Chapter Text
It starts like this:
Ahsoka fights the twisted monster that was once her master. She scores a hit. She almost dies. The world tears open like a hole in a sweater, and she sees Ezra. She sees Morai. She reaches—
--
It starts like this:
Qui-Gon fights the wretched monster that has followed them from Tatooine. He scores a hit. He almost dies. The world rips open like a tear in a tapestry, and he sees another Sith. He sees a togruta. He sees a teenager. He twists—
--
It starts like this:
Obi-Wan is stuck behind a red energy shield, watching his master falter, fear and anxiety clashing in his mind. His master almost dies. The world shreds open like a cut through flesh, and he sees a Sith, a togruta warrior, and a young man with a convor. He stumbles—
--
It happens like this:
Ezra meant to pull her out.
Morai meant to send her back.
--
Ahsoka is thrown backwards. It’s a pull and a push, and part of her grasps desperately for Vader as she’s yanked into a space between worlds. She reaches, and is implacably removed from the reality she knows.
Ezra makes to catch her. He does not succeed. She falls past him, sees his surprise and desperation, and continues falling through to a history she never lived.
Morai follows.
Ahsoka lands awkwardly, rolling to her feet as she watches the jagged cut seal itself away, cutting her off from Ezra, from Malachor, and from the man who was once her master. Bit by bit, he is hidden from her view, as first that passage closes, and then the one from this world to Ezra’s. The frayed and pained, ever-broken ends of the training bond flutter in her mind, grasping at something she hasn’t had in fifteen years.
At least Ezra’s safe.
She doesn’t know where she is. There’s a darkness at her back, though, familiar. It’s oddly smooth, but she sighs and gets to her feet, turning. She can’t worry about where she is, not when she can already feel the spike of aggression. “Maul, what the frell do you want now?”
Her eyes land on him.
He looks… wrong.
There are people behind him, dressed as Jedi. They carry sabers. She doesn’t recognize them, but then, she’s focused on the Sith Lord.
Ahsoka doesn’t light her sabers, not yet. She waits for him to say something. Anything.
Maul bares his teeth at her, like a stray tooka, and paces to the side. It’s away from the elder of the maybe-Jedi.
Finally, he speaks. “Do I know you?”
Well. Not the comment she expected.
She turns on her sabers and spins them in a flourish, eyes darting to the Jedi that she’s rapidly realizing are probably real.
Maul doesn’t know her. He looks wrong, because he looks young. He’s probably a decade younger than her.
“Call me Fulcrum,” she tells him, because if she’s right, then there’s a little girl out there that carries her name, and doesn’t deserve the danger that’s going to chase her across the galaxy.
He flourishes his own double-ended blade. She sighs. “We don’t have to do this.”
“How do you know me?”
She offers him a thin smile. “You are far from the only Sith I’ve fought, nor the only one I know of. It’s a… calling.”
The Jedi looks to be gearing up to interfere, and she flashes a handsign to him, a stand down as the younger—his padawan—is finally let through the cycling energy gate. The Jedi Master does not understand the sign, or perhaps he just doesn’t see it. Still, he hesitates.
Maul continues to circle, trying to keep all three of them in his sights. It’s deliberate, a hunter’s prowl, but it’s lacking the feral, manic quality she’s used to.
“You are already exhausted, Fulcrum,” Maul notes. His voice is smoother, too. He’s steeped in the dark, but he’s just… not quite as mad as she’s used to.
“I’ve been fighting the same war against your kind since I was fourteen, Darth,” she tells him. She sinks into a starting pose, sabers rigidly aloft, and wills her muscles to calm and stop shivering. There’s another battle to be had. “You’re just another Sith, and your master will replace you as easily as all the rest.”
He moves in the space of a blink.
So does she.
--
Qui-Gon has no idea who this person is.
Fulcrum, they called themself. Togruta, and… a woman, he thinks. The manner of speech is a little odd, and the actual content is odder.
A war since fourteen, against Sith, and knowing this lord by name. He wonders at that, but there is a convor that followed the warrior from whatever place they were in before. It flits past with a flash in the Force, so powerful that it almost blinds him to the shift of conversation to battle. The convor has more midichlorians than he does, Qui-Gon thinks in the moment, and it may well be the source of Fulcrum’s knowledge on…
Their target, maybe.
Fulcrum moves with speed and agility that Qui-Gon would have been hard-pressed to match in his prime, let alone now. The saberwork is rough, heavy and unpolished, but practiced and clever and fast. Fulcrum fights like a Jedi who spent their life in the roughest parts of the Outer Rim, and forgot their forms in favor of fighting dirty and fighting mean.
Maul fights the same way, but he can’t predict Fulcrum nearly as well as the reverse.
They disarm him in minutes, and it looks easy when they do, as if Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon had been fumbling younglings to struggle with that same enemy. Maul immediately attempts to win with hand-to-hand, but Fulcrum strikes back, and now they move like a Mandalorian.
