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The driving rain that permanently held Bracca's barren mountains in its miserable thrall was almost blinding tonight. Cal Kestis clung to the side of a BFF-1 freighter like a tiny spider, shivering with the cold and desperately trying to work loose the valuable copper cable he'd been sent up here to retrieve with aching fingers, numb even beneath the heavy duty gloves he wore that were at least three sizes too big.
No-one had even questioned him when he'd staggered, half starved, injured and bleeding into one of a thousand dingy Scrapper's Guild offices dotted across the festering mounds of junk that littered the rocky mountains of Bracca. He had had such limited information on the planet below where the Albedo Brave had been stationed despite her proximity to the scrapheap. The Guild…had seemed like a better option than waiting to either drown in the incessant rain or get his one remaining possession stolen from him and dying in a dingy neon street with a blaster hole between his eyes.
The tattoo on his wrist stung, a permanent reminder of his indentured servitude. Three months since the Purge, three months he had been here, and he had yet to see a single credit, his only ‘pay’ for his services two sludgy meals a day and a cot in a crowded bunk room in a filthy tenement block built out of the bones of the ships they scrapped. He still owed his ‘employer’ for said bunk and meals, not to mention all his equipment and clothes. The Guild had seemed like a safe option at the time, but his debt built up as fast as he could work it off, and the yellow stripes on his uniform just engendered apathy at worst, and pity at best from the employed engineers and riggers who worked the scrapheap for real money.
Cal grit his teeth and resumed his fierce tugging, almost slipping off the edge. If he came home with nothing, he wouldn't eat. With renewed vigour he twisted and twisted, finally crowing a quiet victory when the coil of copper piping came loose in his hand. It was heavier than he'd anticipated and he almost lost his footing, a quiet gasp tumbling from his lips as he clung to the side of the crumbling freighter.
For a moment he was still, trembling. The work as a whole was hideous, dangerous and soul destroying, and Cal pressed his forehead to the wet durasteel in front of him. No-one was coming for him. There was no-one left to come for him, he knew that with a vicious clarity that kept him awake at night even after twelve hours of gruelling manual labour and a paltry handful of bland nutrimash. If he was lucky, this copper would be enough to have a shot of flavouring in his mash tonight. He carefully began his descent, muscles trembling with fatigue as he shimmied down the hull of the bulk freighter, hanging precariously in the air underneath it for a few seconds before swinging himself back onto the gantry rigging that had been hastily erected around the ship. The weight of the copper coils unbalanced him and he gasped, wobbling as he landed.
“You good, kid?” One of the Riggers called as a rough blue-skinned hand reached to grab his arm, steadying him. He didn't have yellow stripes. He wasn't a twelve year old orphaned runaway indentured to a careless Guild. Cal managed a single exhausted nod, and a slim Pantoran face half shrouded in a thick hood looked him over quickly before clapping him on the back. “Down you go then.” It discomfited some of the seasoned workers, seeing such a young kid scrambling all over soaking, dangerous scrapheaps. Bracca was not awash with children, Cal was in a minority that meant he always felt lonely and out of place. Or maybe it was the yellow stripes. What amounted to slavery still offended some, even this far from the Core.
He thought of his Master as he scrambled down the creaking scaffolding that swayed dangerously in the whipping wind that had built up since he'd left for the job. Jaro Tapal wanted him to live, to carry on, to hold the line…so here Cal was, doing his best to survive, because for the moment that was all he could do, indentured or otherwise. It was a miserable existence and as the days had become weeks and months, the news of the elimination of the Jedi Threat recycled on every holocast in every seedy dump Cal had ventured to grace had wormed its way firmly into the Padawan's mind.
No-one was coming for him. The Jedi were gone, the Council would never signal him because the Council was gone. He was utterly alone, stuck on a backwater planet with no credits and no way out, terror pounding with every beat of his heart, with every askance look thrown his way, every time someone looked just a little too long. If they found out he was a Jedi, he'd be dead. And as miserable as this existence had become in the last few weeks…Jaro Tapal died to save him. Was dead because of him. If all he could do was survive…then at least in some tiny way that sacrifice would not be in vain. It was all Cal could cling to.
Because it should have been him, up there outside those escape pods. Their escape had been wrecked because he hadn't been fast enough, good enough. He should have died and his Master survived, because Jaro Tapal would have known what to do. Cal was good for nothing but hiding and crying bitterly into his bunk. He groaned, shoving wet hair out of his face and forcing himself out of his spiral. The worst part of this mind numbing job was how difficult the mundanity made it to stop thinking. He wanted so badly to stop thinking, about the Clones, about his Master.
