Chapter Text
The sixth time you fought Cal was the first time you had fought the Nightsister he had befriended.
She had gotten to you first, her magick burning around the room you were fighting in as she disappeared and reappeared in bursts of bright green flames, throwing wave after wave of magick at you and coming up empty handed. Each time either of you attempted to land a hit to the other, you were met with air, where the other dodged or teleported away just in time. The only reason you were able to keep up with the Nightsister’s attacks was because of how tuned into the force you were, sensing where she reappeared right before she attempted a strike.
The two of you continued the odd semblance of a dance for a few minutes, locked in a stalemate where neither of you were willing to step away. It was a silent battle, no words swapped between missed blows as you glared at each other. You could feel her anger grow with every block and dodge, sense it pulsing from her in waves through the force. That’s where you two differed, you thought. She was fighting for revenge. You were fighting for survival.
“Merrin!”
You could hear Cal shout from somewhere above you, probably sticking out of a maintenance shaft in the large room. So that’s her name. The nightsister— Merrin, as Cal had so graciously supplied, spared a glance up to him and you followed the movement.
He was, in fact, hanging out of a maintenance shaft, one hand latched onto a metal ridge above him and one foot dangling off the edge of the entrance. The sight would’ve made you laugh if you weren’t currently his enemy. And also if you weren’t fighting for your life against his nightsister friend. That was probably the more important factor in the current situation.
You turned back to Merrin, just in time to block a grab at your throat. You twisted away from her as Cal shouted some more, something about needing to leave that you paid little mind to. You were a little preoccupied at the moment. You could tell that Merrin also ignored him when you felt green flames lick at your back, forcing you to duck away before she could make any real contact.
Another shout from Cal echoed from above you, this time accompanied by aggressive shaking that definitely wasn’t natural. The ceiling above you started cracking apart, sheets of metal coming loose and freeing the screws that were holding them together, sending them dropping down around the area you were fighting in. You staggered, using the force to shield you from the tiny projectiles while you tried to maintain balance, and Merrin saw the window, using your momentary shift in focus to send a wave of green fire at you. You didn’t have time to block, barely had enough time to brace yourself as her magick found its target. You were thrown halfway across the room, your back slamming against the wall and leaving you dazed. You barely even noticed her disappear, leaving you to die in the crumbling Imperial base you were supposed to be picking up a prisoner from. If you were feeling especially shitty about the whole Inquisitor thing, you’d probably say you deserved it.
The room shook again, knocking you to your knees when you finally gained your bearings enough to stand. Whatever Cal did to the base was incredibly effective, since you could basically feel the place crumbling down around you. If you didn’t get up soon, you’d probably be crushed underneath it.
What you failed to notice in your disorientation, was Cal. Sometime between you getting knocked into the wall and Merrin’s disappearance, the tremors shook Cal loose from his foothold high up in the room, sending him crashing to the ground across from you. When you finally attempted to make a dash for the door, you found him staring at the pile of scrap blocking both of your exits. How convenient.
“Kark,” you cursed, catching Cal’s attention and making him whip around to you while drawing his lightsaber. You rolled your eyes beneath your helmet.
“If we fight now, neither of us are walking away alive,” you pointed out, vaguely gesturing to the room. As if to accentuate your claim, a large sheet of metal fell a few feet to your left, making you jump.
Cal huffed, clearly seeing the truth in your claim, and sheathed his lightsaber, clipping in onto his belt. He didn’t have his droid friend with him, so you figured that he jumped off before Cal fell. He’s probably on his way out now, while you were stuck trying in a crumbling room with Cal.
“What are we supposed to do?” Cal asked, stern and demanding. He wasn’t in the mood for your usual banter right now, and frankly, neither were you.
“Help me with this,” you order, lifting the scrap from the door and moving it out of the way with the force. Without any argument, Cal joins in, clearing the way to the door and hoping to every force in the galaxy that no more scrap would fall where you were clearing.
In a way, you got your wish, but not in the way you would’ve wanted. Because with another aggressive shake, the floor beneath you and Cal split, sending you hurtling down into some underground tunnel system that you had no clue existed until just then.
You hit the rock floor with a harsh thud, taking most of the impact with your shoulder and leaving it throbbing underneath you as you tried to shake off the dizziness and stand. A rough hand wrapped around your good arm, yanking you up with an excessive amount of force and sending you tumbling back to the ground a few feet away. You looked up in a panic, ready to jump up in a defensive stance, when you realized it was just Cal. A quick glance behind you revealed that he had just saved your ass from being crushed by a massive sheet of metal. Repayment from when you saved him from that rock, you supposed.
“Oh no,” Cal spoke up from your side, staring at the hallway past you. It was completely caved in, blocked off by rocks and rubble from the prison.
