Chapter Text
On another night, the blasterfire on Level 782 might have gone unnoticed. The neighborhood lay deep beneath the planet’s surface, on the edges of a sector dominated by a crime syndicate commonly known as Crimson Arrow. Rumor was that even the Coruscant Security Force didn’t even venture into the sector – a rumor that had been proven false several hours earlier, when the CSF had raided a spice processing warehouse owned by one of Crimson Arrow’s rivals. They were still there when blaster shots rang out a few streets over.
Officers, including one Duros lieutenant and two clone troopers on temporary assignment, were on the scene within minutes. By then the shooter was gone, leaving behind a woman lying face down on the pavement. The blaster bolts in her body – two in the back, one in the neck – were still smoking as the lieutenant reached out to turn her over.
There was no pulse when he checked for it – first, from long training, under the right collarbone, where it would have been on a Duros, and when he saw that she was human, against her neck. The result was the same in both places. He glanced up to see if the clones had returned, then back down at the dead woman.
Lieutenant De Raaha had spent enough time on the force to have gotten fairly good at judging most common species. This woman – human, or close enough that it was no matter – seemed to be in her early thirties, with short red hair and blue eyes that stared blankly at the looming shadows of the buildings above them. Beneath her cloak, the fabric of her clothes was well-made – too good for a woman walking alone on Level 782. Only someone well-armed would be daring enough to parade that kind of finery, and a quick inspection proved that if the dead woman had been carrying, her attacker had removed her weapon before fleeing.
Bootsteps heralded the return of the two clones, who peered over De Raaha’s shoulder at the dead woman.
“Hey,” said Bash, taking off his helmet and tucking it under his arm. “I’ve seen her before.”
“She’s not some squeeze of Hrado’s, is she?” said Lieutenant De Raaha, reaching for his comlink to call the body wagon. “That’s all we need, on top of this Emerald Star kark.”
Bash studied the woman’s face. Like all the other clone troopers, neither he nor his current partner, Teff, had been specially trained for law enforcement, but the continuation of the Clone Wars had seen a great many things change in the Republic, even here on Coruscant, far from the front. While some in the CSF had protested clone involvement, claiming that the police force was meant to be impartial, De Raaha didn’t mind the extra help. Bash and Teff, as well as their brothers back at the sector nick, were smart lads who were quick to learn, if sometimes a little blunt-headed about the meaning of “innocent until proven guilty.”
Teff took off his helmet too. While Bash had shaved his head bald, tattooing gently swooping lines that he said had been painted on the nose of his gunship on either side of his skull, Teff had let his hair grown long enough to tie into a knot at the back of his skull. Although he would never have admitted it, De Raaha was glad that they had done so; it made it easier to tell the two clones apart. Most of the other clones he knew had done something similar, though they were all the same once they put the armor on.
Bash and Teff looked at each other. “It can’t be,” Teff said. “I heard she was KIA on Jabiim.”
“I heard that she was back,” Bash argued. “False alarm.”
Teff put his head to the side, studying the woman’s face. De Raaha looked over his shoulder for the police droids and the body wagon. He preferred organics for investigative work, but there was no denying that police droids were useful for the everyday wear-and-tear of police work.
“I saw her on Geonosis,” Teff said definitively. “She and her apprentice and that senator were on my gunship when they were evacuated.”
“So I’m right, aren’t I? It is her?”
“Then where’s her lightsaber, huh? When was the last time you saw a Jedi wandering around without her lightsaber? She’s not dressed like a Jedi, either.”
De Raaha’s heart sank. If their vic was a Jedi, that meant that this case was no longer in CSF’s jurisdiction – not that they had much of one, down here in Crimson Arrow’s territory, but he was willing to argue it for justice’s sake. “You lads want to share with the class?” he asked. “Not all of us did a tour on the front.”
All three of them looked down at the dead woman. At this point, even De Raaha was willing to admit that there seemed to be something familiar about her, although maybe it was just continued exposure.
Bash and Teff exchanged another of those wordless glances, as if they were conferring between themselves. It had been made clear to De Raaha that despite rumor, the clone troopers the Republic had purchased from Kamino didn’t have a hive mind, but sometimes it certainly seemed like it.
“We think she’s a Jedi Knight,” Bash said.
Lieutenant De Raaha nodded, setting his sharp teeth against his bottom lip. “Well, that’s just great,” he said. “Just great. Any Jedi Knight in particular?”
