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Chapter Text

Naboo was a pleasant enough planet, if you took what it presented at face value and didn't peek behind the curtains. Its performance was elaborate, the costume weighed down by tradition and intricacies of protocol, the voice carefully modulated to avoid nuance, and the accessories fancifully shaped to hide the stunning variety of weaponry capable of being ornamental.

What else could you expect from a planet that preferred its politicians young, its ministers to focus on the arts instead of agriculture, and its monarchs similar enough in appearance to their cohort that the historical decision has been made for the upper echelons of the court to perform as both servant and decoy to the reigning monarch, assisted by the mask-like make-up of state that could be created on any face?

It had been centuries since a handful of monarchs had been so paranoid as to have their helpmeets undergo facial reconstruction surgery, creating a truly inseparable dual being containing the monarch and the decoy.

And it had been sixty-seven days shy of four standard years since he last saw Sifo-Dyas, on that wrecked plain of Serenno in the shadow of the cliff-side palace—in the shadow of Dooku’s own future. In the shadow of a different palace, he found his hand straying to his side. To the pocket where that old communicator sat, silent for three standard years, eight standard months, and twenty-four standard days.

It beeped, and there was only one person who could contact it. Dooku answered and found himself disappointed to find that it was a recorded message. He paused it, feeling the frown manifest in the corners of his mouth as he examined the projected image.

In the image the holoprojector broadcast, Sifo-Dyas looked—

Dooku had to be honest to himself, at least.

Sifo-Dyas did not look entirely unwell. To Dooku’s experienced eye, it looked like his old companion was in the second stage of the aftermath of his visions, after some semblance of rationality has returned. There were sheets and blankets pulled up like a cocoon, his hair free (my hair hurts, Dooku remembers being frantically whispered to, once), enough to have slipped down over one eye while the other squinted into the holo-transmitter.

It could just have been Dooku’s imagination, but Sifo-Dyas’s face looked to have creases pressed into it, no doubtably from the hoard of blankets that had probably grown even larger over the years since Dooku’s departure from the order. He remembered Sifo-Dyas loving to burrow his entire head into anything approaching soft, from pillows to Dooku’s own stomach. Once.

Would it still count as a present proclivity even if it has been far more than nearly four standard years since Dooku had found himself woken up by Sifo-Dyas’s cold nose pressed into his own side? Should it still count if it has been far more than nearly four standard years since Dooku was woken up by Sifo-Dyas’s cold nose pressed into Dooku’s own side? Dooku decided that the crease marks, verifiable or not, supported his conclusion.

He allowed the message to resume.

“I have a huge favour to ask,” Sifo-Dyas started. “I need you to p—ge—fetch a kid for me.”

From the moment Sifo-Dyas grabbed the hand of someone attempting to pickpocket him on the space station ringing Ringo Vinda and discovered a five-year-old Rael Averross who was, at the time, also floating Sifo-Dyas’s lightsaber away from its belt hook (the reach for the credit pouch being the front), and brought him to the Order’s crèche, he seemed to acquire a particular knack for finding Force-sensitive younglings. Sometimes in the strangest places.

“There's a sit—situation that I've been … monitoring from a distance, let's say. It’s some—” The space between Sifo-Dyas’s brows creased, one of his few tells that he’s moving toward being incapacitated again “—something reaching a—” He broke off entirely, making a motion with his hand like either a blooming flower or an explosion. A pressure point?

Sifo-Dyas’s sigh was close enough to the microphone pick up that static distorts the sound in the message for a moment.

“Migraine larger than your ego,” he gritted out, tapping his fingers against the side of his head in explanation.

Dooku rolled his eyes.

“Sorry. It can—can—can’t wait.” Sifo-Dyas’s eyes slipped out of focus, combing through the back annals of his mind to find words that won't trip his tongue up. “Attached files. Forms. Wh—locale.”

One side of Sifo-Dyas’s mouth rose in that crooked smile and that's the end of the message.

Dooku steeled himself to be asked to travel to the furthest reaches of the galaxy. Coordinates on the edge of the Chiss Ascendancy perhaps, where an escape pod floats. The Kathol Rift, where he will be inundated by imaginings of spiders, in the manner of all Force users travelling to that area. Perhaps even a Gree.

If anyone were to find a Gree that had spontaneously manifested Force-sensitivity after the twenty thousand years their leaders say it has been since the loss, it would be Sifo-Dyas.

The coordinates weren’t strictly that. A thorough person would have provided the x, y, and z coordinates of a location on the galactic grid, allowing Dooku to zoom in precisely on where he needs to be. A normal person would list an address in a city on a planet in a sector in one of the galactic rims, with the simplified alphanumeric designation of its location along the galactic plane. A person running out of time would send a local holonet map of the area with a dropped pin indicating the location.

Sifo-Dyas had not attached the sort of map found in tourist offices not the galaxy over. Attached, instead, was a flat holograph of a math. Had he used a camera to capture the image himself? There were creases in the map’s surface, as if it has been folded and unfolded multiple times.

It was a graphical depiction of an area, but it had more in common with a cartoon than a map. Buildings were drawn in a simplified form, many of the larger ones given rounded roofs. The streets were not on a grid, there were squares drawn along the sides of the streets further from what looked like the central government buildings. There were inverted leths around what looked to be the edge of a town—were they mountains?—and places where he assumed the elevation changes. One side of the town appeared to be mostly waterfall.

Dooku didn’t have a bad feeling about this, but he certainly had a feeling drawn out of him by the similarities of the buildings of this hand-drawn town and the city of Moenia bustling around him.

Sifo-Dyas did not give actual coordinates because he clearly thought they would be redundant. A banner across the top gave the settlement’s name first in the formal, irritatingly circular and similar letters of Naboo Futhark. At least the more easily deciphered Furthork was beside it, which allowed Dooku to discover its name.

Dee’ja Peak.

A single square along a labelled street has a number written beside it, and was circled several times. You’ll know it when you see it was scrawled alongside. As to whether or not this statement would be helpful, that remained to be seen.

P.S. It’s north from Moenia or southeast from Theed. Don’t try to figure out the directions. Take one of the transports from the public shuttleport. Not the spaceport.

If it truly was as simple to get to this Dee’ja Peak as Sifo-Dyas was implying, then renting one of the sleek Seraph-class landspeeders should have been no trouble at all for Dooku.

It ended up being trouble for Dooku.

He discovered the original of Sifo-Dyas’s provided map at the Moenia shuttleport, itself not located logically near the spaceport but on the largest of the city’s islands, close to the medical centre. The majority of its trips appeared to be along a loop that connected the three ports of the city: space, shuttle, and the actual docking facilities on the south side of the city.

When asked about rentals, the woman at the information-slash-ticket counter informed him that landspeeders were the choice of ill-informed people venturing into the various mountain ranges of Naboo. Yes, there were special models for the planet’s numerous swamps but the mountains presented a challenge for vehicles equipped only with repulsorlifts and only capable of achieving only a metre or two of height above the ground. If he had been in Theed or Keren, it would have been much easier, since he could have just taken an actual shuttle ferry that went into the upper atmosphere and landed on a small plateau that was being investigated for the installation of a shuttleport near Dee’ja Peak.

It was not so simple from his current location.

“You don’t want that,” she told him, holding her datapad out and showing him the route between Moenia and Dee’ja Peak. One of the many braids her smooth hair was woven into fell over her shoulder and she pushed it back out of the way so it wouldn’t block the screen.

With the way the route climbed the mountains in switchbacks and what had to be steep angles, Dooku found himself giving in and stepping back as the woman flipped up part of her desk and walked out from behind it. There would be no renting of any speeders. Instead, he followed the woman back over to the rack of actual, printed brochures and pamphlets that he had located a copy the Dee’ja Peak map in. It sat beneath an electronic signboard displaying the times and destinations of the next dozen shuttles to depart. The woman plucked one out without searching and unfolded it, showing Dooku the extent of his folly.

MOENIA - CHAFALA - RELLIAS - PARRLAY - FERENTIA - DEE’JA PEAK was written across the top of a timetable, first in Futhork and then in Aurebesh. Some of the slots were filled with only a strike mark, an indicator that certain departure times did not travel through all of the locations. 

“This is what you want,” she said, held the pamphlet aloft, and headed back to her desk. Her braids slapped against her back, the hair somehow smooth despite the omnipresent moisture in swamp-close Moenia’s air. Once back on the other side, she used an ink stylus to circle the departure times still ahead in the day. Which was most of them, as it had not even passed mid-morning yet. “The morning and evening routes are the blue milk runs, but you’re in luck because the ten o’clock only stops at Parrlay and Ferentia on the way. It’s practically half the time as the full trip.”

Dooku took the pamphlet and folded it so that the timetable was on the front. Then, he unfolded the Dee’ja Peak map and located the spot circled by Sifo-Dyas on this unmarked version. He stabbed a finger at it.

“Here,” he said. “Does the shuttle stop anywhere near here?”

“Yes. The second theatre stop,” the woman said. “Not the one in front of it. When the shuttle leaves that one, press the call button. Then you’ll be at the right stop.”

The ink stylus descended again, scribbling a star on the north side of the theatre and then a line following the maze of streets to a three-way intersection where it took the right-most—to Dooku; left-most to the woman—turn. 

“That should take you there.” The woman scribbled another star.  “Just watch out for the street signs. They’re on sides of the buildings at the ends of the streets and in Futhork. Some of the ones closer to the university and the capitol building are also in Basic but once you get into the neighbourhood it’s usually just in the one system.”

She looked at him, this plain-faced, smooth-haired Moenian, and squinted. Her nose crinkled up and she reached beneath her desk to pull out an elaborately decorated envelope printed with the same logo as the map: a waterfall on green hills surmounted by absurdly tiny bipeds, turned to black shadows by the shining sun behind them. Unlike the flimsi map, the logo on the envelope had a shimmer to it. The rays of the sun gleamed beneath the mundane lighting of the shuttleport, yellow and white glittering depending upon the angle one was looking at it from.

It was a heavy sort of paper, tough enough to be carried in pockets and purses without the corners wearing through. 

“This is from the Dee’ja Peak Historical Society.” She held out the envelope. “It should be formatted for just about any datapad. The shuttle takes a couple of hours.”

Dooku was so abruptly and intensely grateful for a non-flimsi method of data storage that he thanked the woman profusely. 

Satisfaction emanated from her in the Force; she was the type of person who found her simple tasks enjoyable, meaningful, even, when she helped someone like she had helped Dooku. It was a strange sensation, to see someone so very settled in their life and not wanting for something more.

It reminded him of Jocasta, that twinkle in her eye when she had come across something in the process of her archivist duties, whether it be weeding or putting together briefing packets at short notice, that clearly needed to be devoured in the way all good scholarship should. For an entire half-year, Dooku had refrained from asking Jocasta for the background on his upcoming missions. It wasn’t like Qui-Gon had ever actually listened to any of Dooku’s carefully gathered research. Rael had listened attentively in the way of someone wanting to know exactly what the limits were and where he could push against them. Komari had listened less intently, but had actually taken notes. Usually in ink, on the inside of her arm. Qui-Gon had simply trusted the will of the Force to guide him to whether or not that was a kind of poison hemlock (skin-irritant) or water hemlock (internal-irritant in the way that poison always was).

He purchased a round-trip ticket for himself (two tickets in truth, on separate slips of flimsi) and went to pass through the lounge area. He paused there for a moment and dithered about purchasing a one-way ticket for a child. He turned the timetable pamphlet over in his hands and found small text announcing that children under six rode free.

Well. That solved that.

There was enough time before the groundcarry for him to make a brisk round-trip to his own ship, a Star Courier to which extensive modifications had been made. Half of the space once taken up by passenger chairs had been turned over to a curved wooden desk overhung with multiple shelves of holobooks and the original pilot’s seat installed there instead. The space where the remaining chars had been he had given over to storage lockers and a pair of high-security safes. The lower level he had gutted almost completely, leaving only one of the sleeping compartments intact of the original arrangement, installing a ’fresher in the place of the other. With the storage bays removed, there was enough room on the lower deck for him to practice a very contained form of Makashi, the narrow corridor leading to the engineering access providing an excellent space to keep his movements tight and along that important centre line.

The pilot droid was on a half-power cycle and became alert at Dooku’s presence only to settle back into the equivalent of dozing at being told that Dooku would be going out again and would, hopefully, be back by the evening. If he wasn’t, there was no reason for the droid to be alarmed.

Just in case, he ran the fresher’s laundry cycle on the clothes he had worn the day and night before. While any dirt present was being shaken off by the sonics, he paused over a small collection of holographic shells. Lying on a shelf between a pair of holobooks tipping onto each other, they looked like many beetles waiting. They were a poor substitute for the interaction of a holocron. But those, like so many things, Dooku had left behind when he left the Order.

As for these.

These were something that should not be found by anyone, regardless of age. He scooped them into his palm and carried them to an retina-locked safe. Just to make certain, he placed the holoprojector that read those cells exclusively into the safe, as well. He touched a finger to each one of the cells, taking a moment to study them without the aid of his mundane senses.

They did not give off a malevolence in the Force or even a hint of the queasiness so commonly experienced by Jedi brushing against the Dark Side. Was it simply his own strength and exposure to those kinds of artefacts that rendered these precious teachings harmless in his perception? After another long moment of focus, Dooku drew his breath and himself back into his body, felt the weight of his years, and closed the safe door. It beeped to show the retina-lock was engaged.

A second, different beep echoed up from the lower level, telling him his laundry was ready.

Data pad packed in an outer pocket of the bag, he headed back into Moenia proper.

By the time the groundcarry reached Dee’ja Peak some three hours later, after the majority of the journey being accomplished in a start-stop motion that made Dooku feel like his neck was about to snap in two, he was ready to never experience such a conveyance ever again. It had two speeds: stopped and frantically in motion.

The second of those involved the driver taking the hairpin turns that climbed up the side of the mountains at a speed that Dooku felt should, quite frankly, be illegal for any sort of ground vehicle.

The human driver.

He should not have been surprised, really. Of course it would be a person. 

He experienced the strain of muscles that probably only had names in medical textbooks and were identifiable by specialists from having to brace himself alternatively by foot or hand or arm to stay in his seat. The lack of a seatbelt had never been more felt. Spacecraft came equipped with acceleration chairs or couches. Intertia-dampening technology of any kind should have been someone’s charitable donation to the transport company. 

Nearing the end of his journey—he had seen the sign with Dee’ja Peak written on it—and with frustration finally beginning to bubble at the edge of his mind like cheese spilling over onto a cooktop thanks to a final obstacle straddling the last, steepest incline, Dooku fantasised about how he would record these events if he had still been recording holodiary entries so he could send then-secret messages to sister, who had been slightly less than secret at the time but hidden all the same.

He would talk about the way the driver played music over the announcement system (it should have been reserved for emergencies), the kind that was thirty or forty years behind current trends, and how it had taken him more than three to realise that he actually understood none of the lyrics because they were beging sung in the language of Naboo. There were, occasionally, a word or three, and sometimes even an entire phrase in Basic, wander-words that slipped through instead of becoming a calque when a language absorbed them. That had been the first thing distracting him.

The second had been how much the groundcarry jolted around, making it impossible to read the datacard about Dee’ja Peak that the shuttleport woman had given him. He tried using the Force to keep his datapad still but that only left him with a creeping nausea that he suspected was not the result of him losing the ability to read on transport but simply due to the specific kind of transport he was trapped on.

At one particular curve overlooking a field far, far below the road, he had spotted what looked like a tower in the middle of a field, a ramp spiralling up its outside. He could only fathom that it was some sort of grain storage silo that the farmers of Naboo had taken to providing an easier path to its top. That wouldn’t explain the windows, though. It looked, for all the world, like a child’s play structure had been crafted out of wood and then abandoned long enough for the paint to fade. If Dooku didn’t have complete faith in his memory, he would have thought it a flitting flight of fancy brought on by the stressful nature of his (lack thereof) choice in transport.

Then there had been the grandmothers who had boarded from a stop somewhere between Parrlay and Ferentia, appearing like they had just popped up out of the mountain like borrats emerging from ferrocrete burrows. The three of them had somehow managed to knit their way until the groundcarry reached the last stop in Ferentia without impaling themselves on their needles, despite the bus’s best efforts. Perhaps they were some kind of elderly witches.

From Ferentia onward there had been a number of vehicles that surrounded the groundcarry, driving even faster than the larger vehicle, like a school of ollopoms swarming a larger, injured scalefish. They had turned off onto a slightly lower plateau that looked like construction was beginning on it. Dooku hoped that, for the sakes of all the spines and hips of the aging population of the mountain town, someone was installing a proper shuttleport that could take proper air buses.

Then there was this final indignity, a tractor of a ground vehicle with inert sifting droids heading down this last of the road, this steepest of inclines. Dooku had the map. He knew that, just out of sight, was the front square of Dee’ja Peak. One side open to the mountain and the road he was currently on. Adjacent sides held the hotel, the easternmost bounds of the university, and a shopping complex. He could feel the square: the bricks beneath the soles of his shoes, the smell of a bakery that, according to the map, was near the hotel.

