Chapter 3: There is Life With Me

Merrin Kestis upchucked the last of her breakfast into the Mantis's fresher. Wiping at her mouth, she shakily stood, using the rim of the bowl for support.

Glancing back behind her to the doorway, she winced. She hoped that Cal didn't sense what was wrong with her. At the moment, her husband was outside, playing with and training their adopted daughter, Kata.

Merrin was under no delusions. She could feel the changes occurring within her body. How her belly was growing round and swollen. How her breasts were now ballooning, filled with a mother's milk.

She was with child. She was carrying her husband's baby, a fetus who was half Jedi, half Nightsister. Or Nightbrother, if it was to be a boy, Cal's son she bore.

Her Magick, and the Force itself, told her so. But would her husband sense with his Jedi powers how he had impregnated his bride and wife with his seed? Merrin didn't know much about pregnancy, but she understood enough to know that she would not be showing for a few months' yet.

No doubt Cal would sense the presence of their little one through the Force before long. Kata seemed to already suspect something; Merrin could tell by the way her daughter looked at her. The last Nightsister, now the spouse of a Jedi, resolved that she would tell her family of how she was expecting before either Cal or Kata could pester her with questions.

Collecting and composing herself, Merrin strode out of the fresher and then down the gangplank of the Mantis. Standing in the bright sunshine of Tanalorr, she paused for just a moment to take in Cal and Kata, going through meditation exercises, interspersed with some levitation practice.

Her husband would make a wonderful father, Merrin knew. She could see it in how they parented their young charge, despite the fact that they together had not conceived her.

Merrin softly caressed, then gripped the shapely contours of her rounding belly. Shaking her head, she took a deep breath and strode over to her family.

"Husband, I must speak with you."

Cal came up out of his meditative trance, blinking and glancing up at his wife, smiling at her. He quietly beckoned to Kata, whose aura had peaked with curiosity, to continue her lessons, before rising and letting his wife take him by the hand. Merrin pulled him furtively over to a set of boulders where they could be alone.

"What is it, love?"

Slowly, Merrin guided Cal's hands to settle over the slight curve to her belly. "There is life with me. Within me. I am with child. Great with child." She searched his eyes, hoping for joy, elation, at least pride at how he had placed his seed within her. "Cal….. I am carrying your baby. Our baby."

For a moment, Cal appeared to have lost the ability to speak. Merrin studied his face again anxiously. "Say something!" she breathed.

"That's….." Cal cleared his throat, coughed. He appeared choked up. "That's wonderful…." His fingers now began to drum over his wife's womb.

Merrin melted into his arms, resting her head sleepily on his chest. "Will you train our offspring in the ways of the Force? Is our little one to become a Jedi?"

"Always hard to see is the future," Cal expressed. "That's what Master Yoda always said." He drew back and kissed Merrin deeply. "Our child shall be half Jedi, half Nightbeing. Half Zabrak and half human. It shall wield the Force and Magick. We shall teach it to be of both worlds, know all its heritage. The baby shall learn of Dathomir."

Merrin smiled gently and settled against her husband. "You've never told me where you were from. Where you were born," she murmured into his chest.

Cal shrugged. "I always considered myself from Bracca. It's my adopted homeworld." He held Merrin close. "I have no memory of my birth planet, or my family. I was taken by the Jedi to be trained when I was very young – a baby myself, certainly."

Merrin hummed softly before reaching up to plant open-mouthed kisses along her husband's jawline, working her way to his lips where she kissed him deeply. When she drew back, she caressed his face and looked deep into his eyes. "I'm sorry. I did not mean to worry you or bring up feelings of pain."

Cal smiled and pecked her lips chastely. "You didn't." He drew her back into him, rocking her gently. "As for our new arrival…. We're not going to worry about that just now. This is a happy moment." He ducked his head and smiled at her. Beamed. "The happiest moment of my life!"

Evening came, and saw Cal watching surreptitiously from the doorway as Merrin tucked Kata, their adopted daughter, into bed.

"Mother Merrin, can Cal and I train more tomorrow?" Kata bubbled.

Cal had always thought Kata's pet name for her new, second mother tickled and even touched the former Nightsister. He had listened to his wife's stories of her childhood and her culture; he heard of Mother Talzin, the leader of her sisters and their brethren.

Merrin smiled tenderly and tucked up the covers to Kata's chin. "You can ask your father in the morning…. but only if you be a good little foundling and go to sleep cycle."

Cal knew that his wife was trying to be sweet, as she glanced back, caught his eye, and smiled brightly. But he was not Kata's father. Adopted father, perhaps, but not her true father – Bode was. Cal and Merrin had not conceived and brought this little one into the world…. although, as he now peeked at his wife's nicely swelling belly where their own baby, their own flesh and blood, lay cocooned within, they would be parents in the most carnal sense of the term before long.

Merrin bent and kissed Kata on the forehead before turning out the lamps. "Sweet dreams, my little youngling."

Merrin and Cal climbed into their bunk together, the Nightsister kissing her husband's cheek.

