revivalproject | Retreat

There was definitely no reason to apologize, but Tony still took it as a chance to throw a challenging grin at Cal and say with wistful lament, "It's alright, Poe showed me around," like Cal had abandoned him to the culture shock and Tony had to rely on the next best thing. It wasn't just a tease, though; Poe really had shown Tony some of the local culture that Tony wouldn't have been able to navigate on his own, giving him a fairly comprehensive picture of the daily life in this weird past of a planet alien to him, so Tony could raise he eyebrows with some surprise at what he thought Cal was telling him. "You're actually from there--like, right there, that planet?" he clarified, because no one else he talked to had said as much, all far flung in that intergalactic society. More importantly, the way Cal spoke, he made it sound like he had grown up somewhere practically medieval, or possibly chthonic. Maybe that was Tony's anxiety.

That look was met with a lopsided sort of smile and a shake of his head. Tease or not, he was glad that someone had accompanied Tony around the city. The ecumenopolis was a lot for anyone to take in, otherwise.

Cal hopped up onto the trunk of a fallen tree that sprawled at an angle, propped up by a scattered group of boulders. "Well no, not really. I don't know what planet I was born on, but Coruscant is where the Jedi temple was, and that's where I grew up. But even then I hadn't seen much of the city itself. Younglings usually stuck more to the temple grounds."

Enough of that made Tony wrinkle his nose that he was glad he was never getting used to the word 'younglings', making him snicker as he picked his way alongside the trunk that Cal scaled. It had been there long enough that moss had gathered thickly on its underside, purplish and shockingly soft to the touch as Tony experimentally traced along its edge where the trunk rose enough to meet him. "When you said 'temple' before, I was picturing, you know, monks in a mountain somewhere, up a sheer cliff and behind a waterfall, that kind of thing," he admitted. "You wore slippers and weren't allowed to look at porn." Which might have still been true, but came with a distinctly different energy when dropped in the middle of a sprawling city-planet.

"Is that where you were, then? You went back to the Temple?" Not that Tony was really paying that much attention to the comings and goings as he wallowed in his hotel room, but he had convinced himself he was there keeping watch and actually looking out for anyone else going missing and not wallowing at all, so he would have noticed if Cal was around.

The tree wasn't really leading anywhere but Cal made his way along it regardless, taking care in his steps. His lips twisted in a faint smile as Tony shared his assumptions of what he envisioned temple-life to be like. "Well, there is a mountain. The temple was built around it," Cal said, hopping from the tree to one of the boulders, then down across several more before he was once again back on the ground.

"I did spend a lot of time there, yeah," he admitted. "At first I wasn't sure that I wanted to. Go back. I know I wasn't the only one. Master Kenobi, Grogu- they were actually there when the Purge happened. But I didn't know if I would ever have the chance to see it again."

That got heavy fast, which might have been easier to deal with in the open air and secure shade of the rustling trees where Tony could keep his distance from the stickier emotions, but he still took his time lingering on, "The place I grew up wouldn't even be there a thousand years ago. I probably wouldn't want to go, either." For very different reasons, obviously. "Some places, though...the Piazza dei Miracoli, Machu Picchu--they're basically a pile of rocks now, but centres of innovation back then, I'd be losing my mind." It wasn't really something that Tony was going to understand, basically.

As carefully as he picked his way around the boulders, he made his way back, "They did it right there in the middle of the city, huh?" It wasn't actually a question, but how Tony had understood what happened to the Jedi was about as misguided as his image of the Temple had been. It sounded like the sort of thing that happened on a battlefield that could be mythologized, or, better yet, in secret. Especially when, it seemed to Tony, that Temple was the seat of power in Coruscant. "You and some of the other guys, you make it sound like not a lot had changed in those 900 years. Something must have."

It was a completely understandable mindset. "It's really crazy, right? From the outside I there didn't look to be much difference. I almost panicked when I saw it outside of our viewport. Coruscant would be the last place any Jedi would want to be headed for. It'd be the heart of Imperial territory."

