At first, Cere doesn’t know what wakes her.
She jerks out of sleep and just lays there, breathing carefully, blinking at the bottom of the top bunk Merrin claimed until they could clear out the other room. Her brain works sluggishly through the motions of rebooting. For a moment, there is nothing but the soft hum of the ship’s engines and the Force, a gentle thing in the background that almost lulls her back to sleep. She thinks maybe it’d been an already forgotten nightmare that woke her, or something from Merrin, but the Nightsister is a smoldering ghostly fire, nothing sparking or odd – and then the air sort of shifts, and it comes through again, like a vibroblade through the gut.
Pain. Muted, coiled tight in an attempt to not project, but it broke through anyway.
Sighing, she sits up, cracks her neck, and pulls on a jacket to protect herself from the chill that falls upon the Stinger Mantis when they’re in hyperspace. No one can track them here – and she dreads the day when something that can is invented – and this lane is busy enough they’re just one among many ships passing through, but they’re still running low-power mode just in case. It makes everything even colder. Like she should be seeing her breath.
Cere tightens her jacket around herself and adds another layer of socks before she finally leaves with a backward glance to make sure Merrin is still sleeping soundly. Greez’s Force signature is a sleepy flutter. She passes by the engine room, pausing only long enough to make sure it’s empty, and heads to the galley. When she finds no tell-tale glow of a data pad or a lump on the orange potoli-weave, there’s only one other logical place to check: the co*ckpit.
And there he is.
Cal sits in the co-pilot seat, a blanket pulled over his head like a hooded cloak and one of his ponchos bundled in his lap, his hands tucked into the folds. He has his feet kicked up on the console, and the bogling Cal doesn’t know she knows about is sprawled long-ways over his ankles in a position that can’t be comfortable, but the creature is sound asleep, using a folded up in stand-by mode BD-1 as a pillow. It’s even snoring. Ugly, snorting snores, but it’s kind of adorable anyway.
Cere assumes Cal’s sleeping too, he can’t move with the bogling draped over him so the only thing he can do is sleep, and that’s where the muted pain must be coming from, nightmares and an awkward sleeping position – mostly the nightmares, though. They’ve plagued him before Cere even met him and they’ve only gotten worse since Nur.
So maybe it’s more of a hope that he’s sleeping. If anyone needs it, it’s Cal.
But when she comes over to unfold the poncho and tuck it around him for extra warmth, that hope is violently dashed when she’s met with a glittering stare from under the blanket’s shadows.
She freezes, hands out-stretched mid motion. The Force hums in warning. There’s something just barely recognizable in that gaze, which is the only reason she doesn’t sound an alarm. It’s distant and old, that look in his eyes, like Cal’s gone too far into an echo and can’t find his way back.
Cere doesn’t move a single centimeter, keeping her presence soothing and unobtrusive as she waits patiently – and then he blinks dazedly, awareness coming back in increments. That look fades and recognition replaces it…and exhaustion. The bone deep kind. The kind that a single night of sleep, no matter how good it is, can fix. It’s years piling on each other. He grimaces and presses the heel of his palm to his healing black eye.
“Sorry,” he mumbles, all clumsy and sleep mussed for all that he hadn’t been sleeping. “Didn’t mean to bother you.”
“You didn’t.” She goes on to exactly as planned – unfolding the poncho and laying it over him like a blanket. His heel is still pressed to his eye as he watches her, reminding her of a tired youngling wanting to stay up despite jaw-breaking yawns. Hyperspace blue makes him washed out and sickly looking. “What are you doing out here?”
Cal blinks then shakes his head, inhaling slowly. He moves his hand to gesture out the windows. “Just needed some light.”
Cere hops into the pilot’s chair, turning so she can face Cal. He shifts his pseudo hood from around his face, letting her see his profile, but doesn’t take it down completely. She props a foot up on his seat and pushes it slightly to make it sway. The corner of his mouth quirks up faintly, not quite a smile. The bogling chitters unhappily at being jostled, but it doesn’t scatter, it just climbs into Cal’s lap instead, using his ankles as a pillow this time and the cradle of his legs as a bed. It stretches with a small noise before going limp in satisfaction. Cal huffs a fond laugh and cards his fingers through its furry tail that now rests on his chest, the tip tickling his jaw, and earns a pleased ear twitch.
“Merrin’s been feeding it under the table,” Cal tells her.
Cere smiles slightly. “So have I.”
