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This is Ahsoka Tano.
A prism through which the Force flows endlessly, concentrated into will and protection. A rebel operative who works behind the scenes as ‘Fulcrum,’ to protect the people. She is a togruta and the pride of her people. She is a friend, an advisor, a spy, a woman who fights for what is good and just in the world and won’t stand aside when people tell her to. She has survived Order 66 and is a relic of the time of the Jedi. She’s buried her past beneath the snow to keep living, and she has lived from day-to-day since then, working to dismantle the Empire.
She is strength incarnate and she is not going anywhere. Two generations of Jedi have come and gone through her, and she remains.
She had been a Padawan once, but that had been a long time ago, and Coruscant is now a shadow of its former self, with the Empire’s influence looming heavy over it. Sidious had them all in a death grip and they hadn’t seen it. Had played right into his hands. It hurts her to think about. But that had been a long time ago, and Ahsoka had been a teenager. Now she is an adult and times have changed.
Fingers tense against her knees. Ahsoka’s brow furrows together and she wills the Force back into her to offer further clarity. Despite her best efforts, the Force continues to shirk underneath Sidious’s palm. Ahsoka isn’t a Jedi, not anymore, but the imbalance of the Force continues to preoccupy her. There is so much she can do with this power, and Ahsoka refuses to abandon any more people.
Besides that, recently, things have changed in the Force. What had once been a continuous cloak of void now shrouds something deeper, more vibrant, pulsating. Like a neutron star trying to die out...but not without going into its final death throes. What changed?
It’s a rhetorical question. Luke Skywalker and Leia Organa happened. Ahsoka doesn’t have to peer far into the Force to feel their presence, bright and undulating, proud and rife with power. The Rebel Alliance is proud to have them, two binary stars rotating around each other, guiding them to victory. She doesn’t have to go searching for them to hear the stories of Skywalker, a legendary pilot who blew up the Death Star and a friend without peer who never abandoned those in need.
Skywalker...Ahsoka’s heart burns. She didn’t need the Force to figure it out. Anyone who knew Anakin would have known immediately.
Luke is so like his father. Anakin would be proud. Or should be. If he wasn’t…before she can continue the thought the burn of guilt rises up and Ahsoka has to fight off the sentence in order to not open herself up to the influence of the Dark Side.
It isn’t that the dark scares her. She’s long ignored the Jedi code and carved out her own path. Her worry is that Sidious or Vader manage to locate her through the fuzz of the Force; her, one of the last few Force-sensitive people remaining from a time long gone. Vader, who wears Anakin’s skin like a hologram. Vader, who is her master, and yet isn’t.
She hopes Obi-Wan is safe. She hasn’t seen or heard of him since Order 66, but Ahsoka likes to believe he is not that easy to kill. Perhaps he’s living a quiet life on another planet. Someday she will find him again and say hello. Once all this is over and they do not have to live in fear. The promise of tomorrow keeps Ahsoka going.
Ahsoka shifts her ribs over her hips and forces her shoulders to let go of some tension. This is a time for meditating, not over-thinking. The air tastes of petrichor and the aftermath of photosynthesis. Beneath her, the raised platform she’s perched on is hard and cool, slick with humidity. Outside the temple bird-like creatures sing to one another. In times like these, Ahsoka remembers that the present can be beautiful, too, that while the future is a gorgeous thing painted in vibrant hues, the moment can be just as intoxicating if she allows it to be. Meditating reminds her of that. She used to hate meditating. Now she looks forward to it.
The Force pulses within her and her limbs tingle with exhilaration at the sensation. And just as easily, Ahsoka becomes the Force, her consciousness purveying everything before, during, and after each minute. She sees herself, a quiet and focused woman, so unlike the cocky girl she had been during the time of the Republic. She sees the flying creatures outside, their pink necks flush with feathers, eternally preening but with bat-like wings. In the distance she feels the bustle of a village. So many lives, happy and busy, but there is a small undercurrent of fear beneath their feet. Always fear.
And suddenly something happens.
