Chapter Text
“Is there anything more heartbreaking than drowning in sight of land? Is there a single one of us who hasn’t at least once felt haunted by the fear of slipping away within sight of a safe haven?”
-Carsten Jensen, We, the Drowned
“I looked upon the sea, it was to be my grave.”
-Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
prologue: salt and smoke
The vast sea stretches out in all directions below them. The water is bluish-gray, nearly the same color as the storm clouds gathering overhead. There is no sign of the shore, and the only visible structure is the jagged, towering fortress rising like a knife in the planet’s side.
Merrin has never seen this much water. The sight of this ocean is both terrifying and intriguing as she dangles off the side of the Mantis, keeping her eyes on the surface and waiting for any sign that Cal and Cere might be surfacing. There is nothing but high waves peaking and crashing.
“Come on,” she says, half to herself, half to the sea. It does not answer her, remaining dark and devoid of any sign of her friends. The stormy waters reveal nothing of what goes on in the depths below. Wind pulls at her clothes, teases her hair out of its tie. The air smells like salt and smoke.
“Cal! Come in, kid, what’s going on?” Greez shouts into the useless comms. He’d been repeating some version of that phrase for the past several minutes, ever since communications with the Jedi had abruptly cut off. It wasn’t a good sign, but Merrin still has hope. Comms could easily be blocked. Silence may not mean they are out of reach. She does not believe that Cal or Cere would fall to the Empire so easily. So Merrin remains hovering at the edge, clinging to the doorframe, poised like a diver readying to spring, looking for any remaining shadow in the water.
The churning waves give her nothing. She sees nothing but the blue.
Greez turns and shouts back to her. “Hey, we’ve got fighters taking off! We’re no match for them. Unless you can do your fancy invisibility spell again, we’ve gotta get out of here!”
Merrin can’t. The spell’s power was fleeting, with only one witch to maintain it. Their escape had always relied on the Mantis’s speed, rather than its stealth. She takes her gaze off the ocean for a moment to glance at the platform jutting out from the tower. The pilots are tiny, black-clothed dots sprinting towards their ships. A few are already getting off the ground, rising into the air and pivoting towards them. Merrin shakes her head, clinging harder to the doorframe. “Just a minute more, they might still—”
“We don’t have a minute, our shields aren’t going to hold up against Imperial tie-fighters! Step back, I’m closing the hatch.”
Merrin doesn’t budge. “No! We can’t leave them!”
Greez doesn’t answer her. He just pulls the Mantis up and away from the tower, at a sharp angle that breaks Merrin’s grip on the door. She’s knocked back and the hatch slides closed. Merrin screams in frustrated rage, trying to catch herself as the angle of ascent increases sharply, sending her sliding back towards the kitchen. She manages to claw herself up by the fabric of the couches, stumbling to the holotable to keep dragging herself towards the cockpit. The angle eases a bit as they approach the upper limits of the atmosphere and Merrin staggers forward into the cockpit. “Wait—”
“Sorry, witch,” Greez says, but there’s no malice in the moniker. Just a note of sad resignation. “We gotta go. You better take some seat, going to be a bit bumpy.”
They hit the atmosphere before Merrin can sit, and she only just barely manages to cling onto Cere’s usual chair. They’re barely clear of the planet’s gravity when Greez throws the switch to send them into hyperspace. Merrin gets a last glimpse of a tie-fighter, just about to overtake them, before the stars bend and they’re gone.
A moment later, they revert to an area of empty space, a dark void with only distant pinprick stars. Silence rings.
Merrin gapes at the blackness outside the windows, unable to believe how quickly their escape had happened. A mere moment ago she’d been staring into the water, her magic gathered around her, ready to spring into action. Now she is lightyears away, facing her failure and the knowledge she left Cal and Cere behind to die. She straightens herself up, leaning heavily on Cere’s chair.
“There are backup plans.” Greez sounds tired, resigned. He won’t look at her, not taking his eyes off the control panel. “Me and Cere, you know, we talked about this. We’ve got options. It’s not over.”
Merrin is unmoved. “We left them behind.”
“You knew that was always a possibility. They did too.” Greez hits a few buttons, putting the Mantis into standby mode. “They knew the risks. They just didn’t make it. We did our best.”
“It was not good enough,” Merrin says coldly. Then she sharply turns on her heel and retreats, trailed by Greez’s doleful sigh. Merrin stalks back to the escape pod she’s made her home, where she lays down in the dark and tries not to dwell on their failure. She tries not to think about what fate awaits the ones she left behind. She doesn’t bother contemplating what she’s going to do next. She very purposefully keeps her mind blank and just sits with how alone she feels.
