Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Anakin wasn't sure if he could remember a campaign from any other time during the war where he and his men were under such heavy fire. The Seppies were firing like they didn't care about hitting anybody. They just wanted to make sure they were pinned down and couldn't organize their attack.

The campaign had started normally. They had received intel that there was activity on Zalibar that indicated that the Separatists might be looking to start some sort of mining operation or even a droid factory. It was a strange place for it. They hadn’t even opened the door to their drop ships before the air had seemed to get colder, which demonstrated the almost awe inspiring cold temperatures of the planet, given that they had just flown those same drop ships down from space. The terrain was made up of icy cliffs and structures that looked like giant waves, frozen in time. There was no distance even half the size of a Star Destroyer that wasn't broken up by a valley or a large spike of ice reaching up toward the unforgiving gray sky. There was no place to build a proper facility unless you dug into the walls, and the ice would shatter or sluice off in great sheets when you tried to dig into it. There didn’t seem to be any caves or crevices, only sloping walls and winding ravines. On top of all that, there had never been any sort of study that showed there might be resources on it that might make the planet a worthwhile location for a Separatist base. Anakin and Ahsoka had been dispatched along with the rest of the 501st to ferret out the Seppies and be done with it.

Upon landing, they had found two places that showed activity. They had decided to split their forces and attack both at once, so neither potential facility had the option to warn the other. Anakin would take the more heavily fortified one and Ahsoka would take the other. Anakin had been hesitant to send Ahsoka out on her own, and he’d made sure to send his more veteran men with her, while he took most of the newer recruits and Rex for his own portion of the mission, and he found himself glad for it, now.

He and his men were quickly getting overwhelmed. Every time a droid fell, it was replaced immediately by another one. The same appearance, same lack of understanding of the very concept of mercy, and, fortunately, same terrible aim. It wasn’t a matter of skill, as Anakin would say with pride that even the newest of his men was better than any droid. The problem was with their sheer numbers. With the amount of shots being fired at them, they were bound to hit eventually. Anakin was sweating even in the extreme cold as he tilted out of the way of a stray shot. It likely wouldn't have hit him, but he wasn't going to leave his men without a general just because he was too cocky to dodge.

"Sir, we're taking heavy losses, and we’re getting reports telling us there are sounds coming from the other direction. There’s the possibility that we might get surrounded. What are your orders?" Rex asked, firing at droids, communicating with the men, and watching Anakin's back all at the same time.

Anakin glanced around. They had stationed themselves in a ravine. They'd had little choice, as the planet seemed to be made entirely of them. It was too deep to fire blaster shots into, and their surveillance and scouting had shown a distinct lack of air support. They'd been dropped off some distance away, as attempting to land closer would have given away their surprise attack and landing the Resolute would have no doubt led to the land giving way from beneath it. In an attempt to make the most out of the terrain, they had stationed themselves at the base of a large ice wave, the tip of which had probably been weakened by the wind and toppled down, which meant they had a large, icy structure behind which they could take cover. When he had first seen it, he had blinked, stricken for a moment by the memory of hazily resurfacing in Geonosis the first time around, and seen his own arm lying on the ground, fingers outstretched as if reaching for something. The ice was shaped similarly, a long, roundish shape that hugged the ground and then curled up at the end, where the wind had eaten away at it. His arm had ached where he no longer had an arm at all. Then he’d shaken his head, thumped his right forearm against his upper thigh to remind himself that he wasn’t actually feeling anything there, and refocused. There was no time for such things. He’d directed the men to set up behind what he was referring to in his head as ‘the arm’ and then sent a few further along to make some noise and draw the attention of the facility, while a splinter group went down a different ravine that they’d determine was an alternate, smaller route to the facility, where they would then place charges and then retreat, so they could detonate them and cripple the place, where they would then sweep in after and gather potentially important intel.

Now, though, it was working against them. The number of droids that had come from the facility had outnumbered even the highest amount speculated at in their intel by several degrees. The ‘arm’ had held up well to the heat up blaster fire, but was now being slowly eradicated. There were pits in the surface and sections where holes had been melted clean through. Soon they were going to have to make the decision of whether they wanted to retreat or not. He’d directed some of the men to fire on some of the smaller ice structures a little farther back, hoping they would fall and provide them cover to retreat behind, but that was a temporary solution, and none had fallen as conveniently as ‘the arm.’ If they retreated behind them, his forces would have to split up behind multiple points of inadequate cover. But if they went into a full retreat without cover, there would be massive casualties. He’d be ordering his men to run and get shot in the back as they did. They didn’t deserve to die like that. And now odds were that they had more hostels approaching from the other side.

“Get some men to detonate the crevice our demolition team took. We can’t leave our backs exposed like that.”

“The team isn’t back yet, General.” There was no accusation in Rex’s voice, only grim reality.

“I know. Set the charges.”

“Yessir.” Rex turned to call over some men and give them their orders.

Anakin hated this. He was condemning a team of his men to die. He had led his men into a slaughter. Where had that intel come from? How was it so wrong? How could he have let this happen?

With a dry, creaking sound, their riddled cover sank in upon itself. Anakin immediately ordered his men to get behind their makeshift cover, deflecting as many blaster bolts as he could as they hurried to follow orders. There wouldn’t have been enough cover for all of them at the beginning of the fight, but their numbers had been rather brutally thinned. He dove behind cover himself as he saw the last of his men find safety, dragging along a few injured clones with the Force as he did so.

He grabbed an abandoned blaster, as his lightsaber wasn’t much help as a long range weapon. The Force blared a warning, and he yanked a clone down just in time to stop his head from getting shot off from behind. He realized suddenly that he hadn’t heard an explosion that would indicate the alternate route behind them had been closed off. He and some of his men turned to observe and help hold off the new droids that were approaching from behind them. He grimaced as he observed them. There weren't many. He hated to leave a job undone, but he couldn't keep sacrificing the life of his men for a hopeless campaign.

"Tell them to fall back. Take out those droids blocking our way and get back to the ships." Anakin ordered.

Rex brought his forearm up and immediately began issuing the retreat. They'd come back and just blow the whole facility, Anakin decided. His orders to preserve the facility so they could gather intel be damned. If the Senate wanted that information so badly, they could be the ones to die for it.

Anakin focused his attention on the endless wave of droids before him. He would hold as many back as he could to give his men more time to retreat. The ice structure might have fallen apart, but the ravine itself still worked as a bottleneck, and there were only so many angles the shots
could come at him from. He trusted his troops to have his back from the few droids that had made their way around to the other side.

He was just redirecting a shot straight into a droid's shoulder mechanism when an explosion went off behind him and he dropped into a defensive crouch. The air immediately filled with icy grit that burned his skin and that Anakin had to blink rapidly out of his eyes. He turned his head to get his bearings and try to figure out where the blast came from just in time to see the next one go off.

One of his men had gotten within a foot of one of the new droids, and instead of firing, it had detonated. Part of the side of the ravine burst into icy shards, almost obscuring the pink mist that his trooper became. It didn't stop the air from tasting like iron.

The droids themselves were the bombs. Suicide bombers. Could it be suicide if it was a droid? Now was not the time to contemplate the thin line between servors and sentience or ponder the etymology of the word suicide. No doubt, after several bad dreams and several drinks, he would approach Obi-Wan with the topic, and they could have a conversation about it that would go largely unremembered in the morning. If he survived to see Obi-Wan again. For now, he needed to focus. The droids were explosives. Suddenly, the three dozen that were blocking their way were much bigger obstacles.

"The droids are bombs!" he heard one trooper bellow.

"Sir," Rex said, voice steady due to his vocorder, but fingers tightening around his blaster, "what do we do? Continue to retreat or press forward?"

Move ahead and face a sea of droids. Pull back and enter a moving minefield. Forward or backwards? Death waited on either side. How much death? All or some? From which option? Better to die by bolt or blast?

"Pull back. Keep pulling back. There's too many for us to ever make it through going forward." Anakin commanded, not letting his turmoil and place in his voice.

Anakin pushed his way to the back, protecting the front line no longer the greatest need for his abilities. He got there just in time to pull one of his men out of the way of a blast with the force. Another wasn't so lucky. He had attempted to get close and then jump back, so the droid would self-destruct without damage to the men, but it had set off its charges too quickly, and he hadn't been able to get away in time. While he hadn't vaporized like his brother, the blast had cut clear through his chest plate and allowed Anakin a look at his shattered rib cage before the gap rapidly filled with blood. Nature abhors a vacuum. Watched as his men took steps forward, fired, and then skittered back. He watched some pick up rocks and sling them at the droids. It wasn't working. Some droids laid down cover as others advanced, evenly spaced, detonating when they got close enough.

"I need some men to go help keep the Seppies from advancing any more on our position," Anakin called out. Immediately, men began to make their way back to what had once been the front line. "The rest of you, lay down cover fire and pull back from the droids."

Almost instantly, there was a no-man's land between his men and the droids. The ground between them and the droids was turning pink with blood, but it was freezing almost instantly, meaning they weren’t losing any of the little bit of traction they had had. Good.

Anakin took a leap forward, swiped the very tip of his saber through the chestplate of the nearest droid, and then immediately used the force to propel himself as far out of reach as he could go without landing directly on top of his men. It was still barely enough. He closed his eyes against the spray of obliterated ice and felt the heat scorch and uncomfortable path up his shins. It almost felt good after the constant cold, before it turned into a twisted, confused pain. But he was alive. No sooner had he landed than he was leaping forward again.

The men seized on the openings he made. They managed to time it, so that they started rushing forwards as he leapt. By the time the blast cleared, they were pushing their way through to the other side and firing at the droids from behind. But the droids were refilling their ranks. Not as quickly as they were earlier, now that the realized he and his men had a strategy, but enough were creeping past to make completely clearing out this wall of droids unlikely.

Back and forth. Back and forth. Forwards and backwards. It was unsustainable. Anakin realized it from the second time he jumped. Sweat was dripping down Anakin's chest. His hair clung wetly to his forehead, the tips that weren’t being warmed by his body heat freezing, and lashing against his brows. His muscles screamed in protest. Some of the men were doing what he was doing, leaping at the droids and creating holes for their brothers. They didn't have the benefit of the force to help them clear out of the way fast enough. They were dying to give their brothers a chance, and something in Anakin withered every time he felt a flicker go out in the force.

He was just about to make another leap when a searing pain tore through his right calf. With a cry, Anakin dropped to the ground in an awkward crouch, the knee of his undamaged leg striking the ground and his injured leg curling awkwardly underneath him. Involuntarily, his mind flashed to a memory of sweat and heat and an electro whip striking his too skinny shoulders. He remembered the pain jolting through him and still holding on to the wires and spare parts in his arms. Weak, Skywalker. He told himself. You're getting soft. And they’re going to die for it.

His men, adjusted to the pace of his jumps, surged forward on instinct, realizing too late that their general had not made his jump. Anakin flinched as he felt several flickers go out at once. They'd trusted him completely. Now they were dead.

Sensing their moment, the droids started to advance again. With the help of one of his men, Anakin staggered to his feet. Well, foot. Below his right knee, his leg refused to respond to any commands. It might as well not be there. Maybe it wasn’t. Maybe it was only his boot holding pieces of his leg in place. Either way, something vital had been struck. The droids were suddenly equally placed on all sides. They were well and truly trapped. Anakin saw that his men that had escaped this hellish circle were firing at the droid's backs. But there were too many. Even with men on the outside, they wouldn't break through.

"Go!" he shouted. "Meet up with the others! Call for reinforcements!"

Anakin knew the odds of any reinforcement reaching them was none at all. But they'd never retreat otherwise. Maybe, with a task, they'd actually manage to save themselves. Even if they'd hate themselves for it later.

The droids advanced further, and then their first line exploded. Then the next. Then the next. When Anakin had fallen, his men had swarmed him, and so he found himself in the most protected position in the middle of the pack. Am I going to have to watch them all die before it's my turn? He wondered to himself.

It wouldn't take much longer. His remaining men were thinning out. He was doing what he could. He was pulling his men closer with the Force, pushing the droids away, redirecting blaster bolts wherever he could. The ice, blood, and smoke in the air was making it hard to breathe. He staggered, and an arm latched around his waist. Looking up, his gaze caught on Rex's jaig eyes.

"Kriff. I was really hoping you'd made it out. It's not fair of us to leave her alone like this." Anakin murmured, blood loss and exhaustion causing his honest thoughts to escape.

Rex didn't say anything, and his helmet gave nothing away, but Anakin could feel his guilt and grief in his Force signature. Anakin turned his face away from his Captain and looked back towards the droids. All at once, the explosions stopped. Only a dozen or so of his men were left standing. There was a brief moment of almost silence. Heavy breathing, joint mechanisms whirring. Anakin watched the ice settling. It drifted leisurely to the ground, catching the light of the planet’s star. It was almost beautiful. He watched the shiny red smears and speckles that covered the armor of his remaining men. He watched and pretended that the water making its way down his face was sweat. That that's what was sticking his eyelashes together and blurring his vision. Waste of water, he thought to himself. But then, he didn't really need water where he was going.

The calm broke as the droids lifted their weapons as one. Anakin raised his lightsaber as his men raised their blasters. A bolt flew wide over his shoulder, and as one they all started shooting. Anakin depended on Rex to keep him upright as he returned the bolts he could and redirected the ones that he couldn't.

Suddenly, the Force screamed. Anakin's head whipped around to where it directed him to look. A droid had its blaster raised. It was like there was a sheet of glass separating Anakin from this moment, and he was just watching. He could see the glow of the bolt inside the blaster's barrel. He could see where it was going to find its home once it left the blaster. If he could just...

The glass shattered. Rex stumbled with a grunt as Anakin wedged his shoulder under his and shoved. The blaster bolt, previously aimed straight for Rex's chest, took Anakin in the flank. He dropped.

"General!" Rex yelled, composure breaking, and placed himself between Anakin and the rest of the world.

Anakin wheezed, vision going in and out, processing the world half with the Force and half with his other senses. Everything was muddled. Rex was crouching over him. Blaster bolts were flying and missing them completely. But they weren't missing the rest of his men. The last of them would no doubt be dead soon.

Last man standing, Anakin thought to himself, holding back a sound between a whimper and a giggle. It was a ugly, twisted version of what he had told himself when he had won a life-changing pod race. Last man standing. I win. I’m going to be free.

The droids advance on his and Rex's position. Anakin reaches out a fumbling hand and curls his fingers weakly around Rex's ankle. He doubts he even feels it through his armor. A droid raises his blaster so it's level with Rex's face. Rex doesn't flinch.

"Commander on deck!" a droid calls, and then comes the sound of all the droids lowering their weapons so that they can properly acknowledge their commanding officer.

Anakin's senses are fading in and out. Sometimes too dull, sometimes too strong. He doesn't know when his eyes closed, but he slits them open to try to take in this new development. A pair of boots stops in front of him. They are pristine, except for the thin layer of ice that has settled where the boot leather meets rubber.

"Why is General Skywalker injured?" a voice came from above him, oddly calm.

"Er, he took a shot aimed at the clone, sir."

There was a moment of quiet. Anakin tried desperately to stretch his senses, but everything was static. His vision had narrowed down to a pinpoint.

"Did he?," the voice says at last. "Interesting."

"We were just about to eliminate the remaining clones, Sir."

Rex's helmet is inscrutable, but Anakin can feel him flinch in the force.

"No. Don't. General Skywalker cares for him. That could be useful."

The boots come closer. A face dips down into Anakin's line of sight. His vision is fading by the second and he feels warm and nauseous. All he can make out are the eyes. Dark, with rectangular, horizontal pupils.

"Hello, General Skywalker. I've heard so much about you. We're going to get to know each other very well."

Chapter Text

Ahsoka wiped the sweat off her brow before it could freeze there, but couldn’t wipe the pleased smile off her face. It had been a tough fight, with more droids than anticipated, but they’d managed it. 

She felt accomplished. She’d probably feel more accomplished if there had been anything of use in the base they had taken, but it was really more of an outpost than a base, which meant her master would once again be the one getting all the glory. She couldn’t even really begrudge him for it. As the war had trudged on, his bright smiles had faded and his mouth now seemed to always be pulled down into a frown. There were lines slowly carving a permanent place upon his face. He was barely half a decade older than her, but this war was aging him. She’d tease him, of course, for being a glory hound, but that was just because that’s who they were, and not any true resentment. 

And besides, if she knew her master, he’d gotten himself into some kind of predictably unpredictable trouble, and would probably benefit from her health. 

“Alright, men, we’ve done our job here!” She announced to the men she had been assigned, taking in the familiar tattoos and markings and haircuts. These were good men. She’d been through a lot with these men. “Time to go save Master Skywalker from whatever he’s gotten into now!”

Laughter rippled out from her men, and some jeered, mocking the second half of the 501st that wasn’t there to defend themselves. 

“By now, the attack should be well underway, and Skyguy will have already revealed himself in some kind of spectacular display, most likely involving explosives, so we can fly straight there instead of marching in.”

Some cheers rose up, split evenly between support of whatever pyrotechnics Anakin had no doubt caused and the relief of not having to take another trek in the blistering cold.

“Still, it’s a bit on a haul to get back to the drop ships, so who wants to place some bets on what trouble your General has gotten into?” Fives shouted to his brothers.

Hands shot into the air. 

***

They were onboard their drop ship and almost to their destination when they realized something was wrong. Credits had already been changing hands (there was not, in fact, a plume of smoke rising from a thoroughly destroyed factory or a 501st blue flag flying high on an ice wave), when Fives had called out.

“There’s a group moving down there. Too small to be ours, but not walking like droids.” He alerted them.

“Bring them up on the view screen.” Ahsoka asked. 

Immediately, a raggedy group appeared on the screen. Fives had been right that the group was too small to reasonably be Anakin’s, but they were very obviously clones. 

“Bring us to them.” Ahsoka ordered, grimly.

Immediately, the cheerful mood on the ship had been wiped away. Nothing good could come of this. Something had not gone according to plan, and not in Anakin’s usual way. 

The ship landed on the nearest ice structure that could support it, the spire creaking as they landed, but holding. They dropped ladders down the side of it, and then waited for the men, who had noticed their approach, to arrive and climb up. 

The first frost burned glove appeared at the top of the ladder, and Echo and Hevy helped haul the trooper up. He staggered far enough from the ladder to give his brothers room to enter and then collapsed to the floor. His armor was soot stained and splattered with a fine misting of red speckles. 

Ahsoka made her way over to him, snagging a canteen from one of her men. They were close to Anakin’s attack via drop ship, but they were still quite a bit away on foot. He must be exhausted. The clone pulled off his helmet to take a grateful gulp, revealing a standard Kamino military cut and lips that were turning blue.

“Report, trooper. Why are you and your men so far from your mission location?” Ahsoka asked, trying to mask the worry she felt, and hoping it came out sounding like the simple urgency expected of a commander. 

“It was a mess. There were so many of them. And we didn’t even know droids could do that. General Skywalker told us to rendezvous with you.”

“What’s your name, trooper?”

“Er, Skipper, Sir.”

“Skipper, okay. This your first mission?”

“Second.”

“An old pro, then. I need a proper report. What happened to General Skywalker and the rest of the men?”

“There were so many of them, Commander. I don’t know what’s on any of the briefings, but something must have been off. General Skywalker never would have walked into something like that with so few men if he’d known what their numbers were.”

Ahsoka exchanged a concerned glance with Jesse. Anakin had had almost half the 501st with him. 

“They just kept coming. We’d drop one, and three more would be vying for the spot.” A different clone piped up.

They turned to look at him. He had what looked like a lightning bolt pattern shaved into the side of his head, and he had a scar through his eyebrow that then ran down over the bridge of his nose. He wasn’t looking at them. He swiped a hand across the red dots on his armor, and they smeared in its wake.

“They blew our cover apart. We heard them coming from behind us. The General ordered some men to blow the alternate route. They did, but not in time, and not completely. Probably, only some of them lived long enough to actually place and detonate the charges. And then they started exploding.”

“So the charges only partially worked.” Ahsoka stated.

“No. Well, yes. The charges that were planted worked. But that’s not what I meant when I said the explosions started.”

“Bolt,” Fives interrupted. “I get that something bad happened and that you’re probably in shock, but we’re approaching fast, and we need to know exactly what happened.”

“The droids. The droids started detonating. I was right next to Dice. He just- poof. Pink mist and shrapnel. They all started doing it. When we got a certain distance away, they’d go off. We had to keep pulling back. General Skywalker managed to make some openings, and then some of the other brothers. We got through. But then he took a bolt to the leg, and he couldn’t do what he was doing anymore. He told us to go for backup. We did. I don’t know what happened after that. But it can’t have been anything good.”

Ahsoka was silent for a moment. Her fist clenched, and she stuffed them in the sleeves of her robe to keep her troops from seeing. None of this made sense. That wasn’t how droids worked. And how had their intel been so wrong. And why hadn’t this happened to her and her men?

“We need to get back in the air and get there. Now.” Ahsoka commanded.

“There are injured men that can’t make the climb up the ladder. We need to retrieve them first.” Jesse commented.

Ahsoka nodded stiffly, lips thinning. “Alright. Get me a line to Coruscant. I need to let them know about this development with the droids.”

“On it, sir.”

***

Ahsoka ended up leaving a holomessage. The atmosphere of the planet was not conducive to placing calls, and she couldn’t get a live connection, so she settled for what she could get. She gave the bare bones. Something had gone wrong. Their intel was flawed. Droids were exploding. She was going to provide backup. At that point the ship lurched into the air again, and she assumed that meant all the remaining men were on board. 

She commanded the pilot to fly as fast as he safely could, but she was also fully aware that Anakin’s definition of ‘safe flying’ had rubbed off on all his pilots, who he had helped train himself. 

Soon, they were hovering over the ravine where her Master’s battle had taken place. The men were in place to drop in, and they had several platforms ready to lower down, to allow them to collect many men at once.

But when they opened the doors and peered out, everything was quiet. No blaster fire, shouting, or explosions. There were no wounded, groaning men. The only sound was the whistling of the freezing wind as it raced past the great waves of ice and the open bay doors. 

Ahsoka turned to look at her men, and she could see the grim looks on all of them that hadn’t put their helmets back on yet.

“Any sign of movement? Enemy or friendly?” She asked.

“Nothing, sir.”

Ahsoka nodded to herself, and then jumped, allowing the Force to cradle her on her way to the ground. She heard the protesting sounds of some of her men behind her, but she was also fairly certain she heard the exasperated noises of those who were more than familiar with fighting alongside their Jedi counterparts. Particularly those of her lineage. 

The ground crunched under her feet as she landed. Everywhere else she had walked on this planet, the surface had been slick and smooth under her feet. Here, though, the ground was pitted. Icy fragments swirled in tiny little cyclones around her feet. The walls were mostly smooth, with concave sections blasted out of them. Some parts were stained red and had shadowy outlines of men. 

She heard the thumping of troopers landing behind her, and she heard the suppressed noises of horror that their vocoders let slip through, but she couldn’t find it in herself to turn away from the scene in front of her. They were half covered in kicked up snow and ice, which is why they hadn’t really been visible from the dropship, but there were mangled bodies of clones lying scattered around them. They’d landed right in the middle of the scene of the slaughter.

Some clones had clearly been killed with blaster bolts. The sooted marks were seared across breastplates and plastoid. Others weren’t so lucky. Some clones were missing limbs. One had half of his ribcage blown off. Others had nothing more remaining of them than their boots, and the bloody, jagged bits of their shin bones that stuck out of them. The ground was stained pink in most places, darkened to red in others. The very edges were still a pristine white. 

She knew from reports that while this planet was cold, it never really snowed. The atmosphere didn’t support that kind of weather. It was just endless ice, as tiny particles of ice carried on the wind froze to the surfaces they encountered. Briefly, she wondered how long it would take before all the blood on the ground would no longer be visible. 

She looked around for dark robes. They were sure to stand out. But they wouldn’t, because there was no way Anakin could be dead. So, logically, she wouldn’t see his robes, because he was probably chasing after whoever had done this. They’d be sorry when he found them. 

“Coll-” Ahsoka broke off, words caught in her throat. She squeezed her eyes shut and took a deep breath. “Collect the bodies. Place them on the platforms. Kix, you take a team and start checking for survivors. Keep record of who you find. If, ah, if you can tell.” She coughed and cleared her throat. There was no time for this.

“Who’s the best tracker here?”

Several clones turned to face one, and he tentatively raised his hand. Ahsoka nodded briskly.

“Let’s look for clues. We need to know exactly what happened here. Everyone, fan out, but be on guard for the enemy. We need to find General Skywalker.”

***

Obi-Wan was relieved to be back on Coruscant. It was unbecoming of a Jedi, but he was starting to resent his title of ‘The Negotiator.’ Just a little. Obviously, as a Jedi, he should be pleased that he was able to help broker peaceful agreements instead of solving things with a fight. And he was. But every day, he was finding that he liked politicians less and less. Maybe it was the war bringing out the worst in people. Regardless, though, once it was all over he hoped his service to the Republic will have been great enough that they grant him a reprieve from all this politicking. 

Maybe he could teach a class on it. Train other ‘Negotiators’ to deal with the ridiculousness. And then he could explore old Jedi temples and do research and only resurface when Anakin and Ahsoka dragged him out by the ear, forced a bit of adventure back into his life, and then returned him to his studies afterwards. 

