Chapter Text
Ahsoka is twenty-nine when the ghost appears to her. He introduces himself as her great-grandmaster, and asks her if she’s willing to take the future of the world on her own shoulders.
“Depends on what you mean,” she hedges. “But if I can fix everything, or even just some things, then I’m willing to give my life to make the galaxy a better place.”
He smiles at her, and there’s a sadness to it that she doesn’t have the information to parse. “You will not die, but you will lose almost everything you have, in friends and family and home.”
“Okay,” she tells him. “How many lives can I save your way that I can’t save mine?”
He holds out a hand to her, and there’s a shudder in the Force as she receives information she’s never had any way of knowing. Her master is Vader, and Obi-Wan is a broken shell of himself on Tatooine, and there are children that the Emperor can never, ever find out about.
There’s a glimmer of hope.
“What?” she whispers, head tilting in a hopeless attempt to see more than she is being given. “He’s…”
“There was an incident,” her great-grandmaster tells her. “He drifted out of the dark for just a few moments, not intentionally, but enough to see… well, to see me. I’ve put a crack in the armor, in the denial. My machinations have not been kind, necessarily, but if it’s to save billions, even trillions of lives…”
“What did you do?” Ahsoka demands.
“I suppose I broke him,” Qui-Gon Jinn admits. “Just… in the other direction. Guilt instead of grief. Determination instead of rage. Desperation for redemption, instead of hate. It was not a quick process, but I have… a position in his history. I did him a kindness, and then died before his memory of me could be tarnished.”
“Unlike the rest of the Jedi?” Ahsoka asks, words wry in the air but dry on her tongue. They’re an immediate reaction, a gut-flinch response. She speaks to fill the air and buy herself time, to feel in control when she really, truly isn’t. “So, Vader wants to make things better. He wants to be Anakin again. It’s because you showed up and… what, talked him down?”
“I may have provided him with a vision,” Master Jinn allows. “Of what will have, could have been.”
“A better universe?” Ahsoka guesses.
“No, just one where he finds his heart before death,” Master Jinn says, words careful and deliberate in ways that Ahsoka never lets hers seem. “His son would have believed that he still had good in him. It would have been enough.”
Ahsoka doesn’t roll her shoulders, though she wants to. “Okay, so he’s returning to the Light a few years early. It’s a few years, right?”
“Yes, I don’t believe he’d have met his children for another five years, and not returned to the Light for another ten,” Master Jinn confirms. “Not properly.”
Ahsoka wonders what that means, but they don’t have time for details. “Okay. What do you need from me, and why would it require that I leave my life behind?”
“Time-travel.”
She waits for a moment, waits for a ping from the Force that this is a bad idea, that something is wrong, that he’s lying or mistaken about what he can achieve, dead as he is. She pokes at the universe for answers.
The Force just pokes her back.
“Right,” she sighs. “Tell me what the plan is.”
--
When Anakin gets surly and grumpy and snappish, Obi-Wan tells himself that it’s just part of being a teenager. Anakin’s almost fourteen now, and most of the teenagers Obi-Wan’s met, including those when he himself was at that age, were prone to emotional volatility and contrariness. Even among the Jedi, this was normal. For all he knew, it was actually a good sign that Anakin felt safe enough at the Temple to act out, given what his childhood had been like.
Obi-Wan tries to reach out, to let Anakin know that he’s here and will do whatever he can to help, but the response is… incomprehensible, mostly. Anakin’s face shows disgust. His emotions roil with grief. His words are, “Thank you, Master. I will… endeavor to keep that in mind.”
All of these reactions are worrying individually, but the fact that they all happen at the same time is absolutely worse.
Of course, nobody seems to notice that Anakin’s acting odd. They attribute it to being a teenager, or to Anakin not being Temple-raised. Nobody approaches Obi-Wan about Anakin’s behavior being odd, except for the Knight who teaches Astrophysical Anomalies for the piloting-focused padawans, and that’s just to ask if maybe Anakin should test out. Apparently, his grades have skyrocketed, while his participation has dropped to almost nothing, and the Knight feels that Anakin would probably do better getting tested for a higher level.
Obi-Wan agrees to it, and Anakin’s reaction in this case is scrunched-nose irritation, self-recriminating fear in the Force, and a clipped, “I suppose that it would be a waste of Knight Jimil’quay’s time to continue teaching me in a subject I have greater knowledge in.”
