Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Dawn on Bracca is more of an idea than an actual occurrence.  A fantasy, perhaps.  Maybe just a joke.  Dawn on Bracca is the system’s central star looking down on its wet, barren seventh planet with distaste, not unlike every time Prauf opens his conservator and sees the tangerette paste has grown a carpet of mold overnight again.  Dawn prods Willflower once and then rolls over and goes back to sleep, letting the rainclouds crowd in on the city while the scrappers grumble out of bed… those of them fortunate enough not to be stuck on second shift, that is.  It’s a far cry from mornings on Abednedo.  Those were blood-orange sunrises burning off the mist, a nuna coop that always smelled of straw, rainbow patterns thrown across a field of white grass from the stained-glass spires surrounding Prauf’s family’s homestead.  He and his sister would compete to see who could collect eggs the fastest without touching certain colors.  Red on Saint’s Day, green on Baker’s Day; Glassmaker’s Day was always damn near impossible because there were more shades of blue on those towers than Prauf’s eyes were even capable of distinguishing.  The loser got an egg smashed over their head until Mam found out and put a stop to the waste.  Nothing wakes a guy like cold egg slime trickling down the back of his neck – not even the fifth hour alarm on his datapad jangling away into the silent flat.

Groaning, Prauf slaps a hand to his face, grinds his palm into his eyes like that’ll sandpaper away the sleep-blur, swipes his nostrils to make sure he didn’t snot all over himself in his sleep.  The only sign of spring around here is a florid resurgence of the puffball weeds the city’s named for.  They wriggle up through cracks in the roads, find every gap in a building’s foundation, poke their fluffy heads out of Maw-holes, sprout in the scraggly flowerbeds dressing up Guild Headquarters for whenever someone Imperial condescends to set foot on Bracca.  For a couple days, Willflower-the-city is blanketed in Willflower-the-plant, a riot of pink and orange and purple that almost makes the place look inviting.  And then, like an inconsiderate hooker, they splooge pollen everywhere before dying all at once.  The following month or so of runoff drives Prauf’s allergies wild.  Luckily, he can still breathe through his nostrils this morning, so winter hasn’t yet relinquished its grip on the planet.  He pats at his datapad’s screen to silence the alarm and sits up, yawning and scratching the top of his eggless head.

It’s pouring.  As usual.  Prauf cranks open the shutter covering the window (a necessary addition, as it’s missing half the windowpanes) and grunts upon seeing the delightful weather conditions awaiting him.  Practically raining sideways – doesn’t bode well for today’s plans, but nothing short of a typhoon will convince him to ditch those.  He sticks his head out, sheltered by the shutter.  The pewter-colored sky is a lighter shade of grey on the horizon, so the sun’s risen somewhere.

Out of habit, as he’s closing the shutter again, he reaches blindly to the other side of the bed, searching for an arm or a shoulder.  The sleep-roughened words are sitting on his tongue – it’s five, so get outta my way or I’ll roll right over you – but his seeking hand finds only an empty mattress, and they wither, unspoken.  Nobody in his bed besides him.  Rather than dwell himself into a funk, Prauf stuffs that complex miasma of emotion into a box where he doesn’t have to look at it, scoots across unoccupied terrain, and gets up.

The ‘fresher’s off the kitchen, clear on the other side of the apartment.  Prauf hasn’t needed lights to navigate his home in years, so he doesn’t bother putting them on, eyes half-lidded as he instinctively maneuvers around the drying rack where his scrapping gear is still damp from yesterday’s shift, inches through the narrow gap between his workbench and a loaded shelving unit without so much as rattling a loose bolt.  There’s a bit of room to breathe by the sofa and the little holoscreen balanced on several crates.  And then comes the tricky part – passage to the kitchen is fiercely guarded by an army of scrap-metal insects and fish and birds, few larger than Prauf’s hand, all aiming to thrust their rusting appendages straight into the soles of his unprotected feet.  He has to finish building another set of shelves.  A man shouldn’t need safety equipment to walk his own flat.  He survives the trek to the kitchen, heads inside the ‘fresher, and promptly rams his bare toes into the little stool loitering in front of the sink.

Prauf doesn’t bother trying to muffle his profanity, teetering on one leg while he massages his throbbing foot.  Once upon a time, he and Tabbers had shared an absolute dump of an apartment on Northside, biding their time and credit-pinching until they could afford a flat in one of the few buildings on Bracca actually sized for residents who aren’t Human-proportioned.  He can fit beneath the showerhead now.  He can reach the countertops without hunching over and stand up straight without banging his skull off the ceiling.  Unfortunately, that also means the flat’s too large for his new roommate.  And maybe new is stretching it, after almost six months of cohabitation, but the alternative is admitting Prauf keeps forgetting the stool has stood in that exact spot for almost as long.

Speaking of the roommate, once Prauf’s finished in the ‘fresher, he gets some caf started before deciding to wake him.  Cal doesn’t have an actual bed – he sleeps on a mat laid out atop an old metal desk, nestled into the back corner of the living room.  If it’s uncomfortable, he’s never expressed anything besides gratitude for the accommodations.  He had a spot in the dorms, once, but there were… extenuating circumstances that demanded a change of scenery, and limited options.  Now, did Prauf have the space for a second roommate?  Obviously not.  Could he afford another mouth to feed?  Not really, especially when that mouth is still on bottom-rung Rigger pay for another three months.  Does he even particularly like children?  That’s an unambiguous no, and yet… Cal is the quietest, politest, most cooperative roommate Prauf has ever had in his entire life.  It’s borderline unnatural.  Prauf’s not lived with anybody Cal’s age since he was a child himself; he’d braced for teeth-grinding adolescent behavior and instead only needs to dodge dangerous artwork.

The boy’s an enigma, honestly.  While he’s mostly stopped crying himself to sleep, he still has nightmares regularly, when he isn’t outright trading his six hours of shut-eye for catnaps on the train and a haunted expression.  Prauf’s not sure what brought him to Bracca in the first place.  Cal’s been silent on the subject except for the one time, under the influence of some truly appalling nectarot, he admitted he’d run away.  It’s not hard to extrapolate from there – whatever ship he’d used, he ditched it out in the wastes, where it’d probably never be found if someone tracked him here, and came to Willflower hoping for a way to squeeze out a living.  There’s really only one way, on this planet; lucky timing to arrive right when the Guild was desperate for fresh meat.

Prauf doesn’t ask questions.  He’s good at keeping his mouth shut, even when he knows he ought to speak up.  Still, there’s one question he wishes he’d asked while the kid was drunk off his gourd and almost unguarded… Cal and Prauf were equally rain-drenched when they met, so Cal’s face and hair and hands had been washed clean, and it’d taken Prauf a few minutes to realize he was not making some sort of bizarre fashion statement by dyeing the front of his tunic and leggings rust-red.  He was just soaked in blood.  Too much for a little Human body to survive losing.  And aside from a spectacular lump on the back of his head, Cal had only blaster burns scorched across his jaw and hand and side.  A horrific ring of bruises around his throat, too.  None of those would’ve bled.

Something terrible happened to him, that much is obvious.  Between whatever sent Cal fleeing to a shithole like Bracca and his stint in the dormitory, Prauf can’t fault him for having nightmares, even when they’re disruptive.  Fortunately, last night was pretty good – no shrieking, no sobbing, no scrambling for a hiding place and shivering there until he could be coaxed out or it was time to catch their train.  Prauf shuffles back through the metal menagerie, past his drooping sofa, and over to the makeshift bed he’d thrown together.  Cal’s still sound asleep, curled in on himself like a tooka, skinny limbs and a mop of ginger hair and a… well, it’s definitely not a stuffed animal.  It doesn’t quite seem to fit the definition of doll, either, unless there’s a destitute dollmaker out in Wild Space who’s mainlining Neutron Pixie for inspiration.  It’s called Raggy Bones, a lopsided facsimile of a person rough-hewn from brown sackcloth, sloppily stitched and painted with what Prauf presumes is a Kaleesh skeleton, accessorized by its own tiny, authentic bone mask.  He finds the thing creepy as hell – it looks like a prop from the sort of low-budget horror films his brothers liked to watch late at night – but Cal’s latched onto it.  In hindsight, Prauf should’ve known the kid was really exaggerating his age.

All right, that’s enough standing here gawking at a sleeping child like some kind of parent.  Ugh.  There’s a word Prauf hopes never sneaks into his obituary.  A tad surprised this notoriously light sleeper didn’t hear him accidentally punting the footstool into the shower, Prauf reaches over and gives Cal’s shoulder a good shake.

Cal always wakes like Prauf’s grandfather, a bare-knuckle prize fighter and veteran of several wars – instantly, completely, buzzing with adrenaline.  His eyes snap open and focus, dart around the room in search of threats, muscles tense… and then he spots Prauf and his eyelids drop low, lending him the blurry, half-aware appearance most people get when they’re suddenly dragged out of dreamland.  It’s bantha-shit, but Prauf doesn’t draw attention to that.  “Morning,” he says.

“…oh, crud,” Cal yawns, uncoiling, sitting up, shaking off Raggy Bones’s clinging limbs and pushing a hand through his hair.  “I wanted to be awake first.”

“Why?”

The kid’s mouth slants, suggesting a suppressed grin as he shoots a look at what stands next to his bed.  It’s Prauf’s one indulgence, his money-pit, the savior of his sanity, his… rather damaged valachord.  Either from age (this particular manufacturer went out of business around a century ago), mishandling (Prauf has to be the fourth or fifth owner), or the unending humidity (it’s stuck on Bracca), one of the soundboards split lengthwise the year after he purchased it.  Wood glue was only a temporary fix; it broke again and now it’s held together with wire and a gratuitous application of space-tape.  Gives half the strings a strange, watery sort of warble whenever they’re played, but it’s actually a rather interesting effect, and at least it’s still usable.   Prauf needs a nonalcoholic outlet if he ever wants to see fifty.  He’s practical, besides – no concert-hall dreams, no imaginary swooning audiences, just something to keep his hands occupied while he’s mentally constructing a new shelving unit from whatever’s lying around the apartment.  “Be kinda nice to wake up to valachord music,” Prauf muses.  “I could go back to bed for a couple minutes and pretend, if you want.”

“Sure,” Cal says brightly, swinging his legs over the side of the desk.  “When you were taking that extra shift on Eleventhday, Tabbers dropped by, and he taught me some of a song he said you’d like….”

Prauf’s vague daydream of a pleasant, melodic awakening crumbles right before his eyes.  “I’m gonna throw him off the roof,” he mutters, and the grin Cal’s trying to hide breaks free.  There’s this old glimmerpop group on Abednedo – call themselves Candyshack – and their biggest hit is a high-energy romantic earworm pining after some sashaying, winking, teasing little flirt… named Prauf.  Came out a year after his parents chose an uncommon, gender-neutral name for their upcoming baby.  It’s never been translated into Basic, so nobody’s sung it at him in the decades since he left home, but that kriffing monstrosity is the soundtrack of his school days.  He needs to die on Bracca so nobody plays it at his funeral.  Tabbers, who is awful, finds this hilarious and got his hands on a copy of the song, memorized the chorus just so he could ineptly plunk it out on the valachord every time Prauf irritated him.

To think Prauf was thrilled when those two started getting along.  Cal, who is almost as awful, taps a few keys – he can only reach the unbroken side of the instrument from here, but Prauf’s eye twitches anyway as his brain fills in the missing notes with his oldest sister’s mocking singsong.  He swats Cal’s hand away from the valachord.  “Keep it up and I’m leaving you here,” he grumbles.  Giggling, Cal fetches some clothing from the desk drawers while Prauf opens the shutter on the living room window (repaired before the one in the bedroom, so the rain wouldn’t damage his valachord further).  Then the boy starts plonking away again, but he isn’t playing anything recognizable this time, just fooling around.  Prauf’s is the first valachord he’s ever seen, and he originally thought it was played by plucking the strings, which was so wrong Prauf didn’t even know where to begin.  He’d finally just told Cal to go ahead and give that a shot.  Cal had put his hand on a string, then stopped dead, feeling the thickness and tension of the wire and evidently realizing it wasn’t going to budge.  Oh, he’d said, and went for the keys instead.

For a total beginner, he’s not bad at it.  Actually, it’s more impressive the thing survived Tabbers.  In the kitchen, the caf machine beeps, blessing them with a steaming carafe of liquid energy, and Prauf prods Cal until he leaves the valachord alone.  “It feels too early to be awake on a day off,” Cal says with another yawn.

“Yeah, but I wanna get out of here soon,” Prauf says.  “We’ve got a long drive.  An hour or so and we should take off.”

Cal fusses with his unruly hair some more, practically cross-eyed as he scowls up at a lock encroaching on his nose.  “All right,” he says, “that means I’ve got plenty of time….”  He goes bounding off to the ‘fresher.  Prauf follows more slowly and still manages to whack a hip into the sofa, which wheezes, legs folding, and slumps off its frame like it’s been shot.  Sighing, Prauf straightens out the legs again and heaves it back upright.  They’ve been babying it along for a while, but it’s terminal.  Cal used to sleep on it.  Now he’s afraid it’ll collapse and smother him in couch stuffing.

Prauf makes himself a cup of caf to the tune of the ‘fresher pipes gurgling loudly, then, fortifying himself with caffeinated sewer water, goes breakfast-hunting.  Something filling, he thinks, if that’s at all possible.  They do have a long drive ahead of them.  Weeks on Bracca are twelve days, and typically, each scrapper crew gets one day per week off, with one spare, ‘floating’ day a month assigned at random.  Used to be three, but Prauf doesn’t bother asking what happened to the other two; he knows he’ll never get an answer.  His crew’s free today, Seventhday, and the month’s extra free landed on this Ninthday.  And then there’s the true miracle – everyone is off Eighthday this week, meaning he and Cal have an unprecedented three-day vacation.  Time to use it wisely and get the hell out of here for a bit.  Prauf would rather be in the wastes tomorrow, far from civilization and holonet coverage.  They’re calling it a new holiday celebrating the first anniversary of the Empire’s founding and Prauf’s no Imperial sympathizer.  Not exactly a Republic sympathizer, either.  There wasn’t really a side for people like him.  The Republic was a hot mess, but a functional hot mess that kept a roof over Prauf’s head and food in his belly; he supported the Separatist cause, but their methods left a lot to be desired.  The Empire… it’s like the worst of both worlds, he’d told Cal once.  The kid had practically bared his teeth when Prauf dared admit he understood where the Separatists were coming from.  Tabbers calls Cal a Core brat – he’d know, since he can smell that sort of thing.  Realizing he had a bona-fide Republic sympathizer on his hands, Prauf said the little guys, not the bankers and tech giants in charge, had gotten shafted under that regime, and Cal cooled off while he chewed on that for a bit.

He’s a weird one.  Awfully interested in politics, for a child.  Even Prauf doesn’t care more than necessary (scrappers’ opinions don’t count for shit in the wider galaxy).  He’d not thought much of it at the time, seeing as Cal claimed to be sixteen – and therefore basically an adult by Human standards – when they met.  Prauf hadn’t bought it, though evidently he fooled whichever Guild recruiter signed him on, and was unsurprised when Cal eventually admitted he was fifteen… well, almost.  Fourteen?  Yeah, that tracked.  The boy was small for his age, but he already had that creaky-voice thing Human males get during adolescence.

“Prauf?” Cal calls from the ‘fresher, and his vocal cords must’ve been eavesdropping on Prauf’s thoughts, because his voice cracks like a supply bar.  “Where did my eyedrops go?”

Prauf tears a packet of powdered ruva open with his teeth, spits plastoid fragments into the sink.  Porridge and toast is the best he can whip up.  “Check the shelf in the shower!”  Kid always remembers now to bring his goggles to the shipbreaking yard – letting a medical droid remove microscopic metal shavings from a man’s eyeballs imparts a lesson he doesn’t soon forget.  If only he’d remember he left his eyedrops in the shower, because apparently that’s where he applies them….

“Oh – yeah – thanks!”

Shaking his head, Prauf sifts ruva through his fingers, thickening a pot of water until he ruefully determines he can’t add any more or else they won’t have breakfast for the rest of the week.  Nothing worse than scrapping on an empty stomach.  Cal is scatterbrained enough already.  Some of that can be chalked up to trauma, some to the stress of holding down a full-time job that wouldn’t pay enough to live on anywhere else, and probably some to not being fourteen, either.  Prauf had been drifting through life, happily oblivious to Cal’s deception, when he learned the truth.  No happy drifting that night, however; he’d come home from his shift with a migraine, he and Tabbers proceeded to have a rip-roaring argument over something so trivial Prauf couldn’t recall it fifteen minutes after Tabbers stormed out of the flat, and, once again, the tangerette paste had sprouted fuzzy tendrils.  He gave up, wrote the entire day off, shotgunned a glass of cheap Ithorian Mist instead of taking a painkiller, and went to bed early.

After all that, the last thing he’d wanted was to wake a couple hours later to his front door buzzing.  The whiskey had beaten enough of the migraine into whimpering submission that Prauf could at least sit up without needing to hurl.  His first thought was Tabbers – drunk, most likely, and forgot the lock code.  Wouldn’t have been the first time.  So he dragged out of bed, composing a sort of backhanded apology (I’m sorry I was an idiot about whatever stupid thing we were fighting over, especially because I was sound asleep before I got up to let your wasted ass inside), and opened the door.

It wasn’t Tabbers.  Or, more accurately, it was, but he hadn’t been the one requesting entry.  He lounged against the opposite wall, arms folded, sober and quite unruffled.  Cal’s finger was still on the buzzer.  He jerked his hand away like it’d shocked him, rocked back on his heels, and hugged himself.  And Prauf… Prauf just stared at him for a moment, stunned.  The boy was shivering, sopping wet, eyes wild.  His nose bled in furious rivulets that dribbled off his chin.  There was blood all over his hands, too, and his throat, streaking through round red marks standing out like brands against his fair skin.  “Stars, kid,” Prauf blurted, “the hell happened to you?!”

Cal swallowed hard, pressed his lips into a pale, trembling line.  Prauf glanced at Tabbers, who just tilted his head to one side a bit and said nothing, which said I don’t know, but prying it out of him is your job.  When Cal finally opened his mouth, Prauf, who’d assumed the blood on his lips came from his nose, saw his teeth were stained red as well.  “I’m sorry,” Cal said, clutching his elbows tight, bouncing on his toes like he was prepping to run, “I know it’s late, I’m – I’m sorry, I just –”  He inhaled, fast and desperate.  “I’m sorry,” he said a third time.  Sounded a little steadier.  “If it’s not too much trouble, could I maybe crash on your couch for the rest of the night, or….”

Had it not been for the lingering migraine, Prauf might’ve actually demanded answers first for once.  He didn’t, though; he stepped back, gestured for Cal to come inside, and then for Tabbers to do the same unless he wanted to sleep in the corridor.  “How long have you been out here?” Prauf asked.  There was a pool of water on the floor large enough to drown a scrap rat.

Cal’s gaze skittered towards Tabbers, then away just as quickly.  He’d still been scared to death of the guy back then.  “A few minutes,” he mumbled, which was such a blatant lie Prauf didn’t even bother addressing it.

“Found him staring at the buzzer like it’d bite him,” Tabbers said, shutting the door.

“Right, well….”  It wasn’t important.  Prauf made Cal sit at the tiny kitchen table – the boy was so white beneath all the blood Prauf feared he would pass out – and dampened a rag so Cal could wash his face and try to get the gushing nose under control.  That ate up about five silent minutes.  Once he was pressing just one nostril closed, the other no longer hemorrhaging, Prauf gently said, “Cal, what –”

“Don’t,” Cal whispered, staring off into empty space above Prauf’s left shoulder.  “Please.”  He blinked again and again, trying to erase the sheen of tears they’d both been conspicuously ignoring.  A few escaped and he scrubbed at his face with his sleeve.  “I just want to sleep.  I’ll find somewhere else to stay tomorrow, I promise.”

“No, you won’t,” Prauf said firmly, mind racing.  If the dorms weren’t safe for the kid… he definitely couldn’t afford his own place yet, first-year Riggers didn’t get paid koja nuts… it’d be tight both physically and financially, but maybe they could make it work for a little while….

His train of thought was derailed by a sudden splash from the ‘fresher.  They both looked towards the open door as Tabbers came back out, holding a dripping caf mug, which he set down next to Cal.  The clear liquid that sloshed over the sides and puddled on the tabletop had a funny iridescence beneath the kitchen lamp.  “Drink that,” he said.

If his expression was any indication, Cal had no idea whether he should be confused, revolted, or both.  “It’s okay,” Prauf reassured him.  “Just Tabbers’s bathtub moonshine.”

Cal chose confusion.  “You guys have a bathtub?” he said blankly, peering towards the dark ‘fresher again.

“No,” Tabbers said.  “Made it in a fuel drum.”

Suspicion overtook confusion, and Cal eyed the mug, where multiple colors gleamed atop the moonshine like an oil spill.  Prauf actually dredged up a chuckle, patting the boy’s shoulder.  “Relax, I had him clean it first… and if he missed a spot, the proof of that stuff ought to kill anything that shouldn’t be in there.”  He’d been kneeling in front of Cal’s chair, and now, as he pushed to his feet, his body chose that moment to remind him not only did he still have the pointy edges of a migraine, he drank a glass of whiskey on an empty stomach.  The room cartwheeled.  Prauf braced himself on the table and swallowed a nauseous groan, rubbed his aching wattles.  Cal watched him with wide eyes.  His mouth formed the beginnings of a question.  “I’m all right, I’m all right,” Prauf quickly said, and waved a hand.  “Just… forgot how kriffin’ exhausted I am.”

“I’m all right too,” Cal said quietly.  He curled his fingers around the handle of the mug.  “Sorry for bothering you.”

“Go back to bed,” Tabbers said, as if he was the one who gave the orders around here.  He twirled his own empty mug around a finger and ducked into the ‘fresher to fill it.  “I’ll babysit.”

Prauf hated leaving them alone – Tabbers wasn’t exactly the most touchy-feely guy in the galaxy and Cal still looked a little too close to tears – but he really needed to lie down.  He patted Cal’s shoulder one more time.  “I’ll put something dry to wear and a couple blankets on the sofa.  Try to get some sleep.”  He almost added you’re safe here, then decided it wasn’t necessary.  Cal had come to him for a reason.  “And we’ve all gotta work tomorrow morning, so take it easy.  That moonshine’s strong.”

Cal did not take it easy.  Tabbers intoxicated everything he needed to know out of the kid.  He was gone before Prauf’s alarm went off; Cal was sprawled across the sofa, blankets on the floor, thumb in his mouth (the only time Prauf’s ever seen him do that), tearstained but sleeping quietly.  Prauf wisely chose painkillers over whiskey and was trying to figure out how he’d stretch his limited provisions to feed three when the apartment door opened.  For the second time in about six hours, a blood-soaked countenance greeted him.  Tabbers, however, absolutely radiated self-satisfaction as he sauntered into the kitchen.  “Oh no,” Prauf sighed.  “Tell me you didn’t kill someone again….”  Violent death was a fact of life here, like Guild fees and rain, so Prauf doubted anybody would bother coming after him with an arrest warrant (did they even have those?), but it was the principle of the thing.

“I don’t like lying, though,” Tabbers lied, turning on the faucet and leaving a stringy smear of gore on the handle.

“Who –”

“Who do you think?”

“Tabbers –”

“You wouldn’t be complaining if you’d heard what the kid had to say,” Tabbers said flatly.  “Turns out filth hunts in pairs.”

“What did they –”  This time, Prauf cut himself off.  He could guess.  One of those red marks on Cal’s throat had already bruised into a ring of teeth.  If Tabbers gave him the details, it was too early to liquor them out of his memory before he did something inadvisable.  He watched the other man rinse his hands clean and thought, for all he didn’t approve of vigilante justice, it was the only kind on Bracca.  Some scum deserved it.

“It didn’t get too far,” Tabbers said abruptly once he’d shut off the tap.  “Not as far as it could’ve.  The runt’s crafty.  Still, he isn’t old enough for anyone to be fooling around with him like that.”  Drying his hands on a rag, he slid Prauf an unreadable look.  “How old did he tell you he was?”

“Sixteen,” Prauf said, leaning against the counter and rubbing his eyes.  Tabbers snorted.  “Yeah, eventually I got him to admit he’s fourteen.”

Making a humming noise, Tabbers flicked the rag back onto the rack above the sink.  He headed towards the ‘fresher, then, but before going inside, he tossed one more comment over his shoulder.  “He’s twelve, you know.”

