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Some days, most days if he is to be honest, Cal feels more like a murderer than a Jedi.
He remembers when he was first… discovered, on Bracca. He remembers landing in the cargo train, and the anxious call of, “What do you mean, a Jedi?”
He remembers cutting those two troopers down more vividly than he remembers most of his time as a Rigger. He killed them, and then he stood there as the stench of cauterization coiled through the air like one of the Maw’s hungering tendrils.
Cal stood until he could no longer, dizzy from the clarity– the knowledge that he was the one to snuff those faint lights out, and that by attempting to save just one life he had doomed both them and others.
Four, he had thought as his guts roiled in a civil war of far more miniscule scale, and then, I won’t forget.
Four became ten soon enough, and then ten became thirty, thirty-one, thirty-five.
Cal knows that Jedi have never been exempt from killing. The lightsaber might be made as a tool of self-defense, but it is a weapon foremost, and even before the war they faced pirates and thugs and slavers.
It is different when it is up close. That does not mean it does not get easier, though, and that– that frightens Cal more than anything the Inquisitors could ever do to him.
Death, it seems, slips as easily as a vibroblade through blue butter. Except he does not want to kill anyone, to hurt anyone. Even still, everything he ever learned about crippling Separatist droids has now been applied to organics. To people.
On Zeffo, the count rose enough to encompass a full company– a quarter of the Iron Battalion’s number in its prime. And he has never really thought about how many droids he took down in each battle, but Cal never realized just how quickly that number builds up.
He thinks he has more blood on his hands now than any individual squad of clones ever did during the Purge. Maybe more than any single Master ever did before the War, or even during it.
Knowing how much is bad enough, but–
Not knowing, Kashyyyk teaches him, is even worse.
Cal does not know how many men he killed in hijacking and using the Walker. He has no way to know– so many of them were unseen, casualties counted by at least’s more than unchangeable facts.
He loses track of the lights snuffed out, and he does not know if it is for better or worse because he is drowning in it either way.
The Jedi are– were– supposed to protect all life where they could, not simply the victims.
Except there is no Republic anymore and he cannot arrest anyone to turn over to justice– because to the wider, ignorant galaxy, those stormtroopers are justice.
The only punishment they would ever face by the Empire would be for failing, and if they lived they would simply continue onwards to ruin more livelihoods.
Why does helping some have to be synonymous with hurting others?
I’m sorry, he thinks in his remembrances. There’s no other choice–
Cere told him that as long as he lives, there is always a choice.
When that choice rests between hope and annihilation, though, is it even a choice at all?
It is one thing, to fight stormtroopers. Sometimes he can look at their covered heads and pale armor and pretend he is fighting a concept instead of something real.
It makes it easier, in a way, that he never has to see their expressions no matter what sounds they make.
Dathomir is different.
The Nightbrothers are not Cal’s enemy– not really. They are not oppressing a galaxy, not hunting entire cultures to extinction. It is not necessary to fight them, not the way he has to fight troopers.
But they are wary and vicious and do not abide by outsiders, and even though they don’t have to be enemies they fight anyways.
Dathomir is different.
The Nightbrothers do not wear armor, or helmets, or shields. They do not mask their identities, and they do not blend together until he cannot tell anyone apart.
Cal sees every snarl, every wide-eyed look, every hitch in breath and flash of terror. He sees their pain and watches their eyes glaze.
He hears every terrified call for aid. He hears every panicked shout and furious growl when someone falls.
Dathomir is nothing like Bracca or Kashyyyk, with dozens of men in white armor and white helmets without a single identifying marker except for rank.
Dathomir does not let Cal keep his delusions.
How can he call himself a Jedi, a peacekeeper, when all he brings is death and fear to a people that do not deserve it? When most Jedi went their entire lives without more than a sparse few sentients dying to their ‘sabers, but Cal has felled hundreds in just a handful of weeks?
No, he isn’t a Jedi. Not like this. He cannot be.
So when he Pulls at an archer that attempted to shoot him from somewhere out of view, and what comes forth is a scrawny Nightbrother, short and thin with damp, terrified eyes, and absolutely screaming the words, “Get me down, brothers!”—
Cal flinches and lets go of them over solid ground because this zabrak looks so, so young, at best the same age as Cal, and he’s hardly anyone’s idea of an adult himself.
That’s a child, he thinks as the archer scrambles away. And then– How young is he? How many teens and cadets have I killed without even noticing?
He does not know.
He gave up on trying to attach numbers to the blood on his hands.
Force, Cal just does not know. he has no way to know. Not unless he asks, and that– that, just as everything else he has done, would be needlessly cruel.
All he wanted was to reach the temple. Everything he has done here, slowly crawling his way back up to the plateaus, has been wholly and unfathomably unnecessary.
This is not the Empire.
All they want to do is survive, to live their lives.