Bleeding Heart

I

He hadn't been anxious, not really, nor had he been nervous. There was no reason to, after all. Either she would succeed like he expected her to and return victorious with a kyber crystal for her new lightsaber, or she would fail, proving that she wasn't worthy of becoming his apprentice once again and thus deserved to die. There was no third option.

Even so, he would confess, at least in his own mind, that he was... satisfied with her continued survival.

His doubts about sending her against one of the strongest surviving Jedi, no matter how small they might have been, were unfounded. Naturally, as it hadn't been an imprudent decision. The dark side was different from the light; it liked to challenge its practitioners by setting them up with enemies that posed a real threat instead of cuddling them like the light side. It was what made them stronger. Letting her fight such a strong opponent right at the beginning of her training would only strengthen her connection to the dark side, making future progress much easier.

Looking her over while she slowly but steadily walked down the ramp of her shuttle, he could see that she hadn't received any major injuries. The armour looked rather worn-down at many places, revealing scratched and dried blood where pieces were missing while also indicating bruises and sprains where the armour was damaged the most, but the only notable injury seemed to be her right arm. By the look of it, she must have been grazed by a lightsaber, but it was seemingly not deep enough to have done any permanent harm, so a simple bacta patch would be enough for that.

All in all, she looked just like you would expect from someone who came right from a fight, with one notable exception.

"I hope you didn't waste your crystal for something unnecessary as a piece of jewellery."

He was, of course, referring to the blue and green pieces of what must have been several kyber crystals that were connected to her skin at the transition between her forehead and her montrals where he knew Togrutas usual wore their headdresses.

Ahsoka held out the open palm of her uninjured arm, showing him the blue crystal within. "I found a few lightsabers in her hut when I looked through it after killing her." She shrugged with a sharp smile on her lips. "I thought this might be a more appropriate use of them, rather than letting them rot in the middle of nowhere."

He considered that for a second before he tilted his head in agreement. "It will definitively showcase what you have done to everyone who understands the gesture." And certainly insult a lot of them as well with this blatant display, he added amused in his head.

Now that she stood directly in front of him, he could feel the change in her. Where before the dark side had been only loosely attached to her, now it had taken root. She was no longer just a random Force user who happened to use a bit of the dark side before getting drunk on its power, not even realizing that they hardly scratched on the surface of it, but an actual student of its arts. It was the same transformation had begun the moment he pledged himself to his master, and that had been finished after the events on Mustafar.

It wasn't just the Force around her that had changed, but her posture as well. Even while clearly exhausted and injured, she stood with a straight back and a new glint in her amber eyes that hadn't been there before. Yes, she had indeed begun to walk the path of the dark side, fully embracing its truths.

Was it pride that he felt? He hadn't thought himself capable of such emotions anymore, but there was no denying he felt something along those lines in face of her success. This would require further meditation on his part on a later date, but he had already planned to hold a meditation session soon anyway, so it was only a matter of adding it to the very long list of things that recent events made him realize.

"Killing Shaak Ti in single combat is no easy feat," he said absently. "I expect to hear about how exactly you accomplished that later in great detail."

He wasn't sure where exactly these words had come from. It was to be expected that she would report her fight to him later, it was just how things were done, but his words...

Regardless of his voice or the way he formulated the sentence, his words could be misinterpreted as an invitation for a more casual conversation instead of a report. Maybe not by a normal person, but definitively by someone who knew him -or at least the former him- for years, or by someone who shared a Force bond with him, no matter how weak it was at the moment.

He should probably correct this error before some kind of misunderstanding occurred, but...

But feeling the weird satisfaction -and was this happiness? No, it wasn't bright enough for that, but definitively something similar- radiate from her made him stop in his tracks.

"Of course, Master."

Just this once he would let it slide. Her training would only get harder from now, involving sweat and blood and pain; he could let her have this 'reward' for killing the Jedi. It wouldn't matter in the great scheme of things.

She was probably in a better mood than she should be, considering the condition she was in. Non-lethal as her injuries were, they were still far from comfortable and the fact that she had nothing to patch them up with during her flight back to Vader's fortress and thus no other choice than to endure the pain did not make it any better. Still, she was... content.

She had made her decision to walk the path of the dark side for a number of reasons, but the most important at the time was because she wanted to stay at her master's side. That in itself wasn't a very strong conviction, but since then, other reasons were added as she realized the power and potential the dark side offered, but that didn't mean her initial reason became less important. So, naturally, his words were nice, in a way. She could honestly not say which word described her feeling the best at the moment, but 'happiness', for all that it wasn't quite right either, seemed like the closest fit.

