Chapter Text
Wolffe was pretty sure his teeth would be buzzing for the rest of his life. And yet…
“Okay, you destroyed it,” he said to Chester, who was sitting in the temporary command office opposite him (his previous office having fallen victim to an exploding droideka), slowly and deliberately drinking through a canteen of water. It did him some good to see that she was moving carefully, presumably so no one would see her hands shaking. Wolffe wasn’t sure what he would have done if it had turned out that she could stare down a room full of droids, unarmed, without getting a little shaky afterward. “You did make sure you could rebuild it before you did that, right?”
“Yes,” she said, “but I won’t.”
It was the way she said it, the sudden superior coldness in her voice, that made him grit his teeth. “With all due respect, Commander, why the kark not? Actually, why didn’t you do this earlier━when the Separatists grabbed you in the first place?”
“They weren’t real eager to let me near a comms console. Neither were you,” she said, totally unrepentant. “Not sure why.”
She’d responded to the second part, not the first.
Wolffe looked around the room he’d taken over while the techs swarmed everywhere else, getting the ship ready to tow. No one else here except Plo, who was napping on the cheap GAR-issue couch in the back. The sonic blast had apparently done a number on his sensory horns. “Look, Commander━what do you mean, you won’t do it again? For that matter, why didn’t you tell anyone this could be done?! There are a lot of my men dead right now who didn’t need to die if you had just TOLD SOMEONE YOU COULD DO THIS.”
Plo had startled awake and was staring at both of them; Wolffe couldn’t even feel bad. He glared at Chester, who was having the fucking gall to just look sad. Like she was somehow the one hurt here.
“The Federation has strict non-interference directives,” she said. “What I did was perfectly doable with your level of technology and basic familiarity with it and a handful of other things. That didn’t mean I was supposed to do it.”
“You make such a stink about the lives of my men mattering, only to keep this under your hat for the sake of some regulations in another galaxy,” said Wolffe. More of a snarl, but he was so far past caring it barely registered. “I guess we’re disposable to you, too.”
“When it comes to the Prime Directive, I’m disposable. My own ship and crew would be considered disposable,” she said, not meeting the venom in his voice. “We don’t interfere with the internal affairs of others. We don’t interfere with the normal development of other cultures, especially ones without our technological capabilities.”
“Yeah, and which are we?”
She went silent at that.
“So we’re not advanced enough for you to help, is that it?” He turned away. He couldn’t stand it. He turned back. “I can take your arrogance, your condescending bullshit, your hypocritical self-centered idiocy, Commander, I already have , but when it gets my men killed━”
“I couldn’t,” she said. “Not before Dooku tried to recruit me, not before I’d exhausted every other alternative. That device would have let me slaughter over a thousand sentient beings, Wolffe, it doesn’t matter that they’re machines. I did it because there was no acceptable alternative; allowing all of you to die and myself to be co-opted by Dooku would be an even more complete violation of my neutrality. I just hope the board at my court martial sees it that way, too.”
“Those men━” Wolffe stabbed a finger in the direction of the door, in no mood to be fair, “they think of you as their commander. They trust you. And you’re willing to sacrifice them to save your own hide just in case you get home to have that court martial?”
“Wolffe.” She had the grace to look pained, at least. “I’ve already made that choice. Repeatedly. I’ve done everything I can in my power and within the scope of my oaths to keep them safe, and today I stepped over that line. It saved lives, and I’ll gladly accept the consequences for it, because it was worth it.”
“And I don’t have any patience for your handwringing. Actually, I don’t have any patience for this at all. You destroyed a weapon that could save my men’s lives so you could what, save a whole bunch of droids? A whole bunch of military droids? Do you think you can feel nice and warm and fuzzy about that, Commander? Because you shouldn’t.”
She folded her arms. “They’re sentient beings, Wolffe.”
“Yeah? They’re going to come out of the sky at some poor little planet full of sentient beings, all armed to the teeth, and they’re going to kill them, because that’s what droids do, Commander, they’re killers, and they’re programmed to serve the Separatists, and the Seppies don’t give a single solitary shit about the rights of sentients. You just took them off the leash, and you might have saved their lives, but what about the people they’re going to kill?”
