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Of course they’re going to go exploring before they’re officially supposed to.
It’s Kamino. It’s where most of their friends grew up. By now, Barriss has heard so many stories about the place that she can find her way around despite never having been inside Tipoca City herself before. She’s heard all the stories, the good ones, the sad ones, and the creepy ones.
Most of the creepy ones revolved around the single door that led down to the detention level. It was underneath the seabed and it was very, very rare that a brother ever even got to see the door, much less actually get sent there. There were the stories, but it was always something a squadmate had heard from his batchmate in another squad who heard it from an ori’vod who heard it from a cleaning droid.
Feral knows how to pick locks. The door keeps him out for nearly twenty seconds.
Barriss grins, igniting her lightsaber just in case, and together they edge cautiously down the narrow stairwell that was behind the door.
It doesn’t really look like a dungeon; the same white walls and ceiling and floor that was part of the entire city doesn’t change. But the door is apparently soundproof and it’s eerily quiet. The hum of her saber is loud in Barriss’ ears.
Their main reason for going down here, way before the Council can put together an official team to search it for any nasty surprises the Kaminoans had left behind, is curiosity. Slightly behind that is boredom, and right after boredom is worry. What if the Kaminoans had left something nasty behind? What if would affect the vod’e? What if it was something even worse than the control chips?
On the other hand, what if the cure for the accelerated aging was just lying around in a computer or a notebook? What if there were account numbers and receipts that could thoroughly implicate some of their enemies in the Senate? What if there was a handwritten confession of all his Evil Plans and Motivations by Sidious himself?
Barriss moves quietly down the long hall at the bottom of the stairs, lightsaber out and ready. Feral moves just behind her, in step with her, blaster poised to shoot over her shoulder. Together they sweep each room as they come to it.
It seems that there is only the one long, long, winding corridor dug through the rock under the sea, with single rooms alternating sides along it. The first dozen or so they come to are laboratories, swept clean and completely without any interest.
By the third one, they no longer trip over each other’s feet as they turn and scan for threats, moving as a coordinated unit.
Feral is just tall enough to look over her head, and Barriss can feel his heartbeat when they move even closer together as they step in sync around corners.
So maybe she had a fourth reason for wanting to explore some creepy Kaminoan hallways. He was nice, and she liked him. She liked him a lot. But it wasn’t like she could just walk up and go “hey Feral, want to hold hands for a bit?” in front of Maul.
Maul, who had taken to herding both of his baby brothers around like an anxious sheepdog with only two sheep as soon as they had left Coruscant, and barely let them out of his sight at all.
He might be hilariously short for both a Zabrak and a Sith Lord, but there was something not very conducive to asking his brother out on a date when he would be followed by an angry black-and-red shadow with burning eyes.
Barriss had, however, found the weak spot in Maul’s overprotectiveness. He got the psychic equivalent of hives at the very thought of letting his brothers just hang out with anyone but him, but he didn’t even blink at the idea of Feral going down into a creepy hallway to possibly fight monsters or mutants or whatever the Kaminoans had decided was worthy of being put in detention.
So maybe she was a little closer than she absolutely had to be, and maybe she leaned into him unnecessarily whenever she got the chance. But it wasn’t like Feral wasn’t doing the same. At one point, when she had stopped to try to get a terminal to respond, he had rested his chin on her head as she prodded at it.
It was entirely possible that the only reason it didn’t work was because she was too distracted to spend any brainpower looking for the power button.
Barriss knew that Feral didn’t know how big of a thing it was for her to trust him to touch her there, on her head, where both very Force-sensitive subcutaneous organs a little like internal montrals were, spreading over her scalp and down her cheeks and neck, and on her hair, which was always kept covered in Mirialan culture much like other cultures kept other body parts covered.
She wondered sometimes if he would be embarrassed if he knew that every time he touched her head he was basically groping her, and then decided that that was a problem for another day. She was consenting, she was an adult, and it was her boundary to set.
And the Force sang every time he was close and she never wanted it to stop.
