Anakin leaned forward in his seat and planted his elbows firmly on his knees, letting his face drop into the cradle of his hands. The chair was one of those uncomfortable, spindly things the princess preferred. It was purple and frilly and clearly designed more for form than function, and it was several inches too short for him besides, but it had been the first thing he saw to drop onto. Now he couldn't muster the motivation to move. Somewhere between the empress's office and the princess's bedroom, he had developed a massive headache. Or maybe he'd had it all along but had only just begun to feel it now that he had finally stopped moving and fighting.

He was exhausted. So far beyond it, in fact, that he couldn't think of a word in any language he knew to adequately describe how he felt. Although he had not felt the physical effects until he'd slowed down, maintaining the Force shield had utterly drained him. So much so that he had needed to augment his body with the Force in order to fight the palace guards, which was something he hadn't had to do against non-Force sensitive humans since he was maybe fifteen.

He had observed other people suffer from Force fatigue during the course of the war, especially Jedi who were new to the front lines and not accustomed to consistently using the Force without rest. But he had never experienced it himself. He wondered if this was how they felt. He hadn't tapped out his Force reservoir yet, unlike how he understood Force fatigue was supposed to work. The Force was still there, completely undiminished as far as he could tell, a brilliant supernova of heat and light filling every nook and cranny of his being and threatening to burst him open at the seams. Begging him to use it. He didn't know exactly how deep his connection to the Force ran, but he didn't feel like he was anywhere near his limit yet.

His exhaustion seemed to be based more on the fact that his body was not used to channeling so much power at once. Hell, at the moment the Force was the only thing keeping him semi-upright in his chair.

But if this was anything like what other Jedi experienced when they reached the end of their reserves, then he could admit to feeling slightly bad about how annoyed he had always been when he had to stop and wait for other people to rest even though he felt perfectly capable of going on.

On top of his bone-deep weariness, there was also something like anxiety or restlessness or maybe guilt curdling unpleasantly in his gut. Reminding him that he should have been halfway through interrogating the guards by now, while they were still reeling from their defeat and their injuries. Or, alternatively, that if he didn't think he could handle an interrogation, then he should have already bundled the princess onto his ship and jumped to hyperspace.

Both seemed wrong to him, somehow, but the thoughts pressed themselves intrusively against his mind anyway. Obi-Wan was always telling him to slow down and think things through. Anakin usually ignored that advice, trusting more in his own instincts than anything else. This time, however, he was doing his best to make himself listen to Obi-Wan's voice in his head telling him that he needed to rest and regroup before deciding on a course of action.

Besides, in the state she was in, he couldn't very well take Cailee with him to interrogate anybody. He couldn't leave her alone either. Not only because she had seemed a hairsbreadth from collapse on the way back to her rooms, or because he expected she would get herself into some sort of trouble if he left her alone for two seconds, but also because he didn't trust one single person in the entire palace not to kill her (except, maybe, the empress). While he was at it, he was not remotely pleased with the defensibility of her suite. He didn't like the exposed windows or the wide balcony that ran along the entire length of the sitting room and bedroom, not one bit. He especially didn't like that anyone who worked in the palace knew which rooms were hers.

Thus, Anakin remained curled over in the pretty, barely functional thing that passed for a chair, pushing past the migraine and the general aching of his body so that he could extend his awareness outwards. No sign of another attack had come by the time he heard the shower turn off, or by the time the refresher door opened and he was hit by a wall of steam.

Anakin could hear as well as sense Cailee moving around the room, but he kept his head bowed, pressing the heels of his hands into his eyes and massaging his fingertips hard into his scalp. It didn't offer much relief for his pain, but it was better than nothing. And there was the added benefit of delaying him having to face the princess.

They had not directly spoken to each other since he had made her cry in the corridor outside the hangar. That had been perfectly fine with Anakin. He did not feel ready to face her.

Or, to be precise, to face the reality that he was the problem. That he frightened people. That he was a danger even to those he had vowed to protect. That sane people ought to be afraid of him.

As attuned to his surroundings as he was, and as acutely as he was focusing on the princess specifically, he could not miss her approach or the way she stopped directly in front of his chair and leaned over him. He even sensed her hand approaching, but he did not have time to process his surprise at her willingness to initiate physical touch with him, after what had happened, before her palm landed softly on his arm and her fingers curled delicately around his bicep. He was sure she could feel his flinch.

"Anakin?"

