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0.
There are two things you need to know about Tatooine:
- You can buy anything here, as long as you can pay.
- Everything that comes from Tatooine is broken.
In Beggar’s Canyon, a meter and a half beneath the surface, the earth is black and jagged-edged with iron ore, enough to turn Mos Espa into Coruscant, and out in the Western Dune Sea, krayt dragons sharpen their claws on titanium and copper. It lies there sleeping; it’s been centuries since the last great blast furnace was reclaimed by the sand. It’s all useless, really: durasteel forged from Tatooine iron crumbles, droids made from its copper go mad. It’s the ghosts, some say, of those who burned, starved, and parched when the forests of old turned into deserts. They will haunt the very soil until twin supernovae burn the sand into glass.
Anakin is nine and doesn’t believe in ghosts (anymore). He spends hours watching the night sky, imagining a million planets draw ellipses around their stars, and himself, visiting them all. A million seems gigantic to him.
1.
Anakin is twenty-one and knows the universe is far greater than that, and smaller, too, in some ways. He’s been to more worlds than he can count and could describe few of them. He can recall the battle of Christophsis in exhaustive detail, map out where every shiny in his battalion was at any given time, and break down exactly which decisions led to victory. He could not, he discovered once, while trying to make conversation with Padmé’s family, tell Sola Naberrie if Christophsis was “nice”.
Chances are, when he goes somewhere, it’s a war zone, and all war zones look more or less the same. All the worlds he was going to visit, they blend into one great dust-coloured, debris-laden mess, and in hindsight, the weariness of war will seem like a suitably grandiose excuse for his failure (it sounds better than boredom, in any case).
There’s also arrogance; his own and Ahsoka’s, but Ahsoka’s failures are ultimately his as well, really.
They did think, both of them, that the mission was beneath them, taking a whole cruiser to escort Bail and Breha Organa on a diplomatic mission to Yarran—a mostly unimportant planet in the Tion Cluster, post-battle, post-coup, post-countercoup, on the verge of possibly joining the Seppies. They were sent to make a point, the point being we come in peace, but we come prepared.
He attended the board room meetings, read the brief on Yarran, commented on the finer points of the Organas’ security arrangements, but he didn’t read the pamphlet that made Queen Breha laugh. Anakin has a number of regrets, altogether fewer than he should have, perhaps, but not reading the pamphlet has a place of honour on his list of blunders.
So this is how it happens: another scarred planet, another battered people, one brief moment in the board room when he can’t bring himself to care. Him and Ahsoka doing their rounds in the mostly intact hotel housing the Organas.
That room.
The holographic floor plan says “function suite, empty”. Anakin senses no immediate danger, but he doesn’t like the way the air ducts connect with the Organas’ suite; you could send a bomb through it, in theory, or a droid, or …
The door is locked the old fashioned way, with a key, not a code, and Ahsoka has no trouble moving the rusty bolts with the Force. He follows her in, hand on his lightsaber, just in case. The inside is softly lit, with a large hunk of upholstery—possibly a bed, but who knows?—as the sole centrepiece. Giant white vases with orchid-like flowers line the walls. The floor is a mosaic, some graceful symbol that catches him off guard. He’s seen it before, he knows that, but it takes him a moment to place it. The pamphlet, he thinks. It was on the cover.
“This smells nice,” he hears Ahsoka say.
And then his mind goes blank.
(You see, the people of Yarran arrange their marriages. In the past, professional matchmakers brought people together; these days an intricate algorithm does the work. Physical attraction is irrelevant because of the Yarran Desert Orchid. If you asked Anakin Skywalker, he’d tell you no half-decent thing has ever come out of a desert, but the people of Yarran did not, in fact, ask Anakin Skywalker. The Desert Orchid causes instant, irresistible attraction to the next person you see and is a staple of wedding ceremonies all over Yarran. It’s all in the pamphlet.)
When he comes to, his mind is foggy, sort of blurred. He feels elated, in a false, saccharine kind of way, and behind it all, the cloying perfume of a hundred flowers. I’m seeing the smell of the flowers, he thinks. That’s weird. He’s lying face down on something soft and vaguely red, but his vision refuses to stabilise. He feels around with his hands instead, and is suddenly acutely aware of his mechanical right arm. His own body is feeding him only diffuse sensations—warm, soft, sweet—but it seems the electric sensors that replaced his fingertips can still make sense of the world. He can, somehow, work out that he’s lying on a blanket, above his head is a pillow, and a little further to the right, another hand. The hand flinches away when he touches it.
“Anakin,” he hears. Ahsoka.
Through the fog comes the realisation that something is wrong. Something happened. With a massive act of will, he turns his head and keeps his eyes open for long enough to look at his Padawan. His vision is still blurred, but he can see enough to figure out Ahsoka is trying to cover herself with a pillow. At the same time, he comes to the realisation that he’s naked except for the glove on his prosthetic hand. And he understands.
He tries to say her name, but speech won’t come to him. Instead, he reaches out in the Force, but the Force feels strangely sluggish too; stubborn, unwilling to go his way, and this scares him more than anything. He gasps for air and tries to push himself off the ground, but collapses again under his own weight.
“Ahsoka,” he tries to say again, but out comes only a sob. Suddenly, he feels her hand on his and her presence in the Force. It’s soothing at first; she means to calm him down, but then a hint of her own terror comes bleeding through. He tries to convey a thought to her: I understand but I don’t remember. Their connection breaks again before she answers.
He has no idea how long it takes him to compose himself, but in the end, he manages to pull himself up.
“I’m sorry”, he whispers, but he cannot seem to look her in the eyes.
2.
They are sitting on opposite sides of the cruiser’s medbay. Before that, they sat on opposite sides of the shuttle and neither said a word. The medical droid hovering between them just finished her lecture on the Yarran Desert Orchid (her voice reminds Anakin of someone, but he cannot say who).
The droid’s hydraulics give out precisely every 89 seconds, making her drop half a meter and soar back up mid sentence.
“I can fix that,” he says. The droid ignores him.
“Have your memories returned yet?” she asks.
To his surprise, Ahsoka nods.
“Bits and pieces,” she says quietly.
“No,” he counters. “They return?”
“According to my contact on Yarran, they usually will.” Jocasta Nu; that’s who she reminds him of. “However, my contact specifically stated that the ritual is not meant for Force users of any kind. The Force tends to amplify the effects in unforeseeable ways.”
She hovers closer to Anakin, drops, shoots back up, and huffs disapprovingly in his direction.
“Really, Master Skywalker, with your midichlorian count, you’d do well to stay away from psychoactive substances …”
“I do,” he objects, but feels too tired to labour the point. He half-looks at Ahsoka from the corner of his eye.
“I’m so sorry,” he says again.
“I’m sorry too,” she says, her voice firmer than his.
“You have nothing to be sorry for.”
