Chapter Text
The Chancellor, Jedi, and handmaidens rushed to the office of Senator Bail Organa. Two Senate Guards stood sentry outside the office and held the party back as medics retrieved the Senator and his wife Breha, who came out on stretchers. “Are they going to be alright?” asked Padmé.
“They didn’t get directly hit by the blast, so it could have been a lot worse,” said one of the medics.
“We should bring them to the Halls of Healing at the Temple,” said Anakin. “It’s the safest place for them to be, with the assassin still out there. What happened?”
“It was some kind of missile, we think,” said the medic. “A fairly small explosive charge, but obviously still powerful enough to get through an inch of transparisteel.”
“I’ll escort them to the Temple with Obi-Wan and Dormé,” said Padmé; “I’d like to be there for them. Sabé, Anakin, see if you can track down the assassin and capture them.”
“Copy that,” said Anakin; Sabé nodded in assent, then the two split off from the rest of the group.
Padmé returned to Senator Organa’s side, and examined his injuries for the first time. The senator was covered in dark gray dust from the explosion, and a wound on his head had been hastily bandaged, but his eyes were open. “Bail? Bail, can you hear me? We’re bringing you to the Temple to get medical attention.”
“Padmé…” Bail croaked. “Is… Breha…?”
“She’s hurt too, but you both missed the worst of it. How much do you remember of what happened?”
“Just walking in… there was someone outside my window, they pointed their arm at us, then the explosion happened.”
“Outside the window? Were they flying?”
Bail nodded. “Hovering, more like. I didn’t get a good look at them.”
Padmé pulled out her comlink and pinged Anakin.
“Yes, Padmé?” said her husband’s agitated voice.
“I just talked to Bail. He says his attacker was hovering outside the window when the attack happened.”
“Got it. Sabé, it sounds like we’re looking for someone with a jetpack or repulsorpack.” Padmé closed the comm, then dashed to catch up with the others headed for the Temple.
Ahsoka and Barriss ignited their sabers in response to the mysterious Sith, who leapt at them with a wide horizontal slash. Ahsoka dodged out of the way, while Barriss caught the blade with her own. The Sith then swung his other blade around, attempting to hit Barriss again, but she quickly switched the side of her guard and caught the second attack with a two-handed block, her saber locking point-down with the attacker’s blade. Ahsoka took the opportunity to lunge at the Sith with a slash of her main saber, keeping her shoto up in a reverse grip to ward off the Zabrak’s attacks. In response, the Sith held out his hand and pushed her back with the Force, and Ahsoka collided heavily with the corridor wall. Barriss’ heart leapt with concern, but she had no time to check on Ahsoka as the Sith unleashed a flurry of blindingly fast sweeps with both blades of his saber. Barriss kept up her Soresu guard, blocking each attack in turn, but losing ground in the process. She gritted her teeth and bolstered her resolve. This was where her preferred Form III excelled—wearing down the opponent with persistent defense. It was no accident that Barriss favored the form that attacked the least. Still, the Sith was pushing her back further and further, and she saw no sign of Ahsoka. She leapt back and used a Force push of her own to knock the Sith back, then took her brief opening to ask an important question:
“Who are you and why are you here?”
The Sith grinned as he got back onto his feet, then charged her again. Barriss sidestepped him and positioned herself on his opposite side so that losing ground would bring her back towards Ahsoka.
“Wouldn’t you like to know, little Jedi,” the Sith snarled, making another swing at her, which Barriss once again blocked, locking his blade with hers.
“Yes, in fact that’s why I asked,” she deadpanned.
The Sith scowled. “Funny girl. We’ll see how much you’re laughing once my brother gets here, though.”