A very, very good one.
Qui-Gon eyes the armor at Fulcrum’s hips. He’d thought it Wroshyr, but there’s metal edging. It… might be beskar.
He’ll have to ask Obi-Wan to take a look.
When Fulcrum knocks the Sith out, they immediately look to Qui-Gon. “Force suppressant cuffs? Please tell me you brought some.”
Obi-Wan bristles a little, but relaxes when Qui-Gon pushes an instruction to wait down their bond. Qui-Gon does, in fact, have the right kind of cuff on him. He passes them over, and Fulcrum sets them on. Qui-Gon watches the quick and clinical application that very few people he’s met are capable of, and wonders how many Force Sensitive enemies have found themselves in Fulcrum’s sights.
“Is Fulcrum a name or a title?” Obi-Wan asks.
The warrior tilts their head, considering. “It was a codename, once. It became something more, eventually. I suppose it is a title, now, but I answer to it as easily as I do to my own name.”
“Are you a knight or a master?” Qui-Gon asks.
“I am… not a Jedi,” they admit. “I haven’t been since I was seventeen.”
They stand, tossing the Sith Lord over their shoulder. “The Jedi and the Force… it is my faith, but I can no longer claim it as my allegiance.”
More questions, really.
“The convor?” Qui-Gon asks.
“A friend,” Fulcrum says. Their smile is quick, and immediately falls. “I don’t know why she brought me here.”
Qui-Gon wants to question that. Something tells him that would be… an exceedingly bad idea. “Alright then. Fulcrum… ah, Ser Fulcrum, then?”
“Agent, technically,” they tell him. “Let’s go with Ashla Torrent, though. Miss, if anyone asks.”
Shadow? Obi-Wan asks him.
Qui-Gon has no idea.
“Let’s go see to the Naboo.”
--
Ashla, if that’s even her real name, walks like a Kyr’tsad.
Obi-Wan knows the sound of it to his bones. He’s sure some other Mandalorians have the same stride, but there’s a way of moving to them, a rhythm and pattern he heard in their pursuers that he hadn’t found even in the traditionalists that had hid Satine when on the run. There are similarities he can’t unsee, once he’s noticed them, and there’s something about… he’s not sure. He keeps thinking of the rural traditionalists he’d met, the ones that didn't like New Mandalore but liked Death Watch even less. Small, old families wearing durasteel armors and speaking in dialects so thick he'd barely understood them. He knows there’s a connection somewhere in there, but the sleek line of her vambrace says Death Watch to Obi-Wan’s eyes.
There’s a tinge to her accent that reaches back to Mandalore, too. He’d wager good money she speaks Mando’a, maybe even spent time on the planet. He’s not sure if she’s old enough to have fought with the True Mandalorians, but she seems older than Obi-Wan. Maybe it's even by enough.
He doesn’t think she’s Death Watch. He really, really hopes she isn’t. It'll be a massive, kriff-off mess for them all, if she is.
The tread of her shoes is softer than a beskar boot has any right to be, and he knows that only comes with either training or lots and lots and lots of practice.
“You never asked our names,” Obi-Wan says, as they walk.
Ashla shrugs. “You are a padawan, and your master is a master. If you wanted me to know your names, I imagine you would have told me.”
“I am Jedi Master Qui-Gon Jinn,” the man himself introduces. “My padawan, Obi-Wan Kenobi.”
Ashla freezes, turns on her heel and steps to Obi-Wan. She leans in, eyes searching for something he can’t even begin to guess at, and he feels pinned. It’s not even just the instinctive fear of a predator’s gaze, but something deeper. She’s looking into his soul, and if Obi-Wan weren’t a Jedi, he’d dismiss it as poetic hyperbole. Unfortunately, he knows what gifts the Force can provide. This is very literal.
The convor swoops behind her, and disappears.
Something about that scares him, too.
“So you are,” Ashla murmurs, a pinch to her brow that speaks of… something. He still doesn’t know. He doesn’t know how to read her, where she came from, who the Sith or the boy in that window were.
There is so much he doesn’t know.
“Tion gar Mando’a jorhaa’i?” he asks, because he needs, needs, to know.
Do you speak Mandalorian?
She leans away, and smirks. “Elek, jet’ika.”[1]
She’s not the first to have called him that.
“Who taught you?” Obi-Wan asks.
“A brother,” she tells him, wistful and mourning and looking at the wall behind him without quite seeing it. She smiles, and it's not very happy. “Many brothers, really, and… they’re all gone now. I suppose it doesn’t matter.”
He grasps for another question, but she turns on her heel and heads off down the hallway again. Qui-Gon’s leading the way, but Ashla marches after him at a pace that eats up the distance between them easily. Obi-Wan tries to match her stride.
“Did those brothers teach you how to fight?” Qui-Gon asks.
