Chapter Text
Ahsoka arrives just as Quinlan finishes setting up the holoprojector for their mission brief.
She stretches out on the sofa, waiting for preparations to finish. Ben is in the kitchen, puttering around the kitchen for snacks and drinks like the mother tooka he is. Hopefully Ben had made a new batch of mango-muja fruit juice with just a touch of passionfruit. It’s sweet, refreshing, and just a touch tart because of the muja fruit, and a perfect cooldown drink after a long run. They still hadn’t collectively agreed on whether they should invest on a gym membership or convert the basement into one, so she has taken to running to the park and making a large circuit through it before heading back.
Ahsoka, personally, prefers having a gym in the basement. If they go to a normal gym, she won’t be able to practice with her knives and Ben won’t be able to do any of his stretching without people hurting themselves on the gym equipment trying to get a glimpse at his ass. Anakin, however, had insisted he didn’t want to continue hack from his room which was too tiny for his tastes between the scattered droid parts, bed, half-assembled droids, circuit boards, piles of unwashed clothes, disassembled speederbikes, and computer desk. If they repurpose the basement as a briefing room-slash-computer room instead, Anakin’ll will have room for four screens and actual leg room when he does research instead of hunching awkwardly over a laptop in his room. Also, if they convert the basement into a gym, he’ll have to smell sweat the entire time he’s doing all the legwork for this sorry excuse of a team.
(No matter what the basement does become, it seems Anakin has designs on claiming at least some of the space there in the name of his dream hacker setup. Ahsoka is sympathetic —she wouldn’t want to be in Anakin’s room longer than she had to, either. It always smelled like dirty socks because Anakin can’t be bothered to do laundry and it always ends with Ben breaking into the room to tidy and toss loads of Anakin’s gross laundry into the washing machine every two to three weeks. It was a point of pride, he said dryly, that he didn’t have mushrooms growing in his home.)
As if summoned, Ben places a glass of juice on the table for her and Anakin, a mug of black caf for Quinlan, and a cup of tea for himself. He waits patiently for her to scoot over to take a seat next to her.
The sounds of Anakin trudging up the stairs are followed by the sound of Anakin slamming the door open (then closed), and throwing himself across the couch chair dramatically.
“I can’t believe you all abandoned me to carry in the ‘tea leaves’ by myself,” he moans, still dramatic. Ahsoka often thinks that Anakin would be better served pursuing a career as a daytime holo-opera star than a member of the Jedi Order.
“You’re young,” Ben says cheerfully, “I’m much too old for such heavy lifting. It’s my age, as you so kindly pointed out last week, it means I can’t carry anything too heavy and Ahsoka just came back from her run.”
Anakin’s glower is undercut by his pleased hum when he sips the juice and realizes it’s the mango-muja fruit juice.
Quinlan artfully drapes himself sideways across the remaining seat, sipping his caf as he points his clicker at the holo.
“Today’s mission,” he says gravely, “is to gather intel on a sentient smuggling operation.”
Anakin stills. It’s only been six months, but Ahsoka already knows he doesn’t react well to even mere implications of slavery. She shoots Ben a worried look. He is frowning at the holo grimly and reaching over to put a soothing hand on Anakin’s shoulder.
“Hellfire is a club about 30 minutes away from the Federal District, and has a wide array of clientele, including children of senators and non-Republic diplomats.” A series of holos of very young, very drunk, potentially high socialites show up one by one. “It is also famous in other circles for spice.” Headlines of dealers getting busted at the club are next. “There’s a lot of speculation that it’s linked to the owner, Sper Irous, but anyone even remotely related to the spice either dies in custody or takes the fall.”
There’s a short pause when Quinlan’s clicker causes the images to change to Missing Sentients reports. Anakin has since straightened in his seat, white-knuckled. Quinlan sends him a sympathetic look before starting again. “We suspect Irous, entrepreneur that he is, has expanded his wares.”
The next holos were of some of the missing teens and young adults. Causes of death vary, many show signs of abuse, others are frozen in a state of terror.
Enough of them have signs of whipping that Anakin wrenches himself out of his seat and stomps out of the room. Minutes later, the soft thud of Anakin trying to destroy his punching bag beats in Ahsoka’s head.
