thatforkedroad
and the universe said i love you
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The best fics are the ones that recognize that although Luke Skywalker may APPEAR on the outside to be a normal friendly twink who happens to have cool powers, especially when contrasted with such ship partners as Boba or Din or even Han, he is arguably the scariest person alive in the galaxy around the prequel era. AND, crucially, he is also a fundamentally weird guy. This man was homeschooled on a rural farm his entire life and then apprenticed to a swamp gremlin who showed him how to tap into the cosmic power of the universe. He blew up the death star age 19, killing approx 2 million-ish Imperials. He is a vortex of Force power that can communicate with the ghosts of dead Jedi. He’s staring into the distance and mumbling to himself and doing Yoda aphorisms and casually pulling out the “yeah I could crush that guy into a paste with my mind (:” and nobody around him knows what to do with that. I think he is a character who has very little frame of reference for how a Jedi or a person in general is supposed to act and there is some thing about him that is by necessity really fucking weird and a little scary but he’s so nice that it can throw you off the scent a little bit. Thanks for coming to my TED talk
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padme body horror is supreme bc when you think about it, her very existence requires constant agony. in real life that red invasion gown took several weeks to build. and the costumes were so uncomfortable that kiera knightly, who was sabe for like 2 seconds, cried every night while filming. the main way natalie portman describes her prequels costumes is “painful” . and sure “beautiful” usually follows but dude. imagine being 14 and in constant pain bc your job requires you be pretty as possible while defending your planet from fucking invasion. i can’t imagine how estranged i’d feel from my own body and sense of self in that moment. you can take that (already extreme) rigor over the body to all kinds of violent ends. possession. some sort of creature. self-mutilation. fic writes itself tbh!
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Does the way Padme and Shmi are discussed in fandom ever make you . . . uncomfortable? I feel like Padme gets bashed a lot (with positive media about her being dismissed because it makes her “too perfect”), while Shmi gets this weird treatment of held up as this paragon of virtue and morality in way that seems to deliberately ignored just how much her life fucking sucked and refuse to engage with the slavery issue at all. I think the canon writing for them can and should be criticized, but some of the fandom criticisms get to be just as problematic, IMHO. With Padme in particular, I get the sense a lot of the criticism doesn’t even stem from actual analysis of her character, but fans who are upset that it’s Anakin who she loves. I get the feeling that if her character remained precisely the same, but it were a different dude who she married, she wouldn’t get nearly as much criticism from certain segments of the fandom. Am I wrong on this one? What are your thoughts?
no i would agree! i do think it is weird. i think it's a combination of factors, primarily that these are female characters and people are always weirder about female characters for systemic reasons, and then, yeah, the inherent arms race of the Did Darth Vader Do Something Problematic Discourse. buckle in. this..... long.
luke and anakin are the main characters of the series, and by virtue of being the ones to carry the narrative, a lot of how you read star wars is dependent on how you read their stories, and how you read their interactions with each other. they carry a lot of the themes of the saga - it's not only their story, but they are the biggest players in it, and their stories are designed to reflect each others', to be mirrors, to tell the story of how evil can corrupt good, but evil is not absolute, and love is where it loses. for all that i've written literally hundreds of thousands of words about The Meaning Of Star Wars, it's not altogether that complicated a premise. i watch these movies the way i do because this is the story i see in it. because i see that kind of a story, that reflects on how i see everyone else in star wars.
if star wars is about how evil is inherently weak because unconditional love is always stronger, then the part of ANH where han chooses the rebellion over his life as a smuggler becomes about that. the part where leia says, "someone who loves you," becomes about that. when leia strangles jabba, it is about that. when leia comforts luke over the loss of obi-wan kenobi, the fact that luke even grieves a man he barely knew, it becomes about that very thing. the cheers and frantic hugging and bright, happy joy of the rebellion after luke destroys the death star becomes about that; the rebellion is cast as a large, loving group, united in their desire for something better, filled with people who love each other and are excited to succeed because they do. the climax of the series becomes about this very thing.
