Chapter 4: The Taste of Penance
The hatch hissed open. Blue light from the hold painted the underside of the cockpit ladder in shuddering bands. Barriss descended, each step measured, her boots finding the rungs with the quiet certainty of a surgical implement being drawn from a sterilizer.
She found Luminara slumped against the alloy support beam. Not unconscious. Profoundly, devastatingly awake.
Fine tremors wracked the older woman’s frame, a constant seismic shudder that made the magnetic binders click-rattle against the cargo strap. Her head lolled forward, matted grey strands of hair sticking to her damp brow and neck. The coarse fabric of her Jedi robes was dark with sweat at the collar, under her arms, down the spine—a map of misery. Her breathing was a ragged, wet sound in the quiet hold, each inhale a struggle, each exhale a shudder.
Barriss approached slowly, the hum of the engines a distant threnody. She stopped a pace away, observing. This wasn’t serenity shattered. This was containment breached. The disciplined channels of Luminara’s mind had overflowed, and a chemical flood was eroding everything in its path.
“The metabolic accelerator raises your core temperature,” Barriss said, her voice conversational, didactic. “Your body is trying desperately to cool itself. The robes are a barrier. They’ll cook you from the inside out.”
Luminara’s head lifted. The movement was slow, laborious. Her eyes, when they found Barriss’s, were not glazed. They were horrifically clear—a lucid, hot rage burning behind a film of sweat and exhaustion. The Jedi calm was gone, scorched away. What remained was bitter, undiluted fury.
“Get… away from me,” Luminara grated. The words were thick, slurred by a swollen tongue and disgust.
Barriss didn’t flinch. She knelt, reaching for the clasps at Luminara’s shoulders. Her fingers were cool, dry, precise.
Luminara jerked back, a feral snarl escaping her lips. “Don’t touch me!”
The binders held her fast. Barriss’s hands continued their work, undoing the fastenings with a calm efficiency that was more violation than any violent tear. “You’re soaked through. You’ll develop hyperthermia. This is basic field medicine, Master. Or did the Order not cover survival scenarios where your padawan drugs you?”
The outer robe fell away, pooling like a defeated banner around Luminara’s hips. The undertunic beneath was plastered to her skin, translucent with moisture, clinging to the lines of her torso, the rise of her breasts, the tense curve of her stomach. Luminara shuddered, this time from the chill of the air on her wet skin, the sensation a bright, shocking agony against the inner fire.
“You hypocrite,” Luminara spat, her breath coming in short, hot bursts. “You talk of necessary choices. Of clarity. This is just cruelty. Petty, vindictive theatre.”
“Is it?” Barriss’s hands slid to the hem of the undertunic. “You said you wanted penance. You said you’d do anything. Was that a lie? Or is the reality of ‘anything’ simply too undignified for you?”
She pulled the sodden tunic up.
Luminara had no choice but to raise her arms as far as the binders allowed, the motion exposing the vulnerable pale green skin of her midriff, her ribs, the underside of her breasts. A choked sound, half-protest, half-sob, caught in her throat as the last damp layer was stripped away and discarded onto the growing pile of fabric.
She sat there, bound to the beam, naked but for her leggings. The cool air was a thousand needles on her overheated skin. Her body, taught and lean from a lifetime of discipline, was slick with perspiration, her ribcage expanding in rapid, shallow breaths. The traditional black tattoos on her chin and hands stood in stark, defiant contrast against her flushed skin. She felt utterly, devastatingly unmasked. Not just physically. The drug had scraped away the padding of composure, leaving raw nerve.
Barriss sat back on her heels, looking at her. Not with lust. With assessment. “There. Now you can cool down.”
“You enjoy this,” Luminara hissed, the anger giving her words a sharp, desperate focus. “Seeing me reduced. Seeing me… like this. It’s what you wanted all along, isn’t it? To prove I was just as weak, just as fallible as you. To drag me down into the muck with you.”
For a moment, Barriss’s clinical mask flickered. Something wounded and furious flashed in her blue eyes. “You think this is about dragging you down?” She leaned in, her voice dropping to a venomous whisper. “You were already in the muck, Master. You were standing in it up to your knees on Geonosis, on Christophsis, on a thousand war-torn worlds, preaching peace while you led me into battle. You just refused to look down. I’m making you look.”
