Chapter Text
Obi-Wan was in pain, he was exhausted, scared and desperate.
O
He couldn't afford to give up. He had seven precious younglings to take care of, he was their only protection in a galaxy that would snuff out their lights, or worse, twist them into something terrible.
When he'd once told Barden that he was meant to be alone, that he was meant for infinite sadness, he hadn't realised just how truly consuming the grief would be, and he was even more terrified that if he lost the children, then he would experience the utter desolation he had always feared.
Little lights, he held them close. Little gods, they were so young.
It had been some trick of fate, luck, or perhaps the Force's will that they'd found each other. Cal had found him first, during the calm before the storm — the toddling Stewjoni had always liked searching for Obi-Wan when he was Temple-bound, and Obi-Wan had even stored some toys in his own rooms for when the child made his way from the creche to the apartment levels for knights.
Aayla had been hanging around due to Quinlan's absence on a mission unsuited for Padawan assistance, and he'd asked Obi-Wan to keep an eye on her. So when she'd asked for help with her astronavigation coursework — even if it wasn't a favoured subject of his, he could handle the preliminary courses without issue — Cal had been attacking Obi-Wan's leg with cuddles, Aayla had been bemoaning teaching strategies, and then Anakin had burst into Obi-Wan's apartments. Anakin had been upset by Master Qui-Gon again, and Obi-Wan had never had the heart to turn the boy away, attempting to be what he himself had needed all those years ago. Attempting to honour Barden in what small ways he could.
It had been, in its own chaotic way, a good hour. Cal warm and heavy against his shin, Aayla's indignation about the astronavigation syllabus bright and familiar in the Force, Anakin slowly unclenching from whatever Qui-Gon had said or not said, the apartment full of life in a way that Obi-Wan's apartments rarely were. He had been calm and content.
He thought about that afterwards. He thought about it more than was probably useful. That the last ordinary hour of his life had been — that. Messy and loud and full of people who had wandered in uninvited and made themselves at home.
Then the alarms went off.
Blaring alarms that had Cal crying as Obi-Wan moved to soothe him through the Force, instinctively pulling the child close even as he turned in to the emergency comm line to hear the words that didn't make sense, that refused to make sense no matter how many times they repeated. A siege. The Republic had declared the Jedi traitors. There was an army marching on the Temple — droids mostly, Trade Federation models, but military forces too, from planetary systems he'd thought allies, and amongst the panicked voices in the comm there were reports of hooded figures, Force-sensitive, red sabres.
He'd been suspended in a horrible moment of stillness, half desperate to run toward the fighting, to put himself between whatever was coming and his people, and half already calculating the fastest route to the nearest evacuation point.
The children decided it.
His quarters were not close to the creche, which would be the most fortified point in the Temple, and he couldn't guarantee he'd make it there safely. The evacuation point it was. He would hand the children off to someone better placed, someone with more backup, and then he could go back.
He had always had a go bag. The life of a Jedi was transient, and he had learned — on Melida/Daan, among other places — to be prepared for anything. He had just never thought he'd be prepared for this. He had never imagined standing in his own quarters listening to the sound of blasters and sabres clashing in the halls of his home, the screaming mixing with the smell of smoke already beginning to curl under the door.
The sounds were getting closer. He could hear blasters — the specific crack of them, a sound that lived in his nervous system in a way that was Melida/Daan's particular gift to him — and underneath that the lower, more terrible sound of lightsabres. His people were fighting and dying in the halls of their home and he was standing in his apartment packing a medkit - he’d never thought he’d hear the sound of blaster fire in the Temple, it had always safe.
He had been wrong.
Aayla and Anakin, both Padawans and therefore fractionally more composed than the younglings, had helped him gather what he could. He sent Anakin ahead with the go bag — whoever he handed the children off to might not have had the opportunity to grab supplies, and his medkit was thorough. He had been thorough since Mandalore. Since Satine had taken a blaster bolt meant for him and he had realised that knowing how to fight was not the same as knowing how to keep someone alive.