She looks to Ben. He has known Anakin longer, has essentially raised Anakin from what she can glean from what the two have mentioned of their shared past. Surely he’ll know how to help Anakin.
Ben just continues to frown at the holos, one hand curled firmly around his tea. He strokes his new beard with the other.
“We will need to ensure that we take our time with this,” he says softly. “This is a matter that needs to be handled delicately.”
Whether Ben means Anakin’s fury or the dismantling of what is most likely sentient smuggling ring, Ahsoka isn’t sure, but she doubts they’ll be successful on either front.
It’s Zhellday morning, which means Anakin only has one lab for the day before lunch and Ahsoka is worried about what he’ll do without school to distract him for the rest of the day. She had still heard the thumping of the punching bag at 2 am before she had fallen asleep.
Ben wants to wean them off Dex’s because he worries about things like if they’re getting enough vitamins and minerals and if their bad cholesterol is too high, so he’s taken to trying to make breakfast every other morning. His only success so far in the kitchen has been eggs and toast and overly thin and worryingly chewy flat cakes. (Ahsoka doesn’t mind; neither she nor Anakin have made attempts to make anything more sophisticated than bowls of sugary cereal or instant noodles. Ben still hasn’t mastered the soft boiled egg, but he has mastered the art of slipping said over-boiled eggs into their instant noodles.)
She sits at the table as Ben busies himself in the kitchen with his latest attempt at feeding them. It smells like he’s trying the flat cakes again, this time with bacon. Last time he had attempted bacon, he had wandered off to water the plants in the shop and returned to charcoal. The problem, Ahsoka suspects, is not that Ben can’t cook, but that Ben likes to approximate when he cooks and often forgets he has stuff on the burner.
(She had watched him follow instructions on how to make a casserole, rustle around their cupboards only to realize they don’t have any measuring cups or spoons, and decide he’d be able to eyeball the volumes. The noodles had turned out unbearably crunchy, likely due to the fact Ben had used one of his delicate china tea cups to measure for the liquid, the top burnt when he had left it under the broiler for too long, and so overwhelmingly spicy that Ben was the only one sadly chipping away at the dish until a week had passed and it was finally interred into the trash.
Ben still has not bought any measuring cups or kitchen scales. He doesn’t even use a timer, apparently convinced his internal clock will be enough.
Unfortunately, Ben’s internal clock only seems to work on missions and doesn’t translate to any other aspect of his life. Besides tea. Ben’s unerring ability to perfectly steep tea to the second is well known.)
Ben slides a plate of a surprisingly neat pile of flat cakes, fruit, and bacon. There’s some rise on the flat cakes, nearly perfectly golden brown, a dollop of butter gently melting on top. A small jar of syrup has seemingly manifested itself in the middle of the table while she was distracted by the miracle. She tests the texture with the fork —dare she say it might even be fluffy? The bacon looks a little dark, but crispy and unlikely to chip a tooth.
She takes a tentative bite of the flat cake. It’s not over-sweet and Ben hasn’t absently mistaken the salt for sugar again. It’s slightly dry, but it’s the best attempt yet. The bacon is just the perfect side of greasy and completely delicious. She smiles at Ben as he places a glass of mango-muja fruit juice just within her reach.
“See, Ben?” She smiles with all her teeth. “You can cook when you aren’t distracted by articles about the life cycles of the Andlem beetle!”
Ben rolls his eyes and sets down a plate and juice for Anakin before returning to the kitchen for his portion.
The reason most agents don’t work multiple missions together, why the majority don’t conduct long-term undercover missions with one another, isn’t just security concerns associated with an agent being captured and tortured for information, but attachment.
Attachment leads to compromised decision making. That can lead to failed missions, dead agents, or worse: dead civilians.
Ahsoka deliberately cuts her flat cakes into neat little squares as she thoughtfully considers Anakin’s still-closed door. She chews. Ben sips his tea. He has not yet touched his plate. There’s only a quarter of her food left.
