Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The Temple, to put it simply, does not know what to do with Cal Kestis.

The youngling is near-silent, unresponsive, unmoored. He stares at the floor, at the walls, the arches, the ceilings; he stares and stares, mind gone somewhere distant, requiring a firm snap at his signature to bring presence back to his gaze.

The créchemasters notice the sudden and wide berth that the boy’s friends give him. The other younglings are unsettled by his abrupt shift in personality, confused by the absence of recognition. This absence of recognition is not on account of his memory, the healers think among themselves. They think he remembers perfectly well— perhaps too well. 

Psychometric overloads can disturb any mind, especially a child's. Whatever Kestis had seen was perhaps too much for him: a strong ability paired with inexperience and an object of strong memory, and it is no wonder that he may still be trapped in the impressions of what he saw. The healers would happily talk about what Kestis saw with him, but that would require them to know what it was in the first place. 

This is what the temple knows: the boy had screamed the day of this psychometric overload, suddenly and without warning. He had been mid-lesson with Master Tseigna and the rest of his cohort, and then he had started screaming, and kept screaming. 

“It was like he just disappeared,” Master Tseigna had said. “He was there and he was so bright, and then there was nothing. ”

A severe response, they hypothesize, a retreat far into the shields of the mind. 

“What did you see?” Master Che would eventually ask him, after a series of failures with this same question guided his case to her. 

And Kestis had simply stared at her, eyes glassy and distant. He reminded her of the way weathered knights gaze at stillness, at normality. It was unsettling to see the same look on a twelve-year-old. 

Further probing on her part didn’t yield any progress. It would take nearly a week before he would speak to anyone again, and when he did, it was to ask for the date.

This brings about a natural curiosity: what was it that he saw? 

There are many questions that do not have answers. This one does. 

Cal Kestis meets his end for the first time at the foot of a bloodhound’s rage. 

By many means, Darth Vader is not a bloodhound; he is a man, but he is all torn edges and animalistic wrath. There is a singular need to destroy, and anything else that came before is certainly long buried. Darth Vader may not quite be a bloodhound, but there is not much else to distinguish between the two, between destroyed man and seeking beast. 

So it goes: Vader hunts Cal, and Cal has struggled for years upon years to become something able to stand on its own. It is a great, terrible misfortune that all it amounts to in the end is to be something worth killing. 

Beneath the looming fury of Vader, of a beast as powerful as a blazing star, he clings to his life and fights with desperation drawn from a well run dry. 

Cal is breathing harshly as he struggles to keep a red lightsaber from impaling his chest, or cutting off his hands, or his head, and there is no backup coming. There is not a soul around, all either dead or gone in this siege, and he knows the corpses of his friends lay among the quiet. 

He is familiar with anger, and equally familiar with squashing his anger to a simmer. It is what he was taught, from the moment he began to feel and the world around him moved in response. Even if all that remains of the Jedi is the death rattle of a few scattered survivors, he still knows, still remembers , to watch his rage, to tread carefully

And yet, this does very little for him, as the symbol of his life’s torment parries a swift, sharp strike from his lightsaber. Quelling his anger does not give him more strength, does not chase away his despair, and— he can fight, but for how long? The removal of his anger does nothing, but neither does the anger itself. Anger at Vader, at himself, at anything at all— it is all very futile, to be thinking about what makes him angry and what his anger is doing and where it is going. All of it.

He is forced to bend back with Vader's incoming jab, all humming power, and he stumbles back, but Vader presses forward. Cal goes with the momentum carrying him to the ground. And it's an utterly foolish thing to do, but he is fresh out of any other ideas: he springs up dangerously close to Vader, well in range of the strike twisting back towards him, and as Vader's hand swings near him he reaches out with the intent to stop .

It's not very successful, as foolish things tend to be, and here is perhaps where the end of Cal Kestis exactly begins, in this moment of split-second decision that thrums in the space around them, easily missed by the oppressive current of battle.

Cal’s hand desperately grapples for Vader’s lightsaber— he sees —

“Anakin,” Obi-Wan says, stern but fond, and Anakin grins, says—

“Oh, come on, Master, I got them, didn’t I?” 

Screams, as his mother is beaten and bloody and dead, then his screams are drowned out by the screams of men, women, children as he swings, swings, and they burn—  

Padme looks at him in thinly veiled horror, and he asks her if she thinks he is a monster, and she holds him, he is unraveling—

PalpatineEmperorMaster— traitors traitors traitors— save her save her save her—-a youngling stumbles back and looks at him in confusion as his blade hisses to life—

He hears—

“I loved you,” Obi-Wan’s eyes are chanting whywhywhywhy, and it is hot, and Padme is gone, and Anakin is on fire and he burns –

“I hate you!” he shouts, and screams, and Obi-Wan watches him burn and he’s alone— 

It is cold and his Emperor builds a star and it is cold and he kills and it is cold and he hates and it is cold and it is cold and it is cold—

And Cal gasps, and it is cold, and Vader— Anakin Skywalker , whatever is left of him —is utterly still. “You,” Cal heaves. “ Skywalker ?” he spits the word like a disbelieving curse, and the air grows frigid, thick, Vader’s lightsaber humming in an eerie quiet.

“You saw,” the words are something close to desperate curiosity; heavy, and angry. 

Cal’s lips twitch. “I saw.” he agrees. “What happened to become as miserable a thing as you—”

He doesn’t dodge as blazing, red plasma tears through his chest. He thinks he is too tired to, that any shred of light in this galaxy has long been snuffed out; because if General Skywalker fell, if Skywalker is the reason for this hellscape, what fucking chance did the rest of them ever have?

Cal is cold, despite the heat of a star burning and cauterizing and ruining him as he stands. He is cold, and Vader’s breath is uniform, indifferent, yet Cal can feel the air tremble in his fury, in his sorrow, his grief. 

And he knows he is dying here on this red blade, wondering, was it all for nothing? His life, the lives of everyone else, was it all for nothing? The air tremors, and they stare at each other, and it’s quiet.

He is dying, and his eyes slip closed, and he—

He springs up and hits his head on solid stone.

There is actually a significant amount of time between Cal Kestis’ first death and his awakening at the Temple. He spends most of it digging, and some of it watching a guy get bludgeoned to death with a chair. 

It takes him countless moments to stand from his position of confusion on the ground, staring at the stone he hit his forehead on as though it holds an answer. He shouldn’t be staring at stone . He shouldn’t be staring at anything at all. 

He lifts his hand to press it against his chest, because he’s not entirely sure that he isn’t spasming on the floor before Vader and hallucinating… rocks? But his chest doesn’t really hold an answer, either. There is only his heartbeat, and it unnerves him.

He feels hollow as he tries to get to his feet, like his limbs are wooden. He tries to take a step forward, and he stumbles. It is here that Cal realizes his gait is smaller than it should be. In fact, he’s a lot smaller than he should be. He stretches his hands out in front of him— tiny —and looks, numbly, at his small shoes. This isn’t real. It can’t be real. 

His heart pounds, and he gingerly reaches up towards his head. His fingers do not graze the end of a braid, and his breath catches. He isn’t sure if he was expecting it, if he is relieved or not over the intangibility of a part of him that he tried to bury. The part that would not, could not, disappear. 

Cal wonders why, even in death, he is still the same terrified child he spent so long digging a grave for. 

“What are you doing over here?” a voice says, murky and certainly close, but Cal cannot seem to center his focus on it quickly enough. 

There’s an old man standing there, head adorned with a lamp. The sun backlights his frame; they’re outside, he thinks. There’s just a lot of rock. The man steps closer, and if Cal were more cognizant, were not reeling from the way his world looks far closer to the ground, he might have stepped back and run. 

“The registry line is this way, here…” the man carefully begins guiding him to a checkpoint, and Cal hazily watches images flit past him, trying not to fall as he steps further than his legs are able to reach.

There are thousands of souls swirling by these rocks like water; he feels the gentle pulse of life, and wonders if they are all waiting to pass to some greater beyond, too. 

He is distracted by this—the ebb and flow of consciousness, the lights all concentrated like a supercluster—in a way he has not been distracted since he was very small. He glances down at himself again. Since he was very small the first time, he amends.

Cal doesn’t pay much attention as he and the old man shuffle through the line. He watches dust motes dance with each other and part into nothingness. He traces the paths of the rocks and mountains where they jut against the blue sky. He looks at beautiful things. 

Words are passed over him, words he lets slide over himself, and he numbly holds a small packet of paper shoved into his hands. 

The old man guides him somewhere dimmer, and the sky vanishes— they’re going underground. He wonders if this is where his soul will move onward, if this is where he will melt into the universe, where he will become something different, something not Cal Kestis any longer. 

The old man hums a tune, and their shuffling feet echo down an endless tunnel. 

He is handed a set of tools and told to dig. 

The swing of his pickaxe into rock is mind-numbingly dull, and Cal continues to let himself float, never quite coming down to complete awareness. It’s possibly, probably, very dangerous, and the part of him that is a hunted animal tries to twitch his limbs to do something, to look and hear and feel. But there is a larger part of him, tired and aimless and dead, that lets each moment slip away in a smear of gray. 

As Cal floats, he sees impressions of moments long-gone. He sees himself at the table with Cere and Greez on the Stinger Mantis. He watches Greez pour salt on his food and listens to Cere spill forth tragedy. He feels himself smile and hears Merrin laugh, on some other planet at night and the stars are so, so bright. He tastes salt. 

He watches himself hiding in his own skin in a rain-soaked dump, trying to become nothing, trying to cling to the warmth of the universe, grasping a bone-deep cold instead. Prauf gives him a precious, ratty blanket. He tastes salt. His master falls to the floor in front of him and the minds of everyone else have gone frighteningly blank. He tastes salt. 

Cal blinks, and there is rock in front of him, and there are tears slipping down his face, into the corners of his mouth, off his chin. He rubs them off with his shoulder, and he drifts. 

He always drifts until it is time for him and the other souls mining to stop. There are always sighs of relief and he never joins them. He watches men sink onto hard cots and others sit in tight circles to try and conjure a spark of joy among themselves. Sometimes they are successful. Sometimes it is smothered before they have the chance to try. 

The old man is quiet, steady— he talks to Cal, sometimes, and he finds that he doesn’t mind all that much. His voice and the glow of his soul flow well with the greater world around him, and Cal wonders if he’s some sort of ancient spirit, if maybe he’s been here since the dawn of time itself. 

“I was like you,” the old man tells him in one of these strange periods of rest. “I was young and didn’t know anything better than to come here.”

Point for being an ancient spirit, he thinks. Cal also thinks that he is not really anything like the man. He does not say this, out of the worry for some offense, and simply lets the other take his silence however he sees fit. It is a lot of silence on his part, and a lot of impressive ability on the old man’s part to make conversation with a wall. 

Cal drifts more: he dimly thinks that he has been drifting for a long time, and that he is still alone. He calls for Merrin, for Cere, for Greez, for Prauf, for Master Tapal— he calls for them and they do not answer. They are all dead, aren’t they? So where are they?

He calls their names, and he says, “I’m ready, now. Where are you?”

“Who are you calling for, kid?” the old man asks gently. 

Cal peers down tangles of carved tunnels; there is no flash of familiar hair, there is no familiar laughter echoing down any mineshaft. There is just the croon of the wind, the sea of souls, the depths. 

“People I know,” he finds himself saying. “Why aren’t they here?”

The old man pauses. “Are they supposed to be here?”

What kind of question is that? Of course they are. They’re dead. “Well, yeah,” Cal says, eyeing the other. 

Maybe this is some kind of purgatory. Maybe everyone else has already passed through here, maybe only he’s lingering for Force-knows what reason. “Maybe they aren’t,” Cal amends, quieter. 

The old man blinks. “Well, they either are or they aren’t. So which is it?”

Cal looks up at him. “I don’t know,” he says, “I don’t know.” 

Cal wonders if purgatory looks different for everyone passing through the bellows of the afterlife. 

He wonders if his is some warped reflection of the worst period of his life; darkness, the mesh of thousands of others doing nothing but working for nothing, endless. He wonders what it would be like if his purgatory was the vastness of space. If he could soar from star to star, if he could choose what corner of the galaxy to fade away into stardust.

That endlessness, he thinks, is one he could find peace in. 

Eventually, he stops getting up. It becomes harder to stop floating, and he thinks he loses more time than he is aware of. 

“Where have you gone?” he hears the old man say, somewhere far away. “Get up, it’s not your time to rest.” 

He considers this, and lets it slip by, just as any other moment might. 

The earth shifts. He tastes salt.

He doesn’t quite snap to awareness— it’s more like a firm tug, or a stutter in the flow of the depths that he’s gotten used to.

It’s the clamor that descends from the surface; a procession of roiling anger and fear, sharp and dissonant against the normal malleability of resignation. It’s jarring enough that his eyes open, and it takes nearly three minutes for the world to come into focus. 

He’s laying down on a cot, and he is not alone, but the people around him feel— dimmer. Wherever he is is some ways away from the larger masses, and as such, further away from the gnarled disturbance.

It takes even longer for his limbs to cooperate with what he wants them to do. His body feels distant from himself, like he has to search for the connection between his nerves and his brain. He manages to make his fingers twitch, and then he has to remember how to make the rest of himself move. 

When he does sit up, he realizes that he’s in some sort of medbay. It’s dinky and probably the most unsanitary place someone could have chosen, with the dust in the air and dirt floor. 

He startles slightly when one of the souls in the room talks: “Ah. Have you finally woken up?” 

A man in stained scrubs enters his field of view, and it’s all Cal can do to blink at him. A medic? The man frowns, crouching beside his cot. “Can you understand what I’m saying?” 

Cal nods, and goes to apologize, but all that comes out of his throat is a wheeze. 

“Here,” something cool is pressed into his hands, and he looks down to see a packet of water. Is he thirsty? 

He stares at the packet for a few moments, considering, and the man coughs. “You should drink that,”

So he does. The water is a balm to his scratchy throat, and he’s tempted to down the entire thing in one go, but a hand gently tips his head down and pulls the packet away. “Careful.”

He crinkles it in his fingers. The water had helped, had distracted him for a moment from the mess in the tunnels. 

“Why,” he rasps, “Are there so many people?”

“What?” 

“More people, they came down?”

The medic looks at him, appraising, and Cal can’t help but feel like he’s missing something. 

“New batch. They’re here thanks to the invaders.”

The air feels— stale. It prickles, and his skin turns very cold. “Invaders..?” The afterlife shouldn’t have invaders. 

The man raises a brow. “The war’s reached the Koros sector for a few months, now,” That’s not right, even if he were alive. The war is over. The war is over and Cal’s people have been dead for years. “They took the planet twenty-six days ago. We lost.”

“Against who?” 

An incredulous look. “Those Force-wielders,” he says like it’s something obvious, “the Sith.”

