"I take back what I said about humility," Lana mutters when they walk in the door of the Chancellor's apartment. Directly in the line of sight of the entrance, on the far wall, is a massive gilded portrait of Palpatine, a fatherly mien on his face. Something in her feels cold at the sight; she puts it aside when Obi-Wan walks a few steps forward. He stops just before the opulent rug on the ground, boots two inches away from touching it.
"The Force," he says briskly at her confused silence, crossing his arms. "Something's—strange."
Lana frowns. It takes a bit of effort to concentrate in here. This high up, all the sensations from below well up like spurts of water gushing out of the ground; if there's anything to be sensed, it's something she needs to look for. She closes her eyes and reaches out. The energy of Coruscant reaches for her in return, but she shies away, trying to narrow in her focus on the Chancellor's apartment. Her brows furrow. "There's something..."
"It's the rug," Obi-Wan says, and she hears him take a few steps back. She opens her eyes and sees him eyeing the rug as if it's Sithspawn waiting to strike. The more she looks at it, the more she thinks it nearly could be. It echoes with the remembrance of the life its materials once held, plants weaving and waving under an unknown sun, but under that... "I've got a bad feeling about this."
"Noted. Bad feeling," Lana says lightly, pulling out her datapad and jotting the sensation down. "How shall we proceed, Master Kenobi?"
Obi-Wan gives her a dry look. "Very carefully. We do only have three hours."
"Ah, look. The Chancellor had his own personal computer mainframe."
"Let me check it."
"Of course, Master."
"My word. What kind of encryption is this?"
"May I see, Master?"
"Well, it doesn't appear to be booby-trapped, unlike nearly everything else in this room. Go ahead."
"Hmm... looks like it's a derivative of a biohexacryption—needs a series of passwords inputted in a timeframe, liable to trigger security measures if failed too many times, and the passwords change every hour. Fascinating. This sort of thing has been mostly theoretical, did you know—"
"I'm beginning to understand what Master Nu meant when she called you a headache."
"Did you say something, Master?"
"Nothing at all. If it'll trigger security measures, I can't say I fancy trying to access the data this very moment. If we had the luxury of calling in a code-breaker..."
A polite cough. "You know, Master..."
"Don't tell me."
"...Master Tholme taught my crop of Padawans rather a lot of things..."
"Of course he did," Obi-Wan mutters under his breath.
"...and there's a chance I might be able to break through the encryption."
"The mostly theoretical encryption?"
"Yes, Master." Lana remains deferent, but there's a strength in the line of her shoulders and the set of her jaw that speaks to the confidence underlying her words. Obi-Wan raises an eyebrow at her. She lifts her chin. "I've kept the skill up."
"You do know that this is the Chancellor's personal computer," Obi-Wan says, shifting when his leg throbs under the pressure of standing in one place for too long.
Lana nods. The reminder, it seems, affects her not at all.
Stars, he thinks, feeling a very familiar, very Anakin headache coming on. "The very same Chancellor whose hobbies seem to have been not only derivative, to say the least, but actively dangerous to anyone within a fifteen-mile radius."
"Indeed," she replies, tucking her arms into her robes as if she's being perfectly reasonable. "I wouldn't be breaking all the way in, Master, not far enough to uncover anything truly sensitive, anyways. That would probably make unpleasant things happen. But I could get us far enough to see what he kept on here. If there's anything at all that could give us a lead as to what he was doing with those artifacts..."
He raises his eyebrows. "I'd rather think that would fall under truly sensitive, Padawan."
"Not if it were being hidden in plain sight," she replies, and something about her absolute certainty makes him pause and look at her for a long moment, as he has so often found himself doing since he began to work with her. If she were a younger Padawan, as Anakin had been when he got into these moods most often, he would be tempted to attribute her conviction to arrogance alone. It is often a Jedi failing. To have access to the Force and all the power it grants—it is heady and intoxicating, filling the less wary with a kind of delirious drunkeness based off of the feeling of false security that comes about by being able to touch the very warp and weft of the universe and make it malleable to your will.
That is why the Jedi endeavor to inform the parents of every youngling on the Temple's kyber memory crystal of both the risks and the benefits of sending their children to become Jedi. Not only does the life of a Jedi require continual sacrifice in order to stay on the straight and narrow, it is equivalent to willingly putting oneself in a crucible again and again, giving up the natural sentient inclination to accumulate power in order to better act as a steward to the will of the Force. Selflessness and humility are demanded of a Jedi not to put them above others, as some in the Order have grown to think, but to keep them on the path—to guide them away from forgetting their own fragility.