The ramshackle outline of his Guild building loomed out of the soggy darkness, and he gratefully pushed open the door and slipped inside, finally out of the rain. He shook himself off like a little wet puppy, dripping all over the floor as he headed to the repository office to drop off his copper coils. He'd be glad to shift the weight of them. The bored looking Mirialan official took his offering and scanned his tattoo to check him back in. He didn't even look at Cal, let alone speak to him, he just measured out the copper and handed over a meal chip.
Cal almost cried when he took it. Hot broth, caf and vegetable flavoured nutrimash. It was a better meal than he'd had in days, and he scurried to the canteen as fast as his short legs could carry him, requisitioning his dinner and fleeing to a quiet corner to mantle it like a threatened bird of prey, watching for would-be thieves. He'd fought for his food before, and won enough times that for the most part even the biggest guys wouldn't mess with ‘that crazy kid Kestis’ by now. But that didn't stop him being careful with his dinner, green eyed gaze sweeping across the canteen suspiciously.
Being raised as a Padawan in a war zone had a fair few advantages, even if his Master's lightsaber was stashed within the broken metalwork of his bunk and not hanging at his hip. Cal could fight. Here, he had had to, utilising every half remembered scrap of hand to hand combat training he could muster until the Guild reps arrived to yank them apart.
He finished his meal in record time, and then made his way to the tiny cubby he called home. It was a curtain-covered bunk in a cold, damp room with a dozen other bunks bolted to the walls, but it was a bed, and after eleven hours on the job Cal was utterly exhausted, only shrugging off his outermost layer because it was soaking wet. He abstractly realised he was karking freezing only when he burrowed under the blanket. Mercifully it was heavy duty, like the uniform, and huddled beneath it, he finally began to regain some feeling in his fingers and toes.
Of course, like everything else he owned here, he owed the Guild credits for said military grade blanket. His debt was a mysterious thing, hanging over his head and changing every day with unknown fees and small, inconsequential repayments. He wasn't stupid, he knew the Guild kept the details from him so they could artificially inflate it and keep him working basically for free. He knew how the Guilds worked, he'd spent weeks stationed over Bracca with little to do save read musty, boring reports from the planet's surface.
Suddenly, he missed sitting on that warm bunk with half a dozen datapads scattered around him with a fierce, aching longing. He buried his face in his blanket so anyone else in the room wouldn't hear his muffled sob. He missed his Master. He missed the Commander. He missed actual personal contact. Curled up in his bunk, he felt small and worthless, just a little pin, twisted and useless, in the enormous machine of the Scrapper's Guild workforce. It wasn't the first time he'd cried himself to sleep in this little rathole he called a bedroom.
***
Six months of living on this depressing trashheap of a planet had taught Cal that friends were not an easy thing to come by in a place like this. Knowing people was one thing, exchanging the odd mumbled greeting and working beside someone for a shift…that wasn't friendship. They were just acquaintances by necessity, and the regular workers weren't exactly keen to make friends with the indentured servants the Guild had under their greasy thumb. The closest thing he had to a friend was the young Zabrak who slept in the bunk opposite his - Nova, he was called, and he was a good handful of years older than Cal. They kept different shifts, but just occasionally found time to sit together in the canteen and share whatever awful meal they’d been able to earn that day. Cal had been smart enough, once, to share his caf with Nova, and now they shared anything they earned above nutrimash. It was a pale imitation of the fierce friendships Cal had nurtured first in the Temple, then on the Brave…but it was contact, and for the first time Cal didn't feel quite so alone.
“Hey kiddo.” Nova sprawled down opposite him, ripping his rehydrated bread roll in half and chucking the smaller piece at Cal’s head.
Cal grinned, catching it gratefully. “Thanks…”
“…Rough day?” The older boy huffed, nodding towards Cal’s depressing pile of nutrimash.
Cal grimaced. “Shouldn't have been. I was working with a couple of Engineers but one of them got himself karking electrocuted and we all had to wait about for hours while they got rid of the body.” He’d had barely anything to bring back to his handler, so a half ration of flavourless mush was all he’d gotten. It seemed Nova had had a better day at least, the Zabrak deftly swapping a scoop of his own flavoured mush for Cal’s plain. “There. Mix it up and it might just be edible.” He teased, tapping Cal on the head with the spoon. They ate quickly, in silence after that, and Cal felt the tiniest flicker of warmth in his chest at the kindness.
