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One day after the day of the trial
“Ahsoka?”
Ahsoka peeks her head around the door of the bathroom into the tiny apartment. It’s just a bedroom and a kitchenette with a wooden table barely large enough for two. Just outside the window, speeders rush past, their lights flashing in the early dawn.
Barriss stands there at the window with her back to Ahsoka, watching them pass, her silhouette a thin line against the huge sky.
The sight of her like that steals the words from Ahsoka’s tongue for a second. She thinks of last night, when they slept beside each other and Ahsoka’s fingers had itched to reach for Barriss, to press herself against the woman beside her, her smooth skin and lithe frame. She’d ached with it. She hadn’t breathed a word, though, or moved a finger; she thinks she can feel the same electricity humming in Barriss’s gaze, but she isn’t ready to bet on it—Barriss is the only friend in the galaxy she has right now, and she can’t jeopardize that.
Ahsoka swallows around the memory of Barriss’s body beside her own and clears her throat, and Barriss turns, backlit by the dawn, expression in shadow. “Is it time to go?”
“I think so,” Barriss says. She moves away from the window, towards the bag she’d left on the floor beside her side of the bed. “We shouldn’t stick around a place this populated.”
How long are you going to stick with me? Ahsoka wants to ask, but she’s afraid the question will force Barriss to commit to something she doesn’t want to commit to—out of a sense of duty or even courtesy. They are on Coruscant now, and Ahsoka will be safest somewhere far away from the Core Colonies, perhaps as far as the Outer Rim. “Where will we go?” she asks instead, scooping her things up off the nightstand and slipping them into her bag before she slings it over her shoulder.
Barriss hesitates. “Somewhere far and remote,” she says. “A moon in a neutral system, maybe?”
“Barriss, I don’t know how we do this,” Ahsoka says quietly, looking hard at Barriss from across the bed. In her heart she means this: traveling together, on the run and pretending there isn’t something that burns so hot between them they’re both afraid to touch it—but she knows Barriss will pretend she thinks the question is about how they’re going to get off the planet. They both let the pretending go on. It’s a two player game.
“Let’s go to the lowest levels of the city,” Barriss suggests, pulling her eyes away from Ahsoka’s searching gaze, “It’s lawless down there, they won’t feel any civil obligations to turn us in.”
“Sure, but they’ll turn us in for a bounty in the blink of an eye,” Ahsoka counters. “By now, my wanted notice will be on every screen they see.”
Barriss steps around the bed, making her way to the door, still not quite looking at Ahsoka. “Do you have a better idea?” she asks over her shoulder, pressing the control panel. The door hisses open slowly. “Do you have the credits for our own ship?”
Ahsoka studies Barriss from behind, framed this time by the doorway. Even if Ahsoka is the one running, Barriss always feels two steps ahead, just out of reach, leaving Ahsoka at a loss.
“No,” she says, although she doubts Barriss is listening for her answer. She pulls her cloak over her head and follows Barriss back out into the city.
One day before the day of the trial
Ahsoka. Ahsoka.
Ahsoka shifts slightly, the world filtering into place as she wakes slowly: her dry throat, the hard bench under her that she’s slept on for the past couple nights, the way she can no longer feel her padawan beads digging into her lekku when she sleeps. The bench she’s meant to use as a bed is narrow enough that one of her arms presses against the wall and the other is hanging off the side, her hand brushing against the floor. Someone is at the door of her cell, a smooth, light voice she recognizes, though right now she’s too sleep-riddled to identify who it is.
“Ahsoka. Ahsoka.”
Ahsoka hums, which is as much of a response as she can muster, and forces her eyes open in the dark cell, pushing herself up to sit. The only lighting is the white light streaming in through the small, barred window in the door of her cell and the pinpricks of red grid of the cell’s floor. When she looks in the direction of the voice, it takes her a moment for her eyes to adjust before she can make out their face.
“Barriss?”
Barriss looks worse than Ahsoka has seen her since the ship ride with the Geonosian worms, baggy eyes, strands of dark hair escaping her headscarf, and a nervous, urgent energy that Ahsoka has never seen in her before. Even in the heat of battle, Barriss has always kept her head, more collected than many experienced generals, thanks to her training under Master Luminara.
“Ahsoka,” she says again.Now that she’s more awake, Ahsoka can detect the fraying at the edges of her voice.
“Why are you here?” Ahsoka asks, swinging her legs off the bench and moving towards the barred window. Her clothes are wrinkled from days of use; she hasn’t had the option to change since she was thrown in her cell, and she hasn’t had a reason to care until now. With everything else to worry about, it seems stupid to be thinking what she must look like to Barriss right now, but it’s all she can think. Moving awkwardly from the soreness in her limbs, padawan beads gone, a small person in a vast, empty cell. “Who sent you?”
She had been sure she wouldn’t hear much from the Jedi after they expelled her—in order to appear impartial at the trial, they’d have to steer clear of her, so no one had visited her since Anakin and Padmé, and she hadn’t expected anyone else.
Barriss hesitates, then she turns to someone just out of the view of her cell and says, “Let me in.”