Truly, this mission on Klaxon IV had been a complete waste of his time and skills. This was the second time the planet had seen fit to renegotiate with the Republic in exchange for its trading routes. He could have understood if the planet was suffering as a result of the war, but they were doing just fine. This war suited them nicely. Never had they been so coveted and courted. 

And in the end, they had called the negotiations because they wanted to be invited to more parties. Oh, they had worded it differently, talked about connections and trade agreements with other Republic distributors. But in the end, they wanted an in into some of the more glamorous social events on Coruscant, and for that he had been taken from things that actually benefited the war effort. Surely there were better things he could be doing with his time. Like coordinating troop movements. Or stabbing himself in the eye. 

Still, he was back on Coruscant and so he did his best to release his frustration into the Force. He just needed to debrief with the Counsel, listen in on any important matters that had come up while he had been otherwise occupied, and then he had a few days reprieve. Perhaps he would go to visit Dex. Maybe his Padawan and Grandpadawan would be back by then from what would no doubt be the war's most uncovert covert mission. 

The hush that filled the counsel chamber when he pushed open the doors was immediately unsettling. 

“Oh, dear. I fear I’ve walked into something. Please. Don’t stop talking on my account. If it’s whatever mess Anakin has no doubt made of his secret mission, I’m sure I can handle whatever you’re saying. Although, you should really stop assigning those to him. I completely failed to train any sense of subtlety into him.”

“Master Kenobi, you should take a seat.” Mace’s words were serious and foreboding.

Immediately, the smile Obi-Wan had pasted on fell away.

“What’s happened?” Obi-Wan stayed stubbornly standing.

The other counselors exchanged glances with one another. Finally, Kit Fisto stood up and handed him a padd.

“A report from Padawan Ahsoka Tano. On what she could gather of the events from Zalibar.”

“What she could gather?” Obi-Wan echoed. “It was my understanding that she was there.”

“The report will make things clear to you, Obi-Wan.” Shaak Ti stated, her voice staticy and her form tinted blue, as she attended from Kamino.

Obi-Wan grasped the report, too well trained to allow his hands to tremble, but the one not being held out was clenched into a fist and carefully hidden away in the sleeve of his robe.

“Thank you, Master Fisto.” 

Obi-Wan retreated to his seat even as he thumbed open the report.

Zalibar information gathering mission report: Padawan Ahsoka Tano

Upon arrival to the ice planet of Zalibar, our radar informed us of two possible locations for the base. The decision was made to split our forces to maintain the element of surprise…

Obi-Wan skimmed ahead, searching for the most relevant details,

…portion of the mission was easily accomplished…

…discovered a group of injured clones who reported that there was a discrepancy with the intel…

…reported that the droids had been converted into some kind of explosives…

…scene of a massacre…

…clearly a trap…

…couldn’t retreat…

…dismembered… completely evaporated… no survivors…

…General Skywalker’s body has not been recovered, no definitive proof..

…General Skywalker’s body…

…General Skywalker…

Obi-Wan felt like he was going to be sick. His skin felt warm and clammy. He placed the padd in his lap and pinched the bridge of his nose between his fingers, eyes squeezed tightly shut. He sucked in a breath and then straightened his shoulders before opening his eyes and facing his fellow council members.

“I am sorry, Master Ti, but I am afraid you were incorrect. This does not make things clear to me. What is our next step? How was our intel this wrong?”

“Padawan Tano is to remain on the planet and continue to look for signs of her master.” Plo Koon stated, concern and empathy clear even behind his mask. 

“I will join her at once.” Obi-Wan made to stand. 

“No.” Mace stated.

Obi-Wan blinked. 

“Surely I misheard you. Did you just say ‘no’? I have no current assignments. What possible reason could you have to keep me here?”

“This is war, Master Kenobi. We need you here for the next thing that happens. And there will be a next thing. This is war.”

“This is my Padawan. ” Obi-Wan’s voice was indignant, and he was relieved it didn’t reflect the anger he could feel building in his chest.

“Former padawan. He is a Knight now.”

Oni-Wan opened his mouth and was immediately cut off.

“I am not unsympathetic to your plight. And I am also not unfamiliar with the feelings of attachment we often hold for our padawans, long after they left our sides. But the fact of the matter is that we cannot spare you. And while you have many skills, you do not possess any that would make you a better fit for tracking Skywalker than any other Knight or Master.”

Obi-Wan’s lips tightened. He didn’t like the idea of Ahsoka out there alone. He might not be a tracker, but he could be there to support her. And he couldn’t think of anything more important to the war effort than recovering a Jedi General. 

“In truth, I do not know that I could be of any use on whatever task you may have for me here. Half of my mind will be with my Padawan and Gradnpadawan.”

“That speaks dangerously to your attachment, Master Kenobi.” Ki Adi Mundi warned. 

Obi-Wan inclined his head in response, not bothering to dispute the claim.

“We will send Knight Vos to aid Padawan Tano. We can spare him for 5 standard days, but no more. He will have another mission to start then.”

Obi-Wan’s shoulders drooped with relief. Quinlan was a good choice. His force abilities would make him far more valuable than Obi-Wan in this situation. He nodded jerkily in acknowledgement. It was the second best solution, and the first was not available to him.

“In the meantime, you will look into Padawan Tano’s reports that the droids are being used as an explosive.” Master Windu informed him, not unkindly.

“Disturbing, this is.” Yoda said gravely. “Badly, this could go for the Republic, if a new tactic, this is. Bad for clones, and speaks to larger Separatist resources that we thought, it does.” 

Obi-Wan couldn’t help but agree. This could hamstring the Republic’s efforts. The clones would no longer be able to be used as effectively without much larger loss of life. That was untenable to the Jedi. He could only hope that it would be untenable to the Senate, too.

Chapter Text

The world was hazy and rife with pain when Anakin began to wake up. A starburst of pain erupted over his side, and when his body instinctively curled, a mirror of it burned across his calf. His eyes squeezed shut and he bit viciously down on his lip, unsurprised when it split, and he tasted blood. I should have had the good sense to stay unconscious. 

Anakin wasn’t used to waking in this much pain. The ache where his arm met his prosthetic was an ever present reality. The steady pain of bruises was to be expected. His throat was often sore from shouting commands. His feet and hands had stopped blistering about a month into his first major campaign, so that was no longer an issue, but sometimes he felt lines of pain along the seams of his calluses. All of these he was used to. There was no consciousness without pain. It was a reality he had adjusted to much quicker than most of the other Jedi. He’d lived it once. The first ten years after his freedom had been gambled and won had been a nice reprieve, but the first half of his life he’d known the constant pain of a sand dry throat, the gnawing ache of his own stomach turning on him in retaliation for not providing it with anything else to digest, the stinging welts left by Watto’s impatient switch, the rubbed raw feeling of his knees--. Anyway, he was used to waking up in pain. 

This pain was different. He’d never had the opportunity to be in pain like this. On Tattooine, this kind of pain would’ve put him out of work for too long for the investment of his time and the medicine to be worth it, and so he would never have been allowed to awaken. In the Jedi Temple, this kind of pain would have put him straight into a bacta tank, and he wouldn’t have been allowed out until he was healed enough that this type of pain wasn’t a possibility. 

So, he wasn’t on Tattooine and he wasn’t in the Jedi Temple. Beyond that, he wasn’t certain. The Force, which informed him always of where he was and who was near, was absent. There was a distant echo, almost like a breeze so faint that all it did was serve to let you know that somewhere else, some one else was cooler and more comfortable than you, and only reminded you of what you couldn’t have. There was nothing he could do with that vague idea of the Force.

The lack of the Force more than anything alarmed Anakin. Even before he had known what it was, he had known the Force. It had guided his every move. He would wake up and know in his bones that there would be a sandstorm and how bad it would be. He knew the appetites of the masters around him, and when to duck into alcoves to avoid them. He found the rocks with the most bugs underneath it. He always knew which of Gardulla’s dancers were pregnant before they did, although he tended to shield himself from that information ever since he’d almost ruined a negotiation by congratulating a sterile minister’s pregnant wife. Now, it was like when he’d lost his arm. He kept going to reach for something that had always been there only to find nothing where there should have been something. He had no idea if he was alone in the room. There could be a doctor or an enemy hovering over him and he wouldn’t know. 

He was so aware of his lack of the Force that it took an embarrassingly long time to realize that his arm was missing. He went to flex his fingers, and while his left hand complied, there was no corresponding vibration in the port in his right arm that indicated the mechanisms were working. A groan pulled its way out of his throat. 

“Sir?” A voice came out of the blur of his surroundings. 

Anakin did his best to blink his eyes open, but they felt gummy and gritty at the same time.

“Sir, are you awake?”

Anakin forced his eyes open, and then immediately slammed them closed. They watered under the brief assault of unfamiliar light. 

“Sir, I need you to wake up.”

The voice was familiar, but in his mind, it reminded him of multitudes. Normally, he wouldn’t even have had to guess who was speaking to him. The knowledge in the Force would be as clear and obvious as the temperature on Tattooine. 

“Wh’sat?” Anakin managed to slur.

“Sir, can you open your eyes? Can you understand what I’m saying?”

That was the voice of a clone. Their voices weren’t identical due to their inflections and the different dialects that different batches developed, but unless a clone with a vocal mutation had been allowed to progress through the program, they all generally sounded alike.  

Anakin forced his eyes open with a groan, and looked up into eyes that were surprisingly light brown for a clone. His brow furrowed. He recognized those eyes. And he was sure he recognized the pale hair that lay beyond them. He just couldn’t put a name to them.

“ Sir, ” the clone said urgently.

“I’m ‘wake. ‘M up.” 

He tried to push himself up, but all he could manage was a rather embarrassing attempt to crawl to the wall until he could prop himself up against it. It was excruciating, and he could feel something warm dripping down his side. Arms snagged beneath his armpits and placed him against his destination with a surprisingly gentle touch. 

“You’re hurt pretty bad, sir. I need to clean your wounds.”

Anakin stared at him blankly. This would go a lot easier if he knew exactly which clone he was talking to. Instinctively, he tried to reach into the Force, but it was like grasping at smoke. The clone, however, seemed to catch onto his lack of recognition. 

“Do you know who I am, sir? I didn’t think you hit your head.”

The clone reached forward as if he were going to try to find any lumps that might indicate head trauma, but hesitated at the last minute. 

“I know that I know who you are.” Anakin offered in his most reassuring voice, which wasn’t particularly reassuring at all. “I know you’re one of my troops. But I just… I don’t know which one.” He admitted.

The clone frowned.

“What’s the last thing you remember, sir?” 

Anakin could tell that the clone was trying to fall back on a calm, military demeanor, but he didn’t need to access the Force to know he was concerned.

Anakin tried to think past the pain and confusion.

“We were… somewhere cold. Except there were explosions. And those were warm. Our cover was falling. The droids! Those were the explosions. They’ve never done that before…”

“That… was our most recent mission, sir. Right before we were taken. I’m not sure I understand. Your memory seems to be intact. How do you remember that, but not me?”

“No! I remember you,” Anakin rushed to reassure. “I remember all my troopers. I just- I can’t access the Force. I can’t feel your Force signature, so I don’t know which one you are.”

“You don’t know which one I am,” the clone stated flatly. 

“Well, you guys have markings on your armor. You’re not wearing your armor right now.” It was true, now that he was paying attention. They both appeared to be wearing all black long sleeved clothing and no shoes. 

“My hair is blonde. I’m the only one of your troops with blonde hair,” he said, sounding deeply unimpressed. 

“I don’t pay attention to that stuff.”

“You don’t pay attention to that stuff.”

“Can you stop repeating everything I’m saying?”

“Sorry, sir,” the clone said, not sounding sorry at all. “I thought you were different. I thought you actually noticed us.”

“I do! I use the Force to do it, is all. You all feel different in the Force.”

“My hair is blonde, ” he stated again. “I am one of the most recognizable clones they allowed through the program without decommissioning.”

“Can you just tell me who you are so I can stop wondering, please?”

“No. Do you really pay so little attention that you’d miss something so obvious?”

“No, I promise. Look. I-I see everything through the Force first. Everything. I don’t- My eyes are secondary. For identifying, at least. For the clones, you’re all so different in the Force, but you all look so similar, so- The Force is- It’s easier. For me. Would it help if I told you that I probably couldn’t tell you what color Ahsoka’s montrals are?”

“No. Now I’m concerned about child neglect. Are we really that different from each other in the Force? Are all Jedi like this?”

“I can’t speak for the other Jedi. I’m fairly certain most wouldn’t want me to. But for me, it’s like… like walking into a hangar! There’s a speeder and a Nubian Star Cruiser. Why would I bother looking at the ship serial numbers when it’s obvious they’re so different?”

“Can’t say I’m a fan of being compared to an inanimate object, sir. But… I’m glad someone finds us all to be so unique.”

Anakin breathed a sigh of relief. 

“I’m Rex.”

“Rex! Good. If I’m stuck somewhere, I’m glad it’s with you. Well, not glad. If the alternative is you not being stuck- Anyway, are we stuck?”

“We are definitely stuck, sir. You even more so that me, it would appear. I’m guessing those things on your arms and legs are what’s messing with your magic powers.”

Anakin brushed off the magic comment in favor of looking down for what Rex had just mentioned. There, clasped above his ankles, left wrist, and right bicep were metal cuffs with a familiar glow. He gulped and became aware of a feeling around his throat. He reached a trembling left hand towards it, and his fingers bumped against metal. A collar. 

He’d worn a collar before. He’d had a chip implanted beneath his skin since the day he was born, but Gardulla had liked it when her slaves wore decorative collars, as well, so people knew just by looking at them exactly what they were and to show off her wealth in one fell swoop. She’s removed his and his mother’s after she’d lost them in bet out of spite, not wanting Watto to have access to the nice metal that they were made out of. 

Anakin’s breath grew shallow. He could feel the harsh desert air on his skin. He could feel the eyes of some of Gardulla’s clients on him, knowing that she had already selected him to be a dancer once he became old enough to physically handle the attention that came with that, and knowing that many were waiting eagerly for just that day.

“Sir. Sir! You need to breathe.”

Rex’s voice broke him out of his memories, and he sucked in a breath. The collar immediately felt just a little less restricting. 

“Right. Sorry. Don’t like collars. I could never really pull them off. They clash with my outfits.”

“Of course, sir.”

“So, where are we?”

“Not sure. Somewhere out of the way. Haven’t seen anything but a medical droid early on and another that dropped off some food. Speaking of, I saved you some. Eat while I apply the bacta they left behind. It looks like you opened the shot on your side.”

Anakin, who no one had ever credited with an overabundance of impulse control, immediately twisted to try to get a look at his side, and just as immediately regretted it. A stab of pain immediately lanced up his side even as his ribs shrieked at him, and gray fuzz immediately started to swarm at the edge of his vision. 

Rex’s huff of exasperation must have been loud, because he heard it clearly through all the pain. Anakin fought the pain enough to flash him an inappropriate gesture, which felt strange with his non-dominant hand, but he’d make due.

By the time his vision had cleared, Rex was at his side and was tugging on his tunic, trying to pull at it gently even as Anakin’s blood caused it to cling to his side. Anakin hissed through his teeth, clenched his jaw, and prayed to the Force for this to end soon. 

“Got it, Sir.” Rex said, after what felt to Anakin like several lifetimes.

“Tell me more about our situation.” Anakin gritted out, as Rex cleaned the wound.

“Not much to tell, Sir. We’re in a cell. I think we’re in orbit somewhere, given how cold it is. Hasn’t been anyone around to eavesdrop on. Not sure how long we’ve been here. I was out cold, too. But they’ve fed us and given us medical supplies, so clearly they’re not interested in killing us.”

“Yet.”

“Always one to look on the bright side, aren’t you, General?” Rex inquired, as he applied bacta to the now cleaned wound.

“Yes. That’s me.” 

“I imagine we’ll be getting a visit from someone now that you’re awake. Of the two of us, I’m certainly not the one who was the main objective. There. That should do it.” Rex ran his fingers firmly along the edges of the bandage he’d just applied to make sure it stuck. “Try not to move around too much, sir. They didn’t give us much in the way of supplies, and I just used most of it. I know you’ll want to check out our accommodation yourself, but give it time. You’re not really in a condition to escape right now, anyway.”

“Sir, yes, sir.”

Anakin pulled his tunic back down, and the two of them settled in to wait.

***

While there was no chronometer to measure time within their accommodations, it had surely been hours when they finally heard someone approach on non-mechanical feet. Anakin was once again thrown off by how little warning he had had. He was used to being aware of every being and thing that approached him through the Force. The other children at the Temple had been a bit resentful of their inability to catch him off guard and play jokes on him. Obi-Wan had once described him as hypervigilant to an almost paranoid degree. Anakin had felt this was unfair, as asking him to be less aware of the world around him was like asking him to turn off his eyes. This had lead to a rather long, one-sided conversation about shielding and trust. Anakin had started acting surprised occasionally when Obi-Wan approached, as it was easier than explaining that he did trust him, and that this was just how he was.

Anakin and Rex immediately straightened up and turned towards the door to face whoever was no doubt responsible for their current predicament. The door opened with an almost silent hiss, and near-human being walked in. He was bipedal, with a face shaped like a human, but there was something about the cut of his nostrils that made him distinctly ‘other.’ Anakin was suddenly sure that if he came close enough to see his eyes, that they would have rectangular pupils. 

“So, this is the Chosen One.”

The tone of contempt that one that Anakin was used to receiving when people brought up that title. Almost no one said it seriously. Maybe if he were a better Jedi it would be said with respect more often, but as it stood, it was almost always accompanied by a tone of disbelief or disdain. Still, Anakin was used to this, and so he did not rise to the bait. He shifted straighter, leaning on Rex to do so, and made silent eye contact with their captor. 

“You were captured with relative ease by my droids. I cannot say I am particularly impressed with your performance so far.”

“Terribly sorry to disappoint you. I don’t believe I caught your name. Or have ever heard of you. Who are you, exactly?” Well, he was never going to stay silent for long.

The man regarded him calmly. For a moment, there was no sound but the three of them breathing. Then, with no warning, he lashed out with a baton.

Anakin was unable to stop himself from flinching back, although he thought he did a pretty good job of making the reaction as small as possible. But he did not have time to congratulate himself for long, as the baton made contact not with himself, but with Rex’s collarbone, which, pressed together as they were, Anakin heard snap with a wet crack! sound.

“Hey! He didn’t do anything! Hit me instead!” Anakin lurched forward slightly, trying to put himself in front of Rex, only for his request to be met, and for the baton to make solid contact with the wound on his side. 

Anakin’s vision immediately went white. There was nothing but agonizing, rippling pain. His hearing came back before his sight, and he wished it hadn’t because he could hear his own pathetic, whimpering gasps, and the sound of Rex letting out a pained grunt over his own broken bone. 

“You will learn quickly who is in charge here. Perhaps you already have, although I don’t credit you with that much good sense. I imagine it will take a while to beat it into you. No matter. We have time. But by the end of your time here- and that is a figure of speech, you will die here- I will have shown the world exactly how unworthy you are of the favors and attention you get.”

The man turned and walked out.

Anakin slowly uncurled from his place on the floor, dragging himself upright. He looked towards Rex, who looked green, and had a hand placed against his neck as if not wanting to touch his actual wound. Anakin blinked lingering tears out of his eyes and looked away. He had no idea who that had been. But he got the distinct feeling that whatever this was, it had nothing to do with the war effort. This was personal.

And he had the horrible feeling that Rex was about to become just the next person in a long line of those he failed to protect. 

Chapter Text

Setting a broken bone with one arm was a bitch. Anakin had had to coax Rex into adjusting and readjusting and regaining consciousness until he was in a position to use the wall and his own arm to brace himself, so that Anakin could snap the pieces of his collar bone into place. Rex had grimaced and sweated through the whole thing, and Anakin had muttered a constant stream of ‘imsorryimsorryimsorry’ under his breath until Rex had snapped at him to knock it off. 

In the end, though, he was fairly certain that they had managed to get it back into mostly the right place, even if there was no gentle reassurance of a job done correctly in the Force, like a final puzzle piece slotting into place, as Anakin was used to. 

Still, even with good medical care, which they didn’t have, the collar bone took a long time to heal. Anakin had rather unfortunate personal experience with that due to the war. And also another experience during his Padawan days that involved jumping from a high place with not enough practice in how to let the Force catch him. Any time that particular instance was brought up, both Anakin and Obi-Wan turned red. Anakin with embarrassment, and Obi-Wan with suppressed laughter, as Anakin had apparently made quite the entertaining image on the way down. 

As it was, Anakin had sacrificed a part of his cloak to create a sling, which he had tied very sloppily with his one hand, and Rex hadn’t even protested Anakin losing the protection of some of its warmth, which Anakin privately thought was the biggest indicator of just how painful the resetting experience had been for Rex. He still wasn’t entirely sure why the clones cared so much for their Jedi general. Was it the bond of brotherhood created by war? Was it something that was programmed into them from or before birth? Or was it just that they didn’t value themselves enough to ever feel like they deserved to be put before their generals, even in the most minute of ways? Anakin hoped it was the first reason, though he wouldn’t stake money on it. 

“You can stop looking at me like I’m going to vanish into smoke, sir. It’ll take more than a broken bone and your shoddy medic abilities to take me out.” Rex’s voice was hoarse, but strong.

“I’m not looking at you like anything. I was thinking up an escape plan.” 

“Yeah? You got anything?”

“”Well. I imagine the door would be a good place to start.”

“Generally is, sir. I can see why the Jedi Council values you for your strategic ability.”

“Hey, I’m not exactly uninjured here, either.” Anakin protested in good humor.

“You’re right. I imagine your blood volume’s not up to capacity yet. You’ve got a hard enough time when you are getting as much oxygen as possible to your brain.”

“That sass part of your Kamino programing? Cody has it, too.”

“We’ve got to deal with the Jedi ossik somehow, General.”

“Yeah, okay. Go to sleep any time now. I’ll make sure to come up with a plan that meets your standards by the time you’re up.”

“None of your plans are ever up to my standards, sir. They all seem to involve falling from high places.”

“That’s just the backup for when everything goes wrong.”

“Maybe if you could try devising a plan that’s capable of going right it wouldn’t be an issue?”

“Okay, now I really need you to go to sleep. And I don’t have the Force to put you under right now, so I’d have to knock you out.”

“As you say, sir.”

Rex shifted against the wall and almost immediately went to sleep in a position so uncomfortable that it spoke to how tired Rex must have been. He’d probably been awake for some time before Anakin was. And the battle they’d been in before they’d been taken was intense. The poor man deserved some rest. 

Once Anakin was sure that his shifting wouldn’t disturb Rex, he pulled himself painfully to his feet, determined to examine their cell.  The blaster wound in his leg flared, but he’d had worse and was determined to ignore it. The room they were being kept in was round, with no walls or beds to take cover behind. They were completely exposed. On one side of the round room was the seam to a door that was currently closed. Everything was made of metal, which leached what little warmth Anakin was producing right back out of his body. Across from the door was a depression in the ground with a hole in it. Probably to use to relieve themselves. It looked too narrow to even fit an arm down, so it didn’t seem like a viable escape route. Maybe with some explosives…. 

It was a very sterile room. A clean slate. The lights were recessed into the ceiling, which was far above their heads without the use of the Force. The seam of the door was tight and heavy. There were no windows or viewports. The ventilation ports were high up, round, and the size of a clenched fist. There wasn’t much to work with, as far as escapes went. 

Anakin heaved out a breath and leaned against the wall. Whoever their captor was, he knew what he was doing. They would certainly not be escaping until they had regained some semblance of strength. If their captor permitted them that, at least. He’d be smart to keep them weak, and so far he seemed intelligent.

He slid down the wall, allowing his injured leg to stretch out fully before him. There was nothing to do but wait. With any luck, Ahsoka was already on their trail with a squadron of troops to bust them out of there. As any good Padawan did (and his was the best, of course), she would never let him live down her having to rescue him, but something about the nature of their captor told him that that would be a trade he would be willing to take. 

***

Quinlan Vos had spent a great deal of time with Anakin Skywalker during the beginning of his padawanship, but not as much during the later half. When a padawan grew closer to their Trials, the Council began sending them and their master on longer, further missions. Anakin had been about 14 when Aayla was reaching that point, which meant she and Aayla were away quite often, and when Aayla was knighted and they were finally able to spend more time in the Temple, Anakin had reached that same stage, meaning he and Obi-Wan were now the ones away and out of reach. Quinlan still saw glimpses of him and Obi-Wan during that time, but mostly they were like ships passing in the night. And then the war had come, of course. 

The night after Quinlan had been summoned to the Council and told Aayla was ready to start preparing for her Trials, he and Obi-Wan had gone out for drinks, knowing they were about to start seeing much less of each other. Halfway through their second round of drinks, however, they had gotten a summons from the healers that Anakin had had some kind of accident. 

The two of them had rushed back to the Temple and made a very undignified run through the halls only to find Anakin and Aayla sitting sheepishly on the same bunk. She had gone to Anakin just as Quinlan had gone to Obi-Wan, and the two of them had been in the Temple Gardens trying to see who could do the best flips from the highest places.

Anakin had declared himself the winner with a delighted smile. (Aayla nodding in solemn agreement when Anakin was looking at her, and then shaking her head vehemently at her Master when he looked away.) Anakin’s bright smile revealed a chip in one of his incisors that he’d gotten when he got overzealous with his last jump and misjudged the distance between himself and the side of the boulder he was jumping from. Obi-Wan had buried his face in his hands with a sigh, but that hadn’t hidden the way his shoulders shook in laughter. Quinlan hadn’t even tried to hide his, and he had slung his arms over Anakin and Aayla’s shoulders and told them they were idiots and to never change. 

