Bargains AU concept 2
Feb. 15th, 2019 02:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bedlamsbardHere is the alternate POV version of the first scene from the bargains AU, plus another scene that follows it! This is actually the first version of the scene I wrote, following two scenes set earlier in the AU that are very fragmentary and so haven’t been posted. (Those are the scenes that give the concept its nickname, go figure.)
Please note that while I don’t typically warn, these scenes contain discussion of self-harm and suicide.
About 2.7K below the break.
*
“Blast.” Ahsoka sank down onto a bench and rubbed her hands over her face, her exhaustion from the day’s events finally catching up with her. They’d been lucky that Free Ryloth had been as close as it had, or Barriss would probably be dead right now.
That’s one asset blown, she thought with cold-blooded resignation that startled her when the rest of her mind caught up with the thought. It was better for the galaxy that there were two Inquisitors out of the Emperor’s hands – three, maybe, though she hadn’t been able to tell if the Hunter had survived or not. A lightsaber through the back was generally fatal, but with Force-users you could never be sure. She’d learned that lesson in the dying days of the Clone Wars.
She looked up eventually to see Caleb – Kanan – still standing, his gaze on the door the two Twi’lek doctors had taken Barriss through. He looked shocky and ill, the bruises on his face standing out darkly against his amber skin. Barriss’s blood had dried in dark splotches on his black uniform, visibly red only where it had splashed across the Imperial seal on his sleeve.
Ahsoka pushed herself wearily to her feet and crossed the room to him. His gaze flickered upwards at the first sound of her footsteps, but he didn’t step back, just watched her approach, eyes wide and on the verge of panic. Ahsoka stopped out of arm’s reach and asked, “Are you all right?”
He nodded. “Thank you,” he added awkwardly after a few moments of silence. “For – thank you.”
Ahsoka nodded back. “I’ll need to ask you some questions later,” she said. “But they can wait. I’m sure we can find you somewhere to clean up, and a change of clothes –”
The door slid open and Kanan flinched like he had been slapped, turning his head aside so that he wasn’t facing it. A green-skinned Twi’lek girl with an obvious family resemblance to Cham Syndulla stepped into the room, saying, “I’m Hera Syndulla, my father –”
Kanan swung around, his eyes huge. The girl stopped mid-sentence, staring at him, then gasped, “Kanan!” and flung herself into his arms.
Ahsoka stared.
There was a girl involved somehow, she remembered Barriss saying that morning, as if it had happened years ago. Barriss hadn’t said that the girl in question had been Cham Syndulla’s daughter, who had gone missing some years ago and had only recently resurfaced. In all likelihood she hadn’t known.
The two teenagers were clinging to each other desperately, Hera trying to get a clear look at Kanan’s scarred face and Kanan holding onto Hera as if he never intended to release her.
“You’re alive,” Hera was saying, over and over again, “you’re alive, I thought you were dead, I thought they’d killed you, you’re alive –”
Kanan didn’t say anything, just held onto her.
Hera kissed him frantically, touching the scars on his cheeks, then the blood-stained Imperial seal on his sleeve. Kanan turned his gaze aside, but Hera just kissed him again, leaning up to say something against his ear. Ahsoka saw his shoulders slump in relief or resignation before he kissed her back, his hands fisted at the small of her back. Hera put her arms around him, her eyes half-closed.
“I take it you two know each other?” Ahsoka said.
Hera looked up, then took a breath and released Kanan, though she immediately took hold of his hand. “I’m sorry,” she said, still looking a little flustered. “I’m Hera Syndulla, Cham Syndulla’s daughter. My father sent me to ask if you need anything, and to tell you that he’ll be here to talk to you as soon as he can. He’s arbitrating a matter on another ship in the fleet right now and can’t leave immediately.”
“I’m Ahsoka Tano,” Ahsoka said. “And you know Kanan already?”
Hera looked up at him, her expression radiant. “We were – I was –” She took a deep breath, her face sobering. “I was the reason he was captured.”
“That’s not true,” Kanan protested. “I would have gotten noticed whether or not you were there.”