She can only see Barriss’s face, as if in a picture frame, but she hears the buzzing of numbers on a pad, and then the door swings open, revealing Barriss in her dark robes, standing at the top of the stairs. She gives the guard a nod of thanks before stepping down to Ahsoka, closer than Ahsoka expects her to, as the door swings shut behind her with a heavy clang. Ahsoka steps back once, twice, automatically, unsettled by being so close, close enough to count the diamonds across the bridge of Barriss’s nose, close enough that she has to tip her head up slightly to meet Barriss’s eye.
“Ahsoka,” Barriss says quietly, nearly whispering. “Don’t react. ”
Don’t react? Ahsoka’s mind races through what could be going on—nothing legal. She glances quickly down at Barriss’s hands, wondering if Barriss is planning to pass her something, information or a weapon, but they’re empty. Quickly, she looks back at Barriss, carefully keeping her expression neutral. Just as quietly, she responds, “Does the council have a message for me?”
Something darts across Barriss’s face, guilt or pain, and she shakes her head. “I’m here alone,” she whispers.
Behind her, through the little square window, Ahsoka can see the guard moving, his shoulder visible, then gone. Can he hear them? Is he listening? She lifts her chin slightly in his direction, a warning, and sees the warning register in Barriss’s eyes, though her expression doesn’t change.
“I know,” Barriss whispers, “there are cameras, too, but no mics. Just look like you’re talking to me normally, but keep quiet.”
Ahsoka nods. “But why are you here? Have you found who really did it? Is anyone still looking?”
There it is again, that expression Ahsoka can’t quite put her finger on, like Barriss has bad news to deliver but for some reason she can’t, but it’s gone as quick as it comes. “No, I haven’t been able to find anything. Nothing else has turned up.”
Even though she didn’t expect much in the first place, disappointment still sinks in Ahsoka’s stomach. As far as she knows, no one but Anakin and Barriss are looking for evidence to clear her, and two people isn’t much to pin her hopes on, even if they’re two very competent people. “I guess they all think I really did it,” she says bitterly. “At least you believe me.”
Barriss gazes back at her evenly. “I know you, Ahsoka, I know you wouldn’t. But I don’t think the jury is going to agree.” She hesitates a split second, turning her head slightly as if she wants to look towards the door but won’t let herself. “So I’m here to get you out.”
One day after the day of the trial
The lower levels of Coruscant are so different from the gleaming city surface that it feels like a different planet: all light is glaringly white, artificial, but most places aren’t lit at all, coated in shadow and grime. The air feels thick and stifling, the thin corridors so crowded that Ahsoka almost loses Barriss in the crowds several times. It feels as if there are thousands of life forms here, breathing in and out the same stink of exhaust, obscuring everything in a thin yellow haze of smog.
Despite the huge number of people, it’s a very quiet place, the sign of a nexus of crime: no one asks any questions, no one answers them, and no one risks being overheard. Many people appear to be trying to get somewhere quickly, like Ahsoka and Barriss, but in turn-offs and alcoves, shadowy figures lounge against walls, smoking, drinking, cleaning weapons.
Ahsoka keeps her ears open, hoping to hear someone talking about flying out somewhere far, perhaps also looking to escape the law, or someone talking about a reward for the live capture of a Jedi. She hears weapons being sold, discussions of drug and slave shipments, bids being placed on discarded fliers from the Republic and Separatists both. Skins of creatures, stolen property, reprogrammed droids.
When they’re weaving past one of them, Ahsoka hears someone muttering to someone else, “...Outer Rim will cost you, but I can do it. My ship’s ready to go, right through this door. I’ll need half up front…” and a squawk of protest in response.
Without time to think about whether it’s a good idea, she grabs Barriss’s elbow and ducks into the turn-off with her, a dark, metal-walled room with no door, lit by a dim yellow lantern. Thin white light streams through an open door at the other end of the room, where Ahsoka sees a tiny landing pad and a ship that probably can only comfortably fit two.
Barriss doesn’t ask what Ahsoka’s doing, though her body goes tense, ready for a fight. Ahsoka appreciates that silent act of trust and care, the knowledge that Barriss is willing to move with her as one unit, lead and follow.
Before them, standing close to each other and muttering angrily, are a pale-skinned being wearing a heavy black helmet and a Besalisk, both with their hands on blasters at their hips. The Besalisk towers over the one in the helmet, who’s about the size and shape of a human, two of his arms crossed, scales shining dull brown in the light. He looks as if he could snap the other like a toothpick, but the man doesn’t look frightened.
Barriss looks at Ahsoka, raising her eyebrows as if to say, are you sure about these two? She seems calm though, as ready as she always is, her eyes clear and sharp. If they had their lightsabers, Ahsoka would feel safer, but she knows that even if they did, it would be unwise to use them; they’d attract far too much attention. She lifts her shoulders in response: may as well.
Both the Besalisk and the one in the helmet have turned to look at them as they approach, watching them warily and their anger with each other forgotten in the face of a third party.
“Yes?” the Besalisk prompts shortly, crossing a pair of arms. His voice is deep and gravelly, reminding Ahsoka of Pong Krell and making her skin prickle with unease. The other leans against the wall, head turned towards them with his hand still on his blaster.
