Chapter Text
Chester wanted to lean on the staff. Her whole body felt wrung out and like her legs might collapse from under her at any moment, but she kept herself standing through sheer force of will and her staff in line, waiting for the next attack as she gasped in big lungfuls of air through bared teeth, not daring to blink and let her opponent out of her sight for a moment.
They’d been sparring, and he had been getting annoyed, she could tell that much. She’d felt the match going sour, had been looking for a way to disengage.
She had not realized it had gone that sour.
The moment the horribly familiar feeling had clamped around her body she had lashed out. It hadn’t all been instinct, and there had been very little fear in it; that was now catching up in horrible reaction, and she was stamping it back as much as she could because the son of a bitch was still standing and she couldn’t afford it. No, it had been the snap threat assessment that had kept her alive through her career, experience informing a split-second decision.
As soon as a Force user grabbed you like that, you were helpless. It didn’t have to be Dooku wrapping spectral fingers around her throat; it could just be Krell picking her up bodily and holding her there. Someone got ahold of you with telekinesis and you were fucked. They could do anything they wanted to you.
And Anakin was the most powerful Force-sensitive she’d ever sensed, even with her limited abilities, and he had been angry and getting angrier. He’d made it clear he thought she was a spy, and that he didn’t trust her, and she’d heard plenty of stories about him being the Jedi willing to go to lengths that others wouldn’t. All of those had been praise from the clones she’d listened to, but she had not for one moment forgotten she was here and among them on sufferance. That she was not trusted and that she was still an outsider, even with the revelation of her own abilities.
He had been angry, and he had seized her using an ability she couldn’t resist. She knew she was going to be helpless in a split second, and even on a Republic ship instead of Dooku’s palace, she’d known he could have killed or maimed her before help came, she’d known the severity of the situation, worse even than Dooku. Dooku had needed her alive to train her; Anakin could have disposed of her in the moments it would take for help to come, and then told whatever story he damned well pleased. She’d been on thin enough ice with Krell, with her own anger; the acceptance the Jedi had shown her had also shown her the knife’s edge they walked, and from what she’d seen of Dooku they had been right to be wary.
And from what she’d seen of Krell, she knew damn well what could happen when you were on the other end of that.
A split second before the incredibly powerful man in front of her could have done anything at all to negate the threat he very likely believed she posed, and with the immediacy of that danger in her mind, with the knowledge of what Dooku had done to her in similar circumstances━she still had a few of the bruises from being slammed into walls━she’d reached for the one weapon she knew she could effectively wield. Her mind, and her ability to influence others.
It was a repugnant one, to intentionally draw on a skill that outright horrified her in its implications, its ability to compromise the autonomy of others. But Chester had not survived the worst war in Federation history by not using the best weapon to hand when lives were on the line, even if she hated it.
And thank fuck, it had worked.
Anakin braced his staff against the floor and shook his head, hard, looking kind of green around the gills. “Chester,” he said, sounding winded, “ what the fuck. ”
“Back. Off,” she repeated, her voice icy and level. She was angry. She deliberately pushed her fear over the edge into anger, because anger she could use, and then she deliberately pushed that anger cold and helpful, like armor against her bones. She had a lot of practice with that. It would help. Even if she’d much rather be facing a battalion of Jem’Hadar than this one man.
“Yeah. Heard you the first time,” said Anakin. At least he looked queasy. He stood, wavering a little; Chester had a feeling of him gathering himself up mentally as well as physically, and then planted his feet, already looking better. “Look, I didn’t mean to scare you.”
“You didn’t,” she said flatly.
He gave her an unimpressed stare, clearly calling bullshit. “Well, anyway. I guess you were taking it seriously.”
She tipped her head at him. “Yeah. I was.”
He tilted his head, the most thoughtful she’d ever seen him. “Look,” he started━and the gym doors slid open to reveal Obi-Wan, looking like a mile of rough road.
“I think,” he said, in his Perfect Jedi Voice, one that was a little sharp around the edges, “both of you had better put your weapons down. Now."
There was no arguing with that tone, even if she hadn’t thought he was right. Chester put her staff down and peeled off the helmet. She was still breathing hard.
“All right,” said Obi-Wan, like someone defusing a bomb. “Are both of you all right?”
