Chapter Text
“Master Plo,” said Mace, as they left the chamber after the Council meeting. “A moment of your time.”
Plo inclined his head and waited for Mace to join him.
“I believe,” said Mace, ushering him over to the full-height windows that wrapped around the outside of the Council Tower, “we are both aware that the Commander’s anger and fear have very little to do with her own personal safety, and a great deal to do with the circumstances of her own galaxy.”
Plo eyeballed him. Mace knew him well enough to take the tilt of his head in the spirit in which it was intended; he returned the look with a grave nod of acknowledgement.
“I drew upon that when I tested her,” he admitted after a few long moments, which surprised Plo not at all. “I would suggest you speak to her on the subject. I had to effectively strike at the heart of who she is as a person and the things she values most, and I believe it was necessary to do so, but… given the magnitude and gravity of the circumstances, it would seem prudent to offer her support.”
“It would,” said Plo. He should not have been surprised that Mace would intuit more from Chester that she was prepared to give away; the man had been uncannily good at reading people since he was a toddler in the creche.
Plo slid his datapad out of his pocket, typing up a quick message to Chester. After a moment, he folded in an invitation to dinner. She would probably appreciate more of a direct approach, given the topic, but there was no reason not to take advantage of the Temple’s catering while they had the opportunity.
“Speaking of which, there’s the question of her training.” Mace’s voice was still very neutral, but the look he cast at Plo said hard questions were coming. “Her particular abilities necessitate more training than we would normally give someone raised outside the Temple who came into their sensitivity late.”
And you need someone to help you ensure she won’t tear someone’s mind in half, thought Plo. He nodded. “Her power of will is remarkable, and between her previous training from the Vulcans in her home universe and her existing skills as an officer, her use of those abilities has been not infrequently alarming.”
“Yes,” said Mace, and then paused by a window and looked very hard indeed at Plo. “You’re fond of her.”
Plo looked out the window. If Mace was driving at something, he could say it himself.
“I can’t help but wonder,” Mace observed, “whether she reminds you of someone. Or, perhaps, something.”
“She reminds me of many people,” Plo said, diplomatically. “For example, her ability to hold one to account is strongly reminiscent of yourself.”
Mace’s eyebrow quirked. “She is a little older than the usual human age for Padawanship. That’s something you’re familiar with, is it not?”
There it goes, Plo thought.
Chester did not, actually, resemble Bultar Swan in any respect, beyond their shared distaste for war. Bultar had been twenty-one when she became Plo’s Padawan, mostly-trained already; she had spent the previous seven years under Micah’s tutelage and when he had been killed on Yinchorr, Plo had stepped in to see her to knighthood.
Chester was not, and never would be a Padawan. She had no desire to be a Jedi… and even if she had, at thirty she was decades too old. But this wasn’t about Chester, not really. It was about Plo himself.
“If you refer to my experience in taking on adult students, then yes, I suppose I am.” Plo turned his head, looking past his shoulder at Mace. “As you have pointed out, Chester is in need of more comprehensive tutelage than the average untrained adult Force-sensitive.”
“Tutelage in a specific set of abilities that lie outside your own specialty, I note.” Mace sighed, and joined him at the window, looking out across the steel-and-glass badlands of Coruscant. “Plo, you let her unleash a whole battalion of droids on the galaxy. The fact that she seems to have successfully convinced them to abandon the war doesn’t really change the fact that I have no idea what you were thinking. Are you trying to channel Qui-Gon?”
“I simply followed the will of the Force,” said Plo, quoting one of Qui-Gon’s favorite non-answers. Mace’s expression did not change, but he raised one hand and pressed it over his eyes, and heaved a terrible sigh.
Plo took pity on him. “I cannot explain it any other way,” he admitted. “My judgment may have been compromised; the sonic attack she used to put down the droids was also very effective against me. However, when she proposed that course of action, I felt the Force lean in on me with an intensity I have not experienced for many years. I took a leap of faith, and it seems to have paid off.”
“Hmm,” said Mace. He swiped his hand down over his face, and the lines around his dark eyes deepened. “Here is an interesting thought for you. Despite all the terribly interesting and potentially extremely meaningful things Chester has done in this short time she has been with us, I have not once seen a shatterpoint over her. Plenty around her, certainly—” here he glanced at Plo again, resigned— “and in fact there is one taking shape on you right now. But none at all on her, despite that she is the primary architect of all this chaos. I can’t imagine why.”
