A River Flowing
Interlude

The shops in Ninth Sector's sky rung were way too hoity-toity for Ahsoka's budget, but she knew how to play her hand. One large fizzy juice made her a paying customer and paying customers got a nice little seat right by the false window where they could spend some good quality time getting to know their drinks, if they paid for them; Ahsoka did. Ten credits, nice and easy. She rolled the glass between her hands; the twisty straw spun. Condensation slicked her skin. Nice and easy, sure: maybe before.

A waiter gave her the once-over from across the room. Skinny Togruta, worn-out sandals, bright clothes from a discount place down on the middle rung. His lip pulled up. Ahsoka rounded her eyes at him, batted her lashes, and blew bubbles into her drink. Snooty jerk. Taking a teeny sip of the juice, and shuddering at the way it frizzled in her mouth, she turned her attention instead to the elaborate ceiling and window system. The café might be situated in the sky rung, but Coruscant's sky was a crowded place, so like many of the shops that couldn't afford roof-top rent, the owner had opted instead to spring for a standard holo immersion that replaced the ceiling with the illusion of a blue sky, clear of air traffic and smog, and the walls with a spectacular view looking out on an ocean Coruscant had lost millennia ago to the encroaching sprawl of civilization. Personally, she'd have preferred actual transparisteel windows looking out on the actual speeder lanes running between Coruscant's starscrapers; then she could have seen Anakin's approach.

Seen or unseen, she felt it. He was at the door; he was through it. She was sinking down in her seat like some dumb kid with the straw digging into the roof of her mouth and the glass slippery in her hands. The hostess greeted Anakin, and he said something to her but he was already walking past her, down the double wide aisle back to the two-seater table in the far corner. His hair was longer, but he still carried the lightsaber on his belt and he still walked like he thought maybe he was late for the action or maybe someone else would get there before he could.

She spat the straw out. He got to the table before she'd sat all the way up, so she was stuck halfway to attention with her legs stuck out in the aisle and her back hunched. It was some time after the professional lunch hour; the café had few other customers, and so there were no well-dressed secretaries laughing noisily or large parties discussing politics and the war across tables pushed together. Quietude sat on Ahsoka's shoulders. Her old master opened his mouth; then he closed it abruptly again, and his teeth clicked together. She curled her toes. The woven leather of the sandals scraped the tips of them.

Ahsoka set her glass on the table. That clicked, too. Slick, the glass slid a half-inch across the table and then stuck. She smiled at Anakin.

"Hey, Skyguy," she said.

The inside corners of his hairy eyebrows pinched. Then, only just, some small muscles in his cheeks twitched, and he too smiled. Only just.

"Hey, Snips," he said.

"Stop standing around like that," she said, puffing her face, "looking like you're gonna bust somebody. You're making me think I gotta start kicking windows out."

Anakin flipped his jacket back and sat across from her. His face ducked; that mess of hair got before his eyes. When he looked up again, the smile was something she recognized.

"Do you have to kick a lot of windows out?"

"Not a whole lot," she hedged, and she chanced another smile, from up between her head tails.

The lines of his face eased, and then they tightened again; he resolved into a person very distant from her, with awful eyes, sad ones. As if from very near, right in her ears, she could hear a steady thumping; but of course that was her own heart beating double time. A pressure like a squeezing hand caught her stomach. The café was quiet. They were silent. Anakin's hands, laid flat on the table, moved. One of them fisted; the other hand closed over his wrist.

I could kick out the window, Ahsoka thought. It was a funny little thought. She didn't think Anakin would laugh. She didn't think she'd laugh either.

Ahsoka looked fixedly at the glass of fizzy juice; she looked through it, the stained yellow of the drink and the bubbles that crept one two three up the sides, at Anakin's clenched hands. Two bubbles coalesced into one and that one bubble trickled inevitably up to the surface where it popped. Padmé had suggested to Ahsoka that she write out a list of everything she wanted to say to Anakin.

"What—like a script?" Ahsoka had asked. She'd wrinkled her nose at the thought.

Padmé laughed and set her tea down. Shizi tea, she'd explained to Ahsoka, to help with the pregnancy sickness; a traditional remedy on Naboo.