“Fine,” said Anakin. He leaned over, bracing his hands on his knees. “Fine, just give me a second. Damn, Commander, you pack a punch.”
“I’d concur with that assessment,” said Obi-Wan, his tone cool. The look he gave Chester was concerned–not so much for her. She’d seen him look at enemy emplacements in a similar way: I hope that’s not going to become our problem, but it probably will be. “Commander?”
Wonderful. She’d managed to place herself firmly into the threat category.
“I’m fine,” she said, matching the coolness of his tone and meeting his eyes with her own hard flat expression. Obi-Wan had been raised in the Temple, she’d been told. She was pretty sure he didn’t understand what it was like being moved around like a doll with no hope of fighting back. There was probably no point to explaining herself.
“Master Plo is on his way,” said Obi-Wan. “Commander, I might suggest you go with him; I think some peace and quiet may be in order after this incident.” The smile he gave her was a diplomat’s smile. It made her exhausted threat perception prick up its ears and growl.
She kept it out of her face and pulled her shields fully back around her. It was a comfort, at least. “Understood,” she said quietly. The message was clear enough.
Go to your room until we figure out what to do with you. If we have to do something, because you are now a threat.
Obi-Wan was pacing, back and forth across the scant clear space in the officers’ conference room. Anakin resisted the urge to snap at him, even though the headache he was nursing made that really hard.
“I worry that we’ve taken the wrong tack in training her,” Obi-Wan said. He clasped his hands, then unclasped them, and laced his fingers together by his belt. “Underestimated her potential, rather. A psychic outburst that strong could do serious injury to most people━even most Jedi.”
Anakin rubbed his temples. The echoes of Chester’s attack reverberated around the inside of his skull. Obi-Wan wasn’t exaggerating; she’d really walloped him good.
“I did kind of provoke her,” he pointed out. In hindsight, no wonder she’d reacted violently━Dooku and Krell had probably acquainted her plenty with Force telekinesis. “I can’t blame her for fighting back.”
“But the strength of that counterattack,” said Obi-Wan, and did not finish the sentence. He sounded a little stressed.
Personally, Anakin thought it had probably been justified. It wasn’t as if most of the Temple hadn’t been telling him just how powerful he was for the last decade.
Chester had seemed pretty rattled. She’d hidden it well; her shields were durasteel blast walls and she’d been steadier than Anakin had at that point, but she’d gone cold and angry. Anakin had some experience with angry people himself, and there was a sort of frozen, stiff anger you got out of gut-deep terror. Chester could have been the poster child for that sort of anger, lying out her ass that she wasn’t scared. Yeah, right.
Anakin felt a bit bad about that. Only a bit, because it did illustrate how she might have gotten away from Count Dooku… but still. He’d meant to rattle her out of her neat defensive bubble. He hadn’t meant to terrify her.
Master Plo looked evenly between them. “Perhaps you should report from the beginning,” he said, to Anakin. “Without interruptions.”
“Well,” said Anakin, heaving a sigh, “I was done with my paperwork for the moment, so I went down to the gym to destress…”
He described how he’d walked into the deserted space to find Chester beating up a punching bag. How she’d felt him standing there, watching, and begun to speak, voicing her helpless rage and frustration, and everything she said reminded him of the misgivings he’d had regarding her presence from pretty much day one.
“I still think she’s lying about why she speaks Basic,” he said, as an aside. “She definitely didn’t want to talk about that.”
Master Plo nodded. Vindication, Anakin thought, and continued.
He skipped over most of their argument━it seemed petty in hindsight, the way he’d felt so personally insulted by Chester’s belief in her Federation’s moral superiority. That they’d resolved it seemed enough. He described how they’d moved on from the argument, and the offer he’d made to spar.
“She’s good,” he said, a little grudgingly. “Way too focused on defense if you ask me, but she knows what she’s doing. I couldn’t get her to break out of that mindset just with the staff, so I picked her up with the Force and shoved her across the room.”
Obi-Wan sucked in a breath through his teeth. “ Anakin.”
Anakin rolled his eyes. “Yeah, bad idea, I figure that now. That was when she tried to punt my brain through the wall.”
“Given that her first experiences with the Force have come from a Fallen Jedi and a Sith Lord, that was a remarkably ill-considered move.” Master Plo frowned under his mask. “Consider how you might have reacted in her place.”
