When Anakin came to, he was lying in a pile of rubble quite a ways off from Killian's lair. He couldn't even see it when he looked around. All he saw was smashed concrete and the Sister, a ways off from him, and her hand about a meter away from the shattered holocron.
Anakin looked on the ground around him and he saw the pieces of his own, scattered about. He picked up one of the shards but he knew the casing was beyond repair. He tried to feel around for the crystal (there was no lighting around where they had landed), but he couldn't hear its song anymore. It must have broken as well.
He sighed, defeated. The holocron was a lost cause, now. If he couldn't recover the crystal, he couldn't recover the vision that was apparently in it.
What had been in it? Anakin had never had a vision like the one he had seen up in the air a few moments ago. He didn't even know if it was technically a vision, it was more like a place that the holocron had brought him to. He hadn't stayed long enough to understand much about it.
Beside him, the Sister stirred. Abandoning the shards beside him, he crawled over to her and helped prop her up as she coughed to consciousness.
"You okay?" He asked softly, shifting her to her knees as she grunted.
"I will be," she told him, "eventually. Thanks."
"No problem," he said, surprisingly genuine. They may have only been on the same side for an hour or so, but he was glad that she wasn't hurt.
Footsteps came from behind them, although distant and faint. A group of footsteps. Someone must have sent a team to investigate their fall. Anakin supposed that their impact must have looked odd from a distance.
"Come on," he instructed, pulling her to her feet. "We have to move before they figure out what happened."
"What about the holocrons?" She asked, following him as he ran into the forest encircling the edge of the capital city.
"Leave them. They're destroyed from the fall anyways."
They ran into the forest that encircled the capital city, disappearing into the trees before the government forces could see them. They waited and watched, making sure that they mistook the glass shards for litter, before taking the long way back to the Republic base.
They snuck silently for about ten or twenty minutes before Anakin noticed that the Sister was starting to wheeze. He turned behind him and saw that her side had been injured during the fall.
"Hang on," he said, slowing to a stop. "Stop here. You don't want to injure that more than you have."
She halted and propped herself up on a nearby rock. "I think I elbowed myself when we landed."
"Don't sweat it," he told her. "Just rest for a minute. We've got time."
She stood still, breathing as she held her side. They didn't say anything for a while, but the Sister noticed he had been staring at her the whole time.
"You have questions," remarked the Sister, eyeing him out of the corner of her eye.
Anakin shook his head. "I agreed to complete the mission, not to conduct an interview."
"But you want to."
He remained silent, neither confirming nor denying the fact.
Yes, he did want to. He wanted to ask her, beg her, to tell the truth about who she was. He wanted to know where she came from, how the Sith had found her. He wanted to clarify what she had meant on those first couple missions, on Xlenia and Bespin. He wanted all of this and more, but he said nothing. He couldn't.
The Sister took the silence as a cue to keep speaking. "If you want to leave so bad, go. I'm not going to try and hold the Chosen One back. If you want to talk, though, I'm open to it. You Jedi are a lot more pleasant when you aren't swinging your lightsabers around."
Anakin hesitated. This might be his only chance to get answers. If he left now, that chance was gone.
He sat on the rock opposite of the one she was leaning on. The Sister did the same and gave him his full attention. "What do you want to know?" She asked.
"How did you get into the service of the Sith?" He began. Start vague, he thought.
The Sister leaned back and propped herself up with her arms. "Easy. I left the Order, and Darth Tyrannus found me."
Anakin's heart began to pound. He turned and stared at the Togruta square in her golden eyes. "Who was your master?" He implored, in a voice just above a whisper.
Her face hardened before she began to explain. "There are lots of Jedi who live at the Temple, but there are just as many who are nomads, or others who stay in one place and never set foot on Coruscant. My master was a nomad, and after he found me and started training me he took me all over the galaxy. I met all sorts of people, and I learned everything I could from him.
"We were on Cato Neimoidia when the system decided to join the Republic Alliance. Your Chancellor had come to visit and 'welcome' (this she said with an extra layer of venom in her voice) the system to the democracy. They even threw a parade to celebrate. It seemed all joyful and fun, but it was all a show."
"What do you mean?" Asked Anakin, his suspicions about her identity forgotten in the light of her story.
"My master and I needed to buy food, but all of the stores were closed during the parade so we watched while we waited. I was standing next to a group of people who were speaking in low voices. I used the Force to listen to them, and they were all talking about how much they wished Cato Neimoidia hadn't joined.
"They said there was no point, since they didn't need protection from the Republic. No one knew why they had allied themselves with anyone since there was nothing they had to offer. I asked my master what they had meant, and he said that the Chancellor had initiated the alliance in the first place. Everywhere I went on that planet, people were talking in whispers about how they didn't see the reasoning in the alliance. They had everything they needed, so why did they join?
"A week later, news came around that the war had spread to Cato Neimoidia. Citizens had been killed in the crossfire, and others had been injured so badly that they needed to go to the hospital. They couldn't, though, not under the Republic's health system that had been imposed on the citizens. It was too expensive, and they had to stay home instead. Most of them died weeks, if not days later. They couldn't even rebuild their homes because the government didn't let them.
"If the Republic hadn't recruited the system, the war wouldn't have come to Cato Neimoidia in the first place. It was the Chancellor's fault that those people died, and what did he do about the blood on his hands? Nothing. He sat back in his expensive, protected office, and watched other people pay the price for his power."
