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Something is wrong with Ahsoka.
Anakin understands the typical nature of a Padawan. Loath he is to admit it, he was one not too long ago.
He knows when Ahsoka’s behavior, whether it be the short bursts of hostility after a cycle of laughter, or the temporary reluctance to speak to anyone, is a result of the typical mind and body of a growing teenager — a teenager fighting in a galactic scale war, he often has to remind himself.
(Anakin has seen much of his younger self in her, but he’s not sure that fifteen-year-old Padawan Skywalker could keep up with the clones enough to be an effective Lieutenant, let alone a Commander to the most— creative legion. He ignores the fact that he is freshly out of his formative years almost every rotation.)
He has also learned to know when Ahsoka is subtly shielding her end of their bond to hide when she’s upset.
From the moment Anakin met her, Ahsoka’s shields have been impressive. Obi-Wan had pulled him aside during the first week of her apprenticeship to discuss her tall, thick blades of nearly impenetrable grass that shield her mind, which, Anakin is also loath to admit, far outshine the shuddering blocks of sandstone that were his own at her age.
Over this past year, and Force, this war has lasted an entire Galactic revolution— Anakin has trained his mind to smell the grass, to hear the shifts and feel the pricks of the blades growing against his skin. To feel when Ahsoka is not okay, even when she snips at him, and laughs at the men’s jokes, and pretends that everything is fine, Master, after every battle they survive.
Anakin smells nothing but grass as they flank around the Resolute’s holotable, the figures of the Council staring at them with expressions ranging from grim to horrified as they each give their abbreviated reports of Zygerria and Kadavo’s events. He was not too happy to hear the sadistic treatment his friends had to endure, nor was he ecstatic when he had to open his own mouth and cherry-pick his words so that his report doesn’t sound pitifully drenched in childhood trauma — but he can’t help but feel his Padawan doing the same, in her own way.
The Masters express their sympathies — honestly, can the Council ever truly apologize? — and Anakin tunes out their platitudes. How a literal former slave and his lineage, his teenage, togruta Padawan, were chosen to lead this mission in the first place instead of the Shadows who are trained for this banthashit, is beyond him.
Master Shaak Ti looks absolutely livid though, and it’s so sharp of a contrast to her usually calm, gentle demeanor that it makes Anakin think maybe, just maybe, he isn’t talking out of his ass when he brings up the Council’s many shortcomings and skewed judgment to any soul that would listen.
Go kriffing figure.
Obi-Wan clears his throat once the blue shapes of the Council wink out, and Anakin, for perhaps the hundredth time since the meeting started, smothers his boiling rage at the sight of his Master in a hover chair. “Well, that could have been worse.”
“I don't see how, sir,” Rex says dryly from beside him. His arm is in a corrective sling, a bacta patch covering a good bit of his left cheek. Thick wraps of bacta outline underneath his blacks.
Ahsoka stands across from them, which in itself is an odd sight. Anakin is so used to her being beside him during these meetings, either signing jokes underneath the holotable or standing in solemn, comforting silence beside him. Not completely across.
The Force is eerily muted around her, the grass tall and formidable while her usual blinding light barely peeks through. Her shoulders are drawn tight. Weariness hangs heavy on her limbs, but her eyes are alert. Watchful.
Ahsoka shrugs her shoulders, her tone unusually detached when she says, “We could have died.”
Obi-Wan hesitates, making quick eye contact with him before focusing his attention fully on his Padawan. “We could have, yes. But we are here, and we saved as many as we could.”
Despair flashes down the spine of the bond with his Padawan before the feeling is viciously wrenched away, and Anakin stares at Ahsoka a bit more critically. Her expression suddenly lifts into a smile, close-lipped and completely false.
“You’re right, Master,” she says to Obi-Wan, not entirely meeting his eyes. Her gaze is fixed to a point over his shoulder, before flicking quickly between Anakin and Rex. “I'm gonna go check on the boys.”
It’s when she starts to move towards the doors that Anakin is finally able to open his mouth as he steps closer. “Ahsoka, wait.”
Ahsoka jerks back as if he’d physically yanked her.
She doesn’t look at him — whether it’s out of stubbornness or a genuine inability to do so, Anakin feels irritation and a slight, underlying worry spike in his chest. His jaw works for a moment, words that Obi-Wan would say were coherent all suddenly failing him. His Padawan doesn’t help fill the tense moment of silence either, nor does anyone else.
Anakin clears his throat a bit harshly, a bit of embarrassment flooding through him. “Training at 0500?”
Ahsoka blinks. Her fingers twitch at her sides. “Yeah. I’ll meet you on the bridge.”
He swallows, rocks sinking in his stomach a bit at the distance in her voice. “Sure.”
She leaves all too quickly, her presence in the Force unreadable and the thick grass of her shields nearly covering the doors as they close shut.