At least the tractor had not started its journey when the groundcarry was still on the bridge that crossed over the final plunge of Dee’ja Peak’s tripe waterfall that was the subject of much rivalry with Theed over precisely which one was better. Dee’ja Peak had the weight of history behind it, being the first human settlement on Naboo (even though the current iteration had only been built some nearly eight hundred years ago after the previous incarnation had been sacked in one of the many wars between city-states), but Theed had the status of being the planet’s capital city and the place that many felt was simply the epitome of Naboo’s culture.

The gratitude Dooku found himself releasing into the Force when the groundcarry finally left the tractor behind was an experience nothing short of transcendental. The first structures of Dee’ja Peak shone in the midday sun, practically reflecting it back. A tension he had been very aware that he was carrying in his shoulders evaporated like sea-fog.

Lesser mortals could, and would, claim it was light-headedness due to the thinner mountain air. They, of course, did not have the mastery of the Force that Dooku had, or the control over their own body that made condescending to trifles like the oxygen content of the atmosphere unthinkable. 

The groundcarry began winding its way through increasingly narrow streets that a city planner had the foresight to build bridges over the many dips in the mountain landscape instead of forcing the streets to bob like waves. 

The theatre was easily the largest building Dooku had seen so far, simple in its structure like the theatres of ancient Tion. The awning over the skene and orchestra was coloured the same verdigris as copper allowed to oxidise, the metal itself not being used since the original colonisation of Naboo by humans though the colour remained linked predominately with Naboo in the imagination. It extended no taller than the three-storied buildings around the theatre and the outer curve of the open-air, stepped seating extended no higher than a fence’s height above the street. A water feature followed the curve of this outer edge, alternating fountains and cambylictus trees.

Dooku pressed the red button above his head as the groundcarry took the corner. He grabbed his bag from the floor, which had been the safest place for it as placing it on the empty seat beside him would have resulted in his hip receiving a pummelling it didn’t deserve.

He braced, holding himself in place with judicious application of the Force. The last thing he needed was to give himself a concussion from falling head-first down the aisle when the driver slammed on the brakes.

The groundcarry stop and he was glad he had braced.

The driver yelled something unintelligible that had a lot of vowel sounds and possibly a nern somewhere in there.

Dooku exited the bus as swiftly as he could and found himself looking down a street framed by a pair of buildings, both with plaster and paint over the stone. One was a pale pink like a zinthorn flower and the other was a rich blue, of the kind that artists prized. He dug the map out of the outer pocket on his bag and then hefted its strap over his shoulder. According to the map, he was looking at the termination of Udopal. The street he was on, the one looping around the theatre, was Berenko and formed a rounded krill-shape instead of proceeding in an orderly line.

The plaque on the blue house confirmed the identity of the street before him as Udopal and the thick, ink line on the map covered its curved length until it came to Arané, which ran parallel with Berenko. The line did not extend down Arané very far to the left before it made a right turn onto Narmlé, which would bring Dooku to a left turn onto a dogleg that became Iokto, where the star marked his goal.

The colour continued down Udopal, most of the buildings in soft, dried-flower-type shades. Every now and then, and more often once he had turned onto Narmlé, there was another brightly coloured building like that first blue one. Orange, green, another few in similar shades of blue but none so bold as that first one. The bolder buildings did not stand out amongst their paler brethren, but sat between structures of similar shades.

The change from commercial to residential was slow and the line blurred even further by what were obviously once homes now changed to office-and-residential combinations. A business on the bottom floor, a home on the upper. Flowers and trees grew profusely from any balcony that existed, some of them spilling over the sides in great lengths of vines.

It didn’t take long for him to reach the place marked on both of his maps. There was an open space off of Iokto, where three streets met. Looking up at the sides of the buildings for the street name, Dooku saw that Iokto carried on in what looked like another doglegged angle, making one corner of the triangle.

He found his eye drawn to a trio of buildings along one side of the junction. They covered a range of blue-green from the pale delicacy of sea-foam to the celadon of jade. The middle one was painted the same shade as Naboo’s oxidised copper roofs. A number was on the upper right corner in stark white.

It was the number Sifo-Dyas had written. Set back from the street, the walkway was lined with gnarled tree trunks that reached upward into branches that seemed to coalesce into a single, arching bower with its siblings on either side. He stared at one of them longer than the others, something about it setting off a non-physical sense.

He moved closer to it, mind open, very aware of exactly the kind of thing Sifo-Dyas had meant when he had written that Dooku would know what he was looking for when he saw it.

He was almost at the building’s door when the mountain air whipped the trees into a frenzy, except for one spot. It was like looking at a sheet of glass so thoroughly tinted that it couldn’t be seen through. It obscured the air above a branch just about the height of Dooku’s eye. He could feel someone there.

Someone with a very, very small presence like they were pulling their whole self in close to hide, holding their breath to not even let that sound escape.

Dooku didn’t need his ears to hear. He studied the green. It wasn’t a coherent whole. There were lighter patches and darker patches, like it was dappled by the sunlight just as much as the leaves were. It was, he discovered, something different. The easy way for a Jedi to hide was to remove the perception of their self from the minds of no more than a handful of people. Beyond that, it was like a scattering of the self, a becoming of background noise. A thin layer of oil on top of water, barely noticeable.

This was like the scattering except, instead of the self, it was a scattering of light. Instead of falling upon the person that was no doubt sitting in the tree, the Force was being used to reflect enough of the spectrum of light that none of the redder aspects or even much of the bluer end of light made it to the eye.

Dooku found himself huffing a small laugh at how much longer it had taken him to bring his focus in on the tree’s occupant than usual. The pane of green light was situated that it would hide anyone from the view of someone standing between it and the building. He strode back down the walkway and took a step to the side so that he faced the tree at a different angle.

If he was correct, then he would be able to see the one responsible.

And he was always correct.

He stood there and looked at a child who couldn’t have been more than two or three. The green space did not shift to prevent him from doing so, which mean that the child was hiding from someone in particular. Dooku reached out to that very, very small presence with the kind of delicacy used by lace-makers and archaeologists, and waited to be noticed. 

Sifo-Dyas had described that first meeting of another Force-user resulting in a child having an outburst like a tooka, new to walking, tripping over itself to chase the bright spot from a laser pointer. A startle reflex that resulted in a flurry of attempts at telepathic communication, a hi-hello-HI? New? Same? SAME reaction floundering like one of the fainting gra upon waking. 

Dooku, instead, was not reminded of any sort of small animal wasn’t the recipient of any sudden influx of curiosity and excitement. Instead, he remembered the first time he had seen an eclipse on Serenno, when Mantero passed in front of the sun and left just a thin halo of light shining around its circumference. It hadn’t been the first eclipse that Dooku had ever seen, but it was the first one in a place he had called home.

Star, planet, moon. It was that first, simplest triangle of astrogation. The classic three-body problem that students were expected to be able to handle in the event of a failed navicomputer, if they couldn’t bend the Force to their will enough to instinctively plot a hyperspace course. It was about how an object could not be examined by itself; it could not be separated from its relation to others, even if those others could not be viewed at the time.

A little moon. Hidden, though untaught. Obscured by a necessity.

The green in the air thinned and Dooku didn’t receive any outburst of communication, silent or aural.

The child looked at him, wary.

Dooku took the first, metaphorical, step. “Hello,” he said.

The child raised a hand and, hesitantly, waved.

“My name is Dooku. What is yours?”

The green light vanished abruptly, the eclipsed moon wobbled and shattered in a flare of alarm that flooded around Dooku so quickly and so thickly that he must have been swept off his feet before he regained his balance. 

A swirl of blades sliced through the dark instead of a halo of light, red and blue lines that fell toward each other from mirrored high guards. 

Dooku tasted panic, not his own, but still bright-prickling and bile-bitter. He felt the skin of a stranger—was anyone really a stranger if you had seen each other through the Force?—began to sweat, that first wave of hot alarm clawed at by frozen, dead dread.

His own chest began to ache in sympathy with shortened breaths but he managed to get his hand out and his grip on the Force in time, before the child jerked and nearly fell from the tree.

They stared at each other.

Chapter Text

It was a bird-chested panic, wings bursting out of his ribcage, and it wasn’t even his own fear. Dooku wrenched himself away from that connection, so sudden and so overwhelming that he barely remembered to keep the child from falling. He could barely do more than stare. It was the same for the child, caught in his grip, unable to go anywhere. Their skin had started out so pale that there was no indication that they had blanched in fear. Even their eyes were almost absent of colour, from what little of the iris he could see around black pupils enlarged by panic.

Ice, the back of his mind helpfully told him while the front of it was busy trying to understand that clash of red and blue lightsabers. Ilum’s blue dwarf of a sun as Crucible arrived in the system; like the difference between the blue of his own lightsaber blade and Tera Sinube’s almost-white one.

Something about the hair put him in mind of the dried roses that Jenza liked to preserve because they had been their mother’s favourite. The outer guard petals held the inner ones packed tightly, forming a paler peach ring around a darker heart. Together with the eyes, it made the child look like they had been bleached and faded by time and light, like the old frescoes down toward the lower levels of the Jedi Temple. 

Dooku decided to use a different approach with the child. He searched the Force for their presence and found it easily, now that he knew what he was looking for. He shuffled the processes of his thoughts around and concentrated on his memory of the way Tera Sinube had felt when he had been Dooku and Sifo-Dyas’s crèchemaster, trying to find his way toward that warmth and welcome.

Those eyes, and that presence, flickered. Perhaps that was the similarity to a tooka that Sifo-Dyas had spoken about. A darting interest, and a feeling like he was being evaluated for watching that interest. He decided to allow the metaphor to play out, letting his own curiosity settle near the almost-absence like leaving a treat out for a particularly reticent tooka intent on remaining out of sight except to swipe at anything that came near. 

Knowing that he was being examined, Dooku decided to refrain from speaking out loud. Hello.

It caused a cascade in the Force. Unlike the previous stomach swoop of fear, this was a bright interest. Bubbles floating up, shining like rainbows. Lanterns with candles flocking together on the breeze. The illumination of snow when the moon moves from behind a cloud.

Suwobinu, came the reply. It was clearer and steadier than Dooku had been expecting. 

Ayesokhalame Sy Bisti nu? Dooku asked.

The child held up the fingers of the hand with which they were not clutching the tree branch. They brought them close together, leaving a couple centimetres between thumb and forefinger.

Only a small bit, then. Dooku had no idea how Naboo structured its schools though he was aware that they were very intense about choosing a path early on and would probably be just as intense in providing a number of subjects for the first years so a child could experience enough variety to actually know how to choose.

The sound of a door slamming open broke both sets of concentration and allowed the unease that had been pushed aside in favour of the immediate to once more rise to a middle point in Dooku’s mind. The delicate jingling of a bell accompanied it, more like an afterthought than any real alert.

He released the child from his grip in the Force and they froze on the branch. Dooku was uncertain as to what was the right choice to make. In the periphery of his vision he saw that a woman had been the one to force the door open. Her scrubs, the back of his mind noticed helpfully, matched that first, pastel pink house that Dooku had seen at the corner of Berenko and Udopal. 

She had stopped in the doorway, either ignorant of or forgetting that a door that had to be wrenched open with that much strength would close with just as much. In its return journey to the door frame, it forced her to take a step forward, deepening a brittle sort of sharpness like a holostar’s false smile when denying career-ending rumours.

Irritation and worry warred in the woman, clear enough to be seen by anyone with working eyes. It was evident from the top of her head and the hair being first blown out of and then tossed away from her face because her hands were currently occupied by gripping her hips, through the tightness of her mouth that made her look like she was biting back an outburst from her interaction with the door, to the way she kicked at the doorstop. 

The child’s gaze had not moved from Dooku, though they had to be aware of the nurse. They tilted their head to the side, and closed their eyes, moving the Force in a very minuscule way. To a man who had lightning on call at his fingertips, who could defeat almost any opponent he went up against, it was certainly a different way of moving things. It seemed that, even in the opposite direction, the adage about size held true. He was reminded of Thracia Cho Leem’s last apprentice, an avian woman who had a remarkable ability to use the Force to work on a near-molecular level.

The green pane reappeared, in the same place, and Dooku saw that it was angled to block the child from the woman’s sight. And, he noticed, it didn’t block his own sight.

He arched an eyebrow at the child and felt the air move against his cape. The woman stalked past him on the way to the central green of the intersection.

The child raised both eyebrows and then lowered one, creating, in effect, a mirror of Dooku’s own expression. It was the first time the child’s face had moved. He had felt first the child’s wariness in the Force, and then their panic, but both times neither emotion had surfaced on their face. That had remained placid, unrevealing of any inner turmoil.

“Araithana!” The nurse called out, her voice muffled somewhat by the trees.

“Is that you?” Dooku enquired.

The child’s eyes moved away from his face, roving for more interesting sights.

“I will take that as ‘perhaps’,” Dooku decided. “Why are you in this tree?”

’m a tree-goat. There seemed to be a deeper logic there that eluded Dooku. Far be it from him to try to make sense of a child’s mind. He had lived through Qui-Gon’s thirteenth year, when the boy had decided that merely communing with the Living Force was not enough but that he needed to convince the entirely of the carnivorous plants greenhouse that he was a friend and not food. The saava plant from Kashyyyk had been particularly ornery in that regard, despite Qui-Gon trying to live in that particular greenhouse for nearly a standard week. Or perhaps it had been because of Qui-Gon’s attempt, not in spite of it.

“I see,” he lied. “I am Dooku, tree-goat, and I am here on behalf of the Jedi Order.”

A flicker of the Force moved near his waist. The green pane paled. Dooku felt the hilt of his lightsaber begin to move under an agency not his own. He put his hand on it to stop it. There came another, harder tug.

The green pane vanished completely as the child lost interest in maintaining it when there was something new to discover.

“Stop that,” he said, tightening his grip on the hilt. He looked up to see the child staring at the weapon and felt the fear beginning to creep back into them. He backed up his words with a pulse through the Force. No.

The child blew out their cheeks with frustration.

“Do you speak aloud?” Species like Drathos and Iktotchi were telepathic by nature and amongst closed populations tended more to oral silence and silent mind-speech. He knew that muteness could happen as the result of trauma. Looking at this small child, Dooku hoped that was not the case. He tried again. “Can you say my name?”

“Tooku,” said the child, and seemed immediately irritated that they did. They repeated the first consonant under their breath, trying to move their mouth so that it became a dorn sound instead of a trill. They manage to aspirate it, making a sound closer to the old pronunciation of thesh, before it changed from a solid stop to something smoother: “Tʰooku.” 

“Closer,” Dooku agreed.

The child moved their jaw around like chewing on something particularly tough. They pressed their lips in between their teeth and then popped them out again, back into place, with a sigh. “Tooka?”

Rael would have found this hilarious. Rael would have started calling him a tooka in casual conversation. If there was one bright spot to his long-term assignment on Pijal, it was this straw Dooku clutched at.

The child brightened, for a moment. Grumpy old tooka.

“Not in the least,” Dooku retorted. 

He could see the moment of contrarian deliberation like a book being pulled off a shelf, its title inspected, found wanting, and returned in favour of looking at the next volume along. The child didn't need to nod. Dooku felt the decision lock into place like disarming the final stage of a trap in one of those infernal temples Lene Kostana had been over-fond of, even after the disaster that was Asusto.

“Kitten,” the child enunciated. 

“Absolutely not.”

“Tooka.” This was said with the impression that they felt Dooku was failing to hold up his end of a bargain that had been begun, negotiated, and agreed-upon without his input. The child had retreated from Dooku’s complete denial, bypassing the second offer along the way, and settled somewhere just beyond their initial offer. It was a compromise, of sorts. Dooku felt like burying his face in his hands. He could only try so many times if the other party was not willing to accept his counteroffers.

“You could use Master or Count.” 

Making sustained eye contact was a difficult task when the other party to it was refusing to look at him straight-on. They looked away, over their shoulder, toward the road. Dooku could sense nothing there to draw their attention. The nurse must have moved on to search further away.

The child turned their head only part of the way back, looking at him out of the very corner of their very pale eye, and thought at him very deliberately.

Count Tooka.

The Force had to be testing him. Dooku decided to let this one lie, and moved on to a more pertinent question. He didn’t feel optimistic about being answered in the affirmative “Will you come down from there?”

To his surprise, the child pushed off from the branch and stood on the air, as if that pane of light they had created earlier was now under their foot. Like that, they floated down to the ground, jumping the last few centimetres. Dooku examined the Force in that area and realised that the child had been levitating the bottom of their shoes instead of the traditional method of slowing one’s own descent by pushing off of the ground with a force just under equal to gravity.

How long had this child been experimenting with the Force? How had this child been experimenting with the Force?

What would happen to a child already this cognisant of how the Force might be manipulated in a way so different than that of the Jedi Order if Dooku had not been here to retrieve them? He remembered their rib-bursting fear and forced the surface of his mind away from anyone else who could have come across the child’s senses and caused such a reaction to be instinctual when faced with another Force-user.

It was an examination that cost him some awareness of his surroundings.

“There you are!” The voice came from the end of the walkway. The child actually jumped, their startle reflex exaggerated to a degree that Dooku would have thought it a deliberate act if he could not tell how startled the child was in the Force. 

The nurse marched down the walkway and stopped in front of Dooku, crouching down so that her eye-level was closer to that of the child that had now twitched the corner of Dooku’s cape out of the way and begun shuffling their way into the space between his calf and it.

