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Chapter Text

The door to her cell swung open with a hiss as the locks let out a burst of pressurized air. The Force swelled back into Barriss, the noise in her head growing louder than ever, the storm of the war and the killing and the inescapable pressure inside her skull. It had been growing for years, but in this moment it seemed worse than ever, and Barriss could have sworn that she could feel the deaths of Jedi, bloody wounds opening across the galaxy as they were cut out of it.

The two guards levelled their blasters at her. A third clone, this one wearing a captain’s rank, said, “hold. regulation D, subregulation 3 clearly exempts Sith from the category of Jedi.”

Something was wrong. Even through the noise, she couldn’t feel them. Something ripped at her and she could have sworn her crèchemaster’s presence in the Force was gone, but that was impossible. She was still at the temple, raising more younglings. Had the war gotten so bad in her absence? The noise pulsed and Barriss just wanted to make it stop. She would kill as many of them as she needed to until they saw that it had to stop, all of it, the killing and the dying.

“‘Sith’ only refers to the Emperor at this time.”

“Subregulation F on fallen Jedi with potential may apply.”

“Identify yourself. Are you Jedi, Sith, or fallen Jedi?”

“What’s happening?” The noise went from a constant whine to a shrill screech and Barriss resisted the urge to clap her hands to her head, fall to her knees, and wail. She was stronger than that.

The safety on the blaster clicked off. “Identify yourself.”

Could she grab the Force well enough to choke them? Not all three at once. She needed time to think, to make everything quiet again. “Explain your criteria further.”

If they answered, Barriss didn’t hear them, because the noise in the Force reached a pitch that would have broken glass and she fell to her knees as a wave of darkness and death and fury and certainty and peace washed across Coruscant. It was like the felling of a great tree, the death of something ancient and timeless, and at once it was like the fury of a wounded animal, willing to lash out to the last drop of blood because by its nature it could do nothing else. These two feelings were laced together, distinct but inseparable, and they overwhelmed Barriss so thoroughly that for a moment she was nothing at all, not a person, not in this cell but everywhere, dispersed throughout the Force like smoke on the wind, and everywhere the Force screamed.

And then, for the first time in years, it was quiet inside Barriss’s head. The Force was still screaming but it was outside of her and she could raise her shields and it grew quieter. Barriss was alone inside her own mind.

It felt like coming back from the brain worms, and she half expected to look up and see Ahsoka standing over her, these last few years all a dream. Instead, there were the three clones, and they dropped their blasters too, clasping their hands to their heads. One of them shouted. Their Force presences were suddenly apparent, as if a shield around them had fallen, and Barriss could sense that one of them was young, recently off Kamino, while another was old for a clone, hiding chronic pain that might have seen him removed from service. Their captain was doing everything she could to protect them from being sent back to the front, and was terrified it wouldn’t be enough.

Barriss, only minutes ago, would have killed them for being too loud.

“Something’s wrong with me,” she said, looking up to meet the helmeted face of one of her would-be executioners. “Something is wrong with the Force. You have to call the Temple right away and ask for a mindhealer and a Master and- and a Shadow. Please.”

--

The comms didn’t work. No comms worked. Anywhere.

--

“Senator Amidala?” Barriss would admit to staring. She’d expected a healer. She’d asked for a healer. Any Jedi wouldn’t have surprised her, or even a navy officer or senior official to stop her from complaining. Instead, she had Senator Amidala, wearing a simple grey suit and with a silver blaster at her hip. She’d gotten a haircut since Barriss had seen her last.

“No,” said Senator Amidala, “my name is Sabé. Senator Amidala is in the hospital.”

Something had happened on Coruscant. Barriss couldn’t hear it anymore, not with the door to her cell shut again, closing out the Force – how strange, it hadn’t stopped the noise inside her head before – but that would explain the feeling of fresh death permeating the Force whenever the door was open. Perhaps a strike on the Senate.

“Will she be alright?” Barriss asked, half because it seemed like the natural thing to ask and half because she remembered Amidala as one of the better ones, clearing the admittedly subterranean bar for being a mostly compassionate Senator.

“Coruscant maternity care is very good,” Sabé said, “but she is early and Skywalker says he’s been having bad premonitions. Both of them suspect the Sith may have done something.”

It was a lot of information all at once, and strange to share with a prisoner. “I asked for a healer. Why are you here?”

“You asked for a Jedi,” Sabé said. “That message made it to the temple, where it reached Acting Grandmaster Nu. She’s occupied at the moment, and so is Anakin, so he sent me.”

“But–”

“Offee,” she interrupted, “there’s no one else. The Sith trap was to place biochips in the heads of each clone. When he triggered it, they killed their Jedi. Including a march on the Temple. Anakin stopped them by frying all the comms relays, saved the last few initiates, but that was all. If there are any other survivors, we can’t get to them.”

--

Barriss was right. The Jedi were on the wrong side of the war, they were wrong to fight in it. It was a betrayal of their beliefs and the source of their doom.

Barriss was wrong. She’d thought the Jedi were the creators of their own discontent, the betrayers of their own ideals and the root of their own downfall. Barriss’s mind had grown loud with what she’d thought was the displeasure of the Force and it had only faded when Yoda and Palpatine had killed each other, when the Sith Lord had been burned from her mind just as Anakin had burned him from the minds of the clones.

How had she fallen so categorically into this trap, become an unwitting tool for the Sith’s machinations?

How was it that she, the most undeserving, was one of the last left?

--

Jocasta Nu was a pragmatist. She believed every piece of knowledge deserved to be preserved, that it was possible to learn from all of it. When faced with the destruction of the Order, she had chosen to preserve herself and her holocrons behind the millennia-old security of the vault. When faced with the Order left to her, two fallen Jedi, one in prison and the other willing to surrender if it would keep the peace, she made the choice that fit her nature, which was to use all the tools available to her.

--

Master Nu summoned Barriss from her cell and met with her and her armed guards on the steps of the Jedi temple. Barriss’s shields, still weak, failed utterly in the face of discord of death and despair that echoed from the building where she had grown up, where she had lost herself. She could hear them crying out and knew that this hadn’t been a product of the Jedi at war, condemning themselves to violence. This had been the Jedi at peace, convinced of their own victory and slaughtered in their home, at prayer and at rest. What would the Sith, the Chancellor, have done if Barriss had gotten her way and they’d decided to end the war? Would it have ended just the same?

Master Nu was a lady Barriss often thought of as having a noble bearing, an admirable dignity. To see her leaning on her stick, looking as if someone had hollowed out her soul, was almost as shocking as the sudden silence in Barriss’s mind had been.

“You wanted to speak to me, Madame Nu?”

She looked at Barriss half with appraisal and half with utter contempt that made her want to sink into the ground with her shame. She had allowed her madness (Sith-manufactured, perhaps, but her own nonetheless) to overtake her and had been a pawn towards the destruction of the order. And now they were all dead, the elders she had looked up to and the children she had wanted to see free of the war alike.

“Why did you send for a healer? You have no injuries.”

Barriss wished her hands were free only so she could fold them nervously in front of her. “There was a noise in my head. I could hear the deaths of the war in the Force. It was overwhelming and then it stopped and I had clarity. I thought– I hoped someone could help me.”

“You’re telling the truth,” Master Nu observed, with calculation rather than disbelief. Barriss nodded. “You aren’t the first person to tell me today that they’ve been under the influence of a Sith Lord without any Jedi so much as batting an eye. Regrettably, it’s less unbelievable when attested to by multiple independent sources. So, the negligence of the Jedi has cost us the independence of eight million men under our command, the minds of two of our most promising young knights, and the lives of all the rest.

“The question remains, then, what do you want now that the compulsion is lifted from your mind?”

The want for silence was gone. She wanted the discordant pain, like a bow shrieking across its strings with too much pressure, to lift, but only so she could again hear the lovely music. With that faded, what did Barriss Offee, alone in her own mind, want?

“I want to help. I’ve always wanted to help.”

“Kneel then,” Madame Nu said, “and give me your oath, Knight Offee.”

--

“You’re right to suspect Sith influence in this sickness,” Barriss said, studiously watching Senator Amidala’s pallid face. She had no intention of looking at Skywalker and seeing the naked hatred in his eyes as he looked at her. Even though Amidala was in and out of consciousness, heavily drugged, and almost certainly could not understand her, Barriss addressed her. “But I have reason to believe you will be alright. Some few people, often children, are instinctive Force users, particularly against threats to themselves or their parents. I can already tell that you’ve given birth to two. Keep them close and trust that the Force will provide. Skywalker can help steady them, keep them calm in the Force the way he would for an apprentice and help shield them from the storm that’s raging everywhere.”

As she left the room, she barely caught Skywalker’s whispered “thank you.”

--

There had been a recurring debate, over thousands of years, about whether the Jedi were a religious order. Conducted in student debate tournaments, Senatorial tax policy meetings, and the halls of the order itself, proponents and opponents of the idea volleyed back and forth different concepts both of what a religion was and what the Jedi should be. For individual Jedi, how they approached the question could vary wildly. Some Jedi approached life as though they were priests in the Way of the Force. Others regarded their Jedi role as so fundamentally non-religious that they themselves were members of other religious sects. Their status as Jedi was a quirk of birth, a product of their skills, rather than a system of belief through which they exercised them.

Barriss had been deeply invested in that debate once, writing a prizewinning essay comparing different frameworks used to understand the definition of a religion and how the Jedi fit into it. For herself, she had developed a complex view that posited that while the Force was fundamentally non-religious (as much as gravity or time), belief in the tenets of the Jedi Order was essentially a religious commitment. Connection to the Force did not require following the Code, and so the choice to do so was an act with significance. Jedi had faith in the Force, and in the doctrine of the Order as the right way in which to achieve connection with it.

Barriss had wanted to write a book about that, had wanted to dedicate part of her life to this long, messy debate because she thought she could see parts of it that nobody else did. And yet somehow, in the noise and mess of the war, she’d stopped caring. If you’d asked her three months ago, she couldn’t have explained it to you. There weren’t any books about it in the room she’d been assigned as a knight. It wasn’t until she’d worked up the nerve to go into Master Luminara’s room, until she’d seen that her essay award was still nestled on a shell between two dying plants, that she remembered that part of herself.

Master Nu didn’t have a strong opinion on whether the Jedi were a religion, though she could have recommended a dozen books on the subject, and Skywalker was too busy to care even if he had one. Barriss had her self back, and there was no one left to debate with.

--

Barriss sat on the plastoid chair with blood on her hands, struggling to breathe. It wasn’t the blood of her oppressive dreams, the bleak visions of war. It wasn’t the blood of the people she’d killed.

“He’ll live,” she told Commander Fox, who was watching her with the same neutral expression he must have schooled through years in the company of the Sith Master.

“He won’t thank you for it.”

If Barriss had been scheduled to meet with the Commander even fifteen minutes later, if she hadn’t broken into a run the second she’d felt the swell of pain in the force, the clone – she thought he was a commander with one of the other Jedi who’d died on Coruscant, maybe Yoda’s or Fisto’s – would have died. Barriss still didn’t know his name, but she knew he’d live, for now.

“I didn’t become a healer to be thanked.”

She got up out of the chair and went into the adjacent fresher to scrub at her hands. There were flecks of blood on her robes too. She’d have to wash them when she went back to the temple. None of the temple staff were coming in, and so, in addition to being the last Jedi in the galaxy, they were also doing their own laundry.

In a pinch, she thought Master Luminara’s robes would fit her. But Barisss would die before taking those out of her closet, acknowledging, as she knew she had to, that her Master was as gone as every other Jedi in the Galaxy.

She told Fox, “he’ll need more care than this. I can staunch wounds, knit flesh, but I can’t be here with him, like he’ll need. Help with basic tasks. Someone to talk to.”

“The medics are already overwhelmed,” Fox told her. “And they weren’t trained for anything like this.”

Neither was Barriss. Not really. But unlike the clone medics, everything she’d been doing since the start of the war had been something she wasn’t trained for. A part of her wanted to tell them to toughen up. Barriss had been given no choice in that, after all.

But then, they’d never had any choice either.

“Were the medics also required to…” Fox nodded once, grimly. He hadn’t, but Barriss could hardly count the lack of initiates’ blood on his hands a mercy when the cause for it was the Sith’s personal interest in him. “And who heals the healers?” She wanted to scream, a little. “Let me see what I can do to help.”

“Alright,” the Commander said, slowly, “but did you still want to hear about what we’re doing to turn everyday patrols over to civilian authorities?”

Right, yes. Barriss had a job that wasn’t just healing now, because she was the second highest-ranking Jedi on Coruscant. “Good idea.”