The urge to ask his padawan what the fuck is wrong isn’t overwhelming, but it still takes effort to hold the words back. Obi-Wan just signs the papers and makes the arrangements, and tries to get Anakin to talk to him when they spar and meditate. It’s all he can do, when Anakin’s wrapping up his secrets tighter than he ever has.
His worry grows, and grows, and then the Togruta shows up.
--
“Call me Fulcrum.”
Anakin can feel his irritation spike, and immediately quashes it. He has no authority over her. Not here. Not now.
“Not a Togruta name,” Obi-Wan comments, voice light but stiff. He offers a smile anyway. “Should I assume the name is false?”
“I don’t have any claim to the name I once carried,” Ahsoka says, with a shadow of a smirk flitting across her face. Anakin’s not sure anyone else would recognize her expression as anything other than a smile. “So now I’m Fulcrum.”
Anakin grinds his teeth, because Ahsoka got to stay an adult. She’s taller than Obi-Wan, montrals curving out but not up, and the patterns on her face are far more detailed than Anakin ever got to see the first time around. She holds herself with the easy grace of a hardened warrior, and the part of him that isn’t angry is just… he’s proud.
He doesn’t have a right to be proud.
He’d have tried to kill her, before Qui-Gon showed up.
Just another—
“Head up, Skyguy.”
Anakin jerks up, ready to catch whatever she’s throwing at him, and then realizes she hasn’t thrown anything at him.
She clearly wants to laugh at him. He can feel it. The mess their bond used to be is there, frayed and burnt.
But at least it’s there.
“Snips,” he says, and then stops. He doesn’t know what to say.
Obi-Wan looks between them in mounting concern. “You two know each other?”
“Mm,” Ahsoka—Fulcrum says. “After a fashion.”
“Is that so.”
“From a certain point of view, sure,” she teases. Anakin makes a face. She’s older than Obi-Wan, if only by a few months. That’s… odd. “I wander a lot. Get into weird trouble. Visit old temples.”
“And this has to do with my Padawan?”
Fulcrum smiles, so cheery that her eyes almost disappear with it. “A ghost gave me a mission, and I’m here to fulfill it.”
Qui-Gon.
He said he’d be sending her. Anakin had known to expect her, he’d felt her coming, and still, the phrasing is… it’s so blunt. It’s so aggravatingly direct that he has to admire her for it, but also… Force, Snips.
“A ghost,” Obi-Wan repeats, doubt in every word.
Fulcrum nods, completely ignoring the energy of his suspicion. “I’m here to play parole officer for Skyguy.”
“Parole officer?” Obi-Wan demands. His anxiety is palpable. “What—Anakin got arrested?!”
“I didn’t,” Anakin immediately denies.
“Well, you did,” Fulcrum corrects. “But that was pod-racing, which is so far below my need to care that I will encourage you to do it again if it keeps you sane.”
It does keep him sane, actually.
“Wait, hold on,” Obi-Wan says, looking more than a little frantic. He rounds on Anakin. “You got arrested?”
“It was a while ago,” Anakin mutters, looking away and at the ground. It’s been decades, for him. Maybe two years, here. “It’s fine. They let me go when they realized I was a kid and I ran off before they got my information.”
Or something like that. He doesn’t really… remember. He’s pretty sure he didn’t get booked properly, just arrested. It can’t have been that bad, if Obi-Wan never found out.
“I—we’re talking about this later,” Obi-Wan says. He looks very frustrated, but Anakin can sense that he feels hurt. Most likely, he’s upset that Anakin didn’t trust him, which… Anakin had been, what, eleven? Maybe? He definitely hadn’t trusted that the Temple wouldn’t toss him out for getting arrested when they hadn’t wanted him in the first place. Anakin looks away again, and Obi-Wan runs a hand down his face. “Okay. Fine. Anakin got arrested, but that’s not why a ghost assigned him a parole officer. Is that… did I get that right? Is that what you’re going with?”
“That about suits the situation,” Fulcrum confirms. “If it’s any help, the ghost in question was actually the psychic visual manifestation of a Jedi Master who passed into the Force some time ago, but retained a coherent sense of self due to his prior study of other faiths that run parallel, but not counter to, our own.”