He feels her gaze like pinpricks and still cannot bring himself to return it.
“Look at yourself,” she says.
Bewildered, he stares down at his torso. His tunics and belt are in a state of disarray, but that’s because he threw them back on hastily when he regained his movement.
“Take that off.”
He raises his eyebrows in surprise. Undressing himself is the last thing he wants to do right now. Ahsoka shrugs.
“You’ll have to anyway. She’ll need to treat you.”
He pulls the tunics over his head and finds himself covered in angry red scratches, like claw marks, and smudges of crumbling dried blood. There are circular lacerations that look suspiciously like teeth marks too. He runs a hand across his back and winces.
“Humans are very fragile,” the droid lectures. “Their skin is only half as thick as Togruta skin. It seems that, in the throes of intoxication, you forgot.” This time, Ahsoka gets the huff of disapproval.
“I’m fixing your bedside manners too,” Anakin hisses.
While the droid is shrouding him in bacta spray, he watches Ahsoka. She’s sitting on an examination table with her legs drawn up, gnawing on her fingernails and staring at the floor. Suddenly, an image of her sparks up in the back of his mind, just for a moment. Ahsoka, underneath him. It isn’t a concrete memory, more an indistinct feeling of familiarity, like his hands know the shape of her and his mouth knows her taste.
He feels his stomach turn and wipes his hand over his eyes as if to rub away the image. A part of him hopes the memories don’t come back, but he knows himself well enough to understand he couldn’t live with not knowing. He’d have to ask her what he did to her, look her in the eyes and hear her say it. Remembering would be easier.
“I’ve calculated a 3.2 per cent chance of pregnancy,” the droid whirrs, “based on your genetic compatibility, age, hormone levels, and typical volume of sexual activity following a full ceremonial dose.”
Ahsoka and Anakin grimace in unison. The droid drops from the air, hits herself on the edge of an instrument tray and gives off a confused beep. Turning to Ahsoka, she says, “Would you like an emergency contraceptive?”
Wordlessly, Ahsoka nods. Anakin decides the bacta spray had enough time to dry and hurries to put his tunics back on.
“The after-effects of the Yarran Desert Orchid can last up to three standard weeks,” the droid drones on, “I’m putting you both on birth control for the duration.”
“What do you mean, after-effects?” he snaps, with more aggression than he meant to. He doesn’t resist, however, when the droid presses the hypospray to his neck.
“Visual disturbances, balance and motor coordination issues, nausea. Do not operate heavy machinery. Nightmares are common following accidental or non-consensual use of the substance. And bear in mind that you received a dose meant for newlyweds. The attraction is meant to last. It will fade over time when not repeated, but it won’t be instant. My contact says to be prepared for that.”
“How do you prepare for that?” Ahsoka asks, with an edge to her voice he can’t quite place. The droid huffs.
“They didn’t say.”
Ahsoka’s face looks pained, and he chews his lip in anger at his own failure. Their eyes meet for a brief moment, and that’s when a flood of memories comes gushing in.
The smell of the flowers is unlike anything he knows. It’s heavy and sweet and slightly off, like overripe fruit dipped in honey, but that’s not it: he can see it too, a luminous white mist crowding in on his mind, lurking right behind his temples. He can feel it on his skin, like static electricity on a woollen blanket. He can taste it, bitter and sweet, simultaneously sickening and seductive, like the first sip of bootleg spotchka a Vulptereen once gave to him in Mos Espa. It’s deafening without making a sound, like the opposite of noise. He stands open-mouthed and wide-eyed as the alien flower steals every one of his senses.
When he finds Ahsoka, somehow, he no longer knows his name, nor hers, nor who they are to each other. All he knows it that he wants—that they want; he can feel her like a part of him, and when their lips meet, it’s like an explosion of both their sensations in his body.
Then: a red piece of thread wraps itself around his finger from where her dress ripped at the seams, and he thinks, was that me?
Then: him kneeling before her, removing her boots and leggings, kissing the side of her knee.
Then:
He squeezes his eyes shut but the picture remains.
They leave the medbay in silence. He can tell Ahsoka is trying to shut him out, building walls around herself. She’s like him in that way, sometimes, except he has Padmé to tell him, don’t do this, Ani, talk to me.
“I will fix this”, he says. “I don’t know how, but I will. I promise.”
She gives him a strange sideways glance and he isn’t quite sure she believes it. She stops and faces him.
“Do we have to tell the Council?”
Do they? He has no idea. Her voice is steady, but her eyes grow wide, begging.
“I don’t want them to know. I don’t want to talk about it. I don’t want them to talk about it.”
His instinct is to agree; the idea of them standing in the Council Chamber, piecing together the story to the backdrop of Master Yoda’s hmm hmms, seems ludicrous. But he knows secrecy. He lives and breathes secrecy. He doesn’t want that for her.
“Are you sure?” he asks. “Maybe they could help?”
“Help? With what? How?”
“I don’t know?” He tries not to sound defensive and fails miserably. He knows that he’ll move the stars themselves to keep it from the Council, if she asks him to. It’s just that there’s this jittery feeling in the pit of his stomach that says they’re making a mistake.
“What if they reassign me?”
“It’s possible.” Do you want that? I’d understand if you did.
“I won’t have that.”
The stubborn determination in her voice draws a bitter smile from him, and he feels a sudden impulse to wrap his arms around her, kiss her forehead, tell her everything will be fine. At the same time he realises, blood pounding in his ears, that that’s not him. Never was him. Those aren’t his feelings. The durasteel wall behind her head seems to be coming closer, and it’s like reality has shifted a hair’s breadth to the side. How can he decide what to do if he can’t trust his own instincts anymore? He crosses his arms in front of his chest, just in case his hands have a will of their own.
Somehow, he manages to keep the panic out of his voice:
“The medical droid is going to file a report. I’ll see that she doesn’t.”
“Thank you.”
A rumble runs through the wall; tertiary engines firing to correct course, a perfectly commonplace sound on a starship, but still both of them flinch.
“Get some sleep,” he says, “we’ll figure everything else out in the morning.” He doesn’t know if that’s the right thing to say, if he should give her space, or talk to her, or-
She nods briefly, and he gives her a smile that he hopes is reassuring but feels empty. One question is killing him, and no matter how awkward, he needs to know.
“Ahsoka,” he begins. His stomach starts twisting itself into a knot, and the words won’t come out right; it’s all have-yous and did-yous and then he stumbles until she says it for him:
“Have I slept with anyone before?”
He nods once, his gaze fixed on the space between their feet. Then, finally, he forces himself to meet her eyes.
“No,” she says softly, and with that, turns around and walks away.
3.
The bunk bed in his quarters remains untouched, tight corners and tugged blanket and all. He takes a full minute longer in the refresher than usual and still feels grubby, so he sits on the floor instead, leaning against the wall.