Barriss noted the fact that the Sith had a brother as she continued blocking his attacks. Come to think of it, he did look a lot like Maul, whom Master Kenobi had reported the survival of just prior to the series of events that led to the end of the Clone Wars—or maybe that was just down to him also being a Dathomiri Zabrak. She couldn’t afford to think too much about it at the moment, though; in fact, her mental aside cost her valuable time as she blocked late and the Sith knocked her off balance, her lightsaber knocked out of her hand as she hit the hard floor. The Sith raised his saber, preparing to impale her; Barriss didn’t have time to dodge out of the way. The world went into slow motion as she prepared for the worst. The crimson blade bore down—
And then stopped, held in place by two green blades. “Get away from her, sleemo,” Ahsoka growled through gritted teeth. Barriss leapt back to her feet and called her lightsaber back to her hand with the Force, and they were once again fighting two-against-one.
“General Skywalker. It’s so nice to see you.”
Anakin’s heart sank as he spotted Admiral Tarkin.
“I’m not a General any more, and I’m afraid I don’t have time to talk, Admiral,” Anakin said with all the forced politeness he could muster.
“It has been so long since we’ve caught up, though, hasn’t it? I trust the wife is well?” Tarkin stepped directly into Anakin and Sabé’s path, then, when they attempted to sidestep him, moved once again to block them.
“Tarkin, this is extremely time-sensitive,” said Sabé pointedly.
“Has she put you two in charge of investigating the Organa incident? Terrible shame, that. Right on the eve of the vote for the Military Finance Transparency Act, too.”
“With all due respect, sir,” said Sabé, before using her full strength to shove Tarkin aside and allow them to proceed out of the Senate offices. Tarkin landed heavily on his rear, and scoffed at the girl’s insolence as she and Anakin ran to Sabé’s speeder.
“Thanks for dealing with Tarkin,” said Anakin, jumping into the passenger seat of the speeder as Sabé took the driver’s seat. “I was about a second away from decking him.”
“I know,” said Sabé, turning on the vehicle, “which is why I took matters into my own hands. I’m not exactly equipped to deal with you going into a murderous rage.”
“Did you think that was likely?” Anakin knew Sabé didn’t much like him—he understood that she and Padmé had some history together beyond their professional relationship, and that she had never really gotten over her feelings for the Chancellor, but the venom in her words now seemed unprecedented. He wondered exactly why Padmé had assigned him and Sabé to track down the assassin, and not a pair less likely to erupt into bickering.
“I know that it’s precedented.” Sabé pulled the speeder out of its parking space and into the air. “Be on the lookout for flames from a jetpack, okay? Who knows how far they’ve gone now, though, especially with Tarkin running interference.”
“What is your problem with me, Sabé?”
“Not relevant right now, Anakin. Your wife is counting on both of us.”
“There—” Anakin pointed to the sky on the right of the speeder, where a trail of smoke was dissipating in the wake of a pair of bright orange lights.
“Thank you, Anakin,” said Sabé, setting off in pursuit of the trail.
“You know, Sabé,” Anakin mused, “I don’t think Tarkin should have known about the attack on the Organas yet. Do you think he might be involved somehow?”
“He’s been working against Padmé for months, Anakin. Why should that surprise us?”
“I don’t know. I just… I used to respect him a lot, during the war, and even though I know he’s done bad things, I still wanted to think there were some lines he wouldn’t cross.”
“You know, Anakin, that’s something you and Padmé have in common—you always try to see the best in people. In your case, you’re two for two on befriending the most evil men in the galaxy, which is frankly impressive.”
“Do not talk to me about Sidious that way. I wasn’t groomed and manipulated by him for twelve years just to have people take cheap shots at me for the crime of being a lonely nine-year-old former slave with no support system.”
“You know, that’s fair,” said Sabé. “I crossed a line there, and I’m sorry, genuinely. Is that why you only ever call him Sidious now?”
“Yeah, basically; it’s to remind myself that that was who he always truly was, so I don’t get nostalgic for what I thought were the good times. My mind healer isn’t too happy that that’s how I deal with it, but it’s all I really can do right now. That’s also why Padmé only ever calls him ‘her predecessor,’ or ‘him.’ He was her mentor too, you know, and she’s dealing with how he manipulated her, just like I am, although not to nearly the same extent.”
