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Ahsoka runs through the stars after a boy seeking his Master and all she can see is gold.
The crack in the mask. The Sith-gold eye. That voice, once so familiar, now hauntingly twisted beyond recognition.
Her failure stabs at her like a second heartbeat with every step she takes.
Anakin.
Reconciling the man she knew during the war with the terrifying Sith lord she’d heard stories of had proved near impossible for months. The dark side had taken Anakin Skywalker and twisted him into something unknowable. In the Force, he burned like a terrifying slash of red-hot anger. When he spoke, it was cold and slow. He was nothing like the Anakin of her memories, who was bright in the Force like a star, enthusiastic and kind. She was grateful for the mask that Vader wore. It was easier to lift her blades against a faceless man.
But then, a strike to his mask at an opportune time, and-
He’d looked at her with Anakin’s eyes. He’d said her name in Anakin’s voice. It had been enough to make her reckless.
I won’t leave you, not this time.
She’s not so different from Ezra, running blindly after a voice and a chance to save his Master.
Ahsoka won’t get a second chance. Ezra won’t either. But if she were 17, with the opportunity to make things right…
The thought has barely crossed her mind when below her feet, a circle begins to glow. A voice from the stars stands out from the rest.
Ahsoka!
Ahead, Ezra is still running to find his Master. For the second time in a day, Ahsoka has been frozen by the voice of her own.
How are you? Where are you? Are... you okay?
In the space of a blink, the world between worlds dissolves around her in a rush of stars. When reality rebuilds itself, Ezra is gone and a shuttle ramp is opening ahead of her.
Something’s not right. Her skin feels odd, like she’s wearing it wrong. Her clothes fit differently than they had just a moment ago. She brings a hand up to her head, only to flinch at how small her montrals are. And her lekku-
She closes her eyes before the ramp can lower all the way and reveal their welcoming party. Her lekku are short.
They are seventeen years too short.
Of course the ancient plane of all worlds and times would bring her here. The day she spent so many years replaying in her head, wondering what she could have done differently to avoid the horrors to come.
Ezra runs toward his temptation, and she has fallen into her own. But just as Ezra cannot save his Master, there is nothing she can do here. It’s too late for Anakin, for the Republic. It is too late to right any wrongs, to prevent order 66. Any dramatic modifications would have consequences.
Why? she asks the Force. Do you think this is a kindness? To watch and do nothing?
The Force, calm and silent, has no answers for her.
Always in motion, is the future, Yoda used to say. And many possible futures, there are.
“Let’s go,” says Bo-Katan from behind her. “We don’t have much time.”
One foot in front of the other. She keeps her eyes on Artoo, waiting happily at the bottom of the ramp for her, takes perhaps a moment too long stroking his dome. But she can’t delay forever.
She looks up and there they are.
This Obi-Wan, a little greyer and sadder than he had been before she left the Order, but still with a gentle smile and nod for her. And next to him...
Blue eyes. A smile. Barely contained eagerness. Something in her chest cracks open.
This is not a vision, or a holocron, or a sliver of a man staring at her with Sith eyes. This is familiar. This is who she has been missing for nearly two decades.
“Ahsoka,” Anakin Skywalker from half a lifetime ago says, sincere and heartfelt, “I’m so glad to see you.”
She’s supposed to rebuff him here, to silence him and tell him of “another time” that can never be. There’s nothing in her that wants to.
It was foretold that you would be here. Our long awaited meeting has come at last.
Ahsoka decides. She’s carried regrets about this for too long. If this is a test of the Force, she’ll fail right here to keep him smiling.
“It’s good to see you too, Anakin,” she tells him. A deviation from the script, but the world hasn’t collapsed around her. The Force is calm.
Anakin Skywalker taught her many things. How to push her luck was one of them.
In the war room, Ahsoka recites the information about Maul to Obi-Wan and Anakin from memory.
“I was able to obtain transmission codes from the Pykes on Oba Diah.” This time, she’s prepared for the wary look Anakin throws her way.
“What were you doing on Oba Diah?”
Then, she’d been defensive, thinking he was about to try and lecture her as a Master would. Now, Ahsoka takes the concern for what it is.
“Nothing you wouldn’t have done,” she assures him. A small grin tugs at the corners of her mouth at the familiar exasperated look she gets in return.
The confrontation between Bo-Katan and Obi-Wan goes about as well as it had the first time, which is to say, not at all. Ahsoka of seventeen years ago had carried deep-seated resentment towards Anakin’s former Master for his loyalty to the Council before anything else. She’d seen him as a representation of everything the Jedi were doing wrong, and it had infuriated her. But it doesn’t matter now. Just a few days from now, there will be no Council to be loyal to, no Jedi to protect the galaxy from anything. There is no point in resenting a man who is days from losing everything.
She never did find out what happened to Obi-Wan, beyond what was on Kanan's holocron. Given what she now knows about Anakin, she no longer wants to.
You wouldn’t, would you Anakin? Surely not him, too?
She knows the answer. It’s not something she wants to dwell on.
“You two certainly haven’t changed,” Ahsoka tells Anakin when Obi-Wan and Bo-Katan have left. This time, she means it not as an accusation. Stagnancy is a compliment when you come from a time where everything has changed for the worse.
She falls into step alongside her old friend as he leads her to her surprise and wonders how, how can he be this happy, when his fall is imminent? Reports of Darth Vader were elusive, but could be traced back to the very beginning of the Empire. How is the man at her side mere days away from becoming the monster she met on Malachor?
