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There is a reflection in the window.
Vader pauses, and it is gone. He dismisses the flash of orange-red. It was a trick of the light.
He keeps seeing it, though.
Orange-red, then blue, then white.
He’s not a fool. By the time the flash is more than an orange-red blur, he knows what he’s seeing. Who he’s seeing.
A trick of his mind and nothing more.
She’s not in every reflective surface. He keeps no mirrors, but he does not see her in them when he encounters them. No, she appears in windows with a background of stars, in clear glass art on planets they tour, in the shine of polished stormtrooper armor.
Never against the shiny chrome that spaceships are made of. Never against black.
The first full hallucination is a surprise; one minute he is alone in his quarters, the next he is not.
For a brief moment, she sits cross-legged atop his desk, leaning comfortably against the wall; the next moment, she is gone.
Vader lets his breath hiss in and out, and does not move for a very long time.
Sometimes she’s as she was when he killed her – Fulcrum, grown to adulthood in the shadow of the Empire. Sometimes she’s younger, a name he refuses to think anymore.
It’s only when she starts talking that he realizes the flashes were on purpose. Those flashes weren’t her gathering strength, gathering focus. Those were an adjustment period for him.
(They make what she will probably think of as backward progress after he realizes this and starts burying his lightsaber in the walls behind where she appears.)
“So,” she says, after he’s finally admitted that stabbing her force-ghost is probably useless and stopped trying. “This all seems… functional.”
If he doesn’t reply to her, she’ll go away.
“You know what I mean by that,” she says. “I mean that it’s boring. Seriously, you’re a Sith, you can do what you want! Get some color in here.”
If he doesn’t reply to her she’ll go away…
“Maybe not just red, though,” she continues. “Remember Palpatine’s office? Man, it looked like you were inside an organ or something, all-red is not a good color scheme.”
This is Ahsoka. Who is he kidding. She’s not going to get bored.
He holds his patience as she rambles on about the color scheme, the uncomfortable furniture, the lack of any posters or models or “at least a mural, come on, don’t you get bored?”
“Perhaps I like it monochrome,” he finally snaps.
She pauses.
Then she almost falls over laughing. “Like it monochrome, that’s a good one. You used to personally paint every starfighter you got a different flashy color, just to show off. Come on, live a little!”
A knock comes at his door, and she vanishes.
Live a little, as if everything isn’t already dead, he thinks.
She’s not always the same age. That first day, she’d been fourteen, young and untested, her montrals barely grown in. Sometimes, she’s older – fifteen, sixteen, her comments growing more witty, more pointed. Sometimes she’s the adult that she was when he killed her on Malachor.
It’s always strangest when she’s in between.
He pauses when he sees her, for the first time really acknowledging her presence.
She tilts her head to the side, then looks down at herself. “Oh, yeah, you never saw this outfit, did you?”
It’s his.
Not actually his, of course, but he can see the echoes of his past self, the dark browns and dark reds, the cut of the fabric.
“Twenty was a pretty bad year,” she says blithely. “Four or so years into the Empire, and it was really just sinking in that it was all staying, that we were never going to be able to stop running. So…” she shrugs. “I felt like I could do with some more inspiration.”
The wheeze of his respirator fills the hallway.
“You were inspiring, you know,” she continues. “The Hero With No Fear – and more than that, you were my friend, my mentor. You gave me hope.”
“Leave,” he rasps out.
“I told you I wasn’t going to do that again,” she says softly. Kindly.
Something inside him catches, knots up, makes him want to choke with nameless emotion. (He knows what these emotions are – he can admit that now, however much he doesn’t want to. He won’t name them.)
She doesn’t leave him.
He meditates, in his hyperbaric chamber; Sith meditation, filled with flashing anger and burning hatred.
She meditates across from him, Fulcrum in all her years, calm and steady and light.
“Oh, come on,” she says, her voice just a whisper. “Does he really deserve that?”
He was incompetent, Vader thinks, loud enough for her to hear. I will not suffer useless beings to live.
