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Anakin kneels in the rubble of Christophsis’ crystal streets, holding the body of a teenage togruta girl in his arms. Droplets of coagulating blood drip down her forehead in a thin line, from where she'd hit her head on the ground after being shot. If she wakes up, Anakin will have to make sure she doesn't have a concussion.
If she wakes up.
He knows she isn't waking up.
His padawan, he thinks, trying—and failing—to stop himself from hyperventilating. He is nineteen and has been a knight for all of two weeks and the council had assigned him a padawan. A padawan who is now dead.
It doesn't feel real. She'd barely been here an hour. An hour.
He closes his eyes and tries to slow his breathing, knowing his reaction is out of hand.
Most soldiers who die are killed in their first battle, Anakin remembers a master saying, in that first briefing the Jedi had held after the council had declared they were going to war. This is normal. Get ahold of yourself and keep going.
He stares down at Ahsoka, painfully aware of the temperature of her lekku—still warm, but cooling, so, so, quickly—and can't quite make himself move. She looks even younger now than she had when she'd waltzed off the carrier ship, childlike features made even more obvious by the way they soften in death. Fourteen.
Not even a padawan, really. An initiate. Ahsoka hadn't been on a single mission before this one. The council had sent her to the front lines with no training except how to battle meditate and use a lightsaber, and the latter she hadn't even been doing correctly.
And now she was dead.
She would never go on a second mission. Never correct that reverse grip. Never get to cause a diplomatic incident or pester her master (he still couldn't wrap his head around how that would have been him) about letting her take her trials.
Most soldiers who die are killed in their first battle, Anakin thinks to himself again, finally allowing the numbness to settle in.
He raises his comlink, keying in Obi-Wan's code. "Master?"
There's the sound of distant blasterfire on the other end, and Obi-Wan's voice is terse. “I'm a bit busy right now."
"Ahsoka's dead."
"She's...?"
"Dead," Anakin snaps, more bite than he'd expected coming out in his tone. "She walked right into a sniper's sightline and got shot in the back."
He'd told her not to. He'd told her to be careful, told her to listen to Rex—
He cuts that train of thought off right there. He doesn't want to think right now about if he somehow could have stopped this. If he could have saved her. If her death is his fault.
Obi-Wan is quiet for a long, long, time, and Anakin knows he is thinking about it.
"I'm sorry," Obi-Wan finally says.
That's it.
Anakin wonders if this is what he'll get from the council when he informs them. A kriffing formal apology for the death of a fourteen year old girl.
"You're sorry," he growls.
Obi-Wan winces. "Anakin—"
"A teenager was shot down under our command," Anakin says. "Why the kriff did we have a kid that young in an officer position? Who in their right mind—"
"Anakin," Obi-Wan says again. "I know this is upsetting, but you cannot let emotion cloud your thinking right now."
"I am not letting the death of my Padawan go into the kriffing Force," Anakin snarls, and isn't that alien to say—my padawan—but it's a cold hard fact and he feels the need to force that down his own throat. Padawan. Padawan, padawan, padawan.
What. The. Kriff.
He hadn't been ready for this. He hadn't been ready for this at all.
"Anakin," Obi-Wan says, voice unusually gentle. "You need to calm down."
He doesn't know what Obi-Wan is saying. He is calm. Plenty calm. Just also ready to kill someone for this.
"I'm fine, Master," he says through gritted teeth. He's not sure why Obi-Wan is focusing on him, right now. She's the one who's dead.
"I know this is probably… traumatic—" Obi-Wan stumbles over the word. "—But situations like these are exactly why we practice letting go of our emotions and attachments. You can't afford to be compromised right now, your men need you."
Anakin forces a sigh, closing his eyes and pulling cold, icy calmness out of the force. It wraps around him like a blanket of thorns, forcing the still-beating throb of anger into a tight knot in his chest. "Alright."
He'll calm down.
He'll fight this battle like a good little general, force himself to think no unnecessary thoughts until their enemies have been decisively defeated and Christophsis belongs to the republic again.
He'll feel nothing, for now.
But he already knows this is something he's never letting go.