Quinlan had seen Anakin since then, of course, mostly in passing. He had observed that he was probably taller than himself by now, and that his shoulders had broadened, and that someone should probably tell him to pull his hair back before it became a problem on the battlefield. He’d never really sat down and had a conversation with him since, though, so the image of him that was stuck in his mind was of his bright smile in his tanned face, the crinkle around his eyes, and the pure delight that radiated off of him in the Force. 

This was the image that he had in his head of General Skywalker as he spent his fourth day investigating what he was becoming more and more certain was the scene of his death. 

“Is there anything? Please, Master Vos, you have to find something soon. I know Master Kenobi said you only had 5 days…”

Skywalker’s padawan was too much of a Jedi to wring her hands nervously, but she was also too young to fully cover up her distress. 

“I’m sorry, Ahsoka. There’s not a lot to go off of here. Most of the physical things left behind are droid parts. There’s nothing here that’s giving me an impression of your master.”

The biggest lead they’d gotten so far was Quinlan’s second day there, when he had found what they were able to confirm was Anakin’s blood. There had been no trace, however, of any scraps of his armor, clothing, and certainly not his lightsaber. Nothing that Quinlan could accurately use his psychometry on. He had gotten whispers of Anakin’s presence and not much else. This was typical of battlefields. Unless the people fighting there had been entrenched for some time, there wasn’t much left behind, other than the pain and fear and despair that lingered almost identically in every battle. This war had really not been good for his balance. 

Padawan Tano hovering in the background and Obi-Wan checking in twice a day was not helping, either. 

“There has to be something . Some proof of… something.” The girl sounded defeated, or maybe Quinlan was just projecting.

“I’m sorry, young one. But there’s nothing here. If he’d been pulled from a crashed ship or something maybe I would be of more use. But this is just- It’s all more of the same. Everyone here was feeling the same thing. They were surprised. They were scared. There was a surge of hope and then more fear. More death. I wish I had more for you. But there’s nothing more to be found.”

“His lightsaber is gone, though! If he were dead, why would they take it? Greivous wasn’t here. He’s the only one that takes lighsabers. He was probably hurt and took it when he got away. He’s injured somewhere. We need to find him before it’s too late.”

“Greivous isn’t the only one who takes lightsabers. Plenty of beings do. It proves you’ve killed or tricked a Jedi.”

“Anakin isn’t dead. We just haven’t found him yet.”

“We found his blood. A lot of it-”

“Not enough to prove he’s dead!”

“Enough that we’d see a track if he’d crawled away. There are no drag marks. Certainly no bloody ones. Only the footprints of the troopers that got away.”

“Maybe Rex carried him. We haven’t found Rex, either.”

“We haven’t found a lot of the troopers, young one. There wasn’t enough left of a lot of them to find, to distinguish one genetically identical clone…”

Padawan Tano’s lips pursed, and she looked away. She was so young. He thanked the Force every day that Aayla was no longer a child when this war broke out. 

“Look, we have another day. Maybe you’re right. Maybe we haven’t looked everywhere yet. Or maybe your master managed to bind his wound before he hid. We’ll start again tomorrow.”

“And then you’ll have to go. And I’ve been ordered to return with you.” The padawan’s voice was flat, but her eyes glittered with a brightness of tears that she refused to let fall.

“Knowing your master, he probably stole an enemy ship and has been making his way back to Courscant this whole time while we’ve been freezing our shebs off. You can give him a punch to the arm when we get home for worrying you.”

The Togruta gave him a tremulous smile, and in her sharp canines, he couldn’t help but see the reflection of Anakin’s chipped tooth and the way he had smiled like nothing bad had ever happened in the world. 

***

The following night, Quinlan commed Obi-Wan. The day had been as he expected, which was more of the same. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath in preparation of what waited for him when Obi-Wan answered. He was barely breathing out the breath he had taken in when Obi-Wan picked up.

“Anything?” Obi-Wan asked immediately.

He didn’t sound demanding or out of breath. He sounded calm and resolute. But Quinlan could see the traces of his anxiety and lack of sleep about him. His hair was falling over his forehead, and the lines of his facial hair weren’t as clean as they usually were. His mouth was pressed just a bit too this and he was leaning forward, where normally he leaned back.

“There’s nothing new to report, other than that we’re on our way back. Our time is up, and, frankly, there was nothing more to find. Will you be there when we return?”

“Yes, of course. I’m to take Ahsoka on until Anakin gets back.”

Quinlan paused, uncertain.

“Obi-Wan… I hope for that, too. But this is war. There are no guarantees. And the battlefield… It was a mess Obi-Wan. You should- you should not get your hopes up. Or, since I know how stubborn you are, you should at least manage the expectations of your grandpadawan. I think there is little good to be found at the end of all this.”

There was a long pause, Obi-Wan’s gaze intense, eyes narrowed.

“Did you find definitive proof of anything?”

“No, but-”

“It is unwise to underestimate Anakin. This is not naivety or denial speaking. Anakin is a skilled warrior and more than that, he is a survivor. Unless there was proof he was killed, I find it unlikely he was. Statistically speaking.”

“Statistically speaking. Of course.”

“On top of that, he is the Chosen One. No doubt we would feel it if he were to pass into the Force. No, most likely he is wherever we least expect him to be, and he will show up at whatever time is most dramatic, as is his custom.”

“You know him best, Obi-Wan.” Quinlan’s voice did little to hide his skepticism. “I must go. I’m must deliver my report to the Council and let them know when we will arrive. Don’t let on I spoke to your before them, yeah? I don’t want a lecture.” The forced levity fell flat, but Obi-Wan forced a fake smile, anyway, which Quinlan appreciated, as it made him feel like less of an ass.

“May the Force be with you, old friend.”

“And with you, Obi-Wan.”

The blue image of his oldest friend blinked out and Quinlan was left staring at empty space with the impression that Obi-Wan was not going to handle whatever came next very well. 

He did need to report to the Council. But, perhaps there was time for him to comm his former padawan first. He had a sudden desire to see her. 

Chapter Text

Rex had woken up the past five days to his general in some state of illness. Most days, he threw up. Three of those days, he had also been feverish. On one, he’d been so dizzy that he’d tried to use the floor to pull himself up, mistaking it for the wall. And during all of this, at least once a day, he was having seizures. 

At first, before the first seizure had come, when he was only feverish and throwing up, Rex thought that one of General Skywalker’s wounds had gotten infected. Rolling up his pant leg had been fairly easy with one arm. Pulling up his shirt, less so. Either way, both of those wounds had seemed to be healing well enough, if not more slowly than usual. 

He’d made a brief attempt to search his general for other wounds that he might have neglected to mention, and had even managed to search most of him, before he’d nearly gotten his nose broken for tugging on the waistband of his pants and decided to stop.

He glanced at the Force suppressing devices that the general was covered in. They seemed to flair with extra light at random intervals.  Perhaps that was it. The Force. 

Once, on Kamino, before he had been deployed, one of his brothers had had some kind of problem. There was something wrong with his brain. Whatever had been wrong had been interesting or concerning enough to make the Kaminoans examine the issue rather than just decommission him. No doubt to make sure it wasn’t a flaw that could crop up in the other clones. Whatever it was, whether it was the issue itself or whatever the longnecks had done to examine him, had left him unable to breathe on his own. He’d been on a ventilator for ages. Whatever the problem was with his brain, it got fixed, but when the longnecks had gone to unhook him, it was like his body had forgotten how to breathe without the help of machines. It used to know how. The rest of the clones knew how. But this particular clone had lost the ability. They had left him off the vent and allowed him to expire. After that, they immediately decommissioned the clones whenever something was faulty in their heads. He supposed they weren’t worth the effort. 

His general reminded him of that clone. He’d spent so long using the Force for everything that his body didn’t know how to function without it. The loss of it was making him physically ill. Maybe even disrupting the electrical signals in his body and causing the seizures. Rex was terrified that, like that brother, he would die without the presence of the thing his body needed to survive. 

Of course, Jedi also claimed that they rarely got sick due to the Force. Perhaps it was as simple as that. His immune system was not used to dealing with invading sickness the old fashioned way, and General Skywalker, who pushed himself further and harder than most beings could handle, no longer had that extra boost to protect him. His immune system was compromised, and he was already run down from battle, and lack of sleep, and lack of food. He was ripe for a sickness to knock him on his ass. 

He had examined the Force suppression cuffs that General Skywalker was covered in. One around each ankle, one around his left wrist, and another just below his right shoulder, before the swell of his bicep. One around his neck, skin already rubbed raw underneath, not helped by the sweat from his persistent fever. There was even one wrapped around his waist. And every single one seemed to be welded on. There was no lock. No hinges or even a seam. They were all pressed closely to his skin, no space for even a finger to wedge through except for the one on his neck, but even that always had at least one point of contact when you tried to pull it away from his skin. They were made of hard, unforgiving metal, and lit up from within.

Whoever had captured them knew exactly who they would be dealing with. They had come prepared for nothing less than the so-called ‘Chosen One.’ One thing was certain, General Skywalker had not been a lucky find. 

There was a groan from the general’s direction, and Rex slid over towards him. 

“General? You with us?”

“W’r ‘m I?”

“Unknown, sir. A cell. Do you remember?”

“Rex. You’re Rex, ‘cause y’r blond.”

“Yessir. Good to know your eyes are working.”

“M’I.. infected? Feel hot.”

“No, sir. No infection. You appear to be ill.”

“Hmm. Don’ like it.”

Rex huffed a laugh. 

“No, sir, I imagine you don’t.”

“Uhuh. I’m gonna- gonna make it stop. I’ll stop.”

“You give that a try, sir.”

General Skywalker squeezed his eyes tight, and seemed to focus for a while. Then, he released a deep breath and seemed to deflate like a balloon.

“See? All better. All-- all better. Gotta sleep t’off, now.”

“Yes, that sounds good, sir.”

General Skywalker was asleep again in seconds. He slept so silently that Rex had felt the need to check him for a pulse several times over the past few days. 

Well. If only him getting better were that easy.

****

Shockingly, him getting better did seem to be that easy. It seemed that his brief consciousness had been an indication that he was at the tail end of whatever sickness plagued him. His fever broke and he stopped throwing up, which was a relief, as he was finally able to keep food down for the first time in days. 

The day after he’d woken up briefly and declared he would stop being sick, he woke up much more coherent.

“I feel like the inside of a bantha’s mouth.”

“I’m not going to ask how you know what that feels like, sir, as I don’t want to know.”

“It’s just an expression.”

“I’ve never heard it before, sir. Are you sure you’re not speaking from personal experience?”

The general glowered at him, and ignored the question.

“How long have I been out? It feels like longer than a night.”

“About 6 days, if they’re feeding us once a day, sir.”

“Does it seem like they’re on a fixed schedule?”

“It seems pretty exact, but that’s just a guess.”

“No, it probably is. It’s easier to program a droid to bring things at regular intervals than to mix it up. Any sign of our captor?”

“No, sir. Just a droid that came in with food and a change of clothes every day.”

“A change of clothes?”

He looked down at himself, taking in the black clothes that did seem much cleaner than they should have if he’d been wearing them for 6 days straight while ill. 

“Did you… change me?”

“No, sir. The droids did. It really shouldn’t surprise me that you fight in your sleep, sir. But you almost got me in the face when I was checking your wounds, so I figured I’d let the droids take any potential damage.”

His general looked… he wasn’t sure. He’d say guilty, but that wasn’t it. Not embarrassed, either. But certainly shifty. 

“Er, sorry. About that. I thought I’d stopped doing that.”

“You were pretty out of it, sir.”

“Yeah.”

There was an akward pause and the General took that time to test out his limbs. He stretcehd out his legs with a groan that was probably equal parts related to his still healing injury and the stiffness that came from haivng been curled up on the floor, largely umoving (except fot the seizures) the past couple of days. He flexed the fingers on his left hand, and then went to do the same to the right, only to stare in consternation at the empty space.

“Those assholes stole my arm.”

“No doubt they’d heard your of your reputation with machines and thought you’d turned it into a weapon. Or added a flame thrower.”

“Now, there’s an idea…” The general mused.

“Sir, please don’t add a flamethrower to your arm. You’re difficult enough to manage already.”

“Think about how cool it would look, though. I could light deathsticks with my fingertip.”

“You don’t smoke deathsticks, sir.”

“I could take it up.”

“...Sir, as much as I would like us to continue pretending we’re not in the situation that we’re in, perhaps we should talk about how we plan to get out of here.” 

The general’s face dropped, the facsimile smile fading away like smoke in the wind. 

“Yeah.”

He hauled himself up completely, face going white as he did so. Rex immediately worried that he’d pushed the general too far, that he’d forgotten too quickly just how ill he had been just a few hours ago.

“Sir, maybe you should get more rest first. We’re not going to accomplish anything while we’re still hurt.”

Rex wasn’t even trying to make it seem like the rest would benefit him so that his general felt less of blame, of which he knew he took too much on himself. His shoulder still ached, nowhere close to being healed. And he’d lost a great deal of sleep worrying over his general’s next seizure. He wasn’t really in a place to be planning an escape. 

“No. We need to start figuring this out. The war’s not going to stop with us gone. We’re needed. Ahsoka is out there.”

Rex jolted. He’d been willfully not thinking about the commander. Had her party been attacked as well? Was she safe? Was she alive? Was she in a cell near them? Now that the thought had been forced upon him, he found himself plagued by it. 

“Okay, sir. What are you thinking?”

“Did you recognize him? You and Ahsoka filter out the reports before I get to them. Was there anything mentioned that might be related to whoever that guy is?”

“No, sir. There were no new threat assessments, no indication of unusual droid movement or function. There have been no reports of anyone with a particular vendetta towards you. Nothing that fits the description of what little I saw of him.”

The general huffed out his displeasure. There was a line of sweat gathering at his hairline, and his lips were pursed in a colorless line. 

“What do we know about him?”

“Doesn’t seem to like you, sir.”

“Yeah, thanks, I got that.”

“Was he a Force user?”

His general paused before he spoke.

“Normally,” he said slowly, “I would be able to tell. But with the Force suppression…”

Rex watched as his general worried his lip. His eyes were furrowed and troubled. Rex tried to imagine what it must feel like to suddenly lose one of his senses, one that apparently the general relied on a great deal. What would it be like to wake up and suddenly not be able to see? No. That was too easy to imagine. He knew exactly how much he valued his eyes. What would it feel like to lose a sense that he totally took for granted? Like the ability to feel? What would it be like to wake up and no longer be able to feel the handle of his blaster? The ties on his boots? How would it feel if he could no longer feel the world beneath his feet ? 

Rex wondered how his general had reacted the first time he’d been placed under Force suppression. It couldn’t have been pretty. And he doubted it was anything as extreme as what he was going through right now. He suddenly found himself appreciating how much effort General Skywalker must be putting into keeping a cool head.  

“Force sensitive or not, he said he’s going to kill us. We need to get out of here. So, we’ll plan it like he is and go from there. And if he is, it doesn’t matter. He’ll die just the same. Soon.” 

The general’s face was fierce as he said it, but it was also dangerously pale, and the sweat was no longer a thin line, but actual beads getting ready to carve a way down his face. The sweat that had sprung up by his scar was making its way down its crevice, the path of least resistance, and soon he would be blinking it out of his eye.  

“We should wait, sir. Get an idea of their movements. Make our plan around that. With the injuries we have, it’s best we try to engage as little as possible.”

The general, who while a good strategist would always lean towards action over waiting, looked discontent with this plan, but also too tired to argue with it. He might be ‘always on the move’ as General Kenobi often sighed out, but he was also smart enough to know that Rex was right.

“Alright. We wait. But just for a few days. Then, we’re getting out of here.”

***

Ahsoka watched as Master Kenobi pretended to mediate. He put on a good show, but she was Anakin Skywalker’s padawan, and she knew what it looked like when someone was only pretending to meditate. However, unlike with Anakin, she was certain that this was an anomaly rather than the norm. Master Kenobi was unsettled, and it was making it impossible for him to meditate, which was clearly throwing him off a little bit. She had even heard him respond to someone’s question of whether they’d ‘located Knight Skywalker yet’ with a particularly acerbic ‘clearly not,’ which was about as snappish as she had ever seen him get with someone who was not Anakin.

She, herself, had not managed to meditate, either. Every time she attempted it, she thought about all the ways that she could have changed what had happened. 

What  if she had refused to split up from Anakin? What if she hadn’t taken all the more experienced men? What if she had gone to his aid faster? What if she had been more in tune with their master/padawan bond and sensed that things were going wrong? What if--

“Ahsoka, breath.”

Ahsoka took a deep, stuttering breath. 

“That’s good. Another.”

Ahsoka took another breath.

“Excellent. Look at me, Ahsoka.”

Ahsoka looked up from where she had dropped her head to look at her fingers as she tore at the skin around her nail beds. Master Kenobi’s eyes were kind and sympathetic. He may have been snapping at unfortunate Jedi who were asking kind questions at the wrong time, but he was endlessly patient with her.  

“Would you like to talk about what just happened?”

“I could’ve done more!” She blurted, jumping up so fast that she nearly headbutted him, and began pacing. “I’m his padawan. I’m supposed to have his back. It’s my fault. If I were better, I could’ve-- I might’ve been able to…”

“Ahsoka, there is little you could have done. And we are doing all we can to find him.”

“Are we?” She asked sharply, “We’re on our way to a completely unrelated mission. They didn’t have Knight Vos search anywhere other than where it happened. So, they’re what? Monitoring transmissions in case he’s mentioned? Is that everything we can do? We should be out there. Looking. Investigating. We’re not doing everything we can!” 

Ahsoka’s chest was heaving by the end of her rant. The adrenaline ran out of her like water through a sieve. She suddenly felt like she’d said too much, and looked to Master Kenobi apprehensive, expecting to be told to mind her feelings or release her frustration into the Force. Instead, his eyes gleamed with amusement, and while she hadn’t seen a smile on his face that wasn’t forced since before she and Anakin had left for that last faithful mission, she could see something about the curl of his lips that seemed like approval.

“Do you know why I requested this mission when I heard about it?”

“I… didn’t know you had requested it.” She replied slowly.

“It’s in the Arcana section.”

Ahsoka blinked at him, uncomprehending. 

“Okay? What about it?”

“There are quite a few droid factories in that area that we took from the Separatists within the past few months. That’s not what our mission is. We’re just delivering medical supplies, but if, on our way back, we wanted to stop at one or two and see if there was any indication for orders for altered droids or the like, I’m sure something could be arranged.”

“Altered droids… Like the ones we found evidence of.”

“Exactly.”

“You want to see if we can find where they originated. Or who ordered them.”

“Precisely. And, as with many things related to droids, these factories often operate on a network. This is usually not particularly helpful, as the orders for droids are fairly uniform and don’t give us much insight, but perhaps that same network might hold information on other factories. It could give us a starting point, even if we don’t end up in the correct factory.”

“So you’re using this mission as an excuse to search for Anakin?”

“We’re also delivering the supplies. That is still a very real need. We’re not shirking our duties, we are simply using them to our best advantage.”

“Without the express orders of the Council?”

“Well, we are not going against any--.”

Obi-Wan was cut off with an oof! when he suddenly found himself with an armful of padawan. He stiffened briefly, and then relaxed into the hold, holding her back just as tight. 

Chapter Text

Anakin woke from a dream of consuming darkness and a feeling of helplessness with barely a sound. A sharp, almost silent inhale was the only indication that this was a less than peaceful waking. He levered himself up onto the remains of his right arm and ran his left hand across his face. The dream hadn’t been as vivid as those he usually endured, but it had still unsettled him. Darkness was an old friend. Crammed in the mostly underground slave quarters of Gardulla the Hutt; digging deep in the bowels of a damaged ship where Watto or his mother couldn’t fit; deep space travel far from star systems; the darkness of a freezing, Tatooine night lit only by small fires, his lightsaber, and made all the darker by the light that no longer shone from his mothers eyes. 

Yes, Anakin Skywalker knew darkness, inside and out, so to come face to face with a new kind of darkness in his dreams that he hadn’t experienced before disturbed him. If he had access to the Force, he might even try to mediate. Except that there was no Force for him right now, so this was just a twisted image sent by his own imagination. Fantastic. As if I needed any help making this situation worse.  

He had been plagued by nightmares his whole life, and he had learned at a very young age to not disturb those around himself while having them. When he’d been very young, he would tremble violently in the aftermath, sometimes in his mothers arms, sometimes by himself in their cot if she was already working. 

Sometimes, when he had just joined the Order and left his mother behind, Obi-Wan would find him in such a state outside his bedroom door. His nightmares were locked tightly behind durasteel shields, though, and crying was something you didn’t do on Tattooine unless you were dying, so he’d mistaken the trembling for him being cold and plied him with blankets. All throughout his Padawanship, anywhere they had gone, Obi-Wan would silently request additional blankets for Anakin, and Anakin would silently pretend he wasn’t sweltering under his mount of bed coverings. 

He had hoped that the one upside of being completely cut off from the Force would be that he would find a temporary reprieve from his nightmares, but clearly, it was not to be. His mind, apparently, had plenty of material to work with without the assistance of his cosmic other parent. 

Keeping quiet so as not to wake Rex, who, the lucky bastard, was actually managing to get some rest, he pulled himself fully into a sitting position. The wound on his leg barely twinged, but the one on his side had been a much more direct hit, as well as the target of their captor’s aggression, and he could feel the delicate, new skin pulling as he made his way upright. It no longer restricted his breathing, however, and it didn’t feel like the healing tissue would tear at the slightest provocation anymore. 

He and Rex had been trapped in this cell for some time. Further exploring had led to what they already knew. Their captor was smart. They were afforded very little opportunity to escape. There was no energy field that allowed them to see out into the hallway. They had only caught the briefest of glimpses as the droids delivered their one meal of the day. Instead, there was a thick, metal door. Most hours of the day, he and Rex were left alone with each other and their thoughts. 

While Anakin would bever protest Rex’s company, he was eager to escape his own. His thoughts had a way of twisting in on themselves, diverting from positive to negative in an instant, sinking hooks into his brain and twisting, until even the most benign things led to thought of his failures and deficiencies and how the things, even positive, that people had said to him over the course of his life was just further proof of how they disliked him, looked down on his, or barely tolerated him. Something, he would look back on those downward spirals and be baffled, and could see the way he’d twisted and misinterpreted actions and words after the fact. That never helped him much during these descents into madness, though. He found the best course of action was to not allow himself to think so much. If he was moving, doing something, he couldn’t be sucked in like that. That, however, was not an option here. Instead, he was forced to linger, and all he could think about was past failures and how they had no doubt contributed to his being here and dragging Rex down with him. 

He remembered fumbling an Ataru leap and slamming hard into the ground, winding himself to a chorus of stifled giggles as the other Padawans in his class delighted in his failure and failed to so much as offer a hand up. No doubt that same clumsiness and inability to control the movements of his own body had been what allowed that blaster bold to strike his leg and lead to the deaths of his men who were counting on him disabling bombs to let them through.

He remembered staring at the jumble of aurebesh presented to him for his Foundational Strategies class and blinking away the heat behind his eyes. He had stayed up hours every night having the computer read to him and desperately following along, trying to match the words on his pad to the words he was hearing out loud. He’d failed every test in the class, and barely scraped by with the take home assignments. His deficiency with reading had been discovered at almost the end of the course, and Obi-Wan had gone to the teacher for permission for Anakin to redo everything with special accommodations. It had been granted for the take home assignments, and he’d been allowed to dictate them instead of write, but the instructor had not allowed him to retake the tests. He’d called it a ‘valuable lesson on knowing when to ask for help.’ Obi-Wan had been fuming, but was also a brand new Knight who didn’t know how to advocate for a Padawan. He hadn’t wanted to push, especially when he still wasn’t entirely certain the council wouldn’t revoke his placement as Anakin’s master. Anakin had, however, learned some new words that day by eavesdropping on his master talking to Knight Vos later that night. But curse words would not make up for the important material he had missed in that first class and that had affected his performance in his following strategy classes, as well. No doubt a general that hadn’t been a slave, who had been taught how to read and comprehend from an early age, who would have been able to understand and ask questions during those classes would have devised a strategy better than throwing themselves at bombs and then running away. No doubt they would never have gotten into that position in the first place. They would never have gotten their men blown to bits.

He remembered the desert. Cold and dark. He remembered his mothers blood cooling on his skin. He remembered being too late. Not enough. Never enough. He remembered the nights and nights of dreams and warnings that he’d ignored. He remembered the years that had passed where he could have done something. A failure in every way. As a son first, and then as a Jedi in how he’d responded. And he’d been failing as a Jedi every since for his complete and utter lack of remorse for that night. Was it any wonder his men were dead? He deserved it, perhaps, to be trapped in this cell, pacing, like the wild animal he was. Like the failure and the monster he was. But Rex didn’t. He had to get Rex out. 

Anakin sprang to his feet. His momentum carried him forward and he paced back and forth across the small cell. He missed the feeling of his cloak swishing around his ankles. What he could feel, though, was the swinging of the empty sleeve where his mechno-arm should be. He bared his teeth at the reminder of the additional insult his captor he meted out upon him. Just another reminder of another one of his failures. His flesh fingers flared, and he could almost feel the phantom fingers of his right hand doing the same thing. 