“But you wouldn’t have been there if it wasn’t –” She stopped as Kanan kissed her, her fingers closing tightly around his.
“You’re alive,” she said again. “I thought you were dead.”
“So did I,” he said quietly, and Hera looked up at him in distress.
“You –”
Kanan took a deep breath, squaring his shoulders, and then looked up at Ahsoka. “The Emperor –” he began haltingly, then had to stop, breathing hard.
“You don’t have to tell me now,” Ahsoka said.
He shook his head. “I don’t know if I can do this again,” he admitted quietly. He shut his eyes, holding onto Hera as though his life depended on it, before he looked at Ahsoka again. “The Emperor – Palpatine – is a Sith lord,” he said. “He was responsible for –” He swallowed. “He made the Temple his palace. One of the masters was able to wipe most of the Archives, but not – not the holocrons, some of the other Jedi artifacts. But a Sith can’t access them. An Inquisitor can’t either, not even the ones who used to be Jedi – that’s most of them. There are a few who weren’t. The Emperor thought that they would still be able to because they aren’t really Sith, but they – but he – but –” He was shaking, his eyes shut again; his native Coruscanti accent was starting to bleed through his Outer Rim drawl. “He killed all the Jedi. He killed us. But it meant that he couldn’t have access to our secrets, and he wanted that. When the Hunter found me, he – he –”
He was crying silently, tears running down his cheeks that he didn’t bother to wipe away. Hera tried to pull him against her but he shook his head a little, still turned blindly towards Ahsoka.
“He made you open the holocrons,” Ahsoka said.
Kanan nodded. “They’re – alive,” he said haltingly. “Not like we are, but not like the kyber crystals, either. They’re almost sentient, in their own way. They – they – it was like torture for them, even with me doing it, not him.”
“And they hurt you to make you do it,” Ahsoka said quietly.
He nodded again, his eyes squeezed shut. “I couldn’t not do it. But it was – it was the worst –” He shook his head fiercely. “I couldn’t not do it. But I couldn’t…I didn’t know what to do.” He finally looked at Ahsoka again, his voice cracking. “I didn’t know what to do. And the Hunter –” He stopped, gasping for breath, and Ahsoka saw eight months of agony in his eyes that a lightsaber in the back could barely begin to repair. He said for a third time, “I didn’t know what to do.”
“It’s over,” Ahsoka told him. “You’re not there anymore.”
“I betrayed –”
“Kanan, I know you didn’t have a choice,” Ahsoka said, before he could blame himself any further. “It’s all right.”
Hera leaned up and kissed the corner of his mouth. “You’re safe now,” she said. She glanced at Ahsoka and added, “I’m going to take him back to my rooms. Do you – my father sent me here to ask if you needed anything.”
“I’m all right,” Ahsoka said politely. “I’ll wait to hear what the doctors have to say about my –” She hesitated for an instant, then finished, “– about my friend.”
Kanan shot a curious glance at her, but Hera tugged at his hand and he looked down at her, his whole body softening, some of the tension bleeding out of him. The two teenagers went hand in hand out of the room, leaving Ahsoka to sit back down and pick over these new revelations.
*
Barriss’s first thought upon waking was incoherent confusion, reaching automatically out into the Force for something that wasn’t there. Instead of the darkness of the Crucible resonating around her, there was pure, scintillating light that eventually resolved itself into two distinct individuals, one beside her and the other further away. It took longer than it should have to put names to them.
She opened her eyes, licking dry lips, and turned her head to see Ahsoka sitting cross-legged in a chair beside her bed, eyes half-closed in a light meditative trance. She blinked as she registered Barriss’s awakening and offered her a smile. “How do you feel?”
“Where am I?” Barriss asked instead. A quick glance around the room told her nothing except that she was in a medbay, though the room looked a little more worn and less sterile than an Imperial one would have. A brightly colored poster on the door featured a cartoon tooka cat in a doctor’s coat gleefully lecturing a clowder of kittens about the importance of washing one’s paws.
“We’re on the flagship of the Free Ryloth fleet, the Forlorn Hope,” Ahsoka said.
