Chapter Text
To be an inquisitor had once been synonymous with having the name you had grown up with—and, for a lucky few, been renowned by throughout small sections of the Galaxy—stripped away forever and become nothing but a number in Palpatine's most infamous band of henchmen. Even Prossett Dibbs/Tenth Brother, Masana Tide/Ninth Sister, and Bil Valen/Sixth Brother hadn't been excluded from that early naming sequence, despite how their names could have lent credit to Palpatine's public image and claim of only targeting the actual criminals in the Jedi Order. He wanted to make his enforcers feel small, lost, and anonymous, and it had worked.
Palpatine's dark brotherhood had risen far from its origins with a Jedi Temple sentential who had sworn himself to Palpatine before Order 66 was even over. That man had acted to both save his own life and strike back at the Order whose compromises throughout the war had disillusioned him. The most recent covert, a Force-Sensitive Dubravan Separatist POW, had donned a black robe but received no number just a month ago. By all rights, he should have been one of their earliest members instead of resisting all kinds of torture and seduction from his prison cell for the better part of two decades.
His defiance hadn’t been out of any affinity to the Light Side, but out of a stubborn refusal to kowtow to the Chancellor of the Republic he had fought so hard against. The Dubravan had only grudgingly submitted after seeing undeniable proof that Palpatine had been Count Dooku's master. That hatred and betrayal had made the Dark Side's already strong hold on him even greater. Eager to learn more, he had knelt before Palpatine and pledged his sword. More importantly, in Palpatine’s eyes, he’d thrown in the locations of several hidden emergency caches of Separatist tech that would aide in the development of Imperial superweapons.
Palpatine had decreed that, as punishment for the new Inquisitor's inconvenient refusal to break earlier, he couldn’t use his name or a number for the next five years, assuming he survived that long. This set him apart not only from Eleventh Brother, Fourth Sister, and their little unit, but also from the inquisitors allowed to operate under their own names like Adalric Cessius Brandl, Lanu Pasiq, Halmere, Tualon Yaluna, Probus Tesla, Renefra Ren, Malorum, Hydra, Jerec, Antinnis Tremayne, Jerserra, Marrok, young Brakkis, Olof, Laddinare Toribn, Ja'ce Yiaso, Cincoo Sinde, and Gwellib Al-Llewf. The individuality they retained was officially in reward for some particular accomplishment in the Emperor’s service. A more secret and pressing motive was the Emperor's eagerness to inspire jealousy, resentment and dissent within the organization.
Those who could use their own names usually were'’t allowed to identify themselves as actual Inquisitors in public and were taken for mere flunkies, while most of those who could openly revel in their status as Inquisitors had no names. Plenty in both groups felt envious due to whichever privilege was denied to them, just as Palpatine had intended. Masana Tide and Bil Valen in particular had given up their birth names with the enthusiasm they might have shown giving up a limb. This unending mutual jealousy made it harder for any of the Inquisitors to escape the Dark Side or trust colleagues who would have otherwise made natural allies if they ever redirected their plotting and hatred toward Palpatine. That remained constant regardless of the name they were known by. Palpatine's manipulations were so effective that that the two groups of Inquisitors wouldn’t even go on missions in the same star systems anymore.
A more mundane reasons for this decision was that calling your elite enforcers by numbers sounded eerie and powerful when there were just a few names being whispered. Seventh Sister, Thirteenth Sister, Sixth Brother, and Tenth Brother had been among the most dreaded in the early days of the Empire. But it would have begun to sound bureaucratic, unoriginal, and unfrightening (although perhaps still a bit chilling for people not wanting the Empire to havea surplus of Inquisitors) once you finally got to names like "Thirty-Ninth Sister" or "Forty-Eighth Brother." The Emperor still refused to start calling certain subordinates of the Grand Inquisitor with particularly long and uninspiring numbers by their real names. But only when he deemed them too weak, useless, or infuriating for him to care about making them look foolish rather than frightening.
Then there were the outliers. The three who had given up their true names but refused to think of themselves by the numbers they had been assigned. The woman who had decided to call herself Darth Sister when the time surely came that Lord Vader would take her as an apprentice was one of those three.
