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I can’t keep doing this.
She keeps parrying the bolts and trudging forward, leading her men towards the next outpost, the next droid factory, the next skirmish, the next rendezvous point, the next battlefield.
Her men. What a joke. She’s not even old enough to legally drive. Yet because she is a Commander of the Grand Army of the Republic, she can not only drive a speeder, but she can pilot a ship. A cruiser. A troop transport. She can fly anything she wants to.
She leads thousands of men to their deaths. She has to make tactical decisions that could cost the Republic planets.
She’s barely fifteen.
She hopes that soon the war will be over, that she can go back to just being a padawan. That her biggest problem will be sneaking out to go to a diner or a concert with the other padawans and not being caught by her master when she returns in the middle of the night.
It’s too painful to let those thoughts out, so she buries them deep and keeps being encouraging, keeps moving forward.
General Skywalker will come for them soon. He’s never let her down.
~
I’m so tired.
It used to be that she’d thought being a padawan, having classes all day with only the weekends off and having extra lessons and housekeeping to do with her master would be tiring.
This is the first day off she’s had in months that wasn’t between battles while going through hyperspace.
She’s spending it in the Temple, catching up with the few padawans she knows that are there as well. Most of them are still out on the front lines with their masters. Most of them she barely knows, because now there are no padawan groups. It’s just padawan and master and their battalion out in the stars, fighting and killing and dying.
So much for learning to keep the peace.
~
But at least my master loves me.
She treasures the few real master-padawan moments she gets between the battles. When he teaches her new lightsaber forms, corrects her technique, shows her a new way to pick a lock or hotwire a speeder, code a droid, use the Force to keep herself safe. Is just there for her after an injury or a nightmare or being taken prisoner.
Then she feels better. She feels loved.
It’s too bad those moments are getting fewer and fewer as the war escalates.
~
I’m so hungry.
The clones were raised on ration bars and protein goo, and that’s what they eat. It’s plant-based. It always leaves her hungry. Too long only eating that leaves her exhausted and feeling sick. There are no vitamins or supplements for her to take. It’s too expensive, the Senate says. That’s why their army is made of clones. They don’t have the time or the funds to care for multiple species’ needs.
Sometimes the clones talk about learning to cook, learning to hunt and garden and eat something else. She listens to them and smiles. It’s nice to hear them planning for the future.
Then she sees them in the medic tents, sick when they try to eat anything but what they were raised on, and remembers that they don’t have a future, that it’s more than likely all of them will die before the war is over.
She resorts to hunting in secret, when they’re on a planet that has anything she can and will eat. Worms, bugs, lizards, mice, spiders, birds. About half of the things she’s used to eating now are things she ate before, and the other half are things she never thought she could.
Togruta are carnivorous and predators, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t things that they think are disgusting.
~
I don’t know enough to be doing this.
She has to make calls that leave some of her men behind, dying or sentencing them to death.
She’s fifteen.
They’re her brothers.
There’s no time to double back for them, no time to mourn them, no acknowledgement from the Senate that they even ever existed. Only new orders and the next bloodbath.
She’s supposed to be learning the theory of lightsaber forms and the mating habits of tookas.
She’s not supposed to be learning how to repress and repress her grief and confusion and guilt at causing death. She’s not even supposed to know what it feels like and sounds like and smells like when her lightsaber rips through flesh.
Yet she dreams of it every time she sleeps.
~
Does my master love me? Or am I imagining things that were never really there?
She knows he’s keeping secrets from her. It’s not like she feels she should know everything about him. But it’s clear that other people know. The clones, other Jedi, even other padawans.
Why is he leaving her out?
Is it because he was forced into taking her on because of the war? Does he still resent her?
Does he even realize he’s doing it, or is she that much of an afterthought to him?
~
Everything hurts.
Some days the hurts are physical as well as mental. She has more scars than she can count and has had injuries in ten times that number.
She always gets bacta for them unless they’re really in a hopeless situation. Her men don’t. They’re undersupplied as it is. There isn’t enough funds to give clones that many medical supplies, the Senate insists. After all, if they’re damaged that badly, they should just be decommissioned. It makes no sense to replace the broken parts at a higher cost than the killing injection.
There’s always plenty of those to go around.
She snatches time when she should be sleeping or writing reports to cry alone at the places they burn the bodies. They don’t even get a burial.
She shouldn’t have to know how to write a casualty list yet, much less be able to do it half-conscious and so exhausted the words are blurring. She should be writing essays on ancient languages and how to pollinate the trees in the Room of a Thousand Fountains.
~
I’m failing my Master.
She’s sixteen and the war is still going with no end in sight.
It feels like her skills as a leader and as a Jedi have barely improved. If she was good enough, she wouldn’t be walking around feeling dead inside. She wouldn’t lose any of her men. She’d never make a bad call on the field, because the Force would be guiding her.
He never says anything that isn’t encouraging to her, but she knows that Master Skywalker is disappointed in her.
