Chapter Text
Well, can you hear me? I cannot hear you,
Every song I thought I knew, I’ve been deafened to
And there’s no one left to sing to
- Cassandra, Florence + the Machine
Bracca
Cal runs.
His legs ache and his lungs heave as he sprints along the top of the train. The wind and rain whip around him, and he can still feel the burn of phantom blaster bolts stinging his face, even if there’s nobody shooting at him anymore.
Cal feels his path out in the force, even though it hurts to use the force this much, like ripping off a blindfold for the first time in five years and staring directly into a rising sun.
He grips the hilt of Master Tapal’s lightsaber so hard he thinks it might crack.
Faster
Debris and rain whip through the air. Imperial starships swing dizzyingly through the storm, laying cover fire and dropping rockets. There is no thought, no future, no plan; Cal exists only in the space between one footfall and the next.
He is one step ahead, until he isn’t.
Because as always, as it has been every time he’s tried to rely the force in the last five years, he comes across the blockage. That old, ugly fracture in his connection.
A misplaced foot. A warning, too late.
The train roof cracks and gives way under Cal’s feet as he lands heavily from a jump, almost sending him sprawling into the cabin below. He yells, leg punched through the roof, and only his own momentum allows him to heave himself back up.
The pain makes him stumble. His leg locks, refusing to take his weight. In dragging himself upright – or perhaps in the fall, he can’t be sure – a fist-sized chunk of flesh has been gouged out of his thigh.
Cal loses precious seconds blinking away black spots in his vision.
Move.
Cal staggers forward, falling into a limping jog, then back into a sprint. He holds what little hope he can muster for the stranger in the unfamiliar ship to re-appear. Her desperate shout rings in his head: “We’re here to help! No time – keep moving - we'll pick you when we can.”
He hadn’t gotten a good look at her, eyes stinging from the smoke and rain. Short cropped dark hair, sensible clothes. A blaster. He doesn’t know her. She could be a bounty hunter, an imperial undercover. He has no choice but to trust her. He’d been almost desperate enough to try to leap to her then and there. Her ship – a stinger, he thinks, of all things, that throws him for a loop, because a stinger is a luxury yacht, not Imperial, not Jedi, so who is she – had pulled away into the storm before he could try. The force urged him to run.
So he runs, running towards nothing but the hope of that unfamiliar woman reappearing to save him, or his death.
Then-
The Imperial ship rises from the mist and fog in the horizon. Cal, carried by momentum and adrenaline, cannot stop, and has no time to change direction.
The ship fires a rocket barely a dozen feet in front of him, and the carriage explodes.
A wave of heat washes over him. The explosion shakes his bones and rattles his teeth, and the train lurches through the sky, his gut lurching with it. Shrapnel cuts into his face, his arms. He sucks in a breath, but the air is boiling, and his chest burns and seizes.
The world tips 45 degrees, and now Cal is sliding uncontrollably towards the final carriage, where only darkness awaits. Darkness, and a long drop into a hungry maw below.
Still, the force urges him onward.
Towards what? What hope do I have? Cal thinks, overcome with bitterness.
He's spent five years isolated from and rejected by the force. Five years of shame and grief and loneliness. Why abandon me for all these years, to come back to me now?
Cal supposes, with no small amount of terror, that these are his final thoughts.
Master Tapal sacrificed himself for this. For me. And this is how I honour him. Five years of creeping in the shadows like a roach, and then an ugly, pointless death.
The stinger yacht he’d seen earlier zips through the air and in front of the train, hovering metres away, appearing as if out of a dream.
For a moment, Cal wonders if he’s hallucinating. The ship is barely visible through the sleet stinging his eyes, but it shines as a glowing hail mary in the force. The door slides open. He can see the woman who called to him earlier.
“Jump! Jump now!”
The force whispers to him, and the ship shines, warmth and light and safety that Cal hasn’t felt since he was twelve years old. It seems impossibly far, for all the pilot as brought it as close as they could without crashing into the falling train, but the force radiates through him, wrapping around his muscles and pushing him through the air.
Not far enough.
Cal catches the landing ramp with one hand, and wraps his fingers around the cold, slick metal, the other still clutching Master Tapal’s lightsaber. The impact and sudden stop almost wrench his shoulder out of his socket. His legs dangle uselessly into open space below.
He can’t pull himself up, doesn’t have a good hold– the ship shudders, he slips, the tips of his fingers curled and frozen on the ramp the only thing between him and a long, long fall.
“Hold on!” The woman darts out and reaches out towards him, her hand just inches from his–
And a barrage of artillery fire rocks the ship. Cal is shaken loose. He falls.
He hears a cry from the woman above him, wordless, anguished. He spins in freefall, the world moving too fast to see, to react. There is a long moment of weightlessness, and then an abrupt stop as his body slams into a falling piece of debris. He bounces off it, falls once more, then slams again against a piece of the falling train and grunts, too winded to scream. He hears something in his shoulder finally snap.
The next piece of floating scrap he lands on, he wraps his arms around, stopping his fall. His shoulder throbs in protest, the breath punched from his lungs.
