Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Twenty-five years ago:

The Jedi Temple is quiet, this late. It's always quiet, of course, filled with the calm of centuries of Jedi meditating and pacing and reaching for the light. It's always quiet, except for when it's not — hordes of rambunctious younglings, aged masters calmly debating theory at the tops of their lungs, the whirling balance of life growing within.

This is a different kind of quiet.

Dooku is sure that the normal quiet, the normal noise, still exists elsewhere in the Temple. But around him—

"Did you hear?" they whisper. "Did you hear about his padawan?"

"Sworn never to take another—"

"Such a dreadful shame, what happened to the girl—"

"Not his fault, surely, but did you hear—"

The whole cursed Temple has heard, surely, for this silence follows him around like Komari's ghost must.

Qui-Gon corners him, finally, a month and a half after the… incident. His new padawan, that Kenobi boy, trails along behind him, the braid in his hair barely long enough for its crimson bead.

Dooku feels another pang of — not grief, he is a Jedi and must not grieve; but still he is reminded of Komari's braid, almost long enough to be cut, with four beads to tell the story of her learning years.

Qui-Gon catches Dooku's eye, catches his arm, and doesn't let him flee. Instead, he drags him back to his quarters, sits him down and places a badly-brewed pot of tea on the table. Padawan Kenobi grimaces, slightly, and passes Dooku the cream and the sugar.

"What happened?" Qui-Gon demands. "Not the nonsense that's circulating in the rumor mill."

"I failed," Dooku says. It's as simple as that; what more needs to be said?

A lot more, according to Qui-Gon, who crosses his arms and waits.

"We argued," he says finally, because it's clear Qui-Gon will make him drink the tea if he says nothing. "About the trials. She said she was ready, and she is — was—" he takes a deep breath. "She was almost ready. She was, truly. But there was something in her way, something that had kept her from fully succeeding in our past few missions, and I was unwilling to advance her until we'd worked through whatever it was."

Qui-Gon is nothing if not patient; he sits still, not judging his master's failures to his sister-padawan, though Dooku would not blame him for doing so.

"She ran away, joining a mission that was departing to Baltizaar, to deal with a pervasive band of criminals. Komari thought that she could help, since we've encountered that particular group before; they work with drugs and poisons often, and she has always been good at chemistry." He's doing it again. "Komari had always been good with chemistry."

"The mission to Baltizaar didn't return," Qui-Gon says softly.

"No," Dooku says, not looking up from his empty cup. When had he drunk the tea? Surely he would have noticed doing so — he can't be that distracted. He is a Jedi, after all, and Jedi do not grieve.

The Council had met, and solemnly proclaimed Dooku faultless in Komari's death; arguments were bound to arise in an apprenticeship, and if Dooku had been too harsh or Komari had overreacted, well, the fault could still only lie with the Bando Gora.

Dooku had not met Yoda's eyes, had not wanted to see — judgement, or sorrow, or sympathy, or worse. Worse would be understanding, would be the knowledge that Dooku had not been a bad teacher or a harsh mentor. Worse would be understanding, because if it had not been the master's fault it had been the padawan's, and Dooku refuses to place the blame on Komari.

"She only wanted my approval," he whispers, and lets Qui-Gon refill his cup with overbrewed tea.

Thirteen years ago:

Dooku has taught many saber-lessons in his time, to younglings and padawans and masters looking to learn new forms. He has learned that a whole class of learners is awful, leaving him with too many students to keep an eye on; one-on-one, he prefers, but many masters, even, find him… too intense for individual study.

Not this one, though.

Shmi Skywalker is as patient as Qui-Gon at his best and as wise as Yoda at his worst, with a sense of humor as dry as Dooku's own and a type of solid optimism that is all her own. With as ancient as Yoda is, with as many students as he's had, Dooku has had many padawan-siblings throughout the decades, but Shmi is far and away his favorite. (Not that Jedi have favorites.)

Some days it seems as if all the Temple is as impressed with her as he is; Adi Gallia teaches her in the archives, Plo Koon works with her on the intricacies of Republic law, Kit Fisto teaches her to swim.

Other days… well, to say the least, Yarael Poof will not be talking to Dooku until he apologizes, which is honestly a relief as Dooku has never enjoyed debating with Master Poof and has no intention of apologizing.

In those long months as Qui-Gon lays unconscious in the infirmary, as little Anakin adjusts to Temple life, as Obi-Wan adjusts to the idea that he's on his way to becoming a master, Dooku searches desperately for something to do — something else to do, as he learns how harsh Shmi's life had been. Sometimes it feels like there's barely anything the Jedi can do, restrained as they are by the Senate.

Restrained by the Senate, and then — Shmi and Master Yoda are investigating a small number of Senators, and this is something he can help with.

Senator Teem is, of course, a dead end; he's clever, for a corrupt politician, and keeps his bribery and coercion small-time, focused on his home planet of Malastare. He has some connections to the Banking Clans, it's true, and the Banking Clans are tenuously allied with the Trade Federation, but what Senator in the galaxy isn't connected to the Trade Federation somehow?

The answer to that, of course, is the ones who want to seem like they're not connected to the Trade Federation, and so that's where Dooku starts.

Senator Antilles is as unlikely to have any ill-will towards Naboo as Chancellor Palpatine himself is, but that means he could be the perfect decoy or the perfect target for anyone who does. Dooku comes up with an excuse to meet with the Senator in the hallway of the Senate, and they exchange small-talk; Dooku inquires about the possibility of visiting an ancient Alderaanian archaeological site with restricted access, and they set up an appointment to discuss it.

The meeting itself goes mostly as Dooku predicts; Senator Antilles has enemies, certainly, and those enemies have connections to the Trade Federation. Does he have any enemies allied with the Banking Clan? Of course. And the Techno Union? Probably, given that recent mess with the Bimm. And—

"My condolences, by the way," Dooku says. "About the election; it was an opportune moment, and yet—"

"Oh, not at all," Senator Antilles says, waving his hand. "These things happen, and there will be more elections in the future."

