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Chapter Text

BRACCA, 14 BBY

Several months before Cere Junda rescues Cal Kestis

The scrapyard always smelled of iron dust and engine oil. That was the smell of Bracca in a nutshell; not the promise of hyperspace, not the healing scent of clear, cold rain, not the kind of freedom Cal Kestis used to dream about when things hadn't gone south yet. It was all things rust, smoke, and the sharp tang of metal that seeped into his clothes, his skin, his very lungs.

He woke with it every morning, and he went to sleep with it every night.

It was a graveyard world. All day long, ships that had once carried Jedi, clones, Separatist droids, senators, smugglers, all of them ended up here, gutted and stripped to feed the Empire's endless appetite for war. If you stayed too long, you started to feel like one of those carcasses yourself.

Cal was starting to feel that way.

He kept his head down as he walked the familiar route from the workers' barracks to the central yard. Another long day of tearing hull plates from Venator-class wreckage, trading quiet jokes with Prauf, and avoiding the crew supervisors with their clipboards and their stormtrooper escorts. Another long day pretending he didn't notice when the Force tugged at him, whispered to him, begged him to see.

He didn't dare. Not anymore, not here and not ever.

That was the secret to surviving. Don't stand out, don't slip up. Don't even breathe like a Jedi anymore.

The sun bled through the haze of smoke above the yard, turning the clouds into fire. For a moment, Cal let himself imagine it was real flame, burning away the rust, burning away the weight in his chest. He closed his eyes, just for a breath, to pretend.

When he opened them again, the galaxy was the same as it always was: harsh, and completely indifferent to the lower lot.

He worked his shift, hands aching, shoulders tight, ears full of the groan of dying starships. By evening, the supervisors finally called it. The whistle cut through the air, and Bracca's endless noise wound down into a tense quiet. Workers filed away, some straight to their bunks, others wandering toward the cluster of cantinas that had sprung up near the landing pads.

Cal should have gone back to the barracks. Saved what little credits he had and kept his head down. But tonight, the silence was heavier than usual, and the ache and emptiness in his chest wouldn't leave him.

He found his feet carrying him to the bar.

The cantina was run-down, sticky with spilled ale, reeking of fried meat and unwashed bodies. Scrap workers laughed too loudly, drank too fast. Somewhere in the back, a Bith musician tapped a broken rhythm on a cracked drum.

Cal slipped inside quietly, pulling his hood low. He didn't come to such places, not really. Too much noise, too many eyes. But sometimes it was nice to feel like a shadow among other shadows, to be swallowed by voices that weren't his own.

No one looked too hard at anyone else here. It was Bracca, after all. You minded your business, or you disappeared into the shipbreaking yards and never came back.

He ordered something cheap. Something he barely tasted. He sat at a corner table and tried not to think about the temple, or his master, or the life he should have had.

And that's when he saw her.

Felt her more than seeing her at first, really. At first, it was just a ripple in the room, like the way the Force sometimes caught his attention when he least expected it, a hush along his senses he had learn to ignore lest it draw attention to him. Something magnetic, pulling him to look. It wasn't necessarily light, not necessarily dark either. No, even he could tell the Dark Side apart; any Jedi could. But this was subtle, unknown, like a new door had opened and a little light shone through invitingly.

She was sitting at the far end of the bar, not drinking or laughing with those around her, just being. Like she wasn't part of the chaos surrounding her at all.

She looked his age, perhaps older, perhaps even younger. Her hair was black, a waterfall down her back. Her skin was tan, a warmth he didn't see often on Bracca, where most people looked pale and sickly from the smog. She had sharp cheekbones and eyes that didn't waver even when the men around her shouted over drinks. They were steady. Alive, almost defiant in their alertness.

She didn't look like anyone else here. She didn't belong in the scrapyard world, in this greasy, smoke-stained bar. She looked like she had walked straight out of a different life and was waiting for the galaxy to catch up to her.

She looked dangerous, and he was drawn to it like a fool.

Cal couldn't look away. He tried to tell himself it was just curiosity. Maybe recognition, the faintest pull of the Force, reminding him that sometimes, against all odds, threads crossed where they shouldn't.

But when her gaze lifted, when those eyes met his across the crowded bar, unflinching, something jolted in him like a snapped wire.

For a moment, it was like someone had torn the silence inside him wide open.

She didn't smile or frown his way. She just looked, watched like someone who knows they're being watched. And in that look was something Cal hadn't felt in years: the sensation of being seen in return. Whether that was a good thing or not, he could not tell.

He looked down quickly, heart pounding, telling himself it was nothing, telling himself not to be a fool. But the taste of it lingered, electric.

He didn't know her name, didn't know why she was here, only that mere moments later, when he had looked up, he had just seen her leave; and when he hurriedly dragged himself back into the night air, when the rust smell and smoke clung to him again, he could still feel her gaze on him.

The bar's noise spilled into the street behind him, dull and sour like the aftertaste of cheap liquor. Cal should have gone left, back to the barracks, back to his cot, back to safety. That was what survival meant: don't stray, don't follow instincts, don't draw attention.

But his feet went right.

It was impossible to explain. Not the Force the way he knew it, not the sharp tug he remembered from years ago when his master would say Trust it. This was different. It was less determined, softer, stranger, something like curiosity wrapped around his ribs and tugging him toward the dark. To the inexperienced, it would feel like the first whisper of temptation.

He spotted her again just beyond the main strip, slipping through the haze of steam vents and shadows like she belonged to neither. Her hair caught the light of a passing transport before the night swallowed her again. She didn't look back.

Cal hesitated. His heart kicked against his chest. Following strangers in the night on Bracca was not just odd, it was dangerous. People disappeared that way. He knew it; he had seen it plenty, too.

And yet, he kept walking.

She led him further from the bar, away from the main drag and out toward the wreck fields that ringed the settlement. The ship carcasses loomed in the gloom, skeletal frames reaching crooked fingers toward the moons.

She stopped on the broken hull of a cruiser, its metal ribs jutting against the stars. There she stood, arms folded, eyes turned up to the night sky, like she was waiting for something beyond this world to answer her.

Cal lingered at the edge of the wreck, unsure how close he dared to get. He cleared his throat, quietly. "Not many people come out here at night."

Her head turned slowly. Her eyes found him, sharp but not surprised. "Not many should."

Her voice was clipped, her words heavy with caution. She looked him over as if weighing him against some invisible scale.

Cal shifted on his feet. "Guess I've never been good at should."

The barest crack in her armor, not quite as rewarding as a smile, but a less rigid spine now. She stared at him for a long time. "You're a little too curious for a scrapper."

"You're a little too smart for someone hiding in plain sight."

That earned a flicker of a smirk.

Encouraged, Cal stepped closer, carefully, like approaching a wild animal that might bolt. "You looked like you were waiting for something. Out there." He gestured vaguely behind him. "Or someone.”

Her gaze flicked skyward, then back to him. "And what if I was?"

Cal swallowed. He didn't have an answer. At least not one that made sense. "Then... I'd say I know what that feels like."

The words hung in the air. For a heartbeat, she softened. Just for a second. The hard lines of her expression eased, her eyes less guarded, as if his words had brushed against something fragile she kept hidden. 

It made her look younger, reminded Cal that they— that he was still a child. Even if he couldn't recall the last time he truly felt like one.

Closer now in the dim light, he spotted a lying, crescent-shaped marking on her forehead, more patterns, faint ones, scattered on her cheekbones, almost symmetrically. Three more prominent ones on her chin.

And then it was gone. She blinked once, the wall sliding back into place, sharper than before. Without another word, she turned from him, stepping lightly across the shipwreck.

"Wait," Cal said too quickly, too desperate.

She didn't look back. She only raised her hand in a brief, wordless gesture. Cal closed his mouth. And then she disappeared into the shadows.

Cal stood there a long while, staring after her until the night reclaimed even her silhouette.

He should have felt stupid. Reckless. Exposed. But instead, he felt like she had left a thread, invisible but stretched taut.

He still didn't know her name. He didn't know if he would ever see her again, but as he made his way back to the barracks, Cal Kestis couldn't shake the feeling that somehow, impossibly, his life had just changed.

Morning came too soon on Bracca. It always did.

The alarm klaxons blared from the barracks wall, shrill and merciless, dragging Cal out of the thin sleep he had managed. He blinked against the dim light, the ceiling above him streaked with water stains and rust. Same as yesterday, same as tomorrow.

But something felt different; quiet but insistent. It sat in his chest, like the afterglow of a dream slipping out of his grasp. The faint image of her face lingered, black hair like ink, eyes dark. She'd looked right at him, seen him in a way nobody else had since... well, before.

Cal shook his head and swung his legs off the cot. Foolish. Dangerous thoughts. It meant nothing.

Prauf was already up, tightening his boots with the resigned grunt of a man who had long since accepted what his life had become. "You coming, kid? We'll lose half the pay chit if we're late."

"Yeah." Cal rubbed the sleep from his eyes, forcing the memory back into the quiet corner of his mind. It was safer there.

The yard was alive with its usual chorus, the hissing welders, the groan of dying ships being torn apart piece by piece. The air was thick with the copper tang of rust. Cal worked without complaint, falling into the rhythm of labor, his body knowing the motions even as his mind drifted elsewhere.

Her voice echoed in him, wary: Not many should.

His own reply: Guess I've never been good at should.

He hadn't meant it to matter. He hadn't meant anything, but the words still buzzed through him like an exposed wire.

"Hey, kid, you listening?" Prauf barked, hauling down a plate of durasteel.

Cal blinked. "Yeah. Sorry."

He grabbed the other end, muscles straining and sweat stinging his eyes. Survival meant focus. Survival meant forgetting. He reminded himself of that with every swing of his cutter, every breath of dust-laden air.

As the hours dragged on, he still found himself searching the crowd when workers passed, scanning faces on the platforms, glancing toward the settlement skyline whenever a shift bell rang.

For her. And each time, she wasn't there.

Days blurred into weeks, weeks into months. The memory dulled, pressed down beneath exhaustion and the endless monotony of work. By the time the season changed and the scrapyard's newest shipment of Separatist wrecks arrived, Cal had convinced himself she was just another Bracca phantom, a ghost conjured by his tired mind.

It wouldn't have been the first time. No one on Bracca comes to stay. 

When he dreamed, though, he still saw her. Always half-turned away, always slipping just out of reach.

And in the waking hours, when the Force hidden deep stirred inside him like a storm threatening to break, he wondered if the thread he'd felt that night had been real or just another cruel trick of a galaxy that had taken everything from him.

So he pushed it down. He buried her like he buried the Force, like he buried the boy he had once been.

By the time Cere Junda found him and a rusted transport fell into the scrapyard months later, and his survival instincts failed him for the last time, Cal Kestis had nearly forgotten the girl with black hair and the eyes that had seen right through him.

Nearly.

Chapter Text

14 BBY

Cal Kestis hadn't thought about home in months. He wasn't sure he had one anymore. Bracca had been work, not belonging. The Order had been family, not shelter. And now? Now it was the Mantis, rattling through hyperspace with Greez muttering about fuel costs and Cere watching him with a gaze that saw too much. 

BD-1, at least, didn't ask for more than he could give.

"You're too quiet," Cere said one night, her voice cutting through the steady hum of the ship.

"I'm always quiet," Cal muttered, fingers tightening on the lightsaber in his lap. His saber. Jaro's saber. He wasn't sure where one ended and the other began.

Cere didn't press. That was something he liked about her, even if he didn't say it. She carried her silence like armor. He carried his like weight.

They wandered from world to world. Bogano. Zeffo. Kashyyyk. Each one carving him into something he didn't recognize: knight, fugitive, all scar tissue. He fought inquisitors, purged troopers, machines older than the Republic. He fought fear. His own, too, perhaps.

DATHOMIR

He hadn't wanted to come here. The Force itself seemed to flinch from the planet, thick with whispers and death. Every step was a warning.

He still couldn't turn away. Something about this place called to him.

The air on Dathomir was heavier than any place Cal had ever set foot on. No air had felt this oppressive. It hung thick with rot and iron, as if the ground itself remembered the blood spilled here. Red mist clung low to the gnarled roots that snaked across the broken stone paths, and the sky looked less like a ceiling and more like an open wound.

Cal adjusted his grip on his lightsaber, blade unlit, the hilt still damp from the sweat of his palm. He hated how tight his chest felt, from something primal, like stepping into a tomb you weren't supposed to disturb.

BD-1 beeped softly from his shoulder. Careful.

"Yeah," Cal whispered back. "I know."

The path twisted, narrow, opening into a wide courtyard that had once been ceremonial. Cal could still feel it, layers of ritual, echoes of chanting, magick hanging like cobwebs. But the sisters who had sung here were gone. Slaughtered. Hunted. A legacy of ash and sudden silence.

The Nightsisters. He'd heard stories as a youngling, hushed ones traded between the crèche like ghost tales. Witches who bent the Force like fire and smoke, who communed with spirits instead of the Living Force. He even remembered a particular one, Asajj Ventress. 

The masters had called them dangerous, untrustworthy. And here he was, climbing their broken steps, searching their tombs, listening to voices, whispers not his own.

Dathomir was where he met Merrin.

A shadow of the planet, pale as bone, eyes burning with grief that had hardened into steel. A lonely Nightsister surviving when all the others had fallen. Much like Cal himself.

Her magic struck first, green fire curling like a serpent around his throat. He barely deflected it, stumbling back.

"You should not be here," she hissed. Her voice was young, but her fury was ancient. "Jedi."

She spat the word like it was venom.

"I didn't have much of a choice," Cal answered, steadying himself. "The Astrium. I need it."

Her mouth curved with something between bitterness and warning. "Always taking. The Jedi come, they take. They destroy. Why should I let you leave here alive?"

Cal raised his hands. "I'm not your enemy."

She laughed, sharp and bitter. "You already were. Long before you came here."

And she was right. The Order had abandoned Dathomir, just as they had abandoned so much else. His chest tightened, guilt threading into shame.

He lowered his saber to his side, letting it remain unlit. "Because I'm not here to destroy. I don't want to hurt you."

Her eyes narrowed. Shadows swirled at her fingertips, restless. "And yet you bring a weapon."

Cal let out a slow breath, forcing himself to meet her gaze. The mist curled tighter around them, like the planet itself was listening.

"I lost everything," he said quietly. "The Jedi... the war... my friends. I don't even know what I'm supposed to be anymore. But I can't just stop trying."

The words came out before he could think them through. Maybe he wasn't talking to Merrin so much as admitting it to himself.

For the first time, she blinked. The shadows slowed their hungry dance around her hand. "Trying for what?"

Cal hesitated. What was the answer? Survival? Revenge? Some noble Jedi mission? None of those felt right on his tongue. He surprised himself with what came out.

"Trying to make it mean something. That we lived. That... that we're still here."

Merrin stared at him for a long time, unblinking, and in her gaze he saw not only suspicion but something buried deeper. Grief, sharp and unhealed. She had been left to carry the weight of an entire people.

"You sound like a liar," she said finally, her voice still cold, though not as sharp. "But a convincing one."

He attempted a smile, though it didn't reach his eyes. "Guess you'll have to decide if that's enough."

The silence stretched. The mist moved between them, curling like smoke. BD-1 gave a cautious chirp, breaking the moment's tension. Merrin's gaze flicked to the droid, and for the briefest instant, Cal thought her mouth softened.

"You carry strange companions," she murmured, her accent softening.

"I could say the same." Cal gestured faintly at the shadows coiled at her back.

The air shifted, heavy again, but less hostile. She didn't lower her guard, and he doubted she ever truly would, but she didn't strike either. He supposed for now, that was enough.

They stood there, measuring each other across the silence of a dead world.

And to Cal, she wasn't just an obstacle. She was another scar left behind by the hunger that comes with war, with bloodshed; another person trapped between vengeance and survival.

He wondered, absurdly, what she had been like before. Before the screams, before the ash. If she had ever laughed, if she had ever known a life beyond magick and blood. Questions he was too afraid to ask himself.

She caught him staring, and her eyes hardened again, shuttering whatever fleeting glimpse he thought he'd seen.

"You want the Astrium," Merrin said at last. "Prove you are not the same as the others."

The challenge hung heavy between them.

Cal straightened, feeling the ground's weight beneath his boots, the mist curling around his knees, the Force thrumming through the ancient stones. He didn't know yet if he could prove anything. But he knew he had to try.

Over days that blurred into nights, their mistrust dulled into words. She told him pieces of her story; he shared pieces of his.

Standing there finally, side by side, facing Malicos together, he understood something clearer than before: survival meant nothing if you couldn't reach someone else through it. And so from that point on, Merrin became a constant in his life.

The galaxy didn't give him long to feel it. Nur burned that belief out of him. Vader's shadow had nearly killed them all. The Stinger Mantis barely made it out alive.

When they left Mustafar's system behind, Cal sat at the viewport and stared at nothing. Merrin sat a few paces away, silent but present, Greez muttered curses in the galley and Cere meditated, scars and grief wrapped tight but befitting of a Jedi. Her wisdom, but especially her composure and presence had always kept him grounded

Seeing Cere after Nur — after Trilla — however, had given him the courage to stay grounded even in her absence.

9 BBY — five years later

And so he did, he found his footing in her absence. Time stretched thin. The crew splintered.

Merrin drifted, wandering the stars, tasting freedom and loss in equal measure. Cere buried herself in Jedha, searching for meaning in ruins and scripture. Greez tried to keep the galaxy at bay by keeping to his kitchen, then moving to Koboh to start his business.

And Cal? Cal kept fighting.

The Empire grew stronger. Every victory felt smaller, every escape costlier.

Some nights, returning from yet another mission Saw Gerrera had sent him on, when his head hit an old pillow and his eyes met the weathered ceiling above, he allowed himself to think of Cere, his mentor, then of Greez's cooking, his gruff but comforting laughter.

He'd think of Merrin sometimes, when the night was cold and his bunk felt too wide. And just one night of many, when he couldn't remember his eyes closing from exhaustion, he'd see Bracca, a pair of dark eyes, a crescent shaped mark and a starry night.

He wondered once if she'd survived. He then wondered if she'd think of him, too. 

And then, like a coward, he'd push it away.

Survivors didn't dream. Survivors endured.

Until Koboh.

The crash was almost expected, a Jedi life was a series of crashes now.

The crash had rattled Cal's teeth and left his knuckles raw where he'd braced against the console. Koboh was all rock and dust, a planet with scars like a tired old fighter. The Mantis had limped here before; Greez had muttered about its canyons and taverns.

He clawed through smoke and wreckage, lungs burning, BD buzzing worried chirps in his ear. The jungle before him stretched vast and green.

It pressed close as he pushed forward, BD-1 hopping lightly at his shoulder. Sunlight scattered through leaves as broad as starship wings, thick roots snarled the ground, and the air smelled of minerals and damp earth. It was quieter than the battlefields he'd haunted the last five years. It even lacked the heaviness he encountered on Zeffo. It was the kind of quiet that felt like it was waiting for something.

He adjusted his pack and kept moving. He stumbled through streams and vines, half-dazed, half-alert.

And then he heard it. Not the hum of a creature, or even the wind. Something more deliberate — the sound of water spilling over rock. The faint trickle of it, the rustle of movement. It was a stream cutting through the jungle. And above it, a voice.

A sound someone makes when they're alone and think no one's listening, a gentle murmur.

Cal slowed.

Through the curtain of vines a stream glimmered, its surface catching rays of the sun. He pushed past them, then he froze.

Her hair was black as a starless void, loose around her shoulders, heavy and wet as she bent at the water's edge. The stream lapped around her wrists, rippling where she combed her fingers through the strands, methodical, lost in thought. The movement was so ordinary it should have meant nothing. But here, in a jungle crawling with danger, she looked unguarded. Fragile in a way that made Cal's pulse jump because it was a lie, no one this at ease on an unpredictable world like this was actually fragile.

Her eyes were lost to some thought he could never touch. The world seemed to hold its breath with him.

It wasn't recognition at first. Just a pull, the same that had pulled him out of the bar many years ago. Something familiar in the angle of her shoulders, the curve of her jaw as she tipped her head back, eyes closed for a moment, face turned toward the fractured light through the canopy.

It wasn't possible. It wasn't real. And yet...

By the stream, kneeling, was the girl he thought he had invented.

Cal's instinct screamed to turn back, to vanish into the brush before she noticed. He should move. Keep walking. Find Greez, find the crew, keep his head down. But survival instinct had never stood a chance against her. Not then, and especially not now.

He stepped forward before he knew he'd decided to. The leaves gave way under his boots, and the sound was enough to make her stiffen.

She didn't whirl or reach for a weapon. She just froze, the way an animal does when it decides whether to bolt or fight.

Cal lifted his hands, palms open. "I'm not here to hurt you."

Slowly, she turned her head. Her eyes found him, and it was like being pinned in place. They were alert. Assessing him.

He swallowed, words drying in his throat. What could he possibly say after five years? I remember you. Or You've been a ghost in my head since Bracca. And that was half a decade ago.

Instead: "I... I thought you were just a dream."

Something flickered across her face then, quick as the glint of sunlight on water. Amusement? It was gone too fast to catch. She turned back to the stream, dragging her wet hair over one shoulder.

"Dreams don't last," she said. Her voice was low, even, but there was an edge in it, the kind of edge forged by years of watching her back.

Cal took a careful step closer. "Then why do I remember you?"

Her hands stilled in her hair. For a second, she didn't move. Then she shook her head faintly, as if dismissing the thought before it could root.

"You remember everyone who walks away from you?"

Cal almost laughed, but there was no humor in it. Just a raw honesty that surprised him even as he said it. "No. Just you."

This time, she looked at him fully. Eyes dark and steady, catching his like gravity.

And he knew, with the same certainty he knew how to breathe, that this moment would stick with him forever. The image of her at the water's edge, unguarded, hair slipping through her fingers like ink, sunlight fractured across her skin; and the words she'd spoken. Dreams don't last.

No, he thought. But maybe some do.

Chapter Text

9 BBY, KOBOH

Cal stood at the edge of the clearing, rooted in place long after the girl had turned and vanished through the trees without another word. Her silhouette, half shadow, half sunlight, still haunted the space where she had been. Hair like black silk, damp and trailing over her shoulder. A glimmer of her narrowed eyes over the stream. And that look: calculating, uncertain, almost angry.

BD-1 beeped softly, nudging against his cheek.

“I know,” Cal murmured. He forced his feet to move, but the image clung to him. That hair, the faint ripple of water still disturbed by her presence, the echo of her voice. 

He shook the fog of her from his mind enough to focus.

“Greez,” he muttered, as if saying the name aloud would remind him of the point of all this. “Find Greez. That’s why we’re here.”

The Mantis now left far behind, his path wound down into the valleys, through fields of rock and grass where sunlight caught the dust in golden shafts. The air here was less poisoned than Nur, more alive than Dathomir, almost as fresh as Zeffo. But it was no less dangerous. Every canyon seemed to hide something waiting to strike.

Hours passed, Koboh’s sun setting soon. He climbed until the valley dipped and a cluster of ramshackle structures came into view. Civilization. Crude, but real. A cantina sign flickered in the dust-choked light, glowing faintly against the carved stone walls. Pyloon’s Saloon.

Cal let out a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding.

Hours of hiking had left his throat dry and his legs heavy. The hike down had been long, the path uneven, his muscles heavy after days of running and fighting. He wasn’t even sure what he expected to find, and maybe another dead end, maybe another scrap heap he’d have to scavenge his way through.

But when he stepped past the stone archway into the settlement proper, something in him shifted. Life pulsed here. He could hear laughter, the clang of tools, the bleating of a pack beast tethered nearby. There was a rhythm to it, the kind of rhythm you didn’t find in warzones or on the run.

And above it all, like a beacon, stood the saloon. Warm lamplight glowed through its carved windows, spilling into the dirt road. Faint music filtered through the walls, weaving with the murmur of voices inside.

Cal paused outside the door. His heart thudded hard, as though his body already knew there was something waiting on the other side. 

He drew a long breath, then made his way inside.

The first thing that hit him was the smell: cooked nerf, sour liquor, smoke from a spice pipe curling in the corner. The second was the noise: boots stomping, glasses clinking, a drunk patron shouting at someone across the room.

But all of it fell away when he heard a voice.

“Well, look what the tooka dragged in.”

Cal’s chest tightened. He knew that rasp anywhere. He turned, scanning, and there, behind the counter, fussing with a tray of mugs, stood Greez Dritus, shorter than he remembered, his beard white, grown out and yet exactly the same. Same fur bristling, same bad-tempered warmth hanging off every word.

Cal’s throat caught. “Greez…”

The Latero froze mid-motion, his big eyes blinking, then widening. “No kriffin’ way.” He dropped the tray onto the counter with a clatter. “Kid?”

Cal crossed the room in a few strides. For a second, they just stared at each other, disbelief battling with recognition. Then Greez threw his stubby arms wide.

“Come here, you little trouble magnet!”

Cal laughed, a sound that cracked and softened at the same time, and folded himself down into the hug. For a moment, the years fell away, the fear, the losses, the endless running, the crew going separate ways—and it was just them again: family, alive and together.

“You’re alive,” Cal said, his voice low.

“Of course I’m alive,” Greez huffed, pulling back. “You think I’d let the galaxy get rid of me that easy? Nah. I’ve been keeping busy. Running this place.” He gestured around proudly. “Pyloon’s. Not bad, huh?”

Cal grinned faintly. This—this was what he’d been chasing since Bracca. Home, even if temporary. Just the feeling of it.

But then something flickered at the edge of his vision.

Movement, graceful and deliberate, behind the bar.

Cal turned his head, and the air left his lungs.

She was there. Again.

What in kriff’s name?

She moved between the tables, a tray balanced on one arm, her dark hair trailing loose down her back. The lamplight caught the strands, throwing subtle blue glimmers against the jet black. Her eyes flicked up briefly, and for a second their gazes caught, her eyes widening for a split second first then narrowing in suspicion. A clench of her jaw.

A flicker of recognition. Then the mask returned, and she carried on as if nothing had happened.

Cal felt the prickle of gooseflesh run across his arms.

Two impossible, absurd chances. First the stream. Now here, in Pyloon’s, working alongside Greez like she had always belonged.

It was too much to be chance.

“Kid?” Greez prompted, pulling him back. “You look like you just saw a ghost.”

Cal swallowed. “I… maybe I did.”

He tried to focus, tried to anchor himself in Greez’s chatter about the Mantis, about the saloon, about Koboh. But the entire time, his mind drifted, circling back to her.

Every time he risked a glance, he caught some small detail: the same pale glimmer of the crescent marking on her forehead, half-hidden by her hair. The way she moved quickly but never rushed, every step balanced like a fighter waiting to strike. The set of her jaw, guarded.

Cal told himself to let it go. He’d seen plenty of faces in his years on the run. People you meet once, people you lose just as quickly. That was survival.

But this wasn’t that.

By the time Greez shoved a drink into his hand, Cal wasn’t listening anymore. He was staring at the girl across the room who had somehow, impossibly, stepped into his path twice now.

Eventually, when the noise had quieted, he crossed the room. BD hopped down to trail at his heel, chirping encouragement.

She didn’t look at him right away. Just wiped down a mug, as if the faint squeak of the cloth on glass mattered more than his approach.

Cal cleared his throat softly. “You work here?”

A pause. Then: “Sometimes.” Her voice was clipped, indifferent.

He waited, but she didn’t offer more.

“…I’m Cal Kestis,” he said finally, feeling the need to break the silence.

At that, she lifted her gaze. Just a glance. Dark eyes, assessing again, that same sharp calculation from the stream. “Liyani.”

The name landed in his chest like an anchor. He hadn’t realized how much he needed it until now. Liyani. It suited her.

“Your…,” he began before he could stop himself, his eyes flicked to the faint crescent on her forehead in recognition as he gestured vaguely, almost lamely. “You’re a Nightsister.”

The cloth stilled in her hands. For a heartbeat, everything around them seemed to go silent; the hum of the cantina, the shuffle of patrons. Her back went rigid, her shoulders locking as though the word itself were a weapon.

“Don’t,” she said, her tone low, steel hidden under softness.

Cal held up his hands quickly. “I didn’t mean- I’ve met one. Merrin. She… she became a friend. I just… I didn’t think I’d ever meet another.”

Her eyes narrowed. He could feel the walls slamming back into place. But under the distrust, there was something else flickering: hurt, old and unhealed.

“I’m not Merrin,” she said.

“I know that,” Cal answered softly.

They stood like that for a long moment, silence stretched thin between them. Cal almost turned away, almost let her retreat back into the distance she seemed to crave. But then he caught something, just the faintest curve at the corner of her mouth. Not a smile. Amusement, almost hidden. Quick like a figment of his imagination.

“You came through the valley to get here,” she said, breaking the silence at last.

“Yeah,” Cal replied, wary.

“And it took you hours?”

“…Yeah.”

Her eyes glinted faintly. “I left from the stream, where you saw me. But I was here before you. By half a day.”

Cal blinked. “But-” He stopped, baffled. “How?”

“Because,” she said, finally allowing a small, sly spark to show, “you don’t know how to treat a Nekko.”

Cal frowned. “A… nekko?”

She leaned against the counter, arms crossing loosely, her posture easing just enough to make him realize how tightly wound it had been before. “Fastest way through those canyons. But only if they let you close.”

“And how do you-?”

“You don’t chase them,” she said, almost amused at his bewilderment. “You let them chase you. They like the game. Give them a reason to follow, and they will. Very stubborn creatures otherwise.”

Cal’s brows furrowed, but something about the way she said it, the faint shift in her tone, the rare glimpse of playfulness under all the guarded steel, lodged itself in his memory. He could picture it already: her, moving through the canyons with wild creatures at her side, like it was the most natural thing in the world.

And since meeting her for the first time, he realized she was finally letting him glimpse something real. Just a sliver. But enough.

He gave a small smile. “Guess I’ll need a guide.”

Her expression shuttered again, the walls returning, but not before he caught the spark still alive in her eyes.

“Guess you will,” she murmured, turning back to her work.

Cal lingered, watching her for a heartbeat longer before finally stepping back. BD beeped at him, as if to say You’re in over your head.

Cal ignored it. 

Cal sank into one of Pyloon’s battered chairs, exhaustion pulling at him from every angle. Greez shoved a drink into his hand, something fizzing and sweet that Cal didn’t recognize, and slumped across from him with a long-suffering sigh.

“Kid,” Greez muttered, “you’ve got a knack for showing up at the worst times. You crash my ship, what’s next? You gonna crash the whole outpost?”

Cal grinned. “Wasn’t planning to.”

“What do you think, I’ll just let my baby rot? Kid, she’s the closest thing I’ve got to a family home. And maybe,” he added, side-eyeing Cal, “the closest thing you’ve got too.”

Cal felt the words land heavier than he expected. “I… I can’t ask you to—”

“You don’t have to ask,” Greez interrupted. “You’re staying. At least until she’s spaceworthy. The galaxy can wait. Force knows you’ve been running long enough.”

Cal opened his mouth to argue, but stopped. Because Greez was right. The years had been nothing but motion, one battle tumbling into another. And for the first time in a long while, the thought of stopping, even if briefly, didn’t feel like weakness. It felt like relief.

“Alright,” Cal said quietly. “I’ll stay.”

Greez grinned, smug. “Knew you’d see sense.

Cal smiled faintly. The air was hazy with heat and faint dust, but it felt almost… safe. Safer than he’d expected.

“Sounds like you’ve built a whole life here,” Cal said.

Greez puffed out his chest. “Of course I did. You think I’d just sit around twiddling my claws after we split? No way. Pyloon’s is my place. A fresh start.”

Cal let the warmth of it settle into him.

But then his gaze flicked past Greez, back toward the bar, where Liyani moved silently, clearing the last mugs.

She didn’t meet his eyes. But he felt her presence like static on the edge of his awareness.

“You’ve got help?” he asked casually, tilting his chin toward her.

Greez blinked, then glanced back. “Oh, Liyani? Yeah. She showed up about a year ago. Crash landing gone bad. She was lucky to crawl out at all, if you ask me. I offered her a spot here. Kept her busy. She doesn’t talk much, but she pulls her weight. Reliable, y’know?”

Cal tried to keep his face neutral, but his chest tightened at the word crash. “She’s been here all this time?” he asked, his voice careful.

“Pretty much. Doesn’t say much about where she came from or what she’s after. Keeps to herself. But hey, who am I to complain? We all got our ghosts.” Greez shrugged, then gave Cal a look. “Why? She giving you trouble already?”

“No,” Cal said quickly. Too quickly. He cleared his throat. “Just curious.”

Greez smirked, not pressing, but the look in his eyes was knowing.

Eventually, Cal excused himself, touring the saloon—its cluttered shelves, its walls scrawled with keepsakes from patrons who came and went.

Later Cal stepped outside into the cooling night. Stars prickled the sky above Koboh, sharp and bright against the stretch of black. Rambler’s Reach spread around him, a cluster of crude homes and shops carved into the valley walls. The air smelled of dry stone and faint woodsmoke. He let his boots carry him along the dusty paths, eyes tracing the lights glowing faintly in windows, the low murmur of settlers winding down their day.

And then he saw her.

Liyani was at the cantina’s side door, fastening a light cloak around her shoulders. Her hair, unbound now, caught the glow of the torches as it spilled loose down her back. She moved with the same deliberate grace he’d seen, as though every step was weighed.

She noticed him almost immediately, he didn’t miss the flick of her gaze but she didn’t speak. Didn’t ask why he was following as she stepped into the dusty road.

BD chirped softly at his shoulder. Cal hushed him.

They walked in silence for a few minutes, her ahead, him trailing behind, the faint glow of lanterns marking the outpost’s paths. Wooden porches creaked, windows flickered with dim light, but the paths themselves were nearly empty.

Cal quickened his pace until he was alongside her, finally speaking. “So… this is Rambler’s Reach?”

A beat passed before she slowed, just enough to show she’d heard him. “That’s what the settlers call it.” Her voice was flat, not unkind, but not warm either.

“How long have you been here?”

“Long enough.”

Cal glanced at her, waiting.

She hesitated. He could almost see the argument play out across her shoulders—whether to ignore him, to brush him off. But then, quietly, she answered.

“A year. Crashed here.”

Cal blinked. “You crashed too?”

Her lips curved, not a smile, exactly, but something sharp, self-mocking. “Badly. Greez offered me work when I couldn’t leave. Said it would ‘keep me busy.’” 

She didn’t explain. Just walked on, her small smirk humorless and private.

“Funny,” he murmured. “Feels like we’ve got more in common than I thought.”

She didn’t reply. But she did glance at him then, not guarded, like before, but something closer to curiosity.

He fell into step beside her. “I met Greez not long after… Bracca. After I saw you there.”

That caught her. She turned her head to look up at him, eyes narrowing faintly. “You’re quite odd, aren’t you?”

He laughed out loud, surprised at her words. “I’m the odd one?”

His laugh seemed to confuse her, but put her at ease all the same, a small smile curving her lips for a moment. They walked in silence until the road narrowed toward the edge of the settlement. She stopped at a modest doorway carved into the stone, resting her hand lightly on the frame.

“This is me.”

Cal lingered in the glow of the torchlight. He wanted to say something more, to hold onto the thread between them. But her eyes, though softer than before, warned him not to press too hard.

Cal hesitated, then said quietly, “It’s good, you know. That you found somewhere to stay.”

She looked at him, and cocked a brow, her eyes still cautious but softer now. Less a blade.

She didn’t say goodbye. Just turned and stepped inside, the door clicking shut behind her.

“Goodnight, Liyani.” Cal stood there for a moment, staring at the door. Then he turned back toward Pyloon’s, the night air cool on his skin.

When he finally lay down in the small room Greez had offered him, he couldn’t sleep. His thoughts spun, circling back to her again and again.

The chances. The impossible, absurd chances. Seeing her on Bracca all those years ago. Crossing her path at the stream today. And now, here, working for Greez, living in the same dust-caked outpost he’d stumbled into.

Coincidence? Maybe. But as he drifted toward sleep, Cal couldn’t shake the sense that the Force was at work. That some current far stronger than luck had brought them here, again and again.

Chapter Text

Koboh could swallow you whole if you let it. Its valleys yawned wide, its cliffs dropped sheer, its rivers carved through stone like they’d been waiting centuries for someone to drown in them.

BD-1 chattered at his side, scrambling onto a ridge as Cal scanned the terrain.

“Yeah,” Cal muttered, tightening the strap of his harness. “If Greez is right, the outpost’s still got parts we can use. Let’s just hope it’s not crawling with raiders.”

It was.

Cal had expected as much, but the sight still tightened his gut. Koboh’s raiders were no organized militia, more like desperate survivors who had traded their humanity for blasters and scavenged armor. Still dangerous. And still between him and what he needed.

The climb through the abandoned smelting works was grueling, filled with the echo of blaster fire and the shriek of metal underfoot. BD was quick with his slicing, his cheerful whistles cutting through the chaos as if to remind Cal that not everything in the galaxy wanted him dead.

The Gyro Module was buried deeper than he liked, under layers of rust and dust. But when his saber carved the last of the raiders down and silence fell, Cal crouched in the ruins, running a hand across the weathered casing.

“There you are,” he whispered.

BD chirped, scanning the module.

“It’ll work,” Cal said, slinging it onto his back. “Just needs a little care.”

By the time he emerged from the outpost, the sun was low, painting the sky in bruised streaks of purple and orange. The walk back felt longer than the fight. His body ached from scrapes and bruises, his lungs stung from the dust. But what weighed on him more was the pull of the river’s sound as he neared Rambler’s Reach.

He almost didn’t notice her at first.

There, by the riverbank, knees folded under her, palms pressed flat against the earth. The water ran steady beside her, glinting like melted metal in the last of the sun. Her hair wasn’t loose this time, tucked in a simple braid down her back. The crescent mark on her forehead seemed darker against her skin in the fading glow.

Liyani.

Cal slowed. She was still, utterly still, like the stone itself. Her eyes were closed, her breathing steady, as if she were part of the river and the land around it. Meditation. It wasn’t unfamiliar, he’d spent years trying to ground himself the same way, but something about the image struck him. There was a weight to it, a connection he couldn’t name.

BD beeped quietly.

“Yeah,” Cal whispered back. “I see her.”

He debated leaving. She’d made it clear she wasn’t the type to invite company. But his feet betrayed him, carrying him a few steps closer until he was at the edge of the clearing.

“Are you just going to stand there?”

Her voice broke the hush like a blade through cloth. She didn’t open her eyes.

Cal startled, then rubbed the back of his neck sheepishly. “Didn’t mean to interrupt.”

“You didn’t.” She replied, turning her head slightly toward him. 

“You always sit by rivers,” he said softly.

Her eyes opened. For a moment, they were unreadable, dark as the water itself. Then one brow arched.

“Do you always sneak up on people?”

Cal smiled faintly, sheepish. “Not usually. You’re… hard to miss.”

She tilted her head, studying him, as if weighing whether to push him away with silence. Then, surprisingly, she spoke.

“The river listens,” she said. “Stone remembers. If you’re quiet enough, they answer.”

Cal crouched, resting his arms on his knees. “And what do they say?”

Liyani’s gaze drifted back to the water. A small twist curved her lips. “That you’re heavy-footed, for someone who thinks he’s sneaky.”

BD gave a delighted series of chirps, which earned him the faintest smirk from her.

He couldn’t help the laugh that slipped out, even if it earned him a raised brow. He stepped closer, lowering himself onto a flat rock a few paces away. The river gurgled between them, filling the silence.

“So, what were you really doing?” he asked after a moment.

Her gaze drifted back to the water “Listening.”

“To what?”

“The ground. The flow. Everything beneath us. Koboh doesn’t just exist, it speaks. Most people are too busy trampling over it to notice.”

Cal tilted his head. “And what’s it saying?”

She glanced at him. “That you’re restless. That you don’t stay still for long. Like the others who pass through.”

“You read all that from the dirt?”

She tilted her head.” Not the dirt. You.”

The way she said it, certain, matter-of-fact, sent a strange shiver through him. It wasn’t magick, not exactly, but it was the same feeling he got when the Force stirred around someone else attuned. A recognition.

“You’re a Nightsister,” Cal said carefully after a moment, repeating his words from the day before. “Like …Merrin.”

Though not as stark as last time, he saw the subtle shift: shoulders squaring, breath catching. The warmth of her wit drained away.

“I’m not like anyone,” she said flatly.

Cal raised his hands in surrender. “Didn’t mean offense. I’ve known her for a long time. She’s saved my life more than once. That’s all I meant.”

Silence stretched, broken only by the river. Finally, Liyani looked back at him, some of the rigidity easing. “You trust her.”

“With everything,” Cal admitted. “She’s… she’s proof that people can find each other again. Even after everything.”

Something flickered in her eyes at that, something Cal couldn’t quite name; longing, maybe, or disbelief.

“And what about you?” she asked quietly. “Why are you here, Cal Kestis?”

The sound of his name from her lips startled him. He hesitated, searching for an answer.

“I came here for a friend,” he said at last. “For Greez. But… I think maybe I was meant to find more than that.”

Her brow furrowed. “Meant by who?”

Cal almost laughed at himself. “That’s the hard part. I don’t know. The Force doesn’t exactly explain itself. Just… pulls. Like a thread.”

Her lips curved faintly at that, some amusement, some mockery. “Threads snap. Don’t rely on them.”

“Maybe,” Cal said. He leaned forward slightly, eyes catching hers in the fading light. “But sometimes they lead somewhere worth holding onto.”

That hung between them. Liyani looked away first, back toward the water. Her hair had come loose from its braid, brushing against her cheek. She reached to tuck it behind her ear, almost self-conscious. Cal found himself watching her hands, then the soil same as though she were drawing strength from it.

Cal wanted to say more. He wanted to ask her where she came from, why she carried herself like someone who had lived three wars already. But he sensed the wall rising again, her thoughts shuttering behind guarded eyes.

Instead, she spoke first. “You should get back before the saloon closes. Greez doesn’t wait up.”

Cal nodded reluctantly, brushing dirt from his gloves. “Yeah. You’re probably right.”

Finally, he pushed to his feet. He hesitated a beat, then added, “I’ll see you around, Liyani.”

Her name felt right in his mouth. Solid. Real.

Her eyes flicked to him again, unsure. Then, softer than before: “Good night, Cal.”

The sound of his name in her voice clung to him long after he left the river behind.

The Forest Array the next day loomed over Koboh like some ancient scar, a tangle of steel and stone strangled by the wild. Cal had seen enough of the Empire’s leftovers to know their cruelty wasn’t always in blasters or troopers, it was in what they left behind. Ruins of ambition. Scaffolds meant to break planets open like fruit.

By the time he and BD picked their way into the foothills, the land had shifted from dusty ochre to dense greens. The deeper Cal went, the more he felt as though he were trespassing. Not on the Empire’s property, on the planet’s.

“C’mon, BD,” he muttered, voice a rasp.

The little droid chirped from his shoulder, projecting a map that flickered faintly before tucking it away again.

Cal’s jaw tightened. Cere’s work on Jedha depended on him, and after the fall of Coruscant’s archive vaults years ago, he knew how fragile knowledge could be. But more than knowledge, there was a strange pull here, something in the Force itself, urging him forward.

The Array itself was half-dead, half-awake, sparking with energy but sagging with rust. Raiders had made camp near the base, their torches throwing jagged light across the undergrowth. Fighting them was a blur: a sweep of saber light, blaster bolts deflected back into careless hands, BD’s cheerful chirps cutting through the noise.

But the climb into the Array? That was punishment. BD scuttled ahead, extending a scanner over a control node.

“It’s fried,” Cal muttered, rubbing sweat from his brow. “Figures.”

BD beeped insistently.

Cal glanced at him, then at the tangle of cables above. “Yeah, alright. Guess we’ll improvise. Again.”

The fight through the Array stretched for hours; beasts lurking in the undergrowth, the storm of machinery hissing back to life under his tampering. Cal’s shoulders burned, his muscles ached, and still he pressed on. The mission was everything he’d trained himself to be: endure, adapt, survive.

Shattered girders, collapsing catwalks, and endless puzzles of stone and steel, Cal felt as if the Array itself was testing him, dragging him deeper into its heart. Every fight left new bruises, every climb cut his palms raw, and still the Force kept tugging him forward.

At the center, he found not silence, but a man.

Suspended in a prison of light, time-locked and waiting. When the seals broke and the figure stepped free, Cal’s breath caught in his chest. A Jedi: Dagan Gera, a name from the archives, a Knight of the High Republic.

For a fleeting moment, Cal thought he’d found an ally, a tether to the Order’s long-lost greatness. But the man’s eyes betrayed him, shards of obsession, madness sharpened by centuries of dreaming. His words burned with the name of a place Cal had never heard before: Tanalorr. A hidden world, a sanctuary untouched by war.

Hope turned violent.

The duel was sudden and desperate, Dagan’s skill edged with fury, Cal’s resolve pressed to breaking. They clashed across ancient stone until the old Knight ripped free and vanished with the Raiders and Rayvis, leaving Cal with more questions than wounds.

Another presence stirred by then. A droid, massive and archaic, flickered to life. Zee. Her voice carried the same name: Tanalorr. A place worth protecting, a promise stolen by betrayal, a dream that had once been the High Republic’s crown.

Cal left the Array not with answers, but with fragments, a bitter man chasing a lost paradise, a droid bound by forgotten duty, and a name that now rang in his chest like an echo of destiny.

But somewhere between the swinging vines and the collapsing catwalks, his thoughts wandered back to the river. To her.

Liyani.

He hadn’t meant for her to stick.

He’d met strangers on a hundred worlds, some fleeting, some memorable, but all left behind. That was the life he knew. Keep moving. Don’t look too closely. Don’t linger.

And yet, he saw her every time he closed his eyes. Palms pressed to the earth. A half-smile twisting at her mouth. That cutting wit when she told him he was heavy-footed.

It wasn’t safe to think of her. And still, he couldn’t stop.

By the time he wrestled the Array into cooperation, exhaustion weighed heavier than the module strapped to his back. His ribs ached from a glancing blow, his temple throbbed from where a raider’s shot had grazed. Nothing fatal. Just enough to make the walk back long and slow.

It was all quieter on his way back, though his mind wasn’t. Cal paused near the cliff edge where the path narrowed.

Below, a group of nekkos grazed, sleek, long-legged creatures with feathers cresting their heads.

They lifted their snouts toward him, curious but cautious. Cal crouched, steadying his breath.

Liyani’s voice flickered in his memory. They’re clever. Show you mean no harm, let them come to you.

He extended his hand slowly, lowering his stance until his knees brushed moss. One of the nekkos blinked, clucked softly, then stepped forward. Its warm breath gusted against his palm.

Cal smiled faintly. “Good girl.”

He mounted carefully, gripping the creature’s back as it took off across the slope. 

As he neared the edge of Rambler’s Reach again, his eyes caught on a splash of color along the ridge.

A flower, deep burgundy, petals layered like folded velvet.

It stood alone, growing defiantly out of the cracked stone, reaching toward the light.

Cal knelt, brushing his thumb across its stem. Something about it stirred him, the way it shouldn’t have been there, the way it had no right to thrive and yet did anyway.

He plucked it carefully, tucking it into his satchel. A fragile, beautiful thing.

Night had settled by the time Rambler’s Reach came into view, lanterns flickering outside Pyloon’s Saloon.

Cal’s body was battered, his shoulder burned from where Dagan’s saber had skimmed too close, his ribs ached from being slammed into stone, and his hands shook faintly from the toll of holding his saber against the fallen Knight’s relentless strikes.

BD trilled worriedly from his shoulder, scanning the wound on Cal’s arm.

“I know,” Cal muttered, voice gravelled with exhaustion. “We’ll get patched up at Greez’s. Just hold it together for me a little longer.”

Inside, the cantina was quieter than usual. No rowdy locals crowding the counters, no holo-music blaring from the walls. Just the soft murmur of a couple of voices in the corner, and Greez humming to himself behind the bar.

Cal leaned against the doorframe for a moment, trying to steady his breathing before stepping inside. His boots scuffed against the floorboards.

Greez looked up, four arms freezing mid-polish. “Kid, what in the nine Corellian hells happened to you?”

Cal tried for a smile. It came out crooked. “Ran into… a High Republic Jedi who didn’t exactly want company.”

Greez muttered something unintelligible, already moving around the bar, but Cal’s attention snagged elsewhere.

Liyani was there.

Half in the shadows near the corner of the room, like she always was, hands wrapped around a cup, eyes watchful and unreadable.

For a moment, Cal thought she would look away, the way she had by the river. But instead, her gaze stayed fixed on him. Assessing. Then something softer flickered, so quick he might’ve imagined it.

Cal slid into a shadowed corner, letting his body sag into the chair. BD hopped down onto the table, whistling softly, scanning his scrapes with concern.

“I’ll be fine,” Cal muttered. “Just need a minute.”

He lifted his gaze.

There she was.

She stood a few paces away, arms crossed, expression unreadable. Her hair was braided back loosely again.

For a moment, she just watched him. Cal straightened instinctively, but she didn’t speak. Instead, she just reached out, fingers ghosting near his injured arm. A question, without words.

He nodded.

She reached for the small satchel at her hip, pulling out a strip of cloth and a small vial. Her movements were practiced, the kind of efficiency that spoke of too many wounds tended in too many places.

“You don’t have to-” Cal began.

Her look cut him short. A raised brow, sharp as a blade.

Wordlessly and without hesitation, she reached across the table, dabbing the cloth in the vial before pressing it gently to his temple. Cal hissed at the sting, but stayed still. Her touch was surprisingly light.

“Hold still,” she murmured.

BD chirped, earning the faintest twitch of her lips, almost a smile.

Cal studied her in the glow of the lantern. The way her lashes caught the light, the quiet concentration in her face. He’d been patched up by soldiers, medics, even droids. But this was different. She wasn’t performing a duty. She wasn’t obligated. She’d chosen.

The silence stretched as she worked. She moved with precision, efficient. A rag dipped in clean water, wiping away dirt and blood. Hands steady as she bound the wound with strips of linen she must have scavenged herself.

Cal watched her closely, every brush of her fingers against his skin pulling him deeper into questions he couldn’t voice.

“Where’d you learn this?” he asked finally.

Her lips pressed into a thin line, eyes fixed on her work. “Places.”

“That’s… not an answer.”

“It’s the only one you’re getting.”

Despite himself, Cal smiled faintly. That same dry edge she’d shown by the river, but now it was tempered with something gentler. She was careful with him. It wasn’t what he expected from someone who wore her walls like armor.

When she tightened the bandage, he hissed through his teeth. She glanced up, brow furrowed.

“Don’t be dramatic.”

“I wasn’t…” He stopped, caught off guard by the faintest curve at the corner of her lips. Almost a smile.

It struck him harder than Dagan’s blade had.

She tied off the bandage, tucking the edges neatly. When she leaned back, her hands lingered for the briefest heartbeat before pulling away.

“There,” she said. “You’ll live.”

Cal smiled faintly, despite the ache in his ribs. “Thanks.”

She didn’t reply. Just rose smoothly, tucking her satchel away. For a moment, he thought she might walk off without another word. But as she turned, she paused, glancing back at him.

“Don’t get yourself killed, Jedi.”

And then she was gone, slipping into the shadows of the saloon.

But something in Cal rebelled against letting her vanish back into the shadows. He reached into his satchel, pulling out the burgundy bloom.

