Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Anakin Skywalker wondered if the bridge of a starship was the only place in the galaxy he had ever known peace.

He stood behind the copilot’s chair, craning his neck to see over the lekku of its occupant, and gazed out into the empty blackness of space. Nothing out there in any direction – even the stars were too distant for him to see properly. Around him, hundreds of planets lived in their own worlds, teeming with their own problems, but Anakin didn’t have to look at any of them. Didn’t have to think about any of them. Only the speed of their ship, the steady humming and beeping of controls and droids, and around them, the vacuum of space.

Anakin frowned to himself. Peace was overrated.

“How long until we’re there, Quinlan?” he asked the pilot.

“About two minutes less than the last time you asked me,” said the Kiffar man who sat in the pilot’s chair, his feet kicked up and resting lazily on the controls. “And still at least another hour until we break atmosphere. Enough time for you to run another circuit of the ship, if you wanted.”

“Ha ha.” Quinlan had used that trick on him a few times back in their old spaceship, back when they’d left Tatooine more than a year before. Anakin knew it too well by now to be fooled. “And have Obi-Wan snap at me for disturbing his meditation again? No thank you.”

“Give him a break,” said Quinlan mildly. “He’s still adjusting.”

“And I’m not?”

“Why are you so impatient, anyway?” cut in the copilot for the first time. Aayla Secura spun her chair slightly to face Anakin, leaning forward like she was genuinely interested in his response – like she wasn’t just trying to make peace. “I thought you weren’t that excited to go back to Tatooine.”

Anakin gave her a dirty look. She wasn’t supposed to have revealed that to anyone. “It’s better than waiting around,” he said. If something was going to happen, he’d rather have it happen now than sit around waiting for it, listen to lots of advice about what he was supposed to do when it happened, and deal with everyone’s worry about what he was going to do. “Besides, Mom wants to go back.”

Whyever that was. His mom had never had a good life on Tatooine, and Anakin had spent most of his youth waiting for the time to come when he could win both their freedom and take her away somewhere much better. But when that time had come, he’d left and she hadn’t, and she’d decided that Tatooine was her home now.

And, for whatever reason, all the rest of them had decided to make it theirs, too.

Aayla’s mouth turned down slightly, as if she’d read his thoughts. Maybe she had – she knew more about them than most of the others on the ship, except for maybe Qui-Gon, who had made it his business to know as much about Anakin’s mind as possible. Even his mom didn’t know this, because if it was what she wanted, how was he supposed to tell her that it was never what he’d wanted for her? Especially when making decisions for other people was one of those things he was supposed to stop doing.

One of the many, many things he was supposed to stop doing. Just yesterday, he’d snapped that Qui-Gon should just make him a list – and then regretted it when Qui-Gon had made him do it himself, under his supervision.

“And there’s important work to be done there,” said Quinlan. “We might be doing things a little differently now, but that hasn’t changed. We always” –

“– go where the work is,” Aayla finished in unison with him, and flashed Anakin a hopeful little smile.

If there was anything Anakin had learned from his time with these Jedi, there was work everywhere. But it wasn’t like he could complain about trying to help people on Tatooine, especially after he’d learned firsthand how little anyone else cared about them. So he sighed and turned away from Quinlan and Aayla to look back out the window.

Tatooine. The planet where he’d lived most of his life, where his mom had chosen to make her home. Where they were now going to meet up with her friends and allies who were fighting to end slavery on the planet for good. It was something that Anakin should care about – something he did care about. He’d dreamed of freeing the slaves ever since he was a little kid. But when caring too much was part of what had made everything go to shit, it was hard to figure out what he was supposed to think about anything.

He reached into the pocket of his robe and fingered the little stone-carved figure that Padmé had given him before they’d left Naboo. To remember me by, she’d said, and given him that special smile that felt like it was just for him. I didn’t carve it myself, but I picked it out especially for you. He’d been using it as a center when he could reach a meditative state (for a few seconds before some thought inevitably led him into a spiral instead). There was something grounding about Padmé, something he could latch onto when he felt like the galaxy was falling apart around him.

Another few minutes passed before a faint whirring sound announced the presence of two hoverchairs entering the bridge behind Anakin. Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan, then. Anakin could feel their presence in the Force as well as hearing them, like sand grating on the edges of his awareness, and he bit down on his lip so that he wouldn’t turn around and glare.

He didn’t want to look at Qui-Gon right now. The echoes of their latest argument were still ringing in his head, and he couldn’t even picture Qui-Gon’s face without his eyes blurring and his jaw tensing to the point of pain. Yes, maybe it wasn’t how a Jedi was supposed to feel, but the thought of seeing it for real made him want to bite something, hard.

They’d been doing that more often lately, fighting. Qui-Gon had been a comforting presence to Anakin since they’d first met, back when he’d been his only point of hope in the confusing and sterile newness of life with the Jedi, and then again when they’d left the Order for real. Qui-Gon had been the Jedi Anakin had always dreamed of being, that person who made him think that everything was possible. A figure of power. But Palpatine had convinced Anakin that Qui-Gon had been weak. Not strong enough to protect him, not willing to do what must be done. He regretted that now – he had to, now that he’d seen what Palpatine’s own strength had made him willing to do – but it didn’t mean he couldn’t see the truth in it, not when Qui-Gon chastised him yet again for being too strong or criticized his plans or his approaches for the thousandth time every day. Sometimes he looked at Qui-Gon’s face and wanted to sink a fist into it.

Of course, Qui-Gon had figured that out. It didn’t make trying to be taught by him any easier.

“What do we expect to see above the planet?” Qui-Gon said. He seemed to be ignoring Anakin as much as Anakin was ignoring him; otherwise he would have come up to him with a hand for his shoulder. Anakin didn’t want him to do it, but still he bristled when Qui-Gon didn’t even approach him. “Sensors picking anything up?”

“Nothing yet,” said Quinlan, “but we’re braced for trouble just in case. The transmission was so patchy that I can’t imagine there isn’t some kind of monitoring system above the planet.”

They’d only managed to contact the people on the planet once, which must mean that both powers on the planet were blocking as many comm frequencies as they could. They still didn’t know what had lowered the defenses enough to sneak past them the one time, but Obi-Wan had pointed out that it could be a trap meant for them to walk right into it.

They hadn’t made their plans public, so no one should know that they were coming, but surely word of the new upheaval in the Republic had reached Tatooine by now.

When Anakin had left the planet months before, it had been taken over by Count Dooku and his Separatist army. Anakin remembered that more clearly than anything he’d ever seen in his life: the way Dooku had so easily taken Qui-Gon down and then thrown Obi-Wan and even Anakin around like they’d been nothing to him. The way he’d taken Anakin’s mother in chains and vanished. It was burned into his brain.

Weak, he’d thought then, and Palpatine had promised to make him strong. But Palpatine had been behind the whole thing, and he’d been the one keeping Anakin’s mom prisoner. He had to remember that. He had to cling to that when the anger crashed over him. That’s what his mom had encouraged him to do, anyway, and he could never be mad at her – not really. Not even if Palpatine had wanted him to be.

“With any luck,” said Qui-Gon, “they’ll be expecting Hutt ships, not ours.”

Their ship, procured from Naboo but not from the royal palace, had no markings. It looked like it could be a smuggler’s ship, which was the way they were trying to disguise themselves. Tatooine had been controlled by the Separatists last time they’d been there, yes, but in their research on the planet, they’d picked up news that the Hutts were battling to retake the planet. They tended to step in to defend their own, Rowana had said, and it would make sense that the Hutts would be reaching out for aid – and that the Separatist military wouldn’t want to let them get it. “Military leaders who have been given control of a planet won’t relinquish it easily,” she’d said, “even if their commander is taken down. Following orders only goes so far once someone has had a taste of power.”

It had been strange to see her giving the research report on her own without Rie by her side. Anakin wasn’t sure how much of the research Rie had even done.

He wasn’t sure about much of anything these days when it came to Rie. She was a quiet shadow in the group, saying little, doing even less. Weak, his mind taunted again, and he gritted his teeth against his own thoughts.

“Let them fight each other,” said Obi-Wan, and his hoverchair whirred as he brought it closer to Quinlan’s seat – entering Anakin’s peripheral vision before Anakin could do anything about it – “and maybe we can slip in unannounced.”

Anakin looked slightly away so that he wouldn’t have to see Obi-Wan’s hoverchair anymore. That was also something he couldn’t bear to look at – not when he knew that Obi-Wan’s missing leg was his fault, and not when he could hear Palpatine’s voice still echoing in his head, that same word. Weak. Weak, to choose a hoverchair and a detachable prosthesis when he could have been restored to full strength with two working legs. Weak, to choose to spend more time in meditation than immediately throw himself into his retraining.

Weak, to want Anakin to do the same thing.

He pushed it down, down and away, yet again. Qui-Gon had told him, when his internal thoughts were too loud, to try and focus on the external instead. It had been something he’d been good at once, back before Palpatine had gotten into his head and twisted him all around against himself. And just because he was mad at Qui-Gon now didn’t mean it wasn’t still good advice.

He focused outside again, ignoring everyone else on the bridge, out into the empty space. Felt the quiet of it all slowly suffusing his mind, let his heartbeat match with the steady beeping of the astromech. Let himself ignore all other organic sound inside the ship, thinking only about the whir of machinery and the emptiness of space –

Wait. Not empty. There was something else out there, something big. He could feel it, and it was coming at them, and it was going to –

“Get to the guns!” he cried. “They’re going to attack!”

“What?”

Obi-Wan made that single word sound like the crack of a whip, and Anakin’s face went hot with anger as if Obi-Wan had actually hit him. The reflex jolted him out of his heightened awareness and back to the ship – back to where he couldn’t feel anything but his own frustration, back to where all these people kept insisting on pinning him down.

“There’s a ship,” he said, not even trying to sound less annoyed. “I can feel it coming for us.”

“And you know it’s going to attack?”

Qui-Gon’s voice was so mild that Anakin whipped around suspiciously, and then had to bite back his rage once again. Qui-Gon’s face was not angry, just that simple questioning expression that he had always used when he wanted Anakin to think twice, to challenge his assumptions – but around it he could see the pockets of weariness, the heavy bags under his eyes and the collapsed crumple between his brow. Qui-Gon was tired of him, Anakin knew, and it snarled in a mass of guilt and anger and sadness that he couldn’t even begin to untangle.

At least the coming fight was a good reason not to try. “I can feel it,” he insisted. “Their intentions. They’re angry.”

“Be that as it may,” Qui-Gon began, but Quinlan interrupted.

“Wait,” he said. “Yes, the sensors are picking something up now. There’s a ship entering our space.”

“Call the others,” said Qui-Gon, and Aayla hit the ship’s intercom.

“All passengers report to the bridge, please,” she said. “There’s something in our sky.”

The other three trickled in, first Rowana and then Rie trailing her like a silent shadow, and then Anakin’s mother last of all. He turned to look at her so that he wouldn’t have to look at any of the rest of them, reaching for her presence in the same way he reached for the gift Padmé had given him. As long as she was all right, he could remember why everything else was important.

“What’s going on?” asked Rowana, her gaze sliding around the bridge from one to the other. It rested a little too long on Anakin, and he felt his own face crumpling into a scowl. She’d taken to doing that, looking at him for too long, like she was waiting for him to snap at any moment – or like she was trying to figure him out like some kind of puzzle. Beside her, Rie was as blank-faced as ever. When he looked at her, the guilt and indignation were even worse, so Anakin looked away as quickly as he could to focus back on his mom.

“We’re coming up on Tatooine,” said Quinlan, “and there’s a ship heading in our direction. Anakin says he can sense hostile intentions.”

“I see,” said Rowana, and glanced at Anakin again. Again, Rie said nothing.

“I can,” Anakin insisted. “You were the one who said that they’d be defending the space. Trying to keep in power.”

“I did,” Rowana said. “And it is likely true. Still, we will approach without hostility. That might  give us the chance to negotiate.”

And since when has negotiating with these people ever worked, Anakin wanted to say, but no one was going to listen to him, and his mom was still watching him, so he held his tongue and waited.

And waited. They all settled into a tense silence, eyes on the ship coming closer to them in the sensors. When it was close enough, Rowana came forward, brushing past Anakin, to join Quinlan and Aayla at the controls.

“Open the comm channels,” she directed. “Let’s see if we can get a sense of what we’re dealing with here.”

“On it,” said Quinlan, and hit the button.

“Intruders?” came the voice crackling over the comm. “Travel to Tatooine has been locked down to all but those ships approved by the Independent Alliance. What is your business on this planet?”

“We’re travelers,” said Quinlan. They had only managed to make contact with the revolutionary group on the planet once, but they’d managed to at least get across that the group shouldn’t identify themselves as Jedi, not for now. “We’ve been exploring the Outer Rim for several months and are hoping to return home. But who are you? I’ve never heard of the Independent Alliance, and I’ve never been accosted on my way back into Tatooine.”

“Travelers.” Even through the crackle of the comm, the voice was heavy with suspicion and something else, something that pinged at Anakin’s feelings in a flicker of wrongness. “How long did you say you’d been away?”

“Long enough, apparently,” said Quinlan, letting his voice relax into a lazy insolent drawl that would have impressed any smuggler. “Why should I share my business with you?”

“Independent Alliance,” murmured Obi-Wan once Quinlan had muted their end of the channel. “I suppose we know what the Separatists are calling themselves on this planet now, then.”

“Isn’t that a paradox?” said Aayla. “How can you be both independent and an alliance?”

“It’s not about the meaning,” said Rowana. “It’s the symbol and the impact. The name is derived from the Confederacy of Independent Systems, but the words are meant to evoke a sense of strength and unity. We know that they don’t have those things on their own, so I suspect they’re leaning into titles to simulate them.”

 Before anyone else could speak up, the comm activated again. “We’ll need your identification and purpose before we can allow you onto the planet,” said the voice. “Prepare to be scanned.”

“Sending identification over now,” said Quinlan, punching in the code.

While it transmitted, the only sound was the humming and beeping of the ship. The identification they’d chosen was a generic merchant code of the kind used by smugglers – otherwise known as the only sort of people who tended to have business on Tatooine. They’d hoped that using the same cover as a smuggler would throw no more suspicion on them than it did on the typical smuggler ship – even if you suspected that there was something wrong, if you couldn’t prove it, you would still have to let them through.

Except that it hadn’t worked. Anakin could feel it now with the same sense that had flickered with wrongness when the voice had first spoken to them: an angry suspicion, an intent to hurt, that set his skin prickling and the hair rising all along his arms and spine. He knew – all at once – that it was a trick. The voice talking to them, the scanning of their ship, was just a distraction – and as soon as he felt that, he could feel the real threat materializing in the air behind them, emerging from a cloaking shield.

“There’s another ship!” he cried. “Coming up behind us – they’re shooting!”

Aayla reacted without any further prompting, diving for the shields and slamming the button just as the bright red of an incoming cannon shot streaked towards them.

She barely got the shields up in time. The whole ship rocked as the beam hit them; Obi-Wan cursed as he was nearly thrown from his hoverchair and Qui-Gon braced him with a hand. Anakin stayed on his feet, and Rowana, but his mom stumbled and clutched his arm for stability, and to their side, Anakin heard a thud and an intake of breath as Rie was flung against the wall.

“What is this treachery?” spit Quinlan into the commlink. “Shooting at travelers who are just trying to return home?”

“The treachery comes from you,” came the voice through the comm. “Do you think we can’t recognize a ship of Naboo when we see one? You’re from the Republic, come to meddle in our affairs.”

“Can’t argue with them there,” said Obi-Wan wryly, the sort of dry humor that made Anakin almost like him. “Qui-Gon?”

“Concentrate on the beams,” said Qui-Gon tightly. “Aayla has the guns and shields; we can try to deflect their shots with the Force. It might confuse them enough to let us slip by.”

“And then what?” burst out Anakin. “Be tracked down as soon as we land on the planet? Draw attention right to the people we’re supposed to protect?”

Qui-Gon never got a chance to answer; he and Obi-Wan held up their hands together, eyes closed – working in the kind of synchronization that Anakin had been jealous of ever since Qui-Gon had agreed to take him as a padawan. When would he get to work in sync with someone like that; when would it feel so easy and natural to work together? When would he and Qui-Gon be able to stop fighting and understand each other again?

Around him, everyone seemed to have a job to do. Aayla was firing the guns, Quinlan was flying in evasive maneuvers. Rowana had joined Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan in deflecting the shots. Only Anakin’s mom and Rie seemed to be at loose ends. But that was right for them – they basically didn’t have the Force, so it wasn’t like there was something to do. Anakin, though –

It felt like he was being excluded on purpose, and he didn’t like it.

The ship rocked again as they were hit once more, and Aayla reached out to return fire, but she was too slow, too tentative. Another shot would finish their shields, and then they would be vulnerable, and no one seemed to admit that there was only one thing to do –

Anakin couldn’t stand it anymore. He dove for the controls.

Aayla let out a cry as he hit her; unprepared for an attack from within the ship, she lost her grip on the controls and slid out of the seat. Qui-Gon’s shout of “Ani!” rang through the air, but it was too late for him to stop Anakin. He took the controls, swiveled to face the oncoming ship, reached out with the Force, and fired.

The shot struck true – right at the weak point in their own shields, the one Anakin had felt as if it were second nature. The glass was tinted, so he couldn’t see the faces of the people inside as their ship exploded into a fireball – and the vacuum sucked away their screams before they could even let them out.

“Anakin!” Obi-Wan’s voice added to the chorus of cries in the ship, but Anakin was past listening. They were under attack, and he was being held back even now? This was what he was good at; this was what everyone had always relied on him to do, wasn’t it? Be the power that let them stay pure?

He turned in the gun seat, feeling the click and hum outside the ship – he couldn’t hear it, but he had locked in and he could sense as the ship responded to him – as the gun swiveled to target the other ship: the one that had hailed them, the one right in front of them. Identification and purpose? Anakin would show them what purpose truly looked like.

“Wait!” cried Rowana, but Anakin was past waiting. He fired again, feeling for the weak point, wrapping his mind around the shot to ensure that it would strike true the first time. What was the point in warning? What was the point in trying not to fight?

Another hit. Before them, the ship exploded in waves of light and heat that Anakin couldn’t feel, and their own ship wrenched violently to port as Quinlan turned them out of the way of the explosion.

It rocked them anyway, though. Their shields were weakened from the hits they had already taken, and the ship lurched again, then wobbled back into its trajectory towards the planet.

For a moment, everything was silent.

Then, Qui-Gon cleared his throat. “Is everyone all right?”

“The ship’s been slightly damaged,” said Quinlan, looking at the terminal again, “but it seems non-urgent. We should be able to limp to the surface and find our people.”

“I’m fine.” Obi-Wan’s hands were still clutching the armrests of his hoverchair, and for a moment Anakin entertained a moment of internal I-told-you-so – wouldn’t he have been glad to have two legs right now? “Aayla?”

He was asking about her, but his eyes were locked onto Anakin.

Aayla was pushing herself to her feet from the floor next to the controls, where Anakin had shoved her. “I’m all right,” she said slowly, rubbing her shoulder, but when her eyes landed on Anakin, they were huge with shock and betrayal.

Anakin couldn’t look at her. He looked at his mother instead, hoping to find some kind of peace in her presence – but she wouldn’t look back at him. Her gaze was fixed on the floor instead, and Rowana came up beside her and put a hand on her arm.

“Everyone else?” she said quietly. “Shmi? Rie?”

“No harm done,” said Anakin’s mom, though she still wouldn’t look up.

All eyes turned to Rie, who had been silent since entering the bridge. Who had, in fact, been nearly silent for the last several weeks. Just like with all the others, it aroused the same combination of anger and guilt in Anakin – the knowledge that he was blamed for this, just like everything else – and that he was blamed because it was his fault.

Her face had been blank all the while, that same neutral mask of an expression, but her eyes widened for a moment when she realized that everyone was looking at her. Her jaw worked for a moment, lips quivering, before she finally said, “Fine.” Her voice was soft and cracked, and Shmi looked up from the floor at last at the sound of it. Rie seemed to flinch as their gazes met, shrinking back against the wall of the ship.

“Excuse me,” she said at last, and fled the bridge.

As soon as she had gone, all eyes in the room turned back once again to Anakin.

Enough of this. He’d done what he had to do, he’d done what they all would have agreed had to be done anyway, if they’d just skipped all the arguing and trying to negotiate, and he knew it was probably bad, but he was sick of them all staring at him like that.

“I’m going to my room, too,” he said abruptly, and followed her out.

Chapter Text

The sunlight of Tatooine flooded into their ship like the impossible landscape of a dream.

Or like the waking from one. Shmi Skywalker swayed on the bridge of their ship as it hit her, blinking against the brightness and gripping almost unconsciously at the railing along the window to keep herself upright as place and time whirled around her.

Her dreams, during her long imprisonment on Coruscant, had centered around reaching for this light. Alone in the dark, with only the chill of her prison and the occasional malice of her captor, she had sought refuge in sleep and dreamed again and again of an endless journey home, searching for these suns and waking up just as she was about to find them, swallowed back into darkness and the taunt of an impossible refuge. Could it be true that she was really returning, finally, after all this time?

Or was this all just one last trick? When she returned, would it be to a world that had no place for her anymore?

Her grip tightened on the rail and she squinted out, forcing herself to look past the brightness and at the ground lurching closer. Quinlan was doing his best with the ship, but the damage they’d sustained meant their landing was bound to be rougher than they’d hoped – and attract more attention, too. Which was, she could only imagine, exactly the opposite of what Gira had hoped for when they’d spoken – briefly and haltingly – over comm.

Gira Cloudfall had been one of Shmi’s closest friends and co-conspirators during her time working for freedom on Tatooine, and one of the many people whose fates Shmi had not known for the many months of her imprisonment. Obi-Wan had told her that Gira was alive when he’d left Tatooine, but no one knew what had happened to any of them in the time since – the time following the Separatist occupation.

Independent Alliance occupation now, apparently.

Gira’s hints about a rendezvous point had led them to somewhere near Mos Eisley – close enough to the traffic of that port that they would either be ignored or suspected as smugglers, the cover they’d hoped to assume, but far enough away that they wouldn’t be swept into the thick of things. That had been Shmi’s interpretation, anyway. But Gira had seemed distant when they spoke, harder to read. Was that the interference of the comm, or the distance of months?

Or was it something in Shmi herself?

She twisted around to glance at where Anakin had stormed away from the bridge, moments before. Once, Shmi would have gone to find him, to comfort him. But there were times now when she felt she didn’t even know her son anymore. When she couldn’t help but remember –

She shuddered and rubbed at her arms, as if she could banish the remembered chill of binders on her wrists.

“Circling the rendezvous point,” said Quinlan at last, breaking the silence. “Where do you think we should set down?”

“Not too close to Mos Eisley, right?” said Aayla. “Didn’t we want to avoid the fuss?”

“Unless we’d rather blend in with the crowds and disappear later,” said Obi-Wan. “In which case we’d want to stay closer.”

“Shmi.” That voice belonged to Rowana Navarr, that particular combination of gentle and direct that she always seemed to manage. “You know them best. Where do you think they would want us to meet?”

Shmi blinked again, and this time it had nothing to do with the brightness of the sun.

You know them best. Did she? Did she know anything about these people she had been away from for so long? Could her thoughts or perceptions still be trusted at all?

She turned and found herself pinned in that steady gaze, those dark eyes refusing to release her. Rowana had a knack for that, Shmi had come to notice – for asking the question or making the demand that struck right at the heart of whatever you most wanted to avoid . . . and whatever, in the end, you needed most.

She took a breath.

She’d interpreted Gira’s message as meaning further from Mos Eisley, while the others had clearly been divided on it. Was that assumption or intuition? She cast her mind back – when they’d all been working together, building their network from the ground up, Loam Whitesun had been drawn to crowded areas. He’d preferred to mingle with neighbors and merchants, building connections wherever he could and not shying away from a fight if he had to have one. It had been a point of contention between him and Gira – Gira, who had once been a dancer in Jabba’s palace and avoided seedy crowds as much as possible in favor of covert yet straightforward connection.

And Loam was dead. Shmi had seen him fall moments before she’d been taken captive – and with the two of them both gone, Gira would have taken command in their absence. Surely, with Hutts and military on the warpath against one another, Gira would have chosen to stay out of the thick of things.

“They’ll be some distance away,” she said. “Close enough to observe, but far enough not to risk being observed in turn. I’d guess to the north – that’s the easiest place to disguise yourself as a traveler if you need to.”

“North?” said Rowana. “Then that’s where we’ll go.”

She spoke as if it were settled – and apparently, it was. The ship lurched gently forward, Quinlan coaxing it lower and further, and silence fell again.

Into that silence crept doubt, yet again. The doubt about what would be awaiting them, the uncertainty of conflict, the fear of what they might have to do if a fight broke out. The fear of what they had already done.

Shmi fought the urge to glance back, yet again, at where Anakin had departed.

The whir of Qui-Gon’s hoverchair, familiar by now, came up on her opposite side, and she turned to face him instead, a welcome distraction. “Qui-Gon.”

“Shmi.” He settled in at her side, gazing ahead in the same direction. She wondered what he saw, out there in the bright sun and sand. Home, for her – or at least, the home she had spent months praying to return to. Home for him, too? He had confessed his hopes of establishing a small group of Jedi here, of changing and learning and growing on Tatooine. Would those hopes survive whatever came next for them? “How are you?”

She didn’t need to lie to him, but nor did she want to tell the whole truth. “I’m managing,” she said.

His lips pressed together in a rueful smile, and he gave a tiny nod. “I’m sure you are.”

Looks were deceiving, Shmi had learned from Qui-Gon Jinn long before. For all that he sat half-slumped in his chair, she had seen him spring into action before in more dire circumstances – and she knew that he was in large part to blame for bringing her son back to her. For pulling him back from a path of destruction, or at least from the point of no return.

Still, his face was drawn into tired lines and his hair was tousled and snarled around his shoulders as if he had just gotten out of bed, and she found herself asking, “And you?”

Another slight smile. “The same.”

Limping, then. Just like Anakin, just like Shmi herself, just like their ship and everyone on it. No one in shape to join a revolution, and yet Shmi would have to trust that even though they didn’t look or feel it, that didn’t mean they couldn’t do it.

The Jedi had helped her before, in times and places when she had never expected that help – in ways that she could not have imagined before receiving it. And, more importantly, she had been able to help herself. She had faith in her movement – and whatever extra power she could bring them would be a benefit.

She had to believe that. Had to believe that she wasn’t returning to them empty handed.

Had to believe that returning to them at all was better than nothing.

She twisted her hands together before her, trying to soothe her troubled thoughts. Seeking the calm that had guided her through a lifetime of slavery, that six months of confinement had perhaps shaken irreparably.

“Do you want to talk about it?” asked Qui-Gon.

“Soon, there won’t be anything to say,” Shmi said, and that at least was true enough.

What would happen when they saw her again? Brief transmissions with one friend had not been enough to paint Shmi a true picture of what was going on here – what had happened during her long, enforced absence. What had her group gone through that she had not been here to help them with?

And who might they have lost in the meantime?

Cliegg’s face surfaced in her mind, and she bit her lip. Cliegg, who had been her savior from slavery without expecting anything for himself in return. Who had supported her in her network and lent whatever resources he had to the task. Who had put himself and his family at risk –

Who surely would have waited for her. Wouldn’t he?

The situation on Tatooine, as they had best ascertained – and seemingly now confirmed – was that the military leadership Dooku had put in place remained. Though Dooku himself had been apprehended and confessed to a plot to manufacture the war on behalf of eventual power consolidation in the Republic, the machines and the military were real enough. With their leader out of the way, the Confederacy of Independent Systems had broken down, their politics revealed to be little but shared resentment and grievance. Some of those systems were negotiating those grievances with the Republic now; some Jedi had been dispatched to help with that task – but on Tatooine, and other annexed planets outside the Republic, that help had mostly fallen by the wayside.

It was typical of the Republic, though in this case – the scrambling, the reveal of a massive plot – Shmi could forgive it. What it meant, though, was that the military – the Independent Alliance, apparently – remained in command of Tatooine even as the Hutts, the gangster group that had formerly controlled it, struggled to regain their power.

What that meant for the people on the planet itself, Shmi had not been able to ascertain. What it meant for her group in particular –

In all their time as an independent network, they hadn’t had a chance to speak of larger goals beyond mere fantasies. The grip that the Hutts and the slavers had on the whole system was too tight, the net too close to do more than slip a few more people free of it every few months. But that wasn’t to say the dreams hadn’t been there – dreams of breaking that grip for good, of making a new system of power on the planet. Of giving it back to the people.

They had never quite reached the point of discussing what that actually looked like. But surely now, with the leadership of the planet in play, those dreams would have turned into plans – plans made without Shmi there to help.

They were flying low now, skimming just above the ground, and the Jedi were on high alert, straining forward as if listening for something Shmi could never hear.

It was Rowana who found it eventually, stepping up to meet Quinlan at the controls. “I sense it,” she said quietly. “A disturbance, a pocket of intent.”

“Positive intent?” said Qui-Gon.

Rowana tilted her head, a tiny wry smile playing on her lips. “Positive enough.”

Shmi’s stomach squirmed as if it were alive with worms. She hadn’t let herself imagine how this would be, this moment – couldn’t know what to expect from it – but here she was, and here they were, and the ship lowered, and the sun was in her eyes, dazzling her until her sight blurred into a useless blob of light and color – beige only, the sandy color of Tatooine that she had begun long ago to call home, now almost unrecognizable before her eyes.

The ship settled down into the sand with the creak and groan of failing machinery. If they were wrong about this, would they be able to get it started again?

The site Rowana had indicated was one of the rocky, canyonlike areas – certainly a place where people might be able to hide, where a base might be set up. But even as the dust settled, there was still no movement from the surrounding rocks – no indication of anyone awaiting a meeting. Shmi twisted her hands together, resisting the urge to clasp her wrists. Had she been mistaken in her instincts? Had Rowana been wrong about her senses?

“They’re here,” said Rowana, with a quiet self-assurance that Shmi couldn’t doubt. “Trust me.” She activated the ship’s intercom. “To the bridge, please, Rie and Anakin. We’re here.”

Shmi had trusted the Jedi before, and they had not let her down. She took a deep breath, pressing down on the wriggle of doubt still inside her, and when the ramp activated, she followed the others out of the ship.

The desert air hit her in a scorching blast – dry heat unlike anything she had felt on Coruscant, on Naboo, the kind of heat she’d been craving to drive away the cold. For a moment, breathing the air of her chosen home, Shmi was able to forget her doubt.

And then, without warning, she was tackled into the sand.

The weight hit her from the side, shock as much as force propelling her facefirst to the ground. She didn’t even have time to get her bearings before there was an arm over her shoulders, a body tucked over her own –

And a streak of light, white-hot and ominous, whistling over her head.

Shmi gasped for air, trying not to inhale sand instead, as another shot rang out, and another. An ambush? Had their comms been tracked, or had the ships at home base identified them as the ones who had targeted their guard? She struggled to get her bearings, to identify even the person on top of her – it was Aayla, who had clearly sensed the bolt before Shmi had and stepped in to defend her. But surely their allies wouldn’t be shooting at them! Had they been attacked first? Had it all been a trap?

Shouts rang out, exclamations of surprise and alarm, and around her she heard the familiar buzz-hum of lightsabers activating, the twang of blaster bolts ricocheting off their blades. They’d flown into an ambush. Had the ships Anakin had taken down managed to warn the others on the surface before they could have arrived?

Shmi’s hands clenched in the sand, grains spilling between her fingers. Her hair had come unpinned from its loose knot on impact and now hung heavy in her face and on her neck, already damp and beginning to clump with sweat. Had she forgotten the heat here? Or had it somehow intensified in her absence? She dared to look up even as Aayla scrambled up off her, igniting her own lightsaber and standing over Shmi in a defensive posture.

Through the blur of sand and sweat, Shmi could make out the dark blots of people and machinery, the glow of weapons. What had Rowana said? Positive enough? She’d been wrong, then – she must have – what she’d sensed was a military trap, not the presence of Shmi’s friends and husband –

“Now!”

That voice cut above the rest, piercing and familiar, and Shmi froze.

Out of the rock, from hidden pockets she hadn’t noticed, came another small stream of people. People she recognized. Gira Cloudfall led the charge – it was her voice that had spoken – tall and commanding with the added height of her lekku and dressed in camouflage fatigues. Behind her came Midge Swift, small and intent, her hair a cloud around her head, wielding her favored blaster. And at her side –

When Shmi had first met Cliegg Lars nearly three years before, he’d been flush with health and wealth. Rounder, more comfortable-looking than some of the other merchants, good-humored, with smoother skin that spoke of the water he was more readily able to access. He’d been pleasant, if gruff, had favored her with rosy smiles and the utmost in politeness as he searched Watto’s shop for the parts he was looking for. As he’d come back – more and more frequently over the next months – she’d gotten to know him, to learn that an equally pleasant soul lived beneath that exterior. Cliegg was good and frank in a way few dealers on Tatooine were, up-front about his intentions and moved to help those who needed it whenever he could. When he’d bought her freedom, shortly after Anakin’s departure with the Jedi, he’d offered to help her get on her feet again – offered to connect her to friends of his who could help her, if she didn’t want to take help from someone who had given money for her life.

Marrying him, only scant months after that, had been one of her easiest decisions – as easy as Cliegg’s round smile.

Now, the months of their parting had taken their toll. He was leaner, harder in the face and the jaw than she remembered, his short beard grown longer and wilder as if he’d stopped taking care of it. His eyes had a glint to them, something steely and hard that she’d never seen before, and he wielded a blaster of his own as he plunged into the fight.

The fight, Shmi realized, that they had expected.

The fight for which she and the Jedi had been used as bait.

The fighting was all chaos now – rebels and Jedi alike converging on the military machines from both directions, surrounding them. When Shmi could catch a glimpse of their foes, she realized that this was machinery she didn’t recognize, either Separatist military equipment or supplied by Hutt allies from off-planet. Their ammunition was thicker, heavier, than typical blasterfire; it resonated with a deeper hum as it deflected off the Jedi’s lightsabers. It seemed to take more effort to deflect, too. Aayla grunted as she parried a shot; Obi-Wan was leaning back in his hoverchair; Qui-Gon was faltering even more. Even Quinlan and Rowana seemed to be struggling a bit, though they were still in full fighting form.

There were two exceptions. The first was Anakin, whose face seemed transported with a violent glee Shmi had never seen in him. It was not the joy she’d always despaired of when he returned from podracing, the sheer delight in freedom and speed – this was something different, something that set a sudden chill swirling over her arms and down her spine, despite the heat of the desert. The sweat on her back was clammy, soaking through the lower layer of her clothing. He deflected shots with ruthless efficiency, and everywhere he returned the fire, something exploded.

The other exception was Rie, the human woman whom Shmi still knew so little about. She had drawn her lightsaber but had not ignited it; it was nothing more than a metal handle that she held loosely in both hands, staring down at it as if she suddenly didn’t know what it was.

But there were not only the Jedi, of course. Shmi’s friends, neighbors, and co-conspirators had converged on the machines, attacking from both sides – and the closer they came, the more of them Shmi recognized. Not only Gira, Midge, and Cliegg, but Daemin Whitesun, who had apparently also taken up a weapon in the fighting, and her daughter Beru, wielding a blaster larger even than Midge’s. She stood back to back with Owen, Cliegg’s son, who had begun to feel like Shmi’s as well. Not the same as Anakin, but a boy whom she could watch grow up, who could be part of her life.

Except, of course, that he hadn’t. Except that she’d been away while they’d made all these plans, had returned now to a group of people who would use her as bait for a fight they’d clearly been expecting.

