Ahsoka stared blankly down into the atrium. Shock and pain tempered her anger, and for a time everything was calm. Then her thoughts lurched into motion, staggering at first and then racing ahead to try to explain this rationally before she did something she couldn't control.

She'd been so caught up in learning Anakin's fate she'd barely given herself the time to wonder if any of her other friends had been captured, too. Barriss must have escaped Felucia, or she wouldn't be at this auction – only new abductees and reputable slave-gladiators were ever brought before Kyzeron's finest citizens – but what did that mean for the others? Where were the other vode and Jedi now?

How could she have grown so narrow-minded in her search for Anakin she'd forgotten everyone else? If she'd moved quicker, thought to widen her search for more of her old allies than just him, maybe she could've prevented this.

At least Barriss was calmer than Ahsoka had been when she'd been cuffed up in that same place. She was pulling at her chains, true, but the tugs were quick and experimental, methodically searching for weak points rather than trying to blindly fight her way through. She still projected an aura of power and dignity despite the obscenities the audience screamed at her.

But Ahsoka's heart still sank to look at her. Mirialan culture encouraged modesty of being and of dress, and Barriss had been forced into a strappy, skin-tight outfit that left little to the imagination. Seldom would a person uncover their head in public, and even more rarely were their arms and legs unobscured by flowing robes. Just as Ahsoka had favored the lightweight garb of her people in her choice of dress with the Jedi, so too had Barriss. Seeing her in so vulgar an ensemble felt wrong. It was a violation of what her friend valued.

The auctioneer said something about a test of skill Ahsoka barely caught in the roar of her own mind. The guards unhooked Barriss' chains from the post, giving her some freedom to move – though she was still bound to a ring set in the ground Ahsoka doubted even a Force-user could budge without difficulty.

"This is what I wanted you to see, Aluxsidrian," Zakhan said to Lux. "One of the privileges of your rank I made mention of. The Jedi will put up a fight to please the crowd, but she is weakened enough to make subjugating her a simple matter."

Zakhan gestured with one arm, and the guards began prodding Barriss with electrostaffs similar to those of the Noreino troopers outside. Barriss did not react.

They struck harder, the staffs lit and sparking. Barriss didn't even flinch.

Ahsoka smiled despite herself. The auction house wanted their main event to put on a show, but while Barriss was more passive than Ahsoka, she wasn't going to comply just like that. Where Ahsoka screamed and thrashed, Barriss stood stoically – and here, it was in the best execution of quiet rebellion she'd ever seen.

One of the guards grabbed her by one arm and shook her, but Barriss hardly afforded him a second glance. Get up. Perform, he said. Ahsoka couldn't hear him over the crowd, which had broken into hundreds of smaller conversations in their disinterest, but she could read the words well enough on his lips.

He reached for the electro-whip coiled at his belt and activated it. Ahsoka clenched her hands into fists. Gestures like that needed no translation.

The crowd's jeers did little to block out the strident, whining snaps of the whip, and certainly nothing to hide every cauterized lash that was left on Barriss' shoulders and back. Ahsoka pleaded with her frozen limbs and watering, unblinking eyes to stop, to give her a little peace by letting her turn away, but she couldn't move. Her throat was closing up, her lungs drowning in air...

Jek's hand at her hip. The whip searing into her back. The dozens of leering faces pressing close, eager for a try with her. It was too much, too much–

"Master," she choked out, a last desperate instinct before she lost herself.

Lux looked up at her, and all the animosity between them faded into nothing when he saw her face. He touched her forearm gently and murmured, "What is it?"

"Rebuke her, boy!" Zakhan growled, turning to look at her as well. "Clearly she has yet to learn that she must remain silent in the presence of her betters unless spoken to. You'd do well to correct it and teach her some manners."

"I... I only..." Ahsoka swallowed thickly, searching for an excuse. Speak their language, Ahsoka, Anakin's voice whispered from somewhere deep inside her. Then, blessedly, an idea came to her. "She's a fine specimen, wouldn't you say, my lords?"

"Silence, girl. You have not been given permission to speak!"

Ahsoka's breath caught in her throat – Jek's hand the cracks of the whip her last Master's guests – but she did not obey. "Was your lordship not telling me as we lay together how you yearned for a Jedi; to know what taking one would feel like?"

Lux's eyes went wide. While his expression was just as carefully measured as ever, the sudden forced calmness of his breath and the slight tremor in his fingers on her arm begged her to stop as surely as any verbal exclamation.

