The Heavy Center

Barycenter - the center of mass around which two or more celestial bodies orbit; from Ancient Greek, “heavy center.”

Chapter One - Prologue - Anakin

Anakin’s heart plummets in the dark and winks out with Master Windu’s body. He has killed, he has killed, if you asked Anakin Skywalker how many people he has killed he could not tell you. None of those deaths have felt like accidents--not even the Tuskans on Tatooine. He has intended them. He has embraced them. His face has flushed and he has clenched his jaw and refused to regret what threatens to overwhelm him.

But he didn’t intend this. He did not intend for all these years of howling frustration and indignation against the implacable Master Windu to end like this. Anakin can hate with all his power, but unknown to himself, Anakin has always held close the reassurance that Master Windu is unbreakable.That has ended now, and Anakin has ended it. One of the most powerful Jedi in the galaxy has been reduced to a scream, his Force-sure body reduced to a falling object with the Force ripped out of it.

Anakin is shrinking away within the confines of his own horror. His dear friend, Chancellor Palpatine, is speaking to him from thousands of miles away. He is the Sith. He is speaking out from an unrecognizable face. None of this feels real--and then, something else cuts through him, and that thing is real.

Padmé is gone. She’s gone.

The Chancellor is talking about the Jedi, about next steps and the inevitable, and Anakin is blank white terror behind his own bloodless face. None of this matters. Padmé is not on Coruscant.

“She’s gone,” he croaks, interrupting. The Chancellor does not like this, but Anakin doesn’t notice. How can he save her, if she is not on Coruscant?

“Who?” Palpatine snaps, irritated to be cut off at the climax.

“Padmé,” Anakin whispers, and then more loudly, “Padmé. Where is Padmé? Padmé isn’t here. Padmé is gone. Where is she?”

“Get a grip on yourself,” says the Chancellor. Lord Sidious. Oh, no, no. Not very gently, Palpatine says, “Anakin. Listen to me. You would know if Padmé was dead--wouldn’t you?”

Anakin meets his eyes, and something in those depths contains...not the kindness Anakin used to see there, but understanding. More even than before.

“Yes,” Palpatine encourages him. “You would know. I can find her, Anakin. I have many resources. I can spare them, even as wretched as I appear now--but you, you must not let this moment slip from us. You must go to the temple and end the Jedi threat, and then to Mustafar, to strike down the Separatists. There is no time for weeping or distraction. Do you understand? We will find her, Anakin, but you must obey.”

Anakin makes his mouth move, “Yes, my lord,” he says.

“Good,” says Palpatine. “Then come here and kneel, and I will tell you your name.”

Anakin’s body moves of its own accord, but poorly. He is still furiously scrabbling through his thoughts for anything like sense.

“Obi-Wan,” he says numbly.

“Kenobi?” Palpatine says distastefully.

“He must have conspired with her,” Anakin says. He thinks of all the things Padmé said, he thinks of Obi-Wan’s voice, crying Padmé’s name in Anakin’s nightmares. Don’t give up, Padmé. Anakin is falling. Everything is falling at once. “He must have helped her get away from me. They conspired against me.”

“Well,” says Palpatine. “Soon Kenobi, at least, will not be your problem anymore.”

“No,” Anakin manages to say, one thought now very clear. The implied threat of Obi-Wan’s death doesn’t trouble him, and why should it, if Obi-Wan is a traitor? Anakin explains, “Obi-Wan has to live. He will help me get Padmé back.” He looks straight at Palpatine, although it’s difficult. “He has to live,” he says firmly, although his voice is shaking. His foundations are shaking.

“Then so he shall,” agrees Palpatine. “Come now, my boy. Before me. You have work to do.”

Chapter Two - Padmé

Tears are necessary. Padmé learned young that to appear immoveable and uncrackable where you need to, you must make the time to move and crack when you can. Steadiness requires movement. Living is a long pattern of breakage and repair. So, she does cry. It helps her, because it keeps that moment of certainty locked at the center of her thoughts and feelings.

What she had felt, as she stared across the city in its melting light, was Anakin. She knew him; that part wasn’t strange. She always knows the shape and warmth of Anakin at a distance, across any distance. Who doesn’t have a sense of their loved ones, wherever they walk? Everybody carries the heartbeat of her people in her own veins.

What she had felt in Anakin--it was that. That’s why she cries, and that’s why her heart is tearing itself apart in fear and haste, and that’s why she is flying, faster and more lightly than she has ever flown in her life. She’d already been boarding her ship when she called for Obi-Wan, but Obi-Wan didn’t answer. She was already in the air, swallowing dread, when she called for Bail Organa, who did. It was her idea to run, and Bail’s idea that she run for Alderaan. She hopes he’s right about that idea. He’s very fond of his home planet, enough that maybe sometimes he overestimates it. Just a little.

When her course is set, Padmé calls those of her handmaidens that she can still reach. That’s the first step--marshaling the first, dispersed forces that might still be at her disposal. She doesn’t know what help she’s going to need, yet. She doesn’t know how bad it’s going to be. She knows that she’s going to need something, though, so she calls the women she loves and trusts with all her heart and hopes that they answer, like hands clasping hers halfway across the galaxy. They do answer--not all of them, but enough to fill her heart–and the ones that answer tell her they will step out of their lives and back into hers, the instant she gives the order.

That’s when Padmé cries. She says goodbye, then leans over the controls and keeps her eyes straight ahead, her ears intent on any message, any warning, any sign. The worst case: that she’s being followed. Or the best case: that Obi-Wan is calling her home, because everything is all right. And on top of that, she cries, eyes streaming, voice sobbing.

It isn’t all right. She knows that. Padmé has watched her planet, under her governance, fall to war and chaos. She has watched this Senate squabble, pinch, and murder. She has watched them cower. She’s seen Sheev Palpatine stand expressionless, prepared to execute Ahsoka, of all people, without a moment’s doubt. Or--not doubt. That’s what is so terrifying about Anakin, now, Anakin and his icy belief in what the Chancellor has told him. Padmé doesn’t think Ahsoka almost died because Palpatine wanted justice. She almost died, Padmé thinks, because Palpatine was inclined to kill her.

And Anakin--she knows him. She knows every remarkable part of him, every teasing, mischievous, unstoppable, loyal, loving, aching, hungry part of him. She knows, also, that he favors force over negotiation, and that he has walked out of the desert heavy with the blood of people he did not ever entirely apologize for slaughtering.

She knows what she felt in that moment: the darkness and terror inside him, boiling up until he wouldn’t have listened to the person he was ruining everything to save. She felt him--that--watching her, and it burned until she had to look away. That’s why she has to cry: because she, who cares about the universe on a grand and desperate scale, risked everything in the world to touch Anakin and be touched in return. And he’s gone. There’s a cold fire where he lived, and she knows without question that if she touches it, him, the only thing she wants to touch--it will kill her.

She stops crying long before she sees Alderaan. She flies alone, with clear sight, with the hope of her friends as a beacon in the dark. When the planet comes into sight, it seems so bright and clean and welcoming that she herself feels kind of like part of a nightmare. Salty and drab, and her whole body and mind are exhausted.

She lands where Bail directed her, and immediately a handful of people come out and usher her into a beautiful spired building, dripping with water and vines and shining in the daylight. They take her to a suite, as large as her apartments on Coruscant.

One of the attendants, a middle-aged man, says, “Please wait here, ma’am, she will see you soon, and then there will be time to settle in.” His solemn expression breaks with an encouraging smile, and he says, “I’ll even ask her to hurry.”

“Thank you,” Padmé says, although she’s taking a lot on faith, like knowing who he is and who he’s talking about and what she’s thanking him for.

While she waits to meet with Breha Organa, Padmé allows herself to survey herself, and her situation. The suite is nice, all silver and blue and gold, with white tile floors and gauzy curtains over high, steepled windows overlooking a deep, green valley. There’s a full sized bath and a bedchamber and a kitchen, although she’s guessing that most people who stay in these rooms get their food from the palace kitchen instead.

There’s a drawing room with a domed ceiling, spangled with stars, and dark blue plush sofas, with tassled deep red rugs piled across the floor. She settles there, trying not to fall asleep sitting up. Actually, as tired as she is, she’s not sure she can sleep; she has a really bad feeling in the pit of her stomach, and another bad feeling that says it’s not her stomach. This would be a stupid time to give birth, wouldn’t it? It feels too soon, but stress can make a difference. And interstellar travel.

Padmé has almost fallen asleep, bad feelings and all, when the doors open and someone calls, “Ma’am?”

“Yes,” says Padmé, and the doors open more fully, and the queen steps in. Padmé has only met her twice, and she’s always much more beautiful than Padmé is prepared for. She dresses with complex elegance that isn’t unfamiliar to Padmé, except she wears it more lightly than Queen Amidala ever did. Less cloth, less macquilage, less weight to her steps, more light to her gaze.

Padmé gets to her feet, unsteady. “Queen Breha,” she says.

“Senator Amidala,” says the queen. “Please don’t stand. You look like your feet are going to walk off without you.”

“Thank you, I think,” says Padmé with a smile. Sometimes, actually, she hates that she can smile through anything as long as it means being polite.

“You don’t have to do that either,” says Queen Breha. She looks Padmé over critically, as if trying to work out where to put her or how to fix her. “They’ll bring you something hot to drink,” she says. “Was the travel all right for you?”

“I feel a little off,” Padmé admits. She feels like her body is just about to do something she is absolutely not prepared to deal with.

“I’ll call my doctor,” says the queen. She smiles very briefly. “Although she’s more used to the trouble of me not having children, so you might be a bit of a surprise.”

“I’m fine,” Padmé says, then finds herself sitting down after all.

“Padmé,” says the queen, closer, suddenly. She’s really very pretty. That’s such a normal thought, and Padmé has such a normal, even physical reaction to it, that she almost bursts into tears again. She is here in a bright room with a beautiful, kind woman and very far away her own husband is destroying everything either of them has ever lived for.

“I’m fine,” she assures her again, unhelpfully.

The Queen turns her head and Padmé sees there are still two attendants nearby.

“My physician,” she says. The attendant nods and leaves. The queen sits next to Padmé and rests a hand on her back. “My husband has not told me much. Only enough to know that it is serious.”

“What did he say?” Padmé asks. She can’t begin to grapple with a conversation like this if she doesn’t know which parts are already aired out.

“There is a very real threat of government collapse,” Queen Breha says slowly. “Your husband, a Jedi, is involved with it.”

That isn’t much, but it is serious. Everything in Padmé jolts and revolts. “Oh,” she says, half in response to Breha’s words, but half because of the furious kicking coming from inside. Someone else hasn’t liked this journey much.

She holds back the desire to ask, frantically, how Bail told his wife about her marriage. Shocked, or disgusted, or merely confused. Why in secret, to a Jedi? She’s held that secret for so long, and to have it come out like this is worse than the other very realistic things she has imagined.

“I expect to hear more soon,” says the queen. She shakes her head. “I am sorry that such a hard thing has happened to you. I am sorry that soon, it’s very likely, hard things will come to all of us.”

“We’ve already been in a war,” Padmé says, trying to sound even a little humorous and rueful.

“Yes,” Breha says. “Harder than that.”

While they wait for the doctor, and an attendant draws a bath for Padmé, she tries to contact Obi-Wan again. There isn’t any answer. After the doctor has seen her--she isn’t giving birth at this second, anyway--and she’s bathed and dressed in clothes borrowed from an attendant who has recently given birth, and eaten something, there’s nothing to do but wait.

She doesn’t wait that long, although it feels like it. The fear, the sense of a bad thing getting worse and worse, coils from Padmé’s stomach into her chest. She sits, but there isn’t anything else to do. Padmé is not made for waiting--even when she’s very still, she has to be solving a problem, she has to be making a plan.

After a time, by which time Padmé is trying hard not to pick apart the seams of the beautiful couch, Queen Breha comes back to the silence of Padmé’s borrowed suite. Her face is schooled but serious.

“No,” says Padmé. “What is it?”

“My husband has told me,” says the queen, “that war has ended, and the republic is no longer a republic.” She shuts her eyes for a moment, and then says, “According to the broadcasts, we have just become an empire, under the benevolent guidance of Emperor Palpatine. Truly a day of great change.”

“No,” says Padmé, halfway to her feet. She feels like she will be sick. “No, no.”

“It was announced in a special session of the Senate,” says the queen. “I believe that the intention is for the senate to remain intact. A courtesy for the member systems of a defunct republic, and a clever way to keep them under his thumb.” She exhales silently. “And I am sorry, Padmé,” she says, “but the Jedi are gone.”

“What do you mean?” Padmé asks, and now, she thinks, being sick is just a matter of time.

“The Emperor,” says Queen Breha, again with that light emphasis, “has declared them traitors, unilaterally. From the early reports, it seems that most of them--soon to be all of them--are dead.”

Padmé sinks back to sitting, numb with grief and horror. Anakin, she thinks. Anakin, Anakin. But she’s not afraid that he’s dead. She’d know that. She’d know it, even from here and even now. What she is afraid of is that the bright spark of him that always sits in the back of her chest is now a small smouldering thing. It tastes bad. And if the Jedi are dead, and he is alive, then he’s not a Jedi anymore.

“No,” she says again. Obi-Wan didn’t answer, she thinks, and it burns her. Obi-Wan, her old friend, didn’t answer her calls.

“I am sorry,” says the queen, in her quietly serious way. “I am sorry for all of us.”

Chapter Three - Obi-Wan

Obi-Wan is resting cheerfully on the knowledge that General Grievous has been broken down into flambé’d parts and is very unlikely to revive. Of course Obi-Wan is focused as well--they’re in battle. Even in a moment of such delightful triumph, he isn’t as giddy or foolhardy as he might have been when he was a little younger. But he can’t help but be pleased with himself. Blaster and all, it was rather well done.

He is climbing down from the talkative and very beautiful mount that has helped him out so very much when Cody calls out a greeting, brandishing Obi-Wan’s unlit lightsaber. Obi-Wan’s hand brushes the smooth, soft scales of his mount and he rediscovers solid ground. A good steed, but she’s given him a mild case of sea legs.

“Ah, Commander Cody, thank you!” Obi-Wan says.

“Not to worry, general,” says Cody, voice gruff and fuzzy through his helmet. “We’ve always got an eye out for you.”

Just as Obi-Wan reaches for his weapon, he’s hit by a heavy weight from behind. It knocks the breath out of him and he staggers forward with a grunt, practically into Cody’s chest. He only just understands that it’s not a bomb or a weapon: at least one body has flung itself against his back. Warm bodies, not droids.

“Hey,” he says, off balance and uncertain.

“Sorry, General,” Cody says coolly, and then everything becomes much clearer and much more nightmarishly unclear, as clone hands force his arms back, and he looks up at Cody’s armored face, and the butt of Obi-Wan’s own lightsaber comes rushing down towards his face.

Obi-Wan is hardly a lightweight, but a few things count against him: he’s just come from Grievous, he has not for a very long time even considered the possibility of treachery from the clones, and there many, many more of them than of him. He fights hard, blood on his face, but they overpower him, and it doesn’t take long. When he boards the Negotiator, it’s on legs that can’t quite hold him up, arms bound, jostled by his own silent men. He has to suppose they are his no longer. His vision is flickering dark.

He’s never been on this side of a laser gate in his own brig. His troops have never refused to look at him. No one sees to his injuries, so he hunches up and stops the blood with the edge of his tunic. It’s there that the rest of it finds him: this isn’t an anomaly, this isn’t a mutiny by his own beloved comrades alone. Obi-Wan’s people are dying, all across the galaxy. They are shocked and in pain and snuffing out, dozens by dozens. The force is here, but it’s stained. He is more and more alone.

Obi-Wan can’t help crying out. Even then the troopers guarding the cell don’t turn and look at him. They don’t say a word. Obi-Wan feels the inarguable truth and is trapped in here alone with it, unable to stop anything, unable to do anything but know it is happening. He feels every death like Qui-Gon over and over again, because they are dying and he is trapped apart from them, red glow all around him. There is no mercy.

There is no mercy. So he wonders, even then, why they are all dying and he is alive.

The Negotiator could be in orbit over Coruscant for any amount of time. Obi-Wan has put himself as best he can into one kind of trance while trying not to be sucked into the riptide of another. Time doesn’t pass like anything real, alone in the dark. It’s only marked by the change of his guard and their occasional coughs and stretches. Finally someone else comes down to the brig--a clone, from the footsteps. Cody.

Obi-Wan does not look up when Cody arrives. He only opens his eyes when Cody says his name. Kenobi. Not General, not Master, and certainly not Obi-Wan. Just “Kenobi.” It makes Obi-Wan think that the last time Cody addressed him by title, it was with irony, or cruelty. Cody is looking down at him, helmet off now. It doesn’t help to see his face. It hurts, actually. Obi-Wan gets to his feet steadily enough, remembers waiting on Geonosis for any moment to escape. He was calm, then, but it was only his death he faced, wasn’t it? At least--until Anakin and Padmé appeared, equally imperiled, from the shadows.

Where are Anakin and Padmé now? He hasn’t felt them die. He has not felt Anakin die.

They shuttle him down to the surface, bound and warned off speaking. At first, he doesn’t want to speak. He is still gradually allowing the scope of what has happened into his mind. Action doesn’t seem right for the moment, and he can’t imagine what action he should take when the moment comes.

That changes when he sees where they are going--the Jedi temple, so full of death and so comprehensively emptied of the living Force that the approach feels like a howling beast sinking rotten teeth into his flesh. He shouts and fights and they force him still. They can’t shut him up. They have to drag him from the shuttle into the dark halls of the temple. It’s death, and more death, crawling around him with accusation and terror. Why here? Why is he alive at all? He keeps wondering that, and he can’t imagine a single reason. His heart almost stops in his chest at something brushing by it. A darkness. It is familiar, and then, it is new: a twisted thing, absolutely charred with hate and fury.

“Anakin,” Obi-Wan says. “Anakin!”

He hasn’t felt Anakin die. That darkness--whatever it is is close to Anakin, and Obi-Wan is flooded with dread. He fights furiously against his guard--though injured, tied, and unarmed, he can still stand his own against twelve clone troopers. Even Cody he manages to knock off his feet, and Obi-Wan is on his feet and running when the terrible thing he has been sensing appears, stepping out from behind a cluster of huge, lush plants.

The plants carry a bright, fresh scent that makes meditation easier. Obi-Wan used to sit under these as a boy, when he was waiting for Qui-Gon to come out of long meetings with his fellow masters. Even in the night and the dread and the dark, they breathe, plant-paced, and tint the air with a peaceful scent.

It can’t stand up to this, though. It cannot stand against the way Anakin is looking at him.

“You’re alive,” Obi-Wan says stupidly, and more stupidly, “I’m so glad.”

“Where is she, Obi-Wan?” Anakin says. Who gave him these clothes? Darker than what he wore before, even. Softer and more elegant. He’s buried in this black cloak, one hand black-gloved and one pale emerging from the sleeves. His hands are empty, but he reverberates with threat. The clones have caught up to Obi-Wan.

“Who?” Obi-Wan says, more stupidly than anything else.

Anakin’s black-gloved hand, the artificial one that is also a part of him, slashes across the air, and Obi-Wan is flung hard to the ground. He coughs. His thoughts rush.

“I shouldn’t expect anything from you at all,” Anakin says. “And yet, I do. And I’m disappointed.”

“Your wife,” confirms Obi-Wan hoarsely. “She isn’t here?”

Anakin laughs. “Oh, you know about that, do you?” he says mirthlessly. “Yes, Obi-Wan. My wife. She’s gone, she’s part of this coup, because you led her away from me. You cost me my mother, you cost me my padawan, and now you cost me Padmé. So now out of the four of you, you’re the only one I’ve got. Can you imagine anything worse than that?”

“What happened to you?” Obi-Wan says, halfway to his feet. “Anakin, what is this? Anakin, where are the rest of the Jedi?”

The next blow strikes his whole body, and then he’s dangling above the ground, his throat constricting on nothing. Anakin’s fist slowly tightens.

“The Jedi,” he says carefully, “are dead. Those who are not dead will be hunted, and I will lead that hunt. So, Obi-Wan, you know what that means, right? The Jedi dead. The clones, loyal to the Emperor--”

Emperor? What has happened? What is happening?

“--and you, here, with me.” Anakin’s voice is so cold. Obi-Wan’s body is hurled against the marble walls, and the stone shudders his bones. He collapses to the floor with his vision blinking out. “You’ve cost me everything, Obi-Wan,” he hears Anakin say. “You’ve warped me, berated me, belittled me, coveted me since I was a child in pain. You used me, and you tried to keep from me the one thing--the one person--who has ever cured anything inside me. I’m going to hurt you until you give her back to me, Obi-Wan. And no one’s gonna show up to help you--you know why?”

Obi-Wan doesn’t know where Padmé is. Obi-Wan has never wanted any of the things Anakin is accusing him of. Obi-Wan looks up.

“Because the one that always saves your ass, old man,” Anakin says, “is me.”

There is nothing inside him, no spark of humor or forgiveness. His eyes are cold and pale and unfamiliar. This, above everything, is the worst thing Obi-Wan can imagine. This is the worst thing Obi-Wan has ever feared.

“Come on,” Anakin says. He turns to walk further down the hall. Without turning back, he says, “I’m going to hurt you now.”

Cody and the others take Obi-Wan’s arms to move him forward. There is absolutely nowhere else to go.

“Anakin?” Obi-Wan says, lost. He cannot have lost, not in so many ways at once. He can’t. More desperately, he says, “Anakin?”

“It isn’t my name, and I won’t answer to it,” Anakin says.

Obi-Wan soon learns what that means, and many other things. But nothing Obi-Wan says now or later, no amount of fear or love that he shows Anakin in the quiet, warm incongruously light-filled upper reaches of the Jedi temple, helps even in the slightest.

Chapter Four - Maul

Maul has been this furious before, of course. Broken and falling. Trapped in a cavernous nest of trash, deformed and hacked together. Feeling Savage’s spirit slip through his fingers at his old Master’s hand. Feeling freedom slip away after it. Kenobi, Kenobi, Kenobi. And now, Kenobi’s little grand-padawan is an outcast from her order, just like Maul.

He might be more sympathetic or impressed if he weren’t locked away in a standing coffin, gagged and furiously watching these mindless, pathetic toys of war chat and lean around and salute their former commander like their prisoner isn’t a living thing at all.

Then, something interesting and exciting and bad happens. Jedi...die? The weight of the Force shifts in the balance. Dark, dark. Dark is what he is, of course, but he is, before that, Dathomiri. He is aware that a slip in the balance in either direction could kill him. He is aware that a galaxy in collapse bodes ill for the empire he himself had planned.

This is what he has waited for. With patience. And then with dread.

His former master has plotted for so very long--the clones, the Jedi, the Senate. He has unscrewed the top on his bottle of poison, and it is flooding the galaxy now. If Maul did not hate him so much, if Maul had not hoped so much for a modicum of security, he might be impressed. As it is, he must rethink everything. Sidious was a threat to his well-being before; he is the only threat, now.

Maul has always been patient, regardless of the smoke and clamor inside him. Maul has always been able to think through pain. Forward motion, never ceasing. He plans now--separates his troubles into new strands, as Ahsoka Tano and her captain flee the ship. Reorders his list of concerns, as the ship erupts into conflict, and Maul’s own fate shifts in the balance. Considers the likelihoods of imprisonment and death, if he is not killed in what must be an imminent crash; the outcomes of escape, if it’s into a galaxy ruled by Sidious and his bottomless hunger.

Not good. Not any good for anyone, Maul included. He will have to escape, and then, he will need to do something very dangerous and violent. There is a very good chance that it will kill him; he is alone, and Sidious is powerful, and Anakin Skywalker must be worth something in a fight if Kenobi and Sidious and Ahsoka Tano all love him so much. Very well. You can only do what you can do.

He does what he can do here in this box, and tests his mental weight against his guards. They are not among the best and brightest of Ahsoka Tano’s former legion. He only needs a little patience to work on them, patience and the suggestion that the clones are better off with a Sith lord on their side with Ahsoka merrily gutting the place.

When he is free, he begins killing. He kills his way into the hangar and muscles through the threats, springs into a small craft on legs that need oiling, and vanishes on a breath into the deep reaches of space. He is halfway across the galaxy before Ahsoka’s battle with the clones has ended.

In the end, though Maul knows that speed and success are inextricably intertwined, he knows also that haste will make suicide a certainty rather than a possible outcome. He takes several days to creep across the stars, gathering what information has not already been crushed by the Emperor’s new order.

He thinks he has come up with the cleverest possible plan, all things considered: he will remain invisible on Coruscant just long enough to arm himself with the collective knowledge of the extinct Jedi. Then he will kill Sidious and Skywalker—Vader, as he seems to be.

The Jedi did not use their knowledge well, but Maul doesn’t believe for a moment that in the midst of war and chaos they did not have the slightest notion of their doom. There is a library in the temple, and the temple is now empty. A gift from them, from them to him. He lands in the darkness, and he breaks through the darkness. He feels the emptiness of the place; once filled with everything he reviled, now it is only dust and disappointment. There is not a single--

Maul stops where he stands.

“Now, that cannot be,” he murmurs to himself.

Kenobi? Kenobi?

Losing his focus would be terribly stupid, so Maul does not do that. The horrible itch of Kenobi--or his ghost, or the vile accidents of Maul’s sometimes self-punishing mind--he ignores, he drives back to the far corners of his thoughts while delves into the belly of the temple and plunders the library for every scrap.

The holocrons won’t submit to him, but there are things he can read, at least. When he has committed to memory everything he can find about Sidious, about Skywalker, about the great hall of the senate, Maul steals back up out of the caverns. He makes his way out circuitously, troubled by his own imaginings but confident that he is not yet in danger from anything real. He finds himself several of the discarded lightsabers of the dead, as well as a cloak that will cover him. By the time he emerges from the depths and into the daylight upstairs, he is certain of his plans. Behind his eyes, the blows he will strike to kill Skywalker and Sidious flash in saber-light.