He stalked to the door of their cell and examined the seam. He stood so close he could see his breath fogging up the metal. Then he looked at the hinges. Shockingly, nothing about them had changed since the last time he had thoroughly inspected them. He strode over to the vent and stood underneath it. However, unless it grew or they shrunk, they would not be getting out that way. 

Why was this happening? Who was this being that had looked at Anakin and Rex and decided that their freedom was his to take? What right did he have to it? Anakin could feel his rage sparking about inside him. It felt like an itch at his fingertips. Saliva in his mouth. His marrow was made of fire and stars. His eyes burned with his fury. He did not try to push it down. It was all he had to work with here. They had taken the Force and his arm. He would use the tools available to him, and damn anybody who condemned him for it.

With a snarl, he slammed the flat of his palm against the metal wall. Immediately, his hand seemed consumed by static as the hit reverberated throughout his body. Rex jolted out of his sleep and then gasped as he’d jerked his still healing injury. 

Anakin grimaced and felt his rage slip out of him, like it was draining out through the bottoms of his feet. Guilt settled like a shawl upon his shoulders. His anger always hurt someone. He was tired of it, but he also knew that it controlled him far more than he controlled it. Truly, trapped with Rex as he was, it was really only a matter of time until he hurt him. It was always going to be unintentional, but it was still inevitable. 

“Sorry.” He muttered, not able to look at Rex.

“Good morning to you, too, Sir.” Rex grimaced and rolled his shoulder delicately. 

“I was trying to figure out a way out.”

“So we’ve now eliminated punching our way out, I assume.” 

Anakin huffed a soft laugh. 

“Well, slapping, at least. My hand’s still vibrating.”

“Good call, Sir.”

“There’s no way we’re getting out of here unless it’s through an open door. We need to make our move when the droids come to deliver our meals.”

“I agree with you, Sir.”

Anakin sent Rex a look, eyebrow raised and mouth twisted.”

“...but?” He prodded.

“I think we need to wait until we’ve seen the guy in charge again. I don’t like not having a tally on the guy. We don’t know anything about his schedule. When he’ll be here, when he won’t.”

Anakin was already shaking his head.

“Rex, if we wait for him to come back, we’re going to get hurt again. Whatever happens next could prevent us from escaping entirely. You could get killed. The time to go is right now, while we’re relatively healed. There’s too much that could go wrong if we wait much longer.”

“There’s too much that could go wrong if we don’t know what we’re going into.”

“We know what we’re going into. Separatists. Maybe Sith. Droids. Force users. Some sadistic sleemo who will get what’s coming to him. When they feed us tomorrow, we need to make our move. I know the risks. I know that having more data would be helpful, but, Rex, we can’t risk it. We need to go. There’s a war happening without us. Ahsoka could be hurt somewhere. The 501st is in the hands of who knows which general. And every day we stay in here is another opportunity for us to be taken out of the picture entirely, and I can’t risk that. There are too many people relying on me. On us. We don’t get to die yet.”

Rex’s mouth was pressed into a thin line, and his eyes were serious. Anakin took the time to look him over. His arm was still in a makeshift sling, and while Anakin desperately wished that he could give him more time to heal, he’d take him straining the arm over being shot dead in front of him. He didn’t want to watch another person he loves die in front of him. He would do everything in his power to prevent it. 

“Alright, sir. You know I’ve always got your back.”

Anakin couldn’t stop the relieved smile from breaking across his face. 

“Thanks, Rex. Truly. Besides, don’t you know? I’m the Chosen One. I can’t die here. The Force isn’t done with me yet.”

***

They had to wait almost a full day for their next meal to be delivered. They rested as much as possible, waited tensely for their interrogator to possibly show up, and drank water out of, unfortunately, the toilet, as they had not been provided with a sink and they didn’t need the additional variable of being dehydrated. They were already malnourished, cut off from the Force, and had two whole good arms between them. No need to add another handicap. 

Anakin felt like he was vibrating. He was ready to get out of there. Now that their escape loomed near, the walls seemed to be closing in even tighter. He couldn’t stand the trapped feeling and he was desperate to get out. 

He would contact Ahsoka right away. He needed to know that she was safe. That she hadn’t been another casualty of his poor ability to lead. He needed to hear her voice and, once he got these Force damned suppressors off of him, feel her Force signature surround him. And then he’d eat his body weight in whatever food was closest and looked most appealing. 

When the door to their cell opened to allow entrance to a basic droid, they made their move. Rex lunged forward and hooked his good arm around its neck, holding it still. Anakin came in with a shiv made from the seam of the vent in the wall, which he’d managed to pry off, only slicing the tips of his fingers once in the process, which he considered a win. He dug the sharpened end into the wires at the base of its neck and cut as many as he could in one powerful swipe. The droid’s eyes immediately dimmed, and the tray of food fell from its slackened hands. Anakin lunged forward and caught it awkwardly with the hand still clenched around his makeshift weapon, so it wouldn’t clang loudly on the floor. At the same time. Rex lowered the now non-operational droid to the floor as quietly as he could. 

Anakin lowered the tray to the floor and placed it down. Then, he looked at the heavy looking metal tray and cocked his head to the side. That might do…

He looked over to Rex and found him looking back, eyes grim and jaw set. He was as eager to get out of here as Anakin was. Anakin held the makeshift knife out to Rex, who frowned but accepted it. Anakin cleared the food off the tray before picking it up and giving it a swing. It had some good heft to it. 

“Seriously, General?” Rex hissed. “A tray?”

“Now we both have weapons.”

“ I have a weapon. You have… that.”

“Anything can be a weapon.”

“Some things easier than others. We should trade.”

“No. Your dominant arm still works. Mine doesn’t. You should have the precision weapon.”

“Sir--”

“No more time to argue. Move out.”

The two set off down the hall, staying close to the sides, peeking around corners, ready to press themselves back against the metal if any shots came their way.

“Which way are we going?”

“I-I’m not sure. Normally, I can just kind of… tell. I thought maybe I was just good at figuring out layouts, but I think now that maybe it was a Force thing. Still we should go up if we can, right? Easiest place for a shuttle to take off from is higher ground.”

“Unless we’re on a ship, sir. Then we should be going down.”

“I don’t think we’re on a ship. There’s no movement. No sounds like a ship would make.”

They continued to move onwards, putting as much distance between their old cell and themselves as they could. It made sense that any place that would hold prisoners would be far away from any means of escape, so the further they were from it, the closer they were to getting out of there. 

Once, they almost ran into two droids patrolling, but they ducked out of the way and then waited for a minute or two even after the sounds of their steps had disappeared. Other than that, the facility was fairly empty.

“I think this guy is operating alone. He’d have more personnel otherwise.” Rex muttered as quietly as he could.

“Good.” Anakin responded, sounding pleased even to his own ears. “No one to miss him when I kill him.”

Rex grunted in approval. 

They continued like that for some time, and Anakin fell into an almost meditative state. Turn, turn, duck and hide behind some convenient boxes, walk down a long hallway, turn, turn-- there. Blaster doors that could only lead to some kind of hangar. Anakin jerked his head at Rex, and Rex nodded sharply. They advanced slowly, quietly as they could, which was not difficult, lacking both armor and shoes. 

The door had a code on it, and Anakin handed Rex his tray and then fumbled to slice through the security code with only one hand. It took a while, but the door swished open. He accepted the tray back from Rex, although Rex’s expression clearly said he thought he looked ridiculous. 

Rex and Anakin edged through the open doors slowly and then took cover behind some cargo boxes. Ahead of them were several ships they could commandeer. Anakin scanned them, trying to figure out which one would be best to take. The fastest or the best armed one? Was there one somewhere in the middle? Or would that one be the worst option? The fast one, he decided. Fast ships, controlled by a skilled pilot, could be their own type of weapon. He turned to tell Rex which one they were headed to when the hair rose on the back of his neck.

He yanked Rex down just in time to avoid the plasma bolt that would have taken his head off at the shoulders. Suddenly, they were under heavy fire. Droid approached them from behind. Anakin turned and slammed the tray into the side of one's head. The brown metal of its face crumpled in on itself and its body dropped to the floor. Rex was trying to get at the wires of another one with his knife, but was having difficulty with only one arm. Anakin dropped to a knee to avoid an oncoming blaster bolt to the shoulder. He swiped at the leg joints to the droid Rex was grappling with while he was down there. Rex finally managed to sever its wires when it faltered. 

They both pressed their backs to the cargo boxes and held their feeble weapons to their chests. Rex turned to Anakin with wide eyes. Anakin chewed on his lip, frustrated with the knowledge that if he had his lightsaber, he could handle all these droids while barely breaking a sweat. 

“Why are they all here? ” Anakin hissed. 

“They’re here, General Skywalker, because this is where I told them to be.”

Anakin closed his eyes as if pained, and Rex’s hand flexed around his makeshift knife at the voice of their previously absent captor.

“You’re very predictable, you know. I looked you up. Talented, but impatient. Powerful, but utterly incapable of planning or long term strategizing. You’re a disappointment, General Skywalker.” 

“Give my back my lightsaber and we’ll see who ends up disappointed.” Anakin snapped over the top of their cover. 

Their captor ignored him, continuing on as if he had never spoken.

“I knew it was a matter of time until you came here. I wanted to see how long you would take. I thought you’d be here sooner. I didn’t expect you to be so feeble as to be held back by simple things like blaster wounds for so long. It would appear I overestimated you. I do so hate being wrong.”

“Kriff you!” Anakin snapped back, eyes scanning everywhere they could, trying to find the best route out. He needed to get Rex out of here. Maybe if he could distract their captor for long enough, Rex could sneak away and get to a ship. He could get word to Ahsoka and Obi-Wan and the Council.

One glance at Rex, however, showed that he already knew exactly what Anakin was thinking and that he had no intention of leaving him behind. Damn. And Anakin couldn’t even lie to him that he’d be right behind him. Rex would see through that in a heartbeat. His captain knew him too well. 

“You might as well come out. There’s nowhere for you to go. My point has been made. I know your every move. I have studied you for years, Skywalker, and there is nothing you can do that will surprise me. You cannot trick me. Force knows you cannot outsmart me. You might as well surrender. Although, I imagine you won’t.”

Anakin clenched his jaw. Studied him for years. Who the kriff was this guy? Anakin hated how well he seemed to know him.

“Come out, and I will show you mercy.”

“I don’t want your mercy. I want you to get out of my way. Do that, and maybe I’ll show you mercy.”

Immediately a new barrage of blaster fire reigned down on their position. They could feel the metal heating behind their backs. Sweat dripped down their faces. Anakin’s curls stuck to his neck and forehead, and Rex’s hair seemed to almost become transparent around his temples. 

All at once, the firing stopped again. 

“Come out, General Skywalker. Face your fate like a man.”

“Sexist!” Anakin taunted. “What do you want with me, anyway? Are you working for Dooku?”

“Dooku is a fool and he has sealed his own fate. My concern with you is nothing to do with the Separatist cause.”

“Oh, look, we both dislike Dooku. We should sit down. Have some caff. Talk about it some.” Anakin was only half aware of what he was saying. There had to be a way out of this. One glance at Rex told him he was having no more luck thinking of one that he was.

“Joking in the face of danger. Very original, Skywalker. Truly, you are unique in the universe.”

“You aren’t dangerous. You’re just one more deranged stalker. I’ve had plenty since the start of the war. They send me the weirdest things in the mail. You’re just more determined than most.”

“I grow tired of this. Come. Face me. If you win, I shall set you and your loyal dog free.”

Anakin stilled. He looked over at Rex. This was an opportunity. He may be down and arm and cut off from the Force, but he was still a Jedi. He was trained in combat and he was a good fighter. He could do this. This guy may claim to know him, but he would underestimate him nonetheless. People always did.

“This is clearly a trap, sir.”

“Well, yeah. Time to spring it.”

“Sir, no. That’s not actually a valid approach to traps.”

“It’s never failed me before.”

“Yes it has. It’s just never killed you before.”

“I learned this from the best, Rex.”

“You and Kenobi both just have a deathwish, sir.” 

“What other option is there, Rex?”

Rex huffed in frustration and ground his teeth. 

“Exactly. I have to do this.”

“I don’t like this, sir.”

“I’m not asking you to like this. I’m asking you to trust me.” Anakin looked at Rex searchingly. He needed his faith in this. He wasn’t sure how he would react if he didn’t have it. Rex nodded brusquely. 

“You don’t need to ask, sir. You always have it.”

Anakin heaved a sigh of relief. Strength seemed to fill him at Rex’s word and his steely resolve. He had Rex’s faith. How could he fail?

Anakin stepped out to face his opponent. 

“You gonna give my arm back first?”

“No.”

“Didn’t think so.”

They fell at eachother like an avalanche. Anakin’s shoulder slammed into his abdomen. He spun and brought his elbow down at Anakin’s back. Anakin tucked and rolled, springing back up and into a kick. His opponent blocked with a forearm. Back and forth they went. Anakin, tray still clutched in his hand, swung it hard at his head. he ducked and it clipped him on the cheekbone. He retaliated with a powerful blow to Anakin’s solar plexus. 

Anakin didn’t think. He just moved. The whole battle was like a dance. Then, he went to block with an arm that wasn’t there and took a powerful blow to the face. His vision spun and he staggered. He spun out of the way of the next hit, but, dizzy, wavered instead of planting his feet. His opponent's next swing caught him expertly in his still healing side. Anakin gasped and faltered. The opponent brought him to the ground. Anakin could practically feel Rex’s distress. No. He couldn’t fail him. He refused. With a roar, Anakin bucked him off and slammed the tray across the side of his face with all the force he could muster. His captor leaned sideways and Anakin seized his opportunity to buck him off and bring the tray against his back over and over. This was it. They were going to make it. 

The tray was yanked from his hands by an invisible force and went skittering off into the distance. His eyes followed it instinctively, trying to understand what had happened. A fist struck him in the temple, sending him to the ground blinking stars out of his eyes. His opponent climbed on top of him, pinning his hand to the ground with a knee. Anakin felt like his bones were being flattened and he gasped as knees squeezed around his ribcage and a hand pressed against his throat. 

His eyes were dragged back to his captor’s. For the first time, he seemed something other than completely composed. He looked furious. There was a madness to his eyes that made Anakin’s blood run cold. He bucked helplessly, ignoring the extra pressure that put on his trapped hand, and felt the hand tighten around his throat for his effort. 

“You are not better than me, Skywalker. This is where you belong. Beneath me. Do you understand? You are a lesser being. You deserve nothing. You are nothing. An insect. A slave. All those who place value upon you are mistaken.”

Anakin spat, and his tormentor jerked back as it made contact with his cheek.

“I’m a person and my name is Anakin.”

“Hold him down. And the other one.”

Immediately, Anakin felt cold, metal hands pressing against his shoulders. More held him at the legs. Judging by the shouts of protest, Rex was in a similar position. His captor rose off of him and stalked away with a purpose. Anakin twisted to look at where he was going, but he soon disappeared out of sight. He turned to look at Rex instead. Rex was on his knees, held down by the shoulders. There was clearly a great deal of pressure being placed on his broken collar bone, as he was white with pain. Anakin made eye contact with him and held it. He wanted to send all the apology he could with eyes. For not listening. For losing. For being his usual, reckless self. Rex smiled grimly, and jerked his head in acknowledgement. 

“Hold his head.”

Anakin jerked back to their captor, who had reappeared, clutching a vial.

Droid hands came down on either side of his face, and held him steady despite his jerking. 

“Do you recognize this, Skywalker?” He asked, holding out the vial for inspection. It was clear glass, unlabeled. Inside was a liquid the color of citrine. Anakin tried to shake his head, but it was held too tightly. 

“No.” He spat.

“Hmm. I thought you might have encountered them before. I know you were once owned by Gardulla the Hutt.”

Anakin sucked in a breath. How is the stars did he know that? Anakin wasn’t even entirely sure the Jedi knew that. The depth of danger seemed to finally dawn on Anakin. This man knew him. This man had traversed his past. Anakin felt hot and shocky. His fingers clenched and unclenched, trying to scratch a groove into the cold, metal floor.

“This is used often in places like that. Maybe you’ll know it by it’s commonly used name. I believe they call it ‘Whore’s Tears.”

Immediately, Anakin trashed. He felt the unforgiving joints of the droids digging into his temples as he did so, but he didn’t care. He needed to get away. The droids held fast, and he hadn’t managed to move even an inch.

“Ah, I see you’re familiar. Your friend isn’t, though.” His smile was cold and cruel and he turned to Rex, who was hiding his fear and uncertainty admirably.

“You see, Captain, this is often found in pleasure houses. Sometimes, the beings there attempt to-- how shall I say? Rise above their station. They get the foolish idea that they are, as the general said, people. Sometimes, such ideas can be dissuaded by simply killing one or two of the most outspoken. But that’s bad for business. Instead, they use this. It leaves no scars. The whores are just as pretty after as they were before, which is essential in their line of work. But suddenly, they find that acting out is… untenable. I think it’s an elegant solution to General Skywalker’s problems. It should remind him of his place. Hold his eyes open.”

“Get off me! Kriff you! Get the kriff off me!”

Anakin writhed and bucked, but the droids came nonetheless. Their inelegant hands pried his eyelids open, and even with the danger of gouging his own eyes out he continued to buck. 

“Anakin!” Rex cried out, dismay in his voice.

A force held him down, and Anakin quickly realized it was the Force. Their captor didn’t need the droids to control him. He merely wanted to humiliate him. Anakin snarled and managed to thrash even with all the various forms of restraint. 

Their captor unscrewed the lid of the vial, revealing a dropper. It came nearer and nearer and Anakin cursed and snarled and fought. It was, all of it, useless. He saw as the dropper came closer and closer until it hovered over his eyes. He saw the first drop fall. Immediately, pain ripped through him. His eye felt like it was on fire. There was a pickaxe in his brain. His vision in that eye grew cloudy and then went out. Fire and ice battled inside his skull. He could hear his screams echoing off the walls of the hangar. He could hear Rex bellowing and probably rebreaking his collarbone. He saw the dropper hover over his other eye, blurred by tears.

And then, he didn’t see anything at all.

Chapter Text

Obi-Wan woke with his eyes burning. That’s what he got for staying up late reading pad after pad. He and Ahsoka had taken yet another side trip after a mission in an attempt to uncover information about Anakin’s disappearance, and he had spent almost the entire night going over every bit of information that they’d found, even if it had seemed inconsequential. He was hoping that some subtle pattern would appear and everything would click. Nothing had. This would be their third mission of this sort, and every single one had tuned up just as much information, which was to say, none at all. 

Obi-Wan pushed himself upright and felt a myriad of half healed injuries groan in protest. Time was, Jedi who received injuries would stay with the healers or at least at the Temple until they were fully healed. Often, this included a stay in a bacta tank. He was fairly certain his and Anakin’s quarters had maintained a constant, underlying smell of bacta the entire duration of his padawanship, given how often the both of them found themselves in there. Now, though, as supply lines were blocked and more and more injuries were being accrued, a full soak in a bacta tank was saved for only the most dire of circumstances. Now, Jedi could mostly expect some heavy duty bacta patches and a few days rest before they were back out in the field. All of them were developing scars that they would have never otherwise had. 

Good, he thought, it is fitting that the outside reflected the horrors that we have encountered. In fact, he would have found it quite unsettling to have no scars to show for the war that they raged. Still, he could do without the aches. He felt like he was far beyond his years. There was only so long a person could function at such a high level of exertion, and he felt it all the more with Anakin’s absence. 

He squeezed his eyes shut tightly at the thought of his missing padawan, and was surprised to find them spiky with moisture, like he had been crying in his sleep. He brought his ring fingers to the inner corners of his eyes, and dragged the nails lightly along his lash line to the outer corners. He drew his fingers away and stared at the moisture that had collected on the surface of his nails and gathered in his nail beds. 

How peculiar. Normally, when he stayed up late reading, he woke the next day with dry eyes. With everything changing, he had hoped that his body would be reliable. Tears of all things. What was it that Anakin would always say? Crying is a waste of water. 

But then, the whole universe had been flipped on its head. And it wasn’t just Anakin’s (terrifying, gut wrenching, devastating) troubling disappearance that made him feel that way. Jedi were no longer peace keepers, they were generals. Elections had ceased. The Sith had returned. Who was he to say what was normal or not. His lineage had always been one of warriors, so he was at least a little more acclimated than most, but the sheer scale of it all was almost  overwhelming. 

After the first battle of Geonosis, several Jedi had had to stay behind. Their Star Destroyers had not been fully equipped with medical facilities yet, and many Jedi were too injured to travel back to Coruscant unaided by medical droids and proper medications. Anakin had been one such Jedi, and so Obi-Wan had stayed behind, too. He and all other able bodied Jedi who had remained were dealt the task of cleaning up. Lightsabers of the fallen could not be left where enemies could find and examine them. Bodies needed to be gathered for a respectful burial. It was horrifying work. 

Scavengers, usually fighting to scraps on a desert planted like Geonosis, had fallen upon the corpses of his comrades like a vicious plague. Many were missing their eyes. Wounds had been widened. Limbs had been torn from torsos, and so, in many cases, he and the others were forced to hunt down parts of their brothers in arms, trying to make them as whole as possible before sending them home. The heat caused decomposition to speed up, and they often had to be careful moving bodies, as they would occasionally crumble in their hands. All of this was on top of the smell of rot and unwashed bodies, as they had no water with which to bathe. 

Obi-Wan had taken to wetting a rag with alcohol and scrubbing his hands before visiting Anakin, hoping to keep as much of the smell away from him as possible. It turns out he needn’t have bothered. 

When Anakin had finally been given leave to walk from the medbay to a shuttle to take the both of them home, Obi-Wan had fretted that the smell that lingered in the sand would unsettle his stomach that was already tender from the anesthesia that was used during the surgery to clear out a minor infection that had started in his arm. 

Anakin had noticed his hovering and his handwriting, and Obi-Wan had admitted to his concern. Anakin, loose tongued due to pain medication, had told him that he’d hardly even noticed the smell. That, this is how the slave quarters I grew up in always smelled, Master. Sometimes, during a sandstorm, people would die of hunger or dehydration, but the storm would still be going, sometimes for days, so they’d just stay there in their cots until it was over. That smell never came out of the cots. I was born in one of those cots. Pretty sure that smell never came out, either. And then Anakin, clearly much more of a lightweight than Obi-Wan had given him credit for had giggled, like he’d just told a funny joke. 

Obi-Wan, struck with horror, had decided then and there not to question Anakin on why his distress signal had been rerouted from Naboo to Tatooine. Whatever had brought his padawan back to the nightmare planet that was his homeworld was no doubt not some trifling thing like a pod race. It was serious, and Obi-Wan would respect his privacy in the matter. Some things shouldn’t be lived more than once. 

*****

When Obi-Wan made his way to the kitchen, Ahsoka was already there, draining what looked to be her second cup of caff. 

“You know that stunts your growth,” he said tiredly.

“Is that what happened to you? Besides, Togruta get pretty tall. I think I’ll be okay.”

“I am not short. It is just that the beings around me are exceptionally tall. It’s one of the Force’s little jokes.”

“It’s a good one.” Ahsoka offers, before taking a sip of her caff, wrinkling her nose at the heat, and then immediately taking another sip.

It was a move that was so Anakin that Obi-Wan briefly felt like his ribcage had shrunk.

“Was there anything good in the intel we gathered? That bounty hunter we spoke to a few weeks ago seemed certain that there would be information on facilities capable of holding Jedi there.”

“Nothing, I’m afraid. Although I wouldn’t say no to a new set of eyes. My own grow rather weary after more than 4 straight hours of reading.”

“That’s the old age, Master. My young eyes won’t miss anything.”

“You’re very insolent in the mornings, young one.”

“I learned from the best.”

“Yes, Anakin is rather free with his opinions, no matter how wrong they are.”

“I actually meant you, Master Kenobi.”

“Well… I suppose it is the job of the grandmaster to instill bad habits in the padawans of their padawans. But it hardly seems fair to have it directed back at me.”

Ahsoka shrugged and gulped down the rest of her caff. 

“How long are we going to be on Coruscant, Master Kenobi?”

“It will depend on the Council. We will deliver our report on our successful negotiations for the Trillian hyperspace lane, and then they will assign us something else or give us a few days to rest and gather ourselves.”

“I want to get back out there. If they do give us some time off, maybe we could take a shuttle and look for more signs of Anakin? Somewhere we’re not likely going to be able to go on a mission.”

“Perhaps, young one.” In his head, Obi-Wan was already thinking of a number of potential places they could go to attempt to track down Anakin’s whereabouts. A few days free to search might be just what they need. 

**** 

Even as a member, Obi-Wan could admit that debriefing in front of the council was not on his list of favorite things to do. And that was while they were giving a report on an entirely successful mission, with no hiccups and no casualties. Ever since Anakin had once described the similarities between a council debrief and a slave auction, ( Well, mostly that first time, but still, Master!) Obi-Wan couldn’t help but feel just a little bit naked in front of them. 

“Done well together on this mission, you and Padawan Tano have. A new mission we have for you, Master Kenobi.”

Obi-Wan kept his shoulders from sinking, but it was a near thing. Ahsoka was not so effective in keeping her disappointment and frustration hidden, and he prodded her gently through their rapidly forming bond. 

“Of course. Padawan Tano and I will read whatever mission outline is provided and prepare at once.”

Something passed through the council, a ripple or a shadow, and Obi-Wan immediately felt uneasy. Mace sighed and laced his fingers together in front of his mouth. 

