Chapter Text
It was nearly midday outside, bright and noisy. Master Skywalker was waiting for them down the boulevard, scowling. Ahsoka wondered what had gotten his underpants in a twist this time.
“Nice of you to come find us,” said Chester, raising her eyebrows.
By Master Skywalker’s expression, she was completely right. “I owed Plo a favor.”
Ahsoka reached out, brushing a gentle thought along the bubbling surface of her Master’s mind. Something must have really gotten to him. “It’s not that far to the Temple—Barriss and I could’ve gotten her home by ourselves.”
Anakin shook his head. “Sure, you could have,” he said, but he really didn’t sound convinced.
Ahsoka bit back the automatic retort. She has a gigantic bounty, she reminded herself, he’s just worried about that.
Barriss looked between her and her Master, expression carefully blank. “I should go,” she said quietly. “There’s a Mirialan bakery down the street—I’ve been meaning to get Master Luminara some pastries.”
Ahsoka didn’t have the heart to object. Anakin could be so prickly sometimes. “Okay,” she said. “Have a good afternoon, Barriss.”
Barriss flashed her a quick smile as she left. “You too.”
Anakin turned the other way, toward the Temple. “Let’s go.”
Chester was watching him sidelong, like she didn’t really trust him. Ahsoka had thought the two of them had patched things up after that altercation that had freaked everyone out, but…
This had definitely gotten kind of weird.
“Padme mentioned you’d had a meeting with the Chancellor today,” said Chester, her voice light and conversational in a way that struck Ahsoka as very deliberate.
“You know, you can drop the act, Commander.” Anakin’s voice was as sharp as the comment seemed irrelevant.
Chester blinked, but didn’t seem too surprised. “The act?”
“The act where you pretend your Federation is so much better than we are. You see, Commander, you may think I’m pretty young by your galaxy’s standards,” Chester made a delicate face at this, “but I’ve got enough experience to call banthashit on your enlightened-society nonsense. If there’s one big thing I’ve learned from my time as a Jedi—and before—it’s that if you see a whole bunch of people living like you claim yours do, it’s because they’re stepping on a whole lot of throats to get up there. Or stay there.”
“I can see why you’d think that.” Chester said this in the very blandest of tones, which was absolutely guaranteed to enrage Anakin. “It fits what I’ve seen here.”
Anakin’s expression twisted. “Or you’re lying.”
Chester raised her eyebrows. “To this many Jedi?”
Good point, thought Ahsoka. The most she’d felt from Chester was that moment of deflection back in the diner, when she had pushed the conversation away from the Dominion—whatever that was. Nothing good, apparently.
Skyguy changed tacks. “You’re holding something back, Commander. It’s clear enough. Maybe you’ve been trying to make us more sympathetic to you by presenting a story that paints your people as saints.”
“I’m holding a great many things back,” said Chester. “And I haven’t made that decision lightly, trust me.”
“Tell me, Commander,” said Anakin, “in your lovely enlightened society, where no one actually has to work and there’s no money… who grows your food?”
The question caught Chester completely flatfooted. She gave Anakin a stare of blank surprise, with no concealment of her sudden scrambling for an answer. Ahsoka bit her lip in the background. That was a real good point, too.
Anakin folded his arms, smug. “How about that uniform of yours? Fuel for your ships? What about all the dangerous and dirty work, Commander? You ever actually worked on a farm? That’s a lot more dangerous than you’d expect. A Federation like the one you’ve been boasting about takes a lot to run it. A lot of goods, and a lot of people.”
She drew a long breath, looking away with a slightly wide-eyed expression. “Hell,” she said.
“Come on, Commander. You’ve been eager enough to tell us how much better you do everything else in the Federation.” Master Skywalker leaned in. “Admit it, you’ve got unlucky and lucky people over there just like we do, and you’re one of the lucky ones. What does your family do, then? It’s got to be something good. You know, I talked to Admiral Tarkin and some of the other officers. They say it takes a non-Jedi a pretty long time to end up an XO of a starship. But with the right influence in the right places…”
Chester’s wide-eyed look broke all at once into startled laughter. “My parents run a restaurant!” She gestured behind them. “Sort of like Dex’s. Dex’s is a little bigger, actually. And as for food and uniforms—automation. We have a lot of it.”
“Oh yeah, automation,” said Anakin. “You can’t automate nunas.”
