Chapter Text
Anakin doesn’t know what leads to the Jedi attempt to leave the Republic. He only knows that their attempt fails. When he’s twelve, he discovers the consequences of the adults’ actions. He and all the other children in the temple are told that they’re leaving the temple.
They’re led outside by the creche masters and several knights. Police officers watch the slow stumbling progress of the younglings down the hallways. The temple, which has always been warm like the embers in the center of a fire, feels cold. Obi-Wan has a hand on Anakin’s back as he pushes him out to the landing pad. His face is impassive, but through their bond he can feel an emotional miasma.
He takes Anakin’s hands and tells him that they’ll see each other again. Anakin throws his arms around Obi-Wan and pulses reassurance across their bond. Anakin has seen slave families separated from one another. He recognizes what’s happening. Work hard or else.
There’s nothing to do but survive, as always.
He lets go and walks over to a shuttle. He’s loaded into it with a dozen other younglings. Most are younger than Anakin. Several of them are crying, releasing pulses of distress into the Force. A togruta girl has her arms crossed over the seat harness holding her in place. Her feet don’t even touch the floor of the shuttle, but she’s glaring with the determination of a full-grown warrior at the driver.
They’re taken to the space port where they’re loaded onto a starship.
There are close to nine thousand younglings between those who were still in the creche, initiates, and padawans. Usually, they release their distress into the Force. Spikes of emotion are just that, spikes. They’re handled quickly. The youngling pushed to understand the emotion and let go.
Most of the children aren’t capable of that sort of emotional regulation at the moment. They’ve been taken from the only home that they know, separated from the adults who care for them. The psychic space on the starship is vibrating with tension. It feels like they’re standing on a patch of ground that will suddenly turn to quicksand, dragging them all down into suffocating darkness.
The journey takes a week. There aren’t enough beds on the starship. The children pile together on them and together on the floor. Already, the lessons of the temple are dissolving as the children seek comfort in one another. Anakin and the togruta girl, Ahsoka, bond on the journey.
He searches through the rations that are provided to the children for the carnivore friendly option for her. She looks for the one that sounds most flavorful for him. She has a habit of saying cutting remarks that sound ridiculous coming from her cute face with its large eyes and nubby montrals.
They arrive at their destination in the middle of the night, ship time. Shuttles take them down to a brilliant blue planet mottled with thick grey clouds. Ahsoka stays close, grabbing the end of his tunic. There are twelve other children on the shuttle, ranging from toddlers to young teenagers. Anakin doesn’t know it yet, but soon those faces will become as familiar to him as his own.
The flight down to the planet is rocky. The theelin toddler on the other side of Anakin screams, large tears flowing down her purple spotted face. He reaches out, sending comfort-reassurance. The tears slow. Her mind reaches back to him, clinging onto him.
Barriss, another pre-teen that Anakin recognizes from his classes, nods at him. Her face is grim. Her hands clench the harness holding her in place. Her shielding feels like cracked mud walls, pebbles breaking loose.
The ship jolts as it lands. After Anakin stands, the toddler raises her arms in a clear plea to be picked up. Anakin unbuckles her and pulls her into his arms. He’s spent some time helping out in the creche, so the weight of a child isn’t unfamiliar to him. She rests her sticky face against his neck.
Ahsoka says, “Looks like the chosen one gained his first follower.”
Anakin tries to smile, but it’s forced. “I thought that was you, Snips.”
The hatch opens. Cold, wet air blows in. They descend, the older children taking the toddlers’ hands to guide them out. They’re met by a long-necked sentient who pins a badge with the number 501 on each child and marks some information on a datapad. A different sentient guides them across raised walkways. The water churns wildly down below.
They’re all thoroughly soaked when they enter into a building with blindingly white hallways. Their shoes squeak as they walk across the floor. The sentient leaves them in a room with other bedraggled children collapsed into chairs. They join the other children in the remaining chairs. The theelin girl falls asleep on Anakin’s lap.
As they wait in the room, a group of children walk through another door. They’re no longer in Jedi robes. They wear black jumpsuits with white numbers printed on them. Anakin notices that each child has a different number. He sucks in a breath. He closes his eyes. He had suspected, but it hurts to see the proof.
His hand against the back of the toddler begins to shake. He feels a warmth settle against his side, feels Ahsoka’s presence pressing up against him. “It’ll be okay, Skyguy.”
No, it really wouldn’t.
