The Jedi, the Witch and the Clone Wars

by Ottertale

Summary:

Adult Badass Cal Kestis travels back in time to the Clone Wars and causes absolute chaos.

 

The thing is, when you slow something enough, eventually it stops.

Then it reverses.

Combine that with the most powerful teleportation spell the galaxy had ever seen.

Well, the Force didn’t know why they were so surprised they got the results they did.

Maybe this time balance would be found. Maybe the Force’s new champion was a better selection than last time. One can always hope.

Chapter 1: The Death of Jedha

Cassian’s hands are shaking so badly, he’s relieved Jyn is the one working the controls to retrieve the plans.
Behind the blast doors, the muffled sound of blaster fire rings out—closer now.

Cassian crushes the urge to run to K’s aid. They all knew what kind of mission this was when they signed on. It was never a question of if they would die—only when.

Suddenly, the power cuts. Terror grips him. What if it was all for nothing?

“CLIMB!” K’s voice snaps through the comms. “Don’t worry about me. Rebel reinforcements have arrived.”

There’s no time for relief. They scramble up the data tower, dangling thousands of feet over open air.

Jyn clips the plans to her belt just as an Imperial appears in a nearby doorway, leveling a blaster at her.

Cassian is already firing—he drops one trooper—but more are coming. Too many. He and Jyn have no cover.

Snap—sssshhh. The sound is soft, but the flash of light is blinding. The blaster, the hand that held it, and the trooper all tumble into the abyss—severed clean in three pieces.

It’s a Jedi. Or someone crazy enough to wield a stolen lightsaber—a surefire death sentence from the Empire.

Cassian isn’t one to judge when it comes to Imperial death sentences. But maybe he is going mad. He thought the Jedi were all massacred when the Empire rose. Only whispers of them remained—myths, spoken even more cautiously than rebellion or freedom.

Yet even after a hard blink, the glowing white plasma blades don’t disappear. In fact, within seconds, they’ve sliced through the rest of the Imperials like wet paper.

The man—Jedi or not—wields a blade in each hand. He looks human, maybe Cassian’s age, with short red hair.

Cassian and Jyn are already climbing again when the Jedi shouts for them to move. His appearance doesn’t change the mission; if anything, it underlines its importance. The Rebellion is willing to sacrifice possibly the last Jedi for these Death Star plans.

With each new level, the Jedi clears their path.

Finally, they reach the roof and the antenna.

Jyn is the first to the top. She manages to upload the plans and realign the antenna in record time—

—but once again, she’s staring down the barrel of an Imperial blaster.

This time, there’s no Jedi. No Cassian.

“It’s too late,” she says. “The plans have already been sent.”

“The shields are still up!” the Imperial snaps. “Nothing’s getting through.”

It is poor timing for the imperial's statement and relief fills Jyn as a huge explosion lights the sky overhead and the shields drop. Now no matter what comes next the sacrifice was worth it. Jyn knows she is about to die but she smiles.

Green ignites behind the imperial and suddenly blood splatters his front as the blade of a knife protrudes from his torso.

He slumps to the ground dead revealing Jyn rescuer. A woman of similar age and height but that is where the similarity stop. She is clearly not human. Her skin is grey a shade lighter than her grey hair. Dark symmetrical tattoos or markings line her face and fingers. She wears a leather jacket and holds a metal staff in one hand and the bloody dagger in the other.

She nods at Jyn. Sheaths the dagger and turns to pull first Cassian then the jedi through the opening Jyn had previously come through. 

The woman speaks with a heavy accent as she grasps the jedi's hand pulling him to the roof.

"You are always falling behind. One of these days you must keep up."

The jedi just grins goofily up at the woman.

"We appreciate the help, but we need to get out of here" says Cassian after checking that Jyn is ok.

 

They all make it to the beach before they see their doom blotting out the sun. 

Jyn and Cassian drop to their knees on the sand.

"Your father would have been proud of you" Cassian says. Jyn smiles at him reaching out her hand to his -there is no escape for them but because of what they have done here there is hope for others. She does not regret the decisions that led her here.

There is nothing they can do death will rain from above.

However, they are not alone. 

 

The first time Cal slowed time, his master had been gunned down by his clone troops. He hadn’t known it was possible at the time, if he had discovered something common or discovered another weird and rare Force ability like his psychometry. Once again making Cal a freaky genetic mutation even among the freaky genetic mutations of the galaxy. Although he hadn’t given it very much thought at the time. It was all too likely that it might even be a dark side power, given how much fear and horror had been coursing through his veins as little eleven-year-old Cal tried in vain to protect his master and himself from being murdered by people he thought of as friends.

Then he hadn’t touched the Force in six years until that day he had tried and failed to save Prauf.

After that, he never thought much of the ability as being unusual, too busy with not dying and protecting his small family. He guessed he could have asked Cere at one point, but the topic hadn’t come up. The power didn’t feel inherently dark, as after the first instance he had used it multiple times without the dark emotions that had caused the first manifestation.

It had gotten stronger with time though, allowing for several minutes of nearly paused time in an emergency, which had come in very useful in several situations. Like that time Merrin had asked him to … anyway. His master would definitely not have appreciated that use of the Force.

As the horizon ignited, he knew it would not be long enough to save them. Not all at least. However, rebellions are built on hope.

“Merrin, teleport yourself and them off-planet now! I will slow it down as long as I can.”

“I do not have the power to teleport off-planet and even if I did, I would not leave you.”

“You have to try.”

“Ok.”

At the very least, they will die as they meant: fighting for survival. But at least at the end, they are no longer alone.

Cal forces his hands out in front of him, gritting his teeth with the strain as time slows. It is almost beautiful as slow mushroom clouds of red and orange fires bloom ever closer and debris drifts like falling petals.

Merrin’s eyes flare a dangerous green, hands igniting in flames. Mother, sisters help me, she thinks, but Dathomir is light-years away and she is cut off from her source without the red planet. Even if she were home, she had never heard of a ritual powerful enough to transport four (she would never leave her Jedi. She would be far more likely to sacrifice the other two hangers-on, no matter how much Cal would complain later). But it mattered little, for no ritual would have been powerful enough to transport even one off the doomed planet. But she was going to die anyway, might as well die trying. And maybe Cal was right, maybe her magick was one and the same as his Force and her mother and sisters were much closer than she had thought.

The Jedi and the witch pull in power. More power than they have pulled in the rest of their lives. Green flames dance around the small group. Time slows to a crawl around them. Blood runs freely from their noses as their bodies break from the strain.

Cal will not let Merrin die. Maybe it is against the Jedi code, but he loves her, and so he pours everything he has and more into giving her enough time to escape.

The thing is, when you slow something enough, eventually it stops.

Then it reverses.

Combine that with the most powerful teleportation spell the galaxy had ever seen.

Well, the Force didn’t know why they were so surprised they got the results they did.

Maybe this time balance would be found. Maybe the Force’s new champion was a better selection than last time. One can always hope.

Cal is pretty sure he must have died and gone to hell.

He is surrounded by nightmares with white plastoid armor, identical T-shaped visors, and raised blasters.

“What have you done with the commander?” The trooper’s voice is tinny through his comm.

Cal feels dazed. At least this nightmare is different than his usual ones that feature the Bave and his master's death. He is clearly planet-side. He reaches down, ignoring the trooper, and scoops a handful of dirt from the earth. It is warm and dry. He lets it run through his fingers. He sways, his vision going a little hazy around the edges. He doesn’t remember feeling this tired before in his life, and that is saying something after having worked as a scrapper once for four days straight with no breaks - other members of the shift had died.

“What have you done with the commander?” the clone repeats, whose yellow armor matches perfectly with Kerr from the Iron Battalion.

You killed him, his mind supplies, but that isn’t right. Master Tapal was the general… Cal frowns. As a padawan, he had been the commander. Was this some kind of messed up Force vision before death, trying to teach him some kind of wacky moral lesson on how much he had changed that he was no longer recognizable? Maybe? But it still felt weird.

The more important question was: where was Merrin? Would he ever get to see her again? Did Nightsisters go into the Force like Jedi? He had to hope that was true. There was no alternative that didn’t lead to despair.

He took more stock of his surroundings, looking desperately for short grey hair and tattooed skin.

No familiar witch met the wandering green eyes, but the lush vegetation and landscapes reminded Cal of that one short mission to Naboo he had gone on when he was a ten-year-old padawan. It had been a trial run for the unusual young padawan, meant to keep him relatively safe and far from the front lines. Strange, he thought, why would he dream of Naboo? Nothing particularly traumatic (especially on his life scale of trauma) had happened here.

He takes a step to start looking for Merrin (only clear thought) and suddenly finds himself on his hands and knees as the world spins around him.

Pain breaks through the cotton that fills his brain and he glances down at the source. A sun-inch jagged piece of metal debris has made a home in his left side right below his ribs. It is interesting the way it flickers and the blood very slowly oozes around it. There isn’t as much blood as there should be. It is in stasis, he realizes. Somehow, he slowed time around the wound itself. Now that he consciously recognizes what he is doing, he can feel the sap of power.

But why would he be doing this in a dream?

For the first time, he touches the Force since the vision has started, and with growing horror gets his answer by the billions of life forces that he can feel.

This is real.

Which means, his heart soars, everyone is still alive.

His master, the Jedi, Prauf, Cere, Merrin… but his family won’t know him. Won’t recognize him. A familiar pain - he is once again alone. But if he can save them all, stop the Empire, does it really matter? At least they will be alive. But the task feels impossibly large and lonely. What could one half-trained Jedi possibly do against the Sith? Also, he glanced down at the wound. He might not live long enough to find out.

The clones were clearly talking to each other over their helmet comms as they surrounded the stranger. One of them—code name Muscle, Cal’s memory supplied—made a rude gesture, circling his finger near his ear to indicate what he thought of Cal’s mental state.

He blinked—and suddenly Muscle was beside him.

"If you harmed the kid, I’ll arrange for a little accident off the record myself," the clone hissed, roughly cuffing Cal’s hands behind him. Cal was too busy trying not to puke from the pain to respond.

"Hey, Captain, he’s got a lightsaber."

"Is it Cal's?" the captain asked, worry clear even through the helmet.

"No—much too large. It’d be longer than the little midget’s arm."

"Is he a general from a different division?"

"No other generals are currently in the Naboo sector."

"Sith assassin? Like that bald lady or the ones with too many arms? Or do you think we got Dooku?"

Cal couldn’t decide whether to be more offended at being mistaken for Dooku (he wasn’t that old) or at being called a midget.

"Hang on, I got an idea." Helpless with his arms tied behind him, Cal could only watch as one of the clones snatched up his lightsaber—and nearly impaled them both when both ends ignited.

"Oops. Double-ended. Well, it’s not red, so not a Sith. But I’ve never seen white lightsabers before either."

"Oops? You nearly took your leg off, bantha fodder for brains. Besides, dimwit, Grievous is on the clanker's side, and everyone knows he had a full rainbow of lightsabers he collected from dead Jedi. So where’s the kid?"

The end of the statement was punctuated by a savage kick to Cal’s injured side that nearly made him vomit.

Cal quickly rejected the idea of telling them who he was. They wouldn’t believe that the 25-year-old, six-foot male with jagged facial scars and a week’s worth of stubble was the ten-year-old, squeaky-voiced padawan they were looking for. He didn’t know where younger Cal had gone anyway. He wasn’t sure what would be worse: if the younger version ceased to exist when older Cal took his place—or if they’d swapped places and he’d been blown up on Jedha.

"Someone needs to inform the general his kid is missing..."

Silence followed—a loud, tense lack of volunteers—until the comm crackled to life with Master Tapal’s voice.

"Report. I can no longer feel or contact Cal. Has something happened?"

"Yes, sir. The commander is MIA. We have captured a possible lead to his whereabouts."

"Trooper, I will interrogate the prisoner. Have the rest of the men start a search grid immediately."

"Yes, sir."

—

A standard half hour later, Cal was face to face with a ghost.

A big, purple, pointy-eared, eight-foot-tall ghost who looked ready to fight. Honestly, it wasn’t that different from the few times Cal had seen his master as a Force ghost. It had always been a 50/50 split between tough love and outright battle. The strange part was, he seemed smaller now. Cal knew it was because he nearly reached his master’s eye level. Master Tapal was no longer the larger-than-life figure who had once been invincible in his young padawan mind.

Tapal had never been the mushy sort. But he’d been the closest thing young Cal had ever had to a father.

The difference now was that he was alive.

Cal was so very grateful.

And he was going to keep it that way.

—

The Lasat master glowered at him from behind the interrogation table.

Cal prided himself on his pretty solid mental shields—multilayered, tough enough to keep out Inquisitors and Sith. He even kept a layer of Huttese rap running on the surface, much to his old master’s annoyance.

"Your shields are impressive. You've clearly been trained—likely Force-sensitive."

Cal tried for a neutral expression.

"If you won’t cooperate willingly, and since your shields are strong enough to keep me from confirming the truth of your statements, we will have to resort to more... unpleasant methods."

Cal swallowed. Master Tapal wouldn’t actually torture him, would he?

The massive Lasat nodded to a trooper, who moved behind Cal.

"Generally, I prefer to avoid such methods. But my padawan is missing, and I will do what is necessary to keep him safe."

A sharp sting. Pressure at the back of Cal’s neck. Something was injected.

Oh good, Cal thought. You're really doing a fine job. Though he knew he was being unfair to his old master.

"Do you know where my padawan is?"

The world went warm and fuzzy. He couldn’t remember why he hadn’t wanted to talk to his master before. What a great opportunity to finally talk to someone he’d missed so badly.

"Yes," Cal said easily.

Oh no. Truth serum. This was bad.

Tapal leaned forward, studying him. Something about this human—especially his Force signature and those green eyes—seemed familiar. But he could have sworn he’d never seen this man in his life.

"Where is my padawan now?"

"On Naboo."

Master Tapal gave a frustrated growl.

"Anger is unbecoming of a Jedi Master," Cal muttered before he could stop himself.

"Where specifically is my padawan? Is he in danger?"

"He’s somewhere you won’t find him. As for danger—well, I mean, he’s always in danger. So that’s more of a relative question. He probably won’t die immediately."

Well, this isn’t painting me in a flattering light, Cal thought. The more I talk, the more it sounds like I kidnapped my younger self.

"Where is he?"

Through gritted teeth, Cal muttered, "In this room."

"Dose him again. He must have built up resistance to the drug."

"Sir, that would be above the recommended safe dose for a human."

Well, so much for Cal being out of immediate danger.

"Dose him, trooper."

Another sting in his neck. Moments later, Cal had trouble forming thoughts. Why was he listening to Huttese rap again?

"Now—where is my padawan?"

"Here. And on Jedha. Maybe. If Jedha still exists," Cal said absently.

"Sir, Jedha is on the other side of the sector. There’s no way the commander could’ve gotten there already."

"Start tracking all flight logs to Jedha. Immediately."

"Yes, sir. But... we may have overdosed him. He also said ‘here.’ The info might be unreliable."

"I’m aware. We’ll work with what we have."

Tapal turned back to Cal.

Cal smiled loopily.

"Who are you working for?"

Oh good. An easy one, Cal thought.

"No one. I’m completely alone."

It was a sad thought. If he weren’t so detached, he might’ve felt it more deeply.

The answer only seemed to frustrate the old Jedi Master further. If his padawan had been kidnapped, then someone had to be working with this man.

"What is your mission?"

Cal considered the question for a moment.

"Save my family. Then, if I can, save some of the galaxy. It’s too big a job for any one person to save all of it. More likely I’ll die trying. But it’ll be in that order."

He shrugged, clearly too drugged to put much emotion into the answer.

Well, that wasn’t very helpful. Saving the galaxy could mean a lot of things—some good, some bad.

Still, if he had a family, he wasn’t a Jedi. And he had a lightsaber. That wasn’t generally a good sign.

"How did you get that lightsaber? Where were you trained in the Force?"

The man frowned, confused. The answer should have been obvious.

"Ilum. And the Temple. Where else?"

That simplified things. A rogue Jedi would be in the Temple’s files. All Tapal needed was a DNA sample.

"Hey, I have a question. Why are we on Naboo?"

Tapal raised an eyebrow. Was the man asking why his troops were here? He wouldn’t say, of course. And if the man was asking why he was here, the serum might’ve been too strong.

"Never mind. It had something to do with the senator, right?"

That was alarming.

He and his padawan had been assigned to protect the Naboo senator for the past week due to the Confederacy’s heightened interest. What did this mercenary want with her?

The Jedi Master stood, heading for the door. He needed to check on the senator.

"Take a blood sample and send it to the Temple for DNA matching," he ordered the trooper as he passed. Then, he paused. An obvious question he hadn’t yet asked struck him.

He turned back.

"What is your name?"

No response.

The strange man had passed out—face smushed against the table, mouth slightly open, ginger hair sticking up in odd angles.

Master Tapal shook his head. For the briefest moment, the man reminded him of how Cal used to fall asleep at his desk late at night when he was supposed to be studying.

He needed to find his padawan.

Chapter 2: Red Planet

The first thing she smells when she wakes is warm red dust. Welcome home, daughter, it calls to her.

There is only a temporary moment of confusion as Merrin pushes herself up to a sitting position on the much too small bed made of hide in her childhood, but a very wide-eyed Ilyana is staring up at her. She can’t be more than 14.

Well, time travel and teleportation—that is a new skill. Well, that is what you get when you mix a Nightsister and a Jedi, she thinks proudly.

She had stories from her sisters, but they were more legends than history. She hadn’t known it was actually possible.

It’s not the most ideal scenario. She is without her Jedi, and he may not remember her. However, if Cal had changed anything about the Nightsister, it was not to wallow in what might have been when there are things she can change. She was going to die and now she is alive with the chance to save her sisters, and that is a good thing. She has a chance to maybe stop the Empire too, though she is not as clear on how to do that. And she will find her Jedi and seduce him from his ridiculous code once again as it was always meant to be. And if, she thinks sadly, he is a child again and they can no longer be what they were, then she will become what he needs her to be instead—whether protector, sister, or friend—and it will have to be enough.

“Merrin? You are so tall! And pretty!” Ilyana says in wonder from her own bed of animal skins. “And Mother will be very upset about your clothes!”

Merrin’s leather jacket and vest, short gray hair, and long legs look very out of place in the child-sized bed and natural red colors around her.

Dathomir is curious. The planet keeps brushing up against her mind. It knows she is from another place. Merrin long ago had come to the conclusion that the red planet wasn’t dark like the Jedi had thought or all-wise like her mothers had claimed. It was simply a wild, living thing, much like the rest of them, just so much larger.

Merrin uncurls from her cramped position and strides out of the children’s hut.

Confused faces watch her as she marches through her childhood village in all its unscorched glory.

She pushes through the tent of Mother Talzin and comes face to face with a meeting that is already very heated.

Pale eyes meet hers and the bald woman sneers at the interruption to her private audience. Ventress, thinks Merrin, recognizing the bald head and tattoos—her childhood hero who had abandoned her people.

Now they are roughly the same age.

Ventress is taller and has a lightsaber and wields the dark side of the Jedi Force.

But Merrin is a Nightsister and has been trained in the true power of Dathomir.

“What is the meaning of this interruption?” Ventress hisses.

“If you continue down this path, you will doom our sisters,” said Merrin, eyes locking with Ventress.

“So Dathomir has sent you, traveler, to warn us of our fall,” speaks Mother Talzin, voice raspy.

Merrin gives a nod. Ventress goes from anger to confusion.

“I was only a child when they came. I do not know the reason for the slaughter or the reason for their interest in us,” Merrin wished she knew more of the details behind the battle now, but at 12 years old she hardly was part of war room discussions.

“But I remember the battle. I remember the monster that slaughtered our people. He was armored and held the weapon of the Jedi. I remember blaster fire, the blank of droids, and the screams of our dying sisters as they were cut down. We will lose this battle if our plans do not change.”

“What is this madness?” Ventress says, angry.

“Who are you? And who are you to question our strength? When Grievous comes I will slay him like the metal dog he is, and our Mother will slay Dooku from across the stars. They will be no match.”

“I have traveled from the future. I know you will fail,” Merrin hisses, desperate for them to believe her and take her seriously. If her warning falls on deaf ears, then what?

“The future…? Impossible.”

“She is telling the truth. Dathomir validates her words. We would do well to heed her warning,” Mother Talzin states.

Ventress fingers the hilt of her lightsabers, frustration radiating into the air around her.

“Fine, let’s say she is from the future. What good is the memory of a 12-year-old in reshaping a battle plan? How do we ensure we do not make the same mistakes?”

Merrin has no response for that. Fear curls in her belly. Ventress is right. What good are her childhood nightmares in planning a battle? They could make the same plan, and she would not know before it was too late.

“Simple,” Mother Talzin says. “We will let her plan the defense. As she did not make the choices before, she can only make new ones now.”

Merrin and Ventress both turn on Mother Talzin, mouths open to point out the many flaws with that logic.

“I have made my decision,” the old witch says. “And so too has Dathomir.”

Cal wakes to a pinch in his arm and his head feeling much clearer.

A clone trooper is trying to get a DNA sample, and Cal knows they will find a match in the temple databanks if they do.

He doesn’t have his lightsaber, and he still has his hands cuffed behind him, but a Jedi is never unarmed.

Grabbing the Force around the trooper in a not very Jedi-like move that pulls at the slowly bleeding wound in his side, he slams the trooper into the floor with a loud crunch. With relief, he feels the trooper’s Force signature—steady but unconscious. He stands, calling the trooper’s gauntlet from his wrist to the door panel to unlock the interrogation room. He doesn’t know why they hadn’t used Force-suppressing cuffs. Did they not have any or think him too weak to escape? He bet most Jedi could have done what he had just done with ease. But to be fair, he hadn’t seen many Jedi since he was ten, and at that point he’d really only seen a handful of Masters and was mostly surrounded by younglings, who like himself were not that skilled. Most Knights had been on the front lines of the war at that point.

He sticks to the shadows, arm tucked to his injured side. He needs to get out of here, make a plan, and treat his wound. Troopers march past him. He slows time so he can dash unnoticed between corridors.

Alarms start blaring. Red lights flash.