“What is he offering you for a ride to the Outer rim?” Ahsoka asks, turning slightly away from the lantern and the open door, so the hood of her cloak still shadows her face.
Now the Besalisk looks interested. “Two thousand, CIS. I won’t hear an offer for Republic dataries.”
CIS? Ahsoka has a few thousand Republic Credits, but of course she doesn’t have any Confederacy credits. She looks to Barriss, wondering if she should push or leave it and go, but Barriss doesn’t look back at her.
“How about three for the both of us?” Barriss asks, coolly, her expression betraying nothing.
Ahsoka stares at her. Is she bluffing? Does she actually have three thousand CIS credits? Why would she have so many CIS credits? She almost forgets herself and asks, but thankfully the Besalisk speaks before she can.
“For two passengers? Three thousand? Four.”
Barriss doesn’t blink. “Three and a half.”
Where is this coming from? Ahsoka, not for the first time, finds her mind awhirl with questions. How many CIS credits does Barriss have, then, if she isn’t bluffing, and why didn’t she mention them earlier, when they were considering their options? Barriss keeps going back and forth with the Besalisk, appearing entirely unbothered as the Besalisk pushes her higher, back straight and voice even and unreadable, even to Ahsoka.
“Wait a minute—take down your cloak,” the man in the helmet says, pointing to Ahsoka, “I know your face.”
Ahsoka freezes, going cold. The man steps towards her when she doesn’t move immediately, and the Besalisk stops bargaining with Barriss to look as well, narrowing his eyes. She opens her mouth to say something—no, or none of your business—but she can’t think of anything that would get her out of this.
“Don’t touch her,” Barriss says, and this time her easy voice has an icy edge to it, an undercurrent of danger.
“Take it off,” the Besalisk agrees, stepping closer as well, “If you’re running, it’ll cost more.”
“Who here isn’t running,” Ahsoka asks, stepping back and feeling the cold metal wall at her back. The dirt caked on its surface drags roughly against the fabric of her cloak. The man in the black helmet is close enough to touch her now, and she’ll have no choice but to hurt him, or let him realize who she is. “All we want is to hire you for a job.”
“All I want is to know who my client is,” the Besalisk counters, coming up alongside the man with the helmet. With one of his hands, he holds the lantern from the table up to Ahsoka’s face.
Several things happen at once.
Ahsoka sees the recognition dawn on the Besalisk’s face, and hears a triumphant sound come from the man in the helmet. The man with the mask pulls out his blaster, the Besalisk raises his hands to seize her.Ahsoka reflexively reaches for her lightsaber, but of course, it isn’t there, so she raises her hands, frantically throwing the Besalisk across the room, slamming into the opposite wall.
“You’re the one—” the man with the helmet begins to cry out, and then the words stop in his throat. His hands fly to his throat, and when the black helmet gets in the way, he grasps it with frantic hands and throws it off, just as his feet start to rise off the floor. He’s black haired with a web of scars down one side of his face and he’s choking, eyes bugged out and feet kicking in the air.
Ahsoka turns, and Barriss is standing there, her face still clear and impassive, her hand curled around an invisible throat.
One day before the day of the trial
“You’re here to get me out?” Ahsoka repeats incredulously. She looks around Barriss out the window to her cell, but she can’t see the guard anymore; he must’ve resumed his position beside her door. She edges even closer to Barriss, dropping her voice even quieter. “How? Right now? There are cameras and guards, and the moment I step out of that door the whole place will—”
Barriss puts a hand on Ahsoka’s arm, squeezing her gently to stop her words. “We’re not going to fight our way out. I’m not General Skywalker.”
Ahsoka laughs quietly despite herself. “No, I suppose your way out involves sneaking around and a lot of maps.”
Barriss’s eyes blue eyes sparkle, an edge of a smile soothing the nervous energy that buzzes around her. “Just one, actually.” She slides her hand farther up Ahsoka’s arm, back and forth, as if giving her comfort, and Ahsoka feels it—the cool press of metal between her fingers, dragging across her skin. “Tomorrow, the power feeding this sector is going to blow. You can just slide the door open, cameras will be off, then you’re going to find the nearest stairs to the next level.”
“Up or down?” Ahsoka asks, turning her palm up, feeling Barriss’s cool touch run down her arm.
“Either, this will be the only level without power,” Barriss tells her, “You find the control panel up there, put this chip in, it’ll show you the map of the place. But you’ll have to be quick. The chaos from everyone escaping will only last so long.” She clasps Ahsoka’s hands in her own. The chip presses to Ahsoka’s palm, sharp-edged and cold; Ahsoka lets it slide between her fingers the way Barriss had and pulls her hands back. They tingle with Barriss’s light touch, something that has nothing to do with the thrill of escape. “After you know where you’re going, take the chip back. I’ll use the tracker to meet you where you come out.”
Ahsoka wants to thank Barriss and tell her how much it means that when the rest of the Jedi have turned against her so easily, Barriss believes in her innocence so firmly that she’s willing to do this for Ahsoka. She wants to hug Barriss so tight, Barriss will be able to feel her heartbeat. She wants to feel Barriss’s fingers on her skin again. “I’ll have to go back to my level to get out,” she realizes, “Those will be the only doors disabled.”