The medic informs him that he had been near-unconscious for twelve days, and has been below the earth for over three months. 

“How did you not know?” The medic mutters as he examines Cal’s ability to walk, to hold things, to return to work. 

As for Cal— he’s lost, first and foremost. At why the people here act alive, why he’s small, why he’s alone, why he doesn’t know where or what this place is. It’s tempting to slide back into unawareness— very tempting —but the longer he stays here, the less wise that sounds. That thought doesn’t make it much easier to stop, though; he finds that he needs to snap himself out of falling into a trance, that he’ll lose seconds or minutes or a whole hour if he isn’t careful. 

The medic thinks he might be suffering brain damage from monoxide poisoning, or an early-onset stroke, or retrograde amnesia. Cal wonders at his credibility. 

He’s cleared to return to work, and he finds his way back by following the tangled mess of emotion that’s radiating like a ball of fire. The tunnels of this place are dank, a sprawling mine with countless paths branching from each larger hollowed section of earth. He wonders what he’s been mining for the past three months. 

The medic had mentioned an active war. No matter how Cal thinks about it, a war should have no place in the afterlife. It also can’t be the same war that ended the Republic: the Koros sector is deep in the core, and the Sith? Cal doesn’t think that anyone but a Jedi would refer to the Empire as the Sith, and that medic had certainly not been a Jedi. 

He reaches the concentration of souls, and it’s a large hollowed space packed to the brim with people, predominantly human or near-human, he notes. He passively watches them all pass against each other, like a large liquid, and ghosts through the crowd in search of the old man’s presence. Cal has to wade through this blob of life until he reaches a pathway that branches off to a less-clustered set of tunnels. 

The old man is leaning against the tunnel wall with his pickaxe next to him, face set in content. The other people in this same tunnel are in similar states of relaxation, and so Cal settles himself beside the old man, figuring it’s a rest break.

The old man turns to him and smiles. “You’re awake again,” he says, pleased.

Cal folds his knees close to his chest. “I am,” he says. “What…” he isn’t sure what to ask. What he’s missed? Where they are? What the old man’s name is?

“Oh, the kid’s back,” an unfamiliar voice says, and two people sink to the ground across from Cal and the old man. One is a young woman, near-human, with short light hair, pale, pallored skin, and a pair of elongated ears. The other is a young man, skin tan and hair falling to his shoulders in waves. Cal has no idea who they are. 

“I’m sorry, who are you..?” Cal tells them, and desperately hopes they haven’t been talking to him while he was drifting. 

“I’m Sange,” the woman says. “I’ve never seen a kid as tiny as you down here. I didn’t know they even allowed it.”

“He might be here because of the war,” the man says. “My name’s Agah, by the way.”

“Oh, like the quota increases? Yeah, I see it,” Sange nods. 

Agah turns to him. “Well, you seemed pretty out of it the last time we saw you. Or ever saw you, actually.” 

Cal shifts. “Um, sorry,” he says, unable to offer anything better. 

Sange elbows the other in the side. “ He’s so tiny, it’s so cute, and you’re being an ass ,” she whispers loudly. She beams at Cal. “What’s your name, kid?” 

“Cal.” 

“Cal,” she repeats. “So, how come you’re down here?”

Agah guffaws. “And you call me an ass? You’re as subtle as a speeder to the face.”

Cal coughs, and both of their gazes snap to him in sync. “It’s fine,” he says. “I— don’t actually know how I got here,” he admits.

Sange tilts her head. “But you had to get here somehow,” she says. “You came down a while before the new involuntaries got here.”

There is likely nothing he can say that will completely sate her curiosity. Nothing true, in any case. He glances at the old man sitting beside him, silent, and wonders if he’ll say anything about how he found Cal and brought him down himself. The old man doesn’t. Cal can probably just— “I don’t want to talk about it,” he says quietly, and her face immediately softens. 

He doesn’t wait for either of them to talk again, and asks, “Are the involuntaries all the people a few tunnels back?” 

Sange leans back on her hands, and she nods. “The mines have always been voluntary— in times of peace, anyway. But now they’re sending down loads of prisoners, and our pay’s getting cut. Can’t really go anywhere else, though, since those of us without the qualifications or credentials will just end up doing similar labor for the same wage.”

The ceiling of the tunnel starts to spin, slightly, and the lights haphazardly strung up burn behind his eyelids. This is all starting to sound too... real, and he becomes very aware of the ground beneath him, the dust that’s made its way beneath his gloves, the weight of the pickaxe against his side. 

“My best guess is that carbonite mining operations have been taken control of. They’re asking for a lot more than we have the manpower for, hence the extra coerced labor.” Agah says, and Cal shuts his eyes. Opens them. Everything is still the same. They're talking about the logistics of a workforce in an active war. None of it makes sense.

Cal abruptly gets to his feet, the motion complete before he truly realizes he's done it. “Excuse me,” he blurts, and slips around the corner, not waiting to hear any response. 

He doesn’t know where he’s going, just that he needs to be somewhere to fall apart alone, somewhere to think. He paces down turn after turn, his breath loud in his ears. He is alone here in more ways than one— there is no one in this bit of mine, and his people are nowhere to be found, still. He’s beginning to think they might not ever come. He’s beginning to have this awful, frightening realization, one that he can't continue to deny—

“This is real,” Cal says aloud, and his fragile world splinters. 

This mine is no afterlife. It is no purgatory. Cal stares at the tunnels sprawling out before him, at the pickaxe clutched in his gloved hands, at the twinkling clusters of souls who are all very much alive and very much real . 

The sureness of their presences feel suffocating. He is alive , and between layers of rock he hides and he hides and he hides; he is the same child once caked in mud and hiding beneath rain-soaked metal, he is the same man who struggled and clawed for his own survival, for his own freedom. All at once, he is everything he ever was.

Cal Kestis is alive against all odds, and— he does not know if this fact is a miracle, or if it is something far worse.

Chapter Text

Sange asks if he’s alright when he shakily sits back down in their little space, and he nods, mute. He’s not sure if he’s capable of saying anything else at the moment. Being alive has so much mess attached to it— why is he so much younger? Why didn’t he wake up at Vader’s feet? Where did Vader even go? Why is he here? 

“If there’s one good thing about all the new miners,” Agah is saying, “it’s that all the overseers are too busy processing them to keep every single one of us working.” 

If Cal is alive, could the others be alive, too? His chest clenches, and his throat feels thick, out of his control. 

The old man hums. “I’ve never seen this many people below at once.” 

Cal has never been this bewildered in his life. 

The newest batch of miners are integrated into the great machine of the mines in only a few days. 

The work has gotten harder, and they’re all stretched thin despite the sudden influx of workers— that much is clear. Cal would need to be drifting to not notice that. No one is allowed to leave anymore, given a shallow excuse over the necessity of every worker; there’s the rumble of discontent, and there’s a lot of silence, too. 

Most seem resigned to their fate of digging for carbonite. A few are not. One man is incredibly vocal about where he came from and who he is and how very unjust it all is: he calls himself Hylemane Lightbringer. 

“I ruled a planet,” Hylemane Lightbringer claims. “The Republic loves me, they’ll come for me soon.”

“What planet?” someone asks.

“Selmiea,” he says with pride.

“...Never heard of it.” 

Lightbringer nods as if in agreement. “Yes, it is quite secluded— it makes for great protection.”

“If it was so well-protected, why are you here?” someone else laughs.

Lightbringer opens his mouth, but nothing comes out.

The Republic will come for me, the alive-man said, and Cal knows with utter certainty that there is nothing left of the Republic. He knows with certainty that there is no war— not one by name, anyway. As long as any institution of power exists, there will always be some conflict, some struggle over it for people to throw themselves at and die for. The one these miners speak of cannot be the one Cal watched his master and people die for. 

But that begs the question— what the kark are they talking about, then? Whatever war they’re thinking of is very clearly real to everyone else except Cal. Rather than the place he’s ended up in being completely bizarre, as an outlier, he must be the reason why it seems to be so. 

He figures he can start with the small things. He asks Agah, the next time they are near each other on a shift, “What’s the date?” 

“First Taungsday of the second month,” the man answers between pickaxe swings, and Cal still finds himself scratching his head. The day and month don’t really tell him much other than the disparity between when Vader impaled him through the chest and when he woke up in the makeshift medbay. But, if he’s apparently been disconnected from reality for months, it probably won’t be a stretch to ask about the new year. 

“Already the second month? So now it’s…” Cal trails off, looking expectantly at the other. It’s difficult to phrase the question as to not make himself seem completely out of his mind— people like to fill in the blanks between words, though, and he banks on this as Agah pauses. 

“Oh, right, you missed the new year,” Agah shakes his head. “Happy belated 20,043, then.”

Cal stares, uncomprehending, for a long moment. 20,043? That’s the Standard Calendar, not the Empire’s new calendar. It’s the Standard Calendar, and— it’s over five thousand years off. 

“Oh,” he says, for a lack of anything else to say. He can’t quite bring himself to dig the tool in his hand into the earth in front of him. 

Agah’s eyes soften, and he lowers his pickaxe. “I’m sorry you were out for so long,” the man says, and his words ring with sincerity. “It must be scary to wake up somewhere all disoriented like that.” 

No, what’s scary is that Cal feels himself approaching an answer that should be impossible; as impossible as his current existence, perhaps more. He forces his arms up, forces them to swing into carbonite, forces himself to talk. “...What happened when I was out of it? All of it.” 

He keeps his gaze fixed on where his pickaxe is landing, watching tiny chunks of ore fall to the ground. He hears Agah hum, and the other man is silent for a moment. “Bad people came from outside Koros-space. Cinnagar’s become a stepping stone.” The man is being deliberately vague, glossing over most anything vital, and Cal remembers that Agah thinks he’s talking to a child. His fingers twitch in frustration. Agah continues, “We’re a little stuck, for now. But we’ll be just fine soon.” 

“Who are the bad people?” he asks, searching for more information, wanting it. 

Agah’s response comes quickly. “The Dark Force-users. The Sith, I think they call themselves?"

Agah’s answers align almost exactly with the medic’s, and it’s not enough. “Why are they here? What do they want?” Cal presses, pausing after he speaks to take a moment of rest. 

The man’s brow is furrowed, and he looks at Cal from the corners of his eyes. It’s a look of hesitation, like he’s searching for the right words to say. It’s a sweet notion— or would be, if Cal was actually an impressionable child. It makes him want to grab the man by the shoulders and shake him, to demand a straight answer. 

“They’re angry at the Republic, and want more power for themselves,” Agah says finally. “This planet can give a lot of power to them, like these mines. But Empress Teta is very clever— I don’t think they’ll be here for long. Nothing to worry about, alright?”

“Right,” Cal responds lamely, mind racing. Empress Teta… does that sound familiar? He digs through the meager fragments of memories he has of his classes at the Temple, and to his dismay, finds absolutely nothing. He knows that he’s in the Koros sector, at least, and— and that it’s the first Taungsday of the second month of 20,043. 

If it is really 20,043, then something has gone terribly wrong, he thinks, a little hysterical. He is five thousand years away from the people he loves, is five thousand years away from his death, five thousand years away from the death of the Republic, of the Order. 

He’s alive, and he’s trapped here, in some long-gone era of the galaxy. The Sith are fighting the Republic, which still stands. The Sith are trying to eliminate the Jedi, still, and Cal suddenly envisions the sheer scope of how long they’ve been waging war against each other. Five thousand years loom over him, and he thinks they’re going to swallow him whole. 

Now that Cal has come to realize where and when he is— more or less —he finds himself at odds with his previous complacency. 

This unsettledness makes itself known as a fine tremor runs through the earth, and dust falls in tiny plumes from the ceiling. Everyone in the tunnel freezes, faces turned upwards as though they might be able to see the surface. 

They wait in silence, the air thick, stifling. The dust does not tell Cal to run, so he too stands in wait as ten, twenty, thirty seconds pass— a collective sigh leaves the people in the tunnel, and Cal watches them visibly deflate. 

“What was that?” he asks the old man beside him. 

The old man’s eyes squint at him, brows furrowed, carving deep and weathered lines into his face. “Just an earthquake,” he tells Cal. 

Cal glances dubiously at the jagged ceiling. “Is this place stable enough for those?”

“It’s lasted this long,” the old man says. “I doubt it will fall now.”

“Yeah, but what if it’s not just an earthquake?” Agah cuts in quietly, having approached in silence from his previous spot of work. Cal follows his gaze to Sange, who remains where she had been during the tremor some twenty paces off, head tilted carefully in the direction of the overseers huddled over their comms.

“Sange’s listening,” Agah informs them. “She has been listening for some days now.” He casts a cursory glance around, then beckons the two of them closer. “The Empress sent out forces to try and reclaim Cinnagar. They’re directly overhead.”

The old man frowns. “Here, of all places?”

Agah shrugs. “Don’t know why. But…” he pauses, here, as if his next words will be monumental. “I think we should be prepared to run. I don’t think this will end well.” Agah turns to look at Cal, eyes set in a promise. “Listen, we’ll be just fine, alright?” He wonders if that phrase is the man’s favorite, if he’s had practice with the ease it rolls off his tongue. 

“I can run,” he tells the other.

Places like these seem to be the breeding ground of hope and anger and resistance. Cal knows these things like he knows the frequency at which they are also beaten into submission.

Bracca had had one of these things, maybe one and a half; Cal had never allowed himself to be hopeful of escape. It’s easier, in some ways, to resign yourself to your fate, to spare yourself from being fragile. Even so, he had never truly felt resigned. He doubted anyone did. 

But he had felt plenty of anger, with nowhere to put it. He’d spent countless nights staring at the water-stained ceiling of his tiny apartment, chasing sleep, not quite able to temper the rage lurking beneath his skin. Wondering, why? Why? Why? Wondering why the Force did not answer, why it had gone unnaturally silent. Squashing his anger was all he could do, then, a new and bastardized attempt to mimic what he remembered from the Jedi. 

The Mantis is a marker of his freedom, of the unwavering life of both himself and the Jedi, of some tiny resistance against an unstoppable force. Like recognizes like as he regards the steely set of Agah’s shoulders— that is all one needs to seek freedom, when it comes down to it. 

Cal thinks Agah might recognize this, too, because instead of pushing the issue further, the man simply presses his lips together and nods firmly. “Alright,” he says. “Then that’s what we’ll do. We’ll run.”

He sleeps with the rest of the miners in the barracks now, and as such, hears every scrap of information they let slip past their lips. Agah and Sange try their best to shelter him from the majority of the wallowing and discontent spread around the barracks, but it does little when he actively chooses to listen in. 

A man close to Cal’s bunk spews long-winded curses nearly every night. He seems to find despair in anything and everything.

