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Ahsoka couldn't sleep. It wasn't for lack of trying, she’d been lying in her bunk, breathing to a meditation count for hours. In, slowly, hold and out, until she didn't seem to be able to get enough air.
The hyperspace engines made the whole ship thrum, a constant background vibration in her montrals. Another battle to another battle. She could trace their route from devastated planet to devastated planet, a line through the black, stretching on forever.
With her eyes open all she could see was the ceiling panels edged with the glow of emergency lights. Harsh, cold, metallic: the beginnings and endings of her world.
With her eyes shut, well… she didn't want to go there. Last battle had been a hard one, and the one before that, and whatever came before that. She was tired .
Sometimes she thought that war was all she had ever known. The calm of the Jedi Temple a fever dream set to the silent gaps between blaster shots. It wasn’t real any longer, not in the way battle plans and ration bars and the endless hallways of the Resolute were.
The sound of her lightsaber was the only constant, but then again it had never sung the way it did in the sunlit training salles of so long ago, as on a battlefield searing through metal and flesh. The melody was punctured by staccato blaster shots and screams. Its resonance quavered and cracked.
It might have been months, it might have been an eternity. Same kyber, same heart. Different heart. War changed them all in ways she didn't even know yet.
She’d come to know death far too intimately. In the way it felt in the Force. In the difference between passing after a long life, and having it ripped away years too soon. How the threads of the universe were left ragged and frayed.
Ahsoka shook her head to clear her unravelling thoughts. She laughed the way that stuck in her throat. ‘Melancholy, a bit.’ Straying to places in her mind she should not go.
She sat up and reached for the lightswitch. All the better to banish the bodies. If she was awake anyway, she might as well use it. Finishing all her flimsii work, rare as that occasion was, just meant she had freed up time to help others. Rex with the mountains that came from being the Commander in all but name. Anakin’s, because he spent too long in med bay after missions to be anything but permanently behind.
Thinking of Anakin, she ran her mind over their bond. It was strong for how recently they had forged it. She prodded at it, just to reassure herself that Skyguy was still alive and kicking with all the trouble he got into, not because she had had a nightmare about him with blank eyes and a blaster hole through his head like she’d seen on a trooper.
His mind was too busy to be asleep and he tugged back, ropes of Force asking “Come to me.” She gave him a shove back, because he didn't seem to realise that he’d done the cosmic equivalent of screaming into her montrals. He was getting better, but sometimes he just sorta forgot.
Tugging a robe over her head, she made her way through the halls of their Venator. With half lidded eyes, she wandered towards the massive, reaching sun that was Skyguy, easily dodging the smaller, but oh so different from each other, stars of the troopers.
When she opened her eyes it was to the hanger bay, standing in front of a familiar yellow and grey fighter. A pair of long legs stuck out from underneath it. She could have guessed. She was really getting better at the whole ‘follow the Force thing’.
Ahsoka shuffled underneath, elbowing Anakin to move over and give her some room. He remained concentrated on something above them, hands dug into the underside of the fighter, up to his wrists.
Eventually he lowered them, turned his head and gave her a small, genuine smile. A crooked little curve of his lips, so unlike his toothy, Hero With No Fear and ‘I’m about to get into so much trouble’ grin.
“Couldn't sleep?”
She nodded.
“Me neither. Thought I’d get a start on the modifications while it was quiet.”
It was quiet, eerily so. The usually bustling hanger was deserted at this time of the night cycle. A handful of automated droids that she could see and the signatures of the couple of engineers on standby were all that filled the cavernous space. And them.
Skyguy looked tired, well more than normal, given how he usually looked. The deep purple shadows beneath his eyes made the irises look a washed out, empty colour. A fading bruise painted his cheek in greens and yellows. It had been a livid, angry purple when he’d first gotten it.
She tucked herself into his side; Anakin’s warmth was much better than the freezing durasteel floor, intent on leaching out all her body heat. Even if he wore crumpled robes which she would bet he hadn't changed since the last battle. He was lucky they were dark enough to hide the blood stains. His hair frizzed and knotted where it was spread out on the floor.
Now she was near, Ahsoka could tell he was humming under his breath, in the way he didn't even realise he did. It rumbled pleasantly in his chest, a respite from other noises that made her montrals ache.
She pressed against his shields until he opened them and wrapped his Force presence around her.
The first time he’d done this it had been smothering, and she’d pushed away. Now it was just comforting.
The ebb and flow of his mind made ripples and eddies in the Force, waves that drowned out everything else. She was perfectly content just to lie here, restful in the silence, not really doing much, but being surrounded, listening to half heard thoughts she was too tired to parse.
Finding little pieces of home in the people she had by her side.
Her eyes slid shut and she slept, no dream and no nightmares.
When Anakin finally pulled himself out of the guts of his starfighter, Ahsoka was still by his side. She was fast asleep, snuggled next to him, making little snuffly snores on every exhale. Her trust was overwhelming. He rubbed his eyes and careful extricated them both from under the fighter without waking her up.
He didn't look at his chrono because he didn't really need to get more specific than stupid o’clock in the morning. He dropped his scattered tools back in their box with the Force, not able to be bothered enough to sort them.
She was so light in his arms. A bundle of thin limbs and stubby lekku, despite how she’d grown. He cradled her to his chest as he made his way through the Resolute. Ahsoka’s life-force glowed in gentle pulses, encircled protectively by his own.
He slid open her door with the Force, in a way that would have Obi-Wan lecturing until he caught sight of their padawan and he just went mushy. She wasn't even awake to do the killer adorable tooka eyes.
He set her down on her bed and chucked her outer robe in the direction of the laundry. It had caught the worse of the grease and dirt from the hanger floor. He smudged a thumb across a drip on her right lek.
After untangling her padawan beads and tucking her into the blankets to make sure she wouldn't get cold, Anakin pressed his lips to her forehead. She was small and vulnerable and clever and snarky and reckless. He couldn't help but love her. His padawan and his little sister. Family.
When he reached the doorway, unwinding his Force presence from hers, he sensed her stir. She turned over, mumbled something that could’ve been ‘Skyguy,’ and slumbered on.
He promised the galaxy and the Force and everything he had that he’d make sure Ahsoka and their troops and their family would survive till the end of this war.