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Chapter Text

Ahsoka clawed her way back to consciousness through a dark fog. She felt heavy, and cold, and like the last thing she wanted was to be awake. There was some reason she needed to open her eyes, though. Some reason she urgently needed to sit up and pay attention to where she was.

As she struggled back to awareness, she realized that the dark and cold weren’t just in her mind. She was lying on freezing rocky ground, darkness pressing in against her closed eyelids. The air around her was ominously still and quiet, except for a low and slightly irregular rasping noise a short way away.

Malachor. That was it. She’d been on Malachor, in the Sith temple. Was very likely still there. She reached through the fog in her mind and remembered lightsabers, red and white. Remembered fighting Darth Vader. Fighting Anakin.

They’d been fighting as the temple walls crumbled around them, cracks opening up in the floors and large chunks of the ceiling falling all around them. Their duel had been in deadly earnest, and almost a mockery of all their many practice sparring sessions years ago. And then, as the lightning flashed and the walls shook around them, she’d tried a trick Anakin himself had taught her and plunged her lightsabers into the floor. If you’re losing, change the situation, he’d told her. She’d seen him use this exact move before, flashing her a reckless grin as he did it.

The floor of the temple had collapsed, taking him with it. She honestly couldn’t remember if she’d fallen too, or if she’d jumped in after him. She just remembered falling, chunks of black rock all around them and lightsabers still slashing at each other until darkness had taken her.

She slowly opened her eyes, seeing nothing but the stone underneath her. She wasn’t alone. Muscles protesting, she dragged herself into a vaguely upright position leaning against the rock behind her.

They were in a small, oddly shaped chamber that had probably been created by the falling rock. There was a faint light breaking the oppressive darkness, just enough to see to the edges of the chamber—two or three meters in each direction. She didn’t see any doors or exits.

Vader—Anakin—was sitting against the wall opposite her. The rasping noise was his breathing, sounding harsh and labored and painful, and he was leaning slightly in a way that made her wonder if just maybe their fight had done as much damage to him as to her. After a moment, she realized that the dim glow in the room was coming from a light attached to the armor on his right arm. Or, for all she knew, built directly into the arm itself.

He was staring at her, through half the black expressionless mask and one bright yellow eye. She wondered briefly what was with the eye color. Something related to the dark side? Not a Sith thing. Dooku hadn’t had yellow eyes. Maul had, even when he insisted he wasn’t Sith anymore.

One of her hands brushed something on the ground, and she glanced down to see her lightsabers. Both of them. As far as she could tell, they were lying right where they’d landed when she fell down here. She reached out for them, automatically checking to make sure they weren’t damaged before attaching them back to her belt. Then, slowly, she looked back up to meet Anakin’s eyes. Eye.

He’d said he was going to kill her, and he’d meant it. He had clearly been trying to kill her when they fought. And yet, he’d obviously been sitting here watching her for some time while she was unconscious and defenseless, and he hadn’t even taken her lightsabers. It didn’t make sense. Unless…she considered the possibility that Sith Anakin had exactly the same approach to plans as the Anakin she knew had. That he might have just as little an idea of what to do next as she did.

Deciding that, all things considered, he probably wasn’t going to kill her the moment she took her eyes off him, she turned to examine the walls.

“There’s no exit.”

She turned to look at him, one hand still on the rock wall beside her, to find him continuing to watch her.

“I already checked.” His voice was weak and whispery, with occasional strangely overlaid echoes of the powerful, mechanical bass that must come from an artificial voice box. Slashing the helmet open seemed to have broken it, or maybe it was the fall that had done it.

“Did you try…” She lifted one hand, at the same time reaching out with the Force to sense the rock around them. A moment later she cried out, hunching over with her head in her hands. She’d sensed darkness before everything else, as strong and relentless as a river of icy water pouring through her.

There was movement across from her, and she lifted her head slightly. He appeared to have made some abortive motion in her direction, one hand still reaching towards her. After a moment he let it drop. It was a moment longer before he said anything, and when he did it was, “This is a Sith temple. The power of the dark side can be overwhelming for those unaccustomed to it.”

She glared at him. She had no doubt such a proclamation would sound grand and terrifying (though still annoying) with his voice modulator working properly. As it was, his words were softly spoken, drifting back and forth between what she thought of as his normal voice and something that was barely more than a whisper. Damaged vocal cords, she thought. She’d encountered that injury during the Clone Wars.

She shook that off for the moment and focused on the problem at hand. Knowing to brace herself for it, her second attempt at sensing her surrounding went much better. The dark currents still pulled at her, dragging at her energy and threatening to sweep her into their depths, but she was able to shield herself from them long enough to get what she was after. Not that it helped any.

“I’m surprised we didn’t get completely crushed,” she said. Walls of solid rock packed in with piles of rubble stretched out in all directions from their little hole. “Did you hold off the rock while we were falling?”

“Did you?” he asked.

She thought a moment. “Not consciously.”

She took his question to mean that he hadn’t, either. He had a point, though, with what he hadn’t actually said. They were both experienced Force users, and both good at surviving. It was very likely they’d created this relatively safe space together without being fully aware of what they were doing.

They settled back to stare at each other some more. She could feel the tension rising. Although, she thought, she was starting to have some idea of why he was leaving her alive. She was almost positive she wasn’t going to be able to get out of here on her own, and no matter what tricks he had up his sleeve, he might not be able to either. She wasn’t even sure if they could make it out working together.

She’d like to think there was another reason, she acknowledged as she stared into that glaring yellow eye. That he hadn’t actually wanted to kill her, despite all evidence to the contrary. Despite him actually attacking with the clear intent to kill her.

It was dangerous to let herself think that way. She’d been a wreck these past few months as she went from confusion to suspicion to trying desperately to tell herself it couldn’t possibly be him behind that mask, only able to do her job when she could stop thinking about it. She had a feeling if she let herself think about it too much she’d collapse in despair.

On the other hand, she really didn’t have a choice but to think about it now. He was sitting here literally staring her in the face. And collapsing wouldn’t do anyone any good unless she actually wanted to die here.

The silence stretched on from tense, through awkward, to almost meditative. She had chosen to be here, she thought. She’d chosen several times over, the last when she’d shoved Ezra away from them, pushing him back to the ship with Kanan, and shut herself in the collapsing temple. With him. Vader. Anakin. She could say it was because someone had to deal with him and she was better equipped than most, because now that they knew each other’s identities he’d never stop hunting her, because now her mere presence would put the Rebellion into even more danger from him and the Emperor. It was all true.

The real reason was that she couldn’t bring herself to walk away from him again. Her vision of him from the temple on Lothal, his anger and betrayal, had haunted her. Even though she knew better than to completely trust a Force vision, even though she didn’t fully know what had happened to him, it was at least partly true. She knew Anakin. She’d told him not to blame himself the last time they’d seen each other, told him that he was the only one who hadn’t betrayed her, but she’d still left and she knew he’d still blamed himself. She couldn’t leave again. Couldn’t leave him like this, a monster doing Palpatine’s bidding, going against all the principles he’d once taught her. Not when there was even the tiniest chance she could save him. So she’d let the walls of the temple descend between her and the Phantom. She didn’t want to die, but she’d accepted the possibility of her death many times over, and if this was how things ended between them then so be it.

Finally she broke the silence to ask, “Are we going to keep fighting?”

He looked at her, the question clear even if he didn’t say it out loud.

“The way I see it, we have a few choices. We could keep fighting each other. We both have our lightsabers.” She let that sit a moment. She’d noticed his on his belt earlier. “Or we could try to get out of here. Or we could sit here until we starve.”

“I have no intention of starving to death.”

She closed her eyes. The worst part, she thought, was that she couldn’t really deny either that he was a Sith or that he was Anakin. She could feel his presence, had felt it earlier when she reached out and could still sense it now. Dark energy twisted around him, burning with the same cold fury as the Force permeating the temple, though the Force around him was far more passionate, swirling at a fever pitch while that in the temple was slow and implacable. It was almost nothing like the master and friend whose Force presence had once been so familiar. At the same time, something about him was just…Anakin.

She looked at him again, putting together a few things in her head, and finally said, “How much of…” She waved her hand vaguely at his armor. “…that, do you need to survive?”

He didn’t answer, but the rasp of his breathing quickened for a moment. His fists clenched by his side, just barely visible in the darkness because she was looking for it. It pretty much told her all she needed to know. She wondered how much damage she’d done. Obviously not enough to outright kill him, which meant he could probably eventually fix it.

Was there any chance at all he’d tell her what had happened? Probably not.

“I could kill you,” he said into the silence while she was wondering. It was an almost conversational tone, a statement of fact that even with his weakened voice left no room for doubt.

“Yes, probably,” she said. “I can’t say you taught me everything I know—I’ve picked up a few things since the end of the Clone Wars. But you know most of my tricks.”

His visible eye narrowed, and the Force rippled with a wave of hostility from him. “Your old master is dead. Anakin Skywalker is no more.”

“I’m pretty sure that wouldn’t sound believable even if your voice modulator was working properly.” It was maybe a more flippant remark than the situation deserved, but there was very little she could say that was as weighty as this situation. And he really did sound astonishingly like, well, himself. Angry, bitter, and aggressive, yes. But trying to cut himself off from his past and getting angry about not being able to do it properly was so very Anakin.

“Believe it,” he said, the hostility she sensed increasing, and all right, that almost sounded scary. He’d apparently given up on trying to sound loud and booming, and had instead gone for a low hiss. If she hadn’t already accepted the strong chance that this would end with him killing her, she’d probably be terrified.

She started struggling to her feet, suppressing a groan as various bruises all over her body reminded her that she’d just had a temple fall on her. “I don’t want to die sitting here,” she told him. “I’d rather be fighting or trying to get out of here.”

He got up too, slowly enough that she thought he was probably feeling the effects of having a temple fall on him too. She tensed for a moment, honestly not sure whether they would be going for their lightsabers or not.

Instead he circled halfway around their little hole, one hand trailing along the wall. “The shortest way to empty space is through here.”

She reached out herself. “I can’t feel it.”

“This temple makes me more powerful. It makes you weaker.”

He had a point. The dark power permeating the temple threatened to overcome her, sway her to its side, even as she simply tried to sense the location of the rocks. She concentrated, struggling to sense beyond the darkness. “I think we could shift the rock. It’s solidly packed, but a lot of it’s in smaller pieces. But there’s so much of it piled up, moving it might make it all collapse.”

“There are two of us.” He said it with almost no inflection in his voice. “One to move the rocks. The other to hold the rest in place.”

“So we need each other to get out.”

“This is a Sith temple. It always takes two.”

She looked at him quickly, but he’d turned the side of his mask with the hole in it away from her. “I don’t think this was quite what they had in mind.”

“Perhaps not.” He examined the rock one more time, then stepped a bit to the side. “I’m stronger. I will hold the rock in place. You will clear a path.”

“Okay.”

“You’re not going to argue?”

“No. You’re right. You are stronger.” And even if he had absolutely no interest in her well-being, she figured she could at least rely on his desire to get out of this hole. “Starting to move rocks now.”

Shifting the rocks was slow, tiring work. There was nowhere to move them to except the small hollow where they were standing, so they ended up inching forward while Ahsoka used the Force (and sometimes her hands) to take chunks of rubble from the pile in front of them and move them to the pile behind.

As she’d predicted, she’d barely started to make a noticeable dent in the the rubble when the whole thing started creaking and shifting ominously. She hardly had time to worry about it, though, before a powerful Force presence flowed around her and into the rocks, and immediately all sign of movement stopped.

She shivered a little. She’d felt Anakin’s near effortless command of the Force more times than she could count, but this display had none of the blazing warmth and passion she remembered. He still burned in the Force, but now it was a cold, icy burn. At the same time, there was that absolute confidence she remembered, and despite the fact that a Sith lord was literally holding up the roof over her head, she instinctively felt completely safe. There was just a thread of familiarity to the whole thing, and she couldn’t be sure whether it was her imagination and too many memories, or if she was actually sensing a spark of the Anakin she knew buried under all the darkness.

It was the same conflicting mess of feelings she’d gotten when she first sensed his presence, back in that space battle with Kanan at her back. She hadn’t been looking for anything familiar then, and had felt it anyway. Maybe that meant she actually wasn’t imagining it now?

With an effort, she pushed all those thoughts out of her mind. Focus on getting out of here first, she told herself. And in fact, before long she really couldn’t focus on anything else. Moving the rocks was taking all her energy. Each one on its own was no trouble, but there were so many of them…

She had no idea how long she worked, staring blankly at the dark rocks and dust as she moved them from one side of the chamber to the other through Anakin’s chilly, all-powerful Force presence. As long as she lived, she thought semi-hysterically at one point, she’d never forget the feeling of a Sith lord’s power surrounding her, even if all he was doing with it was holding up a cave.

Around then was when she stopped, collapsing against one wall as she closed her eyes and just breathed for a minute. Between the constant exertion, the earlier fight, and the dark side power all around her, she felt completely drained.

“You’ve stopped,” Anakin murmured, pushing an accusatory twinge at her through the Force.

She opened her eyes and looked at him. He didn’t immediately appear to be feeling any strain from holding the rocks in place, but after a moment she noticed that he was leaning on the opposite wall in what was clearly meant to be a casual manner.

“How much further?” she asked, not bothering to hide her own exhaustion.

“You still cannot sense it?” he asked, and even speaking with a ravaged voice that didn’t quite hide his own exhaustion, he managed to insert a note of disdain. She felt a brief stab of hurt, before firmly reminding herself to pull it together.

“I’ve been a little busy,” she snapped in what she hoped was something like her usual tone. “Haven’t had time.”

She closed her eyes and, somewhat tentatively, reached back out into the darkness. For a moment darkness was all she could feel, and she flinched away from it.

Anakin clearly noticed the flinch. “Even if you won’t use the dark side,” he said, scorn dripping from his voice, “you should be able to sense beyond it. Focus on the rocks, nothing else.”

She wasn’t sure if she should be more horrified or glad that the Sith lord was treating her like she was still his Padawan, but she didn’t really have the energy for either, so she focused on the rocks. It took a moment, and the overwhelming presence of the dark side still made her skin crawl, but she did get a sense of an open space beyond the rubble. It was rather farther away than she’d prefer, but she thought she could probably manage it. Well, she’d have to manage it.

She suspected she should say something to Anakin, but didn’t want to spare the energy to think through what to say. And she figured that if she didn’t want this entire situation to go even more badly than it already had, she should probably put some thought into what she said. So she just turned back to the rocks, resuming clearing a way out. She could sense Anakin behind her doing his part to keep the roof from falling on their heads as they inched forward.

She should probably be concerned about how comfortable it felt to have him at her back.

They finally made it to a clear passageway, or at least to a tunnel open enough for them to stand without actively holding back the rock. Ahsoka just had the presence of mind to move a short distance from the opening she had just created before sinking down onto a boulder, exhausted.

Anakin came up beside her. She could sense his presence filling the tunnel, along with the sound of his footsteps and the rasp of his breathing. Out of the corner of her eye she could see the light on his armor still glowing. Somewhat incongruously, he sat down next to her, angled slightly away from her due to the shape of the boulder. Clearly, Sith temple or no, their efforts had taken a lot out of him too. She could hear the slightly muffled thuds and rumblings of the rocks behind them falling back into place now that he was no longer holding them up.

“Your control of the Force is impressive,” he said after a moment of silence.

“I know,” she said. The Force was all she had. Until she’d met Kanan, she’d thought she might very well be the last remnant of the Jedi in a galaxy ruled by Sith. She’d made allies in the Rebellion, even friends over the years. But the Force was the only link she had to the people who were once her family. Often the Force was her only backup when she went on a mission. Of course her connection to it had strengthened. She’d made deliberate efforts to strengthen it and practice until she was absolutely sure of her abilities. Even in that horrible year after Order 66 when she’d been hiding and terrified every second she wasn’t in shock, she’d still meditated whenever she could.

“With you at my side, our strength would be unstoppable,” he continued.

That was enough to get her to ignore her exhaustion, twisting awkwardly to peer over at him. He was still facing away, but had turned his head towards her and she could see his one visible eye staring at her intently. Was he trying to ask what she thought he was?

Before she could consider that further, there was a ripple in the air, as if of the wings of some unseen creature, and a haunting cry from the depths of the temple that she realized after a moment she felt as well as heard. Chills rose up and down her arms, and she turned her head sharply, straining eyes, montrals, and Force sense to try to identify…whatever it was. “What was that?”

Anakin had gone tense as well—more tense than he’d been, anyway—and seemed to be trying to figure it out the same as her. After a moment he eased back and said, “Shadows. Ghosts of past lords of this temple. Consuming you would give them power.”

She shuddered. She didn’t ask how he knew, or what exactly he meant by “consume,” or what they would do to him. It was easy enough to believe there were forgotten dark side spirits on Malachor, and that whatever was out there would not be good news if it found them.

“I could show you how to overcome them,” he said, just slightly too casually.

“With the dark side, you mean,” she said.

“The dark side is a path to greater power than the Jedi would ever let you use.”

She turned around to look at him fully. Whatever ghosts were lurking here had at least for the moment disappeared out of hearing and sense, and there was nothing to keep her from answering Anakin. “You actually are asking me to join you.”

There was a small, raspy huff of breath and a slight movement that could almost be considered a shrug.

“You must know I’d never agree to being a Sith,” she said slowly. “And in any case, joining you would mean joining the Empire. I’ve seen what your Empire does to people all across the galaxy.”

“We bring order,” he said, eerily tonelessly. She couldn’t tell whether he truly believed that statement.

“Order for humans on the core worlds, maybe,” she said. “And not even all of them. Those of us who aren’t human, anyone who lives on the Outer Rim—well, your Emperor hasn’t yet made an official decree that we’re all criminals or servants, but he might as well have.”

“You’re not—”

“Not what? A criminal? Actually I am, just for existing. I’m not even part of the Jedi order anymore, but the Empire hunted me for it all the same.”

“It doesn’t have to be that way.”

“Doesn’t it?” She sighed. “Do you really think Palpatine would let me live, even if I agreed to whatever terms you come up with?

There was silence for a moment. “If you return with me he will.”

“You actually sound like you believe that.”

“It is true. Join with me.”

She shook her head. “Even if I was willing to turn to the dark side, unless you’re secretly planning to overthrow Palpatine, it’s not going to happen. I have no intention of being your Asajj Ventress.”

She got the sense that he was about to protest, perhaps deny again that Palpatine would do that to her. He didn’t, though. Maybe the mention of Ventress was giving him pause.

“Furthermore,” she continued, “I may not be a Jedi anymore, but that doesn’t mean I’ve abandoned the light side of the Force. I will not use the dark side, and I will definitely not become a Sith.”

“That is…regrettable,” he said. “A waste of your talents. You could be great.”

He sounded like he genuinely meant it. It was oddly flattering, in a way. Although it probably shouldn’t be.

“If you really do want to overthrow the Emperor, maybe we can work something out,” she said before she could think better of it.

For a moment she thought she’d gone too far. He turned toward her, his one visible eye narrowed, and the sense of hostility from him that had almost disappeared was back in full force. Despite herself, she flinched back. She didn’t try to take her words back, though.

“You will show proper respect to the Emperor,” he snarled.

“Why should I, when he doesn’t show proper respect to me?” she asked. If he killed her for it, so be it. At least she’d die telling him the truth. “If he got his hands on me, he’d either kill me or torture me into being one of his Inquisitors and force me to track down other Force sensitives. That’s not respect.” She hesitated a moment, but she’d come this far. “That’s slavery.”

