Alright, before this gets started, I have to apologise, there shall be another week-long hiatus, but you get 1 chapter to satiate y'all because im generous. My life comes first, and Im in the middle of like 3 things, and sure Im just generating shit with AI, but I have to think of plot, edit, rewrite, think of more plot, yada yada, it takes time. I fortunately have 7 chapters done, so im nearly halfway there, but my goal is 15 before the end of next week. Again, apologies for such a wait, especially after this cliff hanger of a chapter.
Good news, though, you get to join my Discord, which I hope I made well; if not, you guys can tell me. It's also where patrons can talk to me directly and influence my work. Speaking of, p@treon is up, but it's got NATHING, because I won't make y'all pay for some membership when I promise 15 chapters ahead and don't have enough, but with it comes lemon chapters that Im gonna post to Discord members-only chat because im not giving my Government ID to p@treon cause im a lazy ass and paranoid goober. Im not confident in the Discord server, it's nothing fancy, just somewhere you guys can guess what's gonna happen next and chat with me when im awake, which won't be for the next 8-10 hours. Anyway, here is the link. Let me know if it doesn't work.
https://discord.gg/YDh7Zpneay
...
The bridge of Anakin Skywalker's flagship was quiet in the way warships only ever became quiet after too much noise.
Not peaceful. Never peaceful. Just subdued. The kind of stillness that came when a fleet was between battles, when repair crews were finally off the guns, and the dead had already been counted, but the next campaign had not yet begun.
Beyond the broad forward viewport, hyperspace rolled past in vast blue rivers, its light washing over the command deck and leaving moving bands of pale color across polished durasteel, clone armor, and the transparent glow of the central holo-table.
Ahsoka stood beside it with Aayla Secura on one side and Captain Rex on the other, trying not to keep glancing toward the corridor that led down into the lower levels of the ship.
Toward the private medbay.
Toward the room where Anakin had shut himself away after the battle.
The room where HK-47 had been standing guard like some murderous bronze idol, refusing her entry and nearly starting a fight in the corridor just by opening his mouth.
Commander Virek stood across the holo-table from them, posture as severe as ever, hands folded behind his back while he studied the projections rotating over the emitter. Admiral Yularen stood a little farther off, one gloved hand resting against the other while officers in the command pit below relayed status reports from the rest of the fleet.
The battle map still hanging over the table was from the world they had only just left. The ridge lines were marked in red where the droid artillery had been dug in. The blown command position—the one that had nearly killed all three Jedi standing on it—was still highlighted faintly at the center.
Ahsoka was only half looking at it.
Aayla noticed, but she was kind enough not to say so.
Rex, on the other hand, did not bother with that kind of gentleness.
"You're looking at the same blast pattern for the third time," he said. "It won't change on the fourth."
Ahsoka exhaled and folded her arms. "I'm not looking at the pattern."
"No," Rex said. "You're thinking about the General."
She shot him a look, but didn't deny it.
The image would not leave her mind. The buried cache detonating. The entire ridge going white. Anakin shoving her and Aayla clear with the Force and taking the shockwave full on. The sound his body had made when it hit the broken stone.
The medics on the surface had said he would live.
The medics on the ship had said much the same.
None of that had stopped the fear from staying lodged in her chest.
Aayla rested a hand lightly against the edge of the table and tried to pull the mood back toward the practical.
"We did learn one useful thing from that disaster," she said, her voice soft but steady. "If the Separatists start retreating too neatly, Skywalker will insist on standing exactly where the hidden explosives are buried."
That got the faintest snort out of Rex.
Virek did not smile, but something in the set of his shoulders loosened slightly. "With respect, General, he usually insists on standing where the battle is worst. The explosives are only one variation of the problem."
Ahsoka tried to smile and nearly managed it.
Yularen looked up from the line of data scrolling beside him. "The problem, Commander, is that General Skywalker has an unfortunate talent for surviving things that would kill other men. It encourages him."
"It encourages all of you," Ahsoka muttered.
Rex gave her a sidelong look. "That's not wrong."
