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DENIAL.
“Snips.”
Ahoska sucks a breath in and has to physically stop her knees from buckling at the voice.
How long has it been since she had heard that nickname? Fond and teasing, something that had once slipped from his mouth just as easily as the accompanied “Skyguy” slipped from her own.
Too long. A voice mourns inside of her. Too, too long.
It has been years, yet she can still imagine the easy smile that bore his face and the twinkle of his piercing blue eyes. The same face that still appears in her dreams and nightmares alike after all this time—a feeble attempt at keeping him alive, if only in her own mind.
(Never dead, only lost in a place that she could not yet reach.)
In her dreams, she is back in a period of her life that she can not put past her. In a place that she had once called home. In the body of a younger version of herself who did not know that it would soon be taken from her too. When she dreams, she can pretend that nothing ever happened until she wakes up and faces the real world that has chewed and spit her out ten times over.
In her nightmares, he haunts her (just as he haunts her in life with everything she does, every place she goes, every face she sees). She watches him bleed out as he confirms all her worst fears. He tells her that she could have saved him. That she betrayed him. That she failed as his Padawan. That she had practically signed off his death sentence the moment she chose to walk away from him.
(Logically, she knows that the only reason she survived was because she walked away. Yet she can’t help but wish that she died right alongside him.)
On the very bad nights, instead of pushing her Padawan beads into his hands, she drives a lightsaber through his heart.
It’s these nightmares that she wakes up shaking uncontrollably in cold sweat, heart beating out of her chest. She doesn't goes back to sleep after them.
“Snips,” the voice says again.
Ahsoka squeezes her eyes shut. Her voice wavers as she speaks. “You’re not real.”
“Then why am I here?” Force, he sounds so much like him. “Open your eyes, Ahsoka.”
She opens her eyes.
Anakin looks the same as he did the day she lost (betrayed) him. A warm smile overcomes his face as he opens his arms. “Come here.”
His embrace welcomes her. He smells like amber and hints of floral, like the perfume Padmé used to wear.
Padmé.
Her throat tightens.
“I miss you,” Ahsoka chokes out. “Why did you have to leave me?”
She feels Anakin hum into her lekku and in a start, realises she has become as tall as he once was.
“I never left you, Snips,” he says gently. “I’m here.”
“But you’re not,” she protests, trembling in his arms. “You’re not.”
Carefully, he removes her from his hold so she is forced to meet him at eye level. His eyes are so, so sad. Her heart twists. Even in death he is worried about her. Even in death she can’t let him rest. As Ahsoka looks at him, she notices the blue of his eyes shifting in hue, almost as if they cannot decide what shade of blue they actually are.
“I will always be with you.” Anakin places his hand onto hers and moves them both so that they are resting over her heart. “In here.”
Ahsoka’s vision blurs as she shakes her head. He doesn’t understand. “I want you with me. Alive.”
Anakin’s brows furrow. He doesn’t respond. She knows she is asking of the impossible.
They stand like that for a moment, Ahsoka on the verge of tears and her Master quiet as she silently begs him to speak, to say anything at all, if only to continue the conversation that she knows is only a figment of her imagination.
He says nothing.
“Please.” She desperately searches his eyes for—for what? She isn’t sure. Something. Anything.
The world around them begins to unfocus and Anakin becomes hazy in front of her, fading slowly.
“No!” Ahsoka cries. Every step she takes in an effort to move closer to him only seems to pull her further away. Her eyes erratically scan his face in an attempt to commit it to memory before it all falls away.
Anakin gives her one last, wistful smile before a dark shadow overcomes his ghostly figure and he disappears. The sound of heavy, low-pitched breathing follows him.
Ahsoka surges up from her bed. Her heart beats rapidly and the hand he had placed his own over is now cold. She closes her eyes and tries to conjure up his face in her mind once again. Dread washes over her.
She can’t remember the exact colour of blue of Anakin’s eyes.
—
ANGER.
The Jedi say that only a Sith deals in absolutes. Ahsoka is not a Sith. She is not a Jedi either.
So here are three absolutes: Her Master is dead. There is no bringing him back. She has failed him.
She couldn’t save Anakin and it is something that she will regret for the rest of her life. But she isn’t the only one who failed him.
The Jedi had once been about peace and justice before they were forced into a war that warped them into something distorted that Ahsoka could no longer be a part of. The system failed her, at the moment she needed it the most. It failed the 501st, who were now buried with only the two remaining survivors of what was left of their legion to remember them by.
And it failed Anakin. Anakin, who threw himself into danger head-first and lightsaber raised. Anakin, who put himself on the front lines every mission acting as a human shield between his men and the enemy. Anakin, who had only ever wanted to keep the people he loved safe.
Anakin, who had never truly been free himself, leaving one instance of slavery only to be hurled into another—becoming a slave to the war.
(And now a slave to the Dark side.)