“The people they might kill are theoretical,” she said, almost gently, “but when I made that decision, their lives weren’t. It may have been the wrong choice, and if it was I will have to live with it, and I will have to do what I can to set it right… but the choice to slaughter several hundred sentients at our mercy out of fear of who and what they were, would also have been the wrong choice.”
Wolffe gave her a look of utter disgust. “So you wouldn’t get your hands dirty. How much of that is your own conscience, and how much you being afraid your perfect Federation back there wouldn’t understand?”
“It’s my own conscience,” she said, like it was a simple question, and Wolffe would have found it harder to hate her if she had sounded like she was lying.
“So you’re fine with this, then,” he said, through gritted teeth. “You’re fine with the people who trust you dying, because you’re morally superior, with your noninterference regs and your letting droids go kill people because it makes you feel all warm and fuzzy not to offline some machines.”
“We don’t just have the Prime Directive to be superior,” she snapped. “You look at any part of my planet’s history up until the last three hundred years, and it’s vicious bloody conquest. Our last ‘age of exploration’ kicked off centuries of genocide, slavery, and the destruction of entire ways of life. Even in peacetime it continued, we just got sneakier about it━laws that banned people of certain racial groups from owning property, laws that made it easy to kill us without legal repercussions, laws that codified inequality and pretended it was justice. And that━that started when we went to new places, met new peoples, and decided it was our place to dictate to them how they should live and who they should be, and what they had to do to prove they deserved to exist.
“And when we reached out to the stars, we decided we couldn’t do that anymore. We couldn’t afford to make those same mistakes. So we don’t interfere, because we will not export the sins of our past. I might be appalled by your war, I might offer what solutions I can, but I do not get to use technologies or other force in order to coerce you into doing what I think is right. I don’t get to do that to Dooku, either, I don’t get to do it to the droids, and I do not get to take sides . So if you’ve been wondering why I’ve been so squirrely and so non-confrontational━well, you’ve got your answer. Because what I just did…” She made an angry, impatient gesture. “The alternative was unacceptable. But I handed you a new weapon you wouldn’t have otherwise, I interfered in your conflict, in your internal affairs━what if I were to tell you I had a better weapon, one much, much more efficient, but I required a command of my own before I’d provide it? Or perhaps some important position as an advisor in the Senate?”
“Isn’t that basically what you were doing with Tarkin?”
She snorted. “I was lying my ass off to Tarkin, and the only thing I was offering him was myself.”
Wolffe gave her a flatly unimpressed look.
“I handed you a new weapon,” she repeated. “And I’m not doing it again if I can help it, and I’m not helping you build on it or recreate it. If you want it, figure it out yourself. But I’ve put my foot in this mess enough. And I’m not saying that because my superiors will come down on me like a ton of bricks; I’m saying that because doing otherwise would be wrong.”
“And so my men get to die for your conscience,” snarled Wolffe.
“Tell me, Wolffe,” she spat back, finally needled beyond bearing, and it was satisfying to see her smug superiority finally snap, to know there was something human under there after all, “you swore oaths to the Republic, didn’t you? Well, were those conditional? Special dispensation if it would make you feel bad ? Do you get to ignore that oath if following it would just really really suck? My oaths as a Starfleet officer are no less fucking binding than yours are. I know I’m difficult to take seriously because I don’t reach for a gun every time I have a problem, but I’ll thank you to keep that in mind.”
Plo chose that moment to step diplomatically between them. “That will do, I think. There is no solution to this argument, and we all have many more productive things to be doing.”
Chester looked at him almost like she was searching for some measure of approval, then down, her face closing off and shoulders going stiff and square. “Understood,” she said, crisp and professional, and Wolffe didn’t need to be a Jedi to tell, absolutely false, like that facade of her early days with them had just clamped down full-force.
Wolffe stood, in silence, and turned and walked out the door.
