.  This’ll bake while we get some sleep, or… whatever, it should be done before we get to Kashyyyk.  Maybe the Imps will back off if we give them some good fresh bread, huh?  Be nice if the galaxy worked that way.  Instead they just wreck the place… Aunt Shenny, she and my cousin joined up with some militia protesting the Imperial occupation on Lateron, and, well.”  He shrugs a shoulder.  “Never saw her again.  Last time I saw my cousin, he was down an eye and had one hell of a scar wrapping halfway ‘round his head.  Makes some of yours look like little scratches – except that one on your thumb.  Someday I wanna know what you did to that.  Okay, let me see this, I think it should be ready to proof.”

As Greez is inspecting the dough, Cal picks up one of his knives, waves it to get the Latero’s attention, lifts his eyebrows.  “Oh,” Greez says, eyes flicking to Cal’s left hand.  “Cut it off?”  Cal nods and sets the knife back down.  “Yikes.  Better you than me, pal – must’ve been painful.  But at least they put it back on.”

Small mercies.  Getting decent quality, well-fitted prostheses on Bracca is just slightly easier than sawing through a Venator’s hull with a kitchen cleaver.  It wasn’t painful at the time, though.  Admittedly, Cal might’ve been in shock; he was thirteen, cutting sections out of a bulkhead, and abruptly lost his footing when the ship settled.  He stumbled and dropped his torch and did the one thing Prauf said never to do: caught it.  Next thing he knew, the torch was in his hand and he couldn’t flick the off switch because his thumb was on the deck.

Welding torches weren’t lightsabers and didn’t even pretend to cauterize wounds.  Cal bled all the way across the ship until he found the foreman on duty, left hand wrapped in his poncho, carrying his severed thumb in his right.  Since the Empire was still in its infancy and things on Bracca hadn’t gone too far downhill yet, the foreman merely made Cal confirm he understood he would not be paid for the shift if he clocked out early and all medical expenses were his responsibility, then kindly let him hop on a barge headed towards the train station and the onsite medical clinic.  The surgical droid reattached his thumb in about fifteen minutes.  Prauf, working elsewhere that day and blissfully unaware of anything that’d gone on, got a bit of a surprise when he came home and Cal was busy being violently sick from the painkillers he’d taken on an empty stomach.

It's an interesting story, one he already told BD the first time the droid saw him without the glove.  If Greez understood, Cal could tell him the whole thing, and how his thumb is still half-numb but it never really bothers him, and he had no physical therapy but the sign language was a good substitute and his fine motor control has always been kind of shit anyway.  He can’t type or write while he’s measuring dried herbs.  He keeps quiet.

“– believe it or not, they actually thought we were kriffing legit.  Cere just walked in there like she owned the place, sat down at a computer, copied the info we needed, and walked right back out.  Somebody must’ve caught on then because we had to bang outta there like our butts were on fire, and obviously that lead didn’t pan out, but at that point I was convinced she might be on to something.  If the Imps are too clueless to recognize an ex-Jedi – one they captured once – there had to be others who were still surviving out there, right?”  Greez pours the entire container of lentils (they’re apparently the main component of this stew, something that amuses Cal to no end) into the sauce beginning to simmer in the cooker.  “And you’re an odd one, kid – do you actually like it when people talk at you?  Think it’d drive me nuts – but you’re here, so I guess she was right.  She usually is.  Gets annoying sometimes, I’m warning you.  You gonna give me a spoonful of korva root or not?”  Greez digs an elbow into Cal’s arm.  “Hello?”

Cal blinks, shakes his head, stares at the jar of ground korva root he’s holding.  “Ah, just give it to me…” Greez takes it right out of his hands.

Cere comes into the galley before Greez can ask Cal what his problem is (if he even intended to bother), yawning and rubbing at her face.  “Sorry, fell asleep… you guys need help?”

“You are restricted to setting the table,” Greez says immediately, stirring the herbs into the stew.

Opening the compartment above Greez’s head, Cere rolls her eyes at Cal and takes out three dishes.  “He’s convinced I can’t cook.”

“Because you can’t.”

“He thinks,” Cere says as she lays out the place settings, “I’m hopeless because one time – one – I did not know what the instruction ‘fold in the ingredients’ meant.  Now, maybe I can’t improvise the way he can, but if you give me a simple recipe to follow I can blunder my way through.”

“Blunder is a good word for it,” Greez says under his breath.

Cal doesn’t know how one would fold ingredients either, unless that’s meant to be literal.  Trying to picture folding a lentil in half, he leans against the counter and does nothing until Greez is preoccupied with the stew.  Then, once Cere’s looking in his direction, waiting for her to nod between letters to show she understands, he slowly spells, “Control freak.”

Cere figures out what he’s spelling when he reaches the enth and snorts so loudly Greez’s head snaps around.  “What’s so funny?” he asks suspiciously, eyeing Cal (who adopts a very innocent expression) and Cere (who’s standing at the table with her back to them, one hand over her mouth).  “Are you guys making fun of me?”

“No,” Cere says in a strangled voice.  “Just an observation.”  While Greez is muttering something about observing their heads, she turns towards them, face almost neutral aside from a sporadic twitch to her mouth.  “How long until that’s done, Captain?”

“Mm… ‘bout fifteen minutes for the lentils, but I’m gonna give it a little longer so the topatoes are nice and tender.  Be back here in twenty.”

None of them have to come back, because they don’t really leave; Greez starts slicing up the leftover bread, humming, while Cere walks down to the lounge.  For lack of any other ideas, Cal follows her.  She sits on the couch, flicks through a narrow box of what appear to be book chips, and says, “Want one?” when she notices him watching.

Cal shrugs a shoulder and sinks down onto the sofa next to her.  “You’re welcome to borrow a few,” Cere adds, plucking a rather discolored chip from the box and wrinkling her nose.  “I bought this lot cheap a couple months back… so far it’s been a pretty even split between good and garbage.  Best part is, none of them are labeled, so you’ll have no idea what you’re getting.  Sorry in advance if there’s anything horrifying in here.”

He used to read all the time.  He never exactly stopped or anything, it just… fell off the radar as he got older and busier.  Then fun came from exploring the Brave and getting into places he definitely shouldn’t be, tinkering with his lightsaber, playing ridiculous variants of sabacc the clone troopers invented (they toned down the violence when Cal was around, but more than one tiebreaker still involved fighting your opponent into submission).  And while he never enjoyed taking life – how could he, when every time he felt the ensuing vacuum in the Force – he did enjoy the adrenaline rush of combat more than a Jedi was probably supposed to.  Master Tapal had had no choice but to forge his apprentice in a galactic war and Cal was a product of his environment.

Bracca… well, there isn’t much in the way of entertainment there.  The occasional night out at a cantina, when he could afford it or someone else was buying.  Mostly he’d just tried to keep his head above water.  Cal takes a blue book chip from the box, regards the teeth marks in the corner and the blast of incandescent fury he gets from it, thinks here I assumed ‘sinking your teeth’ into something was just a figure of speech, and slots it into Cere’s spare datapad.  It’s an instruction manual for the operation and maintenance of a Rakhmann concussion-miner, which appears to have been translated through five different languages before landing on something distantly resembling Basic.  No wonder someone tried to take a bite out of it.  The next chip is slightly better, some overwrought Chandrilan novel where everyone is way too aristocratic and concerned with arranged marriages and inheritances.  Cal reads that and wonders what it’d be like to have more money than he’d know what to do with until Greez calls, “Dinner’s up!”

BD-1 comes bounding in as they’re settling down at the table, jumps up on the ledge between the galley and the lounge, and Cal pats him on the head.  The droid doesn’t eat and probably isn’t even finished charging yet, but he usually shows up when they’re all having a meal together.  He likes to be included.

Since Greez has never seen a silence he wasn’t fully prepared to fill, he starts talking as soon as the stew is dished out and the bread is buttered.  “So… we’re really doing Kashyyyk, huh?” he sighs.  “I could still drop us outta hyperspace early, you know.  There are some nice places along this route – Coachelle Prime is pretty cheap outside of festival weeks.”

“It’s Kashyyyk or Dathomir,” Cere says cheerfully.

“I dunno if you guys are paying me enough to take you to Dathomir,” Greez mutters into his bowl.  “That’s where rancors come from.  Closest I wanna get to one of those things is at that crappy circus I went to when I was six, and we were so far up our seats shoulda come with oxygen masks.”  He sighs again.  “Either of you ever been to Kashyyyk?”

Cal shakes his head.  They never got there during the war and he didn’t leave Bracca after crash-landing.  BD mulishly announces he’s been to Kashyyyk, though he knows he’s not included in that ‘either of you’, which probably qualifies as discrimination or something.  He also announces his intention to mess with the lock code for Greez’s cabin.  Cal snickers and crunches into the crispy crust of his bread.

“Once,” Cere says, sounding faintly wistful.  “When I was barely a Padawan myself.  It was just a stop on the way to our actual assignment, but the planet was… extraordinary.  Nothing like it is now, I suspect.”

“Yeah, well, I’m just saying… the Empire’s sent more Wookiees to the spice mines on Kessel than any other species, and Wookiees don’t go down easy, you know?  This isn’t gonna be your little Imperial outpost on Zeffo with just one walker to worry about.  It’s a full-blown war down there.”

Cal and Cere exchange a look.  Do you want to remind him we both spent three years fighting in the Clone Wars, or should I? Cal thinks, then realizes he can spell that out for her, though perhaps in fewer words or it’ll take the entire meal.  He should just start teaching her actual words.  For now, he fingerspells, watching her brows knit as she tries to remember all the letters, including the ones he and Prauf made up off the tops of their heads.  Once she glances at BD-1, but before he can give her a hint, Cal quickly says, “Do not tell her.  I gave her a whole list,” so BD informs Cere he is not allowed to help her cheat.

“Okay, okay, wait…” Putting her spoon down, Cere digs in her pockets, then comes up with the piece of flimsiplast.  The edges are worn soft, the creases thin, as if she’s been folding and unfolding it frequently, actually practicing.

His next mouthful of stew must be a little too hot.  He swallows and it warms his entire body.

“All right, keep going,” Cere says after consulting the flimsi.  Cal finishes the sentence and she smiles, but there’s something deeply sad in it.  “Yes, we did,” she murmurs, absently stirring her stew.  “And if that was your entire apprenticeship… that couldn’t have been easy.”

There are worse things.  Master Tapal dying because Cal wasn’t fast enough.  Cere’s Padawan dying because the Empire caught up to them, Cere herself being captured and tortured.  What’s come afterwards.  “Sometimes it –” Cal catches himself mid-sign and goes back to spelling each word.  “It was hard.  But it was all I knew, and Master Tapal protected me.”  And Jedi and their Padawans had been getting involved in violent conflicts long before the Clone Wars began.  Cal just hadn’t expected it to be… well, his entire apprenticeship.  His very short apprenticeship.

“I can’t imagine him doing anything less,” Cere says.  She sounds – and looks – a million star systems away.  After a second, her eyes refocus and she steers the conversation into marginally less depressing waters.  “I was lucky enough to watch him spar with Master Drallig once – this was long before we’d formally met – and I never forgot it.  I hadn’t known too many Jedi to wield double-bladed lightsabers and Master Drallig was… Master Drallig.  It was a sight to behold.”

Stars, he misses watching the older Jedi duel in the training halls, awed, wondering how they managed to make it look so effortless when Cal was still occasionally shocking himself with his own training ‘saber.  “For a while I wished I’d built a double-bladed lightsaber because of him,” he says, letting BD translate so he can finish his stew before it’s cold.  “The important question is, who won?”

“Oh, Master Drallig,” she says, as if it was a foregone conclusion.  Which it kind of was.  “But Tapal gave him some trouble.”

“Just some?”

“A moderate amount of trouble.  If it’d been a real fight, Tapal wouldn’t have lasted three minutes, but they had an audience – quite a few younglings and Padawans, if I recall correctly, so they both played it up a little.”  She grins.  “We all did.  Nothing else was that effective at getting the children to practice their forms.”

“I only got to spar with Master Tapal a few times,” Cal says.  “Mostly I was too small.  And when I did, I had my weaknesses thoroughly exposed.”

Laughing, Cere shakes her head.  “I think we’ve all been there.  In the creche, I was one of the best lightsaber combatants among my peers, so I was a bit of a cocky brat in that respect.  Master Cordova claimed he wasn’t much of a fighter and then disarmed me in about five seconds.”

“The first time, Master Tapal let me go on for a while – like, twenty minutes – to get a good idea of where I was in my training.  I don’t think he even broke a sweat.  I was so exhausted afterwards I fell asleep on the training room deck, and one of the –”

“Uh, not to interrupt,” Greez interrupts, “but hey?  Hi.”  He waves a hand.  “Third person at the table here.  I know you didn’t forget about me, I’m sitting right between you two… wanna conduct this conversation in a medium I can understand?”

Cere hikes an eyebrow at him.  “Or you could get on our level.”

Greez huffs.  “Listen, in addition to learning Basic in school, I know four – four – dialects of Lateron, enough Huttese to chat with traders, and a regrettable amount of Umbaran thanks to a… questionable friendship.”  Judging by the flat look Cere shoots Greez, that means something to her.  “I’m not cramming another language I’ll never use otherwise in my poor skull, even for the scraplet.  Just quit third-wheeling the guy who makes your meals, would ya?”

“Greez, the fingerspelling isn’t exactly complicated.  I’ll even lend you my cheat sheet if you ask nicely.”

“Wouldn’t be necessary if the kid talked,” Greez mumbles, and that should be too familiar a sentiment to sting, but Cal had stupidly started thinking he and Greez were getting along.  In lieu of telling him to fuck off (because that suggestion would need to detour through Cere and Cal’s not sure she’d say it, and also Greez looks like maybe he didn’t mean to say that), he hunches over his bowl and eats faster.  He tries not to waste food no matter how badly he wants to slink away to the engine room.  And Greez’s food is good, especially compared to whatever uninspired crap Cal could scrounge on Bracca.  He mops up the rest of his stew with a piece of bread, and then he just stares at the soggy crust because that pressure in his chest, the backlog of emotions he’s been ignoring for five years since he never had the time or voice for it, is trying to escape again and suddenly he isn’t sure if he’s more afraid he will scream if he opens his mouth, or he won’t.

“Cal, are you –”

He crams the crust into his mouth to keep it occupied, gets up, hastily clears his place at the table.  Then he slinks away to the engine room with BD on his heels and Cere’s eyes on his back.

Do you actually like it when people talk at you?

How Cal feels about it is irrelevant – it’s a simple fact, and one he learned to cope with a long time ago.  Not many people had the patience to sit there and wait for Prauf to interpret.  Cal’s been talked at (and around, and over) for years and he’s used to it.

BD nudges at Cal’s shin with his head, chirps softly, and jumps up to stand on the workbench.  “Yeah, I’m okay,” Cal says.  “Little annoyed, that’s all.  Not with you.”  He would like it if Greez would stop bringing the whole topic up, though.  Cal doesn’t talk anymore and that’s a simple fact too. 

Scrub brush in one hand and metal cleaner in the other, he takes out his frustration on the stuff in his ‘keep’ crate until everything is shining and the chemical fumes are making his eyes burn.  By then, the frustration has drained away, leaving him tired and feeling about as guilty as Greez had looked back there.  He is lying to Greez and Cere about not being able to talk.  If he wanted to, he could, and it’d be much less of an inconvenience to them – no more learning his makeshift sign language or waiting for him to write or type everything or needing to know Binary to understand a simple comm message.  It would also launch him out of his comfort zone at hyperspace speeds with no chance of ever going back, because once they know, it’s over.  He wouldn’t be silent anymore.  He wouldn’t be safe.

Cal feels Cere approaching before she taps on the doorframe.  Without turning around, he irritably says, “If you’re here to ask if I’m all right, the answer’s yes,” which BD translates in an obnoxiously cheerful burble.  Cal rolls his eyes at him.  He can communicate tone pretty well through sign language (at least one argument with Prauf ended when Cal accidentally smashed a hand into a wall or the nearest piece of furniture), but BD seems determined to ignore it and do what he wants.

“Well, mostly I’m here to ask if you want to just hang onto this datapad before it becomes the next victim of Greez’s cleaning spree,” Cere says, waving it at him when he peers over his shoulder.

“It’s yours.”

“It’s my spare.  Or –” she frowns at it for a second, “this might be the original and the one I’m using now is the spare.  It doesn’t really matter.  You use it a lot more than I do.”

She doesn’t say because you won’t talk and therefore have to write down half of what you want to say, which takes forever, by the way – he doubts she’s even thinking it – but he’s thinking it and it’s not doing anything for his sunken mood.  He shrugs.  BD says yes.  “Whose side are you on?” Cal asks him as Cere places the datapad on his cot.

If Cal’s not going to use the datapad, BD says, he will.  He could access the Holonet and meet hot synthetic singles in his area.

“You could what,” Cal says.

BD assumes that’s a reference to something he’s not familiar with, since Greez had laughed quite a bit when he said it three standard rotations ago, so he intends to research it.  Cal starts composing Greez’s eulogy.  Cere, rubbing the bridge of her nose like that’ll hide her smile, says, “You sure you’re all right?”

Cal nods.  “I’m not mad.”

That must be the wrong answer – her brow furrows and she looks from BD to Cal.  “I didn’t think you were angry,” she says.  “You looked hurt.”

He wasn’t hurt, either.  Just overreacting to a dumb comment he’s heard a few million times.  He cannot expect everyone else to keep up with him, after all – it’s nice that Cere’s trying, but she’s sort of the exception to the rule, like Tabbers, who’d been sharing the flat with Prauf at the time Cal moved in.  And Cal didn’t even know he was paying real close attention to everything Prauf translated until the day someone whistled and Cal glanced over at the next walker, where Tabbers fumbled through an incredibly rude message about a supervisor they both hated.  He has Tabbers to thank for most of his profane signs, actually.

Scowling at the scrub brush isn’t convincing Cere he’s fine and should be left alone to sulk in peace.  She perches on the edge of his cot like she’s settling in for the long haul and says, “Greez is stress-cleaning now because he thinks he said something stupid and upset you.”

“I’m not upset!  I don’t care if he –” Cal stops, drops his hands to his sides.  BD watches him with his head tilted and quietly asks if he wants that translated.  Cal shakes his head, drags his fingers through his hair, tries to get his thoughts in order.  “I’m not upset,” he repeats, more calmly.  “It’s nothing I haven’t heard before.  I just get tired of hearing it.”

“Maybe you should tell him that.”

That’d feel like reinforcing a lie.  Cal chose this.  Does he really have any right to whine about the consequences?

“Look, do you want to know what I think?” Cere asks.  Cal doesn’t respond, figuring she’ll tell him anyway, and she doesn’t disappoint.  “I think the two of you need to have an actual conversation.  One where you aren’t in the middle of something so you can answer him, you put in the effort to answer, and he expects you to answer him and doesn’t complain about how long it takes.  Yes, I’m going to have this talk with him too,” she adds flatly at Cal’s sideways glance.  “Every time you two interact, one or both of you winds up moping afterwards and it’s getting on my nerves.”

“Yeah, well, most of the time I feel like he barely tolerates me,” Cal says.  BD, who’s apparently in a sensitive mood tonight, hesitates again, but Cal nods and he translates.  It’s already out there.  Might as well.

Cere contemplates this for a moment.  “He did get in a snit about that sandwich he made you on Bogano that you squished, didn’t he.”

“That wasn’t even my fault!  I fell in a sinkhole.  And I would’ve eaten it anyway, but I think he threw it out.”

“Right,” she says.  “And then, after we landed on Zeffo…”

Ah, dammit, he thinks.  How does she expect him to mope when he can’t be an unreasonable angsty teenager about everything?  “He made me take two.”  And ordered Cal to keep them in separate pockets so maybe this time one would survive.  Cal had eaten both of them tucked into a niche on the side of the mountain, watching the wind play with a broken turbine.  They were tasty.  “Okay, I get it.”

Smiling slightly, Cere stands up.  “I know sometimes he’s insensitive and he rarely thinks before he speaks, but he means well.  Try to give him a chance one of these days before you both drive me insane.” 

On that note, she walks out of the engine room, leaving Cal alone to sulk in peace.  Except he doesn’t feel like sulking anymore, which was presumably her intention all along.  “You going to finish charging?” he asks BD.

Yes, BD says, and Cal should do the same before they get to Kashyyyk.

“I know, I know…” So he flops onto the cot, drags the blanket up to his chest, picks up the datapad, and accesses the book chip again.  If nothing else, reading about Pona’s dire romantic straits (does Chandrilian nobility really consider someone an ancient, withered crone at age twenty?) should put him right to sleep.  He can figure out how to talk to Greez another time.

Do you actually like it when people talk at you?

No.  He doesn’t, really.  But it’s safer this way.

Chapter Text

As a little munchkin with no piloting license, a toy ship his uncle banged together from metal scraps, and big dreams, Greez had been scared of the dark.  He’d come up with outlandish excuses to stay out in the lounge of his family’s tiny apartment for just one more drink of water, then howled like a jilted Kowakian monkey-lizard when he was ordered to bed.  It was pitch-black in there and the monsters would get him and he’d die.  In hindsight, the room he’d spent several years sharing with one cousin or another had been well-lit by the lights of the billboard right next to the apartment complex, but Greez was small and irrational.  So his father, a paranoid anti-government conspiracy theory sort who demanded his four-year-old son be tough, actually tried acting like a decent parent for a change and got Greez a nightlight.

It wasn’t anything special, just a blue glass tube with a spinning light inside it.  Greez had loved it almost as much as he loved that metal-scrap starship Uncle Raz made him.  It looked like space.  He’d seen holovids, he knew how pretty hyperspace was even though he’d never left Lateron.  For months, whenever he played ‘pilot’, he’d jet off into hyperspace by turning the light on and planting himself in front of it, steering his imaginary ship, pretending he was escaping pirates or hijackers.  And as things around his place got worse and worse and it seemed like the screaming would never end, he’d pretend he was escaping his home, too.

He isn’t afraid of the dark anymore, but Greez still finds staring into the churning blue void of hyperspace soothing.  Actually, he thinks there aren’t too many things in the galaxy better than leaning back in the pilot’s chair of his very own starship, turning out all the other lights, and watching the glow with a full stomach and the soft purr of the thrusters luring him into a doze.  Four-year-old Greez might have side-eyed the life he’d eventually live (especially the gambling, because he’d been a sanctimonious moppet who listened to his mother when she warned him about ending up like his dad), but he would’ve died over the Mantis.  Wondering if it’s weird to feel smug about impressing his toddler-self, Greez slouches a bit further in the seat, folding his arms over his chest and yawning.

Oh boy, Zeffo…  He’s not concerned about infiltrating the planet again, although the landing gear might thank him if he can take the ship in a hair more gently this time.  Cere’s technical brilliance had gotten them through the Imperial blockade around Kashyyyk without a whisper of trouble, so even if Zeffo is full of Imps trying to kickstart this Project Auger of theirs, he’s sure they can slip in unnoticed.  He just hopes they don’t get menaced by any more AT-STs and the Mantis’s guns don’t decide to overheat after one karking shot this time.  Those blithering idiots in the walker probably assumed Greez was a kindred spirit who never maintained his ship’s weaponry.  Good thing they hadn’t seen the kid with the lightsaber coming.

He should go get some proper sleep in an actual bed.  Snoozing in the pilot’s seat isn’t good for his neck.  Few more minutes, he tells himself, letting his eyelids fall halfway so he can hardly see anything but the bright blue blur.  Some small part of him wishes he still had that nightlight.  Would’ve looked nice on the credit-sized desk in his cabin.  But that’d been one of the many casualties of his father’s rage…

A clunk from somewhere behind him interrupts his pleasant stupor.  Greez opens his eyes fully, hearing footsteps – both normal-person footsteps and the metallic tap tap tap of a certain droid approaching – and he spins the seat around.  BD bounces into the cockpit and up onto the controls, as usual.  Cal, much more subdued, comes in holding his datapad and a bottle of water, drops heavily into his own seat, and twists the top of the bottle off.

Toddler-Greez would also side-eye this scrawny Human.  Middle-aged Greez agrees with him, for once, because the guy’s white as a ghost and looks like he’s going to fall over if someone pokes him too hard.  “You okay?” he asks.  “You’re real pale… kid, I still don’t understand you,” he adds when Cal, halfway through trying to drain the entire bottle in one long draught, signs something at him.  Cal huffs through his nose and comes up for air, stuffing the bottle between his hip and the armrest (Greez will space anyone who gets liquids on the ship controls, so he approves), and then writes something on the datapad and turns it around.

I spent the last twenty minutes throwing up.

“Oh,” Greez says nervously.  He’d noticed Cal went to bed awfully early, but assumed he just wanted to grab some sleep before gleefully running headlong into whatever awaits them on Zeffo.  “That’s… not good.”  Beautiful as she is, the Mantis is a small ship, and instituting quarantine procedures when they all live out of each other’s back pockets is damn near impossible.  If they’re not careful, germs get passed around like party favors.  Greez can’t help but recall that stomach virus he and Cere both contracted a couple months back – thank the stars they’d been planetside at the time and there was a cheap hotel near the spaceport, because one refresher would not have cut it.  He shudders.  Cal had better keep it to himself, or else Greez is going to regret not spending the money to have a discreet vac-tube tucked away somewhere on the lower level.  Not that he had the money.  After that bug, though, Cere probably would’ve contributed to the cause… he ought to bring it up to her later.

Cal holds up a finger, keeps writing.  What did you call that stuff we had for dinner?

“Darim Shorek,” Greez says.  “Direct Basic translation would be ‘Summer Treasure’, although the ‘treasure’ bit is really, really sarcastic.  It’s a treasure you don’t want.  Friend of mine translated it as ‘Fucking Pukkas’… the pukka fish is invasive, see, got spread all over the karking planet, and as soon as it gets warm and they come outta hiding, they start eating everything else that lives in the freshwater.  Only way to control the population is to eat them.  So every Latero kid grows up knowing they’re gonna be having that stuff for dinner the entire summer and dreading it.  Once I was away from home for a while, though, I started to miss it… canned pukka fishcakes ain’t quite the same, but they’re close enough.”

I don’t think we got along.  Cal pushes his sweaty hair off his face.  But I feel a little better now, so that’s probably all it was.

If he’s going to keep shotgunning the entire bottle of water like that, he’d better be right.  BD-1 beebles and warbles something, which Cal responds to in his usual unintelligible fashion.  “Oh,” Greez says again.  “Guess I’ll take that one off the list, then.  Lotta traditional Lateron ingredients in that dish, stuff I bet you haven’t had before; one of those probably got you.”  The rakso, maybe?  Coulda been the oblok leaves… or just the cheap fishcakes.  Too bad.  He likes sharing this part of his culture with them, and he rarely gets to do that because finding those Lateron ingredients anywhere besides his home planet practically requires a blood sacrifice.  He doesn’t want to keep making the kid sick, though, so he’ll suck it up.

They sit there quietly for a few minutes after that, watching hyperspace warp around them.  Greez wracks his sleepy brain for a good topic of conversation and comes up empty.  Cere’s been pushing him to talk to Cal rather than at him, and this is the first chance he’s gotten.  And maybe he doesn’t think he’d fuss over it quite so much if it were Cal and Cere not getting along, but she's got a point about them both being dumb.  Greez’s mouth likes to rocket ahead of his brain and Cal’s a bit touchy.

A tap on his armrest draws his attention, and he glances over to see Cal’s holding up the datapad again.  There were a couple of Lateros working on Bracca.

Those poor, poor suckers.  “Huh,” Greez says.  “Remember any names?  Coulda been somebody I knew once.”

I only worked with one of them for a little while, and he called himself ‘Stumpy’, which I don’t think was his real name.

“Did he have… stumps?”

As far as I know, he still had all his limbs.  If he was missing anything else, I wasn’t going to ask about it.  Greez snorts.  Cal starts writing again.  He said his people made pretty good scrappers.  Small enough to get into tight spaces but strong enough to do the job.  He pauses, considers what he just wrote, and adds, Well, all the tight spaces they could fit their heads through.

“Ah, you two-armed, tiny-headed brats are all the same,” Greez huffs, shaking his apparently enormous head.  Cal gives him a wan grin and tips his own back against the headrest.  “You know why you don’t see many Lateros with skull fractures?  It’s ‘cause our skulls are twice as thick as those flimsiplast-thin Human things!”

Seems like that’d make brain surgery difficult.

“Not for droids… that isn’t an invitation, pal,” Greez adds, and jabs a finger at BD, who gives a very innocent-sounding chirp.

Cal regards BD curiously for a moment, then signs something, to which BD responds with an enthusiasm that makes Greez worry he may wake up minus a lung.  Noticing Greez’s unease, Cal writes, I just wanted to know if he could do surgery, brain or otherwise.  Answer’s no.  He doesn’t have that kind of equipment built in and not enough knowledge to wing it.

And what a relief that is.  “Wait, could you like, use your lightsaber for surgery?  I mean, it’d cut and cauterize at the same time, right?”  Cal shrugs, nods.  “Listen, I’m not saying we should start an organ-harvesting operation if we ever need money, I’m just putting it out there.”

Either Cal really disapproves of the idea or he just needs to throw up again, because he grimaces, shoves the bottle and datapad onto the console, and is out of the chair and rushing off with a hand over his mouth before Greez can remind him not to put fluids anywhere near the controls.  Considering the alternative, though… Greez slides down from his seat, gathers up the stuff Cal left behind, says, “Come on, you,” to the droid, and heads to the galley.  BD-1 pitter-patters behind him.  “Refresh my memory, is it mallow root that’s good for Humans when they’re nauseous?  Because it’s just sweet to my kind, but I think I read something like that somewhere.  Uh… one tap for yes, two for no.”

BD thumps a foot against the deck once.  “Great.”  Greez turns the lights on, fills the kettle with enough water for two cups, and starts the heat, because if he’s going to be up a while longer, he’s making himself some nice mallow root tea too.  “Hey, hey!  No droids on the counter!”  He tries to shoo BD off, but the droid evades his hands and keeps looking at one of the compartments, twittering away.  “Sorry, little guy, you’re even more incomprehensible to me than Cal is.  Sometimes I can kinda get the gist of what he’s saying, but you just sound like a malfunctioning nav computer.  And you’re in the way.”  BD does helpfully move aside then.  Apparently all he wanted was for Greez to open the compartment and take out some mugs.  “What, do you think I’ve forgotten how to make tea or something?” Greez mutters, sifting powdered mallow root into the bottom of each cup.  “Or… were you just making sure I used Cal’s mug?  It is kinda his now, of course I was gonna use it.  Seriously, get down.  I don’t let anyone sit on the counters.”

