Ahsoka Tano and Captain Rex are Dead
"Fear, loneliness, they're the big ones, Rose.
Some of the most terrible acts ever committed were inspired by them.
There's a lot of things you need to get across this universe.
Warp drive, wormhole refractors.
You know the thing you need most of all?
You need a hand to hold."
-The Doctor, Fear Her
Chapter 27. Little Girl Running
With the sound of applause came the blooming of a feeling she had never experienced before.
It felt foul, wrong, and Ashla turned to face it with her lightsaber in hand. The shadows churned, grew smoky, flowed through the room with a menace she had never felt from them before. She'd never been afraid of the dark, even when she was the youngest of Initiates. The Temple hallways that seemed so welcoming during the day seemed spooky at night, but never menacing, never frightening, never foul. This, though, was all those things. Corrupt and poisonous, but subtle too. It felt soft, like smoke. It would be easy to forget to be afraid, except that the thing seemed to exude fear.
The man of two-colored eyes and ridged old scars tightened his grip on her hand, and before she could protest or even understand what he was doing, she found herself jerked back, not fully behind him, not quite, but the angle of his body was imposed before her, shielding. It was a strange sight. Was it only a minute ago he was pointing his blaster at her, rather than on her behalf?
Blasters made a soft clatter as they were cocked and aimed, this time not at her, not at the strangely spectral form of Ahsoka or her clone companion, but at the emerging shape of a pale, too-tall man with small red eyes and a smirk she did not like. He faded into the shadows, his body a dark miasma that writhed around him, endlessly moving in supple gyrations.
"Interesting," the man in black said, with a voice as smooth and cold as the space between the stars. Then he moved towards them, his grey, red streaked face remaining visible while the rest of his body flowed like steam, black arms lifting through the smoke to reach out.
Four men opened fire, and the room was lit in a blaze of blue brightness. It cast a monstrous, staccato light over the squat shapes of the holoprojector and the computers, and made the shadows of the four clone troopers dance weirdly against the walls. The man in the miasma, however, absorbed the blaster bolts as easily as he did the light, and where each shot struck him, it was sucked into a swirl of the darkness of his smoky body and gone.
His red eyes seemed to be focused on her, and she brought her lightsaber to bear. Whoever it was, he wasn't friendly. She'd begun learning more advanced lightsaber forms recently, but the one she knew the best, and had trained in the longest, was Shii-Cho. It was not often she'd practiced the combat form of the style over the more sparring-oriented form, but she dropped into the opening stance all the same, knees bent and with her weight slightly forward, to make a speedier forward strike. The lightsaber she'd taken from a Master's body was too large for her, but she adapted the best she could, holding it diagonally across her body, two handed to help compensate for any upper body strength she may be lacking. The scarred clone named Chopper scowled, but didn't shift his kneeling stance when she moved a step away from him in the process of preparation for a fight.
But the man in the darkness made it no closer to her than the incandescence surrounding Ahsoka. The silvery-blue light that surrounded her and her clone companion seemed to shift, harden, and expand, and when Ahsoka stretched out her right arm, a wall of solid light became a barrier between Ashla, Chopper, and the man of darkness.
He did not rear back in surprise or anger, and his amused expression did not change, but he stopped short of that hard wall of light. The shadowy smoke around him settled slightly, revealing more of a red-streaked scalp, high collar and pair of broad shoulders. He lifted a hand and reached out, almost idly, drawing fingertips along the steady barrier of silver-blue ghost light emanating from Ahsoka. The wall rippled in his touch's wake, more like water than wall. His head tilted to the side, and he regarded her, then her companion, thoughtfully. "Clever. You've learned something."
The sensation of Ahsoka's defiance seemed distant, as though she were a long distance away, rather than standing right in front of her. She didn't move, didn't look back over her lekku, didn't change her attention from the man in the shadows, but she ordered, sharply, "Chopper, get Ashla out of here. All of you, get out." When the men hesitated, wavered, blasters still marked on the strange man in the miasma, she commanded again, "Now!"
They moved. Chopper had his helmet back on in the same, smooth motion he used to sweep around and grab her hand again, unceremoniously yanking her along behind him. He kept a blaster aimed at the dark man, but pulled her along behind him, sparing a moment to snap, "Put that thing out before you cut my arm off, kid."
She was staring at the stalled scene before her, and didn't realize at first he meant her lightsaber. He kept pulling her along, trying to keep her slightly behind him while he covered their retreat, his three partners trailing after as they backed their way towards the door.