“Stars-damned nonsense,” the man spits one night, beginning a spiral he has gone down many times before. 

“Can you shut your mouth?” his bunkmate groans. “‘S too late for you to be barking on and on—”

“They’re why we’re here! They’re why we’re trapped here!” the man laughs. 

Cal shuffles to the edge of his bunk, peering at the man.“Who’s ‘they’?” Cal asks quietly. The man has never shared who, exactly, “they” are.

The man looks at him with the frightened eyes of an animal, big and sallow. “Those star-touched ones,” he says quietly back, like he’s sharing a big secret, “They make the world go ‘round and ‘round and ‘round,” His teeth glint in the dim light. “‘Round and ‘round and ‘round,” he repeats, “When we die, it will be because of them.” The whites of his eyes glimmer in the dark, like they’re looking through Cal, and Cal dimly thinks he should be the one looking afraid. 

Cal understands that there is a misunderstanding in the greater galaxy about Force-sensitives and what exactly they are. He understands there is fear, hatred, awe, envy— there is blame, too. Even this has not changed in five thousand years. 

He slides back, removing the man from his view, unable to respond in a way that would result in anything other than further disturbance. His answer provided no significant insight. These people are exhausted and ragged enough; discrete misery layers itself like silt over them.

Their hours have grown longer, harder, and the overseers jab and prod at them with a franticness that Cal can only imagine the reason for. If the miners’ prospects are getting worse, they are certainly not being informed. 

In the barracks they share this discontent quietly, a restlessness lingering in the hours when they’re meant to be sleeping deeper than the dead. It’s a movement towards something more, to that resistance Cal tastes on the back of his teeth. They hear the distant clamor of battle, sometimes, in the sound of bombs falling. The mines are at risk of collapse, but their authorities make no action for this, and Cal worries that they never will. 

These people don’t want to be buried alive beneath a war. That, too, is something that hasn’t changed. That won’t ever change, as long as anything alive at all clings onto the will to live.

He tries moving pebbles. 

There isn’t anyone actively hunting Cal down for being a Jedi, or for showing any sign of Force-sensitivity, but he still squirrels off to as secluded of a place he can find, compulsively checking his surroundings in a way that would likely read as suspicious if someone were hunting him. He can’t help the unease prickling at the back of his neck. 

And when he does squat down before a pile of dust and small rocks, reaching out with a small, tentative nudge in a different plane than the physical, it’s like tearing a muscle. It hurts, in an odd way. Almost like how he had struggled to use the Force when he first left Bracca— it’s the ache of disuse, the atrophy from a fracture. 

Cal breathes heavily, and tries again. 

The resistance is frustrating. It makes him feel like he’s actually twelve again, struggling with moving objects larger than a decently sized rock. He tries moving the pebbles. They rattle, and they tremble as they rise into the air. And they fall as a punch of air leaves him. 

It’s fine. He’ll just need to practice more. It’s fine. 

Something wet drops onto the ground, onto the pebbles, and Cal realizes they’re tears.

Sometimes there are martyrs along the path to resistance. Sometimes you can wonder about who they might be, and you might be right. Sometimes you can know who it won’t be.

Hylemane Lightbringer will become the opposite of whatever a martyr is— a heretic, a narcissist, someone who would never die for any cause at all. 

He harps about the Republic and his glories, boasts his strength, refuses to prove his words. His behaviour is stark against the placid flow of literally everybody else— the disdain for this man ricochets from mind to mind, day to day, and so Cal starts the tedious task of reworking and strengthening his shields. He carefully conceals himself here in the earth, subtle enough that the well of feeling of every miner slides easily past him. 

His shields are good, and he knows that. They have to be good, otherwise he’d be dead in a ditch somewhere on Bracca, or perhaps an Imperial starship, and having his shields feel so flimsy is… unsettling. It leaves Cal feeling off-kilter, like he isn’t his own person, instead an amalgamation of the fear and anger and joy of those around him. He hasn’t felt this way since the days following the purge. 

When Agah starts to whisper words of dissent among the mines, Cal carrying his words further too, it’s startlingly easy to fall back into the habit of watching every other person’s move, waiting for something off. 

“I don’t like the idea of staying here longer,” Sange had expressed some cycles ago. 

“Think we should go for it?” Agah had asked.

“Alone?” Cal had wondered. 

Agah’s brow had furrowed, and he said, “Well, it would be easier.”

“It wouldn’t,” Cal had answered immediately. “You think that the overseers aren’t watching the entrance? If not to keep us in, then to keep things out. ”  

Agah had exchanged a look with Sange, considering, and then turned back to Cal with appraising eyes. “I don’t know how much more successful we’ll be with more people, then.”

Cal had shaken his head. “If we can get a majority of the miners to leave with us, we’ll outnumber them. Overwhelm them. They’re more likely to agree than you think, and the overseers hold less power than they let on.”

Agah had sighed. Sange had tilted her head as she looked at Cal. “That all true? You know a lot, kid,” she’d said, attentive, and Cal had cursed himself in silence. He had kept himself calm by rationalizing that Agah and Sange can think him to be a strangely smart, well-spoken child, but they will never learn the truth. It’s unbelievable on so many levels that they can’t even begin to look in the right direction to learn it. 

Agah had then said, “What if they don’t agree? What if it’s just us?” 

Sange’s face had hardened. “We’ll do it together,” she’d said. “We’ll make it out.” 

Even if the outside is dangerous? Lethal? Cal had wondered. But he learned a very important lesson about the nature of survival a long time ago: people will always search for the elusive better chance when given the choice and the will to. Each and every time. 

The three of them had asked the old man, later, and he’d been the first to agree to their half-baked plan for freedom. 

They’d catalogued the weapons the overseers carry, and how much manpower would be needed to take them. ( “Six people?” Agah says. “What? No, three or four people and an attack from the back,” Sange says. ) Cal ends up being right that they’ll outnumber the overseers— they don’t get an exact count, but the overseers barely make up ten percent of the miner population. 

Agah spreads word to the bunks closest to him first, and Cal watches him slowly gain confidence, a surety in his movements previously unseen. It almost feels nostalgic, watching the spark in his eyes become a forge. 

Cal approaches those that Agah and Sange do not. Being a child means, by nature of his small stature and big eyes, disarming those around him. He feels for the gentle glow of the minds of those who seem unapproachable, leaves the ones muddled and shredded drawing caution and sensitivity for later. 

“Who’s to say we won’t die as soon as we step foot on the surface?” a woman asks as the minds of the rest of the circle she’s sitting at resonate with hope. “What if it’s safer down here?” 

Sange scoffs. “You’ll die down here far sooner than up there, that’s for sure.” she sinks to the ground next to her. “Better to die tasting fresh air than carbonite and exhaust fumes.”

Sange’s eyes slide to Cal, then back to the woman. “Besides, a lotta people here deserve the chance.” The woman looks to Cal, too, and she sighs and looks to the floor. 

The swell of hope grows. He’d known it would, that unsquashable thing called dreaming. 

“Is there anywhere we haven’t hit?” Agah thinks as they go over the pockets they’ve planted their seeds. 

They trust that the people they’ve spoken to will in turn speak to those around them— they’ll reassess in a few days. Cal doesn’t know the layout of the mines incredibly well, and he knows gaps exist in his knowledge about how far they extend and where different barracks are. 

He navigates mainly by keeping track of the soft pings of life that radiate through stone. It’s how he’d wandered away from the medic and— ah.

“The medbay,” he says. “Have either of you gone there yet?”

Sange and Agah shake their heads, and Sange says, “I almost forgot we had one, to be honest.”

“It’s far out of the way,” Agah agrees. “I remember we brought you there.” 

“Oh,” Cal says, something tender unraveling in his chest. “Thank you.”

Agah doesn’t say anything, lips curving into a grin, and he simply reaches out to ruffle his hair. He squawks, but makes no move to dodge. 

“Oh, I was hoping you wouldn’t come back,” is the first thing the medic says when Cal enters the medbay, Agah at his back.

Cal smiles, this kind of banter familiar from his time with the 13th Battalion— “Master Tapal, does Chess hate you?” a chuff, the thud of footsteps, “No, Cal, he simply worries about my tendency to skip medical treatment. I imagine I frustrate him endlessly.” — even in this slightly different form. 

“I’m fine,” he says, and steps to the side, Agah coming up beside him. “We’re here for something else.”

The medic pauses, sitting up from a corner with a haphazard desk and the contents of a medkit strewn all over it. The dinky lighting of the medbay allows Cal to get an actual read for who this man is, compared to the last time he was here, too distracted by the push and pull of thousands of minds to notice the world in front of him. 

The medic is young; younger than Cal would have expected for this position in the mines. He has a gauntness to him, dark circles lining the bottoms of his brown eyes. He has freckles, like Cal, and that makes him seem younger, somehow. It’s not quite like looking at a reflection— they’re not similar enough for that. 

“We’re here to ask you if you want to die down here, or if you want to live,” Agah tells the medic bluntly. It’s become a go-to tactic, Cal notes, to target the fear of death, of a death entirely out of your own hand. 

The medic raises a brow, assessing the two of them for a long moment. “Do I want to die? Of course I don’t,” he says, moving to a cot with a man unconscious laid upon it, breath rattling and loud. “I assume by ‘living,’ you mean escaping.” 

Agah nods. The medic hums. “I might wish for the same thing. But there are some people who can’t leave,” he gestures to the wheezing man on the cot. “And some who will be hurt trying to leave. I can’t abandon them.” 

“They’re more likely to die down here than on the chance of making it to the surface,” Agah presses. “There will be people above who need help, too.” This will happen with or without you goes unsaid, and Cal watches as the medic turns his back to them in lieu of an answer at first.

“I know it’s impossible to ask for a guarantee with something like this,” the medic speaks. “But can you guarantee that the people under my care will make it to safety? That I will still have patients to treat?” 

Agah is quiet for a moment, and he is very still. Making promises you can’t keep is dangerous. Abandoning people below the surface is no better. It’s a fine edge to walk on; Agah answers, “You’re right, I can’t guarantee anything. But I can promise to try to get as close to a guarantee as possible.” 

This promise can mean nothing and everything— it’s a matter of trust, in either Agah as a person with his honesty or his capability to follow through. The medic can’t know the man well enough to make a well-informed choice. It’s a risk, a chance, it’s the uncertainty of life. It’s what an awful lot of living down here is. 

“Alright,” the medic says finally. He looks back at the two of them, something unspoken passing through the air. You can promise we’ll get a chance? Prove it.

Keepers of balance, the Jedi have called themselves for as long as Cal has been alive. Keepers of peace, the Jedi had called themselves in increasing frequency as masters turned to generals, as padawans turned to commanders. 

Meddlers, some say. Saviors, say some others. Two sides of the same coin, another line to balance on, to cross. Devote yourself to the light, the good of the galaxy. Believe in the good of people. Believe in the light chasing away the dark. 

This line of thinking had failed them. Or, it had failed the person it mattered the most for. Cal tries to imagine condemning his master, his crechemates, other people he never knew at all, to death. He tries imagining being the singular judge and jury and executioner and— he can’t. He just can’t.

How could a singular person hold so much destructive power? How could someone turn so firmly into the dark? He doesn’t quite know what drove Anakin Skywalker to become Darth Vader. He’s seen fragments, sure— but they were just that. Fragments. He’s missing large pieces of a large picture, and there’s no way to find those parts, not here, not now.

Cal tends to frustrate himself as he begins thinking in circles over what he’s seen and what he’s known. Anakin won’t be born for thousands of years. The conflict he knows won’t happen for thousands of years. 

There is a second chance before him, yes, but— what is he meant to do with it?

“I wanted to be a geologist,” Agah tells him once, sitting against a vein of carbonite. “I wanted to study Cinnagar’s volcanoes— one is the size of a continent, did you know that?” 

Cal imagines the cut of great mountains against Cinnagar’s sky— the little he’d seen of it. He understands the wonder of looking at the raw, natural world and the things in it of great scale. He can understand the desire to dedicate his life to it. 

Cal wonders what he would have done if he had never become a Jedi. If he had been born without a scrap of Force-sensitivity in his bone marrow, would he be the same? Would he still have ended up on Bracca? Would he have pursued a fine craft, would he have learned a family trade, would he have chased the stars?

He wonders if Agah has wondered about what his future might have been like. “Why didn’t you?” he asks, already knowing more or less what the other’s answer might be. 

Agah exhales, turning to look at the ceiling like he can see the sky through it. “Life, I guess,” he says blandly, not quite able to hide the bitterness in his voice. “We couldn’t afford it. I didn’t have an official record, for school or for my birth. All that I know is from what could be stolen– it’s meaningless, now.” 

“What you know has to be worth something,” Cal tries. “And it’s not stolen. Making knowledge something to steal… that destroys what it means to learn. You just learned what you could.”

“Learning loses meaning for most of us when we aren’t given the means to, anyway,” he says. “Someone makes it something to steal, sure. But it’s only something to steal if there’s someone who will steal it. ” 

Circles and circles, Cal thinks. “Believe what you want,” he murmurs. “But you learned what you did. You could learn more. Knowledge isn’t a limited thing like food or water. You can’t place a value on it.”

“On some things you can,” Agah argues. “On things that are dangerous, on things that give people power.”

“If it’s something you really want to know, or something you’re meant to know, you’ll learn it. Nothing will stop you.” 

“That sounds too much like fate,” he sighs. Cal shrugs. Maybe his belief is still grounded in the Force, even after all this time, even after how badly he severed himself from it after everything fell apart. 

“Maybe,” he says. Is he meant to know why he’s here? Is there even a reason? There must be. There must be. If there isn’t, he might break. 

“You’re wise for a kid so small. It scares me sometimes,” Agah says lightly, changing the subject. “I can only imagine the kind of old man you’ll grow into.”

“Like the one we know?” Cal’s lips spread into a small smile, at odds with the unease building in his chest. 

“As graying? Sure,” Agah huffs. “But I think you’ll be even wiser. You’ll have a long life on the surface.”

“And you’ll explore a volcano.”

“Well, it’s not really exploring a volcano— most of it is like a mountain. I want to know what happens underground. ” And not like the underground they’re in now, Cal thinks sardonically. Agah will get the choice to come and go as he pleases to whatever volcano he wants. He can dig a hole or use some specialized equipment and learn only what he wants, leave what he doesn’t want buried. He won’t have to pick up a pickaxe again if he doesn’t want to.

Cal simply hums. He’s seen a lot, and heard a lot from people wiser than him. It’s all been condensed into bone and flesh shorter than five feet. It feels heavier than his grown body ever could. 

This is where Hylemane Lightbringer solidifies himself as the antithesis of a martyr. 

It’s on no particular day that the exhausted, fearful miners overwhelm the overseers. 