But he will go on. He has always gone on, doing his best to smile no matter the chains that bind him.
A scarred human stands in the doorway that the black clad children just walked through. “Group 501 can come in now.”
Anakin and Barriss have to nudge some of the children awake from where they’ve fallen asleep in chairs and on the floor. The human at the door apparently knows how many should be in their group and searches through the room until they find one more child with a 501 badge.
The next room that they go in is lined with cots and medical equipment. More long-necked sapients blink sedately at the new arrivals. One gestures at a cot. “Come now. There will be no pain.”
Anakin steps forward first. He’s the most familiar with this situation. He needs to lead, to keep the others calm. Crying isn’t going to change what is about to happen. If he can keep everyone calm, then it will make it less terrible.
For the most part, it ends up being a physical. The sapient introduces herself as a kaminoan, she/her, named Prim Ne. Prim Ne allows Anakin to set the theelin girl on the cot behind him and Ahsoka to sit next to Anakin. She asks him to lean forward, rubbing a cool sheet of something against his neck.
Afterward, Anakin’s skin begins to tingle, and Prim Ne enters Anakin’s biometric information into a datapad as she asks him questions about his medical history. She uses a scanner to record his vital information.
When she’s done, she gets out a device. Anakin swallows, recognizing it. Ahsoka pulses reassurance at him and for a moment Anakin feels terrible. He’s the older one. She shouldn’t be reassuring him. He needs to be strong for her.
Prim Ne holds up the device. “Turn to the side for me. You will feel a pinch but no pain.”
Anakin turns. Ahsoka tangles her hands with his. Anakin hyper focuses with the Force, feeling Prim Ne come closer. There’s a pinch like she says. It causes Anakin to shake violently.
When he turns back to her, she has tilted her head. “It appears that you have a trauma response.”
Anakin looks away from her. His face feels hot. E chu ta. He just told her that he’s small for his age because he was a slave for nine years. What else is she expecting? She makes more notes on the datapad.
Most of the slavers on Tatooine placed slave chips in arms and legs, that way if the slave ran and the owner detonated the chip, then the slave would be broken but still useful. The kaminoans place the chips in the base of the skull of each child. That’s how Anakin knows that each and every one of the children are expendable hostages.
Anakin sits with Ahsoka and the toddler who he learns is named Ysolt as they get their medical exams and chips. When they’re done, Prim Ne gets out a jumpsuit in the correct size for each child and inserts them into a machine that prints numbers on them. She then shows them to refreshers where they can change.
In the small refresher, Anakin stares at the white number on the dark fabric. 501-01. That’s him now. He had three years. He’s simply being put in his place. He didn’t deserve the ability to travel the galaxy, to do what he wanted when he wanted, or to think that he could save anyone else.
He’ll aways be a slave.
In the temple, younglings learned meditation, discussed philosophy, and contemplated how literature could continue to provide life lessons. In the facility on Kamino, there are no more leisurely lessons on ethics. It’s all physical training, flash learning, and practical exercises using the Force.
Anakin and the others of the 501st sleep in a bunkroom together. Each bed is labeled with its occupant’s number. Mostly though, the younger children share beds with the older children. Their psychic presences begin to spin threads between one another.
The day after they arrive, their storage units are filled with identical jumpsuits and sleeping clothes in the correct sizes. Each child is given a basic toiletry kit and datapad. Everything, including the sleeping clothes, has each child’s personal number on it.
Anakin wonders if that means that if he were to lose his hairbrush with 501-01 on it that he wouldn’t be provided with another. Is this hairbrush unique to him? Is it a lesson that he needs to care for what he’s given?
Commands from speakers in the ceiling of the facility direct them through their day. Lights come on at 0700. They have until 0730 to dress and clean themselves, then they leave their bunkroom, following behind another group of children with 500 on their jumpsuits to breakfast.
They eat in cafeteria #8 at a table with fourteen seats. Anakin notices that there are always thirteen or fourteen children per group at the other tables. All of the younglings from the temple have been split as equally as possible.
For their classes, they’re joined by groups 502 to 504 in rooms labeled Cornflower. In the morning, they do physical training in a gym with large windows that are constantly pelted by rain.
Anakin knows that he should hate the sound of the rain, that he should hate this place that took his freedom from him, but he’s reassured by the fact that they’ll always have water. On Kamino, no one will die of dehydration. The sound of the rain helps him sleep at night.
