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Ahsoka remembered the first time she saw a dead body.
She was playing hide and seek with a few of her clanmates, and being the smallest of the group, Ahsoka was crawling through the Temple vents to be as far away from the seekers as possible.
Hide and seek was her favourite game. As an adult, she would link it to Togrutan heritage of hunting, but as a five-year-old, she just enjoyed the thrill of the game.
Ahsoka found refuge in a system of vents that she had never explored before. She found a loose panel and stumbled into a room that she had never seen before.
It was grey, a vast contrast to the cream-coloured walls and warm-toned furnishings that she was familiar with. The walls were made of metal, and one wall had a series of vault doors on it, reaching from the floor to the ceiling.
The room was cold enough to make her shiver. The young Togruta was still adapting to Coruscant's climate, and was often swaddled in several layers to keep herself warm. But this was freezing.
Unsure as to where she had ended up, she curiously walked further into the room. There was a large gurney in the centre of the room, similar to the one Master Plo had held her on as she received her vaccinations.
Somebody was on the gurney.
They didn't appear to be awake; it looked as if they were sleeping. Even at her young age, Ahsoka could tell that their chest wasn't rising and falling like it would be if they were merely asleep.
She couldn't see much of the person, an effect of her height disadvantage, but she could tell they were a Togruta by the length of their lekku. They reached the person's elbows as they lay on the stiff gurney, and their pale colour was unusual.
In fact, the person's skin was just as pale and grey. As monotone as the rest of the room.
The door clicked open, and Ahsoka turned around suddenly- afraid she was about to have the biggest telling-off of her life.
"Oh!" A woman gasped, a Zabrak with scrubs similar to what the Jedi Healers wore. "Gear, hang on."
"What is it?" A Twi'lek man said, appearing behind the woman. His eyes fell on Ahsoka as she began to shake in fright, "How did she get down here?"
What Ahsoka found so strange about the situation was that nobody ever told her off.
The Jedi who found her took her straight to the Halls, where Master Plo and her clanmaster were already waiting.
They all looked so worried as they checked her over. Master Plo kept her on his lap the entire time, refusing to let her go even when Master Windu arrived. They said someone was coming to talk to her.
Said person was a Jedi who introduced herself as a 'Mind Healer'. Ahsoka didn't know what that term meant, and was more focused on hiding under Master Plo's sleeve out of embarrassment. All this fuss because she took a wrong turn in the vents?
Ahsoka, the Mind Healer, and Master Plo had a very long discussion. She only stayed awake for half of it before she began to doze off. The Healer explained that the person on the gurney had died, and the room that she was inside of was called a morgue.
None of that really made sense to Ahsoka.
As Master Plo explained it to her, death wasn't much different from birth. It was an entirely natural part of life that couldn't be avoided. She shouldn't run from it.
His words reminded Ahsoka of a faint memory of her mother on Shilli. Perhaps she'd heard this teaching from her parents before.
The Jedi tended to shield the younglings from death. They weren't allowed at funerals, unless it was for someone they knew very well.
Ahsoka remembered a fellow Initiate passing from an illness when they were about ten, and even then, the Masters organised a session for her friends to mourn together- separate from the official funeral.
Funnily enough, Ahsoka felt very grown-up the first time she attended a Jedi's funeral.
It wasn't for someone she knew very well, but it was a friend of Master Plo's, so she went out of moral support rather than anything else.
She could fondly remember boasting to her friends later that she had witnessed the lights beaming up into the ceiling from the vault. Everyone wanted to sit next to her at lunch to hear her retelling of the event.
Being at war, things worked very differently.
"Kid, we've got to keep moving!" Rex was tugging at her arm, using the other hand to fire at the incoming droids.
Ahsoka felt frozen to the spot. Just metres away from them, a clone lay with a smouldering hole in his chest.
"But Rex, he's dead!" She shouted, feeling a thunder of emotions in her chest.
Pain and sadness were the two highest contenders, closely followed by anger that they were leaving the clone on this Separatist ship without any comfort or memorial. There was also relief.
Relief that he was no longer suffering. Relief that he was the first of his batch to die, relief that although he wasn’t dead, he also wasn’t burdened to grieve his brothers.
"I know," she was staring into the Captain's visor as he used his battle-hardened, stern voice on her. "But we're not dead- not yet. Now, come on!"
She felt positively numb as she watched Rex tell his batchmates from a distance what had befallen their brother.