“Some of them,” she says. “Refined it, mostly. I didn’t meet them until the war, and I already knew many things by then.”
“Which war?” Obi-Wan asks.
She doesn’t freeze, doesn’t stutter in step, but she does shoot him a look. She turns away to face forward again, just as quick. When her eyes focus on the middle distance, it’s like she’s carved of stone. “A grander one then I hope you’ll ever have reason to see.”
Well, that’s… a lot.
“But the aftermath was worse,” she remarks. She shrugs when he looks at her.
“Are you a Shadow?” he asks, morbidly curious. “Or, not a Shadow, since you said you aren’t a Jedi anymore, but that kind of work?”
She rolls the thought around, and nods. “I’ve been running black ops for about fourteen years, maybe a little more. Yes, I’d say I’m well-entrenched in, as you put it, that kind of work.”
Ashla tosses him a grin as she finishes speaking, and does a bouncy little spin on her way down the hall, a bit of a skip and almost dancer-like turn. Maul, inexplicably, is hardly jostled by this. The movement is smooth and the clink of her boots is musical in a way it shouldn’t be.
He really, really hopes that she’s not a friend of Death Watch.
“You’re caught up in your thoughts, Padawan Kenobi,” she chastises, but she’s still smiling.
He wants to ask why she doesn’t seem more upset about being thrown into someone else’s mess. He doesn’t, but…
He wants to.
--
Fulcrum’s skin is crawling.
That’s Obi-Wan Kenobi, young and fresh-faced and with a stupid little cleft in his chin. He's still getting carded, probably. He’s charming and enthusiastic and kind of a twink, the type she wants to put in a headlock, and scrub at his hair with her knuckles until he yelps and whines to make her stop. He’s the kind of guy she could have been friends with, and bullied a little, if they’d been the same age and there hadn’t been a war and a purge.
That’s Obi-Wan Kenobi, age twenty-five, which is almost thirty years younger than he should be.
Qui-Gon Jinn, she knows, should be dead.
Morai circles far, far, far above her, and there is an apology that hides the firmness of resolve.
There is no going home for Ahsoka Tano, agent of the rebellion.
She’s stuck here.
She may have lost her life on Mortis, but she got that back. This… every time, it’s worse than Mortis was.
Fulcrum, Ahsoka, Ashla lost everything when she left the Jedi.
She lost everything again, when the Republic fell and her brothers with it.
She’s now lost everything a third time. She knows in her heart that she’s gained a chance she never could have dreamed of in this act, but it’s still painful.
Kanan is a toddler. Ezra and Leia, little ones, they aren’t even born yet. Even Hera isn’t around, just barely a twinkle in her parents’ eyes, most likely. Bail doesn’t know her, and her lineage has never met her. Bo-Katan would kill her on sight if she could, instead of sighing and inviting her to a drink as they mourn together.
And Rex…
She does not know if there is anyone she will miss as much as him.
She smiles for her grandmaster and his master, walks with purpose, and digs her grip into her composure until she has privacy.
Morai feels for her, but is not sorry.
This is needed.
“Is it beskar?” Obi-Wan asks her.
“Some of it,” she tells him, a shade absentminded. A gift from Bo-Katan, the first time she’d fought Maul on Mandalore. “Some of it is… only special in sentiment.”
She has plastoid melted and shaped to the outermost layer, has comm and slicer capabilities built in. It doesn’t deflect anything nearly as well as beskar does. Nothing deflects as well as beskar does.
But this plastoid is bits and pieces from a hundred mourned clones, and each time a piece has broken, she's added more. Always, there is another brother to grieve. Ahsoka Tano has salvaged little pieces from those who fall in battle, whether with her or against her, for fifteen years. Each time a plastoid piece needed to be replaced, she’s had all the new bits she's found melted in and shaped with the rest.
She carries her brothers with her into battle. She cannot mourn each one by name, because she never had a chance to meet them all. She doesn’t have the time to list each and every person that deserves it when she speaks her Remembrances. She carries her clone brothers in her armor and her Jedi siblings in the white of her blades, and she must believe it is enough.
“Miss Torrent?” Obi-Wan prompts. He sounds worried.
She’s been silent for too long.
“The handles on my sabers are beskar, too,” she tells him instead. “My lineage had a habit of losing sabers or having them sliced in half. I was owed some favors by a woman who called me in to deal with a Sith infestation of her own, and when she provided the metal, I thought I could at least avoid the slicing issue.”
It’s not the full truth, but it’s enough.
“Are you…” Obi-Wan trails off, and shakes his head. “Never mind.”
She sees Master Jinn past his shoulder, watching her with eyes alight, curious in a way that she thinks bodes ill for what little cover she has.
She smirks at him, and shows just a hint of teeth.
When he laughs and turns away, she decides it’s a success, at least somewhat.
“Master Jinn! Master Jinn, sir!”