if the OT is about unconditional love and its ultimate, unstoppable power to level the playing field and destroy the root of all evil, the PT is about what can happen to that love in the face of tragedy people are ultimately helpless to stop. anakin is not capable of saving his mother. he wasn't capable as a child, and although he had the power as a jedi, through systemic forces and death itself, he never did. anakin is not capable of ending slavery as a child, and neither is he as a singular jedi knight. the things and causes that matter to him only eat him alive, because he can never act on them; the war he fights in is not a violent struggle for justice that can satiate this, but a sham war, state violence for meaningless purpose. he's never capable of saving padme, and even outsources his only idea to do so to someone who will accept, "will you do what you're told?" as payment. it's easy for me to see - compared to the rebellion's open joy, luke's gaggle of friends who he saves again and again, who save him again and again, who hold each other in their joy and comfort each other in their sadness, who openly love each other to the degree where han abandons a probably fairly well-paying life as a smuggler to become a terrorist hunted by the empire, an act which causes him no small amount of suffering but we never see him once genuinely regret it - why anakin's story ends differently from luke's, because, like, that's just what i see in the story.
now my arrival to the point; if you're seeing that story, shmi's life becomes a horrible tragedy. she's a woman left in enormous, incredibly pointless suffering. her name fades out of history, and the only person who remembers her is the proverbial monster at the end of this book. to me, when tiny anakin runs back to shmi, mourning leaving her, i see the only display in that entire film we have that anyone cares that shmi skywalker is enslaved. everyone else quietly moves on. qui-gon says they're not there to free slaves. her words, "be brave, and don't look back," become horrifyingly tragic in such a context, because she's losing the only person who is showing her real compassion, because unfortunately that only person is her nine year old son, whose safety she wants to to ensure by sending him with qui-gon.
if you're seeing a story about how anakin is bad at accepting change and bad at letting go, how his attachments are possessive by some inherent quality, then shmi's wisdom - "be brave, and don't look back" - would make her a paragon of virtue in such a story, and her being enslaved would be this weird piece of set dressing, not easily reconciled with the rest of the plot. they're not there to free slaves. this is why people who do see this story in star wars frequently dismiss That Whole Slavery Business as being pointless; it's either a metaphor for childhood being restrictive, or anakin's childhood was actually supposed to be totally fine, or everyone's just making a big deal out of it because people love woobifying villains. this is a fine thing to see in the story, i guess, although it's probably obvious i personally don't buy it. this interpretation is not without its side effects, however, and i think this idea does an enormous disservice to shmi, whose frankly intense onscreen suffering (she is tortured to death, holy shit) probably should be allowed to matter more than being the highlighter over anakin's possessive attachment issues. her suffering becomes even more meaningless, because the only person who, onscreen, extends shmi skywalker any kind of compassion - who cares, demonstrably, if she's hurting - is explicitly condemned for doing so.
this isn't to say anakin's response to her death is morally correct, because it obviously is not! and maybe this would be a story about possessive attachment if shmi's death was natural and unavoidable and anakin still responded with explosive violence, but simply put, it isn't, and that changes the narrative enough for me to discount that as being true. if you have deduced anakin's problem is attachment, rather than his inability to act on those attachments in any meaningful way, you've created a world where no one was supposed to care that shmi was enslaved. anakin was supposed to be able to leave her behind without feeling guilt, and he was supposed to be able to ignore his visions of her suffering. dreams pass in time. this is a world where it's not just okay for the suffering of the people you love to not matter to you, that is, actually, the only virtuous way to live your life. with regards to shmi, this turns her personal agony into a footnote, the warning that anakin got of the darkness growing within him before it completely took him over, instead of shmi's personal agony mattering because it's inherently unjust to do to someone what she was forced to go through. shmi doesn't matter because she was an innocent person in pain; she matters because she was a warning anakin ignored.
that's why shmi as a paragon of virtue can never be discussed with shmi as one of the most tragic characters in star wars; they can't really coexist, can they? because it would be kind of uncomfortable to go yes, this woman was enslaved, her labor was coerced from her via an explosive implanted in her body, she lost her only family and continued to be enslaved for years, until one good thing maybe happened to her, which was brutally cut short by being tortured to death, and the last she saw of her son was dying in his arms, but no, dreams pass in time. no one should have particularly cared that this was happening to her, and in fact, onscreen, the only person who does is anakin, and even then he's tormented by the fact that he cares. he is explicitly not supposed to. dreams pass in time. the two conceptions of shmi cannot coexist, or the argument becomes kind of cruel. you essentially have to lessen the degree to which she suffered. which is fine, i guess. you do you, or whatever.