“Rebels,” Barriss said, frowning; she had heard of Free Ryloth but they were well out of the Inquisition’s jurisdiction at the moment.
“We were lucky they were as close as they were,” Ahsoka said. “And they do have doctors aboard.”
Barriss touched her fingers gingerly to the wound that slashed across her ribs, feeling the heavy layer of bandages there. “Where’s Caleb?” she asked. She had sensed him a moment ago, but he wasn’t anywhere in sight.
Ahsoka smiled again. “You won’t believe this.”
Barriss froze. “He didn’t – he didn’t try to hurt himself again, did he?”
She had been with the Hunter when Caleb had taken poison, had felt the Force ripple in an agony that was nearly sentient and seen the expression on the Hunter’s face; he had sensed what Caleb had done through the bond they shared. It was the only time she had seen the Hunter run for any reason except to chase down prey; Barriss had been hard on his heels, heedless for once of what anyone else in the Crucible might think.
It had been a very near thing.
She had sat with Caleb just like this when he had been in the Crucible’s seldom used medbay, had been there when he had woken up, registered her presence and what it meant, and then just cried. Barriss had tried to soothe him, something that she hadn’t had cause to do in the better part of a decade, but there had been nothing she could do for him. He wouldn’t tell her what had happened on Coruscant; he had barely let her touch him. And then the Hunter had come in – he had only stepped out for a few minutes.
Caleb had stopped crying. After that, he had stopped doing anything at all that showed he was still Caleb Dume, not just the Hunter’s Hound.
Ahsoka shook her head. “He’s with his girlfriend,” she said.
Barriss stared at her. “What?”
“Do you remember you told me that there was a girl involved when he was captured?” Ahsoka said.
“That was the rumor,” Barriss said. “I assumed she’d died.”
Ahsoka shook her head again, her lekku swaying with the motion. “That girl,” she said, “was Hera Syndulla, Cham Syndulla’s daughter. She was –”
“She was part of Project Nemesis,” Barriss said, blinking. “One of the ISB’s little pet projects. She went missing last year. She was Caleb’s girl?”
This time Ahsoka nodded. “And she’s here now. The two of them went off together. I didn’t know either,” she added wryly.
“She took him back?” Barriss said, startled. “Even after everything?”
“It wasn’t his fault,” Ahsoka said. “And they love each other, apparently.” She shrugged with a Jedi’s typical confusion at the emotion – or at least, the confusion typical of her lineage and Yoda’s teachings. (Emotionally stunted, Barriss remembered Master Vos telling Master Luminara once, in the middle of some rant about something that must have seemed very important at the time. Probably Master Kenobi, their mutual friend and former cohort-mate.)
Barriss wanted to grab Ahsoka and shake her and shout that it wasn’t that that was surprising, but – Caleb was a sweet boy, he always had been, even after everything the Hunter had done to him. She supposed that if anyone was going to be able to come mostly whole out of the Crucible it was going to be him.
There was nothing she could do to make Ahsoka understand that.
More quietly, Ahsoka added, “Kanan told me what happened on Coruscant.”
“His name is Caleb.”
“I’m not going to force him to call himself that if he doesn’t want to,” Ahsoka said firmly. “Do you want to know what happened or not?” Her gaze narrowed. “Or did you already know?”
“I don’t know,” Barriss said, annoyed.
Ahsoka eyed her for a moment, then said, “The Emperor was using him to unlock the holocrons from the Temple.”
Barriss stared at her, astonished she hadn’t thought of it before, and said, “Of course.”
Ahsoka frowned. “Did you know?”
“No, I’d – I’d forgotten it was a possibility. His Imperial Majesty tried most of the rest of us out at – at the beginning. None of us could,” she added quietly. That had been a relief, in a way. It had never occurred to her that Palpatine might have tried the experiment again with the Jedi padawan that the Hunter had brought in and broken to heel.