Usually, Cal went straight to the bunk room after dinner to collapse in an exhausted heap, but Nova poked and prodded until he agreed to join him in the dingy little recreation room afforded to the indentured servants of the Scrapper's Guild. Cal had no doubt the only reason they had it was to meet some sort of anti slavery law that no-one actually gave a damn about, but it had a couple of sabacc tables, and a handful of dusty old board games.
For the most part, Cal realised, they all just came here to relax together on the lumpy cushions dotted around the room. There weren't any left when Nova and Cal got there, so they sat on the floor, where Cal fidgeted and felt terribly small and awkward. Socialising wasn't really something he was good at. The last group of people he’d called friends all shared the same face and voice, and they had tried to kill him.
He'd loved them as much as he'd loved Master Tapal. His battalion, the courageous men of the thirteenth. And his special squad, assigned specifically to him. He had known each of them so well, could picture them in his mind’s eye. Ace, Gunner, Doubles, Stinger and Kit. His Starfire squadron. He'd picked that name out when he was ten. It had been a bit embarrassing when he was twelve. He hadn't seen any of them during the Purge. He'd have remembered if one of his Clones, with their painted insignia on their chest plates (a burst of flame, over the heart, out of fierce devotion to their baby commander) had shot at him as he fled through the bowels of the Venator.
He didn't know if he wanted them to have survived or not. He knew he might not be the only survivor of the Albedo Brave - she might have exploded outside of atmo but his pod definitely wasn't the only one jettisoned. (He'd known. He'd looked, poking through the wreckage that had tumbled to Bracca’s rocky surface. Most of the ship had burned up in the planet’s atmosphere but enough had been left for a skinny, muddy, devastated little Padawan to pick through.)
If he ran into them now…would they still try to kill him? He didn't understand why the Clones had turned on them, the betrayal vast and hideous, and Cal remembered the terror and pain of the chase and being shot almost point blank in the face… but he just…couldn't imagine Starfire Squad turning their blasters on him.
Then again, he'd thought the same of Commader Krayt.
“…planet to Kestis. Cal?” Nova shook him out of his dismal spiral and he blinked rapidly up at the Zabrak, blushing when he realised several sets of eyes were on him.
“Sorry. I'm really tired.” He admitted, rubbing at his eyes. “What…what was the question?”
“We asked you where you were from.” A woman snorted, her voice mechanical, her face covered by a breather and mask.
Cal froze, blinking rapidly as his brain screeched to a halt. He was a terrible liar, Master Tapal and the men had always been able to catch him out, what was he supposed to say? He drew in a breath and scratched the back of his head to give himself a second to think. They were all watching him, this ragtag pack of down and out labourers who had nothing better to do that sit and play with a faded deck of cards and wallow in their shared misery.
Something like the truth couldn't hurt. “I don't actually know.” He admitted carefully. “I was found alone on a refugee ship heading towards Corellia, but I grew up in the Core until I was ten. No idea if I had a family before then, or what.” He shrugged a shoulder, hoping that was enough.
“Ah…adopted?” Nova prodded, tilting his head.
“Something like that.” Cal mumbled, looking away. Thankfully that seemed to appease the little group, and the woman with the breather laughed and squeezed his shoulder before they were back to playing their game. Cal watched with half an eye, misery creeping up within him. He missed home. He missed the Temple and his friends and the kind masters and teachers, the refectory with its abundance of colourful and tasty food, the trips out into the vibrant Coruscanti streets to find snacks with the other junior Padawans.
He'd give anything to be sitting with other Jedi right now, able to feel their light in the Force and curl into the safety of their presence. He couldn't be the only one left, but…stuck here on this barren planet with no credits and no way to escape, he might as well be completely alone in the Galaxy.
He excused himself as early as he could get away with, fleeing back to the bunk room, and Nova followed him a few minutes later. “Not much of a socialite are you, Kestis?” He chuckled, sitting on the edge of his own bunk opposite Cal.
“Not used to talking about myself.” Cal admitted, fiddling with the threadbare sheet tucked into the bunk. “and I wasn't kidding, I really am tired.”
“Alright kid. I should sleep too, got some big job tomorrow out in the Belt, supposed to be a pretty good score but you know how this shit usually pans out, so do me a favour and earn yourself a decent meal I can poach off you tomorrow, yeah?” Nova teased.