BD seizes this opportunity to make a flying leap from countertop to table via the airspace above Greez’s head.  For a teeny thing, he has some moves on him… though Greez supposes one would have to if they want to keep up with Cal.  Kid likes to flaunt his disregard for the laws of physics a lot.  “Thank you.”

Well.  Vomit aside, this conversation is going pretty good so far.  As long as he doesn’t say anything stupid, they should be okay, and then next time Greez inevitably says something stupid, maybe he’ll have enough goodwill saved up for Cal to just let it go instead of storming away.  Teenagers and their kriffing attitudes… either Cere’s estimate is off by a few years or all the shit he’s been through has stunted Cal somewhat, because when he isn’t trying the ‘I am a Jedi and very wise and mature and emotionally stable’ thing on for size, he acts like a teenager.

The kettle beeps and Greez fills both mugs with steaming water, stirs them until the mallow root powder dissolves.  A splash of milk turns the tea an unappetizing muddy-blue color.  He contemplates the sugar – Cal usually adds quite a bit to his caf – but decides to play it safe and just gives the guy half a spoonful in case it’ll aggravate his stomach.  Mallow root’s naturally sweet anyway.

After a couple more minutes crawl by and the tea starts to cool and Cal doesn’t put in an appearance, Greez says to BD, “Maybe we should go check on him, huh?” and quietly creeps down the corridor.  The ‘fresher door is closed.  Greez hesitates, because Cere’s asleep one room over and he doesn’t want to wake her, but finally he knocks softly and leans close to the door.  “Hey, kid?  Make some noise if you’re still alive in there.”

There are about ten unsettling seconds of silence, followed by water running.  Then the door slides open so abruptly it catches Greez off guard and he jumps.  BD gives a trill that sounds like mocking laughter.  “Ah, shut up,” Greez mumbles.  “Okay, still alive, that’s good.”

Cal makes a face – not at Greez in particular, just a general ughhhh throwing up is the worst sort of face, and that’s a sentiment Greez can wholeheartedly get behind.  “Come on,” he says, beckoning Cal to follow, “I’ve got something for you.  Just don’t chug it like a guy trying to impress his buddies at the cantina… that can’t be helping.”

Once Cal is slumped in his seat at the galley table, looking pretty wiped out, Greez sets his mug in front of him.  “Take it slow this time.”  He sits in his usual chair and takes a swig of his tea, which is hot and sweet and slightly milky, just the way he likes it.  Cal frowns into the cup before tentatively sipping it.  “Should help your stomach.  Unless the droid and me had some kinda breakdown in communication and it makes you worse, which is possible.  Then it’s his fault.”

BD grumbles from his perch on the corner of the table.  Cal flicks a tired smile at the droid, reaches for the datapad.  Thanks.

“No problem,” Greez says.  “He was real insistent I use the right cup… at least, I think that’s what he was trying to tell me.”  He glances at the mug with its pretty sunset motif and asks, “What did you see when you touched it?”

Cal traces his finger around the rim of the cup, looking thoughtful, then writes, The woman who painted the mugs liked doing this design, that’s all.  She was happy and it felt nice.

There is something nice in the simplicity of that, even if Greez doesn’t have crazy Jedi powers and can’t access the emotions involved for himself.  The galaxy would be a better place if more people got to do jobs they enjoyed.  And those jobs didn’t include oppressing three-quarters of the galaxy.  He hopes the Emperor chokes on a warra nut.  “Huh.  Good for her.  You know, I can’t really figure out if that psychometry thing of yours is cool or not… I mean, how often do you see bad stuff instead?”

It was kind of a rhetorical question, but Cal answers anyway.  All the time.  I can’t really control it.  The first night I was here, I picked up a multitool from the workbench and saw one of your memories.

And now Greez is leaning towards the not cool side.  “…which one?”

He has to sit there and stew in nervous anticipation for a while, sucking down tea to occupy himself, while Cal slowly writes out his reply.  Greez almost tells him to just type it, because that’d be a little faster, but bites his tongue.  He doesn’t want to ruin the moment.  For the first time since they met, he actually feels like he and the kid are forging some kind of real connection.

Finally, Cal slides the datapad over and picks up his mug.  I don’t remember all the details anymore, but I think you were at whatever school taught you how to fly, and you were annoyed about having to clean up a ship that’d gotten coated in mud.  A girl – maybe named Fay? – came and joined you and you guys started talking about what you were going to do after you graduated.  You were jealous of the job she’d gotten, but you got over it, and she wasn’t going to do it anyway… I can’t remember much else.  Except you figured you’d be really rich in the future.  And my mouth hurt afterwards because you dropped the multitool on yours.

“Oh, Faina!” Greez exclaims, slapping a hand on the table.  Shaking his head, he scratches his ear and says, “Spirits, I haven’t thought about her in ages.  Yeah, I remember that night.  She coulda worked for the Air Guard, but she had to go home and look after her brother and sisters instead…”

What happened to her?

“For a while she was working for a transport company in her hometown.  Total waste of her talent, but it wasn’t a bad job if you could get it – steady income and all – and it kept her close to home so she could raise her sibs.  Dunno anything else; we lost touch after a couple years and I haven’t heard from her since.”  He’s not even sure she’s still alive.  The Empire hit Baerk hard when they rolled in – Lateron was already a powderkeg of angry individualists and volatile paramilitary organizations (like the ones half of Greez’s family had belonged to), but Baerk was particularly well-known for that kind of thing and the Imperials weren’t going to stand for it.  They’d made a solid example of the place.

Cal nods, gazing down at the datapad, and then a slight smile tugs at his mouth.  You were hopelessly in love with her.

Greez snorts into his tea.  “Kid, that doesn’t even begin to cover it.  I was over the moon, outta my mind, writing ‘Mr. Greez Pannifer’ on every – okay, no, I didn’t do that.  That woulda been weird.  But yeah, I was stupid in love with her.”  He sighs.  “Maybe not so much by that point.  We – wait, wait, I dunno if I should tell you the sordid details.  How old are you, again?”

Rolling his eyes, Cal writes, 17.  And I don’t want the sordid details, thanks.

So the teenage attitude’s developmentally appropriate, then.  Cere was off by a few years.  Greez is going to be smug about knowing something she doesn’t (unless she does and just didn’t bother enlightening him) for a bit.  “Fine, I’ll keep it family-friendly.  Let’s say we had a… no-strings-attached, friends-with-benefits kind of arrangement.  And yeah, I loved her, and I’m pretty sure she felt the same way about me.  I could never picture it as a long-term thing, though, you know what I mean?  Kinda figured we were headed in different directions well before either of us had post-graduation plans.  By the time you saw –” he waves a hand towards the engine room, “that, we were back to friends-without-benefits.  I missed it sometimes, even thought about trying to rekindle it more than once, but I knew I had to let her go.  Can’t cling to somebody forever, right?”

Cal taps the stylus against his mouth a couple times, then writes, That’s a rather Jedi-like way of looking at it.

“What can I say?  I’m full of surprises.”  Cere thinks he doesn’t know love, Cal thinks he doesn’t know how to treat a woman… Greez would be insulted if proving them wrong wasn’t so satisfying.  “How’s the tea?”

It’s really good.

“Okay, so that’s something you like, at least.”  It’s so hard to affectionately (or apologetically) cook someone’s favorite foods when they won’t tell him what those are.  If Greez could’ve done that instead, they probably wouldn’t have needed this conversation.

Cal chews on his lower lip as Greez finishes off his tea.  Look, when you asked me what I like and I didn’t answer, I wasn’t being stubborn or anything.  I actually don’t know.

“What, at all?” Greez asks incredulously.  Cal nods.  “How do you get to be seventeen and not know?  I realize Bracca sucked, but I always assumed they’d have pretty good food at that fancy Temple of yours.”

They probably did.  But I was the pickiest eater in the Core.  I barely need more than one hand to count the number of foods I’d eat when I was a kid.  I think it was something like 6.  While Greez is busy being horrified, Cal adds, Luckily, one of them was a kind of ration bar, so I didn’t die of malnutrition.  I must’ve kept the artificial jitfruit flavoring industry in business.

“My great-grandmother would’ve hated you,” Greez moans.  Cal shoots him a sheepish grin.  “I ate what I was given or I didn’t eat at all.  Only stuff I got away with avoiding was scarlet beans – couldn’t stand the vile things no matter how many times I tried ‘em – and her eopie loaf, ‘cause the smell of it cooking would make me retch.”  Good grief.  Six foods?  Greez is almost in physical pain just from the concept.  “So… what changed?”

I moved to Bracca.  Cal pauses, presumably contemplating that understated choice of words.  Food options were limited and eventually I got hungry enough to suck it up.  And Prauf was feeding me for a while without asking for anything in exchange, so I felt really bad about refusing.  You’re right, though, the food there was crap.  I was so happy when I could afford to eat lentils and I don’t even know if I liked them.

Greez opens his mouth, but before he can respond, Cal snatches the datapad back and continues writing.  I did like the lentil stew you made.  And that spicy soup with the noodles and nuna pieces.  Actually, all your food is good.

That seals it.  Greez has to keep making proper meals as often as he possibly can, just so he can introduce this kid to some more real food.  No more Darim Shorek, though.  “Ah, thanks,” he says, rubbing the back of his head, “I try.”

After that, they sit there for five minutes or so without a word.  At least, Cal doesn’t say a word to Greez; he gets very involved in a conversation with BD-1, however, and Greez is happy to leave them to it.  He’s feeling pretty content in general now.  Nothing gets a person into his good books like telling him they enjoy his cooking, and the kid’s not so bad when you get to know him, which means Cere was right.  Again.  And the thing is, the longer he watches Cal sign ridiculously fast to the droid like it’s the only method of communication he’s ever known, the more Greez thinks, shit, I’m an idiot.

He knows Cal can talk.  Greez’s spent the past couple weeks believing, whatever Cal’s actual deal is, he should be able to talk.  Along those same lines, Greez should be able to walk into a sabacc hall, play a few low-stakes rounds with whatever change he’s got in his pockets, and walk out a mere thirty credits lighter, pleased with some good clean fun and secure in the knowledge he still has more than enough money to get by.  But he can’t.  He’s addicted to the thrill, the possibility of winning big and solving all his problems with one elusive perfect hand.  He walks into a sabacc hall and all his restraint goes straight out the window.  That’s led him to squandering what little his great-grandmother could leave him, to borrowing money from the wrong people, to getting in deep with the Haxion Brood.  Cere selling off her kyber crystal had probably saved Greez’s life.  It seems enough of that haul went to Sorc Tormo to mollify him, even though Greez still owes the guy – it’s been months since they were last targeted by a bounty hunter or mercenary moonlighting as a Brood debt collector.

Maybe it’s something like that.  Just a funny blip in the brain chemistry.  Or not, and it doesn’t matter anyway.  Time for ol’ Greezy to get over himself.

Cal eventually remembers they have an audience and looks slightly embarrassed.  Sorry.  I don’t mean to keep excluding you.

“Kid,” Greez sighs, “I’m pretty sure I should be the one apologizing to you.  I was kind of a pain in the ass, wasn’t I?”  Cal does not argue with this.  “Like, I’m not gonna lie, it’s a little annoying sometimes when you don’t talk, but that’s my problem, not yours.  As long as you and Cere aren’t clearly making fun of me right in front of my face – don’t think I won’t know – I’ll shut up.”

So you won’t know if BD and I do it?

“Nah, probably not.”

That gets a smile out of the guy.  Well, I didn’t really help my own case.  I’m used to being ignored.  I guess I figured you would always just talk at me and I didn’t bother trying.

“Maybe we both oughtta try harder,” Greez says, propping up his chin in his hand.  “I mean, I need someone to make fun of Cere right in front of her face with me.  Then she might stop being all correct about everything.”

Cal snickers, then yawns so wide Greez can see halfway down his esophagus.  “And we both oughtta go to bed first,” Greez concludes.  “You want a bucket or something to take with you just in case?”

No, I think I’m okay now.

“Suit yourself.  Just do not puke on the deck in there.  You hit the grates and it’ll be like the solid-liquid waste separation at a water treatment plant.”

Cal’s expression twists into utter revulsion.  BD makes a noise even Greez can tell is disgusted.  He sighs.  “Yeah, I dunno what I was thinking with that metaphor.  Uck.”  Shaking his head, Cal gets up from the table; Greez grabs the mugs to wash them quick and says, “Hey,” before Cal can leave.  “You’re all right, kid.”

One side of Cal’s mouth curves like he’s too tired for a full-blown smile.  He sweeps two fingers along his cheekbone, points them at Greez – Greez has been paying attention long enough to be pretty sure that one means thanks – then heads off into the corridor with BD.

And then he comes back, writing something on the datapad and flipping it around for Greez to read.  HOW do you close the engine room door from the inside??

Chuckling, Greez says, “There’s a control panel next to the cot – it’d be right behind your head if you’re lying down, on the other side of the railing.  Blinking white button.  Can’t lock it from in there, but that’ll open and close it.”  Cal stares at him.  “Not where I woulda put it, but I didn’t get any input in the design process.”

Cal shakes his head again.  I thought that might be it.  Didn’t want to go around pressing buttons unless I knew what they did.

“And that’s why I haven’t thrown you off my ship yet,” Greez says cheerfully.  “Night.”  Cal goes to bed for real now and Greez finishes cleaning up from their midnight teatime.  Once the mugs are put away and the kettle’s dry, he turns out the galley light, goes up to the cockpit to check the Mantis’s monitors, and spends one last minute gazing out through the viewport as they continue racing through hyperspace.

Might as well meet the kid where he’s at and not where Greez wishes he was.  He already knows six languages – seven, if he counts all the Umbaran profanity and mocking terms of endearment.  How hard can one more be?

Chapter Text

Greez’s timing sucks.

Cal had been asleep, finally, after spending three solid hours squirming around on his narrow bunk and trying to find a position that didn’t ache.  Getting caught in an electro-net was hell on the muscles.  Then he was almost knocked senseless by that bounty hunter with the karking flamethrower – he’s fortunate he doesn’t have a concussion – and then the guy must’ve drugged him to keep him from causing any trouble while he was transported to Ordo Eris and tossed in a prison he was meant to break out of.  And then he was forced to play gladiator while the galaxy’s most obnoxious commentator hammed it up in the background. 

It was a weird afternoon.  Not the worst one Cal’s ever had by far, but coming on the heels of what he’d learned from the Second Sister – Trilla – it’d just made him feel even more off-kilter.  And then, once he fell asleep and was blissfully incapable of thinking about whatever the hell was going on in his life, Greez woke him up just to soothe his guilty conscience.

Fine, maybe that’s not the most charitable way of looking at it.  It is nice he apologized for not mentioning his gambling debts have an entire criminal syndicate out for his blood and they’ve no qualms about going after his crewmates in retaliation.  Cal was electrocuted, hit in the head, sedated, separated from his best friend, and kicked around in an arena; BD-1 was electrocuted, shut down, separated from Cal, and slapped with a restraining bolt, so it’s not like he was spared.  Real kind of the Brood not to go after Greez personally – apparently torturing his friends instead is much more effective!

Had it happened some other time, Cal might’ve brushed the whole thing off.  He may have even looked on the bright side.  Poor Sorc Tormo went to all that trouble to transport Cal to his ugly little space station.  The guy was so confident Cal would be ripped to shreds in the gladiator pit, he’d broadcast it on some private Haxion Brood frequency so all the sadists who bankrolled his operation and didn’t make it to this special event in person could still enjoy the spectacle… and it didn’t go quite the way he’d planned.  He probably knew – even anticipated – Greez had access to that frequency.  He probably didn’t know Greez would care enough to swoop in and rescue Cal, causing a teensy bit of large-scale property damage in the process.  So yes, Cal’s a little annoyed yet, but Greez pretty much broke even there.  And now that he’s slightly more awake, he can shake off the cynicism long enough to be happy Greez apologized.

If only Cere would do the same.  Unlike Greez, who just withheld some arguably relevant information, she flat-out lied directly to his face, and if he hadn’t pushed, she probably would’ve kept lying.  Maybe there’s no good time to say hey, when I said my Padawan died, I actually meant I was tortured by the Empire until I gave her up, and then they tortured her into becoming the Inquisitor who killed Prauf and would really enjoy doing the same to you, but he still wishes she’d said it.  Seems like something he should’ve known before he decided to trust her.

Sighing, Cal rolls onto his stomach and presses his face into the pillow.  They’ve agreed not to talk about it for now, because if they tried, Cal doubts he could be calm and rational just yet.  He’d sat quietly and given terse answers to her questions as she quickly assessed whether or not he had a concussion, ate something, washed up, and went to bed.  He isn’t sure if Cere and Greez did the same and he doesn’t care.  He’s not going to think about them.  Or about Trilla.

What Jedi gave their life so that you might live?

Cal’s never been tortured before.  Came close a few times, once landed on the wrong side of an interrogation chair with a cocktail of drugs and terror scorching through his veins, but he has no idea what Cere actually went through.  Still, he’s only ever been a Padawan, so it’s easier to put himself in Trilla’s shoes, think how could you give her up so easily?  They cared more about Cordova – stars, he can’t even be sure that’s true anymore – and you didn’t tell them about him or else that Vault would be rubble.  You should’ve kept your mouth shut.  I’ve been doing it for years. 

Sorry, Greez, you can stick your nose in where it doesn’t belong all you’d like, but I’m gonna continue to be angry for the foreseeable future.

Ugh.  He hates those thoughts.  He hates being angry – not a good look on a Jedi – but beneath the anger is nothing but hurt and betrayal and disappointment, and Cal’s not ready to deal with those yet, so he sinks his teeth into the anger and locks his jaw.

That’s not working out for him either, though (or helping him sleep), because he is a Jedi and spends too much time examining and understanding his emotions.  The bulk of his resentment is aimed towards Cere, yes, and he’s still slightly irritated with Greez… and the rest lands squarely across his own shoulders.  Cal’s been doing good lately – he’s recovering the abilities he had as a child and lost during the Purge, he’s feeling more and more like a Jedi again, he’s making a difference.  At this very moment they’re on their way back to Kashyyyk so he can meet Tarfful and get another inch closer to finding an Astrium and retrieving Master Cordova’s holocron.  Hiccups aside, this is the best condition he’s been in since he was twelve, and he’s accomplished everything without ever speaking.

For the first time in five years, that statement isn’t comforting.

He almost never revisits his decision to stop talking.  In order to do that, he has to go back to the Purge, to Master Tapal’s death (Cal’s fault, he knows, even if he doesn’t recall the details).  To joining the Scrapper Guild.  To Prauf, who Cal refuses to forget because that’s what the Empire would’ve wanted, but still can’t think about for long.  He made a choice and that kept him safe.  Nobody had the slightest reason to suspect he was a Jedi until he saved Prauf from falling into the Maw.  He’s gotten by just fine on writing and sign language and BD interpreting into Binary, even if it’s a hassle sometimes.  It’s better this way.

So why now is he lying here, scowling at the bulkhead, and getting frustrated with himself?  It was pretty funny when BD began translating the obscene gestures Cal made in response to Trilla’s repeated intrusions in their comm line.  She’d said something about perfecting every skill Cere has, and she’s right – Cere can go off on tangents when you get her started about Quenk jazz or High-Republic-era Jedi artifacts, sure, but Trilla is fantastic at never shutting the hell up.  If Cal was that insufferable as a chatterbox apprentice, no wonder the clone troopers wanted to kill him.  But he’d dangled by his fingertips from the sarcophagus in Eilram’s tomb, unable to sign any responses for BD to throw back at the Second Sister when she wouldn’t quit taunting him in that grating drawl of hers, and thought, I wish I could talk so I could tell her to get welded.

He could have.  He can.  He just doesn’t.  I don’t want to… I think.  I don’t know anymore.

Perhaps it’d be a good option to keep in his back pocket, for those times when signing or writing is completely impractical.  Not that he ever really intends to talk with Trilla.  She does enough of that for three people.  The thought of speaking to Greez or Cere, after all this time not speaking to them, when he and Greez have reached an understanding and Cere’s trying to learn his language… it makes the nutrient bar in his stomach squirm.  And BD-1’s fine with the signing.

Okay, so it’s kind of a pointless endeavor.  All he’d be doing is making sure his neglected vocal chords still work.  He turns onto his side to face the rest of the engine room, then sits up, pushing away the blanket and rubbing at his eyes.  BD is over by the workbench, motionless while he charges and runs a thorough antiviral sweep to confirm the Haxion Brood didn’t leave any nasty surprises in his system when they attached that restraining bolt.  If he catches wind of an alarm or something else concerning (or the sound of the table being set for dinner, apparently), he’ll ‘wake up’ in an instant; otherwise, he’s basically asleep.  He wouldn’t notice Cal doing anything weird.

Cal reaches over and closes the engine room door.

He chose not to talk.  Should be easy to start again, even if he’s not really starting, just testing it out in case of an emergency.  He kneels on the floor like he’s meditating, rubs his hands over his knees a few times, realizes he’s borrowing Prauf’s nervous habits.  Better Prauf’s than Tabbers’s, though.  Buying cigarras instead of food for about a year wasn’t one of his better ideas.  Swallowing, Cal wets his lips and focuses on the inert form of his friend.  BD won’t know, and even if he does wake, he’ll never breathe a word about this if Cal asks him not to.

It's easy, he reminds himself.  His heart is pounding.  You talked everyone’s ear off when you were a kid.  Nothing bad is gonna happen if you just say hi to BD or whatever.  You’re still safe.

He takes a deep breath, opens his mouth, and all that comes out is a harsh wheeze.  Well, first try, no big deal.  Even in his gifted childhood years, he usually fell on his butt the first time he tried a new lightsaber pattern.  He wipes his sweaty palms on his pants and tries again.  Nothing.

Easy.  Just talk.  Come on.  Realizing he’s breathing way too fast, Cal makes himself slow down, closes his eyes for a second.  It’s ridiculous to be nervous over this thing he’s never thought twice about since he began babbling as an infant.  He tries again, fails again, squashes the prickle of frustration.  Keep failing in the right direction… whichever way that is.

Cal keeps trying, but he can’t.  The words pile up behind the roadblock in his throat, invisible hands tightening around his neck until he has to put all his effort into breathing, and any attempt at speech falls by the wayside.  He’s twelve.  He’s pressed into the corner, one of the chairs at the table in front of him overturned, Prauf barking at Tabbers to turn that kriffing thing off, he’s a kid, he doesn’t need to see it.  Heavy arm draped over his shoulders.  Warm side pressed against his own.  Soft voice telling him it’s all right, nobody gives enough of a crap about Bracca to send in soldiers, it's safe here no matter what’s happening in the Core.  Tabbers grumbling Cal’s going to see plenty of death at the shipbreaking yard once he’s in the Guild, he’ll have a hard time if watching one runaway Jedi get it bothers him, but shutting off the holoscreen anyway.

Prauf had asked Cal if he was okay.  Cal, who’d been silent until then out of sheer shock and misery, tried to reply – he was fine, it’d just startled him – and couldn’t make a single sound.

Cal’s hands sting.  His palms are red and irritated from scraping against the rough material of his pants.  He doubles over until his forehead’s pressed to the metal deck, but it’s too warm from the thrusters to cool him down.  He’s actually sweating.  Almost queasy, as well; he realizes the muscles in his stomach are clenched so tight they hurt and consciously relaxes them, which helps.  All he tried to do was talk.  What is wrong with him?

A few quick taps on the deck herald BD’s approach, and the droid quickly prods Cal’s shoulder with a foot, asking what he’s doing and if he’s hurt.  Cal shakes his head.  I’m okay, he mouths, tries to breathe the words, push them out in a whisper, and his throat closes.  There was something here.  It’s gone now.  He frees an arm from around his stomach, signs, “I’m okay.”

BD still wants to know why he’s hunched over on the floor like this.  Cal sits up, unsticks his sweaty hair from his forehead and sweeps it back.  “No reason.  Did I wake you?”

No, BD says.  He’s completed his charging cycle and there is no sign of malware in his system.

“That’s good,” Cal says, and gives BD a pat before standing shakily and dropping onto his bed, bracing his elbows on his knees, lowering his head into his hands.  The guidance Master Tapal gave him, the scaffolding upon which Cal rebuilt his connection to the Force, feels utterly useless here.  How can he believe what stands in the way becomes the way when there’s nothing in his way?  How can he let go of what he fears to lose when he doesn’t even know what that is?  He’s trying to regain something.  For a second, he wishes he could talk to Cere about this, but he’s too upset with her.

He wants to talk to Prauf.  The Abednedo probably wouldn’t have any relevant advice, but at least they could talk without having to run the conversation through BD-1 or Cere, or wait for Cal to write everything down.  Cal sits there and stares at nothing and wonders when his security blanket became such an inconvenience.  Then his ears abruptly pop – a sure sign they’ve reverted to realspace – and he glances towards the closed door, startled.  Unless he was asleep a lot longer than he realized, it’s much too early for them to have reached Kashyyyk.

What’s wrong?, he writes as soon as he reaches the cockpit.

Greez blinks at the datapad shoved in his face, leans back so he can actually read the words without squinting, and says, “Nothin’, unless you think ‘we won’t make it to Kashyyyk without some more fuel’ is a problem.  Which I guess it is.  But –” he points through the viewport at the space station orbiting a small, sandy-colored planet, “it’s one we can solve real easy.  Just gonna get the Mantis juiced up and we’ll go.”

From a distance, the station is simply a station.  As they get closer, however, it begins to sharpen into a very familiar shape, and Cal stares at it until he feels Cere slip into the cockpit behind him.  Then he writes, Is that a Republic medical station? and holds the datapad up over his shoulder without looking back.

“No,” Cere says after a moment.  “At least, not the kind they used during the war.  Too small.  Might’ve been one of the predecessors to the Haven-class.”

“Probably got decommissioned and converted,” Greez says, spinning the chair around.  “I’ve seen the – kriff, Cere, you look like hell.”

Cal turns then, and Greez is right – Cere’s pale and haggard, her face creased with pain as she sinks into her chair at the comm terminal.  For a split second, he wonders if he did that to her and feels pretty bad about it, but then she says, “This was just the perfect time for the worst headache of my life, apparently.  I’ll live,” and the guilt is swallowed by anger again.

He can sympathize.  Overusing his psychometry results in migraines, and since the definition of ‘overuse’ tends to vary on any given day, he can’t really predict when it’s going to happen.  Inconvenient and excruciating headaches are a fact of life.  But right now he can’t stop thinking about Cere looking him in the eyes and insisting she’ll say anything to jeopardize this mission, doubling down on her lies, and it eats away at him.  Seething over someone else’s failures is simpler than dwelling on his own.  He sits in his seat, watches the station grow larger and blot out the stars as Cere secures them a berth and Greez starts docking procedures.

“Ah, Captain?” Cere says once the Mantis is docked to the station and a long tube is extending towards the starboard hatch.  Cal glances back and sees her remove her headset.  “Nothing too worrying, but you’ll want to know…”  She flips a switch on the terminal.

“– Peth Station,” says a cheerful, automated female voice.  There is a brief silence, then the message repeats.  “Welcome to Aurora-Peth Station.  To make everyone’s experience a pleasant one, we ask you follow these simple rules.  Please refrain from discharging waste tanks or trash within the docking bay.  Please observe all fire safety warnings posted throughout the station.  Please report any suspicious activity to security personnel.  Any structural damage to the station, intentional or otherwise, will result in immediate ejection and potential prosecution under Imperial Statute 409-K0021.  If you would like to request fuel, water, or starship maintenance, our barges will reach your berth in approximately –” a moment’s pause, “seventy-five minutes.  Enjoy your stay, and thank you for choosing Aurora-Peth Station.”

“Seventy-five minutes?” Greez groans, echoing Cal’s thoughts.  The longer they’re stuck here, the worse things could get for the Partisans still on Kashyyyk… but one peek at the fuel gauge tells him Greez is right.  The Mantis is running on fumes.  “Ya think they’d bump us up if I told them we’re on the clock?  Or…”

“Probably not,” Cere says, rubbing the back of her neck with a grimace.  “Looks pretty crowded.  And if they’re the sort of place to abide by Imperial statutes, we shouldn’t do anything… suspicious.”

“I wasn’t planning to bribe them!”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You were clearly thinking it.”

“But I didn’t say anything.”

Having to write or type or give BD permission to translate his words makes it difficult to speak without thinking.  So Cal knows full what he’s doing when he writes, Yeah, it isn’t that hard not to say anything, right? and swivels the chair so she can see.

Cere’s expression flickers and smooths out, carefully, calculatedly blank.  Cal can feel her nauseous guilt, though, and for a second he feels vindicated – he should not be the only person hurting here.  And then it’s gone and he just feels terrible.

“Ooookay,” Greez says slowly, hopping down from his chair.  “You know what?  Changed my mind, I can wait seventy-five minutes, because I think we’ve all been cooped up together a little too long.”  He looks at Cal.  His eyes say you’re being a disrespectful pain in the ass to Cere, of all people?  Walking on thin ice, kid and his smile says you’re lucky I like you and you’re sorta vital to this mission, and the whole effect is surprisingly menacing.  Cal’s impressed.  “Cal?  Get out.”

Glaring at him, Cal starts writing, gets as far as Why do I before he stops.  The idea of going back to the engine room, where he doesn’t have anything to do besides work himself into a panic by trying to speak, is really unappealing.  “Seriously,” Greez continues, “go walk around for an hour, get a drink or something.  Cool off.”  That last one is not a suggestion.  “Cere’s got the murder headache, so she gets to stay here.  Me, I think I’ll take a shower – as long as we’re here, might as well get some more water, so I can have a hot shower for once – and then go wander a bit myself, see what kinda grocery options there are.  Okay?  Okay.”

Cal gets up and leaves without another word.

Outside their docking berth, the station is teeming with people, which explains the seventy-five-minute wait on refueling.  Cal promptly finds himself squashed between a pair of arguing Chagrians, bumps into one’s elaborate sash, and gets stuck on the receiving end of amorous advances from the other until the horde thins and he can escape the echoes.  The Chagrians head one way, shouting at each other, and Cal goes in the opposite direction, shaking phantom tentacles out of his hands.  He hates crowds.  But if he’d stayed on the ship, he probably would’ve said something else he’d immediately want to take back, so he sucks it up and keeps walking deeper into the station.

If Cere wasn’t honest with him about what’d happened to Trilla – what she had done – what else might she be lying about?  She seems sincere about using the holocron to restore the Jedi Order and bring an end to the Empire, but suddenly he’s forced to revisit the possibility she’s just using him to retrieve the holocron for her own purposes.  She’d said she escaped in a prison riot.  Maybe they let her go.  Or… sighing, Cal viciously tugs at a fingernail with his teeth until it bleeds.  He doesn’t know anymore.  And he can’t exactly trust everything Trilla told him, either, as she does benefit by sowing discord among his crew…

A hush falls.  Cal pauses mid-stride, glances around, and realizes he’s gone wandering into a part of the station that isn’t quite so shiny and well-kept as the previous corridors.  This one is lined with cantinas and gambling parlors.  The near-silence is because almost everyone around him is fixated on a small table crammed up against the viewport, where a Human woman and a Karkarodon are playing a card game.  The Karkarodon’s teeth are bared in a grin; the woman’s staring down at her cards with no visible emotion at all.  Cal takes a couple steps back just in case this is going to get ugly.