No wonder he had tried to kill himself. She was surprised the sheer effort involved hadn’t driven him insane or killed him outright, but combined with the dark side vergences that both the Imperial Palace and the Crucible sat on the agony of the holocrons would have poisoned the parts of his brain that were consciously aware of the Force. That was probably why the Hunter had taken him on that operation so soon after he had been released from the medbay; he must have either known or guessed that keeping the Hound near a vergence while still recovering from forcibly breaking open a holocron would have injured him further. And the Hunter had wanted his apprentice both sane and alive.
“Is he all right?” she asked again.
“He’s with Hera.”
But the girl didn’t know. She couldn’t. Barriss had tested her herself; she had been an Imperial cadet, but she wasn’t a Force-user, she had never had to face the Crucible the way Caleb had.
“Do you want me to tell Kanan you’d like to see him?” Ahsoka asked. “In the morning, maybe?”
Barriss had no idea when that was in relation to the current time. “I don’t know,” she said, and turned her face away, suddenly exhausted. It didn’t matter what she wanted; Caleb wouldn’t want to see her. He wouldn’t want anything that reminded him of the Crucible; Barriss knew that in his place, she wouldn’t. “I think I’d like to sleep now. You probably should too,” she added as an afterthought.
“Perhaps.” Ahsoka’s armor clattered softly as she got to her feet. “You aren’t a prisoner, by the way. The door isn’t locked.”
“But I suppose you still have my lightsabers,” Barriss said without looking at her. “Did Caleb get his?”
“He has it.” Metal clicked softly against metal.
Too surprised to stop herself, Barriss looked over to see that Ahsoka had set her lightsabers down on the table by the bed, which also boasted a cup and a carafe that presumably contained water.
“This is a civilian ship full of Twi’leks,” Ahsoka said. “A very large civilian ship – it’s a converted Separatist dreadnaught. If you do want to wander around, try not to get lost. I’m parked in the port hangar.” She set something else down next to the lightsabers – a comlink, Barriss saw after a moment’s confusion. “That’s set to mine.”
“Why?” Barriss said.
“In case you want to contact –”
“You know that’s not what I mean.”
Ahsoka looked down at her for a long moment, frowning. “You’ve given me no reason to think you’re the enemy,” she said. “I’m trusting you not to start now.”
“I thought I started a long time ago.”
“It’s a new day,” Ahsoka said. “For us all. Sleep well, Barriss.”
Please note that while I don’t typically warn, these scenes contain discussion of self-harm and suicide.
About 2.7K below the break.
*
“Blast.” Ahsoka sank down onto a bench and rubbed her hands over her face, her exhaustion from the day’s events finally catching up with her. They’d been lucky that Free Ryloth had been as close as it had, or Barriss would probably be dead right now.
That’s one asset blown, she thought with cold-blooded resignation that startled her when the rest of her mind caught up with the thought. It was better for the galaxy that there were two Inquisitors out of the Emperor’s hands – three, maybe, though she hadn’t been able to tell if the Hunter had survived or not. A lightsaber through the back was generally fatal, but with Force-users you could never be sure. She’d learned that lesson in the dying days of the Clone Wars.
She looked up eventually to see Caleb – Kanan – still standing, his gaze on the door the two Twi’lek doctors had taken Barriss through. He looked shocky and ill, the bruises on his face standing out darkly against his amber skin. Barriss’s blood had dried in dark splotches on his black uniform, visibly red only where it had splashed across the Imperial seal on his sleeve.
Ahsoka pushed herself wearily to her feet and crossed the room to him. His gaze flickered upwards at the first sound of her footsteps, but he didn’t step back, just watched her approach, eyes wide and on the verge of panic. Ahsoka stopped out of arm’s reach and asked, “Are you all right?”
He nodded. “Thank you,” he added awkwardly after a few moments of silence. “For – thank you.”
Ahsoka nodded back. “I’ll need to ask you some questions later,” she said. “But they can wait. I’m sure we can find you somewhere to clean up, and a change of clothes –”
The door slid open and Kanan flinched like he had been slapped, turning his head aside so that he wasn’t facing it. A green-skinned Twi’lek girl with an obvious family resemblance to Cham Syndulla stepped into the room, saying, “I’m Hera Syndulla, my father –”
Kanan swung around, his eyes huge. The girl stopped mid-sentence, staring at him, then gasped, “Kanan!” and flung herself into his arms.