The teasing bug of paranoia in his ear, however, won’t quiet. Its persistence builds like a headache. Kenobi, it whispers, urgent and harsh. Kenobi, Kenobi, Kenobi is here.

It’s a lie. He’s very often right about things that no one else believes, but he does not trust this--and even if it is true, Kenobi is the last person he needs in this moment. So, he doesn’t mean to do it. He is furious with himself, at the faithlessness of his limbs, even as he diverts from his path and bounds up the stairs, level by level. He is flabbergasted, tracking the scent of his old enemy like a mindless hound. Faster and faster he rises, drawn by the Force and against his will.

And then, at the top of the towers, he stops. His lungs blow, his breath stutters in his chest. He hears it: down this corridor, on the other side of a door, the utterly real sounds of a living creature. Not far from him. Not far at all.

It can’t be Kenobi, but Maul has come this far. Maul creeps along the corridor, a lightsaber slipping into his grip. His free hand reaches out to a door, sealed shut, painted pale gold, and he feels an almost pleasurable rush of anticipation. Whatever it is, it’s no Sith. An unslaughtered Padawan, perhaps. Something that will put this foolish ghost to rest.

Maul draws on the Force to blow the door down--and behind him a quiet scoffing sound.

“My Lord Maul,” says someone. His voice, Maul thinks, his voice sounds like the smell of fresh-cut wood. Maul bares his teeth and turns. There stands a young man, dressed in voluminous black, hair swept and curled around his ears. There is a scar across his eye, and one hand is covered in a slick black leather glove. The other hand grips a lightsaber. Maul did not sense him, but how?

“You will not beat me,” says Anakin Skywalker.

This is not the plan.

Maul has no choice in the moment, so he growls and springs, blades ignited. Kenobi’s lost apprentice fights better than his first master; Maul moves first, but he is pushed back almost immediately by quick footwork and brutal blows. This is a disaster, he realizes. This is the death of his plot. If he survives this, the edge of his surprise is already lost. Sidious will be more than ready for him.

He does not think of “if he kills Skywalker,” because he realizes only moments from his first attack that although they are both powerful fighters, Maul will, at best, leave this fight in a draw. Was Maul ever so powerful, or angry, or fluid with the Force? Skywalker’s hair sticks to the sweat on his forehead and he sends one of the pilfered lightsabers flying in one direction--Maul in the other. Maul hits the floor hard, and makes a decision.

He snarls, and he scrambles up, and he runs.

“You won’t escape me,” Skywalker says. Maul surely plans to do so. This is, of course, Skywalker’s home territory. It is laughable. Skywalker grew up in these halls, Skywalker learned peace and death in these rooms. Maul is alone, surrounded by ghosts who never would have saved him, and he is running. Around him echo the screams and threats of his old master’s new beloved. Skywalker is always a wall, a corner, a floor away.

And still, that one little ghost whispers to Maul.

Kenobi is here, it whispers. Maul snarls. It’s nonsensical, it’s stupid, it won’t help. He knows all of these things, with his rational mind. He loops back anyway. He cuts back through the complex, back up the stairs, chasing that ghost all the way to where Skywalker found him. The echoes of Skywalker’s voice hunt and taunt him. But Maul’s little ghost kicks up the volume, until he barrels down that same hall with it wailing in his blood. Limbs ache from contact with the floor, eyes dart in every direction for his enemy. He barely slows as he blows the golden door inwards by Force alone.

The door bursts through its locks and slams against the wall of the room inside. Light filters down through high windows, into what must have once been a beautiful room. It smells of violence now. And there--oh, what a funny, terrible, impossible thing!

It really is Kenobi.

For a precious few seconds, Maul’s mind reels, and refuses to carry him forward. No, Maul, no. Focus. Be deliberate. He checks for traps, dodges forward and puts fingertips to Kenobi’s throat. A laugh bubbles up in his own. Imagine any world in which he doesn’t touch Kenobi to choke the life out of him. There is breath in him still. Ah--he is moving. There is breath in him.

Maul evaluates. It is too late to kill Skywalker. It is far too late to kill Sidious. He could pretend that he has come to crawl at the Sith lord’s feet, but that would be distasteful, and Sidious would never believe it. Maul would die ashamed, and he doesn’t like that. Well, he is found out now. He took a chance and failed himself, and all he can do is make the most of what will someday, near or far, almost certainly mean his death.

If anyone in the galaxy knows how to fight and survive Skywalker--by whatever slim margin--it seems to be Obi-Wan Kenobi. So it’s Kenobi that Maul needs. This is not a good idea, it is not a wanted idea, but it’s the only idea.

“Kenobi,” he growls, and finds that he’s been staring into nowhere for a moment as he thinks. He looks down, at his hand still on Kenobi’s throat. Kenobi looks back up at him. Kenobi, so brave the first time they fought, and so afraid of him ever since.

“Trouble for me is trouble for you,” he murmurs. “Don’t fight, Kenobi.”

Kenobi does, but he is very weak, badly injured. From even one glance, Maul can see that they have tortured him for days. They? Skywalker, certainly. That malevolence. That darkness. It does not love Kenobi any longer. And besides that, Sidious would never have let Kenobi live unless it was to make sure Skywalker was the one to break him. That is the law of the Sith: not only to leave all things behind, but to kill and bury them yourself.

Maul puts his hand over Kenobi’s nose and mouth and holds him very, very tightly, tightly enough that they won’t be overheard, tightly enough that Kenobi sinks into his arms, heavy and unconscious.

“There,” says Maul quietly. “Agreeable at last and for once in your wretched life, Jedi.”

He hitches Kenobi’s limp body over his shoulders, bracing Kenobi’s leg with one hand, lightsaber ready in the other. He flees. He hears the hideous echoes of Skywalker’s voice, chasing them every step, and he runs, faster than he has ever run, until they are on his little shuttle, until they are flying far, far, far from the heart of the civilized galaxy.

Chapter Five - Padmé

It is one week of terrible news later that Padmé’s babies are born. She loves them instantly. She cries because their father isn’t here. All of the strange, bittersweet upbringings she has imagined for them seem so naive and tragic now. Their father, no more than a beloved friend of their mother’s? Their father, a disgraced and loving former Jedi? Oh, she had been stupid.

Padmé has always fashioned herself into the things she needs to be. She hopes, and believes, that her core is a solid thing, driven by integrity and by personal strength. But as set apart from others as she has ever been, strength is something that has been successfully managed through the people she has kept closest to her side.

Two days after the babies are born, they are still nameless, and she is by herself. She remains on Alderaan, but more than that, she remains in hiding--Breha’s physician and her attendants, Breha and Bail all know where Padmé is, but she’s otherwise solitary. Someone else’s attendants cannot be friends, and a queen cannot spare much time in secret intrigues. She is terribly lonely.

But she set something in motion during her flight from Coruscant, and two days after the babies are born, it comes to fruition. She feels a stirring in her heart, no long before; and then through the doors of her rooms come two attendants and the chatter of people who will not be held back. She’s alarmed for a moment, thinking that this is the end of her secret, maybe of her life.

It’s not that. It’s Sabé.

Sabé stops across the room, wrapped up in brick red trousers with a red felt scarf draped around her shoulders and arms. Sabé makes half a bow, her eyes fixed on Padmé’s.

“Oh,” says Padmé, on her feet, her voice cracking. Sabé rushes to her in total silence, and sweeps Padmé into the full, warm depths of her arms. Padmé had not known she felt so cold. She had not known she could feel warm again. The attendants step out, and Sabé’s arms crush Padmé--only at her chest, only at her shoulders, so characteristically careful of her friend who has just given birth. Padmé does not want to break down, never once in her life has she wanted that. She pulls back, against every urge of her body and heart, and points to the low crib where both babies sleep.

“Look at them,” she tells Sabé. She means to sound excited, but she sounds heartbroken more than anything else. “I didn’t name them yet, Sabé. Maybe you can help me.”

“Oh, my queen,” says Sabé gently. She doesn’t hold Padmé tightly, but Padmé can feel the strength of her. It’s too much all at once.

Padmé says, “I have to give them names,” and bursts into tears.

Sabé holds Padmé for a long time before they stickily break apart.

“I could use something to drink,” Sabé says, and smiles. “I’m allowed to be that forward with you now, aren’t I?”

“Oh! Of course you are,” says Padmé. “Well, you know you. You always have been, when we were--not working.”

“Mm,” says Sabé peaceably. There is laughter under her breath, warm and dark as always. “I think we may be working again very soon.”

“Yes,” says Padmé. She breathes past the wave of exhaustion that creeps up on her at that. “But very differently now. No more queen. No more senator.”

“No, maybe not,” says Sabé. “We’ll still need leadership, of course. But there’s enough of that talk to fill days, isn’t there? Padmé--I am here because you need me. And because I was...I was very afraid that I would never find you in all this mess. Not before it was too late.”

“The Empire,” says Padmé. If she gives the word the same weight as a natural cataclysm, she means it--except that it’s such an unnatural one.

“We are all in a very bad position,” says Sabé. “Every world is on the edge of collapse. We’re all caught in the jaws of an enormously big beast, except only its jaws keep us from falling apart.”

Padmé shudders. “That’s a way to put things.”

“I wish it wasn’t,” Sabé says, so sincerely that Padmé has to laugh.

“But we’re not going to sink before we ever try to swim, are we, Sabé?” she says.

“No, of course we aren’t,” says Sabé. “Do you think I’ve spent the last years destroying the lives of slavers to let that horrible little worm case rob us all of freedom?”

“Worm case…” says Padmé, and laughs harder. “Sabé, I miss you so much,” she says. “So much.”

“You don’t have to miss me now,” says Sabé. “I am here, and I’m not a shy little girl, either. I suppose we’ve both seen things, the last few years.” She picks up Padmé’s hand in hers, then turns them so that her hand is sitting in Padmé’s, palm up. There is a vicious scar across it, long-healed.

“Seen, and what else?” Padmé says quietly.

“Well,” says Sabé. “You did not want me to be only an observer. And neither have I wanted that.”

“Do you think--?” starts Padmé, but although now is the time for action, this isn’t the moment of it.

Sabé's schooled expression glows with affection.

“Show me these children of yours,” she says. “Nameless--Padmé, be serious.” The admonishment doesn’t hit hard, especially when Sabé bends down and comes up again with one baby scooped into each strong arm.

Sabé’s skin has darkened from outdoor work, her body broader and movements smoother than when she lived a palace life. Padmé sent her into the fate that has changed her like this. Padmé hopes that Sabé likes this version of herself as much as Padmé likes her.

“You must have had ideas, I know you,” Sabé prods, bouncing the babies softly in her arms. I know you. What names were you going to tell your husband?”

“Oh,” says Padmé wretchedly. “Oh, Luke. Leia, and Luke. Or--I didn’t think about that until the last few days. I don’t know. I’m not sure I like them.”

Sabé arches an eyebrow. “The names, or the babies?”

“Sabé,” Padmé protests, blinking damp eyes.

“I think they’re very good names,” Sabé says. She sits gracefully on the plush couch and arranges the babies around herself. Padmé slowly settles next to her, suddenly afraid to touch her own children, even more than she is to touch her friend.

“Luke and Leia,” says Sabé quietly. “You won’t be anything like either of your parents, will you? That’s how it is with children.”

Padmé’s heart rushes, and she scoops Luke up from Sabé’s grip. Of course she can already tell them apart, named or not. What else has she got to look at? What else has she got to love? And how could she possibly be so afraid of this gift, when she’s faced so many truly, actually terrible things? She holds her little son close and feels the grief drip down the back of her throat. Sabé whispers to Leia, and doesn’t ask for a drink again until Padmé has raised her head and the tight pain of her chest has begun to ease.

When they’re sitting close to each other, nestled in with a baby each, warm drinks settling in their stomachs, Padmé says, “I didn’t call you here because I was sad.”

“No? You are sad,” says Sabé.

“Yes,” Padmé acknowledges.

“And that would have been almost enough,” Sabé says, with a slight quirk to her mouth.“But that’s not why I’m here.”

“No,” says Padmé.

“At your quietest, you always had a plan,” says Sabé.

“An intention, anyway,” Padmé says. “I haven’t known enough before now to even begin to make a plan.”

“Now?”

“I’m getting the hang of it,” says Padmé. She brushes the slightest curl of baby-hair across Leia’s forehead. “The new emperor’s new right-hand man--Vader. That’s Anakin. Their father. My husband.”

She dares to glance up, to face Sabé’s judgment, or shock, or pity, at any part of this explanation. But Sabé gives her none of this. She only nods for Padmé to continue, eyes troubled but so steady.

Padmé exhales. “He’s being applauded as the only Jedi to stand against the treason of his order. As a killer, in other words.”

“That doesn’t suit you,” Sabé says, understating valiantly.

“No, it really doesn’t,” says Padmé. “So I won’t go back, of course. I don’t know what would happen to us if I did.”

“You want to remain in secret?” Sabé asks.

“I don’t prefer it,” says Padmé. “But I think it’s better. I need to build a network of contacts. I need to know that if our society has crumbled, there are still things we can do, people we can help, a future we can hope for.”

Sabé is looking at Padmé with an odd smile, her hand resting very lightly on Luke’s tiny chest.

“What?” Padmé says. “Too fast? I don’t really think we have a lot of time to waste…”

“Not too fast at all,” Sabé says. “I like it. I can help. Once we know who our people are, that will make it easier to know what we can hope to accomplish.”

Padmé nods, more enthusiastic now. She levers herself upright on the couch and counts off on her fingers. “There will be people among the separatists and neutral worlds. I lost my closest friends there, but some remain. Saw Gerrera, on Onderon...outer rim systems…”

“Anyone closer to home?” Sabé asks. “Closer to you?”

Padmé falters. “I don’t know,” she says. “Obi-Wan--you remember Obi-Wan?” Of course she does. “--he never answered my calls, before I left Coruscant. I don’t know how to hope.”

Sabé says, “Then we’ll start with what you can hope for. I have plenty of contacts. Will Queen Breha and the senator help?”

“I think so,” says Padmé. Although she already knows she can’t hide in their palace forever. “When Bail comes home from Coruscant, we will sort it out. But they’re no happier than we are.”

“Anyone who is, I wouldn’t mind punching right in the face,” says Sabé. Padmé half gasps in grateful surprise.

“Oh, Sabé,” she says. “You know, me too. Not that people can’t be happy. But they’d better not be happy about this!”

“If anyone is happy with the creation of this empire, it’s not because the empire will serve them,” Sabé says. “It’ll be because the empire will hurt the people they don’t like even more than it’ll hurt them.”

“Sometimes I think our training made us too similar,” says Padmé. “But that’s a stupid worry. I can tell that working together will not be looking in a mirror. It’s good. We can’t afford a single weakness.”

“You won’t have that, my queen,” Sabé says.

“I’m not,” says Padmé.

“Padmé,” says Sabé as if correcting herself, but her warm, deep voice makes Padmé’s name royal all on its own.

Chapter Six - Maul

Maul’s quick, keen thinking unravels away from him more the farther they fly. Having his nemesis of so long so close to him makes his skin crawl and his breath catch in pants of anxiety every time Maul remembers him. Besides that: if he was not in very terrible danger from the new Sith lords-of-the-galaxy before Coruscant, he is now. They will hunt him, and hunt, and hunt…

His old haunts are lost to him. Dathomir is lost. Mandalore is lost. He must go far, and he must go in secret.

It is a funny thing about the civilized galaxy that the longest journeys take the shortest time. You can cross between a dozen star systems in the time it takes to walk through a city quarter. In the time it takes to calm and saddle a mount. In the time it takes to kill fifty people by hand, one at a time. So it’s not too long after he has set his mind on a course that NaJedha appears before them, the smudge of the Pilgrim Moon rising up from its far reaches.

That is his destination.

Maul has never had time or attention for the Guardians of the Whills. They have been irrelevant, though he has known their name for many years. Mother Talzin, regaling Maul and his brothers with Force lore across the galaxy. Not to broaden their minds, no--to narrow them, until Dathomir was all they could see.

How well that worked out for all of them.

Maul jettisons the hyperdrive ring on the far side of the planet and lands on the moon inconspicuously, narrowing in on a cave well outside the holy city. His bones ache, his leg joints creak, just thinking of the wretchedness of dragging both their pathetic corpses across any expanse of desert.

But there is no use in howling into the dark. He has strong legs, aching or not, and he has had to build a strong back. He ties Kenobi’s hands together, folded against his chest so he cannot wake up and throttle Maul. He tears his own pilfered cloak into strips that strap Kenobi’s heavy body onto Maul’s back. He breaks the emergency water source out of the wall of the ship, hooks it to his hip, and settles in not to be annoyed by its thumping him in time to his steps.

Kenobi moans softly, but Maul is hardly going to undo his work to check on him, just to do then what he was going to do already.

“Very good, Kenobi,” he mutters. “If you can moan, you can breathe.”

He starts across the dirt, sand and rock.

He must threaten a creature or two on their way, but nothing they encounter is more formidable than Maul himself, not more formidable than the cold, dry air. The city itself is more dangerous than any desert creature. He waits on the outskirts, until the dark comes. He unties Kenobi, forces water down his throat and checks that none of his wounds will kill him before they reach the possibility of help. He holds Kenobi’s hands between his own until they are warm.

When the sky is black, he takes Kenobi up on his back again and tugs Kenobi’s cloak fully over both of them. Without a closer look, they will look like a man carrying a large pack, nothing more. He feels terrible urgency, but he does not let himself show it. They make their way to the holy temple at a speed that shows tired feet and no need to rush.

Maul, by this time, feels the cold with a deep, stinging ache that plunders him to the bones. When he comes to the door, his whole body shivers with cold and exhaustion. He tries to hide the sharp, grinning grimace that his mouth wants to twist itself into. He must not look more like an aggressor than he has to. People do make assumptions, and he is...known.

The monk who sits at the top of the steps leading into the Temple of the Kyber is not as lackadaisical as he seems at a far glance. When he sees Maul, his posture tightens, and a hand curls around the staff lying next to him on the steps. Maul climbs the shallow steps with great effort, wanting little more than to scream into the sky, throw down his burden and run into the night. No one would find him there. No one would find him. (Oh, of course they would.)

He is very close to the monk, who remains seated, before he realizes the man is blind. At home in the Force, then, if he knows Maul for a threat from so far away, and if he is set to guard such a precious door.

The monk rises, alert but not alarmed.

“Welcome pilgrims,” he says.

“You--” Maul starts.

The monk shrugs without changing his guarded stance. “Answer me: if a man can guard at night with no light, what does a cloak hide that the dark does not?”

“Hah!” says Maul.

“Have you come to seek spiritual enlightenment?”

“Refuge,” Maul grates out.

The monk gives a brief nod. “Refuge is sometimes found here. That is not the purpose of the temple, however. Will you really be satisfied, if you come inside and leave again with only your bodies healed?”

Maul growls. “Will you help or not?”

“I will show you the way,” the monk says. “The Force brings life and death, and I can see your friend is trying to discover this first hand. Let’s see if we can convince it otherwise. Sometimes the Force is agreeable that way! Although sometimes not.”

Maul shudders at both thoughts--Kenobi, dead, or Kenobi, a friend.

“Come,” says the monk, decisively turning inward with his back to Maul.

Maul, shivering, follows him inside. The Temple is quiet and dark as well, as though the entire place keeps the same hours.

“Those who are awake are awake deeper within the temple,” the monk advises.

Maul, hating to be so fuzzy-headed, tries to grapple with his surroundings. The curves of the halls, very unlike the Jedi temple on Coruscant or the temples of the Sith on Yavin 4. The way out. The monk, in his thirties or so by a standard calendar, and much too comfortable in all things. Very much too comfortable with Maul’s own thoughts.

“You are a mindreader,” he growls.

“Not at all,” says the monk. “Or perhaps only a little. What is your name?”

Maul hesitates. It could lose him everything, very quickly, but perhaps it’s better to lose against one than against a temple full of monks, all of whom, he remembers, can fight.

“I am Maul,” he says. “Once of the Sith.”

The monk nods thoughtfully. “My name is Chirrut Îmwe,” he says. “Who is your companion?”

That, somehow, is a more frightening question.

“A victim of...political violence,” he says.

“A Jedi,” says Chirrut. “I understand. We will go very deep inside the temple. That way,” he adds as if it’s something like a joke, “if anyone decides I’ve been stupid to let you both in here, it will be very hard to get you out.”

Maul is not in the mood for jokes. He is rarely in the mood for jokes. “Is that likely?” he asks.

Chirrut shakes his head, still leading the way.

“I don’t believe that you will have trouble from any of us unless you make it yourself,” he says. “Fleeing the new world order, are you not?”

Maul says, “We are.”

“The new world order,” says Chirrut, “does not bode well for us, either.”

Maul is greatly relieved when, after what feels like too long a walk to fit inside the building they have entered, he is shown into a gently lit infirmary. It is fit with private cubicles and a neatly organized pharmacy of what looks like both new medications and very old remedies. A monk is ducking into one cubicle, saying something to whoever is inside. Another sits at the door. Waiting for anyone? Waiting for them? Maul mistrusts this.

This monk is an older human woman, round-faced and unworried. She says, “Chirrut. Have you done it again?”

“I don’t plan for when strays will arrive!” Chirrut says, spreading his arms wide. “If the Force places me at the door, I must answer it.”
“A devout thing to say. You place yourself at the door,” the monk says. She stands, and gestures to Maul’s cloak.

“Take that off,” she orders him. Maul reaches up a stiff arm to drag the cloak free and drop it to the ground. His limbs, the living ones, do not feel like his own.

The monk is silent for a moment. Then she says, “I hope you are not confusing me for a morgue.”

“He is not dead,” Maul snaps.

“No, he is not. Îmwe, since you’re here, help me,” says the monk. She turns her head and calls quietly into the infirmary, and a fourth disciple comes forward, a stocky Anomid hidden beneath a vocoder and robes. It takes Maul’s strength not to run; there are too many of them, and he is growing anxious that all of this, the whole moon of Jedha, is a trap.

But the Anomid simply says, in its tinny, bland voice, “Cubicle three is not occupied. I will power up the surgical droid.”

“First the patient,” says the woman monk. “Help me.” Maul hisses and tries not to strike out as the two medics untie Kenobi from his back and carry him between them out of sight into a cubicle.

Cubicle three, Maul mouths, as if that is helpful.

“Chirrut had better help that one,” says the Anomid, and the human, huffing, says, “Chirrut! Help that one!”

Chirrut smiles at Maul until Maul notices it, and then says, “Come. There is a washroom in the infirmary. If you make yourself comfortable, I may even bring you fresh clothes! I think our black and red attire will suit a Zabrak male.”

“You can’t see me,” Maul snarls.

“Well,” says Chirrut cheerfully. “I have heard that we disciples wear black and red, and I have had Zabrak males described to me. Particularly one who is formerly of the Sith. I can put two and two together.”

Maul, with the washroom door shut behind him, strips and bathes and drinks water from the faucet until his stomach aches. His cold body slowly warms. He takes a towel from the neat rack to scrub himself with, and then another to dry off. He is, as always, careful of his metal joints. When he cracks the door, there are robes stacked on the floor outside it. Also neat. He takes them. It feels absurd, but he is no longer shivering. He attaches his belt to the robes and his stolen lightsabers to the belt.

“Come,” says Chirrut when he emerges. “You will be hungry, I think?”

“Kenobi,” says Maul.

“What’s that?” Chirrut asks.

“The Jedi,” says Maul harshly. “Is he alive?”

“You must be patient,” says Chirrut. “Which is another way of saying, he is not dead. Unless you are hiding some very unexpected skills, there is nothing for you to do here. Come and eat.”

Maul does not trust Kenobi not to die, or barring that, to spirit himself out of here and waste Maul’s time and effort. He stares at the cubicle wall. But Chirrut says, “I must return to watch the door, my friend. You can come and find me there, once you have eaten. Now, come, let me show you.”

Eating is as much an unforgivable relief as bathing. He is too ravenous to mind who brings him things to eat and who sees him earth them. Before Maul can find Chirrut Îmwe again, he is intercepted and led to a cell--a monk’s, not a prisoner’s--to sleep. They won’t tell him what has happened to Kenobi. They claim it is because there is nothing to tell. He sleeps well, despite everything. Perhaps it has simply been a long time since even one fiber of his being believed that he would not be killed as he slept.

He does not see Chirrut again that day. He dresses himself in the disciple’s robes, and is given as much to do as if he was one. When he tries to ask about Kenobi, the monks only shake their heads and then act as if he hasn’t spoken at all. As he hunches exhausted over stew and buns, far too late at night, Chirrut touches his elbow, then leans deftly out of the way before Maul can strike.

“He is not dead,” Chirrut says. “When you are done--mm. Do you know your way back?”

“No,” says Maul, narrowing his eyes.

“Then I will wait with you here and bring you back,” says Chirrut. He takes the seat just next to Maul. It’s far too close. Maul’s grip tightens on his spoon. Neither of them says anything, not even when they get up from the table and Chirrut takes him back into the deep.

Kenobi is not capable of conversation, not that day or the next. By the third, Maul is going wild. They will be found here, and this barely-considered plan will have been for nothing. Maul’s risk, for nothing. Maul’s life, nothing. He is permitted by the medics to sit at Kenobi’s side when his work is done for the day, but that only makes Maul angrier.

Stealing Kenobi from the temple was a mistake, born of a small amount of spite and a larger amount of desperation. Maul has lived on trash before, shoring up resources no one else would take when he had no other resources to take. But this hurts his pride, more every moment that Kenobi remains asleep, and now Maul has only this unconscious and hated Jedi and nothing else at all.

If Sidious finds him here, he will leave Kenobi to die. He will curse Kenobi for slowing him down in the one moment where he might have gained safe distance.