He had reluctantly handed Cal off to Aayla. He hated it. He looked at her, thirteen years old and already bracing her shoulders to carry more than they should have to, and he saw himself on Melida/Daan so clearly it made him feel ill. But needs must. He needed his hands free to defend them, and carrying Cal would split his focus dangerously.
"You're doing well," he told her quietly. "Stay close."
She nodded, squaring her shoulders in a way that made him ache.
He'd almost left without the second lightsabre.
It had been sitting in the back of his closet since Mandalore alongside his armour, waiting. He'd felt it call to him as the alarms screamed — not his voice, not quite, but something insistent and certain through the Force. He'd taken it without fully deciding to, clipping it alongside his own. His Jar'Kai wasn't polished, not for combat this serious, but he was unwilling to leave the kyber behind to whatever was coming. Some things you didn't abandon and then at the Force’s insistnace, shoved the bag containing his armour onto his back, at the time, he’d thought it a damned waste of energy to carry the armour, but the Force was insistent so the armour came too.
They moved.
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He had walked these corridors ten thousand times. He knew which flagstones were uneven, knew where the light fell differently in the afternoons, knew the particular echo of his own boots against the floors. He had run these halls as a child, crept through them as an initiate past curfew, walked them as a Padawan and a knight and every iteration of himself in between.
They felt like somewhere else now. The emptiness was wrong, the silence broken in all the wrong places — distant and then suddenly close, the sounds of fighting lurching toward them and receding without logic. The air smelled of smoke and something burnt and specific that he recognised and refused to name.
He kept his face arranged. He kept his shoulders level. He kept his pace measured — fast enough, not so fast as to communicate the urgency that was screaming through every nerve he had.
Cal had gone quiet in Aayla's arms in the way small children went quiet when they understood that the world had become dangerous and crying would make things worse. His eyes were enormous. He tracked Obi-Wan's face constantly, and Obi-Wan kept his face arranged because Cal was watching and Cal was not yet three years old and did not need to know how frightened Obi-Wan actually was.
None of them did.
The darksider came around the corner of the first hall.
Red sabre. He had time to process that, and the cold thing in his chest slammed against its container with an almost physical force, because red sabres meant — red sabres meant someone had done something terrible to their kyber, and whoever was on the other end of this blade was not a Jedi who had lost their way, they were something that had been made, deliberately, into a weapon aimed at —
He lit his own blade and stepped forward and closed his mind.
A darksider. Red sabre already lit, the blade casting everything in a colour that made Obi-Wan's stomach drop. He lit his own without thinking, stepping forward and widening his stance to block the corridor entirely, putting himself as completely between the children and the blade as his body allowed.
The darksider favoured Djem So — aggressive, hard, built to overwhelm. Obi-Wan's Soresu was built to outlast. He locked down, moved small, let the Force tell him where the blade would be before it arrived. He could not go on the offensive. He could not leave the gap behind him.
So he held.
His arms ached. His ribs ached, a sharp complaint that suggested he'd taken a hit at some point he hadn't registered. The blade came at him again and again and he redirected and redirected and redirected, letting the Force make the decisions his exhausted body wouldn't have made fast enough on its own, listening, always listening.
Don't let their panic into you. He could feel the children behind him, the bright terrified colours of them in the Force, even the Padawans fraying at the edges. Don't take it in. You need to be the still point. Be the still point.
Ducking and weaving, the sabre even slashed at his back once - if not for the backpack full of armour it would have likely been a mortal wound, he regained his footing and pressed on, this needed to end quickly, and he had not choice but to win.
The darksider fell after Obi-Wan used the dirty trick Barden had taught him when switching which had the blade was in, and stabbing them in their armpit - he felt it as the man died. He didn't allow himself to think about it.
They moved again.