“That’s right. Tomorrow, midmorning. Be ready.” Before Ahsoka can say anything else, Barriss steps back from her, the distance between them sudden and cold. “I hope they clear you,” Barriss says at a normal volume. “I hope they find whoever really did it.”
Ahsoka watches her leave. “I hope so too.”
One day after the day of the trial
“Barriss,” she says, too astonished to even say stop.
The Besalisk gets back to his feet and manages to croak, “Jedi—” and then the black-haired man falls to the ground and Barriss has the Besalisk pinned to the wall so hard he can’t speak. He struggles, hundreds of pounds of muscle trying to push off the wall, two of his hands reaching for his blaster. Ahsoka can feel the Force shift in the air around them, Barriss’s hand flexing, and then all four of the Besalisk’s hands go to his own neck.
“Barriss,” Ahsoka says again, this time warningly. The man on the ground appears to be unconscious but not dead, which is a small relief. She moves over to Barriss’s side and puts a hand on the small of her back, looking at the Besalisk. She can feel the strain in Barriss as she tries to hold him, the muscles of her back taut. “Let him go.”
“We’re unarmed,” Barriss replies, breath short and gaze fixed intently on the Besalisk. His limbs bang against the metal walls, ringing out, but no one comes. No one is in the habit of running towards fights around here. “What do we do? If we let him go, everyone will know you’re here.”
“Not this,” Ahsoka says.
Barriss looks at her for the first time, her dark blue eyes burning, her mouth a harsh line. For a moment, Ahsoka feels a spark of fear, as if Barriss will turn her power against Ahsoka if she pushes Barriss any farther, but instead, the sight of Ahsoka seems to soften her. The furrow in her brow eases, her shoulders drop, and she lets her hand fall to her side. She breathes out, long and shaky, and the Besalisk falls to the ground. He doesn’t get back up.
Ahsoka looks at him, lying face-down on the floor, and then back at Barriss, who’s watching her with wide eyes, hands held uncertainly in front of her.
“What do we do?” Ahsoka asks. She should be asking what Barriss was thinking, why she did that and why she seems so familiar with a Force choke, relatively unbothered with having used it, but they don’t have time for that. They now have two unconscious people who know who they are and they need to be long gone by the time they come to.
Barriss winces, as if she knows her next words aren’t going to go over well. “We can take their ship.”
“Take their ship?” Ahsoka echoes. It’s not as if General Skywalker wouldn’t do that himself, if in this situation—not that he’d ever end up where Ahsoka is now—but Barriss is always so by the book that the suggestion is unfathomable out of her mouth. Then again, she did just use a Force choke, she has a number of CIS credits, she has sides of her that Ahsoka has never seen.
“Look.” Barriss nods through the open doorway at the small ship Ahsoka noticed before, walking towards it and gesturing for Ahsoka to follow her. “It’s a stolen Republic ship. It isn’t theirs any more than it’s ours.”
“I don’t belong with the Republic anymore,” Ahsoka says. The words feel wrong, but they’re true. The days of fighting for the Republic are over. She wonders if she’ll ever see Rex and the rest of the 501st again, and what they would say if they were here. Rex wouldn’t take the ship unless Anakin ordered it. Fives would take it without blinking.
There’s a small dragging sound, and they both turn to see the Besalisk begin to twitch, fingers first.
“That was fast,” Ahsoka murmurs, heart thudding.
She doesn’t want to fight again. She doesn’t want to hurt anyone, and more than that, she worries that Barriss does want to hurt someone, or at least has no qualms doing so. She doesn’t want to reach safety and watch horror replace the adrenaline in Barriss’s eyes. She’s seen it in plenty of troopers before, though she expected Barriss to be more used to it than new cadets—the whatever it takes of a fight turning into self disgust after the dust settles. The need to escape sings in her veins, go, go, go.
“We need to get out of here,” Barriss says, looking at the bodies on the floor.
Ahsoka gazes at her. “You don’t have to come,” she says, Barriss’s last chance to leave. “They’re only looking for me, but the longer you stick with me, the more at risk you are—besides, when are you going to go back?”
“I don’t know,” Barriss says without a trace of worry, “But I’m not leaving you until I know you’re safe.”
Ahsoka searches Barriss’s face for any hesitation, but Barriss speaks with as much conviction as she always has, a certainty that Ahsoka has always envied. Warmth floods her at the assurance in Barriss’s eyes. I’m not leaving you until I know you’re safe. She is the only one who hadn’t turned her back, and even now she refuses to. “Alright,” she says, the word heavy with feeling.
Barriss smiles that ever-fleeting smile that Ahsoka is always chasing, and grabs Ahsoka’s hand tight, pulling her through the door. Her long, thin fingers around Ahsoka’s wrist, the same fingers she’d curled in the air to choke the two people they are leaving behind.
Ahsoka lets herself be pulled.
Inside the ship, she pulls Barriss to her quickly, mindlessly, hands on Barriss’s shoulders. “We did it,” she says, “We’ve done it.”
