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Soaked through, shivering despite his burning face, Cal walks. He keeps going, not knowing if he's going the wrong way, not really caring if he is. Maybe this is what happens to failed Jedi. Maybe the Force decides a broken Jedi should also be a dead Jedi.
Master Tapal wasn't broken. Master Tapal shouldn't be dead in a crashed escape pod in the middle of nowhere.
What’s done is done. For someone who can witness the past with a single touch, it seems unfair Cal can’t also undo time and go back to a moment where he could make a different choice, a better choice.
Maybe he should have walked north instead of south when he finally abandoned the escape pod.
Too late now.
It’s all too late.
Trust only in the Force.
The Force cuts. Touching it is like pushing his hand into shattered glass and giving it a swirl.
Cal walks on aching legs, ankles bending and popping with every uneven landing. He falls into pools of mud, pulls himself out of its clinging embrace again and again, heavier with every escape. He waits to step into a hole he won't be able to climb out of, encased in so much mud it becomes a tomb. Walking, walking, keep on walking, the rain applauding him all the way. His feet hurt like he's walking on bare bone. His back aches from the permanent hunch he's developed to push himself on through the rain, and -
- A tiny patch of Cal's head feels strange, and yes, it is kinda crazy he's noticing it considering the throbbing blaster burn pulsating agony across his face and neck. Maybe that’s why he's noticing. That strange feeling keeps catching and scraping over the wound. What is it? And why does it keep tickling his cheek?
A bug? His hand swats at it.
And hits the stubby remains of his braid instead.
For some strange reason, it's the thing that brings him to tears. Not the betrayal. Not the horrifying crash landing. Not leaving his dead master behind. Not knowing the Jedi Council may never find him. Not the pain he feels in every inch of him.
His braid is ruined.
He worked so hard for it.
It was getting so long.
The day he became Master Tapal’s apprentice, the braid became a part of him. Sat in a meditation chamber in the Temple, Master Tapal tied off that part of his hair and set about cutting down the rest into a short crop. Cal’s curls tumbled down like fallen leaves, coming to rest on the ground. He couldn’t help running his hands over the new style, soft bristles where once there had been lengthy locks.
Long enough to braid, Master Entola said with a wink when he’d left his clan behind.
Master Tapal brushed out the longer strands with a small comb, one Cal knew had once belonged to Master Yaddle, his Grand Master. Her echoes calmed and soothed, humming with her gentle song. Master Yaddle liked to sing to herself.
“This symbolises your rank as a Jedi Apprentice,” Master Tapal explained as he wove Cal’s hair. “It shows your dedication to the Force, to the Order, and to the Republic we serve.”
Cal chanted the words in his head, over and over. The Force. The Order. The Republic.
Master Tapal tied the braid off with a thin blue thread, leaving it to rest behind Cal’s right ear. It took him a long time to get used to it, to stop reaching up to touch it, heart leaping and twisting all at once with the idea that he, Cal Kestis, official Clan Weirdo, was now a Padawan.
You are not a weirdo! Master Entola told him. Ignore the other children. You are Cal, and you are exactly the person you are supposed to be.
Over time, Cal’s braid grew. He learned to plait it himself (messily at first because there wasn’t a lot of hair and his fingers felt too big for such delicate work even though Master Tapal's hands were bigger than Cal's arms and he could do it just fine), but eventually it became easier and easier. Especially because Master Tapal always braided his own hair, so Cal watched and learned…
And maybe he picked up an echo or two from his master’s brush.
“Do you keep your hair braided ‘cause it reminds you of being a Padawan?” Cal asked one morning while Master Tapal brushed out his long, silver hair. Soon, they would leave the quarters and go to the ship’s mess hall for breakfast.
“Perhaps,” Master Tapal said, taking his time to work out the knots. “Although it is a practical style to keep it out of my eyes.”
“You could just cut it.” Cal’s hair hadn’t gone in his eyes for years now.
“I like having longer hair.”
So did Cal, when he was a youngling. “Why?”
“I just do.”
“Because you couldn’t have it long when you were a Padawan?”