There was a beat of very loud silence. Then he said, “The Jedi had to die.”

She risked reaching out again in the Force to try to get some sense of whether he genuinely believed that, or if he was just trying to convince himself. Once she would have known instantly just from his face and voice, but neither were giving her any clues now.

Her mental probe bounced off his shields, and she scowled. She was really getting annoyed with this whole situation. She’d know how to react if he was the Anakin she remembered, and she’d know how to react if he was just a Sith lord, but the problem was he was both. And that meant she had to acknowledge that the Anakin she remembered had turned into someone who had done all the terrible things Vader did.

These days she had fairly strict control over her temper. She might not be a Jedi, but she had maybe even more reasons than a Jedi did to need to be in complete control of herself. Sometimes, though, having control of her temper meant needing to let out her anger, and she abruptly decided this was one of those times.

“Had to die?” she demanded. She pushed herself to her feet and stalked around the boulder until she could look him in what she could see of his face. “Had to die? Seriously? Every Jedi, all over the galaxy? The younglings in the temple? The babies who hadn’t even been brought to the temple yet?” She shook her head, feeling the tears she’d shed years ago in deep hiding on distant moons rise up again. “My friends? You know how I used to check all the reports from the different battles to see if they were all right. We were all just Padawans, not even knights yet, all in the middle of war. And you had them killed. You and the Emperor. All the Jedi, Anakin—the Jedi were my family! You were my family! How could you do it?”

Anakin was on his feet before she’d even finished, looming over her. “If we were your family, why did you leave?”

Before she could respond, or even think about how she was going to respond, there was another haunting screech, this one from nearly on top of them. A wave of even colder air washed over her, and she automatically whirled to face the new threat.

Anakin had been exactly right to call them shadows, was her first thought. The things creeping towards them were like pieces of the darkest corners of the cavern made solid, with the hint of pale glowing eyes from within them. The nearest one reached out what appeared to be an arm, the tip of it almost touching her. Behind it, more shadows crowded into the passageway, their unearthly voices rising in discordant howls.

Logic said it shouldn’t be able to hurt her just by touching her, but she was in a Sith temple with her former Jedi master turned Sith lord, so she wasn’t going to rely on logic right now. She grabbed for her lightsabers, reaching through her weariness to strengthen her mental shields.

She’d only barely started to move when she was tugged backward and shoved into a new position, behind Anakin and just to his right, his own lightsaber up in a line of brilliant red. It took her a moment to work out what had happened, not so much to adjust to the new position as to the fact that it shouldn’t be so familiar. He’d stood protectively in front of her like this in more battles than she could count. In the dark, only the color of his lightsaber indicated that they weren’t right back in the Clone Wars.

She ignited her own sabers just as he gave a fleeting half-glance over his shoulder, giving her a glimpse of his yellow eye. She got a sense of surprise in the Force, and had the feeling his moving her had been reflexive on his part. She half expected him to step away and leave her to the shadows. Or to join them.

Instead, he turned back to the ghosts, his lightsaber cutting towards them in one of the more aggressive Djem So moves she’d never tried to master. “Keep away from us,” he snarled, his voice still a whisper but his words echoing coldly with power in the Force. Apparently he was committing to protecting her. She shivered.

“She is an intruder,” came a hissing voice from the shadows, and the words were somehow worse than the incoherent screeches. “You may be one of us, Sith. She does not belong.”

“This is our place,” another voice threatened.

“And I am living, while you are not,” Anakin said, and launched into an attack.

Ahsoka didn’t see any lightsabers among the shadows, but they certainly seemed to be fighting back with something. Anakin’s lightsaber clashed again and again with unseen blades in the darkness. More than that, she could feel the currents of dark side energy swirling around them.

Her first instinct was to jump in and go on the attack, as she normally would. This was a Sith temple, though. She could feel the shadows closing in around her, beating against her with dark side power even as whatever weapons they had beat against Anakin’s saber. And Anakin was still fighting, had bought her this moment to think it over even if he hadn’t intended it that way. Maybe, in this case, a more defensive strategy would be better.

She sank into a defensive position, sabers poised to guard herself. Obi-Wan had been the one to teach her that, helping her learn a few Soresu moves she could do with two lightsabers. She wrapped the Force around her as a shield the way he’d showed her before stepping forward to fully join in the fight.

She caught a swift sideways glance from Anakin and another ripple of surprise at her unfamiliar fighting stance before he turned back to swinging his lightsaber at the shadows with renewed vigor. She didn’t have any time to consider this, as her shields were immediately battered with waves of dark power. She could feel the malice and anger in it, not unlike the feelings she’d gotten from Anakin earlier.

The shadows still didn’t have any clearly visible lightsabers, but they certainly had something, some sort of shadow blades that clashed against hers again and again. Her instincts screamed at her to leap forwards, go on the offensive, but all her training and reason told her to remain on the defensive. Let Anakin take care of attacking, which he was certainly doing plenty of. She stayed close to his side, focusing on holding the shadows out of her shields and parrying their blows.

There was a slight shift by her side as Anakin turned completely away from her, apparently leaving it to her to watch his back. She’d seen him and Obi-Wan back each other up this way more times than she could count. Maybe he was remembering the same thing.

A shadow dove at her, and she pushed all memories from her mind. She held her sabers as solid bars across her body—one high, one low—against the invisible blades bearing down on her, and did her best not to flinch at the wave of icy cold flowing from it. Another attack came at her from the side, and she closed her eyes as she blocked it. In the dark, with her attackers half invisible anyway, better to focus on their presence in the Force.

It was hard to make out the separate forms of the shadows, to distinguish them from the background dark power of the temple in the Force. Still easier than trying to see them, though. And Anakin at her back shone, for this moment at least, relatively brighter and warmer than anything else around her.

She couldn’t maintain her purely defensive stance indefinitely, she knew. She wasn’t Obi-Wan. They had fallen into a rhythm, she and Anakin, of attacking, blocking, ducking. If they couldn’t finish this off soon, though, she wasn’t going to last, and he…well, she didn’t know what he would do. She was still pretty sure she wasn’t going to win this through lightsaber skills, but fortunately, she had other options.

She screamed a Togruta war cry, one low-pitched enough to be within human hearing range, mostly to alert Anakin that she was about to change tactics. Over fifteen years, and she still remembered how to fight in tandem with him. But she didn’t have time to dwell on that. She shut off her lightsabers with a thought, then before the shadows had time to move in on her, flung out her hands and pushed.

She had used a similar move on an Inquisitor’s lightsaber not long ago, forcing the saber’s energy back into the hilt as she pushed his physical body away. This was infinitely harder. These shadows were nothing but energy, and energy that didn’t want to be pushed. She stood firm and pictured a shield surrounding her and Anakin, pushing outward against the ghosts.

The shadows howled, and Anakin was clearly startled as they were driven back. It didn’t slow him down much, though. As Ahsoka, straining with effort, shoved them farther away, Anakin threw his lightsaber in their direction. It flew in a bright red arc, sweeping across the ghosts one by one, hissing and clashing over their invisible weapons.

This was apparently the last straw. The shadowy figures dissipated with a few final screeches, and the Force around them rapidly lightened. As much as it could on Malachor, anyway. Anakin caught his lightsaber neatly, and Ahsoka bent over, hands resting on her knees as she tried to catch her breath.

“I was not aware you could do that.”

She turned to look at him. His breath was rasping worse than ever, so loud she could barely make out his faint voice, let alone distinguish its tone. He was, however, projecting ever so slightly in the Force, just a trace of the old familiar emotional jumble she knew so well. There was a distinct sense of accusation, like he couldn’t believe she would dare learn a new Force technique without him knowing about it. Mixed with it, though, was just a hint of…respect? Pride?

“I told you I’ve picked up a few new tricks,” she said.

He returned his lightsaber to his belt. “They are not gone. Merely driven off.”

“I know.” She checked to make sure her own lightsabers were securely put away.

“We should leave.” Without further warning, he strode abruptly out of the cavern they were in and down the passageway. Well, half strode and half limped. She wasn’t sure if he’d been injured in the fight with the shadows, or if it was left over from digging themselves out of the rubble. She was pretty sure he wasn’t going to tell her.

She was also pretty sure he wasn’t truly going to let her out of his sight, even if he suddenly seemed to be ignoring her. And in any case, she still had no intention of leaving him.

She stood still and took a few breaths of the cold, stagnant air in the collapsed Sith temple. After a moment, she followed Anakin.

Chapter Text

Ahsoka and Anakin walked in silence for a time except for the increasingly labored sounds of his breathing. She wondered if his respirator was going to last until they got wherever they were going. Then she wondered if he knew where he was going. Presumably the goal was to get to one of the ships that had been left behind, but right now she had no idea where they were, and couldn’t tell if he did or not.

Finally, thinking back to his accusation before the Sith ghosts had appeared, she said, “I left because the Jedi betrayed me. You know that.”

The only indication he heard was a slight tilt of his head in her direction, but she could tell he was listening.

“But that doesn’t make them evil,” she continued. “Just wrong. And I didn’t know how to deal with that other than by leaving.” Her shoulders sagged, and she voiced the thought that had plagued her on and off for the past sixteen years. “Maybe I should have stayed. I don’t know. I was seventeen, and my whole world had just fallen apart. Or I thought it had. I learned what that actually felt like after Order 66.”

“The Jedi turned against the Republic,” he said, not missing a step. “They were conspiring against it, and Emperor Palpatine brought peace when he stopped their plot.”

“Palpatine is a Sith!” she all but screamed at him. It probably wasn’t the right tactic to take, but she’d had about as much as she could take of the Sith temple and Sith ghosts and Sith Anakin. “The Jedi were conspiring against the Republic? Is Palpatine feeding you that poodoo, or did you come up with it yourself? He’s the one responsible for all of the Clone Wars. There would never have been war at all if it wasn’t for him!”

She’d spent long enough thinking about it, and comparing notes with Bail and Mon. Palpatine had to have orchestrated the entire war, probably as far back as the blockade of Naboo. It had worked out too neatly to his benefit to be anything else. Realizing that had terrified her almost more than anything else, because how was she supposed to compete with that kind of long-term plotting?

The noises from Anakin’s respirator had increased in intensity when she started yelling, and now he stalked over to her and loomed just a few handspans from her face. “The Jedi were corrupt, traitorous.”

“Even if you believed that,” she said, and her voice broke. She took a deep breath to get it under control. “Slavery, Anakin. How could you? How could you follow Palpatine, after what he did to the clones? Our brothers? That’s what made me think there must not be anything left of who you were, but that’s not right. You’re still you. How can you still be going along with this?”

“Is that what you think? It was the Republic that enslaved the clones. Not the Empire.”

“I didn’t say the Republic wasn’t doing it too. I didn’t like it. I know you didn’t like it. How the Republic treated them was wrong, and plenty of people in the Senate even agreed. But what Palpatine did—the control chips. That’s a completely different level.”

“Do not tell me you believe that old story. The clones saw the faults within the Jedi, and chose to turn on them. They understood that the Empire was needed to bring order to the galaxy.”

“Story?” she asked, astonished. “How can you even try to convince me of that, when I saw—I saw the chips myself?” She stopped herself from mentioning any specifics. Whatever she was willing to risk herself, she wouldn’t risk Rex and the others any more than she had to. “I saw what the chips did. I was there, Anakin. The chips forced the clones to try to kill us. They had no choice, they didn’t want to, and the few who got themselves free of it afterwards hated themselves for it.”

She tried not to remember the brothers she’d had to talk down from suicide when she’d tracked them down, after. Or the times she’d failed.

“Lies,” Anakin insisted. “Rebel propaganda, spread by those too cowardly to join their Emperor. The only chips they had were the inhibitor chips to control Fett’s dangerous tendencies.”

“They weren’t inhibitor chips! They were control chips making them do whatever Palpatine said!”

“There were no control chips!” he insisted.

She opened her mouth to respond just as insistently, then hesitated. That hadn’t sounded or felt like a lie. Not a deliberate one, anyway. Besides, lies and manipulation had never been Anakin’s style, not as a Jedi and not from what she’d seen or the information she’d gathered about him as a Sith. Instead, she took a deep breath and asked, “Why do you keep trying to make me believe that?”

“Because it is true,” he said. “To say otherwise is simply foolish rumor.”

She had been paying close attention to the Force as he spoke this time, even closer than before, and now she was certain. “You actually believe that. How can you believe that? How can you not know?”

“I know all I need to.”

“No, I don’t think you do,” she said. “Anakin. Or whatever you want to call yourself. I was on Mandalore with our brothers, when Order 66 happened. Some of them removed their chips beforehand. Fives…I don’t know the details, but I guess Fives figured it out, and convinced some of them. The rest…” She shuddered. “It wasn’t a choice they made. They looked at me, and they didn’t even recognize me. Just called me ‘Jedi.’ And I didn’t recognize them anymore. I think that might have been the worst part, even more than my brothers shooting at me. I knew all of them—you know how, if you looked at them with the Force, they were all completely different. Especially the longer you knew them. But suddenly it was like everyone I was sensing was blanker than the newest shinies.”

“You are making this up.” He didn’t sound very certain of that, though.

“I’m not.” She didn’t quite dare to open herself fully to him, but she tried to project her honesty into the Force. “I wasn’t even a Jedi, and they should have known it. If they chose to turn against the Jedi, why count me as one, when they knew I’d left? Shouldn’t they have at least questioned that?”

He didn’t say anything, but she could feel his presence momentarily overwhelming the space around them. Could sense his confusion, could feel, for the first time, genuine hesitation.

“Every clone in that battalion who still had a chip in their head turned on me. And the ones who’d removed their chips—they helped me get away. They were still themselves, still felt like the same people I’d known. And none of them wanted to kill the Jedi.”

There were suddenly a lot of extra emotions swirling around in the Force from Anakin’s direction. She wasn’t sure how intentional it was that he was projecting, but she hoped it was a good sign.

“I’m telling the truth,” she said. “There must be records somewhere. You can check them.”

“Perhaps I will,” he said, and took a step towards her. She couldn’t tell whether it was meant to be threatening or not. “You should never have been a target.”

She felt her eyes widen. That was interesting. “Well, I was. What in all the hells did you think happened to me?”

There was a long pause, and then he said quietly, “You disappeared.”

“I faked my death. It was safer. I made it look like I was killed by our brothers.”

He stood still for a moment, peering intently down at her. Then he drew back, straightening up with as much dignity as he could muster given the hole in his mask and the fact that his respirator was making awkward wheezing noises. “I know what you’re trying to do. You are trying to trick me. You think you can get your old master back. That will never happen. Anakin Skywalker is dead.”

“I know it won’t happen.”

That got his attention enough that the hints of confusion she’d sensed grew stronger.

“I’m not trying to trick you. I’m telling the truth as well as I can figure it out. But you’re right. I do want the Anakin I knew back. Of course I do.” She gathered her courage and let herself remember him, let him see the sad smile that brought. “I loved you. You were somewhere between a brother and father to me. Maybe I got to a point where I didn’t need you anymore, but I still want you back. But I’m not stupid or naive. I know you’re never going to be the same as you were.”

“Then what is it you’re trying to achieve?” His obvious confusion now was even stronger than the sense of his anger.

“I don’t believe that Anakin Skywalker is dead. Nothing you’ve said or done has convinced me of that.” The opposite, in fact. “Maybe you won’t ever be a Jedi again, but you don’t have to be a Sith.”

“A Sith is all I am.”

She thought about his voice calling her name after she’d cut open his mask, about that moment when she’d stared at the glimpse of his face and thought she’d seen, fleetingly, someone who cared about her looking back. “It doesn’t have to be.”

“Yes. It does.”

Was there a hint of regret in his voice, or was she just imagining what she wanted to hear? Well, either way, she wasn’t going to give up.

“Why?” She spread her hands slightly. “After all, I left the Jedi. I walked away from everything I knew. I survived this long by following the Force. If I could do that, why can’t you leave the Sith?”

“You know nothing about the Sith!”

“No?” She counted on her fingers. “Palpatine. Dooku. Maul. Ventress. You. To be honest, I think I know more about Sith than anyone else alive who isn’t one and has never been one. Has being a Sith actually gotten you anything you want?”

“Why are you doing this?”

“Because…well, I said I loved you. I guess I still love you enough to believe there’s something of you worth saving.”

He glared at her for a moment longer. “I do not need saving.” He turned and resumed stalking down the remains of the corridor.

That, she reflected as she hurried after him, could have gone worse. It almost certainly could have gone better, but given that he hadn’t tried to kill her again, it could definitely have gone worse.

She caught up to him walking down the crumbling corridor—or at least, what had clearly once been a corridor. It was now more like a half-finished tunnel, with walls and ceiling partially standing and partially fallen in large chunks on the uneven ground. Anakin was not hard to find, despite the fact that it was darker than open space in here. Aside from his presence in the Force, which still shone cold and stormy, his respirator was rasping increasingly loudly and unsteadily.

She eyed him as she moved up to walk beside him. He gave no sign that he noticed either her or his own increasingly tortured breathing, although he couldn’t possibly have missed it.

The respirator gave a particularly unpleasant sounding croak, and he stumbled very slightly. One hand came halfway up, as if to adjust the offending equipment, before he determinedly carried on as before.

She decided to say something. “Is that thing going to last until we get out of here?”

Unsurprisingly, his response was a glare. He must have decided that wasn’t going to be enough to shut her up, though, because he said, “That is none of your concern.”

“If it stops working, you die, right? If you don’t say anything I’m going to assume the answer’s yes.” She gave him just enough time for it to be clear that he wasn’t in fact going to say anything. “Then all things considered, I think it is my concern. I’m not even sure where the way out of here is.”

Maybe he would be more inclined to respond to her if she showed some vulnerability. Besides which, it happened to be true.

He paused, clearly deliberately this time, and after a moment stretched out a hand. It would be typical, she thought, if he hadn’t actually considered which way to go from here. Of course, she hadn’t thought much about it either.

She was thinking about it now, and after only a slight hesitation, reached out to join him in searching. She didn’t let herself get swept along into his Force presence, but she did let the edges of her awareness mingle with his as she tried to sense the path out. And it wasn’t her imagination—he definitely didn’t feel completely, well, like a Sith. Or rather, not only like a Sith. Just like in everything he’d said and done, there was a hint of Anakin’s old familiar Force presence alongside the darkness. Buried by the darkness, but just enough for her to sense, now that she was actively opening herself to him.

There, she heard or felt him say, and followed the track of his mind around the twists and dead ends of the temple until they emerged together out onto the surface of Malachor.

She opened her eyes. They were still standing in the middle of the crumbling corridor, but now she knew which way to go to get out. They both did.

At some point, one of her hands had moved up to rest on his shoulder, much like they had done so many times before when she was his Padawan. She withdrew it slowly.

There was more than one way out. Or at least, there were a couple ways to potentially get out, and at least two ships she’d sensed that one or both of them could probably get working. Presumably one of them was Anakin’s and one belonged to an Inquisitor.

“Which one is your ship?” she asked, as neutrally as she could. She hadn’t been able to tell.

He turned slowly toward her. He had obviously been able to sense the same things she had, and probably more as well. She had no idea what he was thinking.

He held out his hands. She stared at them blankly for a moment, until he said, “Lightsabers.”

“Wait, seriously?” she asked. “Now you want my lightsabers? Really?”

“Lightsabers,” he repeated.

“You don’t have to take me prisoner to get me to go with you,” she said. “I already made my decision.”