It goes as smoothly as it does, perhaps, because the overseers aren’t strong enough to hold back thousands of emaciated miners; perhaps they aren’t dedicated enough, or don't care enough to keep people beneath the surface when they are at risk of dying here, too. Maybe they see something as worthwhile in a chance as the rest of them do.

Cal watches an overseer drop their weapon before anyone has the chance to take it. They stand at a stalemate with the miners before them, and words are exchanged that Cal cannot hear, and then the miners take the weapon. They make the overseer walk in front, and the overseer points in a direction, and they go. 

It’s a strange union, but not as jarring as he knows it could have been. Plenty overseers resist, too, of course— it’s all a myriad of responses to every individual’s desperation. It’s loud, both with the clamor of countless bodies and voices, and with the mental rush of gogogo and outoutout. 

He sticks to the shadowed parts of the tunnel walls as he makes his way to the medbay. 

There are thirty-seven people too sick or injured to move on their own; the rest are slated to leave at a slower, safer pace, after the initial rush and danger of a crowd has passed. Cal’s been grouped into this plan, too, out of concern for his size to be easily missed and easily hurt. It’s a little irritating.

Sange is supposed to meet him somewhere along the way. Agah is up front, helping pave the way to the surface. He’d claimed that he wouldn’t leave without Cal and Sange and the old man and the others in the medbay, though; Cal trusts him in this with a startling ease. 

He finds Sange by the familiar flare of her soul, bright and warm, stark against the newfound sparsity of the tunnels. She spots him as soon as he’s in her line of sight, the air almost relaxing as she looks him over, searching. 

“You’re okay,” she affirms. “That’s good.” and she waits for him to get to her side, and her hand trembles as she places it on his shoulder, grounding. 

“Are you okay?” he asks her. 

Her mouth turns up into a thin smile. “I’m fine, Cal,” she assures. “I’m just tired, and I’m ready to get out of here.” 

There’s truth to her words, certainly, but she’s withholding a deep sense of unease. Cal breathes out and gently draws his shields back up, realizing he’s accidentally started peering into the mirage of her internal feelings— it’s not his place to watch and analyze her, it’s not his place to watch and analyze anyone right now . 

“What’ll be the first thing you do outside?” he asks her. 

It takes Sange a few seconds to answer, but she takes the distraction for what it is. “Maybe roll around in the dirt,” she huffs. “Maybe I’ll go find a lake and take a swim. That much water in one place…”

They come up with more ideas, and Sange’s hand stops trembling. 

By the time they get close to the medbay, Sange stops suddenly. Cal is about to open his mouth in question when a sound carries from further down the tunnel, something like a groan. Sange presses down slightly on Cal’s shoulder— stay here —and she steps forward. “ Hey, ” she calls down the tunnel, “who’s there?”

Footsteps speed up somewhere beyond the bend, and he watches the shadow of a man come around first, then the actual man, and— it’s Hylemane Lightbringer, of all people. He looks disoriented, but he recognizes Sange in a matter of seconds. 

“Oh,” Lightbringer says. “You wouldn’t happen to know the way out, would you?” How did he manage to get so turned around? The medbay is surprisingly far from the entrance— it’s closer to the active mining sites, closer to the source of injury. 

Sange tilts her head. “It’s not a straight line from here. You’ll have to wait if you want me to guide you out.” 

Lightbringer shifts on his feet, a kind of impatience visibly buzzing through him. “Hmm,” he hums, and then his eyes find Cal. With that same impatience, he asks, “Does the child know the way out?”

Cal blinks, and before he can say anything, Sange steps back, closer to him. “He’s not going alone with you,” she says flatly. Her frame hides a decent portion of Lightbringer from view. “How about this? You help us move people out of the medbay to the surface, and you don’t get lost.”

It’s quiet for a few moments. “Fine,” Lightbringer sighs. “I’ll help you.” 

Lightbringer trails behind the two of them as they finish out the distance to the medbay. For once, he’s quiet, and neither Cal nor Sange let him stray out of their line of sight for more than a few seconds at a time. 

The medic is by the entrance to the medbay when they get there, rifling through a cabinet, filling a pack with its contents. He nods in greeting when the three of them enter. “Good, you made it,” he says. “Sange, right? And Cal? I’m sorry I didn’t introduce myself before, I’m Rigano.” 

Sange grins, and opens her mouth, but—“I’m Hylemane Lightbringer,” Lightbringer speaks up from behind them. 

Rigano glances at him. Cal isn’t sure if he’s heard about Hylemane Lightbringer and his glories, but if he has, he doesn’t show it. “I’m glad you’re all here to help,” the man says, perfectly amiable. 

“Sange! Cal!”

Agah approaches from behind the medic, and he looks a little winded, a fair bit roughed up, but otherwise intact. It settles something in Cal’s chest. 

Sange raises her hand to his face, poking a purpling bruise on his cheek. “Where’d you get this?” she asks quietly.

He bats her hand away gently. “I’m fine,” he says with a small grin. “I’m surprised I didn’t walk away more hurt.” Agah looks them over, and when he’s deemed them to look satisfactory, asks, “Have you seen the old man anywhere?” 

Sange shakes her head, and they both turn to Cal. “I didn’t see him either,” he answers. 

Agah bites his lip. “I’m worried. I left him by this sector of the tunnels before leading the others out. When I came back, he was gone.” 

“He’s probably waiting somewhere,” Sange reasons. “Maybe someone found him and tried to guide him out.”

From the way Agah glances over his shoulder to where they can catch a glimpse of the tunnels, this possibility is less favorable than he’d like. “There was— a lot of chaos, I’m sure you saw.”

“I’m sure you’ll find him,” Rigano assures. “If he stays put, he’ll join us soon.”

“Right,” Agah says, and though his shoulders are tense, he moves on with an impressive composure. “What do you need us to do?” 

Rigano blinks, but follows on. “The packs I had you load— we’ll need more of them. Some of my patients in better health volunteered to carry a couple of them, but I think those packs can afford to be lighter.”

He steps back and glances at the room at large. There are still many people unconscious on their cots, and others are sitting against the wall. “We’ll need to carry out the cots,” he says, and turns to Agah. “Did you ask more people who could help?” 

Agah nods. “They’ll also be on their way soon, with luck.” 

“Good,” Rigano sighs. He leans back against the cabinet. “I believe that’ll be the most important thing.”

“How’re things on the surface?” Sange asks Agah. 

Agah purses his lips. “I didn’t go outside, I only caught a glimpse. Some said there was smoke still rising off the ground, but it seems safe enough.” Agah had a chance to run. Some people wouldn’t have returned down here. Rigano seems to know this too, a glimmer of respect and relief passing through his eyes. 

The sooner we leave, the better , passes unspoken. 

“Fresh smoke?” Lightbringer says.

Agah nods, raising an eyebrow. “Yeah. Why?”

Lightbringer’s eyes swivel about the room. “The longer we stay here, the more in danger we become. I bet whatever battle just happened isn’t over,” he says. “We could just leave now.”

“We need to wait for more hands,” Rigano reminds him.

“That time waiting could very well be our doom,” Lightbringer insists. “Carrying the people in the cots will slow you down enough as is. How badly do they need to come?”

A glare enters Rigano’s eyes. “I don’t know what you’re trying to suggest, exactly, but we are not leaving anyone down here.” 

“If you take them, none of us may make it out of here.” 

“Waiting a little more isn’t going to kill you—”

“It will! Mere minutes can change our odds! Have you ever heard of the concept of cutting your losses and running?” 

“Aren’t you an officer of the Republic? Do you hold no compassion for your own people?” Rigano asks, baffled. 

Lightbringer lets out a sound of indignance. “I have led great conquests—"

Agah frowns. “Hey, listen,” he starts, “I don’t know what your problem is, but you need to get over it or put a cap on it so we can all make it out of here. Arguing isn’t going to help when we won’t budge. Understand?”

Sange tacks on, “You don’t know your way out, either. You take your chances with us or you wander.” 

Cal watches Lightbringer look toward the medbay exit, clearly considering, and that consideration over his options is disconcerting by its very nature. But Lightbringer must weigh his precious odds against himself and against them, because he turns back to them with a dark look in his eyes. “ Fine, ” he says, irate, and Cal isn’t sure if this is someone they want to be trusting to help carry people to safety.

But there is a sizeable distance between the medbay and the surface, and the only direction they have to go is up.

Chapter Text

Up, up, up. There is something strange about feeling sunlight on his skin for the first time in— however long it’s been. 

He smells smoke. He hears vague whispers of memory call to him from shards of charred metal on the ground; desperate, quiet, endless repetition. He keeps walking. 

They all had shuffled their way from the pits of Cinnagar to the surface, and Cal had tried his best to keep a watch over the glow of them all, this moving swell, this thing that could resemble life. Some little particles in the glow were dim to begin with, and Cal had stared ahead numbly when he realized he’d missed two of them going out. He had held his tongue; if he had pointed to where two corpses lay indistinguishable from the others on their cots, what could he have said? I watched them die. Yes, I watched from over thirty meters away, and no, that other person next to the dead person is still alive even though they don’t look like it. Trust me.

At the point where the sun could cast shadows into the tunnels, it had lit the form of a figure on the ground, and Cal almost hadn’t stopped, but— “Is that..?” 

It had been the old man, not a spark of life thrumming through his veins. The old man had been dead, and Cal had stared at his body for a moment, perplexed. He didn’t ever really know him, he’d thought. He never knew his name. And there he was— dead. 

“Oh,” Agah’s voice had been small from somewhere behind him. The sound of boots scraping against gravel, loud and distracting as a tall figure blocked his view. Agah hadn’t looked at the old man, either. He’d looked at the rocks behind Cal’s head. He’d gripped Cal’s shoulder, and it’d been tight, but Cal hadn’t really cared. The old man’s shoes had peeked out from behind Agah’s legs. His body— it was something not unfamiliar, so why had it rendered Cal so still? Why had it taken him so long to turn back to the light, literally at the end of the tunnel? 

“Do we take him with us?” Cal had asked Agah, but they were already walking. 

Agah hadn’t said anything, and he hadn’t let go of Cal’s shoulder, well past the point where they’d made it outside to broad daylight. One foot, the other, up, up. They had already gone up, and he had still felt like he was suffocating for some time longer. 

Rigano performs a check on them all once they’ve found a spot protected well enough by mountains and rock, as far from the mines as they could manage, and the scent of dust up above is not much different from the scent of it down below, but the breeze that moves it along makes it feel impossibly fresh. And he can smell other things besides dust and fumes— the sky has a smell, he’s come to learn. Maybe it’s just the atmosphere, or maybe it’s the very concept of open space that makes him feel like it’s all different. He hadn’t expected it to feel so different. 

It’s sort of like when the Albedo Brave would go planetside after a long time in hyperspace, when weeks felt like decades to a preteen. The smell of grass, of ozone, of something besides artificial, recycled air. The feeling of the sun, too— warm gold, instead of cold white. A breeze goes by, and Cal shivers, freezing, overjoyed. It makes him feel awake. Vivid . 

“Did everyone— did everyone else make it up alright?” Agah asks Rigano when he’s done, and Rigano purses his lips.

“Two passed away. Keitris and Benebra,” his words are carefully steady, and Cal doesn’t know who Keitris and Benebra were, but Rigano did, and he knows— not by any metaphysical sense, but by pure lived experience —that their names will weigh on the medic’s soul for a long time.  

He hears Agah offer words of condolences, and the man offers to dig two graves. Rigano looks at him. “If you’re sure,” he says, and Agah is already walking to the west, following the path of the slowly sinking sun. Cal follows his shadow. 

They dig the graves in relative silence. Agah does most of the work; Cal does what he can, but his stick-thin arms and average-child strength don’t contribute as much as he’d like to the labor. They dig with shovels brought up from below, their hands well-used to the hard handles, to the motions, and it’s almost like they’re clearing dirt and rock from a tunnel again. 

The graves are somewhat shallow. The earth is hard, unforgiving— shallow is what they can manage by the time they’re shrouded in darkness beneath the mountains. Agah breathes hard as he leans against his shovel, pressing his face into his arms. Cal is crouched on the ground, a mound of upturned dirt beside him. 

“Cal,” Agah says between breaths, “let’s grab those rocks over there.” 

The reason becomes apparent— they put them at where the heads of the graves will be. And Agah gestures for them to grab a third. “For the old man,” he says, even though they hadn’t dug him a grave, even though they left him by the mine’s entrance. But Cal understands the desire to commemorate him anyhow, to leave some marker that he once existed and that someone cared enough to do so.

They bury those two people— Keitris and Benebra, in the flickering light of a lamp. It feels both incredibly impersonal and personal at the same time, and Rigano joins them, watching from over their shoulders, holding the light steady. 

Do you feel afraid? 

The creak of metal. The snap-crack of something breaking in the air.

Well? Are you afraid?

Are you? 

Your hands are formless before you. You reach out for— for what? There is nothing to take, nothing to give. There is nothing before you. 

There is always something. Or else there would not be nothing. 

But you cannot see anything. Cannot find anything. There could be something, but you are looking at nothing. 

You are not understanding. 

You know you don’t understand. You wish you did. Your formless hands squeeze 

over 

emptiness. 

Meaning. Purpose. This thing, do you know it?

Maybe you do know it. Maybe you know it, but not by name— intrinsic, creeping, buried deep beneath your own skin.

You want. You want. Take, give, hold.

Is it as simple as wanting something? But what is it? Life? Chance? Purpose?

Maybe, an echo, of you, of this everything and nothing.

You wish for something — you don’t know what, do you? You wish you could grab and shake the meaning from the nothingness, and this is your flaw. Your hands coalesce, they squeeze 

over 

emptiness—

Cal wakes from this formless dream, bones cold like he’s been left to freeze on Illum. The sun shines on his face. He gets up.

“We’ve been here for too long,” Lightbringer declares the same morning. “Stillness is death.” 

Cal doesn’t have the slightest clue about where they could go next that’s safe. He’s not from Cinnagar, and has never been to Cinnagar— even if he had, his knowledge would likely be null, since it would be, you know, five thousand years off. 

On the way out of the mines, Rigano had mentioned how he grew up near them. “How did you end up working down here?” Sange had asked as they crammed medical supplies into medkits.

“These mines are close to where I grew up. My father died down here— we got a condolence letter from the Guild with a few credits,” the medic had said matter-of-factly. “It was sepsis from a leg injury.”  

“...Bit morbid to come back down.”

Rigano had shrugged. “Imagining him down here kept me up at night. It drew me down here, and I’m still here, so.”  

And up on the surface this is clearer, with how Rigano’s eyes flare with recognition and familiarity as he looks at potential routes for them to trek. Cal doesn’t find any resistance within himself to trust that familiarity.

