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Ahsoka lies on her back, up to her elbows in the inner mechanisms of the latest in a long line of ships. She isn't nearly as bad as her master was, but she's honest enough to admit that there might be something more to her truly impressive record of trashed ships than simple bad luck. She'll admit it to herself, anyway; admitting it to other sentients is another matter entirely. Not that there are many in the galaxy who know her well enough to bring it up.
And isn't that a morose thought. Decades of blood, sweat, and war, and all she has to show for it (apart from a galaxy finally freed from the yoke of Sith oppression) is a bare handful of people who know her by her real name. Rex. Bo-Katan. Mon. Hera. Zeb. Sabine. And most problematically, Luke Skywalker, who won't leave her the fuck alone.
" … and the galaxy needs the jedi, I know that," he's saying. That’s news to her, but engaging with his points has only encouraged him thus far. "But there's still so much I don't know. Things Yoda and Ben never got to tell me. But you can teach me those things, and more! I mean, you lived it! And there's something that feels right about it, you know? My father teaching you, you teaching me. I know he'd be thrilled too."
He doesn't seem to be running out of steam, despite her clear lack of interest. But what Anakin would have thought about anything isn’t something she wants to listen to. Frowning at the warren of tangled pipes and conduits she's been slowly tracing out for the past half hour, she decides on a quicker solution. With a flick of her wrist, she sends the wrench on the ground next to her head flying into the pipe she's almost certain has the clog she's been searching for. The resulting clang is clearly audible several meters away, as evidenced by Luke trailing off in confusion in the middle of his next sentence.
She smiles in satisfaction beneath the ship. Not only has she properly derailed Luke, but as the echoes fade her montrals pick up a dissonant note from the pipe a few feet to her right. With a satisfied hum she twists beneath the ship until the pipe is in reach and begins to break up the blockage with judicious applications of the force.
"Uh, are you ok down there?" Luke asks. He actually sounds concerned, which is either mildly insulting or kind of sweet. She's not sure which.
"Just fine. I've been fixing ships since before you were born, kid," she says.
She feels a brief pulse of sheepishness in the force from him. Mildly insulting it is.
"Do you need any help? I've been fixing things since I could walk."
She sighs. "I’m sure you have. But nobody touches my ship but me."
"Whatever you say," he says wryly. The ship rocks slightly as he leans against it. "Look, I could really use your help, Master Tano."
"Don't call me that," she snaps. "I was just a padawan. You're a knight, at least. You'll find your own path, just like I did." And he'll have an easier time of it too, with a newly free galaxy at his fingertips.
"But that's the problem, there's so much I don't know. I'm not ready to be a Jedi Knight. I don't know what it means to be a Jedi. I barely know anything about them." Luke's impassioned speech echoes in the force, and for a moment she's 16 again, foundations cut from under her first by the fallout of her trial and then by her own hand. And then a third time, with the death of almost everyone she knew and loved.
With a sigh she rolls herself out from under her ship and stares at him. He looks younger than he is, even after his four years of war. That feels unfair somehow. She’s felt old for decades now, even if she’s likely still in her prime. But what was she fighting for all those years, if not to make things better for those who came after her?
"Being a knight never meant that you stopped learning, Luke," she begins, and even if she hadn't been looking right at him she would have noticed his sudden attention in the force. His regard is so similar to Anakin's it hurts. "Knighthood meant that you were ready to learn on your own. Free to grow without the guidance of your master. Yoda and Obi-Wan taught you well. Your trials are passed. The rest is up to you."
Luke looks unsatisfied by that, and she can't blame him. But it's true, and she has other work to do. Someone has to find Ezra, and once that's done there's a whole galaxy to dig out of the gutter. Force knows this "New Republic" won't be able to handle things in the Outer Rim any better than the Old Republic did. Even odds whether they'll bother to try. After all, this republic is missing Padme Amidala, and Bail Organa, and Riyo Chuchi. There are new lights, to be sure, Leia among them, but Ahsoka can't help but see them as poor replacements for her old friends.
"Maybe that's true. Maybe I'll figure it out," he hedges, shifting against the side of the ship. "But I also have to rebuild the Jedi Order, and I can't do that without knowing what they stood for."
Ahsoka gives him a blank stare. "And why do you need to do that?" she asks. She can't imagine where he got the idea that the fate of an extinct order rests on his shoulders. It died before he was born, or close enough.
Luke returns her stare with an incredulous look of his own. "Well, we're the last ones. And the galaxy needs the Jedi. Just look what happened after the Empire wiped them out."