He took a menacing step towards her, one hand reaching for his own lightsaber. She considered fighting him over this, just on principle—not because she didn’t want to go with him. It wasn’t that she was entirely thrilled about it, but she was going to see this through. She’d prepared for Malachor to be a one-way trip, for her at least. Had been preparing in some ways since she’d first started to suspect Darth Vader’s identity. Handing over her lightsabers without a fight, though, just seemed wrong.

In the end, her common sense won out. Fighting wouldn’t do any good, and might do the opposite of good. She sighed, unclipped the lightsabers, and handed them over. “Here. Enjoy. You’re still being stupid about this.”

He ignored her words in favor of taking the lightsabers and examining them closely, turning first one and then the other over in his hands. “These are not your old lightsabers.”

“No. Of course they’re not.” She crossed her arms, feeling surprisingly naked without the sabers. “I left my old ones on Mandalore, to mark my fake grave.”

He tilted his head at her, a very familiar gesture that looked very odd with his helmet. “You left your lightsabers behind? Deliberately?”

“Yes.” She nearly said something about how difficult it had been, how it had felt like leaving behind a piece of her soul, how at least half of that had been because it had been Anakin who gave the sabers back to her after she left the Order and she’d been afraid she’d never see him again. In the end she kept quiet. If he couldn’t get there on his own, there wouldn’t be any point to it.

At last he said, still running his hands over one of her lightsabers, “Your lightsaber is your life.”

She almost laughed at that, and couldn’t help thinking that whatever part of the Force was Obi-Wan’s spirit could rest a little easier knowing that Anakin, even as a Sith, remembered this one thing Obi-Wan had taught him. “In this case, leaving the lightsabers behind was my life. I figured I’d have a better chance of surviving if everyone thought I was dead, and I didn’t get on anyone’s bounty list.”

“So it seems.” He gestured briefly with the saber he held, a clear question in the movement.

“I made new ones, obviously. It took a little while. Over a year before I could even bring myself to think about it.”

He turned the saber over again, then held it out in a basic guard position and turned it on. He didn’t move, just studied the blade with what appeared to be intense concentration. He turned it off after a few moments. “They’re white.”

She bit back the immediate sarcastic response that jumped to mind and said nothing. If he wanted to know, he could ask an actual question.

“I’ve never heard of white blades before.” He apparently did want to know, and sounded remarkably miffed at not knowing already. “What did you do to manage it?”

“Honestly, I’m not entirely sure,” she admitted. “They used to be red. The crystals, anyway. I was kind of in a hurry when I put them together, and just did what seemed right.”

He glowered at her. She knew that look even through the mask.

“All right,” she sighed. “If this is the conversation you want to have right now, I suppose you’re in charge. When I started making them, I tried going to Ilum for crystals first. The Empire was there.”

She looked at him to see if she needed to explain that further. It seemed she was picking up her old ability to read him, even through the Sith presence and the armor, because she could tell he knew what that meant.

“So I looked elsewhere,” she continued. “When I reached out, these crystals called to me. They were in the lightsaber of one of your Inquisitors. He was trying to destroy some friends of mine, and almost succeeded. I stopped him. He wasn’t very good. I beat him without my lightsabers, and I didn’t even kill him deliberately. I cracked his lightsaber and it blew up in his face. So I took the crystals, and a few other parts I needed, and when I put everything together and turned them on, they were white.”

“You took an Inquisitor’s lightsaber crystals.”

“Yes.”

“And you changed them from red to white.”

“I’m not exactly sure if I changed them or if they changed themselves, actually.”

“Explain.”

“Well…” She hesitated, struggling to put it into words. “You obviously know the Sith technique of bleeding the crystal.” She glanced at the lightsaber at his side. “The Inquisitor had done that. Had chained the crystals to his will by pouring all his anger and hate into them. I…unchained them. I’m not sure how to explain it, really. I connected with the crystal, like they taught us to do as Initiates, and I could see where the Inquisitor had bent it to his will, and I released it. I wasn’t really thinking about wanting it to do anything in particular, or to be a Jedi crystal, or anything. There was a battle going on, and I wasn’t thinking about anything except how I was going to save my friends. I just told the crystals to be kyber crystals, and work with me instead of against me, and that’s what happened.” She gestured to the lightsaber he still held.

“Interesting.” He studied the lightsaber for a long minute, then tucked it away beneath his cloak with her other one. Despite everything, she had to suppress a flinch at seeing that.

He studied her next, with as much intensity as he’d studied her lightsaber. She stared right back at him. Finally he drew back his shoulders and said in what appeared to be the most businesslike tone he could muster, “We ought not to linger here. Come, this way.”

And with that his hand descended onto her shoulder, and she found herself being steered towards a dim archway and the continuation of the passage.

She bit her tongue on several possible responses that came to mind, and made herself go obediently where he steered her. There was no more point in fighting it than in fighting him taking her lightsabers.

She fought to settle her emotions as they walked on, not saying anything until she was sure she could do so calmly. Or at least, appearing calm. They marched together down the passage that had increasingly fewer piles of rubble in it, and looked more and more like a temple corridor than a ruin. At least, in this dim light it did, and she didn’t care to pause long enough to observe it closely. Assuming he would even let her pause.

Finally, as they reached a fork in the hall and he half-guided, half-shoved her in the direction he wanted, she decided the silence had gone on long enough. And she was in enough control of herself to speak.

“Why do you want me as your prisoner, anyway?” she asked. “You know I’m never willingly going to help the Sith or give you anything about the Rebellion, and you know I’ve been trained to resist whatever you do to me.”

He paused for a moment, then kept going. “I know.”

That actually sounded sincere. Which was interesting, and still left the question of why he was taking her prisoner. And supported the theory that he was definitely still Anakin Skywalker, master of making it up as he went along.

“So what do you want from me?”

Another slight pause. “You can lead me to Kenobi.”

“I…what?” She’d been about to repeat that she wasn’t about to give him anything, until the rest of his words registered. Was he mocking her, or was he actually, truly insane? “What in all the hells are you talking about?”

“Do not pretend you don’t understand,” he said. “You know where Kenobi is.”

“Kenobi,” she repeated. “Obi-Wan?”

He didn’t deny it.

“Obi-Wan Kenobi, who your Emperor killed?” she demanded.

“Do not play ignorant,” he said. “It doesn’t suit you.”

“Fine, maybe Palpatine didn’t kill him himself,” she said. “He used the clones to do the actual killing, but it was still entirely his fault.”

“No one killed Obi-Wan,” he said, and the pulse of anger was evident even in his low voice. “He’s not dead.”

She whirled and grabbed hold of him. It wasn’t something she thought about; she just acted. Her fingers dug into his arms, hard metal beneath her right hand and what she thought might be an actual human arm—part of one, anyway—beneath her left. “If you’re lying or trying to trick me in any way, Anakin, I will take my lightsabers back and slice the other half of that mask off.”

He stayed absolutely still, not even trying to move her hands off his arms. His one visible eye stared hard into hers, and she thought his other eye was doing the same. The only sound while he studied her was his unsteady mechanical breathing.

“You didn’t know,” he said, the words falling somewhere between a question and a statement as he reached out to her. She could feel his mind, feel him sensing the shock and confusion she hadn’t even thought to hide. “You truly didn’t know? He still lives.”

The anger was still there behind his voice, but she could also sense the honesty. For the briefest of moments, she was lying on the ground, the world on fire and every bit of her body screaming in pain, Obi-Wan’s face hovering over her twisted in horror and grief.

I loved you. The words echoed in her mind in Obi-Wan’s accent, a half-glimpsed vision of a memory that she didn’t try to make sense of. She stumbled away from Anakin, letting herself fall back against the wall and slide down to the ground. The ruined temple corridor was blurry through her tears.

“I thought he was dead,” she whispered. “I thought you were dead. I searched, in the Force. I never…how can he still be alive?”

She knew he was telling the truth. She had felt it. She just couldn’t match it up with all the years of grief, of fear, of loneliness. For the first time since she’d arrived on Malachor, she felt her guard fall down completely around her and wasn’t even able to care about it. She hunched over, shaking with sobs.

She was aware, after a few minutes, of Anakin moving over and hesitantly sitting down beside her. He didn’t say anything, and neither did she, struggling to get her tears under control. It almost felt, as they were sitting there, like they had carved out a little bubble of space in the darkness of Malachor, the same way they had carved their passage through the rubble earlier.

That sense of a lighter, maybe even warmer space was perhaps what alerted her to the familiar chill increasing along the edges of her shields. The Sith ghosts. Her head shot up, long years of practice telling her to put aside her tears and emotions until the danger had passed.

Anakin had clearly sensed the ghosts as well. He was halfway to his feet, his hand reaching for his lightsaber. She reached out to grab his arm, deliberately this time.

“Wait,” she said.

Somewhat to her surprise, he did, although the look he gave her made it clear she’d better have a good reason.

“Maybe you’re up for another lightsaber fight, but I’m not,” she said. She was pretty sure he wasn’t, either. She started weaving her remaining energy into her shields, covering up her presence the way she’d done so many times before, this time leaving just enough of an opening to let him see what she was doing. “Better to hide.”

“I do not hide.” She didn’t have to actually see his face to imagine the sneer on it.

“I do.”

“Do you truly believe you can hide from Sith?”

“I’ve spent the past fifteen years hiding. I’m pretty good at it.”

She more than half expected him to get up and go after the ghosts with his lightsaber anyway, but then she felt his shields tentatively brush against hers. She didn’t think she’d been all that convincing, so the earlier fight must have taken even more out of him than she’d thought.

Forget he’s a Sith, she told herself. If they were both going to commit to hiding, she couldn’t let herself have the reflexive reaction of disgust that provoked. She just focused on building shields that would be as hard as possible to detect even if you were actively looking for them, and on weaving Anakin into them. And just as when they’d been digging their way out of the rocks, it was surprisingly easy to do. His presence didn’t feel quite as painfully icy as before. Or maybe she was just used to him. She’d never have mistaken it for back in the days when they were Jedi and Padawan, but it was not difficult to huddle next to him, tie her shields to his, and mentally project an image of no one here, nothing but cave wall, keep searching.

They sat there for what felt like a long time, but was probably only a few minutes. She felt the ghosts skim across her shields several more times, but there was no sense of them noticing her, or of them coming closer. Eventually the colder, darker patches in the darkness of the rest of the temple seemed to retreat.

She only breathed again when she could no longer sense those deeper patches of darkness. It seemed their shields had held. She wouldn’t want to bet on managing it a second time, though.

She became increasingly aware that, while Anakin’s Force presence no longer felt quite so abrasively Sith, the sound of his breathing was grating louder and harsher against her montrals. It was getting more and more uneven, too, with mechanical hitches and stutters seemingly every other breath.

“I don’t think that respirator is going to last until we get to your ship,” she said, in as neutral a tone as she could.

His presence beside her went chilly again, but not to the same intensity as earlier. “It will do,” he said, completely unconvincingly, and followed it with a fairly undignified wheeze.

“I could…take a look at it, maybe,” she suggested tentatively. “I might be able to do something.”

“That will not be necessary.” He struggled to his feet—and it did look like a struggle, his hands pushing against the wall and the respirator actually cutting out for a couple seconds partway through—and then stood there glowering at her.

She sighed and stood up. “All right.”

He paused for the briefest of moments, as if surprised she was letting it go without a fight, then motioned her to continue down the corridor with him.

They didn’t get far. Only a few steps later, the respirator made a harsh grinding noise and cut off into eerie silence for a moment. He stumbled, only catching himself by leaning on the wall. His breathing started up again, but drawn-out and thin-sounding, as if every bit of it was a struggle.

“I’m pretty good with machines,” she said, when he remained motionless for just a little too long. “Maybe not as good as you, and I don’t know if I can fix it, but you definitely can’t right now or you would have done it already.”

He attempted to straighten up and only succeeded in sliding further down to the ground. “You’re a Rebel,” he said, so faintly she could barely hear him. It shouldn’t have made sense, but it did.

“I don’t want you dead,” she said, kneeling in front of him. “Haven’t you been paying any attention at all? And even if I did, I wouldn’t kill you like this. I’d go for my lightsabers again. You must know me well enough to believe that.”

One of his hands reached out to grasp hers painfully. He didn’t look at her, his head bent and his breaths still agonizingly labored and haphazard, but she could feel his Force presence skittering over the edge of hers, studying her that way.

“You can either let me try to fix it, and maybe we both survive this,” she said. “Or you don’t let me try, and you definitely die when it fails completely. Your choice. But I give you my word that I will honestly do my best to fix it if I can.”

His hand dropped back into his lap. His answer, when it came, sounded like it was forced out through a long tunnel. “Very well.”

“Okay.” She took a deep breath, set aside all concerns about the greater implications of what she was about to do, and rearranged herself to have a better angle on the hole in his helmet.

Something was pressed into her hand. She glanced at it, and realized it was a small hand-held light. Presumably he’d had it stashed somewhere about his person. She took it silently, turned it on, and peered into the visible tangle of wires that was keeping him alive. Stretching out her senses, she followed the wires’ path in the Force as well as with her eyes, trying to see how they were connected and where the damage was.

She frowned a little as she mentally traced some of the circuitry of the armor’s overall structure, but made herself dismiss that. She didn’t need to do an in-depth study on how it all fit together. She just needed what she could see and sense right here, through the gap she had cut.

“This is the problem,” she said out loud. “My lightsaber burned out a couple wires when I hit you. Not enough to break the whole respirator, but then with the temple collapsing and everything else, the connections are unraveling. I can do a temporary fix if…”

He pushed something else into her hand. Wires, of more or less the same kind as the ones she was looking at. They’d work, anyway.

“Thanks.” She began carefully maneuvering what was left of the wiring into place, using the Force more than her fingers for the delicate work. “All right. I’m going to have to completely cut out some of what’s left. I’ll try to make it quick, but it’s going to have to go off for a minute. That okay?”

Out of the corner of her eye, she could see his fists clench on the ground. “Do it.”

“Okay.” Ahsoka made sure she had all the parts lined up. “On two. One. Two.”

He took as much of a breath as he still could, and she yanked the burned-out wires. She kept her mind as blank as possible, knowing she couldn’t afford distractions. Pull out the wires. Twist the new ones into place. Don’t think about the fact that she was literally holding Darth Vader’s life in her hands.

She sat back. A very long moment later, there was a faint mechanical click, and then the sound of him taking a breath. Then another. Another. It still didn’t sound exactly great, but it was at least functional.

He pulled himself to his feet, keeping his eyes on her all the time. Without a word, she held out the useless scraps of wire. He took them, slipped them into a pocket somewhere, and looked like he was considering saying something to her.

In the end, all he said was, “We should continue.”

“I suppose we should,” she muttered, mostly to herself.

By the time they halted in front of yet another barrier of rubble completely blocking their path, even Ahsoka could tell without effort they were almost out of the temple. She could sense the more open air outside, although on her own she still couldn’t sense much more than that except darkness and the few patches of wrongness that were the Sith ghosts, hovering at the edge of her consciousness. She was starting to suspect that even Anakin couldn’t sense a whole lot more than that, whatever he claimed.

Anakin was still breathing, which was something. He had also remained silent since she’d fixed his respirator, in a way that she was strongly tempted to call sulking.

All right, she thought, staring at the rocks. One more push.

She was exhausted enough that she could only move a few boulders at a time, and they floated through the air agonizingly slowly. She noted, when Anakin joined in, that he wasn’t doing much better.

“Anakin,” she said quietly as they worked, not looking away from the blocked doorframe that would be their way out. “I wasn’t leaving you, when I left the Jedi. You should know that already. But I won’t forgive myself if I don’t actually say it, now that I can. You were the only one in the Order I still trusted at that point.”

A few boulders crunched to the ground behind them. A few more rose up in the air.

“You still left,” he said, not sounding remotely like Palpatine’s most terrifying lieutenant.

“It wasn’t you I was leaving,” she said. “It’s just that you alone weren’t enough to make me stay.”

There was silence for another moment, and when he spoke again he just sounded confused. “And yet you will still defend the Jedi.”

“Of course I will.” She almost laughed, but it was probably more from exhaustion than anything else. She supposed it had taken her a long time to come to terms with what she thought of the Jedi. And maybe she hadn’t fully done it yet. “I told you, they made mistakes, but at heart they—we—were trying to protect people. How can I hate them for that?”

“The fools on the Council were too weak to even locate the Sith right in front of their faces,” he said, but it was a half-hearted taunt at best. Maybe he, too, was too tired to do any better.

“Maybe not him specifically.” She tugged with the Force until a boulder wedged at the top of the pile came free. It left a small hole through which she could actually see to the open air outside. “But they knew there was Sith influence in the Senate, or at least they suspected. We both heard them talking about it. At the very least they knew the Senate was corrupt.”

“As were the Jedi.”

“No.” She shook her head. “No, that’s the problem. The Council was wrong to get involved in the war. It went against everything we believed in, and they knew it. But the Jedi spent a lot of time making sure we worked within the law, not outside it, and that’s what Senate legally asked us to do.”

“We?”

“What?”

“You keep saying we. Are you a Jedi, or are you not?”

She still didn’t have a good answer to that even after all these years. She sighed. “I am not. But I could have been. I don’t disagree with the Jedi philosophy.”

He paused for a long time. She thought he was processing that. “Do you regret leaving?”

“No.” She stared at the remaining rocks left to be cleared. The two of them were still mostly cut off from the outside world, the darkness of the Sith temple pressing in all around. She let herself say aloud what she hadn’t since she’d left the Order. “But I would have liked to be a Jedi.”

The gap in the rock barrier opened up a bit more.

“More than once, I thought I should leave after you,” he said.

She nearly fell over in surprise. Not only was he admitting that maybe she had been right, but also implicitly that he definitely was Anakin Skywalker? She bit her tongue on any hasty replies, and made sure her response was carefully thought out. “You always wanted to protect people. I know that. I think you were just as wrong as the rest of the Jedi in the end, but in a different way. But that’s why I can’t ever completely hate you.”

“You believe you know me so well?” It came out a lot more vulnerable sounding than he probably intended.

“Yes. I do. And I’ve had a lot of time to think about why the Jedi acted as they did. It wasn’t just trying to go along with the Senate, I think. I think they saw the darkness, and the corruption, and didn’t want to risk that in charge of the army. Protecting people, standing in the way of darkness whenever possible—that’s the Jedi way, isn’t it?”

“Perhaps it should have been.” He waved his hand, and the remaining rocks in the doorway flew aside. Neither of them made a move to go through.

“It was. They just got a lot of the details wrong.”

He didn’t reply, but after a moment the emotions coming from his direction abruptly cut off. He turned to the cleared doorway with a rudimentary gesture. “Come.”

“Anakin. Wait.” She reached out and grasped his arm.

Somewhat surprisingly, he turned back and made no move to shake her off.

“What do you want Palpatine to do with me?” she asked.

“We shall see,” he said, and she knew that voice. That was the voice he used when he was just going along with things as they happened until he could come up with a crazy spur-of-the-moment plan.

She looked at him, and he looked back. In the dim light coming through the doorway, his one visible eye was a sickly greenish color. Cracks were spreading from the hole she’d put in his helmet, and several chunks of his armor were damaged or missing.

“All right,” she said finally.

One of his hands strayed toward the pocket where he had stashed her lightsabers, and for a heartbeat she thought he was actually going to hand them back to her. He let his hand fall, though. Wordlessly, they walked together through the door and onto the cold ground of Malachor, winding their way around the remains of the temple entryway. They couldn’t see the ship from here, but she knew it wasn’t far ahead.

