Chapter Text
“I don’t know what I did to deserve this. I really don’t.”
Cere hums in acknowledgement. Gently, she peels the end of the blood-soaked towel away from Cal’s shin, checks if the ragged gash beneath it has started to clot yet. Her slight hiss and the quick replacement of the towel tells Cal it hasn’t. Her eyes flick up towards him, making sure he’s not on the verge of unconsciousness; he manages a pained smile and then gasps, tenses involuntarily, almost thrusts a needle into his palm. A sensation like a cluster of electric shocks lights up his entire leg. His muscles seize and cramp so violently a groan slithers from his mouth and his vision goes a little fuzzy for a second. Cere’s hand clamps on his knee to hold his lower leg as still as possible.
“I mean it,” Greez continues. “I’ve got a half-naked kid gushing blood all over my galley, there’s burned fur everywhere, and how the hell am I gonna use all this before it spoils?!”
Once the spasms pass, Cal bites the thread and snaps it with his teeth so he can finish off another row of stitches, then looks up from the pants he’s mending while he waits. Greez is pacing back and forth between the table and the galley counter, which is presently invisible beneath a dead, skinned, fully-grown kybuck. Ghworrkaar, evidently unaware she was shedding quite a lot of fur from her blaster-singed pelt, had boarded the Mantis not long ago with the kybuck slung over her back. While BD was busy rinsing off a coating of mud in the ‘fresher and the rest of them didn’t have much of a grasp on Shyriiwook, some gestures and educated guesses had gotten her point across – the meat was a gift, both in thanks for Cal rescuing a large number of her people from certain enslavement, and for Cere giving the Partisans and Wookiees as many medical supplies as the crew could spare. They needed them more, Cere had said… although, sitting at the table with his leg torn open from knee to ankle, Cal can’t help but be relieved she kept some in reserve. One misstep and a wyyyschokk’s pincers had almost made him an amputee.
“Call it cruel and unusual punishment,” he says, watching Greez helplessly gesticulate at the entire kybuck just waiting to be butchered.
Sighing, Greez runs two hands over his head. “Maybe I should. I appreciate it, but I really have no idea –”
“I meant for us. We’ve been listening to you complain for fifteen minutes now.”
“Oh, ha ha,” Greez says flatly. “There’s gotta be thirty kilos of raw meat here. Would you like to tell me how to fit this thing in the conservator?” He folds his arms across his chest, taps his foot, levels a mild glare at Cal. “Go on, I’m waiting.”
“Captain,” Cere interjects, “if you’re truly at a loss, I have a suggestion – cut off a bit for us to keep, and then go out there, find a translator, and ask the Wookiees if they have a firepit or something to roast the kybuck in.” One of her hands closes around Cal’s bare ankle, again holding his leg still as he flinches through another round of electric muscle cramps. Wyyyschokk venom isn’t fatal, but the pincers still did plenty of damage and Cal lost all control of that leg before he was halfway back to the ship. Cere took over medic duty after ten minutes of applying pressure himself didn’t help; he then figured as long as he was sitting around with nothing to do except cringe in pain every thirty seconds, he might as well fix his torn pants.
Wookiees are an extremely social people who consider sharing meals a gesture of friendship, BD-1 says from his perch next to the medkit. And a number of them here have recently been broken out of Imperial holding cells, where they probably were being fed starvation portions, when they were fed at all.
Cal relays that to Greez, whose expression is lifting from exasperated to intrigued. “Given how long the Partisans have been holding the line here,” Cere adds, “I can’t imagine they’d turn down a filling meal they don’t have to cook themselves, either.”
“Oh,” Greez says, “oh, that’s a good idea… droid, any chance you understand Wookiee language?” he asks, then smacks himself on the forehead, waves them off as he rushes down the steps. “What am I saying, I don’t even understand you. I’ll be right back – don’t let me find you dead on the deck when I return, kid!”
His concern is overwhelming. Cere watches him leave over her shoulder, then says, “All right, while he’s gone and can’t yell at us for doing this in the galley –” She gives up on the soaked towel, laying it aside and digging into the medkit. “This isn’t clotting. We’re gonna need the laser sutures… how many of those stims have you taken in the last hour?”