Ahsoka grits her teeth in agitation at the casual mention of the death of her people. For him it’s just something that happened long ago. Ezra had been much the same. But Knightfall was baked into her bones, and even if she isn't a Jedi now (not that she wants to get into that with this fresh faced child) they were her people, and might have been again.
"There was plenty of evil in the galaxy at the height of the Jedi's power too," she says, keeping her voice level through sheer force of will. "The empire did not grow to such heights in such a short time from nothing. To say nothing of the Hutts, who have survived the Jedi and the Empire both. So, try again. Why does the galaxy need the jedi?"
Luke looks confused by this angle. Apparently, the rebellion was less stocked with former separatists by his time. Or maybe no one had the heart to bad mouth the jedi in front of him. Based on the slightly lost expression on his face, she's guessing the latter.
Ahsoka huffs in annoyance. "I'll answer that. It doesn't need them. The Jedi were often a force for good," (usually in the core, and mostly for those with the influence to get in touch with them), "but they were hardly essential. So why do you need the Jedi specifically, Luke Skywalker?" And that is the crux of it, she thinks. He needs the Jedi, even without knowing what that really means.
Luke looks downright uncomfortable now, which makes her feel somewhat guilty. He came here looking for the wisdom of a Jedi Master, and she can't give him that. No one has ever accused her of being particularly wise. Bitter truths, though, those she has in spades.
"Ben and Master Yoda say it's important too," he says petulantly, "and even if they didn't, maybe I want to know where I came from." Her anger at his first point almost eclipses the feeling of loss and loneliness he's pouring into the force. Figures that nobody ever taught him how not to project. Even if they had, she's always been too empathetic for her own good.
"Your mother wasn't a jedi. Visit Naboo, it's beautiful this time of year. Every other time of year too, actually." She squares her shoulders, as she knows he isn't going to like this next bit. "As for Yoda and Obi-Wan, if the Jedi order was so important to them maybe they should have done more to save it." Or at least done literally anything besides hide in a swamp or desert, for starters.
Luke bristles like an angry tooka, right on cue. "They taught me everything they could in the time they had. Now it's my turn. Our turn."
Ahsoka rolls her eyes. "Yes, as I said, they taught you well. After they spent decades hiding in the ass ends of the galaxy. Not a very efficient use of their time, don't you think?" Hells, from what she can tell she spent more time training Ezra than Obi-Wan did training Luke. A couple of hours in 19 years is a pretty dismal showing.
Luke seems to be making an active effort to control himself, which is nice. Ahsoka can imagine some of the more conservative masters' horror at a knight unable to control himself. Still, he's clearly new at it, and his affront shows clearly on his face and in the force.
"It was too dangerous for them to -"
Oh, absolutely not. "Do not speak to me of how dangerous it was, Luke Skywalker," she hisses. "I was hunted for over a decade by the Empire while you sat safe at home." A part of her recognizes that no one on Tatooine is ever really safe, but the point stands. He has no right to speak of dangers he was kept safe from while more and more of her family died every year.
He must know he's miss-stepped, but he's still so earnest when he says "So you know better than anyone!" Only because all who knew better than her are dead, she thinks grimly. "The emperor would have stopped at nothing to see them dead."
"Then maybe they should have died," she says bitterly, and Luke's eyes widen in shock. "At least they could have done some good for the galaxy before the Empire caught up with them."
"You don't mean that," Luke says, pulling back. Distantly she recognizes that she's dumping decades of bitterness on someone who doesn't really deserve it. She's not angry at him, after all. But he insisted on having this conversation, so he can damn well deal with the consequences.
"Don't I?" she asks sardonically. "Half the galaxy in chains. Children abducted and tortured into madness. Entire species pushed to the brink of extinction, entire planets destroyed, and they did nothing." She is relentless in her recounting of the empire's crimes, and he flinches with each one. "Decades of this, and nothing from the last Masters of the Jedi Order. They might as well have died, for all the good they did."
"They did some good for me," Luke says obstinately, and how Yoda and Obi-Wan instilled this level of respect in such a short time is beyond her. But maybe that was it. He had seen them as wise mystics passing down secret knowledge, not as the flawed sentients they were. He had lived through the consequences of their mistakes just as she had, but he didn't see it that way. The Empire was evil, and the Jedi were good, and that's all that matters.
Ahsoka feels deeply weary at this realization. "Ah yes, how could I forget." Luke looks appeased by this beginning, but he should really know better by now. "They'd found two more children to solve their problems for them. Just the small problem of waiting for them to grow up before they could send them off to war. At least they waited till you were adults, or near enough. I can't argue with progress."