"Not a script. It's more like—" Padmé glanced up, thinking. Her fingers traced the lip of the cup. "A to-do list. Sometimes, when I'm very nervous about something, it helps to write out what I want to say and do. So I feel like I'm ready for it."

"What do you get nervous about?" Ahsoka had blurted. She'd known it was a spit-brained thing to say right as it came off her tongue but by that time she couldn't choke it down again.

But Padmé hadn't laughed at Ahsoka or reminded her of how just a half hour before Padmé had clutched Ahsoka and begged her not to tell anyone. She'd looked at Ahsoka, sitting beside her on the sofa, and smiled with just the corner of her mouth.

"Why don't you think I get nervous?"

Ahsoka hunched her shoulders up. "I don't know. You're just always so—calm. Really together." That wasn't the whole of it, but Ahsoka hadn't known how to say it, that Padmé was very precise; that she was in some small, quiet ways more like a Jedi in temperament and philosophy than so many Jedi that Ahsoka had known. Glancing at Padmé then, Padmé with her serenity draped over her again, Ahsoka had known another moment's tongue-tiedness, the sort of sticky mouth she tried not to admit. Her tongue had got clammy like that around Lux Bonteri and Offee, too, Barriss with the freckly spots on her nose.

Ahsoka looked away from Padmé. Her chest was aching. Don't think about Offee, she said to herself over and over again, and yet she kept thinking of her friend, of Offee shouting to the court that she had done it; she had set the bombs; she had killed those people, and she had put it all on Ahsoka. Barriss had been her friend. Jedi have no attachments, Ahsoka thought; but Ahsoka was not a Jedi, and Barriss Offee was not her friend.

"I'm not always as calm as I appear to you," Padmé said into that stillness, "or to the senate, or the media. Or even to—" She hesitated. "To Anakin."

"So you make lists?" Ahsoka had asked. "And that helps?"

Padmé reached for her tea. "I organize my thoughts. I marshal my words. Like generals do before a battle. And if I'm prepared, then even if I'm frightened, I can set my fear aside."

Now, seated across the table from her no-longer-her master, Ahsoka could not remember anything she'd written out the night before. His fingernails were uneven. She saw that clearly through the glass. An unfamiliar scar notched the first knuckle of the third finger of his flesh hand. He still wore a glove over the prosthetic hand. Carbonation did its work in the glass.

"I don't like fizzy juice," Ahsoka said.

The left hand, flesh, fisted, softened. The tension in his fingers ran out. He looked up to her.

"You don't?"

She made a face and shook her head. "It's yucky. I don't like all the bubbles. They make my mouth hurt. It's like eating that pop candy that explodes in your throat."

Anakin wrinkled his nose and then—his shoulders tipping—he said, laughingly, "Then why do you drink it?"

"Well, I wasn't supposed to drink it when I was a padawan," she said. "You know."

The laugh faded away. His hands were flat again, though, loose on the table.

"Yes," he said, "I do."

Ahsoka's fingertips were dull with cold. The last of the other diners left through the door; they were alone in the café but for the staff, and only two of them remained. She pushed the glass away.

"I know you picked this place out, Master," she said, "but I'm not really hungry and—" And she staggered; she stopped; her tongue turned in her mouth. She wasn't a Jedi, and Barriss Offee wasn't her friend, and Ahsoka had no master.

Anakin rose. The folds of his long jacket fell down past his hips.

"Let's go," he said only. So they went, Ahsoka walking double fast to keep up with his long stride; then she nearly passed him. The tops of her montrals were taller than his shoulders, she realized. Padmé had said Ahsoka was taller, but Ahsoka hadn't thought— A strange exhilaration got into her feet, and she bounced as she stretched her legs out. She didn't have to walk fast at all. She was almost of a pace with him, and Anakin, as if he'd forgotten the months they'd been apart, had already adjusted his stride so that they matched again.

"You've grown," he said to her, as they climbed the outside stairs to the glass-enclosed roof gardens that arched from one starscraper to the next, all along the block.

Ahsoka, running lightly up the railing, did a flip forward onto her hands so she could look back at him. Her head tails flopped down; she shook them out of the way.

"Course I grew. Just because you're stuck where you are doesn't mean I can't keep growing."

He gave her a look, the old, dry one. "You're still just a little snip."

