Chapter Text
“I don’t think I can legally sell you alcohol,” Eagan says the moment she spots him.
“You’re not – sorry –” Cal ducks under someone’s arm, dodges a swinging lek, squeezes past a pair of scrappers who are nose to nose and seething at one another in a way that tells him they’re either going to fight it out or fuck it out, and in any event he doesn’t want to be near the blast zone. He’s honestly surprised Eagan managed to notice him among this chaos. Working nightshift for the past two months was about as much fun as a raging case of Bothan Nether Rot, but rolling up to the Taproot at the crack of dawn meant the place was almost empty and the bartenders sold them at half-price all the swill they hadn’t been able to offload earlier. He finally gets within a meter of the bar, where Eagan’s working a cocktail shaker in one tattooed hand and uncapping bottles of ale on the edge of the sink with the other. “Ow – you’re not selling me alcohol,” Cal says, glaring at a guy who doesn’t seem too apologetic about elbowing him in the head. “You’re selling Prauf alcohol. I’m just the middleman.”
The iridescent hoops Eagan has in place of her eyebrows catch the light when she raises them. “Right,” she says. “Where’d he get to?”
“Tabbers dragged him off as soon as we got through the door so they could find a table.” And good luck with that, honestly. It’s standing room only at this point of the evening. Prauf took a risk tossing his money to Cal and hoping it didn’t hit the floor before he and Tabbers disappeared into the intoxicated mass – riots have erupted over less.
“Right,” she repeats, then glances over at whoever’s calling her name. “I’ll be with you in a second.”
Cal shoves right up to the bar and climbs onto the footrail so he can lean over the scarred wood. “Hi, Keeper,” he calls. Eagan’s old A-LT unit chitters a greeting at him. “You got the gum out of his treads, I guess?” Cal asks Eagan as she returns.
She nods, sighing. “If I ever find out who did it, their next fifty drinks are coming from the grease trap out back… nothing sadder than a cleaning droid who can only spin in a circle.” Keeper trundles past, hooting glumly, and Eagan reaches down to give him a pat on the dome. “That one circle was spotless, though.”
Cal grins at her and spills the credits from his palm to the bartop. “The usual.”
“What about Tabbers?” Eagan says, sweeping the money into her apron and grabbing a large metal tankard from the draining rack.
“Nope.”
“All right…” Eagan makes quick work of their drinks, pausing only to bellow, “Put a karking cork in it or I’m cutting you all off!” at the group of scrappers near the door who are on verse sixteen of Fair Hutt Maiden, the part about the podracer’s eldest daughter. Cal had almost died from embarrassment the first time he’d heard it. Now he thinks it’s kind of funny, if only for sheer anatomical implausibility. “Here you go.”
“Thanks.” Cal picks up the tankard and glass he’s handed and dives back into the throng, bobbing and weaving and keeping his eyes peeled for an Abednedo or a shock of bright red hair. That’s probably the only reason Tabbers gives Cal the time of day. The gingers have to stick together. He eventually spies the two of them crammed into a corner – they did snag a table, to his surprise – and lurches towards them in fits and starts until he gets through the crowd. As always, he doesn’t spill a drop of their drinks. Prauf calls that skill preternatural, which Cal supposes is one word for it.
“ – still gonna be finding bits in my clothes for weeks,” Tabbers is saying once Cal gets close enough to hear. The table’s a tiny two-top that definitely wasn’t built for someone Prauf’s size, but he never complains about this sort of thing, so Cal just steals an unattended chair from the next table and climbs onto it. He slides the change and the tankard of Thuris Stout to Prauf, who gives him a thumbs-up and slurps the foam off the top before it wobbles over the rim. “Oh no, nothing for me, thanks…” Tabbers mutters, flicking a scowl at Cal.
Cal smiles innocently and takes a sip of his own drink. It’s just the plain citrusy soda Eagan uses as a mixer, since that’s about the only nonalcoholic thing besides water in this joint, but it isn’t half-bad on its own. Little bitter. He’s gotten used to it. “I’m not old enough to buy alcohol.”
