Chapter Text
Ahsoka picked Anakin back up and started carrying him to the officer’s tent again once Kix cleared him. His previous outburst seemed forgotten as he snuggled against her chest and started babbling in broken Basic with the occasional Huttese word slipped in there. She heard an aggressive swear and raised an eye ridge.
“Aren’t you a little small to be saying words like that?” She teased. He stared at her.
“Nuh uh. Hear it a lot,” he answered matter of factly. “Is just word,”
“I guess you’re right, but it’s not a very nice word, is it?”
“Um,” he scrunched up his face. “Not sure,”
“Would you like it if someone called you that?” Ahsoka tried a different angle. He thought again.
“Have been,” he replied simply.
Yeah, right. That made sense. Former slave child. Obviously he’d been called worse things than even that.
“How does it make you feel when someone calls you that?” She could salvage this still.
“Sad,” Anakin pouted. “But… just cuz me feel bad, don’t mean I make others feel bad,” he concluded sagely.
“Yes, that’s exactly it. If we spread pain because we’re in pain, that just means there are more people in pain, not less,” she continued, ruffling his hair. He stared at her with bright eyes.
“Be nice! So much bad already, no add more,” he agreed, raising his arms excitedly.
“Very good. Can I tell you a secret?” She whispered conspiratorially. He perked up and moved closer to her. “I had a hard time learning that lesson. I thought that anyone who caused me pain deserved pain in return,” she explained. He nodded. “But I realized that if I cause them pain, I’m just doing what they are, and causing more pain, even if they’d hurt me first. And we don’t want to spread pain, do we,”
“ Noah ,” Anakin shook his head. “If all mean, no one nice. No good left,” he surmised. Ahsoka smiled. It showed a lot of maturity for someone so young. In fact, it somewhat contradicted what she knew about Anakin as an adult. She frowned. There was still that in most respects, but he could hold a grudge. What had changed? Other than age, obviously. It wasn’t something the Jedi taught, so he had to get it from somewhere.
Who did Anakin even talk to that could’ve put that in his head? Not Padme. She was a politician, and most of those sucked , but she had good morals. Not any of the boys either. Even if they weren’t exactly against revenge, none of them would say that kind of thing, or else they would’ve said it to her as well. Who did that even leave?
Anakin, as much as she admired him, was one of the least social people she’d ever met. He preferred to work independently, or work in a space with others while everyone did their own thing, or talk to droids. People weren’t his strong suit. It made sense, knowing what she did now. Seeing the things he had, finding people who could understand him was difficult. Just a day before, Ahsoka and the boys had been dumbfounded by something he’d lived through and probably didn’t realize was so terrible, if only for familiarity. Who could he possibly be expected to connect with? She’d heard her share of the bullying the older kids would do towards him. He was so different , and they decided he didn’t deserve to be with them.
Was that it? The bullying? As much as it was awful, she doubted that would be enough to change something so intrinsic to himself. Who was left?
The Chancellor. Really, it should have occurred to her sooner. Something about him and the way he was around Anakin didn’t sit right with her. She didn’t really like him in general. Everything about him seemed insincere, but she’d equated that to the fact he was a politician. Padme could be insincere at times, when she needed to do her job, surely that had been it. But no.
The more that she thought of it, something was really wrong about the Chancellor and his relationship with Anakin. It was already suspicious that he’d been in office for so long, the war popping up just in time to delay any possibility of voting someone new in.
“Sooooka,” Anakin droned, jerking her from her thoughts. “You quiet,” he frowned. “Okay?”
“Oh, yeah. Just got lost in my thoughts, I guess. Nothing wrong with me, I promise,”
“No lie?” He narrowed his eyes, reminding her that he’d already accidentally broken his trust once.
“To my knowledge. If I’m wrong, I suppose I will just have to be terribly sorry for my mistake,” she answered carefully.
“Okay,” he shrugged. “Me trust you,”
“ I trust you, Anakin,” she corrected lightly.
“You do?” He grinned cheekily. “Me too!”
“Ohhh, you little-” she ruffled his hair, covering his eyes. He shrieked happily, feeling for the first time like the child he was. “You know what I meant,”
“Yeah, but funny,” he giggled. “ I trust you, Soka,”
“I’m glad you trust me, Anakin,” she smiled. He nuzzled into her happily. “You know, that reminds me, I told you about my fidgets. Wanna see if you like any of them?” Luckily, she’d left her bag in the officer’s tent and they’d just reached it. He cheered quietly. Carefully setting him down on a mat, she moved to grab her bag, feeling his eyes on her the entire time. With a grin, she dumped it, and promptly realized she’d made another mistake.
Anakin’s prosthetic, still covered in mud and wrapped in plastic, came tumbling out first. Little Anakin took note of it immediately.
“Gross,” he wrinkled his nose. She laughed somewhat hysterically, missing her Anakin more than she’d realized, the similarities blinding to her. “Where from?”
