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There was a pulse besides his own in Cal’s throat.
The dockside where he hung his feet over the drop was cold, the wind biting into someone else’s skin layered with his. Separate, two distinct echoes, but not apart.
A couple, maybe, waiting for a med shuttle. Maybe waiting for a ride home.
That second pulse stuttered, sometimes faster than his, sometimes slower. Meditative breathing kept his own heart steady against the foreign weight of someone else’s…
Someone else’s death. Someone else’s grief. One and the same, aching in his ribs like it did in the chest of the ghosts whose feelings he shared. The ache of grief. The crushing weight of a heart attack hovering over him.
For someone whose heart had never failed, Cal had intimate knowledge of the sensations: the crushing despair, the shooting pain, migrating into his shoulder and jaw, the cold.
Or maybe that was the wind, harsh against the skin of the lover, jacket long surrendered to the partner in pain.
He supposed that it didn’t really matter anymore. One echo was a ghost from the moment it left its mark here. The other, he imagined, not long behind, not with the way its jagged grief was pulled taught towards the edge of the dockside and the drop below.
He should leave. If he stays much longer, Cere will come looking. If she sees him like this, balanced on a precipice, breathing tightly controlled against the pain, she will worry.
He causes her worry too often.
Only…
Only.
Only there’s something in the echoes that draws him in.
At times, he thinks they are almost aware, burdened by the knowledge of nothing but their pain, and the fact that no one will ever feel it. Until he comes along, and all of a sudden these feelings have somewhere to go, someone to feel them.
They want him there, he feels, want him to feel them, even if only for a while.
Besides, it’s not too large a task. The pain is nothing he isn’t used to; ghosts like this linger where they are, and they are everywhere. They cling to his skin, follow him for a while before they fade, but almost always are replaced before they go. He doesn’t remember a time before his psychometry developed enough for this.
There must have been a time before.
But it’s nice to feel wanted, even if it’s often pain that seeks him out.
“Cal?”
He must have been gone longer than he thought, if Cere has already come looking.
“Sorry,” he says. He knows the dazed distraction of the echo isn’t hidden from his voice. He hopes Cere will assume he was only meditating. Maybe taking in the view. “I lost track of time. It’s quiet up here, isn’t it?”
It took more willpower than he would have liked to turn and face her. The ghosts’ fingers on his skin grasping, pleading him to sit back down, stay just a while longer. Feel us in our entirety.
Feel us the whole way down.
Cere’s face when he does look is blank. The steady rumble of traffic and the background din of work, so similar to Bracca, comes back to him then, with the shattered sobs of the echo receding.
There hadn’t been work going on that night. People had been home, sleeping. Almost waking up, maybe. The bleariness had that early morning tinge to it.
“Sorry,” he repeated. “I should’ve come back before you got worried.”
Cere shifted towards the back of the platform, beckoning Cal with a jerk of the head. He rose to his feet to follow, swallowing down someone else’s lover’s anxiety in his throat.
“” “” “” “” “” “”
Mornings like this, he took extra care when picking which mug to drink from.
The issues were still there on good days, sure, but… well. On a good day, he could handle all the extra noise. The layering of Cere’s too-hot tea last week with the bitterness of burned caf from before Cal was old enough to drink it was only overwhelming, on those days.
Mornings like these did not herald in good days.
Mornings like this, the wrong mug would send him running to the ‘fresher to empty whatever acid was still in his stomach into the greywater tanks.
But Cal was a well-practised mug connoisseur. No cupboard could defeat him. Not even with a few extra decades of pain coiled in his shoulders, writhing behind his eyes like a fog. Even on a morning like this, worse than most bad mornings, even now, Cal knew where to reach.
Knew how to curl his knuckles to avoid brushing the tall white one with the lipstick stain that held both the shame and regret of a morning after and the elation and pride of the night before, all swirled with the unique mix of hangover and hangover cure to form a potent draught that made its origin hurl.
Cal wouldn’t stand a chance on a good morning.
Today was not a good morning.
In the end, it wasn’t the morning-after’s lipstick-stain that got him. His hand curved as it was supposed to. The mug he chose was clean, stained only with the muffled sound of laughter from another room.
A child’s memory, comfortable and warm. Something that might have been Cal’s, had he been on a ship like this with the clones before it all went to shit. The mug had been filled with warm milk. The child had slept well.
He smiled, his own laughter echoing the child’s memory, and his other hand brushed along the countertop. There was no warning from the Force before he touched it. Barely time to register that he had.
Everything went black.
“” “” “” “” “” “”
“I’m okay, I’m okay, I swear!”