Ahsoka stared.
There was a girl involved somehow, she remembered Barriss saying that morning, as if it had happened years ago. Barriss hadn’t said that the girl in question had been Cham Syndulla’s daughter, who had gone missing some years ago and had only recently resurfaced. In all likelihood she hadn’t known.
The two teenagers were clinging to each other desperately, Hera trying to get a clear look at Kanan’s scarred face and Kanan holding onto Hera as if he never intended to release her.
“You’re alive,” Hera was saying, over and over again, “you’re alive, I thought you were dead, I thought they’d killed you, you’re alive –”
Kanan didn’t say anything, just held onto her.
Hera kissed him frantically, touching the scars on his cheeks, then the blood-stained Imperial seal on his sleeve. Kanan turned his gaze aside, but Hera just kissed him again, leaning up to say something against his ear. Ahsoka saw his shoulders slump in relief or resignation before he kissed her back, his hands fisted at the small of her back. Hera put her arms around him, her eyes half-closed.
“I take it you two know each other?” Ahsoka said.
Hera looked up, then took a breath and released Kanan, though she immediately took hold of his hand. “I’m sorry,” she said, still looking a little flustered. “I’m Hera Syndulla, Cham Syndulla’s daughter. My father sent me to ask if you need anything, and to tell you that he’ll be here to talk to you as soon as he can. He’s arbitrating a matter on another ship in the fleet right now and can’t leave immediately.”
“I’m Ahsoka Tano,” Ahsoka said. “And you know Kanan already?”
Hera looked up at him, her expression radiant. “We were – I was –” She took a deep breath, her face sobering. “I was the reason he was captured.”
“That’s not true,” Kanan protested. “I would have gotten noticed whether or not you were there.”
“But you wouldn’t have been there if it wasn’t –” She stopped as Kanan kissed her, her fingers closing tightly around his.
“You’re alive,” she said again. “I thought you were dead.”
“So did I,” he said quietly, and Hera looked up at him in distress.
“You –”
Kanan took a deep breath, squaring his shoulders, and then looked up at Ahsoka. “The Emperor –” he began haltingly, then had to stop, breathing hard.
“You don’t have to tell me now,” Ahsoka said.
He shook his head. “I don’t know if I can do this again,” he admitted quietly. He shut his eyes, holding onto Hera as though his life depended on it, before he looked at Ahsoka again. “The Emperor – Palpatine – is a Sith lord,” he said. “He was responsible for –” He swallowed. “He made the Temple his palace. One of the masters was able to wipe most of the Archives, but not – not the holocrons, some of the other Jedi artifacts. But a Sith can’t access them. An Inquisitor can’t either, not even the ones who used to be Jedi – that’s most of them. There are a few who weren’t. The Emperor thought that they would still be able to because they aren’t really Sith, but they – but he – but –” He was shaking, his eyes shut again; his native Coruscanti accent was starting to bleed through his Outer Rim drawl. “He killed all the Jedi. He killed us. But it meant that he couldn’t have access to our secrets, and he wanted that. When the Hunter found me, he – he –”
He was crying silently, tears running down his cheeks that he didn’t bother to wipe away. Hera tried to pull him against her but he shook his head a little, still turned blindly towards Ahsoka.
“He made you open the holocrons,” Ahsoka said.
Kanan nodded. “They’re – alive,” he said haltingly. “Not like we are, but not like the kyber crystals, either. They’re almost sentient, in their own way. They – they – it was like torture for them, even with me doing it, not him.”
“And they hurt you to make you do it,” Ahsoka said quietly.
He nodded again, his eyes squeezed shut. “I couldn’t not do it. But it was – it was the worst –” He shook his head fiercely. “I couldn’t not do it. But I couldn’t…I didn’t know what to do.” He finally looked at Ahsoka again, his voice cracking. “I didn’t know what to do. And the Hunter –” He stopped, gasping for breath, and Ahsoka saw eight months of agony in his eyes that a lightsaber in the back could barely begin to repair. He said for a third time, “I didn’t know what to do.”
