Chapter Text
Merrin is laughing at him.
Not out loud—no, she’d stopped doing that a few minutes ago, her face now set in a little smirk—but in the Force, her amusement is blatantly projecting in ringing waves.
“It wasn’t that funny,” Cal protests in exasperation as he reaches the top of another pile of rubble. He’s also fighting a small smile—Merrin doesn’t laugh enough, even though she laughs bounds more now than when she’d first joined the Mantis’ crew a year ago.
“It was,” Merrin replies simply from behind him, amusement curling through her voice.
“What was?” Cere asks over the comms. Neither Cal nor Merrin jump at the unannounced return of contact with the Mantis, far too used to the comms cutting in and out everywhere they go.
Cal sighs. He might as well tell her himself. “I ran into a wall.”
There’s a moment of silence. “I’m sorry, did you just say that you ran into a wall?”
Great, now Cere’s laughing at him too.
“It’s not that funny. Right, BD-1?” Cal asks, glancing at the droid on his back as he reaches the bottom of the pile.
Beedee happily chirps his agreement.
“Oh, well, I guess if the droid says so . . .” Merrin drawls.
Cal shoots her a lighthearted glare, poking at her through their bond. Merrin simply pokes him back, sending another wave of amusement.
Beedee beeps in offense.
“Sorry, Beedee, you know I didn’t mean it,” Merrin says to the little droid.
Beedee huffs, but seems to accept the apology, settling.
Cal bites back a smile.
“We’re about to reach the back hallway,” Cal reports a moment later. They’ve been picking their way through what was once some type of large room, the ceiling long since collapsed into rubble now half-buried in vegetation, but the rest of the building stands more or less intact further back, the pale grey stone eye-catching amidst the jungle of deep blue and green.
When Cere doesn’t respond, Cal stops, tapping his comm. It’s still on, and Merrin wordlessly confirms the same for her own when he turns back to her. They share an eye roll—they really need to get more powerful hardware.
They come to a stop in front of the entrance to the hallway, Merrin stepping up to Cal’s side. Beedee readjusts his stance on Cal’s back, head lifting a little higher as he takes a curious look down the dark corridor.
“What do you think, buddy?” Cal murmurs.
Beedee whistles a neutral tone, which matches what Cal’s picking up. These ruins, having once belonged to yet another ancient Force sect, have a sort of resonance in the Force that Cal has long since associated with echoes that have faded too much to convey information but aren’t quite gone, but other than that, they don’t seem particularly special. There’s no encompassing Darkness like on Dathomir, no reverent stillness like on Bogano, no thrum of ancient wisdom like in the Zeffo tombs. There’s not really even a particular lean toward Light or Dark. The Force is just . . . stronger than usual.
Of course, to an archeologist, these ruins are likely both significant and unique. But unfortunately, none of the Mantis’ crew are archeologists.
“Are you picking anything up?” Cal asks Merrin.
Merrin shakes her head. “Everything seems ordinary.”
“Yeah, that’s what I’m getting, too.”
There’s a moment where they just stare into the dark. Then Cal shakes his head. “Right. Well. Onward, I guess. Beedee, can you give us some light?”
Beedee chirps and a moment later, a wide beam of light is piercing the gloom of the hallway over Cal’s shoulder. From what Cal can see, there’s a lot less rubble on the floor, and the walls are covered in some sort of faded paint that detail . . . scenes of the jungle? There seems to be a lot of faded green and blue, but from this angle Cal can’t really make anything out.
“Thanks, buddy,” Cal murmurs as he and Merrin step into the hallway.
They spend the next hour or so exploring the labyrinth of hallways and empty rooms. It doesn’t actually end up being all that interesting. This place has obviously been looted dozens of times, not even something as simple as old pottery shards left behind. There’s only the faded paint on the walls and the occasional impression in the Force—a pulse of overwhelming boredom that hints at some sort of children’s classroom, or a clamor of overlapping voices at the edge of Cal’s hearing and a wisp of savory smells that marks some sort of cafeteria.