Dooku senses some disquiet in him. An opportunity to press, and see what is revealed. "Yes, indeed; and it was quite a close election, too, so better the odds for the next term."

Senator Antilles's discomfort peaks sharply at the mention of how close the election was. "Indeed," the Senator says. "Now, about that archaeological site—"

Dooku lets the conversation diverge; he has what he needs, or at least another piece of it.

Something about the election numbers are off.

It's easy enough to see, now that he knows what he's looking for; the new Chancellor has won by a relatively small margin, and just a few more votes towards Antilles would have pushed it into the possibility of a re-vote.

The Senator for Chandrila, it seems, had voted for Palpatine; not unusual, considering Chandrila and Naboo's close ties, but Chandrila had close ties to Alderaan as well, and the Chandrilan Senator had a grudge against Palpatine from a series of proposals several years ago that hadn't gone in her favor. The Lothal Senator had voted for Senator Teem, when Lothal had close ties to Alderaan and barely any to Malastare at all; but then they were also wholly unwilling to support Naboo after a series of religious disagreements a few decades ago.

The more Dooku looks, the more irregularities appear. Senators who would have preferred Naboo but for personal arguments voted for Naboo anyways, and Senators who would have voted for Alderaan over Naboo due to cultural reasons ended up supporting Malastare.

Suspicious, and yet — would Palpatine really have connections to the Trade Federation, after what it had put his planet through? True, he had come out on top.

True, it had been the Naboo Crisis that had pushed Valorum to resign.

It doesn't help that Dooku can't find anything suspicous about Palpatine. Oh, he's not some perfect, uncorrupt being; he's still a politician. But Dooku uncovers an amount of corruption reasonable for a Naboo senator. A touch of bribery here and there, some skimming from some of his aids, a slight air of speciesism masked by the cultural appreciation for aesthetic.

And yet something feels off.

Dooku delves deeper.

He can't tell Shmi yet, not when he has nothing concrete; she's busy with her Jedi training, as Yoda is busy training her. Qui-Gon is busy recovering, and even if Obi-Wan weren't too young for this kind of work, he's busy beginning to teach Anakin.

So Dooku searches and searches, and when he finds what he's looking for—

Ten years ago:

"Komari," he whispers, and falls to his knees.

She smiles, her eyes a sickly yellow, and places her hand on his shoulder. "My old master." Her voice is smooth, confident, not the hesitant and hopeful padawan she had been but the powerful adult she has become. "I am still a student, you know. But not your student."

He knows. He's learned that much.

"Sidious will betray you," Dooku says. Komari is a Sith, now, is everything that the Temple calls evil; but she is Komari, she is his student, and he will not fail her again.

Komari grins, bright and sharp. "You even managed to learn his name! You're way better at this than I was, when I was just starting. Together, we could be… so much better. We could overthrow him—"

Dooku shakes his head, but he doesn't pull away. "What, and destroy the Jedi? Don't be a fool—"

Her hand tightens on his shoulder, her grip crushing. He still doesn't pull away. "You know how flawed the Jedi are, my old master. There's so much in the galaxy left unfixed, so much pain and suffering that exist because of the Jedi."

"I am still a Jedi," he says, and meets her eyes and does not flinch. "We are getting better. We are learning. So much good is still done, because of us."

Slowly, slowly, her grip relaxes, though she still doesn't let go. "And so much evil is done because of him," she whispers. "Sidious. Palpatine. We can't overthrow him directly, and all we can do is change his plan — help me. My master, I can't do this alone—"

How can he refuse?

Five years ago:

"Again," he says.

Asajj is not his favorite student — that honor belongs to his padawan-sister. But… perhaps she is his second-favorite. Her drive is admirable, though she is too driven for the Jedi and too unfocused for the Sith; certainly she's better than Grievous, who growls and snaps and argues at every turn. Asajj, at least, knows how to listen to someone wiser than herself.

It's a pity that she probably won't survive the coming war. She exists as an assassin for Komari, as a clear enemy for the Jedi, and as a false competitor for Dooku.

Sidious knows of Dooku's connection to Komari, of course. He was the one who put Dooku on Komari's trail, who baited him into this slowly-descending fall that he's been fighting off for years. But he doesn't know how much Dooku knows; he thinks that Dooku is another acolyte for Komari, another game piece set to take up the apprentice position should Sidious fall to Komari, or Komari fall to Sidious.

That's not quite true. It's probably truer than Dooku would like to admit to himself; but he and Komari are not master and padawan, not apprentice and acolyte. Dooku doesn't know precisely what they are, but he does know that they are in this together. Flame and shadow, perhaps, though if he starts coming up with metaphors he will never stop.

"Hold that stance," Dooku orders Asajj, and inspects her balance; she is well-grounded, true, but a Force-shove at the right place, and—

Asajj falls, but rolls over one shoulder and comes right up, settling back into the stance.

Dooku can feel himself smile. A truly gifted student; he would almost like to see what Shmi would make of her, but… no. Asajj probably wouldn't take it well, and it would ruin nearly all of their plans.

The thought is a reminder, though. He will need some way to keep Shmi safe, during the war. Her, and Qui-Gon, and Obi-Wan, and little Anakin. Though Anakin's not that little any more, he always will be in Dooku's mind, just like Obi-Wan will always be the small padawan with a tuft of a braid, surreptitiously offering him cream and sugar to sweeten the tea that Qui-Gon had overbrewed.

Yoda… Dooku feels a pang, but also knows that Yoda will have to fend for himself. His old master would spot any hint of hesitation in a heartbeat.

He feels himself smile again, a small quirk of his lips. Maybe he'll send Asajj after Yoda, and see how she fares; Yoda won't kill a child, and Asajj is still at least partially a furious, prickly child. Yoda will treat her like an unruly padawan and she'll hate it, just like Dooku hated it.