Cal paused to let BD-1 scan some random plant that caught his attention, nodding at Tony. "Not much of the temple itself changed. It's not really surprising, given how steeped in tradition the Jedi are. There are some things that have changed, parts that aren't as accessible..." He shrugged, stepping around to where Tony was.

"So what'd you think of Coruscant?"

Not that it mattered much to Tony, the planet already felt as impossibly distant as Earth and less solid with every day stranded back on Agra-10, but he still managed to complain, "900 years, though," at the idea of those traditions holding so fast against progress. He didn't have many traditions of his own to even think them difficult to give up.

That didn't make Coruscant, despite the halting progress, any less magnificent from his perspective, so he smiled with a dangerous flash at Cal's question and welcomed him closer to make their way through the trees starting to cluster more tightly together, hand on his shoulder. "It was a nice change of pace," he started, too lightly, with his chin up like the difference between there and Temba wasn't the most obvious thing in the world. "Plenty of trouble to get into, and the structure of it..." The truth was, Tony had kind of squandered what opportunity he did have when he could have easily spent the rest of his life trying to learn the new technologies of the galaxy, so he tilted his head and shrugged like Cal could infer that obviously that was what he had been doing the whole time. "A reminder of how little you actually know is always invigorating. Hey, you'll be back there soon, anyway, and if not, it sounds like they might be moving the whole population over here in the meantime. It'll be like you never left."

Cal had no arguments for that. Nine hundred years and something to remain the same for so long? "The building may not have changed much, but I'm sure some things have." The way the Jedi functioned, their practices. He didn't have a good reference point to compare, extreme time differences aside. If there was a war that the Republic was embroiled in then, it didn't seem that the Jedi were as directly involved as they had been in the Clone Wars.

He nodded a bit as Tony shared his own impressions of Coruscant, but it felt fairly vague, although that was completely understandable given the place they were now to the place they'd been. He arched a brow at Tony, a silent inquiry though he's not sure how to frame it.

"Well, the Agrii did bring someone else in recently- and she's someone I actually do know and not someone I'd just heard about, like Master Kenobi," Cal said, forcing a laugh. Tony wasn't wrong- and the Agrii had sent them all out to Coruscant in the first place in noticing the trend of those brought in.

That wasn't meant to be a serious statement, and Tony's hand went to his chest in surprise as he interrupted, "Another one?," expecting a whole other Jedi that wasn't supposed to exist anymore and would make it really difficult to ignore the pattern. Somehow, it was, "She?," that shocked him the most out of Cal's report, and Tony almost stopped, looking like he was about to grab Cal to interrogate him about it. After a brief waver, he skipped ahead instead so he could turn to walk backwards, hands out to catch the trees around him and keep him oriented where he could look Cal in the eye with a challenging glimmer and ask, "Is she cute?"

"Not a Jedi," Cal found himself clarifying first, although the look and reaction from Tony that followed had made him pause enough that they maintained their comfortable proximity without an accidental collision. His head canting slightly at the man as Tony resumed his walk ahead of him, the padawan followed, although of all the questions he might have expected, leave it to Tony to ask the one he hadn't.

The confusion flickered across his face for that curve ball, the honest look of someone who had probably never before been asked that opinion on anyone in his life. Cal glanced off to the side almost awkwardly as he continued along, his eyes drifting downwards as though suddenly more mindful of where they were walking. With Tony walking backwards this wasn't completely a lie as he wanted to make sure the man didn't go tripping over a bare root or some uneven patch of ground.

"Her name's Merrin," he ended up replying. "Honestly I'd only just met her right before I ended up here in Temba. From what she's said, she's from a little later, and thankfully on better terms than what I'd remembered." He smiled crookedly at that. Boy, was that an understatement.