Ahsoka was still facing off against the man made of smoke and shadows, her hand still in that of her companion's. The light that surrounded them was clear, lambent and soft, except for where it blocked the dark man from following them. There it was hard, sharp edged and resonant like an Adegan crystal, and she could feel the faintest hum of it in the tips of her small montrals.
She'd had such hopes.
When the death of Ahsoka Tano became known to her, she hadn't cried, but she sat on her sleeping couch in her quarters for some time, staring at the hilt of her training saber and wondering what would happen next. Ashla didn't know Ahsoka particularly well; they did know each other, spoke politely to each other, even shared bread at Ullambana on the days when they celebrated the festival at the Temple, in one of the meeting rooms. They were friendly, but not friends. Still, when Ashla looked at the older girl, she had plans that were as much daydreams as they were hopes. When she was old enough to begin learning forms that were not Shii-Cho, she began with Shien. She even played, sometimes, with a reverse-grip on her hilt, whacking herself far too many times in the legs as she tried whirling it around her. When the older students had their classes in the training arenas, and she could pick out the shape of the older Togruta girl, she made sure she experimented then, making herself as visible as she could. There was no way of knowing if Ahsoka would want a Padawan after she was knighted, but Ashla tried what she could to keep herself at least on the periphery of the older girl's awareness. She spoke politely to her. Congratulated her shyly one day when she was in the Temple, not long after she was promoted to Padawan and given Master Skywalker as a Master. She liked the idea of being the Padawan of the Chosen One's Padawan. There were no families in the Temple, not officially, but that would have joined her to a lineage of teachers and Masters she could be so very proud of. She wanted to be a fighter, and Ahsoka Tano was acknowledged as one of the most advanced of those, in her age bracket. Ahsoka was just old enough, just far ahead enough in age and skill, to be looking for a first Padawan at about the time Ashla would be trying to attract a Master.
She hadn't cried, when she heard Ahsoka had died in battle. But she sat on the edge of her sleeping couch and felt sadness and loss. Not just for herself, but for the older girl who could have done so much and gone so far.
And the girl she wanted as a Master one day was the one to save her life, on the day the Temple fell. She was dead, and somehow still fighting, standing there now, translucent and spectral, in the middle of a communications room and facing down a creature so full of the Dark she couldn't even begin to understand what he was. Somehow, she and the man with her turned the soldiers about to kill her into allies. One of those allies was now pulling her up the last steps and towards the door, the three men with him falling into formation behind them and covering their escape.
Ahsoka turned then, slightly. Her body was still squared off with the strange man, but her face turned towards the door, and Ashla found her gaze met. The hard, battle-ready look in Ahsoka's eyes softened, and her lips curved upward into a bit of a smile.
Ashla returned it, and extinguished her lightsaber, plunging the room into a darkness interrupted only by ghost-light.
Then she was out the door, and Chopper cursed once, and she found herself swept up from her feet with a hiss of, "Be quiet and don't move!" as she was thrown unceremoniously over the armored shoulder of the clone trooper. The shoulder bell of Chopper's armor was hard, and it dug into her ribs as she swallowed a startled cry of pain. Her lekku flopped wildly, aching at being suddenly flipped upside down and forced to hang that way. Her arms swung wildly, and she wiggled, trying to bring the hilt in her hand to her waist, to hook it onto her belt. It clicked into place just as Chopper hissed again, "Stop squirming!" this time with a wave of alarm stabbing through him.
All she could see were the polished marble patterns on the floor and white-booted feet, as they moved steadily down the corridor, footfalls heavy and slow. She could hear the dull thudding of more blaster fire in the distance, and the sound of several rapidly approaching men. Ashla closed her eyes and went limp, arms dangling and stomach roiling with new fear. The acidic taste of vomit burned the back of her mouth, and she struggled to keep it down. It would be so easy for them to turn her over to others, or put her down and shoot her anyway.
They came to a stop, and a mechanized voice said, "We heard shooting."
She tried not to breathe, and couldn't quite tell who spoke next, but it wasn't Chopper. "Yeah, we got this one in one of the communication rooms, hiding. Last room in the corridor, rest are clear. Where are we piling the bodies?"
There was a pause, then, "We haven't gotten any instructions for it. Put her with some of the others, I guess." She tried not to squeeze her eyes more tightly shut at the words, to remain still and breathless. It seemed like an eternity, but Chopper began to walk again, and she could hear the heavy tread of the three other men escorting her as well.
