Chapter Text
It was getting harder to breathe.
Dust had been kicked up when Cal crashed his stolen speeder, but the thick air wasn’t just his fault, along the equator of Caamas pollution hung in the air, and though much of the planet was swamp land, this region was a desert, it provided stable ground that lent itself to densely populated areas, even if the empire had emptied neighbourhoods and created issues with overpopulation and islands of ghost towns within the sprawling city. As the sun rose in the sky and the heat of the day set in, the winds rose too.
Swirling eddies trailed by his ankles, caressed his knees, and scraped his cheeks. BD chirped his annoyances at the grit and scanned the soil composition for rust accelerants with dismay.
Somewhere ahead, he could feel Merrin in the force, and somewhere behind, but gaining on him steadily was Fett.
Cere and Greeze were off world. They had been tagged for a supply run for the resistance and while they were away, Merrin and he had been left behind to explore the Zeffo ruins at their leisure and to help the native population of Caamasi, Bothans and Ithorian’s as they could.
They hadn't been worried at all at the time, even knowing the empire had a massive operation running in the northern hemisphere.
He was a bit worried now.
When Fett showed up, ostensibly to collect the bounty on Cal's head, they had managed to put him off until they had helped evac some of the locals that had fled from the marshes towards the desert in their escape from the storm troopers that evicted their town.
After Boba had helped, Cal had managed to slip away, he hadn’t thought his injury was that bad when he gave Fett the slip, but his opinion had changed when he crouched over the hoverbike to steer and felt a searing pain at his side. He had no more stims on hand, having used them all on the refugees, but he knew they would do no good for him at the moment anyway, since the shrapnel causing his wounds was still embedded in him.
Cal walked as long as he could towards the nearest city, trying to reach Merrin, but when his path led him to a set of stairs, he could go no further. Merrin was near enough to find him anyway. With BD’s worried coos and encouragements ringing along the streets Cal fell to his knees resting for a while. Blinking and blind in the sunlight, he fought the hazy edges of his vision but still pain and lightheadedness encroached.
BD jumped from his harness to begin running scans, but could do nothing else. From the top of the stairs Merrin sets eyes on him and in a green swirl fazes to him. Finally, Cal slumps to the ground and Merrin pulls his head into her lap. She holds his shoulders and green wisps trace his body. Looking to the alley ahead of her, her glare locks on the buy’ce of the Mandalorian sauntering in their direction.
“Fett, it’s been a while, how’d you get off Ithor?” Cal asked, as though they were old friends, and not bounty-and-hunter.
“With difficulty,” crackled the reply, “you look tired of running, and this time, there is nowhere to jump.”
“Where’ve you been all this time, it’s been so long I was starting to think you had given up.” Merrin noted.
“That’s not how this works.” Fett responded.
“And how does this work, do you call us in, tell an inquisitor you’ve tracked us, or is this the bit where we get disintegrated?”
“No one’s going to disintegrate you Kestis, and as it turns out, I’m not turning you in either.”
“You expect us to believe that?”
“Believe it or don’t,” Fett spoke, he walked up to the pair with a confident swagger and bent forwards at the waist to whisper, “but just between us, I haven’t turned Kenobi in either.” His words rang true in the force, and Cal managed to gape at him in shock. Back at his full height towering over them, his smirk could be heard through the helmet, “Thought that might surprise you.”
“If you aren’t going to hand us over to the empire, are you going to help?” Merrin asked.
Boba nodded, then knelt by Cal’s side. He raised his poncho and shirt to look at the shrapnel embedded in his skin and hissed, “where were you planning on going like this?” he asked.
“Our base camp is about six klicks that way,” Cal nodded.
With Cal supported between them, the three moved on, as they walked they passed shelled streets and barren homes, the planet echoed with the loss of life. Nothing grew in the fields they passed, no insects buzzed, no grass softened their dragging steps. The sector of the city they passed through was empty of all living beings.
When they got back to the main town, Merrin traded Cal her outer robe for his poncho, so he would have a hood to hide his face and hair, while Boba sniped with her about the idiocy of having an infamous face, and memorable hair, and not bothering to keep a disguise handy. The trio snuck past trooper patrols and were nearly back to their safe house when crowds began to clog the streets.
The local dialect wasn’t anything they spoke, but looking up, beyond the bright haze of the planet’s afternoon sun, star destroyers hung en masse, more joining the armada by the minute.
Troopers bullied their way down the thoroughfares and shots rang out when citizens harassed them, their demands and questions going unanswered.
Fighting through the crowds and dodging more and more troopers, they finally made it to the safe house and got indoors.
Cal collapsed on the faded and lumpy sofa built into the wall while Merrin disappeared down the narrow hall into another room and BD zipped from the sofa to the window sill to continue scanning the sky.
“Do you have a way off planet?” Boba asked once Merrin was back, already digging through the meager first aid kit for sterilizer and tweezers.
