Chapter Text
The first thing Cal registers is a groaning sound, pulling him from the deep shadows of unconsciousness. Sensations return to him disjointedly: swooping nausea, the dryness of his tongue, the burn of sand in his nostrils. And — oh. The groaning is coming from him.
A shiver wracks him as he pries his sticky eyes open. The disorientation only builds when he gets his first look at his surroundings: The last thing he remembers is being in the cell on the Venator, and here he is in another cell, albeit one brighter and less metallic than the one he last saw. But the fact that he doesn't immediately recognize his environment makes his heart judder.
That, and the fact that his wrists are suspended above him, chained to the ceiling by thick iron manacles. The tips of his boots barely graze the ground. Judging by the strain in his arms and shoulders, he's been hanging like this for a while. His shirt has been removed, as have his bandages. The air isn't freezing, but his skin still prickles with some mixture of cold and discomfort.
This isn’t good.
It's an old-fashioned cell, seemingly carved out of natural stone, with a sandy floor and a narrow door fitted with iron bars. Dusky orange light filters in from the hallway beyond, though Cal can't see much from his current predicament.
Most concerningly are the tools that litter the floor nearby, scattered there from an overturned table. Craning his neck, he sees knives, needles, hammers, something that looks uncomfortably like a set of pliers. The fractured nature of the Force around him confirms their purpose.
This is not just a cell. People were — are? — brought here to be tortured.
One thing at a time. He's alone for now. He's clearly been taken off-world; this does not feel like the lush planet he last remembers being on. Cere and Greez and Merrin and BD-1 will be searching for him.
In an instant, that reassuring thought turns icy. His last memory is of seeing Brom in the shadows of the Venator, feeling terror coil through him. He has no doubt that he was mind-controlled, as Cere was, and that accounts for the gap in his memory. Who's to say he didn't encounter one of his friends as he was whisked away by Brom? What if he attacked — what if — what if he—
No. He has to believe that he would feel if anything happened to them. Muddled as his senses are, he doesn't feel the gaping absence in his chest he associates with major loss, like when Tapal's thread was finally cut, and Prauf's.
But what if he hurt them—
Stop. He can’t dwell on any of that. The more he panics about the unknown, the less equipped he will be to deal with what's actually happening.
And with his bare torso, his chained hands, and the obvious torture instruments on the floor beside him, he thinks he has a pretty clear picture of what's happening.
Swallowing the lump of fear in his throat, he tests the chains above him. They're sturdy, and the manacles around his wrists have no give. Still, he rattles them a little, tugging with his limited leverage, only succeeding in opening up a raw wound on his wristbone. As for the Force, it feels far away, like it’s being smothered.
"Welcome, Cal."
Cal nearly jumps out of his skin at the voice. His heart tries its level best to break out of his ribcage, the ferocity of its pounding making him lightheaded.
Brom is still out of view. It's impossible to say if he's hidden around the corner from the barred door, or if he's somewhere in the darkened hallway that stretches beyond the cell, or if he’s somehow projecting himself from farther still. Whatever the case, Cal recognizes the voice.
"I admit I was surprised to learn that you survived our last encounter. You'll forgive the intrusion with your dressings. I wanted to see the scars for myself."
Cal’s heart continues its rebellion as reality rushes toward him. He had no time to mentally prepare for torture, and he shrinks from it. He’s not ready. He’s not ready—
But he can handle pain. He's proven he can handle pain. If he just shuts himself down, removes himself — he can do this. He's a Jedi. He can be strong like one.
"Didn't want to kill me on the Venator?" Cal spits, to distract himself more than anything. "Scared my friends would beat you again?"
"You're one to talk about fear," says Brom. "Look at you: You're crawling with it. Why would I want to kill you when you've become so pliable?"
Cal swallows dryly. "If you're going to torture me, might as well get started. I'm not going to give you whatever it is you want. I'm not afraid of you."
"I'm sure you're desperate to believe that, too." Brom laughs breathily. "You want to believe you are unafraid of pain. But look at how your body reacts to the mere suggestion of suffering. Feel how your pulse quickens. How sweat beads on your brow. How your skin crawls. The body instinctively shrinks away from pain, terrified of it even if the conscious mind is not."
To Cal, it’s as if he blinks.