“Master Kenobi, while we have assigned you this task, Padawan Tano will not be going with you,” he said.

A jolt went through Obi-Wan, and he felt Ahsoka stiffen at his side.

“Why? Is she behind in her classes? What reason has she for staying?”

“This Council has determined that it is no longer in either of your best interests to be paired together.”

“No longer in our-- What are you on about? I have had a hand in Ahsoka’s training since the beginning of her Padawanship. Her master would no doubt want me to train her in his absence. Have I harmed her in some way? Neglected an injury?” A thought occurred to him that made him pause. “Has she requested this reassignment?”

“No, I haven’t, Master Kenobi. I wouldn’t do something like that without talking to you first.” 

Ahsoka’s voice was firm, but he could hear the uncertainty underneath. He imagined himself in her shoes, losing a master and then being removed from the next. While he was certain Ahsoka didn’t suffer from the myriad of self confidence issues that had plagued him at her age, no doubt any Padawan would be second guessing themselves, wondering if they were being blamed for their situation.

“On several occasions, now, you and Padawan Tano have been delayed returning from missions. It is our understanding that you have made detours to speak with contacts that might have information on Knight Skywalker or even to investigate possible locations where you believe he might be held.”

“I have taken advantage of strategic locations in an attempt to recover a general that has been central to the war effort while wasting as little extra resources as possible.” Obi-Wan explained stiffly.

“You have been allowing your attachment to your former padawan to sway you from missions and distract you from the war. It has been determined that neither of you will be able to come to terms with what has happened so long as you are continuing to encourage each other in your delusion that this has a happy ending.” Mace’s voice is flat and stern, but not accusing. It is clear that he believes what he says. 

“Padawan Tano will be reassigned to Master Plo Koon.”

“You cannot just reassign a padawan. There are protocols that must be followed. A Master-Padawn pair cannot be separated on a whim!” Obi-Wan insists. He feels like the wind has been snatched from his lungs. Since Anakin had vanished, he has felt like he was clawing at the ground on his way off a cliff, and his momentum was not slowing. This felt like a weight on his legs dragging him down faster. 

“While this is true, Master Kenobi, you and Padawan Tano are not a true Master-Padawan pair. The both of you agreed that this was temporary until Knight Skywalker was recovered. As such, there are no protocols to follow. Just a standard reassignment.”

The room was silent. All eyes were on Obi-Wan, waiting for the Negotiator’s silver tongue to be turned upon the Council.

“Her master would want her with me.”

“She cannot be your Padawan so long as she is Skywalker’s. As such, it is the Council who decides where she goes when her master cannot. You could make a claim on her as your Padawan here and now, if you wanted to. But to do so, you would have to acknowledge the likelihood of Skywalker not being able to complete her training. I could make the offer. Keep Padawan Tano and give up your ceaseless search for Skywalker. Or continue to chase a ghost and give up Padawan Tano.”

Obi-Wan felt like he was transported to over a decade ago. He stood in this same room as his own master made the same choice. His current Padawan, here and present and depending on him. Or the possibility of Anakin. He had resented his master in that moment, when it became clear what his choice would be. And now here he stood, knowing he would make the same one.

“I could offer that choice. But I will not. We are not doing this to be cruel, Obi-Wan. We do not want to see the Order lose either of you. You and Padawan Tano and those like you are the future of the Order. I do not wish to see either of you torn apart by this decision, and so I take it out of your hands. Padawan Tano’s training will be taken over by Master Plo Koon under the same temporary status that it was under you. Should Skywalker return, he will not find himself missing a padawan. Know, in time, that this was a decision we made out of kindness, and not an attempt to sabotage you.”

Obi-Wan stood numbly, mind full of static, until Ahsoka’s hand tentatively curled above his elbow and guided him out of the room. 

They stood for a moment outside the Council chamber doors in silence, watching dust motes dance in the light of the rapidly lowering sun, and listening to the hum of life happening in the hallways near them.

“Master Obi-Wan, are you okay?”

Obi-Wan heaved in a deep sigh and drew a hand across his face, feeling the way it pulled at wrinkles that hadn’t been there just a few years earlier. If he were to look in a mirror, he knew he would be acutely aware of the silver starting to creep into his hair at his temples, and in his beard around his mouth. 

“I am sorry, young one. I had no idea they were considering such an action.”

Ahsoka smiled bravely. 

“It’s okay, Master. Master Plo has always been good to me. And I like the Wolffe Pack. He’s a good strategist and an excellent pilot. I have a lot to learn from him.”

“And I, a lot from you, it would seem. You will truly be the best of us, Ahsoka. I am glad to have had a part in training you, no matter how small.”

“Please, Master. Don’t talk like your part in my life is over. I’m hard to get rid of.”

“And I have no desire to be rid of you, so we will do quite nicely, I am sure.” Obi-Wan tried to offer his most reassuring smile, but more and more often a smile had felt foreign on his face. They lapsed into silence.

“What choice would you have made? If they’d actually made the offer?”

Obi-Wan closed his eyes. The expression of pain he no doubt wore felt far more familiar than the smile he had attempted. 

“Ahsoka, I-” What did one say to something like that? How did he explain himself without breaking a piece of this bright, young girl by letting her know that he knew with full certainty what his choice would have been?

“You’d have chosen him, right?”

“I am sorry, Ahsoka. You deserve better.”

“Don’t be sorry. It was the right choice. It’s the one I wanted you to make. He’s out there. No one should force our hands into giving up on him.”

“He would hate me for making that choice.”

“Yes, well, he’s always been terrible at looking after his own self interest, so his opinion doesn’t mean much here.”

Obi-Wan’s smile in response to that felt much more natural.

“I wonder, sometimes, who we have become- who we will yet become- when these are the choices we’re faced with. Do I give up on a person who means more to me than I can voice so I can keep bringing a child into war with me? How will we ever return to what we were? If the people we were can ask such questions of themselves, is who we were worth saving? Either way, we have undoubtedly failed you, Ahsoka. This is not the world you were meant to grow up in.”

“I would be an entirely different person without the war, Master Kenobi. I never would have existed. This is the only me I’m capable of being. Please don’t feel bad for the only version of me that exists, Master Obi-Wan.”

Chapter Text

Anakin was vaguely aware of being carried roughly from one place to another. He felt the sharp pinch of droid joints under his arms. His toes skimmed across the floor, dragging across every seam in the floor, the minute jolts causing pain of a magnitude he hoped never to feel again to erupt across his face. The air brushing his cheeks seemed to be made of jagged spikes that tore at the delicate, tear stained skin of his under eyes. 

He came fully aware as he was pushed harshly into a cell. His head jolted as his shoulder struck the floor, and he was consumed by pain, burning alive even as he felt the cold air of the unforgiving cell. He curled in on himself and listened as metal feet went clanking away, fading into the distance. 

The pain centered around the rim of his eyes, but seemed to travel down his nose, across his lips. His teeth ached and his jaw felt like it was sinking in on himself. He felt like if he brought his fingers to his face and pressed just a little, his skin would crumble like sand and he would fade away. He hurt so much that that was starting to sound like a good thing.

He turned his face away from his chest ever so slightly and heaved stomach acid onto the floor. He pressed his face back into the cool metal of the floor and let it absorb some of the fire. 

He had never been more aware of his body, even in the time after he lost his arm. He was deeply aware of every breath he took, the way it jostled his body ever so slightly. He felt the way his ribs expanded and the way his skin stretched to accommodate. He felt the way the air scraped upon his bottom teeth as he sucked it in through his open, panting mouth, and the way it dragged across his bottom lip on the way out. He panted as slowly as he could, thinking he might burn into ash if he were forced to breath through only his nose right now.

He had the vague thought that this was the closest he’d ever gotten to emptying his mind. All there was was darkness and the fight against pain. The one he was losing. 

“General? Sir?”

Anakin curled tighter in on himself, bringing his body to his head, rather than his head to his body. 

“Sir?”

A hand tugged at his shoulder, and tipped him onto his back. 

Anakin braced himself for the additional pain in his eyes from being turned to face the lights in the ceiling, but, of course, the light never came and neither did the pain. 

He sucked in a breath and it rattled around his chest like a fortune teller's bones. The Force’s child , they called him. So why had the Force been punishing him since the day he was born?

“General, can you hear me?”

Anakin tried to speak and only a rasp came out. He braced himself and cleared his throat. The pain he expected didn’t come. It still hurt, but it wasn’t the reignited inferno that he was expecting. He’d been anticipating that happening, but his heart still sank. As their captor knew, he was familiar with the drops and their effects. When he’d gotten to the Temple, after a particularly bad nightmare where they played a starring role, he’d looked them up and how they worked. The information had been restricted, but Anakin had been determined. 

“Sir?” Rex’s voice, for it had to be him, for all that Anakin couldn’t see him or sense him in the Force, was becoming rather urgent.

“I c’n h’r you.” Anakin managed to fumble out. 

“Are you okay? What was it that he did to you?”

“Hng.” Anakin, for all that he was fairly certain he had been drooling on the floor fairly recently, found that his mouth was incredibly dry.

“Wh’rs T’rs.” He forced out. 

The fingers of his hand clawed at the ground, and if his prosthetic hand had been available to him, he would be digging gouges in the metal of the cell floor. 

Anakin tried to push himself upright, but the inside of his head flipped around and he slumped back towards the floor. An arm caught him around the bicep, far gentler than the droids had been, and kept him from bruising his cheekbone. Together, they managed to guide him to one of the walls of their cell. 

Anakin let his head thump back against the wall and shuddered when, instead of pain, he felt a distinct nothingness from his eyes. Strange, how unaware one was of their own body and the way the various parts of it respond to being handled, how they jolted and vibrated and twitched, until such time as those sensations were gone, and you suddenly realized the importance or normalcy of something by its absence. 

“Was that poison? Will you be alright?”

Anakin let his head loll along the wall, with a languidness one usually only saw in drunks or those exhausted past the point of good sense. He rolled his head towards the direction of the voice. Rex. He’d asked a question. 

“Hmm. No.”

“...No, it wasn’t poison? Or no, you won’t be alright.”

“Yes.”

There was a pause. Anakin got the distinct feeling that Rex was fighting between his concern over his General’s condition and exasperation over his obtuse and completely unhelpful answer. Anakin huffed a hollow laugh and took pity on his captain. 

“Th’r called-.” His voice clicked in his throat and he cleared it.

“They’re called ‘Whore’s Tears’ in the Outer Rim. Not fatal.”

Rex stayed quiet, no doubt not particularly comforted by Anakin’s deadened voice. 

“They use them-- In the Outer Rim, they--.”

Anakin faltered. How did he even begin to describe to a clone grown in a facility and trained only for straightforward war about the thing that he had learned growing up in slave quarters and amongst pleasure dancers? He kept the dangers and the lessons of his childhood close to his chest. Even Obi-Wan knew only of the ones that had been impossible to hide, like his issues with water and his food insecurity. 

Anakin closed his eyes ( pointless a voice hissed at him from inside his mind) and exhaled slowly, as he’d been taught long before the Jedi had taught him to clear your mind, Anakin and mind your feelings, young Skywalker. He exhaled slowly as he had done back when cracking lips, burnt fingertips, and an empty, aching stomach had been his constant companions. When pain was not something that could be countered, only endured. 

The Grandmothers of the slave quarters had taught his mother and her mother before her and then him how to breathe through the pain. The Grandmothers were the ones who taught the children how to shoulder the pain and keep moving, so as to save their mothers the heartbreak of teaching their children the easiest ways to suffer. 

He called on that teaching now, and upon the inextinguishable strength of his people. He called on Lukka to keep his voice steady and on Leia to kindle her fires in his heart to ward off the cold stirrings of despair that he felt creeping upon him like fog. When even that didn’t feel like enough, he envisioned a sandstorm in his mind, blotting out his pain and his rage that was always simmering, waiting to boil over. The sandstorm added a layer of static over his thoughts. He had never returned to the desert in his mind like this, but he found it a source of unexpected strength. It reminded him of the type of strength he had had to unlearn, so that he could develop different, more Jedi types of strength. 

He inhaled and exhaled once more before starting again. 

“Where there is slavery, you will always find rebellion. And with every rebellion, every slight to their power, Depur will always forge new chains.”

“Depur?”

“The masters. In my mother tongue.”

“Oh.” 

Anakin could hear the questions lodged in Rex’s throat, but he powered on. If he could just tell this story like it was one of the Grandmothers telling it, like it wasn’t happening to him, then he could make it out the other side of this intact. 

“Depur’s first and strongest chain was and is fear. Then came the actual chains. Then collars and chips. But for every way one can be a slave, there are a hundred ways to be free. And so new chains are always being forged. Depur in clever and hates to lose. Power. Money. Reputation. It doesn’t matter. And some of the chains are harder to shake off than others.”

His hand drifts to the Force suppression cuff that’s secured around his upper arm. Then, it drifted to his left leg, where he’d once watched, numbed, as a scalped cut away a small, life changing piece of plastic and metal.  

“As I said, there are many ways to be a slave. On Tatooine, there were two main ways. Most places, probably. Manual labor and pleasure slaves. On Tatooine… On Tatooine, we called them dancers.”

He stopped again, swallowing, throat clicking. He titled his head back against the wall, turning his face, seeking out the cool, metal wall to press his still hot face against. 

“What does that have to do with this, sir?” Rex’s voice is grim. Unsurprising. What good could come at the end of a story like this?

“I was supposed to be one of them.”

“A slave?”

“A dancer.”

He shifted his head, pressing the other half of his face to the wall, so it could be cooled down, too.

“...I don’t understand, sir.”

“My mother and I were owned by Gardulla the Hutt. She prided herself on appearance. Ironic, for a Hutt. They’re as ugly on the outside as they are on the inside. She had to have the best of everything. That included her dancers. They really do dance, you know. It’s a way to show off the wares to potential clients. She wanted them trained early, so they would be the best. Every year, she would have all the mothers present any children over the age of three, and she’d choose the ones that she thought were going to grow up ‘pretty.’ I was one of them. While we were young and small enough that renting out our time would cost more to fix than she would make, we would learn the dances and help the current dancers with their makeup and help wipe them down between clients. We were all just waiting for Gardulla’s med droid to declare us big enough to handle the attention ourselves. Anyway, Gardulla lost my mother and I in a bet to Watto when I was still fairly small, and I never truly became a dancer.”

Now it’s Rex’s throat that clicks when he swallows, before asking hoarsely “Why are you telling me this?”

“To let you know where I’ve seen this before. It was a terrible life for the dancers. And the masters made sure that they knew the price of their freedom included the costs of any medical procedures they required, which occurred often, as Hutt space isn’t known for its gentle visitors. Even the termination of children that depur wanted gone , but that they probably would have chosen to keep if given the option were added to that cost.”

Anakin paused. He’d always considered himself fortunate to have the mother he’d had, but he was also fortunate that he’d been allowed to be born at all. So often, masters didn’t want their property out of commission. 

“Dancers were often given gifts by their clients. And promises, too. Their lives were worse in many ways, but they had more freedom than most and more means to seize it. They had hope. Depur abhors hope. Hope has them rushing to the forges to make new chains. When dancers run, when they’re caught, depur has to make sure it can never happen again. A feisty slave who ran away can bring in good credits from those who like a little fire. One who runs away twice is a liability. They couldn’t kill them as an example. That doesn’t work well on slaves. Freedom and death are the same word in the slave tongue. Besides, that would be a waste of good credits.  A new, better chain had to be invented. So it was. They found ‘Whore’s Tears.’ It wasn’t always called that. The scientific name just isn’t as catchy. With the Tears, there’s no effect on appearance. No pitted scarring, like with acid or anything like that. The dancers stayed pretty. They could keep working. And they could never risk running again.”

“What does it do , sir? What did it do to you ?”

“I looked them up, you know. At the Temple. I had to hack the terminal, but I found it. It gets into the body and travels along mucus membranes, destroying any nerves in its path. It has a relatively short life. It doesn’t spread far. It was made to help people. Stop pain during procedures and such. But then they realized it didn’t numb nerves. That the damage it caused was irreparable, so they scrapped it. 

“ Sir .”

“When you put it in someone's eyes, it lasts long enough to travel down the optic nerve. Decimating it. Blinding them. Permanently.”

There’s a sudden intake of breath and then a shift of fabric against metal. Anakin turned his head, and fixes his sightless eyes in the direction of his captain’s footsteps rapidly approaching him. There’s a slight thud that Anakin assumes is Rex’s knees hitting the ground as he kneels beside him. There’s a pause. Neither man speaking.

Then, “Sir? May I-- Can I…?”

Anakin hums a non-committal assent, and he heels Rex’s fingers skate across his cheeks. They’re clumsy, both from nerves and because hands that were forged to hold a blaster didn’t have much chance to practice being gentle. 

Anakin is pretty sure it’s his pointer finger traveling up towards his eyes, but the feeling vanishes once his fingers get to where the skin thins out at the base of his orbital bone. 

“This isn’t hurting you, is it? Your eyes look pretty red here.”

“No. You can keep doing your field health check. No need to move your hands just because I might be sensitive. Go ahead and finish up.”

“...I never took them off, sir.”

Anakin’s brow furrows.

“I can’t feel them anymore, though.”

The feeling of fingers reappears right at the tops of his cheekbones. 

“It’s back.” He states.

“I’m going to move them back up, sir.”

The fingers vanish again, and Anakin says as much.

“The, er, the Wh- Er, that stuff must have gotten to some of the nerves around your eyes, too, sir.” Rex stated as Anakin felt him withdraw.

Anakin huffed out a soulless laugh. What did a tiny are around his eyes matter when he couldn’t see so much as a shifting of the light?

“We can fix this when we get back, right, sir?”

“Doubt it.”

They lapse into silence. 

“I’ve never- I always had the Force. And that’s gone. And I was just getting used to relying on sight. And now that’s gone, too. I don’t-- I don’t know how I’m going to get us out of here. I’m useless like this.”

“You’re not useless, sir.”

“I’m terrible at most of the Jedi stuff. As terrible as it is, this war saved me. This is where I thrive. What good am I now? What purpose do I serve? How can I possibly complete my destiny as the Chosen One?”

“You can still help the war effort, sir.”

“How? I can’t see anything to help with strategy. I can’t build faster ships or hack into anything. I can’t train younglings. What’s the point of me?”

“I think the Jedi will be able to answer that better than me. But know this, you’re still my General. And just because people in the Outer Rim couldn’t fix this, people in the Core might be able to. You’ve got all those fancy friends that can help you out.”

Anakin snorted, a dry, bitter sound. 

“Besides, you said this was just another chain. From… Depoor? That there’s a lot of ways to break free from chains.”

Anakin’s laugh this time was much more honest. 

“What can I do to help, sir? Right now?”

“I… Can you tell me the way you see things? What color are Ahsoka’s montrals? Do they match Obi-Wan’s hair? They’re both orange, right? Just… tell me things.”

And so Rex began to talk, and Anakin let his voice flow over him. As the pain faded, the exhaustion from the day began to set in. The flight, fight, and injury all on less than well fed stomachs began to take their toll. 

Anakin’s breathing evened out as he slipped into sleep, but Rex continued to talk. Today had been a hard battle to lose. Tomorrow would be worse. His general was very clearly in shock. The world would crash down upon his shoulders tomorrow, and Rex would do his best to see him through it. But he had the feeling that nothing would be getting better for quite a long time.

Chapter Text

General Skywalker's shell shocked calm came to an inevitable end during what Rex assumed was dinner the following night. The whole day, he’d been ominously quiet. He’d sat curled in on himself against a wall of their round room, like a wild animal backed into a corner, only he seemed to be too numb to express any fear or franticness. 

Instead, he had stared sightlessly into some other world, oblivious to the one he actually existed in, seemingly unaware as his fingers worked to take in the details his eyes could not. They traced the seams and felt the material of the basic, black clothing they had been given to wear. They skimmed the metal floor, lingering very briefly over every minor imperfection they came across. At one point, Rex was fairly certain he saw him running the nail of his thumb over the slight serration of his front teeth, but he might have just been covering his mouth with his hand in a contemplative manner that he’d picked up from General Kenobi. But then, his general had never been a particularly contemplative person. Not to say that he wasn’t thoughtful or considerate or passionate in his defense of his men. He just never lingered too long over a decision, seeing time wasted in war time as the same thing as lives wasted.

When the inevitable eruption came, it was during the General’s first attempt to eat since the disastrous escape attempt. Previous times, he’d shaken his head numbly or told Rex he needed it more, as he had injuries one could actually heal from and his body needed fuel for that. It was the closest Rex had ever heard to sounding like the detached, Jedi ideal General Skywalker often described when he was ruefully talking about all the ways he fell short, and Rex despised it. That placid, unwavering calm seemed to leech every bit of his general out of himself, leaving behind a shell that wouldn’t have the fire and fierceness needed to get the 501st out of the scraps it always managed to get itself into. Rex couldn’t help but think that if General Skywalker had been the perfect Jedi he was striving to be less and less as the war waged on, he and many others in the 501st would be dead many times over.

When dinner that night (presumably, at least. Time was was a concept that was rapidly escaping Rex’s ability to grasp) arrived, Rex was determined to see his general eat. 

“Sir, please. You’re no good to anyone if you waste away here.”

“Fed or unread, I’m still blind. I’m not good to anyone either way.” His voice was eerie, stripped of emotion and dispassionate. 

“It would make me feel better, sir.” Rex couldn’t find it in himself to feel bad for playing on his general’s tendency to care more for the well-being of his men than of himself.

“Hmm.” General Skywalker hummed, but shifted towards Rex’s voice.

The General made his way over, fingers skimming over the ground like radar, hunched and small, so he wouldn't lose the connection to something solid. Rex shoved the tray into his path. The tray was metal. They hadn’t bothered to replace it with a less potentially dangerous material, for all that the general had made a good weapon of it previously. It felt like a taunt. Like they were saying ‘we don’t fear further attempts.’ 

General Skywalker’s hands found it, briefly jerking away from the unknown object, like he was afraid it would bite him, before tentatively reaching out for it again, feeling it, and determining what it was by the shape and feel. He brought the tray into his lap. The lack of his right hand meant he had to balance it solely on his legs, while his left hand fumbled around the tray, fingers accidentally sinking into soft piles of gruel while he sought out his utensil. 

Rex looked away, wanting to afford as much privacy as he could, knowing how much pressure his general felt to be perfect, untouchable. He was one of the youngest generals in the GAR, possibly the youngest. Rex knew how much he wished to be seen as mature and responsible, so people would trust in his decisions and allow him to act as he saw fit to protect his men. He was also often under heavy scrutiny by both the Jedi council and the holonet. He put on a very brave face. When Rex had first met him, he never would have guessed how much it distressed him. He’d even thought he rather enjoyed the attention of the holonet. It was only after discussions with Commander Tano-- where she talked about the way he shoulder sank with relief once out of view of reporters, of the red crescents dug into his palm after council meetings, of the way that the red faded in a day or two, but the act was so common that he had shiny, silvery scars etched into that left palm-- that he realized it was all a front. He didn’t need her aid in seeing it now. He could see it himself in the breath his general heaved before he got on a holocall with the council and how his eyes closed with dread when he heard a question called at him from behind, before he turned with a pasted on, self assured smirk. 

So Rex looked away, so his general wouldn't have to endure Rex watching him try to feed himself for the first time after being blinded. Perhaps that hadn’t been the best approach. Perhaps he should have offered his assistance. Because the next thing he knew, the metal tray struck the wall with a clang that seemed unnecessarily loud after the unsettled quiet of the last few days, and General Skywalker let out a bellow of rage. The general sprang to his feet, pacing like a caged animal. Clearly, he had been exploring their cell when Rex was asleep, because he knew the exact dimensions of their prison. He stalked forward and then would pivot right before he hit a wall, coming so close that if he were still wearing his Jedi robes, they would have struck the wall in his wake on the turn around. 

“Sit, please-” Rex started. 

“No!” Anakin snarled. He really was quite intimidating in his fury, and Rex briefly wished they faced more organic opponents, as they would be far more likely to flee in the face of that anger than droids. He felt tempted to flee himself, only he had nowhere to go. “Just a few days ago, I could- I could collapse a bridge with my mind! I could lead armies! I was a general! I could kriffing feed myself!”

He turned and lashed out at the unforgiving wall with his fist. Then, not satisfied with that, he threw himself at the wall. Over and over, Anakin Skywalker slammed his shoulder into the walls, fighting against himself as much as their imprisonment. As he did so, he shouted and raged and cursed in Huttese and Mando’a and a language Rex couldn’t place. Rex could do nothing but wince at particularly powerful slams and do his best to keep out of the way. Eventually, instead of rearing back for another blow, his general stayed pressed to the wall, check digging into the cool surface beneath it. He sank down, not losing contact with the wall. Rex was reasonably certain it was the only thing keeping him remotely upright. General Skywalker folded onto the ground, trembling, tears not actively falling, but silvery tracks on his cheeks lingering as evidence of their existence. He heaved a deep, shuddering breath that sounded like it was summoned from somewhere deep within him. His head shifted, and he pinned Rex with an astonishingly accurate gaze. The only thing that gave away the fact that his General couldn't actually see him was the way he seemed to look right through him. 

“Rex,” his voice was broken, wrecked, dragged violently through the shards of his shattered spirit, “I’m never gonna’ fly again.”

