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Cal gritted his teeth and seethed harshly as he tried to shuffle out of his poncho without moving his left side too much. The blaster burn on his side was raw, the parts of his pale skin visible through the torn fabric of his shirt were red and cracked, and the Jedi Knight could still viscerally feel the ghost of the searing heat that had exploded across his chest from the moment of impact.
There was a loud, disgusted reaction from Cal’s side, and he turned as much as he could to see Greez taking a seat on the end of the couch beside him, quickly pressing a damp cloth to the teenager’s side with both of his right hands. “Yikes, kid, you getting rusty or something?”
The Jedi winced at the pressure and texture of the cloth, but it did succeed in cooling down the wound, just enough for Cal’s face to slacken into something slightly more resembling peace. “I was tired. You know how bad the Shadowlands are.”
“I don’t, and I really don’t want to,” Greez said hurriedly, as if worried Cal was about to explain whatever went down in the forests of Kashyyyk. “This could take a while to heal. You’ll be lucky if we can fix the hole in your poncho — actually, scratch that. We’ll be lucky if we can’t.”
“Hey,” Cal whined at the offence. “That’s one of my better ones.”
Greez regarded the bright orange bundle of waterproof fabric on the small table in front of the couch, a smouldering smell still emanating from it. The Latero couldn’t tell the difference between the orange of the poncho and the orange of the embers nipping at it, but he was sure there were some of the latter. Despite his words, the sigh he let out definitely said he was going to make an attempt to fix it.
“You seem pained,” came the proper voice from towards the holotable, and Cal had to suffer through the pain of turning ever so slightly to see the tall figure of Merrin leaned against the circular piece of high-tech furniture, arms crossed.
“No, this? This is nothing,” Cal said, forcing his obviously pained expression to curl into something that slightly more resembled a smile. He had no idea why he was even making the attempt to look tough for the Nightsister, but the idea of looking as weak as he felt in front of her gave him an uncomfortable level of embarrassment. “Remember when I got stabbed with my own lightsaber? That was way worse.”
“I do remember. You cried when you ran out of adrenaline.”
Kriff.
“Either way, it looks painful. I would offer my magick to assist the healing, but I am concerned about the possibility of driving you into a rageful mindless frenzy,” Merrin continued, fingers tapping against her arm like it was a choice she was giving genuine thought.
Greez’s left arms half-curled around Cal protectively as the pilot looked back at the Nightsister cautiously, so Cal brushed him off slightly. “She’s joking, Greez.”
Then he looked up to share the usual mischievous smile with Merrin, only to see her still eyeing him contemplatively, now also moving over to sit on the opposite corner of the couch. Greez went back to covering Cal protectively, and the Jedi didn’t stop him.
“It’s okay, thanks. Bee-Dee went to get more stims from the engine room. He’ll be back any second,” Cal excused, trying to turn around to look down the living quarters hallway behind him. He could only get as far as being able to see the terrarium before pain shot out from his side again.
Greez grabbed him by the shoulder and forced him to face forward again. “Keep it still, kid. I thought you were used to getting shot by now.”
Cal bit back a groan of pain. “You don’t really get used to it. Still, would’ve thought bounty hunters would depower their blasters a little, right?”
“The Haxion Brood doesn’t really do the whole ‘-or alive’, thing,” Greez said after a very short, very quiet apology to the Jedi. “Especially not after how many of their bounty hunters you’ve killed. Uh, defeated.”
Cal frowned — saying defeated over killed always sounded better in his own head, a little more sanitised, more… Jedi-like, maybe, but whenever it came out of someone else’s mouth it just made him feel immature for it — “I guess. It feels like the bounty droids are always a little more vicious, too. You think?”
“I don’t know, you’re the one that fights them,” Greez said, finally removing the damp cloth from Cal’s side. Once they got the healing stim from BD-1 to alleviate the pain, they could get him out of his nicely crisped shirt to properly bandage it.
“Then I’ll agree with myself,” Cal decided. “Getting really sick of fighting those clankers.”
There were two instant movements aboard the Mantis that Cal noticed. Alongside that, he didn’t even need the force to sense how the mood aboard the ship changed. The first movement was that Greez physically flinched, and looking his way revealed his mouth curled into a static, awed ‘oh’. The other movement was the shifting sound of a chair from the cockpit, Cere poking her head out towards them with an unapologetic death stare.
On the other hand, Cal instantly felt very apologetic, not knowing what for. The best he could do was an uncomfortable, “uhhh…”
There was a trill behind him, and Cal turned to find BD-1 perched on the back of the couch, right next to his head, but before he could make another noise the droid shot out the stim he’d asked for the second he got on board the ship.
Notably, not at him. It plinked away somewhere in the kitchen, probably rolling around down the back of the kitchen table somewhere, and then Cal felt the tiny impact of a little metal leg kicking him in the back of the head. His mouth made the same shape Greez’s was as BD-1 hopped down from the couch and scurried back into the engine room. Cal, still unable to turn so much without wincing, lost him instantly.
“What was that for?” Cal asked himself quietly.
“Are you kidding? You just said… you know,” Greez spoke up once he’d gotten the shock off of his face. Some of it, anyway.
“What? Said what?” Cal asked. Had he said something bad? What had he just said? His brain ran through his previous few words. “Clanker?”
“Cal!” Cere’s voice ran out through the Mantis, empowered by pure ‘not mad, just disappointed’ energy. The last time Cal could even recall a person sounding like that was Jocasta Nu scolding him for shouting in the Jedi Temple’s library, over 12 years ago.