(You see, Anakin has this thing about wasting water. He knows there’s more than enough of it on the core worlds; enough to split it apart to fuel the Republican Fleet. The ion engines keeping the cruiser in orbit run on deuterium that used to be rivers, oceans and rain, and still, when Anakin spends a moment too long in the refresher, he feels guilty.)
(Habits, he noticed, are harder to kill than people.)
There’s no hope of rest until he knows what he did to her, all of it, but when he tries to zero in on a memory, it evades him, like a word stuck on the tip of your tongue. He tries to clear his mind instead, but he’s never been good at the whole letting-go-of-your-thoughts-thing; an empty mind, he thinks, feels uncannily like a lack of purpose. When finally he manages to quiet his thoughts, he can feel the fog lingering at the periphery of his mind. It’s soothing, inviting, and with it come the pictures.
That symbol, the one on the pamphlet and the mosaic, it’s an odd lidless eye inside an orchid, and it’s on the windows too. The setting sun filters through it, throws its shadow on the bed; she lies between two petals, and her hand is in his hair. He kisses a trail from the hollow between her breasts up to her collarbone, his hand following the shape of her lek down to her chest where her heart is racing. Her mouth is on his shoulder, biting softly, but her teeth are sharp enough that when he kisses her lips, he tastes his blood.
Her legs wrap around his, she’s ready and waiting, and he drives his full length into her without warning. She gasps, her body arcs against his, and he buries his face in the valley between her montrals. It’s too much too fast, some part of his mind understands that, but that part has no say. He can feel her hands spread across his ribs, nails digging into his skin, just like she, too, wants to get inside of him.
After that, his mind feels blank, empty. He stares into darkness, waiting for the sun to rise thousands of parsecs away over the Galactic City.
Padmé rises at dawn when the senate is in session. The early sunlight falls on her hair, only a faint glare on her hologram, but the real Padmé must be glowing.
The surprise on her face is quickly followed by the realisation that something is wrong. He imagines what he must look like to her, bone-tired, blue-shifted and distorted by the light-years between them
“Ani. What happened?” She reaches for his hand as if by instinct, as though the distance between them didn’t matter, and he weaves his fingers into air, scattering photons, thinking if he imagines hard enough, he will be able to feel her.
“Do you know anything about wedding rites on Yarran?” he asks, quietly.
A smile cuts through her worry.
“I know they have a very interesting psychoactive plant.”
A sudden wave of affection washes over him. Padmé would’ve read the pamphlet. Padmé would’ve annotated the pamphlet with research of her own. She would’ve made intelligent conversation about the pamphlet with local dignitaries, working in some inoffensive but amusing joke. Ahsoka would’ve been safe with her there.
“I need to tell you something,” he begins.
4.
He finds Ahsoka on the mess deck. It’s nearly empty; this isn’t a real mission and he insisted on giving the 501 a break. He sits down on the bench beside her, just close enough that she can hear him.
“I bribed the medical droid with new circuits and my unrivalled skills as a mechanic. Now she can hover with the best of them, and we had a run-in with a sand scorpion. Officially speaking.”
His voice comes out half out of breath and he’s talking too fast—he practiced this, admittedly, just in case his voice failed him when he saw her. And this too: “Are you sure this is what you want?”
Without hesitation, she nods.
“Thank you,” she says.
He watches her carefully. He can sense her resolve, but the feeling of wrongness doesn’t go away.
“We could take leave,” he suggests. “They don’t need us here, the Royal Guard of Alderaan can handle the situation. All we are is Republican window dressing.”
“Then that’s what we do. We have to finish the mission.”
Going by the sound of her voice, you’d think it was a matter of life and death. He understands, in a way. She’s drawn a line before her and decided that crossing it means defeat. It’s her way to prove to herself (and him, perhaps) that she can go back to normal, and he can’t bring himself to take that from her. He nods briefly.
“Snips,” he says and pauses, looking for the words. “Talk to someone. Anyone. Barriss. Shaak Ti. Just anyone. Please.”
It takes three days and some minor concessions for Yarran to abandon its Separatist aspirations (whether that’s down to the Organas’ negotiating tactics or the persuasive powers of a Star Destroyer darkening the sky, Anakin doesn’t know).
Three days in which he doesn’t find the right words to say to her and their silence grows so heavy he can feel it like a weight on his chest. It’s lucky they’re the only Jedi around, really—they’re like a maelstrom in the Force; there’s no way they could have kept this secret. He can feel her like a shadow on his mind even when she isn’t in the room. When she is, she eclipses everything else. It’s a monumental exercise in concentration just to follow Queen Breha’s words when she announces a treaty is about to be signed. What he understands is that they have to spend one more night on the planet, and it’s a relief. That, and something else, some kind of alarm he cannot describe. He can tell Ahsoka feels it too. When they exit the royal quarters, her arm brushes against his by accident, and it’s like a lightning strike. For a moment, they stand next to each other in the corridor, lost, looking everywhere but at one another, and now’s the time to say something, he thinks, something to make it all right again, but he does not know what or how or—
She walks away and the moment is gone.
He’s sitting on the floor again. He misses his no-frills military bunk back on the cruiser; his room in the hotel is too much like the other room. The colours are different, whites and greys instead of garish reds, but the shapes feel too familiar; he keeps expecting to peel back covers and find the one-eyed orchid staring at him once again. Not an hour earlier, he was determined to find some sleep, finally, after three nights with barely any, but behind the fatigue there is a restlessness that keeps growing. That keeps pushing. That keeps whispering in his head, and it says one thing only: find her.
So he’s sitting on the floor, lights turned low to smooth over the irksome shapes, shirtless to cool down his flushed skin.
When the intercom at his door chimes, he has no doubt who it is.
The nervous energy coming from her feels contagious; her breath comes out faster than usual and his follows suit.
“I really tried to stay away,” she says.
“I really should tell you to leave.”
The door hisses shut behind her, and he doesn’t.
She’s wearing only her clothes, he observes: no belts, no lightsabers, no bracers, no leather coiling up her arm. She’s barefoot, toes curling into the carpet, and he’s too, he realises, measuring the space between them as if to pinpoint the exact place where fine becomes too close. It seems wrong, somehow, to be stripped of the various insignia of rank and station between them, like they aren’t supposed to see each other this way.
He offers the sole armchair to her and goes to sit at the back of his bed: the distance makes a difference, he tells himself. They will talk. He told her to talk.
“Are you cold?” he asks. He finds it hard to tell what other people consider cold. You’d think more than a decade away from Tatooine would’ve reset his perception of temperature to something more sensible, but the truth is, the buildings and ships of the Republic still feel like the inside of a conservator to him. It’s like a part of him still expects to wake up one day and find himself back beneath the twin suns.
“I don’t really get cold,” she says, shrugging, but he wants to wrap his arms around her anyway, just to make sure.
She sits on the edge of the seat, gnawing her lips.