Above all, she hates Palpatine. Darth Sidious. He had been right under their noses the entire time. He had befriended Anakin with the intention of slaughtering the Jedi, of slaughtering him. Disgust washes over her at the thought of that monster, she refuses to refer to such evil as a man. Ahsoka knows Anakin trusted him, and anyone Anakin trusted Ahsoka usually did too.
How could she have been so blind?
Anakin is gone and she has no one left to blame but herself.
—
BARGAINING.
Ahsoka remembers Padmé’s funeral like it was yesterday.
She remembers her face, serene and peaceful in a way that could be mistaken as sleeping. But she had been still, too still. Flowers adorned her gown and her hair fell around her like flowing water. She was beautiful.
Even with a hood covering Ahsoka’s face in an effort to remain anonymous, she could see the small Japor snippet necklace twisted in her unmoving hands.
There had been thousands of people at the funeral. None of them knew that it was Anakin who had carved it for her as a gift years prior.
Padmé was one of the cruellest things this war had taken from her. She was the kindest person Ahsoka had known and loved so sincerely. She saw it in all her efforts to achieve peace in the war that demanded anything but that. She saw it in the way she would relentlessly advocate for innocents. She saw it in the way she would look at Anakin when they thought no one was watching.
She felt it in the affectionate hugs she would wrap Ahsoka in every time she saw her. In the softness of the words she directed at her.
She was my friend.
Ahsoka wonders if Padmé and Anakin would have gotten married if not for everything working against them. She knew they were in love and was sure Obi-wan and many of the Clones had known too. The pair were never as discreet as they thought.
They deserved so much better.
She remembers watching Padmé motionless in her casket and imagining Anakin lying right beside her, hand in hand.
She would give anything to bring them back.
—
DEPRESSION.
Ahsoka is no stranger to war and loss. It’s all she’s known her entire life. It leaves a bitter taste in her mouth, but it is an inevitable truth. She was a soldier before she really knew what the word meant.
Sometimes she wonders where she would be if Master Plo had never found her. If she had lived her life in bliss on Shili with her people, with a family that she doesn’t remember. Would they have loved her? Do they still think of her? Are they alive? Would they love her now, knowing what she has become? Or would she still be subjected to the same fate, walking a lonely path haunted by those she could not save. Shame washes over her.
How could she ever imagine a life without the people that had made her into what she was today? No matter if that meant that she grew up in battle surrounded by death and suffering.
In the midst of it all, she had Anakin, Obi-wan, Padmé, and the 501st, who were her family despite not being bonded by blood. Family bonded by intricate ties formed by the Force. The only real home she knows.
The home that is now a distant memory of before. Just as all other things were.
—
ACCEPTANCE.
Ahsoka wants to scream.
How had she let it happen? How hadn’t she known?
Another failure. Another regret.
She was with the Rebels when she had sensed a Force signature that was as familiar to her as breathing. She had frozen momentarily, but with the stress of the mission, she foolishly pushed it to the side. Just another desperate attempt to convince herself that he was still there with her. That he hadn’t died. That she hadn’t lost him.
Besides, there was no possible way that her Master could still be alive. Not when she felt their bond snapping so intensely. Not when she and Rex mourned him (still mourn him) for so long. Not when he was alive all this time and didn’t come find her. And that Force signature… similar as it was to his, was so dark. Ahsoka had to stop herself from reeling the moment she came into contact with it, almost as if it was reaching out and choking her.
She chooses to deal with these feelings later, when she is away from prying eyes and in the comfort of her own home.
Really, she should have known better. It was Anakin, after all, who always told her to listen to the Force when it tried to speak with her.
It’s not when she comes face to face with him—with what he’s become—that she realises and it all comes crashing down.
It is a fate worse than death for him and it is a fate that she cannot not fathom. She has only ever known her Master as loyal and above all, kind. Yes, he was often impulsive and quick to anger, but never like this. This is not the Anakin she once knew. This is not the Anakin that she keeps alive in her head.
This man goes against everything that her Master had taught her.
Later, much much later, after the confrontation, she goes through the box she keeps tucked away under her bed. Her fingers shake as she hovers over the old Padawan robe now rusted by age, over a hastily taken picture of a child with a bright smile on her face, arms thrown around two Jedi.
She stops when she finds a recording that stands out starkly among the others Anakin had taken for her in the time that she had given up being a Padawan. This was not one she had seen before, she is certain. She had played them over time and time again, if only to hear his voice. No one knew of their existence besides herself and Rex.
Ahsoka stares at the small object in her palms. It was impossible that anyone could have put it there. The only way she could think to explain its appearance was that it was not placed there by a physical being.
The Force is a living thing, Ahsoka. Anakin had once told her. It’s all around us. We can use it by surrendering our will to it, but it has its own will as well.
Maybe its own feelings, too. She thinks, mind wandering to times when the Force would warp around Anakin as if to protect him from the world.
