Chapter Text
Barriss Offee waits in silence, perfectly still. She is hopeful and anxious, but she will not allow her nerves to break into motion. The grand doors to the council chamber loom before her like two massive stone sentinels. Beyond them, a conclave of wiser people than her are deciding her future: which Jedi master will take her on as a padawan learner.
An hour ago, a short missive was delivered. She was to be brought before the council to know who had chosen to instruct her on her next leg of training. The letter instructed her wait outside the chamber until summoned.
As long as that may be. Barriss assumes it is an exercise in forbearance; not exactly a check, but an extension of the order’s inevitable Jedi-ness. Jedi are. Impatience is both foreign and futile to them.
So she waits.
She cannot stop herself from wondering what is going on behind the doors, which person will become a path for her to follow. But that is okay. Curiosity is expected. She has spent many nights staring at the ceiling above her bunk, listening to the other younglings whisper about taking this step, furthering their path towards Jedi knighthood.
She muses about what kind of Jedi she will be. When she was younger, before the Order had taken her, she daydreamed about being a hero, swooping down from the stars to take away all pain and suffering. That fantasy has shrunk with what maturity she has grown into, but the core of it remains. She assures herself that, whatever comes, she will be able to help, to soothe some of the injustices of the galaxy.
She knows enough of the Force to inhale sharply a second before the doors open. Sunlight spills across the floor, floods her vision with light. She sees heads outlined against brightness turn towards her.
For a brief fraction of a moment, she is immobilized. A flicker of panic, like buried lightning in a raincloud – Can she do this, step into what is coming? Or will she remain frozen here with the memory of a thousand bruises and lonely nights, and the expectations of hardships far greater?
But those are not unruffled Jedi thoughts. Barriss forces down any trepidation, emptying herself of anything but receptive tranquility. She walks into the chamber, and the future waiting.
The doors shut behind her.
***
They call her a traitor.
(She knows it is true.)
They name her actions an attack.
(She breathes it in like a throatful of flames.)
The people stare at her in disgust, hurl insults at her like rotten fruit. The Jedi regard her mournfully, distantly, before turning away. Her master is among them.
(And Barriss understands, really. Better let go, let dead things lie, and though she might not be dead, Luminara’s padawan is, neatly released with but a moment of solemn Jedi contemplation.)
She has lost her way. Fallen. It is said and spat and cursed and marveled at.
(At least she’s not the only one. She told them that, too.)
It makes a kind of poetry, the story they tell. Betrayal of the highest order! Accusations, ambushes, speeches, and outraged audiences! And of course, the quick, rightful fling into the jaws of justice. Certainly, there’s a measure of symmetry to it. Jedi turned Sith, honesty turned duplicitous. A servant of the dark captured, in the end, in service of the light.
Cruel and capricious as she is, they say she never looked back. Never stared her last victim in the eyes.
(That, out of the mess of it all, will be the lie she cannot stand.)
Barriss stands straight as the temple guards come to lead her away. The guards grips aren’t kind – how else would they deal their tiny retributions to a hateful traitor than with force? Skywalker watches her darkly, a mix of satisfaction and vengefulness narrowing his marred face. But that she doesn’t blame him for. This violence she deserves.
A moment before they wrench her away, Barriss looks. She meets a heartbroken stare for a fleeting snatch of a second so short it can be brushed away as nothing.
It isn’t nothing. It is her own measure of vengeance against the self she has become.
Her body reacts as she can not - the smallest hitch in her breath, as if that glance has branded her more than the title of traitor. As if she’s finally seen a greater breadth of pain than she was in before.
She refuses to regret, but she does so anyway.
Ahsoka, she regrets. Ahsoka, for letting her show how easy it is to fall. How beautiful it is, how true.
(They take her away.)
***
It starts as the worst things do, creeping up on her before she can recognize it. It’s a masterful, insidious poison, worming it’s way inside Barriss’s mind until she has no way to fight it without fighting herself.
But really, it starts with a smile.
Ahsoka’s smile.
It starts with a dusty, war-ruined planet crawling with the enemy, a host of clones, two Jedi masters, their apprentices, and a, “Well, Barriss, aren’t you going to introduce yourself?”