With these things in mind, she followed her master deeper and deeper into the catacombs below his castle until they reached the entrance to a cave. The Force emitting from it seemed different somehow, more fluid and active than on the rest of the planet, which was quite a feat as Mustafar in itself was very strong in the dark side. She could feel the dark tendrils reaching out to her, trying to amplify the flames of the Force burning in her chest with promises of power and visions of grandeur, and she was tempted to let them do just that until she remembered what happened the last time she let herself go. Closing herself off from the connection with a shake of her head, she turned her attention back to Vader, only to find that they had stopped walking and that he was staring at her.

"This place is a Nexus in the Force," he spoke, his already deep voice seemingly even more amplified by the ambient Force energies. "It's the metaphoric centre of the planet in the Force, and it's here that you will create your new lightsaber."

"The ambient energies should be quite useful for that," she mused quietly. Using the power that was already in the air would take a great burden from her shoulders, allowing her to concentrate completely on fuelling her emotions into her crystal without wasting a lot of attention of summoning the necessary power.

"Indeed," Vader agreed before he visibly hesitated. Well, 'visibly' was probably not the right word, for you wouldn't notice it by just looking at him, but his indecisiveness was clear for everyone with a connection to the Force. Then, he suddenly reached behind his back and pulled out a lightsaber she knew just too well.

Her eyes went wide and the question was out before she could stop herself. "You had it all the time?"

She forced herself not to cringe. Anakin was dead, she knew and had accepted that -Vader had made sure to remind her frequently shortly after he had captured her- so it made little sense for him to keep her lightsaber after all these years. Besides, why did he even have it? Sure, she left it behind to make it look as if she died, but that didn't explain how it came into his possession. Unless...unless he had been looking for her and found it himself. It was still contradictory for him to keep it, however, for Darth Vader had little reason to keep Anakin Skywalker's former Padawan's weapon. Quite the opposite actually, since he should have destroyed it for what it was; a reminder of who he used to be.

"Your preferred fighting style includes two lightsabers," Vader ignored her question. "You got one crystal by embracing the dark and using it to kill a Jedi for it, which will represent you accepting your new role. The second crystal you're going to bleed will be your old one, representing you killing your old- your weak self."

She nodded while swallowing the desire down to ask more about why he had her saber in the first place. She should probably consider herself lucky that he chose to just ignore her first question instead of punishing her, and she didn't think he would be that lenient for a second time. For a moment, she felt indignation rise in her chest, a little flame ready to bloom into an inferno, but she quenched the emotion before it could take root and bottled it up deep inside her just as Vader had taught her. She could draw on it later, maybe as soon as when she started to bleed her crystals.

Accepting the lightsaber, she made her way into the cave, leaving Vader behind.

The cave itself wasn't anything special. There were old hieroglyphs on the walls that she couldn't read and an altar in the centre of the circular room, but that was all. No, the special thing about it was the Force itself; with her every step, she felt more and more as if the was pushing through water, the dark side in the air getting thicker the closer the came to the altar. There was almost something sentient about the way it tried to weasel into her head, trying to fan the flames of her power to until she lost control and became nothing more than a slave to the dark side.

But she was a fighter, and she would become no one's slave. The dark side was hers to control and hers to command, not the other way around. She would not let it win.

She reached the altar, opened the lightsaber, and took the blue crystal out of its casing like in a trance. Then, with a blue crystal in one hand and a green one in the other, she closed her eyes and concentrated.

She grabbed all her rage, hate, fear, and pain, pushed in into a tiny ball, and then, together with every bit of indignation, anger, and determination she could bring up, she threw it against the Force signatures of the two crystals in her hands. She poured it into them, trying to break them until they would do her bidding. The crystals were the iron above the stove and her emotions were the flames that made it foldable, allowing her to recreate them in her image.

Nothing happened for a moment, but then the crystals started to scream.

Both were in pain, both were suffering, and both tried to shake her off to stop the rush of dark side energy into their core, but to no avail. She wouldn't stop, not until she had what she had come for.

She could feel the crystals call out to their owner, but while the green one couldn't hope to find its previous wielder, for she was already dead, she blue one could. It recognized her for who she was, for who she had been, even with her Force signature changed through the use of the dark side. It called out to her very core, pleading for mercy and trying to fill her with warmth.

Then there was a bang and everything went white.

Her head hurt when she woke up in some sort of endless white space, and it needed a few seconds for the memories to come back to her.

Her capture, her fall, the fight with Master Shaak Ti... the crystals.

("What have I done?")

Terror filled her and she was pretty sure she could feel her cheeks growing wet with tears. Never, not in a million years would she have expected herself to fall to the dark side. That was something that happened to others, to people in history books or even the poor souls who got seduced by the Sith, but not her!

Not to Anakin!

"It's alright, Snips."

She jumped around, reflexively falling into a defensive position, only to stop in mid-motion when she realized who stood in front of her.

"Anakin?" she asked in disbelief. "But you-"

"Fell to the dark side and became the very thing I was told to destroy?" he interrupted her with a rueful little smile. "Yeah, I guess that happened, didn't it?"

