Work Text:
The ship was quiet when Kalani returned from making arrangements for Kaevee at Khoonda. The party that had accompanied her to the Enclave had scattered, each heading to different sections of the settlement, to different ends—Visas to find a quiet spot to meditate on the disturbances in the Force on Dantooine; Bao-Dur, for repair parts; Mira, to wheedle gossip out of the settlers. HK-47 had shut himself down, Atton was… somewhere, G0-T0 was thoroughly uninterested in what she had been doing, and T3 had only asked Kalani if she had seen any good droid merchants around.
The ship was quiet, and Kalani was glad of that. She was glad that Kaevee still had family off-world, glad that the girl wasn’t intent on spending the rest of her life eking a meager survival in the ruins of her old home. But that, and everything about this place…
“You used to live here?”
“…Yes. I lived here.”
It would seem that in her absence, the pervasive heaviness outside had filtered into the ship. Each breath Kalani took seemed thick with echoing death and the weight that had worn the settlers down into bitterness. She made her way slowly to the port dormitory, where she knew that at least one person would be waiting for her.
Indeed, Kreia was there—she so rarely ventured from the ship without first being asked to that there weren’t really many other places she could have been. Her back was turned, and if Kalani had to guess, she would say that the old woman was deep in meditation.
Bad news can wait this time. One of the first rules of etiquette Kalani had been taught at the now-ruined Enclave came back to her as recently as though she had learned it yesterday. I shouldn’t interrupt her meditation, except for something life-threatening. She went and sat down opposite Kreia, and waited.
After a few minutes in which the only sound was a faint shot of sparks from a nearby conduit, Kreia lifted her head slightly, opened her milky eyes. “You did not find Master Vrook in the Enclave.” It was not a question. Kreia rarely asked questions, Kalani had noticed, unless she was trying to persuade someone (usually Kalani herself) to reveal more about themselves than they had willingly volunteered.
Kalani shook her head. “No. I found dead mercenaries, and a datapad containing instructions to capture Master Vrook.” And a very lost Jedi Padawan, and one strange historian. “He may have left Dantooine.”
Not that that would have made Kalani shed too many tears. Answers were desired, and difficult to come by if her talk with Zez-Kai Ell was supposed to be indicative of anything. Vrook might know more. But the chances of him being willing to share were slim to none—Kalani had barely known Zez-Kai Ell, but she had known his reputation as being exceptionally easy to get information out of; Vrook, meanwhile, was significantly more tight-lipped, and if Zez-Kai Ell couldn’t be persuaded to tell her the whole story, Vrook would be nearly impossible. Besides, Kalani had vivid memories of Vrook from her time at the Enclave, and hadn’t really been looking forward to the possibility of reliving some of those memories…
“No. I sense that he is still on the planet, and may indeed be close by.”
Oh. Of course.
Kreia’s lips thinned as she looked Kalani over. “Though you did not find Master Vrook in the Enclave, it would appear that you found someone else.”
Kaevee and Mical, then. “What, do you mean all the salvagers crawling over the ruins of the Enclave like carrion flies?” Kalani felt her shoulders tense. “I found plenty of those, both living and dead.” And one corpse in particular that was going to have to be reported to the head of the militia, if only to avoid the salvagers getting into a fight that could wind up spilling over into the Khoonda settlement.
“No, Exile, that is not what I meant.” Kreia’s voice sharpened until it was as keen as mullinine, and just as piercing. “What you found in the Enclave were living relics, vestiges of the Jedi Order.”
Plural? Why—Oh, never mind. “I found a young girl, one who had been apprenticed here when the Sith came.”
Kalani told her the whole story, of how Kaevee had been struggling to survive in a community now hostile to Jedi, of the Sith holocron she had found and thrown away, of the laigreks she had suborned and made “guards” of the Enclave. If Kreia had sensed Kaevee’s presence on her own, and Kaevee really was leaving Dantooine for good, it made little sense to conceal it from her. Why bother?
When Kalani was done telling her tale, Kreia asked her, “And do you think it wise to simply let the child go free? If what you say is true, she could pose a grave danger to those around her.” There was an edge to her voice, but there was genuine curiosity there, and detached enough that it sounded as though Kreia was treating this more as a hypothetical situation than like something that could actually occur.