She wonders if Anakin knows Ben loves him so much that he had taken so much care in making something he would like for breakfast, that Ben had stood by the pan, spatula in hand, looking for the exact time to flip the flat cakes instead of wandering around the apartment and shop as he usually did. Does he know that Ben had apparently gone to Dex’s in the early hours of the morning to borrow a kitchen scale or that the sink has three failed batches of batter that weren’t just the right consistency?
Anakin is upset and Ben has made breakfast.
Ahsoka finishes her portion and clears away her dishes.
“Have a lovely day at school,” Ben says serenely, eyes still on his pad. Ahsoka doesn’t think he’s swiped to a new page the entire time. His plate has long since cooled, untouched. “We’ll discuss strategy when we close shop for the day.”
“Of course, Ben.” She picks up her backpack from her room’s doorway and flashes a smile at Ben. “Those assholes won’t know what hit them.”
She goes to school.
She returns and goes through the side door to drop off her things in the apartment before going back downstairs to help with the shop.
Before meeting Ben and Anakin on Alderaan so they could arrive on Coruscant together to help sell their cover story as a family unit, she had asked The Council what they were like. They’d described the two as experienced and very capable, among the best agents the Order has to offer. Ben and Anakin had completed many stealth missions and saved countless lives, The Council had informed her. In fact, due to Anakin’s tender age when he had first begun missions with Ben, it could be said they specialized in subterfuge and espionage.
She’s not quite sure about the veracity of those statements, because Anakin and Ben aren’t very good with being subtle about the fact they’re fighting. They’re quite loud about it, actually.
The three customers in the shop, an elderly woman and two giggling high school students who keep shooting looks at Anakin and Ben before looking away flushing, don’t seem bothered about the two loudly whispering at each other. Ahsoka half expects them to dissolve into slapping and strategic elbows to the face.
“I don’t see what’s wrong with me going!” Anakin bellows, flinging his hands in the air and forgoing all pretense of whispering.
Ben has a particularly pinched look on his face as he snipes back, “You’re too young to go by yourself.”
“I’m nineteen! An adult! And it’s a club. Plenty of people my age go all the damn time!”
At least nothing they’ve said so far is particularly damning. Ahsoka asks the elderly woman if she needs any assistance. The woman calls her a dear and pinches her cheeks. Ahsoka rubs her cheeks and gently herds the customer towards their selection of chamomile blends that assist with sleep. The girls in the corner continue to titter.
“That’s neither here nor there,” Ben insists with a huff, “and you know it. You will not go and certainly not by yourself.”
“How many years do you think I’ve been doing this? Do you think I can’t sneak into—”
Ben slams a tin of tea onto the counter. It crumples a bit. Ahsoka hisses in sympathy —their containers are high quality; they don’t dent easily. Ben is mad. She can’t blame him; Anakin’s skirting way too close to the truth in public.
“End of discussion, Anakin. We will discuss this later.” He turns on his heel and heads to the back room. “Help Ahsoka with the customers. I need to tend to the supplies we received yesterday.”
The two schoolgirls aren’t giggling anymore, looking at the closed door Ben had passed through with large, surprised eyes. They exchange looks and quietly scamper out the shop door.
Anakin turns to Ahsoka and the elderly woman examining the chamomile selection. He picks up the watering can. He puts it back down. He shouts, “I’m taking my fifteen,” and storms into the back room.
“Have you bought anything from us before?” Ahsoka says brightly, customer service smile firmly in place. “If you have a favorite blend, I’d be able to help you select a flavor that you’d prefer.”
Anakin is still thunderous despite ostensibly winning the argument.
Dressed in all black, he cuts an imposing figure as he adjusts the belts and leathers he has on. He looks like a particularly disreputable spacer, and Ahsoka supposes some people fancy that, she knows a couple of boys and girls and her school who definitely like the notion of dating one, but Anakin just looks like a mutinous child playing at being a bad boy spacer.
Ben, in contrast, isn’t dressed much differently than he usually does. His shirt has a high collar and he unbuttons more buttons than he usually does, flashing more skin and just a whisper of collarbone, his pants just a little tighter than normal. His hair is artfully tousled. He trimmed his beard and put on nice boots.
