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The trouble with learning lightsaber forms from Anakin Skywalker was that Anakin Skywalker did not, as far as Ahsoka could tell, actually know any.
Oh, he could fight. He could fight better than anyone she had ever seen, better than most of the Masters, a wall of muscle and instinct and raw screaming Force that came down on an enemy like a collapsing building. But when she asked him how, when she planted her feet and said, all right, Skyguy, show me the footwork for the second blade, he would just sort of squint at her, do the thing once at a speed her eyes couldn't follow, and say "like that." As though like that were an instruction and not a magic trick.
"You're holding the short one wrong," he'd told her, three days ago, in the training salle, while she stood there sweating with a saber in each hand and absolutely no idea what wrong meant.
"Wrong how?"
"Just — wrong." He'd rolled his shoulder, picked up his own single blade, and ripped through some blistering attacking sequence that had nothing to do with two blades at all — all leaping, hammering, forward aggression, because Anakin had never once in his life needed a second blade, or a defense, or any plan more complicated than hit it until it stops moving. He fought like a man kicking down a door. One saber, both hands, all of it forward. "There. See?"
She had not seen. And she had been too proud, that day, to say so.
So now she was standing outside a different training hall, very late, having talked herself into leaving and then out of it four separate times, trying to work up the nerve for the single most daunting thing she could presently imagine.
Because here was the part that made her palms sweat: she had been Anakin's Padawan for only a few months. Long enough to learn that the lineage she'd been folded into was a legendary one — long enough to know that the quiet, bearded Master had carved his name into half the holovids in the archive — and nowhere near long enough to actually know the man. They'd exchanged perhaps a dozen words, ever, most of them across the width of a war room. He was Anakin's Master — which made him, her grandmaster: one of the heads of the strange little family tree of teachers she'd been grafted onto a few months ago. He was General Kenobi. He was, the clones said in the hushed voices they saved for very few people, the finest defensive blade in the entire Order — the master of Soresu, the man who could stand alone in a hurricane of blaster fire and simply decline to be hit, who had crossed sabers with a Sith Lord and walked away to talk about it. He was, to Ahsoka, a polite and faintly terrifying stranger who happened to be one of the most famous Jedi alive.
And she was about to walk in on him in the middle of the night and confess that there was something she couldn't do.
He was alone in the long salle when she slipped in, which she'd hoped for and half-dreaded. The room was one of the old ones, deep in the Temple — vaulted ceiling lost in shadow far overhead, smooth stone columns marching down both sides, the floor worn pale and slightly hollow in the center from ten thousand years of feet. A single bank of lights burned low. Obi-Wan was at the far end, sleeves of a tightfitting black under-tunic pushed up, going through a slow practice set with his saber unlit, just the hilt, moving through the shapes the way other people breathed without noticing they were doing it.
He stopped the instant she entered. Of course he did.
"Padawan Tano." There was surprise in it, but not a trace of an edge, he said her name the way you greet someone you're glad to see, not someone who's interrupted you. He let the unlit hilt come to rest at his side. "You're up very late."
It wasn't a reproach. That was the first thing that caught her off guard, she'd braced herself for something: a lifted eyebrow, that cool Council-chamber formality, the faint impatience of an important man pulled out of his evening. Instead he simply looked at her, open and unhurried, as though a nervous Padawan turning up uninvited in his training hall were the most ordinary thing in the world, and not an imposition at all.
"I had a — question. Master." The word came out a little wrong; she hadn't worked out yet what she was allowed to call him. General felt too stiff for a training hall, and Obi-Wan felt impossibly forward for someone she'd spoken twelve words to. She crossed the floor, and her nerve nearly gave out halfway, and she kept going on momentum alone. "A lightsaber question. About the two-blade form. Jar'Kai." It came out in a rush, the way rehearsed things do when you've rehearsed them one too many times. "I need someone to teach me, properly — with actual words. And Anakin—" She stopped, because it felt disloyal, and then said it anyway, because it was true. "Anakin doesn't really know it. He's never needed it. He keeps trying to teach me his form with one of my blades just sort of... visiting."
She'd expected him to laugh, or to gently send her back to her own Master with some diplomatic nonsense about respecting the lineage. He did neither. He set his hilt down on the rack with a small click and considered her with an attention that made her feel, suddenly, very seen.
