Chapter Text
It must have been a short meeting—audiences with a man as busy as the Supreme Chancellor of the Republic usually are—because Padmé texts him that the meeting is over not thirty minutes after they hang up. Anakin has Palpatine’s personal comm code, though Palpatine’s only ever been the one to initiate contact using it. Anakin spares himself a moment for a deep breath before he keys it in: he will not break down in front of the Chancellor. The man respects strength, and rightly so; therefore, Anakin has to be strong.
“Anakin,” the Chancellor greets him familiarly, and Anakin can’t tell whether the man is surprised to hear from him or not.
“Chancellor, I only need a few moments of your time,” Anakin begins. Palpatine smiles accommodatingly.
“You I can always make time for you, my friend.”
His genial nature grates on Anakin for possibly the first time ever, but he knows he has to play along if he wants to get anywhere.
“This is about Ahsoka. I don’t believe that she’s been treated fairly, and you’re the only one that has the authority to intervene.”
Palpatine’s brow furrows.
“Frankly, I’m surprised, my dear boy. Did she not lie to you? Did she not betray us? I hesitate to take lightly the ways in which her actions hurt you.”
To hear someone talk about Ahsoka this way—as if her involvement in the bombing is a foregone conclusion—sends tongues of fire flickering up from Anakin’s heart to his throat, but he swallows them down. The Chancellor is just working off the information he has available: he doesn’t really know Ahsoka. It’s touching really, that he is angry on Anakin’s behalf, even if he’s wrong about her.
“I don’t believe she has done anything wrong, Your Excellency. I know Ahsoka, and she would never do something like this. If you could order the sentence to be delayed, or—or even pardon her— it would give me the chance to set things right.”
The Chancellor tilts his head and then nods thoughtfully. He has given Anakin his full attention, which he knows is a gift rarely bestowed on others, though often on Anakin himself.
“Of course, I am inclined to trust your judgement, Anakin, and I would like to do as you say, but unfortunately the rest of the Senate would not see things as you do. It pains me to say that that many in the Senate would much rather use your padawan as a scapegoat to protect their own reputations and power than allow justice to be done. I would not hesitate if I did not need their support to end this terrible war. I fear this would make the Senate call for my head, and such disunity would be a disaster for the war effort,” Palpatine explains, the picture of sympathy.
This is what Anakin thought he might say. Palpatine is always complaining about the corruption in the Senate and how it makes it so difficult to get anything meaningful done. Usually Anakin accepts these explanations and resolves to let the politicians handle it, but not today. This time, he pushes.
“Chancellor, I know that justice is deeply important to you. Is protecting innocent lives from the Separatists not the reason we fight the war in the first place?”
“You’re quite right, Anakin, but the war effort is for the greater good. As the Republic’s greatest leader on the battlefield, I know you understand the necessity of such difficult decisions. As it is, if the Jedi Council had not turned her over to the courts, or, if I had been allowed by the Constitution to have more discretion over the ruling in the first place, we would not be in this position.”
Anakin can’t disagree with him there, but it doesn’t do Ahsoka any good.
“It would still be wrong to let Ahsoka be executed. Is there truly nothing you could—" Anakin asks, abandoning all semblance of formality. He hears the desperate edge he can no longer keep out of his voice. If Palpatine detects it, he doesn’t acknowledge it.
“I’m terribly sorry, my dear boy. Please, feel free to come to me if you ever need a friend to talk to,” Palpatine interrupts, shaking his head, saddened.
“Thank you, Chancellor,” Anakin grits out—he’s never not meant the words before today—and the Chancellor cuts the connection.
Anakin growls and hurls the commlink at the opposite wall. It clatters to the ground with a thoroughly unsatisfying click. Breathing heavily for no other reason than his anger, he stares at the device where it’s fallen, its light still blinking mockingly at him. He hasn’t even managed to break it. The empty ration bar wrapper he’d forgotten he was holding crackles in his mechanical fist. Anakin wants to tear this whole place to the ground, but all he has managed is a working commlink, a crumpled wrapper, and some broken glass in the other room.
