Chapter Text
4 BBY
Ahsoka couldn’t believe how much more active she’d been in the last couple of months, because things had built to a fever-pitch since she’d sent Asajj to Ilum. Nearly fifteen years of planning offensives, spy rings, counter-strategies, and being the resistance, and now in quick succession, there were whole planets in open rebellion and not just parts of their populations.
The news was being ruthlessly suppressed, but it couldn’t be completely. There were too many sources, too many trouble-spots rising at once screaming no more.
The streets of Coruscant were rioting, whole levels a warzone as they fought it out with stormtroopers, miles of gasoline set alight because of her grand-master. The city-planet was almost literally divided in two as decades, if not centuries or millennia of resentment boiled over and everyone that had been ignored, abused, treated like nothing, started shaking the foundations as they took level by level, everything from the bottom up. Every injustice delivered on them by a corrupt Senate and a heavy-handed Empire was quickly being paid in two-fold.
Spear-heading one assault was a group she’d noted before, if more for the smuggling of Force Sensitives off the city-planet and low-grade sabotage, named Windu’s Army. Ahsoka had thought before that it might have been someone honoring the fallen Grandmaster, but shortly after Obi-Wan’s message had gone out, who but Mace Windu himself would come out of the shadows leading the charge with his vaapad and a long staff.
Ryloth had thrown any ‘trooper still loyal to the Empire off-world before strong-arming any ship they could get their hands on to start freeing the rest of their system whether it be from the Empire or from slavery. The Mon Cala fleet soon supplying them with the ships they needed as Twi’lek across the galaxy that hadn’t joined for one reason or another, went after slavers and the Empire turning a blind eye to those that had enslaved them for centuries alike with a vengeance.
They’d reached their breaking point, gone right past it, then dug their heels in after they’d gotten a taste of freedom for the first time in centuries, after lifetimes of oppression and slavery. Winning their own planet back after such a hard struggle, against an opponent as massive and over-bearing as the Empire, because they were tenacious and refused to take anything more, gave them the drive they’d lacked before. Ahsoka thought they might have gone a bit drunk on it, releasing a collective combined fury of billions over nearly a millennia, but Cham Syndulla kept a tight handle on his people and the only ones going rogue were those tracking down slave rings to free friends and family taken and to avenge those that had died in slavery. Those ones no one seemed inclined to reign in as long as the only ones getting hurt were slavers.
Though there also was the fact that the Mand’alor was openly supplying them with weapons and men with glee, that probably negated what control Syndulla had on those rogue factions.
Mandalore and Alderaan had joined forces, backing the Mon Cala fleet with well-trained, well-armed soldiers used to working in groups. Combined with the guerrilla tactics the Rebellion had been employing, now with military precision, the Rebellion was overtaking the Empire in blitz attacks, overrunning bases on the ground and shooting destroyers out of the sky.
The broadcast that had gone out confirming that to the galaxy had been beautiful. She’d watched as the Queen of Alderaan and the Mand’alor had clasped arms, swearing a blood oath by their shared Goddess of Vengeance and Family that the Empire would fall for what it had done to their loved ones, then called each other vod, firmly aligning the two rulers together again after their people had drifted apart centuries ago.
If Tarkin hadn’t already been dead, Ahsoka would thank the hard-headed militant for pushing a volatile situation because he wanted someone that he considered a threat out of the game at the earliest opportunity with the thinnest excuse, and then he’d told Leia’s adopted mother just that. Queen Organa had immediately acted by calling her people to war, demanding the death of the Empire in return.
It was perhaps the most understated detail of the whole scenario that followed, but Leia had been captured on the way to request aid from Obi-Wan Kenobi by her father, whose arrival and presence had turned the tide of the Battle for Alderaan but had been overshadowed by the arrival of the Mand’alor and his troops.
Bail had reached out to her once the battle was won, to tell her that her grand-master was on planet but wouldn’t be much longer before he left to start collecting his men from the Empire. She’d left Yavin 4 the first moment she had, but Obi-Wan had left by the time she got there – Darth Vader having shown up not a day before, and apparently all but frothing at the mouth screeching about sand and Satine as he chased after Obi-Wan.
Who had then left to protect Luke and Leia from any more of Vader’s attention while the Sith was so obviously unstable.
The description of Vader left a sinking feeling in her gut, because she’d hated Vader for fifteen years for killing Anakin, but that sounded like Anakin. She’d never met anyone with such a fervent hate for sand before or since.
The former Senator had broken out the good stuff as he relayed everything Obi-Wan had told him had happened on the Vengeance concerning Vader.
If she’d had suspicions before, they were nothing compared to Bail bluntly saying Leia ‘may’ have managed to stir Anakin up inside of Vader by telling her Master Obi-Wan had loved the Duchess.
She’d been stunned speechless.
It made sense, the part of her that was always looking at details and planning and coldly logical as Fulcrum knew that it did. There had been strange coincidences before, but nothing that had made her think more than just Vader was a Jedi once.
The part of her that was still that fifteen-year-old girl who’d felt abandoned by her Master and by her Order, couldn’t believe it. Anakin had been angry, so angry, by the end, but to join the Sith, to have done everything she knew Vader had done, she would have once sworn was impossible.
The girl that had escaped from Mandalore with Rex’s and Asajj’s help, that had then spent a year traveling with them, dodging the Empire and working to find a balance between what she’d been taught and the reality that she was angry and it wouldn’t go away simply by releasing it into the Force, she thought it wasn’t unbelievable.
She’d left Alderaan feeling hollow, trying to reconcile that her Master could have become a Sith, intending to return to Yavin 4 and her work as Fulcrum. Ahsoka had planned a route, set the course, and then had bounced from planet to planet, careful to confuse any possible pursuers without any attempt to actually return to Yavin 4.
Ahsoka couldn’t- she couldn’t return to the Rebellion she’d help build, look Mon Mothma in the eye, and tell her that their single greatest foe was actually Anakin, the man who was still whispered about with awe and respect as the Hero Without Fear. She couldn’t not tell her though, because she knew how Anakin fought, and showing people how to counter that could save lives. It would be demoralizing though, incredibly so, and since this was not information that she couldn’t risk interception of, she would have to tell Mon Mothma in person.
And convince her to say nothing.
She couldn’t do it – telling Mon Mothma would be accepting what Bail had said about Anakin, and she needed proof that such a thing was true.
She worked and networked, and did her job, but she chased rumors of Obi-Wan – she needed her grand-master’s guidance. A part of her couldn’t believe that Anakin had become Vader unless she either saw it with her own eyes or heard it straight from Obi-Wan.
Which was of course, the moment she had the strangest sense of an echo of Anakin’s Force signature.