Work Text:
Cal’s hands shake as they graze over the surface of his old datapad. It is a decrepit thing now, after everything it has survived, including two years buried under mud and grime with only a cheap duraplast box to protect it. His fingers catch on a crack in the screen, not deep or sharp enough to be a true problem but placed just right to be annoying, and he cannot even recall what caused it anymore. An impact or a drop- something that happened on the Albedo Brave rather than out on the field.
It is only a minor detail, so miniscule in the grand scheme of things. But he needs those small details now, needs to fill in those blanks. He does not remember everything that happened to him during the War, but he remembers enough. And his datapad- this datapad, the one that has been with him since the start and survived where its pair did not- has everything he needs to make sure of that. To fill the gaps he hardly recalls, to put together the timeline that blurs together.
Cal plugs in his headphones, opens the oldest recording he can find- old enough that it is named by the date instead of a number, the first of hundreds, just a little 55.703 that is too sickeningly close to the 58.713 that marked the worst day of his life- and he begins to write. He writes about the day he became a padawan, too young and too aware. He writes about the terror he felt meeting the Iron Battalion, with hair too short to hold a braid because he was supposed to still have time, and he writes about those nightmarish first days. And- Cal loved his men, he truly did and still does even now, but his introduction to them was the third worst day of his life, and second worst week of his life.
He does not want to write it down, gut clenching at the mere thought that any possible survivor could read this and know exactly who he is and how poorly he handled everything, but that is the entire point of this. He cannot let it all be forgotten. Cal has seen how easily people forget what the Jedi stood for, the way they were drafted into fighting against the laws of the same Reformation that was forced upon them centuries ago, unpaid in every way except for requisitions and mission funding and whatever they could get away with. How readily people forgot the Order’s petitions and protests, attempts for peace blocked every time, only for more and more to be taken from them instead, for more Jedi to die with every conflict, numbers dwindling as Padawans were forced into Knighthood too soon.
The Jedi never wanted war, but the galaxy paints them as warmongers, as apathetic and cold and cruel, as if they cared nothing for life. No one remembers that the commanders they drafted into war were children- that it was younglings that were fighting and dying for them. Cal can’t let them forget that. Cal can’t let them forget that they were the ones to sentence younglings to death, that of over ten thousand Jedi to die, nearly two thousand and five hundred of them were under the age of twenty. That over a thousand padawans were not even fifteen.
That Cal, at nine years old, was the youngest serving natborn Commander to serve in the GAR. That he is still only fourteen, and if he is ever found he will die for having served the Republic. That the mere act of writing this now- this autobiography under the guise of fiction– will undoubtedly find him a fate that is worse than death.
These days, he does not think he would mind dying, becoming one with the Force. He just needs people to see, to listen. Once something is on the HoloNet, once it starts to spread, it is difficult to ever truly remove it. All he needs is five, ten, twenty people to see and share it among the trillions that exist.
If he can just finish and share this one thing, if he can get even one person to understand what the Order was and was meant to be, then the Jedi Order will never die.