He’s hanging from the ceiling, fighting for control of his nervous system, and then, after a moment of darkness:
He’s crumpled on the floor, one arm wedged beneath him, and the manacles dangle empty above him. Disoriented, he tries to reconcile his surroundings, how he got here.
Then his wrists shriek.
It punches the breath out of him, the pain, this sudden and unexpected onslaught. When he looks down at his wrists, he finds them torn and bloody: The skin has been almost entirely stripped away from the bottom of his hands and up the base of his thumb. A deeper twang comes from his left wrist; maybe not dislocated, but potentially sprained. As if—
As if he’s wrestled himself free of the manacles through brute force, even though he doesn’t remember doing so.
“Don’t you see?” Brom says. “Fear is a tool that can be wielded. See what you can accomplish when you give over your mind to me? That burst of energy when you are running from a monster. The superhuman strength of a mother whose child is threatened. The ability to lift tons of metal when a loved one is buried beneath the rubble. These are the gifts that fear gives us.”
Cal is still gritting his teeth against the scream that threatens to tear out of him. But he doesn’t want to give Brom that satisfaction. Instead, he cradles his ruined hands close to his chest and tries to filter out the pain.
“Is this why you kidnapped me?” Cal forces out between heaving breaths. “To prove a point?”
“I was hoping you might begin to see sense,” Brom says. “You have a unique ability of your own, do you not? One that the Jedi did not understand? One that they feared?”
Cal thinks back to what Cere said a few days ago, about the Jedi Council having a file on him — a record of him and everything they knew about his psychometry. It’s true that the ability was never fully trusted, seen as an avenue to the dark side. But he’s not about to admit that to Brom.
“If you’re trying to convince me that we’re the same, it’s not going to work.”
“Not the same — we are complements. That is why you are here.” Brom dips his chin. “The Jedi feared what they could not control. They denied us our full potential. I can forge you into your strongest self. Train you, as my apprentice.”
“I’ll pass.” Cal is intimately aware of how vulnerable he is right now, shaky with pain and weak in his fear. Brom has yet to come into view, and it unsettles him even more that the man could have controlled him without even seeing him. “If that’s what you’re hoping for, you might as well kill me.”
“You would accept death so readily?” Brom says. “I can give it to you, if that’s what you prefer. You want me to kill you now, Cal?”
The stubborn part of Cal wants to say yes, just to spite him. But that would accomplish nothing. His crew are still out there, presumably still looking for him. The fact that he’s alive is a conundrum, but it’s also a blessing. He doesn’t want his friends looking for a dead body.
Still, maybe he does have a reckless streak, because he can’t keep himself from saying: “Just like you killed your last apprentice?”
There is no mind control this time, just the Force twisting around his windpipe and crushing it closed. He retches, but he can’t make a sound, can’t get a single scrap of oxygen into his lungs. As his hands spasm toward his throat, Brom at last comes into view. He blocks the entire doorway, hands clasped behind his back as he observes Cal. He still wears those tattered brown robes, and his black-and-gray hair falls in greasy strands around his shoulders.
“Do not say that again,” he warns, with a voice like a hot poker. “The Jedi Order killed Myria. Their carelessness and their negligence. Oh, they may have tried to convince you otherwise. They may have covered their tracks, as they always did, allergic to being perceived as anything less than heroes. But they were responsible for her death. They are murderers.” He bares his teeth. Not quite a smile. “Well, they were murderers.”
Just as Cal thinks he’s about to black out, the hold on his airway is relinquished. He sinks to the ground again and coughs until he’s sore, until he’s sure his ribs will pop. Once he’s caught his breath, his throat still feels ragged.
Brom just waits. And watches. And even though he wants to, Cal doesn’t feel any braver.
“Eventually, I will make you understand,” Brom says. “It takes time to unlearn your own programming.”
“f*ck off.”
“You’re still not convinced.” Brom sighs deeply. “I’m not here to torture you, Cal. I’m here to help you.”
“That’s why you’re keeping me locked up in a room full of torture tools?”
Brom ignores him, instead tilting his head incrementally, peering at him with mild interest. “Your scars — they hurt you, don’t they? So many scars, for someone so young. When you feel them, they remind you of your propensity for failure. They remind you of just how much you have to lose. Don’t they?”
The statement twists in Cal’s gut.
A flash of darkness.
