Chapter Text
Her Master wouldn’t let her come with him.
Anakin had pressed strong fingers into her shoulder when she tried to get on the back of his speeder, pushing her into the hangar bay. “No, not today, Snips. This is above your pay grade.”
She hadn’t been mad, not really. Just confused. “Master, I’m a Commander in the GAR. I had my first engagement at fourteen. What’s above my pay grade?”
“Personal favor for the Chancellor,” he said, then his face turned sour. “And I don’t like how it sounds when you put it like that.” Anakin shook his head, star-brightened curls flapping against his cheek. Their last mission was on a desert planet. Not like Tatooine. Nothing as bad as Tatooine. Well - not the actual planet, at least. The mission hadn’t gone precisely as planned. That could be classified as bad. Ahsoka swallows, hard enough that she feels the muscles in her throat strain. She buries any further thoughts. Of the planet and its previously breathtaking capital city, tiled all blue and purple, radiant under the golden light of their star, the sun that had left the glimmering reflection in her master’s hair.
She wondered what it would be like to have hair. Probably annoying. Anakin’s is always sticking up, and usually, when he combs his fingers through it, it’s all tangled, and they get caught and tear out big chunks, making him whine. No, Ahsoka remembers thinking. She’s glad to have montrals. Much more efficient.
“Snips, what the kriff are you thinking about?”
“Huh?”
“You’re staring at the top of my head.” Anakin had suddenly put a hand to his scalp. “Wait - is there something there? Is there something on me?”
She giggled. “No.”
“Then stop! It’s weirding me out.”
Ahsoka forgot all about her master’s mission, which she later supposes was his precise aim.
She hears the first rumor in the caf. There are a lot of Jedi missing. That’s not unusual. The Separatists are spreading the Order thin these last few months. Battalions come and go, deploying from Coruscant all the way to the far reaches of the Outer Rim.
It’s the missing padawans that catch her attention. Kaycer, and Yuli. A few others she knows mostly by sight. And there are just more spaces between the others who remain.
“Where is everyone?” she asks Aayla Secura.
“Kaycer’s Master came and got her. I was gonna ask, but she started crying, so I figured I should back off.” The Twi’lek girl, sitting next to her own master, shrugs.
Ahsoka chews slowly on her tana root. Then springs up from the table and dashes through the hall, ignoring Quinlan Vos’ call after her, laughter in his voice. “Fire in the seat of your pants, padawan?”
She goes to Kaycer’s domicile. Knocks lightly on the frame. Barriss Offee is the one revealed when the door slides back. “Oh!” Ahsoka is suprised. Pleased, though.
Barriss’s eyes are dark and still, like a well of deep water. Ahsoka gets a glimpse of Kaycer sitting on her bed, her face in her hands. Yuli clasps her shoulder, and frowns severely at Ahsoka in the doorway.
“Come back later,” Barriss whispers. “It’s - not a good time.”
The Force itches under her skin. “What’s happened?”
Barriss hesitates. Then steps forward, lets the door slide shut, leaving them in the dusty silence of the cut stone hall. “Kayce got some bad news, that’s all.”
“Tell me, please.” Ahsoka lets her eyes go big and pleading. It usually works on Master Anakin. And sometimes on Obi-Wan, though he’d never admit it.
“Do you remember Hafi Tanaar?” Barriss bites her lip, the markings on her cheeks shifting with the motion. “She was in Kaycer’s creche.”
“Yeah,” she says slowly. “Yeah, I think I do. She left, didn’t she? What - a year ago?”
Barriss nods. “Kayce took it really hard when she left.”
“Do you know why? Hafi’s Master - well, she hasn’t been back on Coruscant since,” Ahsoka says, hushed. Master Lind had never gotten along with Anakin, so she hadn’t known the soft-spoken Rodian very well, nor her padawan, but she’d heard that Hafi had been loud and brash, often obnoxious. Always smiling, though, when Ahsoka saw her. She’d always tasted a faint tang of disapproval radiating from any other Master in Hafi’s presence. A taste that had grown rather familiar, given her own Master, and the way he seemed hellbent on driving Windu into an early retirement or an apoplectic fit. Or both.
“It was an honorable decision,” her friend replies, with some bite. “She disagreed with the direction of the Order. With - with the Council turning into the Republic’s war dogs.”