Maybe it was a good thing that General Plo had interrupted when he did. Because the answer to Chester’s final set of questions was: Yes, if Wolffe had the choice between breaking his oaths to the Republic, or saving thousands of lives━he would choose to save lives. He wasn’t a shiny anymore, enamored with the vision of the Republic they’d been fed all their lives. He’d seen the real thing in action, and he’d found it wanting too many times to hold onto that idealistic loyalty. He fought for the Republic, and would continue to do so━not because he believed in it the way Chester believed in her Federation, but because… at least it wasn’t the Confederacy.
He shook his head, breathed all his restrained fury out through his nose. A passel of clones in naval blues going the other way took one look at him and parted to each side of the corridor like a school of fish around a shark.
Chester wasn’t a stupid person by any measure. How could she possibly follow a creed that placed ideals over lives? She’d spent the whole time on Felucia talking up the importance of peaceful solutions and preserving lives━so how the fuck could she justify refusing to act on the principle? Let alone for some government in another galaxy. Could she not simply lie? Wolffe knew she was good at that, too.
Little gods, he needed to punch something.
He turned off down towards the elevators, and headed for the gym.
Chester watched Wolffe go, and realized she didn’t want to look at Plo. Not right now. She didn’t want to see what she’d seen in Wolffe’s face mirrored in his own. She respected both of them.
But she did not, in fact, get to ignore her oaths if following them would really, really suck. As they did now. Part of her would have loved to do it, end this war in one stroke, look Dooku in the face while she blew up his little empire and wrecked his ambitions without calling on the Force, let alone the Dark Side, even once.
But she wouldn’t. She had her oaths. There was the Prime Directive, and the reasons behind it; she could not know the full circumstances of this galaxy. Handing the Republic victory might make the situation and the misery of its people worse, not better. There could be still worse things than Dooku lurking in the leadership of the Senate.
What she said aloud was the easiest of her arguments. The one Wolffe couldn’t understand. She hoped Plo could. “Those droids are sentient. I’m not handing you the tools with which to commit genocide.”
Droids could be sapient. This was established fact.
They weren’t always sapient, or even sentient, because most droids were built to be complex industrial tools and aside from the obvious ethical issues, the power and complexity of the processors required cost a lot of money. Protocol droids and astromechs had previously been the only mass-produced models that regularly qualified. Individual droids of other types could be modified into sapience, but that required significant upgrades.
Watching the battle droids negotiate with Chester had made it very clear that here was a third group for whom sapience was a default setting. The droids at Dooku’s castle had not been an exception. Nor was it limited to the tactical droid. The whole battalion of captives were suddenly, obviously, sapient people.
And that realisation had something to do with Chester. Multiple Jedi had tried to negotiate with the droids, earlier in the war. Plo had tried it himself. It had never worked. The responses were either what had seemed to be preprogrammed lines, eerily identical between events, or blaster fire. Not once had it seemed like they possessed the capacity for independent thought.
Perhaps the key was Chester’s non-GAR status? Or non-Jedi, perhaps? None of the clones had ever tried to bargain. Wolffe had been ever so slightly smug in the Force after Plo’s attempts had blown up in his face. (He’d stopped short of saying “I told you so,” but one didn’t have to say it out loud for a Jedi to get the message.) Off the top of his head, he couldn’t recall any other attempts at negotiating directly with the droids.
“I’m not handing you the tools with which to commit genocide,” Chester said, her voice flat and exhausted. Her presence was solid steel in the Force. She meant every word she said.
Plo went back to his couch. Changed his mind, and laid down flat in the shadowy corner behind it.
“I would not expect you to,” he said. His own voice echoed oddly in his head, and pain crawled around inside his skull on clawed little tooka-feet. “The only thing I can’t quite understand is why they listened to you, when they’ve never done so with us.”
“Hostile artificial intelligences are extremely common in our galaxy. I had classes, plural, on negotiating with artificial intelligences at the Academy. And I’m a third party, not an established threat.”
The Force rippled faintly around her, like a pebble thrown into a still lake.