to contrast, luke sees his father, who is demonstrably much worse on a moral level than shmi, who luke would have legitimately had every right to abandon, and goes to free him from a form of slavery anyway. and he is completely and entirely vindicated for this in every conceivable way. do we all see where i'm going with this? i think i'm belaboring the point by now. i can move on.
padme makes, essentially, a very similar choice to the one luke makes; the narrative itself has shown you previously that in the universe of star wars, showing unflinching love in the face of evil can work. but her decision is cast as rash and naive because she fails, which is a really weird way to blame padme for being strangled. because she failed, it's her fault, but because luke succeeded, he's the hero. padme dies because she goes into labor - there's no sign in the film prior that she was anywhere close - which was induced by being strangled into unconsciousness, and fans for years have been obsessed with how "weak" this makes her. these arguments are honestly just bold misogyny. i used to pay lip service to the idea but i've since come around; i think it's fucked up, plainly, to act like padme was at fault for something anakin did to her, and it is downright batshit insane to act like it would be impossible for a pregnant woman in surprise labor who is unknowingly giving birth to twins who has just been strangled so severely she passed out from oxygen deprivation to die because of that. padme is not even allowed to die directly because of anakin's actions without people going, "but padme was so toxic, she was obsessed with him, they're both examples of possessive attachment!"
but it continues! people go from that point, and work their way backwards - it was weak, of padme, to love anakin at all. luke gets a pass because he's male, and successful. obi-wan gets a pass for loving anakin, because he's male, and sad about it later. ahsoka gets a pass, because she's a female character but a Strong Female Character - she's a fighter, she's badass, so it can't be her fault that she made the mistake of caring about anakin skywalker. but padme. we have to come up with endless, endless theories as to how padme could possibly come by the same affliction everyone else in the prequels does; she should have been written to be older, she must have been just as possessive, toxic, and fucked up, there's no possible way that this woman could have had feelings like everyone else did. it's just implausible. it begs explanation. when will padme answer for her mistakes, which were the same mistakes everyone else made? luke's only explanation for returning to save vader's immortal soul is literally, "i have a feeling," but it's instead padme who is the subject of endless, endless interrogation. part of this is because george lucas doesn't spend a lot of time developing padme's interiority - her family, her life, these are left to interpretation, and suffice to say, you can't leave a female character with blank spots without people being intensely weird about it.
the above isn't particularly related to what someone gets out of watching the saga, the way interpretations of shmi are, in my view, inherently reliant on someone's point of view; a lot of the issues that surround padme are classic misogyny-reflected-in-fandom. they are intensified, definitely, by her relation to the Did Darth Vader Do Something Problematic Discourse, purely because in the narrative she chooses a relationship with anakin, whereas most other characters in the prequels just have anakin foisted on them. that act of it being padme's choice stokes a lot of bad will for the character from the crowd of people who dislike anakin intensely. if you fundamentally don't want to engage with the idea that the prequels as a story of good turning into evil, then the decisions everyone makes in that story will, yes, look crazy to you, and because of the above, padme gets the brunt of that criticism where there's more effort to understand characters that are more palatable. if you believe anakin just was evil, that he was always predisposed to it, and that his redemption in the sixth episode doesn't qualify as a redemption, then, yes, padme's choices look unhinged, and it's easy to put the onus of that on her because she's the easiest target. it's simple to project on a blank canvas.