The woman plucks a card from her hand and tosses it to the center of the table.  Cal’s too far away to tell what it is, or even guess at what they’re playing, but judging by the eruption of screams and cheering and the Karkarodon’s furious roar, she just won.  Cal begins walking again, hears the soft puff of a booster through the revelry (and the Karkarodon punching the bulkhead), and something smacks into his back.

“I don’t need an escort,” he snaps, signing the last word so hard he almost slaps a guy walking past him.

Greez was going to shower, BD says, which meant it was time to leave.  He might start singing and that always sounds like he’s cooking a bogling alive.

Cal huffs, amused despite himself.  “How would you know what that sounds like?”

BD-1 gives a comically innocent whistle.  Then he admits he doesn’t know, but Greez’s tortured warbling probably comes quite close to the actual noise it’d make.

“Yeah, that’s fair.”  Forget a bucket, Greez couldn’t carry a tune in a cargo frigate.  “Sorry, I shouldn’t be getting annoyed at you.”

It’s okay, BD says.

“It’s not.  You didn’t do anything wrong,” Cal says.  “I’m just… upset.  With Cere.  And myself, and I – I feel trapped.”  He’s smothering in his own skin.  I think I’ve genuinely forgotten how to talk.  That urge to scream is back, swelling up in his chest and shoving organs aside until it aches, but while it normally scares him – he has to be silent – it’s just making things worse now.  If he opens his mouth, he knows nothing’s going to come out.

He wants to scream, for a change.  Maybe that’d help.  He’s already ashamed of his behavior back there in the cockpit, but Cere lied to him, but Cal is lying to her and Greez, except he might not be anymore, and –

For a heart-stopping second, Cal thinks he’s actually going to scream.  Some kind of sound squeezes through the obstruction in his throat, a faint, throttled little whine, and, panicking, he slaps both hands over his mouth like he’s about to be sick.  He can’t.  There are so many people around.  They probably couldn’t even hear him over all the noise spilling from the tapcaf next to him and his heart pounding so loudly in his ears he thinks it must be audible.  He can’t.  It isn’t safe.

BD’s head bumps against his own for what he gradually realizes is the third or fourth time.  The droid keeps asking what’s wrong.  Cal can taste blood (he’s pressing his lips into his teeth again), but he doesn’t lower his hands to answer until he’s absolutely sure he’s under control and hating himself for it.  He would’ve been better off screaming.  “I’m fine.”

He doesn’t look fine, BD points out.  His mouth is bleeding.

“I’m fine.”  Cal prods at the insides of his lips with his tongue and decides it's not a mortal wound.  His entire mouth tastes like he’s been sucking on dirty copper wire, though.  He looks around, picks a sign at random, and starts walking towards it, saying, “Come on, let’s go sit down somewhere for a while.”

The small, dimly-lit, hazy cantina he chose is mostly empty, with only one bartender and a handful of people seated at the bar.  Just inside the door, Cal pauses and shuts his eyes.  It smells like home.  It smells like being twelve again, but not the same way as earlier; he’s curled up in the squashy armchair crammed next to the heater, Prauf sitting across from him, mending a tear in his shirt, Tabbers slouching by the open window and chain-smoking until the scent burns itself into Cal’s subconscious.  A good kind of twelve.

Cal and BD settle at an empty table in the corner, BD peeking into an empty napkin holder, Cal wiping his mouth on the only remaining napkin.  His teeth ache from the pressure put on them.  He should’ve just screamed.  Then he’d know he still can.  He thinks he did, back on Bracca, when the Second Sister killed Prauf…

“Can I getcha something, kid?”

Cal startles and glances at the bartender, a big Tholothian woman who’d snuck up on him while he was brooding.  She smiles.  BD nudges him and asks if Cal is actually legally old enough to drink alcohol.

“Yeah,” Cal says.  “Most places, at least.  And if I’m not, what’s she going to do?  Call my parents?  I don’t have any of those.”  He just has BD-1 and Cere and Greez.  And now that he thinks about it, he doesn’t have any money, either.  It’s all back on the workbench in his room on the Mantis.  The bartender’s still looking at him, her smile taking on a quizzical edge; Cal rifles through his pockets until he finds an old grease pencil, turns the bloodstained napkin over, and writes, Just some water, if that’s okay.  Forgot my money.

“Sure,” she says.  “Do me a favor and come up to the bar, all right?” she adds, tipping her head towards it before she turns around.  “Makes me nervous when customers skulk around in the shadows.”

BD’s game – there’s nothing interesting in this corner, he complains – so Cal relocates to the quiet end of the bar, where BD can gaze at half-full bottles and into dusty crevices to his heart’s delight.  The bartender doesn’t appear to mind.  She’s also unbothered by several other patrons smoking in here, and Cal takes his crushed carton of cigarras from his pocket, regards the last two inside, ignores BD’s disapproval.  This is the first time in a while he’s craved them.  He started at fifteen during a period of intense anxiety, because there was no way to cope with that sort of thing on Bracca besides self-medication and he had too much to lose if he slipped up on alcohol or spice.  Tabbers said it’d help, and he was right.  Dampening his appetite and letting him save a little money on food was a bonus.  Knowing it was terrible for his lungs, Cal quit a year later, started again a couple months ago… he doesn’t really want to keep it up.  Biting his nails down to nubs is a bad enough habit, and free, besides.  All the same, he sticks one of the cigarras in his mouth and lights it – no point in letting them go to waste.

“Here ya go.”  The bartender sets a glass of ice water in front of him.  Cal waits until her back is turned before he touches it, just in case, but there’s nothing.  “You just passing through?”

Cal nods once she’s facing him again.  He waves a hand to get BD’s attention, says, “How long has it been since we left?”

Nineteen minutes, BD tells him.

“Thanks.”

“I like your friend here,” the bartender says.  She uncorks a bottle, pours a foamy orange liquid into a shot glass, slides it down the bar to one of the other customers.  BD twitters a greeting at her.  “Hey.  Can’t say I know much Binary, it all sounds the same to me… my name’s Maviz.”

That’s BD-1, Cal helpfully writes on the napkin.

“Oh.  You got a name, kid?”

Cal.

“Hi.”  She leans her elbows on the bar and yawns.  “Never seen a model like you, BD-1.  I used to have a C5 back in the day to help out around here – called him Fiver – but he’s long gone.  And business is down now that a whole buncha other places have opened up on the station, so the help isn’t really necessary.”  Sighing, she straightens back up as a customer calls her over.  “Miss him terribly, though.  Never met another droid with such a wicked sense of humor.  And he loved bouncing unruly customers…”

Cal stubs out one cigarra, thinks, what the hell, and lights the other, then looks at BD.  He’d miss BD terribly if he was gone, too.  That’s his best friend right there, scanning bottles of liquor and making scornful noises like he cannot believe some of the garbage organics imbibe.  His partner in crime.  His interpreter.

Does it really matter if he doesn’t talk?  The others have all gotten used to it.  As long as he’s just stressing himself out by trying, it seems smarter to leave it alone.  He has enough stress to deal with already.

Does he even want to?  It’d be so much easier for everyone, Cal included.  It wouldn’t be safe, though.  Or… how is not speaking keeping him safe in any meaningful way anymore?  It only feels safer.

“BD,” he says after thinking for a while and mostly going in circles, letting the forgotten cigarra disintegrate in his fingers.  BD hops from the counter behind the bar to the bar itself, secure in the knowledge Maviz thinks he’s adorable and won’t care, and cocks his head to the side.  “If I could talk to the others… I mean, speak to them… would you be upset?  Because I wouldn’t need your help anymore?”

No, BD says without missing a beat.  Cal needs his help with plenty of other things, after all, like slicing doors and investigating small holes.  And not getting completely lost in the caves on Zeffo for six hours again.

“That only happened once…”

And what a delightful six hours it was, BD says brightly.  Cal can’t help but grin at him.

BD is his best friend.  Aside from him, Cere and Greez are the only ones he has left in the galaxy.  And Cal might be angry and he might be lying, but they have work to do.  Nothing is more important than the mission.  He finishes his water, drops the second cigarra in the tray, tosses the empty carton in a trash bin.  “Relax,” he says in response to BD’s muttering, “I just quit.”  Hopefully it’ll be easier this time, since he hasn’t been smoking several times per day like he used to.  Thank you, he writes on the napkin, holding it up so Maviz can see.

“You’re welcome,” she calls back.  “Good luck out there!”

They’ve only been gone for thirty-seven minutes, BD points out as they leave the tiny cantina.  Greez ordered Cal to leave for an hour.

Cal suspects Greez is not going to keep track of the exact time elapsed, as long as Cal comes back in a marginally better mood.  “We’ll walk slow,” he says.  One thing at a time.  Go to Kashyyyk, talk to Tarfful, learn what this Astrium actually is and where to find it.  Get the holocron and keep it safe from the Empire.  Then he can figure out this whole talking thing.  He’s made it this far without a word.  He can go on a little longer.

Chapter Text

After they leave Dathomir, a heavy gloom falls over the Mantis.  Cal knows he’s the one spreading it, but can’t bring himself to care.

For the first time since he set foot on Bogano, since he met BD-1 and entered the Vault and realized maybe there was a path forward for the ragged remains of the Jedi Order, Cal is tired.  He feels like he’s been stretched too far, hammered flimsiplast-thin.  Maybe it started coming on before Dathomir – having his trust in his friends rattled had punched tiny pinpoint holes in him he’d never noticed until he walked into that tomb.  So many weak spots, and now the lightsaber Master Tapal entrusted to him is lying on the workbench, unrepairable.

It began long before Dathomir, if Cal’s being honest.  He hasn’t been right since the Purge, but it was easier to tell himself he was getting better and never look too deeply at all the gaping wounds he was covering with platitudes.  He’s always known it was his fault Master Tapal died.  Going back there, though, reliving the day his world ended as if for the first time, helpless against the clone troopers, doing nothing until it was too late as his master was gunned down, then being roundly condemned for his failures by that vision of Master Tapal… Cere’s right, Cal was a child at the time.  He was also a Jedi.  If he’d acted like one instead of a scared little kid who’d never had a blaster fired at him in his life, they both could’ve made it to Bracca and survived.

He doesn’t know what to do.  He’s tired.  He doesn’t do anything.  Since Cere directed Greez to Ilum, a journey that’ll take several days, Cal’s mostly stayed in his room and kept to himself.  Caught up on sleep, then slept significantly more than necessary.  Stared at one page of his book chip for over an hour without absorbing a single word.  He got mad at BD for trying too hard to cheer him up, which is why BD’s hanging out in the main cabin with Cere and Greez – Cal feels bad about it and plans to apologize, but he can’t force himself up right now.  The datapad’s lying neglected at the foot of the cot.  He’s written about three responses to questions in the past day, ignored all the others, and barely even talked to BD except to snap at him.  He hasn’t tried to speak.  It doesn’t matter, he can hardly remember what made him want to start speaking aloud again anyway.

Greez is getting a bit irked by Cal’s withdrawal.  He’d said something earlier – Cal couldn’t make out most of the words, but the tone was uncomplimentary – and Cere had told him to leave Cal alone.  “He’ll feel better when we get to Ilum,” she’d replied.

Fat chance.  Cere’s solution is for Cal to build a new lightsaber, like that’s a simple process.  Easy for her to say; she didn’t just destroy her last real connection to her master, and she’s not the one who’ll have to face the caves again.  At that point in his life, Cal’s first trip to Ilum had been the hardest thing he’d ever done.  He’d failed to find a crystal for hours, walked in circles, climbed, fell, was reduced to frustrated tears at least twice.  He wasn’t accustomed to struggling.  Everything was either simple or avoided (which is why his handwriting hasn’t improved since he was about six).  Until he realized his failures were actually bringing him closer to the faint thrumming that kept flickering in and out like a poorly-tuned commlink, he couldn’t follow it.

Cal found his kyber crystal in the rubble of a collapsed tunnel, coated in rock dust and almost completely buried.  It’d gotten slightly chipped, but it gleamed bright blue and resonated so beautifully he’d carried it cradled to his chest all the way back.  He was almost the last one to return – Cal and Tazenthalay ran smack into each other at a fork in the caves.  She’d looked like she had only stopped crying moments ago, and she gave him a watery smile, clutching a crystal in her hand.  They’d escaped just before the entrance to the old Temple froze over and trapped them inside.

Not that that would’ve happened.  It was nothing but ice.  Had Cal or one of the other Initiates failed to return, Master Yoda would have tracked them down and escorted them out.  And even if, by some slim chance, Cal couldn’t find a crystal, that didn’t mean he’d be kicked out of the Order or anything; he would just need to wait a bit longer and then try again.  Regardless, he was deeply relieved.  He’d built his lightsaber not long after his ninth birthday, but he wouldn’t become an apprentice for several months, and Jaro Tapal was still just the large, intimidating Lasat Jedi Master who occasionally oversaw lightsaber practice.  The lesson about failure hadn’t yet been drilled into him until it stuck.

Maybe Cal can handle whatever Ilum’s going to throw at him this time, but there’s another, stronger fear lurking in the depths.  He lost his first kyber crystal and shattered Master Tapal’s.  Will Ilum even see fit to grant him another?  What a waste of time and fuel it’d be if they came all this way just for Cal to return empty-handed and useless.

Cal’s fished out of his fog for a moment by footsteps in the corridor and Cere peeking into the engine room.  She’s worried about him.  It wafts off her like perfume.  “Cal,” she says quietly, and he puts in the effort to turn his head and look at her, “Greez is going to make dinner soon.  If you’re hungry…”

He shakes his head, goes back to looking at the ceiling.  Cere hesitates, then walks away.  Cal’s not angry with her anymore, even if he doesn’t entirely feel like they’ve resolved all their issues, because anger takes energy.  And there’s a lighthouse trying to cut through his fog – every time it comes around and he’s caught in the beam, he thinks I can’t just sit around pouting, I have to do something – but he is so tired.

That book chip Cere gave him several planets ago is still in the datapad.  All he’d have to do is sit up and grab it.  Hell, he could pull it to him with the Force if he really wanted to.  Pona finally snagged a marriage proposal from the winemaker and Cal wants to see whether or not she’ll accept, or, more likely, run away with the rugged-and-uneducated-yet-purehearted groundskeeper.  He’s read less formulaic math problems.  He hates not finishing books, though, so maybe she’ll surprise him.

He hasn’t touched the datapad and is halfway to making himself fall asleep again when Greez comes strolling in, shakes Cal’s shoulder, and says, “Get up.  I’m starting dinner.”

Cal opens his eyes and just looks at Greez.  Greez stares back, two arms folded over his chest, two hands on his hips.  Sighing, Cal uses his heel to kick the datapad into reach and writes, I’m not hungry.

“I don’t care,” Greez replies.  “I need a sous chef, Cere’s in the shower, and your droid doesn’t have hands.  You can sulk in the galley while you’re cutting the driss.  Get up.”

Greez isn’t going to leave him alone and arguing will take more energy than giving in, so Cal gets up.  His head swims – now that he thinks about it, he’s been lying down most of the day.  It’s been about two standard rotations since they left Dathomir, right?  Did he do anything besides sleep yesterday?  Satisfied, Greez grabs the datapad, shoves it at Cal until he takes it, and beckons for Cal to follow him, like he might get lost on the way to the galley otherwise.  BD’s probably been telling Greez and Cere stories about the caves on Zeffo.

Speaking of BD-1, he’s sitting on the counter, reading the recipe Greez left open on his own datapad.  As soon as Cal walks in, the droid jumps up and trills, asking if he feels better now.

“No,” Cal says honestly, and BD droops, making a dejected cooing sound.  Cal pats his head.  “Sorry for yelling at you earlier.”

Oh, that was nothing, BD says dismissively.  In hindsight, he was being a little obnoxious.  And Greez has yelled at him three times since then for minor infractions.  Are all Lateros so touchy, or is it just this one?

“Might just be Greez.”  As far as he can recall, Stumpy had been a pretty laid-back sort of guy.

Greez, unaware he’s the subject of conversation, points Cal towards a cutting board and the large driss pod lying on it.  “Peel it – do the best you can with the round part, don’t worry if you hack off a few nubs – and cube it.  I gotta get cracking on the nuna or we won’t be eating until tomorrow.”  With that, he reaches into a small foam crate on the floor and heaves an entire headless nuna onto the other board.  The thud rattles everything else on the counter.

Well, at least it’s something to do, and doing something doesn’t seem as daunting now that he’s on his feet.  He’s started to like cooking, anyway, the same way he’s started to like food in general, even if he’s mostly stuck with unexciting prep jobs.  Cal gets to work.  As long as he doesn’t think about anything besides removing the skin from the driss and not his fingers, he’s fine.  Slow, but he has a feeling Greez planned for that.  The shaky fine motor control means Cal doesn’t mess around with knives.

The silence is new.  Uncomfortable, where Cal would’ve once found it soothing.  Sometimes Cal assumes half the reason Greez keeps making him help is so he can chatter on without getting strange looks for talking to himself.  And these days, if he’s looking for an answer or an opinion, he’ll actually say so, and Cal will stop what he’s doing to respond.  He doesn’t feel like he’s being talked at anymore.  Either Greez is trying to be sensitive to Cal’s mood or he’s run out of stories.

Once the driss is peeled, Cal slices off the stem and tries to cut the round end in half, but the knife gets stuck halfway through.  Frowning at it, he lays his left hand over his right and presses down with all his might – and then he rattles everything else when the knife suddenly cleaves through the rest of the driss and Cal’s knuckles impact the counter at light speed.  BD jumps.  Greez glances over at him as Cal hisses and shakes his throbbing hand out.  “You all right?” the Latero asks at the same time BD does.

“I’m okay, I’m okay,” Cal says to BD, nodding so Greez understands, inspecting his reddening knuckles.  Then he looks at BD and adds, “You should probably get off the countertop before Greez yells at you.  Again.”  Stains on the sofa are bad enough.  Oil in the food?  Greez would have a stroke.  Fortunately, Cal’s not bleeding, so nobody has to worry about bodily fluids in the food, either.

He brings the stem of the driss closer to chop that up first, then stops, realizing Greez is staring at him.  Cal starts to wonder if he’s figured out one particular sign – the letter grek, with an overhead motion like he’s pushing a hyperspace lever – is his name.  He expected Greez to catch on sooner, honestly.  They all have a specific sign for their names, Cal included, though he never uses his and refused to demonstrate when Cere asked.

He can’t think about that.  He almost could for a little while, but now he’s back at square one.  To his relief, Greez interrupts his spiraling thoughts with, “Hey, just wondering… where’d you learn all the sign language stuff?”  He rubs a spice mix over both halves of the nuna and then, while Cal’s thinking this isn’t a relief at all, actually, continues, “Cere said she learned a bunch of it when she was a kid back in the Temple.  Same for you?  Someone else teach you at some point?  Or both, I guess it could be both…”

Cal grabs the datapad, writes, I DON’T want to talk about it so hard he almost imprints the letters onto the screen permanently, and shoves it across the counter at Greez.  He begins cubing the driss with rather less care than usual.

“Okay, okay, sheesh…”

He doesn’t want to talk about it, because then he’ll have to think about it, and he can’t.  If he dives too deep, he’ll never come up for air.  But stars, Cal wants to.  Prauf is only alive in Cal’s memories, and Cal can never truly let him go unless he acknowledges how much Prauf meant to him.  The man spent an entire year making sure his taciturn new flatmate had a roof over his head and food in his stomach, taught him everything there was to know about scrapping, kept Cal from being shunted into Hazmat and meeting a swift and probably disgusting end.  Even when Cal moved out, Prauf wasn’t far away.  Straight ahead from the station like you’re headed to my place, but keep going past the droid graveyard until you get to Rek’s Electronics.  Don’t go in there, no matter what the sign’s advertising for sale.  Rek can talk anyone into buying anything and you will get ripped off.  Go right, walk a couple more blocks, take the left just after the rail yard, and he’s in the apartment building on the right, unit 6-26.

Prauf didn’t teach Cal sign language.  He’d learned right alongside him, though, and it’d been his idea in the first place, that morning Cal woke up and immediately thought, Tabbers left the karking window wide open again, didn’t he, because he was freezing.  He had curled as small as he could, tugged the blanket up over his half-numb nose, buried his face in the pillow and exhaled so the fabric was hot and damp against his mouth… and then registered what’d woken him.  A big hand was patting his shoulder.  It couldn’t already be time to get up for work, unless he’d somehow slept through the alarm.  “Cal,” Prauf said.  “Come on, wake up.”

Cal had opened his bleary eyes and blinked a few times, first to get rid of the sleepy haze, then to make sure he was seeing properly.  Prauf looked like he’d been frosted.  The heat in this building was a bit sporadic sometimes, but it usually didn’t go out entirely, so for Prauf to still be coated in snow after a five-floor climb couldn’t mean anything good.  Cal pushed himself upright and realized someone had put an extra blanket over him.  He was still shivering.

“You’ll wanna get dressed quick,” Prauf advised, surprisingly cheerfully.  “Bundle up as warm as you can.  We’re off-duty today and the heater’s struggling to keep up.”  Cal raised his eyebrows.  Snow was nothing special on Bracca and they’d worked through several blizzards already.  “One heck of an ice storm blew through overnight.  Even the Guild knows they’re gonna lose more scrappers than they can hire if they send us to the yard before the deicers are done… second and third shifts’ll probably be on.  No pay for you and me today, but at least we don’t have to go out in that mess.”  With that, he jumped down to the floor.

In the month and a half since Cal joined the Scrapper Guild, he’d never had an unscheduled day off before.  He wasn’t even sure what to do with one.  He spent his scheduled days off getting a little extra sleep, or doing mundane tasks like buying groceries and maintaining his equipment.  Going back to sleep did tempt him for a minute, but there was more light sneaking through the window than usual, which meant he’d already slept in.  Kneeling on his bed, Cal swiftly shuddered into his warmest clothing, wrapped both blankets around his shoulders, and descended the ladder to the loft.

Prauf was in the kitchen, stirring a pot of grainmush.  Cal wrinkled his nose slightly – he was growing accustomed to it, but he still imagined it had a similar flavor to wet hay – and opened the cabinet where they kept the dishes.  “Just the two of us,” Prauf said.  “Dunno where Tabbers is.”

Cal nodded.  Tabbers came and went as he pleased, and since he worked second shift while Cal and Prauf were on first, they didn’t see much of one another except in the evenings.  Prauf and Tabbers had had a third roommate before Cal came along, a guy named Jax, but he hadn’t been home in months.  Tabbers only knew he was alive because he’d spotted him in the shipbreaking yard a few times.  “Wish he’d come by just so I could tell him to pick up his shit and go away,” Tabbers had grumbled once.  Cal’s loft – more of a storage space in the short hallway that led to the apartment door – actually belonged to Jax.  Or used to belong to Jax.  Given his habits of being late with the rent and bringing home what Prauf called people of dubious repute for the night (Prauf apparently thought Cal didn’t know what a prostitute was), nobody seemed to want him back.  At least Cal paid his tiny portion of the rent on time.

The heater was groaning and attempting to spit out the occasional puff of warm air when Prauf and Cal sat down to breakfast.  Cal’s grainmush had a faintly sweet aftertaste, which told him the Abednedo had snuck a few drops of molasses in there to make it more palatable.  He was also pretty sure Prauf suspected Cal, who’d initially refused food altogether until he got so dizzy he couldn’t stand up, had some sort of eating disorder.  Cal found that less embarrassing than the reality where he’d just been outrageously picky up until a couple weeks ago and was still working on getting over it, so he’d yet to say anything.  Not that he ever said anything.  He forced his breakfast down and mentally added a few more credits to his rent payment.  He couldn’t let Prauf keep doing stuff like this without trying to reimburse him somehow.

“Uh, listen,” Prauf abruptly said once Cal’s dish was almost empty.  Cal glanced up at him.  “Got something I wanna talk to you about.  It’s not bad, I just… think it’s kinda important.”

That didn’t tell Cal much.  He nodded to show he was listening, shoveled the last spoonful of grainmush into his mouth.

“I know you’re not the talkative type, and I don’t really mind, honestly.  Nice to have some peace and quiet around here – Tabbers is always grumping about something and Jax, wherever the hell he got to, never shut up either.”  Prauf chuckled a bit.  “When we’re home, writing works just fine if we gotta talk.  But… look, I worry about something happening in the yard and you not being able to communicate with anyone, even me.”

Cal always had a piece of flimsi and a pencil in one of his pockets for that exact reason.  In fact, he took them out and set them on the table to remind Prauf of that fact.  “Yeah, I know,” Prauf said.  “I still worry.  Not everybody reads Basic, or what if you got hurt… my point is, I did a little asking around yesterday.  There are a couple scrappers who don’t talk, but know some kinda sign language, right?  Thought maybe we could look into that, see if someone’s willing to teach us a little?”  Then he quickly added, “And even if nobody’s interested, there’s this thing called Abednedish Mining Code.  My dad was a miner, thought maybe I’d be one too, so he taught me.  It’s just a bunch of hand signals, like to tell someone there’s a cave-in or the air’s bad up ahead – comms didn’t work way down in the tunnels, you see.  I sorta repurposed them once I started working here… instead of ‘cave-in’, that signal meant ‘scaffolding collapse’ or ‘structural damage’.  Kinda handy when you can’t hear a damn thing over the ship cutters.  Been a while since I used ‘em; none of the old engineering crew’s still around.  Could help you out, though.”

Over a month and a half had passed since Cal had last spoken.  After the first few attempts didn’t pan out, he’d stopped trying.  It was better this way.  Safer.  He was initially reluctant to even communicate, but given how long it took him to write (making it all but impossible to give anything away by accident), he’d eventually started talking to Prauf and Tabbers through writing sometimes.  Sign language?  That could be almost as dangerous as speech, especially if he got pretty good at it.

The irony of hoping he wouldn’t be good at something, when he’d spent his entire childhood thus far desperately avoiding that outcome, was not lost on him.  He almost smiled.  Maybe if I only learned a little?  Enough to make Prauf happy and nothing else?  Prauf did have a point about the shipbreaking yard – Cal already had one close call with a scrapper picking a fight that would’ve ended with Cal getting chucked into the Maw.  By the time Prauf realized what was happening, it was too late; Cal was extremely fortunate a foreman droid chose that exact moment to drop by for an inspection, delaying his gruesome demise long enough for Prauf to arrive.  Being able to signal for help much sooner would’ve been handy.

Having made his case, Prauf didn’t say anything more, just sipped his caf and waited.  He never pushed Cal for a fast reply unless it was necessary.  Finally, Cal picked up the pencil and wrote, I do actually know a little bit of Galactic Basic Sign Language.  A very little bit.  I mostly just remember some of the letters.  He recalled the sign for ‘Jedi’, too, and ‘Force’, and ‘Master’.  Those he would keep to himself.

Prauf looked impressed.  “Huh!” he said, setting down his mug.  “That’s real useful.”

It won’t be if it’s not common around here.

“So?  Right now, you’re still working close to me most of the time.  As long as I know, we’re good.”

Cal chewed on his lip for a moment, then wrote, You’ve already done way too much for me.  A lot more than he deserved.  Prauf didn’t even know what Cal was.

“Cal, you’re doing this for me,” Prauf said.  “I’m just gonna keep worrying otherwise.  This way, you could at least tell me if there’s an emergency or whatever.”

Prauf never asked him for anything.  Cal couldn’t refuse.  Let me see if I can remember the alphabet first, okay?

“Sure.  And I will still check around.  Must be someone willing to trade a few lessons for a couple creds.”

What should I do if I don’t remember the letters?

“Make ‘em up,” Prauf said, smiling.  “Not like I’m gonna know the difference.”  He stood and took the dishes to the sink.  Cal stayed put, gazing down at his hands.

Aurek was an easy one to remember.  So was besh, and cresh, cherek, dorn – like nearly everything else, Cal had absorbed the lessons in Basic Sign without much effort, but he’d never really bothered reinforcing those lessons.  He suspected he’d be lucky to recall half the alphabet.  And how am I supposed to teach Prauf, especially if I have to invent some letters?  It’s not like I… wait.  Cal started rummaging through the various scraps of flimsiplast he’d collected until he found a full page with just a receipt on one side.  On the other, he tried to draw a hand.

Ugh.  That’s awful.  It looked like a mutated flower.  Cal scribbled it out, tried again.  His second attempt resembled a foot instead.  He could understand it as the fingerspelling for aurek, though, so he counted that as a success.  Prauf already learned to decipher Cal’s horrible handwriting; he’d figure out the doodles, too.

Cal had gone through the entire aurebesh, illustrating the letters he knew, making up new signs for the ones he didn’t before drawing them too.  Just like he did years later for Cere.  Prauf practiced them until he knew them all by heart, and he could’ve stopped there – fingerspelling was enough for the occasional short message.  But he tracked down Kaaev, then Niona, and somewhere along the line, Cal forgot to be cautious.  He talked to Prauf like he had the clone troopers and his master, freely and frequently and sometimes excessively.  In hindsight, he was never silent at all after those first few months.

Someone’s making a harsh, choked-off sobbing noise… oh, that’s him.  He tries to clamp his hands over his mouth to muffle the sound and they’re already there.  Slowly, Cal realizes he’s crouched on the deck, half-cubed driss forgotten, hunched so his head is nearly on his knees, eyes squeezed shut, hands covering his mouth, and crying way too loudly.  That would normally bother him, but everything seems to be happening behind a pane of transparisteel.

Prauf had been like a brother.  It was even in his name – the letter peth and the probably-Huttese sign for ‘brother’ Kaaev had taught them.  Cal’s is the same, just with a different letter.  He can’t use it anymore because Prauf is gone, and it hurts.  He tries to cope with loss like a Jedi, but how long can he possibly hold it together?  No wonder he’s bawling in the galley.  He’s being too loud, though, so he crushes his jaw shut, keeps the next sob to a muffled whine, snuffles.

Then a hand lands on his back. Two hands.  Right, he was helping Greez with dinner.  He has to quit crying where everyone else can hear, but nothing is working, not even biting his tongue until it bleeds – “It’s all right, kid,” Greez says softly, rubbing Cal’s back.  “It probably doesn’t feel like it right now, but everything’s gonna be okay eventually.”  He sighs.  “And I know you’re hurting and whatever happened on Dathomir clearly didn’t help, and I don’t wanna be a giant pain in the ass and press too much or anything, but we care about you, you got that?  Don’t push us away.”

