"Is this a joke?" Cal stood just behind Zarxic, the squadron of troopers behind him.

The criminal had led them through sector 23B. At first walking along wide and busy roads that Cal had never frequented in his old life, Zarxic had begun taking them through familiar neighborhoods and down side-alleys that Cal knew like the back of his hand.

Unease growing with each additional step, a raising panic followed by a sinking dread twisted at Cal's guts as his old apartment building came into view.

Of course, those dueling emotions had disappeared in a flash, burnt away by a sudden assuredness that this was some kind of elaborate joke as Zarxic told them that this was the place.

"What? No. I swear, my people said that the Jedi lives here."

Distrust of the criminal spiking, Cal looked for any hint of deception in the Force. Finding plenty of fear for the blasters and blade at his back, Zarxic was telling the truth.

Looking back up at the dull duracrete block of a building, Cal wondered what cruel twist of fate would bring him back here.

Wonder if there's something about this place that just draws people in. Cal sourly searched for an explanation, trying not to look too closely at the dead-eyed workers shuffling in and out of the place, Then again… these are probably the cheapest rooms in the sector.

Breathing in and stalling, Cal looked back at the ground, catching sight of the lightsaber dangling from his belt as he did, Are you really doing this?

I'm giving them the chance to run. He tried to assure himself

A little doubt whispered at Cal's resolve, But what if they don't take it?

Clenching and then releasing both of his hands one at a time, Cal tried not to think of what would happen then.

But the fears didn't relent, Would you have stopped to listen to an Imperial?

Shaking his head, Cal looked up to speak to Zarxic, but the message was really for himself, "All right. Come one."

The criminal went wide-eyed, "You're just walking in?"

Cal roughly grabbed the man's shoulder, before speaking to the troopers. "We both are. All of you stay out here, this could get messy."

Surprised but happy to take the break, the troopers didn't protest as Cal pushed their unwilling guide towards the apartment block.

"Whoah, hey!" Zarxic protested as he stumbled along, "You just said it's dangerous."

Cal didn't stall for a step as he kept pushing the criminal along, "I keep my people out of danger, you're not my people. Now walk."

Jostling forward at another shove, Zarxic found little to no choice as he slowly made his way into the oppressive building.

Cal followed close behind, trying not to feel the weight of his past closing in around him. Where he could pretend that he didn't recognize the people on the street, in the building he was trapped in narrow halls, having to turn slightly to pass those walking in the opposite direction. Worse yet, these people had been his neighbors. Some of them friends, some of them kind, some of the cruel, they'd all been on a first-name basis. They'd all worked together, suffered beneath the Empire's boot together.

At least a couple had been on that train. On that rain-slicked platform.

Zarxic led Cal to one of the ancient turbolifts. Mercifully empty, the dingy old light was the same as Cal left it.

Settling into the cramped space, Zarxic hit the button for the third floor with a shaking hand.

"You sure that's the right floor?" Cal didn't expect his voice to be as rough as it was.

Zarxic flinched, not sure what had changed with the younger man, "Yes."

"Do you know the room number?"

"Yes." Zarxic swallowed.

"Don't tell it to me." Cal was horrified to think that he already knew where they were going, and he desperately wanted to avoid a terrible but inevitable confirmation.

While Zarxic only managed a confused nod in response, the turbolift doors opened with a raggedy shudder.

The third floor was devoid of the buzzing energy of the first floor. Cal almost wished for the distraction that was fruitlessly avoiding people.

Instead, he was left to look down at the familiar place. Stepping off of the squeaking lift just as he had after every back-breaking shift in the scrap yards, Cal was sickened to hear the same familiar creaks and groans; The same water rushing through rusted pipes; The same poorly muffled arguments coming from his former neighbors.

He was disgusted to see his old front door. Two-thirds of the way down the hall and off to the left.

Locked in silence, Cal roughly pushed Zarxic from the lift before following behind the increasingly fearful criminal.

One step after another, the hallway seemed infinitely long and impossibly short as Zarxic stopped in a familiar spot.

Cal stared at his old door, knowing for a fact that there was no one on the other side. "What was the Jedi's name?"

An awful unease had gathered in the hallway, it bared down full force on Zarxic as he sputtered, "I… uh. I just figured out their last name. Not their first."

"Their name," Cal repeated.

Compounding worries raising at the sound of the Imperial's deathly tone, Zarxic's mind worked in slow motion as he searched for the Jedi's name. After what felt a lifetime, the criminal finally managed to stammer out, "uh… Kestis."

Cal blinked at the closed door.

"Get out," he told the criminal.

"Wha-"

"Get out!"

Scared half a step backward, Zarxic stuttered a step before tuning completely and running from the hallway.

If he had risked a glance over his shoulder, he would have found Cal unmoving at the threshold of his old apartment. Instead, the gangster scurried onto the turbolift, all but huddling in the corner as the doors rumbled shut.

The overloud whirring of the lift shook the hall, just as it had over a year ago.

Cal was sure that the noghri had made it to the ground floor, and maybe out of the building, by the time he worked up the nerve to raise a hand to the door's control pad.

He found it locked, just the way he left it that fateful morning.

Barely containing a deepening dread and a growing terror, Cal moved a hand to try and wretch the door open via the Force.

Propelled by a wave stronger and more feral than Cal thought himself capable of, the door caved in on its side. Reduced to a crinkled lump of alusteel, it clogged a quarter of the frame.