"You've come to the wrong man," he said.
Her stomach plunged straight through the floor. "Oh — I'm sorry, I shouldn't have bothered you, I'll just—" She was already half a step back toward the door.
"Ahsoka." Gentle, and quick, and the sound of her own name stopped her where she stood. It was the first time he'd used it, and there was such unhurried warmth in it that her retreat simply forgot how to finish. "No. I'm not sending you anywhere. I'd never turn a student away at this hour for being brave enough to come and ask me something." The corner of his mouth softened. "I only mean you should know exactly what you're getting before you spend a night of sleep on it. So let me be honest with you first."
The fear she'd carried in with her was already, quietly, beginning to drain away. In the space of about a minute, faintly terrifying stranger had turned into something she didn't yet have a word for, only that she found, to her own surprise, that she wanted to stay.
"I am not a master of the two-blade form," he went on. "I never was. I used it for perhaps half a year, a long time ago, and then I gave it up. The form I actually know — the one I'd trust my life to, the one I have trusted my life to more times than I'd care to count — is Soresu. A single blade. Defense." A small, self-deprecating tilt of his head. "If you want the genuine article, the archives can point you to three Masters who know more about Jar'Kai than I ever learned."
"But you did learn it."
"I did."
"Then you know more than Anakin." She heard how it sounded and winced. "Which isn't an insult to him, it's just—"
"It's just true." Now he did smile, just a little, and there was something fond and tired in it. "Anakin's gifts run in a different river than mine. He has never had to think about how he does what he does, which makes him magnificent and a perfectly dreadful teacher of fundamentals." He paused. "Don't tell him I said the second part."
"I would never," Ahsoka promised, with a straight face that almost held, and somewhere beneath the joke she noticed, with a small private astonishment, that she wasn't nervous anymore. Hadn't been for a few minutes now. She couldn't have said exactly when it had stopped.
He didn't pick up a saber right away. Instead he folded down onto the edge of the worn floor. Just sitting right down on the stone, the great General Kenobi, like any other student, gestured for her to join him, which somehow surprised her more than anything yet. She'd braced herself, walking in, for footwork barked across a salle by a legend. She was getting a man sitting cross-legged on the floor, ready to actually talk to her. She sat.
"Do you know why I learned it at all?" he asked.
She shook her head.
"Geonosis." He said the name the way people said the names of old injuries. "The start of all this. I went into a room with Count Dooku, and I was confident. I fought the way I'd always fought, the way I was good at. There's a form called Ataru. You'll have seen it; it’s the form Anakin draws from, it's all leaps and spins and momentum, beautiful to watch, enormously aggressive. Acrobatic. I was quite good at it, and I was very proud of being quite good at it." His mouth twisted, wry and rueful. "Dooku took me apart in about forty seconds. Opened my arm and my leg before I'd properly understood the fight had started. If Anakin hadn't been there… well. I wouldn't be sitting on this floor boring you."
And oh. She knew that form. She hadn't had a name to put to it before this exact moment, but she knew it on sight, knew it in her bones, because she watched it every single day from the best seat in the galaxy. That was Anakin. The leaps, the spins, the relentless forward momentum, the gorgeous overwhelming aggression that never gave an enemy a heartbeat to think — that was her Master, exactly, that was the whole of how Skyguy fought. The form her grandmaster had bled for on Geonosis and then laid down forever was the form her own Master lived inside as easily as breathing. She filed that away too, and had no idea yet what to do with it.
Ahsoka had seen the holos of that duel, the official ones. She had never heard it told like this. Small, and honest, and without a single attempt to make himself look good.
"After that," he went on, "I did something I'd been too arrogant to do before. I admitted that the form I loved didn't fit me. Ataru wants a particular kind of fighter — endlessly fast, endlessly aggressive, happy to gamble everything on overwhelming you before you can overwhelm them. That's not who I am." A small pause, and something almost fond moved across his face, there and gone before she could be sure of it. "It's who some people are, mind. Born to it, every cell of them, and a glory to watch when it is. It simply wasn't me. I'm patient. I'd rather wait than gamble. And against a real swordsman, all that beautiful acrobatic offense just gave Dooku gaps to put a blade through." He looked at her. "So I went looking. For a year I tried everything. Two blades among them — Jar'Kai, the form you're asking about. I wanted to know if the answer was more. More blades, more options, more offense."