"No, you're just a weirdy giant." At the next landing, where the stairs turned to go up the far side of the building, she swung back onto her feet. "Why do humans grow so big anyway?"

"Why do Togruta grow so small?"

"I'm going to be tall for a Togruta." She stretched up onto her toes. The sandals creaked. "I'll use the force to boost my growth spurts, so I'll wind up even taller than you."

"You won't be able to walk," he said mildly. "Your montrals will pull you over."

She hopped down at the entrance to the gardens and smacked the door release pad. "No lecture about how that's a selfish perversion of the force, and I should do what you say and not what you do?"

The door hissed open. The thick perfume of jungle washed between them, and the sound of a bird shrieking echoed in her horns. Anakin stood there at the threshold, looking at her, and he said, "No. I think that you're free now to decide these things for yourself."

Her nose hurt. She rubbed at it and preceded him into the gardens, trying to think not about how her nose burned but how sweetly the effusion of Karitete flowers at the entrance had bloomed. The gardens were a hothouse, a sweltering change from the chill of Coruscant's sky rung, up high where the winds were cold no matter how warm a day had been scheduled for the sector. Tangles of vines, cut back from the multitude of pathways that ran flat or arced throughout the vast rooftop garden, had begun to creep out again. Ahsoka clasped her hands together at her back and looked up at the patchwork greenery, at the swollen flowers that hung like lanterns in asymmetrical clusters along the way.

It was Anakin who spoke next.

"So what are you doing now?"

She scratched at her wrist. Somewhere in the shadows, a bird hopped; she caught just a glimpse of its scarlet plumage, but she heard its soft cooing.

"Um, not much. Nothing really exciting," she admitted. "It's kind of boring. I'm working for this courier company over in tenth mid, and sometimes they give me extra hours for transcription stuff." She didn't mean to do it but she did glance at Anakin then, to see if—she didn't want to see it. Already she was saying: "I looked into it but I can't do security stuff, not the legal kind anyway, until I'm seventeen, and I can't do police stuff until I'm eighteen, and I don't—I'm not gonna—I'm not a rat fink bounty hunter," she said fiercely. "And I'm not a smuggler."

But all Anakin said was, "You can't do police work?"

"I'm too young," Ahsoka said. She did walk double fast then, to get ahead of him and under the thicker canopy ahead, where the shadows were deepest.

"'Cause it turns out," she called back to him, "that it's not like—no one else official lets kids do—" She threw her arms out. Her hands, turned up to the heavy blossoms, bent back at the wrists; she fisted her fingers. "I can't fight for anyone. And I don't really know anything else."

His hand brushed her shoulder.

"You know many things," he said to her.

"Nothing I can use," Ahsoka said. She dropped her hands. "Nothing any job could use, any real job."

"You have talents, Ahsoka—"

She rounded so sharply on him that he had to stop, stop talking, stop walking, cut off short by her.

"You think any of them matter?" Her teeth ached now too, same as her nose. "Maybe force reading—mind tricks—that stuff I could use, if I worked for Black Sun. If I worked for Hutts."

His face shuttered. She'd known that would stick at him; she wished she hadn't said it.

"If I can help—"

Ahsoka turned from him. She folded her arms over her chest and kept walking; she kept moving. If he followed her, fine.

"I don't need any help," she said, too fast. "This is my life now, and I'm going to—I'm fine. I have an apartment, and I'm working, and I'm learning."

"Ahsoka," he said.

"And you didn't tell me about any of this stuff!" She whirled again; her head tails thumped her shoulders. "I didn't know about rent. I didn't know that you have to—You want to leave," she said instead. "You still do. There's no discretionary funds, Skyguy. They don't give you credit tabs. I have to earn credits, and I had to pay for that drink with my own money, and that was ten credits that I, I could have got enough food for two whole days with that in the ground rung, and it wouldn't be good food but now I can't because you said let's meet at this stupid fancy place—"

Her voice was breaking. She didn't want to crack; she cracked anyway. Anakin reached out to her again. She let him. He wrapped his arm around her shoulder, very cautiously, as if they were strangers, and when she didn't push him away, he wrapped the other arm around her too. Her fingers dug into her elbows. She kept her arms folded. Blinking furiously, she found her eyes were wet. He rested his cheek on top of her head. His skin was cool against her skin; he was always such to her. Humans ran so cold. She could hear his pulse in his throat. She heard it when he drew in a rough breath before he spoke.