She slowed as they reached the place where she’d sensed his ship was. It would be just around the next bend, she knew. But there was something else…something cold, not quite like the Sith ghosts, but something in the Force warning her about what was ahead. Anakin’s steps slowed as well, either because he was matching her or because he’d sensed it too.

They emerged around the last outcropping of rock, and Vader’s ship loomed up large in front of them. Anakin’s hand dropped heavily to her shoulder, and he gripped it hard.

Standing there in front of the ship was Palpatine, waiting for them.

Chapter Text

Darth Vader stared out across his balcony at the lava fields of Mustafar through his newly-made helmet viewscreen. The world looked as it should again, solid and unbroken through a layer of armor.

It had been nearly the first thing Darth Sidious had said to him when they arrived back from Malachor, after saying that he would secure their Jedi prisoner. Ahsoka.

“She’s not a Jedi,” Vader had said, without thinking about it, through his broken vocoder.

Sidious had waved his hand, like it didn’t matter, and truly it didn’t really. Ahsoka Tano had been trained as a Jedi; she could do everything a Jedi could and possibly more. She’d said herself she could have been a Jedi. But she wasn’t.

“Go get your armor fixed,” Sidious had told him then. “We cannot have you walking around like that.”

He had been right, of course. Vader had been a mess when they returned from Malachor, and had required extensive repairs to three of his limbs as well as replacement pieces for his helmet and most of the rest of his armor. Which had now been done. It was a relief to no longer have to try to fit together the jagged halves of vision from one cracked lens and an unshielded hole where the other should be.

But now everything was fixed, and it was only right that he go and see what was happening with Ahsoka. With the prisoner. After all, he had been the one who had taken her prisoner in the first place.

“Why do you want me as your prisoner, anyway?” she had asked.

He did not need Darth Sidious’ permission to visit the interrogation facility. It was his interrogation facility anyway, on his planet. He’d built it himself to deal with the most difficult of the captured Jedi, and just because Sidious had been visiting more and more frequently, that didn’t make it any less his.  

He didn’t need permission, so he simply went. He did not even need to ask where the Emperor would have put Tano. Sidious was still on this planet, so Vader made his way straight to the highest-security, most fully equipped interrogation chamber. Sure enough, she was there, strapped to the table.

Sidious had his hands outstretched, and Tano’s face was tight with pain and concentration. Vader knew this technique. Sidious was using blasts of dark side power to hammer at her mind, not trying to break through her shields yet but wearing her down and pushing her far enough off balance that she’d struggle to use the Force to retaliate. It was a good tactic for interrogating Force-sensitive prisoners. Vader had used it himself.

“Lord Vader,” Sidious said, lowering his hands, as Vader entered. “Good. You ought to be here for this.”

Ahsoka kept her eyes closed, and Vader could see that she was fighting to even out her breathing. She was reeling with the power Sidious had used to batter her mind, unlikely to be able to try any moves of her own without them sensing it, but still coherent enough to answer questions. Later they would drug her to delirium or near-unconsciousness to be sure she couldn’t escape.

Vader focused his attention on Sidious, preparing to start the interrogation proper.

“Ahsoka Tano,” Sidious said. “I had long suspected that the Rebellion had Jedi leadership.”

Tano slowly opened her eyes. Vader half expected her to deny the title of Jedi, or to start an argument about Rebels and Sith, until he remembered that they were no longer on Malachor. She said nothing, and did not look away from Sidious.

“You eluded us for quite some time,” Sidious continued. “Even managed to give the impression you were dead, at one point. Yet here you are. Darth Vader has caught you at last.” His voice caressed Vader’s name, as if gloating or bragging of what he had achieved.

Tano turned her head slightly and studied Vader. It seemed, for a moment, as if she was looking straight through his newly repaired helmet and armor.

“I suppose he did,” she said finally, a slight hint of roughness in her voice the only indication of what Sidious had inflicted so far. If she was afraid, she gave no sign of it as she looked back at Sidious.

I won’t leave you. Not this time. Vader had to stop himself from shifting uncomfortably as he remembered her words, remembered how she’d handed over her lightsabers with barely more than an exasperated eyeroll, how she hadn’t once tried to take them back even when she had the opportunity. Had he caught her? With circumstances as they had been, he couldn’t say that if she’d tried, she couldn’t have gotten away. Well, he could, but it would be a lie.

“And now you’re mine,” Sidious said, smug satisfaction dripping from his voice.

“Do what you want with me,” Ahsoka said. “I’ll never be yours.”

Sidious’ face changed from pleased to furious, and Vader knew what was coming an instant before it happened. Lightning shot from Sidious’ fingers, arcing across the space between him and Ahsoka.

Ahsoka screamed.

It was over in moments. Vader, whose mind had automatically shifted its focus to the pain in his improperly-healed limbs, the reddish interior of the viewscreen separating him from the world, took a second to re-orient himself to his immediate surroundings. Tano briefly gasped for air, but recovered quickly. Sidious was just barely getting started.

Tano, calm once more, asked, “What exactly do you think you’re going to get from me?”

“No need to play the fool with me, former Padawan Tano,” Sidious said silkily. He stepped forward and ran one finger down the edge of her cheek, tilting her head towards him.

Her eyes flickered down to his finger. Vader suspected that she was calculating whether or not she could bite him. It’s what teenage Ahsoka would have done, anyway.

Sidious withdrew his finger and regarded her with icy eyes. “You will tell me all you know of the Rebels’ locations, identities, and plans. You will tell me where to find Obi-Wan Kenobi. And then…” A smile spread across his face. “Then, we shall see.”

“I’ll die before I tell you anything about the Rebels,” she said. “You ought to know enough about Jedi training to know that much. And I can’t tell you anything about Obi-Wan. I didn’t even know he was alive until Darth Vader told me.”

Darth Vader, he thought. She had been calling him Anakin all the time they were on Malachor. He wondered what it meant.

“Is that so,” Sidious said to her, and Vader could tell he didn’t believe her. “You may believe the Jedi fools taught you enough to resist me, but you have not yet felt the full force of my…hospitality.”

He brushed his finger along her cheek again. This time she shuddered, and Vader knew that Sidious had brushed her mind with his.

“But there is no need to rush,” Sidious said. “And after all, I am a busy man. We shall give you time to…consider your situation.” He gave her one last lingering look, and then swept out of the chamber.

Vader followed him. Outside the chamber, he said, “My lord. She is telling the truth about Kenobi. She did not know he is alive.”

Sidious halted and eyed him. “Is that so?”

“It is, my lord.”

“Interesting.” Sidious paused for a moment. “She has convinced you, has she?”

“My lord?”

“Well, no matter. She will reveal all, in time.”

“What do you intend to do with her?”

What do you want Palpatine to do with me? she had asked. He hadn’t intended to echo her question.

Sidious examined him for a moment, one finger tapping against his lips. After what seemed like a rather long time, he smiled. The same smile he had given Ahsoka. “She was once the apprentice of Anakin Skywalker, was she not? And you, my apprentice, have become quite the expert in dealing with former Jedi who have, shall we say, seen the light. Figuratively speaking, of course. Perhaps it is time you had an apprentice of your own.”

I will not become a Sith. She had been very definite about that. But she truly could become great, if she would use the dark side. She had been great, even as a Padawan.

“An apprentice?” he asked, trying to imagine it. Ahsoka hardly needed more training in using the Force. In the dark side, though…

“With her to assist us, just think how much faster we could accomplish our mission,” Sidious said.

Something was nagging at him about that. Something Ahsoka had said back on Malachor. He ignored it. “It would be fitting, as she and her Rebels have severely diminished our Inquisitorial force.”

“Indeed.” Sidious seemed pleased at that. “But that is in the future. For now, let us return her to her cell for a time. Such a proposition may seem more inviting, given the proper chance to think it over.”

He gestured for some stormtroopers, and instructed them on transporting the prisoner before leaving them to it. Vader, feeling uncertain and unsettled and not liking it one bit, followed them.

The stormtroopers put her in a well-fortified, long-term prison cell. Then, apparently figuring Vader had the situation well in hand, they left.

Vader found himself alone in the cell with Ahsoka. The stormtroopers had dumped her in a heap on the floor. She dragged herself to a more upright position, winced, and edged herself over to lean against the wall.

Vader knew the feeling. He’d felt both Sidious’ mind and his Force lightning before. He would have been surprised if Ahsoka hadn’t been in this condition, especially after their time on Malachor. He’d spent time getting himself repaired, but she had been immediately turned over to Sidious.

He probably ought to say something to her. It seemed like he’d had so much he’d wanted to say, so much righteous indignation at her refusal to see how the Jedi were evil, so much he couldn’t get out around the broken vocoder. The vocoder was fixed now, but the words seemed to be gone.

She sat on the cell floor, looking up at him for some time. In the end she was the one who spoke first. “You got it repaired. The armor.”

“Replaced,” he said automatically. “You damaged the previous armor beyond repair.”

“Not all me,” she pointed out. She looked him up and down. “You didn’t actually fix it, though, did you?”

Vader was no longer in the habit of making facial expressions, at least not in any expectation that they would be seen, but he was an expert at projecting his feelings so even non-Force-sensitives often picked up on them. He broadcast his disapproval before he remembered that Ahsoka was still unlikely to be in any condition to reliably sense much of anything.

“It serves its purpose,” he said instead.

She shook her head. “I got a look at a little of your life support, remember? I didn’t see it all, and I’m not a doctor or an engineer. But I’m pretty sure I could design something better without even trying too hard. You could definitely design something better. So why haven’t you?”

For a moment, sketched and half-finished designs flashed through his mind. She was right, of course. At least technically speaking. He’d gotten as far as blueprints, once.

Not that she could ever understand why he kept the armor as it was.

“Is Palpatine keeping you this way?” she asked. “Or are you doing it to yourself?”

He scowled beneath the mask. She was smart; she’d guess at the expression. “My armor is none of your concern. My master wishes you to aid us in our efforts to preserve the peace of the galaxy, and aid us you shall.”

“Oh, Anakin.” She sounded so sad. She had no right to sound that way, not when she was the one locked up in a cell. “When did you become Palpatine’s slave?”

He took a step forward, one hand raised without conscious thought having any say in the matter. He froze, though, before he could…he wasn’t sure what he had been about to do. “You know nothing of what you speak.”

“I know that him being your master is a major downgrade from your last teacher.”

He turned to leave. Obi-Wan had nothing to do with this, and she had no right to bring him up.

“Anakin.”

Without really meaning to, he paused at the sound of her voice just before he left.

“I don’t want to die,” she said. “But I will before I help you hunt down any other Force-sensitives.”

“You will not be offered that choice,” he said honestly, and hurried to get out of there.

He wasn’t quite fast enough, though, to miss hearing her murmur, “There’s always a choice.”

He sent the droid in to administer the sedative with perhaps more emphasis than truly necessary.

There hadn’t been the opportunity to interrogate and turn a captured Jedi for a long time, which was perhaps why, when they returned the next day, Sidious was clearly taking so much pleasure in it. Not to mention a personal interest. There weren’t any signs that he was planning to turn over any significant part of this to Vader, either, even though this was supposed to be Vader’s job. And Ahsoka had been his…

Well, that was not important. The important thing was that they had her here now, Sidious having dragged her back to the interrogation chamber. And no matter who was supposed to be doing this job, Sidious had made it clear that he desired Vader’s presence here. That was enough.

Sidious let the stormtroopers bind Ahsoka to the interrogation table, and then dismissed them with a flick of his fingers. He leaned over Ahsoka, and Vader could tell that he was smiling.

“Are you enjoying our hospitality, Miss Tano?” he asked.

Ahsoka glared up at him.

“It doesn’t have to be this way, you know,” Sidious said. “You have the means to become very valuable to me, with no pain to yourself. Should you choose it.”

She tilted her head slightly, about as far as she could move, and looked past Sidious to Vader. “I already gave my answer to him.”

Sidious sighed. “Then I’m afraid you leave me no choice.”

“Get on with it, then.” She sounded fearless, defiant. She even managed to look that way, despite having been nearly buried by the temple on Malachor and then shut up in a cell.

Vader could see the way she was bracing herself in anticipation of pain, though. The set of her shoulders. The way she bit down on one side of her lower lip. Her body language had mostly stayed the same, even after all these years.

“Oh, I will,” Sidious said. “You think you can withstand pain? It will not be the physical pain that breaks you, although there will be that. Oh yes, there will. You’ve been too much of a disruption to my plans for there not to be pain. I’d be disappointed, in truth, if that was all it took to secure your cooperation.”

He stepped closer to her.

“I will flay your mind,” he continued. “You will feel the full power of the strongest Sith lord in the galaxy, and you will understand how weak you are. How impotent. There is nowhere for you to run, Ahsoka Tano, nowhere you can escape my control, and soon you will understand that.”

“Strongest?” Ahsoka asked. “Of how many?”

“What?” Sidious asked, and Vader was impressed. Not many people could make Sidious sound even slightly off guard.

“You claim to be the strongest Sith in the galaxy, but that only means strongest of two, right?” She glanced from Sidious to Vader and back. “Even if Maul survived again, I don’t think he counts as a Sith anymore.”

Sidious scowled, and a moment later the room was filled with crackling blue lightning and Ahsoka’s screams.

Vader’s hands clenched reflexively at his sides. He focused on telling himself not to move at all.

Sidious had called her weak. Perhaps it was only a tactic to convince her to come to their side more quickly. Surely he knew that Ahsoka had never in her life been weak? Uncertain, sometimes. Betrayed by those who owed her better. Misguided, especially in her refusal to use the dark side. They ought to be demonstrating for her how she could achieve true power, if she would only reach out and take it.

Sidious understood these things better than Vader, though. Perhaps that was what he was doing, and Vader simply could not see the full shape of his plan yet. Often that was the case. He ought to wait and see, and let Sidious act as he knew best.

He didn’t like it, though. Of course he didn’t like it. Ahsoka was his…prisoner, she was his prisoner, he’d captured her (even if she hadn’t tried to fight back). And he was in charge of finding and turning, or killing, the remnants of the Jedi. This should be his job. Obviously he was upset, watching Sidious do it. It had nothing to do with any weakness on Vader’s part.

Except, as he watched Sidious again throw his lightning at Ahsoka, watched Ahsoka’s face twist in pain, he couldn’t help thinking that he wasn’t entirely sure he could do what Sidious was doing to Ahsoka. She had saved his life. It was only right that he respected that much.

And she…

Well, it was no use thinking about that.

He lingered in her cell after Sidious was through for the day, after the stormtroopers had dropped Ahsoka in a heap on the ground and left. He had to admit, if he was admitting things to himself, that he still wasn’t entirely sure of Sidious’ strategy. All he seemed to be doing now was potentially damaging her, which would of course be less than ideal once she was working with them.

He reminded himself that he himself had caused no small amount of pain and injury to the Inquisitors, in order to drum the proper lessons into their heads. But cutting off a few of their limbs while training didn’t truly count as damage, not when it was all for the purpose of teaching them to be stronger. That was for a good cause, and so was this. Although surely Ahsoka was skilled enough not to need the sort of lessons his initial bumbling Inquisitors had? Really, what lesson was Sidious trying to teach?

“Anakin,” she said weakly, looking up at him from the floor.

He was relieved to be pulled from his thoughts, which were not helpful. Although he probably shouldn’t respond to her. He wasn’t Anakin anymore.

Instead of turning and walking out of the cell, though, he found himself crouching down. It was probably fortunate no stormtroopers were here to observe him.

He wasn’t sure what he was going to say until the words came out of his mouth. “You never tried to escape. Why not?”

She started to say something. Coughed. Took a deep breath, and tried again. “You know the answer to that. I told you.”

“You are delusional.”

“Am I?” She was still shaking from the pain, he noticed. She wrapped her arms around herself. He clenched his fists. “Maybe. But I don’t regret it.”

“Let go of this Rebellion,” he said, instead of thinking too hard about her words. “Join with us now. There is no need for you to suffer such pain.”

“I have no regrets, but there are some lines I won’t cross,” she said. “That’s one of them. I won’t hunt down and hurt others. Not for your sake, and certainly not for your Empire’s.”

“Do not put yourself in a position where we may be forced to kill you.”

“I’ve told you where I stand.” She was dirty, still shaking, and exhaustion weakened her voice, but she tilted her chin up defiantly. He knew that look. He knew it very well. “If you truly don’t want me to die, Anakin, you’re welcome to decide not to kill me.”

He shook his head, as if that could shake off her words. “You should give up this fantasy. It has been a long time since I was Anakin Skywalker.”

Of all things, her face actually appeared to light up triumphantly. What in all hells did she have to be triumphant about? Perhaps he was mistaking the expression.

“Anakin,” she insisted. “You’ve never been anyone else.”

He stood abruptly. “I am done here.”

“Wait,” she said. She didn’t seem to be able to raise her voice enough to actually call out to him, but then the cell wasn’t that big. He had no trouble hearing her. Why he actually stopped and waited, though, he could not have said.

He turned, and saw that she was struggling to her feet. She had to use the wall for support, and even when she was more or less upright she swayed and reached out one hand to steady herself against the wall, but she made it. There was absolutely no reason he should be proud of that, except as a sign that she would be a strong asset.

“I know who you are, Anakin,” she said. Her voice had dropped almost to a whisper, either because she couldn’t speak any louder at the moment or because she was afraid of being overheard, he wasn’t sure. “And I know the things you’ve done. I’ve been part of the Rebellion since nearly the beginning. I’ve spent most of the last year researching you specifically. I know who you are, and I know what you’ve become, and I’m not pretending otherwise. But I haven’t given up on you. I’m not going to.”

He didn’t, couldn’t, say anything to that. Instead he whirled around and stalked out of the cell, closing the door hurriedly behind him, though not quite fast enough to hide one last glimpse of her watching him go.

He went back to his castle. There was nothing more to be done today—Sidious intended to take his time with her, as it would take long, drawn-out sessions to bring her to the dark side. And clearly he himself was not going to accomplish anything more by talking to her.

There was something still bothering him, though. Something that had tried to catch his attention when Sidious explained how he would turn Ahsoka, something he remembered she had said on Malachor.

Not that he should be taking anything she had said into serious consideration. She had made her agenda very clear, and it was definitely not one that Vader wanted to encourage. It was absolutely out of the question. Whatever it was he was trying to remember, surely it didn’t bear thinking about.

His mind occupied with these thoughts, he didn’t realize until too late that he had walked right through the heart of his castle to the small chamber housing his auxiliary backup power station. He growled to himself, mouthed several Huttese curses, and glared at the computer terminal.

No one ever came this deep into his castle except Vader himself, and that not unless he could help it. He didn’t want to be here. There was no point to him being here. He should turn around and walk away back to his meditation tank. That was where he’d been intending to go.

But why shouldn’t he be in here? It was his castle, after all, and nothing in it had power over him. He would prove that once and for all.

He stalked across the floor to the computer terminal, then veered around and bent down over the access panel built into the base of the terminal. A brush of the Force sent the screws holding it in place clattering to the floor, and he shoved the panel aside.

There was just enough room inside for a mechanic to peer inside, if they were lying on the floor, and to reach one arm up inside. Any in-depth maintenance would generally be done from the larger access panel on the other side of the terminal.

Vader did not lie down on the floor, nor did he try to wedge his arm inside the cramped space. Instead, he simply held out his hand inside the access space and reached with his mind, using the Force to find the small object wedged deep inside the computer and call it to him. It took a moment—it was (deliberately) jammed deep in the innards of the computer, deep enough that reaching it would take someone with either exceptionally unusual anatomy or access to the Force. And they would have to know it was there, to reach out in the first place.