Cal and Merrin shared a look, hesitating to answer but in the end shook their heads in the negative.
“My ship is on the other side of the city, the eastern space port, though it looks like getting off planet will be a challenge,” he offered.
Merrin was on her knees struggling to tear away Cal’s bloodied shirt when over her shoulder, Boba offered a slim vibro knife.
She took it with a distracted smile and once the shirt was gone unceremoniously dumped sterilizer on his wounds. Cal’s back was slick with sweat and the fine hairs making a little ‘v’ at the back of his neck curled with it. His normally pale complexion had a distinct grey tinge that wasn't dissimilar to Merrin’s. “I can tell some of these are deep, but once the shrapnel is out we have enough stims for Cal to make it across the city, even if he has to parkour his way there” Merrin said, now digging in his back for warped hunks of durasteel.
Boba grabbed some gauze from the kit and moved to kneel above Cal’s hips on the couch and wipe away blood, helping Merrin see what she was working on by lighting the torches on his helmet.
With the final long shard drawn out, Cal was shaking in pain and blood rushed out of his wound, soaking into the couch despite Boba putting pressure on the open wound.
Merrin fumbled the stim in her bloodied hands, and it rolled across the sloped floor. As she reached for it, BD screeched warnings, and the sizzling thunder of orbital bombardment and destructive screams of Ithorians rang.
Fett grabbed her shoulder to pull her close and lay down, his body the shield between her and Cal and the crumbling ceiling of the apartment block. None of them had expected the bombardment, and despite Cal and Merrin’s use of the force the four of them were buried in the building. The force echoed with death upon death and Cal kept on bleeding, until he couldn't stay awake any longer and slipped away into unconsciousness. As he did, alloy pipes he had been keeping suspended fell, skewering through Fett’s thigh, and Cal’s hip.
The bombardment continued, and the building above them settled into its collapsed state, Merrin had been able to preserve enough space that their little cluster wasn't crushed, though they were trapped laying flat on their stomachs, and choking on dust.
Coughing on debris and blinded by the lights of Fett's helmet, Merrin felt through the force the lives beside her slipping away.
“No, no, no, no, I will not be left alone again” she scrambled to see what she could but had no hope to save them. There was one chance, something she could never have done on her own, something she would never have done when she still had hope for the future, but now, thanks to the esoteric lessons from Dathomir, she could have hope for the past. Looking at the two boys, the young men dying in front of her, she knew she had to act quickly. She picked up the long shard of shrapnel she had pulled from between Cal’s ribs and its edges bit into her hands. She released the seal on Fett’s helmet and he too started to cough on the dust.
What Merrin was about to do was undoubtedly the most intimate magic she had ever performed, but looking at the pair before her she felt no hesitation. Cal she had only known for eight months, but even in the first moments of speaking to him she had known, he was hers and she was his, what they each were apart was nothing compared to what they were together. With Fett, he had stalked them from planet to planet for six of those months, but though he chased them, he never handed them to the empire. Instead he flirted, and helped them with their treasure hunts, he helped them aid locals, and disrupt the empire’s plans, he bought them dinners in cantinas and let them slip away whenever Cal spooked. Fett felt as dear to her as Cal did, a sameness resonating between them as it did her and Cal.
Speaking in an ancient tongue, she drew the shard across Fett’s throat, spilling his life blood. The green swirls of the nightsister’s power surged into his body, ripping soul from flesh and holding it stable. She did the same to Cal, flesh tearing like tissue and death coming swiftly to the body.
BD was screaming protests in his own way, though Merrin still could not understand him, she was trying to learn his language of beeps and clicks, but was far from fluent as of yet.
“Peace BD, would you like to travel with them?” she asked, her voice ringing with the echoes of her people. “I do not know where we will wake, or when, but I am a witch, and I command the force-I take life now, but I demand survival in another when.”
BD edged toward her in their cramped space, her hand holding the weapon rested heavily on the droid's head, “you have a bright soul, BD, I will hold it for now,” she promised before crushing his circuits and burning the wiring within him.
With the three dark lights before her, her chanting picked up again. From within crude matter the flare of her soul pulled away from her body, she knew no pain like it, and envied the three before her their deaths. They would never know this feeling, but the ritual demanded the sacrifice of pain and the harvesting of souls. She never would have done it if they weren't already as good as dead, but her revenge was incomplete and she wasn’t ready to die or be without her partners just yet.
When the harvesting of her own soul was nearly complete, and the pain so intense she yearned to escape it, Merrin spoke the final round of chants once more, with a steady hand, she plunged the shard into her chest, and pierced her heart. As her body fell the luminous lights shuddered and condensed, each one a bright star. The corpses flaked and eroded away with green mists enveloping them. Though the mist lingered in that place, the durasteel and concrete tomb marked by the dark magic it had witnessed, the bodies and lights disappeared.