The Accidental Sith, the Confused Jedi Masters, the Eager Padawan, and the Rebel Senator - Chapter 27 - ClawedandCute (Adi_Fire) - Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) (2025)

Chapter Text

26

Interlude V: Snapshots of a War

Anakin is with Padme, huddled in a small ward with her family, Ahsoka, Obi-Wan, Rex, and Cody, when Qui-Gon finds them. He surges into the hospital room, but the moment he sees Obi-Wan, he freezes, as though someone turned him to stone.

Obi-Wan lifts his head when Qui-Gon enters, but he doesn’t move either. Not, Anakin thinks, because he is angry — for once. This is different. He sees something in Qui-Gon’s expression, and whatever it is makes fear flood across his face.

Sitting on one of the hospital beds, Obi-Wan curls his fingers into the rumpled sheets beneath him, looking suddenly young. “Master. What happened?”

It’s the most ridiculous question Anakin can think of. What’s happened? Only everything. Coruscant is on fire .

But it isn’t ridiculous to Qui-Gon, clearly. Standing stiffly in the doorway, he says, “Adi. She didn’t… She didn’t make it.”

Obi-Wan’s face goes slack. “I don’t… I don’t… She can’t have —”

Qui-Gon shakes his head. “She was killed, little one.” His voice gentler than Anakin has ever heard it be. “I’m so sorry.”

He still doesn’t move from the doorway, even when Obi-Wan falls so still that he almost seems dead. There isn’t an expression in his eyes. There isn’t anything.

Stars . Anakin glances at Qui-Gon, still motionless. Jedi don’t know anything.

The course of action is obvious. It’s basic. He learned this when he was five, for Force’s sake.

Closing the gap between him and Obi-Wan in a few brisk strides, he stops in front of the bed and makes a sharp gesture at Obi-Wan. “Up.”

Obi-Wan tips his chin up and looks at him blankly. “What?”

Grabbing the front of his tunic, Anakin hauls him to his feet. “ Up .”

Annoyance flashes across Obi-Wan’s face, bringing him back to life. “Anakin, what —”

Before he can finish, Anakin locks both arms around him and yanks him into a tight, rib-bruising embrace. Obi-Wan is stiff for only a moment before he lets his chin rest on Anakin’s shoulder. In another second, Padme and Ahsoka creep up and wrap their arms around him too. As Padme lays a hand over the back of his head, she whispers, “I’m sorry, Obi-Wan. I’m so sorry.”

# # #

Fives knows Ask Aak is coming long before he ever sees him. About two seconds after he set foot in a senatorial apartment with a Gran family, he knew exactly how the father of the household was. There weren’t that many Grans with high positions in the government, after all.

He realized whose the children were and decided it didn’t matter. Because it didn’t.

He’s kept his promise to the little girl — Ayv, she said her name was — but after over ten hours, ensconced in a hospital room with her in his arms, his extremities are numb. His back is a knot of pain as he slumps in the chair beside the bed where Ask Aak’s wife and son are sleeping, so when Ask Aak rushes through the door, Fives doesn’t bother pulling himself to attention.

He doesn’t have to anyway. As Ask Aak skids to a halt just short of them, eyes wild, it’s clear the last thing he’s thinking about is military protocol.

“I… You…” He stares at Fives. “You saved them?”

“Not just them,” says Fives. “But, yeah.” He manages to shove his way to his feet, grimacing the whole time, and untangles himself from Ayv. She’s fast asleep, collapsed against his chest, and she doesn’t even stir as he settles her in Ask Aak’s disbelieving arms. “They’re not hurt, by the way. I’m just holding her because I promised — well, I promised her I’d hold her till you got here. But now you’re here, so…” Fives turns around long enough to scoop up his helmet from the floor by the chair. “I’ll find my battalion.”

“Wait!” Ask Aak catches his arm before he can leave and pulls him to a halt.

Fives looks over his shoulder, raising both eyebrows in an unspoken question. He probably looks disrespectful — enough to warrant a decommissioning, if some high-up happens to see him and is in a bad mood — but he’s too tired to care.

“I don’t understand,” says Ask Aak. “I don’t understand why you would —”

Fives, who had an unfavorable impression of Ask Aak’s intelligence to begin with, feels his estimation tick downward even further. “Why would I save them? Me, the homicidal weapon? The freak of nature?” He shrugs. “That’s not the question. The question is why wouldn’t I, Senator Aak?”

Ask Aak just shakes his head. “I… I voted against you.”

“I know.” Fives lays a hand on Ayv’s back as she slumps against her father, feeling the steady rhythm of her breathing beneath his palm. He’s still breathing in time with her; after ten hours, it’s hard not to.

“But —”

“I’m a soldier. Saving my people is what I do. Doesn’t much matter who they are.”

Letting go of Fives, Ask Aak grips Ayv tighter. She wriggles in his grasp a little — grumpily, like the pressure is disturbing her sleep. “I… I’m sorry, trooper. For what —- for the things I — ”

Fives doesn’t much feel like listening to him struggle through an apology. “The clone rights bill failed by far more than one vote. In the end, it’s not your fault.” Some knot inside him loosens a little at those words. It’s something Rex might say; Fives himself is nothing like so naturally forgiving. “It’s just what happened.”

Ask Aak swallows. “Maybe it shouldn’t have.”

Fives peers at Ayv. “Maybe not. But she’s alive because I was here, so…” He slips past Ask Aak, heading for the door. “I can make my peace with that.” Hevy, Cutup, and Droidbait are dead because the bill failed. He can’t make his peace with that , but… but if they were here, if they knew he had been in the right place at the right time to save an entire family, they would have been able to.

And that, he can find peace with.

# # #

Trapped in a nest of people, crammed into three hospital beds shoved together, Padme lies awake long after her handmaidens and her parents all fall into an exhausted sleep. Anakin and Obi-Wan, as well as Rex and Cody, are far from asleep. Rex and Cody went to see to their battalions, all scattered on guard duty throughout the hospital or helping the Jedi with recovery, and Obi-Wan went out with Qui-Gon to find Sian, Siri, and Bant, who were somewhere in the city heading up recovery efforts. For once, he and Qui-Gon didn’t argue.

Anakin himself left even before Obi-Wan did, with plans to go wherever he was needed. With power like his, he couldn’t afford to sit idle, even as tired as he certainly was. By the end of today — for it is a new day now, with early morning sunlight laying its fingers on the smoldering skyline — every person in the overcity and the undercity would know his name.

Padme would have gone with him, but no one — not Obi-Wan, not Qui-Gon, not Anakin, not her family, and not her handmaidens — would hear of it. Since she could barely stand from exhaustion, she listened.

There would be time, too much of it, in fact, to push her body to the limits later. Right then, all she wanted to do was listen to Sola, her parents, and her handmaidens breathe.

Of course, Sola, being that she isn’t asleep, isn’t breathing to the same, steady rhythm. Instead, she’s breathing tightly, gripping Padme with both arms and shoving her head down into the crook of her neck.

“Idiot,” she hisses, for perhaps the eighteenth time. “Something blows up, you run. You find us .”

“I did,” says Padme. “Eventually.”

Sola snorts.

“I’m sorry I scared you.”

“I know. You’re sorry. You’re always sorry. You never stop .”

“Sola, I… I can’t.”

“I know.”

“After this, after all we just saw… Could you?”

There’s a pause, and then Sola says, “No.”

# # #

Asajj startles awake when the door to her and Quinlan’s cell rumbles open and light floods in. She hadn’t meant to fall asleep, and certainly not leaning against Quinlan. She jerks away from him, but far too late. Through streaming eyes, burning from the sudden influx of light, she recognizes Dooku’s silhouette. He’ll have seen. Seen her curled against Quinlan, like some trusting Midrim maiden.

Fool , she hisses to herself. Her stomach turns. She’s given him a way in, shown him a split in her armor that he can drive a dagger into and tear wider. He’ll do it, unless she finds a way to stop him. He always does.

Quinlan is not a weakness, but he is a sheep who wandered right out of the fold and into the dubious embrace of a wolf.

And with a sickening little lurch, Asajj finds she doesn’t want Dooku to hold her in place and force her to see him torn to pieces.

It begins immediately. Dooku steps forward enough to blot out some of the light and restore most of her vision. “I see you’re getting familiar with my assassin, Jedi,” he says. As his sharp eyes lock onto Quinlan, Asajj’s own eyes clear enough for the unsteadiness of his stance to catch her attention. Peeking above his high collar are lurid purplish bruises, developing against his pale skin.

Asajj has been the recipient of enough abuse at the hands of the Force to recognize the telltale signs of it.

So he did something to displease Sidious and reaped the consequences, which always puts him in a foul mood. His damaged pride could spell disaster for both her and Quinlan if Asajj doesn’t play her cards right.

“I was cold,” replies Quinlan, with just enough flippancy to give nothing away. He could mean it lecherously, he could mean it accusingly, or he could mean it genuinely. It isn’t a perfect response — that doesn’t exist — but it at least gives Asajj space to work.

Dooku lifts an eyebrow. “I’m sorry you didn’t find your accommodations adequate,” he says. “It needn’t have been so unpleasant. All you needed to do was carry out your mission. Or,” he adds, glancing at Asajj, “not try to deceive me with excuses. I hope you’ve learned the error in your ways.” He takes a step forward.

Quinlan flinches back. One hand goes to the long, scabbed over slice on his arm, which matches the wound on Asajj’s arm. His throat bobs. “I — I have.”

It’s a good performance. If Asajj hadn’t heard him when they were alone in the darkness, if she hadn’t felt the strength of his grip as he caught her hand, if she hadn’t sensed the shadows flee from something inside him, she would have believed it.

Her stomach twists. It’s not a feeling she’s used to, and it isn’t one she likes.

She doesn’t want Dooku to find out he’s lying.

She doesn’t want to see what will happen.

“You did something,” she says, to draw the attention away from Quinlan. When Dooku’s heavy gaze drops on her, she doesn’t flinch. He likes people with a spine — she’s heard him complain about Qui-Gon Jinn enough to know that. “I felt it. What did you do, Master?”

Dooku smiles. “To the point, as always. My sharpest dagger.”

For the first time in a long time, Asajj’s first thought is, I’m not yours . She shakes it off. Quinlan has filled her head with idiocy. She is Dooku’s, in every way that matters, and so is Quinlan. That’s why these next minutes are so important.

“I carried out one of Master Sidious’ plans,” replies Dooku after a moment. “The Republic dared defy him when they commandeered the Malevolence. They needed to bear the consequences. They needed to know fear. It was mercy, in its way,” he adds. “Fear makes people kneel faster.”

Quinlan’s face goes stiff. This time, Asajj doesn’t think he’s faking his reaction. “What did you do? Master?” The term of address pushes past his lips in a half-gag.

“Do you know how many people the Republic has left destitute on ravaged worlds?” Dooku smiles a little. “All people seek hope and a purpose, especially those who’ve lost everything. I took advantage of the tools the Republic left me. Their advent on Coruscant was quite explosive, I’ve heard.” At Quinlan’s sharp intake of breath, he says, “Have a problem with that, apprentice?”

Quinlan’s jaw works. “I joined you to end the war. Not preside over more bloodshed.”

“Bloodshed,” says Dooku, “is what ends wars. The faster the Republic falls, the sooner we have peace. All of us, including young Aayla Secura.” At her name, Quinlan flinches again. That one, Asajj thinks, is a performance. “I did this, all of this, for her and all the lower Jedi. They’re enslaved now, by a Council that doesn’t have the strength to do what must be done. You might thank me.”

“What did you do?”

Dooku shrugs. “Find a datapad. Turn on the news. You’ll see.”

Gesturing to the bruises on Dooku’s neck, Quinlan says, “Will I also see what you did to kriff off the person yanking your chain, the way you yank mine and Ventress’?”

Asajj sees the strike coming long before the force of it throws Quinlan sideways, but she doesn’t move to stop it. That wouldn’t end anywhere useful, and if Quinlan couldn’t handle a punch, she might as well kill him herself, right now.

As Quinlan regains his balance — in a single sharp motion that he uses to yank himself upright again — Dooku shakes his hand out, irritated. “Not a very smart thing to say to the man yanking your chain, don’t you think? That’s the thing about leashes, apprentice. They can always get shorter. Am I making myself clear?”

Breathing hard, Quinlan wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, leaving a smear of red behind on his dark skin, and nods.

“Good.” Dooku jerks his chin toward the corridor outside. “I want you back on the frontlines, pushing our advantage now that the Core is floundering. Your flagship’s ready for you — try not to let this one get shot up. Go.”

Quinlan isn’t stupid enough to argue with him. He only gives a single sharp nood before ducking past Dooku and stepping out into the corridor. He pauses for a single moment to look back over his shoulder at Asajj, like he’s reluctant to leave without her.

“I said go, apprentice,” says Dooku, twisting to look at him. “Surely you’re not this dense.”