But it is too late. He pushes the thrusters to full power in his stolen Jedi fighter. His Master’s, to be exact. It had been the practical choice, with well-balanced speed, weapons, and shields—the precursor to the A-wing of the Empire era, which had abandoned some of the firepower for even more speed. The controls are familiar, and for the differences it is a simple matter of pulling echoes from the controls to learn the correct sequence.

Also, it is a nice racing red, and his Master will be super annoyed it is gone. Call it karma for drugging Cal. It’s not a very Jedi-like thing to do, but at this point, he has a long list of not very Jedi-like things he’s done, and he’s not planning on being accepted back into the Order.

He has other goals.

1. Kill the Sith Lord.

This is going to have many steps, because Cal is not delusional enough to think he has the power to take on the Sith Lord himself. He will have to be sneaky and not very Jedi-like. Cal puts poison and long-range sniper rifle on his mental shopping list.

2. Stop Order 66.

He has no idea how to accomplish this one yet. It is a work in progress. However, he knows he can’t be seen as a Jedi if he fails in an assassination attempt on the Chancellor, because if the sneaky Sith suspects the Jedi know, he will kill them all immediately.

3. Go to Dathomir and save Merrin.

Unfortunately, Merrin never gave him the details or timeline on who actually attacked her people and when, so he knows he needs updated intel. He doubts it was an actual Jedi that killed her people. The old Order was far from perfect, but they didn’t go around committing genocide (Cal at this point hasn’t met Anakin Skywalker). So it was probably a darksider or Sith. If he had to make an educated guess, it was probably Dooku or Grievous—which means stopping the war by taking out the Separatist leadership is also on his to-do list. Seeing as the entire Jedi Order has been trying to do this for years, it feels like an overwhelming task for one half-trained, low-resource, severely injured gray Jedi with no allies. If he was smart, he would give up. But this was a Padawan who fought Darth Vader. No one said he was smart. Actually, BD normally said the opposite. He misses his little droid.

4. Stop the rise of Vader and the Inquisition – since he doesn’t know where they come from, this is also filed under “find more intel.”

5. Take a closer look at this injury so he doesn’t die until he accomplishes at least one of his goals.

He lands the Jedi fighter in a field far from the Republic encampment.

Grunting, he pulls himself out of the pilot seat and lowers himself to sit on the wing of the fighter to take a better look at his side.

Chapter 3: Even the Worst Laid Plans

His blue vest and the shirt underneath were a muddy crimson. Using the Force to pull the first aid kit from under the seat of the fighter, since he had already moved way more than his body could handle today, he flipped it open and laid out a stim and a bunch of bandages.

This is going to hurt.

Wrapping his fingers around the protruding metal, he shuts his eyes for a moment. He knows he’s not supposed to pull it out, but his options are limited. He can’t go to a hospital—he’ll be arrested—and he has no allies who aren’t children or think he is a child.

Even if he had told his master the truth, he was unlikely to believe him. Come on, time travel? No one had ever heard of such a thing. They would lock him away as insane. Even if they did believe him—the Temple would want to investigate him. Best case scenario, it would severely limit his freedom to accomplish his somewhat Jedi-adjacent goals, and worst case, the information would get back to the Sith. Besides, they would likely feel his fear, attachment, and anger and would lock him up for fear of him falling to the dark. Cal isn’t sure their fear would even be unjustified after what happened after Cere died. But he couldn’t afford to be locked up. He had too much to do.

So he yanks and promptly passes out.

He blinks up at the blue sky, feeling pain radiating from his side and hit metal against his back.

Oh, he blacked out from the pain. He should probably put the wound back in stasis to stop the bleeding.

He slows time around the wound and then adds bandages before finally injecting a stim, but the wound is deep. He doesn’t know how deep, but he thinks it’s deep enough to have gone past muscle and into what lies beneath—hopefully an unnecessary organ? Humans have a few extra, right? This is the kind of wound that needs a bacta tank, not a stim and a bandage, but you have to work with what you have.

Between the stim and the bandage, he feels like he can function well enough that he won’t immediately keel over and die.

Okay, he needs to break his goals into bite-sized pieces. What does he need to accomplish his goals? He needs his lightsaber back. Actually, that should be reclassified. He wants his lightsaber back. He technically doesn’t need it. Sith can die by other means. What he needs are resources, access to classified intel, allies, or at the very least, additional manpower and access to the Senate.

Where was Cere when you needed a good plan? Cal wasn’t the plan guy. He was the smash, battle, and grab guy. He sighed.

He had an idea forming. He was pretty sure because he had come up with it, it was a terrible idea, but he couldn’t come up with anything better, and there was no one here to tell him he was being an idiot, so that was the Force’s fault for leaving him alone without supervision.

He was already wanted for kidnapping—why not actually kidnap someone with political power, resources, and access to the Senate? And he knows there is at least one powerful senator on Naboo with direct ties to the Chancellor at the moment.

He already has an angry Jedi Master after him for kidnapping a Padawan. How much more could they possibly throw at him for kidnapping a senator under Master Tapal’s protection? It’s not like the Council would send another Jedi to get her back with the war on. Really, how much worse could Cal’s situation possibly get by kidnapping Padmé Amidala? It sounded like a reasonable plan at the time…

If the Force was capable of ‘cringing,’ it would have. Maybe this Chosen One isn’t any smarter than the last one.

---

Merrin needed a better plan. Without the Nightsisters' magic, it would literally be bows and arrows vs. blasters. She had no problem admitting they were technologically behind after seeing the rest of the galaxy. She definitely missed indoor plumbing too, but that wasn’t her biggest concern at the moment. They need more firepower, and since there weren’t any more blasters to be found on Dathomir, she had to make do with what they did have.

The problem was what they had instead had a mind of its own and liked the taste of flesh.

Merrin wasn’t certain if she was a genius or insane for coming up with this plan. Where was Cere when you needed her? She knew Cal would have approved, but that didn’t really fill her with confidence. Cal was the type to leap off a cliff when he saw his friends jumping off a cliff. It was endearing, not confidence-building.

She looked across the red sand where the red sun caused heat to simmer in the air. The ground here was incredibly flat, and one could see for miles. The red dirt landscape was only broken by a few spotted bleeding gut plants and a rare oasis of glimmering fresh water and the herd of fifty rancors drinking unbothered at the watering hole.

“You are mad,” hissed Ventress at Merrin’s side. “This plan is absolutely insane. We are both going to die for nothing,” the Sith assassin keeps her voice low so they don’t attract attention.

“Rancor’s hide is blaster-proof and lightsaber-resistant,” Merrin says like this proves she isn’t crazy.

Ventress turns to look at her with raised eyebrows from her position on her stomach behind the bleeding gut they are both hiding behind.

“And what weapon are we going to use if they decide we are lunch?”

A roar shakes the ground as a bull rancor takes issue with a smaller rancor that had encroached on its personal space. The bull tears the smaller rancor’s arm from his socket with a swipe of vicious claws. The smaller rancor fights after that, but the battle is short, and then the bull starts to eat its victim. Loud crunching sounds can be heard clearly over the flat landscape.

“This is insane, I’m leaving,” Ventress snaps and begins to rise into a crouch to make her escape.

Merrin grabs her arm, stopping her.

“Would you care to remind me why that thing in the sky is here again? Would you like to remind me who brought the Separatists’ attention down on Dathomir?”

Ventress doesn’t respond but emits defeat by dropping back down to the ground and lowering her gaze from Merrin.

The Merrin before she had met Cal would have gladly given Ventress over to the Separatists to spare her people. The rest of her clan would have too if they hadn’t been so overconfident in their victory. Merrin now would not hand Ventress over to her death. For two reasons: one, after the threats Mother Talzin had spoken to Dooku, she doubts it would stop the genocide of her people; two, she does not wish to be responsible for sacrificing a sister to the man who slaughtered her people no matter how horrible that sister had been. Something in Merrin’s magick was telling her Ventress was not yet a lost cause.

This was supported by the fact that she had not abandoned Dathomir to its fate despite her strong opinions about Merrin’s plan. Ventress had a ship—she could disappear.

Neither of the two women looked at the Separatist capital ship that loomed like an evil storm cloud waiting to break, that floated menacingly overhead near the red giant Domir. It had appeared in the sky late last night, and Merrin knew they might only have days or hours or even minutes before the Separatists started their invasion.

“Are you sure you are strong enough to pull this off?” asked Ventress, the anger momentarily gone from her voice.

Merrin crushed her own self-doubt and said with all the confidence she could muster in front of a Sith assassin and a herd of rancors:

“We may need to sacrifice one of your arms if I get tired, but I teleported myself 20 years in the past and across a star system. I think I can handle this.”

She hoped she was right. She didn’t mention that she had a Jedi helping her that time and they still nearly died from the strain.

Ventress rolled her eyes, unimpressed by Merrin’s joke but not questioning her further on her abilities.

Merrin finished drawing the last runes on the stone surface, wiping the blood that painted her fingers on her pants.

The ichor in the blood flashed green as the ritual completed. Just because she had done similar feats before without preparation doesn’t mean a little preparation couldn’t hurt their chances, thought Merrin.

The women split up after that, Ventress using the Force to speed her movement and Merrin teleporting herself into position.

Here we go, thought Merrin and ignited the semi-circle wall of green flame around the rancor herd, effectively trapping the two of them inside with the beasts.

With a war cry, Ventress ignited her red blades and Force-leaped at the bull rancor. Red blades slashing wildly at the beast’s face.

Flipping backwards, Ventress sailed through the air over the decapitating claws that swung wildly at her.

The rancor roared, and the rest of the herd took up the call.

Merrin vanished from her spot, teleporting near Ventress and then teleporting them both out of the long clawed reach of the bull rancor.

The ground trembled with the pounding of the stampede. Red dust billowing into the air in the wake of the rush.

Merrin ran beside Ventress, teleporting them every few feet as the rancor snapped at their heels so close that she could feel wet spittle on her skin. One misstep, one distraction, and they were lunch meat.

With one final leap, she activated the portal she had drawn earlier and dove through it, pulling Ventress with her, hoping she hadn’t miscalculated and would find herself in a mountain or out in the vacuum of space.

The temperature difference is the first thing she notices as the cool, temperature-controlled air of space greets her skin after the warmth of Dathomir fades. They landed on durasteel in the closed interior of what clearly was a starship, and for one moment they were met with circulated air and the quiet hum of engines.

“Hey, you aren’t supposed to be here. I’m going to have to report y—” started a B1 battle droid, raising his blaster in confusion.

Then the world exploded as fifty enraged rancors were dumped in a floating metal can in space.

It was absolute chaos.

Metal tearing like flimsy as rancors crashed through too-small halls and through walls as if they weren’t even there. Ship walls were rated for a lot of things, but they had never been insured against a 4,000 lb muscle machine with dagger-like teeth and claws.

Five minutes in and things were on fire and alarms blared angry warnings about life support failure through the halls.

Ventress was grinning so hard it looked painful and very creepy.

“I changed my mind,” she huffed as they raced through the ship corridors in search of escape pods. “I like you.”

They race around a blind corner and come face to face with the escape pods they were looking for and a general they were not.

“Ventress, this is your doing,” coughs Grievous, yellow eyes narrowing to slits. Metallic fingers disconnecting and reaching for the hilts of his lightsabers. Like some giant metallic insect. “I have been wanting some red lightsabers to add to my collection.”

The snap-hiss of sabers fills the hallway and the lights on the ship go out.

---

Cal had gone on a therapeutic stealing spree and was feeling better about his plan but worse about his overall moral character as a Jedi. He had to keep reminding himself that—was it bad to steal a cargo hauler from a slightly shady dealership—yes, but the fate of the galaxy may rest on his financially broke shoulders, so he hopes that his petty theft can be forgiven in the grand scheme of things.

He had dismantled the Jedi starfighter's tracker the minute he had stolen it, but it was still too recognizable, so he had parked it within the larger, uglier cargo freighter he had designated the Oggdo due to its similar shape and speed. He had also stolen a blaster and wandered around Theed enough until he found a tourist map of the scenic city describing the location of the royal palace and the residences of the Naboo senators. He had also gotten some new clothes that were not drenched in blood and sweat. Things were looking up.

Cal hopped a low safety wall of beautiful stonework onto the cliff edge that overlooked a sandy beach and crystal-clear water below. Waterfalls dotted the side of the cliff, causing mist to swirl and rainbows to glimmer across the surface.

Vines and lush greenery dotted the cliff surface, making slick but easy-to-reach handholds. Naboo was beautiful. As he climbed, he found himself regretting that he would never be able to share it with Merrin. She would have loved the water, he thinks. She always liked exploring new planets after being stuck on just one, basically alone, for so many years.

And cliff diving sounds like fun. Not that Merrin would be into that, but maybe she would want to go swimming… and wear a bathing suit… He shook his head quickly—not Jedi-appropriate thoughts. She would have probably just rolled her eyes at his chosen hobbies. Not that he had time or energy for that at the moment.

And his Merrin was gone now anyway… he blinked hard to get the ‘mist’ out of his eyes and kept climbing forward since that was all he could do.

Finally reaching the top, it was a simple matter to slip by the single clone trooper posted as lookout on this side of the senator's home. For some reason, the cliff—he guessed the security on this side of the building was very light. The cliff wasn’t that hard to climb. He had climbed a lot worse, but he guessed most people don’t grow up scaling the outside of scrapped capital ships over a sarlacc without safety equipment.

The window is locked.

A wave of his hand and the lock clicks, and he slides the pane open and hoists himself through.

And finds himself in the senator's bed chamber, which is absolutely glowing with dim blue Force echoes.

Uh oh, Cal thinks and gives the bed a wide berth. A general rule when it comes to Force echoes. Not that he knew much about the Naboo senator, but he was pretty sure she wasn’t married—not that that meant anything.

He made his way to the desk hoping to find some blackmail material that would get the senator to listen to him. Since everything in the room had a dim Force glow, he hadn’t realized one was emitting from the desk as well before he touched it.

Cal left the bedroom, cheeks a deep red with embarrassment, with his blackmail material and wishing he could scrub the blackmail material out of his brain with a metal scraper. He had not wanted to know that.

Just why?

Anakin Skywalker and Padmé Amidala are absolutely disgusting.

And why, for the love of the Force, did it have to be her memory he fell into?

He is sooo grateful he had not touched the bed. He was already scarred for life.

And who had taught Anakin his pick-up lines?

Granted, Cal was anything but smooth with his romancing of Merrin, and Cal could confidently blame the Jedi Order for both Cal’s and Anakin's romancing struggles. But come on, man. Cal doesn’t think he is nearly as bad. Cal might be easily embarrassed and sheltered, but Anakin’s pick-up lines were as smooth as sand.

The only thing more confusing was how on earth had they worked?

Maybe the senator wasn’t all that bright.

While obviously Cal would never actually rat out the marriage of a Jedi to the Council, the senator didn’t need to know that.

The soft murmurs of voices alerted him to the presence of people in the next room, and he drew his shields in tighter, making himself practically invisible in the Force.

“Senator, I have orders from the general to get you to a secure location,” came the distinctive voice of a clone through a helmet.

“Captain Kerr, has something happened?” a feminine voice questions, clearly Padmé's from Cal’s unwanted new memories.

Setting his blaster to stun, he spins around the door frame and fires. The trooper collapses.

To her credit, Padmé pulls a blaster from her holster but not before Cal has his leveled at her chest.

“Drop it,” he orders.

She does.

She looks him up and down, much calmer than the average person looking down the barrel of a blaster. As if this might be a regular Tuesday for her.

“Who are you and what do you want? You haven’t killed anyone. If you walk away now, I promise you we can forget this ever happened,” Padmé tried, keeping her voice calm and even, using her best negotiator voice. She had more practice than she cared to admit.

This man could have various reasons for being here, and if she took the wrong approach, it could end disastrously. He could be with the Separatists, Hutts, a bounty hunter, or have his own insane personal vendetta.

All she knew about her attacker at this point was that he had only stunned the trooper, which was a good sign. If he hadn’t outright killed him, she might be able to talk this situation down—and that he looked a little worse for wear, with dirty clothes and dark circles under green eyes that flicked nervously around. Not a great sign. A jumpy captor was a trigger-happy captor. He was armed; she wasn’t. And even if that hadn’t been the case, he was clearly bigger and stronger than her. He was about the same height as Anakin and maybe a little heavier in the muscle department. Her only hope at the moment was rescue or talking her way out.

“So I’m really sorry about this whole thing, but you have to come with me. A lot of lives depend on it. Don’t worry, I won’t hurt you, but if you try and resist, I will stun you and carry you out of here,” says the man, his voice the most apologetic and awkward kidnapper she had ever heard.

If she had to guess, this was his first time kidnapping someone. And maybe it was foolish, but she believed him when he said he didn’t want to hurt her.

He motioned her towards him and through the door he had entered through, blaster tracking her movements.

She obeyed but walked as slowly as she could manage, hoping the delay would result in rescue.

“If lives are really in danger, we can help you if you let us. If you let me go, I can help you save the people you are trying to rescue. I can even put you in contact with a Jedi Master—their purpose is to protect the galaxy. Just let me go and I can help you.” Padmé was being honest. If lives were really in danger, she wouldn’t stand by and do nothing. And this man, as far as she knew, had only committed some breaking and entering and knocked out a clone trooper to save, at least in his mind, lives. He wasn’t adding up to any kind of major villain from the small amount of information she knew. Although there of course could be more to it, or he could be insane.

“The Jedi are some of the people I am trying to save, but there are spies high up in the Senate and in the Order, so I can’t ask anyone working directly under the Republic for help.”

So not a Separatist, but likely insane—unless he is outright lying, thinks Padmé as a large but gentle hand firmly presses against her back, urging her to move faster through the halls.

She is clambering through her own bed chamber window, wondering where in the world he thinks they are going from here because there is nothing but a cliff face on the other side, when she hears pounding feet and yelling and the sliding of automatic doors.

Her captor was momentarily distracted, glancing over his shoulder towards the commotion. She slammed her elbow into his side, causing him to double over in pain and yelled,

“Help! We are—”

Her words were muffled as a calloused hand covered her mouth. She tried to bite it, twisting furiously, stamping her feet on his in an effort to get free.

His voice was breathless and pained as he spoke, more so than she would have expected from the hit she had given him. “I know about you and Skywalker, and if you don’t cooperate, I will inform the Jedi Council.” She froze, fear and anger coiling within her. How did he know? What had he seen? Who else knew? And was it worth exposing their secret to get away from her captor? These thoughts flew around her brain like a hurricane, keeping her off balance.

They had made it to the edge of the cliff before Master Tapal and his three clone troopers caught up with them.

“Release the Senator,” General Tapal demanded.

Cal kept Padmé pressed up against his front, between him and the clone troopers' raised blasters, stopping them from getting a clear shot without endangering the senator.

Well, he was committed now, and he wanted to try this anyway—no time like the present.

Padmé's brown eyes widened in absolute terror as he glanced at the cliff over his shoulder and took another step toward the edge.

His boots knocked a loose rock and it tumbled to the crashing waves below.

It made him feel a little bad for her sake, but maybe she would find it fun once she had tried it.

The Jedi General realized a second too late what was about to happen and tried to raise his hand to pull them back with the Force, but Cal was faster.

He raised his own palm and time slowed around his Master and the troopers.

He’s a Force user, realized Padmé—not that the knowledge would do her much good.

Calling his lightsaber from the Lasat's belt to his own hand with a satisfying thwack, Cal hooked it to his belt.

“I’m really sorry about this,” he said to Padmé before he threw her over his shoulder and jumped feet-first off the cliffside.

I’m going to die. I’m going to die, thought Padmé on the way down.

Too bad I’m carrying her or I could have done a backflip, thought Cal.

Just before they hit the waves, he used the Force to slow their descent.

---

The senator and the kidnapper were long gone by the time Master Tapal looked down into the waves below.

He tried, fairly unsuccessfully, to release his growing fear for his Padawan and the senator, and frustration with the situation, into the Force.

What type of Force user was he to possess such powers to slow time? He must be trained in the dark side of the Force? Who was this kidnapper? Who did he work for? Why had he kidnapped a senator and a Padawan? A ransom? Maybe for a senator—but not for a Padawan. The only thing you got if you kidnapped a Padawan was an angry Jedi Master hunting you down. Did he work for the Separatists?

“Sir, I have just received a report on the blood sample you had us collect from the chair in the interrogation room,” the clone captain said.

“And?” prompted the General, no patience left for having to draw the information out of the clone.

“Umm,” said the trooper, at a very uncharacteristic loss for words. “Well, sir, uhh. We did get a DNA match, but it must be in error.”

“DNA results are highly reliable and are generally nearly 100% accurate. Who is he, Captain?”

“Well, sir, the DNA is a match for Cal Kestis.”

The big purple head turned to look at the clone, assuming he must have misheard.

“Repeat yourself, Captain.”

“The DNA is a match to your Padawan, sir.”

So he hadn’t misheard.

Which left four possibilities.

“Was the captive actively bleeding, trooper? Or was the blood on his clothes?”

“It was hard to tell, sir, but based on the length of time we held the prisoner, it is unlikely that the blood would have still been wet if it was from another source.”

In other words, while possible that the blood on the chair had come from a severely injured Padawan and simply been transferred via the captive’s clothes, it would have been unlikely since it hadn’t been dry. This was both a good and bad thing—one, it meant it probably meant his Padawan hadn’t been left somewhere to bleed to death before they had captured the man, but it didn’t explain the DNA.

It was also possible that the lab had a DNA mix-up or somehow there had been a one-in-a-million fluke. This practically was super unlikely because even if there had been a lab error—which was extremely unlikely in the case of a standard DNA test—it would have been 1 in a billion it would match his apprentice’s DNA.

Three, he somehow was a relative of his Padawan and had found him against all odds. A young father? An older brother? Uncle? But how had he been Force-trained without the Order knowing? He said he had been to Ilum and learned from the Order.

And the last possibility—the most unlikely—but somehow he knew was the correct conclusion: the impossible conclusion that the man with the red hair and those green eyes and that all-so-familiar Force presence was his Padawan. Somehow, impossibly 20 years older, permanently scarred, and more powerful in the Force than he could have ever imagined. What had happened to that innocent child? What had happened to change Cal so much?