"And?"
"And it wasn't, for me. The answer for me turned out to be less. One blade. A defense so complete that an opponent exhausts himself against it and hands you the opening you never had to reach for." He spread his hands. "Soresu. I chose the form that admitted what I couldn't do, instead of the one that flattered what I could. It is, I'll be honest, the least glamorous decision I've ever made. It has also kept me alive through a war." A beat. "There's a lesson in there I'd rather you take than the footwork, if you only have room for one of them."
She didn't say anything. She was busy filing the whole speech away somewhere permanent.
"But you didn't come for a sermon," he said, and got to his feet in one smooth motion that didn't look like it cost him anything. "You came to learn the two-blade form. So. Let me show you what half a year taught me — and then you can go and find what's yours, the way I had to find mine."
He drew his saber, and a second one — a shorter spare from the rack, a training shoto — and lit them both, blue and blue, and the change in him was instant and quiet. He'd been a man sitting on a floor telling stories. Now he was something else, balanced and still, the two blades held low and crossed, and the whole room seemed to reorganize itself around where he stood.
"First," he said, "unlearn the thing Anakin taught you without meaning to. You're treating the second blade like a second sword. Twice the attack. Yes?"
"...Yes," she admitted. That was exactly how she'd been thinking about it.
"It isn't. That's the most common mistake, and it's a killing one. A second blade used as a second attacker just means you're now defending two weapons instead of one, and overcommitting with both." He shook his head. "The second blade is a guard. It's a wall you carry with you. Properly used, one of your blades is always — always — defending, which means the other is free to do anything at all, without fear, because you are never undefended. You're not doubling your offense, Ahsoka. You're buying the freedom to never have to choose between attacking and protecting yourself." He let that settle. "Do you see why a man who loves defense might appreciate that?"
She did. It clicked into place like a bone going back into a socket. Two blades, and one of them is always the wall.
"Now come at me," he said.
"What?"
"Come at me. Both blades. Everything Anakin taught you, everything you've got. I won't attack you — not once. I'm only going to defend. I want you to feel the wall, so you understand what you're learning to build."
She set herself to attack — and then simply didn't move.
Because it was one thing to spar with Anakin, who shrugged off hits and gave back twice as many and treated the whole business like a wrestling match between brothers. It was another thing entirely to be told to attack General Kenobi. Her grandmaster. THE master of Soresu, the man the clones swore could turn aside a thousand blaster bolts without troubling to change his expression. Some deep, deferential, freshly-overawed part of her flatly refused to swing at him in earnest.
So her first few strikes were... polite. Careful. Pulled a hair short, angled a touch wide — the saber-work of a student who would honestly rather lose than risk being rude to a legend on the very night she'd met him.
Obi-Wan stopped at once, blades dipping.
"Ahsoka." There was no reproach in it at all, only a small, knowing kindness, as though he'd watched this exact hesitation a hundred times over thirty years and had a soft spot for it. "You're being careful with me. Please don't. I'll give you my word — you are not going to hurt me. You couldn't if you begged me to let you." A gentle, wry glint. "That's rather the entire point of the lesson. So stop apologizing with your sabers, and come at me properly. Give me the version of you that fights your Master — not the version that's afraid of disappointing me."
And that undid the knot. Because she absolutely knew how to fight Anakin — all-out, no quarter, every trick at once, holding back nothing and expecting none in return. So she stopped being careful. She let her grandmaster have all of it.
It was like attacking the side of a mountain.
She was fast — she knew she was fast, everyone said so — and she had picked up more of Anakin's aggression than she'd realized, big committed leaping strikes, the Ataru-flavored aerial work she was secretly proud of. She came down on Obi-Wan with both blades and absolutely nothing held back.
And he simply... wasn't where the blow landed.
Not by leaping away. That was the uncanny part — he barely moved. A blade would turn, a hair, just enough; a wrist would roll; he'd shift his weight a few centimeters and her strike that had been certain to land was suddenly sliding off into empty air, her own momentum carrying her past while one of his blades sat calmly between her and anything important. She spun, reset, came again from the other side, low, fast, a feint and then the real cut — and the short blade was there, exactly there, not a fraction early or late, and the cut went nowhere.
