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“I’d ask how you’re still alive down here,” a voice says from behind her, so surprising after all these years that she flinches subtly from the odd sound of someone else’s voice. “But I think I figured out by now that you haven’t quite been a normal sentient for even longer.”
She doesn’t turn around. It’s been more than five years since she heard that voice, more than twenty since she’s heard it in person, heard it unhindered.
And, as she breathes a deep breath of sick, Dark air, she can feel it, too.
The Dark Side, even with all of its strength here, could never mimic something so balanced, especially not for her. Especially not when Morai has just calmly landed on her shoulder.
“Anakin,” she says. She thinks she should ask… something, but, again, it’s been many years since she’s talked with another sentient.
“It’s really me, Ahsoka,” he says, and there’s apology laden on his almost echoing voice.
“It was you then, too,” Ahsoka responds, finally turning around. Anakin is wearing a flickering form. Sometimes his face is old and twisted like she’d seen through the mask and sometimes it looks exactly like she’d immortalized in her head, and his clothes switch between traditional Jedi robes which look simply wrong on him and the black and brown and leather he’d worn before…
Well, she still doesn’t fully know what happened, does she?
“I didn’t say otherwise,” Anakin responds. His face settles a little more on the young one and a little more on the wrong robes that he’d never worn in front of her in life.
Because she’d felt it; he is dead.
“Why are you here?” She finally manages to ask. Anakin smiles, but it doesn’t meet his eyes.
“I told someone close to me,” he says. “That you were alive. And… and I killed my— the— I… I killed Sidious. You’re free.”
He looks away.
“For now, everyone is free of…”
Whatever next is indecipherable. It feels like a warning but for the life of her Ahsoka can’t even recognize the language. Anakin turns back to her, smiling.
“Now, will you follow me one last time?” He asks, holding out his hand.
And Ahsoka…
She takes it.
(It’s solid yet nonexistent in hers, and she doesn’t quite know what to think of the sensation.)
“Of course,” she says.
Anakin smiles, and Ahsoka can’t help but smile back.