“I’d have hit back, as hard as I could.” Anakin swallowed down the hole that opened up in his gut at the reprimand. “I know, Master. I don’t blame her for it; I wanted her to fight back out of her comfort zone. It’s my fault I wasn’t prepared for the counterattack I got.”
Plo reached across, laying an approving hand on Anakin’s shoulder. “Consider yourself lucky,” he said. “I am told she bit Krell when he tried something similar.”
Anakin huffed a disbelieving laugh. “What? He’s got scales!”
“I imagine that is why she went for a more direct response this time,” said Master Plo, and his presence nudged humor toward Anakin. “In any case, while your approach may have been flawed, we do now have valuable information because of it━Chester’s power is far more accessible than we had believed. I would nevertheless suggest that you apologize to the Commander when you get the chance.”
Anakin grimaced. “Yeah, all right.”
“Perhaps you ought to give her some space to calm down first,” said Obi-Wan, cautious. “You may have given her cause to treat you as a threat.”
“No shit,” Anakin retorted. “Look, Master, I know you’re worried, but it was my fault, my mess, I will clean it up. You didn’t get this twitchy giving her the lightsaber, so why start now?”
Obi-Wan turned away, rubbing a hand across his forehead. “Don’t remind me. I hope this wasn’t that kyber’s influence.”
“Doubt it. All she did was shove me really hard, when you think about it. Yeah, it was a hell of a shove, but she didn’t try to break through my shields and I didn’t get the feeling she was actually trying to hurt me.” Anakin thought back to the moment that blow had crashed in across his thoughts, and shook his head. “She got a fright, and told me to back off. That seems fair to me.”
Obi-Wan still looked uncertain, but that was all right. In Anakin’s experience, Obi-Wan was too much of a worrywart for his own good.
The door chime was expected.
The Jedi standing in the door, however, was not.
Chester tilted her head, eying Anakin warily. “Thought you’d be Plo, here to scold me.” Or much worse. She’d attacked him with her anger and because of her certainty he posed a threat, and she’d used an ability she’d clearly told Plo went against her own personal ethics to do it. She was far from an expert in the dark aspects of the Force, but she was pretty sure what she’d done was morally grey at best.
Anakin snorted. “D’you think he’d scold you for defending yourself?”
Or maybe not.
The Jedi shifted in her doorway, glancing around at nothing in particular. “I can stay out here if you’re not comfortable,” he said, with the awkward rhythm of someone not used to platitudes. “I just figured I ought to come and apologize. It was not my intention to…” he trailed off, looking her sharply in the eyes, and she remembered firmly denying any fear. “To threaten you.”
She looked at him for a moment, then stepped aside and gestured him in. “Treat the incredibly hard bunk as if it were your own,” she said dryly. Then she eyed him critically some more.
Anakin sat. “Huh. You aren’t kidding,” he said, thumping the mattress.
She leaned against the wall, folding her arms. “I didn’t think I was going to get a chance to explain myself,” she told him, “so I appreciate it.” She tipped her head at the door. “You and all the other Jedi I’ve met—except for Plo, at this point, because I think he’s realized it—keep making a fundamental assumption about me. You’re used to all your trainees being kids, with no experience outside the Temple, and thus needing a lot of teaching and support. Well, that’s not me. Sure, as I keep reiterating, Starfleet isn’t a military. I don’t reach for a weapon to solve my problems, not first, at least. But that doesn’t mean everyone we meet out there is nice. I’ve done a lot of fighting before I showed up here.
“I’m sure you and everyone else use the Force to pick each other up and toss around for fun. Seems like the sort of thing a bunch of kids would do. But my encounters with it were from people who were trying to hurt me.” Her voice went hard. “And I think, having grown up with it, you probably don’t quite understand what the appropriate threat assessment of it is when you aren’t a Jedi, or Force sensitive, so let me just tell you this: when someone grabs you off your feet with the Force, you are fucking dead. There is nothing you can do about it; they can do absolutely anything to you. It’s like a chokehold. The only thing that matters is getting out however you can and as fast as you can.
“I know damned well you weren’t sure of my loyalties and I knew damned well you were pushing me on purpose, and the second my feet left the ground I had every reason to believe you might try to kill me. I don’t condone compromising someone’s autonomy through the type of persuasion I used on you, but it was the one weapon I knew I could use reliably, and breaking your hold was the only thing that mattered in the moment.