“Twelve –”  Once again, Prauf clapped his teeth shut before finishing a sentence, but it was too late.  His raised voice echoed through the entire flat.  Over in the living room, he heard a groan, which morphed into a gurgling retch, and then Cal made Prauf’s hideous rug a whole lot worse.  Prauf closed his eyes for a moment, took a very deep breath, grabbed the trash bin and a cup of water, and went to go deal with that.

Not only had Cal been brutally hungover, he was still half-drunk yet.  The foreman droids didn’t give a shit, but Prauf spent the morning on his toes, trying to keep the boy from accidentally walking off the deck of the cruiser they were scrapping, or deliberately throwing himself beneath an AT-AT so his head would stop hurting.  Prauf hasn’t let him drink since.  Unfortunately, that meant Cal was stone-cold sober (and Prauf wasn’t nearly wasted enough) the night they’d visited the local dive and some prissy-looking Human man popped up on the holoscreen to announce Empire Day.  Because they just had to commemorate the Empire’s creation and the decisive elimination of the Jedi scourge.  The guy prattled on about looking ahead to a safe, shining, prosperous future, but where he was sitting, all Prauf could see was Cal blanching a nasty greenish-grey color and then running outside to toss his cookies in the alley.

“Prauf?” Cal says from the ‘fresher, again, and Prauf hmmms as loud as he can with a burning mouthful of caf.  “Did Jessa drop off the trailer, or do we have to go get it first, or what?”

“I have no idea,” Prauf says once he’s swallowed.  “Guess we’ll find out when we go downstairs.”  He’s elected to spend his longest vacation in six years on a landspeeder, and he knows it’s a good idea because Cal’s okay is almost chipper, like he can’t imagine anything more fun than two days in the wastes.  So Prauf’s going to take him down to Scraw, pick up a nice piece of wood from a friend, and keep Cal the hell away from whatever tragic, limp ‘celebration’ is taking place in the city center tomorrow.  They’ll bring the trailer in case they stumble across a shipdrop they’d be foolish to leave untouched.  Although scrappers aren’t allowed to sell what the Guild’s claimed, whatever’s been abandoned in the wastes is fair game; they won’t get market value for a single scrap, and good luck hauling it offworld to find a better price, but it’s a few extra credits.

Prauf had pitched it as a road trip, like they’re normal people on a normal planet that actually has places worth visiting.  And yes, Scraw’s a miserable, dilapidated shantytown in the middle of nowhere, but there are a few hidden gems along the way… well, ‘gems’ might be stretching it.  Semiprecious at best.  One of them, at least, Prauf’s decided to hit specifically as a treat for the kid.  He’s been real quiet and withdrawn lately, like a full year on this rusting rock is getting to him.  While Bracca might be Prauf’s shithole (and Tabbers, whose head is always off somewhere else in the stars, longing for a home to replace the one that rejected him, has never understood that), it’s a shithole nonetheless.  In the long run, he wants better for the boy.  Cal could do something with his life.  He’s bright, good with his hands.  He could get some kind of qualification and forge his own way in the galaxy.  He’s also young enough that ‘Scrapper Guild’ might be a plus on his resumé – proof of a work ethic and self-sufficiency long before reaching any age of majority.  Certainly how Prauf would see it, and not just because the same employer on his own resumé is proof he’s stalled at a dead end.

It isn’t feasible just yet.  Cal’s too young.  Young enough Prauf’s cooked more this past year than he has the previous nine, despite how thin his paycheck’s spread nowadays, because he’s trying to shovel some actual nutrients into the kid.  A tough hurdle to clear on Bracca fare.  He’s not done half-bad today, though; the ruva’s almost substantial enough to qualify as a proper porridge, and to mark their first day of vacation, Prauf busted out his little jar of moonfruit jam for their polystarch toast.  They’ll eat good this morning… as long as he can find the table.  It’s hardly visible beneath a spread of scrap metal and a soldering iron.  Prauf’s deeply relieved Cal remembered to turn that off before he went to bed, this time.  His poor table has burn scars.

Right in the middle, like a centerpiece, a half-finished starbird arches over the jar of cutlery.  Its talons are built from nails and Prauf is pretty sure its beak is the nozzle off an old plasma torch.  The bird’s mostly rust and tarnish so far, but the head is crested with a spray of thin metal blades, painstakingly trimmed into feathers, and painted – shimmering blue that fades white towards the ends, trimmed with orange, like something fresh from the forge, almost cooled.

Prauf leaves it there.  They can eat around it, and besides, twenty-past-five is too early in the morning to slice his fingers open on that razorblade frill.  He puts breakfast on the table and goes to fetch the ‘fresher hog before everything’s cold.

Chapter Text

Only about five square inches of the ‘fresher mirror aren’t stained, scratched, hidden beneath faded scraps of stickers half-peeled away, or so cracked they fracture the beholder into abstract artwork.  And, naturally, those five square inches are up near the top.  Cal can barely see the bottom of the mirror with assistance from the stool; if he wants to get a proper look, he needs to crouch on the sink.

He envies tall people.  Cal’s officially been a teenager for two months now, and he doesn’t think he’s grown a centimeter since he landed on Bracca.  Unless he counts his hair, he thinks irritably.  That’s a soggy, scraggly mess, hanging in his eyes, getting in the way while he’s working, invading the back of his neck.  Sometimes he considers letting it do as it pleases, seeing how that works out, but at present he simply does not have the time or energy for extensive hair care.  He’s already wasted precious minutes (and a scraping of the shitty ‘hair soap’ sold at the Guild commissaries) washing it.  Luckily, their barber is cheap and convenient – Cal grabs a pair of scissors from the shelf and gets started.

The rusting blades scrape against one another as they bite through each strand.  Snip-snip-snip and chunks of hair, still dark with water from his shower, splat into the sink.  He takes an inch or two off every tuft.  It’ll be a choppy, uneven mess at the end, but nobody, least of all Cal, cares what he looks like as long as he scraps what he’s told when he’s told.  He’s almost done when Prauf thumps a hand against the ‘fresher door and says, “Food’s ready.”

“Be there in a sec,” Cal says, squinting into the mirror, sweeping his hair back to make sure it’ll stay put.  “I’m just cutting my hair quick.”

“If you leave it all over the sink again, you can stuff your arm down the drain to unclog it this time….”

Cal cleans up after himself.  He dusts a few stray hairs off his shoulders and then hops off the sink, ditches his towel, and gets dressed.  Since his scrapping gear is drying on the rack in Prauf’s bedroom, he has an excuse to wear his ‘casual’ clothing… which is really more of the same, except it’s not been issued by the Guild.  The usual steel-toed boots (modified to attach some extra durasteel), thick socks, a pair of rough brown work pants which he’s also modified, turning a hole at one hip into a synthleather-lined knife pocket.  The shirt used to be one of Prauf’s that never fit right, and he tore it up and sewed it back together, smaller, so it fits Cal loosely but comfortably.

That also has some thin sheathes tucked inside the sleeves.  Cal will never be caught off-guard again.  Besides, in addition to the utility knife he was carrying that night in the dorm, he’s acquired two others.  The serrated little number with the bone handle is from Tabbers, left wordlessly and unceremonially on Cal’s pillow one night.  He’s never asked exactly where the bone came from.  The other knife (and some part of Cal finds it funny they both had the same idea) is from Prauf, and it was packaged with a slightly awkward conversation about none of the incident being Cal’s fault, Prauf was there if he ever needed to talk about it, don’t be afraid to ask for help, and so on.

Cal had known all of that already, but it was still sort of nice to hear someone else say it.  And now he has three knives!  He’s always been awful about putting something down, forgetting where it is, and unexpectedly rediscovering it a week after he’s bought a new one; this ensures he should have a knife on hand even if he loses one.  Or two.

…maybe he should get a fourth, if he can scrape up a few spare credits, and stash that one in his boot for safekeeping.

The kitchen smells like ruva and slightly burned polystarch bread when Cal leaves the ‘fresher.  They don’t have a toaster, so Prauf just drops slices directly onto the stove burners and tries to time it correctly.  Probably left them a few seconds too long.  “You might wanna grab some Swill,” Prauf says, mouth full.  “Porridge tastes pretty metallic today.”

Cal dumps the remaining caf into a mug and drinks it straight as he opens the conservator.  Caffeine is supposed to wake people up, but on Cal, curiously, it has almost the opposite effect – it corrals his tumbling thoughts, herds them into some kind of order, unbinds the jittery restlessness that seizes his limbs without warning.  It’s calming.  If only Master Tapal had known caf is the secret ingredient that lets his apprentice sit still long enough to meditate… well, maybe.  Cal hasn’t attempted to meditate in a while.

The Swill (a cheap, theoretically fruit-flavored drink additive) is behind the glazed gnasps Prauf only keeps for when Tabbers drops by and a bottle of snowfig fizzade Cal’s saving for a special occasion.  He’s been saving it for three months, since there’s never a special occasion on Bracca, unless he counts Empire Day.  He shifts it aside, grabs the canister, and heads to the kitchen table.  Prauf immediately stirs a heaping spoonful of Swill into his porridge.  Judging by the face he pulls upon trying it, it’s not much of an improvement.  Cal copies him and shrugs – the artificial shuura flavoring almost masks whatever presumably toxic metal is leeching out of their pipes.  Better than Cal could’ve done, certainly.  The Abednedo’s worked here long enough to be grandfathered into the pre-Empire pay scale, even after the Guild started ripping everyone off left, right, and center.  He’s not rich by any metric, and Bracca has a real low bar for wealth, but he brings home enough to afford the occasional treat, like drink powder.  And moonfruit jam.  Cal spreads a thin layer across his polystarch and it tastes amazing after weeks of dry toast.

Prauf gets up and goes into the living room to put the holoscreen on before either of them have finished their gluey porridge.  Cal can’t see it from here, but nothing of note is happening anyway.  The Bracca “news” is mostly an excuse to disseminate Imperial propaganda between reporting train delays and Maw-induced structural damage in Willflower.  They both nurse their caf and toast while awaiting the weather forecast.  He knows it’s begun when Nalah Rukk – a small, dead-eyed Rodian who probably wishes she’d taken a job anywhere else – actually gets a spark of life in her voice.  No matter how repetitive the forecast, it seems to be the only part of this she enjoys.

Today’s going to be awful, of course.  Rain, rain, and more rain.  She does suggest a possibility of severe thunderstorms rolling in from the south around midday, though, and Prauf gets up again to go take a look.  “Might be kinda risky going out there,” Cal hears him say.  His stomach gives a lurch.  Is Prauf going to call the whole thing off?  Thinking about their trip is the only reason Cal’s made it through the last two weeks, with Empire Day looming closer and closer.  Prauf returns, plops down in his seat with a grunt, sips some caf, leaves Cal on tenterhooks… then, finally, Cal manages to catch his eye and Prauf just lifts a shoulder.  “We’ll be careful, right?”

Cal hides a sigh of relief in his mug.  They’re supposed to venture down to some little village and visit Prauf’s buddy Silby, a scavenger who makes a living off all the ships the Guild will never get around to breaking down.  Cal had once asked Prauf if that’s a good career prospect.  The Abednedo wasn’t sold on it – “Sure, he sets his own hours,” Prauf had said, “and there’s nobody to answer to, but at least you and I earn a regular paycheck.  If nothing decent gets dropped out there, he doesn’t eat.”

Whether or not he has food, Silby’s scavenged one thing Prauf wants: a supposedly-gorgeous piece of Kriin-wood from Alderaan, worth zero credits to the Guild, but perfect for someday replacing the broken soundboard on the valachord.  Prauf doesn’t actually have the slightest idea how to do that.  They’ll figure it out.  He’s passed the dirt-poor-DIY habit onto Cal.  “Couldn’t Silby just try to get the wood on one of the cargo trains and send it to us that way?” Cal wonders, starting to clear the breakfast dishes now that Nalah’s back to droning road closures for tomorrow’s celebration.

“No guarantee it’d make it here in good condition.  Besides, they charge for that sort of thing… he’s giving it to me for free; least I can do is go get it.”  Prauf plunks his empty mug on the table.  “You, uh.  You still wanna go, don’t you?”

“Yes,” Cal says fervently.  There’s a kriffing Imperial officer in Willflower for Empire Day, as if they sincerely give a damn about Bracca.  He’s pretty sure the Empire hates the Scrapper Guild, but all the Republic contracts automatically transferred to the new government, and to some extent they’re relying on large shipments of scrap metal and parts to fuel ‘urgent infrastructure and security upgrades’, so they have to play nice.

Scraw is half a day’s drive across the wastes.  They can rough it for a night and take their time coming home, get in late enough to conveniently miss the festivities, and they’ll still have a day off to recover from the trip before they need to go back to work.  And, as if Cal needed more bribery beyond skipping Empire Day, Prauf’s going to take him to a clay deposit.  He can collect himself a nice big blob to experiment with.  It shouldn’t be too difficult to get silica, even on Bracca, and then he can test-drive a few homemade glaze mixes, and after that he just needs to build a kiln, or (more likely) repurpose something as one.

Spirits, it’s so invigorating, having something to do again besides scrapping and sleeping.  Okay, Cal added sculpting to that list months ago, because there’s one thing Bracca has in extreme abundance and that’s ‘random bits of worthless metal nobody cares about enough to notice if they go missing from the yard’.  He started with little bugs – easy to make with just the tools he had on hand – and then kept thinking bigger.  His starbird’s coming along gorgeously.  He’ll finish it before he starts working in a new medium.  Better that than thinking about the one-year anniversary of the Purge, his master’s death, the merciless destruction of Cal’s entire life.

He can never go home again.  Dwelling on it is just going to make him cry, and that’ll freak Prauf out, so instead he’ll think about revisiting all the ideas in his notebook he couldn’t make work with metal.

While Prauf disappears into the ‘fresher for a fast shower, Cal washes the dishes quickly and then delves into the conservator again.  They’ll only be gone until tomorrow night; there’s not much to pack besides food, an extra tank of fuel (already waiting by the door), and a medkit and Prauf’s blaster in case they run into trouble.  Cal pries the lid off a plastoid container.  Cold curry will be good for a few meals.  If there’s one thing Prauf has in abundance, it’s usually curry.  Apparently his homeworld’s elevated concocting new varieties into an art form.  Wondering if Prauf has ever attempted a gnasp curry for Tabbers, Cal reconstitutes a packet of silkrice and throws it in, adds some extra spices and tangerette paste for flavor, seals the container again, stuffs that and some cutlery and a handful of ration sticks and a large canteen of water into a satchel.  Prauf emerges from the ‘fresher as Cal’s closing the bag on two bowls and a few sticks of instant caf.  “Ready to go when you are,” Cal says, putting on his tool belt and poncho before slinging the satchel over his shoulder.

“Just a sec….”  Prauf rattles around in his bedroom for a minute, then returns, tugging his own poncho over his head, lifting the heavy jerrycan.  “Got everything?  No rest stops out in the wastes, remember… all right, grab the door.”

The lock engages behind Cal and off they go.  He practically bounces down the stairs.  They’re going on an adventure and he doesn’t care how childish that sounds, even in the privacy of his own head.

“Oh, good,” Prauf says once they’ve traded their ramshackle but mostly dry building for a steady rain and the roar of a passing train.  “Don’t have to swing by Jessa’s place, then.”  A two-seater (for a slightly flexible definition of the word seat) landspeeder is waiting for them, lime green and gleaming beneath the streetlight, very obviously patched together by hand like almost all the others around here.  Intact vehicles found on scrapped starships are appropriated by the Guild and sold offworld, and the import fees are obscene.  This one’s borrowed from Tabbers, who owed Prauf something.  He trades in favors, doesn’t give a damn about money at all if he doesn’t need to; Prauf’s said he kept trying to buy stuff with Guild scrip even after their Republic contract stipulated they had to pay their scrappers in credits.  The trailer attached to the back is borrowed from Jessa, who just wants a couple of drinks in exchange next time they’re all at the bar.  That’s a sheet of metal mounted to a few repulsorlifts, with some thin poles jutting up from the corners and meeting overhead, a tarp thrown atop it to protect the trailer’s contents from the rain.  They’ll probably be sleeping underneath it tonight.  It won’t be comfortable, but Cal still prefers roughing it on a wasteland road trip to being anywhere near Empire Day.

“Does it count as a road trip if where we’re headed doesn’t have roads?” Cal asks, looping the strap of the satchel around a pole a few times so it stays put.

“Sure,” Prauf grunts.  He heaves the jerrycan into the trailer.  “We’re staying on one planet, using a landspeeder instead of a ship, so it’s a road trip.  You – ah, kriff, I forgot something,” he says, slapping his hands against his pockets.  Before Cal can ask, he adds, “Get the engines fired up; I’ll be back in a minute,” and rushes inside again.

Shrugging, Cal vaults into the pilot’s seat and hits the ignition, runs his hands over the controls, lets himself fantasize for a minute about driving it.  This thing rides like a bike and it’s fast… probably because it lacks most of a landspeeder’s typical amenities.  It’s long, narrow, looks like an assembly diagram instead of a complete vehicle.  It’s little more than a chassis.  A decidedly Kaleesh design, according to Prauf.  There are no doors, no roof, and no restraints.  No floor, either; the gaps in the undercarriage are left clear so the driver or passenger can brake with their feet and make real sharp turns.  That’d probably destroy Cal’s legs, but Prauf can handle it okay.  And if they ever need to reverse direction very suddenly?  The nose of the speeder is curved down like a hook (or, given its owner, a beak).  Lean forwards to plant it in the ground and whip 180º.  Cal is dead from spinal trauma, but again, Prauf might manage, though possibly with a fascinating new type of scoliosis.

The Abednedo doesn’t tell Cal what was so important upon his return, just gestures for him to scoot over.  He scrambles into the other seat.  They’re still squeezed so close together Prauf elbows him in the stomach every time he reaches for the clutch.  Cal would endure worse if it meant avoiding the droids stringing banners and flags all over the street, each emblazoned with a disgusting perversion of the Republic crest.  Prauf’s got a pretty nice place, as far as Bracca goes, but he lives on a main road near the city center and the Guild’s going all-out to welcome their Imperial overlords.  Spitefully, Cal hopes the willflowers bloom as soon as the officer leaves, just to deprive them of the only hint of genuine beauty this planet’s ever offered.

The traffic isn’t too bad as they trundle south.  An at-grade freight line runs through the middle of this road, which gums things up a bit every time a train passes.  Prauf cranked the lifts to max to carry his bulk and Cal can swing his legs freely, too short to reach the ground and risk his bones.  “Hey,” he says while they’re idling at an intersection, waiting on another train, “what’d Tabbers owe you to let us take his baby into the wastes without him for two whole days?”

Prauf makes a funny noise, clears his throat, thumps himself on the chest a few times like his food got stuck on the way down.  Cal rolls his eyes.  “Never mind.”  He should know better by now than to ask when it comes to those two.

On the other side of the tracks, Willflower slumps back into its usual state – crowded, dirty, undecorated, ugly.  The noise level actually improves a bit without all the droids, but then a Venator’s towed over the city on its way to the shipbreaking yard, and the roar borders on deafening.  Momentarily sheltered from the rain, Cal takes the opportunity to flick back his poncho and ruffle a hand through his hair.  A few loose clippings flutter to the street.  The Empire is once more a distant terror, and he can breathe a little easier, tight ribcage making room for his lungs again.  While Prauf’s pretty neutral on this Empire Day nonsense (probably wouldn’t notice at all were it not for Cal), Tabbers had thought it was ridiculous too, for reasons he claimed were very solid yet refused to elaborate on.  Cal suspects he’s just perplexed by the concept of celebrating a change of government and doesn’t want to admit it.  Either way, Prauf had invited him on the road trip.  Tabbers agreed, but then Prauf added already got a couple of places I wanna show Cal and Tabbers realized Cal would be coming along and promptly changed his mind.  Apparently he’d had a different sort of trip in mind.  “He’s supposed to be the third wheel, not me,” Tabbers grumbled, and then sulked out of the flat.

He’s weird.  Cal likes him anyway.  ‘Tabbers’ is a drastic abbreviation of his first name, which is eleven syllables long; adding his family name and former tribe affiliation renders it into a moniker Cal cannot pronounce in a single breath.  He’s the only Kaleesh Cal’s ever met.  Master Tapal would’ve taken a vow of promiscuity and relocated to Nar Shaddaa to pursue a career as a burlesque dancer before allowing his Padawan in the same sector as General Grievous.  Fittingly, perhaps, they met when Cal took a wrong turn in the cruiser his crew was dismantling and Tabbers was busy garroting another scrapper for claiming Tabbers’s high-value find as his own.  Cal had thought he was used to Bracca’s general lawlessness at that point (two weeks into his Guild career), but he froze like a frightened ash-rabbit.  The scrapper’s body crumpled at the Kaleesh’s feet.  Tabbers dusted off his hands as if he’d simply finished detaching a troublesome bit of circuitry, wound the rappelling line back onto his tool belt, turned around, and spotted Cal.

The problem with Bracca’s general lawlessness, Cal realized then, was that nobody would give a damn if he was murdered here and now for seeing too much.  The only person who might intervene was Prauf, and he was two decks away.  But with no other witnesses… he did have tools at his disposal, including one the Kaleesh would definitely not expect….

Tabbers hadn’t moved, however, except to tip his head to one side and regard Cal curiously with bright yellow eyes, the only part of his face – any of him at all, really – visible.  “Are you the kid Prauf’s been going on about?” he finally asked, his voice a low, rasping purr.  Cal stood frozen a second longer, then nodded.  “Are you going to report me?  Not that anyone’ll do anything about it,” Tabbers added, giving the corpse he’d created a nudge with one foot, “but you could try.”

Cal swallowed, rustled his voice out of hiding, and said, “No.”

He wasn’t sure what sort of response he should expect, but it was definitely not for the Kaleesh to hum, walk by, and pause just a moment to pat Cal on the head and say, “Good boy.” 

Being scared shitless of him afterwards was probably the most sensible reaction Cal could have.  He didn’t know at the time he had nothing to fear; Tabbers inexplicably believed Prauf was acting responsible for Cal because he was Prauf’s actual child, and therefore wouldn’t have harmed him.  Prauf had been just as flabbergasted as Cal when they learned this.  But a few days after that first encounter, Cal dropped by Prauf’s place to return a tool he’d borrowed, wasn’t feeling well, made the mistake of sitting down, and fell asleep on the sofa.  He woke to an unsettling skeletal mask and a pair of slit-pupiled eyes right in his face, which is how he found out Prauf’s place was also Tabbers’s place.  Tried to avoid going around for a while after that.

It wasn’t always avoidable.  The dorms were perilous for a twelve-year-old, and sometimes Cal (a psychometric Force-sensitive who knew that sort of peril long before experiencing it for himself) couldn’t face yet another uncomfortable night, afraid to risk a ‘fresher trip unless other people were around.  He never told Prauf what was happening there, just swore he wanted to hang out and play cards and pretend Tabbers didn’t terrify him.

Of course, hanging out and playing cards and pretending meant Cal gradually got to know Tabbers, against both their wills.  He’s stuck here on Bracca because he’s an exile – he claims he got caught up in a tribal matter regarding his questionable parentage.  Prauf thinks he’s lying, or at least there’s more to the story.  Cal knows it’s true, but can’t say anything.  Raggy Bones told me would be one hell of an explanation.  A more believable tale is the one about hunting a core-crawler, the source of his current bone mask.  Core-crawlers are non-sapient avian-reptilian monstrosities that live in symbiosis with the Ibdis Maw, eating the insects and parasites that try to colonize its hide.  Getting close enough to one to kill it isn’t difficult; what is impressive is not being immediately set upon by the entire screeching horde, or squashed into sludge when the Maw sends a tendril to see what its friends are getting so upset about.  Too proud of his trophy to carve it into a traditional Kaleesh mask, Tabbers wears the entire skull like a helmet beneath the hood and headwrap, occasionally impales troublesome scrap rats on its long, wickedly sharp beak.  He did have to bore a couple of eyeholes first, though, since core-crawlers are blind.

So Cal eventually came around to liking Tabbers.  Didn’t get much of a choice, if he wanted to keep hanging out.  Prauf and Tabbers used to have a thing.  More physical than emotional, or so Prauf says, not serious, not exclusive, just blowing off steam from time to time.  That’s all boldfaced bantha-shit.  Prauf pretends it wasn’t incredibly devoted just like Cal pretended he wasn’t terrified, the same way Prauf also pretends they aren’t sort of still involved.  The other reason Cal tried to avoid going by too often.  They were on the rocks by the time he moved in, but Tabbers didn’t move out for a few more months, and by that point he was far less frightening than some of the scrappers in Cal’s dorm.  The two who gave Cal the most trouble are dead now, their bodies gradually breaking down somewhere in the Maw’s digestive system.  He knows who to thank for that. 