“Cal, you had a seizure.” Cere’s tone had no time for Cal’s bullshit. It never did. It wasn’t bullshit, though. Not really. “That isn’t something you can shake off, Cal. It could be a sign of something much more serious!”
Greez chimed in: “I had a cousin once, who had seizures like that. Turns out he was bleeding into his brain! If he hadn’t seen a doctor when my aunt forced him to, they wouldn’t have caught it in time. He’d have been dead!”
“Greez-”
“Yeah, okay. Tone it down a bit,” he said, “But my point stands! This is important, Cal. We care about you!”
Cal held a hand up to stop them. He was only slightly surprised when it worked; Cere had been trying to give him enough space, lately. To let him tell her things in his own way, at his own speed.
It brought an ache to his ribs that didn’t belong to anyone else.
“If you give me a second -” He raised an eyebrow at Greez- “I can explain it to you. Okay?”
They nodded.
He wasn’t sure exactly where to start. Telling Cere was something he’d been considering for almost as long as he’d known her. He thought that she probably felt about him the same way Master Tapal had, and he’d known, and he hadn’t treated Cal any way he wouldn’t have wanted to be treated.
He’d been understanding and gentle, but he hadn’t acted as if Cal were made of glass, or as if he couldn’t make decisions about himself for himself.
He’s sure Cere would be the same.
But she worried.
He didn’t want to give her anything else to worry about. Already, she spent half of her nights pacing the Mantis, tea steadily going cold in her grasp. He could hear her, through the walls. Telling her wouldn’t help, wouldn’t-
He focussed back to their faces, expressions open, expectant. Neither did a good job of hiding their impatience, but that they were trying was good enough for Cal. He could stall, but he couldn’t keep it in forever.
He closed his eyes.
“I, uh… I don’t feel so good, most days.”
Cere gasped, quietly. Eyes opening again, Cal focussed on the ceiling; they deserved the truth, and they wouldn’t get it with him looking in their eyes.
“Since I can remember, basically. The doctors at the Temple said there was no medical reason, the creche masters were pretty sure it was a psychometry thing, and that’s what I think, so…
“I guess… I guess I’ve spent so long just absorbing things, you know? Feelings, and memories, and dreams, and-”
He sucked in a breath through his teeth. Bounced his foot around a bit. Kept his gaze sternly on the ceiling.
“And pain,” Cere said.
He nodded. Bit his lip.
“It’s almost like it knows that no one else will ever feel it. Like it wants to be felt. Like without me, it’ll be forgotten, and that scares it. Which probably isn’t true, they’re just fragments of echoes in the Force, they don’t feel, but…
“The pain lingers. Holds on longer than the rest of it. It fades eventually, of course it does, but there’s almost always something to take its place, some background radiation, some ghost in the walls.
“It comes and goes. Some days are better than others. The seizure was from an echo. A bad one. I couldn’t hold onto the memory, and I don’t want to. The feelings are enough. But it's not some underlying condition, it's not dangerous. It just scares people and makes me tired.
“On a good day, that echo would’ve sucked. It would have driven me to my knees, I would have screamed, I would have thrown up.
“Today was not a good day. I have voices in my head, today, not just pain, not just feelings. The screams have words, the voices are distinct. I can recognise some of them.”
At that he looked to Cere.
She sobbed, hand over her mouth, eyes wet with tears.
Greez seemed like he wanted to put his hands somewhere, do something, to make them feel better, but he didn’t know what. Cal and Greez both.
“It’s not gonna go away, it’s not gonna get better, but I can still do everything. It just hurts some days more than others.”
Greez looked between him and Cere, mouth opening and closing, trying to find words to say something, probably. Cal just hoped Cere wouldn’t cry. He didn’t want to make Cere cry. Not over something like this that didn’t really matter.
“Say, kid, I think that doesn’t really sound like my cousin with the seizures. Which is good, cause his brain wasn’t doing as well after all that. But I do know this guy.
“He was a pilot. He’s got this nerve condition. It meant he hurt, some days better than others, but never not at all. Called it chronic pain. He, well he described it the same way you just did, minus the Jedi mumbo-jumbo and the voices.”
The past tense of ‘pilot’ made Cal tense. Was Greez going to try to bench him because of this?
“I can see those gears of yours whirring already, calm yourself, calm yourself! He was a great pilot, Cal. Retired two years ago after sixty years flying. Yeah, maybe occasionally he took a day off. But he was a nut like you are.”
“Cal, we aren’t going to hold you back because of this,” Cere said, “Just tell us what you need. We’re here. None of us are going anywhere.”
And Cal looked around at the two people who had saved him from that nightmare of a scrap heap and gave him the leg up he needed to help himself. He could lean on these people. He could let them share the weight.
And they would start by throwing out that lipstick-stained mug.