He turned it over in his hands for a moment, thumb brushing the fragile petals. Then, when she wasn’t looking, he set it down carefully on the table beside where she’d left her cup.

It wasn’t a gift he expected her to accept. Maybe she’d ignore it. Maybe she’d throw it away. But something about it felt right, like a wordless thank you, or maybe a tether.

Cal sat back, breath caught somewhere between his chest and throat. He knew he was leaving in the morning. Jedha waited, and Cere, and everything else. But for the first time in years, he found himself wishing, for just a moment, that he didn’t have to go.

Later that night, as Pyloon’s quieted fully, Cal found himself staring out the window toward the hills. In a few hours he’d leave for Jedha, Cere needed him. The Hidden Path needed him.

Yet his thoughts kept circling back to her.

The way her hands had been steady when she patched him up. The way she hadn’t looked away this time. The way she seemed carved from the same contradictions he carried, danger and gentleness, distrust and kindness.

He didn’t understand it yet. Didn’t trust it. But he felt it.

When he turned back toward the table, the flower was gone.

Chapter Text

The saloon was quiet when she got ready to leave.

She had made a habit of moving silently, as if her boots could slide through a room without ever leaving a trace. Most nights, it worked. Tonight, her eyes snagged on the table in the corner, where she’d left her cup behind.

A flower.

She stopped mid-step, every nerve bristling. Burgundy petals, edges a little wilted but still stubbornly holding their color, sat alone on the worn wood as if they belonged there.

Her first thought was suspicion. Flowers on Koboh didn’t just wander into cantinas. Someone put it there. Someone who thought they were clever.

Her second thought was irritation. Who in their right mind gave flowers in a place like this?

And her third thought was quieter, unbidden - the bloom was beautiful.

Liyani picked it up carefully, twirling the stem between her fingers. The petals caught the lamplight in a way that made them look like bright embers.

She told herself to throw it out. Drop it on the floor, grind it under her heel, pretend it had never been there.

She ended up doing none of the above. Instead, she slipped it into the pocket of her jacket and kept walking, before she had the chance to think too deeply about its meaning.

The morning came like it always did, dull light bleeding across the hills, fog clinging to the streams, the clatter of settlers stirring in Ramblers Reach.

Liyani rose early before the noise grew thick. She always did. Fewer eyes meant fewer questions.

Her day began with routine: fetch water, barter for supplies, keep her distance from anyone too curious. Then work in the cantina when Greez needed her. Make herself useful enough to stay, invisible enough not to be remembered.

People mistook her stillness for calm. In truth, it was calculation. Every step, every word and action measured. The fewer pieces of herself she gave away, the less anyone could use against her.

But her mind never truly shut up.

Like this morning, when instead of focusing on the water jug digging into her shoulder, she kept circling back to the flower.

Why him?

Why that boy- no, man, Jedi, whatever he was, who had walked into the cantina bloodied and tired and still had the gall to look at her like he had the right to expect anything from her? Why did she find herself replaying the sound of his voice, earnest even through the pain?

She hated earnestness. Earnestness got you killed.

And yet, here she was, thinking about how careful he’d been with his words, how he’d said thanks like it actually mattered.

Of course the Jedi hadn’t even said goodbye. Men like him always had somewhere more important to be. Always on the move. Always carrying the galaxy on their shoulders like martyrs.

She told herself it was fine. Good, even. She didn’t need another complication. Didn’t need some half-idealistic drifter sniffing around her quiet corner of the Outer Rim.

And yet…

He left you a flower, Liyani. Not a credit chit, not a weapon, not even a piece of information. A flower.

She snorted aloud at her own thought, drawing a look from a farmer trudging past with a sack of grain. She ignored him.

Later, as she returned to her spot at the stream bank, she let her mind drift. Not to him, she told herself, but elsewhere. To memory. To habit.

The earth remembered things if you listened. It carried whispers of roots , stones and bones. That was something she had learned young, from people she no longer named, in places she no longer claimed.

There had been another life, once, twice. A life where she hadn’t been just another face in a backwater settlement. Where she had lived with her flesh and blood. Another where she had worn silk instead of dust, and her words had been sharper than her blades.

But silk tore. Dust endured. And dust was what she chose.

So when the Force shifted faintly around her, when the presence of the wildflower in her pocket brushed against her focus like a question, she shut it down. Closed the door. Stood.

She would not let herself hope. Not for anything as fragile as that.

That evening, she placed the flower by her bedside. Not because she cared. Not because she wanted to keep it. Just… because it was better than letting it rot in her pocket.

And if, later that night, her last thought before sleep was of a boy with tired eyes and a voice that didn’t ask, just offered…

Well. No one needed to know.

JEDHA

It had been years since Cere had first spoken of this place, of its ruins and archives, of its importance to Jedi and those who believed in the Force long before the Order gave it structure. To be here now, trudging through the wastes with the Empire at every heel—he felt both humbled and weary.

The sand rolled like a great sleeping beast, every gust of wind dragging grit across Cal’s skin. His cloak was already heavy with dust, his hair stiff with salt and heat. The suns burned overhead, and still he pressed forward.

The first blaster bolt seared the sand beside him.

Cal spun, lightsaber flashing to life, and the world erupted into motion. Stormtroopers, half a squad, came over the dunes shouting.

He moved without thinking, blue blade arcing in tight, practiced sweeps. Heat, grit, the smell of scorched plastoid. One trooper went down, another staggered. He reached out through the Force, dragged one closer, and cut him down.

But more came. Always more. The storm was thickening now, grains of sand cutting into his eyes, and for a moment he wondered if this was it, another nameless fight, another body buried under the endless desert.

Then the wind shifted. A streak of green cut through the stormtroopers, scattering them like dry reeds. Their shouts turned to screams, blaster fire spraying wildly before it was silenced just as quick. Cal caught his breath, turned..

Merrin.

Her hair was a spark of silver in the wind, her eyes like fire. She moved with the rhythm of Dathomir herself, her magick coiling through the air, tearing weapons from hands, bending sand and fear alike. Troopers dropped as if the desert itself had swallowed them whole.

When the last one fell, silence reclaimed the dunes.

Merrin straightened and looked at him. For a moment, no words. Just recognition and the fact that somehow, against all odds, both of them were still here, alive.

“You look terrible,” she said flatly, but her mouth twitched into a smile.

Cal huffed, lowering his saber. “It’s good to see you too.”

They walked together through the storm, their steps buried quickly behind them. Merrin told him of the Path, of the safehouses, of how Cere had poured her soul into protecting what fragments of the Jedi remained. She spoke like someone who had carved her place here.

“You’ve settled here?” he asked, stepping beside her.

“‘Settled’ is a generous word,” she replied dryly. “I work. I fight. I keep Cere from forgetting to eat.” A small smile tugged at her mouth. “It is… a place to be.”

Cal studied her profile. Merrin had always been a mirror in some ways, another survivor, another soul carved by loss and rebuilt by stubbornness. She was striking, powerful, magnetic. It would’ve been the obvious path, the obvious partner, right here — if it wasnt for the nagging feeling in the back of his mind, on his subconscious, keeping it from going further. It would become one of the moments where Cal Kestis would later realize how utterly doomed he had been, even from the start.

He managed a smile.

At last the winds broke, and the rocks opened up to reveal the hidden monastery. Carved into stone, half-hidden, it was less a fortress than a sanctuary. Cal felt the Force stir as soon as he stepped inside.

The archives.

Cere was waiting. Older, sterner, but her eyes lit with a fire Cal had not seen since Bogano. She embraced him fiercely, scolded him half a second later, and dragged him into the vast chamber where ancient texts glimmered under soft light.

Bode, of course, was already inside, leaning casually against a pillar, smirking as though Jedha’s suffocating weight was just another brawl waiting to happen. He clapped Cal on the shoulder, warmth seeping into every word.

“About time you showed up, partner. I was starting to think Merrin had to save your hide for good.”

Cal rolled his eyes, but the laughter that followed was genuine.

Master Cordova was also there, waiting, bent over a holomap. His beard had gone white, his hands shook when he gestured, but his eyes burned like stars. When he saw Cal, he broke into a smile that reached deep lines of age.

“Cal Kestis!” Cordova exclaimed, seizing his shoulders with surprising strength. “You’ve grown into the Jedi I always knew you would.”

They spoke, caught up, Cordova’s hands twitching with excitement as he spoke of discoveries. Of temples, ruins, and most of all Tanalorr.

Untouched by evil, by the Empire. A sanctuary beyond the Koboh abyss.

Cal listened, torn between hope and skepticism. A hidden world free of Empire sounded like fantasy.

“Do you believe it?” Merrin asked him later, her voice quiet as they walked the monastery halls.

“I don’t know,” Cal admitted. “But I want to.”

She tilted her head, watching him carefully. “Wanting is not the same as believing.”

He knew, belief had always been harder.

The next morning, as preparations were made, Cere gave Cal the task: return to Koboh. See to Greez. Visit the Shattered Moon. All to bring their research on Tanalorr back to Jedha.

Later, as he boarded the ship with Bode and BD chirping happily, a strange weight clung to him. The desert winds of Jedha whispered through his hair.

“Think it’s real?” Bode asked, staring out at the stars. “Tanalorr. A place where we can actually… breathe?”

Cal hesitated, then nodded. “I have to believe it is. Otherwise… what’s the point?”

Bode’s smirk softened into something more thoughtful. “That’s why I like you, Kestis. You never stop pushing forward. Even when the whole galaxy’s trying to knock you down.”

Cal allowed himself to believe him, just for a moment.

KOBOH

Greez’s cantina was busier than usual. Word of the Empire had everyone tense, though on Koboh “tense” just meant people drank harder and argued louder. Cal pushed through the crowd, catching sight of the familiar stubby frame behind the counter.

“Kid!” Greez’s voice boomed before Cal could get a word in. The pilot barreled out from behind the bar, all four arms wide. “You’re alive. I was starting to think you’d gotten lost in one of those dust storms or decided to join a monastery or-”

Greez’s hug crushed him. Cal laughed despite himself, letting the tension drain from his shoulders. “Good to see you too, Greez.”

But even as the warmth of reunion settled in, Cal’s eyes wandered, searching until they snagged on movement further back, near the corner where sunlight cut through the window slats.

It had only been a few days, but his breath caught. There she was.

Carrying a tray stacked with mugs, weaving through the crowd with careful precision. She set the mugs down, exchanged a few clipped words with a patron, then turned, froze when she saw him.

He wondered if she’d thought about him since. Wondered if she’d found the flower. Wondered if it meant anything to her at all.

Then she blinked, mask sliding into place, and slipped behind the counter.

“Uh, hey, Cal?” Greez waved a hand in front of his face. “You spacing out on me already?”

Cal coughed. “Just…long trip.”

“Yeah, no kidding. Well, you’re back just in time. I got folks asking questions about some of that junk you’re chasing. Artifacts, ancient tech, who knows what. And lucky for you-“ Greez leaned in conspiratorially, “I’ve got someone who knows the terrain better than you know the color of your own boots.”

Before Cal could ask, Greez turned and shouted toward the counter: “Liyani! C’mere!”

Cal’s heart stuttered.

Liyani stiffened, clearly reluctant, but obeyed. She set her tray down, wiped her hands on a rag and came over with the wariness of someone expecting trouble.

“This here’s Cal. He’s- uh, let’s call it a researcher,” Greez, bless him, said with a smirk. “Looking for things nobody’s supposed to find. And you’ve been hanging around this planet long enough to know where the dead ends are. Help him out, yeah?”

She glanced at Cal. Her expression didn’t soften, but her eyes showed her inner debate. He could feel the wall between them, the one she’d raised after the flower, after his disappearance.

“I don’t guide off-worlders,” she said flatly. Or anyone really, he could hear in his head.

Cal swallowed, then forced a smile. “Guess it’s a good thing I’m not off-world anymore.”

Her lips twitched before she caught herself.

“I’ll think about it,” she muttered, then brushed past them, vanishing into the storeroom.

Greez clapped Cal’s shoulder. “Don’t worry. That’s her being friendly.”

Later that night, when the crowd had thinned out and the firelight flickered low, Cal found her again. She was outside, perched on the steps with a datapad, the moonlight silvering her hair. BD chirped, but Cal hushed him and approached carefully, like stepping into a memory.

“You knew I’d come back,” he said quietly.

Her eyes lifted from the datapad slowly, as if knowing he had stood there. “I knew you’d leave.”

Cal blinked, rubbed the back of his neck. “Jedha needed me. Cere needed me.” he added, feeling the urge to explain, even though he knew they didn’t owe each other anything. They weren’t anything.

She studied him for a moment, then looked away. “Everyone needs something.”

The silence stretched. He wanted to fill it, to tell her everything, about Tanalorr, about Dagan Gera, about how he couldn’t stop thinking of her by the river with her hands pressed to the earth like she belonged to it.

But he didn’t know how much to give, how much she’d even care.

Cal sat beside her on the cantina steps, elbows on his knees, watching the dirt road beyond Pyloon’s blur into shadows and crickets. Liyani sat angled away from him, datapad balanced on one thigh, her shoulders taut like a bowstring. She hadn’t sent him away yet, which he was taking as progress.

“You’ve been here a while, haven’t you?” he asked, keeping his tone light, conversational.

Her eyes flicked sideways, the faintest acknowledgment. “Long enough to know Koboh eats strangers.”

Cal huffed a laugh. “Good thing I’m not a stranger anymore.”

That earned him nothing more than a raised brow and the sharp tap of her stylus against the datapad.

Undeterred, he pressed on. “Greez mentioned you know the land better than anyone. I’ve got… research to track down. Ancient sites. Buried tech. Dangerous stuff, sometimes.” He tried for a smile, but it came out more sheepish than confident. “Could use a guide who won’t get spooked by the first bogling that hops out of the grass.”

Finally, she turned her head, full weight of her gaze pinning him. It was like being held under cold water, yet impossible to look away from.

“You want me to hold your hand through ruins you’re too reckless to walk yourself?”

Cal blinked. “I…well, not exactly-”

He flushed, rubbing at the back of his neck. “Look, it’s not that I don’t think you can handle yourself. It’s just…these places aren’t safe. I’ve seen what’s out there. Raiders, creatures, traps older than the Republic. If anything happened to you because of me-”

“Because of you?” Her tone cut like a blade, arching one brow with dangerous amusement. “You think I’m some villager you’ll have to haul out by the wrist when things go wrong?”

Cal hesitated. BD, ever unhelpful, let out a whistle that sounded suspiciously like laughter.

“I didn’t mean-” He stopped, sighed, and raised both hands in surrender. “Okay. That was… dumb. You don’t need my protection. Got it.”

Her silence stretched, her eyes searching his face for something he couldn’t name. Then, with deliberate slowness, she set the datapad aside and leaned back on her hands, staring out at the horizon at the faint glow of starlight.

“Routes,” she said at last. “You’ll need them.”

Relief hit him like a tide. “Routes. Yes. Right. That’d be-”

“Don’t thank me yet.” She smirked without looking at him. “You’ll curse me the first time I lead you through a raptor nest.”

Cal grinned despite himself. “I already did that on Zeffo once. Not keen on repeating it.”

Her head tilted, eyes narrowing faintly. “Zeffo. Nobody goes there.”

“Yeah, well.” He shrugged. “That’s sort of the point. Nobody goes where I end up.”

Her lips pressed together like she was holding back a reply, then she pulled her knees up, looping her arms around them. “I’ll draw you a map tomorrow. But if you get yourself killed on one of my routes, don’t come haunting me.”

“You’d hate me haunting you.”

“Mm, you couldn’t haunt me if you wanted to, Kestis.” she said simply, a spark in her eyes. “Well… goodnight, Jedi.”

And then she quietly slipped back into the cantina, the door closing behind her with a swoosh.

Cal sat there long after, staring at the horizon. The night was full of wind and insect hum, but all he could hear was the echoes of her voice.

It was ridiculous. He had work to do, a galaxy to fight, an Empire to outpace. He didn’t have time for distractions, let alone women who looked at him like they saw the cracks he was trying so hard to keep hidden.

He was a Jedi, he had to remind himself, he couldn’t afford to think like that. But stars, was he already waiting for tomorrow.

Chapter Text

KOBOH, 9 BBY

Morning came crisp, the kind of mountain air that stuck in Cal's lungs. The valleys in front of him were drowned in mist, ridges crowned with crooked trees, dirt paths splitting into a hundred choices.

And waiting at the beginning of one, at the edge of town, was Liyani, arms folded and a satchel slung across her shoulders.

"You're late," she said, though the sun had barely crested the ridge.

He adjusted his pack, BD chattering indignantly on his shoulder. "Well, BD says we're exactly on time."

She arched a brow. "BD is biased."

Cal insisted BD was right, though his grin faltered when she didn't return it.  "Which route first?"

The path towards the Stone Spires was one he could've traced blindfolded if he'd wanted to. He hadn't really needed a guide, not really, not when BD had mapped half the terrain and his insticts filled in the rest. But he didn't say that, he couldn't. And somehow, he knew she knew, too.

It didn't change the fact that she came anyway, and he let her lead.

Cal moved easily, lightsaber clipped at his side, muscles coiled and ready. Every so often, he'd glance forward, not because he needed direction, but because she was there. She walked a few paces ahead, steps kept light, the jungle so serene around her, it was almost as if it willingly parted where she walked. For a heartbeat, Cal forgot where he was.

"You know, I don't actually need this," he said at last, pushing aside a branch. His tone was lighter than he felt. "The guidance."

"Then why are you here?" she shot back without looking at him. "Why am I?"

Cal hesitated. He should've said the practical thing: because Greez asked you to, because it makes sense, because I don't want you caught off guard by raiders. Instead, the words that slipped out were softer, betraying.

"Because I don't mind."

She slowed, just slightly, as if weighing whether or not to turn her head. She didn't. But he felt the shift in her silence, the way it thickened.

For hours they moved through the jungle, the quiet between them more and more like a taut string pulled tight. Every so often, Cal caught himself starting to speak, about Dathomir, about how Merrin's fire and magick had left him wary of what Nightsisters carried —but he swallowed the words. Liyani didn't use magick. She didn't have Merrin's restless anger, she condensed it, tucked away deep inside. She was something else, and Cal didn't know how to ask without ruining the fragile line they walked.

The silence began to gnaw. He tried filling it, pointing out tracks in the dirt, commenting on the shape of the cliffs, muttering about how ancient tech always seemed to end up in the worst places. She didn't seem to entertain it.

Eventually, BD broke the quiet with a happy warble, scampering down Cal's back to scuttle towards her. To his surprise, she crouched low, holding out a hand.

BD chirped a curious trill.

"You're smaller than I thought," she murmured.

"You've thought about him?" Cal tilted his head.

Liyani gave him the faintest smile before rising again, and Cal's chest tightened with something he shoved aside as quickly as it came.

By midday, they reached the first set of ruins, a broken circle of stone, half swallowed by vines.

"Tanalorr. There's something here about the Path, I can feel it." he murmured, feeling the Force humming under the surface, old and patient.

Liyani leaned against a pillar, arms crossed. "So that's what you're chasing? Some hidden paradise?"

He looked at her, surprised she even knew what he was talking about. "It's real. I've seen pieces of it. There's a way through, I just haven't cracked it yet."

"And you think you'll find the answer."

"It's worked before." He shrugged, kneeling to brush soil from carved glyphs. "The galaxy's in pieces. If there's even a chance at a place untouched by the Empire, don't you think it's worth trying?"

Something in her expression flickered. Not mockery, but equally far from belief. "Maybe. But paradise always has a price."

He almost asked what she meant, but her tone shut it down, as sharp as any blade. So instead he worked. She guided, pointed out routes through collapsed chambers he might have missed, warned him when the soil was loose near an edge, corrected his compass without making a show of it. He caught himself staring more than once, not at the ruins, but at her, how certain she was in her steps, how she never hesitated.

By the time dusk bled purple across the cliffs, they'd made camp in a hollow carved by centuries of wind. Cal lit a small fire while Liyani sat apart, gazing at the stars.

He meant to keep quiet. He meant to let her have her silence. But the dim firelight loosened his tongue. "You asked earlier why I care about Tanalorr," he said, poking at the flames. "Truth is... I don't know anymore if it's for me. Or for everyone else."

She didn't answer.

"I've lost too much already." He glanced at her. "It feels like every time I reach for something, the Empire rips it away. Tanalorr... it feels like something I could protect. Finally. Somewhere they can't touch."

At last, she turned her face toward him. Firelight painted her in sharp lines with soft shadows. Her voice, when it came, was quiet. "And you think it won't be taken from you, too?"

Cal opened his mouth, closed it again. "I have to believe it won't. If I don't...what's left?"

For a long while, the only sound was the crackle of fire, BD's soft whirring as he settled near Cal's boot.

Then Liyani said, almost reluctantly, "I know what it is to lose everything. Once you do... you never build your life around something again."

Her words sank deep, heavier than he expected. He studied her profile, the lines of her face softer than he's ever seen before, making her look so, so tired.

"You don't have to tell me," he said softly. "But if you want to... I'll listen."

For a heartbeat, he thought she'd stay silent. Then, without looking at him, she whispered, "Dathomir."

The name twisted the air. He felt it before he heard it, the old but open wound in her voice.

"I was a child," she continued, eyes fixed on the stars, sounding almost . "Like Merrin. I don't remember their faces, I can't. Just fire...Screams. Shadows. My...mother's hands pushing me into the dark, telling me to run. I didn't stop until the planet was gone behind me."

Cal's chest tightened. "Liyani..."

"Don't." She shook her head. "Don't pity me. That's the one thing I don't need."

"I wasn't going to." He hesitated. "I was going to say... you're still here. That means something."

That made her finally glance at him, eyes glinting in firelight. "So are you." This time, she didn't look away, neither did he.

"You remind me of someone I met years ago." he said before he had time to think about it.

"Who, Merrin?" she arched a brow, amused. "Me?"

He furrowed his brows, confusion evident for a second or two, then snorted and gave a shake of his head. "No- well, Merrin, too. But way before that, a survivor, too. The only difference is you're kind."

"You think I'm kind, Kestis?" she teased.

"I do." he replied without hesitation, holding her gaze. She looked away.

"Hm. Say this to every girl you meet, Jedi?"

He only smiled. The silence that followed this time was still heavy, but warm. Different.

Cal cleared his throat, suddenly too aware of how close they were. "We should get some sleep. Long day tomorrow."

Liyani smirked faintly, leaning back against the rock wall. "Try not to snore. I'll push you into the fire."

He chuckled, lying back on his bedroll, staring at the stars overhead. He could still feel her presence beside him, steady as the Force itself. And though he tried to focus on glyphs, routes, and lost paradises, the only thing on his mind as sleep tugged him under was the feeling of her voice in the dark.

Head still full, she watched the stars for a few moments more before looking over to check on him, only to find him already asleep, one arm cushioning his head. She swallowed, trying to look away but finding the task difficult. Especially when this man, this boy, slept there with his guard down, completely at her mercy. 

It was an open display of trust.

Scoffing, she shook her head and angled her body away from him, though she knew very well that even if she tried, sleep wouldn't find her, not in this state. No matter how much she tried, the image remained: Cal Kestis, asleep like a fool, trusting her as if she were worth trusting.

And though she told herself it meant nothing, her chest ached with the weight of it.

Foolish, foolish boy.

The Stone Spires rose jagged against the afternoon light, great spears of rock piercing the sky as though some giant had tried to pin down the horizon. Cal tilted his head back, whistling low. "Of course it had to be up there."

Beside him, Liyani studied the cliffs with a frown. "Nature doesn't care about your complaints, Jedi."

BD-1 beeped brightly, bounding from Cal's shoulder to perch on a nearby rock, scanning the ascent with enthusiastic chirps.

"You really enjoy making me look lazy, don't you?" Cal muttered.

Liyani's lips quirked faintly. Her face gave nothing else away, already turning toward the narrow path that snaked upward.

So they climbed.

The first hour was quiet but steady, switchbacks carved into the stone, ledges that crumbled beneath boots, moments when Cal's hand instinctively shot out to steady her -- though she rarely needed it. Liyani moved with a balance that reminded him of Merrin, but stripped of flourish. No magick. No green mist. Just muscle and instinct.

At one point, a relter swooped low over them, its wings like stretched cloth catching the sun. Liyani, ducking automatically, followed the creature with her eyes until it vanished around the spire.

"Not a fan of heights?" Cal teased.

She shot him a withering glance. "Not a fan of winged beasts that see me as dinner. We had enough of them on Dathomir."

BD beeped something that made Cal laugh. "He says they're harmless unless you startle them."

"Then please make sure not to look them in the eye," she said coolly, though he swore the corner of her mouth twitched upward.

The top of the spires held their prize: an ancient device, half-shattered, its core still humming faintly. Cal crouched beside it, BD scanning, while Liyani circled the platform with watchful eyes.

Symbols etched into the stone whispered of Tanalorr, of a path hidden between storms. Cal's chest tightened as BD projected the faint, flickering map.

"There it is," he murmured, his Psychometry confirming it. "Proof."

Liyani crouched beside him, her shoulder brushing his. "Looks like broken proof to me."

"Still something." He glanced at her. "Cere will want to see this."

She said nothing, but her gaze lingered on him longer than usual, as though weighing the hope in his voice.

The descent should have been easier. But it wasn't.

The Bedlam Raiders struck halfway down the cliffs, twice as many as before, this time with heavier weapons. And they weren't looking at Cal.

"There!" one shouted, pointing at Liyani. "That's her!"

Cal's stomach dropped.

"What?" he demanded, swinging his saber to deflect the first of blaster fire. "What are they talking about?"

"Not now," Liyani snapped, pulling a blade from her boot.

The battle was chaos, Cal cutting through blasters, Liyani holding her own with ruthless precision, but the raiders' words rang louder than the fight itself. Wanted. Empire.

She moved like someone used to being hunted, Cal realized. Every strike efficient, every dodge desperate. And when one raider nearly pinned her against the cliff edge, Cal's heart surged in his throat. He cut the man down before she could fall.

By the time the last raider fled, silence roared louder than their shouts had.

Cal turned to her, chest heaving. "What was that? Why are they after you?"

Her jaw clenched. She wiped blood from her arm with a steady hand, eyes flashing in the dim light. "You ask too many questions for someone who's a fugitive himself, Jedi."

"That's not an answer."

"It's the only one you're getting."

For a long beat, neither moved.

Then she turned sharply, heading down the path without looking back.

Cal hesitated, torn between anger, curiosity, and something else he could, but didn't want to name. Then he followed, BD scampering nervously after them. The trail down the Stone Spires felt steeper than the climb up.

It wasn't the jagged rocks or the loose scree under his boots, but her silence.

He followed a few paces back, saber still clipped at his belt, though it felt heavier now, and the hum of the broken device from his pack faintly buzzing like a half-formed thought. He kept looking at her, trying to read the tight set of her shoulders, the sharpness in the line of her jaw.

Wanted by the Empire.

The words just wouldn't leave him.

"Are they lying?" he asked finally, his voice steady but edged. "Raiders talk big for credits."

Liyani didn't stop, didn't even glance at him. "They weren't."

Cal quickened his pace until he was almost level with her. "Then what did you do?"

She cut him a look that could have turned stone to sand. "Do you interrogate everyone you meet, or just the ones who save your hide?"

"That's not fair."

"No?" She arched a brow, cool and sharp. "You asked me to guide you. I didn't ask for you to play judge. Or hypocrite."

The words stung, maybe because there was truth in them. Cal clenched his jaw, stepping aside as BD chirped nervously between them, clearly trying to soften the tension.

They descended in silence for a while, wind scraping against the cliffs, the sky bleeding into copper twilight.

Finally, Cal tried again, softer. "I'm not judging. I just... need to know if I can trust you."

That earned him a short, sharp laugh. Not amused at all, more like a knife unsheathing. "Trust? You barely know me."

"Exactly," he said, frustrated. "And the Empire wanting you doesn't make it easier."

Her boots scraped to a halt on the ledge. She turned then, really looking at him. For a second, the wind carried her hair across her face, black strands catching the dying light."Doesn't make what easier? Your noble Jedi mission? Should've thought about that before asking me for favors."

He exhaled through his nose. "What I meant to say is... I don't know if I can trust you, not like this, when we're supposed to be working together."

A flash of something Cal couldn't name before it was gone flickered in her eyes as she held his gaze, replaced by the mask again.

"Good," she said at last, stepping past him. "That'll keep you alive."

He exhaled, half a laugh, half a sigh, staring after her. "Force, you're impossible."

"And you're persistent," she tossed back over her shoulder, her tone final. "One of us has to be."

She walked ahead, scanning the ridges, every muscle coiled for another ambush. Cal caught himself studying her movements, not only for tells, but proof that she wasn't about to vanish and leave him stranded.

By the time they finally reached the base, night had swallowed Koboh whole. The spires loomed behind them, far gone, and Pyloon's neon glow blinked faintly in the distance.

Beside him, Liyani adjusted her cloak, face unreadable in the dark. She hadn't asked once what he was carrying back for Cere, what he saw when he touched it. She hadn't even asked him in return why the Empire had burned half the galaxy chasing him.

And maybe that was what unsettled him most. Because for all her sharpness, her secrets, her clipped replies... he not only realized the hypocrisy in his own words, he realized he wanted her to ask.

Pyloon's noise greeted them before the door. Cal slipped inside, blinking at the warmth, the laughter, the crash of mugs. BD beeped cheerily, glad to be out of the wind.

That's where Cal spotted his friend at a corner table, leaning back like he owned the place - Bode.

The man looked exactly the same as before, easy smile, casual posture, flight jacket draped loose. But Cal knew better. That ease was practiced. Bode never really relaxed, not unless he wanted you to.

The moment Bode's eyes landed on Liyani, the smile faltered. Barely, but Cal caught it.

"Cal," Bode called, pushing to his feet. "You took your time."

Cal forced himself forward. "Had company."

"Yeah," Bode said slowly, gaze flicking to Liyani. "I can see that."

Liyani didn't flinch. Didn't offer a hand or a name. She just regarded him with that level, sharp-eyed stare, the kind that measured people in heartbeats, not words.

"Bode," Cal said carefully, "this is-"

"Not your problem," Liyani cut in. Her tone was calm, her eyes were flint.

Bode arched a brow, turning back to Cal. "You didn't tell me you picked up a shadow."

Cal felt the tension coil between them like a tripwire. "She helped me in the spires. Raiders would've cut me down if not for her."

"Uh huh." Bode's smile didn't reach his eyes. "And you're sure she wasn't leading them to you?"

"Excuse me?" Liyani's voice was cool, even. Too even. "If I wanted him dead, he wouldn't be standing here explaining me to you."

Greez, bustling behind the counter, kept glancing over. Cal lifted a hand, stepping between them. "Enough. She's with me."

Bode tilted his head, that smile tightening. "That supposed to mean something?"

Cal held his stare. "It means I trust her."

The words left his mouth before he had time to weigh them. And once they were out, he couldn't take them back.

Liyani blinked, the faintest crease in her brow but she didn't comment on it.

Bode, though, barked a laugh. Not cruel, but edged. "Alright," He looked past Cal to her, lowering his voice just a notch. "don't think for a second I'm not watching."

Liyani's lips curved, holding no warmth. "Good. I like being underestimated."

Bode's eyes narrowed. For a moment, Cal thought he'd push. But then he just clapped Cal's shoulder, all casual charm again. "Shattered Moon tomorrow, then. Don't be late."

He left it at that, retreating back to his table, though Cal could feel his eyes lingering.

Cal turned back to Liyani, suddenly exhausted. "You didn't have to-"

She raised a brow, and he closed his mouth. She carried herself like a storm people avoided but somehow, Cal kept stepping closer to it.

For a heartbeat, he thought about saying that out loud. Instead, he just sighed. "He'll come around."

Her gaze flicked to him, unreadable. Then, finally, she said, "You're a terrible liar, Cal Kestis."

That made him smile.

Chapter Text

Cal should've been gone. Every instinct, every drilled-in discipline from Bracca, from Cere, from years of running said: move, don't linger. But he lingered.

The Shattered Moon wasn't going anywhere, but Bode would be waiting. He had responsibilities. And yet when dawn broke over the Koboh hills, Cal was still at Pyloon's, still listening for the sound of her boots on the stone walkway outside, still pretending he had a reason to stay.

The first day passed with excuses. "Raiders are heavy around the canyons right now," he told Bode over the comm. "Better to move when it's quiet." Which was true enough, but it wasn't why he stayed.

In the morning, he caught himself outside the cantina before dawn, leaning against the wall just so he'd accidentally be standing there when Liyani returned from wherever she vanished at night. He didn't even bother to make an excuse for himself, just nodded when her eyes flicked up at him, half-shadowed in the blue-grey morning.

"Long night?" he asked.

Her brow arched, unreadable for the most part but clearly unimpressed. "And here I thought Jedi were meant to sleep when the galaxy allowed it."

That should've ended it. But Cal walked her back to Pyloon's anyway, inventing questions about routes, about caves he thought might connect to the spires, about anything that would keep her voice answering him.

By midday, he found himself inside Pyloon's when he didn't need to be, crouched by the counter pretending to tinker with BD. Every few minutes his gaze drifted, unbidden, to where she leaned against a beam in the corner. She wasn't talking to anyone. She never did. But the set of her mouth, the tilt of her head, drew him more surely than any beacon.

Bode noticed. Of course he did, Bode noticed everything. The older man leaned on the railing above the sabacc table, arms crossed. He didn't say a word, but his eyes flicked between Cal and Liyani once, twice, enough for Cal to feel heat rise in his neck.

Later, when Liyani brushed past him on her way out, she muttered low, without breaking stride, "Your friend's staring holes in your back. You might want to stop making it so obvious."

Cal froze. "Obvious?"

She didn't answer. Only the barest twitch of her lips gave her away, like she was savoring the chance to watch him squirm.

The second day, the excuse was thinner. "Device is fragile. I want to make sure the readout is stable before I bring it back." Another half-truth. Really, he couldn't explain to himself why he hadn't left. Only that every time he thought about walking away, his chest tightened as if something in him already knew he'd regret it.

The second day was worse, too. Cal spent it chasing excuses like a hound chasing its own tail. He asked her to look at a crude map he'd drawn on flimsi, just to hear her scoff at his crooked lines. He pretended BD needed calibration near the ridge where she liked to stand at dusk. He even asked, half-serious, if she thought raiders avoided the canyon because of her reputation.

Her brows climbed higher and higher with each attempt, until finally she asked, dry as Tatooine's sand, "Do you always hover like this?"

That time, he actually stammered. "No. I...just wanted to make sure you're— safe."

She stared at him for a long, flat moment, then looked past him toward the sky. "Safe," she repeated, like she was tasting the word and finding it strange. "You can stop worrying. I've kept myself alive longer than you've been hovering."

He should've been embarrassed. He was. But he still didn't leave.

Again, Bode noticed. The man never said a word, never teased, just leaned against the cantina wall while Cal lingered by the firepit, eyes narrowed slightly as if filing away notes for later.

And Liyani noticed Bode noticing. She saw the unspoken looks, the silent questions, and tucked them away behind her mask. She wouldn't call either of them out. Not yet. But she saw more than either man realized.

Those two days blurred, anchored by moments, mundane as they were, he didn't want to admit he was chasing.

Liyani at the counter, not drinking so much as watching the room, eyes flicking up every time someone entered. Liyani on the ridge outside town, silent in the dusk, the orange sky staining her hair copper. Liyani not asking questions about the device, about Cere, about his fight with the Empire. And somehow, that quiet felt more honest than anyone else's curiosity ever did.

By the second night, the guilt sat heavy. He was keeping Bode waiting. He was keeping Cere waiting. He was keeping himself from doing what he knew had to be done, but when he looked at her, sitting by the small firepit outside the cantina, legs folded, hair in one, long braid down her back and gaze lost in the stars, he couldn't bring himself to care.

He eased down beside her, stretching his hands toward the fire. She didn't turn, she already knew, and neither spoke for a while. The only sound was the crackle of the wood and BD's whir as he perched nearby.

Finally, Liyani spoke softly without looking at him, "You stall."

He blinked. "What?"

"You stall," she repeated, tone calm, almost bored. "You should've left but you didn't. Because you want something you can't name. And you don't want to admit it."

Cal bristled, then sighed. "You don't pull punches, do you?"

"Someone has to be honest with you," she said, glancing at him for the first time. "Maybe they don't notice. I do."

That landed heavier than she probably meant it to. He swallowed, watching the fire flare. "And what do you notice?"

Her eyes, dark, and so close, lingered on him for a beat too long. "That you're lonelier than you'll ever admit. And that you don't know what to do when someone sees it."

Cal's chest tightened as the firelight played on her features. He wanted to look away, but he didn't, he couldn't.

"You make it sound like you've got me all figured out," he said quietly.

She gave the barest shrug. "I don't need to figure you out. I just need to see what's right in front of me."

Something in him cracked at that. For months, years even, he'd been running from the Empire, from the Inquisitors, from the weight of the Code he kept breaking and trying to patch back together but knowing each crack made him drift further. Everyone he cared about expected him to carry it all, expected him to stay strong. And here she was, cutting through him in a single sentence, like it was the simplest truth in the world.

The words slipped out before he could stop them. "I trust you."

Her gaze sharpened. Not soft, not melting, and not charmed but rather startled, like he'd struck a place she kept buried. She opened her mouth, then shut it again, looking back at the fire.

"You shouldn't," she murmured. "You don't even know me."

"Maybe," he admitted. "But I know enough. It... feels right."

And Liyani, for the first time since their eyes met on Bracca six years ago, looked unsettled, as though he'd struck a nerve she couldn't let him see.

The morning after, he was gone.

Cal felt the emptiness first. Even with Bode beside him, even with the Shattered Moon looming, he felt it, that hollow ache of having left something behind. He told himself it was fine, that he'd see her again, that Koboh wasn't going anywhere. But deep down, he knew he'd been selfish. He'd taken pieces of her attention, her patience, maybe even her quiet, and left without giving anything back.

Liyani, meanwhile, found the silence a relief. Or that's what she told herself. The cantina was quieter without his eyes drifting toward her every few minutes, without his clumsy excuses tying him to her. She told herself she preferred it this way.

She'd survived far worse than the absence of one stubborn Jedi. She didn't need him. She didn't need anyone.

At least, that's what she kept telling herself.

The quiet was supposed to feel like hers again. Liyani had built her life in Rambler's Reach on silence, on the unspoken distance that kept people from prying. The barkeep learned not to ask where she vanished at night, the regulars stopped trying to buy her drinks. Even the stray settlers, wide-eyed and reckless, gave up after a few attempts at conversation. Silence had been her shield.

But now, when she stepped outside Pyloon's in the morning, the hush didn't feel clean. It felt... empty.

The ridge was too still without the sound of boots pacing clumsily behind her, too easy to scan without catching the flicker of red hair in her periphery. Even the air seemed thinner, missing the quiet weight of someone who always looked like he was about to say something and never quite knew how.

She caught herself once, pausing by the cantina wall and glancing toward the trail where he'd waited two mornings in a row. A habit already.

Liyani swore under her breath and forced her eyes away. Habits were dangerous. Habits meant someone had gotten close enough to become a pattern. And she didn't allow that. Not anymore.

The flower was still on her shelf, though. Burgundy, brittle at the edges now, but untouched. She should've thrown it out. She told herself she would. Tomorrow, she thought, and then never bothered to think about it again. Just stop thinking altogether, she mumbled under her breath as the door opened.

She hadn't expected him to return, wasn’t counting on it. And more importantly, she hadn't gone looking either. There was a quiet punishment in that, and a choice.

When the caravan rolled into Rambler's Reach two days later, she welcomed the distraction. A new supply run, dusty merchants unloading their crates, settlers trading credits with weary relief. Noise and bustle filled the outpost. Liyani kept to her usual post near the cantina door, arms crossed, eyes half-lidded. Just another body in the crowd, unseen, untouched.

Until she saw Caedon.

He was lean, his skin the golden hue of someone who'd wandered desert moons for too long. He wore no uniform, and his stride was uneven with exhaustion but his smile somehow intact. His clothes were travel-worn, dust clinging to every seam, but his posture carried a kind of quiet resilience. He paused in the square, brushing his sleeve across his forehead, gaze sweeping the bustle like he was both searching for something and drinking it all in.

And then his eyes landed on her.

Liyani didn't flinch. Men looked at her all the time, with curiosity, desire, sometimes suspicion. She'd learned to wear coldness like armor, to let her stillness do the work of pushing them away.

But this one didn't leer, he didn't hover. His expression shifted in a way she hadn't seen in a long time... or perhaps three days ago, in blue eyes. It was the look of sudden lightness, like someone glimpsing water after days in the desert.

Ridiculous. Absolutely ridiculous.

She narrowed her gaze, already turning back toward the cantina door. She knew that look, knew the spark of instant fascination men sometimes mistook for fate. And she knew how to snuff it out before it wasted her time.

Only this stranger lingered. Not close enough to intrude, but not moving on either. His smile softened when she glanced back, as if he'd already accepted she'd offer him nothing and still found the refusal worth admiring.

Liyani slipped inside, dismissing him. Another smitten fool. Nothing more. And yet, as she moved to the counter, she caught herself thinking: his eyes weren't sharp like Cal's. They were kind.

She bit her tongue until the thought faded.

He found her later that day, as she picked some of her dried herbs from their bundle.

"You're her," he said. "The witch who doesn't curse."

Liyani didn't stop grinding the salve. "And you're interrupting."

He smiled. "My name's Caedon."

She still didn't look up. "I don't care."

"You fight alongside a Jedi. Word gets around."

She went still for half a second. He sat on a nearby stone uninvited, peeling fruit with a blade. "I'm not here to hurt you. I'm just... tired of fighting alone."

"That's a dangerous thing to admit."

He studied her. "So is waiting for someone who can't love you back."

Her eyes lifted. Something tightened in her jaw. "I should kill you for that."

"But you won't." He was right.

Caedon returned a second time.

He offered her an old Nightsister relic from a distant enclave she'd never known. Told her he found it buried near Jedha, where someone had tried to preserve it.

Liyani touched it like it might burn her.

"I think we all came from ash," Caedon said simply, even though she hadn't asked. "We just lie about what kind."

This time, she looked him in the eye.

The sky burned gold in the late hour, bruised by storm clouds to the east but Liyani stood in the clearing where Caedon had left the relic. She hadn't moved it yet.

She didn't trust gifts from strangers, especially not relics of her kind.

And yet, it had been years since she held anything that smelled like the dust of Dathomir. Something in the aged carvings whispered in an old tongue only dreams dared remember. Her heart clenched painfully as she held her breath, eyes stinging.

It wasn't fair.

He returned a third time.

He brought two flasks of steaming tea this time - fermented bark - set them down without ceremony. Didn't ask to sit, just waited.

Liyani glanced once. Took the drink. Stayed silent.

The wind stirred her hair. She didn't tie it back.

"You're quieter today," he said.

"I'm always quiet."

"No," he replied easily. "Sometimes you're sharp. This is different."

She drank slowly. "Not everything is about you."

Caedon smiled, but there was no triumph in it. "True. But I didn't say it was...I just know grief when I see it."

Liyani's lashes fluttered. "That's a dangerous assumption."

"I've seen people grieve the living. You wear it the same way."

She set her flask down gently, too gently, like it might break if she used force.

"Is this why you keep coming?" she asked. "Because you want to fix broken things?"

"No," Caedon said honestly. "I came because I heard stories about a warrior who still fought with purpose. I stayed because I saw someone still fighting with that pain."

Liyani turned her back to him, but she didn't leave.

"That Jedi," he said, softly now. "You didn't follow him."

Her fists clenched at her sides. "He didn't ask me to."

"But you wanted to."

She didn't answer, she didn't have to.

Later that night, they sat near the dying fire again. Caedon told her about Jedha, about pilgrims with no gods left, about the rot of war eating into every untouched place.

She thought of Cal, when he returned from Jedha, sand still caught in longer hair, and immediately hated herself. 

"Do you think the Force is balanced?" he asked.

"I think it never was."

He nodded. "So we bend it to survive."

She looked at him for the first time in a while. "You're not a Jedi."

"No," he said. "But I used to believe in them."

Liyani's expression flickered. "Did he disappoint you?"

"I never met him."

She knew who he meant. Cal.

She swallowed. "Then you only believe in stories."

"No," he said again, more firmly this time. "I believe in the people who survive the aftermath."

He wasn't pressing. He wasn't prying. But he was there.  And worse, he was kind.

It made her angry. So, so angry.

And so, days passed. She trained alone, and Caedon came and watched from a distance.

He never interrupted. Sometimes he left supplies. Once, a flower. No note.

She looked at the flower like it had offended her by simply being, but still didn't throw it away.

Then, one evening, he stayed after sundown.

They argued about nothing first, semantics, battle styles, which was worse, stormtroopers or bounty hunters?

She made him bleed as they sparred, and he laughed.

"You're holding back," he said, panting.

"You're not worth full strength."

"Is he?" Caedon asked, barely above a whisper.

The words struck her like a blade. She stepped back. "You have no right."

He didn't apologize.

She didn't notice how close they'd gotten.

Not until one night, she reached for a satchel and brushed his hand by mistake and froze.

And he didn't move away.

She did. Faster than thought, back three paces. "Don't."

"I wasn't-"

"I said don't."

He nodded.

Again, no apology, no regret for staying. It made something sting behind her eyes.

She left for the river that night, knees in the stream, hair unbound, palms flat on the stones.

She didn't cry, she never did anymore. But something broke beneath her ribs, quietly.

The days blurred again. Rambler's Reach was always dust and heat and smoke but Caedon's presence shifted something subtle in the air.

He never demanded. Never filled silence with nervous words. Sometimes he was just there, hands scarred by long work, eyes always waiting but never asking.

It irritated her. It soothed her. And worst of all, it confused her.

And that rotten, beating thing inside Liyani's chest had the audacity to compare him to Cal, a man who couldn't even stay. You gave him nothing to stay for.

One afternoon, she found him in the square teaching a settler's boy to tie a net properly, hands patient on the rope. His voice was soft and careful, letting the child fumble and figure it out, praising the mistakes as much as the success.

Liyani stood on the porch of the cantina, arms crossed, watching. She told herself she was only scanning the crowd, but her eyes found him.

When he caught her watching, he didn't smile triumphantly the way men usually did. He just nodded, as if to say: See, I exist outside of you.

Later, when he approached her with dust in his hair and sweat on his collar, she was ready to cut him down with a look.

"You're wasting your time," she muttered, not even glancing at him.

He shrugged. "Time doesn't belong to me anyway. Might as well waste it where I feel lighter, alive."

Ridiculous man. She would go on to remember his words even years later.

Over weeks, he learned her rhythms.

He never walked beside her, always a pace behind, as though respecting invisible boundaries. He never touched her unless sparring, and even then his hands were careful. He listened more than he spoke, yet when he did speak, his words carried weight she couldn't ignore.

He told her about Ghorman, and how his people spoke a language that still carried the songs of oceans long dried.

His voice always softened when he spoke of his home, of his mother's cooking, of the way children ran barefoot through streets that ceased to exist little by little each day.

He made pain sound beautiful. He was everything she wasn't, everything she would never be.

He was too good for her.

Chapter Text

RETURN FROM THE SHATTERED MOON, en route to KOBOH

The stars blurred into streaks as the Mantis slipped from hyperspace. Koboh filled the viewport a moment later, green and ochre, ringed in haze.

It was a backwater world in the Outer Rim, and unremarkable to most, but to Cal it had become the axis of something heavier than he wanted to name.

Bode sat in the co-pilot's chair, adjusting the nav with the lazy confidence of someone who trusted Cal to take the beating if they crashed. "You sure about this stop?" he asked, groaning as he stretched. "Could've kept going straight to Jedha."

Cal had told himself the return to Koboh was just logistics. The Outpost was the only place in the Rim that welcomed them without questions, the only safe harbor at the moment.

He leaned against the console, arms folded. "The Mantis needs repairs." It was true, the hyperdrive couplings had rattled on the way out of the Shattered Moon. "And we'll need Greez. He knows how to keep her running when the rest of us can't."

He hadn't seen her since they'd split at the outpost, since she'd turned her back without asking where he was headed. He hadn't expected that to sting as much as it did. She didn't owe him anything.

"So this is about Greez, huh?" 

Cal gave an immediate nod. "Greez should be with us. He'll never admit it, but... he belongs in the fight."

Bode caught him staring too long at the viewfinder. "She's still on Koboh, isn't she?"

Cal stiffened. "Who?"

Bode smirked. "Don't play dumb. Can't blame you. She's... different."

Cal ignored him, but gripped the yoke tighter.

The Mantis broke through the last of the cloud cover, landing struts whining as they set down near Rambler's Reach. Cal's chest was tight. He didn't want to admit Bode was right, and that grated. 

He could've pushed the ship further, patched her up enough to limp to Jedha. Instead he'd set course for Koboh again, the decision made so quickly he'd barely considered it. Now, watching the planet swell in the viewport, he felt the tug in his chest sharpen. A weight and a pull, like gravity wasn't just dragging him planetward but somewhere far more dangerous, into entirely unknown territory.

He knew the name for it, he just refused to say it.

They dropped out of hyperspace to the familiar sprawl of Koboh's skies, the swirling clouds parting to reveal the fractured land below. It looked the same, alive despite everything. It was almost surreal, traveling back and forth so much in such fragile times, and returning to find things the way one left them - it was a luxury that he knew got rarer with each passing day.

"Back to the saloon," Bode drawled, watching the town grow closer. "Hope you're ready for Greez to complain about every dent you put in his baby."

As if summoned, Greez's voice crackled over comms the moment they hit atmo. "About time! You don't call, you don't write, what, I'm supposed to keep Pyloon's running all by myself while you hotshot around the galaxy?"

Cal felt the tension in his shoulders ease just a little at the sound. "Good to hear you too, Greez."

"Good? Kid, you nearly gave me a heart attack with that last stunt on the moon. Place has been crawling with Imperials looking for you. You better not bring 'em back here-"

"Relax," Bode cut in, steering them toward the outpost. "We're clean."

"Uh-huh. You owe me for every drink I've had to pour for nervous settlers asking if the Jedi are ever coming back."

The landing was rougher than he liked, dust clouds rising as the Mantis settled on the pad. Cal powered her down, palms lingering on the controls longer than necessary.

"Alright," Bode said, unbuckling. "Let's find our pilot before the locals rob us blind." His tone carried that easy grin of his, but beneath it was something sharper. Bode never liked Koboh, or the people Cal trusted here. Especially not-

No. Don't go there.

Cal stepped into the warm daylight, the air heavy with dust and a faint metallic tang he remembered from the droid parts in the outpost square. Rambler's Reach buzzed like it always did with settlers unloading supplies, children darting past with sticks for sabers, the sound of shuffling crates and someone - most likely Gido - shouting at the children every now and then.

He let the noise wash over him. Familiar, grounding.

Yet the longer he stood there, the more that gnaw in his gut twisted. He scanned the bustle automatically for something else, for someone, until he felt Bode's eyes on him, brow raised in question.

"Let's go in." he attempted, nodding towards Pyloon's and hoping that's what Bode was asking him.

"Mm." Bode studied him for a beat too long. "We patch the ship, pick up Greez. Then we head out. Quick stop, no distractions."

Cal flicked a glance at him, feeling a sudden surge of irritation he couldn't suppress. "That a reminder for me or for you?"