“Genuinely, Anakin, I would love to continue this conversation later, but I think we’ve been spotted.” Sabé took a sudden evasive maneuver to avoid a salvo of blaster fire from the figure with the jetpack.
Ahsoka and Barriss had together fought the Sith onto a narrow catwalk spanning one of the massive chasms in the space station’s interior, moving as one and creating openings for each other. As anyone who had stood at the end of Skywalker and Kenobi’s blades knew, the pairing of a Form III adept and a Form V adept was extremely potent, especially a Force-bonded pair like Barriss and Ahsoka, and while Barriss certainly would never claim to have mastered Soresu to the same extent as Master Kenobi, her sturdy defense was succeeding at keeping the Zabrak from gaining too much ground, while Ahsoka’s double-bladed aggression kept him on the back foot.
That was, until the Sith slashed across the catwalk, and Barriss’ stomach lurched as the platform began to tilt downward. The Sith leapt to safety on the other side of the walkway, while Barriss latched on to Ahsoka’s wrist to prevent her from falling into the void. The catwalk was still gradually collapsing, though, promising to dump both of them into the chasm. Channelling her devotion to Ahsoka, Barriss reached out in the Force for something, anything she could anchor onto. The Force drew her attention to a cable of some sort which was firmly attached to the ceiling of the chamber at one end and to the catwalk on the other end. “Ahsoka, hold onto me!” she shouted, and Ahsoka complied, pulling herself up and wrapping her arms around her neck. Barriss grabbed onto the cable and activated her saber to cut it loose from the collapsing walkway. As the floor gave out under them, the cable violently snapped taut from the weight of the two Jedi, Barriss’ stomach churning as they dropped, but thankfully it held firm. The momentum transferred to the cable from the drop sent it swinging towards the wall on one side of the chasm—the side opposite of where the Sith stood, watching them.
“Ahsoka,” Barriss called out, “when I say kick, kick!”
“Got it!” her girlfriend replied. The grey wall of the chamber approached them with alarming speed.
“KICK!” yelled Barriss, and both women kicked their legs out just in time to push off the wall and swing back in the other direction.
“Now jump!” called Barriss when they reached a point in their swing where they could reach the Sith. Ahsoka leapt off of her, igniting her sabers again as she pirouetted down in front of their assailant. Barriss followed moments behind, effortlessly transitioning her landing into a Soresu guard and blocking a swing of the Sith’s double-bladed saber.
Barriss and Ahsoka regained their advantage over the Sith, and with each clash of blades, the Sith found himself with fewer and fewer options, forced back until he eventually found himself stuck in a doorway that opened directly onto another seemingly bottomless shaft, with two Jedi and three blades awaiting him in the other direction. He lashed out with a series of desperate, wild swings, but Barriss caught his blade and used his momentum against him, sending him to the ground and wresting the lightsaber from his grip, which Barriss caught with the Force while Ahsoka brought her blades to his throat.
“Who are you working for, Sith?” Ahsoka snarled.
The Sith sneered and spit in her face. “You Jedi are blind. Still the loyal lapdogs of the Republic, I see, even after the Republic showed its true colors. Do you know what would have happened, when Sidious enacted his Grand Plan and destroyed your feeble Order?”
Ahsoka kept her lightsabers trained on his throat.
“Thunderous applause. The Republic would have welcomed your deaths, just as long as dear old Palpatine told them you deserved it, and yet you still fight for them?”
“That’s enough,” spat Ahsoka.
“It’ll never be enough for you Jedi, though, will it? You’ll betray every principle you ever stood for, if it’s ‘for the Republic.’ What did they tell you? That they need a planet-destroying superweapon, because if they didn’t build it, the Confederacy would?”