For a second, Quinlan meets his gaze. His eyes are hard and dark — chips of unyielding stone. If Asajj were Dooku, she might be afraid.

Then Quinlan looks at her. Against all reason, he grins, and that’s when Asajj knows. He has the same plan she does. He’s been in Sith hands for hardly any time at all, and he already has their measure. He knows they keep things alive for one of only two reasons.

One, the thing is useful.

Two, the thing is interesting.

He’s found a way to make them both.

And so has Asajj.

“See you on the ship, ‘Tress?” Quinlan’s grin doesn’t slip, despite his newly split lip. He tips his head to one side. “Cold without you.”

Asajj sets her teeth together. A game. She can play this game. “I’ll be there,” she says, forcing a smile of her own to her face. It’s one of the ones she’s patented over the years — the kind that slinks across her lips like a cat.

Quinlan nods again and disappears up the corridor, leaving Asajj alone with Dooku.

Good. Now she can get real work done.

Dooku moves to block the cell door, tilting his head as he studies her. “So he has caught your eye as well.”

Asajj gives him a hooded look. “Perhaps.”

“I would have thought the stench of the Jedi would put you off, little one.”

“Not when I’m busy covering him with my own scent.”

“That wasn’t what I intended when I locked you both in here.”

Asajj shrugs. “I’m a creative problem solver. You lock me up with a man I don’t know, I’ll make sure I know him… perfectly when you let me back out. Honestly, you should have seen it coming. A celibate Jedi and me, alone in a room together? There was only one way that little story ended.”

“Is that disrespect I hear?” Dooku lifts his eyebrow.

“I think I’ve earned it,” she answers. “I do what I’m asked. I give you what you want. So let me have what I want.”

“He’s still a Jedi. You must see that. He won’t live to the end of this. Either the war will kill him, or I will.”

Asajj sees that. She saw it the moment she first laid eyes on Quinlan in his cell, back at the beginning of all this.

She just thinks — hopes — that both she and Dooku are wrong.

It’s been a long time since she was stupid enough to hope.

“Who says he needs to survive till the end?” She shrugs again. “He’ll be fun while he lasts. And you know I’m better when I have a game to play. So…” She steps forward and closes the distance between the two of them. “Let me play it. Let me play him.”

Dooku drops his chin to look her in the eye. “And why should I, little one?”

“Because the closer he is to me, the more he’s going to listen to you.”

“And why is that?”

Asajj swallows. “Because he won’t want you to hurt me. So you see, we both win. You get a Jedi to corrupt who’s too afraid to cause trouble, and I get a hobby. And you know I’m easier to manage when I have a hobby.”

“Is that a threat? You know better than that.”

“Not a threat. Just the truth.”

Dooku studies her. She hates the weight of his gaze — as cold as ice water pouring over her. “All right, little one. Have your game. But I’m watching.”

Asajj smiles as she steps past him. “Pervert.”

At that, Dooku actually laughs. “Oh, Ventress. This is why I hope I never have to kill you. Think how unamusing my life would be without you.”

Out in the corridor, Asajj pulls up short. It takes everything within her to stop her hands from curling into fists, but she can’t hide the way her shoulders bunch up. Breathing in, she says, “I live to serve.”

“You do,” agrees Dooku, and he means it.

Of course he does. That’s all Asajj has ever been to him and all she will ever be: a utility.

Sometimes, she finds herself hating Qui-Gon Jinn. Jedi that he is, he is not a utility to Dooku. He’s a need. A person.

And he got away.

With a last backwards glance at Dooku over her shoulder, she heads up the corridor, tracing the familiar route to the hangar. The hangar itself was empty except for the huge flagship, full of ranks of inactive droids and a complement or two of active ones, performing essential duties. They don’t react as Asajj passes them on her way to the bridge. They aren’t programmed for interaction. Sometimes, Asajj has gone almost a month without exchanging words with a person. By the time she found herself in a situation that required words, her voice would be hoarse and cracked with disuse. At that point, even a conversation with a Jedi was a relief.

It wouldn’t be that way any longer.

The bridge airlock slides open at her approach. The first thing she sees as she steps onto the quiet bridge is Quinlan. He’s sitting on the floor behind the command chair, back pressed against it. His knees are drawn up toward his chest, and a datapad balances on them.

He’s very, very still.

Asajj stops just in front of him. He doesn’t move. A holonews broadcast plays on the datapad, showing footage of the Federal District of Coruscant. In the harsh morning sun, the sites of destruction stand out starkly — shadowed with debris and glowing with the remnants of fire.

Quinlan’s knuckles are pale as he grips the edges of the datapad.

“Well?” She stares down at him. “Who died?”

Quinlan’s mouth twitches. “That obvious?”

“He struck the Temple.”

“No. No, he didn’t strike the Temple. There’d be a lot more people I care about dead if he did.” Quinlan sets the datapad aside and tips his head up to look at her. “He struck the Council.”

“How many dead?”

“Just one.” Quinlan smiles without mirth. “Just one person. And Light, I should be thankful for that, but I —”

“Who was it?”

His jaw works. “Adi Gallia.”

Asajj knows the name — she’s the Jedi liaison to the Senate. She’s seen her in a few broadcasts: a pretty, middle-aged tholothian woman with an ego the size of Coruscant. “You knew her?”

Quinlan snorts, leaning his head back against the chair behind him. “Knew her. That’s funny. It’s funny to hear it put that way.” He pushes an errant loc back away from his face. His eyes are hollow. “I have this… There’s this little — well, she’s not little anymore… There’s this Jedi Guardian named Siri Tachi. Feral little thing. She punched me when I left, you know. Serves me right, I guess. She… Adi was her master. Raised her, from when she was this high.” He holds a hand up a few feet off the floor.

Jedi relationships are mostly foreign to Asajj. Her own short lived master-apprentice relationship with Ky Narec didn’t give her any sort of universal standard to hold other Jedi to. “And what does that make Adi Gallia to you?”

“Kriff if I know.” Quinlan huffs out a breath. “All I know is she was always there . Unruffled, perfectly coiffed, just there . Watching all of us. Stars, I hated her sometimes.”

Asajj eyes him. “You don’t look as though you hated her.”

“Yeah, that’s the funny thing, isn’t it?” Quinlan rubs a hand over his face. “Last time I saw her, I just about told her to go to hell. I said I’d be back for Siri, for all of them, and that I was going to take them all away and leave her behind. And it’d serve her right.” His voice cracked. “It’d serve her right. And now she’s gone. She was at my knighting, she helped me figure out how my new robes worked afterward, and she’s gone. Dooku put a bomb in her, and she leaped out of the highest tower in the whole Jedi Temple to save the people she cared about. There’s not even a kriffing body to bury.” He lets out a harsh laugh, fisting one hand against the ground. “And the really funny thing is she died thinking I hated her. And I thought I did, but it turns out I’m such a kriffing soft idiot that I didn’t hate her. Not one bit. I didn’t hate her so much that I can’t even breathe right now, even though Obi-Wan and the others are alive. They’re fine. It’s a kriffing miracle, but I don’t even care because she’s — she’s dead , and I can’t even…” He clamps his lips shut. “I can’t even kill the man who killed her because if I tried, I’d die too. So I have to crawl and call him my master, and the whole time… the whole time, everyone I care about thinks I’ve betrayed them. They think I helped kill her, when actually I was in a stars-cursed hole while Dooku tried to blow up my family , and —” He subsides again. His jaw is so tight that a vein on his temple stands out. “I don’t know what to do, ‘Tress. I don’t. I’ve always — I’ve always had them to fall back on, but Tholme… I’m all alone.”

Asajj crouches down in front of him, laying one of her palms flat against the floor to steady herself. Every one of her instincts screams she’s being a fool, but she can still feel the ferocity of Quinlan’s grip as he grabbed her hand and dragged her out of the shadows of the cell. She can still hear him promising her, against all reason, that he wasn’t looking to put her in his debt. “You’re not alone.”

He lifts his eyes to meet hers. “No?”

She sets her jaw and lays her hand on top of his. “No.”

Quinlan studies her for a moment, eyeing her hand on his. “So you liked my idea, then?” His voice is still tight, but he seems intent on stepping past everything he just said, which is just fine with her. “I didn’t know if you would.”

“I had it first.”

He smiles a little. “Of course you did. Think we can pull it off? Dooku’s not stupid.”

“Neither are we. And we’re playing off his weakness.”

“Yeah? What’s that?”

She presses her lips together. “The Sith love pain. And I know for a fact matters of the heart are exquisitely painful.”

“So what? He thinks you’re toying with me? Drawing me into the waters of the Dark Side and leaving me to drown?”

“Just about.”

“And the whole time I’m exerting my Jedi influence, trying to corrupt you back to the lighter side of things, all while I cling to the crumbling doctrines I was raised on. Recipe for a tragedy. It’s good — there should be a stage play.”

“Can you do it?”

“What? Pretend to be in love with you? Fine time to ask.”

“Not love,” corrects Asajj. “Not yet. You just have to want me. Or you have to make everyone think you do.”

“I’m a Shadow. And frankly, I’d like to live. So, yes.”

Asajj leans in closer; Quinlan doesn’t flinch away. “Better get used to it now. Make it convincing.” Her life is tied to his now, which is a more foolish play than she ever expected herself to make. Unfortunately, she can’t take it back now. All she can do is test him, give them both the best chance of making it out of this alive. Or at least taking Dooku with them if they die.

He drops his chin to look at her. “Is that eagerness I sense?” His teeth flash in a brief grin.

Asajj shakes her head. “Only to live long enough to kill Dooku.” Then she closes the distance between them and presses her lips against his. His lips are warm. They stiffen in shock before melting into hers. His hands draw around her waist, pulling her close. Asajj holds her body tense. The sensation of his palms against her back and his body fitting into the curve of hers ties her stomach into knots, but she doesn’t let herself pull away.

This is a test for herself too.

She passes.

When she draws back, Quinlan gives her a strange little half-smile. One arm stays loosely curved about her middle. Loose enough for her to shake free if she wants to. She doesn’t. “Well,” he says. “One way to take my mind off the hell my life’s turned into, hey?”

She gives him a look. “This isn’t a laughing matter, fool.”

“Oh, I think it is.” Chuckling, he lets his head loll back against the chair behind him. “Because that was the first time I’ve ever been kissed. And it was by a Sith apprentice. And I’m a Sith apprentice too!” He laughs again, looking up at the ceiling. “Stars, if Tahl saw me now… My family’s never going to believe this.” He clears his throat, seeming to remember she’s sitting right next to him. “But it was — it was good, you know. As kisses go.” He nudges her shoulder, and Asajj almost laughs too. The knot in her stomach loosens.

“You’re a strange man, Quinlan Vos.”

“I’ve heard.”

She watches him for a moment longer. “You really love them, don’t you? Your… your family.”

“I’m doing this for them. All of this, for them. And…” He hesitates, watching her right back. “And you, a little bit. Now.”

Asajj draws in a sharp breath. “You —”

“It’s all right.” He shrugs. “You don’t have to say anything.”

“I was going to tell you you were an idiot,” she says.

Quinlan grins again. “I know.” He takes her hand in his and squeezes. “Just… once we get this boat in the air… stay here, with me. For a while.” He gestures to the datapad, cast aside and half-forgotten. “I’m waiting. Figure that someone — Obi-Wan, Siri, Tholme one of them — got themselves in front of cameras at some point. It’s just like them all to be in the center of the action. I want to see them. And I’d rather not wait alone.”

Asajj bites the inside of her cheek. “We’re not friends, Quinlan Vos.”

He shrugs again. “I know. But we are all the other has got. Figure it counts for something.”

Maybe it does. Slowly, Asajj nods. “All right.”

He squeezes her hand again. “Thank you.”

He’s still holding her. The warmth of his skin soaks into her, driving away the chill from the cell. Usually, once it has sunken into her bones, nothing except a long, hot shower in the first fresher she can find will take it away.

Watching Quinlan as he leans back and lets his eyes drift shut, Asajj presses her teeth together, breathing deeply. Instinct tells her to pull away, leave this warm place at Quinlan’s side, but that’s not the way to win this war the two of them have begun. If they’re going to deceive Dooku, their connection must be seamless. He has to believe that Quinlan’s body is hers, and hers is his. He has to believe in the game Asajj has promised she’s playing.

Asajj can make her words accord with any lie she wishes to tell, but her body is another matter. She imagines it is the same for Quinlan Vos, celibate Jedi raised to hate and fear the Sith.

She has never slept with someone for any other reason than to stay alive, and while she has no intention of sleeping with Quinlan, Dooku needs to believe she is. Not just Dooku, everyone . And they need to believe she has finally clawed her way to a position of power, of delight in using another the way she herself has been used in the past. Quinlan is meant to be her vengeance against the warlord who enslaved her, against the male gladiators she gave herself to in order to secure their protection, against everyone who ever touched her.