He drew a sharp breath in through his nose and lifted his head from his hands to look at her. Her face was bare and still slightly pink from the heat of her shower, and her damp hair was held back by a wide headband. The effect made her eyes seem, somehow, even bigger and more earnest than usual. Her expression resided somewhere between strained and concerned.

"Are you okay?" she asked, making no effort at all to hide the way her gaze roamed over him critically. "You look terrible."

"I'm fine."

"You're clearly not," she assessed, gently but firmly. "You're pale and sweaty and doubled over."

Anakin sat up, unable to ignore the challenge he perceived in her words. He was also unable to ignore the way his spine creaked in protest at the movement, although he was determined to pretend that she hadn't seen the grimace he couldn't suppress.

"Holding up that barrier took a lot of out of me," he explained, his voice several notches more harsh than he had intended. "But no worries, princess—I'm nowhere near my limit yet, even if anyone is stupid enough to try me again tonight."

Truthfully, anyone who challenged him before he'd recovered his equilibrium would likely be much worse off than his usual opponents, because he didn't have anywhere near the level of control that he normally did. He had worked hard over the years to fine tune his use of the Force rather than wasting excess power on every little thing he did, but at the moment his skin itched with energy even when he was actively trying not to use the Force.

Cailee's eyes narrowed as if he had offended her, and when she spoke her tone made it clear that he had.

"I'm not questioning your abilities, Anakin. I asked because I'm worried about you."

He knew that could not be true. Not that she was lying, of course. He had no doubt she had been perfectly sincere in what she had said. She just had not realized yet that she only thought she cared about him because he was protecting her. She plainly had no reason to actually care. But it was not worth arguing the point with her; soon enough she would realize on her own, like everyone else in his life had, that he wasn't worth anything beyond what he could do or what he could be used for.

He sighed, partly at the downward spiral his thoughts had taken, but mostly at the pain in his joints when he forced himself to stand up.

"Princess, I'm going to take a shower. I'm sure that will make me feel a thousand times better. Then we can talk," he told her as he extended his hand to Force lift his backpack towards him.

He ignored Obi-Wan's voice in his head telling him not to misuse the Force for such a simple task, and he was punished for it when the pack slammed into his palm so hard that he could almost hear the screws squeak in his mechanical hand.

He had made it through the bathroom door before he identified the tension he felt not as anger but as fear. He turned around to find Cailee rooted to the spot where he'd left her, staring not at him or at the spot he'd vacated, but past it towards the floor to ceiling windows that ran along one entire wall of her bedroom. He was momentarily arrested by the sight of her frame, highlighted by the setting sun streaming through the windows and quite clearly frozen in terror. Not two hours past, the girl had left the relative safety of a speeder and placed herself directly in the line of fire with nary a thought for her own safety, but now an empty room was causing her to broadcast her fear so loudly that a Jedi on the other side of the planet would have been able to feel it. To broadcast her thoughts so loudly that he couldn't help but hear them despite not trying to. It was confounding.

Anakin sighed again, this time at the delay before he could enjoy the enormous, multi-jet shower in the princess's private refresher.

"Cailee?"

She startled at the sound of his voice and swiveled her head around to stare at him. Her eyes were, remarkably, completely dry (Thank the Force.), though her pupils were blown so large that he could barely make out a narrow rim of blue around them. Anakin dropped resignedly onto a small settee right next to the bathroom door (which was no more comfortable than his prior seat had been) and let his bag fall to the floor at his feet.

"It seems like our talk can't wait," he pressed.

The princess shook her head slowly, seemingly more to clear her mind than to indicate any disagreement with his statement.

"I, I don't—" she began, then went silent again, save for her short, sharp breaths. After several moments of wringing her hands, she shook her head again and finally settled on explaining, "I don't feel safe in the palace anymore. I didn't want to come back. I wanted you to turn the speeder around."

Anakin lifted an eyebrow. "I wouldn't have brought you back if I didn't think I could protect you here."

"Don't take it the wrong way," she rushed to say, which made Anakin's brow lift even higher, "because I do think you can keep me safe. This isn't about you…. It's about how all I can think when I'm alone in my own bedroom is that somebody is going to crash through the window any second. And how I'm afraid to walk down the hallway of my own home without you next to me, because now I know that any of the guards and staff who've always been here could be trying to assassinate me. And how I'm afraid to twist a doorknob or press a button in case it's wired to, to… to blow up."

"Not to state the obvious," Anakin pointed out as gently as he could under the circumstances, "but your fears are completely reasonable."

