Chapter Text
The Force-carried distress was so familiar that Jedi Padawan Quinlan Vos spent a few seconds wrestling with his frustration and anger at the sleemos who enjoyed raping children before he stiffened.
He knew that aura.
Quinlan bit his tongue before he said anything aloud in the spaceport alley. He was playing street rat and listening for gossip (ostensibly as a training exercise, but Master Tholme would never waste an opportunity to accomplish multiple goals with one task). Twelve was young enough that even teen gangs dismissed him as a child, yet big enough that he could use adult weaponry in a pinch, and the filth and grime he’d picked up from the spaceport almost muffled his psychometry from reading the durasteel and concrete.
He’d already been mulling on how to help the victim, but he decided to take a few more risks. Force-sensitives were too popular with murderers (for the challenge) and slavers (for the prestige or even breeding).
When had he last seen Depa? She’d been elated that Master Windu had accepted her as his padawan, fulfilling her hopes. Was that before or after Master Tholme taken him from the creche? He’d been pulled out at ten, and Depa wasn’t even a year older than he was, so it couldn’t have been too long before that, at earliest. It had been at least a year, though. Maybe two. How long had she been missing?
Quinlan traced the sensations to a compound, laced with thick walls and barbed wire and armed guards he could sense but not see. If he were just a few years older, the drug den basement would’ve given him an entrance, since that looked to be how the compound supported itself.
This also wasn’t the sort of place where a person could pull a solitary rescue without slaughtering the enemy. Master Windu could manage that sort of kill rate, but not Quinlan. (Yet? Did he want to learn to do that? Did he have a choice?)
He reached with the Force to reassure Depa that she’d been found, that help was coming.
Her aura recoiled, shrinking in on itself. He yanked himself back from her ideation before she could tell he’d sensed it. It would take hours to get help from Master Tholme. Thanks to his attempt to soothe her, she’d seek to take her life before then. He’d have to try on his own.
Quinlan carefully cast out his senses, making sure to avoid her aura but daring to hope that maybe someone else was searching for her nearby.
There. Not Master Windu, but Jedi Knight Tahl. Slaughter wasn’t her specialty, either, but she was known to be good with her lightsaber.
His cover as an urchin should hold regardless how Master Tahl was presenting herself, he thought, and she wasn’t too far. He headed that way, daring to hope they’d succeed before Depa killed herself to escape without presumably shaming her master.
Shaming? Quinlan explored the thought and realized why the prospect of rescue had sent her into suicidal ideation. Oh kriff.
Master Tahl was in a bar. Quinlan considered slipping in through the back, but that would probably draw too much attention. He instead whined at the front about having a message for the lady with the caff-colored skin, figuring that would stay the same no matter her mission, even if she was hiding the subtle signals that she was a Near-Human, not full.
After what felt like forever but hadn’t been long at all, she came out. Lenses hid the gold stripes in her green eyes, and her long dark hair was braided in an Alderaanian style and streaked with blue. Her flight suit was worn but not ragged, and her boots, belt, and blaster were better-than-average quality. She was playing moderately successful smuggler, then, or something of that ilk.
“Hear you looking for a girl,” he said, letting his native Kiffar bleed through. He was still learning how to mimic local accents and didn’t trust himself to do it while upset. “A ‘Libba’?”
Not the most obvious reference to ‘Depa Billaba’, but if she knew Depa was missing…
Master Tahl gave him a sharp glance that fit both their covers. “Yeah. Hold on.” She stepped back in, and he heard her settle her tab and excuse herself before returning out and rejoining him.
She followed him out and away from the bar, towards the compound where Depa was being held, and he ducked into an empty nook for them to swap notes, trusting the knight could tell if surveillance was active.
“Why me?” she asked.
“My master’s too far,” he said. “They’ll kill her before he gets them all.”