Loneliness. That, at least, she’s used to.
- - -
Nur
approx. 20 standard hours later
Cal Kestis does not ever remember being so cold in his entire life. He has been a scrapper on Bracca, hanging off decommissioned ships in driving rainstorms and too-little protective gear, has been to Ilum and dove under the ice to find his kyber crystals, and yet, he has never felt the cold quite this acutely. It’s wrapped itself around his bones and sunk deep into his chest and he can’t quite imagine ever getting warm again.
He is, at least, dry-ish. They’d spent countless hours traversing the damp undersea tunnels only for the skies to open up as soon as they reached the surface, and been soaked through by the time they made it across the landing platform. As soon as they’d broken into the ship — an old Republic-era transport vessel, beat-up but intact, just sitting hidden under a black tarp — Cere had made him change into a scratchy but dry flight suit they’d found in the storage hatches, wrapped him in a thick wool blanket from the emergency crash kit, and pushed him into the co-pilot’s seat.
“At least we have power,” she’d said as the craft lit up and the heat creaked to life. “Power is good. Looks like no immediate warning indicators either. We might even be able to get off the ground.” She warmed her hands against the vents then told him sternly, “Stay there.”
“‘kay.” Cal didn’t have much of a choice in the matter. His limbs felt like aching, limp noodles. He could barely keep his head up, watching dispassionately as Cere began searching the rest of the ship.
His hair still drips onto the floor with a regular plink-plink-plink beat. After a few minutes of the vents blowing hot, stale air at him, Cal begins to feel his fingers and toes again. The spasmodic shivering starts to taper off, leaving him limp and exhausted. Cere picks her way methodically through the ship’s aft storage hatches.
The thing is, he doesn’t really feel any warmer. His face is still numb, and the deep void of cold that’s eaten a gaping hole in his chest hasn’t gone away. Cal’s pretty sure it’s not ever going to go away.
Once, only about a year after Cal had gotten his spot in the Scrapper’s Guild, he had cut his hand on a jagged piece of rusty metal while breaking down an old troop transporter. He’d gotten sick, bad, and only had the Guild’s healthcare to rely on, which mostly amounted to ‘we’ll get you to a point you can work and if you die, you die.’ He had shuddered through his workday drugged to the gills, heart beating fast and unsteady, mind almost too clear. Then he’d crawled back to his bunk to spend a sleepless night in the throes of the fever blended with the comedown from whatever awful drugs the Guild medic had pumped him full of. Prauf had found him the next day, brought some broth that smelled foul but was hot and well-spiced, and, along with some proper meds he got from a mutual friend. Cal could finally sleep for a bit. It still had taken days for the fever to break, and weeks to get fully back to normal, sporting a new scar on his hand to match the ones on his face. He believed it to be the sickest he’d ever been. And now he knows, that had been nothing.
Cal is pretty sure he’s dying.
He watches Cere search the ship as he sits with the imminent certainty of his own death. He is sure of it. He will not recover from the wound in his chest, nor the infection that followed. He is going to die and it’s going to be soon.
Cal knows that sounds melodramatic. He remembers so many new scrappers in the Guild who would wail about dying as soon as they got their first injury, even if it was nothing. It would be easily dismissed as just something he’s thinking because he’s really, really miserable, except for three key points:
One: Cal is a Jedi. Though he was only raised by them for a fraction of the time he should have been, he was still brought up in that decade to be resilient and practical. Jedi weren’t often given to bouts of melodrama. They were trained to look at their situation realistically and come to appropriate conclusions from the facts before them and the prompting of the Force, unclouded by emotion. He has been trained to separate himself from the misery of the fever and exhaustion and pain and come to this verdict through reason, rather than fear.
Two: Cal is not just a Jedi, but one with a particular gift. One that has brought him close to death many times before. He has felt the dark void of death radiating back to him from countless echoes, since before he even really understood what that feeling meant. He has lived through a war and among a sea of wrecks on Bracca. Some days, it felt like everything he touched held traces of lives ending. He even felt it cut into his own heart at 12 years old as his master died to protect him, and he sat with the heaviness of it in the escape pod as it rocketed down toward the surface and the corpse cooled. Cal simply knows when death is near. The Force bends in a particular way at the end, a way that sticks to everything it touches. Death is a familiar face, an old enemy, an old guardian, met in thousands of echoes and this time, emanating from inside himself.