If Bash and Teff had recognized her, that meant that she was probably one of the famous ones, the ones who had been making the HoloNet for the past few months. On the other hand, it might have just meant that they had served with her at some point; there were a lot of Jedi who had been on Geonosis that weren’t household names.
“Yeah,” Teff said. “General Obi-Wan Kenobi.”
*
Anakin Skywalker concentrated on the floor in front of his nose as he heaved himself up into another push-up, trying not to listen to the smack of flesh on synthleather in the other room. In his experience, it was a bad sign when his Master was too emotionally fraught even to meditate – and the Force knew that she had been trying; Anakin had woken up to find her in the same cross-legged posture that she had been in when he had gone to bed the night before. He had slept through the same confused mess of visions, memories, and nightmares that he had been having for the past month – half his, half hers. If her dreams were anything like his, then it was no wonder that she hadn’t slept properly since he and Ki-Adi-Mundi had found her on Riflor three days ago.
It had taken them that long to get back to Coruscant. While there had been no question of Anakin staying with Ki-Adi-Mundi once Obi-Wan and Alpha had been recovered – Anakin would have liked to see them try – the war effort couldn’t spare the Reliant to take them back to Coruscant, where they had been ordered by the Jedi Council. If Obi-Wan had been cleared to pilot by the medical droids on the Reliant or the battle cruiser had been able to spare a small transport, they could have gotten back on their own, but as it was they had had to spend several standard days hopping between ships and planets in Republic space until they could book seats on a civilian freighter heading to Coruscant.
Anakin shut his eyes, sweat dripping down his nose as he started another rep. His shoulders ached – he had been at this for the better part of an hour now – and his right arm was starting to chafe where his prosthetic arm met flesh. If he had any sense, he would stop – but if he stopped, then he wouldn’t have anything to think about except the sound of flesh on synthleather as Obi-Wan steadily beat the stuffing out of the punching bag in the other room, just like she had been doing for the better part of an hour.
A quick flurry of blows told him that she had changed tactics, hammering quick punches into the punching bag, occasionally punctuated by a kick. The medical droids on the Reliant had said that she was out of shape and malnourished from her captivity, that she should take it easy for the next few weeks, but it was clear that Obi-Wan hadn’t taken any notice of that advice. Anakin wasn’t exactly sanguine about his own chances in that regard.
He didn’t want to reach out mentally in case he distracted her, but also because he was afraid to do so and fail. Their Master-Padawan bond had always been – odd, was how one of his old training masters at the Temple had told him once, frowning as if it was a personal insult to the Order. It certainly hadn’t been meant as a compliment. Anakin hadn’t much cared at the time, since even if it was wrong, it was the only way that he knew how to be a Padawan. He knew that it had worried Obi-Wan, but she had never spoken of it to him. It had been fine. Good. Great, even, once the Clone Wars had started, because the more closely attuned to each other a pair of Jedi were, the better they fought. Anakin and Obi-Wan had spent so much time in each other’s heads that their thoughts had started bleeding together. No one had really known how to deploy Jedi back then, since Jedi hadn’t had to fight real wars in centuries, and as a result they had spent more time on the battlefield than off it, leaving themselves open to the Force so as to have every possible advantage against the Confederacy’s droid armies. Anakin had always had trouble keeping himself closed off from Obi-Wan; it had gotten even harder when they had had to spend hours – sometimes days – with the bond between them as open as they could comfortably make it.
Then had come Jabiim.
Even now, a month afterwards, Anakin could barely think about the ugly, bloody, failed Battle of Jabiim. Twenty-seven Jedi had died on the planet’s rain-soaked surface, and it had very nearly been twenty-eight. If Dooku’s pet assassin Asajj Ventress hadn’t rescued – ha! – Obi-Wan for her own vile purposes, it would have been twenty-eight. As it was, Anakin had spent three weeks thinking that Obi-Wan was dead and Obi-Wan had spent three weeks being chained up in Ventress’s dungeon, being tortured for intel. If Obi-Wan hadn’t managed to escape along with Alpha, the clone commander Ventress had captured along with her, then Anakin would still think that she was dead.
Stars’ bane, she probably would be dead.
