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Anakin doesn’t know how to help his Padawan.
This is becoming a problem because Anakin is very good at helping people.
He can repair a damaged hyperdrive with half the correct tools. He can fly a crippled fighter through a Separatist blockade. He can take command of a collapsing battlefront, find the one impossible route through it, and drag everyone out alive.
Ahsoka sits six meters away in the 501st barracks with her back against Rex’s bunk, sharpening a knife that does not need sharpening.
Anakin has no idea what to do.
Morai watches him from the upper frame of the bunk, feathers puffed.
Anakin learned that this means violence.
“Ahsoka,” he says.
The sharpening stone continues moving down the blade. “What?”
“You missed evening meditation.”
“I meditated here.”
“This is a barracks.”
“Yes.”
“Jedi meditate in the Temple.”
She glances toward him. “You meditate in engine rooms.”
“That’s different.”
“How?”
Anakin opens his mouth. Nothing useful emerges.
Morai clicks her beak.
The convor appeared right after Mortis and had disliked him from the moment she arrived. There had been no period of tolerance; only immediate, cold assessment, like a predator deciding whether he was too large to ignore or too dangerous to approach.
Now she follows Ahsoka everywhere and treats Anakin’s presence as a security concern.
He steps closer.
Morai opens her wings.
“I’m not going to hurt her.”
The bird makes a low, ugly sound. Ahsoka’s mouth twitches faintly, but the expression disappears before it becomes a smile.
Anakin would take even the smallest smile right now.
Obi-Wan is dead.
The thought comes without warning, sharp and raw enough that Anakin’s chest tightens around it.
He still expects to hear Obi-Wan’s voice behind him. A dry observation about Anakin’s methods. A correction disguised as a joke. The exhausted sigh Obi-Wan made whenever Anakin presented a plan beginning with the words trust me.
Rako Hardeen shot him.
Anakin watched Obi-Wan die on the street.
The Council speaks in careful tones about grief, patience, and trusting the Force. None of them seem to understand that patience is useless when the person who taught it to him is gone.
Ahsoka doesn't talk about Obi-Wan either.
She doesn’t talk about Kadavo.
She barely talks about anything that matters except on the battlefield.
Her presence in the Force used to be impossible to miss, all bright curiosity, sharp instincts, and emotions moving too quickly to hide. Now every time Anakin reaches toward her, he finds the bond closed.
Not broken.
Locked.
He hates locked doors.
“You haven’t slept at the Temple in four nights,” he says.
Ahsoka turns the knife over and begins sharpening the other side.
“I’ve slept.”
“In the barracks.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
The stone stops.
Around them, the 501st suddenly becomes very interested in not listening.
Jesse sits at a table cleaning a rifle that is already spotless. Kix reviews medical files with his eyes fixed firmly on the datapad. Fives is stacking ration tins into an unstable tower for no defensible reason.
Rex stands near the equipment lockers with his helmet beneath one arm.
He's watching Anakin.
Not openly.
Protectively.
That's new.
Rex always protected Ahsoka. Every clone under her command does. Lately, the Captain’s attention has sharpened into something more constant. He tracks the exits when she enters a room. He places himself between her and unfamiliar officers. He checks every set of restraints before allowing them near her.
Anakin should appreciate it.
Instead, some irrational part of him resents that Ahsoka lets Rex close when she won't let Anakin touch their bond.
“The Temple’s too quiet,” Ahsoka says.
Anakin looks back at her.
“The barracks aren’t?”
“No.”
Somewhere behind them, a trooper drops a ration tin. Fives’s tower collapses across the table.
“Deliberate structural test,” Fives says.
Jesse looks at him. “You failed.”
“The structure failed.”
The ordinary noise fills the room again. Ahsoka’s shoulders loosen by a fraction.
Anakin sees it.
The barracks are crowded. Loud. Open. Every doorway remains visible, and there are always clones moving nearby.
No closed rooms.
No chains.
No silence in which Kadavo can return.
“You could’ve told me,” Anakin says.
Ahsoka’s hand tightens around the knife.
“I just did.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Do I?”
He reaches toward her through the Force without intending to.
The bond slams shut.
Ahsoka flinches.
Morai launches from the bunk.
Her beak catches Anakin across the forehead.
“Ow!”
He staggers back, one hand rising to the new scratch above his eyebrow.
Morai circles him once and lands on Ahsoka’s shoulder, green eyes bright with warning.
“You saw that,” Anakin says.
Ahsoka strokes the convor’s chest feathers. “She told you to stop.”
“She attacked me.”
“She communicated clearly.”
Rex coughs into one fist.
It sounds suspiciously like a laugh.
Anakin points at him. “Captain.”
“General.”
“Was that funny?”
“No, sir.”
Fives turns away so quickly that his ration tins fall again.