Quinlan needs to make them believe that he is head over heels, lost in the first rebellion of his life, lost to her wiles, lost to her . Dooku expects the picture of a Jedi given over. A visual representation of the failure of Jedi dogma, of the power of darkness to suffocate all light.

And if he is consumed with drinking in that sight, he will never see his end coming until it’s too late.

So instead of pulling away, Asajj leans closer and kisses Quinlan again. He turns his head to meet her advance and kisses her back. Already, he is learning. The tension from before is gone.

Against her will, the sensation of Quinlan’s warm, strong hand gripping hers in the cell, driving back the stinging pain and icy cold of the darkness, flashes through Asajj’s mind. Her body relaxes against him. She almost jerks back, like she was suddenly dunked in frigid water, but she forces herself to stay, breaking off the kiss and tucking her head into the curve of her neck. The steady rhythm of his heartbeat, reverberating up from his chest, fills her ears.

She shivers. This is dangerous ground.

# # #

Two weeks after the attack, the Senate reconvenes for the first time. Riyo arrives by speeder. Her driver wends his way through the packed square outside the Senate and pulls up in front of the steps. As her bodyguards step forward to receive her, Riyo, pulling a deep breath in preparation for the wall of noise outside, opens her door and slides out into the open. The second she straightens and her head rises high enough to be seen over the curving roof of her speeder, explosive cheers and applause break out.

Startled, Riyo twists, looking closely at the crowd for the first time.

It’s made up of all species, full of a mixed multitude of undercity and overcity residents. They’re a single unit, scattered with flags, banners, and holographic signs that hover over their heads. The signs have a simple slogan: Chuchi for Chancellor, Chuchi for Coruscant, Chuchi for All. The flags and banners are different. They are all cerulean with two yellow stripes through the centers.

The exact shade of Riyo’s skin and shape and color of the tattoos that cross both her cheekbones.

Her breath catches. She finds herself frozen, halfway up the steps — just staring. For a moment, dizziness swells. She almost lists sideways, but then a warm hand takes her elbow. Fox steps up to her side, clad in his red and white armor, and leans down toward her.

“You know, if you stand out here much longer, your security team is going to have a conniption,” he says. “And so am I. Do you have any idea how much of a target you are right now?”

“All these people.” That’s all Riyo can manage to say. “All these people, they’re here…”

“They’re here for you.” A furtive smile slips across Fox’s face. “Didn’t you realize?”

“I thought — I thought — When I announced my intention to become the Chancellor, I didn’t think that the people would…”

In spite of the crowd, or perhaps because of them (because Fox does nothing without consideration of the kinds of eyes on him), Fox moves closer, until his lips are almost pressed against her ear. “Didn’t think they would, what? Fall in love with you?”

“That’s not what I —”

“Because you, Senator Chuchi, are very easy to love.”

Warmth spreads through her. She turns her eyes back to the crowd. “I just didn’t expect it to happen so quickly .”

“I did.” He squeezes her elbow. “When they think of the attack, they hear your voice, telling them how to save lives. Telling them to be brave. Giving them hope . They see you, with a little twi’lek girl from the undercity. When they think about the person who is going to pull the Republic through this war, they don’t think about Palpatine. They think about you.”

Riyo swallows hard. “Our girl — Aora. If you’re here, where is she?” After the attack, the authorities were able to confirm that Aora, the twi’lek girl she and Fox rescued, was indeed an orphan. It was a choice between letting the authorities place Aora in a state-sponsored care facility or taking her in as a ward, which wasn’t a choice at all, in Riyo’s mind. For now, Aora is only her ward, but as soon as the adoption process is complete, she’ll be her daughter.

And Fox’s too, if things between them keep going the way they are.

“In the barracks, with Hound and Thire,” replies Fox. “She’s safe. Decommissioning be hanged, they’ll kill anyone who touches her.”

“It had better not come to that.”

“Well, it won’t — not with our senator benefactor.” Fox’s smile is back, so much easier to summon now than it used to be. “I hear that someone whipped the minority into shape, and now they’re watching over the Coruscant Guard, just waiting to spot abuse and tell the whole city about it, naming all the names they can. Something about public opinion swinging in the clone army’s favor? I don’t know. It might be just rumors.”

Also deciding she doesn’t care about how many eyes are on them, Riyo leans into him. “Now is not the time to flirt with me, Fox.”

“It’s always the time.” After a pause, he says, “What are you going to do?”

Riyo lifts her chin. “I’m going to have Bail call for a vote of no-confidence.”

“It won’t pass.”

“I know. That’s not the point.” She turns on her heel and marches up the steps, Fox at her side. “I want the people to see it. I want them to know that I’m ready to fight.”

And after the vote fails, she has another bill to put forth. This one she is confident will pass, if only because she had Bail, Mon, and many of her other allies crossing party lines to advocate for it as much as they could during the past two weeks. Couched as a debt reduction and budget restructuring bill, it will mandate that the GAR form a special unit tasked with tracking down and rescuing clone prisoners of war.

After all, reusing clones and carefully managing sub-sentient resources purchased from the Kaminoans would prevent the Senate from further raising the galactic deficit and putting the Republic in deeper debt with the Banking Clan, which delighted in funding both sides of the war under the table and raising interest rates to ridiculous levels, all to line their own pockets. Minimizing the amount of new clone battalions requisitioned from Kamino was financially smart.

At least, that was how Bail and Mon put things when they were speaking to the majority. To the minority, all they said was that it was time to bring the lost orphans of the Republic home.

And it was. Riyo would ensure it.

And she would ensure that Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker, along with their two battalions, were given the job of freeing the imprisoned clones. If even half of what Padme has told her about Anakin is true, then not all of the lost clones will be coming back to the Core to be returned to the GAR in metaphorical chains. Some, she is certain, will be reported as killed during the escape attempt or killed by Separatist mistreatment.

And those presumed dead clones will materialize on Tatooine, with the Republic being none the wiser.

Someday — hopefully sooner rather than later — the corrupt forces within the government would regret ignoring Tatooine and thinking that forcing a Rimmer freedom fighter to fight in their slave army was a good idea.

# # #

When Obi-Wan, after another endless day of helping with the cleanup around the city, arrives at his apartment in the Temple, he is both surprised and unsurprised to find Anakin there, sitting cross legged on the wide windowsill of his living room, catching the light from the skyway lights as he hunches over the battered, old fashioned sketchbook he acquired at some point in the last few weeks.

Surprised, because if Obi-Wan has been running himself ragged helping with body recovery and cleanup efforts, Anakin has been working himself to the bone. Most nights, Obi-Wan doesn’t see him until he staggers back to the ranks of quonsets that have been serving as temporary barracks for the clone battalions whose barracks were destroyed in the attack and checks on the 501st, 212th, Ahsoka, and Padme. Obi-Wan has never seen anyone work as hard as he has seen Anakin work in the past few weeks. He approaches everything — from body recovery to the simple shifting of rubble — like it’s a battle to be fought. With the Force, he has lifted entire collapsed buildings on his own and held them in place while first responders flooded in to gather up bodies or — in the earlier days — pull out survivors. And strong as he is, it’s taking a visible toll on him. Obi-Wan can see it, in the translucence of his skin and the ever-darkening circles beneath his eyes.

Unsurprised, because Anakin has been his shadow in the weeks since the attack. Even if their duties take them to opposite ends of the Federal District, before the day’s end, he will find Anakin back at his right side, usually with Ahsoka, Padme, or both of them in tow. He doesn’t know how Anakin does it or how he always manages to find Ahsoka and Padme before he does, but he’s grateful nonetheless. Sometime in between their ordeal on Mandalore and the Separatist terror attack, Anakin decided to enfold Obi-Wan into the ever-growing circle of people he gave loyalty to. Obi-Wan can feel it, like an ever-present warmth at his flank. It’s an almost fearful thing, how quickly he has grown used to looking up and seeing Anakin approaching or Anakin already close at hand. It makes the ferocity of Tatooine’s loyalty make perfect sense. The lines between family and comrade don’t exist to Anakin. He is a brother to Kitster, Owen, and Beru, but he is also a brother to his freedom fighters back on Tatooine and to the 501st and 212th.

And to Obi-Wan… Obi-Wan doesn’t know. He still calls him Master Kenobi, still watches him out of the corner of his eye when he thinks Obi-Wan isn’t looking — as though he still expects Obi-Wan to slide a knife between his ribs — but at the same time, his loyalty, sudden and all encompassing, is etched into Obi-Wan’s skin like a tattoo. Everyone can see it. It’s begotten a saying that flies back and forth between clones, Jedi, and other rescue workers, usually chased with a fond, sideways smile that breaks through the heavy cloud of mourning that hangs thick over Coruscant.

Where there is Kenobi, you will always find Skywalker not far behind.

“Anakin?” Not bothering to ask how Anakin got past his locked door, he lets his cloak fall from his shoulders and hangs it up by the door. He is so tired that his body has ceased to ache. He is inhabiting a stranger’s form, numb to all its complaints. “How did you know I’d —”

“Cody,” says Anakin, still focused on his sketchbook. How he finds time for drawing, Obi-Wan doesn’t know, but his artistic endeavors have become a point of interest for all the clones. In the rare moments of quiet, Obi-Wan can usually find someone — generally Fives or Gregor — leaning over Anakin’s shoulder as he uses a stick of charcoal to recreate someone’s likeness on a sheet of flimsi. “He said you got word from Bant, calling you back to the Temple. It’s all right,” he adds, lifting his head for the barest second, “I left Snips with Padme at the barracks.”

Obi-Wan hadn’t been worried. Ahsoka is his padawan, but an understanding has been growing between him and Anakin, climbing through the space between them like some invasive, spreading ivy. If he leaves Ahsoka with him, she’s safe. He won’t leave her side unless she’s next to someone he trusts — usually Padme or someone from the 501st or 212th.

Never Qui-Gon.

Obi-Wan doesn’t address that, largely because he wonders if Ahsoka really would be safe with Qui-Gon. Somehow, Padme seems to have been able to lay aside what Qui-Gon did on Tatooine, leaving her at Jabba’s mercy, but Obi-Wan hasn’t.

There was a moment, when Qui-Gon gave him the news of Adi’s death, where the walls between them cracked enough for Obi-Wan to see through them to the past, to how things used to be, but then Qui-Gon left once Anakin and Padme engulfed Obi-Wan in an embrace. Without a word, without anything.

Because that is how it always is when someone they both care for dies. Qui-Gon locks himself away, leaving Obi-Wan and the others to stumble through the desert of grief on their own. Even Tholme, usually so present, was bent beneath the weight of losing Adi and Quinlan both, so close together. He disappeared into his work, heading out with a dozen other senior Shadows to gather intelligence and secure Coruscant against another similar attack.

Obi-Wan can forgive him. It’s the first time Tholme’s failed any of them.

Quinlan’s betrayal is an open wound, cutting into everyone. All of them are bleeding out. Tahl’s death at least became a scar, but this… Obi-Wan has spent hours when he should be sleeping staring down the corridors of time, endless months or even years where Quinlan isn’t home and isn’t coming home, and wondering how any of them will survive it.

And how any of them will survive the war as a whole without Quinlan. Quinlan the protector, Quinlan the outspoken one, Quinlan the one who didn’t care what the Council thought, Quinlan the shield they all hid behind.

Obi-Wan is the oldest of them now, and it hangs about his neck like a weight. That’s why Bant called him here, to the Temple, even though he had been spending what little off-duty time he had with the clones. When it came to people she was close to her, her empathic abilities allowed her to guess at the shape of their movements and sense their intentions. If she wanted him here, it meant someone — not her, because Bant never asks for help, not since Tahl died — needed him. Once, the message would have been sent to Quinlan — or, failing him, Tholme — but with Quinlan a traitor and Tholme off-world, it came to Obi-Wan.

It’s his job now. He's the third choice, and for good reason: he’s not good at this. He’s not good at any of this.

“Thank you for looking after her,” he tells Anakin as he moves deeper into the living room. Exhaustion drags at his limbs. “For looking after her and Padme. It’s… It’s good, not to have to worry about them.”

Anakin shrugs, easily. “I’m used to it.”

That’s the difference between them: Anakin has never not been the oldest in his family.

Obi-Wan crosses the room to him and leans over his shoulder long enough to see the familiar lines of Padme’s face, visible in the wane light of the skyway. It’s a moment Obi-Wan remembers — two days ago, when she passed out sprawled across a few supply crates in the makeshift barracks, with her curls hanging down over the edge. She looks peaceful in the drawing, just as she did in real life. Everyone had let her sleep, with the clones all but tiptoeing around her. Of course, she’d woken up and been very ungrateful that everyone had allowed her to “slack off” as she put it.

“That’s good,” he says quietly. “It looks just like her.”

Anakin bends his head lower over his drawing. Self-consciousness bleeds off him into the Force; he still hasn’t learned to conceal his feelings from other Jedi. “Thank you.”