That just makes him cry harder, though for different reasons.  Greez and Cere and BD-1 are under no obligation to care about Cal; they simply need him to get the holocron from the Vault, and since Cal agrees that’s the best course of action, he’s going to do it regardless of whether or not they’re interested in being his friends.  And here they are, caring about him anyway, trying to learn sign language and making him sandwiches to take along when he’s exploring and reminding him yes, they have passed that weird-shaped stalagmite four times now.  He shouldn’t reciprocate – just more people to lose, someday.  Terrible idea.  Too late, though.

He's still trying to stop making so much noise, without any success, and Greez must’ve picked up on that, because one of the hands on Cal’s back thumps him a bit.  “Cal,” Greez says, “I dunno who made you think you have to be quiet all the time –”

I did, Cal thinks.  Why did I do that to myself?  Why am I still doing it?

“– but they were wrong.”  Greez gives a forced little laugh.  “You must be a lot stronger than me.  If I was you, even if I couldn’t talk – especially then – I woulda started screaming my head off a long time ago.”

He’s not sure he can anymore.  He hasn’t even been able to whisper.  Cal does pry his teeth from his tongue, though, swallows the blood with a wince, takes a shuddering breath.  The tears are slowly running dry.  He opens his wet eyes and blinks at the deck for a minute.  Next to him, Greez is apparently trying to comfort Cal and finish chopping the driss at the same time (having four arms must be convenient); on his other side, he can feel BD leaning his head against Cal’s leg as a sign of affection, because he has no arms at all.  Cal makes sure his hand isn’t covered in snot before he pats the droid.

Curiously, BD-1 asks if Cal feels better now, and Cal nods.  The second he gave himself a millimeter of space to grieve, he broke down sobbing immediately… he may be repressing far more than just his ability to speak.  This is why he needs to pull it together and figure out how to meditate well, or at least keep trying.  He scrubs his face with his sleeve, stands back up.  From the looks of it, Greez has gotten dinner in the cooker while Cal was busy having a minor breakdown at his feet.  Cal would’ve found that incredibly distracting.  What’d Greez say about Cal being stronger than him?

“Well, food should be ready in about half an hour,” Greez says like nothing happened, fiddling with the settings on the cooker as the nuna and vegetables begin baking.  “Haven’t made this one in a while, but Cere loves it.  If you’re still looking for something to do, I guess you can cut up the bread…”

Greez kindly ignores the sniffling while Cal punctures the vacuum-seal on the package and slices a few pieces from the end of the heavy, dense block of bread.  It smells weirdly sterile.  He’ll eat it without complaint, but he does write, You should make more bread.

“Are you listening to this one?” Greez asks BD, gesturing towards Cal.  “All of a sudden he thinks he can tell me what to make for dinner… how about this, kid?  I’ll tell you how to make the bread, and you can do it yourself.  Mostly.  This isn’t my aunt’s flat, we can’t afford to waste a couple sacks of flour trying to get the cooker temperature just right.”

Cal shrugs, then nods.  That works.

Cere comes wandering into the galley a couple of minutes later.  When she spots Cal, her eyebrows raise slightly; he meets her eyes for a second, picks up the datapad, writes three words, and turns it around for her.  I got hungry.

She smiles, understanding.  She opens her mouth, but Greez cuts her off – “See, what’d I tell ya?” he says smugly, sliding the clean knives back into their holders and dusting his hands on his pants.  “All it took was a little tough love.”

“Greez, I’ve always suspected your idea of ‘tough love’ is barely firmer than a marshmallow,” Cere replies.

“The heck’s a marshmallow?” Greez asks.  Then he shakes his head, waves a hand.  “Never mind, I’ll look it up sometime.  We’ve only got a little while ‘til dinner, so don’t go too far… hey, I ever tell you guys about that time my cousin Fitz seduced some kinda Hutt princess for a con –”

“Yes,” Cere says hastily, “and you are not going to repeat it this close to dinner.”

“It’s hilarious, though!”

“And it’s revolting.”  She glances at Cal.  “You can ask about it later if you really want to know.  I’m just warning you, it’ll put you off eating for… a while.”

Cal thinks that makes it sound more intriguing, actually.  BD agrees, and Greez must as well, because he says, “Aw, come on.  Who knew that weird sludgy goop Hutts produce was –”

“Later,” Cere repeats.

Huffing, Greez throws two arms up.  “Fine, fine.  Being oppressed on my own ship… there’s nothing funnier than watching this kid go through thirty-two different facial expressions in five seconds whenever I hit a plot twist, that’s all I’m sayin’.  You’ll have to entertain yourselves, then.”

“I’m sure we’ll manage,” Cere says dryly, settling down in the lounge.

Cal leaves the common area, but only to use the ‘fresher and wash his face.  His eyes are redder than the scarring across his nose and beneath his ear.  He pokes his tongue out to see if the teeth marks are still bleeding.  He opens his mouth and tries to say hi to his own reflection, and nothing.

The past five years, he’s always had to look over his shoulder.  His secret’s in the open, now – Cal is a Jedi who survived the Purge, he wears his lightsaber openly, he no longer cares if he’s being hunted because he will never not be hunted while the Empire rules the galaxy.  The crutch that made him feel safe on Bracca has become a hindrance.  He needs to start talking again.  More importantly, he wants to.  He locked that part of himself away for safety and it’s time to drag it out kicking and screaming.  He just can’t quite make his vocal chords cooperate and his brain quit getting anxious about it.

There are no answers on an empty stomach.  He goes back to the lounge and curls up on the sofa and reads while the Mantis gradually begins to smell like catabar-spiced nuna.  Pona doesn’t marry the winemaker.  Cal thinks her tragically low-class cousin, who has a paltry few million credits in the bank and one hell of a garden, should probably get in on that instead.  They have similar interests, at least.  Cere browses news articles with eye-catching headlines, lets BD-1 perch behind her head and browse too.  Up in the cockpit, Greez hums a rather funereal tune, and in spite of the myriad obstacles he still has to clear, Cal’s starting to believe him when he says everything will eventually be okay.

Chapter Text

“Hello, Master.”  The vocal modulator in the helmet doesn’t disguise Trilla’s voice at all.  She’s always had a hint of a drawl, plus a crisp accent she picked up from her crechemaster, and the two combined tend to make her sound contemptuous unless she watches her tone very carefully – something she’d once been sensitive about.  Now she embraces it, and every word drips with sadistic scorn as she walks into the chamber.  “Are the accommodations to your liking?”

There was a time Cere would’ve had a witty retort ready.  Her tongue is so swollen and cracked she can hardly speak.  It’s been – what, two rotations since her captors’ last visit?  She has no way to keep accurate track of time, but unless they want her dead (she couldn’t be so fortunate), they’ll have to give her some water soon.  “…lovely,” she manages to rasp, and then coughs, held tight to the interrogation unit by the restraints.  The one around her right wrist is ever so slightly loose.  She wriggles her pinky – if Trilla comes a few steps closer, Cere could touch her.  “Trilla –”

“No,” Trilla interrupts coldly.  “She’s gone, yet you persist in clinging to her.  If she truly meant that much to you, perhaps you shouldn’t have told the Empire where to find her.”

Cere tries to respond and only wheezes.  Trilla leans in, the lights gleaming off her helmet.  “Sorry, Master, I didn’t catch that?  You’ll –”  Elsewhere in the fortress, someone screams.  “You’ll have to speak up.  There’s always so much going on here, after all.”

She’s not wrong about that.  Bored stormtroopers on guard duty talk.  Cere’s seen little besides the inside of this chamber, but just from listening to the chatter (she has a knack for using the Force to enhance her hearing), she’s fairly certain she knows what else happens on this base, besides breaking captive Jedi.  She knows which computer systems hold the really valuable Imperial intel.  She’s a good slicer.  If she could get free of the chair… the side of her pinky brushes the cool, form-fitting leather uniform Trilla wears.  “Yet you… still call me… Master.”

Trilla jerks, hisses, “You are nothing to me,” but there’s something wrong with her helmet.  It’s not reflecting the light anymore.  She starts to say something else, chokes, scrabbles at her neck.  As Cere looks on, bewildered, the thin red visor in the helmet cracks and begins to flake away.  And beneath it is – no – not Trilla as she is now, but the girl who tried so hard to contain her excitement at finally being made a Padawan, fiddling with her new braid, the same height as Cere already and still managing to look up at her somehow.  Gasping, Trilla buckles to her knees, trying to pull the fabric away from her throat.  Cere knows she can’t free herself, having tried a hundred times already, and she starts to struggle against the restraints anyway.  “Master –” Trilla gags, whimpers, “Master, it hurts, help me!”

A shadow looms in the doorway with a hand extended.  Cere wakes up to a leg cramp, some blanket fuzz drying on her tongue, and every one of her muscles tense like she’s preparing for battle.

She doesn’t move or even breathe until she’s convinced she has the fight-or-flight instinct in hand, and only then does Cere slowly exhale, flex her foot so her calf stops cramping.  This sort of awakening is not new to her – if she isn’t careful, if she lets herself lose control, she can cause some pretty significant damage in a heartbeat.  Several rooms at cheap, anonymous inns in the Outer Rim can testify to that.  Fully cutting herself off from the Force had taken months, thanks to the nightmares.

And that’s all this was, a nightmare.  Trilla never spoke to her during their brief meeting at the fortress.  But… while they had tortured her, warped her into the Second Sister, she must’ve said those words – Master, it hurts, help me –

Cere rakes her fingers through the knots in her short hair, hard, as if she can scrape the thought from her mind.  It’s not helping.  She stares at the underside of the top bunk, bends her knee, massages her throbbing calf, conjugates irregular Rodian verbs in her head.  Her traitorous brain keeps trying to sneak back into Nur’s orbit anyway. 

She feels like – well, how she assumes Cal felt on the way to Ilum.  Empty, leaden.  Adrift.  Tired.  Hopeless.  This is a bad time for it, but there’s not much she can do when the cloud descends, just hang in there and wait for it to pass.  They’re getting shorter nowadays.  Besides, better her than Cal.  He’d come back from the Temple on Ilum glowing, well aware they were being chased off their planet by the same Imperials who were destroying it, still unable to stop beaming until he could’ve powered a small sun.  His new lightsaber was beautiful (Cere had expected as much, considering how much time the guy spent retooling his first one), double-bladed just like he’d said he once wanted as a child, and dual-wieldable, too, which was a surprise.  “Two crystals?” she had asked when he showed it off.

Cal shook his head, reconnected and deactivated the lightsabers to respond.  Technically one crystal that broke in half.  I thought for a minute it had broken for real, but both pieces were still okay.

So he’s happy, possibly more so than she’s seen him since they met.  They’re headed back to Dathomir, because he is also strong enough to face his fears, and truth be told, sometimes Cere wishes she was a little more like him.  She’ll keep her bad mood to herself for now, let him keep pushing forwards, and hopefully the cloud will lift in a day or two.  She sits up, grabs the bottle of water she keeps next to her bed, takes a swig to clear the muck from her dry mouth and throat.

Keeping her bad mood to herself works for about five minutes.  Then someone taps on her door.

Oh, damn it.  Once in a while she still forgets she’s sharing the ship with a practicing Jedi.  After that first night when he had gone poking a little too deep into her head, one would think she’d remember that.  She quickly gets up, turns on a light, and goes over to open the door, and sure enough, Cal’s on the other side, looking sleepy and rumpled.  “Sorry,” she says quietly, “did I wake you?”

Cal shakes his head and, bracing the datapad against the bulkhead, writes, I was already awake.  Just wanted to see if you were all right.

“I’ll survive.”  Even if I have to compromise all my principles to do it.  She brushes that thought away, looks at him for a second.  As cheerful and peppy as he’s been the past two days, there are dark smudges under his eyes.  Making a quick decision, Cere steps back and says, “Want to come in?”

He shrugs and comes in.  Cere closes the door behind him so they don’t bother Greez, sits down on her bunk, and Cal sits beside her, rubbing his ragged thumbnail over a smudge on the datapad’s screen.  Whatever word he signs is one she knows, but it’s not surfacing in her murky brain.  She has a good handle on fingerspelling now, so he switches to that – “Nightmare?”

“Yeah,” she says.  Since she’s sworn she’ll be honest with him, instead of leaving it there, she adds, “Trilla, mostly.”

Cal nods slightly.  He turns the datapad on again and writes, The whole way here I had nightmares about going back to Dathomir.  Now that we are going back, I just keep dreaming about my skin growing over my mouth.

“That’s… unnerving,” Cere says.

Tell me about it.  Couldn’t fall back asleep, so.

Cere looks at him again, then says, “Hold on a second,” and gets up.  There’s a tiny safe in the corner of the room, built in above a couple compartments for clothing or luggage – she keys in the lock code and opens it, then takes out a bottle about the same size as her hand.  The plastoid seal over the cap is still intact.  She peels it off as she returns to the bunk.  “We are not getting drunk,” she says, “because I am at least pretending to be a responsible adult… but a little bit will take the edge off.”  They’ll reach Dathomir tomorrow and both of them should get some more sleep before then.

Cal holds out a hand and his eyes unfocus for a couple of seconds when Cere gives him the small, frosted bottle for inspection.  She doesn’t remember its proper name.  The label says Spirit Flair 60, which isn’t particularly helpful.  Greez once said the stuff should be called ‘A Trap’, and he’s not wrong.  The light pink liquor tastes like a sweet jogan fruit juice, with just a slight burn in the background to remind you you’re drinking, so it’s easy to drink quite a lot… and then you stand up and faceplant into the next table’s tureen of nerf chowder.  She takes the bottle and unscrews the top while he slowly asks – using the actual signs this time – “Do you want cups?”

“I don’t have germs, but if you’d prefer that, go ahead.”

He pauses, then writes, You know what, never mind.  I don’t want to wake up Greez or he’ll probably make us share.

“And he could drink us both under the table, so that’d be the end of this bottle.”  Cal glances at her with a skeptical expression.  “I don’t know if it’s a Latero thing or a Greez thing, but it takes a lot to get him drunk.  Just trust me on that.”  She takes two swallows of the liquor, which tastes as innocent as always – although not quite as pleasant when it’s room-temperature compared to chilled – and hands the bottle off to Cal, who does the same.

For a little while, they trade the bottle back and forth without speaking or any other form of communication.  Cal looks lost in thought and Cere’s trying to avoid her thoughts.  The alcohol’s helping with that.  It can’t dry out the depression, but it can wrap around her brain in a warm, fuzzy, waterproof layer, giving her a degree of peace.  They go through about a quarter of the bottle before she decides to put the top on and set it aside so they don’t hate themselves in the morning.  She feels pleasantly unsteady.  Cal’s hands keep twitching like he wants to say something and keeps holding it back.

“What’s on your mind?” Cere finally asks after a few more minutes of silence.

Cal presses his lips together.  Could we talk about you instead?

“No,” she says flatly.

Sighing, Cal fiddles with the stylus, then turns so he’s tucked into the corner at the head of the bunk with his knees pressed to his chest, making it impossible for Cere to see what he’s writing until he wants her to.  Look, there’s something I need to tell you, because I’ve been lying about it this whole time.

Why do I get the feeling I know where this is going?  “Well, you have my undivided attention.”

Cal hesitates, chewing on a fingernail; Cere looks at the liquor bottle, makes a decision she’ll no doubt regret, opens it again, and gives it to Cal.  He drinks, hands it back, and starts writing.  Cere takes a few more sips while she waits.  Whatever he’s trying to confess, he keeps going back and erasing it.  Eventually, though, he takes a deep breath and flips the datapad around, eyes averted as she reads.  I can actually talk.  Or I could, at least – the clone troopers used to tease me because I never shut my mouth.  I decided to stop after the Purge.  So I’ve kind of been faking it.

Yeah, that is exactly where she thought this was going.  “Okay, first of all, you didn’t lie about it,” she says.  Apparently Cal paid as much attention to her words as Greez did, that night… though Cal has an excuse, given the events that transpired immediately beforehand.  He just stares at her.  “I said ‘do you talk’, not ‘can you talk’.”

The look Cal gives her now is so spectacularly unimpressed she bites the inside of her cheek so she won’t laugh.  “Sorry.  Anyway, second… can I ask why you decided to stop?”

Answering this question takes even longer than the previous one.  I didn’t want to say anything that might be suspicious.  I was afraid I’d open my mouth and accidentally scream ‘I’m a Jedi!!’, as stupid as that sounds.  And I didn’t really feel much like talking anyway.  It was only supposed to be until someone came to find me and I was back with the other Jedi, but… obviously that didn’t happen.  I guess I just cut myself off from it, like you did with the Force.

Cere had cut herself off from the Force because it wasn’t safe for anyone if she continued using it, but it’s otherwise not a bad comparison.  She doesn’t get the chance to reply, because Cal holds up a finger and keeps writing.  Originally I wasn’t really going to communicate with anybody at all.  At first I couldn’t, every time I tried to speak nothing happened.  Then I decided not to speak ever.  It made me feel safer, knowing no one could make me.  Then I met Prauf and started writing so we could talk and then he convinced me to teach him how to fingerspell, so… we learned sign language, and then I didn’t need to talk.

He's clearly wanted to tell someone all of this for a long time, so Cere hates to interrupt when he immediately goes back to writing, but she does it anyway.  “Wait, wait a second,” she says, putting the bottle down.  “You keep talking like this was a choice you made, but that doesn’t sound like it was entirely voluntary.”

It was.

“Cal, you just told me nothing happened when you tried to talk.”

Cal’s staring again.  Cere hikes an eyebrow, drinks.  When she lowers the bottle, he’s torn his eyes away, but he’s not writing, just gazing at the datapad, digging the stylus into the pad of his thumb.  Maybe it’s the alcohol talking, making her jump to conclusions, but Cere wonders if he convinced himself it was voluntary so long ago he’s forgotten otherwise.  “For the record,” she says, and passes the liquor back over, “trauma-induced mutism is not unheard of.  Either way, I don’t think you ‘faked it’… whatever that would entail.”

He doesn’t respond at first, continues gnawing at his nail.  He finally writes something and turns the datapad so the screen faces her.  But if you’re right, then I don’t know why I stopped.  Cere’s barely finished reading the words when Cal suddenly shakes his head, erases the words, starts over.  If you’re right, then I don’t know why I just accepted it.

“That’s not a question I can answer for you,” she says gently.  “You were a child in a terrible situation you had no control over.  Maybe this felt like something you could still control.”

Cal shrugs.  But it wasn’t something I could control, if it wasn’t voluntary.  Maybe I wanted to punish myself.

He hadn’t done anything he deserved to be punished for, but she thinks he’s beginning to understand that, so she doesn’t bring it up.  “I don’t know, Cal, I wasn’t there.  I guess it’s something you need to figure out for yourself.”

He sighs, swallowing another mouthful of liquor and letting his head fall back against the bulkhead.  Whatever the reason, it’s starting to piss me off.

Nodding, Cere draws her knees up and folds her arms atop them.  “Well, I’m not sure it’ll help,” she says, “but I suppose a reminder couldn’t go amiss…”  She waits for him to meet her eyes, then continues, “You are safe here.  You make the decision what to say when you speak; it generally doesn’t happen against your will.  Mostly.  Sometimes – okay, look, I think the lightsaber screams ‘I’m a Jedi’ louder than you ever could, anyway.  And there’s nothing you could say that’d make us go, well, time to turn him into the Empire now!  I mean, I’m not even sure how that’d work… they’d be very entertained I walked right back into their clutches… and if Greez tried it, we could just space him and steal the ship.”

Greez keeps insisting neither of us have enough hands to fly the ship.

“You have two, I have two… and BD could tell us what to do.  We’d manage.  Also, BD would fight the entire Empire for you, so you have nothing to worry about from him.”  That gets her a flicker of a smile.  “I could probably give better advice if I was sober,” she muses.  “But you’re safe, I promise.  If you want to talk… you can.”

Cal writes, I know, and then they’re both quiet again for a while.  The initial soothing blur of the alcohol is passing, leaving her feeling… well, drunk.  Cere’s the introspective sort of drunk, as Greez could wearily attest.  Last time the two of them got smashed together, he’d later accused her of inventing an entire new school of philosophy and making him have an existential crisis.  Of course, Greez went from gregarious to just plain obnoxious; half the patrons of the cantina had been his best friends by the end of the night, while the other half would’ve formed a mob and beaten him to a pulp were they not too wasted to coordinate.  And one of the angrier customers was some kind of bigshot local politician, so Cere dragged Greez out of there before he caused a legitimate incident, and they’d staggered back to the Mantis, giggly, freed of their burdens for just one evening.

“I can’t.”

It takes a long minute for that to register.  When it does, Cere looks at Cal, then to the bottle in her hand – hm.  Only a mouthful of liquor still splashes around at the bottom.  The Trap claims two more victims.  She shrugs, finishes it off, and leans down to put the empty bottle on the deck.  “Can’t what?”

He still has his head tipped way back, so she can see his throat working as though he’s fighting for this, physically forcing the words out in a threadbare whisper – “Talk.”

“Why not?”

Cal takes a deep, desperate breath, like the effort of speaking three words took everything he had.  He unclenches his hands from around the datapad, signs something Cere has no hope of understanding.  She hadn’t known it was possible to slur in sign language.  Her face must say as much, because he huffs through his nose, starts writing… then stops, frowns at the screen like even he can’t read his handwriting anymore, and switches to typing instead.  I mean I can’t.  I’ve been trying.  It’s like when I was younger and just felt like I was being choked and couldn’t do it.  No matter how hard I try now, it doesn’t work.

“Maybe you’re trying too hard,” she suggests.  He scowls.  “No, listen.  Most people don’t think about speaking, right?  What they’re actually gonna say, yeah, but not the whole… physical component involved.  I could imagine focusing on that so much you stress out and make it impossible for yourself.  You're trying to force yourself to do something you've avoided for years.  Unfortunately, I can’t advise always drinking until it’s not so daunting.”  Again, she gets the small, fleeting smile, which feels like a win.  “…it must have been difficult.”

Cal’s face crumples.  Cere’s heart skips a beat – what if he’s the weepy kind of drunk?  She’s not sure if she’ll go to pieces too or if her long-buried Seeker instincts will kick in and direct her to comfort him – but he doesn’t start to cry, just blinks really fast a bunch of times.  Then, with a care that tells her he’s also realized they’re much more intoxicated than they intended, he sluggishly types, It was.  Sorry for coming in here and whining about my problems.

“I asked,” she reminds him.  “And they’re a nice distraction from my problems, honestly…”  Sighing, she tilts her head back to the bulkhead too, shuts her eyes.  “I should apologize,” she says.  “I’m sorry I lied to you about… what happened with Trilla.  What I did.”  She opens her eyes again, but doesn’t look at Cal.  “I knew trying to find a Jedi would bring me into contact with her, and I thought I was ready, but…”

I’m not upset about it anymore.

“That isn’t the point.  I lied about something you probably had a right to know before you threw your lot in with us.  ‘My Padawan died during the Purge’ and ‘my Padawan is the Inquisitor chasing you because I chose to give her up to the Empire’ are two very different things.  You deserved to know who you were working with.”

The nail Cal’s been chewing on all this time has begun to bleed.  He makes a face at it, rubs his hand on his pants.  You were tortured.

“Is that an excuse for my actions?” Cere asks, mostly rhetorically.  I wish I had more alcohol, actually.

I don’t know.  I think we all want to believe we’d never say anything, but unless we’ve been in that position…  He lets her read that, then continues.  I haven’t been tortured.  One time I got captured and strapped into the chair, even drugged with something I guess would’ve made me cooperate, but then it was Angry Lasat vs. B1s and that fight was weighted pretty heavily in Master Tapal’s favor.

She gives a weak chuckle at that.  “Of course it was.  He would’ve done anything to protect you.”  She doesn’t mean to say the next words, but they slip out – “I should have done the same for her.”

Did you really have a choice?  You told me even when that ‘shadow’ came to interrogate you, you still fought.  So you didn’t just decide you’d had enough and tell them what they wanted to know.

“It doesn’t matter when I did it.  It was done.”  Cere rubs her forehead.  She’s getting a headache, a sure sign she drank too much.  “And now I will never trust myself with the Force again.”

I’m kind of drunk so sorry if this is too blunt, but that’s dumb.  Cere reads that sentence and pauses to raise her eyebrows at him; Cal just shrugs, so she keeps reading.  The dark side isn’t like, sentient or anything, right?  It can’t make you do anything any more than the light side of the Force could.

“That’s true,” she allows, “but you don’t realize what the dark side is like, Cal.”  The temptation.  The rush.  The promises.  The lies.  “Honestly, I’m grateful for that.  I just can’t trust myself.”

You make the decision whether or not to use the dark side, though.  It doesn’t happen against your will.

He doesn’t understand.  It’s sweet of him to try, though.  “I –” Cere stops.  Thinks.  “Wait a minute, weren’t we just talking about you?  Why does some of this sound very familiar?” she asks – more questions she doesn’t really expect any answers to – and sends him a sidelong look.

Cal grins at her, shameless.  Maybe you should try taking your own advice sometime.

“Greez is right,” Cere mutters, shaking her head like she’s exasperated instead of trying not to laugh, because that’ll encourage him.  “You are a brat.  You’re what, twenty?  Still too young to be sassing your elders…”

Pursing his lips, Cal flips over to the Galactic Standard calendar on the datapad – he’s sitting cross-legged now, so she can see what he’s doing – and back, then types, I’ll be eighteen in about three months.

Oh, Cere thinks.  Okay, a bit younger than I thought.  Not too young, not to the point she’d be questioning her decision to put him at the forefront of this mission (or kicking herself for getting a child blitzed), but… “I must’ve had you confused with someone else.  I’d thought you were apprenticed right after the war began.”  Seventeen now means he would’ve been about nine then.  Nine-year-old Humans were, as a rule, not Padawans.  Cere can’t even think of any who’d been ten or eleven in her time.  The only exception she can recall is Skywalker, and he was an extraordinarily unusual case, having come to the Temple late and all.  Cal would have turned twelve near the end of the war, however, and the psychometry might’ve gotten him considered for early apprenticeship.

No, that’s right.

Oh, Cere thinks again.  She might have something to say about that later.  For the time being, the urge to just sleep has settled over her like a heavy blanket, the liquor-fueled haze too thick for nightmares to penetrate.  Cal’s eyes keep drifting shut.  She should send him back to bed.  She closes her own eyes for a second.

This time, when she opens them, it’s to the sour taste of stale liquor lingering on her tongue, a nice headache, and a full bladder.  And Cal curled into a ball at the head of her bunk, cuddling her blanket.  And an empty bottle on the deck Cere accidentally kicks over when she wobbles to her feet.  She manages to pick it up without falling on her butt, turns on Cal’s datapad to check the time – they’ve been asleep maybe half an hour, it’s too early for even Greez to be awake – and stumbles out of her cabin and into the ‘fresher.

After washing her hands, she thoroughly rinses out the liquor bottle, fills it to the brim, and drinks it all.  They’re going to be horrifically hungover one way or another, but she might as well try to alleviate the inevitable misery.  Cere refills the bottle once it’s empty and goes back to her cabin.  Cal hasn’t budged a centimeter, his eyes darting behind their lids, lips slightly parted… she’d just leave him and sleep up top, but that bunk doesn’t have a blanket, he’s currently holding hers hostage, and he’s also drooling all over her pillow.  Cere shakes his shoulder until he blinks awake, pushes the bottle into his hand.  “Drink that,” she orders.  He sits up and stares blankly at it.  “It’s just water.  You’ll thank me later.”

Appearing only semi-conscious, he drinks.  Cere steals the saliva-free pillow from the top bunk and tosses it onto hers.  “You should probably go to bed,” she says.  “We’re both going to pay for this in the morning.”

Cal shrugs a shoulder and finishes the water, typing worked through worse one-handed and without paying attention.  So actually, it says, wirkedd throgh worse, but Cere lets that go.  He gets up, wanders to the door in something that loosely resembles a straight line.

“Cal,” Cere says before he leaves, sitting down on her bed.  He glances at her.  “What we were talking about… do you want to start talking again?  Because believing in yourself is one thing, but I also think you do have to want it.”

He looks thoughtful for a second.  Then he types something and turns the datapad towards her.  I do.

“Okay,” she says.  “I believe in you too.  You’re more than strong enough to do this.”

He nods, half-smiling, rubs one of his eyes.  I believe in you, you know.  And I meant what I said – I’m here if you need me.

It takes him three tries to hit the right button to close the door.  Yeah, we’re gonna suffer tomorrow.  Today.  Whatever, it was worth it.  Cere wraps up in the blanket, shoves the fresh pillow beneath her head, and goes back to sleep.

Chapter Text

“I cannot believe you two got hammered and didn’t invite me!  After everything I’ve done for you guys!”  A couple of mixing bowls clatter together loudly as Greez rummages through the galley compartments.  He takes one down and practically drops it onto the counter, sending a metallic clanging echoing through the ship.  “I coulda brought my own alcohol and everything.  All you had to do was knock on the door and say ‘hey Greez, we’re having a liquor-fueled midnight whine session, wanna come?’ and I would’ve been there in a heartbeat.  What, you think I don’t have any problems of my own I’d like to cry about over spotchka?  Think again!”

Despite the complaining, which has been going on without pause for nearly ten minutes now, Cal’s getting the distinct impression Greez is enjoying himself.  He’s gleefully making enough of a racket to rival fifty stormtroopers, at least.  As if to prove Cal’s theory, the Latero takes out a different mixing bowl, catches the first one with an elbow, and sends it crashing to the deck.  Cere and Cal wince and try to climb into their caf mugs.  Greez gives a painfully insincere “Sorry ‘bout that,” as he’s picking it up and cramming it back in the compartment, scraping it against no less than three other dishes in the process.

“Captain,” Cere mutters, one hand holding up her forehead like she’ll actually fall into her mug otherwise, “I have a blaster.”

“Yeah, and it’s in the cockpit,” Greez says brightly.  “As I was saying – I have all this good alcohol stashed away.  Some of it’s strictly for cooking, but if you’d asked, I would’ve broken out the nice bottle of andoan I’ve been keeping.  Instead, you swilled that crap they use to make Pink Nebula like a couple of baby Academy students getting sloshed behind the speeder garage for the first time in their lives.”  Rather than his favored mixing spoon, which is a pretty, carved piece of wood from Lateron, he grabs a metal one.  Cal gives up on acting tough and covers his ears the moment Greez starts churning the eggs as cacophonously as possible.  Cere looks like she won’t need the blaster soon.  “But fine, whatever, I’m not mad or anything.  I can cope with being left out of all the fun – just remember who’s making your meals, and flying the ship, and keeping everything tidy around here…”

Cere just grunts.  She’s been nursing the same cup of caf for half an hour; apparently, she got out of bed two hours ago to camp in the ‘fresher and suffer through the worst of the hangover.  For his part, Cal does not feel good – he has the fourth-worst non-echo-induced headache of his life, which he knows for a fact because after a certain number of headaches, ranking them became a way to cope – but he didn’t wake up puking or too dizzy to walk or still drunk, which he figures is a positive.  He’s not sure breakfast will go over well with his uneasy stomach, though.  BD-1 is up on the counter, watching Greez stir in the greens and some shredded cheese and a splash of cream before he starts cooking the scrambled eggs.  “Dunno what that means, bud,” Greez says when BD beeps at him.