Master Tahl took a few seconds to process that—his master would sooner trick a crowd than kill them, so Quinlan was describing the sort of situation they were facing: a time crunch before Depa died. “Does Libba trust you?”
After what they’d been doing to her? He doubted it.
She grimaced, reading his expression or his aura or both, and pried an emergency comm from inside her belt. “Stream’s gone dry,” she said into it, then waved for him to lead her, the comm in her fist.
Quinlan eyed that warily. Her mission, whatever it was, was now probably wrecked.
“Libba’s worth more,” Master Tahl said softly. “Where is she?”
He led the way.
Dismay flickered in Master Tahl as she saw the same issues he had with the compound, but she discreetly ‘dropped’ her commlink so a passerby kicked it down into the drug den. “How are you at jumping?”
“Way better at landing,” he admitted—lying or exaggerating your abilities was stupid, in situations like these.
The knight’s aura relaxed a little. “Good.”
She led him on a stroll around the compound until they reached a building tall enough across the street. They went up to the second floor from the top. She listened for persons within and picked the lock of an empty suite that faced the compound.
The window was high enough to get a clear view of the barbed wire, and glimpses of the guards patrolling the courtyard between the wall and the building. The best-dressed of them all had a few thermal detonators.
Quinlan evaluated how far it was from that man to the defense towers. He could wreck the towers with the man’s own detonators. Question was, would Master Tahl believe it?
“I can take out the cannons,” he said outright.
She shook her head. “You’re the tracker. When we hit the ground, you go straight for Depa, and I’ll follow. Treat it as an in-and-out, as fast as we can go.”
He looked pointedly at the guards. No way they’d let them leave like that.
“We time this right, my extraction team will cover our exit.”
“Your extraction…” He remembered the commlink and the code she’d given beforehand. “You lied to Judicial?” Told them her cover was blown?
Her slight shrug probably explained a lot of why she got along with Master Jinn so well, and she pulled her lightsaber hilt from her boot. “It’s about to be true, anyway.”
Quinlan grabbed his, too, and made sure she got a good glance at the setting toggle on the hilt, so she’d know it wasn’t just a training saber, since padawans his age didn’t always have full sabers yet.
“Ready?” Master Tahl asked.
He still wasn’t entirely sure what she was planning, but he knew enough to nod.
She opened the window and flung him out so he’d clear the barbed wire, then sprang after and past him. They both ignited their blades in midair and cushioned their landings with the Force.
Three steps took Quinlan to the thermal detonators, two seconds to arm and fling them to the towers, and one breath to stop the detonators’ previous owner before he could retaliate.
Not Quinlan’s first kill.
He sliced a circle in the compound wall, kicked it in, and dove through, Master Tahl covering his back.
The gang or whatever they were was caught enough off guard that Quinlan, partially trained Jedi that he was, was able to hold his own, and Master Tahl didn’t hesitate in swiftly preventing any of them from being able to rally themselves enough to give him trouble.
“Thought you were an archivist,” he commented as someone’s blaster (and hand that had been holding it) fell at his feet.
She snorted, bisecting the man he’d just unhanded. “With Jocasta controlling what records I had access to? I’d be bored out of my skull. Dejarik later?”
He dodged someone’s foot a bit more than necessary, not wanting to risk it contacting his skin and sucking him into a reading. Combat usually overrode his psychometry, but sometimes… “Sure.”
The extraction team announced their arrival, and Quinlan fought all the harder to get to Depa before she—before she—
She was being held in someone’s quarters. That would make him throw up once he thought about it, so he shoved the thought aside and Force-shoved the blaster away from her and her rapist so she couldn’t turn it on herself.
“Two options,” he said, trying so hard to avoid calculating from the damage precisely how the man had manhandled her while he— “I kill you, or she does.”
Quinlan wasn’t about to leave him to hurt more girls. Even if they had the resources to make an arrest, a trial would sabotage Depa’s reputation both in the Order and without, and he wasn’t about to let the rapist steal something else from her. The pregnancy was going to cause enough problems.