There’s a beat and then the Force unravels entirely, so much brighter than it had been just a moment ago, heat exploding from her core and into the world. It’s almost too much for her; her jaw clenches and her shoulders tense up, this power unfurls at her fingertips and she suddenly understands exactly what Obi-Wan meant when he said that the Force had been unbalanced--this is raw, untapped potential, and it’s beautiful but terrifying and it floods through her with ease--how can she hope to contain it? This is what the Jedi before me had to deal with?
Breathless, Ahsoka finds herself ripped back out of the Force and into the moment. Her chest rises and falls with an emotion; fear, she realizes, but of the euphoric kind. What--?
She takes a moment to collect herself, eyes searching the floor before her, identifying the cracks in the ground, counting them, re-grounding herself. The Force...The Force has been balanced.
Which means that the Sith were destroyed. That the Empire’s fall is inevitable. In that simple half a second, the galaxy enters a new epoch. But the news will not reach this planet for at least another rotation. Ahsoka has reached into a secret only few know of. For now.
Ahsoka allows her hands to uncurl and studies the lines in her palms. The Jedi had won. What did that mean for her? For the future she fought so hard for? Had it really been that simple? With Sidious’s removal, were things now safe? She knows it’s a naive thought, but Ahsoka clings to it regardless. For now, she tries to take comfort in knowing that she is safe, that the Rebels will continue to do their work and dismantle the Empire. Which means Ahsoka can come out of hiding and become the peacekeeper she’d always dreamed about being.
She’ll have to make arrangements to get in contact with one of the Rebel Alliance’s outposts. Ahsoka knows to trust in the Force, and she does, but part of her wants to verify it with her own two eyes. Time for her to visit that village.
The path from the small temple she’d been meditating in to the village is easy to follow and used frequently. Ahsoka moves lightly but not without intention, skirting amongst the thick underbrush and into town. She walks for a few uneventful hours before the village comes into view. Canopies of markets and domed buildings greet her; the hustle-bustle of the marketplace proof of the village’s life. The sky is beginning to streak red with sunset. Night is falling, and fast.
She draws her hood over her face and gravitates towards one of the smaller buildings, a hand reaching to push the door open. It complies with a small squeak, and Ahsoka steps into the room. It is quite a bit colder inside the building than it is outside due to the shade and insulation of the material the village had been crafted with. Against her better judgment, Ahsoka shivers. Inside there are groups of bounty hunters and the locals congregating at different tables. Nothing new. For a moment the room pauses; she feels sets of eyes flicker over her appraisingly. Ahsoka ignores them, moving swiftly into one of the back rooms of the building.
Closing the door behind her, Ahsoka lets out a quiet breath. A customary glance around the room tells her that she will be undisturbed. Checking her waist pocket for her holodisk, Ahsoka checks her service. Full bars. Good. Out at the temple she hadn’t had any.
Ahsoka places the holodisk on the table and lowers herself into the seat. Drawing in an untempered breath, Ahsoka taps the holodisk. It spurts to life with the connection to the closest Rebel outpost. There’s a moment of dead noise on the other end, and then one of the officers comes into view.
“This is the rebel outpost on Thyferra.” He clears his throat, adjusts his hat. “Fulcrum, correct? Forgive me, this is my first time meeting with you.” And a hurried attempt to save his pride. “Um, I’ve heard the stories, though.”
“No worries. You’re right, this is Fulcrum,” Ahsoka intones before scrambling for her own excuse to get in contact with the Alliance, “Things have been kind of dead on my end. Do you have any leads worth checking out?”
There’s a glance off-holo from the rebel before a large grin surfaces over his features. “Actually, the Empire is gone,” he says, voice barely restrained with glee, “The Emperor was killed. We won. Now we just have to dismantle the remaining factions. But without the Emperor’s presence, it should be easy work.”
She can’t believe it. The Empire. Defeated. In one fell swoop.
“Be careful,” Ahsoka warns, although her heart brims with cautious pride, “We don’t know what to expect from the other factions.” She hesitates. No. She has to know. Her voice trembles with the guise of monotone wondering, the contemplation only an enemy has about another enemy. “What about Vader?”
