Public All Roads Lead Here

[Cale Gunderson]

Tython Jedi Temple​

A small trickle flowed between moss-laden stones, carrying away sticks and dirt as it went. Cale watched the newly liberated brook he’d made with the shift of a stone grow with a satisfied smile. He didn’t look as old as he was, or as old as he felt. Eighty. He was eighty. Three days ago Marek S’hadar, a Jedi Master with more to his name than Cale could’ve ever imagined, and his twin brother had become one with the living force. It was to be expected, humans lived short lives in the grand scheme of things, and Jedi often lived shorter ones. That his brother had made it as long as he had was more surprising than anything.

It hurt, teachings be damned. It was agony, but more than simple loss beset him there in the lush forest. Cale’s body was younger than his mind, he’d spent so long trapped outside of time and inside sealed pods that he lagged far behind his brother. He wondered if that was only on the outside and that he might collapse someday soon as his brother had. Death didn’t frighten him on its own, it was part of the journey, but the reality of his life’s strange path left him with so many questions.

Could a soul die before the body?

No, he decided that something of that sort wasn’t possible, or else he’d have died all those years ago under a waving crimson banner, wielding swords of the same shade. He’d done so much since then, lost plenty, gained more, and the road ahead would doubtlessly be more of the same.

The stream met its larger sibling, the trickle binding itself to the flowing water he stood beside, planted firmly on its banks. The Jedi Master longed for his absent arm in that moment, wishing it were there so he could fold both over his chest, but instead, the one remaining hung at his side. He needed a stim. He’d needed a stim for a month, but for whatever reason, the temple seemed all too eager to lose his order of them every time. It’d been funny the first time, but now it pushed him close to emotions he was meant to have sworn off.

He took in a breath and turned his eyes to the rest of the world around him. He wasn’t like the others who were in the wrong time. It wasn’t as though he’d come into some galaxy entirely unlike the one he’d left behind. The places were the same, he’d played at this stream as a boy with the other younglings, slept in mostly the same halls, and walked these same woods. It was the people that were different, different faces in place of the ones he’d known. They were all dead, like Marek. It was just him now.

Cale hadn’t felt so alone in a long time.

 

[Tracyn Ordo]

Tython.

What a place- what a wonderful place.

And what a place to be, if things were not quite right, or not quite good anymore. Somehow, Tython, despite everything that had happened, stood firm, and stood hopeful. Burn marks and burnt forests were a mark of wars from months and years ago, graveyards and the ashes of wars that had come and gone.

But the peace always remained.

"The water always makes me feel nice."

Tracyn said with a wry grin, carrying his folding chair in one hand, and his fishing supplies in the other. Most Jedi frowned upon fishing for relaxation, but Tracyn knew the dangers of over-populated fish to an ecosystem. More importantly, Tracyn always found it a funny image to have a Jedi in their traditional robes with a fishing hat, hooks and lures aplenty.

He propped up the folding chair, settling into it near the other Jedi. Tracyn was gray-haired now, in some areas. Blonde had given way to gray, and age was showing on his face more than he'd like to admit.

"You look troubled, Master Jedi. Don't need the force to see you have many things on your mind." He reached into the tackle box, procuring a piece of bait to his line. Tracyn wasn't even reaching out with the force to look at him- or even outwardly at all. One would think that he was actively not listening to the force.

"Perhaps you should do more than stand by the water. Jedi always teach passive meditation but I never particularly took. I always found more peace in simple tasks, or focusing on something. Cleaning, building, fishing, assembling. Studying. Passive has it's benefits but me?" He looked up at Cale with a smirk.

"I find no better peace than the simple act of waiting for a fish to come and bite this piece of cheese here." And with that, he cast his line into the water.



Cale Gunderson

 

[Cale Gunderson]

Cale hadn't turned to face the new presence when it emerged. He'd taken in a deep breath, pressed his eyes closed, and listened to the sound of the wind between the trees. The world's breath flowed around him, its heart beating in the breeze, tousling his dark hair and revealing the streaks of gray beneath. The stranger was right about the water, Cale couldn't argue that.

"Would you believe I used to be good at hiding that sort of thing?" Cale asked with a sigh, eyes fluttering open as he heard the sound of the chair being laid out. He knew this one, at least in passing, didn't he? The streaks of gray that were conquering the man's hair suggested he might've been around that long. Maybe they'd passed one another in long-demolished and subsequently reconstructed hallways, or sat in on the same lectures in days where they both had worn a braid. Or maybe that was wishful thinking.