They all felt so different, in the Force. She'd seen clone troopers before tonight, though not many, and they were usually walking with Masters on their way to somewhere important. She hadn't spent much time thinking about them. Now, though, it was all she could do. Opening herself to the Force only brought the pain of what was happening around her to full bear, and the onslaught of death and darkness and pain was enough to make her scream. It felt like something was changing, moving, like a giant rancor was rolling over and waking from a century of sleep, and he was hungry. It wasn't the feeling the Force should have, and she was repelled by it.
The four men with her were an easier, less frightening source of meditation, even though they were also so very afraid. Their fear was so very like hers. She didn't know which was which, beside Chopper who carried her. Chopper felt much the way he looked, scarred and battered, with a density that sometimes gave way to surprising bits of softness before turning hard and damaged again. It was a strangely lumpy sensation, like running her hand across scar-patterned flesh. Another man felt, not quite soft, but pliable somehow. Like he could bend in any direction, and was not quite sure if he could stand fully up to any who might try to push him. The next was just the opposite; he felt as hard as stone and as stubborn as rock, immovable, tough, weathered and solid. The final man felt keen, sharp; even in his burgeoning panic, there was a certainty to him, like a well-polished, deftly wielded vibroknife. There was also a vague sense of physical pain mixed in with the rest of his emotions, and she suspected he was the man who found her in her hiding place, and she attacked with the access panel.
The entered a turbolift, and once the door closed, exploded in frantic conversation.
"What are we supposed to do with her?"
"What was that thing back there? Where do we go? Should we tell the General?"
"Did you see the General before we came in here? Do you want to tell him we're screwing up when he looks like that?"
"All of you, shut up and calm down before anyone else sees us!"
"But what are we supposed to do?"
Their questions and admonitions overlapped each other, half whispered, half shouted, their voices rising in pitch as the turbolift dropped down through its shaft. Ashla bucked, tucked herself small, and rolled, tumbling herself off Chopper's shoulder while he grappled with her, trying to keep her there. It was one fight she managed to be victorious in, and she landed lightly on her feet with barely a thump. The four men in dirty white and blue armor towered over her, and she looked up at them with wide charcoal eyes and felt her mouth run dry. She wasn't sure exactly how much she could trust any of them, with so many troopers running through the Temple and murdering Jedi. But they were likely her best option for survival right now, they obeyed Ahsoka, and they disobeyed their orders to kill her, a fact that seemed to be frightening them as much as that creature in the darkness did.
There was really only one option. She didn't quite manage to keep her voice from quivering when she said up to them, "We can't stay here."
Those black eyepieces were terrifying. They looked down at her so blandly, so expressionlessly. They were abruptly very still in the Force, too much in shock over what they were in the process of doing. She looked a longer moment at Chopper, hoping perhaps that since he was the first to offer help, he might support her, but it was the one that felt as hard as stone that spoke first. "The kid's right. We need to get out of here. All of us."
The one with the teardrop under his visor shook his head once, vehemently. "We're already disobeying orders. The General –"
"Is leading the attack, Tup," interrupted the one she'd hit with the panel earlier, with the Roundel patterned boldly on his helmet. "The General is a Jedi, and he's leading the attack against his own. He's not going to listen to a crazy story about the Captain and the Commander and some weird…monster man. Not right now anyway. If everything the Captain and Commander said was true, then the whole Republic's just gone to hell."
Ashla backed up a step as those words filled the turbolift with a fresh wave of shock, and she stumbled back into Chopper's legs. The attack was being led by a Jedi? Which Jedi would do this? Who was leading these men? What battalion or legion were they? Who was supposed to wear the blue edged armor?
She looked straight up when she heard Chopper snort. "We running then?"
There was silence in the turbolift, save for the faint swish of their passage through the elevator shaft. That silence ended with a light ping, and the doors opened onto another hallway, this one narrow and dimly lit, a service corridor she didn't recognize.
Roundel-pattern made the final decision. "Yeah. Yeah, Chopper, I think we're running."
The turbolift seemed so cold just then, ominous in its silence. Roundel-pattern moved first, stepping out of the turbolift with such a feeling of heaviness, Ashla didn't want to follow. From the heaviness, a sense of resolution began to form, though it was unsteady and reluctant. As she followed Roundel-pattern – either Jesse or Gus, since Tup seemed to be Teardrop-shape – she heard the quiet pop of a blaster being reset. She wasn't the only one who turned around to see Tup stepping out of the turbolift car, fiddling with his blaster carbine. He his head lifted, turned slightly from one man to another, and he said, determinedly, "I'm not killing any brothers. I've got it on stun."