--

Barriss still wasn’t entirely sure what to make of the fact that a small coterie of senators, and their staff, had moved into the temple too. Technically, only Amidala and Organa slept there, but after Barriss had insisted that Amidala needed more rest and monitoring given the Sith involvement in her pregnancy, Sabé and one of the other women who looked like Amidala had started being there more days than not. And then, after one of Barriss’s senate days – which were terrible, because none of them knew whether they should fear her or pity her – Riyo Chuchi had come up to her and asked,

“Do you regret it?”

Nobody has asked, yet. Everyone else seemed to either take it as a given that she did, or assume she didn’t because they didn’t believe she was telling the truth about the noise in her head.

But as a Jedi, having been asked, she could only tell Chuchi the truth. “I don’t even know how to start regretting it. It feels like a thing that happened to someone else. How can I regret it when, in that moment, there wasn’t anything else to do?”

And Chuchi nodded, as if this made sense to her, which it barely did to Barriss, and asked, “do you regret hurting her?”

Skywalker always talked about it like it was all about Ahsoka too. Barriss knew why. For her, sometimes, it felt like that too. She tried not to think too much about the warmth of Ahsoka’s smile, or her awful jokes. Or the fact that she’d probably been gunned down on Mandalore in a war she wasn’t even supposed to be fighting.

“I regret hurting her,” Barriss said, “I regret killing them. But I also regret that nothing I did that day could stop what happened in the end. I wish I’d been able to see where it was coming from, who was really poisoning the force around me. If I had…”

She’d have died, because it had taken the lives of five Jedi Masters to bring down Sheev Palpatine. But at least she would have died on the right side of the war, and maybe the temple would have someone else, someone more worthy, to fill it.

“I know,” Chuchi said, and, for some reason, she reached out and squeezed Barriss’s hand in hers before running off. The next day, she’d come to the temple after the Senate sitting ended, and she’d talked to one of the Pantoran initiates for a long while. After that she was always around, talking to Amidala or Organa, or helping with the children, and Barriss still wasn’t really sure why.

But in spite of her confusion, when Barriss had a problem that needed solving, she looked at their slate of friendly senators, and picked Chuchi.

--

“Volunteer counselors?”

“Ultimately I’d like the program to be self-sustaining. Clones supporting clones. But right now, they’re all in a serious mental health crisis, and we’re all in a serious mental health crisis. We need someone else. I know we’re not very likely to get anyone half qualified, but I’ll run teaching seminars before I let them actually talk to anyone. Fox can even vet them himself if he wants. But if there’s anyone left in the galaxy who’d be willing to try to help, we need them.”

Chuchi didn’t look at Barriss like she was crazy, which was good. Unfortunately, what she did instead was lean forward and press her forehead to her desk. It was suddenly, immediately obvious that she was no older than Barriss herself. Some planets, Barriss thought, wistfully, put adults in charge, and shuffled them regularly in and out of power regardless of gender instead of putting women in at sixteen to wash out by thirty, and then leaving old men in power until they revealed themselves to be Sith.

“Karking Skywalker,” she said, “and his karking destruction thing. Why did he have to blow up the entirecomms relay?”

Barriss had been so frustrated by Skywalker, when they were both Padawans, and then even more so after he was made a knight and Barriss was supposed to treat him like he actually knew things. These days, her reasons for disliking him seemed childish. If there were any Jedi left, anywhere in the galaxy – including her – it was entirely thanks to him and Master Yoda.

“I’m grateful for Skywalker.”

“I know. If Fox hadn’t gotten himself back – if all the clones hadn’t gotten themselves back – I can’t really imagine this galaxy being worth living in.”

If Chuchi had been a Jedi, Barriss would have chided her. Instead, she confessed, as she had before to Chuchi, “he stopped me. If he hadn’t, I’d probably be a Sith Acolyte right now.”

“And you wouldn’t be free,” Chuchi said, and she reached out to take Barriss’s hand again, squeezing it once tight, before Barriss left her office.

Chapter Text

Barriss was starting to hate the silence that Sidious had forced her to yearn for. The death and despair was starting to leach from the Force, but all that remained behind was emptiness, yawning ever-wider. Once, as a girl, she remembered going to the symphony, to see a show for children about a sleeping curse, where one-by-one, all the players in the orchestra ‘fell asleep’ on stage, and their instruments vanished, until it was only one violin who remained to defeat the witch and wake the rest.

Sometimes, it still seemed like the Jedi might wake, rising from their slumber to fill the galaxy with light and noise, but Barriss knew they wouldn’t. Instead, she took in what little joy she could, in the moments between putting out one fire and the next.

“They’re both perfectly healthy,” she told Skywalker. In this room, with him and his powerful children, there was a pocket where the Force still felt full and lively. “On Coruscant, we have treatments for any challenges children born prematurely are likely to face, and I don’t expect anything about this ordeal to have a longterm impact on their health. I’ll keep checking in, but I think you should be alright to begin relying on the doctors Senator Amidala initially identified. There aren’t many issues specific to Force-sensitives at that age, and most of the ones that there are resolve naturally when raised around another Force-sensitive. They just need someone to hold on to.”

“Attachments,” Skywalker said, rather sardonically.

“The most natural thing in the world for your species at that age,” Barriss told him. “They’re babies. All they know is to cling on to the people that keep them alive. Self-actualization is a concern for those of us with a mind to choose it.”

“Except that those over the age of nine are far too ancient to choose it. Only children young enough to be impressionable can be indoctrinated.”

He was arguing with her like they’d argued as padawans. At the time, Barriss had hated it, because he’d never followed proper debating rules, but there was always a thrill too. He’d challenged her, pushed her to be better. All those years ago, if this topic had come up, they would have argued about it until Anakin lost his temper and then they would have yelled at each other and Barriss would have appealed to Master Obi-Wan, who would have agreed with her, and Anakin would have sulked through dinner. But Master Obi-Wan was gone, now. All of them were gone.

“Maybe we were wrong,” Barriss found herself saying. “Maybe being a Jedi doesn’t mean anything if it’s all you’ve ever known.”

“Maybe they were right,” Anakin told her. “I got the Jedi Order killed.”

She’d heard what happened that day from Master Nu, how Skywalker had killed Windu, had fallen, and then, while Yoda and Palpatine killed each other, he’d changed his mind and saved the last few of them who remained by freeing the clones.

“I fell too,” Barriss told him in return. “It’s my fault too. If I’d been stronger, if I was a better Jedi, maybe none of this would have happened. You and Ahsoka would have been together, you could have protected her. I’m so sorry.”

To her confusion and amazement, Skywalker reached over, baby Leia still held in one arm, and used the other to pull Barriss into a hug.

--

“You wanted to see me about something, Commander?”

Fox shook his head. “Not me. I’m just playing messenger today. Captain Nixie was hoping to see you.”

It took Barriss a moment to recognize her, now that her force presence was entirely her own, and she was wearing casual clothes, a floral jacket and camouflage pants.

“I’m sorry for almost killing you,” she said. “In my defence, it was a really bad day.”

Barriss couldn’t help it – she laughed. Maybe for the first time in years.

“I thought about killing you too,” she confessed. “The noise in my head was so loud, I would have done anything to make it stop.”

“Yeah, I get that.”

“So what did you want to talk about?”

“I wanted to volunteer as a counselor,” said Nixie, “assuming you’re still accepting applications.”

She wasn’t the first – Chuchi had dug a few up, somewhere – but she was close to. And, more importantly, she was the first clone. Which she could do, of course, because she’d been assigned to the prison, where the only Jedi around to kill had been Barriss herself.

“I’m in too,” Fox’s assistant Catapult said, from the other side of the room. “We just thought Nix should have first dibs, since you’re her Jedi, kind of.”

Barriss resisted the urge to grimace. Catapult was irritatingly cheerful, under the circumstances. Judging by the look on Fox’s face when he covertly met her eyes, she wasn’t the only person who thought so.

--

Master Nu had sent out a call telling people it was safe to come back to the temple, but for some reason, she’d sent it in a weird, incomprehensible code – efficiency, she said – and nobody came. It was impossible to know if it was because of that, or because getting a signal to stay constant and audible over any distance longer than a half-parsec was basically impossible right now. Anakin was fixing relays near Coruscant, but it was a miserably slow process, and he was as busy as Barriss was, if not busier.

“You have to record a new message,” Barriss told Anakin, shoving a mic at him. “It can’t come from me.”

“Shouldn’t come from me either,” he said, but he did as she’d ordered.

--

The temple was silent deep in the night, as Barriss found herself sitting in the empty cafeteria with Bail Organa. He was the one notionally ‘on call’, if one of the initiates had a late night emergency. Barriss wasn’t sure why she was there with him, except for the fact that Luminara’s room, where she’d been sleeping on the fold-out couch because she hadn’t wanted to sleep in the room where she’d plotted the deaths of friends and strangers, had felt particularly full of ghosts that night. Unfortunately, the cafeteria wasn’t much better. They’d tried rearranging the furniture, even bringing in different types of furniture to create ‘rooms’ within the space, but there was no way to have this cavernous room feel anything less than monstrously empty. All they’d managed to do in the end was create this little circle of couches which, despite the charm of the mismatched furniture, felt as warm as midnight on Hoth.

After some time, in which their only acknowledgement of each other had been Organa’s nod as she sat on the sofa across from his, he said, “I’m very glad you’re here with us.”

“Please tell me this isn’t your idea of flirting.”

Organa laughed, echoing in the silence of the cafeteria. “My dance card is full, I’m afraid. I don’t have time to flirt with anyone else.” Barriss was fairly certain Organa was married, but since she had also definitely seen him coming out of Skywalker’s rooms in the morning, she wasn’t inclined to trust that was the whole story.

“Why say so, then?”

“Because it’s true,” Organa said, “and you looked like you needed someone to tell you.”

--

“Here’s your first file,” Barriss said, to each of the volunteer counsellors, in their one-on-one training. “A young woman who killed strangers and friends alike. She understands, intellectually, that this was something she did without all her wits around her, but she still feels like, if she’d just been stronger, more clever, better, she could have fixed it.

“Read that over and tell me what you’d say to her.”

Most of them muddled through something passable. One or two went immediately to reassuring Barriss that logically it wasn’t her fault, which she marked them down for because she’d already said, in the initial briefing, that she knew that. That wasn’t the problem, and being told to just have better logic wouldn’t help.

Catapult looked at her, uncharacteristically thoughtful, and said, “me too. Who were yours?”

Barriss just about swallowed her tongue before she told him, “One was Tutso Mara. He was my friend. But I don’t know all their names.”

“Then that’s part of my homework for you,” he said. “Learn their names, and come back and tell me them.”

She gave him a pass on the first exercise.

--

Barriss found herself sitting up at night with Organa a second time when the audio comm, which they passed around to ensure someone was always awake and available, began to buzz. This time, Barriss was the one of them who was supposed to be on shift and Organa was the insomniac, pouring over precedent at 0200 hours. Still, when she answered and Catapult said rapidly, “We have the 212th, putting you through ASAP,” Barriss practically threw the comm at Organa in her rush to ensure that he was the one to speak into it. She knew the people in the galaxy who had the most reason to hate her, and these ranked nearly as highly as Skywalker’s did.

“Kenobi’s,” she hissed, on the off-chance they could already hear her, and Organa rapidly put the old-fashioned thing, which Skywalker had reduced them to, up to his ear and said, “Bail Organa.”

Then he listened for a second or two, responded hurriedly, “we know. It’s okay. Come home,” and then drew the thing away from his ear as they lost the signal again.

“Will you tell Skywalker?” Barriss asked him. “It’s one thing to know your people are dead, and another to know you need to plan a pyre. It might be better he hear it from someone who was close with Kenobi.”

Barriss had admired him, once, but Kenobi had died hating her.

“I’ll talk to him,” Organa agreed, sounding slightly dazed, “but I’m not sure he should be planning any pyres just yet. I think Cody might have said something about a coma? Or possibly a comma, but that seems a bit less salient.”

Barriss could do wonders with a comma, but not at a time like this. A coma, on the other hand… well, she’d written a paper about them once, but that was the sum total of what she knew.

To avoid having to respond to Kenobi’s potential survival, she reached out and took a folder from in front of Organa. The senate was mostly running on Flimsi like it was the Old Republic. “What are we looking for?”

“Precedent for declaring decisions made using the Chancellor’s wartime powers retroactively illegitimate. Flag anything that looks useful.”

“Won’t that cause a mess?”

“What’s a little more mess, under the circumstances?” Organa tossed a pack of stickiflimsi at her, much more gently than Barriss had thrown the comm at him.

