Unspoken Words
Anakin was brooding over the decision to keep him in the chambers while the Council decided to make their move against Palpatine. An hour of mulling over their refusal to make him a Jedi Master and the only conclusion he came to was they didn't trust him. It wasn't even his own enlightenment, but that of his mentor – the only person he knew he could count on when the Council had their suspicions. Even Obi-wan began suspecting things. His master and friend. The mere thought of it was enough for Anakin to give into all he'd been keeping at bay the past couple of days.
He'd been struggling to maintain control for some time now, even before he learned all that he had. The pressure of being the Chosen One had increased the weight on his shoulders beginning when his Padawan left him. Back then, he'd expressed the mutual feeling of wanting to abandon the Jedi Order, but remained loyal and continued to serve his purpose. And now there were more factors playing into that feeling. The ones that surrounded him for as long as he could remember were watching him closely. His relationship had encountered moments of turmoil more than once - the more recent time being after Anakin showed a side of himself he didn't realize he had. Palpatine was convincing him that the Jedi were no better than the Sith.
All signs may have been telling him that the more viable option would be to leave. Anakin was starting to see Palpatine's claims in action. It was Anakin who had brought the information of the chancellor being the Sith Lord mastermind they'd been searching for since the war began. That didn't prove his loyalty to the Order. Because they didn't appreciate Anakin's close relationship with the older man.
Anakin felt his hands clench and unclench.
Their reasons were vague. They might have made assumptions based on the closeness between him, a Jedi Knight, and the chancellor, a Sith Lord, that Anakin was a double-agent. And Obi-Wan should have known Anakin well enough to know that it wasn't the case.
Apparently not.
Atop of it all, the nightmares persisted. Padme crying out for his help in agonizing pain.
When he had sought Master Yoda for help, he couldn't say that he was satisfied with the answer he received. Let go of his attachments, or he would fall to the Dark Side. It seemed as if all answers from the Jedi Order tended to cycle back to the Jedi Code being the only solution to all conflicts. But the perpetual fears and paranoia he held for losing a loved one couldn't be stopped by letting Padme go. Not when there was a possibility he could stop it. He didn't believe he could call himself a "Jedi" if he had been indirectly responsible for causing the death of his own wife. Or failing to save her.
The Jedi had been hiding the full potential of Force-wielders. Secrets like these were jealously guarded by the Council, as were many others. He was determined to find out the truth. He was disoriented. Everything that the Jedi taught him was withering along with his ability to maintain his emotions. He wanted to protect Padme. He couldn't live without her.
There was a distress call in the Force that kept him from taking another step. In the time he'd been waiting for the events to play out before him, the Force had been nothing but static. He'd been watching over Padme, ensuring that she didn't require him to come running to her apartment. When he stopped, the message hit him.
Anakin. It said. If you can hear this... I'm sorry.
"Sorry... for what?" he asked, before wondering who had contacted him. The vibrations were familiar. He hadn't felt them in such a long time. But he couldn't forget who they were from, not even after their bond had been cut when she left him. "Ahsoka...?"
Rex's brain had been scanned twice, but there was no sign of the infamous inhibitor chip. It had either disappeared or sank deeper into his brain. To pry it out required a redirect of his thought process. A distraction from his new mission.
Ahsoka rested her hands on his head and began to chant.
"What are you doing-?" Maul asked her.
She signaled for him to be silent. A break in the connection could have produced disastrous results. Especially if Rex happened to wake. All consciousness of the world around her had been forgotten as she repeated the one line.
I am one with the Force and the Force is with me.
A cloaking method against enemy fire, a boost of confidence, or a retrieval of one's peace of mind. Like the Force itself, it could have had multiple meanings. When she was in peril, Ahsoka had recited the line numerous times and it had become her source of comfort and serenity. When her mind was deep in doubt, the words had given her this feeling of hope that she would prosper. That she would survive.
And she needed that feeling now more than ever.
She had created a shield around Rex that barred him from the chip. His words began to reciprocate hers. The inhibitor chip had been found.
In the time this had taken place, she could hear the rest of the clones banging on the door. She told Maul to stand by, which he responded with the same lack of support for saving Rex that he had before. To this, Ahsoka answered him by telling him there was nothing stopping him from navigating through these dangerous halls without her. It wouldn't be long before he became impatient, however. And Ahsoka was still counting down the minutes before he would snap back to his real self and separate her in two like how it happened to him.