Obi-Wan lets a smile tug at his lips. “You draw her quite often.”

“Oh, don’t even start.” Anakin’s presence in the Force turns sharp, all but pushing Obi-Wan out. “Everyone’s already had their go — Fives, Jesse, Waxer, Boil, even Cody . I’m an artist. I draw what I want to draw. It’s got nothing to do with the person.” He lifts his gaze to Obi-Wan again, but this time, his eyes are hard and full of warning. “So leave it. All right?”

Obi-Wan can feel when Anakin is lying too. That’s a new development, and not one he’s certain Anakin knows about. “It doesn’t matter if you care for her, Anakin. No one is going to take her away from you.”

Anakin’s glare turns fiercer. “Oh, I’m sorry, did you forget a certain tenet of your religious order? Because I sure as kriff didn’t.”

Obi-Wan swallows, remembering his own thoughts about Anakin’s clear connection to Padme back at the beginning of all this. He thought it was a danger, an outpouring of collateral damage waiting to happen. But he was being a hypocrite. And now that he’s seen the two of them in action together, he’s come to a new conclusion. They are a danger, but to all the right kind of people. “I haven’t forgotten,” he replies. “But the difference is I’m standing in between you and anyone who would try to take her away.”

Anakin folds his arms over his sketchbook. “And you want her away from the frontlines as much as anyone.”

Obi-Wan doesn’t point out that Anakin himself doesn’t enjoy Padme putting herself in danger. “I want her where I can see her. She’s not going to stop throwing herself into the fight, so it’s far better if she does it near me. Does that lay your mind to rest?”

After a moment, the ice retreats from Anakin’s expression, and he returns his attention to his sketchbook. “I’m drawing this because it’s beautiful — the shape, the lighting, all of it. It’s got nothing to do with her.”

Normally, Anakin’s lies are better than this, but Obi-Wan doesn’t press. If he thinks about it, he can think of a myriad of reasons why Anakin’s obvious affection for Padme might send him into a panic if he let himself admit it. It’s a certainty that slaves on Tatooine had their loved ones used against them, and if it were Obi-Wan in that situation, he would do all he could to hide what he felt for anyone close to him. He would do anything to avoid painting a target on their backs, and he can only assume Anakin would do the same. But Padme is different. She appeared when his life was upended. When he desperately needed an ally. A friend . There is no hiding how important she has become to him in such a short stretch of time, and knowing Anakin — as much as Obi-Wan can claim to know him — that tactical slip must haunt him. After all, Padme’s already been used against him once, by Pre Vizsla. “I think it’s beautiful too,” he says, instead of contradicting him. “It’s good to see her resting, for once.”

Anakin’s lips twitch in the faintest smile. “Yeah. It is.” He looks up again. “You’re as bad as she is, you know. When it comes to getting rest.”

This is much safer territory. “You have no grounds to criticize me. You’re worse than both of us.”

“I’m used to it, though. I’m not a Corrie.” Anakin grins. “We grow ‘em stronger, out on the Rim.”

Obi-Wan presses his lips together. “Padme’s Midrim.” A smile of his own slips across his face. “You always forget.”

Anakin opens his mouth to say something, but a knock sounds at Obi-Wan’s door before he can. As Anakin’s mouth falls shut again, Obi-Wan holds up a single finger to ask him to wait where he is before crossing the room to the door. Swiping his hand in front of the panel, he unlocks it.

It swishes open to reveal Sian standing on the other side. She looks foreign, like another person wearing Sian’s face and skin and looking out of her vibrantly colored eyes. Instead of her usual sabermaster robes, with all their close practicality and earthy colors, she’s wearing civilian clothes, like a Jedi might if they were trying to go undercover, and rather than being tamed into her usual slicked back ponytail, her dark hair hangs messily down her back and over her shoulder, melding with the snowy white front pieces that usually frame her face. Purply circles shadow her eyes, clashing with her orangey skin. She stands like an uncertain child, elbows hugged tightly against her, shoulders hunched. All the tightly wound, controlled grace that’s typified her since she hit puberty — and how Obi-Wan resented the elegant ease with which she glided around in those years, when he was a tangle of arms and legs of continually changing length — is gone. It’s like she’s eleven again: an initiate who frightened off everyone except Bant, who, with all her fierce loyalty, dragged Quinlan, Obi-Wan, and Siri close to Sian’s side, until they saw her truthfully too.

And the truth was, Sian wasn’t frightening at all.

But Obi-Wan has never seen that truth written across Sian’s entire body before.

“Sian?” He steps up to the threshold, reaching out a tentative hand — because in a strange way, this version of Sian does unnerve him — and laying it on her shoulder. “You… Are you all right?”

Sian lifts red-rimmed eyes to him. She’s been crying, and that’s all wrong too. Sian never cries. “Bant… Bant made you come, didn’t she?” Her voice is faint and faraway. “She always knows when I…” Without warning, she lists sideways. Obi-Wan jerks forward and catches her before she can fall. Now that he’s closer, a smell lingering on her clothes and pouring out her skin rises up and chokes him.

In the year after Tahl’s death, he smelled it so often on Qui-Gon that he has it memorized.

Whiskey.

“Sian.” A tightness fills his throat. Lifting her off her feet, he drags her inside, slapping the access panel as he passes it so that the door shunts shut again. “What did you do ?”

Her voice is thick with tears. As Anakin slips off the windowsill and crosses over to the couch, catching hold of her legs and helping Obi-Wan maneuver her onto the couch, she says, “I didn’t mean to.”

“Oh, you didn’t, did you?” Heat floods Obi-Wan’s chest, turning his words hot and stinging. He lays Sian’s head on one of the couch pillows, tucking it beneath her with more care than he feels. “You just accidentally found the bottom of a whiskey bottle? That must have taken talent.”

Sian cringes away from him. Her face is wane, and her lips are pale. In spite of himself, Obi-Wan’s gut twists. She looks ill. “I didn’t — I just had two. Only two, and then I…” She squeezes her eyes shut. Two tears squeeze past her dark lashes. The knot in Obi-Wan’s stomach tightens. “I felt sick and wrong, so I came here. Didn’t know Bant knew, didn’t know she told you, I just… I couldn’t go to… I couldn’t…”

She doesn’t finish the sentence, but she doesn’t need to. She couldn’t go to Qui-Gon, like any of them might have in the younger years, trusting that he could undo their kriff-up, for obvious reasons, and she couldn’t go to Tholme either, given that he was off-world.

“So you, what?” Obi-Wan stands over her, fists balled at his sides. He’s looming, he knows, but he can’t bring himself to care. The only thing stopping him from shaking sense back into Sian — Sian , the one he’s supposed to be able to count on to not be stupid — is his desire to avoid her vomiting all over his floor. “Walked back on your own? Drunk? When anything could happen to you? ”

“Magtrains still aren’t running,” is Sian’s only excuse. She groans. “Don’t feel good.”

“Ask me how much I kriffing care,” snaps Obi-Wan, ignoring the sidelong look Anakin, standing at the foot of the couch, shoots him. “A drunk Jedi, staggering back to the Temple alone? After everything that’s happened? Do you like the idea of getting trafficked, or do you just have a death wish? I thought you were supposed to be the smart one. I can see Siri pulling something as intellectually bankrupt as this, but not you. Did you rent out your brain to Bant too, as well as your emotions? And Bant! Did you even think about what this might do to her? She’s already dealing with the parts of your head that you don’t want to deal with. Can you imagine what she would have gone through if something did happen? Stars , Sian!” The shout rips out of him, loudly enough that Sian flinches. Anakin does not, but he does raise an eyebrow, still watching quietly. “How could you — after all we went through when Qui-Gon…” He trails off then, glancing at Anakin. So much, so much that is private , has already been dragged out into the open right in front of him, and at the moment, Obi-Wan has no desire to air out yet another dirty piece of his and Sian’s shared history where he can hear.

“Bant would have been all right.” Sian seems small on the couch as she curls her knees up into her chest and huddles on her side in a tight ball.

Obi-Wan tries to steady his breathing. The rhythm of skyway traffic — shafts of brightness from headlights, shadows from the space between speeders — makes a shifting pattern of light and shadow in the living room. “What?”

“Bant.” A trembling, unfocused smile flickers briefly across Sian’s lips. “She’d be all right, if something had happened.”

“Oh, would she now?”

For a moment, Sian seems transfixed by the path of a shadow that followed in the wake of a passing speeder. Then, she says, “I took them back.” She makes a snatching motion with one hand and giggles, even as a tear drops out of one of her eyes. “I took them all back.”

Obi-Wan freezes in place. “You… You what?”

“It was so strange at first,” says Sian, not even seeming to be listening to him. “I hadn’t felt everything all at once in so long … Then I remembered Adi’s funeral, and Tahl’s funeral, and I thought about what would happen if someday Quinlan ended up back here in a box, and I…” A terrible shiver runs through her.

Anakin moves faster than Obi-Wan, scooping up a deep decorative bowl from the table and shoving it against the edge of the couch just as Sian leans over and throws up into it. Anakin catches her hair and holds it back as she does. When she’s finished, he — not even grimacing, since bodily fluids of most kinds likely don’t faze a former slave and current freedom fighter — sets it aside. “I’ll get you water,” he says and slips away to the kitchen at the other end of the apartment, leaving Sian and Obi-Wan alone.

Obi-Wan doesn’t know if it’s intentional or not, but he’s not going to waste it. Lowering himself into a crouch so he’s eye level with Sian, he says, “ Why, Sian?”

Sian pushes sweaty strands of hair back from her face. Cramming down the anger that still wants to leap out and bite her, Obi-Wan helps, tucking her hair behind her.

“I was just thinking,” she says.

“Were you?” Obi-Wan loses hold of the anger long enough for cutting sarcasm to bleed into his voice. “I see. It does seem like a lot of thinking went into tonight.”

Sian shrinks back from him a little. That’s all wrong too. Sian is far more likely to give him a coolly disinterested look when he turns caustic or step right up to him with her chin tipped up and return his jibe with something equally crushing. “I was just thinking that I couldn’t stand feeling all that any more, or seeing Quin in a box, or remembering how it sounded when Siri screamed after… after….” Her words spill out in an uncontrolled rush that Obi-Wan can’t interrupt. Vaguely, he senses Anakin behind him, returned from the kitchen, but he doesn’t turn around to look. “And then you! You, when we were small, and I didn’t feel it properly then, but after I took them all back, I did, and I saw , like I was there all over again, Qui carrying you out of the ship, and I saw Mama on the Temple steps, running down to you and Qui, and then I — I saw Tholme carry him out, and I heard Mama start screaming, and she sounded just like Siri, and she just… she broke into pieces, after Bant gave her emotions back. And she told Qui she hated him, and I didn’t feel it then, but I — now, without Bant, I… It felt like someone was stabbing me. And I remembered waiting outside your bacta tank, hoping you’d wake up, and I remembered when you and Qui went off to Mandalore, and Mama was so sick with worry when you didn’t come back, and me and Siri would go to her room in the morning, early, and we’d hear her crying, and I never understood how Siri just knew to go inside and curl up next to her, but now I do , and I didn’t do it then when she was alive, and now she’s gone, and I can’t… I can’t …” A vast sob wells out of her throat. Without thinking, Obi-Wan reaches out and grabs her hand, folding it in his. “I remembered,” Sian says, voice dropping into something that’s barely a whisper, “I remembered when she left to find you and Qui, and I remembered when you and him came back, without her, and I…” She lifts glassy eyes to Obi-Wan. “No one screamed then. Do you remember? You and Qui were so quiet, Obi. You didn’t even look at each other, and no one even spoke . Tholme had gotten forced out on a mission, so it was just us. It was just us, and Qui went to his rooms without saying anything, and you just sort of… sort of folded up in the hangar. And Bant ran to you because she always knows what to do, and then Quin was…” Another ragged cry almost chokes her. “Quin was there . He was there, when nobody else was.”

Obi-Wan’s chest feels like someone is ramming a rusty, dull blade into it. “I remember,” he says quietly. Quinlan, all of nineteen years old, holding himself steady while everything cracked apart. It was the first time that Tahl wasn’t home to meet them whenever one of them returned to the Temple. Up until that moment, Obi-Wan had believed that — somehow, some way — she would be there when he and Qui-Gon came home. That she was only dead on Mandalore. Through some nonsensical, childish belief, he had convinced himself that death just didn’t count when it happened to Tahl.