“He’s asking why drinking poison is considered a recreational activity for organics,” Cere says.

Greez wags the spoon at BD.  “Hey, it’s only poison if you drink too much of it,” he replies.  “Which, luckily, these two dummies didn’t… though it was really stupid of you to get wasted in the first place,” he adds, looking pointedly at Cal.  “We’re gonna reach Dathomir in just a couple more hours and that is not a good place to be hungover.”

“I know, okay?” Cal says.  “We really didn’t plan to drink that much.  The conversation got a little heavy and we weren’t paying attention, and…”  And now his eyelids feel like they’re made of sandpaper, and Greez had to turn the lights as low as possible or else Cal and Cere would’ve mutinied.

BD translates that for Cere, whose eyes aren’t even open.  She gives Greez a much more succinct translation, mumbling, “We know,” then sits up straight and rubs her temples.  “I was thoroughly punished for my hubris at 0400 ship’s time.”

“Serves you right,” Greez says.  He’s nice enough (or thinks they’ve suffered enough) to stop banging around.  Cal folds his arms on the table and lays his sore head on them until breakfast is ready.  He only woke thirty minutes ago, and it was another fifteen before his brain caught up enough to remind him what he and Cere were talking about during their liquor-fueled midnight whine session.  He’d finally been completely honest with her, and she’d made some salient points, most of which Cal needs to take a good long look at once he’s marginally less hungover.  If he tries to do it now, his brain is going down in flames.  Yawning, he tucks his face into the crook of his elbow and dozes to the sound of the eggs crackling in the cooker.

He actually falls asleep, because a plate clunking onto the table snaps him awake.  Greez puts his own plate down, then gives Cere a questioning look – she takes one glance at what’s on offer and blanches.  “No, thank you,” she says quickly, standing up with a grimace.  “I’m just going to go… in there.”  Cere waves towards the corridor and her cabin.  “And… I don’t know.  Ponder.”  She gives Cal a funny look, then, and walks out of the galley, muttering, “Nine years old.  What were they thinking…”

She’s gone before Cal can tell her it’s probably not as bad as she’s picturing.  Really, what kind of master does she think Jaro Tapal was?  At age nine, Cal hadn’t been allowed near any combat that wasn’t an unavoidable space battle, an ambush, or completely accidental.  He was close to twelve before he was permitted on the front lines.  Of course, he’d gone there without permission many times prior to that, but that was Cal being a dumb, reckless kid and not Master Tapal being a poor mentor.

While Greez is happily tucking into his breakfast, Cal picks up a fork and prods a yellow-and-green blob.  Eggs don’t smell great at the best of times and the knee-jerk revulsion is strong.  Fortunately, he’s had quite a lot of practice getting over that.  He takes a bite and it doesn’t send him racing for the ‘fresher, so he risks another, and another… and suddenly his plate is empty.  Twice.  “Guess you’re the hungry-hangover type,” Greez observes, tossing Cal the last piece of toast.  “Cere’s the nauseous type, obviously.  Me… I pretty much never get hangovers.  Heh.”

Shrugging, Cal slops some jam over the toast and crunches into it.  Cere drank more of the liquor than Cal did and he’s both taller and heavier than her, so that probably helped.  Also, after he left her cabin last night, he made himself throw up the alcohol still in his stomach – a trick he’d learned back in the day when he needed to be sure he was sober before work started in the morning.  Now if only he could lose the headache.  “BD,” he says to the droid, “I’m going to take a shower.  Could you come by the engine room afterwards?  I think I need your help with something.”

BD-1 (who is, at this point, outright flaunting his newfound ability to hang out on the galley counters without Greez physically removing him) agrees.  Cal goes up to the ‘fresher, swallows two ibuprofen dry, and takes a proper water shower for a change, steaming the last of the hangover away.  Afterwards, he checks their ETA – just over two hours to realspace – and returns to the engine room, where BD is waiting.  The droid immediately asks what Cal needs from him.

“I’m not completely sure yet,” Cal admits, massaging the back of his neck and wincing.  He’s stiff all over.  “Give me a couple minutes to think about it, okay?  I need to move or Dathomir’s going to kick my ass…”. BD agrees, settles on the workbench to observe while Cal sits on the deck and stretches out his legs.

Some of the conversation with Cere is a tad fuzzy, particularly near the end, but he remembers the relevant stuff.  He’d told her he can talk.  She… hadn’t seemed surprised, in hindsight, which he might need to ask about sometime.  Then again, she did know Master Tapal, who would’ve been floored to learn his chatterbox of an apprentice had gone mute.  He might’ve told her Cal never shut up.  Regardless, that’s not important at the moment.  She’d floated the possibility Cal had stopped speaking not because he thought it was necessary, but because he found himself suddenly incapable and just… went with it.  And while Cere probably doesn’t realize it, and Cal feels remarkably stupid for not realizing it sooner, she has a point.  At twelve, he was still somewhat inclined to give up on things that he couldn’t master quickly – or do at all.  Master Tapal rarely stood for it, so Cal’s threshold for failure had climbed quite a bit over his three-year apprenticeship, but under those circumstances he thinks anyone could’ve fallen back on old habits.

“It did make me feel better,” he says.  BD gives a confused twitter, so Cal adds, “Not talking.  It felt safer and I didn’t have much safety.  And I think Cere’s right – again – that I wanted to have control over something.  I just never acknowledged that I hadn’t chosen this because if I did, that meant I wasn’t actually controlling it.”  Had he subconsciously intended to punish himself, too?  He’d been so talkative around his master and the clone troopers, and as soon as he had enough sign language to ramble on about whatever came to mind, he often talked Prauf’s ear off too, in a manner of speaking.  “I don’t know.  Maybe I’ll never know exactly.  But I don’t want to do this anymore.”

Okay, BD says, still sounding puzzled.

“Sorry, I’m talking to myself.”  He feels pretty loose and limber now, so Cal gets to his feet.

He’d spoken to Cere last night.  Sure, he was tired and drunk, and while he could go through life tired, the drunk part is potentially problematic, and it’d still felt like he was being strangled the entire time… but he’d done it.  He can do it again.  A plan is forming in his head – if Cere’s right (and when isn’t she?), Cal’s trying too hard.  Time to take a page out of Master Yoda’s book, it seems.  “BD, I need you to be Greez for me.”

Sounds appalling, BD says cheerfully.

“I mean talk to me – about whatever, I don’t care – even if I don’t answer.  I’m going to keep myself occupied.”  Cal closes the door and unhooks his lightsaber from his belt.  He’s not too shabby with a single lightsaber, and between watching Master Tapal for years and meditating as best he can on the echoes left behind in the hilt, he at least has a basic grasp on double-bladed ‘saber combat… dual-wielding is a new one, however.  Cal’s knowledge of proper lightsaber form is restricted to Shii-Cho, as that’s what he was taught as a youngling and a Padawan.  He doesn’t know a damn thing about Jar’Kai, so he’s just making it up – he made up a bunch of sign language too, though, and that’s worked out pretty well for him, so why not?

BD-1, taking an interest, asks if he’s going to turn it on.  Cal shakes his head, to the droid’s disappointment.  It’s much more exciting that way, BD complains.

“Greez would carve out my heart with the Good Spoon if he came in here and found lightsaber marks on the walls,” Cal tells BD, who reluctantly concedes the point.  “I’m going to practice for a while.  So just talk to me, okay?  If you need a topic to start you off, I’d still like to know why Greez was suggesting you look up hot synthetic singles in your area.”

Oh, that’s a good one, BD says.  So he was standing in the galley, minding his own business, and apparently somehow still underfoot while Greez was trying to make lunch – this was back when Greez started screeching the second BD got within a meter of the food – and therefore a collision between BD’s head and Greez’s knee really was unavoidable…

BD talks.  Cal slowly works through the most basic lightsaber patterns he can recall, attempting to adapt them to two lightsabers.  In theory, it’s simple; in practice, he always has to remind himself that what would be a strong strike or parry with a two-handed grip will be significantly weaker with one hand, and he really has to pay attention to what his other hand is doing or else he’s going to chop off another body part by accident.  He focuses on that but keeps one ear on BD, because responding without using his hands is the eventual goal here.  And maybe he’ll hit Greez with a saucepan, too.  Were you trying to corrupt my droid, my datapad, or both?  Fingers locked around the hilts of his ‘sabers, Cal mouths the words.  He's been doing that a lot lately while he signs, because Cere lip-reads fairly well and it’s helping her pick up the language faster.

With extremely limited space in here, Cal has to keep all of his movements close, lest he punch a bulkhead or knock everything off the workbench.  He plans his patterns several steps ahead, which is another thing to focus on besides speaking.  BD, having warmed to his role as Greez Jr., finishes the story and swiftly launches into another.  Wait, go back a second, when exactly was this?  The words won’t come, so Cal leaves them in his mouth and doesn’t force it.  He already knows that doesn’t work and probably just contributes to the anxiety.

His footwork is getting sloppy.  Cal tightens it up, imagining Master Tobak’s reaction if she was watching him now – Initiate Kestis, you are practicing a traditional pattern, not sparring.  Once you’ve demonstrated mastery of the pattern, then you have my blessing to put your own spin on it; until then, control.  Are you holding an ordinary vibroblade, or a lightsaber?

He did feel bad for some of the other droids sometimes, BD says, but it was a matter of practicality, not favoritism.  Besides, his trips with Cordova were not always fun and games.  On one of their earlier visits to Kashyyyk, BD had been terrorized by a dangerous pack of those small, furry, overexcited creatures the Wookiees called children – Cal laughs, breathless, soundless.  You were ‘terrorized’ by a bunch of little Wookiees?  Still nothing.  He’s as close to meditating as he can get without actually meditating, open to the Force and letting it guide his clumsy movements, even when it deviates from the pattern.  Master Tobak might’ve sighed and given him that you’re very talented at lightsaber combat and trying my patience look, but she wasn’t trying to make this work with a lightsaber in each hand.

Sure, you laugh now, BD mutters.  Has Cal ever had the pleasure of being squeezed until he thought his circuits would pop?  One of the fuzzy menaces even wanted to toss him out of a tree to see if BD was flight-capable.  Fortunately, an older female in the group put a stop to that.  Then she’d cuddled him, too. 

Let go of what you fear to lose.  Breaking his silence means losing the last scrap of safety he’s clung to for the last five years.  He’s strong enough to survive it.  He can do this.

Anyway, BD was deeply relieved when Tarfful finished his meeting with some of his people and came to speak with Cordova, and BD was finally freed from the children’s grasp.  Bunch of hooligans, honestly… he still hopes some of them have survived the Imperial occupation.

“Me too.”

It’s barely a whisper.  It’s barely a breath, a coincidence, mouthing the words at just the right time as he exhaled – but kriff, it’s something.  He throat feels tight and he doesn’t know if it’s the usual nerves or just a surge of emotion.  BD gives a little hop; Cal gestures for him to keep talking.  He lost his place in this pattern.  He starts again.

Anyway, speaking of the other droids who used to live at Cordova’s workshop, BD says, there was this one guy.  Astromech.  Went by R4-R8, and insisted the rest of the droids refer to him by his full designation, but allowed Cordova to call him R4.  And he thought he was so great, with his big bulky cylindrical body and his manipulators and his fancy-schmancy upgraded scomp link…

Never heard a droid say ‘schmancy’ in Binary before.  The words get stuck again.  Oh well.  Keep failing.  There is a decent chance he’s going to run into the Nightsister – or, more likely, she’ll track him down and enchant Nightbrothers at him – and while she was too angry to care about his silence the first time, he would like to talk to her now.  “Actually –” that might work.  Distractions do work.  Would she mind him hacking parts off her zombified sisters during the conversation?

He doesn’t want to talk to Taron Malicos, though.  The guy knows enough Binary to stumble through BD-1’s translations.  Cal has a sinking feeling Malicos isn’t coming back from wherever he’s gone during the past five years, anyway, which is honestly a pity – it isn’t too late, and they could use another Jedi, but he seems well and truly entrenched as the Nightbrothers’ twisted leader.  If he tries to get in the way when Cal’s looking for the Astrium… well, Cal isn’t going to start something, but he will end it.  The Ninth Sister can attest to that.

“BD,” Cal says in that bare whisper.  The stop for a sec doesn’t make it out, but the droid clearly catches on, because he pauses the tale of his epic grudge match with R4-R8.  Just when it was getting good, too.  He’ll have to ask for the rest later.  “I think…”

It’s hard to remember being a little Padawan and talking to anyone who’d listen (or at least pretend to).  He’s just trying to talk to his best friend and he can only do it in fits and starts, breathing a couple words, pausing to allow the instinctive, suffocating anxiety to pass.  Cal really did a number on himself, didn’t he?  Sure, his initial mutism might’ve come about as a result of trauma from the Purge, but refusing to even try after those first few failures couldn’t have helped.  And then he’d taken it further, soothing his fears by being as silent as possible at all times.  Eventually, he didn’t wake screaming from even his worst nightmares.

What’s done is done.  He isn’t afraid of what he might say anymore.  He is probably going to fail constantly while he works to regain this part of himself, and that’s a good thing.  As long as he’s headed in the right direction… “My master –” Cal pauses, shakes out his arms, looks down at the lightsabers in his hands, “– he taught me that.”

It doesn’t make much sense without context.  BD tips his head to the side and gives an encouraging chirp nevertheless.  “He taught me a lot of things I’ve… kinda been ignoring lately.”

Out in the hallway, a door opens and shuts, and the sound sends a jolt of adrenaline through his limbs and makes everything else Cal wanted to say dry up in his throat.  He doesn’t know if he can talk to, or even around, other people yet.  And although nobody could hear – he can hardly hear himself over the hyperdrive humming – the panic threatens.  Instead of pushing it, he puts his lightsabers down and switches back to signing.  “I think he’d understand why I did it, but he wouldn’t want me to wallow.  He’d expect me to keep moving forwards.”

The corridor is quiet again.  Cal swallows, wishing he’d thought to bring some water in with him, and gives it another shot; on the third attempt, he whispers, “I’m just scared, I guess.  I –”  He stops and takes a couple deep breaths.  Just BD.  You’re doing good.  Come on.  “I don’t have control over this.  I’m not – losing anything, but –”  Sighing, he swaps back to sign language again.  “I feel like I’m losing control over something that I thought kept me safe for a long time.”

As huffily as a droid who only speaks Binary can, BD informs Cal he should not be scared of anything, because BD will obviously fight anything that frightens him. 

Cal has to smile, and signs, “The problem here is really my own brain.”

Well, BD says, they could always give that brain surgery Greez mentioned a shot, kick it out of there, and then BD could fight it into cooperating.  Cal shouldn’t have a problem after that.

“Overkill,” Cal whispers, but he’s still grinning.  He loves BD so much.  And for all the nerves, the fear of letting go, he feels good.  Weightless.  Like if he meditated right now, he could truly, fully connect with the Force without anything, even himself, in his way… so he does, kneeling on the deck while he’s panting and sweaty, closing his eyes.

For a few minutes, everything falls into place.  Cal’s no longer having flashbacks to his master’s death when he meditates, and there is nothing between him and the Force anymore.  He doesn’t know what’s going to happen in the tomb on Dathomir – or on Dathomir in general, since that planet really enjoys keeping people on their toes – but he’s ready to face it.  He can still speak, and he’s going to continue working on it until the muteness is a thing of the past, no matter how long it takes.

Then Greez comes on the shipwide comm and ruins the moment.  “Hey, kid!” he calls over the line.  Cal opens his eyes.  “We’re gonna be landing in a few, so get your butt up here!”

Rather than take another shower, Cal just splashes some cold water on his face and the back of his neck.  He’s going to sweat to death on Dathomir anyway.  When he leaves the ‘fresher and meets up with BD in the corridor, he signs, “Listen, don’t tell the others what we were up to in there, all right?  Not really ready for that yet.”  The thought of speaking to Cere or Greez is overwhelming.  Maybe someday he’ll be able to just casually ask them to pass the podpoppers at dinner.  Could be funny if he can keep them in the dark long enough beforehand.  For the time being, he’ll stick to sign language… besides, he can’t see himself ever giving it up entirely.  If nothing else, it’s useful for silent communication with BD when they’re out in the field.  He won’t miss writing all the time, though.  Except, since he’s been writing all the time, his handwriting is actually a smidge less shitty than it was a few months ago.  Now there’s something that’d shock Master Tapal, Cal thinks, heading up to the cockpit.  It was the one thing his master couldn’t get him to budge on (even the six-food limit got pushed when they ate together).  He’d hated practicing writing.

“About time,” Greez mumbles as Cal sits in his seat and swivels it towards the controls.  “I can’t believe you’re making me go back to this place.  I can’t believe I agreed.  If I see one more corpse climbing my ship… really, why do we have to go back?”

“The Astrium,” Cere reminds him.  She looks somewhat recovered from the midnight whine session; at least, her face isn’t an unsettling shade of grey anymore.

“Couldn’t we just call a locksmith instead?”

Actually, I’m just going there to piss off the local Nightsister again.  Cal tosses the datapad to Greez, who reads it and grimaces.

“I think I’m gonna keep the engines running this time,” he mutters, handing the datapad back.  “You know.  For my health… peace of mind… sanity…”

The Mantis slides out of hyperspace like she was never there at all, making Cal’s ears pop, and Dathomir looms red and furious before them.  Greez sighs, taking them in without another complaint.  Cal rolls his eyes at BD when the droid brightly reminds him he has a very comprehensive map of their landing pad and the surrounding area, and Cal should remember it exists this time instead of swearing the tomb is this way, I know where I’m going and walking straight into another nydak nest.

“You have so little faith in me,” Cal tells BD.

He has plenty of faith in Cal, BD insists.  Just not in Cal’s ability to navigate his way out of a ‘fresher without help.

Cal huffs and leans back in his seat, eyes on the scanners so Greez is happy even though the likelihood of enemy spacecraft surprising them here is basically nil.  Which, he supposes, would make it all the more surprising if one showed up.  “Thank you,” he says.  “For talking to me back there.  It helped a lot.”

BD trills affectionately, headbutting Cal’s shoulder, and tells him it was no trouble at all. 

Greez is muttering under his breath about making them an easy target, but apparently their options are limited, so he sets the ship down in the same spot as last time.  “You be careful out there, you hear?” he orders, jabbing a finger at Cal, then goes wandering into the lounge, murmuring, “We’ll be fine… we’ll be fine…”

Cere shakes her head as Cal pulls his boots on and BD-1 leaps onto his back.  “You might want to go light on the zombies this time,” she says dryly.  “For Greez’s sake.”  Cal grins at her and she stands.  “May the Force be with you.”

It is.  For the first time in a long time, when Cal steps out onto Dathomir’s ruddy bluffs, he’s truly unafraid of what may await him.

Unfortunately for Greez, what awaits is a number of undead Nightsisters lurking around practically every corner.  Since they’re already long gone, Cal doesn’t feel too bad about cutting them down when they rush at him; he half-hopes that Nightsister will pop up out of nowhere to berate him for desecrating the dead or something, but she doesn’t show her face.

He does not get assaulted by another chirodactyl.  Sometimes the galaxy has mercy on Cal and his ribs and his loose shoulder.  He does get assaulted by a pair of Haxion Brood bounty hunters who were either desperate enough to risk Dathomir, stupid enough to risk Dathomir, or both.  Sure, a couple of mercs show up to cause trouble, and that’s fine, Cal thinks, dodging the hunter’s flamethrower because of-karking-course she has a flamethrower, but I do it and a coven’s worth of dead witches gets reanimated to rip me limb from limb… Where’s the Nightsister when he actually needs her?  Watching the show from a distance with a bowl of cracknuts, probably.

Wow, BD says when both bounty hunters are down for the count, that was fun.

“Yeah.”  Cal whispers it aloud without thinking about it, feels his heart give a little surge that’s equal parts apprehension and delight.  And pain.  He grits his teeth, puts that loose shoulder back in, injects a stim into his arm to soothe the abused joint and the burns where his sleeve caught fire, and moves on into the tomb.

Master Tapal comes to him again, still cold and accusatory as he never was in life.  This time, his words of condemnation don’t find a foothold.  He is not real.  Cal has forgiven himself for his childhood mistakes, let go of what he fears to lose, learned from his failures.  “I will honor your teaching,” he says, “and your sacrifice,” and means every word.

And because Master Tapal knows him well, he leaves Cal with one last piece of advice.  “Persistence reveals the path,” he says – a reminder that failure is part of the process, something he told Cal over and over until Cal learned to embrace it.  Then he’s gone, alive only in Cal’s memories and the echoes in his lightsaber.

And then Cal gets assaulted by Nightbrothers.  Must be Primeday.

BD, who can see significantly further in the distance than Cal, gives a precautionary whirr as they’re squeezing through a tight gap in the tomb wall.  The lunatic with the lightsabers is just ahead, he warns.  Cal nods grimly, ducking a few thick roots twisting out of the rock.  He figured he’d have to deal with Malicos sooner or later.  He’d hoped for later, preferably after he knew for sure whether or not Kujet had one last Astrium concealed in his tomb, but it looks like it’s time for the inevitable confrontation.

Five steps later, the hair on the back of his neck stands up and Cal automatically ignites his lightsaber, whirling around.  No one’s sneaking up on him… at least, no one he can see.

“You chose to return.”

The Nightsister’s voice echoes strangely in the cavernous tomb, bouncing at him from every direction at once.  “Brave,” she says, and Cal turns back, turns again just in time to see her materialize from thin air.  “But not wise.”

She’s not quite so elaborately garbed, now.  With her face and hair uncovered, she looks close to Cal’s own age; he doesn’t trust Malicos’s words much more than he trusts Trilla’s, but he can believe she was only a kid when she lost everything.  He holds up his lightsaber so she can see it, then demonstratively turns it off.

Okay.  He can do this.  His throat feels tight – not choking him, not yet, just warning this could be too much too soon – so for a couple seconds, Cal focuses on breathing, and the Nightsister simply watches him.  As the silence lingers on, she raises an eyebrow.  She’s not actively attempting to separate his spine from the rest of his body, but Cal’s life may literally depend on his next words.  BD rests his head on Cal’s shoulder in a quiet show of support.

“Hi.”

The other eyebrow joins the first.  Cal’s heart is going to storm out there and take on Malicos without help, at this rate, but he has to resist the impulse to start bouncing on his toes like an overexcited youngling.  Slow breaths.  Don’t think about the action, just the words.  “It’s – Merrin, right?”

Instead of confirming or denying the fact, she tips her head a few degrees to one side.  “I can hardly hear you.”

Now he chokes.  He wants to tell her deal with it, I only started talking again this morning, the whisper is about all I can muster at the moment.  She doesn’t know he spent five years mute, though, which makes this a tiny bit easier, as she has no expectations of him (except to be a thief and a liar, apparently).  He doesn’t want to stand here and scorch words into the rock to communicate with her.  Sighing, Cal squeezes his hands together for a second, signs to BD, “Starting to wish I hadn’t quit smoking.”

He did and he’s going to stay that way, BD says sternly.  Or else BD will be removing his lungs, too, because he’s mistreated them enough already and they’ll deserve a turn beating up Cal’s brain.

The Nightsister watches this exchange with slightly narrowed eyes, but she strikes Cal as confused more than hostile.  She doesn’t say anything else, giving him time to unstick his throat and try again.  First attempt is a bust – he only produces a wheezy squeak that makes her blink and BD chitter with amusement.  The second goes better.  “Merrin,” he repeats. 

She does nod this time.  Okay, he thinks again, a little more confidently.  Might as well be upfront with her.  “Sorry, I don’t usually…”  He loses the word, gestures towards his mouth.  It’s okay.  He can do this.  “I’m Cal Kestis.”

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?”

Chapter Text

Later, when Greez revisits his memory of this moment, he’ll think he’s subconsciously edited it to make himself seem much less terrified than he actually was.  Wouldn’t be the first time.  Usually he does it consciously, because he’s a good storyteller and most good stories have a bit of embellishment to them.  But in this moment, hovering above Nur’s ocean with the controls in his hands and his eyes glued to the monstrous eyesore that is Fortress Inquisitorius, he is not afraid.  This is the least afraid he’s ever been, in fact.  The entire galaxy has contracted down to a microcosm, centered on him, the Mantis, and his friends, somewhere out of his reach.

Just seconds ago, he had had company.  Greez and Merrin stayed on the ship as planned and she worked her crazy green magic, keeping them out of sight and mind and sensors as he quietly slipped into the atmosphere.  He couldn’t reach the terminal and Merrin didn’t look like she should be interrupted, so Greez stayed in his seat with a commlink at hand, waiting.  Aside from Cere’s initial report that she was inside and had made contact with Cal, there was nothing.  Greez waited as long as he dared before trying her and getting no response; he pinged Cal’s commlink twice, and didn’t even get some incomprehensible Binary noises to let him know they were still alive.  On the third try, however, the line finally connected and BD chirped.  They had, wisely, worked out a code beforehand – the good old ‘one beep for yes, two beeps for no’ system.  Yes, he and Cal were okay.  Yes, they’d retrieved the holocron, yes, they were on their way out and would need a pickup ASAP.

No, Cere was not with them.

No.  She would not be coming.

Merrin didn’t believe him.  Greez didn’t have time to think about it.  He just felt like throwing up as he brought the ship down as close to the water and the Fortress as he dared.  A minute or two later, Merrin abruptly said (with her voice still echoing like thirty people were speaking from deep within a cavern), “Something is wrong.”

“Yeah,” Greez had replied shakily, “but we gotta –”

“No,” she interrupted.  “Something is very wrong.”  She’d looked at him then, wisps of green light curling straight out of her eyes.  “I have to go get them.”

“You –”  He’d cut himself off, that time.  She could teleport, apparently.  She could get Cal and BD, bring them back, Greez would bang out of here and… he didn’t know what was next.  He didn’t know if he could retreat without solid confirmation Cere was dead.  “Okay.”

“When I leave the ship, we will no longer be hidden,” she warned him, standing up and slipping that chunk of crystal back into her pocket.

“Yeah,” Greez said again.  “I’ll be ready.”

She’d promptly vanished, green flames obscuring her body into nothingness.  Teleportation indeed.  And now Greez is alone, his hands steady, expecting a response from the Fortress the second they realize there’s an unidentified craft in their backyard.  If Cere managed to knock out their scanners, it may take a minute for them to actually pinpoint the Mantis’s position, but there’s no chance he’ll go unnoticed.

Sure enough, a bright red blip pops up on his scopes.  Two.  Three.  TIE Fighters, most likely; the Mantis is totally outgunned, but Greez has a couple tricks up his sleeve and a hell of a lot of righteous fury at this entire fretching Empire.  Let ‘em try it.  At the same time, though, he thinks, come on, Merrin, come on… because for all her freaky witchitude, he’s pretty sure she’s legit about helping them, and given the option to save his friends or deal a small blow to the Empire’s endless fleet of ugly murder machines, he’s choosing the former every time.

A BANG from behind him almost makes Greez jump out of his chair.  Concentration broken, he spins his seat around, half-expecting a hole blown in the side of his ship – instead, he sees a whole lot of water flooding the deck in the lounge.  And Merrin, sopping wet and struggling out from beneath Cal, who seems to be dead weight, shouts, “Go!”

He doesn’t need telling twice.  Greez guns the engines and the Mantis jets towards the open sky just as the first TIE comes screaming around the side of the Fortress, firing its lasers in a wide spread.  He diverts power to the aft shields and they absorb the shots that make contact, taking a beating, hanging in there.  Then he cants the ship’s fin to the side and banks hard.  A lesser ship would’ve snapped in two.  The TIE, not expecting that much maneuverability from its prey, roars past.  “Heh,” Greez says, completing the loop and locking his own cannons on the target.  “Chump.”

The unshielded TIE explodes like a firework.  Greez isn’t worried about the other two, he’s certain he can jump before they’re in range – but then he glances at the scanner and his stomach shrivels into an ice cube.  Behind those two TIEs is a sea of red blobs.  Time to go.  He activates the hyperdrive, doesn’t bother programming a destination, letting it fall back on their previous route.  He’ll figure it out once they’re well away from this place – he glances up again and –

The open sky is not so open anymore.  One of the Star Destroyers formerly orbiting Nur is descending directly on top of them.

Greez looks at the monitor and a single second smears out to a lifetime.  He can make that jump.  One more second and they won’t, they’ll rip through that Destroyer at the speed of light, or be blown to smithereens by its cannons, or the Imps will take Cal and Cere and probably Merrin and turn them into more Inquisitors and break BD down to scrap.  They’ll just kill an ordinary guy like Greez.  He’ll never see his friends again. 

He doesn’t even make a conscious decision.  Greez just grabs the lever and punches it.

An instant later, they’re gone.

No time for relief.  Greez is out of his seat so fast he almost falls face-first into the viewport.  He bolts into the lounge like an Inquisitor’s on his tail, almost falls again thanks to the water splattered all across the deck, and stops in his tracks.  Merrin and BD-1 have rolled Cal onto his back and are leaning over him.  But that captures only a fraction of Greez’s attention – the rest has zeroed in on the other body Merrin’s brought back.  Cere is sprawled bonelessly at his feet, eyes closed, mouth… clamped around a rebreather.

Dead bodies don’t need to breathe underwater.  Greez drops to his knees next to her.  Merrin was right, BD was wrong – she’s alive, she’s breathing, her skin is warm to the touch when Greez works the rebreather out from between her teeth.  A second later, she begins to cough.  He tosses the device aside (great inventions, but of debatable use when the user isn’t conscious and can’t suppress the instinct to breathe through their nostrils) and, grunting, heaves her over onto her side so she doesn’t aspirate.  Now his hands are shaking as he pats her down, forgetting to be delicate about it, searching for injuries.

Aside from some nasty burns on her hands – her fingers and palms are brilliant red and bubbling with blisters – there’s nothing.  BD was wrong.  She coughs a few more times, expelling a mouthful or two of water, then quiets, breathing deeply.  Greez folds over until his forehead’s resting on her shoulder.  She’s okay.  Not dead.