Maul could run, faster than any being like him, farther than any creature living, and find an empty place and scream. But he does not do that. He works alongside the disciples of the Whills, as silent and steady as if he were one of them, picking up hints of their philosophy and personalities. In the evening he stands over Kenobi’s still body and hates him, and when it is very late and dark he goes to his cell and sleeps and dreams everything he does not want to see.

Chapter Seven - Obi-Wan

Obi-Wan dreams for what feels like days before he opens his eyes. The dreams feel like days, but they do not feel like dreams. They’re visions of the recent past, visions of the near future, stark understanding of certain things that have happened and certain things he has missed.

When he does open his eyes, it’s with a rush of sound, clamorous, screaming, fading into nothing in the moment he comes awake. He is lying very still and the lights around him are soft. He doesn’t recognize the smell of this room, except that it’s clean and there is nothing evil in it. The Force hums around him, strong and content except for where it intersects with Obi-Wan himself.

Everything he has felt in his sleep collapses into a cocoon around him. He feels numb for the moment, his ears ringing. The room he is in is small and gray, a modern construction built into something that smells like old stone. It looks like a medical facility, and again: the Force is strong and light here. He ought to get up.

It’s harder than he expects to rise to sitting. He finds himself attached to several unpleasant things, all uncomfortable to get free of and none of them encouraging as to the state and duration of his sleep. Once free, he gets out of bed easily enough. He has willpower and the Force, after all. Anakin hasn’t crushed that. Obi-Wan searches for his lightsaber automatically, but he’s not surprised not to find it.

There is not much to take up as a weapon in here--the bed, a chair (who for? He certainly hasn’t been using it), a small table and some medical equipment he lacks the expertise to identify. Obi-Wan is under-dressed, but his clothes are sitting neatly in the shelf beneath the little table, so he quietly puts on as much clothing as it takes him to settle his nerves and prepare to run.

It truly does not feel risky to be here, though--so he stops seeking a weapon and decides to depend on his fists. Glancing at them, he thinks there have been better tools. He is healing, certainly. Someone has brought him here and wanted him to heal. That could be good news, or questionable news, depending on who and why and how easily Obi-Wan can escape. But he reminds himself again: this place does not feel evil.

When he steps around the chair in his way, and out of the tiny room, there is someone standing in the hall. He takes a step back. The figure is human, dressed in black and red robes suited to the cool air and to--well, Obi-Wan should remember what they signify, he knows they are familiar. His memory is failing him. Her fingers are laced together.

“You’re at the temple of the Kyber,” she says. “You were brought here by a friend--I believe.”

“I haven’t even asked a question,” Obi-Wan says, and he’s surprised at how badly it hurts his throat. But his fists uncurl, to their relief, and some (not all) things fit into place.

“You should not be standing on that leg,” says the disciple, and Obi-Wan glances down in surprise, registering as he does that he is in a great deal of pain. Expecting more, he hadn’t realized.

“How long?” he says. “Who brought me here? Who leads the galaxy?”

“An old threat, not what you’d call a threat any longer,” says the disciple. “I encourage you to sit down, Master Kenobi.”

He flinches without blinking.

“Didn’t I say you were brought here by a friend? He’d know your name, wouldn’t he? Sit down, you’re not proving or improving anything by wearing yourself out.”

He starts to object, but he is feeling the first tremor of physical exhaustion. That is deeply unnerving. He’s been standing only a minute. He backs away, until he leans lightly against the wall.

“I must know,” he says. “I must know which parts were only dreams.”

She shakes her head. “I’m but a simple healer,” she says, straightfaced. “Suit yourself if you won’t sit. It might take a while to retrieve your friend to explain things to you. He has been working aboveground on the far side of the temple the last couple days. It’s always quite a trial getting people there to here.”

She says it like an old grumble. She turns away, going back to what Obi-Wan thinks is the entryway to the infirmary. Obi-Wan is left feeling a bit foolish, leaning alone against the wall. He carefully picks himself up and follows her, wincing on the leg. Past the medical cubicles--there are a few, doors shut--he sees that the little infirmary opens into a pharmacy, leading into an equally quietly lit passageway with dark walls. The disciple sees him, sighs, and pulls a stool out from under the desk where she is sitting. She plops it down in front of him.

“So suit yourself,” she says again, and sits down again. She murmurs into a device, then settles back, fingers interlaced. Obi-Wan thinks she is either meditating or taking a nap. In either case, she is clearly no longer taking questions.

Obi-Wan tries to remember everything he has learned about the Guardians of the Whills. Not enough, unhappily. There’s always been a faint whiff of discouragement of curiosity from the Jedi regarding other paths to the Force. Obi-Wan has occasionally questioned his order--perhaps more, perhaps less because Qui-Gon was his master--but he thinks he should have questioned that a little bit more.

He has been sitting for some time, his back increasingly irritated with him and his sense of calm gradually deteriorating, and his need for private facilities becoming somewhat urgent, when his remaining equilibrium cracks and shatters. He is on his feet as soon as the figure steps into the doorway, his every muscle taut, and his breath crushed out of his chest. He has no weapons.

Maul is very tall in his current form, and dressed in the robes of the disciples, he is at his most intimidating. He looks down at Obi-Wan unsmiling, his eyes glittering with a rage so familiar that Obi-Wan is sure that one false move on his part will mean any healing he has done here will be rendered immediately meaningless.

“What are you doing here?” he demands tightly, but as he does, something crashes through his vision that feels like a pain-induced hallucination. Scraps of more than one memory. A desert, a ship, a temple. Being suffocated to death by an old enemy. Time is reeling backwards, and Obi-Wan is not dead. “You brought me here,” he adds, bewildered.

“Carried you here,” says Maul, distaste curling his voice.

Obi-Wan feels a retroactive lurch of terror, because Maul has never touched him without intending to kill him. But Obi-Wan is alive. He is alive.

“What were you doing in the Jedi temple?” Obi-Wan asks. “You--the Sith--”

“They cannot have me any longer,” Maul growls. “Do you really think I am enough of a coward to give my allegiance to the monster who murdered my brother, Kenobi?”

Obi-Wan absorbs that. His muscles shiver. He says, “Why, then?”

“Seeking weapons. Seeking the means by which the Jedi defeated the Sith before the Sith swallowed them whole.”

“If this will be a long conversation,” says the disciple to Obi-Wan’s left, “I will direct you down the hall. There is a thought cave, thirty meters hence.”

Hence.

“Ah,” says Obi-Wan. He does not at all want to be alone with Maul in his current condition.

Maul can sense this, or else he just has common sense. He narrows his eyes and says, “I wouldn’t drag you here to make you a corpse, and I would never leave alive if I harmed you.”

“We don’t typically kill,” says the disciple mildly, but the typically carries a significant weight.

“Very well,” says Obi-Wan, after a pause. The disciple brings him a cane, and tells him to come back as soon as he starts feeling faint, which is a mortifying thing to be told in front of one of your bitterest enemies. He makes a slow progress down the hall, Maul ghoulishly keeping pace. The cave really is a bit of carved out rock, large enough that both of them could raise weapons, small enough that the fight would be awkward. Obi-Wan thinks of Satine and boils.

He lowers himself onto a plain bench with a thin cushion padding it, sets the cane across his knees, and says, “To be honest, I don’t know what else to say.”

“Say you’re a fool,” says Maul, still standing.

“That’s nice,” Obi-Wan says, irked as well as furious.

“So besotted with your student and your master that you never asked the meaning of balance,” Maul spits, and then he does sit. Obi-Wan tries not to stare at the movements of his legs. His heart jumps in anger.

“Besotted,” he hisses. “When you--”

“If I am a fool, I didn’t destroy the galaxy over it,” snaps Maul. “Your master told you what to think and you clung to it, Kenobi, you clung to his idiocy and did not question. Your obsession with Skywalker destroyed your order. My old master warped Skywalker’s suffering into darkness, but you gave him power, Kenobi. You are stupid, love-blind. This destruction will always belong to you.”

Maul should not be able to touch Obi-Wan’s feelings, of all things, with heavy-handed accusations, but he speaks and conjures what Obi-Wan hadn’t remembered yet. He brings it forth like a wizard drawing a black wave over everything. Loss, and more loss, Anakin unrecognizable in his cold rage, Obi-Wan unrecognizable to himself in his fear and despair. Maul says these things, and Obi-Wan becomes breathless with grief.

“Don’t cry now,” Maul says disparagingly.

“Why not?” Obi-Wan says. He can’t see properly.

“Because you are the only thing that has survived them,” says Maul. “If you crumble now, you are without use and I am without hope.”

“Then I suppose you shall have to be hopeless,” says Obi-Wan. It’s such self-indulgence. Obi-Wan would like to think better of himself. In this moment, however, in the cool dark, facing his enemy, surrounded by the warmth of a Force untouched by the Sith, he cannot imagine strength. He can only imagine the good things of the past marred by the last thing he remembers: Anakin, Anakin, wanting more, refusing to stop.

“Kenobi,” snarls Maul.

“What do you want me to give you?” Obi-Wan says. “What can I give you? We’ve always been adversaries, you know, and you’re absolutely right. I’ve failed in everything that ever mattered to me. Imagine,” he says, with something terribly close to a laugh, “imagine the great Maul desperate to gain my help. The one favor I could possibly do you I’ve already done.”

“What’s that?” Maul asks.

“Shown you the worth of the Sith,” says Obi-Wan.

Maul is silent long enough that Obi-Wan closes his eyes. He hears Maul rise, and go to the door. Won’t they think you’ve murdered me? he almost asks. But the urge to jibe him is ghostly. The room feels too still, and the silence grows. He is gone, and Obi-Wan hasn’t heard him leave.

In moments, the relief of Maul’s absence is swallowed up by all the things it doesn’t change.

“Since you’re up,” says the disciple at the door when he makes his way back to the infirmary, hating the cane more with every step, “we will consider you to be mending. You’ll come back here every day for treatment and an examination until I can call you fit, but no need to keep you in a cubicle now.” She waves a hand. “Chirrut will help you. He’s used to your friend by now. Who knows? You might find him sympathetic.”

“Chirrut?” Obi-Wan says, feeling a little lost.

The monk points around the corner, and when Obi-Wan turns, a man is standing behind him, smiling placidly.

“I am Chirrut,” he confirms. “And you are Obi-Wan Kenobi.”

“You all seem to know all about me,” Obi-Wan says.

“Not at all,” says Chirrut. “Your friend has said very little about you.”

“Ah--well, if you truly think he’s my friend, I suppose that’s obvious,” says Obi-Wan.

Chirrut says, “Odd, what things happen in times of great change. This way, Master Jedi.” He says Master Jedi like there is a small joke in it. Obi-Wan departs from the infirmary with a harried bow to the disciple at the desk. Chirrut moves slowly ahead of him, but not, Obi-Wan thinks, because he is blind. As Obi-Wan finds his feet, Chirrut picks up his pace. He doesn’t need to see, moving gracefully even when people cross their path. He points out things that Obi-Wan might like or need as they go. Communal dining that way, baths this way, through the corridor there, one of the courtyard gardens, all tough winter trees and plants and stone that brace against the frost and form a prayer. Down those steps to the laundry.

Obi-Wan is frustratingly bone-tired by the time Chirrut shows him a small room. Bed, running-water basin, chest, window into a courtyard. A mat to sit and meditate. A cup sitting on the edge of the basin. Two flat stacks of black and red cloth laid out on the chest.

“You have many questions,” says Chirrut from behind Obi-Wan, as he stands in the doorway and takes in this offering of space.

“Yes,” says Obi-Wan, but he doesn’t ask any.

“Ah,” says Chirrut.

“Sorry,” says Obi-Wan.

“There may be time later,” says Chirrut. “Or not. The Force doesn’t always lead us on a convenient course.”

“No, it doesn’t,” says Obi-Wan.

“The doors are not locked here,” says Chirrut. “But they do not need to be. Unsought violence doesn’t root well in the temple.”

“Of course,” says Obi-Wan. The doors of the temple on Coruscant had not locked, either.

Chirrut offers him a good day and departs; the relief of being alone is greater this time, because he is more tired than before. Settling in is not much of a trial, both because Obi-Wan is used to making berth in small, strange places with few possessions, and because he has nothing to do. He has no purpose. He has no one to contact, no mission to complete, no training he can practice. All he can do is meditate, rest, or let his feelings churn him into butter. One is wrong and one is impossible, so he lies down and almost instantly sleeps. That feels a bit like cowardice as well.

He sleeps more than he means to; when he wakes up, it is fully dark, long past supper, and he only jolts into consciousness because of the terrible noise. At first he thinks the noise is himself, crying nightmares into life. He thinks he is on Coruscant, maybe not asleep at all. But he shivers all the way awake, so awake that the aches in his bones awaken as well. He breathes heavily into the dark, and smells that this is an alien world, and the sound continues.

Before his sleep, it doesn’t occur to Obi-Wan that of course they might put him up close to his friend. Waking, Obi-Wan learns too much at once. He does not want to know Maul’s fear, and he does not want it to so perfectly fit against his own. He is caught between urges, which balance out, shamefully, into doing nothing at all. He lies on his back, stiff beneath the blankets, riveted by the rise and fall of the painful noises that cut through the stone of the wall. He wonders what kind of man he is, being this afraid when nothing more is happening than evil dreams to an evil creature.

Perhaps it doesn’t even last that long. A few minutes of begging and tears. It’s brief enough that Obi-Wan is still paralyzed when it ends, with hours left between him and daylight. He sleeps in and out of some of them, but the sickly feeling chases him like a beast through dreams--through narrow corridors and bloody rooms filled with the smell of temple sunlight.

Chapter Eight - Padmé

Padmé has dreams about Anakin. She is always dressed in something different--gowns that used to save her, politically, and now rustle and trap--and she is usually alone. She is in the same place that he is: the senate chamber, emptied by night, and he is somewhere in the halls outside; the door of the Jedi Temple, which feels locked and stained, while he climbs down the steps towards her; a dark, fiery place where her skin heats and her heart catches inside her and he turns towards where she hides.

She always hides. At first she is sure that’s because nightmares are like that--failures of bravery that she’d never allow herself while awake. But the very first of these dreams has not even ended when she begins to suspect. It’s in the fifth or sixth, when for once Luke is with her, a little boy and not an infant, that the terror makes her certain. The dreams are real places, and Anakin is real, and it will be terrible if he finds her. It will be worse if he finds the children.

She wakes up from that dream crying, and Sabé, who has curled up at her side, is upright in a moment to guard first and comfort second. There is nothing in her suite, and the queen’s attendant who waits in the hall, when roused from sleep, has no warnings to issue. Padmé stands over her babies with her knuckles white on the edges of their cradles.

“They keep happening,” she tells Sabé. “The dreams. He gets closer and farther. He’s not there for me, but if he finds me--” She cuts off, because the words are more like visions inside her head and she has a moment of true fear that saying them out loud will be like casting a spell that makes them true.

“They’re dreams,” Sabé says. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry you have nightmares. I can understand it. But they’re only dreams. Do you think there’s a real danger, though?”

“They’re not just dreams,” Padmé says. “I’ve felt it before.”

Sabé is skeptical, even after Padmé tells her about Coruscant, but she believes in the danger in broad strokes, so she doesn’t fight. Padmé can’t put a name to what she is feeling, and has never felt anything like it before, so she can’t fight back as well as she does with facts.

“Padmé,” says Sabé, “the real danger, in the real world--I think that’s true.”

Padmé gives up on the dreams for the moment, even though this one still rattles through her. She had covered Luke’s mouth--he was so real, four or five, and Anakin was so close that Padmé could see the difference of a few years marked on his face.

“If he finds us,” she says, and forces the idea of spells out of her head. “I’m sure he would kill you. I think he might kill me. The Organas, I don’t know--they’re powerful, but everything has changed. And the children--”

Sabé shakes her head slightly. “Do you think fatherhood is really on his mind, now that he’s helping to subjugate known civilization?”

“It might be,” says Padmé. “He can’t love me anymore, but Anakin has always needed someone to love. He loves more than anyone I’ve ever met.”

Sabé scoffs, and Padmé says sharply, “He does. You don’t know him like I do, Sabé. If he’s lost Obi-Wan and he’s lost me, there has to be someone new.” She touches Leia’s soft little face, frowning in its sleep.

“If love kills, it’s not love anymore,” Sabé says, equally sharply. “It’s greed, Padmé. It’s unbearably selfish.”

“You know what I mean,” says Padmé, but she’s afraid Sabé does. Padmé meant exactly what she said, because she can’t really unstick her mind from the potential of Anakin, the hungry, eager potential that never learned to temper itself. He could have been so very good. He was good. It was there in him, and he worked so hard at it. But the people who loved Anakin--Padmé, Obi-Wan--had never known how to help him heal. And Palpatine knew where to twist the blade.

Ahsoka, she thought, understood Anakin. In another world, maybe she could have been the difference between saving him and losing him. But she was a child, and his student, and she trusted that the wild parts of him were better than the calm in everyone else. She knew who he was, but she didn’t know to be afraid--of him, or for him.

Padmé could have known to be afraid, just as she could know right now that Sabé is right. But she never wanted to, and she can’t give over to it completely even now.

“What do you need from me?” asks Sabé. She rotates a sleep-aching shoulder and Padmé watches her muscles work. They were always separate bodies, but she marvels at how closely they were once made to match.

“I need direction,” says Padmé. “I can’t dandle babies and run away in nightmares until the Empire just disappears on its own. I need a plan. I have you and the Organas. We need more.”

“I’m sure there are more,” says Sabé. Padmé nods, vigorous.

“Yes, yes, I know we’re not alone,” Padmé says. “There’s not a chance of that. I’ve been waiting for news, but--Sabé, they can’t have killed Yoda, or--or Obi-Wan. They can’t. They’d say.”

“You think so?”

“I know it,” says Padmé. “Yoda would be too much of a victory for them to keep it quiet. And Obi-Wan…” Her heart shivers. “I would know. If he were dead I would feel it.”

Sabé frowns. “You weren’t in love with more than one Jedi, were you, Padmé?”

Padmé shakes her head reflexively. “No--oh. Sabé, it’s not simple. It never would have been. But he’s as dear to me as Anakin, in his way. I’ve known him so long, through so much. I’d know.”

Sabé seems ready to say more about dreams that are only dreams, but she shakes her head and holds Padmé’s hands, and says, “So what do we do?”

“As if you have to defer to me anymore!” Padmé says.

“There always has to be a chain of command,” says Sabé. “A guiding light.”

“And that’s me? I don’t think so,” says Padmé. “Not me more than anyone else.” She raises a hand before Sabé can argue. “Before we hold elections for rebel leadership, maybe there should be more than two of us?”

“I have friends who can help us look,” says Sabé with a nod. “Make a list, give me names.”

Padmé will, of course--she’s marshalling all the hard-won friendships of her last ten, even twenty years, into ordered columns, trying not to see red where they are lost.

“There’s someone we should look for first,” she says. “Someone who might not have been killed, who’s no longer a Jedi. She’d be the best person we could possibly have on our side.”

Sabé says, “No longer a Jedi?”

“You know her,” Padmé says. “From my letters.”

Sabé’s face dawns understanding. “Ahsoka Tano,” she says, and the name, too, is a little like sunrise. Padmé’s heart aches with hope.

“She’s very clever,” Padmé says. “Resourceful. Steady. And she’s had Palpatine and his army on her tail before without getting caught.”

“And if we can find her, we can depend on her?” Sabé asks.

Padmé says, “More than anyone. She’s saved my life before. And I’ve seen her stand against anyone or anything if she knew she was right.” She half smiles. “She’s always been right.”

“I remember. You sound very fond,” says Sabé. “And in your letters.”

“Deeply fond,” says Padmé. She laughs. “I’m a little afraid to say too much, isn’t that silly? As if saying how well I think of her will make something terrible happen.”

“You don’t have bad judgment,” Sabé says. “Not unnaturally bad. Normally very good, in fact. And I promise that nothing bad is going to happen to anybody because you’ve said you love them.”

“Can you really promise that?” says Padmé. “Can you really tell me that my saying yes to Anakin isn’t what led to his destruction?”

“Of course!” says Sabé, surprised. “Palpatine is a monster, and your Anakin--you described him well, Padmé. Your love didn’t make you stupid. He was always susceptible. I’m not any historian but if you were to make me guess another history, I’d say the difference between your loving Anakin Skywalker and not is that in this world he stayed free a little longer.”

Padmé’s breath catches in her throat.

“But not forever,” she says. “I couldn’t save him.”

“I suppose not,” says Sabé. “But it’s not so pat as him being a victim. Also, Padmé, nothing about Anakin means you won’t save anyone. You saved a piece of his life. You’ve saved yourself, and your children. You’ve saved the Naboo, and countless others in your time in the Senate.”

“That’s putting a lot of faith in the usefulness of the Senate,” Padmé says drily.

“All right,” says Sabé. “But you did it anyway. You have precedent, and there are a lot of other people we can protect in this new galaxy of Palpatine’s.”

“Don’t call it that,” says Padmé sharply. “It’s his empire. That’s his foul creation. But the galaxy isn’t his. It still belongs to us, even if they kill us for saying so.”

Sabé’s expression is soft and hard all at once. “And so it does.”

“What are you thinking?” Padmé says, scanning her face.

“I’m thinking about you,” says Sabé. “Never forget, Padmé, that we all had a choice when we were scouted. To be a queen’s handmaiden may mean you are very prettily decorated, but it isn’t easy work and it isn’t safe. We all saw you clearly, even if all of us were not much more than children at the time.”

“Sabé,” Padmé says.

“Your love and your will are equal to anyone’s in the galaxy,” says Sabé. “We will find you Jedi and your former Jedi and your friends. We will build something out of that.”

Resolve stirs amidst the cobwebs of Padmé’s heart

“Yes, you’re right,” she says. “We will find them. We will build.”

Chapter Nine - Maul

Each day when Maul finishes his work, he seeks Kenobi. The temple work--it makes things twist in him, because it is hard, but it wants nothing from him except what appears on the surface. Mend walls, sweep floors, clean hundreds of dishes with hands that are too unsteady and strong at first not to crack them.

He sees the temple children, and they are so serious and joyful that he cannot recognize childhood. He listens to the disciples' philosophical conversations because they’re within hearing and Maul has nothing to say, nothing else to listen to except his own fear. The disciples’ talk frightens him too; it is like cool gel against a bubbling wound, and hurt comes before relief. Relief is mingled with hurt. There is discipline in this place, but it is cool and generous in a way that he finds unfathomable. There is disagreement, but arguments are heated more like a warm hearth than like an inferno.

Discipline is torture, he wants to tell them. The Force is a burning. You must burn yourself against the Force, torture it until it obeys you, make yourself into a brand so hot that everything you touch crumbles under your fingers.

But the monks here don’t believe this. The monks here keep their religious arguments and their personal squabbles at a low hum. Perhaps these people are dangerous, but not in the way Sith are dangerous. Not in the way Dathomir is dangerous. Not in the way Maul is dangerous. They are not, as a whole, cruel or intemperate. Their strength comes from wholeness and there is no desperation in their confidence. They speak, and he is alienated. He feels too ugly to be allowed even the sounds of the words he hears, but they leak into him anyway, and he trembles.

When his work is done, usually after the early nightfall, Maul goes to Kenobi’s door. At first, he is always in there, secreted behind a door that does not lock. Maul knows. But Kenobi doesn’t answer to his name or Maul’s knock, to growls or patience. After the first week, two, Kenobi isn’t always inside, either. But maybe he can sense Maul as closely as Maul can sense him, because Maul waits for hours sometimes and Kenobi never comes back until Maul is netted and trapped within relentless dreams.

Once, or twice, Maul sees him in a far part of the temple, but it’s impossible to catch him. The place twists and bends in ways Maul can’t combat. But it is ridiculous. How can they sleep a wall apart, and never meet? How can Kenobi be such a coward, which is so much worse than stupid and afraid? Maul saved him, preserved him! And every minute they waste, Maul learning the precepts and Kenobi fleeing before him, is a minute’s closing of the gap between this temple, containing Kenobi and Maul, and wherever the Empire is looking for them.

It’s the dead, cold quiet of night when this little curse is broken, a night when Maul’s dreams launch him out of sleep rather than trapping him there. He hears the ringing of his own voice when he wakes. Perhaps he cried out only in his mind. No one has told him, if it’s otherwise. But when the clamor of his dreaming banks, and his breathing slows, and his heart pounds less frightfully, there is still a disturbance here that does not come from the Guardians, or from clever Jedi-hunters pinning them at last.

Maul is stirred with frustration and exhaustion. He rises from his bed and goes to Kenobi’s door and throws it open, like all of this is a single violent motion. Kenobi jolts out of sleep without making a sound. Maul can see in his eyes exactly what kind of dreams catch him at night. But they are not the same, he tells himself. He and Kenobi are not the same.

“You will speak to me,” Maul says, his voice rough. “I am tired of your running.”

Kenobi swallows, otherwise as still as a predator discovered by something larger than it is.

“Why are you silent?” Maul snarls. “Is it because you are afraid of me? Is it to spite me until we both die? Where is your condescension, your platitudes, your lip? I expect things from you! What is wrong with you!”

“Your expectations are your own,” says Kenobi coldly, and it puts Maul into a fury.

“You will not help me,” he says. Kenobi is silent.

“You will not help yourself,” Maul says. Kenobi says nothing.

“You will not help anyone else who has survived Sidious’s scourge,” Maul says, and the words prick him with disgust.

“No one has survived,” says Kenobi.

“Lack of imagination,” Maul spits. “Cowardice. Delusions of grandeur.”

“Do you think I consider this grandeur?” Kenobi asks, gesturing to the universe at large with a roll of his eyes.

Maul says, “You have yearned for death for years,” and Kenobi's face goes tight with tension.