Bode's grin didn't falter, but his eyes sharpened. "Both."

Pyloon's Saloon hadn't changed, not that he expected it to. The sign still buzzed unevenly, the door still stuck on its hinges. Inside, the place was alive with the usual chaos.

Cal followed Bode in as he pulled his cloak tighter, trying not to flinch at the way the room seemed to lean toward him all at once. It wasn't paranoia, it was the reality of being who he was: a Jedi, a fugitive.

Bode cut through the crowd easily, a man who knew how to read rooms, shoulders loose, his smile crooked just enough to make him look approachable without ever letting anyone close. Cal caught himself studying him more often than he liked, the way Bode made himself ordinary, safe. Almost the opposite of Cal's presence, which always seemed to stir the air around him like dust before a storm.

"Keep your head low," Bode murmured as they slid toward the counter. "No need to make trouble, not tonight. I don't think I can handle more strain after this mission."

Cal gave him a look, half a smile. "When do I ever make trouble?"

Bode's laugh was dry. "You breathe, you make trouble."

The exchange might've been easy if Cal's chest weren't caught on that strange pull. He leaned on the counter beside Bode, murmured thanks when the bartender shoved a dented cup toward him but his hand stayed on the cup without lifting it. His gaze was already scanning the room, his nerves already burning.

At the bar, Turgle was in the middle of an argument or a performance, it was hard to tell. He stood atop a stool, puffed up and wagging his little arms at a pair of settlers twice his size.

"Listen here, I don't owe anybody! I'm a respected entrepreneur! You want business? You come to me!"

One settler rolled his eyes, the other snatched at Turgle's collar, nearly toppling him.

Mosey moved in like a shadow, quiet authority radiating off her. She didn't raise her voice, didn't even touch her blaster, just placed one hand on the settler's wrist until the man let go.

"Settle it outside or settle it with me," she said, the calmness a facade at most.

The men muttered curses but backed off. Turgle smoothed his vest, glaring at them like it was his own doing.

And to Cal's relief, Greez came out from behind the counter, sleeves rolled up as he wiped at one glass of many. His face split in a grin when he saw Cal.

"Kid!" Greez set the glass down and leaned over the bar. "Took you long enough to crawl back."

Cal managed a smile. "Hey, Greez."

They bantered a while. Greez complained, and Bode made himself comfortable, but Cal wasn't really listening. His responses came on autopilot, words spilling and chuckles filling where they should, but he constantly found himself on edge, fingers drumming against the surface of the counter.

Scanning corners. Doorways. Tables. Shadows. Not here.

He felt the absence like a bruise pressed too hard.

The evening blurred, drinks flowing, voices rising, Turgle already trying to pitch Cal some doomed investment scheme. Cal nodded where he was supposed to, even let Bode steer the conversation toward "next steps", but his focus was fractured. His gaze kept sliding to the door and each time someone entered, his pulse hitched, his fist tightened.

He told himself he wasn't waiting. That it didn't matter, and this was just another stop, nothing more.

The gut-deep pull only grew sharper until he actually caught her stepping through the doorway with the fading light behind her, hair catching the last orange streaks of sun.

Cal didn't think, his stool scraped back so hard it nearly toppled.

"Cal?" Greez called after him.

For a moment, the cantina ceased to exist.

She went to the far end, her back to a pillar, one elbow bent as she took in the place warily. The smoke haloed her hair, catching in its strands, and though her stance was poised - warrior's shoulders, steady posture - there was a shadow he'd seen before in her eyes. For a moment, she looked just like she did on Bracca when they were but children.

The sound around him dulled into a hum. The Force itself seemed to pull taut, drawing him across the room right towards her.

He didn't think, or breathe.

The cup was left forgotten as he pushed past bodies, ignoring the curses sent his way and bumped shoulders. Someone shouted after him, someone else laughed, it was all the same to him.

Her eyes widened the instant he spoke her name.

"Liyani."

She turned sharply, shock flashed across her face before anything else, and Cal felt it like a blade through his chest. Then it was gone and she straightened, her expression smoothing, the only betrayal of her composure the faintest flutter at her throat.

"Cal."

Just that. Nothing more.

He hadn't expected warmth, but he'd hoped for something. Anger, maybe. Relief? Anything that meant he'd left more than silence behind. Anything to match his own pull that he couldn't find a rational explanation for.

He filled the gap with words he hadn't planned. "I- I just got back. From the Shattered Moon. With Bode." His voice ran fast and uneven, as if giving a mission report could tether him to her again. "There was an outpost there, raiders dug in deeper than expected. We cleared it out, took losses. Barely made it, honestly, but we managed. We- "

He stopped, breath catching. Why was he telling her this? She hadn't asked. She didn't need to know. And yet, the words had poured from him like water from a cracked vessel. He felt as though he owed her as much.

She blinked once, slowly. "You don't have to explain yourself to me."

But he did. Force, he did, and the words simply wouldn't stop. "It was close. Well, it always is. We- we barely made it out. I thought..." He trailed off, realizing how his voice sounded: cracked and raw.

Her gaze didn't waver. "You thought what?"

"That I might not... see you again." The admission, though quieter than his bravado seconds ago, startled him even as it left his mouth. 

His Jedi training had no room for things like this, no space to name why he had ached when he'd thought of her, why his breath caught now just looking at her, or his throat was left feeling dry after he had spoke those words. 

Her lips parted slightly, as if the words caught her off guard. For the briefest instant, her eyes softened and he felt the echo of what he hoped was recognition ... but then she looked away, tilting her head just enough to let the hair fall, rogue strands framing her face.

"You shouldn't..." Her voice started steady, but then trailed off, her arms tightening around herself. "You shouldn't think like that. I'm not... your reason to fight."

Cal swallowed. "Maybe not. But you're the reason I came here tonight."

The silence between them thickened. The cantina carried on around them, the hum of voices, the clink of mugs, but it all sounded muffled, distant.

Liyani shook her head, smiling but there was no humor in it, and its warmth felt distant. "You're still the same. You'll say things you barely understand and not even realize the damage."

"I mean it." His voice was low, almost a whisper. "Every word."

Her eyes found his again, and for a heartbeat, she let herself look at him — really look. The same stubborn jaw, the same hair that never quite obeyed, the same eyes that burned too bright, too alive for someone who carried so much loss. She swallowed.

Oh, she wanted to believe him, but belief was dangerous for people like her. And men like him never stayed.

"You chose your path," she said finally, steady now. "You walked it. And I stayed here. That's all there is."

"That's not all." His words were soft but urgent, as if saying them too loud would shatter something fragile between them. "I can't explain it. I don't even understand it, but every time I think I've let go... I find myself looking for you again."

She drew in a breath. That was the slip she hadn't been ready for, the way her chest tightened and her throat felt raw.

"Then stop looking," she said, her throat feeling tight. "For your own sake."

Her voice was cool, but it wasn't cold enough to hide the tremor in it. And he heard it.

Cal didn't push, couldn't. He only stood there, his hands useless, his heart hammering like he'd been in a fight. He wanted to reach for her, to close the distance, but he didn't trust himself not to break if she pulled away. 

So he held still, every nerve lit like fire, feeling the weight of something he'd never been taught to name.

It left him wondering if all his training, all the discipline, had left him unequipped for the one battle he had never thought possible, the one against his own heart.

Liyani broke the silence before Cal could.

"I ... should help Greez," she said, nodding her head in a small gesture toward the bar. Her tone was even practiced, but she wasn't fooling herself — not when she felt the weight of Cal's eyes still resting on her, following every movement as though looking away might make her vanish again.

She didn't wait for his reply. Just moved, her stride easy and controlled, weaving through the cantina's clutter until she disappeared behind a booth where Greez was barking at a delivery droid that had dropped half its load of rations.

Cal exhaled, the breath shaky, pressing his palms against the edge of the table to ground himself. Bode slid into the seat across from him, nursing a drink. His eyes followed Liyani for a moment before flicking back to Cal.

"She's got teeth," he said, not unkindly, but Cal heard the edge. "I don't see how she fits into all this."

Cal stiffened. "She's helped before. She knows the land, the routes. She's useful."

"Useful doesn't mean trustworthy."

The words sat heavy between them. Cal bristled, not because Bode was wrong, but because it wasn't his to say. 

He opened his mouth as if to speak, then caught himself, heart tightening with an unfamiliar ache that had nothing to do with just defense. It was the sharp pull of wanting her near, of noticing every small movement she made and wishing, irrationally, that the world could be narrowed down to just this moment with her. 

A Jedi should not feel such longing, such possessive feelings, should not allow the Force to twist around the edges of desire, and yet, he could not deny the tug that anchored him to her presence.

He pushed back his chair before he could answer, the scrape against the floor loud enough to turn a few heads.

"I'll get some air."

Outside, Koboh's night pressed cool against his skin, the sky a quilt of stars broken by the jagged line of the Stone Spires in the far distance. The cantina door hissed shut behind him, muffling the noise.

And there, leaning casually against the railing at the edge of the landing, stood a man Cal hadn't seen before. Tall and broad-shouldered, with dark hair damp from travel and boots coated in the pale dust of a long road. 

He wasn't drinking, wasn't smoking, just watching the horizon with the kind of patience most settlers didn't bother with.

When Cal stepped closer, the man turned. His eyes lit faintly, a quick spark of recognition.

"You're Cal Kestis," he said, as though testing the sound of the name.

Cal's hand twitched instinctively toward his belt before he stopped himself. "And you are?"

"Caedon." The man's voice was warm, he didn't reach for a weapon, didn't move closer than necessary. "Been hearing things. About you. About  ... what you're trying to do."

Cal frowned, suspicion flaring, but before he could probe Caedon smiled, faint but genuine. "Don't worry. Not from the wrong mouths. I listen better than I talk."

Something in his tone eased Cal despite himself. They stood there for a moment, neither rushing, both appraising the other. And Cal ... found no threat. Only gentleness, a kind of softness he wasn't used to in this galaxy.

Then footsteps on stone.

He turned just as Liyani stepped out of the cantina, pausing when she saw them. She looked caught, shoulders stiff, lips parted as though unsure whether to speak.

Caedon noticed too, and if it unsettled him, he didn't show it. He straightened, his voice easy. "There you are." He didn't touch her, only let warmth bleed into his words in a way that made Cal's chest clench.

She inclined her head, her expression smoothing over again into that practiced composure, but Cal wasn't stupid. Not when it came to her. 

He noticed the subtle tilt of her chin toward Caedon, the ease in her body language that hadn't been there with him a moment ago, and it burned.

Before he could say anything, Caedon gave him a small nod. "We'll talk again." Then he stepped past, leaving Cal and Liyani alone again in the night air.

Cal opened his mouth - to say what, he didn't even know - but she was already moving, brushing by him with only a faint, unreadable glance in his direction, her steps quicker than usual.

The silence she left behind was worse than any words.

He stood there until the cantina door hissed again. Bode emerged, rolling his shoulders as if shaking off a long day.

"You've got a lot on your plate, Cal," he said lightly, almost too lightly, his voice catching on Cal's name - which Cal would have heard, were he not busy still looking into the direction Liyani had walked. "Big choices coming. Big risks." He clapped a hand on Cal's shoulder, firm, steady. "Just remember, people don't always show you who they really are. Not right away."

Cal nodded, distracted, the words brushing past him without catching. He was too focused on the closed door, on the shape of Liyani's shadow that lingered in his mind.

Bode's grip tightened just a fraction before he let go.

"Trust me," he said with a smile that didn't reach his eyes. "You'll thank me later."

Cal believed him. Because that was what Cal did, he trusted.

Chapter Text

KOBOH

The first light of morning spilled pale and clean over Koboh, brushing the spires in pink and softening the jagged cliffs. The settlement still slept, its noise muted to the occasional clang of pipes.

Liyani stood at the edge of the paddock, scattering handfuls of grain across the dry earth. The nekkos stirred from their piles of hay, ears twitching and nostrils flaring at the scent. They lumbered closer, necks swaying, movements almost comically slow for creatures so large. She reached for one, her palm smoothing over the warm hide. The creature huffed softly, patient and content.

It was the only time she felt invisible in the outpost, before the cantina woke, the traders poured in, and another day began with its noise and expectations. 

A footstep behind her made her shoulders tense, though more out of habit than danger. She didn't turn immediately, whoever it was hadn't bothered to hide their approach.

"Didn't think anyone else would be awake at this hour."

Caedon's voice. Unhurried, as always.

Liyani exhaled through her nose, loosening the grip she hadn't realized she'd tightened on the grain satchel. "Some of us don't need as much sleep."

He came to stand a respectful distance away, hands tucked loosely behind his back. He looked out at the nekkos rather than at her, as though giving her space was a kind of courtesy he'd learned. "They seem to like you."

"They like food," she corrected.

He smiled at that. "I suppose most of us do."

Silence stretched, though it never felt heavy with Caedon, not anymore at least. She focused on the nekko chewing nosily beside her, tracing the rhythm of its breath, the twitch of its hide against the morning flies.

But Caedon didn't leave.

"I saw you with him," he said finally, so softly it might have been mistaken for idle observation.

Liyani's hand stilled mid-stroke.

"Who?"

"You know who." He didn't press further, only shifted his stance, weight rocking back on his heels. "The Jedi."

The word sat between them like a stone dropped in still water.

She turned at last, her gaze sharp, warning. "Tread carefully."

But Caedon only dipped his head, as though acknowledging her boundary. "I mean no harm. I just... wondered." His eyes flicked briefly toward the horizon, where the sun was burning away the last of the night haze. "You seem different around him. Guarded, but in another way."

Her jaw clenched, voice faltering. "He's not important."

"Maybe." Caedon's voice was mild, but there was a quiet conviction beneath it, like a current beneath calm water. "But sometimes people leave a mark without asking permission."

Liyani looked away. Her hands sank into the satchel again, tossing another arc of grain for the waiting nekkos, though this time not as gently.

Caedon stepped closer then, but not intrusively. Just enough so he could crouch near the fence, palm open to one of the younger beasts who nosed his hand curiously. He laughed, a soft, surprised sound, and rubbed behind its ear.

"You're gentle with them," Liyani found herself saying before she could stop.

"Why wouldn't I be?"

Most men she'd known weren't. That was answer enough.

She studied him from the corner of her eye. His hair caught the dawn light and dust still clung stubbornly to the seams of his tunic, but he didn't seem to care. When the Nekko leaned against him, nearly knocking him off balance, he laughed again; not self-conscious or even a hint of irritatation. Carefree, happy.

She tore her gaze away.

"Don't tell me you're planning to make friends with every nekko in the settlement," she said dryly, though the corner of her mouth betrayed her with the faintest twitch.

Caedon looked up at her then, eyes bright despite the shadows beneath them. "Only the ones you feed. Seems like they know something I don't."

It slipped out before she could stop it, the tiniest smile, breaking across her face like dawn cracking the horizon. Fleeting, but real.

His answering smile was slow, careful, as though he'd been waiting for that single shift and didn't want to startle it away. He turned back to the nekko with a contented hum, rubbing its broad nose with steady hands.

And Liyani, against every rule she'd written for herself, didn't walk away. She let him share the quiet, let him feed the creatures at her side, their hands brushing once, briefly, on the edge of the satchel.

It was nothing, she thought. 

Cal hadn't meant to stop. He'd only gone out at dawn to clear his head, to take the long path past the paddocks before returning to the Mantis for the hundredth round of repairs. A soldier's routine, busy hands to quiet a restless mind.

But his boots slowed at the sound of soft laughter. Not hers, his.

Through the rising light, Cal caught sight of them. Liyani, her posture deceptively casual as she scattered feed into the dirt. And beside her, the stranger — Caedon, he reminded himself— crouched low, palm stretched to a Nekko who leaned against him like an old friend. The creature's ears flicked, tail swishing as if the man had been feeding it for years.

That’s when, Force help him, Cal saw it. That slip in her expression, the rare curve of her lips. A smile. Unguarded, warm, unthinking.

"You don't know how to treat a Nekko." He felt her voice echo through his skull from his first day on Koboh. A raised brow, and a spark in her eyes. "Give them a reason to follow, and they will. Very stubborn creatures otherwise."

Something twisted in his chest. Jealousy was too crude a word for it, but it was close enough to sting. He'd never let himself feel anything like it before. The Code left no room for this, no space for wanting, for wishing. But there it was anyway, blooming hot and unmanageable inside him, and yet he couldn't hate Caedon for it. The man didn't move like a predator. He wasn't trying to conquer her. He was just there; steady, kind, the sort of presence Cal had never been. The sort of presence he knew he couldn't be.

Cal saw himself clearly in the contrast. Where Caedon was gentleness, he himself was danger. Where Caedon was calm, Cal was restless, always head first into the next fight. Flawed, cracked down the center by a lifetime of running and losing.

Cal turned away before she could notice him watching.

Back on the Mantis, he lost himself in the ship's bones. Panels stripped open, wires trailing, circuits blinking a dull protest. He crouched low with a hydrospanner, BD chirping rapid commentary at his elbow.

"No, it's not misaligned," Cal muttered, yanking a cable free.

BD warbled insistently.

"I checked it twice, BD." He shoved the tool deeper into the slot, metal scraping.

A reproachful beep.

Cal sighed, dragging a gloved hand over his face. "Alright, maybe you're right. Again."

BD chirped smugly, hopping from one panel to another like a foreman supervising sloppy labor.

"I don't need attitude," Cal shot back, though the corners of his mouth twitched despite himself.

He bent again to the task, the repetition dull and strangely soothing. Twist, tighten, release. BD's noises filled the silence. Still, his mind kept circling back, not to circuits or wires, but to the smile she hadn't given him.

A knock against the ramp startled him. Light footsteps.

He straightened halfway, expecting Greez.

It wasn't, and deep down he knew that he had felt the calm of her presence as soon as she neared the Mantis.

Liyani stepped into the ship carrying two small cups of steaming tea. Local brew, earthy. She wore simple attire suited to the outpost, a plain tunic, soft trousers, but there was something disarming in the simplicity. Her hair was down, falling straight down her back. She didn't ask permission to come closer. She set one cup down on the open panel beside him, then lowered herself to sit on the deck plating. Not close, but near enough he felt her presence like heat against his arm.

For a while, neither spoke. Only the hum of the ship's engines, the faint hiss of the cooling tea.

When she finally broke the silence, her voice was calm. "You've been glaring at the same bolt for minutes now, Cal."

Cal blinked, realizing she was right. His knuckles tightened on the hydrospanner. "Just... making sure it holds."

She sipped her tea. "You don't have to do everything alone, you know."

"I've got BD." He forced a shrug.

Her brow lifted slightly, unimpressed. "That wasn't what I meant."

He found himself unable to answer.

She set her cup down, hands folding neatly in her lap. "Caedon asked me about you."

That stung sharper than he expected. "Oh?"

"Hm. He wondered why you fight the way you do. Why you look like you're carrying the weight of the galaxy even when you laugh." Her tone wasn't mocking. It was measured, and quiet.

Cal stared at the exposed wires, vision blurring at the edges. "And what did you tell him?"

"That I didn't know," she admitted. Then, softer: "That maybe you wouldn't let anyone know."

He let out a slow breath, guilt threading through the tangle of jealousy in his chest. He didn't know if he wanted her thinking about him at all, and yet the thought of her confiding in someone else unsettled him in ways he couldn't untangle.

"You care about him," Cal said before he could stop himself.

Liyani's head tilted, the smallest shift of defense flickering over her face. "He's kind," she said at last. "Too kind for this place."

Cal's grip tightened on the spanner until his knuckles went white. He didn't know how to name the feeling clawing up his throat, didn't even want to acknowledge it, but it pulsed in time with his heartbeat insistently.

And still he couldn't hate Caedon. Not when he understood why she might want softness after a lifetime of loss and war.

The hydrospanner slipped from his fingers, clattering to the floor, and neither of them moved to pick it up.

The dull clatter still echoed faintly in the ship's belly. He almost expected her to comment on it, some dry remark to ease the awkwardness, but she only watched him in that quiet way that told him she was taking in more than he'd ever willingly show.

Her tea sat untouched beside her. The steam curled upward, ghostly against the dim light filtering in through the cockpit ramp. Her fingers traced the rim of the cup once, twice, and then she drew in a steady breath.

"You know," she began, her tone softer than he'd ever heard it, "I used to feed the Nekkos at dawn every morning, long before anyone here knew my name."

Cal kept his gaze fixed on the exposed wiring, jaw set, but he didn't interrupt.

"It was easier," she went on, voice carrying the rhythm of memory. "To care for something that asked nothing of me. Just a creature, hungry, trusting. It... it didn't matter that I had nothing else."

Something twisted in his chest again, sharp in its simplicity. He understood — stars, he did, the pull of something uncomplicated in a life that never stopped taking from him.

She leaned her shoulder against the wall behind her, head tilting slightly, hair brushing against the plating. "It's strange how little moments like that stay with you. Not the big battles, not the escapes. Just... a handful of feed in your palm, the warmth of them leaning close." 

Cal risked a glance at her then. The lines of her face were gentler in the low light, the hard edges he'd come to know smoothed by something he couldn't name. She wasn't talking about nekkos anymore. She was offering him something private, something delicate, as if to balance out the distance she'd put between them the day before.

He swallowed, throat tight. "Why are you telling me this?"

Her eyes flicked to him at last, quick and steady, before sliding away again. "Because I don't want you to think I'm only cold. Yesterday..." She trailed off, her lips pressing together. "I didn't mean it the way it sounded."

That admission startled him more than if she'd drawn a weapon. Cal's first instinct was to press, to ask what she had meant, but he bit the words back. Instead, he bent toward the panel, forcing his hands to move, to twist a bolt that didn't need tightening.

"You don't owe me explanations," he said, repeating her words from the night before.

"No," she agreed. "But maybe I owe myself the truth, now and then."

BD let out a curious chirp, hopping closer as if to punctuate the silence. Cal muttered a distracted "not now" and bent lower still, though his ears burned with every word she offered him.

She didn't stop.

"I've spent so long convincing myself I was better off alone, that if I kept everyone at arm's length, I couldn't lose them. I thought I was strong for it. Maybe I still do, some days." Her hands turned over in her lap, fidgeting with the hem of her sleeve. "But then people like you come along, and you are stubborn, reckless, too determined for your own good ... and suddenly it feels like the ground isn't where I left it."

Cal's grip slipped on the hydrospanner, and the tool scraped metal with a shriek. He cursed under his breath, leaning back on his heels. "I'm not-" He stopped himself. Not what? Not worth her words? Not the man she thought he was? The truth lodged in his throat.

She saved him from finishing.

"I don't say these things because I want to give you hope," she said. "Don't mistake me for that kind of cruel. I just... You deserve more than silence."

Her honesty was a blade, cutting him two ways at once. The part of him that longed for her wanted to seize those words, twist them into something like promise. But the sharper part, the part honed by years of loss, knew she was warning him just as much as she was offering anything.

Still, her voice gentled further, threading warmth through the space between them. "You remind me that I'm still alive. That I haven't turned to stone entirely. And for that, you have my gratitude, Cal Kestis. Whether or not you want it."

The admission hung there, fragile and unbearable.

Cal drew in a slow breath, forcing his gaze down to the mess of cables at his feet. He felt the pressure of her presence at his side, the unspoken weight of what she wasn't saying pressing harder than the words themselves. He wanted to reach for her, but he didn't, not like that.

Instead, he forced his hands back to work, though every motion was clumsy now. His mind buzzed with static, his chest too tight. "Gratitude's enough," he said finally, low, his voice rougher than he intended.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw her smile at his words; faint, weary, but real. Not the same smile she'd given Caedon at dawn. This one was smaller, more private. One she gave only to him.

And it broke him all over again.

The tea cooled between them. Cal didn't touch his, still bent awkwardly over the ship's gut, but she sat cross-legged on the floor now, her cup balanced carefully against her knee. She spoke like someone who had discovered the odd comfort of words filling an otherwise unbearable silence: meandering, without ever demanding he reply.

"Greez is restless," she said, her voice carrying easily in the quiet hangar. "Pretends he's not, but I've seen the way he hovers around the tables in the cantina. I think he misses the old days more than he lets on. He'd never say it, of course. Too proud. But he needs action, movement... Something to keep him from growing moss."

Cal almost smiled at that. He tightened a bolt instead, trying not to imagine Greez truly sprouting moss if left long enough. "Sounds like the Greez I know."

"It is him. I told him he should take up pazaak tournaments, and he glared at me like I'd suggested he shave his beard." She shook her head, eyes sparkling faintly before softening again. "But then Caedon comes along with his stories, and Greez lights up as if he's already halfway back in the cockpit."

The name hit him like a stray shock through the wiring. Cal stiffened before he could help it, shoulders tense under his poncho. He forced his hands to keep moving, eyes on the circuits, attempting to keep his tone as casual as hers. "Stories?"

"Mmh," she hummed, seemingly unaware of Cal's inner turmoil. "From Ghorman. He paints it as if the whole planet is just fields and skies, a place where war never quite remembered to land. The way he speaks of it makes you believe peace is still possible, even if only in small pockets."

Cal said nothing, jaw tight, though her words dug deeper than he wanted to admit. Peace felt like a cruel luxury these days. He didn't begrudge Caedon for finding it, he himself was chasing it under the guise of Tanalorr. But the thought of Liyani listening to him, absorbing his tales, that was harder to swallow.

Perhaps sensing the heaviness of her own tone, she shifted, her lips quirking into something slyer. "It's funny, isn't it? Contrast that with Dathomir. Do you know what passes for a bedtime story there? Surviving your first step outside the village without being eaten alive by a Chirodactyl. Sweet dreams, child."

That startled a real smile from him. "I've met one of those."

Her brow arched sharply. "You have not."

"I have." He leaned back at last, wiping grease from his hands onto a rag. "It was... Force, years ago. Not long after Bracca. I stumbled into one by accident. Didn't exactly have a choice." His tone was casual, almost dismissive. "Killed it."

Liyani's entire posture shifted, energy sparking through her like she'd forgotten how to be careful. "Killed it?" She sat straighter, eyes wide, genuine disbelief softening every hard line she'd worn since he met her. "You're lying."

He frowned, honestly confused. "I'm not."

"Yes, you are." She leaned forward, searching his face as though the truth might crack under her stare. "Nobody just kills a Chirodactyl, Cal. Not alone."

"I did," he insisted, still maddeningly calm, as if he couldn't quite grasp what the fuss was about.

Her lips parted, then broke into something he'd never seen from her before, a burst of laughter, sudden and unrestrained. She slapped his arm with the back of her hand. "You liar!"

It wasn't sharp or accusing. It was bright, incredulous, ringing through the Mantis like sunlight cutting through cloud.

Cal blinked at her, startled — and then, before he could stop himself, he was laughing too. It started rough, rusty from disuse, but her laughter pulled his into something freer.

They sat like that for a breathless moment, both caught in the absurdity of it, shoulders nearly touching, their voices tangled together. BD beeped in amusement from the corner, hopping in place.

And then it hit him. The way she was looking at him, eyes alight, cheeks flushed from laughter, lips parted with the ghost of a smile she couldn't quite rein back in. Cal saw her not as the wary fighter, not as the untouchable shadow he kept failing to understand, but as her. Alive, vibrant, stunning in a way that knocked the air from his lungs.

It was nothing, she thought. It was everything.

Something fluttered hard in her chest. She felt it, sharp and unwelcome, the dangerous recognition that she had already crossed the line she swore she'd never approach. Because she couldn't look at him, red hair tousled, grease smudged across his cheek, eyes warm in their mirth, without knowing she was in deep. Far too deep.

There was no going back from Cal Kestis.

The laughter faded, but the air between them didn't return to silence. It thrummed now, charged. She pulled back slightly, tucking a stray lock of hair behind her ear, trying to mask her slip with practiced coolness. But the way he was still looking at her, like he'd just discovered something impossible and holy all at once, left her fighting to keep steady.

Cal didn't have the words to name the pull in his chest. All he knew was that it felt like standing on the edge of a cliff, terrifying and thrilling in equal measure. And that, perhaps, he didn't want to step back.

The feeling lingered in Cal's chest, a strange warmth he hadn't felt in years. It held him in place even as she looked away, reclaiming her composure with visible effort. Liyani's smile faltered first, her laughter swallowed back like something she had no right to indulge in. He was still watching her, but she forced herself to set her cup down, fingers tightening on her knees.

"What's your plan now, Cal?" she said at last, softer than she intended.

The shift in her tone sobered him too. He straightened, wiping his hands against the rag again, though the grease never quite left his skin. His eyes flicked toward his poor attempt of repairing the panel, then back to her. "Return to Jedha with Bode. Keep working with the Anchorites. And... Tanalorr." The word seemed to light him from the inside out. "It's more than just a lost world. It's safety. For people like us, anyone hunted by the Empire. If we can reach it..." He trailed off, but the conviction in his voice carried further than words.

She didn't mean to, but she watched him too long. His face, not as boyish as she remembered but scarred and tired, yet burning with that endless, impossible fire. She remembered Bracca, remembered the feel of his gaze on hers for the first time through a crowd of scrap workers, how strange and sudden it had felt. She hadn't believed in fate then, didn't now, but still...

"I don't know if it was the Force at work when we met that day," she said quietly, surprising herself with the admission. "But I am glad I got to know you, Cal."

It sounded like a goodbye even to her own ears. She hated that, hated the weight of it, hated the ache blooming in her chest. Liyani didn't stay. She never stayed. Better to put the wall back up now before he tried to climb it again.

Cal blinked, caught off guard by the gentleness in her voice. He opened his mouth, then shut it, then finally blurted the only thing that came to him: "You should come with me."

Her head snapped toward him. Shock flickered in her eyes, quickly chased by hesitation. "...That's a bad idea."

"Why?" His voice was steady, but the question hit raw.

"Because people like us can't afford attachments." Her words were firm, her jaw tight, but she didn't sound convinced. She sounded like someone trying to save herself from drowning.

Cal wanted to argue, to tell her the Code was already fraying, that everything he believed in had been bent and broken by survival, but he swallowed the words. She wouldn't hear them, not yet. Instead, she shifted uncomfortably, almost as if seeking cover. "And Merrin..." Her voice dropped further, quieter now, so quiet he almost missed it. "I don't even know how to face her."

The name was like a splinter. He didn't have an answer, and he didn't push. He only nodded once, accepting what she gave him.

"I don't believe in coincidences," he said at last, voice low but firm.

Her eyes flickered up to his. He was looking at her with that same steady fire, as if her walls meant nothing to him, as if he could burn through them with faith alone. 

The words sat between them like an open hand. 

She didn't take it. Rising to her feet, she brushed the dust from her trousers, careful not to meet his gaze again. "I should get back. Greez will be wondering where I've wandered off to."

He stayed seated, tilting his head slightly as he watched her. She paused at the edge of the ramp, the hangar light pooling against her back like a halo. She looked over her shoulder once, unwilling but unable to stop herself.

"If it's meant to be," she said, forcing her tone flat, "we'll find each other again."

He didn't hesitate, his answer quiet and certain, with the weight of an oath he didn't yet know he was making. "I'll find you, Liyani. In every universe."

Her breath caught, just for a fraction of a second, but it was enough. She rolled her eyes hard, covering the stillness in her chest with a scoff. "You sound ridiculous, Kestis."

As she turned away, the echo of his words followed her, pulsing hot beneath her ribs. Behind her, Cal sat in the quiet of the Mantis, watching her shadow fade into the dawn. He didn't know why the words had come so easily, he only knew that he meant them. With every fiber of who he was, he meant them.

Chapter Text

The next day, dawn had softened the trees, streaks of gold brushing the edges of the canopy, casting long shadows across the soft undergrowth. Liyani moved with practiced ease along the slope, her basket in hand, pausing occasionally to touch a leaf or lean close to sniff a flowering stem, lingering just enough for her intuition to guide her fingers toward the ripest, most potent herbs.

Caedon followed close, walking deliberately so as not to trample anything she cared for, though his grin betrayed his constant chatter.

"You know," he said, plucking a small, wiry sprig of something fragrant and holding it aloft, "I think you have more patience with plants than most people have with children."

Liyani smirked briefly, the smallest crack in her usual armor. "Flattery will get you nowhere." She moved ahead and her heart stopped beating for a moment, crouching low to examine a patch of burgundy blooms half-hidden beneath the ferns. For a split second, the flowers were replaced by a flash of intense, green eyes and red hair. She shook her head. "See that? That one's potent, do not pick it unless you want to burn your hands off."

"You just...," he began, crouching beside her, and thought better of it. "Alright, noted. Though you seem rather relaxed about the forest today. Are you actually enjoying something?"

Her hand hovered over the petals, moving down to trace their veins with a careful touch. "Perhaps," she murmured, almost to herself. Then, louder, "I would still like you to be careful not to crush anything unnecessary. Some of these plants are rarer than you think."

"I promise," he said, though his eyes sparkled with mischief, "but you might have to forgive me if I accidentally cut a few sprigs to test your reaction."

Liyani's chuckle came quietly, almost lost in the ambient rustle of leaves and birdsong. "We'll see who learns more today, Caedon." She straightened, brushing dirt from her trousers. "I hope you've been paying attention, some of these are tricky. You might think one thing is edible, but it'll make your tongue swell up faster than a stormtrooper's helmet after a blaster shot."

He shook his head, laughing. "I think I can handle a little swelling. Not sure I can handle your scolding, though."

Her lips twitched into a ghost of a smile. "I am not scolding, I am instructing. There's a difference."

They moved further into the undergrowth, the path less traveled, shadier, the scent of moss and damp earth thick in the air. Liyani paused suddenly, eyes narrowing. "Wait, not that one. See those red markings? That's Bedlam's-"

She trailed off, realizing the sprig she had picked was unnecessary. Caedon, oblivious, held out another leaf. "You should let me harvest this one, I'd hate for you to overdo it."

"Overdo it?" Liyani shook her head, parts exasperated and amused. "You're only proving my point. Do you have to interfere?"

"I interfere because I care," he said gently, tilting his head to meet her gaze. "Because I want to make sure you're not, I don't know... overextending yourself."

Her hands froze mid-motion. That soft sincerity, the quiet concern in his eyes made her pause in ways she wasn't accustomed to. She had trained herself to fend off curiosity or sentiment when it came her way, yet here it was, and it shouldn't. Not from someone like him, and not to someone like her.

"Careful, Caedon," she said softly, her voice barely above the whisper of leaves. "I've had... more than enough lessons in the past about why people care. It's dangerous."

He simply smiled, completely unshaken. It scared her, but not for herself.

For a while, silence stretched between them, contemplative, the only sounds being their footsteps on the forest floor and the occasional bird calling overhead.

"You know," he said finally, "I think this forest reminds me of something my father used to say — that all things are connected, even if you can't see the thread. The tiniest plant, the smallest action, it all matters. And I think he was right."

Liyani's eyes softened, scanning the patch in front of her. She had never spoken of family to anyone in years. The memory of her mother's cold, calculating presence rose briefly, but she pushed it down. This forest, this moment, was not about loss or judgment. It was about now - but even in her self-control, she allowed a faint acknowledgment of truth in his words.

"Even a small sprig," she said, lifting the burgundy bloom, "can make a difference. Or destroy everything, if handled carelessly."

He leaned closer, inspecting her choice with fascination barely concealed. "You really know nature like the back of your hand... It's amazing."

She snorted. "Amazing? Try life-saving. Some of these could patch a wound that would otherwise fester, others could put someone in the infirmary for days. Knowledge like this isn't just about survival. It's about..." She hesitated, the sentence hanging. "...knowing what matters, what can be fixed. And what can't."

He listened, not interrupting. His presence was calming, it made her feel strange in a way she wasn't accustomed to, not smothered or suffocated; acknowledged.

"Tell me something," he said after a pause. "Why do you always come out here alone? You've got skills... a lot of people would pay to have someone like you on their side."

She gave him a sideways glance. "Because when I'm alone, I don't have to explain myself. I don't have to let anyone see what I'm really thinking." And I wouldn't know what to make of the credits, she thought.

"You don't have to?" he asked gently, softening his tone.

"No," she said quietly. "Except..." Her eyes flicked toward him. "...sometimes it's nice when someone doesn't make me feel guilty for it."

He didn't respond immediately but nodded, understanding what she wouldn't put into words. Not knowing when had been the last time, she allowed herself to relax significantly now, brushing her fingers along a fern and letting the basket grow heavier with collected herbs.

The sun rose higher, spilling light across the clearing and glinting off the dew. Caedon offered her a hand as she bent to pick a particularly stubborn root, and she let him steady her without protest. 

Liyani didn't know how long they stayed in the grove, but it felt like the world had shrunk to the two of them, to the scent of earth, the hum of life and the warmth of a man who, without expecting anything, simply walked beside her. 

Even as her mind whispered caution, even as the old walls crept back around the edges of her heart, she let herself collect one more, just for the sake of it.

Caedon noticed and smiled softly, taking another sprig for himself. "We'll make it back," he said simply, "and everything we gather today will help someone. You'll see."

She held his gaze now, letting his words sink in, not sure how much she believed in them.

Hours passed in this quiet companionship, until the grove opened onto a sun-dappled clearing where the rarer herbs she sought thrived. She crouched low, hands brushing gently over a patch of crimson-streaked leaves. Caedon knelt beside her, humming quietly to himself as he helped gather what she indicated.

"You know," he said, his voice soft, "I never expected this. That I'd be out here with someone like you, seeing this side of the Galaxy."

Her heart tightened in a way that felt almost dangerous. "I didn't expect it either," she admitted a moment later, voice careful, quieter. 

He gave her a look that was equally calm and sincere. "Well... I'm glad."

She allowed herself a tiny breath of relief. "Just... don't expect me to start talking about my feelings or...history, or the sort," she said, almost smiling. "I have a reputation for keeping things to myself."

"I wouldn't have it any other way."

Liyani was crouched near the edge of the clearing, carefully harvesting a patch of purple-tipped leaves, when Caedon stood and stretched.

"I think we've got enough for today," he said softly. "I'll help you carry it back."

"No need," she replied, shaking her head. "You've done plenty."

He bent to scoop up a small handful of herbs anyway, the gesture unassuming, natural, almost protective.

"Don't drop any," she said, a flicker of amusement breaking through her usual caution.

"I promise," he said, voice gentle.

Liyani's chest tightened. She didn't answer immediately, didn't want to reveal how much she had already begun to care, how much this small, unassuming man had begun to erode her walls. 

Instead, she focused on the path, the scent of the earth, the basket of herbs between them. "Almost back," she said finally. "Stay close."

The forest was alive with its usual sounds, the hum of insects, the sigh of the canopy in the breeze, the crunch of their boots over dry leaves. Liyani moved a few steps ahead of Caedon, basket tucked into the crook of her arm, amused despite herself as she turned back and hissed,

"Not that one. Do you know how many cycles it takes for that root to mature?"

Caedon winced like a guilty child, withdrawing his hand from the stalk he'd been about to pluck. "I was just holding it."

"You were just killing it," she countered. "Consider my reaction tested now."

He flashed her a bright smile.

The banter was easy, too easy, perhaps. Her body was looser, her tone less sharp, the morning had unfolded without threat. For a few fleeting hours, it had felt almost ordinary.

The snap of a twig behind them changed everything.

Before she could draw breath, a voice barked from the shadows. "There she is! Take them!"

Bedlam raiders in piecemeal armor spilled from the tree line like wolves circling prey, their blasters already raised.

Time folded into shards. Liyani's body reacted first, twisting to the side, hand flying toward the dagger hidden at her hip. She barely registered Caedon surging forward, instinctively placing himself between her as he sent the first Raider flying back with a powerful force shove.

Not a moment later, the first shot split the clearing. 

Caedon jerked as if pulled backward by some invisible cord, the bolt slamming into his chest. The sound was sharp, final, not a sound that should belong to him. He staggered, but didn't fall immediately. 

She felt it like a punch to the gut as the bolt struck him square in the chest. The sound that tore from her throat was not a word, not even his name, but a raw, feral cry.

Liyani's mind blanked. The noise of the forest, the raiders shouting, the crackling hiss of more blaster fire — it all flattened into silence, as though the universe had clapped its hand over her ears. All she could see was him, his chest scorched, breath stolen, his eyes widening with shock.

Caedon's body folded, knees buckling, his weight dragging him down into the earth. His eyes softened in something resembling recognition then, as though he'd always expected his story to end this way.

Around her, reality blurred. The second bolt never reached her but twisted midair, dissolving into a hiss of ichor before it could strike. The Bedlam raiders shouted, their voices strange, warped, slow. They became shadows at the edge of her vision, their movements jerky, unreal, as though the world itself had dipped underwater.

The magick she didn't even know she still possessed came uncoiled.

It didn't roar from her, it seeped, bled, spilled like violent silk unraveling from her veins into the soil. The air grew viscous, thick with green shimmer, as though the forest had inhaled and held its breath.

One raider clutched at his throat, eyes bulging as tendrils of smoke coiled from the ground, wrapping around his neck with the certainty of a noose. Another staggered, his blaster ripped from his grip by unseen hands, bones snapping as if the earth itself bent him backward.

Liyani dropped to her knees, crawling, dirt grinding into her palms. "Caedon," she rasped, though she couldn't even hear her own voice over the pulse of blood in her skull. Her body moved in desperation, dragging itself toward him as the world convulsed in the periphery.

A raider screamed, a high and thin sound, then choked into silence as a vine of pure ichor threaded itself through his chest, curling like smoke before bursting outward. Another fired blindly, but the bolt ricocheted, folding back into him, searing his armor as he collapsed.

The circle tightened, bodies falling one after another, like a clock's arm racing parallel to Caedon's own. Every time Caedon's breath stuttered, one of theirs ceased.

Her vision tunneled. Dirt smeared her skin as she clawed across the ground, reaching for him, nails splitting against rock. "Stay with me," she begged, though she didn't know if she spoke aloud or only inside her skull.

The magick swelled in tandem with her desperation, a tide rising, suffocating, beautiful in its cruelty. The forest itself seemed to bow under it, the branches creaking, leaves shriveling midair, blossoms curling into husks.

Finally, she reached him. Her hands pressed to his chest, sticky, and the moment they touched, the last raider screamed. He was lifted from the ground, spine arched unnaturally, before being flung lifeless into the trees. Silence crashed down, sudden and absolute.

The clearing was a graveyard now, a ring of bodies strewn like discarded dolls, the soil blackened where the ichor had seeped.

Liyani clutched Caedon's face between her trembling hands. His eyes fluttered, glassy, trying to focus on her. "Liyani..." he whispered, voice thin, the syllables catching.

"Don't," she hissed. "Don't say it. Don't you dare. Just hold on." But his strength waned beneath her touch, slipping like sand through fingers. 

She felt it then, the drain of his life-force; and as it dimmed, the forest dimmed with him, as if he had taken the life around him right with him. 

"Please," she whispered again and again, forehead pressed to his. "Not like this. Not again."

Grass blackened in a widening radius around them. The herbs she had gathered, still scattered in her overturned basket, wilted into nothing in seconds. Blooms shriveled as though poisoned by the lingering shadow of her rage, stems snapped, colors leached into gray. And so the clock had struck its last hour.

Her tears never came, her chest heaving as if she could force her breath into him. The magick flickered like dying embers, retreating back into the earth as though it, too, had lost its anchor.

The forest bore witness: a cradle of ruin, a ring of bodies, and in its center, a woman whose grief had finally betrayed her silence.

She rocked him against her chest, body curling protectively, her sobs swallowed by the silence. Hours blurred. The air was heavy with the stench of charred life, the ache of endings. She didn't notice the sky changing, or the way shadows stretched over the clearing.

The only thing she felt the crushing, undeniable truth that the magick had answered her grief more faithfully than hope ever had.

The suns had long begun their descent by the time Liyani's steps carried her back toward Rambler's Reach. Her legs moved of their own accord, stiff and mechanical, like the pull of gravity itself was dragging her forward rather than moving by her own will, her mind had no say in the matter. She had told herself, somewhere between the rocks and scrub and the long emptiness that stretched after the last heartbeat of Caedon's life, that weakness was a death sentence. Weakness meant making yourself prey, and she was not prey. She had survived too many times to be anything less than relentless now.

So she arranged her face into something resembling composure, a brittle thing, like thin glass pressed too tighly on her face. Her eyes burned from tears that never spilled, but she lifted her chin anyway, smearing away the mud, the dirt with the heel of her hand until only dust streaks remained. Her mouth was a line carved out of stone, her shoulders squared, though they began aching from the tension locked into them.

Cal had stopped mid-step outside Rambler's Reach when he felt it, hand braced against a post as the strange hollow ache rippled through him. BD had chirped nervously, and all Cal could do was pace the length of the street again and again, unable to explain why his stomach had dropped into lead.

By the time he saw her, he already knew. He stood at the edge of the outpost, posture taut. He had been there a long time, restless, shifting weight from one boot to the other as though trying to shake off the heaviness pressing against his chest. The disturbance he had felt earlier, a ripple through the Force so sharp it had cut the breath from his lungs. He hadn't needed confirmation to know what it meant, but seeing her now, it struck deeper than any phantom feeling ever could.

She stopped just at the edge of town, head bowed. She looked like a shadow of herself, stripped bare of all the careful sharpness she wore like armor. Her hand flexed at her side once, twice, then stilled. She looked smaller now, dust-streaked, her eyes raw and bloodshot, and her usually measured presence frayed into something openly fragile. It stopped him cold, and for a heartbeat he simply stared, unable to reconcile the unshakable survivor he'd come to know with the woman stumbling toward him now.

Then he moved. In three long strides he was before her, his hands reaching without hesitation, pulling her into him with a fierceness born not from thought but instinct. His chest pressed against her temple, his arms locked around her as though shielding her from the very air. He felt her grief before he even processed the tremor in her frame as it bled through the Force, searing, uncontainable; as if her sorrow was trying to carve itself into him. He let it, took it as his own.

She did not collapse, not outwardly. Her spine was rigid, her breath uneven but held, her composure a stubborn wall she refused to let crack, but he felt the betrayal of her body against his. Her fingers clenched into his tunic, fingers curling so tight he swore he heard the threads strain. Every pulse of her hand against him was a silent admission she would never speak aloud: that she was holding on because letting go meant drowning.

There was nothing romantic about it, not now, with the stench of death still clinging to her skin. Cal's chin dipped down toward her hair, his height towering over her much more noticable in her fragile state,  he tightened his hold as though afraid she would vanish if he loosened his grip by even a fraction.

When her voice finally came, it was so faint he almost missed it. A whisper breathed more than spoken, the sound of someone lost in the spaces grief carved, low and flat, the words like stone dropping into water.

"Death follows me everywhere."

Cal closed his eyes, holding her closer. He didn't ask who, didn't need to. He felt it in the weight of her silence, the smell of earth and blood, the way her hands trembled against him.

"I shouldn't be here," she whispered against him, the words barely forming. "I shouldn't let you near me. You'll-" Her voice fractured, caught between breath and sound. "You'll just end up like the rest." 

His reaction was immediate, words cracking like flint struck against stone. "No," he said, fiercely, the word dragged up from a place in him he hadn't known existed until this moment. He bent his head, lips near her hair, not caring who saw them in the middle of the Reach. "Don't ask me that, I've never felt more alive than I do with you."

She didn't answer, only listened. The thud of his heart against her ear, the conviction in his voice that terrified her because she knew where such devotion ended, in ruin, in fire, in sacrifice she couldn't bear to watch again. Inside, she disagreed with him, wanted to shake him, to beg him not to tie his fate to hers, but for now she couldn't bring herself to speak. So she stayed there in his arms, eyes fixed somewhere far beyond the horizon while the truth gnawed at her: 

She had already taken him too deep into her orbit, and she feared she wouldn't know how to let him go.

Chapter Text

THE MANTIS — en route to Jedha

The Mantis hummed through hyperspace, rattling the way she always did when Greez pushed her harder than she liked. Outside, the starfield had stretched into endless white streaks. For all the noise of engines and systems, the ship itself carried a strange hush, an enforced quiet no one wanted to disturb.

She'd accepted Cal's offer because her hand had been forced. The Bedlam Raiders had found her before; that wasn't the issue. They had never caught her off guard like that, and Caedon had paid for it with his life. That meant her quiet corners of Koboh were no longer safe, and survival meant moving before the circle closed around her. Jedha was a transit hub, and she would disappear into the chaos of pilgrims and traders, catch another shady transport for more than its worth, and vanish again. That was her plan. 

Not that she had told Cal that part, she couldn't tell him yet. Let him think she was following. It was easier for both of them.

Liyani sat strapped into one of the side seats of the cockpit, though she hadn't spoken since they left Koboh. Her chin rested against her knuckles, eyes unfocused, staring into the blur of hyperspace as if it were supposed to offer her something. She hadn't blinked in too long, but she didn't notice. If she closed her eyes, she knew exactly what would come: Caedon's face. The weight of him in her lap, the heat of his blood was cooling on her skin, and the silence after his last breath that was louder than anything the Galaxy could throw at her right now. So she didn't close her eyes.

She did, however, look the part again now, like herself before Koboh had softened her, made her lower her guard. A black leather jacket fitted over her frame, blaster strapped tight to her thigh, the engraved vibroblade hidden up her sleeve, hair tightly tied back out of her face, every edge sharpened again, like survival armor. Not Caedon's Liyani, not Koboh's version of her. Just herself: jagged, but most importantly, prepared.

Bode lingered near the cockpit archway, one arm resting against the frame, his other hand folded across his chest. He'd been watching her the way one sizes up a stranger whose motives are still unclear. His presence wasn't confrontational, but still far from warm. They were allies because circumstances forced it, nothing more. Every time his gaze flicked over her, it carried the same tension, the same calculation, and the unspoken warning that he didn't buy her story, even if Cal did so blindly.

For her part, Liyani didn't care enough to play politics. If he distrusted her, she would let him. It wasn't worrisome enough.

Cal sat in the pilot's chair, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, not piloting - being in hyperspace - and simply staying close. His eyes weren't on the viewport like hers were; they were on her, unwaveringly. He didn't ask questions or press, didn't try to fill the silence with words that might splinter her composure. He was simply there, a steady gravitational pull at her side, reminding her that she wasn't as alone as she told herself.

Every so often, when she shifted, his hand would hover like he meant to reach for her and then withdraw, unsure if she'd allow the contact. 

Greez broke the silence first, as she had expected.

"You should eat something," the Latero said, his voice gruff but softened around the edges. He was fussing with controls that didn't need fussing, swiveling his chair to glance back at her. "We've got a long haul ahead, and the ship's not going to feed itself. Not that it couldn't use someone who knows their way around spice better than me, but, you know. Sustenance."

Liyani turned her head toward him. She gave him a look that was a silent acknowledgment she'd heard but couldn't answer.

"Greez," Cal murmured, a quiet caution.

The pilot sighed, waving his stubby hands. "Fine, fine. I'll just keep the caf hot in case somebody decides she wants to join the living." 

Still, he didn't stop glancing at her, almost like a protective uncle trying to coax a stubborn child into taking care of herself. He'd never admit it aloud, but he'd already decided he liked her, since she had stumbled into Pyloon's. He liked the way she kept Cal from being too serious all the time, and the sharpness of her tongue when she did bother to speak.

Hours bled together in the sameness of hyperspace. Bode disappeared into the cargo hold to train or sulk; it didn't matter which. Greez muttered to himself in the galley, the smell of caf strong enough to waft down the corridor. Liyani remained in the cockpit, stiff as carved stone, her body there but her mind still caught somewhere in the dust of Koboh.