Off to the side, Artooie whistles and twirls in a tight circle before running over Ben’s toes, scuffing his nice boots. Artooie beeps viciously.
“Thanks, Artoo,” Anakin says, running fond fingers over Artooie’s dome. “You’re always on my side,” he adds, pointedly looking at Ben.
Ben just frowns at his nice boots and sighs.
“Do I have to be mission control from here?” Ahsoka asks forlornly. She’s suited up in her usual mission gear in hopes someone will relent. She doesn’t want to be cooped up in Anakin’s room with his stinky socks and unwashed underwear. She’s starting to agree with Anakin’s desire to repurpose the basement for something other than a gym. It’d mean she wouldn’t be relegated to Anakin’s room anytime someone needs to monitor things from home base. “I can be outside. With binoculars. It means I can help if anything goes down.”
“Nothing will be ‘going down,’” Ben says tartly. “This is just recon. We will not be doing anything that requires outside assistance. After all, no one is going to do anything reckless, are we?”
Anakin grunts. “Are you ready yet?”
Ben sweeps out of the room wordlessly and Anakin stomps after him.
Drama queens the both of them, Ahsoka thinks irritably before slowly shuffling her way to Anakin’s room.
“There better not be any mushrooms growing on dirty laundry in there Artooie, or I swear, I’m going to make Anakin eat them. Please make sure not to close the door. For my sake.”
Artooie trills an affirmative and trundles after her.
Ahsoka has, with a lot of assistance from Artooie, thank you Artooie, hacked into Hellfire’s cameras and is watching the six different feeds that are not pointed outside the club as intently as she can.
It’s hard, though, with how tiny everything is on Anakin’s laptop.
He’s right, they really need to invest in monitors. Large ones. Multiple large ones.
Artooie whistles and beeps. There’s a thud as a cord lies limply on the carpet.
“Thanks, Artooie.” She plugs it into the laptop. Artooie projects the holos. Ahsoka can feel her eye-strain related headache receding. “I promise you’ll get an oil bath on my next free day.”
Artooie beeps sternly. She better keep her promise.
There are two bouncers at the entrance, the camera there angle in a way that the left elbow of one of them is just barely visible, the other bouncer in full view. Nothing out back beyond a line of dumpsters and rats. A lot of stains decorate the ground and, honestly, the walls look like they could use a nice power wash, but no matter how intently she stares at them, she doesn’t see anything obvious that would indicate a sliding wall or hidden tunnel entrance.
“Akul checking in. Nothing suspicious out front or back. I can’t see any hidden routes of ingress or egress, but I guess one of you can try seeing if there’s anything covered by one of the dumpsters.”
“Varactyl can do that,” Anakin mutters under his breath. Ahsoka spots him trying to smile charmingly at a woman with fair hair artfully messy and curling around her ears. The woman looks disinterested. “So,” he begins in a normal volume, “Uh. Your smile is…like a black hole! It just…sucks me in!”
There’s absolute silence on the comms.
A heartbeat.
The woman curls her lip in obvious disgust. She eyes him up and down, finds him utterly lacking, sniffs, and melts into the crowd.
“Ooooh, crash and burn.” Ahsoka crows. “Not sure your piloting skill helped you with that black hole. Never knew it was possible to shoot yourself out of the sky.”
There’s a soft, barely-there snort.
Ahsoka scans the different feeds until she finds Ben leaning against the bar with what looks to be a fruity drink with a tiny umbrella. He runs his finger along the rim of the glass as he leans in to speak with the bartender.
“I know where both of you sleep,” Anakin hisses as he tries to look for another person to chat up for information.
“Try it,” she dares. In a straight up brawl between her and Anakin, he’ll win every time, but he forgets that between the three of them, she’s the poison master. Every knife under her pillow and every thin needle hidden under her sleeves is coated.
“My dear,” Ben says, chuckling, a hand delicately perched on one of the bartender’s impressive biceps. “I do think you’ve won me over.”
“Ben knows who to bet on!”
Anakin glares at Ben from across the club, clearly outraged.
“Yes,” Ben says in reply to something the Bothan bartender says. “I’ve always been very good at picking out winners.” He looks the other man up and down appreciatively.