it goes without saying that this particular set of criticisms is kind of bullshit, really. it's not someone watching the movies and enjoying them for what they are, or even disliking them on the basis of what they are, as much as it is people huffing the fumes of the point in order to make polarizing posts on the internet for a quick hit of dopamine when the numbers tick up. even the people who i disagree with about the saga's general themes broadly accept the idea that star wars is about how evil can't be absolute as long as love persists, because they actually do like the movies, they just happen to like them in a different way, which is fine. this new kind of criticism is a little more disingenuous. like i said at the start, anakin and luke are the main characters, through which we perceive the world of star wars and how its themes are fed to us, the nerds. if your answer to one of the main characters of the series and its actual climax is, "no," then, i'm sorry, the actual criticism you have of star wars is that you fundamentally do not like it, and, "i don't like this," is not a very hard thought to have, and you probably shouldn't pass it off as critical thinking. it's just not padme's fault as a character that you, the nerd, are bad at watching movies, and weirdly proud of it, and no one is really obligated to take you seriously because you're oddly determined to do nothing, add nothing, and say nothing. it's such a bullshit set of criticisms there's not really anything else i can say than, "i guess?" which is what this paragraph is trying so hard to get at.
anyway! no, i don't think you're wrong, i actually agree, and these are my thoughts! hope you enjoyed this brick of a post hahaha
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One of THE most underrated moments in all of Star Wars comics: THAT TIME ANAKIN WAS WORKING ON REPAIRING HIS SUIT WITH ONLY THE FORCE WHILE HE WAS SUBMERGED IN A FOGGY BACTA TANK.
This doesn’t even seem like a struggle for him, he just casually does it and, sure, it’s hilarious when Anakin Literal Force Baby Skywalker just casually picks up new talents and is like, “What? Like it’s hard?” about it, consider:
A NOT UNCOMMON SIGHT IN THE JEDI TEMPLE:
Anakin stuffing his face with a space taco while in line at the Temple refectory, casually spilling it down the front of his tabard because he’s too hungry to eat properly, because MILITARY RATIONS SUCK AND HE NEEDED REAL FOOD OH SWEET FORCE THANK GOD IT’S TACO TUESDAY IN THE JEDI TEMPLE, also meanwhile Artoo screaming wildly behind him while Anakin floats him along in the Force, flying wrenches and pliers and soldering iron poking and prodding into Artoo’s open processing core, sparks flying every which way, not a single wire out of place of where it should be while Anakin meanwhile is grabbing five more tacos and trying to see if he can fit two of them in his mouth at the same time.
Unfortunately, Anakin is the only one who can understand Artoo’s screaming at least look at me while you’re operating on me, you karking bastard!!! but Anakin’s too busy squirting the bottle of hot sauce directly into his mouth in between maybe-kinda-sorta chewing his food to do anything more than poke another set of pliers right up into Artoo’s sensitive places.
Half of the Jedi are staring at him like “what the actual fuck, Anakin”, the other half are like, “yeah, he does that, pass the pepper flakes, I’m starving” and eat their space tacos with slightly more dignity.
Obi-Wan is in the corner, one hand scrubbed over his face, like, “I have been pretending not to see this for ten years, I’m not going to suddenly be able to see things now.”
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the fact that “the vibes here are rancid” is a power that the jedi actually have is insane to me
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So you got me playing Jedi Survivor, and the recap at the beginning reminded me about something from the first game.
You got any thoughts about Cal, one of the last Jedi in the galaxy, being knighted under an inquisitor's blade?
oh my GOD dude i've never even THOUGHT about that. ok I need a second to go insane about this actually. the new order being built on the ashes of the old. a jedi knight being created with a blade meant for killing him (that HAS killed countless knights like him). Cere knighting her new padawan with the corrupted blade of her former padawan. the jedi making do with the impure and corrupted bc they have to survive. sitting on the floor about this
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“[Anakin] sat meditating in the cold night air, a backpack strapped to his shoulders, staring at the three moons without blinking so that they became a blur and quieted his mind. His breathing had slowed; his pulse rate had dropped dramatically. In that state—and he reached it rarely these days—things spoke to him, and he didn’t always want to hear them. There were layers in his awareness. […] In the depths, though, there was Tatooine. It wasn’t just memories. It was the accumulated misery, greed, and desperation of ages, generations of beings in poverty and servitude, and his small experience of that was barely visible in the mass. It was the voice that got to him. A wordless voice whispered, asking why he did as he was told and never asked the obvious questions, or demanded answers. Why didn’t you make them come back for her? Why didn’t you see she was throwing you to safety, sacrificing herself and sinking back into this terrible ocean so that you could have a chance at life? Why didn’t you come back sooner, change the course of events, and rescue her before it was too late?”
