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Do you hate what you see in me?
She wanted to ask Obi-Wan, Rex, Padmé, anyone. Even Maul.
A half-broken ex-Padawan more deserving of death than anyone, but instead, her troopers- her brothers- took the fall for her. They died on the Tribunal, brainwashed, guns turned against the two of them, helmets still painted orange and white. She buried them on a moon she didn't know the name of, in a cold, lifeless terrain, and prayed to the Force that they would find it in themselves to forgive her when she saw them again.
Like I do?
But she left Obi-Wan on Tatooine to rot; turn to dust.
Rex, forever loyal, forever faithful, could never hate her, because she could never hate him.
And Maul, he would say she was a mirror of himself. They were two sides of the same coin. Tools for greater powers.
Padmé was dead.
And now, Ahsoka sat in her quarters on the ship she had procured (stolen) while Rex punched in the hyperspace coordinates, and stared at the wall. She promised herself she wouldn’t cry about Obi-Wan, or Jesse, or Vaughn, or Sterling. Or Anakin. They were all gone with the wind. She lost her brothers five years ago. Anakin would be twenty-seven.
She was twenty-two, but she had never felt so alone. She loved Rex; he was her older brother, her ori’vod. He called her vod’ika, and kih’vod, when he was trying to get through to her. It always worked. But he didn’t understand. He never would, not fully. The Force bond between Master and Padawan was like no other. The connection she had with Anakin had been ripped away from her, like amputating a limb with no painkillers. Severing a Force bond without the assent of the two parties involved was the equivalent of cleaving directly through the soul.
She missed him like she would miss her parents. She missed him like she missed Master Plo.
“You gonna stare at the wall all night, or are you gonna get some sleep?” Rex asked from the doorway. He had taken his armor off and was only clad in his GAR-designated blacks. The scar on the side of his head where she had operated and removed his chip was less pronounced now, but whenever she looked at it, her head throbbed with a phantom pain that was never there in the first place.
“What’s it to you?” She muttered, and the man pushed off of the frame to seat himself next to her. His hand brushed over her lek closest to him and then came to rest in between her montrals, as if she was a small child that needed consoling.
Maybe she was. She felt like one, just tall and lost and older than she was supposed to be, older than she ever thought she would be, her sternum bursting at the seams from the force at which her heart had been prised from her chest cavity. Now, with her rib cage hollow and her skin a shell, she felt like her montrals, vacant and prized only for extrasensory navigation.
Ahsoka supposed that was what war did to a person.
“Maybe because you’re my kih’vod and I’m worried about you?” He posed the question teasingly, but she sensed the truth behind his words as he tugged her down to rest her head in his lap. Ahsoka settled against Rex, careful to not let her nails dig into his thigh even though she was gripping him like a lifeline.
“One day you’re going to call me that and it’s not going to work,” she murmured, smiling slightly when she felt his stomach tense in a laugh against her lek.
“Good luck,” he responded. “Kih’vod will always get you like ori’vod will always get me. We’re each other’s weaknesses.”
“Jedi aren’t supposed to have weaknesses.”
“It’s a good thing you aren’t a Jedi then,” he mused, and even though she had said it herself a hundred times, there was still that nebulous ache behind her ribs when she heard Rex say it. They had failed her, she knew that wholeheartedly, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that she had failed them, too.
Failed him.
It didn’t matter anymore, but it still stung.
Her Master was a blood-sniffing shark in the back of her mind, always searching for an opportunity to bite, for an opening, for a gaping wound that refused to close.
Ahsoka knew she would never be sixteen again. She would always be begging for a second chance, another break at being Anakin’s apprentice, would always be wondering what would have happened if she had just stayed and accepted Knighthood and pretended like she didn’t notice the corruption seeping into the bloodstream of the Jedi Order.
Rex’s hand brushing over her montrals again dragged her out of her spiral of self-hatred.
“How do I move on?” She whispered, hating how her voice broke, hating the teardrop on her cheek that she swore she wouldn’t let fall.
She felt him pause, and sought out his Force signature. It wavered, only briefly, before settling around him like a blanket.
“I don’t know,” he murmured finally. “I can’t- I don’t know how, either.”
She knew he had loved Anakin, too. She knew he missed his brothers like she missed them, like a lung, aching deeper and deeper in his chest as the days droned on.
She wondered if it was the bridge between their two worlds of navigating grief that made him feel so alone.
She wondered if that was why she felt so alone.
“Missing him feels like a knife twisting in my chest,” Ahsoka told him truthfully, “and I can’t find the hilt.”
“I know,” Rex replied quietly, running his free hand over his shorn head, over the freshly-buzzed, freshly-bleached hair that sloped over his skull.
Ahsoka wanted to be able to talk to him without thinking of Anakin.
Rex wanted to be able to talk to her without thinking of Cody.
Ahsoka wanted to spend one day without hearing Anakin’s voice ringing in her head.
Rex wished he could look at the stars and hear his brothers speaking without listening to his own voice.
Ahsoka turned onto her back to stare past Rex’s concerned face at the ceiling, and pretended they were back on Coruscant, on leave in the barracks, just for a moment. She imagined Jesse and Fives arguing with Echo mediating, Hardcase and Tup egging Dogma on, Rex and Anakin arm wrestling with Kix and Denal betting on Anakin’s ultimate loss because he held too much faith in his flesh hand.
It felt like the start of a holofilm she had seen before, because it was over too soon, and she was watching Jesse point his twin blasters at the two of them on the Tribunal, she was watching Echo meet his demise at the Citadel, she was watching the explosion that stole Hardcase from the 501st Battalion in the darkened Umbaran atmosphere.
She was burying her brothers in an unmarked grave on an unknown, rocky moon in the middle of the Outer Rim.
It was like pulling thorns out of her already-bloodstained palms.
She knew she would be in Rex’s nightmares tonight. He would be in hers, too, like every night.