Jedi don't love.

Ahsoka knows this. It's not just her training, the years of discipline, the practiced detachment, the inner peace, cultivated like a weedless garden. It's a simple fact, a given, the way of nature. It's like saying rocks don't float (except in the Kli'Bek system, but that's different).

But he does. She knows this too, and it is almost as undeniable a fact as the first, almost as inherently natural. Her Master does love, does desire, does have attachment. It's written in the set of his shoulders and the measure of his stride and the way he purses his lips. She sees it when he turns his face away, when he flexes the fingers of his good hand in response to a memory, when his body betrays him with a twitch at the sound of her name. She witnesses these things, marks them, catalogues them. She won't say that she covets them.

The others don't know. At least, she's pretty sure they don't. Master Obi-Wan— although he must suspect something, must see something with those flashing eyes that she's certain see inside her own skin. But Master Windu, even Master Yoda, the Council, they don't know at all. They see nothing.

Of course, they haven't observed him like she has. They don't spend every waking moment memorizing his patterns, his technique. They don't trade barbs and quips and nick-names with him, don't see his flashes of humor and of fury as often as she does. They don't train their bodies and their minds to mirror his, to match each movement close as a shadow, two parts of a balanced whole. They don't know what it is to want nothing more than to be like him, be beside him, be worthy of being his Padawan, his apprentice, his Snips. They don't know him like she does.

They don't watch him like she does.

They don't note what makes him smile or what makes his hunched shoulders drop. They don't listen for the softness to creep into his voice or wait for his eyes to light up from inside. They don't count the times these things happen so that they might be able to once in a while be the cause of them, if only he would let that happen.

Jedi don't love.

Except he does. And so does—

Well. She did learn from the best.