He received three nods, and the other three began to recalibrate their weapons as well. Chopper fell into step beside her, and she glanced up at him with a frown. "You're not supposed to be alive to be walking, kid," he pointed out, and her frown deepened into a scowl. She felt helpless being carried like a sack of topatoes, unable to even try fighting back, and Chopper's shoulder was not exactly the most comfortable way she'd ever traveled. He seemed either oblivious or uncaring about her scowl, and bent down, scooped her up and tossed her back over his shoulder with an oomph of discomfort. She sighed in resignation as they tramped down the hallway, footfalls loud in the quiet. At least it had worked successfully before. Anything that lifted her chances of escape.
She tried to lay limp while they moved quickly down the hallway. If they were planning to escape, they would have to be heading out to the docking bays or the rear exits, either in hope of fleeing into the lower levels or getting entirely off world. She wasn't sure which would be better, or which these four would choose. She wanted to find other Jedi, and most would probably have headed into the undercity. The rest of her Initiate clan might still be alive; they might have been evacuated out of the crèche. She'd be with them now, whatever their fate, if she hadn't stayed up late in the training arenas, learning not to bruise herself with reverse-grip Shien. Mari and J.K. would be leading them. She wished she was with them. Mari was always so calm, she'd be able to keep everyone from panicking, create order out of the chaos and panic that had to be ensuing in the attack. J.K. would make sure everyone stayed together, remembered to fight as a team. Since she wasn't there, she had to hope Chian and Liam could keep Jempa from getting too reckless. He was too prone to charging into a fight wildly; he had too much courage and not enough sense, and he was growing so big lately that he thought he could just muscle his way through everything. But they would fight together, her clan. They would fight with their training sabers and with real sabers if they had to.
They weren't dead. They couldn't be dead. They were her clan, and Master Yoda always told them they were mighty. She felt tears swelling up in her eyes again, and blinked them back, trying not to rub at them. She was Ashla of the Bear clan, and she was too strong to just cry when she was hurt. She was a Jedi, and when she or someone else was hurt, she was supposed to do something about it.
She could hear the hum of the city. It was faint at first, but it grew stronger, as did the smell of smoke, oil and the night. The polished stone floor gave way to duracrete below her, and she closed her eyes again, trying to keep them relaxed. The draft of the hallway became a steady breeze, and her skin of her arms prickled beneath her sleeves. They were outside, probably near the docking bays if not on them. Would they head to the lower levels, or to the sky? She wanted to go below, try to find other escaped Jedi, but the sky...it was harder to catch someone in the sky. Harder to track someone in hyperspace. The sky would be safer, if they could escape the atmosphere. But her clan and the other Jedi wouldn't be in the sky, and if they were, they'd be scattering across the galaxy and she'd never find them.
Chopper's gait was steady with a bit of a swagger, and as she swayed to his walk, she tried to ignore the ache in her lekku, flipped upside down and curving in the wrong direction. Blood was rushing to her head and her montrals were starting to ring. She wished they were longer, bigger. She'd be able to make out more through echolocation, but anything more than a few meters beyond the four clone troopers surrounding her was an incoherent mass. She had to keep her eyes closed. She had to keep her eyes closed and not look around, much as she wanted to. There were more footsteps, the even, heavy march of many booted feet, not too far away. More clone troopers. She had to be still, and trust that Chopper meant it when he offered her a hand and a way out.
A voice called over a distance, challenging, and there was the sound of feet striking the ground at a jog; not the alarmed sound of a full run, but the alerted sound of someone wary. Ashla breathed into her belly slow and deep, the way she was supposed to when she meditated, and concentrated on making herself very, very still.
"What are you all doing? This area's supposed to be kept clear!"
The one who felt like rock was the first to answer, and though there was a sick feeling in him, his response was firm and easy. "We've got orders to find someplace to start burning the bodies. Can't be turning the whole place into a charnel house while we're still in it." There was a pause, then a snort. "Brat thought she could get a jump on us. Didn't work too well."
The guard was irritated, and his response appropriately abrupt. "You can't use the docks to make pyres. This whole area's being locked down. Nobody in or out."
Roundel-pattern asked, very casually, "Gun batteries set up yet?"
"Just started. The walkers are on their way."
"How long?"
Another pause, then, "Five, ten minutes maybe. There was a group that made a break for it earlier, left everything a mess. They're assembling teams to hunt them down, now."