“Anakin, I need to explain something to you,” she sat down and said seriously. He looked up at her and set the plastic wrapped mess down. “Look, you’re… kinda in the future, I guess. Normally, you’re 19, and my Jedi, uh, teacher, and a General in command of the clones. You remember them?” He nodded. “You lost your arm shortly before the war started. This was the prosthetic you used. We took it off because it was all gunked up with mud, and we were running to get back to camp when you were sucked into the mud. And when you surfaced, well, you surfaced, not the other you,” hopefully he wouldn’t be too confused.
“Mud… make me little,” he concluded. “ Weird ,”
“Yeah, it was pretty weird. It’s still pretty weird. But I can’t say I’m upset about meeting you ,” she smiled. He crawled over to her and hugged her.
“Miss him,” he mumbled into her shoulder. Sniffling slightly, she blinked back tears.
“I do, I miss him a lot. He means a lot to me, and this has been really difficult,” she answered honestly.
“Is okay. I miss Amu . Both missing person,” he said softly. She chuckled wetly. He pulled away, looking her in the eyes.
“Oh, Anakin, I don’t think I can say how much this has made me realize. I’m so sorry you went through so many terrible things and didn’t have enough kindness in your life,” she let a few tears drop.
“You kind, Soka. Not fix it, but make better,” he smiled. “Still… scary, but you help. Soka is safe,”
“Yeah, I’m glad you can be safe with me,” she wiped her eyes, and little hands came up and did the same, clearly a gesture he recognized as comforting. “Now, come on, that’s enough sadness, let’s check out these fidgets!” She held up her favourite and presented it to him. He took hold of it and turned it over in his hands, moving it as intended, eyes lighting up when he started to get the groove of it.
“Fun!” He laughed. “This fun!”
And as much as it hurt that fun was a foreign concept to him, it was nice to give that to him.
*****
At some point, Rex took over watching Anakin and Ahsoka decided to follow her line of thought to its conclusion without distractions.
So, Anakin had been taught from a young age that revenge was unsatisfying and needless, taught to put his energy to helping rather than hurting, but at some point between 7 and 19 (which was a stupidly long amount of time in her eyes), he’d become prone to holding grudges and feeling the need to enact revenge in specific cases. Based on her knowledge of who Anakin actually talked to, the main person who could’ve caused this would be the Chancellor.
The Chancellor, who Anakin met privately on a concerningly regular basis and made her senses ping in concern. Palpatine had been in office for too long and the war had conveniently started right when he would be forced to leave office, postponing just that. This war had given him so much more power than he should have. And on convenient events that had furthered his political career, what about the thing that had ended up with him voted in as Chancellor to begin with. The Battle of Naboo. Something that had garnered him a sympathy vote.
Was it just her, or did things line up just a little too neatly? And, Padme, his main opponent in getting the emergency powers the war had given him, had received death threats that had forced her out of the Senate, leaving Jar Jar in charge. And Ahsoka liked the Gungan well enough, as clumsy and somewhat annoying as he was, but he was way too easily manipulated. Getting stubborn Senator Amidala out of his way would’ve been all too easy to do by hiring bounty hunters through a long chain.
Except that they knew that Dooku had been behind that, or it was heavily suspected. But , if Palpatine had been in control of the war, maybe Dooku was in his pocket.
Okay, now she sounded a little crazy. She didn’t even have concrete evidence for her suspicions, just convenient happenings and worrying underlying implications. Really, it all seemed like a crazy conspiracy theory.
But she could get information. The clones had a network, and surely somebody could get in contact with the Corries, maybe even Commander Fox, who would possibly know more about the Chancellor than, well, anyone. With newfound resolve, she stopped her thoughtful pacing and started towards Rex.
The Captain had moved to the bunk area with Anakin after the officer’s tent turned into a betting pool for… something or other. Nothing that Ahsoka cared about. She went inside and found Anakin on a pile of blankets on one of the top bunks, a bunch of the boys around him cheering as he… called their names? She snuck over to Rex.
“What’s happening?” She whispered.
“They’re seeing how many of them he knows the names of, and he can tell apart. So far he hasn’t been wrong. He’s up high so, quote, he can be heard because he’s tiny and needs height supplements, unquote. Don’t ask who said that. It was one of the shinies,” Rex explained with a fond shake of his head. “What do you need, sir?”
“You can drop the sir, Rex. I’m fourteen,” she laughed. “And, in full confidence, what’s your opinion of the Chancellor? I want to hear your worst, most treasonous thoughts, don’t hold back. I promise I won’t tell,” she said quietly.
“Well, I’m all for trash talking him, but I’d prefer to know why before saying treasonous things about the leader of the free Galaxy,” Rex gestured for her to head outside with him.
“Where going!?” Anakin yelled from his perch.
