Chapter Text
She'd got him a book for Christmas.
And Anakin wasn't traditionally a person who read. But she found it in the little bookstore a town over, the one trapped between a Starbucks and a laundromat, the bright yellow cover and dark letters reading The Worst Case Scenario Handbook too good to pass up. It made her laugh and she just hoped he would too.
But now Ahsoka wasn't quite sure she was ready to give it to him. She wouldn't throw it away- couldn't make herself- but she couldn't bear to take it out of her closet or wrap it or put it under the tree either.
She wanted to be mad, but couldn't be calm. Was too angry at him to talk about it but at enough peace to be pained when they were at odds like this.
The only feeling she could recognize was that everything just ached .
She awoke early and everything ached. She silently got dressed and the thought of her sleeping brother ached. She shut the apartment door and she just ached .
She waited for things to change (they didn't) and she waited for herself to stop aching (it didn't).
Ahsoka left the house with no destination. Just thoughts.
Why had it started?
Easy. Anakin annoyed her.
Or was it easy?
It wasn't simple, that was for sure. Not the way she wanted it to be. It wasn't just that Anakin had annoyed her. It had to be deeper, had to be something more than just a fight about going out to eat. Because she didn't blow up like that. Never had. But this was different , somehow, a different kind of anger that had built up over their month together, their month of smiling and trying and forcing things they weren't sure they could force.
It all just… blew up, she assumed. Built up pain and hurt and and blew up anger.
It didn’t make it any easier to stomach.
If anything, it made it harder, not quite sure why she was even still angry but knowing that everything in her was at a painful recognition and homesickness. Not only did she wish to be with Obi-Wan again, but with Qui-Gon, years since his passing but it not getting any easier.
He was the first person to give her a Christmas gift. The first person to smile at her with genuine love, the first person to carry her on their shoulders, the first person she was anywhere near calling a father.
But now she walked the cold streets, finding any grocery store, cafe, or fast food restaurant she could waste her time at, because the only home she had to go back to was filled with fear and anger over a situation she couldn’t control.
A situation.
Not a person. Not directly.
Just a situation.
Anakin wasn’t inherently the problem. He’d been a problem from the beginning, from the moment he laid eyes on her when she was barely three years old and instantly rejecting her, but he couldn’t fix what he’d done.
Maybe that was the problem.
Ahsoka growled as she scuffed her shoe against the pavement. Her thoughts were muddled and there were too many of them, everything was a problem and she couldn’t figure out what the problem was. Was it Anakin, Obi-Wan, Qui-Gon’s death, was it her?
Maybe it was her.
She wasn’t one for self love, after all. And sometimes it was easier to call yourself the problem than blaming someone you loved.
(It was at this point that she decided she needed a therapist. She laughed at the prospect.)
It was dark again when she reached the apartment complex, and it took everything she had to walk through the front door, and down the hallway. So when she reached apartment number four, Ahsoka couldn’t make herself go inside.
Her phone read eight forty when she sat down outside the door. A few people stared, no one asked.
It read ten when Ahsoka finally entered. She didn’t know where her mind had gone, but she didn't really care anymore. She just locked the door behind her, slid off her shoes, and tiptoed into her bedroom.
She tried not to think about the date as she watched her clock tick towards midnight.
========
Ahsoka woke up that morning, and just like the day before, it ached. Everything ached.
She still didn’t wrap his gift. Only avoided listening to Anakin’s footsteps as he carefully padded across the cold floors, too early that morning.
She didn’t want to get up. She didn’t want to face the problem that she could barely identify. She wanted to stay in bed, forget the date, fall asleep and pray no one tried to move her. No one tried to talk to her.
But her fantasies didn’t last long. Because a knock so soft she didn’t even know Anakin Skywalker could pull it off sounded on her door.
She didn’t answer. He entered.
“Hey, kid.”
Some (childish) part of her wanted to insist that she wasn’t a kid. That she was carrying the weight of worlds, and no kid would stomach that. But she held her tongue.
“Hey.”
It wasn’t much but it showed the weight of worlds she was trying to express. Or maybe it wasn’t the greeting, maybe it was the way her eyes didn’t dare meet his, or the blanket tangled around her feet, or the empty mug of tea that had been sitting on her nightstand for at least a day. But the weight was still there, and it made her ache, just like it always had.
“Can we talk?” He coaxed softly. Her own ache seemed to cancel out the realization that he had his own ache to deal with. His own confusion. And normally the sentence would strike fear into the heart of every teenager, but Anakin might as well be her age. Always has been. Ahsoka nodded, Anakin sitting down next to her curled up form on the bed.
“I don’t know what I did.” He let out a wry laugh. “Okay, that’s a lie. I know what I did when I was a kid. But I don’t know what I did the other day, and I want to fix that.”
A part of her ached that he didn’t apologize for what he did as a kid. The other part reminded her that nothing he did or said would fix that anyway. “I don’t know,” She admitted softly. “I got mad, and said things I shouldn’t have. But for the life of me, I can’t figure out what’s making me angry.”
She had no lack of number of things to be angry about, but none of them quite fit. Not that she knew. Which was why she was putting off the conversation for as long as possible, ignoring him and hoping she’d figure it all out and they could go back to being siblings, somehow.
“I take that back,” She replied softly. “A lot made me angry. I just don’t know which thing made me that angry.”
“I’m going to pretend that made sense to me.”
Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong-
It hurt. It ached. Everything ached again because that’s not what he’s supposed to say . He was supposed to pick apart the problem like Obi-Wan, supposed to smile softly and look at her with nothing but love like Qui-Gon, was supposed to figure it out and make her feel good because that’s what a parent does.
Ahsoka picked at a thread on her sweatpants. No one spoke.
“What do we do?”
You’re the adult , something yelled inside her. Figure it out .
And maybe that was the problem. She was the adult in a relationship where she was supposed to be the dependent. She was supposed to go to him. He was supposed to have the answers.
But he didn’t. And neither did she.
“I don’t know.”
Ahsoka saw him nod his head from the corner of her eye. She still hadn’t met his gaze. “It’s Christmas,” Anakin said softly. The thought she didn’t want voiced was finally out in the open, and no longer ignorable. “I was thinking, maybe we could try… Celebrating another day. When we’ve figured everything out.”
It… Wasn’t a bad idea.
Because she refused to let another Christmas be ruined by grief. She’d let too many Christmases consume her when the pain became too much. First, when she was little, barely three, and how to figure out what family meant again. Qui-Gon tried, but she was scared. Then again when she was nine, the grief and anger and hatred so all consuming that she was forced to scream her throat dry in an empty alley on her way home from school the day before Christmas break, because she was ready to give up on life and love and family , and she was only nine.
And at that moment, she was so ready to give up.
But she remembered what Obi-Wan told her, back then, when she screamed her throat dry as the grief became so all-consuming she was so sure her chest would simply crack open at the ache.
Your heart can be tired, too, and that’s okay. It’s been through a lot.
She nodded, gulping down tears at an old sting, and finally facing him. “Let’s do that.” Ahsoka thought he didn’t even hear her at first, his face blank, but slowly, softly, he smiled. “I don’t want to ruin another Christmas.”
A hand laid softly on hers. “We won’t.”
And she had no doubts he was telling the truth.