Barriss curtsies. It’s an old Mirialan tradition that no one can seem to train out of her. But it feels fitting, considering it’s recipient.“Padawan learner Barriss Offee, at your service.”
There’s a pause, but then a hand enters her vision. Barriss takes it, and a strong, sure voice says, “Glad to meet you. I’m Ahsoka.”
And Ahsoka smiles. Somewhere in the far, back corner of her mind, the part of Barriss that will fall with her notes its beauty. The unabashed nature of Ahsoka in this crumbled wasteland. The way she bares her teeth in the smile, teeth ever so slightly sharper than those of humans or other species.
Barriss likes it. She likes her.
Ahsoka’s palm is warm.
What follows next is just as important to the story. The pairing, the plan, the race through the catacombs as catastrophe happens above. It is all part of the same beginning that will end her.
This Barriss is so sure of their mission, so sure of their methods and end result, that she is willing to die for it, as good Jedi do. Trapped in the suffocatingly small belly of an enemy tank, she thinks not once of doubts. A little of sorrow, because they are children, fourteen and fifteen, and this is death. She holds two lightsabers, then one, and clasps Ahsoka’s hand, this time with the weary resignation belonging to veteran soldiers. Which they are, in a twisted way. At least I die with something beautiful is what passes through her mind before darkness swarms her vision.
But she doesn’t die. She wakes to a world of wreckage and wounds calling itself victory. At the time, she doesn’t take it too deeply. Instead, her master greets her, and Ahsoka, who saved them, gives her another beatific smile. It feels like a win.
The high stays with her as they are assigned to the same ship. Barriss loves being able to carry help with her to far quarters. She loves it even more with good company. Good discussion too. Ahsoka poses a question about their role: warrior or peacekeeper? What is the difference?
Oh, the danger that smile carries.
When she encounters death again on this journey, it is her, begging for it. She pleads for Ahsoka to kill her, breath smoking in the wintry air. It uses her last shred of uninfected control. She capitulates unwillingly to unconsciousness.
Again, she doesn’t die. Ahsoka saves her, uses her own body heat to keep Barriss from freezing.
It is always Ahsoka who saves her.
And so they become friends. They meet on odd missions, pass each other in the temple’s halls. Barriss is at first bemused, then relieved, then grateful when Ahsoka keeps bounding up to her, all grins and excited greetings. The war ties her up tight, but seeing Ahsoka always loosens something in Barriss’s chest.
It becomes a pattern. Barriss is sent into the wider world of pain and suffering. She does her best to ease it, but finds herself surrounded and thwarted by the very ones she treats. Even the Force cannot bolster her faith. Near frustration, her spirits low, she returns to Coruscant, and Ahsoka will appear. She’ll say something, do something, smile over something, and it is all easier to bear.
Is it inevitable? Is it all inevitable, what will happen? Or is inevitability a farce, an excuse, and is Barriss just denying a weakness that might be called humanity in another light?
She marvels at Ahsoka in their brief times together. At her endless determination, her optimism, her pluck. The ways she manages to exasperate most masters she interacts with. A part of Barriss wonders why, out of all the people out there, Ahsoka favors her with her presence.
They meditate together in the temple garden occasionally. Blossoms rain down from the trees there, and Ahsoka, always restless, fidgets whenever petals catch in her montrals. Barriss doesn’t open her eyes, but, on occasion, she lets herself laugh softly.
Eight months after their initial meeting, Barriss comes back from a mission with five bloody lines scored down her back, and when she shows Ahsoka, there’s a hiss of indrawn breath.
“ Oh , that looks like it hurts.”
Careful fingers touch the skin beside the wound, gentle as can be. Barriss becomes aware of her flushing cheeks. She forces a smile and steps away, tugging down her shirt. “Please don’t worry yourself. It’s nothing.”
The place where she was dealt it is nothing but dead bodies and rubble.
“Are you sure?” Ahsoka’s voice is worried, insistent. Barriss regrets making a fuss over it all; she suddenly wants to go hide herself in a closet.
“I am sure.”
Ahsoka nudges her affectionately. And somehow, Barriss finds she means it.