She stared at the form of her master -young, strong and healthy and not crippled or burned!- for a few more seconds, two pairs of blue eyes filled with warmth and sadness and disbelief meeting each other, while she fought the urge to run to him and fall into his arms. Then-

"This isn't real, is it?"

He gave her an apologetic shrug. "No, at least not in the sense you're thinking about, I fear."

"Then what is this?"

"A chance. Hope. You need to make a decision, and this decision will determine the rest of your life. Choose wisely."

"Wait!" she exclaimed, suddenly panicked as she noticed the white space around them fading away. "Don't leave! You haven't answered any of my questions, and I haven't even apologies yet, and-"

"There is nothing you would need to apologise for," he interrupted her again even while his lower body started to fade as well, a kind smile on his lips. "And always remember, Snips: no matter what you will choose, I will always be proud of you."

"No!" she screamed again, running towards him. "Anakin, please stop!"

The moment she touched his skin, the last remains of his body plopped away, and suddenly she found herself looking down on her body that was still in that cave on Mustafar.

She watched herself stand up, amber eyes turned blue again, before walking back to Vader, watched the two of them talk and fight and then some more talk until Vader too turned back to the light! She watched herself and her newly reformed master travel to Coruscant, saw them fight -and kill!- Palpatine, and finally help reform the Empire back into the Republic it was supposed to be. They really brought peace, justice, and freedom to the Galaxy.

The vision changed.

First, she saw Anakin, tired and with bags under his eyes but healthy, sitting in a field of flowers, his arm wrapped around the waist of a woman whose face she couldn't see -Padmé, she instantly thought, for who else could that possibly be?- while all his attention was on the two children, one boy and one girl, playing in front of them.

"What-" she started with confusion written all over her face when the sound of footsteps alerted her to two new presences. With an open mouth, she watched as Obi-Wan stepped behind Anakin, putting a hand on his shoulder while smiling down on him, and Anakin, instead of pushing the hand away and grabbing for his lightsaber like the current, real Ana- Vader would do, greeted his master with a warm smile of his own.

"Aunt 'Soka!"

Watching the two children run towards the copy of herself with big grins on their lips while calling her name -"Aunt 'Soka?"- was what finally made her realize what was happening; this was what her future could have looked like if Anakin hadn't fallen and the war ended with a victory of the Republic. She could be the person that was swinging the little girl around while her brother watched them enviously, it could be her who enjoyed a beautiful sunset with all her loved ones without the shadow of war looming over them, and it could be her that was allowed to be happy. Instead, the closest she came to be in that situation was through a vision.

Suddenly, the vision changed again, and once again she watched herself and Vader from the bird-perspective, but this time in a much more peaceful setting. Instead of in the cave on Mustafar or even above Palpatine's corpse in his office, they were now sitting on logs with nothing but a campfire to part them. They didn't speak one word, but the entire atmosphere was calm and relaxed. There was no trace of the dark side, only serenity and the crackling of the flames, and even though she couldn't see his face, she knew that he must have a smile on his lips that mirrored her own.

The scene changed again.

She found herself once again in the Council Chamber of the Jedi Order, surrounded by all the ghosts of her past. Master Yoda, Master Plo, Obi-Wan, Master Shaak Ti -oh by the Force, she had killed her!- and Anakin. They were looking at her with the very same expressions they had all these years ago, back then when they offered her to-

"They're asking you back, Ahsoka. I am asking you back."

She blinked. Only now did she realize that they were really all staring at her. There was no other version of her in the room, it was just her.

("A chance. Hope. You need to make a decision, and this decision will determine the rest of your life. Choose wisely.")

Then Anakin suddenly held out his hand, but it was not her silka beads that rested in his palm; lying innocently on his hands were two kyber crystals, one blue and one green one, waiting for her to grab for them.

Slowly, almost hesitantly, she raised her arm and started to reach out-

("I'm sorry, Master, but I'm not coming back. ")

"No!" Her voice was more of a growl than anything else, but she didn't care. "I refuse!"

She closed her hands with so much force that she feared for a moment she might accidentally crush the crystals, and then started to once again pour all her emotions into them. This time, there would be no visions for them to safe themselves. "This is all there is!"

Throwing all her hatred, betrayal, fear, sorrow, and everything that was broken inside of her against the two bright points in her hands, she felt them change. Their light dimmed down, their screams became quieter and quieter until they faded away for good, and finally, the dark side took root in them. Lightning swept through the room, rocks were crushed from the power of the Force, and it needed all she had to stay on her feet. Then, after almost 10 minutes of chaos, the storm abated.

The next time she opened her palms, she held two blood-red crystals in them, and only a few hours later they would serve as the basis of two brand-new lightsabers of her own.

("Your lightsaber is your life. Don't lose it.")

("They're good as new."

"Maybe a little better.")

This chapter was inspired by the first volume of Marvel's "Star Wars: Darth Vader" series. Hope you enjoyed it! :)