In fact, he was relieved that she had admitted as much herself. He had no desire for her to suffer the way she was clearly suffering, but he had been half expecting her to pull a Padmé and insist on throwing herself headfirst into danger. He found that he much preferred not having to argue over whether she ought to be allowed to put her life on the line in ways she thought would be helpful but would probably just complicate his efforts to protect her and solve the case.

"You don't think I'm being weak? Or letting them win? " she asked, a hint of pleading entering her tone.

Her pale, pretty face looked like it might simply crumple if he said he did. Anakin clenched his molars together to stop from blurting out the first thing that came to mind, which was that she was better off being weak than ending up in itty bitty flaming pieces spread across half a city block.

Instead, he told her, much more diplomatically, "If you weren't afraid, I'd be worried whether you're totally sane."

Cailee managed a weak smile. "I did think a couple of times today that I've probably gone mad."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah," she affirmed, but she didn't seem prepared to elaborate on the subject.

Anakin spent a minute or two watching his mechanical fingers move, assessing how quickly and accurately they followed his commands, and letting his awareness wander over every millimeter of metal and wire and circuits. He would need to make some tweaks after his shower. Eventually the princess's shallow, rapid breathing deepened and evened out, and her fear and racing thoughts that had been pressing demandingly against Anakin's mental barriers subsided enough that he could ignore them, and he allowed himself to look back up at her. She had folded herself into the chair he had been sitting on several minutes prior, with one of her long legs tucked underneath her in a way that made Anakin's knee ache with sympathy and her arms crossed over her stomach as if she were offering herself a comforting embrace.

"They haven't won," he finally broke the silence and answered her prior question. "They've just made it clear that we need a new strategy."


When she had received the first incoming communication from an unknown frequency, Ahsoka had been elbow deep in the guts of her speeder bike and had ignored it. She could have answered it using the Force, but she was trying to keep a low profile. The human mechanic was already too suspicious of her. For the past hour, the girl had been fiddling around with various bits and bobs on her workbench without actually getting anything done, as far as Ahsoka could tell, other than pretending not to watch Ahsoka's every move. Besides, years of experience had taught her that nothing good came from unknown communications.

The third time the same number rang her com in as many minutes, she was startled enough to drop the unreasonably small nut she had been trying to coax onto the end of a poorly threaded bolt. (Why were things so much more difficult without the Force?) Ahsoka let out a growl as she yanked her hand out of the speeder and snatched the comlink off the top of her discarded jacket.

"Hello!" she barked harshly enough to convey her frustration.

There was a slight pause, then a familiar, deep voice said, "Hello to you too, Snips."

"Skyguy?" she breathed out in surprise, a second before her thoughts caught up with her. "Master! Hi! I don't recognize this number."

"I'm not your master anymore, so you don't have to justify why you ignored my calls." She could hear the amusement in his voice, and the image her mind supplied of his wry half-smile and quirked eyebrow made her heart ache with how much she missed him. He paused again, just for a moment, then added, much more seriously, "You can call me Anakin, Ahsoka."

"I could," she acknowledged, although the thought of doing so was just weird. She could count the number of times she had addressed him by his first name on one hand and still have fingers left over. Most of those times had been in life-or-death situations where she had needed to get his attention immediately and had known that the novelty of her using his first name would do the trick. "So, Skyguy, the new frequency?"

"I crushed my old comlink beyond repair."

Ahsoka couldn't stop the laugh that bubbled out of her throat, but fortunately Anakin didn't seem offended.

"I know." He let out a puff of breath that was not quite a sigh. "Listen, Ahsoka, I'm not asking because I think you owe me or anything, and you can say no if you want and I wanted be offended, but… I could really use your help."

He had rarely outright asked for her help before. Not that he had ever rejected it when she had given it or that they hadn't both known that he depended on her in many ways, but it had almost always gone unspoken. So she had to wonder whether he was desperate, if he was actually reaching out to her to ask for help, or if this was just a consequence of her having left the Order. After all, before he would have had his Padawan's help without having to lower himself to actually ask for it.

Either way, she was predisposed to give him anything he asked for. She missed him terribly. She had known that she would miss the Order itself, and the Temple, and the purpose that came with being a Jedi (or almost one), and the other Padawans she had grown up with, and Master Plo and Obi-Wan and the others. And she did miss all of that. But it turned out that mostly she just missed her Master. His support, his lessons and advice. Their adventures together. Their bickering. The way that he understood her. His inappropriate sense of humor. The way he gave her responsibility and let her test her limits without holding her back or treating her like a child. The way he always stepped in when she needed him to. Even, she could admit to herself, the way he often pretended like he hadn't taken her suggestions or needed her help, and his recklessness and inexplicable ability to turn even the most peaceable assignment into a fight for their lives.