They’re getting separated more and more as she grows older, the 501st divided between them and sent to two places at once. The Senate says it’s more efficient. It means that her leave time grows less and less while he’s constantly being called back to Coruscant. What he does there, she has no idea.
There’s no one left for her to look to for reassurance.
The darkness closes in around her every time she sees another death.
She shouldn’t know what death looks like. She shouldn’t be able to tell from a troopers’ breathing over a static-filled holocall that he won’t make it.
Yet she can.
~
My Master doesn’t care about me.
She sits in the cell in the Temple and feels only a dull relief. Someone’s bombed the Temple. Jedi and padawans are dead. She can’t mourn them. She barely knew them. She barely knows anyone anymore.
She hasn’t seen them in years.
She wasn’t listening when they told her the evidence they’d found that pointed to her being the one behind the bombing. It wasn’t her. She just doesn’t care enough about anything, really, to do anything about it. She just wants to survive the next battle with as many of her men as she can.
She just wanted to see him coming for her, to explain that it was a mistake and she didn’t do it. He never did.
The same Senate that cut back their rations and medical supplies and everything else except ammunition, armor, and more bodies to kill until they are all starving and hurt and exhausted is calling for her death.
The Jedi Council is doing nothing to oppose them.
~
The Jedi don’t care what happens to me.
She stands at the spaceport of Coruscant, the bag that has everything she owns on her shoulder. She has nothing.
They took her lightsabers. They took her men. They took her credentials, her rank, her family.
And the Council said nothing as the Senate took her entire life and told her to be grateful. Told her they would give her a free ride off the planet and to never come back and be happy that they were giving her a few credits so she doesn’t die before finding a job, instead of executing her.
She’s still sixteen.
She’s terrified.
~
The Jedi did this to me.
She makes it all of five days before she’s captured by the Separatists and tortured for information for what feels like weeks.
There’s no prisoner exchange. They know she’s worthless to the Republic now. They just want codes and numbers and locations and battle plans.
It’s happened before, but then, her men knew she was missing. They always came for her, the Jedi always rescued her or insisted she be exchanged for Separatist prisoners.
That’s not going to happen now.
~
My Master did this to me.
She doesn’t remember much of the actual battle, but she remembers snatches of it.
Her Master’s face, contorted in an awful serene hatred. Accusations of her betraying them all, being too dangerous. Leaving him no choice but to come and put her down like the failed animal she is. Wasting his valuable time to come and kill her.
She fought back, but she had no weapon. He was fully armed and ready to fight. She could barely stand up.
She lies on the surgery table and feels tears leaking out of her eyes and stinging the wounds on her face.
The medical droid has told her what happened.
Almost half of her bones shattered beyond repair, having to be replaced by metal.
The loss of both her legs below the knee and her left arm in its entirely, replaced by prosthetics. The damage done so severe that they will never fully take like they should. She still can’t really feel them. The droid said she never will.
The poison her master sprayed at her as he left her to bleed out has ruined her lungs and weakened her heart. She will need a ventilator and a pacemaker if she wants to live.
Her montrals sheared off, piece by piece, blinding and deafening her with pain, cutting her off from the Force as surely as a suppression collar would. She can feel it returning, but it’s so hard to feel without them. It’s like she’s submerged in foam.
She remembers that the most clearly, how he had pinned her down and cut her apart inch by inch, telling her the reasons why she had to be punished with every stroke.
~
I owe this rogue Force-user my life.
He’d found her in the wreckage of the Separatist base and driven her Master off. He’d brought her to the medical droid just in time to save her life.
He’d built the suit that she would have to stay in if she wants to live.
She’d said yes, of course. It might be bulky and painful and require relearning almost everything, but it will keep her alive and even replace a little of her senses that she lost with her montrals.
He’s so kind, to build it for her, to take her in, to allow her to become his apprentice.
She hasn’t seen his face; he’s been disfigured by the Jedi just like her. He always wears a mask.
That’s perfectly fine. Her skin will never again see daylight either. It hurts too much and the scars feel raw when she’s exposed to the air.
They’re disguised as Sith, the better to pass unnoticed by the Separatists. He’s named her Darth Vader. His name is Darth Sidious.
For a while she thought she knew that name, but by now, she’s forgotten.
Does it matter? The most important thing is that she was worth enough to him that he cared to give her a name.
~
I hate the Jedi.
They’d lied to her her whole life.
They’d taken her from her birth family.
They hadn’t educated her like they promised; they’d sent her into war.
They’d taken her limbs and her senses and her entire identity.
Her new Master wanted to replace the Jedi, rotten as they were, with a new order of Force-users. A kinder one that actually were peacekeepers instead of warmongers.
He’s given her the honor of leading the assault on the Temple.
An entire battalion of the Coruscant Guard – the real ones, not the flawed and replaceable clone soldiers – are hers now. They call themselves Vader’s Fist.
They’re honored to serve under her. No one calls her ‘padawan’ or ‘Snips’ anymore. She’s respected. She’s feared. She’s trusted with the extermination of the Jedi.
Behind her mask, Ahsoka Tano smiles.