Ashla tried not to cheer at the words. At least someone got out. She tried to breathe in a small breath. Her entire head was ringing now from hanging this way so long. Rock-sturdy moved slightly, as though he were looking around. "Anywhere you recommend for the pyres?"
The guard shifted, stepping back a pace. "Not here. Don't they have any kind of plaza or anything?"
Roundel-pattern shrugged. "We'll find somewhere. Not like the place isn't big enough."
"Yeah," the guard agreed, then added, "Good hunting, vode."
There was a shift among the group, and Roundel-pattern straightened and returned the dismissal. "Good hunting, sir." Then there was more of the sound of moving feet, and she began to sway again as Chopper started walking. They weren't moving straight back into the service corridor. She could sense the bulk of the wall behind her, and as Chopper turned, they moved parallel to it, pace steady and businesslike. Ashla swallowed, trying to ignore the growing pain in her head as they moved along. The sound of more men in heavy boots came and went, then they passed the sounds of industry, of some sort of heavy machinery being put into place or moved about. She breathed in, shallowly, then out again, trying to move her stomach and chest as little as possible in the effort. The sound of movement faded, then there was more marching sounds, then it grew quieter, the footsteps more distant.
Their walk abruptly changed, and she cracked her eyes open an instant before she felt herself whipped around and dropped on the ground, though not entirely carelessly. She bit back a groan as her vision went dark and the blood began to rush out of her head. Chopper's plain white helmet was looming in her face, when she could focus again, and one of his hands clamped down onto her shoulder. "Keep quiet, kid, and get ready," he warned, then looked up. "Got it yet?"
Tup was crouching just above them; they were bent down behind a series of portable diagnostic consoles, which sat beside a large, squat refueling station. Above them towered the red-wings of an Eta-class shuttle. It seemed they'd decided the sky would be the way to go, and she felt a pang in her heart, realizing how far they were intending to escape. At the very least, they'd be heading to the other side of Coruscant.
Air hissed as hydraulics depressurized, and the boarding ramp of the shuttle began to lower. The edge of it touched the ground with a light scrape.
Roundel-pattern made a dash for the interior, just as a shout went up from somewhere nearby. Chopper's hand came down on her head hard when she tried to poke it up over the edge of the console to see, keeping her low. Several more shouts began to go up as Rock-sturdy bounded after Roundel, now clearing the boarding ramp and disappearing into the shadows within the seating area of the shuttle. Rock-sturdy kept low as he rushed past, using the consoles as a cover as long as he could. Still, there was about five meters of open space between the computers and the bottom of the on-ramp. Rock-sturdy cleared it just as an opening salvo of blaster fire streaked towards him, one shot slamming into the outer hull and scoring it with black char. Two other bolts flew through the open space he'd passed through a second before, sailing straight and long until they thudded into the hull of a larger transport several dozen meters away.
Chopper knelt beside her, and Tup just behind her. They had to run, and they had to run now. There was too much noise coming from the other side of their cover; shouts of surprise and alarm, boots pounding against duracrete, and an increasing number of plasma bolts skimming through the air above them and between their hiding space and the ship. The console bucked beside them, and she let out a short, startled scream as something on the control panels erupted in sparks and a column of smoke.
"Tup, you go next," Chopper shouted over the increasing noise. The shuttle was powering up, and the deflector shields were blurring into existence around the body of the ship as the engines whined to life. Another blast made it through the few meters separating them from the ship. It would be too easy to be cut down in those last few strides. She looked at the base of the consoles as Tup leaned forward, coming up off his knees and onto his toes, ready to make his run. The diagnostics were meant to be portable, but they were locked down onto the repulsor platform they were stacked on. The controls were on the further end, and getting to them meant exposing herself to blaster fire. Even if she made it, there was no guarantee she could get it running in time to move it to the shuttle before she was shot.
There was only one other way of covering them as they crossed the space. When Tup darted forward, she moved with him, and though she felt a tug on the back of her tunic, the fabric slipped out of Chopper's grasp as she surged out into the space, blue blade leaping from the hilt of her borrowed lightsaber. While Tup ran straight, she stepped a bit further to the right, and turned to face the battle coming towards her.
The air was a river of blue plasma, and she was at the end of it. The bolts came at different heights, different angles, all at once, so very differently from sparring against a single opponent or a training remote. Beyond that churning stream there were dozens of blue decorated clone troopers running towards her, their faces all made of those expressionless, black-eyed masks.