Of course, the new intel did not change his mission—save the senator and save his apprentice. Whatever form that might take.

---

The floor had become the ceiling. Merrin dodged a falling crate just in time not to be brained by the heavy object.

The only light was provided by the deadly hum of the General’s lightsabers flashing against Ventress in a deadly dance.

Red, green, red, blue flashed in deadly burning circles causing sparks to fly across the metal ceiling.

Merrin hurled a ball of burning green flames at Grievous’ head but it dissipated harmlessly off his metal skull.

The ship lurched again and Ventress went sprawling as the wall became the new floor. Twisting mid-air, Merrin teleported to safety at the last second. Grievous just laughed his horribly coughing laugh, hanging from the ceiling like some horrible metal spider. Metal clawed feet embedded themselves into the ceiling, allowing him to keep his footing.

Her fire is useless, there are no dead to raise, only broken droids, and the ship is spinning out of control towards a crash landing with two Sith assassins battling it out just feet from her. It is not looking good. To make things worse, Ventress is losing.

She is pressed against the floor/wall by two of Grievous’ lightsabers, her own blades creeping ever closer to her neck by the pressure he is applying.

Merrin aims another fireball to try and hit the soft organs between the monster’s metal ribs in a desperate attempt to save the other woman when Ventress uses the Force to slam Grievous back and away from her.

There is a horrible screeching sound as he stops his slide by tearing up the floor with his metal claws, but it gives Ventress enough breathing room to slam her hand out to the side and hit the red button on the wall near her head.

The hatch beneath her opens, swallowing her body into the emergency escape pod.

Without so much as a backward glance, she hits the controls to close the hatch and jettison the pod into space.

Grievous bellows his rage, turning to glare at the remaining Nightsister.

His bellow is drowned out by a much, much louder roar.

The bull rancor tears through the once-floor-now-wall like a lightsaber through flesh, and the two combatants dive for cover.

Recovering, Grievous springs at the rancor, driving two lightsabers through the beast’s arm.

It kind of works.

The arm hits the ground with a heavy thud, the smell of cooked meat filling the enclosed area. The rancor’s other arm sends Grievous flying into the back wall so hard he dents the metal and his own metal leg bends at an awkward angle.

Blind with rage, the bull charges its attacker and goes straight through the hull headfirst and out into space.

Merrin realizes too late what has happened to grab a good handhold. She scrabbles desperately at the smooth wall under her, trying to work up the concentration to teleport. The vacuum of space wipes all the air from the hold and draws the breath from her lungs. And suddenly she is floating outside the ship’s hull.

She is freezing and there is no air.

She can see the ship and stars and the red light of Domir and the vast black emptiness of space.

A very confused rancor floats a few meters away, and maddeningly, Grievous is attached like some great barnacle to the hull of his crashing ship. The General manages to fight the vacuum somehow, one powerful step at a time, dragging himself back aboard.

Merrin is going to die.

Already her lungs are struggling for oxygen.

Black dots float in her vision, having nothing to do with the space between stars.

Her fingers and toes are numb from the cold, and it has only been seconds.

Then she spots the escape pod and with one last ditch effort teleports in a puff of green flames.

She lands hard on Ventress knee but that is the least of her concerns. As she is bounced around without a seat belt as the pod plunges at terminal velocity towards Dathomir.

Something hard contents with her skull and she knows no more.

Chapter 4: The Damsel in Distress

Summary:

I decided I would split the chapters up into shorter sections, so you get multiple shorter chapters this week.
Comments keep me writing...please tell me what you like! I love to hear opinions or ideas :)

Padmé was cold, wet, and annoyed.

She was also cuffed to a chair in the back of her kidnapper’s ship, which had taken to hyperspace, taking her who knows where about 20 mins ago.

The ship was a medium-sized cargo freighter, which she was going to guess had been stolen based on the unfamiliar way her captor looked around the ship as he approached her from the cockpit.

“You have no idea what you did. They are going to come after me and you will regret this,” she spat, thinking a little viciously about what Anakin was going to do to her kidnapper once he rescued her.
It lifted her mood a little to see that her captor looked just as bedraggled as she did, and she noted with some interest that his side, where she had hit him, was bleeding through his shirt.

“Already regretting this,” he muttered, scratching the scar on his neck. “But I needed to do something and I think you can help me.”

She shivered from the cold, and he seemed to realize they both were still soaking wet.

“Oh, sorry,” he said, and started digging through random drawers, basically confirming the ship was stolen as he pulled out a wrench and a hydrospanner before finding a drawer that contained clothes that were luckily humanoid in shape and number of armholes, but unluckily were neon orange flight suits. He tossed one at her and flushed and quickly turned his back, allowing her to change in peace.

She changed, and deciding it was probably better to learn as much as she could about her captor, she tried to keep him talking. Deciding it was probably pointless to ask him his name, she tried another tack.

“What is it that you need help with?” Padmé asked, voice calm.
When Cal heard the zip of the flight suit, he decided it was safe enough to turn around and said,
“I know this is hard to believe, and I am planning to get you proof, so please keep that in mind,” he said, nodding towards the cockpit. “That is where we are heading now.
But the... Chancellor ummm...is a Sith Lord. He is behind the war.”

“Chancellor Palpatine a Sith Lord? You are kidding me.”
Padmé tried to imagine the fragile old man against the scary depictions she had seen in holodramas of 7ft tall, lightning-wielding Sith warlords and couldn’t. The idea was too absurd.

Cal leaned against the wall and sighed. He was tired, cold, wet, and his side hurt. He didn’t blame Padmé for being skeptical about his claim—no one had figured it out the first time either. If she didn’t believe him about that, she was never going to believe him about time travel. It would just make him sound more insane than he already did. He missed the Mantis crew. He just wanted someone that could help him share this crushing weight that was the responsibility of saving the galaxy.

“And how are you going to prove you are telling the truth?” Padmé asked, voice filled with skepticism.

He knew this didn’t add to the plausibility of his claims when he said, “The clones ...have slave chips in their heads. And they are programmed ...to wipe out the Jedi—put there by the Sith.”

“You better have some hard evidence. And if what you are saying is true, how in the world did you figure it out?”

“I know.... and would you believe me if I said Force visions?”
Cal said with a winning grin, which reminded Padmé of Ani - in a I am lying out my ass and I know you know it but I’m cute so you will forgive me kind of way.

She hoped Ani wasn’t going to do anything stupid and risk their secret to try and rescue her. Wait—she needed to rephrase that—she hoped Ani wouldn’t do anything too stupid—it was too much to hope for no stupidity.

Padmé sighed. Why was she surrounded by idiots? What did that say about her? Why couldn’t she fall for someone sane like Obi-Wan? 

“Anyway. I’ll try and find something for you to eat.”

“Thanks,” she said. Didn’t they say it was best to try and make your kidnappers see you as a person so they treat you better?

“Please just consider what I said though—and the consequences for the Republic and the Jedi if I am telling you the truth.” His green eyes bored into hers before quickly looking away as he said, “In my… vision… the Jedi have no warning. The clones… their coworkers, their friends… just shoot their generals in the back.”
His voice was thick and eyes far away as if he was seeing something else. He once again rubbed absently at the scar on his neck and cheek.
The emotion in his face planted the seeds of doubt in her assumption that he was completely lying or mad. Her traitorous imagination provided the image of Rex leveling a blaster at Anakin’s unprotected back.

“OK. I’ll keep an open mind, but you better have some hard evidence,” she said.
His smile returned full force and he gave her a cocky two-finger salute.
“Yes, ma’am.”
How old does he think I am? thought Padmé, frustrated. We are like the same age.

He turned to leave to find food but stumbled, swaying dangerously before catching himself on the doorframe.
“Are you OK?” she asked, worried, looking at the stain that had spread on his shirt.
He followed her gaze, looking less worried than Padmé thought having that amount of blood on the outside of your body warranted.

“I’m handling it,” he said, frowning and not filling Padmé with confidence.
“You know if you die and I’m chained here, you are sentencing me to death—by dehydration or by crashing into a planet or sun—you get the picture.”

“Everything is under control,” he snapped as he continued his drunk walk to the cockpit. 

Chapter 5: The Revenge of Dathomir

Merrin’s head feels like it got sat on by a rancor. She groans, opening her eyes slowly, then quickly closing them against the bright red light that feels like it is scorching holes into her brain via her eye sockets.
The rest of her body is slightly better, feeling like it had only been run over by a speeder bike. She feels dirt under the pads of her fingers.

“Wake up, witch.”
Someone slaps her hard across her face.

Her eyes fly open. This time the light of Dathomir is less of a drill and more like that time Greez had gotten Merrin drunk so he could beat her at sabacc without her cheating by using magic.

A pair of cold, pale blue eyes glare down at her.
Ventress survived—oh joy.

“Next time you teleport into a falling escape pod, don’t do it on top of me.”

Merrin glares back, sitting up.
“Next time I am left to die on a crashing ship by my ‘partner,’ I will make sure I am the only one with an escape pod.”
The threat doesn’t even seem to faze Ventress; as a Sith assassin, it wasn’t a full day’s work if her partner didn’t give her at least one death threat.

Ventress stood, dragging Merrin to her feet. Merrin would have collapsed back to the ground without her support the minute she put weight on her left foot. The ankle was definitely sprained—and hopefully only sprained. Walking back was going to be torture, and she didn’t have enough energy left to teleport more than a few feet.
Teleporting all those rancors had really taken it out of her.

The burning wreckage of the escape pod lies half-buried in the dirt 100 ft to their left.

On the horizon, the Separatist capital ship burns and smokes in three massive pieces and thousands of smaller chunks.

The cliff dwellings of the sisters’ village luckily seem untouched by the devastation and are only an hour or so walk from their landing site.

They nearly make it there, limping along without further issues.

Nearly.

The women are just passing into the shadows of the tunnels cut into the cliff face when a blood-freezing cough reaches their ears.
It is the only warning they get. Their eyes widen in fear, but that is all the reaction time they are given before metal death falls from the tunnel roof.

Four lightsabers slash through the cloud of green smoke that was where Merrin and Ventress had been standing a moment before.

Back pressed to the stone, they try to quiet their breathing so as not to give away their hiding spot to their hunter.

“I hunt and kill Jedi, little witches. There is no hope for you, Dathomirian scum,” Grievous hissed, stalking forward, scanning side to side with his yellow eyes for the location of his prey.

The gentle sound of the wind in the tunnels is only broken by his ragged breathing and stomping gait.

“Come out, come out, whoever you are, little witches,” he punctuated his statement by decapitating a nearby boulder similar to the one they were hiding behind with one swing of a lightsaber.

The plasma melted the rock like butter.

Merrin knew they weren’t in a position to fight. They needed to run and regroup, but with her ankle, all they could do was creep further into the tunnels.

So she wasn’t at all surprised when Ventress gave her a cold look before releasing her grip on her arm and forcing Merrin to lean against the rock to support herself.
Ventress had already proven she wasn’t above abandoning Merrin once to save herself—why would she change her ways now?
The moment Grievous glanced away from the tunnel they were trying to escape down, Ventress made a Force-enhanced dash toward the depths of the cave.

She almost made it.

It was true Grievous could not enhance his movement with the Force, not being Force-sensitive—but having gears instead of joints and compressors instead of muscles made the difference minor in combat.

He pounced on her a foot from the tunnel entrance.

She spun just in time to block the first downward strike—crossed red blades blocking the downward green plasma strike that would have cut her in two.

The blue blade severed her arm at the shoulder.

Ventress let out a blood-curdling cry that was cut short as Grievous’ taloned foot shot out .... and crushed her skull.

Then finally slamming her body into the dirt with a wet thwack.

Merrin covered her mouth in horror, trying desperately not to panic. She needed to escape.
She couldn’t go back to the open.
She couldn’t go forward unless she wanted the same fate.
She couldn’t fight or run.
She glanced up, remembering the maze of caverns that ran at a slightly higher elevation on the mountain—and the reason she hadn’t done this before.
She feared what lived in those caverns, but at this point, she would take anything over the monster that ruled her nightmares.

With the last dregs of her magic, she teleported one last time, tumbling into the entrance to the cavern above, knowing she would not be able to teleport again until she had a chance to rest.

Brittle old bones crumbled and cracked as she fell on them.
They littered the cave floor like a carpet of death—some much fresher, with meat still decaying on them.
Some looked suspiciously like rancor bones.
Everything lands somewhere on the food chain, she thinks. And humanoids are much closer to the bottom on Dathomir than other planets.

The smell made her gag.

She limps further into the center of the nest, wanting nothing more than to be anywhere but here. Her animal instincts telling her to flee.

The sound of metal digging into stone makes her limp faster.

“I can hear you, little witch. You cannot hide from me,” Grievous’ voice floats through the cave mouth, coming ever closer.

Merrin really hopes she has everything under control as she stares at the two white eyes the size of dinner plates that stare back at her through the darkness.

Over the years, Cal and Merrin had tried to teach each other skills with various degrees of success. The Force and magick may ultimately come from the same source, but their training and how they use it was vastly different.

Merrin had tried to teach Cal to teleport—after he had begged her nonstop for a week.

It hadn’t gone well.

Cal had gotten into his head after numerous failed attempts that what he really needed was the right motivation, and had tried teleporting across a gap between two buildings when nobody was around to tell him he was being an idiot.
Merrin was sure the only reason he was still alive was that he fell off things for a living.
He had never been able to figure out how to teleport, much to his dismay.

Merrin had had more success with Cal’s lessons in using magick to tame animal temporarily, but she had only ever tried it on animals that were smaller than her—not something that could swallow her whole.
Reaching out with both an open hand and open mind in the way Cal had taught her, she projected thoughts of friendship and calm and protectiveness.

An irritated snap of a massive beak inches from her hand told her it wasn’t working.

She wasn’t strong enough. This creature wasn’t some weak-willed rodent.
This was an apex predator, the queen of the night, the master of the sky. Everything was on its menu. It bowed for nothing.
It was the queen of Dathomir, its mind told her, brushing off her attempts to tame it.

Merrin was going to fail and die because she wasn’t strong enough—because she was alone.
And worse, her family would die again because of her weakness. Grievous would go down to the village and slaughter her people.
And she would not save Cal from his fate. He would once again be alone and die by the Empire’s hand.

In her despair, she nearly misses the second presence that brushes against her mind.

Daughter of Dathomir, the planet seems to say with no voice—just the whisper of wind through the caves—you are not alone and never have been. Rid us of these invaders.

She reconnects with the mind of Gorgara, this time channeling the power of the living planet through her.

“We are of Dathomir, and we will protect our home from those who trespass.”
This time, matching green smoke curls lazily from Merrin’s eyes and mouth, as well as Gorgara’s, as she speaks.

Gorgara roars her agreement. She will not be tamed, but she will help defend her domain. Dathomir is hers.

Grievous made it to the opening finally.
It had been so satisfying crushing the weakling Ventress into the dust. Maybe now Dooku would finally take him seriously as his apprentice.
Yes, he lost his ship, but once he wipes out the witches, Dooku will see it as a necessary sacrifice in the course of the war.
After all, he doesn’t need an army to kill a handful of witches and savages.

He peers into the darkness before him.

There is only a dim green glow coming from the interior.

The roar that splits the silence shakes rock loose from the ceiling. He has a momentary flashback—not again—and expects a rancor to come charging out of the darkness.

It is not a rancor.
It is something much, much larger.
The creature is the size of Grievous’ personal starship and hits his chest with the same speed.
It has leathery wings and a razor-sharp beak in a horrible round head with pointy ears atop it.
And suddenly there is only air beneath him as they rocket out of the cavern into the open sky, propelled by massive leathery wing beats.

“Dathomir sentences you to death,” the voices that leave Merrin’s throat from her perch between Gorgara’s shoulder blades are not one but many.
They echo each other from the past and the future as Dathomir sings its song of vengeance.

It is the largest and meanest Chirodactyl Grievous has ever seen.

It is also the last thing he sees as the great dark maw descends.

Chapter 6: The Secrets of Kamino

Cal is not fond of ocean planets. To be fair, the only one he had been on previously had been crawling with Inquisitors and Sith, and he had been stabbed, then nearly drowned in quick succession. It hadn’t been Cal’s favorite day, and he would have likely died if Merrin hadn’t pulled him from the water. Kamino lacked Inquisitors, so it had that going for it over Nur, but it was filled with clones...
So, well, Cal didn’t think this was going to change his unflattering opinions on ocean planets all that much.

Heavy rain pelts the Jedi fighter’s viewport, and waves froth below it as far as the eye can see.

He had left the Oggdo parked on a nearby asteroid and taken his master’s fighter in to land on the planet using his master Jedi transponder codes.

He had also left a distress signal that would activate and signal the Temple in 24 hours—in case he was killed. He didn’t want Padmé to die because she was trapped in a spaceship with no way to reach the controls.

He was on a timetable anyway. The minute he used his master’s codes to land on Kamino, it was only a matter of time before the GAR forces flagged that it was a stolen ship.

Setting down at the cloning facility, he briefly wondered who designed uncovered landing pads on a planet that rained 90% of the time. Probably someone who was an introvert.

Cal was drenched by the time he got inside and didn’t look much like a Jedi—aside from his lightsaber attached to his belt in his borrowed orange flight suit instead of traditional Jedi robes. He hoped the lightsaber and the Jedi ship and codes were enough to minimize suspicions.

The doors slid open at his approach, revealing a well-lit white interior that was spotless in a medical facility sort of way.

He wasn’t greeted by raised blasters, so—so far so good.

Two Kaminoans gave slight bows of their long thin necks as one said:

“Master Jedi, to what do we owe this unexpected visit?”

Channeling his best impression of an Imperial officer, Cal said:

“The Jedi have been less than impressed with the most recent batches of clones, and I have been sent to inspect the growth process more thoroughly.”

The two exchanged a glance of surprise but said,
“We are sorry to hear that, Master Jedi. We can assure you the process and inspection standards have not declined. However, we would be happy to provide a tour to reassure the Jedi Council of the quality of our troops.”

Two hours later, and Cal’s head was pounding. Running his hand discreetly across every echo he could find for hidden information on the clones and Order 66 was filling his brain with so many thoughts and emotions that weren’t his own—and many that weren’t useful for his mission.
Very few were from the Kaminoans. Cal was getting the impression they, as a general rule, didn’t feel emotions strongly and thus created very few Force echoes. It also made sense why they could create and enslave an army of soldiers without so much as batting one massive blue eye.

There were a lot of clone echoes. Mostly emotions—fear, anger, confusion as brothers were dragged away to be decommissioned, never to be seen again. Feelings of protection, family, and love for their brothers.
“CT-4567, you have to pass the exam so they don’t—kil—decommission you like they did CT-4566,” one echo whispers in fear.
“My name is going to be Arson, no matter what those long necks say.”
“Shhh, don’t let them hear you.”

The echoes bounced distractingly between Cal’s ears as his fingers brushed another training station.

Clones in their white armor marched everywhere in perfect timing throughout the facility. Nothing like the warships Cal had seen them on—for besides the echoes, they showed no signs of individuality here. These shinies had no paint, few names, and no chance to be individuals under the cold stares of their creators.
Even knowing all this horror and empathizing with their terrible treatment, Cal still could not suppress the shudder at the T-shaped visors.

He knew it made no logical sense. The clones had been his friends and weren’t out to get him here, and had been forced to attack their generals against their will. Also, he had a much less severe reaction to stormtroopers—even though they had been out to get him and tried to kill him way, way more times.
It probably had something to do with being ten and mostly helpless, watching your parental figure gunned down by your best friends—if Cal had to make a random guess.
He scratched the scar on his cheek absently.

“And this is where we do the medical checkups on the clones,” said his guide, gesturing through another transparasteel viewport out onto a huge medical center on the deck below where numerous troopers completed their duties. The Kaminoan sounded as bored as their emotionally stunted voice could convey.

Here goes nothing, thought Cal. He was either about to be escorted out or…

Raising his open hand toward his escorts, he said as he pulled on the Force:

“I am going to use the refresher and show myself out. You can go about your day.”

He held his breath as the four large eyes blinked slowly down at him.

“Very well. We hope you will report favorably about the high quality of the production process.”

“Of course,” lied Cal, giving his best impression of a Jedi bow before scooting as fast as possible out of sight.

Vaulting the nearest safety rail, he did a wall run across open space below and flung himself into the catwalks overhead. He really wished he had been successful in learning to teleport. It would save him so much time. Maybe he could try it now.
He glanced down to see the floor under him crawling with troopers.

…Or maybe later.

See, he can be responsible and make reasonable decisions about safety. Take that, Cere.

Anyway, parkour is way more fun. Imagine if you just teleported everywhere—you probably didn’t get to feel the wind in your hair as you jumped through the air.

He misses BD. He is doing all these very impressive stunts with no audience. Maybe he could find Master Cordova and convince him to give him BD at some point—if he survives long enough.
Not sure how... maybe if he convinced BD that Cal is way more fun than the old Jedi Master and that BD would get to scan way more exotic and deadly creatures (as they tried to eat Cal) than he would if he stayed scanning boring old temples, then maybe the little explorer droid would run away with him.

Seeing a promising, currently abandoned information terminal in a secluded corner, he jumped down softly beside it—as light as a loth-cat, if he does say so himself.

He starts digging through files as fast as possible. most are not useful, but finally, a file labeled Brain Scans—and a suspicious-looking dark mass in each and every image Cal opens.
The mass is labeled chip, but the information about what is on the chip is behind higher-level security clearance. He pulls the files onto an external drive. He hopes the encrypted files have the evidence he needs, but he has no way to slice them at the moment.

Cal had thought about uploading a virus to display hilarious fake images of Count Dooku with a curly mustache but had decided against it in the hopes his access to the computer system would go undetected.

Two Force-assisted steps later, he was back in the relative safety of the catwalk—thinking this might be his first mission to go off without a hitch.

He takes three steps before the Force punishes him for his hubris—the catwalk decides it is now time to give up on life and collapse.

Because he is a Jedi, he does a flip and lands on his feet.

Because he is Cal Kestis, he is surrounded by ten clones who definitely know he isn’t supposed to be there.

“Would you believe it if I said I was looking for the refresher?” Cal quips, hand inching toward his lightsaber.

He didn’t actually want to kill these clones. They weren’t really his enemies, but he would defend himself.