“Come here.” The nurse held out her hand like she was slapping her palm down on a table. It was an imperious, sharp gesture that told even Dooku, who was lacking in vast precognitive powers, that this encounter was going as rapidly downhill as the groundcarry had been going uphill.

The nurse’s hand moved without her doing so, pushed a small distance away with the Force instead of actual touch. Her fingers curled, on their way to forming a fist, before she stopped. “We don’t hit people, Araithana. Now, give me your hand so we can go back to Dr. Adala.”

Araithana had no outrage to direct at the nurse for her presumption. There was only a tiredness, a weary, bordering on teary displeasure at how unfair life was. It wasn’t an uncommon feeling for a child to be experiencing and yet there was something about the breadth and depth of the absolute surrender to a belief in a world that would always be one filled with mistreatment, ignorant prejudice, and constant reminders that, no matter what effort was made by the child, nothing would ever change.

“If you won't give me your hand, then I'm going to have to pick you up.”

Dooku barely heard the actual words over the certain threat underlying the statement. He only saw the child turn their head to stare at him. Apparently, in the face of a greater enemy, he was a more than adequate ally.

Help me, Count Tooka, they implored, fingers curling into the fabric of his trousers. You’re my only hope.

“I believe that's enough,” he said, keeping his tone pleasant. “Araithana—” he paused and manipulated the fabric of his cape with the Force so he could look down into the shadow between itself and him for assent. “—it is Araithana, yes?”

He received a nod and let the fabric fall back into place.

“Araithana does not wish to be touched.”

“Respectfully, sir, this doesn't involve you.”

Dooku smiled. It was not a nice smile. “Respectfully,” he began, twitching his hand at his waist so that only the lightsaber hilt at his waist became visible, “it does involve me.”

A welter of emotions chased themselves across the woman's face as she straightened from her crouch, her hand still loosely forming the beginnings of a fist. She probably thought the tone with which she identified him was neutral. “You're a Jedi.”

“Yes.” He smiled, still, feeling a shift in Araithana. The despair was draining, leaving behind a more solid foundation of belief. Belief in Dooku that, whatever Araithana’s original reaction had been, right here, right now, he would stand between them and those who would sneer at them for being different. That he would, for them, be the protector a Jedi was meant to be.

He would, of course, have to deal with the consequences of this situation later, but later was not now.

Now, the unsaid words were tumbling over themselves as Araithana’s small hand gripped the fabric of his trousers like a lifeline. Thank you thank you thank you thank you.

It gave Dooku a very uncomfortable feeling. 

“You might as well come in, then,” the nurse said. “Araithana needs to see the doctor anyway.”

Bad medicine, Araithana commented as Dooku’s uncomfortable feeling grew. Bad science, they added, solemnly, as they both followed the nurse to, and through, the heavy door that he now saw had a small sign to one side, unobtrusive in its placement, providing clarity with its single, scripted line reading Iokto Family Physicians. 

Araithana switched their grip from Dooku’s trousers to the edge of his cape, allowing him to walk at a much slower pace than he usually did without a pair of feet bumping into his heel.

The nurse didn’t seem like she was going to explain anything further. Dooku and his new charge followed her down a hallway and around a corner into what looked like the waiting room of a spa instead of a doctor’s office. The receptionist’s eyes widened and she quickly looked away, pretending to be intently absorbed in something on the screen of her computer terminal.

There was no one else in the waiting room. It didn’t feel like this was an unusual state of affairs, to Dooku’s senses. It was the middle of the Naboo week and the middle of the day of the middle of the week. The last appointment before a lunch break, then.

The office was down another hallway. The nurse rapped on the door before opening it and entering.

“I found her,” the nurse said to the occupants of the room.

Dooku glanced down at Araithana, who looked back at him, indignant in the Force, disturbingly placid in physicality.

Not a her. 

“Where did she get off to, this time?”

Something about the voice put Dooku’s back up. He felt Araithana move further into the shadow of his leg as the nurse opened the door wider to reveal a man and a woman. The woman was the one who had spoken, and sat in an overly-ornate armchair that Dooku hoped was at least comfortable for the amount of curlicues and waves carved into the wood. The man wore darker scrubs than his nurse, closer to wine in hue than the reddish-brown of dried blood in what had to be a deliberate choice.

“What is this?” The woman continued, her question sharp. Dooku could feel the full force of her disapproval and wondered, for a moment, whether or not Force-sensitivity was something that could be tracked through a family.

“A Jedi,” said the nurse, cheerful in the way of someone who knew that whatever was bothering them was no longer their concern. She ushered Dooku and his charge through the door, and stepped backward to pull it closed behind them and set herself in front of it.

The woman on the chair pursed her mouth. She looked almost as uselessly ornate as the chair she sat upon; her rich, auburn hair pulled back in a style woven through with quartzlight strings that came down to dangle on either side of her face like suspensa beads; though her gown was simple, the lustre of the material, and the amount of it, betrayed that notion. It was an outfit more suited for the wardrobe of a royal advisor than a visit to the doctor’s office with a child. There were enough wrinkles when she made an expression that made Dooku suspect she was older than she appeared to be and had put in the effort to make it so without surgical assistance.

Her eyes were hard and it made them look like blue stones.

“Why,” she said, her tone turning mild and her attention turning to the doctor, “is there a Jedi here?”

“Ma’am, I’m a doctor, not psychic.” The doctor sounded like he was exhausted and trying not to show it.

“I am,” said Araithana.

Every head in the room whipped around to stare, except for Dooku’s. It was always a treasure when something that everyone else found unexpected happened and he had already deciphered the puzzle.

“You talk now?” The older woman demanded. An outrage was building in her of a kind that Dooku had seen before, born of both repulsion and a sense of being owed something that had not been forthcoming. It reminded Dooku of his own father, thankfully dead these last few years. Every year, that number increased more and he was privately grateful it did so.

“I did tell you it wasn’t a matter of capability,” the doctor said, his voice impressively mild for someone who had to be wanting to gloat. “Your grandchild does not like communicating in that method.”

Privately, Dooku felt that it was more that his new charge felt ill-served by who was around to communicate with rather than the method of communication.

“Which is why I decided upon an oxytonic treatment.”

“I’m sorry,” the doctor said, pretending guilelessness, “but I can’t talk about issues like that in the presence of people that doctor-patient confidentiality excludes.”

“Then the Jedi can leave,” the older woman said.

Araithana shook their head.

“Are you sure he can stay?” To Dooku’s surprise, the doctor addressed the child. “You don’t mind me explaining some things about you to him?”

Araithana nodded and then shook their head again, answering both questions.

“Excuse me.” The woman’s temper had once more frayed enough that the sharpness was back in her voice. “Araithana is a child. She does not make her own medical decisions.”

The doctor blinked. “In cases when it is unclear, the capability of a patient to make their own medical decisions is left to my discretion.”

The woman was about to say something else.

The doctor chose to not look directly at her, and carried on. “Like when I’m reassured that my patient does understand what a treatment would do and declines to pursue it.”

“She doesn’t talk to you, either,” the woman said waspishly, as if it were a victory. 

“Araithana can write perfectly well,” the doctor said. He pushed off the floor with one foot, sending his wheeled chair over to one of the counters in the room. He picked up a datapad, one of the sturdy child-friendly ones that had a rugged, extra casing to keep its internal components in place if dropped. He made to move his chair back out, closer to where Dooku and Araithana were, and then stopped. He lifted a hand to push his glasses back up his nose from where they had fallen and Dooku caught the curve of a smirk mostly hidden behind the doctor’s hand.

The doctor held out the datapad. It was a dare. Or a trap. 

Araithana looked at it and didn’t reach out with a hand like Dooku had seen so many children do when they reached for something with the Force. The Force had nothing to do with gestures but repeating them together formed the valuable association of those many children believing that they could only use the Force when they made certain gestures. The datapad rose from the doctor’s hand and made its way across the room, bobbing as it did so. Dooku caught it before it could fall and saw that there was a small keyboard plugged into the bottom, buttons large enough to be pressed by small thumbs. He passed it onto his new charge.

Thank you.

“A Jedi,” the woman repeated, more annoyed now instead of truly angry. Instead of sharp exhales through the nose, her breath was expelled in long flows through her mouth. Dooku wondered if the concept was so alien to the woman that she was repeating herself to buy time for the thought processes in her head to finish.

Or was it simply repellant to her?

“Do you not want your grandchild to be a Jedi?” Dooku felt a tiny knife-sliver of betrayal hit somewhere behind his knee along with an awareness that it could have been an impact from that chunky datapad. He didn't pull back from the attack, but answered it with the firm reassurance that whatever this woman with elaborate hair and silken clothing believed was of absolutely no consequence to either Dooku or his new charge.

“Oh, we all know it's never about what we want when it comes to your people.”

Once, Dooku had found his newest and his first padawans bonding by sitting on the floor of his quarters and yelling nonsense at each other over what appeared to be some sort of game played with one of the fat markers borrowed from the crèche, unmissed due to its point having long worn off and left a sad stub behind, and scrap flimsi pulled from any of the numerous recycling bins set for the task. Nim Pianna, crèchemate to Dooku's third, and new padawan herself to Dooku’s first, had been the only member of that trip to actually sit in a chair. All three had turned to Dooku when the door had opened, caught halfway through raucous jeering.

“Shi—stuff,” Rael had recovered first so he could explain, “people say about Jedi.”

“It's bingo, Master.” Komari had held up a piece of flimsi with a grid on it, half the squares scribbled by that crèche-marker. All of the squares had text of some sort in them. “Nim's just found out she has ‘Gets called you people’ on her card twice, so we’re figuring out what her penalty should be.”

“Should she not simply erase it?” Dooku had asked, undoing the clasps of his cape.

“We don't have any eraser fluid,” Nim had admitted.

“We’re not allowed to have any until we’re sixteen,” Komari had explained, shameless, “because we once left a full bottle open near one of the vents and it got all the seven-year-olds high off of the fumes.”

Nim, at least, had had the grace to look chagrined. Three years ago, the incident had caused a shutdown of the entire circulatory system of the crèche until the bottle of eraser fluid had been found. 

Dooku had fought the urge to cover his eyes with his hand and chosen to cover his mouth instead, so it could be interpreted as an expression of shock at the shared gall of a pair of children who had been ten at the time of the incident. It had been incredibly early on in Komari’s apprenticeship and she hadn't quite yet lost the belief that he was very serious all of the time, a rumour purported by Yoda and Qui-Gon, his lineage on either side teaming up to gently mock him.

“I have the datawork from Master Sifo-Dyas,” Dooku said, in the present. He let the strap of his satchel slip down his shoulder enough so that it was easy to reach its front pocket. He retrieved the datapad and woke it from its sleep mode, bringing up the files that had, thankfully, been sent to his HoloNet mail address instead of attached to Sifo-Dyas’s message. There had been no hunting through his ship for the cable that attached the comm to his datapad, something that had unfortunately become necessary as the comm was several decades out of date.

At the mention of Sifo-Dyas’s name, there came that flicker of attention again, a quick darting non-motion.

“Do you have a hardcopy?” The doctor asked.

Naboo’s desire for holding onto every scrap of information that could be assembled in filing cabinets, on shelving units, and countless, endless bankers boxes would one day be the planet’s downfall.

“Here, if you connect to the practice’s intranet, you should be able to transmit the files directly to our inbox and I can get print them from there.” The doctor rolled his chair to his computer terminal. 

“I need some air.” The decorative woman said abruptly and stood up from her decorative chair. The nurse opened the door so it wouldn't impede the older woman’s stride. 

The level of tension in the room dropped enough that Dooku felt his shoulders lowering the fraction they had risen. Not in response to so insignificant a threat, but in readiness. He shifted the strap of his satchel to a more comfortable position and pulled out his datapad. It was easy enough to find the practice’s identification code in the list of networks that popped up when he tapped the screen. 

“All right, I can see your datapad showing up in the connections,” the doctor said, tapping on the bottom screen set into his desk. “Let me just let you have access. And, there. You should be able to just hit transmit and I’ll get it.”

Dooku pressed the transmit button. The doctor’s terminal beeped. 

Araithana thunked their head to the side, against Dooku’s knee, a puppet with its primary string cut.

This time, the doctor didn't bother to hide his amusement. “Great! Nané, can you get the flimsiwork from the printer for me? Then you can go for your lunch.”

“Right away, Dr. Adala.”

The nurse left.

Araithana let their entire body fall against Dooku’s leg like he was a full-body sort of crutch, not even bothering to lift their arms in an attempt at a hug. They let out a noisy sigh.

“Hanging in there, kiddo?” The doctor asked. 

Araithana’s nod was in contact with Dooku's knee. 

Dooku looked down at them while the datawork was transferring itself to the doctor’s computer. “You are being very patient,” he praised.

Sooooooooo patient, agreed Araithana, forehead mashed against Dooku’s trousers.

“Thank you.”

Araithana ducked their head, shoulders rising like a pillbug trying to roll up its soft insides to protect them with the carapace of its back. That type of shell was more of a hindrance than a help in the long run. 

“How many were you told that your interests were only second to what they wanted you to do?”

That got Dooku a head-rearing, full-faced look: like the result of a second take in the middle of the night, caused by a movement you couldn't place until you actually looked and saw it had been your own movement, reflected in the mirror you hadn't realised was in front of you.

He felt Araithana stop. A cascading power failure, a droid suffering from ionisation, a whole set of stairs missed instead of just one. Dooku looked back down in concern. He was going to get a crick in his neck if this kept up. As it was, he couldn’t make out whether or not the increasing heaving in his new charge’s shoulders was laughter or crying. He couldn’t feel tears dampening the fabric near his knee, so perhaps it was just laughter.

Hysterical laughter, possibly, but at least not crying. Dooku was never any good with crying.

“Yikes,” the doctor muttered under his breath. “Uh, Master Jedi—”

“Dooku.” He really should have corrected the doctor further, but explaining the difference between his former and present titles felt like something that would take up a great deal of time that he, personally, did not want to spend.

“Mas’tooka,” was whispered very quietly, more of a confluence of breath and clicks than an actual word, a break between one heave and the next. A calm spot in an otherwise besieged ocean.

“—Master Dooku,” the doctor corrected himself, thankfully not having heard the insistence on that unfortunate appellation, “this is a family practice, not a psychiatric one. We don’t do those sorts of questions here—thanks, Nané.” This last part was directed at the nurse, who entered, handed over a packet of flimsiwork to the doctor, and re-exited the room with a discretion at odds with her earlier attitude.

The practice’s flimsi was coloured beige, through the matte coating on one side that kept the individual pages from sliding right off of each other. That side was the one in contact with the mechanics of a printer that moved the page through, even though the ink printed onto the non-coated, slippery side. It dried matte, creating letter-shaped spots of different texture.

“Do you insist on actual flimsiwork for everything?” Dooku asked, genuinely curious. Flimsi was hardier than paper simply on a scale of wearability; paper was easily torn and was generally a one-use product while ink on flimsi could be erased with the right chemicals and reused any number of times as long as it was kept out of light.

Light was the ultimate killer of documents. 

“Data can be corrupted,” said the doctor. He gathered up his stack of flimsi in both hands and tapped the bottom against the desktop so that it all aligned. “Plastic is forever. Would you like to sit down?”

Dooku looked at the chair that Araithana’s relative had vacated. “Yes. That would be good.”

“Great. There’s a bunch of legal stuff here that I need to make sure I understand or I can’t sign it.”

Dooku lowered himself gingerly into the chair, finally sliding the strap of his satchel fully off of his arm and setting it on the ground. The chair turned out to be sturdier than he had expected. He looked at Araithana. “Would you like to sit down, too?”

This time, the nod did not disintegrated into a repeated motion. Dooku glanced to the side to see if there was another chair there but was greeted by the treatment bed. He felt a tug on his trousers.

Up?

Dooku acquiesced. Rael was definitely never learning a single detail about this trip, he decided, helping his new charge to sit on his lap, where they immediately leaned against his chest, drooping like a flower in high summer’s heat. The chunky, child’s datapad knocked against his thigh, dangling from the child’s other hand.

The doctor shuffled his flimsiwork, flipped back a couple of pages to check something, and then read further on.

“Do you not talk because you don’t like talking, or is there another reason?” he asked. 

To Araithana, it seemed like there was only one answer necessary. It’s Naboo.

That wasn’t an entire explanation. They settled the datapad on their lap and started typing into the attached keyboard.

Everybody lies came up on the screen.

Dooku’s eyebrows rose. That could certainly be argued, from a certain point of view, but it was an awfully cynical point of view for a child of three to have.

“Why do you think so?”

Araithana picked up the corner of Dooku’s cape, with the Force, and covered their face with it. Their fingers moved on the keys, once more.

Masks all the way down. Bad vibes.

Dooku understood all too well the irritation with the rules that governed interactions; the Order taught its children well. There were oft-repeated reminders that, just because the Force was saying one thing while a person’s mouth was saying another, it was not polite to point this out. Especially when involved in diplomacy, as the Jedi had increasingly been pulled into that orbit since the success of the joint initiatives formed some two centuries ago. He did not have especially fond memories of the dining etiquette classes. Yoda had taught him that the most useful utensil that could ever exist was something that Rael had taken to calling a ‘tactical spork’. Instead of a plain handle, it was one that had one edge sharpened—preferably serrated, covering optional—so it fulfilled not only the original roles of spoon and fork, but also that of the knife as well.