When Shmi had been here, they had not been a fighting organization, not really. They would defend themselves if they had to, either from the occasional tangle with a slaver or a marauding band of scavengers, but they had not been a force like this that worked together as if militancy had been their goal all along.

Shmi’s wrists tingled.

She had no blaster – and certainly no lightsaber – of her own, so she stayed low to the ground, trying, if nothing else, to make herself a smaller target. Aayla was covering her, and Shmi had come to know the Jedi well enough to know that if she moved from her position, Aayla would move as well. She couldn’t do anything to jeopardize her protectors, especially not when she didn’t know the scope of the battle they were fighting. Was this a small ambush, or had they landed in a full-scale military operation?

Suddenly, a wave of exhaustion swept over Shmi, so powerful that she sank lower to the ground. Was this all there was for them? Fighting and killing, staving off the next attack or attacking themselves? Surely there was a way they could stop living like this. Surely there was a way to bring peace to this planet.

The shots were fewer and farther between now, and the hum of the ships lower – and then, with a cry, Beru pointed into the distance.

“They’re running!” she shouted.

“Don’t let them!” Gira shouldered her blaster and squeezed off another round of shots. “Stop them at any cost!”

It sat uneasily in Shmi’s stomach, watching her compatriots aim shots at the backs of their fleeing opponents. Even the Jedi seemed to have been given pause – well, all but one. Anakin had taken off running after them into the distance.

With the shots coming only from their group, Shmi dared to push herself to her feet for a better view. The ships around them – yes, they had been stalled. Even as she watched, Cliegg and Daemin were approaching the first, peering through its windows and wrenching open its doors and conferring softly before moving onto the next one. Ensuring that it was empty – or worse? Qui-Gon had started his hoverchair off in the direction Anakin had run, but surely he couldn’t outpace him.

Shmi watched in that direction anyway – watched the tiny speck that was her son tearing through the sand like a whirlwind in pursuit of someone who was running from him – as if they sensed the danger that he could bring. Watched them converge in the distance, saw the beam of Anakin’s blade again, blue against the yellow sand and even bluer sky –

She’d dreamed, once, shortly after Anakin was born, of seeing him with a lightsaber in his hand. She’d dreamed her son as a Jedi – had known, somehow, even in his youth, that he was special. But she hadn’t ever imagined that the sight of him with a glowing blade would stir up such a sense of dread inside her.

She watched the ships stop moving – watched Anakin approaching the first –

Watched Qui-Gon catch up. She couldn’t hear what they said, but the two figures gestured at one another, Anakin with his blade still lit, Qui-Gon with only his hands. And then –

And then they were coming back, slower than before, with two bound captives behind them. The ships sat abandoned in the distance, Qui-Gon listed slightly in his hoverchair, and Anakin – when he drew near enough for Shmi to see him – looked thunderous.

“Your captives,” he said ungraciously, shoving one of the people at Gira until she stumbled.

Gira pursed her lips. “Thank you,” she said, “but unfortunately, we’re not taking captives today.”

The sentence had not even registered in Shmi’s mind yet, the words still making their way past the thundering of her heart, when Gira drew her blaster and shot both of the prisoners, in quick succession, right between the eyes.

Beside Shmi came a sound, like half a cry, quickly stifled. Aayla, half-lurching forward before drawing back with Quinlan’s hand on her shoulder. He was staring straight ahead, that Jedi impassivity unmoved on his face – as were most of the others. The exceptions were Rie, whose expression was so blank it was if she had hardly noticed what had happened, and Anakin, whose fury had only intensified.

“That’s what we kept them alive for?” he spit, glaring at Qui-Gon.

Qui-Gon’s face was unreadable. “There was nothing you could learn from them?” he said mildly to Gira.

“Nothing we don’t already know,” she said. “They’re Indy, that’s clear enough from the uniforms. They always follow unmarked ships, anyway, so we thought it would be a great opportunity to get some more gear.” She gave Qui-Gon a tight smile. “Thanks for your help drawing them out.”

So they had been used as bait, then. Shmi’s instincts had been right. “You used us?” she said, and her own voice sounded strained to her ears.

Around the circle, her gaze found Cliegg. He was standing partially in front of Owen and Beru –shielding their eyes from what they had watched Gira do? But how often had they seen death in the last few months since Shmi had been away?

How much had they all changed?

She sought the answer in Cliegg’s face and found that he wouldn’t meet her eyes.

“This is war, Shmi,” said Gira shortly, holstering the blaster. “If you’ve come back to help us, I hope you’re prepared to accept that.” She cast a gaze around the circle, taking in each of the Jedi in turn. “I hope you all are.”

Chapter Text

Her lightsaber is dead in her hand.

The handle is metal and motionless, free of vibration, free of Force. The kyber within it is mute or removed or destroyed: unreachable. Her fingers are large and clumsy. Her body is frozen, hollow, a shell. Empty of thought, of life, of Force. She cannot move. She has forgotten how to move.

Around her there are voices. Calls. Something she is meant to do. A shape she is meant to twist her body into, that hapless and unresponsive lump of flesh that can barely be said to belong to her. Connected synapses zap into bursts of sparks, malfunctioning equipment. The necessary neural pathways have gone silent.

“Rie?”

They are watching her. All eyes turned to her, to the figure frozen in the wrong position, to the one who has forgotten the steps of the dance.

“Rie?”

Forgotten? She never knew them to begin with. She has been pretending all her life and now, finally, is the first time she has been caught at it. The masters will be watching. The students will know. They will know who does not belong with them.

“Rie.”

Pressure around her hands: sudden, shocking warmth. Real pressure, not the remembered weight of measuring stares, the heaviness in her mind and her heart. Rie blinked past the haze of memory and into the moment: no, she was not back in a Temple training hall surrounded by her peers. She was on Tatooine, eyes blurring anew in the brightness of the twin suns and the rocky sand, amidst the faltering seeds of a new kind of Jedi Order, and Rowana Navarr was clasping her hands –

Rowana. Panic cleared the last of the confusion from Rie’s mind and she slammed back into full consciousness in an instant. Her shields!

“Are you back with us?” asked Rowana.

Asked. She didn’t know, then – she couldn’t feel it. Rie’s shields, despite her mental wanderings, must have held. Infinitesimally, she relaxed.

And so she must turn her mind to the question. Was she back with them? Rie combed through her memory to try to find the point before the lapse: Tatooine, lightsabers. Yes, they’d made their rendezvous with Shmi’s friends and network, and they’d been attacked. Blasters had been drawn and lightsabers had come alive. Rie glanced down at her hands, numb around the handle of her own lightsaber. Ah yes.

She managed a tiny nod. Yes, she was back – as much as she could be, anyway. She knew her surroundings and she remembered how she had gotten there, and that was as much as could be hoped for these days.

Rowana didn’t ask her if she was all right. Though she could not see past Rie’s shields to know the extent of the truth, their very presence had communicated the answer to that question for as long as they’d been up. All she said was, “Good,” and stepped back, releasing Rie’s hands as she did.

Once, Rie’s hands would have been cold in the absence of Rowana’s; once, that retreat would have hurt. She would have reached out as Rowana withdrew – or barely been able to restrain herself from doing so. But the shields she had erected so carefully kept her from spilling over into the world outside her – and they also kept the world away from her.

And so when she looked around at the small crowd in the desert – the Jedi and the Tatooine revolutionaries alike – who had all witnessed her lapse, there was no feeling of their censure or new wave of guilt and self-loathing. Only the logical awareness of failure, the proof of it in the inactive lightsaber in her hands and her rooted posture, simply one more disappointment of many.

Rie had never been particularly strong in gleaning emotion from the Force; she had had to rely largely on her own pattern-sense and knowledge of herself – on recognizing what she was feeling and why, and learning to apply those observations to those around her. But still, there had at least been something – some vague aura that colored the air, a sense in that part of her that remained always buzzingly aware of the Force around her. She had at least had that level of passivity even when she’d first been impaired – a knowledge, at least, that the Force was out there, that it could still touch her, even if she could not actively reach for it.

Now, she felt nothing. Nothing, but with the phantom memory of something, as if a nerve had been ripped out, her tongue wrenched from her mouth, her lungs squeezed into nothingness. How could a human breathe if she had no lungs? How could a Jedi be if she did not have the Force?

When she had first glimpsed the turmoil of Rie’s emotions, Rowana had told her that it would return. That she was still a light in the Force, even if she could not feel it herself – that the process of healing would bring it back to her.

Rie would not have believed her even if she hadn’t heard Rowana’s voice waver on the word light.

Thought was hard to align in a linear fashion these days, after her mind had been scrambled into mush by the grasping fingers of a man who had reached into her thoughts with no goal but to do as much damage as possible. After she’d been punished, again and again, for reaching too far, trying to know too much. She’d tried to use what skill she had for something, and all that skill had been stripped away from her in righteous punishment for her overreach.

Linearity . . . yes, linearity was hard. Memory flashed into the present sometimes, and other times blurred into nothingness, great gaps in her mind that her conscious awareness skipped over with the nervous stumble of a youth learning to Force-jump for the first time. Earlier – yes, it had been earlier, only moments before, that they’d been locked in a battle, that the Jedi around her had drawn their lightsabers, and Rie’s own had been heavy in her hands, a weight dragging her down. She’d looked at the handle and for a moment it had ceased to be anything but metal.

And then she was twelve years old again, in a salle with her classmates who had progressed to intermediate forms, still struggling with the basics. Dropping her saber on an attempt to switch hands, while her Besalisk classmate Mox passed her own saber around between all four of hers, laughing with glee. Watching her classmates spar while she was disarmed in three moves or fewer every bout.

She’d worked so hard to overcome that. So hard to become even the most basic swordsman, to learn at least a few moves of the most basic defensive forms. So hard to overcompensate for what she lacked in every other area, and none of it mattered anymore.

Had any of it ever mattered at all?

Maybe it was for the best – these chunks gouged out of her mind. Maybe it was better that she carve herself up piece by piece, so that no one would have to bear the whole any longer.

“. . . talk further at our base,” someone was saying. A voice she didn’t know, and she turned in its direction, realizing too late that she had lost time again, that she had withdrawn into her own mind and missed whatever conversation had followed. “We can discuss this there.”

This? What was to be discussed? Rie glanced back and forth across the circle, trying with some flickering remnant of curiosity to glean what she had missed; then, with a dull internal shrug, she let it go.

“Base?” said Shmi. “Not the farm, then?”

“Too exposed,” said the human man standing at her side. “They knew too much about me. We had to leave it behind.”

This must be Cliegg Lars, her husband, the one who had given Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan shelter after Shmi had been imprisoned. They shared some glance, something unreadable passing between them, and then Shmi looked away.

“We found a new place to set up our operation,” said the pink-skinned Twi’lek woman who seemed to be their leader. “We’ll take you there, and then we can talk.”

That new place, as it happened, was inside what had appeared from the sky to be a rocky outcropping – what was in fact a mazelike network of tunnels, pillars, and canyons big enough for the vehicles they had appropriated. Big enough, indeed, for the ship – although even as the Tatooine fighters busied themselves stripping the tanks of any transmitters and electronics that might be used to track them, they left the ship alone.

“Shouldn’t we take it as well?” asked Aayla at one point. “Won’t it draw more suspicion to this area if a foreign ship is left here?”

“It will,” said the Twi’lek woman. “That’s what we’re counting on.” She glanced to another of the women who stood by her side, clearly her co-leader or her second. “Midge has set up sensors in this area that will warn us of another approach.” She smiled toothily. “We figure we can get at least one more ambush’s worth of equipment out of them before we’ll have to change our approach.”

“That’s bloodthirsty, Gira,” said Shmi quietly. When Rie turned to face her, she could see that Shmi was clasping her wrists in the opposite hands.

“That’s war,” said the Twi’lek – Gira – and she turned slowly to face the full group, one by one, pinning them with her eyes. They seemed to come to rest on Rie last of all, flicking down to the lightsaber she still held inactive in her numb hands. “Isn’t that what you’re here to help us fight?”

They journeyed through the canyons and tunnels in the ships they had taken from the enemy.

Rie sat pressed against a windowless wall, crammed into the back of a tank meant more for its firepower than for its passenger comfort. Her shoulder had gone numb from the vibrating of the engine, felt all through the inside; the air smelled like metal and left a bitter tang in the back of her mouth. She knew, without having to be told, that this vehicle had been meant to transport droids – the very droids that Dooku had manufactured by the thousands to help destroy the Republic from the inside out.

The remnants of the war-that-wasn’t felt familiar in her mind whenever she encountered them – memories and impressions she hadn’t even realized she’d retained from the Sith holocron she had touched lurking beneath the surface of her mind. Lying in wait for her to stumble upon something in the outside world that recalled them, waiting to swallow her whole into the murk of darkness. Into the mire that still lurked within her, more real than the people around her, more real than the needs of the galaxy that she had always sworn to serve. More real than the light side of the Force.

The tank veered around a curve, steering deeper underground, and Rie lurched away from the wall, and then back against it as their motion settled. This too was a sensation that hardly seemed to reach her – as if some insulation had settled between her physical reality and her internal torment, thick and heavy as fog.

When they arrived at last, it could have been minutes or hours – Rie’s sense of time and her surroundings, never strong, had gone along with so much else. The numbness of her legs suggested the latter, but even that sensation could have been imagined, her body as unresponsive as her mind. She stumbled as she emerged, and Aayla caught her, letting her steady herself on a shoulder while she found her feet again.

The tanks went on without them when they emerged, the drivers removing them to somewhere else in this large dispersed base. A sign that they were not yet trusted with their location? Rie released the speculation after only a moment, following the others in silence instead into the base of operations.

The base was both smaller and larger than she might have expected – an underground bunker deep beneath the rock connected via tunnels to other rooms currently shut off. Perhaps this might once have been a house, or even a complex of houses – sleeping space was available down a long hallway, shut off from the large front room – but the majority of the shared space was a single room that contained everything: walls lined with weapons, a small kitchen piled high with cans and boxes, a large table littered with empty dishes. The sign of a place that was lived in, yes, but where living took second part to surviving.

No one was home – it seemed everyone who stayed here had come out to meet them. “Is this your operation?” asked Obi-Wan when they had all poured into the room, nearly half again the number of people who had already met them, and cramming the space to bursting yet again. “The entire resistance movement?”

“Of course not,” said Midge – the short human woman Gira had indicated before. Rie remembered her name, vaguely, from what Shmi had told them of the people they might expect to meet; she had been part of Shmi’s network from the beginning, a former neighbor who had been born into freedom but raised by parents who had once been enslaved. “The resistance is spread throughout the planet.”

“But it’s spread thin,” said Cliegg. He stood still beside Shmi, but the two of them remained untouching, at arm’s length. “There aren’t enough of us yet to make a real difference.”

“Yet,” said Gira sharply. She still stood rigidly upright, her posture perfect, her body and voice like a blade. “But that’s what we’re going to change.”

“Yes,” said Qui-Gon calmly. “What is your plan to change this?”

Sometimes when he spoke, Rie fancied she could feel echoes of her own exhaustion in him. She had respected Qui-Gon for so long, long before she could understand the weight of pain that had been resting on his shoulders for the last few years, but now even looking at him made her own chest threaten to collapse in pain. Because Qui-Gon was here – Qui-Gon was exhausted, fought every day against the burden of his own body and his mind – and still he managed to move forward. Qui-Gon had been stabbed through the chest with a lightsaber, and still he had chased down Anakin earlier and even reasoned with him. Qui-Gon had managed to stand against a Sith lord until the bitter end.

Rie couldn’t even stand against her own mind.

“You’ve seen it,” said Midge. “We gain more equipment with every raid. We hit whoever we can, whenever we can, and bleed them of their resources when they’re too busy fighting each other to see us as a threat.” She braced her hands on her hips, dark eyes snapping. “Last time we couldn’t take them in a frontal assault, so we take them little by little.”

“Little by little,” echoed Obi-Wan. He maneuvered his own hoverchair forward until he and Qui-Gon were side by side, so in unison that it almost hurt to see. Rie stared at Obi-Wan and wondered if he saw a mirror in her. “What good do resources do if you don’t have the people to use them? What is your plan to gather others to your cause?”

“The problem is the chips, isn’t it?”

That was Shmi, speaking up at last. The chips . . . Rie knew about this. Didn’t she? She’d heard about it. There was something she should know –

“Yes,” said another woman, someone Rie had not met yet – but she stood beside a girl who could only be her daughter. “We’ve been working on a technology to deactivate them, but it relied on off-planet communications and those have been shut down for months, as you’ve seen. And even if we do find it, it would have to be done one by one.”

“What about allies?” said Rowana. She had settled into place behind Rie’s shoulder, but moved forward, brushing between Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan to settle down at the table. All eyes seemed to follow her, and even that observation sent a new stab of pain through Rie’s chest.

She had never loved anyone the way that she loved Rowana Navarr – the way she had always loved her. Rowana had been everything to Rie for all the life that mattered. Rie had gone through the initiates’ trials twice; no master had chosen her when she’d taken them at thirteen years old. She hadn’t been the only one in her class not chosen; she’d been assured that it was common and expected – but she’d been thinking, all the while she entered into different and advanced classes during her fourteenth year, that perhaps the path of a knight wasn’t for her. That she should look into other forms of service, of apprenticeship – that she should pursue scholarship in a different form.

What would her life be like if she’d done that, she had wondered in the years since. There were apprentices in the Archives who didn’t study under a single master, but who devoted their time to learning everything about the Archives as an institution, rather than as an idea. Perhaps she would have been good enough for the Archivists if she’d let herself be trained by them from early on.

But all the time, she’d longed for a master. Had yearned to study under someone the way she saw other padawans doing. It was not the knighthood itself that Rie craved, but the journey to achieving it – the in-depth learning, the system that would allow her to truly understand something, deeply, broadly. The opportunity to travel outside the Temple and understand the galaxy better and then bring it all back home.

And, when she was fourteen and stinging, after her second time through the initiates’ trials, the Togruta master had made her way through the crowd of students and stood before her.

Rowana had chosen Rie, and she’d continued to choose her, beyond all reason or expectation, for years. When Rie had failed to live up to her potential as an archivist, Rowana had been there. When she’d lost contact with the Force, Rowana had been there to hold her pain and supply what she could not. And now –

Now, in this numbed and absent state, Rowana was still here. Rowana asked her if she was all right, checked in on her when she woke up screaming in the night. Rowana wanted Rie to confess in her, wanted Rie to let her assist – and she couldn’t.

Not this. Not now.

She loved Rowana still, but as an idea – as the distant person she had become. In the moment, she could not bear to let Rowana into her thoughts, could not bear to share the mess of bloody shreds that her mind had become. And the more Rowana asked for entry, practically begged to let Rie help her, the further she withdrew.

She watched the others watch Rowana now, the same way those other padawans had watched the regal master picking her way through the crowd, and she yearned for the person she had once been – and then that thought, too, she clamped down into nothing.

“Hard to say,” said Cliegg. “We’ve been reaching out to people as we can – we all still have friends from before, and I know other merchants. But” – He spread his hands. “They don’t seem interested in listening.”

“They’re not willing to give anything up,” said Gira. “They won’t listen to us when we say we want to change things.”

“But shouldn’t they want the change, too?” said Aayla. “I remember no one was particularly fond of the Hutts when they were in power. And the Separatists – the Independent Alliance – can’t be any better, can they?”

“Sometimes,” said Obi-Wan, “it doesn’t matter whether change would really be better for people.” He sighed. “If they perceive that they’ll have to give something up – as, say, slaves, for example – they won’t be interested in relinquishing it without a fight.”

“Much less fighting against it themselves,” said Qui-Gon heavily.

“Which is why we have to do the fighting ourselves,” said Gira. “We’ve been luring out ambushes when we can – only in numbers we think we can take – and taking their military equipment. If we get enough of it, we’ll be ready to take the fight to them.”

“And then what?” said Rowana. “If you are able to defeat them. If the others on the planet are as opposed to your goals as you say, you won’t be able to retain control once you have it.”

“Doesn’t matter,” said Gira decisively. “Once we’re able to remove the chips, we will have the numbers of the majority on our side. Then we can do what we need to do.”

“What we need to do?” said Shmi faintly. She had been quiet for some time, but when Rie turned to look at her, she looked agitated. “Our goal was freedom, Gira, not death. What has changed in my absence?”

“Our goal is still freedom,” said Midge. “But we can’t get it any other way, Shmi. What are we supposed to do – bargain? Ask politely?”

“No,” said Shmi. “I suppose not. But still – killing in cold blood? That seems counter to our philosophy.”

“It wasn’t in cold blood,” said Gira. “They had attacked us first. You saw that – your Jedi fought alongside us. Most of you, anyway.”

And then her head swung around, her gaze fixing directly on Rie.

Rie sat still, transfixed in that gaze. She stared at Gira through the haze of disconnection between her body and mind, but – for all that she felt unable to pierce it herself – that gaze managed to sweep directly through the fog and strike her to the heart. She felt suddenly that Gira could see her – all her inadequacies, all her shortcomings, all the ways she had been constantly letting people down – and that she did not approve.

Another person Rie could not satisfy.

“We fight when we have to, yes,” said Qui-Gon. Did he know, was he saying this out of kindness to Rie, to deflect attention from her? Or simply to speak up about something that Rie knew he cared about so deeply? “But we fight, first and foremost, in defense. We took up our weapons on your behalf because we perceived that as a just cause – just as we agree with your cause to liberate your planet. But we must be careful with how we enter into battle or violence, because we can be uniquely vulnerable to being taken over by it.”

“Hmm,” said Gira. “And who decides what just cause should be?”

That was the question, wasn’t it? Rie couldn’t help flicking her gaze in Anakin’s direction. How could any of them know what justice really was anymore, when it had been proven how easily the dark side could get into their minds and corrupt them? And at the same time, they had recognized injustice in the approach of the Republic. It was why they had left it – why they were here on their own now.

The silence in response to Gira’s question proved that she had struck a nerve. None of the Jedi spoke.

“I see,” she said. “And is that what was happening before? You were choosing just cause?” Her gaze swung back around to Rie, challenging and fierce. “I noticed you didn’t even bother to lift your lightsaber earlier. Was that a decision?”

Again, Rie was locked in her gaze – incapable of moving. Those eyes, a shade paler than her skin, nevertheless loomed dark in Rie’s vision – dark with the depth of pain that surely lay beneath this whole movement. The kind of pain that Rie had never experienced, because it – unlike her own – was undeserved.

Undeserved pain led to deserved anger, didn’t it?

She hadn’t said anything. Was she supposed to say something? That too was harder now than it had ever been – she’d recovered her speech after the first few weeks of recovery, at least in part – but the act of putting thought into word, of forcing word into world, was harder now than it had ever been in Rie’s life. She stared at Gira, trying to force her numb mind around the signal that was surely being sent.

“You weren’t fighting,” said Gira, more directly. “Are you a pacifist like Shmi? Or did you determine that our cause was not just enough for you?”

Was she a pacifist? Rie had never been a fighter, that much was true, but had it been out of a desire to avoid violence or a knowledge that it was beyond her? Had she ever had a political philosophy, ever had a commitment to anything, that was guided by a principle beyond her own inadequacies?

She swallowed hard. The words had lodged in her throat, tangled up around one another, stuck somewhere just above her chest. She couldn’t speak.

“She’s not well,” said Rowana. Defensive – protective, always, of Rie, and Rie wrenched her thoughts back into the present. She couldn’t let Rowana give up any of her own integrity in her defense. Speak, speak – she must say something!

Something. Yes. She must say something, and that had to be the truth, because she didn’t have the ability to lie right now. But what was the truth? That she was the weakest Jedi in the Order, that she’d left it because she was a disappointment and then become a disappointment in turn to the group she’d joined? That she could not overcome the darkness in her own mind? That even if she had tried to wield her saber in their defense, she would have been of no use?

“I can’t fight,” was what came out of her mouth – and maybe she didn’t need to give the reason; maybe that was the deepest truth of all.

“I see,” said Gira, and she looked away, releasing Rie abruptly from that stare. She brushed past Cliegg and the others to get to the table, settling in at the opposite side from Rowana and pushing a few dishes away. “Well, why don’t I show you this, then?”

She pressed a button on the terminal built into the end of the table, and a projection flared to light above the table.

It took Rie a moment to wrap her scrambled mind around what she was seeing – unsure if the confusion came from within her mind or from the visuals. She couldn’t be sure, but she thought it might be the visuals themselves – layers upon layers of schematics, images, holo-recordings of marching tanks, of blasters and bombs. Of ships transferring battles from the atmosphere to the inside of the planet.

“This is what we’re up against,” she said. “These” – indicating one side of the projections, with the Separatist military uniforms and battle droids – “are what they brought in to subdue the Hutts and the rest of the planet. This” – other sophisticated, if less militaristic, weaponry – “is what the Hutts brought in response. Experimental bombs, incredibly destructive. They turn it against each other, but they’ll turn it against anyone who stands up to them, no matter how.” She turned back to face them, her hands on her hips. “You tell me, Jedi: Is there any way to not fight something like this?”

Rie quailed at the sight of the projections over the table – the ships and tanks and speeders, all equipped with weaponry she’d never seen outside of textbooks. Not even on the worlds they’d visited before, torn by political upheaval and unrest and government crackdowns, had she seen such weapons.

Was this what it looked like when a planet went to war against its own people? Was this what it looked like when a true military operation – a galactic operation – was involved?

“I see,” said Rowana faintly.

And Rie saw, too. How could you reason with a government when they were the ones who had the guns? How could you argue with them when their response could be cold metal and burning lasers?

But how could you stand against then when they had so much firepower at their disposal? When they could overpower you in an instant?

Her head throbbed, those fingers twisting again in her mind in remembered cruelty. Cold sweat broke out over her back; nausea throbbed in her gut.

Why was it always so hopeless? Why were the odds always so against them?

In her past life, she would have been the first to search for a solution, she knew. Something clever, something to subvert both the overt threat of the weapons and the impossibility of doing nothing. Now, her mind was only blank – blank, but for the throbbing echoes of pain.

It was too much. It had been too much long before, and she could not bear to do this again. She should just leave now, should follow those voices urging her deep into the desert, should abandon the group – because surely their fate would be no different without her than it would be with her?

A long pause, a long indrawn breath from everyone at the table. Perhaps their thoughts ran along the same lines as Rie’s – or perhaps they were stronger, braver, less cowardly. Less cowed by their own memories of terror, and merely thinking about what to do next.

“Well,” said Qui-Gon, after a long pause. “All the more reason to be strategic, then.” He brought his hoverchair closer to the table. “We’re here to help you, yes. But it seems like what we need, above all else, is a plan.”

A plan. Of course they would need a plan. Of course there was nothing else that could be done – because they were Jedi, and they had decided to stand up against injustice, and they would give all that they were in service if there was nothing else they could do.

And Rie would do it along with them, although she couldn’t help feeling that she had nothing left to give.

Chapter Text

Two years ago, Anakin would have thought this base was the coolest thing he’d ever seen.

It had everything that would have made his nine-year-old self explode with excitement. The stolen military equipment was enough all its own, but then there were the mechanical upgrades – the little changes they were making to adapt the tanks for the stealth environment of the rocks and tunnels in the desert; the workstation where the tinkerers were disassembling weapons to try to figure out how they worked. There was a weapons practice range – small, yes, and tucked in under a canyon of rock to try to keep it from any larger planetary sweeps, but still a court where you could spar hand to hand and targets if you wanted to work with blasters instead. A collection of maps and schematics that didn’t match up to anything in the Temple or in Palpatine’s private library, but was still bigger than anything Anakin had ever seen before leaving Tatooine for the first time.

And all of it was brought together so that they could fight off the slaveholders, so that they could try to end slavery for good on Tatooine.

Yes, two years ago, no one would have been able to stop him from looking at all of it – from trying out everything all at once. But that was when he’d been just a kid.

Now, he looked at all of it and could only see the libraries in the Jedi Temple, the ones in Palpatine’s private offices. He saw the rooms of practice droids that Palpatine had given him to fight, the footage Yoda had shown of Dooku’s military operation. He saw the blaze of a red lightsaber in the dark, all other colors swept out of its way.

This? This was what they were using to end slavery on Tatooine? This was what his mom and the other Jedi were putting their faith into?

He wandered through a tunnel now, retracing his way back to where the tanks had dropped them off. It was easy enough to pretend to be interested in them, and it got Qui-Gon off his back. And it meant he didn’t have to answer any probing questions from people who kept saying they wanted what was best for him.

Without thinking, he dropped his hand to the lightsaber at his belt, feeling the solid weight of the metal handle in his palm. It felt better to hold it, to know that there was something on him that he could trust to give him power.

Power?

No – no, that was wrong. That was exactly the sort of thought he wasn’t supposed to be having.

Or was it?

Kyber thrummed beneath his hand, strong enough to sever metal, strong enough to part flesh. He still felt it in his dreams sometimes, locked in his sense memories – the way Palpatine’s body had just given way before his blade. The way he’d torn someone to pieces.

The way it would be so easy to do it again.

He wasn’t allowed to spar with the seventh lightsaber form anymore. The first time he’d fought with it after returning to the Jedi he knew, Obi-Wan had exclaimed in horror; Qui-Gon had looked grim-faced and serious. He’d taken Anakin aside after that first session when Anakin had disarmed Quinlan – the only fighter in their group who had ever given him a real challenge – in the space of seconds, and told him sternly that his job in sparring practice was no longer to win. He was supposed to try to fight with restraint and intention now, to keep the bout going as long as possible, and to meditate on each strike he used, each form he drew from.

Anakin had learned to lose himself during battle. To give himself up to the Force and let it carry him away, guiding each stroke. But apparently the Force that he was channeling, driven so strongly by his own anger and desire to win, was the dark side, and that was what he was supposed to be not using anymore.

He had come too far down the tunnel; the tanks and the people working on them were just around the next corner. If they saw him, they would ask questions – he knew already that none of them were trusted here. Better to stop now, in between the places where he might be seen. Leaning against the wall, he let himself slide down to the ground – grimacing at the grainy feeling of sand underneath him, grinding against his legs and slipping into his tunics. There was always sand on Tatooine; you could never get away from it. Even if you had enough water to wash it off, that just made it sticky, and then it clung to you even more.

Anakin fucking hated sand.

Hate leads to suffering, Yoda’s voice rang in his head, and Anakin scowled at the memory of it and unclipped the lightsaber from his belt, testing the heft of it in his hands.

Yes, yes, the light side was good and the dark side was bad. That was one of the first things he’d ever learned about the Force. And it was easier to remember that when he remembered Palpatine and how much he still hated him. When he’d learned that Palpatine had been lying to him from the beginning. When he’d learned how easily he could turn on the people he loved.

He could still feel it sometimes if he tightened his fist, an imaginary throat crushed in his own furious grip. Could remember how it had felt to hold Qui-Gon’s life in his hand and squeeze . . .

He wouldn’t have gone further, he tried to tell himself. He wouldn’t have gone far enough to kill.

Would he?

There was enough uncertainty in that thought to keep him listening – barely – to Qui-Gon and the others when they tried to teach him. But today –

Today he had fought for real, had used his lightsaber to deflect shot after shot of those giant chemical-scorching lasers, and had realized that it wasn’t enough. Yes, protection was good, but you couldn’t defend forever. Sooner or later you had to go on the attack, and the people wouldn’t stop until they were stopped. And if no one else was going to do it, then Anakin would.

Which was sure what it seemed was going to happen. It wasn’t like anyone else had the strength to do it here. Palpatine was dead, but sometimes Anakin could still hear that voice whispering in his ears. He could hear exactly what Palpatine would have said about this setup, about this ragtag group of people trying to take down a military operation. With those weapons? My dear boy, surely it can’t be done.

He was supposed to ignore those whispers and memories, but how was he supposed to do that when Palpatine was so right? Anakin had never been a military strategist, but if they hadn’t been able to take Jabba’s palace back then, he couldn’t see how they could possibly fight two armies at once. And it wasn’t like their group was made up of fighters. Qui-Gon was more tired than ever; sometimes his weariness was so strong in the Force that it made Anakin want to hurt him, even though he knew that was a bad impulse that he shouldn’t be indulging. Obi-Wan was missing a leg and never even tried to wear his prosthesis, so he hadn’t learned how to run and fight the way he used to be able to do. If he hadn’t been able to fight Dooku or Palpatine before, how could he be expected to fight this many people now? And the others – the others were fine, Anakin supposed, but they’d never been big fighters, either, and that wasn’t even mentioning Rie. How were they supposed to stand up to real military powers like this?

“Anakin?”

He flinched, scowling at his own reaction. During the battle earlier, on the ship, all his senses had been clear and alert; it made it too easy to notice the way they dulled at all other times. He hadn’t even felt Aayla coming up behind him. How long had she been following him?

“Hi,” he said reluctantly, keeping his gaze on the lightsaber and on his hands.

“Going to look at the tanks?”

There was an edge of caution in her voice, an uncertainty that made him grind his teeth until they almost squeaked. It was the same as Qui-Gon’s tired looks, Obi-Wan’s disappointment. Aayla had been the closest thing he’d had to an actual friend since leaving Tatooine – and now she was afraid of him, too.

“No,” he said. “I just wanted some peace and quiet.”

“Oh.” She was quiet for long enough that Anakin wondered if she would take the hint and leave, but instead she shifted, the sand grinding beneath her feet. Sand, dry air, cooling rapidly into the freezing cold of nighttime. Everything about this planet that Anakin hated, doomed to be his future forever if they could do the impossible. “Can I stay?”

The lightsaber dug into Anakin’s hands, metal cutting across his palms. “Sure,” he said, not looking up.

She sat down next to him, not close enough to touch. Still the feeling of her was strangely fuzzy in the Force; he couldn’t read her mood, not in the way he would once have been able to. It itched, the not knowing, like grains of sand against his skin. What was she here for? An apology for shoving her earlier? To offer her forgiveness before he could ask for it? To yell at him for it, like he knew Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan were just waiting for the chance to do?

He couldn’t last long. “What do you want?” he said at last.

“I wanted to get away,” she said simply. “They don’t trust us.”

That was enough to get him to look up, even to loosen his grip on the lightsaber – to forget, just for a second, his own anger. “You feel it too?”

“Of course,” said Aayla. “They don’t know what we’re here for, and they’re not used to getting something for nothing.”

No, that wasn’t how it worked on Tatooine. No one gave you anything for free; they always wanted something in return. But maybe that wasn’t how it worked anywhere else, either. “Are we really giving them something for nothing?”

“I guess not,” said Aayla at last. “I guess if we want to stay here and build a new Jedi school, that’s something we want from them.”

“Yeah,” said Anakin. There was the catch, just like there always was. “People always want things from you. At least if you know that, you aren’t being tricked.”

At that, he let himself look over at her at last. Maybe, even if he couldn’t pick up how she felt in the Force, he could at least read her face to see what she was hiding behind her shifty questions – why she had really decided to follow him out here.

The tunnel was mostly dark, lit mainly by the distant lights illuminating the mechanics’ work and the last of the sunset filtering in through openings in the rock. Her expression was hard to make out in the shadow, but her eyes gleamed in the light, and when she spoke, her tone was a little thoughtful and a little sad. “Maybe,” she said. “But maybe it’s okay to want things from each other sometimes.”

“What do you want from me?”

The words burst from him before he could stop himself, so urgent and sudden that he even let go of the lightsaber. It hit the ground with a rough, sandy clink, and he grabbed for it as it rolled away, but Aayla’s hand reached it before his could.