“I figured. It’s been getting kinda chunky.” Cal pokes its stomach, which is definitely rounder than it was when she first saw it under the holotable. “How long have you known?”
“Since day one. It’s not quiet.”
“No,” he agrees fondly. “It’s not.”
She watches him silently for a long moment, marveling at the soft expression on his face as he continues to pet the bogling before she unfurls her presence in the Force and brushes it up against Cal’s. He recoils at the contact, that soft expression shutting down as he tucks himself smaller in both the Force and physically.
His own presence is tattered and sickly, weighed down by injuries and memories and emotions.
“Cal – .”
“I’m fine,” he croaks, and it’s the least convincing thing he’s ever said – and there’s a lot to compare it to, mostly iterations of I’m fine. He clears his throat and repeats only slightly steadier, “I’m fine. I’m just…tired.”
“Then sleep,” she urges softly.
Cal’s laugh this time is a rough, bitter thing. “I can’t.”
She thought as much. Ever since their first trip to Dathomir, his sleeping habits have been practically nonexistent. Before they were merely concerning, he pushed and pushed himself until he just…passed out wherever he happened to be. Once Greez found him curled up under the Mantis’ ramp when they were on Bogano, BD-1 keeping guard and a cluster of boglings sniffing him curiously. Cere never said anything because she hadn’t felt it was her place to do so, but now…
Now they’re sort of Master and Padawan. Cal certainly treats her as such, and now it’s her duty to help him – feeling regretful that it took her so long to reach this point. This lifestyle suits you; she’d said instead of mitigating his bad habits before they became worse.
Especially since he doesn’t even sleep when his body finally gives out nowadays. He wakes up intermittently from nightmares and resorts of meditation when he can. Failing that, Cere’s found him at his workbench instead. Or already out of the Mantis when they’re landed, unlikely to be seen for a full day. Worse is when she finds him in the lounge, hunched hollow-eyed over a datapad and not reading a single word as yet another Imperial propaganda reel plays out.
There has to be a way to help him.
“What do you dream about?” he asks suddenly.
Cere blinks. Cal looks at her with an expectant expression. Like a youngling waiting for a story. For all that he’s the same age as a senior padawan would be if the Order still existed and that he’s, in fact, a Knight now, he’s still so…so young.
She doesn’t want to answer him.
The Force quivers on a precipice, reminding her of her lies – be them of omission, of shame, of guilt and grief and regret, be them to someone who had been a stranger to her, and yet she placed a heavy burden on his young shoulders anyway. Cal may have shouldered it almost gratefully, desperately, she did nothing but add to the weight, the holocron the only thing on her mind – until it wasn’t. Until she remembered what it meant to be a Jedi instead of some shadow of a fallen Republic.
She’d rather tuck her nightmares into the back of her mind, whisper them only to the Force so that it may take her fears far, far away. But she can’t stomach the look on Cal’s face, trusting, wary, and so very tired. She can’t lie to him. Not again
“Trilla,” she answers. “You.”
“Me?”
She…doesn’t like how he says me. How surprised and vulnerable it sounds – she wonders if he thinks she blames him for Trilla. I doesn’t, she wants to say. I could never. I will always blame myself. He did nothing but try to understand, tried to reach a hand out. Cere should call him out on it, but she doesn’t. That’s for another day.
“You die a thousand different ways,” she tells him. His mouth twists. “You fall or a ‘trooper finally gets in a lucky shot. You freeze on Ilum. Trilla kills you on Zeffo and Ninth on Kashyyyk. Vadar murders you – right in front of me in that void damn fortress and I’m as helpless as ever to stop him. You drown swimming us out.” She swallows thickly. “Or worse, you’re caught. On Bracca, on Bogano, Zeffo, Nur, before I even meet you, and they break you like they did Trilla. And you, you die like that. Not in body. But your spirit. Your will.”
Cal shudders, a wounded sound clawed out of his throat. “Sounds familiar.”
“Does it?”
He closes his eyes. “Trilla’s lightsaber held a lot of pain.” Her breath catches. He doesn’t open his eyes. “And it feels…it feels like I’m breaking down, piece by piece, and they don’t even have to touch me for it. Sometimes, I’m afraid the next time I light my ‘saber, the, the blade will be red. That’s worse than dying, I think. Losing yourself like that.”
“Is that what you dream about?” she asks softly.