“It’s over,” Ahsoka told him. “You’re not there anymore.”
“I betrayed –”
“Kanan, I know you didn’t have a choice,” Ahsoka said, before he could blame himself any further. “It’s all right.”
Hera leaned up and kissed the corner of his mouth. “You’re safe now,” she said. She glanced at Ahsoka and added, “I’m going to take him back to my rooms. Do you – my father sent me here to ask if you needed anything.”
“I’m all right,” Ahsoka said politely. “I’ll wait to hear what the doctors have to say about my –” She hesitated for an instant, then finished, “– about my friend.”
Kanan shot a curious glance at her, but Hera tugged at his hand and he looked down at her, his whole body softening, some of the tension bleeding out of him. The two teenagers went hand in hand out of the room, leaving Ahsoka to sit back down and pick over these new revelations.
*
Barriss’s first thought upon waking was incoherent confusion, reaching automatically out into the Force for something that wasn’t there. Instead of the darkness of the Crucible resonating around her, there was pure, scintillating light that eventually resolved itself into two distinct individuals, one beside her and the other further away. It took longer than it should have to put names to them.
She opened her eyes, licking dry lips, and turned her head to see Ahsoka sitting cross-legged in a chair beside her bed, eyes half-closed in a light meditative trance. She blinked as she registered Barriss’s awakening and offered her a smile. “How do you feel?”
“Where am I?” Barriss asked instead. A quick glance around the room told her nothing except that she was in a medbay, though the room looked a little more worn and less sterile than an Imperial one would have. A brightly colored poster on the door featured a cartoon tooka cat in a doctor’s coat gleefully lecturing a clowder of kittens about the importance of washing one’s paws.
“We’re on the flagship of the Free Ryloth fleet, the Forlorn Hope,” Ahsoka said.
“Rebels,” Barriss said, frowning; she had heard of Free Ryloth but they were well out of the Inquisition’s jurisdiction at the moment.
“We were lucky they were as close as they were,” Ahsoka said. “And they do have doctors aboard.”
Barriss touched her fingers gingerly to the wound that slashed across her ribs, feeling the heavy layer of bandages there. “Where’s Caleb?” she asked. She had sensed him a moment ago, but he wasn’t anywhere in sight.
Ahsoka smiled again. “You won’t believe this.”
Barriss froze. “He didn’t – he didn’t try to hurt himself again, did he?”
She had been with the Hunter when Caleb had taken poison, had felt the Force ripple in an agony that was nearly sentient and seen the expression on the Hunter’s face; he had sensed what Caleb had done through the bond they shared. It was the only time she had seen the Hunter run for any reason except to chase down prey; Barriss had been hard on his heels, heedless for once of what anyone else in the Crucible might think.
It had been a very near thing.
She had sat with Caleb just like this when he had been in the Crucible’s seldom used medbay, had been there when he had woken up, registered her presence and what it meant, and then just cried. Barriss had tried to soothe him, something that she hadn’t had cause to do in the better part of a decade, but there had been nothing she could do for him. He wouldn’t tell her what had happened on Coruscant; he had barely let her touch him. And then the Hunter had come in – he had only stepped out for a few minutes.
Caleb had stopped crying. After that, he had stopped doing anything at all that showed he was still Caleb Dume, not just the Hunter’s Hound.
Ahsoka shook her head. “He’s with his girlfriend,” she said.
Barriss stared at her. “What?”
“Do you remember you told me that there was a girl involved when he was captured?” Ahsoka said.
“That was the rumor,” Barriss said. “I assumed she’d died.”
Ahsoka shook her head again, her lekku swaying with the motion. “That girl,” she said, “was Hera Syndulla, Cham Syndulla’s daughter. She was –”
“She was part of Project Nemesis,” Barriss said, blinking. “One of the ISB’s little pet projects. She went missing last year. She was Caleb’s girl?”
This time Ahsoka nodded. “And she’s here now. The two of them went off together. I didn’t know either,” she added wryly.