Unlike all the times he’d brushed close to death before, in the heat of fighting, he knows there won’t be any last-minute dodge, no one coming to scoop him away. Death waits patiently now, as Cal is sucked towards it like the gravitational pull towards a black hole, or a riptide pulling him out to sea. Not even Cere can save him now. There’s a part of him that wants to beg her, to stagger towards where she’s searching through compartments, grip her arms tell her everything, and beg her to save him, but Cal knows it’s useless and would only hurt her. He’s too exhausted and in too much pain to move anyway.
Because here’s the third point: Cal has been dead from the start.
“Oh, Cal, what have you done?” BD’s worried chimes bounce off the airlock’s metal walls and the rippling surface of the water that still mostly fills the chamber. Cere’s breath hitches. “I know, BD, it’ll be okay. He’ll be okay. Just a little longer…”
Cal watched the water drain away. He watched Cere lay his own body flat on the iron floor, begin chest compressions as water dripped from her sodden clothes and pooled around them. His ribs made a snapping sound as the bones splintered. The expression on Cere’s face remained weighed down by grief and desperation, only breaking to profound relief when he finally coughed, spewed water from blue lips.
Cal hasn’t told Cere he remembers this. He doesn’t know if it is some kind of out-of-body experience or an echo he picked up from Cere, or BD-1, or the floor of the airlock. No matter the source, he had watched himself drown and return and carried that all the way through the underwater tunnel. As they walked, as he grew colder and sicker, he replayed that vivid scene and a sense of dread loomed over them both. He drifted through the tunnels like a ghost, passing through periods where he felt more or less solid, more or less real. It got worse as the damp settled into his lungs, as the pain from the lightsaber wound spread and made it hard to breathe. He was stalked through the tunnels by a sense of looming dread that never seemed to point to any specific danger. Just a general sense that something was coming.
In a more coherent moment, after Cere had finally gotten him to sleep a while, he finally understood. With the sober clarity that came from rest, he realized that he was dying. That death had only been temporarily evaded. He watched Cere pack up their things, talk with BD-1, and thought about dying. He came to terms with it, accepted it, but also knew he had to do one more thing. He couldn’t leave Cere alone, not after all she’d lost that day, after all she went through to save him. He couldn’t leave her alone in that horrible dark tunnel. He just had to stay alive long enough to get her back to the Mantis, back to Greez and Merrin. He had been alone once, lost and with his heart shattered into jagged shards, and he couldn’t fathom doing that to her. Cal vowed to stay alive long enough to get her home and used that as fuel to keep him going as he got sicker, and more exhausted, and lucid periods became fewer and farther between.
But in the end, in his most feverishly delirious moments, when every cell in his body ached and dread pulled on him like a currant pulling him into some dark void, he wondered if he was still just one more thing haunting Cere.
From his place bundled in the ship’s co-pilot’s seat, Cal watches Cere search the compartment for another minute before his eyes start to drift closed. His entire body is a solid ache, with a sharper point of pain in his chest. His breath sounds ragged in his own ears and he can hear his plodding heartbeat, a great rush of blood moving through his veins that starts to sound like the swell of waves crashing onto a beach.
Cere drops the last hatch shut with a bit more force than necessary. It closes with a sharp thud and jerks Cal out of his doze. She sighs in frustration. “Damn.”
“What were you looking for?”
“Medical supplies. Of any kind. Our luck in that regard remains sparse. All I could find are these.” She holds out her hand. In the center of her palm sit a few energy shots: auto-injectors of an illicit powerful stimulant that cargo pilots often use to stay awake on long-haul trips. Some of the scrappers used them on Bracca, but they were always too expensive and volatile for Cal’s tastes. He’d never really needed them anyway. The Force, even when he was suppressing his connection to it, always lent him more energy, more focus, than those without it.
“‘Thought those were illegal,” Cal rasps.
“They are. Or were, under the Republic. Maybe the Empire’s legalized them. I admit I don’t really keep such a close eye on their drug laws, but I doubt it. Someone probably left them behind on purpose, hid them so they wouldn’t get confiscated by a superior. They’ll fetch a decent sum on the black market.”
“Might not be meds, but that’s not too bad. We should hang onto them.”
Cere nods and drops the shots into a divot in the control panel. “If we can find a buyer, they’ll at least keep us in food and fuel for a while.”
“Anything to charge BD-1?”
Cere shakes her head. “Sorry. We’ll have to continue on without his help.”