It’s not scrap, he realises with dull surprise, but a maintenance droid. He wraps his throbbing arm around it and hangs on as it shakes and whirs. He hangs on just long enough to drop onto the docking platform it was flying towards.
Thanks, buddy, Cal thinks, somewhat hysterical. His mouth tastes like ash.
The rain continues to fall. White LED worklights illuminate a ship touching down on the landing dock. It's an Imperial ship, not a yacht, not salvation, not for him – there will be no relief, this pursuit is as relentless as the rain falling around him.
Having no other choice, Cal stands.
Blood drips from his leg, where he’d put it through the roof of the train. He’s dizzy, breathless, bloodless. His lungs still burn from the mouthful of boiling air he’d inhaled minutes before. His face stings from the blaster bolts. His rolls out his aching shoulder, grimacing as it seizes and protests the movement.
His hand, tight around Master Tapal’s lightsaber, trembles.
The black cloaked figure – the Second Sister, he reminds himself grimly, Prauf’s murderer – floats down gracefully to stand before him. He feels ragged, half-dead, adrenaline and fear holding him upright. She regards him, dispassionate.
Her sith-red lightsaber ignites.
“Going somewhere?” Her voice is cold and incurious. She may as well be skimming an old book she’s read a hundred times before, for all the interest in her voice.
I’m sorry, he thinks, has Prauf’s murder been an inconvenience to you?
Cal feels something very close to hatred bubble up in his throat like bile as he lights Master Tapal’s lightsaber.
Two-handed grip; defensive stance. The only one he really remembers. Ignore the pain. Knees bent, thigh and core muscles engaged, shoulders back. Head over chest, chest over hips. Coiled strength. Arms higher than that; feet shoulder-width apart. Leading foot just a little further forward. It feels like a weak parody, a kid playing dress-up. It feels like an elastic band ready to snap.
“I recognise that stance. Perhaps you’ve had some training after all.” The Second Sister steps towards him, neither her voice nor her body language betraying any emotion at all, and in the force she is a glacier.
Biting his lip hard enough to split the skin, Cal waits for the first strike. He knows he should release his pain into the force, but for all he remembers that he should, he cannot remember how.
“Who was your master, padawan?” Every breath, a slow step forward. “Someone I killed, perhaps?”
Cal takes a half-step back. He doesn’t say anything; can’t. The mere mention of his master stops him as effectively as a hand around his throat.
The Second Sister is close enough to touch, now. “What Jedi gave their life, so that you might live?”
She doesn’t wait for an answer.
She flies at him, red lightsaber arcing overhead and slamming down onto the ground where he’d been standing a half-second before. But Cal is already moving, rolling to his side. It hurts. She follows him, a half-step behind, not letting up her barrage of blows. He relies on his speed to evade her, unconfident in his ability to parry properly or meet her head on, blade to blade. He hasn’t wielded a lightsaber in five years.
So he evades, letting instinct tell him when to slip to the side, to roll, to dodge under her swinging arms and kicking legs. He can’t think, can’t focus, can’t see any chink in her armour or gaps in her defence, not with his eyes and not in the force.
For her part, the Second Sister seems content to let him dodge and run, tiring himself out. She gives him just enough space to gasp for air, to reset his posture, but never enough that he can think.
He tries to parry the next attack, a vicious blow to his gut, trying to throw her off enough to land a blow of his own. She must predict it, because at the last moment her lightsaber swings high, and she catches him across the face. His vision fills with red as the tip of her lightsaber scrapes across his brow, his eye, down to his cheekbone.
Cal can’t stop the scream that tears loose. He throws himself back, managing once more to get some space between them, and puts his hand up to his eye. He hears his flesh, instantly cauterized, sizzling in the ice-cold rain.
Still, the Second Sister stalks forward. Slowly, carefully, now she’s gotten his measure, like he’s a rabid dog she’s cornered and is ready to put down.
Much like a rabid dog, Cal has his fear and his adrenaline, and they are powerful motivators. He wants to live. He ducks under her next swing and puts space between them, off-hand protectively curled over his eye, tries to hit her in the spine as he moves around her but is batted away.
Cal starts to swing, powerless, childish, desperate slashes that she ducks around or parries with practiced ease.
His only salvation will be from that mysterious ship, if it returns. He is holding out now only on that hope.
They dance, for some minutes. Every now and again, she hits him. Hard blows, a kick to the gut, or the tip of her lightsaber burning through his scrapper’s guild clothes, or the hilt of it crunching into his sides. It’s not enough to drop him, but each time it staggers him. Each time, he is slower to recover.
He’s slowing down. His feet feel like they’re made of lead. Both arms are trembling now, spasming with pain. It won’t be long until-
Cal finally lands a blow. His lightsaber arcs up from where he’d been crouched on the ground, half out of a roll, slicing diagonally along her arm. She stumbles, silent, and for a moment he feels a thrill of victory.
But he is injured, and bleeding, and drenched, and half-blind, and as he gasps for breath in the brief respite he’s bought himself, she shakes herself from whatever pain he has managed to inflict. She leaps through the air, a high arc, and brings her lightsaber down in a brutal, overhead strike. Cal tries to duck out of the way, but he’s too slow, and she punches him in the collarbone hard enough to drop him.
