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Packing up isn’t as hard as they thought it would be; it doesn’t take long for those who know how to safely shrink things with the Force to teach it to everyone else and since they don’t own much in the way of personal property to begin with, most of them can pack the entire contents of their quarters into one bag.
And that means there are many, many helping hands to clear out the library and the greenhouses and the vaults and everywhere else. As for the portals they wanted to use to escape, the Temple provided them with one in a central location, large enough for several people to fit through side by side with ease, but it was blank and showed no destination.
They stand around it, eyeing it warily.
“Maybe we should go get rid of the Sith,” Kit suggests. “It’s all about intent, right?”
“What, we’ve got to be actively running from the guard before it’ll let us through?” Agen snorts. “We’re literally ready to go right now.”
The portal flickers, showing a hint of white and metal beyond before blinking out again.
“It seems that that was a yes,” Mace says after they watch it suspiciously for a few more minutes. He sighs and runs a hand over his eyes. “Let’s go kill him, then. I’ll let everyone know that they should be ready to leave as soon as this damn thing opens, whether we’re back or not.”
“There may not be time for all of them to get clear if they hesitate at all,” Luminara agrees. Her fingers skim along the surface of her saber. “And as for a rendezvous point, if they find themselves stranded?”
“We’re going to find them,” he says firmly. “And then we’re going to go find Skywalker and Kenobi and the rest of our men."
“What about the . . . the prisoners?” Plo asks. “Should we take them along at all? I am worried that they may be more trouble with us than left behind as a scapegoat for the Senate.”
“A danger to us with us, they are, and a danger to us free they are,” Yoda says, ears drooping. “Reluctant I wish I was to pass judgement, but our survival on this may depend.”
“We can’t just kill them without a trial,” Kit objects.
“I think the evidence we already found was pretty conclusive,” Depa argues.
“We have literal time travelers,” Luminara snaps. “Let’s knock them out, drag them with, and then we can ask what they did and then make a decision. Yes, we shouldn’t judge them for things they haven’t done yet, but we need to know what happened. Krell’s already started on things Skywalker claimed he did.”
Mace and Yoda look at each other and shrug. “That works,” says Mace, and thoughtfully ignites his lightsaber, examining the blade. “Let’s armor up and go. Please wear armor. I mean this literally. This is going to be a dangerous fight and I don’t want to lose any of you. We should wear literal armor. I don’t care what style you choose or if you want to wear it under or over your robes, but this isn’t a time to troll our men by using the Force to protect ourselves.”
“Anyway, it probably wasn’t fair to them in the first place,” Shaak says so quietly that they almost don’t hear her. “I don’t . . . It wasn’t nice. If they depend on us so much for, well, any kind of kindness or comfort, and it looked like we didn’t respect them enough to even bother being careful on the battlefield . . .”
They all look at the floor and shuffle uncomfortably.
“Yeah,” Depa agrees quietly, feeling somewhat embarrassed, since she’s the only one there who actually has her troops with her and at the moment she just wants to wrap them in blankets and feed them tea and chocolate and give them everything they have ever missed.
Mace claps his hands. “Anyway! Let’s move out.”
“Suppression cuffs!” Agen says. “We should put some on the prisoners.”
“Good idea.”
~
They go to the barracks of the Coruscant Guard first, at Grey’s suggestion. He and his brothers follow them in and bar the doors.
Depa looks around and shivers, both from cold and from the Force-sense of despair that permeates the walls. “They made you live here?” she asks, and her voice echoes quietly off the bare wall and floors. “I’ve been in nicer prisons.”
Grey is trembling very slightly as he stubbornly follows just behind her left elbow. “It wasn’t so bad when there were more of us,” he says weakly. “Some of the furniture is gone.”
Mace is frowning. “It looked nothing like this any time I came here.”
“We had orders. Things to put out when a General or a Senator came by. We couldn’t use them but it made us look more . . . worth our . . . like something . . .” He falls silent, staring ahead with a faint wrinkle between his brows.