It’s very impressive phrasing.
“Of course,” Obi-Wan says. Anakin tamps down the unpleasant surge of spiteful amusement at his master’s brother’s father’s teacher’s frustration. It’s a Dark energy, an emotion that comes from habit and corruption, and not… it’s not kind. It’s not Light.
(It’s not something Luke would do.)
(That child Qui-Gon had shown him in the future-that-isn’t, that souls-bright young man who could have succeeded where Anakin hadn’t.)
“Maybe we should take this indoors,” Obi-Wan says, after it becomes clear that Fulcrum isn’t going to explain more. “And you can tell me what it is, exactly, that makes my thirteen-year-old Padawan need a parole officer.”
“That’s classified,” Fulcrum says immediately. “But he knows what he did.”
Anakin flinches when Obi-Wan’s gaze lands on him, but grimaces and nods. “I do know what I did.”
“And you’re not going to tell me.”
He shrugs. “I don’t think I should.”
Fulcrum tosses a smile over her shoulder as she stalks away towards the doors to the Temple, and Anakin belatedly realizes that her uniform is not… it’s not going to go over well with anyone. He hadn’t immediately parsed anything wrong with it, but that’s because Anakin remembers her as a war padawan. He knows she became a Rebel, one of the core members trying to take down a Sith empire. He sees her choices and thinks that they’re only sensible, so much so that he’d barely bothered to take note of what she wore, when she dropped out of the sky and introduced herself.
But dark, cool colors and battered beskar armor do not say ‘Jedi’ to the people of this time. The scratches and other signs of heavy use will do her no favors. She is a warrior, and she walks like it. For all that the Jedi aren’t unfamiliar with wars, none have quite her bearing. The Jedi of this time have inserted themselves into civil conflicts, like Obi-Wan’s mission to protect the Duchess. Anakin knows that there have been plenty of other incidents of that ilk across the galaxy. It’s not rare for a Jedi to have experience with these things.
It’s also not the same as a woman who’s lived and breathed war and subterfuge the way Fulcrum clearly does. She’s a Jedi, but one honed and sharpened to something beyond the rest of them. Such a paradigm is even further from what people will eventually see in Anakin, in He Who Once Was Vader, when they truly look at him.
Hopefully, people will assume she’s a Shadow.
Anakin is not a hopeful person.
--
Fulcrum keeps her head high and her gaze even, and does not let the suspicious glances bother her. She knows the kind of figure she strikes. She knows what they see in the unbending military posture she picked up from General Kenobi, in her beskar and twin sabers, in every too-deliberate stride.
(She had perfected it all as one of the Rebellion’s fieldwork leaders. Her brashness had given way to ‘solid bearing born of battle,’ or however it was that Wolffe had phrased it. She’d been in charge, and he’d only been trying to make her smile while she clawed at any attempt for control in an uncontrollable reality.)
(She’d been so damned young, but they’d lost almost everyone else with real field experience, and Kanan had followed her lead, and…)
(Well. Nothing for it now.)
(She was Fulcrum.)
(Perhaps Little Ahsoka would fare better.)
“You’re walking too fast.”
She glances down and back, notes that Anakin is frowning at her, and then brings her head back up in clear dismissal. “Hm.”
There’s plenty she could say. ‘Get longer legs’ would have been funny, except she’s actually aware of how much trauma her former Master has wrapped up in the prostheses he’d gained as Vader. ‘I remember the reverse’ would be almost sweet, a teasing nod to when she’d had to jog to catch up to a much taller Skyguy, but Obi-Wan has enough questions and half-answers already. She won’t slow down for him, and she can’t be too rude.
“You need the exercise,” she decides. “Little padawans need all the cardio they can get.”
He hisses something under his breath, and a curl of irritation-verging-on-anger spikes through their bond. Nobody else feels the Dark in it, not with how good Vader’s shielding is, but Fulcrum stops and turns on her heel anyway. Obi-Wan is glaring at her, but that’s fine.
She won’t drop to one knee to get closer to his level, not when he’s just barely tall enough to make it a problem in the other direction, but she does put her hands on his shoulders. “Look at me.”
He purses his lips and meets her eyes. His irises are still blue, not even a hint of yellow. Good. “I’m trying.”
