Chapter 25

Ahsoka stood with her arm latched around her target's neck, slowly feeling the consciousness slip away. The Force was weak in the human's bones, and Ahsoka buried the feeling of guilt with the fact. He meant nothing to her. He had chosen the wrong side the moment he said yes to Dooku.

She thought of Rex, bloodied and broken, deposited on the hard marble floors of Padmé's bedroom. In a chain effect, the limp figure in the crook of her elbow had put him there. She convinced herself that, and then let him drop to the gritty pavement beneath them, tucked away from prying eyes.

Then she moved on with the information repeating in her head.

"Dooku's got nothin' to do with the freak Palpatine. Dooku's own life'd been taken if he'da stuck around him. He's hiding out, getting a group together. He ain't a Jedi, but he sure ain't a Sith no more. Nearly sliced up the whole bar a few days back."

Ahsoka had followed Dooku's cowardly trail all the way to Caloria, far into the depths of the Tapani sector and farther than she hoped to go. She knew it wouldn't be a day trip—Dooku learned from Master Yoda, after all—but she had secretly held onto the hope that she would be back by Rex's bedside by then, nursing him back to health alongside of Padmé's care.

She shook away the image of his pale face among the Senator's pillows, blood and pus oozing out of his infected and badly treated wounds. Ahsoka scoffed, kicking out at the pebbles around her. What could she do to make him better? She had been so drunk, so absolutely stupid he probably didn't even want to see her face.

With an act like a wisp of smoke, she jumped from the alleyway and up to the rafters of Caloria's city limits. Around her stretched dark, placid mountains with tips that bled into the waning light, jungles and plains running into the remote and congregated parts of the planet. For a reason unknown to Ahsoka, she felt a pang of homesickness.

Homesick? For where?

Not the Jedi Temple, certainly not—she had broken so much of the Code by now that it was useless going back. The Jedi tolerated her and her Master just barely to begin with.

Her Master.

She clapped a hand over her mouth to keep herself silent. The sickness doubled, and she slid down the wall nauseous by her own shortcomings. Where was her Master? Was he getting better, or slowly worsening by the day? He hadn't ever let down his guards when she was around. Would she ever be able to face him, what with her destroying his Captain and his friend, breaking their bond so fiercely and abruptly that she could feel the empty space in her chest? She knew his secret. Somehow, deep in her gut she had always known. She suspected Obi-Wan knew too, deep down. Could she live with that?

Her body against the rough cement wall told her no. If the answer was yes, Rex would be whole, the cavity in her heart would be nonexistent, and her Master would be at her side, whispering those sarcastic comments in that low, mischievous voice.

"Hey Snips, wanna play a game?"

She could hear his voice so clearly in the moment she almost looked over her shoulder. Almost.

"No."

"Aw, c'mon. I'm the automatic winner if I play alone."

"And the loser," Ahsoka whispered to the night's hollow darkness. "You're used to that position, though."

"Stick in the mud!"

"Fine, show me how to play." She was going insane, driven mad by her ache for someone to stand next to, fight with, laugh at.

"It goes like this: I jump a building, you jump two. I jump three, you jump four. Think you can keep up?"

"Easy, Skyguy." The buildings were packed in tightly in the city square, and jumping two, three, four, or even five at a time would be simple. Efficient, too. "But how are you—?"

"You worry about your own pretty little feet, Snips."

So she leapt three buildings at a time, landing on a plywood-covered roof gracefully enough as to not upset the flocks of strange birds. She laughed, sweeping her gloved hands over her skirt.

"Beat that, Master!"

But he never responded. Instead, the birds scattered to the skies, alerting the city below of her disturbance. She cursed her imagination and leapt again, again, again, over buildings and apartments and city halls with a devoted neuroticism that scared Ahsoka herself.

I've cracked, she mourned, I'm so kriffing mad.

As if to prove her point, she heard a gust of her Master's hearty laughter on the warm city breeze, carrying away with it the last of her resolve for the night.

Ahsoka folded in on herself and wept.