“There’s a port maybe ten, fifteen klicks northwest,” Rigano estimates. “Even if it’s being occupied, there isn’t a large chance they’ll hurt us. Unless the place is another active warzone, of course. But I don’t think that’s likely at this point.” 

He’s right. Spaceports are one of the first places to settle, even if the process can be the most violent out of anywhere else on a given planet. Travel in and out of the atmosphere isn’t something the Sith will leave free— something any invader won’t leave free. 

They agree to start moving toward the port; a small group will go ahead to acquire some means of transport, then come back for the others. As it stands, they don’t have the resources or energy to carry all of the cots and supplies across at least ten klicks under open skies. Cal weasels himself into that small group, raising every scrap of stubborn determination he has within him— a rather large amount, Agah had been forced to find out. 

Rigano is torn over whether to stay behind or go ahead, but ultimately decides to join them, doubtful of their ability to navigate safely to the port. He leaves a few people of his choosing to manage the collection of those left behind, promising to return quickly with aid, with something like speeders or a ship if they’re lucky. 

“How are we going to get a ship?” Sange had wondered, and Rigano had muttered something along the lines of thievery, a half-baked idea left to grow into something else that never quite did as they walked those ten-to-fifteen klicks.

(All in all, stealing a ship isn’t as hard as one might think, but often difficulty doesn’t matter— human error is what matters.)

The port isn’t really swimming with enemy troops, and Cal realizes he had been expecting swarms of white plastoid to line the streets, for Imperial warships to cast a cold shadow over the ground— but there’s none of that, because those things don’t exist yet. Some fighter jets had passed by overhead while they were walking, towards the direction of the mines, but all they could do was keep walking, and keep hoping that they would continue to fly far past it. 

The starships here are smaller, and they definitely look older, too. Like models that would appear in an aeronautical museum, weathered and deteriorated, except most of these ones are very shiny and well-kept. But just because warships might be smaller and an Imperial army hasn’t yet formed does not mean the area is absent of threats. 

Cal doesn’t sense the deep, stale hum he’s come to associate with darksiders in the air. There are armed guards patrolling the streets, though, in dark armor, but there aren’t enough to be labeled excessive. He can’t exactly tell the others that there aren’t any Sith around, so he remains quiet as they wonder over whether or not they’ll need to deal with members of an infamous, superpowered schism-nightmare. 

“We need a ship that can make it into hyperspace and stay in it for long enough,” Lightbringer says as they loiter around the turn into an alley, hiding behind the safety of the crowd. Cinnagar is always crowded everywhere, apparently, a fond remark and sigh of relief that had spilled out of Rigano once their aching feet and heads found the murmur of countless passerby. 

Cal watches Agah visibly fight back some likely sarcastic comment; the man has grown steadily more irritated with Lightbringer’s general existence as they’ve made the journey to the port. Perhaps because Lightbringer’s constant preening gets on his nerves, or for some other reason Cal has yet to notice. 

“Well, we can’t steal a ship that requires a large crew. The ship we end up with might be too small to load everyone waiting behind in one trip,” Agah ends up saying. “And I doubt that we have enough knowledge between the eight of us to crew anything big, anyways.” 

Of the eight of them, Cal, Agah, Sange, Rigano, Lightbringer, and three others that Cal had never met before— a man named Ghinen, a woman named Ala’naya, and another man named Mar —Cal thinks he and Lightbringer might be the two with the most flight experience. Functionally, it’s going to be Lightbringer they’ll listen to, which is also something no one wants to do. 

Lightbringer frowns, and opens his mouth, but just as soon closes it in a stall. Then, he says, “Fine. But it still needs to be hyperspace-ready. That means no planet-bound cruisers, and it’ll need enough fuel.” 

“None of us know what the right ship will be,” Sange points out. “ You know what it has to be. We’ll have to trust your word.” 

Lightbringer blinks, at a seeming confusion. “So? Why wouldn’t you trust me?” he asks, raising a brow. “I want to leave this place as much as any of you.” 

“Your impatience is what’s worrying me,” Agah shrugs. “You don’t seem very dedicated to helping the people we left waiting, is all.” 

Lightbringer scoffs. “And what did I do? I helped carry those cots up. I walked fifteen klicks to help you. Only I know how to get us out. Why are you questioning my dedication to this?”

“You said you wanted to leave the sick behind,” Rigano cuts in pointedly. “Your help is appreciated, I assure you, but are you in this because you actually want all of us to escape, or just to guarantee yourself an out by any means necessary?” 

Lightbringer stares at Rigano for a moment, intense, a bit like how some creatures of prey freeze when they’re spotted in the middle of a forest, waiting for the perception of themselves to end and for the perceiver to wander to something else to ponder. And he does unfreeze when Rigano’s eyes slip off him to check their surroundings, the means to remount his affronted, scathing denial. 

He does find them a ship, though, some thirty minutes later after they’ve inched their way around the port. Whether this is out of spite to prove Rigano wrong or not Cal doesn’t know, but Lightbringer acts with a peculiar earnestness that sets him on edge. 

The ship the man points out is a small freighter, and at a small examination from a distance, Cal deems the ship to be worth their time. Whatever ship it is, it’s a private one, which has the potential to make their exit complicated— depending on the exit protocol for spacecraft at this port —but Cal assumes Lightbringer picked it for the simple reason that the cargo door is open. 

“If there’s anyone on board, which there probably is, we’ll need to subdue them,” Lightbringer tells them, hushed. “Groups of two, enter the ship a few minutes after each other. Keep blending into the crowd. The most battle-ready enter first.” 

Lightbringer inserts himself as part of that battle-ready first, and Rigano insists he join the other. Agah and Mar are designated as the next group, then Ghinen and Ala’naya, and finally Cal and Sange. Cal thinks Sange is a lot more “battle-ready” than Ghinen, but he soon realizes her placement with him is more for Cal than anything else; she gets this fiery look in her eyes and the air around her grows warm with a buzz of protection. 

So he doesn’t push against either of their positions— perhaps one of the biggest mistakes he makes on this day —and they scuttle two-by-two, rodent-like, and enter the ship much like pests do. 

Cal makes his second mistake, a second strike out of three before an out, as he and Sange enter the ship. 

Someone must have been watching the entire process from somewhere out in the street, maybe before their turn, maybe not; he gives himself exactly two seconds to mourn over their apparent sloppiness after a shout of “ Hey! ” cartwheels in their direction. 

They’re right in the middle of the ramp, dead-center below the gate to their freedom, and he pushes at Sange’s back to alert her, but she clearly heard the shout too, because she strides up the rest of the ramp with him, and they duck around the corner of the door. One second passes, and panic settles around them, thick and cloying. 

“Shit,” she curses, and she closes her eyes for a moment. “This is fine,” she breathes. She’s panicking more than he is, but he can guess she’s trying to remain calm for him and think of a solution simultaneously— that’s harder to do than one might think. He does not blame her as she puts her head in her hands, and another second passes. 

Cal has had his fair bouts of being caught, of trying in earnest to escape detection and pursuit; he often thinks about the day Prauf died, how Cal had fallen into an anxiety-laden sleep on the train, and when he woke up Prauf had looked at him and asked, you alright? and Cal had just said yeah, I’m fine, and they didn’t talk about the way Cal was a fugitive but a child but a Jedi but a scrapper— contradictions that Bracca and the Empire and the galaxy had no answer for —then the train stopped prematurely, they were lined up outside, and became a feast for the eager anger and indiscriminate cruelty of the Second Sister. Cal did not bargain for his freedom, but Prauf paid for it anyhow. 

He does not tend to think about the moments after, the blurry sweat-flex- run as he placed his trust in an unknown ship, fresh out of any other possible option besides death. No, he thinks about the moments before; on the train, on the work site, and the countless moments before those where Prauf became someone Cal cared for. 

He’ll be overcome with an all-encompassing sense of regret, and though he aches and wonders where to put it, what to do with it, he does not dare do anything beyond stew in some discrete misery. It’s unbefitting of a Jedi, sure, but the Jedi are gone, and he finds he can’t quite remember how to release the burden of anger and fear into the Force; now, there is only himself to contend and fight for forgiveness with. 

Cal does not wish for Sange to fall down this particular type of spiral, regardless of what will happen, regardless of how much danger they’re actually in, and so he says, insistent, “Sange,” and she peers at him from the gap between her hands. 

“I– I have an idea. We just need to close the door. I’ll stand near the entrance, and you’re gonna shut the door immediately.” There is slightly more to this idea than he tells her, but if all goes well, then it will be a non-issue.

“What, you’re gonna just stand there and wait for a stranger to get the chance to hurt you?” she hisses. “That’s maybe the worst idea I’ve ever heard. And completely unnecessary. Why can’t we just close the door without you standing there?”

“Because he might make it before the door closes,” he presses. “We don’t have a lot of time, and it’s the easiest thing we could do. I’m a kid ; if he’s any sort of decent cargo transport he’ll ask questions before he comes in and shoots. It’ll buy us time.”

He looks at her, a few precious seconds, and she caves.

“Just like that, huh?” she says. “Maybe I should be the one standing there. What if you do get caught and he doesn’t care that you’re a kid?” 

“I can run. I’m faster than you are,” another second.

“Cal,” she says dubiously.

“Trust me.”

“Alright,” and that’s all they have time for.

He pushes her with his tiny hands past the door to go find the door’s control, and he stumbles back into the maw of the ship, a precipice, and instantly clocks the figure moving towards them, a spot of motion going against the grit and rush of the river of people— Cal takes a deep breath. 

The man looks furious , and a little bit confused as he takes in the sight of Cal, not even half of the height of the door, and he’s either faster than Cal expected, or he and Sange wasted too much time crouched in the corner. Cal lets him get somewhat close before he lets the world in front of him fade to a dull chatter, and the scattered, twinkling mosaic of that other place forces itself forward, where he had spent drifting for months in the mines, where the man before him is a pinprick of light among a starfield, malleable and lively.

And he reaches with phantom finger-spindles made of bits of plasma and stardust, pieces of the world itself, prying through a small band of resistance— then he is watching a startling, echoing image of himself through someone else’s eyes, but this isn’t what he intended, so he lets the image drift by, and he stresses to the light to tread no further this way, that this moment is how it was always going to be, that there is nothing to do but turn back and walk away, and keep walking. 

The thrum-thrum-thrum of the space around him swells, becomes impossible to ignore, and he begins to bob along to that pulse, discontented to be the one thing that is still , and finds himself enamoured with the way all of the other lights bob, too. But another light is next to him, and although duller, it prods at him from somewhere else, and there is the muffled sensation of his self swaying in another plane— weird —but he’s swaying in this plane too, and he looks at all the lights and goes what’s happening? into the great big sea of life before him. 

Thrum-thrum-thrum, Cal-Cal-Cal— that’s him, isn’t it? He listens, but it’s half-hearted, because as he watches this picture, waiting for an answer, something else watches him back. He stares into the sea and it holds his gaze, assessing, as if trying to find recognition, glimmering back at him. 

The waves of light and motion crest, and then they disappear, and Cal snaps back into his body— he forgets what it feels like to stand, so he crumbles, but he doesn’t hit the floor, because strong arms catch him and gently set him down. 

Someone’s murmuring— Sange —and he blinks his eyes open, not having noticed that they were closed. Artificial light greets him, so different from the primordial glow, and a deep longing ache accompanied by some bizarre, foreign disappointment radiates through his chest. 

“Oh,” he croaks. That wasn’t supposed to happen. That has never happened to him before, certainly never when he tries to persuade someone through the Force. A small spot of panic blooms, deep in his sternum, and it feels like warning alarms are going off everywhere in his body, but his body itself is what’s setting them off, this is so weird —

“Cal,” Sange has been repeating, and he locks eyes with her. “Are you back with me?”

“Yeah,” he says, and moves to sit up, his vision spotted with black. He feels cold and his nerves are tingling. His eyes drag up and the door is closed; there is no one banging at its seal— Force, where did he send that man? What did he do?

He gets to his feet, and it takes him longer than it should as he can’t seem to find his balance, and Sange watches him worriedly, arms braced out to catch him. He can’t even bring himself to be annoyed as she coos at him because he hasn’t been this unnerved since he woke up on Cinnegar and realized he wasn’t dead. 

He stares at the door like it’s some great big secret-keeper, and his heart is pounding in his ears— what happened what happened — and Sange tells him, “You were so quiet .”

He looks at her, maybe the key to this door’s secrets, and he goes, “What?”

She looks twice as worried. “When I shut the door, you were just standing there, and so was that guy, as it was closing, but he walked away all eerie and calm— and you kept standing there,” her brows furrow. “Cal, what the kriff was that?” 

“I—” he starts, and realizes he doesn’t really know what to say. 

In his time here, neither Agah nor Sange have given him any strong reason to think they would hurt him for being a Jedi. But the political landscape of this Cinnegar— and the Cinnegar of his time, if he’s being honest —is entirely unknown to him, as is the political landscape of the galaxy at large. Are the Jedi loved? Are Force-sensitives feared in general? The Sith are invading this planet, and people know, and they despise the Sith for it, and that alone is enough for him to be hesitant. 

Fear is not really a flaw of character, if it is not present in excess— it is a basal instinct, reflexive, and it keeps something alive by producing some reaction or other. The power to bend bits of the universe is more than enough to make anyone or anything afraid, and from that fear become violent or avoidant. Cal knows there is some fear inside himself, inside Agah and Sange, and maybe not enough to produce an intrinsic ferocity over what he can do, but maybe enough for an intrinsic desertion.

He had been intending for that man to simply go away, and he did , but not in the way Cal knows he should have, because he has no idea how long that man will walk for. Sange saw, thus incriminating him, and in addition, whatever it is that he did almost completely spent him. It would almost be funny if not for the nature of— well, everything about this, really.

He looks at Sange, and she watches him back wholly and honestly, and so he decides to return her that bit of grace, decides to take another risk because he might be losing his mind. “Listen, I’m—” 

The ship rumbles ominously, then, and his words die in his throat as he feels the floor start to buzz. The ship jolts to life, the whirring of its thrusters an ominous vibration beneath their feet in turn triggering some amount of clarity. Why is the ship turning on? 

“What’s happening?” Sange twists her head around. 

“It’s turning on,” Cal says back, “I don’t—” 

 And then it begins a takeoff sequence— what some don’t understand is that there is a difference in how a ship feels when it’s preparing to enter hyperspace and when it isn’t. He can recognize that anywhere, anytime, any ship in any year he could ever find himself trapped in. The metal beneath his feet rumbles with the deep, consuming reverberation of a hyperdrive, and— why the fuck are they taking off? 

“We’re launching!” Cal warns her, and then sloppily darts to grab her by the hand. “We need to find the cockpit. Maybe something got triggered, or, or—” it’s a plea to himself more than anything else. Ships don’t turn on and take off by themselves, not without deliberate action, and definitely not commercial cargo transports. 