“Move,” Merrin abruptly snaps, and Greez’s head jerks up before he realizes she’s not talking to him.  BD goes scrambling back, twittering, clearly in a complete panic.  Merrin gets up on her knees and places both hands on Cal’s chest, one atop the other, arms straight like she’s about to perform CPR or something.

Cere’s breathing.  Cal isn’t.  Greez stops.  Stupid karking kid musta given her his own rebreather – he scrambles over Cere, but there’s nothing he can do except grab the restless droid and keep him out of the way as Merrin orders, “Breathe.”  Glowing green tendrils start leaking out of her hands again, disappearing into the air, burrowing into Cal’s chest like worms.  “Breathe… come on…”  She mutters a few words that mean nothing to Greez, then snaps, “Breathe!”

Cal’s entire body jolts like his heart stopped on some medical holodrama, the ones even a dumb schlub like Greez knows are wrong because you don’t defibrillate someone with no heartbeat.  His back actually arches up off the deck, slams down with a thud that makes Greez wince.  He doesn’t breathe.  Merrin snarls something that sounds like profanity, presses her hands to his chest again.

The noise Cal makes is not far off from that one from so long ago, when Greez woke him up from a nightmare and he’d smothered his own screams, but this time it’s followed by choking and retching, and Greez has never heard anything better.  Letting BD go, he helps Merrin roll Cal onto his side as well.  Cal has a lot more water in his lungs – and his stomach – than Cere did, so it takes a while, and there’s a wet, raspy quality to his respiration Greez does not like, but he’s breathing.

Greez and Merrin look at each other.  She looks at BD, who’s making a cacophonous fuss over Cal.  Greez glances over his shoulder at Cere, who’s still out.

“Did they get it?” Merrin asks.

Greez opens his mouth to ask get what, remembers, realizes they’re staring directly at it and Merrin probably doesn’t know what a holocron looks like.  The green and gold cube is secure at Cal’s hip, strapped onto his belt.  It’s so secure Greez has a hard time freeing it.  Probably smart – if they went through all this just to lose the damn thing in the ocean, he would’ve given up and retired to the far reaches of Wild Space.  “Yeah,” he says, gazing at the holocron in his hand and then plunking it on the lounge table.  “They got it.” 

Merrin exhales, shoulders slumping, looks down at Cal again, puts a hand on his sodden side.  BD screeches and headbutts her arm away, bouncing and squealing like there’s something he’s desperately trying to tell them.  They both stare at him, now.

Merrin’s blank expression suddenly collapses into alarm.  She flips Cal onto his back without warning.  “What are you –” Greez starts, but she ignores him, running her hands over his chest until she finds a hole in his vest, on the lower left side of his ribcage.  The edges are scorched black.  So is his shirt, and his skin – “Oh, fuck,” Greez says, trying to figure out how to get the heavy leather vest off, “he got shot –”

“No.”  Merrin’s voice is so thin it hardly sounds like her.  “I have seen these kinds of wounds before.  This is not… this was a lightsaber.”

BD gives a whine.  Greez is about to need that defibrillator.  “Oh, fuck,” he says again.

Through a lot of fumbling, tugging, and possibly a bit of magick, they get the vest off Cal.  Greez pushes his shirt up to expose the wound and swears some more, sickened.  Is there a degree beyond third to describe what a lightsaber does to Human skin?  This kid has an actual hole burnt in him, everything inside and around it is blackened, spirits know what’s happened to any ribs or organs that might’ve gotten in the way… all Greez knows about Human anatomy is the heart’s in the middle, behind the breastbone, and this wound isn’t anywhere near it.  Could’ve clipped a lung, though.  Greez can’t stand to lose Cal any more than he could stand to lose Cere.  He presses a trembling hand to the boy’s cheek for a second, wills him to wake up and brush off this injury like he usually does and tell them he’s okay.  Aside from his chest heaving with every rattling gasp, Cal is still.  “If that witchcraft of yours can heal a man,” Greez says weakly, “this’d be a good time.”

“I am not a healer,” Merrin says.  “I don’t have anything I’d need – but –”

“But?”

“…I can try.”

“Then do it,” Greez tells her.  He jumps to his feet, glances at Cere again – still not conscious, still breathing all right.  “I’m gonna get some stuff from the medical cabinet.  Do – whatever you can, then I’ll douse him in bacta and bandage him up good, and…”  He sighs.  “We hope for the best.”

When he comes back from the ‘fresher, laden down with everything he thinks might help, BD is crouched behind Cal’s head, Merrin kneeling at his side with her hands cupped over the lightsaber wound.  She’s not looking at him – her head is tilted up towards the ceiling, eyes half-lidded and rolled back so all Greez can see is white.  Every exhalation sounds like wind rushing through a tunnel, a thousand people breathing in tandem, green light coiling out of her mouth.  It’s one of the more disturbing things he’s witnessed in his life.  If she’d actually needed an arm from Greez this time, he probably would’ve offered it.  He stays out of her way, checks on Cere again; unconscious, but her respiration sounds okay and her pulse is strong and steady beneath Greez’s fingers.  He brought some burn gel and bandages with him, so he dumps his burdens onto the table and gets to work treating her hands.

Greez finishes with that before Merrin is done.  Cere’s a bit too big for him to move on his own without risking her skull, so he leaves her there, slips a couch cushion under her head, grabs some towels and mops up as much of the seawater around her as he can.  He double-checks for any evidence of a head injury, even just a funny lump that shouldn’t be there, because if that’s the cause of her extended unconsciousness they’ve got a serious problem.  His gentle fingers find nothing hidden beneath her hair.  She’s just… unconscious.  Too much Force stuff, possibly?  Cal gets migraines from that sort of thing – maybe she overexerted herself.  She’ll be fine, though.  She has to be.  They both have to be.

Merrin suddenly groans.  Greez’s head snaps around and he sees her slump, chin falling to her chest, the light show ending as she braces her elbows on Cal’s chest like she can’t hold herself up otherwise.  “Well?” he demands, rushing to her side.

Between greedy gulps of air, Merrin pants, “I think – I might’ve helped?  It wasn’t as deep – as I feared – still bad.  I think I fixed some of it.  I’m not – a healer.”  She curls her arms in, away from the lightsaber wound, and… it doesn’t look much different to him, but he’s even less of a healer than she is.  Besides, if the worst of the damage was internal, better to repair that and let him handle the surface stuff.

“Okay,” Greez says, shaking all his hands out.  “Okay.”  He pats Merrin’s shoulder.  He pats BD too for good measure, even though the droid’s just been sitting silently with his optics fixed on Cal’s face.  “You did good.  Let me do the rest.”

Nodding, Merrin scoots back across the floor until she’s leaning against the table, and Greez takes her place with the bottle of high-quality concentrated bacta in one hand and a sponge he will definitely be throwing away later in the other.  This part isn’t pretty.  Even just a delicate brush of the bacta-soaked sponge across the wound causes charred bits of flesh to flake off.  Fibers from his shirt have melted to his skin.  Biting his tongue hard to repress his gag reflex, Greez tries to clean it up, sloshing bacta into this hole and praying no vital arteries have been cauterized or anything.  He can’t get too close or a smell similar to burned roba bacon cuts through the astringent sweetness of the bacta.  Looks like that’s roba off the menu forever, he thinks, sick to his stomach and pushing on anyway because there’s pretty much nothing he wouldn’t do for his weird makeshift family at this point.

“Merrin,” he finally says, “I left a square plastoid packet on the table.  That’s the bandage – wanna grab it for me?”  He hears rustling, and then she presses it into his outstretched hand.  “Thanks.”  He starts to open it, pauses at a moan from behind him.

“Greez,” Merrin says, “Cere’s –”

He gets his head turned just far enough to see Cere’s heavily-bandaged hand lift, and the next thing he knows, he’s been hit by an invisible brick wall.  It’s not a strong shove or throw or whatever she’s half-consciously trying to do, but it does smack him down so he’s sprawling across Cal’s chest and knock BD back a good meter or two.  “Hey, hey!” he yelps, pushing himself up before he does more damage to the kid, spinning around on his knees.  “It’s all right, you’re safe!”

Cere doesn’t seem to hear him.  She’s more wild-eyed than he’s seen her even after her worst nightmares, lurching to her feet; Merrin swiftly gets up too and hovers nearby, looking wary.  “Cere,” Greez tries again, raising all his hands as Cere’s gaze snaps to him, “it’s okay.  We’re all okay.”  Mostly.  “You’re on the Mantis.”

His words must get through, because she looks around as if seeing the place for the first time.  “The holocron?” she says faintly.

Greez nods towards the table.  “Right there.”

Cere follows his gaze and touches a quivering hand to the cube.  Then, as if the relief’s sapped all of her strength at once, her knees buckle; she doesn’t go crashing down only because Merrin darts forwards and catches her under the arms, lowers her gingerly to sit on the deck.  “Thanks,” Cere murmurs, rubbing at her eyes.  She keeps blinking hard like she can’t keep them focused.  “I feel… terrible.”  She shakes her head.  “Cal?”

“He’s a little hurt.  He’ll be fine,” Greez says, hoping it’s true.  “Just gotta finish fixing him up… maybe you should, uh, go get some clothes that aren’t drenched?  And some sleep.  I think you need to rest.”  Even seated, she’s swaying like she’s drunk.

Cere shakes her head, though she’s apparently trying to keep herself awake rather than refusing.  “Where are we going…?”

“Uh.”  Greez glances at the cockpit.  “I just had it slingshot us back towards Bogano, actually… soon as I’m done here, I’ll reprogram the course.  Don’t worry about it.”  He exchanges a look with Merrin.  “Seriously, Cere, we’re good.  You sleep and I’ll keep an eye on Cal ‘til he wakes up too.”

She nods, eyelids drooping.  Merrin sets a hand on her shoulder.  “Come,” Merrin says, helping her to her feet again, “you are soaking wet and we don’t know what was in that water.”

Well, that doesn’t make Greez much happier about having it all over the lounge and probably still in Cal’s lungs.  But it gets Cere wobbling up the steps and into the corridor, Merrin close behind, and with her taken care of, he can peel the bacta patch from its backing and stick it over the hole.  Once that’s hidden from sight, Cal looks like he’s sleeping.  “Hey, BD,” he says, “you think one of those stims of yours might help?”

BD-1 whirrs and ejects two of them in quick succession.  Greez catches them both, eyes the droid, asks, “You sure two in a row is safe?”  BD nods.  “Fine.  I’m trusting you here…”  He injects one into Cal’s side, close to the wound, then the other.  And now he has the same problem as with Cere – Cal’s even bigger than her and impossible to move alone.  “Once Merrin’s done,” he tells BD, “we’ll get him tucked in too, okay?”

BD just replies with a dejected sort of burble and leans his head against the top of Cal’s.  Greez gives him another pat and waits a couple minutes, listening for any concerning changes in Cal’s strained breathing, until Merrin returns.  “Cere is asleep,” she reports, dragging her hands down her face.  “Although she may have just passed out.  I’m not sure.  But I think she’s all right.”  She crouches next to Cal again.  “What next?”

Greez needs a few seconds to plot their best course of action.  He’s beginning to feel a little fried himself.  “Okay, here’s what we’re gonna do,” he finally says.  “We’ll put him on the deck of the engine room.  Then you leave for a minute, I get him dried and changed, and you come back and the two of us get him in bed.  Got it?”

Raising her eyebrows, Merrin says, “He is not conscious and I have seen naked men before.  It’s not a big deal.  I could –”

“No.  ‘cause if we do that, I just know he’ll wake up and be horribly embarrassed.”  She keeps frowning at him, though, and Greez suddenly has a mental image of trying to pull pants on a guy he definitely cannot lift, and he flings two hands up.  “Fine!  We’ll do that!  But if he wakes up, I’m telling him you bullied me into it.”

Merrin merely shrugs, accepting this.  She carefully works her arms under Cal’s so she can lift his upper half; Greez grabs his legs and says, “BD, just this once, stay out from under my feet… one, two, three!”  In unison, they heft Cal up off the deck.  For such a scrawny thing, the kid’s heavy.  And Greez doesn’t exactly weightlift in his free time.  They have to stop for a quick breather on the threshold between the galley and the corridor.  Nevertheless, they get him gently laid out on the floor in the engine room, and then Merrin grabs the last of the dry towels from the ‘fresher while Greez divests Cal of his boots and socks and digs out his pajamas.

He almost immediately realizes there’s no way he could’ve done this without Merrin.  He can barely sit Cal up on his own, and while BD’s clearly doing his best and Greez doesn’t have the heart to tell him to quit it, he’s no help at all.  She supports whenever and whatever he tells her to, holding Cal steady so Greez can strip away the rest of his sodden clothing and dry him off.  Despite her supposed nonchalance about nudity, he notices Merrin either keeps her eyes fixed on Cal’s face or intently studies a freckle on his ankle the entire time, allowing Greez to pretend they’re preserving a little of the guy’s dignity.  Do Nightsisters blush like Humans?  That’d explain the interesting tint to her face – not a big deal, my ass.

Eventually, he’s completely dry and has his loose sleep pants on.  Greez takes a minute to check him over for any other injuries – nothing on his head, no serious cuts or bones that feel broken, just some incredibly nasty bruises blooming on his back – and then tugs the shirt over his head and threads Cal’s arms through the holes.  Now he’s glad Humans only have two of them.  “There we go,” he sighs.  “One more time, Merrin.”

“One more time,” she murmurs, like she’s encouraging herself, and grunts as they heave Cal up and onto the cot.

Okay, Greez thinks, relieved.  He turns Cal onto his side again, just in case; BD quickly hops on the bunk and sits next to him.  “Okay,” Greez says out loud, tucking the blanket around Cal.

“Now what?”

He turns to Merrin, who’s still sitting on the deck, registers how drained she looks, and says, “Your turn to sleep.  And change,” he adds.  Merrin glances down at her wet clothing with a faintly bemused expression.  “Do that first.  I can’t shove these mattresses in the launderer and they take forever to air-dry.”

“I –”

“Merrin,” Greez interrupts.  She peers up at him through her scraggly wet hair, and for possibly the first time, Greez sees a weary teenage girl instead of a creepy witch who just happens to be on their side.  Between cloaking the ship, teleporting around, and healing Cal… no wonder she’s tired.  Greez is tired and he hasn’t accomplished half that.  “We couldn’t have pulled this off without your help.  And you’ve done more than enough, now.”  He tips his head towards the hallway.  Her eyes flick to Cal.  “Don’t worry about him.  I’m gonna change our route so we don’t go to Bogano and celebrate our success escaping the Imperials by getting captured by the Imperials, and then I’m coming straight back here and staying ‘til he’s awake.  Go on.  If Cere needs my help or something, just holler.”

Merrin gets to her feet.  She gazes at Cal for a moment, then says to him, “Wake up.  You and I have a deal.”  And then, slowly, she leaves the engine room, and Greez hears the door to Cere’s cabin open and close.

Greez keeps his promise – he’s only in the cockpit long enough to reprogram the nav computer, and promptly leaves once that’s done.  He sighs at the water in the lounge that hasn’t yet dripped through the grates, but thinks, screw it, I’ll get it later, and keeps going.  He’ll need to pry up most of the deck panels anyway, and that’s best done while the ship is grounded.

Cal hasn’t budged a millimeter when Greez returns.  He grabs a crate and sits next to the cot, makes himself as comfortable as he can.

It’s two hours, perhaps three, of just watching and waiting for something to happen – nothing does, unless he counts Cal’s breathing gradually sounding less awful and the kid rolling onto his back and almost off the cot – before he hears a door opening again.  Greez looks over his shoulder, expecting Merrin, but it’s Cere who drags herself into the room instead.  “Hey,” Greez says quietly.

“Hey,” she echoes, folding gracelessly to the deck so she’s sitting by Cal’s head.  Her eyes wander over his blanketed form, and she asks, “How bad?”

“Uh… well, I’m no expert, but… Merrin said it was a lightsaber wound.”  Greez touches his own side.  “Right about there.  Merrin healed what she could and I did what I could, so…”

Cere just nods grimly, unsurprised.  “I heard him scream, but I wasn’t close enough to see exactly what was going on.”  She sighs.  “That monster…”

“The Inquisitor?”

“No.” Cere’s voice is barely audible.  “Not her.  She’s gone.”

Greez has no idea what to say to that.  Is it inappropriate to offer condolences when your best friend’s psycho ex-apprentice (who has tried to kill you and everyone you love) dies?  He finally settles on a neutral question – “You okay?”

Cere laughs without any humor at all.  “Not even close,” she admits.  “But… I will be, I suppose.  In time.”  She reaches up, smooths Cal’s damp hair back from his forehead.  “We got the holocron.”

“Yeah, we did,” Greez says, a bit more brightly.  “I should just lock the damn thing in the safe in my cabin.  The code is sixteen digits.  Good luck breaking into that… I didn’t mean you,” he adds, because BD is suddenly paying attention.  “I know it’d take you like, two seconds.”

Smiling slightly, Cere runs her hand over Cal’s hair again… then her eyebrows knit, and she leans close and presses her lips to his forehead.  Greez stares at her.  After a few seconds, she pulls back, notices Greez gaping, and says, “What?”  She lifts a hand and splays her bandaged fingers.  “Can’t exactly use my hands to check his temperature right now.  He’s running a fever.”

Greez refrains from pointing out the droid right there, whose scanners could’ve told her Cal’s temperature in less than two seconds, since she’s clearly worried again.  “That’s not good,” he says, putting his hand on Cal’s cheek to test it for himself.  He does feel too warm.  “His breathing isn’t quite as bad as it’s been the past few hours – I dunno if there’s still water in his lungs or what…”

“Why was there –”

“He gave you his rebreather, I guess.”

Cere looks at Cal like she’s either going to throttle him or hug him.  It’s very similar to the way Greez’s great-grandmother looked at him all the time.  “If the water was contaminated, he’s at risk for pneumonia,” she says.  “Or the wound could be infected.  We’ll have to watch him.”

“Yeah,” Greez says, watches her rest her head against the edge of the cot.  “Cere, go back to bed.  You look like you’re gonna keel over and I’m not leaving the kid until he wakes up.”

She hesitates, but gets up, putting her hand on his shoulder.  “He’s lucky to have you, Greez.”

Greez snorts to cover his embarrassment.  He’s going to start blushing if they don’t quit complimenting him.  “He’s lucky to have all of us.  How does it take four people to wrangle one teenager?”

Cere squeezes his shoulder.  “Come and get me if anything changes,” she says, glancing from Greez to BD-1.  “Or if his temperature keeps getting higher.”

“Sure thing,” Greez says.  Then she heads out, leaving him and BD alone with Cal, who’s motionless and silent.  Greez doesn’t care about the silent part anymore, hasn’t in a long time, but he needs Cal to open his eyes.  Sighing, he leans two elbows on the mattress to prop his chin up in his hands.  “Come on, scraplet,” he murmurs, stroking Cal’s hair, “you gotta wake up soon, okay?  We’re all waiting on you.”

Nothing.  BD gives a miserable hoot and, on impulse, Greez reaches out with his free arm and hugs him to his side.  The droid doesn’t shock him or even resist, which tells Greez how upset he is.  “It’s okay,” he says gruffly.  “He’s gonna be fine.  Cal’s tough.  And when he wakes up, we can both yell at him for scaring us.”

BD makes a noise that sounds like agreement.  The two of them settle in to keep a vigil for as long as it takes.

Chapter Text

The holocron they went through hell to acquire is lying in two pieces on the lounge table.

Cere doesn’t begrudge Cal his decision.  Truth be told, she knows he made the right call; no matter what she might want, the safety of those children has always been the highest priority, and being anonymous to the Empire is the only thing keeping them safe right now.  Maybe she and Cal could protect them.  Maybe not.  It isn’t a risk they can take.  There’s one thing she knows for sure, though – no copies of that list exist.  Trilla had had a head start on them, so she would’ve had plenty of time to open the holocron and at least note down some names and locations.  Cere’s betting the children’s lives on it, but she’s absolutely certain that did not happen.  Trilla waited there in the interrogation room for them to arrive.  Cal had said she had the holocron with her, even showed it to him during a pause in their fight.  A wise Inquisitor would’ve handed it off to that Sith immediately, or at least concealed it elsewhere.

She wanted us to win.  Cere loved that girl like her own, and she knows.  Trilla had given into her rage and fear and hatred a long time ago, but some part of her hoped she would lose that fight and they would take the holocron away from her, the Sith, the Empire, protect those children the way she should’ve been protected.  They’d destroyed it for her, too.

And now she’s dead.  Cere feels like it still hasn’t quite sunk in yet.  Trilla.  Her Padawan.  The Second Sister.  The Inquisitor who’d sown suffering and death wherever she’d set foot, murdered Cal’s friend for trying to save him.  The girl who once gave herself a buzzcut because fourteen-year-olds have zero impulse control, then complained about how it looked until it grew out a few centimeters and she could style it again, who won a massive jar of taffy in a street raffle and strictly rationed herself to one piece per week so it’d last years, who’d gotten so offended over some revisionism in an Anchoron history textbook she’d declared her intentions to write a better one just to put the author out of business.  The clever, compassionate young woman Cere was so proud of.  That Trilla had been the one looking at them in her last moments.  The one who, as they were once returning to their quarters, abruptly asked, “Do you know if King Van Zee still rules Xibariz?”

“I… think so,” Cere had said slowly.  “I’m not certain, but he hadn’t even been crowned king yet when I last spoke with him; unless something’s happened to him, he should be.  Why?”  She’d opened her door, saw Trilla’s pensive expression, and added, “I’m going to make some tea, if you’d like to come in.”  Never mind that they’d eaten dinner less than an hour ago.  Their last campaign had been a miserable slog, they’d hardly had time to eat or sleep, much less talk about whatever was on their minds, and they were now on some desperately-needed leave.  Whiling away an evening with tea and chitchat sounded wonderful.

Trilla followed Cere into her quarters and almost automatically began filling the kettle as Cere fetched cups and a small tin of tea leaves from Bromlarch.  “Do you think he would remember who I am?”

Cere couldn’t help but grin.  “Trilla, you sent that man the most scathing polite refusal in the history of polite refusals.”  Trilla busied herself with the kettle, though it was obvious she too was smiling.  “His servant read it aloud to the entire council and I will forever be impressed by her sabacc face; she must’ve been trying even harder not to laugh than I was.  I have a feeling he might remember, if someone reminded him.  Why?” she asked again.

“Just something I’ve been thinking about lately,” Trilla replied.  She was quiet until the kettle whistled, then brought it over to the small table beneath the window and filled both cups.  “Once the war is over, if we have time… I would like to go back there.  Not permanently,” she added hastily, like she was worried Cere might think otherwise.  “I just want to speak with him.  Show him the life I chose for myself.”

Cere stirred some sugar into her tea, watched her apprentice sit in the opposite chair.  “If you’re hoping he’ll change his mind about allowing their Force-sensitive children to be trained as Jedi… I’m not sure that’s likely.”

“I’m not,” Trilla said quickly, but Cere caught the flicker of disappointment.  Of course she was hoping for that.  Trilla was young yet, extremely bright, and often arrogant because of it.  She’d come a long way from the little girl who was often convinced she was the smartest person in the room, though.  “I don’t expect that.  But I’d still like to talk to him.”

Nodding, Cere said, “Perhaps when the war is over, then.  He did technically extend an invitation for you to return, after all.”  Judging by her impish smile, Trilla was aware and fully intended to abuse that privilege to get an audience with the king.  “He was around the age you are now when I met him,” Cere added thoughtfully.  “Angry.  Afraid.  I think his mother’s death affected him terribly… I don’t approve of the decision he made, but I understand why he did it.”

“Politics,” Trilla huffed, then lifted her mug to her lips.

“Politics,” Cere agreed.  “The Queen was beloved by her people and I suspect they didn’t consider her teenaged son a very worthy successor.  He needed their support.  Unfortunately, we were already unpopular there.”  She sighed, resting her chin in her hand.  “But… I still don’t think the Prince – ah, King – believed what he was saying about the Jedi.  He parroted what his advisors whispered in his ears.  You may not convince him to change his mind, but you might plant a seed, and maybe someday…”

“Maybe,” Trilla said.  She put her cup down a bit too hard, sloshed tea over the rim.  “I was thinking about the kids there who are Force-sensitive and will never be trained.  I can’t imagine what I’d be if I wasn’t a Jedi.”

“I can,” Cere said immediately, and Trilla raised her eyebrows.  “You’d be standing in front of a classroom of literature students, drilling the definition of tactile pentameter or whatever it is into their poor heads.”

“It’s dactylic pentameter,” Trilla corrected primly, doing a terrible job of hiding her grin, “and I know you know that because I drilled it into your head, Master.  But the point stands.  I would not want to be anything other than a Jedi.”

“No,” Cere had replied, “me either.”  And then they’d sat there, drank their tea, and watched through the window as the sun set on Coruscant.

That had been one of the last nights either of them had ever spent at the Temple.  The memory is both precious and painful.  The Jedi Order as Cere knew it is gone, and with the holocron in pieces before her, her dream of restoring it is in pieces too… but there will always be more Force-sensitive children, and no regime survives forever.  She has to believe the Jedi are going to live on, one way or another, that the Empire won’t erase them entirely.  If she can’t help restore the Order, perhaps she can figure out how to preserve a bit of their culture so someday there’s a foundation to start building upon.

At a noise in the corridor, Cere sits up straight, and a moment later Greez comes plodding into the galley.  Lateros don’t get eyebags the way Humans do, but his ears are drooping and the lines on his face are deeper than usual.  “Are you awake?” Cere asks as he rummages around on the counter.

“Mm.  Not even sure anymore…”  Yawning, he comes down to join her on the sofa, rips a ration bar wrapper open with his teeth, breaks off a third of it in one bite.

“You could try sleeping,” Cere suggests dryly.  After two days, she’s slept off her exhaustion and feels pretty functional again; Merrin’s done the same, though it took her far less time.  On the other hand, she doesn’t think Greez has slept much since they left Nur, if at all.  Someone’s gotta look after the kid, he’d said, even though ‘the kid’ allowed himself to be deposited back into bed without a peep and has stayed there quietly since except for the occasional trip to the ‘fresher, mostly napping, occasionally reading.

Actually, put in those terms, no wonder Greez is worried.  Cal’s not a big fan of staying still for too long or resting in bed – he’s too accustomed to the grueling work schedule on Bracca.  The lack of complaints tells her he’s feeling a lot worse than he’s willing to admit.  “How is he?” Cere asks, watching Greez tear into the ration bar.

Greez shoves the last of his dinner into his mouth, chews.  “Been in and out for the past couple’a hours,” he says.  “In, for the moment – little brat actually kicked me out, told me he was sick of hearing my stomach growl and it was keeping him awake.  Sassy pain in the ass,” he adds with an undeniable undertone of affection in his voice.  “We gotta get some food into him soon.”

“I know.”  He’s been in too much pain to have any sort of appetite.  Greez slouches against the back of the sofa, yawning again, scratching at his jaw, and Cere says, “Go to bed for a while, Captain.  If you keep hovering, you’re going to drive him crazy.”  Who would’ve thought Greez had a mother-nuna mode?

Greez huffs, but crumples the ration bar wrapper in his hand and slides off the couch.  “Fine, fine… guess I’ll take a shower first, before he starts complaining I smell, too… and don’t tell me Lateros smell anyway!” he says, wagging a finger in Cere’s direction.  “You lot all kinda smell funky to me.”

The perils of having a diverse crew, she supposes.  “Good night,” Cere replies as Greez hauls himself up the steps and towards the corridor.  He gives her a wave without turning around.

Now that she’s just told Greez not to hover, it’d be incredibly hypocritical for Cere to go in there and hover.  She’s going to do it anyway, of course, after she has something to eat.  Again.  Ration bars are nutritionally complete, but they never feel as fulfilling as a proper meal.

Accordingly, Cere’s still staring into the box on the counter, trying to decide which flavor is the least unappealing, when Merrin joins her and also stares into the box.  Brightly-colored wrappers stare back, trying to tempt them with their chalky texture and a vaguely stale aftertaste that persists even in fresh bars.  Faced with the option of roti, shorn, dricklefruit, izy-leaf, or skappi (though not jitfruit, since that row has been depleted), Merrin says, “I think this is the most terrible convenience in the galaxy.”

“I… don’t disagree.”  As often as she was grateful for them – as a snack on long assignments, during the war when there was a lull in the battle that gave her just enough time to bolt down a bar and catch a twenty-minute nap, that first year or so after the Purge when she was reluctantly forcing herself to survive – Cere’s so tired of the things.  Merrin’s only needed to survive on them for a couple days and she already looks like she’s tempted to torch the entire lot and see if melted plastoid improves the taste.  “No,” Cere finally declares, closing up the box and sliding it down to the other end of the countertop, then crouching and opening the conservator.  “Greez made soup before we went to Nur.  Unless you two ate it while I was sleeping, there should be some left.”

“We didn’t,” Merrin says.  “But I am told you’re not allowed to cook.”

Cere rolls her eyes.  You ask for clarification on a recipe one time… “Fortunately for Greez’s delicate constitution, I’m not cooking,” she says, finding the container all the way in the back of the conservator.  “I’m reheating.”  She pops the cover off.  Okay, there’s enough for the two of them… in fact, she thinks she can stretch it out to about two and a half bowls, and Cal likes this one, so maybe she can tempt him into eating.  “Do you want some?”

Merrin shrugs.  “All right.”

Cere pours the soup into the cooker, gives it a quick stir, turns the heat on.  When she turns around, Merrin’s sitting at the table (they’re going to have to figure out a way to get a fourth chair once Cal’s up and about again) and inspecting a blotchy green piece of fruit from the bowl, turning it over and over in her hands.  “That’s a gruffle,” Cere says, then wonders if she shouldn’t have – she’d stated it matter-of-factly, but it could still be interpreted as condescending.  For all they’ve been sharing a cabin the past few days, they haven’t actually had the chance to talk too much, and she’s not sure how sensitive Merrin might be to her lack of knowledge.  Merrin just looks at her with mild interest, though, so she adds, “They’re very sour.  Personally, I like that – I’ll eat them on their own, in fact – but Greez thinks they’re abominations good only for seasoning and cocktails.”

“Hm.”  She places it back in the bowl.  “There is… so much food in the galaxy.”

Spirits, Cere wishes that was true.  In a sense it probably is; there’s abundant food production throughout the galaxy to feed everyone, but a number of her assignments as a Jedi took her to places with horrific poverty, where malnutrition and starvation were just facts of life.  Helping secure aid for those planets always felt like the least she could do.  She saw more of such places in the years after the Purge, as she planet-hopped and scraped by and tried to stay off the Empire’s radar.  Lateron, large swaths of which are barren and uninhabitable, struggles.  And while he’s never said it outright, Cal’s made it very clear he almost never had enough to eat on Bracca.  “So what’s the food on Dathomir like?”