The nearest clone doesn’t raise his blaster, but he takes a half step forward, eyeing Cal’s lightsaber uncertainly.

“Sir, this area is restricted. We will escort you out.”

“Of course, I just got lost. My ship is on the main landing pad.”

He was halfway back to his ship, and no blaster shots had been fired, and he had nearly convinced himself that the Force didn’t hate him as much as he’d initially thought—when the intercom system blared to life.

“We have just received word from the Jedi Council…”

Cal was already running before they finished the announcement—lightsaber activated.

“…that the visitor with the lightsaber in the orange flight suit is not a member of the Jedi Order, and his ship is stolen. We have also found evidence he has attempted to access restricted files. He should be prevented from escaping by any means necessary.”

Well, he should have uploaded that image of Dooku if they caught him in the system anyway—hindsight.

Doing his best to deflect the blaster fire harmlessly into the walls instead of troopers, he sprinted down the halls to his ship.

But there were so many… coming in from all sides now.

It took all his concentration to jump and dash through blaster fire while twirling a lightsaber in each hand to deflect the bolts.

Was that one painted yellow?

He shook his head, trying to clear the image overlay—these were shinies, not the 13th battalion.

Ten blaster bolts at once required him to slow time around the troopers and the bolts to give him some distance, but the act drained his strength.

He needed to escape the clones and get to the escape pods… No, that wasn’t right. Ship—he needed to get to Master Tapal’s sh…

He had to protect his master—he was bleeding out behind him. He couldn’t let the clones have him.

But when he turned, no Lasat met his confused gaze.

A fiery pain burned across his shoulder, bringing him back to reality just in time to deflect the second energy blast that would have burned a hole right through his chest.

He felt like there was something important he was forgetting—until he realized the wet feeling running down his side was the wound he had forgotten to Force-slow.

Soon, his whole body was wet as he gratefully stumbled onto the landing platform. Using the Force again to slow the troopers enough to give him just enough time to hoist himself (more like roll himself, due to his lack of energy) into the pilot seat, he was able to finally lift off this horrible planet.

Stars and darkness enveloped the ship.
The whole ship jerked, slamming Cal into the restraints as warning lights flashed, indicating blaster fire and incoming gunships.

“Sithspit,” he cursed as the incoming clone ships locked onto his flight path.

Cal was a good pilot. Better than most due to Force-enhanced reflexes, but he had never spent a lot of time flying. He hadn’t even reached the pedals when he was a Padawan and had no opportunity to learn as a poor scrapper on Bracca. Cal hadn’t learned to fly until Greez had reluctantly taught him on the Mantis when he turned 18, yelling the whole time, “Don’t you dare scratch the paint!”

He should have been more worried about the ship than just the paint. Greez nearly had a heart attack when, on Cal’s first outing, Cal had gone way too fast in real space and taken off a gun turret by flying too close to a stray meteor. Greez had said if anyone could find the one stray meteor in light-years of open space to crash into, it would be Cal, and he wasn’t even sure why he was surprised by the outcome.

Cal had never polished a ship so much in his life after that incident.
It had been weeks before he’d been allowed to fly her again.

But Greez had been a good teacher, and Cal had superhuman reflexes. Before long, he was better than most pilots—which was why, when the Mantis crew had split up, Greez had gifted the Mantis to Cal with many tears and several threats, including some very specific ones regarding the treatment of his upholstered couch. Cal had been floored that Greez would entrust him with the Mantis and may have discreetly wiped his eyes after that conversation. The Mantis, Cal could easily say, was the closest thing he had ever known to a home.
He missed her—and Greez—very much.

Thanks to Greez’s teaching, he had survived the dogfight that led to his escape from Imperial-held Coruscant. It had also led to Greez making a good bet on Cal against some non-Force-sensitive rebel pilots after one mission. It was good he had only flown against them in a simulator, or he would be stardust at the moment. He had only learned, after getting dusted in under a minute by the Rebel X-wing pilot and when the rest of the squadron had started handing money to Greez that most of them had bet Cal wouldn’t last 30 seconds and had lost.

It had taught him a valuable lesson: never underestimate non-Force-sensitive pilots.
And never fly against Wedge Antilles and the rest of Rogue Squadron.
He pitied the Imps that got in their way.

So it was entirely possible for highly trained clone troopers to be a danger—especially when his brain felt like it was full of cotton.

But if he had to guess, they probably weren’t Wedge Antilles-level. Later, he’d learned that the pilot he’d flown against was often considered the best pilot in the Rebellion.

He dove toward the atmosphere, the G-force pushing him back in his seat, forcing the pair of clone frighters to follow the steep descent.

The clone ships were the direct ancestors to the X-wing that had smoked him—considered by many to be the best ship to fly in a dogfight for its well-rounded capabilities, including lasers, missiles, shields, decent speed, and the ability to still jump to hyperspace.

His Jedi fighter was the direct ancestor to the A-wing, known for its superior speed but not much else.
Luckily for him, the A-wing had been a downgrade from the more expensive but rarer Jedi starfighter, which had been, reserved due to cost, for Jedi commanders. While the A-wing was fast, the Jedi fighter was fast, tough, and deadly.

Cal might not have had the most practice flying ships growing up on Bracca, but he sure knew the makes and models—from taking them apart for so long.

Water steamed and displaced as he pulled up inches from the surface. One of the clone ships wasn’t so lucky and, with a huge splash, crashed into the pounding waves.

One down, thought Cal.

Red laser fire bathed his viewport as the second ship unleashed its payload.
“Shields at 20%,” the computer warned.

Jerking the stick to the side hard, he rolled the starfighter before cutting the engines.
The tailing ship zoomed past him and into his targeting sights.

He pressed the trigger, aiming at the wing of the fighter—giving the opposing pilot enough time to eject before his ship was consumed in a fiery ball.

As Cal rose out of the atmosphere and into the depths of space, he really hoped the greying in his vision was going to hold off long enough to make it back to the Oggdo before total collapse.

The stars became streaks around him as he entered hyperspace.

His eyelids felt impossibly heavy.
Maybe he would just close them for a moment.

He felt like there was something he was supposed to remember to do…
Must not be that important if he couldn’t remember...

Maybe it had something to do with the Force?
Well, his tired brain decided everything had something to do with the Force, so that didn’t narrow it down much.

Maybe he would figure it out after he took a moment to rest his eyes...

Chapter 7: The Outcasts of Coruscant

Summary:

Thanks so much for the comments and kudos! Hope you like the next part...

Merrin's jacket jingles as lightsaber handles knock against each other.

It had felt wrong to bury them with Grievous. Maybe Cal will know what to do with them once she finds him.

They weren’t the only item she had inherited from a deceased Sith.

She had also acquired Ventress’s spaceship, which would be extremely useful for getting off-planet.

Mother Talzin had bid Merrin farewell, saying she believed that with the help of Merrin's demonstration of magic to defeat the droid ship, the witches of Dathomir would be able to defend themselves using similar magic if the Separatists tried a second invasion. The old witch had told Merrin that Merrin had someone else who needed her among the stars, and Dathomir would be there for her when she chose to return home.

Merrin was very grateful for Greez teaching her to fly. Cal and she had been taught at the same time when Greez had been horrified that both of them lacked what he saw as a basic life skill. Cal had been a much faster learner but had nearly killed the whole Mantis crew by crashing them into an asteroid on his overconfident first flight. Merrin had taken a much longer time to learn—unlike Cal, she had never seen a starship up close. When Greez had told her to push the blue button and she had asked him what a button was, he had finally understood the immensity of the task he had undertaken. Merrin liked to point out she was a quick learner for someone whose species was still using bows and arrows. She had no illusions that she wouldn’t be blown to smithereens in a dogfight, but she had gotten good enough after months of Greez’s patient training to plot a flight path between planet A and planet B. As Greez put it: if he needed to get someplace reliably and had unlimited time, he would ask Merrin; if he wanted to get somewhere fast but didn’t care about his chances of survival, he would ask Cal.

So Merrin was confidently able to land on Coruscant a block from the Jedi Temple a few days after defeating Grievous.

She had taken two steps toward the five spires of the temple.

Then her steps faltered—what would she say when she got there?

Hi! I am here to see Cal Kestis?

A Jedi who may or may not be in the temple or off-world. A Jedi who may or may not be a full-grown man or a ten-year-old. If he was a ten-year-old, what business could she possibly say to convince them she had acceptable business with a child? And Cal may not remember her, so even if she snuck in, he may think she is there to harm him. Which is the last thing she wants, and just the thought of seeing fear of her on his face makes her heart hurt. And in that scenario, if he alerted the temple to an intruder, then what? How would she explain breaking into a child’s room? It didn’t look good.

Not sure what she was doing, she made an abrupt turn into the first entrance on her right. Not sure why she had turned into this one, except a vague feeling and the need to figure out a story that would let her enter the Jedi Temple.

Aggressive neon signs informed her that she had entered Dex’s Diner.

The place was fairly packed, and the happy murmur of voices filled the diner. There was a family of Twi’leks feeding an infant in one booth. A small gang of teenage male Rodians drinking shots and being loud in the corner. A slight hooded figure sat at the bar. A large, four-armed Besalisk was multitasking behind the counter. The smell of fried food and nerf steak filled the place.

Merrin had been to places like this a few times with the Mantis crew at Greez’s request, but never alone—and it hurt. Sitting alone in a booth felt even sadder, so she claimed a stool at the bar and ordered a rare nerf steak. She had learned her lesson about ordering random foods of alien origin when she had ordered something that tasted and looked like a metal cube. As a Dathomirian, she was perfectly capable of consuming raw meat, so felt like any type of steak was a safe choice.

A few minutes later, a juicy-looking slab of meat was set steaming in front of her. It made her stomach turn.

A loud thump sounded from her right.

The hooded figure smacked its head into the bar with a depressed thunk.

The action revealed a blue and white lekku from beneath the brown hood.

Togrutas are carnivores, thinks Merrin. She seems not to be having a good day, says a little voice in the back of her head. Maybe you should ask her what is wrong? The voice in her head sounds an awful lot like Cal. The man who had befriended a murderous space witch who had tried to kill him numerous times with zombies because he thought she was lonely. She sighed and pushed the plate toward the Togruta.

“You look like you are having a bad day. Want something to eat?”

“Of course I am having a bad day, and I’m not giving you an interview because you bought me dinner, and for your information, I was cleared of all charges, so leave me alone.”

Merrin drags her steak back with a yank. How was Cal so nice to ungrateful strangers all the time?

“Well, excuse me, princess, but I don’t know who you are and what you did. I just thought you looked sad and might want something to eat. I certainly don’t want to know your life story. I have enough problems to deal with.”

The Togruta turned to look up, surprised.

Ahh, Sith spit, thinks Merrin.

She is just a kid.

Large watery blue eyes gaze out of a youthful, round face. While she is no expert in Togruta ages, if it corresponds anything to humans or Dathomirians, she can’t be more than 16 years old—and she is alone, crying in the streets of Coruscant—not the safest for a young girl. You can't leave a depressed teenager alone in the middle of the biggest city in the galaxy. Shut up, Cal, she thinks. But Cal isn’t here, so she sighs and pushes the steak back to the girl.

“Sorry,” the girl sniffles. “That was rude of me. You were just trying to be nice.”

“That is okay. I am not looking for an interview, but if you want to talk about it... My friend liked to say talking can help.”

“I don’t think anything can help. I was accused of bombing my home, and then my family didn’t believe I didn’t do it… Eventually, I was cleared of the charges, but I left because no one believed me. No one trusted me, and now I am all alone.”

Oh no. She has lost her family and is completely alone. You must adopt her, said the fake Cal voice in her head. She quickly told it to shut up.

“I understand losing one’s family. I am looking for mine at the moment.”

The girl was just opening her mouth to respond when one of the drunk teenagers catcalled across the bar.

“Hey, Padawan Tano, if the Jedi don’t want you anymore, you can come home with me!”

The Rodian leered at the girl.

The girl—Tano—shoulders hunched, and she muttered under her breath something suspicious like, “Violence is not the Jedi way.”

The Rodian marched forward when he got no response, his buddies hugging his heels.

“Hey, bitch, don’t you ignore me!”

He reached out a grasping hand toward the girl to yank her around to face him.

The hand never landed—Merrin's hand wrapped around his forearm, stopping it.

“The lady wants to be left alone.”

“I’ve got this. Don’t get involved, you might get hurt…” the Togruta starts.

“Ashy old lady, nobody was talking to you.”

“You should show more respect for your elders, boy.”

The Rodian took a swing at Merrin’s face, but the strike never landed.

Merrin’s hand ignited in green flames—hot enough to leave a nasty burn, not hot enough to remove his hand. See she has learned self-control. Old Merrin would have burnt him to a crisp for daring to lay a hand on her.

The Rodian screamed and retreated, his gang following quickly.

Tano’s eyes were wide.

“That is a neat trick.”

“Thanks.”

“You didn’t have to protect me, though. I am a Jedi Padawan… or at least I was…”

Merrin shrugged. “I felt like it.”

Merrin looked down at the table before speaking, thinking hard.

“I am looking for is a Jedi named Cal Kestis. He… saved me (Nice and vague—could work if Cal was a ten-year-old Padawan or an adult Jedi, and whether or not he remembered her, because as a Jedi he probably saved countless people he didn’t remember. It was also the truth.) and I wanted to thank him. Do you know if he is at the temple? Or where he might be?”

The girl frowned, thinking.

“The name sounds familiar… There are lots of Jedi at the temple that I only know in passing. I’m sorry I don’t have any more information.”

“No problem. I just thought it was worth asking.”

Buzz buzz. The comlink on Tano’s belt sounded for attention.

She unclipped the com and set it on the tabletop.

A small blue holographic figure appeared as she answered the com. The distinctive facial features marked him as a clone, despite the fact that his helmet was under his arm.

Tano’s face fell when she saw who the caller was—as if she had been hoping for someone else.

“I heard what happened, Commander. How are you holding up? The boys and I will hide you in the barracks if you want a place to stay. You are one of us. If you don’t want to see a Jedi, they will never find you. The boys can keep a secret, Commander.”

Merrin was instantly relieved that the teenager had someone looking out for her, and she didn’t feel so responsible anymore.

“Thanks, Rex,” Tano, as inconspicuously as she could, wiped at her eyes with the back of her hand. “I’m okay.” It wasn’t very convincing.

“Okay, Commander. But the invite is always there. You know the boys can keep a secret—unlike General Skywalker.”

Tano gave a wet laugh. “Yeah, if it wasn’t for Obi-Wan flying cover, I wouldn’t be the only Jedi who would be out of the Order. It’s a wonder Skyguy still thinks it’s a secret.”

“Actually… sorry to do this to you, Commander, but that’s why I’m calling. Senator Amidala has been kidnapped.”

Ahsoka sat up straight, focusing on the hologram.

“Separatists? When? Where? What do you need me to do?”

“It was a few days ago. We’re unclear if the Separatists are behind the kidnapping. What we do know is that a human male took the senator from her home on Naboo in a stolen ship. There also hasn’t been a ransom demand.”

Ahsoka’s blue eyes widened. “That is not a good sign.”

“No. General Skywalker… is not taking it well. He tried to take a ship to find her himself. When he was denied permission, the men heard quite the ruckus when General Kenobi had to ‘inform’ him he couldn’t take a ship. It looked like the two of them had gone through a durasteel chipper.”

“Why was his request denied? She is an important senator. And he has been successful in rescuing her before.”

“The council already has a Jedi Master assigned to the mission. His Padawan, a ten-year-old human male named Cal Kestis, has also been kidnapped. So the council didn’t see assigning a second Jedi as an efficient use of resources—especially when the war has already spread our forces so thin.”

Merrin’s head snapped around so fast at Cal’s name that something popped in her neck. Tano met her eyes in recognition. Cal’s been kidnapped? He is a child. Sorrow for what she had lost filled her, but the most important fact was: he is in danger. Merrin needs to find him.

“So you want me to go after them because I’m no longer a Jedi and thus not under council supervision?” Tano guessed.

“Basically yes, but only for scouting—not to engage. We don’t know how dangerous the situation is. Please be careful, kid… I don’t even know what Skywalker would do if something happened to you and the Senator. Just find them, then contact the generals. The council will have fewer issues with a quick rescue than a prolonged search. You are not alone, kid, so make sure you call for backup.”

“Don’t worry, Rex. I don’t think I’ll be going alone.”

Tano says, watching flames dance dangerously around Merrin’s fingers.

Fear blooms in Merrin’s chest. Something is very wrong with Cal—and she knows, somehow, he doesn’t have much time left.

Chapter 8: The Crew of the Oggdo

 

---

The sound of an alarm jolted Cal to consciousness.

What is happening? Panic filled him, heart pounding uncontrollably.

He felt cold. Like ice knives had been shoved into his fingers and toes. Except for his side, which was on fire.

Finally focusing on the viewport, he couldn’t understand where all the stars had gone. A grey expanse filled the whole area.

Oh. Sith spit. It’s an asteroid that is going to smush me.

He fumbles with the joystick with ice-locked hands as the proximity alarm blares its warning of impending doom.

The starfighter underbelly scrapes across the rocky surface, causing sparks to fly and the ship to shake violently, but both ship and pilot manage to land without a fiery ball of flames. Cal would call that a win. His standards these days are low and are measured in number of near-death experiences per… da—hour.

Cal’s thoughts are sluggish as he drags himself out of the cockpit and onto the deck of the Oggdo hangar. He doesn’t remember finding the Oggdo or landing in the hangar after the near collision, which is not a great sign.

He can’t feel his right hand where it is applying pressure against the steady red stain that is growing on his abdomen. The Force slow has completely failed him. He just doesn’t have the energy.

I'm not going to survive this… Anger at himself for failing his mission fuels him toward the hangar door. Maybe there is still the slightest chance he can save someone if Padmé believes his story. Even if he isn’t around to help, maybe she could make a difference.

His steps are slow and painful, and the steady drip drip of blood on the deck follows his steps.

Padmé’s voice confronts him as he enters the cargo hold, pissed.

“How dare you leave the Senator of Naboo to pee in a bottl… what happened to you?”

Her voice trails off as she takes in Cal’s state. Cal gives her a weak grin as he pretends to lean against the wall, sliding down it to a sitting position to hide the fact that his legs were about to give out from under him. This act is mostly a failure, as the blood smear that traces his downward path against the wall makes clear.

“Got… hhhm… in a… fist fight with a… ran…cor…” he jokes.

“That would be funny if I thought you were the type of guy who was smart enough not to do that, wouldn’t it?”

“Hmmm… well, not this time,” Cal sighs.

“Cal?”

“Hmmm,” he responds. He feels so tired.

“Can you open your eyes, please?” Padmé’s voice is filled with worry.

Cal blinks his eyes open—he hadn’t realized he had closed them. Padmé is a tan and orange shape in the corner; he blinks harder to try and get her into focus.

“I don’t think you should fall asleep right now. How about we talk about something? How about your mission?”

Cal half shrugs, then grimaces and aborts the movement, reaching for his pocket with the data stick.

“Got you some evidence—pro-bab-ly need a slicer.”

His fingers feel fat and numb as he fumbles the stick and tosses it at Padmé. He doesn’t quite make the throw or notice when the other item he had placed carefully in his pocket also goes with the stick as they both bounce off the deck near the Senator.

Padmé reaches out and picks up both items, examining them. A standard data stick and a thin band made out of a singular piece of cloudy white crystal—clearly made to be a ring for someone with delicate fingers—a woman’s ring, not a man’s.

Padmé suddenly wonders if this mission is one of revenge for whoever was the owner of this ring.

“Whose was this?”

Cal looks away, suddenly finding the floor very interesting.

“No o…ne’s yet… I had pl…anned to pro…pose but… I chickened… o…ut since I wasn’t s…ure if sh…e would say yes and now it is too l…ate.”

Cal had carved the ring out of the shards of Merrin’s broken focusing crystal and had been holding on to it for months now. Due to his ability, he could feel the memories of their first meeting in the stone. Granted, it was full of anger and her trying to murder him, but she would not be able to see that. And the memories were still precious to him, because for him, it had been love at first fireball.

He had even taken her out to watch the stars to set the mood, but he had freaked out at the last minute when she had turned around with one skeptical eyebrow raised to ask him why he was kneeling in the dirt. He had made up some half-assed excuse about dropping something and pocketed the ring. He had been terrified that she would leave him—she had done it before. Maybe she would not consider a human as her husband. Maybe because he was a Jedi or because she was Dathomirian. Maybe she thought it was okay to have a fling with him but not a serious relationship, and if he were to ask for something different, she might disappear forever. Now it is far too late, and he wishes he had just asked. He will never know now.

Lifting his hand, he used the Force through gritted teeth to release Padmé’s cuffs. They fell open with a click.

She stood, looking down on her captor sprawled helplessly on the floor.

“Why free me?”

“N…ot going to make it much longer—don’t want you to die too. Please look at the… data… many lives… on it,” his voice was barely audible now.

Something cool and small was dropped into his palm, and small fingers closed his larger ones over the object. He realized his eyes were closed again.

He blinked them open to see Padmé’s face looking at him.

“I promise—if you promise to live long enough to give this ring to the lucky lady.”

He feels the ring slipping through his fingers. He tries to close them, but they don’t respond.

“Cal?”

Someone is calling his name, but he is so tired.

“Cal!”

He can’t muster the energy to see who it is or what they want. His chest feels heavy and waterlogged.

“Come on, you have to breathe!”

“Cal!”

He feels panic from a familiar green light in the darkness around him. He doesn’t want the pretty light to be so upset, but he is too tired to reassure it.

---

Padmé is not having a great day, and for someone who has had multiple assassination attempts on her life, that is saying something.

It had started with being given a bottle to pee in and food for about a day, with a seeming sincere apology but no other information from her captor, who then had abandoned her on a spaceship who knows where, for how long, cuffed to a chair. She kept telling herself that he would come back and she wasn’t going to die of dehydration after drinking her own pee in desperation floating in space—so she was relieved and furious when she finally heard him return.

When she saw him and he collapsed against the wall, she had had the same fear—thinking he wouldn’t be able to uncuff her if he died there.