Barriss’s eyes are bright, too, as the ramp closes behind them and the rustle of the outside dies out, leaving them with nothing but the sound of their breathing. “We still have to actually lift off.”
“But we did it—you did it. You got me out of there, and you got me here.” Ahsoka runs her eyes over Barriss’s face, drinking in her brilliance and her mystery. She can forgive Barriss for a few acts of desperation, she decides.
She leans up and kisses Barriss, relief and triumph rushing through her like a drug. Barriss freezes for a second, and then she puts her hands on the small of Ahsoka’s back, her hands on Ahsoka’s bare skin, and kisses her back carefully.
Barriss kisses like she does everything else: with complete certainty.
The day of the trial
Barriss’s plan works like clockwork. Ahsoka’s sitting on the edge of the bench, trying not to look as if she’s impatient or expecting anything, when the lights flicker off, on, off, and then everything is dark, the afterimage of the hallway lights still floating before Ahsoka’s eyes.
Ahsoka is able to grasp the bars of the window of her door easily, pulling it open and stepping into the hallway, suddenly crowded with people rushing every which way, all dark shadows. The only lights are the battery powered emergency lights that line the hallway sparsely, hardly enough to make out the figures that fill the hallway. She can hear the sound of dozens of people rushing from their cells and feel their movement through her montrals. Clanging metal footsteps, heavy thumps of doors sliding open, and the widely ignored shouts of the guards.
“Jailbreak,” one guard starts to say into his comlink, “Power outage. Please send assistance to—”
Someone snatches the link from his hand and crushes it underfoot.
Ahsoka darts through the confusion on light feet, winding her way to the stairs she was escorted down when the first locked her in here, one of many who have had the same idea. Some of the guards switch their blasters to stun and start firing blindly down the hallways, but the bright beams are easy to avoid if she sticks to the sides of the hallway, because they’re clearly trying to avoid hitting each other.
Together, the flood of people rush the stairs, and when the first person opens the door, light washes over them from the next floor, illuminating the crowd of criminals. “They’ve got power up here!” someone shouts, and the crowd changes direction, rushing back into the hallways, searching for the exits there, hurrying to be anywhere but where they are now. Ahsoka hangs back a moment as the upper floor erupts in shouts and comm messages, and then half a dozen guards rush down the stairs after the escaped criminals, immediately getting lost in the dark crowds along with everyone else.
Ahsoka slips through the door and finds herself in a hallway identical to her own: cells line the metal walls, control panels between each one, a number pad for the door. The hallway is, for now, empty of guards, the ones on duty having abandoned post, but she doesn’t know how long she has, her heart hammering so loudly in her ears, she’s half sure she won’t even hear the footsteps if more come running her way.
Quickly, she fumbles in her belt and pulls out the chip, slipping it into the insertion slot in the control panel of the nearest cell.
“Hey, let me out of here too, would you?” asks the prisoner, a blue Twi’lek, coming up to the bars and putting his face up against them.
The map begins to load, floor plans taking shape on the screen before her, first the whole building, then zooming in to her level. She clicks to the level below, searching for the exits, tunnels that lead to the surface. She finds one and memorizes the directions: halfway down her hallway, right and then straight past seven corridors, left once, and then down that hall, the only door that isn’t a door to a cell.
“Company’s coming,” the Twi’lek tells Ahsoka helpfully, and sure enough, she can feel the rushing movement of them in her montrals, several sets of footsteps coming down heavily on the floor around the corner.
Kriff.
Jabbing quickly at the control panel, Ahsoka ejects the chip and it falls neatly into the palm of her hand.
She runs.
Down the stairs, down the hallway, past guards and weaving through escaped criminals and dodging stun blasts, only slowing when she thinks she may be nearing the middle of the corridor, around twenty doors from the stairs. Unlike the quiet of the level above, this one is a wave of noise, chatter and comm static, shouting and thumping, the sound of scuffles breaking out blindly.
When the emergency lights lining the sides show a turn off in a new direction, she almost misses it in the cluster of feet blocking out the lights, but as she realizes several of them are heading into what should be a wall or a cell, she understands what’s going on and threads her way through the crowd. This time, she’s more attentive to each passing corner, watching for doorways by looking for where the lights turn out.
One, two, three, four…
When she reaches seven, she takes the left, and then she runs directly along the right wall, running her fingers down the doors, feeling for the barred windows of the cells. More than once, she nearly runs into a guard, who makes a grab for her as she passes, or turns his stun gun towards her. Once, she runs right into one, unable to make out his silhouette in time, and they fall against the wall, hard armor digging into her. He manages to get a hand around her arm, and she has to whirl, holding his arm back and throwing him over her shoulder so he lands hard, grip releasing as he hits the ground.
She stumbles on, door after door after door, barred window after barred window after barred window—
And then, finally, a door without a window, just smooth metal all the way from the ridge of one side of the doorway to the other. She runs her hand across it again just to be sure.
This is it. Just as the map said, she finds the doorway to the surface of the planet, and just like Barriss said, she finds Barriss waiting on the other side of it.