“There’s always vat meat,” Chester pointed out. “You can automate that.” She drew another deep breath, stifled a suspicious cough in her fist, and continued, more seriously, “General, our technology-sharing policies are very strict. Perhaps one day our respective peoples will sit at a negotiating table, and we’ll share the technologies that allow us to do these things. But in the meantime…” She paused, shrugged. “Believe what you like. Now, where did you park the speeder?”
“Sometimes I really don’t like that woman,” Anakin muttered to Ahsoka, then hurried to catch up with her.
Yeah, we can tell, thought Ahsoka.
They managed five seconds of walking in silence before Anakin started up again.
“So you don’t share your technology even though it could eliminate all these problems with our society you’ve been complaining about since you got here. How does that make you the good guys, exactly? Sounds like you’re resource hoarding just like the Trade Federation.”
“All right,” Chester said, “I’ll bite. Imagine someone makes a machine that can make medicine. Any medicine. You feed it a formula and ding, there the medicine is, works perfectly, does exactly what it needs to. This machine can be built by anyone with minimal tools. Someone invents it tomorrow, with the Republic exactly the way it is. What happens then?”
Ahsoka watched Anakin, expectant. That someone guards the patent with their life and gets super rich off selling medicine, she thought. Or they get suckered into giving someone else the ability to get super rich off selling that medicine. She hadn’t got that 98% mark in her last Recent History assignment for nothing.
Anakin, apparently, had far more faith in the Republic than her History teachers. “The Republic would ensure that all member worlds had access to it,” he said, sounding very certain.
“How would they manage that?” asked Chester. “Seems like they’re having trouble doing it with the resources they actually have.”
“And your people would do it better?” snapped Anakin.
Chester raised her eyebrows and said nothing, which even Ahsoka had to admit was way more annoying than anything else she could have done.
“Well, whatever this magic medicine machine is—” he darted a sharp look at her— “or whatever it’s supposed to represent, it’s not like it exists. Unless you’re saying the tech you’ve got is like that?”
“I might say that if the thought-problem of the magic medicine machine presented difficulties, our technology certainly would,” said Chester, her voice bland. “I’ve already been treated to lectures from Master Windu and Commander Wolffe about this, so it isn’t as if I’m likely to change my mind. But technologies that are radically different than the ones a society has built itself around can be terribly disruptive. Lightsabers and hyperspace drives would be quite alien to most people from my galaxy, for example.” She paused, and added, “As would your economic approach.”
“And just what does that mean?”
“Perhaps you should consider whether your people are best served by it? Perhaps there are other ways, a government more interested in the wellbeing of the people.”
Anakin stopped dead in the middle of the walkway, presence seething in a way Ahsoka had learned to be wary of. “Oh, we should , should we?”
Chester tilted her head, apparently unfazed. “I didn’t imply that it would be easy.”
Anakin laughed, sharp and ugly. “Hate to break this to you, Commander, but here? We live in the real world, not whatever daydream you swanned out of. And maybe it’s time you got an actual look at that real world.” He turned around, his smile sharp and forced.
“Uh, Master,” Ahsoka started.
“Not now, Snips.”
Chester tilted her head and folded her arms, her eyebrows raised in a go on, impress me kind of way—basically the exact opposite of what she needed to be doing to make Anakin settle back down.
Anakin's expression twisted into a smile that was anything but amused. “Say, Commander, you’ve not spent a lot of time away from the Jedi or the GAR, have you? Got no real idea how most of the rest of the galaxy lives, have you?”
“Are you offering to show me?” said Chester, with nothing more than dry interest.
“I don’t think this is a good idea,” said Ahsoka, a horrible suspicion dawning upon her. “The lower levels can be really dangerous, Master, and that’s even if we aren’t recognized.” Which we definitely will be, she thought, resigned, staring the Hero With No Fear directly in his bright blue eyes. They’d passed a bank of his propaganda posters not half a block back.
“We’ll keep her safe, won’t we, Snips?” said Anakin, mirroring Chester’s casual posture. His smile was tipping toward a smirk now.
“That’s not the point!” said Ahsoka. Force, they were both stupid and stubborn! “Master Plo said to get her back to the Temple, not do whatever you two are thinking! Dooku’s still got a bounty on her head!”
Chester opened her mouth, and immediately lowered Ahsoka’s estimation of her intelligence. “Dooku’s been disappointed before now.”
Ahsoka put her hands together and let out a deep breath, which failed to help her patience at all. “You were lecturing Joyride about machismo literally yesterday!”
“This isn’t machismo,” said Chester. There was a glint in her eye, confidence or possibly temporary idiocy. “It’s curiosity.”
