Chapter Text
“Marbles come in all sorts of colors, Master, I swear! But I’ve never been to Coruscant, I’m sorry.”
Anakin raised an eyebrow.
“Snips,” he told her. “We’re on Coruscant.”
His padawan’s eyes couldn’t seem to focus on him quite right; he tried to ignore the unease drifting through the hollows of his bones as he pressed the back of his hand to the clammy skin of her forehead, dread creeping into the cracks in his resolve the longer he tried to find something lucid in her gaze; it was a losing battle. The last three days shouldn’t have felt as long as they’d had; coming back to the Temple shouldn't have felt as grim as it did.
Her skin was slick with sweat underneath the touch of his glove. She shouldn’t be this warm, right?
He soothed his hand over the tensed up muscles of her brow, willing her to relax.
What had Master Che said?
“If her temperature goes up, Skywalker, make sure to call someone. This is not something you can fix on your own.”
And, well, of course this was something he couldn’t fix this on his own. But that said, could he have prevented it?
His mind scrambled back to the mission: cold rain, bleak skies; hacking coughs and the ring of death and despair permeating the air in their lungs and the soil under their feet; a camp of lonely people who had lost everything until their life was the last thing to wane away in the tumult of lightning cracks and the sickly embrace of disease.
Her skin was still searing to the touch; had her temperature gone up? It certainly hadn’t gone down, so should he call someone? Oh, Force, he should have never let her near that refugee camp. He should have —
She scrunched up her nose.
“Didn’t I just tell you that the only color marble you can have this week is a blue one?”
She rolled her eyes, huffing. It was so almost-normal Ahsoka-like behavior that Anakin was taken aback.
He shook his head. Even delirium, it seemed, could not ward off Ahsoka’s snippiness. He wasn’t sure whether it made him want to laugh or cry, but before he could do either, a burning hot grip on his wrist made him snap his attention back to his ward.
Ahsoka was staring directly at him, bright eyes clearer than he’d seen them in days.
Anakin leaned forward in alarm, all of his attention on her.
Could this be it? Could Ahsoka have come back to the world of the lucid?
Anakin held his breath in his chest and his hope in his hands. Now all he could do was wait.
A moment passed, nothing but the muted beeps of the machine to the right and the pounding of his heart in his ears — and then slowly, finally, she opened her mouth to speak.
Anakin was intent to hang onto every word. If this was the first time she was lucid in days, he swore he wouldn’t miss a syllable.
He was leaned so close to her that he could feel the staleness of her breath with every uneven exhale that tickled his skin and ruffled his hair, but he didn’t move back, not even an inch. He wasn't missing this for the world.
His eyes desperately searched her own, reaching for answers to questions he didn’t even have yet.
Her other hand, pale and sickly and bonier that it should have been moved to pat his cheek gently, a reassuring touch of comfort, not unlike that of a mother with the world falling apart around her.
“It’s okay, Master,” she told him softly, voice scratchy, eyes intense, brows furrowed in worry.
Anakin’s breath caught in his throat.
“The marbles don’t have to be red, if you don’t want them to be.”
Anakin stared at her, any hope of lucidness slipping away with the fleeting touch of her searing fingers against his skin as her hand slipped limply back down.
Her eyes lost their focus at about the same time her hand went slack against the sheets.
Anakin’s eyes burned.
Ahsoka’s eyes flickered.
“You worry too much, Master,” she mumbled, head lolling to the side as unconsciousness grasped her in its vying arms, clutching her close no matter how hard, how desperately Anakin hung on.
His throat felt tight.
“They’re just marbles.”
Ahsoka went limp against the sheets, and Anakin willed his heart down out of his throat, until the roaring in his ears wasn’t louder than her uneven breaths; the sinking of his stomach racing against the squeezing of his chest.
He soothed his hand over her forehead once more, eyes burning hotter than Ahsoka’s fever and throat tighter than it’d ever felt before.
“It’s not the marbles that’ve got me worried, Snips,” he muttered.