But Vader knew exactly where it was, and it took only a few moments of probing before the object dropped lightly into his hand. Against his better judgment, he clenched his fist around it, pulled his hand out, and slowly opened his fingers to look at what he held.

A string of silka beads, sharply cut off at one end and slightly ragged at the other. They had been almost as familiar to him as his own lightsaber once. He’d given her some of these beads, had been there when others had been presented to her by Yoda. They marked a Jedi Padawan, each link in the string another lesson she’d learned and painstakingly mastered back when she was a teenager and he had been Anakin Skywalker.

He shouldn’t have these, of course. He should have thrown them into the incinerator long ago back with the other Jedi paraphernalia that wasn’t being put to better use by the Inquisitors. He’d told himself that it didn’t matter, that burned to ash or shoved into the depths of a computer no one ever used, they had vanished just as effectively.

Except this way, he could fall prey to the temptation to take them out and hold them in his hands. To turn the beads over and over again, running the tip of one gloved, mechanical finger over the cut-off end of the beads. He had, once or twice long ago, envisioned how he would be the one to cut these Padawan beads off when she was knighted, one day far in the future. It was his place, as her Jedi master.

 What did you think happened to me? Ahsoka had asked. In truth, he hadn’t thought about it much. There had been no reason to think about it much. Except to assume she was dead. Because how could she not be? But they had never heard for certain about her fate. At least, Vader hadn’t heard.

He touched the cut end again, and wound the string around and around his finger. They had yanked this off her, the Jedi Council who’d thought she would commit murder, who had been willing to turn her over to the corrupt Senate without a second thought. The Senate, which would have sentenced her to death.

Just like she claimed the clones had.

But of course she’d survived. Of course she had. She was strong, and brave, and smart, and she’d left them. She shouldn’t have been a target of the hunt for Jedi. But she’d said the clones fired on her on Mandalore, and she wasn’t lying. He would have been able to sense it.

She’d also said she faked her death and left her lightsabers at the mock grave, and shouldn’t he have heard about that too? The battalion that had been with her on Mandalore had reported back to Sidious, and  he knew Imperial agents had been there since the end of the war. Ahsoka had left her fake grave to be found, and she was too smart to put it where it wouldn’t be. Vader should have heard about it.

Instead, she had simply vanished, and turned up years later working for the Rebellion. It didn’t make sense. Nothing about it made sense. She had seen the Order’s treachery; she should have been given the chance to serve the Empire. It would be so much harder to convince her to join them now.

I have no intention of being your Asajj Ventress. That was what she had said. What he’d been trying to remember. She’d refused to use the dark side, and then she’d said that.

Ventress. Dooku’s apprentice, except Dooku had betrayed her. Anakin could only assume Ahsoka had meant that she thought he would do the same to her. She was wrong, of course. Why would he betray her, if she were truly his apprentice? Vader was no Dooku.

Except, obviously, for the fact that Dooku had also been Sidious’ apprentice.

But Dooku was long since dead, and Vader was here. Holding her beads that should have been destroyed long ago, and asking himself the same question she had asked him: Why didn’t he know what had happened to her?

He pulled off his glove, pried back the armor over his forearm, and carefully wound the string of beads around and through the metal framework of his arm. The story didn’t add up, but maybe there was a way to find the answers.

A short time later, he was back in front of his castle’s main computer. The backup power station was safely closed off again, the beads tucked invisibly away inside his arm for reasons that did not need dwelling upon. He had files to look up.

The records on the Jedi were heavily encrypted, of course. But Vader, as the head of the Inquisitors, had access to all the files on those who had survived, when they had been captured, and whether they had been executed or converted.

Ahsoka Tano was not in the records. He checked twice, just to be sure. There was no note about retrieving her lightsabers, or about her supposed death, or even a last known location. They had that much even for Jedi whose fates they knew far less about than Ahsoka’s. It didn’t make any sense.

Unless Vader did not actually have full access to the files.

He immediately berated himself for thinking such a thing. Surely there had simply been a mistake. The data had not been processed correctly, or had been corrupted somehow.

There was nothing else that would indicate data corruption, though. And even if it was a simple oversight…surely her name at least should show up? He understood software and electronics. He’d understood them better than he understood most people, even back before half his body was cybernetic. And he couldn’t deny that it looked very much as if every mention of Ahsoka Tano’s name had been scrubbed from the databank.

From his databank, at least. There was somewhere else he could look. He hesitated to even think about doing it. He was loyal to the Emperor. He trusted him. Sidious certainly would not approve of what Vader could hardly believe he was considering. Probably if Vader brought the matter up with him, they would check together and then laugh about the silly error.

And yet, Vader found himself in his shuttle, preparing to depart Mustafar for Coruscant without so much as notifying Sidious.

He hesitated, briefly, before leaving Mustafar. But it wasn’t as if Sidious truly needed Vader to keep up his work on Ahsoka, and in any case Sidious probably didn’t intend to visit Ahsoka again for several days. That was his usual pattern with the more difficult cases. Besides, there was some business on Sullust that required Sidious’ attention, something about shuttle production. That would occupy him for a few days.

There was nothing to indicate that Vader’s return to Coruscant was anything out of the ordinary. He made sure of that. And, really, there wasn’t anything out of the ordinary about it, at least not yet. He could go wherever he pleased in the galaxy. It wasn’t as if Sidious kept him tied up on a leash. If he wanted to visit Coruscant, he could.

Nevertheless, he made doubly sure that his shuttle was secured and ready for his return, whenever he should choose to depart. Reassured, he headed for the Imperial throne room.

It was odd to be in there without Sidious. Of course, he had been in here on his own before, many times. Sidious frequently went off to do business while Vader was there, or Vader waited for him here, or any of several other reasons. Still, he had never been here intending to do something he knew Sidious would disapprove of.

It wasn’t really treasonous, he assured himself. Surely simply wanting to know the truth, looking up a few little pieces of information couldn’t possibly be considered that bad.
 
Repeating that to himself, Vader locked the door to the throne room and sat down at the Emperor’s computer terminal. He logged in using Sidious’ passcode. Which he knew for completely legitimate reasons—he was, after all, Sidious’ second in command, had worked closely with him for years, had seen Sidious entering this information more times than he could count and had happened to memorize it. It was normal for apprentices to notice this sort of thing. Maybe even expected. He’d known Obi-Wan’s passcode too, once.

Bringing up the records on the Jedi, he typed one name into the search bar. Ahsoka Tano.

His immediate thought when the results displayed was that he’d been right. The information he’d seen before had indeed been redacted. Here, the entry was extensive, with multiple notes and cross-references.

He hesitated for a moment before actually reading it. Sidious surely had his reasons for hiding this information. And for all Vader’s justifications, he couldn’t quite convince himself that Sidious would be pleased he’d seen it.

This was what he’d come here to do, though, and he was going to do it. Ignoring his misgivings, he leaned forward to read.

Ahsoka, he learned, had indeed supposedly died on Mandalore fifteen years ago. She had been killed by Clone Trooper 7567, who had himself died from injuries received during that fight. (At this point, Vader’s fists clenched and several of Palpatine’s statues toppled over and smashed to the floor. He kept reading.) The file described the grave on Mandalore, stating it had presumably made by other clone troopers, although none of those who survived the battle seemed to know about it. The lightsabers had been left there, found by the troopers sweeping the area afterwards. All of this had been noted down meticulously by Sidious.

His master hadn’t told him any of it. Not about Ahsoka. Not about her lightsabers. Not about Rex’s death, if he had truly died. Granted, Vader had never asked, so it wasn’t as if he had lied. Not exactly. And it wasn’t as if any of this really proved that Ahsoka was telling the truth about the clones having—it didn’t prove anything.

But that was a lot of information Sidious had never told Vader. Had, apparently, deliberately kept secret from him.

If he had been keeping this secret, what else was he hiding?

He couldn’t download these files—Sidious had security protocols that would notify him the moment someone tried doing that. And he could hardly read through every single record, hoping to find something. But Ahsoka had given him a place to look, hadn’t she? It didn’t prove anything, but everything she’d told him—at least about what happened to her—matched these new uncensored records. Maybe she was telling the truth about the other things as well.

Control chips in the clones’ brains, she’d said. The possibility sickened him to even contemplate. And of course it had to be a lie, of course it did. It was just stories about the inhibitor chips, which were nothing to be concerned about, and rumors gone out of control. They were just that, rumors. Probably.

But he was here, wasn’t he? He could check just in case, and settle this once and for all.

He opened the files on the clone troopers.

There was a list of security protocols. Orders that could be given to the entire army. He knew about that, knew it existed at any rate even if he didn’t know the details. Or at least, hadn’t known the details. He scrolled through the list of orders now. Order 66, he read with a little jolt, eliminate the Jedi in the event they turn traitor.

There were no details on any hypothetical control chips, at least none that he could see from a reasonably quick look. There was a whole set of files on Kamino detailing the clone program, but no flashing lights or bold text stating There are control chips in the clones’ brains.

There was nothing stating there weren’t control chips, either.

This was ridiculous. And he couldn’t stay here forever. He might be the Emperor’s second in command, but sooner or later, someone was going to wonder what he was doing in here for so long. They might not dare to question him personally, but they might very well mention it to Sidious.

He was going to get answers, though. He’d come too far now to back out, and he was determined.

There was a flash of unwelcome memory in his mind, which normally he would have shoved aside to focus only on his anger at feeling it in the first place. He was here, though, and he’d decided to figure this out. Cautiously, feeling strangely as if he were walking into a nest of gundarks with no weapons on him, he examined the memory.

 Fives. Coruscant, years ago. He remembered watching Fives shot by security troops, his paranoid ramblings about conspiracies cut short. (Had shooting him really been necessary? Anakin had wondered then, and wondered again now.) He had been driven crazy by a malfunction in his inhibitor chip, caused by an obscure parasite. It was terrible, but they had taken steps to make sure it didn’t happen again.

Vader suddenly realized how reluctant he was to look up information about Fives on this computer. Almost scared, even. Which was ridiculous. Darth Vader was not scared.

He opened the file on CT-5555.

It was somewhat anticlimactic. There were no secret messages. No additional entries. The file said exactly what he expected it to say: a long listing of Fives’ military history and commendations, then a terse explanation (cross-referenced with Republic medical records) about how he had been exposed to a rare parasite on Ringo Vinda which had caused his inhibitor chip to degrade, driving him to insanity. Security troops had been forced to terminate him when, in his delusion, he had tried to assassinate then-Chancellor Palpatine.

Vader knew all this. There was absolutely nothing there that even hinted this story wasn’t true. But, he realized with a sort of horrified surprise, he wasn’t absolutely sure if he believed it anymore. Sidious had lied about Ahsoka. And even here, even on the Emperor’s personal computer, could he be completely certain this was the truth?

And if it wasn’t the truth, if Ahsoka was telling the truth and if Fives hadn’t been insane all those years ago, then what did that mean? A plot orchestrated by the Chancellor, Fives had said.

No. This wasn’t right. Vader couldn’t think like this. If Fives hadn’t been insane, everything fell apart, and then the things Anakin had done…

With a decisive gesture, he closed the file. He was done here. Obviously he wasn’t going to learn anything else, and further investigation would prove nothing.

Further investigation here, anyway. He hesitated on the verge of sweeping out of the room. Because there was one more place he could go that might have answers, wasn’t there? Kamino had always kept detailed records on the clones—their clones, they said. Relations between the Empire and Kamino were touchy at best, but Vader assumed he would have no trouble scaring them into giving him what he wanted.

With a surge of anger, he realized he still didn’t fully believe the perfectly reasonable explanation for Fives’ death listed on Palpatine’s computer. And that, apparently, he was planning to go chasing after a different explanation that he was fairly sure he didn’t truly want to know.

He let himself sink into the familiar, comforting grip of his rage as he stalked out of the throne room and back to his ship, let the rage carry him all the way off Coruscant, and through hyperspace.

Vader didn’t bother to think up an excuse for why he’d come to Kamino. He simply landed and went straight to the facility that had once been the lively barracks, school, and training ground for the Fett clones. It was mostly empty now.

A Kaminoan hurried out to meet him, looking distressed. “Lord Vader. We were not aware of your visit.” He sounded distressed, too. Also annoyed.

“It was not necessary for you to be notified,” Vader said loftily. “I require access to your records on the Fett clones.”

The Kaminoan drew himself up to his full height. “Those records are private property, not for public perusal.”

If he was trying to intimidate Vader, he’d picked the wrong Sith. “That project was commissioned and directed by the traitorous Jedi and Darth Tyrannous, and I think you will find that I am the successor to both.”

It was almost disappointing how little argument it took after that. Vader barely even had to use the Force. The Kaminoans led him to a disused laboratory that still held the remnants of some of the jars that had, apparently, once held developing clones. With the lights dimmed and the equipment still and partially dismantled, it was almost more disturbing than the depths of Malachor. Almost.

He knew the Kaminoans were almost certainly not giving him access to the full records. That was how they operated, holding back anything that might give them an advantage later. Unfortunately for them, Vader did not need their permission to acquire full access.

Slicing into their classified files took a not inconsiderable amount of time, but Vader found himself unexpectedly enjoying it. It had been a long time since he’d had a task that was purely data manipulation, as this was, and he suddenly remembered that doing these sorts of jobs were some of the few times he truly understood patience. He had even tried using programming as a meditation tool a couple times, although mechanical tasks usually worked better.

There was a lot of information (the Kaminoans apparently recorded everything), but Vader knew exactly what he was looking for. He didn’t hesitate this time, either. He’d made his decision back on Coruscant, and he would see this through. He looked up anything related to Fives—CT-5555, according to the Kaminoan computer—telling it to give him the most recent first.

What popped up at the top of the list was expected: medical records from Fives’ last trip here when he had removed his own inhibitor chip, with a footnote documenting his death (“termination”) on Coruscant. Vader dug into the medical records, though he did note the casual references to their subject as a thing rather than a person. It did not help to calm his fury.

He focused on the mentions of the inhibitor chip. Fives’ records were cross-referenced with Tup’s (“CT-5385”). He had just clicked over from Tup’s records to some transcripts of communications with Darth Tyrannous when there was a soft clink from one corner.

Vader jumped up, lightsaber at the ready, in time to see a small medical droid that looked like it had seen better days pop out from an access hatch in one corner. The noise had apparently been the panel falling to the floor.

“You are not from Kamino,” the droid said brightly before Vader could even consider what to say. It floated in the corner, not seeming at all disturbed by the sight of Vader’s lightsaber, although a moment later it appeared to droop slightly. “But you do not look like a Jedi either. That is unfortunate.”

“The Jedi are gone.” Mostly. “They were traitors.” At least, Vader had been told they were. “How is it you do not know this?”

“I have been in long-term no-power hibernation mode. My internal records show it has been six thousand eighty-two point five zero eight standard days since entering hibernation, or approximately sixteen point six five three standard years. In Kaminoan days, that is—”

“Why?” Vader demanded, partly because he wanted to know and partly because he didn’t need to know how many Kaminoan days it had been. A moment later, he thought of several better questions. “Who are you, and what are you doing here? If your masters have sent you to spy on me, you will all regret it.”

The little droid’s eyes dimmed for a moment, then brightened. “I am AZI-3452118…” It paused, and bobbed for a moment in midair with what looked for all the world like uncertainty. “My…name…is AZI-3.”

That was odd enough to get Vader’s attention. Droids didn’t generally refer to themselves as having names, even those of them who had certainly developed sentience and ought to have them.

“I do not believe it would be accurate to say I have masters at this time,” AZI-3 continued. “The owners of this facility did not approve of my actions—that is, the owners sixteen point six five three years ago did not, and logic suggests the current owners still would not. But I must follow my programming above all else.”

“Your programming.” On consideration, Vader put his lightsaber away. He could always get it out again if he needed it, but this droid seemed harmless. And the fact that no Kaminoans had yet turned up suggested it was telling the truth about not working with them. If it had been, it would have sounded the alarm.

The droid, AZI-3, seemed to perk up and drifted a little closer. As if it had been holding back out of fear. Was its sentience developed enough for it to feel human emotions? Surely it must be, if it was talking about names?

“What is your programming?” Vader asked.

“To save my patient,” AZI-3 replied promptly. “I am a medical droid. This is my primary purpose. The masters planned to erase my memory, but I judged that losing the information I possess would present a high probability of harming my last patient or otherwise leaving me unable to help should the need arise. So I went into no-power hibernation where they could not find me.”

He sounded distinctly smug. Vader, for his part, was astonished. He wasn’t quite clear on all the details, but that sounded like equivocation worthy of Obi-Wan. He pushed that thought aside quickly, but the sentiment lingered. He was starting to like this droid.

“You are not planning to erase my memories too, are you?” AZI-3 asked.

“No.”

“Good. I would prefer not to go back into hibernation.” AZI-3 turned his eyes to the computer, then back to Vader. “Do you have information about Fives?”

Vader stared at him, glanced at the computer, and then turned back. A few things clicked in his mind. “Fives was your last patient.”

“Yes.”

“You set an alert on the computer system, to notify you when someone searched for his name. That is why you are no longer in hibernation.”

“Yes.”

Vader paused. That was really quite clever. He was definitely starting to like this droid.

“Are you here to help Fives?” AZI-3 asked. “Or to do more harm?” He extended a few of his appendages, ones with rather pointy ends. Vader had the impression that if he answered harm, AZI-3 would do something utterly insane like attack him.

“Fives is dead,” he said bluntly. “He died many years ago.”

The droid dipped his head. His eyes dimmed, and he withdrew his appendages. “I knew that was probably true. I have been accessing files on galactic events from my hibernation while we have been talking. But I hoped it was not.”

He’d hoped. This droid had hoped. Anakin had the sudden, irrational urge to find everyone who’d ever told him that droids couldn’t have feelings and crow about how completely wrong they were.

“You cared about Fives?” he asked instead.

“Fives was…my friend,” AZI-3 said, sounding slightly uncertain of the terminology, but rallied quickly. “My friend. He explained to me about names. His name, Fives, is only minimally different from his numerical designation, yet he said it was important. He called me AZI-3, which is only the first part of my full designation, but there is a difference. He was right. It is very odd.”

“Odd. Yes.” He decided to bypass that for the moment. “Fives came here with Tup, seeking to learn the truth about…an incident.”

“The death of Jedi Master Tiplar. Yes.”

“I am here to find the same truth Fives was looking for.” Well, close enough anyway. He was trying to solve the mystery of Fives’ death, and Fives had been trying to answer the questions about Tup and Tiplar, so…

“But…” AZI-3 tilted his head. “It has been over sixteen years. Why are you still searching?”

That, Vader thought, was a good question. “Never mind. It is…important. Will you tell me what you found?”

“Is this your programming?”

“What?”

“Helping my patients is my programming. Is this search for the truth yours?”

His programming. Anakin wondered if, all things considered, that really was the right word for it. After all, his body was more than half droid at this point.

But if that was true, then the question was, who had written the program?

“Who originally wrote your programming?” he asked AZI-3 suddenly.

“I was purchased from a manufacturer on Kuat,” AZI-3 answered promptly. “Once I arrived here on Kamino, this facility’s engineering team programmed specific instructions relevant to my duties here.”

“But you chose to go against their wishes.”

“Helping my patients is the most important part of my programming. It supersedes everything else.”

“Did Fives explain that to you too?” Vader asked. It seemed like the kind of thing Fives would do.

“Yes. And he was right.”

Vader thought about that for a moment. “Then perhaps this is my programming.”

“You wish to learn the truth?” AZI-3 asked.