The awkward eye-contact avoidance told Tony everything he needed to know, or so his delighted grin said as he tipped his head to try to chase Cal's gaze. It wasn't really mercy at all that he stopped then for Cal to catch up again where they could walk shoulder-to-shoulder, because Tony was still leering at him, only closer. "Merrin," he echoed whimsically, like those soft syllables painted the full picture for him, clasping his hands together as Cal continued, "She sounds exquisite," not at all expecting Cal to just hand him ammunition. On better terms?

"You know that sweet face of yours is irresistible. What a treat to have you here to take care of her," he needled sweetly.

Exquisite. It was like Tony was describing a fine wine or something. Cal gave him a faintly amused look as he fell into step beside him once again, even as he tried not to be unsettled by the grins being directed at him. He rolled his eyes even as he suppressed a chuckle, trying to ignore the comment about having a sweet face.

"I'm uh, pretty sure she doesn't need someone to take care of her," he said, a corner of his lips twitching in a brief, lopsided smile. He imagined she might even be offended at the suggestion.

"Of course she doesn't need it. She doesn't need flowers, either, but we can bring some back for her," Tony offered, quickly snapping a small, yellow bud from a vine twining its way up a tree that they sauntered by to present with a flourish. There was very little Cal could have done to take it from Tony fast enough before Tony was tucking it into the thick mop of his hair, smiling appreciatively for Cal's response despite the argument. He looked awkward, but he was going to do alright.

"You're allowed to do that, right? The Jedi thing, it's not like some--keep it in the faith, thing?" Tony asked, and it still sounded a little sly, but from the way anyone else had talked about their Jedi upbringing, it didn't sound like they were allowed much commingling so it was mostly a question of genuine curiosity. If Merrin was just a gal, it didn't sound like there was any kind of conversion process.

It looked like Cal might protest, although to be honest he wasn't sure what he'd meant to do even as he looked to begin to say something. Tony was already charging ahead in the conversation like a train locked on the tracks, taking advantage of the padawan's further hesitation brought on by the thought of bringing flowers back. Would she like flowers? She didn't seem to not like them. And now he had one in his hair.

Cal sighed.

"Allowed to...what?" He faltered for a moment, half-wondering if they were still talking about the same thing. "Bring flowers?" he asked, partially joking, if only to see how Tony would respond for a change. "Look, we're just friends. Survivors."

That might not have been a question that Cal actually wanted answered, Tony's slow smile, tongue between his teeth, speaking volumes even before he was tilting his head to give some apparent consideration to what kind of flowers were usually on his mind. It only occurred to him then that Cal hadn't seen much of that persona, their time together spent bent more studiously over a workbench, and the smile dropped suddenly like a mask startled out of place, making Tony spin abruptly like he was very keenly interested in finding more flowers for Cal's hair while he decided in a rush whether to affix it again. It hadn't failed him yet.

"When I was your age," he started decisively, spinning back around with another spring-new bud and just about tumbling over a root then in his restless bouncing, not missing a beat even as he smoothly recovered to weight his free hand, more or less, whatever age Cal looked, "I was on my third...serious girlfriend." The number was debatable, and Tony twined his gesturing hand in the air for Cal to interpret that liberally. "Even asked one to marry me, but that just got her sent away to school on the other side of the planet. Probably wouldn't have worked out, couldn't even grow the beard then, so. Anyway. Point is, I haven't regretted any one of them, not even the ones that tried to kill me, I only ever regret that I didn't use my time wisely." He offered the new flower to Cal daintily. "I'm trying to be better about that," he said, softer and with his hand back on Cal's shoulder, before his clipped manner returned to assure him, "You know, in general," with a disappointed shake of his head for Cal's indecent assumption that he could be Tony's new girlfriend. What would Merrin think? It hardly lasted a breath before Tony was still talking yet, "You said she wasn't a Jedi." Not that Tony had any doubt Cal had done plenty of surviving, but that sounded like the big one.