So how does it happen? How does inevitable become irrefutable?
It goes like this: in little increments, in a galaxy at war. Barriss gradually becomes more and more conscious of her fellow padawan. She finds her eyes being drawn to Ahsoka. Ahsoka’s padawan beads flash from the other side of a room, and Barriss looks – instinctively, helplessly. Ahsoka laughs, and Barriss flickers in her concentration on the other side of the temple. She trips during training when Ahsoka enters the room, and catches Master Luminara’s spike of inquisitiveness. But when she then launches into the most fluid set of moves she can begin to think of, her master’s feeling shift to one of cautious understanding. She gives Barriss an impromptu lecture on attachment the next day, and Barriss leaves confused.
When Ahsoka is not climbing into her dreams, it is the screams of the dying. One moment Ahsoka, too close, is telling her a story, smelling of crushed pine, the next her corpse shrivels into black ash and Barriss is alone on a smoldering plain full of ruins and fire. She wakes up weeping and wanting something she doesn’t know how to put into words.
One warm Coruscant evening, Barriss and Ahsoka watch the sunset from the roof of the Jedi temple. They have taken this rare stretch of time without assignments, without purpose, to laze and catch up and laugh together. Over the hours, they have inched closer, moving into each other’s orbits like planets near collision.
The sun blazes crimson, paints the sky gold. Lavender feathers the clouds. They watch in companionable silence – Barriss can feel Ahsoka’s weariness from her last mission at last catching up to her. As the dazzling display slips into bluish night, Ahsoka’s head drops onto Barriss’s shoulder. Faint snores start to rise from her.
Barriss freezes. Ahsoka’s lekku feel softer than expected; her cheek, squashed against the fabric of Barriss’s robe, is even more so. The contact floors her. She forgets how to breathe normally. What are her hands doing? Should she move? She absolutely cannot make that wounded animal sound that is currently trying to climb its way out of her chest; Ahsoka will wake up. Act normal might not be a command her body is currently able to obey, but why does Barriss not want Ahsoka to leave, to wake up, to move away at all –?
It hits her abruptly, all but smacks her in the face.
Oh.
Oh.
But they are Jedi. This won’t – this can’t – be allowed. Barriss knows this.
She panics. Ahsoka will hate her. Every Jedi will. They will spurn her and kick her out and a lifetime of following every other rule will leave her in some backwater planet watching as the galaxy crumbles to warfare around her.
Ahsoka shifts on her shoulder, letting out a sleepy sound of discontent. Maybe she senses the tension in Barriss’s frame.
Barriss softens. In that moment, a small, treacherous part of her whispers, is this really so bad?
There are countless stories outside the order that tell of the nobility of this. Countless poets who extol its virtues.
And she feels so… warm, for once.
It is willful and reckless – maybe Ahsoka is getting to her – but Barriss thinks maybe the order is wrong about this particular thing. Like she is beginning to believe they might be about their position on violence.
Jedi are supposed to be peacekeepers. How can love be a deterrent to peace?
Besides, it’s not as if… not as if Ahsoka will have to feel the same. If it is poison, it will not spread. Barriss can feel it, cradle it, turn it over like a length of silk in her mind, and bind her mouth shut with it. She can, because she has.
But she will not give it up.
Such a tiny rebellion, to keep secret one’s feelings. Such a tiny spark, so carefully nurtured.
How can anything go wrong?
(She has not yet learned that the best poetry details tragedy.)
***
The war drags on.
It is a relief that lightsabers cauterize what they touch instantly, that they are not material weapons but concentrated cylinders of energy, because it means Barriss cannot see the blood built up on hers. As it is, she often emerges from missions with her hands flecked in crimson and her clothes soaked with patches of deepening brown. It made her shiver and cry at the beginning. Now it makes her numb; a cold steals over her and her thoughts, and she feels that ice in her lungs. There are days she fears she will never be warm again.
It isn’t always battlefields she and her master are assigned to. Sometimes Barriss gets to negotiate peace among feuding factions of far-off planets. Other times, they arrive as medics and Barriss gets to play healer. Those are her favorite missions.