“What’s going on in your head, Grey?” Depa asks gently.
“We’re not . . . are you . . .” He makes nervous eye contact with her and flicks his glance away again. “Like this, we’re not anything to want, are we, General?”
“What do you mean?”
“I’ve been in the barracks of the real guards before. They have – they have bigger desks and chairs and a rug on the floor they don’t have to pick up when they’re done with it, and in the hallways of the bunks the floor has something like the denseness of training mats but almost the texture of sleeping blacks. It’s so soft,” he says in wonder, temporarily looking less timid. “I’ve never seen anything like it before. There were partitions. And they had places to file paperwork that weren’t just old munitions boxes, and . . . just. Better. This isn’t –” he waves a hand. “This isn’t a place for soldiers you want to keep.”
They all stand in absolute silence for a few seconds, absorbing that little speech and then concentrating very hard on keeping their calm focus on the task ahead.
Depa takes Grey’s hand, slowly so as not to scare him, and squeezes lightly. “Thank you for telling us, Grey. We didn’t know.”
“You had orders to keep information that needed to be secure in old munitions boxes,” Kit says flatly. “If I didn’t believe Palpatine was masterminding the war, I do now. That’s so kriffing stupid! Anyone could break into them.”
Grey flinches, even though Kit’s words were even and quiet, with no malice behind them. The captain of Depa's Vheh Company moves forward to hover just behind him. “We kept them under guard and as secure as possible, sir. There was nothing we could do against the orders.” His eyes dart between Depa and Kit as if trying to decide which angle he will be attacked from.
Kit gives him a small smile. “I know it’s not your fault. It’s Palpatine’s.”
“Grey, Styles, it’s all right,” Depa says. “We’re not blaming you for any of this. We’re just shocked that we never knew.”
They pass through the front office of the barracks, equipped with a pile of old crates and a cheap folding table, and into a cavernous room. It’s even colder than the office and is murky dark even with the lights on.
“Situational awareness,” Grey murmurs. “We have to be used to suboptimal conditions so that they will not weaken us.”
The Jedi, who were only going to pass through the room on the assumption that it was a parking lot or an abandoned storeroom, stopped in an abrupt clump.
“Hold on, you use this room?” Mace demands. “What is it supposed to be?”
“Rec room and mess hall,” Grey answers dully. He points into the darkness on their left. “The tables are over there, the rest of the space near the door and the stairwell is allowed for use during breaks and off-shift time. The speeders are usually parked in the back, near the doors that open into the street, but it looks like they moved them somewhere else when they left.”
Depa squints in the direction he showed. She can see nothing, even when she enhances her sense with the Force. The only lights on the ceiling are spaced far apart and the coils glow sullenly through grime and smoke from years of exhaust fumes.
“This is supposed to be a parking garage,” Mace hisses. “I saw the blueprints when they renovated this building. There are rec rooms and a mess hall upstairs.”
Grey shifts nervously. “We’ve never seen them, sir. Everything upstairs is bunks. And the weapons lockers. It’s, it’s warmer when we are all here? I’m sorry about that, sir, but we’re not allowed fires indoors.”
Luminara and Shaak advance into the darkness. Their lamps reveal a line of makeshift tables and chairs along one wall, with stubs of candle stuck into empty bomb casings.
“We tried to use our headlamps, but then the batteries would go down too fast and that wasn’t . . . anyway, we learned to make candles. They’re not allowed but they’re easier to hide than all the charging batteries,” Captain Styles volunteers. “We do try to keep the regs, sirs, we really do.”
“It’s all right to want to be able to see what you’re eating,” Plo says a little helplessly, patting him on the shoulder and looking like he desperately wants to hug every single clone he ever meets while signing adoption papers with his other hand. “It’s not wrong to figure out, ah, ingenious solutions to problems, either. In fact, that’s very impressive. I’m proud of you.”
Luminara stays by the tables, poking at the candles with a hand that is ever so slightly shaking as it holds her lamp, but Shaak crosses to the side of the room where Grey had said they took their breaks. Her eyes are narrowed suspiciously.