Rolling his eyes, Tabbers scoots his chair out with a screech. “For someone who’s barely five feet tall, you’re a massive pain in the neck, you know that? I’ll be right back.”
He starts pushing his way to the bar and Prauf glances from the change that was supposed to buy Tabbers’s beer to Cal. “Do I wanna know what that’s all about?” he asks as soon as Tabbers is out of earshot, which doesn’t take long in this racket.
“Revenge,” Cal replies.
“Through petty inconveniences…?”
“Sure. Death by a thousand cuts.”
Prauf laughs, shakes his head, props his chin up in his hand. “If you say so.”
They sit there in relative silence for the five or ten minutes Tabbers needs to carve a path to the bar, order, and return. Bitter or not, the occasional well drink is about the only luxury a scrapper can afford, so Cal takes his time and enjoys it. Today’s shift was one of the better ones. They’d found a badly scorched R5 astromech that’d gotten wedged in an exhaust port – its external plating had melted to the hull and Cal spent over an hour decoupling the two, but that was a few extra credits in their wallets. And they’re off the nightshift. And he’d just gotten a spectacular black eye from a falling pipe this morning instead of a concussion, so that’s as good a reason as any to celebrate. Tabbers shoulders back over to them with a small dish of candied nuts, which he plunks in the middle of the table, and a beer bottle. “Anyway,” he says, flopping into his seat and taking a long draught from the bottle, “I know Hazmats get paid absolute shite, but I’m going on strike if they don’t start doing their kriffin’ jobs. Took me three times longer than it should’ve to break down the damn turbine because I had to keep picking some poor bastard’s teeth out of the blades, and then I was so far behind that the foreman was crawling up my arse for the rest of the day…”
“I figured you were into that kind of thing,” Cal says. Tabbers throws a nut at him. Cal catches it, sticks it in his mouth, and immediately spits it into his hand, gagging. “Ugh!” He goes for the soda so fast he almost breaks his front teeth on the glass. Once he’s swallowed enough to wash most of the flavor off his tongue, he gives the slimy nut a revolted look and chucks it into the nearby trash bin. “That’s disgusting.”
Snickering into his beer, Tabbers says, “Zeltron pop-pepper and catabar glazed. Sort of an acquired taste… most little kids don’t like it,” he teases, leaning back in his seat.
“Maybe you should also jam those up –”
“Enough.” Prauf slides a napkin to Cal, who scrubs his hand dry and glares at Tabbers.
“He started it,” the other man says cheerfully.
“I’m ending it,” Prauf says, in his I was the second of nine children and don’t have the patience for your bantha-shit tone which sounds perfectly friendly and deeply menacing at the same time. Tabbers looks a bit annoyed that it’s directed at him, but he must realize stooping to a thirteen-year-old’s level doesn’t speak volumes for his maturity, because he shuts up. “Mind telling me what’s so important you had to drag us here tonight? I’d like to finish my drink, go home, and go to bed. I’m getting too old for these wild nights out.”
“Buddy, you wouldn’t know a wild night out if it snuck up behind you and welded itself to your balls,” Tabbers mutters. “Or… whatever you’ve got,” he adds, waving a hand.
“We’re not close enough for me to be answering that question,” Prauf says pleasantly.
“Well, color me intrigued… anyway,” Tabbers says again. He digs a crumpled sheet of flimsiplast from his pocket, unfolds it, and slaps it down next to the bowl of nuts.
Prauf picks up the flimsi and his eyes widen. After a moment, he whistles and shakes his head. “Okay, I’m impressed,” he admits, handing it off to Cal, who reads it too.
“You got a freelance permit?” Cal says, lifting his eyebrows. Prauf said ages ago the Guild had quit issuing those – they were losing too many credits on them, since it’s so easy for freelancers to skim off the top that a child could manage it. Cal (who is a child) skims off the top, of course, just like everyone else, but in a grudgingly approved sort of way. Can’t arrest everyone who steals and sells contraband or there’d be nobody left in the shipbreaking yard. “Who’d you kill?”