When I was your age... For some reason Cal felt himself tense in preparation for whatever sort of lecture Tony had in store. He wasn't quite sure what to make of the somewhat unsettling smile the man had worn a moment ago. But he still gave the man his attention, ducking under a mop of leaves from an overhanging branch. He almost stumbled over a root as Tony's story began on his third (serious??) girlfriend.

Having absolutely no idea what to say, he could only continue to listen in bemusement while he pawed through his own thoughts. "You know, I don't think I ever really caught what it is you do back in your world." Aside from amassing relationships with women and advancing technical accomplishments. He looked at the flower offered, taking it more out of reflex than actual acceptance of being the latest fling. Despite the shake of the head he was given, and feeling like he'd missed some joke there, he arches a brow, an open inquiry. Tony had spoken of bits and pieces of his world, but as he thought about it, Cal felt he really wasn't all that much closer to knowing anything about the man he'd befriended. It was usually him being asked the questions, the explanations.

"She's a Nightsister," he said, another explanation and at the same time not much of one, but again, Tony had prompted. "From a planet called Dathomir. Her people were attacked and wiped out, so she might be the last of her sisters. For a while she was convinced it was the Jedi who were responsible."

The elusiveness was largely by design, partially by impulse anymore, just like his predictably flippant, "Keep it turning," with a disarming grin to not explain at all what it was he 'did'. He was a lot of different things to a lot of different people, some he was more proud of than others, and it tended to work out better for the company bank account to let those people decide what those things were. What that had to do with his girlfriends or his brand new sense for appreciating people while they were in his life, he didn't know, and his grin twisted up into a questioning quirk. Was dating a lot a job where he came from? That would make the whole repressed Jedi upbringing even more tragic.

Because it wasn't entirely clear, and from what Tony understood, the Jedi were all incredibly nice people but very much did make clones as canon fodder, he gave Cal a beat to clarify how much responsibility the Jedi had in this genocide before prompting, "But they weren't," with some skeptical trepidation. Before Cal had to figure out how to lie to him, he offered, "I'm not going to go disavowing some gal of the notion that you should not have revenge rained upon you. I can manage a convincing poker face."

As much as he figured he should have expected that sort of response from Tony, Cal still felt a little disappointed by it, and unlike Tony, he wasn't all that good at keeping it from showing on his face. Maybe Tony had his reasons, and that was the only reason Cal didn't push for a better answer.

"No, they weren't. I think she's worked that out. But it was a former Jedi who told her that lie. I guess she started to figure she couldn't trust him when she saw him trying to get me to join him."

Cal twirled the flower between his fingers as he stepped ahead, lifting his eyes towards the canopy of greenery at the sounds of some kind of bird calls, at least so far as he could guess that was what was making them. "And then I had a swarm of undead Nightsisters coming after me, and the only thing I could do was run back to the ship."

That newly cultivated sense of appreciating-whatever-blah blah, it didn't feel particularly well formed in the face of that clear disappointment, and only slightly because Cal was immune enough to Tony's charming smiles be disappointed in the first place. Tony didn't have much of a chance to linger on that guilt, though, so quickly dismissed it to dwell on later as Cal dropped several revelations on him very casually. He held a hand up in the moment that Cal was distracted by the sounds of the forest, silent though he was clearly counting off on his fingers as he sorted through the one, two, three, four very nebulous questions that he was already left with. This was before Cal even said 'undead' at him.

"We call those vampires," he decided this had to mean, because 'Nightsister' did sound a lot like what a vampire would call herself. "And, I'm going to be honest with you, we mostly kill them, too. You're very open minded, Calamity, that's incredibly electrifying of you, but I do have my concerns. I can't make any promises about what I might do if she starts biting people."

"Call... wait, what?" Cal turned his head back towards Tony before laughing a bit. "Not a vampire," he insisted.

"Nightsisters are...what they called their people. From what I understand, they lived apart from the Nightbrothers. The Nightsisters use some kind of magick, I'm not really sure if it's some different aspect of the Force or something else entirely." He shook his head, shrugging. "Merrin's not undead, by the way."