Before anyone could say more, the bridge doors opened.
Ahsoka did not turn immediately. She heard the stride first—too heavy to be a clone, too deliberate to be a random officer. She sighed at what was to come because she already knew who it was.
K2-SO crossed the threshold without pause and headed straight for the command center of the bridge.
Not toward Rex.
Not toward her.
Straight to Yularen.
Rex frowned. "What's he doing here?"
That question, more than anything, made Yularen look up sharply.
K2 almost never came to the bridge unless Anakin had sent him with specific instructions. He was too useful elsewhere and too disruptive when left to his own devices.
The droid stopped directly in front of the admiral.
"Admiral," K2 said, and there was something in his voice that stripped the room of what little ease it had left. "You need to change course immediately. Set a direct route for Star Base Zahannah."
No one spoke for a second.
Yularen's expression changed first.
Not confusion. Recognition.
It was a standing order. One Anakin himself had given him months ago, when the fleet had first been organized around the 501st and its private routes and stranger supply chains and even stranger destinations. K2 was never, under any circumstance, to interfere with the Admiral's navigation authority unless the situation was catastrophic and Anakin was unable to issue the order himself.
Yularen's voice, when it came, was calm but sharpened. "What happened?"
K2 answered him immediately.
"The medical droids aboard this ship were wrong."
Ahsoka straightened.
K2 continued, his deadpan never slipping, which somehow made the words worse.
"They treated what they understood. Shock trauma, internal bruising, skeletal damage, stress to the secondary organs. They assumed that was sufficient because they have never before treated a member of my master's species. Their assumption was incorrect. His condition has deteriorated rapidly within the last eleven minutes."
Ahsoka stepped forward. "How could that not have shown up before?"
K2 did not even look at her.
Instead he fixed Yularen with that ember-red stare of his and kept speaking with terrible, measured clarity.
"The force of the blast did more than rupture tissue. It destabilized systems they did not know to monitor. His vitals spiked. Then they dropped. Then they spiked again. If we continue on our current course, the ship's medbay will not be enough to keep him alive."
The bridge had gone silent.
Even the officers down in the command well had stopped pretending not to listen.
Virek was the one who spoke next, and his voice had gone harder than Ahsoka had ever heard it.
"How long?"
The words snapped Ahsoka around so fast her montrals swung with the motion.
"What do you mean how long?" she demanded, horrified. "He's not dying." She turned to K2 "Is he?"
Virek did not look at her. He was staring straight at K2.
K2 gave the answer no one on that bridge wanted.
"If we do not begin re-routing now," he said, "then yes. He will die."
Ahsoka felt the floor drop out from under her.
For a wild second she could not breathe.
Then anger rushed in after the fear.
"You knew something was wrong," she said, stepping toward K2. "You were with him. You were there. Why didn't you say something sooner?"
This time K2 did look at her.
And for once there was no bite in him, no cruel amusement, no cutting remark for sport.
"I came here the moment I knew," he said. "Not the moment I worried. The moment I knew."
He turned back to Yularen.
"I have already transmitted ahead to Star Base Zahannah. The one stationed there can save him. The meddroids on this vessel cannot."
Ahsoka blinked.
"The one stationed there?"
K2 ignored the question. Whether out of habit, secrecy, or simple refusal, she could not tell.
Yularen did not ask either. He had gone very still, his face hardening into the expression of a man forcing panic into discipline because the bridge of a flagship did not belong to his fear.
He turned sharply toward the command pit.
"Helm," he called, and his voice cut through the ship with clean authority. "Break current route. Signal all ships in formation to follow the flagship. New heading: Korriban system. Priority command. No delays, no stagger, no exceptions."
Acknowledgments came back at once.
The great ship seemed to shift beneath their feet as navigation recalculated. Across the holo-table, blue route-lines bent and reformed. The fleet icon tightened and turned.
Aayla had not moved.
"Korriban?" she asked quietly, and there was no mistaking the surprise in her voice now.
Rex nodded once. "That's where the starbase is."
