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Ahsoka Tano is fourteen years old when Anakin Skywalker takes her as his padawan, a snippy little togruta with a tendency to disobey orders, finding loopholes in the simplest commands and getting on her master’s every last nerve. She is so much like him, stubborn and reckless, too ready to throw herself into dangerous situations while ignoring every possible warning.
He scolds her, yes. Often. But he cannot bring himself to hold a grudge against her for anything she does—not when every one of her actions mirror his own when he was a padawan himself.
“You two will be the death of me,” Obi-Wan says, but his exasperation is laced with humour. She grins at her Master, who rolls his eyes and arches a brow as he always does.
Anakin is only five years her senior, and is instantly captivated by her snark. “Go meditate,” he scolds one day, after another episode of petulance. “You never meditate, Skyguy,” she retorts, and he knows she’s right. The name sticks. He ends up taking her to Dex’s for dinner, and she never manages to get that meditation session in.
To the shock of the entire Jedi council, Anakin likes—even loves—his padawan. They are so much alike in so many ways. Brave, defiant, strong-willed—rebellious , Master Windu sighs in one particularly trying meeting.
Despite her sharp tongue and sass, she trains harder than Anakin gives her credit for. She practices her forms religiously every day, hones her command of the Force, sets aside time for meditation even though she hates it just as much as he does. She holds her lightsaber in that ridiculous backhand grip and he chides her for it, but she somehow makes it work with her flawless Form V, and he soon stops asking her to run through her katas because they are perfect every time.
She cares too much. For her master, for the 501st. It’s brutal, but they learn to accept that clones are meant to be expendable. Not to her, though. She is attached, emotional—just like him , the council whispers behind her back—but she fights for what she believes with a fire only matched by her master. Her heart is too kind and her loyalty never falters.
It will be your weakness one day, Anakin thinks with sorrow, but he never says it out loud.
She is sent on missions with him, and desperately tries to prove herself, too selfless and ready to sacrifice everything for a Republic who barely knows she exists. Running into the heat of battle, lightsaber brandished, deflecting blaster bolts with blazing determination. Almost getting killed countless times. Anakin loses track of how many hours he’s spent sitting in a chair by her side in the medbay, waiting and waiting for her to wake up.
The clones sometimes forget that their commander is a child. In between battles, they teach her Man’do’a until she can almost hold a conversation. Her pronunciation is shoddy and nowhere near fluent, but they’re so proud when she starts calling the people who annoy her dii’kut , and they start to call her vod’ika when the general isn’t around.
(He knows, though, not surprised in the slightest—she is, after all, a little sister to all of them.)
“Is it true?” she asks her Master one day. “You never wanted a padawan?” Her voice is steady but her eyes are glassy. The feeling of being unwanted cut deep into her confidence, and she’d spent an hour staring at the wall in her quarters, trying and failing to comprehend why Anakin took her under his tutelage in the first place if he never wanted an apprentice. She’d spent another hour pulling out every flaw she could find in herself, until she had an inky, bitter pile in the fresher sink in front of her, and her reflection in the mirror was blurred with tears.
Anakin wraps his arms around her shoulders, pausing from where he re-strings her padawan beads behind her, chin coming to rest in the dip between her montrals. “That was before I met you.”
She is fifteen when a blaster bolt catches her thigh and she crumples right there on the field with a cry, vision blurry through tears. The sounds of battle ring in her montrals but everything seems so far away. Distantly, she hears Rex yelling her name, but the only thought running through her mind is failurefailurefailure and how could she let this happen and she should have been faster, stronger, smarter—
Panic sparks through the training bond and Anakin comes rushing to her, worry etched into his youthful features. He is bleeding from a cut on his arm, where the shoulder plate failed to shield his flesh. She wants to insist that he tend to his own injuries first, but a weak, selfish part of her screams in pain and begs for medical attention.
She feels his guilt at failing his padawan, of allowing her to be hurt under his care. She wants to smooth away the lines on his forehead, run her hands over the scar on his eye, tell him she’s alright and he shouldn’t worry. But her thigh is on fire and she’s dropped her lightsabers somewhere and the war doesn’t stop for a single fallen togruta.
Later, her montrals pick up the hushed whispers of clones in the medical bay. She hears too young for war and unfair and a child shouldn’t be on a battlefield and selfishly, she agrees.
But it is her duty, is it not? To fight for the Republic, for freedom and justice. So she swallows the pain and apologises to her master—“for what?” he asks, genuinely puzzled, and she doesn’t consider how ridiculous it sounds when she replies “for getting shot”—because she would have been of more help if she wasn’t injured, and maybe they wouldn’t have lost so many men.
“You have nothing to apologise for,” Anakin says, his mech hand a comforting weight on her slender shoulder. Ahsoka knows he worries sometimes that she is fragile, brittle, that if he squeezes too hard with that deadly durasteel contraption she will shatter and break into a million pieces.
She glares at the bandage around her thigh, white and bulky on her slim leg. She imagines she is made of solid durasteel, that the burned skin beneath it is just another chip on a wall, and she will fill it up with plaster until it is so smooth nobody will know it was ever blemished.
