Chapter Text
19 BBY
Cal felt the surge in the Force and how it began to scream with death and fear and warning.
He didn’t understand why. He couldn’t understand why tears came to his eyes, and his chest hurt, like he had a year before, not long into his padawan-ship with Master Tapal, when his old crèchemaster had died of old age back in the Temple. Only so much worse. It felt like Geonosis all over again, but it shouldn’t.
The war was almost over, they were winning. They’d just gotten orders to go to Mygeeto, with Braaca secure. There was only a handful of major operations left as they captured the remaining Separatist leaders, so there should be nothing like Geonosis.
He couldn’t think of who might have died that he’d known and bonded with, all at once.
He almost didn’t hear Commander Lyen accept Commander Cody’s transmission. Almost didn’t hear the Execute Order 66! beneath how the Force screamed.
Master Tapal acted before he could even shake it off, igniting his lightsaber and deflecting the Commander’s point-blank shot, before killing him.
“Why?”
He didn’t know if he was asking why did they turn against us or why did you kill him.
He was caught in memories of how the Commander had slipped him sweets after a particularly hard training session where he just wasn’t getting it, and had taught him how to use the blaster he’d left in his room this morning.
He hardly heard Master Tapal tell him to go to the lifts, that he needed to get off the ship down onto Braaca, and if he didn’t meet him at the lifts, he’d find him on Braaca, but he had to go.
He ran.
He ran, and as he was shot at by friends – Trip, Byk, Jace – he couldn’t do as his Master commanded. He couldn’t reflect the shots back at them, couldn’t kill them, even if they were trying to kill him.
He knew Byk was an ace shot, but he didn’t understand – Byk could have shot him dead, but he kept shooting to the left. Cal wasn’t trying to zip-and-zag like the Commander had taught him, was barely deflecting the shots aimed in his direction; Byk could have killed him. He’d killed clankers at six hundred paces, and a Sith acolyte. He could have, and he didn’t.
Commander Lyen hadn’t felt angry or hostile in the Force when he’d tried to shoot Master Tapal.
Trip, Byk, and Jace didn’t either.
They felt blank.
They felt like they were crying inside.
He couldn’t help them though, not when they were still trying to kill him. He wasn’t Master Kenobi, who could slip right into his enemy’s guard, and confound them with his words to capture them alive, to find out why. He was just a Padawan, so he continued running, left them behind.
Losing his lightsaber though, that terrified him more than anything.
His Master saved him, but he didn’t see how the moment he’d been disarmed, panicking and trying to pull his ‘saber back, the clones’ aim got exponentially worse. He only noticed because he should have died, but they were shooting all around him, sometimes missing him by a hair, but Mek should have killed him. Mek wasn’t as good as his batchmate Byk, but he was more than good enough to kill him here, at this distance and unarmed, but he didn’t.
Mek was cut down by Master Tapal instead.
He kept running, even as he cried, because these were friends – and he could feel how his family, how his crèchemate Binn – he could feel how they all died.
Everything was a wet blur as he tried to slice open the lifts as Master Tapal defended his back, before he squeezed his eyes shut and folded his arms over his head after one shot grazed his face when he’d looked back at his Master for help. His Master had been making him practice slicing on the elevators, and he’d gotten stuck on this one for the last couple of days, and now they were going to die because he couldn’t break through, and he wanted his Master to override it, only to be nearly shot in the face for the glance.
He was ashamed of himself even as he’d done it, but he’d cowered and cried.
He was fourteen, a Padawan, and had been at his Master’s side for nearly two years of war, but death had never come so close before. He was afraid.
He didn’t know how to help his Master, but he tried to pull himself together when he felt his Master try to non-verbally reassure him that they’d get out of there alive, awkward and gruff as it was, because comfort wasn’t his Master’s strong point, but he was trying.
Cal managed to get the lifts working just as Master Tapal was shot several times, falling back halfway into the lifts. He barely managed to drag him inside without getting shot.
(Five years later, he still didn’t know if they’d meant to kill Master Tapal here, or him, or if Master Tapal had moved to protect him and died for it.)
Then his Master had died, telling him to trust in the Force as he gave him his lightsaber, and he was crying so hard he failed to notice that the ship behind them didn’t blow up like his Master had said it was going to. Not until he was on Braaca.