Depa stared blankly at Quinlan, her dark eyes dull in the maze of variously aged bruises and dried blood that was all she was wearing, other than the shackle on her neck.
Life flickered in her eyes, and he sliced through the chain.
Screaming, she launched herself at the man and choked him with her own chain, which was slender enough to cut into skin. Quinlan blocked the man from being able to fight her off.
Her arms gave out before the man was dead, and he finished the job just before Master Tahl caught up. With her guarding them, he tore off his own shirt to give Depa something to cover herself with. He’d consider it incentive to keep his shields locked down hard.
“Is there a slave implant?” Master Tahl asked gently.
Depa curled in on herself, arms wrapped around her swollen belly as her hands bled, but shook her head as she sobbed.
“Good.” She picked the collar quickly enough that she’d dealt with that type before.
Depa’s gaze was locked onto the thrown blaster.
Master Tahl checked the situation with the Force and picked her up. “You’re on cover,” she told him. “Let’s go.”
Quinlan was little past twelve, not nearly experienced enough to be trusted with that position.
But he couldn’t carry Depa. She was taller than him. Probably heavier, too, and he didn’t have the endurance with Force-assisted lifting to hoist her, never mind keep her from finding something to kill herself with while he did. And if his psychometry got the better of him…
He carefully breathed out. The situation was what it was, and dwelling on the problems with it only made it more likely he’d screw up. “Understood.”
Pregnancy wasn’t something most Jedi had much experience with—contraceptive implants were standard, though not entirely constant or universal. (Such Core medical treatment could be a safety risk, depending on mission circumstances… but the missions like that usually went to men.)
Quinlan’s master was one of the few Jedi Healers who’d delivered a child before, somewhere between his being a Shadow (spy) and Watchman (ambassador…sorta). Quinlan didn’t know the details, but Master Tholme would know what to do.
Getting Depa to safety was paramount, so Quinlan hurried back to his master’s ship without checking in. His master’s introduction to the situation came upon their entry on the ship.
Master Tholme took a second to glance over the three of them, then directed Quinlan to get Depa settled in the bedroom.
”But—”
“Better you than me, Padawan, and Tahl has to chat with Judicial,” Master Tholme said, proving he both noticed and understood.
So Master Tahl set Depa on her feet, and Quinlan guided her into the bunk room.
Depa shivered as Quinlan settled her on his pallet. She’d stopped sobbing, at least, though she still sniffled. “Master will be so ashamed.”
“Nonsense,” Quinlan said as he dug through his bag for something she could wear. “He’ll be relieved you’re alive.”
“I should’ve stopped them,” she said, voice small. “I’m a Jedi.”
“That doesn’t make you omnipotent. Or invincible.” His tunic might work, sort of, but his trousers would be too small for her, and he really couldn’t leave his skin uncovered. Where was his cloak?
She shook her head and repeated, “I should have stopped them.”
“How, exactly? He was three times your weight and reach, surrounded by allies. You could’ve stopped him once, sure. Probably even twice.” Quinlan tried to hide his awareness of her guilt as he tossed her his cloak and put on his tunic, himself. Her hands, sliced by her chain, would have to wait for Master Tholme to tend them. “But then they’d drug you, or maim you, or kill you. You made the judgment call you did for a reason.”
“I made it because I was afraid!” she snapped, then froze and curled in on herself, bracing for a blow.
“You had reason to be,” he answered, reasonably.
She shook her head in outright denial.
“Depa, you stayed alive.” Enslaved padawans tended to either escape in the first month or turn up dead, and her pregnancy said she’d been gone for longer than a month. “You kept them from drugging you.”
“What are you talking about? I’m blocked.”
“Oh.” That was why Master Tahl had relied on him to find her. “I can, uh, sense you. Enough to track, anyway.”
Just add it to the reasons I have to be a Shadow.