“ What?” Sange’s brows are raised to the ceiling, and her hand tightens over his.

He doesn’t know the layout of this ship, but it can’t be impossible to find. It’s a lot smaller than it could be, and that’s all that matters right now. He stretches himself outwards, ignoring the strain that comes from the feeling of spreading himself too thin. He probes for stillness, for someone who would be still enough to be initializing a takeoff sequence. Cal had oriented himself as best he could as soon as they set foot inside the ship— scrapper instinct, some might call it —and they should be roughly in the outer left area. His head twists towards the pull of a glow, a bit to the right, a lot forward. Like a center. That’s probably it, isn’t it?

“This way,” he slurs, and he stumbles down the hall with Sange in tow.

She watches him warily, and she sounds scared as she says, “Whatever you just did, don’t do it again. You look like you’re gonna pass out.”

He shrugs. “I’ll be fine,” he says with no idea if he will be. He probably will. 

Her lips thin, but she does not push. “Okay,” she concedes. “Where are we going?”

“The cockpit,” he tells her, grateful but unable to draw out any more words. 

He simply guides them down the halls of the ship, chasing a flicker, and things get hazy for a little while after that.

Cal remembers the next part of this story in fragments.

The first fragment: in the cockpit, he had seen a vibrant picture, keyframed moments of intensity synchronized with his heartbeat. Lightbringer was alone in a pilot seat, Rigano slumped against the wall some paces away.

“What did you do? ” Sange had shouted.

Cal would like to say that there had been a wild look in Lightbringer’s eyes as he turned to them, but there wasn’t. There had only been clarity and conviction, and Lightbringer had said, “I’m getting us out of here.” 

Sange had stepped forward, no longer holding his hand, and his eyes had felt very heavy, slipping shut on their own. 

He opened them to the next fragment: Agah had been leaning over him, eyes wide, Sange muttering something into the other’s ear, and there had been something loud happening behind the both of them. 

“—what happened to him?”

“He did… something. It honestly looked a bit like—” 

“Cal? Cal, can you look at me?” A snap, a beat, “Blast, what do we do?” 

Footsteps. Shuffling. “Move!” 

“Rigano, sit back down —”

Hands had pulled at his face, and he sank back into darkness for a moment.

The third fragment: some chopped up pieces of argument, some disembodied voices belonging to people he knew. 

“— not agree to this, where are we going?”

“—n’t trust him as far as I can throw—”

“—throw for shit, Ghinen—”

“—ge, you let him do that—?”

“—orry, I couldn’t think! It was—”

There had been more indistinct yelling, and the lights behind his eyes flashed and it had all been very distracting. 

The fourth and final fragment: he wakes up fully, and apparently a very little amount of time had passed between these fragments, because the ship has not yet even entered hyperspace. 

Things are… tense. Lightbringer is standing by the pilot seat, his hands crossed over his chest, a scowl marring his face. He’s one big mass of acrid defense and frustration, shoving against the less potent echoes of shock and adrenaline bouncing off of what feels like every surface imaginable. 

Rigano is awake now next to him, and he’s simply watching Cal, perhaps checking if he’s even aware that he’s awake. He’s suddenly reminded of the day when he woke up in the medbay— how many times had he briefly opened his eyes, maybe sat up, and how many times had Rigano tried shepherding him into lucidity? 

“What happened?” Cal tries, voice a little shaky and small, but there . 

Rigano’s face relaxes a fraction; he turns so that he’s facing Cal fully, and begins to look him over as he answers, matter-of-fact and flat. “Lightbringer launched the ship. He wasn’t supposed to.”

Cal slides his gaze over to Lightbringer again. Sange and Agah are talking to him, and neither look particularly happy. Sange turns back around to where Cal and Rigano are sitting, an automatic motion, and her eyes light up. “Cal,” she blurts as she moves, all singular attention focused on his consciousness, Agah drawn behind her. 

The cockpit isn’t all that big, and the exclamation of Cal is loud enough for anyone else to glance over, to watch, to begin to uncover a missing piece of the story. Curiosity that isn’t his own burns into his skin, and he belatedly realizes that his shields have been absolutely bulldozed. Was it from whatever it was he did? He tries to raise them back up, gentle, but a sharp ache arcs through his head all the way to his temples, and he hisses. Rigano stills. “What’s wrong?”

Cal squeezes his lips together, unsure of how to answer. “It’s fine,” he says with absolutely no confidence and no small amount of bewilderment. “Probably.” 

He looks away from Rigano and trades his stare for Sange’s gaze instead; her gaze darts from Cal to Rigano a couple of times, uncertain, and Rigano sighs. “Sange hasn’t told me entirely what happened, despite my clear concerns for your health. I know you collapsed, but she refused to tell me what caused it, other than that you weren’t shot or hit.”

Surprise flickers through him. She didn’t tell anyone what he did? Even if she doesn’t know exactly what he did, he knows she’s smart enough to draw conclusions with decent accuracy. It’s his choice, then— he exhales, and doesn’t say anything.

“Sange, what did you see?” Rigano asks her, and she tilts her head in question; Cal shrugs, and she fidgets with her hands. Why not, he decides. He was going to tell her anyway, and by extension, Agah and Rigano.

“I waited for his signal, and heard nothing, so I went to check on him. He was standing in the door, and the guy who saw us was also standing there— they were both just, frozen. Looking at each other. Then the guy up and walked away, real calm, and after he was gone, Cal collapsed.” It’s essentially the same thing she told Cal right after it happened, and it fascinates him just as much as it did before. It sounds just like a persuasion technique is supposed to, excluding the part where he passed out. And excluding the whole part where he entered a different plane of awareness— wherever he’d been.

The words hang in the air for a minute, and he feels surprisingly light; her admission feels less world-shattering than he’d imagined it being, for better or worse. He can’t quite tell if his composure is a result of trust and acceptance or detachment and clouded judgment. 

It’s not Rigano or Agah or Lightbringer who speak first— it’s Ghinen, who shuffles ever-so-slightly closer. “A mind trick,” the man comments. “You have the Force, don’t you?”

Cal blinks. “What of it,” he says. He doesn’t think these people would necessarily do anything to him for it, and has long come to rationalize that they wouldn’t, but a part of him still withers inside to so easily admit to being a Jedi— no, he’s not a Jedi right now, he’s just a Force-sensitive child, but to some those are no different —to people who have nothing to do with rebellion, with a fallen people, with a united hatred for the Empire. Or maybe it’s because he never knew Ghinen before today, nor Ala’naya or Mar, who have been silent thus far. His weariness is habit, straight up, a blaring stream of reason and decision, flailing and hissing against being paid no heed. 

“Are you a Jedi?” Rigano blurts from where he watches with wide eyes, like he’s just finished a very large puzzle. 

“No.” Cal frowns, and it’s factual enough that he’s not even lying. 

“He’s too young to be a Jedi, yet. From what it looks like, he’s not an apprentice, either,” Lightbringer enters then, and he eyes Cal like he’s worth something; Cal’s skin prickles under whatever assessment he’s receiving, a markup price or something or other, not an unfamiliar way someone’s ever looked at him. “It’d be dangerous for him to be near the Sith. They like to take the young.”

“What, to turn him into a tiny, evil warlord? He’s probably not even ten.” Sange eyes him, skepticalness a thin veil to the very real fear at the prospect he feels radiating out of her core.

“The Sith… those are the ones invading the Koros sector, right?” Ala’naya asks.

Lightbringer nods. “They seek power and dominion over the galaxy. They’re the opposite to the Jedi.” 

“Wait, so if they find out Cal can do the stuff he did, they’ll try to take him?” Agah says. “Can they tell he has the Force from just looking at him?”

He has the Force isn’t the wording he’d use, but he does not correct them. The Force isn’t something to have, not in any tangible sense. Some people’s presences are far brighter than others, but that’s not a matter of someone having the Force or not. Everyone has the Force, because everyone has some sort of entrenched mass of life within them, that same glow, no matter how dim. What matters is the capacity to use it— something about midichlorians that he’d never bothered to cling to the memory of. 

Lightbringer scowls. “How should I know? Ask the boy.”

Every head in the cockpit swivels towards Cal, and he stares at them all for a second. “Uh,” he stalls. “I think they’d need to see me use it.” And that’s the truth, or close enough to it. He’s young, and he isn’t sure how large his presence is— he knows this: Force-users become somewhat sense-blind to their own presence, much like scent blindness —but it’s probably not large enough to be able to identify him as a threat from too far away. Or up close, even, and isn’t that just a little sad?

“Okay, don’t do anymore tricks,” Agah tells him sternly, and Cal nods without much intent behind it.  

“Can we find out if there’s any Sith in orbit right now?” Ghinen asks. 

Lightbringer arches a brow. “There most certainly are, even if it’s not many. Cinnegar’s too important of a planet to be left with minimal security.”

“Well, can we avoid them?”

The man shrugs. “Most likely. At least long enough to enter hyperspace—” 

“We are not entering hyperspace,” Agah interrupts with a certain amount of heat, and Cal guesses this is something they must’ve been arguing about while he was out of it. 

Lightbringer’s face goes flat, slightly red, and he bears resemblance to an interesting amphibian creature Cal once saw in a pond on Zeffo. “Was your mother a bantha? We need to get to Republic space, where we will receive real help. ”

Agah straightens like he’s going to deliver a cataclysmic retort, but Rigano speaks before he has the chance to: “Have you no shame? We’re going back to all the people we left behind, like you agreed to.”

“Those people are probably dead,” Lightbringer snaps. “The ships that flew above us while we were walking to the port? They likely went to finish the job that was only ever on pause. And seeing such a big group of unprotected people— the Sith would take pleasure in wiping them from existence.”

Rigano glares. “You know as well as I do how unlikely that is.”

“Do I?” Lightbringer asks. “Who, between all of us on this ship, is a general that has fought in this war? Who knows how to anticipate the way the enemy thinks and moves? You? ”

“I’m not a general, no,” Rigano agrees, “but I know better than to give up without being absolutely certain that I have no other choice. We have the choice to go back and look. If we don’t, can we, in good conscience, escape to some other planet and live our lives like we didn’t trade the lives of dozens for ours?”

Lightbringer twitches. “If we go back to check, we’re certain to face death. I’m not taking us back.”

Rigano jabs a finger in his direction. “You’re being deliberately obtuse—”

“I’m not! You’re being moronically optimistic!”

“What if we die trying to get to Republic space?” Agah interjects.

“What?” Lightbringer scoffs. “We won’t.” 

“How can you be so sure?” Agah frowns. “There’s no way you can be that confident. Open space can’t be any less dangerous than going somewhere on the same planet.”

Lightbringer goes to open his mouth, but Agah cuts him off. “The Republic won’t give a kark about a ship full of random refugees with no documentation. Excluding you, I guess. But we have nothing waiting for us on any other planet than this one.”

“They’ll care that it’s me,” Lightbringer says lowly. “I can give everyone on this ship a new life. I can bring you up from nothing .” 

“Do you ever shut up about how important you are? Kriff, ” Agah curses.

“I’m only speaking the truth! You’re lucky to have been trapped in the same labor camp as me, you know. I’ve sat with the Chancellor, I’ve helped plan the most brilliant maneuver in the war thus far, I’m the most decorated officer in—”

“If you’re such an important general, why didn’t anyone come for you?” Agah taunts. “The Republic never came for you— don’t you get it, they’re never going to!” 

“No! They’re just waiting for me, they know I can handle myself, I can get out of anywhere—”

“They don’t care about you!”

“They have to!” Lightbringer yells. “They have to. They wouldn’t just leave me to rot in some musty forgotten mine— me, a general! A general kicked to the depths!” 

Agah abruptly pushes into the other’s space, face set in contempt. “ You don’t matter. That’s all there is to it! If you mattered you wouldn’t have been there and you wouldn’t be here! So shut up and take us back to the fucking mine!”

Lightbringer stills for a second, and then leans back, a small smile spreading across his face. His voice is smug as he says, “You can’t make me do anything. I’m the only one on this ship who knows how to pilot it.”

Agah’s hand fists a ball of fabric in Lightbringer’s shirt. “Are you sure about that?”

“Get off,” Lightbringer snarls, and whirls a fist at Agah’s face. 

Rigano takes a step forward, “Hey, stop it —” and is promptly ignored as Agah swings back, and the two start pitching for each other, grabbing at hair and kicking at legs and aiming punches for the gut. It’s all the rest of them can do to stare, dumbfounded.

Cal isn’t all that good at conflict resolution. He doesn’t like to talk himself out of bad situations very much, and doesn’t think himself to be exceptional at it, either. There’s something easier in the matter conveyed through a fight: if I win, I walk away. But sometimes fighting isn’t a viable option, and words are the only way forward. He isn’t sure which is the case right now.

The two drag their scuffle through the cockpit, a hurricane, and Cal has to move out of the way after they break apart and then start throwing things at each other. Any object they can grab— pens, bottles, and Agah lobs a datapad at his head hard enough to make Lightbringer stumble backwards. 

“Well?” Agah spits. “Are you strong enough to beat one miner? Will you call the Republic to bring fire upon me?” Lightbringer shrieks.

Rigano watches with a hand over his mouth, extremely focused and extremely on edge. Cal tugs on the hem of the other’s shirt, and Rigano hums blankly as his eyes flicker back and forth between him and the other two. “Um, I can pilot the ship,” Cal says, and all Rigano does is blink at him for a moment.

But as Lightbringer takes a few rapid steps back, the hairs on the back of Cal’s neck raise, and something is wrong — 

Lightbringer lunges at Agah, his hands snaking up and around Agah’s neck, and his momentum carries them both to the floor, Lightbringer above, pressing all of his weight down through his arms. Agah starts to flail and Rigano and Sange and Ghinen and Ala’naya start shouting, and Lightbringer is screaming, “That’s right! That’s right!” 

There’s a whole big, muddy swirl of anger and apprehension and mind-numbing panic, and for a moment Cal can’t tell what is coming from who. Sithspit. Rigano is shouting at Lightbringer to stop, and he darts over, trying to peel one of the arms away from Agah’s throat. He’s not very successful, and Agah’s face is starting to turn a different color. 

“Cal,” Sange asks next to him. “If it won’t hurt you, is there anything you can do?”

Cal opens his mouth, and he hesitates. He doesn’t think he can move anything right now— he doubts he has enough stamina left to make anything happen . He thinks if he tried anything he might pass out again, and he doesn’t know how long he’ll be out for. 