"Now, the third kata," he says, and Asajj spins into action, her lightsaber blades burning.

Two years ago:

"Qui-Gon is coming your way," Dooku says.

Komari is dressed as a horror, the skull-mask and dark clothes washed out by the flickering blue of the hologram. "Qui-Gon is what? I thought we were keeping him out of this."

"And this is the best way. Senator Amidala apparently managed to send off some sort of distress signal, and one of her handmaidens came to ask him for help. He has the coordinates of the spot she sent it from, and he is on his way to Tatooine to go find her." It's not the best way, is what he means to say, but it's the only way, now. "I'll forward you some extra money; get Gardulla to carbon-freeze him."

Komari crosses her arms. "If you say so. But there's no way we can keep him secure on Geonosis. I'll send him to Serenno, once he's frozen."

Dooku grimaces. "Are you sure we can't find somewhere else—"

"Yes." Komari is probably rolling her eyes, though he can't tell, with the mask. "At least this way you'll be able to visit him semi-regularly."

"I don't want Ventress getting curious," he mutters.

Komari's eyes glow, even through the hologram, even through the mask. "Then discourage her. She's a Sith acolyte; you should know how to deal with those by now. It was your idea to use Serenno in the first place."

"Because it is Separatist-aligned, yet I have an excuse to visit there," Dooku snaps. "It's an ideal meeting spot, but I don't need to meet with Qui-Gon. I would prefer storing him somewhere safer, somewhere more secure."

"Oh, come on, you'll be happier if you can check how he's doing," Komari says, suddenly light and teasing, not the dark being she'd been moments ago. "And don't give me the whole Jedi don't need happiness nonsense." And again, that darkness— "Don't, my Shadow."

"Fine," he mutters. "Ship him to Serenno. And be careful. If he is injured…"

Komari laughs. "Don't worry. He's still my brother, in a way; and I'm sure he'll see reason once we have the time and space to actually discuss this with him, when the war is over."

Dooku isn't so sure. Qui-Gon can be very stubborn. But then, so can Komari; they'll just have to wait and see.

"Oh," he says, remembering the other reason he'd called. "Keep putting pressure on Krell; he's responding, but slower than I'd like. At this rate, he won't snap until a couple of years into the war."

Sidious's plan to disrupt the Jedi by causing them to fall one by one is a good one, if the goal is to destroy the Jedi from the inside out. Since Dooku doesn't want to destroy the Jedi, though, he's… tweaked the plan, slightly. The Jedi who fall will be the bigoted ones, the cruelly uncaring ones, the ones who have been rude to Shmi and Anakin; that way, when they're killed, their loss will leave the Jedi Order a better place to start rebuilding from after the war.

Soon, the Jedi Order will become what it was truly meant to be — a force of good in the galaxy. Once the war is over, once everything is revealed. Dooku knows that Shmi probably won't forgive him for all of this; that's all right. He's done thousands of unforgiveable things in his life, to Shmi, to Komari, to Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan and Anakin. To Yoda.

But they all, each and every one of them, argue that the galaxy needs to be a better place; so Dooku will do what he can to make it a better place.

For them.

Now:

Dooku dislikes dealing with mandalorians. On one hand, the fact that they follow their beliefs so wholeheartedly is admirable; on the other hand, they won't stop fighting until they're dead, and it's troublesome killing people who on a base level don't really disagree with him, idealogically.

This last mandalorian, the one currently evading the battle-droids, thus will not be a problem unless she somehow makes it out of the fortress. If she remains within, she'll be caught eventually; if she tries to escape, she'll run into one of the external security features. If she tries to fight… well, she saw what happened to her friends.

That means she'll probably try to fight.

He can't find her, though, as he wanders through the halls. Komari has filled them with all sorts of trinkets — some from her Jedi days, some from after. Some of them are more disquieting than others, but Dooku has had enough practice to ignore them.

A small alert pings his comm. Sarad will be waking up soon. The sedative he'd given her wasn't a long-lasting one; he needs to find out what she knows before Komari arrives, just in case Komari… loses control. Just in case.

The last mandalorian will have to remain unfound, for now. Dooku turns and walks towards the inner part of the fortress, where he and Komari keep things they don't want Ventress or Grievous getting their hands on.

He pauses, for a moment, just outside the door to the inner sanctum. He senses a presence here, but that's just to be expected; this is where the carbonite containing Qui-Gon is.

It galls him, to see the expression on Qui-Gon's face, to see him kept as one of Komari's trophies. But when everything is considered, this is the safest place for him; so here he'll stay until the war is over.

Soon, my padawan, he tells Qui-Gon.

All he receives is the impression of a rude gesture used mostly in the lower-class areas of Corellia.

Dooku sighs, and moves on, gesturing the door open with the Force, then closing it shut behind him.

Sarad is being kept in one of the medical rooms — Komari calls them torture rooms, but really, Dooku has used them for healing himself after sparring often enough, there's no need to discriminate by use. Besides, he has no intention of torturing Sarad; there's no need to cause her any pain. He has less awful ways of getting the information he needs.

And he does need information, desperately. Sarad's actions in this war have been confusing, erratic, and if Dooku and Komari are going to regain control of it, they need answers — why Sarad is doing what she's doing, where her information is coming from, how she got Vos to join her team. Blackmail? Surely no mandalorian would willingly work with a Jedi, and Vos had no reason to work with Sarad. Unless… unless something else is going on here, unless Sarad's information originates from the Jedi themselves. Not impossible. Dooku is no fool, and he knows quite well that Sarad considers Tatooine to be one of her homes, that she also answers to the name of Beru Whitesun.

But if that's true, it means that either Shmi or Anakin knows far more than they should, and have been looking into exactly the kind of discrepancies that Dooku has been running around the galaxy trying to cover up. If that is the case… he doesn't change his expression, letting the turmoil pass through his Jedi calm. He does, however, quicken his pace. If that is indeed the case, he needs to handle this himself, before Komari finds out.