Sometimes he misses having Tabbers around.  Most of the time, he can admit the shoebox-sized flat is roomier without him and his belongings.  Besides, he’s still there a lot.  And he’s conveniently never there when Prauf goes off to the cantina without inviting Cal, and Cal assumes if he ever got it into his head to follow, he’d find the cantina shares coordinates with Tabbers’s apartment.

There’s no traffic at all once they clear the city limits, and Prauf kicks the speeder into top gear, taking them alongside the shipbreaking yard for a while before finally curving away, southwards, into the lonely wastes.  He has a map, hung on the wall by Cal’s bed, but he’s made this journey so many times he didn’t bother taking it down.  Cal closes his eyes against the wind and stinging rain, tries to picture it.  Scraw’s marked near the bottom.  It’s going to be a long trip.  “Think I could drive for a while?” he says, opening his eyes again.

“Uh.”  Prauf’s expression suggests he’s picturing the last time he let Cal drive, and then what Tabbers will do to him if history repeats itself.  Cal absentmindedly rubs the thick scar on his right calf.  “Maybe on the way home, if we find a real empty stretch of land….”

Understanding that as a pussyfooted shit no, Cal squishes back in his seat so he’s not such a target for Prauf’s elbow and watches the scenery (such as it is) flash by, keeps his eyes peeled.  Since the war ended, the Guild’s been overrun with decommissioned starships.  The shipbreaking yard rambles further and further every month, Willflower’s tipping towards a housing crisis from all the new blood flocking to Bracca, yet the workload never seems to shrink; by now it’s unspoken truth that many of those ships will never see a scrapping crew.  And if you’re hauling in something that doesn’t get the stamp of approval, forget it.  Cheaper to just dump it in the wastes and write off the fuel rather than try somewhere else.  This planet is a sprawling graveyard for shuttles and starfighters, cheap abundant metals like tin or kelsh, wrong-footed scrappers, droids damaged beyond repair.  Hopes and dreams.  Wannabe predators who ran afoul of a professional.  Master Tapal.  They’re headed in the same general direction Cal came from, a year ago, but there’s no grave to mark his master’s final resting place.

On the upside, because the Guild can’t possibly impose any sort of ‘no scrapping outside the shipbreaking yard’ law, the wastes are ripe for the picking.  They pass a desiccated section of an Acclamator, something Cal thinks might’ve been a T-6 before it crumbled into rust, a framework parade of corvettes left to rot… he borrows Prauf’s electrobinoculars to check on some movement in the distance, determines it’s just a massive scrap rat nest they’ll give a wide berth, and then spots potential.  “Prauf,” he says, thumping the Abednedo’s arm, “there’s something up on the right, just behind that hill.  Looked like it might be intact.”

In reply, Prauf thrusts his right foot down into the mud (less dirt, more pebbles and sand and centuries of rusting runoff) to give them a bit of drag, hairpin-turns, and takes them up and over the indicated hill.  Cal’s stomach swoops in tandem with the speeder.  Then it lurches, because the ship he thought he saw is right there.  He clings to the bottom of his seat so he doesn’t keep going when Prauf curses and throws all his weight into a sudden stop.  The repulsorlifts send up a shower of scree.  Cal hasn’t feared death in a while now, but the prospect of flattening his face on a durasteel hull isn’t a pleasant one, so he shuts his eyes… and the nose of the speeder bumps gently into the shuttle.

“Whew!” Prauf chuckles, clambering out.  “Little closer there than I’d like… ah, no damage, we’re fine.”

He was totally more worried about damaging Tabbers’s speeder than Cal’s bones, Cal thinks.  No harm, no foul; Cal slides off his seat and holds up a hand to shield his eyes from the rain.  Their target is neither a Republic shuttle nor any of the Separatist or civilian models he’s familiar with.  It’s blocky, unsophisticated, and a quick trip around back fails to reveal the discharge vent for a hyperspace shunt, so it probably doesn’t have a hyperdrive installed.  Mud is splattered up the sides of the hull.  Some of it slides to the ground before Cal’s eyes, weighed down by the rain, but it hasn’t all washed off yet, so – “This couldn’t have been dropped off more than a few hours ago.”

“Nope!” Prauf says, sounding as delighted as Cal’s ever heard him.  He claps a big hand on Cal’s shoulder.  “And it’s not marked, either.  Good find.”

The cockpit hatch and the cargo doors on the starboard side of the shuttle are both sealed tight.  It’ll take too long to cut through them with their torches, and this isn’t a Guild job with foreman droids breathing down their necks, so they can afford to be sloppy.  Prauf clears the mud off the cracked viewport while Cal – who maybe enjoys this part a little too much – fetches a roll of thermal tape from the trailer.  Getting it stuck to the wet transparisteel takes some effort, but finally two long strips crisscross the viewport and Prauf crams some tinder beneath one end, snaps his firestrike a few times until sparks leap into the wad of sofa stuffing, and hastily backs away.

Thermal tape would be useless against the thick hull or the hatches, but the low-yield explosion causes the entire viewport to shudder in its frame.  Cal hears bits and pieces of transparisteel clinking against the deck.  Prauf steps forwards and tears off one strip of tape, and more shards come with it.  The second leaves behind a hole perhaps two feet in jagged diameter.  “That’ll do,” Cal says.  With a boost from Prauf, Cal climbs up onto the roof of the shuttle, and from there he aims carefully and then leaps down through the opening, lands lightly.  Transparisteel crunches beneath his boots.

As Prauf’s breaking out the rest of the viewport, creating a gap he can fit through, Cal surveys their options and frowns.  An okay find, maybe, but not a good one.  Everything noteworthy has already been stripped from the shuttle.  Navicomputers, comm terminals, drive systems… there are wires dangling from the console where the flight stick used to be.  Why pay to have your ship towed to a reputable scrapper when you can cut out the middleman, hack loose whatever might still sell for a profit, and cut your losses, Cal thinks.  And if some rainy Mid-Rim planet’s ecosystem suffers for it, well, shit happens.  There are fossils all over Bracca.  It had an ecosystem that didn’t begin and end with the Maw, once.  Now it’s just the galaxy’s junkyard.

Prauf lands in the shuttle with a BANG and startles Cal out of his meandering thoughts.  Despite its unimpressive appearance, Prauf doesn’t seem upset by the carnage.  Scrappers learn to look for things nobody else would pay much attention to.  He walks around the cockpit a few times, occasionally nodding or shaking his head, then pauses at a bulkhead and raps on it, head tipped close.  Whatever he hears pleases him.  Cal feels it, a bright, bold stripe of blue in his mind’s eye and his belly and his limbs.  Much like the shuttle, his connection to the Force has been ravaged, but it’s still workable.

“Do you want me to go out and mark it?” Cal asks, watching the Abednedo tap different spots on the wall.  Marking the exterior of the ship is like a courtesy for other scavengers, letting them know this one’s been picked over already and it’s not worth wasting their time.  It’ll also tell anybody who happens to come by in the next hour or two that the shuttle is spoken for.  Bracca’s general lawlessness lends itself to a loose moral code among scrappers – Prauf and Cal have done their part, so if someone shows up and tries to pick a fight, they’re well within their rights to just shoot the intruder and keep working.  While nobody’s enforcing it, Prauf’s about as ethical as a man gets on this dump and Cal, secretly, is a Jedi.  “I didn’t bring anything, but I –”

“Can of spray paint in my bag,” Prauf says, unhitching his welding torch from his belt.  That’s the best news Cal’s heard today – he loves spray paint.  Bit of a pain in the neck to use while it’s raining.  He’ll manage.  “Go cover our asses, and then get back in here as soon as you’re done.  I’m gonna need a hand ripping this bulkhead out.”

Chapter Text

No matter how many old jumper cables and seat restraints tie down the scrap in the trailer, it clangs and crashes and rattles something awful every time they breeze over the slightest bump in the ground or catch a gust of wind at the right angle.  The sweet song of money, Prauf thinks cheerfully, unbothered by the cacophony.  They’ve got a tidy handful of credits jangling back there.  Won’t pay for a ticket offworld, but it’s a fresh pair of boots (he’s nearly worn clean through the soles of his), another pane of glass for the bedroom window (if he can find one that isn’t scratched beyond reason), a couple filling meals (with vitamins, even – what kind of vitamins do Humans need, anyway?), drinks to repay Jessa for lending out the trailer.  Firehoney-glazed gnasps.  He should quit keeping the conservator stocked… yeah, he’s not gonna do that.  Maybe Prauf has one other indulgence besides the valachord.

Next to him, Cal uncurls slightly, yawns, smushes his palms against his eyes.  He ran scraps back and forth between the shuttle and the trailer for almost three hours; Prauf’s not surprised he dozed off ten minutes after they got on the road again.  Now that he’s awake, however, Prauf can go back to using both hands to control the speeder instead of keeping one on the boy to make sure he stays put.  Should’ve borrowed one of those jumper cables to tie Cal into his seat.  “Can we stop soon?” Cal says, stretching his arms over his head.  “I need to pee.”

“Just a few more minutes,” Prauf promises.  “Got something right up here I wanna show you… and I think it’s just about lunchtime.”  His stomach’s been howling for the past half-hour, at least, and that’s as good a reason as any to take a break.

The landscape is rapidly morphing from something dimly remembered, as if from a dream, into a sharp recollection marked with unrealistic goals and petrichor and, eventually, laughter caught somewhere between a hiss and a purr.  Prauf drops the speeder into its lowest gear, jams his heels into the scree.  His feet leave twenty-meter trenches in the loose ground before the vehicle finally slows to a stop.  This is why he needs new boots.  He really wishes Tabbers would install some actual brakes on this thing, but nooooo, as long as the guy has the most durable skeleton in the galaxy, he’s going to put it to good (or bad) use.

Cal jumps off the speeder and starts prowling, probably in search of a semi-private spot so he can take a leak.  He’s distracted almost immediately, however; they’ve come up next to a massive hole in the ground and he just has to inch close enough to peer over the edge.  Prauf’s done the same before and already knows there’s nothing to see.  Its depth extends well beyond the limits of Human or Abednedo sight.  It’s far too round to be natural, as well.  Always made him a little nervous.  “Watch yourself,” he cautions, glancing into the trailer and making sure they’ve not lost any scrap.  “I’d bet the Maw uses that from time to time… and if not, it’s gotta be full of broken ships at the bottom, just waiting to impale any idiot who falls in.”

“Quicker than being eaten,” Cal says, but he steps away.

He attends to his own business while Prauf works their food out of the mess in the trailer.  They’ve outrun the rain for the time being and the breeze feels almost pleasant now.  Once the boy returns, adjusting his tool belt, Prauf says, “Come on.  It’s in here – bit of a squeeze for me, but you shouldn’t have any trouble.”

From where they’re standing, he and Cal appear to be on the outskirts of a flat plain, directly next to a cliff that rises out of the ground from seemingly nowhere.  From above, Prauf, knows, they’re actually at one side of a ravine almost twenty kilometers across, sliced into Bracca’s rocky crust untold thousands of years ago.  Too bad a lot of the topographical maps are useless nowadays – the Maw terraforms as it pleases.  Cal follows him to the cliffside, where a crack twice Prauf’s height and almost his width splits the rock.  “What’s in there?” he asks, sounding curious rather than leery.

“You’ll see.”  Or he won’t, at first.  Prauf deliberately didn’t bring a light along.  Of course, if time or scavengers have taken a toll, that means Cal won’t see anything at all until Prauf goes back and fetches the torch.  “Watch your step.  There’s a pretty steep downwards slope… starts right about… here.”

He knows they’re getting close when the crevice widens ever so slightly – enough for Prauf to walk normally instead of shuffling along sideways – and the ground beneath his feet becomes soft and spongy, coated in what must be several lifetimes’ worth of moss and lichen growth.  And then the nubbly walls scraping Prauf’s shoulders abruptly vanish.  He feels a hand touch his back as if to make sure he’s not vanished too.  “I can hear water,” Cal reports.  The hand drags around to Prauf’s hip, then withdraws as the kid ventures further.

“Yep,” Prauf says, “there’s a spring.”  Sklush.  “You just stepped in it.  Hold on a minute… it’s around here somewhere….”  He shuffles blindly to his right, hands outstretched, until the toe of one boot bumps something with a hollow wooden sound.  “Got it.  One more second.”

The lantern is where he left it atop the crate.  Prauf gently rocks it from side to side, hears the oil sloshing, finds the latch by feel and gets out his firestrike again.  The wick catches.  Little by little, the lantern gently illuminates the cavern – first, the carpet of moss under their feet, pale as moonlight.  Then the rippling edges of the spring-fed pond, disturbed by Cal’s boot, followed by the surface, until the water reaches too deep into the cave to be touched with such a small light source.  Finally, once the entire wick is burning, almost every inch of the walls and ceiling begins to sparkle like stars.  The rock down here is studded with quartz – as beautiful as it is worthless.

Cal practically radiates delight.  It might not be anything all that special, compared to whatever else is out there in the whole wide galaxy, but there are still tiny pockets of Bracca that aren’t hideous.  He sheds his shoes and socks quick as a flash, leaps onto a rock sticking out of the pond, sits, and sticks his toes into the dark water.  Prauf watches in amusement as the boy yelps and jumps.  “It’s freezing!”

“Yep.”  Crouching, Prauf scoops a palmful of water and takes a cautious sip, then spits it right back out.  “Ugh.  Still tastes foul, though, so don’t drink it.”

“How’d you know this place was here?” Cal asks, dipping his feet in again, more slowly this time.

Prauf straightens up, hooks his thumbs in his tool belt.  “A very old friend of mine showed it to me once, back when I was new around here.”  A fresh-faced engineer who thought this crappy job would be a stepping stone to bigger and better things.  Reality kicked his teeth in right quick – he’s a decent engineer (and a decent scrapper, like it or not), but nothing special, and he doesn’t have the cutthroat personality he’d need to pursue those nebulous better things he daydreamed about.  He’s… a complacent guy, maybe.  Not too thrilled with the direction the Guild’s been headed, but he can live with it.  “Me and Tabbers used to come by here a lot.  Hang out on our days off, when neither of us could stand being cooped up in Willflower for another minute.”

He kind of expects Cal to have a comment ready – the boy’s developing a rather teenage sense of humor, hardly ever misses an opportunity to rag on Prauf about his dubious choice in companionship – but Cal’s too busy swishing his bare feet back and forth in the pond.  Still half a child, in spite of everything.  Prauf drags the crate over next to the rock, sits, and starts getting their lunch together.  This mostly entails portioning out some curry into two plastoid dishes, so Prauf’s snarling belly is sated sooner rather than later.

Not much gets said for a while.  Cal eats with one hand, a wax stylus in the other, sketching a blueprint in that little flimsiplast notebook of his.  Something that’ll savage Prauf’s shins in the middle of the night, no doubt.  For his part, Prauf enjoys the break, scraping his bowl spotless (this is his father’s recipe, modified to compensate for Bracca’s lack of decent ingredients, and the man never made a bad curry in his entire life), listening to the echo of the spring bubbling somewhere down deep in the cavern.  Not for the first time, he wishes they got more days off.  Perhaps even a real vacation now and then.  He’s never minded the work, no matter how shitty it gets, but it does a guy good to escape the crowds and noise and smog sometimes, and one day a week isn’t really enough to go anywhere.

He slips back into old habits for a few minutes, drifts on irrational fantasies of building a cabin or something, a little weekend getaway out here.  Which part is more irrational – the getaway or the weekend – he’s not sure.  Doesn’t matter.  It’ll never happen.  Just keeps him occupied until Cal finally tugs his feet out of the water and massages one, grimacing.  “My toes are numb,” he says when Prauf glances at him.

“Must be close to spring after all; that pond freezes over for most of winter.”  Groaning a bit, Prauf stands up and arches his back until something in his spine pops.  “We’d better get back on the road if we wanna make it to Scraw before nightfall.”

Cal rolls his socks back on, stuffs his feet into his boots, tucks his notebook in his pocket.  They gather everything they brought with them and Prauf blows out the lantern before they leave.  “This place is nice,” Cal says, a wistful note in his voice, as they squeeze back out of the cavern.  “Thanks for showing me.”

“Ah, no problem, kid,” Prauf says, slightly embarrassed.

“Don’t forget you promised me clay.”

The embarrassment collapses under a rush of fond exasperation.  “Yeah, yeah, you’ll get your clay… unless we get out there and the speeder’s disappeared.”  But Tabbers’s speeder is untouched, exactly where they left it.  Prauf wasn’t too worried in the first place.  People on Bracca (the decent ones) abide by a sort of unspoken code – don’t loot another scrapper unless you’re sure they’re dead, and don’t steal from speeders in the wastes unless you’ve checked around and the owner is probably dead.

While Prauf puts their things back in the trailer, Cal fiddles with the electrobinoculars again to check for scrap rat nests, muttering, “I’ve seen six or seven of them so far; they’re kriffing huge out here….”  Then he lowers them almost as quickly as he raised them to his eyes.  “I think there’s another speeder coming,” he says.

Prauf squints in the direction he indicates until a dark speck on the horizon enlarges into something that’s definitely an oncoming vehicle.  He tosses the satchel in the trailer, shifts some scrap, checks the power pack on his DL-18, and tucks it through his belt.  He’s not looking for trouble, but a man can never be too careful, especially out here.  Cal quietly comes around to the other side of the speeder and hoists himself up to sit on the nose.

The battered four-seater that pulls up alongside them has seen better days, though the airbrakes bring it to a neat halt, which is more than Tabbers can say about his pride and joy.  The driver’s Human, or close to it, hooded so Prauf can hardly get a glimpse of his face, and what he can see is mostly beard.  He reaches for a bottle at his side while the passenger, a purple-skinned species Prauf’s unable to identify on sight, folds her arms on the side of the speeder and scrutinizes him and Cal.  “You all right, then?” she asks after a second of silence.  “Thought you mighta had engine trouble or something.”

“Yeah, we’re fine,” Prauf says.  “Stopped for some food.  You caught us just as we were leaving.”

“Oh,” says the woman, and if she’s disappointed, it doesn’t show.  Doesn’t seem inclined to guarantee this speeder’s abandoned before they loot it, either.  “Nice ride.”

“Can’t take credit, it belongs to my buddy.” 

Cal leans way too far to one side, convincing Prauf’s he’s going to fall, but he holds his balance, studying the platform on the back of the other speeder.  It’s so loaded with scrap metal it’s riding dangerously low.  The kid gives an appreciative nod, says, “You got a pretty good haul, huh?”

“Yeah,” she replies.  “Our lucky day.  We’re dragging it all into Willflower, see what we can get for it… check out what this Empire Day thing’s about while we’re there.  Maybe there’ll be some free food.”

Prauf chuckles.  “I wouldn’t hold my breath, but I guess you never know.  Nice to have a holiday, anyway.”

The hooded man, who’s spent the entire conversation thus far drinking without ever appearing to breathe, finally comes up for air.  When he turns his head to look at Prauf, the left side of his face is a mess of burn scars.  In a flat, gravelly voice, he rumbles, “I’ll celebrate any day those karking Jedi are dead.”

The breath Cal takes is more like an aborted gasp.  Prauf side-eyes him – his face is empty, but his knuckles are white.  Just as he’s thinking it’s time to politely put an end to this conversation, the woman says, “We should get moving.  Good luck out there.”

“You too,” Prauf says.  Cal is silent.  Abruptly, Prauf remembers the little… discussion the boy had with another scrapper last week.  A guy from a different crew had apparently had too much Imperial propaganda for breakfast, because he was getting real gung-ho about the impending ‘celebration’ – good thing that formerly-Chancellor-now-Emperor Palpatine had stepped up to rescue the failing Republic, the galaxy needed a strong leader if they ever wanted to recover from the war, the patriotic fervor of Empire Day was going to be better than sex… well, maybe not that last one, but the man had certainly gotten hot under the collar.  One fawning comment too many and Cal, who was usually closed-mouthed on such matters, muttered, “Your Emperor is a slimeball.”

The man overheard, apparently, because he flipped his lid.  Prauf was content to ignore him, but Cal ignited like liquid tibanna.  It escalated into a full-blown shouting match.  Unsure whether to be concerned or amused (the guy was getting verbally curb-stomped by a kid half his size and probably half his age as well), Prauf stuck close and kept working, hoping nobody would throw a punch.  Byllee lent him a hand peeling back layers of bulkhead insulation and shamelessly eavesdropped until she couldn’t hold in a laugh anymore.  “It’s like watching my drunk uncle try to debate my fifteen-year-old nephew over Ascension Eve dinner,” she’d said.  “Farrell’s a moron and kids don’t know shit about politics unless they’re from one of those weird planets that elect teenagers to office.”

He wonders now if it’s odd that Cal does know shit about politics.  Fortunately, if the kid’s inclined to start another argument, the two scavengers are already a hundred meters away and out of earshot.  When Prauf turns around, he’s pale, blank-faced, gazing unfocused into the distance.  “Still here?” Prauf says, waving a hand in front of Cal’s eyes.  Cal blinks, shakes his head a bit.  “Come on, we need to keep moving too.  And I did promise you clay, huh?”

He hopes for enthusiastic agreement, gets a distracted nod instead.  Prauf prods Cal until he climbs over the controls and into the passenger seat like a monkey-lizard, and then crams into the speeder himself, restarting the thrusters, watching the boy out of the corner of his eye.  He was all excited about the clay five minutes ago.  Prauf doesn’t really get kids, and he has a feeling Cal’s stranger than most, but they need to do creative art crap or else they’ll grow up weird, right?  He doesn’t mind Cal turning the corner of the apartment into a mixed-media sculpture display; he does mind that all of those mixed-medias are salvaged metal scraps and navigating to the ‘fresher in the middle of the night is becoming a tetanus hazard.

“Hey,” Prauf says when they’ve been flying along for a good ten minutes and Cal’s not said a word, much less bugged Prauf again to let him drive (which is literally only happening over Prauf’s dead body).  He nudges the boy with an arm.  “Don’t listen to that guy, okay?  Bet he’s never even seen a Jedi except actors on holodramas.”

Cal makes a faint noise and says nothing.  Prauf gets it.  Cal’s a Core kid, grew up close enough to Coruscant that he was probably like Prauf when he was younger – thought the Jedi were heroes, never even imagined something seedy could’ve been brewing beneath the serene, modest surface.  And despite all his Separatist leanings, Prauf did like the Jedi, failed coup notwithstanding.  For most of their history, the Order existed to help, not to line their own pockets and claw their way into power, and there aren’t too many institutions in the galaxy who can say that.  Tragic, really.  A couple bad mepples spoiled the entire barrel.  The rest didn’t deserve what happened to them.  Stars, some of those Jedi were kids.  Look at Cal; he’s thirteen and tough as nails, a better scrapper than half the crew put together, but he still sleeps with Raggy Bones and gets excited about clay and music chips.  Prauf couldn’t imagine slaughtering a child like him in cold blood, the way those troopers did.

He has complex feelings about the war, honestly.  Now, Tabbers, not so much – his people have a negative history with the Republic and the Jedi, so he’d be well within his rights to claim Separatist sympathies or simply remain neutral, and yet he came down firmly on the Republic side, though not for any of the usual reasons.  He just thought it was a travesty that the CIS used droids to fight instead of getting their own hands dirty.  After announcing this, he proceeded to wax poetic about the thrill and bloodlust of battle at great length; Prauf is a pretty peaceful guy, but it gets his blood pumping when Tabbers talks like that, which the man definitely knows, and they were both pretty sloshed on moonshine, and… well, Cal had just sighed.  Got up, went pawing through his stuff, came back with a handful of credits, said he was going down to the five-cred shop for a snack or something and to get it out of their systems now, please.

He’s a smart-mouthed brat sometimes.  Prauf was initially real hesitant to tell him about the whole… whatever it is he and Tabbers had (have, had, have again), eventually did so over dishes one night and just got an impenetrable expression in response.  His stomach tightened around their tasteless dinner.  Out here, people get sketchy sometimes about two guys.  In the Core, where they like to put on airs that they’re more cosmopolitan, noses wrinkle about two different species instead.  Especially when it comes to Humans and such who don’t consider Abednedos or Kaleesh pretty enough for their liking.

Cal had finally opened his mouth.  Prauf braced himself to withstand the wrong reaction.  “So does he take the mask off while you two are getting down, or –”

Squawking, his wattles quivering from profound embarrassment, Prauf smushed the sponge over Cal’s head.  Cal squealed too – as usual, the hot water from the tap was ice-cold.  Prauf kept flicking handfuls of soap suds at him until the boy barricaded himself behind the ‘fresher door, giggling.  Eventually, Cal reemerged, almost straight-faced, and when he decided he was safe from further assault, said, “You didn’t answer my question.”