“Two,” Cal says.
Considering the circ*mstances, BD says, Cal can get away with a third. The benefits outweigh the risks.
“Once I’ve got these in, then.” Grabbing another towel to blot up the little red streamers of blood already leaking from the wound again, she checks the suture gun and marks off her targets with an ink pen. Laser sutures need to be spaced directly across from one another or else the skin won’t knit evenly. Since they plan to accelerate his healing with another of BD’s stimulants, they only have one chance to get this right. Cal does his best not to move. “Do you want anesthetic?”
“It’s fine. Just get it over with.”
“Tell me if your leg starts cramping,” she says, and begins.
The suture gun presses to his skin and goes ka-chunk. Cal presses his lips together at the hot pinch, but it’s hardly worse than the rest of his leg, so he grips the edges of the chair and holds still until the first jolt hits his ankle again. “Stop, stop,” he hisses quickly. His hand shoots out of its own accord and grabs her shoulder so she doesn’t suture him in the knee.
It’s a long one, this time, so they have to wait it out, Cere mopping more blood off his leg, Cal looking at the lights reflecting in the shining brown curves of the kybuck’s horns. He doesn’t know what kybuck tastes like. He doesn’t recall what meat in general tastes like. “You know,” Cal says out of nowhere, huffing a barely-audible laugh, “I feel guilty.”
“For being injured, or something else?” she asks.
“Well – both,” he admits, because the Partisans need help he can provide and would if he wasn’t half-nakedly gushing blood all over Greez’s galley, “but… mostly the food thing.” He’s been here long enough to know making and sharing meals is how Greez shows affection, too. The Latero got over his initial distrust, tried connecting with Cal the best way he knew how, and was stonewalled. And instead of simply accepting this annoying quirk, ignoring it as long as he kept searching for the key into that vault on Bogano, he and Cere are trying to help. Is it working? Cal has no idea. He doesn’t feel any different, and food is no less intimidating or repellent.
“Cal, you’re trying,” Cere says. “That’s all we want from you.”
Except a holocron. She wants the holocron even more.
“And,” she continues, picking up the suture gun at his nod now that the cramping has passed, “you’ve given Greez a studio audience for all his cooking-show fantasies, so he’s pretty thrilled about that.”
Ka-chunk. Ka-chunk. Ka-chunk. She starts on the other side. “Sometimes I wish I wasn’t like this,” Cal says, and it tastes like confessing a dirty secret, something bitter he’s kept locked away for so long it’s almost a surprise to remember it. He’s like this because he had to be in order to survive… but it karking sucks.
Cere is silent while she continues injecting laser sutures. Once she’s reached the bottom of the wound, however, she looks at him with such blatant, unreserved compassion he has to drop his gaze before she drowns him. “I don’t know if it’ll help right now,” she says, quietly, sincerely, “but I would really like you to consider the possibility you have an eating disorder and you can’t help being like this. And even if you don’t, none of it is your fault.”
Those two damning words keep popping up, no matter how often Cal fends them off. “I don’t,” he says desperately, meaning I can’t. He’s supposed to be a Jedi. He’s felt more like a Jedi in the past weeks than he has in five years on Bracca, and Cere and Greez need him to be a Jedi, otherwise this whole fragile mission crumbles into dust. The concept of Cal-the-Jedi does not line up with Cal-who-has-an-eating-disorder. They’re misaligned laser sutures. Maybe if he could trace it back to the Purge somehow, it would feel legitimate, but he can’t have an eating disorder after a poisoning and a bad clinic stay and a few years subsisting on ration bars. Put in perspective, those were nothing.
Greez’s return is foretold by an oncoming tsunami of joy and anticipation. “You were right, Cere!” he announces (BD makes a disgruntled noise but goes unacknowledged). “One of those Partisans proposed to me on the spot when she heard… a couple of the younger-looking Wookiees are stoking up a fire in a big old fuel drum for me. Don’t worry, it’s been scrubbed out good.”
“What are they using as fuel?” Cere asks. “Wookiees are very… opposed to burning their trees for firewood.”
“Didn’t ask. Unless it’s a dead stormtrooper, I really don’t care. I’m – oh, come on, didja have to do that in front of me?!”