Anakin, stunned, sat in silence at the Sister's accusation. He wanted to say something, to defend the Chancellor or prove her wrong, but he couldn't. There was nothing that he could say that could counter her point. The only words that came out of his mouth were "So what happened to your master?"
The Sister stared at the ground. "We went back for some reason, a little over eleven months ago. There was an air fight one of the days that we were there. A Republic ship crashed down from the sky and it was going to crush me, along with a few other civilians I was walking with. My master used the Force to save us, but a stray shot from above came down while he was lifting it. It hit him and he lost hold on the ship. I managed to save the civilians, but the shot from the battle killed my master."
Her voice was laced with hatred and malice, but Anakin's heart sank. His ship had crashed after the buzz droids knocked him unconscious, and Ahsoka saved him. Had his ship been the one to kill the Sister's master?
"I took my master's ship, along with his body, to Coruscant. I was going to march straight into the Chancellor's office and make him realize what he had done. I was going to make him pay for the lives that he was responsible for, and I was going to hold him accountable." She paused and looked at the ground. "But there was a bomb that day. Someone had blown a piece of the Jedi Temple out. I thought that would do it, and he would realize that he was hurting people, but he just kept tightening his hold on the Republic.
"I waited. I watched the results from your Padawan's trial. I saw her get falsely accused. I thought that once you proved her innocent, maybe that monster would realize that the Clone War was a mistake. It never happened. I prepared a second time to convince him, but Tyrannus found me first. He told me that I could put a stop to his bloodshed if I came with him. I had run out of patience with the Republic. Talking wouldn't work anymore. I had to fight them if I wanted to bring them down."
"And violence was the only option?" Anakin asked. "There wasn't any other way? How are you any better than him, if what you say is true?"
"It wasn't the only way," she admitted, "but it was the only way that would work. Besides, he's killed more people than I ever will. After what he's done, why should I care about his losses? He never seemed to care about civilians before now."
Anakin looked out at the night sky, mulling over the story in his head. Was it true, was the Chancellor to blame for the Clone War? His head told him no, that the Palpatine was trying to end it. His war powers were temporary, anyways. They would go away once the war ended.
But the war hasn't ended, his heart told him. It's been almost four years, and it still hasn't ended.
Anakin wanted to think on it more, but the Sister interrupted him. "My turn. Why do you think I'm your Padawan?"
He was caught off guard by the question, A) because he had forgotten about his hope and fear that the Sister was Ahsoka, and B) because he didn't know. He didn't know why he kept asking the hopeless question, other than the thread. That stupid thread, that only came when he was in proximity to her.
Eventually, he answered, "I haven't seen her since the trial. I just want to find her. You're the closest I've gotten in eleven months."
The Sister stared at the Jedi. "What happened to no attachments?"
You have no idea how many times I've botched that rule, he thought, but aloud, he said, "She's my Padawan." Nothing more.
Interesting, thought the Inquisitor. Present tense, if I'm not mistaken.
"Why would your Padawan join the Sith?"
"You did, didn't you?"
The Inquisitor rolled her eyes. Fair point.
"And you just want to find her? Even if she is me, and has betrayed you?" She clarified.
Anakin's mind began screaming, pleading that it wasn't true. "Yes." He met her gaze. "I don't care where she is or what happened to her, as long as she's alive. I just need to know that she's...that she..."
She what? Is happy? Okay? Alone? With new friends? Alive? What did he want for her?
He broke eye contact with the Sister, not bothering to finish his sentence. The Sister looked on thoughtfully for a moment, then spoke her mind. "I haven't seen her since the trial last year, other than the news articles about us being the same person. Wherever she is, I couldn't tell you."
Anakin breathed out, realizing that he had been holding his breath. He didn't know what answer he had hoped for or hoped not to get, but it was an answer nonetheless.
"Tell you what," continued the Sister. "If I do see her, I'll tell her you're looking for her. It's the least I can do to get back at the Chancellor."
Anakin jerked his head and stared at her, astonished that she would even consider something like that for him. When he studied her face, he could have sworn he saw a hint of kindness. Was that even possible?
Apparently so.
"Thank you," he said, unsure of what else he could say.
He didn't need to. The Sister changed the subject again. "Your turn."
Anakin thought for a moment, then asked "So it's just the Chancellor that you hate so much? Why just him?"
She snorted. "Well, it's not like the Jedi chose to fight in the Clone War. At least not like this. The Republic forced them to lead their armies, and the Republic is controlled by the Chancellor. He's responsible for all of this." She waved her arm around, referring to the chaos she had mentioned earlier.
"Did it ever occur to you that he's trying to protect people, not just exploit them?" He asked, hoping he wouldn't accidentally set the Sister off.
"It did, once, and then it never did again," she answered, somewhat dismissively. "If he was really had civilians' best interests in mind, he wouldn't pull entire systems into a war when they didn't need to."
Why was it that every one of her statements made sense? He knew it was technically her turn to ask a question, but he asked his own anyways.
"What are you trying to do, by talking to me? Are you trying to get me to join you?" It was blunt and confrontational, but it was worth asking.
The Sister laughed, which irritated Anakin. "I don't care which side you're on. I don't even care which side I'm on. I just want to kill the Chancellor. Once I do that, I don't care about what happens to the Clone War. Remember what I said to you on Xlenia?"
"You said a lot of things."
She nodded. "I did. First impressions are important."
"I'm enjoying this impression a lot more than that one," Anakin remarked.
"Yeah, me too."