“Who’d he bribe, more like,” Prauf corrects.
“My dignity, and the right people,” Tabbers says, pointing at Cal and Prauf in turn and tucking the flimsi back into his pocket. “And they still wouldn’t give it to me until I put it under Rux’s name. Guess it pays off to turn in nice, profitable, almost-accurate numbers on all your freelancing jobs for a few years… ‘course, he needed my powerful connections to get the permit, so it worked out for both of us.”
“Great,” Prauf says. “What’s it for?”
Tabbers folds his arms on the tabletop and lowers his voice like he’s worried about eavesdroppers, which means Cal and Prauf have to lean in to hear him over the background noise. “So Rux was out on patrol alone a couple weeks ago and veered off his route – he says he saw fire, but I’d bet my next paycheck he had a bad day and was looking to take a few potshots at some mud-eaters –” He chokes off the sentence when Prauf kicks him beneath the table. Cal pretends not to notice. He’s not actually a wastelander (or ‘mud-eater’, which isn’t even the worst pejorative term he’s heard for them), but Prauf thinks he is and it’s safest for everyone else to believe it too. Tabbers clears his throat. “He must’ve been out in the middle of nowhere, because he found something good. I’m surprised it’s gone unnoticed ‘til now, honestly.”
Prauf closes his eyes halfway and sighs. “What is it, Jason?”
Ooh, somebody’s getting first-named… Tabbers’s attempt to build anticipation isn’t getting a whole lot of reception, so he gives up. “Can’t guarantee anything – I didn’t see it myself and Rux only got a quick look – but he said it’s an escape pod. Standard Republic cruiser model. Just sitting there in a nice little crater in the wastes, all by its lonesome, no one around for klicks… intact.”
Cal’s heart stops beating.
It can’t be. On a planet like Bracca, there could be any number of junked escape pods littering the wastelands – old Acclamator- and Venator-class cruisers are still being towed in at a rate of one or two a month, guaranteeing the Scrapper Guild steady work for years to come. It’d simply take an electrical short or a manual override nobody noticed was engaged to jettison a pod by accident. Stuff falls from shipwrecks all the time. There are six square blocks at the south end of Attash that have been uninhabitable for half a decade after some proton torpedoes weren’t secured correctly. It’s not his. It can’t be. Not the one he’d huddled in for hours after it crash-landed, numb to everything except his master’s body already cooling on the deck and the fire consuming half his face. The scar beneath his ear burns, tries to claw him back down into the cold, suffocating little pod that gradually smelled less and less like the familiar Lasat musk and more like a dead body full of blaster holes. He’d made it worse – when Cal finally pulled himself together enough to pop the hatch and see exactly how screwed he was, all the muddy water that’d collected at the bottom of their landing pad spilled inside until it was almost to his knees. The words “Master, watch out for the water –” tumbled from his mouth involuntarily. Master Tapal did not respond. There was no breath left in him to drown. Clutching the glowbar from the emergency kit, Cal sloshed out of the escape pod into the downpour and looked around.
Nothing. He’s twelve years old and his friends just tried to murder him for reasons he can’t even begin to imagine and his master is dead behind him. They’re both drenched now, too, and he should be placing his trust in the Force and waiting for whatever signal Master Tapal’s expecting from the Council, but instead he’s realizing how quickly Bracca’s heat and moisture will speed up decomposition. The traditional pyre’s impossible under these conditions. A waterlogged escape pod isn’t a proper tomb for a Jedi Master, though, so Cal (forty kilos soaking wet) has to get a one-hundred-and-forty-kilo Lasat out of here…
Just for a second, he closes his eyes and stretches again into the limitless wellspring of the Force. The backlash feels like an electrowhip across the face and he staggers, loses his footing, lands on his behind in the water. Something’s wrong with him. He’s tried half a dozen times to use the Force since fleeing the Albedo Brave, but it hurts, and from the sticky warmth dribbling down his lips and chin he knows the recoil has given him his third nosebleed in as many hours. He can’t even ask his master what’s happening to him because Master Tapal is dead, entombed in the filthy runoff that laps gently over him every time Cal disturbs it.