Kalani shifted her weight on the cold, unyielding durasteel floor. “I don’t really think it a matter of wisdom, Kreia,” she argued, struggling to keep her voice level. Forcefulness was not easy to come by when one’s voice was as soft as hers, but Kalani was relearning where to find it, relearning how to control it, and had no desire to let it control the flow of this conversation. “If you think her a danger to others, then you must not think it a good idea to take her with us. She didn’t want to fight, anyways, not after what she went through during the Sith occupation. And I certainly didn’t think it would be a good idea to leave her here.” This isn’t any kind of place for Jedi anymore. No kind of place for not-Jedi. “Sending her back to her family was the only thing to do, if you’re trying to actually help her.”
Twenty years ago, if a child of the Enclave had been in the sort of situation Kaevee had been in, Kalani had no doubt that the settlers would have sheltered her, helped her. When Kalani was a child, she knew the settlers would have aided her. But that was twenty years ago. This was now.
At least she had family to return to, a voice in the back of Kalani’s mind piped up, sharp and knowing. You could have spent the rest of your life trying to track people down, and found nothing. But that matters when you do not wish to return to them, does it?
Kalani pushed the voice back into nothingness, and told herself to focus on ‘now.’ She had to stay rooted.
For instance, if she had been rooted as she ought to have been, she would have taken a larger party into the Enclave when she had first heard reports of the local fauna having become more aggressive. Kinrath venturing out from the caves during the day was hardly a herald of good things to come. A larger party would have been significantly more practical.
Not Atton. He had wanted to go, but Kalani was still trying to figure out what to do about…
“That is the name he gave us, true enough. But he is no soldier, as he might have told you. He is a killer, tried and true.”
…what to do about that. But Kalani could have at least overcome her dislike of assassin droids long enough to let HK-47 go hunting the local wildlife. She was off-balance here. It was the heaviness in the air, the craters marring the landscape, the hostility in the eyes and the minds of the settlers. She couldn’t center herself here.
“And what of the other?” Kreia’s voice was sharper now than it had been when asking after Kaevee. If Kalani concentrated hard enough, she could almost feel the whisper of a touch on her mind—trying to gauge mood rather than thoughts, but the fact that she could feel it at all was significant.
I’ve missed this. She hated the pain of relearning as much as she hated having ever forgotten in the first place. It hurts, but I…
“Mical?” Kalani leaned forward, hunching over slightly as a small frown stole over her lips. “I found him in the Archives. He says he’s a Republic historian, on an assignment to gather and preserve whatever he can find of the Jedi’s history.”
“You have misgivings.”
“I… I’m not sure, to be honest.” It had first struck her on their way out of the Enclave, when Mical was explaining about the other sites he had visited, and how they too had been pilfered of things that were relevant to his interests, and yet were not the sort of items salvagers typically went after. They had found him alone, armed only with a Republic blaster pistol. Mical had made his way across the kinrath and kath hound-infested plains, alone, into the laigreks-infested Enclave sublevel, alone, and all the way into the Archives, all without getting a scratch on him, or even a speck of dirt on his clothes. “I don’t think he’s lied to me, so much as he isn’t telling me everything. That’s hardly a crime, and I don’t think he means us any harm. I don’t sense malice from him.”
If there was anything truly strange, it had originated with Kalani. When she had opened the door to the Archives, and there he was, something had started tugging on memory, a distant shout whose words were lost over so great a distance. There was just something… natural about finding Mical in the Enclave, and Kalani hadn’t even first assumed him a salvager.
That nagging sense of familiarity had grown with each passing hour, stronger and stronger the more she spoke to him, until at last, when they had nearly gotten all the way back to Khoonda, Kalani had asked him if they had ever met before. Mical denied it airily, and for some unfathomable reason, Mira spent the rest of the trip snickering from her spot at the back of the line, but Kalani still had to wonder.
Most surprising of all was that she wanted to like Mical, in spite of her misgivings. That strange sense of familiarity probably had something to do with it. His obvious devotion to the Republic probably had something to do with it, too. Oh, but Kalani wanted… Well. She had wanted many things, once. Nowadays, it would be wiser to keep her mind focused on her objective, and the threat the Sith posed to the galaxy.
“When we leave Dantooine, Mical will likely be joining us,” Kalani said, watching Kreia’s lined face closely for any hint of a reaction. “He’s staying in Khoonda for now, but he’s offered his services as a medic on the Ebon Hawk.”
But Kreia only nodded firmly. “I have no objections, provided that you remain mindful, and you heed my advice that you not allow yourself to be ruled by your affection for others. If he wishes to make himself useful, so much the better.”