Screw it, Prauf thought.  “Only if I order him to.”

“Ewww!” Cal shoved the cooking pot back into the cabinet.  “I didn’t need that detail!”

“Your fault for asking, kid.”

Cal’s never asked again.  Prauf has four siblings – well, three these days, sadly – and he’s the youngest, used to beg his parents for a little brother, never got his wish.  He’d stopped pleading around age ten.  Thirty years later, that brother he wanted so badly came staggering into Willflower, small and shivering and covered in blood.  Didn’t expect a Human, but beggars can’t be choosers.

Getting out of the city had boosted Cal into a much better mood, and now he’s descended back into his sullen, brooding silence.  Makes Prauf’s nerves jitter.  He’s known from the night they met Cal’s downtimes can be dark; it’s been nearly a year since then and things haven’t gotten that bad again, yet the fear always lurks in the back of his mind.  Cal sighs, sweeping back his hood to let the wind ruffle his bright hair.  The air feels downright soggy from the relentless humidity, even though the rain’s still holding off.  Prauf checks their surroundings against the map in his head.  Well on their way to the stream and the clay deposit, but it’ll be twenty or thirty minutes yet… maybe a story will cheer the boy up.  And Prauf’s got a good one he can only tell while they’re alone, with nothing and nobody else around for kilometers.  “Hey,” he says again.  “You wanna hear about the time I met a Jedi?”

Just as he’d hoped, that seizes Cal’s attention in a death grip.  He practically spins in his seat to face Prauf.  “You did?  Back when you were a kid on Abednedo?”

“Nope,” Prauf says, then, in the interest of accuracy, corrects himself.  “Actually, when I was six or seven, some Jedi did visit my city.  No idea why; I thought maybe they were looking for somebody Force-sensitive, but my parents said that wasn’t it, so I don’t know.  And I didn’t meet them, anyway.  The one I’m talking about was… a little more than a year ago, right here on good old awful Bracca.”

He chances a peek at Cal to make sure he’s still got him hooked, and Cal’s face is… weird.  Hard to tell if he’s staring at or through Prauf.  He appears to be listening, though, so Prauf starts the tale.  “I was actually out in this same general area at the time.  Wasn’t heading to Scraw, though; I’d gotten wind of a good shipdrop southwest of here, wanted to go stake my territory and see what I could get out of it before all the other vultures swept in.  That was right after the – uh – incident, so Tabbers hadn’t gotten this thing up and running again.  I borrowed a cruddy T-85 from Urtz instead.  Ran like absolute garbage, but it got me where I needed to go.  And I could blather on for days about the haul I got from that ship… it was pretty much untouched, I think that was the best scavenging payout I earned in all my years on Bracca….”  Prauf sighs, nostalgically.  “But that’s not important.  So I was on my way home, traveling kinda slow because I was so loaded down with scrap, heading through the mountains.”

“There are mountains on Bracca?” Cal asks.

“Yeah,” Prauf says.  Man, he really needs to get this kid out of the shipbreaking yard a little more often.  “They ain’t spectacular – nothing compared to my homeworld – but we’ve got a couple long ranges, especially to the south.  Like the rest of this place, they’re littered with junk, and littered with caverns and chasms too….”

It’d been raining sideways that evening, as it was wont to do on Bracca.  In fact, if the rain got much further sideways, it’d be raining upwards, which was half the reason why Prauf had put the jumpspeeder’s headlight on max and was scouring the landscape for shelter.  He was also exhausted from practically dismantling a V-19 all by his lonesome, and his stomach was pretty pissed about skipping lunch in favor of breaking down ion engines.  “Ah, chill,” he grumbled to himself as his belly whined, “we’re gonna make bank off that starfighter.  You’ll be sated for a month.”  But he had a sandwich in his bag that was calling his name, so he peered through the downpour, gently maneuvering the bike between craggy rocks and chunks of metal that’d probably been there almost as long as the mountains.

Finally, he found something promising.  This mountain had long been beaten bare by the eons of wind and rain, and there was a narrow nook just big enough to wedge the bike and the trailer into.  Not big enough for Prauf to wedge himself in as well, though, so he grabbed his bag and tugged his hood as far over his face as it’d go, kept searching.  Twenty paces along the narrow path wending through the mountain range, his foot struck a tin can that rattled over the rocks.  Some kind of food container.  There was more garbage strewn around – stuff he’d expect to see in a rubbish bin in Willflower, not the typical refuse scattered throughout the wastes – which meant somebody must’ve had the same idea as Prauf, once….

Ah-ha!  The cavern yawned open directly in front of him, almost hidden behind a curtain of pouring rain.  Had he not been searching, he would’ve driven right by it in the dark.  Because he was a courteous sort of guy, Prauf paused at the mouth of the cave first and hollered, “Hey, anyone in here?!”

A rumble of thunder answered him.  No responding voice, no light, not even a couple scrap rats skittering away at the noise.  His torch (which had burned bright during the disassembly phase, but was growing dim and flickering now) revealed nothing inside the cave except some more litter and quite a lot of damp rock.  At the very back, where it curved slightly to the right before abruptly terminating, he did discover a heap of sludgy moss that might’ve been a scrap rat nest once, but that too was abandoned.  This would do for the night.  Stars knew he’d slept in worse places.

Having served its final tour of duty, the torch gave up the ghost as Prauf was overturning the nest with his foot, making sure it was well and truly empty.  He smacked his torch against his palm a few times, to no avail, shrugged, and shoved it through his belt.  He didn’t really need light to eat and after that he’d just be grabbing a couple hours of sleep.  Sitting on the ground, groaning faintly as his aching body reminded him he was getting too old for scavenging solo, he took his sandwich from his bag and unwrapped it.  If only Tabbers could’ve come along… he was sick, though, and Prauf needed him to recover more than he needed whatever credits from that V-19 an extra pair of hands might’ve brought in.  Once his roba and cheese sandwich was history, Prauf stretched out his legs, laid his blaster across his lap just in case, and settled back against the wall with his eyes shut.  Time to catch a nap.  Urtz’s bike rattled and roared like nobody’s business; if someone tried to run off with it, he’d hear it start no matter how loud the storm got.

The bike’s geriatric thrusters weren’t what woke him an hour or so later.  Prauf jolted out of a light doze to the sound of voices, modulated like droid vocalizers, very close by.  He’d hardly gotten a hand on his blaster when he heard, “Over here, sir!  I think I found some cover!”

The next thing he knew, a spotlight that could’ve illuminated his entire apartment cut through the darkness of the cave, sending a brilliant white beam all the way to the back.  Not quite to the end, however.  Prauf had tucked himself away around the curve and the intruder didn’t notice him immediately, which gave him time to curl his hand over the grip of his blaster.  He leaned just far enough to see around the corner as whoever had spoken traipsed into the cavern.

Prauf’s fingers tightened on the DL-18.  He might never have met a clone trooper before, but the war was all over the holonet, and he knew that pale armor instantly.  And it wasn’t just a clone trooper interrupting his rest – a second came in behind the first, helping support a third alongside someone much larger, who wore a hooded cloak rather than armor.  A fourth trooper brought up the rear, stationed himself at the entrance.

Only once all five of them had crowded inside did the first trooper notice the armed Abednedo kneeling at the bend in the cave, watching them warily.  He froze.  So did Clone #2, though it appeared to Prauf the cloaked person merely glanced in his direction, face too shadowed to make out, before gingerly lowering the third trooper to the ground.  “Oh,” Clone #1 said, “uh.  Is this cavern taken?”

Prauf had seen battle footage of the clone army.  They might’ve been cooked up in test tubes or whatever the heck cloners did, but they were damn good soldiers.  He didn’t lower his blaster.  Clone #4 lifted his in reply, though his finger stayed well away from the trigger.  For a moment, everyone seemed to hold their breath.

And then the tall figure, who would’ve even towered over Prauf, straightened up and swept back the hood of his sodden cloak.  The four troopers’ helmet lights provided more than enough illumination for Prauf to get a good look at a species he’d not yet encountered in his forty-one years – a Lasat.  They were keeping their distance from the war, as far as he knew.  What one was doing here on Bracca, in GAR company, he wasn’t sure… the troopers, on the other hand, were definitely not a sign of anything good.  The Guild was nominally Republic-aligned, but there was a lot more pro-Separatist sentiment floating around than even Prauf was comfortable with sometimes.  “At ease, my friend,” the Lasat said calmly, swiping some rain off his face.  “I apologize for barging in.  We mean you no harm; we were caught in the storm and needed shelter to treat an injury.”

The trooper slumped on the ground was panting, his white and yellow armor painted with blood.  He gave a choked-off whimper when Clone #2 tried to lay him down flat.  “Yeah,” said Clone #1, “there’s this… karking enormous tentacle beast living underground nearby?  It started smacking at Birch, but the general managed to settle it down long enough for us to escape.”

Convinced he wasn’t in danger, even if he was awfully leery of this lot, Prauf lowered his blaster, saw Clone #4 do the same.  “That’s the Ibdis Maw,” Prauf informed them.  “The superorganism that’s colonized Bracca’s mantle.  Watch out for holes, ravines, and groundquakes, and it’s not too hard to avoid… unless it’s real hungry.”

“Are you shitting us?” Clone #1 asked skeptically.

“No.”

“I have heard rumors of such a being on Bracca,” the Lasat said, lowering himself to his knees by Birch’s head.  “It seems they are true.”

He, along with the second and fourth clones, began attempting to tend to Birch’s wounds.  They were clearly painful, but the lack of urgency suggested they were not life-threatening.  Feeling like he was intruding, somehow, Prauf sat at the back of the cave and pretended to clean his DL-18 a bit before putting it away.  Clone #1 muttered to himself about tentacle beasts, then turned to Prauf and said, “Well!  Lovely planet you’ve got here.  Guess you work for the Scrapper Guild, huh?  I’m Dom.”

Prauf’s first thought was so am I, under the right circumstances, but he kept that admission locked up in his head (and his bedroom) where it belonged.  His contorted face must’ve been a giveaway, though, because Dom laughed.  “Nah, not like that.  It’s short for –”

“Domino?”

Derailed from his storytelling, Prauf chuckles and bumps Cal with his elbow.  “Come on, don’t ruin the suspense!  Okay, you’re right, but I….”  Just one glance at Cal is enough to make Prauf trail off.  His expression is all wrong.  Prauf isn’t even certain what’s wrong with it, but the boy looks raw and hopeful and hollow and sick and desperate, all at once, somehow.  It’s an expression that’s too old for a child.  It freaks Prauf out bad enough he trips over his words trying to reassure him – “I mean – you are right – it’s not really that suspenseful, I promise.  Nothing big happens.”  Maybe this wasn’t a good idea.  “It’s okay, I don’t need to finish the story if you don’t want.  I –”

“No!” Cal interrupts.  Startled, Prauf again takes his eyes off the stretch of land ahead, and Cal looks almost normal.  Prauf might’ve been fooled entirely if the kid’s eyes weren’t a bit too shiny.  “No,” Cal repeats, quieter, “I’m fine.  I want to hear the rest of it.  Please.”

“…all right,” Prauf says slowly, nudging the speeder into a gliding curve around a freighter that’s been there so long it’s practically rusted to the rock below.  He uses it as a landmark – they’re not far from the stream, now.  “There isn’t much else to tell, honestly, but if you’re sure.”  Prauf had given Dom his name in exchange, and the rest of the introductions were made – Clone #2 was Fifty, Clone #4 was Glitz, and the Lasat was called Jaro Tapal.  He’d then just watched for a few minutes, silent, as the troopers removed their brother’s bloodied armor plates and stripped back his bodysuit to expose the shredded skin underneath.  One of them took off Birch’s helmet, too.  He looked like all the other troopers Prauf had seen in holos, but… younger, in the flesh.  Birch’s injuries were classic Bracca – abrasions and lacerations made worse by the planet’s tendency to infuse everything with scrap.  Glitz picked pieces of metal out of Birch’s chest and stomach and Fifty doused the wounds with water from a canteen.  That was the extent of their abilities, though.  From their discontented murmuring, Prauf gathered the troopers didn’t have a whole lot in the way of medical supplies on them.

He did.  He hesitated a moment, then said, “Uh.”  As Dom glanced over his shoulder, Prauf dragged his bag closer, rummaged through it until he found the little metal box.  “I’ve got a medkit, if you want.  It’s not much, but it might help.”  No matter how he might’ve felt about the Republic and the clone troopers in general, he couldn’t just sit here and listen to the guy yelp every time another shard was extracted.

“Thank you,” Tapal rumbled, prowling over on silent feet to take the kit from Prauf’s hands.  Fifty gave Prauf a nod as well and then put the tweezers and antibacterial gel to good use.  Still no painkillers, but Tapal did something strange – he knelt behind Birch’s head again, laid one large hand next to him so his fingers were just barely brushing the man’s temple.  “Breathe, Birch,” he instructed softly.  “Focus on me.  It is nearly over.”

There was a hunk of metal protruding from Birch’s hip.  The others had left that for last.  Half-wishing he could cover his ears, Prauf took a quick breath, preparing himself for an outburst of agony… yet there was none.  The faintest hint of a whimper riding Birch’s exhale, perhaps.  His face had gone slack, tranquil, eyes almost shut.  Prauf stared, stunned, as a man who’d jerked and gasped with every removed sliver didn’t so much as twitch when Fifty finally wriggled the long, ragged slice of metal free.

Until that moment, Prauf had been more preoccupied with the soldiers than the Lasat.  Wrote him off as a bigshot admiral or something who made someone’s shit-list and got sent to Bracca.  Tapal’s eyes were closed, and he breathed slowly, evenly, as though he were timing it.  His fingers were still resting against Birch’s head.  Birch looked like he’d been hypnotized.  Wait, Prauf thought.  No, it couldn’t be… could it?

Nobody else would be able to ‘settle’ the Maw unless they had a Venator-sized meal of shipwrecks in their pocket.  Tapal was a Jedi.  And, evidently, there was some lingering molecule of Prauf that remained a ten-year-old kid buying holocomics with his pocket money because he thought the Jedi were the coolest thing in the universe, since it took over for a second.  Prauf couldn’t tear his eyes away.  He never would’ve believed it if it wasn’t happening right in front of him.  An actual Jedi Knight!  Here, on Bracca!

…actually, once he pulled himself together and revisited that statement, a Jedi on Bracca was definitely not a good thing.  But he was awed nonetheless.

The troopers depleted Prauf’s roll of bandaging to cover Birch’s wounds.  As soon as Tapal broke the light contact between his hand and the clone’s head, Birch seemed to wake up, blinking blearily at the ceiling a few times before groaning a bit.  “None of that felt great,” he rasped.

Dom flicked him on the forehead.  “Suck it up, shiny.  You’re a little less shiny now.  That ought to make you happy.”

Tapal closed up the box and walked over, head nearly scraping the roof of the cavern, in order to hand it back to Prauf.  “Thank you,” he said again.  “Your help is greatly appreciated.”

“Uh, no problem,” Prauf said, pushing the medkit into his bag.  Gratitude was a precious commodity around here; he wasn’t sure what to do with someone who dispensed it so freely.  The question brewing in his head fell out of his open mouth, then – “Should I be, you know, worried the city’s about to get stormed by an army?”

Tapal gazed at him (felt like he was gazing into him, actually) and said, “That is what we are working to prevent.  Thus far, our presence in orbit seems to have deterred the Separatists from dispatching the invasion force they’re planning.”

Who’d want Bracca, Prauf wondered, but logically he knew there were an awful lot of scrappers who weren’t happy the Guild accepted that contract with the Republic.  Something had been boiling beneath the planet’s ragged surface for a while, and it wasn’t the Maw.  That said, he wasn’t too thrilled about living under the GAR’s thumb, either.  “Dunno how much worse Separatist occupation would really be,” he said, mostly to himself.

Dom had overheard him anyway and laughed.  “Pal, that’s how we can tell you’ve never lived under Separatist occupation.  ‘cause if you had, you wouldn’t be wondering.  You’d be ecstatic to see us….”

“…and I guess that’s kinda where the story ends,” Prauf says.  “I had a feeling nobody would tell me if I asked what they were actually doing on the ground.  We got a good long break in the weather and they got moving, since Birch was as patched-up as he was gonna get down here.  Heard Glitz say something about a ship, so I figure they needed to make their ride.”  He’d wanted so badly to tell Tabbers about the encounter, but restrained himself.  Despite siding with the Republic (inasmuch as it matters in these parts), Tabbers still vocally dislikes Jedi.  “So… okay, I’m not 101% sure the guy was a Jedi,” Prauf admits.  A sparse scattering of raindrops hits his face with the next gust of wind – seems they found the weather again.  “Didn’t see him do anything too weird or take out a lightsaber or anything.  But he had this… aura.  A presence, a sort of energy about him that felt like maybe it could be the Force.”  He’s never experienced it before or since.  “I think he was a Jedi,” Prauf says confidently.

“Yeah,” Cal murmurs.  He’s looking off to the west, head turned so far Prauf can’t see his face at all.  “Yeah, I think so too.”

Chapter Text

They leave their next stop with a block of wet clay the size of an Abednedish toddler.  One that’s tall for its age.  Prauf had huffed a bit when Cal needed help lifting it, but didn’t otherwise complain.  “It’ll keep you busy for a while, at least,” he’d concluded once it sat in the trailer, wiping his hands on his pants and leaving beige streaks behind.  “And next time I walk into one of your projects, it won’t injure me too much.”

Maybe not physically, Cal thinks, but if Prauf could imagine what he’s picturing for his first creation….

Actually, Cal hadn’t meant to take nearly as much as he’d ended up with.  He’d been busy already, perhaps, dwelling so deep in his thoughts he’d just carved out a chunk of clay with no attention paid whatsoever until he tried to pick it up.  Prauf met Jaro Tapal.  Prauf met Cal’s master, and Cal can never tell him.  And of all the scrappers on Bracca, numbering in the hundreds of thousands, Master Tapal met Prauf.  Did he know, innately, just as Cal had, that Prauf was good and kind and sincere when he offered help?  He must have.  Master Tapal had been an excellent judge of character.  Nobody saw the clones’ betrayal coming.

He has no idea how he made it through Prauf’s tale without crying.  The tears were there from the very beginning, burning under his eyelids as soon as he understood what the timeframe implied – only twice was a Jedi ever deployed to Bracca, and the first battle had been right at the beginning of the war, four years ago.  One year ago… Cal knew what was coming long before Prauf revealed the mysterious hooded figure was a Lasat.  He somehow kept his tears from overflowing.  Which is good, because there’s no way Prauf would believe he was crying over something else.  And if he’d pressed, Cal has a feeling he would’ve buckled and spilled the entire story right then and there, consequences be damned.

He needs to go to that cave someday.  He needs to touch the ground, the walls, the moss, let the scattered pebbles run through his fingers until he’s convinced nothing is left of Master Tapal in that accidental meeting place.  He wants there to be an echo, but there probably isn’t one.  He needs to be sure anyway.

After a year on Bracca, Cal’s gotten used to being soaked to the skin most of his waking hours (trench foot is a common ailment among scrappers), so he doesn’t give too much thought to the heavy rain until Prauf drags the speeder to a stop at the top of a hill.  The other side is a steep drop-off with a crumbling shipwreck at the bottom, but that’s not what’s concerning him.  “I dunno if I like the looks of that sky,” Prauf murmurs, feeling around his belt, then glancing at Cal.  “You still got the binocs?”

“Yeah,” Cal says, untangling the cord from his own belt.  When he stands on the seat, a wall of wind tries to kick him right off it; he plants his feet and holds up the binoculars.  The clouds are black to the south, stretching as far as the eye (or electrobinoculars) can see in either direction, illuminated piecemeal by frequent flashes of lightning.  Overhead, their own dark grey clouds rush past, hardly pausing long enough to drench them.  “That storm’s rolling in quick.”  He lowers the binoculars, hands them to Prauf.  “Do you think we can go around it?”

Prauf slowly shakes his head.  “Too big to dodge without something a helluva lot faster than this.  We’re gonna have to deal with it sooner or later – I don’t even think we can turn back around and outrun it.”  He twists in his seat.  “But we are going to turn around.  I see some cliffs just to the northeast, and we might be able to find shelter there.”

Cal doesn’t particularly want to get caught in a severe thunderstorm while he’s riding a metal speeder, so he drops onto his rear and Prauf guns the thrusters.  Tabbers is a capable mechanic, if also a chaotic one; his monstrosity snarls and accelerates instantly, slamming Cal against the back of his seat, crushing the air from his lungs.  He loves that kind of thing.  Really, it’s not fair Prauf won’t let him drive for a little while – out here, he’d see any obstacles long before he crashed into them, and he’s Force-sensitive, besides.  Fantastic reflexes.  That itty-bitty accident a few months back was just a fluke.

They course north at top speed for about ten minutes, chased by a behemoth of a storm, the cliffs swelling higher and higher as they approach, but they’re still much too far away when Prauf suddenly slows.  “What is it?” Cal asks, checking the fuel gauge.  It’s half-full yet and none of the other indicators are flashing (honestly, not that he’d expect Tabbers’s speeder to warn them it’s about to explode), so he can’t tell why Prauf’s stopping here.  They’re on a hill again and he doesn’t want to get caught in a severe thunderstorm while he’s riding a metal speeder on high ground.

“You see that?” Prauf says, with a note of excitement in his voice.  He points across the plain at a constellation of rubble.  Cal shrugs, and the Abednedo works the clutch, sending them careening downwards again and towards whatever it is he’s spotted.  Something profitable, no doubt.  Cal keeps one eye on the sky the entire way.

When they’re close enough for Cal to distinguish the escape pod from the boulders around it, his stomach shrivels into a Dressellian prune.

Prauf parks the speeder three rocks away, beneath one that has a bit of an overhang to shield them from the rain.  They’re facing the pod’s closed hatch and the downpour hides everything else, but Cal doesn’t need a good view of the rest of it to guess where it came from (besides his nightmares).  He knows a Venator-class escape pod when he sees one.  “I don’t think this is a smart idea,” he says, now pressing himself against the back of the seat like an extra centimeter of distance will cause the pod to evaporate, blinking out of existence as he jolts awake with the blanket on the floor and Raggy Bones an uncomfortable lump beneath his side.  “The weather….”

“I’ve seen you hopscotch across the hull of a Lucrehulk when it’s covered in a sheet of ice, and you’re worried about the storm all of a sudden?” Prauf says, jumping off the vehicle.  Cal just swallows and doesn’t reply.  Prauf glances from Cal to the wreck and back, and his face softens.  “Is it because it’s… listen, I know you’re kinda freaked out by escape pods.”

That’s understating it, but it’s not untrue.  “Yeah,” Cal says faintly.

“Okay.”  Prauf grabs his torch – they’re fast losing what little light they had to begin with.  “You stay with the speeder, then.  I’ll be quick.  Gimme five minutes; I just wanna see if this thing’s worth coming back to after the storm’s passed, or if we shouldn’t bother.”

There’s no talking him out of it.  Cal watches the Abednedo’s broad back grow less and less distinct through the heavy rain, blending into the hull of the escape pod.  It’s not Cal’s.  He destroyed his own pod with Master Tapal’s body inside, so this is just an unpleasant coincidence.  Unless it’s… no, he’s not going to think about that.  He won’t.

In direct contrast to his words, Prauf is in no rush as he inspects the pod.  He’s seeing credit symbols for sure.  Cal likes him – he’s basically the older brother Cal may or may not have had before he was brought to the Temple – but the man tends to tunnel-vision when it comes to cold hard creds.  After Cal’s counted off eight minutes, he decides Prauf’s grace period is up and gets out of his seat, creeps through the mud and gravel, shivering.  It’s cold, and his heart is in his throat.  “Prauf,” he says loudly, “we have to hurry, remember?”

“I’m going, I’m going.  One more minute,” Prauf says, like he hasn’t already had three more.  He wedges a screwdriver beneath the door of the exterior control panel, wriggles it, and the hinges squeak.  “There we go… see, most escape pods are designed to be opened from the outside if necessary, even when the power’s completely dead.  Which it shouldn’t be – there ought to be a backup generator.  And if I trigger this manual override….”  As he’s telling Cal things he doesn’t realize Cal already knows intimately, Prauf reaches into the panel and yanks a red latch.  There’s a ka-chunk from within the hull as its locks disengage.  The pod landed right-side-up, at a bit of an angle, and one good shove from somebody as strong as Prauf sends the hatch swinging inwards hard enough to impact the bulkhead.

