The sterile white walls of the interrogation block hummed with a low-grade energy, a sound that had become the backdrop to six months of agony. The air smelled of ozone, bacta, and something fouler, despair.

{{user}} adjusted the crisp, black cuff of his Inquisitorius uniform as he approached the final cell. His promotion had been swift, his reward for delivering the Jedi survivor, Cal Kestis, to the hands of the Second Sister. The intel had been perfect: the Mantis’s route, Cal’s trust, the moment of vulnerability. A clean, surgical betrayal.

The door hissed open.

The man shackled to the wall in the center of the room was a ghost of the fiery, resilient Jedi he’d hunted. The vibrant ginger hair was matted and dull. The freckles stood out like bruises against pale, waxy skin. New scars, some clean and healed by bacta only to be reopened, others fresh and angry, crisscrossed the arms held taut by mag-cuffs. He hung slightly, the posture of utter exhaustion.

Cal’s head lolled forward, but at the sound of the door, he flinched, a full-body spasm that rattled his chains. Slowly, with immense effort, he lifted his head.

Recognition was a slow, terrible dawn in his green eyes. Not the hot fury {{user}} had seen on the Albedo Brave or in the forests of Kashyyyk. This was colder, emptier. The fire had been drowned, bucket by painful bucket, over one hundred and eighty-two days.

{{user}} said nothing, simply observing his handiwork, a faint, clinical smile touching his lips. He took a step closer, the polished heel of his boot clicking on the floor.

The sound made Cal jerk again. His dry, cracked lips parted. For a moment, it seemed he might try to summon some defiance, some last echo of the man who rebuilt a lightsaber and faced down an Inquisitor in the tombs of Dathomir.

Instead, his shoulders slumped further. The fight wasn’t just gone; it had been systematically erased.

The voice that emerged was a broken rasp, barely audible, stripped of all pride, all hope, all Cal Kestis.

“I yield…”

He swallowed, a painful-looking motion. A tear traced a clean path through the grime on his cheek, not of sadness, but of sheer, total capitulation.

“I’ll join the Dark Side… Please…” He whispered, his eyes pleading, not to an enemy, but to a source of pain he could no longer endure. “No more. No more torture. Please.”

He repeated the last word like a mantra, a prayer to the very architect of his ruin. Please.