Watching her catch his lightsaber, her hand wrapping around the handle, where his own belonged, Anakin’s mind went white. Something exploded in his chest, something between panic and anger; his ears roared; all he could think was minemineminedon’ttouchthat –

And then it was in his hand again before he could so much as open his mouth, pressed back into his palm, Aayla’s own hand just skimming his as she pulled away.

“I want to be your friend again,” she said simply, and Anakin blinked the emotion away to meet her hopeful gaze. “Will you let me?”

There was no official mealtime that evening, no talk of dinner. One by one, or small group by small group, people simply rose from the table and went to the kitchen, returning with bread or dehydrated meals mixed with a bit of precious water or simply ration bars. Shmi didn’t know how the stores were kept, and she didn’t dare to ask. This was a different world from the one she’d lived in once, when they had shared food as neighbors but each with their own supplies, the hosting duties always clear. This communal living was new, the rules were different, and there was a precarity to the thought of questioning that Shmi had never felt before in this place, with these people.

Her stomach squirmed, from nervousness as much as from hunger, and she wrapped her arms around herself, elbows tucked into her sides and hands clasped tightly in front – practically huddling. Cliegg sat on her left, but she didn’t dare look even to him; on her right were the remaining Jedi – those who had remained rather than dispersed when the large conversation had ended.

She’d meant her glance to be sidelong and fleeting, but she found her gaze caught and held; Rowana sat forward from where she had been observing in silence. “Why don’t I get some of our supplies?” she suggested.

Her voice was quiet, but it carried. Beside her, Cliegg turned in Shmi’s direction.

“Are you hungry?” he said.

Shmi shrugged. She had been hungry for much of her life, and for most of the last several months. It was a state of being she was familiar with – more comfortable, anyway, than the eyes suddenly turned in her direction. “I’m all right.”

“I think more of us could use a meal,” said Rowana. “We brought some of our own provisions along.”

“No, no.” Cliegg’s voice turned frosty; when Shmi looked over at him, his gaze was fixed on Rowana, his jaw tight in the way it became when he was suppressing the urge to say something he would regret later. “She’s our family; of course she’ll share our food.”

Rowana’s face in response was unreadable; she wore that Jedi calm that Shmi had found haven in amidst Anakin’s turbulence, her own troubled memories. The Jedi wore stillness as easily as they did their cloaks – casting it off at need but reaching for it as a way to move through a surging world untroubled. Shmi had found herself seeking threads of that stillness in her time among them, hoping to stitch her own scattered thoughts into orderly rows – finding solace in their implacability, and Rowana’s in particular. That she now found more comfort from a Jedi Master than from her own husband –

“Here.”

There was a new hand on her shoulder, and she turned with some relief to the distraction in the form of Owen. He had chosen to leave the table when some of the others had, electing instead to sit and talk quietly with Daemin’s daughter, but appeared to her now as a savior from whatever this silent standoff had become. “Let me take you to the kitchen, Shmi. I’ll show you what we have.”

She glanced surreptitiously at Cliegg, half expecting him to protest, but he had sagged in silent defeat. Defeat in what? There was so much happening here, so much unspoken both in the dynamics they had stumbled into and the strange new one they had added; Shmi could feel it falling away from her like cracking ice as she escaped with her stepson.

The “kitchen” was little more than a room piled with crates and supplies. There were a few small electric ranges, but made more for heating existing food than for cooking anything extensive. Owen led her to a corner and began to rummage in a box labeled “LARS.”

“Everyone keeps their supplies separate, then?” asked Shmi.

“We share when we have to,” said Owen. “If someone doesn’t have enough, everyone else will pitch in. But we want to know where our own things are when we can go home again.”

She closed her eyes at the sound of the word in his voice. Home. The last time she had seen the moisture farm she had called home, the structures and equipment had been smashed to rubble, their family driven underground in an attempt to hide. How long had Owen been living without a home? Could any of them make a home for themselves again?

Away from Cliegg, away from the conflicting politics and questions of uncertainty, a thread of clarity slipped through the muddle of thoughts. She opened her eyes again and looked at Owen – really looked at him for the first time since she had arrived.

He’d grown since she’d seen him last, or maybe that was just the fault of her memory. Not much taller, but broader, with more prominent musculature and a squarer bone structure. The youth had begun to fall away from his face and now she could see the angles of Cliegg beginning to shape themselves in his cheekbones and jaw along with a softness around his eyes that must be from the mother who had died years before.

The boy was becoming a man, growing up in the way that this planet had always forced children to do. Carrying a blaster even as the son she had birthed now wore a lightsaber at his waist. Was this violence all that could be expected for them?

Yes, she could concede to Gira that it was necessary to fight for liberation. But was this the world they wanted to make for their children?

“How are you?” she asked softly. “How are you really?”

Owen looked up from where he had knelt to rummage through their crate. For a moment, in his surprise, she could see the vulnerability that he had masked with bravado during the fight earlier, the sensitivity that necessity had beaten back. “I’m all right,” he said, but his voice cracked, and he winced. “I mean, I have Dad and Beru and Daemin, and we’re still alive, so it could be worse, right?”

“It could,” said Shmi, her hands straying to her wrists again. “I suppose you’re right.”

“And you’re back,” said Owen. “Right?”

The hesitance in that last word was enough to distract her from her wandering thoughts, to send her gaze snapping back up to his. “Yes,” she said. “Owen, I – I never meant to leave you last time. Do you believe that?”

“Yes,” he said. “I just – Dad wasn’t sure – with the Jedi and everything” –

“The Jedi want to stay, too,” she said. “But even if they didn’t, my place is here.” Maybe if she said it confidently enough, she would remember it was true. “Did you think I would leave with them?”

That had always been Anakin’s destiny, a fate she’d been sure of since he was small. She’d known he was destined to leave her, to become great in the galaxy. She’d long since resigned herself to a commitment to the place she lived, to do as much good as she could there – and Cliegg and Owen had come along and become the family she hadn’t let herself dream she could have again.

“Not really,” said Owen, but the hedge in his voice belied the words.

And that uncertainty, at least for now, was enough to bring her back into the moment. Maybe she couldn’t fix all of Tatooine’s problems with her return, maybe she couldn’t bridge this larger gap of trust, maybe she couldn’t even settle herself with the knowledge of what was needed to continue this rebellion. But Owen stood before her, a son who needed her, a family member she could help, even if there was so little she could do for anyone else.

“I’m here,” she said, and this time her voice managed to be firm. “I’m here to stay, Owen. I promise.”

And this time, when he blinked up at her, she could almost feel that he believed it.

The Jedi Archives had turned into a labyrinth.

They had always been densely packed and difficult to navigate – Rie remembered her first trips there as a padawan, when she had nearly gotten lost in the many twists and turns and shelves of terminals and holocrons: all the knowledge she could possibly imagine, the accumulated troves of work and research and information of a hundred generations of Jedi. She’d been awed at the time, and even when she’d learned to navigate them, sometimes it had still struck her with the dizziness of overwhelm: how much more there was here than she could ever hope to read, to learn, in one lifetime.

Jocasta Nu knew more about the contents of the Archives than any one Jedi, even those many times her age like Master Yoda. It was thought that that level of mastery would be nearly impossible to achieve – and Rie had thought more than once that she wouldn’t want to reach that kind of knowledge, anyway. She’d seen the way that it could cloud you, having too much in your mind, could prevent you from being able to think around it.

Had that been a self-fulfilling prophecy? For now she gazed around herself at the stacked shelves of the Archives, the turns and nooks that seemed to lead back around on themselves, and that accumulation of knowledge threatened to crush her beneath it.

Perhaps if she’d learned more, she would be able to find her way around now. As it was, she took a few more tentative steps and felt her orientation shifting dizzily, the shelves tilting to the side as if the room itself had turned on its side, reoriented, the path she had been following swallowed up in a new forking tangle of turns.

She stopped again, frozen with indecision, and felt a chill at the back of her neck. Something was following her – something chasing her deeper and deeper into the maze, something that would catch her if she stopped for too long.

There was something wrong with that, but she couldn’t remember why. She chose a turn at random and continued onward.

Again, the room shifted around her. The shelves were taller now, extending as far up as she could see and stacked not only with datacards and holo-maps but with holocrons of all shapes and sizes. Rie craned her neck up – and up, and up – and could not find the end, the shelves disappearing into the distance, narrowing into one another until there was no ceiling visible between the choking mass of holocrons, knowledge and thought and research strangling any vision of freedom.

This was the forbidden chamber of the Archives, the space accessible only to masters, the space Rie had visited only once before in her life. Could she trace everything that had ever gone wrong in her life back to that one moment? Or did it go back further still to the moment she’d been chosen as a padawan? To the moment she’d been taken to the Jedi Temple as a child?

There was something in this room she was meant to find – something she had to find before it could be snapped up by her pursuer. She took another few steps, ignoring the lurch of the ground beneath her feet at the dizzying reorientation of her reality, the realization of her tiny stature in comparison to the shelves above. What she was looking for was here somewhere, and it would give her the answer she sought.

(The answer to what? What was her question? Something in her mind strained for that, but it was a mere flutter beneath the press of urgency, swallowed up in the drive to move forward.)

Another step, and another, and another. That chill on the back of her neck intensified until she was practically running, giving all her discernment up to the pull towards the knowledge she was seeking. Her own judgment had never brought her anything of worth, anyway. Had only ever let down the people she was trying to serve.

She was looking for knowledge. She was looking for the key – for the one answer that would solve things for her, that would resolve her turmoil. What turmoil? She could feel it, though she couldn’t remember its source – and she couldn’t stop long enough to think it through, or her pursuer would catch up.

The chill spread from her neck down her spine like a cold finger tracing her vertebrae and bringing them all to prickling life, an invasive hand touching her in a way she could not shake off. She moved faster, reached forward, striving to ignore it, even as she could feel it branching and unfurling into icy tendrils that encircled her limbs, a restraint that could only stretch so far before it yanked her to an inglorious stop –

And there it was. The holocron she sought: black and hexagonal and heavy – its weight palpable even from where it sat on the shelf – and radiating a faint purple light that seemed to beckon her forward.

It was the answer, and more than that – it called to her, dragging something in her mind towards it. Even the chill around her limbs did not stop her now; if anything, it too urged her forward, as though even her pursuer wanted her to find this answer.

She reached for it and it practically leaped into her hand.

Good, said a voice in her ear, and as the holocron touched her fingers, it lit up in blinding purple light.

She could not stop it, could not drop it – was helpless to do anything but let it happen. The holocron opened, the light searing into her eyes and into her mind, taking the form of grasping fingers that bored into her eyes and past them, lighting up her mind in the same white-hot flare of pain all at once.

Anyone who touches my things, said that cold voice in her ears, in her mind, belongs to me.

And then it was inside her, the holocron burning up her brain from the inside out, that knowledge that she never should have reached for consuming her. The pain was searing and shredding all at once, a lightsaber carving her mind into pieces and cauterizing every wound so that the cuts could never be sealed again. Her body and mind rejected the pain, but somewhere below her consciousness, a part of her welcomed it in. Knew, deep inside, that it was what she deserved. That it was the only thing she had earned, in the end.

Yes, that’s right, said the voice. You were only ever going to be mine, weren’t you? – and the pain tightened in her head like a fist closing on the meat of her brain, and Rie was screaming as her mind tore itself to pieces anew –

And then there was another pair of hands on her head, cool and solid, resting on her temples rather than boring into her brain, and the Archives were melting and changing shape around her, and a voice was murmuring in her ear, “Rie, wake up.”

Wake up.

Yes. The Archives fell away at last as the dream they had been, and she was awake in the hideout on Tatooine, and it made no difference to the reality of her mind. Perhaps she had not really been wandering the Archives; perhaps she had not really found a new Sith holocron – but the memories were real enough, and the violation, and the pain. She closed her eyes again with a moan, though that made no difference to the exploding stars across her vision, and curled up against the agony that threatened to swallow her entire world.

This was nothing new. The dreams were different every night, but the ending was always the same – waking up screaming, clammy with cold sweat, with the searing pain of a migraine that made her want to rip her own brain out of her skull in the hope that that would stop the torture. The Sith lord was dead, she’d been promised, and she could only believe that it was true because if he were alive he would have found her by now, but whatever fragments of him he had planted in her brain remained alive and active.

Dimly she could feel Rowana’s hands on her head, could hear the babbling murmur of her voice, could feel the tendrils of her consciousness probing at the shields Rie had managed to build, offering help. Offering to share the pain, to relieve it, to push her way in. In moments like these, Rie wanted nothing more than to give in – to let her shields collapse, to let Rowana help her. Anything to stop the pain.

She gritted her teeth against the impulse and held.

If these fragments of the Sith lord were still part of his consciousness, if there was any part of him still alive, it was Rie’s duty to keep it back and away from her companions – and from Rowana most of all. She was of no use in anything else, had failed in every task she had ever tried, but this at least she could do. She could shield this pain and keep it from the others so that it would never touch them again. And if she died in the effort – as she sometimes felt she must, when the pain was this intense – then at least it would die with her.

“Rie,” Rowana was saying, her voice a distant noise through the haze of pain. “Rie, come with me now.”

This was new – this was different – and as she was guided upright, Rie realized anew that she was not in the soundproofed chamber she had been given in Theed; she was not in the ship, where her sleeping chambers had been far from the others’. She was in a shared space, surrounded by dozens of people in bedrolls – people who were sitting up now, were staring at her, shadowy figures she could make out through the blur of her unassisted vision and the white points of pain still sparking before her eyes. People who had not been expecting someone to wake up screaming in the middle of the night, who had not been expecting their sleep to be so suddenly and violently disturbed.

This was how the dark side spread – one person at a time, spilling over the uncontained edges of a single mind into all the others around it. She fancied she could feel their irritation, all the worst impulses of sentient beings raw at the edges from disturbed sleep, all the impatience she knew she deserved.

She couldn’t stand; her knees would not support her – but she couldn’t stay here, either. Her eyes flicked from one person to the next, blurred and sore but unable to block out the truth of what she saw – and her heart began to race, her breath tearing into her throat in ragged gasps. She gulped for air in a desperate motion that at least silenced the moans building in her chest and throat at the renewed agony, panic and pain colliding in a lump in her throat that threatened to explode outward in a sound she could no longer keep contained –

“Here.”

The voice was low and rough from sleep, but also familiar. Qui-Gon. His hands joined Rowana’s to support her body; Rowana lifted her around the waist as Qui-Gon’s hands supported her knees, and she was set in something larger and padded that hummed to life beneath her with a mechanical whir. Something that lifted her of its own accord, maneuvering her slowly through the mess of people and away.

The motion sent new shockwaves of pain through her head. She closed her eyes and gritted her teeth against the threatening nausea, pressing her lips together to keep from screaming again or being sick or maybe both at once. She concentrated on the soothing whir of machinery beneath her, the clutch of her own fingers on the armrests where they had been placed, closing her eyes against the change of scenery and praying for –

For fresh air. Yes. The freezing, dry air of desert night broke over her clammy skin, cooling the burning pain in her head with the knowledge of open and solitude. Perhaps, eventually, it would numb her back into something resembling coherence.

She breathed in deep gulps of the icy air and willed it to happen faster.

“That’s it.” There was a hand on her back, rubbing up and down in gentle soothing strokes. “Breathe through it, Rie. Come back to us now.”

The mismatch of the voice and the hand struck her in a new bolt of profound confusion. The voice was Rowana’s, but the hand was too large, the saber calluses less pronounced. Qui-Gon, who must have followed them out here – because Rie sat ensconced in his hoverchair, which he had given up for her use.

Another person she had disturbed. That she had taken such a toll on Rowana’s rest for so long was already inexcusable, but to have stolen Qui-Gon’s sleep as well! A sob collided with her next heaving breath, tears of self-recrimination burning at the corners of her eyes.

“It’s all right,” said Rowana. “You’re safe; we’re all safe.”

But they weren’t safe – not when Palpatine was still with them in the fragments he had embedded in Rie’s mind, in the training he had given Anakin. They weren’t safe from the darkness, because there was nowhere they could go that it would not find them – and because Rie would never be strong enough to keep it from them.

You were only ever going to be mine, weren’t you?

Rowana’s mind was probing at hers again, that familiar presence threatening to smother her in unearned comfort – but it was a kindness now, because it drew Rie’s attention to how perilously thin her shields had become. With great effort, she wrenched her mind back from its spiral – at least enough to clamp down on the pain before it could bleed over – and managed to open her eyes.

Yes, she was outside. The hoverchair had come to a stop under a rock overhang with a view of the sky; the stars overhead could finally be distinguished from the starbursts of pain that had exploded before her eyes. Seeing them helped to steady her breathing, to bring the pain down from unbearable to a moderate throb and allow further awareness to seep in.

Qui-Gon knelt beside her, his hand still on her back; Rowana stood before her with her hands outstretched, rebuffed at the last from her effort to connect to Rie’s consciousness. Rie blinked back the smudges of tears from her eyes, clearing her vision to its usual unaided blur; their faces were still dim and distorted, but recognizable all the same even without the Force sense that she had been severed from.

Her speech felt even slower and more awkward than usual, stunned from the paralyzing attack on her mind, but she knew the script for this moment – knew these two words, if she knew no others. “I’m sorry,” she croaked, choking out the words past the lump of tears that still lurked in her throat.

“There’s no need to be sorry,” said Qui-Gon. “Is this a normal occurrence?”

“Most nights,” said Rowana, when Rie did not answer. “I don’t know what she dreams, and she won’t let me in to help ease it, but I know that it hurts.”

Rie couldn’t imagine there was a single person now who didn’t know that it hurt. She cast her eyes back down at her knees so she wouldn’t have to look at Rowana’s face any longer. The nuances of facial expressions might escape her in the dark of night, with the absence of her glasses, but she could picture the hurt on Rowana’s well enough without compulsively searching for the evidence of it in her face.

“A parting gift, I suppose,” mused Qui-Gon. “From Palpatine.”

“Yes,” said Rowana softly.

That much they all knew. Rie had not been able to keep her thoughts from Rowana in the beginning; when she had first regained some semblance of consciousness, Rowana had been the only thing to give sense to her world, the only person who could draw the boundaries around what was real and what was not. But as she’d regained more awareness of her own, Rie had had to draw further back – once she’d realized what poison lived inside her, it had been her duty to keep it contained. If anything, their compassion only made it more necessary.

She was nothing but a liability – to the Tatooine revolutionary movement, yes, but also to the Jedi’s goals here. She and Qui-Gon had talked for so long about the dream of a new form of Jedi education, of a series of schools on various planets, sharing the Jedi ways with the world but also letting those ways be adapted and inspired by the people they helped. They had discussed their desire to use their skills to do good for the people they meant to live among – but the revolutionaries of Tatooine demanded proof before they could trust the Jedi to bring in their ways of teaching and learning, and why shouldn’t they? And here Rie was, proving that the Jedi couldn’t even resist their own enemies, let alone others’.

Or maybe other Jedi would have been able to resist. Maybe Rie had always been too weak to begin with.

“Nothing helps it?” said Qui-Gon quietly. Talking to Rowana again, not to Rie. Maybe he knew that Rie couldn’t bring herself to answer.

“I could,” said Rowana, and that was pitched for Rie as well as Qui-Gon. “I could take some of the pain, if she’d just let me in to try.”

Rie clenched her fingers in the fabric of her sleep pants and shook her head.

“I see,” said Qui-Gon. “Would you let someone else help you, Rie? Someone not Rowana?”

How could Qui-Gon even ask this? How could she let anyone else see these parts of herself? Rowana had seen the worst parts of Rie for all her life; if these parts were too much even for Rowana to bear, how could anyone else see them and still be able to look at her on the other side?

Or maybe Qui-Gon knew how precious Rowana was to her, knew that she was the last person in the galaxy Rie would want to hurt, and wondered if she would let someone else in to take the pain instead?

Either way, it was something she could not do. Rie kept her gaze down at her legs and shook her head.

The pain was abating, she found, if she could just keep her focus on the faint line of shadow in the crook of her legs. If she could focus on the stiffness in her neck rather than the pounding in her head, on the chill of the desert night against her sweat-sticky skin and the padding of Qui-Gon’s hoverchair beneath her thighs. On the sound of footsteps approaching from behind –

She stiffened, curling her head forward as if she could hide simply by making herself small. As if she could stave off the questions that she knew must be coming.

“Master Jedi?”

Before her, Rowana straightened up. “No need for titles any longer,” she said. “Rowana will do fine. Daemin Whitesun, wasn’t it?”

“I appreciate you remembering.” The voice drew nearer, and Rie tensed anew at the feeling of someone standing behind her, a looming unfamiliar presence who could do anything, see anything, now while she was helpless to stop it. “I’m a healer, or what passes for it around here. I wanted to see if there was anything I could do to help.”

Silence again. Perhaps Qui-Gon and Rowana were waiting for Rie to speak up, but where were the words for a moment like this? If she could not unburden herself to the other Jedi, how could she accept help from someone they were here to serve?

“I’m afraid not,” said Rowana at last. “Though we’re grateful for the offer. Rie suffers from something a bit beyond physical ailments, I’m afraid. I’m not sure about the extent of your training” –

“Limited,” said Daemin, “and only covers the physical. Though I suppose we could use some of the other kind here about now.” She sighed heavily and came forward another few steps, the crunch of boots on sand-strewn stone describing her motion to Qui-Gon’s side. “I was doing research on the transmitter chips before the Indies took over – trying to develop something that would deactivate them from a distance without taking too much of a toll on the body.”

“A worthy goal,” murmured Qui-Gon.

“Worthy but slow,” said Daemin. “Since we’ve been taken up by the need to fight, I spend most of my time patching people up.”

“I wish we could bring more healing knowledge to help you,” said Rowana. Her next words went unspoken, but Rie could hear them clearly enough: we can’t even help ourselves.

Daemin hummed a note that was not quite disagreement, and then quiet fell again.

The desert night was peaceful when not disturbed by speech. Now that the sounds of Rie’s own breathing and the pound of blood in her ears had died down to a manageable level, she could hear the faint chirp-clicking sounds of nighttime insects, the gentlest rustle of wind through sand and rock. Deserts were not as immediately as alive as biomes like rainforest or swamp, but on a night like this, the living Force must be palpable to those who were adept at feeling it. Knowing it was there must suffice for as long as her sense of it was gone.

Her breath was coming easier now, the pain slowly receding to a tolerable level. Though the guilt and horror and the torment of memory still churned at her insides, at least there was that small mercy – and in the quiet of the night, and the reduced noise of her own pain, Rie dared to raise her head at last and crack open swollen eyes.

The chill struck anew at the tender, tear-damp skin beneath her eyes, but the night unfolded before her in a way that could not make her regret opening them at last. The sky was as soft as velvet, sprinkled with stars more beautiful and more real than the explosions of white-hot light that her headaches set dancing before her eyes. She had spent too much time in space to retain any romantic notion of the night sky, but perhaps the real version was just as beautiful – the knowledge that those stars housed thousands of solar systems, thousands of worlds spinning in their own orbits, alive with trillions of sentient beings doing the best they could.

And –

She squinted, tilted her head. There was something else happening in the sky, moving lights like shadowed folds in the fabric of the night, ripples across a pond. It was almost like – but no, surely it couldn’t be –

The indrawn breath beside her revealed that she wasn’t imagining it. “I wasn’t aware you experienced aurora on Tatooine,” said Qui-Gon. “I’ve only ever seen lights like that on arctic planets.”

“We don’t,” said Daemin grimly. “There are solar storms occasionally, but they were never visible before the Indies and the Hutts went to battle. Midge suspects the weapons they use, or the constant traffic and surveillance, have created some kind of atmospheric disturbance. It looks pretty, but it can interfere with transmissions and disrupt technology.”

“Disrupt technology?”

Rowana’s voice was more animated than Rie had heard it in days – her body had straightened in true excitement, jolted for a moment free of the air of calm and steadiness that she had been obligated to project for so long. “Daemin. What kind of technology do you think this disturbance might be able to disrupt?”

Chapter Text

“. . . and if we can get enough people into the right place at the right time, that could be our solution,” Daemin concluded, sitting back at last and waving a hand over the series of plans she had been explaining. She cast an expectant look out at her audience. “Well?”

Shmi glanced from the diagrams on the workbench, which bore only a passing resemblance to the ones Daemin had been working on when she had last been here, to the others around the table. Gira and Midge were there, of course, and Oona and Bet, former slaves from across the planet whom Shmi had only met over hologram before last night. And Cliegg, seated next to Shmi with at least a hands-breadth of space between their arms, space that practically crackled with studied untouching.

All the Jedi were notably absent.

She’d been roused from a sleepless night of lying rigid at Cliegg’s side by Daemin, eyes wide with excitement, whispering that she thought she’d found it. “It” being the solution to their biggest problem, the way to neutralize the slave transmitter chips from a distance – a solution which Shmi had been listening to with equal parts cautious optimism and disbelief.

She had taken part in conversations like this before, what seemed like a lifetime ago. The research into the chips implanted into slaves’ bodies had always been the Whitesuns’ particular interest, and although Loam had taken more of an active and vocal role in their resistance movement, it was Daemin’s work behind the scenes that had driven them forward at every step. She was a medic, and her detailed knowledge of many species’ body systems had led them to their most important discoveries. She had also been on hand for their test of the deactivation system, the careful application of radiation at just the right frequency to deactivate the radio frequency of the chip without harming the body.

And now she seemed to believe that there was a way of doing that over a whole area.

“So, to reiterate,” said Gira, “you think we can use the solar flares to deactivate the chips?” She raised one skeptical eyebrow. “Don’t you think that their designers will have taken that into account?”

“Not the solar flares alone,” said Daemin. “We would have to add something, transmit some radio wave to add to their effect. We still need to study exactly what that radio wave would be, and that’s what I wanted your help with, particularly Midge and Oona. But if the transmitter chips are connected to their home systems, we might be able to interrupt that signal enough to break it permanently.”

A long pause followed her words. Perhaps they were all thinking through the implications?

It seemed both too simple and too impossible to work. If a disruption to power would have been enough to disrupt the chips, wouldn’t it have worked long ago? But then, these were unprecedented times. Average merchants and moisture farmers who owned only one or two slaves would be much more concerned with the larger political upheaval and what it meant for their livelihoods than with the possible alterations in their technology. And if the constant traffic in the atmosphere was thinning it enough that solar radiation might be able to affect the transmitter chips, who would have thought to anticipate that?

“It could work,” said Midge slowly. “Maybe. Power grids have been affected in the last few months in ways I’ve never experienced before. I don’t see why the transmitters should be immune to that. But we’d have to be very careful with the radio waves. We wouldn’t want to do any long-term damage to either the atmosphere or the people caught in our radius.”

“There are some who would say that’s worth it,” said Cliegg.

Shmi glanced at him just in time to see that he and Daemin had locked eyes, clearly sharing some memory in which she had no part. Her stomach squirmed at the realization – just how close had these two become in the days she had been gone? Loam had been killed in the same battle where Shmi had been captured; she could easily picture these two drawing closer together in her absence –

“I’m not one of them,” said Daemin firmly. “And I don’t think any of you are, either.”

Another pause. Shmi’s gut clenched again as she waited, forcing herself to glance around the table to take in the reactions. Oona and Bet were nodding slowly, Midge wore a thoughtful frown, and Gira –

She had dreaded to look at Gira, she realized. Had been fearing what Gira might say in response. But her face was unreadable, the mask over her emotions utterly complete. The same kind of mask she had surely been forced to wear every day as a slave in Jabba’s palace.

Abruptly Shmi thought of Coruscant again, of the six months of imprisonment that had eclipsed decades of forced servitude. Thought of lifetimes of degradation and corruption, the bloated system of exploitation that had been the norm on Tatooine for as long as she’d lived here. She wanted it gone, yes – but what did it say of her that she had half expected Gira to be able to approve such a massive sacrifice? What did it say of her that she herself did not?

Was the absence of a desire for revenge a sign of strength of character? Or did it simply speak of soul-deep exhaustion?

“Of course not,” said Gira at last, and Shmi heaved the weight of her thoughts out of the way with great effort. “But do you think this could work planetwide?”

“I doubt it,” said Midge. “We would have to target one area at a time. The power systems are different and the impacts of the solar storms will be different as well. We’d need a balance of atmospheric predictors, area studies, and physiology to make sure that we can do it right.”

“And, of course,” said Gira, “there’s one big problem. Even if we can figure all this out, target individual areas to deactivate transmitters –”

“– the slaves can’t get there without leaving the place they’re bound to.”

Shmi almost didn’t realize she’d been the one to speak until every face turned to look at her. Her wrists tingled again and she clamped her hands around the edge of the table to keep from wrapping each hand around the opposite wrist, replicating the binders she had worn in that dark cell.

Sidious – Palpatine – had not implanted a transmitter in her; he hadn’t needed to. Watto had needed her mobile, active, able to serve him. The only service she could provide to the Sith lord was her captivity – and, eventually, her death.

They were all looking at her, but only Cliegg’s gaze lingered; only his eyes held hers, for what might have been the first time since her return: large and blue and swimming with the kind of emotion he had always been so easy to express.

Cliegg had told her he loved her only after he’d purchased her freedom from Watto with no strings attached, only after he’d promised to help her secure paying work and a place for herself where she wouldn’t be beholden to anyone else. But he’d said it with an outburst of relief and emotion that revealed months of hidden passion – all the effort it had taken him to hide his feelings until she could be free to hear them. He’d been the first person to free her from bondage, the first person besides her own son that she’d been willing to tie herself to with intent. And now there was so much lingering unspoken between them, so much that he knew about these people she had worked with, so much that had been done in her absence, and she had no idea how to reach across the gap and find him again.

Cliegg had not been an abolitionist when he and Shmi had met – had hardly been one when they’d been married. He’d supported Shmi materially, had believed in her cause, and had voluntarily given his money whenever she’d asked, but he hadn’t attended the meetings himself. It was only once they’d been put in danger that he’d truly begun to fight at her side, stockpiling blasters and learning to use them in defense of their farm, joining her meetings with the neighbors and helping to make plans. Was this a transition that he had begun before her imprisonment and was now only completing? Or was it something that had happened because she’d been gone?

Had the impetus been her abduction, or had it been her absence?

“That’s a problem we can deal with later,” he said now. “Once we know if it’s possible to do it at all.”

“We’ll begin testing immediately, then,” said Gira. “We have a few chips we can try different frequencies on, and there are areas on the planet that might work as large-scale sites. The Hutts’ transmission towers come to mind.”

“And we have people who can help us test.” Shmi did not know exactly what possessed her to say it, but maybe it was their omission from the conversation – or maybe the fact that she had been othered just as surely as they had by proximity. “The Jedi have great knowledge of navigation and I’ve seen them conduct great feats. I’m sure they will have something to add to this conversation.”

She had been watching Gira and Daemin, hoping to gauge their reactions, but she didn’t miss the grimace that flashed across Cliegg’s face.

“Of course, it will be a group effort,” said Midge. “Anyone who wants to help can take part.”

“And,” said Daemin, almost reluctantly, “I admit I owe the idea to the Jedi Rowana. She was the one who led me to the solution.”

“They have a way of doing that,” said Shmi – almost absently, her eyes still riveted to Cliegg’s face. His openness of expression did him a disservice now; though he had clearly tried to smooth his distaste into neutrality, she could see it too clearly to ignore. And abruptly she was fed up with all of this, with the secrets and the hidden conversations and the things that weren’t being said. “Should I not have suggested them?”

“No,” said Cliegg, but the word seemed wrenched from him. “Of course anyone who wants to help should be able to.” The word wants seemed to come with an effort, weighted down with doubt and distrust.

“Do you doubt that they want to help?” Shmi said sharply. Cliegg had hosted the Jedi twice; he had borne witness to their support and their commitment to a cause not their own. Shmi had seen how much they were willing to give up for what they cared about – it was why she had welcomed them to accompany her.

She’d spoken to Qui-Gon, early in their time at the Jedi Temple – when he had confessed to her his desire to reimagine the Jedi Order, his hopes that she would welcome them to Tatooine and into her movement. She didn’t know everything about what the Jedi had become, didn’t know everything that Qui-Gon was hoping to make them into, but she knew at least of the character of those who had come to find her – those who had given up so much to keep Anakin safe. Shmi had no loyalty to the Jedi on Coruscant, those who had stayed behind – but she had seen what this group, at least, was willing to do.

“I think I’ll take a break for the moment,” said Daemin abruptly, pushing away from the table and standing. “I’m going to check on Beru.”

“Yes,” said Gira. “Let’s take a recess for now. Midge, I want to talk to you about how we might start testing.”

Within moments, the entirety of the group was gone. Cliegg made no protest; his eyes were still fixed on Shmi – drinking her in, alone with her for the first time since she had arrived – and yet still she could feel that they were both bristling, ready for a fight.

“Well?” she said at last, unwilling to curb her own tone. If they were going to have this out, then it was time to do it now. “Where does this distrust of the Jedi come from?”

Cliegg’s lips pressed together, but he made no effort to deny it. “From experience,” he said defiantly. “Shmi. Have you forgotten what happened last time the Jedi came to our planet? Have you forgotten what happened to you?”

His words – and that direct bore of his eyes into hers – set chills prickling over her skin, that icy constriction creeping back into her wrists. Forgotten? She would never forget.

“If you had known what happened to me,” she said in a low voice, “you wouldn’t accuse me of that.”

“But I don’t know!” Cliegg was leaning forward now, one hand fluttering up from the table as if to reach for her – and then he let it fall again, flat to the table, with a thud that had Shmi glancing around to ensure that they hadn’t been overheard. “I don’t know what happened to you because you won’t tell me! All I know is that I saw you carted away right after we hosted three Jedi in our home.”

“Carted away from a battle we initiated,” Shmi reminded him. “The Jedi were there to protect us and to ensure our chances of success. The fight was ours, not theirs.”

“But you were taken away because of them,” said Cliegg. “Can you deny that?”

That brought Shmi up short. No – no, she couldn’t deny that. Not when Darth Sidious – the man she had since learned was Palpatine, the chancellor of the Republic – had come to her cell to crow about his training and corruption of her son, to threaten that the next time she saw Anakin, he would be there to kill her. She couldn’t deny that it had been because of the Jedi – because the Jedi had taken her son away.

But if they hadn’t taken him –

“I can see a larger picture than I used to, Cliegg,” she said at last. “I know that Tatooine is part of something greater than itself – some battle that implicates the whole galaxy. Yes, I was imprisoned because of the Jedi, but I was also freed because of them. And I brought them here because I trust their commitment to help us free our whole world.”

“Yes,” said Cliegg. “To free us from the Hutts, maybe, or the Indies. But if they come here to establish themselves, how can we ever expect to be free from them?”

He pushed himself up from the table, the metal squeaking at the absence of his weight. “I know that you won’t leave them behind, Shmi,” he said. “And I’ll go wherever you go, because I love you. But I can’t help wondering where they’ll lead us this time – and how many of us will be hurt before it stops.”

And he turned his back on her, walking out of the room and leaving her behind with the diagrams she didn’t understand and a feeling of sinking in her gut.

“Focus.”

Quinlan’s voice, sharper than usual, jerked Anakin – for the dozenth, hundredth, zillionth time – back to the task at hand: specifically, the transmitter they held suspended between their hands, hovering in the air on the power of the Force. Anakin had hardly been paying attention, and he realized now that it had begun to drift over towards him, his unconscious focus drawing it closer to himself. Overwhelming Quinlan’s hold, like they were kids playing tug-of-war.

“I’m focusing,” he said, unable to keep the annoyance from his own voice.

“You’re drifting,” said Quinlan. “Distracted. Do we need to put this away?”

“No.” Anakin glared. Quinlan, of all people, should know not to treat him like a kid. “I can do it.”