There’s a tiny-loud voice from a tiny-loud child, human and blonde and Anakin Anakin Anakin—
She doesn’t even notice that she’s dropped Maul until he thuds to the ground, and then she barely registers that, because she’s falling to her knees, eyes fixed on a little boy who feels so damnably light that she can hardly connect him to the chaotic swirl of well-intentioned violence from her teenage years, and even less to the monster that tried to kill her.
“Miss?” this little boy asks, stopping in front of her. “Are you okay? Do you need some help?”
“Oh…” she breathes, one hand coming up to cup his cheek. “Hello, Anakin Skywalker.”
She reaches for him in the Force, can barely help herself.
He reaches back.
--
Qui-Gon isn’t as worried as Obi-Wan is, when Ashla loses herself at the sight of Anakin. The woman is something beyond either of them, he thinks, and Anakin is much the same. It’s only natural that she’d be able to tell, in Qui-Gon’s mind.
And then he feels it when a training bond snaps into being.
He jerks in place, though not nearly as noticeably as his padawan does. Obi-Wan, as he is, reaches for Ashla and Anakin, and Qui-Gon has to put a hand on his shoulder to stop him from interfering.
This woman is sent by the Force, is trained against Sith in ways few Jedi alive can relate to. Master Fay certainly isn’t coming back to the temple, especially not to take on a padawan, and even T’ra was barely more than a padawan herself when the last Sith War closed. Meanwhile, Fulcrum had gone from one Sith battle to another with barely a hiccup, simply seen what needed to be done and done it. The Force led her here, he’s sure of it.
A training bond snapped into being faster than even deliberately crafted ones did. Natural bonds take time, but Ashla had met Anakin and, in seconds… it was there, as if it simply always had been.
It must be the will of the Force. Ashla isn’t even a Jedi, but she is following it, and it circles her right back. Qui-Gon can’t decide if that’s a good thing or not, but it feels important.
“Anakin,” the woman whispers again, brushing her thumb over his cheek, and there are tears building in her eyes over a trembling smile. “Hello, little one.”
“Um… hello,” Anakin says. He shifts on his feet, glances past to Qui-Gon and back to Ashla. “Do I know you?”
“No, I’m afraid not,” Ashla tells him. She cups his jaw, still so very close to tears. “But I know you, dear one. Quite well, I should think.”
There’s a lilt to her words that’s familiar in a way Qui-Gon can’t pinpoint. He brushes it aside and indicates for Obi-Wan to pick up the Sith Lord on the floor. Obi-Wan very obviously doesn’t want to do that. He picks up the heap of limbs and black fabric that is one Darth Maul anyway.
“I’m Ashla Torrent. It’s very nice to meet you, properly.”
Anakin’s eyes again flicker to Qui-Gon in confusion, and Qui-Gon offers back an encouraging nod.
“I’m Anakin Skywalker,” the boy says, not commenting on the fact that Ashla had already said his name twice, and definitely knew it. “And I’m going to be a Jedi. Er, at least, I hope so. The Council said I was too old, but Master Qui-Gon said it was going to work out. Are you a Jedi?”
“I used to be,” she tells him. “I was raised a Jedi, and I was a padawan for a time, but some bad things happened and I had to leave. I still follow the Force as a Jedi does, and I help who I can. I always hoped I could come back, though.”
“Why didn’t you?” Anakin asks, with all the impossible innocence and curiosity of a child. “Did the Jedi not want to let you back in either?”
Her smile is so painfully brittle, and Qui-Gon has to hold up a hand to stop some Nabooans from involving themselves. This is too important.
They glare at him for it. Rude.
“They did,” Ashla says, and she brushes Anakin’s hair back in a way that’s impossibly tender. Qui-Gon isn’t sure if she’s seeing the boy at all, or someone else entirely. “But I found, for a while, that there were people who needed my help, and I could not help as a Jedi. I could not carry that title and serve the galaxy as a Jedi should.”
“Oh,” Anakin says, with a little frown that Qui-Gon has quickly learned to read. “So you’re still a Jedi in spirit, just not in name?”
She hesitates. Reality teeters for a moment, in a way that only Obi-Wan notices, and that Qui-Gon is sure would have given poor Mace a migraine if he’d been in the area when it happened.
“Something like that,” she finally says. “Tell you what, if the Jedi don’t take you in, you can hang out with me until you decide what you want to do.”
“Um…” Anakin looks in worry to Qui-Gon.
“Moving too fast?” Ashla guesses, wincing.
“Anakin is a ward of the Jedi until the Council makes a decision about how to handle his particular case,” Qui-Gon announces. “But given the complicating element you’ve just introduced, I imagine you’ll be involved no matter what.”
She looks at him, utterly confused. “What?”
“You hadn’t noticed. I see.” That’s almost disappointing, but maybe her tie to Anakin was so natural that it didn’t even feel as though anything had changed, to them. “I’ll explain later.”