“’s okay.” It’s not, really. Cal regrets that he won’t be able to say goodbye to BD-1. He won’t be able to explain. It will take time for the droid to charge aboard the Mantis and he’s not sure how long he’ll be able to hold on once his final goal is finished.
Rain lashes at the windshield. A fork of lightning cuts through the grey skies, followed a moment later by the boom of thunder. Cere sits down hard in the pilot’s chair, flipping a switch and bringing up a screen. From Cal’s vantage point, with his vision blurred, he can’t read what it says, but she looks satisfied. She taps at the screen again. “Diagnostics showing clear. It’s flightworthy, with a decent amount of fuel. I still want to wait a bit, for this storm to pass a bit, and for dusk. Won’t help too much if they have radar tracking on us, but at least under the cover of darkness we might sneak out under their guard before they think to scan this sector.”
“Slipping out from under their noses. I told you, I couldn’t wait for this part.” Cal had been picturing it initially a bit more heroically, rather than wrapped tightly in a blanket, so exhausted and in so much pain he could barely even turn his head. The important part was evading the Empire and getting off this cursed planet, bonus points for doing it in such a brazenly Jedi way, stealing one of their own ships just when the Empire thought it was all over. It was a perfect last adventure. Some glory to go out on.
It doesn’t feel particularly glorious. A cough bubbles up in Cal’s throat. It sticks in his chest, scraping his already raw throat painfully. The already worn-out muscles in his chest and abdomen ache, taxed even by this pathetic, ineffective coughing spell. He drops his head back against the seat once he can take a rattling breath without spasms. His head aches terribly, temples pounding. Cere reaches across and touches his cheek. Her hand feels cold against his skin, such a relief he can’t help but lean into.
“I knew a proper medkit was a pipe dream, and would have been picked over by stormtroopers long ago, but I hoped at least for a stim or two. Can you hang on for just a bit longer?”
“I’m…I’m not going to say I’m fine.” Cal manages to crack something like a smile that, judging by the look on Cere’s face, isn’t quite as reassuring as he means it. “But at least we’re inside and I’m a useless pilot anyways so while you fly us out of here, I’ll just sleep. Be fine in the morning.” That last part is a blatant lie and they both know it. It hangs between them in the silence. The worst part is how it rings in the Force, like a melancholic chord: if only. There is such a deep sadness in Cere’s eyes as her thumb traces a cool path over his cheek. Cal’s eyes suddenly sting and he closes them against a well of tears.
“You’re right,” Cere’s voice soothes. “You should get some sleep.”
He opens his eyes again, gripped by sudden anxiety. Darkness gathers on Nur, the storm’s gloom deepening in the coming night. He looks out at the dark ocean, the waves crashing over the platforms. “Cere…I…” Cal can’t find the words to tell her now that he’s at the edge of it, he’s afraid to sleep. He’s afraid he won’t wake up again.
Cere traces her thumb again over his cheek, commanding his wandering attention. He meets her gaze and takes a crackling breath in, ready to try to explain.
“Sleep a while,” Cere says before he can. “You can rest now. I’ll get us out of here. Just sleep.”
Cal doesn’t resist. He can feel the little pinpricks of Cere’s presence in his mind, shoving him gently into unconsciousness. He clings to the little sparks of the Force her suggestion leaves in his mind as she takes her hand away and he lets his eyes drift closed.
Cal dozes more than anything for a while. Cere’s suggestion had pushed him along the path, but his own subconscious resistance keeps him from fully surrendering to sleep for a while. He remains vaguely aware of flight as their ship rises smoothly up through the atmosphere, and feels the jolt when it passes into hyperspace. Space travel is routine, despite the strange and distorted feeling of the Force in the hyperspace lanes. It’s familiar enough that the last vestiges of resistance are worn away and Cal slips off into deeper darkness.
Perhaps naturally, he dreams of Nur and he dreams of being underwater.
—it starts in the honeycomb of cells. Cal searches one by one, BD-1 perched on his shoulder, looking for the Holocron. Water floods into the prison from broken pipes and cracked ceilings, filling up the lower levels quickly. He finally sees the Holocron, swept in the current with other debris from the ruined Fortress. Cal dives into the deepening water and swims after it, pursuing in with single-minded determination, without paying enough attention to his surroundings, and the danger. The Holocron is swept into one of the cells and Cal follows it, having to duck underwater to clear the doorway. The lights flicker in here, damaged by the water, but the Holocron glows green. It’s just within reach, bobbing at the surface of the flood, barely a foot from the ceiling.