“I’m glad I was wrong, though.” She tried a smile. It probably came out horribly. “I can acknowledge that, at least.”
Anakin rubbed a hand over his face. “Yeah. Master Plo said the same thing, just not in so many words. I messed up, and I’m sorry.”
“I’m sorry I tried to psychically push you down the stairs when you weren’t actually trying to kill me,” she tried, and made a face. “No, that sounds really insincere. Apology accepted?”
He chuckled, and held out a hand. “Sounds good to me, Commander. I do have one question, though. Did you really try to bite Krell?”
“Yeah, and there was no try about it; he tasted horrible . I was tied up at the time, so my options were a little constrained.”
He smirked at her. “Next time, go for the abdomen. That’s where Besalisks keep their gonads.”
She shrugged. “Well, I did that too. I did wonder why it took him so long to get back up, and why he had the troops grab me the second time instead of trying it himself.”
Anakin chuckled, and his amusement filled the little room, so strongly that Chester could feel it clearly from behind her own shields. “You’re making a habit of that, huh?”
“Yeah, guess I’d better diversify my attacks. Next one will see it coming.” Her grin was wide and impish. “Hey, I didn’t hurt you seriously or anything, did I? I’ll be the first to admit I had no goddamn clue what I was doing.”
He shook his head, his dark hair flopping over his eyes. She’d seen his face on a billboard outside the spaceport on Coruscant, and no wonder; he had the soft good looks of a boy-band frontman. “No, I’m fine. I did have a nasty headache afterward, but that’s normal for psychic attacks. You didn’t break through my shields, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
Yeah, she had been worried. “Good. That’s a relief. Shields are uh, important in the culture I learned them from, and going uninvited into someone’s mind is uh. Really bad.”
He gave her a shrewd look, lifting one eyebrow. “Not regular bad, huh?” he said, and then, “Wait. Did you actually go for my nonexistent mental balls?”
Chester knew the look she was giving him was faintly bug-eyed. She opened her mouth, failed to produce an intelligible response, and shut it again.
“You did!” Anakin slapped his leg, wheezing mirthfully. “Kriff! I’m glad I’m not one of your people!”
“To be fair it hadn’t occurred to me to think of it that way,” she said, a little faintly. “I mean. Different species approach it different ways, but I learned my mental shielding from my partner—er, former now—who’s Vulcan and they generally only share minds between family and partners and really intimate friends. It’s not exactly universal, but old habits and all.”
Anakin snorted ungracefully, fighting the laughter under control. “Maybe keep to kicking Sith below the belt in the future, Commander. I’m sure it’ll serve you well.”
“Apparently so,” she said, still a little stunned.
The look he gave her then was almost sympathetic. “Former partner, huh?”
She made a face. “Yeah. Five year relationship blew up in my face about two months before Aurra Sing grabbed me. Overshadowed by more recent events, but it sure hasn’t helped.”
“Oh, damn,” he said, with a sharp intake of breath. His eyes went a little distant. “That must have been terrible.”
“She didn’t understand the life,” she said, a bit more quietly. “I’m Starfleet; I don’t get to be risk-averse. And my everything is on that ship. It’s good to have someone at home—but I couldn’t sacrifice that for her, and that’s what she had to ask me to do in the end, even if she didn’t quite understand that was what she was saying.”
He nodded, radiating discomfited understanding. “I get it. You can’t just stop being what you are when you serve a calling like that. It’d be like… pulling out a piece of your soul. It’s not just a job, it’s your life.”
“Exactly,” she said. “But Vulcans bond mentally as well, and if one partner dies the other feels it—like losing a limb, she said. And she’d lost one partner already; she couldn’t bear to lose me like that, too, and I couldn’t bear to do that to her, even though leaving Starfleet wasn’t an option. So we ended it.” She paused, and said more honestly, “Well. She did.”
His frown intensified. “She broke it off... because she was afraid of losing you? And you just went with it?”
Chester tilted her head to one side, regarding Anakin thoughtfully. That reaction... seemed a little strong, a little out of place. Sympathy, she'd expected; that was pretty standard for talking about someone else’s breakup. But there was an undertone in his voice, and a faint intensity in the air that hadn't been there a moment ago. He seemed to be taking this a little more personally than expected.