“I scent blood,” she whispers, and it echoes around the room. “I thought I did at first, but the scent is stronger here. It’s not fresh, but it’s strong.”
Instinctively they close ranks, and the snap-hiss of lightsabers igniting and their steady hum fills the room.
Depa’s men look a little bewildered, from what she can read off their body language, as they are gently pushed into the middle of the circle of Jedi.
“Sir,” Grey protests as she steps in front of him. “If there’s a threat, sir –”
“It will be to you,” she answers. “Let us keep you safe for once, please, Commander.”
It might be the sudden sob that almost strangles her last few words, but he stops trying to politely get around her and lets her cover him.
“No body,” Shaak murmurs, letting the echoes carry her voice. “Lot of blood, though. And a trail. It’s so smeared I can’t tell if whoever this was was coming or going from here, but they came or went from upstairs.”
“Coming,” Styles whispers.
“Why do you think that?” Luminara asks, joining them.
He shies but stands his ground and tilts his head a little, looking up at the ceiling. “It’s – it’s kind of a joke. Among us. The city’s so full of pollution, and we aren’t allowed on the upper levels unless it’s Temple or Senate duty and then we’re always inside, so we, we made the ceiling look like the stars we could see on Kamino. And we always say that if we die here, we’d want to die under the stars. It’s . . . it’s easier to find the road if you die under the stars. That’s what the stories say, anyway. So we wouldn’t try to get away from here if we were bleeding out, we’d be trying to get in.” He finishes in a whisper so quiet they can barely hear.
The Jedi look up at the ceiling.
“I can’t see anything,” Mace says.
“You have to be over there to see, sir.”
They move over to join Shaak and in the glow of their lightsabers, a galaxy blooms above their heads.
“That’s beautiful,” someone whispers.
“How did you do that?” says someone else.
“It’s just ends of regulation paint,” Grey says. “There’s always a bit left over after touching up our armor. And people throw out paint cans and tubes, and tiny bottles of this smelly colored polish that’s almost as good as paint all the time, and sometimes we’d find whole cans where buildings were being worked on. It’s – it’s not stealing if someone’s already thrown it away, is it, sir?”
Depa looks at the mismatched and battered chairs and low tables and the single rug of indeterminate color, patched and frayed, and has a horrible sinking feeling.
“No,” she answers. “No, it’s not, but I am so sorry that you had to resort to that to make this place livable.”
“Why?” Grey asks, and the genuine bewilderment in his voice and coming off of him in the Force almost breaks her heart. Yoda shuffles over to pat his knee, ears drooping mournfully. He has been silent since they entered the barracks.
“There are seventeen chairs here and five hundred seventy-six troopers permanently stationed, with your one hundred twenty-three temporarily,” Mace says levelly. “Did they take any of this furniture with them?”
“Just the rugs, sir. And there are one hundred and forty-four of us now, but the shinies were taken with the others.”
“The rugs?”
“They were ours, weren’t they? We make them from our blacks when they’re too torn up to wear anymore.”
“Yes,” Mace says, carefully regulating his breathing. The lights above them flicker spasmodically for a few seconds. “Yes, I think that would make them yours. So when you used this room, you would bring your own seating and candles and?”
“Not the candles, unless we needed to repaint our armor, sir,” Styles says at once. “Those are valuable. Don’t need that much light to sew a seam or fix a dent. That’s easy enough to do by touch. And we’re bred to have good night eyes, all of us, not just the pilots.”
“Reports are done on the official datapads and those have their own light,” Grey adds. “That was never a problem.”
“Why did they leave the candles, then, if they’re valuable?” Shaak asks, still crouched over the disturbingly large bloodstain near the wall.
Grey and Styles look at each other. “I think they wanted to make a statement, sir,” Styles answers when all Grey manages is a slight aborted sound. “Fox was a good officer, and so were Stone and Thorn, and they always said we needed better equipment and more supplies to actually do our jobs and it wasn’t our fault we have to make do with what we do get, and they probably thought that leaving the candle stubs behind was sort of a, a gesture to the nat-born regiments. We don’t need all the soft things they get, because we can make our own and do better.”