It’s a little bit disappointing—Cal really doesn’t think the tip that they were following about some sort of sealed Force-vault being here is going to pan out—but it’s also kind of relaxing. It’s just him and Merrin—and Cere, sort of, when they actually get comm signal—exploring, and only doing that. There’s been no booby traps, no aggressive fauna, and no Imps. They can breathe easy.
“Are you doing alright, Cal?” Merrin asks as they step out of what Cal thinks was once some sort of storage room.
“What?” Cal asks, pulled out of his thoughts. “Uh, yeah. Yeah, I’m good.” He glances at her curiously. “Why wouldn’t I be?”
Merrin purses her lips. “There’s no point in pretending that we haven’t noticed.”
Cal stares. “Noticed . . . ?”
Merrin stops, turning to him with raised eyebrows. “That you’ve been waking up half-screaming every night? It’s been almost two weeks now, Cal.”
Oh. That. “It’s nothing, Merrin,” Cal says, looking away and forcibly clamping down on the fear-pain-grief that tries to blossom in his chest. “Just nightmares. You know how it is.”
For a moment, Cal thinks that he’s convinced Merrin to leave it alone, her determination faltering.
But she regathers it and presses on. “I thought that talking with Fulcrum was supposed to help you heal, not make things worse.”
“It did help,” Cal immediately rebukes. Commander Tano had been able to explain so much about the Purge, things that he’d never let himself think about, even when he’d decided to move on. He’d known—he’d always known, even as he and his Master had been fleeing the Albedo Brave—that the clones’ betrayal hadn’t made any sort of sense, but he’d had to accept it as the new way of the world simply to survive. Finding out that the clones hadn’t chosen to betray them, that the Sith’s scheming had run deeper than anybody had known, that there are kriffing slave chips stealing the clones’ autonomy even now, was both a relief that Cal hadn’t realized he’d needed desperately and a whole new flavor of nightmare.
Because it turns out, the Jedi had been doomed at the start of the Clone Wars, not the end of it. Unless a hypothetical miracle had occurred—which it obviously hadn’t—the destruction of the Jedi Order had been guaranteed as soon as they’d allowed the clones into the Temple.
Cal hadn’t even gone on his Gathering by then.
So, yeah. Talking with Commander Tano—or Fulcrum, now, though that name still feels unfamiliar on Cal’s tongue—had helped, because she’d been able to explain the road that had led to the downfall of the Jedi. Cal had been able to put to rest those questions that had clung to the back of his mind and stabbed at his heart on the harder nights, the ones that he’d been trying to shake off since he decided to move on.
But at the same time, he’d suddenly had a lot more material for his nightmares to pull from. He hasn’t slept this bad since maybe a year into his stay on Bracca. And evidently, the others have noticed.
“Sorry,” Cal apologizes after a moment. “I shouldn’t have snapped at you, it’s just . . .” He breathes out. How is he supposed to put words to this?
“It’s alright,” Merrin says quietly. “I think I understand.”
Swallowing dryly, Cal nods his thanks, pressing the feeling through their bond. Merrin’s lips quirk into a half-smile, a soft wave of understanding-I’m sorry-it’s okay pulsing back.
As they start moving again, Beedee trills softly.
“I’m okay, bud.”
It’s maybe fifteen minutes later that Cal starts wondering if they should call this search a bust.
And of course, that’s the moment that the Force rings with warning and the ground drops out from underneath Cal’s feet.
Cal barely has time to yelp before he’s slamming into stone, his shoulder twinging painfully. “Ow.”
“Cal, are you alright?” Merrin calls urgently, her voice echoing unnaturally. Beedeee is similarly beeping in Cal’s ear.
Groaning, Cal rolls onto his back to find Merrin looking down at him worriedly through the square hole of a trapdoor, eyes glowing slightly and green sparks flickering around her fingers. After a moment, Cal can feel the writhing pulse of her magick twisting above him.
“I’m fine,” Cal confirms, pushing himself to his feet. Standing up, he finds that he only fell about twice the length of his height—he would have been able to land on his feet if the ground wasn’t sloped so steeply, or if he’d actually kept his guard up.
Beedee trills from by Cal’s feet, so Cal crouches so that the little droid can hop up his arm. Beedee gets himself situated with a happy beep, then returns to his role as a flashlight, eagerly sweeping his light around them.