One day after the day of the trial
Ahsoka takes the pilot’s seat, Barriss the copilot’s, and only when they’ve flown far out, on the other side of one of Coruscant’s moons, does Ahsoka turn to Barriss. She keeps flying out, but the path ahead is clear so she can instead focus her attention on Barriss. She’s practiced at flying a Republic shuttle, though this is much smaller than what she is used to.
“We have to put in hyperspace coordinates,” she says. She means: where do we go from here?
Barriss clicks through the map, flicking through routes that they can jump to from here, and Ahsoka watches her. Barriss has relaxed, sitting back in the copilot’s seat, her hair tucked back under her headscarf. Ahsoka memorizes her face, wondering if this is the last time she sees Barriss. Once she’s somewhere safe, Barriss will go back to the Order and return to being the perfect padawan. She wonders what will happen to the other Barriss Offee that lives inside her, the one that will use the Dark Side on people in her way, who’ll steal a ship, who’ll bomb the power lines to a Republican jail to get a friend out.
She likes this Barriss better, the one who is more complicated and whom Ahsoka doesn’t entirely understand. Ahsoka wishes she had the time to understand this Barriss, too.
“Do you remember Wasskah?” Barriss asks eventually, “It’s in the Kashyyyk system.”
“Trandosha’s moon,” Ahsoka says. “I remember it, but the memories aren’t great.”
“I heard the stories.” Barriss taps around on the screen a few more times, finding the coordinates and the route. “I thought it might be good for us to go to the Mid-Rim, though. Neutral, relatively remote, not heavily populated.”
“Sounds like my place,” Ahsoka says. “Put it in.”
Barriss looks up at her, looking again as if she wishes she could say something but can’t find how. Ahsoka wants to pry it out of her, but she sets them up for hyperspeed first, veering around Coruscant’s last moon as Barriss enters the coordinates without a word.
“Alright,” Barriss says softly. “We’re ready.”
Pulling the lever feels in some way like a final act, saying goodbye, and Ahsoka doesn’t want to do it. She wants to take Barriss by both hands and—she’s not sure what. She wants answers. She wants to spend each day with Barriss until she understands, or maybe she just wants to spend every day watching Barriss move and trying to catch that ephemeral smile in her hands. Once they’re in hyperspace, it’ll hardly be any time before they’re at Wasskah, and then Barriss will be gone.
“We’re ready?” Ahsoka asks, stalling. Some ridiculous part of her thinks she can win an eternity moment by moment, just dragging this moment out.
“Yes,” Barriss says, watching Ahsoka grip the lever. Only when Ahsoka begins to pull it does Barriss say, “Wait.”
Ahsoka stills. “Wait?”
Barriss closes her eyes, her lashes thick and dark against her cheeks, and for a moment, Ahsoka thinks Barriss is really going to say whatever she’s been meaning to tell Ahsoka this whole time. Barriss says, “How long is the trip?”
Ahsoka waits a second or two, for Barriss to change her mind. Say something else. When nothing comes, she answers, “A little under ten hours.”
“Alright.”
“Settle in,” Ahsoka says, and pulls the lever.
The engines whirr below them, the stars begin to blur, and then with a crack, they’re shooting through space, light whirling around them in the endless dark.
In the ship, everything is still. The cockpit is cramped, and the space behind it is nothing but a small booth with padded seats, a trapdoor to the wiring in the floor and swing-open compartments in the walls—one of the first things Ahsoka noticed as she began to fly is that the ship had been altered slightly for smuggling. All the compartments are empty, though, nothing rolling around in the back, nothing but silence in the air.
“Barriss.” Ahsoka turns fully towards Barriss this time, no longer needed to pilot the ship, and Barriss turns towards her too, watching her with those dark blue eyes. “What is it?”
Barriss looks away again, out the window to the blur of the galaxy passing by. “Did you wonder why I was so determined to help you?” she asks. The light of the stars dances in her eyes, makes her skin shine, and Ahsoka wants to touch her. Nothing more than that. Just to reach out and feel how real she is under Ahsoka’s hands. “Even General Skywalker wouldn’t do this.”
“I don’t know, he can be pretty reckless,” Ahsoka points out, unsure how to answer Barriss’s question. Of course she wondered, that’s why she’s given Barriss more opportunities to leave than she can count, but if Barriss is here, then Barriss is here, and she doesn’t want to spend too much time questioning it.
That tiny smile surfaces on Barriss’s expression again. “You must get it from him.”
Ahsoka bites the inside of her cheek, reminds herself to be patient, but the question escapes her anyway: “So why did you do so much to help me, then?”
Barriss draws in a long, long breath and drops her head back against the back of her chair. Eyes closed, she says, “It was me.”
“It was you,” Ahsoka echoes, unsure what to make of this. “What was?”
Barriss brow furrows and she swallows hard, but doesn’t open her eyes. “The bombing.”
Everything seems to go still.
The bombing.
Ahsoka tries to say, of the power lines to the jail? But she can’t make her mouth move, can’t get her tongue to say the words, because she knows that’s not what Barriss is talking about.
“I killed Letta,” Barriss adds, as if she knows Ahsoka needs further evidence that she’s not talking about breaking Ahsoka out. “And I couldn’t let you take the fall.”