“Kark.” Well, wasn’t this just lovely. You were stuck in an unfamiliar cave system with your childhood friend/the guy you were supposed to be killing with a bad arm and no way of immediate escape. Just your luck, really.
You spared a glance at Cal, noticing that he seemed in much better shape than you were. He must’ve fallen with loads more grace than you did, since you were sporting an injured arm and minor tears in your clothes while he seemed pretty much fine. You were also missing your cape, but you weren’t really gonna complain about that one.
“I don’t suppose you have a map of this place?” Cal deadpanned, turning to you.
“I didn’t even know this place existed,” you responded, looking around the tunnels. They were old, that much was obvious. It looked like you were in some kind of mineshaft judging by the wooden supports that were periodically set up along the cave walls. The wood was rotting, and you were honestly surprised they were still intact with all the disturbance that’s happened on the surface. “I knew about the underground quarry, but I didn’t know there was anything more down here.”
“I didn’t either,” Cal mused, stepping forward to brush the dust off of a rusty lantern that was hanging from one of the supports. “We used the foundations in the quarry to knock the prison down, but I didn’t see any mine entrances.” As if realizing who he was talking to, Cal snapped his head back to you, eyes wide in alarm. “I mean- we didn’t-”
You cut him off by holding up your palm, signaling him to stop. “If you didn’t knock it down, the supports giving out down here would’ve. You just sped up the process.” You shrugged, completely unbothered by the loss of the base. “Look. Whole place is barely staying up as is.”
You gestured to the rotting wood, specifically the support that Cal was in front of. It groaned in protest at the movement he was causing with the lamp, and when it was pointed out, Cal promptly stepped away.
“It’s best we don’t linger.” Cal nodded in response, following quietly as you started down the hallway. It was dark, nearly pitch black, and Cal lit his saber, holding it up above his head to light the way as you two walked in awkward silence. It had never been this quiet between you two, and it was obvious it bothered you both, but neither of you wanted to be the one to speak first.
“So, what do you think they were mining for down here?” Cal eventually asked, You both cringed at the way his voice seemed to echo endlessly against the rock, glancing at each other with matching grimaces that he couldn’t see because of your helmet.
“I dunno,” you murmured, resisting the urge to laugh at the situation. With the initial panic wearing off, you were able to start relaxing into the normal dynamic between you and Cal. It was just so in character for him to ask something like that, to be reaching for that specific topic as a way to break the ice. He was itching to learn, to uncover the history buried in this mineshaft through the force. He was always so curious about things like this. “What do you think?”
“I dunno,” he parroted, smiling for a moment before remembering who you were. This time you actually snickered at how quickly he looked away.
“I don’t bite, y’know,” you teased, smiling beneath your helmet.
“Your siblings do, though,” Cal quipped back, pulling a laugh out of you. “And what’s with that anyways? I don’t really get the whole sibling thing.”
It was obvious that he was getting more comfortable with you as the conversation continued, falling back into the normal banter you two shared during fights, just minus the fighting. “I don’t either, honestly,” you admitted. “It’s this whole cohesion tactic to strip us of individuality, but why not just the numbers, y’know? Why’d they have to go with the whole brother-sister thing?”
“No clue,” Cal chuckled, finally allowing himself to relax. It was pretty much a fact at this point that you weren’t going to do anything to him, so he wasn’t sure why he was so tense in the first place. Probably instinct from his other encounters with inquisitors. It was interesting, really, how different you were from the rest. Two out of the three Inquisitors he’s met would rather die than betray the Inquisitorious, and the third one actually did die before she had the chance to, but here you were, actively bad-mouthing the organization and seeming completely at ease with it.
“So, I take it you’re not a big fan of the Inquisitorious?” Cal attempted, putting a little more faith than he should into the assumption that you weren’t crazily devoted to the group like the other Inquisitors were.
You paused, taking in the question for a moment that had Cal tensing in slight panic. You could tell yourself that you were distancing yourself from the Inquisitorious, that you were ready to desert and leave all of it behind. You could repeat the thought in your head over and over without issue, but actually admitting it out loud to someone was completely different. Because if you opened your mouth, voiced the thoughts that have been circling in your head constantly since meeting Cal again, it would be real. You wouldn’t be able to take it back.
“No,” you whispered after a pause that was too long for Cal to be comfortable with. You weren’t even sure if he could hear you clearly through the helmet. “No, I’m not,” you said, louder, and it felt like the air around you grew lighter.
And Cal smiled, bright and comforting and so familiar that you could’ve cried. “Same here,” he shrugged, smile morphing into the grin that he always had before he said something he thought was particularly clever, but really wasn’t. “But you probably already knew that.”