Cal’s too busy swearing under his breath to accommodate Greez’s squeamishness right now. Cere activated the sutures while he was distracted, but that didn’t lessen the agony of both sides of his wound abruptly getting crushed together in a microsecond. BD ejects one more stim; Cere catches it and sticks it straight into Cal’s knee. “Uh,” Greez ventures nervously, “everything okay in here?”
“If you start having heart palpitations or hyperventilating for no reason, say something,” she instructs Cal, then, to Greez, says, “I think so. Why?”
“‘cause you’ve got your understanding face on and the longbean looks teary.”
Cal blinks hard to erase the pesky wetness in the corners of his eyes. “I just had twenty-two laser sutures implanted in my skin and then my torn-up shin was forcibly closed,” he says.
“Sure, after you hopped in here on one foot and tried to laugh that injury off… anyway,” Greez continues, grabbing his entire spice rack and inspecting jars, “I’m gonna cut as much meat as I have room to freeze, and the rest’s getting a nice spice rub and going straight on the spit. Be a real old-fashioned cookout, huh?” He eyes one full jar critically. “Call it a white catabar rub, since I think that’s the only thing I’ve got enough of. Cal, you ever had this stuff?”
“Yeah,” Cal says. It sounds familiar. He drags the cuff of his pants closer so he can finish fixing the holes. “When I was a lot younger, I think? I don’t remember.”
Greez unscrews the lid, turns around, and holds out the jar.
Before Cal can refuse, the Latero suddenly says, “Wait, no. What am I thinking?” He then takes a spoon, scoops a tiny pale heap of the spice onto it, and sets that on the table instead. “No pressure.”
BD leaps up there to scan it and announces it is, in fact, white catabar, a variety of the spice made from the burned roots of the catabar plant rather than the dry leaves. Instead of the characteristic tanginess, white catabar has a sweet, smoky, mellow flavor which is also described as ‘round’, though the droid adds he doesn’t understand that part.
“Me either….” Perhaps because Cal’s been eating rectangular meals for half a decade. He eyes the spice between stitches. It’s hard to come up with a suitably off-putting description for a dusting of dry catabar, but he settles on, “Looks like that powdered insulation used in starships. The one they activate with water so it blows up to like, a million times its size before it hardens.”
Greez snort-laughs over the kybuck rump he’s delicately butchering. “Yeah, kid, you caught me. I totally season my dinner with bulkhead insulation.” He pauses, two knives held at the ready, then says, “To be fair, if I did want to poison somebody’s food, that would be a great way of doing it. Not on my ship, though. Real messy.”
Cal’s pretty sure that offhanded remark would’ve inspired some deep, primal terror in him a month ago. Today, knowing full well Greez isn’t going to poison him (and to suggest otherwise would be insulting his integrity as a chef), Cal bites off another piece of thread. Eventually, he’ll need to accept the inevitable and get a new pair of pants, but until that day comes he’s going to keep repairing these over and over. They’re comfortable and practical.
“Now we’re seeing some results,” Cere says. Cal leans forwards, looks down at his leg without moving it – blood is still gently oozing out of the fissure in his shredded skin, but it’s showing signs of scabbing over. “See, Captain, I told you this thing was a better investment than a blender.” She waves the suture gun with an air of smug satisfaction, then replaces it in the medkit.
Cere’s busy putting away the supplies scattered across the deck. Greez is hyper-focused on carving slices of kybuck meat even as two of his hands are working spice into the rest of it. And BD-1, though he watches, doesn’t make a sound as Cal cautiously pokes a fingertip into the catabar. Up close, he thinks, it almost reminds him of soft, powdery snow, actually. The kind that’d drifted against the viewports of the Crucible as Cal and his clanmates bounced in anticipation, waiting for Master Yoda to say it was time and lead them to the Ilum Temple.
“Someone poisoned my dinner once on Bracca,” Cal says, so suddenly he doesn’t even realize he’s going to say the words until they’re already out there. Greez pauses, then resumes his work, slower. Cere shuts the latches of the medkit and gets up from the deck to sit on a chair, giving him her full attention. “I don’t know who. I’m not even really sure why, but if I had to guess, it’s because Prauf offered to train me and I got transferred from Hazmat – just about all of us began there, it was the worst job in the Guild – to a Rigger position. I still lived in the dorm then and ate at the mess hall once a day because we got that meal taken from our pay. Someone hacked a serving droid to lace my tray with chronamite powder.”