It had only been a few weeks, and she would probably be better off keeping her distance from him until she had been able to figure out what her life was going to look like without the Order. Without him.

Then again, no matter what he was supposed to have done when she left the Order, Anakin had not severed their bond. She had been tense with dread for weeks that at any moment she would lose that connection, but she never had. She may have left him, but he hadn't abandoned her. She didn't even care if that was attachment. The Jedi Code didn't apply to her anymore, so why should she deny herself what her heart desired? Or worry over whether her master was keeping to the Code?

"Snips?" his voice crackled through her comlink, and Ahsoka realized that she had been silent for too long. "Like I said, you don't have to feel obliga—"

"Master," she cut him off before she had to hear anymore of the clear disappointment in his voice, "you don't even have to ask. What do you need?"


Cailee shivered and pulled the edges of her robe closer together across her chest. She wasn't cold; it was a relatively warm evening, and she hardly noticed the perpetual dampness of Arkanis, having grown up with it. But she just couldn't shake the feeling that someone was watching her. She found herself counting every diamond and examining every prong of her mother's ring on her finger to avoid the temptation to look at the windows, out of fear that there would be a face staring back at her from the balcony. It seemed irrational, given that her Jedi protector had assured her half a dozen times before disappearing into the refresher that he would be able to sense anyone who approached, but she couldn't stop the hairs on the back of her neck from standing up or the chills from running down her spine.

In deference to her fears, and after the few minutes of privacy he'd insisted he needed, Anakin had agreed to leave the bathroom door propped halfway open while he showered. Cailee had relocated to the sofa right next to the door, which was the closest seat and allowed her to sit with her back against the wall, facing the windows. He was lucky she hadn't dragged a chair into the bathroom to sit in there with him, because she had certainly considered it for more than a passing moment.

She knew he was capable of getting from the shower to the bedroom in a flash—she had witnessed his speed with her own eyes—but she still didn't feel safe alone in the room.

Anakin had seemed more amused by her fears than anything. "Well, you had better hope no one attacks you while I'm in the shower," he had said on a laugh and a wink. "If I have to duel someone naked, I won't leave any witnesses alive."

He had warned her that he was going to stay in the shower until he was in danger of his skin sloughing off, and by the time Cailee heard the water shut off she had started to think he was going to keep that promise. She all but held her breath while she listened to him putter around the refresher doing who even knew what, and was finally able to exhale when he finally appeared around the heavy door.

As irrational as it was, and as silly as it was, and as amusing as it may have been to the Jedi, she felt safe just having him within her line of sight.

Not that she could actually look at him without keeling over in absolute embarrassment. He had not seen fit to put on a shirt, or socks, or anything at all besides loose-fitting cotton pants that hung low enough on his hips that she could see every last curve of his abdominal muscles and lower back as he passed by her. She had never seen him anything less than fully dressed, boots and all. She'd never been in the presence of any man at all who was less than properly attired.

Anakin seemed completely oblivious to her mortification. He made his way to her makeup vanity, where he unceremoniously swung one leg over her bench and plonked his bag next to her great grandmother's pearls.

Cailee watched him with growing indignation mixed with her discomfort at his lack of clothing. A (most likely shrill) demand to know what exactly he thought he was doing was on the tip of her tongue when she finally noticed something that made her breath catch in her throat.

He had a mechanical arm.

She had noticed his leather gloves, of course. She had spared the briefest thought for why he never took them off, not even when he was trying to be less conspicuous for their walk down a misty city block to the dress shop, but she had not found it interesting enough to ask him about it. She had never imagined that the reason he never removed his gloves was that he was concealing a prosthetic arm. The way he wielded his laser sword had been almost poetic. Cailee hadn't imagined, and could hardly reconcile now, that he had displayed such raw skill with a prosthesis.

She had even held his hand—squeezed it half to death, if she were honest—and hadn't noticed anything unusual.

There was no telling how long she'd been staring at his arm with open astonishment before she noticed that his movements had utterly stilled. She let her gaze travel up the defined muscles of his upper arm and shoulder to the hard, almost angry scowl on his face.

"I'm sorry!" she blurted. At his continued silence, she reflexively bit the inside of her lower lip, but she resisted the urge to look down at her lap. It was best to face things head on, she decided. "How… how did it happen?"