She cried of exhaustion, of hunger, of mourning. She cried for Rex and Padmé, for her Master, Master Kenobi, for the 501st, and most of all for her distance from everything. Finding Dooku, getting her revenge did not only seem like the right way but the only way to win her way back into the hearts of those she needed like oxygen. Her lightsaber felt heavy on her belt, and she resisted the urge to whip it off, throw it over the edge of the buildings, wait until it hit the pavement below, where that poor human lay unconscious in the alley.

"Why'd you want to know, kid?" he had snorted. "I may be drop dead drunk, but I ain't stupid. I've got years behind the Seppie lines, and I ain't stupid. I ain't…" he had trailed off, meeting Ahsoka's eyes for the first time. He dropped the toxic-looking liquid in his hand, and the bottle broke messily on the bar's floor.

"What?" Ahsoka dared, her hand moving stealthily to her lightsaber. He swallowed hard.

"You'se a Jedi. It's the brightness in your eyes, I can tell. I've got years behind the Seppie lines…"

Ahsoka squeezed the cold metal in her strong, calloused hands and gritted her teeth. It was her life, it was her life, it was her life. Her lightsaber was her life.

"Tell me what my life is now," she pleaded to the object.

She was no Jedi. She had told the man that, slipping into his mind to convince him to follow her outside, where she proceeded to interrogate him mercilessly. Dooku had been on the planet surface days ago, but he had lost contact. He was too drunk to remember details. Dooku was secretive. He had slipped into a back room and slept off the high and when he had woken up by being thrown out of the bar Dooku had long left the cantina—his lightsaber slices the only evidence of the Count every being there in the first place.

Ahsoka had run her fingers over the splintered wood and the burned metal, concluding the same conclusion as the drunk had. Count Dooku had been there, some fight had started, and he had made his escape in the chaos. How many times had her Master done the same thing, calling over his shoulder for Ahsoka to stay close, or for Master Kenobi to diffuse the situation?

Her body too tired to move from her crumpled spot on the rooftops, she pulled her cloak around her tightly and squeezed into a corner away from the breeze. Ignoring the safety protocol she learned when she was a youngling, she slept with her lightsaber still clutched in her fist, unable to let it go.

Her dreams were troubled.

She was in some sort of prison, one with strange contraptions of torture or the like, a eerily green pool glowing in the lack of light. Two men sat in the center of the room, one with his head in his hands, the other sitting back in contemplation.

Pirates, Ahsoka thought with finality. She had seen it all before—the dress, the strange braids, the long slim, trickster's fingers.

The pirate with his head in his hands swept a tired palm over his face, ending with a massage to his temples. At the same time, the thinker adjusted to sit with his chin cupped, sighing. Their motions almost harmonized with each other in a familiar sense.

"You're wrong about the boy, you know," the thinker said after their long silence. Ahsoka felt like an intruder on a private meeting. Maybe she was. "He is stronger than Eiken. You're not doing him any services by running him to the ground."

The other sat up from his position with an abrupt kick of his feet. "What do you mean by that? I could be letting him rot in a cell."

Ahsoka could finally place a name with the face she looked into. Captain Hondo—that filthy Weequay pirate. She had a sinking feeling the 'him' that could be rotting in a cell was her Master.

"Your patience and grace never ceases to amaze me," the pirate next to Hondo chuckled. "Always has."

"Eh? Well, being oldest always gave you mother's attention. I had to have some redeeming qualities just to be noticed."

Pirate brothers? Ahsoka could have laughed—pirates usually killed off their relations before they were twenty. Only the harshest survived in their world.

"Mother always loved us. All of us." Hondo nodded, clapping his supposed older brother on the shoulder for the meaningful comment. Ahsoka could have sworn they looked teary.

"The Jedi boy reminds me so much of Eiken, I…I can't believe I didn't see it sooner. It's in the way he juts out his chin when he's arguing—he even has stitches, just like our brother!"

They laughed, mocking the common trait between them and clutching their sides. Sand was kicked up around them in drifting fits of glee.

A therapy room! Ahsoka could clearly see it now. It wasn't a torture chamber, it was modeled so close to Master Che's that Ahsoka almost expected to see her around the corner.

