Several months before the Lucrehulk arrived, however, he had the chance to experience something beautiful on Bracca. Beauty was not something he thought possible on a planet that rained almost every minute of every day, the only evidence the planet orbited a star was the storms that star fueled. But it did happen, something beautiful stepped into his life for a brief minute, one of those things a person holds onto in the back of their minds or a quiet place in their hearts that gives them a reason to be thankful for years later even, when it hurts to remember.
Cal had been lost in his work for nearly half a day. The far off sounds of crashing metal and screeching machinery as it tore at the remains of the old battleship like many greedy, mechanical vultures were drowned out by the music blasting through his headset when someone tapped him on his shoulder to get his attention.
"What does he..." Cal began to say as he stood up, removing his headset. He was expecting to greet Prauf who had come with some other highly dangerous maneuver the forman had in mind for them but he stopped short, surprised to not be looking up into the long grizzled face of his old friend towering over him but instead at a young mostly human woman about his age and slightly shorter than him, the ends of her curly brown hair peaked out from beneath her poncho's hood.
"What's your name?" she asked.
"I...Uh... Cal, Cal Kestis," he fumbled back, lost in her strikingly gray blue eyes that seemed to have a hint of purple in them as well.
"Leena," she said, extending a hand in greeting that Cal nearly missed when he reached for it.
"I've seen you around."
"Me..me too," Cal fumbled again and closed his eyes with embarrassment. He shook his head trying desperately to recompose himself before she thought him a complete fool. "I mean, I've seen you around too. You haven't been here long have you?"
"Almost two years," she said with a shrug, "but I was only just transferred to this yard."
"Oh okay," Cal nods, awkwardly. In all the times he's worked in the yards he's never had someone approach him like this, sure there have been plenty of casual conversations with other scrappers while they worked but she wasn't assigned to his section. The feeling of just standing around talking, not working, was so incredibly foreign to him that he couldn't figure out what to say or what to do with his hands. As they spoke, he fiddled with the cutting torch he was holding then the headset that hung around his neck and back to the cutting torch again.
"I saw you the other day in Scrapper District, sitting alone, staring up at the clouds as if by looking hard enough you might actually be able to see the stars beyond them."
Cal was completely lost for words by her surprisingly accurate observation. Most days, after work was done, he would wander down to the scrapper district for a bite to eat. Sometimes Prauf would join him but as often as not he would go alone, find a relatively quiet place to sit and eat while staring up at the clouds, missing the stars that used to fly past the Albedo Brave's transparisteel windows. When he wasn't watching the other workers mill about Scrapper District, that is.
District was a generous term for it; in reality it was simply a row of broken down metal buildings, rusted by Bracca's rains, that housed a few shops and places to eat such as the infamous Mech-And-Eats where a scrapper could get a bowl of some kind of unidentifiable gruel served by the greasy hands of a cook who would repair a scrappers equipment while they ate, probably on the same surface he prepared the ingredients for the unidentifiable gruel.
"You left before I could ask what you were thinking about," Leena continued. "It's such an odd thing to find in any of the guys around here."
"What's an odd thing to find?"
"Thinking!"
"Hah!" Cal burst out laughing as the first feeling of joy he'd felt since crashing into this rock flowed over him from such an unexpected source as this person who seemed to have appeared out of nowhere, shining like the sun had finally burst through the dark clouds swirling above them. Part of him wondered if she was actually real or if he had finally lost his mind to the drudgery and was just standing there talking to empty air.
"I want to show you something. I thought you might appreciate it."
"Okay," Cal found himself agreeing without hesitation.
Just then a booming voice came echoing towards them. The voice barked angry orders to the workers to hurry up, work faster, stop slacking off, as if working harder or faster would actually benefit the scrappers in any way rather than put them in more danger.
"Oh!" Leena started and took a step back. "I gotta go. That's my foreman. But I'll be working on the other side for a while, so another time?"
"Yeah, sure," Cal nodded.
"Good to meet you, Cal Kestis!" she called over her shoulder as she walked away.
"You too!" He called back and watched with surprise as she stepped out onto a warped beam that reached across the gap where the ship they were dismantling had been split down the middle creating a jagged edged corridor for transports filled with scrap to move through quickly. Cal watched with surprise as she slid down the beam, then jumped over the last of the gap to the platform on the other side. A move like that was something he wouldn't hesitate to do – which is why his foreman came to him for the difficult jobs – but in all his time here he had never seen anyone else attempt something like it. On the far side she pulled a cutting torch from under her poncho and began working on a nearby panel as if she had been doing so all this time, just as her foreman stepped around the corner to check on her progress.
"Making a new friend?" Prauf's voice came from behind Cal. He had been working in a neighboring room and couldn't help but overhear fragments of their conversation.
"What? Oh, yeah, I guess so."
"It's good to see you making friends."
Cal didn't respond to that observation beyond a shrug and turned back to the control panel he had been removing from the wall before Leena arrived. Friends weren't something he could afford. The closer you got to people, the more you opened up to them and the more you opened up the more likely you were to slip and give yourself away. He couldn't risk that.
It didn't escape Prauf how Cal had shut down at the mention of friends and how the kid's focus had completely returned to the task at hand. Kid, he was growing into a man now but when Prauf had found him, all bloodied up, he had been barely more than a kid and that's how he would always think of him. It made him sad in a way, how committed the kid was to his job as a scrapper. Prauf knew in his gut that he could be so much more but he seemed stuck here, not stuck due to a lack of credits or the habits that burned through those credits as quickly as they were earned like so many scrappers. With all the high risk jobs Cal took on this heap he must have saved up enough by now for several tickets out of here, but something in him wouldn't allow him to move on from this place. One day, maybe Prauf could get the kid to open up and tell him why. For now, Prauf left Cal alone to work on the control panel to the Back-up Computer Center.
The control panel wasn't one of those rip-it-out-and-toss-in-the-scrap-pile kind of tasks. The panel had to be removed carefully or he might risk hitting the wrong wire, still hot with enough residual electric charge to send a shock through his body; not enough to severely injure him but enough to send him to the infirmary for the rest of the day. More importantly to the foreman, such a shock would also fry the remaining circuitry they wanted to recover and sell back to the Empire at a greatly inflated price. A dishonest scrapper could slip one of those circuits into their pocket and sell it off themselves for enough credits to buy food for a month but the risks that came along with going around the guild could cost a scrapper their guild membership, their job, their apartment, maybe even their life. Others may have seen it as a risk worth taking since a few scores like that could get them off Bracca and on to something better, but to Cal it wasn't worth it. He didn't want to get off Bracca. He had promised his Master before he died that he would hold the line, he would wait for word from the Jedi Council. Even though no word had come after all these years, even though the Jedi were hunted and he didn't know if the Council had even survived, he had made a promise and had no plans to break it. So when he went back to work he carefully removed the panel and placed it whole in the waiting crate to be brought down to the foreman.