That is not quite true, is it? thought Plo. He would not have noticed that disturbance, if he hadn’t been looking for it quite so hard.
He picked through the ripples, looking for a source. There wasn’t one, not exactly. No single key in her answer.
“I’m very sorry about the headache,” she said, sitting crosslegged next to him. That, at least, was genuine.
“I appreciate it,” he said.
True things did not resonate in the Force━outside of a handful of unusual circumstances, none of which applied here. They simply were part of the flow, undisturbed. Untrue things tended to cause a little disturbance, but often one had to be looking very hard to spot them among the myriad of other things that might cause a ripple in the water. Like full telepathy, truth-telling was a rare aptitude among Jedi.
Plo did not think Chester had lied outright. But there was something about her explanation that rang false in the flow of the world. A lie by omission, perhaps. Those were the hardest to spot.
“I didn’t want to risk further casualties, and I wasn’t even sure how it was going to affect the rest of us, just that it would be a lot better than being blown up, but I still regret it,” she was saying, casting a worried look at him. It was not lost on him as an effective way of changing the subject. “And I hope it’s not a serious injury? What should I try to avoid, in the future?”
Plo sighed gently, and let go of his suspicions for now. Little point in trying to think through the ringing in his head.
“I will be fine,” he said. “Anatomically, my sense of hearing is clustered together with two other major senses, and the three have a tendency to interact unpleasantly when assaulted. If you could try it with a different sense next time, I would be very grateful.”
She smiled, her presence hesitantly but deliberately blooming with warm humor and reassurance. “I’ll keep that in mind.”
“So that was…” Barriss trailed off, looking at the cleanup and repair efforts as she very clearly searched for an appropriate adjective. This was equally as clearly hampered by her habitual reserve.
Ahsoka took pity on her friend. “Wild?” she offered.
“Yes,” admitted Barriss. “I hadn’t quite believed the reports.”
“Even though they left out the part about Dooku getting kicked in the choobies?” said Ahsoka, grinning. That mental image was never not going to make her want to laugh. “I’d have thought what was left was pretty believable in comparison.”
Barriss blinked and looked sidelong down at her, her mouth opening a little. After a moment she said, “As you continue to remind me.”
They watched the cleanup a little longer, the astromech droids swarming over the smaller cruiser’s flank. They’d gotten cornered down near the cargo bay, far from the bridge, when Chester had pulled━ whatever she’d pulled with the comms systems. Ahsoka could still feel the insides of her montrals buzzing, all the way down through her sinuses into her nose.
The droids had just gone down in one long wave. They’d been fighting for their lives one moment, standing in a circle of limp metal frames the next.
“I know we’d met briefly,” said Barriss, in a tone that suggested she was working through something. “And I had heard about her previous… adventures. It is different to see them in person, and none of them mentioned her willingness to negotiate with droids.”
“I don’t think anyone expected that,” said Ahsoka. “I don’t think anyone could have. I mean, who negotiates with droids? Successfully? Other than her, obviously.”
“She’s so angry, though,” said Barriss, folding her arms tightly around herself. “And yet…”
Ahsoka thought back on that brief glimpse she’d gotten of Chester unshielded, and felt the chill prickle up the back of her neck. “I know.”
“But she negotiated with them,” said Barriss. “And she could have killed them all, and she didn’t. I heard that she had a fight with Wolffe about it, because she made sure no one else could use it.”
“Yeah,” said Ahsoka. The shouting had been audible from the hallway. “Yeah. Something about her people not being allowed to interfere, or export their mistakes to other people.”
Barriss was staring out of the window, not blinking. “Do you ever think it might be better if we didn’t interfere? The Jedi, I mean. That maybe, right now, we’re just making all of this worse?”
“No,” said Ahsoka, hotly. “You’ve seen what the Separatists do to planets, you were right there with me, Barriss! We can’t just leave people to get killed and enslaved and tortured, not when there are helpless people we can save! It’s worth it. All of this, it’s still worth it if we can help them.”
Barriss glanced at her, just a movement of her eyes.
“Barriss,” said Ahsoka, “are you okay?”