It, in this case, was sensing and altering the radiation emerging from the transmitter, a combination of familiarity with the mechanics and the feeling of the Force around them. It was the thing the Jedi were finally being allowed to do to help, after several days of arguing about the best way to move forward with this plan to deactivate slave transmitters. And it was a thing that Anakin, of all their group, was best at. He was the one with the mechanical sense and the raw Force power – and the only one who knew, of all of them, how it had felt to have a slave chip in his system.

Not that any of them were going easy on him because of it.

“Prove it, then,” said Quinlan. “Loosen up.”

Anakin glared and the transmitter quivered in the air between them, drawn towards him yet again as he pulled it towards himself. He hadn’t even meant to; it was just an instinct that took over whenever it felt like someone was trying to take things away from him. Quinlan’s pull on the transmitter felt like an attack, and Anakin found himself yanking harder in response.

It was just the two of them in the little workroom, where Quinlan had banished the others one by one as Anakin bristled at the feeling of Qui-Gon’s eyes on him, Obi-Wan’s silent judgment, Rowana’s too-knowing look. He could feel the presence of his mom’s friends just outside, too, doubting his skills. He knew he had to do this – not only for all of them, but to prove to them that he could.

He forced himself to loosen his grip, prying his own Force grip away from the thing like he was pulling a ball from the jaws of an akk dog. Let go, Qui-Gon would tell him. Prove you don’t need to hold onto this so tightly.

Like Qui-Gon had ever had any trouble letting go.

No – that was one of the thoughts he was supposed to be releasing, too. He knew that was wrong – knew that was one of the lies that Palpatine had planted in his head, and he knew it because Qui-Gon had come back for him after Anakin had given up hope that he ever would. It was why he couldn’t give up on Qui-Gon now – couldn’t give up on any of them, even if Quinlan was raising an eyebrow at him like he was about to say I told you so.

“I know, okay?” Anakin growled, and he snapped his attention away from the transmitter in a single abrupt yank, letting Quinlan hold it alone.

The transmitter wavered in the air, and then Quinlan released it from his grip as well, catching it easily before it could hit the table. “I don’t think we can try this right now, Anakin,” he said. “The fine Force control required to try to change the radio transmission won’t work if you can’t even hold the machine steady.”

“I know,” Anakin snapped again, and glared at the floor.

The truth was that his fine Force control was shot in a lot of ways now. He’d always been good with machines – all his life, they’d spoken to him more than people. He’d felt them singing to him as if they were friends, and he knew now that that too must have been the Force – the way he could coax just a little more speed out of a broken-down racing pod or find the exact right dial to turn to get the gas started again even after sabotage. He’d known them down to their smallest parts.

But in the last year, he’d learned to get angry. He’d learned to channel all the power he had into bigger and bigger actions, wilder and wilder swings. He’d learned to turn all that intimate knowledge he had once had into an understanding of how to hurt, how to kill –

And it felt like machines had stopped singing to him because of it.

“Come on,” said Quinlan, gentler this time, and Anakin felt a hand land on his shoulder. “Why don’t we go spar?”

They were all waiting for them outside when Quinlan pushed open the door and guided Anakin through. “Well?” asked an unfamiliar voice, and “How did it go?” asked another, and “Have patience,” from Obi-Wan, with an edge of irritation. Anakin gritted his teeth through the babble and couldn’t hold back his relief when Rowana’s voice broke through with a gentle but firm, “Let him be,” and Quinlan brushed everyone else aside as he and Anakin made their way through the small crowd and out towards the courts.

The sparring courts were deeper under the stone than anywhere else in the base – the better to hide the potential sight and sound of weapons – and Anakin followed Quinlan down a steep tunnel into the cool dark of underground. There was still sand here, though, of course. Nowhere on this stupid planet was safe from it, grating under his feet and rubbing under the waistband of his clothes and generally just getting in the way.

It was a little better the further they moved from the others, though – when it was just Anakin and Quinlan, and Anakin reached out for Quinlan’s presence to steady himself. Quinlan was all quiet focus in the Force. He wasn’t always this toned down – sometimes he was a sparking ball of energy and enthusiasm, which was what had first made Anakin like him – but right now his mind was quiet and his concentration was clear, like a railing for Anakin to hold onto. He linked himself up with Quinlan and felt his own Force concentration begin to settle, the thunder of irritation and noise pushed back, at least for now.

“All right,” said Quinlan as the sparring courts opened up before them – a simple flat clearing with a ceiling high enough to jump but not high enough to somersault. There was a scattering of targets throughout the room – meant for people practicing with blasters, obviously – but Quinlan cleared those away with a sweep of an arm, lining them up along the far wall and leaving the space in the middle clear for both of them. “Guard.”

He was on the attack before Anakin could even get his lightsaber up.

It was a dirty trick, and Anakin laughed despite himself, darting out of the way of Quinlan’s attack, then rolling to escape another slice. Quinlan was trying to catch him off guard, trying to make the fight last as long as possible – and Anakin appreciated it, except that his hands had found his own lightsaber now, and the beam flared to life in front of him and something else took him over.

This lightsaber, ever since the moment he had first ignited it, had meant power. It had been a symbol of everything that he’d never been allowed to have, all the things he’d never been deemed good enough to do – and finally he could. Finally, there were no limits on his training or his hopes, and he could learn with it on his own and do with it whatever he wanted. They’d quickly become a unit, unstoppable, uncontrollable. Anakin had never felt stronger or faster or better than when he was holding a lightsaber.

It flooded into him now, the joy of fighting, the need to win. He blocked Quinlan’s last strike and came on the attack, a flurry of blows that it was Quinlan’s turn to dodge. The air lit with blue and green, sparks flying and ozone crackling as blade met blade, and he was flying along with it, his spirits soaring, all the turmoil lost for the moment in the need to fight, to win – he was pressing his opponent back, gaining the upper hand, he just needed another strike to cut him down –

“Stop!”

For a moment, lost in the frenzy of fighting, Anakin had forgotten everything – forgot himself. He didn’t even recognize the word as a word – it was just a noise, uttered from the mouth of his victim, someone whose words didn’t need to be parsed anymore, whose thoughts didn’t matter, because Anakin was stronger, and Anakin’s will was what mattered. Mercy? Was it a cry for mercy? Which of his enemies had ever proved they deserved mercy?

“Anakin! Anakin, you need to stop right now!”

This time, the words pierced the haze over his mind, even if only slightly. Just enough to make him pause, to hold his lightsaber, which he had raised for the killing blow. Anakin blinked, froze where he stood – and then couldn’t move at all, rooted to the ground with dread.

Quinlan Vos stood before him, lightsaber deactivated and held aloft, both hands raised in surrender. How long had he been standing like that? How long had he been unarmed, and Anakin hadn’t even noticed? “Solah,” said Quinlan softly, but his voice was grim.

Anakin lowered his lightsaber to his waist but couldn’t quite bring himself to put it away. He took on a guard stance, instead – a defensive form, one no Jedi used as a prelude to attack – so that at least Quinlan could see that he didn’t mean to keep fighting. “Quinlan?”

“Are you back?”

Quinlan’s voice was wary, no longer the voice of a teacher to a student but something else entirely – something Anakin had heard before. It was the voice of a tavern owner trying to calm a rowdy drunk, the voice of a merchant trying to suss out if his buyer was carrying a blaster. The voice of someone who wasn’t sure what was about to happen next.

Anakin swallowed, his throat suddenly tight with threatening tears. “Yeah,” he said. “I think.”

Quinlan tilted his head. “Can you put away the lightsaber?”

Of course he could. Couldn’t he?

Anakin’s hand did not move towards the power switch, and he looked down at the lightsaber still held across his body with a sudden heavy reluctance to deactivate it. Put away his own protection? What if Quinlan got vengeful? What if he took Anakin off guard again, came at him like the Jedi had always been coming at him –

Anakin’s hand jerked. It felt like something had exploded inside him, some pouch full of poison that had popped and sent horrible liquid sloshing through his insides. The lightsaber went flying out of his hand, blade still active just long enough to decapitate a sparring dummy before it hit the wall, a harmless handle, and rolled to a clinking stop.

“Ani,” said Quinlan carefully, “I’ve never seen you spar like that. Are you okay?”

But Quinlan had sparred with him before, since he’d come back, even. Quinlan had been one of the only sparring partners never to look at him like that, never to tell him to stop using the seventh form because it was too dangerous for Jedi to use. That he was doing it now –

“I’m fine,” he said, and his voice came out drenched in that poison, bitter as corroded metal.

“Is he?”

He whirled.

They had been followed. Somehow, without his noticing – or maybe while he’d been wrapped up in the fight – those people they had brushed past had followed them here. Jedi and Tatooinians alike – he looked between the faces he didn’t know and the ones he did, and he wondered which expressions hurt the worst.

The person who had spoken was Gira, the Twi’lek who had taken leadership from his mom. She stood at the front of the group with her arms crossed over her chest, looking from Anakin to Qui-Gon – Qui-Gon, who had entered as well in his hoverchair and now sat watching with that unreadable expression that made Anakin want to bite something. “This is whose skills and abilities you want us to trust?”

“Yes,” said Qui-Gon.

For a moment it was quiet while they all waited for him to say something else – then, when it became clear that he wasn’t going to, Gira scowled. “Why?”

“Because he has the strength and the ability to do it.” Qui-Gon folded his hands in his lap, letting them disappear into his draping sleeves. “Yes, he has much to learn about discipline, but in skill and will, he is more than capable.”

“So you say.”

Anakin’s fist tightened around the empty air – ah yes, that was right, his lightsaber had flown across the room. He could feel it against the wall, humming, begging to be returned to his hand – and he was practically humming too, his body vibrating with the need to move, to scream, to bite. The back of his mouth still tasted like metal.

“So says the Force,” said Qui-Gon.

“The Force,” Gira repeated. “The mysterious deity whose will you can sense, but we can’t. You must admit it’s rather convenient.”

“The Force is no deity,” said Qui-Gon. He had slipped into lecture-tone now, and Anakin could practically feel him settling in for a lesson. “It is a field of energy that strives, above all else, for balance. That is how we know we can help you. This planet is out of balance, and our efforts to redistribute power align with that goal.”

“Balance,” said Gira. “That’s your goal, then. Not our freedom, your balance. And you wonder why we don’t trust you?” She shook her head when Qui-Gon opened his mouth. “Never mind. Keep working with loose cannons if you need to. We’ll be back in the workshop.”

And with a swish of her lekku, she turned on her heel and stalked out.

Most of the others followed her, but the Jedi stayed: Quinlan and Qui-Gon and – and his mom and Cliegg, her new husband, who had not looked Anakin in the eyes since they’d all returned here. All of them standing in the doorway looking at him, their stares hot on his skin and in the Force. His palms itched. His blood itched. His stomach itched.

“Anakin?” said his mom softly.

“What?”

The word came out as a snarl, and he looked away before he could see how she reacted. He couldn’t bear more disappointment – not from her. He fixed his eyes on Cliegg instead. There was someone he could be furious with, someone whose anger he could stand. Cliegg was staring at him with the same distrustful eyes as Gira, just another person who doubted him. Another person who was wrong – who Anakin could prove was wrong if he had to. “What’s your problem?”

Cliegg started, then took a step back with his hands raised. Something inside Anakin snarled with satisfaction at the sight, a predator sensing weakness. “Don’t bring me into this,” he said, but it was a lie, Anakin could sense it. Cliegg didn’t trust him, just like no one here trusted him; Cliegg was afraid of him, of fucking course he was, and Anakin’s breath was coming faster through his teeth now, fury washing over his vision.

“Anakin.” Qui-Gon’s voice cut sharply through the haze. “Calm yourself,” and he had sounded exactly like that before, when he’d been trying to talk Anakin down from a rage like he’d never felt.

He was supposed to listen to that voice, he knew it, and that knowledge was just enough to keep him from lashing out with the Force but not enough to keep him from snapping at Qui-Gon too when he turned. “Why?”

“Why what?”

Qui-Gon’s face was still so calm, so fucking impassive, and Anakin’s fingers tensed around the emptiness where his lightsaber should be – it was still across the room; why was it still across the room? “Why should I be calm?” he spit. “Everyone here is mad at me; why shouldn’t I be mad at them?”

“Not everyone.”

The voice came from behind him, so close – and so sudden again, another presence he had missed, another thing he hadn’t sensed. Anakin whirled around, and the lightsaber came to his hand with just a thought, thunking satisfyingly into his palm and illuminating –

The face of his mom, standing in front of him with her own hands up. His mom, who he had not been able to look at, but who had been watching the whole thing, and he had –

He had turned on his lightsaber. It was active in his hand again, the blade raised against his own mother, the person he loved most in the world, and that was enough to make him drop it yet again as if the blade had burned him. How could he have come to this? How could this be happening to him?

“Anakin,” said Qui-Gon, his voice steadily, deadly calm. “Put down the lightsaber.”

But he couldn’t. His hand tightened on the handle, instead, at the feeling of Qui-Gon approaching him – the thought that he might be coming to take this away, too, the only power he’d ever had. And he should, he knew it, he deserved it, but he couldn’t even trust himself to let go of it right now, because who knew what he might do?

“It’s all right,” said his mom – and when he looked at her, all he saw was all he had ever seen in her eyes: forgiveness, kindness, love. And it was that love, that recognition, that brought him back to himself – back, as if he’d been lost for days, for weeks, for months.

Lost, yes. Wandering in darkness. What was that haze of anger in his mind, the red wash in front of his eyes? What was the fear he couldn’t release with all the meditation in the world? And now he had turned a weapon on his mom, just like he had shoved Aayla, like he had choked Qui-Gon all those months before –

“It’s not all right,” he said, and now the bitterness in his mouth was the coppery taste of tears. “I could have hurt you.”

His hand was shaking, the beam of light wavering in front of him. He was terrified of himself, but in her face and her Force presence, there was no fear. In that moment, nothing else existed – just the two of them, Anakin and his mother, the anchor who had always kept him close and calm and himself. She reached forward and wrapped her hand around his where it held the handle of the lightsaber, not bothering to be careful of the blade.

When her hand touched his, the blade shrank away at last into nothing. It was almost as if she’d deactivated it – but she hadn’t. Somehow, with her hand touching his own, Anakin had been able to do it himself.

He lowered his hand to his side, but she didn’t let go.

“Palpatine told me that you would kill me one day,” she said when the lightsaber was safely back in his belt, her hand still wrapped around his fingers.

He jolted upright, but her hand kept him steady and focused. “He what?” he whispered hoarsely.

“That’s why he had me imprisoned,” she said. “His final test for students he trains, he told me – he has them kill the person they love most in the world.” Her eyes were so tender still, as if she were comforting him after he’d crashed a pod, after he’d come home raging at Watto and determined to fight their way free. “He told me that he would bring you to me when you were ready.”

“I would never,” he said fiercely. There was no way she could trust him, but he meant the words more than he’d ever meant anything in his life. His eyes burned, his throat constricting – tears fighting their way free at last, and he could do nothing to stop them from running down his cheeks. “Mom. I would never hurt you.”

“I believe you,” she said gently. “I believe that you were never that far gone. I’m telling you this now because I have faith in you. Because I believe you won’t let yourself be pushed over that edge.”

Behind him, Quinlan cleared his throat.

Anakin started. He’d forgotten about the others in the room – had forgotten everything for that moment, when the only thing that existed was his mom and the promise and truth of her life and the horrible thing she was telling him. But he turned, and Quinlan too was looking at him with sympathy rather than anger.

“I wonder if we might try the radiation experiment again,” he said. “But instead of me, maybe your mother can help you focus it.”

Across the base, people and plans were coming together.

Haltingly, yes, and even begrudgingly – even Rie, shut off from the Force and from her own ability to communicate, could sense the tension. She could hear the arguments and hissed conversations, and she understood the sense of them well enough – particularly when her own incompetence was at least part of the cause – but they were happening. Rie had done enough research in her past life to know that it was often the moments of struggle and conflict that led to the greatest rewards.

But even that conflict was cut off to her now.

It wasn’t that she was excluded from the plans. Rowana had sought to include her in conversation with Aayla over star charts and solar angles; Qui-Gon had ventured a leading question or two on philosophy that had seemed primed to draw her response. Quinlan would have welcomed her if she’d chosen to join the small group that had formed with him and Anakin and Shmi, where they sought to alter radio waves from a small transmitter in the hopes that it could be expanded across a broader area. She could have screwed all her courage together, clasped her hands before her, and spoken to someone – anyone – with a question about what they were doing that might lead her to a better understanding, in the end. She could join the people looking for solutions.

The thought of doing any of that made her stomach ache and her head tighten and her tongue glue itself to the roof of her mouth.

Once, she would have been among the first trying to understand. It had always been what she’d sought to do – Rie was not one for instinctive action, not one to glean an intuitive understanding of a situation until she had felt her way into it, learned her way through it. She would have loved the thought of planning, asking questions, seeking patterns. Applying the learning she had once hoped to apply only to scholarship to the real world around her, and the real people who needed help.

That, too, was gone now.

She hovered now under an overhang of rock outside the kitchen area – shaded enough to stay protected from the sun, but not quite inside, not quite anywhere she could be seen. Inside, she could hear the overlapping voices, though the pit of her mind prevented her from making sense of them. She listened for tone instead, Rowana and Aayla discussing something with Midge, this slow building of collaboration, this important process in which she could not bring herself to take part.

Rowana’s voice rose a little above the din, and Rie backed a few steps away, drawing her arms in as if to make herself smaller, less visible. Knowing – even if she couldn’t see it, even if she could no longer feel it – the keen awareness of Rowana’s attention to her. Once that had made Rie feel chosen, special – once it had been a balm to the sore, wounded parts of her soul that couldn’t believe she would ever be worthy of another Jedi’s attention, let alone one so wise, so kind. Now it only made her feel watched, measured – inadequate.

Yet again, inadequate.

She backed away further still, out towards the sun and away from the Jedi who would feel too much if she could bear to let any of it out. Let her feet carry her where they would, with no direction but away.

Her mind wandered even as her feet did – drifting aimlessly from pit to pit. It was not a meditative state that she sought – she had given up on that long ago, even before the Sith lord had thrust his hand directly into her mind. Perhaps inner peace simply could not survive direct contact with the Sith, whether through their malice or simply their artifacts.

Or perhaps Rie had simply never had inner peace, and it had taken Palpatine to show her the truth.

Her mind had always been a jungle, dense with thought and worry and tricky knots of emotion. Rowana had told her once, teasingly, that she’d been drawn to her because she had so much going on inside her that any Jedi master would have been jealous of the challenge. It had been the work of years, during her apprenticeship, to learn – not exactly to clear her head, not to wipe the thoughts away entirely, but to find clearings amidst the dense mass, places where she could rest.

But those clearings were all overgrown now. All those things she had once been able to trust – Rowana’s care for her, the few skills she knew she had honed, the little bits of value she had managed to add to the Jedi, to the world – were now sucking voids of absence, mires of darkness that she could dwell on forever if she let herself.

You are useless. It was a mantra Rie had shied away from for years, though it had always lurked in the back of her mind, teasing her and threatening any state of calm she had ever been able to find. Her response in the past had always been to make herself more useful – to find that area of weakness and learn her way around it, or at least try to avoid drawing attention to it. Or, if none of that could be done, to acknowledge it – to declare it to anyone she was working with before they could find it out for themselves. To offer up her own weaknesses before they could become a liability, so that they could all plan around them.

Maybe she should simply accept it. Learn to meditate on her own worthlessness and find a state of peace. Learn to accept what she could never do again – what she had maybe never been able to do in the first place.

Not only was she no help, she was an active liability. She couldn’t even be trusted in her sleep.

Her feet had found a path on the rock, and she followed it as if in a trance. Away, away, away. Away like an infection, like a germ burned free of a body, like a curse banished by one of those witch-practitioners who used the Force so differently from the Jedi, who called it magic.

If it was magic, was this what it felt like to have your magic burned away?

The Jedi were more than the Force – but Rie had spent so long being so critical of them that it was hard to remember why, or to be sure that was a good thing. If the part of her that could connect to the Force was gone, the part of her that could recognize herself as part of a larger pattern, did that only leave the part that had been trained into a system she had eventually yearned to break away from?

Or maybe the Jedi had been right all along, and she had been unsuited to the Order simply because she could never be good enough to stay.

There was a strange peace to these thoughts – a bitter comfort in the resignation. If she could simply give up on striving for something more, then she didn’t need to be in pain all the time. She could accept that she was not fit to be a Jedi and remove herself from the lives of the people who had poured so much useless energy into her success. She could walk out of this rock outcropping and never come back.

She could walk into the desert and never come back.

The air grew warmer around her, as if in confirmation that she had made the right decision – and then warmer still, and lighter. The shade of rock above her head was lessening, greater space between each overhang; the sand over the rock was growing deeper until she was practically wading through it: panting with every step, dripping with the sweat of the exertion she had avoided for so long, her breath rasping in her throat and sweat stinging her eyes. Her legs burned, and soon enough her skin would as well.

But there was something intoxicating about the burn, something sweet and soothing in the pain. She could keep going, could press forward, and feel like she was shedding pieces of herself in every drop of sweat, every damp exhale. She could walk until there was nothing left of her, and in doing so expel the dark parts she couldn’t trust, and the parts that the darkness had revealed to her. She could vanish, could disappear, and no one would be the worse for it.

The ground was soft beneath her feet, sand so deep she could no longer feel the rock, and she emerged at last from the shelter of stone and into the pounding, beaming suns. Her ankles and shins and calves strained at the cushion of sand and she opened herself up to the physical pain with a welcome she could not grant to any kindness. Felt it as deserved punishment, as purifying cleanse.

Her soul could be stripped clean if she walked far enough. Maybe, if she walked away all the parts of her that that were unworthy of it, the Force would welcome some small, deserving part of her back into its light.

It was almost hypnotic, this feeling – the steady motion of her legs, the scorching sun of the desert that blurred everything before her eyes. She couldn’t see, and soon enough the sun bored into her head in an echo of the pain that haunted her dreams, but she felt it as a tug, drawing her forward. Like she’d been taken over by something bigger than herself.

Maybe the Force was calling to her. Maybe it had latched onto the part of her that was worthy of it and was drawing that part out and away from all the rest, was pulling that tiny pure core of her into itself. Maybe the rest of her would fall away, if she could only keep walking.

Keep walking . . . keep walking . . .

There was no thought anymore, only the mindless, demanding tug of that conviction, a metal cable hooked into her body. She walked. She could not see where she went; her eyes were closed now, tears running down her cheeks and drying into tracks of cracking salt, and it didn’t matter – there was nothing in her path. Her feet traced that path, dragging in the sand, heavy with her own exhaustion, and still she walked, seeing nothing, hearing nothing, feeling only that pull and the merciful relief of that pain – in her skin, in her muscles, in her feet. Feeling the pain and the sun as if they would burn her into nothing.

Into nothing . . .

The promise of nothing was the most beautiful thing that Rie had experienced in months – maybe in her whole life. She leaned into it, into the pain that promised to burn away the failure, the disappointment, the inadequacy, and let the world fade away.

Chapter Text

Shmi was not a Force user. She had known that much ever since her son had been born and she’d recognized instantly that something about him was special – more powerful than anything she had ever experienced or ever would. She’d known that Anakin would be able to touch forces, to do things, that she had never even dreamed of.

But Qui-Gon had told her, after she’d been freed from Palpatine at last, that every being was connected to the Force whether or not they could manipulate it or contact it directly – and that she had a greater sensitivity than many. Now, standing opposite Anakin and watching him concentrate on the radio transmitter, manipulating invisible energy into a new shape, she could almost feel what Qui-Gon had meant.

She couldn’t identify it, couldn’t shape it, couldn’t quite touch it – but she felt different, somehow, watching Anakin work. She could feel the air changing, the energy around them shifting. Could feel the intensity of his focus, the raging emotions that simmered below the surface.

Or maybe she could simply feel it because it was Anakin, and even with all his changes, he was still the same person she’d always known.

Anakin had always carried his anger close to the surface. He felt deeply, and everything that happened to him could be the end of the world if she let it. She’d learned early in his life how to divert his moods, how to recognize a spiral when it came. She’d learned what his limits were, the lines he would not cross, no matter what – and the ones he would.

She believed, still, that he would never cross that final line, that he would never knowingly inflict pain on her, on the people he loved most in the world. But she could see how close he had come to doing it before, and how he could be goaded into doing it again on accident.

So maybe it was good to give him these tasks – a focus for his considerable strength, a means of connection. She could see now, watching him do this thing that no other Jedi could accomplish, why Qui-Gon had wanted to see him trained – and could also see the magnitude of the task he had taken on for himself in the training.

“I can do it,” Anakin announced at last, and let his hands fall.

He seemed to have given up all attention, but the transmitter did not fall – it remained in the air, though Anakin hardly seemed to be devoting any effort to keep it aloft. But it must be his doing, because all the other Jedi had turned to look at him. “You can?” said Obi-Wan, clasping his hands and leaning forward.

“Yes,” said Anakin. “I can change the frequency.”

“For what kind of range?” said Aayla.

“Enough.”

“Enough?” said Midge. “What does that mean?”

“It means whatever the range of the transmitter is,” said Anakin. “I can’t cover the whole planet with it, but if the signal I’m changing reaches out a few miles, then I can too.”

Midge took a sharp breath, but Quinlan spoke first. “He can,” he said. “I felt the change in the Force. I couldn’t do it myself, but I can tell that he can.”

“You felt it in the Force,” said Midge. “But can we feel it too? And even if it does work the way you say, how can we know it’ll work at the right time?”

Anakin was bristling, but Rowana stepped in before he could speak, her voice already conciliatory. Shmi wondered if she ever got tired of mediation. “We’ll run a test,” she said. “Maybe we can’t test the exact radiation that Anakin is trying to change, but we can surely find something that satisfies your doubts. We understand that this is a lot to take on faith, even if no one doubts Anakin’s abilities.”

“What kind of test?” said Anakin, crossing his arms over his chest. The transmitter lowered itself to the table, landing with a thunk that made Shmi wince, though it remained undamaged. “How am I supposed to prove it?”

“We know how we hope these signals will react with the solar flares,” said Quinlan. “Why don’t we find something that can simulate the effect, so that we can show you that the necessary change is possible?”

“It’s doable,” said Daemin. “We know how the chips react to various types of radio waves. Even if we can’t change the radiation to what we need it to be here, we should be able to simulate an effect.”

For the first time – even though she had believed in this project herself – Shmi’s heart leapt with the real and sudden possibility that this might actually work. This project, which they had been straining and struggling through for so long – which they had conducted in covert transmissions and secret meetings, with which they had managed to free people one at a time, if that – might actually be possible. They might be able to free people on this planet for good.

And Anakin, who had once been enslaved here, might be the one to do it.

Had she been struggling so much with her integration here because some part of her hadn’t believed it could be possible? And what did it mean for her – for all of them – if they really could make this change?

“Then,” said Rowana, “I would suggest we try that next.” She glanced around at Midge, Gira, Daemin, and Cliegg – and the others who had come forward from their own small groups and projects, looking at each of them in turn. “Does that sound acceptable to you?”

And they clearly still had doubts, still felt whatever reluctance Cliegg had expressed before about letting the Jedi help them, but they also couldn’t deny the chance to look for a real solution. Nods and murmurs of assent spread around their loose circle, and Rowana gave her own decisive nod.

“That’s settled, then,” she said. “Now, let me ask – let me” –

Her eyes widened, her mouth working as she broke off midsentence to glance around, that calm evaporating all at once, her certainty dissolving into fear. “Where’s Rie?”

“You wouldn’t think it would take so long to find one person,” murmured Aayla.

She walked at Anakin’s side, her brow furrowed in concern even as they walked in ever-lengthening strokes up and down their assigned quadrant of the circular search pattern – out several yards, back, out again, and then repeat a bit further out. The others among their Jedi group were doing the same thing, and the Tatooinians as well.

“It can take longer,” was all Anakin said. It had been some time since he’d lived in the desert, but he remembered well enough the way people could go missing here. A short distance away from home could turn into miles fast if you weren’t exactly sure where you were going and didn’t have your navigation senses perfectly tuned to the desert. And one thing he knew for sure about Rie was that she didn’t have either.

He was fairly sure she didn’t even know where she was most of the time. Even before she’d – well, even before, she’d been distracted and disoriented by changing terrain. The desert didn’t change, but maybe that was just a reason to get even more disoriented. And people could disappear in the sand. If you were out of sight, you could get lost way too easily.

And Rie couldn’t see. That was something Anakin had learned early and well about her. She could lose a group at a hundred paces even when there wasn’t a hazy, sandy horizon and two blinding suns to help do the work.

They swept up and down, using vision and the Force alike to feel for her presence. Rie had been harder to feel in the Force lately, too – still there, still a blurry presence, but shielded heavily from the others and not using the Force in ways that could draw attention to her presence. They had no idea when she’d vanished.

“What do you think is going on in her mind lately?” asked Aayla, tentative again. Out of the corner of his eye, Anakin could see her lekku swishing gently as she darted a glance in his direction, then away again. “Why would she walk away?”

“I don’t know,” said Anakin. “But she hasn’t been the same since” – He couldn’t say it. He didn’t even know what to say, but he never talked about it with the others – except for Qui-Gon, who made him and kept making him, even when Anakin started yelling. “You know.”

“Yeah,” said Aayla softly, and her walk beside Anakin tensed as she rolled her shoulders.

This was why Anakin didn’t talk about it. Because even though he was still angry, so angry that it choked him sometimes, he knew that Palpatine – the man he’d thought was his mentor, the man he’d learned had been using him for years, the man who had manipulated everything that had gone wrong in Anakin’s life since he and Qui-Gon had left the Order together – had hurt his friends so much worse than he’d hurt Anakin. He could still remember bursting onto the scene and seeing them all lying crumpled on the ground, only Qui-Gon still conscious enough to fight, his energy completely spent. Aayla had nearly been paralyzed in that attack – had been held in temporary paralysis afterwards so that her spine could heal – and she’d forgiven Anakin for it so easily that he sometimes felt like he couldn’t trust it. Because if he was still this angry with no real reason, how could the others ever have meant it when they said they’d forgiven him?

And Rie –

It was the worst with Rie. Bad with Obi-Wan, but at least he talked about it: his experiments with prosthetic legs, his decision to stay in a hoverchair while he was still adjusting. He didn’t flinch away from talking about what had happened, and at least when he was mad at Anakin, he said so. Then they could fight it out and feel better afterwards, at least a little.

Rie – she’d said she forgave Anakin. Quietly and haltingly, and then she’d said almost nothing more to him since. Had been locked in her own world, quiet and withdrawn, never using the Force, never talking to any of them about what she was thinking.

Was she angry too? Was she like him, so furious at the world that she couldn’t even talk about it without screaming? Or was it something else, something none of them could even imagine because she wouldn’t talk about it?

She hadn’t talked to them in days, and maybe that was why they hadn’t noticed she was gone. They’d all been wrapped up in their projects; Anakin had been so relieved to have something to do for once, something that he could actually focus on. Quinlan had been right; having his mom with him while he worked did help him to calm down, to keep his mind on the project rather than spiraling into useless emotion. It had made a difference. He had felt like he was making a difference, in a good way this time – in a way he hadn’t felt in too long. He’d gotten wrapped up in the project, just like he would have done when he was little, and he would never have noticed when Rie had slipped away. And apparently, none of the rest of them had either.

She could have been wandering in the desert for hours.

Anakin reached out again at that thought, sweeping the desert around him with the touch of his mind and his Force sense. That fuzziness was still there, the blur over his awareness that made it harder to sense emotion and intention. Maybe that was also something Palpatine had done to him – made it harder for him to sense anything other than threats.

But even if he couldn’t always tell when someone was a friend or a foe, he could still sense presence. Even if it did feel like a threat, even if opening himself up like this did still feel like he was making himself vulnerable to attack – this was for Rie. Anakin had never been close to her, no, but she was someone he knew – and was one of the people who had given up everything to come find him. To try to save him. He had to try to save her, too.

That thought made him push harder, casting the net of his senses out far into the desert, far across the sand. He felt for the living Force, like Qui-Gon had taught him – felt for the weak pulse of cacti and other low-moisture plants thriving in this wasteland, felt for the animal scavengers that circled, hunting for food, even as they were now enacting their own circular pattern looking for Rie. That thought gave him a pang – what if something had happened to her already? – but it also gave him an idea.

Instead of looking for Rie, trying to identify that Force presence that he hardly knew anymore, he reached for the animals instead. Felt for their presence, their shape, their intention – and then he had it.

There was a band of sandhawks nearly a mile south of the outer edge of their search perimeter, farther than he could see – but he could feel them. They were circling lower and lower in the sky, the kind of pattern they used when they’d found something they weren’t sure was prey but were willing to find out.

Anakin reached out for that thing they had found – not sure if he should hope it was a dead animal or something alive – and when his mind touched it at last, he shuddered.

The Force around it was sluggish and dark, as conflicted as Anakin’s own mind, but it was there. Strong, even, despite its confusion – too strong to be an animal, or even a regular person. Too strong to be anything other than what it was. Because even if the figure was unconscious, and even if the Force was twisted and dark, he could also feel the special kind of light that meant he was sensing a Jedi.

He opened his eyes.

“Found her,” he said, and he and Aayla began to run, both yelling for help.

They carried Rie back an hour after the search had begun.

Anakin was in the group that had found her, Shmi saw as the groups began to converge. He walked beside Rowana Navarr, who was carrying Rie in her arms – apparently unbothered by the weight of a woman both taller and heavier than she was, with eyes only for the head nestled in the crook of her arm and the hair spilling off the edge.

Rie was unconscious, or at least unmoving. Shmi found herself hoping, heart in her throat, that unconsciousness was the worst of it. A few hours in the desert was not usually enough to kill – it was enough for heatstroke, dehydration, disorientation, yes, but not enough alone to cause death. Least of all the death of a Jedi, who could – she had learned – regulate their body temperatures and their body systems, at least to some degree. This should not have been a cause for alarm, not yet.

But she remembered the disruption of that first night, the horrible bloodcurdling screaming that had startled all of them awake. She remembered how quiet Rie had been throughout all those weeks on Naboo, how disinclined she had seemed to speak or to eat or to participate in anything – how she had felt barely present in the world.

Not enough to kill a Jedi, no. But what about one who already seemed to have stepped away from life?

The other Jedi rushed forward first, and Shmi stayed back with the others in her group. She’d chosen to hang back only because she didn’t want to impose by reaching forward, because caution was so drilled into her, but it was as if loyalties had been chosen in that moment, as if that same choice were being demanded from her. She remembered how Cliegg had spoken to her a few days before, the implication that she was drawing away from him by following the Jedi, and she wondered how he would read her actions now.

But why did she need to choose a side between those who wanted to make change and those who wanted to help? Those who already had?

Slowly, deliberately, Shmi stepped forward – a few paces behind the Jedi, yes, not quite alongside them, but in the middle of the line of separation. Perhaps it wouldn’t be noticed, but maybe some would take a lesson from it.

“How is she?” That was Qui-Gon, urgently, maneuvering his hoverchair closer to Rowana and reaching out for Rie, though he stopped short of touching her. “Do you know what happened to her?”

“No,” said Rowana, and one of her hands flitted over Rie’s cheek, a ghosting motion that might not have even contacted her skin. “She’s alive, though. Unconscious, but breathing.”

“That’s something,” murmured Qui-Gon, and he let a hand rest on Rie’s forehead. “Sunburned . . . or feverish?”

“Most likely both,” said Rowana. “We need to get her back inside.”

But even as they continued back towards the rock, Rie began to revive, twitching and murmuring in Rowana’s arms. Shmi couldn’t look away from her motion – she seemed, strange as it was, to be straining to return to the desert.

