Chapter Text

Chapter 1

Cal did not remember a time before the Temple, before his corner bed at the creche, before the daily afternoon naptime with the other younglings in his clan.

He tried asking, once. Crechemaster Entola smiled softly at him and told him while keeping her hand on Cal’s little shoulder, “What matters now is not the past, little one. You were brought here to learn the ways of the Force and the people here, at this very temple, are your family now.”

Some of his older crechemates claimed they did remember–flashes of gentle touches of mothers, of color of the grass-sun-tree-animals!, of an inkling of life that existed before the cream robes and humming meditation rooms, but Cal’s earliest memories were already threaded with the songs of the Force, with training sabers, with the careful voices of Masters reminding him to breathe.

And with the echoes.

He learned as early as three years old that a mere brush of his hands on objects was rarely non-consequential. Even the everyday objects held impressions: fear baked into metal, grief soaked into linen, anger lingering like heat. At first he thought everyone could feel it–he didn’t understand why the others didn’t become sad like he did after touching the muted green woven blanket in one of the linen baskets in the living room. Only when another youngling laughed at him after being frozen in place, eyes rolled back, did he realize something was different.

“Psychometry,” the healers called it. Extremely rare. Dangerous.

The word valuable came up most often, though spoken in hush tones when Cal was around.

By the time he was seven, he noticed the Knights and Masters tended to move away a little bit when Cal happened to be nearby, within touching distance. They did it almost unconsciously, the way their body would just so happen to be farther away than it was just seconds ago. Meetings happened behind doors that never quite shut all the way. Words drifted out:

Frontlines.

Intelligence advantage.

Padawan assignment sooner than usual.

Cal didn’t quite get it because the Masters used jargon too complicated for his mind to comprehend, but he understood just enough to feel the weight of expectation settling over his shoulders. Master Plo took him for a tea one afternoon, just right after he finished his meditation class for the day.

He liked Master Plo. The Force aura around him felt calm and protective. Also, Master Plo brewed tea leaves in Cal’s favorite milk, resulting in the best beverage Cal had ever had in his meager seven years of life.

“Cal,” the older Jedi began, “how do you feel about being a Padawan?”

That was when Master Jaro Tapal entered his life.

The Lasat Jedi was enormous to a child, especially to Cal who was famously smaller and shorter than any of his crechemates. Jaro Tapal had a voice deep enough to vibrate in Cal’s chest and hands so big Cal was sure he could easily be lifted using just two fingers. Yet he moved with surprising gentleness, like someone constantly aware of how easily he could break what he touched. Their first meeting wasn’t dramatic nor emotional. No ceremonial speech. Just Jaro kneeling so their eyes were level and saying:

“You don’t have to be fearless, young Padawan. Only honest.”

It was the first time anyone had acknowledged that Cal had been afraid.

===

The whispers of incoming war made everything move faster.

Cal didn’t know all the politics, only that the Republic was fighting, and the Jedi were suddenly soldiers as much as peacekeepers. Missions came quickly. Briefings were fleeting, debriefings sometimes even shorter. And increasingly, people looked at Cal not as a child but as a resource.

The Senate liaison who visited once spoke about him as if he weren’t present at all.

“His ability could recover crucial battlefield intelligence,” the man said, with an air of utter disregard. “Casualty reduction alone would justify early deployment.”

Jaro’s jaw tightened and he was just about to yell at the Senate liaison. Instead, he took a breath and felt for Cal in the Force, pushing concern-proud-sadness to their bond. Cal responded in confusion. Later, during survival drills, he corrected Cal more gently than usual, as if compensating for something he couldn’t control.

During one late night sit-downs, the ones they do almost every day after dinners, Jaro spoke to Cal quietly about how, while the Senate is responsible for the lives of the trillions of beings in the galaxy, they seem to have absolutely zero respect for the lives of the Jedi who fought their battles (now war) for them.

That was Jaro’s way: he rarely fought the system head-on, but he quietly fought for Cal within it.

Jaro knew he couldn’t refuse. He was one of the distinguished Jedi generals and he was more often than not sent to the murkiest and darkest conflict zones in the galaxy. He realized from early on, after receiving Cal as his Padawan, that he could not always keep Cal away from the horrors of the battlefield.

He didn’t want this to become Cal’s path.

In the early morning, in their shared quarters, Jaro told Cal of his newest designation. He was expecting Cal to become utterly terrified at the notion of being in warzones and demand Jaro to return to Coruscant. The Lasat would have dropped everything in a heartbeat and escorted Cal straight back to the Temple, perhaps even asking for a reassignment from the Council himself. Jaro did not, however, expect Cal to put his tiny freckled hand over his larger one and meet him in the eye.

His touch was so, so warm, Jaro thought.

“It’s okay, Master,” Cal had said, with a tiny smile of understanding that no one should ever see on an eight-year-old’s face, “we must trust only in the Force.”

Jaro could feel his heart shatter, but he must stay strong. For Cal.

He smiled back.

===

The first time Cal was asked to read an object from an active warzone, he fainted.