The man’s expression remains ecstatic. Ahsoka can make out a chorus of happy cheers in the background of the call. “Dead. Skywalker took care of him, too. But he keeps saying something about Vader sacrificing himself.” With that, his expression warps into one of mild scorn. “Frankly, I’m not sure if I believe that, but...well, dead is dead. We’ve won.”
Darth Vader dead. Ahsoka’s eyes widen. She can’t be bothered to refashion her expression into one of quiet acceptance; this seems almost too far out there to be true. And…Anakin. She remembers that burning image of the yellow eye beneath the mask. The hate that eye had held. It had been only a shallow reflection of the man she had once knew, but it had still been his.
“Well, keep an eye out for any retaliation from the remaining pieces.” A pause. “Fulcrum out.” And she taps on the hologram, ending the call. For a moment Ahsoka stands silently and stares quietly at the disc. Anakin.
In just one night, so many lives have been saved. Will be saved. They can rebuild now, with no looming threat over their heads. The Sith are eradicated and peace has returned to the galaxy. Ahsoka hardly remembers peace. She had been barely a teenager when the Clone Wars started. She should be ecstatic.
So why isn’t she?
She’s proud, yes, and she’s grateful to have a tomorrow, but part of Ahsoka feels like it’s died. Hasn’t it? Yes and no. Part of her died years ago, when Rex first turned his guns on her, when they had to bury the bodies of her friends and his brothers, when she dropped her lightsaber into the dusted ground, before Jesse’s helmet--the day she finally, finally, had ceased to be a Jedi.
She thought that being Fulcrum would help. And it did. For a while.
Ahsoka keens forward, elbows propping on her thighs, fingers worrying at her eyelids. She feels too much. Too acutely. And she doesn’t know where to begin or how to sort these swirling feelings inside her. A symphony of songs brims inside her chest but it hurts and feels discordant.
“Ahsoka.”
She’s jarred back into reality, eyes snapping open, and the Force slithers out from her. But how--? That’s not possible--, she tells herself, but she’d know that voice anywhere, even decades later, even without seeing him in person, even when he locked it away behind a mask that kept him alive and breathing. “Anakin.”
Slowly, Ahsoka turns around, dream-like in movement. And there stands Anakin Skywalker, his body a translucent but vibrant blue, his shoulders as rigid as the day she said good-bye--but that’s not entirely true, they never had a good-bye, only promises of ‘another time,’ and ‘good luck.’ The burn scar under his eye is just as prominent as it had been years ago. His smile is quirky and odd, twisting the right side of his face.
“You’re--,” she can’t bring herself to speak the confirmation of what she heard minutes ago. Dead. He’s dead. Anakin Skywalker is dead. But now he’s HIMSELF. This isn’t Vader. This isn’t the machine she fought in the temple. Who stared at her with mechanic resolve, lungs breathing not because he wanted to but because he had to. Who snarled, “Then you will die,” with vitriol. This is Anakin Skywalker. Her master. Her friend. “You’re back.”
His smile grows more sheepish. “Sorry it took me so long.”
She wants to run and hug him. Tears brim in her eyes and promptly spill over. Ahsoka’s shoulders shake uncontrollably and at once she becomes a scared teenager again. “It’s okay,” she bursts out, “I missed you.”
Anakin moves closer to his once-Padawan and his gaze becomes more apologetic. “I missed you too,” a pause, as if testing the weight of his next word, “Snips.”
And Ahsoka is entirely undone, teeth breaking behind her grin as she sobs, both with joy and with sadness, because this is the Anakin Skywalker who was always so in love with the world and his friends, who never gave up on people, who fought viciously to do what was right--but this is also the Anakin Skywalker she never knew, the one who grew up on Tatooine and was unafraid of his past or losing people he loved, the Anakin Skywalker who survived a podrace at the age of nine and was continuously awe-struck by the world around him. This is the Anakin Skywalker she only saw glimpses of when he thought she wasn’t looking, and it feels godsent to see him without the armor of trauma wrapped tightly around him. “There’s so much I’ve wanted to tell you.”