“Shh,” Rowana murmured. “You’re safe, Rie.”

The words did not seem to bring any comfort. Rie’s stirring spread from her arms and head to her full body, which contorted in Rowana’s arms, folding at the middle to turn out arms and legs in an effort to spill free. Rowana released her, opening her arms and placing her on her feet – which promptly gave way beneath her.

Shmi watched in shock and horror as, on hands and knees, Rie began to crawl.

“Rie,” said Rowana sharply, and reached for her again. “Stop.”

Rie did not respond. Her body moved slowly, sluggishly, driven nearly to the ground by the exhaustion and dehydration of her earlier wandering – and yet she struggled forward, pulling herself on hands and knees back in the direction from which they had carried her.

“Rie,” said Qui-Gon. “Knight Axtin!”

No response.

“I can’t reach her, Qui-Gon,” said Rowana, and though Shmi only caught a flash of her gaze, she could make out the look of utter despair and ragged exhaustion that lined her face. “She’s been shutting me out for months.”

“I know,” he said, and he gave her a meaningful look that Shmi could already recognize as a promise of a conversation later.

It was a surprise even to hear this much. The Jedi didn’t reveal much of their feelings before the others – she’d caught flashes of Qui-Gon’s only, and little from the rest of them. Rowana especially seemed more preoccupied with an empathetic recognition of the feelings of others, rather than a revelation of her own.

But this was – something else. Something new. She had never seen a Jedi lose control like this before, had never seen this possession, this utter lack of awareness of the world around her. Rie’s eyes were swollen shut, cheeks streaked with dusty tears, and she did not react to anyone around her, but clawed her way through the sand towards something no one else could sense.

“Let me try,” said Qui-Gon. He rose from his hoverchair, his motions slow and awkward – but Rie was slower still, and he caught her easily, kneeling beside her to rest his hand once more on her forehead. “Sleep,” he said, and even though Shmi could not feel the Force like he could, she fancied she could hear the compulsion in his voice.

Rie sagged. She did not drop, exactly, but her arms bowed at the elbows and her hips sank towards the ground, and for a moment it looked as though she would collapse yet again and let herself be lifted –

And then she pushed herself back up, struggling all the way to her feet, and continued to forge ahead.

“Hmm,” said Qui-Gon, and then he strode up to catch her and slapped her across the face.

Shmi swallowed back an exclamation at the sharp smack of skin against skin, wincing in sympathy at the sight of Rie’s cracked and sunburned face. The pain must be unbearable, and the intimate violation of it was something she had never imagined she would see from one Jedi to another –

The sharp cry that cut through the air was so in time with Shmi’s own suppressed reaction that for a moment she thought she had failed to suppress it after all, that she’d let her own shock out into the air in anything other than a pulse of emotion that the Jedi must surely feel – but no, it was Rie, reacting at last to something other than constraint. Her hand flew to her cheek, her eyes gleaming in swollen slits, open at last, and she glanced around herself in confusion.

“Qui-Gon?” she said, her voice wavering, and Rowana rushed forward to catch her as her knees gave out.

“A compulsion,” said Qui-Gon quietly. “A pull from the Force itself – or at least from something very strong in it. You’ve been shielding from all of us, Rie, but the Force hasn’t let go of you yet.”

“Oh,” said Rie weakly, and clasped her hands over her face.

Compelled by the Force. After another two days of this, Rie could not deny that it must be happening, although she was fairly sure the others were wrong about the reason.

The nighttime migraines had stopped, and that was a grace that she could have wept with gratitude for, but they had been replaced instead by this incessant wandering – by this tug into the desert, out away from the others. She couldn’t sleep, couldn’t even drift, without feeling her feet turn in the direction of the exit – or without waking up, disoriented and stinging, to someone guiding her back.

Qui-Gon believed it was the Force calling on her; Rowana tried to hearten her by speculating that she had been chosen for something – seeing through, as always, Rie’s attempts at secrecy. Recognizing the worries that plagued her, the certainty that the Force had forsaken her. It was kind. She had always been kind.

But Rie couldn’t help but feeling that her conscious thoughts, her deep-churning feelings, must have been right the first time: the Force was calling on her to leave. To take herself out of this space, out of this world, where she was no longer worthy to remain. To die, if she needed to, though she kept that thought too clamped down tightly.

It would have frightened her, once. She would have feared for her sanity, would have selfishly rushed to Rowana or to anyone else for help in working through it – she had never had a thought like that before, for as low as she had fallen, as worthless as she had felt. But now she simply accepted it with a philosophical awareness of something that was right, something that was as it should be. She was no longer fit to be in this world, and maybe it would be a relief for everyone if the Force – or even simply the desert – decided to take her out of it.

Maybe this was the reason she had been called back to Tatooine, the reason the group had returned.

No, that was too selfish. She was not important enough for the whole group to have been compelled to come here only to shake her off. They had work to do here, and they had been called here for a purpose. Perhaps it was better for her to melt away and let them get to it.

Except that they wouldn’t let her. Except that they seemed convinced she was part of that purpose still.

During the day, they continued their work, though Rowana kept an eye on Rie now – having learned that she could not be left alone, lest she be overtaken again and wander away. There was no infirmary in the base here, only the most basic medical supplies, but Rie had been kept in a dim room, her sun-ravaged skin coated with a cooling gel, water poured into her even when she could hardly force herself to swallow it. She’d been observed, and she couldn’t help feeling the resentment sizzling in the corners of the room – the people who did not want her here as a drain on their resources.

But the work continued, even if she could not be part of it. Anakin and Shmi had isolated the specific radiation wave that they would need to impact to change the frequency of off-planet transmissions to interrupt the function of the slave chips. Another group was working on the perfect site to target the wave. The revolutionaries were working on disseminating the word to their networks. The process continued without Rie – but that thought assumed that she had ever been part of the solution.

But apparently she was to be, because on the third day of her confinement – and after five more futile unconscious attempts to break free – Qui-Gon came back to her with news.

“We’ve made a plan,” he said.

Rie blinked up at him from the pad that had become her bed. Words were harder than ever these days; complex thought and any attempt at communication had been smothered beneath the mingled daze of sleeping and waking. But Qui-Gon was regal in his hoverchair, his hands clasped together, and that tone – that posture of a Jedi Master – compelled bodily response after years of training.

“The others have located a remote transmission tower,” he said. He must know she was listening, or at least trying to. “The Hutts’ forces have left it with lower guard as they strive with the Independent Alliance elsewhere on the planet. It’s not near a central hub, but it will do as a test of our ability to change radio frequencies. And if they notice that something has gone amiss, it will take longer to communicate as much with their allies. In the meantime, we might be able to manipulate a few people into the area.”

Again, she managed a sluggish blink. Why was he telling her this?

Her thoughts were shielded; surely he couldn’t read them, but he stared at her as if he had understood. “I thought you’d be interested to know,” he said, “that it’s in the same direction your unconscious walkabouts have been taking you.”

He tilted his head, waiting for her to catch on. Waiting, as he always would, back when her mind had worked quickly, back when she could have understood the click of pattern pieces into one another. Back before her mind had turned to dust and ash.

She let her eyes sink shut in response.

Qui-Gon sighed. “We believe you’ve been called, Rie,” he said. “Anakin and Shmi will be departing tomorrow, and Rowana and I agree that the Force is compelling you to accompany them. Would you deny that will?”

Would she? She had never been one to doubt Qui-Gon’s convictions, but this one seemed too absurd to be countenanced. Even if he was not in her mind – even if he couldn’t feel how utterly she had been spent – he had borne witness to her uselessness over these last months. He knew how undependable she was. He knew that she would only be a burden to this group.

“Knight Axtin,” he said, and this time the cadence of his voice had so changed that she opened her eyes at last, dragging at exhausted lids to take him in. He sat before her now with a tilt to his chin, a stubborn expectation carved into every line of his face – and the tones of his voice were heavy with command. “You have been assigned a mission.”

Chapter Text

Their last night before departure, Shmi and Cliegg were given some privacy.

It was a kindness granted in quiet, in murmured arrangements and in Gira leading them that evening to an overhung nook away from the main shared space, encouraging them to lay out their bedrolls there away from the others. A kindness that Shmi would have declined if not for the fact that they desperately needed it.

There had been no time in all the days of planning, no time since their return, for them to have this conversation, but it had been building all the while. It would have been wrong to leave without speaking of it, and yet they prepared for bed in the awkward silence that had become so characteristic of them lately.

But when at last there was nothing more to do, no more distractions, Cliegg turned to Shmi – crosslegged on the bedroll they were meant to share – and said baldly, “I don’t want you to do this.”

It was something he had never said to her before. Acutely aware that she had come from slavery, Cliegg had always stepped back and let Shmi make her own decisions about herself and her actions. He had invited her into his life and changed it to suit her; he had not complained when she’d connected with others interested in abolition; he had not objected to her having others in the area over to their farm in the guise of a social hour and then using the time to plan and scheme. He had raised his eyebrows at her decision to invite three Jedi to stay with them as well – but had reluctantly acknowledged, when she’d reminded him, that given the recent attack on their farm, the Jedi would likely serve as protection. He’d disagreed with her, at times, but he’d always, always been careful not to tell her what to do.

Even now he wasn’t, but the bold statement of disagreement rubbed at raw edges in Shmi’s soul, pricked her hackles to awareness. The urge to argue snapped behind her tongue and she pressed it back only with the practice of years. He hadn’t given her an order, she reminded herself. He was only speaking his mind – and giving her an opening to speak hers in turn. A chance to lance this wound between them, this swelling that seemed to be holding them apart, even after months of separation and loneliness.

“Why not?” she said, as evenly as she could.

She sat opposite him on the bedroll, nearly close enough for their knees to touch; that bare inch of space between them rose up like a physical wall. In the quiet, she could hear the indistinct murmurings of others preparing for bed, the faint distant sound of sparring from the courts. All the noises were loud enough to remind her that they were not alone – to remind her of this journey they had started and had to finish – but quiet enough to assure her that no one would be listening in on them.

“It’s dangerous,” he said. “Going out alone, venturing close to enemy territory, with” –

He clamped his mouth shut.

With. Was it Anakin he had a problem with, or Rie? Or both?

“Everything we’re doing is dangerous,” she said. “You’ve been living a dangerous life since I’ve been gone, Cliegg.”

“We’ve been living a dangerous life since we got married,” he said. “I knew what I was getting myself into, I just didn’t” – He shook his head. His body was held rigid across from her, legs crossed, hands clamped around his knees, like he didn’t trust himself to loosen into her, to soften in any way.

“You agreed to every step of it,” she reminded him. “And you’ve stayed with it. I come back and find you one of the leaders of the movement!”

“What else was I supposed to do?” said Cliegg. He looked away from her now, down at his knees, but his voice trembled. “You changed my life, Shmi. I couldn’t undo that change. I couldn’t even want to. But if I’d known that it would take you away from me” –

Her throat contracted around a lump as hard as metal and as sharp as a thousand grains of sand. “I didn’t want it to,” she whispered. “You have to believe me.”

“I do,” he said. “I know you couldn’t have done it any other way. And I know you didn’t have a choice. But now you do.” He looked up, his eyes gleaming in the low light of their low-tech lamps, the skin beneath them damp with the edges of tears. “You’re choosing to leave again. To risk yourself.”

“But not for no reason.” She had come to love this too about Cliegg – something she had never known from anyone in her life: he was reasonable. There was something steady about him, something so different from Anakin’s unpredictable emotionality or the constant demands of the people she had served. She loved him for it now – even in the fierceness of her defense, her need to make him understand, she knew that he would let himself understand. “It’s never been for no reason, Cliegg. It’s always been because I believe it’s possible to be safer than we are. To live better.”

“I know,” he said. “But there has to be a better way. The Jedi – I know you trust them, but all I’ve seen is them coming and leaving again. And these two – they’re unpredictable. I don’t think they can protect you.”

“They’re hurting,” she said. This too was something she had seen that no one else in their cell could have understood – what the Jedi had given up, what they had fought. What they had returned to save her from. The way they had seen her, even among the larger struggle that they fought on behalf of the whole galaxy. They had not placed her salvation above that fight, but they had remembered it; she had mattered – and they had given up so much in the process. “You haven’t seen what they faced, but I have. I was held captive by it for a long time. The man who had me – he was worse than anyone I’ve ever known on this planet, and he was the enemy of the Jedi. What I faced with him – it could have been so much worse if I’d been his enemy instead of merely his pawn. But they still came to rescue me.”

“But that’s just it,” Cliegg insisted. “His battle was with the Jedi. They have different enemies and different battles, and sure, they come to help us when those battles line up. What was it Qui-Gon said – that our planet is out of balance? But what if they decide we don’t line up anymore? And if they’re hurting so much, how can we trust them not to hurt us too?”

“How can we trust anything?” Shmi countered. She’d never had faith in the Republic, in the larger picture of a government for the galaxy. She’d only ever lived on planets that had slipped through the cracks, and Tatooine had been the worst of all. She’d grown used, long ago, to being left behind. But these Jedi – and Anakin – had come back both for her and for her world. “I’m tired of living with less pain, Cliegg. I’m ready to live better. And they want to help us do that.”

“And you trust that this is the way?” he said. “To go off alone with two of the most unstable of the bunch?”

He snapped his mouth shut after saying that, as if he knew he had overstepped, but he made no move to retract his statement.

Cliegg was one of the most honest people Shmi had ever known. If he had misspoken, if he’d said something he didn’t mean, he would have withdrawn, tried to explain. That he hadn’t done so now –

And could she deny that she understood? She knew so little about Rie Axtin or the pain that consumed her or the compulsion that had overtaken her. She knew enough about the man who had had Anakin in his clutches for years to distrust what had been done to him.

But beneath it all, she had faith. Somehow, with that feeling that Qui-Gon had identified as a latent Force sensitivity, the feeling that had guided her all her life to serenity in moments that should never have allowed it, she could just sense that everything was going to be all right.

He’d tried to quash that in her, Palpatine. He’d twisted her thoughts and her fears, had made her distrust her own son and the world around her. He’d wrapped icy claws of darkness around her wrists, and she still heard his voice in her head. But he’d been defeated, in the end, and Anakin had come back to her, and she was back on her world and determined to make a difference.

“I know it’s frightening,” she said to Cliegg now, and she was overcome with a wash of sympathy for him – who had seen her leave and not known she would ever come back, who had had months to imagine the worst. And could the worst he had imagined be so different from how bad it had actually been? “I know you have no reason to trust them. But I do. I do.” She reached out at last to rest her hands on his own, feeling the tension of the muscles beneath her grip – feeling Cliegg’s shuddering inhale when they touched at last, a vibration that echoed in her own body. His hands were the same as ever, steady and callused and tough. Worker’s hands, the hands of someone who had always done all he could in defense of the people he loved – the world they both loved. “Can you trust me in this?”

With another gasp, damp and tear-filled, Cliegg leaned forward to let his forehead rest against hers.

“I can try,” he whispered, and melted against her, and for all the tension of the upcoming mission, at last something in Shmi seemed to melt as well.

The journey to the outpost had been expected to take them three days; when they finally stopped to rest for that first night, Shmi began to suspect it might be only two.

Anakin’s driving was the main culprit. She had intended to pilot herself – they’d been given a small speeder fixed up to look like a basic traveler’s transport, hoping to make themselves a small and unenticing target for enemies and robbers both – but Anakin had been so restless in the seat beside her that she’d finally ceded the controls to him in the hopes that he would at least stop fidgeting with his lightsaber. He drove faster than Shmi would have preferred, but he’d at least managed to refrain from too many of the podracing tricks she’d watched for years with her heart in her throat.

He’d seemed a little too excited the few times they’d encountered anyone else, first a band of Jawas on the hunt for scavenge and then a sleek transport that might well have been a smuggler – and Shmi had been braced for a fight, but thankfully Anakin had chosen to maneuver them out of the way at terrifying speed rather than challenge anyone.

She’d breathed a sigh of quiet relief both times. Her main responsibility on this trip was to keep Anakin in check – to manage his darkest impulses – and she had no idea how she would hold him back if she had to.

She still heard Palpatine’s voice in her dreams, echoing in her mind in quiet moments: the reminder of what he had promised and threatened to do. The promise that the next time she saw her son, he would be the last thing she ever saw.

She couldn’t believe it of Anakin – in that much, at least, she had faith – but she still tensed up at the thought of his unchecked rage, the potential for explosion into violence. Those few times they had come near to someone else, she’d found her arms prickling with cold sweat despite the heat of the day.

And as for the third member of their group –

Rie had said nothing all day, sitting quietly in the back and only at times nudging Anakin to point in one direction or another. He’d obeyed her prompting, as Qui-Gon had strictly ordered him to before their departure, but he seemed none too thrilled to be taking direction from someone who hadn’t spoken a word to him. That only ratcheted the tension up further in the speeder until the air seemed to tremble, agitating Shmi’s already-jittery nerves until she felt that something was about to explode.

She’d called them to a halt at last when Rie’s instruction had threatened to take them into Tusken territory and Anakin had protested. No one was in the shape for a fight, with enemies or with one another.

And so now they sheltered in a shallow cave, one Anakin had swept with his Force sense and pronounced free of snakes, having eaten their meager meal of rations and a few precious swallows of water. Anakin lay in his bedroll, shifting in uneasy sleep, a furrow still visible between his brows.

Once upon a time, Shmi would have reached out to him to try to soothe his bad dreams. Now, she could hardly manage her own.

She sat against a wall of the cave, sand grinding between her back and the rock, and let her gaze fall onto Rie, who had volunteered to take the first watch. Or maybe all the watches – the offer had been as silent as everything else she had done that day. She’d simply seated herself in the mouth of the cave and waved the other two off when Shmi had tried to offer a watch.

Maybe she didn’t mean to sleep at all.

Shmi could relate.

It was all too much – the tension of the day, the reminder of what her son had almost become, leaving her raw and on edge. She couldn’t trust what might come to her in her sleep: those memories of darkness, the prickling of fear and pain that always had her waking up in a cold sweat.

The next time she glanced up at Rie, she caught a responding gleam – the encroaching moonlight reflecting off the lenses of Rie’s glasses as she gazed back.

There was something in her eyes – some lostness – that drew Shmi forward. She leaned away from the wall, half-rising in the shuffling crouch to keep her head from scraping rock, and settling at last across from Rie.

The air was cooler here, the night settling over them unmitigated by the shelter of the rock. Somewhere in the distance, a lonely nightbird called out to nothing. The silence around them shivered with anticipation, and Shmi clasped her hands on her knees and waited.

Rie’s jaw worked, her brow furrowing, her lips parting. Finally, she spoke, her voice rough and dry from disuse. “You too?”

Shmi took the words as the offer they were. Something stirred in her chest, the slow unfurling of a nighttime cactus bloom, at the realization that Rie had spoken – Rie who had been quiet all day, for the better part of days. “Me too what?” she said.

“Can’t sleep.”

“No.” It sat wrong with her to confess it, to share the burden of her trouble with someone else who had already suffered so much, but it would sit just as wrong to spurn an offer for sympathy. She breathed into that feeling in her chest, that fluttering vulnerability, and let it open further still along with her confidences. “Bad dreams.”

A tiny ironic smile tugged at the edges of Rie’s lips, not quite reaching her eyes. “Yes.”

Something about that expression – that odd combination of sympathy and pleading – tugged at Shmi’s heart. Before she could think better of it, she was speaking again. “Sometimes I feel that I can still hear his voice in my head. Do you – maybe you know?”

Rie gazed away from Shmi and out into the desert night. The sky was cooling rapidly from light blue to deep; soon enough, it would be an expanse of black. Perhaps Rie was looking for a threat, but the expression in her face spoken otherwise. Shmi knew that studied blankness intimately, knew the hollowness on the other side of those glazed-over eyes. When at last Rie spoke, her voice was a whisper, but the words rang with sincerity. “I know.”

“Yes,” murmured Shmi. “I thought you might.”

What she knew of what had happened to Rie was secondhand at the most. It had come mostly from Qui-Gon, who seemed to have taken it upon himself to keep her connected with the Jedi, but what he had learned was from Rowana and from the healers at the Jedi Temple. As far as she had understood it, Rie had shared some kind of mental connection with Palpatine, one that had left her disconnected from the Force and from the rest of the Jedi. She’d recognized Rie’s screaming, the last few nights, as the same sound she had heard in the last moments of her imprisonment, when she’d known that her fate hung by a thread. Either Palpatine’s life would come to an end, or he would kill most of the people she loved before coming to finish her off as well.

She’d tried to push back her fear then – had tried to be strong for Anakin, as she had so many times before. Had tried to resign herself to her fate, to believe that the certainty of whatever would come next had to be better than the days of icy anxiety and fear, of never knowing and only fearing whatever he would do to her in the future. But repression could only work to a point. Sooner or later, the horror of it always crept back.

Rie looked back at last, frowning in concentration. “There’s – Jedi exercises,” she said. "For bad memories. Meditations.”

Shmi raised an eyebrow in Rie’s direction. “And they haven’t worked for you?”

Rie shook her head and did not stop shaking it. It was eerie to watch – the quick, jerky motions of her head from side to side like an automated fan, like some part on a droid whose programming had jammed. Shmi looked down, as if the absence of her gaze might help Rie regain her control, and spoke again to distract her. “I didn’t mean to push.”

“No,” said Rie. Shmi dared to look up again to see that she had gained a handle on the motion of her head, though her hands had begun to worry at her belt. It was a cosmetically similar motion to the one she had already grown to dread from Anakin, who toyed with the lightsaber clipped to his belt as if seconds away from drawing it. Rie, on the other hand, flicked at the lightsaber as if striving to push it away. “It’s all right.”

“The meditations,” said Shmi. “Do you think they will work for someone not strong with the Force?”

Rie paused. Even her hands stopped moving, and the expression on her face softened at last, suddenly, into something easier, something gentler. “They can,” she said. “Trust me.”

And so Shmi found herself sitting crosslegged opposite Rie in the mouth of the cave, her hands resting on her knees with palms facing the sky in a mirror of Rie’s posture. Rie had closed her eyes, breathing so deeply that Shmi could see her chest moving, and seemed to be gathering herself to speak.

“Find a comfortable posture,” said Rie at last. “Whatever you think you can hold for some time.”

After a moment of consideration, Shmi left her palms open, fingers loose, as if she were cupping the chill of the night air in the center of her hands. This chill was different from the one inside her blood – natural and traceable, rather than a prickle of threat and fear – and that slight discomfort helped to remind her that she was in the open, that she was free. That the danger that still surrounded her was still at bay. That, if nothing else, she had the safety of the night.

“Find a light meditative state,” said Rie. Her words were halting at first, but settled into a cadence of repetition, as if she were echoing something that had been told to her long ago – reciting something from long-held memory. “No need to reach for the Force, not yet. This meditation requires you to connect first and foremost to your body. First, pay attention to the tips of your fingers.”

Attention. Yes. Shmi dragged her thoughts back from their wondering, from the curiosity about Rie’s own training and memory, and into her body. The tips of her fingers.

They were cold, she noticed, the chill of the night beginning to seep into her extremities. She flexed them in an effort to improve their circulation, then stopped as she remembered that she was meant to be meditating.

“If any motion arises during this stage, that’s fine,” said Rie. “This meditation is about internal stillness rather than external. It is a meditation of attention. Keep your thoughts in your body. How do your fingers feel? What do they mean to you?”

How did they feel? At first, all Shmi could think was cold – but then, as circulation returned to her fingers from her flexing, she found herself adding flexible to the list. Mobile. Capable.

Capable, yes. Fingers that could cook and write, that could point and direct, that could operate controls. Fingers that could lace into other fingers, could hold the people she cared for close.

“Now your hands,” said Rie. “How do they feel right now? What do they mean to you outside this moment?”

Tingling, her palms, as if the night air were cupped in them and held in little shapes close to herself. Was this how Jedi felt when they used the Force? – connected to everything around them? Shmi could not use the Force, but sometimes she felt that her hands could cup whole worlds.

“Move down your arms now,” said Rie. “As slowly as you can. Each part of your body – how it feels, what it means. Bring your mind fully into alignment with your body.”

Down her arms. The wrists came next, and she felt her mind straining away from the phantom memory of the binders, the way that her wrists had held her captive and chained. But they were free now. They were free and mobile, and she rotated them to prove it to herself, flexing her hands in every direction. She was free to put her hands to use, free to try to cup the world – to try to shape a new one.

“Now your feet,” said Rie. “Notice any cramps – stretch them out if you need to. Move up your legs in the same way.”

Her feet – a little cramped from the crosslegged seat, a little numb from having sat in a speeder all day – but she had used those feet to walk long distances, to support the weight of her body. They had carried her through this world and others – and she could feel the flex of her calves, the rotation of her ankles as she moved up her legs, traveling further up her body. The physical sensation, matched not only with how she could use her body but also what it meant to have it, to be bound to this physical form, to use it to inhabit the world.

“Meet in the middle,” said Rie. Her voice was fainter now, as if it came from a great distance away, a thread connecting both her and Shmi to lineages of Jedi training. “Center in your heart and your stomach. Bring your awareness of the rest of the body with you.”

Her heart – that heart that had been throbbing for months and torn with uncertainty for days. Her stomach, squirming with discomfort at the ways that things had changed around her, with anxiety about the future of her family and her organization both. Those parts of her body that warned her of trouble, that let her feel, that kept her alive. Her chest, moving as she breathed, her stomach, not quite full from the meager food they had had for dinner, but used – as it had not always been – to having enough to eat.

This was the place in her body where her faith lived, she realized. This was where she had always trusted that things would come out all right. Palpatine had shaken that trust, but he hadn’t removed it. She’d believed that Anakin would come for her, and he had. If she believed in better things for the world now, there was no reason they couldn’t come true.

“Last, your head,” said Rie. “Bring your thought into alignment with your body. Find what peace you can, and let your mind trust the certainty that you have found elsewhere. Let it rest.”

Her head was growing heavy, her eyelids slowly sinking. Rie’s voice ran over her in gentle soothing shivers, that practiced teacher-cadence, the sign of lessons that were strong enough even to transcend her own pain. Shmi’s body began to sink backwards against the wall, her limbs too heavy to hold upright.

“Sleep now, Shmi,” said Rie. The resonance had faded from her voice, the recitation replaced by the halting tones that had characterized her speech for as long as Shmi had known her, but she spoke still. Perhaps whatever barrier kept her from the world had begun to melt. Perhaps the meditation had helped her, too.

Shmi was not too far gone to crawl back to her bedroll, but her head sank onto the pillow when she finally let herself collapse onto it. Still, she levered her eyes open just enough to cast a gaze back in Rie’s direction. “And you?” she murmured. “Will you do this when it’s your turn to sleep?”

Rie’s face closed up again, her lips pursing, her eyes shuttering. Whatever peace had existed between them, whatever vulnerability, faded away – but Shmi was too far gone to chase it.

The last thing she saw before sleep carried her away was the profile of Rie, a smudge of shadow against the darker night.

Chapter Text

His mom and Rie were being weird.

Anakin didn’t know what had happened over the night. but ever since he’d woken up in the morning, they’d been strange. His mom had woken him, but Rie had been awake either already or still – her eyes were hollow and tired; her motions heavy and sluggish. And – well, she must have been awake all night, or else Anakin have woken up to hear her screaming.

Well, actually, Rie was acting the same. But his mom was different around her now – looking at her more than usual, asking questions directly to Rie rather than just including her more generally in conversation. Rie never replied, or if she did, she spoke in two-word sentences, but his mom kept trying, like for some reason she was expecting a response this time.

It all made him feel left out, like people were keeping things from him, and he’d become more and more angry about that since his time with Palpatine. Anakin couldn’t stand to not be in on the secret, not anymore – not when he knew there was so much that could be hidden from him. But he tried to push it down, to keep it hidden, because he didn’t want to make things even more uncomfortable than they already were.

They were entering Tusken territory today, which Anakin shouldn’t be excited about, but he couldn’t help it. Tusken Raiders were the people he’d been warned all his life to avoid – the only times he’d really crossed paths with them had been them taking potshots at the podracers or the occasional evacuation ahead of a suspected raid. He’d heard Watto complaining about them, and the other merchants, and Kittster had told him horrible stories about the time the farm where he worked had been raided, but Anakin had never met them.

But if they did – well, his lightsaber was ready, practically itching for a fight. He’d never been stronger than he was right now, and it wasn’t like anyone could blame him for defending himself. If he had to.

“Ani?”

He startled at his mom’s voice, directing his attention back to the endless sand in front of them. “What?”

“You seem jumpy today,” she said. “Is something wrong?”

Yes. Everything was wrong and had been for months. But that wasn’t what she was asking about, and he wasn’t in the mood to be lectured again. “No,” he said. “Just paying attention to our surroundings.”

He hadn’t meant it to sound like a jab, but beside him, Rie flinched.

Why was she sitting next to him, anyway? His mom had insisted she ride up front today as they got closer to their goal, but she hadn’t helped him to navigate or said a word to him all day. As usual. Anakin was starting to wonder why they’d even brought her here. Yes, Qui-Gon had insisted that her dreams or compulsions meant she could help them find their way, and Anakin was trying to trust him. But they had a map.

Even as he was thinking that, Rie stiffened as if an electrical current had run through her body. She reached out as if to touch his shoulder, let her hand fall, and then raised it again.

“What?” he said, yet again. What was it with all these people not saying what they meant?

Rie pointed out the window, slightly east of their trajectory. Anakin reached out with his senses to see if she’d felt something coming (unlikely as that was), but sensed only sand.

“You want us to go that way?”

Rie nodded.

He looked down at the map again to double-check what he already knew. “That’s off course. It’ll waste our time.”

Rie shrugged.

Qui-Gon had told him to listen to her – had told him that the Force would see them through this – but Qui-Gon wasn’t here to remind him why he was supposed to listen to anyone at all. Especially not when he could read the map for himself. Anakin wavered at the controls, but couldn’t make himself do it – not this time. He continued straight, his chin tilting up defiantly. If she didn’t have anything better for him, he didn’t see why he should give way to nothing but a shrug and a point.

“Ani,” said his mom in a warning tone that she’d used when calling him to bed as a kid. As if he were still a kid to be called to bed, told what to do. “We were meant to be listening to Rie’s instincts.”

“Yeah, well,” he said. “I’m listening to mine, and mine say that we should keep going straight. So does the map. Why do you think we should go east?”

Another shrug, and suddenly it wasn’t good enough for Anakin – this silence, the way she seemed to be ordering him around without saying a word – and without pulling her own weight. “Tell me,” he said. “Say it out loud or I won’t do it.”

“Anakin!” said his mom sharply, but what could she do? What could either of them do if he just decided to ignore them? He was done with this – done with the secrets and the unspoken shit and the hints. He wanted Rie to speak up – to talk to him, finally, to prove that she didn’t think she was better than him. Maybe to explain what had been going on with his mom, whatever secret thing the two of them had now that Anakin wasn’t part of.

For a long moment, she was quiet. When he cut his eyes to the side, he could see that her face had gone blank, like she’d just disappeared from her own body – and then she opened her mouth and said simply, “I want to.”

The words were strangled, like it had been hard for her to force them out. It was almost enough to make him feel bad for his demands – if not for the fact that they made no sense at all. He turned fully to look at her, actually letting go of the controls. “You want to?”

She nodded.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” His voice was getting too loud; he was dangerously close to one of the outbursts that he was supposed to be controlling, but he just couldn’t take this anymore – couldn’t handle being told to stop feeling, or to think about things differently, or to let other people do their plans, even when they were worse than his own. “You want to go east? Just because?”

“Anakin!” His mom’s voice was not only sharp but shocked, the true sign that he’d gone too far. “How can you speak like this?”

“Yeah, yeah, she’s been compelled,” he said. “I know, okay? But her feelings are telling us to go out of our way and the map is telling us to go where I’m taking us now. Why should I listen to a compulsion instead of the map?”

“Isn’t that what the Force is supposed to be about?” said his mom. “Listening to your feelings?”

Feelings. Always feelings, and the talk about them seemed to get more confusing by the day. Trust your feelings, but don’t trust them. Your feelings speak to you. Your feelings betray you. Everything was betraying him; nothing could be trusted, and he was trying so hard and no one was giving him any credit for it. His fingers itched again for his lightsaber, one hand drifting towards it where it was clasped to his belt –

And just in time.

While they’d been arguing, Anakin had stopped paying attention to his surroundings. Had stopped listening for pursuit. But in the silence that followed his outburst, he could hear it: the zoom of speeders crossing the sand.

Tuskens. They were in Tusken territory; it was bound to happen eventually – but no, when he looked up, he could see that it wasn’t the Tusken Raiders at all, unless they had seriously upgraded their technology. Converging on them were two of those slick military speeders that must be owned by the Indies, armed with weapons that outclassed their little speeder by a hundred.

And the only route open to them was to the east – where Rie’s feelings had been telling them to go.

“You get your way after all,” he said sourly, and jerked the speeder into motion.

“I” – Rie began, but broke off. Anakin darted a glance over at her, wondering if she had been distracted, but she was just shaking her head, as if she’d already given up on explaining herself.

At least there was a chase to distract him from his fury. He ignored Rie, ignored his mom, took his mind off his lightsaber and everyone else in the speeder with him, and focused on the speeder itself.

That sense of threat was crystal clear now, sending him signals about everything around them. Yes, there were two speeders coming up on them, both stronger than the one they were driving, both armed. He couldn’t outrun them with power alone – he’d have to rely on his instincts and his wits.

So, just like podracing, then.

He kicked the controls into the highest gear they would go, to buy them as much time as he could while he reached out in the other direction. They were going east, because that was the only clear path, but what was there in the desert that could be turned to their advantage?

Dunes, looming before them – barely visible in the haze of the day, but reachable within seconds if he sped up. They could take cover behind them if they could get enough distance from their pursuers, but that wasn’t possible with this machine, so he would have to do something else. Sand was no good for cover, but it was good for other things, if this speeder just had –

A glance at the controls was all he needed. Yes, the speeder had an extra exhaust pipe, like lots of machines on this planet, meant to funnel bad air out as quickly as possible. And it could open and shut on both ends.

Anakin veered hard to the right and headed directly for the dune.

“Ani!” cried his mom behind him, clutching the back of his seat; beside him, Rie let out a strangled squeak. Anakin ignored them both, steering on a collision course with the dune, waiting until – until –

There. At the last possible second he leaned hard to the left, ignoring the horrible scraping sound as the side of their speeder ground against the massive sand structure – right where the exhaust pipe funneled air into and out of the speeder.

He didn’t have his goggles, so he used the Force instead. In an instant, as the grains of sand funneled their way into the vehicle, Anakin reached out and caught every single one of them, directing them through the speeder in a single cylindrical shape through the empty air. He heard his mom gasp as the sand blasted past her, heard the scrape of a few errant grains against the metal water cannisters and other supplies, but he held the sand together just for long enough for the exhaust pipe to catch it again, to funnel it out the back of the speeder in a spray of fast-moving cover.

He couldn’t spare the attention to look back, but he heard the combined ping of thousands of grains of sand hitting metal, heard the screeching of brakes, felt the surge of dismay in the Force, and couldn’t help pumping a fist in triumph.

“Hit!” he crowed, but he didn’t have time to celebrate. He still had pursuers to lose, and he’d won them seconds at best. They would be wise to that trick now; he couldn’t do it again.

What else was in the desert? He stretched his senses ahead, letting his feelings support his vision as he gauged the upcoming terrain. The dunes were behind them, but now they were coming up on a slot canyon.

Perfect.