She eyes him. She smiles. It’s not a particularly kind expression. “You’re an infuriating man to work with, aren’t you?”
“Hey! Don’t be mean to Master Qui-Gon!” Anakin immediately defends.
“Oh, an old fogey like that? He can take much worse, I assure you,” she tells him. Her eyes are dry, when she stands and brushes half-imagined dust from her metal skirt panel. “So, where to now, boys?”
--
Anakin gets bustled away by a friendly handmaiden when they make it to where they’ll be staying, with promises of a bubble bath—with a droid there to help him understand all the buttons without invading his privacy—and a nice set of new clothes that he can wear until some little padawan robes come in for him.
And just in case they don’t.
Qui-Gon is busy with the Council, and Obi-Wan finds himself alone with Ashla in the sitting room of their guest quarters.
“Do you want to rejoin the Jedi?” Obi-Wan finally asks. The question’s been gnawing at him. She’d said why she hadn’t before, but she’s just fought two Sith and escaped one, capturing the other, and there’s some Force-touched convor following them around. If that doesn’t make a Jedi, he’s not sure what would.
“I don’t know that I’d belong, anymore,” she admits. She doesn’t look away from the wall, and she’s otherwise utterly still. He finds it odd, partly because even most Jedi will fidget in a situation like this, and partly because she’s lounging sideways in an armchair, and it looks pointlessly uncomfortable for her back. “And it’s not like anyone knows me, now.”
Obi-Wan waits for her to elaborate. She doesn’t.
They just sit there, in silence, with the only noises being the air circulation and the low, rough murmur of Qui-Gon through a door. It’s calm, but it’s not peaceful. Obi-Wan almost sinks into a meditation to pass the time and sort through his own thoughts and feelings from the past few years, but he doesn’t get a chance to do so. Ashla has questions of her own.
“Do you know what he meant?” She doesn’t look at him. “About complicating factors?”
“You really didn’t notice?” Obi-Wan asks. When she shakes her head, still not looking at him, all he can see is the fatigue of… years, he imagines. “The Force wants you to be Anakin’s master.”
Ashla doesn’t freeze, but it’s only because she was already still as stone. “What do you mean?”
“The second you met him—I mean, you already knew who he was, but the second you actually met him, a training bond just… happened,” Obi-Wan explains as best he can. “I’ve never felt anything like it. One second, nothing, and then suddenly there was this training bond of full strength, like it had always been there. I’ve seen padawans with several years under their masters who haven’t had that kind of robust light. That doesn’t just happen, and I don’t think it can be done artificially, or at least not so quickly, so it must be the will of the Force.”
She’s still not responding. He gets up, goes closer, puts a hand on her bare shoulder. He wants to find it strange, that she doesn’t wear pauldrons, when it’s such a basic piece of armor for most, but for anyone who fights as she does… it would probably just get in the way. He squeezes. “Ashla? I just… you were meant to be Master and Padawan, I think. The Force has been exceedingly clear on that, and with how you reacted when you saw him, I feel like you already love him as much as you would a padawan you’d found and picked yourself.”
“That’s not—that’s not the problem,” she huffs, but it’s a shaky breath. “Ne’lise, Ob’ika. Ne’lise bajurir jet’ika.”[2]
He wonders what her ploy is. He can at least try to respond in kind. “Nari ra nu’nari, ne’cuyi nar.”[3]
Ashla barks out a laugh at that, and she finally looks at him. “Really, Padawan Kenobi? I wasn’t even saying anything about trying.”
“It seemed fitting,” he says. “For the conversation.”
She snorts. “You sound so posh, you know that? In Basic and in Mando’a. You learned with a Kalevalan accent, right?”
“I did,” Obi-Wan says. He thinks he’s setting up a rapport, but he also feels like he’s wading through half blind. He hasn’t missed that they’ve changed the subject pretty drastically. “I don’t know yours, though.”
“Concordian influence,” she tells him. She shrugs when he gestures for her to elaborate. “Not the dialect, technically, but everyone I learned from had gotten it in there somewhere. My boys from their… father, who was from Concord Dawn, and I had a friend who spent a number of years on Concordia.”
It’s an answer, technically.
He considers following it, but he doesn’t want to. “Why are you scared of teaching Anakin?”
The glare she aims at him is definitely meant as a reprimand. Unfortunately for Fulcrum, Obi-Wan is a padawan to Qui-Gon Jinn, and he’s seen significantly dirtier looks far too often for anyone’s comfort.
Obi-Wan doesn’t move away, and she finally turns and stops looking at him.
“I don’t know that I can be what he needs,” she finally says. She rubs at one montral, discomfort all along her body. “I don’t even know how to be a person instead of a weapon, these days. I was a child soldier. Entered war at fourteen. Had a break to grieve for a year at seventeen and eighteen. And then it was almost fifteen years of black ops without a break longer than a day unless I was on a medical hold. I don’t know what peacetime is going to do to me, and I don’t know what I’m going to do to Anakin.”