“Are you going to tell Padmé?” There’s a pause in front of the name, a question mark, like she’s just trying it out, seeing if he’ll deny that there’s something. He’s never been especially careful and she isn’t blind, but this is the first time they’ve acknowledged it between them.
He nods quietly, more to confirm her guess than to answer her question.
“Already have.”
Her eyes widen.
“What did she say?”
“She’s worried. About you too, Snips. She told me to make sure you talk to somebody.“
The look on Ahsoka’s face goes from surprise to affection to pain within seconds, and it breaks his heart.
“None of this is your fault,” he adds. “She knows that. She’s still your friend.”
Her mouth relaxes into a faint smile, and she closes her eyes for a moment. He wonders if she’s going to cry and has no idea what he’ll do if she does. Hugging her is out of bounds. Just closing the space between them is out of bounds. In the end, she just swallows hard and that’s that.
“She sounds like a keeper,” she says softly. He grins.
“I think so too.”
For a moment, he’s tempted to show her the promise ring that’s tucked away in his discarded Jedi robes, but he can’t ask her to keep his secrets for him on top of all this. He just feels she should know that, no matter what happened and no matter what will happen, he will always choose Padmé, above anything. Above the Jedi, the Republic, the whole bloody galaxy, if need be. No brain fog and no desert shrub can take that from him.
He studies Ahsoka’s face and thinks she understands.
“So how did you know?” he asks.
She rolls her eyes with over-accentuated annoyance, but she cannot hide her smile.
“You two aren’t exactly subtle, you know? You haven’t spent a night at the temple in years. I heard gossip about that before I even met you. You look at her like she’s the only thing in the universe that really makes you happy, and I think that might be true.”
She trails off, staring out of the large bay window into the near-darkness. There isn’t much in terms of civilisation out there (not anymore).
“And,” she adds with a lighter tone, “I heard her call you ‘Ani’ once and you didn’t seem to mind. Anyone else, you’d be at their throats.”
“Actually, there is someone else who calls me that.” He pauses for dramatic effect, a little longer, perhaps, than strictly speaking necessary. “Representative Binks.”
He watches her eyes grow wide and can’t help but laugh.
“I’ve known them both for a very long time. And the truth is, I couldn’t stop him if I tried.”
“So there are things beyond even your power.”
“Not many.” He feels his smile die as his eyes fix on hers. “I was going to protect you, Snips. When I took you on as my Padawan, I swore I’d let no harm come to you. I hate that the one thing I couldn’t protect you from was me.”
She rises from her armchair and he watches her cross the room in silence. She looks as tired as he feels, he thinks.
“It’s not your fault either,” she says quietly. “I hope you know that.” She puts her hand on his shoulder, squeezes softly, and lets it linger.
He’s so exhausted. Three nights with little sleep left him feeling raw, kind of naked, and weak (he hates nothing more than feeling weak). Her hand is warm and something else too, something beyond human senses. The moment she touched him, something stirred at the edges of his mind, white and luminous and fragrant and electric, and coiled itself around the part of his brain that said no.
And so he doesn’t. Doesn’t say no. Doesn’t move when she lifts her leg over his and sits down in his lap, straddling him. Doesn’t shy away when her face is so close to his he can feel her breath on his lips. His arms wrap themselves around her waist, and he wonders if this means he’s given up fighting. It’s strange, he thinks, how he wants her more than anything and not at all.
She brushes a strand of hair from his forehead, her touch feather-light. Then, slowly, her fingers trace the scar that runs down his face.
“Togruta skin doesn’t scar,” she says. “Shame, I think they’re neat. It’s like they tell your story.
“The story of my failures,” he laughs. He sees her brow furrow and adds, lightly, “No, they are. I keep them so I do better next time.“
He raises his right eyebrow as if to indicate the scar behind it. “Ventress.” He lifts his left arm to show her a red streak just below his knuckle. “Really bad landing.”
Her fingers trail down his neck and come to rest on his collarbone. There’s a fine white line, nearly faded, in the hollow behind it. Ahsoka’s fingers ghost over it, and he flinches.
“Sorry!” she mutters, pulling her hand away.
He lets his head fall against her shoulder, cheek brushing against her lek. She’s warm. The bond between them is also warm; comfortable and inviting. He’s too tired to resist it.
“Transmitter chip,” he says against her skin. “So your owners can terminate you if you run away. Or for any reason, really.” The droids on Coruscant took ages to find it. “Micro-explosives with biomimetic coating. Quite elegant, actually.”
She laughs softly, her hand playing with the hair at the nape of his neck.
“Let me guess, you just had to take it apart.”
“Of course I did. Blew up a desk in the library and was put on sanitation duty for a month. Joke’s on them, I’m excellent at cleaning.” Did enough of it back when—
They sit in silence for a while, his head on her shoulder, her hand in his hair. Her fingers draw circles around his vertebrae (like planets do around their stars), absurdly light, making goosebumps. He’d happily tell her a thing or two about his childhood right now just to distract himself from her touch (it does make for a good story, truth be told: two Jedi, a queen, and a Gungan fell from the sky…).
Here’s your chance, Snips, he thinks. Ask me anything you want to know. Ask me how you get from Slave Quarters Row to the Jedi temple.
“Where’s the failure?” she asks.
He doesn’t follow.
“You said you keep the scars to remind you of your failures.” Her hand leaves his hair and travels back to the fine line on his collarbone. “How’s this a failure?”
He has no good answer, really.
“It feels like a failure,” he says simply. “Sometimes.”
He watches his hand trace the length of her spine and casually slip underneath her dress. He wonders how long he’s been doing this for.
“It isn’t,” she insists, with so much conviction he almost believes it.
“Ahsoka,” he says, his voice cracking. It’s an apology, an admission of defeat.
“I know,” she whispers into his hair. He kisses her shoulder, her lek, her temple, and then her lips.
The strange fog returns as soon as he tastes her, blurring the edges of his vision. There it lingers, different this time. It leaves him with some basic sense of self intact, and he doesn’t know if that makes it better or worse.
Their Force bond is changing too. He could always sense her, gauge her moods and feelings, but now she’s a luminous presence at the forefront of his mind. He can feel her like sunshine on his skin. There’s no need to learn her body; the Force guides his touch, and he can feel her pleasure reverberate through him.
Eyes closed, he traces the contours of her face, like a blind man trying to see. His hands follow the shape of her lekku all the way to the soft skin at the tips, drawing a small moan from her lips. He can feel the back of his cybernetic fingers brush against her Padawan braid and flinches. Shame hits him like a fist in the stomach, but the fog swirls and takes it away. He lets his hand drop to her thigh, feeling a hint of bare skin through the intricate pattern of her leggings. Memories come washing in of what her naked legs felt like underneath his hands, his lips, and against the side of his face.