He let himself collapse to the floor at the end of that last push-up. From the sound of it, Obi-Wan’s attack on the punching bag was growing more erratic; she was probably as tired as Anakin was, if not more so, since captivity and torture weren’t exactly favorable to continued good health. There was a reason that the Jedi Healers hadn’t cleared her to return to active duty yet, despite Obi-Wan’s frequent complaints on the subject.
The sound of beeping made Anakin roll smoothly to his feet, grabbing his comlink off his nightstand. “This is Commander Skywalker,” he said, keying it on.
“This is Master K’Kruhk,” said the older Jedi, faintly rebuking. Anakin took the hint; military rank had no place in the Temple.
“Sorry, Master. Force of habit.”
K’Kruhk took the apology gracefully. “Is Obi-Wan with you? She hasn’t been reissued a comlink yet and your holocomm isn’t connecting.”
“It’s broken,” Anakin said. He fought down the spike of worry that K’Kruhk’s question had triggered, since he hadn’t actually seen Obi-Wan in the past hour, but the idea that she had left the suite without his noticing was patently absurd. Besides, he’d heard her; the sound of a mouse droid running into a wall over and over again, the next most likely explanation, was entirely different from that of a woman beating a synthleather punching bag.
He flicked his fingers at his bedroom door to open it as he walked out into the common room, just in time to see Obi-Wan spin a roundhouse kick into the punching bag and send it swinging wildly from its hook. She caught it and steadied it as he emerged, a thread of curiosity passing between them in the Force.
Anakin felt his shoulders slump in relief as he felt it. Their connection had been sporadic at best since they had been reunited on Riflor. At worst, they were Forceblind to each other, the way they had been that first year of his apprenticeship, during which Obi-Wan had later confessed to him that the Council had seriously considered separating them because of their apparent incompatibility. On the opposite end of that, they were constantly in each other’s heads again, which Anakin quietly thought would have been preferable if it didn’t make it all that much more likely that Obi-Wan would find out some of the things he had done when he had thought that she was dead.
“She’s here, Master K’Kruhk,” Anakin said into the comlink, then tossed it to Obi-Wan.
She plucked it out of the air, stepping away from the punching bag as she said, “This is Obi-Wan Kenobi.”
Anakin didn’t hear K’Kruhk’s response. He leaned against the doorframe, taking Obi-Wan’s distraction as an opportunity to study his Master. She had lost weight and muscle mass during her captivity on Rattatak, so that, stripped down as she was to light workout pants and a long-sleeved undershirt that covered the bacta bandages on her wrists, she looked almost skeletally slim, her bones standing out sharply beneath skin that had paled in Ventress’s dungeon. Alpha had cut her previously waist-length hair back to her shoulders while they had been on the run, which somehow seemed even worse to Anakin than the scars left by Ventress’s interrogations. Obi-Wan had loved her long hair. It had been her one real point of vanity – or at least the most obvious one, anyway. It was still long enough that Obi-Wan had pulled it back into a tail at the back of her skull for her workout, now tinted dark with sweat, which Anakin privately found rather a relief. If Alpha had cut it as short as Senator Mon Mothma wore hers, it would have felt too much like an amputation.
He glanced down at his prosthetic hand, gleaming in the artificial light. A different kind of amputation, anyway.
Obi-Wan glanced up at him; Anakin looked down rather than meet her eyes. He could still feel the bond between them, but now it felt faint and distant, stretched out over half a galaxy. “We’ll be down shortly, Master K’Kruhk,” she said into the comlink before keying it off and tossing it back to Anakin.
He caught it. “Do we have an assignment, Master?”
Obi-Wan pulled the tie out of her hair and shook it loose, combing it straight with her fingers. “I’m not really sure, but there’s a CSF lieutenant downstairs asking for me.”
“Well, I’m sure you didn’t do it, whatever it was,” Anakin said.
“Your faith in me is reassuring, my young Padawan,” Obi-Wan said, slipping the tie over her wrist. “Let’s meet back here in five minutes, since neither of us is currently fit for polite company.”
“You look beautiful,” Anakin blurted out, and promptly wanted to eat his own lightsaber blade first.
Obi-Wan blinked. “That’s very flattering, Padawan, but I think I’d prefer to put on proper robes anyway. And you probably want to put on a shirt.”
“Um,” Anakin said, glancing down at his sweat-slicked bare chest. “You might have a point.”