BD gives a horrified bwoooo. Greez turns around. “Okay, do not think I’m blaming you, because I definitely ain’t, but – how didn’t you taste that? It’d taste like –” He breaks off, as if he just remembered that whole long list of foods Cal said he couldn’t handle.
“Metal,” Cal says. “It did. Everything did. As far as I can tell, everything in the mess halls was sourced from some warehouse where it’d been sitting forgotten for fifty years – it all just tasted like can. So I couldn’t tell the difference. I was so sick within a couple hours I was afraid I’d die on the ‘fresher floor.” He takes a deep breath, pushes the needle through the fabric of his pants again and again. “I finally had a seizure the next morning and didn’t wake up afterwards. If someone I barely knew wasn’t kind enough to carry me to Upanni’s medical clinic….”
Silence. In the distance, blaster fire, a faint explosion that’s felt more than heard – proof the Partisans and Wookiees are still holding the line, and Cal should be out there with them, aiding where he can and searching for the breadcrumb trail Master Cordova was following. He will be, once he has pants on.
“I was joking about the insulation thing,” Greez mumbles.
Rolling his eyes, Cal says, “Yeah, I know that. I’ve known you aren’t going to poison me since… I dunno, a day or two after we met. But that’s why I’m paranoid, okay?” Stitch, stitch, stitch. Pull. Knot. Break the thread. “That’s… where it started.”
“…how old were –”
“Thirteen. I’d only been on Bracca for a few months.”
Greez turns away from the counter and heads towards the lounge, aiming for a neutral demeanor, but he’s flushing a sick horror into the Force and looks nauseated. Maybe Cal should’ve kept his mouth shut. “I’m – just gonna step outside for a second. Get a breath of fresh air. And… yeah, I gotta find someone to turn that kybuck over for me so I can do the other side….”
Cal flicks a look at Cere. She has a deeply thoughtful expression, though once she notices Cal looking she wipes it away. “I’m sorry,” she says. “That must’ve been terrible.”
“And expensive,” he says dryly. “Took me three years to pay off the money I owed the Guild for medical care.” And then he’d hardly finished when his lung collapsed and put him back at square one, financially speaking. He might still owe them for that treatment. Cal doesn’t lose sleep over it. The only ‘repayment’ he’d like to give P-7B is a computer virus.
Greez returns a few minutes later with a shaggy grey Wookiee who’s about three times his height, but has a skinny gangliness about him that suggests he’s not done growing yet. “Thanks, right up here – ignore the half-naked bloody kid –”
“Technically, I’m not half-naked,” Cal says. “Still have my underwear on.”
The Wookiee peers at Cal’s outstretched leg, partially clotted now and continuing to do so as the laser sutures hold the gash shut, and makes a whuffling noise before giving Cal an approving sort of nod. Apparently his injury qualifies as impressive to a teenage Wookiee. The guy then goes and easily flips the kybuck over like it’s a piece of flimsiplast before bounding down the steps and heading back out. “Thanks!” Greez shouts after him. “Should be done in about five minutes and then we can get her on the spit – the fire’s roaring already,” he adds for Cere and Cal’s benefit, taking two handfuls of catabar and smearing them across the raw meat. “This is gonna be great.”
Classic Greez. Give him something new to cook and he forgets he’s in a warzone. Cal sets the needle and thread aside, shakes out his pants; the ripped leg looks good as… well, not new, but about as good as it looked when he first boarded the Mantis. It’ll do. He glances at Cere, who catches his unasked question and says, “Give it five more minutes or so until the bleeding stops entirely, and then we’ll slap some bacta on it and I think you’ll be all right to get up and move around. Carefully.”
Resigned to sitting half-naked in the galley for a little longer, Cal finds himself studying the catabar again. He pokes his finger into it a second time, rubs his fingertips together so the spice drifts off his skin and onto the spoon. Starship insulation. Powder snow.