Ahsoka does not meet him on the bridge at 0500. Anakin doesn’t even feel her presence approaching at 0530.
It’s only when the nagging Obi-Wan in his mind drawls its fifth patience that Anakin leaves in search for his tardy Padawan.
The halls of the ship are mostly clear of the men as he walks through, and the Force is murky around her quarters. He opens his senses despite the moss, and looks for Ahsoka through their tether as he raises gloved metal to knock on her door, his Master’s mental objections be damned.
“—strongly urge you to—”
Anakin pauses at the grainy echo of a voice behind the door, confusion stilling his hand. His Padawan almost never holocalls anyone, besides Barriss, and that doesn’t sound like— is that—
“—and inform your clone medic,” Anakin catches after his ears connect with his brain, and his blood runs cold. He would know the removed, detached voice of Master Che anywhere, though now she doesn’t sound as detached as he’s used to. He knew something was wrong. Is Ahsoka hiding an injury? Why is she consulting Master Che, and not Kix?
Or him?
“I will,” he hears Ahsoka mumble, voice quiet and subdued in a way he’s never heard before.
“Your Master as well,” Master Che’s grainy voice adds, pointed and firm, but not unkind if he is hearing correctly. Anakin’s eyebrows furrow in confusion and a slow, foreboding fear settles over his chest. What is Ahsoka not telling him?
There’s silence on the other side of the door, and Anakin knows he shouldn’t be eavesdropping, knows it’s an invasion of privacy, as Obi-Wan used to put it to him as a child. But it’s Ahsoka, and that nagging feeling of wrongness in the Force is too persistent to be leading him astray.
“Thank you, Master Che,” Ahsoka says after a long moment, a slight tremor to her words that only those who know her can hear. Then she adds, a bit stiffly, “I will. Soon.”
A staticky sigh crackles through his Padawan’s comm. “May the Force be with you, dear.”
In the little over a decade that Anakin has been a Jedi, he’s only ever heard Master Che use a term of endearment for someone twice: the first time being when Obi-Wan had wept himself into unconsciousness in the early days following Master Qui-Gon’s death, and the second when Anakin had woken up from surgery to his transmitter chip pressed tightly into his palm.
What in Sith hells is happening?
Before Anakin can scurry away or even blink, Ahsoka’s door opens with a sharp hiss and he’s suddenly met with his Padawan’s wide eyes, and not a single excuse or explanation lands on his tongue.
He stutters. “Uh- Snips—”
“What did you hear?” Ahsoka quickly cuts him off, sharp and authoritative in a manner she’d only speak in the worst of battles.
“Nothing,” he says quickly, too quick to be believable and Anakin cringes as soon as it’s out his mouth. “I mean— Ahsoka, what’s going on? I heard you speaking with Master Che. Are you hurt?”
Ahsoka stares up at him unblinkingly in the same way she did after the Council meeting, and pushes past him entirely. She quickly walks down the corridor without a word, and Anakin, stunned and absolutely confused, can barely manage an unprepared, “Where are you going?”
“To see Kix,” the girl says quickly over her shoulder, and then she vanishes around the corner before Anakin can say another word.
Kix is not one to visibly show an expression other than patient-induced irritation.
Of course, as a medic, there is that quick, painful screw of grief that shows clear on his face whenever there is a brother that cannot be saved.
(Please, vod, gaa'tayl ni—” Anakin would hear almost every rotation when he’d muster up the strength to be a General and stay by Kix’s side as he counts the bodies, guilt and misery and hatred biting at his heels every time he’d walk away as a morbidly successful, failed leader—)
The grief never lasts longer than a few seconds, for there is always another man on another stretcher that could be saved. And Kix will smile a small, wry smile here and there when one of the men cracks a stupid joke, after he’s successfully patched them up.
But Anakin doesn’t think he’s ever quite seen this expression on Kix’s face before.
“General?”
Anakin blinks, not realizing he was staring. “Erm— Kix,” he clears his throat. Kix’s brows furrow, his mouth curving even more downward and Anakin straightens, attempting a confidence he doesn’t feel. “I wanted to know if Ahsoka came to you with an injury today.”
Kix freezes, and for the first time Anakin can ever recall, his stoic and unwavering medic breaks eye contact. “Sir,” he says slowly, fingers twitching at his side. Kix’s fingers never twitch. The Force is a brewing storm waiting for Anakin to falter, to look away—
“Kix,” Anakin chokes, desperate. The Force wails in his left ear. “Please, tell me what happened.”
He should’ve predicted Kix’s face smoothing into a forced neutrality. The man’s eyes harden but they are haunted, and give him away with an ease that Anakin is not used to. Whatever this is, it’s bad. “Patient confidentiality, sir,” he says, hollow. “I’m afraid you have to ask the Commander herself.”