The name would commemorate her time as an Inquisitorial sister. This would remind her of both the time she first accepted the joys of the Dark and how far she'd risen from a role that (however much the Grand Inquisitor might argue otherwise) was practically equivalent to a Hutt bounty hunter. She still said the name in her head when she heard others calling her out the number Palpatine had assigned her as if she was a battle droid. Even when her mouth was saying her true designation, her ears felt as if she her already identifying herself "Darth Sister" regardless of what sound reached her ears. It was all down to state of mind.
Stronger souls than her had found their hubris inflated by the Dark Side. Darth Sister was no Darth Tyrannus, but she felt just as confident in her future as the Count of Serenno had in his. Darth Vader had actually considered her as a potential apprentice, but only six times in sixteen years of knowing her.
The first time had been about two years after Order 66, while Darth Sister had been investigating the safehouses of a Jedi fugitive named Wønde Stradley. Four months before her search, Stradley had been captured by First Brother, returned to Coruscant and killed at the Emperor’s personal order. Darth Sister's search was a routine mission to see if Stradley had any files on other surviving Jedi fugitives now that natural disasters triggered by First Brother’s visit had passed and made Stradley’s planet safely accessible again.
For someone who had only survived Order 66 because a foggy battlefield kept her clone troopers from being able to tell which direction to shoot, Stradley had been quite the inventive fugitive. She had changed the color of her hair, skin, and eyes with makeup and contacts, then gone through four different escape ships and three fake IDs in the two weeks before her capture alone.
Darth Sister could only shudder at the thought of how impossible tracking Stradley would have been if she had gone jumping from one sector to another instead of staying in the Maltorra System, a footnote in the Council of Neutral Systems that some duchess had formed early in the war. The Maltorrans unyielding natural recourse extraction had extracted themselves into near-bankruptcy centuries before the Sith had to instill the Rule of Two.
One by one, a satellite branch of the University of Alderaan, the galaxy’s largest retirement home, a handful of casinos, and Clone Wars refugee farming communities had appeared to gradually draw in more travelers. There were thrice as many humans and near-human refugees Stadley could impersonate as there were native Maltorrans. Stradley and her fellows in the Circle of Jedi Healers had helped save the retirement home and its people from being wiped out by a plague two years before the Clone Wars, a task which had led to her to spending six months on the planet and making quite a few friends there.
Darth Sister had found no clues to the location of Stradley’s fellow Order 66 survivors. What she had found instead was even more interesting. Letters from a terminally ill, faintly Force-sensitive actress whose brother, an orderly at the retirement home, had been the first person Stradley cured. In those letters, the actress had offered to impersonate Stradley and let herself be captured to buy the Jedi time to flee deeper underground. A quick search for that actress confirmed that she'd vanished from the galactic record the same week Eleventh Brother put Stradley on a ship to Coruscant. Perhaps she had merely succumbed to the disease mentioned in her letter. Or perhaps the wrong woman had died in Palpatine's palace.
Even more alarming than Stradley's possible survival was the fact that her apparent death had allowed her killer, Beyghor Sahdett, to earn his freedom and become a probationary inquisitor himself. Sahdett had known both Stradley and the actress (whose terminal condition he was aware of) quite well. Well enough that he might have seen through the deception and known he was killing a decoy who wanted to die. Sahdett had since vanished without a trace. The Grand Inquisitor claimed Darth Vader had killed him by mistake, or perhaps in a rage, when he encountered an undercover Sahdett on a mission. But many others whispered that Sahdett may have been one of the first, if not the first, Inquisitors to desert and live. The mention of his name was certainly still enough to make Palpatine's hands crackle with uncontrolled Force lightning.
The Grand Inquisitor, a major advocate of accepting Sahdett's defection, had called Darth Sister a liar who was trying to make him look bad. Darth Vader had seen Darth Sister duel the Grand Inquisitor and cockily throw him off a cliff. Vader had actually made a small nod at her and had a brief daydream of the two of them together over Palpatine’s corpse one day. He had abandoned that plan scant seconds later after seeing the Grand Inquisitor pull himself from the edge of that cliff, resume the duel, and make Darth Sister grovel after she arrogantly assumed complete victory just a little too early.
The second time Darth Sister's star rose in Vader’s eye visor had been a year after that. She'd volunteered for a sparring session with Vader, and he could tell she was studying and learning his lightsaber techniques and attitudes about combat with open and sincere respect. Then he had seen Darth Sister's former apprentice, another unrepentant inquisitor recruit, watching the match and smiling in pride at the woman who had trained him for ten months before Order 66 and their capture and conversion into soldiers of the Empire. That lingering emotional bond made Vader distrustful of Darth Sister's commitment to the Dark Side. It also made him wonder if Darth Sister could be a sufficiently humble student under him after already having experienced the power and control of being a teacher. He had said this to her face and watched her and her former apprentice go from warily friendly to rivals for the rest of their lives in the space of a breath.