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The droids were almost a relief by comparison. B-1 models, Trade Federation standard, and while they were numerous they were also predictable. He worked through them efficiently, Anakin at his back now with his own sabre lit, the boy's jaw set in the way that meant he was frightened and furious and holding it together through sheer stubbornness. Obi-Wan had never been more grateful for that particular quality.
There was evidence that others had come this way. Shattered droids. Scorched walls.
And bodies.
The droids were almost manageable.
B-1 models, Trade Federation standard — he had fought these on missions, knew their patterns, knew where the joints were weak. Anakin was at his back with his own sabre lit and that stubborn furious set to his jaw that meant he was frightened and had converted all of it into something he could use. Obi-Wan let him. Right now it was serving them well.
He saw the evidence of others having come this way. Shattered droids, scorched walls, a lightsabre burn along a doorframe that he recognised as Master Iri's style by the angle alone.
And then he saw Master Deren.
He had a single unguarded moment where his face did something involuntary — he felt it happen, couldn't stop it — and then he locked it back down, locked all of it down, because Anakin was behind him and Aayla was behind Anakin and Cal was watching his face.
She had put herself between the droids and the children. He could read the whole story of it from where he stood — where she had stood, where she had fallen, the arrangement of the small bodies near her. Four of them. An half of a creche clan. The youngest couldn't have been more than five.
The cold thing in his chest cracked open and he held it shut through something that was not quite will and not quite the Force but some desperate hybrid of both.
There had to be survivors from the rest of the clan. There had to be. He could not think about the alternative. He filed it away — her name, her face, the knowledge of what she had done and what it had cost — and he put it with everything else behind his eyes, all of it pressing against the inside of his skull, and he kept his face like water, and he kept moving.
Not yet, he told the grief. Not yet. Later.
He had so much waiting for later. He was terrified of later.
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Siri.
He almost didn't recognise her at first. Not because she had changed but because some part of him had refused, in the chaos, to believe that people he loved could be in the middle of this. It was an irrational protection that his mind had erected without permission, and it came down the moment he saw her face.
She was pale in a way that people only went pale one way, her weight against Ferus's shoulder, Ferus himself white-lipped and holding it together through what looked like the same sheer bloody-minded determination that Siri had always had and had clearly passed along. Three small girls clustered behind them — he would bet they were Master Deren's surviving charges, he realised. His heart moved around in his chest in a way that was physically uncomfortable.
He took out the droids. He told Ferus to watch their flank. He turned to Siri.
She had three blaster bolts in her stomach.
He looked at them with the part of his mind that had learned field medicine on Mandalore, that had pressed hands against wounds in ash deserts and tried to do the mathematics of survival, and the mathematics were very clear and very terrible and he was not going to say them out loud.
She relaxed when she saw him. That was the part that broke something in him that he couldn't immediately find the edges of. All that pain, all that effort to keep going, and she saw his face and simply — let go of it. As if she had been holding on against the sheer force of will until someone she trusted arrived.
He was a twelve year old temple washout. He was a Padawan without a Master, a knight in name only, a boy from Stewjon who had been on Bandomeer, Melida/Daan and Mandalore and apparently not yet run out of terrible things to survive. He was not what she deserved and he was what she had.
"You'll get them out, won't you, Obi-Wan."
Not a question. He nodded. He didn't trust his voice. There was something happening in his throat that he was managing very carefully.
She looked at Ferus and her voice was steady in a way that Obi-Wan recognised, that same deliberate steadiness he had been maintaining all afternoon, except hers was coming from a different place — not from pushing grief back but from having moved through it already, from somewhere on the other side. The Force, he thought. She could feel the Force waiting.
"Stay with Master Kenobi. Do as he says, and all will be well, my dearest Ferus."
"Master, please—" The boy was choking on his own words and Obi-Wan could only watch on helplessly as he realised that she was already gone.
"There is no death, only the Force, and I will be with you always."