“If we’d continued the relationship, one of us would have had to compromise who we were. I would have had to leave Starfleet; she would have had to continue to live with the fear of a repeat of the worst trauma that ever happened to her—and believe me, the chances of me dying in the line of duty are damn high. My ship is a heavy hitter, and our enemies in our galaxy know the damage they can do by taking a command officer out. She would have resented me for asking that. She did resent me by the time we ended things. Her family resented me; they wanted a reliable mate for their daughter, who would contribute to the running of the house and not get herself abruptly killed and leave a shattered bond and grieving widow in her wake.”
“Well,” he said, and his voice was very bitter indeed, “the Jedi would say you did the right thing.”
She blinked at him. “And you don’t?”
He paused, looked down. “We’re forbidden attachment.”
Oh, this was personal personal. Granted, there was very little a twenty-year old human resented more than someone getting in the way of him making bad romantic decisions, but there was a sharp tension in the air all of a sudden. Not quite what she’d felt in the gym; this was less focused, more abstract.
He continued, looking past her, toward the opposite wall of the cramped cabin. “It’s a little more complicated than that, and there is a good reason for it, but… yeah. No relationships, no marriage. Yeah, we’re sworn to the Order and the Republic first and foremost, but I personally think those can co-exist.”
Chester hid her own reaction behind her best Vulcan face. “I hadn’t been aware of that,” she said. “Well. So much for being a Jedi. I’m very attached to my crew.” And family. And little squad of clones. “Tight, irrational bonds are what make a starship function . The good of the many might outweigh the good of the one, but Starfleet is a promise. Whatever happens, we’re coming back for you; we’re not abandoning you. Even if it’s a really bad idea.”
Emotion surged up the back of her throat. No one was going to be coming for her. Not out here. They didn’t even know this was a possibility. They probably thought she was in some Dominion prison camp, at best.
But they’d know better. It’d been two months. She wouldn’t be declared officially dead for another two years, but everyone would know that was just a formality. That she’d died screaming somewhere long, long before that.
It had to be tearing her family apart. Her crew? They’d lost enough people they’d have picked up the pieces by now and kept on with that familiar hollow feeling in their stomachs.
She didn’t even know if they were alive. The Bedivere could have gone down with all hands, and she wouldn’t even know.
“I have to get home,” she said.
Anakin looked at her, sympathetic. “I know how hard it is, to be separated from people you… really care about. Like,” and Chester could hear the addition of forced levity that spelled someone pivoting from talking about something they weren’t supposed to, “Obi-Wan and I are deployed separately way more than I’d like, and sometimes I have no idea what’s happening to him for a long time, and there’s nothing I can do to help. He can handle himself, obviously, but… you know?”
“He trained you, right?” Chester asked. “Like you’re training Ahsoka?”
“Yeah,” he said, with a little smile. “At least we’re together most of the time, but sometimes she can’t come on my missions, or she needs to be doing something different, or… well, a lot of things have happened. I worry about her, too.”
Chester resisted the urge to mention, again, how young Ahsoka was. “That… bond you share, you and Ahsoka, and you and Obi-Wan—I’m sure I’m just misunderstanding, but it seems odd, if you’re not meant to have attachments.”
He frowned—not at her, exactly, but clearly some old frustration. “It’s like… I mean, Obi-Wan is like family. So’s Ahsoka, now. It’s not that we’re not meant to care about each other, right? We’re not like that. We’re supposed to care about everyone, really. The Masters always say it’s another way we learn to be able to let go, even when our emotions are deeply invested or whatever. Whether that’s about just… learning to trust them to stand on their own two feet and handle themselves alone, which I know Obi-Wan had trouble doing with me, or—like, Ahsoka got kidnapped a while back, some scum who like to hunt Jedi younglings for fun.”
“Shit.” Chester’s stomach dropped. She knew the padawans were on the frontlines like everyone else, and that was obscene all by itself. But a group capturing and hunting kids?
Something Plo had said in their argument bubbled up out of the backwaters of her mind: Force-sensitives, and especially young Jedi, make very valuable slaves.
No wonder she’d been cautioned about the dangers awaiting an untrained Force Sensitive in this galaxy. Oh, certainly, there were unscrupulous groups back home, but their ability to reach into Federation space and kidnap kids was rather limited.