At least, that’s what it feels like at first. A hard punch, or, no, more like she’d swung a sledgehammer into him. The force of it sends him to the ground. It takes him a long moment to reconcile the flashes images of what just happened with the curdling pain in his collarbone, his shoulder. The Second Sister is crouched over him, her lightsaber extended towards him.
No, that’s not right. Not towards him. Into him.
It feels nothing like the glancing slices from the tip of her lightsaber when he’d been quick enough to dodge. It’s nothing like a punch either, really.
It is like nothing he has ever felt before.
The Second Sister’s lightsaber has sliced through him from the place his shoulder meets his collarbone, then several inches further in, towards his heart. It would have been fatal – would have cut him cleanly in two – if not for his other hand, still gripping Master Tapal’s lightsaber. He'd blocked the blow before the lightsaber had cut him in half, but had been too late to stop it entirely.
He can feel himself burning. He tries to gasp a breath of air, but only loses whatever is left in his lungs when a pained grunt escapes his lips. He isn’t sure why he’s not screaming.
He tries to push the Second Sister’s lightsaber out of him the way it came, but his arms feel like they have pins and needles running up and down them and he can’t get his muscles to work right.
The Second Sister extinguishes her lightsaber. The instant loss of the hard, burning line inside him almost makes him vomit. His shoulder pulses, and he writhes to get away from the pain, but there’s nothing to get away from anymore, just his own body betraying him.
A blurry shape that could be the Second Sister stands up from the crouch over him. It's hard to tell; it’s so very hard to see anything. With each ragged breath, the world turns a little bit darker around him.
The Second Sister’s voice betrays nothing, and her breathing is steady as she murmurs, just loud enough to be heard over the rain; “It will be over soon, Jedi.”
I’m no Jedi, Cal thinks. He doesn’t think he could respond aloud, even if he wanted to.
The Second Sister puts her boot over the cauterized hole in Cal’s shoulder. He hadn’t realised he’d been trying to crawl upright until it sends him crashing back down to ground.
She ignites her lightsaber, and brings it down.
Cal has nowhere to dodge. He lifts Master Tapal’s lightsaber up to block the swing, trapped and trembling as she bears down on him.
It’s over.
He thinks he’s supposed to release himself into the force, to feel calm and accepting at the end. Instead, guilt and nausea and fear burn in his stomach, far more painful than the wound in his shoulder. He doesn’t want to die. He doesn’t want to die.
Sparks fly where their lightsabers meet, hissing and spitting in the torrential rain. It takes all of Cal’s strength not to let go, let her run him through. Her helmet tilts, and they stand there, locked together in a strange moment of stillness.
“Such rage in you, little Jedi,” she says, her voice soft, impassive. “Such potential.”
Then, the hum of engines. Close.
The stinger yacht drops out of the fog, and the Second Sister’s head whips towards it in surprise. Cal sympathises; he can barely believe his eyes, either, as a gunport opens and blasterfire slams along the platform. Some luxury cruiser that is, he thinks as he rolls out of the way, instinct once again keeping him alive. Slight modifications made, that’s all. Just some heavy artillery and a couple rocket launchers, nothing too crazy. He might be slightly hysterical, but he’s certainly not complaining.
Over the pounding rain and the whine of his tinnitus and the groaning of metal he hears a voice-
“Get onboard!”
Cal stumbles up. Up, up, up, a chant in his head, an urging from the force. Go, go, go. He doesn’t remember falling – maybe he hadn’t rolled quite as far from the blast as he thought he had. His legs won’t move right. His vision throbs in and out, in and out. The ship seems so far away. He takes a step; falls to his hands and knees. Stands up again. Behind him, he hears the thrum of a lightsaber as it re-ignites. He takes another step. Faster. Only a few feet now, surely.
He stumbles into the incline of the boarding ramp. He can’t see it, vision fading in pulses every time his heart beats. He can feel it though, metal under his boots. Up. One more second-
Cal feels a pull in his gut, a warning from the force.
Move.
It comes a second too late. Or perhaps, beaten and battered and half-dead as he is, it comes at a perfect time, and Cal just has nothing left in him to react anymore.
His would-be saviour grabs at his arm to pull him forward towards the safety of her ship.
The Second Sister crashes into him from the side. For the second time that day, Cal’s arm wrenches out of its socket, and they roll off the ramp and back onto the ground.
Cal can’t get up. He can’t see. He can’t breathe. He hears blasterfire, the hum of a lightsaber. He doesn’t know who’s winning. He struggles to his knees, fighting gravity, then feels pain in his face as he slips and crunches against the ground. He tries again. He falls again.
Something’s pulsating thickly inside his skull, and dimly he can hear someone screaming, then the ship taking off. Without him.
Suddenly, it’s very quiet. He can’t even hear the thrum of the Second Sister’s lightsaber anymore. Just the rain, falling on the metal grate. His face is wet.
In muffled, far-distant reality, Cal feels something grasp the back of his neck. Then, he gives in to the blackness.