It’s not about the look.
“I know,” she says. She squeezes his shoulders, and reminds herself that he may look like a child, but he’s in his thirties. He needs support, but not a teacher. Not in her, at any rate. “I’m just here to remind you.”
The hall is mostly empty, and she’s grateful for as much. Anakin prunes the curl of dark energy and emotion until it’s thinned enough to be normal annoyance at a bad joke, not a slippery slope to… what, relapse?
The Force twinges in the back of her mind. Yes, relapse would be the word.
Maybe she needs to take some mind-healer courses.
She’ll need to convince the Council she’s not dark first, but she can do that. Probably.
Obi-Wan still frowns at her, but it’s less now. He doesn’t know what’s going on. She wishes she could tell him, but she barely believes it herself, and she’s the one living it.
“Snips, I’m fine.” Anakin shrugs her hands off. He does his best to clear his face of expression, but it doesn’t do much. “We should… continue with this attempt at reacquainting you to the Council.”
She snorts, and cuffs him across the head before she can stop herself. “Stop talking like an encyclopedia.”
“I’m not.”
“You sound like you ate a thesaurus,” she refutes. “Chill.”
He frowns at her, but the Dark doesn’t return. She starts back towards the Council chambers. There’s work to be done.
--
Obi-Wan doesn’t trust this woman.
He doesn’t think anyone would blame him, but there’s an underlying why to his feelings right now. The darkness clings to this woman like a shell; she’s kept it out of her soul remarkably well, but she’s been surrounded by it for so long that Obi-Wan wonders how. She wouldn’t be the first Jedi to go undercover, not even the first to risk going Dark for the Order, but… he doesn’t know. Something is off. She’s too familiar with Anakin, and part of him strains for a bond that isn’t there. A ghost of a connection.
Obi-Wan should know her. He doesn’t know why.
He doesn’t want to leave her alone with his padawan. Anakin’s been acting strange, but the fact that he knows Fulcrum, that he agrees when she tells him that he needs watching, that the Force, somehow, inexplicably assigned him a parole officer…
He doesn’t know what to do. He doesn’t like this situation, doesn’t like Fulcrum, doesn’t trust her.
He has a feeling she’s not in Temple records. He doesn’t know where that feeling comes from, isn’t even sure the Force is involved, but the thought concerns him. Sure, some Shadows are in that deep, but the ones that have their identities cleared from the Temple database are all a little…
Off.
Just like everything else about this situation.
They’re nearing the doors when Anakin drifts back and wraps his fingers around Obi-Wan’s sleeve. It’s not a childish maneuver, but he’s clearly seeking comfort for something. Obi-Wan twists his had about enough to grasp Anakin’s forearm for a moment, tries to push some support through the bond, but their connection is tangled. He doesn’t know how else to describe it. He can’t quite catch how Anakin’s feeling, and every emotion he gets, every regret and relief and affection and resentment, just concerns him more. Anakin’s blocking him out for the most part, but…
But there was something Dark, before. Just a moment, and hidden under layers of other emotions, but Obi-Wan knows what he felt. It’s the first time, but it’s not… it doesn’t feel new.
He doesn’t know what to do with that.
The Council isn’t expecting them, but Fulcrum has some choice phrases on hand to get them in anyway.
She starts by saying, “I know what happened to Master Ky Narec.”
There are other things she says and does and is to get them to let her in, like the fact that she really isn’t in the system, that she has white sabers, that Obi-Wan himself admits that he doesn’t know who she is beyond ‘someone that knows my padawan.’
Fulcrum just waits, arms crossed in front of her instead of tucked behind her back, and then smiles when they let her in. She pulls Anakin by the sleeve, and once Anakin is inside, nobody can justify keeping Obi-Wan out. He doesn’t have to argue it. It’s a small comfort.
“Greetings,” Fulcrum says, and bows, and then it’s back to hands-tucked-behind and a level stare. It leaves Obi-Wan uncomfortable, and the rest of the room doesn’t react much better.
(Anakin stands like a padawan should, but something about it rankles.)
“Know you, we do not,” Yoda says, after a few moments. “Know you, the Temple does not.”