Cal stayed, always.

At one point, he rose from his seat and crouched beside her, lowering himself until his gaze was level with hers. "You don't have to stay awake like this," he said gently.

Her lips curved humorlessly. "Close my eyes and he's there," she whispered, voice rough.

He didn't tell her it would fade with time, didn't offer platitudes. Instead, he nodded once, a solemn agreement that her pain was real, unsoftened. He finally rested his hand lightly over hers on the armrest, no pressure, no demand, simply offering warmth. She tensed up and her knuckles twitched, but she didn't pull away.

The Mantis carried them on, its heartbeat the steady thrum of engines, the silence filled with grief. Bode kept his distance, and Cal's entire world had narrowed down to the woman who refused to let herself sleep.

Greez was getting restless now, too. With a sudden clap, he announced, "That's it. I'm cooking. Properly cooking. None of this ration pack junk. If we're stuck in this tin can for a day, we're doing it right."

He disappeared into the galley, muttering about spice balances. The smell hit first: savory, sharp, comforting in a way that cut through the sterile air of the ship. Something with herbs and heat, something that reminded Liyani of taverns she'd hidden in on forgotten planets, nights when she was allowed to pretend she was just another wanderer, not a fugitive from more people than she would like to count.

By the time Greez called them to the table, the others had gathered with a quiet sort of relief. Even Cal, who lived off dried portions more often than not, looked like the promise of food had loosened something in his chest.

The four of them sat around the table. Greez shoved plates at them all with a flourish. "Eat. And if you don't like it, don't tell me. My ego's fragile."

Cal dug in first, too hungry to wait. He made a small, genuine sound of appreciation that made Greez beam. Bode kept up his chatter, praising the food, even needling Greez for being stingy with portions. And Liyani adjusted; she knew how to do that.

"See? This is how you travel," Greez said proudly, ladling a second helping of stew onto Cal's plate whether he wanted it or not. "None of that ration-bar nonsense. A real meal, shared. You can't tell me it doesn't fix half of life's problems."

The small gesture made Cal smile faintly. He hadn't realized how hungry he was until the food was in front of him. The smell alone felt grounding.

Across the table, Liyani picked at her portion, offered small comments when spoken to, and even smiled once when Greez teased her about looking like she walked straight off a holo set. It almost passed for an ordinary dinner, but the tension was palpable between all of them.

Bode watched her, leaning back with his chair balanced on two legs, fork turning in his hand. "Greez, you might've saved us all from starvation. If all this doesn't work out, you could open a place on Coruscant. Make a fortune cooking for overfed senators."

"Please," Greez scoffed. "Politicians don't deserve my cooking."

Cal chuckled, but his eyes slid to Liyani. She didn't laugh, though the corner of her mouth tugged upward for just a second.

Bode caught it. He tilted his head toward her. "And what about you? You look like you've eaten in worse places. What's the best meal you've ever had?"

The question sounded casual, but Cal felt the bait in it. A probe, wrapped in charm.

Liyani didn't look up. She cut another bite, chewed, swallowed. "The kind you don't have to fight for."

Every time she spoke up, Bode's eyes flicked toward her, as if measuring, looking for cracks. The same way every time he said something, her gaze sharpened, as if she were dissecting the words for the rot underneath. They smiled when it was needed, traded polite quips when the others were watching, knowing the current between them was anything but friendly.

Cal felt it, too. He wasn't oblivious, not when the Force hummed with a sharpness every time the two of them locked eyes. He had tried to become the bridge with gentle conversation, drawing Liyani in, asking small things, "Do you like it?" or "You used to cook?" to anchor her with them. She would answer softly, giving him just enough to keep him from worrying too loudly.

Bode let out a low whistle. "Practical answer. But that's what I mean. Everyone's got to have a story."

"And sometimes," Cal said evenly, "it's not for sharing."

The words came out sharper than he'd intended, but he didn't regret them. His gaze stayed fixed on Bode, daring him to press.

Bode lifted both palms like he had meant no harm. "Hey, I was just making conversation." He turned his smile on Cal. "You're right, though. Everyone's got their secrets."

The table went quiet. Greez cleared his throat, desperate to pull the mood back. "Well, speaking of stories. Now Jedha's a place with some character. Monks, weird chanting in the streets. Don't say I didn't warn you."

Liyani's fork paused halfway to her mouth.

Cal met her gaze. "We've got allies there. People who might know more about... Tanalorr."

Bode released the fork from his tight grip, covering up the sudden tension in his body by leaning forward. "Jedha's not exactly safe, though. Empire's got its claws in deep. Patrols, checkpoints. You sure it's the right place to drag along someone who's not..." He trailed off, pretending to search for the word. "...trained?"

Liyani's knife scraped softly against the plate. "I can take care of myself."

Bode smiled as though she'd proved his point. "Of course. Didn't mean anything by it."

Cal set his spoon down, voice steady but unyielding. "She's with us. That's enough."

The conviction in his tone silenced the room for a moment. Liyani's lashes lowered, hiding her expression, but her grip eased just slightly.

Greez broke the tension again with a loud slurp. "Well, all I know is, Jedha's got street food that'll blow your head off. If we live through whatever it is you two are dragging me into, I'm getting us a round. My treat."

Cal allowed himself a laugh, but the tension still hadn't eased. When Bode tried to press further, asking where she learned to handle herself like that, why she was hunted, or why she never stayed in one place, her answers were clipped and evasive. 

Even Cal, for all his warmth, noticed the silence where her story should have been, even though he knew with absolute certainty that his trust in her wasn't up for debate.

Liyani excused herself first, her plate half-empty. She carried it to the sink, murmured a soft thanks to Greez, and disappeared down the narrow corridor. Her steps were silent enough that if Cal hadn’t been listening for them, he might have missed them.

Bode leaned back in his chair with that unbothered air that was becoming too practiced to be real. “She’s quiet,” he said lightly, as if observing the weather.

“She’s alive,” Cal replied. “That’s what matters.”

Bode tilted his head, studying him. “You’ve got a lot of faith in her. You don’t even know where she came from.”

Cal pushed his plate aside, meeting Bode’s eyes evenly. “I don’t have to.”

Bode merely smiled like he’d found the exchange amusing, like he’d learned more from the defense than from the question.

Later, Cal stacked dishes into the sink beside Greez. The pilot muttered to himself about stubborn stains and never-ending mess, but his four hands worked with well-worn rhythm. 

Cal dried the dishes in silence. He stood there longer than he meant to, wiping at the same plate until he felt a presence join him. Not heavy-footed enough for Bode, not Greez, who was grumbling to himself about yet another thing Cal had tuned out.

She quietly took a seat on the chair behind him as he turned to face her, towel in his hands to wipe the excess soap off.  The glow of hyperspace caught against the planes of her face, softening her edges. “You didn’t have to defend me,” she said at last.

“I wasn’t defending you,” Cal answered. He glanced at her and caught the faintest flicker of surprise in her expression. “I was telling the truth.”

Her lips pressed together. For a moment, he thought she’d argue. Instead, she asked, “Why Jedha?”

“Cere’s there. She’s building a place where knowledge can survive, especially after everything that got lost. Her and Master Cordova... They'll have more answers about Tanalorr.”

Liyani moved her gaze back to the table. “And if they don't?”

“Then we keep looking.”

She let out a low breath. “You don’t stop, do you?”

“No,” Cal admitted, and his eyes lingered on her profile. “Not when it matters.”

Cal saw her walls slam down again as soon as the words had left him, the rigidity in her spine back like it had never left. Still, he could not find it in him to take them back, not when they rang true.

When the Mantis dropped out of hyperspace, Jedha hung before them like a scarred jewel. Its pale deserts sprawled across the curve of the planet, broken only by dark ridges and canyon scars. The atmosphere shimmered faintly, as if its dust hung even in orbit.

“Welcome to Jedha,” Greez muttered from his seat. “Home of sand and fanatics.”

As they descended, the sight grew clearer: robed pilgrims trailing in long processions, scattered settlements clinging to cliffsides, Imperial patrol craft hovering like Bonegnawers.

The ship cut low, weaving past a Star Destroyer’s shadow before settling outside a discreet outpost carved into the rock. The air hit like a furnace the moment the ramp dropped, hot and dry,  nothing like Koboh.

Cere was waiting at the entrance, robes brushing the ground, presence calm but firm as stone. The lines in her face deepened when her gaze flicked from Cal to Liyani, recognition sparking but questions unspoken.

“Cal,” she greeted, voice both warm and weary. “You made it.”

Cal stepped forward, relief softening his posture, a warm smile on his face. “Cere. It’s good to see you.”

But even as her arms opened in welcome, her eyes lingered again on Liyani, as if weighing her place in all this, and Liyani felt the uncomfortable weight of being watched.

The Archive had a smell to it, one that would've comforted Liyani under different circumstances: parchment and stone dust, but most importantly, smoke from incense burned too long ago to remember. The walls rose high, curved and carved with reliefs of Jedi lore that seemed to glow faintly even in shadow. It should have been calming. To Liyani, it was not.

Cere’s voice guided them inward, even as her eyes weighed the new presence. Bode answered easily when asked about the route, Greez complained about Jedha’s dry heat, and Cal kept the faint smile on his face. Liyani only let her silence speak for her.

Contrary to how it seemed to an onlooker, she wasn’t tense because of Cere. The woman could look at her however she wanted, prod as delicately or as bluntly as she pleased, Liyani had nothing to hide that could be spoken aloud.

Her breath ran shallow because beneath the Archive’s hum, beneath Cere’s steady tone, she could feel a ripple in the air that she had feared for the past few hours, the past days even, since Cal had confirmed her survival. One too familiar and inescapable, reminiscent of a life she never again looked back at.

Merrin.

The recognition struck like the memory of a blade she hadn’t realized she still carried. Dathomir. Red skies, ash storms, her mother’s hand dragging her deeper into the caves when the Nightbrothers turned. The smell of ichor, and sometimes oxidized blood. She had left — run — with her people dying behind her. 

Now she was here. Close enough that the Force carried her name through the very stone.

Liyani kept walking, shoulders squared, breath even. Survival meant composure; it meant never letting anyone see the crack until it was too late.

Cal glanced at her once. Just once, but enough to notice the faint tightening at the corner of her jaw. He didn't ask, and that gave her a strange, irritating sense of comfort.

Cere led them to the heart of the Archive, a chamber circled by shelves, with dim light filtering through thin cloth banners. Holocrons rested under glass, and ancient texts lay open as if waiting for their owners to return.

“This is what we’re protecting,” Cere said. “A memory of the Jedi Order. A chance for the future to remember we existed.”

Her eyes fell on Cal, lingering with pride and weight. Then she turned to Liyani. “And you?” Cere’s voice was soft, almost kind, but every word was sharpened with intent. “What do you fight for?”

Liyani met her gaze without flinching. She had lied her whole life; the trick wasn’t in the words but in believing them yourself.

“Survival,” she said. “Not much else to fight for left these days.”

Bode shifted at her side, his mouth curling like he wanted to add something but thought better of it. Cere inclined her head, though the faint line between her brows deepened.

Later, when the others dispersed to explore, the Archive seemed even larger. Cal trailed after Cere to see the latest recovered manuscripts. Greez went hunting for a galley nook, not turning back once with his mind made up.

That left Bode and Liyani in the same stretch of hall, the air between them as tight as wire.

“You’re good at that,” he said casually.

She raised a brow. “At what?”

“Playing the survivor. Saying just enough to keep people guessing.”

Her fingers brushed the hilt of one of her blades, though the gesture was casual, invisible to anyone not watching her hands. “You sound unsettled.”

Bode smiled, but it didn’t reach his eyes. “I just like to know who’s watching my back.”

“And you’ve decided it isn’t me.”

“Not yet,” he admitted. “But I can see how Cal looks at you. Like he’s already chosen.”

Her chest tightened, but she gave no sign. “That’s his problem, not mine or yours.”

Bode leaned closer, voice lowering. “Just remember, when someone puts that much faith in you, it can break more than just him if you let it fall.”

She met his gaze evenly, but her pulse began roaring in her ears. Not from his words, but from the pulse of her presence, Merrin, drawing closer through the Archive, like a storm cloud waiting to break.

Liyani kept her chin high, hands gloved, posture unbending, letting Bode have his moment of victory from her own distraction. She felt Merrin’s presence deeper in the complex, like a splinter in her ribs. She had kept herself alive by knowing when to run, but here, the air gave her nowhere to breathe.

Then Cal returned, and he wasn’t alone. Jedi Master Eno Cordova moved with the careful pace of age, his robes brushing the Archive floor. His eyes found Liyani the moment they entered the chamber, and in them was something she hated on sight. Knowing, as if he could peel her open like a page, as if every secret written across her bones was legible to him alone.

“Another ally,” Cordova said warmly, though the weight of his gaze pressed heavily. “You walk with shadows at your back.”

Liyani’s jaw locked, but she inclined her head as if the words meant nothing. You don’t know me, she thought. You’ll never know me. Cordova’s eyes lingered, searching, before moving on.

Cal must have noticed the stiffness in her shoulders, because his hand brushed the small of her back, a gesture so gentle it made her skin burn and irritation prickle.

“Come on,” he said quietly. “You should rest. I’ll show you the guest quarters.”

She almost snarled that she didn’t need guiding like a lost child, but with Cordova still near, with Bode watching from the corner like a man taking notes, she played along and let Cal lead her. And if it had been true to her character to be honest with herself, it gave her the cowardly excuse to avoid Merrin, if only for a few moments more.

The guest quarters were also carved from the stone, simple but cleaner than most places she’d laid her head. A cot, a table, a basin. No windows, consequently no escape. She chucked her leather duffle bag to the side and stood in the center, arms stiff at her sides, and her back to Cal.

“Here,” he said, softer and closer now, as if she were made of glass. “You’ve been through a lot. You should-”

It was that tone. That careful, coddling tone. It shattered the fragile shell she’d kept intact.

“Don’t,” she bit out.

Cal blinked. “Don’t what?”

“Don’t treat me like I’m fragile.” She tore at her gloves, peeling them off finger by finger with sharp, angry movements. The leather hit the table with a slap. “I’ve survived more than you can imagine. You think I need rest? You think I need you to guide me to a bed like a- like a patient?”

He didn’t flinch; he never did, only pressed his lips in a thin line. “You’re exhausted. You’ve been carrying this on your own, I can feel it. I just—”

“You don’t know what I carry.” Her voice rose, words spilling like broken glass. “You don’t know me, Cal! You look at me like- like I’m something to protect, and it makes me sick. I don’t need your pity, and I sure as hell don’t need your kindness.”

Anger flared in his eyes then, something she hadn't seen aimed her way before. Anger, banked and controlled, but there. His jaw tightened, his hands curling into fists at his sides.

“You think kindness is pity?” His voice was low, steady, but charged. “I don’t protect you because I think you’re weak. I-” He cut himself short, chest rising with the breath he didn’t let out.

She spun to face him, every nerve alight, hating the way he stayed calm, hating the way his quiet, restrained tone only made her fury roar louder. “Then why? Why do you look at me like that? Why can’t you just leave me alone?”

He stepped closer, his height shadowing hers, his presence filling the small room. His voice cut raw, sharp now, volume matching her own. “Because I can’t.”

Her breath hitched. For a moment, neither moved, the space between them a storm barely held.

She hated him, hated that gentleness. She hated the way his anger didn’t lash out, and instead met her fire with a fire of his own. And she hated most of all that she could think of, standing there, how much she wanted him anyway.

She shoved him with both hands, enough to close the distance when he didn’t step back. She shoved against his chest again, harder this time, and his hand caught her wrist as he stumbled backwards a step from the unexpected force of it, keeping her there.

Her lips crashed against his before she could think.

It wasn’t soft, nor tender. It was teeth and heat and the taste of her own fury, and it burned like something forbidden, something neither of them were supposed to have. With hands still trapped against his chest, she pressed closer, not even realizing he wasn't kissing her back until he finally did. His hands, hesitant at first and then steady, found her jaw, her shoulder, holding her as if the world tilted beneath them.

She pulled back sharply then, but just enough to glare up at him, her chest heaving. “You’re a fool.”

And his reply was ragged, almost desperate: “Then I’ll be your fool.”

Caught off guard, her anger faltered, and in its wake, terror seeped in. 

Chapter Text

JEDHA

The kiss ended not because they wanted it to, but because breathing demanded it.

Liyani pulled back first, her forehead resting against Cal’s for half a beat longer than she meant to, her breath harsh and lips trembling from more than anger. Her eyes searched his, wide and startled; not the cold, cutting stare she usually wore, but stripped bare.

Cal’s chest heaved. His hands, still cupping her face, trembled as though only now realizing what they’d done.

“Liyani-” His voice cracked on her name.

“No.” Her whisper cut like glass. “Don’t say anything.”

She’d kissed him to wound him, to prove she felt nothing, but her pulse still hammered against her ribs, betraying her. Cal hadn’t moved. She felt his stare like a brand. "That," she whispered, "was a mistake." She finally shoved his hands away, stepping back until her spine hit the cold stone wall.

He stood there, fists opening and closing at his sides, his breath uneven. For once, the calm steadiness of a Jedi abandoned him, he looked as shaken as she felt, and the guilt that came crashing down on her almost suffocated her.

Cal’s jaw tightened. He looked at her like he wanted to step forward again, to argue or plead, but some small flicker of restraint, maybe training, maybe mercy, or simply confusion pulled him back. His voice was rough when he finally spoke.

He exhaled, sharp. "Yeah." A single syllable, heavy with everything unsaid. 

“I’ll give you space.”

He turned and left, his boots echoing in the narrow stone hall, leaving her alone with her thoughts in the room that now felt too small.

When the door closed, her knees nearly gave out. She pressed both palms to the wall, grounding herself against the cool surface, chest heaving. Her thoughts screamed in every direction at once.

What have I done?

What will this cost?

“Kriff.” 

She paced once, twice. Her reflection caught in the darkened window, hair disheveled, eyes too wide, jaw tight. Pathetic. She looked pathetic.

She wasn’t supposed to touch him, not after Caedon, and especially not after having pushed him away over, and over again herself.

He’d been trying to help her, to comfort her, of all things. And she, with her temper wound tight as a snare, with grief still clawing at the back of her throat, had lashed out the only way she knew how: by reaching for the one person she had no right to want.

Her breath hitched, remembering his face; the shock in his eyes when she’d grabbed him by the collar, the half-second of frozen confusion before instinct gave way and she pressed her mouth to his.

He hadn’t kissed her back at first. He’d just stood there, every muscle locked in disbelief, hands half-raised like he wasn’t sure whether to hold her or stop her.

And for a heartbeat, that hesitation was enough to make her realize what she’d done, right before he finally did respond, soft and startled, so painfully human in his lack of restraint.

Then she pulled away, and everything in the room had gone still. He’d looked at her like she’d broken something sacred.

He didn’t even look angry, or hurt. He just looked lost, like a man standing at the edge of a cliff and realizing he’d already stepped off. Now, the memory of that look made her chest tighten so painfully with guilt, her nails dug crescents into her palm.

She hated herself for the way her lips still burned, for the way her body still leaned toward where he’d been, even as her mind begged her to run.

Run, she had to run. That was survival. She couldn’t stay tangled in someone else’s orbit, especially not his. This was as good of a wakeup call as any. 

She pulled off her jacket, meaning to toss it aside, when her fingers caught on something in the inner pocket.

She froze. Slowly, she pulled it free.

Caedon’s trinket. The small object she had taken from him almost without thinking after he fell; a token he’d once spoken of with quiet pride, something from his family line. She’d carried it since that moment like a shard lodged beneath her skin, unable to discard it, unable to look too closely.

Her chest squeezed. His smile flashed before her eyes, too kind, too pure. The way he had died in her arms, and how she had lived.

Cordova’s gaze came back to her then, unbidden. That damned knowing gaze, as though he had seen the reminder of Caedon in her pocket before she even remembered it herself.

She sank onto the cot, gripping the trinket until her knuckles went white. I owe him, she thought. If I do nothing else, I owe him this — that his memory doesn’t die with me.

Minutes passed like that, soon hours, the stone walls tightening around her, her mind running circles. She thought of Cal’s voice, ragged and fierce: Because I can’t. She thought of the way she’d let herself slip, again. She thought of escape routes, of slipping off-world before dawn, of never seeing any of them again.

But the weight in her palm dragged her back.

Turning it over in her palm by the weak light of her quarters, Liyani saw it was a fragment of a holoproj, small enough to fit in her hand, battered from travel but not useless. Its casing bore faint engravings — not ornamental, but practical, coded marks she didn’t recognize. She thought of Caedon’s words, long nights by the fire, fragments of stories that at the time had sounded like ramblings of a pilgrim who had wandered too far.

How he used to travel to Jedha, how he carried messages between enclaves, old shrines, and “friends who had no names.” She’d half-dismissed it, half-admired his persistence. A Force-sensitive without a clan, he had once said, you either find your own path, or you don’t survive.

By the time she forced herself to stand, her eyes were hollow, her mask rebuilt, every crack papered over by sheer will. She slid the trinket into her pocket again and slipped from the room.

Her boots were soundless on the stone floor. She kept her chin low, her gaze averted, her steps deliberate. Greez’s laughter echoed faintly from the Archive’s common room, BD’s chirp somewhere in the distance; she avoided them all, shoulders stiff, unwilling to let them see what fragility still clung to her.

Her hand hovered near the trinket in her pocket as she searched the Archive’s endless corridors, each step weighed down by dread, by obligation, by something close to hope.

The air here burned. Every lantern flame, every crackling wick lit by the Force, made the marrow of her bones ache. Light flared in ways she hadn’t felt since her childhood, when magick had been second nature instead of a shameful scar. And now, unbidden, flashes struck her mind: that day on Koboh, the bedlam raiders falling one by one, her hands outstretched but not her own, her grief bleeding through her like black ichor.

She tightened her jaw. Breathed once, twice, and forced the images back into the shadows where they belonged.

Anchorites passed her in their quiet procession, pale robes brushing the stone, their voices low, humming prayers that seemed to fold the air inwards. Their presence pressed against her ribs, another weight she hadn’t asked for. They looked so calm, so certain. It made her restless, as if she were standing in a temple she didn’t deserve to enter.

And then, the flicker at the edge of her senses returned as she turned a corner. Only this time, the flicker turned into a face and a presence so painfully familiar in the span of seconds, it nearly knocked the breath out of her lungs.

She froze. Merrin.

The Nightsister stopped short, her own dark robes trailing, her hair catching the lamplight like fire. Their eyes locked, two survivors of the same ruin, but standing worlds apart.

“Merrin—” Liyani’s voice cracked against her own will, her name an echo that slipped past her lips before she could stop it.

Merrin’s gaze hardened however, while not necessarily cruel, it was decisive. She didn’t speak, simply looked her in the eyes — final — and moved past without slowing.

The silence that followed struck harder than any words could. Liyani’s throat tightened, and for a moment she stood rooted there, her chest hollowed, before she forced her body to move again, each step heavier than the last.

If it wasn’t for this kriffing Trinket, she thought, biting the inside of her cheek to silence her thoughts as she forced herself to stay composed. None of them would see me again.

The main hall was alive when she entered, the others gathered beneath the domed ceiling where the archives branched out in radiant paths. Cere was speaking softly with Cordova, Bode and Cal lingered on the other end; too close and too far at once.

The claustrophobia returned in full, pressing at her throat like a hand. She had been in worse places, in cages with less air, and yet here, surrounded by supposed allies, she felt smothered.

Still, her mask slid easily into place. Her spine straightened, her eyes cooled, her stride steady and composed as if the air wasn’t weighing her down at all. She ignored Cal’s presence with precision, not once letting her gaze catch his, though she felt him there; like gravity itself, pulling, tugging, demanding she notice.

She didn’t.

Bode, however, she met head-on. His stare was subtle, assessing, the faintest curve at the corner of his mouth as though daring her to blink first. If anything, she welcomed the challenge, as though every fiber of her being warned her that there was something sour beneath his polished veneer that none of these idiots could see.

Cordova stepped forward, a hand clasped around the strap of his satchel, his wise old eyes turning toward her with a gentleness that grated and soothed all at once. She stiffened.

“I thought you might come,” Cordova said gently.

“I doubt that.” Her voice was sharp, meant to deflect, but her hand slipped into her pocket anyway. She hated that he was right.

“You carry something with you,” he said, gentle and knowing. “And I think you know it ties to what we’re building here.”

Her heart clenched, but her face betrayed nothing. “And if it does?”

Cordova gave her the kind of look that cut through excuses, though his voice remained soft. “Then perhaps you could help us. If not for us, then for those who came before you.”

A pause. Liyani inhaled sharply, then looked away, her gloves creaking under her grip. Her mask didn’t falter, but her silence said enough.

When she finally spoke, her voice was low, clipped, almost begrudging. “If I do this, it’s not for you, or for your cause.” She glanced at Cordova, her eyes hard. “It’s for him, and him alone. Consider it a debt.”

Cordova nodded, accepting her terms without protest. She crossed the room and set the holoproj down on the nearest table with a metallic clink.

Cordova’s eyes widened. His hands reached for it reverently, the way one might take up a sacred relic. He turned it over, fingers tracing its battered edges, his expression shifting from curiosity to recognition to quiet awe.

“Where did you find this?” he asked, his voice lower now, intent.

“It belonged to someone I knew.” The words came clipped. “Someone who isn’t here anymore.”

Cordova hesitated, then looked back at her. “Their name?”

“Caedon.” She swallowed hard, hating the way saying it cracked something in her chest. “He…he mentioned Jedha. Pilgrims. Shrines. I didn’t listen closely enough.”

Cordova nodded slowly, almost mournfully. “Caedon, yes. I met him once, years ago. A wanderer, but also a courier. This device…these marks belong to the Hidden Path.”

Liyani’s stomach clenched. “The what?”

Cordova looked at her with patient, piercing eyes. “A network, secret and fragile. They move people who are hunted; Force-sensitives, their families, allies. Caedon was one of their couriers, brave enough to travel where others couldn’t. This device…” He tapped the casing. “It holds safehouse coordinates. Places meant to be hidden even from us.”

Liyani froze, her fingers curling into her palms. Of course Caedon had carried something bigger than himself. She should’ve known, he had always spoken of survival as if it belonged to everyone, not just him.

Cordova softened, studying her face. “Did he entrust this to you?”

She shook her head violently. “No. He died. I took it.” The words cut her own throat to speak aloud. “I didn’t even know what it was.”

“You brought it here.”

“I shouldn’t have.”

“But you did.” Cordova’s tone was unshaken. “That speaks for itself, if you ask me.”

Her anger flared at his patience, at his refusal to condemn her, at the unbearable truth that she had carried Caedon’s legacy without even knowing it. “Don’t put meaning into my choices. I’m no one’s courier.”

Cordova gave the faintest smile, tinged with sadness. “Perhaps. But sometimes, purpose finds us whether we accept it or not. Thank you for bringing it here.”

She didn’t respond, couldn’t get herself to. Every part of her body felt too tight, like she’d splinter apart if she said another word. So she opted for a nod, as hesitant as it was.

The others gathered to watch in their own ways; Bode with his careful but amused calculation, Greez with a worried twitch of his brow, but Cal with something she didn’t dare acknowledge, though she felt the stare like twin bullets through her back until she didn’t, and only heard his retreating footsteps carrying outside the hall. 

Cal left to work in silence, trying to lose himself in maps and strategies, but when Merrin’s voice carried from behind him, he stilled.

“You didn’t tell me she was here.”

Cal turned. Merrin stood in the doorway, her cloak trailing dust, her eyes lit sharp in the torchlight. She looked like the storms of Dathomir embodied, anger and sorrow braided together.

Cal opened his mouth, but no words came.

Merrin stepped forward, her gaze pinning him. “Liyani.”

He stiffened at the sound of her name on Merrin’s tongue, heavier than the stone walls around them.

“You brought her here,” Merrin said flatly, an accusation more than a question.

Cal stood with his body taut, fingers flexing at his sides as if holding onto words that didn’t want to be spoken. “I didn’t plan it.”

“No, but you didn’t stop it either,” Merrin agreed softly, eyes on him like blades. “Every time you find another ghost, you drag it back with you.”

“She’s not a ghost.” The words left him sharper than he meant.

“No,” Merrin allowed. Her arms unwound, her hands resting in her lap, composed. “She is very real. And that is exactly why you’re afraid.”

Cal’s jaw set. “I’m not afraid of her.”

“You are.” Merrin leaned forward just slightly, eyes searching his. “And not only because she’ll hurt you, because she definitely will. But because you’ll choose her. Again, and again.”

The air went thin between them, and Cal’s hands curled into fists. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I know what it looks like when you’ve already chosen.” Her tone softened, but it didn’t lose its weight. “You don’t even realize it, but everyone else can see it. Even her.”

Cal dragged a hand over his face, groaning under his breath, every muscle in his body coiled like a spring. “I don’t know what I’m doing anymore, Merrin. I thought—” He cut himself off, voice droppin. “I thought if I kept moving, I’d figure it out.”

Merrin’s eyes softened, though her mouth stayed firm. “You’ve always known. You just hate what it means.”

He finally looked at her, raw, cornered. “And what does it mean?”

“That you want something for yourself.”

The silence stretched long enough that the shifting of the holoprojectors below seemed thunderous.

At last, Cal shook his head, voice hoarse. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

“You can’t hurt me in that way.” Merrin’s expression flickered, edged with an old wound that had closed many, many moons ago. “Not anymore.”

Cal’s lips parted, confusion flickering.

“I know what we are,” Merrin said, steady now, resigned. “What we aren’t. I made my peace with it long before you ever could.” She paused, her gaze hardening slightly. “But don’t ask me to make peace with her.”

Cal swallowed. The words lodged deep in his chest, because he knew that Merrin wasn’t being petty, simply honest.

“I won’t,” he said quietly.

Merrin nodded once. “Good. Because I wouldn’t forgive that.”

One by one, the hall had emptied out. With a gentle nod her way, Cordova, too, followed Cere out, leaving Liyani by herself.

The Archive’s main hall was not built for silence, yet it was full of it. Liyani sat in it now, cloaked in black leather, her figure bent over a polished table. Her gloves lay discarded on the edge, fingertips bare as she traced a line of text across a brittle scroll.

To anyone watching, she might have seemed perfectly absorbed, her posture precise, movements fluid, her expression a mask of calm. But Cal had learned, or perhaps felt enough, to recognize tension when it cloaked itself as poise. The small betrayals were there: her shoulders too rigid, her breath held a beat longer than natural, her eyes darting away too quickly from the words she wasn’t truly reading.

From the corner of the hall, he watched her.

He hadn’t meant to. He’d tried to throw himself into anything else; repairs, meditation, even conversation with Greez — but somehow his feet carried him here, and now he stood as though tied to the spot. Watching her move was its own kind of gravity.

The kiss replayed itself in his mind whether he wanted it to or not. The heat of it, the way it had felt less like choice and more like inevitability, two storms colliding, explosive and impossible to stop once it began.

His first. The one he hadn’t known he’d been waiting for until it had already happened. And then the recoil, sharp as a blade. Her fury, her rejection.

He should have hated her for it, for plunging him in and out of the cold whenever she desired. A part of him thought he did, but when he looked at her now, hunched over scrolls as if she could bury herself inside their ink, he didn’t feel any of that. He felt… caught. Between what he was supposed to be and what he couldn’t stop himself from wanting.

BD, perched on his shoulder, chirped quietly, almost encouraging him forward. Cal grimaced, muttering, “Yeah, yeah. I know.” His feet moved before his mind caught up.

He crossed the wide space of the hall with measured steps, each one sounding louder than it had any right to. Liyani stiffened the moment his shadow fell across her table, though she didn’t look up, her fingers tightening against the edge of the datapad.

Without asking permission, he sat beside her.

Silence thickened, heavy and unwieldy, yet not unbearable. For a long moment they simply sat, side by side, the air between them stretching taut. She shifted once, subtle, her body angling slightly away, as though distance might soften his presence, but she didn’t tell him to leave. That, Cal took as a victory.

He leaned forward on his elbows, pretending to scan the same lines of text she was pretending to read. “You’re allowed to give yourself a break, you know,” he said at last, his voice not gentle, having learned his lesson from the last time, but rather careful, like stepping onto ice.

Her lips twitched, but not in amusement. “And you’re allowed to talk less.”

It wasn’t meant to sting. Cal breathed out a soft huff of a laugh, lowering his gaze. BD tilted his head and whirred, clearly unbothered by the tension.

Another silence followed, this one a little looser. Cal didn’t move closer, but he didn’t move away either. His presence was steady, warm in a way that pressed against her walls without breaking them. The golden retriever to her cornered black cat.

Liyani finally exhaled through her nose, sharp but quiet, her knuckles whitening as she set the datapad aside. Her shoulders dropped just a fraction, betraying more than she intended.

“Why do you keep doing that?” she asked, not looking at him.

“Doing what?”

“Being kind. You don’t even know me.” Her voice was low, flat, but beneath it throbbed something raw. “You don’t know where I came from, what I’ve done. What my intentions are.”

Cal studied her profile, the set of her jaw, the flicker of her eyes refusing to meet his. “Maybe I don’t need to know everything.” His tone was soft, steady as bedrock.

“You have no survival instincts. I don’t understand how you’ve made this far,” she deadpanned, earning her a raised brow from him. Her instinct was to argue, to cut him down before he could chip away at her armor. But instead she held back, her pulse roaring in her ears, her walls rattling under the weight of his quiet persistence.

It was as infuriating as it was terrifying, and it was something she couldn’t look away from.

”I know what you’re doing, Liyani. It won’t work this time.” 

“Don’t you have somewhere else to be, Jedi? A galaxy to save?”

He shrugged, rubbing the back of his neck. “Probably.”

Liyani sighed, though her eyes held more amusement than her tone. “That’s it?”

When he silently held her gaze in response, she pushed a datapad toward him. “You can make yourself useful then. These cross-references don’t line up. Whoever copied this was sloppy.”

Cal leaned in, shoulders brushing hers as he scanned the symbols. The touch jolted her, but she didn’t move away. “You’re right,” he murmured, tapping at the mismatched script. “Cordova taught me to spot that trick, scribes would rush their transcriptions if they thought no one would check.”

Their heads bent close, they picked through the mess of text together. At first their words were almost utilitarian, limited to notes on hidden coordinates and smuggled codes, but slowly, the conversation loosened. Cal teased her when she mispronounced an archaic phrase; she rolled her eyes, tossing back a sarcastic remark that made him laugh under his breath. They started speaking without thinking about it, words spilling naturally, as if silence had finally loosened its hold.

After a lull, Cal shifted, leaning back. “So… all this,” he gestured at the piles of records, “what are you actually looking for?”

Liyani hesitated. She hadn’t meant to let him in, but the steadiness of his gaze was disarming. He wasn’t prying, and she was so tired of holding everything so tightly shut.

Her voice dropped. “The Path. Caedon — the work he left behind, it’s here, buried between the lines.” She tapped the scroll in front of her. “If I can piece it together, maybe… maybe I can give at least something back.”

Cal studied her, and if the mention Caedon caused him to feel something, he didn’t show it. “That’s not a small thing, Liyani. This is good.”

The silence stretched then, and Cal wondered whether he had said the right thing or not. Nothing about the woman betrayed what she felt, not her posture, not her expression. 

When she spoke again, it was quieter, fraying at the edges. “I saw Merrin today.”

Cal straightened, heart lurching. “You-”

“She didn’t want to see me,” Liyani cut in quickly, her jaw tight. “The way she looked at me… it was like being back on Dathomir. That little girl who ran. Who hid. Who left everyone behind.”

The words came sharp, spilling before she could swallow them. Shame clawed through her voice, through the set of her shoulders.

“You’re not that girl anymore,” he said, the words coming instinctively. His voice was steady, protective, more sure than he felt. “You survived, Liyani. That’s not cowardice, that’s strength.”

She shook her head, but he leaned closer, willing her to hear.

“If Merrin can’t see it yet, she will. But I see it, right now.”

Her lips parted, no sound escaping. The anger, the shame, all of it tangled with something new she didn’t dare name. She hated the way it warmed her chest, took her back to a place she couldn’t afford to return.

For a long moment, she only watched him, searching his face for cracks. There were none, and unfortunately for this particular witch, he meant every word. Looking back at her wasn’t just this fiercely caring and protective Jedi, it was the boy who had seen death the same way she did.

Her breath trembled as she finally leaned back, breaking the intensity before it consumed her. She reached for another datapad, trying to steady her hands. “You’re too kind for your own good, Cal Kestis.”

He smiled faintly, gaze lingering. “Or maybe you just don’t let people be kind to you.”

Liyani’s eyes had already shifted back to the spread of parchments and flickering datapads, her quill-like stylus hovering with the faintest tremor. Somehow, though, her focus had sharpened since Cal had sat beside her, as though the Force itself had steadied her hand, or maybe it was simply the warmth of his presence brushing against her edges. She let herself breathe, let herself work, drawing fragments of the Hidden Path’s encoded trails into clearer lines.

It was easier now, with him near.

Minutes stretched. The hush of the archives folded around them, broken only by the scratch of writing and the occasional anchorite passing through. Cal stayed quiet, his own mind restless, caught between the weight of what had passed between them in her quarters and the quiet steadiness of this moment.

Finally, his voice came low, careful, like he was afraid of breaking something delicate. “Those raiders… the ones who were after you on Koboh. Bedlam Raiders.”

Her stylus paused mid-mark. She turned her head slowly, eyes narrowing, not in anger but in thought, weighing how much to give. His gaze met hers with an openness she had come to associate with the color of his eyes, no judgment, just a quiet question and an earnest need to understand her.

“I… pissed off the wrong people,” she gave eventually, voice flat but not cold. “Took something that wasn’t even theirs to begin with, but word travels. Credits flow, and suddenly I’ve got a bounty high enough to keep me looking over my shoulder. That’s all you need to know.”

Her tone was gentler now, but there was a firmness there, as if conveying this was all he would get. Cal let it sit. He nodded, swallowing back a thousand more questions he wanted to ask, so many layers he needed to peel.

And then, like a blade slipped under his ribs, her next words came, quieter, heavier: “Cal, I…need to leave. Sort things out. Tie up loose ends before they catch up to me here.”

For a second, he forgot how to breathe. It sounded final, like a door closing, like she was already pulling away before he’d even had the chance to hold her there. He forced his face still, forced his voice to match hers in casualness.

“Then I’ll come,” he said lightly, like it was no different than offering to fix a broken part on the Mantis.

But she was already watching too closely not to notice the flicker of hurt under the surface. Her hand moved before she thought better of it, fingertips tracing over his knuckles, a ghost of a touch. Then her palm settled, covering his hand completely.

Her eyes softened. “You’ve drawn me in too much for me not to see you again, Cal.” Her thumb pressed gently, reassuring, firm. “There’s no way our paths won’t cross again after everything.”

The ache in his chest loosened just a fraction.

Chapter Text

JEDHA

The datapads spread across the table pulsed in dim sequence. One was older than the rest, its casing worn smooth from years of use and lettering faded. Liyani tilted it closer, adjusting the glow. Notes, or at least fragments of them, but now the words came into focus.

“Here,” she whispered, almost startled.

Cal leaned in, shoulder brushing hers. His breath warmed her temple. “What is it?”

Her stylus tapped at a block of coded lines. The characters weren’t standard Aurebesh, but a hybrid script: Caedon’s careful invention, meant to conceal information in plain sight. Liyani’s pulse quickened.

“It’s a location,” she said, the disbelief tugging at her tone. “Not Tanalorr itself. But… a relay. Notes on someone he met. A contact.” Her voice quieted. “On Daiyu.”

Cal’s brows knit. “Daiyu’s chaos. The Path wouldn’t risk people there.”

The words stilled her. The Path. The very thing Caedon had been woven into, without her realizing.

“Then maybe he wasn’t with the Path anymore,” she said. Her tone came out sharper than intended. “Maybe he was keeping something.”

Cordova was waiting in the study chamber when they brought him the datapad, robes bundled around him like a patchwork of parchment and dust.

“This is… remarkable. Caedon had been gathering knowledge for years, I suspected as much, but to have a thread that leads to Daiyu…” His voice cracked with excitement. “If this contact still lives, they may hold the next piece of the path to Tanalorr.”

Liyani folded her arms. “Or it’s another dead end.”

Cordova’s eyes softened. “Even dead ends teach us where not to step.”

He turned to Cal. “You’ll go. Both of you. Take Bode as well. Daiyu’s underworld has its own rules, you’ll need more than one pair of eyes.”

Liyani hesitated. “After Daiyu,” she said quietly, “I’m going my own way for a while.”

Cordova’s gaze flicked to her, measuring. Cal didn’t speak, but the subtle shift in his stance said enough, unease, maybe even hurt. She ignored it.

“I just need to sort some things out,” she added. Her voice carried a finality that dared challenge anyone to pry.

Cordova only nodded, thoughtful. “Understood.”

As they began to leave the study, Cordova called out after her.

“Liyani,” he said gently, “stay a moment.”

Cal paused mid step to glance between the two. When Cordova only held Liyani’s gaze, he hesitantly began walking towards the exit once more, throwing one last look over his shoulder as he turned a corner.

She clasped her hands behind her back, approaching the older man warily. “If this is about me leaving-”

“It isn’t.” He stepped closer, lowering his voice. “While you worked tonight, I noticed… something curious.”

Her brow arched. “Curious?”

“Your presence in the Force…it hums oddly.” His eyes unfocused slightly, as though listening to something she couldn’t hear. “Almost like an echo, but not separate. As if two threads of energy intersect within you.”

She frowned. “Right…You mean I’m unstable.”

“No.” His smile was kind, almost fatherly. “Unusual. I’ve seen disturbances in many forms; trauma, rebirth, even magick, but this feels different. It doesn’t feel wrong, only unfamiliar. When you focus, it … shifts tone.”

Liyani crossed her arms, more uncomfortable than she wanted to admit. “Maybe that’s just what happens when you’ve been through what I have.”

“Perhaps.” Cordova’s gaze lingered. “The Force doesn’t make mistakes. It may be telling you something, even if you don’t yet understand the language.”

He turned back to the datapad as though the conversation had ended. Liyani stood rooted for a moment longer and watched him, the faint unease crawling up her spine.

There was a hum at the edge of her awareness, like a vibration under her skin, one she swore she hadn’t felt before. She told herself it was exhaustion, or simply the crazy old man’s antics.

When she finally left the archives, Cordova was still murmuring to himself, studying the glow where her hand had brushed the table.

Outside, the hall felt colder than before.

Cal was waiting near the stairwell, hands clasped loosely behind his back. When he saw her, he pushed off the wall but didn’t move closer.

“Cordova keep you long?” he asked, voice mild.

“Long enough to tell me I’m some kind of anomaly.” She brushed past him with a quiet scoff. “Guess I’m special after all.”

He gave a small smile. “You always were.”

That earned him a sharp glance. “Don’t start.”

“I wasn’t going to.”

“Good.”

He said nothing of the exhaustion shadowing her face, of the way her stride slowed as though her body had grown heavier with every step. He didn’t call it out, just stayed close.

The door to her quarters whispered open when they reached. She hesitated on the threshold, hand on the frame. Cal lingered behind her, but when she didn’t dismiss him, he followed without a word.

The room still carried the ghost of their last encounter here. Cal felt it wash over him in a flood: her nearness, the taste of her breath when she kissed him, the sharp ache of leaving immediately after. He swallowed hard.

She must’ve felt it, because her gaze softened knowingly. She stepped further inside, then crouched at her pack.

From within, she pulled out a bundle of Caedon’s belongings; small, worn, unassuming. A pouch of carved beads, a strip of etched leather, the old datapad itself. She held them a moment, then offered them to Cal.

“Give these to Cordova,” she said quietly. “They’re not mine to keep.”

Cal blinked, caught off guard. His fingers brushed hers as he accepted the bundle. “You sure?”

Her lips quirked in a humorless smile. “Surprising, isn’t it?” Her eyes flicked up to his, and something unguarded flared there. “Trust doesn’t come easy. But… you’ve earned it.”

She straightened, her heart pounding, and then with a courage that startled her as much as him, she whispered the words he’d once given her back on Koboh, words she’d carried like an ember since:

“I trust you.”

His chest swelled painfully, like his heart wasn’t made to contain this kind of ache. She trusts me. After the silence, the arguments, the shadows that still clung to her.

Still, against his very being, he wanted more. He wanted to reach up, catch her hand before it dropped away. He wanted to pull her closer until she forgot the world existed outside these walls. His body leaned forward before his mind caught it, before his Jedi discipline slammed down like a shutter.

Not now. Especially not when her voice trembled on those words, and when the trust itself was as delicate as spun glass.

So he did nothing but look at her, memorize her, burn the shape of her into him like a scar he would carry forever.

She turned from him then, shoulders drawn tight, but not dismissive. He read it for what it was: she couldn’t bear more tonight.

“I should let you rest,” he said softly. His voice sounded strange to his own ears, like it belonged to someone else. “We’ve got an early start.”

She gave the smallest nod, not looking at him.

Cal lingered for a moment at the door, his hand braced against the frame, eyes trailing her silhouette. Then, before he could betray himself, he left.

Bode found him later in the quiet glow of the archive’s upper decks. Cal was leaning against the viewport, watching the stars slip past in their eternal patterns. His shoulders looked looser than they had in weeks, the tightness in his jaw gone.

“You’re in a good mood,” Bode said, voice kept casual.

“Am I?”

“Yeah,” Bode said, leaning against the railing beside him. “Don’t think I’ve seen you look this… light since before Koboh.”

Cal rubbed the back of his neck, suddenly aware of the softness in his chest, the way the memory of her words still hummed like a second heartbeat. He tried to smother his grin, but failed. “Just… a good night. That’s all.”

Bode tilted his head, studying him. “Has to do with our guest, doesn’t it?”

Cal’s smile flickered, but he didn’t hide it. “She’s… complicated.”

“That’s one word for her,” Bode muttered. He crossed his arms, weighing his next words. He could push, could plant seeds, but something in Cal’s glow stopped him cold. Kriff. The kid was happy, happier than he’d been in years. And Bode, despite everything, cared for him.

For a moment, the conflict twisted in his gut. He could picture it: dropping the act, telling Cal the truth, abandoning the Empire’s leash, building a new life on Tanalorr, just the few of them. Maybe that was enough. It had to be.

But then Liyani’s face flashed in his mind, the way her eyes seemed to look right through him. No, she was dangerous to him in a way Cal couldn’t see.

“Tomorrow,” Bode said finally, breaking his own spiral. “We hit Daiyu, track down this contact Cordova wants. One more step closer to Tanalorr.”

Cal nodded, eyes bright with something more than mission focus. “Yeah. Tomorrow.”

Bode forced a grin, clapping his shoulder. “Get some rest, brother. Big day ahead.”

THE MANTIS — en route to Daiyu

Dawn came cold and pale over Jedha. The archive was hushed, the Anchorites beginning their chants in the courtyards beyond.

Liyani adjusted the strap of her black leather gear, knives tucked at her hip, blaster secured, the same armor she had carried across half the galaxy. 

Bode joined them at the steps, cloak drawn tight, rifle slung over his shoulder. His gaze cut briefly to Liyani before softening at Cal.

“Ready?” he asked.

Cal looked between them, so different yet bound together for this path. “Yeah, let’s find our contact.”

Hyperspace wrapped the Mantis in its endless blue blur, a tunnel stretching into forever. To most, it was comforting; the illusion of speed, the reassurance of motion. 

Liyani sat at the edge of the cockpit, one boot hooked on the rung of her chair, elbow on the armrest, chin tilted like she was perfectly at ease. Cal had drifted into the pilot’s seat, not because he needed to fly, but because it gave him something to hold on to. He hadn’t spoken much since last night, and neither had she.

It was a rare kind of silence, almost comfortable. 

Almost, because Bode was there. He leaned against the doorway with his arms crossed, watching her like she was a puzzle with too many missing pieces.

“You’ve got a talent,” he said suddenly, breaking the quiet.

Liyani raised a brow, slow. “Just one?”

“For making things incredibly awkward,” he said, voice even, lips tugging just enough to make it hard to call him outright hostile.

Cal’s head turned halfway between them, like he was caught in a crossfire of words before they were even fired.

Liyani didn’t blink. “Huh, I always thought you had the same talent. Being loud doesn’t make you funny, you know.”

Bode’s smile was sharp and humorless. “Touché. Difference is, people still like me afterwards.”

The steady sound of the hyperdrive took over the silence. Cal cleared his throat, fingers drumming against the yoke. “So, uh…Jedha’s archives had maps of Daiyu’s lower levels. That’ll help.”

“Sure,” Bode said, eyes still on Liyani.

“Sure,” she echoed, tone clipped to mirror him.

BD, perched on the console, gave a long, electronic whirr that sounded suspiciously like a sigh. 

Liyani stood abruptly. “I’m getting something to eat.”

She made her way down the corridor, boots clicking softly against the decking. The galley was too small to escape the feeling of being watched, but at least it was quieter here. She pulled open a locker, yanked out a bundle of dried herbs she’d stashed from Koboh, and began chopping with too much force. Another cupboard held an unknown fruit, but edible enough for Liyani to consider adding to a stew.

Lost in thought, or perhaps just imagining the chopping surface was Bode, the skillet heated too fast. Her hand slipped. The smell of char filled the galley before she could curse under her breath. Of course.

Bode was the first to notice, and his voice carried over to the galley where she stood. “Uh, is someone murdering the rations again?”

Cal’s brow furrowed as he followed the smell. When he entered the galley, he found Liyani standing in front of the stove, holding a pan of what used to be something edible. BD beeped mournfully from his shoulder like a droid witnessing a tragedy.

“I turned my back for thirty seconds,” she said defensively, lowering the spatula after realizing the way she held it didn’t really help her case.

“Looks like you turned your back for thirty years,” Bode quipped, stepping in with his arms crossed.

Cal bit the inside of his cheek, trying hard not to smile. “You… uh, need help?”

“I had it under control until you two arrived,” she replied coolly, swatting away the smoke with a towel.

“Sure you did.” Bode’s voice came, and her grip tightened. “You trying to smoke us out?” 

Liyani shot him a look. “Don’t you have a corner to brood in?”

Cal followed right behind, BD hopping down from his shoulder to investigate the stove. “Hey, it’s fine,” he said quickly. “I burn food all the time.”

She arched a brow at him. “You don’t say.”

He scratched his neck sheepishly. “Ask Greez.”

“Please don’t,” Bode muttered, dropping into one of the galley seats.

BD chirped twice and helpfully toggled the temperature down with his worn metal claw.

“See? Even BD thinks you’re overdoing it,” Bode said.

“He thinks you’re annoying,” Liyani fired back, though a flicker of amusement betrayed her, to which BD gave a chipper boop that somehow confirmed it.

Cal laughed under his breath. “You two ever not argue?”

“Only when he shuts up,” Liyani said with a dismissive wave of her hand.

Bode pointed the spare fork on the table at her. “You started it.”

“Did I?”

“Yes.”

Cal didn’t bother hiding a grin as he slid into the seat across from Bode. “Why don’t we just… sit? Let the food be. Tell stories, pass the time.”

Liyani hesitated for a moment, and when Bode met her gaze challengingly, exhaled and joined them, arms still crossed.