“Will you tell me what you and Fives found?” Vader asked. No, demanded. Vader didn’t ask.

“I believe Fives would want the truth to be known,” AZI-3 said. “That is within my programming. I will show you.”

A small hologram popped up, and a familiar clone’s face appeared. Fives. Vader realized he was seeing AZI-3’s memories, which he must have stored.

He watched as Fives argued with a distinctly less helpful AZI-3, and found himself nearly laughing when Fives convinced the droid that helping him was indeed following his programming. He was not laughing at all, though, when AZI-3’s scans revealed what he’d taken to be a tumor in Tup’s brain, and he was definitely not laughing when a similar one was found in Fives’ brain. And implanted in all the other clones as embryos.

He knew that the inhibitor chips were meant to stop the clones from falling prey to Jango Fett’s violent and defiant tendencies. (Although now that he was thinking about it, implanting even that sort of presumably beneficial chip seemed…questionable.) But if that was truly what these chips were, then why the whole conspiracy? The Kaminoans in AZI-3’s memory hologram definitely appeared not to want to share any information.

Besides which, hadn’t he and Obi-Wan discovered that it was Dooku who’d commissioned the clones in the first place? And he’d been in the process of reading the Kaminoans’ communications with Dooku when AZI-3 showed up.

“I was not able to fully analyze this chip when Fives was here,” AZI-3 finished. “Perhaps the Republic did. That was what was meant to happen. But I do have the data from my initial scan, and I have examined it since then. Would you like to see my current analysis?”

Anakin was getting the extremely bad feeling that he did not actually want to see the analysis at all. “Show me,” he said.

AZI-3 extended an appendage and plugged into the computer terminal. Immediately, lines of very odd code started scrolling across the screen.

“It is a bio-electronic component, specifically engineered to the Fett clones’ genetic makeup,” AZI-3 narrated. “Or, well, to Fives’ genetic makeup at any rate. It is designed to send powerful impulses to certain parts of the brain when given certain commands.”

Vader eyed the data on the screen. It wasn’t like anything he’d ever seen before, but there was just enough familiar code that he could see how it might fit what AZI-3 was saying. “Stop. Go back to the last section.”

The information on the screen scrolled back obediently, and Vader stared hard at what it said. He knew that code, and not from the tinkering he’d done at the Jedi temple.

Watto hadn’t cared much what his slaves thought or felt, as long as they did their work and didn’t annoy him too much. Most of the Hutts, and the other slave owners on Tatooine for that matter, had been more or less the same. But there had been a few exceptions.

Anakin’s mother had once had a woman over, maybe a year before Qui-Gon Jinn had showed up, desperately seeking help. It was her sister, she’d said. Their owner had fitted her sister with a cranial implant meant to control her thought patterns, to prevent even the slightest idea of rebellion. His mother hadn’t wanted Anakin to be present, but it wasn’t as if she had the power to shield him from the realities of their life.

In any case, he’d seen the implant’s code. It was a little like a more aggressive version of a restraining bolt for droids. And it was very similar to what he was looking at now.

(His mother hadn’t even been trying to remove the implant completely. There was no way she could do that safely. She had just been trying to stop the implant from irreversibly damaging the woman’s brain. He couldn’t fully remember, but he was pretty sure she hadn’t succeeded.)

“Is something wrong?” AZI-3 asked, and he realized he’d been staring silently at the data for some time.

“Everything is wrong.” The rage had never left him. Not since…well, he couldn’t remember a time when anger wasn’t his constant companion, despite Obi-Wan’s efforts. Palpatine had taught him how to turn his anger to the implacable power of ice, with all the unrelenting force of an avalanche and the razor sharpness of glass. Now, though, the Sith control had deserted him, and his rage had exploded into flames once more.

“Is there anything I can do to help?”

That got his attention. He turned to stare at the little droid. “You want to help?”

“You were Fives’ friend,” AZI-3 said. “So was I. It only makes sense that I should try to help you.” He hesitated. “And…I do not think I like anyone who would create this device.”

“Neither do I,” he said, and wondered just what he was admitting.

“Then…” AZI-3 paused, and blinked. Or at least his eyes dimmed and brightened. “What is your name?”

“You said you were accessing the database from the time you spent in hibernation. Surely you know who I am.”

“I know your designation,” AZI-3 said. “But what should I call you?”

He opened his mouth to speak, although obviously that wasn’t visible beneath his armor, and then stopped. What did he want AZI-3 to call him? The answer to that should be no question. But he had no idea what he was going to say.

There was a commotion from the corridor outside the room. Vader immediately abandoned the name question and reached out with the Force. There were several Kaminoans down the hall, arguing.

“Oh dear,” said AZI-3, who apparently heard it too.

“I have found what I need here,” Vader said. “I have no wish to waste more time.”

AZI-3 disconnected himself from the computer and bobbed in the air for a moment. “Will you take me with you?”

“What?”

“I do not believe I belong on Kamino any more,” AZI-3 said. “You came in a ship, did you not? I could go with you.”

“You do know who I am, don’t you?” Vader asked.

“Yes,” AZI-3 replied. “The Holonet files on you are…interesting. But I believe if the Kaminoans discovered me, they would wipe my memory. I do not want that. I would rather go with you.”

Even with the chance of Kaminoans bursting in any moment, Vader had to take a moment to stop and stare. He was not at all used to people actually wanting to go somewhere with him, whatever their reasons.

“You will not like where I am going,” he said. He was returning to Mustafar. That was a fairly safe assumption.

“I do not like it here,” AZI-3 said.

“Very well,” Vader found himself saying before he could consider it too carefully. “You may come, if you can keep up.”

He’d never approved of wiping droids’ memories, anyway.

He went out into the hallway. Several Kaminoans looked up at him, startled.

“I am finished here,” he announced.

Two of them made motions like they were considering trying to stop him, so he drew his lightsaber. “As I said, I am finished. I will be leaving now.”

Apparently they didn’t want to risk the lightsaber. They fell back, and very nearly let him pass.

He had almost reached the corner of the corridor when one of them called, “Wait! What are you doing with that droid?”

AZI-3 shrank back. Anakin considered his options and decided that he really had no patience left for this planet or anything about it. “Where the droid goes is none of your concern.” He lifted his lightsaber a little higher and waited to see if any of them were stupid enough to try something. Part of him hoped they were.

Fortunately or unfortunately, it turned out they had a healthy sense of self-preservation. None of them tried to stop him, or AZI-3. Given what he knew of Kaminoans, they would probably try to find someone to report him to the moment he left their sight, but he really didn’t care. The only one who could cause him any trouble at this point was Palpatine, and by the time the Kaminoans decided whether it was more in their better interests to report to him or to cover this up, he would…

Well, he didn’t know exactly what he would do. But he certainly wasn’t going to hang around Kamino to do it.

Chapter Text

Vader stayed in silent thought for the entire trip back to Mustafar. Obi-Wan might have said he was sulking, once. Ahsoka would have made a comment about his usual brooding self, which she wouldn’t really mean seriously.

Teenage Ahsoka would have done that, anyway. He wasn’t sure what she would say now, the Ahsoka who’d fought him on Malachor. Who he’d nearly killed.

AZI-3 was there, but seemed to understand that Anakin didn’t particularly want to talk. Or the droid was busy with his own issues, but it hadn’t seemed like he was the sort of droid who let that stop him from talking.

Ahsoka had been right. There were control chips in the clones’ brains. They had been forced to…

To what? Do the right thing? Turning against the traitorous Jedi was the right thing. Of course it was. It was good the clones had done it.

But they hadn’t had a choice. She had been right. That was slavery. Anakin knew what it meant to be forced to do something, and they had not only been forced to do it—even if it was the right thing—they hadn’t even been left the freedom of their own minds.

If Ahsoka had been right about that, what if…?

No. He couldn’t think like that. Where would that lead him in the end?

Determinedly not thinking about it, not letting himself go down that path, he returned to his castle.

AZI-3 zipped off the ship after him, and looked around curiously. “This is quite interesting,” he said. “I have never been to a planet such as this. Of course, I have never been to any planet but Kamino and my manufacturing plant on Kuat. But from my research I understand that such inhospitable planets are not usually inhabited except by very specialized life-forms.” He peered over the edge of a balcony, seemingly fascinated by the lava below. It was not exactly the reaction Anakin would have expected, although, he realized, based on his limited experience with AZI-3 he wasn’t entirely surprised.

“Here, just…don’t break anything,” he said as they came inside. He had considered trying to restrict AZI-3 to only certain areas, but he wasn’t feeling very enthusiastic about restricting anyone right now. Even if only by normal commands. Anyway, no one ever paid attention to droids. And it wouldn’t be the first time Vader had showed up with a new droid in tow. There was at least one rumor that he was a droid himself. “I have to go now. I’ll be back.”

“Where are you going?” The question sounded purely inquisitive and innocent, despite the fact that AZI-3 had almost certainly accessed all of Vader’s publicly accessible history at this point. And possibly some that wasn’t generally accessible. Most people with even a slight familiarity with Vader would sound some combination of scared and accusatory.

“A separate facility on this planet,” he said, answering honestly for lack of any better ideas. “Someone I know is…is there.”

“Oh,” AZI-3 said. “Are they a friend?”

Anakin hesitated over that for long enough that even AZI-3 seemed to be getting uncomfortable. Finally, he just said, “I don’t know.”

He went back to the holding facility somewhat on autopilot, not even thinking about what he was going to say to her until he was actually opening the cell door. He just knew he needed to say something.

Sidious was still off the planet, at least. That was probably for the best.

Ahsoka looked noticeably worse when he opened the door, although with very few physical indicators of it. Of course, Sidious had been gone the past few days. But she was still in this cell.

It had to be this way, Vader reminded himself, but even to himself it didn’t sound entirely convincing.

Ahsoka had started to struggle to her feet when the door opened, but when she saw it was him, she sat back down on the floor. He wasn’t sure what to make of that. “What is it now?” she asked.

You were right, a part of his mind screamed. About the chips. About the clones being controlled, enslaved. Our brothers. He couldn’t say that.

She looked at him for a few moments, but when he still didn’t say anything, she sighed. “It was about Padmé, wasn’t it?”

“What?” He was so surprised to hear that of all things that he could hardly respond properly. He could just stare down uncomprehendingly at Ahsoka’s face, remarkably calm given the circumstances.

“You becoming a Sith,” Ahsoka said quietly. Matter-of-factly. “It was because of Padmé, wasn’t it? I still don’t really know what happened, but all your worst decisions have only ever been because you were afraid someone you loved was going to die. If it was me you would have gone dark sooner, and if it was Obi-Wan you would have gone to the rest of the Jedi no matter how you felt about them. But you couldn’t tell anyone about Padmé. Even though we all already knew.”

They all already knew? He wasn’t entirely sure what she was saying. What did she mean by “all”?

“She was pregnant when she died,” Ahsoka continued. “I didn’t even know that until I saw the holofeed of her funeral.” She clenched her fists and stared down at her lap, and for a moment seemed to be fighting tears.

Anakin would have been angry, except he remembered how she and Padmé had become friends. How he’d helped them become friends.

“Her pregnancy—it was yours, wasn’t it?” she said. “It had to be.  And she was a senator living on Coruscant, with the best possible medical care available, but you drove yourself crazy thinking of all the ways it could go wrong. I assume Palpatine told you there were ways to protect her, if you used the dark side. If you became a Sith.”

If she hadn’t been so clearly surprised when he told her that Obi-Wan was alive, he would have thought Obi-Wan must have explained things to her. Except he wasn’t even sure if Obi-Wan knew what Darth Sidious had told him.

He took a step towards her, not sure whether he was going to deny everything or demand she stop talking. Before he could do either, she kept going.

“I don’t blame you for being afraid of her dying,” she said softly.

Anakin rocked back on his heels in astonishment. Of course she blamed him. She didn’t know about the dreams, and probably wouldn’t believe them anyway. And hadn’t she just said it was silly to be concerned, with the best possible medical care available?

“I looked up the childbirth mortality rate on Tatooine,” Ahsoka said, and he froze. “You must have known logically that it wasn’t the same on Coruscant, but that sort of thing doesn’t ever really leave you, does it? I was only three when that bounty hunter tried to kidnap me from Shili, but I still remember how no one there listened when I said I was scared of him. Not until Master Plo came to find me.”

“There were dreams,” he said abruptly. He hadn’t meant to tell her that. Had he? He shouldn’t have. He continued anyway, not really sure why he was doing so. “Visions of her death. I saw it.”

“Visions?” She frowned. “You don’t usually have Force visions. Didn’t. Is that new?”

“I had them before. When…when my mother died.”

“Oh.” He could see her processing that information, slotting it in among the rest of what she knew about him. About Anakin Skywalker.

“If you are intending to attempt to explain the nature of Force visions,” he began, because surely that was where this was going. The uncertainty over whether it was true, the ways such visions might mislead, the need to accept what would come to pass…he’d heard it all.

“No, I wasn’t,” she said, surprising him. “What would be the point?”

None, of course. Oddly, he was almost disappointed.

“So you had visions of Padmé’s death, and…you told Palpatine,” Ahsoka said.

“Yes.” Why did it suddenly feel wrong to admit that? There had been nothing wrong with confiding in then-Chancellor Palpatine. Anakin had always figured that part of him knew, deep down, that Palpatine could help.

“And he said he could save her, or that he could teach you how to save her, if you became a Sith,” she concluded. “Did he try?”

“What?”

“Anakin, I can guess what happened, but honestly I have no idea if I’m right. I was on Mandalore, and then I was running for my life. And I’ve never been able to find out any details about you, Obi-Wan, and Padmé at the end of the war. So I’m asking you: Palpatine said he could save her. It clearly didn’t work. Did he try to save her? Did he show you how?”

Anakin hesitated. The answer, of course, was no. But it only made sense. After she was dead, there was no need to learn such techniques. Although Palpatine had never even offered to teach him, and Anakin had never asked. Why would he?

“I suppose it doesn’t matter,” she said softly.

Anakin was surprised. She agreed with him? Somehow he didn’t quite believe she actually agreed with him.

“It didn’t work,” she said. “Whatever you tried…it didn’t work. She’s still dead.”

“That is none of your concern,” he said. This was ridiculous. She was sitting on the floor of a prison cell, looking worn and exhausted, waiting for Sidious to come back and finish dealing with her. She had no place to be lecturing him.

“Of course it’s my concern,” she snapped, and he could hear some of her old fire in her voice. It only emphasized how tired she truly sounded. “Padmé was my friend. And you loved her, and you’re my family whether I like it or not. Don’t even try to pretend I don’t have the right to care.”

“Wife,” he said.

She looked confused.

“She was my wife,” Anakin said, and found that he wasn’t even horrified he was telling her. Part of him wanted her to know. She was right. She ought to know. “We were married. Since before I even met you.”

“Oh,” she whispered, eyes wide. He’d actually managed to surprise her.

He said nothing. He could still feel, all these years later, the scorching air and burning ashes of Mustafar on his skin. Could hear her pleading with him. Asking him to turn back. Anakin, you’re breaking my heart… You’ve changed… Because of what you’ve done…

He could still feel, as if he’d done it with his hands instead of the Force, his own choking grip around her neck. Remembered the light fading in her eyes, her body crumpling to the ground. Still alive in that moment, he was sure of it. Maybe if he’d tried, right then, he could still have saved her. If he hadn’t been distracted. If Obi-Wan hadn’t fought him.

If Obi-Wan hadn’t seen him for what he was and stopped him. You have become the very thing you swore to destroy.

“No!” he cried, out loud.

“What?” Ahsoka asked, and he remembered he was still standing in the prison cell with her.

“Nothing regarding you,” he managed.

She stared at him hard for a moment, then slumped back against the wall. He was startled to see her sag, huddled in on herself, as if she’d given up. He could remember her like this only once before—when she’d been held in the Republic prison, waiting for her trial for a crime she hadn’t committed. She’d been sure she’d lose that case.

Ahsoka closed her eyes, seeming to gather her strength, and then looked back up at him. Straight into his eyes, as if she could see through the mask. “Anakin,” she said quietly. “You don’t have to come back for me. I’ve mourned you once already. I’ll do it again, if I don’t die here. But come back for yourself. Has being a Sith brought you anything good, anything you wanted at all?”

He couldn’t answer that. He couldn’t. He decided to leave instead, back to his castle. There hadn’t really been any point to him coming here, anyway. Nothing more would happen until Sidious got back.

He intended to retreat directly to his bacta tank, but found AZI-3 there. The droid was buzzing around the tank control panel, examining the connections.

Without even looking to see who’d come in, AZI-3 said, “I believe that with a few small adjustments, I could improve both the efficiency and the comfort of this apparatus by at least thirty-two percent.”

“Not now,” Anakin snapped.

AZI-3 turned to look at him. “Oh! You’ve returned. Is your friend all right?”

Anakin stopped in his tracks. AZI-3 sounded genuinely concerned. It was so unexpected that he answered honestly. “I don’t know.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” AZI-3 said, again sounding completely sincere.

“It is nothing you need concern yourself over.” He stalked forward in a way that should be menacing. To be honest, he actually mostly just felt tired. But that was what the mask was for.

AZI-3 backed up slightly, but didn’t seem particularly intimidated, since the next thing out of his voicebox was, “It seems this topic makes you uncomfortable. We could return to discussing medical details if you prefer.” He waved one appendage vaguely toward the bacta tank. “Really, I believe this entire apparatus ought to be unnecessary. It suggests healing in progress, but as that does not seem to be the case in your particular situation, it must indicate that the healing was never properly done in the first—”

“Leave this chamber,” Anakin ordered.

“Very well.” AZI-3 turned precisely and floated away, though not without casting one more baleful look over his shoulder that suggested that Anakin hadn’t heard the last of this conversation.

Anakin wasn’t going to think about that. He was going to go into his bacta tank until Sidious returned and absolutely, definitely not think about any of it at all.

Sidious returned shortly afterward. By the time Anakin got back to the prison facility, Palpatine already had Ahsoka back in the interrogation chamber, and appeared really serious this time about getting to work on her.

She wasn’t screaming this time, although the air around the two of them was nearly crackling from her resistance and Palpatine’s attempts to break into her mind. He hadn’t brought out the lightning yet, Anakin was pretty sure. This seemed to be all about delving into the thoughts she was foolishly trying to keep secret. Which, he knew from experience, could be no less painful a process than the Force lightning.

“Ah, my apprentice,” Palpatine said when Anakin came in. He released his grip on Ahsoka’s mind, and the tension temporarily drained from the air.

Anakin looked past Palpatine to Ahsoka, now slumped back on the table within the restraints. Her breathing was uneven, and she didn’t seem to be focusing on the two of them. Looking closely, Anakin could see the traces of tears on her face.

The process of turning to the dark side was often painful. But the pain was worth it, for the power. Wasn’t it?

But, he found himself wondering, what specific things had that power given him? What good things?

And maybe more importantly, would Ahsoka want that power?

No. She wouldn’t. She’d said so herself, and he believed her. So what would Palpatine do when he figured that out?

While Anakin was thinking, Palpatine had apparently decided it was time to return to the torture session. This time, he did use the Force lightning. Anakin flinched as Ahsoka screamed, the Force catching and sending him an echo of her pain.

“Weak,” Palpatine murmured, as he finally let up. “You are so weak. And you so desperately want to protect whatever remnants of your friends are still left alive, don’t you? How can you hope to do that as you are now? But I can be reasonable. They need not suffer.”