Ahsoka would have known, at least that touching Barriss there was reserved only for family and mates, if not all of it. Ahsoka is the only other living thing Barris can imagine allowing to touch her like that.
~
The further they go into the seabed, the more disturbing the labs become.
They pass from the ones that are clearly more like offices to ones with chairs and tables that have heavy restraints on them fixed to the floor. Then there are the ones with cages in the corners.
Barriss has a white-knuckled grip on her lightsaber by the time they turn around a gentle bend and see the end. Some of the tables still have bloodstains on them, worn into the sterile white by time and repetition. Some of the cages have discarded clothes in them, not made for the Kaminoans and far too small for a cadet older than three or four.
Feral is breathing deeply and evenly, in through his mouth and out through his nose. She can feel his anger wrapping around him in the Force, but he is keeping it quiet and contained.
There are racks and racks of unidentifiable samples of things in tubes on the walls of the labs, neatly marked and organized. Only a few are obvious as biological. Like the set of bright blue eyes.
She’d had to turn around quickly and hide her face in Feral’s chest at that one, wondering who had been the first of the brothers unlucky enough to be born with such an obvious and, to the Kaminoans, obviously fascinating mutation.
There are clones with blue eyes. She knows some of them. Evidently it had been categorized as a nonimportant problem. After thorough study.
She is not looking forward to walking back up to the city and telling them that some of the stories are true.
They stand in the hallway after she has slammed the door to that lab shut. Feral runs his free hand up and down her back as she leans into him.
“I grew up with them,” she whispers. “They’re family. Even the ones I never knew.”
“I understand.”
“I want to fucking murder everyone who decided that this was a good idea.”
She feels the hand on her back stop for a second before it pats her shoulder twice and resumes the gentle up and down strokes. “You made a good start on it,” Feral says, serious but with a hint of something that might be a smile in his voice. “Going after Sidious first was ambitious of you.”
Luckily, she thought to turn her saber off before she threw her arms around him, because her hands clench into fists around the fabric of his robes.
Oh yeah, Feral had started wearing robes over his usual clothes. Dark ones. They looked awesome.
“But they’re still out there,” she spits. “There’s still Sith out there. The nasty kind of Sith. Vader. How is that fucking fair?”
“It is not,” he answers.
“I’m going to hunt him down. I’m going to hunt him to the ends of the galaxy and then I’m going to give him the death Sidious deserved. I’m going to –” She waves a hand at the closed lab door. “Whatever they felt, whatever they went through, I’m going to make Vader live it a thousand times before he dies.”
“Sounds good. When do we start?”
“I’m serious!” She blinks at him. “Wait, are you serious?”
Feral nods. “He broke Maul so badly that it took him decades to remember us. He used him and threw him away. I want revenge too.”
~
After that, their sweeps through the last few rooms are more perfunctory.
Step in, assess for threats, desperately ignore the obvious signs of child torture for their own sanity, look for anything useful, leave, close the door, try not to vomit.
They almost miss the stasis tank set into the wall of the last and deepest room.
It’s occupied.
Barriss steps away from Feral for the first time since they entered the detention level, running her fingers over the controls on the tank, trying to figure out how to get it to open.
“Are you sure we want to let him out?” Feral asks. He’s standing guard, pointing his blaster with steady hands at the still form of the brother inside the tank.
Whoever it is, he’s full-grown, dressed in the red-orange uniforms all the cadets wore. There are no obvious scars or identifying marks and he doesn’t appear to have any physical differences that set him apart from any of the others; as much as they can see through the cloudy lid of the tank, anyway.
“Yes!” Barriss says, finding the right buttons. “Why not? Look at what they did down here, he doesn’t deserve to be stuck any longer.”
“He might be dangerous.”
“We’re dangerous,” she retorts, coming to stand beside him, lightsaber ready but not ignited.
The lid of the tank slides open, it beeps and flashes a few times, and the man begins to twitch, clearly fighting for consciousness and control of his body. They watch him cautiously, knowing that it’s better not to get too close, to not startle him.
