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The TIE that’s locked in on them is unmistakably piloted by a Force user. Whoever it is, is strong; stronger than any Inquisitor she’s met. Kanan wants to help, and in the same way that she does, he wants to know, to understand what’s happening, so he rests his hand on Ahsoka’s shoulder and lets his resignation slip away as Ahsoka reaches out. She knows she has to do so carefully; even one of the Inquisitors would know the touch of a Jedi’s mind, and it’s better for all of them if they have as little detail about the remaining Jedi as possible. But she can’t help it, and neither can Kanan. When they were kids, reaching out to another was as natural as breathing, a skill they both perfected before they could tie their own shoes, before they learned to wield a lightsaber or touch their surroundings with the Force. Kanan and Ahsoka reach out, just to glimpse the mind that’s chased them from Lothal, and he glimpses back.
She would know him anywhere, even after all this time, even like this. Against all odds, against all logic, Anakin Skywalker reaches across time and space to touch her mind. Their badly severed training bond ignites, her head erupting in a searing flash of pain, and Ahsoka loses consciousness.
Kanan’s eyes swim to life above her. His hair is falling from his ponytail and his expression is frayed. He’s supporting her in an awkward half-crouch, braced against the ricocheting of The Ghost.
“What was that?” he asks, his voice strained. “Ahsoka —” Kanan, like her, has lost so much, saw the destruction of the his people, of everything that he knew. Like her, he lives in fear. Ezra is different. He’s calling to them from the guns, his voice strained but excited. In a lot of ways, Ezra reminds her of Anakin, and —
“Whoever that is, he’s…” she swallows. “He’s not an Inquisitor,”she decides. She can still feel the echoes of him, but she had thought she found him — him and Obi-Wan and Master Plo, and once, in a moment that caused her heart to nearly stop, Barriss — so many times before, and she’s never been right, their long dead voices imagined in her head.
Kanan nods curtly, offering her his hand up. “The Sith. From Lothal. We dropped an AT-AT on him and he just got back up.”
She stands, without taking Kanan’s hand, her head pounding from the battle they’ve just escaped. And the sound of something else too, of the heavy whine of mechanical lungs, of her master’s voice. “Can you get Ezra?” she asks, clasping her arms behind her back, working to keep her voice even.
Kanan hesitates. His hands are shaking at his side but he’s composing himself by the second. A decade and a half of hiding away, pulling his fear back away from her. Hera’s looking at between them. Kanan gives her a small smile and leaves the cockpit. Hera has been on the run with Kanan a long time, Ahsoka knows, gently cajoling him this whole time to join this cause. It’s all Ahsoka knows, it’s all Hera knows. Kanan wants something else, but now that the Sith Lord has found them, they don’t have a choice. A knot of anxiety unfurls itself inside of her.
“Do you want a moment alone?” Hera asks softly, looking away out into hyperspace. “Some of this, I don’t understand. But I met Jedi, before. And I know that Kanan —” She sighs. “I was hoping that by meeting you, he’d see what we have to do. That he isn’t alone.”
Ahsoka swallows. “The Sith who attacked us,” she says. “He’ll be coming after us now. I don’t know that he has a choice.” She never has. Bounced from one conflict to another since she was fourteen, always at her master’s heels, in his long shadow. Kanan’s stayed out of this fight for too long, happy with his fake name, and his disassembled lightsaber, while the Clone Wars dragged into another conflict. Ahsoka walked away from the Order, and she still —
That isn’t fair.
Ahsoka takes a deep breath. Anakin’s voice, long dead, is counseling patience and grace, which he always tried to foster in her because he found it so lacking in himself. That really isn’t fair either, although it might be true in ways she couldn’t appreciate as a teenager, when they were both so young and Anakin was alive.
Hera is still watching her keenly. “I’ll give you guys some time to talk,” she decides. “We have a few hours before we get to Safe Haven.” The doors slide shut behind her, the sound swallowing Ahsoka’s thanks.