She's still asleep when he enters the room that she's in, restrained in a reclined chair with a medical droid hovering over her.

He brushes over her mind, trying to see what he can get from the impressions of her dreams. Most unexpectedly, he can sense… nothing. He sees her frown, sees her head shake a little, as if she's starting to toss and turn. That can mean only one thing: somebody has taught her how to shield her mind. Recently, from the simplicity of it, but thoroughly; if he presses harder, he might damage the shield and damage her mind.

Instead he withdraws his touch, letting her fall into a more restful sleep. "Transfer her to a containment chamber and wake her up," he tells the medical droid.

Dooku will have to act fast. Komari will return soon, and there's no telling what she'll do when she finds out about this most recent mess.

Chapter Text

"She's not going to be happy with you," Beru says, and… tries not to think through the consequences. If she thinks through the consequences, she'll get caught up on all the little details that spell nothing but disaster, and that's not productive right now; she'll focus on what she can do, which is guilt all seven hells out of Dooku.

Dooku refuses to be guilted. "Shmi has every right to be completely furious with me," he agrees. "And I expect she will be, eventually, in her calm way. However, she will also be alive, and I judge that to be rather more important."

"And so you've betrayed everything you once stood for," Beru says, and wishes she could cross her arms — but floating in a suspension field makes that rather difficult, even without the constant rotation giving her a bit of a headache. "The rest of the Jedi, the Republic, everyone you cared about—"

"Don't be foolish," Dooku says calmly. "The Jedi will survive, though admittedly much changed — tempered in a trial by fire, if you want it in poetic Mandalorian terms. The Republic itself might fall, but it's been bloated far past the point of uselessness for long before you or I were born. And you're practically living proof of its ineffectiveness, aren't you? Daughter of three worlds, each of them outside of Republic rule, one way or another. And I think you know well enough that your third point is moot."

She… doesn't have much of a comeback for that. It's not that his points are necessarily wrong, after all; the Jedi have left their standalone lives, separate from those they were supposed to protect, and truly become a part of the galaxy. The Republic… well. She can't disagree. Beru can't disagree with any of it, except for how she knows in her heart, as a child of those three disparate cultures, that the ends do not justify the means.

Dooku is watching her, so she's careful what she lets show on her face. The conflict, as his points are well-made; the certainty that starts to erode, but only on the surface level. He will not convince her, but if she keeps him talking, maybe she'll be able to do something. Anything. She won't know unless she tries, after all.

"I don't… I don't believe you," she says. "There's no way you could plan it out — no way you could make sure everyone you cared for was safe."

There's a brief flash of triumph in his eyes; he thinks she's accepted his first two points. Oh, well, if only he hadn't built a slave army and caused billions of deaths.

Of course, he's a decent actor, too; he hides the triumph away, and fills his demeanor with patience and understanding. "You underestimate my ability to plan, Miss Whitesun."

She glares at him, allowing the genuine reaction. "Oh, really? You've started a war, here. A stray blaster bolt, a lucky droid, an orbital bombardment, a single gunship slipping through their defences—"

Dooku raises an eyebrow. "You must truly think I'm a fool. But consider what you've said — a lucky droid. I contest the concept of some force of luck in the world, but you make a valid point, assuming, oh, a moment of distraction or chaos, with the droid aiming accurately and at full power. Except, of course, these are droids that we're discussing, and all droids can be programmed."

Beru sees it, then, and can't stop the shock from showing on her face. "You messed with their targeting."

"If they shoot at Shmi, or Anakin, they won't miss — quite. That would make it more difficult for the bolts to be deflected," Dooku says. "But they'll aim for non-lethal shots, and their blasters will be at a lower power setting. Painful, but quite survivable, even on a battlefield. Much the same with space combat. I have my ways of knowing exactly which ships they are on at any given time, and nobody is surprised when a droid-piloted ship makes foolish decisions." He smiles, then, almost concilliatory, as if he's not saying I’ll save the people I care about, and the rest of the galaxy can die, for all I care.

"But," Beru says, and swallows. This conversation is about to spiral out of control, and that's a dangerous thing, with Dooku and his carefully-honed arguments. But she has so much bitterness floating up inside her — the way he's carefully not mentioned the clones, the rest of the Jedi, the Sith — she has to ask *something* to let that out. "But — what about Vos?"

Dooku's face goes blank, from his quietly proud smile to opaque. "Vos — and the rest of you — should not have been here in the first place. Vulsion will return soon, and I have been far more gentle than she would have—"

"You killed him," Beru says, letting her fury bubble up inside — letting what's been simmering this whole conversation rise to the surface. "All this talk about saving the Jedi, and you threw him against a wall and broke his neck—"

Dooku flinches, the tiniest bit, and Beru understands then that Vos's death had been a mistake. All that talk about planning ahead and controlled circumstances, and he hadn't been able to control the exact angle at which Vos hit the wall.

Of course, he'd gone right ahead to guiltlessly murder most of the non-Jedi portion of her team, so there's a limited amount of sympathy she has for him.

"I have been," Dooku says again, "Far more gentle than Vulsion would have." And now his expression is starting to fracture, starting to get… if he weren't a Jedi, Beru would say furious. And he's not a Jedi, is he?

Well, this has spiraled out of control, Beru thinks, and braces herself for… well, for whatever's coming.

She can see Dooku breathe, in and out, and he has a look that she's seen on Shmi, and Obi-Wan, and Anakin, when they center themselves and reach out to the Force. Dooku—

Stops.

Looks, for a brief moment, terrified.

And, without a word, turns and leaves the room, his robe snapping at his heels.

It takes Beru a couple minutes after Dooku's left to think through what had just happened.

He'd sensed something, that much was obvious. But her next moves depended on what exactly it was that he'd sensed. If it was Bo Katan, out there in the fortress killing droids or making trouble, Sarad needed to get free so she could go help her out — or, at least, so she could ensure that one of them escaped to warn the Jedi.