Seeing shatterpoints was an inborn ability, one of a multitude ways of interacting with the Force. Mace was the first Jedi to see them in several hundred years. He’d largely had to make up his own methods and principles as he went.
“I see,” murmured Plo.
Mace inhaled, exhaled, and his stormy presence settled out a little. He stepped away from the window, heading for the elevator doors. “Talk to her, make sure she feels supported. You’re going to have to handle her tutelage, because I certainly don’t have time for it. Just remember, the end goal here isn’t a knighthood.”
Plo closed his eyes beneath his goggles, and accepted the rebuke without argument. Mace was right, of course.
At the far end of the Room of a Thousand Fountains, there was a row of spacious greenhouses. Once upon a time, they had been working spaces, where the Order’s botanists and gardeners kept sensitive plants, those that required more specific atmospheric conditions than the rest of the gardens. Over time, the research and specimens had shifted to newer spaces elsewhere in the gardens, and the greenhouses had become the domain of amateurs.
One such amateur had been the late Yarael Poof.
That evening, Plo met Chester at the door to the Room of a Thousand Fountains. She took in the wicker picnic basket tucked under his arm, and raised a curious eyebrow. “I took the liberty of ordering dinner,” Plo explained, and ushered her into the Room.
Chester was silent throughout the five-minute walk through the gardens, dark grief flaking around the edges of her presence. She took in the verdant gardens, the reflecting pools and water features with not much more than acknowledgement in her eyes. Unusual, for any visitor to the Temple, and especially so for Chester herself.
Yarael’s favourite greenhouse had been the one on the end, a little smaller and darker than the others. Plo unlocked the door from the inside, sliding the bolt back with the Force. His old colleague’s Quermian orchids turned unerringly to face the light.
Inside the greenhouse, there was a low worktable, currently free of plants. Plo put the basket down, tasked Chester with inspecting their dinner, and went to seal the door behind them.
“This greenhouse was once managed by a late colleague of mine,” he explained, settling himself into one of the slightly lichen-covered wooden chairs around the table. “He spent so much time in here that it ended up being a relatively frequent setting for what you might call informal Council meetings, and as such it was made significantly more secure than the rest of the gardens. We can speak freely here.”
She was laying out the food and gave him a lifted eyebrow. “And what would we be discussing that would be on a level with an informal Council meeting?”
“Master Windu tells me that he brought up your war in his assessment of your abilities, and that he may have done so with no diplomacy to speak of.” Plo did his best to project sympathy through his presence, strongly enough that she might feel it through her shields.
“Yes,” she said, distant. “I believe he was trying to make me lose control on purpose, though he could have brought it up with all the diplomacy in the world, and it would have made me feel no better about the whole thing.”
“Mace has always been disconcertingly good at getting to people. It has to do with his particular ability to touch the Force; he has a knack for divining weak points and the like. I have known him since he was about four years old, and I have never had a child argue with me so effectively before or since.” Plo paused for a moment, took a bowl from the basket and doled himself out some steamed dumplings. “He would certainly have done his best to provoke you—that was the purpose of the assessment, to see how you reacted under a different sort of pressure than you have encountered thus far. Mace is satisfied with your response, and thus the Council is likewise. Given what you shared with me regarding your war, though, I felt perhaps I should check in with you.”
“It’s appreciated,” she said slowly, and folded herself into another of the chairs. “As for the war…”
Chester sighed heavily, clearly indecisive, and then her shields flickered and lowered. The sense of leaden grief and fear intensified, a network of fractures running through the steely skin of her presence in the Force.
“It’s not my secret to tell,” she said at last. “A lot of things aren’t. And maybe I’ve been doing all of you a disservice by keeping them so secret, but having encountered Tarkin and Krell so early in my time here, and with an appreciation for how little the Jedi are able to change things, I’ve felt it far better to exercise caution in what I say, even at the risk of rudeness. The thing is, my people are particularly vulnerable right now. As Master Windu has already concluded, our war is not going well. In fact, the Federation is very close to losing. I don’t know if my presence would make the difference. It’s unlikely.” She looked down, and said, as if she couldn’t help it, the greatest lowering of control he’d seen from her yet, “But I could at least die with my people, and for something I believe in.”