She remembers the secrets Anakin has let her in on nights when the memories were too loud and the darkness was too suffocating. One of the few times he ever spoke about his past.
I have—had—a mother, he said, voice smaller than she had ever heard it before. She loved me enough that I never cared to know what had happened to my father. She was all I ever needed. He had breathed in shakily in an attempt to recompose himself. Still, I was a curious kid. When I asked, she told me that I had no father. Not in the sense that he had abandoned us or died. She couldn’t explain it herself, but she always said that I was a gift from the Force.
Half-force, she had breathed in disbelief.
It made sense, really. The hushed rumours of the midi-chlorians in his blood that floated around before she became a Padawan. The sheer amount of raw power she had seen him exude on multiple occasions. The way the Jedi constantly held him at higher expectations than the rest of them. The time he had almost effortlessly commanded the Daughter and the Son—both the light and the dark—in a way that she had never thought was possible.
The bringer of balance. The destroyer of the Sith. The Chosen One.
Ahsoka has always thought it was a Jedi myth. Even with the knowledge that the Force could be Anakin’s parent, she still hadn’t fully believed that the prophecy was true. How could it be when the Force is more out of balance now than it has ever been before? How could it be when the Force feels lifeless whenever she tries to channel it? How could it be when Anakin died before he could have fulfilled any prophecy?
You can’t save your Master, her own words to Ezra echo in her mind, and I can’t save mine.
The Force had cried out when Order 66 had been set in motion. There had been so much death all at once. It was as if something had shattered, leaving behind nothing but the remnants of its perpetual pain while it cradled the faded life forces of its children in its arms.
Ahsoka would never forget how she had felt the Force scream in anguish the same moment that she felt her bond with Anakin snap.
She knew that her bond with Anakin wasn’t the only thing that had died that night.
Against her better judgement, she picks up the new recording. She hesitates a second before pressing play.
Seconds pass.
She frowns, only just beginning to check it was on when she hears it.
Mechanical breathing. Slow, agonising breaths.
His breathing. It sounds so pained.
Anakin. The Padawan in her sobs, identical to when she was met with the same (different, changed) man she thought had died years ago.
“Anakin?” Ahsoka whispers, barely recognising her trembling voice.
The stillness seems to drag on forever until he speaks to her for the first (last, only) time.
“Goodbye, Ahsoka.”
Then he’s gone.
Ahsoka knees buckle. She collapses in a heap of her own grief and weeps.
She weeps for the man who had once smiled at her like it was the most natural thing in the world. For the friend who had been by her side when no one else was. For the hero who fought tirelessly to see the end of an endless war. For the general who made it his personal mission to learn every single one of his men’s names. For the child from Tatooine who wanted nothing more than to free his people. For the boy who was never truly able to free himself. For the Master who had fiercely defended her in the face of a council that had never welcomed him. For the boy with a bleeding heart who loved and felt everything so intensely, only to have that ripped away from him and twisted into something cruel and unforgiving.
She weeps for her brother, who had done everything he could to give her some sort of childhood in a war that neither of them should have had to fight in. For her brother, who would cradle her with overwhelming gentleness and care on days where it all became too much. For her brother, who had once seemed so untouchable, so much bigger than the rest of the world, before it tore him down just as it did with the rest of them. For her brother, who fought tooth and nail to save a universe she wasn’t sure deserved to be saved.
For her big brother, who she misses so much that she finds herself wishing day after day that he would come back to her. That if he would just come home, everything would be okay.
She knows in that moment that it hadn’t been Darth Vader who had spoken. It had been Anakin Skywalker. A final farewell before letting himself be swallowed by what he had always feared he would become.
It is like he has died and she is mourning him all over again.
Maybe she is. Maybe in her heart of hearts, she had never truly accepted that he was gone. Some small, scared part of her would close her eyes every night and think ‘Tomorrow will be different’ only for her to wake up to the same emptiness she was met with the day before.
Anakin had been the sun that she had relied on to guide her during the darkest days. A steady anchor. A lifeline to latch onto when all else failed.
That lifeline was now truly and irrevocably gone.
Ahsoka Tano is alone with only the memory of the dead to keep her company. She can’t help but feel that it is all her fault.
And so she cries in the silence of a cold, isolated room. She cries until there are no tears left to shed. It still doesn’t feel like it’s enough. Nothing ever does anymore.
Your brother is not coming to save you. Her mind taunts. You thought he survived, didn’t you? No one survives this story.
(There is an invisible presence beside her as she mourns. Arms wraps around her just as they had all those years ago, and suddenly her tears aren’t the only ones that are falling. There is nothing more to do but envelope her in warmth that cannot physically be felt. Whispered reassurances fall deaf to her ears as sobs continue to wrack her frame.
She doesn’t know this yet, but he has always been with her. One day when the time is right and she has finally made peace, she will.)