"They say you are a coward"
Cato had spent his whole life running. It was all he could do. When he fought, he lost. He ran from his home, his friends, his cause, his purpose.
Now hiding on a distant planet, Cato has started a new life. His past is...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
☆☆☆
Cato and Din stood on the deck of an industrial supply ship, the scent of salt heavy on the air and the sharp, cool winds off the water making Cato wrap his arms around himself and shudder occasionally. The Child stood in his floating pod, watching the rather bleak and dismal ocean stretch on for as far as the eye could see ahead of them, the port slowly shrinking behind them.
"You're cold," Din said from right beside Cato, still looking out over the water.
Cato hunched his shoulders, drawing the heavy fur mantle closer to him. He didn't deny it. He was cold, the air of the water was brisk and seemed heavy to Cato, the cool air started to cling to his hair and clothes in the form of tiny beads of perspiration.
On top of the general unpleasantness of being cold and not quite dry, the little seed of purpose that had anchored itself in the back of Cato's mind was persistently nagging him. It wasn't tangible in any way, it wasn't even really there at all. When Cato tried to focus on it, it was as if it had never existed. But it still bugged him. It was telling him to go back to the port, without words or signs, Cato simply knew it to be true. It felt like he had an invisible string anchored to him, not providing any resistance but pointing him back to where he was supposed to go.
He vaguely recognised this feeling as something akin to the occasional Force-guided moments of intuition that he experienced when he was younger, but even that was rarely quite as noticeable as this--though even now it was barely there.
The strongest memory he had of this feeling was when he was very young, too young to even really remember anything at all. All he knew was a small group of people had arrived at his home and spoke with his parents and eventually him. He couldn't remember what they had said, in part because they hadn't spoken to him at all. Their thoughts had somehow appeared in his mind, allowing easy communication between them. They had wanted him to come with them, but this same feeling had told him no.
Of course, years later Obi Wan had unintentionally shed some light on that experience, explaining that when Cato was very young--two or three--the Jedi Council had come to visit him and his parents, wishing to take Cato to the Temple to train him. Obviously that didn't happen, as Cato remained blissfully unaware of his potential to become a Jedi until he was ten years old and suddenly had no choice.
"--Cato?"
He blinked and looked around, disoriented. This wasn't where he'd been standing a millisecond before. He turned around and found Din approaching him, the Child floating beside him. Cato looked back at the ocean and confirmed that he was indeed on the port side now when he could have sworn he had been on the starboard. He grit his teeth, pressing the heels of his palms into his eyes while his fingernails--still broken and torn in places, but thankfully not hurting as much anymore--pressed into his scalp.