***

Darth Sidious had had better days. The Jedi council, in its most recent scheduled update, had reported that General Skywalker was missing in action. In general, the adventures that befell the boy were known to him even before the council, as he had had a hand in creating them. As a result, there was little need to worry. He never had total control over the outcomes, as he was not omnipotent, but they were designed to push him to his brink without actually killing him. And if he did die, it would be a pity to have wasted the time, but he would be saving time in knowing that he was not actually the worthy apprentice he had thought him to be. 

No, his missions were not designed to kill, but they were meant to tear and pick at his weakest points. A negotiation with the Hutts, to grind his face in his past, like a pup who had messed indoors, and to show him how little care the council had for the misfortune of his past. A mission to Mandalore, where the pacifist duchess who his precious Master Kenobi loved would disdain the violence woven into Skywalker’s nature and drive a further wedge between Master and Padawan. Missions that put his Padawan, Tano, in danger, to remind him of how fragile the lives of those he loved were and how easy they would be to snuff out and to show him how far he was willing to go to protect them. All interspersed with mundane missions, of course, to disguise the pattern. 

This mission, though, he had had no hand in and he found that his ire at the loss of control made it more irritating than usual to slip into the facade of ‘genial old man.’

He had not been on the planet when this mission was doled out to the Skywalker boy. He had been off assuaging the ego of Tyrannus, the fool. He had had grand plans to share about the future of the Confederacy. The plans, of course, were a waste of his time, as they would never come to pass. Tyrannus was suffering under a delusion that Sidious had fostered, that this war would come to an end with a treaty drawn up between the Republic and the Confederacy once the Jedi were eliminated. He believed that he and Sidious would act in public as two leaders, while in reality they would share power in a united galaxy. As if Sidious would suffer anything other than the complete and total subjugation of the galaxy to his whims. Still, keeping a pawn as powerful as the Count in line was a worthy use of his time. 

But is Tyrannus’s pathetic mewling had lost him a potential apprentice as powerful as the foretold Chosen One, he would feel his displeasure at their next meeting. He would not kill him, of course. With Skywalker potentially lost to him, Tyrannus would become all the more essential to his plans, carrying out some of the tasks he had intended Skywalker to complete once he was finally kneeling at his feet where he belonged. This would also give him time to sift through the many force sensitives and darksiders he had collected and trained before selecting Maul as the most suited to his purposes, before discovering the Chosen One had been found and gearing much of his energy and plans towards grooming him for a greater destiny. Still, Tyrannus would learn the value of his time, and the repercussions of wasting it. 

To lose Skywalker would be a blow. Not an insurmountable one, but the thought of the time he had put into him going to waste displeased him. The hours spent listening to his adolescent ramblings, carefully selecting and nurturing his fears and insecurities. The carefully chosen words and stories and praises and secrets that had weathered away at the bonds that connected him to the other Jedi and made him doubt his place among them and their acceptance of him. The careful arranging he had done to make sure his mother was in the right place at the right time, and the headaches he had endured slipping past Skywalker's mental shields and planting images that felt like usual visions, untainted by darkness. 

Skywalker was incredibly loyal to those he gave his trust to, something Sidious valued in an apprentice, especially since the Sith were known to turn on each other as part of their very nature. He also had an exceedingly strong moral code. He didn’t balk at death and violence, a consequence of his upbringing, no doubt, but his sense of right and wrong was deeply ingrained in him and his profound desire to help the helpless was disgustingly Jedi at its core. Sidious had spent a great deal of effort slowly unwinding it. It was a stroke of luck that the Jedi had chosen to rebuke the former instead of praising the latter. 

Truly, it has been a delight mounding the boy, playing with him right under the nose of the Jedi. There have been triumphs and failures. Not long ago, the boy had come to him, confessing that he and his secret wife had gone their separate ways. He felt that it was unfair and cruel to tether her to him, when he was fighting a war and training a Padawan and saw the strain that the secret placed on her, close as she was to her family and friends. He and the senator had decided to part and to allow their love to fade into a steadfast friendship instead. It had been a bitter display of selflessness, a disgustingly unSith like trait. He had put on his grandfatherly face and hemmed and hawed over the loss of a love in the universe and done his best to convince him to keep trying. But Skywalker had displayed the stubbornness that Sidious intended to beat out of him once he was his apprentice and kept on with the course he’d decided on.

Still, on the whole, he rather thought he was winning. The boy had slunk into his office at the start of the war, radiating shame and rage, and confessed to him his acts of Tatooine. Sidious had been delighted to learn of the slaughter, more so to hear he had not stopped at killing the warriors. He had made sure not to appear too reassuring, allowing concern and doubt to show through his mask, but ultimately twisted Skywalker around his fingers and reassured him that while his actions were extreme, the feelings were natural, and he had probably saved lives in the long run. That was a very far way to fall, and Sidious had carefully and artfully made sure that Skywalker had no one he felt he could turn to with such things other than himself, no one to help him claw his way out of the dark. 

Yes, Sidious would begin to revise his plans for the event that Skywalker was lost to him. He could not afford to be caught off guard simply because he attempted to linger too long over a plan that had already expired, but similarly would he not throw away all the time and effort he had put in before he truly had to. He would see if he could recover Skywalker. Maybe show him how Kenobi had not even done him the service of going to the planet where he disappeared to investigate himself, how he was not training Padawan Tano, as Skywalker would no doubt want. He would find a way to use this to his advantage as he did in all things. 

But he would also see who had caused this disappearance. Who had dared to unwittingly inconvenience him. Finding someone he could torment to his heart's content might be just what he needed. He had to step so lightly on Coruscant. It had been some time since he had last played with an opponent. This might prove to be just what he needed. 

Chapter Text

Anakin’s anger didn’t burn out, but his energy did. I was to be expected, but he still seethed at the betrayal of his body. He’d been injured, ill, engaged in a failure of an escape attempt, injured again, and put through an emotional wringer. On top of all that, they weren’t being fed particularly frequently or plentifully. And he hadn’t even eaten most of those meals. He was fairly certain he had already lost weight, although gaining and losing weight had been a pretty regular cycle during the war so far, so it was hard to tell. Still, he expected more of himself. 

Starvation and sleep deprivation has once been a way of life. More times than he could remember, he had been set to work with his stomach turning in on itself and the sting of a bantha prod at his shoulders. He had still gone to work to earn his keep and prove he shouldn’t be sold away from his mother. How weak had he become that he was no longer capable of what he was at nine years old? He had become more of a papered core worlder than he’d thought, and he was disgusted with himself. 

And now here he sat, the panic and the terror that had overwhelmed him and transformed itself into aggression still rampaged through his system, racing beneath his skin, like lightning jumping from conductor to conductor, leaving behind devastation and vibrating heat in its wake. Instead of purging it through action, it was all trapped inside, tearing at him, ricocheting around his rib cage, clawing up his throat, making his teeth feel like chalk, making him imagine he could feel his fingernails growing. It turned his hair to wire, scraping against his cheek and brow. He sat and felt it all, overrun. He was caught in a current, dragged beneath branches, and he’d never been a strong swimmer. He was so tense he thought it might snap his bones right out of his skin, and he doubted he’d even notice. 

The tenseness proved to be a problem when he and Rex (mostly Rex) realized that Anakin had managed to dislocate his own shoulder during his frantic and embarrassing display. Anakin felt himself flush with humiliation, and it did nothing but stoke the anger that swirled inside him still like a blizzard.

“Sir, I need you to relax if we’re going to reset this properly.”

“Just do it.” Anakin bit out.

“All due respect, sir, but you can’t order me to hurt you. Especially if no good will come of it. You can punish yourself all you want, but you can’t force me to do it. Sir.”

Anakin stayed silent. He hadn’t been punishing himself. He just… he’d been incapable of keeping it all in. He’d felt like a supernova was going to burst out of his skin and he’d needed to let it out. He still had more to let out, and he shuddered to know what his surroundings would look like if he weren’t cut off from the force. Not that you’d know what they looked like, an insidious voice whispered in his head. 

“Sir,” Rex’s voice was dry, but Anakin could sense a touch of humor in it. “We’ve only got one working arm between us at the moment. If we’re going to get out of here at some point, surely you agree that we could use at least two.”

Two arms hardly seemed like enough. Certainly not enough to make up for being down two eyes. 

“You think we’re going to get out.” Anakin didn’t mean for it to be a question, but that’s how Rex took it.

“Well, I definitely don’t want to spend the rest of my days in here looking at your ugly mug. Also, respectfully sir, you’re starting to smell.”

It was like a pressure valve was switched. All the tension and turmoil rushed out of Anakin, like oxygen out of an airlock. He deflated, shoulder dropping from their hunched position, ribs expanding as they finally got a full breath of air, fingers uncurling from where they had been digging grooves into his palm, which in turn took some pressure off his abused shoulder. The anger wasn’t gone for good. Anakin was sure his various inadequacies would give him something else to linger on, etched as they were into his very bones. 

“You’re not exactly smelling like a field of desert roses, either, Captain. Anakin huffed.

“I’m not near as bad as you. I’ve at least wiped myself down with some damp cloth from time to time. You’re only smelling it already because your sense of smell is getting sharper to make up for your lack of vision.”

There was a tense pause, as if Rex were waiting for an inevitable explosion. Instead, Anakin barked out a laugh. 

“I don’t think it happens that quickly, Rex. Just admit you smell.”

“If you say so, General.”

Anakin shook his head wryly. At least Rex wasn’t treating him like some damsel made of glass. He decided to voice that thought out loud. Rex scoffed.

“One hell of an ugly damsel, sir. Who would want to rescue you?”

“I’ll have you know that tabloids think I’m very handsome.”

“The tabloids also say that about General Windu, sir.”

Anakin made a face that he knew was exaggerated, but he’d hardly ever made it a week during his Padawanship or with his own Padawan without being called dramatic, and he was hardly going to change it up after all this time. 

“And anyway, sir, you don’t seem the damsel type. Frankly, I don’t think you can sit still long enough to let someone else come rescue you.”

“Well, with all the times I allow myself to screw up and get captured, if I didn’t rescue myself, everyone else would get frustrated and stop bothering to come get me. I think I’ve managed to fall into almost every trap laid for me.” He was aware his voice had come out more bitter than intended, but he was currently locked in a metal cell, blind, with no idea who their captor was or what he wanted. He was allowed a bit of a sulk. 

“That’s the whole point of a trap, sir. You can’t blame yourself.”

“I can when this is the outcome. When the consequences are permanent.”

“You don’t know what Core world medicine can do for your eyes, yet.”

“Yes. I do. But that’s not what I was talking about. I was talking about all the men that trusted me, followed me into battle, and then got slaughtered because I was too arrogant to sense a trap. About you being stuck here with me. About whatever Ahsoka is going through right now. If she’s even still alive.”

When he listed it out like that, his failures truly knew no bounds. He heard rustling and then felt the heat of Rex’s body close to his own.

“On Kamino, they trained us to be good soldiers. Efficient soldiers. When you get tangled up in the ‘what ifs,’ if you get paralyzed, all you’ll ever have is what could have been, rather than what is. They taught us that we couldn’t-- weren’t permitted to-- carry those kinds of burdens with us.”

“Nice of them.” Anakin says dryly, fully aware that the motivations behind and of the Kaminoans actions had very nothing to do with the best interest of the clones themselves. 

“I don’t think ‘nice’ had anything to do with it.” Rex’s voice was carefully neutral, but Anakin could still sense the resentment. “They wanted to make sure we could still function. That we wouldn’t get caught up in the pain and loss of losing our brothers over and over again. We had to make sure we lived up to the price they charged for us.”

That sounded familiar to Anakin. Working desperately to prove his worth was familiar, both on Tatooine and in the temple. But the part about letting go of grievances sounded very much like Jedi teachings. Anakin liked Rex’s version better, though. The jedi always talked about letting go and how it would make Anakin a better jedi, more at peace and balanced. But it had always felt selfish to him, to ignore the pain and suffering of others to improve himself. The way Rex talked about it, though, framed it as a way to help others. To make sure you didn’t get bogged down and distracted and end up letting more people down. It made sense. He’d always been better at doing things for others than he was at doing things for himself. There was just one thing that he always stumbled over when it came to that particular teaching, though.

“How am I meant to do better if I don’t think of all the ways I could fix what I’ve done wrong?”

“You can’t get stuck there, sir. Right now, I need you here with me. With a working arm, preferably.”

“...Yeah, alright.” Anakin tilted his shoulder towards Rex, hoping to give him better access, but not being fully certain where he was, other than near him and vaguely to the right. 

Anakin heard more rustling, as Rex shifted again. Rex guided him into a position near the wall that allowed him to get the leverage he needed to maneuver Anakin’s arm back into the socket with a still-broken collar bone.

“Tell me when.” Anakin requested.

“No.” Rex said, and then shoved the joint back into place. 

Pain exploded in Anakin’s shoulder like a firework.

“You son of a--!” Anakin swallowed the rest of the insult as he curled around his throbbing shoulder, the pain already easing.

“I was created in a test tube, General. I’m nobody’s son.

“Obi-Wan at least pretends he’s going to count to three before he sets it on two.” Anakin hid a cringe even as he said it. He could hear the whine in his voice. Something about the cadence of his voice led to him saying things that, from someone like Ob-Wan or Windu would sound mature and measured, sounded petulant and sulky. Maybe it was the Outer Rim accents that he could never fully shake, dropping the last letter or two off of his words, blending them together, where others would clearly enunciate each one. Still, if ever there were a time he could permit himself a bit of a sulk, surely it was now.

“Do I look like General Kenobi to you, sir?”

Immediately, both of their thoughts turned to his predicament when it came to seeing anything. There was an awkward pause. Anakin, who delighted in little more than making and awkward situation even more awkward-- looking Obi-Wan dead in the eye while eating bugs, watching his lips go bloodless as they pressed tighter and tighter together with every shell he cracked between his teeth--  tricking Ahsoka into a spar so she couldn’t escape The Talk that she kept running away from, dismay in her eyes as he locked their sabers even as he talked casually about foreplay and how even females and other beings who might secrete things to ease the way might still need to use artificial lube and to never let anyone convince her otherwise and how to apply a contraceptive device to something phallic (later demonstrated on a lightsaber handle)-- “Oh, what a lovely gift to get your five year old. When I was five, I had an explosive device implanted somewhere on my body. They didn’t tell us where, of course, in case we tried to carve it out with scrap metal,” to a political acquaintance of Padmé’s who had spoken in great length about his wealth at a benefit meant to raise money for a war refugee program -- allowed the silence to drag on to a length that was clearly uncomfortable for Rex before commenting.

“I don’t know. I imagine that if you and Obi-Wan were in the same room right now, you’d look about the same to me.”

Rex huffed, relieved of the tension, but clearly not amused by Anakin’s antics. Pity he’d be stuck with them for a while.

“It’s good to know your terrible sense of humor wasn’t wiped out with your vision.”

“I have a great sense of humor.”

“People laughing at you isn’t the same as people laughing with you, sir.”

The ghost of a smile that Anakin had been unaware was emerging on his face was wiped out like dew in the desert sun.

Anakin remembered how his fellow Padawans had laughed at his pronunciation and spelling, how they’d disguised cruel remarks as polite requests to not be paired with him for projects, while their classmates suppressed their smirks. How they’d snickered in the hallway outside their classrooms, listening in on the scoldings he’d get for not being able to contain the temper that they had provoked. The yawning chasm that had slumbered very briefly opened up inside his chest, pulling at his spine, heating his blood and fogging his brain.

“Yeah. Trust me, Rex. I know.”

There was another pause, and Rex was clearly aware that the wrong thing had been said, but was no doubt confused as to what. He was clever. Anakin had faith he’d figure it out. There’s a lingering pause that Anakin doesn’t revel in as he did the earlier one.

“...How’s the arm, sir?”

“Fine. It’s pretty used to being popped in and out. They both are.”

“That’s not as reassuring as you think it is.”

Anakin shrugged, winced, and then shrugged again, the pain forcing the abyss inside to recede just the smallest amount. 

“Anyway, sir, we should rest. We only have until my arm finishes healing- it’ll take longer than yours- and then we’ve got to get out of here. We’ll need all the rest we can get.

*****

They both manage to fall into a fitful sleep, but they’re awoken minuteshourswhatever later by the sound of the door sliding open and heavy droid feet clanking outside. Then, Anakin hears the sound of rubber souls walking in. Gate steady and collected. He hears Rex shift, swears he can hear his teeth grind together. 

Anakin pushes himself upright, onto his knees, too exhausted and unwilling to embarrass himself by standing like an unsteady foal, trying to orient himself towards where he heard the sound of the boots. No sooner had he turned in what he thought was the right direction than a powerful backhand blow knocked him straight back to the ground. Rex made a sound of protest, followed immediately by the sound of clanking and blasters being aimed, and Rex’s angry sounds were grudgingly cut off. 

Anakin panted into the ground, left shoulder screaming as his forearm braced his weight against the ground. He pushed himself up again, feeling like his shoulder might detach itself from its socket out of protest, and faced the direction the blow had come from. He tasted iron where his teeth had cut into his cheek. He sucked all the liquid he could into his mouth and spat on the floor where he was almost certain the boots were. That, he thought to himself, was not a waste of water. 

“Pathetic.”

His captor’s voice was cold. He certainly sounded more put together that the last Anakin had heard him, voice more collected that the last time he’d heard him speak, raging about how Anakin was inferior, and then just after that, maliciously and breathlessly speaking about the vile concoction he was about to use on him. 

Anakin got the feeling the comment wasn’t directed at his small act of defiance just then, and more at his character as a whole.

“This is what our master wanted? You? Perhaps he is not as wise as I once thought. You are just like Maul. All fire and rage. You will burn yourself out. Well, you would have. Instead, I get the pleasure of dousing you.”

“I don’t have a master. And definitely not one we share.” Anakin’s voice hurt coming out of his throat, vicious and venomous as it was. 

“Just because you are blind to the truth does not make it any less the truth.”

“What the kriff do you want? Why did you set that trap? Why keep us here? You can let Rex go. Whatever this is, he’s got nothing to do with it.”

“And make things easier for you? No. I want you to suffer. I want you to struggle. I want you to regret ever leaving your dusty rock of a home planet, and all the lives you ruined as a result. I think he’ll help with that. His is certainly one of them. Mine was. And your Master. I can only imagine the man Kenobi could have been without you holding him back. Perhaps your Padawan is still salvageable.”

“Do you have her? If you do anything to her, I will destroy you. I don’t need my sight. I’ll tear you apart with my bare hands.”

“A savage beast, like I thought. A blunt instrument. How disappointing you have turned out to be.”

“Let us go then, and you won’t have to deal with me anymore.”

“Hmm. No. This isn’t about you, anymore. I want him to see what a bad investment you were. He needs to understand the mistake he made. I will make him see that I have made you useless to him.”

Anakin had to idea who this ‘he’ was, but he’d certainly like to turn him loose in the desert during a sandstorm. 

“I will be back later, Skywalker. I just want you to know that everything that’s about to happen, in the end, I’m saving you. It’s not my intention. It’s only a side effect of all this. But when you die here, you will die a prisoner, but not a slave. You should thank me, really.”

Their captor- still unnamed- turned, the breeze from his cape, no doubt flaring dramatically, brushing against Anakin. His steps grew further away, cut off by the door swooshing shut behind him, and the room was silent except for his and Rex’s quiet breathing.

“Well,” Rex said. “Mysterious fucker, isn’t he?”

Chapter Text

It was difficult to keep track of how long they’d been there. The food was not a reliable indicator of time of day, as it was brought inconsistently. Anakin was certain there was a pattern to it, because aside from their tormentor, the entire facility was staffed by droids, which ran more efficiently and without lagging or glitching if they were programmed with specific parameters. Rex had also told him that they were definitely on a patrol rotation, but even that was of very little help when time had begun to twist and warp with the totality of their isolation and desperation.

But Anakin knew it had been some time. There were two main indicators. First, Rex’s collar bone had made a great deal of progress on its way towards healing. Second, the cuff that was secured to his arm above his bicep, which had been snug to the point of discomfort when he had first awoken in this monochromatic hell, now had enough room to allow the first knuckle of his finger to pass underneath it. He was losing weight. 

Anakin had found it difficult to notice at first. Anakin had many vices, chief among them his recklessness and attachments, but he’d never been particularly vain. He’d appreciated what his body could do for him; ease him through endless katas, dodge blaster bolts, carry his wounded brothers over rough terrain. He’d never really cared for any of the physical beauty others seemed to find in it. 

On Tatooine, he’d been coveted for his looks, Watto waiting for the day where his sale to a dancer’s den would be worth more than he would lose in an extra set of hands. He remembered walking through markets, hands reaching out to paw at him or wrap a curl around fingers and tug. He remembered his mother rubbing foul smelling, fermented cactus pulp into his hair and over his skin in an attempt to make him less appealing. He remembered the awful nights, close to when the protection tax to the Hutt’s was coming due and Watto would suddenly remember he’d gambled away what he’d socked away for it. How Watto would turn to him and decide that, just until he made that money back, it was worth it to run a dancer’s business without a dancer’s license, and so Anakin would be directed to the least used storage area in the shop to greet clients who weren’t there for spare parts. He remembered the rough feeling sand, making its way through the threadbare cloth at the knees of his pants, trapping itself between his skin and the material and rubbing away at his skin, until later his mother would rub aloe into his raw knees and he would chew on dried sweetmallow roots to get the taste out of his mouth. 

So, no, Anakin had never taken much stock in physical appearances. When his hand brushed over his collarbone in sympathy for Rex, he didn’t have enough of an inventory of his own body to know immediately how much more prominent it was than usual. But Rex said he could make out the ridges of Anakin’s sternum, and he trusted Rex.

But he did notice when the Force suppressing cuff became looser. He could move it up and down his arm, just a bit, but more than he’d been able to at the start. He’d started fiddling with it unconsciously. He’d also, Rex had told him, become quite pale, and Anakin wished for his eyes back, because he’d never been pale a day in his life, and he’d quite like to see it. Rex had told him he looked like a corpse and you could see his veins. Anakin had informed him that he could smell Rex from across the room, and that Rex could always just close his eyes, but that Anakin could not stop smelling him. 

Their days had turned monotonous, and their conversations bizarre. Much longer, and he was pretty sure they would develop their own language and start speaking in tongues. 

And through it all, he fiddled with the cuff. He slid it back and forth. He rotated it around his arm. He traced his fingers around the outside of it. He rested his cheek against it, bumped it with his nose, tried to find a seam in it with his teeth.

“Would you please stop! Your arm is turning red!”

On instinct, Anakin glanced down at his arm, but, obviously, he saw nothing. He ran his finger tips underneath the band again, this time focusing on the flesh underneath and not the band itself. The skin was tender and sticky, like how it used to feel when he brushed his arm against something too hot, or when he’d fiddled with the settings of his lightsaber as a padawan and ended up with a ‘training mode’ that led to Obi-Wan giving him a withering look as he smeared bacta that he’d normally use to treat sunburn onto his forearms, refusing to break eye contact. He’d chucked the bacta at Anakin, first, and told him to treat his own burns first, because he always took care of Anakin first, but he’d been very grumbly about it. He hadn’t let Anakin help him. Hadn’t let Anakin fix what he’d broken.

Anakin was someone who liked to fix things. At the heart of him, that’s who he was. Droids were the most obvious example. But that’s why he liked battle strategies, too. He could make things better than they were. He thought he might’ve liked to be a healer, but he’d had too many remedial classes to take, to make up for joining the Order so late into his life. He was too busy learning skills that most Jedi learned in the creche to take the number of electives that most younglings and padawans did to help guide them to the path they wanted to take. Instead, he was learning push-pull and how to meditate and how to read. When he’d finally been able to joining any electives, he’d been automatically placed into Piloting and Engineering. He loved both, but he wished, sometimes, that he could find joy in a skill that he hadn’t learned as a matter of life and death in the deserts of Tatooine. 

Maybe then, the thing he could have focused on fixing in that tent on Tatooine just before the Clone Wars could have been his mother, rather than the monsters that had taken her. Instead, she had been dead and they had needed to be dealt with. They would have gone on to do more damage, rape and kill more mothers. But perhaps being able to heal as well as kill would have helped balance out the taint in his soul. In his dreams, he heard the screams of the children he had slaughtered. He’d saved them from the fate of growing up to be monsters. In the balance of the world, especially a world like Tatooine, he felt he’d done more good than bad, but he wasn’t going to kid himself into thinking that what he’d done was something the Jedi would ever understand. 

Maybe what he’d done to that tribe hadn’t been the good, light, Jedi thing to do. But it had been the right thing to do. The Tusken’s had a long history of preying on recently freed or escaped slaves, severing their freedom at the root. They were monsters, and they had been the monsters of his childhood stories, the ones that explained why you shouldn’t wander off by yourself. They were second only to Depur. If Anakin had to become a monster himself to see to the freedom of his people… well, slaves had been killing their own children to spare them from a life of chains for far longer than the Jedi order had probably been around. Slaves were familiar with the concept of sacrificing their souls. If he was a monster, he was in good company. 

“I said stop! You’re rubbing the top layer of skin right off!” Rex exclaimed. 

Anakin jolted out of his reverie, fingers stilling where they had one more been spinning the cuff idly around his arm. He blinked.

“Well, maybe with less skin, the cuff will come off faster.”

“...I’m going to tell Kix that you said that.”

“Please don’t.”

“What were you thinking about?”

“Nothing. Just my mother. Childhood. You know. Happy memories.”