Their trainers demand the same activity from each child in the group. They soon learn, though that it’s acceptable for anyone in their group to complete the tasks assigned to the younger children. It’s not acceptable for any of the older kids to help younger kids outside of their group.
Anakin finds this out when he picks up a cingulon toddler from 504 struggling to finish running another lap. He feels a shock to his system and nearly drops the toddler. The instructor barks out, “501-01, remain within your formation.” Anakin grits his teeth through the pain until he can hand the child off to a pre-teen from 504.
Following the training, they have an hour of flash learning in which images and concepts flash by on a screen. This learning makes Anakin feel like a hard drive that’s having data downloaded to it. At the end, his head aches and knowledge will burst to the front of his mind. At lunch, he’ll suddenly remember tactics that were shoved into his brain.
In the afternoon, they learn from a Jedi master who appears as a holo in the center of a padded training room. There are no cameras or microphones set up to transmit from the training room. The Jedi has no way of knowing what’s happening in the training room.
It’s strange to see someone in tan robes when all around them are stark monochromes. Sometimes when the Jedi master speaks, the audio will cut out. Anakin takes that to mean that certain concepts are now being censored from them.
This training is inefficient. There are some things in the Force that are hard to explain with words. It’s easier to reach out and feel how a master manipulates matter in order to move it. Jedi aren’t extraordinarily knowledgeable about physics or quantum mechanics. They usually learn Force techniques by example.
It helps that Barriss seems to have memorized about half of the temple’s library and has already attempted some of the techniques that she read about. She’s particularly good at patiently showing Ysolt and the other younglings how to move something with the Force on purpose.
Shizo, a fourteen-year-old human with dark skin and messy hair, isn’t very good at using the Force to manipulate objects. Anakin suspects that if they were still in the temple that Shizo would soon be asked what part of the Service Corps he’s interested in joining.
Anakin sees how Shizo carefully observes his surroundings and smiles unabashedly when he fails to move a block that Ahsoka, half his age, can move. There are many different strengths.
In the evening, they have a free period in which the young ones are expected to use the learning programs on their datapads to practice their reading and writing. Anakin and the other older children try not to speculate on the future and mostly fail. Gossip travels swiftly through the facility. They hear impossibly fantastic stories about the politics of the core worlds.
Anakin dives back into the materials for the math, mechanics, and pilot classes that he had been taking at the temple. No matter what the future will bring, this knowledge will be useful.
Life goes on like this for three months. They go from tense, worried that a hidden sarlacc will swallow them at any moment, to bored. Access to the holonet in the temple had been limited, but now access is entirely restricted. They’re only able to access local study materials and a basic range of fiction from their datapads.
Anakin tries slicing into the holonet after one memorable occasion in which two of the toddlers in their group screamed that they want to do something fun. He discovers that access is limited to a couple of rooms within the building. Sneaking out of the bunkroom after curfew is a big no-no, which causes everyone, even the non-rulebreakers to get shocked.
Instead, Anakin gets clever with making toys. He tears into bedding to make ragdolls. Barriss carefully knots the strips of fabric together as if it’s one of the most vital things that she’s ever done. Ahsoka starts pointing to everything in the room and calling it potential toy material.
Anakin uses the Force to pry pieces of plastoid from their bunks and break them into some of the ugliest block toys that he has ever seen. Hibiki, a human hybrid girl with pink hair who likely would’ve washed out from being a Jedi because she’d be labeled ‘too emotional,’ names each of the blocks and starts to walk them across the floor as she tells a story to the toddlers.
The next day, they talk about their impromptu craft session with the 500th as they walk to the cafeteria. Anakin can tell from the presences leaning forward in the Force that the 502nd are just as interested. In the next couple days, they begin to see the most misshapen, clumsily made toys in the hands of the youngest among those who eat in cafeteria #8.
Ysolt carries her own ragdoll tucked into the front of her jumpsuit. All of 501st breathes a sigh of relief when the instructor notices and ignores it.
After six months, Anakin feels his bonds with all of 501st settle into place. The strongest are with Ysolt, Ahsoka, and Ecrion, a pantoran toddler. All four of them pile together on a bunk at night. Ecrion can be as churlish as Ahsoka, but mostly because he hates waking up, exercise, and doing anything quickly.