Even now, in the middle of the state dinners he was obliged to both attend and host, he found himself sighing internally over the multitude of forks present.

The tactical sport had been useful even beyond eating. Once, when he and Rael had been escorting a contact defecting from one of the many conglomerates that made up the Corporate Guild to safety, they had been forced to make a detour to the location of the documents she was buying his new life with. They had been awfully useful in aborting an unlawful attempt to take over a planet near Felucia. The contact, not so much. Their heart had given out from a poison administered weeks prior; by the time Dooku and Rael landed on-planet, it was too far into his system for either to make the attempt of healing with the Force.

The poison had dropped the contact dead two and a half kilometres from his cache.

At least the location of the cache had been relayed in advance to Dooku, along with its security measures. At least Dooku had brought the spork. At least the local vegetation had supplied a leaf sturdy enough to be folded into a very small basket with cover. Most of all, he had been grateful that the spy’s iris hadn’t clouded over enough to be useless by the time he and Rael had found the cache.

As for the rest of Araithana’s statement? These “bad vibes”? He knew, of course, that there were scientists out there who believed that the universe was made up of nothing more than strings that vibrated together at all pitches and frequencies. Like with binary, they held that there were two primary states: an open string and a closed string that formed a loop. It was all a very complicated way to try and tie hyperspace into a framework of dimensions whose number exceeded the accepted four. It was very much not an area of Dooku’s interest, but he understood that it was a way of explaining how everything in the universe was interconnected, without saying that it was the Force that did so.

But that couldn’t possibly be what Araithana was talking about. Equally—actually, far more than—impossible was the idea that they could be talking about the presence of an individual person.

“A miasma?” He suggested, trying to steer the conversation.

Araithana accepted the suggestion in the spirit it was given (uncertain) and examined it like a similarly-aged child would a worm on the street after a rainstorm, first from a distance, and then prodding at it to see if it would move.

Sure.

“So to make sure I’m not condoning kidnapping, this looks like the Jedi Order is standing in as métra réillal for Araithana, with you as its current representative on behalf of Master Sifo-Dyas. Right?”

“What is métra réillal?”

“Mother of the nation,” answered the doctor. “Local language for Atrisian’s parens patria. It’s the same legal concept, it’s just in Nabul. And the gender is changed because we track people matrilineally not patrilineally. Legally, a child inherits from their mother. Back when we were still operating under a variant of the Grizmallt law, technically half-siblings who were related through their father weren’t considered legally related.”

Dooku had a burgeoning suspicion that a migraine was not the only reason Sifo-Dyas had deputed him for this acquisition. 

“I am going to need to get Madam Pallopides back in here to sign some of this, though,” the doctor continued. “Shekteeha métral. Mother’s right. Grandmother in this case, but the people who named the law weren’t thinking about it literally.”

Araithana made noise halfway to a buzzer indicating a negative answer on a HoloNet quiz show. When both the attention of Dooku and the doctor were on them, they held out their hand, thumb and final two fingers tucked up together. They pressed the tips of their index and middle finger against the surface of their datapad and moved them like they were a pair of legs walking.

Dooku realised what was being communicated without words. “She left?” 

Araithana lifted their hand up, flattening all of their fingers and pressing their thumb to them like holding up a sock puppet without the sock. They made their hand nod.

The doctor stared blankly at both former and future Jedi for a moment. “Well, then. Uh. I can.”

There was a moment of awkward silence.

“I’m going to need to get a Pupeelliu Réillal form,” the doctor said, rolling his chair as close to the door as he could possibly get it.

“You have datawork for abandoning children?” Dooku demanded.

“We have a very interesting history,” the doctor said, clearly deciding that a retreat to the location of the practice’s printer was in his best interests and leaving Dooku and Araithana behind in his practice room.

The child on Dooku’s lap tilted their head back, as if to say: see? Naboo, and Dooku found himself beginning to believe that Naboo being Naboo was apparently the only available answer to some questions.

Chapter Text

The heavy door to the clinic closed like a gate, separating Dooku and his new charge from the spectre of Naboo’s past still (unfortunate) pressing its weight upon the present. 

He did not need to dwell on Naboo’s law regarding child abandonment. That law would affect him no further, would affect his charge not further once he handed physical custody over to Sifo-Dyas, fulfilling the legal facet’s dictates. It should fade from his mind, taking the snarled memories it caught on like the wisps of wool removing a burr could drag with it if not handled with care. All he needed to do was let it slide from him on the exhale, just like a Jedi should.

Or, he could hold onto it like gripping a knife by the blade and not the hilt. He could reconstruct that first betrayal he had experienced, performed before he could even be aware of it. 

To Gora, the betrayal had been Dooku’s first.

From the absence of Madam Pallopides, as the paediatrician had called her, the idea of a child failing to live up to expectations of a certain strain of mundanity was still anathema to some. It was a scorching sort of absence, how the white deserts of Mandalore must have felt in the first moments of their existence after the Excision. Dooku felt faintly singed by the action in a way that Araithana did not, though he could tell that their apparent placidity regarding being abandoned was the very constructed, deliberate calm of someone repressing rather than allowing their self to work through the result of a crisis.

Something poked against the side of his knee. Dooku looked down to see the corner of the child-proof datapad being held out to him. He reached down to support it before it tumbled out of Araithana’s grip.

There was a single question on the screen: you need a minute?

Dooku chuffed out a sound that was not quite a laugh. He should really be the one asking that question. His past was past, done and over with, dead and buried.

Araithana tipped their head to the side, bottom lip thinning. Not tightening, but indenting. They were sucking it in between their teeth, and continued to do so even as they ducked their head back over the datapad and began typing out a new query. A long one, by the time spent on it.

No, it was not a query at all, he discovered when the datapad was proffered once more.

During Xer’s reign, people buried the body of a girl in the foundations of a new house so that the potential unused in her life can be harnessed for the prosperity of the new household. 

“Unused potential?”

Another long moment of typing revealed an answer: fertility, mostly. Her dying young denied it to the community, but its power still has to go somewhere. That’s how you got deities like Hetzal’s Vine Matron and the Beatific Countenance aspect of Via. Even the concept of the Winged Goddess on Dathomir has something similar among the witches, not just the Nightsisters.

“What are you?” Dooku asked, momentarily wishing that he could put this child before Pelgrin's ancient Oracle and have its clockwork provide the answer to his question, the way Shannur Darkstar had been given foreknowledge of the Light and Darkness War, as the Sith Wars that had brought the Republic to its knees throughout the previous millennium were known. He always swept away this particular strain of desire before it could truly take shape, experiencing the aftermath of Sifo-Dyas's visions for so many years as he had. The future was not something to be predicted, no; he was learning that it was something that had to be taken control of, not allowed to coalesce out of that formless fog that only allowed glimpses. 

There was a pause like someone deciding where to move a piece during a game of shah-tezh. It had been picked up, but the potential outcomes were being reassessed now that the piece was in hand and a direction committed to, if not a specific pathway.

It settled into the chosen outcome with a click. Araithana tucked the datapad against their side, no longer in need of using it for a lengthy explanation.

Consequences, they nodded.

Dooku found himself letting out a sound much further along the line toward laughter than his earlier one, which had been suspended halfway toward a scoff of incredulity.

Araithana raised both eyebrows at him and then lowered one, so the effect of a single, arched eyebrow was created. They didn’t even need to communicate the doubt in their mind.

“I am fine,” he said, though he was beginning to feel like he was in a different kind of doctor’s office than the one he and his new charge had just left.

For all that Araithana did not look directly at peoples’ faces, like there was something inherent in the way eyes fit into the other features that made them flinch back, there was an intense scrutiny levelled upon Dooku in the Force that would make a search-and-rescue team jealous on behalf of their searchlights. It was not comfortable nor was it uncomfortable. It was simply there, like a fact. They did not search, they observed.

In some small way, it felt like a step back to Dooku. They had accepted and even clung to him so readily in the face of other people—adversaries, really, apart from the paediatrician—and now that had vanished in the face of a neutrality that appeared so placid and nonjudgemental that it had to be practiced. It was, like Araithana’s unspoken vocabulary, something that he had never noticed in any of his interactions in the crèche. Jedi children were different, yes, but even among the Jedi there were still those who were different from different. They were the ones that philosophers said the Force loved, to work through them so plainly.

Or, according to Sifo-Dyas: most were wary of Jedi, but even Jedi were wary of those who the Force chose to work demonstrably through. Great feats of the Force were to be wary over, not celebrated, for twisting it to serve one’s own purpose was the great dividing line of every schism in the Order’s past.

Dooku was not afraid of this particular child, only concerned. About, for, and by; and that direction of thinking was not a place he dared travel in the company of others. He knew how to overcome his own unease. The number of times he had been scolded by someone—lovingly, annoyingly, concernedly—over his habit of hogging one of the tables in the Archives and covering it with so many holobooks that it became a fortress with towers of tomes so that he could proceed with building the information up in his mind from a lay foundation to one with towers of its own, fact and theory and supposition sorted into their neat categories by his memory.

But there was a suspicion forming in his mind, one that, under closer scrutiny, there was something very wrong here. Even though his new charge communicated easily with him and had enough ability to utilise  the Force consciously, instead of the usual manner for their age (pulling things from shelves, averting injury, or even pressing minds away from noticing them).

Araithana had no shields and shielding was one of the very first things taught to a potential recruit of the Jedi Order. Even if the parents or guardians were undecided, shielding a child’s mind was important enough that it was always taught to anyone with a midi-chlorian count high enough to be noticed.

With a Seeker visiting, the situation should never have progressed to the point where Araithana had actively learned to hide in different ways. Dooku could feel them pressed against him like they were still leaning against him. If he so desired, he could reach out and slide into the depths of their mind to retrieve the whole of that image of duelling that had flashed from their mind to his. 

It wasn't the way of a future Jedi. The visiting Seeker, regardless of the eventual choice of the Guardians, always helped to smooth out any use of the Force that was purely reactionary. It was for safety reasons. A tantrum could be deadly when the one having it was capable of strangling the life out of anyone around them on an uncontrollable whim. Even the way they had mentioned that particular burial practice of the Ancient Tion was not a coincidence; it had been pulled directly from Dooku’s own admonition to himself and that was not something that should have been possible.

He felt that waiting attention begin to narrow, a search area now picked for more delicate sifting. At this change, Dooku was compelled to questioning both to satisfy his own curiosity and to provide a distraction for his observer so they wouldn’t try to clumsily prod further into his mind than they had managed on their own. It would not be pleasant for either of them. 

“Have you never met a Jedi before?” he asked.

For that inquiry, he received the very first straight-on stare that he had observed Araithana give anyone. The eyeballing he received was backed up so thoroughly in the Force that it felt like being under Jenza’s scrutiny for his first experience of the Serenno social season. The season he was, in fact, in danger of missing the opening of. Jenza would never forgive him.

Still haven’t.

And, thus, Dooku and his charge came to the crux of the issue of his being the one dispatched to Naboo.

The eyeballing gained a chin rising to second its challenge.

He could deny the charge and outright lie for the first time about his position vis-a-vis the Jedi Order as opposed to simply allowing the nurse, the doctor, and the grandmother to colour his words with their own perception. He could say that only Jedi had lightsabers, the typical reasoning used when explaining to people who had never met one before. He knew, in the same way he knew what to say to resolve a tense situation satisfactorily, that this was a fact that would be robustly challenged. 

Or he could handle this like a rational sentient. 

“How can we resolve this?”

For a fraction of a moment, Dooku would have sworn that Araithana was going to order him to let them flay the secrets from his soul and search through the back corners and shadowed crevices of his mind until they had glutted their self like a scavenger picking over carrion, tasted the patterns in which his thoughts travelled, prodded at and laid bare the essence and reason of what made Dooku himself until they were satisfied. And it would be a very long time before Araithana would be satisfied.

“Would you like to go back inside?” He didn’t bother asking if they would rather being returned to their grandmother’s custody as it seemed like everyone involved preferred that not to be the case.

“Hmnn.” The sound fell like a smile turning into a frown. He pondered if his charge had come across a tonal language in their exploration of Sy Bisti and purloined the rising tone for their positive indication and the falling for the negative. 

Dooku shifted the weight of his bag on his shoulder and decided that bending his neck constantly in this way for the next few days was not going to be the death of him but it was certainly going to be the annoyer of him. He folded himself to the ground, so that he and his charge were closer in height. 

“What do you need?”

“K’lr.” It was said out loud only in the very loosest sense. The difference between Araithana’s spoken vocabulary and written vocabulary was astonishing. It was the difference between the bedrock of Coruscant and the current street level. They ground the toes of one foot into the sidewalk.

Dooku did a translation of Toddler to Basic, a skill he had not needed to call upon for a very long time. He was, admittedly, rusty and had not worked very hard at retaining fluency. He knew there were certain vowels that were more prone to elision by others. It happened between consonants, which was how many of the adverbs of Taizhon-jen had lost their final letter, resulting in the -k and -ng endings.

It couldn't be ‘clear’. That would make no sense. Cooler? Again, no. 

“Colour?” Dooku tried. “You want to see the colour of my lightsaber?”

Please, fluttered against his mind, echoed in his lightsaber twitching at his hip. 

He had to close his eyes for a moment to smooth the exasperation at this reversal in Araithana’s willingness to proceed any further and an odd relief that would certainly be remaining unexamined that crystalline extension of his soul remained the colour it always had, ever since his fingers had closed around the clear kyber on a high, narrow shelf in the caverns of Ilum. It had become an unblemished and lucent cerulean in his hands, in that moment when the ever-widening gyre of the galaxy paused to let a boy stare at the facets of a fraction of his soul made manifest beyond his own form.

Blades of water and blood clashed in the back of his mind, the original image not his own but still potent enough to linger. Still, it pushed him toward removing his own lightsaber from his belt and pressing the ignition switch. He did not make the traditional flourish after igniting it, which left him feeling oddly unfinished. Better to not make any movement that would draw any further attention to the appearance of his blade in the middle of a Dee’ja Peak street.

Araithana squinted at it.

“Don't look directly at it,” corrected Dooku. Generation after generation of initiate-aged Jedi suffered through stripes of phosphorescence on the inside of their eyelids from looking at the blades of plasma for too long, or too directly. It was the edge of the light that showed the colour.

Araithana screwed their eyes closed very tightly, shaking their head as if they could loosen the after image that way. There was an irony present in having to tell a child who did not look directly at people not to look directly at a bright light.

They opened one eye and it slid back along its normal path to look along a sightline that followed the back of Dooku’s knuckles.

“Does it meet with your approval?” 

He received a nod in reply and shut the ’saber back down, his fingers loosening in relief as soon as it attached to his belt once more. With their curiosity now satisfied, Dooku hoped that he could move Araithana along, both physically and figuratively. He did not comment on the feeling in the Force like the soft melting of snow in the springtime, a sense of relief so complete that Dooku realised his charge had been holding onto a tension from the moment he had introduced himself and they had first tried to lift his lightsaber.

It also felt like bleeding out quietly, peacefully. He needed to staunch this before it could get bad, even though he did not know what that consisted of.

“Why don’t you hold onto my hand?” Dooku moved to cut off this strange flow before it could turn into a flood. 

The downward sloping of Araithana’s shoulders instantly reversed, accompanied by a flurry of sensations that threatened to overwhelm even Dooku’s orderly mind. He waded through them, gathering memories of touches to sift the intent from. He surmised that it was a combination of both touching and being touched too much. Fingertips, held separate as five individual areas of touch, he gathered (through the projected sort of writhing, spasming contortions of an arachnophobe desperately seeking to remove a large specimen of the type without actually having to touch it) were the pinnacle of undesirable touch. 

Hands touching was, therefore, out of the question. A quick rummage in a pocket produced a wide ribbon, long enough to wrap around a small head and be tied in a bow. Or, as it was presented to Dooku, long enough to be tied around two differently-sized wrists with enough slack between them that neither owner of said wrists would be stretching the arms attached to said wrists uncomfortably.

However comfortable his arm might remain, his mind was not comfortable with the idea of, essentially, either leading a child around by a leash or being tied to someone.

Ribbon rejected and stuffed back into the pocket from whence it came, Araithana grabbed onto the fabric of his cape once more.

That would work.

And it did, down Iokto and the short stretch of Arané. On the turn to Udopal, things began to fall apart.

Araithana’s hold remained on his cape, yes, but it would change mediums as he led them toward the theatre and its bus stop. His cape slipped from being held by small fingers to being held by the Force, as if Araithana was allowing the distance between their self and Dooku to spool out as much as possible before it overcame their ability to stretch their grip, like a fishing line being played out from the pole.

Dooku wondered if his charge was testing their ability to hold onto things with the Force or testing Dooku’s ability to sense the difference between physical and metaphysical hands. Perhaps they were even testing Dooku’s dedication to his task, exploiting the difference between their step-length and his.

It was evident that, even with his pace slowed greatly, it was still not slow enough. The first few times it happened, Dooku would stop and wait. He heard the slap of running footsteps on the pavement and felt the fingers grips his cape once more, and the two of them would begin once again.