She attacked until her lungs burned. She tried everything. She tried the things Anakin did and the things she'd invented and a couple of things she was fairly sure no one had ever done. She got faster and angrier and more inventive and she did not, not once, in five solid minutes, touch him.
And the whole time — this was the thing that finally got through her pride and into the cold honest place underneath — the whole time, he was never forced. She never pushed him back a step he didn't choose to give. She never made him scramble, never made him rush, never knocked him an inch off his center. She threw the entire weight of herself at him over and over and he absorbed all of it the way the shore absorbs a wave, without effort, without anger, without ever seeming to be in any particular danger at all.
It was nothing — nothing — like fighting her Master. With Anakin you always felt the contest, the shared thrill of two people hammering away at each other, the way he'd grin and surge and try to bury you under sheer overwhelming force. There was none of that here. Her grandmaster wasn't trying to bury her, or to beat her, or even, really, to win. He was just... declining to be hit, with a patience so total it bordered on serene — and somewhere in those five exhausting minutes Ahsoka stopped fighting a legend out of the holovids altogether and began, for the first time, to actually see him. Not the war hero. Not the famous blade. The quiet, patient, faintly amused man who'd folded down onto the floor to tell her honestly about the day he'd nearly died. THE master of Soresu, up close, turned out to be the most unhurried person she had ever met in her life.
She staggered back at last, chest heaving, both blades suddenly very heavy.
Obi-Wan hadn't even raised his voice.
"Good," he said — and he meant it, she could tell he meant it, there wasn't a scrap of mockery in it. "That's good. You've got real speed, and you commit fully, which is more than most ever learn. Now do you feel it? You couldn't move me."
"I couldn't touch you," she got out.
"Those are the same thing. That's the whole secret of it." He stepped back, blades lowering slightly, and his voice shifted into something almost gentle. "You can't push what you can't catch, Ahsoka. An immovable defense isn't about being strong enough to stand against a blow. I'm not stronger than you — heavens, I'm certainly not stronger than your Master, and he's tried this exact exercise on me more than once." A dry flicker. "It's about never being where the strength is aimed. And the second blade is what makes that possible. Because I never have to choose between guarding and answering, I never have to retreat, and a man who never has to retreat is —"
"Unmovable," she breathed.
"Unmovable," he agreed. "Now. Let me show you the part that frightens people."
She didn't understand what he meant until he did it.
"You cornered me, a moment ago," he said. "Did you notice? Just there, by the column. You had me with my back nearly to the stone, and I saw you see it — I saw you think, I've got him now, the great Kenobi, pinned." He smiled, not unkindly. "Come and do it again. Pin me. Drive me to the wall."
So she did. She pressed him — and he let her, giving ground this time, retreating step by step toward the nearest column and the blank stone wall beside it, and her heart leapt because she had him, she'd finally backed him into a place he couldn't slip out of, no room left to roll the blow away, and she gathered everything and committed to one enormous overhead strike with both blades, a strike with nowhere for him to go but down —
— and Obi-Wan stepped onto the wall.
Not against it. Onto it. One boot found the vertical stone as though it were perfectly ordinary floor, and the Force took his weight, and he simply — ran. Up. Three impossible strides straight up the wall, vertical, blades still held in calm guard, his cloak's absence the only thing making it look like flight, and at the top where the wall met the vaulted ceiling he did not stop. He turned, rolling along the seam, and ran out across the underside of the ceiling, upside down, hanging from nothing, his hair falling the wrong way and his expression as mild and unhurried as if he were strolling a corridor.
Ahsoka's enormous committed strike hit the empty wall where he had been and the shock of it jarred all the way up to her teeth.
She had time — barely — to look up, mouth open, and see him directly above her, walking the ceiling, looking down at her with what she would later swear was faint amusement.
Then he came off the ceiling in a slow, controlled fall, twisting as he dropped, sabers crossing into a guard, and landed without a sound in the one place she absolutely was not defending: directly behind her.
The cool hum of a blade settled a careful hand's breadth from the back of her neck.