Cal grimaced. The Belt was notoriously dangerous, a sharp rocked, sweeping mountain range a handful of sky train stops south, littered with centuries-old rubble. Cal had never been on the sky train, only the rattly little local network that ferried them around the scrapyard, so he'd never seen the Belt for himself, but the other scrappers told enough stories that he knew he definitely didn't want to. “Hope it's worth it. I'll do my best.” He promised, rolling over in his bunk to pick at the peeling paint on the wall before falling into his usual restless sleep.
Luckily, everyone was always too exhausted to wake up to his nightmares, so no-one shook him awake until the work bell tolled the next morning. Nova was up and gone already, presumably to get an early train out to his job, and Cal joined the shuffling queue for the sonic and helped himself to a ration bar that tasted like sand dipped in bacta. Then it was yet another endless queue for a job chip, and all this before the sun was even up.
Not that you could see the sun today, the clouds were dark and menacing as Cal clambered his way up a service tunnel to get to the heap of broken bombers he was supposed to dig through today.
The ship cutter had already torn them all apart, and the pickers and engineers had left them a solid mess, but Cal’s job was to pick the bones for anything left behind. Which usually meant sliced up fingers and cold hands by the end, with not a lot to show for it. He soon zoned out at least, the hours slipping by as he plucked fruitlessly at tangled wires and decaying consoles.
Something glinted in his peripheral, and he scrubbed at his eyes, pushing rain-drenched hair aside as he leaned over. “No way…” He murmured, digging under a heap of metal scraps until he unearthed a small silver disc. It was a navigational device designed to control a proton torpedo direction and somehow it had been missed by everyone that had come before him. He stared, wide eyed, before quickly tucking it into his poncho and climbing out of the heap.
He took a bit of a convoluted route back, nervous with his prize a solid weight in his inner pocket. It felt like he had a beacon above his head screaming that he was carrying a valuable item, and he tried not to hurry back to the Guild offices too fast.
The Quartermaster looked up at him in surprise as he slunk into the repository office, and Cal breathed a bit of a sigh of relief - the Trandoshan's lackeys were much more stingy with their payouts than he was, which meant Cal had struck lucky twice in one day. He grinned proudly as he dumped the tiny torpedo navigation chip on the desk, and took a moment to enjoy the look of shock that passed over the Quartermaster's face. “Well well.” He hissed approvingly. “Look what the little red scrap rat dragged in.” He inspected it carefully, turning it over in his hands as Cal rocked on the balls of his feet.
“…Double rations and half shifts for the rest of the week.” He said finally, sliding the navigator out of sight and handing over three meal chips. “Good job little red. You've a handy eye.”
Cal basked in the praise, then made a beeline for his bunk. He'd wait for the end of shift so he could share with Nova, anticipation curling in his stomach. The older boy was going to be so pleased with him.
Several hours later, one flavourful meal heavier and practically bouncing as he waited to share the best meal he'd managed to scrape together in months with his friend, he hovered close to the canteen door, watching as the last handful of workers returned to the canteen. It was getting late - he knew Nova had been at the Belt, but the last train had been ages ago, and there was still no sign of him. His stew was going cold, so he sidled over to a table and poked at it, slowly eating his half as he waited.
And waited, and waited. The workers were beginning to leave now, it was so late, and a dawning sense of dread was beginning to build in Cal’s chest. As the bell rang to chase the last of them from the canteen, he stood stiffly, still holding his bowl.
He couldn't stomach the second half.
Dumping it in the trash, he trudged back to the bunk room, and accosted one of the other boys at the door. “Hey. Have you seen Nova?” He asked quietly.
“…Ah…shit, Red. You didn't hear?” The older boy, a skinny Togruta with moon-pale markings on deep red skin. “He got lippy with a couple of the cutters. They said it was an accident, but…” He shrugged. “He went over the mountain. Reckon they made it happen, you know? Not like any of us yellow stripes are worth shit. Sorry kid.” He patted Cal on the head awkwardly, then left him to stare at Nova’s empty bunk, already cleared of its blanket and sheet, bare and empty.
He sank back onto his own bunk, a hollow ache in his stomach.
Not like any of us are worth shit.
Cal’s shoulders shook, and he collapsed back into the bunk, burying his face in his pillow and choking back sobs as silently as he could.
Nova had hardly had time to be a friend. But Cal felt his absence keenly, the same way he still felt Master Tapal’s absence, and the Order, and his Squad, and all their men, his friends in the Temple…
In the relative quiet darkness of the bunk room, Cal Kestis felt the aching chill of loneliness as he cried himself bitterly to sleep.
You aren't worth shit.