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There was rain falling outside. Cal could hear it drumming on the roof of the escape pod. It sounded angry, like someone was throwing stones at the walls, and Cal tried not to be reminded of blaster bolts.
He stared at the spot of floor where Master Tapal’s body had been just a few hours ago, and then turned to stare at the open hatch, his chest cold.
Cal didn’t really remember burying his master, but he remembered before. He remembered sitting in the escape pod, crying and shaking, staring in any direction but Master Tapal’s body, and waiting. Waiting for the Jedi order to swoop in and heal Master Tapal, to put life back into his still-warm body.
Then, the sun went down, and Master Tapal’s body got cold, and Cal started waiting for the Jedi order to swoop in and give his mentor a funeral.
Then, after the sun rose and fell again, he stood on aching legs and dug the grave alone. It wasn’t how Master Tapal would have wanted to be laid to rest, as it was too wet to light a pyre, and Cal didn’t know any of the funeral rites he needed. He dug the deepest grave he could, and left a marker made from bent metal –coming away with blurry vision and a nasty gash on his hand– before the wind chased him back into the escape pod.
The sun was rising again now, but it was still cold. The rain, gathering in the pod’s impact crater, had seeped through the open door, and was beginning to pool around Cal’s toes. He didn’t want to leave, but he had to. He’d die if he stayed, and the other Jedi would never find him.
It was risky, and it killed Cal inside to leave Master Tapal without a proper pyre, but something in him was more willing to chance probable death between here and the distant lights of the nearest shelter, than to await certain death in the cold and wet of this escape-pod-turned-tomb.
He took off his soaked outer tunic and rearranged it to be a bit more inconspicuous, tucked Master Tapal’s lightsaber into his belt, then solemnly marched across the pod’s slanted floor towards the wasteland outside.
—
The Sun had set again, and yet Cal felt no closer to his destination. The distant lights of Bracca civilization were still visible through the curtains of rain, but he couldn’t make out any details, and they were still flickering at the horizon, just as they had been when he’d started hours ago.
He was starving, and thirsty, but there was no substantial life left in Bracca’s rocky planes, and the little rainwater he’d managed to catch in his cupped hands tasted like metal and acrid smoke, so he hadn’t chanced it.
He’d thought about turning back a few times, but by the time he’d worked up the nerve to turn around, the escape pod had vanished into the curtains of noxious rain.
So, he kept moving forward.
Slowly, the distant lights of the scrapyard got closer, and the barren rocky plains of Bracca bled away into piles of rusty scrap and wrecked spacecraft.
Cal reached a ladder, leading from the surface up to higher platforms. Despite the blisters in his hands and the numbness in his feet, he climbed it, whimpering as the jagged crust of rust and flaking paint crumbled into the wounds on his hands.
Eventually, he managed to hoist himself onto the flat surface at the top of the ladder– though there was no joy in it. The climb had sapped the scant energy left in his muscles, stiff and cold from the continuously pounding rain, and he couldn’t get his rapidly numbing limbs to respond to him in any meaningful way. Fighting the chains of unconsciousness, Cal just managed to drag himself into a rusty-but-slightly-less-exposed alleyway, curling up against a steel-and-rivet wall as he succumbed to his exhaustion.
—
For the first time in weeks, Prauf’s commute back from his shift was not set to a background score of a fellow scrapper– usually Tabbers or Qya– grumbling about the weather. It was still raining, oily droplets of polluted water making every surface a G.F.O.S.H.A violation on any other planet, but the malaise brought about by the downpour was negligible in the face of good old fashioned gossip.
When the Venator in low orbit over Bracca had exploded, the news spread like an engine fire to anyone who’d somehow missed it, and the ship was the talk of the scrapyard for almost a day afterwards, even once it’d become clear that there wouldn’t be much of use to salvage– if they could find the wreck at all. It had gone down miles out in the wasteland, and was probably nothing but shredded parts now.
When, barely three days later –just this morning in fact– the galaxy had been inundated with broadcasts of the news, the news that the Jedi had staged a coup and been eliminated en masse, the rumors about the ship doubled. Even if nobody said it, everyone was thinking the same thing.
On the way to the yard, the train was full of back and forth chatter, generally ranging from indifference to celebration at the prospect of the newfound lack of Jedi Order. The ride back was shaping up to be much the same.
Prauf didn’t really know how to feel. After all, this wouldn’t really affect Bracca much, and he knew what the galaxy thought of the Jedi. If they’d really tried to start a coup, then maybe the response was rational, and the galaxy was really better off.
It really didn’t sit right with him though, this whole…elimination, as they called it.
Prauf had only met Jedi once, when he was still an engineer and Bracca was still a mildly pleasant place to live. There’d been two, an older Twi’lek woman and a teenage human girl, who had stayed on Bracca for about a week. They’d been odd– they both had this look, like they could see things that no one else could–, and Prauf hadn’t really spoken to them much, but they’d helped fix some folk’s malfunctioning speeder, and babysat his neighbor Freida’s toddlers when she’d had to take an extra shift at the spaceport. He couldn’t imagine that kind of person staging a coup.