"And that," said Obi-Wan Kenobi pleasantly, somewhere behind her left montral, "is why there are no corners."
She turned around very slowly.
He'd already deactivated the blades. He was just standing there, breathing a little deeper than before but not much, watching her with that patient, expectant look teachers got when they'd shown you something and were waiting to see whether you'd actually understood it or merely been impressed by it.
She had, embarrassingly, been very impressed by it. But underneath the impressed part, something larger was turning over.
"You weren't running away," she said slowly, working it out. "When you went up the wall. It looked like — I thought I had you, I thought you were trapped, but you weren't trapped, you were never trapped, there was just — more room than I knew was there."
"There's always more room than people know is there." He said it quietly, like it mattered. "The floor isn't the only ground, Ahsoka. The wall is ground. The ceiling is ground. The space above your enemy's head is ground. The moment you stop agreeing that the fight has to happen on the two square meters of floor your opponent has decided it should happen on — you cannot be cornered. You cannot be pinned. You cannot be moved, because there's nowhere your opponent can push you that you haven't already decided is a perfectly good place to stand." He shrugged, and it was such a small, modest gesture for what he'd just done that it almost made her laugh. "It's only the Force. You've felt it lift a crate. This is the same thing. It simply doesn't occur to most people to walk on a wall, so they fight as though they've signed an agreement that the floor is mandatory. I never signed it."
"Anakin can't do that," she said, before she could stop herself. "I've never seen him do that."
"Anakin could absolutely do that." A glint. "It would never occur to Anakin to do that, because Anakin has never in his life met a problem he couldn't solve by going straight through it. Which is, again, why he's so dangerous, and why you should learn this from me instead." He sobered. "And it's the same lesson as the wall, do you see? The immovable defense and the wall and the second blade — they're all one idea wearing three coats. Don't fight on the enemy's terms. Don't be where the force is aimed. Never put yourself in a position where you have only one option, because the moment you have only one option, a better swordsman will take it away from you. That's what carved me up on Geonosis. Ataru gave me one option — attack — and Dooku simply waited."
He made her try it.
Not the ceiling — "in a year, perhaps, and not in this room, the other masters would have something to say" — but the wall, the first few strides of it, with him standing ready to catch her, which she needed, because the first four times she hit the stone like a sack of ration packs and slid right back down, and her montrals would not soon forgive her. He was unfailingly patient about it. He didn't laugh. (Anakin would have laughed. She loved Anakin, but Anakin would absolutely have laughed.) Obi-Wan just reset her each time, adjusted the angle of her approach, told her the precise wrong thing she was doing in precise correct words — you're asking the Force to hold you up after you've already committed your weight; you have to decide the wall is ground before your foot touches it, not after — and let her fail again, and again, until on the fifth try she got two full strides up the vertical stone before gravity remembered her, and the wild singing thrill of those two strides was unlike anything she had ever felt.
Then they worked the blades. Slow, now — he insisted on slow, which she'd resented from Anakin and somehow didn't from him, because Obi-Wan made slow feel like it was for something. He drilled her on the guard blade. On keeping one weapon always between herself and harm. On the difference between two blades flailing and two blades thinking. He corrected her grip on the short blade at last — and it turned out wrong meant she'd been holding it in a way that locked her wrist, so the guard couldn't flow, and the moment he fixed it the whole second blade came alive in her hand in a way it never had under Anakin's just, you know, like this.
He defended; she attacked; and somewhere in the second hour she got one blade past his guard, just one, just the lightest kiss of the training blade against the outside of his shoulder — and he stopped at once and said "there," with real warmth, "that's it, you found the line, you used the guard to buy the cut, do it again" — and Ahsoka grinned so hard her face hurt.
She did not, in the entire session, manage it twice. She didn't care. She'd touched him once, and he'd been glad of it, gladder almost than she was.
It was very late, or very early, when they finally stopped. Her arms were ruined. Her tunic was soaked through. She felt better than she had in weeks.
Obi-Wan racked the spare shoto and stood there a moment, turning his own hilt over in his hands the way he seemed to do without noticing, and Ahsoka looked at him — at this man who had just run up a wall and across a ceiling and dropped a blade to the back of her neck, who had repelled everything she could throw at him without once raising his voice, who was unquestionably one of the most lethal beings in the entire galaxy — and found that the thing she was feeling wasn't intimidation at all anymore.