“Commander Thire is also posted to the Coruscant division of the GAR,” Mace says.
“Yes sir. His company was posted to the Temple and lived there.”
“And who was the commander of this building?”
“Fox and Stone and Thorn, sir.”
Mace blinks. “All of them? But they each lead a company. That’s almost two thousand men.”
“One thousand seven hundred and twenty-eight, sir,” Grey says. “The bunks are upstairs.”
“This building can’t hold that many people.”
All the clones look at him uncomprehendingly.
“There’s three shifts, sir,” Styles says cautiously. “And we don’t mind sharing bunks with our brothers.”
Depa does some quick calculations. “What about when other companies were sent to stay here temporarily? Like now, with us?”
“It got a little crowded,” he admits. “But we made it work.”
“But they have their own barracks in other places around Coruscant. I’ve been there.”
“Yes, sir. The nat-born guard use those. The neighborhoods are too peaceful for us and they need the space. They’re not like us, sir.”
“They’re making those companies into battalions too, how the kriff –"
“I think we’ve seen enough,” Shaak interrupts. The furniture, such as it is, rattles faintly as she passes it to join them again. She is breathing deeply. “Let’s look for anything left behind and then follow this trail.”
~
In the end, searching the building doesn’t take long. Vheh knows where to look for the tiny things their brothers hid to make life a little more bearable, and they are ready to leave before they’ve even spent an hour in the barracks.
Depa looks at the two packs full of personal belongings they’ve collected for almost two thousand people and feels the Force sway and snap around her. Her men had been surprised that so much had been left behind.
They follow the trail of dry smeared blood into one of the tiny rooms that are supposed to be offices and through a wardrobe with a false back into one of the tunnels that snake through Coruscant. This one is probably more well hidden than some.
It leads them to a soundproof door, approximately beneath the Senate by their estimations and the Force signatures they can feel moving above them. It opens when Grey looks into a scanner.
“How is that any kind of security?” Agen grumbles as they cautiously edge into the corridor beyond, Jedi first. “Couldn’t any clone trigger that?”
“They’d have to know the door was there first, sir,” Grey whispers back. “And then they’d have to want to be here.”
Depa takes a better look at him in the dim light of their sabers. His eyes are wide and he is breathing fast and shallow. She slides back to wrap an arm around him and pull him to her side. “Are you all right? Have you been here before?”
He shakes his head. “I saw – once, I saw Fox – through the cabinet, and he couldn’t talk, he didn’t know us –”
She looks down, where the blood still flakes and cracks beneath their feet. It’s thinner here, but they have followed a steady trail of it all the way from the barracks.
“We’re here now. It’s going to be okay, you’re not alone. We won’t let anyone hurt you. Never again.”
“You are all incredibly brave,” Plo adds, appearing on Grey’s other side and only hesitating for a moment before also putting an arm around his shoulders. “We will not fail you any more than we have already.”
“There’s a room here,” Luminara passes down to them from the front of the line. “Where the blood started.”
They don’t stay long there, and only Mace and Shaak go inside. When they come out, they have a shielded bag full of Sith books and artifacts. Shaak’s eyes are glittering with fury. Depa can feel the anger and hurt swirling around her former teacher, pulling him closer and closer to the point of no return.
They find a narrow emergency stairwell, another room full of Sith things and space for doing rituals, a mixed library of books, scrolls, and holocrons, and a very opulent room with a comm unit.
They have two dozen filled bags of Palpatine’s things, and a few that cannot be shrunk, only shielded.
“This must be where he directs the Separatists from,” Luminara whispers, expertly making the comm experience a random accident in the wiring and fail, grabbing the data of the transmissions as she does so. “It looks like a throne room. Not a very tasteful one, though.”