Barriss drew in a long breath, and there was a sense of strain around her for a moment before she said, “It’s just that the way she approaches things is so different. And maybe… there are things we can learn from it.”
“I guess,” said Ahsoka, still unsettled. She cast about for a new topic, one that wouldn’t make it obvious she was trying to change the subject. “So, when we get back, maybe we should show her around Coruscant a little?” Show her there’s more to this galaxy than war.
And maybe some time doing something that wasn’t about the war would be good for Barriss, too.
Chester had gone down to the ship’s gym to work out her feelings. The last thing she wanted to deal with was an eavesdropper, but here they were; a sense of filled space at her back and silent judgment.
Wonderful. She’d had to face down Wolffe, she’d saved everyone’s asses from a literal army of droids, and she’d saved the droids’ asses as well, a step back from the mutual annihilation both sides seemed so intent on, and here she was about to get chewed out for━something. Her handling of Wolffe. The droids. It didn’t matter.
This galaxy was deeply committed to its injustice.
“I do not handle a blade when I am angry,” she said, without a pause in her fierce beating of the padded bar. Her watcher could fucking wait until she was done. “Krell. The very fact someone like that was allowed to get away with that, to practice on the defenseless for so long━the fucking droids━Dooku deciding that slicing through an entire fleet was a fair price to pay to get me━You are doing your best. I know you are doing your best, but that does not change the fact that this Republic is sick , and the rot has gone so far there is very little we can do. My oath as a Starfleet officer means I cannot interfere━but right now it is very difficult, far more difficult than I imagined it could be, when I made that promise, and worse, I don’t think I could make a difference if I threw it to hell, because the rot is too profound, and too deep, and dammit, I hate being helpless! I did not join Starfleet to be useless!”
She delivered a final series of vicious blows and stepped back, breathing hard, then turned to look at the person in the doorway.
It was Anakin Skywalker. Well, that was embarrassing.
“Hell,” she said, and shook her hand out. “I thought you were Plo.”
He glared at her out of piercing blue eyes, shadowed beneath bunched-up brows. Obviously not best pleased to see her, either. “Is our war a game to you, Commander?”
“Not in the slightest,” she said. “I could ask the same of you, however. You seem disinclined enough to end it.”
His glare intensified, and he folded his arms. “So what was that with the droids, huh? You just let them go to fight us again another day?”
“I’ve already explained it,” she said. “They’re sentient beings, just like your men, just like you. They’ve had no choice in this war either, and I don’t like killing people.”
“Like you didn’t want to kill Dooku.”
She blinked. “What?”
“You didn’t kill Dooku when you had the chance, either,” he said, unfolding his arms and advancing on her. Chester felt a stir of alarm, an instinctive warning to fall back. She didn’t. Klingons did this too, when they wanted to intimidate a smaller human, and absolutely nothing was gained by showing them it worked. She gave him a bland flat stare.
“Krell is scum,” he said. “But he did bring up a very good point. There’s no way an untrained Force-sensitive━no matter how powerful━brought down Dooku on her own with a bunch of tied-up clones. Better Jedi than you have tried.”
Chester tilted her head. “I’m not a Jedi,” she said.
“Yeah. I noticed. ” Anakin advanced another step. Standing this close, he was about an inch taller than her. Physically it was less intimidating than he probably intended, but even Chester and her four cumulative days of Force training could sense that his presence far outstripped his physicality. She made a mental note━Anakin was powerful ━and proceeded to ignore that prickling sensation completely. “And you somehow surprised him, lied to the droids, and escaped with your men.”
“I feel like we’ve been over this before,” she said. “They’re good men. If I’d gone to Dooku’s side, they wouldn’t be covering my ass. There’s nothing in the galaxy I could threaten them with to do so.”
His frown deepened. “And I watched you with those droids.”
She raised her eyebrows.