It wasn’t a question of determination; Araithana caught back up with him every time though, he had noticed, it was taking longer this time. Dooku actually turned around to see what the problem was, even though he was completely aware of where his charge was. He didn’t need to look and there was no danger of anyone trying to make off with his charge, not on a planet that valued its younglings as highly as Naboo did. This dawdling wasn't from a creeping exhaustion (although Dooku suspected that particular state would make itself known to him at the most inopportune time).

This was not going to work, Dooku allowed himself to realise. He shifted the strap of his bag and crouched down again as Araithana came to a stop by a collection of tables littering the sidewalk, spillover from the restaurant behind them.

They listed to the edge of the sidewalk, nearing the street before self-correcting and lowering Dooku’s alarm.

“This is not working,” he told them.

Araithana shook their head, pale hair whipping against their cheeks. After a moment, Dooku reached out with the Force to arrest the momentum as it didn't seem to be stopping on its own. He didn't push back, only created a solidity in the air as a stop. He watched his charge press their face into it.

Unsustainable, they agreed.

“Are you tired?”

They moved their hand like a see-saw. 

The skin on their cheeks was dimpled inward far more than any smile could cause and did so in the wrong direction, anyway. Dooku looked closer and saw that the indentations lined up with where Araithana’s teeth would be. They were biting down on the inside of their mouth. Even on the inside of their bottom lip, from the way it looked like their top lip now projected further out than before.

“Are you hungry?”

A negative response. 

“Can I carry you instead?”

Araithana tipped their head away from the pressure Dooku had created in the Force. The skin beneath their left eye crinkled, like they were moving the muscle in the bottom lid alone. It was a very small tell, and Dooku braced himself for whatever it was a tell for.

They shrugged expansively, arms going out to the side with palms facing upward. An expression of unknowing that used their entire body. They didn't even have to put it into words or even that sound that, somehow, signified that the maker didn't know.

“Can you?” There was an emphasis on the first word.

Dooku stared past his charge for a moment. There had better be some answers waiting when they arrived at the Jedi Temple, because Dooku was coming to realise that, even for a Jedi child, this one was very odd. A philosopher had once said that no Jedi was ever truly a child, not with the whole of the Force available to them. Dooku was inclined to agree with this; he had never truly felt whatever idylls of childhood were agreed upon to exist. Jedi lived to serve. They were taught this at a very young age, the purpose to which they were to put their ability to use the Force. At any rate, any childhood Dooku felt he might have had was drastically reoriented from the revelations on Serenno those many decades ago.

Dooku corrected his question like an etiquette teacher was watching him. “May I?” 

The hand of one of those outstretched arms formed a fist, save for the thumb. It stuck straight up.

“Very good.”

The thumb was tucked back in and an index finger extended in warning. “N’tuhi.” 

Not too high, Dooku translated for himself. “Why not?”

Araithana pointed down the street.

Dooku looked down the curve of Udopal.

Rooftops, came the instruction. The round ones.

He looked at the cupolas and saw that there were statues there. Unlike Theed, where the statues would be of famous philosophers or former rulers, they were of dark stone and had a subtle menace to them that came from a very strong collective cultural belief. It was rare to find objects imbued with something like an impression in the Force from non-sensitives, but it could happen. A large enough tragedy could warp the very fabric of the Force itself.

The statues were of birds. Large birds. Dooku had a moment, like a projection settling into place over what he could actually see, where he could imagine very clearly one of the statues coming to life, grey stone to grey feathers that covered a wingspan so wide it could blot out the sun, the sky, the earth.

A winged shadow that dropped like it was made of grey stone, talons grasping for purchase around something alive and struggling.

It unsettled him in the way holo-recordings of the Blight in action had.

Big bird not friend.

“No?” He pulled away from that half-hallucination, half-memory.

Araithana did the walking gesture from the clinic with one hand again. Only this time, they stretched the other one high before diving it toward the first and grabbing it so it pantomimed someone walking and being snatched from the ground, lifted back up into the air by what could only be understood to be the ‘big bird'.

Big bird should be friend.

In Dooku’s opinion, anything with talons that a bird large enough to carry off humans of any size had to have was not something that should be considered a friend by anyone sentient unless it was extremely well-trained or being guided by a Force-user. He was briefly thankful that none of Lene’s convors had ever approached such a size.

“Very well,” he said, choosing his next words as a test. “I shall accommodate your request, although I doubt that our definitions of what ‘too high’ consists of align.”

Araithana let out a sigh and then tucked the datapad beneath one arm. They stepped toward Dooku, and then stopped, turning to look intently down the street.

Dooku’s hands closed on empty air and he drew all of himself inward so he could have a momentary grouse about what could possibly be happening now.

The remonstration almost cost him. He brought his attention back to the present as a groundcarry older than the one Dooku had experienced earlier that day rounded the corner and Araithana decided it was a good idea to fling their self toward the moving vehicle.

Panic pooled in his stomach and he immediately lifted, one hand stretched out, the Force lengthening his reach so that he could scoop his charge up before they managed to partake in the time-honoured Jedi tradition of literally throwing themselves into a deadly situation without taking the time to think it through.

All-around pressing! Araithana moved a hand slowly, palm facing outward as if they could push back against the manipulation of the Force Dooku was bringing to bear then upward. They kicked their feet, a good half-metre away from the edge of the road. It was further than Dooku had thought. ’S good, Master Tooka.

The groundcarry pulled to a smooth stop; it had already been in the process when it appeared. This one was shorter than the first Dooku had experienced and looked a thousand times more disreputable. It was half the size, looked to be more of a shell of a vehicle than anything—he didn’t think there were any windows in those frames—and had, in the driver’s seat, a very short, very old man manoeuvring a lever to lock the groundcarry’s wheels where they were. He was seated upon a stack of what looked like very out-of-date textbooks. There was not a holographic volume among them.

On the other side of the groundcarry, a teenage boy slipped from the front passenger seat onto the door, sitting where a window would usually be, stretching his arms out so he could drum on the roof.

“You were right,” he called into the confines of the vehicle.

“Of course I was,” said the old man, a lilt to his voice like the emphasis pattern in Nabul-language songs. “Do you think I can’t find my youngest archaeologist when I say I’m going to?”

“SHI.” 

The syllable was extremely loud. Perhaps there was an upside to not carrying Araithana yet, Dooku allowed.

The driver’s side door opened and Araithana scrambled up to it, reaching into their pocket. The hair ribbon emerged again, and was held out to the old man this time.

“What’s this?” He pulled a pair of spectacles down from the top of his head, reaching for the ribbon.

It was withdrawn from his reach. When he had stopped, Araithana held it forth once again, shaking it this time.

“I see. No, Maira's gone to a conference on petroglyphs from worlds settled in the aftermath of the Sith War. She’s on Renatasia III for the next week.”

Behind the old man, the teenage boy drummed a final beat on the roof of the groundcarry and slid his lanky form back inside. He reached for the starter, leaning over the space between the two front seats, and flipped switches until the groundcarry’s engine faded. 

“Shif Moural,” said the old man. “Professor to most.” 

Dooku told his heart to start beating again because that wasn’t a vev sound, it was a forn, and for all he knew the name was the Naboo version of Jon Antilles. There were at least twenty-three of them in the Order.

“Or Uncle Shee,” said the teenage boy. “A few greats or less in there.”

The boy was waved off indulgently. “I teach stratigraphy at the university as well as the introductory archaeology course weekly practicals because I'm cheaper and better than anyone they’ve tried to hire.”

“I can relate,” Dooku said dryly. “I’m delivering this one to the Temple on Coruscant because the Jedi actually responsible for finding them has a migraine.”

Shif clucked his tongue in sympathy at Dooku, and then focused his attention on Araithana. “Finally given Madam the boot?”

Araithana looked at their feet, confused. They lifted one up, holding it out so that everyone could see they were wearing some sort of slipper embroidered with orangey-red fruits in the centre of the upper—pomegranates, Dooku realised.

“The metaphorical boot,” said Shif.

Araithana kicked the air and over-balanced. Dooku kept them from falling with a judicious application of the Force, and they side-stepped back over to him.

“Now, my very young archaeologist.” The old man finally moved from the front seat of the groundcarry to squat down with the ease that came from a lifetime of crouching down to patiently dust away the last layers of dirt on an object that would be precious simply because it existed, regardless if it was another shard of pottery or gold left behind after its backing had rotted. “You learn that power that lets you know the history of objects just by touching them and come back to visit so you can tell me how much I have right about my house.”

His nephew—probably some form of great-nephew in truth, as the generations between them were unknown to Dooku—smiled tolerantly. “Only what you have right?”

“Of course.” Shif didn’t miss a beat. “And if I'm dead by then, you summon me right up with the traditional hecatomb of falumpasets. If you can't find enough real ones, I'll settle for that bowl I have that has sixty-six clay models of falumpasets molded to the sides. You know which one. The ceremony is in The Depths.”

“Is that the bowl that you borrowed from the museum and never gave back to Auntie Reiya?”

Shif waved off his nephew’s concern yet again. “And fill it with the libation of blossom wine to pour over my grave.”

Araithana saluted.

“Make sure it’s the twenty-year-old, not the fifteen or I’ll have to haunt you afterward. I’d leave a bottle in the house for this but they keep trying to convince me that I can't live on my own and hire people for me. I apparently drive them to drink so I can't promise that it’ll be there when you need it.”

Dooku found himself smiling at the other man’s antics, as the tightness he held in his jaw and neck faded a little in the presence of people who actually cared about the child he was shepherding toward their future. He could feel that the welter of Araithana’s own sensations and feelings had calmed from its earlier suppression and furious rise, easily discernible to someone with the proper training.

Shief Moural and his nephew said their goodbyes and continued on their way as Dooku’s  eyes and thoughts drifted toward a point on the horizon in the southeast, where he knew there was an estate empty of all but the servants required to care for it. It really wasn’t that far from Dee’ja Peak, if the distance was taken as a straight line. The rise and fall of the Gallo Mountains obscured it from his direct sight, but thinking on that closeness brought a current of unease to Dooku’s thoughts. A might-have-been that could very well have been the impetus for Sifo-Dyas’s call.

Araithana looked up at him, catching on a fragment of Dooku’s thoughts again. They were strangely incurious about Sifo-Dyas’s role in changing their fate; it wasn’t the practiced placidity of earlier but a patience borne out of expectation that it would be revealed, even if it was not at this exact moment.

Dooku crouched back down and swept the future Jedi trusted to his care up in his arms, making sure that they were stable in his grip. There, Araithana wrapped a hand around the silver chain between Dooku’s cloak clasps and tried to poke their finger through the individual links. They wiggled their fingertips.

“You need mental shields,” he told them, deciding a part of the future in a way that was not really deciding it at all, but going along with a pathway already staked out. He let Araithana tuck their head beneath his chin, datapad held in their lap, and proceeded to the Dee’ja Peak theatre and its second bus stop.

Chapter Text

Dooku was making a list in his head of things he needed to order for the next three and a half standard days when Araithana stood up on the seat next to him and grabbed onto the windowsill to steady their self against the swaying motion of the vehicle. They had insisted on sitting in the first row of passenger seats, the ones separated from the groundcarry’s steps with a barrier that was not high enough to prevent anyone from flying forward into the front windshield. Dooku wrestled with himself for a moment over which material it would be worse for the windshield to be made from: glass or transparisteel.

One provided a short, sudden stop against its nearly unbreakable surface. The other would cut anything hurled through it at speed but offered the chance of landing on softer ground.

Both were equally faulty, so he put those thoughts aside. He could feel nothing threatening approaching. His charge was reacting more with anticipation than trepidation. 

“What is it?”

Aigopróvata. When he turned to look at Araithana, their eyes were closed and their arm formed a curve in the same direction as the road ahead.

Dooku looked ahead. With his eyes, all he saw ahead was more of the curve around the mountain. With his further senses, he could feel a cluster of simple minds ahead, one keener than the others. He moved first, getting a firm grip on the child in the Force and putting his arm across their front where a seatbelt should be and bracing his feet against the floor.

The groundcarry rounded the latest of the blind curves.

The driver slammed on the brakes. Dooku had images of the entire contraption fishtailing off of the road, requiring him to fold the small child he had been entrusted with in the shelter of his own body and then form a bubble of shelter around them both in the Force. He didn’t trust the idea that all young Force-users automatically protected themselves, like the immunities inherited from a mother for the first few months of an infant’s life. 

Beyond the front of the groundcarry, a pair of soulless, slit pupils set in sulphurous irises stared into the front window like a particularly demonic manifestation had emerged from the blackest pits of bogan to drag Dooku away. Or, at least, judge him for some of his recent choices.

Beyond those eyes and the face those eyes were in and the body that face was in, there were milling, multi-horned dray sheep.

Wrādamnohawîkʷes!

He looked down at his charge, currently experiencing delight, and then followed their gaze to look out the window, old lessons of Ossian Tionese surfacing in his mind. The object, or rather objects of the child’s attention were, indeed, goats. And trees. Scraggly and multi-branched, like shrubbery that had outpaced its biological imperative. The goats were in the trees.

Wrādamnohawîkʷes. Wood-goats. Tree-goats. 

Dooku decided to focus on the current moment, to ponder if this phenomenon was strictly relegated to the Gallo Mountains, rather than the millennia that the child’s vocabulary had suddenly lost, in moving from modern Tionese to the dialect spoken well on four thousand years ago on a now-devastated planet, rare enough within the Jedi Order and higher academe and unheard of outside those.

Araithana patted the window as if they were petting the goat itself.

“I assume those are your brethren?” Dooku asked. Happy little sparkles refracted like light shining off the facets of gemstones.

I’m a tree-goat, Araithana told him again.

He was genuinely curious. “How many languages can you say that in?”

Eímai ena dendro-aigos.

Dooku gave the child a point for the Tionese. “One.”

Arbor-capra sum.

“Two.”

Éyem esmi akey … they paused, uncertain. Their eyes flicked away, to the left and up. Dereeal?

“Are you asking me?”

Dereal.

Dooku knew approximately five words in Nabul, and two of them were simply different forms of the same noun.

“Three.”

With one hand flat on the window holding back nature’s follies, Araithana took in a deep breath. “Ḗhmi hén wrādamnohawîkʷes,” came out on the exhale.

Dooku breathed out himself, now that he was aware that it wasn’t just a fluke of a single word that had made its way across the vastness of the Slice from the Trans-Hydian to the trailing sectors of the Mid Rim. That was a whole sentence, and it wasn’t the kind to be found in language learning holobooks. If it had been ‘ḗhmi hén ánðrokʷos’ then it would have been a sentence easy to explain away. ‘I am a human’ was elementary, introductory.

A three-year-old on Naboo, of all places, where the presence of Jedi faded after the liberation of the planet from Nihil occupation should not have the fluency that this one had. 

“You already used Tionese. Do you think that counts as a different language because of the time difference?”

Tṓ kʰrónōléktō Tionĭkōys.

Current moment thoroughly focused on, and the Force incapable of supplying him with the types of answers that were swiftly becoming more of a need than a want, if only for the sake of his insatiable drive for knowledge, Dooku decided that the present was not worth focusing entirely on. He retrieved his datapad as the groundcarry’s driver shifted it into a complete stop before turning it off and opening the door so he could assist the farmer in clearing the road of ruminants.

Dooku paused with his datapad on his lap, the stylus still attached to its magnet, and stretched a hand out toward the open door. He closed his eyes and drew upon the Force to sidle up next to the nearest goat’s mind. He pressed against it firmly, flicking through the unstructured sensations of a non-sentient mind like he would with a document in which he needed to find the signatory line. He slipped in like the blade of a knife to capture memories of when the goat was distressed and began to echo them around the bus’s door, taking advantage of his proclivity for animal control to layer the idea that, through that doorway, there were things dangerous to goats. He pressed this on to the other goats and even felt the one in the tree gain a dislike for the very big creature that managed to dwarf the goat even in its tree.

Araithana’s hands pressed against his right shoulder. He withdrew from influencing the lesser minds and opened his eyes. His charge moved from the window, to the furthest corner of the seat from it, where it met Dooku’s own and shared a hard plastic armrest.

What was that? They patted his shoulder instead of grabbing the fabric of his cape and tunic.

“I was making sure the animals wouldn’t come on the bus.”

“Wókʰémátikes hawîkʷes?” Araithana fairly breathed the words, looking back over their shoulder at the tree being swiftly denuded of its goat. Disappointment dripped like raindrops sliding off a chin after travelling the full length of a face.

“No goats on public transport.”

On ferries.

Dooku was struck with the implication that his dalliance with public transport could be so much worse. He freed the stylus and turned his datapad’s screen back on, opening up the HoloNet application to search for grocery stores in Moenia. The less said about spaceport food, the better. Overpriced, like tourist memorabilia, and tasting like it had been made halfway through a trip made along the former frontier of the southwest of the Republic on a class four hyperdrive, out of ingredients that had been frozen instead of kept inside stasis containers or grown in hydroponics.