He touches a white-coated finger to his tongue before he can talk himself out of it. The catabar tastes like a memory, a burned sweetness, the crispy, sugary shell of a warm pastry he shared with Joola in the refectory.
“Ready?” Greez asks.
Cal swallows hard, swallows the stomach acid so it stays where it belongs, swallows an automatic hell no. He closes his eyes for a second and then holds out his hand.
Greez drops three koja nuts into Cal’s palm. The small, pitted spheres look nothing like the koja-nut-flavored ration bars Cal’s had for every meal today. They’ve already been shelled and they have no scent Cal can detect. He puts two of them on the galley table and studies the third, digs a thumbnail into it, and breaks it, lets one half join the others on the tabletop. The little piece remaining gives off a faintly nutty smell, now, reminiscent of the ration bar. That’s all the ration bars earlier were – koja nuts ground into paste and smushed into a block with a binding agent and enough powdered nutrients to keep the average Human going for a while.
Nothing but a ration bar without all the other junk, Cal tells himself, and shuts his eyes again and tosses the piece of koja nut into his mouth.
Sometimes Greez watches cooking holoshows while he’s cooking. He isn’t even following along or anything – he’s dicing dried fruit and onions to go in the pot alongside one of their thirteen thousand cuts of kybuck, and the Pantoran draped in black lace displays muted enthusiasm for some kind of colorful icy treat she’s purchasing from a cart. Cal’s not sure what’s with her wilted, monochrome outfit. Among a sea of droopy puffs and limp tulle, she looks like a cake that’s melting beneath the brilliant twin suns.
“I had one of those once,” Greez says, handing off a bunch of pits and peels so Cal can throw them away. He sighs wistfully. “One for me, one for Yarra, the girl I was going with at the time. A traveling market from the Core set up shop in my city for just a week and everything was damn expensive, but for a girl like Yarra, it was worth it.”
“Do you remember the food at all, or just the girl?” Cal asks.
On the datapad screen, the Pantoran magically teleports from a street fair to a kitchen straight out of a horror set and begins preparing to recreate the snack herself. “Mostly the girl,” Greez admits, “for as long as that lasted, anyway… but the Rainbow Glacier was real good. I do remember the green lompop berry part was so karking sour she and I kept daring one another to hold our tongues to it as long as we could.” Another sigh, this one lacking the nostalgia. He must’ve spotted the grimace as Cal looked into the cooker, saw all the marbling on the meat, and imagined the feeling of slippery, slimy fat in his mouth. “I’d buy you a Rainbow Glacier if we ever found them and I didn’t think you’d gross yourself out with it somehow.”
“We’re trying to save the Jedi Order from complete extinction, and you’re upset because I can’t eat random street food?” Cal says flatly.
“Yeah,” Greez says, pulling the mepples closer to cut them up as well, “I am. You and Cere are the big-picture people. Me, I stick with the little picture – that’s this.” He gestures around him with the knife. “Myself, my ship, my crew. I gotta keep you guys fed and happy.” And you’re not making that easy goes unsaid. “Want to try this?” he adds.
Cal looks at the wizened, off-white bits of dry mepple on the cutting board. “Um.” He’s been trying. Some stuff he’s had to spit out because his throat sealed the blast doors and wouldn’t let him swallow. Then he feels guilty for wasting food, even though Greez has always brushed it off as some miniscule scrap he wouldn’t have missed anyway.
Greez picks up a piece and eats it himself. “Not as much flavor as the fresh stuff,” he says, “but you still get that nice burst of mepple… and it’s a lot more authentic than that juice you drink by the barrelful.”
Realizing he genuinely likes that juice is a surprise.
The tiny chunk of mepple, once he’s convinced his gag reflex to take a hike and gotten past the unsettling chewiness, isn’t half-bad either.
“Bad news, Cere,” Greez says as he enters the lounge. Cere makes a mildly interested humming noise but doesn’t look up from whatever she’s been reading for the past hour. Greez’s ‘bad news’ rarely requires anyone’s full attention – when he’s not flipping his lid over something insignificant, he’s usually joking or exaggerating for effect. “We’ll need fuel when we leave. Probably gonna need to go a ways to find it cheap, too; the stations in this sector will wring you for everything you’ve got….”