Speak their language. It was a language of lies, and speaking it made her want to throw up, but she couldn't back down now. "Now is your chance," she finished softly, keeping her voice level but her gaze too fearful to make her seem a threat.

Zakhan's gaze went dark, and when he raised his hand, Ahsoka was sure he was about to reach over and strike her. "Why, you insolent–!"

Ahsoka took a few hurried steps back, bowing her head in submission. Zakhan had only made his way to the top by being extremely perceptive. If she seemed just a little too bold or pushed just a little too hard, he'd catch on, and this entire thing would be finished. But if she could make him think Lux wanted a Jedi, maybe, just maybe, she could save her – and help soften some of the threat Lux felt he was living under, the same as her.

"I wish only for what is best to serve my lord," she told Zakhan quietly, hoping the words sounded more like a plea than a retort. Force knew it would be satisfying to yell at him, to tell him exactly what he'd done while the ray shield kept him a captive audience.

Zakhan relaxed back in his chair, leaning his head on one hand thoughtfully. "Everything in moderation, my boy," he said, ignoring her and turning back to his son. "Even the pleasures of the flesh. Softening yourself up too much with what you want is a path to weakness – weakness people of our station cannot afford."

The Force curled around Ahsoka's fingertips. That hand he rested on would do little to block her, if she snapped his neck right then and there. Such a powerful temptation...

"But," Zakhan continued, "on the other hand, a Jedi in chains by your side would be an excellent show of power to our opposition. The only thing to do would be to make sure she is properly broken first. She resists – her treatment has not had as strong an effect on her as it has had on some of the others."

Through her relief, Ahsoka had to bite back a laugh. If only he knew.

"We will let the show continue," Lux said calmly, letting go of her and leaning forward in the perfect picture of intrigue. She might've even believed him, had she not been able to smell his fear – and the bitterer scent beneath it had to be betrayal. "I'd like a show of her skills and how much reconditioning she'll need, first."

Ahsoka frowned. That first flash of instinct was fading as her plan to bring Barriss to safety coalesced, and abruptly, she realized Lux was digging himself deeper in. She'd yelled at him, berated him, and still he was helping her.

He could have called me out and saved himself all this trouble, but he didn't. And I should have expected he would betray me, but I didn't.

She'd trusted him not to. In one short week, she'd begun to trust the man who by all rights should have been her enemy. And still she'd betrayed him – for it was a betrayal, even if he she tried to make it easier on herself to swallow by saying it would please his monster of a father.

A flash of movement drew her gaze back to the atrium below. The guard with the whip had apparently decided Barriss had learned her lesson, and was yanking her to her feet. A group of commando droids adorned with the Imperial and Noreino crests rose through the sandy floor armed with a gun and a sword-like vibroblade each. As the gladiators advanced, the guard held a plain grey hilt out to her.

Her heart in her throat, Ahsoka reached out with the Force, a quick, arcing probe that shot toward the hilt and back in a heartbeat. It came back with the song of a lightsaber crystal, and for the first time since that battle on Felucia a year before, she felt a brilliant, true sense of hope flooding through her.

Barriss had snuck in here for something. This had to be an assisted escape attempt. Did the Rebellion know she was here? Had Ashalla, or Kuro, or someone she didn't even know sent word? Was Anakin coming for her, at last fulfilling that promise he'd made to always protect her?

Lux gasped softly beside her. "Is that a lightsaber? That can't be safe!"

"It's safe enough. Watch."

Barriss held out her bound hands to summon the lightsaber to her. Ahsoka opened herself up to the Force as much as she dared in the hopes of sensing her plan; maybe there was some way she could help. But she felt only Barriss' sadness and hollowness, like something had burrowed inside her and stolen...

The lightsaber didn't go to her. It didn't even twitch. Barriss' ability to use the Force had been taken from her, ripped from her very cells until she couldn't even bring the means of her salvation into her hand. Just like what the Empire had tried to do to Ahsoka herself.

"No," Ahsoka whispered.

Finally, Barriss gave up and stepped forward to pick up the lightsaber. The green blade sputtered as she ignited it, utterly lacking in the natural fluidity of a true Jedi weapon. Ahsoka had heard rumors in the Rebellion of Imperial initiatives to reverse-engineer lightsabers from those of fallen Jedi; this had to be one of them.