****

Rex didn’t believe his general had been thinking about happy memories in the slightest. His face had been too deeply twisted, his fingers too anxious and fidgety. And besides that, Rex knew that Anakin had experienced little kindness in the course of his life, between the slavery of his youth and the high, restrictive expectations of the Jedi order. 

“A mother? What was that like? Having one?”

Rex had never given having biological parents much of a thought, but now that the question crossed his mind, he found himself burning with curiosity.

“...having a mother? I don’t- I don’t know how to describe it. I tried, I think, with the jedi, so that they could understand what I was missing, what they were lacking, but… I don’t know. I don’t think I have the words to describe…”

“Well, then tell me about her. I’ve never really spoken to someone who had a mother before.”

“You’ve spoken to villagers. And I’ve seen you talk to Padmé.” 

“Yes, but I’ve never known someone with a mother well enough to have a conversation about it. And you’re stuck with me. So might as well ask. Haven’t got anything better to do.”

He saw Anakin’s eyes burn with anger. He knew that his general often stewed in the knowledge that others saw the clones as less than. He wasn’t really supposed to discuss the war councils and the senate meetings that he sat in on, but he still often came to Rex, ranting, about the comments others made about the clones. About the lack of humanity they saw in them. About the way they spoke in meetings about the ease they could be sacrificed due to the fact that ‘more could be commissioned.’ He saw the anger in him every time they saw an establishment that had a ‘No Service for Clones’ sign in the window. His general was often so angry on their behalf that Rex almost saw no need to be mad himself. He still was, though. More on the behalf of his younger brothers than himself. But he understood the resentment that often burned in his general’s eyes. 

“Well, then?” Rex prompted again. “Tell me about her.”

“She’s dead.”

There was a moment of silence. Rex knew what it was to lose a brother. Based on the pain her saw in Anakin’s unfocused eyes, to lose a mother was something different.

“Well… before that, then. What was she like?’

He could almost hit himself. Before that ? What kind of idiot was he? He was about to backtrack, when Anakin began to speak.

“She was… kind. And steady. And constant. She was like the stone spires of Tatooine. Worn down by time and the desert, but still standing. Immovable. A landmark that let you know exactly where you stood. The sandstorms could bear down on her, and still, there she stood. She was just… always there.”

There was another moment of silence. What to say to that? She sounded like the type of person that everyone could use. And Anakin had lost her. Perhaps he should have given some sort of condolence. But instead what came out of his mouth was,

“She doesn’t sound much like you at all, sir.”

If earlier he had wanted to strike himself in the face, now he wished to immediately and without further ado pass away. The general’s eyes widened and his mouth dropped open. Rex expected him to get angry, to snarl like a cornered beast. Unsteady, he looked wounded. That was somehow worse. 

“...what?” he croaked.

Well, now he was committed. If there was one thing Rex knew, it was how to commit to things, even if those things were rash and poorly thought out. He was, afterall, the clone commander of the 501st under the command of Anakin Skywalker.

“She just seems like she was calm. Unflappable. You’re there for us, sir, but… you’re not alway the most steady, consistent person. Just doesn’t seem like you got much of that…constance from her. Sir.”

“I- I have your backs.” The protest was weak, like he was still regaining the air that Rex had knocked from his lungs.

“I know, general. But you’re impulsive. Erratic. I would never describe you as a pillar during a storm. As the storm itself, maybe. It’s not necessarily a bad thing. To be a storm. You’re just… unlike her.”

“You didn’t know her!” Finally, the anger. Rex had been growing concerned. 

“Are you going to lash out and snap at me, sir? Maybe cause an argument that will make it more difficult to work together and get out of this place? Is that what she would have done?”

Rex wasn’t really sure where this anger on his part had come from. He respected his general, truly. He admired how much he cared, how passionate he was. And yet… there was something lingering there. Some resentment that was bubbling to the surface, stoked by the tense quiet and the thinking time provided by captivity.

“No. She wouldn’t. She would… she would try to understand you.”

“Well, in that case, let me explain. I know you, sir. You would die for us. You would make the sacrifice play. Some days, I don’t think you’ll survive this war. Some days, I’m not sure you want to. I can always depend on you, in the moment, to do what has to be done. But I can’t depend on you to live for us. We live and die by our generals. Some see us as more expendable than others. Every time you rush off to do something reckless, no matter how much you think you’re doing the right thing, you put us at risk. We don’t know who comes after you. What if it’s someone like Pong Krell? Every mission, we fear what will happen to us not on the field, but after. Just think we’d be more secure if you took more after your mother, sir.”

“Why are you saying this?”

“Like I said, we haven’t got much better to do. Might as well talk about the things that need talking about.”

Maybe Rex was angrier on behalf of the clones than he had thought. He was just… so tired. Of everything. Being overlooked, being looked at too closely, being told what to do, not being given clear enough instructions, his brothers dying, his brothers never truly living. General Skywalker was one of the good ones, and still there was much more that could be done. And now they were stuck here. In a cell. And Rex was, once again, not seen as a person, but merely as leverage. It burned at him that that was the very thing that was keeping him alive. He was a person. He had a name. He doubted their captor knew it. 

“I try. I try to be enough.” 

“I know you do, sir. We just need you to be more.”

“There’s only so much I can do! I’m being held back! If the order would trust me with more, then I could fight for you better! I could be in the room as they make plans, and we could make our strategies sound from the start! But no one trusts me! They tell me I’m the Chosen One, that I have all these responsibilities to defeat the Sith, and I don’t want it , but then in the next breath, they tell me to sit down and know my place! It’s like I’m being split in two! Is it any wonder I’m not ‘ constant ’?”

“Everything you just said is about other people. This is about you. ”

“Other people are stopping me from being everything I can be!”

“That’s not possible. You aren’t less yourself just because you aren’t a Master on the council.”

“Is basic respect too much to ask?”

“You’re asking the wrong person. I’ve known very little basic respect in my ten years. Doesn’t stop me from being who I am, though. Why is it stopping you, sir?”

“I- I don’t… What--?”

“Your mother knew who she was. That’s why she was so steady. Who are you? Most of the time, I don’t think you know.”

“I’m Anakin Skywalker.”

“What does that mean? You said it to the man that’s holding us captive, too. What does it mean?”

“I- My mother. She used to say I was a gift. That I brought the rain to her life. I- I want to be that. I want to bring good things to people.”

“Do you feel like that’s what you’ve been doing? In this war? As a Jedi?”

“...No. Not always. Not enough.”

“Well, then, sir. That’s as good a place to start as any.”

Maybe this time in a cell wouldn’t be a waste. Maybe they could grow from it-- both of them-- stronger than before. Maybe he, a lowly clone, could speak truth to power. Maybe he could help lance the darkness that had been bubbling away in his general, growing during this war. Surely something good, finally, had to emerge from the darkness that had defined the course of his existence and seemed to be consuming the both of them whole. 

****

Obi-Wan blinked his eyes opened and stared at the star-studded ceiling of the astrolab. Since the invention of transportable, holographic maps, the astrolab had become rather redundant. However, Obi-Wan had always thought it rather beautiful. Peaceful. You could select random sectors of the galaxy and project them on the dome above your head and become mesmerized by the shifting patterns of the galaxy and the stars. 

More than that, though, no one really bothered to come to the astrolab anymore. It made it a rather ideal place to come to mediate, where people would not come to seek out his council or make sure he was not, as Mace put it, wallowing. Even his quarters lacked peace, haunted as they were by Anakin. 

There was another purpose to this location, as well. He would select a sector, at random or based on intel he thought might be related to Anakin, and he would meditate with that sector all around him. He hoped the Force would guide him to a planet or a moon or even an asteroid that held his friend. Mostly, he sensed static, like a wall between him and Anakin. Sometimes, he was directed to a place where they had had a mission, and he would dive deep into the reports he had written on it, hoping to come upon a clue about the person that had stolen Anakin away from him. So far, he had come up empty. Only with reminders of missions that were typically rougher, ending with him and Anakin at odds for one thing or another. Painful realizations of how often they had clashed and hurt one another. He wished to right so many wrongs. 

For the past few days, he had come out of his meditation with something directing him to the same planet over and over again. 

Tatooine. 

He loathed the planet, thought he knew it was not the Jedi way to do so. He loathed it for what it had taken from Anakin and for what it had taken from Obi-Wan himself. He had tried to ignore the nudges, sure he would find only more pain as he uncovered carefully concealed details of Anakin’s past. But the Force had no concept of time, and, therefore, he could not hope to ignore it and imagine that it would drop the notion. 

But as he opened his eyes from his most recent mediation and found them locked, once more, on that dreadful, insidious place, he heaved a great sigh. He was not fool enough to continue to ignore the guidance of the Force. 

And besides, Anakin had been gone for some time now. His disappearance was becoming widespread news, starting to reach even the Outer Rim. Best to make his way to Tatooine. 

He had never met the woman, but Shmi Skywalker didn’t deserve to hear the news of her son’s fate from the Holonet. He would tell her himself.

Chapter Text

Obi-Wan was struck by the sudden realization that he’d never actually left the ship last time he’d been here. He’d been left behind to protect their (defunct) transport and the (false) queen while his master went gallivanting off to find spare parts (his replacement.) The same small (and now not so small, damn him for spending time around abnormally tall humanoids and making his own entirely reasonable height look short by comparison) being that had gone on to replace Qui-Gon himself as the most important relationship in Obi-Wan’s life and his most damning attachment. Why else would he be here, now, on this hellscape of a planet. 

He had truly not given Anakin enough credit. 

He had spent some time deciding how to wear his clothes to best protect himself from the sun, but had not spent enough time concerned with the sand. He had given it some thought, tucking his leggings into his boots to leave as little gaps as possible, but it seemed he had made some sort of funnel directly into his boots. Even worse, it appeared to have made it into his socks, and he could feel it between his toes and rubbing between his ankles and his boots. He couldn’t say he liked the feeling. Even less he liked the feeling of sweat sticking between his shoulder blades and pooling at the small of his back. He had also spent some time giving thought on how to disguise himself on a planet where he was no doubt worth a lot of credits, and had struggled to cover both his face and his hair with the scarf he’d packed. Eventually, he’d decided that there were more people running around with his hair color than there were with his face and had settled for wrapping the scarf over his nose and mouth. As a result, his hair was covered in a fine layer of sand and he’d been accidentally sucking the scarf into his mouth, no doubt leaving a wet patch. He could only imagine the image he would present to Anakin’s mother. Wet stains under his arms, down his back and front, hair turned stringy and a much darker red by the moisture, where it wasn’t muddy with sand. First, though, he had to find her. 

Which brought him to the more pressing problem. Obi-Wan had no idea where to find Shmi Skywalker. Well, that wasn’t entirely true. He knew Qui-Gon and Padmé had gone to Mos Espa. He knew Anakin and his mother had worked in a junk shop. The only problem was that Mos Espa was fairly large, and, as far as he could tell, Tatooine seemed to be entirely made of junk shops. Perhaps that was unfair of him. There were also seedy gambling dens and some truly terrible looking cantinas. Still, he found himself with very little idea of where to start. Anakin had always been very tight-lipped about his childhood, and most of what he’d shared had been centered around his mother, the things he’d built, the friends he’d left behind, and pod racing. So much pod racing. So much so, that Obi-Wan was almost entirely certain it had been a ruse to get him to stop subtly inquiring so he wouldn’t get dragged into another conversation about it. 

And Anakin had also complained about sand a lot. But as Obi-Wan could almost feel the sand snake into his shirts, merge with the sweat gathering between his shoulder blades, and join the pull of gravity downward towards places he did not want to think about, he was beginning to sympathize with the sand thing more. 

He could have contacted Padmé. She was a dear friend and he didn’t begrudge the relationship he sensed between her and Anakin, but he didn’t want to risk another emotional conversation with someone who loved Anakin, as he was no doubt about to have with his mother. He also hadn’t wanted to risk her asking to join him on his mission. It would be a perfectly reasonable request, and he would be unable to deny her, but this felt like something he should do on his own. He wasn’t sure if that was something the Force was telling him or if that stemmed from his own selfish desire to keep as much of Anakin to himself as he could. He did not wish to know the answer. What would it say of him, the day he had to admit he could not differentiate between the will of the Force and the yearnings of his own heart? Perhaps he was lying to himself, when he said did not begrudge Padmé. 

That was neither here nor there, though. He had made the choices he’d made and sending a call out on a Republic frequency from Hutt space, Tatooine of all places, was just asking for bounty hunters to converge on him. Some would just have to exit the nearest cantina. So instead, he walked through the cesspit of villainy and subjugation that was the birthplace of his former Padawan. Everywhere he looked, he saw a wrong he itched to right. Emaciated children with bruises on the small bits of skin revealed by the clothing they used to ward off the sand. A seller  bumped up his prices when he saw the desperation of the face of the female twi’lek bartering for water, lust tainting the Force like oil, making it clear what they would accept to make up the forced deficiency in payment. He wanted to scream when he saw a similar interaction a few stalls over, only this time it was a human male, no older than fifteen. The boy looked nothing like Anakin; the hair darker, the eyes too wide set. And yet, his traitorous mind easily substituted his Padawan into this boy’s place. Anakin, as he was at fifteen; lanky, with a boyish flush to his cheeks making him look cherubic. He imagined Anakin with resignation on his face like this boy had, and he pivoted and stumbled into a nearby alley. 

He braced himself against the stucco wall of whatever building he had stumbled against with his forearm and took deep breaths to quell the sudden and overwhelming nausea. That turned out to be a mistake, as he got a lungful of vile, corrupt air. Old urine, sweat, and rotting garbage had nothing on the smell of old, heated feces. With his free hand, he ripped the scarf from his mouth just in time to vomit the contents of his stomach onto the ground at his feet. When he opened his eyes, he could see crusted puddles on the ground and splashes on the wall, some of which the arm he’d braced himself with were resting on. He wrenched himself away from the wall and staggered to the middle of the narrow alleyway. Looking up, he realized that he was leaning up against some kind of housing structure. Of course, in a place like Tatooine, with its scarce water and destitution, both water plumbing and sonics would be little more than a spice induced dream. In place of more modern conveniences, they resorted to such things as chamber pots, which they then emptied out their windows. Into this alley. Where he was standing. He looked down, where his sick had mingled with other things. That certainly explained why these skinny alleys, with their valuable shade, were deserted. Stars, but he wanted to be away from this place, with its misery and the ghosts of Anakins that could have been. 

He spat to clear his mouth of bile, adding to the disgusting concoction on the ground, and pulled the scarf back over his nose and mouth, trying not to think of the way it trapped in the smell of his own vomit. 

He couldn’t allow himself to get caught up in the market and all its despair. When he walked out of that nightmare of an alley, he kept his head down and moved away from the stalls and the destruction of the human spirit that could be found there. Instead, he headed to more open areas, where places like junk shops would have more space to house their wares. He reached out to the Force to guide him, and was a little startled by the eagerness with which it answered his call. It didn’t seem right for the Force to exist so strongly in a place such as this. 

He followed the tug in his soul towards an area where the buildings were more spread out. He watched as the sand went from a washed out pinkish tan to a much more vibrant reddish color. The buildings grew rounder and the windows became more scarce. When the Force called him to a stop, it wasn’t in front of anything like a junk shop. Instead, it was in front of a small cluster of round buildings. 

The outside of the huts, for that was all he could truly describe them as, were as plain and unadorned as humanly possible. There was no color or pattern to the cloth that hung in the doorways. No bright pottery decorated the worn path leading to them. More than that, though, was the way that the Force lingered around them as if stagnant. Nothing good had happened here in a long time. Still, it was where the Force had brought him. Cautiously, he moved forward to investigate. 

The archway leading into one of the buildings had patterns etched into it. He hadn’t noticed them at first, as they were unassuming and colorless. They were pretty, winding designs, one bleeding into the next. Not knowing why, Obi-Wan reached out and skimmed his fingertips along the designs. In the Force, he was hit by a sense of security. Not of safety, exactly, but the feeling that he got when he and Cody found solid cover during a firefight. His fingers brushed past a different pattern, and a new feeling washed over him, this one of trust, but also of dangerous secrets being kept. Not dangerous intent, but of danger to the possessor of the secrets. 

The scholar in him, the Jedi he was when not wrapped up in and consumed by war, was intrigued by the designs and their clear connection to the Force, and he wanted nothing more than to linger and study them more closely. The warrior in him, the part of himself that he found himself embracing more and more (and liking himself less and less for it), told him that he was here on a mission, self-assigned though it was, and that he had no time to linger on things like marking that had nothing to do with tracking down his Padawan’s mother. The part of him that existed from before the war raged against the un-Jedi-like dismissal of any aspect of the Force and how it interacted with the universe. 

He was distracted by his conflicted musings by the rustling of cloth in the entryway. Obi-Wan glanced towards the movement and caught sight of a small face disappearing back behind the curtain. He froze and tried to project a sense of safety into the Force. As he’d guessed might happen, the little being’s sense of curiosity overcame their fear and the face reappeared. This time she, or at least he guessed it was a she by the long hair, made eye contact. He smiled warmly at her and she smiled tentatively back before a hand on her shoulder tugged her back and a body emerged from inside to place their body in a way that blocked Obi-Wan’s view of her. He took no offense to it. He himself had often done the same thing when interested eyes lingered too long on Anakin. And he needed to speak to an adult to answer his questions anyway. 

“She is not for sale.” The voice was deferential, but there was steel in it, which Obi-Wan barely noticed, so taken aback was he by the statement. 

“Pardon?”

“Not for sale. Not old enough. Needs more time.” The protective figure was male. Her father, most likely, given the matching triangle-like patterns running up the sides of their necks. 

“Oh. I-I’ve no interest in… That is to say- I’m not here to… buy a child?”

“I am not for sale, either. My master values me.”

“I’m… not here for that, either. I am not looking for a slave.”

“These are slave quarters. There are only slaves here.”

Obi-Wan glanced around at the buildings with new eyes. They were run down, not through lack of funds of the owners, but lack of care. There was no decoration, because the people who lived here felt no ownership over these buildings. They knew they could be removed from them or sold away from them at any moment. He turned his attention back to the man, who had never once looked away from him.

“Ah, yes. Well, I suppose I am looking for a slave. That is to say, I’m looking for a specific slave. And not to buy. I don’t believe in owning people.”

The man stared at him blankly, unmoved. He shrugged, but there was nothing casual about it. “You do not need to believe. Slavery is there. Believe or do not believe. No difference.”

“You are correct, of course. I only meant to say that I, personally, would never own a slave or support any being or organization that would. People are not things to be owned.”

Liar, the voice in his head whispered. Who helped plan the campaign that reunited Jabba with his son? Who was willing to make sure the Hutts stayed in power, so that a less agreeable faction would not take over? …Who’s fighting with an army of clones who were never asked to volunteer to fight a war?

Obi-Wan shoved the thoughts away from him with a sharp shake of his head. 

“I do not wish to buy you or your daughter.”

The man’s silence was damning. 

“I am looking for a woman. A former slave, actually. Her name is Shmi Skywalker. Do you know her? Of her? Where I might find her now?”

“No.”

“She once worked in a junk shop. Are there any near here?”

“Only one master owns a room in these quarters that also owns junk shop. Toydarian. Watto. Gambler.”

“Excellent! Do you happen to know where his shop is?”

The man grunted and offered brusk, disjointed instructions, Common clearly not his native language, but clear enough. He kept his daughter shielded from Obi-Wan’s gaze the entire time. Obi-Wan memorized what he was told and expressed his gratitude before turning to be on his way.

“I am sorry.” The man’s voice rang out.

Something about the tone ran like cold water down his spine and he pivoted slowly on his heels, half expecting a blaster aimed at his back, but there was nothing. Just the man and his stone faced expression. 

“Whatever for?” Obi-Wan asked, anxious to be on his way, but not willing to let the strange apology go unanswered. 

“For the pain. The pain that will be.” The words felt prophetic, and Obi-Wan brutally repressed the shudder that wanted to shake its way through his body.

“Pain,” he echoed. “What pain? Have you heard something? About Shmi?” Or about Anakin? He couldn’t help but wonder. Had news made it here already? Was he too late to deliver it personally?

“I know nothing.”

Obi-Wan let out a relieved breath, tension draining from his shoulders, and then narrowed his eyes. “Then why would you say that?”

“You are looking for a slave. With slaves, there will always be pain.”

****

“What can Watto do for you? Need a converter? Navigational alignment? Whatever you need, you’re more likely to find it here than anywhere else! Those other shops? Pah! Scraps. Broken parts! Here, you get quality supplies. Best prices in the area, too! Ha! Can’t beat that! Better quality and better price!”

Obi-Wan glanced at the droid arm on the shelf directly next to his face. The joint connecting the upper arm to the forearm was disarticulated and the wires, fraying, were the only things holding the two halves together. 

The shop had been relatively easy to find. The man he’d met, unsettling and foreboding as he was, had given good, clear directions. He’d found himself at the shop and under the assault of its loathsome owner’s sales pitch in very little time.

He glanced away from the droid arm and all the equally broken and battered parts that accompanied it on the shelf and thanked his time negotiating with distasteful governments for keeping his disdain from his face. This was the being who had once owned Anakin. He had been certain of it the moment he had gotten close. It was barely noticeable, but Anakin’s Force presence lingered here even now, a testament to his power and the time he’d spent here. Or perhaps to the power of the emotions he’d felt there, he contemplated, looking at the door behind the counter that looked like it led to a supply room that he could still feel Anakin ringing from sharply. Similarly, he could feel him still echoing in the repair hanger for the larger ships and speeders. He forced a bland smile onto his face and faced the creature that had been responsible for so much of his Padawan’s suffering.

“I am not here for parts, actually. I am here for information.”

Watto’s wings gave a little buzz of interest, no doubt sensing the credits that he could extort with for something like valuable information. This had the side effect of wafting tepid air, rank with the smell of the unwashed, towards Obi-Wan, and he had to fight to keep his face neutral. Toydarian’s, as far as he knew, had no sweat glands, being an insectoid race, and so the dark pits of Watto’s undershirt and the swell of body odor was concerning him. 

“Information. Well, I could have that. A little more from you first, perhaps?”

“Yes, of course. You see, I travel by ship quite a lot. I transport goods, you understand? Often the kinds of goods you don’t want to stop in most ports with. I’m sure you understand. And the places I do stop in often have establishments of less… quality, shall we say, than yours. I find myself in need of an onboard mechanic. Preferably one I don’t have to pay. I’ve heard you have a talent for acquiring such workers.”

“Hmm. The slaves pick things up in places like this. They’ll never know as much as a free person like you or I, of course, they don’t have the breeding to have brains like that, but they learn enough to be helpful. You want better than that, you need to get them specially bred for it. Cost goes up for special breeding, of course.”

Obi-Wan felt his temper flare, and he clenched his fists so hard inside of the sleeves of his clothing that his nails might have pierced his palms had they not been kept so brutally short to prevent them from breaking in battle. He managed to suppress any other reaction with every bit of cunning and control that he had acquired on his way to becoming The Negotiator.

“Breeding stock?” He repeated, and he considered a minor miracle of the Force that he managed to make himself sound intrigued rather than homicidal. 

“Sure. Like any other livestock. Most are bred strong around these parts. Some are bred smart. And sometimes they get bred with desert breeds to make sure they last in the sun. Always have to suffer through a few ugly generations where they do that!” Here, a lascivious smile spread across Watto’s face, half concealed by the overlarge snout the Obi-Wan desperately wanted to feel crushed beneath his fist. “And some are bred pretty.” The Toydarian licked his lips and then cackled, body swaying up and down with the force of his wings. 

“So you don’t currently have any of better breeding?” Obi-Wan asked in lieu of vomiting or turning on his heel and walking out. 

“No. Never have. And I’ve only got droids right now. I could sell you one of them.”

“Someone mentioned that one of yours built a podracer out of scraps. That it won the Boonta Classic Eve. That’s the kind of help I could use.” Obi-Wan knew it was a risk to get this detailed. The more obvious it became what he was looking for, the higher the price would become for information. 

“Hm. Did you?” Obi-Wan grimaced internally. As nonchalant as the being in front of him was trying to act, it was clear he’d smelled blood in the water. 

“Someone was telling the story in a cantina.”

“Long time ago, now. Strange thing to be talking about in a cantina more than 10 years later.”

The suspicious glint in Watto’s eyes only grew and Obi-Wan found himself frustrated at it. It didn’t seem right that someone vile enough to own slaves should be clever. How twisted must a being be to be intelligent and still talk about other sentients as if they were lesser beings. How could a creature have known Anakin, been capable of intelligent thought, and still keep him in chains?

“Event like that is memorable. Probably brought up a lot, especially when gambling is going on. I imagine a lot of money was won and lost that day.”

The Toydarian pinned him with a suspiciously sharp stare, and Obi-Wan knew he’d underestimated his opponent when devising this portion of this plan. His (completely reasonable) bias against slave owners (and perhaps a previously unrealized biased view of junkyard owners) had led him to the assumption that this waste of consciousness would be unintelligent. That was clearly a mistake. 

“If you’re looking for the Skywalker boy, he’s long gone. And the information will cost you.”

“Skywalker. That was the name of the boy who won the race?”

“Don’t pretend. Lots of people have come round these parts sniffing after that boy and his mother. And what have I got to show for it? Pah! Nothin’! If I’d known they’d be of so much interest, I’d have kept ‘em and sold ‘em for more!”

“So many? Who else has been asking?”