The whole schedule of the facility wears on him. He doesn’t cry, because he finds even that to be too much effort. He just gets grumpy, leaning more and more on Anakin as the day progresses. Mealtimes are a struggle. He rarely is able to finish before they’re required to leave the cafeteria. In the afternoon, he stares at the objects that they’re meant to Force pull as if they’ve wronged him in a past life.
Ysolt is an energetic toddler who freely expresses her emotions. She loves to Force throw objects with all her might, delighting in when she whacks someone in the face with a ball. When the Jedi master introduces using the Force to enhance your body, something that most younglings don’t learn until they’re initiates, Ysolt quickly picks up the skill.
After three days, she’s literally bouncing off the walls and clawing hand grips in the ceiling. Anakin finds that he didn’t truly understand Force push and pull until out of frustration, he redirects his personal gravity so that he can pry the girl off the ceiling. The action uncovers a nest of fever wasps that Anakin wishes he never found.
In the next training session, he demonstrates in front of all of Cornflower how to map your personal gravity to large bodies of mass other than the one you’re closest to. The next day, in the cafeteria, children at other tables whisper and glance at him. He can feel their curiosity and interest. It reminds him of when he first arrived at the temple and the other children stared but never talked to him.
A week later there’s a girl on the ceiling of the cafeteria eating a piece of fruit and a teenager from 467 asking Anakin to help get the girl down.
The little girl waves. Children at other tables laugh. Ysolt screams with delight and waves back. Contentment-delight expands around all of them. It’s strange. Anakin can’t remember ever feeling so connected to others at the temple.
Morale is high. They’ve gotten used to their new circumstances.
That’s of course when things change.
They start to see groups of identical boys being led through the hallways. There’s no explanation for who they are or where they came from. News travels from 448 whose bunkroom is at the end of the hallway, by a window. They say that they’ve seen the boys being settled into the new buildings that just finished being built.
They also say that the cranes and large-scale part printers are continuing to expand the floating town. The couple dozen buildings that Anakin saw when they first arrived on Kamino are quickly doubling and tripling.
Two weeks after they begin to see the boys, the food shortages begin. Anakin immediately notices that the plate on his tray has two-thirds the amount of food that it usually does. He looks around and sees that all the plates are the same.
Rationing.
It sends a shudder through Anakin.
When they train in the gym, Anakin sees supply ships arrive at the landing pad every four weeks. When the fourth week arrives and there’s no ship, he knows that something has gone wrong. There’s even less food on their plates. Barriss, Shizo, Hibiki, and Anakin exchange glances and give a little bit of their food to the younger kids. Anakin makes sure to put the food on Ahsoka’s plate while she’s explaining something to Ysolt.
She scrunches her nose and makes a face at him when she notices the extra food.
Later that night, Anakin pries himself from the warm pile in his bed, meeting the older kids on the floor. Barriss quietly explains that it’s possible to sustain oneself with the Force. Anakin is familiar with the technique from Watto regularly punishing him and his mother by taking away their food. He didn’t know that was how he survived long weeks of reduced food rations until Obi-Wan explained a variety of ways to use the Force.
Barriss describes the technique in detail, then lets down her shields so that the rest of them can sense exactly what she’s doing. Anakin is worried that Shizo will have trouble, given how he isn’t good at most techniques, but Shizo shrugs, a wry smile on his face. “Doing things internally is easier than externally.”
Hibiki is the one who has difficulty. Barriss describes several images that Hibiki can use to visualize the technique. Sweat is running down Hibiki’s brow when she finally announces, “Oh! I just need to eat the Force.” Then she bites at the air and collapses backwards.
Barriss blinks. “It looks like you’ve managed it.”
Hibiki raises her hand in a thumbs up. “I feel like I burned and gained the same number of calories. Absolutely great. Fantastic.”
In the near darkness of the room, Anakin thinks that he sees Barriss’ lips tilt up a notch. He nudges Hibiki with his foot. “Come on, let’s go to bed.”
She groans and mumbles about just sleeping on the floor.
The rationing lasts for six weeks. They learn later from some younglings eavesdropping on the kaminoans that the last supply ship was intercepted by pirates. Kamino is in the Outer Rim. There’s always going to be the potential for pirates to interrupt the supply chain.
“Do you think… should we see if we can find shelf stable rations?”
Ahsoka overhears him asking Barriss one night after curfew and says, “And when are you going to do that? In the five minutes that you can use the refresher between meals and classes?”