If Dooku had sensed Shmi or the other Jedi coming — if Beru's alert had gotten out — then Beru wanted to get out, to get clear of the inevitable confrontation that might leave Dooku hitting a self-destruct to hide the evidence or the Jedi bombing the fortress into nonexistence.

If he'd sensed Vulsion returning… Beru had to get out. She would not let herself be at Vulsion's mercy again.

Well, maybe her next moves don't depend so much on what Dooku had sensed. Maybe she just wants to justify escaping. Well, screw that. Escaping is a good plan and she'll do it.

Just as soon as she can figure out how.

Suspension fields like this are hard to come by — the power costs are high enough that there's usually a better way of restraining someone. She's really only heard of them being used when some rich person wanted to show off, or when for whatever reason somebody was trying to restrain a Jedi. Or a dark side user, she supposes; the Jedi Order probably has a few set up in their holding cells, though with the difficulty of restraining Sith or fallen Jedi without getting killed or killing them Beru doubts they've been used much. But still, she knows for a fact that they're one of the few restraining systems that can't be easily unlocked with the Force. Something about the way the electromagnetic fields interfered with the physical body, the mind, and physical space itself.

The good news is that Beru doesn't need to worry about any of that, since she's not a Force-user. The bad news is that there's not much else she knows about suspension fields.

(There's a very large part of her that wants to curl up in a little ball and cry. But she learned not to give up almost before she learned her own name, and that isn't something she's going to let go of, not now, not ever.)

Well, what can she feel? The bands around her wrists and ankles aren't there to support her body weight — they'd be cutting into her much more, and they don't do that unless she turns, or tries to pull on them. Those are easy enough to get rid of; Dooku hasn't taken her armor, except for her helmet (foolish for a man who's dealt with Mandalorians before), so she just tells her gauntlets to release. Her hands slide out of them, only a little cramped, and with her hands free she can just press the release on each cuff.

The cuffs stay floating where they were in the suspension field, and unfortunately, so does Beru. She can move her arms and legs around, now, but her torso is still stuck, as if she's in zero-g. Still kriffing rotating. And she doesn't have anything to push or pull on, to see if she can just move out of the field. The walls are far too far away, she can't reach the base or the top of the field generator, and these kriffing cuffs keep getting in her way as she spins and spins around—

Oh, huh. she's spinning at a different speed than the cuffs, probably from adding or detracting a bit of energy when she got herself out of them. And, of course, the cuffs are keeping a constant position in the field, and they kept her arms and legs still. That means…

She grabs onto one of them, lets her spin slow down to match theirs, and shoves.

For a brief moment, Beru is spinning wildly, up and down and around, and her feet impact the cuff where her hands had just been; she kicks out at it, and then she's half out of the field, at an awkward parallel angle to the ground. If she hadn't been Mandalorian-trained to withstand all sorts of zero-g nonsense, she'd feel like throwing up right now. But though she keeps rotating around in the edges of the field, she can feel it slowing, see herself dropping closer and closer to the ground, and it only takes a minute for her to fall the rest of the way out of the field.

All right.

Now what?

Beru can escape (maybe); she can fight her way out of this fortress and bring what she's learned to the Jedi. Or… she can go deeper down into the fortress, see what she can find in the data banks that are sure to be somewhere past the detention cells. The only question is if she will be able to escape with that data once she's gotten it.

… no, not quite. The only question is will she be able to get the data itself out.

Well. Nobody has ever accused her of doing the smart, self-preserving thing.

She collects her helmet and her weapons; Dooku had left them just sitting out in the open, ready and waiting for her to pick them back up. Although – she checks over her blasters – he had at least been smart enough to take out the ammo. Unfortunate, but not enough to stop her.

The locked door out of the cell isn’t enough to stop her, either.

She has a grudging respect for people who actually secure their compounds properly. Some might consider it overkill, after all, to lock the door to a prison cell if the prisoner is otherwise completely secured; most would consider it overkill to do that and also lock the door out of the area that contains the prison cells.

Clearly Dooku doesn’t consider anything to be overkill, judging by how every single interior door that Beru comes across is secured, sometimes in multiple ways.

Despite that, there aren’t many security cameras, and the ones that are there are easy enough to hack, even with what rudimentary tools Beru has to hand. Old tech, most of it looks like, which makes sense for Serenno – she’s heard other bounty hunters both complain and brag about how easy and/or difficult it is to secure and/or break into these old Serennese fortresses. It’s nearly impossible to get modern security systems up and running, which means there are more vulnerabilities to exploit in what security systems do exist; but in turn, the natural defenses of these fortresses lead to some unexpected challenges. Her team had learned that the hard way, spending much longer than they’d wanted wandering through the corridors, until eventually they’d missed a camera, or forgotten to disable a low-tech motion sensor, or… or something. That’s the other thing about these old fortresses – they’ll always surprise you.

So Beru plans to be surprised.

It takes her longer than she’d like to open up all the other nearby rooms, the ones that could be prison cells or torture chambers or who-knows-what, but she has to make sure that she’s not leaving anyone trapped here when she could’ve at least tried to rescue them. Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, she appears to have been the only one kept down here.

Dooku doesn’t come back, which is both good and bad; good because there’s no way she can win if she has to fight him, not right now. Bad because it means there’s something else he’s dealing with, something he considers more important than an escaped Mandalorian bounty hunter loose in his inner sanctum. She’ll make him regret that, if she can, but it doesn’t bode well.

If she wanted to be really paranoid, she could theorize that this whole thing is a set-up, that she was expected to escape, that whatever information she finds and sends back to the Jedi is going to be lies, bait meant to lure them into a trap. But that seems inconsistent with how flustered Dooku had been to find them there, how he’d panicked and killed Vos. Besides, if that were the case, the traps and locks she’s coming across would be easier to get through.