By the time the ventilation kicked in and they’d managed to plate something vaguely resembling food, the three of them sat around the narrow galley table. It was quiet at first, too quiet. 

Cal drummed his fingers on the table. “So…”

Bode sipped from his cup. “So.”

Liyani stabbed her burnt meal with deliberate precision. “This is going well.”

“Alright,” Cal said, leaning back. “Speaking of food…Worst food I’ve ever eaten was on Bracca. Maintenance rations, gray paste in a tube. Supposed to be ‘nutrient balanced.’ Tasted like the inside of a hydrospanner.”

Bode snorted. “Bracca cuisine. Yeah, I’ve unfortunately had that pleasure.”

Liyani glanced at him, curiosity flickering for a second before she masked it. “You’ve been to Bracca, too?”

“Briefly. Smuggling job, didn’t end well.” He grinned. “Ended up hanging off the side of a cutter while someone was shooting at me. Long story.”

Cal tilted his head. “You can’t just stop there.”

Bode shrugged. “Got paid, didn’t die, and learned to never take a job from anyone associated with that place. There, moral of the story.”

Liyani gave them a skeptical glance. “All this…This isn’t some Jedi trust exercise, is it?”

“No,” Cal said with mock offense. “It’s a crew thing.”

Bode leaned in with a half-smile. “Well, dish out the stories then, hero.”

Cal laughed under his breath. “Alright, well...” He pointed at Bode. “You remember before Saw, our Kuat job?”

“Oh, no,” Bode said immediately, shaking his head.

“Kuat job?” Liyani asked, faintly curious.

Cal looked too smug for his own good. “We were supposed to extract a family of informants before the Empire leveled the outpost. Easy run. We get there; no ship, no comms, blizzard storming, troopers everywhere. We find the family hiding in a pretty much buried crawler.”

“Sounds cozy,” Liyani said dryly.

“It got better,” Bode said, holding up a hand. “The crawler started sliding off a ridge while we were inside it.”

Cal grinned. “So we tried to stabilize it.”

“With what?”

“A tow cable,” Cal said.

Bode nodded, unimpressed. “That snapped.”

“Shock,” Liyani snorted, earning her another of Cal’s rather frequent grins as of late.

“But then I used the Force,” Cal said, defensive.

“You tried to use the Force,” Bode corrected. “What actually happened was, you lifted it just long enough for me to shove the family out, and then you almost crushed us with the kriffing crawler.”

Liyani blinked. “You’re alive, so it worked?”

“Barely,” Bode said. “We rolled half a klick down a mountain on a scrap of hull plating.”

“And he laughed the whole way down,” Cal said, pointing at him.

Bode smiled faintly. “You were laughing, too.”

Cal shrugged. “It was fun.”

He then leaned in, amused. “Okay, Liyani. Your turn, make it good.”

Liyani rested her chin on her hand, eyes focused on a distant spot for a beat, like she was back there again. “Nar Shaddaa,” she began. “I was younger, stupider, and thought taking a courier job was a good idea.”

Bode grinned. “Nothing on Nar Shaddaa ever is.”

“I was supposed to deliver a case to some broker. Clean, easy. Except when I got there, turns out half the lower levels had decided the same case was worth their lives. I had three syndicates after me in ten minutes.”

Bode whistled low. “You were walking around holding that?”

“Didn’t know,” she said simply. “Until blaster bolts started raining down from every level. I ducked into a maintenance shaft, and with my luck, ended up in the middle of a swoop race.”

Cal’s eyes widened. “You’re kidding.”

“Not even close,” she said. “Two racers crash just a few meters ahead of me. So I grab one of their bikes, and I’m off. I’ve got three syndicate enforcers in pursuit, a biker gang screaming behind me, and a malfunctioning speeder that kept jolting like a shaak that wanted to throw me off.”

Cal shook his head, grinning wide. “You really do live by the phrase ‘it wasn’t supposed to go that way,’ don’t you?”

She raised a brow. “This is rich coming from you, Kestis.”

Bode leaned forward. “Well, what about the good part?”

Liyani arched a brow. “Good part?”

“You know.” His smile was almost charming if she didn’t know any better. “How’d you get away?”

Her eyes narrowed in sharp awareness. He was fishing. He wanted details, a little slip, a mistake. 

“I didn’t get away.”

Bode blinked. “You… didn’t?”

“No,” she replied, leaning back in her chair like she was talking about a bad drink order. “They caught me, some Dug had me by the collar, hauled me up like I weighed nothing. Smelled like spice fumes.”

Cal folded his arms, half-smile ghosting over his lips. “I assume you didn’t thank him for the lift.”

“I didn’t have time. He shoved a blaster under my chin and started demanding to know who I worked for.”

Bode’s tone was cautious now. “And…?”

She let a small smirk appear. “I told him the truth.”

Cal’s brow lifted. “Which was?”

“That I worked for whoever was paying more.” She tilted her head. “And since he looked like someone with pride but not necessarily brains, I offered to switch sides, for a price, of course. Told him the beacon wasn’t worth what the other syndicate would pay him to hand it over instead.”

Bode let out a slow whistle. “You bribed your captor.”

“I negotiated,” she corrected, a finger pointed his way. “He lowered the blaster, started calculating the math, and by the time he realized I was lying, I’d already kicked the crate into his gut and used his comm to trigger the droids outside.”

Cal blinked once, impressed. “So you blew up the place.”

“I improvised,” she said smoothly. “The explosion just… encouraged a faster exit.”

Bode stared at her. “You’re alive because you out-talked, double-crossed, and detonated a Dug in under a minute?”

“Give or take a few seconds.”

Cal’s grin widened, genuine this time. “Remind me never to play you in a negotiation.”

“You’d hold your own,” she said with quiet confidence, eyes catching his for a beat longer than necessary, the corner of her mouth flickering up. “But I wouldn’t bet on you winning.”

Bode cleared his throat, breaking the charge in the air. “Someone help us when you two team up.”

“Or when we don’t,” Cal said lightly, still watching her.

Liyani smiled faintly, but there was that familiar flicker in her eyes, the one Cal had learned to recognize. A haunted edge, one that said you couldn’t live that many lives without a cost.

He looked away, deciding not to poke at it, and instead said, “Alright, I’m calling it; next time we end up in a swoop chase, Liyani’s driving.”

“Absolutely not,” Bode said immediately.

She smirked. “See? He trusts me.”

“Because he’s blind,” Bode replied.

Liyani’s smirk softened into something close to warm. “Relax, Bode. I only blow things up when people ask stupid questions.”

“Noted,” Bode muttered, sitting up straight and exhaling. “Alright, enough near-death stories. Let’s do something that doesn’t involve explosives, for a change.”

Cal’s grin was boyish, crooked. “Sabacc?”

Liyani’s raised a brow. “You play?”

“Badly,” Cal said, already reaching for the deck Greez had tucked away. “But a safe version. No credits, no stakes, just for fun.”

“Vanilla sabacc?” Liyani said, her tone skeptical but amused. “So no one loses their shirt or their dignity? No fun.”

“Consider it training wheels,” he shrugged.

The cards spreading across the table filled the silence as Cal shuffled with the grace of a bantha. Bode had heckled him for every dropped card, and Liyani had watched with the faintest curve of her mouth, dangerously close to affectionate amusement.

“Alright,” Cal said, cutting the deck “Standard Corellian rules, so first to Sabacc wins the round. We’ll keep score the honest way.”

“Honest,” Liyani repeated with a faint smirk. “How… noble.”

Bode barked a laugh. “You sound like you’re allergic to honesty.”

“Only when it gets in the way of winning,” she shot back with a quick, easy grin.

Cal’s lips twitched. “We’ll see about that.”

It started out tense, hands played close, no one speaking much, until inevitably Liyani and Bode began their dance once again.

“You peeked,” Liyani accused when Bode glanced up too quickly.

“I did not.”

“You twitched.”

“Maybe I just twitched.”

“Suspicious twitch.”

Cal was laughing again before he realized it. Liyani caught his gaze at the sound of it and, despite herself, smiled.

The first hand was pure observation. Cal played tight, he studied his cards, the field, them. One could almost see the equations forming in his mind. He didn’t fidget or bluff, simply waited.

Bode, however, went for chaos, grinning as he traded two cards. “See, this is what you don’t get, Jedi. The game’s not about logic, it’s about confidence. You look the cards in the eye, you tell them who’s boss.”

“…The cards don’t have eyes,” Cal said without looking up.

“That’s why they lose.”

Liyani’s tone was deceptively mild. “So by that logic, if you lose, does that make you the blind one?”

Cal snorted before he could stop himself.

“Just trying to see how sharp you are, playing friendly here.” Bode shrugged a shoulder, leaning back into his chair.

“Oh, I’m sharper than I look,” she murmured, and flipped her hand; a confident twenty-one.

Bode’s grin froze mid-expression.

Cal blinked. “That’s fast.”

She shrugged. “Sometimes the galaxy gives you exactly what you deserve.”

“And what’s that supposed to mean?”

“That you were due a reminder,” she said, sliding her braid over her shoulder. She leaned forward, chin in her hand, eyes dark and intent.

“Wait a minute,” Bode frowned when she called a Pure Sabacc with casual precision. “You’ve done this before.”

“Beginner’s luck,” she said airily.

“Beginner, my ass,” he muttered, tossing down his useless hand.

Cal, too, narrowed his eyes as she raked in the pile of nothing-stakes. “You’re very comfortable with this.”

The next round, Bode was very determined to win, narrowing his eyes like he was staring down a mark. He smirked as he laid out a strong hand.

“Twenty,” he announced.

Cal put down a shaky nineteen, already frustrated with himself.

Liyani didn’t even blink. She slid her cards forward, another pure sabacc.

“Okay,” Bode said, pointing. “That was a twitch. That was a cheating twitch.”

“I don’t twitch,” she said smoothly. “Or cheat. Mostly.”

“You just twitched.”

“That was a breath.”

“Suspicious breath.”

Cal burst out laughing once more, the sound spilling out before he could stop it. “You two sound like kids arguing over who stole whose ration bar.”

“Yeah? Which side are you on, Jedi?” Bode shot back.

Cal hesitated, then risked a glance at Liyani. She didn’t look back at him, but he noticed the curve of her smile, and Force help him, it made his pulse trip.

“I’m just saying,” he muttered, shuffling again, “maybe we should let the cards speak for themselves.”

“Your tell,” she said to Bode. “It’s in your left eyebrow.”

He raised it on reflex. “My what?”

She smiled faintly. “Exactly.”

Cal grinned despite himself, shaking his head. “Remind me never to play against you for credits.”

“You’d lose everything,” she said, so evenly it didn’t even sound like bragging.

Bode leaned back. “You’re awfully confident for someone sitting between two men with military training.”

“Oh, please,” she said, deadpan. “There’s much, much worse than two men in uniforms with nothing but a dream.”

BD chirped a beep of mock indignation, hopping off Cal’s shoulder onto the table. Cal gave the little droid a sidelong look. “He says…we should raise the stakes.”

Liyani arched a brow. “What kind of stakes?”

“Winner picks a dare.”

Bode grinned. “I like it. Adds drama.”

“Now that,” she said slowly, “I can get behind.”

Bode leaned in, eyes glinting. “You’re into dares? Color me shocked.”

Liyani’s eyes glinted like the edge of a vibroblade. “Drama’s good,” she murmured. “Keeps the table awake.”

Cal smirked. “You saying you’re bored already?”

“Only of slow company.”

That earned a scoff from Bode. “Alright then. Winner gets to give a dare, and preferably something that won’t get us all thrown out the airlock.”

“Meaning you’ve tried that before?” she asked.

He shrugged. “Depends on who’s asking.”

Her smile was thin but amused. “Noted.”

Cal’s voice dropped. He leaned forward, steady. “Alright. Winner picks the dare.”

“Now you’re talking,” she murmured, satisfaction curling at the edge of her lips as she reshuffled the deck.

Not soon enough, Liyani’s last card hit the table with the sound of inevitability.

“Sabacc.”

Cal exhaled sharply. Bode let out a groan that could’ve rattled the hyperdrive.

“Again?” Bode complained, throwing his hands up. “I swear you’re bending the cards with your mind.”

She smiled faintly. “Wouldn’t need to if you played smarter.”

Cal’s eyes narrowed, amused. “You’re not supposed to taunt your opponents, you know.”

“That’s exactly what you’re supposed to do,” she countered, leaning back. 

“Confidence,” she said eventually, eyes flicking toward Bode, “makes losing prettier.”

He barked a laugh. “Did you just call me pretty?”

Her eyes lowered again, lazy amusement glinting. “I said losing makes you prettier. Try to keep up.”

Bode grinned, taking it in stride, already reaching for another card.

But Cal’s fingers stilled on his.

It wasn’t a glare, only a subtle narrowing of his gaze, a beat too long, a quiet tightening in his jaw.

Liyani noticed, really did. The air seemed to sharpen; her pulse picked up, though her tone didn’t change. Interesting.

“You both play like you’ve got something to prove,” she continued on smoothly, eyes still on her hand.

Bode chuckled. “You say that like you don’t.”

“Oh, I do.” Her gaze slid up briefly, past Bode, to Cal. “Just… different things.”

Cal held her look for a fraction longer than polite. “That’s dangerous talk at a sabacc table.”

“Everything worth doing is dangerous.” Her smile didn’t quite reach her eyes. “Didn’t anyone teach you that, Jedi?”

He leaned back, voice low. “Maybe I just like learning the hard way.”

Bode’s brows reached his hairline, unimpressed as he stared the table down. “Okay, am I the only one still trying to win here?”

Liyani’s grin returned, quick and sharp. “You’re losing beautifully.”

Cal snorted, shaking his head, the hint of a smile cutting through his composure.

“Alright, alright,” Bode said, rubbing his temples. “A deal’s a deal. Winner names a dare.

Liyani glanced between them, fingers drumming against the edge of the table. Blue light rippled across her cheekbones. “A dare,” she repeated, like she was tasting the word. “Fine.”

Her gaze lingered on Cal.

“Since you two think I’m all smoke and mirrors…” she said slowly, voice smooth, “…let’s test who’s really got a steady hand.”

She reached into her belt, pulled free one of her smaller blades, and laid it on the table. The light caught the metal, dull but still deadly.

Bode blinked, unimpressed.

She smiled, languid. “Whoever lost holds the knife between their fingers. Winner flicks it, slow. Close. No contact.”

Bode hesitated. “That’s not a dare, that’s an accident waiting to happen.”

“Then don’t flinch.”

Cal’s lips curved into something that wasn’t quite a smile. “You want me to trust you with a knife?”

Her brow arched. “I thought you trusted easily, Jedi.”

“I do,” he said softly, but there was a pulse in his voice. “Just not when someone looks that eager to test it.”

Bode chuckled, still clueless to the static brewing between them. “Fine, I’ll go first. Let’s see if I live through this.”

He slid his hand forward. She flicked the blade gracefully, the point landing between his fingers with barely a whisper. The look on Bode’s face was half put-on ease, half relief.

“Force save me,” he muttered, hand still rigid. “You’re terrifying.”

She only turned to Cal in response. “Your turn.”

He didn’t move right away. The cabin felt tighter, the hum of the engines louder. Slowly, he set his hand on the table; palm flat, fingers spread. “Go on, then.”

Her gaze flicked up to meet his. For once, no grin, no quip. Just that pulse of something taut between them; curiosity, danger, maybe both.

The blade whispered through the air. A clean flick, and it hit the surface just shy of his knuckle. Neither flinched.

“Didn’t even blink,” she murmured.

“Didn’t need to.”

She tucked the blade away again, movements fluid, eyes on the cards like nothing had happened. But her pulse hadn’t steadied, and her lips still carried the traces of her wicked grin. 

The silence after that was warm, almost familial; the strange kind of quiet that came only after too much adrenaline and too much laughter. Hyperspace washed its blue light over all three of them, tinting their faces like ghosts caught in motion.

Bode finally broke it with a sigh. “You’re a menace, anyone told you that?”

“Frequently,” she replied, voice lazy.

“And if we ever end up in another card game-”

“Over my dead body,” she said flatly, immediately.

“That can be arranged,” Bode muttered under his breath, earning himself a warning look from Cal and a bright flash of teeth from her.

Chapter Text

9 BBY, DAIYU

The Mantis bled out of hyperspace like a thing waking from sleep, the stars stretching and snapping back into place. Daiyu rose under them: a lattice of glass and steel, neon aurebesh spilling green and magenta, monorails threading through stacked levels like silver veins. Even from orbit, the city felt alive, a skin that quivered with a million small lives and a thousand threats.

Cal felt it first as a pressure in his chest, a tightening behind the sternum that had nothing to do with the drop. It was the city, yes, the alive underworld Daiyu promised, but it was also the memory of the cards stacked against the table in the galley, the blade laid flat between them, Liyani’s smile like a spark. He’d expected to be jangled, but not like this, the quiet pull that settled at the base of his throat when he thought of her.

Bode moved with the casual surety of a man who belonged to such dark places, with no troubles blending right in. He handled the docking and the bribes and the airway permissions as though he did it every day, which, to most people’s misfortune, he did. He was already briefing routes and exits even as the cargo clamps released.

Liyani checked her weapons holster with a small, almost private attention. She had a way of doing things that looked too casual for the danger in it: fingers nimble and sure, leather slick with polish, hair unbound from the tight braid to fall in waves. The neon light caught the black curve of her hair as they stepped into the hangar, and for half a breath, Cal forgot to breathe.

He stood a few feet away, checking gear with the same precision he breathed with. Hood, belt, blaster, and saber tucked under. He looked ready to pass through a street of smugglers and spice dealers unnoticed, except he didn’t. He looked like a Jedi pretending not to look like a Jedi.

Liyani clocked it instantly. She pulled in front of him without asking and reached up, tugging the seam of his collar lower.

“This,” she murmured, smoothing the fabric down, “is a dead giveaway.”

Cal blinked. “My… collar?”

“Your entire aura is screaming 'I help old ladies across the street'.”

“That’s...a bad thing?”

“Here?” She stepped closer, fingers brushing the tension of his shoulders as she pulled his hood forward. “It’s basically asking to get mugged.”

Her touch hovered, light, her thumbs brushing the warm line where his neck met his jaw. Cal went totally still, gaze locked on hers, and she felt it hit her, that sharp, quiet awareness that lived between them.

She shouldn’t have looked up, because his eyes were already on her.

Impossibly green, steady, unreadable but warm, and when she caught him staring, his breath hitched almost imperceptibly. Liyani felt it like static across her ribs.

Cal cleared his throat, rougher than normal. “We should go… blend in,” he said, not moving an inch.

“We will,” she murmured. “Once you stop looking like you care about the very strangers we're here to exploit for our own agenda.”

He huffed, offended. “I can look the part just fine. I want to think I've been doing great so far.”

“Mm.” Her fingers lingered at his jaw before she finally withdrew. “We’ll see.”

The air was magnetic, and it tightened until Bode’s voice cut through.

“You two done touching each other?” he called, hood already up.

Cal's head snapped up, and Liyani cleared her throat, feeling caught. She recovered first.

“Let’s go,” she said, slipping into the rain.

The Bleeding Moon lived beneath the lip of a collapsed walk, an alley that reeked of spilled drinks and motor oil. Its sign hummed in cobalt and acid pink. The bouncer, a Trandoshan with a face like hammered brass, took one look at them and let them in with a grunt. Inside, Daiyu’s heartbeat was louder: low bass, the scrape of boots, laughter cut with the clack of language Cal didn’t know. Holographic banners dropped like moths, casting false skies across the low ceiling. Anchorites’ hymns weren’t welcome here; the music was the religion. The bar itself sat like a wound in the room: half its patrons were shadowed, half luminous, any of them tradeable if the price was right.

Bode melted into the place without ceremony, a familiar animal in an unfamiliar den. He knew which booths held information, which tables traded favors, which booths were safe to ask questions in when you had credits to burn and a voice that could sing you a lie. “We keep it low,” he said by way of plan. “We split up. Small talk, big ears. Let's find this Kesh Orra.”

He slipped in first, the kind of ease that made the room’s peripheral glances slide off him. He scanned as he moved, not the quiet, thorough scan Cal did, but a more social read: eyes pausing on faces, absently cataloguing which one of their kind might be persuaded, who might take a friendly bet, who would trade information for a bottle. He had the kind of ease that worked the room without seeming to work it.

A Zeltron with ultraviolet-streaked hair, one of those performers who traded winks for credits, caught his eye. She was attractive in the way the night was, not polite, entirely unapologetic, and very good at making people tell her what they wanted to hide.

He shot them a grin over his shoulder. “Don’t wait up.”

He sidled up to her with a remark about the music and a grin that had a polite edge to it. She responded with a laugh and a nudge, and suddenly Bode had a new, willing friend to fish for scraps of local gossip. He slid into the corner nearest the slicer-stand and began the work of a man who loved the craft of bleeding secrets out of people politely.

Cal’s senses adjusted when he came in a heartbeat later, quieter, the sort of person who filled a doorway with calm more than presence. He didn’t need to shout to be noticed. People moved around him the way leaves shift around a stone in a stream. His jacket was practical rather than flashy, wet from the damp outside, hood pressed low, Liyani's own personal touch. He chose the side of the bar with the better view of the room and drifted into a conversation with a pair of smugglers nursing something that looked like regret and cheap liquor. He asked about Kesh Orra, Caedon's lead and their contact, in the same straight way a man asks for a route on a map; the smugglers gave him half-interested sneers and misdirections, the sort of small refusals the city specialized in.

Liyani, however, made a straight line for the bar.

She slipped onto a stool like she belonged there, because she did. Places like Daiyu bars loved her type: quiet, observant, beautiful enough to draw attention, dangerous enough to keep it. She didn’t need to signal anyone; they always found her.

The first drink slid toward her in under thirty seconds. A middle-aged human in expensive clothes, a long coat, jeweled rings, thinning dark hair, but the confidence of a man who bought people for fun.

She accepted it with the almost bored grace of someone who had watched too much and learned how to exchange her silence for power. The man was mid-forties, had money pressed into his posture, and patience worn thin on the edge. He was the sort who thought a pretty face was a currency to be invested, and he let his coin fall in the form of a drink and a smile. Liyani sipped the brandy like someone testing the heat of a forge while she set about the quiet work of being dangerously charming.

He settled beside her.

“Evening,” he said, voice warm with arrogance. “Didn’t expect to see someone like you alone.”

Her lashes lifted. “Didn’t expect to be alone.”

There was a technique to it, one she’d honed through long nights of dangerous deals and softer manipulations. She let herself be amused by his long-winded stories about shipping lanes, his little self-inflating descriptions of power. She laughed at the jokes he told because small laughter keeps a man's hand generous. She smiled when he leaned in the way a tide leans on a shore, when she made him feel like the sole exquisite thing in the room.

He laughed, delighted, hooked, and gestured to the bartender. “Another, for the lady.”

“Careful,” she murmured, accepting the glass with a tilt of her head. “I might think you’re trying to impress me.”

“Oh, I am,” he said eagerly. “Nothing wrong with wanting a bit of company.”

She let her lips curve in a soft, practiced smile, a dangerously deceptive thing disguised as charm.

“Well,” she said lightly, “I do like my men generous.”

He brightened. She lowered her lashes. Within minutes, she had him pouring coins onto the counter to “help her family” on a far-off moon that, in fact, did not exist. He believed every word; they usually did.

For one moment, she almost felt the old rhythm return, a life she had been trying to leave behind, but its habits were still deeply ingrained like innate survival itself. Syndicate shadows, practiced smiles. The art of letting a man think he was winning.

Then something shifted, pressure aimed at her back, a sudden thrum in the Force.

She didn’t turn; there was no need. She knew exactly whose eyes were drilling holes into her back.

Cal’s conversation with the smugglers fell into a rhythm and then shattered around him within minutes, a pebble in a pond of half-truths. Because every time he glanced up, his eyes snagged on Liyani. She had the kind of presence that rewrites the room’s gravity; he found himself pulled out of professional focus by the ridiculous, steady draw of her.

The man at her side leaned too close, that slight invasion of space that reveals a man's assumptions, and Cal’s jaw worked in a way that told the rest of the room something simple and dangerous: this is mine, or at least he felt the impulse to act as though it was.

He told himself it was the mission, that the proximity of a stranger to a key asset was an operational detail. But the truth was less disciplined.

Jealousy was a small but practical sting, and for the first time since all those losses had taught him what guarding meant, it flared inside him as a private, hot thing, and he found that he absolutely hated it.

Cal’s jaw clenched, sharp, and most certainly involuntary. He tried to drag his attention back to the smugglers. “So if you know which stall-”

“He’s actually paying for her drink,” one of the smugglers snorted, following Cal's gaze across the room. “Lucky bastard.”

Cal didn’t remember ending the conversation, only moving.

The smugglers watched him go with the bored arrogance of men used to being left; their shoulders eased as if relief came in the form of walking away from a problem not their own. Cal crossed the room in controlled, quiet strides with his shoulders set that left no room for misinterpretation, hood casting a shadow over his eyes, jaw hard enough to crack duracrete.

Liyani felt the shift like a small electric warning across her skin. She did not drop the act. That was always the first rule; never let the stage falter. She batted the man’s ego with a phrase or two, let a laugh curve at the right place. Then she let her gaze wander, slow and careful, until it landed on the coming figure.

When she finally turned her head, just slightly, as if she could feel him coming, Cal swore he saw her breath hitch.

Cal didn’t speak or bother with a smile. Didn’t break eye contact with the man as soon as the other had dragged his gaze up to find Cal standing there. Cal simply stopped at Liyani’s side and folded his arms over his chest, and it wasn’t necessarily subtle.

The man raised a brow, seeming collected outwardly, but his voice rose by an octave. "I, ah—didn’t realize you were… with someone.”

She let the man hang on the edge of her attention a second longer. Close enough that the scent he carried, which was too much aftershave and a trace of expensive tobacco, made a small line across her tongue. Liyani watched Cal watch him, the way the room watched the tension briefly. A small grin of amusement tugged her mouth. This was a reaction she did not expect, and...Force, she liked it.

“Liyani,” Cal said, voice low and even as he ignored the man entirely, crisp in a way that straightened the shoulders of those who heard it. “We should move. We’re here for Kesh.” It sounded like a command, but it wore a softness that made it impossible to resist.

The man cleared his throat, suddenly feeling small. “I... um. I didn’t mean-” He stammered.

“We’re working,” Cal said finally, flatly. “And she’s needed.”

The man nodded fast, grabbed his drink, and scurried off like a kicked tooka. Only when he was out of sight did Cal let out a sharp, aggravated breath. The room seemed to settle as if a storm had passed.

Cal didn’t sit. He leaned one hand braced on the bar beside her, close enough that she felt the heat of him, far enough that he could pretend he wasn’t doing it on purpose.

Liyani leaned forward a fraction, elbows resting on the bar. She let the neon paint her features in ruby and teal; it made her skin look like polished wood and her eyes deepen to midnight, and the faint crescent curve on her forehead, one of her many, scattered and distinct Nightsister markings, caught the light. Cal’s gaze warmed in response like a hearth coming to life. For him, the world shrank to the distance between their faces. 

She tested him with a light prod. “You seem very fond of tucking men away in corners,” she murmured.

“I’m fond of keeping people safe,” he said. His voice had just enough friction in it to suggest he was holding back a deeper edge, earning him a raised brow.

“You didn’t need to encourage him,” he said quietly, after a moment.

“Encourage him?” Her brows arched even further. “I was gathering intel.”

“Is that what we’re calling it?”

Her laugh was low, throaty, and entirely teasing. “You sound jealous, Jedi.”

“I’m not jealous,” he said, and much too fast, tone too sharp.

“Mm.” She swirled her glass. “Then what exactly are you?”

He held her gaze, and for the first time since she’d met him, she saw something she dared call hungry flicker behind his eyes. It shot a thrill down her back.

“I’m focused,” he said, like a lie told with sincerity.

She leaned in, only slightly. “Focused on what?”

He didn’t step back. “I think you know.”

For three heartbeats, neither moved.

Her chest tightened, and not from fear or panic, but something far more dangerous: wanting. This man, who radiated light he didn’t know he carried. This man, whose breath she could practically feel on her cheek now that they were close enough, she didn’t dare move.

She dragged her fingertips along the rim of her glass.

“You should be careful, Cal,” she said softly. “People might get the wrong idea here.”

“What idea is that?”

“That you’re…” She paused, hunted for the right word. “…interested.”

He didn’t flinch or blink, only let a moment pass. “I am.”

Something hot, sharp, and dizzying dropped in her stomach. She masked it with a coy tilt of her head.

“Careful,” she whispered. “You don’t know what you’re saying.”

“I know exactly what I’m saying.”

Oh. Maker help her.

This was a different Cal; warmer, darker, a more instinct-driven Cal.
He wasn’t loud, wasn’t touching her, but he was looking at her like he’d been waiting for this moment since Bracca.

She swallowed, walls threatening to shoot right back up, like the exact moment before a free fall. “We have a mission-”

“I’m aware.”

“And you’re-”

His whisper cut through her defenses.

“You think I don’t see what you’re doing?” he murmured. “The way you talk, the way you look at me. The way you just used that man for information.”

“That’s not-”

“You’re good at it,” he said quietly. “Too good. And part of me…” He leaned in another fraction of an inch. “…really hates watching it.”

She froze.

There it was again. Raw, unfiltered jealousy, burning through him like wildfire. She hadn’t expected it, not from him, not from someone who’d spent years pretending the Jedi code was a shield instead of a cage.

Her heart thudded. She let her lips part, just slightly.

“You shouldn’t hate it,” she breathed.

“Why’s that?”

“Because I didn’t care about him.”

His chest rose slowly. “And who do you care about?”

The question hit her like a blade pressed to her throat, never painful but incredibly precise.

She shouldn’t answer, she really shouldn’t.

“Cal,” she warned, the faint whisper a plea all the same as her breath hit his face now.

He didn’t pull away. Liyani’s fingers brushed his wrist, barely a touch, accidental or intentional, she wasn’t sure - and Cal’s eyes dropped to her mouth like gravity had a personal vendetta against him.

“Back to the contact,” Bode suddenly called over from where he had collected a useful scrap: a name spelled wrong on a manifest, a time and place that might lead to Kesh Orra. The Zeltron’s flirtations had given him something in exchange after a laugh and a favor. He wanted to be useful and folded it into the room’s hum.

From across the room, where he had notched a few useful nuggets from the Zeltron’s gossip, he raised an eyebrow and mouthed something that might have been a playful curse Cal's way, as if knowing exactly what he had interrupted.

She sat up so quickly, it almost gave him whiplash. Her laugh was quiet, almost indecent in the way it softened the tautness of the bar’s light. He watched it ripple like water. Liyani’s amusement shifted to something more complicated, something like warmth wrapped in an unexpected, cautious fondness. “You’re very dramatic for a Jedi.”

He didn’t give the wide, embarrassed laugh some would have. Instead, he held her gaze for a moment longer, then offered a small, restrained smile and folded his hands where they could be seen. “Only when required,” he said. “Now let’s find Kesh.”

He traced the line of her jaw with his eyes, memorizing the crescent marking on her brow like one studies a map to a hidden harbor. The room around them hummed, and the city took another breath; Kesh was a step away, and the rest of the night waited like an unread page.

The rain on Daiyu was not simple water. It fell in thin, oily sheets that slicked polymer and chrome, catching neon like scattered coins. It smelled like iron and cedar smoke and the chemical tang of cheap synth-liquor. It sank into leather and plastic, and the skin that did not expect kindness. Liyani felt it on her face as they moved, droplets beading at the edge of her lashes.

Slip Alley, the Zeltron had said.

They were not going to Slip Alley because it was scenic. It was an offhanded crumb passed to them, but a crumb none of them wanted to let cool. Kesh Orra’s name had been folded into the whisper the Zeltron spoke between giggles, and whispers, Liyani knew, were usually wrapped around truths someone was too afraid to say outright.

When they found the narrow way that led down into the east grid, the light became a close thing. Alley walls rose like the sides of a gorge. Wires draped across each other like spider silk, some live with current and humming tiny songs. There were vending booths lit by smiling holo-faces. A child in a dark coat sold hot noodles out of a cart and kept one hand tucked inside to keep the credits dry. A woman with half her face replaced by an optical lattice stood as if carved from the neon and the rain.

Liyani noticed all of this the way someone notices the edges of a pattern. She catalogued faces, hands, gestures. She kept one register full of the things that might hurt them and another of the things that might help, that they might need. Bode looped off to a side stack of crates to play his charm on a pair of slicers; Cal moved closer to the alley’s mouth and scanned the crowd with that same steady patience that made people answer him as though they had no choice.

They found Kesh Orra because Kesh wanted to be found. He sat slumped across two chairs under a leaking awning, a thin, smoldering cigarette cupped in one yellowed hand. His eyes were the kind you only saw in men who had given up on hiding their pain; they were small and bright and hard, the way flint is. He should have been invisible, a relic of another problem, but the alley gave him bridge-light and a stillness that made him visible like a cornerstone.

He didn’t stand when Cal came up and did not look up quickly when Liyani slid into the booth opposite. He took his time answering like a man who stored patience in his ribs.

“You Kesh?” Cal asked. His voice was quiet, but people opened up to him because it reminded them of a calm wind.

Kesh’s mouth twitched. “Depends who’s asking, and who’s paying.” He spat ash into a puddle as though the cigarette had been an agreement he was done with. “What’s it to you?”

Bode moved in, sliding an envelope of credits and a quick promise. He was all competency and smiles, a business face that cost. Kesh peered at it. “Now that pays attention.” He tucked the envelope away, like a man tucking a memory into a safe drawer. “You’ve come looking for relic dust, then. Old routes. Safehouses.”

Cal exchanged a look with Liyani. Kesh looked at her without surprise, as if her presence was a story he had already half-read.

“You know Caedon?” Cal asked.

Kesh snorted. “Names float in this city like feathers. Caedon was a courier. Brave, stubborn, maybe too saintly for his own good. Kept tabs on routes, people, and safehouses. Kept the kind of notes that read like maps for people who don’t like the Empire’s ledger.” He turned his head to spit the words into the rain. “You want the small piece? There’s a relay on a roof in the old supply grid. High Republic-era tech... someone with a sad face and a soldering iron put it there like a prayer. It hums differently. Caedon marked the alignment once, said 'the stars were honest there', whatever the kriff that's supposed to mean.”

Liyani felt the words like a hand at the back of her neck. High Republic, relay, hum - terms Cal had used in the past, small pieces of lore that fit like puzzle corners. Kesh’s voice had the flat humor of someone who had stopped believing and yet loved stories anyway. He was almost poetically pessimistic when he said, “The stars don’t owe us anything. They just keep orbiting while we lie to ourselves about their meaning.”

Cal’s jaw lifted a fraction. “You don't believe in it?” he asked.

“Believe?” Kesh spat, half-laughing. “I sell belief by the ounce. I don’t keep much.” Then he surprised them by leaning in, voice low: “But the relay… it hums like something that remembers. If you listen, really listen, you might find a pattern that points toward a planet no one much remembers... What was it, Tanalorr? Old stories, old bones. If Caedon wrote that note, he was not a liar.”

Bode’s hand brushed Liyani’s arm for a second when he leaned in. “You sell this as rumor or do you shoot straight?” he asked.

Kesh lifted his cigarette and pinched the ember out with a thumb. “I sell what I can prove, brother. The roof relay? I can get you access. I can get you a look at its signature. But I’m not buying myth. I’m buying a cut. Everything has a price, this one’s risk.” He tapped his temple. “If you’re feeling sentimental, the relay will hum for you.”

Cal’s face lit with something like a compass realigning. “Show us.”

Kesh blinked slowly and set the terms. It was not money only. There were tasks: a favor for a favor. He wanted a small service done on a courier’s route, rerouting a manifest that had been mislabelled, and he wanted them to promise discretion. Bode accepted with a grin, Cal agreed quickly and directly; there was a steadiness in his voice that made the bargain feel settled as soon as it left his mouth.

Liyani listened. The details were solid enough in the pragmatic way of men who traded in risks. When the favor was laid out (reroute a manifest between docks three and nine and make sure a certain crate never arrives at its ledger) she folded it into her ledger of necessary things. She would do it. It cleared Caedon’s name a little more and left a small credit on her conscience.

When they left Kesh, the rain had thinned into a fine mist. The alley lights turned puddles into stars. Cal walked closer than he had been before. He began to tell the others the specifics the way a man tells a map to be believed; his voice was full and bright with something like triumph. They had a way forward. A relay, a roof, an access, steps threaded together into something true.

Liyani found herself smiling when Cal’s sentences stumbled into a laugh. Bode clapped him on the back, and the two men exchanged what looked like the small private joy of two people who had won in the smallest possible way. They were delighted in a manner that made the city feel less like a closing throat.

She stood at the edge, watching them bond. The thought that kept unspooling in the spaces between her ribs was taut and real: once this was done, she would leave. Daiyu would be a checkpoint on a path she’d set for herself, and this night would be the closing of a circle. She would pay her debts, clear Caedon’s name in the small way she could, and then slink into darkness. It was a neat plan.

Cal’s arm suddenly slipped around her without the ceremony he might have used in another life. It was impulsive, and gentle, and the kind of thing a person does when joy overrides caution.

He was taller than her; she measured his shoulder often, and when he swiftly drew her in, the difference in their heights made her look up at his jaw like a lighthouse. The arm was close, protective, an instinctive thing to keep cold places warmed. She felt it like a heat in the rain.

For a second, the movement startled her. She had not expected this tenderness and yet did not resist. His arm was steady. She let her own shoulder lean into him secretively and perhaps deep down, selfishly. The contact was brief but heavy in its innocence.

Bode watched them and, surprisingly, his face softened instead of plotting. He did not look away, but he did not intrude. The internal calculus of his loyalties, always a sharp instrument in him, shifted in the presence of something lighter than his usual plans. He had a large hand in manipulation, yes, but he had a soft knot of something he kept for Cal, like a hidden emblem. He let the moment be.

They pushed onward, cutting through the market outside the alley, a cavern of traders and homely thieves. Stalls sold tweaked sight-augmentations, used droid cores, and spice in little paper cones. The market’s sounds braided into one another: the seller’s croak, the rattle of a cart, an old woman calling the day’s catch of mechanical parts, a child laughing with a voice too loud for his years. The neon made dances of lights on the puddles.

Bode drifted toward a stack of broken slicer-ports and cheap comm rigs, already audibly bargaining with a kid who had one functioning optic and two good lungs. Cal moved toward the shadowed end near a vendor of old ship parts; his fingers found a datapad and thumbed through signatures the way a priest reads scripture.

Liyani hung back, drawn to a corner where a pair of addicts, faces thin with chemical hunger and eyes bright with the cheap thrill of anything new, were hawking a bag of spice that smelled like burning citrus.

The two addicts noticed her; every beggar and thief notices where a door might open. They offered her a sample with the practiced lilt of people who knew how to turn attention into coins.

It should have been a reflex to decline. Instead, she reached, and for a second that felt like the ghost of an old habit when she touched the little pouch, and let a small pinch of spice nestle in her palm.

It was stupid, more an unconscious ritual than hunger. She slid the pinch into the inner seam of her pocket with an absent nod of thanks, a small souvenir to be thrown away later or used to keep a hand steady if the night turned sideways. Bad habit. Old comfort. Mostly, she did it to feel the small, reckless pleasure of doing something without thinking.

“Liyani.”

The voice slid across her shoulder like satin. She felt it before she turned, a presence that knew the edges of her old life. He stood close enough now that she could see the fine silver scars riming his cheek and the small ridge where the helmet had once cut his temple. No visor, no helmet. The Mandalorian's face was bare and dangerous and strangely intimate for a man whose armor once answered to the very orders she had helped carry out.

Zor.

He had a smile that did not curve so much, and eyes that were mild until they were not. He was younger than the myth that hung around Darth Maul’s name, but the scars did not lie. They spoke of work done in other names, of unspeakable orders carried out without questions asked. There was a practiced flirtation about him that belonged to his kind, a tilt of the head, a measured softness that could be as lethal as any vibroblade.

“You never changed,” he said, and his smile was a pure facade.

She kept her face smooth. The market would swallow visible fear, but Liyani had always preferred to hide tremors. “Neither did you,” she said, a measured reply with a neutral edge. “You look better without the helmet.”

Zor’s laugh was a small, dry thing. “You always look like trouble knits itself into your hair. That suit of yours hides a lot of stories.” He took a step closer, and the crowd parted only because people had learned to make room for danger. “You still play with spice, Liyani? Figures... Temptation suits you.”

For a second, she considered telling the addicts to shove off. Instead, she let him see her fingers close around the small pouch in her pocket. “It suits lots of things,” she said, voice casual. “Less interested in temptation than in companies that pay well.”

He cocked his head. “Companies?” It was the old joke they used when both of them had been on the same ledgers, the old numbers that tied men to names. “You mean the ones that don’t keep receipts?”

“What else,” she said, and the banter slid between them like a blade, soft threats wrapped in silk. 

Liyani felt Cal in the corner of her eye before she saw him. He was already moving through the stalls, cutting across the crowd. He had been watching, she knew, had probably seen Zor from the moment his shadow fell near the stall. She had not wanted him to see, not because she wanted to hide Zor’s presence from him, but because she had promised herself she would keep the night small and tidy.

She would not drag her mess into this.

Zor’s voice leaned lower, the crowd turning into a cushion for their words. “You left.” It was not a question, it was a fact laid naked.

“It could've gone more smoothly,” she said, attempting to appear nonchalant, but the spice she’d pocketed burned cold against her palm.

He moved around her, close enough that the reek of his armor was a presence, old oil and warmed metal. “You left the wrong people, Liyani. That kind of thing doesn’t forgive.”

She watched the way he looked at her and felt the old map of fear unroll. She had walked away from a ledger and not looked back; she had, naively, thought leaving would be tidy. 

Zor smiled like a man who likes the sharp corner of a bargain. “People collect debts. People who remember names you thought were gone, Liyani. I remember names, and I remember faces. And I certainly have a taste for old business.”

The edge in his voice made the taste of copper rise in her mouth.

If he mentioned the one name she truly feared, the one she’d shoved hard and far into her chest like a secret, she might truly tip. He didn’t say the name. 

She tried to keep it light. People in stalls watched, half trying to see the spectacle. Liyani let the banter do the work, but her fingers tightened, the spice tucked into her pocket like a stupid, private talisman. “You used to be useful,” she said. “Now you’re just a rolling tin can.”

Zor tilted his head. “Don’t push me, Liyani. Not here.”

She smiled tightly. “I don’t think you’d enjoy the cold.”

He came a fraction closer and said softly, the words almost lost in the ambient chitter of the market, “You should know if you step too far, the people who watch for you don’t love you. They remember what you were.”

It was the oldest type of threat, a ghost rapped at the window: the implication that someone more terrible would come for her.

Liyani felt the old coil of panic in the back of her throat, the one she had taught herself to swallow. So she did what she always did: she built the story for a second and wrapped herself in it so tight it fit like armor.

“Everyone I know is expendable,” she said, voice soft as velvet. Then, dangerously, she added, “Everyone except those who share my blood.”

The words sat between them like flint. She had not planned on saying them, but she hadn't planned on being confronted by her past so quickly, either. Zor’s expression shifted, a micro-change the length of a heartbeat that told her she had landed a line she did not mean to allow.

He laughed, but it held a sharp edge. “Family lines are fine protection until the ledger wants payment. Don’t make claims you can’t afford, Nightsister.”

The old name, Nightsister, landed with a precise weight. Liyani’s mouth curved, and she pushed forward the bluff she had not meant to show: the one where she offered him a reason not to sell her name.

“You listen to me,” she said, closing the distance and using the heat of the crowd to hide fear. “There are things you don’t sell. There’s a ledger you don’t cash when it has the wrong name. If you think naming me, selling me out, gets you more coin, you should know the cost... He doesn’t kill his own.”

Zor’s mouth tightened. He blinked fast like a man who’d had a curtain pulled aside and didn’t like the stage he saw. “He?” he asked. He did not name the one Liyani feared, the old master, but the implication was clear. The Mandalorian’s eyes slid to the corner of her smile. “You’re a funny liar.”

Liyani’s fingers curled a notch more in her pocket. She could feel the pulse in her thumb, a ridiculous, pointless comfort. “You know enough to be careful, Zor.” Her voice was small now, less theater and more raw.

Zor watched her for a long beat. Then he did something that surprised her and relieved her in equal parts: he shrugged. “Maybe you’re honest, or maybe you’re a very dedicated fool.” He took a step back. “Either way, I’m not in the business of dying for old orders.” Then, almost to himself, “Not tonight.”

He turned his head the barest fraction and scanned the sky. He saw Cal finally, marching toward them like a man about to do what men who love do best, which was to protect. The way Cal walked had a clarity that hit Zor like a gust of wind. He paused long enough to raise one brow at Liyani in question, a slow, cold read, and then he vanished into the crowd as if he was never there.

Liyani watched him go, the whole of her breathing a single tight exhale. She had not wanted to make that bluff, and yet it had worked, at least for now. Her legs felt unsteady, and she, herself, foolish and alive. She’d gambled a dangerous card in a market of knives and won a reprieve.

Cal reached her in two strides, taller and immediate. His face was the map of worry. “What did he say?” he asked, voice low and clipped.

She offered him nothing but a small, ironic smile and the words she used when she wanted to close a book and hide a page: “Old business. But I handled it.” She curled her fingers in a gesture that meant both truth and concealment.

He didn’t like the answer. His jaw worked as if physically exerted by patience. “Liyani,” he said again, softer this time, but with an edge in it, the way a net has tension when slowly being pulled taut. “If he’s here for you, you tell me. We don’t leave things half fixed on this ship.”

She saw the hurt in him cross like a quick shadow; it made something in her unfasten. “You do what you need to do,” she told him, and meant it both as reassurance and as an already-formed lie. She didn’t want to scare him with the full weight of what she’d been carrying, especially not tonight. Not when the relay was half a breath away.

Before he could argue, Bode returned, a small rectangle clutched to his palm like treasure. “Got what Kesh wanted,” he murmured, breathless from the bargaining. “Simple thing: check the frequency on the relay. If it pings like Kesh said, we’ve got our start.”

They moved out after that; the market’s life flowed around them, and they flowed with it. Cal’s hand brushed her hip once in passing, a small admonition, a reminder he was there and not leaving. Liyani let it happen, more steady now in the relief that the immediate danger had folded back into the crowd.

The market unwound behind them. The neon advertisements folded into the wet, vendors packed away battered wares, the last of the night’s barter calls petering into the throb of the city’s heart. The rain had returned, softer, the kind that made everything smell like old engines.

Bode fell into step beside Liyani with an effortless gait. Cal walked a little ahead, his jacket hood up against the drizzle, shoulders broad and composed. He kept his hands in his pockets, but his entire posture was taut, something coiled under that even breath, something resembling anger, or even fear. Liyani could feel it in the way he ground his jaw every time Zor’s name floated back to her like a stone.

“Anyone want to celebrate with a smoke?” Liyani asked suddenly, with the dry humor that made men underestimate her until it was too late. It was a half-joke that hung there like a candlestick in a chapel.

Cal didn’t answer; he only kept his steps measured, a small distance between them. Liyani could see the way his jaw ticked at the idea of Zor; she felt it as a pressure at the base of her ribs. Bode, surprising her, answered before Cal could, with a quick, eager nod that she didn’t expect.

“Yeah. I could use one,” Bode said. “We never get to celebrate. Why not?”

They found a small alcove between a shuttered vendor and a stack of discarded comm-cores. Liyani pulled a deathstick, one she’d slipped from the bar earlier, because old habits were a comfort, from the inside of her jacket. The paper felt silly in her fingers, and sacred at once. She struck it between her palms and offered the lit end to Bode. He took a deep drag, closed his eyes, and for the briefest moment, his face eased into something like relief.

“You always had terrible habits,” Cal said, voice flat. He kept his eyes on the avenue as if expecting something at any moment.

“You say that like you don’t,” Liyani replied, and the smoke curled out of her mouth in a little white ghost. It tasted like guilt and adrenaline and the cheap joy of doing something decidedly petty after a night of high stakes. Bode handed the deathstick back, grinned, and lit another off the same ember. The two of them shared it like conspirators, passing it back and forth as if their lungs might stitch something together between them.

“Remember your worst hangover?” Bode asked suddenly, voice low as if the market itself might gossip too loudly.

Liyani turned, smirk half-formed. “The kind of stories that get you banned in respectable cantinas?” she said. “Go on, start with your masterpiece.”

“Alright. This is mine. Back in the Ferrix years... small-time job, big-time arrogance. We thought we could cheat a dock manifest. No plan, little credits. We celebrated like we were kings. Next morning? I wake up in a cargo hold, someone’s dropped a bucket of coolant on my head, and the ship had left. No credits, no ship. I had to lug three crates of frozen synthesizers across half the planet for a week, trying to sell them at market rates to pay off a cold debt. I may or may not have slept in a storm drain for two nights, and I definitely ate wet, expired ration bars. Sworn off cheap rum ever since.”

He smiled at the memory like it was a bruise. Liyani laughed, genuine and bright. Even Cal cracked with the sound, the laugh more of a loose exhalation.

“Your turn,” Bode said, smoke curling about his head like a halo with jagged edges.

Liyani rocked back on her heel. “I have one,” she said, voice low. “Not my proudest. You remember Nar Shaddaa? I was running a courier job and thought I could make it clever. Misread a route, ended up in a building that was not quite a building, but the private swoop ring I told you about. Halfway through a bid, someone recognized the insignia I’d been wearing accidentally — long story — and thought I was a planted distraction. I spent the rest of the night cheering with the crowd until some idiot pulled a gun and turned the event into chaos. I slipped out with someone’s helmet and a crate that wasn’t mine, sold it, and walked off with enough to feed a small village for a week. Embarrassing, but luck mostly when you think of it.”

Cal met her gaze then, the neon pooling under his eyes, and for a moment, the world narrowed into a single small bright point where they were. He smiled, the kind of smile that usually lived in his chest rather than his face. “You always manage to turn chaos into your own playground?”

She shrugged, letting the compliment rest. The smoke made the air look soft and ridiculous, and she liked the way it softened the edge of the night. They walked on, each step taking them closer to the Mantis and - in Liyani’s private tally - closer to the moment she would step away from it.

The ramp of the Mantis rose like a waiting mouth in the dock, a bright strip of light cutting a path into the ship. Cal pushed the ramp control and the walkway hummed. Bode clapped Cal on the shoulder in a brotherly, transient way, a touch that said more than the words would have. “Good work today,” he said, half-grinning, as the two of them moved up.

Liyani paused at the foot of the ramp. She felt the ship’s hum in her bones, the familiar thrum that always made wanderers feel safe. For a moment, she imagined stepping aboard and staying. The thought pricked like a fresh wound, and then she quickly shoved it away, Zor's face flashing before her eyes. She had plans. Dangerous, messy plans that did not include the compromised canvas of family that the Mantis offered. She had her own ghosts to settle and a debt to pay that wasn’t really hers to forget.

Bode, finishing a quip, looked back and saw her there. His face softened minimal,ly and the performative bravado fell away into something simple and friendlike. He reached out and clasped her shoulder in a way that felt warm and genuine, a farewell without ceremony. It was a gesture he didn’t often show, and she felt it like the touch of a hand remembered.

“You sure you’re not coming up?” he asked lightly, less probing she had come to associate with him, more just wanting to give her the space to say the thing she wanted to.