"The usual sitting quietly by the water doesn't work for me anyway, was someone else's thing. Just figured I'd try it for his sake." Cale gave a shrug. It'd been Asha Seren who'd shown him the only meditation that had worked for his ailing mind; Endless drilling, saber in hand, repeating the motions until his arm was sore and his mind begged for him to sleep. Sometimes he wondered what had happened to her, if she'd managed to find whatever she'd been after. He hoped so. "Looks like it's still his thing."

He hadn't needed the technique as much in recent years, only on the days he got some message from Aleks that suggested his once-pupil was on the cusp of doing something extremely hazardous. The kid had always known just how to make him worry. He'd just sat with his brother and talked about the tedium of the day they'd had. They'd only had the last year together, decades of near-reconciliation had finally been followed through, and now Marek was gone.

Cale knew he'd be in the training yard tonight.

Tracyn Ordo ​

 

[Tracyn Ordo]

"We were all better at things once upon a time. Getting out of bed in the morning used to be easier, for example." That same smile. He had a lovely smile- that much was undeniable about Tracyn.

He looked at the water, then at the Jedi. He turned his cooler around, moving some of the baits and hooks he had on top for him to sit on. "I think we might have met a long time ago- maybe when I was in the Army of Light, once upon a time or two. Sound familiar?" He looked back at the water, his eyebrows wiggling as it moved all by it's own.

"Maybe you knew my wife, hm? Could have met at a party. Lovely woman, you'd love her. Not as much as me though." A chuckle, a grin.

"Have a seat, standing scares the fish. Makes them think there's birds over the water with the shadows. I also snuck something down here, if you're interested."

Cale Gunderson

 

[Cale Gunderson]

“True enough.” Time hadn’t taken as much from him as it should’ve, he’d cheated it, so the galaxy took from him in other ways. Things like throwing on a shirt, opening a can of caf, all things he used to be a deal more skilled at. He’d adapted in the decades since, but he still missed not having to call on the Force just to crack a canister.

“I knew the Army, wasn’t with it though.” Cale had been on the opposite side, if he wasn’t misremembering his wars. Far from the front, trapped in his own body, a slave to a being of unimaginable yet exceedingly common cruelty and power. The One Sith had fallen though, as had its successor, and the successor after that by Cale’s own counting. It was all ancient history. “Which temple were you with? I was part of the brat pack here, way back when.”

They’d used to make jokes at the expense of the Coruscant younglings, and they’d returned the gesture in kind. He missed that sort of innocent rivalry.

“Might have met her, what’s her name?” Cale questioned the fisherman, gaze flicking from the man to the end of his line, wondering if he might get a bite. Cale had never had the patience for the sport, even now.

He took the offered seat with an amused scoff.

“Well, wouldn’t wanna scare the fish would I?”

Tracyn Ordo

 

[Tracyn Ordo]

Tracyn's eyes never left the water, but he smiled and looked over at his new companion when he asked about his wife. It would seem that every facet of the galaxy faded away, from that memory, from the idea, from that love that had lasted decades and would last until eternity. He smiled, tearing up at the thought of how lucky he was to feel such a love. He answered his question without looking at him, as if the thought of anything else in that moment, thinking of the black-haired love of his life, would mean his doom.

"Asha. I think you've met her, if I am not mistaken."

He said, looking up at the sky, before watching his reel again. A nibble, but not a bite. The fish were cautious in the lake, something that the average fisherman would become irate at. You'd take many nibbles before you got a bite.

"The Temple, rather. Back in the hey-day of the Republic. Shortly after my expulsion and exile from my people, the Mandalorians. A lifetime ago." He was being modest, as usual. Tracyn was many things, but "just" a Mandalorian was an understatement. Though, that was also generations separated from the Mandalorians now. Everything was so different, yet things could still be the same.

"Men often don't sit by lakes unless they are fishing, waiting for a woman, or thinking. Which one are you?"

Cale Gunderson

 

[Cale Gunderson]

“Ah, indeed I have. She taught me the only meditation that’s ever worked worth a damn for me; pretty sure I owe her my life, I wasn’t sleeping right for years before that.” The fact the man knew of their meeting answered a number of long-held questions and gave him a feeling of reassurance he’d desperately needed. He thought of a few faces, one old, one new, and then pushed aside both.

He’d never had that sort of love, not really. But he had Aleks, and though he didn’t say it, their bond had always been more paternal than the relationship between master and apprentice ought to have been. Aleks was his boy, in all his insufferably agitating glory.