He’d been expecting this. Of course he had. When was the last time politics solved a problem instead of creating more? The only thing that seems to work anymore is violence, and Anakin has seen enough of it to know. Ironically, it is violence that he is trying so hard to stop.
Not even the Supreme Chancellor of the Republic can (is willing?) to stop this, and Anakin certainly can’t. He is forced to acknowledge that the nauseating sinking feeling of inevitability he’s had since this whole thing started might be real.
Not this again, anything but this, he’s felt this way before.
And then Anakin isn’t seeing the room he’s in anymore. He’s seeing his mother’s body tied to a wooden frame, her exhausted face lit up by the fire, he’s seeing a streak of colored light hurtling towards Ahsoka’s head. He’s hearing Shmi Skywalker’s rattling breaths, he’s hearing Ahsoka’s body hit a cool metal floor. He’s seeing his mother’s familiar face disfigured by a long weeping cut along her cheekbone and Ahsoka’s white forehead markings marred beyond recognition by a circle of blackened, burned flesh.
He’s hearing his mother’s last words.
I love… I love…
He’s feeling Ahsoka’s voice in his mind.
I love you too.
Anakin’s awareness comes back to his trembling body in the here and now and he stumbles into the refresher, retching. Even though he ate Kix’s ration bar, there’s still not much in his stomach. It burns his throat in an almost satisfying way.
He dry heaves a few more times after that, but there’s nothing left. It just makes his head pound. He hits the button to flush with shaking fingers that barely feel like his own and sinks down against the wall of the ‘fresher, closing his eyes. Not resting, never resting.
He’s not sure if the Ahsoka he saw is actually the future or just a horror of his own imagination. Anakin supposes it doesn’t really matter—she’ll be dead all the same.
He stays there, with a bad taste in his mouth and worse images dancing behind his eyelids until Obi Wan finds him.
“Oh Anakin,” he says from the doorway. Anakin cracks an eye open to look at him.
“What.”
“Are you—”
“I had a vision,” Anakin rasps, wanting the present to resemble the past no more than it already does. Obi Wan goes over and crouches down next to him, face open with concern that he doesn’t want or deserve. Anakin swallows.
“Of Ahsoka,” he says. There’s only one event in Ahsoka’s future left to sense, and Obi Wan at least understands this, not needing Anakin to name it out loud.
“Anakin—”
“I don’t want to hear anything from you unless its to say that she’s going to be safe,” he says flatly but forcefully. Obi Wan just sighs and tugs at Anakin’s arm. He lets himself be pulled to his feet, leaning on his former master only because he needs to. Obi Wan guides him across the hall, to his bedroom, where he has to sweep a pile of droid parts off the bed before lowering Anakin onto it.
“You need to sleep. You’ve been running yourself ragged.”
Anakin shakes his head.
“There’s nothing more you can do now, Anakin.”
Does Obi Wan think he hasn’t realized this? Why else does he think Anakin ended up slumped on the floor of the refresher? The visions he had before never made him physically ill. And he’s witnessed plenty of death.
He clenches his jaw painfully. “I know.”
Obi Wan tries to sit down next to him on the bed. It should be Anakin doing this, sitting down next to Ahsoka and trying to help her work through the knowledge that someone, probably a Jedi, had attacked her home.
“Don’t,” Anakin says, but Obi Wan does anyways. Anakin thinks the only way he’ll get Obi Wan to leave is if he pretends to go to sleep. He leans over to the side table, which has the added benefit of distancing him from Obi Wan’s misplaced attempts at sympathy, reaching for the digital chrono.
“What time?”
Obi Wan’s eyes dart between Anakin and the chrono, which clearly is telling them that it’s 19:32 right now.
“Not what I meant.” Anakin says. Obi Wan clears his throat.