He stretched out his hands, and she stiffened as he delved into her mind again. Anakin watched her face twist in pain, his own breathing rasping loudly inside his mask.

“All the fear,” Palpatine said. “All the deaths, from this moment on—those will be on your shoulders, because in this moment, you have the power to stop them. You can control your friends’ fate, if you choose to.”

She gasped for breath, and Anakin’s chest tightened in sympathetic pain. He knew how that felt, to struggle for air after Palpatine had his say. It didn’t appear any easier for her with fully functioning lungs than for him with…whatever he was.

Despite everything, Ahsoka somehow managed to raise her head and glare at Palpatine. Anakin felt a swell of…well, he shouldn’t be proud of her for defying the Emperor. Or maybe he should be. In any case, he was.

“If you—kill them,” Ahsoka forced out, and then had to stop to try to get another breath. “You kill them. Your fault. Not mine. They understand.” She sank back, shaking.

“Oh really?” Palpatine sounded amused, but there was a definite undercurrent of real annoyance. “They’ll understand, will they? When they are suffering? They put their trust in you, did they not? You need not betray them. You don’t want to betray them, do you?”

“No,” she said, her voice down to a whisper, but then she bared her sharp teeth in what Anakin knew wasn’t a smile. “Joining you—that’s betrayal. I’ll never.”

She closed her eyes, apparently anticipating what was coming, and sure enough a moment later Palpatine plunged back into her mind, clearly furious. Anakin winced, and couldn’t have said who he felt for more in that moment.

When Palpatine had finished—Ahsoka hadn’t said another word—he turned her over to Anakin to return to her cell. Or at least, he swept out of the room, calling instructions over his shoulder to see to her. Anakin chose to interpret those instructions as directed to him.

He carried her back himself. He could have ordered some of the stormtroopers to do it, but why? With the Force, it was easy enough. She was barely conscious. And the stormtroopers had other jobs to do.

He was going to lay her down on the bench in the cell, but she pushed weakly back against him. It was ineffectual, of course, and she was listing to the side with her eyes half closed even as she did it, but he still paused.

“No,” she murmured. “No. Can’t let…” Her voice trailed off.

There really ought to be some way to reassure her, he thought. But anything she would find reassuring was probably a lie. Finally he said, “You should rest. He won’t be back for a while.”

He wasn’t even sure if she was aware enough at this point to understand who had been hurting her, or where she was. She had the look of someone delirious.

“Master Plo?” she asked, sounding very young.

He went still. She thought he was Plo Koon? He wasn’t sure how he felt about that, even if she was delirious. And he couldn’t help remembering that, according to the reports, Plo Koon had been shot down by his own Wolf Pack.

Who hadn’t had a choice about it.

Gently, he moved her into what was hopefully a comfortable position on the bench. She went quietly, and almost immediately seemed to pass out. He stared down at her, knowing he should leave but unable to do so quite yet.

He had a strong, almost irresistible urge to try to heal her. To take away some of her pain. But that would negate the whole purpose of this exercise of Palpatine’s. And maybe more importantly, he actually wasn’t very good at Force healing. It had been a very long time since he’d thought about pain as something to be eased, rather than encouraged.

In what was far more an act of willpower than it should be, he turned, left, locked the cell behind him, and went to find Palpatine.

He found the Emperor in the office he kept on Mustafar, reading through some reports. “Ah, Lord Vader,” he said. “Come in.”

He set the datapad aside, and Anakin could see that the top of the screen was marked with the logo of a Corellian mining company. For some reason, that enraged him. Of course, the Emperor was a busy man and had to devote his attention to all sorts of things. But Anakin couldn’t understand how he could focus on anything else when they had Ahsoka here, in their cells.

“Well, my apprentice,” Palpatine said, and now he was giving Anakin his full attention. “You have been observing our…guest. Tell me, do you think Miss Tano is likely to turn to our side?”

Anakin hesitated. What should he say? He had the feeling the wrong answer would involve consequences, although he couldn’t say for sure what those consequences would be. Or even what outcome he actually wanted.

He could lie. But he’d never been very good at that.

“It is hard to say,” he said finally. “But she is obstinate.”

“Indeed,” Palpatine said, and steepled his fingers together. “I believe you are right. Too obstinate, perhaps, to see reason?”

There was a trap here. He knew it. He just couldn’t quite tell for whom it was intended, or why.

“Reason,” he echoed. “She does not see it that way.”

“I suppose she does not,” Palpatine said, and sounded truly regretful. It made Anakin tense with anticipation. “It is a shame, but she is a dangerously chaotic element that could threaten all we have built in this galaxy. And I fear she might seek to use her connection to Anakin Skywalker to damage you, my apprentice.”

“Anakin Skywalker is dead,” he said automatically, but this time he knew it wasn’t true. Maybe he had always known it, even if he hadn’t wanted to. But he was Anakin Skywalker, and nothing he or Palpatine or anyone else did would change that.

Palpatine peered at him, and Anakin could feel his heartbeat speed up. Could Palpatine sense the lie? He could usually tell when Anakin was lying.

But what Palpatine said was, “He is dead, yes. It is for the best. It gave you, my apprentice, the chance to be stronger than he ever was. But I believe Tano would desire to make you weak again.”

And the thing was, it was true, from a certain point of view. Ahsoka had been perfectly clear about what she wanted for Anakin. Only he was no longer certain that what she wanted counted as weakness. After all, she’d survived. She’d been strong enough to fight him, to escape the Empire, to help lead the Rebellion. Strong enough to leave the Jedi.

“She may desire that,” he said out loud.

Palpatine frowned. “She could undermine the stability of our government. She is a danger to all of us, and I’m afraid she will continue to be so as long as she lives.”

There was definitely a right answer here, and this time Anakin knew it. Knew it, and didn’t like it. “She is a danger to us. Yes.”

“As long as she lives,” Palpatine repeated, leaning forward slightly. “But we have the power to end that danger, right now.”

“You want to kill her,” Anakin said, mind whirling.

“Surely your mind isn’t clouded by sentiment for Skywalker’s old apprentice,” Palpatine said.

“Not at all,” Anakin replied, because it was the only thing he could say that Palpatine wanted to hear.

“Good,” Palpatine said. “Then we are in agreement. The protection of our Empire must come first.”

“My lord,” he said, bowing his head, and left the room as soon as he could.

This, he realized as he strode through the corridor, was what Palpatine had intended all along. He had never meant to truly try to turn Ahsoka to the dark side, or had never believed they could. He had always planned to kill her in the end. She had been right. She was right about the clones, too. About more than just that.

He stopped abruptly, turned, and stalked back toward the prison cells with purpose.

He was going to go straight to her cell, but then he remembered that her lightsabers were locked up in the safe storage unit, so he went there first. There were several stormtroopers guarding the room, and quite a few security measures in place, but none of them were designed with the idea that Darth Vader might turn against them. He picked up the lightsabers, checked to make sure the crystals were still in place, and left with no one the wiser and the lightsabers stashed beneath his cloak.

Getting into the cell was even easier. He closed the door behind him, and was relieved to see her sit up and look at him. It looked like it took some effort, and she swayed as she leaned back against the wall, but she seemed to be actually seeing him this time.

“Anakin?” she asked, her voice a dry rasp.

“Yes,” he said, taking a step forward, but then stopped. She hadn’t appeared afraid of him before, but he could see why she would be. “Can you stand? We need to leave.”

“Can I—what?” She blinked, appearing somewhat dazed, and he cursed himself. It was fairly clear from the way she was supporting herself against the wall that she wasn’t likely to be able to walk out of here under her own power.

He took two more steps toward her and knelt on the floor, bringing him closer to her eye level. Her eyes widened in surprise.

“He’s planning to kill you,” Anakin said, keeping his voice as low as he could out of reflex.

“I know,” she said.

He wanted to take a moment to steel himself, but wasn’t sure they had any extra time. “You were right.”

It felt like saying the words out loud ought to cause something to happen, some observable effect, but nothing seemed different. She didn’t appear to even quite register what he’d said, at first. Then her head snapped up and her gaze focused more sharply. “You…really?”

“You were right,” he repeated. It was easier to say this time. “Not just about that. I went to Kamino.” No, they didn’t have time for that. He desperately wanted to just grab her, pick her up and blast their way out of here while they still could.

But he had hurt her. Almost more than he could bear to think about. He couldn’t let himself hurt her any more. Instead, he reached under his cloak, drew out her lightsabers, and held them out to her.

She stared at them for a moment, then at him, then back at the lightsabers. He wanted to scream, but made himself be patient. After what couldn’t have been more than a few seconds, but felt like longer, she hesitantly reached out to take the lightsabers, and clipped first one and then the other onto her belt.

She met his eyes once she’d finished, or at least his mask. There was caution in her face, but also acceptance. She couldn’t possibly know exactly what his aim was here—he wasn’t even sure if he fully knew that himself—but she understood that he wanted to save her. He held out his hand.

She took it and pulled herself to her feet, leaning against him to keep her balance. And it felt right, not to have her injured or tortured, but to have her at his side. It was the first thing that had truly felt right in a very long time. He wanted to take the time to memorize this feeling, to try to hold onto it so he wouldn’t lose sight of what was right again, but they had to go.

“How…?” Ahsoka asked as he led her to the cell door.

“I have my own ship,” he said. “And it will be easy enough to deal with any guards we meet.” He mimed the gesture Obi-Wan always used to use when doing a mind trick. Not that the gesture was necessary, as Obi-Wan had told him repeatedly, and yet he still did it anyway.

Ahsoka made a small noise that sounded halfway between a gasp and a sigh. Anakin glanced down at her, and realized it had been as close as she could get to a laugh right now. She was smiling. She recognized the gesture too, and for a moment it was like they were right back in the Clone Wars fondly mocking Obi-Wan.

The moment vanished, and they were back in a cell on Mustafar. The war was long over, and Obi-Wan wasn’t here, and Ahsoka had been tortured because Anakin brought her here. She had no reason to trust him, except that it was her only option. He had to get her out of here.

He could have done it, too. It really would have been easy to get past the guards. Except that when they left the cell and started down the corridor, it was Palpatine, flanked by a squadron of guards and wearing a little smirk, who stepped around the corner.

And in that moment, Anakin hated him. Hated his lying, him making slaves of people Anakin had once called brothers and forcing them to kill for him. Hated the way he’d been Anakin’s friend. He hated everything he’d done to Ahsoka, even to the other Jedi. He wasn’t entirely sure yet exactly what Palpatine had done to Padmé, but he hated him for that, too. Hated himself for trusting him.

Anakin reached for his lightsaber. It was a little awkward, still supporting Ahsoka, but he’d manage.

Palpatine was faster. He lifted a hand and, a heartbeat later, Anakin found himself thrown hard against the wall. Ahsoka, now several paces away in the middle of the hall, crumpled to the ground.

“I thought I might find something like this,” Palpatine said silkily. “It seems you aren’t so free of weakness after all, are you? That was foolish, apprentice. You know she must die.”

“No,” Anakin said, struggling back to his feet and going for his lightsaber again. Almost casually, Palpatine swatted him back down.

And then he held out his other hand, and lightning shot out of his fingers straight at Ahsoka. Not the controlled lighting he’d been using on her earlier, either. This appeared to be full strength.

She screamed, her body arching up off the floor.

“NO!” Anakin yelled, grabbed hold of the Force, and used it to propel himself to his feet. He stumbled a little, but he stumbled forward, ready to charge at Palpatine and do whatever damage he could.

Then he stopped. No, he thought. He couldn’t do that. Or he could, but it would be stupid. He needed to kill Palpatine, but he also needed to save Ahsoka. And she was more important right now.

In one motion, he put away his lightsaber, reached out again, and pulled. Not at Palpatine, or at the guards who were starting to look alarmed.

The ceiling above Palpatine cracked. Anakin pulled harder, and another crack appeared. And another. They widened, dust starting to fall down. A few of the more sensible guards started to back away. Palpatine frowned, sensing something wrong, and glanced up.

The Force rushed through Anakin as strongly as it ever had, and he yanked as hard as he could. The ceiling gave way, large chunks of it falling down on Palpatine and whichever guards hadn’t managed to get far enough away. A massive pile of rubble that had once been the ceiling, the walls, and part of the room above crashed down in front of Anakin and Ahsoka, cutting them off from Palpatine.

He wasn’t foolish enough to think this would stop Palpatine for long. Being buried by an entire temple on Malachor hadn’t killed Anakin; this certainly wouldn’t seriously injure Palpatine. But it might slow him down just enough. Anakin bent down, gathered up Ahsoka in his arms, and took off at a run for the nearest exit.

He had to take a small detour to avoid the ruin he’d created to get to the ground transports, but he used the Force to run faster. At one point a couple stormtroopers appeared in his path to possibly try to stop him—he didn’t wait to find out. He used Palpatine’s trick and threw them both into the wall. By the time they’d recovered, he was out of their reach.

He could still feel Ahsoka in the Force. He held onto that, even if she seemed barely conscious. He hadn’t entirely failed her yet.

Fortunately, it appeared that Anakin had caused enough destruction to the prison facility that everyone else was too busy to pay attention to him. He got Ahsoka into a speeder, took off across the lava fields at speeds that would make even the best podracer jealous, and went straight in the back entrance to his castle.

He flung his senses out in every direction as he landed and carried Ahsoka into his ship. He could feel the Force all around him, the castle, the cliffs and molten rivers around him, and it seemed the pursuit wasn’t anywhere close yet.

Standing on the ramp of his ship, he strongly considered tearing down the entire castle before he left for good. He could probably do it. He’d pulled down the ceiling in the prison facility; he could almost certainly use the Force to destroy a few key walls and bring the lava in to burn the rest of it. It was very, very tempting.

But it would take a considerable amount of time even for him, and no matter how satisfying it would be, it wouldn’t be worth the risk of Palpatine catching up with him. And it might be that he would be better off saving his strength.

Which meant that all he had to do was—

“Oh. You’re leaving?” AZI-3 asked, zooming around the corner to the docking bay and pulling up to a stop in front of Anakin. He wasn’t terribly surprised that the droid had showed up before he’d had to go looking for him.

“You can come with us if you want,” Anakin said. “You don’t have to. Although staying here isn’t likely to be pleasant.”

“Of course I am coming with you,” AZI-3 said, sounding indignant that it was even a question, and Anakin had to suppress a surge of unexpected happiness. It was silly, and anyway AZI-3 would probably part company with him as soon as they got to somewhere he actually wanted to be.

“Then get in,” Anakin said, and got them in the air as fast as he could.

As he took off, he saw the shapes of several ships approaching from the direction of the prison. It seemed they were finally being chased, and moments after he saw them, the ships altered their path to an intercept course with his ship.

They were too late, though. Anakin cleared the atmosphere before they were even close to being in weapons range, and a moment later, he was in the unreachable blankness of hyperspace.

“Is this your friend?” AZI-3 asked, and Anakin, no longer completely occupied with flying them safely away, turned to see him hovering over Ahsoka with his scanners out. “Oh, dear. She doesn’t look good, does she?” Thankfully, he quickly added, “There is not likely to be any permanent physical damage, although it would be best to give her nourishment and care in a medical facility. What are you going to do with her?”

And that was the question, wasn’t it? He wasn’t sure what to do with Ahsoka. He just knew he had to take her somewhere where she would be safe.

“I could look after her, with the right supplies,” AZI-3 continued. At Anakin’s look, he added, “Caring for patients is my job.”

Anakin wanted to agree. He could probably find an abandoned medical station—he thought there were a few left over from the Clone Wars. He wanted to find one, take Ahsoka there, and keep her with him. Saving her had felt right, and nothing else had truly felt right since she’d walked away from the Jedi and from him all those years ago. He didn’t want to lose her again.

But would that be best for her? And would it be what she wanted? He didn’t like to admit it, but he was pretty sure it wouldn’t be. He thought she would probably want to go back to the Rebellion. Because that was her choice, wasn’t it? Joining them?

He had no way of reaching the Rebellion, though. It wasn’t like they exactly shared their codes with Darth Vader, let alone their secrets of where they were hiding. He would have to…

No. He did know how to find them, didn’t he? Some of them, at least. Hadn’t he himself complained multiple times about how ridiculous it was that they couldn’t go after several senators who were obviously Rebel leaders, just because there was no definite proof? And senators’ general schedules were posted publicly on the Holonet, a remnant of the Republic days when they were supposed to be easily accessible to anyone who needed them.

“We are going somewhere?” AZI-3 asked, noticing Anakin programming a new course into the computer.

“Yes.”

“Where?”

“Alderaan.” Or, more precisely, the edge of the Alderaan system, where Bail Organa’s fleet was currently located.

Anakin spent the trip trying not to think. AZI-3 spent the trip muttering over Ahsoka. He had conducted a thorough inventory of the ship (without asking Anakin, although Anakin didn’t stop him and wouldn’t have said no) and come up with a blanket, some water, and some protein supplements, which he brought back to Ahsoka. She spent the trip unconscious, thought AZI-3 did manage to get her to drink some of the water.

It was difficult to make himself bring her to one of the ship’s escape pods, once they were just outside the range of the Alderaanian fleet’s sensors. He was pretty sure he was making the right choice, though. Actually the right choice this time.

“Ahsoka?” he asked as he set her down in the escape pod’s pilot seat. He didn’t want to wake her up, but he needed her.

“Anakin?” she murmured, blinking a few times before her eyes drifted shut again.

“Yes,” he said. “Ahsoka. I’m going to get you…home.” He stumbled a little over the last word, his heart clenching as he realized he had no idea where home was for her these days, or what it was like. Or if she even had one. But Bail Organa probably knew.

“I need you to do something,” he continued. “Can you put your codes, Rebel codes, into the computer here?”

“Huh?” She frowned, visibly made an effort to focus, and winced.

“The Alderaanian fleet is nearby, but I don’t know your codes. I could put in Clone Wars codes, but I think that might make them even more suspicious than Empire ones.”

“Oh.” He wasn’t sure how much of that she’d truly understood, but with his help, she leaned forward. She stared at the computer keys for a moment, then finally typed something in. He could only trust that it was the right code.

He settled her back against the seat, tucked the blanket in around her, and hesitated. He didn’t want to leave her. He had to.

“You’re going to be okay,” he said to her, not sure which of them he was trying harder to reassure.

He hadn’t thought she was still awake, but she reached out and caught one of his hands. “You…too?”

He wasn’t sure whether she was asking if he was coming too, or if he was also going to be okay. He gently squeezed back. The sensors in his cybernetic hands were pretty lousy—he’d have to fix that—but he could faintly feel the pressure, and could see her hand in his.

“I hope so,” he said, and escaped back to the main part of the ship before he could convince himself not to follow through with this.

He remained lurking on the edge of the system after he launched the escape pod, flying in just a bit closer and landing on an asteroid to watch what happened. He wasn’t going to leave until he was as sure as he could be that Ahsoka was being cared for.

He watched as one of the ships broke off from the fleet, meandered towards the pod, and finally scooped it up before heading back to the main fleet. And that, he realized, was all he could do, unless he wanted to fly in there and turn himself over to Organa. He almost did want to.

No, there had to be a better way. There was. He had spent fifteen years determinedly closing himself off from any sort of Force bonds he’d once had, or might have had. But he didn’t have to do that, did he? Carefully, he reached for the place where his bond with Ahsoka used to be. It was still there, withered and faded and blocked up, but not completely disappeared.

He poured a trickle of Force energy at the old bond, pushing aside the blockages and strengthening the paths, just enough to open the smallest connection. It went both ways, of course. He could reach for Ahsoka and feel that she was alive, relatively safe, and shining like a beacon in the light side of the Force. She’d be able to reach for him as well. If she really tried and he didn’t stop her, she’d probably be able to use the bond to find him.

