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“So, this is going to sound crazy,” Barriss began, her words echoing uncertainly inside the massive Geonosian war machine they had captured, now badly damaged and buried under the rubble of a factory.
Ahsoka quirked up a white eye-ridge. “Bossy Barriss Offee, the perfect Jedi, is going to tell me something that sounds crazy?” The other girl did know she was Anakin’s padawan - unless the blast had rattled her head more than Ahsoka had realized.
Barriss sighed and let her head thud against the metal interior of the tank, muffled by her hood. She took a deep breath and recentered herself, using the steady blue of her lightsaber, the only light in the dark space, as a beacon. It was hard enough to betray Ahsoka once, she reminded herself. Don’t fall into the trap of doing it again. “What would you say if I told you I knew how the war was going to go?” The war, she thought with a shudder, and so much more.
“That bad, huh?”
“Worse than you can imagine. Worse than I had feared.” Even with what she had prepared herself to do, she had never expected the sudden mass slaughter of so many of her fellows.
“In that case,” Ahsoka said with a shrug, “I’d say the Force had given you a warning of what’s to come so that you can avoid it. The legends are full of prophecies and visions like that.”
“The legends,” Barriss echoed. “But I’m no legendary hero.” I’m not even a hero, she added bitterly.
“Not yet,” Ahsoka countered. “But you’re clearly very smart, and you know what’s coming. So we’ll warn the Council, and we’ll stop it.”
“No! Or, at least, not yet.”
Ahsoka frowned. This was getting increasingly strange. She probably wasn’t suffering from oxygen deprivation, right? “Why not? Wouldn’t the Council want us to win the war?”
Barriss blinked as tears filled her eyes, tears for Ahsoka’s naivete. “You have to promise to believe me,” she began, and only once Ahsoka had agreed did she continue. “This is about much more than the war, Ahsoka. Just under three years from now, nearly every Jedi left in the galaxy dies within a span of ten standard minutes. I felt them die, Ahsoka, and every death was accompanied by the same three emotions: fear, shock–”
“And betrayal,” Ahsoka finished for her. “That’s why you can’t tell the Council.”
“Exactly.” Barriss punctuated the word with a grim nod. “I don’t know what happened, or why. The best I can tell is that the death of so many Jedi left a wound in the Force, a gaping hole in reality that my meditating consciousness slipped through, leaving me in the past. And so far, everything has happened the way I remember it.”
“Okay, but,” Ahsoka’s brow furrowed. “How did you survive?”
Don’t flinch now, Barriss steeled herself. “I was imprisoned for sabotage and murder; I was trying to call attention to how wrong it is that the Jedi - an order of peacekeepers and diplomats - were fighting a war.”
Ahsoka let out a low whistle. “When you put it like that…” Three years of endless violence? Ahsoka wondered to herself. “I don’t know that I would blame you.”
“That’s good,” Barriss said with a wan smile. “Because I put the blame on you. They caught me eventually,” she added to Ahsoka, wide-eyed. “And when I confessed, you didn’t call for my execution - you would have had every right to have done so, but I suppose you felt me worthy of mercy then.” She lowered her eyes and handed her lightsaber, still lit, to Ahsoka. “I can only hope you feel me worthy of mercy now.”
Ahsoka blinked as she grappled with the enormity of the implications of everything Barriss had said. “Why are you telling me all this?” she managed at last.
“Because whatever their crimes, the Jedi deserve better than whatever happened to them. And if they were betrayed on such a massive scale…then perhaps there is more at work here than I imagined. Something we need to investigate.”
“But why me? Why me, out of all the Jedi in the galaxy?” Ahsoka asked, still reeling.
“Oh, Ahsoka,” Barriss murmured, tipping her head back up, face to face with her fellow padawan, pressed close by the implied space carved out by the light from her saber. “Because I love you so.” She pressed a quick, dry kiss to stunned orange lips before she could help herself, then drew back. “I suppose I’m not - what did you call me? - the perfect Jedi after all.”
“No,” Ahsoka agreed, starting to feel her own doubts about the Order manifest three years early. “But you might just be the right Jedi.”