Maul says, completely furious, “You have imagined your death in my visage. But I refuse you, Kenobi. If I must wait here to be pried by his empire from a cell without dignity, like a crab from its shell, without ceremony, without distinction, without hope, then you will have that, too. You will live and be nothing, and when they kill you it will be as nothing.”

Kenobi is pallid, riveted, pretending not to see him at all.

“It won’t be Skywalker,” Maul says, as viciously as he can, and slams the door behind him before striding into the dark deeps of the temple to find any place where he can howl alone.

The morning comes well before Maul’s temper cools, and a little time before he has emerged from the underground labyrinths of stone. When he comes up, the morning light shocks his eyes. He does what he always does, and walks straight into the pain. He walks into the light, into the back walk that the temple spits him into first. It’s nothing as ugly as an alley, or if it is an alley, it’s better dressed than some of Maul’s own past burrows. It’s a narrow way, paved with flat gray stones that prickle with morning frost melting in sunlight. A low wall borders the walk, and on the other side of the wall, there is a drop of ten or twelve feet--the next layer down of the city. Leaning against the wall a little distance down the way are two men.

The nearer, back turned, is so large that the other is mostly invisible. Maul can hear the voice of the second, though; it takes him just a sentence or two to place as Chirrut. He registers this fact, and the conversation pauses--Chirrut first, the big man second--and resumes. Maul stiffly makes his way towards them. It is the only way out and he wants at least the illusion of being able to walk into the city without walking into death. He thinks he’ll nod and pass by, but Chirrut’s unabashed hand, strong, shoots out to grasp Maul’s arm. Maul stops in his tracks.

“Baze,” Chirrut says. “Maul.”

“What a name,” says the huge man. Baze. Maul narrows his eyes.

“He is a bit of a refugee,” says Chirrut.

“Him?” Maul says roughly, as if Maul is an insult to refugees. Refugee is an insult to him. Maul can’t abide the thought that he has ever been driven from his chosen course by desperation. Baze laughs, not so friendly.

“Refugee from what?” Baze asks. “And you’re sure it’s ‘refugee’? Not ‘war criminal’?”

“Excuse me,” says Maul narrowly.

“Oh, please,” says Chirrut. He doesn’t seem worried about either of them. Baze grunts and his shoulders shake out.

“Chirrut told me about you, come to think of it,” he says. “Can’t say I’m a huge fan of the so-called Empire. Wasn’t much of a fan of the so-called Republic.”

“Hardly an upgrade from that to this,” says Maul.

“You’ve got that right,” says Baze. Maul’s eyes flick to Chirrut. Baze says, “You’ve got the friend, right? The--” He makes circles with a thick, oil-creased finger.

“I don’t have any friends,” Maul says reflexively.

“A cheerful assessment,” says Chirrut. “He is the one with the Jedi, yes.”

“I’m not with anything,” Maul says and hates, hates the whine of his own voice.

Chirrut smiles inscrutably.

“Obi-Wan Kenobi,” he says, as if he hasn’t been interrupted. “One of the very Jedi Council.”

“Well?” Maul challenges. It is incredible, and he means this as no compliment, the way the dispassionate disciples and Chirrut especially make Maul feel like paper, trodden and torn muddy underfoot. He can’t get his bearings. He’s only ever felt peace in dominance, and the disciples are not interested in vying for power.

“Perhaps you made a mistake in packing a person like he is a tool,” says Chirrut. “A weapon.”

“That’s not what he is?” Maul demands, gesturing roughly at Baze, who is muscled, armed, and radiates the capacity for, a comfort with violence.

Chirrut does not smile at all, but he is not angry, either. Baze laughs and says, “He doesn’t need a weapon.”

“Hmm,” says Chirrut. He shifts, looking somewhere past Maul’s ear. “Perhaps it is better to say, I do not need more of a weapon than I find in myself. What I need is a partner. Another half. The other side of my breath.”

The way he says it makes Maul shiver. He understands at once how the two of them would move together in a fight. They are two utterly different shapes in the Force, and the Force between them is so bright and clear that it tightens Maul’s throat.

“Chirrut, Chirrut,” Baze reprimands. “You’ll make him scared of you.”

Maul says, “I am not scared.” The words open up a sickening tiredness.

“Yes, no doubt that would be very terrible,” Chirrut agrees. “But, then, fear of fear is an even more terrible weakness than fear by itself.”

Maul opens his mouth--to counter the accusation, to breathe in cold air.

“I’ve known more fear than most,” he says. “I have known it from every side.” His voice sounds to him like metal scraping across stone.

Baze looks him up and down. “Maybe you have,” he says. “You’re cooping yourself up like the fowl for the next dinner now, though, aren’t you?”

“As if the Empire will not reach down its hand to strike us too, one of these days,” Chirrut agrees. “How nice it would be to find perfect safety, at no cost.”

“Don’t waste my day with bad jokes,” Baze says, gruff and tender.

“Many apologies,” says Chirrut. That clear line between them shimmers and strengthens. Maul wrestles down the knot of his emotions.

“You are…” he says. “Old friends?”

“Since before we were born,” says Chirrut, like this is not nonsense.

“Until after death,” says Baze, like this is not humiliating.

These words unleash in Maul the bitter, crushing grief of Savage’s absence, which waits for Maul at unguessable hours. There are always two, he thinks, and it is what he was taught to make him loyal, it is what he was taught to make him ruthless and alone, and it is what he said to make his brother love him. There are always two, always two. It is simple, it is not the whole answer to anything, but it’s a central spidle around which he spins and he can’t untangle himself from the conviction of it. At night, or in the day, he defends himself, he curses himself: he did not know another way to do it.

“That easy, is it?” he says, not quite sneering.

“Yes,” says Baze.

“If you are going into the city,” says Chirrut, stirring, changing the subject without emphasis, “you should know that many of the food vendors overcharge. Breakfast in the temple is cheaper, although sometimes it’s true you pay for taste. Perhaps you’ll find the expense worth your while.”

Baze bares his teeth. “Sweet and hot meatballs,” he says.

“Very good,” Chirrut agrees. “I only mention the vendors because soon, the temple will stop serving until dinner time. I could hear your gut at a distance.”

“How conscientious,” says Maul. He doesn’t like to be challenged over something so small as breakfast. The street at a cost, or the temple, the coop, and either way it is such a pitiful and meaningless choice that shouldn’t shake him at all. But the sun is too much--still cold, but brighter than any length of time outside his caverns and shadows has made comfortable. And Baze and Chirrut make him uncomfortable.

The choice isn’t real, of course, because he has no money to spend. He could stay and trouble them, punishment for troubling him, but it’s not the kind of menace that brings him any joy. Instead he bites his teeth together and turns back towards the door. Some noise arises from his throat that is horribly like thanks, and that with the warmer air from inside the temple makes him shudder. He thinks he likes Chirrut, but he does not like this.

“Tell your Jedi friend about the meatballs!” Baze calls behind him.

“No,” says Maul as the door shuts, and is so disgusted by the weakness of this as a parting shot that it haunts him for the rest of the day.

In the late afternoon, Maul makes only enough inquiries to get what he wants, gritting his teeth, point to crevice, in a perfect line. One of the courtyards is open, with stark grey-white trees whose branches and twisted knuckles are so bare it’s hard to imagine the leaves. Kenobi sits on the far side, which is not more than a dozen yards off, on a cold grey stone bench. He looks unnatural in the dark colors. His breath comes out in barely-visible clouds. His hands tuck into the sleeves. Maul imagines for the first time that Kenobi must have sat like this sometimes in his own temple, but Maul has only ever known Kenobi to be quiet or still when damaged into it.

Kenobi sees him, of course. There’s a flinch in his eye. Maul’s attention is good enough to catch it, even if there’s a slight dimness to his vision from his time in the dark.

Maul has no plan.

He slants his thoughts away from himself, to see where his body and words will carry him. That can be so dangerous--Maul slips far, and fast, when he doesn’t cling to control with all his might. This is a stupid thing to risk that for, but the stagnant, sickly tension between them makes him wild already.

He stands in front of Kenobi. Kenobi watches and doesn’t watch him. Maul wants to scream. He says, “We have both lost everything. Isn’t that enough?”

Kenobi stirs. Looks through or past him. Maul presses his tongue hard against his teeth, and must stop himself a moment before it slips and bleeds. He wants to shame Kenobi back to life.

“Let me sit,” Maul growls. “These legs can ache.” They can’t, but his body can, where it meshes with them. Even these perfect legs. Kenobi is startled to one edge of the stone seat. Maul sits. He imagines, frantically, that someone will speak, and something will happen. He imagines this as a moment of great change. The dark crawls in fast and early here, and with it a chill deep enough that both of them shiver. A long time passes, enough for nightfall. Neither of them says anything.

Maul refuses to lose, so he sits in silence, inches from Kenobi, until he imagines that Kenobi might feel that Maul has won. He clenches his teeth against the urge for a parting shot, or a pathetic attempt. Again, the silence. Again, again, and Maul is cracking against it. He gets to his feet and walks away, both of them wordless, and in the Force he feels Kenobi sag against the release from his presence.

He sleeps in his bed, but his dreams are awful things.

Chapter Ten - Ahsoka

Ahsoka hasn’t spoken to Rex in days. She’s been afraid to contact anyone, in case these new things that can find her on the most desolate moon can also spot a single measly transmission in the depths of space.

Leaving Raada so quickly had stung, but under the discomfort Ahsoka knows she was right to run. She had seen the disaster mounting on that green moon, she had loved those people so quickly, but she’d been alone. That grey-faced creature with the double-bladed lightsaber and the violently overlapping layers of the Force--what he had been, what he had become--that had been too much. She hated it, she hated that it was too much, but she’d known once their eyes locked that he would kill everyone on Raada to get to her and that once he got to her, she would die as well.

What she had felt from that thing…

She comes to Ibrum and tries to regain her equilibrium, take back her ground on a cold planet in the distant edges of the galaxy. Kyber grows here, and the echoes of Jedi persist in a landscape that’s otherwise silent except for the shifting and cracking of ice. Ahsoka tries to meditate herself out of a fear so deep that she doesn’t even dare reach out to the voices of the past. Her people, or once her people. She is afraid of what she’s seen. She is so sure that he is not alone. She is so sure he will feel her hope across the reaches of space and twist it until it breaks.

Rex, she knows, will worry because she’s quiet. Bo-Katan will worry. They’ve all known to expect gaps in communication, in their discreet survey of the now broken Republic. But every gap that could be caution could also mean discovery and death. Ahsoka would be worried.

Ahsoka has been sinking her mind and body deep into the cold for two days when she finally feels the fear give, feels her spirit still. Her relationship with the Force is so strange and so tentative now, even more since she last saw Anakin and Obi-Wan. There was so little time, between seeing them and letting the hurt open up just a crack, between that and the entire galaxy splitting apart. Here, alone and cold and silent, the Force seems to come back to her.

The Force is still the world. She is still the Force.

She can imagine the grey monster now, without so much of the fear that she will summon him just by her thoughts. She can reach herself through the Force and absorb the places where it winks out, where it had glowed in children and Jedi and innocent beings, and was now dark (dead) or dark (changed). She searches for so long that her fire goes out and her hands go numb, her stomach aches with hunger and then stops aching. She is looking for what is left of her world.

She has no answers when she is startled out of her meditation. Startled is too strong a word, probably. It stirs her. Tugs her up from the deep. She understands the dim all-night light of frozen summer, then the brittle cold of her hands, the ache of her stomach. She understands that a shuttle is descending through the atmosphere. It’s navigating confidently to a patch of solid land that won’t crack under its weight. Ahsoka’s ship is hidden near there, and she thinks of what a lot of trouble it’s going to be if this is an enemy.

She wakes slowly, slowly, as the small bright light of the pilot flickers and moves, departs its ship and comes to her. She searches herself for fear, searches the stranger for peril, but there’s no darkness in them that Ahsoka can sense from a distance. She waits.

The single small figure struggles up the slope and stands at the entrance of the cave--the entrance, in reality, of an almost impenetrable temple, perilous in its mirrored, icy passages. The stranger faces Ahsoka, who regards them without speaking or flinching. The stranger slowly unwraps the scarf around her face, and when she is visible, Ahsoka starts. For a moment, she is sure the woman is Padmé.

“Ahsoka Tano?” says the woman. She doesn’t really look like Padmé. She doesn’t sound like Padmé. It was something in her jaw, or the set of her mouth. She is all the wrong colors.

“What do you want?” Ahsoka asks, her voice as surprising and unfamiliar as a stranger’s.

The woman holds out her hand, and a holovid springs into blue light.

Oh. That is Padmé. Ahsoka’s steadiness shudders with a hunger she’s not ready to feel.

“What--” she says.

“Ahsoka,” says the vision of Padmé, so warm and sad and sure that Ahsoka forgets to breathe. “This is my friend Eirtae--Eirtama Ballory. She was a royal handmaiden once. She is a friend now.” Ahsoka glances at Eirtama’s face; Eirtama’s expression is schooled. “I believe you are alive,” Padmé says. “I believe you are seeing this. This is an invitation, Ahsoka. I am not alone. We are hoping that we are not alone.”

Ahsoka’s body is waking to the cold; she shudders. It’s not just the cold.

“Where is she?” she asks Eirtama. The woman nods again to the palm of her hand. Padmé speaks again.

“If you come with her, Ahsoka, I’ll be able to tell you everything.” Something happens to her expression that Ahsoka can see even blurred and in miniature. “I’ll tell you about Anakin.”

“What does she mean?” Ahsoka asks. The message blinks out. Eirtama shrugs.

“You’ll have to come,” she says. “She couldn’t put more in a message, and I wouldn’t take more.”

“How did you find me?” Ahsoka asks.

“She sent us to places that the Jedi might go to find each other.”

The words send a nauseous lurch through Ahsoka’s body.

“You’re not the only one carrying the message, then,” she says. “Have you found others?”

“You have to speak to her to know,” says Eirtama.

Ahsoka searches her face and the Force around them and nothing says not to. Her gut says, with painful urgency, that she does and doesn’t want Padmé to fulfill the promise she’s made in her message. Her heart says, with more painful urgency, that she wants to see Padmé so badly it feels like a new heartbreak. She didn’t know Padmé was alive. She hasn’t seen her in any broadcast of the Senate. She hasn’t heard a word of her in any news.

And nothing, not a word about Anakin. Not a breath in the Force.

“You don’t have to come at all,” says Eirtama. “I’m just a message.”

Ahsoka drags herself to her feet, and after the first painful moment her muscles settle into place. She feels solid, anxious, resolute.

“No,” she says. “I do have to come. Show me, please. Show me where she is.”

Ahsoka’s ship and Eirtama Ballory’s play a kind of tag across the center of the galaxy, taking a long route that darts between the major systems and lands not so far from Alderaan, which tells her more than it’s supposed to, she thinks.

Their ships meet and break apart until both come to port a few hours apart at a little nowhere place called Teardrop. Ahsoka arrives second, and her feet touch earth with a shiver. The air is wet and cool, and there’s no shadow of the Empire here--not yet, and it’s a relief after many of the worlds they’ve passed. She signals Eirtama, short-range and therefore hopefully more or less safe. Ten minutes later, Eirtama emerges from over a rise in the sparse trees and beckons her on. They trudge together in silence, and come to a small building.

“There was something here twenty years ago,” Eirtama says, shrugging. “Syrup-tappers or something. The trees stopped working, I guess. I don’t know a lot about it.”

“Right,” says Ahsoka, who can barely process the words. Her hand is reaching out long before they’re at the door.

“Right,” says Eirtama. She reaches it first, knocks particularly, and swings it open. “Me first?” she suggests, and steps into the dusty light of the cottage. Ahsoka’s heart is beating in her bones. She steps inside.

“Ahsoka,” says Padmé. “Oh, you’ve grown.” Her voice catches, and Ahsoka sees her, soft, firm, familiar, tired and beautiful.

“Senator,” Ahsoka says.

“No, I’m not,” says Padmé. “No, I’m not.” She throws her arms around Ahsoka and they hug so tightly that Ahsoka’s lungs forget how to breathe.

“Padmé,” Ahsoka corrects herself, and feels closer to crying than she has since just after she felt the Jedi die. Padmé kisses her forehead.

“I’m sorry,” she says, but does it again. “I’m so glad to see you. Oh, Ahsoka. I knew it, I knew you were alive. I knew we could find you.”

“What happened to you?” Ahsoka asks, leaning back but not letting go. “Where have you been? What--what happened to Anakin? Most of them are--”

Padmé says, “I’ll tell you everything. I will. Everything I know.”

“Is he dead?” Ahsoka demands. “Padmé, please. Tell me if my master is dead.”

“Anakin is…” Padmé’s expression refolds itself into something painful. “He isn’t dead, Ahsoka. I ran away from him.”

“Because he was in danger,” Ahsoka says, a question or suggestion.

“My dear friend. He is the danger,” Padmé says. “I’m so sorry.” And she is, she must be, because Padmé never cries and her eyes are brimming.

“I don’t understand,” Ahsoka says numbly. She doesn't understand, but she does know. She knows something. She knows what Maul told her, that Anakin was the key. He said that just before everything else she trusted fell, murdered or murderer. The timing was so convenient, and Maul is a monster.

Padmé trains her breath.

“I hoped for a gentler explanation,” she says. “But not much in the world is gentle, is it?”

“You always were,” says Ahsoka. The grief is creeping up her body already.

“Not when being gentle allowed something worse to flourish,” says Padmé. “Which was often. It’ll be more often now. Ahsoka, I am going to tell you something about myself, and some things about Anakin. Do you want to hear them?”

Ahsoka nods. She is standing when Padmé starts to speak, and then frozen in place, and then sitting on the edge of an old chair, barely feeling it tip from foot to foot on the uneven floor.

She’s enlightened by marriage and delighted by babies, and when Padmé describes her senses, her dreams, things that can’t be anything but the Force, Ahsoka says in wonder, “You.” Padmé brushes it off and keeps speaking, like detours will lead to dead ends.

Ahsoka knows it will get worse, and then it collapses into a cataclysm, and she is saying, “No, no, Anakin wouldn’t do that, Master Skywalker hates the Sith, Anakin can’t be that.” But she knows, because Maul told her, and she knows, because she didn’t feel him die and if he didn’t die, he’d never hide. And aside from her gut feelings, Padmé has had time and eyes to see. Anakin is not a Jedi anymore, and he is steadfastly riveted to Palpatine’s side. He kills people, many people. He is sending new things to hunt Jedi.

“No,” says Ahsoka, and it’s such a deep, horrific wound that she doesn’t feel childish when she chokes on a dry sob. Anakin alive to Anakin destroyed us in a handful of breaths. Her heart aches. Her skin aches. A distant, insistent, tiny part of her says, If you hadn’t left, the Jedi would still exist. Anakin would be Anakin.

Padmé waits until Ahsoka will let her, and holds her steadily. Her tears are silent, but Ahsoka feels them fall. It’s not absurd to mourn the death of everything you loved. But as Ahsoka wears down, she remembers that it’s not the death of everything. Padmé and her women are here. There are children. There are Ahsoka’s far-flung friends, with their own people around them.

She sits back, salt-eyed and shaky, and rests her hands firmly against Padmé’s arms.

“I’ve seen the hunters Anakin is sending,” she says. “And I’ve seen more. I have eyes, too.”

“Any that I know?” Padmé asks. “Friends?”

Ahsoka tilts her head. “Well,” she says. “Rex is a friend, at least.”

Padmé startles. “The Clone commander?”

“No chip,” says Ahsoka grimly. “No Order 66.”

Padmé shudders. “How horrible,” she says. “To be any of them, but to be the only one to get away. All of his brothers…”

Ahsoka swallows acid. “I know,” she says. “We took care of Rex, but we didn’t have time…there wasn’t time to save anyone else. So--Rex, me, Bo-Katan of Mandalore--”

“Satine’s sister?”

“Yeah, her,” says Ahsoka, a little evasively. She may not be ready to reveal the full extent of her contact with Bo-Katan. “And...there’s someone else. Ventress.”

“You’re kidding,” says Padmé, and Ahsoka laughs, watching her friend the practiced diplomat try so hard to look polite.

“Hey, she’s in a tight spot too,” Ahsoka says. “And she saved my life when no one else could. And--well, she’s okay, that’s all.” Maybe now isn’t the right moment to talk about that, either.

Padmé shakes her head. “Strange times,” she says.

“Here we are,” Ahsoka agrees. She shivers. “When I captured Maul, he said something about Anakin. But I didn’t understand. And it was too late.”

“Maul,” says Padmé.

“Everyone we didn’t expect doing everything we didn’t expect,” says Ahsoka. Her heart aches so deeply she feels like she’ll be dragged to the ground. “I know.”

“Ahsoka, I am so glad to see you,” says Padmé. “I can’t imagine where you’ve been or what you’ve been doing since the Republic fell.”

“I probably shouldn’t tell you everything,” says Ahsoka. “It’s probably not safe.”

“No,” Padmé agrees. “And maybe you never can. But–Ahsoka, I hope you understand that I’m not just here to see you once and let you go. I want this to be the beginning of something. I need people, and I miss you. And we were a good team, when we had the chance.”

Ahsoka, says, “You know? We really were.”

Padmé smiles. “As you can see, I’m keeping busy. I know you are as well, even if I don’t know the details. I am sure we can help one another. I am sure we can help people. I have to believe that we can.”

Ahsoka blinks back a burning in her eyes.

“We’re sure trying,” she says.

“We are,” Padmé says. “And we’ve found each other. In the whole galaxy, it can’t just be my friends and yours. It’s just not statistically possible.”

“We’re not alone,” says Ahsoka, testing the words.

“We’re not alone,” Padmé says. “I know it. I can sense it. I’m sure of it. If the Force is balanced, that means there’s as much good as evil in the galaxy. And even if it isn’t...we are going to tip the scale. Can you help me?”

Ahsoka can barely imagine, but she finds that she believes.

“Padmé. Of course I’m with you. You didn’t really think I’d just disappear, did you?” she says, even though she has disappeared before. This is different from Coruscant, and when she looks at Padmé it’s impossible to want to disappear again.

Besides, she thinks, Padmé is right. They’ve each been building their own little constellations. Ahsoka imagines hers linked with Padmé’s, and feels something like hope. Her points of brightness in a dark sky, and then Padmé’s, and then more. Point by point. Brighter and deeper, and more vast.

Chapter Eleven - Obi-Wan

Obi-Wan heals, and when his leg is right he secrets himself out of the temple almost every day. The guardians know a great deal about the outside world, but they’re elliptical people and they don’t keep his council. Obi-Wan is on no council now. But he has to know. Each day, disguised, he goes outside. This distant, chilly rock is not the most attuned to the movements of the galaxy, but there are pilgrims from everywhere, and he senses that pilgrims come in greater number and greater fear than they have in the past. They carry with them scraps enough for Obi-Wan to gather and sift through.

He is plagued, or maybe kept aflame, by a single idea. He cannot believe that, among all the deaths he felt, he would not have felt the deaths of those he knew best. Perhaps there’s no chance of finding them, in the thousands of worlds, but the chance that they are alive gnaws at him. And if he never finds his old friends, perhaps he will find other survivors, whom he didn’t know to sense.

A brittle fear grows up beside his brittle hope. Something, some shadow. He doesn’t know what--no one will name it. Something evil and specific, harrowing what might be left of Obi-Wan’s kind.

To some a few short months would be nothing, but Obi-Wan has never spent so long anywhere but Coruscant and the childhood home he can’t remember, and a handful of long assignments or supposed mistakes that have punctuated his life. He is growing to know Jedha, and it’s strange, but he is damned if he won’t know it as a Jedi is meant to know things--with precision, and no attachment.

He knows the flow of pilgrims arriving on the moon and departing again. One in thousands will stay at the temple for a while. One in ten thousand or more will stay for good. He has months to learn this in. He supposes that by staying, he and Maul alone have thrown off the rhythms of the temple, although no one seems to mind.

Maul is a problem. Or-- he is not, and that is the problem. He sleeps a wall apart from Obi-Wan, but they do not work together, or eat together, or speak. Maul has spoken a handful of times, only to castigate Obi-Wan. At some point Obi-Wan will push him over the line between self-preservation and rage, and he will undoubtedly try to kill Obi-Wan again. At the moment, awareness of him weakens Obi-Wan’s sleep, and when Maul’s dreams are vivid, breaks it altogether.

Obi-Wan is ambivalent. He knows what Maul dreams, but Maul has given Obi-Wan plenty of dreams of the same kind.

Maul awake and elsewhere is somehow worse. Although Obi-Wan tries to be pleasant enough to the people of the temple, he isn’t close with any of them. That is why it shocks him to see Maul in company, in conversation, seemingly hard at work with a steady, unemphatic rapport between himself and those around him. It makes Obi-Wan angry. He tries to soothe the anger, but it crumbles and curdles inside him. Maul doesn’t deserve this. Doesn’t deserve to survive, and be accepted, and be treated as anything but a raging animal.

But Obi-Wan is not thinking of Maul at all, when they surprise each other in broad daylight. He is thinking of news he’s heard, a good sign, a small thing, more of a candle than a shadow. He is hungry for action, but that would be a mistake, so he’s willing himself back to the temple to meditate. To take his time, and not risk putting out that little flame because he is too desperate for something to be true.

He is so focused, cupping the flickering hope within his thoughts, that he doesn’t sense Maul, doesn’t see him although there aren’t any corners blocking them from one another--he nearly collides with him, realizing a split second later who it is, taking an automatic step back and an aggressive one forward again.

Maul hisses, “Stop,” and Obi-Wan freezes.

“If you want to fight me,” Maul says. “If you want to kill me, you will have to do it in the desert. Not here. It isn’t like that here, don’t you understand? This place, these people, they can fight, but they are not fighting. Don’t you see this is the only chance you or I will ever have to know peace? It won’t last, Kenobi.”

