A Shadow of What You Used to Be (18)
Chapter 18: Truce | Cal Kestis x Irele Skywalker
Requested by Anon
Summary: There is another! Yearsafter young Anakin Skywalker departed Tatooine, his mother Shmi delivers a secondchild—this time, a daughter. Whilst the circumstance of the girl’s birth remains unexplained, Irele Skywalker has yet to choose the true path between those laid out for her.
Tags: Fem! OC, Irele Skywalker, Force-sensitive! OC, Anakin’s Younger Sister, Skywalker! OC, Darth Vader’s Secret Apprentice, Long-lost Sibling
A/N: Hello guys, I’m sorry if I’ve become so inactive last year. The slump was one thing, but more and more things kept piling on my shoulders that it’s becoming more difficult to bear. I lost my grandmother last year. My only comfort was that I was able to take care of her and spend time with her. For a while, I lost my energy to write at the time; and now that it’s the new year, I’m picking up my old habits again. I hope you guys have had a great Christmas and I wish you guys a wonderful 2022. ❤ As for me, I’m okay and I will be.
Requesting to be tagged:@heavenly1927
Also in AO3
Chapters: Prelude – 1 – 2 – 3– 4 – 5 – 6 – 7 – 8 – 9 – 10 – 11 – 12 – 13 – 14 – 15 – 16 | Previous: Part 17 | Next: Part 19 | Masterlist
19 of ?
Their screams echoed in the ice, but no one to hear it but themselves as they wind got colder and heavier. Cal managed to snatch a stray cable on one hand—apparent scraps from the excavation—and used to Force to shrink the minute inches that separated him from Irele’s arm.
That ultimately saved them from a bone-crushing demise, along with a few bumps of frozen outcropping delaying their fall, they may not know it but they’re a few feet away from the ground. With her free hand, Irele fished out her torch to flash on whatever’s below her feet. Without telling Cal at all, she pried Cal’s hand open so she can free herself and free herself she did, while warranting an abrupt “Hey!” from her apparent savior; she fell for a few feet but safely landed in a cat-like manner.
“D’aw come on!” Cal groaned through his teeth. He peeked down and decided to follow. He wasn’t sure whether to trust the Force, his instincts, or the mere fact that Irele had touched the ground nearly unscathed. He contemplated for a second before unfolding his swelling fingers clasped on the frozen, brittle cable.
When Cal straightened his back, he found it odd to discover that Irele has her saber in its sheath. She has her back turned to him, and so he examined her secretly while she examined the cave they’re in.
“Well, I guess we have to find our way out of here,” Cal awkwardly breaks the silence, but he wasn’t rewarded with the answer that he expected.
“Look over there, several openings—they must lead up to a tunnel network,”
He wholeheartedly startled by how agreeable she was. Irele quickly spun to face him and he jumped at the sudden confrontation.
“Listen, I don’t know about you but I don’t plan on dying of hypothermia while hundreds—if not thousands—of feet below the surface. So for now, as much as I wanna preserve my pride which I don’t have the luxury of, we…” she choked at the very idea of the word. She clears her throat, “We’ll have a truce. And that expires once we’re back on the ground, then we’ll go back hating and trying to kill each other.”
Out of habit, Irele uttered the word “Understand?” in Huttese—her second native tongue—to which Cal was taken aback by. He just nervously nodded, pretending to have understood the last word. She didn’t wait for Cal to say anything more, she expected that he complies because realistically speaking, there’s no other option.
She shuddered at the thought of what Second Sister or any of the Inquisitors would say once they find out she went in connivance with a Jedi just to get out of a cave. Scandalous!
Like a whisper, BD-1 nudged Cal’s jaw and flashed a dynamic map of the cave’s subterranean level. Two yellow blips indicate himself and Irele, surrounded my raised mounds of blue holographic light signifying the dead ends, the rock and ice formations, and open paths.
“Listen, umm…” Cal tries to call her attention while she was busy contemplating which path to go through.
“Irele.”
“What?”
“My name is Irele. You hesitated because you didn’t know what to call me, is that it?”
“Y-Yeah, you’re right, uhh…” he redirected his attention to the map. “T-Take a look at this.”
She approached him with such an assertiveness just by the way she walked; he guesses that she’s lived a life of entitlement, privilege, and power. She was standing by the opposite side of the map, the blue light highlighting the brown tinge in her hair, the yellow blips dotting her eyes like stars against a moonless sky.
“BD-1 managed to take a perimeter scan of this part of the cave we’re standing and its closest proximity which is just about a mile and a half. Would’ve been two miles if we were closer to the surface for a better signal.”
“Oh, so we do have the luxury of going back if we took a wrong turn,” Irele chirped. Then she hovered her finger over one of the paths. “We can start here, this pocket right here looks promising; if not, then we either turn around or head straight.”
“Okay then, I’ll roll with that,”
“Ah-ah, you take the lead,”
Cal caught on quite quickly, “How would I know you wouldn’t stab me in the back?”
“Funny, I was about to ask you the same thing,” she inhaled, immediately regretting it as the cold air froze her throat. “Don’t worry, I’ll give you a proper Jedi’s death instead of leaving you out to freeze.”
“Should I be comforted by that?” His brows furrowed.
“It’s the best I can do, buddy,” she shrugged.
He sighed and did take the lead. When he got a considerable distance from Irele, he whispered to BD-1, “You got my back, right, little bud?”
“Woo!” BD-1 whistled quietly.