They were going to go out tomorrow, Kalani and Mical, to look for the Sith holocron Kaevee had thrown away. Apparently, the Republic had a Sith holocron in custody, and Mical had once been allowed to study it briefly, which would make him the only member of the crew asides from Kalani herself (at least as far as she knew), capable of identifying the holocron on sight. Kalani had dealt with Sith holocrons during the war; the old temple on Dxun Revan had claimed as a base had been crawling with them. While Revan and Malak were elsewhere, it had fallen to Kalani and her men to hold the base, and the holocrons… Kalani knew better, now, and knew that it would be best for everyone nearby if the holocron was found and destroyed. Finding Vrook could wait; the holocron had to take priority.
I suspect Mical might object to its destruction, though. Apparently, the Republic hadn’t given him nearly as much time to study the holocron as he would have liked, because he was taking the expedition as a potential opportunity for him to study the blasted thing. When Kalani thought about it, Mical reminded her a little of Atris, when Atris was young. When Atris was young, she likely would have leapt at the chance to study a blasted Sith holocron. Maybe that had something to do with why Kalani wanted to like Mical, too.
Kreia closed her eyes and was silent, and after a while, Kalani began to wonder if she had been dismissed. Kreia didn’t always bother telling her to leave; sometimes, she would just return to her meditation, and ignore the woman sitting opposite her.
But then, Kreia spoke, and not to utter a dismissal. “The Enclave…” Her voice was much softer than usual, almost hesitant. “…How was it?”
Kalani blinked. “You didn’t want to see it before.”
“Humor me.”
As a short, shallow breath tore from her throat, Kalani found herself leaning against one of the low bunks, fighting the urge to let fingernails bite into skin.
The Enclave had still been under construction when she was brought there, what felt like an eternity ago. The youngest of the initiates’ favorite game was to see how high they could climb on the construction scaffolding before an adult came along and caught them, and Kalani had enjoyed the game as much as any of the others. Well, almost any of the others. The only time Atris had ever climbed up onto the scaffolding had been to try to persuade Kalani to come down—and indeed, they had both come down, when Atris’s tugging on the younger, smaller girl’s shirt had caused them both to lose their balance and fall. A tongue-lashing from the healer who patched them up had put a moratorium on any further climbing expeditions.
Here, Kalani had been initiated into the ways of the Jedi, and the mysteries of the Force. She could remember constructing her first lightsaber—“Steady, child; this isn’t the work of a day”—and the expedition into the crystal cave to find a focusing crystal. Her first master, the one who had died, rather than cast her off like dead weight, had begun teaching her the forms; later, Kavar had continued those lessons, whenever Kalani was between masters again.
Here, they taught her history, science, had tried teaching her languages, though Kalani had never been as gifted with languages as had certain others. Horticulture classes had brought her out to the gardens, digging her hands in the dirt as the warm, damp smell of earth filled her nostrils.
Not all her memories of this place were good ones, and when she was older, Kalani had often been shuttled back and forth between Dantooine and Coruscant, but this place had been home for her, once.
“It… It took heavy damage during the Sith bombardment.” Things had gotten a little touch-and-go when they actually found an unexploded mortar shell in a pile of rubble in the sublevel, but thankfully, Mira knew how to disarm that type of shell. “It’s… It’s not what it was,” Kalani choked out.
She had not come expecting to find it intact. Even past the Outer Rim, rumors had reached her of Dantooine’s bombardment; upon returning to Republic space, those rumors had been confirmed by the captain of the Harbinger. Kalani had been braced for the sight of her childhood home in ruins, but somehow, the broken shell of the Jedi Enclave had still paralyzed her, until at last Mira’s jostling her shoulder and Visas and Bao-Dur’s murmured, worried questions had brought her back to herself.
Where once there had been a place that was home to living Jedi, now there was a tomb, and a den of monsters. The ceiling of the sublevel had collapsed in several places, leaving the cool floors littered with dirt and loose stone and metal beams. The classrooms sat empty, forlorn desks coated with dust. Skeletons laid in bed, sightless eye sockets turned to the ceiling, jaws transfixed in silent screams. Lights flickered on and off, electrical conduits sputtered as they walked by. The irrigation system for the sublevel’s center garden was the only thing that still worked properly, feeding water through the channels to the clay flowerpots. Violet flowers bloomed under empty sky, water flowed cold and cheerless in the artificial pond, and the gardener’s remains could be found on the dais, clothing clinging to his bones in rags. Where once there was life, Kalani found silence, and dry bones.