It is still grief to hold an old soldier’s hand and watch the shine of his eyes dull, but it is easier, because Barriss has spent the last hour fighting with his comrades, rallying their spirits against the hungry maw that is their demise. And she saved them. She saves so many, and it feels better to force a smile for a patient than to grimly observe silent mounds of droid parts and ash-blasted buildings.
Those missions help. They remind Barriss of what the Jedi are supposed to stand for. But they can’t make her forget the rest.
More fighting. More suffering. More endless, pointless confrontations and undone ceasefires, bombardments and battalions, artillery and atrocities.
A month might see her battling droids and getting into skirmishes with local milita or intergalactic criminals without coming back to Coruscant once. She takes in the aftermaths of hundreds of clashes. So finely attuned to violence she is that death and desperation almost become a perfume she can smell in the air. It’s sickening to dip into the Force in these places; the sharp feeling of souls savagely ripped out of existence makes her head ring.
Even on Coruscant, Barriss is enmeshed in conflict. The temple is always abuzz with the newest reports from this battle or that Separatist stronghold revolt. The Senate plays their games of power, discarding the pleas of dozens of poorer planets. The lower levels of their own city remain cespits of crime and decay, and no one from the glittering surface ever thinks to reach a hand down to help. Sometimes, on her weekends back, Barriss goes down to hospitals and help those she can, and feels the virulence of their desperation and anguish like a crushing wave in the Force.
It is hardly a relief to come back. But it’s worse to leave, because of what she has to see and has to do.
There, amid the chaos and carnage and charnel fields picked clean of life, Barriss begins to disappear.
In her place is another. Soldier is her name. Soldier gets up and coughs herself hoarse at the dust and debris in the air. Soldier marches onto battleground after battleground in the service of – well, Soldier doesn’t fully have a grasp on why, but Soldier does it anyway. Soldier commands comrades to leave behind craters that used to to be cities. Soldier leaves behind friends.
Barriss cries herself to sleep. Soundlessly, so not to wake Soldier.
She – and this galaxy – are breaking.
How can no one else see it?
***
One day, she and her master end up on Mirial.
They are not sent to fight. It is a short journey to provide supplies for a sector of the planet that experienced a sequence of devastating rockslides. Barriss has a sneaking suspicion that Luminara has arranged it. She is a Jedi, after all, and Jedi see not only with their eyes but with the Force. Perhaps she sensed her padawan was too mired in the difficulties of the past few years.
They don’t talk about it, however. They never do.
It’s… odd, being back on the planet she was born on. Odder seeing features like hers reflected back at every angle. Mirialan tattoos form intricate designs that take up entire faces here. Barriss honors her culture with her own, but she’s never considered how many varieties they come in. It’s art, really. A life inked across skin.
The air is dry and carries a chill as they begin to unload supply boxes. To Barriss, the planet both embodies splendor and disappointment . The scrubby vegetation flowers varying shades of green and has rosy-hued leaves. Everyone welcomes her with limited hesitation. It is beautiful, that is for sure. But it is not really familiar. Barriss spent only four years of her life here, barely enough to collect the faintest scraps of true recognition – for the crispness of the hills, the precise aroma of a certain folded pastry, a scrap of landscape she once saw from her childhood window. Curiosity has urged her to read many a report on her home planet, but scholastic articles and treatises, especially ancient, out-of-date ones from the dusty backs of Jedi archives, don’t lend her a real sense of belonging. Nor does coming back to a place she no longer knows.
She wonders of her parents. Wonders if they still think of her, the child they gifted to a greater cause. She stays away from the idea of seeking them out with a sort of bitter resignation; that attachment would be far too blatant for many to ignore.
But amid the only slightly frantic hustle of supply operations, Barriss imagines what her life would be if she had never left. Had she not been Force sensitive, she might have been raised in a home much like the middling-sized curving houses she passes while distributing food and medicine. Her village might have looked on fondly as she floundered her way through life.
Somehow, the idea doesn’t comfort her as much as she once thought it would. The war would have come for her in another form. Even Mirial feels it’s impacts – there’s been a proliferation of weapons and tension in the streets. She would be exposed to its horrors one way or another.
But as Barriss stays where she is, breathing, helping, a little knot of stress unwinds itself in her stomach.