“I haven’t been here since I was seventeen,” Fulcrum says, and the Force whispers that it is the truth. “As far as the rest of the universe is concerned, I am… unaffiliated.”
It’s another point in favor of her being a Shadow, Obi-Wan thinks.
“And yet even the Master of Shadows does not recognize you,” Master Windu accuses. Blast.
“You already had time to check?” Fulcrum asks, voice light.
“Word travels fast.”
“So it does.” She tilts her head, eyes half-lidded as she assesses the gathered sentients. “I’ve been a spy for twelve years, Masters. I’ve also been out of contact for that time. I am aware of the suspicious nature of my circumstances.”
Obi-Wan wants to pull Anakin away from her.
“You want to share your information and be reinstated?” Master Poof asks. “Even when none of us know who you are?”
Fulcrum blinks. “The Force guided me to return to the Temple to take up a position as a guardian for Anakin Skywalker under a very specific set of circumstances.”
A flare of twisting the truth from Anakin.
“He already has a master,” Master Gallia points out. She calm, at least. Polite. Willing to give a chance, Obi-Wan thinks. “A skilled duelist and a devoted teacher. Why would the Force send him another?”
“I know things that he doesn’t,” she says, voice flat. “I know what hunts Skywalker. I was asked if I would take this mission, and I agreed.”
“You said the Force sent you,” Master Windu points out.
“By taking the form of one Qui-Gon Jinn,” she states, and Obi-Wan feels the bottom of his stomach drop out. There’s attention on him for a spare moment, eyes from all sides, before Fulcrum continues. He isn’t sure what the Masters see in his face. “Whether you choose to believe that this was the Force manifesting in a way that I would recognize and be able to converse with, or that Master Jinn still holds some semblance of a consciousness in the Force after death… it is the fact of the matter that the Force wore his face to enact its will.”
None of the Masters are happy with that. A few are curious, in a neutral way, but nobody is happy.
Obi-Wan definitely isn’t, and he’s just a Knight.
“Have you any proof?” Master Rancisis asks.
Fulcrum blinks, causing them to wait, and—
No, that’s just hesitation. She’s hesitating, but keeping herself so still as to hide that she’s the one unsure.
“I saw him too,” Anakin speaks up.
A padawan shouldn’t speak in a High Council meeting, not unless they’re spoken to first, but… nobody tells Anakin to stay silent. Obi-Wan looks down at Anakin, tries not to show on his face how much that simple sentence breaks him. Anakin just stares at Master Yoda, face completely wiped of emotion, and his very self under such a tight lockdown that even Obi-Wan can’t feel what he’s thinking. It’s not… it’s not how Anakin acts. Not until this week.
“Just so,” Fulcrum confirms, with the slightest of nods to the teenager in their midst.
“Why you?” Master Koth asks, leaning forward and pressing his fingers together. “If this was the doing of the late Master Jinn, then why you and not Knight Kenobi?”
Obi-Wan wants to say ‘thank you,’ except he’s a little busy trying to figure out why Anakin didn’t just tell him.
Was this more teenage rebellion?
“Like I said,” Fulcrum repeats, “I know things that Kenobi doesn’t.”
“Such as?” Master Koth prompts.
“Such as what it looks like when a Sith Lord is trying to groom a child under the noses of an entire Order,” Fulcrum says, voice entirely devoid of inflection.
Silence.
“We would have—”
“No,” Fulcrum snaps, cutting off Master Mundi. “You would not.”
Anakin sucks in a breath, loud and impossible to ignore in the complicated emotions that start to rise in the room, and takes a step closer to Obi-Wan. There’s nothing he can do except put an arm around his Padawan, his little brother, his ward, a helpless attempt to stop what this woman just spoke into being.
She sounds so very, very sure of herself.
“You’ve seen that happen before,” Master Gallia says. It’s not a question.
Fulcrum ducks her head, a short, tight nod. Her lips are pressed tight, unhappy and unafraid of showing it. “I know how they work. I’ve seen… well, I haven’t exactly been in the room to watch the process, but I’ve seen the effects, the waves it creates. The line of Bane has been exceedingly subtle for a thousand years. Doing this without the Jedi’s notice is their specialty.”
“Let’s say we believe you,” Koth says, before anyone else can jump in. “About Master Jinn, about Skywalker being targeted, about your experiences here. We can string those together and see the connections fairly easily. What confuses me is that you mentioned Ky Narec at the door. That seems unrelated to the rest.”