Anakin's eyes glittered bright and cold even from across the room.

"I dueled Count Dooku, the leader of the Separatists," he said stonily, although he need not have clarified who Dooku was to Cailee. "I was young. Inexperienced, compared to him. And angry."

"I can't imagine anyone being more skilled than you are. He must really be something."

Cailee had meant it earnestly, but as soon as she witnessed the lightening of Anakin's entire expression and the twitch at the corner of his mouth, she comprehended that she could not have crafted a more perfect thing to say to him even if she had actually tried.

"Dooku was trained by Grand Master Yoda himself—he's about a thousand years old and one of the most skilled swordsmen in the Order," the Jedi explained as he went back to prodding at his metal arm with some tool Cailee couldn't identify. "And Dooku has about seventy years of experience and was the master of my master."

She hummed in acknowledgment as she considered how to respond. She wanted to say that, given the information he had shared, there was no shame in having lost to Count Dooku. But she strongly suspected that it was not the lost duel itself that he was ashamed of so much as the loss of his arm in the process. And she had no idea what she could say to make up for having stared at his arm like it was a circus exhibit.

Before the silence could grow uncomfortable, she settled on saying, "You keep using that term: 'master.' And your… friend?... on the comlink called you that."

"Padawan," he corrected quickly. "Ahsoka is—was—my Padawan. My apprentice. And I'm… I was her master."

Oh, good, she had walked into another conversational black hole. Next time she would probably just stick to asking the man about the weather.

"You must be excited to see her again, then." There, that seemed safe enough.

Anakin no longer looked like he was angry, but when he glanced up at her the gorgeous contours of his face were set in grim lines. "It will be good to see her," he acknowledged, voice rough, "but mainly she's coming to help investigate, since I can't leave you alone to investigate things myself."

Cailee blinked at him a handful of times as she processed what he had said.

"I thought you were going to leave me with her while you investigated."

"No. She is an amazing Jedi, and I trust her with my life, but I think that might get you both killed. If it'd been her in that shop, you'd have both died."

"But you think she can handle questioning the assassins?" asked Cailee, not even bothering to conceal how perplexed she was.

Anakin shrugged. "Sure. She can handle herself in ninety-nine situations out of a hundred, and you're the target, not her. You should be more worried about where we're going to stay from now on. We've got to get you out of this room."

If Cailee had thought he was annoying before, she had now upgraded him to infuriating. She didn't disagree that they needed to relocate, but she had thought so even before they had come back to the palace in the first place. She had thought so for the past hour as she had been practically frozen in fear in her own bedroom. And now he agreed? She was trying to decide how to fully express her frustration when he continued.

"We should be fine tonight—they'll need time to regroup after today, and I haven't sensed any ill intent—but going forward I'd like our base of operations to be more defensible than this. I thought of just taking my ship into the atmosphere every night, but there are only so many landing pads for them to target if they want to shoot us down." He pulled a glove back over his arm, wiggling his mechanical fingers into the tight-fighting leather. "It'd probably be better to stay in the palace anyway, so we won't be vulnerable traveling back and forth out in the open from a second location. Maybe one of the towers?"

He pulled on his tunic and shook his head to get his floppy, wavy hair out of his eyes, which he immediately pinned on her with an inquisitive look.

Cailee pursed her lips in annoyance, but she couldn't muster up a glare. Which just annoyed her more. If the thought of being alone without his protection didn't fill her with abject terror, she may have been seriously displeased with him.


Things had not gone well. They hadn't gone as disastrously as they could have—the High Council had not voted to expel Anakin—but they had not gone well. Obi-Wan was convinced that only Plo Koon's support had prevented the worst from happening. It was his gentle, calming influence and reminders of his extensive experience working with Anakin that had convinced Shaak Ti to counsel moderation, and had convinced Ki-Adi-Mundi to withhold his judgment until they had spoken directly to their erstwhile knight.

Obi-Wan was under no illusions that he could have achieved such a stay of execution without Plo's help.

Even now, nearly a full day after the Council had voted, he could still feel the unadulterated fury simmering just underneath the surface of Mace Windu's outwardly calm but obviously not-very-happy expression. Obi-Wan's, Plo's, Shaak Ti's, and Ki-Adi-Mundi's combined influence had not been enough to convince Master Windu and Master Yoda that Mace was not the best person to be sent to relieve Anakin of his duty, even if the duty was originally supposed to have been Mace's. It had barely been enough to convince the grandmaster that Obi-Wan at least ought to be allowed to accompany Mace to Arkanis.