Oh, BD-1 says, just fuel prices again. So apparently Cal’s yet to mention his little bogling friend had some serious stomach troubles and excreted effusively all over the Mantis’s boarding ramp.
“I think you should tell him,” Cal mutters. Yawning, he tips his head back onto the lounge table. There’s plenty of space on the sofa, but he’s not completely sure he hasn’t gotten any bogling poop on him, and finding that staining the potolli-weave would send poor Greez into a germophobic fit he’d never recover from.
“We’re still fine,” Cere says after a minute. Cal cranes his neck even further to watch her swipe through some documents on her datapad. “I’ve gotta hand it to Lateron Spaceworks; for a luxury ship, it has very efficient fuel consumption.” As usual, whenever someone compliments his ship or his people or his homeworld, Greez lights up like Coruscant. “Hm… we are spending more on food than we used to.”
“Well, yeah,” Greez says blankly as Cal stiffens. “Did you forget this entire other person we’ve got on board now? He’s sitting right there, trying to pretend if he doesn’t see it, that mess on my ramp doesn’t exist… you better hose that off in the morning, by the way.”
“Am I –” Cal hesitates, searching for the right words, “costing you guys too much or something?”
Surprised, Cere looks up quickly. “Of course not,” she says. “We did deliberately go searching for a surviving Jedi; I budgeted for an eventual third crewmember long before you turned up on the Imperial radar. I thought the agreement was clear – you’re doing the legwork searching for a way to get the holocron from the Vault, and we handle the logistics.”
“And since you don’t eat much besides ration bars and mepple juice, which are pretty cheap, we’re probably coming in under budget,” Greez adds.
“No, we’re slightly over… but that’s you, not him. You’re cooking a lot more.”
Greez shrugs and, before Cal can open his mouth again, swats him atop the head with a piece of flimsiplast. “Don’t go around blaming yourself,” he orders. “Not like the food doesn’t get eaten. And frankly, having more actual meals is gonna be healthier for everyone in the long run – my oldest relative lived to be a hundred and nine. He was an ass, so I intend to beat his record.”
That doesn’t do much to alleviate the unease of feeling like a burden. Remembering something Greez said a while back on the refueling station, Cal turns around to face the table and Cere and says, “I’m curious, and I guess you don’t have to tell me since I’m just the legwork guy, but… how are you paying for – well – this?” He tilts his head towards Greez, indicating both the Mantis and its pilot. The Jedi Order was provided for by the Republic; it didn’t seem likely Cere had drawn a salary before the Purge, and now she’s a wanted fugitive whether she’s a practicing Jedi or not.
He's expecting don’t ask, but Cere sets down her datapad. “When I escaped Imperial captivity, I didn’t do it empty-handed,” she says, looking distant. “It took a little while to find a way out, and I stumbled into a security post near the cell blocks. The guards had been… killed in the rioting. I’ve always been good at slicing and decryption, and the terminal’s last user hadn’t logged out before he died, so it was only a minute before I discovered a lot of extremely sensitive intel.” She draws a slow breath. “There was no one alive to see me and I covered my tracks. I made it out with a datastick of Imperial secrets. And I knew what I had, what it was worth, how dangerous it could be, so I held onto it for a long time. Only sold it a few months before I met Greez.”
“To…?”
“I don’t know. We communicated through an intermediary. They convinced me they were trustworthy, and vice versa, and they could use it where I could not, so I sold them the data. For a little less than I’d hoped, but some of the intel was quite outdated by that point. They still paid very well.” She shakes herself a bit, shakes off the memory. Her eyes are clear again when she meets Cal’s. “Money is not going to be an issue for a while yet as long as we’re diligent.”
Greez bops Cal on the head with the flimsi again while he’s still absorbing that. The concept of money not being an issue is foreign. For five years, some part of Cal’s brain was always preoccupied with it – how much he had tucked away in his locker or his flat, how much he owed the Guild, how much a new pair of boots would cost him, how much longer he could get away with taping up the old pair because his thirdhand welding torch was hanging on by a thread and he urgently needed to replace it so he could keep working, how much a slightly newer one would bleed him, how much a single drink at Grey’s Haunt would set him back. “Okay, Financial Hour with Cere Junda is over,” Greez says. “It’s time for my show.”