Ahsoka blinks at her. Barriss goes back to biting her lip. Unease gnaws at her gut, as she realizes that Barriss often looks like that, lately. As if she’s containing words unsaid, imprisoning unspoken thoughts behind her teeth.
“I don’t understand,” Ahsoka says. “What does this have to do with Kaycer? Does she still talk to Hafi? Is her Master worried she’ll convince her to leave too?”
The notion goes off in her mind like a depth charge, sending a tremor through foundations she assumed were solid. Can Jedi just leave the Order? Just, walk away, and abandon the people that they’ve known all their life?
“Kaycer’s Master doesn’t have to worry about Hafi’s influence anymore,” Barriss mutters. “She’s on the run.”
“What?” Ahsoka gasps.
“Yuli’s creche-mate heard it from his Master, who liaises with the Senate Guard. They say she killed a junior senator and fled the scene.”
Her mind expands in leaps and bounds. “That’s where he went.”
Barriss looks at her sharply, but she shakes her head. The door hisses open, and Kayce is there, purple shadows under her pale eyes. Her black hair is uncombed, tangled, like she’s fisted her hands in it. “It’s not true,” she rasps. “Hafi couldn’t have. She wouldn’t do that. She didn’t want to be a Jedi anymore, but it doesn’t mean she’s a killer.”
“Why do they think she did it? What’s the evidence against her?” Ahsoka asks.
“They found her lightsaber at the scene,” Kayce mutters.
Ahsoka stares. “She still had it? I thought it was confiscated when she left the Order.”
No one responds. After her shock settles a little, Ahsoka understands. If she - stars forbid - if she left the Order, she’d hate to leave behind her lightsaber. Her blades feel more like muscle and bone than steel and plastic, when they’re in her grip. And she’s positive Anakin would let her keep them. He’d lie to the Council if he had to.
Yuli hovers behind Kaycer. “And because of the antiwar stuff,” she says, but cuts off at Kayce’s glare.
“Look - if you know anything, you should tell me.” Ahsoka squares her shoulders, draws herself up like she does when she’s addressing the clones. Barriss is often deployed with Master Unduli, so she seems to recognize the stance, and lifts her chin. The other two padawans shrink back.
Kayce and Yuli’s Masters are both healers, and they don’t see much action off Coruscant. They’re not Commanders. Ahsoka feels the divide between them deeply in that moment, a crevasse.
“My Master has gone to investigate,” she says. Ahsoka is almost positive. No wonder he didn’t want her to come with him. A traitorous padawan, fleeing from the law? Or ex-padawan. It’s delicate. “Anything you tell me that can help, I can tell him.”
“They’re having a General investigate?” Barriss shoots her a look filled to the brim with skepticism. “Shouldn’t he be planning the next offensive? That’s what Master Luminara is doing.”
“The Chancellor asked him. A favor.”
“The Supreme Chancellor of the Republic?” Yuli gasps. “Knows about Hafi? And - asked your master a favor ?”
“He’s a General,” Barriss reiterates. The answer to Yuli’s question, and still a restatement of her own. Ahsoka ignores it, because she doesn’t actually know why Anakin is investigating.
“Will he listen to you?” Yuli asks, tugging at her soft, floating antennae. Her blue skin is a shade paler than normal, washed out in the white light spilling from the open door of Kaycer’s fresher. “My master says Skywalker’s ears are stuffed full of bantha - um,” she stammers. “That he’s not, well, a good listener.”
“He listens when it’s important,” Ahsoka snipes, pointed. She is tired of having to defend him. Everyone in the Temple has got opinions, and it’s so very frustrating. Maybe if they could see the way he can cut through a drone unit in four efficient maneuvers. Maybe if they could feel the way his whole Force presence brightens, like the sun coming over the glass spires of Coruscant, when he smiles.
Yuli, stung at the implication, opens her mouth to snap back, but Barriss raises her hands. She’s the oldest of them, and they all subside. Even Ahsoka.
Kaycer breaks the silence. “My Master told me to stop talking to her, okay? He didn’t know she was back on Coruscant. Didn’t know we were still in contact,” she says, subdued.
“Did you tell him now?”