She met his eyes. “I’m sure,” she said, and the smile she gave him was hesitant but true. It was a small bridge being burned, and she acknowledged that burning with a measured grin.

He gave her a squeeze in return, the kind of clasp that held something like approval and quiet affection. It was the friendliest they’d been, and it felt like a benediction. For a second, she almost wanted to change her mind.

But she didn’t. He turned and walked up the ramp, his silhouette swallowed by the Mantis’ belly, the sound of boots on metal receding into the ship. Liyani watched him go with an odd, hollow satisfaction, the kind that comes when you have to promise yourself you are doing the right thing.

That left the two of them alone on the dock: Cal, taller and steady; Liyani, small under the neon halo and the sky. The rain found the rim of her lashes and weighed them down with tiny glints. The hum of the Mantis was a heartbeat behind them.

He did not speak at first. He simply watched her: the curve of her crescent marking at her forehead, the dark lake of her eyes, the way the rain pooled in her hair and made black look like polished glass. He memorized the line of her cheek and the unreadable angle of her mouth. He kept the map of her in his head the way sailors keep stars: for certainty, and for return.

Finally, she broke the silence, voice small and rough with a confession she hadn’t thought to give anyone. “I know I haven’t been fair to you,” she said. The words came out brittle. “I will explain everything one day.”

He made no move to interrupt. His stillness wasn't indifference, it was the kind of attentive listening that was an act of care. She hated that she wanted him to fix everything with one look, then hated him for being the stubborn and light, and clear kind of man. He was the kind of man who made her feel like a tarnish, like something wrong had visited his brightness and could infect it.

“I need to get people off my back,” she continued, the confession spilling faster now. “Before someone I care about dies because of me...I’ll probably find you again. Odds are against us, but I’ll look. If the world is reasonable, maybe I’ll find you. And if not… if this is too complicated for you, I get it. I do.”

She tried to frame it in a way that left him room to walk. She tried to offer an exit. She wanted to be merciful for once, to give him the choice.

Cal’s shoulders softened. He did not say the obvious. That yes, he would wait in every universe. Because he had learned perhaps too late the weight of absolute promises. Instead, his voice was steady as he answered, “I’ll wait, Liy.”

Her breath hitched.

Liy.

It was a small phrase and a big one. There was a lifetime in the quiet between the words. He stepped closer then and lifted his hand. His palm cupped her cheek with the gentleness of someone who handled fragile things for a living. The neon light painted his skin with washed color; the rain sat on their faces like jewels.

He paused, searching her face, then leaned forward and pressed his lips to her forehead in a soft, almost apologetic kiss. His mouth brushed the crescent marking he had adored since he had first laid his eyes on her, an old sigil stamped into her skin, and for the moment, the whole of Daiyu reduced itself to that small, intimate act. It was not a lover’s claim but a promise that he held a part of her sacred, even if she could not be whole.

Liyani closed her eyes at the contact. It landed like something she had not asked for but desperately needed. She tasted the salt of rain and a little of the city and something like the small beginnings of a future. She let herself keep the moment, selfishly.

When they broke apart, the ship’s ramp was quiet, the Mantis humming softly like a chest. The night felt heavy with all the things unspoken.

Liyani straightened, set her shoulders, and turned away. She walked into the alleys alone, the city swallowing her shape. The device, the relay readout, the map to whatever might be on Tanalorr’s dust, sat like a promise in the ship where Cal and Bode would take it back to Jedha. He would hold it as if it were both treasure and responsibility, and he would think of her in the glow of it.

As she melted into Daiyu’s rain, she kept the memory of the kiss like a small thing tucked into her palm. For a few steps, she allowed herself to imagine a life where she did not have to be a cautionary tale. Only then did she put the thought away because there were debts that would not wait for her to be brave on her own terms.

Bode took the console as if nothing in the world had changed beyond a minor inconvenience. The ship’s ramp folded up with a soft mechanical sigh. Cal watched until the grate closed and the light in the dock dimmed. He walked inside a moment later, shoulders heavier and a little lighter at once.

Chapter Text

14 BBY, BRACCA

...Bracca stank of melted durasteel and the kind of grease that ate through even the strongest of boots. That was her first thought stepping off the transport: the smell, not the scavenger towers rising like rusted teeth or the excessive humidity trapped beneath stagnant clouds.

A graveyard world. Exactly the kind of place Maul favoured for things he didn’t want witnessed.

The seventeen-year-old Nightsister pulled her hood lower. Her boots hit the duracrete with a silent, predatory rhythm. She kept her hips loose, shoulders relaxed, and every line of her posture choreographed to appear harmless.

People let you close when you look unthreatening. And when you looked like her, they let you closer still.

Liyani no longer used magick; whether she was just scared deep down or simply refused to, she didn't concern herself with it, not since Dathomir. But the Dark Side without the ritual? That she wielded just fine. Maul had taught her that well, taught her to wield the Force like a blade rather than treating it like a sanctuary, taught her to separate it from the Nightsister rites that made her skin crawl even now.

She stepped into the shadows of the scrapyard’s perimeter fence. No need to check her tracker; she’d memorised every rotation of her target’s route. A Crimson Dawn traitor. A courier foolish enough to sell names to the wrong people. It was straightforward enough: They wanted his tongue removed and his datapad returned.

Anyone working for the crime world knew they didn’t particularly care for his tongue, and that, in simpler terms, he had to go. Rain slicked across her gloves as she dropped into a lower ventilation trench, moving through the tight spaces with ease as her shoulders brushed metal ribs, with her long hair tucked behind one ear. Ahead, the traitor’s silhouette hunched over a service case, muttering under his breath.

Liyani approached soundlessly.

One step forward.
Then another,...and with the third she had crossed the room.

She pressed the vibroblade beneath his ribcage.

He gasped. “Please-”

“Don’t beg,” she murmured, voice a low velvet rasp. “It makes this feel personal.”

She withdrew the blade and caught his weight as he crumpled, lowering him silently. He died fast, mercifully so. She retrieved the datapad from his inner pocket, making sure not a drop of blood touched her boots. Instead, she wiped the blade on his own sleeve.

Cheap man, and an even cheaper betrayal.

Another job done.

She straightened, pulled her hood back up, and vanished into Bracca’s night as if she’d never been there.

The traitor's bar wasn't far from there. It sat crooked atop a half-collapsed platform, its neon sign barely blinking like it wanted to die. Liyani stepped inside, letting the noise wash over her: some miners arguing, another pair of scrappers laughing too loudly, and the dull feeling of hopelessness baked into the metallic walls around it.

Incredibly depressing, and the perfect cover.

She slid onto a stool, crossing her legs with calculated ease. The bartender took one look at her and only watched for half a heartbeat, then looked away quickly, like a man who’d lived long enough to know trouble when he saw it.

“Corellian black,” she said, knowing she wasn’t going to drink it.

When he turned, she slipped the tiny listening node from her sleeve right into her palm and reached down, pressing it into the underside of the bar rail. The bug blinked once, active. Efficient and quick, but mostly vital to keep track of the business here. Eliminating the traitor always meant to make sure to clean any evidence, too.

She would’ve left immediately. Would’ve, if she hadn’t felt it.

A stare, and by no means the leering, predatory, transactional ones she had got to know over the years. It hit her temple like a feather. Slowly, she turned her head that way.

A red-haired boy-... Man? No, he was too young to be either properly. Too earnest, too open. Too…bright. That was it. He shone in a place where no one did, like someone had taken a lantern and left it burning where it shouldn’t.

His green eyes were fixed on her, with curiosity so clean it irritated her.

What was he? A kid? A scrapper? Some lost creature? He didn’t fit in the place, even less so the grime on his clothes. He radiated like a spark that refused to go out.

She hated that about him. Or maybe she loved that about him, but she didn’t really love anything. Not then, at least.

But she certainly felt stripped when he looked at her. Her pulse jumped, annoyed at itself.

So she did what she was best at. She stood, pulled her hood back over her hair, left her untouched drink on the counter, and walked out without giving him the satisfaction of seeing her glance back. Except, she could still feel him behind her.

She slowed, against her better judgment. She’d handled men like him a thousand times, even the naïve, idealistic types who were the easiest to manipulate, but he didn’t stare at her like any of that. There was no hunger or calculation, only that maddening sincerity she didn’t know what to do with.

She led him through the industrial corridor, the hiss of steam vents masking her footsteps. She didn’t need to look to know he was following, because the Force brushed against her awareness, faint but unmistakable, like a soft tug at the edge of her senses where she’d spent years refusing to look.

The shipwreck loomed ahead, its broken hull like a corpse sprawled across the dirt. She climbed easily onto its slanted frame, stood against the skyline with her arms folded. She let the wind pull strands of hair across her face and stared up at the smog-drowned stars. For a moment, she let herself breathe.

Don’t be stupid, she warned herself.

The rusted metal groaned softly behind her with heavy footsteps.

She knew it was him before he made a sound. He approached hesitantly, like someone trying not to scare off an animal. She found that almost amusing.

“Not many people come out here at night,” he offered quietly.

Smart, she thought. He was observing her, observing him.

“Not many should.” Her voice stayed clipped, letting him hear the warning in it.

He shifted, and she watched him from the corner of her eye, cataloguing him. He had broad shoulders despite his youth, calloused hands, and his eyes held something ancient and aching beneath the brightness. And where her kind would have used the saying "he reeks of a Jedi", here she only found herself thinking that he was almost perfumed in the Light.

“Guess I’ve never been good at should,” he said.

A tiny crack in her cool facade appeared, barely a breath of amusement.

“You’re a little too curious for a scrapper,” she countered.

“You’re a little too smart for someone obviously hiding in plain sight.”

That earned a real, fleeting smirk from her before she could stop it. Encouraged, he stepped closer, cautious but determined. “You looked like you were waiting for something. Out there...Or someone.”

She lifted her gaze to the polluted sky. For a heartbeat, her armour slipped. She wasn't sure if he saw, but it distressed her. “And what if I was?”

He swallowed, chest rising with a breath he didn’t notice he took. “Then… I’d say I know what that feels like.”

His words struck somewhere she couldn’t afford to acknowledge, a place too honest, too close to her. She let herself soften for one moment. Only one, enough to feel dangerously young again, to forget that she’d killed a man an hour earlier without blinking.

Then she locked it all away. No one should see her, least of all someone like him.

Without another word, she turned sharply and walked across the tilted hull.

“Wait,” he called after her desperately, his feet quicker than his mind as they carried him two steps towards her.

She lifted a hand in a silent gesture, as a dismissal, a warning, and a mercy all in one. And then she slipped down the far side of the wreck, leaving that pitiful planet behind once and for all. She didn't ask for his name, and it was better this way. Still, his presence tugged faintly at the edge of her senses, still bewildered, but so, so warm.

9 BBY, NAR SHADDAA

She woke with a small, ruined taste in her mouth, and not from alcohol, because she barely had any, but from the stale machine-oil breath of the transport, and an almost overwhelming wave of hunger. Her head rested against the passenger window, and the blur of Daiyu’s neon had long since become a smear of wet colour. When she opened her eyes, the carriage hummed low and steady, the kind of noise that makes a person feel like they’re already in someone else’s story.

Her braid had come loose in sleep; she fumbled at it with one hand, fingers quick and efficient. It took a moment to find the rhythm of her body and uncurl the coil of exhaustion that had wrapped itself around her shoulders. She tasted the night in the back of her teeth and made herself sit up straighter.

Blinking the blurry memory of Cal away, she opened her eyes properly then and catalogued the carriage like it was a tiny theatre of possible threats.

A pair of maintenance workers in grease-streaked jumpsuits argued in a guttural dialect over missing parts. A woman in a shimmering mesh coat nursed a drink and a boredom that screamed credits. Two kids, their faces freckled with soot, traded a mechanical sparrow like contraband.

Her hand went to the inner seam of her jacket, to the small pinch of spice she’d pocketed on Daiyu, and she felt the ridiculous comfort of her bad habit.

When the carriage shuddered and announced its arrival at the transit node, she rose smoothly to her feet, her braid like a pendulum at her back. The exit funnelled them into a corridor smeared with ads for late-night auctions and luxury synth-threads. Transit nodes were the arteries of criminal cities like these, the hub where money was traded for fragile loyalties.

The ride was slow, and by the time she stepped off the transport, the sky was a bruise and the market light cut like knives. Nar Shaddaa never forgot a face, so you either learned to change yours every week or never left. Luckily, she was practised in changing her roles as easily as changing her clothes.

Her Daiyu credits felt heavier than their worth. Liyani wasted no time walking down the alleys toward a district that traded in second lives.

The Mirage. Here, the streetfront was an opera of velvet and glass, a place where people like her bought elegance like an off-the-rack disguise. She kept her head down until she picked the right door, hoping they wouldn't recognise her.

Inside, the world changed. Lights softened from the harsh neon outside, fabric swam like smoke, mirrors all around lied to every onlooker. The assistant there, all flat smiles and quick hands, measured her in careful motions after she had wordlessly set a pouch of credits on the counter. Liyani let the salesman wrap a robe around her shoulders, let the jewellers drape a necklace across her collarbone that glittered like tiny stars. The dress looked expensive and hated her at the same time, clinging and absolutely perfect. She knew how to be beautiful as a weapon, while also hating the weapon. The silk slid over her skin, and she felt something like shame, nearly comical, heat her face. Perhaps it had been quite a while, after all.

The dresser handed her a compact mirror. For a moment, she let herself look, and the reflection surprised her. The woman in the glass had symmetrical markings like smoke marbled into the skin above her collarbones, eyes sharp, and the braid looped behind like a soldier’s plait. The jewels winked, and the light above softened her scars into the faux image of smooth skin. She looked, externally, magnificent. Internally, she felt like someone reading the wrong lines of a play.

Her fingers moved over the marked skin as if to check it was really hers before almost angrily dropping her hand as she caught herself in the sentimental act.

By the time she left the emporium, she had not only an outfit but jewels parcelled in a soft pouch. She had paid too much for the illusion, but certainly not more than someone had paid for a woman in that dress once.

The club she had visited countless times in a past life was anything but just that. It sat like a wound in the most glittering part of Nar Shaddaa, like a carved-out black hole where noise and money obscenely bled into each other, and the lights were always just a little too dim. From the street, it lured her in like a cathedral for bad decisions, and inside it was a weather system of its own. Sound and light washed the floors, and scent and sweat braided into the air like smoke and perfume.

Liyani slid through with the ease of someone who knew how to get past the line of bodies at the entrance. Her new dress clung in the right places, a dark thing that swallowed the light. There were cameras, eyes, and men whose faces had signatures she had learned to read. She catalogued them without looking like she cared, which was part of the theatre, if one wanted to survive in these environments.

The club’s main floor was a carnival of motion: dancers wrapped in lace, holograms flirting with the crowd, waiters balancing trays as if they were acrobats. The music was a thick, electronic pulse that almost synchronised with that of her heart. Liyani let it roll over her like a tide. People here were soft for a night and harder the morning after, but she preferred them in the soft hour. They were easier to bruise and buy.

She threaded past tables and booths until she found the long corridor that led to the private rooms. VIP doors lined the passage like mausoleum slabs, each with a handler at the entrance and a list that said who was worth seeing tonight. Her pulse stayed steady.

She stepped into the back area where the air was thicker, and the lights softened into gold and shadow, and the volume of the music dropped until voices were on par. The VIP booths here were carved out like sanctuaries for the powerful: low tables, plush seats, and guarded spaces that smelled of rich tobacco. At the centre of the room, in a booth ringed with men who wore little more than killed smiles, sat the man she was looking for.

He was less a man than a concept dressed in velvet. He was a broad-shouldered human with the kind of jaw that had been carved like someone who liked to collect enemies. His skin was a deep, burnished brown, and his eyes were the kind that glinted when a deal smelled of profit. Around his neck hung an emblem that identified his reach, a sigil the city knew and respected. It symbolised a Shadow Collective leader, the sort that could make a dozen small lives unpleasant with a single raised hand. Men bowed when they passed his booth, and women laughed too loudly at his jokes. He was built to be obeyed.

She knew his name in the way a thief knows the route to a safe: Darik.

And perhaps for the first time in years, she thanked her younger, stupid self for all the bad decisions that had lead up to this moment. Liyani had wrapped him around a finger once, years ago, and knew he had kept the memory, because with it came the memory of Liyani herself. That was leverage, exactly what she needed.

She approached with the patience of someone who had sold their smile before. The men around him fell into a hush when she moved into the booth’s edge. Darik’s gaze found her like a homing signal, and a slow, amused grin spread across his face.

“Well... If my eyes ain't deceivin' me, Liyani,” he said when she was close enough to be seen properly. His voice was warm, the dangerous kind. “You look… different.”

“Different can be good, Darik,” she said, slipping into the seat opposite him as if he’d been expecting her all night with a practised confidence that she did not feel. She let the light catch the jewels at her neck with intentional indifference, like a small show of identity that told him she was the same as before. She tilted her chin like a cat, smiling in that slow way that had once earned her the very yacht and safe exit to her freedom.

Darik’s men relaxed slightly. It was the ritual: recognise, react, then fold.

“You disappeared,” he said, leaning in like he enjoyed the fact that he could still create concern. “Do you know how annoying that is for someone who likes to know who owes him what?”

She laughed, and it was a small sound, well-placed. “I had my reasons,” she murmured. “You’d be surprised. Or perhaps not. I suppose you did always have a taste for melodrama.”

He slid a glass toward her without breaking eye contact. “What can I do for you, Liyani? I don’t give favours without a return.”

She took the glass like she was accepting a peace offering from the sun itself. The drink was violet and cold, and smelled faintly of both citrus and fire. She sipped it with the slow luxury of someone drinking for both effect and relief. You play their script, then slip the dagger, she thought.

“You always were blunt,” she said, leaning into the part of herself that was a performance, as the charming, distressed woman who has fallen on hard times. It had worked before; it stands to reason it would work again.

He harrumphed, but it was a controlled noise. “You owe me an explanation.”

She lowered her voice. “Well...after the Bracca job,” she said softly, “things went wrong. I had to disappear. I..made enemies. I kept one step ahead, and I did what I had to.” Her fingers toyed with the glass ring on her middle finger, which was a fake, but heavy enough to look like the currency that she needed here. “Now they’re knocking on doors I thought I had nailed shut. I don’t want a war here, Darik. I came because you're... an old friend, and because if anyone can keep a name quiet, it’s you.”

The piece was elegantly false. She had traded in worse lies for less. The look that flitted across Darik’s face was mastery: offence at being used, and the delicious flicker of private concern. He enjoyed feeling needed; it made him feel useful in a way even credit couldn’t always do. But he also wasn't stupid; he could hear the insinuation that he owed her exactly where she placed it under the disguise of "old friend".

“You always had a way with words,” he said, letting the amusement slide into something rougher. “And with men. Are you begging?”

She smiled the sort that was trained to be half-apology and half-breach, even though all she wanted to do for his words was twist his neck. “...I’m asking a favour.”

He harrumphed again. The female workers, the hostesses who observed life through the panes of the VIP room, watched her with scepticism. They had seen fledglings of her type before: someone who knew how to make a man feel necessary and then disappear. Their eyes practically screamed judgment and warnings all the same, almost as if saying, You are not leaving this unscathed.

She felt it and looked away in a way that made them tighten their jaws. Yes, I am.

Darik asked the question she’d rehearsed for: “What’s in it for me?”

She set the glass down and met him with the calm of a woman making a gift out of poison. “Protection,” she said. “For a price. I give you a cut and information on a courier route... It's small, sellable. I give you leverage you can use. In exchange, you put me on your list. No hits, no stings. Keep me off radar long enough for me to… go away.”

“Why should I trust you?” he asked, because trust is the only thing that counts more than money in their business, and most likely also because he enjoyed doubting her.

“Because...,” she said softly, and let the other role take its place: vulnerability, the trembling lip, the person who’d been worn down. “I know where bodies are buried that make men like you happy. I can be useful long after I’m gone, or I can be trouble. Which do you prefer?”

He watched her for a long, slow beat. The corner of his mouth twitched, and it was clear that the theatrical cruelty in him liked the contest. “You owe me big time, little witch.”

She did. Not because I wanted to, she thought, tasting the lie like cheap candy. Because I needed him to be willing now.

But she also understood debts: they were contracts and tools and in ninety per cent of cases, mistakes. It was business. She let him say the words and pulled a thin datapuck from a hidden seam. It contained just enough information, like breadcrumbs that hinted at a courier route, a code of a contact man she had gotten from Kesh Orra when Cal and Bode were turning away, and a small notch that a buyer could make sense of if they liked the taste of profit.

He took it like a man who likes to own things. He ran a fingernail across the plastic as if testing it for weight. “You know what this costs you,” he said.

“I do,” she said. “I’ll not forget your generosity, Darik.”

He grinned a wolfish, pleased thing that showed he liked the power he had, and motioned to a burly man at his side. “Make it so, then,” he said.

The man nodded and left, swallowed by the crowd, and Liyani saw the small machine of men go to work: a favour called in, connections bent, a list written now in the shadow-ink of debt.

“So I keep being useful,” she smirked, rising like a cat uncoiling. Her voice had changed; it was smooth and cold now. “You do this, and the contact I sold you will make you richer for a month. You save a name, and you get a cut of a route no one else knows.”

He laughed and shook his head, the sort of laughter that meant a man had just swallowed a bargain and found that he loved the taste. “You’re trouble, Liyani. You always were.”

“Trouble pays best,” she said, with a smile that suggested she both accepted and regretted it.

She left the VIP area with the practised nonchalance of a woman who had just bartered a life and not even broken a sweat. She walked through the club's thrumming bodies and lights until the fresh, bitter air hit her like a cool slap at the entrance. The alley outside was drenched in neon and rain, and everything smelled like old metal and cheap, wasted bread.

She realised only then, with a private kind of embarrassment, how hungry she was when all the adrenaline had worn off. Not starving in the poetic sense, because that had been a constant companion, but properly, painfully hungry: the kind of hunger that rattled the edge of your thoughts and made your hands shake. All through the con, she had been holding herself taut on carefully expressed emotion. Now all the currency was spent.

The dress had been a perfect mask. Now it looked ridiculous in the rain. She looked ridiculous in the rain. The glamour got wet and clung in ugly ways; it made her feel like a marionette that had lost its string halfway. She wanted to laugh at herself, wanted to rip the thing off and run barefoot down an alley.

Instead, she kept moving. The little bundle of credits she’d earned in Daiyu, which was practically all gone after she visited the emporium earlier, now felt like both a joke and a lifeline in her palm. Two or three credits worth, after the exchange at the bar. Enough for a greasy rack of noodles and someplace to crash.

She ducked into a place that smelled like oil. It was the kind of stall with a heat lamp and a single wobbly table, the kind of place that served dinners with a side of pneumonia and a bowl for anyone who could show half the coin. The owner looked at her dress, then at her face, then shrugged and scooped noodles into a paper bowl without comment. That shrug was an invitation into a different kind of world: one where everyone wore the same kind of tired of the same day, over and over again.

She sat under a low awning, the rain hammering a slow drum above her, and felt the city fold around her like a blanket. A child down the table from her tossed a scrap of meat to a mangy creature that might have been a dog. He cackled when the animal made an ugly, grateful sound. 

She ate most of it with her fingers because spoons were a show, and she had no wish to pretend. The noodles were hot and greasy and perfect in the way cheap food always is. The bowl warmed her like a hand. She chewed slowly and watched faces.

They were poor, in the basic and honest way: people who could not afford a second day of luck. Their breath made the air fog where the heat lamp shone. 

This is home for now, she thought, tasting broth and diesel and letting something in her unclench. No silks, no favours, just here.

She let herself relax because the world nearby was too busy surviving their own life to notice her. It was a small mercy. She listened to the conversations and learned nothing, which was the whole point. You watch, and you don’t leave a print. You take the warmth, and you go.

Her stomach quieted. The silk, the feel of the night on her skin. None of it mattered as much as the bowl in front of her. She finished slowly, moved to wipe her mouth with the back of her hand like someone who never cared to be delicate. Somewhere in the room, a man swore about a lost charge, and someone else argued about the market rate for a droid part.

When she was done s,he walked without the usual slow confidence that accompanied her on a good day. The silk that had cost too much was now a wet memory, clinging to her like proof of the life she could pretend if she wanted. 

The cheap hotel was a step down an alley that smelled of trash and old rain. Its neon sign flickered like an eyelid. The man at the desk took the last of her credits without comment and pushed a key across the counter like an offer to forget. The room itself was small and fraying: a single bed at the far end, springs that protested when you sat, a window that didn’t quite seal. The wallpaper had peeled from a hundred years of humid weather. The bedspread was a faded pattern that might once have been floral.

It was the perfect shelter.

She didn’t bother with fancy baths or trying to fix her hair. She let it spill loose, the braid an afterthought. Her shoes that felt more like daggers on her soles than anything came off with a sigh. She turned the mattress over with a small, impatient motion, threw the wet dress into the corner, and rolled onto her back.

The shutters were half-closed. Through the crack, she could see a slice of city light and the shadow of a passing advertisement. Far off, a siren wailed and then died; somewhere in the distance, a vendor called the last of the night’s stalls closed.

She stared at the ceiling and let her thoughts spool out. She thought about Darik and the favour, about the burly men who had nodded and moved away, about the small success she could celebrate in her own company. Unbidden, Caedon's face flashed behind her eyelids, but it felt different now, she felt lighter, if only a little.

She thought about the stupid little stash of credits she’d spent on the noodles, and how little money could do the work she needed. She thought about the woman’s teeth at the fixer’s stall and the rumour that the woman promised to seed. She had paid for confusion and for delay, which was all she could afford.

She let her mind slide to Cal, as she always did, even when she promised herself not to. He would still be on the Mantis with Bode; they’d taken the relay readout and left Daiyu behind. She had the sliding image of him smiling when he believed something had worked, or the way his jaw tightened when he thought she might be in more danger than she let on, but especially the way he looked the nights she had seen him before with a light that did not belong in dark places.

She pressed her hand flat on the mattress and let the cool, brittle duvet warm up on her skin. He trusts too easily, she thought. It will be a danger to him.

She let the thought rest like a pebble in her mouth, irritating and nagging.

The siren outside came nearer and then farther, a wail that should be nothing to her and everything to the city.

A neighbour in the next room coughed and muttered about storm drains and lost packages. She let herself breathe slowly, the kind of long breath that used to mean “I’m fine,” and pretended for a little while that she meant it.

The corner of her vision softened, and she felt the knot in her chest unpick a thread. The room hummed like a small machine of warmth, dampness and neon, amidst the familiar comfort of it, she let sleep come like the tide.

Just for a few hours, she thought, and for once she let the thought be true.

Chapter Text

9 BBY, NAR SHADDAA

The pain began.

It struck without announcement and with the full force of a thrown brick. Her chest burst open with something like cold fire, and the breath ripped out of her. She sat bolt upright, the dark, cold room pitching with her. The world tested the edges: the radiator rattled, a far-off shout, the slow drip of rain off the window frame.

For a dizzy second, she thought it was just the aftereffects of too much adrenaline, or a panic that had uncoiled in her. She let her palm, slick with sweat, press to her sternum and breathed shallow, tasting iron. Her mind scribbled possibilities, the pragmatic list of what she could blame it on, what old habits would keep her brand of pain away.

But deeper than the physical shock, there was a pull that slid cold through her. It came without logic and without warning, as if she sensed that someone was in trouble. 

Cal, and the feeling hit with a specificity that had no room for coincidence.

She stood, knees unsteady, and moved to the window. The shutters had been half-closed, but she yanked them the rest of the way and peered out into the rain-slick alley. The street was a blur of neon and movement. No sign of anything immediate, no flashes of a speeder's light, no blaring emergency responses. 

Her breath came unevenly. She leaned on the sill with both hands, tried to listen for something a thousand miles away, and found only the city’s distant heartbeat. The pain in her chest eased a fraction like a hand on a rope, but the tautness under her ribs did not leave, only tightened into a line of ice.

He could be fine, she thought, the voice trying to reason with itself. He could be fine, and this is an idiot’s fear.

She knew better, though, because fear is a stubborn animal; once it took root, it would not be easily shoved. The thought of Cal, his steady jaw, the small hopeful tilt in his voice, was like a lantern in the dark of her chest. It was a bell tolling, and she could not ignore it.

She fumbled in the pocket of her coat because there was one small thing that had been a promise: the little heavy comm Cordova had sent her off with, its casing worn and its speaker dented. She had no right to it, but she kept it anyway. She thumbed its panel and waited.

BD-1’s reply was a stream of chirps at first, the little language the droid used for joy and confusion. Liyani’s fingers tightened, and she leaned into the device like someone listening for a heartbeat. The chirps became a string of digits and a rough map. BD-1 was trying to say something, then stopped, then chirped again with a nervous little hitch, sounding like steel being forced into confession.

“Come on,” she hissed at the speaker. Her voice was a sandpaper thing that had slept in gutters. “Say it.”

BD-1 gave a worried little chitter and then, like a child who’d been told to tell the truth or else, vomited out a short burst of data containing coordinates, a timestamp, and a stuttered garble that conveyed movement. They left.

And then, with a bolder beep, a single packet of location data shot out into the comm and into the channel she had kept open with Cordova’s network. It pinged in the corner of her device like a small, frantic light.

“That’s not your operating protocol,” she muttered, but the droid chirped in a way that suggested it had acted under force of will. Liyani nearly laughed, and the noise was equal parts of friction and relief. There was no time for gratitude.

She forced herself to breathe and set off mere moments later.

No credits left now, she smuggled herself on a cheap transport anchored on the fringe docks. It was moral enough for a woman who had no moral luxuries at the moment. She slept in fits on the trip, each time the transport shuddered through a jump, waking her with a lurch and the stale smell of recycled air. Between naps, she went through BD-1’s tiny bleeps and pings like someone going through old love letters.

When the droid’s coordinates translated on her comm-link, they did not make sense at first.

Nova Garon.

A system too far from Jedha to be reasonable, and Cal’s presence there was a riddle. Where the kriff was he, what had he signed onto, and why did BD-1 sound like his tiny metal soul had been kicked? His signature on the Force, whose presence Liyani never fully realised had attached itself to hers so strongly until now, wasn’t gone, but fraying, like a rope pulled too tight beginning to fuzz at the fibers.

She should have stayed in the hostel to hide, to vanish into a sink of anonymity like she always planned. Instead, she pressed the small, foolish button on her temper and did the worst possible thing for someone with nothing left to lose: she stole a small freighter.

It wasn’t noble or clever, but as desperate as it could get. She found it because desperate things have a way of smelling one another out. The ship was cheap and loud and spirited in the way someone’s pawned animal is. The owner had been careless, perhaps drunk, or trusting, or both. Liyani had hands that remembered complicated things, and in twenty minutes she had doctored the navicomputer, spoofed a clean boarding manifest, and lifted the little one-person shuttle into the black.

The shame of it was immediately shoved to the back of her mind as she told herself excuses. There was a small, moralised voice in the back of her head that she could've sworn wasn't there last year, but it would have to be paid with teeth later. For now, she had a vector and a destination that pulsed like a brand on her conscience.

Space made her small and terribly alert. She traced the route BD-1’s ping had specified, and felt the ship shrink into a thin coin of noise. The freighter took her across a few jumps, engines coughing like an overweight animal, until the Nova Garon system bloomed ahead in a scattering of moons and a satellite that looked sterile on the nav.

II-0810 Satellite Station sat in orbit like a white eye with its clean lines and stern plating. It was the kind of installation that meant imperial rules and imperial patience, the sort of place that signed death warrants with paperwork and waited for ripples. She knew the station in schematic: docking bays for military shuttles, a ring of maintenance decks, transponder arrays that talked to every ship that came near. Home for the Empire’s careful hands.

Simple enough, unless she considered that she, in fact, did not have clearance. She did not have any clearance codes. She had BD-1’s data packet and the droid's trembling courage, and that composition was not enough to open a locked door on an imperial installation. The freighter’s false manifest might've passed with lazy miners and some cargo freighters, but not with the layer of security that kept this place polished.

So she studied. She watched the traffic, folded herself into a shadow near a maintenance raft, and let the complex little starlines a human bureaucracy made drift through her brain. She spotted couriers, fighters, and an imperial shuttle that cut the light like a needle. Docking codes cycled like the beats of a patient's heart. The station talked in a language she did not fully speak, but it spoke loudly enough to anyone who knew where to listen. She traced the pattern of sanctioned dockings and the windows when a ship could disappear into a darker segment.

If you can’t open the door, find the back entrance the door uses for its trash, she thought, and the smirk that came with it was fleeting.

She used the freighter’s emitter to mask her transponder, bouncing her signature into a maintenance quorum cell a few degrees out of phase. In other words, she spoofed a supply crate’s manifest to say she was a low-priority maintenance run, not worth their worry at all. It bought her the blind spot required to be shepherded through a service corridor that the station usually kept for old contractors. Every hack was a small sin she could not find herself guilty of, like looping the verification or echoing a trusted fleet ID.

When she dropped into the dead-end corridor and the station’s bulkhead hissed a welcome, she almost felt stupid with relief. She repacked the freighter’s tools into an old maintenance harness and slipped a maintenance lapel peg on her shirt.

It smelled like rusted metal. She slid through the non-secure decks with the careful breath of someone who had once walked through palace kitchens as an employee rather than a guest. The station’s lights were too white, and its seams shone like bones.

The moment she crossed into a corridor that hung like a throat toward the central ring, she felt it again, that awful fraying of Cal’s signature in the Force. It felt like a sound that had lost half its strings, vibrating at the edges of her perception like a bell cracked. It made her chest clench like someone who had suddenly been told the truth in a language she had always pretended she did not know.

Her breath hitched. This was not an ordinary distance or muddled presence. This was a message, saying that something had been done to him, and that it had left him ragged enough to override even her senses. The Force, the very living, humming thing she had once been taught to distrust and later to fear because of her own blood, answered with nothing like clarity but everything like urgency.

She could press on and risk running straight into someone who would kill first and ask questions later, or she could step back and try to find a gentler, more effective method to locate him. The station would have sensors that masked or scrambled Force-signatures at times; the Empire liked to conceal its secrets in technology. They used it like a dampener on the kind of sense she had once used as freely as breath.

She exhaled, the air leaving her slow and bitter. For the first time since Dathomir, since she had cut her tongue on fear and kept the taste, she closed her eyes and made herself still.

This is not a Jedi ritual, she reminded herself, because she had no right to those words, but the Force did not belong to robes or to codes.

Nightsister magick whispered to it in a different dialect. It was raw, older, and scarred. She had learned to bury it like a terrible secret. She didn't unbury it now, either; she couldn't if she tried. But she reached into the comfort of the Dark Side like she was gently prying open a box that might be full of knives, its seductive whispers wrapping around her senses like a blanket from bygone days.

She sat on the maintenance grate, pressed palms to cold metal, and breathed. She let the rhythms of the station hum through her. She listened not to the metal and the lights but to the small, necessary currents of life around her: from the cadence of distant engines throbbing, the subtle shift in a sentry’s breath, to the tiny chirp of a service droid. She folded her attention inward and then outward until the distinction blurred into the same.

The Force came back like a tide, gathering into a clear line she could trace. It was not Cal’s full voice, not the strong cord of light that had once made her stand downed and trembling; it was fragments, like scrambled words on torn paper. A fear here, a sharp splinter of anguish there. This...bond, the thing that bound her to him, behaved like something more intimate; it felt like skin left behind on a kiss. It tugged her toward the place he was, but left traces like ash.

She let the bond speak to her in little truths: He is wounded. He is not alone. And he is changing, fast. The words were not coherent sentences so much as impressions, but together they formed a map that was impossible to ignore. It was the first time she’d felt that invisible thread as something more than a rumor or curiosity, but rawness, loss and terror all knotted into one. It made her hands shake.

When she opened her eyes, the station’s white lights seemed paler, less severe. Her face was wet from the meditation, sweat from the effort of drawing something desperately thin from the living net of the galaxy. She had reached out and found the frayed cord, and in doing so, she had answered the thing inside her that had pulled her out of a bed in a cheap hotel with no plan other than the sound of his pain.

She rose, muscles humming with the unusual strain, and steadied herself against a conduit. The maintenance peg at her chest felt ridiculous and small, but the meditation had given her something useful: a direction to begin with. It had not given her the exact corridor or the face, only the sense that he was close to the station’s central ring and that the fracture in his inner sense had been done by more than time; it had an author who was still around.

Walking the ISB corridors felt like being inside a held breath. The lighting was sterile, the vents hissed with cold air, and every surface tasted of reflected ugly truths. She kept to the shadows, every step with caution. Cameras blinked like a spider's eyes, and troopers patrolled in pairs, with their boots a dry, hollow sound. When she paused, she could hear her own heartbeat over the station’s low hum, like a trapped bird.

Her bond with him was becoming more and more like a compass whose needle had been violently struck. The Force-thread vibrated like a string on a broken instrument: the note was wrong, the sound bitter, and it made her teeth ache.

She closed her eyes often, just for a half second, and let the world narrow until it was only the line that joined them. The line tightened and sagged and then pulled again, urgent as a rope being tugged by someone who’s falling. She let it pull, as her feet now knew the path the way a hunted animal knows the farmer’s fence-line.

As she rounded a supply alcove, the sound hit first: a metallic cracking and the sickening percussion of something huge being pushed beyond its limit. Her stomach dropped.

She stopped on the catwalk and looked down like a person peering over a cliff.

Cal was a looming silhouette in a hall that had been converted into a control center.

Consoles were sparking, warning lights like small red moons, papers and armatures torn. The alarms made everything blur, like stars seen through a rain-streaked window, but the thing that kept her from moving was what he was doing with the Force. It wasn’t the steady, careful shaping he’d used in the past to move a fallen crate or coax a delicate mechanism. This was violent, savage, a ripping of the world into pieces and throwing them away.

Troopers exploded out of the corridor doors like dummies on wires. One went flying and struck a panel with a wet thud, another slammed into a support strut and slid to the floor like a rag. Cal’s hand movements were not the measured simplicity of defense; his palms pushed and dragged and crushed anything they could reach; his fingers arced like claws. The dual sabers were less tools and more instruments of apocalypse. He wasn’t dispatching threats so much as unmaking them. Each strike sent a shock through the floor.

Liyani’s breath went thin, and it tasted like iron now. For a second, the world tilted: she had never seen the man become a thing of pure force and fury. It was both breathtaking and horrible at the same time. The Force around him thrummed with a dark energy that wasn’t his; something had threaded into him, used his pain like tinder, and set the rest aflame.

Her first instinct was to run in and stop him. Her second, stronger instinct was to let him be. She knew him. She knew when Cal was in danger from within and when he was a danger to the world. Right now, he belonged to the latter, and the only person who could help him in this instant was himself.

So she quietly lowered herself from the ramp, and she stayed.

She kept herself small and silent and let him rip the world apart, because sometimes the only thing a person can do for someone who is burning is to stand at the edge of the fire and hold the bucket.

He moved toward Commander Lank Denvik like a thunderclap. Denvik ran with the animal’s panic that comes when someone knows blood debt is due. Cal’s path was simple and terrible: cut the pursuit, close the distance, end it. He muttered nothing; there was no warning in his voice, no negotiation, no mercy. Only the work of retribution.

Liyani watched the way his shoulders hunched when he struck. He didn’t look like the Jedi who counted vows and measured consequences. He looked like a man whose moral ledger had been smashed and replaced with a single, monstrous entry.

It came crashing down when he saw her.

The strike that ended Denvik’s breathing left the center of the hall under a sheen of red and stillness. Cal stood over the fallen commander with chest heaving, the saber staff coiled again by his side. For a frozen, fragile moment, the darkened veil around him trembled like a heat mirage.

His head turned, and their eyes found one another across the ruined floor, and something in that moment folded into pieces.

It wasn’t the relief or the triumph the taste of the Dark had promised him. It was as if he’d been submerged underwater and someone had broken the surface for him, and he tasted air and then realized how cold it was.

His face changed in a way that made Liyani’s knees feel unsteady; shock, then a raw kind of guilt, then a look that might have been confusion, like he couldn’t place her there. He had the expression of a man who has glimpsed a loved one in the middle of a crime and doesn’t know whether to turn away or kill the truth.

There was so much in his eyes, ash and apology and a fierceness that made her heart lurch and hurt at once. He looked like someone who had just burned his hands trying to save a house. The sight of him, so unmade, so dangerous, so achingly human, threw her whole plan into a single small, pitiless point: he needed her in a way that terrified and terrified her back.

But there was no time for reckoning. Trooper reinforcements were already screaming down the corridors. The station’s alarms made the lights strobe like a stuttering heartbeat. The smell of singed armor stung her nose.

Cal didn’t hesitate once. He was a man who acted first and answered later, and later would be filled with words heavy enough to sink a world. He sprinted toward her and grabbed her hand like a lifeline. The grip was fierce and immediate. He pulled as if he’d been clinging to a ledge and had found one place to hold.

“Let’s go,” he rasped, voice a paper torn, only urgency and hunger for distance and breath.

She let him pull. Her fingers fit into his as if they had always been shaped for the space, and they ran.

The corridors blurred. Cal’s breaths were ragged in; his hands were rough, but clammy and shaking. She kept low and light, keeping her footfalls near silent as they ran. She cut down maintenance shafts he hadn’t seen because he ran on raw need while she ran on practiced stealth. 

When they burst into the hangar, the Mantis rested like a sleeping beast. Merrin was there like a single, steady figure at the lip of the ramp, waiting and watching. Her face didn’t give much away; she’d always been built of quieter storms. She saw them, took in Cal’s state in a single, small look, and did not say anything. For a beat or two, she was an island of stillness in the tidal chaos.

Greez cursed and shoved the throttle as the three of them wriggled onto the ramp. Cal dragged Liyani up and then stumbled, throat raw and exhausted. He collapsed into a heap on the deck, and for a breath, the world contracted into the close, cramped space of the ship and his ragged lungs.

The Mantis shuddered as Greez pushed for speed. The stars smeared into long lines through the cockpit viewport, and the little ship sighed as if relieved to be moving away from the hollow scream of Nova Garon behind them. Greez’s face was a map of worry and fury and a particular sort of pilot’s glee that he’d gotten them out, and that was everything. He barked orders at the engines and slapped the throttle like a man who’d always loved making something run when nothing else could.

Merrin watched them like someone who had just seen the change in someone she cared about. She let Cal tell her the parts she needed to hear, the shorthand, efficient version that cut to the bones but kept the worst of the details blunt and certain horrors implied. Bode escaping, the relay gone, Denvik dead in a way that made no moral sense anymore.

“The bastard took the map… took the dream. He left with it. And... Cordova- Cere,” he almost choked on her name, pressing his lips in a tight, trembling line. His words were shards that sounded like an accusation to the sky. All Liyani could do was stand there frozen, not knowing what to do with all the pain, even as it squeezed her from the inside out.

Merrin absorbed it like someone taking in cold water, nodded, gave him the one or two pieces of reassurance she could manage, and then she read the room the way she always did. Her face softened where the story left holes.

“Rest for now, Cal. Greez will get us out,” Merrin said, voice uncharacteristically gentle. She looked at Liyani for a second with a sudden, barely concealed hardness in her gaze, before she made her way to the Latero.

The door to the small crew cabin hissed shut behind Merrin, and the ship’s engine tones were a low, oddly domestic hum. Liyani followed her retreating form until she disappeared, and it was just the two of them.

Her mouth opened, hesitantly, to ask, to comfort, to just be there. But Cal moved like a man who had been holding himself together with a wire and began retreating to the room down the corridor past the galley, BD-1 hopping off halfway with a low chirp. Liyani gave the small droid a pat on the head and inhaled sharply. "Good to see you too, bug."

When the door didn't close behind him, Liyani gathered the courage she could muster and followed the same path Cal took. 

He had retreated to the cramped workbench where he kept his saber parts. The clank of tools and the smell of metal and oil filled her senses. He dug at the mechanism with a single-minded anger, scrubbing the blade’s hilt with a rag until friction burned the skin of his palms. He adjusted and tightened, unscrewed and tested, as if meticulous disassembly could unmake the day.

He was silent. So silent that the only sound in the small room was the soft squeak of cloth on metal and Cal’s breath, too loud in the fragile silence.

Liyani waited a heartbeat, then another. The ship’s isolation made the cabin feel too small. She stepped inside before she even realized she’d moved.

He didn’t look up, only scrubbed harder.

“Cal.” Her voice was small in that space, and with it she tried for something humane and tactful. “I felt it...felt you… I had to come.”

Silence. The scrub of the rag. The clink of a tool.

He didn’t speak. He worked as if words would be a splintered thing between them.

She crouched at the edge of the bench and watched him. He looked raw; his jaw was a line of knotted rope. She’d never seen him like this, no Jedi reserve wrapping the edges, no careful propriety. This was visceral hurt translated into desperate motion.

“I felt you, Cal,” she said again, a whisper on her lips, offering the only thing she had: the knowledge that the Force had screamed his pain through her, no matter how far she was. “It was like— like someone ripped a thread. You were… burning.”

He didn’t flinch, only scrubbed.

Then, very slowly, his hands stilled. He set the rag down with false care, and the room’s air condensed into the set of his shoulders. For a second, he was in her world and not in the dark he’d been thrown into.

“You shouldn’t have seen that,” he replied roughly, voice a blade with less anger, and burdened with twice the wounds. Anger with an edge of shame. “You shouldn’t have.”

“That’s not-” She began, but he cut her off, and the sound he made was a raw thing.

Cal’s jaw worked as he set the saber down, palm flat on the hilt. His lips pressed into a line. “Bode,” he said thickly. “He-” The rest stuck like a stone. He almost began scrubbing the metal again, not to clean it but to keep his hands busy.

“I know you’re angry,” Liyani said, testing the surface. “I just want to understand... I want to be here for you.”

He snapped his head up then, like a man finally remembering the other people in the room, and for the first time, his eyes really found her. They were raw and big and old at once. The shame in them was bright and ridiculous and carved a pit in her chest.

“You have no right,” he said suddenly, voice pitched high with something like fury. “You don’t get to-” He cut off, and his breath faltered. “You never liked him. Of course it’s-” The accusation rolled with a venom that made no sense, but it was brittle, and whoever it landed on wasn’t Bode. It was Liyani.

His words were a hot stone thrown in a place meant for conversation, and they struck her unexpectedly. For a breath, she felt the sting. Her reply came sharp and immediate. “Do not make this about me.”

She stood stunned, because it was the easiest thing in the world to be hurt by that. But then the spidery edge of logic climbed through the shock. He was flinging words to see which wound would hurt more than the other. He was looking for a target to keep him from the rawness of what he had done.

But he wasn't done. “You think you know? You think you’re the justice in a world that burns? That these are the kinds of things you can fix with a pretty face?”

She slammed the unwatched words against the air because truth is a blunt tool in crude hands.“How dare you.”

Cal’s face flickered with hurt, with the briefest wince, and for a moment the fight in him shifted. His anger over the betrayal smeared across his expression like spilled ink and then bled into something softer and less performative.

“You don’t understand,” he said then, lower, meaning it. “He-” He stopped again, every syllable a piece of his ribs. He closed his eyes abruptly, the space between his brows forming a tight line. When his voice came, it was smaller, but steadier

“You don’t know what it feels like,” he whispered. “To have to kill to get there. To-” He couldn’t finish. The words were cups of water he could not lift. They trembled from his mouth instead. “I thought...I thought I could save them.”

Liyani’s breath hitched. That short sentence landed like a weight in her bones. He had thought he could save people. Her sweet Cal. He had thought his violence would buy life. And it had not, it never did. It had only traded one horror for another and left his chest void where belief had been.

She moved closer, not daring to bridge too much space too soon, but enough that her hand hovered near his shoulder. “You tried,” she said, quietly now. “And it hurt. God, I’m so sorry it hurt like this.”

He laughed then. It was a short, broken sound that almost resembled a sob. His face crumpled, the man in him peeling away to reveal the exhausted boy. He tried to breathe steadily. He could not.

“You don’t...” his words cut off. He rested his head in his hands as if trying to hold his skull together. The fortress was failing. He was failing.

Without thinking, Liyani moved. She wrapped herself around him the way something warm wraps around a cold thing to bring it back. Her arms went under his shoulders. He stiffened, a reflex of someone unused to being cradled, but then something like muscle memory, the oldest of needs, gave. His shoulders slumped, and his breath hitched.

She didn’t ask permission, didn’t talk, but simply held him.

At first, he tried to be strong, arm knotted tensely around her, hands on her back. Then he began to fold. The sound that came out of him was small and single-minded in the form of a broken noise.

Liyani felt the tremor move from his shoulders into her own chest until she thought she would break from holding it all. She set her cheek to the top of his bent head and let the hair prick at her face. There were sparks of scent like dust, metal, and a rust-raw human smell that had no poetry to it.

“You don’t have to tell me everything,” she murmured into his hair. “Not now. Not if you can’t. I'm here.”

He made a sound that could have been a yes, or it could have been a no. It was whatever his breath could manage. Then the dam breached, and his voice came ragged and full and small, the syllables a rush that could not be stopped.

“He was my friend,” he said. “Bode. He-” words tumbled, each one soaked with regret. “I trusted him with something I thought I could give up if it meant hope for everyone. I trusted him, and he walked away. He took what I needed and left me with the cost. He handed them over. Cere, she... I thought I could stop it. I thought-” He broke into a sound of raw grief.

Liyani’s hands moved in the slowest of circles on his back. Her touch was something between a promise and a stitch. She had never been someone who thought of herself as a comfort-giver. She’d been a fighter and a survivor, never staying long enough to catch her breath, but this was different. This was a person around whom her world had begun revolving, being hollowed by his decisions. There were no rules for what to do next.

“It’s not on you to bear it alone,” she said, each word as soft as she could muster. “We’ll carry it. You won’t drown in it.” Her voice cracked but didn’t break. “Let me help.”

Cal’s breath hitched, and he clutched her arms with a force that hurt. Then, as if giving himself permission for the first time, he let the rest go. Something in him unspooled like a rope with too much weight. He cried then, open and wet and shuddering, in a long, bone-deep sound that tore at Liyani’s chest.

She held him through the whole of it. She said nothing grand, offered no platitudes or easy truths. She let the ship’s vibration be the background and her presence the shore against which his pain could break without being lost.

When the storm subsided to shuddering sobs, his breathing ragged but quieter, Liyani stroked his hair and whispered a promise that was also a vow: “I won’t leave you. Not now. Not for this.”

He clung to her as if she were the only thing that kept the world from sliding off its axis.

Cal’s breathing had finally settled into something like sleep, the kind that wasn’t peaceful so much as exhausted into submission. His body twitched now and then, as if his mind still fought phantoms behind closed eyes. Liyani stayed where she’d ended up hours ago: kneeling beside his narrow bunk, propped on her knees despite the burn in her joints, fingers carefully threaded through his hair steadily, rhythmically. Something grounding. Something he could cling to, even unconscious.

His hair was still damp where sweat had dried after the breakdown. She didn’t stop touching him. Every time she paused, even for a breath, he twitched, brow knotting like he sensed her pulling away.

“You’re safe,” she murmured, not sure who she was saying it to. Him, or the version of herself that didn’t know how to handle any of this and was simply improvising her way through heartbreak.

Her own exhaustion was creeping in, soft and dangerous; her arm trembled faintly each time her fingers combed through his hair. She blinked long and slow—

And then the world tilted.