They’re not hard, not for someone who was once Jango Fett’s daughter, but they’re not easy. She has a near-infinite supply of lock-picks, both mechanical and electronic, hidden in various stashes throughout her armor, but it takes time, going through the different options until she finds something that works, and each and every door has a different style of lock. This place has clearly been designed by rich people. There’s a spiral staircase up out of the area containing the prisoner cells, and from there are three hallways, splitting off into different directions, and out of a lack of any better options she picks the leftmost one.

The next set of rooms nearby turn out to be storerooms, and not the interesting kind. One is full of medical supplies, but Beru’s not injured, and her medkit is fully stocked; one has a bunch of old cloths, drapes and linens and stuff; one looks like it was originally for furniture, but then had a bit of everything tossed in after whoever was organizing got bored of sorting. Nothing of use. She backtracks, and takes the center path.

When she opens the next door she finds, at the end of that hallway, there’s a slight click of pressure beneath her foot, and she just has enough time to think oh dank farrik before a droideka drops down onto her head.

If she weren’t wearing her helmet, she’d be a lot worse off – bruised at the very least, probably concussed. But Dooku is an idiot who left her helmet in the same room he left her in. The droid just knocks her down and leaves her very, very angry.

It can’t activate its shield, not with Beru inside its space; the energy arcs won’t connect properly. She grabs on to one of its support struts and twists her entire body. It’s still scrabbling to get a good purchase on the stone tiles. Her flip yanks it off-balance enough that she flips it over entirely, putting a dent in the top of its carapace. It shrieks in binary.

“Don’t want to get dead, shouldn’t have tried to kill me,” she snarls, heaves herself up, and pulls it towards her rapidly-accelerating foot to deliver a kick right to its central processing core.

With a squeal of twisting metal, it dies.

She can’t afford to wait the minute it would take for her to catch her breath; whatever trap she triggered could set off a cascade, if things are wired together correctly. Beru shoves herself up and starts jogging down the hallway, not caring any more about stealth. This would be easier if she had a blaster, if she could shoot down the security cameras as she comes across them, if she could keep things at least slightly obscured – if, if, if.

The set of rooms after that are storerooms. No furniture this time, though. Boxes, stacked one atop the other, except for a few placed haphazardly the door, without dust settled around them – with one of the tops ajar, as if it was put on hastily, and there’s something in Beru’s gut that knows exactly what she’ll find.

The first one is helmets. Mandalorian helmets, and ones she recognizes, some covered with new blaster burns, some with the visors shattered. Nad’aai’s dark red, a few shades darker than her skin had been; Jorad’s yellow-swirled-black; Kurshi’s vivid green stripes.

Even though it costs time she can’t afford to spend, she opens all the other ones, prying up the sealed lids, sorting through the pieces. Each set of armor has a ka’rta beskar, a piece of heart-iron, that she slips out of its attachments and slides into a pocket of her own armor. Individual pieces may come and go, may be worn down and replaced, but the ka’rta beskar is what makes the armor whole. Each encodes the lineage of those who came before, whose beskar was passed down through the generations to those who wear it today.

The least she can do is try and carry each ka’rta away from this place. Even if she’s unlikely to get out of here herself, she owes it to her team, the one that she had lead to this death, to try to bring them home.

It’s not surprising, that Dooku has kept the armor – it’s rare, a commodity, worth a fortune in the right places. Or maybe he had *really* meant to keep it, meant to display it up in the main fortress with all the other relics.

What is worse, Beru wonders. To have their possessions, their memories, their losses, displayed out as trophies, a hideous boast? Or to be stored in a box, almost forgotten, as if they’d been irrelevant?

Well, she knows the Mandalorian answer. To be forgotten is to die a greater death.

The answer from Tatooine is much the same, actually. That’s why they pass on their stories, why they whisper to each other in the dead of the night. It’s how they keep up hope. Memory and lineage – family and community.

And – huh.

Beru doesn’t consider herself Kamionan, of course not. Kamino is a place of horror and nightmares, a place she and her family were trapped for years after they discovered the truth. But she can’t deny that she grew up on Kamino, and with all the despair that place brought into her life, she knows. Better to have your losses shown to the world, better to boast, to be loud – make it so that you cannot be forgotten. Even the scientists had understood that, in their own twisted way, in the way they put their names on their work, the way they focused not just on their – she grimaces at the thought – products but also their makers.

Dooku called her a daughter of three worlds. And for the first time in a long, long time, all three are in agreement.

Dooku must pay for this.

"He's moving," Qui-Gon Jinn says, and stands.

Bo Katan follows him, standing at the ready with one hand casually resting by her blasters. So much is happening, so much has happened — but if she stops to let herself process it all, if she stops to think, she won't get moving again in time. "Can he tell you're free?"

"Not yet — he's distracted, and not paying me much attention," he says. "Once he notices, though, we won't be able to hide."

"I hid from him," Bo Katan points out, then she thinks it through. She'd hidden behind the carbonite that Jinn had been trapped in, but he'd explained that there had been some… Force-thing, letting his sleeping mind stay more awake, more conscious. The Shadow must have sensed that, leaving her undetected. "But that won't work again, will it. Did you… learn anything, while you were… in there?"

Jinn grimaces, and doesn’t make eye contact with her. "Not in any meaningful manner. The information is all there, but like a dream; I can try and recover it, sit down and meditate on it, but that would take hours, and we barely have minutes."

"Can you remember any of it?"

"I… maybe," he says. "Another Mandalorian, bright like the stars. A soldier, one with a familiar face, who’s learned how to not yield. A Jedi padawan, one of the balance points. A would-be Sith, burning with the desire to be more.” He blinks, then tilts his head to the side. "If I told you a story about… a poison thorn dressed as a sweet fruit, or a gundark dressed as a nerf, or a krayt dragon dressed as a bantha, what would the two different things represent?"

"Allies and enemies," Bo Katan says promptly. It's a common enough type of story, so if they're going to do this in weird Jedi dream metaphors… well, they might as well do it accurately.

"Not Jedi and Sith?" Jinn asks casually. "Not… new Mandalorians and old Mandalorians, or the other way around?"