Alone, she has time to think, to allow herself the fullness of fifteen years of grief. Since the day the Republic fell, Ahsoka hasn’t thought of what Maul said to her about Anakin. He died. She was so certain of it. Anakin, hopeful for her return and still finding it impossible to let anything go, had left their training bond open, open so that even in the chaos, even as she felt the Jedi die and the Republic fall, she could feel the moment he had died. He had been strung out, tired but fine, when they parted, and then the Galaxy imploded and she had felt their bond sever so completely and suddenly she had felt like she was burning alive. He had died in the first wave of the Jedi Purge, killed by Clone or Sith, and she had mourned him, had ached for him in those early days, wishing he could be by her side to guide and teach and protect her, had missed his obstinate loyalty and his quick temper and how he always, always, was there for her. But she had mourned, and she had grown up and he hadn’t. It couldn’t have been him in the TIE, switching course so single-mindedly when their minds touched. One powerful Force user could be mistaken for another. Anakin had had flaws, among them his blind loyalty to Palpatine, and Jedi could fall, could turn to the Darkside, even those who you wouldn’t suspect, but this —
She has a few moments. Kanan is worrying outside the door, whispering furiously to Hera. Again, she has to go back to that moment again, when their minds touched, when she looked at him in the Force and he looked back, the moment of pain, of the shock of cold fear down her spine. Her curious mind begging to peak into the psyche of a single pilot who could take out an entire squad of fighters by himself; she could feel the ripples of the Force around him from the second he appeared out of hyperspace, a presence so strong that she hadn’t felt since the end of the Clone Wars. She hadn’t been careful enough, or else he was always going to feel her; Anakin had always felt everything, he moved through the Galaxy like it was nothing, like he stood still and it moved around him. He was going to look back, he was going to turn his mind’s eye on her, and he did, one word, clear between the two of them, one startling moment of recognition before the pilot turned all his attention on her. Ahsoka! An involuntary note of relief, of anger, of twisted hope. It all happened in a second, but he turned his attention to her, all of it, probing her mind, the tattered remnants of their bond, and she remembered this from her adolescence, that even back then, having all of his attention hurt, left her skin tingling and her montrals ringing and a headache that could last for days. He never meant to hurt her, at least back then. It was always accidental, careless use of power he barely understood, it was part of who he was, it was the price of loving him, and she did back then. She still did, and he felt that too, and it sparked between them for a moment before his scrutiny intensified, changing course — pursuing them, pursuing her, still so careless but now thoughtless as well. She would know him anywhere. But she can’t believe it.
“Ahsoka?” Ezra is opening the door and talking at the same time. She turns from the viewport to watch Ezra and Kanan enter the cockpit. Master and apprentice, Kanan watching her. She’s sweating and clammy, but Kanan’s back to his composed and steady self, his expression narrowing at her. “Did you want to see us? Are you okay?”
Ahsoka pulls her feelings closer to herself. This isn’t about them, and they don’t need this burden. She tries on a smile for Ezra. His eyes flick up to Kanan, trying to gauge how much he should trust his own feelings, how much of what he feels now is Ahsoka’s fear and uncertainty. Kanan’s expression is impassive, exhausted, and he sits, elbows resting on his knees.
“Yes, thank you,” she says, calmly, so calmly, the headache mounting behind her eyes no longer on display for the others. “I wanted to ask you about the Sith Lord you encountered on Lothal.”
A name, perhaps, a description, anything helpful but Kanan shakes his head. “You know we encountered an Inquisitor before, but this was nothing like that. The fear, the anger…the hate…” He shivers, letting Ahsoka in, a fuzzy memory of a time before he was Kanan, when he was just a kid, like her, on a battlefield in the middle of a conflict designed to kill him. So young and so afraid, clones he thought were his friends, the world chaos, but neither of them knowing any different, blaster bolts and shrapnel raining down on them both before either of them were adults. “I haven’t felt a presence like that since…” He can’t finish the thought, but Ahsoka knows anyway.
“The Clone Wars,” she says, for Ezra’s benefit more than anything else. Kanan’s memories shudder back behind impenetrable shields, but it was enough. Ezra is looking between them, his face ashen.
“Do you know who or what he is?” he asks, his voice low barely above a whisper, and Ahsoka looks down at her hands, hands that had taken lives and would take more before the end of this conflict, before the end of the next, that were trained to kill by one of the most powerful Jedi the Galaxy had ever seen, and would ever see because at the time he had died, all of the Jedi were hunted down and exterminated one by one until all that was left were the three of them fleeing the destruction of their way of life.
She clenches her fists and looks up at them, desperate to console them in some way, to console herself. The truth won’t hurt Ezra, but it may shake Kanan. She imagines herself saying it aloud, that she knows him, that she loves him and mourned him and once upon a time she would have died for him and he would have died for her but she can’t manage to find the words to even start, can’t believe it even though she felt him, she saw him. For a moment, that hope felt like her own, before she remembered what it would mean, that Anakin didn’t just die, didn’t just fall, but he was the one who killed every person she had ever loved, the only family she had ever really known. “No,” she says, her voice catching. “I don’t.” She wants to believe it, she needs to. The alternative would be unthinkable. Anakin was a lot of things but he was never evil, and the Sith she had felt was pure evil. He cared for nothing, for no one, consumed by anger and fear. He couldn’t be. It was impossible. Her master, who taught her everything she knew about being a Jedi, about how to be brave about how to fight. “I don’t,” she says, her voice stronger now, hoping that Kanan at least believes her, at least for now. “But they’ll be coming now. They’ll all be coming.”