Ahsoka can do nothing but stare at Barriss, at her smooth skin and the diamonds across her nose, at those long, delicate fingers that have Force choked three people and—it must’ve been her—wielded Ventress’s lightsabers. Her long, lithe figure and the deft, clean way she fought, just like the figure from Ahsoka’s duel.
Barriss opens her eyes and looks at Ahsoka, her usual impassive expression replaced with wide, worried eyes, a partly open mouth; she’s visibly regulating her breathing, pulling in deep lungfuls of air as if she has to remind herself to do it.
Eventually, Ahsoka gets out one word. “Why?”
Barriss’s eyes drop. She isn’t fiddling, but she’s clutching her hands together tightly in her lap. “Why did I bomb the temple?”
Why everything—why did she bomb the temple, why did she pretend to be helping Ahsoka when she was actually framing her, why did she change her mind, why are they here now—but Ahsoka can only manage a nod.
“I thought it would change something,” Barriss says quietly. She’s running her thumb over the back of her own hand and watching the movement. “The Jedi have become… something they were never meant to be. We’re supposed to be peacekeepers, aren’t we? And somehow we’ve become generals in a galactic war? What does that mean for us? What does it mean to be a Jedi anymore? That’s not the Order I was raised to believe in and it’s not one I want to be part of anymore. I thought if I… I thought showing the Jedi what it looked like, having violence where there should be peace…” She taps her thumb against the back of her hand. She doesn’t finish the rest of her sentence.
“And me?” Ahsoka asks, so softly she worries Barriss won’t hear them. She doesn’t have it in her to ask again if Barriss didn’t hear her the first time. She isn’t sure enough that she wants to know.
Barriss does hear her though. Her head tips slightly in acknowledgement, though she doesn’t speak immediately. Her eyes lift to Ahsoka’s face, darting across it as if the answer she’s looking for is there. “You were easiest to frame. And when you went into Letta’s cell to question her, it was—” Her voice falters. She whispers the next words. “It was so easy to kill her.”
“It was easy to kill her,” Ahsoka echoes, her voice returning to her at once, harsh and loud. She remembers Letta struggling in the air, gasping and kicking, and the explosion of panic she felt. She was so close to getting information when Letta began to choke, and disappointment took hold even before alarm. She remembers how she raised her hands up, trying to bring Letta down, wishing she could somehow counteract the Force choke—but that wasn’t how it worked—and watching Letta crumple at her feet.
Barriss doesn’t respond to this, still gazing at Ahsoka. She continues in her slow, whispery voice, “And then I realized I couldn’t let that happen to you. I wasn’t capable of watching you get hurt. If I could put one thing right, it was this.”
“I guess you knew I was innocent,” Ahsoka says.
Barriss looks out the window for a long time, and Ahsoka doesn’t push her to say anything more. She’s said enough to leave Ahsoka feeling more lost and empty than she ever has before. She’s adrift in space with a murderer and a bomber and she can’t escape. She’s adrift in space next to the girl she longs for the way she’s never longed for anyone else, and she can’t escape.
“You should sleep,” Barriss says eventually. Ahsoka doesn’t have the energy to protest. She stands, moves to the back of the ship, and lays down on the padded seats, staring up at the ceiling of the ship and remembering sleeping next to Barriss in a proper bed just last night. The memory feels unreal, like if she lingers on it, it’ll dissolve like so much smoke.
She doesn’t sleep, though. She just stares at the ceiling, remembering Barriss trading CIS credits and pinning the Besalisk to the wall, spinning Ventress’s red sabers in her hands as if they belonged to her, dragging her hand down Ahsoka’s bare arm with a metal chip held between her fingers. She remembers the feel of Barriss’s mouth and the sharp look in her eyes as she watched the man in the helmet writhe in the air.
The day of the trial
“Looks good,” Ahsoka says, laying her things by the bed and stepping up to the window that overlooks the bustling city center. The room has a kitchenette and a wooden table, and a bed wide enough to comfortably fit two. She wouldn’t mind if it was smaller, she thinks, imagining her shoulder pressed to Barriss’s, waking up with her arm accidentally cast over Barriss’s stomach. She imagines learning what Barriss looks like when she sleeps and finding out whether she snores when she’s extra tired. “Were those all your credits?”
“Nearly,” Barriss tells her, “But you have a few, don’t you?”
“A few, nothing much,” Ahsoka says. “I wouldn’t rely on them. It’s enough to get me a ride somewhere far, but that’s about it.”
“We should leave tomorrow then,” Barriss decides, “We don’t have the credits for another night here.”
The sun is down and two of the moons are out, illuminating the room even when Barriss turns out the lights for the night, stretching in the moonlight. Even after nightfall, traffic rushes through Coruscant, a city too busy to pause when the sun goes down.
Ahsoka hesitates only a moment before pulling off her belt—she’s too tired to worry about propriety and the belt will dig into her if she sleeps on it. Out of the corner of her eye, she can see Barriss pulling at her clothing too, her black layers falling to the floor quietly.
“Warm night?” she asks.
“I think so.”
When they slide beneath the thin covers, it takes everything in Ahsoka not to look at Barriss, see the shape of her in her thin black undershirt and pants. Instead, she stares at the ceiling as Barriss reaches up, pulling off the scarf that covers her hair and letting that drop with the rest of her clothes on the floor beside the bed.