Obi-Wan raised an eyebrow, then shrugged and stepped into her room. Anakin ducked back into his bedroom, dressing quickly and clipping his lightsaber to his belt. When he reemerged, Obi-Wan was waiting for him, now fully dressed in robes and looking every inch the proper Jedi Knight. She had even managed to braid her hair in the short amount of time she had allotted, pinning it into a coil at the back of her head.
The familiar halls of the Temple seemed unnervingly empty around Anakin as he and Obi-Wan made their way downstairs. With every able Knight and Master who wasn’t philosophically opposed to the war deployed offworld, most of the remaining residents of the Temple were children and convalescents. Even the majority of the healers had gone, scattered at various medical stations across the galaxy, leaving only a handful behind to tend to Jedi medevaced back to Coruscant.
Anakin hated it. He hadn’t been raised in the Temple the way most Jedi had, but he had spent most of his life here nonetheless. There was a particular type of energy that formed in the Force around a large number of Jedi; Anakin suspected that the same might be true of a large group of Sith, but fortunately that was an infestation that the galaxy was no longer plagued by, Count Dooku’s handful of Dark Acolytes aside. That energy wasn’t absent from the Temple, not exactly – there were still several hundred Jedi here, even if they were mostly younglings and Padawans whose Masters had been killed in combat – but it was definitely muted from what it had been before the war, as if a heavy cloth had been dropped over the entire complex. It made his skin crawl.
He couldn’t sense any of Obi-Wan’s thoughts right now – blast it – but he risked a quick glance at her face. To a stranger, she probably looked quietly introspective, but to Anakin she just looked uncomfortable, a little small and lost in clothes that had fit her like a glove before her captivity. It reminded him too much of how she had looked those first few years after Qui-Gon’s death, before she had settled into her new role as a Knight-Master with a Padawan.
If Anakin ever got his hands on Asajj Ventress, he’d wring her pale neck.
At this thought, Obi-Wan glanced sharply at him. Anakin swallowed, trying to prepare a verbal defense, but eventually Obi-Wan looked away again without remarking on it. Her mental shields were up, making it impossible for him to get a read on what she was thinking – at least until the next time their bond fluctuated and they ended up in each other’s heads without any way of disentangling themselves.
Master K’Kruhk and the CSF lieutenant, a Duros male, were waiting in the entrance hall. The lieutenant had come accompanied by two clone troopers in full armor, both of whom wore the arm-patches that marked them as having been seconded to the Coruscant Security Force. Obi-Wan’s pace quickened as she caught sight of them, striding purposefully down the otherwise empty corridor.
“Lieutenant De Raaha?” she said. “I’m Obi-Wan Kenobi; this is my Padawan learner, Anakin Skywalker.”
“Hi,” Anakin said, looking the Duros up and down. From Anakin’s brief and automatic mental scan, skipping quickly across the surface of his mind, he seemed like an upright sort of guy. The clones were a known quantity; there was more variation among them than they were given credit for, but these two seemed familiar enough. Not ARC troopers or commandos, but they didn’t have to be for their current assignment.
Obi-Wan nodded to K’Kruhk, who returned the greeting. The Whiphid Jedi Master’s apparent good health was misleading, since Anakin knew that despite his current tenure as Temple gatekeeper he was still recovering from injuries sustained while failing to foil the assassination of Senator Viento.
The Duros lieutenant studied Obi-Wan with an intensity that Anakin found mildly disturbing. “I’m afraid that I have to ask for a genetic sample, General Kenobi,” he said at last, pulling a scanner out of his pocket.
All three Jedi stiffened, but it was Anakin who snapped, “Why?”
He heard the Force compulsion in his voice too late, as Obi-Wan and K’Kruhk both swung around to frown disapprovingly at him. De Raaha, who hadn’t been expecting the mind trick and thus had no defense against it, was already talking, though.
“There’s been a murder down in the lower city,” he said. “The genetic match came up to a coded ID – two, actually – but my associates here,” he indicated the two clone troopers, “made a visual ID to you, General.”
“Well, I’m clearly not dead,” Obi-Wan said, sounding much calmer than Anakin felt at the mention of her death, hypothetical as it had to be. She held her hand out for the scanner, pressing her thumb against the thin needle that slid out. Even though he couldn’t see it, Anakin winced; he didn’t like needles and he had felt the sharp sting in his own thumb, even though he shouldn’t have been able to – it would, after all, have been his prosthetic hand if their positions had been reversed.