“Oh-six-hundred hours.”
At dawn, then. Anakin makes a show of setting the alarm on the chrono for 05:45. His former master takes this as Anakin intends him to and stands up.
“Thank you, Anakin.”
Anakin chuffs a humorless laugh. He doesn’t deserve anyone’s thanks.
Once Obi Wan is gone, Anakin reaches over to turn off the alarm. He won’t be sleeping: he meant what he said to Kix. It would be a waste of Ahsoka’s last hours for him spend them doing something as mundane and pointless as resting.
He checks him comm first. He only has one message: a text from Padmé that simply reads How did it go? It is from an hour or so ago, and he feels a flash of regret that he kept her waiting for so long. The thought of not telling her, letting her hope for a while longer, crosses his mind. But, she’s probably worried, and Anakin hates the thought of lying to her. They’re going to face this together. He answers:
He said he can’t.
Or won’t.
I’m sorry.
She responds a few minutes later, a length of time that makes him think that she saw it right away, but it took her this long to compose an answer.
Do you need anything?
He wants to send back a scathing reply: Ahsoka. But that wouldn’t be fair to her. She just wants to help, and if she were anyone else, that fact might make him furious. Padmé is the only one who actually, genuinely did something to help them, even if it didn’t work.
Next, he wants to say: you. But that’s not right either, for all that it’s true. They’ve already agreed it’s not possible. Asking her for something she can’t give won’t make either of them feel better.
No.
Anakin’s ended up lying to Padmé anyways. She doesn’t reply after that. They both know there’s nothing to be said.
Next, he puts his lightsaber on the table next to the chrono and curls up on his side to watch the digital numbers change. After that, he just thinks. Anakin is ashamed that not all of his thoughts are of Ahsoka, though everything always comes back to her.
He looks at his lightsaber, a cylinder of metal that used to mean more than the sum of its parts. It used to mark him as a Jedi, as a protector, but he doesn’t want to be the former anymore and he’s failed at being the latter. Anakin thinks of what he’s going to say to the Jedi Council, the next time they call him in front of them. How many days will it be before they’re wanting to send him back out to the front again? Or maybe he shouldn’t even wait to be summoned—maybe as soon as Ahsoka is gone, he’ll go to them himself. Should he bring the ‘saber with him when he does, so he can give it to them, throw it at their feet, or should he should just leave it here for Obi Wan to find after he’s long gone? It might even be amusing to leave it here and make a game out of seeing how long it will take an astute Council Member to notice he’s not wearing it. He wonders which one will figure it out first. Then, he’s thinking of making games out of situations that shouldn’t be the least bit funny, which leads him to keeping counts of droid kills and then Ahsoka.
That’s how it goes. Everything comes back to her.
Anakin realizes that he’s skipped over the part where he decided to leave the Jedi Order. He can’t stay after this, he knows that. When did he decide? Maybe after Obi Wan asked him to cut the Force Bond. Maybe even before.
He tries to plan out in his head exactly what he’s going to tell the Council when he leaves. He wants to see the stunned looks on their faces. He wants them to feel as betrayed as he does. This exercise requires him to think over what his reasons are. There’s a lot of them.
Their treatment of Ahsoka is issue number one. They were supposed to take care of her, but they did the exact opposite. They took Ahsoka from her family when she was small—she didn’t even get the level of choice that Anakin had, which isn’t saying much—gave her to him instead, and then expected him to not love her like a daughter. This part is too personal for him to even tell the Council. The part where he says he loves her. That’s between the two of them. Soon the burden of it will be his alone.
What he will tell them, is that besides their actions having destroyed any perception of their moral high ground, he can no longer trust them.
He became a Jedi because he wanted to do good: help people like mom always said. No, he thinks, that’s why he stayed. He joined because he wanted to be free and make others free, but he’s long accepted the fact that the Jedi aren’t going to do anything about the slaves. He has no reason to look past that now—he never should have. Being a Jedi is not what he thought it would be.