"Should I go give the two Jedi dinner?" the brother asked. Hondo waved him away, wiping his decidedly wet cheeks with his filthy fingers.

"No, no, Buuca. I'll do it myself."

Ahsoka woke, names and thoughts and curses echoing in her head. Hondo, Eiken, Buuca—but most importantly the two Jedi. There were only two Jedi that Ahsoka knew with a talent at getting caught by everyone and anyone they might happen upon.

Obi-Wan Kenobi, and Anakin Skywalker.

She shot up from the ground set on action, even though it was dark—save the flickering lights of full apartments and streetlights below. Then, she hesitated.

What were they doing in the Outer Rim?

The Council wasn't desperate enough to send Anakin on a mission—not with their mindset of his incapacity to fight. Obi-Wan wouldn't be keen on dragging him along without the Council's direct permission…unless they were reconnaissance, on a galaxy-wide stroll, or a rescue mission.

Ahsoka's heart sank.

She could, of course, dismiss the dream as just a dream. Her track record for prophetic dreaming wasn't perfect. It could be any number of her exhaustive symptoms driving the dreams punch into reality.

"Force," she moaned, clipping her lightsaber back to her belt. "Idiots!"

As she leapt two more buildings in the planet's darkest hour, she said other things about the two Jedi ranging from bad to worse. They weren't supposed to go looking for her. What was she to them now? The Code-breaker, friend-stealer, heart wrenching failure of Anakin Skywalker, Jedi Knight.

It couldn't have been on Council orders.

Which meant they stole a ship.

Possibly a crew.

And most definitely meant they were in serious trouble.

Because while Ahsoka always had those two idiots worrying about her, they now had no one. Rex couldn't go, Padmé wouldn't go, and the 501st was in someone else's command, out of reach of their former General's influence.

Ahsoka tried to reason herself out of her conclusion.

They might be fine? She thought half-heartedly. Maybe they're at a dinner party, and the therapy room was my active imagination.

She was back to the ship she had bartered for with her Padawan beads, and while she missed their familiar weight on her head she knew she had chosen right. The Force was still kind to her, after all that she'd done, all that she'd run from.

She knew where she needed to be.

Two Jawa creatures were slinking away from the left wing, and Ahsoka raised a menacing eyebrow. They muttered to each other in their own language, leaving Ahsoka without the words to carry what she thought had happened.

"What did you steal?" she hissed, her hand jumping to her hip for her saber. When they didn't respond, she called on the Force and lifted them by their plush coats, high into the air. "I asked you a question!"

They chirped and squirmed, but nothing fell out of their cloaks or grubby hands. Ahsoka let them go with a flick of her wrist, and they scrambled out of sight, leaving her frustrated, scanning the ship over to see what was missing.

There was no time to make an unplanned stop at a mechanic—especially when she would probably be buying back the same part that had been stolen by the Jawa. Ahsoka had always rolled her eyes at her Master's insistence to visit the junkiest places when they were on planet in need of supplies, his sharp eyes scanning for the exact part from the exact person. If it never showed, he would buy up food or clothes in bundles and hide them in the shops, slaves bending over his hands in awe and gratitude. Then, they'd go to the next store and do the same.

She ran her hands along its sleek metal wing, checking the left side once again. This time, her fingers caught on an edge.

A tracking device.

With renewed fervor, she patted down the ship's interior and exterior, finding two other devices. She hooked one on the rubbish bin she parked by, another wedged between bricks of a building. Before getting rid of the third, Ahsoka fingered it, turning it around and around in her palm.

It was Separatist made.

Somehow, someone had given away her position. Whoever that was wasn't ready to be caught…or fought with, more likely, given Ahsoka's current flaring temper. They had made sure she would be able to be found again when they were ready to face a Jedi.

Or whatever Ahsoka was now.

"Dooku," she whispered, though she couldn't be certain.

Her information said Dooku had left the planet. Fine. Let him leave, he couldn't run far. If he really had left, all the better. She would enjoy the look on his face when she cut him down. For now, she thought, let him enjoy his last days in hiding.