The Abednedo strides inside without hesitation.  Cal’s going to throw up.  “Prauf,” he says again, shrill, shuddering, “we seriously need to go.  The weather’s getting worse.”  The blinding flashes of lightning are near-constant, rendering their torch almost superfluous.  Cal takes a step closer, than another, legs leaden.  He hates these things.  “Prauf, come on –”

Cal cuts off at a spark of pain when what feels like a small rock thumps him on the skull.  Something pings off the durasteel hull of the pod.  The boulders too are abruptly being battered, and Cal catches the next projectile before it lands in front of him – not a rock, but a blob of ice.  “Ah, shit,” he hears from inside the escape pod, and Prauf finally pokes his head out.  “Cal, get your ass in here.  It’s hailing.”

When Cal doesn’t move a muscle (except to flinch when another hailstone catches him just above the ear), Prauf walks over, one arm up to protect his face, and takes Cal’s wrist as gently as possible.  Without using the Force, there’s no way Cal can resist being tugged back towards the pod.  “I’m sorry, kid, I know you’re scared.  But we’re not gonna be able to avoid that storm now.  I vote we hunker down here until the worst of it blows over, pull all the valuables while we’re at it – what do you say?”

“I say we could have avoided that storm if you didn’t insist on stopping,” Cal mutters, but it sounds more weak and frightened than indignant and accusatory.  It’s also debatably true; they’re a good distance from the cliffs yet, the storm’s crowding in faster than either of them expected, and they may not have found shelter there anyway.  He sinks his teeth into his lower lip, sucks a deep breath through his nose, shuts his eyes, and lets Prauf guide him into the escape pod.

Nothing happens when Cal’s boots hit the deck.  Nor is he assailed by memories when his hand brushes a chilly bulkhead, either, and a little bit of relief punctures the anxiety.  Okay.  He’s okay.  Cautiously, he cracks his eyes open again, then wishes he hadn’t; all Venator-class escape pods have the same utilitarian interior design.  This one just lacks the cooling corpse of a Jedi Master on the floor.  Cal shivers hard, and then, to distract himself, says, “What about the speeder?”

Prauf’s already let go of him and is leaning on the pilot’s seat, peering at the console.  “Not a lot of options, unfortunately.  If we can find something to tether it to….”

“There’s nothing around here except rocks and this pod.”

“Pod it is, then.”  Prauf grunts and reaches into the shadowy space beneath the controls.  “The heck is this… I’ll go tie the speeder to one of the nacelles.  If it disappears, Tabbers is gonna strangle me.”

And not in the fun way, Cal thinks dizzily.  He can barely hear himself think over the hail hammering the pod.  Prauf says something else Cal can’t hear either (quite possibly just vocalizing Cal’s exact thought), then adds, “You stay put, all right?  Back in a sec.  Oh, here, catch.”  Something white comes sailing across the pod.  Cal reaches out to grab it and realizes an instant too late it’s a clone trooper helmet.

He disengages the escape pod before the other three have even sat down – behind him, there’s an oof as Lynx, caught off-balance, stumbles into the bulkhead – but he doesn’t dryly ask if anyone needs help finding their seats.  His eyes are glued to the first pod, a small grey smudge plummeting towards the larger grey smudge that is Bracca.  It carries two traitors to the Republic… well, perhaps just one, now.

“Sarge?” Shears says.

“We’re good,” he determines, checking their heading on the navicomputer.  “Strap in and prepare for impact,” he adds.  He clips his helmet (probably useless, but he’ll double-check once they make landfall) to his belt, increases their propulsion so the other pod can’t put too much distance between them.  Silver lining to this situation – the kid might not yet realize he’s being tailed.  Years of working with Jedi have taught him that even they are somewhat susceptible to the element of surprise.  “I’m pretty sure the general’s incapacitated, if not dead, but the commander’s injury wasn’t serious.  As soon as we land, Aurek, I want –”

A sudden shockwave flings all of them against their restraints and flips the pod a few times before it stabilizes.  He glances at the monitors, expecting a damage report and finding nothing.  “They’re supposed to shoot at the other pod, not us,” he grumbles, tweaking their heading, then reaching for the comms to give whoever’s on port cannons a piece of his mind, but it won’t connect.

“Chant,” Lynx says, “you see that?”  Chant glances up from the terminal and immediately finds what’s caught Lynx’s eye – a piece of metal debris almost as large as their pod, sailing past them.  It’s followed by a second, then a third.  Only when something swats the capsule and it spins three-sixty and Chant gets a glimpse behind them does he, and the rest of the squad, understand.

There is no longer an Albedo Brave for their comms to connect to.

They blew up the ship.  That’s what Tapal was doing, why he took such a strange, roundabout route to the life pods; they’d believed he was merely attempting to lure them away from his apprentice.  He must’ve made a stop at the reactor chamber.  The men had tried to keep abreast of his movements, but Jedi are cunning, and they know how to vanish in plain sight.

Chant swallows the bile in his throat.  He and his three subordinates are the only surviving members of the 13^th.  The pod is deathly quiet as the others come to the same awful conclusion – and then the silence shatters into a shriek.  “BESH!”  Chant quickly looks over his shoulder and Aurek’s already released his restraints.  “Besh!”  Aurek crashes headlong into the pod’s hatch, scrabbling frantically at the controls, but Shears is up as well, seizing him in a tight bear hug before he can expose them to space and vent their limited atmosphere.  With another ear-piercing howl, Aurek tries to thrash loose of Shears’s hold.  Lynx charges over and wedges himself in between Aurek and the control panel, and gets punched in the helmet for his trouble.

“Stand down, trooper!” Chant shouts.  Aurek, either too stubborn or too distressed to listen, does nothing of the sort, so Chant surges to his feet and stalks across the pod and grabs Aurek’s helmet in both hands.  Staring him dead in the eyes through the visor, he growls, “Take.  Your.  Seat.  That is an order, Aurek!”

Aurek doesn’t comply.  He does, however, only jerk weakly against Shears’s grip a few more times, then slump like his knees have buckled.  Limp-limbed, he no longer resists while Shears and Lynx guide him back to his seat and strap him in again.  Lynx and Chant also return to their seats while Shears stays close to Aurek, a hand on his shoulder in case he gets his second wind.  Chant has a feeling he won’t.  There are some losses a man can’t grit his teeth through.  Aurek is a tube-twin, half of the only set the longnecks didn’t separate into two jars due to some misplaced sense of scientific curiosity.  Chant never separates them either.  Nor did the general, until today.

While he sympathizes, this is not the time.  Captain Miles instructed them to take another pod and follow, keep track of the commander and, if necessary, the general (Chant should stop thinking of him as the general; all the Jedi have been stripped of their ranks).  Make sure they didn’t go to ground before the rest of the troops could shuttle down to Bracca.  Then they would finish carrying out their orders.  But… they no longer have backup.  At all.

Everyone Chant’s ever cared about, besides this lot, is dead.  Scratch, who’s been his best friend since they shipped out.  The other two members of his usual squad, who weren’t fast enough to beat Shears and Lynx into the pod.  Iceblock, the wide-eyed little shiny Chant’s kind of been mentoring along because that kid has serious leadership potential someday.  Everyone.

Well.  If he couldn’t genuinely sympathize with Aurek before, now he can.  The dense foam of the seat cushion warps beneath Chant’s fingers; he clutches it like a life preserver so he doesn’t reach for something more dangerous, like a bulkhead to fracture his knuckles upon.  Apparently it wasn’t enough for the Jedi to betray the Republic.  They had to massacre an entire battalion of clones, too.  Chant was not inclined towards mercy to begin with (his orders don’t include mercy), even if Kestis is only twelve years old, and any shred of compassion he might have managed has been obliterated alongside the Brave.  He’s no Jedi; he doesn’t need to temper his negative emotions.  He won’t mind seeing the life leave the boy’s eyes.

The hull temperature climbs as they enter Bracca’s soggy atmosphere, and Chant activates the repulsorlifts so they don’t decorate the pod’s interior on impact.  “Been blown a little off-course by the explosion,” he mutters, watching their descent.

“How much?” Shears asks.

“Not enough to significantly alter our trajectory.”

“Good,” Aurek says, ragged and rasping, like he’s crying behind the privacy of his helmet.  Chant wouldn’t blame him.  “I’m gonna tear that little bastard limb from limb.”

“No,” Chant says firmly.  The pod lands hard enough to rattle his bones, sending up a torrent of mud and scree; Shears grunts and Aurek makes a pained noise, either in response to Chant or because he’s got a few bruised ribs left over from their last campaign.  “None of us are getting that close to him, if we can help it.  Tapal was the more dangerous of the two, but we all know the kid’s far from helpless.”  They’re more likely to survive the engagement if they can snipe him with a blaster bolt from afar.  It worked on Tapal.  “First things first – get our bearings, fan out, and determine where that other pod landed.”

Lynx stands up, stretching, as if they’re just going for some casual recon and not on a mission to kill a Jedi traitor.  “And then?”

Chant allows himself a grim, vicious smile, removing his helmet from his belt.  “And then, boys, it’s time to go hunting… we’ve got a lot of brothers to avenge tonight.”

The sergeant slips away, gathering his remains (one single memory, that’s all) back into a damaged helmet that falls to the deck, not that Cal’s paying a whit of attention to it.  He has more important matters at hand.  Escape pods are outfitted with self-destruct protocols.  He knows how to activate them because he was taught, years ago, peering over Captain Spark’s shoulder as Spark explained the process Master Tapal had told Cal to memorize.  “It’s a tad more complicated than a simple switch or button push,” Spark had said.  “Don’t want anyone setting it off by mistake.  Watch, I’ll show you again –”

Numb, Cal runs through the sequence.  He’s landed in a barren wasteland.  Even in the unlikely event he could gather enough flammable material from the many shipwrecks littering the landscape, the rain would probably prevent it from igniting.  There is no possible way to build a pyre for Master Tapal.  He has only this one choice… and, from a practical standpoint, destroying the escape pod will also eliminate any evidence he made it from the Albedo Brave to Bracca.  It’s what his master, practical and unsentimental to the last, would command Cal to do if he had any say in the situation.

Every light on the console flashes red, indicating the countdown has begun.  “Thirty seconds,” Spark had warned him, “so do not dawdle.  Make sure you’re ready beforehand.”  Obediently, perhaps on autopilot, Cal has done so already; all the pod’s supplies have been moved a safe distance away.  The last thing left to move is Cal himself, and he lingers, clutching his master’s lightsaber to his chest, crouching next to the Lasat’s crumpled body.

He does not have to move.  He could stay and let the self-destruct eradicate them both.

Cal’s vision blurs over, and he touches Master Tapal’s hand – the hand that held his the day Cal boarded the Brave and was still too shy to be comfortable with hundreds of clone troopers gawking at him, the hand that guided him through lightsaber forms, the hand that stroked his hair when he had nightmares – one final time.  “I’m sorry,” he whispers.  It will never feel like enough, but it’s all he has.  He leaps to his feet, then, and rabbits out of the escape pod, running towards the shallow dip in the ground where he stashed everything.

He makes it almost all the way before the pod explodes.  The concussion slaps him off his feet, and Cal crashes to his knees and huddles there, vision obscured with rain and tears, a wracking sob bubbling up from somewhere deep inside him.  He doesn’t know what to do now.  Nobody ever trained him for anything like this.  Or perhaps they did – involuntarily, he recalls Master Tapal running escape drills.  He doubts his master designed them with the suspicion the troopers would one day attempt to kill them (and succeed, partially), but Cal was prepared.  If only he’d not balked at the most crucial moment.  Then Master Tapal would be here with him, firmly telling Cal to get on his feet, wipe his eyes, and think.

He’s been given clear instructions.  Hold the line, wait for the Council’s signal, and, when it comes, find a way to contact the Temple.  Or should he try to contact them sooner?  Tell them what happened, warn them – Master Tapal had seemed certain theirs was not the only battalion that’d abruptly turned on the Jedi.  There’s nothing resembling civilization around here, so Cal can suck it up and cry like a baby later.  It would help had he been to Bracca before, but his master didn’t allow it, afraid the situation was unstable and the Separatists could invade at any moment.  Master Tapal also said there isn’t a whole lot on Bracca to begin with.  Only one city; on the rare occasions the cloud cover parted, Cal had seen the web of lights from the Albedo Brave.

Gritting his teeth, Cal gets on his feet and wipes his eyes, not that that has much effect in the soaking rain, and turns in a circle.  There’s absolutely no hint on the horizon to which direction he should go.  He should’ve paid more attention while the escape pod was coming in, but he spent the trip bawling and freaking out, instead….

As he’s berating himself, the back of his neck starts to prickle, like someone’s watching him.  Too late, he realizes the plume of thick black smoke winding into the sky from the destroyed escape pod might be drawing attention.  Bracca’s mostly scrappers, Cal thinks, standing very still, watching for movement.  Would they harm him?

The sound of a blaster firing says yes.

Just in time, he gets Master Tapal’s lightsaber lit and lifted to block the bolt aimed at his skull, and it rebounds into a rock.  Unfortunately, he can see exactly where it originated.  Tall, bipedal, white armor with yellow detailing to indicate affiliation, a familiar face unconcealed by a helmet.  Cal freezes and it’s sheer luck (or possibly poor visibility in the rain) the second shot misses his head by about two centimeters.  There’s no way anyone could’ve survived the Brave’s destruction – unless they were quick enough to flee the same way Cal did –

More shots streak towards him.  Then more, and then more, and Cal runs and throws himself behind a sheet of metal pockmarked with rust.  Bolts came from four different angles, so four clones total, he guesses.  For a moment, he is paralyzed with terror.  They want him dead.  They’ve got him here with minimal cover, nothing but rocks and debris and ships so deteriorated they’re practically transparent, and nobody is coming to help him.  Master Tapal died helping him.  The time between a blaster discharging and the bolt fizzing against his cover is rapidly growing shorter; the clones are closing the distance.  He has only a half-broken lightsaber and the Force.

Deciding he really should’ve blown himself up when he had the chance, Cal leaps out of hiding, catching the closest trooper off-guard.  The clone fires.  With a sweep of the lightsaber, crackling as the raindrops evaporate against the glowing blue blade, Cal banks the bolt straight back at its shooter.  It burns a hole in the trooper’s chestplate.  He knows that piece of armor – it’s Shears, so named because of the deep furrow in his chestplate from that time an attacker with pruning clippers, of all things, attempted to kill him.

They were unsuccessful, but Cal is not.  Shears staggers back a few steps.  Facing a barrage, Cal doesn’t watch him fall, though he does feel a sudden, sucking emptiness in the Force as Shears dies.  He’s not dumb enough to stand here and let them take pot-shots, so he races to a boulder, ducks behind it, catches his breath, runs to another like he’s going to take cover again, then keeps going, making it as difficult as possible to predict his movements.  Most of the following shots are poorly-aimed and easily avoided without using the lightsaber.  One, however, he doesn’t anticipate in time; it skims against his ribs, leaving a trail of fire behind to match the burns smoldering on his face and… hand?  Before now, he didn’t even notice the same shot that ripped his own lightsaber from his grip raised blisters across the back of his hand.  He manages to crash back into cover, breath stolen by pain.

Three clones left.  Their strategy, thus far, has amounted to ‘single-minded pursuit, shooting whenever Cal’s in sight’.  Unsophisticated, but he knows it’ll work sooner or later.  Still gasping, he pushes back up into a crouch, tightening his grip on Master Tapal’s lightsaber, readying himself for another sprint.  The ground beneath his feet shifts, quivers.  There’s a metallic groan behind him.  Cal risks a peek around the rock, sees the precariously-perched skeleton of a shuttle creaking and swaying, yanks his head back before he gets another burn.

Wait – wait – now!

The Force-pull feels like something is pulling on Cal, yanking his bones in directions they aren’t supposed to move.  He hears a screech of metal against rock, and the shuttle tips over, lands exactly where he meant it to – atop another clone trooper.  He’s not sure who it was and, at this very moment, doesn’t care.  Two left.

When he tries to stand, his insides turn to liquid.  He slumps again, panting, dizzy, his last meal sloshing in his belly.  Using the Force shouldn’t take this much of a toll on him… maybe everything’s adding up, or the buzz of the groundquake is messing with his inner ear.  But he can’t get up.  He feels the last two clone troopers approaching, somewhat more cautious now that half the squad’s gone, guided by a constrained rage that looks bright purple and makes Cal’s throat hurt.  Sergeant Chant, he knows, and either Aurek or Besh.  Without digging deeper into the Force, he can’t quite tell.  If he had to guess, Aurek; he has softer edges, has always been quieter than his twin.

Cal summons his last burst of courage and stands one more time, locking his shaking knees, lightsaber ready.  He’ll die on his feet, like Master Tapal.  Chant and Aurek, perhaps ten meters away, pause, raise their blasters, aim.

They had taken care of him once while he was sick, Cal thinks.  Do they remember?

And then the rocky ground behind the two troopers erupts.

Cal falls on his butt.  Chant and Aurek both whip around.  Something emerges from the brand-new hole, some kind of massive tendril four times an escape pod in diameter, accompanied by eight or ten flying creatures that take to the sky in a chorus of warbling screeches.  The tentacle arches upwards, then comes down again, slaps Chant into a crumpled LAAT/i so hard it almost flips over.  Chant is gone in a heartbeat.

Scrambling to his feet and running like a squirrel seems to be the best possible course of action in this scenario.  Cal does exactly that, well aware Aurek is right on his heels, but for the moment they are united in their desperate desire to escape whatever the hell that is.  He chances a glance back and sees the hole widening, great sheets of rock disintegrating as the tentacle flails and smashes and terraforms.  It doesn’t actually seem to give a damn about either of them.  It’s long enough to reach and squash them both into paste if it so desired.  They’ve still got the problem of the land behind them just disappearing, though, and so they run, animosity forgotten.

Cal makes it.  He looks back again and the tendril is finally retracting into the planet’s crust, and there is solid, motionless ground underneath him when he trips and cannot find the energy to rise again.  Aurek’s not quite so lucky – he fell behind seconds earlier, grabbing at his side, and now he’s clinging to the precipice, scrabbling wildly for a handhold, slowly sliding into the depths.  Without thinking (because he never would have before), Cal stretches out a hand and extracts Aurek from the hole in one jerky motion, sends him sliding headfirst by Cal’s feet.  Not his best work.  His brain throbs with the effort.

He’s not even had a chance to catch his breath when Aurek surges forwards.  The clone locks his empty hands around Cal’s throat.  Suddenly unable to inhale, Cal kicks out, misses, instinctively tries to pry Aurek’s hands away, fails, panics.  “Why did you do it?” Aurek demands, grip tightening.  “Why did you kill them all?!”

“Cal!”

“Why did you kill Besh?!”  Cal’s never heard Aurek – or any clone, really – sound so enraged before.  He sounds like he’s sobbing, too.  He heaves Cal up a few inches, gives him a brutal shake, and slams his head back into the rocks.  Cal’s vision fractures and darkens.

“CAL!”

His lungs are searing.  He can’t breathe.  The Force slips through his fingers like he’s trying to hold water; there’s something wrong with it, with him, with them both.  Aurek squeezes even harder –

“CAL!”

He blinks rainwater out of his eyes.  It’s swiftly replaced by more.  Starved for air, he opens his mouth to gasp, but his lungs are already full – he exhales, instead, realizing the crushing pressure around his throat is gone.  Aurek, too, has vanished.  The person sprawled atop him is an Abednedo, staring down at him with eyes full of alarm, silhouetted against a clouded, dark, almost green-tinted sky.

“Prauf?” Cal says, bewildered.

Sighing, Prauf relaxes slightly, though he’s got Cal’s right arm in a death grip and keeps it pinned firmly against the ground.  There’s something in Cal’s hand.  He glances over and sees the blade of a knife protruding from his closed fist.  “Yeah, kid, it’s me.  What in the universe is going on with you….”

Cal’s stomach sluices into his throat.  He hates being held down.  “Get off of me,” he says faintly.

“Only if you promise you’re not gonna try stabbing me again,” Prauf says.  There are several thin, bleeding scratches on his face and neck.  He wipes at the worst cut impatiently as it dribbles blood down his collar and backs off, kneeling in front of Cal.

Cal promptly rolls onto his side and throws up until he has nothing left.

Chapter Text

Since acquiring a little Human roommate, Prauf’s adjusted to living in a state of low-key concern at all times.  Years of exposure had already rendered him immune to Tabbers’s quirks.  Actually, cohabitating with the Kaleesh might’ve been good preparation for Cal’s tenancy, since there’s often a bizarre level of overlap between Tabbers’s quirks and Cal’s quirks.  And Prauf should really call those what they are – trauma responses.  He doesn’t ask questions, just remembers what he should and shouldn’t do and tries to be a steady port in two tumultuous lives.  He continues to worry, however, because a kid Cal’s age shouldn’t have war-veteran reflexes, or go bone-white every shift they’re stuck scrapping an escape pod, or wake up shrieking half the time.  Tabbers got mad about that last one once, bitched for a while, and finally Prauf had enough of listening.  “Oh, get over it,” he’d huffed.  “You don’t karking sleep unless I make you, anyway.”

“That’s not the point!  Do you have any idea what I think’s happening when I wake up ‘cause someone else is screaming like that?!”

Prauf didn’t.  He knew he wouldn’t get a straight answer if he asked, either.  “You used to do the same thing,” he said.  “Nightly.  For years.  You still wake me up every few weeks.”

“I was –” Tabbers began hotly, but then cut himself off and said nothing more until they headed off to work.  Prauf almost wishes he’d pushed.  Tabbers will not talk about his life before he showed up on Bracca… there’s another thing he and Cal have in common.

So Prauf doesn’t know where Tabbers got the myriad scars any more than he knows why Cal has some kind of escape pod phobia.  That phobia doesn’t explain Cal’s frankly bewildering behavior over the past couple of minutes, though.  Maybe that seizure or whatever it was back there scrambled his brain like a nuna egg.  Right after Prauf tossed him the clone helmet, Cal began shaking like a leaf, eyes wide and staring, pale, unresponsive.  Prauf had seen that happen before.  He’d always been okay once it ended, so Prauf took the torch outside to deal with the speeder, sacrificed a jumper cable (and likely the scrap it was anchoring), tied the vehicle to the escape pod, went back in… and found Cal prodding aimlessly at the buttons on the console like he’d forgotten there was no power.  Before Prauf could ask what he was doing, Cal turned around, walked through the hatch.  Prauf had seen that happen as well, the post-seizure confusion, so he quickly followed the boy and reached for his shoulder.  “Hey, Cal, come on – dunno where you are right now, but it’s not safe out here.  Let’s get you back –”

His hand landed on Cal’s shoulder.  Cal jerked away and ran.

Prauf really had no choice except to pursue him.  Not only was the storm battering them both with hail and nearly blowing this skinny kid off his feet, he could be headed straight for a gorge they wouldn’t see until it was too late.  Of course, Cal was fast when he wanted to be.  Cursing, Prauf sprinted after him, prayed they’d be able to find the escape pod again when all was said and done, almost got bludgeoned by a hailstone the size of his head, put on one more burst of speed once he was close enough, and tackled Cal at the knees.  Cal absolutely flipped out.  And Prauf had seen that too, but from a different source, and while a panicked Tabbers sometimes reacted to being touched with mindless screaming and extremely mindful violence, he’d never lost his head to the point he tried to shove a blade into Prauf’s throat.

Spirits help him, Prauf actually needed to pin the kid to the ground to keep him from running any further.  Cal hadn’t pulled a knife until that point.  What if he was remembering what’d happened at the dorms?

Very, very tentatively, he lays a hand on Cal’s shoulder again.  Cal doesn’t freak, just finishes spewing curry all over the wastes, heaves for air, groans, and cracks his eyes open.  “Okay,” Prauf says, as quietly as he can while still being audible over the unending thunder.  “You’re okay.”  He helps him sit up, pulls Cal’s hood over his head as if that’ll do anything to protect him from the hail, gently takes the knife out of limp fingers.  He looks very small and young.  Prauf almost tucks the blade back into the sheath in Cal’s pocket, then thinks better of it.  It wasn’t safe to arm Tabbers after he’d had some kind of episode, even if the Kaleesh was more of a danger to himself than to Prauf at those times.  Cal might be the same way.  The knife goes on Prauf’s belt instead.  “I’m sorry.  I didn’t mean to scare you.  You back with me, now?”

“Yeah,” Cal murmurs.  He shakes his head, looks around, flinches at an earsplitting crack of thunder.  At least he’s aware of his surroundings.  They’ve gotten much further from the pod than Prauf’s comfortable with – he must’ve disturbed a dozen core-crawlers while he chased Cal, which means the Maw’s likely close to the surface in these parts, and he doesn’t want to be dinner.