Anakin snorts. “Nah, let’s figure out how to disable the curfew zapper.”
Barriss hums. “That would certainly be advantageous. We would be able to freely explore the facility.”
Anakin and Shizo work together on the zapper while Barriss projects nothing to see here into the Force, in case there’s someone watching the camera feed of their room. They think that there’s a device in the doorframe that detects when they go through after hours. Anakin rubs at his hair, because... “If they’re tracking us through the chips or cameras, we’ll need access to the central hub.”
Ahsoka sighs, flopping back onto a bunk with Ecrion who languidly looks at her with half closed eyes. Hibiki starts to tell a story about a previous war with the Sith that’s wildly inappropriate to tell toddlers. Hibiki has an interest in the history of warfare that likely was discouraged at the temple. Ysolt asks why the Jedi are always fighting the Sith.
Barriss, sitting primly on the edge of her bunk says, “I suppose it comes down to ideological differences. We haven’t truly been able to prove that the dark side has a corrupting influence on those who Fall.”
Shizo zaps himself on a live wire and hisses. Anakin smirks as he writes the new protocol for leaving after hours on his datapad.
Ahsoka asks, “So the dark side doesn’t instantly make you evil?”
“One may argue that you turn to the dark side because of amoral thoughts, rather than having amoral thoughts because you’ve fallen.”
Ahsoka huffs. “This is one of those raptor and egg situations, isn’t it?”
Barriss opens her mouth, no doubt to go on a lengthy dissertation of Jedi understanding of what makes someone a Sith. Hibiki interrupts, “I always thought it came down to if you make logical or emotional decisions while using the Force.”
Now that’s something that Anakin is very familiar with. He can’t count the number of times that Obi-Wan would sigh and chastise Anakin by saying, don’t you think before you act?
Hibiki continues. “What I’ve never understood is why there’s a threshold. What really happens in someone’s mind to make them a Sith? Like how emotional do I need to be to jump over that threshold?”
Barriss taps her finger against the plastoid of her bunk, looking thoughtful. Shizo motions Anakin over to the exposed wiring. Anakin connects his datapad. After uploading the new protocol, he sends a command for the door to open. It slides into the wall with a quiet whooshing sound. The other kids go silent as Anakin steps into the hall, bracing themselves.
There’s no pain. Anakin turns back to the group with a grin. “Who feels like exploring?”
Barriss and Shizo stay to watch the younger kids while Anakin, Hibiki, and Ahsoka leave the bunkroom. Hibiki projects we’re not children, we’re floor tiles. It’s a very specific psychic imprint that makes Anakin put a fist in his mouth to hold back laughter as they step softly heel to toe across the floor.
They’re already familiar with most of their own building. There are 64 bunkrooms, 16 gyms, 16 classrooms, and a cafeteria. In the kitchens behind the cafeteria, droids are powered down on charging docks, lights blinking orange. There are several pantries and fridges stocked with food. Looking at the shelves of carefully labeled boxes and cans, Anakin thinks that he can’t imagine a more beautiful sight.
He reaches for one of the cans. What stops him isn’t the thought of getting caught or reducing that perfect inventory, it’s the memory of the little girl on the ceiling. She had been missing two teeth. Her face had been sticky with fruit juice. She had looked like it was the best thing ever to giggle at all the other kids, upside down to her.
Anakin frowns. “Maybe we shouldn’t take any food. What if we take something and there’s problems with rationing later?”
Hibiki pats Anakin on the shoulder. “Wow, Ani, I’m so proud of you! Such a nice thought.”
Anakin rolls his eyes. You get yelled at once by a Jedi knight in public and then everyone in the temple thinks that you’re as slow as a bantha. In the case of Hibiki, she’s had several months to learn Anakin’s intelligence level, but she still enjoys teasing him by saying things like you’re a lot smarter than I heard and wow! You’re still this blisteringly bright after three whole entire years of training?
Ahsoka protests. “But I thought the whole point was to steal food!”
“Gathering intelligence is just as important as consolidating supplies in war.”
“We’re not at war, Hibi…”
“Is that what you think?”
“That’s what I know…”
“Oh, really?”
“Yes, really!”
They leave the cafeteria while Hibiki continues to tease Ahsoka. On lower floors that they’ve never been to before, they find obstacle courses, holo simulation rooms, and rooms with fake environments. There’s a desert room, a forest room, a tundra room, and more.