Obi-Wan shakes his head, not because he disagrees, but because he feels crazy when Maul speaks to him.

“The life of peace will be even more brief because you will not look up,” Maul says. “Coward. I’m ashamed ever to have let you slip my defenses. You will not even search for hope. All the inflexibility of the Jedi and none of their strength. Council,” he spits, as if that’s enough.

“I am looking up,” Obi-Wan says reflexively, surprised and nettled into it. “I am looking. I am not spending all my days sweeping the floors like you.”

Maul growls, an unpleasant purr. He brushes the insult aside, and says, “Have you, then. What have you found?”

And to Obi-Wan’s astonishment, out of the fog of anger and old enmity and deep pain there arises a spark of excitement--the urge to prove it, to offer what he has found to someone who might care that he’s found it.

“There are hunters,” he says, “but only because there are quarry.”

Maul hesitates. “A name?” he says. “A place? A sign?”

Obi-Wan nods.

“You won’t tell me.”

“I don’t trust you,” says Obi-Wan.

“Skywalker’s apprentice,” says Maul, which jars Obi-Wan badly, until Maul continues, “she believed me, even as she captured me. Even as she bound me more tightly than the seams of a starship. She believed me. You could do that.”

“How in all the galaxy could I do that?” Obi-Wan says. “I know what you are. I’ve seen what you’ve done.”

“I took you from Skywalker,” says Maul. “When he would have torn the life out of you day after day. I tried to prevent his fall. The fall of civilization. We are not the same, but we have both lost and we can lose more. We are--on one side of this, Kenobi. Enemies of the Empire. Perhaps capable of unmaking it, in part, in piece.”

Something in Obi-Wan creaks--doesn’t crack. Doesn’t release any floodgate. But he feels a pressure, close to the surface and perilous, which he shouldn’t ever feel and which certainly Maul of all monsters shouldn’t threaten in him. It is something too close to need.

“I am tired of battling you,” says Maul. “I only want to survive.”

“You killed Satine,” Obi-Wan says, reciting backwards through time. “You killed Adi Gallia. You killed children, hunting for me. You killed my master.”

“Yes,” says Maul. “You killed me. And hundreds more. Thousands more. More than I have. Can you say all those deaths are just?”

“It’s not the same,” Obi-Wan says roughly, and is horrified that he can’t refute the basic premise and doesn’t even think to try.

“It doesn’t matter,” Maul says, and Obi-Wan’s heart revolts against the words. “It is all over now. There is us, there is the Empire, and we can ally against it or not.”

“You are wrong, if you think there is no difference,” Obi-Wan says.

“Then I am wrong,” Maul says, gesturing ghoulishly. “Shall we argue back and forth until the Emperor comes to slit our throats?”

Obi-Wan feels the futility of it sink into his bones.

“No,” he says. He has, however briefly, worked together with equally evil creatures, for survival, for the greater good. He should admit it to himself: Obi-Wan Kenobi does not meet his own expectations.

He realizes that Maul is staring at him, scrutinizing, uncertain.

“No,” Maul repeats.

“No,” Obi-Wan confirms, and stirs. Something in him stirs, and he’d rather say it to someone who isn’t Maul, but Maul is here and stirring him. “I cannot do anything alone. That courts disaster. I do not trust you, though.”

“You’ll trust me with what you have to,” Maul says, as if testing that it’s true.

Obi-Wan shuts his eyes--the first test of trust, really, although he could fight in a moment without opening them again.

“I will tell you a little,” he says.

Chapter Twelve - Padmé

Padmé does not feel strange about the larger request, although she feels heavy from it. It’s many years since she was allowed to pass her days without ordering people into peril. Into their deaths, even. She’s used to it, although she’s never been comfortable with it--she’s afraid of becoming comfortable with it, and watches herself closely, and hasn’t yet alarmed herself. What is making her uneasy, though, isn’t asking someone like Ahsoka to fight and risk and give up any hope of rest. In Padmé’s mind there’s no doubt at all that Ahsoka would do all those things without Padmé. It’ll just be a little more organized this way.

She feels badly, however, that she asks Ahsoka to look for Obi-Wan.

When she asks at first, Ahsoka is quiet and unreadable. Padmé feels as if Ahsoka is floating on the surface of water so salty you could sit on it, letting Padmé’s words flow through her. She can sense it. She can sense more, by now, because she and Ahsoka are close, but also because Ahsoka is the one teaching her.

“Ahsoka,” she says. “I know it’s hard. It’s what we need.”

Ahsoka says, “Padmé, it’s fine. I’ve already grieved the Jedi betraying me, including Obi-Wan. I’ve had to grieve most of them again for dying. I want Obi-Wan to be alive. I want to find him.”

“He’ll understand about Anakin,” Padmé says impulsively, and Ahsoka turns away from her, not able to keep ahold of her equilibrium.

“Anakin was the only one of them who was right about me,” she says. “Who fought for me. I don’t know what Obi-Wan thinks I am. What’ll he think if I turn up alive when I’m the one Anakin trusted?”

Padmé says, barely keeping her voice steady, “He won’t think whatever you’re thinking right now. He’ll think that if you were still with the Jedi when Anakin was lost, you’d be in hiding or you’d be dead. He knows what he did to you.”

“I don’t think he let it shake him up very much,” Ahsoka says.

Padmé turns her head quickly at a quiet thump, but it’s just Luke trying to sit up and falling over again. He and Leia are getting big, so fast. She feels peace and fear in equal parts all the time, because she has them.

“It’s Obi-Wan,” Padmé says. “The model Jedi, most of the time.” She doesn’t mean it as a compliment, but it’s complicated. There’s a lot of the Jedi code she doesn’t agree with, more in the last few years of war that she hasn’t agreed with, but she does understand having to school your passions for the sake of your duty. She hasn’t always succeeded either, and trying has sometimes led her wrong. She can sympathize with Obi-Wan. She doesn’t think she’d ever say so to Ahsoka.

“The model Jedi,” Ahsoka sighs. She straightens. “I’m sorry if you thought you couldn’t ask me. I would have gone looking for him weeks ago.”

“We weren’t ready,” says Padmé.

“Maybe,” says Ahsoka. “But anyway--I’m ready now. We know enough about the Inquisitors. I think I can look for Jedi without putting us or them at too much risk. And Obi-Wan...like you said. He’s one of the best. If he’s alive, we need him. If he’s alone, I don’t know how long he’ll survive.”

Padmé scrutinizes her for signs of all her feelings about this, but strangely or sadly, Ahsoka is now more a Jedi than she was as a Jedi. Padmé can sense a ripple, and nothing more.

Ahsoka says, “He’ll be happy to see you. And to meet these guys, too.” She scoops up Leia and bounces her.

“He’ll be heartbroken,” says Padmé.

“Obi-Wan? No,” says Ahsoka. “Obi-Wan wouldn’t let his heart break for anything. He’s proved that plenty of times.” And that’s when Padmé can see her clearly.

“I’m so sorry,” she says.

Ahsoka shakes her head. “Oh--no. I did mean just about me. But you know him--forward, forward all the time, focus on the Force and the next step and never really grieve anything.”

“You’re right about that,” says Padmé. “But that doesn’t mean he’s never heartbroken.”

“Kind of does by definition,” says Ahsoka, and where the old Ahsoka would have shouted about it, waved her hands and thrown every argument back at Padmé, this one doesn’t do that. She stops right there, and Padmé doesn’t believe she could be budged by anything.

So Padmé lets it go. She lets Ahsoka go. She confers with Breha and Bail, and organizes with Sabé, and pores over every scrap of intelligence she receives. Some days she feels so small, but she is painstakingly gathering mass. One by one, she finds allies, and far away from her, Ahsoka searches.

Chapter Thirteen - Ahsoka

Ahsoka is on Coruscant.

On the face of things, it’s a stupid place for her to be. The whole planet is Palpatine’s oversized, well-guarded palace. Troopers flood every level of the city, the undercity is just as brutal and dangerous as it ever was, and if Ahsoka gets caught here these days, there won’t even be a sham trial.

On the other hand, the troopers down here aren’t paid to do much. They’re a performance. Collaborators and career criminals are the only people to really thrive in the new regime, and collaborators have a pretty high death rate. The pirates, the scum, and the crime syndicates, on the other hand, may be pilloried in the government media, but they’re making very comfortable fortunes in the real world. Palpatine likes their resources and their methods and something to decry, Ahsoka thinks, and the pirates, scum, and syndicates like his promised stability and their fat payouts. As long as none of them gets powerful enough to threaten his rule, they’ll probably go on thriving.

And in the meantime, the undercity of Coruscant is still the best place in the galaxy to find things you’re not supposed to know. It’s also the best place to find Ventress.

Ahsoka slides into a battered chair across the table from her friend, in the third-dirtiest bar she’s ever visited. They haven’t been here together before.

“Hi,” she says, and Ventress passes a short glass across the table.

“Your favorite,” she says, in her familiar hoarse voice. It’s funny--she always sounds like she’s about to scratch whoever she’s talking to, but once they stopped hating one another, Ahsoka found it very easy to learn the inflections of Ventress’s speech. There’s warmth in there, cautious but tender. Ahsoka can hear it, and that taught her to sense it. She understands. They understand each other.

“Thanks,” she says. She takes a sip, and the flavor does sit on her tongue almost nicely. It’s a crappy bar, but the syrup they use instead of fresh flowers at least almost tastes like the real thing. “I’m here because I need to do something you won’t like.”

Ventress crosses her arms and rolls her eyes. “Color me shocked,” she says.

Ahsoka grins, and thinks for a second how much she wants to tell Ventress everything she’s been quiet about for the last few months. Of course Ventress already knows the worst--she knows about Anakin. She knows about the Jedi hunters, the Inquisition--she is the source of half the information about them that Ahsoka has pieced together. But she doesn’t know the details of the better parts--Padmé, and the Organas. New allies in good places. Ahsoka hates not telling her, but this isn’t the place, and there might never be a time. No one should know everything. That’s how rebellions are broken.

She says, “Please don’t hate me. I need to find Obi-Wan.”

Ventress hisses.

“You’re kidding,” she says. “If he’s alive, let him rot out there wherever he ended up. He’s a traitor and too weak to be useful. And you don’t owe him anything.”

Ahsoka says, “I need to find him anyway.”

“You don’t think Skywalker already killed him?” Ventress asks.

Ahsoka doesn’t flinch. She’s thought about it. She’s imagined it. “I hope not,” she says. Ventress’s gaze breaks away first, but it’s just Ventress’s version of being nice. She doesn’t agree and she’s not ashamed of it.

She says, “Ahsoka. You’re a fool. You think I should help you find a man who betrayed you, who almost ended your life?”

Ventress believes that, in this respect, Obi-Wan and Dooku are the same, and she believes that’s part of what makes Ventress and Ahsoka the same. She might not be completely wrong. Ahsoka nurses an injury to her heart, over how Obi-Wan failed her, and over how cool Obi-Wan tried to play it the last time she saw him. But her feelings and his failures are not the point. They need everything, and he’s good for many things. They need him back.

And from the bottom of her heart, she does not wish Anakin had murdered him.

Ventress changes tactics. “What makes you think he’s alive?”

Ahsoka presses a hand to her chest. “I think I would know,” she says. “I knew when some of the others died. I knew when Plo died. And Master Windu. And the--the children.”

“Hmph,” says Ventress. “Well, if your heart tells you…”

Ahsoka flicks a fingernail against Ventress’s hand.

“You’re being mean,” she says. “Thanks. I know it’s to protect me.”

Ventress looks like she’s about to protest, but she says instead, grudgingly, “There aren’t many ways you let a person do that.”

“Yeah. You do better than most people,” Ahsoka says, and instead of flicking her nail again, she takes Ventress’s hand.

“In public,” Ventress grumbles.

“You’re right,” says Ahsoka, and lets go. “But not about Obi-Wan. I might not be better protected if he’s alive, you know, but we will have better chances. We need to find things. Know things. That’s kind of his thing.”

“Yes, the fiddling investigator who was always being nearly murdered by Maul or getting thrown in dark prisons or discovering an endless clone army that has been used to destroy all that he loves,” Ventress agrees. “He truly is a shining star.”

“We’ve all got flaws,” says Ahsoka. “And strengths, too. You know Obi-Wan is more good at things than bad at things. He beat you, didn’t he?”

“Hardly,” says Ventress, recalcitrant.

“Ventress. I need him. Can you help me?”

She looks pained. “You’re a fool. But yes. I am good at finding things out, too.”

Ahsoka smiles. “You can’t be jealous. I like you a lot more than Obi-Wan. And I’m asking because I trust you, and I know you can do it.”

“I can do it,” says Ventress.

“Will you do it?”

Ventress shuts her eyes. She’s afraid for Ahsoka’s feelings, if nothing else. But if someone really wants to be stupid, Ventress is not the kind of person to stand in their way forever.

“I’ll help you,” she says. “But if I find him first, he won’t enjoy it.”

Ahsoka stifles a laugh, because it would stand out here more than because it feels rude to laugh.

“Leave him in one piece, okay?” she says.

“No promises,” says Ventress. But it is one.

Too soon, Ahsoka has left Coruscant. She won’t miss the planet, but she misses...well. A lot of things could happen. It’s a big galaxy, with a lot of moving parts. In some versions of the future, Ahsoka gets to see the people she cares for in more than snatched moments with more important business to worry about. And even a future where they haven’t won yet doesn’t have to be completely empty of good things.

She feels the echo of Ventress’s hand touching hers all the way to her pit stop on Katraasii. She must still not be hiding her feelings as much as she means to, because when she makes her way down back halls and through secret tunnels and comes out in one of Bo-Katan’s safe houses, Bo-Katan sets down what she’s doing and says, “Ahsoka. Who kissed you and ran?”

Not Bo-Katan. Unlike Coruscant, Katraasii is relatively safe, and Bo-Katan’s turf here is well protected. Ahsoka can’t stay long, but she can relax a little. It’s important to find moments to relax. To welcome peace. Even if a revolutionary Mandalorian with vengeance and ascension on the brain is not the most relaxing person in the galaxy (or even, usually, in the room), Ahsoka finds her comforting.

As much as that’s true, Ahsoka doesn’t say anything about Obi-Wan, or mention Ventress or Coruscant. Padmé goes without saying. Bo-Katan is grudgingly understanding about Ahsoka’s new attention on Padmé. Bo-Katan would like the Empire toppled, but only for the sake of Mandalore. Ahsoka wants something bigger, and Padmé is a better way to get that.

But again: most of it Ahsoka hides from most people, most of the time, because sharing too much information among even people you trust is how rebellions are broken.

She skips back across the galaxy with stops where she needs to stop, gathering information and fueling her ship and checking in on the people who need her, who she needs. It takes weeks to find the first hint, and weeks after that to hear anything from Ventress. Other missions succeed and fail while Ahsoka searches. As good as it feels to find those first whispers, they have so far to go.

Chapter Fourteen - Maul

Obi-Wan baffles and annoys him.

The change in the wind of Obi-Wan’s moods is a good thing--exactly what Maul has wanted, since he first acted on impulse in the Jedi Temple. Obi-Wan has gone from a spitting, brittle creature that must be kept at a distance to someone Maul can work with. If the brittleness and grief still underscore him, it doesn’t matter; Obi-Wan sets it all aside, between the two of them. He focuses on work, and he is no longer unpleasant. He is clever again, and confident in his own wits, and reasonably trusting of Maul’s.

Condescending, sometimes. He would probably die if he couldn’t be condescending.

This is what Maul wanted, and it annoys him. Obi-Wan’s manners are--utilitarian. Easily installed or removed because he has decided Maul is necessary to his ends. That troubles Maul--he does not want to be friends with Obi-Wan Kenobi, but Obi-Wan’s forbearance makes Maul feel like a tool. This is the one thing Maul hates more than any other.

But Obi-Wan is practical, not sadistic. It leaves Maul at loose ends. Each time he chafes, after a brief internal struggle, he must settle again; Obi-Wan gives him nothing to rail against, and instead gives him exactly what he so urgently hoped for.

They work in the temple, and sometimes leave it, separately, returning at night or in the very early morning to lean their heads together and place the new pieces of their puzzle into the larger picture they are building.

Maul learns from a few local engineers, then returns to his ship and repurposes it. The ship remains flyable, but the navigation is more precise, the processors more nimble, and the communications system greatly improved--he can reach farther, hone in more tightly on a distant signal, hide his tracks more thoroughly in the noise of space. Even if it doesn’t fly again for some time, the ship is now a tiny mobile base, and he and Obi-Wan could take it with them if they needed to run, and they would not lose most of what they have worked for. Sometimes there is a speeder available to borrow from the temple which makes quick work of the trip between city and ship; when there’s not, it’s usually Maul who goes. Maul, they agree without speaking, is ironically better equipped than Obi-Wan for a long hard walk.

“You’ll want to go soon,” Obi-Wan says one evening, at the end of their nightly exchange of information. “If they receive this intelligence quickly enough, our friends can use it to booby-trap the imperial carrier at New Apsolon, and if that buys even an hour’s delay, the Onderon rebels should be able to evacuate. I hope that is enough. That’s the best I think we’ll be able to offer.”

“It will work,” Maul says. He is amused by friends. He does not think that pirates have friends, and he thinks it is very funny for someone with Obi-Wan’s overstuffed sense of morality to call them that. However, pirates have suffered in the new regime as some of the crime syndicates have not. “You put a great deal of faith in those faithless cowards.”

“Hondo Ohnaka enjoys novelty more than anything else,” Obi-Wan says. “We provide novelty. And usually a reasonably good payout. And besides, he has his own craving for a certain...justice.”

“I am not sure about that,” says Maul.

“Oh, yes. If it offends his pride or interrupts his comforts, it isn’t just,” says Obi-Wan. “Therefore, he hates the Empire. Therefore, he will continue to play games on our side. We are more fun to work with than the opposition. And they are more fun to annoy.”

“For now,” says Maul.

“Now is the best we can hope for in this game,” says Obi-Wan. He sighs, and puts the data plaque in Maul’s outstretched hand. “I’m sorry to send you alone, but you are a great deal faster than me on foot.”

“No thanks to you,” Maul growls. “But you are right--you are even weaker than you used to be.” Obi-Wan snorts.

“Be rude if you like,” he says. “As long as you make the run instead of me.”

It is true that Obi-Wan is less limber than he used to be. Maul sees it in his walk, no matter how much he trains and stretches when he is not working. Grief can make you delicate. So can being nearly killed, and only mostly mended.

But it’s not a comfortable world for Maul, either. Maul doesn’t miss Dathomir, but the cold of the Jedha winter makes his body stiffen with homesickness. Their summer is cold enough; and he didn’t realize it was summer, when they first arrived. The winter cold slithers into the temple through stone and the crack of every door. There are thicker blankets for the season, but it isn’t a rich temple or a rich place, so they are not thick enough to smother his discomfort. The cold disrupts his sleep, and his sleep fills with nightmares.

Maul takes the plaque. He says, “Tomorrow, in the early morning. Now I have other things to do.”

Obi-Wan waves him off, looking back towards his work as though he’ll find out anything else tonight. It’s a façade, one they both maintain for reasons Maul does not entirely understand. They will both be in their beds soon. They are going to beds that sit in cells that share a wall. They can hear one another through that wall. They can each hear how the other does not sleep. They do not walk to their doors together, and part at the thresholds. They do not knock on the wall to wake each other out of nightmares. They do not speak of any of this in the morning. They never do.

The next day, Maul delivers their message to the pirates; two days later they know that the gambit has worked, that the Imperial strike force was delayed just long enough that rebels on Onderon slipped away from them, and that since then, the same rebels have destroyed a small and vital base on the far side of their planet. It is good news. When Maul tells Obi-Wan this, Obi-Wan’s face loses a few of its lines.

“I didn’t know you were capable,” Maul says in surprise.

“Hm?” says Obi-Wan. “Of course they’re capable. They have been fighting for years.”

Of relief, Maul means. He doesn’t correct him. He doesn’t want to explain, not to himself or anyone else.

He is in a determined mood, a triumphant mood, when he goes to bed that night. They chip, chip, chip at the empire, and they have survived so far, and when they are through, Maul’s old master will be dead at his feet. Perhaps Obi-Wan’s old apprentice will be dead at his. If Obi-Wan has sense, he will want it that way.

The injustice of the universe is that Maul goes to sleep in the furious joy of knowing that something has gone right, and wakes screaming in the utter darkness of the night, his fists pounding at the stone of the walls, his thick winter blankets shredded by his mechanical legs. The door is opening as his eyes open. His hand searches for a weapon, but it is Obi-Wan, not armed.

“What do you want?” Maul demands, still half-blinded by terror and nightmares. There is a rule. They never come, they never speak, they look away. This is how they abide each other. This intrusion is not how it is meant to be.

Obi-Wan is lit by the dim lights of the passage. Maul can barely see his face. It is like Obi-Wan has come back to kill him, except that what comes from him is utter calm.

Obi-Wan says, “Did you have nightmares when Savage was with you?”

It strikes Maul dumb, and he stares in silent fury at the doorway.

“No,” he says at last. “Yes. Only at first.”

And again they came, when Savage was gone. So many, so, so many, with brutal death and falling and agony, remembered and reinvented for every night that he dares to shut his eyes. He does not feel as if his eyes are open now.

Obi-Wan says, “Is it because of me?”

“Perhaps,” says Maul.

Obi-Wan is still.

“Your dreams,” says Maul.

“Yes?” says Obi-Wan.

“Nothing,” says Maul.

“We have bruised one another,” says Obi-Wan. “You know this. I know this.”

“You are not what I am afraid of,” says Maul.

“No? I wonder if that is better.”

“And you, Kenobi?” Maul says. “Do you still fear me?”

Obi-Wan is once again silent, for so long that Maul crawls inside his skin, wishing for motion, for movement, an attack or a dismissal. Anything. Something.

Obi-Wan says, “No. But I still imagine you might kill me someday.”

Maul wants to say yes, yes, and I will, but his mouth is dry.

“Well, then. I hope your sleep is sounder now,” says Obi-Wan, and shuts the door behind himself.

It is unbearable, this thing.

Maul remains angry well into the morning, when he misses Obi-Wan leaving the temple by a hand’s breadth and must spend the next four hours waiting and not waiting for him to return, for the opportunity to say something terrible that will bring them back at level with one another. He works in the temple, sweeping and scrubbing and snapping at dedicates.

When Obi-Wan returns, he smells of clean air and looks pleased to see Maul. It is like everything is forgotten, and it is deeply unfair. Obi-Wan says, “I am not sure how they kept this place running until you had arrived,” and as much as Maul tries desperately to see how it is an insult, he is certain Obi-Wan doesn’t mean it as one.

For a moment he is furious, but he can’t sustain it. Obi-Wan is too much trouble. His shoulders straighten, and he says, “I do not like to be helpless or useless, Kenobi, so I take measures not to be either.”

Obi-Wan smiles at him, a satisfied expression. A private expression. Something truly horrible happens in Maul’s gut.

“Well, what did you do out there?” he mutters.

“I will tell you,” says Obi-Wan. “But come get lunch.”

Chapter Fifteen - Ahsoka

Normally, it’s easy to decide when to tell Padmé anything: it’s any chance they get, as much as Ahsoka can verify and oftentimes the whispers of what she can’t. Padmé knows parts of the puzzle Ahsoka and her friends don’t, and can sometimes thread them together into something invaluable.

In this case, Ahsoka is pretty sure, but she doesn’t dare.

If she had found anything else, she would have jumped in a ship and flown back to Padmé immediately, pounded on the door to let her know that she’s succeeded, that something has gone right, that someone Padmé cares about is alive--alive! Except this time, Ahsoka is too afraid to be wrong. She is too afraid that the clever threads of a dozen plots that she’s picked out over half a year aren’t Obi-Wan. Padmé is patient and realistic, but that doesn’t mean she can’t be hurt.

Ahsoka wants to walk into the room with a holoprojector and give Obi-Wan to her. She can’t be the person to give her a promise of hope and deliver tragedy instead.

There is more work to do, but she knows where to start.

“I appreciate you talking to me,” she says. She is shivering cold, on a dry moon in the middle of nowhere, where a communication hub has been hidden in the rock, calling only to one untraceable device. She had to go upside-down and backwards to get to this tiny hub, and hope against hope that someone would pick up. And if someone picked up, talk to her.

On the other end of the crackling call, there’s possibility.

“You did your best for us,” says Saw Gerrera. “I may be able to do something for you. Not much, I’m afraid. I have my people to think of.”

“Of course,” says Ahsoka. “I just want to know--someone delayed a deployment to your world. Someone bought you time, five or six months ago. I don’t want to know who provided the distraction. I want to know who sent them to you.”

Saw is silent for a long time. The machine screams and clicks and buzzes. Ahsoka thinks maybe she’s already run through Saw’s patience. He’s a weird one, and she’s a little anxious to trust him at all. You can’t ever know, with Saw. She’s fairly certain, though, that this is right. At least--she hopes.

“Calls itself K-2,” says Saw finally.

“Like--a droid?” Ahsoka says, surprised.

“Don’t know. This isn’t like on planet. We don’t know each other’s faces and names here.”

“That’s all right,” says Ahsoka. A droid? K for Kenobi? Who would be the other K? “Can you give me a frequency for...K-2? I assume I won’t be able to trace it. It’s relatively safe to tell me.”

“Nothing is safe,” says Saw, and Ahsoka bites back the urge to say, That’s why I said relatively. It pays off to hold her tongue. Saw says, “But I’ll give you the frequency.”

She thanks him without making any promises, since he’ll mistrust the promises and she won’t be able to keep them. When she has the frequency, she sits for a long time in the cold before she climbs into her ship, and makes the call.

There’s nothing, the first, second, seventh time she tries, but after a day of intermittent signaling and very stale pre-packed food from her ship’s miniscule larder, something happens.