Barriss whipped around, trying to slash it through her chains. They didn't break, and the last of Ahsoka's hope was shot down mid-flight.

No rescue was coming. This was real.

But instead of trying to attack the gladiators with the lightsaber to get herself another weapon, Barriss doused the blade and swung the hilt at an edge of the sturdy metal post behind her. The casing broke on impact, the flimsy, poorly welded metal snapping under the stress.

Barriss dropped to her knees and bent over the ruined hilt. When she rose to her feet again and ignited the lightsaber a few seconds later, the blade was steady. She switched to a reverse grip to bring the blade between the cuffs on her wrists, and this time, it slid through them like a knife through butter.

Then, she turned on the droids.

"She's gone rogue!" the auctioneer screeched, darting out of the way as the nearest one fell to the ground in two smoldering hunks of metal. "Kill her!"

That feeling of hope, bruised and battered but not as defeated as Ahsoka had thought, began to rise anew. Barriss must've known how to fix whatever problem these sabers had. She must have planned this, even if she'd lost the connection to the Force that made her a Jedi. There had to be something.

But why was she here?

She pressed a fist to her mouth when one of the droids blasted Barriss' right shoulder. Her old friend switched her saber to her other hand without hesitation and kept deflecting their shot, but it wasn't long before another droid landed a hit on her left side. Barriss was highly skilled, but without the Force, she was moving too slowly – she had no external energy to fall back on, quickening her steps and whispering to her when an enemy was about to fire.

She was too far out of her element, trying to pair old techniques with reflexes she no longer had. Just like with Ashalla a week before, unless someone stepped in, Barriss was going to suffer.

For all the ice she'd tried to build up around her heart, protecting her until she could find a safe place to heal, Ahsoka knew she couldn't let that happen.

"I'm here, Barriss," she whispered, reaching out to touch her mind to her old friend's. Barriss' head whipped up, Ahsoka's name on her lips, and even with the Mirialan woman's reduced strength, Ahsoka had already opened the door. She reached back through it, and Ahsoka saw.

Barriss bled from a thousand wounds no one could see, deep scrapes etched into her soul by months of grieving. They were ripped open afresh every day. Like Ahsoka, her dreams had begun to die in the Battle of Felucia. Ahsoka saw the wounded through Barriss' eyes, all the ones she hadn't been able to save and those she felt she could have saved if Gree hadn't dragged her onto their transport, and something ached deep inside her. Then she'd found out Ahsoka and Anakin and so many of her friends had fallen to the Empire, and hadn't been able to stop crying for weeks. Ahsoka could feel the warm, unending streams of tears staining her cheeks as surely as if she were the one crying.

Then, after nearly a year of flitting through her duties, wraithlike, healing what injured Rebels she could and whispering the old Jedi words of parting for the many more that died on her watch, news of her Master had surfaced. A snatch of her presence distorted with pain as Barriss meditated had confirmed it, and the hope and sadness and love she'd felt washed over Ahsoka like a wave, threatening to drown her as it had drowned Barriss.

Here was someone she could save. Here was someone she wouldn't allow to slip away as she had let so many others escape her grasp.

She'd inherited Anakin's junky freighter in the absence of Ahsoka and Obi-Wan. She spent weeks aboard it, hardly daring to stop for fuel in her haste to follow the trail of Imperial breadcrumbs from system to system before they went stale.

Victory had proved to be a phantom. Luminara Unduli's body, preserved with harsh chemicals instead of being allowed to return to the Force from whence it had come, had drawn Barriss to the Spire on Stygeon Prime – not her living soul. Barriss' last hope had been a trap, and though she had not been its intended target, every Force user with viable midichlorians in their veins was a welcome asset.

Pain arced up her spine as a tracker was activated for the first time, and her veins flamed like the very blood within them had turned to lava – memories that were Barriss' as much as they were Ahsoka's. Hundreds of billions of tiny voices cried out in pain as the searing burn of the silvery drug in her system charred them into non-existence.

Ahsoka gasped and broke the connection, stumbling back a step.

It's too late for me, Barriss whispered in her mind as it faded, an after-echo of everything she'd shared with her. I've lost everything else, but I'm so happy I didn't lose you. Now, I can die knowing I am not alone.