The second his hand closes around it, the red shield activates, sealing the cell off from the rest of the prison. BD-1 chirps shrilly, panicked, the sound warped in the water. The droid dives down to look for a way to splice the door back open. Cal takes a gasping breath and follows, looking for weaknesses in the walls. They’re smooth and solid, and he knows that an Imperial cell will be far more difficult to escape than the Brood’s.
He runs out of air and pushes up to the ceiling, to the smallest remaining pocket of air, pressing his face to it for the last gasp of oxygen before the water fills to the top. He dives back down to where BD-1 struggles to splice the door. The Holocron lies abandoned at the bottom as Cal feels around in the strobing light for any way out, any gap to pry loose, and finds none. His lungs burn and he can’t hold—
Cal stirs, shifting a little with a groan. He’s chilled, damp with feverish sweat, and he struggles with the blanket. He’s gotten tangled up and in the confusion of this uncomfortable half-waking state, he doesn’t know if he wants to cast it off or pull it closer. Cere’s there, helping untangle his limbs from the tight cocoon. Her voice comes reassuring but faint, like from far away. “—come, lie down, here.”
She helps him out of the seat and guides him back to the aft storage, where she lays him down on a pile of clothes. She covers him with the blanket, after shaking it out, then the jacket she’d taken from the defector’s supplies. Her fingers run through his hair once and then she returns to the pilot’s seat, to tap away at the screen. Cal looks back once at her, silhouetted against the lights of the controls and the distorted stars beyond, then drops his head back down and drifts away again.
—the landing platform is impossibly high. The water lies staggeringly far beneath them. A squall’s blown up from the ocean. The dark sea below churns, the waves cresting as high as mountain peaks. Cold rain lashes at Cal’s face. He can barely see through the downpour. Cere stands at the very edge with her back to him. He tries to call her name but the wind steals his voice away. Rainwater floods into his mouth, making him choke. He coughs and tries again, but nothing comes out but a feeble gasp. He tries to move towards her, struggling through the wind and rain across the platform, but no matter how many steps he takes, they never seem to bring him any closer.
“Cere!” He finally manages to scream, but she doesn’t turn. As the storm rages around them, she simply takes a step and drops like a stone towards the monstrous waves. “No!”
Cal feels the drop in his stomach like he was the one that fell. He rushes towards where Cere’d disappeared, but before he reaches the edge, he hears the distinct sound of a lightsaber activating and red light springs from the shadows. The Sith stalks towards him and raises his blade high. Cal barely gets his own lightsaber up to block the blow. It’s stunning, heavy and Cal has to retreat back. The Sith strikes again, pushing Cal further towards the edge. The rain hisses as it strikes the blades, turning to steam that fogs around them. Cal divides his saber in two and takes a defensive stance, just trying to keep the Sith at bay as he rains down heavy blows, each one driving him toward the edge. He breaks his focus to glance down at the waves below. He considers jumping but in that split second, the Sith slips his blade under Cal’s guard and drives it into his chest, running him through and Cal gasps—
The stab of pain in the dream resonates in reality, making him flinch. He shifts, trying to ease the aching spasm in his chest, but he’s too out of it for anything more than a feeble twitch and a pained whimper, before he’s out again, pain following him back down.
—Cal treads water in an empty expanse of sea. The sky looks the same as Nur’s did, but the Tower is nowhere to be seen. Neither is the Sith, nor BD-1, nor Cere. Cal is alone, barely keeping his head above water. He can’t see any land to swim towards. The water stretches out in all directions, fading to nothing at the horizon. A wave crashes over his head, flooding saltwater into his nose and mouth and he sputters. He feels so tired, to the bone, like he’s been swimming for hours. His head slips below the surface again but the dip between one wave and the next lets him break free and suck in a wet, coughing breath. He bobs beneath the wave again, then manages one last deep breath before he’s sucked under the surface.
He sinks. The current is stronger underwater, though everything’s quieter. The roar of the waves is dulled to a soft whoosh. It would almost be peaceful if the current was not so strong, sucking him deeper and deeper into the darkness. The water is cold. His ears pop as he gets deeper, sinking past a field of kelp, past schools of fish, and a reef alive with eels and skittering crabs. It’s no use fighting against it, so he lets the current pull him along.