Not forward. Inward.

A silent rip of light tore across her vision like a seam being split, and the Mantis melted away.

She was standing. Cal was still kneeling beside her, but dreaming, no, remembering, or reliving. Or all of it at once.

It's a vision, she realized.

She tried to pull out on instinct; her ability to slip free of visions had always been sharp, trained, but something held her there.

Cal.

Cal’s emotions were bleeding into the Force like ink in water. He must have reached out accidentally, dragging her with him into a vision triggered by his psychometry.

The ground beneath their feet wasn’t ground at all but a map of stars: floating nodes, swirling nebulae, arc-light threads linking ancient machines.

Liyani realized what she was seeing.

The arrays.

One lit up in bright gold, pulsing like a heartbeat. Another blinked alive on the Shattered Moon. A third deeper in the nebula, forming a corridor.

A makeshift path through the Abyss.

Her mouth parted. The realization hit her in the gut.

“Cal…”

He wasn’t awake in the vision, his dream-self stood there breathing hard, chest rising and falling like he had just run for miles. But he was aware enough to turn his head toward her. His eyes were so raw, so open, seeing her not as a stranger in a shared vision but as if the Force had aligned their thoughts exactly.

He understood, and she understood. Then the vision collapsed.

Cal sucked in a sharp breath as he jerked awake, reaching instinctively for his saber, for her, for something solid.

“You saw it,” Liyani whispered, before he could speak.

His eyes were still clouded, but clarity sliced through fast. He nodded once, breath shaky.

“The arrays,” he murmured. His voice was rough. “Santari Khri’s backup route. The temporary one.”

They didn’t need to say more. He pushed himself upright, rubbing a hand over his face, and their eyes locked; two fugitives, two people who had held onto each other in the dark and stumbled into the same revelation.

“We can get to Tanalorr,” Liyani said first, steady despite her racing pulse. “Without the compass.”

Cal exhaled, a breath that wasn’t quite relief but not quite disbelief either, some fusion of the two. He nodded again, firmer this time, a decision clicking into place.

“We follow the arrays,” he said. “Just like Khri intended. One safe passage… one time. But it’s enough.”

She pushed herself onto her feet, legs weak, joints numb, but heart hammering with purpose.

“Then let’s tell the others.”

Cal hesitated only half a second, long enough for the vulnerability of the last few hours to flicker across his features. For a moment, he looked young, tired, so breakable.

Then he swallowed it down again and rose. She stopped him with a soft hand on his shoulder.

“You okay to move?”

His laugh was humorless and small. “Does it matter?”

“It does to me.”

His breath hitched, but he didn’t answer. He didn’t need to, and they stepped out of his room together.

Greez was already half-panicked, half-preparing-for-a-breakdown, half-praying-to-whatever-Luck-Gods-listened-to-flesh-eaters when they entered the cockpit.

“Not to rush you two,” he yelled without turning around, “but this moon’s fuel options are-”

“We know how to reach Tanalorr,” Cal interrupted quickly.

“What do you mean, ‘we know’? Because unless you found the compass under your pillow, I’m not seeing a way through a death-clouded nebula that eats ships for breakfast.”

Cal cut him off gently, but with the sort of exhausted certainty that made the room still.

“There’s another way. Santari Khri left a contingency route. Using the High Republic navigation arrays.”
He exhaled, then hesitantly continued. “I saw it...In a vision. Liyani did too.”

Merrin looked up sharply from the back of the cockpit where she’d been sitting, arms folded tight across her chest. Her expression was unreadable, but her eyes flicked between Cal and Liyani with something closer to worry than suspicion. She knew how dangerous shared visions could be.

“How?” she asked, voice low. “The arrays have been dead for centuries.”

“They’re not,” Cal said. “Not completely.” His gaze slid to Liyani, brief but grounding. “We can activate them. All of them. Enough to synchronize a safe corridor through the Abyss.”

Merrin stared at him for a long moment, assessing. Finally:

“If this is true,” she murmured, “then it is our only chance.”

Greez rubbed his temples, muttering a heartfelt prayer to whatever deity protected pilots of doomed crews. “We are all going to die,” he sighed, “but okay. Plot the course.”

Chapter Text

9 BBY, TANALORR

Bode was dead. 

It was a single, undeniable fact that opened like a blade across everything that came after. He fell, and the world snapped back into focus, and none of the neat explanations stitched the hole closed. For a second, there was only the echo of his name and the small, stunned sound in Cal’s throat.

But that came later. For now, hours earlier, the planet was still only a promise on the horizon.

After the impossible storm Greez had piloted them through, the planet had held its breath for them. Tanalorr had seemed to exhale only welcome, warm air full of salt and pollen, sunlight that sifted like gold through drifting floral mists, cliffs of stone draped in vines, and waterfalls that sang in a language older than war. The landing platform accepted the Mantis as a supplicant more than a machine, and when the ramp lowered, the scent of wet earth and all blooming things reached into them like an apology on behalf of the Galaxy.

Cal’s breath caught before his voice could make anything of it. Greez cried like a wounded gull and then laughed at himself, delighted in the awful, ridiculous way only someone who’d been dragged across half the galaxy could be.

Liyani stood at the threshold, the residue of earlier chaos still under her nails, and for a moment, the long, complicated stories she carried of survival and theft all slipped away. She had doubted the legends once, in the quiet places where cynicism was the norm, but there was no doubt now. This place breathed its own truth.

They walked toward the temple haloed above a pool like a pearl. The stones were warm beneath them, streaked with climbing moss that glowed faintly when the light hit. Little birds, if they were birds, sang curving songs that braided with the sound of distant waterfalls. The path opened, and the world seemed to exhale. They arrived at the temple entrance like pilgrims.

First came the singing.

Ghost star, wonder where you are,
Ghost star, are you very far?

At first, it was an eerie, crystalline voice threading from the stone-lipped doorway like a moth’s wing against the ear. Not language as the galaxy used it, not a catchy melody, but a voice that hummed at the bones. It slid along the columns and made the hair rise on Liyani’s arms. The sound was soft and oddly childlike, full of intervals that made the skin on her neck prickle.

They saw her before they realized they had been seeing the exit of their own breath. It was a small figure silhouetted in the doorway, hair the color of fresh wheat, eyes like bright chips of moonlight. Kata, from what Cal had murmured. The child came toward them with an ease that seemed to belong to the place itself, steps unhurried and entirely at home.

Bode's daughter looked up and registered them in a single, quick sweep. She didn’t look afraid, but not exactly thrilled, either; she looked perfectly steady, like someone who’d seen both kindness and cruelty and had decided to catalog both with the same stone-faced acceptance.

“Hey there, little star,” Liyani murmured, stepping closer with her palms visible so the child understood no threat. Kata’s gaze flitted to Liyani then, and the girl’s face was unafraid and privately delighted, like someone who had been given a new toy for no reason at all.

Kata recognized Cal. There was a small, almost imperceptible flare that softened her little face, the way recognition brightens a lamp. She did not greet him with gush or clinging; she simply regarded him, measured him. “You’re Cal,” she said, not a question. Her small voice piped up, direct and brave. “You’re the man with the lightsaber."

Merrin walked close, and Kata’s eyes flicked to her, warm and unschooled. “You’re pretty,” the child announced in the blunt generosity of the young. Her words fell like sunlight on stone.

Merrin’s cheeks twitched, startled, then softened. “Thank you,” she said, small as a bell, and for a second Merrin’s face looked like a place a person could stand in and not be bruised.

Liyani watched them as they were led deeper into the temple’s carved halls by the child. The temple hummed with a benign kind of power; the walls bore bas-reliefs of beings who once looked to the stars and decided to shelter something delicate here. Liyani felt the weight of their history against her ribs, the lives sacrificed for this patch of beauty, and she imagined Cordova and Cere’s work pressed into each tile like a reward.

They walked until the world narrowed into a chamber that smelled faintly metallic and old and a little like rain.

And there he was.

Bode stood within that ring of shadow and light like an animal pressed to the corner. He was dangerous and taut, a man who had once been their friend under pretenses and had become something else by choices, fear, and hunger. There was an animal’s sheen to his eyes, the desperation of someone trying to hold the last thing that kept them together. A man who’d chosen a selfish way and then justified it into a life. He looked tired and furious, and something like regret flicked across his face as he saw them. For a ridiculous fraction of a second, Liyani felt pity. Awful, complicating pity, and then her muscles twitched with the knowledge that pity would not solve anything.

The confrontation began with words flung, accusations, the brittle clatter of regret. It did not make the whole room loud; rather, it filled corners with tension, every syllable a stone dropped into a still pond. Bode’s face did not look like a villain cut; he looked worn, hollowed by decisions, and the grief in his jaw made Liyani's chest twist.

When the fight broke, when ideology and betrayal turned to motion, the room erupted. Blows landed, the battle was a ragged, dangerous thing. Cal moved with brutal efficiency, cutting the space between Bode’s evasion and a final answer. The Force snapped like flint. Cal and Merrin fought in a tangled urgency, Cal racing with the dark burning him, Merrin a desperate but controlled storm at his shoulder. Bode struck like a cornered thing, and the ache of watching a friend unmake himself was terrible.

At one brutal moment, when the fight careened close, Bode shoved with the Force in a raw, frantic move that sent Kata skidding against a pillar. In his chest, it was, maybe, an awful kind of protection, a shove born of the instinct to clear the field, but in the instant it happened, Liyani’s heart flipped with the instinct to rescue.

She left the battle without hesitation.

Darting away from the fight, she cradled Kata and dragged the small, stunned body into the open air beyond the temple’s carved mouth. The sunlight struck the little girl’s face and made her look more fragile and luminous than any adult had a right to be.

“Shh,” Liyani breathed, voice suddenly all warmth and shelter. Kata’s breath came like a swallowed laugh; the girl coughed and blinked and then, as if nothing bigger than a bump had happened, began to search Liyani’s hands with a curiosity that made Liyani’s heart ache.

Behind them, the hall kept tearing and breaking; metal clashed with stone, and the sound of lightsabers hummed like neighbor thunder.

The child was small and trying her best not to tremble, and Liyani’s chest went tight with a fierce, unexpected tenderness. All at once, Kata became more than an orphaned kid who mouthed the truth of beauty; she became a living vessel of fragile hope that needed someone to stand between her and the world’s ugliness.

“Hey,” Liyani said softly, crouching so she could match the child’s wide eyes. She felt foolish at the gentleness of her own tone, at how unnatural it was to hold that softness.

Kata's gaze lowered, a line between her brows from thinking too much. “It hurts,” she whispered, and Liyani knew she didn't mean the push.

In the quiet, she curled her hand around a small, stubborn thing poking between two flagstones. It was a bud the size of a fingertip, green and knuckled and stubbornly alive. Her mother's face unbiddenly flashed before her eyes before she blinked it away.

She wasn't made for this. She wasn't made for delicate, small things, let alone pretending to be their safety.

Liyani closed her fingers over the bud with a sudden, maternal decisiveness anyway. She concentrated, with the small ordering of attention, the benign coaxing of life. The sensation felt foreign at first; she felt the bud's energy as if it had transferred to her palm. It was warm, like an early morning sunshine on Dathomir through a curtain of living vines.

Under her palms, the bud shuddered, and it split, unfurling into a tiny blossom that opened as if taking its first, trusting drink of sun. The petals were not large, but they were perfection: a bright, impossible azure that mirrored the lagoon a couple of steps away. Kata’s mouth opened in a small yelp of wonder as the flower unfurled.

Liyani opened her hands and showed the child the bloom like an offering. Kata leaned forward, breathing in the scent, the whole of her face clearing into a stunned, holy delight that was almost painful to see. Liyani felt a bubble of something like grief and relief collapse into a single ache and then, disarmingly, joy.

“You see?” Liyani whispered. “It’s all right.”

She felt small, embarrassed, and honest. She had been so practiced at keeping people at arm’s length, at never letting magic become anything other than survival. But this tiny conjuring was a clean thing. For a beat, she forgot the fight, forgot the strike of the saber, forgot that a man they had known a long time had just been felled by the knife-edge of violent choice.

Kata’s small fingers reached to touch the petals, tentative and reverent. “Pretty,” she breathed, simple as a bell. Then, with the blunt honesty of a child who does not wear masks, she said, “Merrin is really pretty.”

The smallness of the observation made Liyani laugh, a soft, surprised sound. “Yes,” she said, before she could stop herself, “She is.”

Kata’s head tipped. She looked up at Liyani with those clear eyes as if she was testifying to a verdict of truth. “You’re pretty too,” she announced, solemn and incapable of guile. “Are you sisters?”

Liyani’s brows reached her hairline. The little child’s innocent framing removed the heavy edges of history and guilt, and for a moment, the world felt impossibly simple.

Liyani’s voice came small, a hush full of too much meaning, and she answered in the only way that would hold the moment’s fragile magic without dissecting it.

“Yes.” She let the syllable hang between them. They did not need to say how or why. The child did not ask for bloodlines, only for a belonging. To Kata, the world could be mended by the simplest truths.

They waited. The temple’s distant clamor had retreated to a background thrum as if it never had the right to be this beautiful and violent at once. Grass whispered, and the waterfall sighed.

Later, once a hush settled over them, and the sound of the last blaster shot had long faded, Cal and Merrin returned through the doorway, their clothes torn and the light in their faces ragged and raw. They looked at one another and then, almost unconsciously, at the small pair in the alcove. Liyani’s gaze caught Merrin’s for a single, shining heartbeat, words moved over the surface of their eyes in a thousand small pacts. We do not let this child carry the loneliness we did; we will not let her grow with that empty place that scarred us.

The sun bled out of Tanalorr's sky in a long, dignified sigh. By the time the last of the funeral rites finished, the small, private words and the placing of things that mattered into the earth, an easy, exhausted hush had settled over them.

They had done what they could. The ceremonies were simple and true. There were tokens laid at the base of stones carved with Cordova’s and Cere's sigils, a quiet moment where Cal had spoken in a voice that scraped like stone being worked into something softer. Bode’s farewell was less tidy. It was ragged, edged with what had to be said but could not fully be cleansed. Kata's toy lay in the flames like a conclusion, like the sun had set on them, too, ready for a new dawn.

When the last ember died, all but Cal returned to the Mantis and to the real work like shelter, food, tending to a living child who deserved the simplest comforts.

They built beds with the Mantis’ spare supplies and with woven canopies harvested from the overhangs near the landing ring. Greez fussed over a particularly stubborn tarp like a man staking a flag in the world, grumbling curses with a protective edge, a combination only Greez could conjure. He found himself in his little cabin aboard the ship and refused, with good-humored sarcasm, to sleep outside.

“You planning on cosying up in a mudpit all night?” he demanded, waving a hand at Liyani.

Liyani, who had no taste for staying cooped up in the ship while grief was eating Cal's inner rest up like poison, let her answer be a soft, “I’ll be right behind you.” That seemed to satisfy him enough for him to stomp his little way up the Mantis. She didn’t follow.

Merrin took Kata down to the Mantis herself. The child played with BD-1 until the droid chirped and bleeped a frantic, happy tone, and then, when the little girl's eyelids became droopy and her movements became heavier, Merrin tucked her in like a mother who had learned gentleness by pure necessity and habit. Kata curled under the soft, makeshift blanket, her small chest rising and falling in occasionally troubled breaths, and Merrin, exhausted, lay down beside her on the narrow bunk and fell asleep in the softened, watchful way of someone who keeps a tired vigil for the vulnerable.

The old Latero's snores rattled through the Mantis like a malfunctioning hyperdrive not much later. Greez had passed out face-down in his bunk, one arm dangling over the edge, fingers twitching as if even in sleep he was still fussing with the ship’s wiring. The scent of the stew he had whisked together, something involving too much blue salt, lingered in the air vents.

Liyani stood at the edge of their arranged camp and watched for a long time, feeling the aftertaste of the day’s work settle into her like a bruise. Not everyone could grieve loudly. Some grief was a thing kept in the belly, a slow burn that you stitched into your sleep so other people didn’t have to see it. She had been good at that for a long time. Tonight, seeing Cal still perched at the foot of the stones, head bent and shoulders as taut as a bowstring, she realised grief was never meant to be kept a secret.

So she walked.

The place was dotted with natural pools that called to her the way some memories do. Tanalorr’s waterholes were not all identical; they were scattered like gems across the landscape, each like a little world of its own. Turquoise basins rimmed in white stone, the water lit from within by a natural luminescence that made the surface appear to glow, a soft internal light that showed off the planet’s honest purity. The pools lay tucked into pockets of cliff and fern; their edges were cushioned with moss and petals that shivered in the breeze like shy things.

The air was thick with the scent of blooming vines. Tanalorr’s moon cast silver fractures across the stony shores. 

She walked until the softer soil gave way beneath her boots. The sky had fallen away into a velvet dome, and the moon hung like a guardian over the cliffs. Stars shivered, and the distant waterfalls made a soft, steady thrum. The air smelled of flower nectar and something exquisitely green that had nothing to do with the rot, clank, and oil of the places she usually knew.

Liyani reached the edge of one of the larger pools and stopped. The water there was a bowl of glass, still except for the soft sigh of a gentle eddy where a breeze teased at the surface. The moonlight made the water look unreal with a glow that reflected on her own face and turned the hair of her braid into something luminous. She reached towards the end of it and let the hair come loose.

She dropped to her knees without fanfare. The earth was cool against her skin. Habit guided her hands: palms flat on the earth, fingers splayed, a posture she’d used in the far-off nights when she had forced magick to the edge and tried to coax it without screaming. This time it was different. Her connection was quiet, a touch of presence rather than a calling of force. She let the water’s stillness merge with the smallness of her breath.

It wasn’t a ritual so much as a remembering how to be a person in a world that felt cruel, of how to take a small measure of the planet’s peace and pocket it for later. She let the sound of the falls fill the hollow spaces in her, and she felt, outside of herself, the small thread that had led her to Cal being pulled gently taut again, like life breathing back into it.

So she stayed, palms to pebble and sand, for a long time. 

The crunch of footsteps made her open her eyes.

Cal stood a little way behind her at first, watching as if he’d stumbled into a deja vu. She recognized that gait immediately, one that had been a part of him the first time she’d noticed him on Bracca. He sat down beside her without a word, letting his weight sink into the sand. For a while, they simply sat.

They didn’t speak at once. There was no need, and it had become their way. Words could be too heavy with the wrong meaning. When she looked up, the moon painted his profile in a soft light, making him look thoughtful, strained, the lines of grief carved into a face that had always held a grin ready. Liyani’s hands were still on the earth, the tips of her fingers pressed against warm pebbles.

She watched him, and something in her reached out, not with magick so much as with a humanity that had been kept tucked away. She rose slowly, as if moving might be the only honest thing left in their world.

She began pulling her coat off with a soft motion. Her movements were simple; she didn’t look toward him as she peeled away the fabric, then the next layer, until only one remained. Liyani stepped out of her tunic in one smooth motion, letting it pool at her feet. The moonlight traced the Dathomiri tattoos along her back, and down her spine; they were faint, swirling lines and bands that arced like old scars and smoke alike, dark and beautiful against the light of her skin. For a moment, Cal’s breath caught in the scrape he made between his teeth, and his eyes widened as though he’d seen her for the first time.

She turned toward the water, the invitation in her motion quiet and certain. “Come,” she said, and the single word hung between them.

He watched her step into the shallows as though watching a ceremony. The water wrapped around her ankles, cool but bright. She walked inward with slow steps until the pool came up to her waist. In the moonlight, her back looked almost ethereal, the markings like smoke trailing along her shoulder blades, the curve of her spine a soft line. She inclined her head back and let the water lap the lines of her shoulder blades.

Cal watched, an invisible storm in his chest. Then, as simply as the tide, he rose and walked toward the water. He did not strip with showy hesitation or sudden revelation, but with a practical, raw need. His clothes came away like leaves, and below, his skin wore bruises and the not-quite-healed lines of recent suffering.

She felt the small, particular pressure of attention that had followed her across half a galaxy. It was a quiet thing, almost intimate enough to be embarrassing, the way someone’s hand might linger at the small of your back in a crowded room. Liyani kept her face to the moon, letting its cold light make patterns across the water and across the small crescent on her forehead. Above them, the sky was a bowl of black silk with pinpricks of stars.

She could feel Cal’s gaze as if it were a heat against her spine. It made her aware of the small details she usually avoided noticing, like the way the water clung to the fine hairs on her arms, the delicate way her mother's tattoos on her skin darkened in wetness, the subtle shallowing of her own breath. It made all the practiced walls she kept around herself feel suddenly porous and ridiculous.

There had been a time, she reminded herself, when the idea of disappearing from Jedha had been the only honest plan she had. Disappear, cut off the past once and for all, and never be used, never be owed anything, never have anyone else's decisions fracture her life again. She'd been so thorough in that plan that for a while it had been the shape of her days. Then she had followed after him to Daiyu, out of duty, she told herself; she couldn't have told herself the truth then. She then had left him; she had chosen the habits that kept her apart. And after all of that, the galaxy, in its grim way, had a habit of arranging collisions of the sort she tried to despise but couldn't: it had dragged her back to him as if their lives were two magnets that refused to lie separated.

The irony of it warmed her in a complicated, bitter way. She had sworn to be nothing anyone could attach themselves to, and yet here she stood, in luminous water under a moon that made everything look like a painting, thinking she could no longer imagine being anywhere else. The thought itself felt stolen from a different woman. It made her want to laugh and to cry at once. Her fears back on Koboh had been proven right; there was no going back from Cal Kestis, after all.

She turned then, slowly, letting the water slide from her arms in slender rivers. Cal’s face came into view like a shadow opening into light. He watched her with an intensity that made the world compress into the single pull of that look. For a heartbeat, she thought he might look away; instead, his eyes softened with something that was almost disbelief.

“You found me.”

His voice was breath-thin, as if he had to shape the words carefully or they would crack. The phrase landed against her like a stone skimming across a dark lake and then sinking, stirring the water in her chest. He said it as if it were impossible, as if any other outcome of all those choices might have been expected. The modesty of the claim, his astonished, grateful “you found me,” signlehandedly melted another wall she never knew stood to begin with.

She could not find a reply. The truth of him being there, alive, present, and fragile in a way that refused to be heroic, swallowed every smart, flippant retort she might have had. All she had were the small, unmagical sensations: the quickening of her pulse where his attention rested, the dry salt of the air in her mouth, the way the moonlight turned his hair into a darker halo. She felt stripped, not in the way of being exposed, but in the honest vulnerability of having someone find you after you had lukewarmly tried to be invisible.

She had sparked the first catastrophe of a kiss on Jedha, and the memory of that misstep had become a private lesson she returned to often. She would not be the reckless one here. She would not be the one to ruin this fragile moment with impatience or selfishness. She had learned, the hard way, that sometimes the only kind of courage that mattered was the patience to let someone else find you.

He took a step closer, slower than she expected, as if she might dissolve if he moved too fast. The way he moved was tentative, as though the world had become something brittle; he did not want to scrape it. Up close, she saw the small tremor in his hands, the pallor under his jaw where sleep and sorrow had ravaged him. He smelled faintly of metal and the lingering smoke of recent battles, not the perfume of a man triumphant, but the honest and bodily scent of someone who had been broken and used and yet still held together by sheer will.

He came closer until the distance between them was nothing and then less, until his chest brushed her shoulder and she felt the steady, aching rhythm of his heart. He reached out, not like a thief or a conqueror, but like someone remembering where home might be. His fingers hovered near the small of her back and then rested against her as if finally steadying himself.

She held her breath. For a long second, they simply stood there, the world made small and private by the way the planet folded around them.

He lowered his head as if in apology and then in want, two things that could coexist because no person was uncomplicated. And then, with a gentle tilt of her chin, he pressed his lips to hers with a deliberation that bordered on worship. It was not a quick theft of breath; the first kiss on Jedha had been a spark, feverish and imperfect; this was a slow, deep press of all the weather they'd survived into one single one. His mouth was warm and tired, carrying the faint taste of iron and a too-urgent thirst that made the back of her knees go soft.

She did not move at first, but matched him. She let the heat of that contact pool like a secret. Fear and tenderness braided in her chest. When she finally answered, it was not with the petulant, guarded flurries of before but with a rich, layered return, a soft and full thing that tasted of apology, of hunger, of relief. She let her hands go somewhere new: one to the back of his neck, where his auburn hair had grown longer, and the skin was thin and vulnerable, and the other to his shoulder, feeling the taut muscles there like replaced armor. The way he leaned into her was both small and enormous; the way he held her made her breath hitch.

Language fell away. Memory and future and all the noise of the galaxy condensed into the single, true sensation of being found by someone who had once been lost. As his hands slid up her back, he traced the markings there like a man memorizing a map.

Liyani pulled back just enough to see his face, the moonlight catching on his lashes, the way his pupils had swallowed the green of his eyes, but he cut the moment off with another kiss, biting her lower lip in a way that made her nails dig into his shoulders. Liyani tangled her fingers in his hair, pulling just enough to hear his groan vibrate against her chest.

The water grew warmer around them, reacting to her pulse or his presence; neither of them cared enough to question it. As he pulled away for a breath once more, Cal's fingers tangled in her hair, tilting her head back as his mouth found her throat. She arched into him with a sound of bliss so light, he almost missed it. He muttered something against her in either a curse or a prayer.

Somewhere beyond the shore, a bird cried, low and mournful. Cal stilled, forehead pressed to her shoulder. His breath came ragged. "Tell me to stop," he murmured against her damp skin, though his hands still gripped her hips as if he'd drown before letting go. She didn't.

Distantly, she registered the sound of movement. Liyani went rigid, but Cal only pressed closer, his hands sliding up her back as if he could fuse them. "Don't worry about it," he murmured against her pulse point, teeth grazing the spot that made her shiver. His certainty should have unnerved her; instead, it sent a thrill down her spine. This Jedi was attuned to her in ways that defied logic. 

The same bird cried again, closer now. Cal lifted his head, water still clinging to his lashes. Some unspoken understanding passed between them that this moment couldn't last, not now and certainly not like this. But when he kissed her this time, it was slower, devouring. As if he could sear the memory of her taste into his bones.

Finally, as if reciting a private vow, Cal brushed a thumb across her cheekbone.

“Stay,” he said, not as a command but as a plea.

Liyani’s answer was a small, genuine whisper. She threaded her fingers with his and let go of the practiced defenses she used, if only for the time being. “I'm here,” she said, the promise in it small but absolute.

The sand clung to their feet, the salt drying in the creases of their skin; their clothes were limp things they had wrestled off the ground and now gathered without ceremony. The moon traced wet lines down their arms. For a moment, they moved with the quiet, intimate awkwardness of two people who had just revealed more of themselves than either had planned and were now discovering how to fold in the silence.

Cal slipped the damp coat over Liyani’s shoulders first, an instinct so easy it surprised them both. She let it fall there for a second, the fabric hanging between them like a fragile truce, and then they picked up the rest of their things in a careful, nervy choreography. There was no laughter or easy jokes, just the thin, electric glance every time their eyes met. The air between them was taut with things unsaid: questions that would come later, the memory of what’d been done in Nova Garon, the horror that had followed them even into paradise. None of it wanted clarity yet.

She tucked her wet hair back into its braid with the same, quick motion she’d used the entire trip, but paused when Cal reached for his own cloak. He then moved to help her adjust the fabric at her shoulders, and in the dim, she let herself feel the warmth of his fingers as if it were a lesson in steadiness.

Then, abruptly and with the same reckless impulse that had chased them through other bad choices, he swept her up.

It was sudden enough to knock the breath out of her. For a second, she felt absurdly adolescent and caught off guard. Her first reaction was to find the gesture silly and slightly theatrical, and his arms around her felt like a scene from a holodrama she would have mocked on any other night.

“Put me down, Kestis,” she started, eyes narrowing with rebuke she couldn't even convey with a straight face.

He cut her off with a kiss, like a command that erased jokes. He kissed her as if the shape of her lips could steady the staccato of his heart. For all the grandness of the carry, this one was urgent and private, a secret moved between them with the gravity of something necessary. Liyani sputtered a little, surprised by the sincerity that sat in the gesture.

She stiffened, then gave in. The resistance dissolved into a warm, amused surrender: she let herself be carried because he needed it. After all, the absurdity of being scooped into his arms was a small rebellion against the day’s cruelty. She still had a reflex to roll her eyes at the cheesiness, but the roll softened into a smile she couldn’t entirely hide.

He walked that last stretch in silence, the Mantis looming as a dark silhouette against the jeweled horizon. The ramp felt like a threshold between the mythic green of the planet and the cramped life of the ship. They moved up it without fanfare, his arms firm under her thighs, her hands hooked around his neck just enough to steady herself. Each step carried the quiet of proximity: they were close enough now that neither could pretend indifference.

Inside the ship, the halls were dim, and the familiar smell of oil and warm metal flooded their senses once more. The conversation that might have been - plans, strategies, some apologies - sat down like something heavy and inevitable in Liyani’s chest, but Cal only carried her down the narrow passage toward his room. The world outside had been unmade and remade when Bode died; the corridor felt like a place where time could be stolen and folded away.

The door whooshed shut with a soft finality, cutting them off from the rest of the crew and the distant, real world on which they had all been forced to tread today. Radio silence, no instruments clattering, no idle chatter, just the thud of their heartbeats.

He lowered her onto the narrow cot with a care that surprised even him. For a moment, he hesitated, hands lingering at her waist as if asking permission he did not voice. She watched him, the barest flicker of amusement tugging at the corners of her mouth. He was awkward at tenderness in a way that felt raw and completely human.

As he started to step back, she caught the front of his cloak between her fingers and pulled him down again. He froze, eyes wide, for an instant, terrified she might push away or say something that would break the fragile mood. Instead, they simply looked at one another.

The air between them thrummed with an electricity neither wanted to name. There was danger in everything now: visibility, attachment, the possibility of being found by enemies or betrayed by friends. Yet something in the bubble of that small room felt fiercely private and calmed them both beyond rationality.

Slowly, with a slowness that was its own kind of pledge, he lay down beside her. They faced one another on the narrow cot, blanket dragged up over them like a small sail. The space was tiny, indulgently intimate: two people, shoulder to shoulder, a world reduced to the width of a sleeping berth and the sound of each other’s breathing.

They were close enough that the heat of his body hummed into her side. The unresolved tension that had been a taut wire all night seemed less predatory now and more fragile, like glass that might catch a room in color if handled gently. Neither moved, and neither spoke. The blanket wrapped around them and held everything in.

After a long, heavy beat, Cal’s hand rose like a tentative ship pushing out to sea. He brushed his thumb against the small, crescent mark on her forehead, the ink there catching the dim light like a tiny moon. His thumb traced the curve with a tenderness that made something clench in Liyani’s chest, the same hands that had struck down every man in his way only a day or two earlier.

The room stayed dark and small around them, the alert lights on the wall blinking in a slow rhythm. She felt the question forming in the line of his shoulders, the quiet asking that came from someone whose compass had been smashed and was searching for signposts.

She could feel him hesitating. “Why… these?” he asked, voice low and careful, like someone reading an old language he’d always wished to understand.

Liyani didn’t answer at first. The markings were a part of her body she rarely let anyone look at directly, for multiple reasons, like the shame she couldn't place, some stubborn loyalty, and perhaps some superstition. Dathomir didn’t encourage softness around such things. She watched him as his thumb moved in tiny, slow circles and found that she had to pull some of her defenses away because this was delicate but, for a change, earned.

Finally, she exhaled through her nose, a small, wry sound. “Most people think we’re born with them,” she murmured. “We’re not.”

Cal’s thumb stilled. He listened like he was trying not to breathe wrong.

“It isn’t a birthright,” she continued. “It’s a rite. No Nightsister is born wearing her tribe’s shadow. You earn it.” She paused, then added, “Well… ‘earn’ isn’t the right word. More like survive it.”

His brow creased, concern flickering.

She almost smirked. “Don’t make that face. It’s not as dramatic as it sounds.”

She let a beat pass before speaking. “This one… isn’t common. Some clans give no forehead mark at all. Mine only reserves it for children who…” She paused, searching for the least dramatic phrasing. “Whose birth mattered.”

Cal blinked once, startled. She almost laughed.

“It doesn’t mean what the rest of the galaxy thinks it means. Not royalty, or power. More like...” Her fingers lifted to the crescent unconsciously. “Like a promise.”

She shifted on her side to face him more fully. “When a child is born under a rare lunar alignment, which was a full moon cresting into eclipse, in my case, the clan marks them before their skin even finishes warming.” She huffed a small, ironic laugh. “Barely out of the womb, and someone’s already drawing on your face.”

Cal looked at her like he was holding a fragile artifact. She ignored it.

“The crescent symbolizes observation,” she went on, quieter now. “It means you see what others miss. That you walk between fate and choice. That you’re never supposed to be blind to the signs around you.”

A beat passed, and her voice thinned considerably. “And that you’re never supposed to forget where you came from.”

Cal brushed the crescent again, but said nothing.

She forced herself to continue before the moment grew too heavy. “That’s why it’s on the forehead. Not the cheek, not the jaw. Here.” She tapped gently between her brows. “Where intuition sits, and where a witch sees.”

His gaze flicked lower, to her chin. “And these?”

She swore under her breath, amused and reluctantly impressed. “You noticed those?”

He nodded. “Barely visible. But… they’re there.”

“Well, they’re not supposed to be.” She pulled the blanket up in a mock gesture of annoyance. “Those are… older, much older. They’ve faded because I haven’t used magick in years. Normally, without magick, they’d be nearly gone.”

He waited, and she sighed. “Three dots. For the Triad Mothers. Maiden, Warrior, Crone. Only given to children inducted into the inner teachings. It’s...” She hesitated. “A declaration of belonging. To a specific bloodline, a specific matriarch.”

Cal’s brows knit in thought, but he didn’t voice the guess forming behind his eyes. Good, because she wasn’t ready to hear the name out loud.

“My mother gave them to me herself,” she said softly, but not necessarily in a fragile way, only distant.

The air shifted just barely. A thread of lineage she rarely touched flickered in her mind unbiddenly, and she shoved it right to the back of her mind.

“The spine markings,” she added quickly, redirecting, “are the same. They map the matriarch’s line. Your place in it, and who you’re tied to. Mine…” She swallowed. “Mine come from someone powerful. Someone who casts a long shadow. They shouldn’t glow like they used to.”

He whispered, “But here they do.”

“Unfortunately.” She snorted. “Tanalorr must be full of ancient energy. I haven’t even used magick, but this place feels like it’s trying to remind me I’m a witch whether I like it or not.”

Cal’s gaze dipped down instinctively, as if he could somehow see the living marks beneath. “They look…” He was smiling now, boyish and devastatingly. “They look incredible.”

She groaned. “You’re unbelievable.”

“No,” he said softly. “You’re beautiful.”

She froze, like a small system error. Then she turned away from him with an exasperated little huff.

“That is the kind of thing someone says when they’re sleep-deprived and sentimental. Go to sleep, Jedi.”

He didn’t argue. Just shifted closer, slow enough that she felt every inch of hesitation, then wrapped an arm around her waist carefully, like he was asking without speaking.

He waited one heartbeat, or two, and she didn’t pull away. Then gently, he pulled her in, her back fitting to his chest with a familiarity that startled them both.

She muttered something that sounded a lot like “ridiculous”, but she stayed exactly where she was. She let herself sink into him carefully, as though even her muscles weren’t fully convinced she deserved stillness, but she didn’t move away. She promised she wouldn't this time.

There would be time for that.

Chapter Text

9 BBY, TANALORR

The room smelled of warm metal and the faint, honeyed tang of Tanalorr’s blossoms, an odd scent that seemed impossible after the violence of the day before. Liyani woke with her cheek pressed to the thin blanket, the ship’s hull a steady, distant hum beneath her. For a slow, suspended second, she didn’t remember where she was. The last thing her mind could hold was moonlight on water, his arms around her, the stupid, utterly soft thing he’d been in the small hours when grief had finally broken him open.

He looked like that now, sleeping like someone who had been allowed to collapse. The curve of his jaw was relaxed, the line of his throat unguarded. Shadowed lashes lay against his skin. He breathed as if each inhalation might hurt if he did it loudly, which made the rise and fall of his chest so careful it made her chest ache in imitation. It was the kind of intimacy she’d trained herself to keep small, guarded, a thing not meant for anyone, yet there he was, next to her in the gray light before the sun, and the sight of him made something inside her bloom foolish and soft. She felt almost disgustingly smitten, warm, ridiculous, and helpless. He had been a fortress, and now he was folded inward like he needed to be kept safe, despite knowing he was more than capable of that himself.

Then, as the new light sharpened, the shape of the day came in slowly. Bode was dead. Cordova and Cere were buried. The price of getting here had been carved into their bones. Liyani felt the old pragmatic urge rise, to move, to prepare, keep doing whatever the world demanded, and she couldn’t entirely dishonor it, even in the quiet.

She watched him for a moment longer, the longing and the fear settling into a complicated knot. She knew, without a doubt, that this would not be enough. Not for him, and for what had been twisted into him. The dark he had touched had teeth. It had made marks that would not simply be soothed by moonlight and calm.

She rose quietly, careful not to wake him. His hand tightened around her waist when she shifted, and for a breath, she considered staying, letting the pretense of peace hold a beat longer. Then she drew back enough, tugged on a dry shirt and the coat he’d slipped over her shoulders earlier, an oddly domestic thing that smelled faintly of him. He slept on.

Outside the Mantis, before the sun had made its full promise across the horizon, she slowly chewed a spare ration bar she had found in the galley in small, unhurried bites. The air was cool and damp. Small animals scurried in the low brush; one of the softer, luminous birds they’d heard last night fluttered past and vanished. The planet breathed in a way that was both ancient and unconcerned with galactic violence, and the contrast felt surreal to her.

She almost didn’t hear the soft step behind her, the careful tread that belonged to someone who had learned how to approach people with respect for their silence.

“Merrin,” she said. She did not turn at first. She chewed the ration slowly, letting the sugar tack to nerves. The steps behind her measured themselves the way a drum measures marching. Then Merrin’s shadow fell across the rim of light.

Merrin was quiet as ever, an outline cut in the new sunlight. She carried the kind of face that had learned to be both shield and blade, soft around the eyes where she kept memory, hard where she had to be practical. Her presence made a small crease of unease form deep in Liyani’s belly; it was not just because Merrin had been close to the people Liyani had lost, but because Merrin carried those losses like an old, sharp thing that could cut if mishandled.

“Morning,” Merrin said, and it was more complex than the word. It could mean welcome, caution, or accusation. Liyani’s mouth made nothing in reply at first. She felt the immediate temptation to curl back into the small private space she’d kept.

They had shared the same grief that morning, but their grief wore different faces. Liyani felt the old defenses - her practiced sarcasm, the hard horizon she’d built around herself - stir up out of habit. Merrin’s arms stayed folded, the simple posture of someone who had learned how to protect the small places of themselves.

“Did you sleep?” Merrin asked finally, voice paper-soft.

Liyani swallowed. For a second, she considered lying. Instead, she said, “A little.”

They stood side by side and watched the sky change. The first true light of dawn sent a spill of gold across the cliffs; mist rose in slow columns above the pools like breathing things. Liyani’s jaw tightened at the sight, and she felt the old wave of guilt.

After a silence that tasted of brine, Merrin spoke first in that low voice that belonged to her when she was not trying to be cruel. “You left,” she said.

The accusation was simple and not new. Liyani had expected it, had rehearsed responses in the small corners of nights when her guilt needed telling. Still, the words built ice in her chest.

“I ran,” Liyani said, deliberately even. “I didn’t-” She stopped because words always tried to cheat things away. “I didn’t have a choice.”

Merrin’s eyes didn’t warm at the explanation; they only watched. “Where did you go?” she asked.

“Avoidance places. Then… other places.” Liyani found she couldn’t keep the edge out of her voice; guilt had a way of making one brittle. She swallowed and added, quieter, “Mother hid me. That’s how I survived.”

Merrin’s mouth pressed into a line. “I stayed,” she said. Her sound held no triumph, only a steady fact. “I hid. In the ruined temples near the low passes. I lived in the dark with their voices.”

Liyani’s chest tightened at the image: Merrin crouched among bloody stone and the stench of death, while she’d vanished into work and noise and other people’s needs. The two of them had survived by learning diverging arts.

“You stayed with them,” Liyani said, not quite a question.

Merrin nodded. “Some of us had nowhere else. Some of us had no other language.”

There was a pause heavy with a history they both knew too well: that survival often required different moral contortions. The nights on Dathomir had been long, and both of them had had to make decisions in the dark.

Liyani felt something hot and protective rise in her chest. “I didn’t leave because I didn’t care,” she said, the defense sharpened because guilt had teeth. “I left because it was the only way to survive.”

Merrin’s eyes flicked to her then — a small look that held both skepticism and a weary empathy. “Survival is a ledger,” she said. “You pay in different currencies.”

Then Merrin’s expression shifted, subtle as a tide. She cocked her head like she was weighing a truth inside her. “People in the outer camps asked, you know. Knew you were of the old line,” she said. Her tone was careful, far from accusations, but Liyani heard it regardless.

It was the one thing she had never wanted spoken aloud, hints of her bloodline threaded into conversation as if it explained everything. “We don’t talk about that,” she said fast, a reflex that came from years of needing to shut the subject down. “It doesn’t matter.”

Merrin’s patience thinned a degree. “It matters,” she said bluntly. “If people hear that you are, they will not look at you as a simple survivor.”

Liyani's jaw only tightened.

“Magick?” Merrin asked quietly after a moment of silence, scanning Liyani’s face. She waited for an answer.

Liyani’s eyes flashed as she felt a fresh sting. The word was a hot coal in her mouth. She had closed that room away with a lock and a shove. She deflected it fast, practiced. “No,” she said, clipped. “Not anymore.”

Merrin’s mouth thinned with irritation. She’d expected the shutdown and knew the pattern, but the refusal to even acknowledge the Nightsister line felt like salt. The subject had wings and talons. She pressed stubbornly. “You still shut it down. You don’t have to be ashamed of it.”

Liyani’s temper reacted not with reason but with the ugly spring of shame pushing back. “Shut up about it,” she snapped, sharper than she meant. “I don’t want to be talked into an identity like it’s a costume.”

Merrin’s expression hardened. “You say you don’t,” she said, “but the Force doesn’t forget how to sing just because you cover your ears.” There was wary frustration in Merrin’s voice at being shut out.

For a moment, both women stood with stinging silence. The gentle chorus of the planet throbbed around them, almost mocking with its patience.

Then Merrin sighed and softened, not because Liyani’s bark had been pleasant but because grief reshapes people into smaller tolerances. “I didn’t mean to… pry,” she said.

Liyani’s stomach churned on instinct, as if her body was offended at her own refusal to acknowledge any of it. “It’s not something I use,” she tried again. “I-” The rest came out harder than she wanted, like thorns along her throat."I can't."

Merrin didn’t press the point. For a long moment, both of them were quiet. Her face softened despite herself. “Because it is painful,” she said quietly. “I know.” Her voice carried no triumph, but it carried recognition. That small concession was like an olive branch; it unclenched a part of Liyani’s chest.

Silence fell between them, not thin but full of things left unspoken — histories, choices, shame. The world outside shifted light and made the lagoon shimmer. Two women who had been separated by survival found themselves once more near enough to speak like kin.

Liyani, careful now, asked what she had been circling for nights like a hungry animal. “Cal?” she said. The name tasted heavy.

Merrin’s expression changed then, something tender and complicated cracking in her features. “It was never just me,” she said slowly.

She continued, quieter: “He was always carrying something from long before I met him, Liyani. It isn’t something I begrudge, because he’s not a prize. He’s a person.”

Liyani’s breath snagged. The revelation landed with both surprise and a constricting warm feeling. “Me?”

“Yes,” Merrin said simply. “He remembers the small things. It stuck with him in a way that...” She trailed off, and the silence filled the gap.

It made Liyani feel both unsettled and strange. To be an imprint on someone’s mind carried tenderness and an odd accusation. She swallowed.

The way Merrin said it was almost gentle. Liyani felt something unwind and then tighten all at once. The admission stung, because it held truth: a seed planted long ago, a memory that had threaded into both their lives. The certainty that Cal’s mind had room for more than one influence was equal parts comforting and frightening. She had not expected to carry such a weight.

“I didn’t set out to be any of it,” Liyani said, voice a little raw, and there was a guilt there she hadn’t anticipated feeling as if she’d stolen a part of someone’s map. The admission made her uncomfortable.

“Kata?” she asked when Merrin's silence was her only answer, changing the focus with a soft nudge. The child’s name felt like a balm in the valley of their talk.

Merrin’s face warmed without permission. “She’s… already attached. I was not prepared,” she said, surprise and embarrassed affection in one small breath. 

As they rounded to Kata then, the mood softened in a way that made Liyani ache differently. Merrin brought the child into the talk with a nervous hand that looked like it wanted to pet rather than prod. Liyani’s voice brightened without pretense as she talked about the way the child moved around Merrin, how she followed her like a small shadow. “She already loves you,” Liyani said. Her tone was light, but the warmth in it was real. “She keeps looking for you.”

Merrin’s cheeks betrayed her. The faintest green flushed across them, a color that, to Liyani, always read like home. “I don’t know how to be… in that place,” Merrin admitted, a little awkward, a little fearful. “But I feel something for her. I don’t know what to do with it.”

Liyani looked at her with a true, open gladness. “You’d be a good mother,” she said without thinking.

Merrin’s face went small and unguarded in a way Liyani had rarely witnessed. “You think so?”

She blinked when Liyani only raised a brow, then allowed a half-smile to break through, the kind that looked pleased and embarrassed at once. The small, honest softness in her made Liyani want to laugh and cry both. She returned the compliment with surprise and sincerity. “Well, and you...” she began, then faltered, the words halting on their edges. But she managed, softly, “You’re not as cold as you like to act.”

Liyani snorted, a short, incredulous sound that carried a layer of ironic disbelief. “That’s the world’s biggest lie,” she said, but it came out more tender than scornful. It made something loosen inside them both. The tension between them, taut as it had been since the temple, unwound in a small but soothing way.

On the Mantis, Cal surfaced from sleep like a man slowly dragging himself out of deep water. For a flicker of a moment, there was nothing but the fog of early morning, the cool air of the small room, the faint scent of salt, and a note of local flowers clinging to the sheets. His body felt heavy… not in the way a soldier feels after battle, but in the strange, unfamiliar heaviness that follows peace, a peace he didn’t trust, one he didn’t think belonged to him anymore.

His arm moved before his mind did. Instinct. 

His hand slid across the bed, reaching for the warmth that had been there all night, a space shaped like her. He brushed only cool linen. The absence hit him like a jolt, his fingertips curling as if trying to hold onto something that wasn’t there. His eyes opened fully, alert, sharp, and already the dread came clawing in from the edges.

Gone? Where-?

His gaze snapped across the room, searching the shadows, the quiet corners, as if maybe she’d just moved to sit somewhere else, maybe she’d stayed close, maybe-

His senses then sharpened, settling and focusing like a lens being twisted into clarity.

There.

A soft presence along his conscience. Familiar in a way nothing else in the galaxy had a right to be. Not quite light, not entirely dark either, a blend that always felt like it was tailored to him personally.

Liyani.

A breath escaped him, long and relieved, nearly shaky. His shoulders eased, and his heart stopped its frantic, caged pounding.

She hadn’t left.

He pressed the heel of his hand to his brow, dragging in a slow inhale as everything began to crowd in at the edges of that relief, everything he wasn’t ready to think about.

Bode. Dead.

He had killed him. Shot straight through the chest, no hesitation. A choice he didn’t regret, but a choice that lived in him now like a stain he could feel but couldn’t scrub out.

Cere and Cordova. Gone.

Their bodies still fresh in his memory, their last breaths, their voices echoing in that silent, burning archive. The hole their absence carved into him was almost too large to look at directly.

Kata.

An orphan. She had no one except them. Except him, and he wasn’t sure he deserved to be responsible for anyone ever again.

His jaw tightened. The air felt suddenly thin. Not now. Not. Now.

He shoved the thoughts aside quickly and way too recklessly, the way a man throws a sheet over shattered glass, pretending not to see the sharp edges didn’t make them disappear, but Force. Pretending was easier. 

Instead, he clung to the one thing that quieted the noise.

The memory of her breath against his throat last night, her hands in his hair. The way she’d looked at him in the moonlight, like he was still someone worth finding.

When he exhaled again, it was steadier, and he swung his legs out of bed. He dressed on autopilot: rough trousers, shirt sliding on easily, boots strapped tight as if he were preparing for battle. Maybe he was, for a different kind, one he refused to actively understand.

The door hissed open.

BD-1 immediately chirped up at him from the floor before springing with eager precision onto his shoulder. Cal let out a soft scoff under his breath and reached up to steady the little droid.

“Morning, buddy…” His voice was hoarse, barely awake. “Yeah, yeah, I know. I slept in.”

A pleased trill.

“Don’t rub it in.”

He stepped into the corridor. The Mantis welcomed him like an old friend who didn’t ask questions. Sunlight from the rising dawn filtered faintly through the small windows, turning the metal warm and gold.

As he passed the galley, he caught the movement of a familiar silhouette seated in his periphery, spine straight as a spear but shoulders just a touch softer than usual.

Merrin's hair fell loose around her face, her posture as relaxed as it could get, but her presence sharp as ever. She held a steaming cup between her palms, its surface swirling with faint herbs.

Cal’s feet slowed instinctively. He stepped closer and rested a hand on her shoulder, squeezing gently, a gesture that said I’m here and I’m okay enough and thank you for still being alive.

Merrin turned her head slightly to look up at him. Her smile was small, warm, but made his stomach pinch with the concern she wasn’t bothering to hide.

He ignored it completely.

“What’s that?” he asked, nodding toward the cup.

“Tea,” Merrin said simply. “Liyani made it.”

He blinked. “Liy?” He raised both brows, genuinely surprised.

Merrin gave a knowing little hum. “It is… thoughtful. Calming...Unexpected.”

He couldn’t help it; his mouth twitched. Yeah, that sounded exactly like something she would do when her heart was splitting open in seven different ways.

He squeezed Merrin’s shoulder one more time, grateful but unable to linger in the worry behind her eyes. He couldn’t handle anyone else’s fear right now; he could barely carry his own.

He straightened, BD-1 chirping in encouragement.

“Thanks,” he said, not even sure what exactly for, perhaps for all of it. He nodded once to Merrin, then stepped away.

He couldn’t wait any longer. He made his way down the ramp and out into the fresh dawn air.

The soft and cool breeze reached him first, scented faintly with dew and distant sea salt. The sky was pale pink now, the kind of morning that belonged to a world trying to heal.

He followed the quiet pull of her presence until he stepped into the clearing outside the Mantis.

There she was. Liyani sat alone, hair tousled by the wind, eyes fixed on the horizon like she was still deciding whether to stay alive for another sunrise.

For a moment, Cal just stood there watching her.

The stone still held the night’s humid warmth, smooth against Liyani’s legs as she sat cross-legged atop it, high enough to see the tree line, low enough to pretend she wasn’t keeping watch. Her clothes were soft, old, linen, the color of river sand, worn so thin they clung to her lightly. Ordinary. Almost painfully peaceful.