If the Force was feeling generous, not only would the support staff at the Moenia spaceport have filled up the fuel and water reserves on his ship by the time the groundcarry pulled into that stop, there would be a market within walking distance of it where he could purchase enough food and clothing to cover the nearly four-day journey to Coruscant. The spaceport would be filled with overpriced tourist tat, as all spaceports were, but he could still pick up a travel kit with toothbrush, gel, and other sundry hygiene items contained within it.

The grocer’s he ended up finding was not part of any chain Dooku recognised and it did not have the option of ordering and paying online. Thankfully, the personal concierges that Moenia’s spaceport employed for its private landing slots were available for these types of errands. Dooku had declined the use of one upon arrival.

Retrocognition, alas, was the bane of every Force-user. 

He switched to the datamail application and found the address to which he had sent the notification that he needed to cancel his original departure time. There was a reply there now that stated it was not a problem—by now, the slot had passed—and asked if he knew when he would be departing. He wrote back that his departure time was more of a concept than an absolute now, and would someone be available to pick up a few groceries for him, and charge the account used to pay for the berth?

While waiting for the reply, he switched back to the HoloNet. At least the grocer’s infocache was set up to list the items it carried and the ingredients of those items. 

“What do you eat?” he asked Araithana.

Negamo. It was accompanied by the image of a dish of brownish-green buds all shrivelled up on their selves, being plucked out.

“You can’t just eat herb buds with nothing else.”

Foekattu. Rice. Potato. Again, that slide of their gaze like they were following something moving to the right of Dooku.

“Yes, that is the carbohydrate category covered.” Rice, he had plenty of. Even if it was the longer, chewier Kerkoidian strain instead of the Order’s short, sticky daizurem that Dooku had eaten every day for the majority of his life, barring missions and diplomatic dinners. 

“N’aminals.” Araithana bit off the end of the word before trying again. “Ni-mals.” 

“Is it just meat you object to or is it the whole animal?”

They held their arms out, indicating something large. Whole bantha bad for digestion.

Some sort of protein allergy, then. It was probably in the flimsi stack from the paediatrician, but Dooku made a note of it anyway, bringing up his empty list and scribbling in the box provided for extra information about restricted diets, companies that the list-maker might want to avoid and have replaced by another’s offerings if mistakenly chosen.

He loaded the bakery section and dozens of static pictures of breads, captured at the peak of their apparent edibility, filled the datapad’s screen. He filtered out all options but the flatbreads. There was no point in having something that took up more space if it was nutritionally the same as something much easier to store. He filtered the results further by tapping the tip of his stylus against the empty square next to the ‘vegetarian’ option.

There were four left. 

“What does coriander taste like to you?”

Not soap.

“How do you feel about garlic?”

Yum.

Dooku added the flatbread with cilantro among its ingredients to his checklist, leaving the phareen, brown phraig, and plain white phraig flatbreads to the mercies of other consumers. 

Redfruit.

That was an easily met request. The entire fruit could be eaten. He looked over the peppers and weighed the future cost of not only having to slice them open and scoop out the seeds, but the mess that would create, and found the equation weighed more away from peppers than toward them.

“Any other fruit?”

Their gaze shifted to the right. Sour apple.

He paused. “Or would you prefer juice?” Anything that cut down on the amount of water used in food preparation was more favourable than produce needing to be washed. Apple juice would satisfy both the fruit and vegetable requirement and the need for hydration, always increased in space travel from the dryness of the recycled air.

Juice, please.

“What kind of vegetables?”

Not cruciferous. 

There would be no Gungan bouillabaisse or bog broth or rootleaf stew for this one. Soup on a spaceship was a bad idea in general. It was always packed in freeze-dried pucks that were the result of boiling down far beyond stock to something easily portable and meant to be easily reconstituted. The blandness that still hadn’t been solved over more than twenty thousand years of space travel (apart from adding more spice, as the Mandalorians did, to the point where a being could burn his tongue and still be bereft of at least half the actual taste usually added by punctil and or ju powder) claimed another victim. It used up water and was, in Dooku’s opinion, overall too much liquid to be sloshing about in the same room as delicate electronics when there was the possibility, slight as it might be, that gravity’s weight would disappear.

He doubted that Araithana had ever had a ration bar before and was not about to be the one to introduce a toddler’s palate to those many disappointments. 

“Nut allergies?”

“Hmnn.”

He added a package of granola bars claiming to have the nutrition of a complete serving of vegetables hidden amongst the colourful sprinkles and chocolate drizzle.

Dooku amused himself with the idea of presenting Sifo-Dyas with an itemised bill to forward to the Order’s billing department for reimbursement. Not that he was so desperate for funds—Beings Holozine and Chrono seemed convinced that he was one of the richest men in the Republic—or even though that Sifo-Dyas would do anything other than open the file and then leave it there until it was tax season.

It was the principle of the thing.

And his family accountant would want the receipts anyway.

“What kind of sauce do you like on your rice?”

He received an image this time, not a name. The writing on the bottle was not the by-now-familiar Naboo cursive but the variant on Tythan characters used in the Tsùchǎn system, one of the many said to have been settled in the wake of the devastation of Tython’s biosphere. Tansaihen had turned to tazeyen at some point in that long journey, judging from the Basic translation below the characters. 

Only that one.

By the time the groundcarry pulled into Moenia, Araithana was asleep, having given in to the inevitable barely a half-hour beyond the ruminant holdup. No more arboreal animals had appeared before Ferentia, resulting in a steep decline in interest until they had pushed the seat arms up and out of the way so the hard plastic wasn't in the way of any limbs that might find themselves beyond the chair’s embrace.

Dooku’s shopping list had been dispatched to the concierge, along with a request for sleepwear and an entire outfit for a small three-year-old from the skin out, one that had sensory issues that meant any no syn- or synth- or plas- or otherwise branded fibres should be summarily ignored, and neutral in colour. 

In return, he was informed that he could pick up his outsourced purchases at the produce counter of the tax-free shop located beyond the security desks and the notification boards, up along the northernmost ramp, and around a corner that placed it in a proximity closer to private departures than regularly scheduled commercial passenger lines.

Spaceports were not home to produce sections. Spaceports were the disappointing home of nerfburgers that cost twenty credits before they were combined with a drink designed to make you thirstier and a limp attempt at a vegetable side. 

By produce counter, the concierge surely meant the dried and liquified kind. Juice. Chips. That sort of thing.

There was not a bag of dried fruit chips or boxed juice to be found in the tax-free shop in the Moenia spaceport. Dooku eyed the produce counter. It made all other spaceport food pale in comparison.

“Do all of your planet’s spaceports have a produce section?” Dooku asked, while the counter was temporarily abandoned so its salesperson could retrieve Dooku’s purchases from the cooling room they were being kept in, somewhere in the behind-the-scenes section of the spaceport.

Araithana shrugged the shoulder not resting against Dooku’s chest, attention caught, just as Dooku’s was, by the composition of a display counter even more considered than that of a senator’s first public appearance after an embarrassment. Soft light caused a tidy selection of rose-blushed golden apples to appear radiant beneath it. The Agricultural Circuit’s board of advertisers trying their hardest couldn’t reach the level of perfection presented by the produce counter of the Moenia spaceport.

They were crèche-tale-perfect apples. To one side sat shurra that had been coaxed into ripening in a perfect cream and ochre gradient; cambylictus berries that could have been lost against a background of Tyrian violet cloth were on the other. They not only put every other spaceport Dooku had been in to shame in quantity, but in price. A twenty credit nerfburger didn’t seem like an outrage next to an apple that was two-thirds of its price. 

Look.

Dooku followed the out-thrust finger past the berries to see a selection of meiloorun melons in both their regular orange and a blue-violet hue.

The orange ones were a hundred and fifty credits. The violet ones, two hundred even.

Sticker-shock was not something Dooku had anticipated encountering upon leaving the Jedi Order (not that he had anticipated anything about leaving the Order). How could he have done so, when the majority of the funds given out for missions came out of accounts centuries, if not millennia old? There were accounts held in escrow by the Republic’s treasury department, their contents untouched since Tarsus Valorum’s reformations had gone into effect, setting down that the Republic would no longer have a military. The funds used for the Army of Light still gained interest even though they remained untouched year after year, century after century, to the point where barely anyone knew they still existed. The legislation required to allow the release of the funds for other projects was a labyrinthine nightmare, so much so that an attempt hadn’t even been made during the Nihil Conflict.

“Would you like to see what a two hundred credit meiloorun tastes like?” Dooku offered.

Negotiable?

“You've skipped a few steps,” said Dooku. 

Normal meiloorun crate price.

Two hundred credits for a crate of meilooruns seemed … not excessive, really, when Dooku took into consideration the stranglehold the Trade Federation had on not only Naboo, but a good number of planets in this quarter of the galaxy.

The Trade Federation was relatively young, in a galaxy that contained entities such as the four-millennia-old Czerka Corporation and SoroSuub, older still by another thousand and a half years. It had been founded by a motley group in the wake of the capture of a dozen or so Outer Rim sectors by a would-be warlord of a now-extinct species who had detested the expansion of the Republic’s promised peace and security into what was then the Galactic Frontier. Stolen San Tekka and willingly-supplied Graf technology had formed a rent in the fabric of the galaxy, creating the Occlusion Zone.

After it became clear the Republic would be the victor of the long skirmish, certain parties had tried their best to squirm their way free of the consequences of justice. Including the main branch of the Graf family, who had brokered the sale of many of their private hyperlanes to the burgeoning Trade Federation in order to have funds not frozen in Republic Bank accounts pending investigation.

Nearly two hundred years later and the Trade Federation owned not only an alarmingly large percentage of Republic hyperlanes, but had their own senator, and controlled the votes of many more through the passing of an act in 7925 that allowed the Federation’s client worlds a seat in the echo chamber of the senate rotunda.

“Would you rather a crate of meilooruns, then?”

So same credit amount? It was not the amount of fruit, but the amount being spent on fruit, that had apparently caught Araithana’s attention. 

Dooku now understood what steps had been skipped. “What do you think two hundred credits should be spent on?”

Araithana grabbed at his cape and the chain of it to haul their self further up, directing Dooku’s attention not to a different section of the shop, but across the vast concourse entirely. He adjusted his grip on his charge and looked.

Of course. The bookstore.

Better than any meilooruns.

In theory, Dooku had to agree. In actuality, he doubted that the contents of a spaceport bookstore could fulfil anyone’s longings. Before he could give voice to his doubt, the salesperson returned with a small repulsorcart, ready for Dooku’s inspection.

Down?

“Yes,” said Dooku. He wondered, idly, about how much wear picking up and putting down younglings the knees of crèchemasters acquired over their decades of experience. Araithana hopped in place like they were readjusting to standing while Dooku accepted a print-out of his requests from the salesperson.

Unfortunately, when he had finished poking through the bags and boxes and stasis containers—there was a note taped to the box holding children’s clothing from the concierge saying that they had put the clothes through a laundry cycle as a precaution to ensure that any chemical treatments of the fabrics were gone, as Dooku had written that they were for a child with sensory issues—and looked over to tell Araithana of the fact, he discovered that they had wandered from his side.

It was his mistake, really, for not telling them to stay close.

“Where?” Dooku muttered to himself, turning around to look. It didn’t take very long for him, at his vantage point, to spot his escaped charge at the outer edge of the bookstore, head tilted back and attention focused on a row of books far above their head. He slipped his bag off of his shoulder and let it fall on the repulsorcart, barely paying attention to the people he had to move through to exit the tax-free shop.

Across the spaceport’s wide hall, a book began slid its way out of an orderly row.

Dooku moved faster, seeing the thickness of the volume, and its rapid approach toward the tipping point that would make it drop from the edge of the shelf entirely. He managed to grab it before it fell on any small heads.

Nomês.

The picture on the front showed a woman with an uneven hairline, wearing green. Dooku turned it over in his hands, remembering old lessons and the stained glass windows in a particular verandah in the Temple. 

“Do you know,” he said, thumbing through the introduction, catching glimpses of the standard fare disclaiming that the people in the Qel-Droma Cycle may have existed, but the contents were certainly fiction, “that I have a copy of the Nomês on my ship, in the original Ossian Tionese, annotated by the current head of the Jedi Archives?”

Araithana shook their head strongly enough that the ends of their pale, dried peach petal hair slapped against their face.

“Would you like to read that copy instead?”

They began to nod. And did not stop nodding.

After approaching the half-minute mark without stopping, Dooku reached out with the Force and placed a flat, invisible hand against Araithana’s head. They stopped nodding. Interesting. It seemed like they preferred touch through the Force instead of by an actual hand. Perhaps it was similar to a weighted blanket, where the pressure was a steady presence throughout the entire blanket. Unlike a hand, where the force applicable by the heel of a hand was different than that of the fingers, which were even more unequal in their ability.

He returned the Nomês to the shelf.

Instead of reaching for the Nomês after making a beeline from the lift straight for the bookshelves on the upper deck of Dooku’s Star Courier—thwarted only by the existence of the passenger seat, Dooku’s seat, between the holoterminal and the edge of the desk beneath the shelves—Araithana’s fingers closed around a holobook and yanked it down while Dooku was still experiencing the turbulence of whiplash in the Force. He handed the bags that needed to be placed in refrigeration to his pilot-droid, with instruction, and then crossed to the lockers to put the remainder away, a task that required very little of his attention.

Whatever Araithana had seen, it had snatched all of their attention and some of their calm along with it. They staggered under the sudden increase in object their grip was forced to absorb before propping it against the volumes on a lower shelf and pushing it forward so there was enough space for the thin container of the holobook to rest on while opened.

The title and copyright pages flashed by too quickly for Dooku to make them out, pixels of digital ink fading into new formations. There was a momentary pause at the table of contents before Araithana pressed the pad of one finger to the About the Author subject heading. and a picture of a long-necked Quermian filled three-quarters of the page. He wore the robes typical of a scholar and the smug expression of one who saw himself deserving of the spotlight that had shone on him. 

Murk Lundi. A better lecturer than writer, who had somehow managed to turn his career around by focusing on the history of the Sith, both the descendants of the original exiled Dark Jedi from the Hundred-Year Darkness and the people they had subjugated.

Dooku should have gone through his entire ship. He could see that now, and he could see the path that would lead to forgiving himself for this mistake that he could not have foreseen. If he had been ferrying a six-month-old to the Order or any child other than the one about to start demanding an answer rather than asking for one, this wouldn’t have happened. If the holobook was found in the personal collection of anyone who had not been part of the Jedi Order, it might have been excused as an indicator of that infinite desire to look upon the forbidden, a desire to sweep into view the darkest actions of the past, and this wouldn’t have happened. In comparison to the contents of the safe, the book was less incriminating. 

Less incriminating was still incriminating.

He could feel the barrage of why why why being pitched at him through the Force like the small darts Mandalorians kept in their gauntlets, but he also knew that he could salvage this. And that he could salvage it with the truth because the one demanding an answer of him was this particular child.

“I audited his class at the University of Coruscant,” he said. 

Assigned own book? Araithana pointed at the professor and let out a small, derisive scoff. Then came the rendered verdict: Disgraceful vibes.

Did one of their family attend the university in Dee’ja Peak or work there? The answer truly didn't matter in comparison to the others he was beginning to desire. It was one that would offer an explanation of the facts in front of him, allow some of them to fit together in a way that didn't have him wanting to throw it all together in an anonymous report and have someone only tangentially connected to him deposit it in Jocasta’s mailbox so he could watch her put her keen mind to the task.

Yours are getting kinda rancid, they added, as if it were an afterthought.

Dooku was, as Rael put it, being called out (or, as Komari had put it, between handfuls of her favourite Valon clusters that she made sure to crunch extra loudly when she felt the situation called for it, such as the mission on Doruuma shortly after the terraforming of the frozen moon had begun: being read for filth). 

There was a term Sifo-Dyas liked to use: he wasn't trapped in a room by someone; they were trapped in a room with him. At the time, the room in question had been one of the Temple obstacle courses programmed to configure itself for anti-kidnapping training. The last Dooku had heard of the knight who had had that teaching rotation at the time, the Mirialan knight had sworn undying vengeance against Sifo-Dyas (in a recently-knighted, dignity-affronted way, of course. The kind of vengeance resulting in the receiver being inundated with many small irritants, providing a lesson in suspect observation for the avenger and serenity for the avenged-upon).

He and Araithana were, indeed, trapped in a room with each other. For the next three and a half days, absent any issues with the routes.

“I’m afraid that you're stuck with me for the time being,” he said, resolutely not moving his eyes nor his thoughts in the direction of the locked safe with holographic shells containing certain teachings locked within. “Is this going to be a problem?”

Araithana lifted a hand and tilted it back and forth. Before they could form any other answer, Dooku decided that distraction was going to be the better part of valour in this case, as discretion had been summarily executed by his charge. He reached above their head, their eyes tracking his movement the whole time, to the point where they tipped their head as far back as they could. They nearly slipped backward on Dooku’s desk before he steadied them with a gentle touch of the Force, Jocasta’s version of the Nomês in hand.

Its leather binding was of a similar hue to the soft glow of holobook spines. Dooku had never been entirely certain what animal it had come from. What he was certain of was that Jocasta had returned from a mission that unintentionally included breaking up an animal smuggling ring on the edge of the Corporate Sector with two things she hadn’t left with: a still-healing scar on her forehead and a roll of cerulean hide longer than she was tall. She had looked like an advertisement for Eriadu’s savannahs.