"Please, we'll take you to a medicentre, we can—"
Siri shook her head, gentle and absolute, and pressed her lightsabre into Ferus's hands. Her hands were steady. He did not understand how they were steady. He would think about that later, in the dark, and try to learn something from it.
She looked at Obi-Wan over Ferus's head. Her eyes were very clear.
"Take them, Obi-Wan. You are their only hope."
He took them.
He did not look behind him. He did not stop moving. He felt her go — felt the particular quality of it, the way the Force received her, gentle and without resistance, and the light she had always been in his peripheral awareness simply wasn't there anymore — and he kept his face like water and kept the children moving and did not stop.
Later. He would fall apart later.
He was running out of later.
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They made it out.
He went to the familiar because the familiar was all he had — down into the sewers beneath the Temple, the sewers were cold and they smelled of everything the city tried to forget and Obi-Wan had never been so grateful for a hiding place in his life.
He settled the children against the wall and made himself breathe. Cal came to him without being asked — toddled over and wrapped both arms around his leg and pressed his face into Obi-Wan's knee — and Obi-Wan crouched down and gathered him up and held him, and felt the tiny heartbeat against his chest, and let himself use that to anchor against everything that wanted to come pouring out.
Not yet. Not yet. Take stock. Move forward.
He counted. He learned his charges names.
Seven children. Three Padawans — Anakin, eleven years old, jaw still set, trying to reach through his bond to Qui-Gon and finding him alive but not missing, a common thread for Qui-Gon Jinn, which was its own quiet torment. Aayla, thirteen years old, more contained, drawing her reassurance from the sense of Quinlan somewhere out in the field, somewhere safer and yet still terrified as her home had just gone up in flames, and Ferus aged twelve, who was not crying but whose eyes had the specific quality of someone who had used up all their tears without knowing it and would find them again later.
Four initiates. The eldest introduced herself as Barriss Offee, nine years old, composed in a way that he recognised as the composure of someone who had decided to hold it together for the sake of the smaller ones and was going to honour that decision if it killed her. A six year old Togruta who said her name was Ahsoka Tano with a particular fierceness, as if daring the universe to tell her that wasn't enough and a human girl named Trilla who wept openly but silently, and looked to Obi-Wan as if he had all the answers. He did not.
And lastly tiny Cal, who had had stopped crying and gone very still and very quiet, and Obi-Wan held him against his chest and felt the tiny heartbeat and focused on that when everything else threatened to be too large to hold.
The Temple was gone. He felt it in his bones with a certainty he didn't want and couldn't refuse. It had fallen. His home, the place he had grown up and fought to return to and sometimes resented and always loved — gone.
The Republic had declared them traitors.
He couldn't go to any of his normal contacts. Couldn't risk it. Any of them could be watched, could be compromised, could simply be frightened enough to turn them in.
He'd have to go to the abnormal ones then.
Dex was in Coco Town. Dex, who had never once asked Obi-Wan to be anything other than what he was, who kept a back door code just for him, who had been feeding him information and bad caf for years without once making him feel like a burden. Dex was the best place to start.
It took four hours to wade through the sewers to Coco Town without being seen. Obi-Wan carried Cal the whole way, the child's weight a small, warm anchor. He surfaced briefly at intervals to check above — the streets were in chaos, an emergency lockdown, people gone to ground and the few still visible either in uniform or being chased by those who were. Coruscant - the planet he’d grown up on now resembled something out of his oldest nightmares.
He didn't let himself think about it. He moved.
The diner was closed, which was almost surreal — Dex's was never closed at third meal hours, it was a law of the universe he had long taken for granted. He ushered the children through the back entrance, the familiar door code still working, still his, and they spilled into the back room in a huddle of exhausted and terrified children and one Padawan who had lit his sabre before Obi-Wan could stop him.
The large shape in the dark resolved into Dex, rifle in hand and expression furious until the moment it wasn't.