“What is your maintenance need?” says a voice that doesn’t sound like it knows anything about customer service. Or maintenance. Or Obi-Wan.

“K-2? I was referred,” says Ahsoka. “By--by a friend of mine on Onderon. My...ship’s communications device is broken. I...borrowed this one.”

A long pause.

“I have no time today,” says the voice at last. “Call again tomorrow. You may make an appointment then.”

The call ends. The next day, she only has to try once, and all she receives are coordinates. This could be a trap, but something tells her it isn’t. Maybe it’s just her own desperation. She thinks it’s the Force. She goes. It’s another place that’s hard to find, out of the way, with no visible markers on the planet itself. But she’s not going to the planet--the coordinates drop her into space, in sight of the place but not in it. As good a place as any for a rendezvous, and probably less obvious than most options.

And soon, she’s not alone.

It’s only the one tiny ship, one she doesn’t recognize. It looks fast enough to get away from her, and small enough to be easily destroyed if she can catch it. She supposes she looks exactly the same to them--whoever they are.

Her ship’s comms notification blips, and a call comes through the frequency she’d used the day before. She allows it. The same voice, too silky and oddly familiar to be a mechanic, says, “Open a holo channel. I am not detectable.”

She kills the call and mutters, “Moment of truth,” but she only hesitates for a second. It’s not Obi-Wan, this she is painfully sure of. She would know Obi-Wan. But she can’t let her disappointment swamp her. She has to put it aside, and think.This person is familiar, and whoever they are, they’re an ally--unless Saw sent her really, really wrong, she needs to speak with them. She opens the channel.

“Ahsoka Tano,” says Maul. “I had heard from a friend that it might be you.”

“Maul,” says Ahsoka, and her temper flares out of her control for a moment before she pushes it down. Her hands are on the weapons controls, though--poised and ready.

“Do not shoot me down,” says Maul. Even through the holoprojection she can see his uncanniness, the slight stoop of his shoulder wrestling against his rigidity. The keen gaze of eyes that don’t want to look straight at anything.

She says, “Why did he send me to you? How are you even still alive?”

“I am K-2,” Maul says. “I helped with the problem you identified to our--friend of a friend.”

Months of this, and Ahsoka is good at it, but it does sometimes make her head spin. She can’t help her head spinning, staring straight at the blurred blue face of one of her greatest enemies.

“How nice of you,” says Ahsoka reflexively. “Why? And what kind of code name is K-2?”

“Why? Do you really think I do not have the most profound desire in the galaxy to see Palpatine dead, his reign ended, his threat obliterated with every last particle of the memory of the Sith?” Maul growls.

And that, Ahsoka thinks, is fair. Regardless of Maul’s own monstrosity, Palpatine has done monstrous things to him. And Maul isn’t the kind of person to let go of pain.

Still. That doesn’t mean he wants anything good.

“You’re sure you don’t just want to take his place?” she says aggressively.

Maul sighs. “No, I do not want to take his place,” he says. “I want--” Then he scowls, and turns his eyes on her again, and says, “Lady Tano, what I want afterwards is not a meaningful thing to ponder. I am far from achieving it. For now, I only wish to be a splinter in Sidious’s foot, and to grow and grow until it poisons his blood.”

“It’s a little relevant, what you want,” Ahsoka says, unyielding.

“Then I wish for a happy retirement into moderate crime and relative comfort,” Maul snaps. “We do not have much time to float here exchanging judgments, Lady Tano. I assume you are looking for someone other than me.”

Ahsoka says, “I thought the plans were Obi-Wan’s. I can see I was wrong.”

“You were not wrong. You can see nothing,” says Maul.

Ahsoka blinks. “What do you mean? You said--”

“I suppose it is not a surprise that you would recognize his touch,” Maul answers.

Ahsoka turns it all around in her head, and bursts into horrified laughter.

“I’m supposed to believe that?” she says. “Obi-Wan, and you? You hate each other more than any two people in the galaxy! Well, you do, anyway. Obi-Wan’s not allowed to hate. But if he was, he’d hate you the most.”

“Not anymore,” says Maul. She thinks that he almost sounds--smug? “Now we share an enemy. Now we share a purpose.”

Ahsoka tries to absorb all of that. “How?” she says quietly. “How would that have happened? How am I supposed to believe you? If he were alive, he’d be the one talking to me.”

Maul shuts his eyes. “I found him on Coruscant. After I escaped from transport, during the calamity of the clones. You provided plenty of distraction for my escape. I believed he would provide--well. How many Jedi survived? I felt he might be a key to my own survival.”

“And he just went with you?” Ahsoka says dubiously.

“He had no choice,” says Maul.

“You--” Ahsoka starts. Her trigger finger itches, but this isn’t the right way, and she relaxes her hand.

“He has a choice now,” says Maul. “But that is not your business. I came alone because I did not want to tell him you were alive and then be proven wrong.”

“What?” says Ahsoka after a moment.

“I did not wish to disappoint him,” Maul says.

“Oh,” says Ahsoka. “Um. Okay. Well, I’m alive. Are you going to tell him that? Where is he?”

“Do you really think I should tell you that?”

“Maybe not,” says Ahsoka. “I won’t tell you where I’ve been.”

“No.”

“But I have less reason to trust you than you do me,” says Ahsoka. “You know--if you’re telling the truth. You see what I mean? If you’re telling the truth, you’re doing me a favor. If you’re lying, you could be pretty successful at luring me into a trap. But on the other hand? I don’t think you think I’m working for the Empire.”

The holotransmission cuts out, and for a minute Ahsoka thinks Maul will shoot her or run. But no weapons power up, and Maul doesn’t go anywhere. The ship bleeps, and Ahsoka allows Maul’s holotransmission again.

“Yes?” she says.

“Jedha Moon,” says Maul. “At the Temple of the Kyber.”

She’s surprised, but in the middle of the surprise, something clicks. “Kyber...the code name.”

“K-2 for kyber. Two of us. A good joke.”

“Yeah, well, and until this meeting I thought you were a droid,” says Ahsoka.

Maul narrows his eyes. “A very good joke,” he says darkly.

“Jedha,” says Ahsoka, but her better instincts kick in, and she shakes her head. “But I can’t know which it is. A truce or a trap.”

“You are wrong about me,” says Maul. “You know from your friends that I am what I say I am. I do not want you to come to Jedha. I could shoot you down here. I want the Empire destroyed. If I am not a spy against you and I have not killed you, what would I lie for?”

“Hatefulness,” she says. “And you could be a double agent. You could just be playing what I want against me. I’ve lost a lot, too.”

“Perhaps,” says Maul. “But you are stronger than your desires. I have seen this. And as for me--when have I ever been anything other than myself?”

“Plenty of times,” says Ahsoka.

“No,” says Maul. “I am many things, but they are all myself. I will not lie to trick you, Lady Tano, when I could fight you. Didn’t I tell you about Skywalker? Didn’t I tell you then that he and Sidious were the greatest threats to any of us?”

“You did,” says Ahsoka slowly. “I need to see Obi-Wan. All of this doesn’t add up to anything if you don’t prove it.”

“I will tell Obi-Wan you are alive,” says Maul. “You will see him when it is wise to see him. This is all I have come to see, and it is all I will say.”

Abruptly, the call ends. There is a chirp as Ahsoka receives the smallest coded transmission, and then the little ship turns. It disappears in the flash of a hyperspace jump.

Ahsoka floats, stunned. Her hands rest on the controls while her heart follows Maul’s ship, far, far to Jedha Moon. It’s not what she expected, but the strangest thing of all is that she’s nearly sure it’s true.

Chapter Sixteen - Obi-Wan

“You were out for a long time today,” says Obi-Wan. He has waved Maul over to him in the temple mess, gotten up from his seat to meet him at a halfway point. At this odd time of day, no one is likely to overhear. Most of the people in the mess just now are children and their minders, caught up in their own chatter. Obi-Wan smiles as one of the children shrieks and is chastised. The temple children make him think sickly of so many lost padawans, and he aches–but the children here are alive, vivacious and possessed of a child’s charming thoughtlessness despite all their meditations. Despite his grief, they make him happy. He adds, “I trust the ship is in good repair? No catastrophes?”

Maul stiffens. Obi-Wan is buoyant with good fortune, so he laughs and says, “Oh, what? Are you offended? All right: I trust you not to destroy the ship. Now, eat, if you haven’t eaten. And then I have good news.”

“No,” says Maul. And then, slowly, “I have not eaten. What news?”

“You’re in a good mood,” Obi-Wan says. The jibe feels easy, but it is chased by the shiver of uncertainty that Obi-Wan gets any time he is too familiar with Maul. The line is never clear; it moves. They are enemies. It lingers in him. They are not enemies for now, but this thing they have at present, as close as it comes to friendship, can’t permeate the thick skin of Obi-Wan’s memories. He has to remind himself sometimes that he is not afraid, or he must contend with Maul’s own persistent caution.

“Yes,” says Maul at last. “Good news. Good mood.” He does not move, either to sit or to gather a late lunch. Such a bullheaded person. Sometimes a worrying one.

“Well, I wanted to tell you that friends of mine have detected a communication line that promises to be extremely fruitful for our cause,” Obi-Wan says. “But I can see you’re not interested in that?”

“Yes,” says Maul. “I am interested. I will need time to think.” He straightens--he always hunches when he is puzzling through something, although at the moment he is what is puzzling Obi-Wan. “I must eat. Later you can tell me about your communication line.”

“Oh, yes, of course,” Obi-Wan says. “That will be fine. You want me to come and find you?”

“I will know where you are,” says Maul.

Obi-Wan thinks it’s a little funny, how the best news in the world leaves Maul in just as foul a mood as anything else.

“All right,” he says, heart light. “Come and find me.”

It is hours, not a lunchtime, later when Maul does so. Obi-Wan does not ask why; it doesn’t matter. Nothing more will be done with Obi-Wan’s information today. And the hours give Obi-Wan time to realize that, and further time to meditate.

He is still seated, on a flat square cushion in a tiled room deep in the temple, when Maul comes for him. Obi-Wan, unmoving, says, “Now do you finally want to hear the gruesome details of my good news? You’ve made me hold my breath for quite a long time.”

Maul says nothing. Obi-Wan opens his eyes.

“Well?” he says, refusing to be put off-balance. “What is it?”

Maul sits on a cushion across from him.

“Tell me,” he commands.

“I’ve been trying all day,” Obi-Wan reiterates. He describes the weak spot in the Imperial communication line, and the spies within the Empire who plan to exploit it. They’re unlikely to have use of this wonderful spot of luck for long. Perhaps it will serve them for months, or perhaps a week, or perhaps they will use it only once before their game is up and their agents must shut everything down and flee for their lives.

Maul listens, unmoving and unblinking.

“Now it’s you who doesn’t seem excited,” Obi-Wan says.

“I am thinking,” Maul says.

“It’s good news,” Obi-Wan reminds him.

“I know,” Maul says.

Obi-Wan doesn’t understand the problem. It’s not that Maul is cheerful at his best--but he doesn’t often shut down this way, not anymore. That fact has been a private pleasure of Obi-Wan’s, quite honestly. No matter what memories guide and haunt him, Obi-Wan can see what’s in front of him. Neither of them is the same person that they were a year ago. But on a day of news so good that Obi-Wan could only have dreamed it, Maul seems to have absented himself from his body. Earlier, Obi-Wan thought it was something small and funny; now it doesn’t seem so funny. Perhaps not small, either? He doesn’t know. He doesn’t understand.

“Are you hiding something?” he asks.

“I have thousands of secrets,” Maul says.

“I suppose you do,” says Obi-Wan. “All right. Well--that was what I had to say.”

“Thank you,” says Maul. He gets up with a creak of metal.

“That leg--” says Obi-Wan.

He expects some rejoinder, about how any aches in Maul’s prosthetic legs are Obi-Wan’s fault, and he has not earned the right to critique Maul’s self-maintenance. But there is none of that. Maul leaves, quickly, without another word.

Obi-Wan shakes his head, and shakes it away. Still, and perhaps forever, some parts of Maul are beyond understanding.

He remains in a good mood, although a little unsettled, when he returns to his room some time later. It is early for sleep, but although he has taken strides today, there is still nothing for him to do but wait. And when all you can do is wait, you may as well use the time for sleep you won’t get later. His younger self deplores this idea, but his younger self got in a lot of trouble any number of times by doing rather more than necessary. The Obi-Wan of now likes to think himself somewhat wiser even than the man who first arrived on Jedha.

He is dressed for bed and sitting on the edge of it when Maul comes and finds him again. Obi-Wan senses him, hears his steps pause at Obi-Wan’s door instead of his own.

Obi-Wan says, “If you’re finally going to tell me what tantalizing secret you were hanging on to this afternoon, please interrupt.”

There’s silence on the other side of the door, so Obi-Wan says, “I mean you can come in.”

The door swings open, ominously slow. Obi-Wan wants to find Maul’s accidental dramatics funny, as he often does, but as Maul’s face is revealed, Obi-Wan’s humor takes a dent. Maul’s mouth is pressed tight, his eyes first far off, and then too closely focused on Obi-Wan’s own.

“What is it?” Obi-Wan says, still light, but he’s worried this is not about Maul’s secret at all, and instead about something new and worse.

Maul, his voice too high and distant, says, “How exactly did Skywalker break you, Kenobi?”

Obi-Wan’s heart stutters in his chest. This question is not any of the things he expects, and it expands in him like ice.

“Did you want the mechanics?” he asks stiffly.

“Not the torture,” says Maul, brusque. “I can read the signs of what’s inflicted on a body without your help.”

Obi-Wan holds back a shudder.

“Ever the master of social graces,” he says, trying valiantly to keep a steady voice. They do not talk about this. Obi-Wan had thought it belonged to the great catalog of silences neither of them ever breaches.

“I want you to tell me what he cost you,” Maul says doggedly. And then, “I want to know how he loved you.”

The words no sooner touch him than Obi-Wan is lightheaded with outrage. More vividly than for months before, his mind recalls what his bones know: Maul, his enemy. He can see no reason behind this sudden attack, except that with Maul, it should be considered inevitable.

“To be entirely clear: you want me to tell you how much I loved someone who has destroyed everything I live for?” he asks.

“No,” says Maul. “That is--no, Kenobi. I know that answer. Too much. You’re a fool.”

“Then what, pray, are you asking me?” Obi-Wan says. He feels moments away from true fury, and he mustn’t allow himself fury, but it sings in his blood and shortens his breath.

“I want to know what he gave to you before he took it back,” says Maul. He gives an agitated exhalation, flicks a hand, jaggedly, like he wants to shake it off of his body.

Obi-Wan cannot find words for a moment, and then he says, “Whatever Anakin might have taken from me, it’s certainly not yours to have.”

Maul becomes still; he stares back at Obi-Wan, impassive.

“Well?” Obi-Wan says.

There’s not a breath between them. And then.

“I spoke to Ahsoka Tano,” Maul says, and the whiplash is so powerful that it pushes Obi-Wan to his feet.

“You what?” he says, but it’s more like a shout. It bounces out the door and down the hall. He tries to recalibrate, but it’s impossible to calibrate yourself to insanity.

“Lady Tano,” says Maul. “I flew out and spoke to her today. She discovered us through the patterns of our spycraft. We must be more careful.”

By now, Obi-Wan is incandescent.

“Ahsoka is alive, and you didn’t tell me?” he says. “Ahsoka is alive, isn’t she?”

Maul gives him a look, as if in this scene it’s Obi-Wan being unreasonable and cruel.

“I arranged a meeting,” he says. “For later on. We will go together. For safety.”

“What the hell is wrong with you?” Obi-Wan says.

Maul regards him, belligerent and watchful.

“Maul,” Obi-Wan says sharply. Emotion is rising against him like a wave. He tries to step out of its path, but it’s as inevitable as Maul’s violence. He says, “You went to see her.” It has been so many months. He had hoped, and had found nothing. “Where can I find her?” Obi-Wan says. His voice shakes. He hears the threat in it.

“The meeting is in three days,” Maul says. “I have already given the coordinates. Sufficient time for due diligence on all sides.”

“I suppose you won’t tell me more than that,” Obi-Wan says caustically.

Maul’s expression twitches with something Obi-Wan can’t read.

“No,” he says. “You would go alone. And as I have said, Kenobi. Safety.”

Obi-Wan swallows everything he wants to spit out. He says, “Tell me what else you know.”

He half-blinks. “Only what information we used to find one another. Perhaps I should have asked more questions.”

“Perhaps,” Obi-Wan agrees. Maul keeps staring at him. “Well?” he says curtly. “She’s all right?”

“Everything you could hope for,” Maul says.

He hears it, and then re-hears it, and something in it--in his voice, or in whatever it is that he is offering--trips Obi-Wan up. Suddenly he isn’t startled and enraged. He rubs his eyes for a moment and says, “She is, is she?”

“Herself. One piece. Operating under her own volition,” Maul says. “At least as far as I could tell you.”

“Ahsoka has always operated under her own volition,” Obi-Wan says, and sighs. “Why didn’t you tell me? Why did you ask me about Anakin? What were you trying to get at?”

Nothing. No answer, no footsteps. Obi-Wan looks up, and Maul is indeed still standing there, poorly framed in his squat doorway, looking less like a threat than like an awkwardness. It staunches the adrenaline. Obi-Wan is slightly lost.

“What did you bring all that up for?” Obi-Wan says. “It can’t matter, can it? I’m not on his side now.”

Maul says, “I am sorry if I injured your spirits. I will let you sleep.”

“Wait. Don’t do that. Sometimes it’s just very hard to understand you,” says Obi-Wan.

“That is not on purpose,” says Maul. He shifts abruptly, with the tics of movement that always become more pronounced when he is unhappy. Then he says, “Good night, Kenobi,” and is gone from the doorway, gone into the next room, gone with the door shut behind him.

Maul always leaves immediately, when he has decided to leave. Obi-Wan never really tries to stop him. He can’t help feeling, however, as if he should have this time. Maul shuts a door between them, and everything feels unfinished, like a half-pulled tooth.

Chapter Seventeen - Padmé

Padmé dreams. Anakin hunts her. She draws the hunt, slipping through corridors--a maze of places she’s been, places she hasn’t been, places that may be real. If she turns wrong, someone she cares for will be on the other side of the turn. She knows that if she sees them, it’s as much as if she revealed them. Anakin will find them. The Empire will find them. There is no need to say they will die.

She always has one child near her--in her arms, or with their hand in hers. Sometimes it’s not a hand, or a face, or a little body. Sometimes it’s just the knowledge of them, they are with her, the ghost of they are with her pressing against her mind, as surely as breath and skin.

Sometimes, a second child is there as well. But it troubles her, frightens her, how often it is only one of them.

Neither of them cries.

When Padmé wakes, she is often in tears, and if Sabé is on planet, Sabé is often by her side. Not infrequently, Sabé ventures out from Alderaan to organize this or retrieve that. She is Padmé’s lieutenant, with the other handmaidens reporting to her. She is doing a great deal of the work to build their new outpost at D’Qar. The outpost is slow work, but a lot of work, and it’s necessary to make “slow” as quick as possible. When it is completed, the Organas will be safer to carry out their work, and Padmé will not be locked away as she is now.

But as crucial as it is, sometimes Sabé must come back to Alderaan, and at those times, Padmé can’t help being glad. Sabé sleeps next to her, and her warmth pulls Padmé down from the heights of her anxiety, fills her with an old, familiar conviction, one of loyalty and intimacy which has grown up in their time apart. They have both learned. They have both aged. They have lived without each other, and now it is easy to touch one another, easier somehow to reach across the distance. Anakin’s ruin doesn’t make Padmé doubt herself, and she has met him often enough in dreams not to feel guilt.

When she wakes now, in the middle of the night, it’s with Sabé’s arm on hers.

“Did I say something in my sleep?” she asks. What she means is, Did I cry?

Sabé says, “No, Padmé. But Ahsoka is here.”

That shakes the sleep out of Padmé’s head, and her sluggish distress from the nightmares lurches into something else.

“Is all well?” she asks.

“She is well,” says Sabé. “And she says there is news. Weird, but probably not bad,” she recites dryly.

“Oh,” says Padmé, amused through the muddiness of poor sleep. “That’s Ahsoka, always herself. Let me up, Sabé, I’d like to hear some probably not bad news, even if it’s weird.”

Sabé vanishes through the door. Padmé stretches her arms until they creak and pop, then gets up to check on the babies. Both here, both breathing softly, both safe. But for how long? How can she find a single way in the whole galaxy to make them safe? She tries to tell herself that she’s dead to Anakin, that he hasn’t bothered to threaten her parents and she hasn’t been found. But her dreams are real hunts. She knows this. She is certain. And Anakin is trained, as a Jedi and as a Sith. At some point, he will reach through her and find the children.

She is touching their soft skin, making them frown in their sleep, when Ahsoka enters the apartment.

“Padmé,” she says. Her expression is strange, just slightly screwed up from the schooled expression that she’s only really seemed to get the hang of without the Jedi hounding her to do it.

“Is it something terrible?” Padmé asks. “Whatever it is, tell me. We’ll plan.”

“Not terrible,” says Ahsoka. “I...think. And I don’t think it’s a trap, either. I just think it’s impossible?”

Padmé says, “Well, now I’m not worried at all. What is it?”

“I found someone,” says Ahsoka. “I found someone who works like Obi-Wan and has all his contacts. But I had a face-to-face, and the person I talked to wasn’t Obi-Wan. He claimed to be a partner. Said they were working together from the temple on Jedha Moon.”

Padmé waits, and Ahsoka sighs, somewhere between tiredness and laughing. “It was Maul,” she says. “I went to find Obi-Wan and the one who came to meet me was Maul.”

Padmé’s heart seizes. “That doesn’t sound like good news to me,” she says, understating to keep herself steady.

“It wouldn’t be,” Ahsoka agrees. “If I thought he’d hurt Obi-Wan. But I could sense Maul in the Force. We were close by one another, and I’m--I’m pretty sure he was telling me the truth. And the things I’ve been tracking--it has been Obi-Wan’s contacts, but not all his style. If it were just Obi-Wan I’d expect him to be sneaking onto Coruscant and jumping in volcanos. You know--he always put up a front of being the sensible one, but Anakin learned it from somewhere. Obi-Wan never really stopped him, did he? He was always doing just as many stupid things.”

“Yes, he was,” says Padmé.

“Well, this is smarter than that,” says Ahsoka. “No offense to Master Kenobi.”

“Offense deserved,” Padmé says, only just smiling.

Ahsoka returns the expression. “And something else,” she says. “Maul hates Palpatine more than anything else in the galaxy. And...he warned me. About Anakin.”

“What?” says Padmé.

“That’s why he laid the bait,” says Ahsoka. “When I chased him down, before Order 66 came down. The whole thing was a trap for Anakin. Obi-Wan was supposed to come for Maul, and he was supposed to bring Anakin. Maul knew he was the key. Maul thought that if he killed him, Sidious’s plan would fall apart.” She inhales, and releases it slowly. “He knew Anakin was Sidious’s tool. But it was a stupid plan. I came instead. And I didn’t listen.”

Padmé brushes Luke’s face with her fingertips.

“Oh,” she says. “Well. Why would you listen to Maul?”

“It was too late anyway,” says Ahsoka. “Halfway back to Coruscant, and the Republic died.”

Padmé lets her eyes shut for a moment as she schools herself.

“So, Maul hates the Emperor,” she says.

“Yes,” says Ahsoka.

“And you think he is working with Obi-Wan? You really do?”

“Yes.”

“Of all the people in the galaxy to work together, Ahsoka, you know that makes the least sense.”

“I know, and I agree,” says Ahsoka. “But I feel that it’s true. He told me about Jedha and he didn’t have to. He sent coordinates and a time for another meeting--it’s on Kokash--so there was no reason to bait me anywhere else. Some of what I’ve uncovered to find them...it makes a lot more sense if you can just get past the part where Obi-Wan and Maul as a team seems too crazy to be real. And--well, I’ve gotten better at reading people. He was...I think it’s real.”

“Do you want to go to the rendezvous?” Padmé asks.

Ahsoka nods. “I do,” she says.

“I suppose Maul told you to come alone.”

“He...didn’t,” says Ahsoka. “Do you think I shouldn’t?”

“I don’t want to send you,” says Padmé.

“I understand. Think of it more as what you’ll allow me? You’re my commander, after all.”

“I wouldn’t have called it that,” Padmé says.

“You need to,” says Ahsoka. “More and more. It’s what you are, you know. And it’s what we need, when we’re at war.”

War, Padmé thinks, is all Ahsoka knows. War has made her and betrayed her, and now she has stepped back into it, and she sees it more clearly than the rest of them. Even Padmé, who spent years in the Senate chambers, her ears rumbling with the dispassionate violence of worlds, doesn’t know war like Ahsoka.

She knows, Padmé thinks.

“Then I’m your commander,” Padmé acquiesces. “And if I tell you not to go alone? Or not to go at all?”

Ahsoka stiffens, but she says, “Then I’ll follow the order.”

Padmé can’t help laughing. “Then it’s the first time you’ve really obeyed anyone you were supposed to,” she says.

“I trust you,” Ahsoka says. “And we can’t afford to sneak around behind each other’s backs.”

Padmé says, “All right. Go, and you can go alone. But have Rex in rescue distance. I can’t afford to lose you, either.”

“The rendezvous is in two days,” says Ahsoka. “Thank you, Padmé. I feel it, that this is the real thing.”

Padmé imagines a single glimpse of Obi-Wan, alive, and it’s like realizing that she has forgotten to eat all day and instantly feeling the emptiness of her stomach. She is ravenous. For the next two days, she wonders, will she think of anything but hunger?

Chapter Eighteen - Obi-Wan

Kokash is bare, not of life, but of civilization. It is a flat clay-earthed land, where Obi-Wan and Maul wait to meet Ahsoka. There are evergreens and deciduous trees that are dropping their leaves for the winter, flat land and sparse undergrowth. Waterways slither across the surface of the planet, and the air is damp and chilly. The place smells of rain that wants to become snow.