That hide had gone on to serve not only as cover material for her book-making hobby but as a pair of sturdy boots that, as far as Dooku knew, she still owned.

Araithana sat down with a thump on the desk as Dooku turned the book around so it could be read without having to resort to deciphering upside-down text. They reached out a hand, as tentative as if it were truly an artefact of an earlier age, and not simple arbovellum. Making paper from plant material wasn't from times ancient and forgotten; it was much less of a necessity on civilised worlds, but it still existed as an art.

Araithana ran an index finger in a line down the page’s text, as gentle as if they were stroking a flower petal. At the bottom of the page, they splayed their hand out over the final  lines.

Then they flopped forward, pressing their face against the open book as well. To Dooku it looked like they were trying to absorb the book’s content through osmosis. In the Force, it was almost the opposite: Araithana pressing against the book like a liquid spreading over its pages, to be as close to the entirety of the tome as possible. 

“Are you going to hold on to that?”

Araithana turned their head far enough away from the page so they could see him re-shelf the Lundi book.

“It’s very dangerous to have loose objects in the cabin before entering hyperspace,” Dooku explained, closing the last of the locker doors. He reached over to pick up Araithana’s shoes and secured them in a mesh pocket on the back of the seat. 

Their mouth did a wobble, and their presence in the Force did the same thing. Very carefully, they sat back up, closed the book, and slid it across the desk, away from them.

How does it work?

Dooku let out a laugh short enough to mean no offence. He was not laughing at the question or its asker. “That is a question every physicist has been asking for at least twenty-five thousand years.”

No one knows? Araithana’s mouth thinned into a line and then into non-existence. They turned their head to look out the viewport, ignoring the lift opening and the pilot droid returning empty-handed.

“It is safe,” said Dooku, aiming to be reassuring. He picked up the Nomês and put it back on its shelf, as well. “If there’s a problem, the ship’s failsafes will kick in and pull us out of hyperspace. Now, come sit down and we can depart.”

The ascent through Naboo’s atmosphere was lessened by the inertial dampeners of the ship and the acceleration cushioning of Dooku’s chair. Dooku supposed that he served as a sort of acceleration cushioning himself, as Araithana was sitting on his lap again, this time because there was no possibility that they could sit in one of the other chairs without slipping free of too-large restraints.

There was that familiar stretch of the stars against the darkness of the universe and that little shiver of crossing some sort of boundary like moving through an osmotic field. From the outside, it would look like the vessel paused despite the enormous speed it was travelling at. A pause, and then the vanishing like a spot of water being cleaned off of glass.

Araithana made a sound that was a cross between a whimper and a squeak.

Inside, looking out, the lines of stretched-out stars vanished in the wash of the simu-tunnel’s cool hues. At the incoherent sight, like looking upon clouds swirling into a vortex, Araithana’s breathing changed. While Dooku could tell the cycle rose with deep, full breaths that caused their torso to expand (diaphragm-breathing, not lungs), their inhalation was not normal. It proceeded very slowly: a long winding-up of air inside followed by an equally lengthy expulsion. 

“Have you ever been off of Naboo before?”

A negative sound, cut-off by a shaky breath.

“Are you hyperventilating?”

It presses funny. Outside. Araithana pressed their self back against Dooku’s chest, hands nearly covering their ears as if there were an actual sound they could block out.

Within the hyperspace tunnel there was this: the vibration of the membrane of tachyon particles wrapped around the ship, the last remains of realspace gifted by the Cronau radiation upon entry, that would vanish in a burst upon reversion; the vibration of the ship’s hyperdrive with its cascading reactions of the null quantum field generator so the tunnel would not collapse, stabiliser and regulator to keep the ship together; all of this to keep the ship steady and frictionless in the continuum warp it made by puncturing into that dimension beyond the confines of normal space-time. 

Empty, continued Araithana, uneasy, reaching for the edges of Dooku’s cape. They tried to pull it around their self, thwarted by Dooku’s existence between cape and child. Not Force. 

“The Force exists in everything,” said Dooku, wrapping an arm around his charge instead. They grabbed on, tiny fingernails pressing in hard.

Not here. ’S’in vergence scatter. 

The phrase did not raise an alarm in any part of Dooku’s consciousness, but it caught his interest all the same. Just the name indicated it was something different from the ancient, lost ways of traversing the galaxy by means of the Force. The Kwa and the Gree had once had their gates, the Rakata their scavenged Force-driven hyperdrives, from the very limited information available, even in the expanses of the Jedi Archives.

A vergence was, in essence, the soul of a planet. The power of the Force flowed from the concentration of power rooted in a planet’s riches, and there was nothing that could be compared to that power.

Wars were fought for control of them. The Jedi Temple on Coruscant had been raised over one that had been held by the Sith for the duration of the Great Hyperspace War’s occupation of the planet. They were terrible and wonderful things, and singular in their existence, strewn across the cosmos.

Scattered across the cosmos.

It was said that the world of Tython, the world that had birthed both Jedi and Sith traditions, named once for the bright moon of Ashla and the dark moon of Bogan, had many, and that the most powerful one existed in a massive, jagged tear in the world’s crust, within a bottomless abyss. There were writings in the Jedi Archives that indicated those responsible for the Hundred-Year Darkness had gazed upon the whirling Force storms of a vergence out of balance and learned the art of alchemy, long shunned by the Jedi Order, in the depths of its devastation.

Dooku almost regretted what he was about to teach his charge; it was very possible that this easy communication between them would vanish once the needed barriers were built. The ship was steady enough in its journey through hyperspace that he brought Araithana to the lower level, where he took off his cape, his own shoes, and his belt so he could sit cross-legged more comfortably. 

“Your mind has need of shielding before we arrive on Coruscant,” he said. “Let me help you.”

Araithana’s eyes darted to his face and then away again. They crossed their legs so they sat mirroring Dooku. In the Force, without the limitations of physicality, Dooku could instruct his charge without words. Mind against mind, he helped them regulate their breathing, helped them gain an understanding in the Force of how a person’s self had boundaries. The Force flowed in and out of those boundaries easily, but if left uncontrolled, it could grow wild and vicious, capable of hurting both its user and others unintentionally.

It was like concentrating on the feeling of clothes against one’s own skin. Something so familiar that it was second-nature to ignore it but still capable of being distinguished. After a time, there was more of a shape to Araithana’s presence in the Force, a gathering-up as opposed to the earlier spreading.

“Imagine a fortress,” he began, low and gentle, reaching for the first crèche shielding lessons even though Naboo had no fortresses. The palace in Theed was a security nightmare. No wonder their rulers had so often been assassinated. He let that thought dissipate. It was of no use here. 

There was a building taking shape in the mind in front of him. Dooku’s own, when he had first become aware that it did have a shape and that shape could be changed, had been of the Jedi Temple surrounding the crèche. One structure of many, surrounded by layers built up through the centuries and even the millennia, from the oldest built before even the concept of a Jedi had yet to exist. The one he could make out in Araithana’s thoughts was a different design than anything he had seen.

He remained very still in the Force and watched as a doorway formed around him, a representation of his presence at the edge of their mind. He could make out a hallway leading inward, a wall half-built. Instead of a solid whole, there was a back and a front, and the space between was filled with rubble. It was like something rebuilt instead of something new. It skinned itself over, the wall completing, gaining marble. Dooku turned himself around without moving. Ahead, the corridor turned. He took a step forward.

Beyond that turn, the corridor split. Looking down one of these new halls, he could see stairs heading upward; the other bisected again. He followed the first to those stairs and, upon putting his foot on the first step, found gravity flowing so that the stairs that should lead up made him feel like he was standing upside-down, with only the span of his footprints, small in comparison with the rest of his body, keeping him from plummeting down what was now the type of shaft with a bottom that a body would arrive in more pieces at than when it started.

Dooku backed out of there, and then backed further out so that he left this construct completely. He felt himself settle back into the confines of his body. He still sat across from Araithana, their breathing in concert and the connection in the Force between them and Dooku gaining cohesion and strength.

Speaking directly mind-to-mind was often the result of spontaneously made Force bonds, whereas it might take years before a master and Padawan pair could communicate so clearly and concisely. Komari had been the only one of Dooku’s three that had persevered at making herself known that way, instead of being satisfied with knowing that the impressionist and watercolour sensations that she could send him were still well-understood. 

As he felt those metaphysical walls rise and rearrange the flow of the Force, he turned to reflect upon his own. Throughout his years at the Jedi Temple, he had first meticulously constructed them under the instruction he passed on, and maintained them just as scrupulously. He ran his attention over them like a tongue running along the outside of teeth to make sure there was no food there, like running his hands over Sifo-Dyas in a cursory medical exam to make certain that there weren’t any after-effects of his visions.

Dooku looked upon his own metal shielding, and he found them … lacking. He probed at them and it was more like pressing against the spring floors of the padawan training areas, designed to soften hard landings when stung by the floating training remotes and encourage creative ways of dodging, than the shock-absorbing sprung floors of the duelling halls. 

It was true that Dooku had not been in contact with other Force-users in the way living in the Temple put him. That did not mean he could becalm himself into commonplace ease; he was aware of the effect an unrestrained Force-user could have on the world around them without the proper discipline. He was nowhere close to losing control like that, he was just not that kind of person. 

Still. This give was a vexation that he could not allow to serve as an augury. It was a sloppiness that was worrisome, but worrying about it would do nothing to fix the problem. He smoothed the furrow that had formed upon his brow on the exhale of a breath, and eased his physical body even more on the next to allow himself to more fully immerse himself in the Force so the problem could be fixed.

He didn’t know how much time had passed before he was satisfied that any unnatural give in his shielding was given the attention needed. By the time he opened his eyes again, Araithana had the holobook of Murk Lundi’s out in front of them, their datapad in their lap. They jabbed at the button to make the holobook’s pages turn. Something on the newly loaded page made them scowl and turn their attention to furiously thumb-type something on their datapad.

Dooku cleared his throat. Araithana looked up and waved at him.

“Do you feel better now?”

They nodded, and then pointed at him.

“Do I feel better, now?”

Araithana nodded again, paused, and then did so a third time.

Dooku parsed the pause. “I feel better to you, now?”

Araithana applauded.

Chapter Text

That, it seemed, was that.

There were no further mentions of Dooku’s vibes throughout the rest of the trip. It seemed Araithana was content to sit and read, or sit and be read to, or sit and eat (while looking up at Dooku every so often, confused about why he was not eating at the same time, until Dooku explained that he really did have only a single bowl and utensil on his ship and, thus, would eat after he had fed Araithana), or sit and not ask questions about their destination. The last was unbelievable to Dooku, who knew that he would have been full of questions had he come to the Jedi Temple when he was old enough to ask them.

It had become very quiet on his ship, and it had also become very quiet in his mind without someone else leaning into his mental space. There was no reason he should feel disappointment at the absence of someone pressing right up against him in the Force, when it was something he had been perfectly fine without before.

Dooku expected to be woken, on the third and final day of travel, by the comm panel by his bunk chiming the beginning of the fifteen minute countdown to the reversion of the ship from hyper- to realspace somewhere in the space between the outermost orbits of Muscave’s moons and Coruscant’s. Instead he rose toward wakefulness slowly, aware that something was off in a way that it hadn’t been before he had slept. 

He opened his eyes to find Araithana staring at him intently, their own pale eyes peeping out from beneath the folds of his own cape (upon being put to bed after eating, and finding there were no blankets on Dooku’s ship, Araithana had nimbly pulled it off of its hook and detached the chain and clasps, discarding those on top of their datapad before climbing back onto the sleep couch, and wrapping it around their self, something Dooku did not discover until he had descended back to the lower level after his own, later supper). After getting used to the lack of eye contact, the sudden kinship Araithana’s stare had with the kind earned from Jocasta when one had snuck food into the Archives was unnerving.

What if they don’t …

Dooku blinked at the face so near his own. He raised a hand so he could cough into it before speaking. “What if who doesn’t what?”

What if I’m wrong. Araithana shrunk further into the cape-blanket.

Dooku had come to the conclusion long ago that some people just shouldn’t have children,  and he included himself in that category. It was one of the few things he was willing to share with his father, as it was a fact made obvious from the way Jenza and Ramil had been followed around by that poor nanny droid. Crèche duty had been fine because it came with a built-in time limit. The important part was that he could leave. A child of his own, one got in one of the usual manners? He knew what his family was like. Ramil had had children with an Alderaanian woman, who had apparently been in the process of divorcing him before Dooku summarily disposed of him. As far as breeding was concerned, he was relieved to have nothing to do with it.

Forcing his biology onto an innocent life just for the sake of perpetuating legacy? No, thank you. He was grateful to have been able to choose his own padawans. From what he had heard, Qui-Gon was on his third, this one the result of pointed meddling.

His own had all been talented in their own ways: Rael following in his footsteps in excelling at the second form of lightsaber combat; Qui-Gon so connected to the Living Force that, through most of his teenage years, Dooku had been forced to prise his padawan from the clutches of his own former master; Komari had—Komari had been the prodigy’s prodigy, to the rest of the Order. She had blazed through her training like the rare comet that made its way inward from the OboRin Cluster, beyond the ice bands of frozen Ulabos that marked the last of the planets in the Coruscant system.

When Dooku did not immediately answer the question that was not a question, Araithana flung their self onto an open section of the sleep couch. They let out a sound that was either a screaming grumble or a profusion of high-pitched grek and resh sounds. Dooku could see them kicking their feet, the movement barely identifiable through the fabric of the cape they used as a blanket, and feel doubt and worry and a panic borne of a lack of knowledge. It swirled in the shallows of the re-opened connection between Dooku’s mind and that of his charge, pressure swirling into the opening circles of a cyclone.

He reached out with the Force and pressed down, carefully dialling down the velocity of a push until it was close to zero. Araithana stopped kicking.

More, please.

He increased the pressure.

Komari had been a bit like this, whenever she came to her limits. There had been …moments … when her creativity had been sorely tested, where it hadn’t mattered that her memory was prodigious, even for a Jedi capable of augmenting their own through the Force. She had risen to each challenge before her with the steadiness of the mountain beneath the Temple. Yet, increasingly as her training had neared its end, she would look over her own after-action reports constantly, picking away at every move she had taken, the increasing obscurity in the Force felt by everyone taken as a personal failing.

It was one thing for other Jedi to comment that Komari was the prodigy’s prodigy and another for Komari to use that as her metric for self-evaluation.

As a Jedi, Dooku had had a level of confidence that had often toed the line, and been accused, of being arrogance. He could see it clearly in his padawans, each set in their own way and certain it was the only way, once their minds had been made up. Rael and the Advent; Qui-Gon and his handling of his second padawan’s seeming repetition of Dooku’s own attachments with his family; Komari’s experience with the faction clashes that, in retrospect, clearly marked the beginning of what the latest incarnation of government on Mandalore was now calling the Great Clan Wars.

Her certainty had failed her there, in the snows of Galidraan, not long after Dooku had left the Order. It had not been her fault; it had been a trap from the very start. He sighed and sat up, refocusing his attention on the here and now. While he used the Force to press down on Araithana, they pressed back against him in less coherent manner. Like sitting close enough to someone to feel the heat of their body radiating onto Dooku’s own.

He reached out and added his hand to the Force, setting his palm against thoracic vertebrae and ribs, fingers lined up together. He didn’t press down with his thumb, worried about digging into the floating rib on that side of Araithana’s torso.

“Can you explain to me what’s wrong?”

“Nnnnnnn.” They slapped the sleep couch with both hands, thrice in a row, and then yanked them back out of sight.

Dooku summoned the datapad and slid it up near Araithana’s elbow. A hand slithered out from the morass of fabric that his cape became on someone so much smaller than him. It hooked in the datapad and slid it so that the screen lit up the underside of Araithana’s face like a youngling holding a glowrod to enhance whatever nightmarish legend they were regaling the rest of the crèche about when everyone should have been asleep. Dooku shifted so he could see the text appearing on the top line of the screen.

Rejection-sensitive dysphoria is a—the first three letters of the next word were backspaced out of existence before a new word takes their place and the sentence continues—quagmire of a neurochemical thicket.

Dooku wasn't sure how old he was when he learned what a neurochemical was, much less that many existed, but it certainly wasn't before he was a teenager.

“What does that mean?”

All frowns are directed at me.

Dooku kept himself from frowning (in concern, not at misbehaviour). “How do you deal with that?”

Telling those thoughts that they’re lies being told to me by the dark side of my brain. And then I put them in a box, put that box inside another box, and send it very far away or smash it with a hammer.

“The human brain doesn't have a dark side.”

I know. It's really all dark because it's inside a skull inside a wet bag of meat.

Dooku pressed his mouth to the knuckles of his unoccupied hand and tried very hard not to think of the point in the initiate curriculum when teenagers were introduced to the Revan Mythologies (the Qel-Droma Cycle being the exclusive province of Ossian Tionese scholasticism in the Order, the odd literary circle notwithstanding) and the more verbose of its droid protagonists. Jedi were Jedi, but teenagers were still teenagers even if they were being raised in a non-secular environment and the temptation to call each other ‘meatbag’ overcame the wealth of decorum previously learned.