Plo let that admission hang in the air for a while. He couldn’t say he was surprised. Chester had been fighting like hell to get back to her galaxy since she had first arrived. She had also never once expressed any more than a cursory practical concern for her own skin. She feared little━ too little, Plo would say━in this galaxy; and her criticisms and dire warnings regarding the future of the Republic were so clearly driven more by a strongly-developed sense of morals than an emotional concern for a galaxy she barely knew. That root of fear buried deep under her shields could only be fear for what she had left behind.
That fear was no longer buried; it looked out at him from her dark eyes, faint lines appearing in her forehead.
“That, I can empathise with,” he said at last. “You may not be able to make a difference on the larger scale, it is impossible to know; but perhaps there is still something you can do to change the lives of the people standing right beside you.”
“That was all I could hope for,” she said bitterly. “That was what I was doing , for my people and my crew. And now I’m here, and everything I fought for, everything I was willing to compromise the person I wanted to be for—turn myself from someone who saves lives to someone who takes them, choose violence over diplomacy and lies over truth—everything I believe in is dismissed as the delusions of a naive idealist. I’m stuck here, and I can’t get to the people I promised to protect, and it may already be too late. ”
There was so little he could say to that, wasn’t there?
She drew a hiccuping breath and added, “My family, my parents and my grandmother, live just across the Bay from Starfleet Headquarters. When the Dominion gets there, even if they just decide to enslave everyone instead of outright destroying Earth—my parents and my grandmother are dead . And they’ll die not even knowing where I am, that I abandoned them. ”
Plo hesitated for just a moment. Then he turned toward her, reached out, and gently rested a hand on hers. “You have not abandoned them,” he said. “I can say that for sure. If you thought you had a microscopic chance of reaching your galaxy alive you would either be gone by now, or you would be trying your hardest to be gone. Instead, you are making the difficult, courageous choice to rely on the help of others to maximize your chances of making it home to your crew and family. And when you do, because I have no doubt that you will … If they are alive, I think they too will see that. And if they are not alive, then they will surely have passed knowing that you fought to return to them.”
She gave him a long stare, with none of her calm or her confidence left in it, just the exhausted haunted look of someone down to the dregs of determination and hope. “But it’s the same outcome,” she said, dull. “Whatever my intentions.”
“Abandonment is not an outcome—it is a choice. Intent does not always change the outcome, but it can help to recontextualise it.” Accepting one’s own failure was just as much a part of the Jedi mindset as accepting change and death. Plo kept that part to himself; the look in Chester’s eyes and the rusted-over weaknesses in her Force presence felt very much like moral injury. “I have known you for about a month and I already find it difficult to imagine you ever choosing to abandon someone for no good reason. I doubt that those who have known you far longer could believe it of you either.”
She snorted, before her shoulders hunched forward. “Not in the absence of orders at least,” she said, with a miserable note in her voice. “I’ve almost spent more time here than at my post. Commander Faisal died a little over two months ago; he sacrificed himself when the Dominion took Betazed, so that I could get the rest of our landing party out before the planet was overrun. After the battle, there was no one else to rotate from another ship into his place as executive officer, and so I got a fast promotion.”
“I am sorry. It is evident you cared a great deal for him. But he died protecting others, and your determination shows that he could not have picked a better person to carry on his legacy.”
She swallowed hard. “I’d like to think so.”
“Betazed,” said Plo, feeling as if he were very close to the heart of the matter. “I take it this is a central world for your people?”
She nodded. “It is. We’re running out of places to fall back to. I heard rumor we were sending out peace feelers before I was taken—and they were rebuffed. Unconditional surrender only. And, Plo—I was in the Gamma Quadrant before the war broke out, I’ve seen what the Dominion does to planets that have defied them. Frankly, I’d take the Separatists any day.”
She had to be remembering very clearly, and projecting very intentionally, because with her words Plo caught a few moments of vivid sense-memory: a crowd of big gray beings, scaled, spines along their jawlines and the crests of their heads and nothing but indifference in their eyes, as the butt of a blaster slammed into his shoulder and bore him to the ground. With it came the emotional memory, humiliation and helplessness, the horror of realizing there was nothing he could do, and his life was in the hands of those who saw him only as an insect to be squashed. Those who wouldn’t do him even the bare dignity of hating him.
Hot on its heels, a woman with welts like spidering veins across her face, raised and purple-blue—not quite end-stage of the disease yet—and her gratitude as she thanked the Starfleet aid team. She would die, and she would die terribly, but her child would not, the first generation born without the disease the Dominion had created to punish an entire species for their long-ago defiance. He could feel how that gratitude had seemed almost obscene; so much, for ultimately so little.