There were two Jedi she loved dearly rotting in a Weequay cell.

Padmé jogged out of her last interrogation-like meeting, sweat cascading down her spine. She had pleaded trauma—intense, shell-shocked trauma though she wasn't proud of it—when questioned about the stunning of ten or so doctors and guards after her attack. She was frightened, unsure of who was her friends, and couldn't trust anyone. The Senate as a whole had understood. A few were skeptical, but within good reason, seeing the events with Palpatine. And, fewer still had just vowed to become her mortal enemies.

All in a day's work.

She rounded the corner to her bedroom, where in the tunnels of the building lay Captain Rex, her slowly recovering patient that had been dumped on her floor just days before. While progress was a word Padmé had used often in his presence to cheer him up, it was a word too kind for his situation. He was still waxy and pale, feverishly warm yet shivering for hours on end. His wounds were red and pulsing with infection. She injected as much pain blocker as she could, him being too weak to swallow much more than small sips of water.

She wasn't a professional, and Force knows she couldn't pretend to be any longer. Rex was getting worse under her care, not better. As many supplies and instructions as she had received from her clueless staff, she was just an amateur playing doctor.

With a press of a button, Padmé had a medical droid called to her room. It was slow in getting there, but his phrase when he entered was: "I am here to assist you; you can trust me with your immediate medical care as well as long term treatment. Can you tell me your symptoms?"

Urgency was something Padmé hadn't seen in the Senate in a long time.

She pulled the droid in to the tunnel system and to the cot she had set up with fluid bags, a carry-on heart monitor, and plenty of blankets. The droid scanned over the scene with indifferent yellow eyes.

"Are you sworn to patient confidentiality?" Padmé pressed. The droid nodded. "Good. This is Captain Rex of the 501st. He's been tortured by Count Dooku for information and now he needs our help."

"I must ask if he has been receiving your help for a long period of time."

"Three days."

"Please exit the operation area. If I am unable to perform the necessary actions, the patient will suffer in his recovery. Am I understood?"

"O-operation?" Padmé stuttered, shaking her head in disbelief. "They're flesh wounds! I know that they're infected, but—"

"I have detected major internal bleeding, brain damage, and nerve damage. Two cracked ribs and a possibility of a punctured lung. Has the patient been wheezing, coughing weakly, or going without deep breaths for long periods of time?"

Padmé shrugged weakly. "I haven't been listening for it."

The droid turned its attention back to Rex. With new eyes, Padmé did also.

The discoloration underneath his skin—Padmé should have noticed that—and the way his chest rose and fell so weakly, so unevenly made her sick. She had been busy bandaging and cooing about how much progress he was making, how good it was to see him awake again that she had completely missed the important signs that he was getting worse, and that he needed help—higher, better help—fast.

"Oh, Rex," Padmé whispered shakily. It felt wrong, the strong Captain lying in the semi-darkness of the underground. The lanterns she had hung only cast long shadows over his body, making him look thinner, sicker.

The droid went about his business methodically, checking her novice medical work once and then rechecking, changing the levels of his fluids and pricking his finger. She watched the blood slowly leak out into his waiting utensil with interest. His heartbeat monitor was muted as to not give away their hideaway, but something about seeing the spiked lines and not hearing them made her yearn for the comforting, rhythmic beating.

Then she scoffed at herself. If she was only better at standard procedures, if only they could examine Rex in an open space with real lighting, if only they hadn't left at all…

She reached instinctively for his hand, weaving expertly through the cords and tubes around him. The medical droid looked at her hand in his.

"I do not care to ask again: Please exit the operation area. If I am unable to perform the necessary actions, the patient will suffer in his recovery. Am I understood?"

"Mghh."

Padmé was about to nod her head and take her leave when Rex stirred, his weak, battered body twisting on his cot. Instead, she quickly turned to the droid.

"Can I—?"

"Lukewarm water would be appropriate at this time. The patient will be raised slightly to accommodate."