“Come on, Lord Vader,” she says, her voice harsh and condemning, soft and teasing. “You know better.”
I don’t know what you’re talking about, he thinks to her.
He can feel her grin. “Yes, you do. Come on, now, don’t get snippy with me.”
Vader growls and discards the incompetent officer, ignoring his gasps and wheezes as he curls up on the ground. What do you want?
Ahsoka doesn’t reply. He still feels her presence, though; he always feels her presence.
“I won’t leave you,” she’d said, and she doesn’t.
She doesn’t pass judgement on him. She doesn’t condemn his actions. She just… stays. Her eyes may be sad and quiet when he has new blood on his hands, and she may roll her eyes and make snide remarks when he deals with incompetents or general imperial buffoonery, but she doesn’t try to turn him, doesn’t try to change his course.
Ahsoka sits across from him as he meditates – and it’s little Snips this time, not battle-weary ex-Padawan-Tano or calm and sly Fulcrum.
“You never used to be so good at this,” she says. “This whole sitting still thing.”
“Necessity is a teacher,” Vader says. “You know this.”
She snorts. “What, you have to meditate, now?”
“My master requests it,” Vader says stiffly.
She’s quiet for a long moment, her arms crossed and her gaze narrowed; stubborn to her core and no good at hiding it, not at this age. “Why do you let him hurt you?” she finally bursts out. “I thought you were trying to get rid of stuff that was tying you down!”
“You would not understand,” Vader snaps back.
Ahsoka ages, suddenly but not sharply; she leans forward and she’s the padawan he lost, the padawan on the run, her silka beads ripped from her head and her montrals bare. “Wouldn’t I?”
“No.” He reaches forward, tendrils of the Force wrapping around her neck, squeezing – just a warning – he wouldn’t go too far – not this time–
She meets his eyes, knowing, and lets him have a few moments of what he thinks is power before she lets herself dissolve into mist.
Vader kills two senior officers and it only makes the knot in his chest grow.
He can feel Ahsoka with him always, even when he cannot see her.
“The stars are beautiful from in here,” Ahsoka says.
Vader doesn’t reply; he’s too busy blasting a rebel ship into oblivion.
Ahsoka runs her fingers over the controls. “I never really thought about how it would look on the inside of one of these.”
“How do you fit in here?” Vader asks. His TIE fighter is made to accommodate him and only him.
She grins at him. “The Force works in myserious ways,” she says. “Also, I’m only semi-corporeal.”
Ghosts, as Vader well knows, are not corporeal at all.
What has his padawan become?
Not his padawan, he corrects himself after a split second of hesitation. Fulcrum. A traitor, a rebel. She gave that up. She left.
“I’m here now,” she says softly, with that tired smile of hers stretched across her face.
“Do you have any regrets?” Ahsoka asks one day.
“Do you?” Vader says.
“Of course,” she says, without a second’s delay. “I’ve made many mistakes – you were there for a lot of them.”
Vader rolls his eyes. Yes, he certainly was. They’d had more than their fair share of disasters.
She sighs. “Most of all, though, I regret leaving.”
Of all the things to regret, though… “The Jedi were a corrupt order,” Vader growls. “They took everything they had and they ruined it–”
“They were,” Ahsoka agrees calmly.
Vader stops.
“What, did you expect me to disagree?” She asks. “I regret leaving you. We both abandoned the Jedi, remember? I just did it first, and with less collateral damage.” Her smile is bittersweet, aching somewhere deep in his chest where he hasn’t felt an ache in years. “Barriss was right. The Jedi were growing darker by the day; they were never meant to fight wars. But we both know that the corruption started long before that.”
Ahsoka leans forward, her montrals sharp and sensitive, her eyes looking at his mask – through his mask.
“Anakin,” she says. “Whose fault was that corruption?”
“Don’t call me that,” he snarls.
She doesn’t reply, just keeps watching him.
“Sidious orchestrated their destruction, I know this,” he grumbles finally. “And the Line of Bane has been influencing the Senate for centuries. Still. Changes imposed by the Senate do not excuse the actions of the individual Jedi who did great wrongs.”