Bo Katan shakes her head, trying not to be impatient. "The whole point of that story is that both things have dangerous aspects, isn't it? It's easy to… to choke on a fruit's pit, or get trampled by nerfs, or whatever. But one of the things is domesticated — not peaceful, but at least willing to cooperate with beings, while the other is actively dangerous to you. Why? Did you dream in metaphors?"

"No, but a friend did," Jinn says.

"Huh," Bo Katan says, and keeps trying to think of a way out. "Will you be able to tell where he is, and keep us moving?"

"I can tell where he is, but any battle-droids he sends are a different story." Jinn takes a deep breath, as if trying to resettle himself within his body again. "The way you got in — can we go out that same way?"

Bo Katan glances back down the hallway. "We can try — he can't have repaired the hole that Vos cut, not yet. He'll have it guarded if he's not a complete idiot, though. I wouldn't risk going there on my own, but with both of us…?" She leaves it a question, because she has no clue how Jinn is with unarmed combat, and she doesn't have quite enough blasters that she's comfortable giving one away except in an actual emergency.

"If I had my lightsaber…" he shakes his head. "There's something I can try, but no guarantee it will work, and I can't think of any other way out. Either way, we should start moving. He's getting closer."

"He's got two lightsabers," Bo Katan says, even as she turns and leads him back down the way she came. "The yellow one he used, and one I just caught a glimpse of, under his cloak."

Jinn turns his face away, watching the trophies in the hallway, though he follows her out of this one and into the next. "The yellow saber is a decoy, one he built for this purpose. His usual lightsaber is… distinctive enough to identify him immediately."

Bo Katan frowns. That almost sounds like… "You know who he is?"

He doesn't reply, though he does keep walking.

"Jinn—"

"Qui-Gon," he says. "If we're facing the Sith together it may as well be on a first-name basis."

"Qui-Gon," she says, and grimaces. He has a point, but still, ugh. "You know who he is."

Jinn — Qui-Gon — doesn't reply for another few twists and turns, as Bo Katan tries to remember which way she'd gone to get there.

"Listen," she says. "Your… emotional crisis, or whatever, is fine, but we need to get out of here alive, and I can't help us do that if I don't have all the relevant information. So spill."

He inhales like he's about to speak, then exhales again. Bo Katan waits, not all that patiently.

"Some more metaphors first, please," he says. A delaying tactic, but if it makes him talk clearly for once she'll take the delay.

"Fine."

"A poison thorn disguised as a poison thorn."

That one is obvious to Bo Katan, maybe to any Mandalorian. "An enemy, but one who's trying to make you think they're a different type of enemy than they are. Maybe, in the metaphor, the poison thorn is at a different angle than you think it is, so you'll prick yourself when you try to avoid it. Maybe it's a blaster disguised as a vibrosword, or a razor-wire trap disguised as a pitfall trap. Something like that." And as frustrating as this metaphor nonsense is, it's let her take her mind off their path, and helped her remember which way to go — so not completely useless, she supposes.

Qui-Gon nods slowly. "The nerf who was dressed as a gundark, and believed it, until she tore away her flesh to see what lay beneath."

Bo Katan frowns. That one's not harder, but it's definitely… worrying. "Someone who thinks they are, or thinks they should be, an enemy — but who isn't, and realizes it. The realization's not an easy process, either."

"Hm." He looks almost pleased at that one, before his face clouds over again. "Last one. One who wasn't sure whether it was a bantha or a krayt dragon, and instead became… nothing."

Bo Katan thinks that Qui-Gon probably knows all these answers. But if he's not letting himself see them, well, she'll spell them out for him. "One who's torn between both sides. One who tears themself up over it, completely, leaving nothing behind."

"I see," he says, and Bo Katan can tell that his voice is being held carefully flat.

Well, no use putting it off.

"All right," she says. "Tell me about him."

"He's a Jedi named Dooku, and my old training master," Qui-Gon finally says. "This is his ancestral home, as his house is one of the ancient and wealthy houses of Serenno — the reason it's so easy to sneak around here is that it's too old to have been retrofitted with any kind of good security system, except at the very exterior."

Good — Bo Katan couldn't have asked for better. That means they won't have to deal with barriers crashing down, cutting off their escape route, or with heat sensors pinpointing their location from halfway across the fortress.

"Also," Qui-Gon says, almost as an afterthought — but when Bo Katan looks, his eyes are distant. "He's noticed that I'm awake, and he's not happy about it."

There's a split second when Bo-Katan thinks that they've done it — evaded all the droids, worked around the cameras, kept ahead of the Jedi-maybe-not-a-Jedi tracking them through a maze of a mansion that he knows much better than they do.

That moment, of course, is when they turn a corner and run face-first into three entire squads of battle-droids.

She swears, hard and fast, and starts shooting before the droids have even managed to process that they've got company, but three squads on her own is too much. Four droids go down before they've figured out that they need to shoot back. But then they do start shooting back, and it's a storm of blaster bolts all aimed at her. She rolls behind a statue, pops back up to shoot a second volley. And takes a hit straight to the seam between her pauldron and her arm-guard.

It's not the worst hit she could've taken. She can still shoot with both arms, if she grits her teeth through the pain, but her aim will be off.

Then she swears again, because she could have asked before — "Jinn. Qui-Gon. There's a holdout blaster on my belt, can you shoot?"

The Jedi's voice is decidedly peeved. “Blasters are an inelegant weapon, one suited more for a battlefield than for a subtle escape.” To his credit, he thrusts a hand forward, pushing several of the droids off their feet; not the most helpful, but at least it'll take them a moment to recover.

("Hey!" One of the droids says. "Those are escaped prisoners! Switch to stunners!")

“You’re calling this mess a subtle escape?!”

“It certainly was, before these droids showed up!”

“Well they’re here now! Can you take my blaster?”

“I haven’t been on a battlefield in years–“

"That's not a karking answer!”