The Bothan’s ears twitch and his head tilts, obviously pleased.
Ahsoka really needs Ben to teach her how he does that. Anytime she and Anakin have to use comms in public, they always resort to pitching their voices low to avoid notice. Ben just weaves his comm responses into active conversations seamlessly without the other party realizing anything.
Ben continues to try to covertly needle information about the missing clubbers, clearly deciding to ignore them for the moment.
After a few minutes, Anakin finds his next target and tries to sidle up to a woman with a sweet face and a full mouth.
“Uh, hi,” Anakin pauses, clearing his throat. “Your eyes glitter like the stars.” Not a bad start, Ahsoka allows. She lowers the volume on Ben’s comm to hear the next lines better. “And like the stars they,” Anakin stops again. Ahsoka can hear the gears turning. “They’re brighter than…”
“You, clearly.” Anakin’s victim replies not-so-sweetly. “Time for another try, kid.”
She stares Anakin down until he awkwardly shuffles away.
It’s another handful of minutes before he decides on another girl, this one sitting by the bar, slowly sipping her wine.
“So,” he starts, slipping into the vacant spot to her left.
“Lesbian and waiting on my girlfriend,” she says without looking at Anakin.
“Right then,” he says meekly sliding right back off the stool.
Ahsoka listens to Anakin strike out six more times before suggesting, “How about checking those dumpsters I mentioned are out back, Eopie?”
“Krayt Dragon!”
“Hmmm, I still think you’re more of an Eopie.”
“Krayt. Dragon.”
“Sure. Eopie.”
“Excuse me, dear one. I think I need to use the restroom.” Ben excuses himself from the bar and slips the bartender some credits.
“No, I’ll check the bathrooms,” Anakin sighs. “You’re better off mingling and seeing what if you can find anything linking the missing sentients. If nothing else, I might stumble on a spice deal. Punching a spice dealer in the face might make me feel better.”
If Anakin doesn’t answer in the next five minutes, she thinks Artooie will blow a fuse and she definitely isn’t skilled enough to fix Artooie, especially after all of Anakin’s modifications. She might do irreversible damage like fry his motherboard or erase his memory chip or something.
“Anakin,” Ben says in a tightly controlled voice. “I want you to know every gray hair I have is caused by you.”
Ben wasn’t graying —yet. Chances are he might have a full head of gray hair before the night is over.
Artooie makes a sad little whistle. He’s been trying to triangulate Anakin’s position for the past half hour.
For whatever reason, there are no cameras in the hallway that leads to the bathroom, Irous’ office, or the bathrooms. It probably helps facilitate the illicit drug transactions and any shady dealing Irous does. Did that person go down the hall to use the restroom or go to visit Irous? Or did they slip out the back?
No one had shown up on the camera pointed to the back door and the back alley had stayed empty aside from the occasional scurrying rat. No speeders had pulled up to spirit away kidnapped teens.
That left Ben trying to subtly case the bathrooms for the seams of hidden doors that someone —a kidnapper —might be able to bundle one or two unconscious bodies away without much notice.
It wasn’t easy with the amount of traffic the bathrooms experienced and, from the sounds Ben made, it meant accidentally stumbling on more than a handful of copulating couples.
“I’m not making much headway with the bathrooms,” Ben admits under his breath. “The stalls don’t reach up to the ceiling, so it’s unlikely there’s anything that triggers very high on the wall. I haven’t been able to check every stall.” He takes a deep breath, likely counting backwards from thirty. “And I can’t keep drawing attention to myself just leaving stalls only to go directly back in line for the next one. Even jumping between the unisex and male bathrooms, it’s starting to get suspicious.”
“I’m sure you wished you brought me with you now,” Ahsoka sniffs. “I could check the ladies’ room.”
“You’re underage, Akul.”
“As if you or The Council couldn’t get me a very credible fake ident that would pass muster.”
“You could be missing, too,” Ben says quietly. “What would I do then?”
She doesn’t have anything to say to that. The comms go quiet for a bit, the only thing Ahsoka hears is the soft whirring of Artooie’s processors trying to locate Anakin.