He had been delirious for a time, introducing himself as Cal Kestis and introducing someone called BD-1 to her that was clearly not there.

Cal Kestis was the name of the Padawan of Jedi Master Tapal. So he was either even more far gone than she realized, or something else was going on here. Maybe he was a clone with enhanced aging. It would explain both the Force wielding and the obsession with the clone troopers.

Then he had freed her with the Force and told her about his love life, and it was getting awfully hard to be angry at him when he was dying in front of her. She knew Anakin would yell at her for being a bleeding heart, but she couldn’t just sit back and let Cal bleed out. And Anakin wasn’t here, which was probably for the best.

She kneels by his side, placing the ring in his palm. His skin is icy to the touch, and his green eyes are half-closed and dull.

She promises to look at his evidence. It isn’t a lie, but she doesn’t think she will find anything more than the ramblings of a madman. She goes to unzip the blood-soaked flight suit to get a better idea of what she’s dealing with, when, with startling strength and speed, his large hand clamps around her thin wrist. Crazed eyes widen, staring into hers.

“Y…ou must be… liev…e me.”

She can’t look away.

She is falling into the green depths.

 

---

She is running. She has to get to the escape pods.

The 13th Division is shooting at her. Pain slices across her cheek as blaster fire eats her flesh.

---

Jedi are traitors to the Republic; they must be turned into the Inquisition for the safety of the citizens, the holonews reports. She hunches further down into the dirty alley beneath the garbage bins that have been both bed and food source.

---

She is in a firing line. The woman in the black helmet is going to kill them all if she doesn’t sacrifice herself as a Jedi. The only thing stopping her from stepping forward is the fact that she’d probably kill them all anyway.

---

"This is Master Obi-Wan Kenobi. I regret to report that both our Jedi Order and the Republic have fallen, with a dark shadow of the Empire rising to take their place..."

She is the very last. It is her job to save the galaxy. It is a crushing weight for a Padawan who was never even a Jedi. Her whole family is dead.

---

Fear. Pain. A black cape. Mechanical breathing. A suffocating evil and then—nothing.

---

Padmé fell back, gasping for breath. What was that? They felt like memories, but not her own. Had he shared his Force vision with her? No wonder he was hell-bent on his mission. That had been absolutely terrifying. The flashes of images were confusing, mixing thoughts and emotions and losing context, but one thing was clear—if that was the future, something needed to change.

Obi-Wan’s message had been the clearest: the fall of the Republic and the Jedi Order.

Maybe she was just as insane as Cal now, but she believed him—and the crazy Force vision—and she would do everything in her power to stop that from happening.

For the galaxy, and for her children.

She hadn’t told Anakin yet—it had been too soon. But she wouldn’t let her twins grow up in the world she had just seen.

She sat up, planning to tell Cal she believed him—but froze.

His eyes were closed and he was suspiciously still.

“Cal?”

He didn’t respond.

“Cal!”

He wasn’t breathing.

He can’t die on her now! She can’t do this alone. She didn’t know how he had handled that weight for so long.

“Come on, you have to breathe!”

“Cal!”

Fingers trembling, unhelpfully, she pressed them against his neck to check for a pulse—nothing.

Curse words that would make Obi-Wan blush bounced around her skull as she flew to her feet and started digging frantically through every drawer or compartment as fast as she could, looking for an emergency medkit. Tossing useless items this way and that until the ship looked like it had been hit by a tornado.

Finally, under the refresher sink, she found a large medical kit.

Skidding to her knees beside Cal, she tore open the kit and found what she was looking for. Using all her strength, she pulled him down to lie flat on the floor. The guy must eat rocks for breakfast—he was almost too heavy for her small frame to move. She sliced open the front of his shirt with a pair of scissors from the medkit.

Praying her vague memory of the medical crash course she was given for 1 hour several years ago was enough, she plunged the adrenaline needle into his chest near his heart and depressed the plunger.

Dropping the needle, she moved to his head. Taking a deep breath, she pressed her mouth to his and exhaled. Thinking that if this didn’t kill him now, Anakin surely would if he ever found out. It would probably be for the best if Cal and Anakin never met.

Relief flooded her when his mouth gasped for breath against hers. The adrenaline had done its job and restarted his heart. But that was only a temporary fix.

Diving for the medkit, she found a bacta gel pouch. Exposing the wound on his side using the scissors, she emptied the pouch into the jagged hole, then used the rest of the bandage supplies in the kit to stop the bleeding. Her hands were red and shaking by the time she was done.

Cal, luckily for him, had passed out.

She checked his pulse again—it was weak, but there.

He needs a bacta tank immediately or he’s not going to make it. What she had done was a patch job, but he could still flatline again at any moment.

Running to the cockpit, she found the comm station and had punched in Anakin’s frequency before pausing above the connect button.

There had been a reason Cal had not wanted the Jedi involved…

Deleting the number, she input another code and pressed connect.

If the clones were compromised, and there was no way she could go to the Separatists, then she needed a neutral system. She only knew of one neutral system with the military might and leadership she could trust.

Hopefully, she was making the right choice.

Chapter 9: The Rule of One and a Half-ish Sith

They were all going to burn. He would murder them all! How dare the Jedi Council defy his wishes. How dare anyone take what was his!

There are currently two people in the room. One is a Jedi Knight, the other a Sith Lord.

These are the thoughts of the Jedi Knight.

The Sith actually has happy thoughts—such as look at how my boy is coming along so nicely. Like a sun about to go supernova.

“Chancellor, with all due respect, this isn’t the best time for a social call.”

“Of course, my boy, I apologize, but I just wanted to make sure you are doing alright. I mean, with the loss of your Padawan, and then I know you were quite close to Senator Amidala.”

Palpatine makes sure his words convey the empathy of a mentor and friend as he carefully hides his smile at Anakin’s clenched fist and the way the water glasses on the table tremble.

Now if he could just off Kenobi and keep Amidala and Tano out of the picture—or off them—then Anakin would surely turn dark. He is so close.

“Pa—I mean, Senator Amidala—is a close friend, and I am the best qualified to rescue her. I don’t know why the Council and Obi-Wan can’t see that. I have done it before.”

He touches a massive bruise on his chin as he speaks. It worries Palpatine that he is not powerful enough to defeat completely unmarked whoever had fought with him. His new apprentice should be powerful enough to defeat any challenger unscathed—with the exception of himself, of course.

“Clearly, their judgment is questionable on this subject, since you have proven yourself time and time again. Not to say anything negative about your old master, but clearly he doesn’t trust you enough if he won’t support your decisions.”

“Sometimes I just feel like Obi-Wan does not listen to me and just blindly follows the Council, even if they are wrong. Sometimes I just want to go into the Council chamber and just—and tell them how wrong they are to their face and then just storm out.”

Anakin was glaring unseeing out the viewport over the Coruscant skyline—fist clenched.

The glass on the desk developed a crack. Palpatine had to briefly turn away to hide his smile.

But then Anakin took a deep breath and released the tension in his hands.

“But I didn’t even do that when Ahsoka was being accused, so I’m no better than Obi-Wan, and I didn’t go after her either. And now she probably never wants to see me again. I’m a terrible master.”

Palpatine held in his sigh. Self-hatred was not a good look on a Sith.

“From what you told me, your apprentice left you—not the other way around—so do not lay blame on yourself for her decision to remove herself from your life.”

That is better. Make him feel alone and unwanted and lay the blame on others.

There is a polite knock at the door to the Chancellor’s office.

“I’m sorry, my boy, but I do have an appointment with a tailor. Do you mind if he works while we chat? You must understand my schedule is quite full.”

“Of course. My apologies. My outburst was inappropriate for a Jedi.”

“We are friends here, and everyone must have a friend they can trust with their feelings.”

Anakin gave a small polite smile while the Chancellor calls for the tailor to enter.

The tailor gave a polite bow to both men, then discreetly got to work measuring as they continued their conversation as any good servant should, thought Palpatine pleased. He would look splendid in his new robes. This Coruscanti fashion designer, Varian Skye, had come highly recommended.

He needed to look his best when his new Empire is born.

Anakin frowns slightly as the dark-haired tailor measures the vibrant pink fabric with yellow flowers upon the Senator—but what does he know of fashion? He is a Jedi—humble servant to the galaxy that only dresses in boring sand tones and sometimes black if you annoy your master enough and the other masters relent and tell him that your Padawan is just in an edgy phase that he will grow out of.
Thinking of Padawans—how in the world did Ahsoka ever get her outfits approved? She was literally wearing a two-piece in battle at 11. What adult had let that happen… Oh, that might have been partly his job, thinking back on it now… He had never thought to ask her. It definitely wasn’t standard Jedi wear. She must have been even more annoying as a youngling than him. He’s not sure that was possible, but they did send her to him. He had a feeling that might have been Obi-Wan or Yoda’s sense of justice.

He needs to find Ahsoka and apologize once Padmé is safe. He’ll give her back her lightsabers as a starting point. They are hers, no matter what the Jedi Council says.

“Let’s talk on more uplifting topics to raise our spirits. What news have you heard?”

Anakin tried to think, but doom and gloom seemed to smother every thought. Finally he said,

“Not sure if it is a good or bad sign, but Grievous and Ventress have vanished from the war for the time being. I’m probably being optimistic, but maybe they flew themselves into a black hole. Although they are probably just plotting. They are both extremely hard to kill, so I doubt someone managed to take them out—but one can hope.”

“That is promising news. Maybe this war will end sooner than later if that leaves only Dooku to deal with,” says Palpatine.

The Sith Lord was not actually thrilled with this news, for he had genuinely lost contact with his minions. While not true Sith, they had their uses—but he had lost contact with both of them on Dathomir. Probably some work of a witch. Only a darksider could truly be a threat to one of their own.

Now more than ever, he must pull Skywalker to the dark to replenish his power. Then he could get rid of that hanger-on, Dooku.

Then he would rule the galaxy, and the Jedi would only be an echo of a memory.

Chapter 10: How to care for your adopted padawan

Summary:

I'm back peeps...

Merrin and Ahsoka had gone to the spaceport fuel station to make sure they had the supplies and fuel necessary for trekking around the galaxy for an undefined length of time.

They still didn’t know where to start their search.

But one problem at a time.

Merrin looked uncertainly at the large number of choices that ship fuel came in. She hadn’t known there was more than one choice.

Would getting the wrong kind cause damage to the ship?

She glanced over at the younger woman, a question in her eyes.

Ahsoka nodded discreetly towards the one in the lower left.

As they walked back to their ship to wait for it to be finished refueling, Merrin said,

“Thanks. I did not grow up among the stars.”

“Don’t worry about it. But whose ship is it then? Do you have a crew?”

“It was my sister’s, but she died.”

“I’m sorry about your sister. It would have been nice to meet her.”

“You probably would not have liked each other.”

Ahsoka squinted up at the ashen-haired woman, confused, but decided to change the topic to a safer subject of more urgency. The Nightsister didn’t know how to select fuel, which called into question…

“You do know how to fly, right? I’m a pretty good pilot myself. Taught by the best in the galaxy. If you don’t mind, I would love to pilot the ship, and you could just sit back and relax…”

Merrin wasn’t listening to her. Her head was tilted to the side and her hand had fallen lightly on Ahsoka’s shoulder.

“That’s the one from the bounty puck?”

“Yep, the Togruta—someone wants that one dead bad. Same with the Naboo Senator and that General Kenobi. Guess someone already beat us to the Senator. Makes sense—easier pickings. And I’m not going after a full Jedi. Someone else will have to cash that one out. But I’m going to retire after this.”

The Trandoshan finished speaking, not even trying to hide his slow and confident approach, reptilian lips curling in an intimidating smile.

His Duros companion, with a ridiculously large-brimmed hat, followed in his footsteps more cautiously. The rest of the bystanders, sensing impending violence, started to fade away, leaving the street basically deserted.

“Wish I had my lightsabers,” said Ahsoka, clenching her empty fists. She felt naked without her blades. A voice that sounded suspiciously like Yoda told her that a Jedi was never alone, as the Force was one with her.

But why is Obi-Wan always on about the lightsaber being your life then?

Anyway, it had felt right to leave them behind, and she hadn’t even been sure she would have been allowed to take them with her, as she was no longer part of the Order. But she missed their weight.

Merrin suddenly opened her jacket, and Ahsoka’s jaw dropped—she had been expecting a blaster.

“Take your pick. I know a Jedi weapon is unique to them due to the attunement of their crystal, but I figure in a pinch you won’t be so picky.”

“You sure you aren’t a Jedi hunter?” asked Ahsoka, suddenly questioning getting into a spaceship with an unknown adult who seemed to have a collection of lightsabers that couldn’t possibly be hers.

“Oh no. I have only attempted to murder one Jedi. Luckily, I failed, and later we fell in love. No, these I got after I killed Grievous.”

Ahsoka didn’t think her jaw could drop any lower. There were so many things wrong with that sentence. She had sooo many questions.

“You killed Grievous? As in General Grievous? As in four-arms Separatist Grievous?”

It would explain the collection of lightsabers. But how powerful was this woman?

A blaster bolt zipped past her lekku.

“Maybe I will tell you the story another time.”

“Right.”

Using the Force, Ahsoka pulled two of the lightsabers free from Merrin’s coat and snapped them to life.

A brilliant orange and blue blade expanded to each side of her. She grinned. This was more like it.

Deflecting the next shot, she leapt into the air, somersaulting over the head of the Trandoshan and bringing her lightsaber down, slicing neatly through his arm at the wrist. His hand and blaster hit the duracrete with a clatter.

The Nightsister had vanished and reappeared behind the Duros. A metal dagger sprayed blood as it sliced through his neck.

Try not to pick a fight with the witch woman, Ahsoka adds to her facts-she-learned-today. A list she had started when she had become a padawan. She has quite the list. Some of her favorites include don’t lend a ship to Skyguy and expect it back, and don’t paint Rex’s armor with polka dots as a prank.

Merrin studied her with deep brown eyes before saying,

“I hope my children are like you someday.”

Ahsoka grinned. “What—beautiful and kind?” she joked back, touched.

“No, deadly and dangerous,” Merrin said, straight-faced.

“You know, it’s hard to tell if you are joking… Do you have children?”

“No, but I planned to have some with my husband before all this…” Merrin gestured vaguely around.

“You’re married?” asked Ahsoka, surprised. She couldn’t imagine the guy who would have the guts to ask the Dathomirian witch out—unless they liked to flirt with death.

“No, but I had plans to be. But my mate was being very slow on the uptake… It is not his fault—he was raised in a cult and is not very good at romance.”

Ahsoka frowned, putting two and two together.

“Wait… you said you fell in love with a Jedi…”

“Yes, I did,” Merrin said, voice unruffled.

Merrin remembered the exasperating evening when she had invited Cal out to dance, and he had promptly invited the rest of the Mantis crew. She had even snagged him for a slow romantic dance and leaned close, looked up into his eyes, and pressed herself against him. He had turned as red as his hair and had bolted the moment the song was over. Greez had given her a sympathetic look. She had then called Hera (another pilot of the Rebellion dating another Jedi, Kanan, she knew of, (they had previously become fast friends) and begged for help. Hera had been straight with her and told her that dating a Jedi was the same as dating an idiot, and if she wanted it to go anywhere, she would have to be the one to make the first move.

This was against Nightsister tradition. Their mating rituals involved Nightbrothers fighting to the death for their hand in marriage. It wasn’t so backwards that Nightsisters had no choice in who they were to marry, since if they didn’t like the winner of the test of strength, it was their right as a Nightsister to scorch the offending male from the face of the red planet. This had sometimes led to quite the slow population growth, and sometimes decline.

However, she was progressive and was willing to leave tradition behind, and so should Cal.

He had, of course, already proven himself a mighty warrior, way beyond any Nightbrother, and since she had not killed him, she had basically completed the mate selection process on her end. But she probably should have just told him that, since he was very clueless about these things.

She believed the common Core practice was to present a ring. Maybe if she threw a ring at his face, he would get the message—okay, she would not have actually thrown it at him, but his lack of taking a hint had frustrated her to no end. Now that possibility was lost for good, as he was just a kid, and the Cal she knew was gone. Depression ate at her, making her not want to move. The only thing keeping her going was the thought of little Cal in danger.

They made it back to the ship without further incidents.

“This is Ventress’ ship… the Dathomirian Ventress’ ship…”

“As I said, I don’t think you would have liked her. She tried to leave me for dead several times. I did not much care for her either.”

At this point, Ahsoka wouldn’t be surprised if Merrin told her that she had killed Dooku and that he was her long-lost uncle. She highly doubted anything the witch could say would shock her at this point.

Their second problem had solved itself via a data upload from Rex of a recent report from Kamino that was only a few hours old.

Apparently, Master Tapal’s stolen fighter had requested landing on Kamino. The kidnapper had stolen some data and then fought their way off planet before managing to escape to hyperspace before reinforcements arrived. Master Tapal was on his way there now to see if he could find any clues about the kidnapper. Merrin and Ahsoka decided to do the same.

Chapter 11: The Ruler of Mandalore

Cal’s body was floating.

His brain also felt like it was floating.

Fluffy and disconnected.

He blinked, and something stung his eyes.

Everything was green and dim.

Faces and figures swam and teleported across his vision.

Some with unsettling T-visors, but in startling colors as if someone had vomited the rainbow on clone troopers.

His brain panicked, sending fight signals to his limbs, but they didn’t respond, and eventually he couldn’t hold his eyes open.

--------

 

The next time he woke, he was laying flat on his back on a soft surface, and he could sense the Force presence of someone hovering over him.

He was also shockingly no longer in any pain, which either meant he had died, he was drugged, or it had been a lot longer than he had thought—and that floaty green dream/memory, which felt a lot less real than some of other people’s echoes, was his memory from being in a bacta tank.

Blinking open his eyes, a familiar face with dark brown eyes and matching hair glared down at him.

“You have some explaining to do!” she snapped.

“It’s you,” he mumbled, sounding stupid even to his own ears.

“Yeah, it’s me. I mean, what the kriffing shit was that? I hadn’t even seen a lightsaber until I met you! I thought the Jedi and the Force were a tall tale, and here you come with your flashy blades and space mumbo jumbo and mess up my mission and send me back to my childhood bedroom? Do you know how hard it was figuring out what to tell my previously deceased parents that I was their adult daughter? Thank the stars for DNA tests.”

He had somehow sent Jyn back too? To a different point in time and on a different planet? How was that possible? To be fair, how was any of this possible?

But did that mean others could have traveled back as well?

Was there a chance Merrin had been sent back?

“Sorry…?” mumbled Cal. He felt a little bad, but he felt she was being unfair—he had also saved her from certain death. His emotional capacity to feel sympathy for her was limited after everything he had dealt with.

Letting her steam on, he took in his surroundings. He was in a private luxury med bay, which must cost a small fortune. A large window—from which a sniper could easily shoot in (he has issues)—displayed a very iconic skyline: symmetrical buildings of durasteel and glass.

Oh no.

He tried and failed to bolt out of bed, getting tangled in the sheets and nearly falling on his face.

“Hey, you have to be resting. You nearly died,” Jyn’s voiced - lacking much sympathy.

“But you did give me a chance to fix things. An impossible task for sure, but you did give me hope things could be better. So I guess I forgive you.” She grabbed his forearm and helped him sit on the bed.

“We are on Mandalore.”

She rolled her eyes at the lack of interest in her previous tirade but let it drop.

“Yes, I came here looking for a specific metal needed for my father’s weapon. I needed to make sure it would not fall into the Empire’s hands again. You were brought here by your lady friend because you had a hole in your gut, and she wanted to take you to the leader of the neutral systems.”

“The Sith Lord Maul was on Mandalore during the Clone Wars,” he said, trying to convey his urgency. Cal didn’t remember when—it had been a vague piece of temple gossip not for young Padawan ears.

“I am aware. You won’t believe what happened to me over the past two years—try and get an audience with the duchess, get in the middle of an assassination attempt and coup—nearly die, mind you. Then get promoted to royal scientist, for which I am not qualified. Also, we have a Sith hiding out in the sewers, so if you don’t mind dealing with that when you’re done with your beauty sleep, the duchess would appreciate it.”

 

He noticed Jyn waiting for a response and quickly said,

“I appreciate the confidence, but I have never successfully killed a Sith. And for that matter, how did you scare one off—no offense.”

“Wow, never meet your heroes. Must be better Jedi in this time,” said Jyn. Cal scowled.

“Anyway, one Mandalorian was no match for a Sith, but we are on a planet full of them, and I had already been experimenting with a new... invention, based on my father’s work, for self-protection, which Maul wasn’t expecting. It wasn’t enough to finish him off, but it made him back off for a while. Now, I doubt it will hold him back forever though.”

“What was your secret invention?” Cal asked, curious. Now that his immediate fear of a Sith Lord waltzing into the room had been negated, he leaned back against the headboard, relaxing a bit.

Jyn’s eyes gleamed. “So, this time around I really could get into my dad’s research, being significantly older, and apparently the second biggest bill for the Death Star after the kyber crystal was the metal he had to line the inside of the firing chamber with so that it wouldn’t just melt the moment they turned it on. Kyber, while harder to find and mine, is found on multiple worlds, while the metal they needed—beskar—is only found on Mandalore, and even here it is in short supply and high demand. A suit of beskar armor can cost the same as a small planet. You probably know this, but the reason for its popularity is that it is the only known metal that a lightsaber will not cut through. Now imagine if you take that property and…”

“You’re awake!”

Padmé smiled widely, showing off perfectly white teeth that could be used in a dentist commercial. Her orange flight suit was gone, and she was dressed in an elegant, flowing purple gown with floor length sleeves. Highly impractical and would get her killed in a fire fight (he has issues, he knows).

“You had us worried for quite a while.”

A third woman entered the room. She was even more elaborately dressed in formal clothes of blues, greens, and purples with a large decorative headdress that her blonde hair had been interlaced through.

“Welcome to Mandalore. I have assured that you are vital to ending this war and that you would be able to remove the Sith from my planet.”

“Cal, let me introduce you to the ruler of Mandalore and the leader of 2,000 neutral systems, Duchess Satine.”

Cal got to his feet and gave an awkward half bow, feeling slightly embarrassed to be meeting such a powerful ruler in bed and in a hospital gown.