Barriss enjoyed the distraction until one of the younglings wandered in after a nightmare. Then she steadied her weary presence in the Force so he wouldn’t see that she was as broken as he was, and went to show him that there were no monsters under his bed. At least, no more than usual.

--

She thought about prescribing herself sleeping pills, but the idea of staying asleep longer sounded worse. Besides, there was too much to do for sleep.

--

“You have to be the one to greet them,” she told Skywalker, for the third or fourth time. “Nu’s not a good enough fighter to survive if your all-clear didn’t work for some reason.”

“But I killed Master Windu!”

“I’m supposed to be in prison,” Barriss reminded him. “If I show up, they’re more likely to shoot me if their chips are deactivated than if they’re active.”

“Will you watch Luke and Leia at least? Sabé is having a meeting with some of the temple staff who had the massacre off, seeing if any of them want to come back.”

Barriss was supposed to be running a class for the initiates while Madame Nu met with Fox and the other commanders.

“They’re better company than you are.”

“My master’s probably in a coma. You could cut me some slack.”

“Well, my master’s probably dead, so…”

“Barriss,” he began, but she shook her head, and went into the nursery before he could see the look on her face.

—

She had not fully understood how much she had been forgiven, these last weeks, until Skywalker called her in to see Kenobi. His commander - Cody, she thought - had a decent sabbacc face, but she could feel the hatred radiating off of him the Force, and even in his eyes he could hardly disguise his suspicion.

It came from a place of fear, she understood, as she began to take a blood sample, and Cody twitched reflexively towards the empty clip on his belt.

“Thank your medic for his thoroughness,” Barriss said. “His notes were very helpful. And I concur with his assessment. This doesn’t make sense with his injuries.”

“Pulse said something about a brain scan?” Anakin said, in a nervous but conciliatory tone.

“For a normal person, she’d be right. For a Jedi, there’s one logical avenue to look at first. I’m going to run a Midichlorian test, compare the results to his previous assessments. My preliminary feeling is that his presence in the Force is altered in some way, but this will help me confirm it. Anakin, you may already be sensing something of the sort?”

They were very close, and Anakin was very powerful. Indeed, he nodded. “He’s nearby. If I reached out, I could try-”

“Don’t.” Barriss looked down at the results of her test. “This is delicate. Let me look this up in the case history index first. We don’t want to make the situation worse. You may not have sworn a healer’s oaths, but I have.”

Only, she hadn’t. She had sworn her oaths as a knight, had completed her training as a knight. She had the skills to fight more than she had the experience to help with this. The healers who had died in this room would have been able to do this, but they had been without skills to defend themselves, and were not here.

“He reached out to me,” Anakin said. His hand was tight on the railing of the bed. “I saw him there, in the chancellor’s office. I thought I saw his death - it was in the middle of the storm of death, and I could feel so much pain. But it wasn’t. He was reaching out to me, and he saved me. I just have to-”

“Thirty hours,” she said, in a tone that allowed no disagreement, as Master Luminara would have. “Make yourself useful and take over with the kids. You can bring Luke and Leia by to introduce to Cody later, but I don’t think he should go out in the temple while the initiates are awake. They’ll be frightened.”

“You think I’m going to scare the initiates? How many of their teachers did you kill, exactly?”

There were a thousand smart remarks to be made - about Anakin’s death toll, about the number of teachers his brothers had killed. Barriss didn’t make any of them. Instead, she set up Obi-Wan’s I.V., and an emergency monitor to ping her short-range if anything changed, and left.

--

“I’ve talked to Cody.”

Barriss looked up from the latest in her stack of datapads. The sun was setting over Coruscant, catching in Fox’s hair and setting Riyo’s tattoos sparkling. They must have climbed up to the roof on the same ladder Barriss had, and come around to be as far as possible from where she’d set off her bomb. It was the place she usually came, on the rare occasions when she had time for a minute or two alone.

“How’d you find me?”

“Your emergency call beacons don’t have that wide a radius, and Padmé said you went outside, so…”

Neither of them were stupid. “You didn’t have to say anything to Cody. He’s right. Why should he be hidden away like a lover under the bed on Coruscanti Regency when I’m the one who chose to hurt them, to kill them? I’m the one the Temple staff is too scared of to come back.”

Fox sat on her left side, and Riyo sat on her right, each shifting flimsi and datapads to make room for themselves.

“Better I said something than let someone else take a swing at him. He doesn’t know what things were like here. He doesn’t get to talk to you like that any more than he does to me.”

“And of course,” Riyo said, conversationally, “he wouldn’t say it to you. He says it to Barriss, because he’s afraid, and can take it out on her. And she’ll let him.”

“It’s an improvement over when I was taking out my temper by murdering my friends.”

“Was it your temper?” Fox asked. Barriss didn’t answer him. “Do your hands ever feel like they belong to someone else?”

“These aren’t healer’s hands. The Dark can’t heal.”

Riyo held a hand out, palm raised. The lines of gold on her forearms were like veins, paths to her heart. She was no warrior, with no defense against the violence of Barriss and Fox both. But there was no fear in her.

“Logically,” she said, “that would suggest you aren’t dark.”

She had very steady hands. Barriss was starting to get used to the feeling of them against her own.

“I know the feeling of the dark, now. I know how it tastes. I chose it, even if the things that made me choose were Palpatine’s doing. I wasn’t an automaton following his orders. The plan was mine. I made the bomb; I framed Ahsoka; I stole Ventress’s lightsabers.” Riyo’s fingers squeezed tight against hers.

“Bullshit,” Fox said. “Your plan was too well aligned with Palpatine’s. He needed Ahsoka out of the picture to get Skywalker. Killing her would have pushed him over the edge, the same way he says losing his mother did. But this time the Republic and the Jedi would have been responsible. Even Padmé would have been involved.”

“That wasn’t it. I know why I did it. I remember-”

“I remember a lot of things,” Fox told her. “But Riyo says they didn’t happen. I remember being on duty, standing outside the Chancellor’s office for hours, but she remembers looking for me and not finding me all the time. I remember her telling me to stay away, that I made her sick. I remember killing a little brother for treason and not thinking for a second about why he’d do something like that. Of course she would have been disgusted with me. But she remembers me doing that, and still looking for me, and wanting to see me.”

“It wasn’t like you.” She’d never heard Riyo’s voice break like that. “I know you. I knew you would never do something like that unless you were certain it was right. I should have done something more – gone to the Jedi, gone to Padmé, investigated – something. But I just left you with him. I’m sorry.”

Fox reached around Barriss, putting a hand on Riyo’s back. The gesture had the effect of pulling Barriss against his solid chest, and Riyo leant towards her too, shoulders brushing together. Barriss squeezed her hand.

“You couldn’t have known what he was. A thousand Jedi couldn’t see it. Skywalker had to be told to figure it out, and no one would have known if he wasn’t.”

“None of us could see it,” Fox said. “None of us could fight it. But we can fight now. We’re still fighting, in our own way.”

Without lightsaber or blaster in hand.

“I think we can have Kenobi awake tomorrow. I’ll use Skywalker’s training bond as a scaffold, and bring him up gently. It would be easier with more Jedi, but I don’t want all of us down if something goes wrong.”

“Can only Jedi help? You look so tired, when you heal. It’s like it takes energy out of you.”

“It does. And anyone can meditate with a healer. In the old days, before there were many Jedi healers, we have records of the dedicates - the followers of the religion who weren’t Jedi themselves - meditating with Jedi healers in ceremonies. There could be hundreds of them. They were all connected, so they worked well together.”

“Can I sell you a few hundred men who have all worked closely together, all of whom are connected to Kenobi, all of who would do anything for him?”

They weren’t exactly dedicates – key subjects in Barriss’s study of code-as-religion – but they could learn, if they chose. And Skywalker, who didn’t believe himself, could hardly teach them.

Barriss didn’t know what she believed, these days, but she knew what it meant. And if she could guide them in it, as great Jedi before her had…

Well, it was something, at least. Better than despair, in a time when it was still a feeling that overwhelmed the Force itself.

Chapter Text

When Barriss laid out her requirements for what she would need to help Obi-Wan - chiefly, volunteers an open mind, a desire to help, and strength to share, Fox brought her candidates swiftly enough. There was none of the awkward searching required to find volunteers to help the clones themselves. For their Jedi, they would do anything.

“I culled down to a dozen,” Fox said, “but anyone in the 212th would have put their names forward. A few of mine too.”

“You’ll have to record your results,” Master Nu said, “as far as I know, a healer has not attempted such a technique in several hundred years. I would be interested in knowing your impressions of it.”

“I’m more interested in whether or not it works.”

Master Nu observed, “You were curious once. The number of references I remember you asking me to track down, even as an initiate, were more suited for an educorps graduate student.”

“There’s no point in research now. Who would read it?”

“I would,” she said, “and others will, someday. The archives are for the future, not only for the present.”

It did not feel as if there was a future beyond the next day, beyond only the next hour or two. But perhaps there would be.

—

Fox’s dozen were all 212th members, and it was no surprise who their chief was. He had taken Barriss’s orders to stay out of the initiates' way so seriously she thought he had slept in his general's sickroom.

Cody didn’t apologize to her, but he sat and listened as she explained what it meant to meditate as a Jedi did, to empty one’s mind, to search for peac and for control over, or at least awareness of, one’s emotions.

“Skywalker and I will be there to guide you,” Barriss said, “but I want to be clear that you should give no more than you can afford. Spreading the burden out in this way is designed to ensure that no one is exhausted as healers alone have a tendency to be. Skywalker may have a have a Force presence with the strength and subtlety of an elephant-“

“Hey!”

“But he’s not a battery for us to use. Only Luke and Leia get to do that.”

All twelve clones had been fascinated and delighted and concerned in turn by the existence of the baby Skywalkers. Barriss felt the same, sometimes.

Cody turned to his men and asked, “are you all sure about this? Nobody’s under orders to do anything.”

All of them shook their heads and one said, “Commander,” rather plaintively.

And so Barriss encouraged them all to find a comfortable pose for meditation around the room. She perched on her stool – she was used to performing a healer’s meditation in almost any pose – while Anakin sat cross-legged in a technically perfect posture that made him look very much Obi-Wan’s student. The clones, watching them, mostly copied Anakin as best they could, but Cody knelt on his knees, and Barriss had a sudden sense that, alone of his brothers, this practice was not new to him.

“This will rely on trust,” Barriss said, “a release of control. I know trusting me will not be easy. Perhaps trusting yourself will not be easy. But we will try as best we can. If this does not work, Skywalker and I will try alone, and have every hope of success. There would be no shame in choosing to step back.”

Cody looked her directly in the eyes until Barriss looked away. Skywalker said, “trusting us will not be easy, you mean.”

But it was easy for Barriss to trust him now. She had no doubt of Skywalker’s sincerity in this moment, no matter what he had done. She was too used to sharing meals with him, and watching him with his children and the initiates alike. They all adored him with an uncomplicated wonder, whether or not they were old enough to realize that it was only because of him that they were still alive.

“Shut up, Skywalker,” Barriss told him, “stop sitting like a model. I won’t scold you if you slouch.”

“Obi-Wan will,” he said, and didn’t relax an inch. But in the Force, as Barriss began to sink into it, she could feel the fondness in him, the steadiness. Sometimes, she hardly recognized him from their childhood. He had never quite felt like a knight to her, and certainly not like the master he would have been if Ahsoka had taken the knighthood offered to her. But he did now, in a way. Not unbroken, but well-glued, at least. Soldered, like the grease-monkey he was. The steady hum of an engine repaired.

Skywalker had no natural healing instinct, but he was well-joined to Obi-Wan, and so Barriss set him in the centre of their group, their first chair. She was the conductor, and, one by one, she reached out to each of the clones. The horrible silence of the force, which haunted her every day, began to lessen as she surrounded herself with the unconventional cacophony of clicking bolts, chimes, electronic beats, and drums.

They were haunted, the same as everyone else in the temple they’d been snuck into – carefully avoiding the initiates – but not in the same way. There was a dangerous hope in front of them, and in none of them more than in Cody, who Barriss reached out to last of all. Part of her doubted that he would be able to meet her, so evident was his dislike and distrust. But he was practiced in this art, in releasing that fear and fury as he sunk into meditation, and what met her instead was generosity, trust in Obi-Wan, if not in her, and a selfless love that wanted nothing more than to give.

Barriss was deep in meditation of her own, in the feeling of her body as well as the feeling of the Force, and she was keenly aware of the wetness in her eyes.

There was only one step left now, and so Barriss, directing her orchestra with one hand, raised the other towards Anakin alone, and he, with skill and power both, reached out to Obi-Wan, and invited himself into the isolated storm of Obi-Wan’s mind, pulling Barriss along behind.