Anakin looks around the barracks.
Nobody meets his eyes.
Great. His own men have sided with the sentient Force bird.
“I’m trying to help,” he says.
The humor drains from Ahsoka’s face. “I know.”
“Then let me.”
“I don’t know how.”
The answer stops him.
Ahsoka sets the knife and stone on the floor.
She looks tired. Not the ordinary exhaustion that follows battle, but something deeper. There are shadows beneath her eyes, and the white markings across her face seem too sharp against her skin.
“I don’t know what you want me to say,” she continues. “That I’m scared of elevators now? That I can’t sleep if I can’t see the door? That every time somebody closes binders around a prisoner, I can still feel them on my wrists?”
Anakin’s anger disappears.
“Ahsoka…”
“I know we escaped. I know I’m safe. My body doesn’t care.”
She looks down at her hands.
“I don’t want you in my head when it happens.”
“I wouldn’t judge you.”
“I know.”
“Then why?”
Her eyes rise to his. “Because you’d feel it.”
Anakin goes quiet.
That is exactly what he has been asking for. He wants the bond open so he can understand, so he can carry some of the pain for her.
Ahsoka does not want him to feel it.
Not because she distrusts him. Because she is protecting him. The realization makes everything worse.
“I’m supposed to protect you,” he says.
“You do.”
“Not from this.”
“You can’t fight a memory with a lightsaber.”
“I could try.”
Ahsoka’s mouth pulls into the smallest smile. “There he is.”
The smile vanishes again when Anakin steps closer, but she does not retreat.
Morai remains on her shoulder, watching him. Anakin keeps his hands at his sides.
“Obi-Wan knew what to say,” he admits.
Ahsoka’s expression crumples for one unguarded second.
Anakin regrets the words immediately.
Then she whispers, “Yeah.”
The grief between them opens.
Not through the training bond. Not fully.
Only enough for Anakin to feel the shape of her loss beside his own.
Obi-Wan was her grandmaster, though Anakin never used the term. He taught her forms Anakin neglected, corrected her diplomatic manners, and carried emergency tea because he claimed Skywalkers created situations requiring it.
He was part of the structure holding both of them upright.
Now he's gone.
Anakin sits on the floor beside Ahsoka.
Not too close.
Rex’s posture relaxes near the lockers.
Morai studies Anakin for several seconds, then folds her wings. She does not bite him again.
“I don’t know how to do this without him,” Anakin says.
Ahsoka rests her head against the bunk frame.
“Neither do I.”
For a while, they sit in the noise of the barracks.
Fives rebuilds the ration tower. Jesse knocks it down on purpose. Kix threatens to assign them both sanitation duty. Somewhere farther down the room, a pair of troopers argue over whose turn it is to clean the fresher.
It is not meditation.
It helps anyway.
Later, Anakin visits the Chancellor.
Palpatine receives him immediately, as he always does. His office is warm, private, and quiet in a way that does not feel like the Temple.
“My boy,” Palpatine says, rising from behind his desk. “You look exhausted.”
Anakin lowers himself into the chair across from him.
“I don’t know how to reach her.”
“Ahsoka?”
“She’s shutting me out.”
Palpatine’s expression fills with sympathy.
“She has endured a great deal. Perhaps more than the Jedi Council should ever have allowed.”
Anakin looks down.
The thought has occurred to him.
It feels heavier when Palpatine says it.
“They sent her back into the field,” Anakin says. “After Kadavo.”
“And now, while both of you mourn Master Kenobi, they offer philosophy instead of help.”
His voice is gentle. Understanding. Palpatine does not tell Anakin to release his attachments. He does not speak about death as transformation or grief as selfishness.
He listens.
“You have always cared more deeply than the other Jedi,” Palpatine says. “That is not a weakness, Anakin.”
The knot in Anakin’s chest loosens slightly.
Padmé says the same thing later, curled beside him on the sofa in her apartment while Coruscant’s lights move beyond the windows.
She rests her head against his shoulder and traces one finger over his knuckles.
“Give Ahsoka time,” she says.
“I don’t want her to think she has to handle it alone.”
“Then stay nearby without forcing her to speak.”
“I’m not forcing her.”
Padmé looks at the fresh scratch across his forehead. “The bird disagrees.”
“Morai hates me.”
“She has excellent instincts.”
Anakin turns toward her.
Padmé’s expression remains perfectly serious for two seconds before she smiles.
He nudges her shoulder.
She laughs and catches his hand.
For a little while, Anakin lets himself breathe.
Obi-Wan is gone.
Ahsoka is hurting.
The Council has answers that feel like riddles and expectations that feel like walls.
At least Padmé remains beside him.
At least the Chancellor understands.
Those two truths feel solid when everything else is coming apart.
Anakin holds on to them.