It was something closer to a decision.
Because he didn't act like the most lethal being in the galaxy. He'd spent the whole night telling her how he'd failed, how a form had nearly gotten him killed, how he wasn't the right teacher, how three Masters in the archives knew more than he did, how the choice that defined his entire reputation as a swordsman had been the least glamorous one available to him. He'd shown her the most extraordinary thing she'd ever seen a Jedi do — and then shrugged and said it's only the Force, as though anyone could, as though it weren't years of patient, unglamorous, relentless work stacked one quiet day on top of another.
She thought about Anakin, whom she adored, who was brilliant and burned like a star and knew it. And she thought about this — this other way of being powerful, where the power sat so lightly on a person that they kept handing the credit to the form, to the Force, to their own old mistakes, to anyone and anything but themselves.
That, Ahsoka thought, with the sudden ringing certainty of seventeen. That's the kind of Jedi I want to be. Not the flashiest. Not the strongest. Not the one the holos loved. She wanted to be unmovable — the way he was unmovable — and she understood, watching him, that you couldn't get there by being proud, because the wall and the second blade and the patience all started from the same root, and the root was honesty. The willingness to admit exactly what you couldn't do, and build something true on top of it. Determined enough to fail five hundred times against a vertical wall. Humble enough to keep saying I'm not the master of this while doing things masters couldn't.
"Master Kenobi," she said. "Thank you. Really. That was—" She didn't have the word. "I've never learned that much in one night. From anyone."
"You did the learning," he said, predictably, and she almost laughed because she'd known he was going to deflect it before he opened his mouth. "I only stood in the right places and refused to be hit. Anyone can do that part."
"You ran across the ceiling."
"The ceiling was showing off," he admitted, with the ghost of a smile. "I'll confess it was fun. But the rest of it — Ahsoka, you came in here tonight and admitted, to me of all people, that there was something you couldn't do and needed help with. Do you have any idea how many great warriors never manage that, their entire lives?" He looked at her, and the dry humor gave way to something steadier and kinder. "That's the part that'll make you formidable. Not the speed. Not even the footwork. The willingness to walk into a room and say I don't know this — teach me. Keep doing that, and you'll outgrow everything I have to give you faster than I'd care to admit." A pause.
She tried very hard not to glow, and failed completely.
"Now go to bed," he said, gentler still, racking his own hilt on his belt. "And, Ahsoka — when you tell Anakin where you've been, do try to be kind about the fundamentals. He means terribly well."
"I'll tell him you said he was a magnificent and perfectly dreadful teacher."
"I will deny every word," said Obi-Wan Kenobi serenely, "and he will believe me, because I am very good at saying things with a straight face." A beat, and the corner of his mouth lifted. "That’s the only form I've truly mastered."
She was still grinning halfway back to her quarters, both blades light at her belt, her arms aching, her head full of walls that were really ground and second blades that were really shields and an immovable man who kept insisting he was nothing of the sort. A few hours ago she'd been too frightened to so much as say his name properly. Now she couldn't quite imagine the shape of her life without him somewhere in it — her grandmaster, the quiet one, the one she'd decided, somewhere between the floor and the ceiling, that she wanted to grow up to be a little like.
She practiced the first two strides up the corridor wall before she'd even reached her door.
She hit the floor four times.
On the fifth, she made it three.
Anakin found her in the training salle the next morning, which was unfortunate, because Ahsoka had managed maybe two hours of sleep and looked every minute of it.
"You look terrible," he said cheerfully, by way of good morning, peeling out of his over-tunic. "Big night?"
"Couldn't sleep." Technically true. She'd spent it too wired to lie still, running walls-that-were-ground and the exact angle of a guard blade over and over behind her eyes.
"Perfect. Then you won't mind warming up." He lit his blade — one saber, both hands, that loose careless grip that looked like nothing at all right up until it took your head off — and came at her without further ceremony, because that was how Anakin began every lesson. By attacking. By seeing what you did about it.
And here was the thing.
Every other morning of her life, Ahsoka would have met him the way he'd taught her: head-on, blade to blade, aggression flung against aggression, trying to out-muscle a man who could not be out-muscled and getting cheerfully flattened for the attempt. That was their whole rhythm. He hit, she hit harder, he won, they laughed.