(It’s not the last blaster injury she suffers, but she learns to hide the pain the way her master does so well. He finds out one day, and the sadness in his eyes is almost enough to make her regret ever bottling up her feelings.)
The nightmares don’t stop when she turns sixteen. She gets better at shielding, learns to mask the tangled emotions and the mess she makes in her mind, pretends the blood on the ground is water and the screams are recordings from a crappy holovid. But each night the shrapnel cuts further into the walls she’s put up, cracks spider-webbing over bulletproof transparisteel, until it shatters and she falls apart.
Anakin is in her bedroom within seconds, holding her tightly against his chest. She cries openly, tears falling like her shields, hating herself for being so weak.
“I’m a Jedi,” she sobs, gulping down the turbulent sea of her emotions. “Jedi aren’t supposed to be scared.” Jedi aren’t supposed to cry.
“It’s okay to be scared,” he says, a hand rubbing soothing circles into her back. Your fear does not rule you. He should be lecturing her about serenity over passion, but he, just like her, is at fault for embracing his emotions instead of releasing them.
“Maybe I’m not cut out to be a Jedi,” she says, her voice cracking, and Anakin almost spills the memories of his own tears when he doubted himself the most, of his own master pulling him from a deep pit of self-loathing when he regretted ever being found on the sands of Tatooine. He refuses to watch her cut herself down like he did.
She is sixteen, for Force’s sake. She is a child.
“You’re the strongest Jedi I know, Ahsoka,” he whispers. “Nothing in this universe will ever change that.”
The war ends. Ahsoka is seventeen.
Chancellor Palpatine is dead. Without his influence, the Separatist forces descend into mayhem. The Republic squadrons ensure every fleet is destroyed, and war criminals are taken into Coruscant for trial. It is messy and there is so much work to do but nobody complains. How can they, when the war they’ve been waiting for years now to end has finally dissolved into final casualty reports and reparations bills?
The 501st mill around the camp they’ve set up on a newly liberated planet, formerly under Separatist rule. They wear only their blacks, buckets and not-so-shiny white armour lying in piles on the ground. What use do they have for it anymore? Men who share the same face, same stories, brothers who look exactly alike. Where will they go now? They joke about being outsiders, planet-less hitchhikers—but deep down they wonder if there is anywhere in the galaxy where they can find peace and a purpose which isn’t to fight.
Ahsoka sits by the fire, warming her hands on the heat of the flames, imagining the blaze melting away all the grief and sorrow of the war. All around her is cheering, voices of her own troops which should sound like carbon copies of each other but have grown unique in her mind. She can almost taste the joy in the air, the tangible relief and rejoice at the end of what feels like a lifetime of fighting. They have lost so much but saved so much more.
She hears his footsteps before he emerges from the din of clone voices and lowers himself down to the ground beside her, plonking himself onto the hard dirt with an oof and carelessly throwing an arm over her shoulder. The physical affection comes naturally—they have been touch-starved for so long. She grabs his mech hand, covered in that same leather glove from years ago now worn and faded, and tucks herself closer into his side. He is her brother now, the missing piece of a complex puzzle which has taken her years to solve.
They sit in silence, basking in the muted euphoria at the end of the clone wars. Remembering.
Anakin turns to look at her. “You’ve grown up, Snips,” he says.
She can read it in his eyes, the unspoken words. Too fast. You’ve grown up too fast. But she ignores the pang in her chest, doesn’t comment on the depth in his weary eyes which have seen too much, pretends not to notice the heaviness of his motions, the compensation for a lifetime of fighting.
She will undergo her trials soon, and those padawan beads will no longer hang behind her lekku. Never again will Anakin sit behind her, carefully re-stringing them, the same way he carefully solders wires together or calibrates the sensors in his hand.
“You too,” she says. And Anakin smiles—not the cocky, self assured smirk she’s seen one too many times, the one which says I can and will disobey those exact orders you’ve just given me which has been passed on to her like a legacy. Instead, it’s tinged with sadness and grief—how much they have sacrificed for the little they receive in return. Yet it beams with so much pride and is that love? That’s love.
She will be the youngest Jedi Knight in history, finishing her training under the runner-up to that title. She is ready. The war has more than prepared her for knighthood.
Anakin looks into sapphire eyes which have seen too much death and destruction for their age. She is not so snippy anymore; now careful, mature, wise beyond her years. Wary that words spoken too soon can reopen old wounds, but fiery in defence of what she stands for, and reckless in the face of harm to those she loves.
Through the bond, she hears him whisper I love you.
That’s all they are—mere specks in a war torn galaxy, so much yet so little resting on their shoulders. They’ve won. Every single tear shed, every drop of blood spilled. Every life snuffed out and forgotten.
Night falls, stars leaping out of the dusk to litter the sky. Ahsoka looks to the vastness of space, remembering that every single glimmer on the black canvas is a glimmer of the past. The stars only shine because the light of each supernova has yet to reach their eyes.
Yesterday, she ran through a battlefield, lightsabers blazing in her grip as she cut down battle droids and prayed for the millionth time with dwindling shreds of hope for this battle to be the last.
Today, her prayer is answered. She is a war hero. It is more than she wants and more than she needs and more than she would ever think to ask for.
As for tomorrow—tomorrow has yet to come. But tomorrow never really arrives, does it?