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Attachment – especially romantic attachment – was forbidden to Jedi.
Cal had never been able to fully understand the reason for that rule and had even spoken to Cere about it once, but she had not been able to provide him a proper explanation. At the time, she had told her that he was just curious since he didn't understand what was the difference between attachment and the bond he had established with the rest of the Mantis crew.
But that was not the only reason.
The other reason Cal had brought up the subject was something he had long unconsciously tried to deny even to himself, looking for logical explanations or justifications for feelings he should never have had for Merrin.
Merrin had been his best friend for nearly three years —though their first meeting had been anything but friendly—and they had developed a deep bond rather quickly, a different bond from the one he had with Greez and Cere but somewhere along the line something had changed. Cal couldn’t pinpoint the exact moment when he began to see her not just as a friend, but as something more, something he should never have imagined and hadn’t even realized at first.
In the past years Cal would always give himself an explanation for some of his thoughts or attitudes, he kept repeating to himself that it was natural for friends to risk their lives to save each other, that it was natural to argue when he proposed a plan that would put him in danger and that it was natural to distrust anyone who tried to get a little too close to Merrin, since on more than one occasion they had turned out to be people interested only in her powers and how they could be useful to solve their own problems.
“ I need to see the galaxy my way Cal Kestis, I can't stay here anymore”
Merrin's words, just hours earlier, were like a stab to his heart and it was in that precise moment that Cal had realized that his feelings for her went far beyond friendship.
Only when he saw her boarding an unregistered transport, after a last embrace, he realized that he loved her and that precisely in the name of that love he could not ask her to stay but that he had to let her go.