“Who hasn’t?” Watto sneered. “The first one, the long haired Jedi cheat! Then some human, probably, who never took off his hood. Musta’ been sweatin’ up a storm! Then some girl with two other girls who looked just like her, a year or two after I was cheated out of the boy, looking for the mother. Then, little Ani comes back, all grown up, all threatening-like asking after his mother. Just a year or two ago! Then, not far back, some other creature with strange eyes. Wants to know everythin’ there is to know about the boy. Never known people to care so much about some slaves. The money I could’ve made…”

Something he’d said stood out, though. “Strange eyes? Golden? Or yellow?”

“Might’ve been. How badly do you want to know?”

Obi-Wan took a deep breath and reminded himself that this being had probably been raised in the Outer Rim, with an acceptance of slavery and extortion being taught to him since birth. Undoubtedly, he’d been taught that slaves were lesser and that a life was only worth as much money as you could get out of it. 

Jedi were raised to not judge other races and beings for their cultures, even if they were incompatible with their own. However, he was finding that incredibly difficult right now. Not now that there was someone who possibly had Sith eyes who had been by asking about Anakin recently. Possibly just before he’d disappeared. And on a less selfish level than that, perhaps if more systems and cultures were less willing to overlook slavery that wasn’t staring them in the face every day, there would be less of it in the universe. 

“One hundred credits for any answers I wish.”

“Republic credits are no good here.”

“Yes, they are. With the war on and the Hutts being paid in credits for their alliance with the Republic, don’t waste my time pretending credits haven’t become legitimate currency on Tatooine.”

“Five hundred.”

“One hundred and fifty.”

“Five hundred. I have something you want and you, with your poncy, Core world accent, wouldn’t have come all the way to this dustball unless you wanted it very badly.”

“One hundred and you get to keep all of your fingers.” Obi-Wan growled, pushing menace into the Force. He wouldn’t do it, of course, probably, but Watto didn’t need to know that.

There was a pause. 

“Two hundred and I keep all of my fingers.” But his wings gave him away, twitching nervously at his back. 

“One hundred and fifty, you keep all of your fingers, and I don’t destroy all of your inventory on my way out.” The destruction, however, he would be delighted to do, wracked with tension as he was and had been since Anakin’s disappearance (since the beginning of the war) and most of it was unsalvageable junk, anyway. 

Watto licked his lips nervously. “Deal.” He rasped out.

****

Back on the speeder he had taken to get to Mos Espa, he made his way to the Jundland Waste. What he’d learned in the junk shop disturbed him. Namely that Shmi had still been a slave until Watto sold her to a man named Cliegg Lars. In his mind, he’d always assumed his master had freed the both of them, but only taken Anakin along as his mother could not come back to the temple, and she, perhaps, considered Tatooine her home or had family she had no wish to leave. 

Learning how wrong he’d been left him angry with himself. He should have questioned Qui-Gon more sharply about the origins of the boy he’d collected in the desert. But there had been so much happening then, and he was so used to his master bringing back strays and just sighing in resignation over the explanation that he’d never get, and then his master had been dead. And he was mad at himself for not asking Anakin more about his life on Tatooine. But it had made him so uncomfortable to discuss it and it had hardly seemed conductive to letting go. But surely Anakin would not allow his discomfort with his past to stop him from advocating for his mother’s freedom. He’s struck, suddenly, by the thought that perhaps Anakin thought he knew. Thought he knew and that he was more that content to leave his mother in slavery. The thought is so terrible that Obi-Wan does his best to fall into a meditative trance for the rest of his trip to the Lars homestead. 

When he gets there, many sweaty, dusty clicks later, it’s just past midday. The hottest part of the Tatooine day. He was drenched in sweat and so parched he was concerned he wouldn’t be able to speak, as he was fairly certain he’d stopped producing saliva about an hour previously. Essentially, he’d be making the worst possible impression on his Padawan’s mother. 

The door (free beings on this planet appeared to have those. It was only slaves denied the privilege) swung open before he’d even turned off the speeder. In the doorway stood a man too young to be Cliegg Lars, his broad shoulders taking up almost the entire frame and, in a bizarre mirror of earlier in the day, a woman he was clearly trying to conceal was peering out from behind him. He had a battered blaster in his hand, but his aim was steady and deadly. The switch that controlled the power was switched to high, in essence ‘kill mode.’ Based on the lack of wear on the pain around the switch, Obi-Wan would guess that it was almost never switched to another level. 

“Wha’d’you want?” The man called out. 

“Peace. I am Obi-Wan Kenobi. I’m a Jedi. I know Anakin. I came looking for his mother.”

“For his mother?” Asked the woman behind him, and the man threw her a look that was more exasperated than angry.

“Yes. His mother. I have news for her. I wanted to deliver it in person. This is the Lars homestead is it not? Is she here?”

The man stiffened, and his lip pulled up in a sneer. The woman behind him sensed it and warned “Owen, don’t-” before she was interrupted. “She’s right over there. With my father.” He said and jerked his head. The woman sighed in frustration. 

Obi-Wan followed the jerk of his head and found a patch of desert much like every other part of the desert he had just traversed. 

“Wh--?” He started, but stopped when he saw it. Two stones. Unnaturally places and evenly spaced from one another. There was something etched on them. He walked numbly over to them to read them better, but already knowing what he would find. 

‘Cliegg’ one said in blunt, straight writing. There were no further embellishments. No dates or quotes. ‘Shmi’ said the next, but this one had some kind of symbol etched underneath in a lighter hand. The pattern looked similar to what he’d seen at the slave quarters.

“I don’t…” He stumbled over his words and cleared his throat, trying to bring moisture to his mouth and pretending that its lack is what caused him to falter in the first place. “What happened? When did this happen?”

“I thought you said you knew Anakin. Didn’t he tell you?” The man’s voice is brusque and dismissive. 

“Anakin knows?”

The woman took pity on him at this point, stepping out from behind the man guarding her. He made to keep her behind him, but she deftly stepped out of his reach, not even having to look to do so.

“He was there when she died.” She confirmed, approaching Obi-Wan and then steering him towards their home.

“Beru…” The man murmured, voice heavy with caution. 

“It’s fine, Owen. He’s a friend of our brother. He is welcome in our home.” The man, Owen, hesitated for a moment before stepping to the side. 

Beru guided Obi-Wan through the entryway and down the stairs. He didn’t know why he felt so numb. He was a general. In the last year, he’d seen more death than he could have ever conceived as a Padawan. He’d held troops as they’d bled out in his arms, hands pressing down on open wounds, fingers accidentally slipping into the edges of wounds as he tried to pack them, only for them to die anyway, and then find their blood hours later under his fingernails during a briefing and scraping it out as best as he could while he went over death tolls like they were just statistics. Obi-Wan knew death. 

Perhaps this day had just been too much. Maybe his earlier discovery of his Padawan’s possible mistrust had affected him more than he’d thought. Maybe he’d been so braced for the conversation he’d have to have with her about her son’s vanishment that having it suddenly not take place made him feel like he was free falling, like walking down a staircase and missing a step. 

He felt himself pushed down into the seat of a booth and a cool, ceramic cup pressed into his hands. He took a sip on instinct and closed his eyes in bliss at the tepid water passing his lips. The two strangers, Owen and Beru, sat on the other side of the booth, and he appreciated them not boxing him in. They sat in silence for a few moments as he savored his water. 

“What happened?” he asked, breaking the silence. “You said Anakin was there?”

“He didn’t speak of it to you?” Beru asked, voice inquiring and eyes kind. 

“He… spoke of visions. He saw her in pain. Calling out. I know they drove him to visit. I know of nothing that he encountered here. I did not inquire, so he did not have to incriminate himself for being away on a personal matter while on a mission. We never- it was never truly brought up. And then the war started immediately afterwards.”

“The Tusken Raiders happened.” Owen’s gruff voice offered. Obi-Wan turned away from Beru to look at him. 

“You said Anakin was… your brother? Were you…?”

“Shmi married my father. Cliegg.” Obi-Wan remembered the name on the other stone. 

“I’m sorry. Did the Tusken Raiders… happen to him, too?”

“In a manner of speaking. He went after her. Him and a party of others. Thirty others. Four came back.”

“But not your father.”

“No. He came back. Not all of him. Body or spirit. But not for long. He couldn’t live without her. Died not long after. But not before he saw her avenged.”

“Avenged?” Obi-Wan inquired cautiously, the Force blaring warning in his mind.

“Yeah. Avenged. By Anakin. He came looking for her. Went after them on his own. Thought for sure he was going to be lost to us, too. But he came back. With her body.”

“Anakin… went after them? He snuck her out?” Obi-Wan knew as he said it that that wasn’t the case. Even if it had been Anakin’s intent, Obi-Wan was fairly certain he’d never completed a stealth mission successfully. And he’d know. 

Owen snorted. “He did what he had to do. Don’t think much sneaking was involved, though.”

Obi-Wan stood, bracing his hands against the table so he wouldn’t sway, as it appeared the world was shifting beneath his feet. “Where did this take place?”

“A couple of clicks out. No landmarks to discern it now. But I have the coordinates from the first rescue attempt.”

“Might I have them?” Obi-Wan’s voice was an echo to himself. There was something speaking with his body, but it couldn’t be him, because he was fairly certain he wasn’t in his body right then. 

“We can do that,” Beru murmured. “But why? What do you hope to find?”

“Hope?” Obi-Wan repeated numbly. “It is my dearest hope that I find nothing.”

Owen snorted. “You’re likely right. Nothing goes there anymore. The Raiders think it’s haunted.”

“ Owen.” Beru snapped sharply. “For Ar-Amu’s sake, have some pity.”

“I’ve no pity for them. ” Owen snapped. 

“Then have some pity for him!” Beru snapped right back. “He’s clearly had a shock. I don’t think our ways are the way of the Jedi.”

“Hmm.” Owen grumbled. “Well, good for them. Nice for them, to have that luxury. Here, we do what needs doing. Anakin knew that. He knows what it’s like here.”

Obi-Wan staggered outside, Beru pausing to tap briefly at a computer and then fast on his heels. He made his way over to his speeder and swung his leg up over it. His hands settled on the handles and his fingers traced over the grooves, then using his thumb nail to scrape sand out of one of them. 

“Wait.” Beru’s soft voice called out. Obi-Wan looked at her, and he knew his gaze must be intense, but she never wavered. “Take this.” She held a data chip out to him. He stared at it blankly. She sighed and moved around him to flip up the panel on his speeder covering the port and slipped it into the slot. “It’s the coordinates for the location of the rescue. The location of the attack.”

Obi-Wan flinched at hearing it referred to as an attack, the first time it had been called what it was. His first time hearing the truth of it. He nodded in confirmation and thanks, not trusting his voice. He flicked on the first switch before placing his hands where they would need to be to rev the speeder on. A hand settled on his upper arm, heavy with callouses that he could feel through the cloth covering his arm. He looked up and locked eyes with her. There was no pity in her eyes, for all that she’d asked it of her husband? brother? earlier. They were solemn and understanding. 

“Come back, after.”

“Why?”

“You’ll be better for it. You don’t understand what you’re walking into. You won’t understand it, truly, until you speak to us about it. But we can’t explain it until you’ve seen it. Just come back.”

Obi-Wan nodded jerkily and made to go, but her hand clamped down harder. 

“Promise me. Your word.”

Obi-Wan let himself truly focus on her. There was something in her that he recognized. It reminded him of Anakin. They were nothing alike other than the desert weathered tan of their skin, but nevertheless it was a strong enough resemblance that it took his breath away, and he found that he could not make her a promise and then break it as he’d been fully planning to do. 

“I’ll return. I will- I will return. And speak with you. But I understand more than you think.”

“You know nothing of slavery and the desert, Jedi.”

“This didn’t have anything to do with slavery. Or the desert.”

“Everything in Anakin’s life has to do with slavery and the desert. It always will.” Obi-Wan wanted to protest and inquire more, but she squeezed his arm with a gentle smile and then released him. “We will see you when you return.”

*****

The ride did not take long, which was a pity, as Obi-Wan had half wished it to last forever. He suspected what he would find at the end would break him or at the very least alter him permanently. But before he could fully prepare ( was that even possible?) his navigation system beeped at him to alert him to his arrival. 

Reluctantly, he clambered off of his speeder and observed his surroundings, hand unconsciously drifting to his lightsaber. The Force here was still, like the eye of a storm. It looked normal. There were no landmarks. No structures marred the endless sand. No blaster or lightsaber burns would have survived the shifting of the sand. Still, he moved forward, allowing the Force to guide his movements. He took a few steps away from the bike and then stopped. Almost in a trance, he knelt down and places his hands on the ground. Without thought, he shifted the sand, Force aiding him and speeding up the task. It didn’t take long for his hands to brush against something smooth. 

He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. Then, he swept his hands across the surface one last time and revealed what he had found. A bone, stark white, stared back at him. Anatomy had never been his best subject, but it didn’t need to be when he could follow the length of it down to a wrist and a hand. A few more pushes with the Force and he’d revealed the entire skeleton. In the middle of its chest was a charred hole. The charring was the only color on the whole thing. There was no clothing or flesh, desiccated or otherwise. It was all picked clean, by animal and non-animal scavengers. No doubt the flesh had been sustenance for some desert creature, but the clothes and no doubt blaster the being had no doubt had on them were gone, too, and no animal did that. Shifting to the side and with knowledge of how deep down he had to go, he swept away more sand, some shifting and tumbling with the unfamiliar use of the Force. Would he be able to uncover it all? The full atrocities of his Padawan? The next body was similar to the first, but this time the darkened hole was through the skull, lined up with the eye socket, and the visual that gave him made him feel sick. 

With every body he uncovered, a wind seemed to pick up in his ears, rattling his skull and drowning out his thoughts, leaving him only with his feelings, which were twisted, wretched things. He thought himself not capable of feeling worse than he did earlier in that alley, when he realized the tragedy that Anakin’s life might have become if not for the Jedi, but had he avoided it? Truly? Or was it just shaped differently? Inflicted upon others instead of himself? Was that better or worse? Better, he decided, far better, of even as he looked upon the massacre before him, he could not bring himself to regret taking Anakin away from the future that had awaited him if he’d stayed. Clearly, he could feel worse, for he hated himself for still fully supporting a decision that had led to such carnage, such tragedy. 

The wind that had been building up inside his skull exploded out of him in the form of the Force, creating a blast radius around him that blew back all the sand, revealing the full extent of Anakin’s rampage. Obi-Wan choked and clasped both hands over his mouth, before moving one up over his eyes, as if the sight wasn’t already burned into his eyes and into his mind. 

Bodies. Bodies everywhere. 

The worst were the small ones. He dropped his hands from his face so he could lever himself up off of the ground. He staggered his way over to the first small corpse, just as picked over as the rest. Collapsing to his knees beside it, he used delicate fingers to tilt the skull to the side, just as he had hundreds of times to inspect various black eyes and bruised cheeks on his Padawan’s face when missions had gone wrong or he’d gotten into scraps with other younglings at the Temple. He stared into the empty sockets of this child’s skull, and found himself folding over it, weeping over it as he hadn’t since it was his master lying dead in his arms. His chest heaved and the scarf around his face was sucked into his mouth. He coughed and spat it out, swiping it off his face and into the sand. Tears cut down his cheeks like the blades of a knife. 

Placing the child gently into the sand, he staggered to the outskirts of the depression he had made and fell to his knees again. He plunged ihs hands into the sand and scraped them out. Then again and again. Over and over he scraped sand away, almost as much falling into the hole that he was making as he was getting out. He could use the Force to aid him, but he didn’t feel worthy of it. He kept going, back of his neck burning in the sun, fingers bloody, not sure if his fingernails were still there. All the while, he thought grimly that the hole didn’t have to be all that big. Skeletons needed little space at all. 

Finally, the hole was enough, and he made his way from body to body, gathering them up and placing them in the inadequate grave that he had made. He cataloged their injuries as he went, shamefully relieved that most seem to have been struck down by a single blow, pain not drawn out into intentional torment. What a pathetic thing to be grateful for. Some had limbs detached from their bodies and he had to go back for them. 

One of the bodies had a gouge down the front of its face, and he thought of the scar that adorned Anakin’s. Had it been retribution, then? The Force’s punishment for the damage he had done? The lives taken? The arm, too? But as soon as he thought it, he dismissed it. The Force did not act in such ways, and even if it did, in what world would Anakin’s injuries even begin to make restitution for what he had done? A mark across his face that had spared his eye and had the holonet swooning? The arm that, while a grievous injury to the soul and not to be dismissed in its permanent effect on his ability to function, was neatly replaced with a prosthetic that almost immediately replaced all of the function that he had lost? There was no equality in that. No fairness. Not when Obi-Wan had carried dozens of bodies into a makeshift grave lined with his own blood, many of them children. 

For all the desert heat, his body was cold with horror. He was not sure he understood the world anymore. But, then, Beru had promised to explain, had she not? To help make sense of it all, not that there was any sense to be found in this, the most senseless of acts. Still, if the smallest fraction of his could find some peace, he would listen. 

******

Obi-Wan was back at the Lars farm almost instantly, or at least that was how it felt. Beru was waiting for him outside, shawl draped across her head to protect her from the sun. He’d redonned his own scarf, but he knew the damage was done. 

Upon seeing him, she stood, her face serious and prematurely around the eyes and mouth by the desert. She said nothing, just ushered him in and settled him at the booth, pressing a whole carafe of water into his hands, though he knew the value of such a thing in the desert and tried, silently, to deny the gift, feeling unworthy of just about anything at the moment. 

Owen appeared silently in a doorway and looked at him with judgemental eyes. These people, the both of them, knew exactly what had happened in the desert that night. Maybe some of the hands that had stripped the bodies of anything of value even belonged to them. There was no sympathy or horror at the tragedy in Owen’s eyes, only contempt for Obi-Wan’s own horror. 

“He killed them all.” Obi-Wan’s voice was little more than a whisper, his voice sore. He wondered idly if he had been screaming at some point. 

“Yes.” Beru replied calmly. 

“How can you-? It was a slaughter. How can you possibly justify it?”

“It was them or us.” Owen cut in harshly. “You’ll excuse us if we’d rather it be them.”

“It was not them or you. You weren’t there. Anakin could have snuck her out. He’s been trained. What happened did not need to happen.”

“And then what, Obi-Wan? When Anakin was no longer here? What then?”

Obi-Wan blinked and faltered. “What are you talking about?”

“They didn’t take her because they felt they had to. They took Shmi because it pleased them to. And to take her back would have brought their wrath down upon us. So she would be buried at home. And then we would die. They would come for us, and there would be no one there to protect us. A prepared group of thirty could not handle them. We would be corpses, just like the ones you found.”

“There had to be an alternative.”

“There was.” Owen said. Obi-Wan jolted. There was an alternative? And they still justified what had occurred. “He could have left her. He could have walked away and left her to suffer for longer, never knowing what had happened to her.”

Obi-Wan closed his eyes in defeat. That would never have happened. It was not in his nature. It was not in the nature of any Jedi, to not help when they could. 

Owen snorted. “Yeah, that’s what I thought.”

“There had to be another way. He killed- he killed everyone. The warriors, the women, the children. Surely he did not have to kill the children.”

“He could have let them live. And we would be safe, for a time. And then the children would grow up and they would come for us.”

“You don’t know that.” Obi-Wan said fiercely. 

“ Yes, I do.” Beru said back, equally as fierce. “We are of the desert. We are shaped by the places that birth us. This is the place of twin suns, of winds that peel the flesh from your bones, home of the Krayt dragons that devour towns, of slaves and masters. There is no peace here. There is only strength and how you wield it and what you can take with it. And because of how Anakin wielded his, we are safe. There are no children to grow up and come after us. No other raiders will come near us, not when we have a protector like him. Not for at least a generation to come.”

“I cannot believe that was the only choice.” Obi-Wan said stiffly, even as he turned her words over in his head. 

“Like Owen said, there was.” Beru said simply. “He could have chosen to forgive them. Then they would have no reason to come back. But, like revenge, forgiveness must be absolute, or it does not work. He would have had to leave his mother to her fate. But we are of the desert. And this is not a forgiving place. And so revenge was the only option. Complete revenge. To leave one alive would have meant it was not over. Now, because of Anakin’s actions, my husband and I might live in peace. We might have children in peace.”

Owen reached out and grasped her hand, turning a tender smile on her that Obi-Wan would not have thought him capable of. 

“Is that worth it? The death of so many for your own safety? Why not just leave this place and be done with it? It is clearly cursed.” Obi-Wan finished bitterly. 

“My name is Beru Whitesun. Did you know that?” Obi-Wan was silent, but it was quite obvious he didn’t, and he wasn’t sure of the relevance. “You are not from this place, so you might not recognize a name such as mine, but my husband’s name is Lars. A name like his, people know he is free and was born free. Whitesun is a slave name, just as Skywalker is. I am free now, but that was not always the case. I fought for what I have. This is what I have.” Here, she gestured at the walls around her, but he knew it encompassed much more. “And now, I fight for others. This table we sit at now is also where my husband and I remove the slave chips from those who can escape their masters without triggering them. Beneath our feet is a shelter that they can hide out that no scanner can penetrate. Would you have us leave that? Leave the slaves of this place more helpless than before? Would you have us stand back and let Tuskens take us away from them for the sake of children that will grow up to be just like their parents?”

“You don’t know that.” Obi-Wan said, but his tone was uncertain, his voice unconvinced. 

“We are shaped by the people that birth us, too. If they had lived, it would have been by beings just like the parents they lost. There is no escaping our fates.”

“So Anakin would have always turned out like this.” He said bitterly. 

“Like what? A warrior? Did you not make him one?” 

“The Jedi are peacekeepers.”

“Are they?” Owen interjected. “Those are not the stories we hear here. That is not what we think when we see the war you wage. When you help the Hutts hold onto power. When they suppress our people with weapons you helped them get. It seems to me Anakin turned out okay in spite of you lot.”

Obi-Wan shook his head. “Enough. I’ve heard enough of this. We are not what you think we are.”

“Neither is Anakin.” 

Obi-Wan pushed himself to his feet. “I can’t. I can’t. I have to go.”

As he dragged himself away from the table and away from them, Beru once again grabbed him by the arm. He flinched and stopped, turning to face her. Her eyes were kind but strong. 

“Please,” she said, “use the fresher before you leave. You have a way to go before you get back to your ship, and the first sun will start to set soon. Leave in comfort. And as a friend”

Obi-Wan was fairly certain he’d never be comfortable again. And he was entirely certain he was a worthy friend to no one. But he was caked in sand, and he could feel it on his lips where his scarf had hit the ground, so he nodded and let her guide him. 

The door closed behind him and he leaned back against it, head tilted up and eyes closed, raising his hand up and pulling the scarf down. He stayed like that for a moment, letting everything he’s learned that day circle around his mind like water around a drain. Then, he shuffled over to the sink, bracing his hands on it before looking up and making eye contact with himself. 

He jerked back at what he saw. Fine dust had settled into every crevice of his skin, even under where the scarf had covered him, illuminating every wrinkle and flaw. His skin looked darker, and even through that he could see new freckles blooming. Pale lines cut down his face where his tears had fallen and he’d bit his lip bloody without noticing. The biggest difference was his hair. He’d left his hair uncovered to hide his face and the sun had taken full advantage. Where at the start of the day his hair had been a darker reddish brown, it had been bleached by the sun. It sat almost blond with a reddish undertone. Altogether, he looked older and beaten. He barely recognized himself. Inside and out, it appeared he was changed. 

We are shaped by the places that birth us, Beru’s voice echoed in his mind. He could not deny he felt he’d been slain and reborn in the desert this day. What had he been rebirthed as?

****

He had no recollection of the trip back to his ship nor to Coruscant. He just knew he’d been on Tatooine and then he hadn’t. Upon landing back at the Temple, he’d been leveled with a disapproving look by Quinlan Vos and dragged to the healers. There, Bant had sat him on a bed and forced him to sit with his head lowered in order to apply bacta to his very burned neck. First, she had had to cut open the blisters that had already formed and taken over, grumbling about how he’d managed to get himself into this situation on what was supposed to be his shore leave. Vos had cracked more ‘old man’ jokes in that 15 minutes than he had in the past 6 months, but the stoniness in his eye belied his humor. 

Obi-Wan himself had sat quietly and been grateful for the awkward, hunched way he’d been forced to sit, as he was fairly sure he’d never be able to look a fellow Jedi in the eye ever again. 

It was hours later that Mace Windu arrived at his door. Obi-Wan was half afraid he or Yoda had sensed every new secret he carried with him. Obi-Wan let him in and watched as Windu’s eyes locked onto his hair and his eyebrows shot up. 

“I’m not even going to ask, Kenobi.” 

“It’s best that you don’t.” He responded, which was a fairly normal response from him, given the number of times he and Anakin had come back from a mission covered in slime, with a new, stolen ship, or on one occasion wearing eye makeup. This time, however, it lacked its usual humor.

Windu caught the seriousness and eyed him appraisingly. “The council saw fit to allow you this leave as time to recover from the loss of your Padawan. I and the others do not begrudge you for it. However, this is a trying time for the Republic. We need all our members doing what they can. Are you prepared to take on a mission at this time?”

A mission sounded perfect to Obi-Wan. The more complex the better. Anything to take his mind off of his recent journey and to put some space between himself and all the spaces he had shared with Anakin. 

“Yes. I believe I am ready.”

“Excellent. We have an undercover mission we think you would be suited for. We have word that there is a plan to kidnap the Chancellor.”