He also hoped he could deliver on their hopes for him. As Jyn stated, he wasn’t the most powerful Jedi out there.

“It is a pleasure to meet you. I’m Cal Kestis, and I hope to live up to your expectations.”

The Duchess nodded with a small smile.

“I must attend to matters with my advisor. I will let Senator Amidala catch you up.”

With that, Jyn and the Duchess left—Jyn with a military gait, the Duchess seeming to float as she walked.

Now to see how badly the situation has gotten, thought Cal. He wasn’t in custody at the Jedi Temple, or murdered by Skywalker for kidnapping his wife—that was a plus—but who knew who Padmé had talked to about what, and what had gotten back to Palpatine’s ears. Hopefully nothing about the clones, or it may be way too late for the Jedi. Maybe she thought his ideas were crazy and so had not told anyone?

“I believe you.”

Well, there goes that idea.

She sat on the edge of the bed, looking out the window.

“Your vision. The clones—they are really going to turn on the Jedi, and the Republic is going to fall.”

He nodded, throat tight.

“Is there any chance we can stop it?”

He shrugged, then said,

“Not if the Chancellor finds out we know before we figure out a way to stop his orders going through.”

“We will have to be very careful on how we oppose him then. Satine has agreed to fund the operation and offer us a base in exchange for trying to end the war. Once I can return to the Senate, I’ll move Naboo and Alderaan to vote to end the war and have an election, but… he won’t step down. The election will be to remove his power structure, but it will not stop him.”

“No, that’s my job. I just don’t know if I can beat him,” Cal sighed. If he had his doubts about Maul, they were tenfold for Palpatine.

“You don’t have to do it alone, and actually Jyn had a gift to help you.”

Padmé handed over a small metal box no bigger than his hand.

He opened it to reveal a dozen small objects.

“Are these what I think they are? They must have cost a fortune.”

“Yes. You should thank her later.”

She paused as Cal admired the gift, then said,

“Do you think I could contact Anakin now to let him know everything is okay?”

“I won’t stop you, but he is close to the Chancellor, isn’t he? They probably have him bugged, and even if you don’t say anything incriminating, they still know I broke into Kamino, which means the Chancellor probably suspects I know something. If he thinks we are all on the same side, he might think the Jedi have been alerted to his plan and activate it before we can stop him. It would probably be best to wait until you can talk to Skywalker in person and explain the situation.”

Padmé nodded—it made sense, but that didn’t mean she was happy about it. She didn’t want to do anything that could risk Anakin’s or any Jedi’s lives.

“One more question—your name is the same as Master Tapal’s Padawan? But he is only a child? No offense, but did the Kaminoans succeed in making a Force-sensitive clone? Is that what you are?”

A short bark of laughter sprang from Cal. Wow, he thought, when the more plausible explanation is “you are the older clone version of yourself,” your life is definitely messed up. Should he go with the explanation? It would be the easier answer...

Listening to the Force, he said,

“So if I said I came back from the future, what would you say?”

Padmé was quiet a very long time. Cal shifted nervously.

“I’d say that I don’t know anything about Force visions, but what you showed me felt an awful lot like memories. They were yours, weren’t they?”

He nodded.

“I don’t know exactly what you saw. I was pretty out of it at the time.”

“You lost everyone, and you were only a kid… I’m so sorry.”

Cal shrugged and blinked hard. He had had a lot of time to process what had happened to him. It wasn’t great, but he couldn’t stay stuck in the past (ha ha, universe), or he would never move on with his life.

“A lot of people lost everything. I was one of the lucky survivors—very few even had that.”

Knowing it was self-centered but needing to know in case they failed again, she asked,

“Who survives? I saw Obi-Wan. Does Anakin make it?”

He’s the strongest Jedi—he must have made it, she thinks.

“Sorry, I don’t know. I only know Obi-Wan survived the initial assault, but I never met him again after it happened. There was no word about Skywalker, which is probably not a good sign. Judging by the fact I don’t think he would be one to stay in hiding... I’m sorry. I only met four Jedi survivors after the fall of the Order—Cere, my second master; Cordova, who was killed shortly after I met him; Kanan, a Padawan like myself, also killed by the Empire; and Ahsoka. That’s it. There could be more, but I doubt there were many, and the few that did make it were often hunted down later.”

A small fraction of relief filled Padmé at Ahsoka’s name. At least she made it. Maybe leaving the Order allowed her to escape that fate at least.

“That isn’t going to happen again. I don’t care what it takes,” she said, mouth set. “If I have to put a blaster bolt through Palpatine’s head myself, I will.”

Cal grinned at her.

“That’s the attitude. Absolute ridiculous confidence that you are going to get the job done no matter the odds. If we are right, we will be heroes, and if we are wrong, we will be dead, so no ‘I told you so.’”

Padmé had an uncomfortable feeling—backed up by the small amount of time she had known him—that this was actually one of Cal’s major guiding tenets, and she thinks it is a miracle he had survived this long.

Chapter 12: The Master and the Apprentice

The Lasat general accepts the data pad from the Kaminoan; large purple hand nearly swallowing the small device.

“This is the security feed from the break in, as you have probably been informed the intruder used your transponder codes for address” the Kamino voice was devoid of emotion but the Force gave the true hint of annoyance that underlay the words.

“I will view it immediately and start my investigation right away and of course the Republic will compensate you for any damages.”

The Kaminoan lowered his massive head in a half bow half nod gesture then took his leave, leaving the Jedi master alone aside from two clones of the Iron Battalion in the room standing guard by the door.

It is the Force that alerts him initially.

A spike of life that is quickly smothered by a dark shadow.

Then his pointy ears prick as there is a soft thump from overhead, near the vicinity of the air duct.

His hand creeps toward his lightsaber.

“Be quiet! Master Tapal might hear us,” someone hisses.

Master Tapal? And the voice is very young sounding… his hand drifts away from his lightsaber as he reaches out with the Force.

“I am a Nightsister of Dathomirian. If I wish to be undetected, no one would know of my presence. You on the other hand are nearly as loud as a herd of rancors. Why are Jedi padawans so loud? I could have teleported us exactly where we needed to go if you had just let me…” comes an angry whisper.

He sighs and walks over to peer into the metal grate covering the vent. Either these are some of the worst separatist spies he has ever met or there is a Jedi padawan in the ceiling with a friend who is about to be very grounded. After having his own for almost two years, it doesn’t even surprise him to find a random padawan in an air duct they are not supposed to be in—it seems just to be a natural state of being for padawans.

He holds up his hand to stop the troopers from advancing on the intruders and glares hard up at the two bright pairs of eyes that stare down at him—one pair of wide blue and one of narrowed brown.

“Busted,” says Ahsoka Tano as she lithely slips down after popping open the vent.

Master Tapal recognizes her immediately. While not having a close relationship, the padawan of their most well-known  war hero was somewhat of a celebrity inside the Temple, especially to the younger padawans who, including Cal who was several years younger than Padawan Tano, tended to hero-worship her—a tendency the older Jedi tried to squash.

Skywalker’s apprentice being in a vent in a room on a planet she isn’t supposed to be is just expected at this point.

The second figure in the vent doesn’t jump down but just appears on the ground in a puff of green smoke. She is older than Tano by at least ten years but younger than himself despite her gray hair.

Master Tapal eyes the gray-haired woman then picks up the still of the security footage taken during the break in.

It shows the perpetrator, white lightsabers raised in defense. It also shows his scarred face clearly.

There is no significant facial recognition from either of the women before him.

She is very good.

But the Force tells another tale.

Her emotional reaction is so strong that even the padawan turns to look at her, surprised.

Shock followed by a tidal wave of happiness tinged with fear.

This woman has no shield for her emotion. While clearly Force-sensitive, she isn’t trained in the ways of the Jedi to repress emotion. She lets it run freely and emits it through the Force to those around her—almost tangible and definitely a possible path to the dark side. She should be watched closely.

If she doesn’t know, she could be a danger to herself and others. Unrefined Force users could be unstable. If she does and has some training of any sort, that is even more concerning, and her influence on any Jedi, especially on a padawan—even a senior padawan—is not ideal. But a problem for a later time.

“You know this man.”

It wasn’t a question.

“Yes,” Merrin breathes as if saying it too loud will cause the image to disappear. Her eyes have not moved from the hologram. Her brain is singing a little song that goes something like—Cal alive, Cal alive, Cal alive and an adult, Cal will probably remember her, everything else seems highly unimportant at the moment.

“Who is he?” Master Tapal worked hard to release his own emotions into the Force as his own suspicions of the man’s identity and the worries for his padawan surfaced.

“A hero,” Merrin said carefully, locking eyes with the Lasat towering above her. There was no fear of the master Jedi in those brown eyes. Overconfident? Maybe… maybe not.

“He is the man who kidnapped the Senator and my apprentice.”

Ahsoka’s eyes flicked toward Merrin. Had this been a setup? She took a step back from the witch. How could she have been so blind? Was she out for the bounty on their heads? Was the man her partner? Why was Master Tapal so calm?

“If he did kidnap the Senator I am sure he had a very good reason and if she is a decent person I can assure you she is unharmed.”

“How can you be so sure of this man’s intentions?”

The Jedi master’s challenging gaze fixed on Merrin.

“Because I trust him with my life and I know he is a good Jedi and a great man. But Master Tapal, I think you can also answer that question yourself. Your apprentice spoke highly of your wisdom.”

“You have spoken with Cal?!” He waits with bated breath—for the answer he knows he will get.

“Your apprentice has grown into a great man and you should trust him.”

Tapal glances at the image of the man—Cal.

Sorrow for the boy he had lost filling him.

“How?”

Merrin shrugs, waving her arm in the air a bit. “I’m a Nightsister, call it the magick, the will of the Force, or an accident, but we are here now.”

Ahsoka finally steps forward again, having had enough.

“What is going on? Who is that man and how do you know him and why won’t he hurt Padmé?” Ahsoka’s voice is strained with annoyance for being blindsided.

“Very well, I will give you the truth but only to you two,” she glanced at the troopers who had filed in behind Master Tapal.

The master nods and they march out.

Merrin waves her hand, flames dancing around her fingertips, and the light from the cameras in the corners of the room dims.

Well, that answers the question if she has been trained, thinks Master Tapal, worried about the influence this woman has both on Padawan Tano and his own apprentice. Was it her magic that caused his accelerated aging? If so, maybe she can reverse it?

Merrin turns back to the two, gesturing at the hologram, she says—

“We have traveled back from 20 years in the future. I believe it was a mix of Cal’s Force abilities and my magick and our desperation at the time that allowed the feat, although I doubt we could replicate the results.”

She stops there as if this bombshell was a complete explanation.

Ahsoka’s eyes had gone wide and she had started shaking her head.

“Time travel?  You expect us to believe this bantha fod…”

Then she catches sight of Master Tapal’s face. He doesn’t look surprised in the least.

“Master Tapal? You don’t believe this, do you?”

“When I questioned the man who kidnapped the Senator, he told me my apprentice was in the room under truth serum. I obviously did not believe him at the time. Later I had his DNA tested—it matched my padawan. Even so, I would still be skeptical, but I have felt this man’s presence and the Force does not lie. He is my padawan, somehow impossibly decades older. It is not easy to believe, but I can’t rule it out after what I have felt through the Force. It is the Jedi’s job to listen to what the Force is telling us.”

Ahsoka is grateful that she hadn’t been stuck with an insufferable wise Jedi master such as Master Tapal and had gotten Anakin instead, whose answer to anything he didn’t understand was to poke it with a stick.

“So if he is a good Jedi, why did he kidnap Padmé? And put a bounty on Obi-Wan and me?” she asks, crossing her arms.

Merrin meets her gaze and says calmly—

“I do not think he was the one who put the bounty out on you or this Master Obi-Wan or Padmé. I do not know who would, but I do not think the bounties are his doing and I do not think he is trying to collect a bounty by capturing the Senator.”

“Padawan, you will be safe as long as you stick close to me, and no bounty hunter would be fool enough to take on Master Kenobi—especially knowing that he has been called away to a mission on Mandalore where he will be surrounded by the royal family guard. As for the Senator, if it really is Cal, I don’t believe he would hurt her, but why he has taken her I cannot guess.”

“He probably has some kind of plan to save the Republic and the Jedi.”

“What? What’s going to happen to the Republic and the Jedi?”

Merrin meets their gaze as she says.

“They fall. The Republic is taken over by the Sith and the Jedi are hunted down and destroyed. Cal is one of only a handful of survivors. You die protecting him. I am very grateful, but it did traumatize him quite a bit. Hopefully we can prevent that from occurring this time around.”

Ahsoka can’t even comprehend the Jedi falling… there are so many—just over 10,000. How could only a handful survive? What could possibly kill that many Jedi? It was unfathomable. And how could the Republic fall? That thought was unrealistic.

It is a shock to learn you die, but he is grateful it was doing something as worthy as protecting his apprentice. At least Cal survives. Obviously his lesson on letting go of attachment needs further work though.

“When? How?” asks Ahsoka in disbelief.

“I do not know many details. I was isolated on Dathomir at the time of the fall. I have learned some, but Cal did not like to discuss the details, and as it was history I did not think the details important to learn,” Merrin purses her lips, frustrated, “but I do know it will happen soon as Cal was very young when it happened—he hadn’t been a padawan for more than two years.”

Master Tapal’s fists clenched. “It will be soon then. His two-year apprentice anniversary is only a month away, assuming nothing you have done has changed the timeline.”

The more Master Tapal spoke, the more it became real in Ahsoka’s mind.

“How could so many Jedi be wiped out?”

It can’t be. Anakin? Obi-Wan? Plo Koon? Her whole family?

“They were betrayed and taken by surprise by the only force large enough to remove them from the galaxy, as orchestrated by the Sith,” as Merrin speaks she looks out the viewport at the clones milling about below.

Ahsoka swallows.

Not Rex—he wouldn’t.

He was her friend. She had known him for nearly half her life. They, despite looks, were about the same age due to the clones’ accelerated growth. (That was something else that worried her. Was there a way to stop that so he didn’t only live a half-life? If they lived that long?) They had grown up together in war and as a team. She had saved his life countless times and he hers. He wouldn’t—he couldn’t.

She had to be wrong or misunderstanding.

“At the time no one knew what had happened. It was discovered much later that the clones had been implanted with slave chips that forced them to execute the Jedi against their will—not that that changed the outcome.”

Slave chips?! Slave chips in her friends?! Rage boiled under Ahsoka’s skin and radiated outward.

Master Tapal sent her a disapproving look at the uncontrolled emotions.

“Calm yourself, young one. We will figure out a plan to deal with this delicate situation.”

Merrin nodded her agreement. “The Jedi must not be seen as aware of the situation because the order to execute the Jedi could be given at any time. I am sure this is why Cal has not contacted the Jedi for official help.”

“He could have talked to me.”

Merrin looked him up and down, judging. “Perhaps… you may have believed him, you may not have—he may not have been sure and didn’t think it worth the risk with so many lives at stake.”

“My own padawan would not trust me, but you will?”

Merrin gave a deadly smile.

“Do not get me wrong, I care about the lives of innocents and I do not wish them hurt, but my goal is not the same as Cal’s—to rescue the Republic or the Jedi. My goal is to protect Cal. And I am not ‘risking’ anything. If you betray me, I will scorch you from the face of this planet.”

Two Jedi versus this witch? Master Tapal is not sure she can make good on her threat, but her smile gives him pause and he does not wish to test it unless absolutely necessary.

There was just something unsettling about her. Master Tapal hopes she had not influenced his young padawan too far from the Jedi code and his teaching in the time they spent together. He has not been his master all that long, but Cal is a good kid and he believes he would make a fine Jedi one day—he doubts even this witch could push him very far from the Jedi code.

“So what do we do about it?”

“At the moment, the Jedi can do nothing—or else they will raise suspicion. I, on the other hand, will start by decommissioning the cloning facilities.”

Ahsoka snorted. “You and what army?”

One Force user, no matter how powerful, wasn’t going to take on Kamino by herself.

Merrin’s eyes began to glow poisonous green. “An army of the dead.”

Chapter 13: 1-800 Jedi Pest Control

There is water up to his ankles and who knows what else. Cal Kestis—Sith pest control. Why did he say yes to this again? he thinks as he strains his eyes to see further into the darkness of the sewage tunnels. It’s not his main mission but it probably can’t hurt to take out a Sith—except of course battling a Sith can hurt a lot. Cal would know. Last time he battled a Sith he had been stabbed with his own lightsaber and nearly died. But Cal couldn’t leave people in danger, the fatal flaw of a Jedi even a slightly grey one. So he trudged along Mandalorian muck and lowered his mental shields to try and sense anything living through the Force.

There was life everywhere. But the signatures were not distinct and were whomp rats most likely or the Mandalorian equivalent.

If he had to take a wild guess, based on his luck, he would take a bet they were most likely carnivorous and aggressive. He had long ago determined that most fauna wanted to eat him—and had decided that if ever given the opportunity to go on a safari he should immediately turn down the chance to protect himself and those around him.

He came to another bend in the tunnel, glanced at his data pad, and made a right down another dim tunnel that looked exactly the same as the first.

The only sound was the sloshing of his boots through the water and the drip drip of the condensation off the slimy stone walls.

His comlink beeped.

He tapped the button to answer it.

“C ..zz..al sa..zz ti zzz … si …th” the broken chatter from the com buzzed.

The heavy static was not a surprise. Cal’s com had been on the fritz for the last 10 or so hours while he had been exploring the sewers. It wasn’t unexpected with how deep underground he was and the heavy masonry around him but the lack of contact with the surface was less than ideal if he got into trouble.

He was tired and he was sure it was getting late but something in the Force was calling to him just a little further down the corridor.

Whatever Padmé wanted he was sure it could probably wait a few more minutes.

The Force grows darker and angry as he approaches what looks to be a collapsed portion of a side wall. There is a small alcove inside the collapsed area and there is clearly a place where someone has been living.

A bed roll. Some ration bars. A comlink and power pack.

Movement catches the corner of Cal’s eye.

Faster than thought he has ignited his blade and slices up in an overhead arc.

Two thumps follow the movement as a body of a loth cat size rodent is severed in two.

Several other patchy looking rodents scurried out and within moments the first is nothing but bones.

Well not a Sith but he was right on the money about the wildlife. Unless it was the smallest fuzziest sith in history.

Once he was convinced the rodents were full enough not to need a Jedi-sized snack he turned back to the campsite.

The comlink glowed an eerie blue.

A Force echo.

Warily he reached towards it.

Fear.

His old master’s image glowered at him from the comm but his malice still seemed to extrude from him even whole star systems away.

He could only see the lower half of his face; his hood cast the rest in shadow but by the straight line of his mouth he was not pleased.

Not a good sign.

“I have a mission for you my old apprentice.”

A strong surge of hope.

“Kill Kenobi. Send me evidence of his demise and redeem yourself as my worthy apprentice.”

Yes—he is the worthy one. He will take his rightful place at his master’s side and together they would rule. But…

“What of Dooku?” He spits the name like a curse.

“He is weak. Do this and I will allow you to slay him and claim your spot in the Rule of Two.”

“I will kill him quickly master.”

“See it done. Send me evidence soon.”

The transmission vanishes and so too the echo.

Cal finds himself on his knees on the damp stone floor.

Well, that’s not good. General Kenobi had survived the first time around at least long enough to send out the warning message to the surviving Jedi. But things had changed. Cal hopes for the better but things are starting to cause a butterfly effect. Jyn’s presence had changed things here on Mandalore who knows by how much but he was pretty sure that the first time around the Duchess had been dead at this point.

One thing is clear: events are snowballing out of his control.

Where is Maul now?

Clearly not hiding in here.

A comlink beeps for attention and for one insane moment he thinks the dark lord of the Sith is calling and his brain supplies a lot of things he probably shouldn’t say. My name is Cal Kestis, you killed my family, prepare to die. Most ordinating around where the Sith could stick his severed limbs when he was done with him. Nothing that was particularly smart to say to a Sith Lord or very Jedi like.

Turns out it was his comlink not Maul’s so he could workshop his oneliners before facing Palpatine.

Priorities people.

Too bad BD wasn’t here to help. He always had the best insults. It was a good thing that most of the Mantis crew didn’t know binary or BP would have been kicked out an airlock long ago and Cal too for laughing.

“Zzz ckkll … at..tk zz… mxzzzl”

Cal frowned getting to his feet bowing his head not to hit it on the low ceiling.

The Force was dark with warning.

He needed to get to the surface.

He has a bad feeling about this.

Chapter 14: Iron Brothers

Summary:

Hi guys! I'm back! As a recap:

Merrin has saved Dathomir and is about to take on all of Kamino.

Cal has... umm... collected everyone's love interest except his own.

Teamwork!

CT-1253, AKA Captain Kerr of the Iron Battalion, finally relaxed on his assigned bunk on Kamino; letting his muscles melt like butter onto the mattress. It had been a very long week.

He is in his black undersuit and his white helmet with yellow paint stares with empty eyes at him from his gear rack.

A loud thud and a yell of mock annoyance come through the thin walls. As a captain, he gets his own closet-sized room when they are stationed at the Kamino barracks. His men, on the other hand, have to share—judging by the happy clamor and jokes he doesn’t think they mind, and honestly, most times he would prefer to be out there with his brothers.

Right now he just feels like a failure.

How could he have lost their commander?

Their small pint-sized helpless child commander?

And kriff the Jedi Council for sending children to war.

The kid had only been eleven, and while yes, that was actually older than several of the shinies, the kid had not been genetically aged both in mind and body.

He couldn’t even reach the pedals to fly a speeder and looked like a stiff wind could blow him over. And Kerr had caught him smuggling a stuffed animal into his room once. He had wisely pretended he hadn’t seen anything, but the little commander had still turned red.

And on top of it all, the General had then informed Kerr that not only could the little commander be traumatized by seeing battle firsthand but he had this special freaky Force magic thing that let him see it through touching objects.

Which led to Kerr really wanting to yell at someone on the Jedi Council to remove this kid from active duty before he was traumatized for life—or at least wrap the kid in bubble wrap or something. Why isn’t this kid at least given a pair of gloves? But Kerr was a clone and had no power or rights to tell anyone what to do, much less a Jedi. To the Republic he wasn’t even a person.