“A lot of meat,” Merrin says, unsurprisingly.  “It was easy to acquire and the Nightbrothers are brought up as hunters, as were my people, to a lesser extent.  Nydaks are delicious.  Rancors, too, though only as juveniles; the older ones are too stringy and tough to eat.  Better for leather, after about three years.  Veekas.  Burra fish.  When I was very little, my sisters killed a sprantal who had attacked another Nightsister, but that was the only time I’ve had it.  They weren’t particularly common near my home.  We had many kinds of edible plants, some fruits, mushrooms… even the Bleeding Gut can be eaten, but only if it’s prepared properly to release all the toxins or else it will kill you in a very unpleasant manner.  The name is… appropriate.  I don’t recall exactly how it’s supposed to be prepared.”

“Greez shouldn’t have to worry about his, then,” Cere says, glancing over at the terrarium.  The Gut’s his latest acquisition, picked up on the same trip where they picked up Merrin, and it’s not even begun to sprout yet.  If someone tried to eat one of his babies, he’d decompress the entire ship just to space them.

“It’s good,” Merrin murmurs, sounding dreamy for a moment.  “We used to heat a rock over the fire, pour oil onto it, and fry strips of pickled Bleeding Gut until they were hot and buttery... they’d almost melt on your tongue.”  Then she snaps out of it, says, “But there is more variety on this ship than I have ever seen in my life.”

Cere smiles.  “You have Greez to thank for that,” she says.  “He tends to consider nutrient bars a necessary evil at best and a personal affront to his taste buds at worst.  I didn’t really hire him to cook, but I’m glad he does.”  He’s been putting in extra effort so Cal has some decent food for the first time in five years.  When he finds out Merrin considers their limited galley fare vast, he’s probably going to turn it up to eleven.

Before long, the soup is hot and bubbling.  Cere ladles out two bowls, leaving a small amount behind, and hands one to Merrin, who thanks her quietly and digs in.  They eat without speaking, which is a nice change of pace – she wouldn’t trade Greez for the galaxy, but he wards off silence as if it’ll bite him otherwise, and Cal got increasingly conversational as he came to trust her.  Then Greez and Cal actually had some kind of late-night chat that smoothed over the rough spots in their relationship, and they started talking to one another.  Meals with the two of them take a while because they just keep talking, and since Cere often needs to translate, her food gets cold a lot.  For once, the soup is still warm when she spoons up the last bit of broth.  Merrin’s already finished and cleaning her bowl.  “Here,” she says as Cere stands, holds out her hand, “I’ll wash it, if you’re going to take the rest to Cal.”

“Thanks.”  The remaining soup fills a little more than half of the bowl.  If he eats half of it, Cere will be happy (and so will Greez).  She takes the bowl and a spoon and a bottle of water down the hall to the engine room.

BD is, as always, keeping a close watch over Cal.  Being that he doesn’t have physical needs aside from the occasional charge, he’s left Cal’s side even less than Greez has.  He chirps when Cere enters, warning her Cal dozed off again and should not be bothered, or else he’ll have to misuse his shock prod.

“He needs to eat,” Cere says softly.

Humans can survive much longer than two and a half days without food, BD-1 counters.  He’s hardly been able to sleep because he’s so sore.  Rest is more important right now; he’ll live without a meal for another few hours.

“Yes, he’ll live, but it’ll weaken him more and he’s already in rough shape.  He needs to eat.  If he doesn’t want the soup, he can have something else, but he has to eat something.”

He can eat when he wakes up, says BD, planting himself firmly in front of Cal… who sighs and lifts a hand.

“I’m awake, thanks.”  BD translates almost immediately, but Cere’s getting good at remembering the simpler or more commonly-used signs; at this point, he’s just filling in blanks for her.  Cal cracks his eyes open and watches Cere tiredly.  She sets the water bottle on the deck, sits on the crate Greez left by the cot.  He also swapped the pillow around to the foot of the bunk so Cal can lie on his side without aggravating his wound and not have to stare at the bulkhead; he’s hunched beneath the blanket, face pale and pinched with pain.  They’re giving him everything they can and it’s not enough.  Cere is starting to fear he'll need actual medical intervention to recover.

“Hey there,” she says.  “How are you feeling?”

Cal scrunches up his nose.  “Don’t ask,” he signs.

“I just did.”  Her bandaged hands are warm from holding the bowl, so she lays the inside of her wrist across his forehead.  His temperature is still up by a degree or two, but that’s all.  Despite her initial concern of an infection, that hasn’t come to pass – she’s seen the wound when they change the bandage and while it looks pretty kriffing terrible (and hurts to match), there are no signs it’s festering.  And there haven’t been any complications from the water he inhaled, either.  For him to develop pneumonia or something similar within a couple hours of being pulled out of the ocean, that would have to be a seriously aggressive pathogen, one she would expect to produce severe illness… but so far he’s suffered a moderate fever and symptoms of what seems a lot more like a garden-variety upper respiratory infection.  If that’s the case, she’s glad it decided to hold off on showing its face until after they’d gotten away from the Fortress.  “Indulge me.”

Making a face, Cal gestures to the trash bin set next to his cot.  It’s brimming with crumpled tissues.  “If I try to blow my nose one more time, it’s going to fall off.”  His hands drop back to the cot and he’s motionless a few moments before adding, “Dizzy.  Head hurts.”

He’s been complaining about the headache and vertigo since he woke up.  He doesn’t have a concussion, though, so Cere thinks – hopes – it’s related to whatever he’s come down with.  BD coos sympathetically and nestles against his chest.  Cal pats him, peers at Cere, and asks, “How are you doing?”

“I’m all right,” she says.  Her hands still throb a bit, but that’s what she gets for catching herself on an unsuspecting probe droid that’d spent too much time exposed to the raw heat beneath the interrogation room.  Besides, the alternative was much worse.

Cal gives her a deeply skeptical look.  “We had to return to the place where you were tortured,” he says slowly.  The last word is the only one she doesn’t know off the top of her head, and it’s pretty easy to guess from context.  “I wouldn’t be all right.”

Cere sighs.  “Cal, you don’t need to be worrying about me right now, okay?  You should focus on healing.  Look at it this way – I escaped the Fortress, broke back in, and then escaped again.  Three for three.  I’m going to be fine, and so are you.”

He sets his jaw, adopting a familiar stubborn expression that shouts you’re not getting out of this that easily louder than he ever would.  “You’re mad at yourself.  I can feel it.  I’m just saying, if you want to talk about it…”

“And if I don’t?” she asks, raising her eyebrows.  Cal shrugs a shoulder, flinches, holds his breath for a second and stays very still.  Cere makes a mental note to see if the cold pack is frozen again yet.  She knows he’s not going to let this go, though, so she gives in a bit.  “I wouldn’t say I’m mad,” she says.  “I’m disappointed in myself, that’s all.  I won’t let it eat me alive this time.”

“You were trying to protect those kids.”

She shakes her head.  “Yes, I was.  But that –” there is no other word for someone so steeped in the dark side, “Sith… I hated him.  I hated him for what he’s done to me, for hurting you, for Trilla, and I was furious… and I gave into those feelings instead of a desire to protect.”  And the horror when Cal’s voice had cut through that rage – how could she protect anyone if she fell and let herself become what she hated – was enough to clear the red from her vision, giving her the strength for something exponentially more difficult.  When she’d created that barrier between them and the Sith, she drew on her love, instead.  Trilla was so close to coming back and he had murdered her.  She would not allow him to do the same to the young man she’d just Knighted.  Nor to her, even if Cere would’ve once believed it was no more than she deserved, because she was trying and all they could ever do was move forwards. 

It had taken all of her energy.  Until she’d woken a few hours ago, drenched in cold sweat, tears streaking her face, still hearing Trilla’s final words echoing in her ears, Cere hadn’t done a whole lot besides sleep.  She’s finally feeling better, in more ways than one.  She expects that means the grief will kneecap her soon.  “I needed your help,” she says.  “Thank you.”

Cal nods, signs, “You would’ve done the same for me,” and she prays she’ll never need to.

But what may happen in the future isn’t important.  Right now, she’s looking ahead to the next fifteen minutes.  “I brought you some soup,” she says, lifting the bowl slightly.  “Think you can sit up?”

Cal doesn’t look overjoyed about this, but BD actually backs her up, pointing out Cal hasn’t consumed any food since before they left the Mantis in the escape pods, and it’s probably been more like three days since he’s eaten.  So Cal sluggishly struggles upright until he’s leaning against the bulkhead, panting and sweaty, the effort sapping what little color the fever gave his face.

“You don’t have to eat it all.”  Cere gives him the bowl and spoon, then hands over the bottle of water.  He goes for that first, twisting the top off and drinking about a quarter of it without pausing for air.  “It’s too soon for painkillers, but we should have antihistamines or something that’ll make you feel less congested, and as long as your stomach isn’t totally empty, you could probably take some more ibuprofen for the headache.  I’ll be back in a few.”

She’s on her way out, secure in the knowledge BD-1 will pester Cal into eating a little bit, when Cal says, “Wait.”

He’s so quiet Cere almost misses it over the engines.  She pauses on the threshold, then turns around and sits down.  Cal doesn’t meet her eyes, just stirs his soup, gathers a single noodle in the spoon, pours it back into the broth.  “I… thought you were dead back there,” he whispers.

“So did I,” Cere admits.  “I was extraordinarily lucky.”

Cal shakes his head, though.  “Greez contacted us,” he says, no louder than he was that night in her cabin, but he doesn’t sound like he’s struggling for every word anymore.  “I – he needed to hear it from me.  I couldn’t.  I tried, but BD had to do it…”

“Cal, you try incredibly hard all the time,” Cere says.  “Don’t think I haven’t noticed.  You never stop trying.”

“Things used to come easily when I was little.”  He smiles ruefully.  “Kinda miss that.”  He finally sticks a spoonful of soup into his mouth, grimacing as he swallows.  Poor guy.  He picked a terrible time to get sick – a lightsaber hole in the torso is more than enough to cope with.  “Okay,” Cal says, more to BD than her, “you were right, this is only a little weird…”

BD proudly proclaims he is almost always right about a large majority of things.  Cal nudges him with an elbow, rolling his eyes.  Cere chuckles and keeps her mouth shut.  She figured Cal would actually speak to her when he was ready – she knows he already speaks to Merrin, because Merrin doesn’t understand Binary or sign language and doesn’t read Basic.  She also knows Cal’s offered to teach her to read Basic.  Between that and the enthusiasm with which he took to teaching Cere sign language, she can’t help a moment of sorrow for those children he will never instruct in the ways of the Force.  He’d be good at it.

Someday, maybe.

“I think you –” Cal breaks off, and now she can see him struggling; he tips his head against the wall and takes a couple deep breaths and drinks another quarter of the water bottle.  He seems unable to get anything else out, though, so with an apologetic look, he switches back to signing.  Cere doesn’t mind.  Recovery is like that, the constant two steps forward, one step back (or the other way around, sometimes), and not long ago he wouldn’t make a single sound.  “I felt safer, and I wanted to control something, so I refused to talk.”

Cere nods, letting BD finish interpreting so she knows she understood correctly, then says, “I still don’t think you had much of a choice.”

“I didn’t.  At first, at least; I really couldn’t talk then.  But I never tried afterwards.  I let my fear control me instead.  Otherwise I probably would’ve gotten over it a lot faster and it wouldn’t have been an issue by the time we met.”

“Maybe.  We can’t change the past.”

That earns her a tired smile.  “Just keep moving forwards, right?  I’m trying.”

“I know,” Cere says.  “And I’m proud of you.”  He looks embarrassed, but in a very pleased sort of way, but also like he’s attempting to play it off as no big deal.  Teenagers.  Cal wasn’t formally her Padawan, because Cere wasn’t a Jedi, but she’s still glad she got to play a part in his journey.  She hopes Jaro Tapal would’ve approved.  She stands again, gives the bowl in his lap a significant glance.  “That does not mean you’re getting away with only eating two bites.”

“Why do I feel like I’m ten years old and in the mess hall with Master Tapal?” he whispers.  Cere just smiles back at him and goes to see what’s left in the medical cabinet.

Chapter Text

If Cal doesn’t get up and do something soon, he’s going to melt into a Human-shaped puddle right here on Greez’s sofa, stagnant and useless, ruining the nice Potolli-weave cushions and probably making them smell a bit funny forevermore.

And that might happen regardless, he thinks, downing the last of his tea and promptly cracking open yet another bottle of water.  If he doesn’t stop drinking soon, he’s going to liquefy into that puddle.  He can’t help himself, though – he is so kriffing thirsty.

For lack of anything better to do while he’s lying here, propped up on three pillows and the rolled-up extra mattress from Greez’s cabin, Cal sips his water and starts ranking levels of exhaustion like he does his headaches.  There’s regular everyday tiredness, curling up in bed at the end of a long day and dozing off.  There’s what he personally considers the best one, the physical weariness that comes from working his muscles until they’ll hardly support him anymore, when he knows he’s going to be sore in the morning but feels like he accomplished something.  Emotional exhaustion is a tricky one, because it can be either excruciating or cathartic, depending on the emotions involved.  The groggy, lightheaded, heavy-boned weariness he gets when he’s sick can piss off.  Alcohol-fueled sleep is nice (he never remembers those nightmares); the hangovers, not so much.

Then there’s this, which ranks firmly at the bottom.  In the week since they snuck into Fortress Inquisitorius under the Empire’s nose, since they recovered the holocron, since Cal was stabbed with his own lightsaber, he’s been so unshakably exhausted he hasn’t been able to do a damn thing besides sleep.  And nap.  And rest.  And eat occasionally, though he feels like he’s being skewered in the side whenever he moves and that’s not doing wonderful things for his stomach.  The pain has become background noise, otherwise.  He sleeps some more.  He drinks ridiculous amounts of liquid.  He wobbles to the ‘fresher and back about three hundred times per hour.  He falls asleep while trying to read.  He made it all the way out to the lounge this morning to lie on the sofa instead of his cot, and it’s the most exciting thing to happen to him in days.

On top of the exhaustion, he’s accompanied by his other two constant companions: the horrible dizziness that hits whenever he moves his head, and the horrible headache (which Cal does not rank, since it’s not debilitating) that clings even if he’s perfectly still.  Between those and the thirst, Cere’s pretty convinced she knows what’s wrong with him, and of course it’s not good.  “I think he’s bleeding internally,” Cere had said a few hours ago, while Cal was still in bed and mostly asleep.  She must’ve thought he was entirely asleep, because she’d sat on the edge of the cot and began stroking her hand over his hair.

“What?” Greez squeaked.  “I heard those lightsabers of yours cauterize –”

“Keep your voice down.  They do cauterize wounds,” she said quietly.  “They’re not medical tools, though – it isn’t a proper cauterization.  It can be extremely fragile.  He may have torn something open and that’s been bleeding this whole time.”

“Okay, but… shouldn’t he have been in trouble a lot sooner, then?  I mean, he isn’t passing out on us or anything – no, not if it’s small,” Greez muttered.  “Right.  Small tear just bleeding a little bit constantly for days…”

“Exactly.  He might not be in immediate danger, but if it hasn’t clotted by now – or if it has and keeps reopening – it’s not going to.  We need to find him help.”

“Help that won’t recognize a lightsaber wound, or if they do, will keep their mouth shut about it…”  Cal heard Greez sigh.  “And, you know, won’t turn in a few of the most wanted fugitives in the Empire.  Not a tall order at all.”

The cot creaked as Cere stood up.  “Drop out of hyperspace as soon as it’s safe,” she’d said, her voice growing softer as they headed back into the corridor.  “I’ll tell you where to go.  I’m going to owe someone a massive favor, but I know I can trust them…”

Cal had opened his eyes then and looked at BD-1, who’d been seated silently next to Cal’s head.  “Shit,” Cal said aloud.  He'd caught one hell of a break surviving the Fortress.  It was probably too much to ask for another, but he hated Cere indebting herself to someone for him.

Regardless, he can’t go on like this.  According to BD, who’s no medical droid but wields his scanners like a pro, two of Cal’s ribs are almost literally hanging on by a thread.  He’s missing a big chunk of bone and connective tissue on the lower left side of his ribcage. Cere's theory is well supported by the magnificent bruise discoloring almost a quarter of Cal's torso.  And if one wrong move could turn that suspected little tear into a gusher that’d send him into hypovolemic shock, they can’t afford to wait for a better option.  He’ll just have to feel guilty.  Not like that’s anything new.

So he’s just lying on the longer side of the sofa, too tired and blurry to read, too sore to sleep.  At least he’s not constantly blowing his nose anymore.  He’ll take whatever relief he can get.  At his feet, Merrin is reading, close enough to poke him in the leg and ask for clarification whenever she stumbles across a word she doesn’t know or can’t puzzle out.  ‘Though’ had caused some drama.  Apparently few words in her native language are halfway comprised of what she derisively called decoration.  But she’s picking it up fast, just as Cal expected.  All he’d needed to do was write out the aurebesh and tell her what sounds each one made; she’d written the closest Dathomirian equivalents next to them and then she had a handy chart to consult as she read.  She’s consulting it less and less now.  That means he gets to lie there and see it out of the corner of his eye, taunting him with her very nice handwriting.  Everyone, even Greez, has better handwriting than he does. 

He doesn’t really need to worry about it.  Cal is determined to speak to Greez, the last one aboard the Mantis who doesn’t yet know he can talk.  After that, he won’t need to write much anymore, so nobody will have to look at his awful handwriting.  Nevertheless, he thinks, maybe I should start keeping a journal or something for practice… later.  He can’t actually see straight at the moment.  His datapad has been lying next to him for so long it shut off from lack of usage.  Having finished the drippy Chandrilan novel, Cal had given that one to Cere and began another, which he assumes is some kind of mystery based on the three pages he’s managed to read this week.

Cal’s trying very hard to doze off, just so he’ll stop getting nauseated every time he tilts his head a few degrees in either direction and the room spins, when Merrin taps his ankle.  “What’s a femur?”

She’d gotten off easy.  Instead of making her risk the Mystery Box, Cere had lent Merrin a book chip from her own, more curated collection – something she enjoyed when she was younger, not childishly simple, but also not stuffed with esoteric words Merrin’s probably never even heard in Basic.  Greez is still in his cabin, so Cal draws one knee up and knocks his knuckles against his thigh without opening his eyes.  “Bone in the thigh.”  He vividly recalls hearing Commander Drift scream clear over the tornado when his had broken, and, unaware what’d happened, being terrified Drift was dying right there on top of him.  “Apparently hurts like hell if you fracture it.”

“That’s what I thought,” she mutters.

“How do you know ‘testicles’, but not ‘femur’?”

“That was important,” Merrin replies.  “Knowing how to threaten someone’s… valuables… in multiple languages is useful when dealing with disrespectful Nightbrothers.  A few of the bolder ones sometimes had to be reminded how to address me appropriately.”

Cal’s afraid to ask what that entailed.  He’s gotten the impression the dynamic between the Nightbrothers and Nightsisters was a profoundly unequal one.  From up in the galley, where she’s relegated to peeling topatoes because Greez is back on his proper-meals kick, Cere says, “Was that an issue with… Malicos?”

Cal opens his eyes halfway and raises his head a bit, as much as that sucks, to get a look at Merrin.  He’d never even considered that possibility.  She doesn’t look upset, though, and says, “No.  For all his transgressions, he did not seem interested in me that way.”  Merrin pauses for a moment, brow furrowing slightly.  “I didn’t hear about him making advances on any of the Nightbrothers, either.  That would’ve been worse.  They may not have felt able to refuse their clan leader if he had.”  She pokes Cal’s ankle again.  “Inoculation?”

It takes him a few seconds to track the change of subject.  “Vaccine,” Cere says before Cal can respond.

“What?” Merrin says blankly.

“Method of preventing disease,” Cal yawns, rubbing his eyes.

“Maybe while we’re getting Cal seen to, we should make sure you don’t die of something preventable…” Cere muses.

Merrin still looks confused.  Cal consoles himself about that upcoming seeing to by thinking about how he’s going to be blissfully unconscious and unaware of any needles they’re sticking him with.  “Better you than me,” he finally says, closing his eyes again.

It feels so strange to just… talk to people.  Open his mouth and say what’s on his mind and not have to wait for a translator or something to write with.  Sometimes it still feels wrong.  It always sounds wrong, because he’s trying for a little volume now and then to give his vocal chords real exercise; the first time (with just BD around to hear, naturally), he’d been dismayed by the results.  He did not sound like that, so why did he sound like that?  The answer slapped him upside the head after two seconds of thought – the last time he’d spoken, he was twelve and a half years old, right on the cusp of adolescence.  “Oh, stars, puberty’s gonna take you twice as long,” Beckett had realized one day.  He’d given Cal’s shoulder a sympathetic pat and added, “Sorry, Commander.  Good luck,” which hadn’t really made Cal feel any better about his voice suddenly cracking like a stale ration stick all the time.  It’s been five years since then.  Of course his voice changed while he wasn’t paying attention.  And it’s not that different, just deeper, but he’s still adjusting to it.

“My stuff’s almost done drying, Cere, if you wanna do yours next,” Greez says, entering the galley.  “And then that’s everybody and my ship should stop smelling like old socks.”

“Those were Cal’s socks,” Cere says.

It was one sock that’d gotten stuck under the sofa, give me a break.  He can’t quite get the words routed from brain to mouth yet.  It wasn’t that bad with Cere, not the awkward experience he’d feared, but Greez isn’t Cere.  He makes fusses.  Cal will actually die, in that case.

“We’ll see,” Greez says ominously.  On top of making actual meals again, Greez ordered everyone to do their laundry as soon as he realized it’s not been done in over two weeks.  Cal was exempt from handling his own because he can’t stand up for more than thirty seconds without feeling like he’s either going to throw up or pass out.  Usually the latter, but he’s gotten close to the former a few times and thankfully managed to hold off until the urge passed.  There’s a good chance the force of vomiting would shatter those fragile burned ribs of his.  “How are the topatoes coming?”

“I have one more left,” Cere says.

“Great, thanks… I’ll be right back to get started on dinner.  Lunch.  Man, we’ve gotten so outta sync I don’t even know what meal we’re on…”

As soon as he’s gone, Merrin taps Cal’s leg.  “Co.”

Cal frowns, mulling that one over.  “Um… wait, is it like, ‘Something and Co.’?  Because then it’s just short for ‘company’,” he murmurs.

“No, it’s just ‘co’.  ‘A terrible co’.  Look.”  He drags his eyes open again and Merrin turns the datapad around, pointing to a word.  “What is that?”

“That’s –” Don’t laugh don’t laugh don’t laugh languages are hard you’d be much worse if you tried to learn hers – “Cough.”

All traces of expression disappear from Merrin’s face in a fraction of an instant.  “Cough,” she repeats. 

Cal nods.  “Yeah, it… doesn’t rhyme with ‘though’.  Sorry.”

Merrin looks at the datapad.  Then, very deliberately, she turns the screen off, places the pad on the lounge table, and stands up.  “I am going to take a shower,” she says calmly.  She walks up the steps and out of the common area without another word.

“Uh,” Greez says when he returns to the galley, “Merrin’s in the ‘fresher muttering something about a cough… she picking up whatever Cal had, or what?”

“Probably not,” Cere says.  “Topatoes are done.”

“‘kay, lemme get those in there…”  Greez starts bustling around the galley and Cere, finished with her task and not trusted with any others, wanders off.  With BD sitting in the cockpit (possibly in the pilot’s chair, waiting to see how long it takes for Greez to notice), that means it’s just Cal and Greez here.  This would be a good time to talk to him.  Or try, at least; since they’re alone and Greez can’t see him at the moment, nobody at all would notice if he fails.  The first couple of words are always the hardest.  Once those are over with, he just has to make sure not to think about it too much or else the nerves kick in.  It’s fine if he talks.  Convenient, even.  It’s fine.  He’s fine.

Right, so the pep talk isn’t working.  Yesterday was bad – a night full of haunting dreams and a general sense of unease (brain-related, not Force-related) kept him from managing a single sound all day.  Today’s been much better.  Think of something to say and say it, Cal orders himself.  He can start by thanking the guy for doing his laundry, aside from the pajamas he’s been marinating in all week.  He’s taking a shower later even if he has to sit on the floor the entire time.

It's getting much too warm in here.  He’s been comfortable since his fever broke, didn’t even bother taking the blanket along to the lounge, but now a flush washes over him, leaving him damp with sweat.  The air’s so humid it clogs his lungs, and tastes of smoke – if Greez burned something, none of them will ever let him forget it, especially Cere.  Cal’s never known him to do such a thing, though.  Overcook a piece of meat or whatever, yeah, that’s happened once or twice when they’ve had a lot going on.  Risking a fire on his beloved starship?  Definitely not.  Greez is too cautious for that.  More likely the air circulation just got toggled down to low by accident.  Sighing, hugging his left arm to his side to support his bad ribs, Cal sits up slowly, waits for the dizziness to ebb, then pushes to his feet and starts stumbling towards the cockpit.

As he’s circling around the holotable, his bare foot strikes something small and it skitters across the deck with a glassy clink-clink-clink.  Cal holds onto the edge of the table and leans down to get a good look at it.  It’s… a piece of the holocron, but not one of the burnt halves they’d stashed away in Greez’s safe.  Just a pyramid-shaped corner.  Cal picks it up and keeps going.

He finds another piece further down the corridor, and another lying in a corner, the orange glow beneath the floors illuminating the glass like a lamp.  Someone had disassembled it to keep them from retrieving it.  Acutely aware he’s being led into a trap, Cal follows the trail anyway, collecting holocron parts in the bottom of his sleep shirt like it’s a basket.  Eventually, he finds something else – small, white, bloodstained.  He pokes his tongue around his mouth and confirms it’s not any of his, then drops it in alongside the holocron parts.

After that, he only finds teeth.  It’s not until he’s close to the interrogation room that he inspects one – canine tooth, with a slight, familiar chip – and realizes who it belongs to.  “Cere?” he says, looking up and around the massive chamber.  His voice is so small it doesn’t even echo.  He fumbles for his commlink, says, “Cere?” again.  There’s no response but – she wouldn’t if they’ve captured her – he has to get the door open, but he can’t slice it himself, and BD isn’t anywhere to be seen –

“That’s enough.”

“We’ve still got a lot left.”

“I estimate the subject weighs between thirty-eight and thirty-nine kilograms.  A full dose will kill him, and dead bodies do not speak.”

The needle slides out of the crook of his arm.  Cal opens his burning eyes and watches the blurry battle droid take a step back, syringe in hand.  Everything is too bright and too colorful.  This is the second time they’ve drugged him – whatever they gave him the first time hasn’t done much besides make him extremely nauseated and mess with his vision.  The straps, intended for larger victims, have been tightened as far as possible to restrain him, and it’s all he can do to turn his head to one side and spit out the bile flooding his mouth every minute or so.

He can’t reach Cere.  Master Tapal was supposed to meet up with them at the pass.  He wasn’t there.  Instead, there were droids, and the squad Cal was traveling with – Clover and Six-O and Brook and Pop, his friends – were cut down, and he woke up in the interrogation chair.  The lack of a proper interrogation droid is his only savior right now.  His questioning is overseen by a pack of standard B1s who are pretty clearly just winging it.  Unfortunately, the chair itself will do most of their job for them.  Cal can’t even begin to guess what half the devices attached to it are for, and the thought of finding out makes him want to burst into tears.  He doesn’t, because he’s a Jedi, but as one of the droids begins fiddling with the control panel and his system floods with drugs that make him sick and sleepy and terrified and relaxed all at the same time, he whimpers, “Master,” involuntarily.

“Dead,” one of the droids says flippantly.  “It’s true what they say about the bigger ones falling harder.  Poor B-187.”

“Should we go help him?” another wonders.

“Nah.  You think you can lift a Lasat?”

Cal’s throat goes so tight he can’t even argue.  Master Tapal isn’t dead, he’d feel it, he’d know.  He can’t say a word.  He can’t… he can’t breathe, either.  There’s an invisible strap around his throat, constricting, cutting off his lungs.

“Of course he’s dead,” says a voice from behind him, managing to sound coldly amused despite the heavy vocal modulation.  Cal thrashes in the restraints as much as he can, desperate to escape, desperate for air – “Now you may join him.”

“Come on, kid,” another voice interrupts, and a hand lands on his arm, squeezes.  “Wake up for me, would ya?  You’re okay, I’m right here…”  Then, quieter, almost lost beneath a choked keening sound, “Please stop making that noise…”

It takes a second for Cal’s brain to catch up and realize he is the one making that noise.  He stops instinctively and gasps for breath and opens his eyes.  He’s cold.  Greez and BD-1 are both standing over him, the Latero wringing two of his hands and rubbing Cal’s arm with another.  “There we go,” Greez sighs, his tense shoulders sagging.  “Really freaks me out when you do that.  You all right?”

Cal nods, dragging a hand over his face and through his hair – ewww, I seriously need to shower.  The details of the nightmares are already fading, leaving him with snapshots of a broken holocron and Cere’s teeth scattered through the Fortress and the Sith showing up that time he’d almost been tortured.  He covers his eyes for a couple of seconds and counts his breaths, slowing his racing heart.  Greez pats his arm some more.  “Gonna be a while until dinner’s ready.  You wanna stay out here, or go back to bed?”

Staying here means he doesn’t have to move, and they’ll have dinner down in the lounge with him, Greez threatening death and dismemberment to anyone who drops food on the Potolli-weave cushions the entire time.  Bed means he has to move and will probably eat by himself whenever he wakes up, but is so much more comfortable.  A little closer to the ‘fresher, too, which is kind of useful since he’s been steadily draining the Mantis’s water tanks.  And on that note, his bladder’s demanding attention and he also needs a bath, so… “I’ll move,” he mumbles.

The hand on his arm stills.  Cal leaves the one over his eyes, just breathes.  It’s okay.  “If you make a big deal about this,” he adds, failing at the volume bit but proud of himself for getting the actual words out, “I’ll never speak to you again.”

There’s a moment of silence before Greez pokes his shoulder.  “Up, then,” he says.  “The short guy’ll haul your sorry carcass to bed again.”  And that sounds fantastic, so Cal sits up, braces himself on the back of the sofa, stands.  The short guy is there immediately, his shoulder the perfect height for Cal to lean on just a little in case he gets too dizzy to walk.  “Also,” Greez adds, so smug Cal narrows his eyes at him automatically, “here’s a fun fact for you, scraplet… I’ve known you can talk since the night you showed up on my ship.”