“We’ll find him,” she says finally, brushing fingers over Artooie to soothe both herself and the little droid.
“Little gods help me, Anakin, I will throttle you when this is all over,” Ben swears viciously over the sound of a speeder’s engine turning over.
“Eopie,” she reminds him absently. It’s the second time Ben’s forgotten the Order’s stringent code name-only policy when in the field since Anakin went silent on the comms. “I’m sending you the coordinates right now, Varactyl.” Ahsoka is already rushing through the secret tunnel connected between the basement and the secret garage a few blocks away from the shop. She hops into one of the landspeeders —fast, discrete, quiet, and most importantly, has room for both another passenger and lots of gear.
She’s tossing a change of clothes, emergency rations, medical supplies, and lots and lots of weapons into the trunk before sliding into the driver’s seat. Artooie trills from his little cubby in the back of the speeder affirming he’s set to go as well.
“Coordinates received,” Ben says after a few minutes. Ahsoka can hear furious honking and some angry shouting. “You’re closer than I am, Akul. I’ll rendezvous with you in 22 minutes. Standby and don’t attempt extraction without me there.”
Rather than extraction, Ahsoka thinks the bigger problem will be infiltration. Artooie has been refining the data, and it looks like they’ll have to go down once they reach the coordinates.
That deep into CoCo town, there are definitely many hidden entrances; the problem is how they’ll find the right entrance, if there is one, that will lead them to where Anakin is.
She’s two minutes out from the destination when Anakin’s comm flickers to life.
“Can any of you hear me?” Anakin whispers.
“Loud and clear, Eopie.”
There’s some shuffling. Ahsoka thinks she hears crying in the background. “Must’ve hit the comm when I was shoved down that trapdoor,” Anakin whispers. “I modified the comm a bit while fixing it.” Of course he had the tools required to fix it, probably hidden under his jacket like his modified bagh nakh were. “Boosting the sensitivity of the comms and muting you guys until the mission is over. Surrounded by civvies.” He finishes the last part in a rush, like he’s expecting company. The sobbing is louder.
A heartbeat later, the sound of a door swooshing open, and then the sound of steel-toed boots.
“Rise and shine —the game’s all set for you little lambs. You’ve got a half hour’s head start.” There’s the whine of a blaster. “You manage to survive the next six hours and you’ll go free.”
Anakin curses.
More than likely any survivors are then shipped off world and sold to slavers.
Ahsoka parks the speeder, dread pooling in her gut. She’s been trying to count the voices, and there’s got to be at least fifteen other captives wherever Anakin is. There’s no way that many people can disappear from one club in one day, even from a club like Hellfire. There’s got to be multiple points of abductions.
From what Anakin had said earlier, it sounds like part of the reason why it had been so hard to notice the disappearances earlier was because there were no similarities between the victims beyond geography. They weren’t chosen for qualities they had, but because they had simply been in the right place at the wrong time.
How many of Coruscant’s citizens have simply disappeared? Ahsoka doubts all the trick doors are located in clubs —rotating library bookcases? Hotel beds that flipped over, dumping its contents into one of the endless, sprawling tunnels beneath Coruscant?
She had packed in preparation for about half a dozen victims; fifteen, more than fifteen, is beyond what she had anticipated.
Artooie is sending an encrypted message to The Council. They need back up.
Someone who identified herself as Naberrie had tried to convince the other captured sentients that there was safety in numbers. It had sounded, for one brief handful of seconds, that maybe she had swayed them, that they would listen to her.
Then a high, terrified voice had shouted, “No! We’re just sitting ducks if we stay together!”
The dam broke, and suddenly, there was shouting everywhere. Naberrie was shouting for everyone to please listen.
Anakin was cursing and, from the indignant way Naberrie had started hurling insults at him, had resorted to bodily hauling her after him.
“Put me down! They need help!”
“I don’t see how you can help them, you’re just as trapped here as the rest of us.”
“Splitting everyone up just means they can pick us off one by one. We don’t even know how many people are trying to track us down. And why would they even let us live after the six hours are up? Surely they’re not going to see us off at the front door and wish a lovely rest of the day.”