He just hoped they would get the kid back before it was too late.

“Hey Captain, stop wallowing and come join the boys,” a voice resonates through the door.

Sighing—thinking it is probably good for morale for him to hang out with his men and not mope alone in his room—he joins his brothers.

And immediately regrets his sudden lack of plausible deniability.

There is no standing to attention or salutes when he enters the room like the Kaminoans would expect of their perfect military force.

Captain Kerr could care less about that.

He doesn’t even really mind the ridiculous push-up star that is taking up the middle of the floor where five men are each doing push-ups in a circle with their feet on the next man’s back. It is a bit of fun harmless exercise—not an issue.

“Why? Just why?” he asks, dragging a hand down his face.

Muscle stands at the opposite end of the room, helmet on but lacking the rest of his armor.

Griffin, their resistant sharpshooter, stands across from him, knife held upside down in a throwing hold.

Some sort of disfigured melon sits atop Muscle’s head.

“We were being safe, sir. See, I am even wearing protective gear,” said Muscle, gesturing at the helmet.

“And what if he hit the rest of your unprotected body, trooper? You don’t need those bits?”

Griffin has the nerve to look offended.
“My aim isn’t that bad.”

“If I have to write up a report for any injuries I will have you both on latrine duty for the rest of your lives.”

With that he marched out of the barracks they shared to take a walk and scavenge whatever possible deniability he had left.

Imagining what he would say to the General when asked how Muscle had been killed at home base, his response could only be—natural selection.

He wasn’t really paying attention to where he was going, just wandering, not something that would be approved by the Kaminoans, so whenever he saw one of the long-necked freaks he made sure to march with purpose as if he was sent on some errand.

It was just his luck to try and go on a walk to lift his spirits and end up in the most depressing place in this depressing facility. The decommissioning wing. Technically he wasn’t in it. No clone had access to this wing of the facility. He was just outside the double doors that led to the wing. No clone had ever gone in there … and come back out, that is. It is where the defective clones were sent to be decommissioned—or that’s what the Kaminoans said. The clones called it something much worse.

He is just about to quickly turn around when he notices the supposedly secure door is ajar. That is definitely out of the ordinary.

He takes one step away, not wanting to be blamed for whatever is happening here.

Then the lights go out.

It is completely dark.

There are no windows, no natural light, he can see nothing.

A feminine silhouette suddenly is outlined in neon green smoke.

The image is burned into his brain.

Then she is gone.

And he is blind again.

A primal fear makes his heart pound.

There is a predator in the dark.

The lights blink on.

There is no woman, but the double doors are now wide open.

Something is very wrong.

Kerr wishes he had his rifle.

Movement past the open door catches his eye.

Familiar white armor makes an appearance and he nearly sighs in relief.

Maybe he needs to be checked out by medical for head trauma? Is he seeing things?

He quickly turns to make his escape.

Shuffle, shuffle. The sound is strange and coming from behind him. It is not the deliberate march of a well-trained commando.

Shuffle shuffle.

He knows he shouldn’t get involved…this is when curiosity kills.

He glances back over his shoulder anyway.

His brother is walking very strangely. Feet dragging and unsteady. Drunk? Hurt?

He can’t abandon a brother in trouble.

The closer Kerr gets to the other trooper the more he notices.

The trooper’s arms are bent at odd uncomfortable angles across his body. His head tilted permanently to one side. Fingers half curled into claws.

And weirdest of all a green mist flows from under the helmet.

“Trooper, status report,” orders Kerr.

For a long moment the other clone says nothing, just continues to shuffle forward toward Kerr.

Then a low pained moan escapes his helmet.

Something was seriously wrong with this trooper. Did the Kaminoans do some kind of freaky science experiments on the brothers who were decommissioned? What a horrible thought, but he would not be surprised.

“Alright, vod, I’m going to remove your helmet so we can figure out what is wrong with you.”

The trooper made no acknowledgment and kept trying to move past him as if he wasn’t even there.

The smell was the first thing that Kerr noticed.

A heavy decaying scent of rotting meat.

He gagged involuntarily and suddenly he really didn’t want to know what was under that helmet.

The helmet came off with a wet squelching noise as if stuck via suction.

It had pulled away the skin on the right half of the trooper’s face as it was removed.

Half a grinning skull peered out at him; white just like the helmet had been. The other half was bloated flesh, discolored and peeling. The eyes were gone, replaced with green light.

Kerr cursed, stumbling back in panic, dropping the helmet as he goes.

Please let this be a nightmare.

Shuffle shuffle, the thing advanced. Kerr scrambles back on all fours. Heart in his throat.

Shuffle, shuffle.

Shuffle shuffle.

Shuffle shuffle.

The sound got infinitely louder.

Realizing it wasn’t coming from the nightmare advancing mere feet from him, he glanced behind it.

The hall was full. So full that they bumped into each other as they staggered forward.

An army of the dead coming for their revenge.

Kerr is on his feet and running for his life.

Hours later the cloning facility goes up in flames.

Unnatural green flames.

Chapter 15: The Negotiator and the Duchess

Taking a deep breath Obi-Wan tried to center himself in the Force. This was just like any other mission. He has rescued important people from many dangerous scenarios before. Just look at his first meeting with Padmé. Just because this time it was Satine shouldn’t make it different than any other mission.

It shouldn’t.

He was a Jedi—he tries desperately to let these emotions out into the Force.

Jedi didn’t have attachments.

Boy is Anakin going to murder me if I survive this mission.

Obi-Wan going to rescue Satine from a kidnapping after Obi-Wan had decked Anakin for trying to do the same to rescue Padmé, had not gone over well.

The difference, Obi-Wan tells himself, is that the Council has assigned this mission to him. Because the kidnapper had wanted him there as part of the ransom demand. It was officially Jedi business.

He knew Anakin did not see the difference.

Between Padmé kidnapping, Ahsoka leaving and now Obi-Wan being a hypocrite Obi-Wan just hoped Anakin had enough control on his temper that he would not do anything stupid.

But Anakin has never let him down.

He loves his padawan/brother but sometimes he can be an absolute moron.

How in the world did Anakin still thinks his marriage to Padmé is a secret from Obi-Wan? It is a wonder and it kind of hurt him that his apprentice thinks he is that oblivious.

Does he wish Anakin happiness?

Of course.

Would he prefer Anakin pick either a life following the Code or marriage to Padmé so he wasn’t doing things against the Code?

Also yes.

But Obi-Wan is not a perfect Jedi either no matter how hard he tries and his own attachment to Anakin keeps him from trying to push him one direction or the other. He does not want to see Anakin hurt by cutting himself off from Padmé and he doesn’t want to lose his best friend in the Order by suggesting he leave. Obi-Wan knows it is selfish but here he is.

He was currently inching down the corridors of the Mandalorian palace. Sticking close to the walls and being as quiet as he could. It had only taken him two standard hours between the Jedi notification of the situation and Obi-Wan landing on Mandalore. He had gotten here as fast as possible—too fast for proper planning or backup.
His breath fogs the faceplate of his ‘borrowed’ Mandalorian armor.
He doesn’t understand how the clones go around wearing helmets all the time. Between the limited view and the readouts he can barely see where he is going.

He finds the kidnapper right where they said they would be in the throne room. He peers down from the overlooking balcony on the scene. The first thing he notices with dismay is the number of Mandalorians milling about—at least twenty all fully armored with the Death Watch insignia emblazoned on their helmets.

So not loyal to Satine obviously.

He swallows hard as he sees her. She is seated to the right of the throne on her knees, arms bound behind her, hair disheveled but even so she holds her posture with as much rigid dignity as her position allows. Chin up, no sign of fear on her beautiful face.

And on the throne was a red and black horned demon.

The monster that haunted Obi-Wan’s nightmares.

But how? He had been severed in two? Bacta can’t fix that… maybe he was more demon than man.

Maul sat spread-eagled in the chair. Fingering his lightsaber near Satine’s head.

He had slain him once before, he would do it again.

Unfortunately, he can see now there is no way to sneak her out of there.

It will have to be one of Anakin’s favorite plans then: spring the trap.

So like the melodramatic Jedi he is, but pretends not to be (Yoda has seen through his nonsense), he activates his stolen jetpack and blasts off before landing in the center of the audience chamber below.

“Hello there,” he says with a cocky smile as he removes his helmet.

When outnumbered, bluff.

And he thought he could be a good role model for Anakin.

He should have been worried about Anakin being a very bad influence on him.

Why did he scheme with Master Yoda to let Anakin train a padawan again? They thought it might help teach him about letting go of attachments. And look how that turned out.

Back to his current problems.

He is really hoping the warrior honor of the Mandalorian extends to even the Death Watch or his plan is about to fall apart.

“Kenobi, perfect. I have been wanting to repay you for everything you cost me,” Maul purrs looking completely relaxed.

“Well you are looking quite well. Taller than I would have imagined after our last encounter. Have you been getting cosmetic tips from Grievous?” Obi-Wan says raising an eyebrow at Maul’s lower half.

Maul sneers. “The dark side has many abilities. The Dathomir witches have explored some even the Sith had yet to discover. Although I doubt even their power could help with what will be left of you when I am through.”

“Well, I hope I never have the misfortune of needing medical care from one since obviously even their magic was not powerful enough to fix your personality.”

“Start the recording. I want every gruesome detail and scream of agony recorded and transmitted live,” Maul says to one of the Mandos who gives a nod of confirmation before Maul turns his attention back to Obi-Wan. “My master wants you dead and so it shall be but I would do this simply for the pleasure as well.”

“By the way of the Mandalore I challenge you to single combat,” Obi-Wan declares, unlatching his lightsaber hilt from his belt.

“Of course Kenobi, I would not give anyone else the pleasure of killing you. I will do it myself.” Maul stands from the throne.

One blood-red blade ignited then its twin.

Obi-Wan slides one foot back and angled his body sideways, igniting his own lightsaber over his head and throwing his other arm out front he settles into his Soresu style and waits for Maul to throw the first blow.

The battle is furious and beautiful at the same time. The lightsabers blur as they twirl in deadly circles so fast that the non-Force-sensitive can barely track their movements.

Red - blue - red flash by mingling with yellow and white sparks as every so often plasma melts the floor around their feet and sprays molten stone and metal.

Finally, Obi-Wan ducks a lash then jumps over a low strike before somersaulting over Maul’s head. His blade hovers an inch from the back of the red and black head.

“Surrender,” Obi-Wan orders.

The battle was short—Obi-Wan had beaten Maul before and he was only a padawan himself at the time. Now he is a master.

But skill with a lightsaber does not determine the winner of every battle. Obi-Wan learned this lesson the hard way on Mustafar and he is about to learn it again on Mandalore.

Growling in frustration at another defeat at Kenobi’s hand Maul spits, “If the Jedi does not drop his lightsaber in the next five seconds shoot the Duchess.”

Maul would have preferred to have beaten Kenobi. His defeat is humiliating and he is sure his old master is watching and won’t be pleased. It is time to salvage what he can from this crashing ship and at least get his revenge even if not his apprenticeship back.

“What about the Mandalorian way? You can’t interfere in a blood duel.” Obi-Wan tries desperately to reason with the Mandalorian near Satine.

“The Mandalorian way is for Mandalorians, you are intruders,” comes the modulated voice of the Mandalorian raising a gauntlet fist with a dart gun attachment to point directly at the Duchess.

Maul can feel the defeat in the Force before he hears Kenobi’s blade hit the ground. The would-be Sith grins.

“Obi-Wan! Nooo!” screams Satine but it is far too late.

Maul spins on his heel and buries his lightsaber blade in Obi-Wan’s stomach.

Chapter 16: The Battle of Kyber and Beskar

Shock and then pain is clearly written across the Jedi’s face—blue eyes going wide and blood flecking his lips.

Obi-Wan’s knees give out from under him and he collapses to the ground. Maul follows the movement holding his lightsaber steady.

He is going to drag it inch by inch across the human’s gut and cut him in half just like he had done to Maul so many years ago and he is going to enjoy it.

He hopes his master is enjoying the video feed.

The Duchess is hysterical. Sobbing and wailing. The only other sound is the hum of Maul’s lightsaber.

Obi-Wan is going to die just like his Master did.

“Die Jedi scum,” snarls Maul tensing his muscles to deliver the killing blow.

Then his lightsaber goes out.

And for the second time that day a hum of a jetpack in the throne room.

Then the stained-glass window shatters.

Cal lands with a crash between the Sith and the Jedi. He stumbles a little and nearly falls on his ass.

To be fair this is all Bode’s fault for not giving him a jetpack so that the only experience he has with jetpacks is landing midair on other people wearing them; a totally different experience.

“I’m here to rescue you,” he tells General Kenobi.

“Good job…” the General says back, voice full of pain and sarcasm and worry. His vision is failing but he can still feel the supernova of Force energy that is Anakin coming in for his poorly planned but much appreciated classic rescue attempt. If anyone can take on a room full of Mandalorians and a Sith apprentice and live it would be Anakin. He just hopes he brought reinforcements since this might be a bit much even for the Chosen One. Please be careful Anakin… think Obi-Wan, thoughts becoming muddy and confused.

“I don’t think you know what you have gotten yourself in the middle of,” says Maul before igniting first one blade then the other as if he thinks it will be intimidating.

Cal grins, still riding the high of having his very own jetpack.

“Mine can do that too.”

Then he ignites both sides of his lightsaber.

“…” Maul considers Cal for a moment. “Shoot him, shoot them all.”

The Mandos raise their blasters.
Cal lifts his arm with the mandos and they are yanked into the air before being mercilessly slammed into the ground. All twenty of them.
Cal has been fighting severely outnumbered most of his Jedi career. His wanted posters had listed things like taking out an entire Imperial base single-handed and it wasn’t much of an exaggeration.

Several of the Mandos do get shots off (these are Mandalorians not stormtroopers and thus have the ability to aim).

Blaster bolts zip towards Cal, Obi-Wan and the Duchess.

Too quickly for Cal to save everyone.

Spinning his lightsaber he catches the bolts meant to end his and the older Jedi’s life—wait they are the same age now— and deflects them back. The bolts bounce harmlessly off armor. This is going to be much harder than fighting stormtroopers.

Cal was too far to get between Satine and the deadly laser fire.

The Duchess was thrown to the floor by a Mando landing on top of her. Her breath was knocked from her lungs as the heavy armor of her assailant pinned her to the floor.

However, the Mando armor absorbed the blaster fire saving her life for the moment.

“Stay down,” the modulated voice orders.

One of her loyalists? Satine wonders but complies.

“General Kenobi,” she starts. She needs someone to make sure he is still alive. He can’t die. Not when he had been risking himself to save her life.

Maul stalks towards the strange man with the twin white sabers, furious at the chaos his well-laid plans have become.

He swings his blade overhead before they clash in a series of blocks and parries, both taking advantage of the double blades’ range. Then Maul tries to do what Obi-Wan had done so long ago to him and sever this man’s blade right down the middle.
At first he thinks he succeeded when the blade splits.

“Can your saber do this?” taunts the Jedi, holding a functional blade in each palm.

Maul opens his mouth to speak but he never gets the chance.

He gets a strong warning of danger in the Force and spins, blade raised to block.

Crack.

He knows he makes saber contact with the small projectile but somehow it doesn’t stop its path.

Then there is a perfectly circular hole the size of a finger in Maul’s skull and he knows no more.

“That was for Qui-Gon,” says Padmé lowering the gun with its specially designed beskar bullets.

______

Cal doesn’t wait for the body to hit the ground; he is already dancing through the Mandalorian who haven’t fled at the Sith defeat.

He grabs the first by his shoulder plate and stabs his saber through his chest—or at least he tries to.

Beskar. The great equalizer.

His saber skids harmlessly off to the side. The Mando retaliates by punching Cal in the kidneys with an armored fist, causing the Jedi to double over in pain.

Well—thinks Cal… you got to do what you got to do. And hopes no one is recording this.

He grabs a hold of the only other weapon at his disposal and closes his fist.

This is something he has seen Vader do and he is hoping he is not crossing any lines he can’t return from.

His attacker’s hands fly to his neck, scrambling uselessly at his throat before a moment later going limp.

Cal turns; advancing on his next target.

------

Padmé drops to her knees.

Obi-Wan is so still.

Hand shaking, she checks his pulse.

Besides Anakin, Obi-Wan is her closest and oldest friend—he can’t be dead, he can’t.

As her fingertips brush skin, blue eyes meet hers and she feels immediate relief.

“Pad..me, you’re o..k. Gl..ad you two… fou..nd each other. Don’t kn..ow what he … would d…o aft..er I died and he ha..dn’t found you.”

He gave her a pained smile and then closed his eyes.

“Tell h..im, he was my bro..ther and I lo…ved him.”

Panic filled Padmé. No, no, no this can’t be happening. She would get help. She had saved Cal, she would save Obi-Wan.

“You aren’t going to die,” she tells him, but her voice shakes as she sees the blackened hole through his middle just like Qui-Gon.

“Tell Sat.ine …I’m so…rry and I w..ould h…ave left fo..r her.”

Obi-Wan’s eyes close and they don’t reopen.

Chapter 17: The Lies of the Sith

Sidious fingers his comm link.

He could give the order now.

There was nothing stopping him from destroying the Jedi, those weaklings. He had all the power and he was tired of waiting.

He eyed the holographic image projected before him in his private chancellor office.

The footage was interesting for sure and very useful intel, but it was worrisome that there were factors and players he had not predicted. And thus came the decision if he should activate his plans earlier.

In good news the video showed that Maul had fulfilled his purpose and slain Kenobi. Official reports from the stoic Duchess of Mandalore and then the Jedi council were soon to follow and they would surely push Skywalker off a cliff. He sneered. The love he had for his master was pathetic, but it was a useful weakness to teach him the foolishness of love.

The video did not show what had happened to his old apprentice. The Mandalorian filming had been preoccupied by another figure.

But gathering by Maul’s lack of contact he doubted his former apprentice survived. He cared little as he was simply a tool that accomplished the job it had been assigned and now, he would be replaced with a better model.

No, the thing that both concerned and excited Sidious was the human man with the scarred face. He had the image frozen with the man’s arm lifted, fingers forming a tight C. A very familiar Force choke action often used by dark side wielders. What was even more remarkable about the move was the number of Mandalorians seeming suddenly to clutch their throats at the same time—at least five or six—with more bodies lying motionless at his feet.

This man was an incredibly strong Force wielder.

A threat? He had tried to save Kenobi.

He fingered the comm unit.

Or an opportunity?

Could both he and the Jedi council be mistaken about Anakin’s identity as the chosen one?

He would need to test Anakin against this new challenger to make sure.

Then there were the recent reports from Kamino to weigh in. It had the telltale markings (the risen dead and unnatural fire) of Dathomirian revenge. The targeting of Kamino and not the Separatists was the concerning part. Had Mother Talzin and her magic told her of the Sith controlling both sides of the war? It was the only thing that would make the move sensible. The witches were the only other established body of Force wielders outside the Sith and Jedi that Sidious knew of, though he generally considered them primitive and cut off from the rest of the galaxy with the exception of Ventress. Maybe Ventress had given away more secrets than she should have known. He doubted that even if the witches had a vendetta against him that they would be a serious threat or that they would collaborate with any Republic forces—much less the Jedi, who tended to distrust them as dark side users—but he would need to keep a close eye on the situation and possibly move up his timeline if the army of the Republic was soon going to be depleted of clones. The zombies had uncharacteristically only targeted machinery and had not themselves caused any casualties, but the machines destroyed were worth a fortune and the Republic was already in debt with the Kaminoans. And even if they overlooked that fact it would take years to rebuild.

He fingered the comm link one last time before placing it on his desk.

Not yet, but soon.

There was no direct evidence of threats to his plans currently, just whispers that he could deal with or work to advantage.

Additionally, it would be nice to keep the tradition if possible, of having the position of Sith apprentice obtained by one applicant killing the last apprentice, and he still had to deal with Dooku.

Tomorrow was the big senate meeting where he would ask for even more emergency powers due to the dire straits caused by the loss of the cloning facilities. He was determined to make it the last senate meeting he would attend before he would call himself emperor and establish his new galactic empire.

Anakin just needed a little push.

He looked at the sliced copy of the video of Kenobi’s demise. The tattooed face of Maul skewering Kenobi on his blade had been replaced by a skilled slicer with the image of the scarred human male with the impressive Force abilities.

A knock sounded at his office door and Sidious quickly adopted a somber and sympathetic expression.

“Come in, my dear boy. I am sorry to have to be the bearer of horrible news that the Jedi council did not see fit to share with you. But this is the duty of a true friend, to be truthful even when the news is unpleasant.”

Anakin Skywalker entered the dimly lit office, hands folded together within his Jedi robes as if to try and be the perfect picture of Jedi serenity. It was ruined by the nearly permanent crease between worried brows and the waves of anger and anxiety rolling off him.

“Good evening, Chancellor. Is there news of Padmé?”

“No, I’m sorry. She is still missing, but there is … news of her kidnapper and of … General Kenobi. Well, it appears that her kidnapper is a Jedi—maybe a rogue knight or perhaps on a secret mission that we, the rest of the Republic, and those Jedi not on the council were not privy to? Maybe some sort of corruption? But anyway, this man, he…. well, I’ll let you watch the recording for yourself.”

Anakin took a hesitant step forward until he could view the holovid.
The chancellor hit play.
What had the Jedi council not wanted him to see?
Dread filled him as Obi-Wan came into view, furiously battling a man of similar build but wielding a double-ended lightsaber.

It was the man who had stolen Padmé. Anakin gritted his teeth, trying to keep a lid on his emotions. Had Obi-Wan tried to rescue Padmé, or had the same man gone after his master for a totally different reason?

Was the council behind this? Was that why they had not approved Anakin’s request to go after Padmé? Had Obi-Wan found out and gone against the council’s wishes on Anakin’s behalf?

Obi-Wan looked like he was winning, then suddenly there was a cut in the video and the man was standing over Obi-Wan, lightsaber through his stomach.

“Master, no!” Anakin breathed in shock.
The video ended.

“How badly is Obi-Wan injured? Where is he now?” he asked, voice higher than he liked.

“I’m sorry, my boy, General Kenobi did not survive the encounter.”

“No, no, no! You have to be mistaken. I would have felt his death!”