Obi-Wan looks at her, at the almost feathery marks on her face, as fine as they are. He looks at the striation on her montrals, veined like marble.
He’d hoped it was just genetics.
“I was in a war when I was thirteen,” he offers, and her head snaps to pin him with a stare he doesn’t know how to read. “It wasn’t for long—the crèchelings will tell you all sorts of things about how bad it was, but a lot of what they say is just things they’ve made up to make it more dramatic, like when they claim Qui-Gon booted me from the order or confiscated my saber—but I sort of understand what you mean. Getting back to people who haven’t lived what you have is… a whole new kind of terrible, even when you’re not getting shot at anymore.”
He still can’t identify the look on her face, really. It’s intense and knowing and uncomfortably familiar, but… surprised.
“But if you come back to the temple, I mean, if you’re let back in… you’d have a support network,” he offers. “People to teach him the things you don’t know, or weren’t ever taught. You could visit the soul healers, like I did. And, I dunno, I like the kid, and Qui-Gon is… really invested in him being a Jedi, so there’s people willing to babysit if it’s one of the bad days.”
Obi-Wan doesn’t know if she caught his bitterness about Qui-Gon not thinking through his suggestion of just knighting Obi-Wan, and then Master Jinn could take on Anakin instead.
If she has, she’s not saying anything about it.
--
Fulcrum hides.
She’s not… proud of it, so to speak. She’s just overwhelmed, and Obi-Wan treating her as a weirdly skittish expert—not a superior, because she’s not a Jedi, but older and more experienced—is wigging her out. Qui-Gon is at least a stranger, and while she gets the feeling he’s kind of a jerk, she can take solace in the fact that she has no real expectations for him. He’s even the kind of asshole that she’d normally enjoy watching make a mess, and being friends with.
But Obi-Wan is… that’s her grandmaster, but he’s still a padawan. She’s, what, eight years older than him? It’s uncomfortable. He’s a padawan, with a master that seems at least somewhat traditional, and there’s some strange drama going on between them that she’s not at all eager to get involved in.
She gets the feeling they might try to involve her anyway.
Force’s favor, she’s hopes they don’t.
“Miss Torrent?”
Ah. It’s a handmaiden. She has no idea which one.
“Hello,” she says, leaning over the edge of the rafter she’s perched herself on. “Is something the matter?”
“The new Chancellor arrived,” the handmaiden says. “He’d like to meet the woman who captured a—”
“No,” Fulcrum says. “I will not be meeting with any politicians.”
She would not be able to resist punching Sidious in the face. Then she’d have to explain why, using proof she doesn’t have.
Best she just doesn’t meet him.
“…he’s the Chancellor,” the handmaiden stresses. “That’s not an invitation people usually turn down.”
“Tell him I’m unstable,” Fulcrum says. “If he tries to force the issue, I’ll be leaving the planet and even the Jedi won’t be able to find me.”
The handmaiden stares at her. “You… all politicians?”
“Amidala’s young enough to not have been corrupted yet,” Fulcrum says. “And there’s one other currently active on a similar level that I won’t name, but would trust my life with. Beyond that? No. I do not trust politicians.”
And I certainly do not trust Sith.
“I’m… I’ll them you’re unwell,” the handmaiden finally says. She does not say that it seems close enough to the truth, but Fulcrum can feel her thinking it. She can feel the unspoken belief that this handmaiden, and soon more, think her not wholly sane.
They’re probably not wrong.
The handmaiden doesn’t leave, though. “If the Jedi ask for you…”
“Them, I will speak with,” Fulcrum says. “But they might not like what they hear.”
“…should I mention that part, or would you like to tell them yourself?”
Fulcrum grins, and the handmaiden very carefully does not step back from too-sharp teeth. “Oh, I’m sure they already know. I don’t expect Master Jinn hid how very unconventional I am. No, I just need you and yours to keep the Chancellor away from Darth Maul. You can’t imagine what a Sith Lord could do to an unprotected mind, even with Jedi in attendance.”
It is entirely Fulcrum’s intention that the handmaiden assumes that she is talking about the other Sith Lord.
She’d say it’s not her fault, but it really is.
“I’ll keep that in mind,” the handmaiden says, a shade paler than she was a minute earlier. “Would the Jedi not know this already?”
“They might,” Fulcrum says. “But even Yoda wasn’t alive for a Sith War.”
“And you were.”
“And I was.”
The handmaiden nods slowly, and takes her leave. She’s polite about it, at least, even if she does clearly thinks Fulcrum has a few screws loose. It’s cute.
Fulcrum isn’t surprised when she gets the summons by the Jedi Councilors on-planet an hour later. It’s not all of them, but it’s enough. Yoda and Windu are here, as are Billaba and Piell and Koth and—
Plo.
