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It doesn’t take long for the crying and yelping to blend into the background, as if they were as much a part of the prison’s structure as the metallic grey walls or the forcefield reinforced doors. There’s always something happening here, always someone remembering their old life or someone tempting the hand of an overzealous guard. Everyone — prisoners and guards alike — just gets used to the noise and keeps their head down.
So when Barriss Offee doubles over in pain with a phantom scream locked in her throat, the guards outside don't even react.
Barriss clutches — scrapes at — her heart as if that might ease the tearing at her soul. At first, she thinks she's dying. She must be. Someone has poisoned her food or pumped the air full of toxins or plunged a secret saber through her chest because there is no other possible explanation, not for the life-rending void bursting through every part of her. She is being autopsied and hollowed out from the inside out and all she can do is cry.
The prey-animal blood haze passes and Barriss realises she's not dying; the galaxy is. It is being burned to ash and she is feeling every second of its suffering and nobody but her even seems to realise. The pain is not hers but it is so very close and it is bigger than anything Barriss has ever known. She wants to warn the men outside that something is happening, something is coming, but her throat refuses to cooperate.
After minutes or hours or days, the pain recedes. It dribbles away, like a tsunami returning to its ocean, and in its wake there is an emptiness Barriss cannot name. She does not understand what is lost, not yet, but she knows that something in the galaxy’s structure has been shattered.
—
She was told, at the start, that this place was temporary. That’s why there’s so little in the cell, why she is kept in complete isolation. They were going to move her somewhere more secure soon, once they worked out the security plans. A few years ago, she would have spent mere days here. But the war gets in the way of everything — even transfers of dangerous terrorists — and so whatever they planned, it never happens.
In a way, they were right; she does eventually find herself in a new prison, but she stays in the exact same cell. She’s no longer in Republic prison on Coruscant; she’s in an Imperial one. The changes are gradual; at first it’s the name, next it’s the insignias branded on the walls outside her cell. She notices less and less of the guards are painted maroon, replaced with varying soldiers who have numbers, not nicknames.
It’s one of the new guards she works up the courage to finally ask what happened, what this new Empire is that she hears over the loudspeakers. He doesn’t beat or electrocute her like she expected; he seems more confused by the question than anything. He explains it as if he were explaining a sunset to someone who’d never seen one, like it’s something that everyone should know, something natural.
Distantly, Barriss thinks he must not know who she is — who she was. He explains in the bluntest, blandest terms and does not make a single comment when he gives a name to the night of her greatest pain.
The Purge, he calls it. A dark and glorious birthday for the fledgeling Empire. With their strongest enemies dead, the Jedi betrayed the Republic and tried to assassinate the Chancellor — now Emperor. He lived and ordered the loyal Grand Clone Army to enact justice on its so-called peacekeepers. The Jedi are gone and they said the war’s over, but there are still Separatists. There are still campaigns in half the galaxy, but they don’t have rations or power cuts anymore, which is good, he says. Aside from that nothing has changed under the Empire, he tells her, before he remembers himself and tells her to quiet down and step away from the cell door.
Barriss barely hears the command over the thunder of blood in her ears. Nothing has changed. Everything has changed and she had no idea. She didn't agree with what they had become in the war, didn’t agree with the idea of Jedi generals and commanding warriors, but this…
She knows in her hollowed-out heart that this is not true. The Jedi were made into soldiers, not power-hungry assassins. They could not have fallen this far, not yet. No Jedi would… They were only trying to free themselves from the thing that was eating them, corrupting them like a bled-out kyber. Could nobody see that?
Barriss shook her head. She knew the Jedi would fall to the Republic one day, she just… didn’t expect it to happen like this. She expected years of solid decay, like the rotting of a living corpse, until the Order could no longer recognise itself. She thought its death would happen over years, maybe even decades. Yet all it took was one night and a knife in the back.
And now everything she fought to save is gone.
Part of her hisses how dare you mourn, after everything you did to them. How dare you mourn, after everything you did to her.
She wishes she could listen, but her grief pushes far heavier than her guilt. Instead, she tugs at the torn bonds in her soul, reaches through the empty expanse where ten thousand lives once sung bright, and calls. She calls and calls and screams and howls and calls .
Nothing calls back.
Soon enough, she begins to mourn herself. Every time she hears a too-heavy footstep, her heart spikes in panic. They’re coming for her too. The Republic used the Jedi for their power and the Empire killed them for it. Barriss might not be a Jedi now , but she was raised as one. She has that power. She is a threat. She is a loose thread and she must be cut.
They’re coming for her too. It’s only a matter of time.
—
She thinks she is less a person and more a thing by now. Hollowed out by isolation and preparation and an overwhelming knowledge of things she should never have had to understand.
At first she is resigned. She sits and she waits and she watches the door, flinching every time a new food tray clatters in. All she registers is the alarm of footsteps and the electric-fast beat of her heart. There is no room in this small, dark cell for anything but fear.