Luke has clearly lost the thread of this conversation, and she doesn't blame him. He’s missing a lifetime of context.
"Obi-Wan was protecting me," he offers weakly, and Ahsoka snorts.
"Like hell he was. If he wanted you safe, he could have taught you to protect yourself, and told you about your father. Instead, he tossed you a lightsaber, pointed you at Vader, and sacrificed himself at the first opportunity." She still hasn't forgiven him for that last bit. He survives for decades, then kicks it just before she could see him again?
Luke's fire has returned along with her recriminations of the illustrious Master Kenobi. "That's not fair. I…"
She's mildly curious how he'll spin her completely accurate account of the last hours of Obi-Wan's life, but it seems she'll never know. A ghostly figure of an old man appears between her and Luke and cuts him off.
"That's enough Luke," he says, and her heart breaks at the changes in the contours of his voice, just as it had when he first appeared to her several months ago. He hadn't been impressed with her blank refusal to engage in any discussions on the Jedi order. She should have known he'd find someone else to do his dirty work. It was much easier to ignore ghosts than the living, even if the ghost felt like an old friend.
"Finally fighting your own battles, Master?" She can barely look at him even as she snarks like the snippy padawan she used to be.
"Remember you as a youngling, I do," comes a voice from over her shoulder. The Sith weren't the only ones who gravitated to twos, it seems. "More respectful, you were."
She doesn't remember that. Most of her memories of the creche center around being chided for the snide comments that have since seeped into her bones, but maybe she kept a lid on it when the grandmaster was around. She sighs and turns back to her ship, beginning to disassemble the engine casing.
"Don't play games with me, Master Yoda. Say your piece and leave me be. I have work to do." The clogged fuel line is clear, but this ship was old before she 'acquired' it, and hard use hasn't done it any favors.
"Helping you, this anger is not."
Ahsoka rips the last panel on the engine open with the force in lieu of a verbal answer. She's too old for them to be chiding her for her emotions. And even if she wasn't, she wouldn't trust their input now. It's not like they could possibly have an ulterior motive for wanting her to let go of her anger at them.
Obi-Wan sees that she's not playing along first. "Perhaps you could explain why you're so angry at us, my dear."
"You know damned well why," she snaps back at him.
"Some of it, yes," he agrees amicably. "But I will not pretend to know you as well as I once did. We know very little of what you have been through since we parted decades ago."
Ahsoka scowls at the flux capacitor array in front of her. "Fine. You want to know? Let's start with betraying everything the Jedi stood for. Everything you both ever taught me to be. That enough for you?"
She can feel Luke's shock, and suspects either Yoda or Obi-Wan is prompting him not to interrupt. Montrals don't detect ghosts though, so she can't be sure. It's almost annoying enough to get her to turn around and face them. But she's always been stubborn.
"Whether it's enough for me isn't particularly important. Is there anything else?"
He's as patient as ever, which is just infuriating. She wants him to defend himself. To explain that she's wrong, that there was more to the story, and they both did what they could. When she was a padawan, she hated nothing more than being wrong. But now, a quarter century later, she wants nothing more.
She starts to feel decades older than she is at the lack of resistance, and her anger blows away with the wind, leaving her empty. It's all she is, these days. Tired, bitter, and alone. Present company excluded, in recent months.
"Do you know how many Jedi I arrived too late to save from Inquisitors?" she asks rhetorically. She hadn't kept count, after all. "How many rescue plans I was forced to abandon for lack of backup? How many I left to die over the years simply because I could not be in more than one place at a time?"
She's stopped pretending to fix the engine in favor of allowing herself to feel this grief again. She'd dealt with it at the time because there was no other choice. So much of her life in the rebellion had been the same. There was no one else, and so she stepped up.
Except there was someone else, it turns out. Two someones, in fact. Hiding away and letting the galaxy pass them by. Her grief must be leaking past her shields enough for Luke to sense, because he's no longer projecting indignation. Small mercies.
"And then I hear that two of the most powerful people in the galaxy had been alive all along." She's leaning heavily on the ship now, finally letting the weight she's carried all these years bend her. "I had stopped being angry at my expulsion years ago. But to hear that you both sat and watched the galaxy burn? I can't just let that go. It's a betrayal, an abdication, of the highest order."