“No.” The near-human girl hunches her shoulders up, defensive. “She was talking to some antiwar group. They were planning a bunch of demonstrations and stuff. It wasn’t anything big, just to support the peace initiative that Senator Mothma is planning to bring before the Planetary Defense Committee.”
Kaycer had been leaning against the sandstone wall, spine curved inward, but now she stands straight, feet planted. “All I know is that something changed. The last time I talked to Hafi, she said she was going to back out. I swear. Tell Knight Skywalker that. You have to tell him.”
“What changed?” Ahsoka prods.
“I don’t know. The guy she’d always talked about, the group’s leader - I think his name is Nan Kavala. He was really mad about the GAR offensive on Cabaron.”
The name settles like a chill, as if someone opened a docking gate and let in a breeze from the void of space. Even though there is no such thing. Ahsoka’s always imagined it, when they’re on a starcruiser in a desolate sect of the Outer Rim. The kind of place where all you can see is darkness. When the hum of the engine sounds like a heartbeat through the ship’s hull.
She swallows. Barriss nudges her side. Ahsoka ignores that too, with a touch of guilt this time. She can’t talk about Cabaron, not right now. It hasn’t been long enough since their troop transports lifted from the skin of that desert planet. Leaving behind smoke and rubble, a grit in her teeth she can feel when she clenches her jaw.
“They wanted justice, didn’t they?” Barriss says, when Ahsoka doesn’t respond. “They wanted someone to be held accountable.” She cuts a glance at Kaycer, sounding curious. “Do you know what they were planning?”
“Hafi wouldn’t tell me. She said she was going offworld. Somewhere that needed her. Help man a medical station, maybe.” Kaycer stares at Ahsoka, her eyes glittering hard and pale. “Why would she say that, if she was going to do this?”
“I don’t know. But I’ll find out.” She leaves the other padawans behind, and makes it to the junction where the hall to the doms splits before she realizes she doesn’t know where Anakin went. One cavernous hall leads to the hangar bay, the other to the caf, and another to the main entrance hall.
Ahsoka comms him, but he doesn’t pick up. She hesitates for a second, and then comms Master Kenobi.
“Padawan?” His voice is warm, reassuring.
“Do you know where Anakin went? There was a mission, I know, but he wouldn’t let me come.”
“I am certain he had good reason.”
“You know what it was about,” she accuses.
His sigh filters over the open line. “I am a Council Member, Ahsoka. Of course I know.”
“Right. No, I - of course. It’s just… I think I have information that could be mission relevant, Master.”
There is a pause, then, “Meet me at the fountain.”
The Room of a Thousand Fountains is to the right. She follows the winding thread of the passage until she comes out underneath the wavering green glow that pours in from distant filtered skylights. Silver water arcs and jumps around her. The scent of fertile earth fills her nose. Master Obi-Wan is perched on a bronze edge of the largest fountain.
“It’s Hafi Tanaar, isn’t it?”
He blinks. “What do you know of Hafi Tanaar?”
“Kaycer Yagobar is her friend. They said she’s accused of killing a junior senator.”
Obi-Wan hushes her, pulls her to the side of the room, under the shade of a giant fern. “This is need to know, Ahsoka.”
“Kayce says she got a comm from Hafi yesterday,” Ahsoka says quietly. “That Hafi was planning on shipping offworld, going to work on a medical station. She said it doesn’t make sense that she’d attack a senator. And I think she’s right.”
“She didn’t tell anyone this?” Ahsoka shakes her head. He thinks for a moment, his Force presence curling and flickering along with the color of his changeable eyes. Now blue, then grey, and then a flicker of green like the leaves that frame his head in a verdant crown.
“Anakin is at the Senate Dome,” he reveals. “I am heading there now.” Obi-Wan turns a stern gaze on her. “You may come - if,” he stresses, once she leaps forward, ready to dash to her dom and grab a cloak, “If I can count on your discretion. No talking to Kaycer Yagobar about this case unless you clear it with me or Anakin first. And no gossiping about this with other padawans. This is an extremely serious charge. And against a former Jedi…” He presses his lips together, forming a white line. “The galactic press would have a field day with this. There are already questions about the Order’s position with the GAR.”
Ahsoka feels the expectation settle like a weight on her shoulders. She nods, serious. “I won’t let you down.”
“Then follow me.”