Steam curled from the metal cup beside her, carrying the scent of herbs she’d gathered before sunrise. She didn’t drink it yet. Instead, she focused on the slow, steady process of braiding her hair, her fingers weaving with a quiet, mechanical rhythm. A ritual. A grounding technique she’d learned from Mothers who taught her to braid not just strands, but nerves, thoughts, memories.

The Mantis behind her was quiet except for the low hum of the engines cooling.

Still, her fingers paused mid-twist, just once, and barely a fraction of a second. Then she resumed, controlled, unbothered.

The pause was enough for Cal, though. He stopped at the edge of the clearing, stopped breathing, too.

For a heartbeat, he simply stared at her back, chest tightening at the sight. She looked real. The kind of real that terrified him. Soft morning light touched her shoulders, slipped through loose strands of her hair, and traced her profile when she leaned forward slightly.

His heart hit his ribs hard. She was here, still here.

He moved toward her without meaning to, slow steps crunching on the stone and soil until he stood just behind her, close enough to see the tiny tension in her shoulders, trying very hard not to be obvious.

“You felt me,” he said quietly.

She didn’t turn her head, didn’t even pause the braid this time.

“Or,” she said in a bored tone, “you’re still as heavy-footed as before.”

His mouth curved.

He leaned down, close enough for his breath to stir the hair at her ear and murmured, “Liar.”

Warm and intimate. It felt too casual and too natural, as if the night before had rewritten the entire gravity between them.

She swallowed. He noted it with a flicker of private satisfaction before straightening and circling the stone she sat on. He climbed halfway up and dropped down in front of her, sitting at her feet like it was the most normal thing in the galaxy.

She watched him with a mixture of amusement and longing she tried (and failed) to mask.

Without asking, he reached for her tea.

She narrowed her eyes at the audacity, but didn’t stop him. He sipped, and his shoulders loosened immediately at the warmth sliding down his throat.

“I ran into Merrin,” he said, rolling the cup between his hands. “Said you made this?”

Liyani’s braid paused again, this time on purpose. She let a small smile surface, faint but sincere.

“May or may not have reached a truce,” she replied.

Cal raised a skeptical brow. “A truce.”

“She hunted me down, first thing in the morning,” Liyani shrugged. “I made her tea later. Easy enough.”

“That… actually sounds like the two of you.”

“It helped more than either of us wants to admit.” A softer look crossed her face, one he never got to see involving Merrin before. “She’s changed. We both did.”

Cal didn’t trust himself to answer that yet, so he sipped again.

The conversation wandered, light and hesitant in parts, but warm. The guarded edge between them had dulled into something gentler, not the crackling intensity they’d had on Koboh, or the desperate gravity of last night, but the early steps of something careful and new.

Liyani spoke more than he did, hands moving as she described the herbs she’d found near the cliffs, the subtle differences between them, which ones worked for calming the mind, which ones eased tension.

“Those purple-tipped leaves?” she said, nodding toward the brush beyond the cliff. “They’re good for settling the nerves. I picked a handful earlier; they smell like rain.”

Cal sipped her tea and hummed. “You’re really into this plant thing today.”

She shot him a sharp look, entirely unimpressed. “You’re lecturing me about plants? You? The man who turned the roof of Pyloon’s into a rogue botanical refuge?”

His ears went a little pink. “That is… different.”

“How?” She raised her brows. “You had mushrooms, Cal. Mushrooms.”

“Very useful mushrooms.”

“Yes, for keeping the Mantis smelling like damp socks.”

He let out a quiet laugh.

She kept going, rolling her braid between her palms. “Anyway, this place is ridiculous. I woke up. The sun was barely above the horizon, and already I saw the most beautiful bird with green wings, this bright gold underbelly, a long tail like a comet. You’d love it. I didn’t follow it. Didn’t want to scare it.”

“Didn’t want to… hunt it, you mean?”

She made a face as if the idea personally insulted her spirit. “How am I supposed to hunt anything here? Everything looks sacred. Even the insects look at you like you’re inconveniencing them.”

Cal smiled at that slowly, warmly, from somewhere bone-deep. She noticed, of course, but pretended she didn’t.

He didn’t hear half the words; he just watched her, watched the light on her lashes, the little crease between her brows when she concentrated, the way her voice softened when she talked about things she loved.

He didn’t realize how enamored he looked; he also didn’t realize how quiet he’d gone.

Not until, “I’ll make a batch for Kata, too. It might help her sleep better.”

Everything inside him snapped taut. The world dimmed around her voice, and her words blurred into static. His heartbeat dropped into the hollow pit in his chest he’d been avoiding since the moment he killed her father.

Kata.

A child with no parents.

A child who had watched death in every direction, a child whose world had been destroyed because of him, because of the Empire, because he failed to save the people he loved-

Liyani’s voice began to fade entirely now, becoming nothing but distant noise.

His vision narrowed, and the guilt surged, acidic, merciless, until it drowned everything.

Her eyes caught the change instantly.

She stopped mid-sentence, brow lifting sharply. “Cal?”

He didn’t respond. She leaned forward, lowering herself until her face hovered right in front of his, close enough that he could see the tiny flecks of gold in her irises. Her hand hovered near his cheek, but didn’t touch yet.

“Hey,” she said softly. “Where did you go?”

He blinked, and the world snapped back into focus.

Her face with concern, warmth, and patience, and him sitting between her knees like someone who didn’t know where else to put himself.

She arched a brow, feigning offense. “If I’m boring you, you can always go listen to Greez talk about fungi.”

His mouth twitched.

He should tell her what was wrong, should just tell her everything. Instead, his voice came out low and too honest, almost rough: “Nothing about you could ever bore me.”

And before she could press him further and could pry open the things he couldn’t look at without breaking, he leaned in.

Slowly and surely, he pressed his mouth to hers.

It was steady this time, not rushed like the first time on Jedha, and not fragile like last night either. A kiss that asked her to stop worrying, to let him breathe through her instead of his own thoughts.

Her breath hitched, and it only took a moment for her hands to slide automatically into his hair.

He abandoned the tea without a second thought, pushing the cup aside as he lifted a hand to her waist, guiding her gently down from the stone. She let him pull her toward him, let herself be lowered until she settled against his chest, knees bracketing his hips.

His fingers curled behind her neck. Her lips softened, then deepened against his.

The guilt faded.

The fear, the grief, the dark edges of everything waiting inside him, all of it dimmed under the warmth of her mouth, and it worked on her just as powerfully as on him. Her heartbeat settled against his chest in a rhythm he recognized instantly.

They hadn’t meant to sit, only meant to kiss just long enough to pull each other out of whatever storm had been building in the back of their minds. But when they finally broke apart, breaths still mingling, Liyani let gravity take her and slid down to the rocky floor with a soft exhale.

Cal, half dazed, half drawn, as if her body had become the only place in the galaxy his could naturally fall into orbit around, settled with his back against the rock, legs stretched out long in front of him.

She sat perpendicular to him, knees bent and tucked over his thighs, her legs draped lightly across his like the most effortless claim in the world. It was intimate, the kind of closeness people only fell into when they trusted the air between them not to shatter.

The rock hid them from the Mantis. Hidden from Greez, from Merrin, Kata.
Cal knew exactly what he was doing, tucking himself away from the reality waiting on the other side of this outcrop, clutching this moment like it was the only thing keeping him upright.

Liyani knew it, but she let him have it anyway, tilting her face toward the sun, fingers absently brushing a small sprout pushing up through a crack in the stone.

Cal’s hand rested on her shin, thumb tracing slow, absent lines up and down the curve of her lower leg, almost fondly, as if touching her grounded him.

She broke the silence first, voice quiet. “Tell me about him.”

Cal blinked. “Who?”

“Your master.” She nudged his leg with her hand. “Jaro Tapal. You never talk about him.”

Cal’s eyes softened, gaze drifting upward toward some memory suspended above them.
“He was… massive,” he said, the smile tugging at his mouth boyishly, as if he were thirteen again. “Tall enough that when he stood in the Temple halls, people used to say they finally understood what ‘imposing’ meant.”

Liyani hummed. “Sounds like he scared younglings for sport.”

“He did,” Cal chuckled. “Absolutely. And he didn’t care at all. But he was gentle, too. Strict. So strict, but he really cared. He’d make me repeat form drills until my arms felt like they’d fall off, then he’d tell me I did well, and I’d immediately forget how much I hated him five minutes earlier.”

Liyani smiled faintly, running her fingertip slowly along the stalk of a weed growing beside her. “Sounds like you loved him.”

“I did,” Cal said simply. “He taught me everything. Discipline, focus, purpose,” he paused for a breath. “Family.”

Her smile faltered from recognition. Cal noticed, but didn’t press.

“And you?” he asked softly. “What was Dathomir like?”

She let out a snort. “Chaotic...deadly. Definitely not Jedi-approved, you should know.”

Then, after a beat, with a small smirk: “My mother would’ve despised you.”

Cal barked out a laugh. “Is that supposed to flatter me?”

“Absolutely not,” she said dryly. “She hated everyone. Maybe not the plants she grew outside our hut.”

He nudged her calf. “So what’s your childhood story? The first one that comes to mind.”

Liyani leaned back on her hands, looking up at the sky for a moment before her lips curved mischievously.

“All right,” she said, “picture this. I was maybe… seven? Eight? And my mother told me, very clearly, to stay away from the northern ridge. Which obviously meant I went straight there the minute she turned her back.”

“Of course you did,” Cal murmured, thumb brushing a lazy arc across her skin.

“Well,” she continued, “I wandered and wandered, and suddenly I’m standing at the edge of the Nightbrother village. I had never seen so many tall, scowling men in my life. I thought I discovered some forbidden giant species.”

Cal grinned widely. “You didn’t.”

“Oh, absolutely,” she insisted. “I walked right up to one of them, and they were towering, huge, so red, very armed, and I said, ‘You are not supposed to exist. Mother said so.’”

Cal’s laugh burst out, full and delighted. “What did he do?”

“What would he have done? He just blinked at me. Then said, ‘Little sister, go home before something eats you.’ In the flattest, most bored voice imaginable. I was so insulted, I told him he was the one who would get eaten.”

“By what?”

She shrugged casually. “Something. I hadn’t planned that far. I ran home after that,” she admitted, tone softening.

But the moment the words left her mouth, something in her expression shuttered. The light remained in her eyes, but dimmed, like a lantern turned down just enough to hint there was more than she wanted him to see.

“She wasn’t… exactly thrilled,” she said vaguely, as if tossing the truth just out of his reach and daring him to imagine the rest. “Let’s just say she preferred when I didn’t wander.” Again, that airy and evasive nothingness, the kind of half-truth a person learns to perfect when childhood wasn’t the type you tell whole.

Then, almost theatrically, she pivoted, voice brightening with feigned scandal: “If she knew her daughter would end up hiding behind a rock with a Jedi?” She clicked her tongue. “You’d have been fed to a rabid rancor by sunrise.”

Cal blinked, a corner of his mouth tugging up. “Why me? Why not you?”

“I'd say that's pretty self-explanatory,” Liyani said simply, brushing stray petals from her fingers.

He opened his mouth about to argue, or perhaps to demand more stories, but something flickered at the edge of her vision. Liyani’s gaze drifted upward, over his shoulder, her brows lifting with a soft, amused exhale.

Cal followed her line of sight.

Just past the edge of the rock, two dark, curious eyes peeked out, unmistakably Kata’s. She froze the moment she realized she’d been spotted, like someone caught pilfering sweets.

Liyani straightened instinctively, posture gentle but alert. Cal felt her shift above him, pulling her legs away from over his stretched-out ones, as if she didn’t want Kata climbing over the sight of them intertwined. Her knees folded under her neatly as she turned to face the girl fully.

“Hey,” she said warmly, patting the flat stone beside her. “Come join us.”

Kata hesitated only long enough to make the decision dramatic, then padded over and plopped down beside Liyani. “What are you doing back here?” she asked, tone suspicious in the childish, genuine way only an eight-year-old could manage.

“We’re hiding from Greez,” Liyani answered with complete seriousness.

Kata lit up as though this were the greatest mission briefing of her life. “Why?”

Liyani widened her eyes conspiratorially. “Because he’s on the warpath over someone spilling flour in his galley last night.”

Kata gasped. “It wasn’t me!”

“Then we’re hiding from him just in case,” Liyani whispered.

Cal tried to laugh, but the sound got stuck somewhere in his throat. Instead, he smiled at Kata, but Liyani felt the sudden spike of discomfort twisting into their bond beneath his quiet façade. His legs had gone rigid and his hands, once relaxed between them, were now almost curled tightly on the ground.

He was trying way too hard, and she noticed.

Kata tugged on Cal’s sleeve innocently. “Where’s BD?”

Cal’s smile held. “He’s scanning the terrain,” he answered gently. “But stay with us, okay? Don’t wander off looking for him.”

“Okay,” Kata said, cheerful again.

Liyani’s gaze slid toward Cal pointedly and knowingly. He didn’t meet her eyes.

She inhaled, slow and thoughtful, then rose to her feet in one smooth motion. “Come on, little star,” she said, brushing imaginary dust from her hands as she offered one to the girl. “Let’s go find some smooth stones. Good ones for rubbing between your palms. They help you focus.”

“Oh! Like Merrin does?” Kata chirped, hopping up and taking her hand.

“Exactly like Merrin,” Liyani said with a tiny smile.

Cal watched them walk away, Liyani’s braid swaying and Kata practically bouncing, and the moment they rounded a patch of tall grass, something inside him caved inward. The quiet between his ribs seemed to pulse with ghosts.

Guilt for Bode. Loss for Cere, for Cordova.
The Hidden Path, Kata.
Everything.

It all clawed up his throat at once, and for a heartbeat, he sat completely still, staring at the space they’d just occupied as if the rock itself had turned hollow.

Then, because he was Cal and because avoidance felt like duty, he buried it. All of it, like shoving debris under floorboards and telling himself the structure was sound.

He rose swiftly, dusting off sand that didn’t need dusting, jaw set with practiced resolve.

He turned on his heel and strode off, shoulders stiff, and footsteps heavy enough for Liyani to call him out for being exactly that.

The noon sun was already beating down on Tanalorr by the time Liyani finally walked Kata back toward the Mantis. The ship shimmered in the heat like something half-dreamed. Fitting, considering the way Cal had disappeared into the morning haze hours earlier. She tried not to think about it, or feel the weird, tight twist in her chest that always came with his absence, and failed horribly.

Greez was already in the galley when she stepped inside, fussing over a pot so aggressively it might’ve been plotting assassination. “Lunch is ready!” he barked, as if she’d asked.

Kata immediately wriggled her hand from Liyani’s and sprinted toward Merrin, who was leaning against the counter. The witch's expression softened as Kata launched into an excited monologue about the “stones” and “magic weeds” she’d discovered on her walk. Merrin listened like she was receiving sacred prophecies.

Liyani listened too, just not well.

Her eyes kept drifting.
First to the cockpit, then to the meditation room door, then to the empty spot beside the wall where Cal sometimes leaned when he was thinking too hard.

He wasn’t there, obviously. Her leg bounced impatiently under the table, completely unintentionally.

Merrin didn’t miss a thing, and a single brow arched.

Liyani froze her leg mid-motion like she’d been caught with a detonator in hand. Her face arranged itself into a mask of utter serenity. “What?” she asked too quickly.

Merrin hummed. “Nothing.”

Liyani pretended she didn’t hear.

The four of them sat down to whatever Greez had cooked, something starchy and aggressively seasoned, but no one mentioned Cal. The absence hovered anyway, like gravity bending around a missing star.

Kata didn’t notice. Merrin pretended not to, and Greez only swore loudly at the stew’s consistency but said nothing about the redhead. Liyani ate quietly, thoughts swirling like loose dust.

Was he avoiding her?
Was he avoiding everyone?
Probably both.

Hours passed again.

The sun dipped low, throwing long warm shadows across the place. The galley was filling with the sounds of a hologame. Greez was shouting, Merrin sniping, Liyani occasionally pressing controls with the sort of deadly precision that made Greez's brows shoot up.

That’s when Cal finally returned. He appeared in the doorway like sweaty, dusty, and hands scraped raw from some task he’d clearly thrown himself into with too much force. BD-1 bounded in ahead of him, chirping joyfully before barreling straight into Kata’s arms.

Cal didn’t greet anyone; the tension in his shoulders greeted them all for him. He walked straight through the room and into the galley, grabbing the stalest ration bar in existence and biting into it like he deserved punishment.

“Temple’s High Republic,” he said to Merrin, voice flat, clipped, almost like a weather report. “Worth a look.”

When Merrin gave a reluctant nod, he vanished down the corridor without another word.

Liyani stared at the door he disappeared behind, one brow lifting in slow concern. Greez made a noise close to a sigh.

“I’ll never figure out that kid,” he muttered, returning to the game console.

“Same,” Merrin murmured, eyes narrowing in the direction Cal had gone.

Liyani only stayed with them a few minutes longer, pressing buttons, pretending she wasn’t listening for footsteps that never came back.

Eventually, she stood. “I’ll be right back.”

No one questioned her. Quietly, she ladled the leftover stew into a bowl, the broth steaming in the warm galley light. She grabbed a cloth, wrapped the bowl to protect her hands, and made her way down the corridor.

Cal’s door slid open with a soft hiss the moment she pressed the panel.

The door slid shut behind her with a soft hydraulic sigh, the smell of Greez’s stew still rising warm from the shallow bowl she carried. She’d meant to announce herself, but the sight before her stole the impulse clean out of her chest.

Cal was on the floor in a loose, familiar position, legs crossed, back straight, palms resting against his knees. Meditation posture. But there was something different about him tonight, something worn thin and frayed at the edges. His shoulders sagged in a way they never used to. His head dipped slightly, as if the weight of his own thoughts kept tugging him earthward. The Force around him, usually a mixture of calm and vibrant energy, felt unsettled, faintly turbulent, like a wind trying to decide whether it wanted to blow or finally rest.

She stayed quiet. Stepping softly across the threshold, she set the steaming bowl on the nearest crate, letting the warmth linger against her palms a second longer than necessary before she drew back.

Then she let her eyes roam. She hadn’t been inside his room long enough to truly see the things he kept. The small clutter that made up a life constantly on the run. Items collected with care, maybe by accident, maybe because he didn’t know how to let anything go anymore.

A holocron sat on the shelf, cracked slightly along one edge as if it had survived far too many travels. Next to it lay a folded piece of cloth with faded stitching, something from Jedha, she realized, from the monastery ruins he’d once spoken about. A metallic triangle, the fragment of some ancient lock mechanism, rested beside a scattering of kyber shards still faintly glowing from whatever temple they’d been stolen out of. A tightly rolled scroll, brittle and brown with age, tied shut with a strip of simple twine, and a handful of objects that weren’t relics at all, like stray bits of metal, a child’s wooden bead, a broken stim dispenser spring he must’ve kept for reasons even he couldn’t name.

Her fingers drifted among the pieces until they found a small, round bottle cap. Scratched. Ordinary, and still out of place like the rest of them.

She turned it in her hand, letting the dim light catch its worn edges. That was when his voice came from behind her, sounding low, ragged from meditation, or maybe from exhaustion.

“I used to work for this man named Saw Gerrera,” he said. “Some years. Hard to tell when everything blurs.” A beat passed. “That cap is the only thing I still have from that time.”

She froze for half a second. He wasn’t talking about Saw.

He was talking about the man whose name had haunted every breath these past hours, the man Cal still hadn’t forgiven himself for losing.

Slowly, Liyani turned toward him. He was staring at the floor, eyes half-lidded, face pale in the low light. Tired didn’t begin to cover it. He looked empty, scraped out, like whatever strength he’d been holding onto had slipped through his fingers somewhere between morning and now.

“I know Saw,” she said quietly.

His eyes lifted in surprise, sharp despite the weight in them. “You do?”

“When you’re on this side of the galaxy, it’s impossible not to.” Her voice came out dry.

He didn’t speak, but she could feel the questions forming, filling the air between them. She sighed, walked over to his cot, and sat down with a practiced ease that she hoped passed for nonchalance.

But she knew him, and he knew her.
And tonight, more than anything, he needed to feel like she trusted him.

“This syndicate I used to work under…” She hesitated, brushing her thumb against her palm as if deciding how much she dared to reveal. “They had ties to Saw’s partisans here and there. Nothing deep, nothing I wanted to be part of.”

He stared at her, the frown forming before he even realized it. “After Daiyu?” he asked. “Is that where you went?”

She let out a small, humorless laugh. “Let’s just say… if I did everything right, they won’t be a problem again.”

He absorbed that in silence. She didn’t elaborate.

To shift the weight, she tilted her head. “Didn't Saw go around causing… terrorism? That’s what I heard, anyway. Not that the holonet ever tells the truth.”

Cal’s shoulders lifted, dropped. “He gets the job done. The jobs no one else can, or will.”

She considered that. “I’ve never seen the point of resistance,” she murmured. “Everyone’s trying to survive to the next moment. That’s all. You either get hunted… or you become the predator.”

She didn’t name her own faults, but the implication lay between them.

Cal shook his head slowly. “That’s not survival. That’s… surrendering to the worst parts of the galaxy. Someone has to stand up to tyranny, to oppressors.”

“I agree,” she said softly, and though her tone carried that usual wry edge, it wasn’t dismissive, just tired. “Standing up matters. Doing the right thing matters.”

Cal glanced toward her, surprised that she wasn’t arguing, only to find something far heavier in her expression than simple disagreement.

“Sure. But…” she went on, voice turning pensive, contemplative, the way she only ever became when she let her guard slip a fraction, “The galaxy doesn’t always reward the ones who fight for it. Sometimes the ones who try the hardest bleed the most. Sometimes the people with the biggest hearts end up losing everything, and the galaxy moves on like they never existed.”

His throat tightened because she was speaking straight into wounds he’d tried to bury before sunrise. “Yesterday, it was the Republic versus the Separatists. Today it’s the Empire, and tomorrow it’ll be someone else. It’s all the same to people like us, Cal. The tides shift, the names change. The bodies are the only constant.”

“And you and I…” She exhaled a slow breath, almost a laugh but not quite. “We don’t exactly have the luxury of believing the galaxy is fair. We’ve lived too much to pretend it is. You survived the Purge. I survived a different kind of purge altogether. People like us don’t get to be...idealists without consequences.”

Cal stared at the floor for a long moment, jaw hardening, then softening, then tightening again as if each small shift was a battle waged on his own skin.

“I’m not trying to be an idealist,” he murmured finally. “I just… I don’t want everything I’ve done to mean nothing. I don’t want the people I lost to be for nothing.”

Her expression changed into something gentler, sadder, and recognition replayed in her eyes.

“I know,” she said. “I know you’re trying to make their sacrifices matter. I know you need your actions to add up to something. But survival… the way I see it… Survival doesn’t cancel out meaning; it is meaning. Getting up in the morning when the universe wants you dead, that’s meaning. Protecting the people you still have, that’s meaning. Not letting the Empire see you fall apart is meaning, too.”

He swallowed hard, gaze drifting somewhere she couldn’t follow. She let the words settle quietly between two people who had very little left except each other, knowing he would still be set in his ways regardless.

The silence stretched, filled not with disagreement but with two histories brushing against each other slowly.

Eventually, her eyes drifted to the bowl she’d brought, steam curling upward in lazy ribbons. She tried for a small smile.

“You haven’t eaten all day,” she said. “Greez would actually combust if he knew you skipped another meal.”

He let out a long breath, something halfway between a tired exhale and reluctant amusement, and shifted to reach for it. The spoon clinked faintly against the ceramic as he began to eat slowly and mechanically, as if chewing gave him something else to focus on.

She stayed where she was for a moment, watching him with a gaze gentler than she intended. The way he leaned his elbow on the workbench, or the way his shoulders rounded with fatigue, he hadn’t admitted to anyone. The faint tremor in his fingers that he probably thought no one could see. He ate in silence, and yet his silence said more than any words he hadn’t managed to string together all day.

And Liyani, for all the fierce edges she bore and the sharp retorts that came naturally, felt an ache in her chest that had nothing to do with battle, or jealousy, or any of the fire that usually kept her upright. It was something impossible to speak about without giving too much away.

Eventually, she stood, slow and uncertain in a way that didn’t fit the woman who could face down a rancor without blinking. She moved toward him with almost instinctive precision, but her hand paused just short of touching him, hovering in the air for a breath.

Then she let her fingers slip gently into the hair at the back of his neck, brushing the longer strands with a featherlight touch. Her thumb stroked once, a barely-there motion that spoke of worry she wouldn’t name, tenderness she wouldn’t voice, and a tension in her spine that betrayed how hard this kind of closeness was for her.

He stiffened in surprise before his posture softened under her touch, shoulders dropping just slightly as if relief had finally remembered how to reach him.

“Are you shutting me out?” she asked, her voice low, steady, almost too calm. But the carefulness behind it was unmistakable. With everyone else, she was sharper, colder, harder to read. With him, she sounded like she was speaking around the edges of a confession.

His spoon paused. He didn’t look up right away, but when he did, the guilt was unmistakable.

“Why would you think that?” he murmured.

“You’re quiet,” she answered simply.

He blinked, looked down at his bowl as if it might offer an escape from the truth. “I’m always quiet.”

Her thumb grazed his nape again patiently, refusing to let him hide in that old pattern.

“No,” she whispered. “Never with me.”

Something inside him seemed to unclench just a fraction, just enough for the exhaustion in his eyes to show clearly, honestly, without the shields of a Jedi or the denial of a man drowning in everything he refused to face.

“I’m sorry,” he said, but it sounded lost. Apologetic without knowing what he was apologizing for. A reflex born from too much responsibility and not enough places to set it down.

“I don’t want an apology,” she murmured. “Just… don’t disappear inside your head and think I won’t notice. I’m right here.”

He reached up then, slowly, and took her hand from the back of his neck to hold it. His fingers wrapped around hers with a kind of tired honesty that made her pulse jump for reasons she refused to examine.

He didn’t say anything else. He just held her hand while finishing the stew, and she stood beside him, thumb brushing back and forth over his knuckles with a tenderness that would’ve terrified them both if either had acknowledged it out loud.

Chapter Text

Three days passed like a held breath. By the fourth night on Tanalorr, the sky felt closer than it ever had before.

After sunset, Liyani lay stretched out on one of the makeshift canopy beds the crew had built from scavenged wood and sailcloth on the first day, the fabric shifting softly with the breeze. The air was warm but gentle, carrying the scent of flowering vines. Her hair was still faintly salted from the pool and spilled in loose waves down her back and over one shoulder, catching starlight in soft silver lines. Above her, the sky unfolded in impossible layers of color and depth, constellations unfamiliar.

She had cracked open one of the local fruits beside her, a round, thick-skinned thing with a pale inner shell that split clean under pressure. Inside, clear water shimmered faintly with natural luminescence. It wasn’t sweet, but crisp, almost mineral, cold enough to feel refreshing on the tongue. She held it between both palms, tilting it carefully as Kata sat beside her, watching with unfiltered fascination.

“So you just… open it?” Kata asked, eyes wide.

“Brutalize it,” Liyani corrected lightly, angling the fruit so the water pooled at the edge. “It fears commitment.”

Kata giggled and leaned closer as Liyani let her take the first sip. The girl drank with exaggerated seriousness, then blinked in surprise.

“It’s cold!”

“Nature likes contrast,” Liyani said, watching her with quiet fondness. “Saves you from boredom.”

Kata considered this deeply, then immediately asked, “Is everything on this planet alive?”

Liyani laughed under her breath. “Probably. Including the rocks. No, especially the rocks. They’re the angriest.”

“That one doesn’t look angry,” Kata said, pointing at the pale stone near the canopy.

“Excellent acting,” Liyani replied solemnly.

The questions kept coming after that: about the stars, about the birds that cried at dusk in spiraling calls, about whether the fruit grew back once you stole its water, about whether Jedi could see better in the dark than normal people. Liyani answered all of it with patient calm, sometimes bending the truth just enough to keep things interesting.

Eventually, footsteps echoed up the Mantis ramp, followed by Greez’s familiar gravelly voice.

“Kata! Bedtime before I start charging interest on all this peace and quiet!”

Kata groaned dramatically. “But I’m not tired!”

“You were tired ten minutes ago, which means now you’re about to turn into a menace,” Greez shot back.

Liyani leaned in and gave Kata one quick, playful tickle at the ribs, just enough to knock out a surprised laugh and send her scrambling to her feet. “Go,” she said softly. “Before the grumpy captain reverts to his true form.”

Kata beamed, then ran for the ramp, calling a quick goodnight over her shoulder before disappearing inside. Liyani watched until the dark swallowed her small shape.

She lay back again, muscles protesting now that she was still. The day had been long work at the temple, lifting stone, clearing debris, brushing dust from High Republic etchings that hummed faintly under her palms. Beautiful work, but exhausting work.

She had just closed her eyes when she felt him. Cal approached from the path between the trees, hair still damp, darkened curls clinging to his temples and nape. He wore one of the loose tunics Greez had scavenged from storage, light fabric, pale in the starlight, clinging faintly to his shoulders from the residual water. There was something almost unreal about him like this. 

She lifted one of the fruits toward him without sitting up.

“Hydrate,” she murmured.

He took it with a quiet nod of thanks and drank slowly, as if savoring more than the taste. She lay back fully, one forearm draped across her eyes, the night pulsing slowly around them. After a moment, she felt his free hand settle around her shin, warm and grounding, fingers moving with absent, affectionate strokes that had no intention behind them beyond simple contact.

Her breathing slowed. He shifted slightly to sit at the edge of the canopy, still drinking in unhurried sips. “BD’s scanning something under the western collapse,” he said quietly. “Some kind of archway. We can look at it tomorrow.”

She hummed softly in response, already drifting, exhaustion finally winning. His hand stilled for a moment, then resumed its gentle rhythm as her breathing deepened, lashes fluttering once before sleep took her fully.

Cal watched her for a long time after. When he finally set the empty fruit aside, he leaned down and pressed a gentle kiss to her forehead, cautious in its tenderness. Then he lay back beside her, arms folded behind his head, facing the sky, and stayed awake far longer than he meant to.

The stars didn’t judge.

Day six on Tanalorr carried a different weight, similar to the air before a storm that never quite breaks.

The four of them were back at the temple by midmorning: Cal and BD already lost in the dust, Merrin moving between collapsed archways and fractured spires, and Liyani lingering just a step behind them all, her attention drifting far more than she liked to admit.

They were searching for anything now. High Republic relics, Old Republic schematics, navigation systems, defensive measures. Anything that could make this world not just a miracle, but a sanctuary strong enough to survive being known.

That was the problem.

Liyani had been carrying the thought for days now, turning it over in her mind over and over. The Hidden Path, bringing their people here, opening Tanalorr to the galaxy. It made sense; it was the logical next step.

And for reasons she couldn’t fully name, it made her uneasy in a way she couldn’t shake. She’d seen what happened when too many hopes were piled onto one place.

Cal had thrown himself into the work with a kind of tunnel-vision intensity that worried her more with each hour. He moved from chamber to chamber with relentless focus, speaking only when necessary, clipped answers, sharp nods, eyes always scanning, searching, digging. He barely rested, barely joked, and when he did speak to her, it was gentle (it always was) but distant. Like he was still standing one step behind himself.

She kept noticing it and pretending she didn’t. The temple itself felt different today. Light spilled through towering cracks in the ceiling, illuminating old murals and fractured walkways. The Force pressed close in here, ancient and layered, not light or dark so much as vast; it felt like standing at the edge of a deep ocean and realizing how small your own breath was.

Merrin had wandered toward the outer edge of the structure, drawn by something that had caught the sun just right. “There are sigils out here,” she called over her shoulder. “Older than the rest, I think.”

BD chirped, already bounding after her.

Cal barely lifted his head. “Careful with the footing,” he called, then turned back into the deeper hall without another word.

Liyani watched him go. That was her opening.

She hesitated only a second before following, slipping through the archway he’d vanished into. The deeper chamber was vast, circular, its ceiling lost in shadow. Stone pillars ringed the room like sentinels, their surfaces etched with symbols that once meant something to someone. 

In the exact center of it all, Cal knelt.

He sat in a classic Jedi meditation posture, back straight, hands resting loosely on his knees, eyes closed and held in a careful stillness she recognized as effort rather than peace. His breathing was slow and controlled enough for Liyani to gather that he was forcing himself into meditation.

She stood at the threshold and simply watched him for a moment.

This wasn’t rest, it was restraint.

The chamber was strong in the Force; she could feel that instantly, the way the air seemed to thicken around him, bend subtly toward his presence. He had chosen this place deliberately.

For a heartbeat, she considered leaving. Letting him have this, whatever he was wrestling with, to stay contained behind that closed expression.

But she’d already learned on more than just a few occasions that giving Cal too much silence was sometimes just another way to lose him. So instead of speaking or interrupting, she did the only thing that felt right; she joined him.

Liyani crossed the chamber quietly and lowered herself to the stone floor opposite him, mirroring his posture with an ease that came from muscle memory older than conscious thought. She rested her hands on her knees and closed her eyes, and let go.

The Force answered her the way it always did.

She slipped into it like sinking beneath warm water, feeling no resistance or hesitation. The dark side, as others named it, gathered around her like a familiar shadow, vast and alive, not cruel as many had coined it. It was a living current beneath the galaxy’s skin. Where the Jedi reached upward for clarity, she had always reached inward for pulse, gravity, for the slow, tidal strength that didn’t ask permission to exist.

This was how her people had touched the Force for generations.

The Sith bent this power until it howled, turned it into a wound that never healed, but what Liyani felt now was untouched by that corruption. It was raw, ancient, intimate. 

She hadn’t purposely practiced true Nightsister magick in years. That path had been burned behind her since Dathomir was nothing but a planet she had left behind, and for Caedon's death, it had been her subconscious lashing out more than Liyani herself. But this underlying sensitivity, this way of sinking into the dark and letting it hold her, had never left.

Her awareness spread through stone, through dust, and the long-dead echoes embedded in the temple walls. She felt the history here not as images but as pressure and residue. A thousand meditations layered on top of one another, each leaving a faint ripple behind.

That's when it shifted. At first, it was subtle, like smoke encountering smoke.

Her presence in the Force had always been distinct, heavy with shadowed current, slow and deep.

Cal’s, she realized here dimly, was the opposite. It was bright, fast-moving, restless like wind moving over water.

Normally, those signatures would pass near each other without touching. This time, they didn’t.

Where her dark current expanded outward, his light pushed back in instinct, not resistance. Two tides met, breaths drawn into the same rhythm.

She felt it before she truly understood it.

Their meditations began to slowly overlap like waves on shore. It wasn't violent like it should've been. They were twin spirals turning toward one another, pulled by an invisible thread.

Her darkness curled around the edge of his light, not swallowing it, simply brushing against its surface. His presence reacted not with retreat but with a quiet flare, instinctive and unguarded. The glow of it softened, bending instead of shrinking.

The chamber deepened, and the distance between them in the Force narrowed in a way it never had before.

Liyani’s awareness flickered with surprise.

This wasn’t how meditation usually worked.

Individual minds had individual currents, but parallel paths. This, however, started to feel shared.

Their Force signatures continued to intertwine without either of them consciously guiding it. Shadow drifting through light, light bleeding into shadow like an exchange, and with that exchange came the faintest echo of something she hadn’t expected at all.

A second heartbeat, parallel to her own.

At first, she thought it was her own, only amplified by the meditation, too loud in her awareness, but then it stuttered just slightly out of sync.

Impossibly slowly, the second pulse aligned.

Her pulse and his matched.

The sensation was disorienting, intimate in a way that had nothing to do with touch, as if the space between their bodies had been quietly erased over an invisible bridge neither of them had meant to build.

She didn’t pull away, and neither did he. Their breathing found the same cadence. Smoke and wind, braided together. The Force between them thickened, alive with possibility neither of them yet understood. As their meditations continued to merge in the unseen and unguarded, the chamber around them fell utterly silent.

For a suspended moment, she was only sensation. A pulse, then the drift, then an exchange.

Then the world tipped.

The tilt wasn't violent in its nature, but more like the moment before sleep claims you, when the edge of thought loosens and gravity quietly forgets its rules. The temple’s stone floor vanished beneath her awareness. The hum of the ancient ruin thinned into silence.

Suddenly, she was elsewhere. She stood barefoot in grass that swallowed her feet.

The meadow unfolded in every direction. Endless, luminous, impossibly still. The green was too perfect and saturated, like it had never known drought or death. Each blade of grass bent with a breeze she could see but not feel. Above her, a sun hung low and radiant, pouring light over the world without warmth or heat, as if it had been painted into the sky for the sole purpose of being beautiful.

The air shimmered with quiet energy.

Liyani turned slowly, taking it in. Her breath came steady, because this place seemed to demand stillness. Sound felt almost optional here; even the whisper of the wind through the grass carried no weight.

It was peaceful in the way dreams are. The kind that convinces you nothing bad has ever happened, that nothing ever could, either.

A presence shifted behind her. She didn’t startle, because her soul already knew who it would be.

When she turned, Cal stood a small distance away, exactly as he always did in her memory but more vivid than he ever was in waking life. There was a faint crease between his brows, and his hair had a copper warmth in the unreal sunlight. The light softened the sharp lines of his face instead of hardening them.

Relief surged through her so suddenly that it nearly buckled her knees.

A laugh escaped her before she could stop it.

“Cal.”

The sound doesn’t travel the way sound should here, but he hears it anyway. She sees the flicker of awareness cross his face as his gaze finds her fully.

She took a step toward him, then another.

The grass whispered around her legs as she moved, bowing in her wake like it recognized her passing. With each step, a tightness she hadn’t acknowledged began loosening. The ache of days, the weight of watching him slip further into himself, the fear she hadn’t dared to give a name.

She didn’t stop walking, didn’t question the dream either. She only ran.

She ran with a lightness that made her feel weightless, skirts of shadow and sunlight trailing behind her like silk. She expected, without even thinking about it, for him to meet her halfway, for his arms to open, or for the familiar gravity between them to snap back into place.

When he didn’t move, she slowed.

The distance between them shrank to only a few steps, and that was when she saw his face clearly, making the relief in her chest falter.

His expression wasn’t the easy fondness she knew. It wasn’t exasperated affection or quiet warmth. It was something else entirely—subtle, but devastating in its precision.

Polite confusion, not a single sign of recognition.

His eyes traced her face the way one might examine a stranger across a crowd, searching for context that refused to surface. His brow furrowed with the careful concentration of trying to figure something out.

Liyani stopped.

Her heart stumbled in her chest.

“Cal?” she said softly.

The name seemed to vanish before it reached him. He hesitated, then tilted his head just slightly, the way he did when faced with a puzzle he couldn’t immediately solve.

“I-” He broke off, blinking once. “Have we met?”

The question did not echo, did not thunder.

It fell gently between them like a petal landing on water, and somehow it still drowned her.

The meadow dimmed at the edges of her vision, like it was retreating in shame.

She laughed again, too quickly. “Very funny,” she said, but the sound wavered. “This isn’t the place for jokes.”

His confusion deepened. She didn't see any of the hurt she was beginning to feel, nor any guilt, just blankness.

“I’m not joking,” he said carefully. “I don’t know you.”

The world tilted again, only in her head now. She took a step back this time, the grass parting reluctantly around her ankles. “You’re tired,” she insisted, though her chest had begun to ache. “This is just… the Force being strange again. You’ll remember in a second.”

He watched her with that same distant curiosity, no spark of familiarity catching behind his eyes.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I really don’t.”

The words pressed in on her from all sides.

Dream-logic warred with memory.

Desparately, she reached out, and nearly sighed out of relief when she could still feel him. In the Force, he was still there, still bright and warm, layered with familiar currents she had brushed against a hundred times. Their bond hadn’t vanished. It was right there, tugging at her awareness like a constant.

But his eyes were empty of her. She lifted her hand, slowly, as though approaching a frightened animal. “Look at me,” she whispered.

When she reached for his face, her palm met resistance. Not the flesh it should have, not the air either. Something cold and unyielding halted her hand inches from his skin.

She startled, breath catching sharply. Her fingers slid across the smooth and invisible surface. A boundary she hadn’t seen until it refused her.

Her stomach dropped.

“What is—?” She pressed her palm flat against it, but the surface held. “Cal, there’s something here. Can you see it?”

He glanced at her raised hand, mirroring the motion hesitantly. When his fingers touched the same invisible divide from the other side, he frowned in faint surprise. “Glass,” he said.

Panic bloomed sharp and sudden in her chest.

“No,” she whispered. “No, this isn’t right.”

She struck the barrier once with her palm. The impact made a muted, distant sound, as if it traveled through deep water before returning to her.

“Cal,” she said again, more urgently now. “Something is wrong.”

His brow creased with concern, but it was concern for her distress, not the reason for it. “You seem important,” he said slowly, as if testing the truth of the sentence. “But I don’t know why.”

She hit the glass again and again. Each strike sent a dull vibration through her arm, jarring but not breaking. The meadow remained serene around them, the grass still swaying, the sun still glowing like nothing in the galaxy had ever gone wrong.

“Stop,” she pleaded, not sure if she spoke to him or the entirety of the dimension itself.

He lifted his hand again, pressing it gently against the barrier opposite hers. Their palms aligned, separated by the thinnest impossibility.

For one suspended breath, nothing happened.

Then the glass sang. A sharp, crystalline sound split through the meadow, like the first fracture racing across a mirror. Light spiderwebbed outward from where their hands aligned.

The meadow shuddered, and Cal’s eyes widened.

The fractures raced faster now, branching across the invisible wall in a thousand luminous threads. The sky flickered, and the sun stuttered, its glow warping like an unstable hologram. The serene dream began to come apart at the seams.

“Cal!” she cried, surging forward, but the barrier shattered.

The sound was not sound at all, but more like the sudden absence of it. A violent, soundless rupture tore through the meadow, the sky, the space between them. Light and dark collapsed inward at once, slamming into her like a tidal wave of Force so intense it punched the awareness from her body.

The grass withered, the sky imploded, and Cal vanished.

In the chamber, Liyani gasped, her body snapped forward as if yanked violently upward from deep water. Air tore into her lungs in a sharp, ragged inhale that burned all the way down. Her hands clawed at the stone instinctively, as if she might fall through it if she didn’t anchor herself.

Across from her, Cal jolted at the exact same moment, breath leaving him in a harsh, startled sound. The Force recoiled between them like a snapped wire, the shared current violently severed. For a heartbeat, they were both doubled forward, gasping, disoriented, the echo of the vision still vibrating through their bones.

The temple rushed back into being. Stone, dust, archways. Their eyes met, and for one terrifying fraction of a second, Liyani felt the ghost of that stranger’s empty gaze echo through the real world before recognition rushed back in and shattered it.

Liyani’s lungs burned with the echo of that meadow, with the aftertaste of sunlight and glass and the sick, impossible distance she had seen in his eyes. For a long second, they only looked at one another, searching the other’s face for explanations, for the familiar lines that had always meant home.

Her voice came out raw, brittle with the weight of what had just happened, and ragged from trying to hold the miracles and the horrors of their lives in the same chest.

“Cal… what was that?” she asked, and the question floated in the air like mist.

He answered with a motion that closed him down; jaw hardening, shoulders tensing, the look of someone who’d learned to build walls so well they no longer knew what lay on the other side.

“You shouldn’t have done that,” he said, and the words were flat, a condemnation masquerading as a command. It felt to her like a betrayal at the most basic level because what she had meant, what she always meant when she sat in the Force and opened herself, was communion, never invasion.

The accusation landed like a palm against her face. She straightened, heat flaring under her skin, the years of training and secrecy tightening her features into something more defensive than she was used to being with him. “Done what? I sat down next to you and closed my eyes. I didn’t-” Her denial came quick, but he didn’t let her finish.

“You pulled me in,” he cut across her; his voice held the brittle edge of someone afforded no room for nuance. “You used the dark side on me.” The words carried a weight that made her laugh sharply and humorlessly. It was painfully small; he was not a judge, but the accusation had the same gravity.

Darkness, light, old prejudices. She had expected questions, maybe fear, but never the reflexive condemnation of something she had never weaponized against him.

“I didn’t ‘use’ anything,” she said, the hurt a slow burn now. “I breathed. I sat. The Force answered me. You felt connected because you were open, Cal, not because I forced you.” She searched him then, trying to find his eyes behind the storm of his expression. She wanted him to understand how natural it was for her to reach into that deep well of shadow and touch the world, how it was her breath as much as his was his. But his face kept folding into angles she had never intended to see, unintended suspicion, fear, and an exhaustion that seemed to eat at him from the inside.

He stood as though startled into motion, the movement abrupt enough to break the room’s fragile cadence. “That was not normal meditation,” he said, sounding older and rawer than she wanted to believe. “It felt like someone ripping into my mind.”

Those words, ripping and mind, felt as if he were angling his accusations to make a wound where none had been necessary. Liyani tasted bile. “I closed my eyes, Cal. I did what I always do, I sat down for you.” She tried to make the explanation simple, unthreatening. He heard only threat and, far worse, proof of her otherness.

“You don’t get it,” he said finally, voice pitched with fatigue and something uglier, something that blamed the world for his pain but somehow landed at her feet. “The dark side brings nothing but loss. Pain. Death. I’ve watched it destroy everything that mattered to me. The Order. Friends. People I loved. Why do you play in it like it’s water?”

It was an old refrain, one he had every right to repeat, given what he had seen and the personal scars he bore. But the words came at her as if they were meant to indict her soul rather than to name the terror he was trying to keep at bay.

She found her own voice, low but fierce. “And you cling to the Jedi like a drowning man clings to a sinking ship,” she said. “They taught you to fear your feelings, so you run from them, Cal. You bury them until they rot. You call grief dangerous because that’s easier than learning how to hold it.” The insult came from a place of exhaustion, of watching him suppress the turbulent things that made him human. It was not meant to be cruel, yet she heard the strike of cruelty settle in the air between them like dust.

Hurt flared white across his features, then something like shame settled in the folds of his mouth. “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said quietly, each syllable a fragile attempt to hold himself together. He turned away, pacing in tiny, agitated circles, as if movement could shake loose the tightness in his chest.

She moved closer, softening her tone though not surrendering the point she’d been trying to make. “Cal… you’re grieving. You lost Cere. Cordova. Bode. You almost lost yourself. You can’t...”

She stopped when he spoke with a voice rawer than the stones around them. “I killed Bode,” he said, and the admission landed with a brutal honesty that left no room for speech. “And now his daughter trusts me like I didn’t take everything from her.”

There was an accusation in the confession; he was telling her the truth and condemning himself at the same time. He had tried to explain it to himself in a thousand ways, that it was strategy, a necessity. 

“She doesn’t blame you,” Liyani said, not because she had any firm evidence but because she wanted the sentence to be true, to set something right in the way he looked at the world. He shook his head like he wanted to dislodge the thought.

“But I do,” he said, the admission breaking through his control like fragile glass. “I’m the reason everything keeps falling apart. The Order is gone, the Hidden Path, my friends- Everyone around me ends up hurt or dead. Now we’re on a planet we didn’t ask for and pretending to be safe. What right do I have to… to sit here and feel anything that isn’t remorse?” The hysteria of culpability in his confession made her chest hurt because he attempted to shoulder the universe, and that wasn't a noble burden but a crippling one.

Her mouth faltered at his words. There was something desperate in the way he spoke. “Cal,” she started, but he barreled on, pain pushing him into confession:

“What am I even doing?” he pushed on, voice rising. “Meditating? Drinking tea? Kissing you by moonlight like nothing happened? Like I’m allowed to feel that when people died because of me?”

Her stomach turned. The tenderness of last night suddenly felt like glass in her hands.

“You didn’t kiss me because you thought you were allowed,” she said, hurt bleeding through. “You kissed me because you wanted to, because you cared.”

“Maybe that’s the problem,” he shot back bitterly. “Maybe every time I care about something, it gets destroyed. Maybe letting myself, letting us-” He stopped, raking a hand through his hair, breath uneven. “Maybe that’s another mistake.”

Her throat closed.

“I see,” she said softly, the word sharp as a blade.

“Liy-”

“No.” She shook her head, feeling the fissure splitting between them. “You think everything around you dies because of you? Fine. But don’t drag me into your guilt spiral and call it logic. Don’t accuse me of pulling you into the dark when you’ve been sinking into it all by yourself just fine for weeks.”

The words landed with a cruelty that could not be softened by his remorse. Liyani felt that cruel edginess like a blade and, though anger rose, there was a deeper fear underneath, fear that his suspicion would turn outward into a decision to never open again, to build the kind of walls that no one could climb. She wrapped her hands into fists to keep them from reaching for him, to keep from doing what her body wanted; pushing into him, holding him, telling him the world could still be different.

He hurled back a litany of the things he was feeling: confession and self-flagellation. “You don’t understand what it’s like to feel the things the Jedi told you to bury. Rage. Fear. Grief. All at once. I can’t control it. I can’t breathe. I don’t know what I am anymore.” The meltdown sounded like truth and terror knocking into each other until both were broken. She saw his edges, how training had made him cut himself off from the very things that defined being alive, and it made her ache.

She softened. Compassion rose like a slow tide from the center of her being. It felt important for her to explain that her relationship with the deeper currents of the Force wasn’t one of compulsion or cruelty but of survival and clarity, that it wasn't always the corruption he had grown up believing.

When her anger softened just enough to let compassion through, he twisted her silence into judgment, into pity, and it made him lash out.

“You use the dark like it’s a toy,” he continued. “Maybe you’re fine being swallowed by it, but I’m not.”

She felt the words as a dismissal of a part of herself that had been the only thing constant since childhood. Her lash back was immediate, spiteful from the hurt. “Do not talk about my connection to the Force like it’s corruption. Don’t make me the villain when you can’t stand your own feelings.” Her tone hardened because hurt draws a line, and she could not let him continue erasing her with words.

“Then stop pretending you know what I’m feeling.”

“And stop pretending your way is the only right one,” she fired back. “Stop acting like the Jedi didn’t fail you so catastrophically that you don’t even know how to feel without hating yourself for it!”

Cal looked at her, eyes burning with fear and hurt and stubbornness, his walls slamming up so hard she almost felt the reverberation in the Force.

She then realized something with a cold, sinking clarity that he wasn’t going to let her in. Not tonight, and maybe not for a long time.

Her throat tightened painfully. “I’m done talking,” she said, voice low.

When she finally rose to go, it was not a blow of drama but the decisive movement of someone who has been arguing with the ocean and realizes the tide has turned against them. 

He did not reach for her; he did not call her back. He simply watched her go, the look on his face a complicated ache of regret tangled with his stubborn belief that he was right. That refusal to act was the last cut. It said that for all his grief, he would choose the narrowness of his pain over the wideness of a shared burden.

She left without the theatrics she could have mustered. She stepped into the temple’s deeper corridors, the echo of her boots on the flagstones a small, relentless metronome marking the distance she put between them.

As she walked, the words they had thrown like stones replayed in her head: his fear, her defense, the way their grief had turned inward and against each other. The broken, bright memory of that meadow hung heavier than any of it, because in the dream he’d looked at her like a stranger; in waking, he’d turned his confusion into accusation. Both were betrayals of different kinds.

Outside, the air was cooler and tasted of distant sea and green things. She paused a moment to steady herself beneath the open sky, letting the night expand and make room for the ache she could not swallow. She had not come here to become a casualty of someone else’s fear. She had not given up whole histories and burned roads so that she might be punished for the manner in which she survived.

Still, her hands shook, and under her ribs, grief had nested like a small animal that would not be driven away.