Barriss turns on her side to face Ahsoka when the blanket is pulled safely up to their necks, the movement shifting Ahsoka too. Her stomach tumbles as Barriss’s knee accidentally brushes the back of her calves, and her skin tingles with the knowledge that Barriss is looking at her without saying anything. She doesn’t move.
“Did you ever think about leaving the Order?” Barriss asks her, in the soft, confessional voice that only comes out at night. “Did you ever wonder what that might be like?”
Ahsoka turns on her side to gaze back at Barriss. It feels like nothing counts if it happens under the cover of darkness, so she admits, “Yeah, I did. I’ve always wondered.”
“What did you imagine?” The moonlight gleams on Barriss’s light green skin. She looks perfectly constructed like this, unreal.
Ahsoka shakes her head, unsure where to start. She’s imagined what life would be like if she never got brought into the Order, and the possibilities there are endless, though the reality is that she’d probably have been killed in the battle Plo Koon rescued her from. On the worst days, though, when she was forced to take drastic, violent actions to save her men, times when she felt so careless with life that she may as well not be a Jedi at all, she thought about what it might be like to leave. What would it be like to know how to use the Force but not be on the front lines, leading clones to their deaths as if they were nothing more than chips to bet with?
“I imagine being somewhere far from here,” she settles on, “Not a city, but a world where there are still new things to explore, somewhere I can solve my problems without my lightsaber.”
Barriss smiles, a rare, beautiful thing. “That sounds lovely.”
“Do you?”
The smile drops away. “Yes,” Barriss says, rolling onto her back to look at the ceiling. “Sometimes I want to so much that I just wish they’d exile me and take the decision out of my hands.”
Under the covers, Ahsoka reaches out and takes Barriss’s hand, squeezing it. Usually, Barriss’s skin is cold to the touch, but with them both under the blankets, they feel just the same, skin against skin.
“They aren’t that bad.”
Barriss lifts her hand and waves it at the curtains, pulling them shut over the window. “Go to sleep, Ahsoka.”
Two days after the day of the trial
Ahsoka finds Barriss still sitting in the copilot’s seat, her knees tucked to her chest, when she gives up on sleeping and goes back to the cockpit. Barriss is still watching the stars; she doesn’t look like she’s done anything else for the past few hours as Ahsoka stared at the ceiling and tried to lose herself in sleep.
“Are you going back to the Order?” she asks.
It’s the one thing she kept coming back to, again and again. She wondered why Barriss bombed the temple, but she knew. She wondered why Barriss was so compelled to come help her, but she thinks she understands that, too. There’s something that draws Ahsoka towards Barriss again and again that she suspects Barriss shares. She can feel it when they look at each other, humming quietly between them.
She wondered if Barriss regretted it, but as soon as she had the thought, she knew the answer. Of course she did. And as small as it was, Ahsoka couldn’t even bring herself to hurt Barriss by asking.
But she wondered: was Barriss going to go back? And she keeps wondering. She could; no one knows it was her, she has a ship, and she’s hardly been gone a couple days. She’s a model Padawan, the one every master told their own padawans about, and she’s on her way to becoming like Luminara: balanced and collected, fair and pragmatic. She hasn’t said anything about leaving the Order.
But then, Ahsoka can’t recall her ever saying anything about staying either, Ahsoka just assumed she would and Barriss never said anything to make her suspect otherwise. Nothing but that she clearly hates it.
Barriss looks up at her. Sitting like that in front of the wide window with her big eyes and unhappy mouth, she looks incredibly small and young. Neither of them even reached knighthood.
“I don’t know,” she says.
“You don’t know.”
“I’ll go somewhere else, another neutral planet, and never go back.” Barriss taps her thumb against the back of her hand again. “Perhaps send Master Luminara something to let her know I’m okay. I can do the same for you.”
Ahsoka studies her. “So, no, you aren’t going back.”
Barriss shakes her head. “I can’t.”
“You could.” Barriss could, but Ahsoka truly can’t. She is a wanted criminal and has been stripped of her padawan braid, and it rankles her to hear Barriss speak as if they share the same options.
“I don’t want to,” Barriss amends. She’s quiet for a moment. “Are you going to be okay?”
Ahsoka closes her eyes, but she still sees Barriss—Barriss in bed beside her, the look on Barriss’s face when she met Ahsoka’s eyes and released the Besalisk, the way she said I wasn’t capable of watching you get hurt. She opens her eyes and stares into the passing stars, each one putting them farther away from the Order. She can hardly believe herself, but she says, “Stay with me, then. On Wasskah.”
Barriss’s mouth opens, then closes. She turns her chair to Ahsoka and searches her face. “Why?”
“I don’t know,” Ahsoka says, but it doesn’t feel true. “I want to understand you.” That’s close enough to be true, close enough for Barriss to understand what she means.
“I do too.” Barriss stares out at the stars, too. “Do you think you ever will?”
Ahsoka’s uneasiness settles down as she brushes a hand over Barriss’s shoulder. “You’d better sleep,” she says, instead of answering.
And Barriss smiles.