She beams at him. “They don’t. And would you say that Sidious is doing great rights, then?”
The word yes sticks in his throat. “I–” he says, then stops.
“Maybe a question for another day,” she says.
He uncoils a tendril of the frustration and fury he’s feeling and throws it at her. “Stop playing the wise master, Snips, it doesn’t suit you.”
“I learned from the best,” she says, and vanishes, her laughter echoing in the air.
Vader’s lips twitch the tiniest bit. She did, after all.
He pauses on the empty bridge of a star destroyer.
“What are you?” he asks, finally.
When he turns around, Ahsoka is sitting perched on the holotable, looking like the senior padawan she was before she left the Order.
“A ghost, of course,” she says. “You killed me, after all. Drove your lightsaber right through my chest.”
Vader refuses to flinch. Instead, he strides forward, pauses right in front of her.
She faces him, his padawan, her eyes calm.
He reaches out, caresses her cheek. Warm flesh against his cold bionics.
“Ahsoka,” he says. “What are you?”
She doesn’t pull away from the hand, the thumb tracing the border from white to orange-red on her face.
“What do you remember about Mortis?” she asks.
Mortis–
Fire.
Now that he thinks of it, he remembers.
Vader growls and clenches his fist, feels the possibility of lightning gather in his bones – but no, no lightning, no shorting out the suit.
“I could have stopped it,” he says, furious. “Then and there. And I–”
“Forgot,” Ahsoka says. “We all forgot what mattered most.”
He stops, and looks at her. “Ahsoka–”
“It’s all a bit of a blur,” she says. “The dark side – you fell from what you saw, from knowledge of the future; when I was dark, it was… corruption, more than anything else. It wasn’t me.”
Vader – can’t bring himself to wish that it was.
“But no, what else happened on Mortis?” she asks.
“You died,” he whispers. “The Daughter…” he stares at her for a long, long moment.
She stares back, calm and light and very clearly not a ghost, for all that she’s very clearly not alive.
“What are you?” he asks, one more time.
“Light,” she says. “When the Daughter brought me back, with the last bits of her spirit, it was like she put a little bit of herself in me – like a holocron, except not quite. For what she was, instead of who she was. After I left the Order… that part woke up.”
She stands and paces, circling him so that she’s presented against a curtain of stars. As she walks, she ages, from who she was on Mortis to who she was on the run, to the dark outfit mimicking his, finally to barely a year older than that, where she wears simple Jedi robes in shades of pale grey.
“I am dead,” she says. “But I was still myself when I died – me, Ahsoka Tano, not some nameless Force being who would dissolve back into her element. As far as I can tell, that gives me some… leeway, maybe. More influence. More… presence.”
Vader has studed Sith and Jedi lore alike. He can put the pieces together from here. “So when you died on Mortis,” he says, disbelief coloring his voice clearly even through the respirator, “You somehow accidentally became a Force Goddess?”
Ahsoka winces a bit. “I… don’t really like throwing that word around. I’m hardly omnipotent. But, yeah, minor light Force deity would be what the Jedi and the Sith would call me.”
Vader’s mind is whirling. Force deities are recorded beings, of course, in both Jedi and Sith history; a few steps up from ghosts, maybe even a step up from what the Father, the Son, and the Daughter had been; they had only become what they were because of Mortis’s natural Force presence, from what he and Obi-Wan had pieced together later. They’d been what they were for so long that they were barely more than wisps of energy, no personality on top of the light or the dark. Most Sith Force deities were exorcised by Jedi, after long and grueling battles filled with many deaths; most Jedi Force deities let themselves merge with the Force.
“I’m not a Jedi or a Sith, though,” Ahsoka says, plucking his thoughts from his head as she always does. “I’m something else, and I plan on sticking around for the long haul.”
“Not a Jedi or a Sith,” Vader says quietly. Then, again, he asks, the Force whispering to him that it has to be answered. “What are you?”
Ahsoka smiles. “Fulcrum,” she says.