“He picked up Siri,” Sian goes on. “I think she was eleven — too big for it, really, but he carried her anyway, and somehow he got all three of us tucked under his other arm, even though you were getting so tall, and I remember… I remember feeling so safe . Like if Quin was still there, it would be all right. It would always be all right. So when Qui kept drinking, or when you and he never really started talking again, or when you disappeared off to Mandalore that one night and none of us knew if you’d come back, or when you and Qui went to fight on Naboo, or when you both were captured on Geonosis, or when I left when the war started and Mace had to convince me to come back, I wasn’t really frightened. Quin was still there, he was always there, so it would be all right.” She tightens her grip on his hand. “And now he’s not here, Obi, and I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do, I don’t know how to bear it, you need to tell me how, or else I’ll…” She shivers again but doesn’t throw up. Her eyes are huge as she stares up at Obi-Wan. “I’m scared, Obi. I think I’m just like Qui, I think I’m just as selfish as —”

“No.” Obi-Wan silences her with a hard look. “You’re not. You’re not like him, Sian.” He leans forward and presses his forehead against hers. She curls closer, knitting her free hand in the shoulder of his tunic. “But please — please promise me you won’t do this again. Please, we can’t — you can’t — not after everything. Siri and Bant need you. Aayla needs you. Tholme needs you.” He cups one hand to the back of her head. “ I need you.”

Sian’s soft exhale brushes across his face, scented thickly with whiskey. “I’m sorry, Obi. I won’t… I won’t do it again. I don’t even like the stuff.” A cracked little laugh makes its way out of her throat. “Tastes foul. And I couldn’t even see straight after the first one. Qui could go through a bottle in a day sometimes, do you remember? How did he do it?”

“By working at it,” says Obi-Wan, with no small amount of bitterness. “It was his favorite kriffing hobby, remember?” He leans closer, whispering to her. “I remember I dumped two whole bottles down the sink once. Made eye contact with him the whole time. Stars, I thought he was going to kill me, but he just stalked out of our apartment.”

Sian giggles again. “Was that when you spent a week sleeping on Quin’s floor?”

“I wasn’t frightened . I just didn’t want to deal with all... all he’d say. Or what he wouldn’t say. It was only the second time I went against him, you know.”

“What was the first time?”

“Wouldn’t you like to know.”

Sian gives him a conspiratorial smile. “Dirty, dirty man.”

“I got married, gutter-brain.” The vise squeezing his lungs loosens. A faint smile of his own timidly stretches his lips.

“Dirtier. If you’re a Jedi, anyway.”

He shakes his head. “You’re an idiot, Sian Jeisel.”

“I learned from the best.” Sian pulls back enough to look him in the eyes. “Promise me, Obi,” she says in the softest of whispers. “Promise me I’m not like him.”

Obi-Wan swallows hard and pushes her sweaty hair back from her face again, using his fingers to brush away the fine strands spiderwebbed across her forehead and caught on the blunt nubs that serve as a female devaronian’s horns. “I promise. You can’t be like him.”

“Why not?”

“Because you’re too kriffing stubborn. If you don’t want to be like Qui-Gon, you won’t let yourself. Simple as that.”

“You think so?”

“I know so.” He sighs. His anger is gone now, swept away when he wasn’t looking, and all he feels is wrung out and tired. “Why now, Sian? All these years, you let Bant handle this end of things. Why did you suddenly decide you wanted them all back?”

Rather than answering, Sian first says, “She knew I took them back. She didn’t say, but she knew. She must’ve known this was coming. She always knows. Stars, she’s just like Mama.”

“Sian, please, just —”

“I wanted them back,” she says, like that’s any kind of answer at all. “I kept thinking about what Mace said, when he found me and asked me to come back and fight.” She frees her hand from Obi-Wan’s tunic and scrubs at her face. “He said he knew I was afraid of what the war would mean, of seeing all my padawan-level students go off to fight, but he said it wasn’t a Jedi’s role to be afraid. That if I was afraid for my students, I should let them go. That I’d find… clarity when I gave up my attachment to them.” Her eyes focus properly for the first time, cutting through the fog the alcohol left and turning sharp and fierce as she looks at Obi-Wan. “To you. To Quin. To everyone, even him.”

“He was just telling you what he was told his whole life,” says Obi-Wan, uncertain of why he’s bothering to defend Mace. Perhaps it is because Anakin is standing behind him, having only the memory of Mace supporting his indenture to inform his opinion of him. He has no idea what it was to grow up knowing Mace, laughing at his stilted but warm jokes, and blushing beneath the approving smile that crossed his face whenever Sian, Obi-Wan, or any of them did something impressive. “He didn’t —”

“It’s not what he said then. It’s the fact that he said it again when I found him after Adi’s funeral.” Sian snorts at the word funeral , and Obi-Wan doesn’t blame her. It’s difficult to call a ceremony without a body, held in a tiny span of time between duty rotations, a funeral. “He went on and on and on about it. Like he was trying to convince himself. And I just stood there, listening, and I thought about everyone we’d already lost and all the people we might still lose, and I just thought…” Her lips pull back a little in a snarl. “ Kriff that. I thought I let Bant handle it all because I was afraid, afraid they’d see how much I cared about all of you, that I’d be the reason we got separated, but it wasn’t that at all. I was just doing what he does. Holding myself back, pulling away. Calling it courage. Kriff that. Kriff them. Kriff it all . And if they want to graduate any of my initiates to padawans and send them off to war, they’ll have to go through me first. That’s my role. And if they want to stop me, they can kill me.”

Obi-Wan smiles at her, even as his stomach sinks at the idea of her voicing any of these ideas where the Council can hear her. “And that’s why you’re not going to be like Qui-Gon.”

Sian suddenly lurched up and wrapped both arms around her neck. The embrace is so startling, especially from her, that Obi-Wan draws in a sharp breath. As he wraps both arms around her and cradles her close, she says, lips close to his ear, “I know you’re doing something too. You and Anakin. Something stupid, and you’ve gone and wrapped Aayla up in it. Little scrap still can’t lie to me, Shadow or not.” She draws back, staring up at him. “I’m not going to ask you what you’re doing. But be careful, Obi. Be careful.”

“You first.” He lowers her back onto the couch, catching hold of one of the blankets Tahl made him when he was a child — patchwork, in the Mandalorian fractal style, which has always struck him as a painful coincidence. He tucks the blanket around her and draws it up to her chin. He makes sure part of it covers her exposed ear, just like Tahl always drilled into them — something about twenty percent of body heat being lost through uncovered ears. “Go to sleep, Sian. Things will seem easier in the morning.” That is something Tahl always said too, and it springs to his lips like the words to a long-memorized song.

She huddles beneath the blanket. A yawn splits her face, so wide and uninhibited that Obi-Wan almost laughs. “I’d kill for you, Obi,” she says softly, in a wispy, faraway voice that belies her words. “You know that, don’t you?”

“Yes.” Obi-Wan shakes his head at her. “You’re very like Tholme, in that way.”

“Miss him,” says Sian. A slur fills her words; she’s sliding swiftly toward sleep. “I miss Mama too.”

“I know.” He kneels beside the couch, taking weight off his aching feet. Softly, he adds, “So do I.”

Sian falls silent after that, and in another few moments, the sound of her deep, even breathing fills the apartment. That is when Anakin finally crosses the room and drops into a crouch beside Obi-Wan. By then, Obi-Wan is leaning his head against the arm of the couch, stroking Sian’s hair back from her face with one hand.

The silence between them is thick enough to be unbearable. Somehow, Anakin has been privy to more of Obi-Wan’s secrets in a few weeks than other people have been in years. It stings like salt in a wound. When Obi-Wan can stand the quiet no longer, he says, “Qui-Gon had a… At one point, he had a drinking problem.”

Anakin gives him a purse-lipped smile that would have been unconscionably annoying from anyone else. “I gathered.”

“It’s handled now. But it… We all agreed it would be a bad idea for any of us to… It’s very out of character for Sian to…”

“Yeah, I gathered that too.” Anakin saves him from having to say anything more.

Obi-Wan huffs out a soft laugh. “I shouldn’t be angry with her.”

“Yes, you should be.” Anakin shakes his head, like he thinks Obi-Wan is being ridiculous. “You’re not angry because she got drunk, idiot. You’re angry because she hurt herself. It means you’re a good brother.”

“She’s not my —”

Anakin silences him with a knowing look, and Obi-Wan lets him, largely because after what Anakin heard, he would sound foolish trying to defend himself. “You know,” Anakin says, “once I found Kit strung out on a line of spice. Stupidest thing he’s ever done, but it was after Jabba found an encampment of Tuskens we were allied with. They were harboring freed slaves, so he killed all of them. Kitster answered their comm for help, but he was too late. Just charred bodies by then. You can imagine. So he cracked, hid himself out in the dunes, and snorted so much that when I found him, I actually thought he had overdosed. Just for a second.” Anakin’s eyes are shadowed with the memory, but he doesn’t flinch away from it. “It was one of the worst moments of my life.”

Obi-Wan presses his lips together. “What did you do?”

“Carried him back home. Everyone else was out on missions — Kit and I were waiting for more runaways coming in from the Freedom Trail — so it was just us. I dumped him on Amu and Ipu’s bed, since that was the biggest, and waited for him to wake up.”

“Then what?”

“Oh, I yelled at him. Gave him the reaming out of his life, until he promised never to do something so stupid again. I was shaking by the end. I don’t think I’ve ever been as scared as I was when I found him. And then Amu and Ipu got home, and Kit started crying, and Amu held him, and Ipu took me out into the yard so I could express my feelings with a quarterstaff, before I expressed them to the walls, with my fists.” Anakin gives Obi-Wan a sideways look. “If I had ever lost Amu or Ipu… I don’t know where I’d be. I don’t know who I’d be.”

“Your point?” Obi-Wan lifts his eyes from Sian and focuses his attention on Anakin.

“Only that you should give yourself more credit.” He smiles, more softly than he usually does. “You lost your own amu, didn’t you? And look, you’re still standing.”

Obi-Wan stares at him. “Anakin…”

“You don’t need to make a thing of it,” says Anakin, with a little sideways smile. “When I met you, I thought you were just another Corrie who thought they knew best. Who didn’t know about Tatooine or did and didn’t care… I didn’t think I could stand to trust someone who wasn’t a Rimmer. But I was wrong. Whatever else you are, you’re not who I thought. You… You understand loss. Maybe not the way an Amavikka does, but close, and that…” He looks down at his hands for a moment, like he’s gathering his thoughts. “That makes you someone I can trust. I hope you know that. I wouldn’t leave Snips with you, if I didn’t.”

Despite the fact that Ahsoka is Obi-Wan’s apprentice, not Anakin’s, Obi-Wan believes him. “I didn’t think I could trust someone whose sister’s first act was to poison my master and whose mother threatened me with beheading.”

“Oh, yeah.” Anakin grins, like he is remembering an amusing incident. “They did do that. Post mortem beheading,” he adds, as if that makes everything better. “Don’t forget.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry.” Obi-Wan snaps his fingers. “You’re right. I was overreacting.”

“You do tend to do that.” Anakin slides a smile his way. “So you do trust me now, huh?”

Obi-Wan turns to look at him. “With my life.”

To his shock — and perhaps he shouldn’t be so surprised — Anakin ducks his head like he’s embarrassed, and a wider grin peeks out from beneath his lowered head. “Good. Good, then. Because you’ll need to.” He looks up. “Word came, after you left and shut off your comms.” He didn’t question why Obi-Wan had chosen to do that, especially during a time like this. Maybe he knew that anyone who might truly need to contact Obi-Wan either had the Force or had almost round the clock access to someone he did, and maybe he further knew — or guessed — that Obi-Wan didn’t like having his comm on when he was with Bant or Sian or any of the others. What with the comms being GAR-issue now, there was no telling who was listening.

“What word?” Obi-Wan’s stomach tensed. “The bill — Riyo’s spending bill, did it…”

“It passed.” Anakin’s teeth, bared in a tense grin, flash out in the darkness. “The GAR has an immediate mandate from the Senate to form a unit whose sole task is to go behind Separatist lines and rescue clone prisoners of war. Guess which battalions are going to be used to form that unit?”

“212th and 501st?”

“Who else?” Anakin rolls his shoulders. “Riyo did her job. And Qui-Gon didn’t get in the way.”

“For once.”

“I have to say,” says Anakin, “your new attitude toward Master Jinn is taking all the pressure off me.”

“Oh, is it?”

“Yeah. I don’t have to come up with ways to insult him or kriff him off. You keep doing it for me. It’s really freeing up my schedule.”

In spite of himself, Obi-Wan laughs. “I’m so glad my deteriorating relationship with him is convenient for you.”

“You should be.” Sobering again, Anakin says, “Anyway, we ship out at the end of the week. I came here to tell you that — or, that’s part of the reason I came.”

“What’s the other part?”

Anakin circled a finger to encompass the Temple as a whole. “You were going into enemy territory. I don’t let my people do that alone.”

Obi-Wan shakes his head. “Anakin, I grew up here.”

“And I grew up in Jabba’s palace. Your point?”

“I suppose I don’t have one, when you put it that way.” He glances at Sian, sighing. “Thank you.”

“For what?”

“Coming. I don’t know what I would have done if I were… if I were alone.”