He shakes his head, mouth pulled into a pained smile that looks terribly out of place. “No, but it would better if it was, don’t you think?”
What in the galaxy could make that the better dream? Cere stares at him, horrified. “What do you dream about, Cal?” she prods carefully, afraid of the answer but needing to know. If not Falling or dying, then what? What could put that look on his face?
And then, soft and wavering, he whispers, “I touched him, you know.”
Cere’s mouth drops open, her heart sinking, her chest icy cold. No. Please no. Anyone but Vadar. The Sith who is nothing more than a black hole in the Force. A wound that’s constantly screaming to the point even the most Force null beings could sense that something is wrong.
“Cal – .”
“Only for a second. I didn’t get anything concrete. I don’t know who he is or why he Fell. But I – it – it was overwhelming, Cere. All, all that Darkness and I just – I just keep thinking how can someone live like that? Like you’re constantly b-bleeding out and you don’t bother staunching the flow because it just doesn’t matter. Nothing matters. It never stops and you just keep, just keep screaming. Every second is agony. Every breath is burning.”
His voice cracks. His eyes are wide and glassy, directed towards her but not looking at her. And it’s that same look again – distant and old, and so very alone. What a terrible burden that is. She wants to tell him to stop. Stop talking. Stop sinking into these echoes that have clung to you, you don’t need this. You need to step away. But she knows what she asks for is impossible. A second. Only a second. And this is what came from it?
“All that pain and, and that hatred. There’s no Light. No hope. You can’t stop it. You can never stop it. You can’t even slow it down. It just burns and burns and burns and – I don’t – I tried to release it into the Force like Master Vos taught me, I swear, but I, I can’t. It won’t let go of me. I don’t want – .” He chokes on his next breath, ragged and painful, and the tears that had been glimmering in his eyes finally fall free as he presses a hand to his mouth to muffle sharp, awful sobs.
And there – there it is, she feels it again. Less like a vibroblade to the gut and more of a slow carving of a dull blade. Mournful and heavy in the Force, no longer muted, but cracked open and raw, traveling on the bond that connects them as fledging master and apprentice, as two of the last Jedi in the galaxy.
Pain.
It’s deep. Abyssal deep. Physical. Emotional. Mental. It seeps out past his shields like they’re made of flimsi and fills the air around them. His free hand splays across his chest where the lightsaber wound Vadar inflicted mere weeks ago is. It’s both healing faster and slower than she’d like. He braces it as he cries. He’s too quiet. The sobs make his entire body shake but if Cere wasn’t sitting right next to him, she thinks she wouldn’t have heard him at all.
Somehow, that makes this worse. How often has he cried, and she nor Greez never knew because he was so quiet? Was it Bracca that taught him to do this, trapped in flimsi-thin walls, muffling his tears of loneliness and pain so no one would take advantage of him?
Cal can go back and forth on his tolerance for physical touch despite always craving it, but Cere risks it to stand and wrap her arms around him. Immediately he grabs onto her jacket in a white-knuckled grip, face pressed against her stomach, shoulders jerking. He’s louder now, as if realizing he doesn’t need to hide it, though his mouth is still covered. She rests her cheek on his hair and feels her own eyes sting as she rubs his arm in a pathetic attempt at comfort.
“He’s in my head,” he mumbles, voice still muffled by his hand. Like it’s some terrible, awful secret to admit. “All of that. In my head, like, like it’s meant to be there. I don’t want it anymore. I don’t want to feel that.”
Oh, Cal. Psychometry really is a burden sometimes.
The Force cries too, long and drawn out, as if weeping for the pain this boy – this man, this knight has suffered through. It’s a pain very few people can understand, having someone else’s trauma in your head and feeling like it’s your own. Cere exhales slowly.
“Let me help you.”
He shakes his head rapidly. His hand still covers his mouth, trapped between them, shuddery breaths slipping through his fingers. The bogling has curled around BD-1 now, watching them with big, luminous eyes. It chirps softly, almost sounding concerned. It – actually sounds remarkably like BD-1 when he’s concerned, the same chirping sound just less digital. Huh.
Cal moves his hand to gasp wetly. “It’s too much.”
“Then share it, Cal. Lean on me and we can bear the weight together.” She clutches him tighter. “I can only ease the burden if you let me.”
Please let me.