Cal rolls his shoulder, pulling on the Force to sooth the small twinges of pain, and scans his surroundings. “It looks like some sort of cave.”
“Should I come down?” Merrin asks.
“Sure,” Cal answers, eyes fixed on the tunnel that Beedee’s light has fallen on. There’s waves of something pulsing from it in the Force, the small disturbances making the hair on the back of Cal’s neck stand up.
Whatever Cal’s picking up feels wrong. Not Sith-wrong, there’s no cloying, suffocating Dark power, and it’s not the unique brand of Dark that Merrin’s Nightsister magick is. It’s not Dark at all—but it doesn’t feel Light, either. It’s just . . . wrong.
Cal doesn’t realize that he’s moved to the entrance of the tunnel until Merrin steps up behind him, a breath hissing between her teeth.
“Something vital has been broken down there,” Merrin murmurs.
Cal can’t tear his gaze from the darkness of the tunnel. “‘Something vital’?”
“Even Nightsister magick has its limits, because the universe has rules. Only a fool tries to break those rules . . . and only a large group of fools actually succeeds.” Merrin squeezes Cal’s forearm as she steps around him, stopping only once stone frames her shoulders, Beedee’s light falling squarely on her back. “Whatever the people living here did, they undoubtedly paid for it with their lives.”
“Pleasant,” Cal comments dryly. It would certainly explain the vague legends of whoever once lived here completely vanishing overnight.
Cal feels more than sees Merrin’s grimace.
Right. Well. “So, should we not check it out, then? I mean,” he edges forward, “it’s not likely that a Force-vault is hidden down there, right?” The further he goes down the tunnel—and he’s only gone inches, so far—the stronger the wrongness feels, Cal’s instincts lighting up with the need to run. At the same time, though, something in the Force seems to be pulling him towards it, like something’s tugging at the center of his chest.
Cal has no idea if that’s normal or not.
Merrin hums. “It’d be a clever place to hide one, considering that no one who was capable of opening it would want to go anywhere near it, and even most who couldn’t open it would be subconsciously driven off.”
Wait, “But if creating whatever this is killed all of them—”
“The contact said that the vault is built differently than the ruins, remember? Someone else—”
“—could have found this place after,” Cal finishes. “Right.”
Hesitantly, they start moving down the tunnel, Cal once again taking the lead so that Beedee’s light can shine relatively unobstructed.
The tunnel is a natural one, the walls rough, the occasionally protruding stone obscuring the way as the path twists and turns. The sounds of their footsteps and Beedee’s gentle whirring echo back to them as they move, but that’s in no way near as ominous as the way the unnatural pulses in the Force swell with every step they take—pulses turn into ripples which turn into waves, each washing over Cal with the comfort of being doused with a bucket of ice water, making Cal’s breaths stutter. Cal’s instincts are well and truly screaming now—run, get away, not right—and his hand is gripped so tightly around his lightsaber that it’s starting to hurt, but the tugging in his chest has intensified into a full-out pull, as if someone had tied a cord around his breastbone and started dragging him forward.
Merrin mutters a curse in her native tongue, her voice sounding small under the onslaught of wrongness, and Cal silently agrees.
Another few steps later, Cal stumbles slightly when he realizes that he can hear the waves of wrongness, the bases of his ears throbbing—
The tunnel widens into a cavern abruptly after a sharp twist, and Cal’s eyes widen.
There’s—Cal doesn’t know what it is. It looks like a tear in the fabric of the air itself, and it feels like a rupture in the Force. It’s large and pulsing and every color of light Cal could imagine is spilling out from it in every direction along with that same sense of wrongness that’s now crashing against Cal’s shields like a hailstorm.
What in the karking kriff—
“There!” Merrin shouts—and she does have to shout, because the tear is loud, a throbbing clamor of a thousand unidentifiable sounds echoing through the cavern—pointing a little to the left and past the tear. Cal has to squint against the barrage of light, but he can just make out what looks like some sort of carved archway set into the stone.
Carefully, Cal takes one step into the cavern—
Only to be yanked forward by an invisible rope, twisting through the air as he grasps for the Force with a shout—
The last thing Cal registers before he collides with the light is Merrin’s scream.