Anakin swallows his rage and storms out of the medbay to do just that.
He finds her accidentally, if he’s being truthful.
“You never asked what happened to Atai,” Ahsoka says underneath the belly of her fighter, slow and stilted. He shifts, uncomfortable with the inability to see her face and demeanor. The Force is unusually quiet, and the name isn’t—
“Molec,” Ahsoka says, muffled by the machinery she pretends to occupy herself with. And oh, does Anakin remember now. The slaver scumbag that hung Ahsoka in that cage like a kriffing bird. What does he have to do with—
“I killed him.”
Anakin chokes. “What?” he sputters out. Artoo shrills abruptly from the opposite of the small ship, and he doesn’t startle.
(He just wouldn’t have guessed his astromech was there, and so unusually silent.)
Ahsoka jumps up and away from the fighter, nails immediately digging into her arms, and she continues before he can reprimand her. “He deserved it, Master. I killed him, and it felt good.” She's shaking. Anakin’s feet feel like they’ve been submerged in wet plaster.
“Ahsoka,” he says, helpless, always helpless—
“He deserved it,” she repeats, louder, frantic. She’s backing away, eyes darting around like a trapped tooka looking for a way out. Something is wrong— “I'm not kriffing crazy. It happened, and I'm glad he’s kriffing dead.”
“Ahsoka, what happened?” He — doesn’t necessarily shout, but it was certainly the wrong tone if his Padawan’s flinch is any indicator. She meets his frazzled gaze with a panicked one of her own, chest heaving and breath coming in short bursts.
“Master,” she gasps, muffled by the palm she slaps over her mouth. “Master, I can’t—”
“Snips, calm down,” Anakin says, the Force a blaring siren in his ears, and he can’t hear anything—
“I tore his neck out with my teeth, Master.”
“What? Ahsoka, what are you—”
“Anakin!” Obi-Wan’s voice.
“Is everything alright, General?” Rex. No, everything is not alright, Ahsoka’s shields are cracking like glass and a piece of him feels like he’s shattering with her, and Obi-Wan is here?
“Snips, what’s going—”
Before his eardrums are prepared, his Padawan is shrieking, high-pitched and deafening with her chin pressed into her knees and her hands clapped over her montrals, and Anakin swears he sees stars before—
“—kin, please.”
A gentle, calloused hand gently pats his cheek. Another clutches his robes tightly.
“Padawan.”
Anakin’s heart lurches, eyes snapping open as he distantly realizes he’s on the landing floor. He shivers, briefly leaning into Obi-Wan’s palm before his memory chills him into consciousness; Molec, Ahsoka—
Anakin doesn’t remember waking up.
He remembers Ahsoka’s face as they lie in identical medbay cots; vulnerable, and angry, and everything he seeks to hide from within himself.
“He kept shocking me,” she says quietly, her shields both fragile and controlled. “Over and over, for no reason. Just ‘cause he could, I guess,” she shrugs with a grimace, swallowing thickly. Bile threatens to rise in his throat, and the sedatives are not helping his migraine, but he lets her continue.
“I don’t know, I must have passed out or something because when I woke up it was dark, and I wasn’t in the cage anymore, and it was—” Ahsoka squeezes her eyes shut tightly.
Anakin slams his shields up with a force that damn near makes his skull vibrate. The gears of his mechno hand whir and grind in his lap. He wants to hold her hand, or provide some sort of comfort. He let this happen as her Master, as her teacher, and behind the barriers of his sandstone shields, in the privacy of his own mind, he rages—
“I’m sorry, Snips,” Anakin forces out, his throat dry and his voice raspy from the phantom pain their bond naturally creates.
Ahsoka nods rapidly, head tipped up to blink at the overhead lights as she continues. “And then I just, I don’t remember how or when, I just — I bit him.” She's staring at the ceiling now, wide eyed and still as if realizing this for the first time. “I bit him, and he was yelling, and there was blood everywhere, and when I let go his flesh was in my mouth—”
Ahsoka chokes on a sob and Anakin, heart twisting at her agony, reaches his arm out. His Padawan latches to his fingers and grips his hand with a quickness.
“He was laughing, Master,” she cries as she turns her face away toward the wall, and Anakin damn near feels her chest cracking in two. “He was laughing in my face and saying horrible things like it was— like I wasn't…”
“Like you weren’t a person,” he whispers to the darkness of the medbay. He turns his head to see no one but dead and dying brothers, who wouldn’t be able to hear a word of their conversation even if they tried, and the Force is exceptionally heavy around them all. “I’m sorry, Snips.”
When Ahsoka is silent for too long, and the momentary panic he feels before quickly checking her pulse subsides, he drifts back to sleep alongside his apprentice, patiently waiting for Obi-Wan to wake him when the next rotation begins.