It’s bringing him to an edge. A boundary between the seafloor and darkness. The silt and rocks and swaying seaweed surrender to a black abyss, almost as dark as the void of space. The sight of it fills him with the same sense of horrible dread that haunted him in the tunnel, a bitter, mournful pit in his stomach. It’s so big he can’t take it all in, the edges fading to black. The overwhelming scale of it fills him with terror.
His lungs ache terribly and he tries to hold his breath as long as he can, but as he hovers over the black void, air bursts from his lips and salt water tears through his throat and chest, burning him from the inside out. He drowns — again — as he passes over the edge into the crevasse and the ocean draws him down towards the bottom—
Expecting to see the ocean’s dark abyss, Cal is surprised when his eyes open to the sight of space before his eyes. Stars dot this black void, visible through the curved glass of the windshield. A bright, reddish moon rises. Their ship is in orbit around it, close enough that he can see craters and rock formations jutting out in the desolation. Its bright glow casts the interior of their craft in sharp relief, turning the pilot seats and control panel into a dark silhouette.
Cal lies on the hard floor of the ship, in a puddle of sweat and tangled fabric. Time seems to hold its breath as he tries to figure out what woke him. He’s not alone. Cere is there, crouched beside him, gripping his arm hard and talking, though her voice is garbled and inaudible and he can’t focus to decipher it. The scene is so vastly different from the world of the dream, that it takes him a second to realize what has not changed.
What has not changed is that he is drowning.
Cal tries to take a breath in and can’t. Panic brings him fully to consciousness as his chest heaves but brings no air into his lungs. Cere drags him up to sit but the change in position does nothing. Fluid gurgles in his lungs and he tries to breathe again and comes up with little more than a choking gasp. He can’t get any air through the thickness in his throat. Panic, primal and frantic, seizes him. He keeps trying to breathe and failing, his lungs starve for air and his stomach clenches, hand grasping onto Cere’s with surprising strength and—
—the Force moves in a certain peculiar way, when death is near. A tide, sweeping over them both, over their small ship, crashing over them like a breaking—
—Cere’s hand, pressing on his back, hard on his spine. She’s dropped his hand to place the other in the center of his chest. A firm pressure, reverberating in the Force, and he coughs sharply. He pitches forward onto his hands and knees and retches up fluid that tastes like salt and copper. Cere keeps her hands on his back, rubbing hard until he’s coughed up all the blood and phlegm, and manages a breath in. And another. The tide retreats as oxygen hits his brain.
Cal slumps bonelessly back against Cere’s chest, away from the mess. All he can do for a minute is pant, catching his breath. The lightsaber wound in his chest throbs as the ship spins dizzyingly overhead. The moon rises again out the window, casting its sweeping light over them.
“Where?” The word comes out as a pathetic wheeze.
“A deserted system. We’re in orbit.” Cere’s hand shakes as she rubs his uninjured shoulder soothingly. “We’re safe. You don’t have to worry about anything right now, just breathe.”
He shakes his head. Despite her reassurance, he’s afraid. Don’t they have to keep going? Keep moving through the tunnel? It’s wet and dark and dangerous down here, the metal could fail, the tunnel could flood, the Mantis might be at the end, the Inquisitors might be pursuing them, he can’t—
“We’re safe. Hush.”
“Cere…”
“I’m here. Just sleep." Cere shifts him a little so he’s resting a little more comfortably, laying him down to rest his head in her lap. She feels his forehead, then runs her fingers through his hair. She doesn’t say anything else: she doesn’t have to. She’s in his mind, in the Force, a soothing presence. Little sparks of her light pull him away every time his mind turns towards fear. It feels familiar, like a long-buried and forgotten memory of someone else taking care of him like this when he was very small and ill.
They lay like that for a long time, quietly orbiting some moon. Cal gradually drifts back to sleep, with Cere standing sentry over his dreams. Every time the Fortress rises in his mind’s eye, every time a red lightsaber bursts from the darkness and makes him jolt, she shoves it away.
If Cal were not so delirious, he might be able to appreciate the connection more. After five years completely isolated, it had been hard to accept the way Cere would crackle and fizzle in the Force like a bad comms connection. She would be there one moment, completely closed off the next, almost worse than all the completely blank beings he encountered on Bracca. It was a bad habit, the way he reached for her with his mind. It resulted in more than a few horrible jolts, akin to the sensation of unexpectedly missing a step and falling. He’d tried to break the habit, with only minimal success, all of which was wiped away the moment he started getting sicker in the tunnels. She was stronger there, though still unsteady and staticky. But now she sang in the Force, a strong and reliable connection like nothing Cal has felt since the Order fell. Cal wraps himself up in her presence like a child clinging to a comforting blanket.