“I see,” he told her, and she seemed relieved for a moment, the dread that had wrapped around them lifting. He realized it had been a desperate attempt to communicate the nature of her urgency and fears, very likely because she had found herself so often dismissed, and had feared he would do likewise; his initial reaction when she had first hurled the fact of her war in his face like a weapon had not likely helped.
How that must have galled her. She’d made little secret of her own pride; a failing in someone unwilling to set it aside as she so often did, but to not only know her people were fighting such a frantic battle but also to be dismissed as a fool by all those around had been painful and enraging, the secret of her own war gnawing away in her chest with every dismissal, the constant urge to spit, you know NOTHING about what war can be, you with your disposable soldiers and your stupid little money games! While she watched the rot behind the Republic lines, same as the Separatist, Krell and Tarkin and all the condescending natborns in their crisp impersonal uniforms, and tasted the thick rustiness of the fear she’d been tamping back ever since she arrived in this galaxy.
“Ah,” he said quietly. “You are afraid that even if your people survive this war, you may never come back from what it made you. You are afraid your Federation will become like the Republic.”
Her face crumpled, and she turned away.
“It is an understandable concern, given the circumstances. It is… hard not to wish total destruction on such opponents, and that is a mindset that is possibly harder to come back from.” Plo paused for a moment. Perhaps dinner had not been such a great idea. “I… see your point, regarding preferring the Separatists. They have dabbled in biological warfare before, but the idea of tying such a disease to a people’s genetics, passing it on through generations so that every parent condemns their child to a horrible death the moment they are born… that is a level of cruelty beyond anything I have seen yet in this war.”
She gave him a look of open relief. “It helps,” she said. “To finally actually tell someone, more than the bare minimum. Letting someone like Tarkin know, or even mentioning it to anyone is out of the question. And at home, I’m a senior officer—I can’t let them know how I think things are going.”
Plo gave her an acknowledging nod, projecting sympathy and a certain amount of resignation through the Force. “I am sorry you’ve had to bear these secrets on your own so long,” he said, meaning it with every bit of his heart. “And I apologize, both for myself and my fellow Jedi, that we ever mistook your ideals for mere naivete. In the midst of our own war, I suppose, it is hard to imagine worse.”
“Thank you,” she said quietly. “My pride is a small price to pay to protect my home, but it was wearing.”
“Entirely understandable,” said Plo. “I have had words with Master Windu, and I will speak to the others as well, but given the necessity of keeping the details secret I cannot guarantee the message will sink in. You are quite right; the last thing anyone needs is Tarkin smelling blood in the water. Yanssigir that he is,” he added, mostly to himself; the Dorin-native predator had a reputation for following in the wake of disasters.
“At home we’d call him a Denebian slime devil,” she said dryly. “I understand. And… perhaps you now understand more of my own rage at your war. The idea of making the clones and putting them in that legal position they’re in just because of Dooku…” She gave him a slightly sheepish look.
“Trust me, that part was the most easily-understood.” Plo nodded, his tusks twitching in a reflexive smile within his mask. “The clones’ situation is abominable, and it would be so with or without Dooku at the head of the Confederacy.”
Chester nodded, slowly. “Your Republic, when it reached for a solution, reached for the same one the Dominion did to put us down—genetically modified cloned soldiers.”
“Ah,” said Plo, and the lingering discomfort from the glimpse of those soldiers in Chester’s memory came roaring back. “And here I thought I could not possibly be more bothered by that than I already was.”
“Oh, their bureaucrats and diplomats are genetically modified and cloned, too,” she said, with that same dry defensive humor he was realizing was second-nature, perhaps a way to keep the morale of her people up.
“At the very least,” he said, responding in the same dry tone, “I can say for certain that the Republic did not create the clones. The Senate merely swarmed like flies once the opportunity was put in front of them.” Not that that made much of a difference. Plo knew he would be wondering for the rest of his life just what the fuck Sifo-Dyas had been thinking. “Cloning for profit was and still is illegal within the Republic. Fortunately for the Senate, the clones were created outside the Republic and paid for likewise, and so existed in something of a legal grey area; they could be co-opted into an army without completely tearing up the Republic’s founding charters.” He gave her a resigned look. “If you are thinking that this all sounds extremely convenient, you are not alone.”
Chester made a face. “Sometimes I think the Federation’s anti-genetic-modification laws are far too draconian, but that’s an eloquent counterpoint.”