She continues in this state, somewhere between life and death. She eats only when her stomach calls louder than her terror, moves only to keep her limbs half-functioning.
It’s soon. It has to be soon.
She barely sleeps, but she dreams one night. It’s the first in months that doesn’t jolt her awake, heaving in a cold sweat. She dreams of the gardens, untouched by death and war, a calm in the middle of the chaotic city. She dreams of the Temple’s quiet, of her master’s instruction, of an orange-skinned and pointy-toothed grin. She dreams.
She wakes up feeling — feeling, how novel! — a half-washed heartache. She knows they are dead. She knows she will never enter that Temple again, never hear another lesson or another sweet, honey-like laugh. She is going to die like them, this much she knows. But that morning she decides she will face death as her people did, with dignity and in strength. She runs through stances holding nothing. She meditates and ignores the Force’s black silence. It does not make her feel any less a ghost, but it ties her down. She memorises the guards’ shift changes and their footsteps, one-two-heavy down the hall.
She does not hope. She does not expect anything to come of her memorisation, but there is nothing else to do but listen.
—
In the end, all that memorisation is for nothing.
She blinks against the hallway light when they finally open her cell, wincing at the change in environment. A prim officer holding a datapad comes into focus, followed by a small squad of troopers.
Barriss stills. She thinks this is it. They’ve come for me.
But the troopers keep their guns neutral across their chests. The officer clears his throat and reads a command; you’re being transferred, he tells her. She blinks dumbly.
The officer’s mouth flattens in a mix of disappointment and boredom. She half-thinks he’ll repeat it — slower, like her brain has turned into the sludge they feed her. But he wants to get the job done; he silently gestures and two troopers move forward to cuff her routinely. They guide her out the cell and into the hall that she hasn’t seen in full in four years.
The officer leaves the group as they turn down the hall, and she realises there are only four guards surrounding her. All they have are guns and flimsy white armour, shinier than the clones’ armour ever was. Have the Jedi been dead so long that the Empire has forgotten their danger? Or is it only that Barriss has been buried too deep for them to remember her or what she was?
She risks asking them where they’re taking her and she’s met with unsure silence. They’re just grunts, she supposes; the new Empire does not need its cogs to understand the machine.
She considers waiting for a shipyard or a secondary location, but she has waited years for this opportunity; she will not waste it looking for a better one. The Republic forced her to be a warrior and the Empire forced her to be something craftier. She waits only for the bell that calls a shift change. The flimsy guards fall like cards under the Force and she is gone before any alarms so much as think of blaring.
She’s sure they notice something soon enough, but she's fled through the city before and this time there are no vengeant Jedi masters to find her. She steals a cloak from one stall and a headscarf from another, and blends right into the busy Coruscanti night.
It takes little more than a nudge of his mind to convince the harbour master that she's meant allowed in, and more importantly allowed onto this cargo transport. She’ll switch ships at the next spaceport, stay running until her legs can’t take her any further.
In the later hours of travel, as the cargo around her shudders through hyperspace, her mind wanders to the negligence of her escape. Ahsoka has — or had. Ahsoka must have rejoined the Order after Barriss confessed and Ahsoka was exonerated, she and her master were probably executed too. But Ahsoka has-or-had friends in the Senate; she knows-or-knew all about bureaucracy and the drawn-out processes of politics, even if she claimed not to understand it when she tried to explain them to Barriss. Ahsoka would have known a thing or two about how an organisation could forget a prisoner like this. If she were here, sitting next to Barriss on this cargo carrier headed to who-knows-where, she would be theorising rapidly, her hands and eyes flitting about like living static.
Barriss’ smile at the thought dies as fast as it appeared. It doesn’t matter that she’s free; she’s never going to see Ahsoka’s smirk or wild hands or hear her laugh again. She and her master were fast and bold Jedi, but they were closer to their soldiers than most. They never would have seen it coming.
Barriss had tried to tell Ahsoka that she was too trusting.
But she doesn’t want to admonish her friend or try to blame her or even roll her eyes at her. Barriss misses her friend. Misses her more than she thought her heart capable of, and alll she wants to do now is apologise. Or frame her better, so Ahsoka could have survived in Barriss’ place instead of being shot in the head by her own troops. Ahsoka deserved better.
But instead, it's Barriss who is sat in the shadow of a cargo crate headed to who-knows-where. A new plan forms alongside her directive to run. She must not take great risks and she must hide — but that does not mean she must be useless. She will help weaken the Empire, bit by bit, bolt by bolt, until it is weak enough to stab in the back.
She no longer wonders why the Force gave the burden of survival to a traitor like her. The Jedi taught against revenge, taught of peace and forgiveness, yet it is too late to save these teachings. It is far too late to save them.
But Barriss is certain, more than she has ever been of anything, that it is not too late to avenge them.