The men looked deflated, but none of them crashed to their knees. None of them began to openly sob. None of them refused to salute Rex before he walked away.
"Something on your mind?" Anakin asked, standing by her side.
Her hands hadn't stopped shaking, so Ahsoka had resorted to pinning them to her sides. She didn't want Anakin to know how much it had shaken her up. He wouldn't have any sympathy, having been involved in this war longer than she had been.
"Their brother died," she told him, still watching the clones as they patted each other on the backs and went about their day. "Rex said we had to leave him."
Next to her, the older Jedi sighed.
A gloved hand landed on her shoulder, "That's war for you, Padawan. Get used to it.”
She didn't expect her Master to be any more compassionate, but his bluntness surrounding the topic still left her feeling empty inside.
She guessed that he had his reasons.
Ahsoka's hands ached something fierce as she shovelled another pile of dirt. It felt like she'd been working for hours, but based on the blistering sun surely catching the skin on her shoulder blades, it hadn't been that long.
Sweat caused the shovel to slip out of her grip, and Ahsoka winced as the raw wounds were stretched as she flexed her fists. Her palms were blistered and bleeding, a result of extended lightsaber use, and then, however long she’d been using the shovel.
She braced her hands on her knees and panted hard. As much as the battle had exhausted her, nothing compared to the clean-up.
Ahsoka sniffed to stop her nose from dripping, taking a moment to look across the pit that she and five other troopers had dug. It was one of many mass graves for the dead to be buried in.
Like many things in this war, these graves were procedure. It was more of an environmental concern than a requirement to give the dead soldiers a proper burial. She supposed it was also meant to give the local people a chance to continue their lives without having corpses strewn all over the place.
Ahsoka picked up the shovel once again, ignoring the sting of her hands as she pushed the spade into the dirt. She tried to ignore the desire to just give up and let somebody else do this job.
It wasn't so bad if she could ignore the smell.
Dead bodies smelt weird.
It wasn't a specific scent, but rather just the general smell of something bad.
The closest replica was probably mouldy leftovers, or perhaps sewage. In heat like this, it was intensified. If it had rained, Ahsoka always had to wear one of the disposable masks that the medics handed out before going anywhere near the graves. They’d even give her a little piece of plastic to attach the mask around her head, as they were obviously designed to be worn by people with ears.
A personal touch for a horrendous task.
"Ahsoka.”
She jumped, having not heard her Master approach. His voice was hoarse from shouting orders, and he tried to clear his throat.
"Come on. You've done enough."
Wiping under her eyes, which only succeeded in smearing ash and dirt (and probably blood) further into her skin, she sniffed harshly. "There's still more to be buried, Master."
Anakin sighed, exasperated. He had to be as tired as she was.
"Rex has it under control," he murmured, stepping to her side so she could see him.
Not that it was a pretty picture.
Anakin looked ragged and worn out. He had a dressing on his temple that clearly needed changing; the edges of it were black with dirt and there was even some blood seeping through the white material.
She hadn’t noticed it earlier. Though, she’d started digging as soon as the battle was over. She’d rather do that before she had the chance to process whatever had happened.
In her case, she was physically okay. She was achy, and her hands hurt like hell, but she was still standing. She could see from a distance that the medtent was overcrowded, with a line of the ‘walking wounded’ extending almost as far as the first mass grave.
This battle had been worse than most. She wouldn’t know how many had perished until the final report was made, and hopefully by that point, she’d be able to process it as just another statistic.
She’d made the mistake of focusing too much on the KIA list after Christophsis. She thought it was her duty as a Commander to know which men had been lost, until she realised that only a clone’s designation was noted, not their name, and she didn’t recognise a single casualty.
"You'll make your hands bleed if you shovel another grave." Anakin said, attempting to persuade her still.
Her hands were already bleeding, and it stung, but not enough to make her stop.
She felt sick, like the meagre rations she'd eaten earlier in the day were refuting their stay in her stomach.
"Ahsoka-"
"No," she almost growled, fingers tightening around the wooden handle.
She wouldn't stop until every dead body was out of sight and buried under the same dirt that they had died upon. She wouldn't relent until they'd been given a proper burial, even if it was undignified.
"I wasn't asking," Anakin said, the edge to his voice being a natural warning.
Ahsoka closed her eyes, inhaling sharply. Her stomach was strongly protesting, and the last thing she wanted was to vomit on top of the bodies that she had yet to submerge in the soil.