“We can keep an eye on one lost ‘Starfleet officer’,” said Anakin. Ahsoka could practically hear the quotation marks clank into place.
She closed her eyes and took a deep breath in through her nose, squashing the desire to jump up and smack their heads together in hopes of shaking some common sense out of them. She felt for a moment like the most mature adult there. This was a shocking realization.
“Okay, look, maybe we can, but maybe we shouldn’t? "
Both of them drew another breath, looking at each other. For good measure, Ahsoka added, “Guys. I’m fifteen. How am I the responsible one in this situation?”
That made Chester at least pause. “You’re probably not wrong,” she started, and Ahsoka could just hear the ‘but’ lining up when Anakin, who sometimes sucked at reading the room said, in between very fake coughs, “Scaredytooka.”
Chester’s face sort of froze. She slowly looked back over her shoulder at Anakin. “Oh, you did not. ”
“If you heard anything it was your own imagination. Calling you a coward,” said Anakin.
“On the other hand,” said Chester, looking back at Ahsoka, “I am a Starfleet officer, and we are explorers.”
“Arrrgh,” said Ahsoka, because at this point there was nothing else she could contribute to the conversation. Except maybe keep a running countdown to the point where everything inevitably karked itself, but that seemed more likely to encourage them.
Chester had moved first toward their speeder. Anakin stopped her with a hand on her shoulder, which she cast a rapid glance at that implied she was thinking about removing it at the wrist. “No, Commander. It’ll just get stolen. We’re taking public transit there. Ever heard of it?”
“You have public transit?” The sound of blank surprise in her voice was only a little bit fake, Ahsoka guessed. “Thank god, I’d thought you didn’t have any of the hallmarks of civilization.”
Anakin rolled his eyes, gestured upward, toward the skylanes where speeders streamed through the afternoon air nose-to-tail. “Coruscant’s population is literally half a quadrillion people. Do you want to deal with that traffic jam?”
“Not at all,” said Chester. She tilted her head at the skylanes. “We don’t have traffic like that at home. Pretty much everything is public transit. It doesn’t make sense to do otherwise.”
“Oh, of course,” said Anakin, with dripping sarcasm.
Ahsoka kept both her reactions—firstly that Anakin was being unfair, and secondly that Coruscant public transit was probably a little different from the sort of public transit Chester was used to—to herself. The last thing she wanted to do right now was take sides.
It was pretty clear that Coruscant’s lower levels thought anyone escorted by two Jedi was probably valuable for one reason or another. Technically, they weren’t wrong. Chester wondered how many of them might take a look through current bounties, get some of their friends together, and come back.
She assumed there would be at least one.
It wasn’t that she was unaccustomed to hostile reactions to her presence. There were plenty of places back home where Starfleet—or even just a human—was viewed with suspicion.
But she could count on the fingers of one hand how many times that hostility had been so actively predatory . By the third person who looked her over with a sneer and an evaluating glint in their eye, she was ready to start bashing heads out of bad temper alone. None of this was helped by Anakin’s protection—a hard look from him discouraged attention pretty fast, but it left Chester feeling like a coddled official with bodyguards, and that appealed to her even less. She would have given a great deal for an honest brawl.
The stupidity of their jaunt had fallen into clear focus by now. Ahsoka was glancing at her every so often with an expression too sympathetic to be an I told you so look, though she would have been totally justified in that, but Anakin was still dead set on teaching her a lesson and was cheerfully oblivious. There was a nasty little edge to it, though. He knew damn well what he was doing.
“We should be getting back, Master,” said Ahsoka, glancing around. “This isn’t the best place to be at this time of night, and it’s going to get worse.”
“Nonsense!” said Anakin. “The Commander’s seen barely anything, and we’re hardly even in the Lower Levels yet.” He glanced sidelong at Chester. “The shops still have lights on them.”
Chester wondered how much of what had gotten her into this was perfectly laudable curiosity, or stupid machismo, and exactly where the line between wanting to accurately understand the socioeconomic dumpster fire that was the Republic turned into being a cheap tourist of other people’s suffering.
None of the possible answers were flattering.