~
Cal hadn’t quite gotten used to his new life as a scrapper in the shipyards of Braaca, but he’d stopped standing out as much six months after the Jedi Purge began.
He couldn’t listen to the reports on the Jedi Hunts without wanting to cry, so he missed how the number of Jedi found rather dramatically dropped off, with the number of Jedi killed even less, after six months.
Even still, he didn’t miss how Master Tii seemed to be on a regular basis, killed, only to come back a few months later, actually alive, before being ‘killed’ again. Nor how Master Kenobi and Master Yoda were still out there, alive.
No one could miss how Darth Vader and Master Vos had clashed twice without either dying.
The Jedi were a dying breed, but they weren’t going quietly.
It left him with a kernel of hope no matter how many near-misses he had with newly-dubbed stormtroopers.
One that was fostered with how both Ryloth and Mandalore refused to accept the Empire’s yoke and fought. He wanted to go out and join them, to hold the line like his Master had told him to, but he didn’t know how to get off the planet. He was barely slipping by without Imperial papers as it was.
~
17 BBY
Two years as a scrapper, and Cal felt like he saw a lot more ‘troopers than most scrappers did.
Or more accurately, he saw a lot of what remained of the troopers, since the Empire seemed to have been phasing them out, or just plain not letting them group up as more than three or four at a base. He tried pointing it out to Prauf once, because even without the Force recognizing some of them, there was a way they walked and moved that was different from the ‘troopers.
Prauf didn’t see it though.
Sometimes, it even felt like he was seeing flashes of color on their black by their necks and wrists.
Sometimes red, sometimes green, sometimes yellow, sometimes even purple. Sometimes gold.
He’d almost revealed himself when a Star Destroyer, escorted by a Commander, was brought to the shipyard. Because it was Commander Cody, bringing the Negotiator. He’d wanted to strike out at the clone that had brought this whole mess down on them, who had been the cause of Commander Lyen’s death, of Master Tapal’s, and who knows how many others when he said execute Order 66, but Prauf pulled him behind him, out of the sight of the ‘troopers that were starting to look their way.
Prauf had saved his life that day, because he knew that even if he had killed the Commander in vengeance, he would have died there as well.
Still, he hadn’t been able to help following him all the way back to the base, watching him every day that he wasn’t working on dismantling the Negotiator, just, watching them – him. Unable to help himself because on the Commander’s waist was Master Kenobi’s lightsaber.
He watched the clone suffer silently as his home was destroyed slowly in front of his eyes, as his grip on the weapon was white-knuckled even as he polished it and cleaned it expertly.
His anger died that day, because whatever the clone’s reasons for bringing about the start of the Purge, he was suffering for it far more than he could if he was killed. Cal almost thought that he might not even fight if it was a Jedi that killed him, because there was so much guilt hanging around him as he cleaned that weapon, as he watched the Negotiator be dismantled piece by piece.
It became clear that this was both punishment and test for the Commander, to have to sit there as they destroyed what had once held so many memories for him.
It made it abundantly clear that the clones had just been the weapon to end the Jedi, just pawns in someone’s master plan. Unwilling ones at that, because he remembered how Byk, Jace, Trip, and Mek had been crying inside shooting at him and Master Tapal.
It didn’t mean that he ever confronted Commander Cody about it or checked that those flashes of color on troopers was really there.
~
14 BBY
Cal didn’t know what it was, but he was suddenly seeing a lot more troopers on Braaca than ever before.
He was seeing a lot of 327-yellow and 106-yellow and 92-yellow as they started to work on a Venator-class Star Destroyer. Cal watched them comb from one end of the scrapyard to another without drawing attention to how they were looking at young male humanoid scrappers. He knew it wasn’t a coincidence, knew they were looking for him, but he didn’t feel hunted.
Maybe he didn’t let himself get caught, but he didn’t run.
Not with how they felt almost desperate, how they felt worried in the Force. Like they were looking for him because they were afraid – but that didn’t make any sense.
He just didn’t realize they might have been trying to find him to warn him, maybe even get him off Braaca, until he stood across from the Second and Ninth Sisters.
Then it was too late.