“I told you. You’re my people.”

Warmth spreads behind Obi-Wan’s ribs. “I see.” After a moment spent watching Sian’s chest rise and fall as she breathes, he asks, “Are you afraid? Of what will happen after we deploy?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because.” Anakin nudges him. “I know you’ll have my back out there.”

“I will.” Obi-Wan meets his eyes. “And I know you’ll have mine.”

“Well, there we go.” Anakin gives a sharp nod. “Good enough for me. You?”

Obi-Wan swallows. “Yes. Yes, it is.”

# # #

Riyo is in the Coruscant Guard’s barracks when Ask Aak finds her. She and Fox were struggling to teach Aora how to read, since she had never learned, and that involved sitting on the floor of the common room hunched over Riyo’s datapad, which had a reading program loaded onto it, and helping Aora trace out simple words with her finger. As she read out loud, haltingly, Fox’s brothers kept shouting out encouragements in a mixture of Concordian Mando’a and Basic, making a shy smile creep across Aora’s lips.

It isn’t a dignified picture — Riyo has a stylus stuck through her updo, tumbled and messy after a long day in the Senate, and has her skirts knotted up to enable her more freedom of movement — but it is a vulnerable one, which is why she jerks up straight when Ask walks in.

She hadn’t thought that anyone else knew the access code to the barracks, but of course Ask, as the head of the committee that oversaw the Guard, would know the code — or at least have an override.

Beside her, Fox went stiff and scrambled to his feet, snapping out a salute. The atmosphere of the whole common room turned cold as all Fox’s brothers pulled themselves to attention too, leaping up from benches and laying aside the armor they were polishing or the datapads they were using. In less than thirty seconds, the demeanor of the whole room changed, in such a sharp, wrenching way that Riyo’s stomach turned.

This is not respect. This is fear — baked in. Whether it’s fear of Ask or what he can do or a combination of both, Riyo neither knows nor cares. She just wants him gone . “Stay here and keep reading,” she murmurs to Aora. Once Aora nods, watching Ask with that particular, dissecting stare of hers, Riyo stands. She unfolds herself slowly and deliberately, taking time to shake out the folds of her gown and fix her hair. Ask will see that she will not rush for his sake. He might have forced the Guard to dance on his strings, but he has no power over her.

And she will make sure he knows.

“Senator Aak,” she says, lifting a single eyebrow. It takes all she has to keep the tremor of anger out of her voice, to stop herself from telling him exactly what she thinks of him. Looking into his face, the image of Fox, beaten and bloody, flashes through her mind. This is the man who allowed that to happen. “It’s quite late. I thought you would have gone home by now.”

“I knew you wouldn’t have,” he answers, in a quieter tone than the grating one he usually strikes. “I knew you’d be here.”

Heat flushes across Riyo’s skin, certainly coloring her cheeks. “If you’re here to make more pointed innuendos about me and the Guard, please refrain. Your colleagues have made all of them already, and I find myself growing tired of them.”

Ask swallows, blinking all his eyes — a nervous tic of his. “I’m not here to do that.”

“Then what are you here to do?”

Seeming to steady himself, he meets her gaze without flinching. “I’m here to tell you I’m switching parties. I’m joining the minority.”

Riyo feels herself sway; Fox’s hand closes around her elbow to steady her. “You’re… You’re what?”

“I’m changing parties.” Now Ask looks away again. “I know… I know I was such a vocal opponent of clone rights before that this must shock you, but of late, I find myself… Well, I find myself seeing things differently.” He faces front again, but this time, his eyes land on Fox. “The night of the attack, I was here, in the Senate, with most of the majority. That meant I wasn’t home when the cargo ship leveled the block of apartments where my family lives. Lived. I wasn’t there to protect them because I was in a gilded tower, going over all the ways we could squash this new movement.” He glances at Riyo. “Your new movement, Senator Chuchi. My family would have died, if it hadn’t been for the two clone battalions that evacuated the area in time. They could have run and saved themselves, but instead they chose to risk their very lives to save the families of those who hated them. And I am ashamed to say that, had our positions been reversed, saving the clones would not have crossed my mind. Yet despite that, when I finally managed to make it to Federal Hospital, I found a clone guarding my family. More than guarding, he carried my youngest child for ten hours. Held her, like she was his own. She told me he promised not to put her down until her…” Ask swallows. “Until her daddy came and got her. And he didn’t. And I realized… I realized that I voted against his very personhood. This man, who has more of a soul than I do. I believed him to be fundamentally a weapon that needed a tight leash.” He looks around the room, at all of Fox’s brothers. “I believed that of all the clones. But my daughter fell asleep in the arms of one of those weapons, and even though he knew all I had done, it never occurred to him to hurt her. Or abandon her. In fact,” adds Ask, “it seems that violence against me or my family has never occurred to any of the clones.” As he speaks, he looks right at Fox. “Even though I have authorized violence against them.”

Fox is too well-disciplined, too used to having to hide everything about himself, to let a hand stray to the ribs in his middle that were cracked by the Red Guard, but Riyo isn’t. Without really thinking, she moves her hand to the spot, and Fox, giving up on secrecy for her sake as he so often does, lays his hand over his.

Riyo’s next words drop from her mouth like rushing water. “Are you telling the truth?”

Ask’s mouth forms a thin, tense smile. “For the first time in a very long time… Yes.”

Riyo swallows hard against a sudden lump in her throat. “And your position? On the oversight committee?”

“I’m going to keep it. Use it, to protect the Guard. Protect all the clones.”

“And why should I trust that?”

“You shouldn’t.” Ask shrugs. It’s such an uncharacteristic motion for him — careless and fierce, all at the same time. “But I’m going to have a press conference in a moment, and I’m going to tell the people of the Republic everything.” He holds up his datapad. “I have receipts. The authorization I gave for the Red Guard to whatever was necessary to keep the clones in the Senate in line. The reports I sent up to the Chancellor that he signed off on.” Ask draws in a slow breath. “The decommissioning request he sent me for… I don’t know his name, but his number was CT-9999.”

“Niners,” says Fox. “An idiot.” His voice has gone gruff and cold, as it always does when he speaks of memories he would rather not carry. “The Chancellor tried to get him to say which of us had put off a female senator harassing one of our shinies. Niners said it was him, but Palpatine didn’t believe him.”

“And then he spat in the Chancellor’s face,” says Ask. “I signed off on his… on his death warrant.”

“I remember.” Fox’s face is expressionless. “It was me, who got the senator to leave the shiny alone. I didn’t know where Niners was or what the Chancellor was doing until it was too late. He never told me. By the time someone else did , you and the Red Guard were already breaking down the barracks door.”

Ask meets Fox’s gaze steadily, which makes Riyo hate him less. “If I could be arrested for all I’ve done, I would turn myself in,” he says. “If I thought it would make things better to let you kill me, I’d put your blaster up to my head myself. But this —” he shook the datapad for emphasis “— this is all I have. I can’t repeal the bill that took away your rights. I can’t bring back all of the… all of your brothers that are dead because of me. All I can do is tell the truth. All I can do is try to make people see.” His voice cracks. “I’m sorry, Commander. I’m sorry for everything. I was blind — willfully so. I was a fool. I am a monster. But if it takes my whole life, I will fix this. If your brothers can risk their lives to save senators, then I can spend mine trying to save clones. I swear to you.”

Fox watches him for a long moment. Riyo draws closer to Fox’s side but says nothing. This isn’t her decision, just like the decision to fight wasn’t hers — not really. It’s Fox’s.

“All right.” Fox lifts his chin. “On one condition.”

“What’s that?” Ask looks nervous for a split second, as though he thinks the condition might involve physical violence against him. Riyo doesn’t blame him for thinking that. Anyone might, languishing under the hard gazes of several dozen clones.

“You do everything Riyo says. Everything . You’re not chair of the committee — she is. Understood?”

Ask’s shoulders relax. “Yes. Understood.”

“Good.” Fox crouches down for long enough to scoop up Aora. “Then let’s go have a press conference.”

# # #

Snippets from Senator Aak and Senator Chuchi’s joint press conference are playing across the holoscreens that line the skyscrapers and follow the skyway above Shaya as she climbs out of the speeder she hired and heads in the direction of a corner high rise, which backed onto one of Coruscant’s largest ports. She still doesn’t understand how such a new outreach organization managed to snag some of the most coveted real estate in the Federal District, but she supposes that the Naberries have connections she can’t even imagine. With a former queen and current senator on their side, buying out an entire building probably isn’t difficult.

She pushes her way through the shining revolving door. The lobby on the other side is a madhouse. From end to end, it is packed with people of all shapes, sizes, and species. All of them are women, since the Mothers and Sisters of the GAR solely recruits females. The men of the galaxy, radicalized by the attack, are already being drawn into the civilian recruitment efforts led by Jobal Naberrie and Bail Organa. From what Shaya has heard, they’re working with the Mandalorian army to seed nat-born units into the GAR.

She’s not a fighter. But she still wants to help.

Sticking out her elbows, Shaya fights to the front of the room, where a dozen recruiters are set up behind a long counter, staring out at the crowd with harried, dubious expressions. Carried forward by the press behind her, Shaya thumps into the counter, slapping both hands down on it. The recruiter in front of her looks up from whatever she was doing on her datapad and opens her mouth to speak, but Shaya never lets her finish.

“I want to sign up,” she says. “Ship me out to wherever there’s the most need. I’m good — hard worker. I run my own cleaning business, employ over a dozen other maids and do cleanings myself. You give me enough time to figure things out, and I can do anything you need.”

The recruiter, a slim twi’lek with blue skin, gives her a measuring look. Then she says, “We need someone to head up our Outer Rim chapter. Frontlines work.” Her gaze runs over Shaya, noting, Shaya is sure, all the bandaged cuts and healing scrapes that mark her as a survivor of the recent attack. “Not safe.”

Shaya sets her jaw. “If the Separatists are going to drop more bombs on my head, I’d at least like to see them coming. And I’d like to be doing something useful when they fall. I’ll do it.”

The recruiter smiles. “Welcome to the fight.”

# # #

Anakin plans carefully before he speaks to Rex. Things have been different, since the attack. Rex has been different. More open than before. Fiercely loyal to Anakin in a way that reminds Anakin of the best of his freedom fighters back on Tatooine — the people who run into the bloodiest of fights with him as long as he said, “I have a plan.” It’s a terrifying sort of loyalty, but it’s not unfamiliar to Anakin. In a way, it’s a relief to tread familiar ground and know that, whatever else Rex might do, he will trust Anakin enough to let him save his life, if necessary.

The planning, therefore, is less for Rex’s sake and more for Cody’s. Anakin recognized the look in Cody’s eyes when he threw himself in front of Rex when he had the vision that saved everyone’s lives. He has had that look in his own eyes, time and time again. It was a special kind of hell, being an older brother and a slave at the same time. You had to do an impossible thing: protect your younger sibling when neither of you even owned your own body.

The night before they ship out, he finds Rex in his quarters on the Resolute — his territory, and even if Anakin will be invading it, that’s better than having the conversation in a place where Rex can’t exert any control. He has Cody with him, because Rex needs an ally who isn’t a Jedi. He has Obi-Wan, because Obi-Wan is the general and while Anakin isn’t used to not being at the top of a given chain of command, he does understand its function. Finally, he has Padme, because if there’s anyone that can feasibly get Obi-Wan to do what she wants, no matter what, it’s Padme.

It’s a testament to Rex’s fundamentally forgiving nature that he hardly flinches when Obi-Wan and Anakin — Jedi, or in Anakin’s case, as good as — enter his quarters. All he does is straighten up on his bunk and try to get up to stand to attention. Obi-Wan waves him off, and he settles back down, still alert. “Sirs?” he asks. “What is it?” Then, in another testament to the sort of person Rex is — infinitely capable of regeneration, even after someone like Krell tried to cut him into pieces brother death by brother death — he adds, “Padme?”

Hearing her name from his lips, rather than a distancing my lady , makes Padme smile.

Anakin cuts straight to the chase. Searching questions, veiled queries — they all stink of traps to someone like Rex. They’ll have him grasping for the right answer. The answer that pacifies anger, the answer that saves his brothers, the answer that saves him from a Jedi’s anger unleashed. It won’t matter that neither Obi-Wan nor Anakin will ever hurt him; old instincts die hard — if they die at all. “Rex, I want to talk to you about your Force sensitivity. Is that all right?”

Rex doesn’t flinch, but Cody does. For all that he knew what this conversation was going to be about, it seems he still couldn’t quite prepare himself to hear the words spoken aloud.

“I have a choice?” asks Rex. His shoulders have hunched a little, as though he wishes he had a place to hide. For a moment, it isn’t hard for Anakin to picture him as he must have looked on Kamino: small, uncertain, and frightened.

It’s Obi-Wan who answers that. “As long as I’m alive and your general,” he says, “you will always have a choice, Captain.”