Mace shifted next to him, subtly reaching down to readjust the lightsaber he had hidden underneath his robes and muttering complaints about having to take a public transport because Skywalker had taken his ship.

Obi-Wan had still not found the right opportunity to point out to Mace that if he had been on Arkanis instead of Anakin, he would have been exceedingly lucky to survive and certainly would not have been able to save the princess's life. Now, sitting on an uncomfortably small, hard seat next to the seething man, just before they boarded a starship for a long flight, did not seem like the opportune time to bring it up. He would save it for the perfect moment. Maybe in front of Anakin. He wondered whether such a show of confidence in Anakin's skills would make his friend's feelings soften towards him.

An abrupt jerk of Mace's body next to him drew Obi-Wan's attention back to the overcrowded waiting area. He did not have enough time to really think of what he expected to see, but whatever he may have thought of would not have approached reality of the familiar blue eyes staring at him in shock.

"Ahsoka!" he exclaimed before he could stop himself. "What are you doing here?"

"Ma—Obi-Wan." Her lekku twitched in agitation, and her face flushed. "I'm traveling. No fancy Jedi transports for me now. What are you doing here?"

Although Obi-Wan saw no harm in telling her that they could not fly a Republic ship into neutral Arkanis airspace without risk of provoking the Separatists into trying to claim it for themselves, and that there were no unmarked ships available on such short notice, Mace responded before he could.

"That is Jedi business, which you no longer have any reason to know."

Obi-Wan recognized her narrowed eyes and downturned lips directly from the face of his own former Padawan. The similarity caused his heart to pang painfully in his chest. Ahsoka had been nothing but good for Anakin. Losing Ahsoka had been a catastrophe for him. Obi-Wan missed her too, but he wasn't as close to her as Anakin was, and he had been much better able to accept her departure than his friend had. Obi-Wan was practical about it: If Ahsoka had what it took to be a Jedi, she wouldn't have left the Order. He missed her, but he knew that both she and the Order were better off than they would have been had she stayed when her heart was not fully in it.

Anakin just missed her, period. Obi-Wan primarily missed the last vestiges of lightness and levity in Anakin's heart that Ahsoka seemed to have taken with her when she left.

Ahsoka crossed her arms over her chest, again in a manner very reminiscent of her former master. "You're sitting at the gate for the next flight to Arkanis. The only reason you'd try to hide the truth from me is if you're going to Arkanis to punish my master, because you know I would warn him."

"It's none of your business, young one," growled Mace, "and Skywalker is not your master. Not anymore."

"Okay!" Obi-Wan interjected before things could devolve even further than they already had. "Ahsoka, I can't help but notice that you're also at the gate for Arkanis."

"He called me," Ahsoka informed him in the cocky, snooty tone he thought she had long since grown out of.

"You have Anakin's new com frequency?" asked Obi-Wan as he reached out to place a restraining hand on Windu's arm.

His efforts to turn down the temperature were for nothing. Ahsoka's harsh frown and accusing glare remained firmly in place, and even Obi-Wan, who was in no way fluent in Togruti, knew that the position of her lekku denoted a grave insult. Towards Mace or Obi-Wan or both, he didn't wish to guess.

"Of course I do," she snapped defensively. "Why wouldn't I?"

Honestly, Obi-Wan had only been thinking about the fact that he didn't have Anakin's new frequency, but upon reflection he realized that this did not reflect favorably on his friend. It was not that Anakin was expected to completely give up any future relationship or communications with his former Padawan. But it had only been a few weeks since she left the Order, and Anakin had evidently reached out to her despite having been completely radio silent to Council. It reeked of attachment.

"Skywalker asked you to join him?" Windu all-but growled, and Obi-Wan knew that the situation had just gotten a hundred times worse.

Granted, Anakin was particularly good at taking any situation—any one at all—and single-handedly taking it from bad to worse. But this was really, profoundly bad.

Ahsoka met his eyes, hers full of concern and guilt. Despite anything that had happened between them and any negative feelings the young togruta may have still felt towards Obi-Wan over the Council's treatment of her or the way he had hurt her and her master during the Hardeen incident, they at least remained united in their worry over Anakin.


Author's Notes: I may be slightly poking fun at the fact that we never see the characters in anything other than what they wear into battle, even when they're in their private quarters at home and not anywhere near a battlefield.

Also this story isn't abandoned, obviously. I have just been going through some unpleasant grown up stuff that sucked up most of my time and focus. And I couldn't get the second half of this chapter to work for the longest time.