“She took him back?” Barriss said, startled. “Even after everything?”
“It wasn’t his fault,” Ahsoka said. “And they love each other, apparently.” She shrugged with a Jedi’s typical confusion at the emotion – or at least, the confusion typical of her lineage and Yoda’s teachings. (Emotionally stunted, Barriss remembered Master Vos telling Master Luminara once, in the middle of some rant about something that must have seemed very important at the time. Probably Master Kenobi, their mutual friend and former cohort-mate.)
Barriss wanted to grab Ahsoka and shake her and shout that it wasn’t that that was surprising, but – Caleb was a sweet boy, he always had been, even after everything the Hunter had done to him. She supposed that if anyone was going to be able to come mostly whole out of the Crucible it was going to be him.
There was nothing she could do to make Ahsoka understand that.
More quietly, Ahsoka added, “Kanan told me what happened on Coruscant.”
“His name is Caleb.”
“I’m not going to force him to call himself that if he doesn’t want to,” Ahsoka said firmly. “Do you want to know what happened or not?” Her gaze narrowed. “Or did you already know?”
“I don’t know,” Barriss said, annoyed.
Ahsoka eyed her for a moment, then said, “The Emperor was using him to unlock the holocrons from the Temple.”
Barriss stared at her, astonished she hadn’t thought of it before, and said, “Of course.”
Ahsoka frowned. “Did you know?”
“No, I’d – I’d forgotten it was a possibility. His Imperial Majesty tried most of the rest of us out at – at the beginning. None of us could,” she added quietly. That had been a relief, in a way. It had never occurred to her that Palpatine might have tried the experiment again with the Jedi padawan that the Hunter had brought in and broken to heel.
No wonder he had tried to kill himself. She was surprised the sheer effort involved hadn’t driven him insane or killed him outright, but combined with the dark side vergences that both the Imperial Palace and the Crucible sat on the agony of the holocrons would have poisoned the parts of his brain that were consciously aware of the Force. That was probably why the Hunter had taken him on that operation so soon after he had been released from the medbay; he must have either known or guessed that keeping the Hound near a vergence while still recovering from forcibly breaking open a holocron would have injured him further. And the Hunter had wanted his apprentice both sane and alive.
“Is he all right?” she asked again.
“He’s with Hera.”
But the girl didn’t know. She couldn’t. Barriss had tested her herself; she had been an Imperial cadet, but she wasn’t a Force-user, she had never had to face the Crucible the way Caleb had.
“Do you want me to tell Kanan you’d like to see him?” Ahsoka asked. “In the morning, maybe?”
Barriss had no idea when that was in relation to the current time. “I don’t know,” she said, and turned her face away, suddenly exhausted. It didn’t matter what she wanted; Caleb wouldn’t want to see her. He wouldn’t want anything that reminded him of the Crucible; Barriss knew that in his place, she wouldn’t. “I think I’d like to sleep now. You probably should too,” she added as an afterthought.
“Perhaps.” Ahsoka’s armor clattered softly as she got to her feet. “You aren’t a prisoner, by the way. The door isn’t locked.”
“But I suppose you still have my lightsabers,” Barriss said without looking at her. “Did Caleb get his?”
“He has it.” Metal clicked softly against metal.
Too surprised to stop herself, Barriss looked over to see that Ahsoka had set her lightsabers down on the table by the bed, which also boasted a cup and a carafe that presumably contained water.
“This is a civilian ship full of Twi’leks,” Ahsoka said. “A very large civilian ship – it’s a converted Separatist dreadnaught. If you do want to wander around, try not to get lost. I’m parked in the port hangar.” She set something else down next to the lightsabers – a comlink, Barriss saw after a moment’s confusion. “That’s set to mine.”
“Why?” Barriss said.
“In case you want to contact –”
“You know that’s not what I mean.”
Ahsoka looked down at her for a long moment, frowning. “You’ve given me no reason to think you’re the enemy,” she said. “I’m trusting you not to start now.”
“I thought I started a long time ago.”
“It’s a new day,” Ahsoka said. “For us all. Sleep well, Barriss.”