She’s on her lunch break, watching Master Luminara laugh at something a volunteer said – actually laugh, head thrown back, looking borderline undignified in her fit of mirth – when she thinks of Ahsoka.
Ahsoka would like it here. She would find a way to laugh too. Barriss could show her Mirial – the sunrises washing pink over the hills, the tea vendors calling on the lazily winding streets, the mountains up north with sides so sheer they could have been ancient columns leftover from an age of giants.
She pictures a scene: herself, pulling Ahsoka around by the hand, smiling at something the girl said. Ahsoka’s nebula-blue eyes wider than the sky – new things always spike her curiosity.
Maybe they would wander up to another rooftop at the end of the day. Or perhaps find a deserted hilltop. Or climb to the top of a mountain, if that’s what it took. They could watch a thousand sunsets or one. She only wants Ahsoka to be with her, in a world at peace.
Maybe she wants more; a brush of hands, a flutter of eyes meeting, a kiss – but those things are beyond articulation. She cannot dare that far in imagining.
This, of course, is impossible.
And Barriss feels… angry, all of a sudden. Of how stupid of a rule is keeping her from something beautiful. How ridiculous this war is – and everyone in it! Every Jedi raising a lightsaber and pushing fatalities higher!
Her image of Ahsoka fades. She sets down her lunch as her insides seem to ignite. Barriss has never considered herself an angry person. Yet here she is, near rage. Or near tears. She can’t tell the difference.
Habit makes her bite her tongue, as if to stifle an exclamation, though what has Barriss has ever impulsively exclaimed? She bites so hard it leaves a coppery remnant on her tastebuds – and accompanying guilt. As a Jedi, she should be better than this. As Barriss, she should not have to stoop so low as violence.
They leave Mirial the next day. Master Luminara stands at the windows of the ship and watches as it recedes into a pink and green speck, before turning around, indifferent. Barriss closes her eyes and says nothing, burying any remnants of an unbecoming wrath deep inside.
That new fire of hers abates over the next few weeks, but not completely. Frustration simmers beneath her skin as she trains, meditates, and avoids her own thoughts as much as her fellow Jedi. She doesn’t see Ahsoka; she’s out on a mission of her own.
But the heat of it writhes in her mind like a live thing. Barriss is assigned to go with Master Plo Kloon and push back an advancing droid army on Anoat. For the first time, she welcomes her time with a weapon in hand, desperate to pour this out of her, turn it to something external. Her anger fits right in, part of the chaos and artistry of hurt. It’s funny, in a way. Battle is a collage of care and terror and desperation – exactly what the Jedi claim to stand above. Yet here they are, leading millions into it.
Only, when it’s over, when Barriss heaves for breath over the hacked-apart pieces of her enemies, she doesn’t feel any better. She just feels sick. Sick, and very, very cold. Gooseflesh erupts painfully on her skin; her shivers feel spasmodic. She bends over, retches, and tastes burning rubber and cinders. No one near enough to notice as she gasps through the acrid aftertaste.
She has almost recovered when a droid head rolls over to her feet, buzzing and sparking. “Jedi! Je- jedi!” it babbles as it registers the lightsaber in her hand. “Prepare to be – de…stroooid.“
Barriss stares, uncomprehending, as it powers down with a few last jerks of motion. The red and blue wires that hang limply out of it’s neck look unnervingly like veins. A force of these droids has just killed nearly half of a nearby mining village in an attempt to capture a precious mineral. The survivors are battered and despairing, but the mines collapsed as the Republic attempted to push the enemy away. Their livelihood is ruined.
“Destroy us, then,” she says softly.
Someone should.
***
Barriss has always been the perfect padawan for Luminara Unduli. Attentive. Obedient. Compassionate. Dutiful. Steady. Quiet.
She now spends all her time pretending to be all those things.
Her attention wanes easily; she’s distracted by the littlest sounds. Empathy inflames her heart one moment and goes ice-cold another. She does what is required of her, and visits the healing halls in her free time, but hours that used to be spent pouring over ancient Jedi manuscripts or meditating are now spent in fitful contemplation. What she is contemplating is not yet something she is able to put into words.