— Karen Traviss. The Clone Wars
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Got emotional thinking about jedi lineages.
Like. Maybe Ahsoka ties her obis in double knots because that’s how Anakin taught her. He told her it helped them stay on better.
But Anakin does it because that’s how Obi-Wan helped him, the first time he wore the robes that seemed impossibly heavy, with the weight of his new life.
But Obi-Wan only tied it like that because he had seen Qui-Gon do the same, and had desperately wanted to be perfect, so copied his master.
But Qui-Gon only did it out of habit- of all the rules of decorum that Dooku taught him that he ignored, the obi knot had stuck.
But Dooku had been trained by the greatest master of them all, so assumed however Yoda tied his robes was the most correct.
But maybe that is all because, centuries ago, a master whose name the rest of them will never know, taught his tiny padawan to double knot his obis, because they just never fit right.
And Ahsoka will never know that she got this from a jedi who lived in a totally different world from her, who she never knew and would never know her, but the legacies are there, no matter how small. And I bet every lineage has a handful of them.
I just… the jedi leave behind their blood ancestors, but they still have things running in their families.
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OMFG I LOVE THE MINECRAFT QUOTE AS YOUR USERNAME IT GETS ME CRYING EVERYTIME AS WELL AS THAT ONE UNDERTALE QUOTE
SAME the entire mc end scroll did NOT have to go as hard as it did wtf
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really important news. so w the debug menu u can spawn vader in the saloon which is fun, bc literally nobody will react bc its not a hostile environment. who give a shit if cal is dying im thirsty
cal will literally just stand there. his lightsaber turns on but he doesnt fight cause there isn't supposed to be enemies in here
he can even join the crew bc he gets confused if you manage to get him on the mantis <3 and doesnt fight you <3 he just sorta stands there like an asthmatic emo lemon <3
and the best thing of all: he's too tall to leave certain doorways and gets stuck all the time. vader's one greatest enemy isn't the jedi it's low ceilings
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ok my HOTTEST take on star wars is that if you infantilize luke/neglect to think of luke with depth & character flaws, we probably disagree on most things.
i find luke to be a Rorschach test of a character and i am begging people to look beyond either his naivete in ANH or his calmer demeanor in ROTJ and ask themselves like...what is lying beneath?
i think the crazy thing about luke is that even though he is a kind character, mark hamill so clearly plays him with rage just simmering under the surface for most of the OT and people are just like "la di da he's whiny!!1!" into "he's the most badass alpha male jedi who ever lived" no nuance no questions no nothing. bro did u miss the insane trauma? did u miss the insane parental issues? the complexity of forgiveness?
and i find this characterization always just leaves luke with zero agency or thought behind his actions when. clearly bro is thinking Constantly, All The Time about the crazy shit the narrative is putting him through. or trying desperately not to think about it. either way give him the fucking respect he deserves! and therapy! holy shit!
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Hear me out. Eldritch Luke Skywalker. I know this isn't a new thing, but there ISN'T ENOUGH of it. And I'm not talking about 'scary tentacle monster' eldrich (although I love it too and I think its super cool), I'm talking more of a 'I can tear through your mind like paper and blow up planets with minimal effort but I won't because I'm nice and have moral values' eldritch.
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I love the idea of jedi babies with psychometry just.... latching onto random things that have good memories attached and carrying it around like a teddy bear. Like baby Quin found a spatula with a memory of a kid and their parent lovingly making cookies in it and he slept with a dollar store spatula for the next 3 years. Cal found some silverware that a happy group of friends used for all of their special occasions, so his pockets end up full of comfort spoons. and forks. and butter knives.
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Obviously at one point in time all their faces were being plastered across the galaxy for assorted bounties, but I like to think that as time goes on post-RotJ, Leia goes and becomes the extremely recognizable President of the New Republic, Luke becomes the still fairly-recognizable Grand Master of the Jedi Order (even if it’s mostly because of the robes/lightsaber), and Han becomes the galactic equivalent of Tony Hawk, who is still extremely famous but absolutely no one realizes it because his Just Some Guy energy is off the charts.