But he can’t do nothing. He raises his hands, looking towards Lightbringer. Cal tries in earnest to push, to exert some sort of force into the greater world, but it’s like pushing in slow motion, his burst of energy dissipating into slight ripples, not enough to make Lightbringer move. He breathes in and out, just once, and tries to reach out to the strings of existence he’d touched before, the world starting to fizzle out around him into something else, his head pounds—

“This is taking too long,” Ghinen grimaces, and Cal watches, then, as he makes for an overturned foldable chair, grabbing it and adjusting his grip as he rounds over to Lightbringer and Agah. He comes up behind Lightbringer, raises the chair as high as his arms will allow, braces his legs, and swings the thing at Lightbringer’s head. 

There’s an audible crack, and Lightbringer jolts, and then falls forward, face-down, into Agah’s torso, but his fingers loosen, too. Agah gasps, chest heaving, and he rolls out from under the other man, sitting up to wheeze, his hands coming up to rub at his throat. Lightbringer doesn’t move from where he’s limp on the floor, but Ghinen holds the chair as if he’ll jump up at any moment. 

Cal’s snapped out of that strange plane again, the world bizarrely sharp. His head hurts a ton, but he doesn’t think he’s going to lose consciousness. He sinks to the floor next to Rigano. “Sorry,” he murmurs. Rigano shushes him, not unkindly, leaning over Lightbringer, and he tilts Lightbringer’s head to get a better view of it. There’s a big bulge where Ghinen hit him with the chair— his head looks misshapen there, and Cal realizes that the skin broke, too, red staining the man’s hair. 

“Kriff,” Ghinen says, leaning down to get a good look. “Is he… okay?”

Rigano’s lips are pressed into a thin, thin line. “No,” he says simply. 

It’s quiet for a long moment, their breaths filling the air. 

“I highly doubt he’s going to wake up,” Rigano tells them all gently. “You fractured his skull.”

“Holy kriff, Ghinen, how hard did you swing?” Sange curses. 

“I just— I wanted him to stop,” Ghinen says, still holding the chair, and he seems to realize this too, because he drops it and it hits the floor with a clang. 

“Me too,” Agah croaks, staring at Lightbringer’s body with an unreadable expression. 

“Let me take a look at your neck,” Rigano instructs.

As he rises to his feet, a voice comes through the radio: “ Unknown Class C freighter, please provide identification and your exit permit serial number. ”

“Are you kidding me?” Rigano hisses, and casts a regretful glance at Lightbringer’s body. He turns to Cal. “Cal, you said you know how to pilot a ship?” 

He nods, focus sharpening. “I do, but that’s useless if we’ll just be chased down. A freighter won’t outfly whatever patrol ships the Sith have in orbit,” he pauses to think for a few seconds. “I can… probe to check if there’s any Sith nearby. If there aren’t, then we could probably get back into the atmosphere. I don’t know if they’ll let us go, but I could try something similar to what I did before.”

“...How did you end up in the mines, again?” Ghinen asks.

Cal shrugs. 

Rigano frowns. “I don’t like the sound of you doing more tricks considering what the drawback was before. If we have no other option, I need you to promise me to stop if you start feeling the way you did earlier, okay?” That’s good, that’s an allowance —

“I promise,” he agrees just to be done with it.

“Seriously, Cal,” Agah’s rough voice says. “You don’t know how scary it was to see you like that. You can’t go too far.” 

“I won’t,” he reassures. “I was trying again when Lightbringer was choking you, and I didn’t pass out.”
“You what —” 

“It was fine, so I’ll probably be fine again. Maybe the first time was just a fluke,” he’s talking entirely out of his ass, but as long as they buy it, it doesn’t matter. Sange looks worriedly at him, and she looks a little guilty, too, but he doesn’t have the time to wonder about it or console her. 

“Alright. Just a quick probe.” is the terse answer he gets from Rigano. Great.

The thing is, beyond probing, Cal has no idea what to do after that. He figures he’ll come up with something— he tends to improvise more often than not, to his detriment. But he wants to know just what he’s been doing— is it something like a new technique? He’s never heard of anything like it, and for a moment he mourns the loss of the Temple’s archives. 

He closes his eyes, breathing deep, and reaches inside himself for his awareness. This part is normal meditation, and it’s also normal when he begins to feel for the space around him. He registers Agah, Rigano, Sange, Ghinen, Ala’naya— there’s a bare flicker that he realizes is residual energy from Lightbringer, his lifeforce still not entirely dissolved into the air, but there is none remaining within him. He can’t bring himself to feel much sorrow for the man. 

He extends himself out past the bounds of the ship, into the cosmos, and he brushes up against the lifeforces of a moderately sized ship, but it’s not close. He’s careful to be as gentle as possible as he spreads his self past them, nothing more than a passing particle of air, don’t look here. He floats further, further, and then he reaches, again, for the ghostly star-strings that tie everything together. They glimmer and he looks at them closely— they look like they’re made of tiny, tiny, particles, like how dust looks in a brightly-cast sunbeam. 

He watches these threads dance in the same sea of life he saw before. He finds himself swaying with them, again, and has to force himself to stop, but it’s hard. Why should he stop? Because he was doing something. Right. What was he doing? One of the little lights close to his physical body brightens, and right, he’s looking. He’s probing. He’s trying to figure out how to hide himself in the seams of the universe. 

Can these lines shelter them? Does he need to hide in them or beneath them? Can he hide beneath them? He follows one down, down, down, and it keeps going, it doesn’t seem to ever end— but, persistent, he looks at all of the threads again. They’re all in this plane. Can he— is there another plane? Does the sea become deeper? He gazes at the big picture, and he realizes it’s gazing back again. Something in it is gazing back.

He reaches out, somewhere, and he immediately knows that the sea was not looking at him before. The sea was looking at everything, and now that it is actually looking at him, he feels the attention of the threads and they’re all one big mass of life, and the threads shiver and the sea says, there 

                                                                                      you 

are

And something’s tugging at him, tugging at his very core, and he goes wait, wait, no, wait, but the sea is insistent, and he backs away but it’s already there. The sea repeats, with a childlike glee, there

                                                           you 

    are 

And Cal Kestis disappears.

And this incomprehensible moment— the shifting and reshaping of stars, dizzying fractals, something beyond mortal existence— where this singular child-man-other has crossed eons—

What is he meant for? This child-man-other who died before a bloodhound’s gnashing teeth, who crawled out from a carbonate mine as corpses crawl from graves, who grasps at time, unstuck and clutching emptiness, adrift—

The circumstances behind the death of Hylemane Lightbringer will never be remembered; beyond the peculiarity of the bloodied edge of a chair, there is nothing significant enough to recall. The mines will become a footnote, and even Hylemane Lightbringer himself will eventually become obsolete and forgotten. Such is the way of time— so why, for this insignificant person who died an insignificant death on an insignificant ship, did Cal Kestis watch it all happen? 

Consider this statement: nothing in this universe happens by accident. 

Consider: is this statement true?

Cal opens his eyes to the long-dead Master Tseigna and his equally long-dead crèchemates— what the fuck —and there are stars imploding behind his eyes and the incoherent murmur of millions and millions of souls— a crushing wave, an impossibility, sunlight streaming onto his skin, like fire swallowing him whole— 

Cal stares at a graveyard and the graveyard stares back— he screams the scream someone makes when they look like they’ve seen a ghost, and this is finally starting to sound familiar, isn’t it?

Chapter Text

His lungs are gasping for air, a twitch away from convulsion, and he feels himself stagger back . Thoughts and feelings graze against his shields, loud and cacophonous, mostly incoherent, and it feels like drowning. His skin buzzes, a tremor of discontent at being shoved back into consciousness, into such a container as a body.

He feels the zing of his crechemates’ curiosity and alarm and concern — wow — and beyond them, the minds of millions only possible in a gargantuan city on the likes of planets like Coruscant. A small flutter of hope or dread or some gods-awful mix threads itself through his veins, and it makes him feel thin and reedy. His throat runs dry of his scream, and he’s left empty.

“Cal?” Tseigna’s voice hits him loud like a blow, and he feels his breath grow fast and harsh. Tseigna’s signature brushes against his, on a different plane than the physical, and he hasn’t felt another Jedi like this in years, because Cere was always too afraid, and he — 

The Force, it screams, and it’s one of the loudest things he’s ever heard. How are these people still standing? And so Cal does the only sort of thing someone can do, in somewhere as surreal and horrific as this: he hardens his shields, tough as rock, too hard, even for him, and pain ripples through his head as the world fades to black— but it’s quiet, and so the darkness he welcomes without hesitation.

He wakes up in the Temple’s infirmary, and the world around him is just as loud and confusing as it had been before. His memory is an unclear blur, difficult to differentiate between what is his and what is the universe’s. 

He knows he is incoherent, for at least some time. It’s not quite the same as when he first awoke by the mines; he is far too cognizant, and there is far too much anger within him. He thrashes and screams, and words push past his lips unbidden, but he’s unsure if those words he wants to say ever form; he calls for Sange and Agah and Rigano. Take me back, he begs, and there is no answer. He calls for Cere and Greez and Merrin, the syllables of their names a palpable comfort, but they too do not answer.

He understands that he is somewhere new, again. Some time new, again. He once spent months in denial and some part of him refuses to do so again. As much as he wishes to drift, he comes back to himself some time after, and the loudness still grates at him, so he raises his shields tight again. He feels spent.

“Oh, now, there’s no need for that, everything’s alright,” a healer coos at him as she must feel his stream of tension abruptly cut off. He doesn’t say anything, but that doesn’t seem to be much of a deterrent.

The healers inform him that he underwent a psychometric overload, and promptly give him a new pair of gloves, thick and dark gray. He doesn’t correct them, partly because he feels half out of his mind, and because how could he? He’s not supposed to be here again— do-overs aren’t supposed to happen twice. He watches it all happen, strangely blank, and looks at his hands as he flexes them, completely covered by skin-tight gray. These gloves are so much thinner than the thick, protective miner’s gloves he’d worn for months. He can feel the shape of his palm as he traces it beneath his fingers. 

“I am Healer Preiks,” someone says gently at some point. Cal draws a blank at any possible first name for a Healer Preiks. Whoever he is, he never survived the purge, because healers never really left the Temple, and— Cal shuts down that train of thought rather quickly. 

 “Can you tell me what you saw?” Preiks asks.

Absolutely not! “I—” 

What could he tell them all? I died and went back in time where I did absolutely nothing of importance, and then went a lot forward in time but not where I’m supposed to be. You’re all going to die anywhere between five minutes or a few years from now depending on how old I am, because I’m actually still not sure, and it’s gonna be Anakin fucking Skywalker who kills you. He would sound certifiably insane. If Cal wasn’t Cal, if he was one of these poor healers assigned to him, he wouldn’t believe him either. 

Even if his time displacement could be believed as some ancient and mysterious Jedi technique, he thinks the truly unbelievable part is the brittleness of the Order, and the ease in which it will fall. The idea that Darth Sidious is the Chancellor is absurd, but the Sith Lord has twined his presence so closely with the Jedi that the two are nearly indistinguishable. And that would be laughable to him, had he not lived through its fallout.

Cinnagar was far enough removed from the past– future– whatever– that he never felt the same sort of dread he feels now. He’d felt small and insignificant and terrified at being thousands of years off  from where he was before, yes, but now he’s awaiting catastrophe in a measure of years in the single digits.

“Kestis?” Preiks says gently, and Cal blinks. “Can you tell me what you saw?” he repeats.

Of course he doesn’t say anything. Of course he doesn’t tell Healer Preiks what he saw. He doesn’t say anything at all, actually, hands curling tightly into his blanket. 

Preiks’ face softens, and he says, “That’s okay, there’s no rush, you’re okay,” and Cal doesn’t even have the bandwidth to feel that bad about it. 

He won’t be having much to say about what he saw for an eternity. He checks out, after this— even if he can’t afford to, he doesn’t get much choice in the way his body feels distant and small. It’s just how things go. 

The Temple doesn’t know what to do with him. That much is clear.

He doesn’t talk to any of them— not the crechemasters, not the younglings, not the healers. He doesn’t want to. He doesn’t think he could even if he tried. This is all opening a wound in him he thought to be closed, and he doesn’t care to widen its flayed edges. So he… drifts, again, albeit more tethered to his body than before. This time he does not wait for an afterlife to engulf him whole, and he does not wait for— he does not wait for anyone. He knows they will not come, now; he knows they cannot materialize from thin air.

He spends a great deal of time staring at the halls of the Temple, superimposed with the vision of blood on mosaic floor, sinking into the grooves of pillars, soaking through thick robes.  He finds himself almost amused with his imagery, and then grimaces at the thought: he had not seen the massacre of the Temple itself, but he has imagined it, in unwarranted detail, an unwelcome torment associated with short, fitful sleep. So much so to the point that the envisioned tragedy, with startling ease, is the first thing that comes to mind when he thinks of the Temple, rather than the pristine version before him now. 

But the Temple does not know these things. The Temple does not know why Cal is suddenly morose and a completely different child than he had been the day before. They assume it’s because of his alleged psychometric overload. He hears them discuss his condition over his head as though he isn’t there; perhaps they think he isn’t, in the way that matters. 

“Would a mind healer do him some good?”

“His signature’s barely there—”

“I’ve never seen a reaction to an echo this severe,”

And, curiously, “Where is that other psychometric? Vos?”

“What’s the date?” he eventually asks, because that’s the most pressing thing he could ever ask here, the most pressing thing he could wish to know.

The healers look at each other; one writes something down, and the other turns to Cal and says a date, but Cal hears something else entirely.

You have one year, the healer does and doesn’t say. You have one year until everything is going to fall apart.

He continues not to refute any theories they have, because he is still drifting, a date one year in the future hanging over his head, watching the world shift around him like mosaic glass; fractals of sound ping through this kaleidoscopic picture, and he cannot bring himself to try and cling to them. He watches the collection of souls in the temple and beyond, and it’s a throb, it’s a strong, heady pulse in which the people on Coruscant live. It’s frightening. It’s no matter, he will keep floating, just a little while longer, until he thinks he can be present without tearing at the seams.

And this works for him all the way up until it doesn’t, when someone tugs him down from the fragmented kaleidoscope and says, “Ah, there you are.”

He blinks and there’s a person in front of him, bright and contained like a siphoned star, and Cal says, “What?”

“You’re Cal Kestis, yes?” the man says. “ Psychometric . Ring any bells?”

He blinks again, disgruntled, and the man doesn’t disappear, so he frowns. “...Yeah?”

The man smiles, and it’s more than a little foreboding. 

Quinlan Vos is truly, very, incredibly annoying . 

“Call me Quinlan, squirt,” he first tells Cal, then pats him on the head and grabs him by the shoulder, dragging him off to some unknown torture. Cal finds himself growing incessantly irritated. He zones out until Quinlan lets go of him and he almost falls, and as he reorients himself, he realizes he’s been taken to a training room. 

“You’re lucky I’m back on Coruscant, you know,” Quinlan hums as he makes himself comfortable, cross-legged on the ground. “Who knows how long you would’ve been lost otherwise.”