She supposes her silence is the one thing she maintains. It’s easiest to think the things she is thinking in the isolation of her own mind.
Her master seems not to notice. Either Barriss is a better actor than she gives herself credit for or Luminara is all too distracted by the war. Or she simply does not care.
And what is Barriss doing, while pretending?
She is building a case. Evidence, she gathers with each mission. Reasonable proof. Justification. At night, before she goes to sleep, she makes lists and weighs pros and cons. She deliberates, argues with herself. Considers different paths.
A counterpoint surfaces and resurfaces on across her mental arguments, a juvenile plea more than anything, but nevertheless effective: Ahsoka Tano.
Because Ahsoka would not want her to do this. Ahsoka fights this war wholeheartedly to the promise on the other side that Barriss doesn’t fully believe in.
(It doesn’t occur to her to worry about Ahsoka getting hurt; her mind always shies away from the harm her plans might inflict, and right now, her plans are not yet so… explosive.)
Sometimes she derails herself thinking of Ahsoka at all. It will turn from casualty lists to wondering if Ahsoka would enjoy Mirialan tea or reminiscing about some afternoon they spent together. It feels at once luxurious and crucial to scheme of ways to get Ahsoka to hold her hand.
Maybe her head is just filled with more Ahsoka than sense.
(Later, on Barriss’ more lucid days, she will understand that this isn’t just intense, youthful affection; it is a life raft, a single rose in the ashes, and the disparity it brings is what highlights it, draws it again and again to Barriss’s attention, so that she might drown in it. So that she may die with something beautiful.
Ahsoka smiles, and the gray world looks all the starker.)
But every time Barriss ventures off-planet, her resolve is tested, broken, and reformed stronger. The galaxy cannot keep going this way. She agonizes over her conclusion: that this self-perpetuating cycle must end.
The last straw is Eriadu.
It is a large planet for the Outer Rims, heavily inhabited and industrialized. It’s slums are many and crowded. Still, the planet draws migrants with the lure of lommite work. Whether extracting, processing, or transporting the ore, it offers enough credits to entice those from even less fortunate worlds.
Barriss arrives in the middle of a crisis. See, the war has sufficiently disrupted the movement of workers to the planet that the ore economy is precariously strained. Fights have broken out over control of precious resources as the overburdened population revolts.
Some of the more powerful families have found their own revolting solution to the labor shortage: slavery. They gather up groups of people from neighboring worlds and force them into the steel-press of their industry, prodding them on with threats and lures of food.
It is pure chance that gets Barriss and her team here. A man with insider information was kind enough to tip of a rare uncorrupted authority, who in turned tipped off the Republic.
That was a year and a half ago. Only now did the Republic decide they have sufficient troops to send. Led by a padawan, for necessity’s sake.
They clear out a few rings of slavers in two weeks. Barriss dons her military persona and bites down frost when she sees the awful conditions these people have been unjustly forced to live in. Their delayed rescue doesn’t save everyone.
The worst part is the children. There are children in this place, forced to work until they have become nothing but skin and bones that would like nothing more than to collapse. Barriss frees as many as she can, but some stare at her with dull eyes, as if freedom is no longer a concept they can imagine.
They find bodies. Too small. Too late.
There is a point afterward where she corners a roomful of slavers, who cry for mercy and plead for their families. Her heart seems to slam against her ribs, drowning their voices. Her bloodflow is a ruthless, glacial deluge.
She sweeps her lightsaber across a slaver’s throat. It makes such a clean line, and the air is free at last from his incessant groveling.
Peace. Yes. This is peace.
Filled with thoughts of tiny, manacled wrists rubbed raw, Barriss advances on the others.
The entire flight back, she is confined to the lavatory, hurling her guts out. Between rounds, she curls up on the cold metal floor, tasting rot as her skin turns to ice.
Everything is wrong. Everything.
On Coruscant, she finds her room and crawls into bed and does not speak a word to anyone for two days. On the third day, Luminara knocks, forcing Barriss to begin pretending again. She walks out the door, eats food, and musters conversation.