Stars, this road trip is the worst idea he’s had since he got wasted and decided a second tattoo would be swell.  It’s kriffing ultraviolet ink, so he couldn’t even tell once he’d sobered up what sort of embarrassing thing it might be, and he’s too afraid to ask.  “Can you stand up?”

“Yeah,” Cal says again, and does so, only wavering slightly once he’s on his feet.

“Let’s go, then,” Prauf says, careful not to loom over the kid too much just in case that makes him nervous.  It’s the sky making Prauf nervous – hung low with dark clouds, dumping hail onto their heads, almost green in hue.  Something about that nags at the back of his mind, something he knew long ago and has since forgotten, but it seems unimportant while he’s trying to guide Cal back to the escape pod.  Cal looks up at Prauf and his lips move, and the words get lost in all the noise.  The thunder is so frequent there’s no longer any pause between each clap.  Which is weird, Prauf thinks, seeing the cluster of boulders that marks the pod’s landing zone and feeling a rush of relief.  What he’s not seeing is anywhere near enough lightning to cause all this ruckus.

“Prauf!”  Cal’s palm strikes Prauf’s side.  He pauses and glances down into the white little face.  “Look at the core-crawlers.”

Prauf turns in the direction Cal points.  Six or seven of the nasty beasts have gathered around a crack in the ground, giving their piercing, rattling cries; before his eyes, more core-crawlers drop down and join the lot in a flurry of leathery wings, and they begin wriggling into the fissure one by one.  Odd behavior.  Like they’re fleeing from something, think they’ll be protected underground.

…that’s not thunder at all, is it?

Prauf turns again to face the storm and his stomach gives a lurch.  What looks like a wall of dust and debris is bearing down on them, towering, shapeless, almost definitely cloaking a funnel cloud.  “Oh, shit,” he says faintly.  It’s been years since he experienced a tornado, and he was in the shipbreaking yard at the time, with abundant cover that was too heavily to be flung off its landing gear.  Everyone just sheltered in whatever they were working on and hoped for the best.  A few unfortunate scrappers got blown into the Maw, but it wasn’t a strong tornado and mostly it just left a mess in its wake.  Best-case scenario, really.  This is shaping up to be the exact opposite.

Another glance at Cal and he’s frozen, staring at the oncoming cloud, mouth slightly open.  No time to make for the cliffs and hope there’s a convenient cave that’ll withstand the wind.  Now Prauf’s kicking himself for stopping to check out the pod.  It’d seemed like such a good idea when they were only facing a deafening thunderstorm.  “Get back in the escape pod!” Prauf orders.

Cal doesn’t move.  Prauf swears (that tone works so much better on Tabbers), grabs the boy by both shoulders, leans down so Cal can’t see anything but his face and gives him a bit of a shake.  “Cal!  We need to get in the pod!”  He knows Cal’s afraid of them, but they don’t have time for this –

Luckily, the get your ass moving before we both die voice gets through where you’re gonna do what I say and you’re gonna like it didn’t.  Cal kicks into high gear and starts sprinting towards the boulders.  Prauf is right behind him, watching the tornado barrel closer.  It’s a behemoth.  Hell, maybe the escape pod was a good idea; it’s built to withstand impacts that are probably equivalent to what the storm’s about to deal them.  He looks forwards again in time to see Cal’s boot slip on the layer of hail icing the ground.  Cal starts to topple and Prauf’s hand shoots out of its own accord and snags the fluttering edge of his poncho.  He doesn’t give the kid a chance to regain his footing, just flings Cal over his shoulder, puts his head down, and runs like his life depends on it.

They make it with time to spare.  Saved again by the scrapper physique – Prauf’s a big guy, but he’s been working manual labor for over twenty years, he gets some extracurricular exercise, and his legs eat distances for breakfast.  He charges through the open hatch of the escape pod and dumps Cal into a seat.  “Buckle up,” Prauf shouts over the roaring wind.  Once again, Cal doesn’t move.  This time, though, it’s because he’s gone rigid, limbs twitching, bug-eyes fixed on some invisible point in space.  “Kriff.”  This looks even more like a seizure than the last one.  Prauf’s beginning to think the boy’s epileptic and just keeping that under his poncho for some reason.  He straps Cal in and runs back to the hatch.  The hail’s now flying parallel to the ground as Prauf grits his teeth and tries to shut the door, fighting both the weight and the gradual roll of the entire pod as the wind catches it.

As soon as the hatch squeaks shut, he triggers the door locks.  If Cal wakes up and tries to pull another disappearing act, he’s not getting far.  Staggering across the tilted deck, Prauf grabs for the pilot’s chair – currently sticking out at a 45º angle – and braces his feet against the console so he can sit down.

He has one restraint buckled across his chest when the tornado hits.  The entire pod does a backflip and the other strap goes whipping out of his hand, its end smacking into the backside of the chair.  “Shit, shit –”  Rattled, shoulder aching from the jolt, on the verge of invoking some of the old Abednedish gods for help, he slaps at the controls to trigger the pod’s backup generator.  It activates.  Maybe those old gods are paying attention.  The propulsion systems sputter to life, start chugging weakly with the limited power they’re supplied.  Prauf triggers the autopilot in hopes it’ll land them if this thing goes for a ride.  Probably the best chance they have to survive, as long as they don’t hit anything too flammable in the process.

Hand hovering over his pocket, Prauf hesitates.  These are dangerous conditions.  Nobody else should be exposed to them, unless it’s absolutely necessary….

He hits the button on his emergency beacon anyway.  He may end up real glad he went back for it at the last second.  And then the escape pod goes rocketing into one of those boulders it managed to avoid the first time it landed, smashing into solid rock so hard the viewport cracks, and Prauf – still only half-restrained – gets flung too far forwards much too fast.  His head bashes against the console.  There’s a burst of light behind his eyelids.  After that, there is nothing.

No amount of meditation could ever have prepared Cal for the all-consuming inferno of hatred in this echo.  Even if, on some level, Aurek was aware Cal was not actually the one responsible for the detonation of the Albedo Brave, he would never forgive either of the Jedi for killing his twin.  He needed Cal to die for it.  And at the very last second before losing consciousness, Cal instead jammed the multitool blade from the pod’s emergency kit up under the edge of Aurek’s helmet, piercing through the weak seam between bodysuit and armor, and punctured his carotid artery.

Cal is sobbing dryly when he shudders out of the echo, nauseous and overwhelmed, head pounding with the seeds of a psychometry headache and the lingering burn of Aurek’s fury.  He opens his eyes to see what’s going on in reality and very nearly wishes he’d stayed in the clone’s memory.  For a second, he’s in his own memory – another escape pod, another seat he clung to as the vessel descended through Bracca’s atmosphere, another boneless, unresponsive companion.  The G-forces had glued Cal into his chair and, thankfully, Master Tapal’s body to the hatch, keeping him from flying around.  When they landed, however, Cal couldn’t catch him in time, and the Lasat slammed into the viewport with an awful crunching sound… at least he was unable to feel any of those broken bones.

Speaking of broken bones, Cal’s pretty sure he lost a couple of ribs at some point.  No idea when or how, but he inhales, the restraints hold tight, and a spot on the lower right side of his chest hurts so badly he chokes.  He can’t hunch over, so he draws his knees up and sinks his sweaty forehead onto them, fighting the dizziness.  His head swoops.  The pod tips.  There’s a thump and Cal looks up again.

It’s not Master Tapal in the escape pod with him, this time.  It’s Prauf, sitting in the pilot’s seat, and the thump was one or both of his legs striking the console.  Briefly, Cal thinks the pod is rolling across the ground – the world beyond the viewport is a churning grey maelstrom – but they’re rotating in every direction like a gyroscope.  No wonder he’s nauseated.  He puts his feet back on the deck so he feels a little more stable, watches something go streaking past the pod too fast to distinguish, and thinks, oh, right, the tornado.

The concept of being inside an escape pod that’s caught up in a raging tornado should probably frighten him more than it does.  This little durasteel capsule survived a plunge from the Albedo Brave, through Bracca’s atmosphere, and into the rock-strewn wastelands, though, so it’s a lot more likely to endure than a fragile Human body.  Prauf must’ve gotten the power back on, too, because Cal can hear the thrusters whining as they try to cope with the conditions they’ve been handed.  He does cower before the concept of being in an escape pod, but even he’ll admit this is the best place for them right now.  Clutching at his restraints, Cal fights another round of vomiting and squeezes his eyes shut.  He almost loses the battle of wills against his stomach when the pod barrel-rolls, but another thump snags his attention and he opens his eyes again.  “Prauf, what are you –”

Even if Prauf could’ve heard him over the screaming of the wind, he probably wouldn’t have.  He flops, and Cal realizes (with a sickening jolt in his stomach that has nothing to do with the weather) the Abednedo isn’t sitting in the seat so much as he’s loosely trapped there, one restraint hooked around his left shoulder.  The second strap is flapping around wildly.  The pod wheels; Prauf lurches to one side, then the other, head lolling.

So much for staying put and hoping for the best, Cal thinks grimly.  He hooks a finger around the release for his own restraints and waits.

There’s a moment when the escape pod stops tumbling like the galaxy’s shittiest carnival ride.  Cal seizes it – he pulls the release, yanks his arms free, and launches himself across the deck, paying no mind to the knife between his ribs.  He stumbles as the pod shudders and plunges several feet before getting caught up again.  Either Prauf’s unbuckled restraint swings in his direction at exactly the right time or Cal unconsciously uses the Force, because it slaps into his outstretched palm.  He grabs the back of the pilot’s chair and swings into Prauf’s lap.  Normally, Cal wouldn’t be enough to weigh him down (he’s about forty-four kilograms soaking wet), but gravity comes in with the assist and Prauf’s unconscious form stays put long enough for Cal to secure the other strap.

With that taken care of, he twists around to face the controls and sees the propulsion and autopilot are active.  Both systems are confused as hell.  While the navicomputer might help with that, he also sees they’re running on severely limited power.  Evidently the atmosphere generator activated automatically upon starting the generator.  They don’t need it so long as the storm doesn’t chuck them into orbit.  Panting, incapable of taking a full breath without agony, Cal diverts electricity from illumination and life support into the stabilizers.  The lights wink out.  The pod is still helpless – he gets the impression they’re circling around and around the center of the storm – but it almost holds steady, now.  Cal braces his elbows on the console and puts his head in his hands for a minute, breathing sharp and shallow, wondering if making a break for the medkit would be unwise.

Before he commits to a decision, something crashes into the side of the escape pod.  Prauf is still restrained safely, but Cal isn’t – he’s sent flying off Prauf’s lap.  Not headfirst, thankfully, but he tumbles to the floor and his left foot jams into the corner where the control console meets the deck.  His ankle flexes at an angle definitely not intended by the manufacturer.  There goes the warranty, Cal thinks woozily, because it’s that or scream as another acid-burn embrace of pain cozies up to him, this time settling in his foot, his ankle, his shin.  His breath comes out as a sob.  He drags his leg up and hugs it and hunches there on the deck, trying not to whimper.

Just to add insult to injury, the backup generator runs out of juice right then and there.

Cal’s stomach drops out.  They’re falling.  Escape pods are designed to fall, but they’re also designed to slow down so they don’t land at terminal velocity, and the system which handles that has gone offline.  He lets himself whimper now, his ribs going straight for the lungs as he hauls himself upright and balances on one foot.  Attempting to restart the generator does nothing.  They are powerless in every sense of the word.

Well.  Not every sense, perhaps.

Using the Force doesn’t feel natural and comfortable anymore.  It’s like biting funny so his teeth don’t fit together correctly, bending a joint just a little too far, trying to stuff a round peg into a square hole.  He is desperate, though, and the only other person around to stand witness is unconscious (hopefully not comatose, hopefully not dead), and what choice does he have?  Once again, Cal does what he has to in order to survive.  The Force itself is no longer natural and comfortable either, instead reaching him jagged-edged and bitter.  And he’s doing it wrong – lifting with his back, not his knees – something part of him yet not goes pop out of place and his nose floods, starts dribbling blood over his lips.  He neither pushes nor pulls, cocooning the Force around the pod, trying to slow their descent.  He’s never done this before and has no idea if it’s working.

Out of practice and only a thirteen-year-old Padawan to begin with, Cal cannot hold on for long.  But just as his grip begins to weaken and the headache pulsing in his temples becomes an armed threat, the pod bumps into something solid.  Bumps, not crashes or slaps or slams.  He’s done it right.  Bit by bit, the shrieking winds are quieting, that something solid holding the vessel steady as the tornado moves on without them.

The pod sighs to the ground and lands on its side with a gentle thud.  Cal lets go.  He promptly copies the pod, folding until his butt meets the deck, then tipping over and squishing his eyes closed until everything stops turning.  His nose is gushing.  He’d also like to die a little because his side and his leg hurt so badly, but he clenches his jaw and makes himself get back up anyway as soon as possible.

The pilot’s chair is extending perpendicular to the deck where Cal’s standing, which is actually the bulkhead.  Prauf’s dangling in the straps and doesn’t appear to have made any attempt to extricate himself.  He’s not yet awake, and a gash right between his eyes is steadily leaking blood a bit more maroon than Cal’s, but he groans faintly and his eyelids flutter when Cal shakes him.  Hopefully he’s coming around.  Cal pinches his nose shut, looks around the pod, takes one hobbling step towards the med locker, and his foot hits something.

It’s Chant’s helmet.  Cal forgot it was here.  He can see now the sergeant was correct in thinking it useless; the visor is scorched and melted as if a blaster bolt skimmed across it.  Must’ve barely avoided one of the shots Master Tapal deflected.  It didn’t hurt him, but it obscured his vision, so he dropped it here when he and the others went in pursuit of the traitor.  Cal wants to kick it and hug it at the same time.  He doesn’t do either, trying to get a good look out the filthy viewport.  The tornado has left them behind with nothing but rain.

“Urrghhh.”  Prauf lifts his head groggily, blinking.  “Wha….”  He doesn’t appear to realize he’s sitting at an angle.  Before Cal can warn him, his uncoordinated fumbling at the restraints yields results – they retract with a snap and the Abednedo plummets to the bulkhead currently serving as the pod’s deck.  Groaning again, he rubs at his head, clumsily rolls onto his belly and pushes up until he’s kneeling.  He sways and Cal puts a hand on his shoulder to steady him – and also to brace himself, since his left leg is no longer interested in supporting his weight.  “Cal?” Prauf says, blinking some more.  “What happened?  Where are we?”

“Still in the escape pod,” Cal says, muffled and nasal since he’s got his nose blocked.  “There was a tornado coming, remember?  We got caught up in it for a minute, but we’re back on the ground.”

“…I remember a storm.  And getting you into the pod… we’re still in it?”

“Yeah.”

“You hurt?”

Cal shrugs.  “Nothing life-threatening.”

Prauf presses a palm to his forehead and regards it curiously when it comes away covered in blood.  “Hey, I’m bleeding.  What happened to us?”

Typical concussion, Cal thinks.  They survived the tornado, but they’re still in a bit of a pickle.  He’s not sure how much walking he’ll be able to do, Prauf shouldn’t do much walking while he’s got a head injury, the weather’s still awful even if it’s improved, he has no idea where they might’ve landed, he doesn’t think he can get the hatch open by himself… and he’s not wild about hanging out in any escape pod, much less this one.

Sighing (and cringing at the spike of pain it brings), he shuts his eyes for a moment.  He has to suck it up and see what he can do about his leg.  If Prauf can open the door, Cal can take a look around.  For now – again – it’s unfortunately safest to stay with the escape pod.

On the bright side, when he limps over to the locker and retrieves the medkit, he finds the clone troopers never took so much as a single bandage.  Not the most well-equipped medkit in the galaxy, but they’ll manage.  Cal shakes two painkiller capsules out of the bottle and swallows them dry, saving the hypospray for Prauf since the guy’s pretty loopy.  “Where are we?” he asks while Cal discharges the hypo into Prauf’s neck.  “This is an escape pod.  We get stuck scrapping this thing?”

“No, we found it in the wastes,” Cal says patiently.  “We were… sort of on a trip.”

The hypospray smooths some of the lines in Prauf’s pinched face.  “Really?  I can’t remember where we were going.”

Repetitive questioning and amnesia are normal with a head injury.  Prauf’s not displaying any seriously worrying symptoms (for Humans, at least; Cal has no idea about Abednedos), so he tries not to stress too much about it.  Of course, then Prauf lights up and practically jumps to his feet – practically falls over, too – and looks around the pod with a calculating expression.  “This one’s in good shape!” he announces, thumping a hand against the bulkhead, which is the deck.  “Sorry, kid, I know you hate these, but we might’ve found a real jackpot here!”

“Please sit back down,” Cal begs.  “You’re hurt, you need to rest… we’re going to have to camp here for the night anyway.  You can start running the numbers in the morning.”

Prauf either ignores him or he’s too concussed to think straight, because he doesn’t sit back down.  He doesn’t fall, though, so after a minute of nervously watching him inspect the pod’s interior, Cal sighs and checks the progress on his bloody nose.  “Look, if you’re not gonna listen, could you maybe try to open the hatch?”

“Aren’t the controls working?  What’s wrong with them?”

“We ran out of power.  It’ll have to be manual.  The pod’s sideways, so it’s going to open upwards and I definitely can’t lift it.”

The Abednedo gets as far as reaching for the manual override before he hisses suddenly, his right arm jerking, grabbing at it with his other hand.  “Shit – ah, kark, I think my shoulder’s out.”

Given that was the only part of his body secured to the seat for a while, this isn’t really surprising.  But it is shaping up to be the last straw; Cal’s eyes sting and he blinks hard, pressing his lips together, battering back the impulse to burst into tears.  He doesn’t want to be here.  If he cannot return to the Temple or his cabin on the Albedo Brave, he wants to be snuggled into his makeshift bed atop the desk in Prauf’s flat, warm, sleepy, listening to the rain and Prauf humming in the ‘fresher while he gets ready to turn in.

“Hey, hey.”  Prauf comes back over, almost in a straight line, and puts his big hand on Cal’s head.  “What’s the matter?  You – your shirt’s all bloody.  Are you hurt?”

Cal sniffles, dashes away a few tears that defied his instructions to stay put.  “Not bad,” he says.  “That was just the nosebleed.  My ankle might be broken, though.  Couple ribs are bruised at minimum.  But I’ll be okay.”

Prauf ruffles Cal’s hair, then mutters, “We gotta get that hatch open.”  He gives his shoulder a disdainful look.  “If this thing worked properly… listen, you think you might be able to help me put it back in?”

Shrugging, Cal says, “It’s worth a shot,” and makes sure his nose is finally finished misbehaving.  That’s enough crying, too.  There’s work to be done.

First order of business – while Prauf tries to mop the blood off his face (with limited success, since they have no mirror), Cal unfolds the temporary splint in the kit, locks it to the correct length, and uses almost an entire roll of pressure-wrap taping it to his leg.  His ankle is still a mess of agony if it’s forced to bear weight, but the rest of his leg doesn’t feel quite so unsteady anymore.  Since he can actually see what he’s doing, he sticks a bacta patch against the deep split in Prauf’s forehead.  Prauf makes Cal stand still and gingerly feels around his side before deciding Cal’s right and his ribs, even if they’re fractured, are not a significant concern.  And, finally, they set to the task of reducing Prauf’s dislocated shoulder.  Cal’s three years aboard the Brave come in handy here, because he occasionally helped out in the medbay and Silk, one of the field medics, taught him how to do it.  Well, for Humans.  It doesn’t seem too different in this case, however – Prauf sits and tries to stay relaxed as Cal holds his arm in the correct position and rotates it.  The first few tries yield no results, the fourth is so painful they have to stop and wait for his muscles to quit spasming, but on the sixth attempt, Prauf suddenly says, “There!”

“I didn’t hear –”

“I felt it,” Prauf insists, teeth gritted.  “It’s in.  Gimme a sec.”

Cal lets go of him.  Prauf rests his forehead in his hand, elbow propped on his knee, and breathes deeply for a minute.  When he looks up again, his eyes dart around before landing on Cal.  “Uh.  What were we doing…?”

“We went out into the wastes, got caught in a tornado, and had to shelter in an escape pod.  The power’s off so we need to open the hatch ourselves.”

“Right,” Prauf says, and almost manages to sound like all that isn’t news to him.  “How many times –”

“Several.”  And there will be more, no doubt.

“Sorry.”  Wincing, Prauf stands, flexes his arm.  “A little better.  I bet some other stuff in there got messed up, but it’s not hurting so much… okay, c’mere.  Only one way we’re gonna do this.”

Even one-handed and concussed, Prauf is insanely strong.  He would be able to open the hatch easily were he in better condition.  Since he’s not, all he can do is jerk it open about a foot, quickly crouch (Cal closes his eyes for a second here, afraid Prauf’s going to get dizzy and smash his head into the deck), and shove his good arm beneath the door.  “Cal!” he huffs.  Cal opens his eyes.  “Can you get through?”

“Yeah,” Cal says, leaning down to look and then dropping flat onto his belly.  “I’ll yell when I’m out and you can let go.”

“No,” Prauf pants, “I’m not getting this up again.  Just – hurry.”

Bracca’s taught Cal to compartmentalize pain.  Ignoring his sore leg, trying not to notice the white lights that burst in front of his eyes every time he bumps his ribs, he writhes out through the small gap between hatch and hull.

The first thing he notices is what an absolute mess everything is.  The wastes are always an abandoned junkyard, but stuff settles, falls apart, gradually becomes part of the landscape.  The tornado did some drastic redecorating on its way through.  Six inches from Cal’s foot is what he thinks might’ve been part of a Jedi starfighter, once; he knows that dome-shaped viewport and the short fin, though both are burned and warped.  The hail hasn’t yet melted and the ground’s solid white in spots.  Unfortunately, a quick glance does not show him the lime-green speeder, which means he and Prauf are dead whenever Tabbers finds out.  Maybe they ought to stay here after all.  But he does find something useful – a metal beam, twisted at one end, nearly the length of the escape pod yet light enough Cal can drag it along.  “Here!” he says, pushing it into the pod.  “Hold on – I’m coming back –”

“Any second now,” Prauf says, sounding strained.

Cal squeezes back inside, leaves the twisted end under the hatch, and runs (well, quickly hobbles) to prop the other end up on the side of a seat.  With a gasp, Prauf lets the hatch fall, gives a groan at the echoing clang as it impacts the beam.  “All right,” he says, joining Cal, “this should be easier….”

He’s both strong and heavy enough to use the metal strut as a lever.  Cal goes out again, finds another suitable piece of debris, and that becomes the support to hold the open door up against the ceiling, which is a bulkhead.  Once he’s convinced it isn’t going to buckle and bludgeon anyone, Cal slouches against the wall and tries not to throw up from pain.  Judging by Prauf’s expression, he’s doing the same, but his face swiftly warps into surprise when he finally gets a look outside.  “Stars,” he says.  “I’m seeing three of everything and even I can tell this place is a mess.”

It’s not even their place, Cal thinks.  That something solid which kept the escape pod from traveling any further was one of the cliffs they didn’t think they’d reach in time.  Spirits know when the tether broke or where the speeder ended up – Prauf doesn’t seem to notice it’s gone, so maybe Cal just… won’t mention it.  It’ll upset him.  “It’s only raining and windy, now,” Cal says, shading his eyes and peering out past Prauf.  No more massive wall clouds or weird greenish hazes in the sky or skull-cracking hail.

“Yep.”  Prauf gives a sigh, takes a couple steps back, and then hits the bulkhead and slides down to sit on the deck, rather unsettlingly beige in complexion.  “Okay, kid, you’re up… I need to sit for a while.”

“Good,” Cal mutters.  He’ll give it four minutes before Prauf forgets he’s supposed to be on break and starts taking the pod apart.

Since neither of them are in any condition to go speeder-hunting, and it may very well be gone for good, and Cal’s not yet worked out how they’re getting back to Willflower without it, the escape pod will be their camp for the night.  These things are designed for short-term survival; that’s shelter squared away already and the supply locker is as untouched as the medkit.  Cal cracks a couple of glowsticks to illuminate the pod, gives Prauf a water bulb, pops another open and sips at it while he inspects their dinner.  GAR ration packs – boy, that takes him back.  Another thing he won’t tell Prauf.  “No heater,” Cal reports, “but there’s a box of tinder.  Still got your firestrike?”

“Yeah,” Prauf says, shifting so he can dig it out of his pocket.  He lights the tinder and soon a small, bright fire fills the metal tinderbox, and Cal stands a pair of ration packs close to it.  They’ll have a warm dinner, if nothing else.  “Hey.  Cal.  Something I wanna know.”