He’s quiet for a long moment, but she doesn’t let go. The Force twines around them, thick and heavy like a weighted blanket, a comfort on a rainy day, a cup of perfectly brewed caf for the coldest night. The feeling loosens something in her chest, a settled knowledge that she’s headed in the right direction, that she can help, and the Force is confirming this is how. She knows Cal feels it too because his shoulders droop, his forehead presses against her like a tooka seeking affection, and he makes sound caught somewhere between wounded and comforted.
“What if I stumble,” he asks in a small voice, “and I take you down with me?”
Cere finally pulls away, but only to immediately cup his face and wipe away his tears with her thumbs. “You won’t,” she says, firm and unwavering in her belief. He stares up at her, breaths hitching, eyes dark with fear and despair so thick she can practically taste it, but there’s a fragile edge of hope that she recognizes – and she hates that she recognizes it as fragile. And that’s all the kind of hope Cal feels most of the time, fragile and breakable and Cere wants to fix that, has almost fixed it. “You’re so strong, Cal, but you’re not the only one, remember? I want to help you. You’re my apprentice – and even if you weren’t, I’d still want to help.”
She squeezes his face before she finally lets go and actually steps away, giving him room to think. He hangs over the armrest, leaning as if she were still holding on. The chronometer ticks in the background, faint and muffled from the galley. He inhales slowly then lets it out just as slowly.
“Now?”
Cere smiles and agrees. “I really want you do sleep.”
“I do too,” he admits quietly.
They don’t need to go far. Cal keeps the blanket pinched around him as he follows her into the lounge then watches her with big, wide eyes as she sits in the classic mediation pose – legs crossed, hands on her knees. She looks up at him expectantly and has to breathe through the sudden pang in her chest. If she thought he looked like a youngling before, he looks especially like one now. Sleep mussed despite the lack of sleep, blanket pulled over his head and clutching the corners tightly at his throat with one hand, feet bare and toes all scrunched up, peeking from under the hem of his loose pants.
He hovers awkwardly, visibly debating on his next move. Cere has never once seen him sit anything other than basic combat mediation. The style, as the name suggests, was meant for battle. Created during the Sith Wars to give Jedi ample time to react during emergencies or, when they had to meditate on the battlefield, time to react to an attack. It was brought back during the Clone Wars and considering Cal spent three years as a commander in war then five hiding on Bracca and then half a year on the run from the Inquisitorius, she can’t blame him for being more comfortable with it.
But it won’t do for group meditation. She tips her head to the space in front of her, watches him bite his lip before he settles to mirror her pose.
The blanket pools to the ground and he shivers. Cere silently offers her hands to him, waiting patiently and is rewarded when his slip into hers. They’re cold and trembling ever-so-slightly. She squeezes them in reassurance and gets a small smile for it.
“Follow my lead,” she says softly and closes her eyes. She inhales slowly, holds it, exhales even slower. Her heart rate eases. Her thoughts slow. The physical contact between her and Cal allows her to feel the buzz of anxiety under his skin, the fear thumping through his pulse. She squeezes his hands again and feels the moment he sinks in with her.
The tremulous peace swells and shatters, the chaos rises as what inside him howls with an agony that isn’t his. – and Cere has never felt anything like it before. Not even when she herself slipped deeper those months, those years ago, has the Dark ever felt so…oppressive. So, so sad. A desperate kind of sadness, all wrapped up in grief and hatred. It’s a nauseating mix of emotions and this terrible, awful feeling that this is the only Truth. The only way. And – Cere drags herself away from it, only to find Cal leaning in, his mind tangled up with someone else’s memories. Their truth, their sadness, their anger becomes my truth, my sadness, my anger, and he’s drowning in it.
She tugs on the little bond between them, a golden light in the darkness, braided with the bonds of the Masters and Padawans that came before them, and the ones that still might yet come after. Tapal is there, and Trilla. Cordova and Master Yaddle. There is a fleeting ghost star too far away for her to see, but it sings brightly, and something…something in her chest aches.
Follow my lead, she repeats silently.
Cal’s grip tightens to the point of pain, but she doesn’t flinch. She can feel his fear and how it drowns him as if it were her own. She buoys him, lifts him high above it. She treads water, pulling him along like he did weeks ago, swimming despite the wound in his chest from his own lightsaber and the water filling his lungs and the injuries he sustained fighting Trilla, running from Vadar. He talked her down from the Darkness. Nearly gave his life for him. She pours everything she has into the Force between them, guiding him into picking apart the tangles that are Vadar and the pieces that are Cal. Trust only in the Force – You were my – I loved you – Keep failing, keep getting back up! – Don’t make me kill you. He fumbles to mimic her movements. Hesitating, like he can’t tell the difference. It’s easy for her, being on the outside-inside. Cal is a fiery light, a streaking meteor, a shooting star in the night sky. Burning bright and hot and – crash landing. Cere doesn’t want to see him crash. She wants to see him flourish.