She hugged her knees. “Will they let me stay in the service corps, you think? When Mas—” She choked on the word. “When he repudiates me?”
“Why would he do that?”
“A high councilor loses his padawan to slavers?” she asked sadly. “Finds her pregnant? It doesn’t matter how happy he’ll be to see me or how much he wants to keep me. He can’t.”
Was she just panicking, or was she right about the politics?
Studying her was worsening her anxiety. Quinlan lay on his master’s bunk, hands tucked under his head so he obviously couldn’t use them to grab anything. Her tension reduced immediately.
“Master Tholme will take care of all that,” he reassured her. He didn’t know how, but his master would. “You won’t have to give up your master unless you want to.” Er. “I mean, unless you want to leave the Jedi so you can keep the baby?”
She shuddered.
He hadn’t thought so.
Master Tahl excused herself promptly, to go help with the other girls rescued by Judicial’s raid—apparently the compound had been one of those cults where men enslaved females and claimed they were wives. From what details Quinlan ‘overheard’, Depa seemed to be the youngest—not by much, but by enough that she’d probably been picked for her midichlorians, for the possibility of Force-sensitive offspring. The age had just been so she could be captured and controlled and all that.
Master Tholme asked to speak to Depa, but he waited for her to come out to him, rather than entering the bedroom, himself. She wrapped herself in Quinlan’s cloak and shuffled to the doorway.
He met her there with the medkit and tended her sliced hands and other visible wounds. “Mace is very happy you’re alive,” he said, “but he can’t come yet because then he’ll lose plausible deniability with the idiots.”
“I see,” Depa whispered, blinking back tears. “Thank you, Mas…”
She fought with her voice to finish the sentence.
Master Tholme was letting sadness show. “Call me Tholme, child. You don’t need to call anyone ’master”, right now.”
“I broke cover,” Quinlan said. “And we didn’t hide coming here.” Should we leave?
“Tahl told me. But let’s discuss our options, first.” Master Tholme didn’t do smiles, not like Quinlan’s parents had—maybe because he still mourned them, too—but his compassion was palpable in the Force.
“First option: We can take you back to Coruscant, be forthright about your kidnapping. There will be gossip and bullying, but that’s the only way that we’ll be able to give the child to the Temple if he takes after you. You’ll see a mind healer for the rest of your apprenticeship, and there may be some side effects into knighthood.
“Second option: We terminate the pregnancy, tend you through whatever the father set up to discourage that, and quietly take you back to Coruscant. You’ll have to see a mind healer—and this one will affect your options in knighthood, because whether you admit or hide the termination, no mind healer will clear you for standard duty with the precedent of termination or lying about severe trauma.
“Third option: We discreetly spin this entire mess as you getting some special education that Mace can’t provide while stuck on Coruscant, what truly happened never gets reported, and the child is quietly handed off to a family as soon as he’s born. If we do this, your apprenticeship and knighthood shouldn’t be affected, but you won’t be able to see a mind healer. Tahl and Quinlan freed some slaves. That you were one of them will stay secret.”
Quinlan thought they all sounded awful.
Depa shivered in the doorway.
“You don’t have to choose right away,” Master Tholme said gently. “Mace says he’ll support you no matter what. He’s been keeping your birthday present for you.”
A cry tore from her throat, and her knees gave out. Quinlan barely caught her before she hit the floor hard, and he was going to have some bad bruises of his own.
He looked from his weeping crechemate to his master and abruptly realized Depa was thirteen, the year when Jedi Initiates knew for certain if they would be padawans or be reassigned to the service corps. That made the birthday Important among padawans, and masters tended to respect that with special gifts.
“The father's dead,” Quinlan said abruptly. “We killed him.”
“Good,” Master Tholme answered.
Depa, as the padawan of a councilor who was not a Shadow and therefore lacked the pragmatism fast gained by all successful spies, stared.