She could sense that he was starting to wish he had before. Just a little longer until they made it to the hangar, where a solitary ship would be waiting for them. She could escape with Rex and leave this criminal here to deal with the rest of the rogue clones. All three of them required the Venator to be out of hyperspace, she'd realized. It wasn't like her to leave an ally, no matter how repulsive, to fend for themselves in an unevenly-matched fight. The heat of the situation was drawing out improbable behaviors from them both.
In her moment of distraction, she'd realized that the rest of the clones had made it through the doors. She had been prepared, Maul activated both sides of his saber, but the clones only had a limited amount of time before they'd been shot down.
Ahsoka turned to see Rex, the look on his face filled with shame, as he shakily held his blasters in the air.
"Rex?" Ahsoka asked him. "Are you okay?"
It had taken him a moment to recuperate before he responded. "... yeah, yeah, kid." He lowered his weapons. "I'm sorry, I almost shot you."
Rex hadn't forgotten part of his mission - his actual mission - of making sure Maul was under constant supervision. The renegade was humiliated, Ahsoka could tell, and while they traveled back from the medical bay, he turned abruptly and spoke, "Is it really necessary to have your artificially-manufactured eyes witnessing my every move?"
Rex kept his blaster out of its hold on his hip. "If I had any reason to trust that you wouldn't off us both any second we weren't looking, I would."
Maul looked begrudgingly at Ahsoka. It was her idea, after all.
"How many others have this inhibitor chip?" Ahsoka asked Rex.
He sighed, "It's in all of us. Right from the start, we were built to one day turn against our own allies."
Maul chuckled. "Ever the beauty of conducting a machine-generated army."
Ahsoka gave him a shove with the Force. "I've decided I like you best when you're quiet."
Rex gave her a puzzled look. "Why'd you bring him here?"
She was trying to conjure a good reason, herself. "I thought he would help us. I didn't think he'd be this annoying." If Rex had experienced the same sensation she did when Maul begged her to join him, maybe Rex could have had a description for the feeling it gave her. It wasn't as if she was being sympathetic. Far from it, actually. She was fearful of what would become of Anakin, she knew, but that didn't explain why she gave into Maul's deception.
He was toying with her, she realized. He knew she'd been an outcast from the Jedi Council and he planned to use it to his advantage. By making her believe there wasn't anyone else on her side. No one that wasn't him. To think that he could relate himself to her in any way made her sick. And now, after just telling herself this, she felt like she had sunk to a level as low as he had.
In that moment, she rejected her strength to move past his manipulation. She had become vulnerable.
"I could sense that you're beginning to rethink your decision to join forces with me." Maul said to her. Ahsoka crossed her arms. Wasn't anything in her own mind sacred?
"The thought crossed my mind," she told him. "I don't need to remind you of your own reputation..."
Maul waved a dismissive hand. "Oh no, I don't require you to flaunt my achievements for my sake."
Ahsoka had to take a deep breath in. "Let's just get moving." She sped past the two men. "The sooner I don't have to be around you, the better."
Rex kept his blaster on stun for when they came across more clones. Ahsoka proposed the idea that if it had only taken a swift removal of the device from Rex's brain to save him, then there was a chance that the others could be relieved of it as well. The reaction she received wasn't the one she was expecting.
"What an incredible waste of time." Maul said to her. That was one she knew she would hear. It was Rex who surprised her.
"I hate to admit it," he began. "But I kind of agree."
Ahsoka was speechless for a second. "Think about it, Rex. It worked on you. Surely, it wouldn't take that much more effort to-"
"Yeah," Rex cut her off. "But I'm just one clone. You're talking about thousands of hostile soldiers."
She wouldn't accept it. "I know we can't go through this entire ship in such a short amount of time. But... if there's any way we could save them..."
The rest of her sentence hung in the air, because she knew her own words sounded unrealistic. But the idea of the clones, who were more than just machine-created copies to her and Rex, being executed for their involuntary treason was one she didn't want to become a reality. She couldn't do it on her own, that was for certain. Rex was correct, though.
If they wanted to escape in one piece, they would have to go about it with violence. Ahsoka didn't want it to be true, either, but there truly were no other options.