Master Tapal laughed. It was an unexpected sound. He was often so calm and serious. The reaction made Cal smile and giggle with giddy pride. He made Master Tapal laugh! Wow! “Perhaps, Padawan,” his master said.
Cal nodded. “I’ll grow my hair out again when I’m a knight,” he announced. “Have a big braid just like you.”
“Perhaps you will, Padawan. For now, however, let’s attend to the little one you do have.”
“Not so little now!” Cal said.
Master Tapal gave it a tug. “Quite so.”
Sometimes, Master Tapal added new threads to the braid marking Cal’s successes – green for new skills, red for overcoming challenges, yellow for diplomacy. The blue one remained where his braid had once started, a marker of time passing. Each new thread became a badge of honour, proof Cal was on his way to becoming a real Jedi.
Gone, now. All that remains are the charred ends of the braid, the hair thinned out and curled. He can smell it too, at least he thinks he can. Maybe burned hair and burned flesh smell the same, sharp and sickening. Hiccuping, tears tracing a scalding path through the burn, Cal’s fingers trace the braid’s remains up to his scalp. It will have to go. He tugs, hard. Everyone knows if you’re expelled from the Order they rip your braid away. Cal’s should be torn from him, only the hair remains stubbornly attached. The tears flow harder than ever, his sobs thin and weak. How will he be rid of it? He considers, briefly, using Master Tapal’s lightsaber to slice through it, but he’s not sure he can without also chopping off his ear and maybe his whole head along with it.
The other end of the weapon though, the broken end, with its jagged metal and frayed wires, might do the trick. Walking, gotta keep walking, Cal pulls out the lightsaber from where he’s wrapped it up deep within his sodden robes and flips it around. Echoes crawl like ants, Master Tapal’s entire life in his hands, in his mind. Cal raises the weapon to his head and uses a sharp edge to saw at his hair. It takes longer than he thought, but eventually what remains of his braid sits in his hand. Cal hides the lightsaber once more (still walking, walking, walking through the wastes), and sees only two threads remain – the blue one his master used the first time he made the braid, and a green one for the first time he performed an overhead strike.
He unpicks the green one first, lets it fall into the puddles. What remains of the braid frays into individual hairs, only its ghost crinkling the bunch of red hair.
One thread to go.
He’d been so proud that first day. Excited. Nervous. Disbelieving. Him, a Padawan.
Not any more. Even if the Council do come for him, they won’t have a place in the Order for a failure like him. He didn’t save his master. He was too slow. Too weak. Too cowardly. If he’d been faster, if he’d listened better, if he hadn’t lost his lightsaber, Master Tapal would still be alive. Cal looks across Bracca’s wastes, sees a light in the distance. Yes, this is where he belongs now, among the wrecks and the ruins.
Cal pulls the last thread and releases his hair, watching it fall away in his wake.
He sniffs hard, lets the pain settle over him until it numbs every emotion, dulls every thought. No more tears.
Keep walking.
When he finally stumbles into a yard, people and droids moving all around him, the only thing left to identify him as a Jedi remains hidden in his filthy, bedraggled robes and the lightsaber he's tucked away once again. The lights, the sound, the voices swirl around him.
No longer in the wastelands.
No longer a Jedi.
Cal is nothing and nobody.
A new voice shouts, closer than ever. Hands grab, pulling him back just as a barge shoots by, horn blaring.
“What are you doing here, kid? You’re gonna get yourself killed!”
The new voice belongs to a big, big guy. Cal looks up, up, up at him. Blurry. A big ol’ blurry Abednedo. Cal’s vision tunnels into his face. Either that or night’s falling fast on Bracca. He’s still shouting too, his panic and disbelief crashing against Cal’s crumbling shores.
“ – happened? Where’s your family? You shouldn’t be here all alone.”
Family? Cal finds his voice. “They’re all dead.”
The words undo him. The escape, the crash, Master Tapal, his burning face, his exhaustion, the braid he cut away, this stranger’s unrelenting symphony of concern/confusion/panic burrowing into him. All of it winds up and delivers one final hammer blow.
He’ll just have to hope the big, big blurry Abednedo catches him.