“The Republic,” Cale let the words roll of his tongue for the first time in a long time, his agri-world drawl flavoring them. “Sometimes I wonder if I just misremembered it existing, a nation that stood centuries seems so laughable these days. Not that it was the bastion of liberty some of the kids these days make it out to be.”

That made him chuckle to himself.

“Mando’ade and a Jedi? In those days? No easy thing.” His eyes followed the bobbing line while his hand curled and uncurled reflexively, repeating the motion unconsciously as he watched the water.

“Thinking. Pretty sure I’ve missed my chances with the latter, and I’ve never been much good at the former.”

Tracyn Ordo

 

[Vulpesen]

Tython, one of the few places that the jedi could truly call their ancestral home. Long ago, he'd been a regular visitor to this place, one of its many inhabitants. Life had changed since then. But the benefit of old age, was the ability and right to travel down memory lane. What he didn't expect however, was to see some of those memories become real. The first presence, felt similar only in that he recognized it in himself. An old soul in a young body. The second, something he hadn't felt since he was much much younger. The Army of light had been an endeavor of his boyhood and the origin of his now, phrikite battle mask. He was over ninety years old, now, though he looked hardly more than a decade of when he had first met Tracyn Ordo.

Approaching the pair, he just managed to catch the elder jedi's musings on the republic and couldn't help but chuckle as he found his own truth mirrored in the words. "That's why I left. So many of them preached the virtues of the old ways, yet forgot the second tenet of the code. 'There is no ignorance, there is knowledge.' So willing they were, to subjugate and deny those that didn't stick their noses firmly up the rear ends of the council." His golden gaze swept over to Tracyn and he put on a wide smile. They had never been truly friends, not in the way that they were close in any meaningful way. But they had been comrades in arms. "I thought you were dead."

Tracyn Ordo Cale Gunderson

 

[Tracyn Ordo]

"I'm not a Mandalorian anymore. I left that behind decades ago. I was born, I was raised, I became. But I no longer remain."

Tracyn smiled over at Cale, tipping his hat at him. "You can see how I fell in love with her." He said, looking back to the water. "I like to remember the good parts about the Republic." He looked up the cascading mountains and hills of the area, then towards the river as a whole. Taking it all in.

"Life is long, and love is sneaky. I hope you find it." He palmed his wedding ring, before turning and giving that same handsome smile.

"Not dead yet, old friend. Just fishing."

A lifetime ago, they might have quarreled, bickered, or not even liked each other. But it all went away, with one statement. He missed his old friends. And anyone that survived this long, and still was the same person- and still was as good as they were in their souls and in their hearts, well. He was happy to call them friends.

"Though it's bullshit you don't look older now."

Vulpesen l Cale Gunderson

 

[Cale Gunderson]

Cale remembered the bright spots, a brother saved, a galaxy protected, friends, family, Talia. He called on the memories often now, able to exert enough control over his own emotions that he could keep his memories separate. Still, he often found the dark chasing the light, and he saw the Republic burn, and his own twitching blade arm swung against his will at the very people who he'd have otherwise died for.

"I'll settle for life getting a pack of stimsticks down here at this point." The Jedi mused with a wry smile. Marek had tried to get him to break the habit until the very end. It'd been the last thing they'd talked about. Not a serious argument, just a few brotherly jabs thrown back and forth, dry laughs on their lips. Cale missed him terribly.

He looked over his shoulder to the newcomer, another who recalled the days when the Jedi had fought under a flag other than the Starbird. Maybe he'd cheated aging the same way Cale had, but from his look, Cale doubted it. Zephi maybe? One of the near-humans with pointed ears, there were more than a few, and the distinction didn't matter. Vulpesen would be around long after he was gone, cryo or Netherworld be damned.

"The Republic had its bright spots and its dark ones. The street food outside the temple on Coruscant tasted better back then." Cale sighed, remembering the taste of skewered meat fresh off a burner after a long day in the yard. The vendor who'd taken the spot these days overcooked and underspiced it.

Tracyn Ordo | Vulpesen ​

 

[Vulpesen]

Vulpesen groaned at the remembrance of the stands Gunderson had mentioned. "So many credits spent avoiding that chowhall food." Still, he managed to flash Tracyn a grin as the man voiced his distress over Vulpesen's apparent lack of aging. "Benefit of no being human. Zorrens live a very long time." His tail flicked behind him, though idly he wondered if Tracyn had ever learned of what he truly was. He was fairly certain that he himself had only learned after joining the sith. His entire time among the jedi, he had thought himself a human. It was simply another truth that had turned out to be false in the long run. "Don't look too glum, you're lookin' alright compared to most I remember from the old days. But if you think my looks are nerfshit, you should see Master Ike."

