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Ahsoka wakes with a start and a sharp scream.
Her mind cycles over yellow eyes, the feeling of cold fingers on her forehead, and the look on her master’s face.
She tries to take a shaky breath and recollect herself, but it’s no use. She’s already tearing up. So instead she rolls over and buries her face in her pillow, trying to muffle her reaction.
She barely remembers Mortis, a week on. In fact, she barely remembers these nightmares she keeps getting, and in the bright daylight of the Jedi Temple, it’s easy to brush it off as weird but over. But now, in the dark, alone, reeling from a nightmare that she only remembers snippets of but puts a choking panic in her heart all the same, she lets herself cry a little.
There’s an uncertainty there, about her own emotions. Emotions are one of the only things she remembers. There was anger and hate and confusion, and now she just feels a little off-balance. Like she’s teetering at the edge of a cliff. And she hates feeling fragile, but even if she has no memory of what happened, her body remembers, and it demands fragility, just for a little while.
She grabs her arms and squeezes.
It’s hard to feel grounded.
She resigns herself to crying herself to sleep (again) when her door slams open with a hurried urgency, causing her to jump like a startled tooka. When she looks up, it’s to see Anakin slumped against the doorframe, running his hand through his hair, exhausted but somehow relieved. His eyes are also red, and the eyebags under his eyes are impressively dark.
“Sorry, Snips, I thought…” he shrugs sheepishly. Ahsoka had screamed after all.
She smiles shakily and the two of them just kind of stare at each other for a few moments. Anakin looked drained, like he’d woken up from his own nightmare. She fiddles with her blankets, pulling the fabric softly and then harshly between her fingers, still feeling off-kilter. She sees Anakin zero in on her wet face, her body language with an uncharacteristic sharpness for her oblivious master.
He steps into the room proper, rolling his shoulders. All of a sudden she’s hit in the face with a bunch of soft fabric. Pulling it away, she can see it’s her tunic.
“Come on, put those on.”
“What, why?”
“Come on!”
Rubbing her eyes, she pulls on the tunic and the leggings, yawning as she does. Her master shifts from foot to foot in the doorway, seeming impatient about something - not that she knows why, considering how late (or early, depending on how you look at it) it is. Once she finally pulls her boots on, she follows Anakin at a far too brisk pace for this time of the morning down to the speeder bay.
“Skyguy, where are we going?”
“You’ll see, Snips!”
She resigns herself to just following her Master, wherever they were going.
They zip several levels down, stopping in front of a shop that was surprisingly clean looking, white and black and grey. But it’s the artwork in the window that gives Ahsoka a moment of pause.
“A tattoo shop? Really?”
“Well, you are technically old enough-”
“Barely, Skyguy.”
“Besides, these guys know me, it’ll be fine.” Her master looks hesitant for a second. “You know, if it would be something you’re interested in.”
She looks at the shop again. Honestly, she is interested. And curious.
“Why?”
“Huh?”
“Why’d you bring me here?”
Anakin looks at the shop in thought. Ahsoka does not hurry him.
“When I was 16,” he begins slowly, “Obi-Wan and I went on a mission, on one of the systems near Jedha. There was a slave market on the planet, and they were… experimenting on the slaves.”
“Experimenting?”
Her master shudders. “The guy was trying to- to create Force sensitivity, I guess. The stuff he was doing, with their brains or other organs or- well, I still sometimes have nightmares of his lab.” Her master took a forceful breath, shivering from the memory. “It wasn’t even our actual mission, we just stumbled across it during negotiations of something else. Our hosts were suitably horrified, actually, but…” he blew a breath in and out. “It shook me up for a while. Knocked my confidence a bit.”
“I snuck out to this tattoo shop a few weeks after that. Got this.” He rolls up his sleeve and Ahsoka sees an inked square just above his prosthesis.
“What is it?”
“A japoor snippet.” He rolls his sleeve back down. “It’s- well, what it means doesn’t really matter - the tattoo was to remind me that my body was my own.”
“Did Master Obi-Wan find out?”
“Oh, yeah.” Anakin smirks fondly. “He’d followed me all the way out from the Temple and down - he’d noticed something was off, and I wasn’t the most subtle at 16.”
Ahsoka wants to interject that he wasn’t very subtle now, but she didn’t think that telling her master how obvious he and Senator Amidala were at 3 in the morning was really the move. Besides, she and Rex had a bet on how long Master Obi-Wan would last before he snapped.
“Anyway, he didn’t intervene. Actually paid for it, then we went to Dex’s, which is where we’re going next.” Anakin winks at her. “Lineage tradition, you know.”
“Is he following us now?”
“Nope, he finally crashed out. Pretty sure he’s been awake for a week straight, you know how he gets.” Her master turns to her properly. “I thought this might help you as well. So, what do you think, Snips?”
Ahsoka remembers how he had actually hugged her after she’d woken up, how he’d felt so large and comforting. One of the only things she actually could remember with any clarity. Anakin seemed to struggle with emotional closeness more than anyone else she knew, always pinwheeling between wanting to express and holding back.
“Absolutely.”
The tattooist had been an impressively buff Twi’lek with tattoos covering every space of skin except for their lekku. Ahsoka had been able to feel the buzzing of the tattoo gun in her montrals; it hadn’t really been painful, it was just a uniquely unpleasant experience, and she didn’t think she’d get another tattoo any time soon.
But sitting squeezed up to Anakin in a small booth at Dex’s, after getting practically suffocated by the besalisk’s hug, they didn’t talk. Just sat together, trying to throw fries into each other’s mouths.
Ahsoka could feel the warm ache of the new Torrent Diamond on her upper thigh, where it would be covered by her tunics all the time. It was grounding, Anakin was right; she felt calmer than she had in months.
But how much of that was due to the tattoo and how much of that was due to Anakin, she wasn’t sure.