Padmé climbed out of the tunnel network and back into her bedroom where to her surprise, sat Master Mace Windu. If she had just a single bone of Force sensitivity she would have felt him come in. Instead, she just brushed off her dress with self-loathing and gave a thin-lipped smile.

"To what do I owe the pleasure of a Master Jedi meeting me in my bedroom?" she said, trying to pack as much of her annoyance into the phrase as politely possible.

"I'm only here to ask you a few questions," Master Windu said just as politely-annoyed. Maybe less so.

"In my bedroom?" Padmé said again, just to make sure he realized how much of an invasion of privacy he had committed.

"If you would be so kind."

Padmé made a show of sitting down on her bed, blocking Master Windu's direct view of the tunnel entrance. If he had felt something in the Force, he would have already been alerted of her traitorous actions. If not, she did not want to take any chances of him finding out.

"Should I order tea?" Padmé asked pointedly. The Jedi didn't even smirk.

"I'm not Master Kenobi, Senator. I can ask questions without a hot drink."

Padmé cleared her throat, determined not to break his withering gaze. "Then I don't have all day, Master Jedi. By all means, ask away."

She had been interrogated all week for her actions, and before that for many months for Palpatine's. She had been interrogated by Separatists, Senate members, members of her Royal Court, and even Jedi from time to time. This was no different. She was not guilty. Her actions were right and just.

"Have you been in contact with Skywalker and Kenobi within the last week?"

She paused, in thought. She had dreamed…and that was that. Only a dream, for all Master Windu needed to know. She convinced herself that, and answered: "No, I have not."

The Jedi nodded. "And what of the Padawan, and the Captain?"

"I have heard nothing but rumors. Some say they were at the attack in the Undercity."

"So I've heard." He stood. "My last question, Senator, and I will leave you to go about your business."

"You are very kind, Master Jedi." The formalities were making her queasy.

"Master Healer Vokara Che has done extensive research on paralysis for Skywalker's sake—"

"And for her own personal files," Padmé added quickly.

"Yes, of course. But there have been witnesses saying she's employing Kaminoans. You yourself have proved a valued keeper of young Skywalker: does this sound true?"

"It does," Padmé answered truthfully. "Why not ask for help? Anakin Skywalker is a Jedi Knight, and thought to be the Chosen One to fulfill the prophecy. If he's confined to a wheelchair—"

"Thank you, Senator. I am well aware of what is thought about Skywalker."

"You mean you don't believe it's true?"

Master Windu pressed his tightening fists to his sides. He was suddenly both tensed, and comfortably cocky.

"I never have." He bowed slightly, turning to cross the room in four long strides. Padmé refused to breathe until he left, fearing even a sigh would give her away. "And Senator? Don't let any of your answers change. I don't want to have to come back here on... less friendly terms."

"Have a good day, Master Windu."

"You as well."

And he was gone.

Padmé sucked in air quickly, her stomach churning and her head reeling. What had she said? Had she given anything away? She couldn't remember. What had he said about Master Che? Kaminoans? Research? He didn't believe in Anakin being the Chosen One. What did that response mean? Did he suspect anything?

A shriek flooded out of the tunnels, snapping Padmé out of her frantic replays of the questioning. Rex.

Remembering what she had come for in the first place, she snagged a cup from her bedside. She cursed at her faucet as it spat cold water over her trembling hands, the realization of just how catastrophic that impromptu meeting could have been.

Did he know?

Was he fooling with her?

And then: Could he see the blood?

The water had already washed most of it away, but in the crevices of her fingers there was the undeniable crimson color that sent her mind reeling. A minute passed, and then two, then as the water rushed warm over her cup and her hands, filling the basin to the brim, Padmé steeled her will. Switching off the faucet, she checked the door's lock, crept over to the grate and pried it off, then careful not to upset her cup she climbed down into the tunnels, following the soft light from the lanterns until her eyes fell upon the droid and Rex, the silent heart monitor still spiking and falling, spiking and falling.

But as she bent to tip the water into the Captain's parched lips, she found it to be too late. The beaten soldier had lost another battle against unconsciousness.