Somewhere in her cold-fever haze of interaction, Barriss almost swears she sees concern in her master’s eyes. An old urge rises – to confess, to beg, to implore for directions to follow. It burns like a hot stone in her throat; she thinks she might split from it, or scream.
But Luminara does not broach the subject. She gives her usual, brief report on the mission she was on previously, and listens to Barriss’ own. She sketches out a few lessons that could have been learned – Barriss barely hears her, struggles to keep an even expression – then reminds her to keep up her meditation.
She leaves, with a serene “May the Force be with you, padawan.”
The stone that has crawled up to her tongue sizzles and cools. Barriss stares blankly at the walls.
Until a familiar voice interrupts her reverie, reverberating from a few halls over. It hurts to hear, because the raw and scraped parts of Barriss turn towards it like it is the sun and she a plant seeking sustenance.
Relief mingles with the pain. At least Ahsoka is alright. She can never be sure, not in these times.
Barriss closes her eyes and allows herself to bask in the knowledge, in Ahsoka’s nearness.
But she cannot quite make herself seek the other girl.
Because what if she doesn’t make it? What if Ahsoka, uncowed by hurt, by suffering, is swept under anyway? An endless fight will get to anyone in the end. It is an evil that feeds on itself. Forever draining the galaxy dry.
It’s wrong.
There’s such a searing belief behind that thought for a second Barriss stops breathing.
But yes. She sees it now. The Republic, the Separatists, the Senate, the Jedi – they are all wrong. They have and will continue to manufacture this awful situation.
How can they claim to be peacekeepers when their legacy is only one of blood and misery?
Some distance away, Ahsoka leaves the area she was. She strides down corridors, projecting purpose in the Force. Briefly, she passes the doorway of the room Barriss is in.
Barriss is entranced for the instance she is in view. Her head is half-turned away, but light pours over her, highlighting the blue and white of her montrals, the sun-color of a sliver of face. In that fraction of observation, Barriss can tell Ahsoka is smiling, eyes turned towards something ahead.
This. This is what she must save.
Ahsoka passes by. Barriss watches her disappear.
(A difficult piece of realization coming: long ago, Ahsoka was her friend. But it is difficult to be friends with a precariously centered anchor when the edge is so close.)
She makes a decision. She wins a case.
It is not just someone who has to speak up now; it is Barriss. She feels the weight of that on her shoulders, on her mind. Ever present. Ever pressing.
Something has to give. Something has to change.
The galaxy must be saved. It will take sacrifice – but what is her conscience against the horrific entity of war?
For Ahsoka, she will do it.
***
In spite of it all – maybe because – Barriss concludes the betrayal like a Jedi. In the end, that is what fails her.
She goes down to the lower levels. Counts the floors – a legion of criminals, a legion of families.
She gets out at the correct level, Ashoka’s directions ringing hollowly in her ears. With clinical detachment, she leaps soundlessly to and from crumbled building ledges, haphazardly bundled wires, rickety struts. Stays motionless while her target moves below.
She stalks Ventress through soot-covered back alleys. Incapacitates her with hardly a struggle (saber in hand, mechanical movements, pulse in her ears whispering save her, save them, see it through ). When she pulls on the mask, it feels hardly different than the stillness that has settled so deeply over her own features.
It is so easy, so familiar, she doesn’t even realize it when she finds herself standing in front of a pair of warehouse doors.
(Here, a buried, distant part of her thinks/hopes/despairs over the presence she detects inside.)
She enters. They fight. Battle is art. War is masterpiece. This is neither. This is sterile, clean, disengaged. This refuses to exist outside of a purpose.
(Luminara should be proud. She found a justification and cut the world neatly around it – a wound of principle, and nothing else.
Nothing else.)
She returns to the temple. There is an uproar – someone in the order has betrayed them. Except for one excursion, Barriss stays locked in her room, staring at two humming beams of red light. They are antithesis to the Jedi – hot and furious and aggressive. Barriss can feel how eager they will be to kill, to maim.
They’re just like her. Bled to become weapons, enactors of destruction.
This is what they made her.