“I’m sorry, a wh—”
Barriss’ query was cut off as she felt the Force constricting her throat. She desperately clung onto the Sith’s lightsaber as she was lifted into the air, in agony from the invisible hand around her neck as her brain went fuzzy from the lack of oxygen. Ahsoka turned to see what was happening, keeping one of her sabers at the Sith’s throat, only to see another Dathomiri Zabrak stepping down the corridor slowly, extending his hand forward with curled fingers, eyes glowing gold. In his other hand he held his own deactivated double-saber. This Sith was significantly slighter in build than his counterpart, but no less menacing. His skin was crimson and black, his face a bloody mask of death.
Ahsoka was Obi-Wan Kenobi’s grandpadawan, which meant she had heard all of his stories, and that left her with no doubt about who this was.
“Maul.”
“I don’t know why you’re here, Jedi, nor do I much care,” said the former Sith apprentice, his voice deep, smooth and ice-cold like the frozen waters of the ninth Corellian hell. “All I know is that we do not need two Jedi brats running around disrupting our mission here. If it’s any comfort, I could kill you two in much more painful ways if I truly had any quarrel with you.” He pulled Barriss towards him, finger on the ignition button of his saber.
“Barriss, no!”
Ahsoka leapt at Maul, both sabers buzzing as they swept in a desperate arc towards the Sith.
“Ahsoka, I’m so… sorry—” Barriss choked out, then everything went black.
Rook Kast would rarely admit to having gotten in over her head. She was a proud Mandalorian warrior; she feared nothing and bowed to no one, and would persevere or die trying, whatever happened.
The attack on the Senate office of Bail Organa was about as close to in over her head as Rook Kast had ever been. Vizsla had been acting different in the days since Bo-Katan and the Nite Owls’ desertion, more like a drill sergeant and less like a Mandal’or, and had been particularly insistent that the assassination attempt on Organa must happen as soon as possible. If she didn’t know better, she might suspect Vizsla was scared of the Republic admiral who had hired them.
The attack was hastily-planned and sloppy; Rook could admit that. Senator Organa had gotten a decent look at her through the transparisteel window, and she had failed to catch the senator and his wife anywhere near the explosion’s center. A successful assassination was not really the point of the mission, but it would have been good to at least injure Organa severely enough to truly put him out of commission, and she didn’t think she’d accomplished even that. To be fair to her, though, she could have planned the assassination much better if she’d just been given time. Unfortunately Admiral Tarkin seemed to be quite impatient in his demands, and Pre wasn’t putting up a fight with him anymore.
And then there was the matter of the speeder now following her through the streets of Coruscant. Whenever she had a second between maneuvers, she would turn back and blast the speeder, but its driver was remarkably competent and dodged her fire every time. A beep inside her helmet indicated that her jetpack was running low on fuel. She dipped down towards the lower levels, trying to find a landing spot busy enough for her to disappear into the crowd. The speeder pursued her, gaining ground on her as she tried to make her remaining jetpack fuel last as long as possible.
Finally, she reached a busy lower-level alleyway and dropped down, landing in the midst of a crowd and on top of a couple of unlucky civilians. She sprinted out of the crowd, hoping to lose the speeder in the confusion, but sighed as the throng parted to reveal the same speeder cutting off her escape, its occupants having exited the vehicle and now standing before her, brandishing their weapons. One of them was a petite brunette woman—Nabooian, if Rook had to guess, based on her features—who had a small, elegantly shaped blaster trained on her. It seemed likely that this was one of Amidala’s weird handmaiden-bodyguards. The other was a man with long, wavy dark-blond hair and piercing blue eyes with a vertical scar across one of them, wearing dark robes and pointing at her with his blue-bladed lightsaber.
She knew that face. That was Anakin Skywalker. The Anakin Skywalker. The Chancellor’s husband. The Hero Without Fear. The most powerful Jedi in the Order.
Rook could now admit that maybe she’d gotten in a bit over her head.
Maul calmly Force-pushed Ahsoka back, sending her sprawling to the floor but in the process releasing his hold on the unconscious Barriss, who slumped to the ground like a discarded doll.