Ezra nods stoically, but Kanan’s emotions storm ferociously beneath the surface. He’s keeping them as close to his chest as Ahsoka is, though, she thinks bitterly, for different reasons. Ezra descends into the depths of The Ghost after a moment. She can hear him and Sabine bickering, and it reminds her of a simpler time; the moment of danger has passed, and in spite of the looming danger always on the horizon, they can find comfort and laughter and joy. Kanan lingers, watching her, so Ahsoka keeps her expression schooled, neutral and cool like she has for the last fifteen years. It’s harder, with another Jedi watching her, than it is with civilians, but Kanan doesn’t pry because he wants to keep his thoughts to himself as much as she does.
“The Sith Lord,” he starts haltingly. “He’s the one who stormed the Temple?” Just rumors, picked up over the years.
Ahsoka’s blood runs cold at the thought. Her head pounds dangerously. She doesn’t meet his eye, visions of Anakin as he was back then; she always imagined that he died protecting the Temple. A noble death. Her vision swims again, her stomach churns. “My master was on Coruscant,” she says, despite herself, because she has to tell someone, because Kanan might be the only person left in the whole Galaxy who might understand. “He would have —” Her mouth is so dry and she can’t see Kanan in front of her. All she can see is Anakin, dark bags under his eyes, cocky and brash like he always was, but something was off, something was wrong. Maybe she’s imagining it, maybe there was nothing wrong and she’s imagining all of it. It wasn’t him. It couldn’t be. For all his flaws, he was always kind, always loyal. Loyal to her, and to Obi-Wan, and to Padme; loyal to the Republic. To Palpatine. “It would have to be,” she says finally. She shakes her head, trying to clear it of the visions of Anakin storming the Jedi Temple. Someone the Jedi trusted, who they would have let inside their walls without a second thought. For all his flaws — “That’s what I’ve heard, from people who would know. The Sith apprentice.” She swallows, the name Bail gave her on the tip of her tongue. He always looked bloodless when he had to talk about the Sith, like saying his name would summon him. The truth is worse.
“You know something about him?” Kanan asks. “He killed your master and you’ve been in this fight or a long time. You know something you don’t want to tell Ezra.”
“No.” She says it too quickly, but Kanan backs off, retreating from her in the Force. “No,” she says again, like she can make it true. “All I know is that he’s more powerful than anyone you’ve ever faced and that he’s going to be coming after us now. I’m sorry, Kanan. He’s —” She’s going to be swallowed whole by her guilt. She should tell him. She should call Ezra back in here, call Sabine, and Zeb and Hera and spill the truth all over the floor for all of them to see, examine. “I’ll see what I can find out, but you need and Ezra need to be careful,” she says, trying not to plead with him.
Kanan just nods. “One conflict after another,” he says, his voice laced with venom. “Ever since we were kids. I don’t want to fight. It doesn’t seem fair.”
“It isn’t.” It’s all she can say, it’s all she can do to stay upright and conscious. She wishes she could offer him some wisdom, some advice, but they’ve been in this fight their whole lives and Ahsoka feels the weight of it, finally, after all these years. And all her advice, everything she knew, everything she knows comes from him, her master who she wishes she could say for sure died on Coruscant fifteen years ago. “They say,” she says quietly, so quiet she can barely hear herself over the pounding in her head. “They say that the Sith apprentice was a Jedi. Like Dooku was.”
Kanan scoffs and pushes himself to his feet. “No way. Even Dooku wouldn’t have resorted to the mass slaughter of Jedi. There’s no way it was one of us.” He says it with such finality, with such certainty, that Ahsoka almost believes him. The doors slide closed behind him and Ahsoka tries to imagine what must have happened, those final days before the Republic fell, but the Order collapsed. She wants to follow him out, join the Ghost crew in their safe travels through hyperspace, but she’s still cold, as cold as she was on the day she thought Anakin died, and she can’t shake the truth she’s known, deep down, for fifteen years, the nagging truth that Anakin was alive, that he was out there. She has to face it now. Anakin is as unmistakable as he ever was.