It was overwhelming. Noise and disorientation, a cacophony of power and uncertainty. She needed the noise to stop. Why would the noise never stop> Stop it. She had to tear, to hurt, to make it stop. She couldn't breathe, or feel her body. She couldn't feel anything but the noise and it had to stop-

And then there was light, the roar of engines drowning out all other sound. They kicked up sand behind them as they burned.

Skywalker. Barriss reached out and clung to him like a child herself, let him wrap his presence around her, suns and sand, the smell of flowers on Naboo, and blood in the desert too. She pressed upon him her fear, her failure in face of Obi-Wan, who was still caught in that moment of horror and screaming, of death in the Force, presaging loneliness eternal.

But they weren’t alone, Skywalker reminded her, and then she could hear them all, could feel their willingness to help, to give, lined up and waiting for Barriss, who had the ability, to use their strength.

I can’t.

You can, Skywalker assured her. let us help. You have to trust too. He can’t touch you here. We won’t let him.

So close, she could feel the touch of Palpatine in Anakin’s mind too, the nagging thoughts of loss and death, constant fear, horrors running through his mind whenever he least expected it. It wasn’t like her noise, but it wasn’t so different either.

But the Sith wasn’t there anymore, to give the noise to either of them. Anakin had seen it himself. He had felt the great dying begin, had seen Obi-Wan reach out to him across a thousand lightyears, and had made the right choice. In a way, it was Obi-Wan who had saved them both from it.

Barriss felt her breath, the expansion of her lungs, and the push of oxygen down to her extremities. She sank into the soreness in her feet, the feeling of her bones and sinew. Carefully, she collected energy from every part of herself, skimming off the top so as not to cause damage anywhere, and added it to all the offerings made by her companions, and reached out into the storm again. She could heal this. Obi-Wan wanted to heal, to be present, and that made her job easier. Steadier now, with Anakin blazing at her side, she did the simplest thing in the world, and offered Obi-Wan the strength to help himself. He caught her extended hand, and held, and pulled himself up. Barriss breathed deep again, and lifted out of the meditation.

Obi-Wan’s eyes shot open at almost the same time hers did, and, as she was the only one in his eyeline, they stared at each other for a long, awkward moment. Barriss could feel her ears lightening in embarrassment, and was glad that they were covered.

Cody, next up out of the meditation, shot to his feet and joined them in awkward, silent staring. He saluted, and then thought better of it and hurriedly shoved his hands in his robe pockets, a position made even more unnautral by his evident unfamiliarity with his borrowed clothing.

“Master Kenobi,” Barriss said, unable to keep from drawing the embarrassment back onto herself. She bowed, which made things worse. “Skywalker, be in charge. I’m going to go… somewhere else. Ping if anything seems wrong.”

“You’re on night shift!” He called after her, but Barriss was already halfway out the door.

--

There was someone waiting for her when Barriss came down from the roof to take that night's watch. She had known there would be, but had chosen to come anyways. The children were used to the routine, to knowing who would be there waiting if they woke in the night, and Barriss was used to it too. She knew all their names, was familiar with their wants, and had, rather selfishly, allowed herself to become used to the way they did not fear her. Most of the surviving initiates were from a single clan, between five and seven years of age, and had been too young to understand Barriss’s crimes when they happened. Only the older ones understood, and even for them, it felt less real than the massacre to which most of their friends had lost their lives. Barriss had somehow become, for all of them, a person who was safe, and trusted, and she did not count that cheaply. She would face this confrontation for it.

“Have you eaten?” Master Kenobi asked her. He was wearing a worn, cozy-looking brown robe, and had a blanket across his lap. There was a cup of tea in his hand, which he set aside a moment as he leaned forward to pour her a cup of her own. “Padmé brought honey cakes, if you’d like one.”

“I did eat.”

She hadn’t come down for dinner, but it hadn’t mattered. A little maintenance droid had come and beeped angrily at her until she took the package that was stuck to its head, which contained a clone dinner ration, and a half-full bag of pine nut brittle, which Barriss only recognized because Riyo had shared some with her before.

“Take the tea at least,” he said and Barriss did, sitting opposite him. The yawning space around them, shadows at the edges where neither of them had bothered to turn on the lights, felt particularly awkward and desolate, and gave the entire experience a rather surreal quality.

Barriss knew she ought to say something, but she couldn’t think of anything, so she kept her silence, and drank her tea, until Master Kenobi said, “Anakin tells me we owe you thanks, and an apology.”

“Anakin is projecting.”

She still wasn’t very good at reading human emotions sometimes, despite having grown up in the Temple, and she couldn’t tell what that look on Master Kenobi’s face meant. It might be that she only had hours left here, that he – as the true Master of the Order, the only surviving member of the council – would see the need to return her to prison. There, in the prison, she would experience true silence, cut off from both the noise in her head, and this last remaining place in which there was brightness and music in the force. The thought terrified her, but she swallowed her fear, and did what needed to be done.

“I think Palpatine was grooming him,” she said, “possibly from the moment he came to Coruscant. He’s done horrible things, there's no question of that. And he does owe debts that no labour of his will ever repay. But this order failed him. You failed him. He won’t say it, but someone ought to.”

That expression, at least, was unmistakable hurt. Some broken, twisted part of Barriss found that she enjoyed it. With Palpatine dead and most of his allies far away, there was no one here left for her to hurt. The last cronies in the Senate had been Bail and Padmé’s to deal with, not hers. There was no one left to make pay for what had been lost.

And what a dark impulse. What a strong reminder that her shadow still lived deep within her, whether of Palpatine’s creation or her own.

“I’m sorry–”

“Don’t,” he cut her off, and then interrupted himself by turning, just a moment before Barriss did, to look at the small purple face peering out of the darkness.

“Sirill,” Barriss said, trying to make her tone as welcoming as possible, “do you want to come join Master Kenobi and I for a little while? We’re drinking tea.”

She didn’t ask why Sirill was awake at this hour – there was no mystery about it. She had nightmares most nights, as far as Barriss could tell. If anyone but Barriss was on shift, she just climbed in with one of the other children. But if Barriss was up, she went to her.

Sirill considered this a moment, and then, exactly as she usually did, climbed up on to Barriss’s sofa to curl sleepily against her side.

“Good evening Sirill,” Master Kenobi said warmly, but Sirill paid him no mind and asked Barriss,

“Can I have ral-ral?”

Usually, that would have meant them both getting up again, but tonight Barriss decided to take advantage of Master Kenobi, “can you bring her a glass of ralai? It’s on the top shelf in the ‘fridger in the kitchen. The juice is purple.”

“Like me,” Sirill said, helpfully.

“It’s more purple than you,” Barriss told her.

“But not as purple as the Cloak of Clever Romianna,” Sirill said, unsubtly trying to lead Barriss to performing the next step in her bedtime routine.

And so, while Master Kenobi fetched the juice, Barriss told Sirill one of the classic Mirialan children stories, and reached out to her in the Force, and soothed the worst of her hurts until, with these three things together, she fell neatly asleep.

Master Kenobi passed over his blanket, and, once Sirill was settled under it, said in a quiet voice, “Luminara was very protective of that stuff, as I recall. Used to import it particularly.”

It took Barriss a second to realize his confusion. “You’re thinking of ralissi, not ralai. That’s the fermented version. For adults.”

“Ah,” he said, and, after a pause that stretched a little too long in the silence, said, “she would be very proud of you, I think.”

“You don’t have any right to say that. You don’t have any idea-”

“They nearly executed Master Vos for falling,” he said, startling her. “It was a near-run thing. That is what the most common punishment is for those of our own who fall in times of war. The Jedi are an organization for the destruction of the dark side, not for its rehabilitation.

“But Luminara didn’t even let that possibility make it to the table for you. She never stopped believing that there was more good ahead of you than behind. And that was even without knowing what Palpatine was, what this war had become. So if she were here now-”

Sirill stirred a little in her sleep, not anywhere near waking, but Barriss took the opportunity. “I should take her back to bed before she wakes up.”

He leaned back in his seat, perhaps recognizing the battle lost. “Very well. Goodnight, Barriss.”

“Goodnight, Master Kenobi.”

Chapter Text

One of Kenobi’s first orders of business, once he was back on his feet and firmly in command of the order, was the search for survivors. He was convinced, with a resolute certainty neither Barriss nor Anakin had, that they must have been out there. Barriss kept her head down as he did it, and tried not to think too much on the matter. There was no victory in this for her. If they found enough Jedi to form even a semblance of a real order, then there would be no future for Barriss here.

But she didn’t deserve a future; she knew that well enough. And so she kept her head down and went about her days. She taught her counseling students, and gave the first few permission to start leading group meetings. She recruited more support from the 212th and started training them too. She did her own laundry, she carried messages to the senate, she babysat the twins while Anakin went off-planet for a few days to fix one of the many interplanetary communications relays he’d damaged in his efforts to end Palpatine’s terror.

She reported back to Catapult the names of all those she’d killed, and he asked her, “and their families?”

“Some had them. Some didn’t. But there’s nothing I can do for them now. Nothing I could do that would end this nightmare.”

“No,” he agreed, “But don’t you think they might want some answers about what happened?”

“What? My evil monologue?”

He laughed at her joke, despite the circumstances. Barriss still wasn’t fully persuaded by him, but she had to admit there was something impressive in his ability to find the light.

Then he asked, “wouldn’t you want to know the truth, if all you knew was that my brothers killed your teacher? If you didn't know why?”

--

Kenobi wanted to bring life to them, but all he found, reaching out into the universe, was death. Master Koon dead. Aayla dead, and the 327th collapsed around her.

And from Mandalore,

“A hyperspace accident?” Riyo repeated, after Barriss told her. She couldn’t stay in the temple, and so she’d come here, to a well-appointed apartment covered in tasteful minimalist art and small ferns and half-empty cups of caf.

“More likely caused by fighting. But the Mandalorians say there was no sign of any survivors.”

It was so utterly senseless. Not only Ahsoka dead, but all her people with her. Ahsoka wouldn’t have wanted that. She’d have wanted them all living, she’d probably have said something stupid and vulgar like that they should all go kick Palpatine’s grave.

“I’m sorry.”

Barriss was being awful again. She had to try to stop being so horrible. How dare she make this about her? “I’m sorry. She was your friend. You’re the one who should-”

“She was your friend too,” Riyo said, without room for argument.

Barriss never did figure out how she spent that night sleeping on the other side of Riyo’s bed, but it kept happening, after that, on those rare few nights when she didn’t have any shifts watching the children.

--

In the dead of night, sitting alone in the horrible emptiness of the temple canteen, Barriss wrote out a hundred versions of her apology, of her explanation, but they weren’t good enough. None of them were good enough.

After a couple weeks of trying, she got sick of Catapult looking disappointed at her every time she went to visit Fox, and sent a version that wasn’t good enough.

--

“I hope you didn’t tell them it was your fault.”

“It was my fault.”

“Explain it to me again,” Fox said. “We know by now that you wouldn’t have done it if Palpatine hadn’t been fucking with your head. Are you saying you should have just gotten around him? Just figured out there was a Sith in your mind with sheer force of willpower?”

He seemed to see things so clearly.

--

Master Kenobi did succeed in bringing them home survivors too. There was just a small, ragged group of them. Master Kcaj came back to them, and then Knight Akonori. Both had fought their way out. Eeth Koth, who had been nowhere near the fighting because of his choice to leave the formal order, returned to them of his own accord, though he was clear that this didn’t constitute a re-upping of his vows.

All three of them looked on Barriss – and Anakin too – with weary suspicion, but none of them said anything.

Fortunately or unfortunately, most of what Master Kenobi’s reconnaissance missions revealed was only clones. Barriss’s recruitment of counsellors continued, and yet the need for them seemed bottomless. She felt like she was treating an epidemic, a ravaging disease that was reaching every little hamlet in the galaxy, claiming more victims by the hour.

But she was treating it. They were treating it. And it was going to be easier, once they had somewhere for the clones who’d already joined them to go and make a life. It was harder to heal when stuck in a perpetual limbo, unable to move on. Organa and Amidala had been pushing on the issue in the senate for weeks with little response. Riyo, whose methods were more subtle, had been conducting meetings behind the scenes, trying to find someone who could get her a lead on where would work.

And Barriss had her own plan, of which she was increasingly certain, which she raised with Fox first.