You snorted, shaking your head. “You don’t say?” You moved closer to him, going to bump your shoulder with his own, but completely forgetting about the fact that you were injured. So, when you shifted your body and pushed your arm forward, a sharp pain left you hissing and clutching the sore limb.
“Ah, shit,” you hissed between grit teeth, hand pressed against the front of your shoulder. “That’ll be fun to deal with.”
Cal cringed sympathetically, feeling just the slightest bit guilty about your busted shoulder. It was technically his fault you were injured, but he absolutely didn’t feel remorse about tearing down the base. It was still an Imperial facility, after all. So, he didn’t say anything, just settling for lifting his saber higher as you came across a fork in the tunnel you were following.
“Oh joy, a decision,” you muttered sarcastically, looking down each hallway. It was difficult to see through your helmet visor, but the alternative was letting Cal see your face, and your temporary allyship was still so new and fragile that you didn’t want to risk messing up anything by revealing who you were to him.
“Which way should we go?” Cal asked, looking about as lost as you felt.
You continued looking between the hallways, frustratedly realizing that they looked identical. Guess you would just have to wing it.
“Uh, left?” You said, uncertainty clear in your voice. It wasn’t like Cal had a good argument for going the other way, so he turned down the left hallway, leading you both down into the dark tunnel.
“You’re not so bad when you’re not attacking me,” Cal mused when the silence between you two drew on for too long.
You looked at him from the side in amusement, not exactly sure how to respond to that. “I can’t tell if that was supposed to be a compliment or not,” you chuckled.
“It was more of a neutral statement,” he said with a shrug, turning a corner with you in tow. “An observation, I guess.”
“Gee, thanks,” you drawled, sarcasm present in your words. You peered further down the hallway, squinting like it would help get rid of the red film covering your vision. “Hey, what’s that?”
Cal looked over, following your arm down to where you were pointing further into the tunnel. He held his saber out further, pushing the light out into the tunnel some more, and squinted, trying to see past the dust particles floating around that he probably shouldn’t be breathing in. There was a minecart pushed up against the wall and rails a few feet away from it, running down the center of the tunnel.
“I think that’s our way out,” he muttered, picking up the pace to stop at the minecart, peering into it curiously. You joined him, looking down at the rocks in the cart and picking one up to examine it.
“Huh,” you said, squinting at the mineral through your helmet. “Looks like trinium. Wonder why they abandoned this place.”
“I don’t know,” Cal murmured, mindlessly reaching into the cart to grab out the pickaxe sticking out of the trinium. You glanced at him, just quick enough to catch his eyes widening and his grip tightening as he fell into one of his psychometric visions.
You weren’t a stranger to the visions. He’d had them often enough in his youth that you recognized when he wasn’t himself, when he was pulled into a memory that wasn’t his own, experiencing events from the past as if he were actually there, wrapped in the mind of someone who was. You stepped forward instinctively, wrapping your own hand around his gently, lifting your other to settle on his shoulder and ignoring the ache in your shoulder from the movement. It was the position you always took when he would have a vision, acting as his anchor for when he settled back into his own body, head foggy and veins still buzzing from the echo. You weren’t even sure if he still experienced that after all these years, but the muscle memory overrode your logical thinking, and you just let him ride out the vision like that.
“Cal?” you called gently when he blinked, eyes falling back down to the pick clutched between his hands.
He took a moment, blinking the white fog away from his vision and trying to shake off the slight vertigo that always hit him when he came back from an echo. “I’m fine,” he reassured you, reaching down to place the pick back in the cart. “Thanks,” and then he said your name.
You both froze, stiffening as you looked at each other in the dark. Your hand was still on his shoulder and Cal’s lightsaber was laying deactivated on the floor from when he dropped it going into the vision. It would’ve been comical if you weren’t so torn by the situation.
You were both shocked for different reasons. Cal was stuck in the past, engulfed by memories of you from his time as a youngling and a padawan, and absolutely mortified that he just mistook an Inquisitor for his best friend during his youth. And you were torn between the urge to rip your helmet off and tell Cal everything, about how you missed him and thought about deserting the Empire and the Inquisitorious and wanted to just leave it all behind, or backing off, acting like hearing your name from Cal for the first time in years didn’t feel like a blaster bolt to the chest.
“Sorry!” Cal was the first one to move, pulling away from you and letting your hand slip off his shoulder, sending another pang to your own. “I thought— you just reminded me,” Cal stammered some more, an embarrassed blush crawling up his neck and settling into his cheeks. You couldn’t see it, but he could definitely feel it.. “I’m sorry,” he settled on, letting his shoulders drop.