"Obi-Wan!" The rifle came down. Anakin's sabre went out. "Thank the little gods you're alright. I saw the smoke — heard about the Temple—"
"Dex." He heard his own voice crack on the word and couldn't find it in himself to be embarrassed about it. He was twelve and on Bandomeer expecting to die, thirteen on Melida/Daan leaving the order to protect children, and he was twenty-three on Mandalore ready to let go life as a Jedi with the supports of a family so quickly taken away. His home was gone and Siri was gone and he was standing in a diner kitchen with seven children and nowhere else to go. "They took us by surprise. I don't know what's going on, but the Temple—" He stopped. Glanced at the children. Started again. "We need somewhere to lay low while I determine what to do next."
Dex looked at him for a long moment — at all of them, at the children, at whatever was showing on Obi-Wan's face that he hadn't managed to put away yet.
"Back office," he said gruffly. "All of you. We'll figure it out."
Obi-Wan exhaled.
He kept moving.
He always did.
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Jaster had always assumed he would see Ben again.
It was not something he had examined too closely — examining it too closely had always felt like tempting fate, or worse, like hope, and hope was a thing he had learned to handle carefully. But it had lived in him anyway, quiet and persistent, beneath everything else. The certainty that the story was not finished. That somewhere in the galaxy Ben was alive and older and carrying whatever the years had made of him, and that one day, in some port or on some planet or through some improbable chain of events, they would end up in the same place at the same time and Jaster would get to look at him and tell him - tell him that Jetti or not, he should come home to Mandalore, he’d always be welcome.
He had rehearsed what he’d say in his head sometimes, in the small hours. Not often. He was not a man who indulged in rehearsal or even lingered on memories, but Ben had always been the exception.
He had not anticipated having to grieve it instead.
He sat very still in front of the holoprojector and watched the Temple burn.
It was enormous, the Temple. He had never seen it in person but he knew it from intelligence reports, from the occasional diplomatic correspondence, and from his own vigil when he’d gone to the Republic to represent his people, and he’d been unable to resist at least seeing Ben’s home for a distance, and hearing Barden and Kal bemoan whatever language all their files were written in, as no matter how good they were at hacking, if they couldn’t read the retrieved documents it wasn’t much use at all.
He reemmbered seeing it in person for the first time, and he was reminded of Ben’s careful words when he’d mentioned the home he’d grown up with and thinking Ben hadn’t really done it justice, but then again, Ben had been so quiet whenever his past came up. That every careful deflection, every half-answer and redirect, had been the architecture of a secret that he had believed, probably correctly, would cost him everything if it came out.
He had been angry about it once. The lie of omission that had lasted over a year, the identity they had never been given the chance to know properly. He was not angry anymore. He had moved through fury and out the other side into something that ached differently — the understanding that Ben had been frightened, had been a young man in an impossible position who had made the decisions available to him and run when running felt like the only option left. Jaster had not agreed with those decisions. He still didn't. But he understood them, and understanding had made it impossible to sustain the anger, and what was left without the anger was just this. The longing. The grief of a thing that had never gotten to be what it should have been.
Barden had taken it harder. Barden, who had never done anything by halves in his life, who had decided somewhere in that first year that Ben was his and had apparently not revised that position even after everything. It was Barden who had pushed to find him. Barden who had sent out the careful quiet inquiries, who had pulled every thread available to him, who had refused to accept that a person could simply disappear without leaving something to follow.
Nothing had come of it. Ben — if that was even his true name — was impossible to find. And the Jedi Order did not make it easy to find its members even if you knew where to look, which they didn't, because they didn't even have a real name to search.
So Jaster had held the quiet certainty that the story wasn't finished, surely Barden would find his ad, surely he’d see his Ben again, and they’d get some kind of end, some kind of closure to what could have been.
He looked for Ben in the footage anyway. He knew it was irrational. The footage was too distant, the chaos too complete, and even if he'd been standing at the Temple gates he would not have been able to find one face in all of that. But he looked, the way you looked, because the alternative was to simply accept it without looking and he found he could not do that.