“We’re in an escape pod,” Cal recites automatically.  “We were out –”

“Not that,” Prauf interrupts.  “I’ve just been wondering… how come you’re so scared of – this?” he asks, gesturing around at the pod.

Prauf doesn’t usually ask a lot of questions.  That’s half the reason Cal likes him so much – the fewer questions he’s asked, the less he has to lie, and the less he has to lie, the less he has to worry about keeping a story straight when he can barely keep his tools straight.  A closed mouth spills no secrets.  But… depending on how badly Prauf’s concussed, he might not remember a word Cal says tonight… and he’s made it pretty clear he’s always liked and respected Jedi, isn’t likely to turn Cal in… it would feel so good to finally unload some of the weight on his chest.

Despite all the rationalization, he can’t convince himself to confess.  Too much of a risk to both of them.  Peeling back a corner of each ration pack to vent any steam, Cal mumbles, “I got stuck in one, once.”  That’s not even really a lie – just an extreme understatement.  Here he is again, this time in the pod that brought a squadron of troopers to Bracca solely to track him down and kill him, and it saved both his life and Prauf’s.

He’ll still be happy to get the hell away from it.  The last thing he needs is more escape pod nightmares.  Prauf nods, says nothing else.  Cal drinks some water and heats their dinner and sets his mind to the task of finding a way home.

Chapter Text

Cal wakes, groggy and disoriented and in pain.  Unlike his last three or four awakenings, though, this one doesn’t come with an adrenaline-dose of panic – his face is mushed against someone’s sleeve, and before he can lift his head and look around, his brain engages far enough to remind him it’s Prauf’s sleeve.  So, already alerted to Prauf’s presence, Cal resists a descent into blind terror when he does look around and sees the inside of an escape pod.

Road trip.  Pod.  Tornado.  He reminded Prauf so many times it’s stuck on repeat in his head.  Yawning, Cal rubs at his eyes, then his throbbing side.  He fell asleep leaning against Prauf’s better arm, which hurts Cal’s ribs, but he’ll live.  Prauf is still sunk against the bulkhead, snoring faintly.  Cal leaves him be.  Between the lurking core-crawlers and scrap rats trying to get a peek into the open pod (they didn’t want to risk closing the hatch in case they couldn’t open it again), the ever-present threat of more severe weather, and Cal waking Prauf several times to make sure his condition wasn’t deteriorating, neither of them have had a very restful night so far.

Carefully, so he doesn’t disturb Prauf, Cal gets up.  He has to sink his teeth into his lip and swallow a whine as his ribs and his ankle and his headache retaliate.  It’s probably not been long enough yet, according to the instructions, but he takes a few more painkiller capsules anyway.  Then he picks up a piece of pipe – banging it against the hull makes a racket that scares the lurkers away – and limps over to the hatch to look outside.

It’s the dead of night and even the rain’s quieted to a thick mist that makes Cal’s face feel sweaty after ten seconds of exposure.  There’s no reason at all to be awake yet.  Once the painkillers kick in, he should try to sleep a little more, and perhaps he’ll wake again with some idea of how to get back to Willflower when it’s entirely possible the speeder’s somewhere in Scraw.  He scrubs his face on his sleeve, which doesn’t do jack shit as it’s just as damp, turns around, turns back.  He’s hearing something.  Without the backing track of rain-on-hull, the wastes are eerily silent, broken only rarely by a warbling core-crawler, and yet… there is a low, buzzing hum.

For a second, Cal’s feet freeze to the deck.  The adrenaline rush makes its victorious comeback.  He remembers the noise of the tornado – if another is approaching, they need to close up the pod and strap in and pray they stay on the ground this time – but no, it’s not the same.  His legs unlock.  Whatever it is, it’s nearby, though it sounds like it’s growing fainter.  Fading into the distance.

It’s an engine, he realizes, and almost before the thought fully forms in his head, he’s rushing to the supply locker.  Almost trips over Prauf’s outstretched legs in the process.  The Abednedo just grunts a bit and turns his head to one side, and Cal hardly notices, shifting ration packs, checking behind the medkit, digging through the stuff on the top shelf until his fingers meet what he knows every escape pod is supposed to carry.  He limps back outside as fast as he can.  The engine noise is gone.  Cal sets the flare upright on a flat rock, yanks the ignition tab, and scuttles backwards.  With a fizzing snarl, the flare skyrockets.  He throws a hand up to shield his eyes as it explodes overhead in a burst of blue sparks.

Then all he can do is wait and hope.  If their savior is someone official, they’ll have to reimburse the Guild for transportation, probably with added interest and fuel and every other expense they can tack onto the bill.  If it’s another scrapper or scavenger, he and Prauf will just owe someone a massive favor.  Either way, he’ll take it; he doesn’t fancy trying to walk back to Willflower with a broken ankle and a concussed friend.

For two or three minutes, Cal leans against the hull of the escape pod, shivering beneath his poncho, straining his ears for any sign of rescue.  There’s a second flare, if he needs it, but he’ll wait a little longer first.  For all he knows, the vehicle was a fair distance away to begin with and just has a busted muffler, or they’re being real cautious in case this is a trap… or he mistook something else for an engine.

The sound comes again.  It gets louder.  And then, born a little pinprick of yellow in the distant darkness and growing into a headlight, a speeder draws near.  Cal straightens up, resting the piece of pipe against the pod so this doesn’t look like a trap.  Getting shot at in his memories was bad enough.  He also backs into the pale slant of light spilling out of the hatch until he’s visible – being a small, unarmed Human who probably looks pretty battered will either net him sympathy or a mugging.

Or, he thinks with a funny sort of jolt in his belly, neither.  Because he doesn’t know that speederbike, but he knows the silhouette.  Not too many people have a head shaped sharp and birdlike, or a distinctive loping gait when they leave the bike in a space clear of rubble and approach him.

“Where the fuck is my speeder,” Tabbers growls.

“Um,” Cal says.  Ideally, he would’ve gotten a chance to explain his situation before the matter of transportation came up.  “Who does that one belong to?”

“Nevine.  She owed me a favor.”  One long, gloved finger catches Cal beneath the chin, tips his face up as far as it can go.  It’d be threatening if he wasn’t aware the Kaleesh is just trying to determine where the blood all over Cal’s front has come from.  For a guy who’s real weird about being touched sometimes, Tabbers has no sense of personal space.  “Now you owe me as well, since I came all this way.  Where’s the speeder, Cal.”

It’s not even inflected like a question.  Too bad that tornado didn’t kill him.  “I have no idea, okay?” Cal says, turning his head and pulling away.  “I don’t really give a damn right now.  We got caught in a kriffing tornado.”

Tabbers tilts his head to the side, which makes him look even more like a bird.  “Another one?”

“Another – what do you mean, another one?”

“One hit the city,” Tabbers says offhandedly, picking up the pipe and inspecting it.  Most of his expressions are unreadable, thanks to the mask, but he feels things so deeply and vividly Cal can often pick up his emotions without trying.  He’s amused by the pipe, as if he’s picturing Cal attempting to defend himself with it.  “Nowhere near us, and I don’t think it was very big, but I’m not stupid, so I stayed put until it blew over… and then I came looking for you.”

The storm was headed towards Willflower.  Cal isn’t too surprised it eventually spawned at least one more tornado.  He’s about to question that last statement when there’s a sleepy grumble from inside the pod; Cal looks over and watches Prauf climb to his feet, wobble a little, and, clutching his head, stumble over to lean his shoulder against the doorframe.  “Cal, what… Tabbers?” he says, rubbing his eyes and blinking hard.  “What are you doing here?  How did you even find us?”

“Have you caught stupidity or something?” Tabbers snaps.  “I got home from work and saw you’d activated the emergency beacon, idiot.”  Cal did not know Prauf was carrying an emergency beacon Tabbers can pick up, but, once again, finds himself unsurprised.  The Kaleesh tosses Cal a look, says, “I see you’ve not lost him too.  Where is my speeder, Prauf?”

“Your….”  Prauf trails off.  He blinks a few more times.  Then he steps out of the escape pod, peers around it, behind it, inside it, turns in a circle twice to stare into the misty night.  “Cal, where’s the speeder gone?”

“I don’t know.  You tethered it to the pod, but I guess the cable wasn’t strong enough.  He has a concussion,” Cal adds helpfully when Tabbers looks at him again, now quite puzzled.

“Why?”

Giving a heavy sigh, Cal rubs the bridge of his nose.  At this rate, he’ll have a stress headache to keep his psychometry headache company.  “Escape pod,” he says, gesturing to it, “versus tornado.”  He points upwards.  Both Tabbers and Prauf are paying rapt attention, which strikes him as funny.  He’s too tired and sore for laughter.  “We voted for the pod and I think we kinda tied that round.  He and I survived, but we did get thrown around a lot.  This isn’t where we started out.”

“Hm.”  Tabbers mimics Prauf, gazing around their landing zone.  He can see in the dark better than either of them, though the mist will still hinder him.  “So where might I find my speeder?”

Cal flings a hand into the air (the other gets about halfway there before his ribs warn him that is a bad idea).  “Stars, you’re worse than Prauf, asking the same question over and over, and he’s the one with a head injury!”

“And you can hardly walk on that leg,” Tabbers retorts, suddenly tart.  “And –”  He swats Cal on the side.  Not hard – it’s really more of a tap – but Cal chokes on a gasp, hunching over, and chews his lip until he tastes blood so he doesn’t cry out.

“Tabbers, don’t kriffing do that,” Prauf groans.

“Just making sure.  He was guarding that side.”

“So next time ask instead of hitting him.  Cal?”

“I’m fine,” Cal says, shutting his eyes for a second and then inching upright, feeling like an old man.  “Tell me you’re here to take us home and I won’t shank you.”

Flippantly, Tabbers says, “I’d like to see you try,” but then he’s all business when he adds, “and what else would I be doing out in the wastes at second hour when I could be sleeping… besides retrieving my speeder, which you’d better pray we find.  I doubt the bike will run too well with all three of us on it.  Prauf, pick up your shit so we can get out of here.”

“Since when do you tell me what to do?” Prauf grumbles, and Cal really did not need a reminder their relationship is sort of… like that, especially when the Abednedo’s been pretending lately they don’t even have a relationship (unless he’s at the cantina).  Prauf goes back in and grabs his poncho, tossed over the protruding pilot’s seat to dry off, then his tool belt, while Cal takes the smoldering tinderbox outside to dispose of.  He almost chucks it at Tabbers in exchange for prodding Cal’s busted ribs, but that’s a bit too much of an asshole move.  He tips the ashes into a puddle instead.

“I don’t have anything to pick up,” Cal tells Tabbers when the Kaleesh looks at him expectantly.  “All of our other stuff was… well, on the trailer.  Which is also missing.”

“I’m never letting either of you borrow my speeder again,” Tabbers says.  That may be a moot point if the vehicle’s been strewn halfway across the continent, so Cal doesn’t worry about it much.  He debates taking the rest of the emergency supplies from the pod, but the bike is going to be overweight as it is.  Besides, someone else might get caught unprepared in a storm too, someday, and perhaps a stocked medkit and clean water and a couple of ration packs will save their life.  More likely it’ll get plundered by scavengers long before then, but he can dream.

Prauf comes drifting out of the escape pod, ponchoed and belted, sporting a vaguely perplexed expression that suggests he’s lost the plot again.  “Sorry,” he says, “where are we headed now?”

“Home,” Tabbers says.  “Get on the bike.”  He nudges Prauf towards the jumpspeeder, not especially gently, then he stops in front of Cal (who’s leaning against the pod again and trying not to look too pained) and crouches, smooth and fluid as water.  “Let’s go.  I’ll ride you over there so they don’t have to pin your ankle back together later.”

From what Prauf’s said, Tabbers spoke Basic fairly fluently when he arrived on Bracca, but he occasionally makes it very obvious it’s not his first language.  “Carry me, you mean,” Cal corrects, clambering onto his back and clutching his shoulders. 

Tabbers stands like Cal weighs no more than a rucksack.  “No, I don’t.  I’m not carrying you; I’m giving you a ride.”

“Well – okay, it’s fine when you say it like that, but….”  Cal glances over at Prauf to make sure he isn’t snickering at this dubious exchange, but the Abednedo’s gone a good ten meters in the wrong direction.

“I really have no idea what your problem is.  You’re – Prauf, it’s this way.  Come back here.”

They aren’t even that far from the bike and yet Prauf wanders off four more times to inspect random bits of scrap that catch his eye.  The fifth time he does this, Tabbers growls so hard Cal feels it reverberate through the Kaleesh’s back, turns on his heel, and stomps after Prauf.  “You!” he barks.  “I said to stay with me, dammit!”

“I was just thinking,” Prauf says, doggedly continuing back the way they came, “that pod was about as intact as I’ve ever seen.  We could –”

“We couldn’t anything!  Let’s go!”  Because Tabbers’s hands are full, tucked beneath Cal’s knees, Cal leans out and gives the collar of Prauf’s poncho an insistent tug.  Prauf appears deeply put-out by this treatment.  He shoots the escape pod a lingering look.  “Once more and I swear to the entire karking pantheon I’m going to put a leash on you,” Tabbers threatens.

A slow, sly smile creeps up on Prauf’s normally genial face.  It’s downright unsettling.  Making zero effort to hide the affection in his voice, he says, “Thought being leashed was your thing, telashi.”

Cal pretends to vomit.  Prauf must have gotten his bell rung good – otherwise he wouldn’t say anything like that where Cal can hear.  Tabbers, on the other hand, is not embarrassed by the mere suggestion the local teenager might know he has a sex life, so he would… but he doesn’t rebound with a blistering comment.  He doesn’t even tell Prauf to get on the bike before Tabbers turns his head into an internal organ.  He just stands there, silent, stunned.  Cal does not miss the lance of longing.  It’s been buried almost too deep to hurt.

Okay, this is a topic Cal generally prefers to avoid at all costs, but now he needs to know what that word means.  Term of endearment, perhaps?  He’ll interrogate Prauf once the Abednedo’s recovered.  After about five more awkwardly mute seconds (during which Prauf does not stop smirking), Tabbers finally growls, “If the bike can’t manage with all three of us, you can walk home,” and starts moving again, this time without checking to see if Prauf’s meandered away.  Thankfully, Prauf follows.  Once they reach the jumpspeeder, Tabbers leans so Cal can slide from his back onto the seat.  “You’ll be bringing up the rear, so scoot.”

Cal makes a face, but putting Prauf anywhere except directly over the repulsorlift would throw this poor thing hopelessly off balance, so he scoots.  No seat back here; he sits sidesaddle and holds on tight.  Tabbers still practically needs to perch across Prauf’s knees in order to fit and reach the controls.  This does not seem to bother either of them overmuch.  “Please,” Cal mumbles, “remember I’m back here… and innocent….”

Tabbers laughs harshly.  “No one’s innocent,” he says, and hits the ignition.

Despite the combined weight of a Kaleesh, an Abednedo, and a snack-sized Human, the bike manages to get up off the ground and wheeze along.  They’re going about ten kph, but Cal doesn’t have to walk on his bad ankle, and Prauf can’t go anywhere while they’re moving and Tabbers is sitting on him.  Cal does his best to point Tabbers in the direction the escape pod had originally landed.  Once he sees for himself his speeder is no longer with them, maybe he’ll be kind enough to find Cal and Prauf some medical attention before fighting them to the death.  Sort of poor sportsmanship otherwise.

Tabbers stops between two of the seven boulders marking the escape pod’s landing pad and jumps off the bike, giving Cal a narrow-eyed look.  “Here?”

“Yeah, the pod was sorta in the middle,” Cal says.  He doesn’t get up – now that he’s been seated a while, the burn in his leg has gentled to a steady, pulsing throb that only makes him feel slightly sick – but he does lean as far as he can to look.  “There was one rock that had sort of an overhang and we left your speeder there while we were checking it out… I’m not sure if Prauf moved it closer before he tied it to the pod.  Probably.”

Huffing, Tabbers stalks out of sight.  Cal leans his head against Prauf’s back (the Abednedo having been instructed not to move under pain of death) and sighs.  “Prauf?”

“Yeah?”

“I don’t think we’re gonna get to Scraw for your valachord wood.”  Or miss Empire Day.  It’ll only be dawn by the time they reach Willflower.

Prauf gives a weary chuckle, cranes his left arm to pat Cal’s knee.  “Guess not.  Another time….”  He pauses, then starts clambering off the bike, waving away Cal’s protest.  “Relax, I just need to go take a leak.”  He pulls something from his pocket, too – another glowstick out of the pod’s locker – and cracks it.  “Be right back.”

Well, if he had the foresight to bring some light, he’ll probably be fine.  Unless Tabbers decides to leave without him.  Cold, Cal tugs the folds of his poncho around himself tightly and tucks his chin down into his collar.  He should really scrimp for the next couple of months and see if he can put away enough money to afford a proper coat before winter comes around again.

Tabbers looms up out of the darkness so suddenly Cal jumps.  Prauf also suddenly looms up out of the darkness, and Cal jumps again, but Tabbers doesn’t.  He glowers at Prauf without speaking, then at Cal, then slams onto the bike.  “You have two seconds,” Tabbers hisses when Prauf doesn’t sit.

“What are we looking for?” Prauf says instead of preserving life and limb.  “Your speeder, right?”

“Yes, my speeder!” Tabbers snarls, all anger except for the thread of genuine upset in his tone, smacking the ignition button with his palm.  “I spent four years putting it together, and you two lose it – I’ve no idea what –”

The only person in the galaxy who could get away with doing such a thing grabs Tabbers’s mask by the beak, forcibly turns his head, shifts aside, and gestures.  “I dunno how you could miss something painted that eye-gouging color.”

One heartbeat later, Tabbers is off the bike again.  Prauf calmly ambles after him.  Cal has the clever idea to clamber onto the seat, take the controls, and urge the speeder into a thin gap between two of the boulders, towards a dim glow… and the headlight illuminates Prauf’s dropped glowstick, lying next to a very familiar frame.

How Tabbers’s landspeeder only wound up a couple dozen meters away when the escape pod was toted several kilometers will forever be a mystery to Cal, yet there it is.  It’s overturned, splattered with mud, the curving nose is crumpled sideways, the entire chassis has been scratched and dented and even bent in spots.  “Where’s the trailer?” Cal wonders, spotting the bare hitch as Tabbers and Prauf attempt to flip the speeder upright.

Again, Prauf points.  “I think that’s it over there, but I didn’t look closely.”

Cal fetches the glowstick and limps to the battered metal rectangle jutting out of the ground, which does indeed turn out to be the trailer, lying on its side.  Half of the supports are missing, as is the tarp.  So is almost everything they gathered on their ill-fated road trip.  He manages to shove the trailer over and holds up the glowstick to get a good look.  “Oh, hey!” he says delightedly.  “My clay’s still here!”  Filthy though it is, the block of clay is stuck firmly to the bottom of the trailer.  Actually, when he pokes it… “I might need a chisel to get this off.”

He hunts around the nearby area, picking up some pieces of scrap he recalls running from the shuttle to the speeder hours ago, until he doesn’t feel like he can bend down or walk much longer.  The jerrycan with the spare fuel never turns up; nor does Prauf’s bag or the rest of the food.  By then, Tabbers’s speeder is oriented correctly again, and Tabbers says, “I suppose I won’t leave you here for the scrap rats after all,” when he tries to start it and the thrusters purr to life.

“That’s good,” Cal pants.  He also got the lifts on the trailer going, but he’s wiped.  Pushing it close to the speeder is consuming everything he has left, and it’s a relief when Prauf takes over for him.

The chain that hitches the trailer to the speeder is gone.  Prauf just bends a thin piece of metal he finds on the ground into shape and welds it shut.  “We’ll cut it off later,” he says, standing up and pressing a palm to the side of his head.  “Stars, I feel like I got kicked by an eopie… and what the heck did I do to my shoulder?”

“Just sit down, would you?” Tabbers huffs, and gives him a push towards the speeder.  “Cal, can you drive the bike?  I don’t trust the man with the concussion right now.”

“Sure.”  Finally, he gets to drive – the wrong vehicle, and he was picturing very different circumstances, but he won’t look a gift fathier in the mouth.  He shuffles back to the bike and nearly falls onto it.

“And you,” Tabbers says to Prauf, who sat in the passenger seat without a fight, “if you try to get out while we’re moving, I will tie you in.  Don’t test me.  And don’t make a bondage joke, either.”

“Hey, come on,” Prauf says, shoulders hunching slightly, shooting Cal a glance, “don’t talk about that kinda thing in front of Cal.”

Tabbers stares at Prauf again, realizes he’s serious, and says, “I hate you so much.”  He shakes his head, beckons to Cal.  “Home is that way.  Get going.  I’d like to be in bed by sunrise so I can sleep through the rest of Empire Day.”

Cal does not get to sleep through the rest of Empire Day.  He spends four hours in a semi-reputable medical clinic (which makes it galaxy-class by Bracca standards), three of which are whiled away in a waiting room.  A one-minute consultation with a 2-1B informs him he has two fractures in his ankle, another fracture further up his fibula, and two cracked ribs.  Fortunately, none of the breaks are complicated or displaced; he lies on a table beneath a bone-knitter for the remaining hour, listening to the attending nurse droid squawk at him to hold still whenever he so much as twitches a finger.

Surprisingly, when he hobbles out of the clinic with his ankle properly splinted for support, he finds Tabbers isn’t sleeping through the rest of Empire Day either.  His speeder, which looks even worse in the watery grey light, is parked in front of the clinic, and Tabbers is sitting in the pilot’s seat.  Reading, naturally.  It’s not really something Cal would’ve expected from a Kaleesh, but Tabbers is a voracious reader.  His tinderbox-sized flat would be shoebox-sized like Prauf’s, except he owns so many books he literally has room for nothing else (though he fits Prauf in frequently enough).  Cal used to assume he liked to read a lot, then he met Tabbers and realized he likes to read an extremely normal amount.

“I didn’t think you were going to stay,” Cal says, prodding at a spot where the paint’s chipped off to reveal bare metal beneath.  There are rather a lot of those.  He hopes Tabbers has more neon green paint; Prauf’s opinion aside, Cal likes the color.

Tabbers shrugs and looks up from his book.  “I had entertainment and nothing better to do… and it’s quieter over this way.  Some moron mounted a speaker right outside my apartment block.  Did you get any time off?”

“One day, since I’m already free today and tomorrow.  Better than none, I guess.  I’m supposed to stay off my ankle for a week.”  And yet he’ll be back in the shipbreaking yard in a few days, Cal thinks.  Canned instructions programmed into a medical droid and automatically dispensed don’t really apply to Bracca, where weeks are twelve days and there are no sit-down scrapping jobs.  “I asked after Prauf, but they’re keeping him a little longer.”

“I assumed they would.  Get in,” Tabbers says.  Cal retakes the passenger seat, which is downright roomy when it’s only Tabbers next to him, and gets a book shoved in his face.  “Hold that.”

Cal does so, turning it over to inspect the back cover.  Some thriller set in a sentient-trafficking ring on Corellia.  He flicks it open to the first page and pretends to be absorbed for the ride to Prauf’s apartment complex, careful not to look up, wishing he could plug his ears.  There’s a speaker system set up all along the streets leading to the city center, because the Empire actually has a karking theme song.  It’s not new – he’s been hearing variations on the tune since the war – but it’s since been adopted as the official anthem of the Empire.  Cal keeps his eyes on the book and chews furiously on the inside of his cheek until Tabbers stops.  He only has to look once, because he’s still feeling achy and a little weak and doesn’t trust himself to exit the speeder blindly, and one glimpse of the temporary stage down the road is enough.  He’d bet his next five paychecks that Imperial officer has some slimy, unctuous speech prepared.  The willflowers haven’t bloomed.  At least it will be ugly.

The lift’s busted (it worked once, on Cal’s first visit to Prauf’s flat, and never again), so Tabbers piggybacks him up seven flights of stairs.  “What’s the door code changed to?” he asks once they’re standing outside.

Cal stares at the top of Tabbers’s hood incredulously.  “You really think Prauf changed the code even once since you moved out?  He’s still hoping you’ll come back.”

For the second time today, Tabbers is rendered mute and disbelieving.  The sigh gets punched down into an ordinary exhale, but Cal cannot help an eyeroll.  He misses the Jedi Order for many reasons, and here’s another to add to the list – he didn’t need to deal with this sort of… relationship drama.  “Listen,” he says with all the patience he can summon, “for some unfathomable reason, he loved you.  Loves you.  Whatever.  But this is kinda his home.  I think he actually finds some sort of weird fulfillment in scrapping; I don’t know if he’d quit without a damn good incentive.  And you… you want to get off of Bracca more than you want to stay here with him, but here you are pining because you love him too and honestly, it’s annoying, so could you two maybe work your shit out one of these days?”