“The Jedi have lands,” she told him. “The Order was once larger than it is now, and it was more of a religion too. There were dedicates and believers who weren’t ordained Jedi but lived in communities at temples. People left land to the Order when they died. Some of it used to be used by the Agricorps, but there’s more, and there’s temple sites we stopped staffing at or before the start of the war, and-”

“Blood money,” Fox said, and, before she could argue, clarified. “I know what you mean, but you have to know that’s how they’ll see it. We killed you and now we’re being paid for your deaths.”

It took her some time to put it into words before she said, “those places are for the Jedi. Not just the sworn knights and healers, but those who’ve followed with us. They were always your place. We just didn’t know.”

--

Letta Turmond’s sister looked shockingly like her, with the same straight dark hair and the same certainty in her eyes. Barriss wondered if she was carrying a blaster. If she was, Barriss was as good as dead. She hadn’t carried a lightsaber since Anakin had taken hers.

She was the only person who’d responded to Barriss’s letter. She had done so by presenting herself at the temple, still dressed in her suit, carrying a sleek case under her arm, and demanding to speak to Barriss in private.

“I met with the Chancellor,” Beatrice Turmond told her, “after they arrested you. He wanted to offer his condolences.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“He wasn’t the first. Some of the Jedi came and offered them too. Windu and the other Mirialan one.”

There’d been so many more Mirialan Jedi once. But Barriss still knew. “Luminara Unduli. She was my teacher.”

“The Chancellor told me that you probably made my sister kill her husband using Jedi mind tricks,” said Beatrice, matter-of-factly. “And now you send me a letter and tell me that he made you do that to her because he was using Jedi mind tricks on you?”

There had never before been such dryness in Barriss’s throat. “No.”

“No?”

“He didn’t compel me. A direct compulsion, like what he described to you… that doesn’t work well for long on a person with a strong will, no matter how powerful the person using it is. It takes someone obedient to succumb even for a while. And when you do succumb… it’s pleasant. It feels right. This wasn’t that. I was still making my own decisions. I’m still responsible. I just… it didn’t feel like I could do anything else. Maybe I couldn’t do anything else.”

“And my sister? Did you compel her?”

It would have been kinder to lie. “No. Not in the essential moments. Not that I remember. Your sister…” In another life, Barriss and Letta might have been allies in service of some other cause, some gentler thing. “She believed the war was wrong. She knew it was wrong. She just didn’t know why, and I used her, and I killed her, and I’m sorry.”

“She killed Jackar on her own?”

Barriss nodded. She found she could not say it. After a moment, Beatrice nodded too. “I thought she had,” she said. “They were always fighting about his work, and- I mean, I never thought she would hurt him, but when Palpatine tried to tell me she was innocent, just a victim…”

“You knew the strength of her will.”

“I did,” said Beatrice.

--

“Obi-Wan switched your room assignment,” Sabé told her one morning, over breakfast. “If you like the new placement, we’ll move your things this evening.”

“I don’t want-“

Fox could not accept the spoils of Palpatine’s genocide, despite his own innocence; Barriss, who was guilty, could do no less.

“He said to look before you decided,” Sabé said, and when Barriss did an hour later, she discovered that she recognized the room well enough to know that it had been sitting empty for over a decade. Obi-Wan had taken a new suite of rooms upon his knighthood, rather than lingering in Qui-Gon’s as Barriss lingered in her Master’s even now. The personal belongings had been cleaned out years ago, but the furniture, which was mostly temple property, remained where it was, and so did a few personal items too inconvenient to simply move – a large stand that had once held a dozen plants, a warm, soothing light screwed into the ceiling.

Are you sure? She asked Obi-Wan that afternoon, thankful for Anakin’s repair of the temple’s internal messaging system.

He would be.

Barriss took Qui-Gon's rooms. And so did Riyo and Fox, more often than not now. All three of them were too used to each other to do anything else.

One perfect night, once, their schedules aligned, and they slept for nine glorious hours, and stayed in bed for a tenth, taking turns reading to each other from one of Riyo’s historical romances, and Barriss let her heart feel lighter.

Chapter Text

Barriss woke sluggishly, a blurry feeling about her. She had been drugged before – she had been a Jedi General, had been injured and even captured, and had known before the terror of waking sluggish in an unfamiliar place. Sometimes it came upon her without any drugs at all, pure horror as her half-sleeping mind conjured up the torment of Palpatine’s presence pressing against her. Lately, she had pressed aside that horror upon waking by reaching out in the force to Fox, or to Riyo, or, on the unlucky days when both were absent, to the rest of the temple, to Anakin’s roaring presence and Master Nu’s simple, precise tones, and the dancing spirits of children.

None of them were here now, and Barriss’s heart seized in terror a moment as she convinced herself it had all been a dream, that she was still alone in her cell and at any moment the terrible noise in her head would resume, and that would be all she knew.

“Open your eyes,” someone said, voice gruff and furious though distorted by a vocoder. “We can tell you’re awake."

She was tied to a chair in an ill-lit room, with force inhibiting cuffs on her wrists, and no weapons, and no living shadows or judicial investigators to find her, but still Barriss had never in her life been so relieved as she was to see the pair of armoured bounty-hunters leveling blasters at her. She wasn’t in prison. This was a nightmare, but her freedom hadn’t been a dream.

She was going to die down here, one more loss the Jedi couldn’t afford. They still had no surviving healers. And yet she was grateful. The other thing, though kinder to the rest of the galaxy, would have been death for the very last of Barriss’s tattered spirit.

“There won’t be a ransom,” she told them, pragmatically. “The Order can’t afford it, and the Senate would never sign off.”

Riyo would argue for her, she thought, and she would be glorious, every line of gold on her body singing out in the Force. But she wouldn’t win.

“And your Master?” Barriss felt a thrill of fury down her spine. How dare they. But before she could speak, the female bounty hunter – Twi’lek or young Togruta, based on the helmet – continued, “what’s the going rate for a Sith Apprentice, these days?”

She’d be the Master now, if he’d taken her. But he hadn’t. That was what Count Dooku got, a poisoned fruit from the poisoned tree if ever there was such a thing. Barriss had been offered no such temptation, only the ceaseless drive to escape her own madness.

“Chancellor Palpatine was the Sith Master. Generals Yoda and Skywalker killed him.”

They would always be generals, to people like this, though Barriss hated the taste of the word in her mouth.

“Oh yeah, because Anakin killing Chancellor Palpatine is a believable story.”

One of the bounty-hunters nudged the other. “Where’s Skywalker?”

He’d only gone off-world for a couple days, fixing another relay, but, “I’m not telling you that.”

They couldn’t know the Temple was so poorly guarded. She wouldn’t let them know.

The female bounty hunter moved forward, pressed her blaster to Barriss’s cheek. It was impossible to help an instinctual burst of fear, but in the moment after, as it sat cool against her skin, she forced herself to breathe, to release terror from her chest.

“What did you do to him?”

“I didn’t do anything.”

“Then why aren’t you sitting in a cell right now?”

She could have explained, but they didn’t deserve it, and so instead she told the truth. “I don’t know.”

The two bounty hunters looked at each other, and she wondered if they were like the clones, who could read each other as seamlessly as breathing in their helmets. Somehow, it angered her. How dare they come here to kill her. What right did they have to fury? If she was going to die, she should have died with Nixie’s blaster to her head on the floor of her cell. That might have been what she deserved, to die unrepentant and unaware of herself, like the animal she had become.

“Do you think I don’t know that I don’t deserve to be here? That I don’t know that there are hundreds of Jedi and hundreds of thousands of clones who deserve it more than I do?” They said nothing. “It’s the only thing I know. I know there’s not a person in that Temple who wouldn’t prefer someone else. But they don’t have Master Unduli, and they don’t have Master Yoda, and they don’t have Master Windu. Their healers and crèche masters died protecting them, fell dead on the floor of the temple like leaves before the storm. So there’s just me. As I am. And there’s nothing I can do about that.”

In the morning, before leaving the temple and presumably being kidnapped on her way to the senate, Barriss had helped a human child remove one of his teeth – she’d forgotten that humans shed their teeth in childhood, instead of in their teen years. He’d told her that the crèche master had a ritual to celebrate this, but he hadn’t remembered all the steps.

The bounty hunters looked at her again, and the human said, “stand down.”

She took her blaster away from Barriss’s face, but only because she was angry at her companion. “Stand down? She’s a Sith.”

“Are we sure she is? She wasn’t when-

“So she passed her entrance exam and got admitted when Dooku croaked? Who cares. She helped her master kill them, and she did something to Skyguy, and your brothers, and-”

“Ahsoka?” It had to be. Nobody used that nickname but her.

They both turned back to Barriss. “Kriff,” said the human – he must have been a clone, must have ben one of Fox’s brothers. Maybe Barriss would die by their hands after all.

“Well that karks it.”

They both looked so oddly dejected to have been caught out. It was infantile. Barriss should have been grovelling at Ahsoka’s feet. Instead, she said, “I might as well know who’s going to kill me. Who am I going to tell?”

“We’re not going to kill you,” Ahsoka said, offended. “That’s what you’d do.”

Her friend took off his helmet, and Barriss discovered that she vaguely recognized him, though she didn’t remember his name. The blonde one. The captain. He had clear eyes, and he looked at Barriss carefully.

“Why don’t you tell us what happened? From the beginning.”

--

Last night, Barriss’s shift with the children had ended two hours after dinner, leaving her with a long, unoccupied evening. She’d meant to spend it catching up on offworld correspondence addressed to the Temple that was piling up as their communications improved. But Riyo’s reception had finished early, and Fox had been sharing more and more of his responsibilities with Wolffe, while Cody, whose hands were relatively bloodless, handled the more delicate matter of representing the clones before the Senate. They had both come to their rooms, and sat together in silence for a while, working on their separate work, and then,

“Have you ever played Apiyon?” Riyo asked, and then she fished a kit out of her bag and taught them this Pantoran game of word-joining, and Fox began spelling Mando’a when he ran out of good Basic words, and then Riyo and Barriss joined in with their own birth tongues, and, close to the end, Barriss looked down at her hand, and out at the web of meaning, and set down all six of her chips, joining with Fox’s ‘cin’ to make the word ‘anohrah’.

Riyo and Fox waited for her to tell them the meaning, as they had been for each of the words they played.

It took her longer to find the words in Basic than it had to play. “It’s Dai Bendu,” she said, “the language of the Jedi. It means… the temple that is your home.”

She reached out for Riyo’s hand in silent question, and received, as she had hoped, gentle fingers laced with her own, and, as she had not imagined, a kiss to the tips of her fingers.

Fox said, “I didn’t know there was a Jedi language.”

“It was less spoken, even before. There were fewer and fewer of us, and we were working more and more as diplomats and peacekeepers, and less of us than ever were priests, living in seclusion among our own people. But many of us still speak it- spoke it in crèche. And most sacred texts are written in it. I suppose there aren’t many left alive who can read it, now.”

A dozen, perhaps? Not all the Jedi living. Anakin didn’t.

“And once we’re gone,” she continued, and found she wasn’t able to finish the thought.

“It will live on in the children,” Riyo said, “if you teach them.”

“They should be learning it from a real Jedi.”

Gently, Fox said, “they would be.”

--

That wasn’t the story she told Ahsoka and her captain. Instead, Barriss stripped it back to the facts. That she had been alone in her cell, and Nixie and her men had come in and nearly killed her, and then she’d watched them regain themselves. That Sabé had come and asked her for help, and told her what Anakin had done, and what he’d sought to undo.

“Hang on,” Ahsoka said incredulously, “are you expecting me to believe that Anakin murdered Master Windu?”

Not only Master Windu, of course, but Barriss didn’t have the heart to say as much. Anakin would have to voice that himself.

“It’s not an easy thing,” Bariss said, “to have a Sith Master whispering in your ear.”

“And did you?” the Captain asked her.

Bariss would have liked to be able to say as much. That would have been easier. “No,” she answered, and she told them of her visit to Padmé, of returning to the temple, how those days had required more hands, how the halls of the temple had still been stained with blood, how they kept finding more bodies in secluded places for days.

Ahsoka put her hand to her mouth. She’d removed her helmet during the telling, and Barriss watched with a strange feeling of detachment the loathing in her eyes.

Of course she still hated Barriss. What Barriss had done was unforgivable.

Barriss kept talking, even as her throat burned from the dryness. She told them of Bail’s fight in the senate, and Obi-Wan’s return, and the slow trickle of Jedi back in. She told them about Fox and Cody and Wolffe leading the clones together, about the children’s lessons, about the volunteer counsellors, so many of them clones supporting each other as best they could. She spoke until she found she had nothing more to say, but,

“He should kill me, not you.” She told Ahsoka. “It’s too personal for you. You won’t be able to do it like a Jedi should.”

“I’m not a Jedi,” Ahsoka reminded her.