Cal stops walking.  Greez prods him to keep going and Cal doesn’t.  “How?” he says faintly.  He didn’t do anything, he didn’t say anything, he –

It’s okay, BD reminds him.  Since he can’t hop around on Cal’s shoulders or back right now without causing excruciating pain, he’s walking just ahead of them, guiding them like Cal’s really going to get lost trying to find the engine room.  It’s okay, the droid repeats.  He’s allowed to speak and make noise and nothing bad is going to happen, he will still be safe.

“So you didn’t know you talk in your sleep, huh?”

He’s a bit too thrown for speech, so Cal just shakes his head, regrets it instantly.  “Yeah, you do,” Greez says, grabbing Cal’s arm as he sways.  “Not all the time, but pretty often.  I’ve always known.  And I told Cere, so she knows too, just in case that’s, you know, helpful… wait, am I the last one?!”

“Mm.  Sorry.”

Greez’s sigh is full of disappointment, and this time Cal doesn’t resist when he’s urged along.  “And here I thought that was two things I’d beaten Cere to.  Well, I still knew first.”

There are a lot of things Cal could say to that, but he’s stuck on the revelation he apparently talks in his sleep – even after he successfully stopped himself from screaming awake during nightmares, not bothering Prauf anymore, and…

Did he know?

If Cal’s been babbling in his sleep pretty often for more than the past month, Prauf probably knew all along too.  And yet he’d seen that Cal didn’t talk and found another way, even though it required a lot of time and effort and he didn’t have a whole lot of those to spare after a full day’s work.  Anyone else might’ve left Cal alone to drown in his own silence.  Prauf had reached in, grabbed his collar, and kept his head above the surface until he started treading water.

Good thing the ‘fresher’s empty when they stagger into the corridor.  He needs a minute to himself.  “Drop me off here,” Cal says.  “I’ll only be a few…”

Greez gives him a look, but releases the death grip he has on Cal’s forearm.  “Don’t die in there,” he orders.  “We’ve only got the one ‘fresher, remember; it’ll be a real pain in the ass if I gotta move your corpse next time I need to take a leak.”

Frankly, whenever Cal dies, he intends to do so in a fashion slightly more befitting a Jedi Knight than ‘sprawled across the vacuum toilet on a starship’.  He cheats through a three-minute shower, sitting on the floor with the sonic on, not even bothering to undress, tipping his head way over so he doesn’t get shampoo all over his shirt.  Once he’s less disgusting, he yawns out of the ‘fresher to join BD-1 in the hallway, and the droid happily accompanies him to the engine room.

“I feel like shit,” he announces to BD before tossing his datapad to safety and gingerly collapsing onto his cot.  The blanket’s warm and clean-smelling and Cal curls beneath it, already fighting the urge to close his eyes and slip back into sleep.

That’s not surprising, BD replies.  If Humans were more like droids and could run diagnostics on themselves, perhaps it wouldn’t have taken a week to realize he was very, very slowly bleeding to death instead of just miserable from pain and a cold.

“I dunno if I’m really bleeding to death.  Yet.”

“You’re not doing it at all,” Greez corrects, walking into the room with an extra blanket in his arms.  Cal’s comfortable enough to shake his head when it’s offered; the Latero leaves it at the foot of the cot instead.  “Assuming Cere’s medic friend is legit, by this time tomorrow you should be patched up.”  He claps his hands and looks around.  “Okay, you’ve got water, someone’ll bring you dinner later if you don’t wanna heave yourself back out there.  Just yell if you –” He pauses, a funny expression passing over his face.  “Wait, could you do that…?”

Cal shakes his head again.  Volume is hard.  He’s overcoming the need to be silent; still tentatively poking at the need to be quiet.  One thing at a time.  “Okay,” Greez repeats.  “Then BD, you know what to do.”

He doesn’t leave after that, like Cal expects.  He hovers near the threshold, checks out a few of the monitors, rearranges a bunch of tools on the workbench.  There’s obviously something else he wants to say, so Cal finally says, “What?”

“Nothing!  Nothing…”  Greez fiddles with a roll of bonding tape for a second, then says, “Ah, this woulda been so much easier to ask when you didn’t talk.  Shouldn’t have waited.”  Cal raises his eyebrows.  “Look, I borrowed Cere’s cheat sheet a while ago.  I’m not that good at it, but she’s been coaching me a little, and… I was gonna ask if you’d teach me that signing stuff too.  Thought maybe it’d be useful.”

Cal opens his mouth, closes it.  He’s running out of steam.  He gestures to the datapad he left on the workbench and Greez brings it over so Cal can write, You know half of it is completely made up, right?  Cere once said to fully understand it, you need four different languages and membership in the Scrapper Guild.  You’d be better off learning actual Basic Sign.  I’ll teach you if you want, but it will not be useful.

“See, that’s where I think you’re wrong,” Greez says.  “Bear with me here for a sec – maybe I’m just embracing my new status as an official enemy of the state or whatever, but a half-made-up sign language that’s kinda exclusive to our crew?  I could see that coming in handy someday.  Teach Merrin too and we’ll achieve total incomprehensibility, and then we’re unstoppable.”

BD says he makes a good point.  Cal doesn’t know if he’d go as far as good – he can’t imagine too many scenarios where encrypted comm lines wouldn’t be superior, but there are a few, he supposes.  And what harm could it do?  He’s been talking to BD with a mix of speech and signing the past few days, since he’s suddenly petrified of losing this language that sort of feels like he’s keeping part of Prauf with him.  Especially now, with the discovery Prauf probably knew and never breathed a word.

He's not going to dwell on that too much at the moment.  Cal already spent his three-minute shower sniffling because he was so much more deeply loved than he’d ever realized, and he also had a sobbing breakdown in front of Greez once before.  If he really needs an audience for another, maybe Cere can handle that one.  I think I’ll leave that up to Merrin.  But if you actually want to learn, sure… when I’m not bleeding to death.

“Cool,” Greez says, looking rather relieved, like he honestly thought Cal was going to say no.  “Okay, I’d better go keep an eye on din- ah, dammit, I never cut up the zog, did I?”  He points at Cal.  “See, you can’t bleed to death because I need more hands than I’ve got.  You good for now?

I’m fine.  Cal almost turns off the datapad, then quickly adds, You could just ask Cere for help, you know.

“Listen, we make jokes about folding ingredients and all, but she gave both of us food poisoning last year.  You know why the whole one-‘fresher thing wasn’t a problem that time?”  Cal shakes his head.  “‘cause I spent it in a medcenter, I was so fretching sick.  Maybe it wasn’t totally her fault, but I ain’t taking chances.”  Greez pauses.  “Also, she hates doing the prep work.”

So you make me do it instead.

“Well, yeah.  You enjoy it.”

Cal can’t deny that.  He made bread once and, aside from building his first and second lightsabers, it was pretty much the most amazing thing he’s ever done.  Definitely the tastiest.  Shrugging, he turns off the datapad and leaves it on the deck by the cot in case he needs it again.  Then, clicking his fingers first to make sure Greez is watching, he fingerspells six letters.

Greez is silent for so long after Cal’s finished he thinks the Latero didn’t get it.  But Greez abruptly says, “Yeah, I’ll risk it,” turns on his heel, and walks out of the engine room.  A second later, Cal hears him knocking on another door.  “Merrin!” he calls.  “I need an assistant!  Grab a knife and meet me in the galley.  Or… the other way around.”

BD and Cal look at one another.  “If Merrin had grabbed a knife in his presence a week ago,” Cal signs, “Greez would’ve fainted.”

He might still, BD says brightly.  Maybe he should follow them and be ready to record, just in case.

“No… Merrin will tell us all about it if he does.”

Drooping, BD grumbles about not being allowed to do anything fun (or collect any good blackmail material) and jumps up onto the cot.  Cal folds an arm beneath the pillow, rubs the droid’s head affectionately, and drifts until the exhaustion beats the pain into submission and drags him under.

Chapter Text

“Just so you guys know,” Greez says along the comm line, talking as loudly as he dares over whatever music’s playing near him, “there are a bunch more troopers heading out.  They don’t look like they’ve got a purpose or anything, but…”

“I’m watching the gate,” Merrin says.  “If I see anyone, I will let you know.”

Her statement is followed by a loud, crackling CRUNCH.  “Did you seriously get another vendor to give you free food?!” Greez sputters.

“No,” Merrin says thickly.  She swallows so noisily that’s audible over the comms too, then adds, “I paid for this one.  I needed a reason to stand around and eating doesn’t make me look suspicious.”

“But this is like, your third one!”

“Fourth.”

“Excuse me,” Cere cuts in, and she sounds like she’s gritting her teeth, “keep the comms clear unless there’s something to report, please?  We’re trying to focus here.”

“Sorry,” Merrin says.  She drops out of the line midway through another CRUNCH.  Greez mutters an apology as well, along with something sour about nobody giving him free food, then also falls silent.

Honestly, Cal prefers the comm chatter.  It’s a nice distraction from the general creepiness of what he and Cere are doing.  Very careful to keep his hands to himself whenever possible, he uses the long hilt of his lightsaber to poke through another pile of gilded knives, tarnished candlesticks, and bones.  Nothing resembling a skull in this mess, either.  He aims his torch into the next alcove, but it’s empty aside from cobwebs and a painting of a Human man who’s glaring at Cal like it’s his fault the place is such a tip.

Further down the row and on the opposite side, BD-1 suddenly gives a loud chirp, letting Cal know he’s found one.  “All right, I’m coming,” Cal calls, glancing quickly at the other tombs between him and the droid.  “You checked all of these?”  BD confirms it, so Cal heads over to join him.

BD didn’t just find one skull, Cal discovers, he found six, scattered amongst the rest of the bones and weaponry and valuables in this tomb.  Sighing, Cal crouches next to one, says, “I’ll get the three over here,” and touches it.

Nothing.  Relieved, he flips it over to see the inside and shines his torch on the golden symbols engraved into the bone.  It’s not even close to the inscription they’ve been told to look for, the one Cal drew on his left wrist in marker for convenience, so he leaves it be and blows a centimeter of dust off the next one before touching that too.

She can hear Dolan shouting at the medics all the way down the hall, and through the agony – even the nullicaine is doing nothing for her anymore – she still manages to muster up a sliver of amusement when he barrels into the room, ignoring the droid wailing at him to stop.  A man entering his wife’s birthing room is just not done.  But if they haven’t moved her elsewhere by now, she knows they never will, and this is their last chance.  He stops in the doorway for an instant, horror crashing over his face at all the blood, then stumbles over and drops to his knees next to her bed. 

She’s so weak she can hardly lift a hand to touch his wet face.  He catches it in his own.  “Macie –”

“The baby.”  Even speaking hurts.  “Tell me… the truth, Dolan.”

He sobs, turns his face to press his lips into her palm.  “A girl,” he whispers.  “They tell me she’ll live.”

A girl.  They have a daughter.  His mother will be delighted – she’s pestered them endlessly to just find out already, but they wanted it to be a surprise.  And she’s going to live.  The accident won’t take both of them.  “You promised… we’ll call her Lenna, Dolan.  Don’t let anyone… change your mind.”

Cal loses the echo, blinks the dampness out of his eyes.  Not the skull they’re looking for.  They’ve already found the two women; the final one belongs to a man.

The third skull he touches is Dolan’s.  He’s glad there isn’t a tiny skeleton in here too or else he might just call it quits.  He’s seen so many people die tonight.  It would be easier if someone else could do this part (Merrin, who’s quite unbothered by dead bodies, had actually volunteered), but Brelix’s largest ossuary is located in the middle of an ancient, mostly-residential neighborhood, and they’d learned at the checkpoint it was not open to ‘tourists’.  They figured out pretty quickly that meant ‘non-Humans’.  Cal and Cere could walk around until they found the ossuary without anyone batting an eyelash; Greez would’ve attracted unwanted attention.  Merrin’s sort of on the borderline.  As long as nobody looks at her too closely, she can pass for a pale, tattooed Human, so she snuck in via magick to avoid the checkpoint and is keeping watch at the ossuary’s gates, whereas Greez is hanging out in the more tourist-friendly city center, paying close attention to stormtrooper activity.  He wouldn’t want to be in here, anyway, and the two of them are a lot less likely to be pegged as The Empire’s Most Wanted by passing troopers.  Unfortunately, that leaves skull-hunting duty to Cere, Cal, and BD-1.  If they want to get this done before dawn, Cal has to touch a bunch of things he’d rather not.

He and BD continue on down the row, searching for the right skull.  Combing the entire ossuary would’ve taken days, but Dezayne – Cere and Greez’s friendly contact on Brelix – was able to give them a decent idea of where her family members were once interred.  They can probably get through this area before the New Year festival ends and the regular guard rotation resumes.  They have to, really.  One, the money they’re being paid for this job is badly needed, and two, the second a trooper steps inside to do their rounds, they’re going to notice the five security droids have turned into many smaller, nonfunctional security droids.

The next couple of alcoves Cal checks are even worse than the previous ones, empty of everything except bones, many of which have been broken or stomped into dust.  Yet another thing the Empire ruined.  This was once a place where the local Brelixi laid their dead to rest with gifts, weapons, prized possessions, family heirlooms… everything they believe their loved ones might want in the afterlife.  Brelix also happens to be one of the few places in the galaxy with vast mythra mines, though they mostly ran dry a long time ago.  The majority of those weapons and heirlooms are made of mythra.  According to Dezayne, as soon as the Empire swooped in, they closed off the planet’s ossuaries and began tearing them apart in search of the precious metal.  The tombs are currently off-limits to the Brelixi.  That policy hasn’t gone over too well among people who practice ancestor worship, but there’s little they can do about it – unless they’re Premier Umera Dezayne and can afford to hire people to steal their relative’s skulls back for them.

At least it’s just the skulls she asked for.  Cal’s not sure how they’d get out of here and back to her office carrying three skeletons.  It is a festival, so he’s seen some pretty wild costumes on the way here; running around with Human remains might cause some trouble, though.

“How are you holding up?” Cere asks over the comm.

“I’m holding up,” Cal says dryly.  His head is killing him.  This is another one of those why did I quit smoking jobs.  “Couple more rows and I’m gonna have to take the risk and swap with Merrin, though.”  He’s significantly more recognizable, but if he pushes himself too much further, the migraine will linger for a week.

“We – oh, wait a second,” Cere says.  While she’s busy, Cal sifts through a few more ransacked tombs.  The only skulls he finds are too broken for him to check the entire inscription.  Then Cere abruptly says, “BD?”

“He’s here,” Cal replies, beckoning the droid closer.  “Did you find it?”

“I… think so, but the symbols are so faded I can’t make all of them out.  I could use a scanner over here.”

“Where are you?” Cal asks.  “Wait, never mind, hang on –”  He ignites one blade of his lightsaber and holds it up over his head.  “Can you see that?”

“Hard to miss, it’s the brightest thing in this place.  I’ll be right there.”

He doesn’t lower his lightsaber or turn it off until he spots the beam of a torchlight in the distance, followed by Cere coming into view.  BD, always happy to be of help, is clinging to Cal’s back; as soon as Cere raises the skull so he can get a good view of the inside, he activates his scanners and analyzes the faint, worn etching in the bone.

It’s a match, BD happily announces.

“Good,” Cere sighs.  She doesn’t even have to tell Cal to move out – he’s already heading back towards the entrance.  “What time is it?”

14:81 local time, says BD.

“Over an hour to spare, then.”  The two of them make their way to the doors, where Cal’s left an extra poncho on the floor, the other two skulls atop it.  Cere adds the third one and Cal wraps them all up until they’re hidden beneath the fabric, gathers them into his arms.  The poncho does nothing to stop the echoes, so he gets caught in another from their latest acquisition, and comes out of it to hear Cere talking into her commlink, her hand on Cal’s shoulder.  “– at the plaza,” she says.  “Best if we’re not all spotted walking around together too much.”

“I’ll leave now,” Merrin replies.  “The gates are clear.”

“All right, thanks.”  Cere squeezes Cal’s shoulder.  “Okay?”

“Yep,” he mutters, rubbing his eyes.  If only painkillers did anything for the echo-induced headaches.  “Let’s go.”

The three of them leave the ossuary the same way they came in – slipping through the doors, checking to be sure the surrounding area is clear, and casually strolling through the gates.  It’d be impossible any other night, Dezayne had said, but during the New Year festival, almost all the stormtroopers on Brelix were pulled off their usual assignments to patrol and make sure the festivities weren’t covering up any treasonous rebel activity or whatever it was they were watching for.  Cal has a hard time picturing this guy in the ostentatious, rainbow-feathered bird costume bombing Central Plaza.  They follow him down into the subway, wait for the next train like everyone else headed to the city center for the night, board, and quietly take seats at one end of a car.  Cal leans his head back against the window and sighs, letting his eyes close.

“Everybody still good?” Greez asks, again almost shouting so he’s audible over the music.

“I can see you,” Merrin says.

“You – oh, hey.  Cal?  Cere?”

“We’re on the train now,” Cere replies.

The music, some bad glimmik-pop dance remix that’s threatening to get stuck in Cal’s head and make his headache a real ordeal, finally muffles somewhat.  “I can’t believe it was that easy,” Greez mutters.  “Nothing’s that easy.  We never get the quick bang-in-bang-out milk runs.”

“Greez,” Cal says, “could you not tempt fate until we’re done here?”

“Sorry, sorry… listen, unless you think I really need to have the Mantis ready to go, I’m gonna meet you at the office, okay?  I don’t trust this lady not to rip us off if she realizes it was a milk run.”

“I know she’s a bit… disagreeable,” Cere says, “but –”

“You used the word ‘horrid’ earlier,” Merrin interrupts.

“And ‘heinous’,” Cal adds.

“Heinous was my word,” Greez corrects.  “Anyway, maybe she won’t, but I’ll be there to back you up anyway.  Any problems and she’ll be catching all four of these hands… we –”  CRUNCH.  “Seriously, Merrin?!”

“What?” Merrin says.  “Some of us are blending in instead of standing next to musicians and looking extremely shifty.”

Greez huffs.  “I was trying to look like some kinda fan – you know what, forget it.  Anyone get hurt on this one?  We might be able to negotiate hazard pay.”

“I scraped my knee tripping over a spear,” Cere offers.  “Think that’ll count?”

“We can make it count… play it up.  Limp, grimace a lot, see if she’ll offer you a chair.”

“She won’t.”

“Yeah, probably not.  We’re too grubby for her fancy office.”

Cal dozes slightly (he practically conditioned himself to catch some extra sleep on trains during his scrapping days), letting the banter wash over him.  He can’t help out by playing up his own recent injuries, since Dezayne’s not going to believe he acquired them tonight – he has several titanium-reinforced ribs now, along with half a spleen.  The Delphidian medic who’d performed the surgery was all too thrilled to tell Cal the other half of his spleen, the source of the internal bleeding, had resembled a used charcoal briquette.  Dezayne doesn’t give Cal the time of day, anyway.  She pretends to have some respect for Cere, and that’s all; she pretends not to even know Greez and he actually met her before Cere did.  They’re putting up with it because they need the money and she’s paying pretty damn well.

After a little while, Cal opens his eyes and peers out the window to see dark water beyond the transparisteel tunnel, meaning they’re traveling through the bay and not far from the city center.  A minute later a voice over the speakers drones, “We are now arriving at Central Plaza Station.  Next stop: Textile District,” and the train grinds to a halt at the platform.  They stand and disembark with most of the crowd, keeping to the middle, avoiding the handful of stormtroopers so nobody takes an interest in that bundle Cal’s carrying beneath his arm.  He’s still not sure how he’d explain three Human skulls they definitely did not just steal from the ossuary.

Central Plaza is the physical manifestation of a migraine.  Any other time, Cal might’ve enjoyed it – the lights strung between buildings, the bright costumes, the crappy-yet-catchy music, the mingling scents of twenty different street food vendors packed into the square – but after dying about thirty times tonight and the subsequent headache, even the infectious joy swelling into the Force is overwhelming.  He tugs the edge of his hood down to cover his eyes halfway.  Luckily, the metallic blue spire housing the Premier’s office is just across from the subway station.  Greez is waiting for them, standing between a temporary stage and the tower doors, with a perfect view of the city’s Imperial headquarters.  He’s scowling at a couple of people who are openly staring back.  Even with so many off-world tourists visiting Brelix for the big festival, he stands out a bit.  “What,” he grumbles once Cere and Cal are in hearing distance, “never seen a guy with four arms before?  Hate this kriffin’ planet, I swear.”

“You could’ve gone back to the Mantis,” Cal points out.

“I told you, I don’t trust her premiership to keep her word.  Also…”  Greez’s gaze focuses on something beyond him, “as long as you’re on your fourth one, you could share.”

Merrin considers her snack as she comes up to them.  She still has most of a stick of candied starblooms in her hand, the spiky yellow fruits coated in pink gloss.  “I suppose,” she finally concedes as they step inside the tower lobby.  She pops a starbloom off the stick and gives it to Greez, then offers another to Cere, who shakes her head.  Cal takes it, though.  The man staffing the lobby radiates disapproval at the sticky-fingered, crunching posse in front of him, but Cere confirms they’ve finished the job and he does recognize them from their previous visit, so they’re allowed into the lift without a fight.

It's the same sticky-fingered, crunching posse that enters Premier Dezayne’s posh office a minute later.  She doesn’t look any happier about it than the receptionist did.  She zeroes in on the bundle Cal’s carrying, though, and immediately asks, “Did you get them?” in lieu of a greeting, standing up from her enormous desk.

“We did,” Cere says.

Wondering how she would’ve reacted if it was Greez carrying her relatives’ remains, Cal steps forwards, lays his poncho on the desk, unwraps it.  Dezayne’s lined face doesn’t budge a millimeter when the skulls are revealed – no relief, no happiness, no nothing.  She picks up the closest one, laser-eyes it like she expects to find evidence of a forgery.

The first skull apparently passes muster, because she nods slightly, sets it down.  Cal’s pretty sure this is what a workplace performance review feels like.  The second one gets a critical look before she even touches it.  “It’s broken,” she observes, frowning at Cere as if Cere personally stomped half its face into oblivion.

“Most of the remains in the ossuary appeared to be broken,” Cere says calmly.  “The Imperials weren’t too delicate when they raided it.”

Dezayne shakes her head in disgust.  “Pigs,” she mutters, checking the second skull.  Half-hidden behind Cere, Cal risks offending the Premier by quickly sucking the sugary coating from his fingers.  She’ll probably be even more offended if he touches something and leaves tacky fingerprints.  Greez is doing the same.  Merrin isn’t; the office is much warmer than outside and the candy gloss has started melting off the starblooms and all over her hand.  Dezayne would throw them out if Merrin began tongue-bathing herself like a tooka.  “Are you certain this is the correct one?” Dezayne asks as she gazes inside the last skull.  “The writing is almost unreadable.”

“We’re sure,” Cere replies.  “We had BD-1 scan it to check.”

Dezayne gives BD, peeking over Cal’s shoulder, a rather contemptuous look.  “And you’re sure this droid is accurate?”

BD’s response is uncomplimentary.  Forgetting they’re supposed to act like the hired help and let Cere be all diplomatic and inoffensive, Cal says, “BD scanned the inscription you wrote for us and compared it to every skull he checked, including that one.  There’s nothing wrong with his optics.  It’s the right one.”

He gets the contemptuous look this time, along with a raised eyebrow.  “I didn’t think you could talk,” she remarks blandly.

Cal’s mouth snaps closed so fast he almost bites his tongue.

Should’ve kept my mouth closed in the first place, he thinks irritably.  Not just because they’re supposed to – Cere can handle Dezayne by herself – but because last time they were in this office, yesterday morning, Cal had not been in the right frame of mind to talk.  While those days are dawning less frequently, they do trip him up occasionally, and he’d stuck to sign language while they discussed the job the Premier would pay them handsomely to complete.  If he’d been thinking, he would’ve remembered to keep quiet.  Of course she’s the sort of person to bring it up.  This is the first time that’s happened in over a month and it still makes him feel intensely self-conscious… and shuts him up more effectively than anything else could.

“Well, now he can’t!” Greez snaps, shattering the uncomfortable silence.  He folds two arms across his chest, shaking his head, and mutters, “Nice job ruining it, lady…”

For a second, Dezayne looks startled at their dumpy little pilot (her kind description) speaking to her without permission, and then she glares at him.  “That’s not really relevant, is it?” Cere says, placid as ever, but the words are coated in frost.  “We had BD-1 scan the inscription and I’m certain it’s correct.  If you’d like, he could do it again.”

Though Cal expects the Premier to refuse – she’s plainly no fonder of droids than she is of non-Humans – she agrees.  BD jumps from his shoulder to her polished wooden desk, presumably just to watch her make a face, and activates his scanner.  While he’s busy with that, Cal sends Merrin a sidelong look.  A bit slower than usual, he nods to the stick of starblooms and signs, “If she rips us off, you think you could ram that up her nose?”

Greez snorts loudly, tries to cover it with an unconvincing coughing fit.  Merrin tips her head from side to side like she’s thinking, then responds in kind, “That would –” she pauses, fingerspells (incorrectly) the next word, “contaminate the food.”

Greez was right.  This is extremely useful.  Dezayne can only watch them with a dark scowl, uncomprehending, and suddenly BD chirps to get her attention.  He projects two images in front of him – on top, the flimsiplast upon which she’d written the inscription they needed to search for, and on the bottom, the writing inside the third skull.  He’s filled in the bits that are so worn they’re unreadable to organic eyes, and they do indeed match perfectly.  She looks at that for a moment, at the little row of skulls on her desk, then exhales through her nose and opens a drawer.  “As we agreed,” she says, and hands a small pouch to Cere.

Cere weighs it in her hand like any good merc, then tucks the pouch into her pocket.  “You know how to get in contact with us if you need our help again,” she says.  “The Imperials will probably realize someone’s broken in – we had to deactivate the security droids – but they’ve made such a mess of the place I doubt they’ll ever be able to figure out exactly what went missing.  Still, I would keep those hidden.”

Dezayne nods and sits back down.  “I don’t intend to display them publicly,” she says dryly.  “Now, I need to give a speech in twenty minutes.” 

Understanding they’ve been dismissed, BD jumps onto Cal’s back, Cal takes his spare poncho off the desk, and all five of them head out of the office.  He glances over his shoulder right before leaving.  Premier Dezayne is touching one of the skulls like she can’t believe it’s actually there, an expression of sheer reverence on her face.  Cal looks away quickly and follows the others.  He doesn’t like her at all, but he knows how it feels to recover something you thought you’d lost forever.

“Well, that was fun,” Greez deadpans once the doors to the lift have closed.  “Can we work for someone a little more pleasant next time?  Like, say, a rampaging rancor?”

“Emperor Palpatine wants to hire us,” Cere says.

“Don’t even joke about that.”

“I do not understand why you’re so frightened of rancors,” Merrin says.  “They’re quite friendly – even affectionate – once they have been tamed.”

Financially secure for the next few weeks, they emerge from the spire and take a left turn out of Central Plaza, following the neon signs directing them towards the spaceport.  A young, blond-haired Human man tending one of the food stands spots Merrin, lights up, and waves; she just raises her starbloom stick in greeting and he looks delighted.  Cal dimly recognizes him as the guy who gave her the first two starbloom sticks.  No money changed hands either time.  “I wish I could get free food by standing around, looking mysterious, and having a cool accent,” he laments.

Merrin’s forehead furrows.  “Looking…”

“Mysterious, I think,” Greez says.  “And yeah, agreed… didn’t catch that last word though.”

Neither Merrin nor Cere know either, so Cal spells it for them.  BD suggests he fake the accent and see how that works out.

“I think it’d just make me sound like a bad holofilm character.”  Cal pauses, gazes at his hands.  “Maybe if I painted my nails black…”

“You will have to get your own paint,” Merrin says, wiggling the last starbloom free and tossing the dowel at the nearby trash bin.  She misses; the sanitation droid rolling up to empty the bin manages to glare at her without any discernable facial features.  “Sorry,” she tells it.  “Anyway, mine is made from the roots of the hydraatis plant; it’s slightly acidic and may burn through your fingernails.  And if not, it will poison you the first time you eat it.”

Cal regards his bitten-down nails again and shelves the idea.  If he ever needs to break the habit, there are less lethal methods.

The Mantis is right where they left it, in bay 838 of the city spaceport, blissfully quiet and low-lit and only smelling faintly of phraig from their hasty lunch earlier.  Better than any painkiller, Cal thinks, relieved.  Nah, that’s not true.  Those won’t help his headache, though, so as Greez tells Cere, “Gimme that, I’m gonna count every credit and make sure she didn’t skim off the top ‘cause one karking skull was broken,” Cal wanders into the engine room and drops onto his cot with a sigh.

It was a milk run, but it still feels good to get through a job so smoothly for a change.  Since the berth is paid through tomorrow (Greez almost had a heart attack when he found out the festival pricing and couldn’t argue for some kind of pay-by-the-hour deal), they may as well stick around for the night.  Cere will check in on the stormtroopers’ comm chatter here and there to see if they notice the break-in at the ossuary, let them know if staying becomes too much of a risk.  Otherwise, no point in wasting fuel when they don’t have another destination yet.  He stays there for a couple of minutes with his eyes closed until BD-1 pokes his side with a foot and asks if he’s okay.

“Fine,” he signs.  “Headache, that’s all.”

He had to cope with a lot of echoes this evening, BD says.

Cal shrugs.  “I’ve coped with more in less time.  All the deaths weren’t that great, but I’m okay.”  He could meditate, process everything he saw in the ossuary.  He could take a nap.  He could knock out a few more chapters of the book he’s been reading – Cere finally finished the Chandrilan novel after quite a bit of incredulous commentary and now Merrin’s making her way through it, equally bewildered.  If Greez reads it too, Cal’s entertaining the thought of forming the galaxy’s worst book club just so they can discuss all of Pona’s endearingly stupid choices.  In the meantime, he could also crack open the journal (which is about sixty percent lightsaber schematics) he hasn’t touched in a week… one of these days his handwriting might even make it to readable.

Or he could go see if Greez plans to hit a store and buy some vegetables that have never been dehydrated, frozen, or canned.  Ask if he needs help with dinner.  Find out what Cere’s up to and where she left the hallikset.  Tell Merrin ‘contaminate’ has an esk at the end, but only if she’s already washed her hands.  Merrin is a proud, dignified, powerful Nightsister, and she is absolutely not above planting her sticky fingers in Cal’s hair just to be petty.

“Hey, BD,” he says aloud, only a little quieter than usual.  The droid beeps.  “You think we should hang out in here, or go see what the others are doing?”

BD cocks his head to one side.  Unless Cal’s planning to rest, he says, the engine room’s kind of boring.

“Yeah…”  He probably should rest.  He fully expects the migraine aura to show its ugly face within the next couple of hours.  But until that point, he can rest on the sofa – Cal sits up, rubs his eyes, grabs his datapad and the latest book chip, and stands.  “Come on,” he says to BD, and they head out of the room to join the rest of their family.