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Malachor is a disquieting place. She knows that this is where her story was supposed to end—Vader, the man who had once been her Master, striking her down, just one more Jedi on whatever was left of his conscience. Ahsoka, never able to overcome her past. She knows she would have died, if not for Ezra’s help in stealing her life back.
You will still die here, the spirits whisper to her in her dreams. The ghosts of long dead Sith linger around her; the entire planet is a graveyard. They are old and weak, insidious enough that she hadn’t noticed them before her battle with Vader.
The Ezra of this time still thinks her dead. She doesn’t know when he’ll be able to get back to her. She is on her own, more alone than she has ever been, even during those long years after the war, after she and Rex parted ways. Never staying in one place long, knowing that she would be killed if her true identity was ever known.
Survival is the order. She scavenges. She eventually gets used to the taste of the game on Malachor. The water has a strange metallic quality to it even after she boils it, but it doesn’t make her sick, so she keeps drinking it. She finds a busted ship—at least a few centuries old, maybe even older. Possibly even dating back to the old Sith wars. Ahsoka uses the skills Anakin had taught her long ago to try to fix the ship, she tries to center herself, and she prays that she won’t die on this planet.
She wonders what happened to him over the last days of the war. When she saw Anakin—well, he hadn’t seemed fine, but he certainly didn’t seem like he was on the precipice of Falling.
And she can’t help but think—if I hadn’t left the Order. If I had stayed, then maybe—just maybe—
Ahsoka had thought that she had long made peace with her decision. When she had told Kanan and Ezra that she was no longer a Jedi, she had meant it. When she had snarled I am no Jedi at Vader, she had meant it.
She had thought that she had let go of her anger with the Order, and with the Council a long time ago. The Jedi would always be the people who raised had her and shaped her into the woman she was. For a long time, a part of her had regretted bitterly that she hadn’t been there when they had been killed. And she knows that she can't call herself a Jedi again—that she can't be a Jedi again.
But every day, Ahsoka wakes up, and she wonders if she really let go at all. Why does she hesitate to call herself a Jedi, when that is all she will ever be seen as? Was it really just some grudge against the people who had raised her, made her into the person she is, her people, who were all murdered nearly two decades ago?
Could she have helped Anakin? If she had been there, could she have helped him?
Could she have stopped him?
It wasn’t my responsibility to stay for him, she tells herself. I was a child. It wasn’t my responsibility.
(Sometimes, she even lets herself believe that.)
That dark, ungenerous part of herself, the part of herself who at her lowest moments wished she’d died with the Jedi, tells her that she was a slighted, immature little girl. That she was self-important, blind, and most of all arrogant. Maul had been right. But Ahsoka hadn’t wanted him to be.
Not for the first time, Ahsoka imagines how her family died.
It’s different, now that she has accepted the truth. She can’t imagine Anakin defending the Temple anymore, side by side with any Jedi old enough to carry a lightsaber. Maybe even with Obi-Wan, if he had been able to return from Utapau quick enough.
Ahsoka knows now that Obi-Wan can’t still be alive. She had held out hope about survivors of Order 66 for years. She had kept an ear to the ground, had investigated every report she could, had let herself be disappointed so many times that she lost count. But Ahsoka knows that even if Obi-Wan had survived Order 66, he never would have left Anakin in the state he was in now.
She hopes Anakin wasn’t the one who killed him. The thought of him getting shot in the back by Cody and his men is hardly pleasant, but the thought of Anakin raising his saber against Obi-Wan makes her feel ill.
Stop it, Ahsoka says to herself, squeezing her eyes shut until she can think of something other than Anakin calmly sliding his lightsaber through Obi-Wan’s stomach.
Then she does katas until she is too exhausted to think anymore.
After two weeks alone on Malachor, Ahsoka lets herself be angry.
I would have come back to you if you had let me, Ahsoka thinks.
She does not let herself indulge for long. Indulging her anger, her grief, her pain was everything she’d been taught against for the first sixteen years of her life.
Ahsoka is not a Jedi. But she was one. And that history still informs every decision she has ever made. She understands that all the wishing in the galaxy can’t change what her life has become. Only she can do that, and she needs a clear head if she wants to try anything.
Still, secretly, she had always thought that Anakin’s teachings—plus more than a little bit of luck—had been the reason why she had survived the Purge when so many had not. He had taught her how to be strong. He had taught her to never give up, even when the odds were against her. He had taught her that sometimes the rules, the Code, needed to be broken.
But for the first time in her life, Ahsoka wishes she had never been assigned to Anakin. She wishes that she had never met him, had never grown to respect him, had never grown to love him. She wishes that she had been the student of any other Jedi. Because if she had, she knows, she would never have had to know the pain of being betrayed by your own Master.
Her knowledge of who Darth Vader is and the things he has done—which had been just another terrible fact about the Empire, a spy’s careful knowledge—now sickens her. She knows these things for a fact: Vader had been the one who razed the Temple. Vader is the leader of the Inquisitors and he had led the effort to hunt down any survivors of Order 66. Vader is the Emperor’s second in command, the dark phantom by his side.
Vader has been loyal to the Emperor since the day the Republic fell, and maybe even before, and Ahsoka has no idea why.
She has pieces of a puzzle she can’t put together: Padmé’s murder, shortly after the rise of the Empire, by Jedi traitors according to the Emperor, by Palpatine’s assassins according to every Rebel she’d ever discussed it with. Obi-Wan’s last conversation with her on Mandalore: his worries and Anakin’s secret mission from the Council to spy on Palpatine. Maul’s warning about Anakin, which she had refused to even consider.
Ahsoka had thought that she had let it go. That she had accepted that there were things about the last days of the Republic that she would never get to know. Maybe it was Malachor, the darkness of the planet's past infecting her mind, making her unbalanced. She doubts that, though. She has survived nearly two decades in the Emperor’s galaxy. It would take more than a few long dead Sith spirits to Turn her.
But in between her attempts to fix a ship, between her attempts at mediating, while she wonders if she is going to die on Malachor, she keeps imagining Anakin.
Did you think of me? she wonders, her own bitterness cold and shocking.
Did you think of me when you pledged yourself to the Emperor, when you murdered our family, from old Master Sinube down to little Katooni and her friends in the crèche? Did you think of me, did you think of Rex and the men, did you think that I would be with them when your new Master ordered all the Jedi dead? Did you have a moment of hesitation? Did you think of me for even just a moment?
The apprentice lives, Vader had said. He had been surprised.
He had thought her dead.
Did you mourn me?
Ahsoka has spent a lifetime letting go: of her childhood when she was sent to war, of her home and family when she left the Jedi, of her identity when the Republic fell. She had never thought that she could lose her faith in Anakin. She had never thought that she would have to.
Did you think of me at all?
The Force leads her to the truth, as it always does. And so Ahsoka knows that the answer is no.