“And I’m not killing you,” her Captain said, looking at Ahsoka with some concern.

“I’m sorry,” Barriss told him, “I’ve forgotten your name.”

“You did check the side-effects of the tranquilizers with Mirialan physiology, didn’t you?”

“We don’t generally have adverse reactions to human medications,” Barriss explained, “but I’m allergic to spice and some spice-alikes.”

“This isn’t-”

“No,” Barriss agreed, “you’d have noticed my skin turning orange by now. Which I assume it isn’t?”

He shook his head. “Why are we supposed to be killing you, exactly?”

“Do you not know what you were pointing that blaster at my head about?” She looked to Ahsoka again. “You can’t do it. Anakin needs you firmly in the light, Jedi or not.”

“We’re not killing you,” she snapped, irritated, and flicked her blaster off before she threw it on the ground and stormed out.

Rex, who introduced himself eventually, was left behind to release Barriss, letting the force back rush painfully back into her, the death and brightness of the universe all at once. She could feel at once the panic and fury and desperation of Fox and Anakin both, and realized, with some surprise, that they were close by. Very close by.

“When that wall comes down, you should get behind me,” she told Rex, “I’ll need time to explain.”

“What?” He demanded, but he did as Barriss ordered, when it counted, and survived the initial confrontation to embrace Anakin in joy and relief.

As for Barriss, she approached Fox tentatively, watched as he removed his helmet and she saw the way sweat had stuck his hair against his brow.

“Anakin couldn’t feel you,” he said, “we thought you might be dead.”

She could hear the traces of fear echoing around Fox, and listened as he let them fade away, as good as a Jedi himself, into nothing but the most distant memory.

“I’m alright,” she told him, “it was just Rex and Ahsoka. Nothing I didn’t deserve.”

“Banthashit,” he said, and hugged her as long as Anakin held Rex, even though they’d only been apart a few short hours.

--

That evening, just before bed – she’d been taken off rotation for a second night in a row, under the circumstances – the chime at their door rang.

“I’ll get it,” Barriss said, already knowing it was for her. She could feel the tension in Ahsoka on the other side of the door. Here, at last, was the confrontation Ahsoka had fled when she chose to let Barriss live. They’d managed to avoid it all day as Ahsoka reunited with Anakin and Obi-Wan and the rest of the survivors she knew. Barriss had been planning to keep avoiding it. Who would want their own personal monster hanging over their shoulder? Even with her master alive, Ahsoka’s return was going to be hard enough. It was unimaginably awful, seeing the temple like this.

She’d changed out of her armour into a cozy-looking cream robe with a blue sash that matched her montrals. It was also immediately evident that she’d been crying.

“I’m sorry,” Barriss said, not for the first time. She felt disarmed by the way Ahsoka was looking at her. That wasn’t the same expression she’d worn that morning.

“Why didn’t you just tell me?” Ahsoka demanded. Not waiting for an answer, she continued, sounding like she might cry again, “how long did I miss him messing with your head, Barriss?”

“It’s not like that. I still had agency, I still chose to do it. And I’m so sorry, I just-”

“Shut up,” Ahsoka said, and she hugged her.

--

They might have stood there in the doorway for hours. It was hard to tell. To Barriss, time began to run like paint, the Force rising up to swallow her, all Ahsoka’s light and wonder and fury and grief and hope consuming Barriss – a gentle devastation.

“It was so loud,” she found herself confessing, “and I couldn’t think. I couldn’t do anything. I just had to make it stop. I didn’t know how to make it stop and I-”

“I’m sorry,” Ahsoka said, in turn, and Barriss found her whole body was trembling, like she had a fever, brought low with sickness and exhaustion instead of by grief and the strange, impossible relief of its lifting.

They whispered apologies back and forth, understood forgiveness in the way they held each other, in the force singing between them, until Riyo said, “is that Ahsoka?” And ushered them both in to sit on the couch, never releasing each other, and she embraced them too, for just a moment, and kissed Barriss’s head before leaving them be.

In the end, they sat there until the tinting on the window began to shift colours, creating a sunrise out of Coruscant’s artificial sky.

--

Ahsoka didn’t return to the Jedi. That was a surprise to Barriss. She moved back into the temple and dressed like a Jedi a lot of the time. She looked after the children during the day and stayed up for them at night. But she did it as a civilian.

“It wasn’t about you,” she told Barriss one night, when it was the two of them sitting in the cafeteria, drinking tea. They found it easier to talk, now, than they had in those last months before Barriss’s betrayal. “It was about them. I’d fought and bled for them. I would have died for them. But in the end they didn’t trust me or believe me, would have let Palpatine’s trumped-up cronies do what they liked with me. I didn’t even know he was behind it then, but I knew it was unfair. And then at the end of it they thought they could just pretend it was all a trial, that they could buy my loyalty back with a title.”

“And knowing the truth doesn’t change any of that?”

Ahsoka stared at her. “Knowing the truth is worse. Now I know it wasn’t just me they failed.”

And perhaps she was right about the failure of the Jedi. Perhaps they had failed Barriss and Anakin and Ahsoka too. And yet Barriss, with Ahsoka throwing the world into sharp contrast, found that she didn’t want to leave. She had betrayed the Order unto death, and now had taken lovers who would have given Master Yoda, Force keep him, conniptions. And yet she didn’t have any desire to be anything other than what she was: an awful failure of a Jedi.

“It makes sense to me,” Catapult said, when Barriss broached the topic with him in one of their meetings. “Ahsoka’s more like us. She trained because that was what she was supposed to do, what she thought she was made for, but she can be those things without it. You’re more like a real Mandalorian, with a creed that makes you a warrior.”

Barriss knew more of the Mandalorian cultural context now, from Fox, and so she parsed what he was saying easily enough. For Barriss, being a Jedi was was her system of belief in a way it wasn’t for Ahsoka.

Catapult, not realizing she had this context, clarified, “like it’s your religion, I guess.”

Barriss thought of her essay on Jediism as a religion, its trophy still sitting in Master Luminara’s quarters, gathering dust. Centuries of Jedi arguing the point, and here Catapult was, getting to the heart of the matter in under a minute. For Ahsoka, being a Jedi was a way of training her abilities, a community she’d belonged to, maybe even a culture – though she, like Anakin, spoke little Dai Bendu – but for Barriss, it was something else, not greater, but different.

The fact it was so clear to a layman should have been in Barriss’s book, she thought, if she’d lived in a world where it made sense to write it.

--

How to be a Jedi, when you had betrayed the Jedi, when you had failed as a Jedi? How to be a Jedi when those who remained either no longer held the Code in high esteem – Anakin, Master Nu – or no longer held you a person worthy of following it?

How to hold to the Code at all when you knew intimately emotion and ignorance and chaos and death? How to do it when you knew the gentleness that could come with passion, the steady, delighted warmth in Riyo in the depths of it?

There was only one person on Coruscant that she could talk to about it. And there were enough Jedi on Coruscant, now, that they had time to do it, to pull away from their duties a moment and sit together over a cup of tea. Barriss made it herself, luxuriously spiced and rich and warm in her chest. Especially after she added the spirits.

“You’ve made a good thing here,” Obi-Wan said, and she knew he was not speaking of the tea, not with the way he was looking around the apartment.

“It was mostly Fox,” Barriss admitted, which was true. He had a surprisingly good eye for design, it turned out, trained on years of judging the deeply questionable aesthetic choices of thousands of senators. He was the one who’d insisted on finding warm lighting that softened every shadow, who’d taken a couple of the older children, who were long used to him, digging through temple storage to find the perfect furniture. It was his idea of a worthwhile break from the constant, overwhelming needs of his kin.

“You’ve made a good thing here together,” Obi-Wan corrected himself, and it warmed Barriss as much as the drink did.

It gave her the courage to ask: how was he doing it? How did he hold the Code and hold to Anakin and Cody with as much strength? How did he carry it with him, knowing what he knew of war and death?

He told her something that surprised her.

“I’ve spent a long time thinking of it.” His thumb traced the rim of the delicate cup that belonged – had belonged – to Master Luminara – “Not now. Somehow, it comes easier now. But when I was a Padawan, I nearly left the order several times, and when I was just a little older than you are now…”

He’d been a Padawan longer than many. He’d been a couple years older than Barriss was now when Master Qui-Gon had died. The first casualty, though none of them knew it then, in this genocide.

Someday, if they made a memorial, they’d have to remember to put his name on.

“And what did you conclude?”

“When I was a padawan, I concluded that I might be a Jedi, even if I wasn’t cut out to be a very good one.” Barriss shot him an incredulous look. “Well, yes. And then when Qui-Gon died… I concluded that it didn’t matter if I was a very good Jedi, so long as Anakin was. And you know how that turned out.”

“Anakin is better than he thinks he is.”

“So are you,” Obi-Wan reminded her.

“I am.” Barriss thought if she didn’t agree, Ahsoka would sense it from across the temple and come kick her shins like Master Yoda reincarnate.

“Well,” he continued, “nonetheless, I’m not sure that was a very wise course, though my grief let it seem well enough. Everyone else was so impressed I’d lived, but all I could think of was that moment where Qui-Gon – he must have sensed that he was going to die, he was so calm – was cut off from me. If I’d just been a moment faster, a fraction better, I could have been there with him. And it was easier to blame myself for not living up to that than to question what it meant to be a Jedi in a world where no one, not one person, was strong enough to overcome the darkness.”

“But living with it comes easier to you now?” Barriss could hardly keep desperation from her voice.

“The grief isn’t easier,” he admitted. “And neither is the guilt. When I think of the fact that if I’d never left Anakin alone on Coruscant, if I’d never once let Palpatine near him in all those years, I might have stopped it all? That’s never going to be an easy thing to bear. But being a Jedi? Yes, that’s easier.

“The moment of testing has always been part of what it means to be a Jedi. As long as there have been Jedi, followers dedicated exclusively to the light of the Force, rather than merely to the Force itself, there has been a challenge of the Dark. There have been wars with the Sith. There have been moments when the Order shamed itself – in our actions on Mandalore, for one. Even individually, we ask that our knights face trials, not only of their skill, but of their spirits, their minds. Once, all trials were like mine – trials of the world, rather than trials of the temple. By those trials, all of them, we become more ourselves, more able to face the trials that will continue through our lives.”

“The Rough-Hewn Path.” It was an unfashionable doctrine, even as its core legacy, the trials themselves, continued unabated.

“As the Force wills it.” He said. “In each of its trials, the Order has found a new path, formations and reformations. This is another, where we search deep within ourselves for the core of what we are, the kyber that powers and steadies us. In my search, I think, I have found serenity. I have found that my fear of emotion and passion had only made those things more opposed to peace. I found that my fear of chaos only gave it greater power over me. To be a Jedi, I think, one must first accept the world as it is, and next seek the good in it. To see that the light may exist even in the darkness. Perhaps especially in the darkness.”

“You’re thinking of the Initiates’ Code.”

The simplified version of the practice, intended for children, without the rigid rejections of emotion, chaos, passion and death in the true version.

“I am,” he agreed. “I never spent much time with the initiates – not since I was one myself – and at the time, I wanted more than anything to be an adult, to be focusing on the ‘true’ version of the code.”

“Actually, the initiates’ code-”

“Is just an alternate translation.” Barriss felt her ears shift. Of course he knew that. “And I think more of that now. And I think of what we lost. Who are we to order that there be no chaos in the universe?”

“I think the rejection of chaos is the idea that there is meaning in all things, that the universe is fundamentally ordered, rather than random. That the Force guides and shapes all things, in the end.” She could not help but argue. It was so rewarding, to have someone to argue with. “But in the rest of it… you are not wrong, I think. We are not meant not to have emotions, or passions – perhaps even fears. What we are meant to do is have all those things, to be utterly Mirialan – or human, as the case may be – and also, in those moments where we feel deeply, we must seek to retain peace, and an ordered mind, and trust in the Force.”

“It seems to me,” he said, with a smile, “that you know what it is to be a Jedi better than I do. Thank you, Knight Offee. Your words grant me greater wisdom.” These last words, when spoken in Dai Bendu – which Obi-Wan had not used, he was too used to a student who knew none of it – were a traditional benediction for a Jedi Sage, one who saw the Force deeply and shared its truths.

It was the first time anyone had ever said it to Barriss. The ambitious child deep within her, who had never fought in any war, would have thrilled to hear it. She did not yet know the path required to earn it. If, indeed, Barriss had earned it.

“I am no knight,” she said, “not if we focus on the trial. I never should have passed. He was already shifting my mind. There must have been a mistake, I think, or else he manipulated the examiners in some way. I never should have been cleared, sitting in that hall, meditating on the code, and all the while hearing the noise growing in the back of my head, becoming more and more certain that becoming a knight meant I needed to end the war by whatever means necessary. That was no true trial.”