She looked at him. "I know what Korriban is. I'm asking why Skywalker has a Republic starbase over it."
Rex glanced toward Virek, as if deciding whether he should answer at all. Then he did.
"Because the 501st doesn't train there by accident," he said. "The place is hell on supplies, hell on nerves, hell on anyone who thinks war should be clean. The General wanted a world that could harden clones before the enemy did it for them. Kamino gives us discipline. Korriban gives us teeth."
Ahsoka stared at him.
Rex went on, perhaps because now that the truth of Anakin's condition had broken over them all, the lesser secrets no longer seemed worth guarding.
"The terrain's brutal. The atmosphere wears at you. The isolation strips away every comfortable habit a soldier can carry. By the time a trooper rotates back into the 501st from Zahannah, he's meaner, steadier, and a lot harder to break."
Aayla listened, but it wasn't the whole answer she was after.
"That still doesn't explain why he chose the homeworld of the Sith, he could of choosen any other world, many harsh planets are suitable enough."
Virek answered that one.
He had not changed posture once, but the tension around him had become almost visible.
"Because from Korriban," he said, "the fleet can move in almost any direction without asking permission from half the Republic to do it. The starbase sits deep enough in neutral space that politicians leave it alone, and close enough to several contested corridors that the General can strike fast when he needs to. It is isolated, heavily defensible, and far from scrutiny. Those were the qualities he wanted."
Aayla's eyes drifted toward the viewport, toward the terrible beauty of hyperspace.
"That sounds like him," she said, though she did not sound reassured.
Ahsoka barely heard any of it.
Her focus had narrowed to one thing.
Anakin was dying.
Not in some abstract battlefield sense. Not in the way Jedi were always one step from death anyway. Not in the familiar shape of wartime risk.
Now.
Here.
Somewhere only a few decks beneath her.
She looked back at K2.
"You said someone there can save him."
K2's head turned a fraction.
"You heard correctly."
"Who?"
He didn't answer.
Rex, who knew enough to recognize when certain questions would only vanish into a wall, stepped in before Ahsoka could push harder.
"Kid," he said quietly, "the important part is that we're moving."
Ahsoka opened her mouth to argue, then closed it again.
He wasn't wrong.
The bridge lights dimmed for a moment as the fleet synchronized its new turn. Outside the viewport, the stars of hyperspace twisted in long curving bands as the entire 501st formation reoriented around the flagship.
Yularen remained in the pit below, issuing course confirmations and range adjustments with perfect calm. Not once did he raise his voice. Not once did his hands betray the urgency he must have been feeling.
Aayla stepped beside Ahsoka and, for the second time that day, laid a hand lightly on her shoulder.
"He's alive," she said.
Ahsoka nodded because she could not trust herself to speak.
At the far side of the bridge, K2 had gone still again.
Only now Ahsoka understood that beneath his deadpan, cruelty, and constant needling, there was something like fear in the way he held himself. Not emotional in the way organic fear worked. Not panicked.
But absolute.
Focused.
The kind of fear that did not waste itself on expression because it was too busy trying to save someone.
Nine hours to Korriban, the helm announced.
Nine hours to Star Base Zahannah.
Nine hours for a war fleet to outrun death.
And as the bridge of the flagship turned toward one of the darkest worlds in the galaxy, Ahsoka Tano stood in the cold blue light of hyperspace and realized that for all the power her master carried, for all the legend and armor and mystery around him, he could still be lost.
That thought frightened her more than any battlefield ever had.
...
Now you guys have stakes, actual stakes, what's gonna happen, who's gonna heal Anakin, how is it gonna happen, what's Starbase Zahannah, who's Zahannah, when am I going to actually update A New Home. Stay tuned next time on DRAGON BA... Nvr mind, bad joke. Anyway, let me know how the discord is, if you have permission somehow to delete stuff that I didnt mean to allow, please let me know, I dont want to go through the process of creating another whole server again, it was such a pain, also theres a weird dude in there cause I made this server awhile ago, he helps me proofread my actual writing.