Alright guys, you ask for Ahsoka, you get Ahsoka! I know everyone wants Obi-Wan, but not yet. Have patience, as he would say. Muahahah. And keep in mind, Anakin isn't exactly saved YET…
Enjoy! ~JLM
Chapter 8
Ahsoka flattened herself against the wall, gasping silently for breath and not daring to look around the corner.
"How'd I get myself into this mess?!" she groaned inwardly. Twice now, TWICE, she was on the run. For the same crime—killing clone troopers.
Except this time—she actually had killed one.
"Go interview one of the Jedi, they said. You'll get a nice bonus, they said. Well, in all honesty they couldn't have predicted THIS!"
Her wheezy breath caught in her throat as a helmeted figure appeared off to the side. In two seconds, he would spot her. Desperately, she extended a hand and caused a Force-interference to echo off the surrounding walls, creating a BOOM in the opposite direction.
Helmet-man whirled around—and looked straight at her.
"Crap, he's well trained."
Spinning, she kicked the huge blaster that was in his hand and it went flying through the air, landing his partner, a Royal Trooper, square in the face as he came up behind him. Neither of her pursuers was particularly fazed.
Ahsoka whipped out her shoto, having lost her lightsaber in her first tangle with the clone who was attacking General Krell. Jedi and clones against each other now? It was too much to believe! Why?
The Royal trooper opened fire at her and she deflected every bolt. Sensing someone behind her, she leapt up over the second trooper and continued to deflect, but the fire was now coming from all three and getting harder to keep up with. She couldn't stay in one place much longer.
Time to start running again. Boy, wasn't this fun. At least Derolf was with Padmé and none of the Republic agents now chasing her knew he existed.
"What're ya trying to do?!" she spat out between breaths, addressing helmet-guy. "I thought I was supposed to get a fair trial in the Republic! You know how it went for me last time—this is another mistake, I swear!"
The helmet moved as if whoever was in it was tossing his head in frustration. "Oh, she talks," he barked in a gruff voice, heavily accented. "But this time, she dies!" He opened fire again and Ahsoka's eyes flew open. There would be no trial this time.
She took off running as fast as the Force would carry her. Over buildings, across antigrav highways, leaping over rows of cars and speeders and sleds, just trying to evade them as swarms of troopers suddenly started appearing on all sides of her. She ducked down a sewer vent when she thought no one was looking, but apparently someone was. Which meant he radioed all the others. Deeper and deeper into the sewer she ran, diving down a waterfall of filth and trying to avoid a shudder and the instinct to stop and shake the scum from her head-tails.
In desperation she tried opening her eyes underneath, but the liquid stung so badly it took her breath away and she couldn't see anything anyway. Surfacing with a gasp and frantically reaching out with the Force to ensure no one was close by yet, she suddenly remembered that there were notorious gangs that wandered the sewers consistently. Run into one of them—and both they and she would be in even worse trouble.
She couldn't go back to Padmé's. Or to the Temple, although she needed to warn the Jedi of the clone's attack—General Krell's memory might not be exact enough to give them what they needed to know. He'd been unconscious most of the time.
Ahsoka choked back an unbidden sob. She couldn't go anywhere—all of her friends would be put in danger if she even went near them. And everyone else was now her enemy.
Taking a deep breath, despite the arid fumes, she told herself that the single tear rolling out of her left eye was only from the puke she'd opened her eyes in, not from the horrid ghost of loneliness that seemed to threateningly cloak her.
Pounding started just over her head and there was a grate on the ceiling, quite close. She knew the clones had heat sensors and knew exactly where she was now. Taking a deep breath, she dove under the filthy river and swam with her eyes closed, trying to use the Force to know where she was at.
"Turn up ahead. Okay, got that. Slimy thing up ahead. Too bad, already—bleahgh! Don't want to know what that actually was! Warning—warning about what? What could possibly be worse than—"
Lungs bursting for air, she surfaced despite the warnings and almost blacked out as a huge object came smashing down on top of her head. Choking back the mouthful of something that would probably kill her later, she came up, sputtering, and grabbed flailingly onto a concrete beam above her.
She tried to look up and see what had hit her, but only seeing stars, she listened instead.
"Oh, sorry," a young man's voice addressed her. "I thought you were the Parasite."
Ahsoka still gagged. "What?" she managed to protest.
"The Parasite," he repeated, sounding confused as to who she was. "You'd better get out of there, it—"
"Working on it!" she shouted, her patience on its very last drop at this point. Despite feeling totally unbalanced and still unable to see much more than a couple of lights in between the black, she used the Force to heave herself up and flip up on top of the beam, where she wobbled to balance even though it was relatively wide.
She heard blaster fire, and, thinking first that it was the clones, she reached for the man and shoved at him, screaming. "Get out of here—they're coming for me!"
"What are you doing!?" he screamed back, gripping her shoulders to keep from falling off the beam.
Vaguely her vision finally made out the blaster that was in his hand, and she realized he'd been the one shooting. At a huge, slippery creature reaching up out of the river—
"I touched it," she realized with horror. She reached up as the man flinched and gave him a firm stand on the beam. "Keep goin'. If there's clones, don't tell them you saw me. Or you might die."
He paused his shooting just long enough to give her a bewildered stare as she leaped off again, onto the platform beside the river and leapt through another grating. From behind, she could hear the huge creature's screams as the man tried to kill it before it killed him. She silently said a prayer for him, since he'd been kind of nice except for hitting her in the head.
Reaching an empty concrete room used to store mechanical supplies for maintaining the sewer systems, she finally crawled to a stop and rested for a second. What a horrible day it had been! She let her head rest on her knees, pulling them up to her chest and trying unsuccessfully not to cry. Maybe—just maybe—they wouldn't find her for a couple more minutes and she could stay here and get her breath.
"Please don't cry—please don't cry—" it was so unfitting for a Jedi! But she couldn't stop herself. Thinking about all the ways she could possibly get out of this mess, all she could think of was one person. The same person who had saved her last time, and would stop at nothing to protect her.
"Anakin," she whispered through the Force, "Anakin, please. I need your help!"