He set down his tea, and leaned forward a little, watching her closely. There was, she realized with some shock, a little grey in his hair. She had thought that only happened to humans when they were very old, and Obi-Wan was not yet forty.

“I would not wish a Trial of the World on anyone,” Obi-Wan said. “To win a knighthood in one is the worst imaginable consolation for grief and pain, and I am not at all surprised Ahsoka rejected hers. But I accepted mine, despite that. And you, I think, would be more than entitled to accept yours, if you would let another knight you by it.”

He was right. It was the worst imaginable prize. “How could you bear to be knighted by anyone but him?”

“For Anakin,” he told her, simply. “But you have something I didn’t. Something we never allowed Ahsoka, though we should have.”

“Which is?”

“Time. You have a home here no matter what. You are a recognized knight of the order, no matter what. But if you want to be knighted for the trial you truly faced? Know that there is a master in this order willing to see it done.”

His words had meant so much to her, once, and she had spent too much time pretending they didn’t.

“Thank you, Obi-Wan.”

They had never hugged before. Not once, in all their years of knowing each other. But they did now.

Chapter Text

The world had settled into a haze of routine. Sunrises and sunsets, the predictable cycles of Coruscant’s artificial weather, the calendar for supervising the children, Barriss’s shifts as a healer, her training sessions with the clone medics. There were occasional disruptions in their routine, certainly, good and bad, but even many of these were by rote. Particular Jedi re-emerging from death – T’ra Saa, now the most senior Jedi among them in the wake of Yoda’s death – and news emerging of other deaths. A few times, they were particularly lucky, and children returned to them.

Caleb Dume wouldn’t even look Barriss in the face, but he was returned to them.

Other disruptions were notably less predictable.

Barriss rolled over to grab her comm, accidentally shoving her elbow into Fox’s chest and making him gasp painfully. “Where?”

They normally only called her in the night when someone was badly hurt, but from the other side of the comm, what she heard was the thudding beats of club music.

“We’ve got it!”

There was Riyo. She’d been working late tonight with Cody and a handful of others. “What?”

“We’ve got the votes!” Riyo was yelling in her ear. “For the citizenship bill. The Senator for Onderon-” A Separatist senator, that was. “-signed on, and brought a dozen friends. That’s all we needed!”

In her sleep-addled state, it took a moment to register properly. “The bill?”

“Cody’s bill!”

Ah. Right. Barriss poked Fox again, more deliberately this time. “Riyo has news for you.”

“For me?”

“Congratulations,” Barriss told him, kissed him once, and then shooed him out of bed to enjoy his good news while she went back to sleep.

--

Having the votes didn’t mean they had all the practicalities, but it was the essential thing. The thing that would allow Fox and his brothers their own representation in the Senate, the right to marry, to work outside the GAR, to leave and live freely as they liked.

It was too late for so many, but not too late for everyone. When it was officially signed into law, Barriss was dragged out to a sudden spate of weddings, mostly of guards, who had had the most time to meet and fall for civilians, but also of a handful of the counsellors she had trained, some of whom were even marrying each other.

Catapult’s wedding was the first, to a bright Dathomiri hairdresser who Barriss knew because she was running a night class session for a couple dozen clones. The first in a series of classes Catapult had suggested, actually, and Barriss now wondered whose idea that had been.

“And should I expect an invitation to yours?” Fox teased Cody, when they were all standing there, watching Catapult and Vreka being sickening together.

“Shut up,” Cody said, but Barriss could tell he was blushing.

As for Fox himself, he had a slightly different set of priorities for his newfound freedom. The first he asked of Barriss alone that night, quiet and hopeful, and so she set about making it so.

She was a knight and a healer, tried by fire, by the world, at the hands of a Sith. Her calling was to serve, and her duty was to the people who had been burned alongside her. In this, she was responsible not only for their bodies, but for their spirits.

She spent three days in the archives, a fourth speaking to a civilian neurosurgeon who, she learned, had once been friends with Vokara Che and who was happy to help avenge her in a small way, before she went to Fox and said,

“I can do it, but if everyone is going to want it, then we’ll need to find a way to scale. Additional training for the medics, or…”

“Or?”

“Droids,” Barriss said, simply. This had been Dr. N’mara’s suggestion. “Most surgeons use medidroids in delicate procedures these days. They’ve steadier hands than we ever could. We’d need to source a significant number of neurosurgerydroids, and it would be expensive, unless we brought cheaper standard medidroids and upgraded their programming.

Fox snorted. “If only we had someone on Coruscant who could do something like that,” he said, and so they brought Anakin on board.

He listened to their proposal, looked down at Barriss’s sketches of what needed doing, and was mostly silent until Fox said,

“It may seem a trivial thing-”

Anakin interrupted him. “It isn’t,” and he showed them a small white line on the inside of his arm near his elbow that Barriss had always assumed was a self-harm scar. She’d never realized it might be surgical, because most simple surgeries performed with appropriate amounts of Bacta, in the Core, didn’t leave scars.

But surgeries on Tattooine, performed on slaves, probably did. And this scar was old. The entry wound, not the exit.

“If you need-”

He shook his head. “Obi-Wan arranged it when I was twelve, as soon as I asked.” They sat with that a moment. “I know he talks about it like he was the worst teacher in the world, but-”

“It wasn’t their fault,” Barriss agreed, and wondered if Master Luminara had known that. She had always talked a good game about non-attachment, about not showing too many ties to Barriss, but there was no doubt in Barriss’s mind that, had their stories been reversed, she would have been able to rely on her master even as Skywalker could his. She swallowed the thought down and returned to the most important thing. “You can build them? Write the program?”

“Of course. But not everyone will want droids, you know. It’s… a very personal thing.”

“I’ll do what I can,” Barriss agreed, “and we’ll see to it that no one is alone, droids or not.”

--

So, Riyo and Cody and Obi-Wan had their triumph now, in the citizenships, and Fox and Anakin had theirs soon enough, as they began the slow process of removing the chips from the clones. But still the work continued.

And one morning, Barriss came down to breakfast to find Ahsoka and Wolffe in the kitchen, whispering together in hushed tones.

She made to withdraw, but it was too late. Ahsoka looked pleased to see her – Barriss still didn’t know entirely what to do with that – and waved her urgently over. “Is Fox here?”

“Still asleep. I can go wake him, if-”

“Later,” Wolffe said. “It’s going to be the last sleep any of us get for ages.”

Barriss had never known him well – all she really knew was that he’d been close to Master Plo, and she knew that better now than she had when Master Plo was alive. “What’s happened?”

“Word from Kamino,” Ahsoka said.

“Good or bad?”

“Karking weird,” Wolffe told her, and indeed, it was. When he showed Barriss a transcript of the transmission, which had only just reached them after Anakin’s latest bout of comms restoration, she could do nothing but stare at it in confusion.

“The Kaminoans have lost control of the planet?”

“So they say. And are in the market for backup to take it back, apparently, if anyone’s willing to come help turn their blockade into something capable of actually seizing the planet.”

“‘Payment to be delivered in the form of 1.3 million multi-purposes military units when assets are re-secured,’” Barriss read out.

“Assholes,” said Ahsoka.

“Assholes,” Barriss agreed, which made Ahsoka laugh with delight – for some reason, everyone always thought it was funny when Barriss swore, like they thought Mirialans had some kind of prohibition on it. Or maybe just because she didn’t usually bother. “But that’s good news, I think.”

“Is it?” Wolffe asked, a slightly dangerous note in his voice. He hadn’t made a point of offering Barriss any particular degree of trust, though she didn’t think he disliked her particularly. It was just that he didn’t like anybody particularly, these days.

“It means they think at least 1.3 million of them are still alive.”

--

Once everyone had been briefed, Obi-Wan and Anakin took charge of organizing the mission, which predictably meant it was madness.

“No,” Barriss said flat out, when the plan was explained to her, “you can’t possibly be doing that.”

“Why not?” Anakin asked her.

“Because you have two children at home and you haven’t used a lightsaber in over a year? Because you’re one of the most recognizable people in the galaxy?”

“I’ll have the helmet on the whole time. The Kaminoans won’t know I’m me.”

“Oh yeah, and that’s going to go well.” Barriss turned to Ashoka for support, but she just shrugged.

“I mean, do you have a better idea?”

Obi-Wan, who could be reasonable, said, “it’s a stop-gap measure, I must admit. Our ultimate priority remains getting a team to the surface to re-establish communication with the clones there, but our options for doing that are limited until we have a better sense of the Kaminoan defences, which is going to require someone going undercover and doing reconnaissance on their blockade.”

It came to her then, and she hated the idea, with the burning passion of a thousand suns, but, “you don’t need anyone going undercover. You just need someone who would believably be on Palpatine’s side. There’s no way all his associates ever knew about each other.”

“Oh yes, that’s loads more achievable.”

“Ahsoka,” Barriss said, “you already thought so yourself, and you know me. Why wouldn’t they believe it?”

--

Fox and Riyo hated the idea even more than Barriss did, which was saying something.

“You’re a healer,” Riyo said, a bit plaintively. “Fieldwork isn’t-”

“I’m not really a healer,” Barriss reminded her, “I never finished my training. I’m not even a knight, by right – I never had a legitimate trial.”

“You’re the closest thing to a healer they have. We need you here.”

“Master Saa isn’t a specialist, but she has more training than I do in-”

“Master Saa isn’t you,” Riyo objected. “And what are you going to do? You don’t even have a lightsaber. You’ll get yourself killed. Barriss.”

“One-point-three million,” Barriss reminded her. “I’m not a very good knight, or a very good healer, but I can do this. I don’t even have to lie. I just have to let them believe what they want to believe.”

“And come back,” Fox said. “You have to come home to us.”

The shaved patch on his head where Barriss had removed his chip still hadn't quite grown back. He'd tried to do a pattern as best he could, but now that it was growing out, it looked silly. Maybe one of the hairdressing students could help him.

“I’ll do my best.”

And she would, too, for them.

--

The Kaminoans docked the small ship without too many questions, and though they did have her watched carefully as they showed her around their borrowed Trade Federation blockade ships, the guard, such as they were – Kaminoans awkwardly holding blasters made for humans in three-fingered hands – looked frightened of her.

Barriss couldn’t blame them. She would have been frightened of her too. Padmé and Sabé had dressed her meticulously in black. Barriss had always favoured dark colours, but somehow the way Padmé did it was more… elegant. She kept enough modesty for Barriss to feel comfortable, but it all gained a vaguely threatening quality that Barriss thought her own clothes didn’t have, a dark leather vest, a cape hanging from silver facets, even the way she’d arranged Barriss’s scarf said powerful and threatening.

And, of course, the lightsaber at her belt helped with the disguise, even if the pulse of darkness coming off it made Barriss feel vaguely nauseous. This had been Ahsoka’s contribution, the ugly, stolen thing she’d carried with her all the way back to Coruscant in lieu of her own weapon, which she’d left to disguise her survival. She'd had some vague plan to drag the crystals back into the light but there had never been time. Now, unmended, the hilt sat at Barriss’s belt as a deadly reminder of the power of the darkside. The noise that came from it, the pain, made her feel sick, even as she kept her head high and her back straight, trying to move like Padmé would have.

“Jedi.”

Barriss laughed, cruelly. “Not for some time, I’m afraid. Do you get the news from Coruscant all the way out here?”

“We did once,” the Kaminoan general – they wore a military uniform that looked like it belonged in a museum – said. “Not for some time.”

“You were victims of Skywalker’s treachery,” Barriss advised them. “He double-crossed our lord at the last possible moment. And stole your merchandise, I believe.”

She put on a good long show, hours of talking and performance and trying not to throw up on anyone’s shoes, before she had an opportunity to slip away to the fresher and set up the micro-transmitter Anakin had given her to stick just behind her ear after she’d been swept for surveillance devices the first time. With it there, Barriss started to talk terms, what she’d need to accomplish the task of subduing the clones with minimal ‘loss of product.’

All she could think, as she did, was how all it took for her to 'subdue' the clones, to bring out the rash loyalty that drove all of them, was simple acts of decency and kindness. It had never required any kind of control mechanism to manipulate them, nor any twisting of their minds with the Force. They would have followed Barriss into hell – despite knowing what she was – simply because she had done her best to help them. They were too inescapably good to do anything else. And yet the Kaminoans, who saw themselves as scientists, as doctors couldn’t even begin to see it.

Somewhere else, well beyond what Barriss could see, she knew that Obi-Wan and Ahsoka were sneaking their way down onto Kamino.