Sighing, Cal gets to his feet, and BD bounds from the deck to the table to Cal’s back. Hopefully this program gets cancelled soon, BD says. It doesn’t seem to be finding much of a viewership and the last few episodes have all felt like reruns.
Cal thinks BD may have a point there. When he follows Greez up to the galley, he finds more of the usual spread across the countertop. “Oh look, kybuck … you’re going to be making it until you die, huh?”
Snorting, Greez says, “No, and thank the gods for that. This is the last fresh piece – the rest’s all frozen and I think it’s staying that way for a while. But here’s the thing….” He indicates the row of ingredients with a sweep of his hand. “Everything we’ve got here, you’ve tasted – except for the raw meat, obviously – and you survived all of it.” There’s a sparkle of hope in his eye when Cal looks at him nervously. “Think maybe you could give the finished product a shot?”
Just like every other time Greez has suggested he try something new, Cal’s stomach rapidly rearranges itself into an impassable boulder and his throat tightens in warning. Real food. Not just some mepple or a ring of Red Nebula onion or a mixture of catabar and punctil (all of which, he notices, are laid out before him), but something cooked, changed into unfamiliarity.
Maybe it won’t be so bad. Cooked onions and cenwick probably don’t taste too different. At one point, he’d known what cooked onion tasted like. He can’t imagine what heat will do to the slightly sticky calarantum root, though – soften it into goo that’ll coat his tongue until he gags? And that’s not even getting into the question of the meat. There are… bits in meat. Fatty bits. Stringy bits. Gristly bits.
“You don’t gotta if you’re not ready,” Greez says. He slides a knife from the holder and presses it into Cal’s hand. “But I’d like to have dinner before dawn. Think you can handle the mepple?”
As BD wonders when Cal became an unpaid extra on this cooking show, Cal nods silently and rolls a few of the dried mepples onto a cutting board. The more he looks at them, handles them, tastes them, the less daunting they seem. Wrinkly and squishy, sure, but they’re a kriffing fruit. Cal’s a Jedi. He can’t be afraid of a fruit. And if he is, hacking it into teeny pieces with a kitchen knife helps. The onion takes more mental preparation – while he doesn’t mind the stinging, watering eyes, the scent lingers on his skin a lot longer than he can tolerate. He gets it done and Greez lets him go scrub his hands with the sparklemint soap in the ‘fresher until he can’t smell onion anymore.
And then only the genuinely frightening part remains: the kybuck. Cal’s categorically refused to have anything to do with raw meat up to this point, so Greez gets that squared away in the pot, but Cal has to stand there setting the table and knowing all the tolerable ingredients are being cooked alongside… that. The unknown variable. He keeps standing there holding a stack of plates for too long and finally Greez says, “Cal.”
“What?”
“You can’t think of one time in your entire life you had some kinda steak and enjoyed it?”
“I – I don’t know.” Cal deliberately tainted his own memories to keep from wanting something he couldn’t have, and the stay in the medical clinic did the rest. He’s trying, though. Greez isn’t a patient guy but he’s been so patient with this messed-up kid on his crew, so Cal sinks into a chair and closes his eyes and tries to think. No good memories on Bracca. He goes back further, and further, and… “There was – this one time in the Temple we had nerf,” he finally murmurs. “With sea cabbage. I mean, it wasn’t the only time, but… that was Winnicker’s hatchday.” The meat was so tender it’d fallen apart the moment he stuck his fork into it. He’d wrapped chunks of nerf in the crisp, warm cabbage, dunked it in something that might’ve been glockaw sauce. No metal flavor or overpowering amounts of emulsauce. If there’d been fatty or gristly bits, he hadn’t noticed them. “It was good.”
“Yeah? Try something for me – when this is done, think about that instead of all the stomach-turning stuff you usually come up with.”
Cal opens his eyes. “Greez, I know what you’re doing, but I’m not a droid.” BD, spelunking in the fruit bowl, makes a rude noise. “I’m not sure you can – reprogram me to think positively about food.”
Greez closes the cooker lid with a clunk and smiles. “From where I’m standing, sounds like it’s already working.”