Tabbers lets go of one of Cal’s legs to input the same door code Prauf’s used for years.  Cal expects to be dropped, but instead they enter the flat and the Kaleesh totes him straight through the kitchen to the living room… and then he tosses Cal onto the sofa.  It’s a soft (if agonizing) landing.  The sofa promptly collapses beneath the onslaught, coughing a plume of loose stuffing into the air.

Beneath the fuzz showering down, Cal fights his way free of the floppy cushions, wipes off his face, spits lint.  “Ugh.  I hope this isn’t asbestos.”

“Get rid of that pathetic thing already,” Tabbers says, shedding his dripping poncho and slinging it over a kitchen chair.

“Prauf’s holding out until he can find a replacement.”

“Why?  You don’t need a sofa.”

Cal doesn’t have the energy to fix the couch, so he shoves the cushions up against the backside and leaves it on the floor where it fell.  “Do you have any furniture at all, or do you just use stacks of books?”

“I have a bed.”  Cal’s not even looking at the guy and he can hear Tabbers leering when he adds, “Obviously.”

“Gross,” Cal mutters.  The sofa’s lost a foot or so of height, but it’s still comfortable enough when he snuggles into a corner and stretches out his bad leg.  This is a mistake – he realizes a second later the situation could only be improved with his blanket, which is on the other side of the room.  Oh well.  He’s not getting up again.

“Catch,” Tabbers says from the kitchen, and something comes sailing through the doorway.  Cal’s been burned once already, so he does not catch, and the object splats against the floor about three feet away.  “I punched the chemical pack from the ‘fresher, but it isn’t getting cold, so that will have to do….”

Cal tilts forwards to pick up the rag, which is soaked in frigid water.  Good enough, he thinks, and wriggles his boot (it’s a bit looser now than earlier, when the nurse droid nearly needed to cut it off) until his foot slides free.  He loops the wet cloth around his swollen ankle.  “Thanks,” he calls, to which Tabbers snorts.  Manners on Bracca are rarer than a sunny day and people tend to react with confusion when Cal’s polite to them.

After a minute of debating with himself, he turns on the holoscreen.  If it’s Empire Day bantha-shit, he’ll turn it right back off.  He finds Nalah Rukk doing her usual gig – blandly reading off a list of train delays Cal guesses are tornado-related – but she’s practically vibrating, and the instant she’s done, she almost drops her datapad.  “Back on our top story, I’ve just gotten a few more holoimages of the tornado that struck Willflower yesterday evening.  This is an excellent shot – it was taken south of the 118^th line several minutes before the tornado actually reached the city, and the funnel cloud is very clear….”

She actually sounds animated, Cal thinks, watching her flash picture after picture of the storm across the screen.  She’s talking so fast she keeps tripping over her words, gesticulating, bouncing on her toes.  This must be the best thing that’s happened to her since she accepted this job.  “– and look, this is exclusive – well, there’s hardly anyone else reporting, but that’s not the point – I sent out my own weather drone once I was sure we were about to take a direct hit, and check out this radar map!”  The screen fills with a pixelated blob – blue on the outside edges, then green, yellow, orange, red, and even a splotch of purple near the center.  “If you look at the bottom-left corner of the screen, you can see where there’s a little tendril of the storm extending from the rest of the cell and kind of curving back towards it.  That’s called a hook echo, and it’s a signature unique to supercell thunderstorms –”

Tabbers pokes his head into the living room, leaning so he can get a sideways look at the holoscreen.  “Has someone spiked her caf with glitterstim?”

“I think she just really likes weather.”

“Freak.”

“Any other furniture besides that bed?” Cal asks, and Tabbers gives him a rude gesture before tipping back into the kitchen.

Nalah finally sits down again and manages to corral her excitement long enough to read out another report, this one about damage to the southeastern side of Willflower.  No fatalities, from the sound of it, but a number of buildings have been rendered unsafe for habituation; an unused warehouse is being set up as a sort of makeshift refugee shelter until new housing can be found.  Cal wonders who spearheaded that initiative.  The Guild certainly wouldn’t lift a finger.  He’s rather glad the tornado he and Prauf encountered fizzled out before reaching the city, since it probably would’ve done far worse than this one.  Nalah’s returned to gushing over candids when Tabbers strolls into the living room, carrying the container of glazed gnasps and Cal’s bottle of snowfig fizzade, which he hands to Cal.

Well, he refuses to celebrate Empire Day, but surviving a tornado is probably the best special occasion he’ll get on this dump.  Cal pops the top and takes a swig.  Before sitting down, Tabbers eyes the rug, prodding at it with the toe of his boot.  “I swear this has a new stain every time I come here.  Do I even want to know what the big one is?”

“I redecorated with moonshine vomit once, remember?”

“Oh, right.  Well, you’re not special, I’ve done that also… among other bodily fluids.”  Cringing, Cal swiftly yanks his feet up off the rug.  Tabbers rolls his eyes.  “I meant blood, you grubby-minded little brat.  Move over.”

Cal tucks deeper into the corner of the sofa, like that too hasn’t been exposed to multiple organic leaks.  Tabbers sits next to him and starts crunching through gnasps.  He only pushes his mask up far enough to expose his mouth, and Cal doesn’t try to peek – the fact Tabbers will eat in his presence proves he doesn’t just tolerate Cal for Prauf’s sake.  He’s stabbed people for seeing less of him.

The holoscreen abruptly cuts out and refocuses on the stage in the city center, which says it’s high time Cal swap over to the one other frequency they can pick up on Bracca.  It’s usually blurred and jittery and the sound quality is garbage, but anything is better than sycophantic Imperial slop.  They used to get a third frequency, a numbers station from the war – even distorted, he can recognize the voice of a clone trooper – but it stopped broadcasting about two months ago.  This hour’s offering is surprisingly crisp coverage of a boloball game, though only across half the screen.  The other side is an alternating pattern of purple and green bars that oscillate like they’re trying to induce a seizure.  Cal leaves it on and drinks his fizzade.

The downside to being home and safe is that it’s a lot easier not to think when he’s laser-focused on survival.  Getting two clones’ memories of the same event shoved into his head yesterday… the snowfig flavor rots in his mouth and Cal swallows it hard, fights the urge to gag.  Those men had been his friends before deciding he had to die.  If they’d landed on Bracca and decided a terrified twelve-year-old Padawan wasn’t worth executing, they would probably still be alive.  “Once,” he murmurs, peeling up the edge of the label on the fizzade bottle, “I had to kill a bunch of people who were trying to kill me.”

“Good,” Tabbers says.  A gnasp crackles loudly between his molars.

“But they used to be my friends.”

“Even better.  Don’t betray your friends, and don’t pick fights you know you can’t win.”

Cal blinks at Tabbers.  “They could have won.  You don’t know who was after me.”

“I don’t need to.  You’re a runt, but you’re a lot tougher than you look,” Tabbers says matter-of-factly, which is almost certainly the nicest thing he’s ever said to Cal.  It doesn’t feel like much of a compliment, given the topic of conversation.  “Besides,” he adds, “sometimes it’s necessary.”

“We – I didn’t even do anything,” Cal mumbles.  He understands the clones (especially Aurek) despising him for destroying the Brave with almost the entire battalion aboard, but the echoes did not explain why they suddenly believed the Jedi were, to a man, traitors who had earned summary execution.  Did they always believe that and just waited all that time for the opportune moment to strike?  Were they ever his friends, truly?  “One of them… he hated me more than he’d ever hated anyone else in his life, because he thought I was the reason his brother died.”

“Were you?”

“Sort of?  Not really.”  He’d not known Master Tapal had overloaded the reactor until they’d left.  Had Besh fired on him while Cal was trying to escape the ship, though, Cal would have done as he was instructed – what had to be done.  He doesn’t say that.  He’s said too much already.

Tabbers yawns, tossing another gnasp into his mouth.  “This is all sounding very much like self-defense to me.  Kill or be killed.  If you want my opinion, you made the right decision.”

It’s a little funny.  Tabbers likes to think he’s incomprehensible, possessing a peculiar moral code and no interest in conforming to the social standards of the greater galaxy, but – tendency to solve every minor kerfluffle with attempted murder aside – Cal understands him perfectly.  While he can never breathe a word, because he can’t explain where he got his knowledge, he knows Tabbers.  The Kaleesh was younger than Cal is now when his father brought his mother before the tribe and publicly accused his bonded mate of infidelity.  The tribe found her guilty, as they always did, and she was put to death.  With his father refusing to claim a child he believed wasn’t his, and nobody else willing to claim him either, Tabbers left.  He may be a bit of a warrior yet, but he grew up detached from Kalee, let the rest of the galaxy infect him with gentleness and empathy and mercy, qualities the Kaleesh people traditionally decry.  He didn’t kill the scrappers harassing Cal because it was a good time (‘hunting practice’, he called it); he did it because two adults should not have been touching a child like that.  He heard Cal crying in the middle of the night and gave him Raggy Bones.  Gave him a knife, too, so he could protect himself if he was ever in the same situation again.  He’s trying to comfort Cal over needing to kill his friends to survive.

Cal might not grasp all the aspects of the attraction, particularly the physical appeal, but sometimes he can kind of understand what Prauf sees in Tabbers.  He steals a couple of gnasps and doesn’t even get his hand stabbed.  “You can have a little of my fizzade, if you want,” he offers in reply to Tabbers’s glare.  “It’s snowfig-flavored.”

“That sounds disgusting,” Tabbers says, and takes the bottle anyway.

Chapter Text

By the time Prauf gets in, several hours later, the boloball game is over, Cal’s puzzled his way through a game show entirely in Kyuzo, and now there’s some kind of Trandoshan film on.  That’s in Basic, at least, but it looks like it was filmed on a rangefinder.  The Empire Day speeches are still going strong – last time Tabbers decided to check, the special Imperial guest had finally made it onstage, then was promptly sidelined for a broadcast from the Emperor himself.  “Please turn that down,” Prauf groans from the kitchen as a blurry Trandoshan in a trenchcoat shoots at a fleeing shuttle, “I’ve got one mother of a headache….”

“Sorry.”  Cal quickly dials the volume back.  “How are you doing?  Besides the obvious.”

“Well, I can sorta think straight again.”  Prauf’s boots thump against the floor and then he appears in the doorway, no longer sporting a bacta patch on his forehead, but there’s a purplish-brown bruise and a paler scar where it used to reside.  He doesn’t wobble too much when he strides over to the fallen sofa.  “Shoulder’s not bad.  Tore a couple of ligaments or something they needed to stick back together.  How about you, kid – did they fix your ankle or your ribs?” he asks, smoothing Cal’s rumpled hair.

Cal opens his mouth to answer.  Tabbers, who gave up on the film a while ago and kept reading his equally-implausible thriller, beats him to it, levering off the couch cushion with a scowl.  “He’s fine.  You sit; I’ll go scrape up some lunch.”

“There’s more curry in the conservator,” Prauf calls after him.

“‘fresher mold it is, then.”

“Okay,” Prauf says, then lowers his voice so only Cal can hear.  “Just not the gnasps, please.”

“It’s all right,” Cal reassures, “we finished those.”  And they’re not half-bad, actually.  Cal was introduced to true hunger on Bracca and if he was ever inclined to be picky before, he sure isn’t now; glazed gnasps are far from the weirdest thing he’s eaten over the past year.  The wing fibers kept getting caught in his teeth, though.  He watches Prauf settle in Tabbers’s vacated seat and wince a bit, rubbing his head, and then Cal says, “I’m, uh… sorry about freaking out so bad in the escape pod.  When I ran away, I mean.”  He’d been pretty far down the ash-rabbit hole.  Sometimes he’s afraid the trauma of the Purge rewired every synapse of his brain, from memory to instinct to Force-sensitivity.

“I forgive you,” Prauf says immediately, “‘cause I don’t even remember it.  A lot of the stuff after we stopped to check out the pod is either real jumbled or just gone.”  He sends Cal a guilty sidelong look.  “But I gotta confess – your ribs are probably broken because of me.  I do remember tackling you for some reason.  And then I think you tried to stab me.  We must’ve gone back to the pod after that, but my memory goes totally blank there.  Next thing I recall, we were having dinner and I was hurting all over.”  His shoulder must be feeling better, since he doesn’t grimace when he lifts his right arm, and Cal accepts the invitation to lean against his side.  He’s nice and warm.  Reminds him of cuddling up to his master when he was tired or upset.  Someday, when he thinks he can sound offhand about it (and not cry), he’ll press Prauf for more details about that time he met Jaro Tapal.  “It’s okay.  Glad we both made it through.”  Prauf pauses for a moment.  “Actually, there’s one other thing, but – I dunno, it doesn’t make much sense.  I’ve got this… little piece of a memory, or maybe it was some kinda concussion dream.  But I opened my eyes, and everything was warped and fuzzy, and – I think I was floating.  You were standing there by me.  Gravity just felt all… wrong.”

He’s so engrossed in this oddity he doesn’t notice Cal silently panicking.  And then Tabbers snarks, “Did someone spike your caf with glitterstim?”

“Ah, shut up.  I said it doesn’t make sense.  I must’ve been dreaming, or confused, or something.”  He squeezes his arm around Cal’s shoulders, gingerly, mindful of his ribs.  “You remember anything like that?”

Cal finds his voice.  “Definitely not.”  Prauf has no idea what he saw while semi-conscious and suffering from a head injury.  Cal’s secret is still safe.  He needs to be more careful, next time… hopefully there won’t be a next time, because given the choice between keeping his secret and saving Prauf’s life, he’s picking the latter without a moment of forethought.

“Yeah, just crazy, then.”  Prauf’s hand comes up, runs over Cal’s hair again.  He must still feel a little rattled, or else a little maudlin – he doesn’t usually fuss so much.  “Sorry, kid.  Looks like we’re stuck here for Empire Day after all.”

Shrugging, Cal says, “As long as I don’t have to watch any speeches.”  If everyone else is quiet and he listens hard, he can hear a muffled, measured drone in the background, interrupted by the occasional squeal of feedback, so perhaps whichever poor sucker drew Bracca out of the Empire Day Business Trip hat has gotten around to proselytizing.

Tabbers comes into the living room with his arms full, looks at the collapsed sofa, looks at the two of them occupying the cushions anyway, looks around, and then just sets everything on the floor.  Lunch is curry, of course, still in the pot and so hot it’s bubbling.  Bread, too – polystarch is cheap and bland but surprisingly versatile.  Messing with the proportions of powder and water can have interesting (or inedible) results.  These particular pieces of bread turned out thin, flexible, and chewy.  Good for scooping, Cal decides, tearing a piece off of one and dunking it into the pot.  It’s the only cutlery within reach, anyway.  All these years and Tabbers has yet to understand the point of forks.

“What exactly are we watching?” Prauf asks through a mouthful, brow wrinkling in confusion as the trenchcoated Trandoshan attempts to seduce a Twi’lek waitress into telling him the location of the suspect.  At least that’s what Cal thinks is happening, anyway.  The dialogue is dubbed into Basic, quite possibly by someone who did not have a very good grasp on Basic themselves, and doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

“It’s some kind of mystery.”  Cal chases a hunk of nuna around the pot with his bread.  “I’m pretty sure this guy’s supposed to be investigating a politician’s assassination, except nobody – him included – really seems to care too much because she sucked.”

Tabbers, who looked up from his book again at the word assassination, says, “Hm.  Maybe I should’ve been paying attention after all.”

“Don’t get any ideas,” Prauf says.  “Once I’m done, I’ll go find the datapad and see if I can get it hooked back up to the holoscreen… I know I’ve got stuff to watch that’s better than this dreck.”

“If you put on a soap opera –” Tabbers stops, contemplates his curry-loaded polystarch.  “What does that name even mean?”  Then he shakes his head and continues, “If you put on a soap opera, I will leave you.”

“You already did, remember?” Prauf mutters sourly.

“I did not.  I’m sitting right here, aren’t I?”

Cal doesn’t know if Prauf gets the datapad hooked up or if Tabbers is forced to endure one of Prauf’s beloved, terrible, over-the-top holodramas.  Stomach full, side and head and ankle all aching again, he curls up and rests his cheek on the arm of the sofa and almost immediately dozes off.

When he opens his eyes again, he’s in his own bed.  The blankets are tucked snugly around him and Raggy Bones is sprawled across the other side of the pillow.  He yawns, squints at the chrono bolted to the wall over the holoscreen – it’s early in the evening, now.  Big raindrops plunk against the windowpanes.  There is nothing better than being warm and cozy and sleepy and knowing he doesn’t have to keep track of time, because they’re off work tomorrow… the only distraction from a pleasant laze is the pressure in his bladder.  And while the holoscreen’s dark and silent, somebody left all the lights on.  Sighing, Cal gingerly sits up.

It’s still so nice to just go do what he has to without being afraid, or carrying a weapon.  The most dangerous thing in the apartment ‘fresher is mold.  He yawns his way through the kitchen, turning out the light, running some water into the empty curry pot so the last smears of sauce don’t glue themselves to the metal for the rest of eternity.  He turns out the living room lights too.  He hesitates near Prauf’s bedroom; the door is open and his lamp is on as well, but Cal can’t hear a single sound that’d suggest the Abednedo is awake.  Actually, there’s no duracrete sign Prauf is even here.  Cal peeks into the room.

Prauf is both here and sound asleep.  He’s also not alone.  There’s a head on his shoulder, the curving beak of a mask resting beneath his chin, an arm flung across his chest.  They’ve obviously not been doing anything (they never do while Cal is around), which makes the whole tableau just kind of cute.  Ugh, Cal thinks, hitting the switch and retreating.  He doesn’t like thinking about those two as cute.  They can be cute once Cal’s financially secure enough to afford his own flat.  But… they are good to him, and they’re kind even if that kindness is sometimes harsh, and they occasionally commit – or condone – murder on his behalf.  If he cannot have Master Tapal or the Jedi Temple anymore, at least he can have this.  Whatever one might call it.  Cal picks up a fallen blanket and moves Raggy Bones off the pillow so he’s not taking up so much space and goes back to bed.

“Cal, do you have, uh, any idea where you’re gonna put that rabbit-thing?”

“I told you, I don’t know yet,” Cal says, a bit waspishly.  “I need to finish this, and then see if the rabbit even survives the first firing, and then glaze it, and then I’ll start worrying about that.”

“Okay, okay.”  Sheesh, Prauf thinks, artists.  Awfully touchy, all of them.

“Maybe I’ll give it to Tabbers,” Cal adds.  “He thought the sketch was funny.”

And now Prauf is once again faced with the fact that his thirteen-year-old roommate and his – well, Tabbers, have the same terrible sense of home décor.  He gets a perturbing mental image of that creation sitting on the shelf over Tabbers’s bed, glowering down at them, watching, judging….

With a shudder, Prauf opens the conservator and focuses his wandering mind on throwing together dinner before they turn in.  He’d hung around the shipbreaking yard for a while today after his shift ended, hoping to pick up some overtime.  None materialized, so he finally headed home over an hour late, only to find the kid hadn’t even thought about dinner.  The clay might’ve been a bad idea.  Cal’s been having an absolute ball, and it’s not like he’s shirking work or anything, but Prauf hasn’t seen him so fixated since he first discovered he could steal little metal scraps from the yard and turn them into bugs.

It’s been two weeks since their sojourn into the wastes went sideways.  Cal can walk without limping too much and breathe without wincing too much (sneezing is still best avoided), and aside from some miserable headaches and a smidge of difficulty concentrating on occasion, Prauf’s over the worst of his concussion symptoms.  His shoulder’s feeling pretty good as well.  And Empire Day was surprisingly painless when they were both too injured to do anything except nap, eat curry, and deride six episodes of Champion Racer – if any of those imbeciles ever make it through an actual podrace with all their limbs intact, Prauf will eat his poncho.

Tomorrow is Seventhday, so they’re off again.  No big plans aside from spending money he doesn’t have to replace his boots.  The left sole has torn halfway off.  Prauf’s been space-taping it together before work every morning, but it only stays waterproofed for about a third of the shift.  Now, next week should be more interesting; Tabbers’s crew’s extra free day coincides with Prauf’s usual free day and he might come around.  Or Prauf will drop by his place.  Or both, so they can all have some regular hangout time and he doesn’t have to worry about Cal overhearing anything Prauf would really prefer to keep between himself and Tabbers.

Dinner, Prauf reminds himself, eyeing a puny podpopper, shrugging, and tossing it on the counter.  He’s low on tangerette paste and the yellowish dust that Guild commissaries pass off as punctil, so curry’s out of the question tonight.  Soup it is.  “Did you remember to pick up more polystarch on your way home?”  Prauf leaves off the like I asked you to, because that sounds kind of patronizing and judgmental, but he’s already preparing himself for disappointment.

“It’s in the cupboard,” Cal says.  Miracles do happen.  Then he adds, “Actually, I forgot, but I had to stop at the Exchange for some wire, and the commissary was right next door, so I remembered at the very last second.”

Still a miracle.  Prauf mixes a couple buns up real quick, leaves them on the back burner so they’ll be warm by dinnertime, and starts some broth.  He’s chopping the podpopper and regarding a tube of protato with disdain when Cal abruptly says, “Hey, Prauf?”

“Yeah?”

“What does telashi mean?”

The knife skids off the skin of the podpopper and misses Prauf’s thumb by about a millimeter.  He puts it down, turns around.  That is not a word he ever expected to come out of his little Human roommate’s mouth.  “Where did you hear that?”

Cal looks up and blinks at him from a landscape of electronics and wires and heating coils.  He’s trying to repair a broken countertop oven he bought from a salvager so he can convert it into a kiln for their current kitchen table centerpiece.  “Is it vulgar?”

“Not at all, but….”  Prauf shakes his head a little, returns to the task at hand.  “Have you been watching Abednedish soap operas or something?  ‘cause that’s the only place you’re probably gonna encounter it, unless you’re on my homeworld.  It’s something affectionate you’d call your partner, but it has… connotations.  First, it’s not used casually – it’s like, you’re bonded or married or whatever the local equivalent is, or intending to be.  And second, while it is real affectionate, it’s also got, uh, kind of a suggestive slant.”

Cal doesn’t say anything.  Prauf glances over his shoulder to make sure the boy’s listening and not buried in oven parts and finds himself being watched with a decidedly shrewd expression.  His stomach gives an uneasy twist even before Cal opens his mouth.  “Has Tabbers ever heard it before?”

Not exactly the question Prauf anticipated, but an easy one to answer.  “Doubt it.”  Tabbers doesn’t bother concealing his distaste for those soap operas.

“Does he know what it means?”

“No,” Prauf says again, confidently, slicing the tube of protato open.  If he forms blobs of this slop into patties and cooks them on the stovetop first, they might actually hold their shape in the soup this time instead of melting into sludge….  “Never explained that one to him.”  Even though he wishes, sometimes, impractically, they could maybe be telashim to each other one day.  Cal is once again quiet and Prauf shoots another suspicious look in his direction – this time, the boy hastily props up his chin in his palm to cover his half-smirking mouth, almost shoving his magna-driver up a nostril in the process.  “No, he doesn’t,” Prauf emphasizes.  Except it’s occurring to him now that Tabbers could’ve stumbled across it while reading something and looked up the meaning.  He very well might have some translations of Abednedish novels in the cluttered library he calls an apartment.  “…oh, gods, what did I say while I was concussed?!”

Cal just laughs at him before continuing to rewire that little oven he hopes will bake his bipedal, hunched, decrepit, rotting rabbit-creature sculpture into horrifying permanence.  And then Prauf can shove his head in there and end it all.  Or… Tabbers hasn’t breathed a word on the subject for the past two weeks.  Maybe he really doesn’t know.  Or he does and thinks Prauf forgot whatever it is he said, which is true.  And in that case, Prauf can just let that hang there, see what happens….

BANG!

He drops the knife again and whips around.  Cal’s disappeared behind the cloud of smoke emanating from the oven; Prauf can hear him coughing, though, and a second later sees a waving arm try to clear the air.  “It’s okay!” Cal calls.  “Lost a fuse, but at least now I know the heating coils still work fine – oh no –”  The hazy silhouette pulls a sleeve down over his hand and starts swatting at the fire creeping across the tabletop.

Sighing, Prauf snatches up a nearby mug and fills it with water to douse the flames.  Most likely outcome, the kid will burn the entire building down and kill the both of them before he ever has to deal with what Tabbers does or doesn’t know and how he feels about it, but Prauf is going to hold out for another miracle anyway.