--

It took Barriss nearly a week to earn enough trust to get what she’d really wanted all along – a drop ship, with approximately 50 Kaminoan soldiers on it. By then, they were perfectly convinced that the Sith, Barriss Offee, would be using her mind control powers to bring the clones back under their control.

Barriss was good at manipulating people. She’d nearly forgotten, under the noise, how good she’d been at it in her plots against the temple, but she had been brilliant then, and she still was. It was all about faith and confidence, Barriss thought. They Kaminoans believed in her because, as far as they knew, Barriss believed utterly, without a twinge of doubt.

They believed in her, and Barriss was leading these fifty, she knew perfectly well, to their deaths. Anakin hadn’t set the comm up for two-way communication, but it could buzz a little if Obi-Wan and Ahsoka pressed a switch on their end, to ensure that Barriss knew everything was going well. And so she knew, when they landed exactly where she’d said they would land, to expect a small force of clones to immediately jump out in ambush. Mostly they used stun shots, but that didn’t stop a few from falling, screaming as they went, down towards the roiling seas below. If the landing didn’t kill them, and the drowning didn’t kill them, what lived there would get them soon enough.

One of the clones was wearing a Commander’s uniform – though he was barely grown, probably about Ahsoka’s nat-age – and so it was to him Barriss said, “where’s Master Kenobi?”

Things would have to move quickly now. Wolffe, who had control of the fleet and had received Barriss’s transmission, had only been waiting for Barriss herself to be out of the way before exploiting the holes Barriss had uncovered in the Kaminoan defences. But it would still be valuable for him to have help from planetside, and that’s what Obi-Wan would be running, if he could.

“He’s with Buir,” the Commander told her, and then, embarrassed, explained himself, which was how Barriss, who’d picked up rather a lot of Mando’a these last few months, learned that Shaak Ti was alive, and that the clones on Kamino called her their mother.

Shaak Ti, who’d been with her master on Kashyyyk during 66, had lived. Barriss and Ahsoka had mourned them together, had idly spoken with Obi-Wan about setting up a memorial for the pair of them and Quinlan Vos, the third Jedi assigned to that mission. It cut at Barriss more than she’d expected to learn that one of them lived.

“Well, you’d better show me to them,” Barriss said, and she followed the clones inside the airlock, out of the downpour, and shucked off her sodden cape. The dress, wretchedly, was also soaked by even a few minutes out in the rain, as was her scarf. There was nothing to be done about the scarf until she could get somewhere more private, but in the interests of not dripping her way down the halls, Barriss knelt down to begin wringing out the hem of her skirt, and it was in this undignified position that she heard the sound of running footsteps, and she looked up, startled by the fact that they were not a clone’s heavy-soled footsteps, to see a face she knew better than she knew her own markings staring back at her in wonder.

Suddenly, the beautiful disguise Padmé had made for her felt like the worst garment in the world. Here she was, dressed as a Sith, that evil lightsaber still at her belt – blessedly never drawn – and her eyes lined dark enough to make up for the fact that they weren’t Sith-yellow. And there was her Master, every inch of her the picture of a Jedi, of a Mirialan lady, and the Force around her sang with belonging and rightness.

There wasn’t time to regain her dignity by standing and then bowing, so Barriss sank down onto her knees, and lowered her head in shame, and said, “I’m sorry, Master. I was weak, and I could not resist or stay in the light.”

She sat there in her puddle and her shame until awkward arms came up around her, and Master Luminara said, “you’re here now,” as if that was all that mattered, and soaked herself by embracing Barriss more fiercely than she ever had in all the years of her apprenticeship.

--

It was only later that Barriss learned exactly how they had come to that place. It was after their plan went off with only minor hitches, and after Master Luminara finally pried herself from Barriss’s side to go greet Master Nu, leaving Barriss alone to find her centre once more. She was not alone for long.

“I explained to her what happened,” Ahsoka said, unrepentant, and told her about coming down to the surface of Kamino, the fear and the tension, the uncertainty of what they’d find.

“Obi-Wan sensed Quinlan first. He’s good at disguising his Force presence – he’s been disguising the three of them all this time – but Obi-Wan knows him better than anyone. That kind of disguise can have certain tells, once you’re close up, and when we recognized they were shielded, Obi-Wan knew exactly who had done it. So when we revealed ourselves to the clones, he was all ‘take me to your leader’ about it.”

And so they’d been taken to their leaders, the Commanders of three battalions of clones, and their three generals, all alive.

“And Obi-Wan was thrilled, of course, and I was happy too – Master Ti was the one who took me Akul hunting; she’s family, even if she’s a bit distant sometimes. But then I saw Master Unduli and she just looked… cold, unphased, and I maybe kind of lost my temper.”

“Ahsoka.”

“For all she knew you were dead! And she’d left you out there to die, and hadn’t gone back and checked or anything.”

But that wasn’t the real betrayal that made Ahsoka so angry. She was angry about the same thing Barriss probably should have been angry about. When Ahsoka had been suspected of treason, Anakin had fought for her long and hard. He’d worked out all Barriss’s schemes to prove Ahsoka’s innocence. But when the tables were turned and Barriss’s guilt revealed, Master Luminara hadn’t even come to visit her.

“And she’s always been so cold with you,” Ahsoka complained. “The pair of you, always ‘attachment’ this and ‘distance’ that. It’s kriffed up, you know, to try and keep that much distance from a child you’re raising. Maybe it’s fine for some species, but it’s not for Togruta, or humans, and I know karking well it’s not for Mirialans either. I’ve never seen you calm in your own skin like you are when you’ve got Riyo on one side and Fox on the other. Having people is good for you.”

Barriss barely remembered her birth parents, but she knew there’d been at least three parents in her clan. It was common for Mirialans to live in large family groups, just as it was for Togruta. But still.

“Just because the Jedi way isn’t what you like-”

“That’s not the Jedi way. What you do with the kids now, teaching them and looking after them and doing everything you can to help them be happy, and sharing that with all those around you. That’s Jedi child-rearing. Communal and educational and kind. That’s the childhood I had. And it’s the childhood you had too, before whatever the fuck Unduli was thinking.”

“Ahsoka!”

It was the highlights of this argument, apparently, that Ahsoka had ranted at poor Master Luminara in an increasingly temperamental monologue as she explained, at some length, how she’d done wrong by Barriss.

“And then she just cut me off, and asked, ‘she’s alive?’ And I realized I’d maybe missed a couple points somewhere in there.”

And so Ahsoka had explained, to an apparently awe-struck audience of one, how Barriss had survived, and what she’d been doing since.

“And you told it right?” Barriss asked, suspiciously. “You told her the truth, not just that I was ‘innocent,’ like it wasn’t my brain making the scheme and my hand holding the lightsaber?”

Ahsoka rolled her eyes. “Of course I told the truth. And I probably did a better job than you would have.”

Barriss would have liked to argue with her, but she still hadn’t been wholly forgiven for managing not to tell Ahsoka about Palpatine’s effect on her when they reunited.

“I wish you weren’t angry with her on my behalf,” she said instead. “You’re not angry with Obi-Wan.”

“I’m sometimes angry with Obi-Wan,” Ahsoka admitted, with all the emotional freedom of someone who wasn’t a Jedi anymore. “But I’m not joking – you know I’ve never liked how she talks about you. I can’t imagine what it was like to have a master you didn’t know cared about you.”

How to explain? “But I did know. We’re not like you and Obi-Wan and Anakin, with the big gestures and the sacrifice, but I knew. And if there was anything more I needed, that’s not anyone’s business but mine.”

Ahsoka didn’t look happy about it, but she was older and wiser than she had been in their years of childhood friendship. She let Barriss be.

--

It was only later, when they were alone on Coruscant, and Barriss was helping her master return to her quarters, returning her keys and trying to set to rights all the things she’d disturbed in Luminara’s months away, that she heard,

“Heleo.” It was the great apology in Dai Bendu. Closer to the Mando’a 'ne cheta' than it was to any standard apology.

It was such a kindness to hear the tongue spoken like it was natural that Barriss nearly forgot to respond to the word itself until she turned and saw Master Luminara clutching Barriss’s girlhood essay prize in her hand, which Barriss had thoughtlessly moved all those months ago, ruminating on the lost potential to share her ideas and have them be understood.

“Master?” Barriss spoke the same tongue back to her, a benediction on her lips, “What are you-”

You have been my student,” Master Luminara said, “and in my cowardice, I failed you. I was so unable to face what I imagined as my own failure that I damned you for it without truly asking why. I scoured for clues as to your motives without speaking to you. I mourned you without accepting that you were yet living and I ought to face you. And for my failure, you suffered, and that is my endless shame.”

I mourned you. She wondered, Ahsoka’s words in the back of her head, if Master Luminara would even have been capable of speaking those words had Barriss died on the battlefield three years ago.

But then, Barriss, too, was capable of saying, of understanding, so much more than she had been.

“It began before that. I was a child. A healer. It wasn’t Palpatine who taught me to kill, who pushed me to the point where I couldn’t tell the difference between my own despair and his poison.”

“Heleo,” said Master Luminara again, and, gently setting aside the trophy, she knelt before Barriss.

It was an indescribably wrong picture.

“I couldn’t have done better,” Barriss admitted. “I know it was the whole war his poison touched, not just me. I know that was part of his plan, and I couldn’t see it either.”

“You were my student, and it was not your responsibility. It was mine.”

Barriss confessed, “I am your student. He was in my mind before my trial. I never should have passed. I never should have been knighted.”

Curious eyes watched her. “Would you want to be still? Ahsoka, I understand-”

“Ahsoka doesn’t believe anymore. Perhaps she never did. But I still believe. I believe that the Will of the Force touches all things, that there is order and meaning in this pain. I believe that through my choice of duty, of peace over war, of light against darkness, I can be a Jedi by faith, though I do not deserve, may never deserve, to be one by service.”

“Bow your head,” her master said, sternly, and when Barriss did, and closed her eyes, a palm pressed against her cheek. “Have you faced a trial of your skill?”

“I have faced a war,” Barriss replied, “that would have claimed my life, had I not skill. I have faced a peace that would have claimed the lives of others, had I not skill.”

“Have you faced a trial of your courage?”

“I have faced with courage those who I wronged, who I would have shirked from, had I not courage.”

“Have you faced a trial of the flesh?”

This trial was the rejection of attachment, in the modern temple, but it was also older than this, “I have faced the pain of a Sith’s claws in my mind, and my flesh has survived. I have faced the pain of deafening noise in the Force, rent by wickedness and the screaming of the dying, and so too the pain of silence, when the dying was done. And yet my flesh bears me on.”

“And have you faced a trial of the spirit?”

“I have faced the knowledge of my greatest weakness. I have seen my own capacity for darkness, and by the strength of my spirit, I have returned to the light.”

“Tell me of your other trials, Child of the Force.”

And this was an ancient custom, rarely practiced in the Coruscanti tradition, but Barriss knew it, as Master Luminara knew, for she was the one who had encouraged Barriss to study all the Jedi virtues. “I have faced isolation, in the cells of Coruscant, and in my own mind, and in the death of my people. I have faced betrayal, not only that of my peers, who could not save me from a Sith who we were sworn to serve, but that of my own mind, which failed me at my moment of greatest need. And I have faced forgiveness, that trial which has asked me to forgive others, and, far harsher, to forgive myself.”

“And have you done this?”

Barriss spared a thought for the girl facing her trials with a Sith’s hand already upon her, so certain of her rightness, so naive to the true capacity of the dark, and so isolated already, with only a scant few distant friends, so many of those she had cared for already dead. How could she ask that child to see more than any other Jedi in the Galaxy could?

“I have not proclaimed myself innocent,” she said, and she never would, for there would always be blood on her hands, “but I have forgiven myself the shame of failure. I have forgiven myself imperfection. I may have to do it again tomorrow, though, if my mind turns again to shame in the night.”

“Light comes not in a moment,” said Master Luminara, “but in an eternal resistance to the dark.” She removed her hand then from Barriss’s cheek. “Look at me, Barriss.”

She reached into a pocket of her robes and withdrew a small drawstring bag. The force sang around it, familiar, soothing notes. Barriss took it, and upended it, letting the kyber crystal fall into her hand. It wasn’t touched with darkness, as Barriss was sure she had left it. Instead, it was gently polished, not only gleaming, but sparkling with light in the Force, like someone careful and good had dedicated many long hours of a siege to its care.

It was what Ahsoka had intended to do with Maul’s kyber, but a thousand times amplified.

Master Luminara reached out to close her hand around the crystal, and said, “Rise, Barriss Offee, Healer and Knight of the Jedi.”