The third time Vader had considered her for bigger things had been in an idle moment of diversion while focusing on something more important. He'd merely taken note of how she bore a strong resemblance to a centuries-dead Sith in a holocron treasured by Darth Sidious that showed one of the Sith's greatest duelist back when she was a humble (for a Sith) apprentice. That likeness had made him start to think of what kind of a Sith Darth Sister could be. Then, he'd been distracted by the ground shaking and alarms going off to signal a bombing by some of Saw Gerrera's Partisans, teamed up with a South Mustafarian fugitive whose previous claim to fame was inviting Gizzor Dellso to his planet to spite the Empire over some relatives who the 501st Legion had shot while retrieving Vader from the lava flow where Obi-Wan Kenobi had left him. Vader had raced out of the room to the fighter bay and quickly forgotten about the matter.
Darth Sister had often lamented not being included in the task force that had landed on Emperor Palpatine's homeworld with the 501st Legion for a mission still had many politicians and royals hotly debating what, if any, involvement Queen Apailana had in making the planet a way station for the Hidden Path. Over twenty Jedi had died in Theed on that hunt, but several of their companions had managed to escape without a trace. Her fourth chance to be Vader's apprentice had been thanks to a delirious sickbed confession of one of Apailana’s incarcerated former handmaidens. Torture couldn’t break the woman once she recovered, but what she did say ensured the Empire knew two of those escapees remained in the Chommel Sector and enjoyed the protection of an important government official there.
Palpatine had invited everyone who was anyone in Chommel Sector government for an Empire Day celebration. Everyone except the nonhumans it would have looked odd for him to suddenly favor, like the Gungan High Council, the T'Rinn Parliament, the Aar'aa Government-In-Exile, the Archprelate of Courataine, and the Oodoc barons.
The Grand Inquisitor and Ninth Sister were standing by to investigate everyone who came in case they were bluffing with a show of false loyalty. Meanwhile, Darth Sister was sent to assess any human who declined the invitation and Fourth Brother scrutinized the aliens not invited in the first place. Several absentees on Darth Sister’s list seemed to be genuinely busy with pressing commitments, but she found two good traitor possibilities.
Count Ccolumboh was the hereditary ruler of the small Chommell Minor moon Frincasco. The count was short, dark-haired man with the cough of a former smoker and a default facial expression that seemed to be mixing sincere empathy with gloating about an inside joke. Pundits and comedians often made fun of both his ancient robe and his character tic of taking cigarras from his pocket to light, then throwing them to the ground to stomp on as soon as his recovery-minded brain caught up with his muscle memory.
The Count's son had been a Senate Guard who turned to alcoholism after the New Order was established. Ccolumboh himself had been a police commissioner of legendary honesty before the deaths of his parents and three elder brothers in a plague. He'd worked with Jedi about once or twice a year, and intelligence reports placed him as among the attendees of a memorial service for certain members of the Order on Jedha right before Palpatine consolidated enough power to ensure such gestures could never be repeated as long as he reigned. Cclumboh had blamed frail health for his absence from the Empire Day festivities, yet had felt healthy enough to go skiing earlier a week before getting his invitation
Darth Sister's second suspect was First Minister Aisyle of Kang Station. The youthful politician was a great admirer of the late Padme Amidala and had been far more open than Columboh about how her refusal to attend Palpatine’s celebration was an act of protest. A trigger-happy Imperial raid on a Partisan nest hiding deep inside Kang Station had seen fifteen innocent Kang Station residents wounded and one killed. Half of the wounded were maimed for life, and the dead citizen was only nine years old.
Aisyle had known better than to try secession or a trade embargo or even have the storm commandos or their ISB handler extradited for trial, but she had been calling for the troopers to at least be dishonorably discharged. In a broadcasted meeting with Minister of Propaganda Pitina Mar-Mas Voor, Aisyle had hotly denied the minister’s claim that the boy’s death was "a simple mistake" on a mission that had been necessary to protect the other 250,000 residents of Kang Station. Aisyle had left Mar-Mas Voor and her staff furious by icily retorting, "It was a life!" She hadn't quite shouted it, but she'd come close.