But Cal could see into the old room perfectly fine.

Dirty light from the dirty hall laid as a bright line across the apartment floor, split in two by Cal's long shadow

The landlord, too frightened by the prospect of the Empire's inevitable return to the dingy one-room studio, must have never rented it out again. Or maybe he just couldn't find anyone willing to live there, even the most desperate of souls being too afraid of living in the den of a supposedly traitorous Jedi.

For whatever reason, the apartment was abandoned. A rotted and dusty shadow of Cal's old life, it captured his final moments as a macabre spectacle, bound in time by a thick layer of decay.

Dishes, left half washed in the sink before he had gone to work that day, sat crusted over with mildew and black streaks of decay, the dingy sink water still puddled after a year. His bed, pushed into a corner, lay beneath a mound of thin blankets, themselves coated with dust and mold. A cabinet hung from the wall, crooked and only attached by a single straining anchor point, it reeked from the putrefied food within.

Sickly and sticky air clung to the place. A bother even when it was lived in, the humidity from Bracca's constant rains had only made the room rot into a shaggy and fungus-infested mound.

Nearly outside of himself, Cal stepped into the gloom.

Old habits controlling his actions now, he clicked on the light: a single bulb that hung from the center of the room.

Something skittered behind the half-broken holoprojector. The floor groaned and sagged slightly where Cal stepped. Water slowly dripped from a pipe in the fresher.

The sound was rhythmic. A constant plip, plip, plip, that burrowed into Cal's psyche and made his skin crawl.

Alone in the rotted remains of his old life, a terrible truth clawed its way through Cal's head.

This place was a tomb. A crumbling temple to a life that no longer existed.

He'd spent years wasting away on this soggy trash heap, tempering a fear that all was lost with an idiotic hope that all would be right again. He'd wasted months on a foolish quest to bring about the very Order that had crumbled and left him to suffer.

All of that. Everything. Every thought, every supposed loyalty he'd held, every friendship, every personal connection. Everything had been washed away in less than two months.

What did it matter?

What did any of it matter if it could all be unmade in an instant?

Days of walking around Bracca, seeing familiar faces look at him with nothing but fear. Seeing nothing but the Empire when they looked at Cal, knowing nothing of the life he'd lived between leaving this pathetic planet and returning.

Who he was didn't matter. It never mattered. Not when he landed here as a scared kid, not when he ran away, and not when he returned as the same.

Surrounded by the rotted remains of his past life, Cal dropped to his knees.

The sole light flickered. The loose cabinet finally clattered to the floor.

Something snapped.

Something mental, something personal, within Cal. Something physical, in the room. He didn't care what.

This place was a tomb. A wrecked monument made by some forgotten person from some forgotten culture. Just like the others, it was an ancient thing that served no purpose to Cal beyond fulfilling some mission that he had been sent on.

A mission to kill a Jedi.

A mission that he had accepted.

He'd changed. He'd stayed the same. The galaxy had forgotten him. It had never noticed him in the first place. He'd killed the past as much as it had faded away, as much as it had never existed at all.

This place was a tomb. A shrine to a man that didn't exist anymore.

It was an insult.

An outrage.

A reminder of a life lost.

Blood running cold but burning with rage and fear and so many twisted things, Cal let out a shout, pushing through the Force as he did. Dirty old cloths and gathered dust tumbled back in a wave, the fallen cabinet slid across the floor to break into pieces against the wall. The bare hanging bulb flew upward, crashing against the ceiling and blunging the room into darkness beside a scant shower of sparks.

Rising from his knees in the perfect dark, saber suddenly in his hand, not a single coherent thought dared cross through Cal's mind. Breathing deep the stale air, Cal's hand shuddered like the rest of him as he switched the blade on.

Broken like so many things in the room, like the man holding the blade, the crystal that Cal had nearly died to retrieve was fractured. Torn to pieces in its housing, it bled as the saber hissed to life.

Once blue then faded to a deathly white, the weapon turned a shade as red as all the blood that it had spilled.

Standing in the gloom, shaking really, Cal came to a simple conclusion in the dull carmine light:

This place needed to burn. To be ripped to shreds and thrown into the abyss just like the boy who had lived there.

Seeing red; Red from rage; Red from the cursed light of a broken saber; Cal swung down. Searing red lines hissed into the wall and floor. Red sparks and smoldering scraps leaped out of the derelict machines that had been left to rot in the old apartment

Sounds and scraps and memories and so many reminders of the past filled the air, thrown about and then cut to cinders. Rats scurried, spore clouds bloomed, that awful leaking pipe in the fresher was ripped from the wall.

Swinging, cutting, destroying anything and everything, Cal wasn't sure how long he was in the apartment.

He wasn't sure when he stopped either.

Wreckage and refuse cluttered the ground. Blazing red streaks cooled to black against the duracrete walls. Rot and dirt and broken machines coated the ground, barely visible in the dim red light.

Huffing, covered in fetid dust, Cal wasn't sure what he was doing as he stood straight once more. Tired, perfectly tired, but coursing with persistent and desperate energy, he turned off the searing red saber.

This place was a tomb.

So Cal left it like he had left all the others, desecrated and with all of its treasures made into little more than scraps on the floor. More powerful and closer to some goal that he wasn't even sure was really his own.