Her dress pools around her hips, his fingers just about grazing the hem, and he swears the fabric moves out of the way on its own account, just a little, but if that’s his doing or hers, or if the Force has a will of its own, he cannot tell.
He breaks away, staring at his mechanical hand clutching her dress. He remembers the sound it made when it ripped apart and how he didn’t even notice then.
He makes himself look into her wide blue eyes and tries to see her, the real Ahsoka, behind the alien fog.
“Did I hurt you?” he asks, quietly. “Last time?”
For a moment, she stares at him in bewildered silence.
“I don’t know,” she whispers, finally. “I don’t know anything anymore.” She presses her forehead against his, and when they kiss again, he tastes salt. Tears, he thinks, but he cannot tell whose.
Then, she leans back and pulls her dress over her head. He watches as his hand trails down the middle of her chest, feeling her heartbeat in his fingertips. The hand wanders down across her belly when she rises to her knees to slide her leggings down and off. It feels surreal to him, like he’s watching himself on autopilot.
He’s in awe of her: she looks feral, alight and alive with raw power. She runs a thumb over his lips, down his throat and to his chest, and their eyes meet for a moment before she presses her lips to his, her hand pushing him into the wall behind him. She’s gone, he thinks. Lost in the fog; no words of his could reach her now. The Force is running wild in her, unchanneled, flying like sparks from her fingertips. Luminous beings are we, Master Yoda likes to say, and Anakin has never felt this more than he does now. He could melt his whole self into her, he thinks, if he gave up whatever speck of control he still possesses.
She runs her hand along his waistline, nails carving lines into his skin, fingers slipping past the edge of his trousers. He lets her. He follows her movements pliantly as she slides the fabric down his hips, and his body screams for her warmth and the weight of her in the brief moment that she breaks away.
When she returns to his lap, a strange half-sob escapes him; I’m sorry, he whispers against her montral, not that it means a damn thing when he’s hard between her legs.
She cups his face with her hand, her lips on his feather-light; her breath fast and unsteady as she sinks down and takes him inside her.
He wraps his arms around her, pulls her close, and that’s when the last bit of control leaves him. He cannot tell where his body ends and hers begins. He cannot say which one of the two beating hearts is his own. He can feel the way sound fills the room with senses that don’t belong to him. He doesn’t know whose pleasure bursts like stars behind his eyes: his, hers, or theirs.
5.
He falls asleep because she does. His body senses her calm, her measured breath and steady heartbeat, and falls in line as though it forgot it was a separate thing.
In his dream, the second sun sets scarlet behind a curtain of dust, and part of him admires, briefly, how resiliently the desert fought off everyone who tried to claim it. The would-be colonisers, strip miners, devastators, builders of megastructures who rip solar systems apart to remake them after their own design, they were all bested. He’s standing on a wealth of metal, and still, the most profitable thing to sell on Tatooine are people. Anakin knows his own price in sixteen currencies (including Republican credits because not everyone in the Republic is a pious believer in law and order, and some want things you can’t have on the core worlds, but you can buy everything on Tatooine, even with credits, if you have enough of them). Business is business, eh? Watto says; Anakin’s hair is sun-bleached and too long; there’s sand and oil under his fingernails and Watto says: clean that up before
“Anakin.”
He wakes with his heart racing and Ahsoka’s hand on his chest, like she’s trying to keep it in place.
“Nightmare?” she asks.
“Some old memory.”
“Looked like Tatooine.”
“You could see it?”
“I didn’t mean to. I thought I was dreaming, but then I realised it wasn’t my dream. It was strange.”
He studies her face and sees her worry fade as his heartbeat slows down. His arm is wrapped around her waist, her fingers playing with the hair on his forearm, and the casual intimacy of it scares him. Touching her is almost like a habit now (and those are harder to kill than people).
They should’ve waited this out on opposite ends of the galaxy, really. They were too arrogant to think some fragile flower could beat them, but it did (no, he corrects himself, he was too arrogant when he should have taught her better.)
“Humans are funny,” she chuckles, “I can make your hair stand up.” Her fingertips ghost along the inside of his arm, and she smiles when goosebumps appear. Then, she trails her hand up his chest, tracing a trio of parallel scratches she left on him.
“Get a bacta spray for those,” she says. “Please. I don’t want to be on your list of failures.”
The melancholy in her voice hurts him someplace deep, somewhere behind where her fingers are, and the last thing he should do is pull her closer, but that’s what he does. One of the last things, anyway, another is kissing her back when her lips brush over his.
With one quick move, he shifts himself on top of her. His kisses are too desperate and hers too cautious; she worries about her teeth and nails being like knives to him, but he doesn’t care one bit if he cuts himself open on her. He tries his own teeth on her, gently on her lower lip and down the side of her neck; he leaves no mark but he does make her shiver.
He grows hard between her legs, pushing against her folds, and he feels her shift to guide him in. The fog lingering about the edges of his mind twirls and thickens; he wants nothing more than to comply, but there’s a part of him that’s got something to prove (and doesn’t he always?). That part wants to make it last, to see how much pleasure he can wring from their bodies. Another part (that which dreams of Tatooine, maybe) wants to claw back some measure of control; if he cannot stay away from her, he at least wants to have charge of the how.
“Patience”, he whispers against her temple. Her eyes narrow in frustration, and he grins.
He wants to know her with all of his senses: he wants to watch the light play on her skin, wants to see if her orange, white, and blue flush like human skin when he touches her the right way. He wants to feel the sharp edges of her bones, the softness of her breasts, and all the hollow places in between. Sliding his hand down her body, he listens for her breath: it is a low hum right behind her lips as his fingertips brush her hipbone, open-mouthed and fast when he traces the edge of her thigh, and stops dead in her chest for a heartbeat when he presses his palm against her mound. He explores her slowly, with just the lightest of touch; her topography is subtly different from what he knows, but her pleasure lights up like fireworks in his mind when he gets it right.
He wants to taste her too: he places a kiss on her belly, and another in the hollow of her hip, moving down her body, and then his mouth joins his fingers. It’s an almost-kiss, all hot breath and butterfly wings, as slow as he can make it. Her fingers curl around nothing, into air, pressing half-moons into her palms, and she looks at him wide-eyed.
“All right?” he asks. For a moment, she just stares at him, and he wonders if it’s too much too fast again. Then, she nods hastily. His eyes stay fixed on hers as he lowers his head between her thighs.
Tentatively, he runs his tongue over what he assumes is her clit; he doesn’t really know the right words for her anatomy, but he can feel her pleasure run through her like electric currents. He takes a moment to savour her taste, which is unlike any human’s, and the alienness of her excites him. He sucks her in, and it’s like a shock goes through her body; her back arches, her head falls back against the mattress, and the noise she makes is almost but not quite a sob.