And oh, Luke had their justifications locked and loaded when he came to her. Someone had to keep him and his sister safe. Somebody had to be ready to train the next generation. But there were dozens of young survivors of Order 66 in need of protection too, and where was Obi-Wan? Ezra was as much a part of the next generation as Luke and Leia, but where was Yoda? A long distance mission assignment to Malachor didn’t count for much.
"It was."
Obi-Wan's voice breaks the silence that had stretched at the end of her outpouring. Turning to face them she sees Yoda's ears drooping and Luke looking slightly dazed. But Obi-Wan has the same wretched expression on his face as he had after her expulsion, and again when he'd decided to rush off after the Chancellor instead of pressing on to Mandalore.
"I will not try to justify it, because I cannot," he continues. "I focused on Luke, and I cannot bring myself to regret it. But this is why we cannot be alone in guiding Luke and the new Order that will rise with him."
"Tested, we were, and found wanting," Yoda says gravely. "Rose to the challenge, you did."
"I didn't react well the last time you implied that what happened to me was some grand trial of the force," Ahsoka says wryly. But then again, she can hardly resign from the Order twice. Maybe they're hoping she'd get confused and do the opposite.
"You are, of course, free to interpret the will of the force in any way you wish," Obi-Wan says mildly.
She snorts at that. "Well that's just it, isn't it? I've been interpreting the will of the force on my own for a long time. And not as a Jedi. There are other survivors. Send Skykid to bother them. I'm busy."
"Skykid?" Luke mutters off to the side. Obi-Wan spares him a glance before continuing.
"There are others, yes. But they survived much as we did, eventually. They kept their heads down, hid their connection to the force, and moved on."
"I'm not the only one who chose to fight," Ahsoka points out sharply. "There were a dozen others I couldn't save. More I never even heard of."
"And now the last, you are." Yoda's pronouncement has the weight of dreadful certainty behind it, and Ahsoka's heart aches for her fallen family all over again. She'd been well informed as Fulcrum, of course, but nowhere near omniscient despite her best efforts. She'd held on to hope that more Jedi had escaped both hers and the empire's notice.
She feels her resistance wavering in spite of herself. Is this really so different from everything she's done since the fall of the Republic? Once again, for one reason or another, there is no one else but her. At least according to Yoda. He would know, she supposes.
"I was only ever a padawan," she says instead of caving. "Surely one of the old masters would be better able to guide your new order than I would." A wicked thought enters her mind at that, and she can't help but needle her old grandmaster for old time's sake. "Vos is still kicking, last I heard."
Luke perks up at the mention of another Jedi for him to pester, as she intended. Even better, Obi-Wan audibly groans.
"You know perfectly well why Quinlan isn't our first choice."
Ahsoka gives him her most innocent look. "I'm not sure what you mean, master. Master Secura always spoke so… highly of him." In that she said her master was often tripping on one illicit substance or another whenever she turned her back on him for more than a moment.
Yoda just looks at her calmly, ignoring her attempted deflection. "Agree then, you do. Good, good."
Ahsoka sputters a little at that. "What? No, I… Like I said, I was just a padawan."
"I was knighted for defeating Maul myself," Obi-Wan points out. "Knighting Ceremonies were formalities meant to celebrate an achievement, but in truth as soon as one passed their trials, they were a knight."
Ahsoka huffs, unimpressed. "I was 17. Definitely not ready to be a knight."
"Being a knight never meant you stopped learning," Luke says impishly. The little shit.
Yoda is nodding sagely, but his twinkling eyes reveal his amusement. Obi-Wan isn't even trying to hide how funny he finds seeing her own words used against her.
"Just so," Obi-Wan says smugly.
Unwillingly she feels the walls she's built around herself these last decades start to come down, just as they had when the Spectres reeled her in. Even with two of her present company dead, just being here with them makes her feel more whole than she has in years. Jedi were never meant to be alone, and she has been alone for a long time.
"I'll think about it," she says, but only because she doesn’t want to admit they've won her over.
"That is all we ask," Obi-Wan says, and judging by his knowing smile he knows exactly what she's doing. "We'll leave you to your business. Take care, dear one."
"Speak to you soon we will," Yoda says, before cackling like a crecheling. "Master Tano."
She'd forgotten how infuriating Jedi insight can be. Before she can give the old troll a piece of her mind both he and Master Kenobi are gone without a trace, leaving her with a newly invigorated Luke Skywalker and a ship in less than excellent condition.
Surprisingly, her companion holds his tongue. His excitement is clear in the force of course, but at least he's trying. Maybe she should throw him a bone.
"So," she says, breaking the silence. "Fixing things since you could walk, huh? What do you make of these intake manifolds Skykid?"