Cal closes the hatch for now to keep the water from getting any deeper and clambers back onto his seat, wiping his bloody nose on his sleeve, clinging to the glowbar and a damaged lightsaber. Without the Force, how is he going to move Master Tapal?
Jedi become one with the Force when they die. Maybe the pain is Master Tapal’s final punishment, a lingering condemnation of his Padawan’s cowardice. He bites his lip, spits out the blood that leaks into his mouth. He’s cold. The pod’s main power supply fizzled on impact, so the only light comes from the glowbar and it throws strange, eerie shadows over the planes of his master’s damp face. Drawing his legs up, Cal hugs his knees, then cringes. Water’s seeped into his boots and there is no sensation in the galaxy worse than that of wet socks. At least he can fix that, as opposed to everything else; he could lose his socks and keep a death grip on the lightsaber, let a lifetime’s worth of Master Tapal’s memories surge into his head, pretend that’s real and this is just a terrible dream…
“Cal?”
Cal shivers out of the flashback, head jerking up. Tabbers is mopping rings of condensation off the table with a napkin, watching Cal, wearing an impassive expression that doesn’t quite mask his unease. It’s Prauf who’s calling his name, though, and he isn’t bothering to hide his concern. “Are you all right?” he asks, brow creasing.
He’s in the Taproot. His heartbeat is thundering in his ears, drowning out most of the drunken revelry pressing in on them from every direction, but he recognizes the desperate, exhausted echoes of the respite alcohol brings, trapped in the slippery glass he’s white-knuckling. He’s not in the escape pod anymore. Prauf and Tabbers are just talking about an escape pod, probably a different one, and Cal’s freaking out about nothing. Remembering he was asked a question, Cal nods, fixing his gaze on the spray of neon pink globes mounted over the bar and counting them, anchoring himself to reality. Apparently his single delayed nod isn’t very believable, because Tabbers says, “Kid, you’re bone-white and you just checked out on us for a good minute.”
“I’m fine,” Cal mumbles. He rubs at his nose to confirm it’s not bleeding.
“You sure you feel okay?” Prauf reaches over and lays a large hand on Cal’s forehead, then grimaces like he remembered an instant too late he doesn’t know Human temperature norms well enough to determine whether or not Cal’s outside them. He doesn’t pull away for a few seconds, though. The heat of his palm is a tangible reminder Cal’s here, he’s about as safe as it’s possible for a Jedi in hiding to be. And when Prauf does back off, he still pauses and gingerly brushes his thumb next to Cal’s right eyebrow, where the worst of the swelling and bruising is. “I know the droid said you don’t have a concussion, but you might get some nasty headaches for a few days…”
“I’m fine,” Cal says again, putting a bit more strength into the words, and Prauf relaxes even if he doesn’t seem fully convinced. One hundred and twenty-four pink lights above the bar, the burn under his ear is long healed, he’s safe. Now he just needs to persuade his brain it’s not his escape pod they’re discussing. The ghosts interred there are better left undisturbed.
“As I was saying,” Tabbers picks up the dangling thread of the conversation, turning his attention back to Prauf, “permit’s for this coming Primeday, since that’s Rux’s day off and I’m pretty much setting my own hours at this point. Figure we leave after work ends on Benduday, since it’ll take a while to get to the site, scrap as much of the pod as we can, and make it back before the permit expires.”
Prauf frowns. “It’s not my day off, so I’ll have to see if they’ll let me rearrange my schedule…”
“Well, ask real nicely.” Moving his empty beer bottle aside, Tabbers rests his elbows on the tabletop. “We’ve got a day to break down one pod, so that’s at least a three- or four-person job. You know Rux is gonna bring Chessie in on this. And I’m asking you because I owe you one – the Guild gets their cut, I take what I need to cover the permit, and we split the rest four ways, and then you and I are square.”