So he does it again, and again, licks and kisses her until he has her gasping and twitching. He takes her as close to the peak as he can without sending her over and leaves her right there: he stops what he’s doing and watches her pant, every muscle underneath her orange skin tense. His fingertips drift across her belly, her mound, and her lips, avoiding the most sensitive spots. He leaves a trail of kisses and soft bites on the edges of her thighs, and when he feels the tension in her body easy off, he returns to her sweet spot.
Again, he takes her right to the edge and no further. The third time, she makes a feral sound, like a growl; her legs tremble and close instinctively, looking for friction, and he pins her knees down to keep her spread open. The need he feels coming from her nearly overwhelms him too, and for a moment, he rests his head on her thigh to gain back focus. While they lie there panting and gasping, she slides a hand between her thighs.
“No!” he says with a grin. He grabs her wandering hand and pins it to her belly, and the other up above her head with the Force.
Her fingers dig into the leather of his glove, sending sensations up his arm and into his head. It’s not pain as such, it’s more technical than that, a dispassionate, abstract warning that if she did this to his human hand, she’d tear the skin right down to the bone.
He loses track of how often he takes her to the edge, loses himself in the surge of her sensations; he feels like he knows her body as well as he knows himself, and still, when he finally lets her come, he’s unprepared for the intensity of her feelings. He weaves his fingers into hers as she shivers underneath him, squeezes her hand as the waves of her pleasure come crashing in. For a moment, all he can do is breathe against her skin, inhale the smell of her arousal, and lightly kiss her most sensitive parts so the waves keep rolling.
When he senses it becomes too much for her, he releases her hands and slowly kisses his way up her body. A pearly sheen of sweat has formed just below her breasts; he licks it off her, teases her nipple with his teeth. He tries to meet her eyes, but her lids are half-closed, gaze unsteady. He curls his right hand around her neck, gently, without pressure, thumb tracing the line of her jaw; the leather of his glove on her naked skin looks almost obscene, he thinks. His lips ghost over hers, offering her a taste of herself, and she accepts, returning his kiss with a hunger that leaves him short of breath.
He grazes her temple, follows the line of akul teeth with his fingertips, caresses her lekku and the curve of her neck, bathing in the heat that radiates from her body. Then—could be minutes later, could be hours, he cannot say—she shifts and wraps her legs around him so his cock rubs against her mound. The sensation sends sparks through his body, and he can hear himself growl against her mouth. He quietly swears to himself, and her (and the Force, and whoever else listens), that he'll go slow this time. He kisses her forehead, running his thumb along her cheekbone, and sinks into her with his eyes squeezed shut. He pushes into her gently and deeply, listening for the rhythm of her breath to guide his pace.
In a world where they chose to do this with each other, this is how he’d have done it, he imagines. He wants to think that no such world could ever exist, but he’s no longer sure. Her hands graze the back of his neck, the sharp tips of her nails angled away, and he misses the flash of pain they brought him before. It felt right that he should be paying some small price for what he’s doing.
She’s still hyper-sensitive; he can feel ripples of pleasure run through her as he moves inside her, and they flow through him too, like their bodies are one. When he senses that she is spent, he chases his own pleasure, knowing she can feel every bit of that too, and when he spills himself inside her, he can hear her gasp.
He could fall asleep, he thinks. Right here, right on top of her, but sleep is the last thing he wants now that he knows she can see his dreams. So he kisses the tip of her nose, lifts himself off her and rolls out of bed. Her eyes follow him with a look of mild bewilderment, and he smiles.
“Be right back,” he says. This seems to placate her; she closes her eyes and only half opens them when he holds a glass of water to her mouth a moment later, when he gently pats her inner thighs dry with a towel, or when he wraps her in a blanket.
He discards the towel in the refresher and places the water glass in the dumbwaiter that takes it away (to the kitchen, 14 meters down and 3 to the right, he knows this now, he knows every speck of dust in this place, he knows the composite of the walls and the names of everyone who works here, he knows the precise long and latitude on the planet and the hyperspace coordinates too, because he always does better next time, with or without scars to remind him).
Out of the blue, he’s hit by a wave of something, he doesn’t know what. His stomach turns, his heart races, and his chest feels too tight. He braces himself against the wall; his mechanical hand touches the stone, and the electrical sensors in his fingertips tell his brain that it is cold. All of a sudden, nothing feels real. He doesn’t know if any of his feelings are his, or hers, or a fever dream, if the bond between them is the Force or the fog, or how much of what he’s done to her tonight was by his own free will.
He thought it would be easier to say none of this was my choice; it’s true enough. It’s like saying it brings it to life, gives it shape and weight and meaning outside of their shared dream state. When he told Padmé, that morning when the light was in her hair, the words turned sour in his mouth, became unspeakable, became angry, ugly tears that he didn’t understand. There was a warmth to the way she looked at him then that made him feel the light-years between them like physical pain.
He splashes his face with cold water and goes back to bed.
6.
It makes for a good story: Two Jedi, a queen, and a Gungan fell from the sky.
He could make an anecdote out of it, some quaint little story to tell to foreign dignitaries when they look at him and Padmé and ask, “how, then, did you meet?” He could, except when he does, he stumbles over the words, and something creeps into his voice, something uneasy and restless. He’s been to more worlds than he can count and could describe few of them, but Tatooine is etched into his bones.
Gardulla he remembers in sudden flashes: memories of her stench, glimpses of overcrowded, sand-flea-ridden barracks. Watto was mostly (mostly) benign for a slaver (mostly, except), which came with its own set of terrors. You can settle for mostly benign, you can cherish the cool, white-washed house that almost feels like your own, you can go to bed grateful that your owners are benign when they don’t need to be, and that’s when they own your mind as well as your body. You can go to bed grateful and then lose everything in the time it takes to roll a die. You can be sold, traded for favours, bet and won, lent and borrowed or rented out, to anyone, at any time, for any reason or purpose, and you will be. Some day, somebody will pay enough.
(In the end, by some stroke of fate or luck or maybe just a bunch of Jedi tricks, it was Qui-Gon who won him, and it took years for him to stop kind of, sort of thinking of the Jedi as his owners).
When he falls asleep again, in spite of himself, he dreams of a rainforest.
It’s an overcast night, and the giant serrated leaves around him look nearly black in the darkness. He doesn’t recognise the landscape, but it agitates him for some reason he cannot pinpoint. It’s not the humming, thrumming, buzzing, and howling that underpins the scene, nor the tang of layers and layers of rotting leaves, nor the humid heat laden with the perfume of so many flowers you can almost taste them on your tongue. He imagines that some six- to a-thousand-legged creature is probably crawling up his body somewhere, but that’s not it either. It’s the things that don’t belong here. It’s the blaster rifles randomly discarded on the forest ground. It’s the noise of speeder bikes patrolling in the distance. It’s the solitary person sitting hunched over a flickering comm unit.