“Barriss? Ahsoka?” asked Maul. “You are Barriss Offee and Ahsoka Tano?”
Ahsoka kept her mouth shut.
“Brother,” Maul said to the other Sith, who stood up and retrieved his lightsaber where Barriss had dropped it as she lost consciousness, “these are no ordinary Jedi. These are the girls who brought down Lord Sidious.”
“They don’t look like Sith-slayers to me,” said Maul’s—brother? That couldn’t be right, Ahsoka thought, “I say we dispose of them nonetheless.”
“No, they shall live. I believe we may have a matter of mutual interest. These two do not blindly follow the orders of the Republic; if they have come here it is most likely they too are investigating this station. Savage, do you have your Force suppressant cuffs on you?”
The other Sith—Savage, apparently—produced a set of handcuffs, then grabbed Ahsoka’s arms, pulled them back behind her, and clicked the devices into place around her wrists. Ahsoka retched as she felt her connection to the Force go cold. Maul, meanwhile, had placed a similar set of cuffs around Barriss’ wrists, then hoisted her unconscious form over his shoulder. Savage shoved Ahsoka forward, pushing her to walk in the direction Maul was now taking Barriss.
“I apologize for the cuffs, Miss Tano,” said Maul. “They’re a temporary precaution until I can be confident you won’t attack us; I hope you can understand.”
Ahsoka hissed at him, but seeing no other choice, complied.
“You’ll never take me alive, jet’ii,” the assassin snarled through her vocoder. Then she pulled a flare gun out from her utility belt and raised it to the sky. Sabé took aim at the hand holding the flare, and fired a shot before the assassin could pull the trigger. The bolt scorched the flare gun, which dropped from the assassin’s hand as she recoiled in pain. The assassin’s full-body armor—Mandalorian beskar, by the looks of it—had absorbed the worst of the bolt, but it had still burned her hand.
“Bitch,” the assassin spat at Sabé before pulling out a pair of blaster pistols and firing a volley towards her and Anakin. Anakin deflected the projectiles sent his way with his saber, while Sabé dodged out of the way as the assassin broke into a sprint again, pushing through the crowd of citizens milling about on the pedestrian street. The Jedi and the handmaiden returned to their pursuit, weaving through the mass of bodies.
“I’m getting deja vu here,” said Anakin, attempting to lighten the mood as they ran after the Mandalorian; “this is almost exactly like when Obi-Wan and I went after Padmé’s assassin a few years back.”
“Except that neither of us have jumped down a hundred-story drop yet.” Sabé was very familiar with the misadventure of the chase after Zam Wessell; Padmé found the whole story incredibly entertaining (after she had gotten over the shock of the attempt on her life), and had asked Anakin to retell it on multiple occasions. (Sometimes Padmé’s blitheness towards life-threatening situations she’d been in frightened Sabé.)
“Yeah, well, I’m getting too old for that kind of thing,” Anakin replied. “Gotta take care of my knees and all.”
“Anakin, you’re twenty-three.”
“And I have a beautiful wife who I’d rather not prematurely widow.”
“...Extremely fair.”
Ahead of them, Rook Kast activated a button on her wristpiece, sending out a distress signal to the other Death Watch agents on Coruscant. Come on, come on, she prayed as she dodged through crowds trying to avoid her pursuers. Her prayer was answered by the appearance of a YT-1000 freighter which descended towards the street and extended its landing ramp. Another beskar-clad Mandalorian reached out his hand on the ramp; Rook took hold of it and attempted to hoist herself up into the ship, but felt a tug on her leg as the ship lifted back off. She looked back to see Anakin Skywalker hanging off of her, hands firmly grasped around her ankle. “Crazy jet’ii,” she cursed, still trying to scramble up the ramp with the assistance of both of her compatriot’s hands.
Back on the street, Sabé opened her comlink.
“Padmé, we’ve tracked the assassin, but there’s been a bit of a… complication.
…yes, Anakin’s done something insane.”