“Five ways,” Cal interrupts.
A smirk tugs at the side of Tabbers’s mouth. “Sorry, little one –”
“Don’t call me that –”
“– you’re not invited.”
That should be a relief. He doesn’t want to return to the wastes. He doesn’t want to know if it’s the Albedo Brave’s escape pod this Rux has found, and he doesn’t want to get anywhere near it regardless of where it originated, but since when has the galaxy ever cared about what Cal wants? “I can help,” he insists. “It’ll go even faster with five people, won’t it?”
“I think adding you would only make four and a half,” Tabbers says, cracking a nut between his molars. “And Rux is in charge here, not me. He doesn’t like kids.” He notices Prauf shooting Cal a thoughtful look, though, and groans. “You’re gonna bring him along no matter what I say, huh? Rux won’t agree to split five ways, I’ll tell you that right now.”
“So we split four –”
“Hey, hey, hey!” Tabbers says quickly. “We spent months telling the kid to quit doing stuff for free just to be nice. Don’t start sending him mixed messages.”
“And I’ll pay him later out of my share,” Prauf continues like Tabbers hasn’t spoken. “Rux can deal. An extra pair of hands is always useful. Okay, Cal?”
It takes him a moment too long to respond again. He only tears his eyes away from the rising bubbles in his drink when Prauf’s worry spikes and it feels like Cal’s swallowed a needle. “Yeah, that’s okay.”
“Rux might give you a hard time,” Tabbers warns.
“How’s that any different from working with you?” Cal mutters.
Tabbers huffs and opens his mouth. Cal’s baiting him back into their usual volley of barbs because he knows that’s what Prauf expects, but his heart isn’t in it. And Prauf cuts Tabbers off before the guy gets more than one syllable out, besides. “Listen,” he says, “I’ll check into getting Primeday off next week and let you know if we’re in as soon as I can. Finish up, Cal; we should get going.”
“I’m done.”
As Cal and Prauf stand up and some opportunist steals Cal’s chair the second his feet hit the floor, Tabbers snags the half-empty soda and takes a slim flask from his pocket. “No point in wasting it,” he says, emptying his flask into the glass. “See you tomorrow.”
Prauf never has much trouble getting through a hefty crowd. He’s big enough that most people automatically shift aside when they can, and Cal (who’d really love to be taller if substandard nutrition will allow it) normally follows in his wake. Tonight, however, Prauf urges Cal ahead of him, keeping his hands on Cal’s shoulders until the door of the tapcafe scrapes shut behind them. It’s pissing down rain, of course. Cal flips his hood up. Prauf doesn’t bother, since one pass with a towel is enough to ensure he won’t be sleeping on a sodden pillow tonight. He does sigh, “You know, I’m kinda looking forward to winter,” when someone streaks past on their shitty modded landspeeder and the blowback splatters him with dirty water.
“Yeah.” Cal was shielded from the deluge by Prauf’s bulk. Being small has its advantages. “Can’t wait to work through another sixteen ice storms in two months…”
“Ah, it’s not usually that bad this far south,” Prauf replies. “You picked a tough year to start scrapping. That was the worst winter I’ve seen in about fifteen years.” He falls silent, then, and for the next few minutes, they meander towards home without speaking. Their apartment block is only a short walk from the Taproot. The ramshackle building comes into view as they round the corner, and Prauf says, “Look, Cal…”
“I’m fine,” Cal says for what, the third time? He’s going to keep saying it until one of them believes it. “I’m just tired. Got used to being nocturnal.”
Prauf doesn’t let him wriggle out of the conversation. “I meant it when said we could use your help, but if you really don’t want to go back out there… it’s not a big deal.”