He picks a blaster off the ground and examines it. Hand guard and trigger shaped for reptilian hands, and the markings on the stock look familiar. He thinks he knows where he is: up in the sky, Trandosha is rising in the east, Kashyyk a faint glow just above the horizon.
He looks sadly at the figure by the comm unit. It’s Ahsoka. It’s not right, though. This is not how it went down. She was never alone when she was brought here (he read the report three times). There was always someone else, watching, being watched over, planning. She was younger then than she looks now too, from a few meters away. He tries to move closer, but his presence disturbs the leaves, and any odd movement sets her on edge. He looks around; the forest is blurry at the edges—it’s a dream, he realises, and wonders briefly why he would be dreaming about this. Then, he understands that he isn’t.
This is her fear. She’s back, she’s alone. The noises are coming closer. They are waiting. They are coming. Three figures emerge, grinning, fangs bared, from the trees (Krix, Remy, Smug: he knows them; they’re the three that got away). We came back for you they hiss, somehow in unison; it’s not real, after all. He tries to tell Ahsoka this, somewhere in their shared mind, and is surprised when his voice rings out loud in the darkness.
The forest dissolves, melts into the ground like wax. For a moment, his brain is confused by the darkness that follows, and he doesn’t know if he’s asleep or awake. When he finally opens his eyes, he’s alone in the bed; Ahsoka’s standing by the window, the ghost of her warmth still lingering between the sheets.
It has begun to rain. Lightning flashes faintly in the distance, but it’s too far away to hear the thunder. Past the horizon, the land is veined with the roots of Desert Orchids digging deep into the ground, soaking up the raindrops.
He rolls out of bed, taking the blanket with him, walks up behind her, wraps his arms around her and the blanket around them both. She leans back against his chest.
“My turn to have a nightmare, I suppose.”
“The droid warned us this would happen. Are you all right?”
She hums affirmatively, and he can feel the sound of it reverberate through his body.
“I have no idea where this came from all of a sudden,” she says, “I haven’t thought about it in ages.”
He nods.
“Tell me about it. It’s one strange plant.”
“It was different from getting captured by Separatists or pirates. It’s being turned into an animal. Like you’re a thing.”
“I know,” he says softly. “It’s not a great feeling.” Under the blanket, he squeezes her shoulder, and it feels like something he’d do, on his own accord, without some alien flower warping his brain. For whatever reason, it feels weird, like the wrong memory at the wrong time.
“Do you think the Jedi are right to forbid attachments?” she asks, suddenly, and it catches him off guard.
“It’s clearly not a rule I’m very good at following,” he says, and then, after a moment of silence, admits, “I have my doubts. Why are you asking?”
The faint glow of lightning illuminates the clouds, and for a second, he can see their reflections in the window. She looks lost to him, sad and wide-eyed.
(“I keep forgetting how young she is,” he told Padmé that morning, when his eyes were stinging and the light was in her hair.)
“I know this is all wrong”, Ahsoka says softly. “I know this isn’t me. I know this isn’t you. But it makes me wonder what I will be missing if I spend the rest of my life following these rules.”
He’s the wrong person for this kind of question. He can teach her the intricacies of Form IV, show her how to use a shoto as an off-hand weapon, or how to shoot down droid ships and salvage the wrecks for parts. But the war will be over some day, and he’s not sure he can teach her how to be a Jedi in peacetime. So often, the endless litany of let go, fear not, grieve not seems empty to him, both hollow and unachievable, and he cannot repeat the words to her without also sounding shallow.
(“You keep forgetting how young you are too,” Padmé said. )
Ahsoka turns around in his arms and rest her head against his chest. For a moment, they stand like this, his arms wrapped around her, the blanket cloaking them both. She looks small next to him, almost fragile, but underneath the surface, he can sense her strength, her muscles like durasteel; she’s wild and deadly, a shining beacon in the Force.
Her hand follows the curve of his waist, traces the contour of his hipbone, and then slowly travels further down. He draws in a sharp breath. The way her hand wraps around his cock is a bit uneasy, a bit insecure, conscious of her nails; he guesses she probably hasn’t done anything like this before—and really, he should stop her—but his body doesn’t care about what his mind thinks, and he grows hard anyway. He can feel her reach out in the Force, like he did before, reading his sensations to guide her touch; he didn’t quite realise how exposed it makes you feel, how out of control. He lets her continue regardless, or maybe because of it, he doesn’t know anymore. Her touch grows more confident every time his breath hitches and every time he bites his lip and all the times he moans against her montrals or digs his fingers into her shoulder. It feels all kinds of wrong and all kinds of good.
And then, suddenly, it is too much. He drops the blanket, grabs her by the waist and lifts her onto the window sill. He takes her face in his hands, half-kisses and half-bites her lips, and crashes his body into hers. He slides into her easily, too easily, with hardly any thought at all, and only just remembers his vow to be gentle.
He wonders if he’s always liked it rough and doesn’t remember. He cannot remember a time when he didn’t want her. His head feels perfectly clear but his memories are off, like there’s a part of himself he cannot reach. He closes his eyes and listens to the sound of the rain. The drops seem to fall in slow motion; he can hear them burst and splatter against the window pane. The desert is unlike Tatooine, all brown and level, the soil too pasty to make dunes, and he imagines a sea of orchids swaying in the breeze. He wonders how much it has taken from him, how much of himself he lost without remembering, if he’ll ever get it back, and how he would know if he did.
“Anakin.” Her voice is low and heavy with worry; her breath is hot against his face. “Are you all right?”
He only now realises that he's stopped moving.
“I’m always all right.” He smiles against her mouth, but it doesn't hide that it's a pitiful lie, obvious even if she wasn’t sharing the haywire stream of sensations coursing through his system.
His hand follows the shape of her back lek down her spine, coming to rest at the small of her back. He pulls her close and drinks in her warmth; she’s a beacon in the Force, and she shines through the coldness of the universe.
Her head falls against his shoulder. He can sense her tiredness, or maybe it’s he who’s tired. He gives up trying to make sense of it. After a while, she shifts and places a light kiss onto the edge of his hair.
“Let’s go face the nightmares,” she says.
7.
He’s dreaming of sunshine again:
The soft Yarran sun streams through the window, painting shadows on his body, and when Ahsoka traces the edge of light and darkness with her nails, she etches the shape of the Desert Orchid into his flesh; it will stay there forever just below the surface, behind the freshly healed skin. The scars you can’t see are worse, he thinks; they’re unreal, intangible, deceptive, with nothing to ground you and say this was then and now it’s over.
The twin suns burn, they always burn; when his shirt comes off, the tan lines around his neck and wrists are like shackles, and he thinks about how strange it is that his body doesn’t belong to him.
(There are two things you need to know about Anakin Skywalker:
- You can buy anything on Tatooine, as long as you can pay.
- Everything that comes from Tatooine is broken. )
The second sun sets scarlet, and he’s thinking about ghosts, but it doesn’t go the way it did in reality. The scene is frozen, set to just before.