“I know a lot of droid programming languages. They respond differently when you talk to them that way; they’re more likely to take what you say as legitimate data. To trust you.” His glare was intensifying. He leaned in, evidently expecting her to lean back; when she didn’t, he paused. It was that or bump heads. “I watched you with those droids, and even though you were speaking Basic, they were responding like you were talking to them in their own language. The only other way to do that would be if you had some kind of command access to them.”
Shit.
He must have seen it in her face. He smirked. “Just come clean, Commander. You won’t be the first person Dooku’s scared into helping him. It’ll go easier for you if you do.”
She closed her eyes. “Has it occurred to you that it’s pretty weird I speak Basic, too?”
That made him hesitate in turn. “It’s not like it’s difficult to learn,” he said.
“Yeah, exactly.” She leaned on the staff, waiting for him to back off. “We talk to a lot of new people, Master Skywalker. Easier to do that if you have some idea of what they’re saying. You don’t get into Starfleet if you’re not good with languages.” She drew a breath, well aware this didn’t explain why the droids had been treating her the way they had. “And… the men can tell you, and you’ve seen it for yourself. Starfleet doesn’t use force unless it really can’t be helped. We lean toward scientific or technological solutions. The droids out there are fairly simple AIs, even as sentient ones go. They can be manipulated, and say what you like about Dooku, he wasn’t as careful about my activities as the Jedi were, because he saw pacifism as weakness.”
All the actual lies were simply implications; what she had said was true in fact. Now, she had to see how good Anakin was at telling when someone was lying to him.
Anakin made a face. “They’re not that simple. I mean, sure, compared to a protocol droid or a nav unit they are, but you need processors leaps and bounds above average just to get sort of sentient.”
Chester lifted and dropped a shoulder. “Different galaxies, different technologies.”
He gave her the hairiest eyeball she’d seen yet in this galaxy. “What the hell sort of droids have you got over there?”
“Well, until about two months ago, ours outranked me,” said Chester, favoring him with a grin.
Anakin raised an eyebrow. “That doesn’t help your credibility, you know.”
She dropped the smile. “Look, you’ve got rules and regulations and customs you have to follow as a Jedi, right? I’ve got them as a Starfleet officer. We’re careful about who we share technology with, because we don’t want to be an imperial power, and we don’t want to━whether on purpose or inadvertently━push everyone else around. We don’t want to interfere with other societies and their self-determination, and it’s a lot easier to do that than you’d think. So I can’t talk a lot about our tech, and for that I’m sorry.”
His expression darkened. “Just how superior do you think you are? If you don’t want to be an empire, how about just fucking trading it? The Republic spans half this galaxy; I’m sure there’s something your precious Federation could buy from us. Raw materials, artisanal goods, I don’t know.”
“Unfortunately, I don’t get to negotiate trade treaties. They get a little tricky because of the whole we don’t use money thing,” she said, warily watching the flush of anger in his cheeks. She could feel that anger, bubbling under the surface of his presence━which went some way to explaining the Jedi’s overall caution, if this was what an angry Force-sensitive felt like. If she could feel it through her shields, it must have been so much worse for another Jedi. “I’m way too far down the food chain for that; that’s for after we open official diplomatic relations. I’m not even a captain yet, General Skywalker.”
And it wasn’t just a matter of what the Federation might want from the Republic. There were other considerations too, like what the Republic might then use the technology for. As it was, she couldn’t see anyone at home thinking it was a good idea to arm a rapidly-degenerating authoritarian state with any sort of technology that might help it wage war.
Anakin seemed to sense the billowing mass of his rage. He closed his eyes, breathed deep and slow, and gradually the oppressive sense of disquiet faded out of Chester’s limited range.
“All right,” he said. “Maybe I should introduce you to Padmé. You can put in a good word for her with your superiors once you get back home.”
“Padmé?” Chester smiled━this was definitely an improvement. “Is this your friend that you mentioned back on Felucia?”
Anakin blinked. “Yeah, that’s her. You remembered that?”
“You said that she was one of the people trying to do better by the Republic. I thought that sounded like something I should remember.”