Cal’s never asked what Prauf thinks happened to him in the wastes. The Abednedo undoubtedly has constructed his own narrative that justifies a twelve-year-old boy running away from a wasteland camp, getting winged by a blaster bolt, turning up sick and dehydrated on the outskirts of the shipbreaking yard in a miserable heatwave, and leaping at the chance to join the Scrapper Guild even though the pay’s crap and the prospects for upward mobility are dismal. Any explanation Cal offers will probably poke gaping holes in that story, so he’s stayed quiet. But whatever it is, it must be bad, because Cal got a tattoo and a welding torch and Prauf tossed him straight into the deep end on his first day – he only starts treating Cal like glass when he thinks something serious is going on. To be fair, he isn’t wrong. Still – “I’m not a baby,” he reminds Prauf. “I won’t fall apart if I’m stuck somewhere I don’t want to be for a day. I’ve survived worse.”
He gets a pained look in response. “I know,” Prauf says. “That’s the problem. You work damn hard, Cal, and you’re good at this job – in a couple months I figure you’ll be the youngest Human the Guild’s ever promoted to journeyman – but you don’t seem to know what limits are and you don’t take care of yourself.”
“I –”
“You wouldn’t have let the med droid check you out today if I hadn’t made you,” Prauf says bluntly. Cal’s pathetic defense dies in his throat. “Being tough only gets you so far. Eventually you gotta draw a line. So I’ll say it once more – if you don’t want to go out there, it’s not a big deal. We can handle it.”
Prauf tends to be pretty passive and he’ll look the other way if it’ll make him a quick credit and he snores like an akk with a sinus infection, and he’s too good for this grueling, cutthroat industrial disaster of a planet. Too good for the likes of Cal, also, but he has no idea what his apprentice really is or how horribly he failed the last person responsible for him. Or that it doesn’t matter what Cal wants. The only thing that matters is the spark coursing through his frayed connection to the Force, beckoning him back to the wastelands almost a year after he stumbled out of them. “I want to,” Cal says, and means I have to.
Prauf sighs again. “Well, it’s out of our hands anyway. I just called in a favor to get us switched off the nightshift; I don’t know if they’ll let me move my day off too.” They reach the courtyard of their apartment block, swerve around the scrubby tree in the center, and head towards the stairwell. Prauf always adopts a slightly wide-legged gait when he ascends, walking on the outside edges of each stair – he’s pretty concerned about the structural integrity of these sagging old steps – but Cal stays right in the middle, where thousands of scrappers over the years have sunk their footprints into the metal. He’s done this every time since the first night he followed Prauf up. His boots fit in the deepest point of each divot, welcomed, like they belong there.
Unit 1308 is the same as every other flat on this side of the building – small kitchen, small refresher, and a main room that’s little more than a box with a couple of windows overlooking the backs of three other buildings, plus a small nook beneath a leaky skylight. In the eight or nine years he’s been renting the place, Prauf’s gradually divided the space up with sheet metal and shelving units. His ‘bedroom’ is separated from the worn yet comfortable sofa in the ‘living room’ by what Cal recognizes as a blast door. And since Prauf is usually repairing or disassembling something to bring in a little money on the side, the whole apartment could pass for a junk shop, but Cal’s not about to complain. Apprentice Rigger pay sucks. He kicks Prauf most of what he makes to cover his nook and the cost of feeding him and socks away the last few credits so maybe he can afford his own place someday. “I’m gonna head to bed,” Cal says, hanging up his dripping poncho.
“Probably a good idea,” Prauf replies. “Couple more days and I won’t feel like I should be clocking in right now… put some ice on that eye first, okay? Night.”
“Night.” Cal fetches the cold pack from the conservator (almost bare, since they met Tabbers at the Taproot instead of going food shopping), hits the ‘fresher quick, and retreats to his tiny part of the flat for the night. It isn’t much besides a bed, a shelf with a few books, and some hooks on the wall for his harness and tool belt. But it’s home, and the skylight doesn’t leak too much now that they’ve welded three of the four panels shut. He can cope with wet feet from time to time. He just doesn’t wear socks to bed.