Casting the shovel onto the ground, Ahsoka turned and brushed past Anakin, her feet taking her quickly away from the burial site as her head spun.
She didn't care if Anakin followed her or not.
Ahsoka didn't make it far until her body protested. She managed to brace one hand against a rock as she vomited onto the wet ground. She tried not to look at it, keeping her eyes tightly shut, even as she began to heave and wretch.
The first time she’d vomited whilst dealing with the dead, Rex had been with her.
So unfamiliar with ‘younglings’- as he called her- the Captain told her to sit down and take small sips of water from his canteen whilst he moved the bodies away. She felt unworthy of her rank that day, having to rely on Rex like that for something so petty as a bit of sick.
It wasn't long before she heard the tread of Anakin's boots in the dirt. She gasped for breath, spitting the vile taste of acid out of her mouth as a mechanical hand touched her back, rubbing slow circles.
"I'm okay," she said, trying to sound confident, but it came out like a whisper, "I'm fine."
Anakin sighed, taking his canteen off his belt and offering it to her. She nodded her thanks, unscrewing the lid and taking a sip. After swirling and spitting a few times, she felt like she'd got her breath back.
"I hate the smell," she said, then clarified in case he thought she was talking about the vomit at her feet. "The bodies."
"Me too," Anakin replied softly, "I don't like moving them either. You expect them to be light, but they're actually so heavy."
Ahsoka nodded, "Dead weight."
"I don't like how their limbs go stiff," Anakin carried on, still rubbing her back, "And if you roll them too fast, the contents of their stomachs get rejected."
"They make a noise," Ahsoka added, "Kix told me once, it's from all the air getting pushed out of their lungs as you move them."
"At least these bodies are fresh," Anakin said, "Not like Felucia; do you remember that?"
Ahsoka nodded. The civilians they helped bury on Felucia had been dead for days. They were covered in flies, and the heat made the stench even worse.
"You sent me to the cruiser," she said, "I only buried a few."
"You weren't ready."
He was right, even if she protested at the time.
This was the only the third time that he’d allowed Ahsoka to stay for the entire clear-up. She knew her Master didn’t like keeping her on the surface for this sort of thing, but likely the Council had insisted it was a necessary part of her training.
"You remember that one guy on Felucia, the one whose eyes wouldn't shut?" Anakin drew his hand away from her, and Ahsoka found herself able to somewhat stand upright.
"Yeah," Ahsoka wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, "Nobody had any tape. The medics used sutures in the end.”
Her Master smiled at her, accepting his canteen back. Mentioning the medics caused Ahsoka to gesture to her own forehead. “What happened to you, anyway?”
“Shrapnel injury,” Anakin supplied, reaching his hand up to the bandage but not quite touching it.
“It needs changing,” She commented, making a face. “It looks dirty. You don’t want to end up with it getting infected.”
“I’ll get it sorted,” her Master replied, crossing his arms over his chest, as if to stop himself from prodding at the wound on his head. “When the medics are less busy.”
She hadn’t been Anakin’s student for long, but she knew some of his tricks by now. He’d likely never get the wound looked at again.
“I’ve got some medical supplies in my bag,” Ahsoka said, “It can’t be too hard, right? Saves me having to check if you get it changed or not.”
The older Jedi cracked a smile, “Usually, I’d tell you ‘no’, but if it’ll stop you from digging more graves, then I guess I can tolerate some First Aid from my Padawan.”
Ahsoka smiled brightly, somewhat elated that he would let her when he was typically so adamant that his injuries weren’t seen to.
“But…”
Her smile dropped.
“You’re going to let me dress your hands afterwards.” Anakin said, eyeing her. “They're bleeding.”
Ahsoka pouted slightly, “If you wrap them up with bandages, I won’t be able to help-”
“What a shame,” Anakin cut her off, placing a firm hand on her shoulder to turn her back in the direction of the others. “I guess I can find another job for you. Admiral Yuleran might even have a task for you on the cruiser.”
Seeing through his masterplan of keeping her away from the dead, Ahsoka frowned, glancing up at him as they walked towards the main camp once more.
“You can’t shield me from this forever, Master.”
Anakin’s jaw visibly tensed, but he didn’t look at her. His grasp on her shoulder merely tightened.
“You’re probably right.” He said, “But that doesn’t mean I won’t try.”