Darth Sister had uncovered evidence of a secret romance between Ccolumboh's youngest daughter and a man who was very much not the subject of her approaching arranged marriage The young Ccolumboh maiden's lover (later husband, once she did belatedly end her betrothal) was First Minister Aisyle's brother, and Darth Sister had come to believe Ccolumboh and Aisyle had been brought together politically by this romance, otherwise why would they have kept it a secret?
Ccolumboh's daughter could easily break her engagement to the gambling-addicted nonentity who she’d probably only accepted the proposal of in the first place because she was drunk at a party. It would have been politically advantageous to both governments to announce their political blocs entanglement, providing they weren’t hiding anything. But the damage they could do to the Empire as Rebel allies had Darth Sister quick to start proposing covert assassination methods. Aisyle's aunt was the wife of a banker with the means to call in some very big loans from a lot of senators and Imperial advisors if they did anything to hurt his wife’s family.
The source of the danger Count Ccolumboh posed was more complicated. Three thousand years ago, a Frincasco monarch on the verge of imprisonment during a Sith-backed coup had ennobled his entire surviving military.
His soldiers had naturally felt grateful for that and spent the next thirty years being a thorn in the Sith’s side, ultimately ending their domination over the moon and restoring the previous monarchy. When the Dark Side usurper saw the writing on the wall, he tried to repeat his predecessor’s trick and ennoble anyone he thought might carry on his fight with the right kind of incentive. The Frincasco Assembly had passed a quick law declaring any family ennobled by a monarch whose dynasty was overthrown within the next ten generations would be attainted of their lands and titles. They'd had to go into hiding just hours after passing that law, but it had been enough to defeat those long-dead Sith.
If Ccolumboh was arrested, leaving anyone from his close-knit and politically homogeneous dynasty to rule in his place simply wasn't an option. His family had done a lot of ennobling in the past ten generations, and there were over 200 offworld members of the Frincasco aristocracy with fairly young pedigrees serving as courtiers, governors, senators, and military or corporate officers throughout the Empire. Most of those people didn't share Ccolumboh’s politics (obviously) but nonetheless cherished their noble titles and would do almost anything to keep them. They had proven this by silently uniting to protecting Ccolumboh from official action when he had resisted a plan to strip mine sections of his moon in the past.
Darth Sister felt certain that Ccolumboh and Aislye were acting in concert to hide the Jedi and were also working toward a plan to shake the Empire to its core with their combined influence at just the right time. She'd presented a detailed memo explaining her theories and all the ways that the Empire could take advantage of upheavals on Frincasco and Kang Station that would follow her recommended assassination of their leaders.
The Imperial Navy could gain leverage over the governments and economy of the space station, pave way for strip-mining Frincasco, and secure blackmail material against many Imperial courtiers who enjoyed a frustrating amount of job security through membership in Janus Greejatus's Chommel Sector political machine. Dominating Greejatus and his bloc would give Vader more of a voice in government, especially once he used them to slant the selection process for new courtiers toward Imperials worshipping the ground Vader walked on. All of this would ensur a smoother transition once Vader finally usurped Palpatine to become the Galaxy’s Emperor and senior Sith (she didn't say that outright, of course, but subtly hinted at ot).
Vader read Darth Sister's memo, felt impressed, and soon approved a series of arrests on Frincasco and Kang Station. He did reject her proposal to execute Asiyle and Ccolumboh outright and instead elected to demonstrate his contempt for their connections by openly arresting both leaders and putting them on a ship to the spice mines of Kessel. Mere hours later, the defense minister of Kreeling Beta broadcast a public message exonerating Ccolumboh and Aisyle and showing himself standing alongside the Jedi fugitives as they fled into lightspeed onboard his personal cruiser.
That defense minister had been on Darth Sister's list of people who’d been invited to celebrate Empire and refused. Darth Sister had spent ten minutes reading files about the man, dismissed him as a simple workaholic and hardly spared him another thought. A deeper analysis into his past would have shown that his workaholic nature was out of a desire to feel useful as the Empire marginalized and downsized the ancient and traditional military institutions of his homeworld. Proper scrutiny would have also shown that he'd first become defense minister in recognition for meritorious service in the Clone Wars alongside dozens of Jedi knights, Antarian Rangers, and even the odd Baran Do Sage.