That didn't clarify anything whatsoever, leaving Tony staring after Cal with a confused furrow of his brow for thinking that it did, lips curled in a teasing grin even as he raised one in speechless shock. So, they weren't vampires, they just sounded a lot like them and didn't really die, but Merrin wasn't there yet. Great.

"What did this other guy get out of lying to her?" Tony wondered. It didn't sound like a reasonable thing for a former Jedi to be doing, telling tall tales of his people that didn't exist anymore committing mass crimes. "And what is it about you that is inherently untrustworthy? That one, I gotta say, that's a cultural difference, I think mothers would trust you with their newborns on Earth."

He was only passingly familiar with the people of Dathomir so his vagueness wasn't without reason. Unsure of what to make of the grin Tony was giving him, Cal could only shrug.

"From the echoes I'd picked up, he must have crash-landed on their planet not long after the Purge. He won over the Nightbrothers by his strength, and he wanted to learn about the magick of the Nightsisters from Merrin." He laughed weakly, shaking his head. "I was trespassing on their world. Malicos had them all going after me before he found out who I was."

This was not a sequence of events that made any more sense to Tony, particularly not the quick 180 to recruit Cal presumably upon finding out his Jedi training, so after a moment Tony declared, "He sounds fantastically unhinged. And she was spending time with him? I've got to meet her."

The forest by then was growing dense, further from the city than Tony had been yet and blocking out the sunlight but for some glowing, dappled patches where the musky mushrooms shied away and more of those budding vines gathered greedily into tightly packed nests, some looking lush with the coverage of their new flowers. They had to skim tightly by them at times to wind their way around the trees, sending cascades of petals to the leaf-packed ground or leaving them clinging to their clothes. Meanwhile, Tony asked, "How did you go from that pit-with-teeth situation to pulling a B&E on a whole planet? That's the third life you're telling me about. I might have had three girlfriends, but you've been moving through identities."

Here and there BD-1 would hop down freely from his perch to skitter off and scan the interesting flora, or jump around in leaf piles while Tony and Cal continued to pick their way along.

"B and E?" Cal asked, but he supposed caught the main gist, and frankly he couldn't really say it didn't sound like another lifetime. "Same identity. Just had to dust it off and refine some things," he laughed quietly, shaking his head.

"After I gave myself away on Bracca the Empire was there and looking for me. But as it turned out, someone else was looking for me too. I was picked up by Cere and her pilot Greez. Cere said she'd used to be in the Order, and they'd been monitoring Imperial frequencies for survivors. She knew about an ancient vault that her old master hid away a holocron, one that has a list of Force-sensitive children. So we've been trying to find the 'key to the vault'."

Tony flapped his hand at the question, didn't matter, and besides, they were approaching the sound of running water that they were going to have to deal with soon. As Cal explained how he got from point A to point F, Tony swept down to drag a knotted branch out of the undergrowth, snapping it out of a loamy snarl of new roots and testing it with a few taps to the ground as they walked. He didn't expect this journey to include a list of secret kids, making him shoot a sidelong glance Cal's way, lip raised again with a new question that wasn't coming together easily.

"So you can hide it better?" he landed on. It sounded, from this brief recount, that it was quite thoroughly hidden and maybe exactly where it needed to be. "Listen, I don't--There's this thing, on Earth--" he tried, and heaved a sigh of frustration at himself, boxed in now by his own recalcitrance. The understanding the upcoming registration bill depended on a lot of context that hadn't even been enough for Tony's allies back home to understand his position. "We've got all kinds of guys'n'gals with superpowers, you know, Billy and...Cap'n...whatever, you know what I mean. And it works, we work, because we wear masks, we wear the costumes and put on a whole show to become someone else, so no one can follow us home," he tried, and tilted his head with a grimace, eyebrows raised and watchful for any recognition from Cal for the possessive form. "What makes you think it's better to find this list?"

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