"Why didn't you call me?"

"I have to do this on my own," she said, muffled in his shoulder.

"I would have helped you—"

"You can't." She turned so her cheek was fitted to the long stretch of his clavicle, so she looked out along his shoulder, at the way the vines knotted along the path. Dully she said, "You're a Jedi Knight, Skyguy, and I'm an apostate. They're not gonna make you a master if you're still talking to me. No attachments, remember?"

His arms tightened around her. Ahsoka wrinkled her nose as hard as she could, trying to get the Hutt-faced, spit-shit tears to go back down but it was like saying something you didn't mean to; it was like—kicking out a window, she thought, and the glass came out but you couldn't cram it back together.

"You saw Padmé," said Anakin.

Ahsoka nodded. She couldn't, really, the way he was holding on to her.

"I'm going to be a father," he said. "The council isn't going to look very highly on that either."

Ahsoka's arms were loosening. She didn't have a father, not one she remembered. She had no family at all.

"Padmé said, she was going to go into hiding," Ahsoka said. "So the Jedi wouldn't know that the baby was yours."

"She isn't," Anakin said, with flat certainty. "I won't let her."

"You can't make her—"

"Ahsoka."

His arms parted. He settled his hands on her shoulders and pushed her back; he held her, still, and he held her still. He looked at her, but he did not see her. Something else was in him.

"They took my mother from me," he said to Ahsoka.

She hooked her hand around his elbow. She tried to say, "Every Jedi is taken from their family," but Anakin hadn't stopped.

"I was ten," he said. "And the next time I saw her, she was dying. The Jedi didn't kill her, but I wasn't there to protect her because of the Jedi. And then they took you from me—"

"I left," Ahsoka said, "I did that on my own—"

"Because of what they did to you!" He shook her, once, and she knocked his arms away. His hands fell from her. One fell into a fist. A bird nearby rustled in the leaves, and a cat was yowling plaintively somewhere.

"I won't let them take my wife from me too," Anakin said. He was in shadow; they were both in shadow. "And they won't have my child. They're not taking any more of my family, not now, not ever. I won't let them."

She looked at him in the thin light the canopy allowed. The gardens were hot, sweatily so, and yet she did not sweat, though she could see the telltale glimmering on Anakin's skin, the faint flushing of his cheeks. He would have been very uncomfortable on Shili, with its deep valleys overflowing with riotous jungle, those vast swaths of rainforest. The canopies there had been so thick, at night she could make out only her palms in the dark, her fingers lost.

"I went to Shili," Ahsoka said. "That's where I'm from. Originally, I mean, before Master Plo Koon found me. I thought maybe I could learn something about…" She gestured vaguely at first and settled for pointing to herself. "The Togruta live in tribes there. Really big family clans. If I could find my clan, I figured. That sounds really silly now, like how could I find one group on the whole planet that I could say, yeah, that's mine, when I don't even know—anyone."

Whatever anger had sustained Anakin faded from him. His shoulders relaxed.

"What did you find?" he prompted.

"That I didn't fit in," she said. "You're not supposed to be—an individual, if you're Togruta. They do everything together, and you have to, you think with the group. They don't argue, ever, and all I do is argue about everything." She didn't hold it against Master Plo Koon, not really. As a child, when she'd tried to remember her family on Shili, she'd found nothing more than a distant impression of happiness, and that was certainly no stronger than her happiness when Master Plo Koon visited Clawmouse and held his hands out to her and let her sit with him to talk.

"They don't wear shoes on Shili," she said. She stuck her foot out so he could see the sandals she'd traded her boots for. "It's to keep them connected to the earth. They feel it; that's part of what ties them all together in the pack. So I, um, I took off my boots, and I walked like they did, barefoot." Ahsoka looked at her own toes. She set her foot down. "Do you know what I felt?"

Gently he asked her, "What did you feel?"

"Nothing," she said. She wiggled her toes. The weaving still worried her feet. "I didn't feel anything. Just dirt and grass."

"You aren't wearing your head dress anymore," he said.