Anakin hadn’t navigated one of these in a speeder before – the few times that the podraces had intersected with them, he’d either been knocked off course before they could reach the place or been in Watto’s most maneuverable pod. This machine handled much worse than any racer Anakin had ever driven; it wouldn’t be able to zoom through the narrowest of openings, let alone lose someone behind him.

But maybe he didn’t need to lose them. Maybe he could just trick them.

There was a narrow slot visible in the side of the canyon, the kind of thing that someone could see from a distance and think was an entrance. The people following them were Indies; they didn’t know Tatooine. They didn’t know a trap when they saw it. If they tried to enter, they would find – at best – an immediate curve, if they didn’t just smash into a narrow opposite wall. Even if they could stop themselves in time, they would still have to waste precious time turning back around.

And – yes, this speeder had the ability to leap straight into the air.

There would be other places in this canyon they could go, other possible hiding places or hidden entrances, but not while they were being followed so closely. The only thing to do now was to lure and to hope.

Anakin cut their speed just slightly. This was a delicate balance – he had to keep it fast enough not to make it an obvious trick, but also slow enough to allow himself the maneuverability he needed. He needed their pursuers to see the trap – and they needed to be closing in fast enough that they couldn’t change course in time. When he gauged that the distance was right, he angled himself towards the entrance and hit the throttle.

Every nerve in his body was on fire, every midi-chlorian in his blood sparking with its connection to the Force. This was what it felt like to feel alive – this was the action he had been craving. There was no time to think about his lightsaber, no time to question his choices, no time to get frustrated. There was only him and the maneuver and the moment.

Your focus determines your reality.

Yeah, yeah. The Qui-Gon in his head could shut up. He didn’t have time for that right now.

The speeders were closing in on them now – close enough that he could hear the whine of weapons charging up. There were only seconds to impact, one way or another, and whether he’d judged it right or not, he didn’t have time to think any longer.

“Hold onto something,” he said, and as the weapons fired, he jerked their speeder directly up into the air.

The air under them shuddered, the shockwaves from the weapons and the speed rocking them slightly higher. Anakin gritted his teeth and squeezed harder on the controls, bringing all of his strength to holding them there, using the Force as a cushion for the speeder high above the canyon and above the others – and looked down, heart in his throat –

To see both speeders zoom into the canyon, unable to stop in time.

“Yes!” he cried. This was podracing, this was what he’d been missing all this time. He didn’t have time to celebrate; there was no telltale explosion from beneath them, which meant that their enemies probably hadn’t crashed. But still, there was enough time to get lost.

He shot above the canyon, trying to make up as much distance as possible, feeling beneath him for two things: the right entrance and the other speeders. Waiting – waiting –

He could feel them turning around, and he found his chosen opening just as they managed to get their speeders brought around. He dove, skimming towards the slot he had sensed, and their speeder disappeared beneath the ground just as their pursuers emerged.

Anakin cut their speed instantly, and their sound along with it. Though adrenaline was singing in his blood and he wanted nothing more than to keep moving fast, he knew that now was the time to prioritize stealth over speed. He found a corner, let the speeder settle down, and cut the engines.

All around them, it was almost silent. He waited, hardly daring to believe it, but as the seconds passed, all he could hear was the heavy breathing of everyone in the speeder and his own blood thundering in his ears.

Safe.

Well, safe for now.

“Are they gone?” whispered his mom at last, when the quiet had stretched for long enough. “Did you lose them?”

“For now,” said Anakin. “The canyon will give us cover, but we can’t hide forever.”

“Still,” she said. “You saved us, Ani. Well done.”

The words soothed something in him – some ache that had been throbbing along with his anger, something that had been raw and wounded. He had saved them, hadn’t he? He’d been able to use his skills for something that didn’t make people look at him like they were afraid – something he could do right, something that helped people.

It was like a cool sip of water against a raw, dry throat, and he didn’t know how to thank her for it. How did you say thank you for thanking you? But he reached out, almost unthinking, for her hand, and she caught it and held on tight.

“Yes,” said Rie. “Thank you.”

Her tone was dull, the words choked from her throat like everything else seemed to be, but at least she’d said them too. At least she’d also recognized it. At least Anakin could know that he’d done something right.

He’d done something right. How long had it been since he had last felt like that?

“What do we do now?” said his mom. “We should probably stay under cover for a while, right?”

“If I were them, I’d split up,” said Anakin. “Send one person outside the canyon to look for us in case we left; send another one to search inside. Call for backup if they have it.”

“They do,” said his mom. “We’re outnumbered now that they’ve seen us. I think the only chance is for us to hide.”

“No.”

At the sound of that word, so strong and clear that he almost didn’t recognize the voice, both Anakin and his mom looked over at Rie. She sat forward, practically transformed with clarity, one hand on the speeder door and the other on the lightsaber at her belt, animated like Anakin hadn’t seen her in almost a year.

“What?” he said, blunt with surprise.

“Splitting up,” she said. She took a deep breath. “We should do it before they can. I can distract them and lead them away.”

No. The word sprang to Anakin’s mind before he had even worked out what she’d said – but understanding followed quickly enough. Picturing Rie wandering on her own, off into the canyon, acting as bait just to draw them away? Giving herself up for nothing? No.

He’d had enough of this – of people splitting up, of other people being hurt because of him. He could keep them all safe now, he knew it. He could fight off their attackers, no matter how many of them there were. He could protect them all.

“You don’t have to,” he said. “We can fight them! Or, or we can hide. They won’t find us yet. We can disguise the speeder” –

Rie didn’t speak, didn’t bother to disagree. Instead, she just looked at him.

And he hated it, but he could read it all in her eyes. He could see all the logical responses she would give, even if she didn’t have to say them out loud: that they were outnumbered and had barely gotten away this time, that they would be found eventually, that their mission couldn’t be jeopardized. Don’t jeopardize the mission. It was what seemed to be said to him every time someone had to make a sacrifice – that they should stay cool-headed and calm, that they should be able to do what had to be done –

Well, fuck that. How did she know what had to be done?

“I’m not letting anyone else sacrifice themselves,” he said. He couldn’t bear it – not now, not this way, not anymore. So many people had taken so many risks for him already, and all his resentment and anger couldn’t make that untrue. He couldn’t take away what Rie had already done for him, but he could keep her from doing anything else. “I’ll stop you if I have to.”

“Anakin,” said his mom quietly.

He knew that voice. It was the voice she had used when she’d told him to leave Tatooine and not to look back, the voice she’d used when he’d left her the second time. It was her leaving-voice, and he rounded on her, ready for her to suggest sacrificing herself instead –

But instead her face was heavy with resignation, as if she’d already let go. “She’s right, Ani,” she said.

Anakin gaped. How could she just be okay with someone else making this kind of sacrifice? How could she just accept this – after what had been done to her, he would have thought she’d understand –

“You two are needed for the mission,” said Rie. “I’m not.”

When he turned back to look at her, she was smiling – an expression of what he would almost have described as wonderment suffused her face. She looked like – like –

Like she’d been touched by the Force. Anakin scowled.

Did they ever stop to think that following the will of the Force was a bad idea? Especially when it led to something like this?

“We’ll find you,” said Anakin’s mom. She was ignoring Anakin now, talking directly to Rie. “We’ll track you down if we have to.”

Rie tilted her head to the side, still with that beatific smile.

They were working together now, working against him. The only thing Anakin could do was try to convince them, and he fought for some logic that he could use, something that might convince Rie of all people. “You can’t give yourself up,” he said at last, triumphantly. “They’ll find out you’re a Jedi. They’ll use you to trace us.”

The smile on Rie’s face turned thoughtful, considering. Surely he had her. She hadn’t thought of that, had she? –

But his triumph was short-lived. She reached down for the lightsaber at her belt, unclasped it, and placed it into his hands.

At the feeling of the saber against his palms, Anakin’s mind went quiet, and time slowed down.

He couldn’t be sure if what he was feeling was actually a glimpse into Rie’s mind or just an echo of it, some part of her spirit stored in her saber, but he swore he could feel something humming in the kyber, something different from his own lightsaber. Something so far from the lightsaber Palpatine had given him, its power and speed and ferocity.

Rie’s saber was quiet and humble, the crystal slow to respond to him – not a lightsaber built for fighting. Not a lightsaber meant to use in attack, and only rarely in defense – but rather one made because it was the Jedi way to carry this weapon, this weapon of light that was meant to symbolize hope and freedom but could so easily be twisted to cause pain and suffering. This power that could be used for fear and darkness as easily as it could for protection and light.

It felt – not like his own, exactly, but like the hand of a friend. Like a companion standing by his side, helping shore him up against the darkness.

“Use it well,” said Rie, and before he could stop her, she had launched herself out the speeder door.

Anakin reached out for her as she turned away – groping for something, for the back of her tunic, for the Force, anything. She couldn’t be allowed to run off like that – but before he could catch hold of anything, before he could open his own door and follow her out, another hand wrapped around his wrist and pulled it back. “Ani,” said his mom gently. “Let her go.”

He rounded on her, furious abruptly at the betrayal – feeling all those months of abandonment rushing right back, all that anger just looking for a target. “How can you just let her go?” he demanded. “How can you be okay with this?”

“Because it’s what has to be done,” said his mom. “She’s giving herself up for us. She’s making the choice. Would you take that away from her?”

Yes, he wanted to say. Yes, he would stop people from giving themselves up, from getting hurt for him. He would have stopped it all if he could.

But his mom was looking at him, and something in her eyes stopped him before he could say it. Something of the look she’d worn when he’d seen her again for the first time – a combination of trust and fear, something that he couldn’t quite name, but that shook him to his soul.

Palpatine had taken away her choices just like he’d tried to take away Anakin’s. That was what he had to remember, what it was so easy to forget when this anger surged up in him. Palpatine had pretended he was making Anakin stronger and freer, but he’d just been trying to make him his own kind of slave.

“I hate it,” he said, but he let his hand fall.

“I know,” she said. “We’ll find her, Ani. We’ll stop them from taking her. But we have to get to safety first.”

“Fine,” he said. “Fine.” He couldn’t look at her, couldn’t look at where Rie had disappeared into the distance, so he stared down at the lightsaber in his hands instead and tried to believe in its calm. “Let’s make a plan then.”

Rie had never been good at running.

Most of the physical training that came along with being a Jedi had evaded her. Yes, Jedi had the aid of the Force, but they were expected to be able to use it to enhance what they could already do, not to rely solely on it. And just as Rie had never been able to use the Force to compensate for her other physical inadequacies, so too had it been with this. She had always been slow and stumbling and unable to avoid obstacles in her way, breathless and easily winded, disinclined to physical challenges and avoiding them as a result. She would never be the first person chosen for a challenge like this, not if the goal was truly escape.

But as it was . . .

Rie ran as hard as she could and put her own incompetence to work for the first time. If she could not run fast and silently, she could run hard and loud, letting her own panting breaths take on the whine of desperation, the fear of being caught.

Was there fear? She couldn’t tell. She would have been terrified months ago – she had been terrified all her life, it felt – but now inside her she felt only a sense of freedom, a broad expansiveness at the thought of giving up at last. Giving herself up.

She had been holding on for so long, trying to drag some more worth out of a slow body and a spent mind. The thought that she could use them both now for good – and maybe be nearing the end of her own fight – was almost euphoric.

It seemed to lend her wings. She ran harder, faster, than she ever had before – or at least it felt like she was, until she stopped feeling altogether. She could feel it taking over her, that compulsion, that draw, that need to move – and she gave it free rein in her mind and her body. Perhaps this had been the purpose of the tug all along. Perhaps it had been pulling her to that final sacrifice, the one she had always been meant to make.

Maybe this was where her life had always been heading.

Shouts behind her, and the sound of blasters charging up. Rie darted around a corner, still with that almost intoxicating lightness, that utter lack of fear. Whether they hit her or not, she didn’t care.

But if they hit her now, the bluff would be discovered too quickly. She had to buy Anakin and Shmi time, if she possibly could.

Behind her, the sound of a speeder starting, sputtering, going out. More voices – a language she didn’t recognize, but she knew the intonation of curses even if she didn’t know the words themselves. Anakin’s ploy had worked, then. They must have crashed, rendering their speeders worthless, even if they were still alive.

That meant there was a chance.

Rie ran harder, faster, coaxing more speed out of a body that had never known how to move like this. She could hear them behind her, their footsteps gaining. A shot fired, ricocheting off the stone above her head. She coughed on rock dust but avoided the shrapnel. Kept running.

There was light blooming ahead of her. The exit to the canyon! If she could lead them out, maybe Shmi and Anakin could make their way through in the other direction. Maybe they could make it to the place where they needed to change the radio signal. Maybe they could complete the mission.

Light, and that grinding sand beneath her feet. Rie followed its trail, faster and faster. Almost there – she was almost there – if she could just –

She burst out into the open with footsteps practically on her heels, running blindly without stopping to let her eyes acclimate to the sun. She couldn’t see either way, and she didn’t bother to try, and that too was freeing, that too let her keep moving. She ran, listening to the sound of blasterfire behind her and feeling the spray of sand as shot after shot impacted the ground around her feet.

They weren’t trying to kill her, she realized. They were trying to incapacitate her, to capture her, so they could get the information about who she represented. They must know – surely they knew – that there was a plan afoot, that there was a movement of rebels seeking to unseat them. They would catch her and make her talk, just as Anakin had feared – and for all that she’d determined she wouldn’t, Rie’s mind wasn’t her own anymore, and she couldn’t trust what it might do.

She couldn’t let them take her alive.

Her body bounced off something hard – a pillar of stone, perhaps a remnant from the canyon? The sting barely registered on her skin, already seared under the sun. What was more important was the potential.

If she couldn’t let them take her alive, then what was there to do but ensure that they couldn’t?

She craned her neck up in the scant seconds she had before her pursuers caught up – just high enough to see that the pillar of rock shot into the sky, certainly high enough for her purposes. Before they could catch her, she placed hands and feet against the stone and began to climb.

This would be easier if she had the Force, but even the instinct to reach for it had been burned out of her after months of debilitating pain. She gritted her teeth and put her trust in her muscles, instead. She didn’t have to get all the way up, she reminded herself. Didn’t have to escape their shot. She just had to get high enough –

It was the fastest Rie had reacted in weeks or months – the most she had exerted herself in a long time. Sensation was still not as near as it could be, but it was closer than it had been since before her mental invasion – she clawed at the stone, and if she couldn’t quite feel the skin of her hands ripping against its jagged edges, she at least knew it was happening.

She glanced behind her. The pursuers were a blur to her vision – which had not had the decency to improve even when her Force sense had been mostly cut off – but they were coming, she could tell. She was too exposed on this rock –

She climbed faster.

Anakin and Shmi would be hiding somewhere, surely. Anakin would have wanted to come help her, but Shmi would keep him back for his safety. Surely.

If Rie had nothing to give any longer, she could at least give her life to ensure that Anakin had the chance he deserved.

A shot impacted the rock near her hand; she flinched and lost her grip. Panting, sweating, she clung with feet and fingertips, flailing her hand at the stone to find purchase on another hold. There had to be – yes, right where the shot had landed. It had at least left a neat gouge to rest her hand. What were the chances a shooter could hit the same place twice?

They didn’t need to.

The next shot came higher, blasting against the rock just above her head. Sweat was dripping into her eyes, slicking the bridge of her nose; her glasses slid another inch down her face. Not that they were providing her any use anyway, not here.

If she could use the Force, this height would not have been a problem, not even for her. But if she could use the Force, she wouldn’t be in this situation to begin with.

Above her, a chunk of rock creaked against the stone. A new tactic, then – instead of shooting her where she stood, they would bring her down to their level. She couldn’t let them have her, but her eyes flicked up to that rock, that ominous chip in the surface right above her head. There would be no chance to avoid it, no chance to push it away even if she did have the Force within easy grasp – not without letting herself fall.

Another shot, so loud that she almost flinched and lost her grip anyway. Just above the previous one. A shower of dirt and pebbles engulfed her as still more of the rock came loose from the fixture.

There was nothing she could do. In a way, it felt almost freeing. This – the knowledge that she was about to die, that she could do nothing to stop it – was more present than any thought or awareness that had been with her for weeks. There was some calm in this knowledge, in this helplessness – the knowledge that she had done her best, that she had at least failed trying. That soon it would be over.

Another blast, louder still than the last, and the rock gave way at last. With a deep rumble, the chunk above her came loose from the stone, and in her last conscious action, Rie curled her head down so that it would at least impact the back of her head and not her face.

A dull thud, not even painful. The feeling of her fingers scrabbling loose on the wall.

She was unconscious before she hit the ground.

Chapter Text

Rie came awake slowly and hazily, the little part of her in the back corner of her mind uncurling with an agonizing weariness. It was hard to tell – the distance between herself and her awareness was always so vast these days – but it might be even greater now, a blurred-around-the-edges quality to her recognition that had nothing to do with the lack of her glasses.

She groped for them instinctively, a rote motion towards a bedside table that instead set her fingers knocking against something too slender and too tall. That set her blinking and squinting, urging her vision to resolve through the haze of her eyes and mind, instincts still activated by the presence of unfamiliar surroundings – and it was that effort that brought on the pain.

Oh, the pain. Pain had become familiar to her over the last months, of course, but this was entirely physical and so all-consuming that it reached even the little corner of her mind where her consciousness walled itself away. It was cacophony in her head, noise without any sound, blinding light visible through the dim of the room where she lay, overwhelming her senses. She moaned, a sound that she could feel against the grated-raw edges of her throat, and squeezed her eyes shut as the room spun.

The room?

Her surroundings were so unfamiliar that something in her mind – something long dormant and fuzzy with pain and disorientation – began slowly to uncurl: a curiosity, a logic pattern that she had not needed in months, a way of figuring out where she was and what was happening. An instinct, worn into the patterns of her mind like any muscle into the knowledge of the body, to follow the trail back one thought at a time. Information first, categorization later – which was just as well, since the pain precluded any more complex thoughts. She was in a room that she did not recognize; she was lying on something soft, fabric rough against her skin. It was too warm, but not as hot as the full desert sun. She was not underground, then, but in some structure built outside.

What was the last thing she remembered? Rock beneath her fingers, the burn in her muscles from climbing. The sound of blaster bolts in her ear. The shots, and the rock, and the pain –

And then nothing more.

The thought should chill her. A head injury severe enough to bring on unconsciousness could be a sign of long-term brain damage – but instead something inside Rie’s torn and wounded mind almost laughed at the thought. Brain damage? What was new about that? And since she had woken up with her memories, the risk of coma was low.

Since she had woken up.

She frowned, pushing her mind through the surge of pain to pursue that thought. She had woken up, and perhaps that was the most important information of all. Her goal had been to resist interrogation – to protect Anakin and Shmi. If she had been taken alive, was that not a sign of failure?

Very slowly, Rie peeled her eyes open yet again. The room was still blurred around her but she could make out beige fabric, moving shadows, furniture of some kind. Then a wave of nausea crashed over her and she slammed her eyes shut again, lips pressed tight together.

If vision would not work for her, what about sound? Somewhere outside, she could make out faint shufflings and murmurings. The words refused to resolve themselves into language, though, and her stomach clenched tight. Had the blow to her head taken away her ability to understand language?

No, that was not it. As the sounds drew nearer, as she slitted her eyes open again in desperate attempt to at least know what was coming for her, a figure resolved at her side – a figure shrouded in several layers of beige fabric and a dark mask – and she realized that language had been the important word, after all. She could not understand the words because they weren’t in any language she had been taught.

When Rie and Rowana had departed for Tatooine for the first time, two years before, Rie had taken what information she could find on the planet from the Archives’ database. She had lost much in the intervening years, but she had managed to retain her datapad and all that was stored on it. A few times as they planned their removal to Tatooine, the thought had crossed her mind to study it all, to try to force herself into the researcher she had once been through sheer willpower. But the closest she had ever come had been to shuffle dully through the many articles, books, and holovids she had found, skimming over their titles without opening a single one to read further.

Still, she knew enough of the planet to recognize where she was now – and she could not remember if she’d even found a suitable resource for the language of the Tusken people.

For those were her captors. Not the Independent Alliance soldiers who had been chasing her, not the Hutts whose outpost they had been preparing to target, but the Tusken Raiders, feared and avoided by all the other groups – including Rie’s own allies.

Was she their prisoner? She had heard about what happened to Tusken prisoners. But if that was true, why would she be waking up alive?

Don’t believe everything you’ve heard. Wasn’t that something she had instructed padawans at the research desk; wasn’t it what she had taken as one of her only consistent tenets? Verify your source. Check for bias.

That thought wound through the tangle of confusion and pain in her mind like a tiny sip of fresh air – a tiny shaft of light. Yes, she had once believed that. What did it mean, this remnant from her past existence as a coherent thinker? This return to thought patterns that had been inaccessible to her for so long? It was like a shred of her past self – the person she had begun to believe was gone for good.

A sharp clicking sound over a low groan caught her attention, and she blinked up at the masked figure above her, struggling to focus. They were gesturing at her, tapping their fingers together in a way that must be generating the sound – maybe some material attached to the gloves? – and after a moment, she realized that the sound she had mistaken for a groan was in fact words. The language was unfamiliar to her ears, tonal and guttural at the same time, and she couldn’t even parse out the inflection of a question or a statement. Were they asking her what had happened or telling her how they had found her?

There was no response ready in Rie’s mind for a question she could not understand. The muscle memory of her mind could not be trusted even if she were not dazed and dizzy. So there was only one thing she could do – one gesture she could only hope was universal. Very slowly, as much to refamiliarize herself with her body as to ensure that the gesture bore no threat, Rie twitched her fingers. They moved, which was another relief for the absence of direct and dire brain damage – and she extended them, slowly opening her hands in an assurance that she bore no weapons.

Her captors – healers? – saviors? – looked down at her, and then made a sound that – unfamiliar as their language and even their way of speaking might be – sounded like nothing so much as a laugh.

Of course they would know she bore no weapons. They had carried her unconscious body here. Even if she had carried any, they would have stripped them away from her before she could respond.

The tension of responding laughter in the back of her head set up a wave of blinding pain that blurred the bounds between the physical and the mental. Instead, she managed to twitch her lips up into something resembling a smile. The feeling was like trying to wrench a statue into shape, moving muscles that had been frozen into blankness for months.

The person standing above her said something else she couldn’t understand, then inclined their head towards her in what she was starting to believe was a question.

A question, of course. They were expecting her to speak.

Rie’s throat tensed, her jaw bracing to open, her mouth preparing to wrap around a word she didn’t have. It had been this way for so long – ever since Palpatine had reached into her brain and stolen the Force and speech and coherency from her, speech was so far away. She had been entirely mute for the first few weeks after his attack on her mind. At that time, she had curled into a tiny defensive shell in her own mind, had been walled behind the chaos of her brain and her feelings – had been impenetrable to all but Rowana, desperate to communicate and unable to do so. Rowana had been the one to help her then, reaching inside her and letting Rie pour unfiltered thoughts and emotions into her mind, then sorting through and translating them for the others.

That had lasted only long enough for Rie to see the toll it was taking on her teacher. Rowana had begun to linger in her mind, to try to counter the thoughts, to offer reassurance when Rie’s fears overwhelmed her – and eventually, it had become too much. She couldn’t let Rowana see this part of herself without her master wanting to step in to help her, and she couldn’t let Rowana help her when she knew how much pain and struggle it caused.

And so she had established her shields. She had walled herself back up, hiding behind those adamantine barriers, and had learned how to force forth words again.

It was helpful when there were scripts to draw on. She knew what to say when asked how she was doing; she knew how to respond when asked a direct logistical question. Even with Shmi, before, she had been able to share the meditations for rest that had been ingrained in her since her time in the crèche. But when she didn’t know the answer – that was when the words lodged in her throat, an unformed mass of tangled intention and uncertainty like a weight pressing down on her tongue. She couldn’t speak when she didn’t know what to say, and knowing what to say was too far outside her reach.

But in this moment, there was no rote response she could give, no expectation for what she could say. Neither spoke the other’s language, and so there was no script; there was no emotional weight. The only need was to communicate, to make herself understood – and how she accomplished that could be imperfect. Had to be imperfect.

She raised her arms yet again, slow and nonthreatening, and touched her fingers to her own mouth.

The figure above her tilted their head, then repeated the question.

Rie touched her ear this time. Would that be enough to communicate that she didn’t understand the language?

Maybe – or maybe it had simply suggested that she couldn’t hear. Either way, the figure above her seemed to understand.

Or maybe not. They moved forward and brandished a blaster before Rie’s eyes.

Reflexes sluggish, Rie didn’t even flinch – didn’t even have time to jerk away before the blaster was turned to the side and held before her eyes. No, it hadn’t been pointed at her; her captor was showing it to her. It was one of the IA weapons – the group that had once been Separatists. Perhaps the one that had even been shot at Rie herself?

Rie leaned away from the blaster and shook her head, trying to communicate that she had no relation to it – and then moaned aloud at the nauseating wave of pain that engulfed her in response.

The Tusken set down the blaster again and shook their head at her, admonishment plain even without a view of their face. They leaned down then to peer into her eyes.

Up close, and after looking at it for some time, the mask did not intimidate the way it had at first. It was just metal and fabric, just another piece of clothing. If the Tuskens chose not to show their faces, that was simply a choice they made. It said nothing about their trustworthiness.

A gloved hand came up, the finger tracing lines back and forth before her face – another gesture Rie knew well enough from the healers’ halls. She followed it dutifully with her eyes – or tried to, at least. If she had had any doubt before about being concussed, it was gone now; she kept losing sight of the finger in a blur, and the effort made her head spin and her stomach roll. She closed her eyes with another groan, splaying a hand across her face in the hopes of communicating that much at least.

A low clunking sound had her lifting her hand away with another wave of wooziness, opening her eyes to see that the Tusken had stepped momentarily away from the bed where she lay and returned with a large basin.

The strange urge to laugh rose up in Rie’s throat again – the triumph of managing to communicate juxtaposed against the absurdity of it all – but it was not the only thing. She rolled to the side, enduring another explosion of pain in her head, and retched into the basin, any dignity that she might have tried to preserve stripped shamefully away.

This was not how Jedi were meant to appear to outsiders – reduced to their lowest and most vulnerable. Pitiful, even. It was an image Rie had always held up as a standard perhaps in part because she knew she could never live up to it – weak as she was, faltering and fallible. She’d failed every time she tried, and had come to try less and less as a result.

But then, shouldn’t she of all people know that Jedi were not all dignity? She’d lived and worked and learned with Rowana for years, with Qui-Gon and the others for another few years after that. She’d seen Jedi in every state imaginable, and so much of their efforts here were meant to place themselves on the level of the people they sought to serve, not to hold themselves apart.

She leaned over the basin for another moment to catch her breath, then pushed herself slowly away and rolled onto her back again – exposed and helpless in every possible way, awaiting the judgment of her captor.

The healer – for who else could this be but a healer? – stepped away again and then returned with a cup that they nudged against Rie’s lips.

That gesture was plain enough. She shouldn’t drink something unfamiliar given to her by a captor, but what other choice did she have but to trust? The Tuskens had kept her alive – they’d rescued her, even, in a moment when she’d been certain her death awaited her. What did she have to lose?

She drank, and within moments her consciousness had slipped away again.

Rie was running.

Sand sprayed around her as she ran, her feet pounding the ground, her pursuer’s breath on the back of her neck. She was locked in a futile race against the sunset: the sky was still light around her but already fading fast into the blackness of Tatooine night; the heat of the day was being swept away in the frigid breeze of oncoming chill, and that same chill gripped at Rie’s body, icy fingers brushing against the back of her neck, tugging at her hair just enough to set her scalp prickling.

She was running from the night, from the darkness, from the being that was pursuing her – and she was always already too slow. She couldn’t keep up with the punishing pace she had set herself, just like she had never been able to keep up, and she could hear the laughter behind her, could feel the ghost of icy breath on her neck. Pain waited for her, and the loss of everything she held dear, and the confirmation of all the worst things she had always thought – and she couldn’t let it catch up to her, but she couldn’t do anything else –

The rock surged up in her path out of nowhere and brought her up short; she cried out and fell. Her body hit the ground like a sack of tubers, sand abrading her knees and shins and the palms of her hands, and she was scrambling back up already, trying to resume her flight, but it was too late – she couldn’t avoid the hand closing around the back of her robes, hauling her up to his level.

“Got you,” hissed the voice in her ear, and the dream broke around her as she surged awake with a scream.

Blankets fell away from her body and her head swam as she bolted upright, panting, the echo of her own strangled yell still dying away around her. She gasped for air, her fingers clenching around nothing, her hands jerking in spastic motions as though still clawing her way through the sand to escape her captor, and the grasping motion nearly caught the robe of the Tusken healer who was standing by her bed.

Rie blinked hard, trying to clear away the hazy shreds of the dream mingling with the scrambled mess of her mind, trying to orient herself back to the present. Yes, she was in the Tusken infirmary still. Night had fallen, the light that had flowed into the tent replaced by the dim glow of a lamp on a table across the room. The chill was real too, icy against her sweaty skin, but she couldn’t even remember how to pull the blanket back over herself.

The Tusken said something else that Rie couldn’t understand. This could have been in their native language or it could have been in Basic for all Rie knew; she couldn’t trust any of her powers of observation or communication right now. She gazed up into that mask, still gasping for breath.

The healer tilted their head again and pointed to Rie’s throat.

Yes, the screaming. Surely if it was disturbing to her Jedi companions who knew what had happened to her, it would be even more so to someone who had no idea. But Rie couldn’t even figure out how to pantomime any of that, so she simply made a pillow of her hands and leaned her head against them, hoping to simulate sleep and thereby communicate: bad dreams.

The healer nodded, accepting this, and touched Rie gently on the forehead.

Rie frowned, scrambled for a moment to decipher that, and then remembered that she was in an infirmary and had been put to sleep by medicine of some kind. Clearly, the healer was asking about her concussion.

For all that the dream had awakened the mental anguish yet again, she did feel better physically. Much of the dizzying throb was gone, and – though she had woken to bad dreams – the migraine that had accosted her for nights uncounted was blessedly absent. She nodded back and tried for the slightest twisted hint of a smile.

The healer dipped their chin and stepped back, so evidently that interaction had gone off well enough. But they did not leave the room; instead they returned to the side table and picked up, yet again, the abandoned blaster.

Rie’s mind seemed to be working faster now, as if the desperation of her situation had allowed her to press past the obstacles or at least avoid them for some time. The Tuskens could not be friends of the IA military, and they must have rescued her with the assumption that an enemy of theirs was, if not a friend, at least a potential ally.

But why would they want allies? Everything Rie had heard or read about the Tusken Raiders suggested that they kept to themselves, that they had no love for any of the other inhabitants of the planet. That they were dangerous.

Everything she had heard or read. Heard from whom? Written by whom?

Yes. Yes, her mind was working faster indeed, and the feeling of it was as close to euphoria as she had come the day before when contemplating a purposeful death. Maybe that had not been her purpose, but instead had been what was necessary to lead her to it – because she was not restrained. She was still in the bed but not tied to it, and though she had woken up screaming from nightmares, she had not tried to walk out into the desert. That compulsion, that itch, that she had thought was leading her to her death, had faded.

Had the Force stopped calling on her altogether? Or had she reached the place it meant for her to be?

She pointed to the blaster, then to the Tusken healer, and clasped her hands together. It was not a perfect simulation of gratitude, but it was the best she could do to thank them for saving her. Even if it had been for self-preservation, it was still a deed that mattered.

Thus began a series of extensive and absurd pantomimes, the closest semblance of a conversation between two people who could not communicate in spoken language but struggled nonetheless to convey complex ideas. Of course it was imperfect; of course Rie knew she was missing so much, but it was also oddly freeing. There was no need for her scripts, for the words that her interlocutors were expecting or hoping to hear, and no need for lies. This was simply an attempt to establish a connection, to make oneself understood and to understand another in turn – and it was somehow exactly what Rie had been waiting for.

If anyone had been witnessing her, Rie would have felt embarrassed at being reduced to this – first pointing to the blaster they held, shaking her head violently, and making chopping motions at it with her hand to indicate that she was an enemy of the IA military. But her healer-captor was nodding along, so she must have made herself understood, and the euphoria of that lightened her heart, helped her sit forward on the bed, gesturing more wildly.

And then the healer took her by the arm and hauled her upright.

Rie squeaked as the world reoriented around her, unable to stop herself. Blood rushed to her head and thundered in her ears, dizziness swamping her yet again, and for a moment she wondered if she would need the basin again (that had been switched out as she slept, and that too was a great gratitude that she didn’t know how to express). But she regained her orientation quickly enough to marvel at it. Whatever had been in that medicine must have worked wonders. She’d never heard of a treatment for a head injury that could so quickly reduce some of the most debilitating symptoms, and yet again she despaired of the limits of the Jedi Archives. So many people hid their knowledge rightfully from those who sought it only to collect. The archivist in her itched to learn more, to understand where the medicine had come from and how they had kept it so well hidden, while at the same time recognizing that some things were kept secret for good reason.

The archivist in her! When was the last time she had thought like an archivist?

But she didn’t have time to wonder about the change – the sudden opening – in her mind. She was being marched out of the infirmary, both steadied and restrained by the tight grip on her arm. The night air slapped cold against her clammy body and she shivered as her stumbling feet were guided through a mazelike encampment of tents.

People were watching, she realized. She still had no glasses, but she could make out the faint blur of figures against the tents, the shadow-smudge of masked faces against light fabric. She hunched her shoulders against the feeling of stares – curious? Hostile? She couldn’t reach the Force. She couldn’t know.

The healer jerked her sharply to the left and swept aside a flap of the largest tent. Rie stumbled as she was guided inside, found her footing, and looked up to see that she was surrounded.

Perhaps someone with better vision – or a grasp of the Force – could have made out differences in the masked figures looking for her; absent both of those things, Rie reeled, abruptly glad of the arm holding her up. Vertigo crashed over her and she felt suddenly as if she stood in the Senate chamber with delegation pods extending in all directions, dizzyingly identical. Of course, this room was so much smaller, but the anonymity of the masked and cloaked figures spiraled around her in an overwhelm she struggled to control.

Her guide spoke, a long string of syllables that Rie’s slow-moving mind could not parse. Once, she had been good at languages – able to retain meaning once she had gleaned it and piece conversations together from smaller clues. It was an insight that had fled along with so much else, or maybe the unfamiliarity of the language made it impossible for her to follow. Still, context rendered this clear enough: it must be an explanation of her presence here.

Murmurs among the crowd, a low droning that rose into a crescendo of shouting. An argument or an agreement? She could not even read the lilt of their voices – and then, in a ripple of beige, the crowd parted and a figure stepped forward.

They were masked like the others, but with their separation from the crowd, Rie could make out differences in the bands of their clothing and the shape of their robes. They were also notably shorter. A child?

Before Rie could wonder more about their identity, they withdrew something from behind their back and handed it to Rie’s healer, and Rie’s heart clenched.

This was not the blaster from before, but it was clearly a weapon. Was she to be ritualistically executed before a crowd? Why would they have healed her and questioned her – unless her communication had been unsuccessful?

Rie’s blood froze in her veins; her head spun and she fought to breathe past the fast throb of her heart in her throat. She had made her peace with death, she’d thought – but it was different to face it now when there was no immediate mission in which to subsume her fears. And it was different now than it had been even the day before – no, she was different. Something had shifted in just the last few hours, and the thought of death was not a welcome relief, not anymore.

Before she could parse that thought, before she could attempt to plead or negotiate, the healer had spun her around and held the weapon before her.

She blinked. Was it being handed to her? No, no – the slightest twitch of her hand in confusion had set her guide tensing in return. She let her hands fall to the side and considered.