He stirs only once more, as Cere bundles him back in the co-pilot’s chair.
“It’s okay. Just rest.” Cere tucks the blanket and her jacket around him, then moves back to the pilot’s seat to tap away at some controls. She’s still in his mind, splitting her attention, and keeps nudging him away from nightmare.
Tucked in the shroud of the Force, Cal slips into something deeper than sleep, a trance that offers, finally, a little relief.
When he wakes the next time, Cal feels slightly less like death. Slightly. The pit of dread is still there, coiled in his stomach, but it’s dormant for now.
Cere is there too, a steady presence in the pilot’s seat. “Good morning,” she says quietly.
Cal gingerly extracts himself from the wound-up blankets, letting them fall to pool in his lap. Just that act tires him out. “Is it morning? Where are we?”
Cere doesn’t answer right away. She rises, helping him get a little more untangled, then drapes one of the blankets over his shoulders and feels his forehead with the back of her hand. “A little better. Still pretty warm.” She grips his shoulders. “We’re in orbit around a deserted moon. We’re safe.”
Cal gets a vague flash of memory. He remembers choking on fear and the fluid bubbling in his lungs, and Cere’s calm voice insisting they were safe. “No one’s followed us?” he croaks.
She shakes her head. “I’ve seen no evidence they even noticed our ship leaving Nur. We only have pretty rudimentary tracking on board, but it’s been hours and I’ve detected nothing in the system. We’re alone.” She releases his shoulders and fetches one of their last bottles of fresh water, making him drink a few cautious sips under her watchful eye. Cal goes slowly, the memory of choking and drowning a little too vivid. She checks his pulse, then rests her hand on the center of his back for a moment. The Force moves as she searches its depths. Whatever she finds must satisfy her because she stops fussing, retreating back to the pilot’s chair.
“We can stay here a while, though we’re going to need fresh supplies soon, and medicine. If we let things die down, there are a few planets we might be able to blend into the crowds on—”
“But the Mantis?” Cal croaks.
“Don’t worry about that.” Cere tries to keep her voice light, but the expression on her face at his question is worrying. It’s carefully schooled, blank. The tension in her shoulders betrays her unease.
“What? What is it?”
“Just rest a while more, we’ll be okay—”
“Just tell me.”
Cere sighs, then brings up the diagnostic screen. This time she rotates it towards him so he can see, even if he can’t quite decipher the readings. His vision is still blurred.
“The ship is mostly sound,” she explains. “That’s the good news. We’ve got power and an intact hull and life support. But there are two critical failures. Here, and here.” She gestures at two lines glowing red. “Nothing too serious. We’re not in danger. But our first problem is communication. We’ve got nothing. I might be able to fix the short-range, if we land somewhere, but the long-range transmitter needs a complete replacement. Our other issue is a bit more serious: the hyperspace navigator.”
“We can’t travel through hyperspace?”
“We can, that’s just it. We can start a jump, but as soon as we’re in the lane for more than a minute, the navigational computer starts to fail. I managed to make manual calculations to steer us here, but that won’t get us across the galaxy. Our planned meet-up point was a small, out-of-the-way marketplace near Mygeeto. It’s got enough traffic to be fairly busy, and most of it unregistered, and enough of a backwater that the Empire doesn’t have much of a presence there. It seemed a good place to lie low and then disappear. But now we don’t have any way to reach it now and no way to contact the Mantis to change rendezvous points.”
Cal nods, turning this all over in his mind. Now that the sleep has cleared his mind a bit, he takes a more appraising look around the vessel. Stats resurface from where they’ve been buried in his subconscious. They’d broken down quite a few of these transporters in the shipbreaking yard over the course of a few months, about two years ago. He sifts through his memories, searching for anything useful. “Okay. So we have to find a way to either repair the navigational computer or the comms. Or replace them. Replacing would probably be better. These old transporters have completely interchangeable systems, good for swapping out broken components, but this thing is so old they’d have to be the exact right replacement. The manufacturing changed the couplings twice around the time of the war, we’d need one from about a three-year period. Anything else won’t fit.”
Cere sighs. “It seems easier just to steal a new ship. Though that will be dangerous.” She glances sidelong at him, mouth forming a hard, worried line.
“Can you show me where we are on the charts?”