When Cal awakens, he’s kneeling on the floor. Woozy, he tries to piece together details that have suddenly shifted. There’s a knife in his hand. One of the knives from the pile of tools. The knife is dripping blood, and crimson runs through each crease of his hands. Warmth drips down his collarbone. Fire sears his neck.
He drops the knife and reaches up, again nearly gagging at the abrupt and astonishing pain. The scar marking his escape from the Albedo Brave, the one stretching over his jaw and across his neck, is now a bleeding gash.
“I know you don’t believe me yet,” Brom says. He watches Cal, hands still clasped behind his back. Cal presses one hand in desperation to his neck, trying to keep the bleeding in check, but the hot crimson spills between his fingers regardless. “I am here to offer you an opportunity. To train you. You will see sense. Think it through. Consider this your demonstration.”
Cal wants to reply, but it’s taking everything him not to scream.
“I believe that you are a survivor,” Brom continues. “There is a needle and thread near you, if you would like to prove it.”
He takes one long, last look at Cal. Cal meets his stare, eyes watering. Then the older Jedi disappears down the hallway.
Once Cal’s sure he’s gone, he squeezes his eyes shut and moans. His whole body aches. His shoulders and arms bear the brunt of the soreness from being strung up on the ceiling for so long. And, of course, the fresh bleeding wounds on his wrists and neck are enough concentrated pain to keep him teetering on edge.
Cere. Help. It’s instinct, now, to call out. But the involuntary cry is suffocated by his surroundings, that heavy void of the Force. He’s on his own.
Just as Brom promised, there’s a strip of cloth near the wall that contains a gleaming needle and surgical thread. Though he can’t begin to judge the sterility of the needle, it at least looks newer and cleaner than the other tools scattered in the room. And with the freshly opened scar gushing blood as neck wounds do, Cal doesn’t have much room to be picky.
He’s had to stitch himself up only once, back on Bracca, when he snagged his thigh on a jagged piece of a ship’s hull and couldn’t afford to see the medic. Despite his efforts to bandage it, the wound had not stopped bleeding by the time he made it back to his apartment, so he pulled out the needle and thread he used to patch up his poncho. It was an adequate job, if messy. But that was almost four years ago, and the next time he needed stitches, Cere had been there to help, numbing gel at the ready.
Numbing gel is conspicuously absent. This is going to suck.
It’s a clumsy job, made clumsier by the placement of the wound on Cal’s neck and the fact that he has no mirror with which to see his progress. He works by feel more than anything; a tall order when each touch to the ragged edges of the wound zing all the way down the length of his arm. Twice he has to pause to blink hard and collect himself, convinced he’s about to pass out, fighting dizziness.
Eventually, though, he manages enough of a stitch to keep himself from bleeding out, haphazard though it is. He uses the cloth to clean some of the blood from his hands, dab some that’s pooled in the dip of his collarbone. But there’s no water in sight, so he’s going to have to live with crusty dried blood on most of his right side for the time being.
Now that he’s no longer chained up and Brom’s gone, Cal has a chance to more thoroughly take stock of his surroundings. There’s not much beyond the torture tools, which Brom evidently feels secure enough to leave behind with Cal. A quick inspection of the cell door does not yield any immediate answers for an escape, especially with the Force just outside of his grasp. Mostly, there’s a low buzz of worry underpinning everything, the Force gnawing its own cheek. Cal gets the sense that even if he did try something, he’d be found out.
But is that a rational worry? A correct intuition? Or is it something that Brom, through clever tricks and insinuations, is making him fear?
Right now, he’s frankly too exhausted to find out. The blood loss and pain are making him lightheaded, and even if his brain was shut off for several hours — days? — as Brom transported him here, he wasn’t exactly asleep.
Near the needle and thread is a square of meticulously folded brown fabric that appears to be an old undertunic. I’m not here to torture you, Brom had said. The shirt is clearly meant to replace Cal’s missing one — the one Brom confiscated in order to plant the idea that Cal was going to be tortured. Cal would much prefer his own shirt. Even more so when he crawls toward the fabric and realizes that it’s covered in an echo. Even from a distance, Cal can tell it’s not a good one, either.
A frustrated sigh escapes him. Brom must know what he’s doing. He knows about Cal’s psychometry, now. Every part of this has been calculated.