“I am sorry, there is no mistake. I wish there was. Mandalore is relatively far from the core. Are you sure you could feel a death that far away? Not that I know much about the Force, but it seems quite the distance.”

This could not be happening.

Padmé.

Ahsoka.

Now Obi-Wan…

He clenched his fists. The floor seemed to be unstable beneath him.

(Unbeknownst to Anakin the building was actually quaking with his rage, and the droids reported a minor earthquake.)

Blue cracked with gold irises met Palpatine’s gaze for the briefest of moments before flickering back to blue.

He was on a knife’s edge.

“Forget the council’s orders. I will give you permission from the senate to hunt this terrorist down tomorrow at the meeting. However, please stay by my side until the meeting is adjourned. You can get more information there from the Duchess of Mandalore as she is coming to speak on the subject. And if this terrorist is after the people closest to the hero without fear, then they may make an attempt on my life during such a public event.”

“Yes, Chancellor,” growled Anakin, fingers gripping the hilt of his saber in rage.

Gold crept back into his gaze as he stared at the image of the man who took his wife and father figure from him.

He was going to eviscerate him.

Chapter 18: With Thunderous Applause

Summary:

Me = enjoys reading found family/ hurt/comfort
= tries to write the same/ epic adventure
= actually writes comedy

A Jedi, a witch, and a padawan stand in the public viewing area of the senate floor. It is not especially crowded. Apparently, common folk do not believe the time spent listening to senators argue is time well spent. Merrin would tend to agree—she is very bored and is leaning on the railing before her. The teenage Togruta next to her mimics her posture. Merrin had been noticing quite a bit of that lately. It was like having her own miniature clone. It was kind of cute. If this is what having an apprentice or child is like, she definitely wants one. And if anyone dared to harm or come between her and her mini-me, she would remove their head from their shoulders.
The Lasat master stood behind them, arms crossed, the permanent scowl on his face after Merrin’s display at the cloning facility. He had not been pleased with Merrin’s use of what he deemed dark Force powers. And it was only because of what he deemed a delicate situation that he had not arrested her. Merrin would have liked to see him try, but had kept that comment to herself for Cal’s sake.
They had all been required to dress up to attend the senate meeting because of the dress code. Merrin was a little miffed that apparently this just meant the Jedi had to wear their formal robes, which wasn’t that much of a change. Ahsoka and she had done a short shopping trip and gotten Merrin an elegant blood-red full-length gown that was strapless and shimmered when she moved. She had chosen it because it had somewhat reminded her of her clothing on Dathomir, just fancier and less practical. At least there seemed to be some sort of elastic that held the sleek thing in place—a feat of magick in itself.
In a quirk of the moment, she had used magick to lengthen her hair, and it now was pulled back atop her head in a complicated knot that let stylish wisps of hair loose.
So if she could not wear normal clothes, she would make sure everyone else knew it. She had gotten some appreciative whistles on the way here, and she had fun imagining how red Cal would turn if he could see her now. Probably as red as the dress.
Maybe he would. That is why they were here after all.
She continues her searching gaze down on the senators in their round pod platforms that attach to the sides of the chamber and float here and there as they are given permission to voice their opinions.
In the center of the chamber the chancellor stands on his platform in his absolute hideous robes of floral pink—hideous Sidious, she thinks smugly. Whoever makes his fashion decisions deserves to be shot—or a given a medal, depending on how you look at it.
Next to the old man is Skywalker, like a personal doom cloud in his dark brown, nearly black Jedi tunic and robes. A permanent scowl on his face. It is clear he is acting as bodyguard to the chancellor and doing his job quite well, as many take one look at his murderous figure and change their minds about approaching to speak.
In the Force he felt like a volcano about to erupt.
Ahsoka’s gaze had not left Anakin’s back since she had spotted him.
“I can’t reach him over our bond. The Force around him feels dark and clouded.” Her voice is low but filled with anxiety.
“Padawan, calm yourself. We will talk to him after this meeting ends. I am sure seeing you will help him center himself in the Force and release his emotions to be a good example for his apprentice,” Master Tapal says with more confidence than he feels. The cloud in the Force around the center stage is incredibly dark and concerning. He will need to report Skywalker’s poor behavior to the council, but that is no reason to further stress his padawan.
“We will talk to him right after,” promises Merrin. To make him feel extra guilty for abandoning his padawan, she adds to herself.
She still scans the crowd for Cal.
It was more of a feeling or a guess than actual intelligence, but it had been the only logical next step in their search. Their only real lead was that the Sith Lord was in the senate, and if she had to guess, Cal would at some point try and kill him. A big public setting was a perfect opportunity to gain access to the heavily guarded man, and so the large open forum senate meeting seemed like their best chance of running into Cal.
Yet she had not spotted her Jedi.
A blonde human woman in elegant clothes of deep greens, purples, and whites addressed the crowd as an emissary from planet Mandalore and the neutral systems.
“The heroics of Jedi Master Kenobi saved my life and for that I will be forever grateful for his sacrifice and to the Jedi Order for their loss of such a hero. His sacrifice and the care of the Jedi for a world not even of the Republic has made me reconsider my stance on being part of such an alliance. You all know if Mandalore moves to join so too will 2,000 other systems, and as such my decision must be made with great care.”
There is an uproarious applause at her mentioning joining the Republic.
“I would require certain guarantees.”
She pauses for dramatic effect, making sure everyone is listening to her words.
“We will not be ruled by a king or emperor. Mandalore must have a voice in electing the chancellor, and thus we will be calling for an immediate election upon joining the Republic.”
There is some muttering at this, and the cloud of dark energy around the center stage darkens, but even more applause follows for the majority of the senators who are always ready to promote a new official themselves to gain additional power.
“Second, we would require the immediate dismissal of the clone army.”
Boos and hisses follow this statement, drowning out the Duchess of Mandalore. When she can finally be heard over the din again, she says:
“We will not join a society that approves of slavery. A thing I thought outlawed in this very same establishment. The clones are not given any rights or choices, and they fight and die unpaid for this very senate.”
This is followed with a very uncomfortable silence.
“However, I do realize an army would still be needed so that the Republic is not left defenseless. That is why I offer the paid services of the military might of Mandalore. We are the undiluted genetic ancestors of the clones. Our armor and weapons are superior and we are a free people. I do not support violence, but I value life more, and if our swift action via superior military might could end this war in days instead of years, the bloodshed would be minimized. This I see as a worthy goal. And it is a lesson Master Kenobi had been trying to convey to me for years. I am sorely sorry that it took his death for me to understand his lesson.”
There is a moment of silence after her speech ends where democracy hangs in the balance. The chancellor’s message about more emergency power in the face of desperate times due to the sudden imminent decrease in the production of new clones no longer seems like the only solution. Given a morally acceptable and potentially superior alternative, the mood begins to change. Applause starts slow but builds, and suddenly nearly every senator is on their feet clapping. Then Senator Organa from Alderaan starts the chant.
“Vote now.”
And it is immediately picked up like a highly contagious virus and spreads to the rest of the senators.
“Vote now, vote now.”
Sidious’ normally perfect performance cracks in the face of his carefully laid plans burning to ash by the words of one non-Force-sensitive woman. He can’t help the sneer that flickers across his face or the flash of rage he explodes into the Force before he gets himself under control. Anakin glances his way, confusion momentarily crossing his face.
Sidious’ hand digs under his robes, gliding past his saber to his comm link.
If he was to lose his power, he would take the Jedi with him. He had already activated Anakin’s final test. They would be here very soon and Anakin would be his. He could execute the Jedi at the same time. Then it would not matter what a few powerless politicians said. He would send his apprentice to deal with any who would dare to speak out against him.

Only one person notices this motion.

Cal lays on his stomach, cheek pressed against the cool duraplast as he looks down the rifle scope. The stock of the heavy-duty rifle pressed firmly into his shoulder to steady it against the recoil.
Would Cal like to say a few words to the Sith? Yes.
Is he an idiot that would go toe to toe with the Sith master—much to many people’s surprise—no.
He knows his limitations.
He is not above sniping a Sith Lord from a safe-ish distance.
He is a survivor. Like, who in their right mind would go up to a Sith Lord and just declare that they were going to kill them when you can do it from hundreds of meters away? No one could be that dumb or overconfident. But he guesses a lot of Jedi hadn’t dealt with a Sith in a while. Cal unfortunately has way too many times.
Master Tapal, like many Jedi, had held the view that blasters were uncivilized weapons. Cal hoped his master wouldn’t be too disappointed in him, but he had grown up as a preteen scrapper who would have been offed numerous times by adults many times his size if Cal had not carried a blaster as soon as he had gotten his hands on one. Bode’s training had helped, but it had been far from the first time he had handled a blaster. Besides, if he had used his master’s lightsaber to defend himself as a child, he would have had far worse problems than adults trying to take what little food, money, and dignity he had left. Cal was not above using a blaster. Maybe that made him an uncivilized Jedi from an uncivilized age. But he would use the right tools for the job.

He takes three calming breaths to steady his breathing before holding his breath to stop the movement of the crosshairs. Even the smallest movement can have a large change in where he would hit the target over such ranges. He centers the crosshairs on Palpatine’s shriveled Sith heart. He gently compresses the trigger with the pad of his index finger. The trick for an accurate shot was not to jerk the trigger—just compress it so slowly even the shooter doesn’t know when the shot will be fired.
Cal tries not to get his hopes up—that this might all be over in a manner of moments.
He pulls the trigger softly, but in that split second he makes eye contact with golden eyes and he knows something has gone terribly wrong.
Crack!
The shot is impossibly loud, deafening him even through the earpiece he wore to protect his hearing.
There is a moment of confused silence that follows as people don’t understand what the sound means.
Then mass panic as people see the red blossoming on the challenger’s robes and realize there is a shooter in the crowd.
That is when the screaming starts. Senators and aides scramble over each other to exit the meeting chamber in a mass stampede.
The red clones of the Coruscant Guard start scanning the crowd for the attacker.
Anakin had felt a sense of danger in the Force a split second before the shot that would have gone through the chancellor’s heart had been fired. He had used the Force to shove the old man to the left just in time so that the bullet had gone through his shoulder and not through his chest. Likely saving his life.
Anakin’s lightsaber ignited with a snap-hiss as he took up a defensive stance in front of the chancellor.
“Sith spawn!” Cal curses through gritted teeth before firing off a few more desperate shots. He has lost the element of surprise now.
The first round blasts right through Skywalker’s ignited saber but misses its target, embedding inches from the Sith’s skull in the durasteel of their platform.
Skywalker isn’t fooled a second time and uses a Force hold to stop the rest of the rounds midair before letting them tinkle harmlessly to the floor like metal rain.
The sound of troopers pushing through civilians, closing in on Cal’s hiding spot, tells him his time is up and he has failed.
He pushes himself up on his elbows in the air duct when he realizes he can’t move.
Something is holding him in place.
Or more accurately, someone.
Anakin makes a hard yanking motion with his outstretched arm and Cal crashes through the metal grating and the wall and lands with a tumble at Skywalker’s feet.
Cal groans, dazed, his whole body hurts and feels like it had been run over. He is sure that the arm he had used to shield his head from the metal grate is going to have some very interesting colors if he survives this, and the rest of him is not in much better shape.
He is used to getting thrown through objects, but it never gets any more fun.
Cal feels the heat of the saber and hears its steady hum as it hovers centimeters from his neck.
“Where is Senator Amidala?” Skywalker growls.
Thinking of how mad he would be if someone took Merrin, Cal could sympathize. Spitting a glob of blood, Cal says:
“Safe.”
Of course, this doesn’t really do much to assure Anakin.
Looking every bit the disheveled old man, Palpatine speaks for the first time, making a production of trying to stand from where Anakin had shoved him.
“He is lying, my dear boy. We can look for Padmé ourselves. Finish him. He is too dangerous to be kept alive.”
Cal senses the warning of danger before he sees the decision in Anakin’s mad yellow eyes, and he knows this is it. He just wished he could have seen Merrin one last time, even if he failed at being a Jedi in so many ways.

Chapter 19: Duel of the Fates

There is a puff of familiar green smoke and a sudden sense of falling.

Anakin, realizing his prey is escaping, dives forward at the last instant, grabbing hold of someone in the smoke screen.

Anakin hits the ground hard. The screams of the senators running for their lives have vanished. The sound of speeder bikes rushing past fills the air. Glancing around, he realizes he is on the rooftop across from the Senate building. The polluted evening smog of Coruscant fills his lungs.

He has somehow, impossibly, been carried outside in a matter of less than a second.

The would-be rescuer of his prey is a lithe gray woman in a stunning red gown. She stands protectively over his would-be kill, who is looking up at his rescuer with something akin to awe.

Cal’s brain is still an unorganized mess from being hit one too many times against his skull, but the fact that Merrin is here—Merrin is here and alive and more beautiful than ever—does penetrate. Everything is going to be okay now. They had found each other through the depths of time and space.

Anakin releases his bruising grip on her forearm so that he can grasp the Force instead.

There is no air.

Merrin scrambled at her throat, but there was nothing to grab on to. Black spots form in her vision. Her feet kicked helplessly, hitting nothing but air. A flashback to her fight with Bode ran through her mind.

This can’t be the end.

She had just found her Jedi again.

When she had spotted a body flying haphazardly through the air moments after the gunshot, she had guessed correctly that it was probably her Jedi doing something stupid that he would need rescuing from. Now she wonders if she had miscalculated her opponent and if she had doomed them both.

She tries desperately to see if she had at least succeeded in giving Cal enough time to recover, but her vision is darkening from lack of oxygen.

“Where is Padmé?” roared Anakin, his fingers tightening, causing the Force to constrict Merrin’s throat even more.

There is the sudden snap-hiss of a lightsaber igniting as a glowing white blade appears inches from Anakin’s shoulder.

“Let her go. Now,” growled Cal.
Merrin had never heard anything sweeter and would have smiled if she could breathe.

With a vicious shove, Anakin threw Merrin against the wall, where her body flopped limp to the ground.

“Noooo!” yelled Cal, already swinging at Anakin’s neck.

Anakin’s metal hand shot out, stopping the swing and crushing the bones of Cal’s wrist until he dropped the saber into Anakin’s other hand.

Using the Force, Cal leaped over Anakin’s swipe at his ribs that would have cut him clean in two.

Cal ducked under the next swing, calling Anakin’s own lightsaber to his hand.

Rage.

He was going to kill them all.

They had killed the one he loved.

The overlapping image of an older woman and Merrin’s limp body.

They all deserved to die, and he was going to be the one to end their miserable existence.

All he needed to do was touch that dark shadow.

He had done it before; he could do it again.

It leapt to his call like an old friend.

Mimicking Skywalker’s earlier move, Cal raised his clawed fist, and the Jedi rose into the air, struggling uselessly, before Cal punched downward, causing Skywalker to slam into the floor with a loud bang.

Unlike Merrin, he didn’t stay down. Skywalker wasn’t considered one of the most powerful Force-users of all time for no reason. Spitting blood, he rose to his feet with a vicious spin strike to Cal’s side.

Blue blazed against white, sparks flying from the locked blades.

A snap kick to Skywalker’s gut broke them apart before Cal followed it up with two quick overhead slashes and then two upward cuts, all expertly parried.

A stab from Skywalker was blocked and redirected outward at the last moment.

Their blades blurred as they spun faster and faster, a deadly light show.

Using the Force, Skywalker hurled a crate weighing several hundred pounds at Cal’s head.

Cal wall-ran across the side of the crate, then used the momentum to side-flip over his opponent’s head, slashing down as he did so.

Cal is going to kill him for what he did to his moth… Merrin.

“If you have harmed Padmé, I will end you!”
The building begins to tremble with Anakin’s rage. Metal groans and glass clinks under stress.

“You will suffer for what you did,” Cal snarls back.

Anakin somersaults through the air with a combined overhead strike that slices through durasteel like butter as Cal dodges to the side.

Cal swings to his side, targeting the other man’s back.

Anakin blocks with a two-handed grip over his head, the plasma inches from the fabric of his tunic.

With a yell of fury, the glass in the windows of the nearby buildings shatters and flies toward Cal in a deadly glittering rain.

The glass shards part around Anakin in a harmless wave, as if he is the eye of the storm, and engulf Cal.

The first embeds deep into his shoulder, quickly followed by another and another, cutting shallow gashes across his arms and legs. A stinging slice cuts across his brow, nearly missing his eye and dripping blood into his vision.

Reaching for his own power, the shards slow—shuddering, hanging suspended in the air. Light refracts off them in glittering rainbows.

Cal uses the momentary freedom to Force-pull Anakin closer to him and into his own deadly cloud.

The glass is immediately released from the Force and crashes with a clatter to the ground.

Anakin ducks a blow from Cal’s lightsaber and sweeps Cal’s legs out from under him with a powerful kick that lands Cal on his back with a crash on a bed of broken glass.

He doesn’t have time to worry about the shards stabbing him or the pain because in the next instant Skywalker is on top of him, lightsaber bearing down on his throat.

Cal is being crushed into the ground, and the glass shards dig ever deeper. He can feel the Force bending to Skywalker’s will as Cal’s bones creak from the pressure. He grits his teeth from the pain, scrabbling to take back control, but it is like a nexu pinning a loth-cat. Anakin presses his blade down harder against Cal’s. Anakin’s eyes are a phantom yellow. Cal growls in anger as the plasma creeps ever closer toward his neck. His skin is starting to burn at the proximity.

He will not die before he takes Merrin’s murderer with him.

Rage floods him, and with it, a dark power—enough that he can halt the descent of the blades but not enough to free himself.

He doesn’t know why he had tried to suppress his emotions before. The power is intoxicating. How can it be that bad?

It gave him the power to avenge his mother against the Tusken Raiders, and Merrin had used strong emotion to fuel her magick—one of the principal differences between her control of magick and the Jedi’s Force.

She had said it felt like the fire that escaped her was the physical embodiment of her emotions. The stronger the emotion, the stronger the flames. Then she would simply exert her self-control to get what she needed. This link to emotion was the reason Cal suspected he had never been able to replicate her feats.

Now the rage that boils in him feels like an all-consuming fire.

Cal’s eyes go yellow.

Anakin collapses to the ground as Cal vanishes from under him.

Scrambling up from his crouch, confused, Anakin looks around, searching for his missing prey.
Sensing a presence behind him, he turns and freezes.

Cal stands behind him, white flames dancing around his hands and slowly melting the non-metal parts of Anakin’s lightsaber.

The last flickers of matching flame have scorched a circle in the duracrete with Cal at the center.

Gold eyes promise Anakin’s death.

However, he could care less about that sight—it doesn’t matter how impressive his opponent is being right at that moment, because twenty feet behind Cal’s left shoulder is the only person that matters to Anakin.

Padmé is running towards them, looking unharmed and beautiful as always. And suddenly, a large portion of Anakin’s rage and the dark surge of power that came with it drains out of him.

There is only one set of golden eyes left on the rooftop as Anakin’s flicker back to their original blue.

Anakin just wants to grab Padmé and get away from it all. Everything else no longer matters.

However, he isn’t given that chance to run, as Cal does a side spin and brings Anakin’s stolen lightsaber crashing down on its owner’s head.

Anakin’s arms shake as he blocks the blow.

The power balance has shifted.

Cal lands and pivots, reversing his grip on the blue blade and stabbing backward at the other man.

Anakin just manages to knock the blow off course before he is skewered.

He tries a desperate upward slash of his own, trying to make space between them.
For one confusing moment, he thinks he actually will connect the blow, as Cal hasn’t raised his lightsaber to block the strike—instead going for his own attack.

Is he going to sacrifice himself to kill them both?

Anakin’s swing is halted as his blade meets resistance on Cal’s forearm—raised to guard his face.

But it does not sever the limb. Impossible white flames blaze around his arm, protecting his flesh and stopping the blow. Cal grins wickedly back at Anakin through the flames as his own strike cuts through Anakin’s hand at the wrist.

Deactivated lightsaber and severed mechanical hand drop to the ground with a heavy thud.

“Ani!” comes Padmé’s terrified scream from somewhere behind him.

“Run!” he screams back, hoping she will listen to him or that his attacker will be satisfied with his blood.

A Force shove knocks him from his feet and sends him skidding several meters across the rooftop.

He tries to call the fallen lightsaber to his organic hand, but it flies instead to its original master’s off-hand, who now advances with a blazing saber ignited to each side.

He tries to get away, but his opponent is fast, and he knows this is it as both blades come swinging down towards his head.

He closes his eyes at the last moment.

But nothing happens.

When he opens his eyes, it is to a latticework of sabers crisscrossing above him.

A white, an orange, and two blue.

“Why is someone always trying to kill you, Skyguy?” snips Ahsoka.

Anakin grins despite the situation. After all, things are looking up. He has got Padmé and Ahsoka back now.

“I’m pretty sure it’s my winning personality.”

With practiced teamwork, they both raise their hands and shove, sending Cal skidding backward, but he doesn’t lose his feet.

Ahsoka tosses Anakin her blue lightsaber, and they turn to face Cal together.

“Cal, you need to calm down. We are all on the same side and want to save the Jedi.
You don’t need to do this,” Ahsoka tries.

“I don’t think he’s listening,” snaps Anakin.

“It’s called a diversion, Master—it’s called tactics, and it’s something I learned from my Grandmaster.”

A new puff of green smoke envelops Cal, distracting Anakin from his retort, and he is gone.

 

---

Cal is falling.

High over Coruscant’s skyline.

At this height he would be nothing but paste when he hit.

But he could care less.

As he stares into those brown eyes that burn with green fire.

The wind tears at their hair and clothes as they cling to each other in freefall. Their faces only inches apart.

“Merrin,” he mouths, the wind howling, stealing the whispered word.

His rage still boils under his skin but it feels disconnected. Why is he angry? Merrin is here and alive.

“Cal, give me the lightsabers,” Merrin searches his golden eyes for something.

“Do you trust me?” she yells over the roar of the wind.

He knows the answer to this question.

“Yes,” he breathes. And he releases the saber hilts into her grip.

The rage vanishes.

An echo. A memory not his own.

He blinks and Merrin is suddenly staring into familiar green eyes.

“I told you I would guide you back.”

He kisses her as they fall together.