–
Normally, Stormtroopers take ten to fifteen minutes only to write a status report; but with Irele involved and having been into an accident, they exceeded the deadline; going over the same paragraph mentioning the young Sith in command, debating whether it’s presumptuous, exaggerated, or understated.
“Hey,” uttered the girl, the boy turned around to acknowledge. And she continued. “Why did you help me back up there?”
He could not answer. As a matter of fact, he can’t pinpoint the exact reason why. Irele watches him trip over his words as he makes up an answer, she continued to stare at his shifting eyes.
She internalizes, “Oh, so that’s the Jedi’s compassion in action. Cute.”
“Don’t hurt yourself thinking of a good answer… if there isn’t any to begin with.”
“You could’ve killed me the moment I landed down here,” he suggested.
Irele clicked her tongue against her teeth and rolled her eyes around the subterranean space they’re in, trying to avoid the topic in earnest.
She squinted her eyes at him and slightly nodded, “I don’t like fighting in the cold.”
Cal gulped. He studied her as she came up with a plan to escape the cave and return to the surface.
“What are you exactly?”
Her head swung to the side to look at him in disbelief, “Are you kidding me?”
“N-No! That’s not what I meant! I mean… I know you’re human, but… So far, you’re the—”
“The what?”
“The most… docile Sith I’ve encountered,” it would appear that Cal did his best to come up with an adjective for Irele. The last time he met a Sith, she clung onto the windshield of the Mantis and attempted to steal control of the wheel using the Force. “You could take that as a compliment.”
“Thanks? I guess,”
Back in the Mantis, Cere frantically shoots back and forth on the computer terminal, hoping for Cal’s comm signal to bite—but to no avail.
“Cal? Cal, do you copy!?” Cere shouted through the microphone. After a minute of static, she gave up and took his seat next to Greez. “Nothing!”
“Look, I know it looks bad, but he’s a big kid. He can handle himself!” consoled Greez, but clearly that wasn’t enough to stroke the older woman’s nerves.
“Something doesn’t feel right, Cap, I feel like he’s encountered something… like a paradox,”
Greez admits to not being the most knowledgeable when it comes to Jedi beliefs, but with his practical living, he shares his own inkling that whatever it may be—he’s sure that Cal can handle it.
Meanwhile, Trilla has caught wind that Irele had been entangled with a Jedi, fell into a chasm when a Jotaz pounded the ground until it crumbled, and are now in the deepest level of the caverns. The girl’s circumstance gave her a thought, but it’s a shot in a dark—a bold one at that. What ought to be most perfect situation to test Irele’s apparent immunity from Vader’s wrath is—given how it looks like right now—is a baseless claim, in Vader’s perspective, at least.
“That’s the only report you have of her?” Trilla feigned concern for a comrade and the Stormtroopers did not see through it.
“Yes, Second Sister. Unfortunately, the search party is having difficulty in navigating the unpredictable terrain. We have no record of the underground levels of this area, so there’s lots of unexpected twists and turns,”
“For all we know, she could be in the other side of the region,” the trooper’s seatmate interjected, half-jokingly. “Just a theory, though.”
They continued on their monitoring while Trilla was left out to her own thinking. She retreated to a spare room in the station where she could do some thinking, after spending what ought to be an hour of meditation, she was discouraged by the mere thought that Vader will defend the young girl and will only believe Irele’s side once asked.
Behind closed eyes, she remembered the way Irele glowered back and how her words now sounded like a warning rather than advice.
“Remember this, Trilla: the fantasy you think I have is no reality of mine.”
“No reality, my ass!” she growled and stormed out of the room.
Trilla ordered a small transport to bring her to the other excavation site, near the crashed Venator, she needn’t explain why; she only had a feeling that she will encounter one of them, but she prioritized getting the Jedi first.
The unlikely pair continued to find their way out of the caverns and back on ground level, heavily relying on BD-1’s map, they seem to traverse deeper into the complex cave system with rarely a clue if they’re any closer to their goal. For Cal, it almost reminded him of the Padawan trials back in the day.
“That turn looks promising,” he points ahead.
They come across an enclave with a narrow path that leads up; they follow that but were stopped short when they were facing a cliff-face of ice with no manageable handholds and a gap between them. Cal remembered that he had the grips from Dathomir, he jumped toward the wall with the clawed grips punched through the ice and proceeded to climb. At that moment, he was too focused on not falling that he forgot about Irele for a minute; when he was just a few punches away from the ledge, he felt a chilling breeze blow at him—causing his fists to quiver—and when he finally reached the top, Irele was sitting on the ground, legs crossed over each other, her chin resting on her palm as if she was bored, and smirked.
“You know, it’s dangerous to turn your back on me.”
“Are you gonna help me or what?”
Irele took a moment. She instantly remembers when she watched Cal examining a broken Zeffonian pot and got an inkling that he had psychometry. She has met—and killed—Jedi who share the same ability, or something similar. One incident in the past made her cautious of people like Cal.
“I think you can handle this yourself,” she scoots back to give him room. Having the urge to use his showy side, he sprung off of the handhold, spun in the air and over Irele’s head and landed after her.
“Such a big help.” Cal mumbled under his breath as he dusted off his sleeves.
At the end of their new path was another large mouth of the cave; Irele hesitated to follow, curious as to why Cal was so carefree in just stepping in. The girl followed her gut feeling—it was something ominous and it’s not good for her either—as she slowed her pace on purpose, doing so quietly that Cal couldn’t hear her or feel her behind him, the boy was beginning to pick up the same thing… but he was too late.
Cal finds the Second Sister at the other end of the cave.