Nodding, half to himself, Rex flicks a questioning look in Cody’s direction. Obi-Wan and Padme don’t react to it, and Anakin imagines that’s because they know the look. They’ll have given it to their older siblings — Sola, for Padme, and Quinlan, for Obi-Wan — countless times. Anakin recognizes it because he has been on the receiving end enough times to have it memorized.

It’s a simple question, communicated to a protector in a single glance.

Is this safe?

Oh, Anakin has felt the weight of that a hundred times.

Tell me it’s safe. Decide for me. Please, I can’t do it on my own.

Please, I’m afraid.

Please, step out in front and shield me from the world.

I forget to look both ways when I cross the street because I know you’ll look for me.

I trust your eyes more than mine.

Please, tell me what to do.

I said I wanted to grow up, but I was lying.

Slowly, almost imperceptibly, Cody nods. His expression doesn’t change, but Anakin’s stomach twists in sympathy. This is the world of the elder: everything is always your fault.

Rex relaxes. To Anakin, he says, “Yes, sir. Yes, that’s all right. What did you want to know about it, sir?”

“Whether you’d be willing to use it,” says Anakin. “To save your brothers.”

“That’s not even a question, sir.”

“It should be,” says Cody. He glances at Obi-Wan and Anakin, and there isn’t exactly mistrust in his eyes, but there isn’t trust either. Anakin can’t blame him. “It should be, Rex.”

And then, in the neverending coin flip of younger siblings, Rex turns an irritated gaze on Cody, bristling. In the span of a breath, the shield that Rex, the younger, was counting on from Cody, the elder, has become a wall to surmount. That’s the world of the younger: you are forever torn between feeling sheltered and feeling smothered.

“Why? You think I should just let them die?” Rex’s voice is sharp now, like it never is with anyone except a fellow clone. “Our brothers? You’re not the only one with people counting on you.”

Cody gives him a hooded look. “Don’t talk to me like I haven’t counted the lost, Rex. Don’t you ever do that, unless you want me to kick your shebs from here to the Rim. Got it?”

Apparently, threats from Cody hit an entirely different nerve inside Rex than threats from anyone else do. Instead of shrinking down, he seems to grow. “Seems to me my lost outnumber yours. And none of mine are in kriffing prison camps because my sha’buir of a general didn’t believe in surrender, and he certainly didn’t believe in my brothers coming home alive. So if I want to use whatever kriffing Jetii magic almost got me killed when I was a cadet to finally help my brothers, rather than just living with all the dreams that tell me who’s going to die next, you’ll have to kriffing deal with it .” He subsides then, glancing at Obi-Wan. “Sorry, sir.”

Obi-Wan smiles. “No — no, Captain, I’ve very much been wanting to call General Krell a sha’buir since I met him. I thank you for beating me to it.”

Rex smiles back, just a little. “If you say so, sir.” He looks back at Anakin. “I want to help. What do you want me to do?”

Without really thinking about it first, Anakin looks to Cody first. It isn’t fair — not really. Rex is his own person. A grown man, as clones go. But Cody… Anakin knows exactly the gut-twisting terror that he is feeling at the thought of Rex jeopardizing himself. He has felt it himself, every time he sent Kitster or Owen into battle or sent Beru up into a sniper’s nest.

It was both the terror of failure and the certainty of it. His brothers or his sister could die if he made a bad call — the terror. They shouldn’t have to be fighting in the first place, and he should have remade the world to ensure they didn’t have to — the certainty.

At the end of the day, Rex was Cody’s . Not in the way a depur owned a slave but in the way that siblings owned each other — souls interwoven like threads in a blanket, shared blood — of the covenant, in Anakin’s case, rather than in the traditional sense — making a chain between them that led straight back to equally shared parents.

Or, in the clones’ case, a shared parent. Singular.

Rex sees him look at Cody, of course. Irritation flares on his face again, but he doesn’t say anything. In fact, he looks at Cody too, which Anakin expected. However much Owen, Beru, and Kitster pretended they didn’t, they listened to him, even when they would rather not. He imagined Rex was the same way with Cody.

Cody presses his lips together. “I need you to understand,” he says, quiet and cold. “I need you all to understand.” He even looks at Padme, who Anakin has never seen misunderstand the clones once. “I need you to understand what it means, for Rex. For any clone. To be a — to be this way.” He glances at Obi-Wan. “When you…” He swallows, faltering over the term. That’s a familiar feeling too. The tongue, once trained to never speak a certain truth, wasn’t easily persuaded otherwise. “When you were found, you were brought to the Temple, weren’t you? Cherished. Celebrated. Protected . Even you, Commander Skywalker, were more afraid of the value your abilities added to you in the eyes of the Hutts than anything else. But Rex?” Cody’s voice cracks — just a little. He composes himself, straightening his back. “Deviation on Kamino means death. His hair was almost too much for them. If he — if he does this, and anyone finds out, he’s dead. Or worse, he’s in some secret lab where his brothers can never find him, being cut apart and studied — piece by piece.” He gives Obi-Wan a hard stare. “Don’t tell me it doesn’t happen. Don’t give me the same lies they gave you. I was born there. I watched brothers leave, and I watched them not come back, and I watched him —” he stabbed a finger in Rex’s direction “— feel them die. Or feel them not die but still never come back. Not long after Rex was decanted, one of our batchmates made a cup float. Just one cup, barely an inch off the ground. It was enough. I don’t know if he’s still alive or if there’s any of him left if he is, but I just know he’s gone. And that if the brass gets the faintest whiff that Rex is… If they find out he’s the same way, they’ll ship him back to Kamino in a heartbeat.”

“I don’t care —” starts Rex.

“No, they won’t,” Anakin interrupts. When Cody turns his attention to him, he says, “If they find out, if they try to take him, I’ll kill them.”

Obi-Wan stirs at that. Anakin expects him to stay silent — that’s been his way, thus far — but instead he speaks up too. “I’ll help.”

“So will I,” adds Padme.

Still Cody hesitates. “You’re asking me to put my brother’s life in your hands.”

“It’s already in their hands.” Rex’s voice is sharp. “It’s always been in Jedi hands, ori’vod. At least now these are finally Jedi I trust. I stopped one of my visions from coming true for the first time in my life a few weeks ago.” He points to Anakin. “ He made that happen. If he tells me I can help save my brothers from hell, then I trust him. If he tells me he’ll protect me, I trust him. And even if I didn’t, I would still want to do this. For them — our brothers. So they can come home. Don’t you want that?”

Cody just looks at him. Then, more quietly than Anakin has yet heard him speak, he says, “I want to be the one with the Force. I want to be the one with deviant hair. I want to be the one Krell hates. I want to be the one on the chopping block. Not you, Rex’ika. Never you.”

Rex gives him a sad smile. “We’re clones, Cody. When have we ever gotten what we wanted?”

“I wanted you, ” says Cody with a sudden ferocity. “I watched you, when you were still in your growth pod, and I wanted you. You were small for too long, and you were different, and no one thought you would live, but Jango…” He swallows. “Jango saw me watching and told me to pray to the Light that you’d live. It was the one kind thing he ever said, and he didn’t even believe it. He just wanted to give me something to do. But I did, Rex’ika. I prayed. I prayed. I told the Light how much I wanted you to live, and He gave me you . And I can’t… I can’t lose you now.”

Rex braces his hands against his knees. From the look on his face, he hasn’t heard this story from Cody before. “I always thought it was the other way around,” he says, with a faint smile. “I thought the Light gave me you.”

Cody is unmoved. Gruffly, he says, “Well, you think stupid things sometimes.”

“The Light gave me this.” Rex stands, pushing off from his bunk. “A genetic miracle — that’s what I am. Yes?” He flicks a look at Obi-Wan, seeking confirmation.

“Yes.” Obi-Wan nods. “No one knows for sure exactly where Jango Fett was born, but most assume Concord Dawn — a Mandalorian world. The assumption has always been that he was ethnically Mandalorian, as well as culturally. And since there hasn’t been a confirmed Force sensitive Mandalorian since Tarre Vizsla, a thousand years ago, the chances that Jango Fett had latent Force sensitivity in his genome are slim. Even slimmer are the chances that that recessive trait would manifest within one of his clones without being discovered. You are a miracle, Rex. That’s correct.”

“See?” Rex refocuses on Cody. “And miracles happen for a reason , Cody. Why would the Light give me this, if He didn’t have a purpose for it? It can’t have been just to torment me with everything I can see and not stop. It has to be this. I was born to bring our brothers home.” He reaches up and touches a pendant tucked beneath his blacks. A ring, Anakin thinks. He remembers seeing it, back when he spoke to Rex at the clones’ favored bar. “I was born to see deaths before they happen and try to stop them.”

Cody bites his lip. His hands flex into fists and relax again. “Fine, Rex’ika. Fine. If this is what you want, then… Fine.”

A fragile, hesitant smile creeps across Rex’s face. “Yeah?” Maybe it’s just because Anakin’s seen that exact same smile — uncertain but triumphant — mirrored on Kitster’s, Owen’s or Beru’s faces so many times, but Rex looks much younger with it than he does at other times. For the first time, it hits Anakin that — biologically, if not chronologically — he and Rex are about the same age.

Most of the time, the clones seem far older than they look.

“Are you admitting I’m right?” A note of playfulness enters Rex’s voice.

“Don’t push it, Rex’ika. I can still kick your shebs.” Cody turns his frown on Anakin. “What are you asking of him?”

“It depends on what he can do,” Anakin replies. “I don’t… I don’t know what a Jedi can usually do. I didn’t exactly grow up with much comparison besides myself and my amu, when it came to the Force. But Rex isn’t a Jedi either, so… I was thinking that if he could use it to find members of the 501st, we might stand a chance of locating the prison camps where the Separatists are keeping the clones they capture, yeah? It’d be different if they were selling them off at markets, but they’re keeping them. So we’ve got a shot at getting swathes of missing clones back with each camp we raid.” He pauses, eyeing Rex. “Can you, Rex? Find your brothers, if you need to?”

Rex hesitates, shifting from foot to foot a bit.

Seeing that he’s still reluctant to share information, in spite of all his bravado from before, Anakin gives secret for secret. “I can find my family,” he says “And some of the fighters in my army I’m closest with. If you pulled up a map of Tatooine right now, I could point where everyone is. And I know that Snips is asleep in one of onboard salles right now.” He smiles a little at that — he can’t help it. “Give me enough time, and I could probably find your brothers myself. But we don’t have time. So. Can you?”

Rex swallows. “Give me a starmap, and I could find them. Wherever they are.”

Anakin’s smile widens. “It’s like they’re all threads, connected with you at the center, isn’t it?”

Rex nods. “Yes. Since we were cadets.”

“Good.” Anakin rolls his shoulders. “That’s going to save some lives, if we play our cards right. Only one problem: we’ll need volunteers. 501st members who are willing to get captured to give you a homing beacon.” His smile slipped away. “It’ll be dangerous.”

“They’ve never known lack of danger, sir,” says Rex. “And at least this time, they get a choice.”

“Who, then?”

Rex lifts an eyebrow. “Who do you think, sir?”

Padme is the one who answers. “You’re thinking of Fives, aren’t you?”

“And Jesse,” replies Rex. “Hardcase, maybe. Anyone crazy enough to put their lives in my hands.”

Another sneaky grin creeps over Anakin’s face. “So your entire battalion, then?”

At that, Rex laughs, in a way that makes it sound like he startled himself. “I suppose so, sir.”

“Well, then let’s go bring your brothers home.”

# # #

Sheev watches destroyers rise up from the GAR shipyards. Multiple battalions, called home to help deal with the aftermath of the attack, are shipping out today. That is good. That is what he wants, especially now that he has instructed Dooku to push the frontlines. An escalation is needed. The people of the Republic are less likely to support a change in leadership if the skies of their homeworlds are black with Separatist ships. They’ll want to keep him as Chancellor — he, who has saved them in the past. Not Riyo Chuchi, untested idealist.

From a separate shipyard, different ships arrow up into the sky. These are boxy civilian ships — Alderaani blockade runners, built to withstand a fight if necessary but also built to carry huge loads of people and cargo. They were provided by Queen Breha in support of the outreach the Naberries started, and they are filled with female volunteers ready to help and advocate for the clones in the GAR, from the Core to the Rim..

The Mothers and Sisters of the Clones.

Sheev’s lip curls. It isn’t enough that Padme Amidala is a persistent thorn in his side, radicalizing members of the minority — people like Riyo Chuchi — and facilitating their stand against him. Her entire family now seeks to undermine him and humanize the clones.

Humanize them. Freaks of nature grown in pods and designed to do one thing: kill.

Sheev cannot think of a more foolish endeavor, yet it’s working . Senator Aak, once a vocal opponent of clone personhood, has joined the minority and seen fit to tell the entire galaxy private Senate business. He’s made himself out to be a monster, crawling out of the darkness into the light in prayerful hope of redemption, but in doing so, he has happily thrown Sheev to the wolves as well.