It was a standard issue blaster, cracked in some parts and caked with mud and blood, retrieved after a skirmish on a planet in the Outer Rim. The casualty was too great on the Republic’s side and even greater was the number of questions surrounding the incident. Cal did what he was ordered to. The Senate wanted answers, thus he would find them. Cal remembered the expectant faces of the clones and Jaro standing slightly behind him–close enough to intervene, far enough to let Cal choose.

Cal touched the blaster.

And suddenly he was screaming.

Bomb. Panic. Loyalty so fierce it hurt. Coordinates-faces-strategy-witnesses.

Hurt-hurt-PAIN-PAIN-PAIN!

Then the abrupt, cold silence of death.

He jerked back, gasping. Tears came without permission.

“I don’t want to do that again,” he whispered.

Jaro didn’t say he had to. That mattered more than Cal could articulate at the time. Instead, his Master guided him through grounding exercises he’d adapted specifically for Cal’s psychometry: slower breathing, tactile awareness, separating self from echo.

All the while Cal clung to Jaro like a baby.

Later in the medbay, Cal overheard Jaro speaking with Temple healers in Coruscant, asking questions any holobooks or ancient scrolls hadn’t answered. About neurological strain. About long-term emotional impact. Jaro had even pushed for medical scholar texts that would confirm that no Jedi children, any children at all, with psychometry should be exposed to potentially traumatic artifacts.

No one seemed to have clear answers. Or the texts.

That uncertainty scared Jaro more than anything, though he never admitted it aloud.

Training with Cal changed after that.

Sessions became shorter but much more frequent. Jaro insisted on rest periods other Masters might have skipped. When Cal had asked, Jaro called it “mental health rest”. Cal asked what mental health was. One of the troopers, Sledge, had jokingly answered, “A thing that is a privilege to maintain, apparently.” Jaro had elbowed the trooper in the side.

Meditation wasn’t just spiritual discipline anymore; it was protective maintenance. Sometimes Jaro even told stories from his own Padawan years, a young Jedi under the tutelage of Master Yaddle. “She would’ve loved you,” Jaro had said. “Master Yaddle instilled in me that although Jedi teaches us to avoid attachment, love for another shall not be something to fear nor avoided.”

It worked, mostly. Cal did love Master Tapal’s stories.

But echoes accumulated.

A weapon from a massacre. A pendant from a grieving refugee. A flimsi containing someone’s final message home. Each impression lodged somewhere inside Cal, even after the immediate memories faded. The history, the feelings, stayed. He started having trouble telling whether certain memories were his or borrowed.

Once he spoke to Jaro about a conversation they’d never had. Once he reacted emotionally to a place he’d never visited, because he’d felt it through someone else’s terror. Another time, he claimed that he loathed oatmeal with jogan fruit and meelooreen for breakfast, although the confused trooper insisted that Cal had had them every day for breakfast without complaint aboard the Albedo Brave (it was a young boy whose life was taken away too soon–he’d hated the breakfast meal with passion, although it was mostly the texture of hot oatmeal he loathed).

Small things. Easy to dismiss individually.

Harder when they kept happening.

===

One evening, after a particularly taxing mission debrief, Cal realized he couldn’t recall what he’d eaten for dinner. Not unusual on its own, days blurred during wartime, but the blankness felt… different. Not forgotten. Absent.

Like a recording that had never been made.

He mentioned it casually, with a shrug of his shoulder. Jaro didn’t treat it casually, his own shoulders tensing minutely.

The Lasat asked careful questions, with watchful eyes, then took him straight to the healers on board. More questions and tests followed. Observations. Cal hated it, hated being treated like an experiment, but Jaro told him that it was for the best that they make sure Cal was alright, after experiencing all the trauma from the echoes. Gentle reassurance that stress could affect memory, that rest would help.

Still, Jaro began keeping notes on his datapad that he now carried everywhere (Commander Alloy once protested that Jaro purposefully ‘misplaced’ his datapad way too often). Cal pretended not to notice. 

Despite everything, there was warmth. There was love.

Jaro’s hand steady on his shoulder before missions. Shared tea after meditation, right before bed. The trooper’s encouraging smiles and jokes. The Lasat Master’s dry humor emerged when Cal least expected it. Moments where Cal felt less like a strategic asset and more like a kid learning from people who genuinely cared.

Those moments anchored him.

They also made the pressure easier to bear, which, Cal would later realize, meant he accepted more than he otherwise might have.

On the night before their next deployment, Cal hesitated before picking up the small practice saber Jaro had given him years earlier. Normally the weight of the saber comforted him, the hum and buzz of the plasma lulled him into focus. This time he worried about what it might show him.

Cal stood before the bench, a small hand hovering just above the saber. He didn’t move to grasp it. Jaro felt Cal’s scared-whatif-unsure within their bond and decided to put down his own training saber.

“Afraid of the echoes?” Jaro asked quietly.

“A little,” Cal answered, even quieter. 

“That’s wisdom, my Padawan. It is not a weakness.”

Cal nodded, but the unease stayed. He picked up the saber. He must be brave because he was a Jedi, after all.