To be a Jedi is to sacrifice all to the Force: the self, the body, the blade, everything. Rare is the Jedi that would consider walking with the Light the easier path.
Though Lana notably struggles with letting the Force guide her 'saber, she is amongst the breed of Padawans that carry an ardent, uncanny faith in the purpose of the Force in every possibility it presents to them—the kind that so often dwell in hope for the prevailing endurance of the Light, and less often that which is before you. Obi-Wan would have likely leaned more toward her viewpoint had he not had a Master who pushed him to both think and act in the moment; as it is, with the experience of both time and suffering, he has come to a realization that there must be a balance between one's hopes and one's actions.
Just as there must be balance in the heart of a Jedi. He shifts again and ignores the fresh spurt of pain that shoots up his leg. "You saw something?"
"I believe so." The tense line of her shoulders relaxes at his failure to immediately discredit her proposed plan. "It... isn't what I would've chosen, Master, but many things I see seem to point back to something to do with him. Whatever he was hiding—I think it was big."
"And you want to find out what it was," he says, less a question, more a statement.
Her sea-green eyes flicker to the console of the computer and back to him, and for a moment he sees fire in her gaze, sees her face lit from behind by unearthly light. But she shrugs, at odds with the flash of ferocity he'd borne witness to, and the moment passes. "When the Force leads, what else can I do but follow?"
What indeed, Obi-Wan wonders, eyeing her with weariness. He's getting too old to keep up with the children these days. Not that Anakin has ever listened to his reservations—it's nice that Lana at least puts up the appearance of consideration. "Well, then. A calculated risk it is."
"I won't disappoint you, Master," Lana says, relief rippling in the Force, clear as day. Strange, considering he knows she's been working on her shields.
Strange, unless...
Obi-Wan closes his eyes and reaches for the Force as Lana sits at the console and begins typing, a rapid pitter-patter of fingers against the keys. With unexpected speed and depth, the world falls away; what remains is the universe, a tapestry of divine threads balanced on the sharp tip of a keen knife, ready to tumble over given the slightest provocation. The thread that is himself looks and sees a million different fractures occurring across space and time, sees the galaxy, sees the rise and fall of the ages, sees supernovas and voiceless things, sees life in it all and through it all.
He pulls back, treads in the endless sea that is the Force, bewildered at the breadth of this on Coruscant of all places. He did not intend to go this deep.
Look, the voice that has been with him from his earliest days croons. Listen.
To the Force, they are all but children, but servants. Obi-Wan can do naught but obey; he looks and he listens, one blazing life among trillions, and in the murmur of the inumerable voices presented to him, one begins to repeat itself—faint at first, but it grows louder and louder, echoing with the chorus of a hundred, maybe two hundred sentients.
Into the galaxy steps a brown-haired mercenary woman with eyes that burn with the same fire that had peeked out of Lana's. She stares at him, stares into him, and when she opens her mouth the universe draws a breath with her.
"Rebellions are built on hope," she tells him, and Lana is tugging at his sleeve in the late afternoon in the apartments of the former Supreme Chancellor, her hands unsteady with an anxiety he'd previously only suspected her to possess.
"Master Kenobi? Master?" Lana is asking; the moment he moves she lets go, steps back, and lifts her chin to regain some measure of poise. "Are you quite alright, Master?"
"Perfectly fine, Padawan Ruhr. Only a vision," he reassures her with a faint smile. "I have them as well. Have you finished with your task?"
She waves a datachip in the air and nimbly slots it into her personal datapad. "I was able to get several docs onto this without triggering anything. They've got some additional layers of security on them, but deciphering them will be an easy enough task. I noticed on the computer's chron that our time is almost up...?"
Obi-Wan glances at the innocuous holo-clock projected just above the wall-length windows. Sure enough, they've been present for at least two and a half standard hours; the guard shift will change soon, and they had been told in no uncertain terms to finish up their data collection by then. Being a Jedi does not gain one much favor these days, at least not in the Legislative District, and it had taken some spirited negotiation (that he had carefully left Lana behind for) to gain access to the Chancellor's apartments—a power play on the part of the Senators he had ended up needing to speak with.
Political bureaucracy in the Galactic City, in Obi-Wan's esteemed opinion, is for droids. Other star systems, usually being possessed of some measure of respect for the art of meaningful rhetoric, are entirely different matters.
"With this," Lana is saying, "we should have plenty to assemble a preliminary report based on physical evidence. That's what the courts like, anyways, going by their refusal to acknowledge the holovid of the Jafan statue incident."
"Indeed we should. Though this is going to the Senate, not the courts," he reminds her, not for the first time.
