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Crickets trill in the silence of the dusk, their calls echo off the leafy treetops. The forest is dark with shadows, haunted by the weight of some thing Ahsoka can’t quite name. She’s cross-legged in the center of a clearing, the grass cold beneath her, tiny blades that uncomfortably poke through her leggings. The trees around her tower into the sky, like the skyscrapers on Coruscant, both alive with beings inside them.
The air is heavy, tinged with smoke, the smell of a battlefield instead of dirt and grass and mud. She can taste blood on her tongue, can feel it on her hands where they rest on her knees. Clones’ armor is in pieces in the grass around her, blue and red staining the white. Her lightsabers rest heavy at her hips. She can hear them singing, out of harmony with the crickets, out of harmony with her. She unclips her shoto, and at the touch of her hand to the blade, the crystal screams, like the sounds of dying clones being cut down by a red saber on the battlefield. She raises the shoto and thumbs the ignition switch and the saber ignites red in the darkness.
She can no longer see the trees around her, can’t hear the crickets call, can’t feel the grass on her legs. The ground is hard, like durasteel, cold and smooth like it too. The red light in front of her is all she can see. The blood on her tongue is all she can taste. The screams in her head are all she can hear.
Ahsoka wakes with a start, bolting upright in bed, eyes wide and open searching the room around her. But of course, there is nothing there for all that haunts her dreams has already happened a long time ago.
She presses a hand to her chest, feels out the beats of her heart, and licks the blood away from a bitten lip, tasting salt with it too.
She takes in huge gulps of air, as if that would help to banish the dream, but it’ll help her catch her breath at the least.
There’s a knock at the door to her quarters. “Ahsoka?” A sleep raspy voice calls.
It’s then that Ahsoka notices the items strewn about the room. That’s been happening less often with the dreams. Losing control of the Force means possibly revealing herself, and that is something that is unthinkable.
She reaches out into the Force, feels for the controls, and the door slides open. She has nothing to hide from him, and she knows how he worries. She and the others used to tease him for it, calling him a mother-tooka, but days of teasing are long past.
Rex steps into the room, and even after all this time, it’s strange not to see him in armor. His clothes are plain, a simple flight suit in navy blue, and he’ll wear a poncho over it when they go out. Similar to Ahsoka’s own plain jumpsuit. Unnoticeable in clothes and in actions is what they must be now.
Rex takes in the room with his war-sharpened gaze, and then those hazel eyes fall to Ahsoka. He walks over and sits at the edge of the bed. He seems to always know when talking is needed and when it’s not.
She can tell she woke him from sleep, his presence is in that waking-up stage of grogginess that seems to be Rex’s permanent waking-up stage. Others will wake without the grogginess, but not Rex. She asked Kix once about it. He’d explained to her a proper amount of sleep for a human, and how Rex hadn’t gotten that since he was promoted to Captain. Now, Ahsoka doesn’t think he ever will. His body has adjusted to the lack of sleep, the way hers adjusted to training regimens meant for soldiers.
The thought connects back to her dream, and she knows she has to tell Rex what her dreams mean. He deserves to make the decision for himself.
“The Rebellion has a plan,” she speaks lowly, the words scraping out of her throat. “I can lure him out.” She doesn’t speak his name. She doesn’t have to with Rex, because he knows the person she can’t name. Sometimes he can’t name him either. To say what he’s become is too painful, and to call him what he was is to live in delusion.
“That’s not your burden to bear,” Rex speaks with the confidence of an eldest brother protecting his siblings. “There–”
“It is,” Ahsoka says calmly, her voice at odds with the tear stains on her face and the destruction of her room. “His darkness is my darkness, like his light was my light.”
“He’ll kill you,” Rex says equally as calm, like they’re discussing the weather and not someone they both called friend.
From everything Ahsoka has seen in these reoccurring dreams of hers, her death was never one of them. It’s not something she fears, hasn’t for a long time. War will blast that fear out of you.
“Maybe.” She wipes the tears from her cheeks. “It’s more likely he’ll turn me.”
“Is that what you dreamed about?” Rex asks, perceptive as ever.
“It’s always what I dream about. My blade is red and your brothers are dead by it.”