"Goodnight," she cooed, settling down to sleep at his side. For once, even though they both knew that Merrin's pregnancy hormones would demand them to come together at some point, the couple did not move to make love.

Later that night, in the bunk that husband and wife shared aboard the Mantis, it was now Merrin who was tossing and turning about.

In her dream (or was it a vision?), she could only see an endless plain of windswept desert. Off in the distance, nearly at the horizon, the silhouette of a single humped creature, mounted by a cloaked rider, was backlit against a pair of twin setting suns….

Merrin Kestis abruptly woke with a start, stirring against her husband's bare chest. Cal was sleeping soundly for once, and it pained her to wake him, yet the Nightsister felt as though she had been sent a message.

"Cal….. Cal, my darling, awaken!" She resorted to kissing his face, then his lips, to stir him. "Arise, dearest husband!"

Cal finally stirred and lifted his head to capture her lips with his, returning her kiss as he sat up.

"Mer? What's wrong, my love?"

Merrin bit her lip. "I have received a vision." She paused, then finally had out with it:

"I saw a man marooned on a desert planet. A planet with twin suns. I believe he is one of your bretheren."

Cal gaped at her, at last breathing out one word, a sparkle of exhilarated hope in his eyes.

"Jedi….."

Husband and wife spent the remaining months of Merrin's pregnancy doing research, preparing for a possible scouting and recruitment mission.

Cal may have decided that the Jedi Order as he had known it was gone, and that aspects of the Order (such as the code forbidding attachments) needed to change…. But that didn't mean he hadn't agreed with Cere that the Jedi needed to be rebuilt. Something could be both rebuilt and made new, he had come to learn.

After weeks of scouring tomes, as well as the digital archive stores within Zee, who had served as a droid to the Jedi during the High Republic era, Cal and Merrin had narrowed their search down to the planet they thought may have been seen in her dream/vision.

There were plenty of desert worlds, and several which featured twin suns in their orbit…. But only one had both.

"There, darling: Tatooine," Cal had pointed out.

A rock on the Outer Rim, Tatooine seemed like a rather ghastly and indeed inhospitable place to try and make one's way in the galaxy. In other words, the perfect place for a Jedi to hide.

Cal should know: Bracca hadn't exactly been a picnic to live on either, even before the Imperials came knocking. And he hadn't had much of a choice in homeworlds – the escape pod bearing him and the dead body of his Master had landed there.

The deeper mystery had been the identity of the Jedi whom Merrin had seen in her dream. It was difficult to determine. "I didn't see his face," Merrin made clear. "He was moving away from me." But she had seen that the mysterious fugitive Jedi had been wearing brown robes.

That was a clue. Only Jedi Masters had tended to wear brown robes. Master Tapal had been one of those rare exceptions that had enjoyed being decked out in full battle regalia once the Clone Wars had begun.

It indeed was a clue, if not a particularly helpful one. Without a look at the person's face, there was no telling who it could have been.

But at least they had a destination in which to investigate and search, and that was a start.

For their mission to Tatooine, they would need to carefully plan. Leaving Tanalorr was always risky, even on missions, given that the Stinger Mantis was the only ship they had, and it seemed inconceivable that the Empire wouldn't have her ID docs on file as a wanted, fugitive transport. In the meantime, Merrin was eventually placed on bedrest to ride out the rest of her pregnancy while Cal, Greez, BD-1 and Zee stayed up late strategizing.

Cal sensed his wife going into labor the moment before she came stumbling out of their room one evening, screaming for him that the baby was coming.

Cal spent hours at Merrin's side, holding his wife's hand as she went through the pangs of childbirth. Only when a new day was rising over Tanalorr did she finally push their baby out of her womb, letting it slide into the world.

The Nightsister brought forth Cal's first-born child – a son.

He was indeed both Zabrak and Human. In time, his parents would teach him to be fluent in both Paecean (the language of his mother and the Nightsisters) as well as Basic. Smiling with pride, Merrin bent and placed a kiss on the baby's crown, where tattoos and a small pair of horns had already grown.

Cal had known Zabrak who were Jedi – Master Eeth Koth, for example. He had even heard the story of the Zabrak Sith Darth Maul, whom Padawan (and later Master) Obi-Wan Kenobi had defeated in a duel during the Battle of Naboo, the year he, Cal, had been born.

But a Nightbrother Jedi? This was something new entirely. Cal smiled down at his wife with pride, bending to softly kiss her lips. Their two cultures may have once been forbidden from mixing, yet they had, coming together in marriage and laying together in love to conceive this baby. Make new life that the Force would bound itself to.

Merrin named the child Vunre – a Zabrak name, to balance the Human surname, the Human family name that was his father's. The Human name that Cal had asked her to share and which she had agreed to take, as his wife.

Vunre Kestis: a Jedi who would one day be respected.

Cal kissed Merrin deeply again, and she kissed him back. The new parents embraced.

"Now let's go find ourselves a Jedi Master," Cal murmured into his lover's lips.