And now he was getting the heart-hurting feeling he always did when he thought about his days as a Youngling or Padawan.
In his defence, though, he’d totally had a psychometric episode when his hand glanced across another Jedi’s lightsaber hilt. The whole thing had been really unfair. Kind of like right now. “What, what’d I do?”
“You can’t say that, Cal,” Greez butted in right before Cere could make her point.
“What’s wrong with that word?” Merrin asked, exactly how Cal wanted to. Though, she was more curious compared to his abject confusion. “‘Clanker’?”
“Don’t you start too,” Cere pointed an accusatory finger at Merrin, managing to shut up the Nightsister immediately. “Cal, that’s derogatory to droids.”
“No it’s not,” Cal claimed, and wished he could take it back when Cere furrowed her brow. “I mean, maybe it is, but… not in a… uh… the Clones used it all the time.”
Cere cocked her head just slightly, like that wasn’t an excuse.
“Well… the 13th Battalion did. Didn’t your Clone Troopers ever say it?”
“Cordova never got his own Clone Troops. Neither did me and…” Cere froze on the name. A few weeks on and she still couldn’t get herself to say it. Cal instantly felt frustrated at himself for even taking the conversation to a place where it needed to be brought up. “Neither did my apprentice and I.”
“They do,” Cal said, but that was seeming like a more and more pathetic excuse by the second. “They said it a lot. Constantly. It wasn’t derogatory, it… like a funny insult, or…
“The word the soldiers used to describe their droid enemies wasn’t derogatory?” Greez asked sarcastically, now sharing Cere’s skepticism.
Cal went silent for a second. A couple of seconds. A while. Then he whispered something that was probably another cuss to himself, and moved to stand up.
By the time he got to his feet, his vocabulary was all curses and pained yells. The two other crew members of the Mantis on either side of him were quickly beside him to force him back down, while Cere dashed past them to grab the stim BD-1 had thrown away.
BD-1 was sitting on its own for 19 minutes and 20 seconds exactly, before its audio receptors picked up somebody approaching. The droid spun its legs over its back until its feet were planted flat on the mattress, and it could pick itself up to a standing position. Then it spun its head around until it saw Cal Kestis. He was leaning, very slightly, against the doorway in a way that made it clear he was trying to pretend he wasn’t. His ginger hair was still a little tousled, but the sweat and Kashyyyk dirt on his face had been wiped off. He’d finally taken off his damaged shirt and his midsection was tightly bandaged, though Cal was still favouring his right side in terms of weight distribution as he stood and the left hip of his pants still had some superficial scorching.
BD-1 turned and sat down again, facing away from Cal and leaning its own side into Cal’s pillow.
The Jedi Knight swallowed nervously and stepped closer, testing the social energy in the upper deck of the engine room before he slowly, silently took a seat at the other end of the cot.
“I’m sorry,” was the first thing Cal could think to say. He’d entered the engine room hoping that the right words would appear in his head, but even after starting off the tense conversation he had no clue where to take it.
BD-1 made an array of beeping noises.
“Not talking to me. Right. That makes sense,” Cal said, starting to fidget with his hands. The glove that was usually on his left hand was gone — he was less inclined to touch his injury when it came with the possibility of his psychometry making him re-experience it with more vividness than the first time around. “You don’t have to forgive me, but you deserve an apology anyway. I didn’t know what it meant.”
BD-1 booped disbelievingly.
“No, that’s true… I guess I did. I had to. I just… didn’t really put two and two together,” Cal peeked at BD-1, and the droid swivelled its head back around in an attempt to pretend it wasn’t looking at him. “That’s kind of what I have you for.”
BD-1 slowly, painfully slowly, turned back to look at Cal, then beeped questioningly.
“Well, not that exactly. I mean… you’re the brains of us. I just have to swing the stick around.”
BD-1 got to its feet and took a single step over to Cal, making even more noises.
“Come on, you save me every time we fight someone. I don’t even mean the stims — like when we fought the Second Sister on Zeffo? Or the Sith Lord, in the Fortress?” Cal recalled their adventure, what were truly terrifying times in the moment, but now somehow managed to be half-fond memories. “I’d be dead a hundred times if it wasn’t for you.”
BD-1 trilled with the same kind of reminiscence, and took a seat again, now comfortably beside Cal.
But the Jedi Knight continued. “You’re the best, Bee-Dee. There’s no one I’d rather have with me.”
The little droid leaned over so it could nuzzle its head gently into Cal’s side. It was probably perfectly calculated so the contact would be nice, just slightly tingly through the bandage, not hard enough to make the blaster wound roar with pain again.
And Cal gingerly moved his bare left hand to the droid, stroking the plating of its head with his fingertips.
In an instant, Cal saw the flashes, his psychometry showing him scene after scene of the droid’s life.
Finding Cal meditating on Bogano, where they first met. Racing each other up to the Vault. Exploring Zeffo, and Kashyyyk, and Dathomir, meeting Merrin and Saw Gerrera, Cal listening with a smile on his face as BD-1 beeped and trilled about whatever new thing it had just scanned and added to its databank. BD-1 sitting with Cal and booping sadly as he recovered from the lightsaber wound to his abdomen just weeks ago.
Cal knew, realistically, these were just whatever memories the metal frame of the little droid had, selected at random. He didn’t have control of what he saw, and it certainly wasn’t like BD-1s circuits were choosing their favourite moments to share with him.
But Cal wanted to imagine it was the latter, so he did.