Ahsoka is there with him, sitting on a bed, in a cool white house, and it’s all wrong. He won’t know her for a decade. She looks puzzled, like she doesn’t know how she got there either, but she knows who he is, because who else could he be, really?
“Hey,” she says. Her large eyes are kind and a bit sad, and her voice is warm. It’s odd, he thinks. He sees her steel and her fire, her limitless, incorruptible determination, but he doesn’t always see her gentleness. She smiles.
“How old are you?”
He isn’t entirely sure. He hasn’t thought about this in a long time.
“Nine,” he says. “I think?”
There’s a pause.
“What happens next?” she asks, finally. There it is again, the kindness in her voice, with a hint of pain that tells him she has a theory, but she doesn’t know. He’s surprised to find there’s a small part of him that wants to tell her—
You don’t speak about it. You know, though, you always have. You know human bodies don’t only get sold for labour. You know when the transports arrive that the girls with the haunted eyes won’t be hauling water or fixing ships. You know when a stranger comes to Tatooine they’re looking for something that’s off limit in the shiny cities of the Republic. Sometimes that’s spice, sometimes a pilot who won’t ask questions, and sometimes… Some say things like: I want real, not the dead-eyed ghosts in the backrooms of Mos Eisley. You know when it happens to your friend. You know when Watto says you can’t go home until way too late even though there’s nothing left to do in the shop, and then your mother also has that haunted look for days, no matter how hard she tries to hide it from you. You know, and it’s someone else until it isn’t. Business is business, Watto says, and so you go where he sends you. You never speak about it. You know your price in sixteen currencies, you imagine yourself on a million worlds a million light-years away, you go to bed grateful that it’s over, and you never say a word.
It’s like saying it brings it to life, gives it shape and weight and meaning.
When he wakes, her hand is on his chest again, but it’s her heart that’s racing. He pulls her close and kisses her forehead, and it’s partly because he doesn’t want to look her in the eyes.
He understands. He understands the pattern that worms its way through the rainforests and desertscapes of their dreams. He understands that when they go to sleep, the fog goes away, and when it does, their minds underneath are screaming. He understands, suddenly and with aching clarity, with his naked body wrapped around hers, that when this is over, they will be nightmares to each other.
When the alarm on his chrono wakes him in the morning, she is gone.
Coda:
He sees little of her during the official signing of the treaty. They stand guard at opposite ends of the banquet hall, and when the ceremony is over, she leaves before he can get to her. Her presence in his mind is beginning to fade, but he can still sense where she’s going. He gives orders to prepare the cruiser for departure and follows her.
The room, that room, seems strange without the flowers, strangely ordinary. Without the perfume overwhelming every one of his senses, it’s just garish colours and imagery. He finds Ahsoka sitting on the bed with her legs crossed, looking out of the window, past the orchid-eye, onto the sunlit plains in the distance. He sits down beside her, an arm’s length between them.
“Are you all right?” he asks without looking at her. From the corner of his eye, he can see her nod.
“What happens now?” she asks.
“We go back to Coruscant, and we don’t tell anyone. If that’s still what you want.”
“It’s what I want.” Somehow, she sounds less convinced than before. He wishes he could ask Obi-Wan for advice.
“Anakin.” There’s an edge to her voice, and somehow, he already knows what she’s going to ask him. It’s almost funny, he thinks; he was so preoccupied with his other secrets that he forgot about this one.
“The three Trandoshans that got away, that you saw in my dream? You recognised them. I know you did. I felt it. You saw their faces, and you knew each of them by name. How? You weren’t there. You didn’t see them.”
She turns her head, the sunlight on her face so bright it swallows her features.
“I found them on Nal Hutta,” he says, knowing it explains little. After a pause he adds: “You know me. I couldn’t just let them get away.”
Her voice is low, with a hint of alarm, when she says, “What have you done?”
“Do you really want to know?”
For a moment, she hesitates. He can sense a trace of fear in her, but whether that’s of him, or for him, or both, he cannot tell. He tries to imagine the look in her eyes and is a little glad that he can’t. Then, she nods.
He offers his hand to her; their minds are still intertwined and he needs no words for this, he can simply make her see. Her hand is warm from the sunshine when she takes his.
A broad reptilian face shrouded in darkness.
Ahsoka inhales sharply; she recognises him. Krix, that’s his name. Prowling the swamps of Nal Hutta, he keeps looking over his shoulder, stressed, on edge. He knows there’s something there with him in the darkness with the unerring instinct of one predator recognising another. The next time he turns around, the blade of a lightsaber flashes blue in his eyes, and it’s the last thing he sees.
Ramy sees nothing as he dies. His eyes stare blankly into the night while his claws clutch at his throat, scratching himself bloody.
Smug lives up to his name.
“A Jedi,” he laughs, “I used to hunt the likes of you.”
As a reply, Anakin places the hilt of his lightsaber on Smug’s hip, angles, ignites, and watches the blade emerge from the opposite shoulder, artfully evading the heart. Blood shoots into the reptilian’s eyes, his breath gargling and rattling—there’s just enough left of his lungs to make his death a slow spectacle. He collapses, twitching, immobile, speechless, deformed with broken bones and melted flesh. Anakin watches every minute of his agony with quiet satisfaction.
Ahsoka pulls her hand away. He tries not to intrude upon her feelings (and really, he’s not sure he wants to know what she thinks about him right now), but a wave of them is coursing through his mind before he can stop them. There’s relief that no one else will have to go through what she did. There, too, is the slightest hint of gratification that her hunters are dead and she isn’t, but it passes in the blink of an eye. Then there’s disappointment, and repulsion, and then a hollow, fathomless sort of sadness.
She shakes her head slowly, sunlight bouncing off her skin.
“You didn’t need to do this,” she says.
“I know.”
“Did you think I’d want this?”
“No, Snips, I know you’re better than that.”
“Then why?”
He doesn’t know. He never has. He doesn’t understand how other people can acknowledge their anger and move on, while his runs him over like a sandstorm. He has no answer except that everything that comes from Tatooine is broken.
For a while, they sit in silence. Then, she takes his hand again, in both of hers, and there’s a warmth radiating from her that’s more than sun and body heat, that drowns out the disappointment and disgust and makes the sadness feel a little lighter.
“You shine so bright,” she says. “I wish you could see yourself. Because for all your boasting and all your showing off, I don’t think you know that. I don’t know if you’re the chosen one. I don’t know what you have to do if you are. But I know there is so much light in you. So much.“
He doesn’t know what to say, so he simply squeezes her hand. There’s still a part of him that doesn’t want to let her go, but in the end, he does. A stray cloud drifts past the sun, and he can see her smile.
She bumps her fist lightly against his arm before she rises to leave.
“Later, Skyguy,” she says over her shoulder.