You bit your lip, mentally fighting with yourself to keep the helmet on. “It’s okay,” you whispered, voice shaky enough to betray the words. It really wasn’t, you thought. The simple sound of your name tore into you, pulling you further and further from your ties to the Inquisitorious, ripping you out of the reconditioning you went through and rewiring you again. Even after all these years, the syllables were familiar, a permanent etch in your brain that was covered in dust that Cal wiped away, even if it was unintentional. It felt like coming home, if you could even fathom the feeling anymore, and you almost couldn’t handle it.
You jerked backward, clutching at your injured shoulder as your throat went dry. You didn’t mean to step back so harshly, but your body wasn’t cooperating with your brain. Cal flinched at the movement, not expecting it and barely being able to see what was going on from the lack of light. He dropped down and fumbled for his lightsaber as you bumped against the minecart, nearly losing your balance.
“Are you alright?” he asked, so concerned for you even after everything you’ve done, even though he didn’t have to, shouldn’t be. He finally found his saber, igniting one of the blades and holding it up as he reached out towards you, trying to help.
His face was illuminated by the blue glow of his saber, lighting up his eyes, wide with concern that you didn’t deserve. You could see him open his mouth, fumbling for something to say. Your name, you realized, seeing the way his eyes jerked around your masked face. He was trying to call out to you, to do something to knock you out of the sudden panic that gripped you, and it only made it all worse.
Your good hand found the edge of the cart, clutching onto it with a death grip that did virtually nothing to ground you. You shook your head, distraught and feeling suffocated beneath the helmet. You thought you were over the panic, the overwhelming fear that used to hit you every time you considered leaving the Inquisitorious. You thought it subsided months ago. But now here you were, facing an open door that would lead you away from it all, that could give you everything you’d considered and more, and you were frozen, too afraid to step through and leave the familiar box you’d been stuck in for so long.
“Hey,” Cal attempted, stepping forward. His free hand was extended towards you, a calming gesture that was more often used with animals than turmoil-ridden Inquisitors. “What-”
Your breath hitched and everything seemed to freeze for a moment. And in a frantic, impulsive leap of faith, you ripped your helmet off.
You didn’t get to see the way Cal gaped at you, stunned into silence as you pressed the heels of your hands beneath your eyes and leaned against the minecart behind you. He nearly lost grip on his saber, fumbling with it for a second before he managed to resecure his hold. It was an overwhelming influx of information for him, sending his brain stuttering to an abrupt stop to process everything. Because here you were, standing in front of him, helmetless. And now Cal had to grapple with the fact that the Inquisitor he had been at odds with for nearly a month now was the same person he grew up with. The person he trained with and joked with and adored with every ounce of his being was the same person he’s been fighting with and trading insults with and trying to keep alive despite everything they were meant to be.
The pieces of the puzzle were finally falling into place for Cal, and it felt like a tidal wave crashing over him, soaking him to the bone.
And you were still pressed against the minecart, shoulder throbbing and hands covering your face. And for the first time since the purge, since you were caught and remolded and left your entire identity behind to become an Inquisitor, for the first time in eight years, you felt like you could breathe.
You heard Cal say your name, quiet at first but then again, louder, and you let your hands drop from your face, your vision blurry from the pressure. Everything was still being illuminated by Cal’s saber, soaked in the light emanating from the blade. You looked at everything in a blue haze, and the sight was beautiful.
“Yeah,” you croaked, swallowing thickly to even your voice out again. “Hey, Cal.”
You smiled thinly at him, looking at him through tired eyes, and he could see the toll everything has taken on you. He could see the weariness from serving the Inquisitorious, the anguish and fatigue that plagued you from your turmoil, and the relief etched across every line and angle of your face from breaking free from the chains, from stepping through the door and letting it shut behind you.
And despite all of it, despite the changes and the trauma and the clashes, it felt right. Like destiny, almost. Because you were here with him again after everything that happened, and some part of him knew you were always meant to end up like this. Because that was what you two did. You found each other, over and over. Because you were his best friend, his partner-in-crime, and if you weren’t torn apart by becoming padawans, you wouldn’t be torn apart by becoming what you were now. The galaxy wouldn’t allow that. And if it did, Cal would fight tooth and nail to make sure it wouldn’t.
So Cal smiled. He smiled that familiar, heart warming smile that told you things would be okay, because he had you back, he was here and putting himself between you and that door that was still unlocked and still within reach, and he was guiding you away from it, taking you by the hand and showing you there was a way away. He held out his hand, palm up, an invitation to you.
You slid your hand into his, feeling his warmth through your glove, and he gripped you tight, a promise not to let go as he met your gaze, eyes soft.
“Hey,” he whispered, looking at you clearly for the first time in eight years. Taking in every curve and contour in your face like it was the first time he’d done so.
And you smiled. Bright and familiar and beautiful. And just for a moment, everything was as it should be.