It was also sobering. She’d known this universe was capable of incredible cruelty and that the poverty must be equally as appalling, but what she was seeing here, with so far yet to go, was nauseating. She’d seen inequality and poverty before, of course, and worse than this, but…
It was something about how big and old this Republic was. The technology they had, the fact they’d spread across the entire galaxy with people even in their capital suffering from hunger and unable to access medical care. They were tens of thousands of years old, and they hadn’t figured out food insecurity—because, presumably, they hadn’t cared to. They didn’t even have the excuse the Ferengi did of ideology. This was pure and simple laziness. The result of deciding that a large part of their population simply didn’t matter, and that they didn’t care.
These problems went so very much deeper than the war. No wonder Dooku had been so successful. It was the perfect fertile ground for a populist ideologue to spring from, and Chester could point to multiple examples in Earth history (let alone Vulcan, Andorian, Klingon, Tellarite—every species had wrestled with something like this) when these conditions had led to just that.
“Credit for your thoughts, Commander?” Anakin was, somehow, smugger.
“Trust me, they’re unprintable,” said Chester.
“Try me.”
“You’re totally fucked.”
Anakin stopped walking and looked at her, intent. Whatever he’d expected her to say, evidently, it hadn’t been that. “What do you mean?”
“You’re going to have a populist ideology propel an authoritarian individual or few into power, with an ensuing dictatorial regime,” she said. “Possibly totalitarian, even. I give it five years at the outside, maybe closer to two. You have a war compounding existing social inequalities, and however facetious Dooku is in espousing his ideology, I rather doubt that cynicism is a constant throughout all of the Separatists. Or even within the Republic. People around here, and lower down, have to be looking around and going, maybe Dooku has a point. And they’re not going to care that the majority of Dooku’s buddies are in it to line their pockets. Meanwhile, you and the rest of the Jedi and the Senate and everyone else leading this war are going to look like out-of-touch elites. The second you get some ideologue who starts pointing out how unfair it is that all the money is going to the war—a war that they’ll argue could be ended by letting the Separatists alone and hauling the lot of you off for war crimes–it’ll be a match on dry grass. People will look at their lives, decide that the Republic doesn’t really matter, and with the generations of training that this kind of inequality, the lessons learned from frantic scrabbling in a capitalist system where one slip or injury means poverty or death, they’re not going to be so picky about stability is delivered. If it goes as bad as it did on Earth, they might not even be interested in the stability—just the chance to make sure they’re grinding someone else’s face down, for once.”
“You don’t know that’s what’s going to happen,” he said, denial hard in his blue eyes. “Just because we don’t look like your perfect Federation—”
“My perfect Federation came after my species fucked up about as hard as we possibly could have,” she said. She gestured around herself. “It looked a hell of a lot like this, actually; people giving up on their idealism, their belief in self-determination and dignity and democratic governance.”
“You want to talk to me about democracy?” snapped Anakin. “Look around you. Ours does nothing. Coruscant is nothing compared to industrial worlds—at least these people aren’t slaves in all but name. And the Senate is too busy bickering to do anything about it! If someone would just make them all sit down and force them to agree— ”
Chester eyed him, cautious, feeling rather like she’d just stumbled on an unexpected rattlesnake on a narrow trail. Someone force them to agree? Someone like Khan Noonien-Singh, or Colonel Green? Someone who can make hard decisions, like Kodos the Executioner? And here, in this unequal galaxy, Anakin Skywalker was exactly the sort of person who could make those assertions a reality, with some bad luck.
“We tried that too," she said. "What it got us was thermonuclear devastation.”
He snorted.
“I’m sure plenty of people in the 21st century had that same reaction,” she said, then sighed heavily. “Told you it wouldn’t go well.”
“Guess not,” said Anakin. “You ever realized that smug superiority is pretty annoying, Commander?”
“Yup,” she said. “But what were you expecting, Skywalker? That I’d look around here and say ‘oh wow, this is so much better than the poverty we have at home’? What did you think we were getting out of this?”
He huffed. “I was thinking I’d give you a dose of reality, Commander. Real people live like this, not in whatever high-class fantasy you think you’ve got. Get your head out of the clouds.”
Something about the way he said it made Chester wonder if perhaps this was more than bruised national pride at play. He seemed to be taking the whole idea personally—more so than anyone else she’d argued with over this wretched stumbling zombie of a Republic.
“Maybe we should change the subject!” Ahsoka said brightly, like a teacher to a couple of arguing five year olds.
“There’s a bar over there,” said Anakin, with evident bad feeling.
“Sure,” said Chester. It’s not like I can get any more depressed about the state of this place.