"Listen, kid," Rex said to her. "I know you mean well, but we clones have been turned from the loyal Republic Army to being completely hellbent on killing you, the Jedi, and all that oppose of Order 66." He lowered his gaze. "And I want you and I to walk out of this place alive. We can't rely on our good intentions to do that. Not anymore."
Ahsoka nodded to him. There wasn't any other argument she could make for this.
Though she may not have believed that they could make it to the main control room without harming the others, she still attempted to take as little of their lives as possible. She knew Maul was unrestrained, regardless if she told him to avoid satisfying this bloodlust of his. Why she decided to give him a chance was beyond her.
When they made it to the control room where the three droids awaited their return, she noticed that a completely different aura was surrounding him. The droids went to work putting the ship out of hyperdrive and Ahsoka stood across from him, keeping a close watch. He looked pensive. He didn't have anything else to say about their previous discussion, or the discussion about how he was planning on helping her liberate the rest of the galaxy from Darth Sideous.
If that was even what he was intending to do.
The thing about this man who spoke very little about what went on in his mind as he slashed his way through this ship was that Ahsoka believed she could predict what those things that went on in his mind were based on prior behavior. Plenty of the words in his mind went unsaid, leaving him a mystery to most people, and the way he chose to communicate was through his actions.
And his actions spoke volumes.
But the thing Ahsoka didn't understand was how his actions in the past couple of hours made her question the things she knew about him. Like the fact that he decided to give up Mandalore after she told him to. And he allowed Rex to live, although Ahsoka wouldn't have allowed him to do otherwise. In such little amount of time, Ahsoka thought she was seeing hints that he had the ability to be someone other than the unrelenting force of pure hatred and terror he'd been raised to become.
People of the Jedi had been wrong to make this judgement before. Especially since she told herself that just because he could have been something else, that didn't mean he would. He already chose not to after seeing how unprofitable it was for him.
That was not the Sith way.
"You wish to speak with me?" Maul asked her. Ahsoka just noticed that she'd been leering at him the entire time. She dropped her arms at her sides and kept her eyes on the ground.
"There is something I wanted to ask." she told him. He locked his hands together and rested them on his abdomen while he waited for her question. "Why were you just okay with stopping the war on Mandalore? I thought ruling that planet was what you wanted."
He tilted his head to one side. "You hardly gave me a choice in the matter." He inhaled deeply. "But... if you must know, obtaining my status as ruler was only part of the equation. There was a much grander plan I had in mind."
Ahsoka was intrigued. "And?"
His eyes softened. The sight was almost as strange as it was when she first told him she would help him.
"It was not executed successfully like I had intended."
It sounded like that was the conclusion to most of his ideas.
"What happened?" she didn't know why she bothered. She could have most likely figured it out.
"I'd rather not dwell on it."
Ahsoka found it hard to believe. He dwelled on his hatred for Obi-Wan for so long. Not to mention the entire Jedi. But something intense and possibly tragic, aside from warfare, had to happen in this misadventure of his for him to have responded in that way.
And he turned away from her, hands behind his back, and kept his grim façade forward.
"Darth Sidious had robbed me of more than the title of being his apprentice," he continued, his voice less of the intimidating pitch of a Sith Lord and more of a melancholy tone of a tired warrior. "More than you care to know, Commander Tano. Words are not required for me to understand that you do not trust my intentions. You are right to believe so." He watched the last remaining minutes of the hyperdrive atmosphere around the ship. "Perhaps I'm more interested in settling this score between myself and my master, not just for my sake. But for ours."
Ahsoka knew when he said "ours", he wasn't referring to the three people currently struggling to leave this ship. And now, this terrifying, psychotic man who didn't think twice before terminating an entire population was starting to look and sound like a pathetic, defeated wreck who was pining for the approval of someone who didn't see his worth past being the perfect killing machine. Ahsoka felt pity for him. It was a minor feeling, but it was there. Just like when she listened to his spiel, she could sense the minor feeling of remorse within him. Most likely for the first time in his entire life, he felt the tiniest speck of guilt, and for what exactly she wasn't sure.
She didn't need words to recognize that.
AN: This is in reference to Darth Maul - Son of Dathomir.
"My mother is dead and everything is worse now..." - Bojack