Ben would be older now. Twenty three when Jaster had last seen him, and that had been four years ago. Twenty seven, twenty eight? Jaster could not even be sure of Ben’s age and now Jaster would not know how those additional years looked like on him. He did not know what the Jedi Order had made of him in the time since, or what he had made of himself, or whether the careful guardedness had softened at all or only calcified further with time and distance.
He did not know his name.
He had loved a man whose name he did not know, and now he never would, and there was something almost darkly appropriate about that — the final proof that what they'd had was always built on a foundation that Ben had kept deliberately incomplete. It did not make him love the memory of it any less. He wished it did. It would have been easier.
He allowed himself one moment. Deliberate and contained, the way Mandalorians grieved — fully, and then set aside, because survival required functionality and the dead deserved to be honoured by the living continuing to live.
Nu kyr'adyc, shi taab'echaaj'la. For Ben. For all of them, for the adikas in the pyres and the masters who had died on the steps and every light that had gone out in that burning building. Not gone, merely marching far away.
He hoped it was true.
He sat with it for exactly as long as he could afford to, and then he put it away.
He had an Empire to run, and the galaxy had just become significantly more dangerous.
The political situation had been deteriorating rather aggressively in the aftermath of the burning Temple and bodies in pyres and a Senate reorganising itself around a Trade Federation Lord named Hego Damask with a speed that spoke not of opportunism but of long preparation. This had been planned. Someone had built the mechanisms for it years in advance and waited for the right moment to pull the structures down.
He did not know yet if Damask was the real culprit or if he was just a puppet. He intended to find out.
Mandalore's relationship with the Republic had always been careful. Pragmatic rather than warm, built on the understanding that open borders and functional trade routes served both parties better than antagonism. It had required constant maintenance and a great deal of patience, and he had given both, because his people needed stability and stability required functioning relationships with the dominant galactic power.
The dominant galactic power was currently burning its own judiciary.
Each law moving through the new Senate carved further into the rights that had made the Republic worth engaging with — sentient rights, justice structures, the protections that had, imperfectly but genuinely, constrained what the powerful could do to the less powerful. Mandalorians had been treated poorly enough under the old arrangement. He had no illusions about what they could expect from this new one.
His Verde scattered through Republic space would need to come home. Not forced — he would not force it, that was not how he led — but the route made clear, the invitation open, Mandalore visible as a place worth returning to.
He looked at the footage one last time.
The Temple was still burning.He thought about Barden, who would be watching this same footage somewhere, with the same carefully arranged face that Mandalorian grief required, carrying his own version of this. He would need to speak with Barden. Not tonight. But soon.
He turned the holoprojector off.
The room was quiet. His Verde waited, reading his face the way soldiers read their commander's — looking for steadiness, looking for the shape of what came next.
He gave it to them.
"Bring the Verde home," he said. "Anyone in Republic space — word goes out, open invitation, route made clear. I want them to know Mandalore is there." He looked around the room. "I want everything we can find on Hego Damask. Who he is, where he came from, who supports him and who's quietly keeping their head down. And I want our diplomatic position reassessed — the Republic we were willing to work with is gone. We don't overreact, but we don't pretend we're still in the same negotiation either."
Acknowledgment moved through the room, quiet and immediate.
"Mandalore endures," he said. It was not a platitude. It was a reminder, to himself as much as anyone. "That is what we do."
He held himself straight until the room had emptied, until he was alone with the dark screen of the holoprojector and the quiet.
Then he sat back, and he let himself feel the full weight of it — Ben, and Barden, and the Temple burning, and all the years of quiet certainty that had just become certainty of a different and permanent kind — and he breathed through it, and he grieved, and he was for a few minutes just a man who had lost something he had never properly had and had always, foolishly, hoped to find again.
He did not even know his name.
Then he stood.
He had work to do.
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