He makes a self-referential movement as if to say ‘look at me,’ and she knows he’s referencing the state of his being. “I have all the time in the world now, thanks to Obi-Wan. And I want to hear everything.” He means it; the emphasis on ‘everything’ says enough. And Anakin goes to sit cross-legged on the floor, the meditation pose he so often assumed with her. Ahsoka remembers mornings spent in the Jedi Temple, sitting beneath the warm sun, opposite from her master, eyes screwing shut and attempting to tap into the Force as he did. How easy he had made it look. Everything Anakin did was fluid and resolute; he simply had to will things for them to work out. And they always did. Her trust in him had always been steadfast.
It wasn’t just her; the 501st followed him with little reservations. How many times had she and Rex shared a side glance before deciding to follow the Hero With No Fear? And he’d carried them to victory each time. Until the coils of manipulation ripped him away from them all and into the Dark Side.
For too long Ahsoka has regretted going to Mandalore. If I could change one thing, she had thought bitterly for every day of her life since then, I would stay.
Ahsoka follows Anakin’s movements onto the ground, her vision still blurred with tears. An arm raises and swipes viciously at her eyes. “You mentioned Obi-Wan,” she breaks out, “Is he okay?”
Anakin’s expression crumples and Ahsoka immediately regrets asking. The answer lies between her master’s irises. And because the Force is stronger than ever, she sees the scene play out before her. Two men fighting, their lightsabers crashing with cataclysmic light ending with Obi-Wan’s sacrifice. “Oh,” she breathes out. But in that split-second of foresight she also understands that Obi-Wan, too, has reached the end he wanted to. He is one with the Force, and for Obi-Wan, there would be no higher honor. He was always a Jedi without peer and would not want to be grieved as a martyr. He had only been doing his duty, nothing more.
And as if on cue, the blue shimmer of an additional presence materializes besides Anakin’s shoulders. “It’s not very polite to talk about someone behind their back, you know,” Obi-Wan Kenobi says, his voice as amused and collected as he had been back on Coruscant. But now his hair is snow white, the lines around his eyes cracked and dust-ridden. Age and stress have claimed him, even now as a force-ghost, but he still has the youthful inflection to his words Ahsoka knows him for.
“Master,” Anakin says, as if he hadn’t been expecting him--but Ahsoka knows he’s just playing the role--and he grins amusedly at Obi-Wan, gesturing for him to join them cross-legged on the floor, “How kind of you to join us.”
“Well, after the celebrations with the rebels came to a conclusion, I thought I might check in on an old friend.” His gaze flickers pointedly over to Ahsoka, who feels like she might begin crying again. “You’ve grown, Ahsoka.”
And that’s all it takes. Tears fall again, cascading in a victorious stream. The catharsis from the past twenty years of grief erupts off of her chest; Ahsoka is just so happy to see them again, to sit like old times and share stories laced with dry wit. “You’ve missed a lot.” She seconds Anakin’s movement for Obi-Wan to sit down. Then she takes a moment to swipe some more of the tears away, but more replace them in an instant. “I was just about to tell Anakin, actually.”
Obi-Wan’s eyes crinkle as he smiles. He strokes his beard as he always did. “Well,” he says thoughtfully, “I suppose I can spare a few moments now that the rebels aren’t throwing themselves at the Empire’s every whim. I’ve grown quite tired of looking after Skywalkers.” There’s a moment where he casts a baleful but warm look at Anakin, who simply returns it with a disheveled grin. Obi-Wan lowers himself to the ground, his aura luminous and vibrant as he orients himself into the cross-legged position. At once his attention shifts entirely over to Ahsoka. He’s always been an excellent listener.
The Force holds the three of them tightly in its grasp. Balance has been restored. They are home; Ahsoka understands what she had been yearning for all this time had never been a return to Coruscant or the past--she only wanted to share time with her two friends.
‘Another time,’ the words she had regretted so much for too long becomes, ‘now.’ She knows that she no longer has to live swamped with the memory of Anakin’s sad smile before he ran off to save the Chancellor, nor does she have to stare at the stars regretting that her last encounter with Obi-Wan had been her accusing him of playing politics.
She concentrates on the Force and wills herself to hold Obi-Wan and Anakin’s hands in her own. It acquiesces. Ghostly palms made real by the Force’s intent squeeze around hers.
Things are finally okay again.
She begins to tell her story.