“Genetic modification and cloning itself is legal here—the Republic has several sapient member species who can now only reproduce via artificial methods. Otherwise, yes—creating beings for any other reason too often seems to lead to using those beings as weapons.”
“There’s a lot of ugly history behind ours,” she said. “But yes. There are just enough parallels here for me to see where we might end up in similar circumstances, if we made it out of this war without taking care to preserve who we are.”
“There are so many ways to lose without realising it,” Plo said, softly. “Even if the Republic wins a martial victory, I suspect it may have lost a fundamental part of itself. Possibly, long before we went to war.” He took a deep breath—this conversation was supposed to be for Chester’s benefit. “I very much hope that you and your Federation can retain your ideals through this war. It is reassuring to think that such things remain, elsewhere in the universe.”
The look she gave him made him suspect that his own vulnerability had perhaps been the best response he could have provided.
“We’ll try,” she said quietly, and with conviction. Then she leaned back and gave him a crooked little smile. “You know, I think I’ve gotten more sleep in the last three weeks than I had in the preceding eighteen months.”
“Is that so?” Plo pushed his wry amusement into the Force. “Then perhaps we ought to give you many more opportunities to sleep, so that you may return to your crew well-rested.”
The joke was spontaneous, but it reminded him of something else he’d meant to tell her. He produced his datapad. “I have also had some news on the search for the anomaly you were taken through. The bounty hunter’s ship was traced through several hyperlane junctions. This takes us from thirty potential routes to investigate, to nine.”
“That’s good news,” she said. “That’s really good news, actually.” She sniffed, abrupt and a little surprised, and used one of the napkins with their dinner to wipe her eyes and nose. “It feels better, to have been able to talk about it,” she said. “But it’s horrible to know that that’s still going on back home. That while I’ve had some time here to catch my breath, a break from it, no one else I know has—and I don’t even know what’s happened in my absence.”
Unspoken: there might be no one at all to go back to.
Plo shuffled his chair closer, and leaned over, carefully offering her support that she could choose to take or leave. “We will do our best to return you as soon as possible. That hasn’t changed, I promise.”
She nodded. “Dooku did his best to make me doubt that, and ensuing events made it easy to believe him.”
“Perhaps,” offered Plo, very carefully, as he would not blame her for being just as cautious about sharing this information as she had been with everything else, with all the people she was determined to protect, “as we look for ways to return you, you could tell me about your home—your friends and your family. I find it is a comfort to remember why one is fighting, especially when things are very bleak.”
She looked at him, a little startled, then smiled. “Yeah, I think that might help. The question would be where best to start…”
She told him about her friends from the Academy, and how they’d met on the first day when she and Rilas Jeln—an unbonded member of a species that sometimes hosted a symbiont with hundreds of years of memories—had accidentally driven an anti-grav cart into Sotek, a Vulcan academic whose husband had noted his boredom and packed him off to Starfleet for his own sanity, and how all three of them had immediately become fast friends, Sotek and Rilas’s horror when they’d learned she was significantly younger than they were, and her own horror when, in a fit of irritation, she’d called Sotek a nickname in her own language that translated to older brother and he had, appallingly, decided to take it seriously .
Rilas was now in Intelligence, and Chester had not the slightest idea where she was; Sotek had been hastily reassigned to a diplomatic mission just before Chester had left Federation space, and now she had no idea where he was, either.
There was a family at home, a restaurant, and her crew, and Captain Steenburg, her mentor, who’d been helping her through the process of stepping into her predecessor and former mentor’s place. Takahashi, who’d probably taken Chester’s place in turn, and whom Chester had been mentoring in turn; J’etris, the head of Tactical, who she didn’t know yet but had been fencing with—she used something Chester called a bat’leth, a weapon held in no little regard by her species, which wasn’t affiliated with the Federation.
As she spoke, Plo could almost feel the community taking shape in her words, the crew to whom she’d referred so many times and missed so deeply, like glimpsing her briefly complete.
This was for Chester’s benefit, he told himself, and kept the sadness as private as he could.
“Commander,” he said, as she came to a close, “rest assured, we will get you home.”
“Thank you,” she said, paused, and turned to look at him, thoughtful. “You know, at this point, you might as well call me Diane.”
For all the casualness of her tone, there was a weight to her words, a strong measure of trust, and the gesture touched him deeply. “Diane, then. We will get you home.”