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If it didn’t herald such a tragedy, Ahsoka would have to admit that the sight of the Temple burning is magnificent.
She enters the Temple through a small, lesser-known entrance Plo showed her and some of the other younglings once, and keeps her blaster’s safety off. When she begins hearing the screams outside of her head, she speeds up, tempted to cut herself off from the Force but knowing that will only make it harder for her to do what she needs to do, to find who she needs to find.
Somehow, she manages to avoid corpses for nearly all of her attempt to find the source of the Force’s agony.
And then she rounds a corner into one of the Initiate residency halls.
“...Anakin?”
His shoulders are heaving, and she sees the body in front of him. A Jedi she doesn’t know.
Still, unmoving, unbreathing.
Dead.
“Anakin, please, I—“
She moves to walk forward and he stiffens suddenly, turning halfway.
“Ahsoka,” he says, voice rough. “I need you to leave. Pretend you didn’t see this.”
“But Master, I—“
“Go, Ahsoka!” He’s yelling now, and he turns fully toward her. However, when he speaks up again, his voice is quiet, breaking. “Please. Before—“
“Before what, Anakin?” She walks forward carefully, hand hovering over his shoulder as she tries not to look down at the dead body, or at the lightsaber, still ignited, in his hand. “Just tell me. Please. I want to help you.”
“You can’t help me.” His voice is quiet, but firm; the next sentence, however, is as shaky as she feels. “You can’t help this.”
He lifts his head to meet her gaze, and she barely stops herself from gasping.
His eyes are a dark gold.
“Anakin.”
“What, Ahsoka?” he asks, sounding more tired than even when they’d pulled a series of all-nighters out on the front lines together. This tired comes from his bones.
“What’s going on?”
She knows, of course. She can feel it, can see it in the way a shadow passes over his eyes, the way he stiffens before seeming to relax again, only this time he’s not the Anakin Skywalker she knows.
“I need you to leave.”
“Not until I know what’s going on. I can help you, Anakin! I can—”
“Can do what!?” he shouts suddenly, eyes flashing. She pulls her hand away as if burnt as he raises his lightsaber into a defensive stance. A hand hovers over her blaster as she watches him, backing slowly away. “You can’t save me this time,” snarls the man that was—that is—Anakin.
“I have to try,” Ahsoka whispers. “I can’t leave you without at least trying, Skyguy.”
“Then you will fall.”
He rushes her. Ahsoka draws her blaster, cocks it, aims, fires point blank as his ‘saber moves toward her neck—
And never makes it there.
Anakin gasps, the sound rough and coarse and so, so wrong oh Force why did I do this why—
“Snips?” he chokes out, disbelief on his face.
“I’m here.” She throws his ‘saber with the Force, knocking it far away in a moment and sheathing it in the same, as she helps him to the floor.
His lightsaber hilt rolls, clinking quietly against the wall.
In the distance, she hears screams.
“Snips, I- I need to see Kix or something—”
“You’re okay, Skyguy, you’re okay.”
Your master is dying your master is DYING AHSOKA AND WHAT ARE YOU DOING YOU’RE JUST KRIFFING SITTING THERE GO AND DO SOMETHING ALREADY—
“I didn’t...didn’t want to kill them...they...I was gonna help them escape...I...I’m so...so sorry….”
When Anakin’s signature fades in the Force, she barely notices.
It already faded the moment he re-entered the Temple.
Ahsoka rises several minutes later, inhaling deeply, and continues further into the death trap that has become the Temple.
She leaves his lightsaber there.