She averts her eyes. She will not cry. She is kyber, she is beskar, she is one with the Force and she will not cry.
She focuses on Master Yoda, goes to one knee for a deep bow, and says, “It’s an honor to bid you well, Master Yoda.”
“Hmm,” he says, not at all commenting on the way she’s twisted her words to avoid saying meet and letting them know of her lies. “Not a Jedi, you claim to be.”
She stands, and then holds herself like a soldier. They already see her as an outsider. It might be a good idea to emphasize that, to set her feet apart and her shoulders back, to lift her chin, to clasp her hands behind her back and simply watch.
“I have not held the title of Jedi since I was seventeen,” she tells him.
“No record of you, do we have,” he accuses. “Checked your markings, we have. Not even a partial match, have we found.”
“I can’t imagine you would,” she tells him. She’s glad that he’s up on a raised seat, so she doesn’t have to choose between ducking her chin or looking down her nose at him. “There are no records of me.”
“Yet a saber, you carry,” he says. “The Force, you use. The Sith, you fight. A Jedi, such things make.”
She rolls it around in her mind, the option that sits easiest. The Force nudges, and she follows. “A friend of mine framed me for a terrorist attack, and I was stripped of my title and rank to stand military trial by a third party. I was sentenced to death shortly before my innocence came to light. I needed to take some time to myself, and intended to take up the title again eventually. By the time I was ready to do so, there was nothing left to return to, and so I simply… didn’t.”
It’s true. It’s heavy. It has them questioning things, but if the Force rings her sincerity as loudly to them as it does to her, then it should shut down at least a few avenues of question.
“Who was your Jedi Master?” Master Windu asks.
“Classified,” she immediately says, and keeps her eyes fixed on the wall behind him. She doesn’t let her lips twitch upwards, but part of her wants to. Faintly, she registers that Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon are in here. “Most things about my life are. You won’t be getting any names.”
Master Gallia tries anyway. “The Sith you fought before—”
“Is not a topic for discussion,” Fulcrum immediately cuts. “For many, many reasons.”
Nobody’s happy about that. Master Koth speaks next, oddly quiet. “It is this Council’s duty to lead the Jedi, and the Jedi’s duty to prevent the return of the Sith. With recent evidence, it’s clear we’ve failed at the second. You may not consider yourself a Jedi, but you seem to be just as against the Sith as we are. Would it not be best to combine the information we have to handle this threat?”
It’s so damned sensible. She can’t be too rude in response.
“He went by Vader,” she says. “He was… he used to be my Jedi Master. If you ask me to talk about how a man I trusted beyond anything tried to lure me to the Dark and followed it up by trying to kill me for refusing, I’ll end up crying, and that’s just going to be embarrassing for all of us. I will not be saying more on the matter.”
Her eyes stay fixed on the wall. The discomfort in the room is almost painful, which wasn’t her goal, but which she also doesn’t regret.
She doesn’t want them digging.
“Was he the first Sith you fought?” Plo asks.
“No,” she says, and resolutely doesn’t think about sitting on his lap as a youngling, cheering and squealing as he did a floating meditation with her right there. She doesn’t think about drinking with Wolffe and mourning— “The third. Well, second, depending on if you count the apprentice to an apprentice, especially since she later dragged herself back to the Light without help. Banites get strange about their whole ‘rule of two’ thing. Various acolytes that did their master’s bidding but weren’t technically included in the Sith count because of that aforementioned rule-of-two thing.”
She looks at their faces, and goes for broke. The Force wants her laying it on thick, as much as she can while being truthful. This qualifies. “Also there was a cyborg. Not Force Sensitive in the slightest, but my understanding is that he was taught by a Sith, and I had evidence that he killed dozens of Jedi, many in single combat, or even him against multiple… I know he had a habit of keeping their sabers and padawan braids as trophies. He showed them off. Bragged, even. I’d… he wasn’t a Sith, because he wasn’t Force-Sensitive, but he was Sith-adjacent, I guess.”
Fulcrum isn’t sure if they believe her. She’s behaving incredibly suspiciously. She… can’t quite care.
“Which war did you fight in?” Master Billaba asks. Fulcrum pointedly does not let herself think about how young the woman looks. Fulcrum’s barely any younger than her. Maybe two years, at most. “Not one of the wars we learned about had such a being mentioned.”
“I don’t want to talk about it, and I’d thank you to not ask,” she says, closing her eyes and grinding her teeth together. “Especially not in an unsecured room, for pity’s sake.”
Oh, there. She’s offended them.
It rankles, really, that they’re picking at her worst moments and deepest hurts, and then getting offended when she snaps back. She gets it. It still hurts.
“Listen,” she says, after enough time has passed in this blasted silence. “I’ve been working black ops for fifteen years. I’ve done my best to stay true to the Force and act as a Jedi would, but I’m not… I would not fit in at your temple, for all that Master Jinn and Padawan Kenobi have implied otherwise. I wouldn’t be trusted, and for good reason. Just… give me a comm code for a Shadow contact and a lift to the nearest hyperlane, and I’ll get out of your hair.”