She stood abruptly, turning away, walking to a storage locker. She pulled out a standard-issue grey blanket, coarse and thin.
Luminara’s anger was a storm with no outlet, turning back in on itself. The tremors worsened. She was cold now, a deep, marrow-chill setting in as the sweat evaporated. The humiliation was a living thing, squirming in her gut alongside the chemical despair. “I failed you,” she whispered, the admission dragged from a place deeper than pride. “I see that. But it was you who chose the path, your arrogance blinding you to everything but your own flawed vision.”
Her voice cracked with the weight of the truth, the drugs stripping away decades of careful diplomacy, leaving only the raw, bitter truth behind. “I should have known you would take this path. I sensed the weakness in you years ago, but stayed my hand out of pity. Now look where that's gotten me.”
Barriss froze, the grey blanket still clutched in her hands. The words hung in the tense silence of the cargo hold, a blade unsheathed and left to dangle between them. She turned slowly, her blue eyes burning with a dangerous light, the clinical demeanor shattered like glass under a boot heel.
The accusation hung between them, a vibroblade quivering in the air. Barriss’s face went very still, all the calculated fury freezing into something colder and more brittle. A muscle in her jaw twitched, a tiny betraying pulse beneath the geometric tattoos.
“Weakness,” she repeated, the word flat and drained of all its previous heat. She let the blanket fall from her fingers, a grey heap on the deck. “You think my fall was about weakness?”
She took a step closer, her boots scuffing against the metal. The hurt was there, bright and glinting in her eyes, but it was being hammered instantly into a weapon. “That’s the Jedi diagnosis, isn’t it? A failure of character. A moral deficit. It’s so much easier than admitting the galaxy is a rotten, screaming place that your serene philosophies can’t fix.”
Barriss stopped just outside of Luminara’s reach, her gaze sweeping over the older woman’s exposed, trembling form. “But I’m not the one shaking apart right now, am I? I’m not the one radiating a signal so loud it’s screaming in the Force.”
She tilted her head, a mockery of her old, studious expression. “Let’s see. I feel bitterness, sharp as broken glass. That’s obvious. Shame, hot and oily. That’s newer. Under that… a torrent of sheer, undirected rage. And beneath that.” Barriss’s lips curved into a smile that didn’t touch her eyes. “Hunger. A deep, aching want that has nothing to do with the Light.”
“Stop it,” Luminara breathed, shutting her eyes, trying to wall it in. The drugs made it feel like her skin was gone, every emotion bleeding out into the open air for Barriss to poke and prod.
“I can’t. It’s all just… pouring out of you.” Barriss’s voice dropped to a coaxing, vicious whisper. “All those years of perfect control. For what? It was a dam, and I just blew a hole in it. Why not let the rest go? Let me see what’s really in there, under all the Jedi dogma. I saw a glimpse when we fought together. I know it’s in there.”
“You don’t know anything.”
“I know you want to hit me.” Barriss leaned in, her breath a ghost on Luminara’s cheek. “You want to make me feel a fraction of what you’re feeling. That’s not very Jedi, Master. That’s just animal. So be an animal. Just for a second. Show me.”
The words were a spark in a fuel-rich atmosphere. The cocktail in Luminara’s veins—the Synox, the Peptyl, the glitteryll—turned the command into a physical compulsion. The dam cracked, then shattered.
Every suppressed ounce of betrayal, every moment of condescending pity from her jailers, the visceral humiliation of being stripped and examined, the decades of grief for the bright-eyed girl now twisted into this—it fused into a single, white-hot point of need.
It was a lash of pure instinct.
An invisible wave of concussive energy erupted from Luminara’s core.
It hit Barriss squarely in the chest, lifting her off her feet. She crashed into the far wall of the cargo hold with a sickening crunch of body against reinforced alloy. The impact shuddered through the ship’s frame, silencing the ever-present hum for a single, stark moment.
Barriss slumped to the deck, a heap of black fabric and limbs.
Barriss lay still for three heartbeats, the air knocked from her lungs. A sharp, bright pain flared in her side where the bulkhead had met her ribs. She pushed herself up on one elbow, a line of blood tracing from her split lip down her chin. She touched it, looked at the red smear on her glove, and laughed—a wet, ragged sound that echoed in the metal space.