The bar was not quite as bad as it could have been, to damn with faint praise. Chester had been to worse; some establishments seemed to decline in quality as soon as they saw a Starfleet uniform, sort of on principle. Inside, there were tables and chairs, the odd paper menu. There had been an attempt made at proper lighting, though this was an odd mix of buzzing fluorescent tubes and neon signage in five or six different colors. There was a bar, with taps and everything, and shelves on the wall behind filled with a chaotic array of bottles. On closer inspection, the bottles were empty.
Chester glanced around at the other patrons’ foodstuffs—not bad. It looked all moderately edible and free of vermin, and if there were extra legs here or there, at least they looked like intentional parts of the food. She very carefully did not make a crack to Anakin about whether he was coddling her. She didn’t want to insult the locals, or give him further ideas.
Shortly after they sat down, the interest seemed to increase. The waitress took their order with a fine show of indifference, went over to the bar, said something to the bartender. The bartender—someone short and sturdy with several extra arms—gave them a once-over, carefully didn’t react, and went back to scrubbing at a glass. The way he eased over to one of the customers afterward and had a brief quiet chat that was drowned out by the pounding music was probably coincidence; the way the customer got up and slipped away without apparently paying his tab was also probably coincidental.
Chester watched this, the hairs on the back of her neck prickling. She liked that not at all. She liked still less watching the performance repeated with a few other of the bar’s denizens.
She glanced at Ahsoka and raised an eyebrow; Ahsoka looked as concerned as she felt. Anakin on the other hand was cheerfully sipping his drink as if he’d noticed nothing, which Chester rather doubted.
Chester weighed their options. They’d been noticed. It was very unlikely that by sneaking out they’d avoid a confrontation at this point. It just meant they might be jumped somewhere even less ideal. And while Anakin was an idiot, with all the common sense of a brick, he probably had some cause to believe he could make this point to her without losing her and incurring the wrath of his superiors.
She flicked a resigned look at Ahsoka, and leaned back in the booth to sip her very bad beer.
Then people started coming back into the bar, and they were definitely way too interested in Chester. She could feel the eyes on her; the first couple weren’t as good actors or as casual as the lookouts who’d left, and they were being pretty blatant about surrounding their small booth. The exception was the one lanky blue individual with fantastic taste in hats who slouched his way casually past the bar and vanished around the corner toward the bathrooms and presumably the kitchen while the attention of the Jedi was focused on his less subtle cohorts.
Chester spent a moment wishing passionately her lightsaber had a stun setting, and another passionately regretting her poor phaser, lost who knew where when she’d first been captured. That bounty hunter probably had kept it, and what a depressing possibility that was.
“Master?” said Ahsoka, who’d been watching what Chester had. “Any of those guys who just came in look familiar to you?”
Anakin looked around too, eyes narrowing. “Unfortunately.”
“Let me guess,” said Chester, finishing her drink in a hurry, “this is the part where we quietly slip out the back?”
Anakin didn’t bother to answer. Instead, he made eye contact with Ahsoka and tipped his head at the double doors leading to the kitchen. Ahsoka briefly sank her head into both hands, took a few deep breaths, and got to her feet. “Come on, Commander, while he distracts them.”
“Right behind you,” said Chester quickly, following her. There was a time and a place for heroics and this was certainly not it.
Behind them, Anakin climbed up onto the table and ignited his lightsaber.
They got most of the way toward the door before getting cut off. Ahsoka immediately put herself between the bounty hunters and Chester as blasterfire broke out in the main part of the bar and the screaming started. The bounty hunters in the hallway took that as their signal to start trying to shoot Ahsoka, too.
“Get through the kitchen, Commander!” said Ahsoka, igniting her lightsabers and starting to deflect bolts. Chester had some pretty mixed feelings about hiding behind an actual child, but went anyway—waiting wasn’t going to do the kid any good.
As she slipped through the double doors, the next unfortunate thought occurred to her, at the same time her eye landed on the huddle of terrified cooks and dishwashers in the corner to her right. The lanky blue guy with the hat who’d vanished around the corner in this direction. He wasn’t out there getting his ass kicked by the pride of the Jedi Order, he’d gone sneaking into the kitchen. The escape route.
The eyes of the staff were fixed on a door at the far end of the room. Walk-in freezer, Chester guessed. It was right by a pile of crates that probably denoted the back door.
She slid carefully along toward the stove, setting her feet carefully to keep her steps silent. “Hey,” she said, not looking at them in favor of scoping out the collection of pots and pans. “Can you show me to the back door? Promise things’ll cool down once I’m gone, yeah?”