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anakins questionable flying is an ongoing gag and all but honestly just imagine it. he, aged 9, won his freedom that way. everything good that happened in his life proceeding was because he happened to be a good enough flyer that he beat out actual grown professionals with biological advantage. hes reasonably confident, in fact, its probably just about the only skillset hes still confident in after going to monk school and skipping every grade due to one very persuasive guy dubbing him "universe's very special little boy". like im not pointing fingers here but maybe hed be normal if they sent him to making macaroni art class at some point before taking up the "heres how to stab people and throw things with your mind" class. but anyway, back to flying, coruscant presumably has some rules regarding that, even for jedi. i dont give a shit if its not canon, you cant take space flyer's licence from me. i need the mental image of anakin and obi-wan experiencing the emotional whiplash of being in a car with your anxious dad bc yes anakin reasonably thinks hes hot shit behind the wheel but hes also notoriously a death race survivor & his driving style is best summarised as "get from point a to point b as fast as possible. disregard what happens to you. disregard what happens to others. there is only you and point b and the possibility of exploding. make your mother proud" which now that i think about it is also his whole life philosophy. so i think he sits behind the wheel with full confidence & his many neuroses loaded and ready and obi-wan also sits in the passenger seat with full confidence because while hes not exactly the leading expert in anakin lore due to his passion for shoving his head in the sand and pretending he Does Not See, he probably remembers that there was a podrace victory involved and expects this to be very simple. it is, clearly, canonically, not simple. but heroically obi-wan still lets him be the pilot every time for the rest of their time together because 1) hes chronically a passenger princess 2) his love language is putting anakin into situations he can then nag him about and 3) his own self preservation is clearly slowly whittling away. on the other hand, anakin's love language is initially going "im so sorry are you okay" the first time obi-wan starts screaming and then as he gets more attached to him progressing to hitting the sgas (space gas) pedal even harder out of pure malice the moment he as much as hears a whimper
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the tearing at her soul
Summary: how Barriss Offee survives order 66
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It doesn’t take long for the crying and yelping to blend into the background, as if they were as much a part of the prison’s structure as the metallic grey walls or the forcefield reinforced doors. There’s always something happening here, always someone remembering their old life or someone tempting the hand of an overzealous guard. Everyone — prisoners and guards alike — just gets used to the noise and keeps their head down.
So when Barriss Offee doubles over in pain with a phantom scream locked in her throat, the guards outside don't even react.
Barriss clutches — scrapes at — her heart as if that might ease the tearing at her soul. At first, she thinks she's dying. She must be. Someone has poisoned her food or pumped the air full of toxins or plunged a secret saber through her chest because there is no other possible explanation, not for the life-rending void bursting through every part of her. She is being autopsied and hollowed out from the inside out and all she can do is cry.
The prey-animal blood haze passes and Barriss realises she's not dying; the galaxy is. It is being burned to ash and she is feeling every second of its suffering and nobody but her even seems to realise. The pain is not hers but it is so very close and it is bigger than anything Barriss has ever known. She wants to warn the men outside that something is happening, something is coming, but her throat refuses to cooperate.
After minutes or hours or days, the pain recedes. It dribbles away, like a tsunami returning to its ocean, and in its wake there is an emptiness Barriss cannot name. She does not understand what is lost, not yet, but she knows that something in the galaxy’s structure has been shattered.
—
She was told, at the start, that this place was temporary. That’s why there’s so little in the cell, why she is kept in complete isolation. They were going to move her somewhere more secure soon, once they worked out the security plans. A few years ago, she would have spent mere days here. But the war gets in the way of everything — even transfers of dangerous terrorists — and so whatever they planned, it never happens.
In a way, they were right; she does eventually find herself in a new prison, but she stays in the exact same cell. She’s no longer in Republic prison on Coruscant; she’s in an Imperial one. The changes are gradual; at first it’s the name, next it’s the insignias branded on the walls outside her cell. She notices less and less of the guards are painted maroon, replaced with varying soldiers who have numbers, not nicknames.