Still, Cal has begun to shiver in earnest, and he doesn’t like how exposed he feels without something covering up his still-tender wounds from Mirrest. So he makes a choice and reaches for the cloth, his body flooding with fiery exhaustion—
Why won’t Master Tykri let her rest? Her palms are sweaty as she wipes them on her tunic, trying to conceal the way her hands shake. Her bones are heavy.
“Again,” Master Tykri says.
Myria raises her lightsaber in defense, even though they both know that she’s flagging. As predicted, he disarms her within a minute.
“I’m tired, Master,” she says. Her arms tremble so much she’s not sure she can pick up her lightsaber again. “Please.”
“Your strength is not the problem,” Master Tykri says. “We have barely begun. It is your mind that is holding you back. Accept what has happened, Myria. Let it empower you.”
Myria’s not sure how the past 24 hours could possibly empower her. Master Tykri has always spoken so cryptically, like he’s busy untangling some knot in his own mind and using the string to create a new web. One that only he fully understands, but which can so easily ensnare others.
Myria saw him earlier, when she was pinned under the wreckage of that ship. The droids were advancing on her, blaster shots pinging off the metal around her face. Then Jorcaid and Brekari arrived, leaping down from the top of the canyon, their expressions blank. Jorcaid’s leg’s shattered upon impact — Myria saw it, felt it through the Force — but he continued walking. The two Jedi muscled through that no-man’s land between Myria and the droids, just as mechanical as their adversaries. And Myria watched as the blaster shots tore through them, as they kept walking like zombies, dispatching droids until they were overwhelmed by their injuries and dropped motionless to the ground.
Myria had looked up at the canyon ridge at Master Tykri; and though she couldn’t see his face, she could see how still and calm and resolved he carried himself, even as the lives under his control were snuffed out.
Myria looks at her Master now and can’t help the shudder that passes through her.
That is why the Jedi are after them now, isn’t it? That is why they are in hiding? That is why Master Tykri has insisted on this training: to prepare her to fight back against these people who are not the enemy?
“Please,” she repeats, her voice barely audible even to her own ears. She tries again. “Please, promise me you will not use your ability on me.”
Master Tykri stiffens. He was expecting her apprehension, perhaps, but he was not expecting this.
“Even if it makes me stronger, I don’t want it,” Myria presses on before her courage flags. “I don’t want to lose myself.”
“Even if it would save your life?”
It didn’t save those Jedi’s lives.
Myria tightens her lips. She doesn’t want to cry. It his her instinct, when she is afraid. Some people fight. Some people flee. “Promise me.”
Master Tykri regards her with something like sadness. Regret? She can tell he doesn’t understand her; what she cannot tell is whether he is listening.
“You will change your mind, in time,” he says. “Once I can show you what you are capable of. Now, go again.”
He springs forward, the bright orange of his lightsaber blinding. She calls her lightsaber to her hand, and though her feet remain rooted to the ground, her heart pounds the same rhythm it did earlier, pinned at the bottom of that canyon.
Cal’s fingers tremble when he comes back to himself. If this echo was a planned attack by Brom, it’s working: Cal’s stomach feels tighter than ever, his whole body heavy with Myria’s fear and despair. It’s like the emotions are gripping at him, hundreds of hands clinging to his arms and shoulders and hair and dragging him down, down.
Myria. Brom’s apprentice. Seemingly innocent, a student simply trusting where her Master led her — even as he became a fugitive of the Order she committed herself to. Her confusion and terror sink into Cal’s bones even now.
But the echo is gone now, at least from the object. The memory is six years old, and it cannot hurt him. After another moment’s hesitation, Cal slips the undertunic over his head. It’s a Jedi’s shirt, a proper one: soft, criss-crossing fabric in beige, though darker and more threadbare with time and damage. Cal hasn’t worn something like this since the Purge, and it brings with it a strangeness. A sickness. He lives outside of his body for a moment, caught between familiarity and a deep sense of undeserving.
The shirt doesn’t provide much warmth, but it’ll have to do for now. After some consideration, Cal slips one of the knives into his pocket; at least Brom let him keep his utility pants, which can conceal a lot. Then he huddles against the wall of the cell and tries to sink into calm. Meditation is hopeless in this tainted bubble of the Force, but he can at least ground himself.
There is no reason to be afraid, he’s tried to console himself the last several days.
But now there is.
There are several very real reasons to be afraid.
And it is much, much harder to push those away.