She nods. "Right, my mistake. Shall we go, Master? I don't trust the computer not to have a time-delayed failsafe."
"What did you do?" Obi-Wan half-asks, half-demands at the too-casual tone in her voice as she follows him out the room.
"Oh, a bit of this, a bit of that..."
"Padawan."
"Nothing really, Master Kenobi, please do believe me."
"Somehow, I'm far from reassured."
A moment in time, or perhaps a living memory, reverberating in the Force:
The thing about Anakin Skywalker is that he is unerringly, blisteringly human; you can't be around the man for more than five minutes and walk away thinking of him as unpersonable. He is young and winsome, charming in his warmth, so unlike a Jedi.
("So why is he one?"—nobody quite dares to ask.)
Anakin Skywalker is exactly what the galaxy needs. He is their human warrior, their rallying cry, the face of the Republic. He does not fight only for the impersonal ideals of glory and liberty—he fights for something more, something raw, something visceral. He fights to protect his children. He fights for his wife, the strong, beautiful Senator Amidala, the former Queen of Naboo, fights to give her the safety she needs to do what she loves.
Enabling the system, some would say. They are not entirely wrong.
This is why, when he is sitting in the command tent of a makeshift camp on Jakku with the 501st, wondering why under the suns Count Dooku would've been sighted skulking about this nowhere planet of sand and bleached rock and dead things and why the Council thinks it's of such importance that they ordered him away from the front lines, he takes the datapad Captain Rex hands him, reads the document opened on it, and carefully sets it down on the rickety table they'd scavenged from a scrap heap. His face could be carved out of stone for all the emotion he shows.
"Sir?" Rex ventures. When the tent begins to vibrate, he looks around uneasily. Perhaps including his account of getting his inhibitor chip taken out had been a mistake.
"We're fixing this," Anakin says, the glare he directs at the sand below their feet burning like the twin suns of Tatooine. He hadn't wanted to believe Fives when this had come up before, but the Chancellor was alive then, and things have been changing rapidly since the man's death. Rex can sympathize. It's something, to learn that everything you thought you knew had a flawed edge to it somewhere. "We're fixing this, and we're fixing it now."
"You'll need a plan," Rex points out, not willing to let on how unsettling the contents of his dead vod's journal had been for him. The years of agonizing over whether it'd been true or not, the decision to believe a man who is, by now, long gone—all of that was a uniquely transformative journey, one he's still not sure will end in any kind of positive outcome. Not for him and his brothers, at least. Until he can be sure, that means there are things he just can't share with the upper management.
But with this... This is different. This is new. This is leagues beyond the turret-lined fortress wall that the General had previously tended to spontaneously manifest whenever anyone looked to be gearing up to cast doubt on the Chancellor.
Anakin turns to him, a proud man, and Rex can see the desert in his eyes. "I'll do whatever it takes, Rex. Nobody deserves that. It's like—it is an inhibitor. Serve well and serve proudly—but you should have a choice. Everyone should. You removed the chip, didn't you? There has to be a way to make this work."
It is then, looking at the helpless pain etched into the face of one of the most powerful men in the Republic, pain they have seen in millions of different eyes during the course of countless liberation campaigns in the Outer Rim, that Rex begins to understand something: Anakin Skywalker is many things, but he was born a slave.
Rex could think of many arguments in this moment, ones for duty, ones for loyalty. They both know what it is to be devoted to the cause; he won't do his General the disservice of questioning his perception of a vod's devotion. Not while the sand is quaking and the tent poles are vibrating and their jetii is shaking and all too human. Instead, he slowly, cautiously puts a hand on Anakin's shoulder. "General," he says. Anakin looks up at him, a horrible nothingness in his gaze, the kind of blankness that comes with too much emotion. Stars, but the man is young. They all are. It's something he tries not to think about. "As your captain, let me point something out. You need mirjahaal—peace of mind, processing time—to make any kind of plan of the scale we'll need effective. Maybe talk to your wife, or—do jetii stuff. I'll speak with my brothers. Not all of us will agree, but I do."
"This place dampens the Force," Anakin mutters, half to himself, standing. He's taken to verbalizing his thought process more frequently since General Kenobi got stuck on forced medical leave. Rex knows better by now than to attempt a response. "That's out. Com call, then. I'll have to use some parts to rig up a scrambler... I'll bet Luke would love that, wouldn't he... Right. Later." Crossing his arms, he turns to Rex. "Get on it, Captain. I want you back in this tent by the time the sun meets those far dunes."
"Understood, General."
Been a bit of a week.
Be good to those who would call you vod.
jetii - Mando'a. Mando term for "Jedi".
Sourced from the Mando'a dictionary.