The intercom near the bunk gave a sharp double beep, indicating that the ship was approaching the outer edges of the heliosphere, where the momentum of the winds from Coruscant Prime failed and its ejecta became so much more cosmic stuff existing in the gaps between solar systems. Even though it couldn’t be felt, the Star Courier’s hyperdrive was being shifted into down-gear, in preparation for exiting the Perlemian.

The return to realspace would happen in just under ten minutes. While the passenger bunk that Dooku had allowed to remain in the lower deck wouldn’t be the worst place to ride the reversion out, given its construction from the same acceleration-cushioning material as the chair, the presence of Araithana shifted his preference to sitting in the actual chair designed for it.

The bunk’s existence as the only object of its kind had caused him some chagrin upon Araithana inquiring where Dooku was going to sleep, with him deciding that it would be perfectly fine if he simply meditated the sleep cycle away on the round pouf across the hold instead. That had been put paid to when he had returned after his own supper and discovered Araithana had curled up on the meditation pouf instead—wrapped up in Dooku’s cape—instead of forcing Dooku out of his own, temporary, bed. 

“We’re going to be coming out of hyperspace soon,” Dooku explained, withdrawing first the physical pressure of his hand and then the metaphysical press he used the Force to do. “It’s safer upstairs.”

Araithana used their feet to scoot their self closer to the edge of the sleep couch.

“Are you going to change out of your pyjamas?” Dooku asked.

Araithana shook their head.

“Well, I am. We’re going to be coming out of hyperspace soon, so we’re going to get strapped in on the upper level.” He held out a hand for his cape. “Shall I put that away?”

Araithana struggled beneath the outsized (for them) amount of fabric until they managed to fold it over itself and gather it in tighter around them and their datapad. They slid off the sleep couch, slow enough that the Force had to be employed in the process, and stepped into their shoes. They twitched their feet in turn, rotating their ankles, settling each one in its returned confines.

“Very well, then.” Dooku reached over their head and scooped up the abandoned chain and clasps and tucked them into a pocket on the side of the sleep couch. “Wait here.”

Nowhere else to go-oh-ow, Araithana told him, twisting around so that the loose parts of Dooku’s cape flapped and slapped around them.

They were still doing so when Dooku returned, his pyjamas folded and stowed away in the locker meant for them in the ’fresher. He retrieved his belt and lightsaber from their hook and settled them where they belonged. There was no need to look in the mirror; he had made certain of his appearance so many times before that it was all muscle memory now.

Coruscant had been blessed as the centre point of the galaxy by the Bureau of Ships and Services and the Transport Bureau, but the four hundred billion stars collected between the  outstretched arms of the galactic disc truly rotated around a black hole some seventy-five thousand light years south of the triple zero marker. Thirty billion of those stars were in the confines of the Deep Core, old and dying in shades of orange and reds that were only visible from much closer. From here, they were a cloud of dim grey on the horizon, all that light diffused through distance, swollen around the event horizon of Galactic Centre.

None of that was visible from the cockpit of Dooku’s ship when the distortion of hyperspace stopped and the stars became points instead of lines again. The Vultar Nebula was visible on the right, a pale smear that put the orientation of the ship as perpendicular to Coruscant, as was regular. The city-planet was nowhere on the horizon, beneath the belly of the ship, where the repulsors kicked in as the engines cut out to bring the ship to a safe in-system speed.

The final act of the repulsorlifts was to give the smallest of nudges to reorient ships to face their destination. The city-planet rose from below like the morning sun, the cloud cover diffusing the bright lanes and circuses of the districts and quadrants so that the night side was brighter than that of the day. The clouds over the sun-illuminated part of Coruscant were white and, where they parted enough to permit a glimpse of the world they encircled, the visible ground was the darkness of shadowed metal.

It was quite a sight every time. 

“The centre of the galaxy,” Dooku said.

Araithana shuffled on his lap until they freed an arm and pointed to the now-visible Deep Core, those thirty billion stars a bright bulge rotating around the supermassive black hole at their centre, drawn ever inward toward that singularity. They stretched their hand out a little further, to emphasise how wrong Dooku’s statement was.

He was only acquiescing to the mapmakers. Some seven thousand, three hundred or so lightyears away was the actual centre of the galaxy, it was true. If Galactic Centre was truly located in the Coruscant system, the black hole would have swallowed Revisse, Platoril, and all three of the Vandors, before snagging Coruscant as part of its accretion disc.

Gravity. Physics.

“Consider it the metaphysical centre of the galaxy. Culturally, socially.” 

Ecumenically?

“The Jedi Temple on Coruscant is the largest. Even when there were still working outposts, the Order was based here. It has been for the last thousand—” Dooku stopped himself and did some very quick and easy math before the accuracy of a generalisation could be questioned. “The Order has been on Coruscant since its liberation nine hundred and ninety-four years ago.”

From Sith.

“Yes.”

Araithana pondered that in silence for a long moment, head turning to watch the some of the other ships approaching Coruscant. The hum of the engines filled the ship, reminding Dooku that it was now holding at a steady pace. He began unbuckling the crash webbing, freeing himself and his charge.

How much longer? Araithana scrambled onto the desk.

“A few more hours,” Dooku said. He expected impatience of the kind that drove countless ‘are we there yet?’ queries. Instead, there was a quiet apprehension that reminded him that his charge’s mental shielding was days-old and untested. Distraction was needed, he decided. “What would you like for breakfast?”

Araithana shook their head.

“Not hungry right now?”

They shook their head again.

“Juice, then,” he decided, pulling one of the pouches out. He passed it over and took a granola bar out of their bright box, setting it on the desk near Araithana in case they desired it, before he went about assembling his own breakfast.

At supper that first day, Dooku had discovered the methodical way that Araithana went about consuming their food. Nothing was allowed to touch anything else while cold and, even when hot, there was a specific way the combinations were allowed that Dooku could not fathom. 

The vando-fruit, heated on the portable thermapad (hidden beneath a hinged section of Dooku’s desk, set in without any outside indicators and only moveable by the Force) instead of grilled as tradition had it, had to be eaten by itself, not folded into flatbread. Nor could it be eaten with rice. A herbal mixture was allowed for flavouring, but there would be no sauces allowed. The rice could only have the tazeyen sauce on it, and a certain amount, at that. 

Breakfast had brought with it the discerning way they took flatbread apart. They peeled the edge off first: strips no more than the width of half their hand, long enough that the flatbread could be folded over like an official letter. This, Araithana repeated, creating a smaller and smaller oval of flatbread until something in their mind flipped over to the different process of extracting, one-by-one, from the oval like pulling strips of wallpaper down. 

Dooku wanted to put a multi-layered polystarch pastry in front of Araithana to see if they unrolled it before eating. He wanted to put several different things in front of Araithana to see how they reacted. Right now, he watched them watching the view through the transparisteel as the ship closed on Coruscant.

By the time he finished with his breakfast, the ship had passed the Centaxes and closest, smallest Hesperidium, and were approaching what was considered the high orbit. Here were the satellites that faced outward, monitoring for comets breaking from the OboRins beyond Ulabos. Next were the inward-facing ones; geolocation, communications. Then began the orbital stations, some simply large parking garages for those who did not have berths on-planet. A passenger liner, sprouting shuttles like jumping fleas from its upper decks, swung toward one of the larger stations.

“Welcome to the worst part of travel,” Dooku said, gesturing to the glittering ecumenopolis  visible through the viewscreen. Some people likened the traffic on and around Coruscant to fish schooling together but the only orderly line of piscines he had ever seen was the initiates lining up for their showers before being allowed to enter the Temple's aquatic levels. Fish had no sense of magnetic direction. “Queueing.”

Traffic formed false rings around the planet, and spiralled in like the undertow of a whirlpool. Most of it would never actually land on Coruscant. The great starliners that disgorged their passengers for a day—or night—of exploration of the capital world did so at vast parking sites that served as entry and exit terminals for customs. 

Freight managed got closer than the passenger liners. Cargo and container ships were blocky, barely manoeuvrable, and incapable of atmospheric re-entry once they had been launched into space. They dropped cargo within the limits of the satellites that guided it on tightening spirals downward into the atmosphere of the planet, until the repulsors fired and brought it to a gentle descent over the warehouse districts near Coruscant’s poles, some of the only places on the planet where levels lower than the current ‘street’ were easily accessible. Once past the surface, they descended further to the freight system burrowed into believed-abandoned levels; once emptied, they were given over to the recycling droids because it was cheaper to melt anything still usable into ingots than outfit the dropship engines with the necessary capacity to achieve orbit.

Individual ships arrived on Coruscant in one of two ways: with a transponder code that told the port authority and traffic control that its broadcaster was a citizen of Coruscant and allowed to land on-planet without having to pass through the tangles of bureaucracy; or one that told those government agencies that the ship in question was owned by someone who had purchased the right to land on Coruscant at any one of the many privately-owned landing fields.

There was, of course, a third way that individual ships could arrive on and depart from Coruscant. The automatic processes that governed cargo traffic were not equipped with the ability to tell that a personal shuttle was not a water hauler if the transponder code said that the personal shuttle was, indeed, a water hauler. 

Dooku had experienced the first of these methods the majority of his life and had quickly learned the necessity of the second method the first, and only, time that he had been forced to put in at one of the parking stations and deal with entry customs.

Araithana looked toward the passenger liner, eyes tracking the shuttles launching from its upper decks, that headed in the opposite direction for a handful of seconds until they looped round to settle in magnetically guided lanes that automatically fined anyone not equipped with the right transponder at a rate several times the actual use-rate charged to the transport companies. 

How many people?

“A little over six thousand passengers and crew if it’s full.”

Dee’ja Peak has five thousand. Dooku’s sense of Araithana in the Force felt diminished; a retreat was in the offing, back behind those walls he had instructed them in building. It’s a municipality.

That passenger liner stretched for two kilometres. It was likely that Araithana had never seen any place with that kind of density before now. Dooku kept an eye on them and considered Coruscant’s population. There were, at the last census count, at least three billion sentients that listed Coruscant as their primary address. This was a number that was probably a gross underestimate of the ecumenopolis’s true population, given the thousands of square kilometres deemed condemned and the traffic that slipped in and out at the poles, disguised by a transponder code that told the traffic authorities that it was cargo. The levels of the city built not only upward but bulked the planet outward until the original measurements no longer held. 

Araithana looked toward Coruscant once more. Then, back at the passenger liner pulling up to the nearest orbital station for disembarkation. They shivered a little, drawing their knees in and up so that Dooku’s cape covered them in entirety but for their head.

“Drink your juice,” Dooku said, noticing that the pouch had yet to be pierced with its accompanying straw. 

The off-loading orbital station was close enough for its thronging, congregating crowds to feel like a seething boil upon the surface of the Force to Dooku. It wasn’t just the quantity of people but the effects of travel: the fatigue, the exasperation, the excitement, all of it bouncing like a blaster shot in a mirrored hallway. There were no longer individuals in that station, their moods reflected back and reinforced and increased by being in a crowd. 

It stretched across the distance to Dooku’s ship, to his charge. He could feel it being repulsed, those new shields being put to work. He reached over and flipped part of his cape up to frame Araithana’s face like it was an actual hood instead of just a fold of fabric. He tugged on the sides to adjust them, watching Araithana’s mouth become thinner and thinner until they had sucked their lips between their teeth entirely. Tension showed in the thin crinkle of muscle beneath skin of their chin.

’S a lot.

“You don’t need to think at me,” Dooku said, “not if that keeps you from protecting yourself from outside influences.” He picked up the juice pouch and sat back down in his chair, swivelling it to face the desk and Araithana. He pushed the straw into place. “Here. Space dehydrates people faster than being on a planet, and you’re from a very wet one.”

Araithana fiddled with the juice straw before putting it to their mouth and slowly using it. They weren’t even halfway finished it when it was time to strap back in for atmospheric entry. 

It was common for arrival lanes on Coruscant to pass over their eventual targets more than once, bleeding off altitude and velocity in carefully-managed loops. Entering a planet’s atmosphere was less stressful on a ship the gentler the entry angle was. It was better to be as parallel to the horizontal as possible than dropping like the ship’s nose was being pulled to the ground by an electromagnet. 

The troposphere was restricted airspace; without a flight plan that ended at the Temple’s hangars, Dooku’s ship would not have approached closer than one of the many landing platforms level with the highest floors of the tallest monads, floating above the canyons graciously called streets or even attached to some of the residential buildings. There was just no room to keep spacecraft on-planet unless it was in a private hangar. 

Don't feel good. No, Araithana did not. There was an uneven quality to their presence now, a wobble introduced like a planet shifting off its alignment. Dooku’s palm automatically went to Araithana’s forehead before his other hand joined it on a quick journey—no swollen lymph nodes, no pupils dramatically changing size. He was well-practised in giving a brisk cursory exam from the aftermath of Sifo-Dyas’s visions and, later, his own chaos-prone padawans.

He was allowed to see, instead of being explained to. Grains of smooth rice, grains of rough wheat, grains of coarse sand slipping through fingers, each one a different person that had to be accounted for like an old crèche tale about a monster who was compelled to count anything that came across its path before continuing. Coruscant, covered in light and life, throbbing like a pustule about to pop. The same feeling inside, like a bomb going off between lungs, causing the ribcage to burst open.

The ruin being pressed back into shape, wrong, beneath the uncountable weight of that much life boiling over the constraints of the planet. Araithana back into Dooku’s chest, elbows digging in like they could burrow into his ribcage instead, one that had to be sturdier than their own.

“I have you.” Dooku released the crash webbing with the Force, allowing Araithana to turn around on his lap. Their knees pressed into the tops of his thighs and he hooked both arms around them, pressing with his body and pressing with the Force—All-around pressing! ’S good—like one did with a wound. He squeezed a little tighter and then relaxed, still firm. “Concentrate on here, now. This. What’s down there doesn’t matter; do not give it more thought than it deserves.”

The webbing went back into place with another flick of the Force, and he kept his own breathing steady as a guide for Araithana to follow. It was always the first step in being calm, counting breaths until exhaling ratcheted down the tension in shoulders, in spines. 

The ship turned to bleed off more height and speed, its path following the longitude north. This descent through the mesosphere travelled along the dividing line between night and day, passing above the Fobosi District and then into the industrial flatlands south of the Senate and the Jedi Temple before passing over both. At the apogee of the turn, Araithana settled a little, only for that panicked fluttering inside their ribcage to start up again after the ship had finished passing back over the less-populated Petrax Historic Quarter, some distance north of the Temple.

in the middle height of this restricted airspace, the quincunx of towers on the roof of the Jedi Temple became visible as a recognisable landmark and not just as a section distinct from the wide plains around it. From the distance between the building and the east-creeping night, it was sometime late in the afternoon. Now that it was visible, Dooku could feel it when the loop brought his ship close. It was warm and familiar; the centuries of Jedi had pressed something more than their presence into the walls of the building, something that lasted beyond their individual selves. 

It faded to the back of his mind as the ship passed over the Senate Rotunda on one of its last loops and Araithana pulled their head back to look up at Dooku, pupils huge and dark. 

“Got a bad feeling about this,” they said, utterly flat in tone. They let out a short laugh that was mostly a shudder. It was terribly portentous, and it was the first full sentence that Dooku had heard Araithana speak. He cupped the back of Araithana’s head as if he could keep that overwhelming crush of life away with just his hand. He could help shore up their defences, but the Jedi Order’s location was central to its availability to the government of the Galactic Republic; again, it wasn't just the amount of life, but the type of it. Instead of the quantity, it was the quality of the people this time.

Going from feeling a single other being in the Force to the majority strength of the Order must be a particularly nerve-wracking type of overwhelming, like learning how to swim by facing down a tsunami. There was no safe, high ground to be found; even if Dooku had the pilot droid divert to property he had inherited with his title, it was still Coruscant. No plan survived first contact with an obstacle. Retreat was necessary. 

He discarded the possibility of one of the orbital stations. Even those would be too thronged with people to provide a respite. No, what Dooku needed—what Araithana needed—was the type of place where the population was stringently limited.

“FA-4, switch to the closest outgoing vector,” Dooku ordered. The good thing about a droid pilot was that it never asked questions. “Head for Hesperidium, but make clearing Coruscant the priority.”

There was probably a traffic controller on the receiving end of that data now squawking up a storm, but Dooku did not have to hear them or deal with the fallout. He spent his concentration in the Force, feeling like he was piling up sandbags to deal with flooding when the hurricane had already started. 

The hurricane had an eye that was black and cold, pulling the glittering lights of Coruscant’s orderly lines and circles of traffic into an accretion disk. It manifested in the corner of Dooku’s vision like a phosphorescence on the back of his eyelids, dark instead of light. Those lights became indistinct, fading, as he felt Araithana’s conscious move toward the smoothness of disengagement rather than a true shift to unconsciousness, felt them slump in his arms like a droid with the power switched suddenly off.

In the place where the inverted phosphorescence had been, a light began to blink on the communications console between Dooku’s chair and the pilot’s station. He had hooked that old communicator into the console so its calls would be forwarded there. A flick toward its flashing with a touch of the Force ended its distraction as the purple of Hesperidium’s oceans and the deep, thick blue-green of its forests grew larger in the ship’s viewscreen. 

He kept his hand cupping the back of Araithana’s head and wished it did not feel so much like he was holding their skull together.