Sheev would have him killed if he didn’t think it would raise too many questions. Especially after Aak looked at the hundreds of holocorders pointed at him during his press conference and said, “I’m not suicidal. If I die, if Separatists assassins are reported to have killed me, it was Chancellor Palpatine. I promise you.”

Last of all, a third fleet of ships — smaller but still significant — trails upward from a shipyard adjacent to the navy yard. These are the result of Ruwee Naberrie’s lobbying and the combined efforts of Bail Organa and Mon Mothma. They carry the first of the nat-born enlistees, on their way to be trained by and fight alongside the Mandalorian army. Soon, every clone battalion in the GAR will have a a nat-born squad, with a Mandalorian commander, implanted amongst them.

Bail and Mon couched it as a way to encourage patriotism and fill the empty spaces within GAR ranks, but Sheev knows what this really is. It’s an attempt to undermine — undermine him, his government, his clone army.

It’s Mon and Bail doing it, but really, in the end, it’s all Riyo and Padme. The rot goes straight back to them.

Sheev curls his hands into fists, tightening them until his nails dig into his skin. They want to take the Republic from him. They want to force him to sink into obscurity. They want to turn the people against him.

He has no intention of letting them.

“Chancellor.” Mas Amedda’s voice behind him makes him turn.

“Well?” asks Sheev. “What was the result of the vote?”

Mas folds his hands in front of him. “They voted down the new security measures, Your Grace. The minority managed to sway enough undecided members of the majority.”

Those security measures, carefully planned out as a response to the attack, would have given Sheev all the control he needed to reorganize the Republic into an empire without anyone noticing until it was too late. “I see.” He ground his teeth together. If not for Dooku’s disobedience, he would have control of the Jedi Order in every way that mattered by now, and the Jedi would have never been able to pull their ranks together enough to save the people of Coruscant. They would have been shattered and hated.

All Dooku had to do was hijack the latest shipment of orphan Force sensitives. All he had to do was have his operatives plant bombs in them during their routine vaccinations. All he had to do was fill the creche up with bombs. Was that so hard?

Sheev should have killed him. He should have killed him for letting the future crechelings go and wasting time planting a bomb in a Council member.

This failure is his , not Sheev’s.

And Sheev will kill him. Just not yet. When his usefulness has expired — yes, then. And slowly.

Sheev pulls in a slow breath. “We yield to the will of the Senate and serve at the pleasure of the people.”

For now.

# # #

Plo shouldn’t have been surprised to find Anakin Skywalker comming him in the middle of the night, as he was in flight on his destroyer.

“Anakin?” He sits up in his berth, twisting to look at the hologram of Anakin that had popped up on his side table.

Anakin wastes no time with pleasantries. “We found them, Plo.”

A shiver of hope runs through Plo. “All of them?”

“All of them. Same prison camp, hidden on some kriffing asteroid near the Rim. We’ve sent Fives in — he volunteered.” A flash of a smile. “What about you? Feel like rescuing your boys?”

Plo doesn’t hesitate. He has his duties, yes, but Wolffe — if he can be persuaded to stay behind — can handle them. “Give me the coordinates. I’ll rendezvous with your battalion as soon as possible.”

# # #

The prison camp isn’t much different than Kamino, in the end. Copious searches, little freedom of movement, eyes on him everywhere… In a way, Fives almost feels like he’s coming home as he falls into the ranks of other captured clones sorting themselves into the cramped barracks within the floating asteroid prison. It’s easy to tell which prisoners are new — they still have a spark of ferocity in their eyes, like young cadets do on Kamino. The prisoners who have been here for longer are drawn and thin. They keep their heads down; they don’t make trouble. Just like ori’vode like Rex and Cody.

Oh, yeah. Just like home.

Fives keeps his head down to as he slips inside the barracks he was assigned to and finds a seat on a bunk adjacent to another clone — one that doesn’t look quite as broken as some of the others. “Hey.” Voice low, he nudges him. “Hey, vod .”

The clone lifts his head to meet his gaze. His hair is dyed a bright red, but he’s been in the camp for long enough that his dark roots are growing in like shadows. “Yeah?”

Fives presses his lips together into a thin, conspiratorial smile. “You ever heard of Ekkreth?”

“Who?”

“It doesn’t matter.”Fives reaches across the gap between them and grips his brother’s wrist. “104th, yeah?”

His brother’s eyes widen. “How do you —”

“That name. Remember it. And be ready.” Fives leans closer. “‘Cause he’s coming.”

# # #

The most substantial thing left of the prison camp is fire. Quinlan stares at the footage on the empty bridge of his and Ventress’s flagship and shakes his head. “How…” He lets his words trail off. He knows the answer. He’s already heard the intel — that Obi-Wan’s battalion has been tasked with retrieving captured clones and dismantling the prison camps.

So how is simply this: when Obi-Wan decides to do something, he does it.

Having a Force sensitive like Anakin Skywalker on his side probably doesn’t hurt.

“They saved everyone,” says Ventress from his side. Her arms are folded tightly across her chest. “All of them. No one knows how they found the place. They crashed down out of the sky.”

Quinlan smiles. “That’s Obi-Wan.”

Ventress looks over at him. There’s a strange new light in her eyes. “Do you think we can find a way to make it easier for them to find more, without Dooku knowing?”

Quinlan tips his head downward to look her in the eye. His smile widens into a grin. It means something — her coming to him for the plan. “You want to do that, on top of everything else?”

Ventress looks from him to the screens and back. “I want to see fire crawl over everything Dooku’s ever built.” She doesn’t say that she wants to free the slaves, but Quinlan hears the truth of it in her words anyway.

To keep up the habit, even though there’s no one around to see them, he tucks an arm around her shoulders and pulls her close. She lets him. “I know the feeling. You bring the fire, I’ll bring the accelerant, hey?”

A thin, hesitant smile greets his. “I can live with that.”

# # #

Anakin’s never celebrated Life Day before — not properly. Tatooine doesn’t have a solstice in the same way other planets do, and what they do have certainly doesn’t coincide with Life Day. As such, the way the 501st and 212th celebrate the holiday is entirely foreign to him. There’s a lot of music and dancing — though that seems to be a constant among the clones — and not a single room in the Negotiator, docked on a snowy moon while the two battalions regrouped for their next mission, was allowed to be unlit.

“Longest night of the year,” Fives told him when he asked. “Got to keep the night out.” He grinned. “Got to win .”

That was Mandalorian culture all over, from what Anakin could tell. Everything couched in terms of victory and defeat.

The hangar was packed the entire night long, echoing with laughter and with brothers’ challenging each other to the most ridiculous of challenges. Anakin let himself get swept away in it — in the laughing, in the food (not rations, for once, thanks to the Mothers and Sisters of the GAR), in the way Padme’s hair caught the lights overhead when she spun in a circle, in the way Ahsoka had chocolate smeared around the edges of her mouth.

The best part of the night was when Obi-Wan started puling out the crates the Mothers and Sisters of the GAR had sent. Anakin had thought they were the usual care packages, which have become routine over the past several months, but as Obi-Wan pulled off the lids and threw packages into the crowd, it became clear that these were something entirely different.

Life Day gifts. These Anakin knew about — it’s the one tradition Amu tried to keep, even if his and Kitster’s gifts as children were nothing more than tiny japor figurines, carved by Amu herself in the spare seconds she found over the course of weeks.

Judging by the clones’ reactions, Life Day gifts — or indeed gifts of any kind — were entirely foreign to them. Once they really got into the swing of things, packing material flew about like debris in a hurricane and the entire hangar echoed with their joyous, shocked cries. At one point, Boil and Waxer emerged bearing matching knitted sweaters, given to them by the twin sisters who had ended up being their sponsors within the Mothers and Sisters of the GAR. Rex received a patchwork quilt, made by a grandmother who couldn’t ship out with the rest of the volunteers and clearly wanted to make up for it. The quilt was made up of over a thousand squares, with each bearing the name — the real name, not the number — of one of Rex’s 501st brothers in aurebesh. The second Cody saw it, he pelted across the open space between him and Rex and tackled Rex to the floor, cocooning him in the blanket while the pair’s brothers egged them on.

Rex’s laughter, muffled by the blanket, was still louder than Anakin had ever heard it.

Even Ahsoka received a gift — a new silver diadem with blue and orange gems set within it. She held it high in the air, still trailing tissue paper, and yelled, “Now I’ve got both your colors!” to the assembled clones.

Anakin himself unwrapped a long overcoat made of soft nerf leather. Obi-Wan grinned at him across the room when he saw him swing it over his shoulders. “I figured,” he said, “that you’re always cold, but you hate Jedi robes.” His grin widened. “Compromise.”

Cheeks bright red and eyes dancing as she proprietarily lifted Obi-Wan’s arm and tucked herself against his side, Padme said, “And that’s why they call him the Negotiator.”

Later, when the massacre of packages has ceased, the clones troop away to the bridge, with Ahsoka riding on Rex’s shoulders as she usually does at any kind of celebration, to watch the sunrise through the massive viewscreen. That is another tradition Anakin knows about, but on Tatooine he, Kitster, and Amu — and later on, Cliegg, Owen, and Beru — climbed up to the roof of their home and lay on the chilled adobe, watching the horizon flush with light.

It won’t be a proper Life Day if Anakin can’t smell the wind. If he can’t scent dawn in the air.

Wrapping his new coat tightly around him against the cold, he heads down the Negotiator’s lowered ramp and wanders to the edge of the makeshift base camp surrounding it. The terrain is flat, affording him a sweeping view of the horizon. The dawn isn’t even a suggestion yet; there’s just endless snow stretching out, cold and empty, into the distance. Anakin hugs his arms against himself and settles in to wait.

After a few minutes, the crunch of two sets of boots in the icy snow alerts him to Obi-Wan and Padme’s presence long before they reach his side. Padme, shivering even in her thick white coat, inserts herself in between Anakin and Obi-Wan both, drawing warmth from their proximity.

“Good party,” Anakin says after a long moment, not taking his eyes off the horizon. Then, he adds, “Good couple of months, actually.” He’s lost count of how many prison camps they’ve liberated, but he hasn’t lost count of how many clones they’ve saved. That’s the number that actually matters.

Obi-Wan, surely thinking the same thing, smiles. “I suppose it has. Despite all the odds.” He eyes Anakin, tipping his head toward him. “Four months in now. Still hate it here?”

Anakin shows his teeth in a grin. “What do you think? But here — right here?” He shrugs a little. “This isn’t too bad.”

“No,” Obi-Wan agrees. “It’s not bad at all.”

“Four months in,” says Anakin after another moment. “Do you still have my back?”

Quirking a single eyebrow, Obi-Wan says, “Always. You?”

“To the end.”

Between them, Padme scoffs and wraps one arm around each of their waists, yanking them closer. “And I suppose I’ll just run after you both and desperately try to keep you alive?”

Obi-Wan snorts. “As if you aren’t right on the frontlines with us, Padme.”

“Still,” she says, turning her brown gaze on Obi-Wan. “Do you both have my back?”

“Do you even have to ask?” Obi-Wan exchanges a look with Anakin. “Stars, you’re never satisfied.”

Padme lifts her chin. “I’ve high standards.”

“And don’t we know it,” says Anakin.

They fall silent for a while after that, huddled in a tight knot, watching the horizon. In a few minutes, it begins to lighten — so slowly at first that it’s a bright gray before Anakin even notices it was changing. Then, like a miracle, and orange-gold ball of fire peeks over the horizon. Liquidy sunlight cuts across the snow, turning the flakes into diamonds. The shadows turn softer. The snow beneath Anakin’s feet shines a gentle blush pink as it soaks up the beginning of the sun.

He pulls in a long breath of the sharp air. “We made it.”

Padme suddenly lets out a long, raw yell, leaning forward and gripping both his and Obi-Wan’s arms for balance. “We’re alive!” she screams out toward the horizon. “You hear that? We’re all alive! You tried to kill us, you tried to bomb us, but we’re all kriffing alive!” She subsides with a harsh breath, shoulders heaving.

As her yells echo across the plain, Obi-Wan takes up the charge. He shouts something rhythmic and fierce in Mando’a. It rolls across the frozen grass, charging forward to meet the sun. Before it fades away, Anakin whistles through his teeth — the melodious flock call of an ekkreth-bird. It’s how runaways call to each other, if they get separated on the sands.

Keep going, sing the slaves turned ekkreth-birds as they take wing across the desert. Keep going, keep going, don’t stop.

We’re almost home. We’re almost free .

Anakin reaches down and takes Padme’s hand, squeezing it. “Keep going,” he says as the sun breaches the horizon in a great burst of light. Even cold as it is, the sunlight is warm as it touches his face. “Keep going, don’t stop.” He catches Obi-Wan’s eye and smiles again. “We’re almost home. We’re almost free.”