The brother’s eyes open, and they’re brown. He claws at the side of the tank, hauling himself upright, not quite able to stand up yet but making a strong effort to do so anyway. His head comes around, eyes locking onto them.
“Who are you?” he says, voice raspy and painful. Barriss notices that there is a bruise around his throat, and blood beginning to soak through the shoulder of his clothes.
“I’m Feral, this is Barriss,” Feral says slowly and calmly. “I’m a medic. Are you injured?”
The man looks down at his hands, the knuckles swelling, a few of the fingers aligned strangely, and shakes his head. “Doesn’t matter,” he mutters. “Traitors. Where’s my kid? Kids?”
“Your kids?”
He tries to step forward but slumps as soon as his weight leaves the edge of the tank he was half sitting and half leaning on, sliding down to the floor. A thin trail of blood follows him, smearing over the white. Feral snarls, showing his sharp teeth for a moment.
Barriss rolls her eyes at herself a second later for getting distracted and follows him as he moves quickly but smoothly forward, hands up and empty.
“You’re hurt,” he informs the man. “You might not be able to feel it right now, but you’re bleeding. I’m a medic and I’m going to take a look at your injuries. Do you understand?”
The man nods once and his breathing catches. “My kids,” he whispers.
“We’ll help you find them,” Feral says, tipping the men forward gently to rest against his chest while he searches for the source of the blood. It’s a gash across his lower back, and Feral rests his hand on it and begins to clean and close it as much as he can with the Force.
The man jerks in his hold. “Jetii,” he hisses, flailing to get away.
For a moment his eyes lock onto Barriss’, and she is surprised by the amount of terror there is under the anger on the surface. She shakes her head. “We’re not Jedi. We’re just Force-sensitive.”
“What’s difference?”
“We actually give a shit about people,” Feral says, holding the man steady with one arm and healing him with the other, moving on to the blaster wound in his shoulder after patching over the cut. “And aren’t afraid to do something about it. Hold still, di’kut, or you’ll bleed out and then you won’t be able to find your kids.”
“What happened to you?” Barriss asks as Feral works, letting the man sit back against the wall now that he’s in no danger of bleeding out and beginning to work on the broken bones in his hands.
“Ner’ade. They were –” He closes his eyes. “Not part of plan.”
“You were protecting them?”
She gets a jerky nod.
“And they what, just threw you in the stasis tank as soon as they could get you to stop fighting?”
Another nod.
“Fuckers,” she mutters, not even knowing exactly who she’s cursing and not really caring.
“Demagolka’e.”
“Wait, you speak Mando’a?”
He nods.
“Oh, good. We sort of do – not the pure version, although we can make ourselves understood. The vod’e kind of made their own version of it and that’s what we learned.”
“Vod’e?”
“Yeah, we – ugh, it’s not important right now. Do you know what they wanted to do to your kids?”
“Kill them. Take them away. They said I could keep –” He clenches his jaw as Feral resets his finger bones. “Only few hundred, they promised. Just to be ori’ramikad. Help me make Mandalore safe. And one to be my child. But they started making more, more. They were selling them to Republic.” He stops to breathe as Feral tips his head back to examine the bruises around his throat. “I found out. They were killing little ones who were different for being different. Then they came for Boba. I tried to fight them but they were killing them in front of me, I had to stop. They did something, put me there.” He jerks his head backwards, making Feral reach out to steady him as his fingers rest on the hollow of his throat, making the bruises fade a little, making to easier for him to talk.
“What’s your name?” Barriss asks, with a rising suspicion that she already knows and that it’s impossible, he died on Geonosis, he’s been dead since the start of the war.
But it’s not like there weren’t a few hundred thousand people running around with his face then and even more now. And who actually knew him well enough to tell the difference, before they got to know the vod’e well enough to tell them apart?
How did the Kaminoans keep making clones for so long after the donor was dead? When they claimed they had limited samples of his DNA that would result in smaller and more imperfect batches but there was never any actual drop in the quality or the number of clones being made?
“Jango,” he says as Feral moves on to the other hand. “Fett. Where are my kids?”