This morning, she didn't.
This morning, when the full overwhelming wall of Anakin Skywalker came down on her, she simply... wasn't there to receive it. Not by running. She gave ground — a half step, a roll of the wrist, the short blade rising into a guard so his huge strike skidded off it into empty air while she declined, very politely, to be where it landed. She let his own momentum carry him a hair past her. She didn't try to win. She tried, for the first time in her life, to be a wall.
It lasted about four seconds. She wasn't remotely good enough yet to make it hold; on the next exchange he adjusted, found her, and bulldozed her flat onto the mat, where she lay blinking up at the same vaulted ceiling she'd watched a man stroll across the night before.
But for those four seconds, she had made Anakin Skywalker miss.
He stood over her, blade still humming, looking down with an expression she had never once seen on his face. Not irritation. Not even a surprise.
Recognition.
"...Huh," he said. He thumbed the saber off. "Get up. Do that again."
She did. Worse, this time — self-conscious now, thinking too hard about it — but he watched the guard and the half step and the refusal with his eyes narrowing, and she watched the precise instant he placed it. She saw it click. She saw him know.
"That's not mine." It wasn't a question. "Giving ground, making me chase you — you're not trying to land a hit, you're trying to make me waste one. I have never taught you that in my life." Something complicated moved across his face, several things stacked one on top of another. "And I know exactly one person in the entire galaxy who fights like that."
Ahsoka had the decency to look a little guilty. A little.
"You went to Obi-Wan."
"...He was available."
"It was the middle of the night."
"He was available then, too."
Anakin pressed the heel of his hand to his forehead as though she'd run him clean through. "You crept off in the dark to take a secret lesson from my old Master. Behind my back. Snips, I am standing right here. With a lightsaber."
"You kept telling me I was holding the short one wrong," Ahsoka shot back, with three days of stored-up feeling behind it, "and you never once told me how. You'd just do it too fast to see and say like that. That isn't teaching, Skyguy. That's gloating."
He opened his mouth. Shut it. She got to watch him hunt for the rebuttal and come up entirely empty, because there wasn't one, and a slow, rueful grin took its place instead.
"...Yeah," he conceded. "All right. Fair. I'm hopeless at the fiddly stuff — I honestly don't know how I do most of it, it just happens." He shook his head, and the grin gentled into something harder to read. "Obi-Wan, though. Of course it was Obi-Wan. He'd be utterly insufferable about this if he weren't so —" he flapped a hand, hunting for the word — "so aggressively humble about everything." A pause. "Did he do the thing? Please tell me he did the thing."
She couldn't help it. She lit up. "He ran across the ceiling."
"He ran across the ceiling," Anakin echoed — and then, to her complete surprise, he laughed, warm and wondering, the laugh of a man remembering being on the wrong end of that exact humiliation a long time ago. "Yeah. He does that. Used to do it to me when I was about your age, just to prove a point, the absolute —" He stopped himself. Looked at her. And the wistful thing she'd half-caught a moment before came all the way up to the surface.
"You've got both of us in there now," he said, quieter. "You realize that? My half, and his — whatever that was you just pulled on me. The attack and the wall." He shook his head slowly. "That's not a bad thing to be carrying around, Snips. Most people are lucky to get one teacher worth the trouble. You snuck out at midnight and came back with a second." He bumped her shoulder with his — roughly the upper limit of sentiment Anakin Skywalker allowed himself before breakfast. "Don't tell him I said any of that."
"He said you'd say that," Ahsoka told him — and chose not to mention that the two of them deflected a kind word in precisely, identically the same way, because she was fairly certain neither man would survive hearing it said out loud.
"Of course he did." Anakin reignited his blade, the softness folding away as cleanly as it had come. "Right. Show me everything the old man taught you. And then we're going to work out how to break a guard like that — because there is no version of this galaxy where I'm the one who can't get past my own Padawan." A glint. "Even if it means I have to go and learn the stupid ceiling trick myself."
He came at her again.
And Ahsoka — aching, sleepless, and grinning like a complete idiot — dropped into a guard her grandmaster had given her in the dark a few hours before, and made her Master miss one more time.