And…the Jedi order wasn’t just adults or warriors. It was children, like the human girl, or the young force-sensitive kids Prauf had heard lived in their temples. What had happened to them?
Prauf shook his head just as the train pulled into his stop. It didn’t sit right with him, but it wasn’t his job or within his abilities to do anything about it. What’s done is done, despite the guilt stirring in his gut.
Ahead of him, Tabbers had already gotten off the train, and Prauf hurried to follow him. Bonus of being built like (as Tabbers would often say) “a shit brickhouse”: people tended to let him pass. He swerved around a couple gaggles of scrappers and fell into pace beside his friend.
The walk back to their neighboring apartments was short and uneventful, and Prauf had taken this route so many times that he could essentially tune it out, completing the trek on autopilot. It was for this reason that he almost missed the body lying near the mouth of the alleyway.
“Hey,” he called, jerking a hand to point at the body when Tabbers turned around to look. Corpses weren’t rare in Bracca allies, but something about this corpse warranted a second look. Tabbers shot him a long-suffering glare, and planted his feet near the mouth of the alley to stand watch.
As Prauf stepped into the alley, more of the stranger’s body came into view– they were human, with gangly legs, a body, and a head of hair redder than Tabbers’s– and few things became clearer, even in the lowering light of dusk.
One: this person was definitely still alive, if only just. The sluggish and shallow movement of his chest was evidence enough of that. And two: Prauf couldn’t really tell, but this person seemed young. Very young.
Prauf suddenly understood the urgency of the situation, and scooped the body into his arms, calling back to Tabbers:
“The kid’s still alive–!”
“Kid–? What the fuck are you..?” Tabbers began, before he got a good look at the boy’s face and his face went an ashy grey. “...shit– the kid’s like, nine, max. We gotta get him inside–”. Before he even had a chance to finish, Prauf had taken off with the kid draped over his arms.
They got him into Prauf’s cramped apartment without much issue, and Tabbers automatically scrambled to turn on the light. In the flickering halogen lighting, the boy’s pale face seemed even more stark white, coated in the residue of murky rainwater.
“I’m grabbing your first-aid kid,” Tabbers announced, retreating deeper into the apartment as Prauf laid the kid down on his ratty couch. “If those cuts aren’t infected, I’m the fucking emperor.”
He was right, of course. The rain on Bracca was choked with smog and oil, and there were several nasty cuts– and shit, was that a blaster burn? What the fuck had this kid gone through?– marring their patient’s skin, soaked just as much of the rest of him and well on their way to being nastily infected.
As Prauf stripped off the kid’s worn boots –trying not to wince at the blisters and nasty trench foot– he noticed a drying crust of dirt on their soles.
He’d wandered in from out in the wasteland. Far out in the wasteland.
Prauf really didn’t like where this was going.
When Tabbers returned with the ramshackle med-kit, Prauf helped him apply shitty antiseptic and cheap, maybe-expired patches to the kid’s arms, as well as burn cream to the blaster mark on his neck. When they’d cleaned up most of the injuries, he brought up the boots.
Tabbers glanced up in interest. “He came from the Wasteland?”
“Yeah. Maybe he’s from out there, and got lost?”
“He doesn’t look like a wastelander. Doesn’t look like he’s from Bracca at all, actually.”
Prauf felt sick. “...Do you think he was on the ship? That he survived, somehow?”
Now it was Tabbers’ turn to look ill. “You don’t think this kid is a…well, y’know, right?”
“Let’s not jump to any conclusions here, we don’t even know if that ship going down had anything to do with the whole coup thing from the broadcasts,” Prauf floundered, hastily applying the last of the patches to their mysterious patient’s neck. “We can’t just assume that the kid’s a jedi– he doesn’t even have the, the –what was it– the flashy light sword thing! Yeah– he doesn’t have that.”
“You mean, uh… this?” Tabbers managed, sounding just as drained as Prauf felt. Slowly, he lifted his gaze up to his friend’s shaking fingers, already knowing exactly what would be held in them.
Still, he almost didn’t believe his eyes, staring at the sophisticated metal hilt clutched in Tabbers’s hands. He didn’t want to believe his eyes, because doing so would be admitting to the very dangerous, very illegal situation that he and Tabbers were in.
The Jedi were terrorists… supposedly.
This kid was a Jedi.
But this kid didn’t seem like a terrorist.
They should turn him in, wipe their hands of this entire situation. But looking at the kid’s face, Prauf knew that was never going to happen. He looked to Tabbers again, and knew his friend agreed.
Sighing, he took the hilt and placed it next to the sleeping boy, then adjusted his position on the couch. Old knees cracking, he stood back up, a faint smile painted across his face.
“Let’s give the kid a break,” he whispered. “We can figure this shit out when he’s awake”.
Whoever this kid was, Prauf knew he wasn’t just going to leave him alone out on Bracca –especially not on Bracca, and he’d already made the decision to take responsibility for the strange human child on his couch. But nobody would get anywhere if he forced anything now. He could find out what was going on later.
First, the kid needed sleep.