It’s one of the new guards she works up the courage to finally ask what happened, what this new Empire is that she hears over the loudspeakers. He doesn’t beat or electrocute her like she expected; he seems more confused by the question than anything. He explains it as if he were explaining a sunset to someone who’d never seen one, like it’s something that everyone should know, something natural.
Distantly, Barriss thinks he must not know who she is — who she was. He explains in the bluntest, blandest terms and does not make a single comment when he gives a name to the night of her greatest pain.
The Purge, he calls it. A dark and glorious birthday for the fledgeling Empire. With their strongest enemies dead, the Jedi betrayed the Republic and tried to assassinate the Chancellor — now Emperor. He lived and ordered the loyal Grand Clone Army to enact justice on its so-called peacekeepers. The Jedi are gone and they said the war’s over, but there are still Separatists. There are still campaigns in half the galaxy, but they don’t have rations or power cuts anymore. Aside from that nothing has changed under the Empire, he tells her, before he remembers himself and tells her to quiet down and step away from the cell door.
Barriss barely hears the command over the thunder of blood in her ears. Nothing has changed. Everything has changed and she had no idea. She didn't agree with what they had become in the war, didn’t agree with the idea of Jedi generals and commanding warriors, but this…
She knows in her hollowed-out heart that this is not true. The Jedi were made into soldiers, not power-hungry assassins. They could not have fallen this far, not yet. No Jedi would… They were only trying to free themselves from the thing that was eating them, corrupting them like a bled-out kyber. Could nobody see that?
Barriss shook her head. She knew the Jedi would fall to the Republic one day, she just… didn’t expect it to happen like this. She expected years of solid decay, like the rotting of a living corpse, until the Order could no longer recognise itself. She thought its death would happen over years, maybe even decades. Yet all it took was one night and a knife in the back.
And now everything she fought to save is gone.
Part of her hisses how dare you mourn, after everything you did to them. How dare you mourn, after everything you did to her.
She wishes she could listen, but her grief pushes far heavier than her guilt. Instead, she tugs at the torn bonds in her soul, reaches through the empty expanse where ten thousand lives once sung bright, and calls. She calls and calls and screams and howls and calls.
Nothing calls back.
Soon enough, she begins to mourn herself. Every time she hears a too-heavy footstep, her heart spikes in panic. They’re coming for her too. The Republic used the Jedi for their power and the Empire killed them for it. Barriss might not be a Jedi now, but she was raised as one. She has that power. She is a threat. She is a loose thread and she must be cut.
They’re coming for her too. It’s only a matter of time.
—
She thinks she is less a person and more a thing by now. Hollowed out by isolation and preparation and an overwhelming knowledge of things she should never have had to understand.
At first she is resigned. She sits and she waits and she watches the door, flinching every time a new food tray clatters in. All she registers is the fear of footsteps and the electric-fast beat of her heart. There is no room in this small, dark cell for anything but panic.
She continues in this state, somewhere between life and death. She eats only when her stomach calls louder than her terror, moves only
It’s soon. It has to be soon.
She barely sleeps, but she dreams one night. It’s the first in months that doesn’t jolt her awake, heaving in a cold sweat. She dreams of the gardens, untouched by death and war, a calm in the middle of the chaotic city. She dreams of the Temple’s quiet, of her master’s instruction, of an orange-skinned and pointy-toothed grin. She dreams.
She wakes up feeling — feeling, how novel! — a half-washed heartache. She knows they are dead. She knows she will never enter that Temple again, never hear another lesson or another sweet, honey-like laugh. She is going to die like them, this much she knows. But that morning she decides she will face death as her people did, with dignity and in strength. She runs through stances holding nothing. She meditates and ignores the Force’s black silence. It does not make her feel any less a ghost, but it ties her down. She memorises the guards’ shift changes and their footsteps, one-two-heavy down the hall.
She does not hope. She does not expect anything to come of her memorisation, but there is nothing else to do but listen.
—
In the end, all that memorisation is for nothing.
She blinks against the hallway light when they finally open her cell, wincing at the change in environment. A prim officer holding a datapad comes into focus, followed by a small squad of troopers.