After two minutes of sitting there, Cal gets permission to vacate the galley until dinner’s ready so he doesn’t sit there and psych himself out. He sorts through some junk he picked up on Kashyyyk, cleans a gummed-up joint in BD’s right leg, waters his potential mushrooms, soothes himself by organizing his emergency stash. It’s migrated to a crate beneath his bunk to make room in the terrarium. He’s now up to fifteen loose ration bars, plus two entire boxes Greez gave him specifically for this purpose, six juice pouches, and that one lone packet of sweet-sand cookies. Resisting the urge to hoard his food rather than eat it is still hard, sometimes impossible, especially when he’s handed three bars for meals and then a couple in between for snacks. Cal doesn’t need four or five rations per day, but generally he eats them anyway.
He’s only suffered one headache in the past week. Either his body’s grown used to the frequent Force-usage again, or there’s a connection here.
“Dinner’s up, longbean!”
Cal sighs and pushes the closed box back under the cot. “Should I get annoyed when he calls me that? I hate those things.”
He could probably just tell Greez he doesn’t like the nickname, BD points out, though there’s a high chance Greez will come up with an even worse replacement.
“Mm.” To be honest, Cal doesn’t really mind too much. As long as Greez holds to the hard limits and never makes Cal interact with actual longbeans in any way, he can cope with it.
When Cal enters the galley, he’s faced with something new. Aside from the usual wrapped ration bar and a cup of water, there’s real food at his place – four neat little bites of kybuck, resting atop chopped mepple and onions and cenwick, with two salted strips of calarantum root lying nearby. Cal freezes for a moment and BD hops up into his seat, then the table, scanning the plate, oblivious to Greez’s dirty look. “Would you cut it out?” the Latero mutters, flapping a hand at BD until he backs off. “Spirits know what that does to the food….”
No chronamite or bulkhead insulation, BD says cheerfully. Cal’s good.
Cal manages a weak smile and then forces himself to walk the rest of the way to the table, sit down. His stomach is in his throat. He tries to think about the nerf at the Temple as he shakily lowers his eyes to the plate. “Uh,” he says, “weird question, but… what’s the calarantum like when it’s cooked…?”
“Cooking it takes the bitterness out,” Cere says. “Otherwise, it tastes like raw calarantum. It’s softer, though, kind of… starchy? It reminds me of a fern potato.”
He cuts one of the roots in half with the side of his fork. It does have a squashy, crumbly, potato-like appearance now, and it’s overall less intimidating than the meat, so Cal scoops a pinky-nail-sized blob of calarantum onto his fork. Smells like the thin raw slice Greez had given him the other day. Tastes pretty much exactly as Cere said. He’s not sure he likes calarantum root, but it hasn’t killed him yet.
And then, once again, the kybuck can no longer be ignored. That does not look or smell pleasant no matter how much Cal tries to link it to the nerf. He buys himself some time by separating one tiny square of meat, scraping mepple and cenwick away and peeling off a sneaky, near-invisible shred of onion clinging to the underside. In the process, he catches a throb of amusem*nt mixed with sadness and an excruciating guilt – Cal’s head pops up automatically and he zeroes in on Cere, who blinks and then looks away quickly. “Don’t stare at me,” Cal mutters.
“Sorry,” Cere says. She clears her throat. “Trilla – my apprentice – she was the sort of person who didn’t like her food touching. You… reminded me of her, for a moment, that’s all.”
Cal doesn’t like food in general. Except maybe mepples, and he’ll acknowledge koja nuts and onions and ahrisa are okay, too. Look at him, expanding his horizons… he’s not sure he wants to expand them far enough to encompass this steak, though.
No pressure, he thinks. Greez and Cere have mostly stopped reminding him he doesn’t have to taste anything he doesn’t want to, because at this point, he knows. It’s always his choice. And in the end, he can’t do this one; his sore stomach is too opposed, the meat is viscerally repulsive no matter how hard he tries to frame it in a positive light. He does his best and the fork still won’t move from his plate to his mouth. But he can try the cooked mepples and onions and cenwick, decide he prefers the first one raw and the second two cooked, and nibble at the calarantum root a little more before he has the ration bar, and that feels like progress.