“That won’t happen.” Rex’s tone brooks no room for argument. Ahsoka sometimes thinks Rex would take on the entire galaxy in defense of someone he considers family, but he was never handed the power to do so. Instead, he learned how to defend like a scrappy kid on the streets protecting his meager possessions, brutal and wild, and unwilling to take on more than he could handle.
But for Ahsoka, for any of his surviving brothers, Rex might take on a tidal wave of violence to keep them, and he’d do so because he believes that the only thing that would make them fall is some violence wielded by an outside force.
Ahsoka wishes she had the faith that Rex has in her, but Ahsoka’s faith is swept away in the sea of the Empire.
She knew a star that burned so brightly, that fought with a vicious determination to save everyone he loved. Now she knows a void that takes and takes and takes. She was taught that there is balance in everything. Equal dark and light. She’d never considered that Anakin’s brilliance in the light would be equal to his shadows in the dark. That everything his light touched, would also burn with the touch of his darkness, so cold that it sucks the air from a room, just as Anakin was so bright that it lit up a whole planet.
Ahsoka orbited Anakin as his padawan, a planet drawn to the light of a star. Now, she’s helplessly pulled into the void, a planet caught in a black hole.
She’s outmatched, underpowered. But that’s why she won’t make the killing blow, won’t even get close. That honor goes to Cody–or Sabé, whoever makes the killing shot. Ahsoka just has to give the opportunity.
She’s complicit in every death Vader has wrought, so too should she be complicit in the death of Anakin.
******
Ahsoka thought she knew cold, knew the whip of wind that cuts through your coat, but this is so much worse. This cold seeps into her very bones, claws at her mind, like talons of ice with how they burn her so.
The figure he cuts is imposing, a dark mass that in the force looks exactly like a black hole. She’s displeased with how accurate her metaphors have been. He will swallow her whole. This person who she once came to in the middle of the night to soothe her fears, whose arms wrapped around her tight and promised to keep the monsters at bay, is now the biggest monster that galaxy has ever seen. And she’s the footsteps in the blood trail he leaves.
His helmet lenses are tinged with red, and she always knew her master had a flare for dramatics, but this seems a bit much. She wonders if he has a HUD display in there, if he sees in shades of red now, if blood looks just like everything else to him.
He stops across the way from her; fifteen meters between them if that. Ahsoka lets the light wash over her, lets herself be baptized in it, hoping that she’ll emerge as something new, something untainted by her master’s actions.
She hears the rasps of his breaths, the wheeze that has sparked fear into the hearts of millions. The only thing it sparks in her is a low-simmering rage.
She never told the clones what she told Sabé, what she told Bail and General Draven. If she falls, they have to kill her too. She’s seen the visions, together her and Vader would be unstoppable.
She lets the rage wash over her and breathes it out, just like she was taught to do.
“Anakin. Fancy new outfit, I see.” She resorts to a language that she and Anakin used to be fluent in.
“Padawan.” His voice is darkness itself, deep and broken and all wrong.
Her task is to goad Vader into a fight, and it’s what she’s been training for. Maybe it’s always what she trained for, as a padawan that sparred against the famed Skywalker and Kenobi duo.
“Kill anyone I know recently?” Ahsoka steps forward, projecting an air of nonchalance. “I hear Master Vos is still running circles around you.”
“Vos is not a concern when I face you now,” Vader snarls. “You are no match for me.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure. You trained me after all.” Ahsoka steps into ready stance and lets her sabers fly from her belt to her hands. They shine white, but Ahsoka remembers her dream, and wonders if this will be what makes them red.
“Do you really want to fight me, Ahsoka?”
She hears Anakin in the way he says her name, but she holds firm, lets the grief form her determination. Her rage on the back burner, waiting to be let loose.
“No,” she answers honestly. “But I don’t know who you are anymore, and I’ve always been bloodthirsty for monsters.”
And she launches herself forward. Her white blades clash against his red one, and the Force screams around them, a cry of pain so deep it scrapes down her spine, but she lets the Force be her ally as she was taught.
She spins through the cries of pain, the voices of her past imparting wisdom, the memories of clones at her side. She lets them float along her skin, and her feet dance in tune with the Force around her.