“Rex and I just have boring grown up stuff to talk about. You keep going!” Ahsoka yelled back. Anakin grinned and turned back to his audience. They slipped out of the tent, Rex leading her away from anyone, and even removing his comm and helmet. She also got rid of anything that could overhear her. They were standing next to a large tree fairly far from their camp, among land that had been a muddy, untraversable mess just a day ago, but now was perfectly solid.
She understood why, of course. This was treasonous, and she needed to know if others were as worried about it as she was.
“Alright, we should be good. Why are you being potentially treasonous, Ahsoka?”
“Some of the things Anakin was saying made me realize that he’s had a weird shift in mentality since he was this age. Through power of deduction, the only person that would logically make him think differently would be the Chancellor. He doesn’t talk to many people, and the other option is droids. I like droids and all, and we encourage their devious little activities, but endorsing revenge in a droid isn’t the same as becoming vengeful seemingly out of nowhere,” she explained. Rex nodded.
“Well, personally, I think that stopping the Seppies and other evils from causing more pain through death is perfectly acceptable, I know that Jedi have different rules for a reason. You can’t have people with that kind of power running around with revenge fantasies. That’s why Ventress and Dooku are a problem,” Rex agreed. “And my opinion of the Chancellor? Well, most of this, I will say, is kinda hearsay through Fox, because he never stops complaining about the guy, but from what I’ve been able to parse, he doesn’t really regard clones as people, which isn’t a good start, but has some advantages. We’re disregarded by those people, and they’ll talk in front of us. Fox doesn’t say everything, but he’s made it clear that the guy is doing some nefarious things for his own gain, and might even have something going on with Dooku, but this is all conjecture. Fox has to speak in codes and stay quiet or risk being decommissioned. What I know for sure is that the Corries are treated terribly, and their living conditions are bad . They don’t get enough to eat, and individuality is heavily punished, unlike here or among deployed clones. We do what we can, giving what we can when on Coruscant, but it isn’t safe. I can talk to Fox about getting you an opportunity to talk to him about it where you won’t be overheard. Tiny Skywalker means we’ll probably be on leave until it’s either resolved or we get a new General, which I don’t want,” Rex scoffed. “What other ideas do you have? Something about the guy is weird and I don’t like seeing the General around him. Normally, he’d be critical of someone like that, but he’s weirdly defensive. But I do have it on good authority that he’s been meeting with him since he was nine ,”
“That’s bad , Rex,” Ahsoka hissed. He nodded in agreement. “Mostly, it just occurred to me that he’s had a few too many convenient ‘coincidences’ for my liking. Something about the Battle of Naboo is fishy, same with the start of this war. He’s already been in office two years longer than the usual term because he took over halfway through Valorum’s last term, allowing him to get two more. And then this war shows up right before he has to worry about getting the boot, keeping him in office and postponing any idea of a vote. And if he is working with Dooku, it’s possible that he was behind Senator Amidala’s assassination attempts, keeping her out of the Senate and leaving easily manipulated Jar Jar Binks in her stead, getting him the emergency powers he shouldn’t have,” she gave her perspective. “I just can’t figure out why he’s manipulating Anakin,”
“Maybe he’s trying to foster hostility on both sides to keep the war going,” Rex suggested.
“That’s not unlikely. And he may have put Anakin where he is on purpose, so that someone mostly under his control is embedded in Jedi affairs, making him an unwitting spy,” she hypothesized. “Anakin trusts Palpatine a concerning amount, and tells him things when other Jedi normally wouldn’t,”
“You need to talk about this with Fox. And don’t put anything in writing. There can’t be any evidence of our activities. Treason has a steep penalty, even just treasonous speech like this,”
“That’s also suspicious. Why be so against it unless you have something to hide?” If he was innocent, people entertaining lightly treasonous thoughts wouldn’t be a problem. They’d find no evidence. Putting up a wall may hide something, but people will be likely to question what the wall is doing there unless you explicitly ban snooping around the wall, making those more stubborn people even more curious. And sneaky. “I feel like we just uncovered something really dangerous,” she muttered.
“You can still back out, but once you start this fight, you can’t leave,” Rex told her harshly.
“If I don’t, who will? I need to figure out who I can tell. Obviously not Anakin, but do you think Obi-Wan would be okay?”
“I’ll get Cody to probe him. Test the waters, so to speak,” Rex decided. “We could probably get Vos on our side. Fox speaks highly of him, and someone with his skills would be great to have on our side. Plus, we know he can keep a secret,”
“I assume you already know who’s safe to tell among the clones?”
“Brothers are prone to questioning authority, but we make sure before they know anything. We know how to keep a secret from anyone who shouldn’t know, either because they’re against it or will tell someone against it. Fives can’t know, Echo was… recommissioned, as a cadet. It’s not a fun process, makes brothers risky and more likely to cling to the regs. Fives can’t keep anything from Echo, they’re too close,”
“Of course,” Ahsoka nodded, her attention wandering when she heard a ship engine. “I think that’s Obi-Wan. Don’t worry, I won’t say anything ,” she mimed, zipping her mouth shut. Rex grinned and nodded.