(Perhaps that was truly why she had been so eager to get Kaevee out of the Enclave, and had accepted Mical’s offer to join her crew so readily. The living had no place with the dead, and never would.)
Kreia sighed heavily. “I had expected as much. Malak was the blunt bludgeon to Revan’s honed knife.” She curled her lip. “He thought that wanton destruction and colossal collateral damage made for an acceptable demonstration of his strength, rather than simply being proof of why he was unfit for any role but that of Revan’s attack dog.”
“And he turned his wrath on Dantooine, when he couldn’t get to her,” Kalani supplied. She knew Revan had been taken here—Zez-Kai Ell had let it slip, and Kreia had told her as much when they first landed. It seems as though every last thing that’s gone wrong in the galaxy that isn’t my fault can be traced back to Revan. Wonderful. “And bombed the Enclave straight to hell.”
“That is a rather nebulous term,” Kreia remarked, in the sort of tone that sounded as though she didn’t know whether to be lecturing or just amused. “I wonder what you mean by it.”
Kalani’s brow furrowed. Please tell me she doesn’t think this is funny. “The Enclave is uninhabitable now,” she explained, very deliberately. “The lighting only works once in a while, and the central heating and cooling is completely gone. The only part of the plumbing that still works is the irrigation system to the central gardens. Bao-Dur took a look at the wiring while we were in the sublevel, and he thinks the wiring would have to be completely ripped out and replaced before anything electrical could be repaired or replaced.” She looked away, her jaw set. “I can’t imagine how Kaevee managed to survive in the sublevel for so long. Or why Master Vrook would return here at all.”
“Can’t you?” This time, there could be no mistaking the amusement in Kreia’s voice, but it was tempered with a strange, gentle sadness. “Vrook taught at the Enclave since its inception; indeed, after the destruction of Ossus, it was he who came to Dantooine and negotiated and oversaw the Enclave’s construction. He poured his life’s blood into this place. I cannot imagine how he could ever bring himself to abandon it.”
Kalani looked up into Kreia’s face, frowning slightly, her stomach starting to churn. The call of home was strong, indeed. Perhaps she shouldn’t have been surprised that someone else wound up answering it, too. Perhaps… “Did you know him?” she asked quietly.
Kreia’s mouth twisted in a grimace. “Not well. After the loss of the Great Library, our paths crossed from time to time, but our relationship was not a friendly one.”
Kalani spent enough time lost in fellow-feeling that Kreia’s mention of the Great Library did not truly register with her at first. But inevitably, it had to, and she stared at Kreia incredulously. “You lived on Ossus?! What was it like?”
It would be well-nigh impossible to find a Jedi who had not heard of Ossus. The history—and loss—of Ossus was on every curriculum, and Kalani had had Atris for a companion, too. Any time Atris discussed history with her, there was a roughly eighty-five percent chance that the topic would veer into a lament for all the knowledge that had been lost when Ossus was destroyed, and a diatribe against Ulic Qel-Droma and Exar Kun for orchestrating its destruction.
Ossus had been a sanctuary for Jedi, a paradise where they kept all of the knowledge and teachings they had accumulated over the millennia. With the collapse of the Cron Cluster, hundreds of Jedi were killed, a sanctuary world was lost, and every last book and scroll that couldn’t be evacuated in time went up in flames.
Even having no memory of the planet’s destruction, Kalani had felt the effects; everyone had. It was difficult to find someone who had known Ossus, and yet wished to speak of it. So for Kreia to imply that she had been to Ossus…
The admission would seem to be more of a slip. Kreia paused for a long moment, her mouth slightly open. “If,” she said finally, her voice almost creaking, “you wish to learn of Ossus, I would ask the historian you found in the Enclave for answers. If he has studied the Jedi, as he claims, he will likely know much.” She drew a deep, shuddering breath, and a change came over her, likely just as much a slip as the mention of the Great Library. There wasn’t anything tangible, nothing physical, but suddenly, as old as Kreia was, she seemed much, much older. “My words are unequal to the task of describing it. Now leave me. I must rest.”
Their conversations had ended this way more than once, and always when Kalani asked Kreia a question about her own history. She considered pressing further. She had always considered that. But she looked at Kreia, who showed every one of her years in the weight of age that bowed her shoulders now, and thought better of it. “Another time, then,” she murmured.
“Yes, another time,” Kreia said, as someone might look forward to an appointment with an old nightmare. Kalani pretended not to hear. They both needed to center themselves, it seemed.