“My experience is best dealing with beings, not machines–“

"Yes or no, can you shoot!"

"Even if I could, my vision has not fully recovered from the carbonite," he finally snaps.

Ah. Kriff. Would it have killed him to at least mention that beforehand??

"All right, then," Bo-Katan says, and ducks behind a statue to dodge the droids' latest volley of stunners. "We need to run."

"Fine." At least he doesn't argue with her. "The time for stealth is over, I think. Avoiding security cameras is a waste of time, and we're on borrowed time as it is."

"Stop talking and go,” Bo-Katan snaps, and thankfully he does.

Every pounding step sends a throb of pain up into her shoulder, but she's had worse. That’s what she tells herself, and it’s true, though she can’t think of when she’s had worse, she can barely think at all, everything’s just pounding corridors and flashes of blasters just barely missing her and Qui-Gon. Hopefully that’s what those flashes are. Hopefully it’s not the pain pulsing red through her vision.

But she doesn’t know, she’s having trouble keeping track, which probably isn’t a good sign. It’s been – how long, since she’s eaten? How long has she been awake? How long has she been stuck in this fortress, sprinting and stumbling from endless gray corridor to endless gray corridor–

Wham.

The distant sound isn’t a comfort.

“Blast doors,” Qui-Gon notes neutrally, sounding far too composed for a man running as fast as he is. “Over the exits.”

“Surprised he – didn’t do that – earlier,” Bo-Katan wheezes between pounding steps.

“Didn’t want it to be noticeable from the outside, maybe?”

Maybe.

“Left,” he says suddenly, and veers off.

Eh, she has no reason not to follow a practically-blind man through a fortress of things trying to kill her. She’s mostly been taking random turnings anyways, since she has no way of knowing where to go. “What’s – this way?”

“Not sure,” he says. “Well…”

“Well what? It’s – a Jedi sense? More – metaphors?”

They’ve slowed down, almost without Bo-Katan noticing. Well, she does notice, when a blaster bolt hits one of the weird displays they’ve just passed, shattering the glass.

“Metaphors…” Qui-Gon murmurs, slowing down even more.

Bo-Katan swears, grabs the collar of his stupid tunics with her good arm, and yanks him along. “If we’re going this way let’s go.”

As the blaster-bolts fly around him, it’s like he’s coming back into focus, even more ignorant of the danger but somehow still more present. “You’re hurt.”

“I’ll be fine–“

He picks her up, in a smooth scoop, before she even has time to react, and takes off running at a breakneck pace, nothing like the stumbling jog he’d had before. How dare he! She’s fine, she can run herself, it doesn’t matter how light-headed she was getting. And she can’t even make him stop, because arguing with him would slow the both of them down.

She settles for swearing into his ear. “Can you even see where we’re going?”

“It’s getting clearer,” he says. “In both ways.”

“What does that even mean!?” And no, she is not going to acknowledge that it’s easier to talk and to think without the throbbing pain pounding through her body with every step. He could mean anything, about the way being clearer–

Oh.

“Exactly,” he says.

The Jedi empathy is really annoying some times.

“We’re running towards the answers,” Qui-Gon continues. “The metaphors. The people, the mysteries.”

“Good.”

They’re not running away from the danger.

They’re running towards it.

The droids have gotten further and further behind them, so Bo-Katan doesn’t feel as bad as she otherwise would have for shifting around in his grip, even though it makes him stumble and slow. She needs to access her utility belt. There’s no bacta in here, but there’s… well. There’s adhesive, which will have to do for the time being, to keep her from bleeding more. Spare charges for all her blasters, making sure her knives are loose in their sheaths, ready to be drawn…

Out of the corner of her eyes, something familiar.

“Stop.”

Qui-Gon stumbles to a halt so abruptly that Bo-Katan gets vertigo.

“We don’t have much time,” he warns her, even as he sets her down. “The droids are still on our trail, following us through the security cameras. What–“

“Here,” she says, and turns down a corridor they’d just passed. She’s seen this corridor before, as similar as all these grey hallways look. But the decorations, prizes, trophies in them are all different. This one has a giant gold-glimmering obelisk, cracked up one side (and bright enough to catch her eye); a twisted and broken staff of some kind, with fragments of a shattered orb still attached to its top; scraps of charred paper; and–

The remains of what must have once been a beautiful stone statue, shattered by detonators. At its feet, three small metal objects - the detonators in question. One, just a pile of fragments. One, twisted and rendered useless by some blast of heat. One, sliced in half. One, still unused.

She doesn’t recognize the style of detonator, from the mechanism to the casing to the explosive used; but, something her buir used to say – so many years ago that she’d almost completely forgotten her – well. Any sword in a storm, Kat’ika, she’d say. Her other buir – her father – had laughed, and argued, but her mother…

First, you win, her mother had told her. And if you can’t do that, you survive. And if you can’t survive…

“Any sword in a storm,” Bo-Katan murmurs to herself, and picks up the unused detonator. “Time to make them pay.”

Qui-Gon isn’t watching her; he’s looking around, as if he has all the time in the world. But now that Bo-Katan has spent more time in his presence, now that she’s made her decision, now that she’s let the world slow back down, she can see the way he tenses up, the way he’s trying to strain his eyes to focus, to recover. The way he’s clasping his hands around each other, bereft of anything to grab on to. The way he’s keeping an ear towards the corridor they came down, to the distant sounds of running droids.

“Is there anything around here you can use as a weapon?” She asks him. “Or as a shield, even?”

He blinks, as if he hadn’t even thought of scavenging from the Sith’s trophies. “I… don’t believe so, but I’ll keep an eye out.”

“Your eyes are that recovered already?”

“I’ll keep my senses out,” he amends, sounding snippy.

“Good.” She tosses the detonator up in the air, has a split-second thought of oh dank farrik I’m an idiot it’s going to explode, catches it, and doesn’t let herself flinch. “I think I’ve got our way out of here.”