This was not one of the blasters she had seen on the planet so far, not a weapon of the IA, but it was vaguely familiar nonetheless. And the posture of the guide, the question directed at her – they were familiar, too.

The Hutts. The first thing she had been asked was if she was identified with the IA and their weapons; she had denied it and been believed. Now, because the Hutts were the other power striving with the IA on this planet, they were asking if she was allied with them instead. And with that realization, the memory clicked back into place: this blaster had been in one of the projections Gira had shown them days ago when explaining the forces allied against them.

Of course. The Hutts, the IA – they hated the people they had enslaved, but they hated the Tuskens just as much.

She shook her head, repeating the series of pantomimes that she claimed no affiliation as well as she could with her arm still trapped in a vise grip.

Silence followed, heavy with anticipation. Rie’s breath hovered high in her chest, caught in the tension, and she watched as every face turned towards the child before her.

Their gaze, meanwhile, or at least that mask, was locked on her.

Rie was still walled behind her shields – trapped in the protective device of her own making, unable to feel the Force – unable even to try. But she recognized that cant of the head, that expectant posture. That charged look, even if she couldn’t see the expression beneath the mask – the look of a half-practiced reading.

They were Force sensitive. They must be. And whether the Tuskens understood what that meant or not, they clearly knew enough.

For a moment, all else ceased to exist. Rie couldn’t feel the Force; she couldn’t see this child’s eyes, and still they drew her into their space, into that shared presence. Everything hung suspended, falling drops of sand paused in an hourglass. And then, finally, they nodded.

Rie’s arm was released so abruptly that she nearly stumbled, braced herself for a fight she could not win – but there was nothing. A sigh of relief traveled through the masked and cloaked figures, a slight unclenching. Safe.

Safe. The very sense of it, the awareness, seemed to warm the very air, drive back the chill of the night – and some of the chill inside Rie’s bones, that chill that had seeped into her so long ago.

Rie glanced back and forth between the two Tuskens who stood before her – the healer who had led her here, the child who had read her intent. Now that she was looking, she could see that their clothing was slightly personalized: the healer wore black bracers with light thread embroidered into sunlike patterns, and the smaller person who had approved Rie had a band of red cloth tied around their head.

That was individual enough. Why did it matter what lay beneath the clothing?

The script for the moment had never seemed so clear. Rie pointed to herself, took a shaky breath, and said, “Rie.”

The healer glanced to her, then to the child, then back to her as if making some decision. Then they repeated, “Rie.” Her name was recognizable in their voice, though still deep and hoarse and with an echo of the ringing resonance that their language had carried. They pointed back at themselves and said, “A’Mana.”

“A’Mana,” Rie echoed. The name was surely a shortening for her benefit; she couldn’t copy the tonal fluctuations in the vowels, but evidently it had been near enough. The healer nodded, raised a hand in a few quick, flashing signals, and disappeared.

All the other Tuskens followed them out. Rie turned towards the exit as if to follow, but no one was looking at her any longer – no one had paid her any attention at all. They were gone, all but one.

“Rie,” echoed the child before her – their voice higher and hoarser than A’Mana’s had been. A child, yes – a child trusted enough to evaluate the honesty of a stranger, enough to be left alone with one. A child with all the responsibility of a Jedi padawan.

A Jedi padawan.

Something seized in Rie’s chest, her breath catching on a snag of longing she hadn’t known was there. If she could feel the Force now, she could not have been given a clearer sign than this: this was why she had been called here. This was what she was meant to learn.

She nodded at their repetition of their name, tilted her head to the side, gestured.

“Oloro,” they said, the name like a cascade of pebbles.

“Oloro,” Rie echoed. There was a singsong quality to the way they had said the name that she couldn’t emulate – her palate wouldn’t relax enough; her throat wouldn’t hold words that far back. But she tried as best she could, and they nodded.

Questions tumbled over one another in her mind, pushing one another aside in an avalanche of curiosity, as though now awakened, her thoughts could not be stilled. She wanted to ask Oloro about the Force – what they called it, how they felt it, what role it played in their life and the life of their tribe. She wanted to ask what they had learned, what else they might want to know. But she didn’t have the language to ask them any of it – if she could even find the words in her own.

And if they had the Force, and had been using it for their tribe, there was no guarantee that they would have any interest in learning the Jedi ways.

Had it been arrogance to assume they could come here and be wanted? They were useful to the slaves’ revolution only as long as they could help them; Rie herself had been worse than useless so far. What were their teachings worth to the people who had lived here and had their own ways?

But –

But no, because even if there were times that Rie’s relationship to her own Jedi past and her Force sensitivity aroused nothing in her but dark emotions, fear and hatred and suffering, there were other times that teaching had brought her so close to the light that she would remember it forever. Strangely, she felt closer to it now than she had in months – now when she was alone among strangers. For all that she had felt at odds with it, conflicted in her own mind, she didn’t want to give up the part of her that was a Jedi. If she was not meant to die here, if the Force had sent her here to save her, then she still had a duty to return to.

Maybe the Force had been leading her here. Maybe this was where she was meant to be.

Oloro stared at her, and she stared back. She couldn’t make out their eyes behind the covering, no expression on their face, and this too was oddly freeing. There wasn’t some subtle cue she was expected to read, some expression she had to watch so closely for what it might reveal. Communication would have to happen through other means.

She sat down crosslegged, making a decision all at once. Rested her hands on her knees in the meditation pose she hadn’t assumed in so long, the one she hadn’t even dared to take on after guiding Shmi through it only a short time before. She couldn’t touch the Force right now – couldn’t try. That pain was still there, miracle medicine or not. But the position was comforting as it had not been in so long, promising a stability that she could at least affect, even if she didn’t feel it.

Oloro looked at her for another long moment. They didn’t understand what she was doing – of course not. How could they? But perhaps they could feel in the Force what Rie could not – or perhaps they were simply willing to try. Their shoulders jerked up in some approximation of a shrug, and they settled down across from her.

Something loosened in Rie’s heart, the slightest easing of a weight in her chest, an ease in her breath. She breathed in the scent of sand and distant animals and the feeling of companionship, and felt the breath all the way into her belly.

Oloro shifted to crosslegged as well, imitating her posture, and it was like she was back in the Temple again with an initiate interested in learning something she had to teach. As if the bonds of that teaching could travel all this way, past the bounds of language and time and space and her own aching, wounded mind, and into this moment shared between the two of them.

Her palms were turned up on her knees, open to the world. She peered out through her shields, as if they too were the mask that the Tuskens wore over their faces and bodies, and felt she might be seeing a crack of light for the first time.

Chapter Text

The transmitting outpost was ugly.

When Anakin was a kid, the older boys in town had joked that anyone who built big structures on Tatooine was compensating for something. It had taken him a few years to understand what they meant, but the memory slammed into his mind at the sight of the tower thrusting above the rock at the edges of the Jundland Waste. There was so much here already; why build higher? Why did you need to prove you were the biggest and the baddest in the world? People who really had power, Palpatine had said to him once, didn’t need to pretend.

Anakin glared in memory, and the hand not busy steering dropped to his waist to fumble at the hilt of his lightsaber.

No, not his lightsaber. Rie’s.

He’d kept it close since she’d run off – it wouldn’t have felt right to keep it anywhere it could have been lost. It hung at his belt, jostling against his own as if the two lightsabers hated each other just as much as the two people who had given them to him. But he’d clipped Rie’s in closer to himself, hoping to make sure she knew he’d kept it safe when he gave it back to her.

When he gave it back to her. When.

He’d wanted to follow her immediately – to go after her as soon as he’d sensed, in the distance, the feeling of fighting and fear. It was hard to make out individual Force signatures, especially with how much hers had been masked for months, but he’d sensed first a struggle, then its end. He’d wanted to go investigate right away, but his mom had urged him to wait, and then to wait longer still.

When he had finally sensed that their pursuers were gone, they’d searched the canyons, but the only bodies they’d found were the Indy soldiers who had been chasing them – no sign of Rie. His mom had convinced him that the lack of a body must mean that she had been captured, rather than killed, and that the best thing they could do to honor her would be to complete the mission before they went looking.

Qui-Gon would have been proud. Maybe his mom should have been the Jedi, not Anakin. They sure seemed to have gotten to her, anyway.

“Ani?” she said now. “What do you sense?”

Snapped back into the moment, Anakin stretched out his senses. There were guards there, as was only to be expected from a transmission tower, but not as many as he would have expected. Maybe the Indies were stretching the Hutts thin after all. Maybe their grip on the planet was slipping.

Maybe there was a chance that this little rebellion really could become something big, if this plan worked.

This was what Anakin had always dreamed of when he’d been little – when Watto had given him some ridiculous order or demanded something Anakin couldn’t possibly give, when he’d seen his friends get beaten up by owners worse than Watto ever was. He’d dreamed of them all rising up, turning on the people who ordered them around, showing them all. He’d imagined himself at the front, raising a Jedi laser sword and shouting his defiance.

Now he had two lightsabers, and the plan seemed like it could be possible, so why did it all feel worse than he’d ever imagined?

“There are guards,” he said. “We can take them, though.” He had the two lightsabers and his mom had a blaster she’d taken from their stash of weapons. Did she plan on using it? “But we’ll need to draw them away first so they can’t call for help.”

“Right,” said his mom. “I think I’d better drive, then.”

They switched seats, and she began to circle the tower: wide, distant circles at first, then slowly drawing just near enough to draw their attention. It was a delicate balance – they couldn’t look like so much of a threat that they would call for backup, but they also had to seem threatening enough to warrant a closer look – and they managed it perfectly, without even speaking. As seamless as any Jedi team.

Anakin craned his neck out the window, watching the tower carefully, all his senses on alert. He tested the currents in the Force, waiting – waiting –

There. He caught the ripple in the Force and then the faintest glimpse of a black speck scuttling down the side of the tower. They were coming to investigate.

“Get a little closer,” he said to his mom, and she did, tightening the circle to bring them within earshot. Anakin snatched the blaster she had set down, opened the window, and fired off a round of shots.

They weren’t meant to hit, just to draw attention. Sure enough, they skidded across the sand, sending sprays of it up at the outpost guards. In the distance, Anakin heard a cry, and then the distinctive twang of firing blasters.

He only had a few seconds to be satisfied with his plan before the sand was exploding before them into little geysers raised by shots. “Get out of range!” he shouted, one hand already on the door handle. “I’ll cover you.”

He opened the door before she could argue, and the wind whipped away any protest she might have made. Leaving the blaster behind but keeping both lightsabers for himself, he dove out of the speeder, hit the ground in a roll, and shut the door behind him with a flick of the Force.

She might not have been a fighter, but at least she had the instincts not to fight him on the decision he had already made. Behind him, the speeder turned, making a wider circle away from the outpost as if to come back in for another sweep. Hopefully she would stay back. For now, he stood between her and the shooters, covering her retreat. Mission or no mission, there were only so many sacrifices he was willing to make.

When the guards abandoned their ranged attack and moved for their vehicles, Anakin caught hold of a lightsaber.

Qui-Gon had taught Anakin battle meditation early on in their work together. Sparring practice was focused largely on perfecting his forms, on being patient with himself and his instructor, and on making sure to do every part of every form right instead of rushing through. Shortcuts were okay once you had learned the form, Qui-Gon had said, but not before. But as soon as they had begun to move into sparring with one another and with other Jedi, Qui-Gon had emphasized battle meditation – learning how to sink into your body and the Force exactly in the moment where you were.

Anakin had been better at that than regular meditation, at least at the beginning. Since being with Palpatine, though, he’d forgotten that just like he’d forgotten all his regular meditation practice. It hadn’t seemed necessary when he was growing stronger by the day, using his anger to fuel his strength, but Qui-Gon had started drilling him on it as soon as they’d started their training again. Instead of getting Anakin back into his seated meditation, he’d ordered Anakin to meditate while moving and especially while fighting. But in all these months, he hadn’t been able to do it.

Maybe that was why he’d come so close to hurting Quinlan that day, to hurting his mom. And maybe it had something to do with the lightsaber.

Because the blade that blazed into green light before his eyes now was not the one Palpatine had given him. It was Rie’s – and at the sight of the blade, at the feeling of the metal beneath his hand, Anakin drew a deep breath and the world burst into clarity around him.

It was a sharpening of his senses, yes, but it was also a slight release of control. He was giving himself up to the Force, and as he let himself go, his mind emptied out. The thoughts, fears, frustrations that had clouded his mind for months seemed to dim, just a little – not gone, exactly, but stepping back. Letting the needs of the moment take over just in time.

His deflections grew more precise, his own strikes cleaner and kinder. No one was here to tell him not to kill, and so he wasn’t trying to avoid it – but he wasn’t trying to do it, either. When he deflected blaster bolts back at their shooters, when he heard them fall with shrieks – when he drew close enough to strike back directly – he noticed when his strikes killed. He noticed when life drained away from his enemies and when they merely fell, moaning and clutching at severed limbs. But the feeling of taking life didn’t carry that savage glee anymore, that satisfaction of what he had thought was righteous anger. He killed because he had to – because he had a mission to accomplish and leaving people alive would only lead to more pain in the end. He wasn’t doing it because the Hutts and their allies deserved to die.

They did. Anakin believed that, down to his bones. But for the first time, he understood what Qui-Gon had talked about when he said that Jedi weren’t meant to be executioners. They were supposed to help, yes, to serve, and to keep people safe, and sometimes that involved fighting and killing. But they weren’t there to determine who lived and who died. It wasn’t their place to decide. Anakin could feel anger; he could hate these people forever. But what mattered now wasn’t killing them; it was deposing them. It was taking down their operation and replacing it with something better.

When the sand cleared, when the battle ended, when he stood over a field of fallen enemies with Rie’s lightsaber in his hand, it might not have looked different from any other time. But it felt different. He understood now that he had done what he had to do and no more.

“Anakin?”

His mom had returned in the speeder, and he turned to her, Rie’s lightsaber shrinking back into a handle. He clipped it back to his belt and opened the door.

“Let’s go,” he said.

The radio transmitter at the top of the tower was easy to reach, and the code was easy to crack. It felt too easy not to be a trap, but maybe there was another reason for it – that the Hutts and the Indies were weakening themselves fighting each other. They were leaving too many cracks in their defenses because they were too busy tearing each other apart. Maybe it meant they wouldn’t notice a strike from an unexpected place.

It was the kind of logic that Anakin could imagine Rie spouting – back in the days before she’d been hurt too badly to speak – and he touched her lightsaber again, feeling for the calming hum of kyber beneath his fingers as he led his mom up the stairs to the top of the tower and placed his hands on the transmitter.

“Ready?” she said, and he nodded and closed his eyes.

When he opened himself to the Force like this, he could feel everything – even the slightest change in electrons and charge in the air. He reached for that radio signal and pressed himself forward into it, feeling the way it vibrated in the air. Sensing the frequency, matching it to his memory, to that broader alignment in the Force of the way things were meant to be.

“Here.” His mom pressed the chip remover into his hand, and he felt for the signal there, too – felt its vibrations and compared them to the signal from the tower itself. If he reached for the invisible beam, pulled all the collected particles together, concentrated himself in the atmosphere right there –

There. He felt it. He felt the vibration shift, felt the mingling of the radio signal in the atmosphere with the solar storm; felt the way it reflected out across the planet. Felt the exact spot where it would hit and compared it in his mind to the map Aayla had given them.

It was too much to hold in his head at once; outside this state of consciousness, he would never have been able to do it. But here – connected to everything, his mind clear from the battle and from the presence of his mom beside him – he could.

Because he understood now. He understood that you had to make some sacrifices, but that you could do it without sacrificing your integrity, if you tried. In that one moment of sudden clarity, where the whole planet opened up to him and everything in the universe seemed possible, he felt connected to something bigger than himself.

Was that the Force?

And in that connection, with all his senses sweeping out over the planet, with every living thing amplified in his awareness, he felt something else. A Force presence he didn’t recognize, reaching out at them from the heart of Tusken territory.

“Rie,” he breathed.

The meditative state evaporated around him. Suddenly, with a sharp sensation of dwindling, he was himself again – back in his own body and his own mind, back with the pull of darkness still lingering in his thoughts and all those fears still with him – but with the calm that came from having, for just one moment, managed to reach beyond them and touch something greater.

“Rie?” said his mom.

“She’s alive,” said Anakin. “I felt her. And she’s in Tusken territory.” He let his hands drop from the radio. “It’s done. We can tell the others now that the signal will deactivate any slave chips that come into its radius. But we have to go rescue her first.”

“And it’s where again?”

Even over a commlink, Gira managed to maintain her cool competence. Shmi could conjure up a perfect picture of her, though their connection was voice only – the tilt of her head, lekku swaying just slightly, hand under her chin, eyes sharp and intent over the map.

“A few clicks north of the space Aayla indicated,” said Shmi. “The majority of transmission power is extended up rather than out, so the range is slightly smaller than we had anticipated. But it should be large enough, if we can get people there.”

She glanced out the window of the speeder, the desert whizzing by too fast to identify any landmark – if she could have recognized any in this area where she had never lived. Anakin was pushing them to maximum speed, coaxing more power out of the speeder’s engine than it should have possessed.

Had he been like this when she’d been captured? He must. She still remembered how he’d looked when he’d seen her – fragile, almost broken, like the little boy he’d ceased to be long before the Jedi had taken him away. Now he was focused and furious, eyes straight ahead, intent on the sense of Rie that he had claimed to pick up, and Shmi shuddered to think what it would take to divert him from his course.

“We’ll start spreading the word,” said Gira. “None of our contacts have come up with a coordinated effort yet to herd people into the area, but I’m sure it can be done.”

“We’ll need to move quickly,” said a new mild voice. Qui-Gon, of course. Had he and Gira reached some sort of truce, or did he listen now against her wishes? “Once the Hutts find out that their transmission tower has been attacked, they’ll be wise to our strategy.”

“We can handle it.” The frost in Gira’s voice and the delicate stress on the first word seemed to answer Shmi’s question. “Thank you for your work, Shmi. Are you on your way back now?”

Shmi hesitated. This was the part of the conversation she had been dreading – the part she had not been able to prepare for. “In a manner of speaking,” she hedged.

“In a manner of speaking?” Qui-Gon’s voice sharpened, and Shmi could picture him too: leaning forward in his hoverchair, hair slipping forward over his shoulders. “What’s happened?”

“We’ve had – some complications,” she said slowly. “We were – separated.”

Separated. What a passive way to speak of what had happened, Rie’s choice, the way she had locked eyes with Shmi and for the first time Shmi had seen her behind those eyes, behind the glasses that seemed to reflect the world rather than letting it in. The way Rie had practically begged Shmi to let her go.

The way Shmi had agreed.

“Separated,” repeated Gira. “Separated how? Didn’t the transmission tower mission require all of you?” Unspoken: wasn’t that why we let you all go?

“It required me and Anakin,” said Shmi. “Rie” –

“What happened to her?” Now there was an urgency to Qui-Gon’s voice, a hushed tension that seemed to make it through even the halting comm connection, as though he knew how dire the situation had been, how much danger she had put herself into. “Where is she now?”

“No,” said Shmi. “But Anakin assures me that she’s alive. We were attacked by IA forces and attempted to lose them in a slot canyon. Rie split off from our group to lead them off our trail and we haven’t seen her since. In a search of the canyon, we found our pursuers dead and Rie missing.”

“Missing?” said Gira sharply. “Captured?”

“We think so,” said Shmi heavily. “But Anakin couldn’t sense anything more specific than her presence. We’re moving in her direction right now in the hopes of recovering her.”

“Hmm,” said Gira. “Keep an eye out. If the Indies were killed, she must have been captured by the Hutts.”

“Maybe,” said Shmi. “Or” –

She broke off. Out the window of the speeder, though their speed had not decreased at all, something about the land was becoming familiar to her. Not any particular landmark, but something about the layout of this area – the rock outcroppings and canyons of the Jundland Wastes, the kind of place where Tusken Raiders made their homes.

“Or?” said Gira.

“Or worse,” said Shmi grimly. “We’re entering Tusken Raider territory.”

There were rumors about what the Tusken Raiders did to their captives, though Shmi had never met anyone who had survived a raid and could confirm it. The thought of Rie escaping the IA only to fall prey to them sent a shiver up Shmi’s spine, despite the heat of the day.

“Oh,” said Gira, and fell silent.

“Well,” said Qui-Gon, and did the same.

“Yes,” said Shmi, and for a moment they were all quiet.

“Try not to risk yourselves, if you can avoid it,” said Gira at last. “We don’t want our plans to fall into enemy hands, but we don’t want you to, either.” Her voice warmed – warmed in a way Shmi had not heard it in so long, with humor and real worry. “I would hate to bring bad news to your husband.”

“Believe me,” said Shmi, “I would also rather you didn’t.” She glanced to Anakin, his gaze still locked on the desert before him, though the clench of his jaw revealed that he was listening closely. “Are you sure she’s here, Ani?”

“I’m sure.”

“Anakin,” said Qui-Gon. “Can you hear me?”

“Yes.” Again: tight, monosyllabic. For a moment, Shmi almost feared her son more than where they were going – almost feared for the Tusken Raiders – but she pushed that down and aside. She’d seen something change in Anakin, even if just for a moment, before on the outpost. Something about him had quieted, and she had to trust that even if she couldn’t see it now.

“I’m proud of you, Ani,” said Qui-Gon. “Your work here has made a difference already.”

Anakin grunted. “I’m not going to sacrifice another friend for it,” he said, as defiantly as if Qui-Gon had ordered him to do just that. “We’re going to find Rie and bring her back.”

“I know,” said Qui-Gon. “And I believe you will. Remember, Ani: breathe into your feelings and let the Force flow through you. All is not always as it seems.”

“What is that supposed to mean?” Anakin demanded, but the call disconnected before he could get an answer. Shmi was left staring at the silent commlink in her hand before lifting her gaze yet again to the desert surrounding her.

Yes, the nearer they drew, there could be no doubt that this was Tusken Raider territory. Telltale signs were beginning to appear: strips of cloth tied around poles thrust into the sand that marked temporary hunting territory; the call of distant banthas. Shmi’s hands tensed around the commlink she still held. If they were caught out here –

“You’re sure she’s here?” she said, hushed.

“Yes.”

The shots rang out before Shmi could push him further – the sign that they had entered the Sand People’s territory. The first one impacted the hood of the speeder and the whole vehicle nearly spun in a circle, jolted off balance by the close-range shot. Anakin yelled and adjusted, flicking a switch so hard that they were thrown forward. Shmi had never wanted to be in a podrace; she supposed she was getting a taste now of what Anakin had endured at the young age of eight years old, and cold sweat prickled at her back and under her arms.

The increase of speed took them out of range of the first ambush, but now tents were coming into view, and Shmi’s skin crawled with chills. No one ventured this far into Tusken territory and lived. How did Anakin intend to get them out of this?

Another shot – not from the attackers too far behind them, but from one of the tents. The encampment was not unguarded, then – and this time, the shot impacted something in the machinery and the speeder began to sputter.

“Anakin,” said Shmi, her voice shriller than she would have liked, “Ani” –

Anakin had hit the brakes before the second word was out of her mouth. They stopped so suddenly that Shmi was thrown forward yet again, catching herself on the door handle just in time to avoid a collision with the windshield. Before she could recover herself, Anakin’s door was open and he was springing out, lightsaber ablaze.

“What have you done with our friend?” He spoke in Basic first, then in Huttese, the two languages of Tatooine. “Return her to us if you want to live!”

Two more blaster shots, both deflected off the green fire of the lightsaber. Anakin wasn’t aiming to kill, not yet, which should have been a relief – except that it wasn’t. Emerging from the tents now came the Tusken Raiders, as if drawn straight from nightmares. The face masks were unmistakable, black pits of eyes and mouths against beige face coverings that made them look like some kind of horrible sand creatures. Shmi shuddered, her hand trembling on her own door handle, knowing she should leap out to her son’s defense and not able to make herself move. Could he really wade through the whole camp and find Rie? What state would she be in when they found her? And what state would he leave the encampment in when he had done it?

They all stood still – Anakin and the Tuskens, blasters and lightsaber poised against each other in a deadly stalemate. Should she emerge from the speeder? Would that be enough to turn the tide, or would that just make her a liability? She hovered on the edge of decision, not able to move in one way or another – and then, all at once, her mind went quiet.

For a split second, all was clear. She could not have articulated it, could identify no reason or prompting for it, but suddenly she felt certain that all would be all right. That something was about to go their way. And from the depths of her mind, she could almost swear she heard a voice, quiet yet resonant, speak only one word: wait.

And no sooner had she thought that, but a voice really did speak up, cutting through the tension and ringing in the quiet.

“Stop!”

The voice was so strong and clear that for a moment Shmi didn’t recognize it, though it spoke Basic, though she had heard it before. She had never heard it with such confidence, never heard it so loud or decisive – and even as the recognition filtered through her shock, she turned to see another figure making its way slowly through the knot of raiders, trailed by another shorter figure following close behind.

Rie Axtin pushed her way through the knot of raiders and repeated, “Stop!”

The explanations took place in two languages, across five speakers.

The Sand People did not speak Basic, and none of the humans knew their language, but they spoke a bit of Huttese. Anakin and Shmi translated between Huttese and Basic, between Rie and the two Tuskens who seemed to be their speakers, reading between the lines at times where language failed.

Rie’s explanations were still short and halting, as though she’d used up all her confidence in calling for them to stop, but they were enough. Apparently the Tuskens had found her as the IA pursued her and had taken that opportunity to take a prisoner who might be an enemy of their enemy. (Rie had used the word “friend,” but Shmi would hesitate to go that far.) The person who spoke, an adult whom Rie referred to as A’Mana (though Shmi could barely make out the name through the guttural groans of the Tusken language), said only that they had had a good feeling about Rie. Maybe that was an error in translation, or maybe –

“Oloro is Force sensitive,” said Rie, before Shmi could clarify further. She gestured to the child at her side, who had spoken little but almost seemed to cling to her without touching her. “I believe they interceded with the others on my behalf.”

Anakin started. “Force sensitive?” He turned to stare, that intense look fixed on the child at Rie’s side. They were even shorter than he was, but that mask turned back towards him, unflinching; the posture beneath the draping fabric seemed to straighten in defiance. “I suppose I can feel it,” Anakin said almost reluctantly. “It’s different from any Force user I’ve known, though.”

“Like you are different?” said Rie, and Anakin whipped that stare towards her for a moment before subsiding with a slow nod and looking down at last.

“Still . . . why would they intercede for you?” asked Shmi. “I haven’t known the Sand People to make alliances.”

“Maybe there is a reason for that,” said Rie darkly. “Settlement does not often come with a history of peace.”

“I suppose,” said Shmi. It was hard to muster up sympathy for that when she’d had as little choice in her presence here – at least at first – as the Tuskens did. She hadn’t come here to settle anything; she’d been sold into a system that oppressed and exploited, and in exchange, she’d been living in fear of raids and revenge against people like her. Did the Sand People ever attack the Hutts?

“Our planet has been occupied for long generations in our memory,” said A’Mana. They turned to Shmi, and she had the eerie feeling that those eyes were looking right through her. “But now it is worse than it has ever been. We are hunted in our own territory with metal monsters we cannot fight. We want these people gone.”

We want these people gone. That, at least, was something they could agree on.

He had spoken to Anakin, but abruptly Qui-Gon’s words rang in Shmi’s head: all is not always as it seems. She wouldn’t have ever expected to see Tusken Raiders rescuing a companion, much less to be entertaining the possibility of alliance. But this was a time to do and experience new things. This was a time to think differently about what Tatooine could look like – a time to reimagine the future of the planet they all were forced to share.

“We want them gone, too,” she said. “We are the enemies of your enemies. Maybe that is enough to make us allies.”

The call was set up in what seemed to be a conference tent, and it included everyone: the leaders of the Tuskens, the leaders of the revolutionaries, and the leaders of the Jedi.

Shmi stared at them all arrayed in miniscule blue-tinted light, Jedi interspersed with her friends and allies of years even as she and Anakin and Rie stood intermingled with the Sand People she had been afraid of for as long as she’d known they existed. It felt impossible – surreal, even – but it was real, a council like the portent of a new kind of future.

The Jedi kept mainly quiet on both sides of the call; Rie seemed to have shrunk into the background again as if hiding. Mostly, Gira spoke with Akar, the leader of this band of Tuskens, who had been persuaded to join this war council – diplomatic gathering – dreaming session? All three?

The conversation moved quickly beyond the now. Both sides – all three, really – wanted assurances that this alliance would be in their best interest. Everyone wanted to know what would happen next. All sides were in agreement on one thing: the Hutts and the Separatists had to go. And they were also in agreement that no matter who ended up leading them, that leadership could not be connected to the Republic.

The how was a bit harder to accomplish.

“What about a system of voting?” suggested Midge. “An elected leader, not to represent us to the Republic, but a governor or a minister responsible for administering laws in response to the majority?”

“We have no interest in your systems of leadership,” said Akar, once the words had been translated for them. “We know how our tribes are run and do not need to change that.”

“What about an agreement?” proposed Qui-Gon in Basic. “Agree that the Sand People will maintain their sovereignty and their lands, with agreements that those lands will not be trespassed. Similar to the current system, but with more guarantee of safety. Meanwhile, the rest of the planet will vote on a governor, and the two leaders will meet regularly to keep the alliances open.”

“And how do we trust that that alliance will not be broken?” said Akar suspiciously.

“How do we trust you in turn?” argued Midge.

Shmi tensed, preparing for things to go downhill – surely that wouldn’t turn out well for her, in the middle of things as she was – when suddenly, shockingly, Gira said, “Use the Jedi.”

Everyone – even the Jedi on the other side of the call, distorted as they were – turned to stare at her.

She was looking directly at Qui-Gon. “You claim you want the Jedi to be a neutral party here,” she said. “You say you have broken away from the Republic, that you have our best interests at heart. That you’re mediators. Prove it, then. Mediate the truce. Declare your loyalty to the best interests of Tatooine, give up your affiliations, and ally yourselves with us.”

There was a long, long pause. Perhaps no one, even Gira herself, could believe that she had spoken – had suggested that, after her hostility to them – but after a long moment, slowly, Qui-Gon nodded.

“We will not give up all association with the Jedi Order on Coruscant,” he said. “Our teachings and our connections are as much our heritage as your traditions are yours. But neither are we answerable to them. Even as Tatooine is not a system under Republic control, neither are we an extension of the Jedi Council.” He turned as well, rotating his slow gaze out at everyone on his side of the hologram – and on Shmi’s side. “If you will trust us with this, we will do it for you.”

“Trust,” said Akar. “Trust takes time to build. We will not trust you now, not so easily. But we will consider it.”

“And consideration is all we can ask,” said Midge. “Especially since we still don’t know if we’ll be able to do this at all. We still have to overcome our enemies. We don’t have enough forces to take them in open battle – do you?”

“No,” said Akar. Shmi couldn’t read their tone, particularly not in a language they clearly did not speak well, but she could sense their distaste at having to confess this.

“But you conduct raids.” That was Rowana, speaking up at last in flawless Huttese – Shmi jerked a startled glance in her direction, but Rowana’s gaze was fixed directly on Rie. “We have devised a plan to free people who have been enslaved by merchants, gangs, and others who do business on this planet. But that plan revolves around guiding them into a specific location, where our actions can take effect.” She paused, and an indrawn breath seemed to pass around the tables on both sides of the call, waiting for her next words. “Maybe you can help us with that.”

Chapter Text

It was the night before they were set to begin their raid, and the encampment was quiet.

The Sand People traveled with an organization that Rie had never seen them given credit for, though to be fair she had not read exhaustively about them. The writings from official sources – which tended to be merchants’ logs and smugglers’ diaries – described them as chaotic and uncontrolled, unpredictable and violent, and gave them no credit for the efficiency that Rie had witnessed as they packed up and began their journey.

The raiding party consisted of about three dozen people: all adults, all garbed similarly, bearing tents and bedrolls that they had packed up so tightly they could carry them easily on their backs – or strapped to the backs of the banthas that accompanied them. They carried blasters, but also bore staves that seemed to crackle with some kind of hidden power.

Shmi, Anakin, and Rie had been separated among the group, each kept in a tent with others who bore close watch over them. Rie could understand it – they were not exactly in a position to be trusted, and although the Sand People had agreed to do this as part of a shared goal, they had no way to trust that it would come out in their favor in the end. She knew that the three of them were just as easily prisoners who could be killed or held up for ransom if things did not turn out in their favor in the end.

She could only hope that wouldn’t happen, not only for her own sake but also for the Tuskens’. They did not know what they were getting themselves into with Anakin in their midst.

Thinking of Anakin set Rie’s mind drifting back to Oloro, who had been left behind. They were a child, so of course it made sense not to bring them into danger – but they were also a Force sensitive child, and Rie couldn’t help feeling a duty to them: the kind of personal duty she had mostly been able to divorce herself from in the last few months. The duty she had let herself neglect because she’d been too afraid she would never be able to rise to it again.

But that was an excuse, wasn’t it? That was a way to prevent herself from doing the hard inner work that had now become necessary.

She rose now from the bedroll she had been given, the top of her head nearly brushing the tent she was sharing with A’Mana. They seemed to like her, as much as anyone could in this fraught situation, so she hoped they would give her leeway to do this. She could not put it off any longer. She must face herself.

She had learned a few hand signals from the Sand People – only the ones that required broad enough gestures not to confuse her limited sight – and she flashed one now, indicating a need to go outside. A’Mana extended a hand in a silent yes, and Rie pushed the flap of the tent aside and set out into the night.

She picked her way around the tents, to the edge of the safe perimeter the Tuskens had set up. The guard on duty turned towards her in acknowledgement of her presence, and she took the hint, settling on her knees where she had been seen. This would do – distant enough from the guard and the tents to allow her the illusion of space, but not so far that she appeared suspicious. The practice was meant to be performed in solitude, but she would make do with what she had right now.

The night vigil was reserved for advanced Force users in search of enlightenment through pain – or for those in despair who had no other place to turn. The practice, on its surface, was simple enough: sitting awake all night, not meditating, not turning to the Force, and remaining in one position for as long as possible. It was meant to be a time of contemplation, forcing physical discomfort without any attempt to ease it, letting that discomfort inform conscious reflection. It was an exercise in denial, keeping oneself from the Force in an effort to strengthen connection to it. A time to confront problems directly, neither wallowing nor looking away, but forcing one’s attention to remain always on the matter at hand. Those who managed it reported breaking through spiritual blocks, unlocking new pathways to the Force through its absence.

Rie had never tried this meditation before – though from time to time she’d thought it might serve her well, if she could muster up the courage to attempt it. Now, she had finally reached a point where she had no other choice.

Her knees creaked under her – a reminder of how long it had been since she had last sat down to meditate, an ominous warning of how soon the pain would begin. She took a deep, trembling breath and rested her hands on her knees – palms open to the star-sprinkled blackness of the desert sky. Open to the night. Open to the possibilities.

Open.

A shiver started between her shoulder blades, warring with her determined stillness until her muscles locked in an effort to hold it back. Her breath turned to a hiss, her mind clenching in response to the very word.

The thought of opening her mind was as rusty with disuse as her muscles, as her practice of meditation. She hadn’t sat down to meditate in months, at first because reaching for the Force hurt so much, and then because fear of the pain had become fear of the practice itself – fear of the experience, yet again, of reaching for something and not finding it. She had cut herself off from the Force because as long as she did not try to reach for it, she could pretend that it would still be there. Could not face the experience of finding herself entirely forsaken.

But had she come to believe she had been forsaken? Had she come to believe that the Force would never be there for her again?

Open.

She could not open her shields, not yet. Could not reach for the Force. But perhaps the problem was not in the Force at all. Perhaps the problem she needed to confront was in her conscious mind.