Cal settles across from him— purely because it’d be awkward if he was the only one standing. He doesn’t say anything, for the reason that he doesn’t think anything coming out of his mouth would be appropriately civil. 

Quinlan clearly waits for a response, and when one doesn’t come, the man appears to examine him. His eyes are sharp, and Cal finds himself examining him in return. Quinlan wears gloves, too, and Cal knows this is the other psychometric. But— he never met Quinlan Vos, the first time around. The man was scarcely in the Temple, if at all; Cal doesn’t recognize him. Maybe it’s a little strange that they haven’t met, considering they’re part of the few psychometrics in the whole order. 

Whoever this man is carries an air of exhaustion. Even his signature is tight and tense, enough so that Cal wonders whether it’s wise that the man picks up the extra load of working on whatever he’s trying to do with Cal. Beneath his eyes are violets, bruised and deep, and there’s a rigidity to his shoulders, a natural defense against the weight of an ineffaceable stressor. 

“The healers told me you went borderline catatonic,” Quinlan says when the silence stretches on. “I won’t ask what you saw. Not yet, if it was bad enough to take you out like that. But we will be working on your psychometry.”

Great. Just great. 

“You’re listening, so I don’t really care if you talk right now. Being a psychometric means constantly being susceptible to the memory of every living thing near you, and that memory can be anywhere and on anything, ” Quinlan explains a topic that Cal knows well, but he does listen, and damn himself for doing so. “It sounds like you’ve got a lot of sensitivity to the traces, like what you saw. Lots of potential. But we’ve got to help you protect yourself so you only look at what you want, you see?” 

Quinlan takes him through a deep meditation with certainty, deeper than Cal normally finds the safety to do so in. The whole thing is weirdly surreal. It’s like listening to an old song on the radio: he finds he can still mouth along to the words, knows the chord progression, knows the intonation in which Quinlan says open yourself to the Force, stills when they do something he doesn’t remember. 

When they resurface, there’s a slight frown on Quinlan’s face. Cal doesn’t know what to make of it. 

He’s let loose from sleeping in the infirmary at Quinlan’s request that same day, and he returns to his room for the first time. It’s startling, how much he’s forgotten as he walks on autopilot down the halls. How much is still vivid and alive, deep in his head, unearthed by the way sunlight strikes the windows, the way younglings clump and follow knights, the way his footsteps echo in the hall as he approaches his room. The way the door opens, the way his breaths fill the space and the way hall light wedges its way onto the edge of his bed. Every part is familiar, but discordant. 

Cal looks at it in full, and he does not cry. He blinks, expecting tears, expecting some dampness at all, perhaps even goading himself to cry, but— there’s nothing. It’s just him, in this room he hasn’t seen in years.

His room is impersonal, compared to what he’s used to. There’s a stuffed animal on his bed that he’d left behind when he boarded the Albedo Brave, some misguided attempt at appearing more mature— he’d never seen it again. It’s a stuffed tooka, blue and purple, and its big eyes stare at him from on top of his pillow. He gently picks it up— flashes of images dipped in gold; playing pretend, his crechemate smiling at him, thinking Master Yoda is cool, staying up past lights out; Force, get these memories away from me — and turns it in the other direction. 

There are no posters nor any other sort of decor on the walls, because such things are of a borderline dangerous frivolity , he remembers, and solidify too solid of an attachment to a room that does not belong to you. Despite this, small trinkets and plants are allowed, to be part of collections from various missions that knights deem of deep value; not for much sentimental reason, but for the lessons the trinkets remind them of to connect them closer to the Force. Or that could all just be a load of banthashit they claim in order to fill empty shelves and find a source to smile from.

His room on Bracca had not been anywhere near as sparse. He’d lived in Guild housing, a tiny apartment consisting of only three rooms. One room for the bathroom, of which the light never got brighter than a dim yellow, vague enough that it once had him unsure if he was looking at a cockroach or half of a ration bar (it was a cockroach, and he’d screamed very loudly).

One room for a kitchen with a fridge that never saw heavy use, a stove with only two burners caked in unidentifiable, irremovable grime, counterspace that fit only a dish rack and a roll of paper towels, and no above-head cabinets; although, there had once been some, he and Prauf deduced, having examined the marks in the wall where nails had been torn out and the paint never replaced. There had also been a small table with two different chairs, none of which had come with the apartment; perhaps the Guild assumed whoever would live in that apartment wouldn’t find much use for a dining table, considering the most common diet among scrappers was nonperishable protein rations, to be consumed in silence in the dark while sitting on the threadbare couch that comprised the living room.

But Prauf had taken one look at all of that: the dingy kitchen, the stained couch, the half-rotted coffee table, and he’d dragged Cal out to the flea market and split the cost for a tiny table, a foldable metal chair, and a wooden stool whose seat was painted to look like a fish with its mouth open. “ The fish is eating your ass, ” Cal would tell anyone who sat on it, to hear them go, “ What? What fish? ” and after looking at the chair, either glare at him or express a well-founded jealousy over the work of art. But Prauf also gifted Cal a small vase for the table— green glass, tall and narrow —and there are no flowers on Bracca, Cal’s sure of that, but he’d put tall, thin things into the vase anyhow. A pencil, a collection of thin wires, the sink sponge that he’d stabbed the wires into in effort to resemble a plant. He never used his dishes, anyways. 

Prauf had stared at the sponge creation in disdain, taking the thing over to the couch. “ I can fix this, ” he’d said with all the gravity of a debt collector, and after Cal fished two rations out of their box, he’d sunk down on the couch to see the sponge impaled vertically on a single wire, with every other wire poked in a circle around it. The sponge had looked petrified.

Cal found it far more hilarious than it likely was. Prauf had frowned, looking more despaired than when his shoe had been lost to a nasty sludge on the job some months before, and it made Cal laugh so hard that he flailed, kicking the leg out of the coffee table, and the leg broke unevenly in half, caving as though it had been desperate for release from its wooden prison. He and Prauf tried to fix it with tape, but the leg had proven itself to be completely done with its job— they stacked small sheets of metal they’d collected from the scrapyard on top of a ration box, and it made the table slightly lopsided, but Cal didn’t give a damn. Prauf’s sponge creation had remained perfectly intact, and it lived on the coffee table from then on. 

Prauf had also lent him a thick blanket, which Cal had kept on his bed indefinitely. He’d only had a thin one before, and with no central heating and piss-poor insulation, Prauf had scoffed and showed up the next day with it, alongside a staunch claim that he had no need for it as an abednedo. Cal had no way to tell whether or not that was true, but he hadn’t questioned it after his feet were marginally less cold as he slept that night. 

He’d decorated his room as much as he could. Any bits of scrap he found pretty, like stained glass or wire matrices, found a place on his shelf, or on his wall; it’s something most scrappers did, taking the bits and pieces the Guild had little to no use for, repurposing them into something that did have use, even if it was simply to be something to look at. He’d even come into possession of multiple posters— granted, one was a Guild recruitment poster that Cal and some other scrappers defaced, but the other ones were nice, like a poster for a new ship release. He’d had to tear some of them off the walls where he found them, but they were never missed in a place where wall postings were typically water-logged, torn, and streaked with runaway acid within a few weeks. 

He’d taped pieces of colored glass to his bedside lamp, and it made his walls look like a mosaic, like somewhere other than Bracca if he squinted and let the colors bleed into the walls— he’d found himself genuinely missing it on the Mantis, and vowed to recreate it, one piece of glass at a time. 

Looking at his room in the Temple, Cal finds himself— disappointed is the wrong word. Empty? Despite the familiarity he feels, it’s just that: familiarity. There’s no sort of emotional attachment to the room, nor the stuffed tooka on the bed. Any child could have lived here. But maybe that’s the point the Temple wanted to make. It’s a nice room; the walls and floors and ceiling are all clean, the furniture is beautiful and polished, and the bathroom is clean and far larger than his apartment’s had been. And yet— he finds himself missing that apartment. It had felt like it was his, even though it didn’t belong to him any more than this room did. 

There’s an ache somewhere within him as he climbs into a soft mattress and pulls the big comforter over his shoulders. His body is stiff as he lays first on his back, then curled up on his side. The room is quiet and the sound of the city outside is muffled behind thick walls and tall spires, far away. His heart beats too loudly in his ears as he stares at the darkness behind his eyelids. Why does he feel so off-kilter? What reason is there for him to be unsettled by the way the sheets press against his skin? 

He is tired beyond reason, but sleep does not come for him for a long, long while.

“As long as you’re alive, you will always have a choice,” she says—

That woman told you this exactly once. 

Why does it haunt you so?


Haunt?

It lingers in your dreams. Your thoughts. 

Is she not long gone enough for it to disappear?

But you’re not haunted by that.

You are not?

No. You’re remembering. It was important to you. She was important to you.

She is gone. It should not matter what she said. Lingering is a flaw. 

Why remember such pain? 

You linger too much and
you
do not
change.

But—

Listen.

at

the new

dawn, a sea 

of ichor falls down 

a great mountain. there is

no riverbed the gold sloughs to; 

once sunk to the valley below in its near

infinite entirety, the mountain glimmers pyrite

beneath the sun. the leaves shudder on frozen limbs,

stems snapped and recast in novel frailty, unable to bear the

weight as the wind rends through, falling, discordant, cacophonous.

Listen. 

Do you understand yet?

He wakes and he knows he dreamt of Cere and a mountain and gold and things falling apart. He does not understand. He does not understand. 

Quinlan won’t leave him alone, despite how little time the man must spend in the Temple. At least once a day he’s dragged to do some lesson or meditation, and Cal is begrudged to admit that they do help. 

His body is uncontrolled, again, and the tight leash he’d held on his psychometry had been ripped to shreds in the mines. When he’d worn his gloves, it hadn’t been a problem. When he went to sleep with bare hands, he’d been plagued by the dreams of the last miners who’d slept in his bunkbed; he’d seen the echoes of thousands of people eating from the same spoons he ate his dinners with; he’d watched images of the person who last owned his shirt, who made the shirt, who sold the shirt. He’d seen it all and it left him tired.

But the knowing is the worst part of all this. Knowing, I’m going to a lesson. I’m in the Jedi Temple. I’m learning things I already know about psychometry. It leaves him vaguely nauseous, because he doesn’t know if he can do it again: he doesn’t know if he can grow attached to this place again, when it will not last. Going to a lesson like he did when he was a kid, learning under a Master, and— he’d left that all behind, withering on a distant planet, eroding in the furthest depths of his mind. Unearthed, these memories all look him in the eye, and he can’t even muster the courage to look back. 

“Here,” Quinlan hands him an object. It’s a small wooden statue of a bird with two heads, wings shut against its body. 

“Go ahead,” Quinlan waves at him. “Try looking at it.”

There’s no hesitation as he takes his gloves off, despite this being the first time Quinlan’s let him touch something without them. 

“Wooden materials are rich for memory,” Quinlan tells him. “It’s organic, and echoes like to cling to the organic when they can. I’ve found they’re the most vivid and vibrant in wood. Just touching it should be enough to look at the echoes, but remember to always go in with the intent to look, not to passively let any echo overtake you.”

Cal, half-listening, grasps the little wooden bird in his little palms, looks—

— glass beads chime in the wind, she hums—

—she sweeps the steps of the shrine, the sun shines warm on her skin and Father calls her in to drink marmalade—

—”You’ve come a long way,” she muses, looking the stranger up and down. “Jedi don’t come here often.” —

—she’s relieved, joyous, she holds her father’s hand and searches for his steady pulse—

—he holds the bird, she looks at him from the top step, haloed by the morning light. She is kind, and this world is kind. He huffs—

Cal wrinkles his nose, the memory of the sun warm against his back. That, at least, went more normally than any of the other things he’d tried on Cinnegar, but the thought doesn’t settle him much. He looks at Quinlan. Quinlan raises a brow. “So?” the man says. “What’d you see?”

“A girl. She lived by a shrine on some other planet, and she had a dad who she drank marmalade with every evening,” Cal says, and these echoes are easy to talk about. They’re nice, they’re warm. “You knew her. She gave you the bird, because you helped her. You helped her save her dad?”

Quinlan hums, subdued for a moment. “Yeah,” he says. “Was a real nice mission destination, I’ll tell you that. But you got it, and it sounds like you were able to connect the underlying emotions between echoes. That’s… that’s good.” 

There’s something Quinlan’s not saying. He does that a lot. Despite how casual he comes off as, despite how easily he yaps at other members of the Temple, he’s far more secretive than Cal thinks others give him credit for. He wears a strong front, but who doesn’t? Cal doesn’t particularly care about what he’s trying to hide, but Quinlan then looks at him, as if in deep thought, and Cal feels like his skin is being peeled back layer by layer. 

Cal quickly hands him the bird and slides his hands back into his gloves. 

That night, he dreams of the inhale-exhale inhale-exhale of Darth Vader’s breaths from mask. He dreams of the glow of red, the sting of a burn on his arm.

He dreams of holding the Sith’s lightsaber, and he dreams of—

“I loved you,” Obi-Wan’s eyes are chanting whywhywhywhy, and it is hot, and Padme is gone, and Anakin is on fire and he burns –

“I hate you!” he shouts, and screams, and Obi-Wan watches him burn and he’s alone—

He dreams of dying. He dreams of remembering, and he remembers in crystal clarity as his eyes shoot open, sweat clinging to his hot skin. He wonders, at these dreams: at Cere and gold and mountains and Anakin Skywalker.

What are you trying to tell me? he pleads to the Force, and it does not answer him. 

The first time he sees a clone, he stops, stock-still, because the trooper doesn’t read as dangerous to the flood of information passing through his head at any given moment. His blood runs cold at the idea of having been walking around the Temple for weeks now without noticing a single clone trooper. 

Cal watches, as a padawan skips up to the trooper, and the two laugh over something, and he forces his body to relax. There’s still a year. There’s still time. That trooper won’t aim his blaster at that padawan— oh, Force, he feels a little sick, and he’s overcome by a sudden bout of guilt and sadness and he’s so tired of feeling like this. 

Cal chooses to be real with himself for a moment: he can’t watch the purge happen a second time. He can’t disappear to a planet to be his prison again, he can’t do it all again. He can’t be helpless— there has to be something he can do.

Why else would he know what’s going to happen? Why else would he be here, and now?  He knows who's behind the fall of the Jedi, and he knows that the clones and Skywalker are involved, but not quite how. He knows broad dates for catastrophic events, and they could be prevented, with the right resources and the right people. 

Okay, he thinks, this isn’t impossible. All he needs to do is somehow prevent millions of troopers from slaughtering the Jedi, prevent Anakin Skywalker from joining the Dark side, and prevent Chancellor Palpatine from superseding the Republic. 

Shit.