But- it’s something she never noticed the first time around. The mania around the edges of his happiness. The shreds of normalcy that he clings to like a lifeline. A euphoria born of desperation. Ahsoka understands now, as they walk the corridors of the Resolute. For very different reasons, they’re trying to pretend they’re still the same.
When Anakin unveils his “surprise” for her, she walks around, looks at all the clones wearing her face that will soon be dead. The ache in her chest grows at the sight of a youthful Rex.
He really never learned how to stop calling her Commander. This time, she doesn’t bother telling him not to.
The sirens blare overhead, scattering everyone. To everyone else, they're a sign of an emergency. To Ahsoka, they’re a sign that she’s running out of time. Obi-Wan rushes in with news of the Coruscant attack, and she knows she has just minutes left.
“What about the Chancellor?” Anakin immediately asks. It takes everything in Ahsoka not to react to that because now, more than ever, temptation eats away at her.
She could do it. One sentence to start a chain reaction. The Chancellor is a Sith Lord, she could say, and everything would change. They would know, they could take action, they could-
The Force roils uneasily. No. This is not why she’s here. She is here perhaps as a cruel punishment for failing to stop Vader, but she has not been given a chance to fix this.
She bites her tongue, and stays quiet.
“We can be there within the hour,” Obi-Wan is saying. Ahsoka frowns. She has no desire to argue with Obi-Wan, who she will never see again after this, but she needs to get troops on Mandalore. Perhaps it’s time to take a page out of the Negotiator’s book.
“Master Kenobi,” she says, careful to keep her tone neutral. “Bo-Katan and her people are counting on the Republic.”
Obi-Wan has always been one to react to the tone in the room. Then, he'd met her accusing tone with condescending defensiveness. Now, he replies with a calm, “Ahsoka, surely you understand that this is a pivotal moment in the clone wars. The people of Coruscant need our help.”
Ahsoka thinks but doesn’t say, no. The Chancellor does.
“I understand,” she counters instead, “that Coruscant and Mandalore need help from the Jedi.” She turns to Anakin. “Aren’t there enough forces on this ship to handle both?”
Anakin narrows his eyes in thought. “I’ll…. divide the 501st! Make a new division under Ahsoka’s command.”
There you go, she thinks. They can sort out the rest from there.
Obi-Wan still makes his quip about Maul never staying dead as he heads out, and Ahsoka privately, fervently agrees.
And then it’s just the two of them, for the last time, in a moment she wants to freeze forever.
Perhaps it’s selfish. She knows exactly what this man is capable of. She could strike him down where he stands right now and alter the course of history. She could warn him of what he will do, in the hopes that he won’t fall this time. But the Force has not brought her to change the future.
She understands now. This isn’t a punishment, or even a test. It is a chance to say goodbye.
When Ahsoka faces Anakin for the last time, she gently inclines her head. Not quite a Jedi bow, but respectful all the same. “Thank you. For everything.”
He’ll take it to mean for the clones, the lightsabers, for having her back. She means it to encompass more than that.
That grin again. “That’s what friends are for.”
Friends.
Then you will die.
She can’t look at him like this, exactly as she remembers. She can’t look away, either. There’s an ache in her ribs as she carefully accepts her old lightsabers- they were blue for a time, a detail she’d nearly forgotten- and when she looks back at her former Master, everything she wants to stay gets stuck in her throat.
I miss you. Every day. I’m sorry I wasn’t there. I’m sorry it can’t be different now.
“I have… so much to tell you,” she says softly.
“Me too,” Anakin says. There’s an excited glint in his eye that breaks her heart. “You capture Maul, I’ll take care of Grievous, and with any luck, this will all be over soon.”
“Master Kenobi always said there’s no such thing as luck,” she makes herself say.
“Hmm.” His eyes are still kind. “Good thing I taught you otherwise.”
He begins to walk away- and this is it. In her memory, she quips a “good luck” for old time’s sake, gets one more smile, and then she loses him forever.
You abandoned me. You failed me. Where were you when I needed you?
“Anakin!”
This time, when he turns expectantly, Ahsoka takes five steps and flings her arms around him, lightsabers still in hand. He lets out a quiet oof, then a little laugh and his arms come up over her shoulders.
“Good luck,” she says into his tunic, and gives herself three selfish seconds.
One- to reach out for a Force presence she’s been missing for seventeen years, to find not a slash of anger and fear, but something bright and intense and, for the moment- happy.
Two- to let her expression finally break where he can’t see her, and finally grieve for the loss of one of her oldest friends.
Three- to convince herself to let him go.
When she steps back, she’s smiling again. Anakin hesitates for a moment. His brow furrows. But then he gives her that one last crooked grin.
And she loses him a final time.
In the space of a blink, the world shatters, rebuilds itself into a vast array of starry paths and she’s herself again, running after Ezra through the World Between Worlds as he seeks closure with his own Master.
“You don’t understand what you’re asking me to do!” he chokes out when she finally catches up to him.
“Yes, I do.” A kind smile. A cruel gold stare. Both a pain as fresh as an open wound. “You can’t save your Master… and I can’t save mine.”
One last thing she learned from Anakin- teaching a lesson often requires holding your student to higher standards than you hold yourself.
With the knowledge that she’s holding him to a standard she herself might never reach, Ahsoka tells Ezra, “I’m asking you to let go.”