She danced, and her lightsaber provided the music around her, its humming pitch rising and falling with each motion. Kata were different than the kind of joyful spins and leaps she would perform for fun, and this was even more different than kata. There was no proper set of movements, one flowing into the other in a particular pattern. Here she made up the pattern herself, guided by the promise of death that accompanied each shot approaching her. This wild dance was part Shii-Cho, part Shien, the varied steps incorporated as smoothly as she could make them. When the first shot hit her blade, she felt it reverberate up her arms and into her montrals, the recoil almost hard enough to make her drop the hilt. But there was no time for shock or pain, because there was another shot skimming towards her, and another, and the world narrowed to her blade and those flying streaks of light, and she felt full, so full, more full of the Force than she ever had, while she danced on the edge of living and dying. It was full of death, the Force. Of something hungry that descended into a bottomless emptiness, except for in this one little place where her feet and her saber danced out a feeling of life, of survival, of a future beyond those bolts of blue death that could pierce her so easily.
Vaguely, she was aware of a second body moving behind her, which must be Chopper. Then there was a sudden volley of return fire coming from her left, the bolts shaped differently, wider and crackling as they closed the distance between the ship and the first of approaching clone troopers, now only a dozen meters away. The stunner rounds sizzled through the air and met their targets, two men staggering and toppling backward as they collapsed to the ground. Ashla edged to her left, sending another bolt back towards their attackers; it flew wide, high. She had too little control to shoot the bolts back into her opponents accurately, but her goal was to cover their retreat, and she was succeeding. Another volley of stunners crackled forward, and she made it up onto the ramp, Chopper and Tup following close behind, and one of them was screaming to go.
The ramp began to lift, as did the shuttle. Ashla extinguished her lightsaber as Chopper and Tup clamored past her, towards the cockpit, and someone was shouting, "Tell me you know how to fly this thing!" as the ramp locked into place.
Roundel-pattern was in the pilot's seat as she reached the cockpit, and his hands were flying frantically over the controls. "Can't be any worse than an Umbaran starfighter. At least this layout makes sense."
The shuttle was moving beyond the edge of the docking bay, and the dull thuds of blaster fire hitting the deflectors sounded throughout the ship. There was no heavier fire; the walkers weren't there yet. Ashla shivered at the thudding sounds, looking at the four men surrounding her. Rock-sturdy was in the co-pilot's chair, and she was wedged between Chopper and Tup as they eased further out over the Temple District, and into the sky. They were remarkably calm now, all four of them, as the lights of nighttime Coruscant swept towards them, then stars as they aimed higher. Battle didn't seem to unnerve them the way disobedience did. The lights of the city grew fainter as the sky grew darker, the stars more intense as the light pollution faded behind them and the atmosphere grew thin. Other ships began to grow visible, then distinct, as they rose through thin cirrus into the exosphere.
A hand came down onto her shoulder, gently, and Ashla staggered under the gentle touch. "You okay?" Tup was asking her, black eye pieces blank and empty. She gripped her lightsaber hilt to her chest tightly, clutching it as she realized she was trembling. This time, when her eyes filled with tears, she couldn't stop them from spilling over, and she hiccupped once as they ran down her face.
She was alone with four men who, less than an hour ago, were storming the Temple. Even now, more of them were still fighting within it, killing other Jedi. The feeling that something was devouring the galaxy was spreading, pulling at her, hungry and seeking to fill an emptiness that couldn't be filled. There were so many dead; she didn't even recognize the Master whose lightsaber she took, when she found him lying sprawled in the hallway with open, sightless eyes. She'd never been in a battle before. Never had anyone genuinely trying to kill her.
Worst of all, maybe, was that she still didn't really understand why. Ahsoka said the Chancellor had become a Sith. How could that happen? Did he really hate Jedi so much that he'd want to kill them all? And why would a Jedi lead anyone to attack their home? She tried pulling a hand away from her lightsaber hilt to wipe at the tears blurring her vision, but her fingers stayed locked around it. A lightsaber was a Jedi's life. She couldn't let go. Instead, she turned her head to the side and tried wiping her eyes on her shoulder, but her lek got in the way, so she slid down to her forearm. Clearing the water from her eyes did little good, though; more tears came and she bit on her lip as she let out a sob.
All four of the troopers were staring helplessly at her, but she couldn't stop. Roundel-pattern looked away first, saying quietly, "Hyperspace in…three, two – now."
As the transparasteel dome of the cockpit went from star-scattered black to the blue streaked tunnel of hyperspace, Ashla cried.