One of them gulped and pointed a finger at the pile of crates. There was a narrow passage through them that meant passing right by the walk-in.
“Cheers,” said Chester, and selected a nice heavy dirty pan from the pile by the sink, lifting carefully straight up so it didn’t make noise. It was good and solid, like one of her mother’s prized cast iron.
Then she firmed her step, letting her boots clack on the tile as she headed with purpose for the back door, frying pan in hand and a little back for the extra momentum it might give. She was three paces from the walk-in. Two. One.
The door began to open. Chester grinned like a wolf and brought the pan up and was swinging by the time the bastard with the hat got his head and gun around the edge of the nearest door to her.
“Hold it right there, Commander—” Pan connected with bounty hunter, and bounty hunter connected with walk-in door, like a slapstick Newton’s cradle. He bounced a little, staggered, held onto the gun.
Ah. So that was how it was going to be. Chester let the momentum of her first swing carry it around to the other side, took a passing step on the diagonal forward, so she could deliver the second blow with the flat of the pan right into the bounty hunter’s lack of a nose. The hat went flying, and the force of the blow tipped him right over and onto the tiled floor, which in the way of all restaurants everywhere was slimed with unknowable and concerning substances. He lay there and didn’t move, grease marks up and down his face.
Chester put the pan down by the sink with a nod to the terrified kitchen staff, picked up his hat from the crate and eyed it critically. Not too dirty. She popped it onto her own head, then dragged him out of the restaurant by his armpits and into the alley.
Outside, secure in their certainty they’d left her out of trouble, Anakin and Ahsoka were finishing off the rest of their attackers, which they’d evidently lured out of the bar and to the rendezvous. Chester cleared her throat, and both turned to stare at her.
“Kitchen turned out a little more exciting than anticipated,” she said, dropping the bounty hunter at their feet like a cat delivering a dead mouse.
Anakin stared down at him, then at her, then back down. “That’s Cad Bane,” he said, accusingly. “What did you do to him? Why are you wearing his hat .”
“Frying pan,” said Chester, very dry. “Is he a friend of yours?”
Anakin powered off his weapon and stuck it in his belt, then folded his arms and glared. “Definitely not.”
“I see,” said Chester, and looked down; Cad Bane had started to come around. His species had to have pretty hard skulls. “One moment. I think I need to make a point.”
She knelt in front of him, tugged his hat off her head and examined it. “Cad Bane, is it?” The bleary red eyes focused on her. She gave him a pleasant smile. “I get the feeling you like this hat. It’s a nice hat. And I understand you’re simply doing a job, no hard feelings.”
He was awake enough to frown now.
“If you ever put civilians in danger to capture me again,” she said, still pleasant, “I will burn this hat in front of you.”
She popped it onto his head, patted it into place with a condescending hand. “Glad we’re on the same page.”
His mouth twisted. “You’re going to regret that.”
“Are you going to scuttle off nicely, or do I have to hit you in the head again?” she asked. “Tonight’s not your night, buddy. Better luck next time.”
Not breaking eye contact, he hauled himself to his feet. He was still wobbling a bit, and looked pretty sick. “No one can get lucky forever, Commander Chester.” He aimed a sneer at Ahsoka and Anakin. “Even Jedi.”
“I’m not a Jedi,” said Chester softly, but the vicious note in her voice stopped him where he was. “You’d better remember that, Mr. Bane.”
His eyes narrowed. “Oh, I will, little lady. I will.”
Chester rose to her feet, and flicked a hand at him. “Then go on. Shoo.”
He looked at her, at the Jedi behind her, clearly making up his mind, then turned away and vanished into the swirls of Coruscant’s pollution. There was a moment of what passed for silence in the middle of a city, broken suddenly by Anakin’s slow, sarcastic applause.
“Brilliant, Commander,” he said. “Now you’ve gone and made it personal with Cad Bane. Do you think you could stop making enemies for one hour? I’ll even settle for ten minutes, at this point.”
Chester was watching the unsettled mists at the end of the alley, adrenaline ebbing from her veins. She suddenly felt very, very tired, and more than a little stupid. She could still see the faces of the staff in the kitchen. It probably hadn’t been the first time someone had come and threatened them with a gun at their unpleasant low-paying job, which they probably only worked because the other choice was starving, but that hadn’t meant they hadn’t been scared, and being the cause of it didn’t sit well with her. Especially when she’d ventured down here because of a stupid pissing contest with someone who was basically the next thing to a kid.
She let her shoulders slump. “Let’s just go home.”