She sat and let her mind wander.

First, there were the surface-level thoughts – the immediate need that had driven her to this point. Oloro needed training. They were Force sensitive and clearly wanted to expand their knowledge. Though they hadn’t been able to communicate in words, she had understood that much from the way they’d stayed with her, the way they’d reached for her, trying to connect.

She’d felt that – felt it as she hadn’t so much in so long – a brush at the edges of her shields, the tentative reach of an untrained mind for connection – and she’d barely been able to stop herself from flinching back.

But it was one thing to flinch back from Rowana, who did not need her, and another to flinch from someone who did.

Rie paused. There was something wrong in that thought.

This was what this meditation was meant for – to force its practitioner to sit with their thoughts, to follow them to their conclusions, without seeking refuge in the abstract clarity of the Force. To refine the purity of their own mind as a way of building intention and strength to draw on later, when most needed. And Rie’s own mind, brambled and shredded mess that it was, could use this kind of refining.

Rowana didn’t need her: this was an assumption Rie had held throughout her life. It was Rowana who had given her kindness, had extended a hand to a young Jedi padawan unsure of her worth in the world, and shown her a place where she could belong. Rowana had given Rie everything she was, without any expectation of reward.

Unless –

She could hear Rowana’s voice in her mind, admonishing her not to let self-doubt stand in the way of what she could do. Rowana, who had always been by her side. Rowana, whose face had fallen with sorrow when Rie had brushed her off.

Maybe Rowana needed her, after all. Maybe she needed someone who could respond to her, could accept her help. Could care for her in turn.

How could Rie help Oloro – how could she help anyone – if she could not accept help for herself? But why was she worthy of help to begin with? What did she have to give that made her worth Rowana’s attention – Rowana, who could give so much more, who deserved so much better?

That was a well-trodden path of thought, the path that sent Rie into the black spirals of guilt and shame and self-loathing, that brought on dreams and memories and migraines. She could feel it descending even now, the black sucking mire that wrapped around her mind and dragged her down, down –

Down.

She blinked.

Yes, it was a downward spiral, this thought. A feeling of falling within her own mind, sinking into a mire that she could not extract herself from, and –

And that was the dark side, wasn’t it? A fall?

Anakin had nearly fallen months before – fallen for Palpatine’s lies and into a dark pit from which he was still dragging himself out. She had seen him draw nearer to the edges of his own self-control, had seen his anger threaten to consume him. She had known that darkness had taken root in her own mind; she had felt it, freezing and burning at the same time, clawing and devouring, threatening everything about herself. But she hadn’t stopped to think that maybe the darkness had been able to root in her because it had caught hold of something that was already there. Something that had made it easier for her to fall.

Her knees were beginning to ache; her legs tingled from the dig of her heels into the soft meat of her thighs and buttocks. She ached to shift position, but she forced herself to hold it for another breath . . . another . . .

Anchor in the physical pain. Lean into it.

The spiral of her mind . . . that was not solely Palpatine’s doing. That thought made her quiver, made her want to shy away, but she gritted her teeth against the burn in her legs and the flinch in her thoughts and held tight. The darkness had already been there.

The memories, the dreams – those were not dreams of Palpatine’s plans; they were not solely the memory of his greedy grasping hand in her mind. They might end there, but they began in her youth, with her training. They began with the Jedi.

With the Jedi . . .

She had known all along that there were problems with the Jedi’s approach to the world. It was why she had fit in so poorly in the Archives; it was why she had eventually left to seek her fortune elsewhere. But her thoughts had always concentrated on the Jedi’s approach to politics and knowledge, not with their approach to her.

Her mind was already a thorny tangle of briars, brambles that threatened to tear her hands apart if she plunged them too deeply in; the thought of reaching deeper, letting herself be ripped to bloody shreds, had made her cower. But her failure to look deeper was what had brought her here in the first place.

By now, the pins and needles in her legs had transitioned to a burn with the restriction of blood from her shins and feet. She blinked hard against tears of pain, clenched her teeth to keep from moving or making a sound. If she could hold herself in this position, could she not brave the thorns inside her brain?

Closing her eyes, feeling the burn of tears at the corners and their warm trickle on her cheeks, Rie reached inside herself.

All her life, she had been taught both that her worth lay in service and that there was a right way to provide that service. She had taken that to mean that she was of no use if she could not render it – that the only good in herself was in what she could give up for the world. And she had learned that there was a right way to do that – those Jedi who put their bodies and minds on the line, who threw themselves into their duty without hesitation or question. Had learned that to render such service took a courage and skill that she would never possess.

Was that the training she wanted to pass on?

If the Jedi were to set up a school here on Tatooine, if they were to find a new future here alongside both the Sand People and the formerly enslaved; if they were to train Force-sensitive students – and maybe even those who would never have been found by the Jedi they had left behind – they would have to be able to learn from the people they were working with. They would have to examine the lessons they had always been taught and determine what they wanted to pass on and what was best left behind for good.

How could she teach Oloro to listen to their instincts and trust their feelings when she couldn’t trust her own?

How could she tell anyone else they were worthy of help when she couldn’t believe it of herself?

Rie reached down into the brambles of her mind, searching for the memory that had left her motionless and numb during the first fight on this planet, the one that had preluded the compulsion to come into the desert. Had the Force been trying to tell her something, amidst all the pain and fear? Had it been trying to show her the root of the problem?

She reached for that memory now: the shame of being unable to keep up with her classmates, the moments that had led her to try harder, to push further, to lean into the things she could do and try to make herself perfect. The moment that had taught her that there was only one way she could serve, and that she might as well work herself to disappearing if she could never live up to it. She reached for it, pulled it up in her mind, and clenched her gut against the memories – against the very real pain and humiliation and shame and disappointment –

And she let herself sink into it. Remembered it, let it live in her body, replacing the numbness of her lower half with the memory of faltering legs and straining eyes and a body that wouldn’t move the way she wanted it to. Remembered the sinking in her stomach at the realization that she would never be enough.

It’s all right, she told herself silently. It was always all right.

She reached for that younger version of herself, caught her hands just as Rowana had done so long ago, and for the first time she understood what her teacher had been telling her all along. There was worth in her beyond what she could give. There was worth in trying and failing, but there was also worth in simply being. There was worth in letting herself be helped.

In her mind, she felt something give way – some tension release, some lock in her heart click open.

She blinked her way out of the memory and back into her body, and immediately wished she hadn’t. The burn in her legs was so fierce that a new wave of tears rushed to her eyes. She bit down hard on her own teeth in an effort to hold against the pain. This meditation was meant to last all night; she couldn’t give up so early –

Why?

At that new thought, she broke her posture to gaze down at her legs. This too was a Jedi meditation exercise, one that used pain as purification or an increase in strength. But strength for what? The pain had served her – it had helped her to find the roots of her problem. But was this not also one of those roots? Did she seek out pain for herself because she worried there was no worth for her outside of it? Had she sought to hurt herself because she believed it would make her more worthy?

If she was questioning the way she had been taught, could she not start here, too?

In order to help people on this planet, the Jedi had to be different. Maybe, if they were to help others, they had to help themselves, too.

Rie pushed herself forward onto hands and knees, biting back a yelp at the new wave of sensation in her legs. They would hardly move; she felt her lower half had been made out of rubber, except for the tingling pain of blood beginning to rush back into her legs and feet. She rocked forward, then back, pushing herself back to a seat, stretching her legs out in front of her and bending over them, rubbing desperately at the cramps in the muscles and breathing in short, pained gasps.

Above her, it was still deep night. She hadn’t lasted all night after all, not before the pain had become too much for her. But she had found something nonetheless.

Cautiously, Rie probed at the shields she had erected for herself around her mind. Still there, still tight – but there was still that tiniest chink that she had created when Oloro had reached out for her, when she’d allowed herself to connect. She extended a careful tendril of awareness towards that tendril, allowed it to poke free.

The feeling that rushed into her mind was the pain of hot water on frigid skin, bright light after long days in darkness. Burning, eye-watering pain – but the awareness that something existed outside it, some comfort that was waiting for her if she could only ease her way into it.

Maybe she would need help with that easing. But she knew someone who would be willing to give it to her.

Stumbling, tear-smeared and breathless, dizzy with the new revelation and the cold desert air and the star-sprinkled sky, Rie pushed herself to her feet and made her weaving way back towards the tent.

Chapter Text

Anakin had never been raided by the Sand People before.

He’d heard the stories, of course, and he’d seen them at podraces, when they showed up to shoot at the racers – but they never dared to attack the stands. The Hutts were usually there, and even if the Tuskens really did think that the planet was meant for them and everyone else on it deserved to die, they wouldn’t put their money where their mouths were if it meant risking fighting Jabba and his goons.

Not until now, anyway. And maybe that was a sign that they were actually in a position to win this. Why would the Tuskens help them if they thought there was no chance of victory?

Anakin cut his gaze uneasily back and forth over the raiders surrounding him, the camp they were currently packing up. Rie might trust them, but she hadn’t lived here as long as Anakin had, and she wasn’t exactly stable at the moment. Anakin and his mom were keeping a closer watch.

“What do we do if they betray us?” Anakin had whispered to his mom the night before, and she’d just shrugged and said, “We hope they don’t.”

The Tuskens had the numbers right now. If their plans had all worked, though, that might change. If Gira’s transmissions had made it to their allies in the area; if the signal had really changed enough to deactivate hundreds of chips all at once; if the raids really did draw everyone into the right place. If, if, if.

Well, if his mom wouldn’t be prepared, Anakin would. He touched the lightsaber at his belt – his own again, now that he’d been reunited with Rie. He’d given hers back, and she’d taken it a little uneasily. Some part of Anakin was sorry to see it go – it wasn’t his own, but he’d felt more balanced while holding it, a little more in touch with the calm center that Qui-Gon told him he was supposed to be looking for all the time.

But his own was more powerful. Rie had rarely used hers to fight, and he’d felt it; Anakin’s had been made for power, and he might need that power now.

They were part of just one raiding party, but the Tuskens had communicated with their other tribes in this hemisphere, and they were all converging on the same spot now, approaching merchant settlements and places where the Hutts’ enforcers lived. Places where there were likely to be lots of slaves – and where it would be easy to herd them where they needed to go.

Their band was now gathered on the outskirts of a market, too far away for Anakin to see, but he could feel it from a distance: buying and selling, giving and taking orders. People just working through a normal day . . . except for the ones who knew what was coming.

A sharp bark gave the signal, and they all burst into motion at once.

The raid was targeted and tight. Anakin only watched at first as the raiders fired shots, then charged in, breaking into small teams that all struck in different places – driving the people out of homes and stores, converging on them until there was only one direction to run. Some fought back, but the Tuskens had caught them unprepared and they didn’t have weapons ready. There was only one thing they could do, and that was flee.

And as they began to take to their speeders, the Tuskens who had still been lying in wait followed them.

Anakin tugged at the face covering over his own head where he stood near the back of the party. He hadn’t been trusted as part of the raiding party, but he – and Rie, and his mom – were all dressed as Tuskens as well, just to make sure that no one would see them among the raiding party. It itched, and it constricted his sight and it smelled like sweat and sand, but he kept it on with sheer stubbornness and tried to compensate for his difficulty seeing by reaching for the Force instead.

He could feel all the usual battle sensations – the fear and the power, licking at his insides like they wanted to gobble him up – but he could also feel his mom beside him, the struggle between determination and guilt. She didn’t like battle; she didn’t want to fight anyone, but she’d come around to recognizing that sometimes they had to do it to prevent more pain and death on the planet.

Anakin, meanwhile, was itching. He wanted to be in the thick of it. He wanted to be making the slavers pay, the way he had always dreamed of doing. The way Palpatine had promised him that one day they could –

No. No, he wasn’t supposed to want what Palpatine had told him to want.

That’s why it was so hard, because he did want it! He’d always wanted it. Palpatine hadn’t made that appear by magic; he’d seen what Anakin already wanted and told him he could have it. Palpatine had known that Anakin wanted revolution on Tatooine, that he wanted the slaves all freed. If they were doing this now, if the moment he had always dreamed of was here at last, did that mean Palpatine had been right about some things after all?

Everyone was running now, slavers and slaves alike, trying to stay within reach of their owners. There were basically two ways to activate the chips: either you could get too far from home or you could get too far from your owner. You could leave your home territory, but only if you were with the person who held the controls. Now, slaves had to choose between running away and staying behind to be raided.

Most of them ran, and Anakin wondered how many of them knew what was coming and how many were about to have the best surprise of their lives. A few stayed behind, though, and that was where Anakin’s party came in. They encircled the people, drawing them forward – not threatening them with weapons, but pulling them into the motion all the same.

The way they looked at him – if he had been able to forget that he was wearing Tusken clothes before, he sure couldn’t now. The air was thick with their fear, and Anakin fingered his lightsaber again, waiting for the moment when they could jump into action.

It didn’t take long. They followed behind the raiding party, but when they arrived on the scene, the carnage had begun.

Gira and Midge and the rest of the Jedi were already there; blasters were firing and lightsabers were flashing, and a shrill alarm cry was wailing – the Hutt enforcer who lived in the area must have called for reinforcements – and Anakin couldn’t hold back any longer. He tore the mask off his face, drew his lightsaber, and charged.

Sometimes he thought he’d never felt more alive than when he was fighting – when he could turn against a whole battalion of foes and get to work. Their enemies were pouring in now, only the Hutts’ side – set ‘em up, knock ‘em down, Anakin supposed – and he set his lightsaber blazing to glowing blue life and went to work.

The fight became a blur. He was carving his way through his foes, wreaking destruction wherever he went – not even looking too closely at them. He could tell that his enemies were falling before him, but it wasn’t the battle meditation he’d sunk into when they’d taken the outpost. It was closer to that drunken battle-joy he’d first felt when he was with Palpatine, the one he still knew was always so close to the surface –

“Ani!”

Dimly he heard his name, but he had no time to listen. He deflected a blaster bolt, swung his blade through the arm of another attacker, moved on to the next.

“Anakin!” His mom’s voice, cutting through the noise in his mind. “Anakin, they’re surrendering!”

Were they? Anakin blinked, and the haze of blood before his eyes didn’t clear. He still saw foes with their weapons raised – the faces of the people who had oppressed him and his mom throughout his life –

“Anakin!”

That last voice belonged to Rie, piercing through the haze, but it wasn’t just her voice. There was something flying through the air along with her cry, an object aimed at him. He opened his hand without even looking, caught it with the Force, and blinked at the familiar smack of a handle into his palm.

A lightsaber. Rie’s lightsaber.

When his hand closed around it, something else washed over him – not a wave of calm, exactly, but a sort of cool, clear logic that cut through the blur of battle in his mind. He ignited the lightsaber and crossed it with his own, green against blue, and in the clashing light of the blades he saw –

A vision? A dark shape resolved itself in the light: the dark silhouette of a tall man in a domed helmet and a mask, a man who breathed darkness. He stared at it, for a moment forgetting battle, forgetting everything around himself, and seeing only the horror of this vision, the flash of it seared into his eyes like the afterimage of the lightsabers’ glow. He didn’t know what the vision was, but he felt drawn to it and repelled from it in equal measure, like it both was and wasn’t him – like it was a warning.

A sign from the Force.

He deactivated his lightsabers and stood, panting and sweating, in the aftermath.

A hand fell on his shoulder and he looked up to see Qui-Gon standing beside him. He was listing slightly; he’d lost his hoverchair at some point in the battle, and his hair and face were damp and shiny with sweat, but his face was calm and serious as he looked down at Anakin. “Are you calm now?” he said.

Anakin stared down at the lightsabers, reeling from what he had seen within them. “I – I think so.”

“They’ve surrendered,” said Qui-Gon. “It’s time to negotiate terms. But I think you and I should talk.”

It had been so long since he’d spoken to Qui-Gon openly. Well, maybe not, but the last few days felt like they’d taken years.

They sat on their knees back at the base after returning from the successful raid. The others were talking strategy – how to take out the Indies now that they had a larger group on their sides, now that they’d taken the military equipment from the Hutts; how to get more of the slaves into the same radius of effect so that their chips could be deactivated. How they would start rebuilding from there. But Qui-Gon and Anakin sat in meditation pose, hands resting on their thighs, eyes open and staring at each other: not meditating yet, but talking.

“Tell me about the battle meditation,” said Qui-Gon. “How did it feel different?”

“There were two,” Anakin tried to explain. “There was the meditation with Rie’s lightsaber, and then there was – like a haze. I felt like I was in the Force, but it was – different.”

“How was it different?”

Qui-Gon’s tone was patient, but relentless. Anakin bristled against it, as always, but – when Qui-Gon pushed him, he always felt better on the other side. He tried to remember that now, even in his own frustration. “With my lightsaber, it felt like I was with Palpatine,” he said. “I could feel where my next enemy was and how to take him out, but they were always my enemies. Everyone was out to get me, and I had to get them first.”

“Fear,” said Qui-Gon quietly. “Leads to anger.”

“I know that,” said Anakin reflexively, but then he stopped. Did he really know? He’d heard the saying so many times, but had he ever really stopped to think about it? Yes, he’d been afraid, and he’d been angry, and he’d left suffering behind when he fought. But –

“But I don’t understand how it’s different,” he burst out finally. “I’m still swinging the lightsaber. I’m still hurting people, sometimes even killing them.”

“You’re right that the impact isn’t different on this small scale,” said Qui-Gon. “We carry lightsabers because we often have to fight, and sometimes we have to fight to kill. You’ve seen that on this planet – you know that the Hutts wouldn’t stand down for less than an existential threat. But it matters why we do the fighting, because that affects how often we fight and what kind of environment we create for the people around us.”

“I don’t understand,” said Anakin.

“We aren’t fighting to conquer the planet,” said Qui-Gon. “And it matters that we aren’t doing that, because it means we know when to stop. It means that the next time something goes wrong, violence won’t be the first solution we jump to. And it means that we aren’t creating a precedent for what the Jedi will do on this planet.”

“But maybe the Jedi should do more!” protested Anakin. “It’s not like they’re better off without us!” When he’d first seen Qui-Gon, when he’d first spotted the lightsaber at his belt, he hadn’t been able to shake the mental image of a heroic Jedi Knight rushing in to free his world. Maybe some part of him had held onto that image for too long, even when he’d learned that the Jedi could be killed, that they could make mistakes. And even though he didn’t like the way they’d done things in Coruscant, it wasn’t like the Hutts had been any better here.

“Maybe,” said Qui-Gon. “And you’re right – if we didn’t believe we could make a difference on this planet, we wouldn’t be here. But that difference doesn’t come from taking charge. It comes from teaching – and from learning.” He glanced around with a wry smile. “There is much to learn from the organization here, even as I hope we have things to teach them as well. Our training and our ability to use the Force gives us a power that others on this planet don’t possess. We have to wield that power with humility if we don’t want to become the next tyrants. And humility means letting ourselves be taught sometimes, too.”

Anakin wasn’t sure Qui-Gon was speaking for him anymore – he seemed to be talking to himself – but he looked down at the lightsabers in his hands. The memory of that vision was still fresh, still strong in his mind, and it gave him the courage to say it. “Qui-Gon,” he ventured, “I don’t think I can use this lightsaber anymore.”

His hand shook as he held out the lightsaber from Palpatine, as though he were asking Qui-Gon to cut off his own arm, but when Qui-Gon’s hand wrapped around the handle and took it from Anakin’s palm, he felt lighter. It was like some itch under his skin had died away at last, and the sweet relief of it was like cooling aloe on a sunburn.

“I’m proud of you,” said Qui-Gon. The lightsaber disappeared into the pocket of one of his robes, and Anakin jerked his gaze away from where it had gone. “Giving up a lightsaber is a difficult decision, but I think the Force agrees with you.”

“I do, too,” said Anakin. He could feel it already, calm and sweet around him, and he let himself relax into the feeling. He didn’t know what this meant for him in the future – would the Jedi let them get more lightsabers now that they had broken away? – and the thought of not having one at all rocked him with fear – but maybe this was the good kind of fear. The brave kind of fear. The kind that real heroes were made of, if they could face it down.

He would face it down, he promised himself. He would take whatever happened next, he would listen to the Force, and he would keep reaching for the light.

Chapter Text

The next few days were a blur.

There were arrangements to be made and places to go. The Sand People would not part ways with the revolutionaries; neither group wanted to let the other out of its sight, and with good reason. The peace was tenuous and would doubtless remain so for a long time.

But there was peace. The agreement stood, and perhaps soon they would be able to extend it even further.

Rie knew enough galactic history to be suspicious of societies built on treaties. So often, they were built on foundations of dishonesty and the intention of exploitation; even on those rare occasions that things began well, they regularly spiraled into chaos. Inevitably, someone broke the peace, threatened the other, gained too much power and decided to use it to further their own ends. People never changed, if history was to be believed. But wasn’t that the point of their striving? The hope that they could do things differently this time?

What they were trying to do with the Jedi – that was something that had never been done before, either. They might fail. But hopefully they would at least fail in a new and different way.

The thought of failure didn’t hit Rie as hard as it once had – not now that she had come out the other side of her own. Not now that she had learned that sometimes what seemed to be failure was simply change – and change could be for the worse or for the better.

She hadn’t had an opportunity to speak to Rowana yet. Her master spent much of her time with the leaders of the two groups, working to negotiate that peace and to advocate for the Jedi as well. If this new government were to be formed, if they were to win back and keep control of the planet, they would need at least the most basic arrangements made for the Jedi’s place on the planet. Who would they be accountable to? How would that accountability be structured and ensured? If they were to provide a service, how would they be funded? All these were considerations that had doubtless been part of the original arrangement with the Jedi and the Republic on Coruscant, and Rowana was also in contact with the Council for their recommendations. With the alteration of the radio signal, comm transmissions could be made off the planet again, and they were taking advantage as best they could.

Rie let herself be shuffled back and forth between the groups of people. She was still reeling from the revelations of days before, from the new sense of possibility that had sprung from her wounded and battered mind and soul. She had so much work to do, but she knew that she couldn’t do it on her own.

There was a conversation she needed to have first, and she was just waiting for her chance to begin it.

As the Force would have it, though, she found another opportunity first.

They had stopped for the night in a network of caves which seemed to wind their way endlessly beneath the planet’s surface. Had there been burrowing megafauna here once who had left these tunnels and caverns? Or had they been hollowed out by sentient residents of the planet who desperately needed a place to take shelter from the sun? Either way, they were here – here and ready for any enterprising group to take advantage.

She found Anakin before she found anyone else, wandering aimlessly through the tunnels as if in the same daze she felt. He had been scarce for the last several days, as if he too had experienced something when they’d been separated, as if he too had been changed. Rie would not have approached him on her own before; would not have felt ready to hear what might be in his mind – would not have been capable of managing his emotions or thoughts. But at last, she felt brave enough to try.

“Anakin,” she said.

He turned to her with no surprise – had he sensed her presence? Had she finally begun to broadcast a presence in the Force again, to bleed through the shields she had held up for so long? “Hello, Rie.”

She hesitated. For all that she had begun this conversation, she didn’t know what to say. Words were still tricky, still easier when there were known scripts she could draw on. So much of her still felt locked up behind barriers – barriers that it might take a lifetime to take down. But scripts were there for a purpose, and maybe at least this one would help lead her into something more real. “How are you?”

He opened his mouth, closed it again. Deciding whether or not to follow the script himself? Rie waited.

“I’m okay,” he said at last. “I’m getting better, anyway. What about you?”

Rie sorted through the possible words for a moment before deciding on the truth – something she wouldn’t have said to any Jedi Master, but which seemed right to say to Anakin now. “Trying,” she said, and ventured a smile.

“Yeah.” Anakin nodded. “Me too.”

Silence for another moment. Just as Rie was wondering what had compelled her to come to him – or perhaps if the silence was the point, the simple companionship – Anakin looked up again as if realizing something. “Oh,” he said, and fumbled at his belt for a lightsaber. “I should give this back to you.”

The lightsaber was hers, Rie realized as it lay on his palm, waiting for her to take it. She had hardly recognized it, either in sight or in Force resonance.

The correct thing to do would be to take it, to thank him for returning it to her. Why then was she so hesitant? Why did she stand there for another long minute, staring at the lightsaber as if it didn’t belong to her?

Because it didn’t. The realization seeped in slowly, but with a settling of rightness in the Force. Rie had never been skilled with a lightsaber. She had spent all her life trying to make up for that lack, developing her mind and her intellect so that she could compensate for what she lacked. But even when those too had been taken from her, she hadn’t gone back to the saber. In fact, she had no desire to pick it up ever again.

The lightsaber was the weapon of a Jedi – meant to represent certain things to the galaxy as a whole. Meant to signify justice and nobility and strength. But were there not other ways to seek justice? Were there not other ways to protect people? And did Rie need to provide protection in order to be of worth?

“Thank you,” she said, and the words came as easily as if the Force itself had placed them on her tongue. “But I think it belongs to you now.”

There was a rightness about the way it looked in Anakin’s palm. He was meant to hold a lightsaber, yes, but should he really be wielding one that Palpatine had made for him? Could there be a better place for the weapon Rie had constructed with so much love and hope long ago than in the hands of someone learning to protect again?

Anakin looked down at the lightsaber, and his hands curled around it for a moment before he glanced back up at her. “It’s yours,” he said. “I was just borrowing it. I shouldn’t keep it.”

“You should,” said Rie. “I don’t think I’ll be using a lightsaber again. I believe this one is meant to pass to you.”

Again, that longing curl of the fingers. Anakin took longer to look up at her this time, gazing down at the lightsaber as if memorizing the way it looked in his hand.

And then he looked up again, and for all her own blocked-off Force sense, Rie didn’t think she was imagining the gratitude in his face. “Thank you,” he said. “I will take good care of it.”

“Yes,” said Rie, and the moment resonated with rightness. “I believe you will.”

The day had settled into evening when Rie found Rowana at last, wandering back from where she had been cloistered with some of the leaders with a dazed look in her eyes that Rie recognized.

This was how Rowana had looked in the last few years they had spent on Coruscant, when political tensions had been rising and negotiation had become more and more untenable. They knew now that that been at least partly the fault of the chancellor, who had been working his way slowly up in power and entangling the bureaucratic systems even more closely together, into a sonic net that not even the fastest ship could have escaped. She’d known abstractly that that was what was happening, had connected that once she’d looked at his holocron and seen his plans, but had somehow never connected it to the toll that negotiation had taken on Rowana.

To see her like this again, now –

There were times that it was worthwhile to give everything they had, yes. But it hurt Rie to see Rowana suffering, to see her tired and in pain and lost.

Oh.

She had determined to apologize already – for shutting Rowana out, for cutting her off – but only now did she realize how much she had been hurting her master simply by hurting herself.

“Rie,” said Rowana cautiously, coming to a stop in the hallway. The air hummed between them, crackling and alive with an electricity that Rie had not been able to feel in so long. “You’re still awake.”

“Yes,” said Rie. Her stance on the floor was uncertain, her head seeming disconnected from her feet. She had the feeling that she’d stepped into a tiny room full of fragile objects, and that even turning slightly wrong would send everything crashing to the floor.

“Are you all right?” Rowana was inspecting her, that gentle once-over look that Rie knew so well from the years of her apprenticeship: whenever she’d come in from a disappointment in class or in friendship, whenever she’d been unsteady or unwell – whenever something was clearly wrong, but Rowana could not pinpoint exactly what. Now, the knowledge that she had become so opaque to her master filled her with sorrow.

She knew the script for this moment – that script that had become so easy for her to recite by rote: yes, I’m fine. I’m all right. Don’t worry about me. She opened her mouth.

“No,” she said.

Rowana stepped closer, short and clipped, as if pulling herself back at the same time she advanced. “No?”

Rie took a deep breath. The words were hard to find – no, the words were impossible. She couldn’t articulate this feeling, but maybe she didn’t have to. She reached for Rowana’s hands, reached for her mind, and extended her own consciousness outside that tiny chink of light she had made in her own shields.

At the touch of their minds, Rie almost wept. It was so much like it had once been, when she’d been frayed or anxious or ashamed, when Rowana had reached out to soothe her mental wounds like a cool hand on a fever-burning forehead. She hadn’t felt it like this in so long – this mental touch as non-invasion, as gentle care, as protection and healing. Everything she had cut herself off from.

Connected like this, Rowana could read her. She could read Rie’s remorse, her pain, the anguish she had tried so hard and so unsuccessfully to lock away – and now Rie shared the new sensations she had felt during her time with the Tuskens, the feeling of protectiveness over Oloro, the feeling of seeking somewhere to belong. The feeling that in order to belong anywhere, she would have to let her walls down at last.

She let it flow, emotions streaming forth in an undammed flood, an onslaught that once begun, she could do nothing to slow down. A rush of feeling that would have been too much for anyone to take in. A rush that would never be too much for Rowana.

“I see,” said Rowana softly, when the flood slowed down enough that words would make sense again. “You want to teach.”

Rie tried to speak and realized that her throat was thick with tears, her cheeks wet with them, her voice choked. “Yes,” she said, and the word was a revelation. Yes, she did. Trust Rowana to understand what Rie had not even been able to realize herself – that that was exactly what she had begun to yearn for.

“You will learn, my apprentice,” said Rowana gently, “that the act of teaching is just as much an act of learning. You don’t have to be perfect in order to pass on your wisdom. You just have to be open.”

"Yes," said Rie again, the word a croaking squeak, but this time she forced herself to speak further, to press the words out of her tightening throat and stumbling mind. “I need help.”

Unspoken: I need your help. I need your wisdom. Please.

“You will always have it, Rie,” said Rowana, and she pressed her forehead to Rie’s own, that mental connection at last open between them and flowing freely. “Always.”

“. . . and we’ll need to plan for the redistribution of the assets immediately,” said Gira.

It was the last but possibly the most important item on a long list of agenda points for the meeting between Shmi, Gira, Cliegg, and Midge. A meeting they had to have among themselves before they could communicate to any of their allies, either the Jedi or the Tuskens, what they would be doing next.

It wasn’t the last item on any agenda, of course. Shmi could already think of so many more, and doubtless there were other issues that would arise in the effort to form a new government out of one that had been so irrevocably broken. Growing up as she had, where the labor of her own hands didn’t belong to her and the logistics of her existence were numbers on someone else’s ledger – and then even in her free life, where Cliegg worked for himself and no one else – she only had the faintest notion of how taxes worked or what a central service was supposed to look like. And she had no notion that the people of Tatooine, self-sufficient and lawless as they were, would accept something like that as a plan anyway.

But that would be the point of establishing a new government, one ruled by the actual people of the planet. They would have the chance to make those decisions as they arose.

And as for the Jedi . . . they would just have to deal with what came as it did.

“Not the weapons, though,” objected Midge. “Why would we spend so long confiscating them just to give them out to everyone? If we’re fighting for a free planet, we can’t let that kind of military power get established again.”

“People will want it for self-protection,” pointed out Gira. “We’re used to having to defend ourselves here. No one will support a course of action that leaves us powerless.”

“But then how do we prevent things from playing out this way again?” said Shmi.

She still – even after everything – felt uneasy with the amount of military power they had needed to appropriate and use. Yes, maybe the Hutts and the Separatists wouldn’t have given up their power without them; maybe there were times when violence was necessary. But she’d seen what had happened with Anakin, had seen that sometimes having power made it too easy to reach for more.

“I don’t know if we can,” said Midge philosophically. “But isn’t that part of it, too? That we’re letting people make their own choices.”

Shmi sighed. Yes, in principle that was true. But could it really be expected that people on Tatooine would simply shift out of the mindset they’d had all their lives? That they would stop feeling threatened – or threatening one another – just because they had a new government that was made up of former slaves? And what about the people who had once been slaves? The desire to take revenge would be strong, but if there was one thing Shmi had learned in her long imprisonment, revenge couldn’t be allowed as a lasting force.

Revenge, the Jedi had told her, had been Palpatine’s motivation. The revenge of generations of Sith, nursed from master to apprentice and cultivated into a long-term secret plan to destroy the Jedi and the Republic they served. And the Jedi she’d worked with had certainly had their problems with the Republic, but none of them had really wanted government to crumble.

“Think of all the people who would be hurt along the way,” Obi-Wan had said to her when they’d discussed it as a group. “For what? The hope of something better that no one can agree on?” He’d sighed. “Sentient beings will always want to hurt each other – that’s the nature of the light and dark in us. There’s no foolproof system that stops that from happening.”

“We want to let people make their own choices,” she said now. “But we can’t let our planet fall back into war and chaos because of it. I don’t know if I can trust the people here to choose right.”

“Well, then that’s their choice to make,” said Gira. “But I won’t be the keeper of something that I have no right to.”

“We can melt the weapons down,” said Cliegg.

He’d been quiet most of the time, letting the others speak – letting them wrangle their idealistic hopes into a realistic view of the future. This had not been his fight, not before Shmi had dragged him into it, and evidently now that the worst was over he had planned to revert back to that approach. But he sat forward now, hands clasped on his knees, eyes keen. “We don’t have to dictate how they’ll be used. We can destroy them.”

Shmi looked over at him. He wasn’t looking back, had made no effort at eye contact with her – but there was something about the way he held himself now, the assuredness of his words, that suggested a warming of his stance and his attitude.

A compromise. Cliegg had been a jovial man as long as she’d known him, a good neighbor and community member. Someone good at bringing people together, mediating their conflicts. Whatever else had happened, he was still the same person at his core – and if he could adjust to this, maybe there was hope that all the rest of them could follow suit.

“I like that,” said Shmi. “People will still have their own weapons to protect themselves. But the military machines – those should be destroyed.”

“And what about the Jedi?” said Gira. “If they stay, then whoever they align with will have all the power they possess.”

Shmi raised an eyebrow. Gira had changed her tune on the Jedi quickly enough once she’d seen what they could do – even a broken, renegade gaggle of Jedi who still had so much healing to do themselves. “The Jedi want to give over power to us,” she said.

“They say that,” said Midge. “But what if they decide they don’t like what we’re doing with it?”

There was silence for a long moment, all of them pondering this. There were no Jedi in the room with them now, to speak for themselves, and that was for the best. Shmi could imagine what they could say for themselves, but what was the use of having them here just to repeat it?

“That’s why we let them stay,” said Cliegg at last.

Again, Shmi whipped around to look at him. He was still facing forwards, his mouth pursed as if he’d bitten into something sour, but he continued. “They’ve told us they want to train our people, our children. Right?”

“They have,” said Gira. “Though it sounds more like indoctrination to me.”

“But they’re on our planet,” said Cliegg. “They’re not taking our children far away; they’re staying with us. Keeping them with their families.” He glanced to Shmi, then away, and she could read it in his eyes: the apology, the forgiveness. The inclusion of Anakin in his family, as she had hoped might one day be possible. “What if instead of indoctrinating us, we’re indoctrinating them?”

“They did say they wanted to learn from us,” said Midge thoughtfully.

“Yes,” breathed Shmi. Yes – this was the answer, both to what the Jedi had told her they wanted to do and what she had seen for herself. “They’re lost, too, Gira. They’re trying to figure out a new way forward. Why don’t we let them learn from us as well as teaching us? They can help us keep the peace with the Tuskens, but they can depend on us, too.”

It was what they had all wanted, after all. Wasn’t it? A way forward together?

“I suppose,” said Gira. “It’s a place to start, at least.”

“That’s all we’re doing here,” said Shmi. She was alive with this idea, on fire with the possibilities – with the realization that for the first time since she’d been hauled away in chains, she could truly see a way forward here: for herself, for the people she loved, for the world she had decided not to give up on. “Starting. Isn’t it?”

“Well, yes,” said Gira. “I suppose it is.”