Depa has to agree. The velvet hooded cloak flung across the table the comm sits on is far too garish to impress in person, and the red and gold walls and floor and dais and the fake windows showing a view of snowy tundra and . . . everything, really, hurts her eyes.
“The shields here must be crap, if he hasn’t noticed all of us taking all his stuff,” Agen whispers as they raid a bedroom that reeks of the Dark Side and, damningly, contains so many unique personal items that Palpatine has shown in public that there is no doubt that the room is, first, his, and second, also a Sith Lord’s. No possible conclusion can be drawn beside either Palpatine being a Sith or sleeping with one every night.
Mace steals his bedspread. It’s big enough to be a picnic blanket for the entire Council and room to spare, and made of something that feels like spun clouds. He looks between the trooper watching the door for them and Palpatine’s enormous bed and then grins, expertly shrinking it and stuffing it into a bag.
“I’m not taking his pillows, though,” he announces in a stage whisper. “I’m pretty sure we can purify the bedspread, but the pillows have been in direct skin contact.” He shivers.
“Gross,” Kit agrees, scooping an armful of golden eating utensils from a tray table into a bag of his own.
“Do you think it’d give us away too early if I set his mattress on fire?” Plo rumbles, appearing from behind them. He still has an arm over Grey’s shoulders.
“Let’s do it on the way back,” Mace says.
“An excellent firestarter, Nabooian brandy is,” Yoda cackles from the closet, where he is shredding Palpatine’s Senate robes with his claws and pocketing the jewels he rips off. “Also tastes like lighter fluid, it does. Serve him right, it shall. And buy us much fuel for our ships, these shiny rocks shall.”
He levitates four bottles of it over to Depa, who slices the tops off with her saber and starts pouring them all over the very expensive feather mattress, assisted by Styles and Luminara, ripping it up to get more fluff.
“I think I know where some of the pay he stole went,” Luminara whispers in her ear so that none of the clones can hear, gesturing to the room in general, and catches two more bottles from Yoda. “Force, did he drink every time he appeared in the Senate? That’d certainly explain some things.”
They were not small bottles.
“Crushed kyber in the sleeves of his robes, he has. Very, very naughty,” accompanies a final ripping sound. “Restored, these poor crystals shall be later.”
Kit helpfully pulls the drawers out of the dresser and rips them apart, tearing his tunic in the process. Oblivious, he and Yoda and Agen shred the wooden furniture into kindling and stack it on and around the alcohol-soaked mattress.
“Any oil?” Mace asks hopefully.
“There’s this,” says a trooper shyly from the doorway, where they are crowding to watch the Council go feral in the Chancellor’s secret bedroom with what must be wide eyes beneath their helmets. He extends a large jug of industrial lubricant in a hand that is only slightly shaking. “We took it from the closet by the – the torture room.”
Mace eyes it with sudden disgust and sets it on the floor.
“Right, we’ll pour that on the top,” Kit says, lifting Yoda off the bed-pyre as he finished shredding the pillows. “I think it’s ready to go.”
Yoda cackles quietly again. “Reminds me of my padawan days, this does.”
Nobody is brave enough to ask.
~
The emergency staircase leads up to a hidden sliding door in the Chancellor’s office. The Chancellor himself is standing by the window, staring at something in the distance. His hands are behind his back, one hand loosely clasped around the wrist of the other.
From what they can see as they peer out of the door, he is smiling.
His body still smiles as it slumps to the floor, a blaster hole through his brain. Just to make sure, Mace strides over to it, dropping the standard-issue blaster he snatched from one of the troopers, and stabs Palpatine through the heart and cuts off his head with the cutting end of a vibrostaff from the wall.
“No lightsabers,” he warns quietly.
“Mace,” Depa says.
“We don’t want anything linking this to us automatically in anyone’s mind.”
Agen joins her a little way back from the window. “Mace,” he says.
“This should look like one of his own friends did it,” he says, examining the crime scene with a critical eye.
“Mace. Mace.” Depa reaches out with the Force and tugs on his hand, something she hasn’t done since she was a small padawan. “The Temple is burning.”