“Why here, exactly?” Obi-Wan asks.

“No one is here except us,” Maul says. It’s an incomplete answer; of the uncountable planets in the galaxy, there are many where no one is here. Whatever has infected Maul’s mood for the last three days is clearly not flushed from his system.

They are early, but Ahsoka arrives exactly on time. Obi-Wan hears the little craft, but more than that, he feels her. Unmistakable. Cool, bright, more controlled than he remembers, but Ahsoka without a doubt. His heart leaps towards her, and he feels like a child clamoring for a gift as the ship lands and they wait for the hatch to open.

When he sees her, not much older but so much changed since she was Anakin’s Padawan, his eyes ache. Maul tenses beside him. Ahsoka walks steadily towards them, from some hundred yards away, and that clamoring feeling intensifies.

“Ahsoka,” Obi-Wan says, steadying himself. Ahsoka’s eye is trained on Maul, but her mouth is slowly curving into a smile. Is there anxiety in that smile? Yes–hidden at its edges, slipping through the slight tension of her eyebrows above her bright eyes. Obi-Wan knows, quite painfully, that the hesitation in her happiness is his fault, and for the first time ever, he feels the full weight of guilt.

“Obi-Wan,” she says. And then her voice catches. “You’re really here. You’re alive. You--”

He touches the scar on his face. “Oh--yes.”

“Are you all right?”

He thinks she’s asking not just about whatever caused the injury, but about Maul. Whether he’s coerced, or imprisoned, or whatever else. He thinks of sending Maul away, but something about the idea tugs against him. The Force, maybe, telling him not to. It must have a reason, so instead of stepping away with Ahsoka, he very slightly leans his weight in Maul’s direction. They are allies, it means to say. He is safe.

He says, “I was detained on Coruscant. This was back when the order was issued. It doesn’t ache so much now.”

“It all still aches,” she says immediately.

Obi-Wan says, “No--of course you’re right. Of course it does. A little less so, seeing you alive and well.”

“You too,” she says. She means this, he can see, but he can also see the caveat in it. The very slight distance, which used to be respect and is now a healthy assessment of Obi-Wan’s trustworthiness.

That also aches, and it’s his fault. But this is not the time or place to beg her for forgiveness. It would be unfair to ask at all, and the honest relief of their mutual survival is, he decides, enough of a gift.

“We have Maul to thank for that,” he tells her. “I wouldn’t have survived under my own power.”

Ahsoka’s face goes a little pale. “Well,” she says. “In that case, I suppose I have to thank you.”

Maul makes a gruff sound, then says, “I warned you about him. About Skywalker.”

“You did,” says Ahsoka. And then, her smile breaking into pain, “Oh.”

“I won’t say it’s all right,” says Obi-Wan. Unsure of whether he should, he half raises a hand towards her. She seizes it, more quickly than he expects.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “For all of us. But he didn’t--I haven’t seen him since…”

Obi-Wan rubs the damp off his face, although the damp in this humid place is inescapable.

“Are you all right?” he asks, insufficiently. “Where have you been?”

“All around,” she says. She gives Maul one more hard look, then says, “He’s not a spy?”

“He’s not a spy,” says Obi-Wan.

“If he is, it could ruin everything,” says Ahsoka.

“I know,” says Obi-Wan. He can only imagine how bizarre it must seem, Obi-Wan of all people trusting Maul of all other people. Obi-Wan being plucked out of torture and death by someone who has tortured him, who has killed people he loves.

Ahsoka nods slowly. “I’ll trust you,” she says, like it’s a fresh decision. “So I’ll trust him. I’ve been with Padmé.”

Obi-Wan inhales sharply. “I haven’t heard anything,” he says. “She’s all right?”

“And the twins,” says Ahsoka with a grin. “They’re a handful. Or two handfuls, actually.”

Obi-Wan is flooded by something he almost doesn’t recognize--not just the fierce pleasure of small progress against a vast enemy. Not just cultivated serenity. Something violent and fresh, so tender he is afraid that his happiness will break the thing that instigated it.

“That’s wonderful news,” he says.

Ahsoka bites her lip. “Do you know?” she says. “Whose they are?”

“I never asked,” says Obi-Wan. It’s more than that. He convinced himself that to ask was such a tremendous breach of privacy and dignity that he would not even consider the question in private. He willed himself not to know the simplest, most obvious thing about his dear friend of many years. Now, with Ahsoka facing him, he relents. He lets the Force in where he has not for so long. He says heavily, “But it’s Anakin, isn’t it?”

She says, “It is.”

Obi-Wan lets this settle into him, and imagines briefly what it would have been like to find this out before Anakin fell. How angry he would have been with him, when the full extent of his catastrophe was falling in love. How stupid it seems, compared to what happened.

“Padmé is having dreams,” Ahsoka says. “He’s looking for her.”

“In the dreams?”

“It’s probably safe to assume he’s looking for her when he’s awake, too,” says Ahsoka. “But, yes. She says he keeps getting closer. She’s planning to leave where she’s been staying. She’s worried about what he would do with the babies.”

“So am I,” says Obi-Wan. “The dreams--Padmé is Force-sensitive?”

“Turns out,” says Ahsoka.

“Well now,” says Obi-Wan. “That’s a surprise. Does she have somewhere safe to go?”

“We’re building a new place,” says Ahsoka. “A new base of operations, away from allies who might be hurt if she stays where she is.”

Obi-Wan can think of a number of worlds where Padmé might be, and in the back of his mind he sifts through the likelihood of each. It doesn’t do anyone any good for him to know too much, but he can’t help himself trying to solve the riddle.

Maul says, “You came to our meeting. You want something from us.”

“I wanted to know that Obi-Wan is alive,” says Ahsoka combatively. “No offense, but your word alone isn’t exactly reassuring, especially considering...well, everything you’ve ever done.”

Maul shifts uneasily, so taut that Obi-Wan can feel it like muscle in the Force around him.

“Things have changed,” he says. “The Sith do not do me any good. I am not--” He pauses, and Obi-Wan can hear the moment that he reroutes his words. “I will not be your enemy if you are not mine, Lady Tano.” What was he going to say instead?

“So, an alliance?” she asks.

“We will ally with you,” Maul says.

Ahsoka gives him a strange look, bafflement twisted up with some other thing. She certainly doesn’t look excited. Neither would Obi-Wan, if he were in her position.

Obi-Wan says, “You’re aware of what we’ve been up to. It’s an effort made together.”

She turns that expression on him, and says, “Well. Other than seeing if you were real and in one piece, Obi-Wan, that’s the other reason I’m here. To bring you into the rebellion.”

“We are a rebellion,” says Maul. “We have allies. We have done many great deeds.”

He gets so very poetic when he is offended. Obi-Wan stifles a smile and says, “And if we join with Ahsoka, our efforts may be even more effective. What do you think?”

“I think I am the one who arranged this rendezvous,” says Maul, “so you needn’t try to convince me. We are allied. It is done. What do you require, Lady Tano?”

“Well...if you’re in, then you’ve given me what I need already,” Ahsoka says. “At least, I think so. I do need a way to contact you. And I need a minute alone with Obi-Wan.”

Maul stiffens, and says, “Yes, of course you do. Because I am holding Obi-Wan Kenobi against his will, as docile as a pet.”

“Eeaugh,” says Obi-Wan. “Ahsoka, of course you can have a moment.” On impulse, he touches Maul’s arm with light fingers before he walks with Ahsoka back towards her ship. It’s strange how the hard wet ground makes his feet ache after barely setting down on it. He misses the dry cold of Jedha; this is miserable.

“Horrible planet, isn’t it?” he says, waving aside a little cloud of bugs.

“Not my favorite,” Ahsoka agrees. “Obi-Wan--if you’re in trouble, we can run from here. We can get on my ship and be gone before Maul can board his. He won’t find us.”

Obi-Wan smiles. “Ah, a rescue. I know it seems like the most absolute madness,” he says. “But his terrible attitude aside, I trust Maul. I trust him with all of this.”

“How am I supposed to believe in that?” Ahsoka says. “Even if Maul is telling the truth, I don’t understand why you would ever work alongside him. He’s a murderer. A torturer. He’s killed people you love for sport.”

Obi-Wan swallows the sudden nausea. “I know,” he says. “And I killed him, once. I know it’s not the same,” he adds hastily. “But he is not the same. Can’t you feel him, in the Force? Does he feel like a Sith to you? Does he feel like a danger?”

“No,” says Ahsoka. “And I don’t understand it.”

“I do. I listen when he dreams,” says Obi-Wan, about to say, I know how he was made, but instead he shuts his mouth and wishes he hadn’t said anything. It is private. Not private only to Maul, he realizes; private to Obi-Wan. He silences himself from the unexpected fear that something will break if he gives this away.

Ahsoka’s eyes widen for a moment before she schools herself. Lightly and quietly, she says, “You care about him.”

“He is my ally,” says Obi-Wan. He tries to anchor himself in this more certain thing, against the startling notions that suddenly stir beyond it. He adds, valiant, “He’s proven himself.”

“That’s not what I meant,” says Ahsoka.

Obi-Wan says, “Jedha is a solitary place. And you can’t do what we’ve done without trust.”

“What you’ve--” Ahsoka bites her lip. “You’re safe with him?”

“I really am,” says Obi-Wan. It feels true. “And so is the rebellion.”

She nods, slow. “I guess I can’t judge so much,” she says. “After all, I’m trusting Ventress.”

“No!” says Obi-Wan.

“She’s one of the only people who helped me when I was framed by Barriss,” says Ahsoka, meeting his eyes without a waver. “And she parted ways with the Sith a long time ago, just like Maul. And she’s resourceful. And she’s cute.”

“I have a great many questions,” says Obi-Wan, feeling a little faint.

“I won’t answer them,” says Ahsoka. But she relaxes. “All right. I’m going to take it on faith that you’re right about Maul. Can I give you one other piece of good news?”

“I would love a piece of good news,” says Obi-Wan.

Ahsoka leans back towards the hatch of her ship. “Rex!” she calls, and Obi-Wan inhales sharply. Seconds later, a man in black breeches and a loose blue shirt strides down the gangplank. Obi-Wan recognizes a clone’s face, but even more, he recognizes him.

Behind Obi-Wan, Maul growls in alarm, and Obi-Wan himself finds a lightsaber in his hand. Not as comforting as his own, lost on the path from Utapau, but still a comfort--picked up by Maul as he fled the Jedi Temple, and now secure in Obi-Wan’s grip. He raises it slightly, feeling Maul come up behind him.

“No,” says Ahsoka very firmly, putting up a hand. “Rex is safe. He and I made sure.”

“General,” says Rex with a brief nod. There’s a blaster strapped to his leg, but he doesn’t reach for it.

“Made sure?” Obi-Wan prompts, not lowering his weapon.

“A little brain surgery,” says Rex, unsmiling. “We didn’t get to many of my brothers in time, but Ahsoka saved me. And it’s not many, but it turns out we’re not the only ones to figure out the funny little trick the Kaminoans planted inside us. So there’s others like me. Free clones.”

“It’s not their fault,” Ahsoka says. “Rex’s own men tried to kill us. You know they wouldn’t turn on him like that, even if they turned on us. It was a trap, Obi-Wan. For all of us.”

And Obi-Wan was the first ever to fall into it. The full weight of the disaster lands on his shoulders and presses down. He is the one who brought news of the clones to the Republic. He has been, he thinks, such a well-played game piece.

“I’m sorry,” says Obi-Wan. “In that case, your loss is as great as ours.”

“It is,” says Rex. “Thank you for saying so.”

“Rex and I have been working together since the order,” says Ahsoka, as Rex makes his way to solid ground to stand beside her. “Partners in crime.”

Maul stirs, and despite everything Obi-Wan finds it a little funny. There are certain things that always whip Maul up, and the mere mention of a life of crime happens to be one of them. Obi-Wan says, “I’m glad to hear it. You’re both safer with backup.”

Ahsoka raises her brow. “Yes, Master Obi-Wan, thank you for the instruction.” Rex raises a hand to cough a laugh into it.

“I’m sorry; of course you know.”

“One or two things,” Ahsoka says.

“I know this clone,” says Maul suddenly.

“Come to that, sorry to say I know you as well,” Rex says blandly. “So, Ahsoka--we’re trusting this little arrangement? This isn’t just the general going screwy from the hell of it all?”

“I think we are. Trusting, I mean,” Ahsoka says.

Rex nods. “Then it’s time to lay out some cards,” he says.

“Come on,” says Ahsoka. “It’ll be more comfortable on the ship.”

Seated inside, they get into things. Maul does not speak much, although he corrects Obi-Wan several times, and he becomes ferociously quiet at the mention of Bo-Katan.

“Is it better not to mention my friend to her at all?” Obi-Wan wonders. Maul stirs.

“Let me decide,” says Ahsoka. “I know her pretty well by now. She can’t be deceived in the long term. And if she finds out later, instead of me telling her now--well, it’ll be bad no matter what.”

“I do not ask for forgiveness,” Maul says.

“Great, because she won’t give you any,” says Ahsoka. “But it seems like you’re non-negotiable, and the last thing we need is to lie to Bo-Katan, then have her find out about you at a crucial moment and blow up. So I’ll figure it out. Better me than either of you.”

“They have rapport,” says Rex thoughtfully. Ahsoka says, “Hah!”

“You have been busy,” says Obi-Wan, and Ahsoka shrugs, a smug, Well, there you have it.

By the time their conversation winds down to its end, Obi-Wan feels buoyant with hope. There is power in Ahsoka and Rex’s resistance, and what was split apart is weaving together. Obi-Wan and Maul are doubling their allies in a single hour. They will be stronger. They will do greater damage to the Empire, and protect more innocents than they could before. They are building something.

Before it’s too late to ask, Obi-Wan says, “What about the twins? The dreams? What will Padmé do?”

“I don’t know,” Ahsoka says. “She’s afraid. As long as they’re with her, they’ll only be one step ahead of Anakin. And…who knows what he’ll do if he finds them?”

Obi-Wan says, “I can’t imagine. If we can help…”

Ahsoka and Rex both look at Maul, and then at Obi-Wan.

“I don’t pretend either of us is an expert on babies,” Obi-Wan says dryly. “But I’m offering whatever help we can give. If she ever needs it or wants it. I’m certainly not saying she should leave the children with us.”

But something does itch at him when he says this. Maybe it’s just flies. Maybe he is just tickled at the idea of a baby, pure foolishness on his part. But what he thinks is that no one is as powerful as Anakin, and that even if Padmé hides herself on this new base, she will be at risk as long as Anakin is alive.

They stand and sigh, and Rex and Ahsoka see them off the boat; then, sudden and fierce, Ahsoka grabs Obi-Wan into a hug.

“I missed you,” she says. “I’m so glad you’re alive.”

She doesn’t say I forgive you, but Obi-Wan tells himself again: he understands why not.

She pulls back and says, “Remember. When you need me, I’m Fulcrum.”

“So it would seem,” says Obi-Wan bemusedly. “I’m very proud to know you, Ahsoka. I’m very glad that you both are well. I’m very glad for all of this.”

Ahsoka looks at Maul again, letting Obi-Wan go. “If you betray us,” she says. “If you hurt us.”

“You’ll hunt me,” says Maul in a purr.

“That’s right,” Ahsoka says.

“Your cause is mine,” Maul says.

“I hope so,” says Ahsoka. She takes Obi-Wan’s arm again. “Obi-Wan. Be well. Be careful.”

“May the Force be with you,” Obi-Wan says. “All of you. Let us know what you need.”

Rex gives a casual salute, and he and Ahsoka climb back aboard their ship. They’ve taken off and vanished into the grey sky before Maul and Obi-Wan have boarded. Maul is very quiet, not just wordless but making his body vanish with silence. It does not make him small; he can’t do that, no matter his mood. But he is as still as a statue. Waiting for a ruling.

“Well?” Obi-Wan says.

“Auspicious,” says Maul.

“You’re happy?”

Maul is silent. Sulking?

“Tell me,” says Obi-Wan.

“Yes,” says Maul. “Happy. We needed a stronger alliance. More passageways. More doors.”

“Are you all right?”

Maul blinks. “You called me a friend.”

“Well, I’d better, by now,” Obi-Wan says.

“I will not hurt them.”

“Good,” says Obi-Wan. He searches the Force and himself and all that he can see of Maul. Anger, discomfort, the ragged edge that is always present. Nothing, though, that Obi-Wan does not trust. The chance of a cruel word or two doesn’t change that.

“You want to raise her children,” Maul says, oddly accusing.

Obi-Wan laughs. “I don’t think you’ll have to worry about that,” he says. “I doubt that a confirmed bachelor and a former Sith would be Padmé’s ideal as far as surrogate parents go.”

“I have hurt children before.”

He has, and that part is not funny. Obi-Wan lets his thoughts settle before he answers. He says, “You can never escape anything that you’ve done. But it’s a choice now, you know. You can make all of this a convenience, leave it behind when a way opens back to your old life. Or you can become what you’ve made.”

“What have I made?” Maul says.

“Something good. Something unselfish,” says Obi-Wan.

“Such a simple tool for the Force,” Maul snarls. Obi-Wan raises his hands up to quell him. So often he doesn’t understand what is wrong. It’s humbling, to be made uncertain for once in his life. Maul stares hard at Obi-Wan’s hands, and turns to their ship.

“What is it?” Obi-Wan says to his back. “You keep being very upset with me. What is it that I’m doing?”

Maul hums, a low noise of discomfort. “Nothing, Jedi,” he says. “You’re doing nothing.”

It’s a more distant address than Maul has used for Obi-Wan in a long time, and Obi-Wan is certain that it’s deliberate. He just doesn’t understand why, why Maul strikes in the ways he strikes, when it seems to Obi-Wan that there is nothing wrong, when there is no reason anymore.

“If you would just tell me--”

“Board the ship,” Maul says.

“I tell you the truth,” Obi-Wan says.

“I am not the one who will leave,” Maul snarls.

Obi-Wan leans back. “Now that’s a thing to say.”

“You have your friends again,” Maul says. “You have our allies. None of them will deal with me without you.”

“They will so, and why would they need to?” Obi-Wan says.

“Because it’s all in your grasp and it is not mine to have!” Maul says in a violent rush.

The words strike familiar, and Obi-Wan gropes backwards for memory. Any context. Two days ago. Of course here is Maul clinging to something two days old, and wildly misremembered.

“It was a fight,” he says. “An argument, and you weren’t playing fairly. What you said about Anakin wasn’t fair.”

“You are hungry for what he took from you,” Maul says. “You leave parts of yourself empty for him to come back and fit himself into. All of them. They are fitting.”

Obi-Wan decides not to lose his temper, and the Force flows through him, rewarding his patience with a sense of calm.

“If I have grieved,” he says. “If I welcome my friends back. Does that mean I can’t learn anything new?”

No reply.

“I don’t think you understand how I value what we have accomplished,” Obi-Wan says. “I don’t have any plans to leave this behind. Has a single word I’ve spoken on this horrible mud ball demonstrated otherwise?”

Maul is stymied for only a moment before he says, “I am no longer necessary.”

“The partnership,” says Obi-Wan gently, “is part of the accomplishment.” Obi-Wan says, “I am not interested in abandoning any part of this. Including what we have built between us. Is that clear to you?”

Maul looks at him so strangely. “Obi-Wan,” he says.

Obi-Wan shuts his eyes, shakes his head. “Come on,” he says. “There’s work to do. And I really hate this terrible planet that you’ve brought us to. It couldn’t have been warm and dry, with a little breeze? Butterflies and pretty flowers?”

“This was convenient,” Maul growls.

Obi-Wan laughs, and the enormous relief of this entire day washes over him.

“Come on,” he says again.

Chapter Nineteen - Padmé

Every day when Padmé wakes, she feels everything at once: relief, in the vivid memory of Ahsoka coming home and saying Obi-Wan is really alive, terror in the narrow escape from her nightmares. Anakin comes closer and closer. He is a clearer shape in her mind, his voice in her ear, his shadow on the walls across from her. She knows what he has been doing all this time, but she thinks he must be wrung out, exhausted, because when he sleeps, he bends himself only towards her.

The elation of Obi-Wan being alive is dampened by the danger of Padmé knowing it. If Anakin catches her, he catches so much else: the twins, Ahsoka, the Organas. She imagines, against her will, what would happen if he found out that she sleeps with Sabé. She knows all about his violence, not just now, but for so long. She remembers Tatooine. She remembers Rush Clovis. She imagines what he would do to Sabé, then what he would do to her.

On a night when Sabé is there, Padmé wakes in the darkness with her breath staggering its way out of her lungs. Her arms shake under her weight. Sabé shifts. Her strong hand brushes Padmé’s skin. She says, “Padmé, did he find you?”

“Not yet,” says Padmé, and bursts into tears.

Sabé holds her, and Padmé sinks into the warmth, feeling the slight flex of Sabé’s muscles against her. She breathes in Sabé’s smell, like cut wood and slight spice.

Sabé says, “He can find you in the Force. Isn’t that what you believe?”

“Yes,” she says. “But not many people are stronger in the Force than Obi-Wan. He doesn’t have any of these dreams. And I can’t imagine Anakin isn’t looking for him.”

“Hmm,” says Sabé. “Perhaps. But if that’s true, it’s also true that Kenobi has an advantage, isn’t it?”

“Advantage?”

“Well, yes,” says Sabé. “Do you think it might help to keep Anakin out of your head, if you were trained how to use the Force?”

It’s an idea that hasn’t occurred to Padmé at all, and she laughs because it’s so obvious. So far, the most striking evidence that Padmé is Force sensitive at all has come via her warnings and visions about Anakin. It has been terrible. And in her mind, the Force and the Jedi are exclusively connected. If the Jedi no longer exist, what kind of learning can there be?

But that is ridiculous, and Padmé feels ridiculous for not realizing it.

“There are no temples now,” she says.

“You have Force users here under your nose,” Sabé says. “What do you think Ahsoka is?”

“Not a Jedi,” Padmé admits. “But–would she? It’s hard for her.”

“Maybe,” says Sabé, prevaricating once again.

“What!” says Padmé. “What?” She nudges Sabé’s stomach with her elbow. “You think I’m being silly and I want to know why.”

“You trust us, but you still underestimate us. You underestimate her.”

“She’s been hurt, badly,” Padmé says.

“She was hurt by the Jedi so badly that she will let you be destroyed?” Sabé asks sardonically. “The girl who is running messages between you and a member of the Jedi Council, even now?”

Padmé leans her weight against Sabé’s chest.

“All right,” she says. “I’ll ask.”

When she does ask, Ahsoka says yes.

“I’m not a teacher,” Ahsoka says cautiously, but only after she’s already agreed to do it.

“So we’ll both be learning together,” says Padmé. “I trust you. Can you do this–be a Jedi?”

“I’m not a Jedi,” says Ahsoka quickly and firmly. “And I won’t teach you to be a Jedi. I’ll teach you what I know now. They’re not exactly the same thing.”

“That’s for the best, because I don’t want to be a Jedi,” Padmé says. “And thank you. I think it will help. Sabé thinks it will help.”

“She’s probably right,” Ahsoka says. “Anyway. There are worse things if someone is hunting you than to have skills they don’t expect. And there are worse things than being close to the Force.” The last drops into close to a whisper, and Padmé’s skin prickles.

Ahsoka loves the Force, even if she can’t be of the Jedi. For Padmé, it’s always been a neighbor, something close by but not belonging to her. When Ahsoka starts to train her, though, will she invite the Force in? Will it become something sacred to her? Will reverence and love steal her voice, like it does Ahsoka’s?

Padmé is such a practical person. Feet on the ground, eye on her challengers. She’s a creature of precision and seriousness, no matter that people can make her laugh. What will it be like, to be all of that and also, somehow, a person who lets go of specifics, and sinks into the everything of the universe?

She buries her fear for much of every day, and works. There is plenty to occupy her. There are Ahsoka’s lessons. There are the twins. And in the months since they began to work alongside Obi-Wan and–she still feels strange and slightly nauseated about this–Maul, they’ve made tremendous progress in strengthening their alliances and building their resources. And meanwhile, piece by piece, they build Padmé’s crucial project: the base on D’Qar, small, sturdy, hidden and well-equipped. The place she will go as soon as it is ready, making the Organas safer and freeing herself from the larger part of risk. Alderaan is a populous planet, and there is no such place as a populated planet without Imperial sympathizers; she has barely been outside since the Empire woke.

She is restless. She is restless, and no amount of work can settle her, because everything she does is in preparation. It looks forward to what comes next. Here has been very good to her. The Organas have been too hospitable, taking too much risk on her behalf. It is time to go. Or, almost–the base is nearly habitable, and as soon as it is, she is going to steal away from this world. Sabé is worried that Padmé will be lonely, and Padmé thinks that’s probably true. She can bear loneliness, though, with work and freedom to keep her. And there will be visitors, all people she trusts and loves.

Well. Largely. It’s bizarre to think that Maul has set foot on her secret base and that she is still supposed to trust its safety. It’s more bizarre still to realize that despite her uneasiness, she does trust its safety. This is a choice she made months ago that still attacks her from the side sometimes: she could have Obi-Wan with Maul, or she could not have Obi-Wan at all. There was no middle option. She committed, somewhat dizzily, to her decision, and took them both. Now one of their oldest enemies is making her a place.

And when she wakes, what frightens her isn’t the first Sith lord she ever saw. It is her husband.

She wonders sometimes if that is still the right word for him. Nothing has been done to separate them, in the legal or formal senses. Merely changing a name doesn’t break a contract like theirs; but Anakin hasn’t changed a name. He’s discarded a self. Perhaps it’s true enough to void the thing, and their marriage has evaporated into the emptiness, and no one would hold her to it. Perhaps it’s not so simple as this. It’s not unusual in this life to be bound to something vile. Grief alone can’t free anyone. And as much as she would like to dream otherwise, wife does not equate to safety, or comfort, or intimacy, or love. It is a contract, with no guarantee of an amicable release.