Oh, they don’t like that, either.
Yoda taps his gimer stick before anyone else can say anything. “So eager to leave the Jedi, are you?”
“Eager to lick my wounds in peace, more like.” She shrugs when they all look at her like there’s something odd about it. “I found out my master became a Sith after spending fifteen years thinking he was dead, and he tried to kill me almost immediately. Then, with almost no warning, I was ripped from everything I’ve ever known and loved and told ‘be here, fix this’ by a manifestation of the Force that stalks me in its spare time. I’ve lost my world for the third time, honored Council. I would really, really like to just find some place to cry about it.”
“And you are so certain that place could not be the Temple?” Master Koon asks. He’s kind about it. He always has been. It almost breaks her.
Beskar and kyber and stone. She just needs to hold it together.
“The Temple would try to welcome me, perhaps. I cannot imagine they’d have an easy time of it. Best I just… skip the issue altogether.” She shrugs, and looks away.
“So eager to leave the Jedi,” Yoda repeats himself, with a harrumph of a noise. “So eager to leave your new padawan, you are.”
She twitches to look at him again, and then to Qui-Gon.
“I did not need to tell them,” he defends. He looks hurt that she’d even suspect such a thing. She doesn’t believe that expression. She narrows her eyes. “Your bond is already obvious to anyone who knows how to look for it.”
Which means Sidious knows. Lovely.
“I’m…” she trails off, and grimaces, twisting away for the moment it takes to gather herself. “I am not stable. I am not… teaching material. That boy is going to need someone who can provide him with routine and support, and I’m, frankly speaking, going to be a mess for at least a few months. Anakin deserves better.”
“It almost sounds as though you have someone in mind,” Master Piell comments.
Fulcrum… looks away. Glances at the Jinn and Kenobi team. Purses her lips.
“I rather expected him to end up with Obi-Wan,” she finally admits. The sharp little gasp from the young man himself is almost funny. The palpable spark of curiosity from Jinn—control yourself, man, good gods of all the rings—is significantly less funny, and more in the realm of portending trouble. “It felt… right.”
“Too young, Padawan Kenobi is, for a padawan of his own,” Yoda mutters.
“And too young, Anakin is, to be a padawan,” Fulcrum snips back. “They’d be good together, and I’m sure you’d realize if it you took the time to consider—”
“But you already have a training bond with him,” Obi-Wan finally bursts out. He seems very flustered. It’s adorable. “It’s—you didn’t even try and it happened, in seconds. The Force wants you to be a team.”
Oh, so she can mess him up? She left before, and it helped send him into the Dark. She’s not Obi-Wan, bright and clever and the best Jedi of his generation, a man who grew up in the Temple and remained a denizen of it for decades. She’s not even Qui-Gon, who seems very competent and zen, if a little smug and boring; she supposes he’s more like Dooku than her grandmaster had ever thought to mention.
Either of them would be better than a wannabe-Shadow who’s spent almost twenty years clinging to the light, metaphorical fingernails scraped raw, in a galaxy bathed in darkness. It clings to her, she’s sure.
“He doesn’t even like me,” she says instead.
“Oh, I think you’ve underestimated how quickly young Anakin makes friends,” Qui-Gon muses. A frisson of annoyance passes through the council, but nobody comments. “The Council was ready to dismiss Anakin for his age, to say he could not be a Jedi because he missed his mother and feared for her safety, because he hadn’t grown up among us and learned our ways. They were prepared to dismiss the Sith in our cells as an anomaly, a random darksider who claimed to be Sith but wasn’t truly.”
He smiles. It’s very smug, but in a polite, refined way. Calm and peaceful and airy. She barely avoids rolling her eyes at him. It’s a very punchable expression. “And then, now, here you are. From nowhere, brought by the Force itself, uniquely skilled and experienced in fighting our historic enemy. Forming a bond on sight with a boy I suspect is the Chosen One.”
“That prophecy is a metaphor,” someone mutters. Qui-Gon ignores them.
“Suspicious? Perhaps,” Qui-Gon allows. “But if we were to turn you, and Anakin, away? I believe we’d be ignoring quite a few signs directly from the Force itself.”
Just let me leave, she thinks.
“Why not ask the boy?” Plo suggests. “Perhaps, if we know his thoughts on such a bond, we will be able to make this decision with clearer heads.”
--
When the Jedi ship lifts from Naboo and heads back for Coruscant, recently instated Knight Torrent is on board, a young human boy with the brightest eyes in her arms.
She’s terrified.
Nothing can be allowed to hurt him.
[1] Yes, padawan (lit. little Jedi)
[2] I can’t, little Obi. I can’t teach a padawan.
[3] Do or do not, there is no try.