Chapter Text
As he clutched his abdomen, staring around at the smooth hole he’d fallen into, Cal Kestis had to admit that this might be the end.
Which honestly really sucked.
After so many close-calls and near death experiences, it was a fall into a bloody pit that was going to be the death of him. Fucking fantastic.
“I don’t suppose you have any more stims, BD?” He asked, clenching his teeth.
The droid booped back a sad no.
Cal sighed. He should have been counting better. At his best, BD could carry about ten stim canisters, but he’d unfortunately used them all against the robotic temple guards and hostile fauna inside the extensive chamber. Once he’d fallen through the floor, well…
Of course he’d broken something.
Maybe it hadn’t been such a good idea to explore the abandoned Jedi chamber by himself without bringing a comm. Too bad his psychometry didn’t predict the future instead of showing the past. Maybe then he wouldn't have gotten himself into the deep shit he was currently in.
Cal grunted as he tried to assess the damage to his body. His ribs were definitely broken. He also probably had internal bleeding, which was arguably bad. By the way his head swam and his vision blurred, he assumed a concussion too.
So, yeah. Things weren’t looking too good.
He checked out BD for damage too. The droid looked fairly put-together, though his antennae were bent and a quick diagnostics scan told him his internal drive (y’know, the place that held his map memory, digital files, and all of Cordova’s stored recordings) was damaged.
That wasn’t too big of a deal now, but they’d definitely have to get that fixed later.
He propped himself up on a rock, staring at the only other interesting thing in the pit with him. A few meters away lay a dark, red-tinged door that whispered and hissed like the entrance to hell or something. Cal didn’t know what was on the other side of it, but he knew it reeked of the dark side and it was likely what the intense, awful feeling in the pit of his stomach had been warning him of the whole time he was exploring the chamber.
Perhaps Santari Kri had placed this Jedi chamber underneath the temple as a final test for her students to pass, for Jedi to resist the darkness below. Or maybe she truly hadn’t known of the pit.
But either way, Cal probably should have guessed how structurally unsound the chamber would be. After falling though the Force knew how many unstable floors—on Ilum, in the tunnels underneath Koboh, and now here—you’d think he would know better than to blindly explore such old structures.
And now he was stuck between a rock and a hard place. Between dying alone and in pain in this pit or braving the very ominous door.
“What do we think, buddy? Stay here or go through the door?”
BD beeped back something that essentially equated to: I don’t like the door.
“Yeah.” Cal sighed. “Me neither.”
He glanced back up at the dim light from the chamber above. He’d fallen a long way—long enough that he’d have been killed instantly if he hadn’t managed to cushion his fall with the Force. The pit was mostly smooth stone, with few handholds and nothing climbable. There also didn’t seem to be anything to grapple onto. Even if he wasn’t injured, he’d have been hard-pressed to get out of there.
Cal got to his feet, slowly and surely making his way toward the door. Perhaps—if he could just resist the pull of the dark side—it would lead to a way out. It would be difficult, especially with his psychometry, but he couldn’t just sit in this pit and wait to die.
He couldn’t do that to his team. Not after losing Cere and Cordova. Not after Bode. He had to survive. For Kata. For Greez.
For Merrin.
With a final step, he placed his hand flat on the door, triggering, as he predicted, a psychometric vision. He expected perhaps a vision of his possible fall to the dark side or a play-by-play of all his worst memories, the deaths of his masters, but what he saw weren’t his own memories.
He saw something much, much worse. Something that made his mind teem with the pain and grief of an entire lifetime.
The edges of Cal's vision went white, and he screamed.