“There you are,” she coughed, pushing herself fully upright. Her side protested with a stab of fire, but the pain was a clean, clarifying thing. She’d reached into the chaos of Luminara’s mind and been answered. Not with Jedi serenity. With a storm.
She limped toward the same storage locker, her movements stiff but purposeful. Inside, next to ration packs, lay a matte-black cylinder—a standard-issue crowd-control sonic baton. She hefted its familiar weight. This was a different kind of tool.
Luminara watched her approach, chest heaving, the aftermath of her outburst leaving her empty and shaking. The anger had crested and broken, leaving a sickening wash of shame. She’d attacked. With the Force. Out of pure, unadulterated fury. “Barriss, I…”
“Don’t,” Barriss interrupted, her voice tight with pain but vibrating with a perverse triumph. “Don’t apologize. That was the most honest thing you’ve done in years.”
She stopped just outside Luminara’s reach, thumbing a switch on the baton’s handle. It emitted no visible light, only a barely-audible high-pitched whine that set their teeth on edge.
“You showed me the wound,” Barriss said. “Now it's my turn.”
She raised the baton and pressed a second button.
A concentrated cone of supersonic energy, invisible and silent to the outer ear, hit Luminara like a physical wave. It wasn’t sound she heard, but a pressure inside her skull, a disorienting jolt that scrambled her inner equilibrium. Her vision stuttered and swam, the blue emergency lights smearing into streaks. A violent wave of nausea clenched her stomach, and she dry-heaved, her body convulsing against the binders. All coherent thought was scoured away, replaced by a vertiginous, drowning whiteness.
The blast lasted only a second. Barriss watched her former Master go limp, head lolling, eyes unfocused and swimming. The fight was gone, melted into total neurological disarray. She thumbed the control again, shifting the setting.
The brutalizing supersonic pulse ceased. A new emission began—a low, pervasive hum that was felt more than heard, a deep-frequency vibration that seemed to originate in the bones. Barriss stepped closer. Luminara was barely conscious, her breath a shallow pant, her skin slick and pale.
Barriss lowered the vibrating tip of the baton, touching it to the soaked fabric of Luminara’s leggings, right at the juncture of her thighs. The material was drenched, a combination of sweat and the unmistakable evidence of the drugs’ relentless work. The gray fabric was dark, clinging.
The vibration transferred through the wet weave instantly. It was a bizarre, invasive sensation, a deep rattle that resonated through Luminara’s pelvis, a mockery of touch that bypassed nerve endings to speak directly to the marrow. A choked gasp, devoid of any anger, tore from Luminara’s throat. Her hips jerked, a helpless, involuntary spasm away from the source, but the binders held her fast, offering the vibration nowhere to go but deeper.
“See?” Barriss murmured, her own breath quickening as she watched, clinically fascinated. She moved the humming tip in a slow, deliberate circle, the soaked fabric transmitting every nuance. “The body has its own truth. It doesn’t care about vows, or discipline, or control. All those walls you built…” She increased the intensity a fraction, and Luminara’s back arched, a strangled sound catching in her clenched teeth. “They’re just scenery. This is the foundation.”
Luminara’s head rolled against the beam. Tears of sheer, overwhelmed sensation leaked from the corners of her eyes, tracing clean lines through the sweat on her temples. Her hands curled into useless fists, the magnetic cuffs scraping against the strap. She was a exposed circuit, overloaded, every signal screaming. The simmering, drug-fed hunger in her belly was no longer a secret; it was a conductor for the relentless, vibrating frequency, amplifying it into a tidal wave of shameful, undeniable need.
“Just let go,” Barriss whispered, her voice hypnotic, her own face flushed with a dark, vicarious thrill. “The Luminara who needs to be in control… she failed. She failed me. Let her die. What’s left will be so much simpler.” She pressed the baton firmer against the drenched fabric, a relentless, impersonal stimulation. “What’s left is just this. Just feeling. Just truth.”
Luminara’s mouth opened in a silent cry. The last vestiges of her composure, the final shreds of Jedi detachment, were being systematically unraveled by the vibration buzzing through her core. It was an annihilation not of body, but of will. Her breaths came in short, sharp pants, each one a surrender to the sensation she could not escape. Her eyes, wide and desperate, found Barriss’s—no longer pleading for mercy, but mirroring a horrifying, dawning understanding. This was the breaking. And she was, finally, breaking.