Once he’s swapped his scrapping clothes for pajamas and feels suitably dry for the first time all day, he crawls beneath his blanket and looks up through the watery glass. The view from here isn’t any more impressive than from the windows – air circulation units, the undersides of a few balconies, cables, a clothesline he doubts ever gets used, and, way up there, a jagged sliver of black sky. Sometimes Cal imagines this is what Coruscant is like for people who don’t live on the upper levels. He rests the cold pack on the side of his face and listens to the pounding rain and Prauf drifting around the apartment.
If only he could believe it’s not his escape pod they’re planning to scrap. It’s a burial ground for more than just Master Tapal.
About two hours pass before Prauf begins to snore, and Cal’s still lying awake. He sits up, ditching the lukewarm cold pack and all his half-baked ideas for making sure nobody ever disturbs his master’s final resting place, and takes a small metal box off the shelf. The credits he’s been hoarding in here might add up to six weeks’ rent for this apartment. What lies beneath them could buy the entire building and probably the ones on either side to boot. That’s not why he brought it along, though. Master Tapal was over two meters tall and wielded a double-bladed lightsaber with a hilt as long as Cal’s arm. Cal, suspecting he might not want to be pegged as a Jedi immediately, couldn’t conceal something that distinctive, so he dug the lightsaber its own grave… but he’d pried the kyber crystal from the mount, first.
In the faint glow from another flat’s lit window, his master’s crystal is a dull gray instead of the clear, vibrant blue he remembers. He hasn’t looked at it except under cover of darkness in months. Prauf probably wouldn’t recognize it – there’d been a whole conversation once about finder’s fees that’d wipe out a scrapper’s entire indenture in an instant, Patrek had suggested kyber, and Prauf said he’d never even seen any – but Cal’s cautious nonetheless. He's spent a lot of nights cradling the crystal in his hands, slipping into fantasies to escape the grief crushing him. At the moment, though, the only thought that crosses his mind is what am I going to do? He’d arrogantly assumed he was nearly grown when he turned twelve, felt so strong and independent, and now, at thirteen… all Cal wants is someone, an adult, to tell him how to fix this. How to keep a bunch of genuinely strong and independent scrappers from finding his master, or the lightsaber, or even just the braid he’d sheared off with a knife from the pod’s emergency kit.
Cal had shed his identity in the wastes and trusted no one would ever discover it out there. What is he going to do? Master Tapal’s kyber crystal has no answers, so he puts it in the box and returns it to the shelf a little too hastily. The box skates off the edge. The sound of all its contents rattling across the floor is deafening in the silent apartment and Prauf startles awake with a grunt. “What the hell…?” he grumbles.
“Kar – shit.” Reminding himself not to use Lasat profanity where other people can hear, Cal snaps the light over his bed on and scrambles to pick up the kyber and his money.
Prauf’s bed creaks, but a metal-and-glass partition missing most of its glass blocks his view of the mess Cal’s made. “You’re still up?”
“Barely,” Cal lies. “I was putting the cold pack on the shelf and I knocked some stuff down. Sorry.” He sweeps a handful of credits into the box, concealing the crystal.
“‘s all right… just get some sleep,” Prauf yawns.
“I will.”
Prauf is snoring again by the time Cal gets in bed and wraps his arms around himself. He wishes he had something to hug; specifically, he wishes for his ratty old stuffed tooka. Smudge was most likely vaporized in the Brave’s explosion and Cal desperately wants him back. He’s too old for most of the methods of self-soothing he used to employ – he had a favorite blanket as a toddler, he quit sucking his thumb at age five (that first month after the Purge when he couldn’t close his eyes without seeing his master die doesn’t count), and for years he cuddled Smudge until he fell asleep. Now, lacking other options, he’s come full circle. The grey blanket Prauf lent him is very soft and large enough Cal could use it as a parachute. It thrums with a distant memory of warmth and comfort. So he bundles up one corner and snuggles it to his chest, tucks the other corner beneath his cheek, and stares at the chronometer across the room. The burning orange numbers keep him company for the rest of the night.