She obliges, bringing up the glowing star chart without further question. “We’re here,” she points out a blinking green dot. “We want to go here.” She expands the map, pointing out their target system and the threading hyperspace lanes that should take them there. Cal pitches forward to study the chart closer.
“We might have another option,” he says. “I maybe know a place where we could find plenty of replacements for the nav and comm systems, the right age even. Guaranteed.”
“Where?”
“Oh, just a massive scrapyard full of old Republic-era ships, that I happen to know my way around.”
Cere looks at him with a flat, humorless expression on her face. “You want to go back to Bracca.”
Cal nods. “I want to go back to Bracca. Okay, well, want is a strong word, but we can find what we need on Bracca. They broke down a whole fleet of these things and because of the connection issue, they haven’t been able to sell any of the onboard systems, just the hulls for raw metals. So there’s a whole storeroom, that I can access, full of exactly what we need. It’s perfect.”
Cere sits back in the pilot’s seat, folding her arms. “It’s going to be dangerous. There will probably be a heavier Imperial presence than you remember, after what happened.”
Cal’s cheeks warm, the flush nothing to do with fever. “I know.” And there’s the Guild to consider. They won’t be happy that he skipped out. He doesn’t mention it. Cere doesn’t necessarily need to know much about the Guild. She’ll just get that guilty look on her face again, the one she gets every time he brings up some of the less savory aspects of his life hiding on Bracca, and she’s got enough to worry about. “But the Empire’s everywhere. We could find trouble in any shipyard and just any shipyard might not have what we need. I know Bracca does and I know where to find it, and I know how to access it.” He pulls the blanket down and tugs his sleeve up to bear the Guild’s tattoo inked in black on his pale skin. “We can avoid the Empire easier on familiar territory anyways. So? Can we make it to Bracca?”
Cere is quiet for a moment, studying the chart. “I think so. It will take us into an area of higher traffic, which I don’t love, but if we can skirt the core lanes, take it wide…we can make it to Bracca.” She rotates the map again, zooming back out. Cere frowns at it, worrying at her lip. “They’ll have changed the codes, flagged your ID.”
“Maybe. But then we’ll just have to move fast.” Move fast. Ha. It’s hard to imagine moving at all, let alone quickly, when even leaning forward to view the screen tires him out and just explaining his plan to Cere leaves him winded.
“Cal.”
“You know it’s our best option.”
Cere sighs. “Do you know your way to a medbay?”
He nods. “Fully stocked, for once.”
“Ok. That’s our first stop, got it?”
“I won’t argue that. Would really, really like some painkillers.”
Cere gets that sad look on her face again. He really hates making her look like that. It seems like he’s been doing it more and more lately. He only wishes he had time to make it up to her.
Cal is still going to die. That hasn’t changed. Sleep has only bought him a little bit more time, a little bit more coherence. He still feels that dread, that solemn certainty that the end is coming. He doubts at this point that even the best medical facilities on Coruscant could save him now, never mind whatever they’ll be able to steal from the Guild on Bracca. But if he can use his knowledge and access to help Cere find the replacements they need, and get her and BD-1 back to the Mantis, that will be enough.
A wave of sadness washes over him. Cal can’t fathom the thought of breaking Cere’s heart, not so soon after Trilla, and he especially can’t imagine leaving her alone. He has to get them back to the Mantis. He was alone once, in the rain on Bracca, with his heart shattered into a million pieces. He can’t do that to Cere, not after everything she’s been through, not after she saved him.
His eyes sting as he sits back and watches Cere deftly plot their route through hyperspace to Bracca. He makes a pathetic effort to lighten the mood a little: “Won’t be any drier. Sorry.”
“We we get back to the Mantis, I promise, only desert planets for a while.”
Cal cracks a faint smile. “Desert destinations only. Sounds good.”
“Do you want to sleep a bit more?”
Cal nods. “Just a bit, I guess.”
“I’ll wake you when we revert.”
He curls up and watches the moon rise through the windshield as Cere makes the manual jump calculations. The ship is very quiet in orbital mode, with the engines powered down. The silence is a little tense. Cere’s bleeding worry into the Force and the foreboding shadow of death still looms over them.
Cere finishes the calculations and hesitates, glancing back over at him. “You’re sure about this?”
“About returning to Bracca? Not really. But it’s our best shot at fixing up the ship and getting back to the Mantis so…yeah. I’m sure.”
“…okay.” Cere restarts the engines and pulls them out of orbit. The moon disappears. The void of space, dotted with distant stars, fills up the whole of the window.
Cal drifts off as they slip into hyperspace.