Lieutenant De Raaha took the scanner back. It hummed a little as it cycled up; it couldn’t put a name to a coded ID, as all Jedi were, but it could certainly check to see if Obi-Wan’s genetic sequence matched anyone else in the CSF computer system.
“Who was the other ID?” Anakin asked. “You said there were two genetic matches, both coded. What was the other one designated?”
“Senatorial,” said the lieutenant, his red eyes fixed on the scanner. They widened slightly as the scanner pinged, announcing its results. “This doesn’t make any sense!”
Anakin took the device out of his hand without asking, frowning down at the display. Obi-Wan’s blood sample had come up with a genetic match, all right – one to the corpse, currently designated L782-X23, one to a coded ID with a Jedi designation, and one to a coded ID with a senatorial designation. Anakin showed it to Obi-Wan. “Master?”
Obi-Wan took the scanner from him, punching in her Jedi ID. “My Padawan and I were offworld until last night,” she said. “If your murder occurred any earlier than about eight o’clock, then I’m afraid that we didn’t have anything to do with it.”
“What would you say, Bash, about dinner time?” De Raaha said, directing this question to one of the clones.
Obi-Wan apparently didn’t hear him. Her expression had turned into a frown. “You’re not entirely mistaken, Lieutenant,” she said. “That is a genetic match.”
“What?” Anakin said.
“But I’m afraid that it’s not me that you want to speak to,” Obi-Wan went on, as if he hadn’t spoken. “It’s Senator Mon Mothma of Chandrila. Your murder victim must be from her retinue, although I’m not personally familiar with this woman.”
“What?” Anakin repeated. “Master, what are you talking about? That’s – not you, is it? I mean, of course it isn’t,” he corrected himself, resisting the urge to grab at Obi-Wan and reassure himself that she was really there; she wasn’t some vision that the Force had conjured up to torment him.
“I assume that you have a hologram of the body?” Obi-Wan asked De Raaha. Her mind touched Anakin’s lightly; although there was an undertone of tightly controlled agitation, her mental voice was otherwise as calm as her physical one.
“I do,” the lieutenant said reluctantly. One hand went to his pocket, but he hesitated, obviously reluctant to show it to someone he thought might be connected to the murder.
“Let’s see it,” said Master K’Kruhk, with just a hint of compulsion in his voice. By now, he was obviously interested – well, he would be; the gatekeepers were at least partially responsible for any Jedi on Coruscant.
Without further protest, the Duros knelt down and took a small holoprojector out of his pocket, setting it down on the marble floor before activating it.
Anakin was barely able to bite back his cry of alarm. He could see why the clones had identified the dead woman as Obi-Wan – she was Obi-Wan, right down to the mole on her forehead. Her hair was even parted the same way.
But it was the hair that gave it away. Obi-Wan had never cut her hair that short in all the years that Anakin had known her. Once he recognized that, it became easier to see the other physical differences. While Obi-Wan was all lean muscle, any excess body fat stripped away by her training, this woman tended to plumpness, her cheekbones not nearly so defined. The scar on Obi-Wan’s collarbone, caught unprepared by a vibroblade some years before Anakin had met her, was missing, as was the scar beneath her chin and the still-healing marks on her face left behind from shrapnel on Jabiim. Beneath her cloak, this woman was wearing civilian clothes – Chandrilan, Anakin thought, though he was hardly an expert on women’s clothing. There was no lightsaber on her belt – there was no place to put a lightsaber, or even a blaster.
He felt his breath even out as he studied the woman. Despite the physical resemblance, this stranger wasn’t Obi-Wan. She just looked like her. A lot like her.
“Can you explain this, General Kenobi?” asked the lieutenant, at the same time that Master K’Kruhk said, “A clone?”
“I’m afraid not, Master K’Kruhk,” Obi-Wan said, answering the second question first. Anakin felt her beats of hesitation stretch out in the Force, coupled with a discomfort so profound that it made his own skin itch.
He looked at her instead of the hologram, relieved to see her familiar features rather than those of the dead woman’s. Obi-Wan caught her lower lip briefly between her teeth before she spoke again, a millisecond of discomposure that was more upsetting than another kind of display would have been. “That woman isn’t a clone,” she said finally. “She’s my birth-sister.”