“Are you going to talk them to death?”
That had been ten minutes ago, and they’re still sniping at each other. Ahsoka isn’t sure how they can still keep it up.
There’s a loud buzzer.
For one endless moment, there’s just stillness from the other end of the comm as Ahsoka, Ben, and Artooie try to determine the best course of action. They’re potentially two to four levels down, it’s not something they can blast their way down to. There are no guarantees any of the hidden passages in the area can bring them down to wherever Anakin is; secret sentient hunting arenas aren’t going to be publicly accessible through the normal routes, either.
Quinlan has his feelers out and Ben is furiously whispering into his comm with all the information brokers he knows.
There’s the crack of a blaster bolt hitting something, the whine of a blaster charging, and suddenly the stillness before breaks.
All Ahsoka can hear over the comms now is blasterfire. In the distance, there is shouting. High, terrified screams, the sounds of dying. Naberrie sounds incandescent with rage. There’s a rustling of cloth. The blasterfire doesn’t cease. Ahsoka thinks she can hear someone calling out directions. Hunting them.
“What’re you doing?” Anakin hisses, sounding mortified. More rustling of cloth.
“Can you shoot?” Naberrie asks.
“What?” Anakin says dumbly.
“Can you shoot?” Naberrie repeats calmly. “I’m not giving a blaster to someone who doesn’t know basic blaster safety.”
“Uh,” Anakin says.
Ahsoka thinks he might be a little in love.
Artooie has schematics of the six levels directly underneath them in a three klick radius. Ben is examining them intensely as Artooie beeps and trills. If Artooie’s calculations are correct, and they always are, Anakin should be on the fourth level down.
There’s nothing in the area that should be large enough that someone could set up what is essentially a sentient safari so they can hunt some terrified civilians. There are some sanitation zones, where the recycled water is treated before being reintroduced into the planet’s public water system. Those rooms are filled with filtration and sanitation systems that heat the water beyond boiling to kill bacteria and other contaminants; some of the rooms run hot enough that specialized gear is necessary to spend more than ten minutes in it without getting seriously ill.
There are one or two sections, just barely covering half a square klick, that look to be recycling factories. A good chunk of the search area, however, are just shops. Endless rows of tiny shops with poor ventilation crammed next to and on top of each other.
Anakin is cursing; Naberrie is calm as she tells him she’s down to the last blaster strapped to the small of her back.
Ben points at a cluster of sanitation rooms in the south east corner of their search radius and declares: “There.”
He points out a series ventilation shafts, some so small Ahsoka can just barely squeeze through, and hands her some explosives and a detonator. “Place them here,” he says, pointing at an area just above what looks like a klick of sanitation pumps and furnaces. “And you should be able to enter the arena.”
“I’ll burn to death in there!”
“No more than Krayt Dragon and Ms. Naberrie are burning, my dear.”
Ahsoka is convinced she’s going to die cursing Ben with her last breath as her lungs burn from the inside out from the scalding air. She primes the explosives in a small circle and then shuffles back out of the blast radius. She braces herself.
There’s a contained explosion and a hole about four feet in diameter after the dust clears. She’d been expecting a sudden blast of heat, but the air instead feels just slightly over-warm and muggy.
She looks through the hole and sees what looks like the jungles of Kashyyyk below her.
“What the hell?”
She has to duck because suddenly there are blaster bolts being aimed her way.
“Fuck, Varactyl, I’m pinned down.”
“I’m taking the long way around, Akul. I’ll be there as soon as I can. Any chance you were able to get eyes on Krayt Dragon before—”
“Varactyl, there was a loud boom and then part of the ceiling fell thirty feet to the ground.”
Ben hums his acknowledgment. “Well, Krayt Dragon knows where you are. Hopefully he and Ms. Naberrie will make their way to you.” Ben pauses, clearly making some quick and dirty calculations in his head. “I should be entering from the east, ground level. It will be very distracting.”
“More distracting than my entrance?” Ahsoka asks drily.
“Most certainly, my dear. ETA is 8 minutes.”
“Oh good, I get to just sit here getting shot at until you arrive.”