“Yeah. Yeah, she is.” He smiled, and it had the looseness of genuine happiness about it. “Padmé is the current Senator for Naboo━that’s her home planet. You might get along with her━she and I, ah, disagree about the necessity of this war. I think she’s wrong on that account, but she is an incredibly smart woman and she works hard to make people’s lives better.”
“Oh, she’s a politician?” Chester couldn’t say she was surprised. “I’d be glad of an introduction, then. I can’t promise anything, of course, but perhaps in time a trade agreement could be set up between the Republic and the Federation. We do like to make friends, after all.”
“Yeah, you’ve said.” Anakin’s smile went lopsided. “I heard you sparred with my Padawan before we left Felucia.”
“I did, yes.” Chester eyed that lopsided smile. “She beat me quite soundly, but I’m proud to say I did make her work for it.”
“That’s good. She needs a challenge.” Anakin glanced away from Chester, toward the open mats in the middle of the gym floor. “I didn’t come down here to argue with you, believe it or not. I was wondering if you might like to spar.”
Chester thought hard about it. On the one hand, it would be good to form some sort of rapport with Anakin. That wasn’t going to happen through discussion, since they disagreed on so much, so perhaps a spar might help? On the other hand, the strength of his anger had been… disconcerting, and she knew better than to ignore that her own anger had been just as strong.
“Staves?” she offered, at last. “Like I said, I don’t wield blades when I’m angry.”
“Sure.” Anakin went to one of the tall lockers that lined the sides of the room, and produced a pair of wooden staves and soft padded helmets. He floated one of each over to Chester, winking. “Frivolous use of the Force. Don’t tell Obi-Wan.”
Chester quirked an eyebrow at him to hide the lingering sense of anxiety she still felt at the telekinesis. “Will he mind?” She was fairly sure she’d seen Obi-Wan pick up a dropped stylus with the Force. Telekinesis seemed pretty handy on that account.
“Ah, he’s always telling me not to show off,” laughed Anakin. He strapped his helmet on, and stepped into the ring. Chester followed, pausing a moment to adjust the chinstrap.
She hoped this wasn’t a mistake.
Anakin circled Chester, watching. He’d seen her sparring and practicing with Plo; he’d seen the aftermath of her run-in with Krell. He wasn’t sure whose side she was on, but whatever the answer, it was clear the woman had a gift for really pissing people off.
Him included. Not that that was hard; he knew he struggled with his temper, had done since he was a new Padawan.
He wasn’t sure whether he believed she’d beaten Dooku. Maybe Krell had been right. It certainly seemed most likely. But the clones probably weren’t lying for her, and weirder things had happened. Sparring with her would tell. Actually sparring, not the delicate careful whatever the hell Plo was doing. He wanted a better idea of what she was capable of, and he wanted to see it for himself.
If she really had beaten Dooku, she needed all the training any of them could give her to survive.
He wasn’t going to go easy on her. She needed to know how to defend herself from an actual Force user who wasn’t going to go nice and easy on her as Plo. Plo was probably worried about her, what she’d encountered in Dooku’s care, how she was handling the revelation of her abilities. That was fair, Anakin supposed. But coddling her wasn’t going to help. It was the last thing she needed, and it would get her killed.
Anakin was fast, Chester realized, and he wasn’t fighting her the way the rest of the Jedi had━he was fighting her like he thought they were on equal footing, like she was another Jedi. Which might be flattering if you turned your head and squinted but in practicality meant she now had a problem; she was not a Jedi, and even letting her shields down and just reacting as Plo had been trying to teach her wasn’t going to cut it.
Right now, she was focusing on not being wherever the hell his staff was; he hit like a shuttle, and not a small one. He was fast and strong and seemed to know what she was doing before she did, which, given how Plo had said the Force worked, probably wasn’t too far off the mark. Keeping out of the way and jabbing at him on the rare opportunities he gave her seemed to be the best she could do; she was about to get her ass kicked , and she wasn’t even sure she could do much about it.