“Yeah.” Anakin was nodding, his blue eyes narrowed under a remembering frown. “Scared me out of my mind, knowing she was missing and that dangers like that are out there. But—she got out of it. Got others out of it too. That was with the skills she learned from me, and Obi-Wan, and Rex and Master Plo and everyone else who’s taught her. She made it through. We made it through.”
She nodded. “You give them the tools you can, but you hope like hell they won’t have to use them.”
“Exactly. So the idea is just… learning how to trust her to keep doing that. Letting her go knowing that she’s learned the skills she needs to make it on her own. She’s not ready for Knighthood yet, and she probably won't be for years yet. But… I’m sure I’ll be ready, when she is.”
She wasn’t sure if he should be. Ahsoka was a kid.
“I just… it’s hard not to hope I’m learning to let her go because of that. We have to learn to let go regardless. Whether it’s because they leave training for Knighthood or because…”
After a long pause, she said, “Because they get killed?”
He shook his head slightly, not quite a no, more like he was trying to shake the words out of his ears. “I bet this all sounds weird to you.”
“Coping with death? Not particularly.” The death of teenagers, less so, but she didn’t add that. “We see enough of it.”
“Is that easier, over there?” he says, a little bit of mocking but not the same harsh questioning.
“No,” she said. “No, I wouldn’t say so. I don’t like to think what we’d be if it was easier.”
He paused, at that, and nodded. “I guess it wouldn’t be.” He shook his head again, his shoulders dropping. “It was different, before the war. I was finishing up my training when it started, and—I mean, it wasn’t like my training was conventional, I only got trained because Master Qui-Gon insisted on it. Most Jedi arrive at the Temple when they’re tiny. They’re raised by a bunch of other Jedi with the other kids in the creche, grow up learning with other younglings and all that. I wasn’t. But still, when Obi-Wan was training me… it’s not like it wasn’t dangerous. There are always dangerous things out there, and we don’t do easy work. But the war has made things so different. Most Jedi, before they became a padawan, they would have known the Knight or Master who was going to train them, just from being around the Temple. The Knight would choose them, make them an offer, and they could accept or decline. Ahsoka—I can’t imagine her not being my padawan, but neither of us chose it, she was shipped out here to be my padawan. To the front lines, you know? I don’t think I’d met her more than twice beforehand. She didn’t get anything like a normal apprenticeship—not even one like mine. We’re not supposed to be…” He sighed harshly through his teeth, and leaned back, bracing his hands against the rock-hard mattress. “We thought of things differently before the war.”
Thought less about teenagers dying, she imagined. Chester looked down to hide her expression. No empathic powers necessary to see what she thought of that.
“The war’s necessary. And we’re doing real good out here. I mean, where are our skills needed if not here?” he said, defensive, then wilted a little. “There was always going to be danger, but… this isn’t what it should have been like, for her.”
“I know a little about having to become something that… wasn’t what you were meant to be.” Because Starfleet wasn’t a military, and yet here she was. A soldier, and good at it. Sometimes you have to be ruthless, Captain Steenburg had said, approval in her voice, twisted with a deep unhappiness. When had conscience become a luxury?
The war would end. If it ended badly, the way it looked it would, she would shortly be beyond caring about much at all. If it ended well…
They were going to do better. It would be too easy to continue this brutal way of thinking, of seeing others, the constant threat assessment in the back of her mind.
He nodded. “All you can do is try to look out for the people you care about, wherever you end up, right? Do right by them, and all.”
“Exactly,” she said. “I’d rather Ahsoka wasn’t in a war either.” That was putting it mildly, because holy shit was it obscene. “For what it’s worth, though… from what I’ve seen of her, and the thorough walloping she gave me, I think your training is doing right by her. She’s so capable.”
Anakin gave her a smile, somewhat forced. “Yeah. She’s doing pretty well, so far.”
He glanced aside then, at the digital clock that glowed altogether too brightly on the wall beside Chester’s bunk. “Speaking of doing right by her. It’s nearly time for latemeal━want to come get something that isn’t rations from the officers’ mess? I told Ahsoka I’d grab her a whole steak, and I need someone to distract the naval guys.”
“Yeah, I can do distracting,” Chester said, and grinned.