“I’m sure it’ll be something you and Krayt Dragon can bond over during the mission debrief.”
Ben’s entrance is, appropriately, just as flashy and dramatic as he had promised.
“Did you knock down the wall with fireworks?”
“Quinlan had a very illegal stash of extremely banned fireworks, yes.”
Ben had given her a countdown before the detonation which had given her enough time to drop down from her position in the vent during the lull in blasterfire after the entire area rocked with the aftermath of the fireworks display.
She settles herself in the boughs of a tree and counts the number of armed assholes below her.
Seven dead little kidnappers-slash-slavers-slash-wannabe-hunters is a nice number to start with. She pulls out two of her blades in her favored reverse grip.
They’re on her turf now.
“She’s a what?” Anakin screeches as Ben corrals him into Ahsoka’s car. The older man shoves a water bottle and a ration bar in his face and waits patiently until the teen numbly takes each item and starts to drink.
In the end, Coruscant Security had poured in through the hole in the wall Ben had punched through with fireworks. Ahsoka isn’t sure how Ben had managed to avoid being caught up in the stream of Core-Sec that had quickly flooded the entire area. Ahsoka had found Anakin before Core-Sec did, managing to signal his comm until he had known to scan the trees for her. They had both slipped away from Naberrie before she noticed, distracted as she was in the process of trying to triage the handful of other civilians she had found, tending to the most severely wounded first.
They had gotten out the way she had gotten in; they climbed their way up the rope she had used to reach the canopy of trees and then pulled it up. They followed the labyrinthine ventilation shafts, avoiding the ones that got too tiny for Anakin, until Artooie led them to a grate just outside the busy parts of one of Coruscant’s many busy night markets.
It took pretzeling Anakin into some very uncomfortable shapes, but they had made it out, mostly unscathed, and returned to the upper levels of Coruscant via elevator.
“A senator,” Ben repeats calmly before closing the speeder door in Anakin’s face. His mouth is open, half-chewed ration bar for all to see. “Quinlan’s sources stated that Senator Padme Amidala wasn’t going to wait for the Senate to debate how much money would be going into creating a task force to solve the kidnapping problem, so she decided to take things into her own hands.” He checks his chrono and eyes the pink skyline. “Drive safely, my dear. I’ll meet you both at home base.”
He climbs onto his speederbike and leaves Ahsoka with Anakin making high pitched noises in her passenger seat.
“Swallow that before you choke on it,” she orders before shifting gear. “I’m tired and all I want is my bed. My nice, soft, warm bed.” She guns the engine.
Anakin swallows and quickly pulls on his seatbelt. “Do you even have a license to drive?” He asks, sounding a little dazed.
“No,” Ahsoka replies cheerfully, kicking the engine into higher gear. She narrowly misses another speeder by making a sharp cut to the right, but she also manages to merge into the lane above them while gathering speed.
“Huh.” Anakin takes another bite of his ration bar, seemingly comfortable with his mortality in light of Ahsoka’s ability to squeeze between spaces just a smidge larger than their speeder. “That’s fine; speed limits are just suggestions anyways.”
Three minutes of blessed silence later, Anakin opens his mouth again.
“How did Core-Sec know where to go if Naberrie had planned this by herself?”
“She was working with her handmaidens, of course. They tipped Core-Sec off. With a senator missing, presumed kidnapped, they had to act.”
Anakin looked at her strangely. “Handmaidens?”
“Anakin,” Ahsoka says slowly, “Surely you know Senator Amidala was once Queen of Naboo?”
“Queen?” He croaks.
“Queen,” she repeats.
Anakin presses a hand to his stomach and makes his indigestion face.
“She probably had a tracker on her,” she continues, because she really is too tired to care about Anakin now that he’s not about to be imminently murdered for sport. “I’m sure Ben and Quinlan had planned for the fireworks to draw Core-Sec’s attention, too.”
Anakin has since changed position, hunched over, both elbows resting on his knees, his face in his hands. He lets out a low moan.
“I can’t believe she’s a senator,” he whines.
“Poor, sad Eopie,” she replies.
He doesn’t even try to correct her this time.