She got in one solid whack to a shoulder, but it cost her a sharp rap on the shin. She pivoted quickly away, eluding another blow, keeping her weight up on the balls of her feet so she could move fast. There was a reason, she realized, for the way that Jedi jumped and flipped and rolled in combat; her lack of acrobatic ability was actually limiting her. She was falling back on old techniques, things she’d learned long before she came to this galaxy, as if her opponent were a more powerful and agile species. Given that her regular sparring partner back home was J’etris, the new Klingon head of Tactical, she wasn’t half-bad, but even J’etris didn’t have precognition.
And falling back on those techniques was really unsettling, in a fight with another human.
She didn’t like his body language. There was something off there. As if the anger hadn’t quite left yet and was coming back. A little too much aggression, a little too pushy and challenging. She felt the tides shifting as she kept out of reach. There’d been no final exchange of blows, nothing that would have killed had they been using live blades, and it was as if he found that frustrating.
The next one she blocked was definitely harder. With a sinking feeling, Chester started looking for a way out, a way to step back and call this off–without leaving herself open to attack.
She wasn’t taking this seriously. She was dodging and weaving, refusing to meet his attacks, only occasionally blocking, and still less often attacking herself. It was all right in the sparring ring━in fact, with what he was doing, it had kept him from landing anything serious━but Dooku wasn’t going to be this nice. Anakin had the prosthetic arm to prove it.
He could see how she might have provoked Dooku into making a mistake, but she was rooted to the ground, barely drawing on the Force to anticipate his moves, her awareness stopping short about a meter from her body. Like she was purposefully restraining herself.
Anakin grit his teeth. That was going to get her killed .
Whatever reason she had, next to her own survival, it was banthashit. Whatever she thought she was doing, it was going to get her killed, and Plo wasn’t pushing her the right way, not if she was still pulling this kriffing garbage. The Council had tasked all of them with training her, and Anakin could now see why; Plo was too close, too worried about her. He’d never trained an older apprentice. Anakin had been an older apprentice, and he knew sometimes you just had to be startled out of your habits, shocked into reaching for what you needed to use. She needed to see what an actual Force user could do to her in a fight if she insisted on clinging to what she was accustomed to.
“Take this seriously, Commander!” he told her, and scooped her up with the Force and tossed her, gently, across the room.
Obi-Wan was appreciating the rare quiet. The battle cleanup was mostly over, the ship slowly pulling itself back into order and the amazed whispers about the droids simmering down. Now solidly back into Republic space, it seemed very likely it would remain quiet for the rest of the journey, though he knew better than to say anything like that out loud.
He was in one of the corridors adjoining the gym, looking over one of the last of the repair reports with some satisfaction when he realized there was something very wrong. He looked up, frowning. There was a simmering tension to the air, something moving powerfully under the surface, alight with distress and anticipation. It was… familiar, but not intensely so; a presence he’d felt a handful of fleeting times and usually much more faintly, which meant it could only be one person. Chester.
There really were disadvantages to training an older apprentice. He’d discovered quite a lot of them with Anakin, who had, to his credit, done well at overcoming them. But if they had been bad with an eight year old, he couldn’t imagine the pitfalls open before a grown adult.
He reached for his comm. Perhaps this was a training exercise; less cause for alarm if Plo was supervising.
The storm broke before his fingers touched the comm. It was as strong as a blow, even through the bulkhead. Obi-Wan actually staggered, raising an arm, with the feeling of a mental command more felt than heard, a roar of rage like a physical shove━ BACK OFF!
It felt deafening, though it wasn’t a sound at all; it took him a moment to reorient himself, realizing he was still standing in the corridor and that the sheets of flimsi were still in his hands, and yet another moment to register that there was no damage at all to the ship; part of his brain had been determined to interpret that as an explosion. But everything was neatly in order, if you didn’t count the various people in the corridor looking around with faint concussed amazement as he was.
The feeling was still there, dread and determined anger that had settled into something steady like a banked fire, dangerous and dark for all its control; a cornered beast baring its fangs.
Obi-Wan’s fingers reached his comm. “Plo, old friend,” he said, a little surprised to sound so steady, “I think you had better come join me in the ship’s gym. I suspect someone has startled the good Commander.”