Piece by piece they take what is Vadar and they release it together in the Force. – then you are my enemy. Like cupping glowbugs in their hands and then letting them flutter off into the darkness. Emotion, yet peace. Chaos, yet harmony. They whittle it down until the tangled ball resembles Cal more than anything else. There are stray pieces of fuzz here and there, but there’s no helping that, she thinks. She’s seen him with echoes before. How they cling to him. How they become him. Languages he didn’t know, suddenly he’s fluent in. A new move that looks like he learned it decades ago. Strange mannerisms that stick unnervingly so – and she wonders if he knows where he begins, and they stop. How much of the Cal Kestis then is in the Cal Kestis now?
How often does he think that very same thought and wonders who am I?
It my head, like, like it’s meant to be there.
Cere shakes her head. That is a path she doesn’t want to travel down. Not tonight at least, one thing at a time. He knows more about echoes than she does anyway. How they shape him, how he deals with them. She regrets not sitting in on that seminar Quinlan Vos held a few months before the Clone Wars started up in earnest. The power of hindsight, unfortunately.
She’ll keep an eye on him – a better one than she has been keeping – and that’s all she can do.
Cal is soft in the Force now. A few sparks of turmoil and pain here and there, but that’s all him this time. An ache starts up in her chest, radiating from the spot where Cal was impaled by his ‘saber. She sooths it the best she can before she regretfully pulls back from their shared meditation. Slowly coming back to reality, Cere squints, eyes heavy as if she’d woken from a deep sleep, her mouth tasting like something died in it.
The night cycle as switched over to early dawn, the lights a bit brighter but not blindingly so. Cal sits across from her still, his hands slack in hers. He breathes easily, though his brows are furrowed in that pain she can still feel faintly. The bogling blinks up at her from his lap, ears twitching. She huffs a small laugh, shaking her head. Of course. BD-1 chirps where he sits just outside of their huddle, his little feet splayed out in front of him, waggling merrily. He quietly informs her how long they’ve been meditation – and that is…a lot longer than she was expecting.
Standing is going to be a very uncomfortable affair.
Cere sighs then starts squeezing Cal’s hands rhythmically. Partly to coax him out of mediation gently, and partly because this is what they do when he’s caught up in a drawn-out echo. He likes the anchor to the present, he told them. He never feels it when he’s in the echo itself, but it’s always the first thing he’s aware of when he comes out of it. It makes him feel safer, knowing he’s not alone, and she hopes it translates well to whatever hellish combination of meditation and echo and nightmare this is.
The furrow in his brow deepens, mouth twisting into a frown. Slowly, even slower than Cere, he starts to unearth himself from the Force. A shift here, another there, and it’s less like his head breaking the surface and more of a sleepy crawl from under the covers, wondering who the hell is waking him up so damn early in the morning. Cere can’t help but laugh at the mental image, an orange tooka superimposed over a grumpy Cal.
She vows to scour the holotnet for a video that matches what she’s thinking, just so she can show Merrin.
Cal’s lashes flutter then open. He squints in the light too, nose wrinkling. Cere smiles, tugging on his hands. He looks at her, blinking blearily, not quite all there yet.
“How are you feeling?”
“…better,” he says slowly. “I think – .” A jaw-cracking yawn interrupts whatever he was about to say. He takes one of his hands back to cover his mouth, cheeks flushing pink. “sh*t. Sorry.”
“Don’t apologize,” Cere says. “Do you think you can sleep now?”
He’s still blinking slowly, looking like it gets harder to open his eyes every time he closes them. He nods lethargically. “Yeah…Yeah. I’m just gonna.” Cal goes to stand, but the consequences of sitting here for nearly four hours hit him hard and his knees give out before he gets very far. He sits there, more confused than hurt.
Cere stands carefully. Her legs are full of static. She very carefully shakes them out, rotating her ankles and bending her knees until she can feel them again. Cal stares up at her before he swipes a hand over his face, shaking his head.
“Can you help me?” he asks.
She holds out a hand. “Of course. You only have to ask.”