She flips these ideas on their sides sometimes, when her mind wanders away from business. When she steps out of the bath, or when she catches a scent on the Alderaan air that makes her think, Maybe this is a place that would have made him happy. They slip in like unwanted letters under the door. It doesn’t matter, she tells herself. It’s only a formality, and if there weren’t a contract he could use to claim her, he would just find another way. He could always be jealous, and sly with loopholes.

It doesn’t matter now. But it’s hard to forget this: the fact of their marriage, the formality and the authority, did matter to Anakin. It mattered to him, a former slave who could never have married, shunted into an order that demanded absolute obedience–asceticism from someone who wanted and needed the fullness of everything to make up for the desolation of his childhood. But the rule of Coruscant ruled slavery unlawful, and it did not care about the Jedi code. Anakin married Padmé, and the law wrote it down, and it was not just a romantic act, all wildness and ardour. It was proof of what Anakin knew and needed to know: that he was his own master.

The parts of her that still ache for Anakin ache not least of all because, after burning his whole life, what has he done? Buried himself, and made himself subject to every whim of the cruellest master imaginable.

Although Padmé learns from Ahsoka most days and strengthens steadily, the dreams don’t stop. And she knows that, even if they were to stop, Anakin wouldn’t stop searching for her. So Ahsoka’s training does help. It trains her fear into something she can manage. It trains her mind into something that can combat and evade Anakin’s trespasses. It cannot convince her that she and her children are safe.

It cannot convince her that her children are safe.

One day as she meditates with Ahsoka, the specter of Anakin and his ghostly squad of murderers looms up into her mind so swiftly and violently that she shouts and falls out of the air where she’d been sitting, unable to catch her breath. Ahsoka steps down after her, with more control but with plenty of concern.

“Padmé, what is it?” she asks, her hands gentle.

“Nothing,” says Padmé. “Nothing is wrong. Not really. I just feel so sure sometimes that he’s going to find us. I’m so sure he’s going to kill them both, right in front of me, just like he did the children at the temple. And it will be my fault, Ahsoka. It will be my fault he’s there.”

“No,” Ahoska says vehemently. “It won’t be your fault at all.”

“I should send them away from me,” she says. “Luke and Leia. I shouldn’t keep them.”

“They’re your children,” says Ahsoka cautiously, as she has before. “Of course you want to keep them.” But of course she wasn’t raised by her birth family, and maybe she doesn’t think that’s so strange.

“I’ll condemn them,” Padmé says.

“You won’t,” says Ahsoka. “It’s pretty likely they’ll be just as safe with you as anywhere in the galaxy.”

It wouldn’t be such a reassuring thing for her to say in the best circumstances, and it’s even less reassuring because Padmé doesn’t believe it. She does so much just now, but behind every victory and every moment of determination, behind every laugh or sigh of relief, it haunts her. She feels her children’s hands go slack in her own. She sees her children’s deaths.

“I think I need to do something,” she says. “Don’t ask me what. I don’t know yet. But sometimes I feel like the tighter I hold onto them–it’s like a trap for them. Sometimes I think my fear is what will kill them.”

“I can think about it,” says Ahsoka. “Could Eitama, maybe? Or one of the other women?”

“I don’t think that the ones who haven’t answered would exactly be willing to foster one of Darth Vader’s children,” Padmé says, every word bitter on her tongue. “And the ones who have are too public, or never stay in one place for long enough to feed a baby breakfast, let alone raise one.” Her heart feels like it will beat its way out of her throat, just speaking this way.

Ahsoka says, “Are you serious about it? Sending them away?”

“Billions of parents have sent children away when they’ve had to,” says Padmé. “I wouldn’t be unique.”

“No, you wouldn’t,” says Ahsoka. “And if that’s what you decide to do, I’ll help you.”

Chapter Twenty - Ahsoka

Ahsoka considers the twins. It’s in the back of her mind for weeks, as she checks in with a contact here, sneaks a kiss in there, creeps through danger with Rex or Bo-Katan out of sight but at her back. What she concludes is that, if Padmé does want to send the children away, there are two choices.

First: to give them to someone who knows nothing. Nothing about the rebellion, nothing about the children’s parentage, no training in the Force. Give them to someone who thinks they’re only two more orphans in a world of death. Someone kind, someone normal, someone who will raise them as civilians who keep their opinions to themselves. Everyone they know is in danger all the time; ignorance could conceivably be the children’s greatest protector.

Padmé voiced this, once. She said only, “Anakin’s mother had a husband on Tatooine. He seemed kind.” Ahsoka has pieced together enough of Anakin’s stilted scraps that Padmé did not have to tell her how much he hates that planet. It’s not likely he would look there, only because he hates it so much.

But, Ahsoka thinks, Anakin’s monsters have found many babies with the Force kindling inside them, the babies of many innocent parents, and those babies are dead.

The second choice is to send the children to someone who is far away from Padmé but who stands a fighting chance when, almost inevitably, Anakin smokes them out. A trusted ally, someone who knows what they’re facing. Someone who can keep the children alive long enough that they learn to defend themselves. (It really says something that Ahsoka can’t always imagine the twins living that long.)

She runs through her options over and over, only privately and not ever to Padmé, because the list gets shorter the longer she thinks about it. Padmé’s former handmaidens, absent, conspicuous or on the move. The Organas, famously unable to have children and more visible than any of their other allies. Definitely not Ventress or the pirates. Not the Onderanians–she has a soft spot for them, but they’re still reckless and chaotic, so no.

Ahsoka considers the Mandalorians. They have a very good track record for survival, and they’re ferocious protectors of what’s theirs. It’s not safe, exactly, but it’s well protected, and the kids would definitely learn something about defending themselves. They’d definitely end up squaring off against the Empire.

This idea is the first one she brings to Padmé. “If you’re serious,” she says, “I can think of worse places for them to be. A lot of worse places.”

Padmé bites her lip and answers slowly. “I think I’m serious,” she says. “And I see your point. But the Mandalorians–they’re not just fighting because they want to overthrow the Empire. They’re fighting because they see war as sacred. They’ll continue to fight no matter what happens with the rebellion. And that goes against everything I believe.”

She’s right, of course, but what’s left?

Obi-Wan said he would help, her memory whispers. But she finds herself pushing that thought away over and over. It’s not just Maul–and who would be crazy enough to give a child to Maul? It’s Obi-Wan himself. It’s that despite all the best parts of Obi-Wan, he can be so quick to judge, so impatient and so wilful, just as much as Anakin was. Ahsoka can’t help knowing that, even though it’s not Obi-Wan who enslaved Anakin or Obi-Wan who poisoned him, even thought it wasn’t Obi-Wan who framed Ahsoka for murder, he made things…worse. He refused to see clearly, and the only two young people he’s ever had to care for both suffered because of it.

Ask Obi-Wan, her mind nags, but she can’t, and she tells herself it’s because she’s right. She is right.

None of this is in her thoughts when she makes a rendezvous with Maul–alone, nominally because Obi-Wan refuses to come back to the horrible Kokash.

She is almost used to Maul by now. She doesn’t take his hissing and glowering personally. The way he moves–half preternaturally smooth and half abrupt, unsteady tics–no longer rings every alarm. If Maul wanted to do violence, she’s sure he would be fast and deadly and merciless. The inconceivable but apparently very true thing is, he doesn’t want to.

Obi-Wan was right: when Ahsoka probes the Force where it surrounds Maul and pours through him, it’s not the same as it was. He’s ruthless against the Empire, but it’s not the same. He will do violence, but she thinks that he’s afraid to be violence. She feels it from him, an anxious note of no more, no more that hangs in the Force between them.

The unforgiving part of her is glad that it hurts him. The rest of her, talking to him normally, exchanging information and hatching plots like he’s any other ally while he doggedly toes every line, is simply bewildered.

At this meeting, the actual exchange doesn’t take more than five minutes. But instead of leaving when it’s done, Maul looms in place, eerie eyes fixed on Ahsoka.

“What?” she says.

“How…are you?” he says guardedly.

“What?” she says, more stupidly.

“How are you,” Maul growls.

“I’m…fine,” Ahsoka says.

Maul sniffs and stares off unblinking into the stringy grove of trees around them.

“Was that a wrong answer?” she says.

“No,” says Maul.

“This is a first,” says Ahsoka.

“My apologies,” says Maul snidely.

“If you don’t need anything,” Ahsoka says.

“When she goes to D’Qar,” he says, “will she take her children?”

“I don’t know,” Ahsoka says, startled into it. “What makes you ask that?”

Maul shifts with all the strength of a great beast of prey, but uncomfortably.

“Obi-Wan would take care of them,” he says. All of Ahsoka’s fraught picking and plucking at this very idea gets knocked right out of her head by surprise.

“Did he say that?”

“He jokes,” Maul says gruffly.

“You think he means it.”

Obviously, Ahsoka thinks. Obviously he means it.

Ahsoka says, “What about you?”

His quick yellow eyes flick away from her. “I would not hurt them.”

“You’re serious,” she says.

“I would not hurt them,” he repeats. He doesn’t argue that he’s changed or that she should trust him, but again, she feels it. Something that she doesn’t understand. Something querulous but proud. Something like new, delicate skin over old, vicious wounds, something that is fighting its way into the light.

“Is Obi-Wan,” she starts.

“They could be raised by the Temple,” Maul says roughly. “W—he would be present. Even now the temple is left alone, and it is fortified, and there are many places to hide. Many ways out. They could learn to protect themselves.”

Is Obi-Wan what made you like this? is what she wanted to ask. She’s had ideas of what goes on between them now for months, and hasn’t asked. It’s more than she wants to know, and she doesn’t understand it enough to make sense of any answer Obi-Wan could give her. But it’s right here in front of her, a dangling bait. The mystery of Maul. For once she keeps her foot out of her mouth and doesn’t say any of the things she most wants to.

“Is it really not his idea?” she asks finally. It’s not a replacement for her real questions, but it’s relevant, at least. Because Maul is making it sound reasonable, and she wants to know why he’s saying it at all.

“No,” says Maul. “It is my idea. I am right. If she sends her children away, they should come to Jedha.”

“Maul. You had a brother,” she says.

Maul shivers in unhappy surprise. “Yes, Lady Tano, I had a brother.”

Ahsoka says, “What did you teach him?”

“Some things right,” he says. “Some things wrong. Not enough. But I would not be the guardian for her children, no, it’s Obi-Wan who should care for them.”

Ahsoka says, “Well, you’re not planning to leave him, are you?”

His mouth shuts, obstinate, and she sees the outburst fighting his lips. She raises a hand. “You don’t have to say so,” she says. “But if you’re with Obi-Wan, then of course you’d be their guardian too. You wouldn’t be able to help that. And between the two of you, the track record…is not the best.”

He stiffens.

“Not this time,” he says. “No more failure.”

He means it, and she thinks he means all of it. She’s not won to the idea, and she can’t imagine Padmé will be, but his resolve hits her like everything does with Maul these days. Something fundamental in him has given way, like the roof of a cave collapsing so that light streams in. The debris stays behind, but everything inside is changed. She wonders if Obi-Wan knows, or if he’s being as stubborn and unobservant as usual.

“It doesn’t matter much what I think,” Ahsoka says. “They’re not my kids. But I’ll tell Padmé what you said, all right?”

“Thank you, Lady Tano,” he says curtly. Apparently he’s spent all his manners for the day. But Ahsoka is thoughtful as she flies, because putting her life in Maul’s hands is a calculated risk she’s been taking for months, but she’s recalculating now. The odds of destruction, she thinks, are less than they were.

She doesn’t keep her promise at first, but there are reasons for that. It sounds a little crazy, coming from Maul, and there are other things keeping Ahsoka, and Padmé, very busy. There’s a close call on Alderaan with an Imperial inspection, and for three days they are all nothing but alerts.

But when the dust settles and the unwanted visitors are far, far away, the moment comes. Padmé is helping Leia stand, hands around her chubby middle, and Leia wobbles and looks around and throws her fists in the air. She babbles to herself, and Padmé murmurs back. Luke is lying on his stomach, eyeing his mother for a good moment to crawl away without being caught.

When Padmé sees Ahsoka, the sadness in her eyes deepens instead of retreating.

“I don’t want to send them away, Ahsoka,” she says.

Ahsoka sits cross-legged across from her, tugging at Luke’s pale hair, softly patting his head. He’s so much bigger, every time she comes back! But it’s hard to look at him and not also think how small, how helpless.

“You don’t know for sure that they’d be safer wherever you sent them,” Ahsoka says.

“Your lessons are helping,” Padmé says. “I’m sure of that. The dreams are better than they were. Even so.” She pulls Leia into her lap and squeezes her deep in a hug, then straightens her back. “I have to weigh the odds. And as much as the children mean to me–I love them, Ahsoka, I do love them so much–I can’t do what I need to if I spend all my sleeping hours and half my waking ones worried about what will happen to them. It makes me useless, and I can’t be useless.”

“My commander,” says Ahsoka. She gives it a moment, then says, “You don’t know which is safer, you or someone else. Did you think…maybe you could keep one of them with you, send one away. Even your odds.”

Padmé laughs with how horrible that is. “Splitting the difference with my children’s lives. Am I a monster, Ahsoka?”

“No,” says Ahsoka. “You’re a mother. And a leader. And this world stinks.”

Padmé looks down at the children for a long time, and Ahsoka knows she is doing frantic and agonizing math. Who would she keep? Who would she rip away from their family in the name of safety? Which of them would be more likely to survive?

Ahsoka says, “If you send them away. One of them, or both. Do you know where they would go?”

Padmé shakes her head, smiling painfully. “I’m sorry to say that after all this agonizing I have tried not to think about that part at all. It’s all hypothetical, and I can manage that. If I know where they’d go, I might really do it, and that doesn’t seem manageable. Silly to be halfway about things, isn’t it?”

Ahsoka says, “Maul wants you to send them to Jedha.”

She knows this is a crazy place to start that conversation, and sure enough, Padmé’s eyebrows shoot up. She says, “Maul?”

Ahsoka hefts Luke into her lap. He doesn’t seem to mind, but he babbles something to Leia and starts trying to grab her. Ahsoka tugs him back. “Not for himself,” she says. “He wants you to send them to Obi-Wan.”

Padmé has had to accept their partnership, but unlike Ahsoka, she hasn’t been directly in contact with Obi-Wan or Maul since their alliance. She rarely asks Ahsoka anything about it–there’s too much else for her to worry about, and once the decision was made to accept them, there wasn’t much more to say. She doesn’t seem interested in prying apart the relationship or its reasoning.

“That doesn’t sound safer to me,” Padmé says.

“Maul thinks they can blend in among the temple kids,” Ahsoka says. “And if you want them to learn to defend themselves, there are worse places to end up. The monastics at the Temple of the Kyber fight, and they know the Force.”

“I really don’t know much about Jedha, or the temple,” says Padmé. “What’s it like?”

“I’ve never been there, but Obi-Wan says it’s cold,” says Ahsoka. “Maul says the temple is a good defense, and it’s very out of the way. You know, Padmé, if anyone could get an early alert to an Empire attack, it would be Obi-Wan. There really are worse places.”

“But does Obi-Wan want them?” Padmé asks.

“I think so,” Ahsoka says. “He joked about it.”

“Well then,” says Padmé, as if this is another dead end.

Ahsoka shrugs. “The serious idea was Maul’s, yes, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a good idea. And you could ask Obi-Wan.”

“I don’t think he much liked having Anakin pushed onto him all those years ago,” Padmé says.

Ahsoka is not interested in figuring out Obi-Wan’s feelings. She says, “It could be different.”

“Maybe,” says Padmé. That ends the conversation. But a few hours later, as Ahsoka is halfway to bed and no longer thinking about it, Padmé knocks on her door and says, “Please ask Obi-Wan for me. Ask him directly. Nothing is promised.”

Chapter Twenty-One - Maul

Maul comes because Obi-Wan calls.

“I wanted company, that’s all,” Obi-Wan says.

“What are you doing?” Maul asks.

“Mm. It’s a different kind of weapon for a different kind of Obi-Wan Kenobi.”

“I won’t ruin it?” Maul asks. “I thought Jedi saber-making was an act of solitude.”

Obi-Wan sits at a long, low table, the pieces of two lightsabers spread out across the surface. He is delicately rebuilding something out of what Maul pilfered on Coruscant.

“It is. But you won’t ruin it,” Obi-Wan says, without looking up.

Maul settles nearby, at first ramrod-straight, after a while resting his back against the cool stone wall. Obi-Wan speaks to him about this and that, his voice a low murmur that follows the rhythm of his work. Maul hardly hears him. The movement of Obi-Wan’s hands, the cadence of his voice, is too mesmerizing.

“I took those from dead Jedi,” Maul says, interrupting some piece of conversation. “Doesn’t that spoil them?”

“You didn’t kill the owners, and neither did I,” says Obi-Wan quietly. “And I think the crystals are happy here at the temple. Besides, what I am making is not those lightsabers; it is a new one.”

Maul runs his tongue across his teeth, sore over a question he doesn’t entirely want to ask.

“The one I carry,” he says finally. “It’s as I found it. I suppose I am only a graverobber.”

“You took it at need. But you could do what I am doing,” Obi-Wan says, leaning in to see his work more closely. “If you’re going to carry a lightsaber at all, it could be one you make new. One you make that isn’t bound to the Sith.”

Maul’s tooth scrapes his tongue a little too roughly. He winces.

“I want to ask you something,” says Obi-Wan, checking the fit of one component against another.

“Do you,” says Maul.

“Did you tell Ahsoka we would take in Padmé Amidala’s children?” Obi-Wan asks evenly.

Maul’s hands tighten into fists.

“It’s only a question,” Obi-Wan says.

“I said she should give them to you,” Maul says.

Obi-Wan twists the lightsaber hilt in his hands and ignites it. He stares at the blade for a few moments. He turns it one way and then another, testing. Still illuminated by its light, his face, the line of his throat, the light in his eyes look almost unfamiliar. The quiet makes Maul shiver.

“How did you know?” Maul asks accusingly. His voice is too rough. He wishes he could hide it, or not have come into this room at all. The building of the saber was too intimate, Obi-Wan’s hands unbearable, and now Obi-Wan has cornered him.

Obi-Wan says, “I can answer that. But I’d like to know why you made such a suggestion.”

Maul’s fingers twitch of their own volition. An anxiety he hasn’t felt in days–-no, weeks–creeps into his chest.

“It’s not a trick,” says Obi-Wan quietly. “It’s only a question.”

“They are not safe,” says Maul. “They would be safer with you.”

Obi-Wan extinguishes the lightsaber, and looks evenly at Maul in the last pale light that still filters through the window. Maul does not know what he’s thinking. It’s an unfamiliar sensation; they rely on each other too thoroughly to be strangers anymore. They wake, they eat, they work in the temple, they plan the downfall of Sidious and his Empire. They sleep with only a wall between them and they know the matter of each other’s dreams. This anxiety is no longer familiar, and Maul does not like to find himself at a loss.

“What is it?” he says.

“You,” says Obi-Wan. “All this time, since we met Ahsoka on Kokash. Have you been thinking about this all the time since then?”

Maul feels wild. He wants to stand and leave. He wants to say something that will strip the thought from Obi-Wan’s mind. He wants, for a fleeting moment, to look at Obi-Wan and see his old enemy. His tongue is tied. He raises his chin.

Obi-Wan sets the lightsaber down on the table. Slowly, he stands, looking at his hands.

“There’s no reason to be angry,” Maul says.

“I’m not angry,” says Obi-Wan.

“I don’t know what you are, Kenobi,” Maul says. “But I don’t like it.”

Obi-Wan looks up, too quickly, and Maul inhales sharply. Obi-Wan’s eyes are wet.

“You are the most unexpected relief,” Obi-Wan says.

Maul is startled into silence, startled into feeling a hunger that he isn’t prepared for. He tries to swallow it down, but it chokes him.

“Obi-Wan,” he says, a line of defense.

He doesn’t expect a hand to grip his. He doesn’t expect the coolness of Obi-Wan’s palm to be chased by its heat. He doesn’t expect to look up and be met.

“Padmé wants us to take care of her daughter,” Obi-Wan says. “She wants us to raise her on Jedha.”

“You,” Maul corrects him, although this news shocks him. “She wants you to raise the child.”

“Yes,” says Obi-Wan. “But we come together.”

Maul’s skin prickles. “She believes this?”

“You know this,” says Obi-Wan. His voice is firm, but there is a question in him. An uncertainty. Maul sees this, and the slithering nervousness under his skin halts itself. Obi-Wan Kenobi is afraid of saying too much.

Maul tightens his grip, and for a moment there is a line of taut muscle between them. Then Maul brings Obi-Wan’s hand to his mouth; not a kiss, but the press of warm breath on cool skin. He feels Obi-Wan’s fine bones under his cheek. He feels Obi-Wan’s pulse under his fingers.

He says, “We will keep her daughter safe.”

Chapter Twenty-Two - Padmé

They meet on Tatooine. It is safer than many places, because Anakin can’t stand to look at it. Besides that, to Padmé it feels like the right place to be. She thinks of Anakin’s mother’s family, somewhere on the other side of this hot, dry world; the Larses won’t know they were here, but she thinks of them anyway. She thinks of how much Anakin’s mother would have done for her grandchildren, if she had lived, if Anakin had remained Anakin, if the world had been different in so many crucial ways.

They meet in the shadow of a great canyon: Ahsoka, Padmé, the twins climbing out of one ship to find Obi-Wan and Maul climbing down from another. Padmé has to shake the doubt out of her mind like shaking dust out of a rug. She’s made her choice. There’s no helping Maul’s looks. That slips away from her, though, when she gets a good look at Obi-Wan. In all this time since they found each other again, she and Obi-Wan have not been face-to-face. She gathers in the sight of him, from his shaggy hair to his scarred face, all the way down to his toes. Her eyes prick.

“Padmé,” he says, and throws his arms around her. His hug is tight and warm. Padmé can’t think of the last time he’s hugged her like this; maybe he never has. She shifts Leia in the crook of her arm so she can hug him back with all her might.

“Obi-Wan, I’ve missed you,” she says. “Spy games aren’t the same.”

He pulls back and smiles at her. “Don’t I know it,” he says. He seems to be taking her in just as she did him, grateful and hungry. Some ways behind him, Maul waits, his dark robes caught by the wind. How extraordinary it is, Padmé thinks, that he’s standing at Obi-Wan’s back and Obi-Wan is happy. She is sure he is, from the ease of his grip, from the lines of his face. They have lived to see a broken Republic, Anakin has betrayed them, the Jedi are lost, but Obi-Wan’s expression doesn’t carry a hint of despair. Padmé, whose heart is breaking, feels it lift very slightly.

Ahsoka, carrying Luke, catches up to them.

“We wanted him to get to say goodbye as well,” she says. “Even if he won’t remember.”

“The body remembers its blood,” says Maul. His voice is unexpected, rough-edged but without malice. “He will remember his sister.”

Despite the heat, Padmé feels chilled. She holds Leia close, breathing in her perfect smell, feeling her eyelashes brush against her skin. She is doing this because nothing is safe, because she would rather her children live in two far-flung homes with two chances of survival than take them both with her and risk everything to her own strength. Perhaps if she were really brave, Padmé would give them both up. Perhaps she would send them to two far reaches of the galaxy and let herself know nothing. But she isn’t quite that brave–so she is keeping Luke with her, and she’s sending Leia to someone she loves. Even that is risky, but there’s no version of this world without risk; she can only do her best.

“Then this is Leia,” says Obi-Wan. He sounds shy. He looks shy, when Padmé sighs and pulls her face away from Leia’s soft skin.

“Yes,” Padmé says. “This is Leia. She has Anakin’s spirit, so don’t be too discouraged if she screams for a few days.”

“Padmé,” says Obi-Wan.

“I’m asking you to do this,” Padmé says firmly, although she’s never felt more unsteady. “Don’t feel guilty for doing the greatest thing I’ll ever ask from you.”

“We’ll look after her,” Obi-Wan says. He is looking at Leia with wonder already.

They don’t have long. There is only a brief span of time in the planet’s rotation that will spit them out into space discreetly; if they leave almost at once, they can be on their way and it’s very unlikely that anyone will see them or follow them.

“Please,” says Padmé, so quietly that only Obi-Wan can hear her. Her voice cracks, and she puts it back together before she speaks again. “Please love her, Obi-Wan. Please keep her safe.”

“Padmé,” he says softly, “I would die for you. And so I would die for her. I promise you, we will protect her to our last breaths.”

It’s all she can ask for, and their time is running out. She squeezes the tears from her eyes and kisses Leia’s face, then sets her gently in Obi-Wan’s arms. At once he holds her like something both startling and as familiar as breath. Padmé cracks, but she holds steady. Ahsoka stands close to her, and takes her hand. The three of them watch Obi-Wan and Maul climb back into their ship with Leia. Soon they are less than a speck in the sky.

“Oh, Ahsoka,” says Padmé.

“It’s nothing that couldn’t be undone,” Ahsoka says. “But you’re right to do it.” She lifts Luke into Padmé’s arms, and Padmé hugs him close until she can see clearly again.

“Come on,” says Ahsoka. “Our window is closing. I’m flying. You don’t need to think about anything.”

The pain is a constant dull ache that sometimes roars into agony, but there is so much for Padmé to do. The base on D’Qar is quiet, only her and Luke and a small but constant rotation of her most trusted. There is Sabé’s strength and Ahsoka’s, and far off Jedha’s. They are small, but they grow. Luke is small, but he grows. The Empire shudders, and it does not know why. But Padmé can feel it: the change that they are weaving. The life they are coaxing out of battle dust. The bright current of the Force, shifting at their touch.