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In the months after, Ahsoka finds him in everything she does. She can’t seem to get away from him.
She told him that she needed to find out who she was without him, but that was a fallacy. There is no Ahsoka Tano without Anakin Skywalker. Or, rather, there is no Ahsoka Tano as she is now without Anakin Skywalker as he was then.
No one had given her much of a choice when they sent her off to Christophsis—to Anakin. If they had, she wouldn’t have known the magnitude of what she was choosing. Nevertheless, that arbitrary meeting has sparked irrevocable transformations—the consequences of every moment they spent together spiral out into the galaxy and into who she is. Who she is, was, and will be.
It had happened so slowly that it took this—their abrupt and traumatic separation—for her to realize.
Only when she begins to try to disentangle the two of them, trying to eek out a new life for herself in the underlevels of Coruscant, does she realize how tight the knot of them had become. How much of him is a part of her now. The tendrils of her master had reached out into the cracks of her—likes vines growing towards the sun—and wound themselves around her, entrenched.
Ahsoka won’t ever be able to get him out: out of her head, out of her heart, out of her core. It would be totally impossible to make herself back into what she was before she was Anakin Skywalker’s Padawan.
She finds herself doing things like standing at parade rest, her hands clasped behind her back, when it is her turn to order a cup of caf or tea at the cafe—the picture of Anakin Skywalker in command of a Star Destroyer. She finds herself jumping into street fights, to protect a child caught in the brawl, throwing kicks and punches on the way in and on the way out—fighting dirty, but only to protect others. She finds herself smothering her discomfort, her sense of displacement, her loneliness, in bravado.
Only someone close to her would be able to see past the show she puts on, but he’s not there.
When she finds herself doing these things, it hurts—like finding shrapnel sticking out of her skin. She’s not sure whether disentangling herself is necessary. Or safe. Maybe it will kill her either way. The problem is that no one she could meet now would understand the analogy. Apparently having shrapnel embedded in you is a fairly unique experience, even in a galaxy this harsh.
Among the many, many things she is learning about the real galaxy, she also learns how ordinary people see Anakin Skywalker. Yes, she had known that he was something of a celebrity, quickly becoming a household name due to his improbable successes on the battlefield, but she hadn’t cared much about it. Why would she when she knew the real Anakin Skywalker?
But now Anakin Skywalker the celebrity is all she has.
She is making her way through a lower level—she doesn’t know which—when something tells her to look up at a giant news holoscreen a few levels above. She has to seriously crane her neck to make out the picture, but when she does, she realizes why she had the urge to look.
Anakin is up there, shaking the Chancellor’s hand. It takes her longer than it should to understand that the picture is meant to represent the successful conclusion of Anakin’s most recent campaign—he looks too healthy, too awake, and too clean. When battles were newly won, Anakin hadn’t looked like he belonged in even the same galaxy as the rich, tidy Chancellor. But, of course, he did and still does. And she doesn’t. Not anymore.
Ahsoka’s neck twinges under the weight of her montrals, and she remembers that she used to look up at him all the time. He was so tall compared to her at the beginning. And even at the end, after closing his open hand, she had looked up at him. If she had turned at the bottom of the Temple steps, she would have been looking up at him.
This is a poor substitute. Ahsoka looks away from the holoscreen, because if she can’t have that look, then she shouldn’t have this one.
Other people, here in the underbelly of Coruscant with her, are still looking at Anakin, and she looks at them instead.
Down the corridor, there are two human women. Ahsoka can make out that one of them is blushing. She whispers something in her companion’s ear that makes her giggle, and then they are both blushing.
A Twi’lek boy is walking towards Ahsoka, holding his mother’s hand. The lightsaber noises he’s making with his mouth grow louder as they approach, and his free hand waves wildly in the air to mimic brandishing a weapon.
Two middle-aged men walk out of the bar across the way. She can’t hear, but she’s become fairly passable at reading lips. The one on the left is calling Anakin “the only one of them worth a damn thing."
The two girls are hurrying away, sneaking glances upwards at the screen again, even though Anakin is no longer there.
These people admire Anakin. They think he is strong and brave and good. They’ve never known what it was like to hear him vomiting on the other side of the fresher door—like he did after they left Kadavo—or the dead look in his eyes when he was done. They’ve never known the sound of his voice when he told her to run, or his too-sharp smile after making kills in a dogfight, or his growls of frustration and the clang of his metal hand against the side of the holotable after the Council dismissed him. They’ve never seen him kill anyone.
Those things are hard to forget and equally hard to remember. She misses them like a layer of own skin, perhaps even the killing.
Ahsoka decides that from now on, she would rather be like these people. This will be all she thinks of Anakin: he is strong and brave and good, but in a distant way.
Ahsoka walks away and, with this decision, tries to make someone new out of herself. She’ll never quite manage it.
She still draws herself up to attention and wears confidence like armor, she fights dirty and takes the punches as they come, she does barrel rolls in freighters, she fixes machines for people without asking for anything in return, she smothers her rage at the injustices she encounters in the galaxy every day, and she loves. It’s unconscious now, and she can only live the way she knows how: like him.
In the end, it becomes clear that the problem is just as that stranger once said: to her, he’s the only one of them worth a damn thing.