He found that he could live with that. He was maybe even glad of it.

“Where are we going?” AZI-3 asked as he sat back down at the controls of the ship.

“I don’t know,” he said, and it was true. He didn’t have anywhere to go.

No Emperor instructing him what to do, where to go, how to think. No troops looking to him to lead them in battle. No Jedi directing him on missions. No owner dictating his life.

He had done a lot of things, things he was afraid to think too much about, but knew he probably had to. Things he wasn’t going to be able to fix or make up for. He could try. Try to put right what he could.

But he didn’t have to. He could fly away right now, somewhere far away, and never again look at what he’d done. He could do that, and it would be his choice. And because of that, he would also be responsible for any consequences of that choice.

Obi-Wan was out there somewhere. If he tried, he could probably find him. For so long, Anakin had thought of getting revenge. He could do that now, if he chose.

Revenge for what, though? He realized that nothing remained of what had once been a burning river of anger and hatred toward his old master. He remembered Obi-Wan dismembering him, and telling him he loved him, and leaving him to die. And now, the only thing he could really believe Obi-Wan had done wrong was to not actually kill him.

If he found Obi-Wan, it would be his choice, and it would not be a choice made in anger. If he tried to make up for what he’d done as a Sith, that would be his choice too. Anything he did now would be his choice. His decision. His responsibility.

For the first time in his life, Anakin Skywalker truly understood that he was free.

He punched several coordinates into the computer, and minutes later the ship took off away from Alderaan into hyperspace.

Chapter Text

Ahsoka woke up in a bed in what appeared to be the medbay of a ship. There was a window at one end of the room, and she could see the blackness of space outside it. There was the low throb of engines all around her. Turning her head to the side, she saw that her lightsabers were sitting on a table next to her.

“You are awake.” A medical droid came hurrying over to her, no doubt responding to the change in her vital signs. It had an Alderaanian mark on one arm. “How are you feeling?”

Like she’d been tortured with Force lightning, not to mention emotionally and physically drained in every way. She sighed. “Could be worse.”

The droid made several mechanical noises to itself and started checking over a number of scans. “Your vital physical signs are making progress toward standard levels. That is good. I should alert Senator Organa and Captain Syndulla you are awake.”

“Captain Syndulla?” she asked. “Hera’s here?” She’d already figured Bail probably was, given this seemed to be an Alderaanian ship. Although come to think of it, how had she ended up here? She strained her memory, and thought she could just remember Anakin saying something about the Alderaanian fleet.

Anakin. She remembered that. Remembered him coming into her cell, and kneeling down in front of her, and saying that she was right. Remembered how he’d held out his hand to her, and, finally, he hadn’t felt at all like a Sith. After Malachor, she was never going to be able to forget the dizzying sensation of her old master and a Sith lord as one and the same. But he hadn’t felt like that when he’d come to take her out of that cell. He hadn’t felt much like a Jedi, but he’d been free of that awful cold darkness that had overwhelmed her when she’d first reached out to his TIE fighter all those months ago. He’d been Anakin.

Her memory got a little fuzzy after that. She thought that whatever desperate strength had been driving her since Palpatine took her prisoner, since she’d arrived on Malachor, maybe since she’d started tracking Vader—that strength had dissipated when Anakin came to rescue her. It was like some part of her deep down understood that her master was watching her back again, that she could let her guard down and he’d protect her. She thought she remembered him carrying her for a while, and his hands tucking a blanket around her. She remembered his mechanical breathing, and remembered thinking that it no longer sounded sinister.

“You were found in an escape pod after Senator Organa received a distress call near his flagship vessel,” the medical droid told her. “The call contained Rebel codes, although your escape pod was clearly Imperial. The senator transferred you to the appropriate ship.”

She focused more closely on the droid, and sure enough, while one arm had an Alderaanian mark, another bore a small red starbird, almost like a tattoo. A Rebel ship, then. Granted, most of Alderaan’s fleet was at least partially associated with the Rebellion, but Bail had carefully arranged for a few of his ships to be entirely staffed by Rebel crew. She supposed it made sense he’d put her on one of them.

“Thank you…ah…” She looked questioningly at the droid.

“HG-286,” the droid supplied.

“Thank you, HG-286,” she said. “How long have I been here?”

“Three standard days,” HG-286 said. “Senator Organa believed that the crew of the ship Ghost would like to know your whereabouts, and alerted them to your presence. He and Captain Syndulla both asked to be informed as soon as you woke up. Shall I let them know?”

“Yes, go ahead,” Ahsoka said, struggling to sit up. It was a rather longer process than she would have liked as the world seemed to start spinning around her every time she moved. The droid made a few noises of distress and rushed over to help her.

“Thanks,” she said when she was more or less upright. HG-286 pushed a cup of water into her hands, and she drank gratefully. “Yes, please go get them.”

She had no idea what she was going to say to them. She wasn’t sure how to even begin explaining what had happened, and she certainly wasn’t up to thinking of a convincing lie even if she’d wanted to. But she did want to see them.

“Ahsoka!” Running footsteps announced the arrival of her friends. Ezra and Sabine were the first through the door, racing towards her and then both skidding to a halt as if realizing that maybe they shouldn’t fling themselves on top of her. Sabine’s hair was different, white fading to purple at the ends, and they both looked like it had been a rough couple of weeks, but she was infinitely glad to see them again.

Rex was right on their heels. Unlike Ezra and Sabine, he didn’t hold himself back. He threw himself down on the edge of her bed and leaned over to grab her in a determined hug. He was clearly being relatively gentle with her, which she was grateful for because every one of her muscles felt battered and sore. But she held him back just as fiercely.

“Ahsoka,” he said roughly, finally pulling back but keeping hold of her shoulders. Which was good, because it was helping her stay upright. “We thought you were dead.”

“I came close a few times,” she admitted.  

“Don’t do it again,” Rex said. His eyes were suspiciously watery, but she couldn’t really blame him.

“I don’t plan to.”

A brief, semi-familiar presence skimmed across her in the Force, as several more sets of footsteps announced the arrival of the others. She frowned, not sure why Kanan would bother with such a surface level Force scan when he was right there, until she actually looked over at him and saw the bandages over his eyes. She’d been pretty sure Maul had done some serious damage to him, although she’d been a little preoccupied at the time. She wished she hadn’t been right.

She sent back an acknowledgement to Kanan on the same level of the Force, and because she was looking for it, saw his shoulders relax just a fraction and felt a hint of relief from him. She knew the feeling.

Kanan made his way over to her, moving slightly slower than she was used to, but navigating fairly smoothly around the beds and medbay equipment. Hera came with him, her eyes flickering over to him a few times, not reaching out to help him although Ahsoka thought she probably wanted to. Bail hovered a little ways behind them, his eyes fixed on Ahsoka with an odd sort of intensity. Zeb and Chopper rounded out the Ghost crew, both staying back near the door, apparently to avoid crowding her. Well, Zeb probably wanted to avoid crowding her, and she appreciated the thought. Chopper was most likely just being antisocial.

It was Hera who asked the question Ahsoka knew they were all thinking. “It’s good to see you again, Ahsoka,” she said. “But you must know I have to ask. What happened?”

Hera seemed faintly apologetic, and genuinely glad to see Ahsoka, but also wary. Ahsoka met her eyes and nodded. She understood. In Hera’s position, she’d be wary as well.

“How did you get out?” Ezra broke in eagerly, clearly unable to resist any longer. He was staring at her as if he couldn’t quite decide between worry, fear, or hero-worship. “You were fighting Darth Vader.” His eyes widened. “Did you win? We thought…”

“Ezra!” Sabine elbowed him, but she was looking at Ahsoka just as curiously.

“We thought…” Kanan said quietly. “When you stayed behind…and then when we heard Vader was back with the Emperor…”

“You thought I was dead,” Ahsoka finished. “Understandable. I probably would have thought the same.” Although, back when she was Anakin’s Padawan, they might have tried to stage a rescue mission anyway. She was glad the Ghost crew hadn’t.

“Which brings us back to the question: how did you survive?” Hera asked bluntly. She crossed her arms over her chest, staring down at Ahsoka. It wasn’t a nasty stare, exactly. Just determined. Hera was not going to back down, and Ahsoka knew it was good she wouldn’t. Even if it was somewhat uncomfortable for her.

She sighed. The truth or a lie, that’s what it came down to. And she didn’t particularly want to lie, nor did she have the energy for it. Let alone for the sort of prevarication Obi-Wan used to be so fond of. She closed her eyes for a moment, then opened them again. “I survived because Darth Vader saved me.”

Predictably, this caused a wave of surprise through the room, both audibly and in the Force. She opened her eyes to see all the others, including Chopper and HG-286, staring at her with expressions ranging from confusion to disbelief.  

“That’s not funny!” Sabine protested.

“No, it’s not,” Ahsoka said. “It’s the truth.”

“Ahsoka, perhaps we should talk about this privately,” Bail said, striding forward past Ezra. He stared at her pointedly, as if trying to communicate something. At the same time, he seemed unusually agitated, as if he was performing some sort of mental calculation. As if…

Abruptly she felt as cold as if she were back on Malachor. “You knew.”

“Knew what?” Ezra asked. She ignored him.

“Ahsoka…” The look on Bail’s face was enough to confirm it.

“You knew, and you didn’t tell me.”

“Didn’t tell you what?” This time it was Sabine. Ahsoka ignored her too.

“How long have you known?” she asked, voice coming out as barely a whisper.

Bail hesitated just long enough for her to guess the answer. “Fifteen years,” he admitted.

“Fifteen years,” she repeated. “And you never told me.” She choked the words off before they turned into a sob. She’d thought he was her friend, but he hadn’t thought she deserved to know the truth about her master. About her family.

“Ahsoka, are you okay?” Rex asked, sounding alarmed. He looked at her with concern.

“No,” she said, and buried her face in his shoulder. His arms came up around her, holding her as she gave in and let the tears spill out. Her whole body shook, and she almost felt like she was going to come apart with all the emotions she’d been holding in check for so long now. Bail’s admission was the last straw, and the weight of all these past months came crashing down on her.

From the first hint of a question when she’d seen a single TIE fighter take on the Rebel fleet, to that crushing and uncomfortably familiar sense of fear and hatred that had overwhelmed her when she reached out to him, the months spent carefully investigating any possible information about the Sith lord, convincing herself her suspicions couldn’t possibly be true, trying to convince herself that no part of her wanted her suspicions to be true just because then he’d be alive, that vision on Lothal, the increasing certainty that she’d have to confront him and the way she’d had to accept that she probably wouldn’t survive that confrontation and it would be because he would kill her, her desperate last-minute insistence that the Sith she was facing couldn’t possibly be her old master right up until she was forced to admit unequivocally that he was, throwing herself over and over at the wall he’d built around himself in the hopes something would get through, Palpatine’s torture, her uncertainty whether any of it was worth it… and all the while, one of the very few friends she had left in the galaxy had been hiding the truth from her.

For once she didn’t worry what impact she was having on others. What their reactions might be, watching one of their leaders break down in front of them. Didn’t worry about being someone important to the Rebellion, being Fulcrum. She just let herself cry, let herself completely let her guard down in the arms of Rex, her friend, her brother. Maybe the one person in the galaxy right at this moment she trusted without question.

“I am sorry.” Bail’s voice was much closer now. She looked up to see he’d moved over next to her bed, and was looking down at her in concern. He did appear somewhat guilty, but not actually entirely sorry.

She considered several responses, but in the end just sighed and sagged back against Rex’s shoulder. “I don’t have the energy to yell at you right now. Later.”

Bail hesitated, then finally nodded.

“Ahsoka,” Hera said, and Ahsoka glanced over to see her and the rest of the Ghost crew watching with an understandable mix of confusion and worry.

Ahsoka knew they probably wanted an explanation, but against all reason hoped they wouldn’t actually ask. She wasn’t at all sure she could get through any part of an explanation without falling completely apart. Even more than she already had.

“Leave her alone,” Rex growled. “Can’t you see she needs rest? Just let her be for now.”

Ahsoka nearly broke into tears again at his concern over her. Normally she would have laughed and pushed back against his protectiveness, as she had since she was fourteen, but right at that moment the proof that she had a friend who would support her, no questions asked, was exactly what she needed. Rex didn’t even know anywhere close to the full story of why she was crying. Although he should. If she ought to know, so did he. She would have to tell him eventually. She just wasn’t sure she could make herself do it quite yet.

“I know you’ve been through a lot, and we should let you rest,” Hera said, glancing from Rex to Ahsoka. “But we really do need to know a little bit more about how you escaped. It sounds like it could be important, and none of our intelligence reports have been very clear in the last few weeks.”

She could feel Rex tense up beside her, and knew he was preparing to push back in her defense. She appreciated it more than she could say, and knowing that he would do that on her behalf gave her the strength to sit up and attempt to pull together some sort of answer.

“It’s okay,” she said to both Rex and Hera. She considered carefully. “The Sith…there are always two. A master and an apprentice.”

“I remember,” Kanan murmured, and she knew he, like her, was remembering long-ago lessons that had been added hastily to the Jedi initiate class curriculum.

“Only they’re not like the Jedi,” she said. “And Palpatine isn’t even like other Sith before him. I think he just wanted an apprentice to have someone else to use, someone who’d do whatever he told him to and could use the Force to do it. And A—Vader finally got tired of being Palpatine’s slave.”

She knew her voice had taken on an edge of vicious satisfaction, and knew the others were looking at her slightly askance for it. She didn’t care.

“Sith don’t just…stop being Sith,” Kanan said.

“No, they don’t,” Bail said, frowning, and something in his tone made her look more closely at him. It occurred to her that if he’d known about Anakin, and Anakin knew that Obi-Wan was still alive, then Bail might know something about Obi-Wan as well.

Later. She’d deal with that later.

“This one did,” she said. “He and Palpatine took me to a prison on Mustafar, after we dug ourselves out from the temple wreckage on Malachor. I didn’t tell them anything. But I did help Vader realize what Palpatine was doing to him. And then he broke me out of prison. It’s not a trick. I assume you already changed the codes and checked the pod for trackers and bugs.”

Hera nodded slowly at that.

“Ahsoka,” Bail said, and paused. She could tell he was trying to decide how to phrase what he wanted to say. “I realize this has been…difficult for you. Do you think there may perhaps be a chance you are, ah, seeing what you want to see? No one would blame you if you were.”

She glared at him as hard as she could (which, honestly, wasn’t very hard at the moment, especially since she was still leaning against Rex), reminded herself that he meant well and had a larger Rebellion to think of and that she really was too tired to get mad at him. “Yes. It is difficult. Right now, Bail, you’re the only one in this room who might have an idea exactly how difficult. But you’ve also known me for almost twenty years, and you should know by now that just because I’m upset doesn’t mean I can’t see the truth of things. If it did, I’d have been dead years ago.”

He at least looked a little sheepish at that, and took a step back.

“Kanan,” Ahsoka said. “Ezra. You felt him, when he was a Sith lord. The anger. The hate. You know what that was like. Would you ever be able to mistake that for something else?”

“No,” Ezra said, and Kanan shook his head.

“Believe me, I wouldn’t either,” she said. “Especially after being trapped with him under that temple. So when I say that when he broke me out of prison, he didn’t feel like a Sith anymore, I’m not just making things up. It’s not something that’s easy to hide.”

And it wasn’t something that Anakin Skywalker would hide, she thought, Sith or Jedi or otherwise. She didn’t add that part.

“She has a point,” Kanan said after a moment.

“You don’t have to believe me,” Ahsoka said, feeling the flickers of anger that had been energizing her start to drain away. “I understand if you don’t. And I know you have to think about the whole Rebellion. You don’t have to trust me. I turned over all my work to Mon Mothma before I left.” She wasn’t going to leave the Rebellion scrambling to cover her duties if she didn’t return. “But keep track of the intelligence reports when they come in. Once things settle down a little, it will be clear that Vader isn’t working for Palpatine anymore. I’m sure of it.”

Hera studied her for a long moment. “Fair enough,” she said finally. “I suppose I can live with that, for now. We’ll let you get some rest. And…it really is good to have you back.”

Ahsoka nodded wearily, and Hera herded her crew out the door. Bail followed them, with a last lingering look over his shoulder. Finally, only Rex remained.

“Whatever that was about,” he said quietly. “Is that something you can tell me?”

“I…” She closed her eyes and slumped back against his side. “Yes. Not just that. I should tell you. I will. I just…I…”

“That’s all right.” His arm came back up around her shoulders. “You don’t have to tell me anything before you’re ready.”

She took a breath that was shaky with relief. “Thank you.”

“You want me to stay?”

She nodded before she could second-guess herself. He rearranged them so they were both in a more comfortable position on the bed.

She took several moments to let it sink in that she really was back among friends.

She had no idea where to go from here. Even if she hadn’t essentially handed over her old job in the Rebellion to Mon Mothma, she knew it would take a while for them to fully trust her again. If they ever did, after she’d spent time with a Sith lord and potentially been compromised.

She was certain that Anakin had escaped. And she was equally certain, as she’d told the others, that he’d left Palpatine’s service for good. But she didn’t know where he was now, or what he was going to do. Not being a Sith didn’t mean he was going to actually help the Rebellion. Or even try to find her again.

She hadn’t reached out to him since she’d woken up, hadn’t checked to see if anything remained of the connection they’d started to re-form on Malachor and on Mustafar. She’d been afraid of what she might find. Afraid of what she might not find.

How she could ever forgive him for what he’d done, she didn’t know. But she knew she would forgive him. Knew, in some ways, she already had. That didn’t mean what he’d done was any less awful, didn’t mean she’d ever forget it. Didn’t mean she could ever look at him again without remembering what he’d done to the Jedi and to the clones and to the Republic and to her. He’d been Darth Vader. He wasn’t anymore, and she had felt him change, but he had been Vader. And she had to find some way to accept that, and accept him as he was now, because she still loved him and cared about him. And maybe because she’d been raised to be a Jedi by Plo Koon and Yoda and Shaak Ti and Obi-Wan and Luminara and Aayla and Anakin and so many others, and at the core of everything she believed in compassion.

She didn’t know how she would forgive him, but worse than that would be never having the chance. Would be if he cut off their connection again, if she was going to lose him again after everything without ever really knowing him again.

She sat on the bed in the medbay of the ship, taking in the hum of engines around her, and the sense of friends and fellow Rebels spreading out through the ship’s corridors and decks, and Rex as a solid, comforting presence beside her. And finally, fixing all of that in her mind, she took a deep breath, acknowledged her fear, and reached out.

And there it was. Once, her connection to Anakin in the Force had been strong enough to reach him without even thinking about it, bright and sure like the power coupling in one of the podracers he’d gleefully showed her. What she felt now was more like a thin, fragile wire between them. But it was there, and for all its thinness, it was steady. She couldn’t feel much from him beyond a faint sense of his presence, and that was a somewhat dull and muddy glow. But he’d left himself that little bit open to her. They had a chance.

She didn’t try to grasp that connection, or send anything along it, or search for more than what was there. Not yet. But she let the knowledge of it fill her, anchored her end of the bond to a careful corner of her mind, kept hold of the fact that it was there. That it said they would meet again, and not as enemies. When she opened her eyes and directed her main focus back to her immediate surroundings, to Bail’s ship and Rex sitting next to her, the connection was still there.

She shifted around on the bed to face Rex, took a moment to make sure her breathing stayed steady and even, and began to tell him the whole story.