In the arena below, Barriss dodged to the side and deflected another blaster bolt with a blade that was suddenly much too bright and a hilt that was spewing sparks. Ahsoka bit her lip so hard she tasted blood. Barriss hadn't known how to fix the problem with the Imperial lightsaber. She'd only known how to boost the power – and what had served her at first by strengthening the lightsaber was starting a chain reaction that would destroy it.

One of the droids shot Barriss in the back. As she fell to the ground, she threw the lightsaber as hard as she could toward the ray shield protecting the box.

Her life force flickered out. Something inside Ahsoka snapped, the raw shriek of agony tearing its way up her throat fading to quiet rage at her failure, at Barriss, at the Empire, at everything.

The lightsaber struck the shield and exploded, a surge of power that took out many of the surrounding boxes and their occupants.

She did not flinch as the blast devolved into an inferno of sickly green flames just barely held at bay by the protective field.

She did not wince as the heat from the explosion seared her skin through the shield and made the tears on her cheeks sting.

She sidestepped the guards rushing in to protect their lords and ran out into the hallway. The very air around her felt charged with some strange power that was just waiting there for her to bend it to her will. She had gashes like Barriss', too – slashing through her with a pain so terrible it was only by hiding herself away that she kept from going insane. But instead of bleeding now they glowed red hot, and some uncanny mix of blood and ash and fire began to seep through.

Revenge is not the Jedi way. Again, the voice of her conscience took on the shape and sound of Anakin's voice. She pushed it away. She would not think of Anakin, or of the purpose she had given herself for the duration of her stay in the midst of her enemies. She would only basked in her newfound strength, power that had slumbered within her almost untapped for months, and let it fuel her.

Ahsoka had already lost so many people to the senseless greed and violence of the Empire. Barriss' death had to mean something. It had to.

She would make it so if it was the last thing she did.

The Force surged away from her like waves away from the epicenter of an underwater earthquake. She couldn't see it with her own eyes, but she sensed it plain as day when all the guards in the building fell dead, their necks twisted and broken by the sheer power she possessed.

She extended it once more in an intangible bubble that encompassed the auction house and all the markets surrounding it. The energy came to her almost without her having to summon it. Bending and shifting it in the right direction, she reached out for every lock, chain, collar and pen door that was holding a slave at bay and broke it beyond repair.

Ahsoka closed her eyes and took a deep breath. Then, she whispered a single phrase into the minds of the beings who, like Barriss and even like herself, had lost all hope that their oppression would ever come to an end, that things could ever change for the better.

Run. Fight. Rebel.

The slaves outnumbered their masters ten to one. If they rose against them together, nothing could stop them.

Run. Fight. Rebel.

In her mind's eye, Ahsoka could see the utter pandemonium she had helped unleash. But she couldn't take full credit. No, the will to fight had always been there, somewhere beneath the surface. She was just helping it along.

"Barriss, Anakin, Rex, Padmé, you are the wind that buffets the mountain range," she murmured. She barely recognized the words coming out of her mouth as hers, but she liked them. "I am the stone that starts the avalanche."

Run. Fight. Rebel.

It was time to join those who had become her brothers and sisters under the Empire's cruelty and go about what she had waited far too long to do.

Ahsoka has hit a tipping point with the death of a dear friend. It's sending her down a path she believes she should have started on long ago, and with it comes powers she's never felt before. Could the truth of their origin change her mind about what she's about to do? Is throwing caution to the wind really the right thing, now that any hope of saving Barriss is lost? How will all this translate back to Lux, Ahsoka's self-assigned purpose and mission? Only time will tell...

This time around I was conflicted about whether to kill Barriss off. I adore TCW with my entire soul, but Barriss' betrayal was one of the things I'm on the fence about because as far as I can remember it wasn't set up AT ALL. It felt like it was kinda outta nowhere – hence my attempt to explain it in one of my other fics, Luxsoka: A Love Story. But ultimately I did what they must have in TCW and went with what served the plot. Ahsoka needs a catalyst to really kickstart her journey back to herself and back to Anakin, and this is a really powerful way to remind her that even indecision has high stakes.

Even so, I think it's starting to become apparent that something is wrong with Ahsoka. She turned to anger as a means of gaining strength and steeling herself against the world, but she's dug herself in deep, and getting back out again could be problematic. At the very least, it won't be without some serious emotional reckoning, which makes this chapter and the next very pivotal ones.

Run. Fight. Rebel. It's simple, but powerful. Something has begun here, and I feel like it'll become an iconic phrase later in the story...