"Togruta wear the akul-tooth headdress," Ahsoka said, "and I'm not really Togruta. Am I?" She tried to smile at him, but it wasn't the smile that came out.

Anakin gave her his arm again, and she turned; she buried her face in his chest. She hated to cry. It left her tired, her head hurting, her ears stinging. She knotted her fingers in his jacket; the leather groaned as she pulled at it, beating her fists once, twice, against his back.

"I should have been there," he said. "I'm sorry I wasn't."

"You couldn't have changed it," she mumbled. "Not even you, Skyguy. Head up in the clouds. Thinking you're so great that you can do any—anything."

Her heels lifted off the path. Gravel scraped underfoot. He was rocking her, very softly, from one side to the other, and he was still so much taller than her that she drifted on her toes. Anakin sighed. She closed her eyes and thought, she'd left snot all over his shirt. Well, he could afford to clean it.

"I'm sorry I didn't call you," Ahsoka said at last.

He was silent for a long moment, holding her like that.

"I'm sorry," he said, "that I wasn't someone you could trust."

She took a deep breath and unwound her arm, long enough to wipe at her face. With her arm over her eyes, she said, "I do trust you. I just didn't—I didn't want you to be ashamed of me. For leaving."

"I will never be ashamed of you," Anakin told her, and he squeezed her shoulder in such a way that she wanted to cry all over again.

Instead, she brought her arm down and her eyes up; she did smile then, though it couldn't have been a terribly strong smile.

"Senator Amidala said that—she thought you were worried," Ahsoka said, "about being a dad. But I think that—" She swallowed. Already her head throbbed; her eyes felt blistered with tears. "You're gonna do okay."

On Shili, looking for a face that matched her own, markings that might tell her if someone was related to her, if she'd found the clan to whom she belonged, she had thought now and then of who her parents might be, who her father would be; and it hadn't been her face she'd seen or Master Plo Koon's, but Anakin's as he'd clapped her back and said, "Well done, Snips," and then smiled at her.

Anakin touched her stinging nose, just to flick it. She scowled and batted at him. He was smiling now, that smile that was almost what she'd remembered but older now, in some way she couldn't define, as if he too had grown while she was racking up inches in her legs and her horns. She wanted to ask him, do you have nightmares, too? Do you wake up at night, thinking about the soldiers that died because of mistakes you made? But Jedi didn't have nightmares. Ahsoka did, most nights since she'd left the order. She'd gone to apply to the police academy on Coruscant and they'd told her she was too young, and she'd wanted to laugh because what she remembered was Captain Rex calling her kid and little one and then telling her she was calling the shots.

"Thank you," Anakin said, smiling at her almost like he used to smile at her. "For coming back."

"I know that—I'm not supposed to," she said, and she wasn't a Jedi any more, she wasn't, but she remembered: let it go, let them go, let go of hate, let go of love, find peace in the absence. She remembered, too, Padmé, very composed after she'd finished shaking in Ahsoka's arms, asking C3PO for more tea and then saying to Ahsoka, "I don't regret it," as her hand rose from her lap to brush her belly.

Ahsoka grasped Anakin's sleeve; she held on to it tightly, so very tightly, like Senator Amidala had held on to Ahsoka.

"But I really—I really missed you," Ahsoka said.

"It's all right," Anakin told her, and he turned his hand so he cupped her arm as she clutched his. "It isn't a bad thing." That wasn't what a true Master would say; but he wasn't Ahsoka's master anymore, and she wasn't his padawan learner, and she thought: yeah. It was okay.

"I missed you," she said again, "I really missed you," and Anakin said, "I know," and she was—Ahsoka was glad, glad she'd gone to see Padmé, glad she'd listened to Padmé, glad that she was here now; and she thought, then, in the rooftop garden, that everything would be okay after all. It had to be, after everything that had happened. No more bad things, she thought, and it was a wish as much as anything else. No more bad things. Please, Ahsoka thought. She didn't know how much faith she had left, but surely—Surely.

Anakin said, "You must be hungry. Let's go find some ice cream. My treat."

She wiped at her face again, scrubbing at her eyes and cheeks and nose with her hands. She wanted it off, all of it, the tears and the snot, the burning in her skin.

"If you're paying," Ahsoka said. When she brought her hands down, she smiled at Anakin.