A pair of blue eyes darted open, drinking in the dim. The room so vaguely lit by a chemical-cloud sunset was hung with a grim austerity of a crypt. Barriss Offee rose to her feet, stiff and uneasy. Her meditations seemed to quiet her mind less and less. She turned from her altar to rummage in the small footlocker, the home of her few worldly possessions. She withdrew a small mirror, such a vital part of her daily routine. It was a gateway to vanity, that was true, but it was unseemly not to be presentable. She ran her fingers through her trailing mess of hair. It had been jet black that day on Geonosis, so many lifetimes ago. Now it was grey as Coruscant's streets, grey as the future she struggled every day to glimpse some sliver of clarity or hope within.

She locked eyes with her own gaze, with a face that seemed unlike her own. There were lines there that had not been so before. There were scars too. Scars the bacta couldn't heal. Scars were ugly. A lady doesn't talk about her scars. A padawan, a Jedi, endures, without comment or complaint. A Jedi is focused, selfless…peaceful.

Was she still any of those things?

Fingers ran down her face, as if to prove to herself what she saw was real. The callouses sat heavy on her hands, made thick by blasted bulkheads, rocky soil and the hilt of her lightsaber. They had been healing hands, once. How many wounded clones had she taken into her arms, poured her own life into theirs, to draw them back from the brink? How many had she then watched fall again, armour ripped open in a steaming, bloody ruin, beyond her own will, her own screaming futile desire to save them? She was no longer sure she could still ache for clones. War machines, expendable, that was how some even in the Order came to see them. Machines. Yet they were machines of flesh and bone that still laughed, still knew love and pain and fear. Beings that were all pieces of the Living Force, bred, manufactured for one purpose: to kill. They seemed the ultimate perversion of life itself…and the Jedi were their shepherds. Their masters.

Their butchers.

She remembered, yet again, she could still ache after all.