She remembers strangling Leta. It wasn’t her hands that did it, but it was the Force, which made it all the worse. The Jedi had made it so the Force was more a part of her than her body; through it, she could sense Leta’s terror, her anger, her confusion – a blitz of emotions so strongly reminiscent of Barriss’s own ice-inhumed ones that she almost cried out.
She didn’t, though. She had stayed silent. She squeezed harder, suppressing their connection and her own feelings.
Everything had subsided into a frigid hum in the back of her mind.
She hears a name, back in her room, muffled, outside the door. It hits like an electric shock. Quickly, she stuffs the Sith sabers into a vase. Then she rises and leaves the room.
The Jedi turned on Barriss. Now Ahsoka will see how quickly they turn on her as well.
***
Her plan goes awry. She is discovered, then disarmed.
Ahsoka likely hates her.
The war will keep going on. Millions more will perish.
They put her in prison.
***
If asked, Barriss Offee would say failure was only slightly worse than Falling.
(If asked, Barriss Offee would say she never really Fell – but maybe, she admits, somewhere along the way, she left a piece of herself on some far away battlefield, and never quite got it back.)
Maybe a few would to think to question – how did the dark creep into their inner sanctums without their noticing? Where did it start? When did this infection take root?
(Most don’t want to know. They are content to believe it was a one-in-ten-thousand chance, a fault, a slip in a single mind. So they leave her alone.)
In truth, Barriss wishes she could answer. Perhaps it would bring clarity. Like, this is where the war entered my body, this is where my thoughts became a blade for my flesh to welcome.
But there isn’t one answer. Beginnings are cyclical. Like poems. Like inevitable things. Imprecise mayhem with endings that loop back around to ruminate on their roots.
Maybe it was a smile. Maybe it was a bomb.
Maybe it was just chaos and Barriss losing her mind trying to craft a kinder fate out of the remains of stardust and blood.
So here she sits, in a cell, quietly and in perfect stillness. She is not so much torn as much as passively drifting between remorse, relief, and release.
Remorse, because she did fail. The war wages still. The Jedi remain out there, blind in their arrogance, leading so many worlds to ruin. So many died (by her hand, a part of her ruthlessly reminds herself. Her fault, her fault), and it led to nothing.
Remorse for herself, as well. For the child she never got to be. For the distance that took the place of fondness. For never getting to visit Mirial with Ahsoka.
Relief chases the edges of that same sorrow. Because she did it, in the end. Spoke up. Brought to light the subterfuge of the Jedi. Shattered all their rules. Killed. Betrayed. Fell. All for a chance that never came to fruition.
But Ahsoka. Ahsoka is free. Ahsoka left.
One person. She saved one person, and warned those she could.
There’s nothing for her to do now, other than be still. Even as she catches herself waiting, she knows, deep down, there’s nothing to wait for.
It’s not that she is at peace. But she has spent so long abandoning herself that this forceful push into nothingness is almost a comfort. A selfish comfort.
At last, she doesn’t have to hurt.
She can, if she wants to, disconnect. Become empty. Relinquish, finally, the pain and the sorrow of the world outside. Release herself and all her burdens, descend into the cool sea of indifference.
It’s a very Jedi train of thought. Even here, she can’t escape her training.
Two things stop her from doing so.
She spent her last free moments standing against those who gave her these instinct. How can she just give in?
(Eternity waits patiently. It eats all resolve in the end.)
And that last look. Barriss will not stop replaying it in her mind, reawakening the pain, the regret, the dizzying feeling of wait, no, I half lived for your sake, how did I ever think to hurt you?
Their infinitesimal lock of eyes haunts her nightmares. Ahsoka holds her gaze (skies and star nurseries) as she puts a lightsaber through her gut, touches her face without any notion of the betrayal to come, arrives and leaves her to rot, or worst of all, tells Barriss she forgives her.
Sometimes, she allows herself tears. They are the only apology Ahsoka will never get.
(The poets say you fall in love. They neglect to add that you may never stop plummeting after.)
Barriss teeters across her three responses, and breathes. In, a swirl of sadness. Out, and it was for a purpose. In again, and it’s all air, suspended meditation. Out, Ahsoka (Ahsoka. Ahsoka, I’m–).
She inhales. Exhales. Readies herself for nothing.
The doors never open.