It’s bitterly ironic. Many believe that Anakin is the Chosen One, sent by the Force to bring balance and save the Jedi. The Council preaches trust in the Force, but trust goes both ways. They abuse their power to play politics with people’s lives. From where Anakin is standing, they haven’t given the Force a reason to trust them. Anakin doesn’t believe that he’s some kind of manifestation of the Force—he’s not entirely convinced the Force even has a will anymore, or that he should follow it if it does—but he sure doesn’t trust them.
Anakin wishes he were a manifestation of the Force. Does the Force feel pain? But he knows he’s human, alive just like anyone else, because he can feel. He can feel and it hurts.
He spends the hours running over the place in his mind where he and Ahsoka are connected. It’s like when he was a child and he had a loose tooth. He couldn’t stop poking it with his tongue, even though it stung every time did. He doesn’t project anything across the bond—nothing that would call Ahsoka’s attention—but he wonders if she might be doing the same thing. At this distance, actually using the bond to communicate with Ahsoka would take a lot of effort. He needs to save his strength if he’s going to do it later, when it really matters.
The only movement in the room is Anakin’s chest rising and falling and the numbers on the chrono changing. He reaches for Ahsoka’s presence over and over again, trying to memorize how it feels, because with each breath, each moment, the time is coming closer when he’ll reach and find nothing there.
He needs to remember what she felt like, what she looked like, how she laughed, what she liked and disliked. Anakin won’t let her be lost to the universe. Already, he is starting to forget his mother’s face. Every time he thinks of her, her features shift and blur, just slightly out of focus. He’ll do better this time.
Too slowly and too quickly, it becomes 05:45. Anakin pushes himself upright on the bed and then spends another minute sitting there, looking at his hands. Not really sure why he feels the need to, he strips the glove off his right hand and leaves it there on the bed. The gleaming metal and exposed wires make him think of failure.
He goes into the living area and stands in front of the large window there. It doesn’t face the detention center where he knows Ahsoka is, but it does face the sunrise. The sky is awash with pink and orange. This room is high enough above the other buildings in the city that the bright beacon of the sun and colorful expanse of watercolor sky aren’t too obscured by Coruscant’s skyscrapers. He can still see their reflective rounded towers stretching towards stars that aren’t visible right now—ones he knows are there nonetheless. A few star destroyers are departing the planet; he can see their grey outlines in the upper atmosphere and the bright bluish-white spots of their engines firing.
Anakin assumes the same pose he did on a morning that’s now years past, on the balcony overlooking the lake at Varykino: feet spread wide apart, hands behind his back, straight spine. He doesn’t close his eyes this time.
The Force tells him when Ahsoka needs him. He takes a deep breath and stretches out with his mind, follows the Force racing across traffic lanes and through walls to find her. It’s not as hard as he thought it would be. His thoughts for the past night have been so full of her and her life that they make it easier to lock away the darkness he feels: the rage and despair.
Ahsoka, he thinks, hoping she can hear him. She doesn’t send any coherent thought back, but he can feel her flicker in the Force and knows she’s listening.
Watch the sunrise with me, he thinks. For an instant, he stretches his senses out from her and hears a man’s crisp voice, giving orders. They don’t have much time.
Anakin collects himself back to her and then surrounds her completely in his Force presence. Ahsoka’s mind is right there, pressed up against his own. At least he can do this—take her mentally away from where she is. This way, she won’t be able to sense it coming. She won’t even flinch. He can help her be brave.
He’s pulling her awareness back to the Temple, to where he is. Anakin imagines that they’re in one of their battlefield camps, and he’s wrapped her in a warm blanket, carrying her—already half asleep—away from the fire and back to her tent. Then, it’s like Ahsoka is standing right next to him. She burns bright in her place at his side.
They watch the sun rise.
He watches the sun rise.