“Master Ky Narec was shot down over a planet under pirate and warlord control several years ago,” Fulcrum reports. “He has, in the time since, found himself a padawan in a Dathomiri slave that was owned by one of said warlords. I have reason to believe that she is among the other targets being explored as a potential future apprentice to the Sith Master.”
Oh, Obi-Wan hates everything about all this.
Anakin squeezes his hand.
To comfort him.
His padawan is the one offering comfort, despite the fact that an unknown Shadow just…
Just told them all that a Sith Lord was grooming him.
Grooming Anakin.
“You have not brought up any physical proof,” Master Tiin points out. “Given that none of us know you, we have no way of knowing that you speak the truth.”
Fulcrum nods again, just a dip to acknowledge the comment. “I am willing to share information, but much of what I know is highly sensitive. I would prefer to share with one individual on the Council, and then they can disperse the knowledge as they see fit.”
There’s a pause as everyone tries to figure out if this is a request they can agree to, and who to even send, and—
Plo Koon leans forward in his seat, hands laced between his knees. “I know you, don’t I?”
Fulcrum’s breath hitches, the first true break in decorum that Obi-Wan’s seen in her. He sees the hesitation, and there’s a faint curl of hope-grief-longing in the Force around her. “I… yes. I didn’t know that you’d… remember.”
Master Koon tilts his head and appraises her, silent. “Perhaps ‘remember’ is not the right word.”
Fulcrum closes her eyes, and nods. “It’s complicated.”
Obi-Wan is not fast enough to stop Anakin from stepping forward and gripping Fulcrum’s hand in a show of support, one that Obi-Wan’s pretty sure she doesn’t need from a teenager and oh Force, Anakin, please stop.
“I see,” Master Koon muses, and then sits back, satisfied with whatever it is that he saw in the Force. “You have my trust.”
Fulcrum’s eyes snap open, a roil of emotion following that she yanks under control in a fraction of a second, and Obi-Wan has to wonder.
“Oh,” Fulcrum says. “Thank you.”
--
Anakin isn’t entirely sure how Plo Koon recognizes Fulcrum, even if it’s not quite as being Ahsoka Tano, but he’s grateful for it. Maybe there’s a Searcher bond in the way of Master bonds. Whatever the reason is, Fulcrum’s practically crying on the inside, in a good way. Anakin’s got enough of a grasp on the Light and enough regret and affection in his heart to be happy for her.
Fulcrum lets him keep holding her hand, but Anakin’s mind wanders to just how she’s choosing to handle this. Part of him itches to take control, but he can’t. He can’t let himself do that, because he’ll steamroll, and the whole reason she’s here is to keep him from doing that. He wants to question her, though, wants to know why she’s making the decisions she is. He wants to know why she’s specifying that he’s targeted by a Sith Lord, instead of just telling them the truth. He wants to know why she’s protecting him as much as protecting people from him. He wants to know why she’s twisting truths like which Sith took on Asajj. He wants to ask a million questions, but part of him snaps back that it can wait, that Ahsoka’s got this.
Not Ahsoka. Fulcrum.
Fulcrum.
The spymaster that evaded the Empire for a decade and a half.
He has to trust her.
(He has to get her name right.)
He can feel Obi-Wan’s worry from behind him, the consternation and frustration and sheer sensation that’s coming from his… brother? Yes, brother.
Anakin ducks his head and bites his lip, and tells himself that Fulcrum deserves to have Plo Koon on her side, because she needs support. Anakin’s going to have her and Obi-Wan, at least. Maybe just her, if they tell Obi-Wan the truth, and Obi-Wan decides a former Sith is… not something he wants in his life. But still, Fulcrum’s made it clear that she’s here for him in all senses of the word, and she deserves to have someone to lean on.
Anakin can’t be that for her, not the way she deserves, but he can do his best. Master Koon… Master Koon can do the rest.
(It’s no surprise when the Council finally compromises and agrees to Fulcrum having the discussion with both Mace and Yoda.)
(Anakin gets invited halfway through, and it’s… well, he’s sat through worse meetings.)
(Mostly with Sidious.)
(It’s fine.)
(He’s fine.)