Barriss stills. She thinks this is it. They’ve come for me.
But the troopers keep their guns across their chests. The officer clears his throat and reads a command; you’re being transferred, he tells her. She blinks dumbly.
The officer’s mouth flattens in a mix of disappointment and boredom. She half-thinks he’ll repeat it — slower, like her brain has turned into the sludge they feed her. But he wants to get the job done; he silently gestures and two troopers move forward to cuff her routinely. They guide her out the cell and into the hall that she hasn’t seen in full in four years.
The officer leaves the group as they turn down the hall, and she realises there are only four guards surrounding her. All they have are guns and flimsy white armour, shinier than the clones’ armour ever was. Have the Jedi been dead so long that the Empire has forgotten their danger? Or is it only that Barriss has been buried too deep for them to remember her or what she was?
She risks asking them where they’re taking her and she’s met with unsure silence. They’re just grunts, she supposes; the new Empire does not need its cogs to understand the machine.
She considers waiting for a shipyard or a secondary location, but she has waited years for this opportunity; she will not waste it looking for a better one. The Republic forced her to be a warrior and the Empire forced her to be something craftier. She waits only for the bell that calls a shift change. THe flimsy guards fall like cards under the Force and she is gone before any alarms so much as think of blaring.
She’s sure they notice something soon enough, but she's fled through the city before and this time there are no vengeant Jedi masters to find her. She steals a cloak from one stall and a headscarf from another, and blends right into the busy Coruscanti night.
It takes little more than a nudge of his mind to convince the harbour master that she's meant allowed in, and more importantly allowed onto this cargo transport. She’ll switch ships at the next spaceport, stay running until her legs can’t take her any further.
In the later hours of travel, as the cargo around her shudders through hyperspace, her mind wanders to the negligence of her escape. Ahsoka has — or had. Ahsoka must have rejoined the Order after Barriss confessed and Ahsoka was exonerated, she and her master were probably executed too. But Ahsoka has-or-had friends in the Senate; she knows-or-knew all about bureaucracy and the drawn-out processes of politics, even if she claimed not to understand it when she tried to explain them to Barriss. Ahsoka would have known a thing or two about how an organisation could forget a prisoner like this. If she were here, sitting next to Barriss on this cargo carrier headed to who-knows-where, she would be theorising rapidly, her hands and eyes flitting about like living static.
Barriss’ smile at the thought dies as fast as it appeared. It doesn’t matter that she’s free; she’s never going to see Ahsoka’s smirk or wild hands or hear her laugh again. She and her master were fast and bold Jedi, but they were closer to their soldiers than most. They never would have seen it coming.
Barriss had tried to tell Ahsoka that she was too trusting.
But she doesn’t want to admonish her friend or try to blame her or even roll her eyes at her. Barriss misses her friend. Misses her more than she thought her heart capable of, and alll she wants to do now is apologise. Or frame her better, so Ahsoka could have survived in Barriss’ place instead of being shot in the head by her own troops. Ahsoka deserved better.
But instead, it's Barriss who is sat in the shadow of a cargo crate headed to who-knows-where. A new plan forms alongside her directive to run. She must not take great risks and she must hide — but that does not mean she must be useless. She will help weaken the Empire, bit by bit, bolt by bolt, until it is weak enough to stab in the back.
She no longer wonders why the Force gave the burden of survival to a traitor like her. The Jedi taught against revenge, taught of peace and forgiveness, yet it is too late to save these teachings. It is far too late to save them.
But Barriss is certain, more than she has ever been of anything, it is not too late to avenge them.
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You ever think about Obi-Wan on Naboo after the duel having to be the one who takes care of everything. He's just lost his father figure and killed the first sith in a millennia and he has to be the one carry Qui-gon's body away and arrange for the funeral and make sure Anakin has a room and is eating and call the council and explain what's going on. Because sure Padme and Panaka are there but they don't know about jedi customs and they arrange for Anakin's room and board but they're busy so they can't be the ones to sit him down and gently explain what happened and promise him that everything is going to be all right and they don't even really know what that sith was let alone what he meant. do you ever think about the sheer amount of responsibility that was dropped on his shoulders the moment Qui-gon died.
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