Vader is a dark void that spits darkness out around her, his blows heavy and fast, but Ahsoka lets the darkness wrap around her too. This darkness is scary and deep but it belongs to Anakin. And she’s not Crys, doesn’t understand how slicing works, but she understands a backdoor, and any darkness Vader has contains a backdoor that will allow the light in. You just have to have the key.
There was one more element of her dreams that she’s never shared with Rex. In the dream, there’s always an owl. The owl has a brother–a winged ram–made of darkness and hatred. Together they fly through the forest. The owl’s brother swoops down to kill mice with abandon, but the owl soars above hearing the cries of death, yet holding steady in the force. And more importantly, never leaving her brother behind. The owl is never corrupted by the darkness.
For these past few months in preparation for this moment, Ahsoka hasn’t just been training how to fight. She’s learned how to soar.
She whirls around Vader in a dance, the Force flowing through her and giving her wings. She can’t wield both light and dark, but she can dance with the dark, right on the edge of the precipice.
White clashes against red, over and over and over, and Ahsoka keeps the faith.
“I know you’re in there, Anakin,” she rasps, her breathes coming shorter and shorter. She’s no match for him, but she doesn’t have to be. The key is not found in a blaster bolt fired out of grief and rage. The key is found in staring into the void, and believing in the light. “It’s not too late to come back.”
Vader’s saber clashes against hers, forcing her back. “It is.” His breath wheezes out steadily, despite the exertion from the battle. She wonders if he still has human lungs, or if they’re machine now too. “There’s nothing left for me.”
“What am I then?” She blocks the blow aimed for her neck.
For a second, Ahsoka thinks she can see his eyes past the lens, see the rage and pain in them. “You’re trying to kill me.” His blows knock Ahsoka to the ground, and she rolls out of the way of his lightsaber. It slices across the rock surface, sending shards flying into the air with a sizzle.
Ahsoka flips to her feet and holds her sabers at the ready, but Vader doesn’t advance.
“Do you really think a clone can make a killing blow?” Then Vader knows about Cody waiting for a shot, but maybe not about Sabé. For some reason she wants him to know about them both, about the entire plan, so that he can avoid it and escape. Because more than anything she doesn’t want that finality of knowing her master is never coming back. If she fails to speak to him, then she doesn’t want him to die, even at the expense of the galaxy. There's too much of her master in her that way.
“You would have a better chance of killing me.”
“Is that what you want? More blood to stain the ground between us? Come away with me.” She makes one entreaty. There is one way to be swallowed by a black hole, but many ways to come out alive on the other side.
“What?” Confusion sparks across his presence, a light in the darkness.
Ahsoka deactivates her shoto and holds out her hand. “Come away with me, brother.”
Hope swirls into the air around them, something so bright and potent that it seems to freeze the air between them. Or maybe time really is frozen, because a bolt hangs in the air beside Vader, but neither he nor Ahsoka have moved. The plasma energy crackles as Ahsoka waits with bated breath.
She can see a future out in front of her. A planet removed from the larger galaxy. Seasons that change faster than predictions can be spoken. The Force alive in the air around them. Light to balance the darkness. Cool, blue eyes that remind Ahsoka of the light, and a soul Anakin is hesitant to kill.
She never realized Obi-Wan was still alive until this moment that stretches for an eternity.
She never realized that the owl in the forest was watched by the cool, blue eyes of a panther in the branches, protective of the owl and winged ram both despite the darkness around the winged ram’s soul. A father’s blinding love for his son some would say.
A younger sibling’s hero worship for their older brother, some might call Ahsoka’s actions, but she knows there are no heroes here.
She sucks in a breath. “Please.”
The last thing she wants is for Anakin to die. General Draven was right to doubt her willingness to make the kill. She won’t let the darkness take him to his death either.
The air splits with the sudden crackle of the blaster bolt flying through the air. The ground spits at her when the bolt connects with it.
“I trust you, Ahsoka.”
Vader’s breaths wheeze out of him, and it reminds Ahsoka that she’s luring a monster away with her too, not just her master.
“I have a ship,” she says anyway. She’s never been afraid of Anakin’s darkness, and perhaps that will be her downfall. Perhaps she’ll still stand across from him in a temple as energy crackles around them in shades of red and purple and once again cross blades with him.
But the Force sings a different song, and Ahsoka will choose to listen the hopeful melody.