He stepped over tot he water's edge and with a raised hand, lifted a pillar of grass covered earth from the ground to serve as a seat. "And between a planet, a company, and two kids to take care of, sometimes I swear I can feel myself aging like a human." The streak of white in his hair had been with him since his teenage years, a mark earned by hubris. Sometimes though, he was certain he could find a few stress formed greys hidden in his otherwise dark hair.

Tracyn Ordo Cale Gunderson

 

[Tracyn Ordo]

"Kids are great."

That topic was open and shut- Tracyn's words were enough to convey the loss. But he wanted his friend to know that he knew how great they were. And his friend probably knew how much it hurt, or could fathom, how much it hurt to lose them.

"My old Masters chastised me for eating meat. Nowadays I think the vegetarian angle has gone out of style for the modern Jedi."

He chuckled at the thought, himself as a younger man, in full Jedi regalia- eating street food outside the temple. Even then, Jedi were a rarity to see. He knew the importance of meeting one, and tried to make a great impression wherever he went. And at the same time, sometimes you also wanted a sandwich.

There was a moment of silence between them all, and Tracyn put up a hand, indicating for them to all enjoy nothing but each other's company and the silence for a long while.

He spoke after a few blissful moments of watching the beauty of the world around them, feeling it pulse and radiate with life and death, a beautiful cycle. Winds blowing, trees swaying- it all was so, so peaceful. Despite everything that happened. Despite everything they lost. Despite everything they didn't get to do, didn't get to say, or missed, or didn't get to speak to again.

There was great beauty all around them.

"This. Whenever I feel like giving up on the fight, or stopping. I always remember this spot. I'm glad you all are here to share it with me."

Cale Gunderson l Vulpesen

 

[Cale Gunderson]

Cale made no remark on the subject of children, and any inclination to do so that had lingered went away at the swiftness of Tracyn's words. Pain was no stranger when one walked the way of the Jedi, especially for as long as any of them had. He'd had Marek, and Marek had been married, Marek had once had a daughter, but Cale had never settled down. Too many years had been spent on the run, in hiding, enslaved, or locked out of the passage of time. He hoped that no drunken tryst had ever left him with a child of his own blood, that sort of twist in his fate would've flogged his spirit.

There was Aleksander though. Their bond to one another was beyond what it should've been for a student and a teacher, and he'd grown far too accustomed to calling the Jedi Knight 'his boy'. Father and son had been a convincing disguise when they'd had need of it, but he'd never quite been able to take off that mask; he wasn't sure if it even was a mask any longer. Not that he'd ever say that aloud, least of all to Aleks.

"Thank the force for that, if I ever see another salad sprinkled with nutri-cubes in my life it'll be too soon." He sighed, wondering just how well Master Ike had kept after so many years. Cale still chafed at his own title, master felt so wrong. Yes he'd trained a Padawan to knighthood, but that felt as though he'd earned it on a technicality rather than through his own merits. A stupid thing to fret over at his age, but fret he did.

"Glad to be here, glad for the one who showed me it in the first place." Marek had been more a Jedi than Cale could've ever been, he'd been raised in the dark, yet shook off his shackles and chose the light. Cale hadn't had a choice, the Jedi had raised him, the Sith had used him as a slave, he hadn't started making his own choices until he was already well into manhood. Another pointless, small thing to concern himself with, but in that moment Cale's thoughts insisted on dwelling.

Tracyn Ordo | Vulpesen ​

 

[Vulpesen]

Vulpesen winced at the curt response to his jubilance. It was a harsh galaxy and losses often tipped the scales in favor of sorrow over glee. A aprt of him felt that their generation knew that better than most. He reflected on that as their silence lingered. Vulpesen had never been the sort for meditation, even as a jedi, but a moment of quiet introspection never hurt when done in moderation. "The wheel turns and the fight goes on." He looked between the pair of jedi. "I don't know about either of you, but looking back, I was always more of a soldier than a jedi. Just a warrior with a glow stick and some neat tricks. I didn't mind it then, and truthfully, I don't mind it now. For all I disagreed with the council, those of us who put our boots on the ground knew we could trust each other, even if we didn't always agree." He grew a wry grin and his tail flicked at a few select memories. "I'm sure some of those old masters would point at me, laugh, and say they had been right about me. I'm no real jedi, but I'm proud to say that many of my greatest friends have been."

Cale Gunderson Tracyn Ordo