The vibration was no longer an assault. It had transformed, weaving itself into the frantic rhythm of her own pulse, becoming a devastating promise that coiled tighter and tighter in the base of her spine. Her muscles, wound taut for hours, began to unravel into the hum, accepting it. A low, broken sound escaped her, one that held no words, only surrender to the invasive frequency. Her head fell back against the beam, eyes squeezed shut, her body no longer fighting the binders but straining towards the source of the terrible, necessary sensation.
Just as the tension crested, as the white noise in her mind focused into a single, blinding point of release, the humming stopped.
The sudden silence was violent.
Luminara’s eyes flew open. Barriss had thumbed the switch off and was stepping back, the baton held loosely at her side. The absence of the vibration was a physical shock, a void where electricity had been. Her nerves screamed, aching and abandoned on a cliff edge. A raw, guttural whine tore from her throat, part sob, part snarl.
“N-no,” she stammered, her voice shattered. “Barriss, please—” The plea was directionless, a contradiction. Please continue. Please end this. Please.
Barriss watched her, a sheen of sweat on her own brow. She could feel it in the air, in the Force—the chaotic storm of need, the agony of interruption. It was a thick, delicious pressure against her senses. But the core of it, that final, willing capitulation, still held out. There was still a shred of the Master in the wreckage, observing its own destruction.
“Please what?” Barriss asked softly. She leaned the baton against the storage locker, the gesture casual, final. “You’re begging, but you don’t even know what for. You’re still arguing with yourself in there. I don’t want your body’s reflexes, Master. I want your permission.”
Luminara shook her head helplessly, her hips making a small, frantic circle against nothing, seeking friction, completion, anything. The slick heat between her legs was a throbbing, unbearable accusation. “I can’t…”
“You can,” Barriss corrected, her tone shifting to something almost mundane. “You just won’t. So, think it over. I’ll be upstairs. The hold is soundproofed, by the way. For cargo.” She turned and walked to the ladder.
“Barriss, don’t you dare leave me like this!” Luminara’s shout was hoarse, fraying into desperation.
Barriss paused, one foot on the bottom rung, and looked back over her shoulder. Her expression was unreadable. “Like what? Alive? Aware? Full of feeling? You asked for penance. This is what it looks like. It’s not meditation. It’s not quiet. It’s loud, and it’s messy, and it’s all yours.”
She climbed. The hatch sealed with a definitive thump of hydraulic locks.
Silence, total and absolute, crashed down. It was worse than the sonic blast. In that silence, every sensation amplified. The chill air was a razor on her damp skin. The ache in her shoulders from the binders was a dull, detailed map of strain. And the need, the unfinished, furious need, was a second heartbeat pulsing between her thighs, urgent and shameless.
She let out a shuddering breath that sounded like a sob. She tried to hold still, to muster the fragments of her discipline. To breathe through it, as she had with pain a thousand times before.
But this was different. This was an itch in the center of her being, a relentless, chemical demand. Her thighs, pressed together, offered a faint, tantalizing pressure. A whimper escaped her. She clenched her fists, the binders biting. It was undignified. It was animal.
She couldn’t stop.
Her hips shifted again, a minute, grinding roll against the cool metal of the deck plate. The contact was negligible through the wet fabric of her leggings, but it sent a spike of sensation so sharp it made her gasp. Shame burned her face, hotter than the drugs. This was beneath her. This was everything the Jedi had taught her to transcend.
Her body, pharmacological, did not care.
She rubbed her thighs together again, a slightly harder, more deliberate motion. The slick friction was a betrayal and a relief. A choked sound, half-despair, half-pleasure, caught in her throat. She did it again, and again, a slow, secret rhythm in the deafening silence. Each movement was a surrender, each muted gasp a funeral dirge for her composure. She kept her eyes tightly shut, as if not seeing her own actions could negate them, but the dark behind her lids was filled with the image of Barriss’s retreating back, her cold, analytical eyes.
She was alone, utterly, with the wreckage of herself. And in the quiet dark, with only the ship’s distant groan for company, she moved against nothing, chasing a relief that only deepened her ruin.