When they’re done exploring their building, they return to the ground floor (which isn’t really the ground floor but the floor that’s connected to the walkways) and peek outside. It’s a rare night in which it’s threatening to rain, rather than outright raining. They decide to risk going to other buildings.
As they step outside, Hibiki whispers to Ahsoka, “I’m not a child. I’m a fish that somehow jumped up onto the walkway.”
Ahsoka raises her chin and says, “I’m not a child. I’m a big fat raincloud.”
They both turn to look at Anakin. He says, “I’m not a child. I’m a pile of sand that someone transplanted from a desert planet.”
Ahsoka squints at Anakin. “You know, in the Force you’re all swoosh sh sh sh like lots of little bits of something grinding together. And getting smaller? And trying to hide all the shifting layers.”
Anakin stops. He feels a raindrop hit his cheek and slide down. “What does that even mean?”
“Dunno.” Ahsoka fiddles with the zipper pull on her jumpsuit. “Just sounded right.”
Anakin closes his eyes for a moment. He’s heard similar ambiguous statements when interacting with younglings (Jedi adults mostly know to keep such observations to themselves), but he’s still not used to when they’re directed at him. He feels like the dunes around his mind have been brushed aside and Ahsoka is seeing the dull rock that was hidden within.
They walk through a building nearly identical to their own. The only difference between this building and their own is the numbers written on the doors. Anakin can feel the bright minds of Jedi younglings on the other side of those doors. When they leave that building, they divert over to one of the newer structures. It’s within a dark laboratory with lines of glass tubes that they discover where the new boys are coming from.
The Kaminoans are growing them like they’re seaweed. Their hair waves with the currents of the liquid in their tubes. Bubbles occasionally slip out of the masks they wear and waver upwards to the join with oxygen. Ahsoka walks up to one of the tubes, reaching out to put her hand on the glass.
In the tube, the boy’s eyelids twitch like he’s dreaming. In the Force, Anakin can feel the slow ponderous energy of hundreds of minds waiting to wake up.
Several days later, they’re in the cafeteria. Barriss says, “I’ve been thinking.”
Anakin stuffs a forkful of food in his mouth. “You do a lot of that.”
“Mm, yes.” She pokes her fork at a lump that may be a clump of rehydrated egg or may be a solidified nutrient paste. It’s hard to know. Most of the foods on their plates don’t resemble anything fresh. Anakin doesn’t discriminate. He eats it all. “I think that after a lifetime of releasing emotions into the Force, one would find it… refreshing… to experience things to their fullest potential.”
Anakin tilts his head. “Yes?”
“And it’s ridiculous to place morality on metaphysical forces. Tools are tools.”
Well yeah, it’s people who place bombs in one another. It’s the people who decide to press the button on the transmitter. It’s the people who made Tatooine such an inhospitable wasteland. Anakin never hated the desert itself (other than how sand gets everywhere). He hated how it was the place that wore him down into a flesh drone that responded to commands.
Sometimes at night now, Anakin dreams of lying in a cot, homespun sheets rough against his skin, his mother’s mind a soothing presence nearby. The rhythm of her inhales and exhales an impression that rolls through Anakin like the rise and fall of Tatooine dunes, a constant reshuffling of the landscape that never ends.
“In conclusion, the dark side should be re-named.”
Anakin raises a shoulder. “Sure.”
“Oh,” Trilla says, looking up from her plate. “And what would you call it, Barriss?” Trilla is a dark-haired human girl a year older than Ahsoka. Similarly to Barriss, she’s good at releasing her emotions into the Force. Her face is placid, but there’s always something a little too sharp in her words, like she wasn’t able to let go of one last thread of irritation.
Barriss turns to look at the other girl. A furrow develops in her brow. She obviously wasn’t expecting this question and is now attempting to think of an answer to it.
Hibiki says, “Why shouldn’t it be called the dark side? It’s all those parts of yourself that were hidden before being uncovered and exposed. It’s not like those parts of you are bad, they’re just deep under all the other things.”
Trilla stabs her fork into her food. “Maybe we’re all horrible, bad things at our core. The only thing holding us back is the Jedi code.”
The discussion ends up going in a circle. There are quite a few comments of, but the masters say and only terrible, evil people could do the things that Sith do.
They never decide on another name for the dark side, or even if there should be another name.
Anakin himself wonders at the fact that the dark is bad. The dark is a good place to be when you don’t want to be found.