The secret relationship between Ccolumboh’s daughter and Aisyle’s brother was merely being kept secret out of respect for Lady Ccolumboh's fiancée as she looked for less painful grounds to break the engagement. Neither the count nor the first minister had any clue about who their relatives were sleeping with, nor did they have any plans of open defiance (yet).
Darth Sister's failure to identify the defense minister as the traitor led to many, many undesirable outcomes. The Jedi and their protector escaping wasn't even the worst. The Empire's blunder in arresting the wrong people was publicly exposed and discussed to the point that even Mar-Mas Voor and that bootlicker Pollux Hax had to make some disapproving statements about certain officers acting in haste. The people of Frincasco and Kang Station became more further radicalized against the Empire even as Aisyle, Ccolumboh, and their allies were flown back home and granted costly concessions in a failed effort to prevent any future insurections by their people. The potential ministers who Vader had already promised to ascend to the Imperial Court positions he sought to vacate were left bitterly disillusioned with him, as were the industrialists he’d told to prepare for strip-mining operations of the Ccolumboh territories. Vader had actually Force-choked Darth Sister for a few seconds while rebuking her about that fiasco.
The penultimate time she’d earned his consideration had been after she returned from Anoat Sector with the corpses of four Jedi fugitives who she had isolated and dispatched one at a time, almost eight years after the Jedi Order's fall. Since the Chommel Sector failure, she had shown signs of being an eager subordinate and learner. Vader had become introspective enough to admit that much of the blowback of Aisyle and Ccolumboh had been his own fault for not doubling down on the wrongly accused heads of state and suppressing any evidence of their innocence. She'd also eavesdropped on Vader telling his majordomo that he now felt her time with a padawan had been short enough not to affect her the way he'd feared, especially given the legendary skill and ruthlessness her onetime padawan showed on the hunt and the way any Light Side bond between them was clearly gone.
None of that had been enough for him to actually reconsider her as an apprentice, though. Not until he heard her tell how many Jedi she'd just killed and how not even one had been a mere Padawan. Vader had considered Darth Sister as a potential apprentice just long enough for her to get a vague feeling of this through the Force, but then he abruptly changed his mind being after learning the names of her victims.
Zubain Ankonori, the second to die, had been a close friend of Qui-Gon Jinn and had always treated Anakin Skywalker almost as well as Qui-Gon himself had. He had given Anakin toys, sized him up, and agreed with Qui-Gon about him being the Chosen One shortly before the young boy went to see the Jedi Council for the first time. He had arrived late to Qui-Gon's funeral openly weeping over the tardiness caused by his sacred duties. Before leaving, Zubain had given Anakin some of the deepest and most helpful condolences he’d gotten that day. Even in the grip of the Dark Side, that mattered to Anakin a little.
However, four years after Ankonori’s death, Vader's old qualms were buried once more as he and Darth Sister worked to together to track one of Master Aqinos's Iron Knights to the swamp planet Mimban. The Knight had been the best of his order and actually beaten Vader and taken off his sword hand (albeit during a distracting rumble of thunder) before being killed when Darth Sister moved to defend Vader. Vader saw a potential in her that the long dormant teacher in his soul reveled in. However, that good impression had been negated when Vader learned that they could have cornered their quarry in half the time if Darth Sister had accepted the help of seven bounty hunters: Selle, Brazzo, C-3PX, Mala Mala, Fourdee, Beesix, and Kleb Zollock. Instead, she'd embezzled Imperial funds to pay them twice what they were asking to abandon the hunt. All because of her paranoia that they’d show her up in front of Vader.
Her bribe had been extravagant enough that Zollock had even been able to afford going into semi-retirement and left her and Vader with barely enough funds to repair their ship to leave the planet after the Knight and his allies in the local rebellion fell. Her foolishness in thinking such a large embezzlement would escape detection was another point against her. Vader had never told her that he knew of her actions, judging that this secret knowledge would make her easier to manipulate in the future. At the same time, he'd stopped seeking opportunities to work with Darth Sister and had begun considering other potential apprentices.
But there was more to being an inquisitor than just impressing Darth Vader. There were petty feuds, meaningful and justified insecurities, and nonstop killing to keep Darth Sister plotting. Nonstop plotting, to. What kind of aspiring Sith would stop feeling ambitious merely because of the convenience, wishes and opinions of another? Such an attitude would be practically heretical…