Anakin basically lived out of a footlocker at the best of times, and out of a backpack the rest of the time, so he was befuddled by the sheer amount of packing the princess seemed to think was necessary to spend a few weeks on a battleship.
"You're not going on a grand tour," he had tried reminding her. "You're going to be stuck on a warship with no contact with anybody except me and my men, most of the time."
She had looked at him as though he had three heads and she would dearly love to punch all of them square in the nose, so he had done what any sane man would and left her to contemplate her gowns in peace. If he ended up needing to store one or more of her trunks in his cabin because they wouldn't all fit in hers, well… it wasn't like he needed the space for his own belongings. Most of what he owned was in his quarters at the Jedi Temple, so he was unlikely to ever see it again. He was only glad that he ultimately hadn't lost the Integrity. If he had, he would have had to call Rex and beg him to smuggle Threepio off the ship before the next Jedi had taken over.
Cailee finally collapsed into bed well after dark, in the randomly selected guest room Anakin has chosen for the night. He waited for another hour to make sure she had fallen into a deep sleep and was not likely to wake up, then he stepped into the hall and called Ahsoka.
"You have great timing, Skyguy," his former Padawan said by way of greeting. "The good doctor just went to bed. Let me tell you, the only thing more boring than watching this guy during the day is watching him sleep at night."
Just wait until you hear what I have to say and you'll wish you were back on stakeout duty, Anakin thought. He managed to keep it to himself, if only barely.
Instead, he thought he did a pretty good job of sounding natural when he said, "I think it's time for me to take over there. Come watch the princess for me?"
There was a long pause, probably because Ahsoka knew how loathe he was to leave Cailee under anyone else's protection, even hers. Eventually, she replied, "Okay, I'm on my way."
"East wing, second floor," Anakin told her gruffly and ended the call.
He leaned back against the wall and bowed his head to begin trying to put himself into the necessary mindset for his task tonight. It was easy to take things too far when his blood was up—in fact, it had become increasingly difficult over the years, whenever he was angry or just filled with the thrill of a fight, to stop himself from doing things he would regret later. When the clone troopers had tried to prevent him from seeing Ahsoka in jail, he had vividly imagined crushing their helmets, slowly, so they could feel every millimeter and experience every second of panic as their skulls were pulverized. Then there was Clovis—unlike what he had claimed since the incident, he had been under perfect control and had consciously decided to attack Clovis. There was no need to even think about Tatooine, or that he had almost murdered Hardeen-who-was-really-Obi-Wan.
Once his strongest emotions wore off, Anakin was often ashamed of what he had imagined or regretted what he had actually done. He didn't always regret it, but usually he wasn't particularly happy to have hurt or killed people, even if the situation had called for it. Unless they really deserved it. (He'd have gladly beat Rush Clovis to death with is bare hands if Padmé hadn't intervened. He still would, if he were ever lucky enough to encounter the man without any witnesses around that he couldn't mind trick into forgetting.)
But when his conscious hadn't been set free by the heat of battle or the passion of rage? Well, when he was calm, he had a hard time doing what needed to be done without feeling like Obi-Wan was going to pop around the next corner, with his most disapproving expression, and make him feel like a monster for it.
So Anakin closed his eyes and focused on gathering his anger around his mind like a cloak. It wasn't too difficult. He had plenty of material to work with; he could well recall the sheer terror Cailee had felt as she had trembled beneath him in the dress shop, and the anger he had felt when the guards had tried to kidnap her off the street right in front of him, and the mingled fear and fury of watching a blaster bolt fly directly at her and that split second of not knowing whether he'd be able to intercept it. And his indignation that the army medic stationed at the palace had dared try to lie to his face about the fate of the guard who had almost shot the princess in the head.
He felt Ahsoka approaching through the Force long before he heard the door at the end of the hall open or her footsteps on the hardwood floor. Her presence was a source of unfailing joy to him (also, usually when she was talking, of mild annoyance). He had to consciously push his happiness at her arrival to the back of his mind to keep it from pulling him out of the dark emotions he had so carefully cultivated as he had waited for her to arrive.
"What are you doing standing in the dark?" she asked, bright and brash, as she nearly bounced the last few steps to his side.
"Hello, Snips. I'm fine, thank you. How are you?" he snarked rather than answer her question.
"I know you're not fine, so there's no point in asking," she dismissed with a shrug. "But lurking alone in dark hallways is a new low, even for you."
'Even for you,' she says, Anakin thought with a roll of his eyes, not really offended since he knew she hadn't really intended any offense.
"I don't want to wake the princess," he explained, hoping it would be enough for his apprentice. "Ideally I will be back before morning and she'll never know I left."
Ahsoka tilted her head to study him, not that she could make out his features clearly. The hallway was only illuminated by the dim light of the crescent moon filtering through the thick-paned windows. And Anakin was deliberately remaining in the shadows, because he suspected his eyes were partially, if not wholly, golden. After a few seconds of futility, she huffed and crossed her arms in a gesture so familiar that Anakin had to viciously expel his sudden rush of affection for her out of his mind.
"Yeah, why is that?" she demanded, sounding all the world like the fourteen-year-old girl she had been when they'd met. (There was his mild annoyance with her, right on cue!) "When I suggested that you let me babysit her royal blondeness because you were about to fall asleep on your feet, you nearly tore my head off. Now, a few days later, you're suddenly being all cloak and dagger about sneaking away from her."
Anakin brought his organic hand up to pinch the bridge of his nose and dig circles into the inner corners of his eyes, in an attempt to relieve some of his tension. It didn't work, but he had known beforehand that he might as well not bother.
"I've got a hot date," he told her flatly. "I don't want her to know that I'm abandoning my post to get my dick wet."
"MASTER!" his Padawan shrieked in undisguised disgust.
"Shhhh!" he hissed. "Did you not just hear me say that I don't want to wake Cailee?"
He couldn't see it, but he knew that Ahsoka was glaring up at him when she hissed back, "Don't say things like that to me!"
"Then don't ask stupid questions," he retorted with another roll of his eyes that was entirely lost in the darkness. "You know full well that I'm going to deal with the healer."
"Yes, I know that. What I don't know is why you're going instead of just letting me do it, if you're so worried about someone blowing up the princess while you're gone."
Anakin reached out to clasp her shoulder. "Ahsoka, I may have taken you into warzones and taught you to be a child soldier, but there are some things I won't ever let you do if I can help it."
She brought her hand up to grasp his arm, but she did not speak for a long time. He could feel her curiosity and her apprehension through the Force. There were also her love and her unwavering trust in him. He was not sure he deserved the former, given that he had failed her so spectacularly, and he was certain he did not deserve the latter.
Finally, in a small voice, she asked, "Are you going to torture him? Kill him?"
"Yes, to the first. And also yes, to the second, if I have to."
"I see." After taking a few moments to absorb the impact of his words, she suggested, "Skyguy, do you think maybe you're going off the flight path here?"
Anakin released the sharp bark of laughter that bubbled up in his throat, finding himself unable to repress it while he was so deliberately allowing his feelings to run free.
"Yeah, Snips, I have been for a long time." He took another deep breath, as if he could brace himself for the fallout he knew was coming. "I left the Order."
A frisson of shock and denial sparked across the space between them like static electricity.
"But you're, like, the Chosen One! Chosen One, comma, the!"
"You can't be that surprised," he declared with another laugh. "You know that when people called me unorthodox, they really meant heading down a dark path. You, of all people, have witnessed enough to know that it's true. And that was before I told you I've been married to Padmé for years."
"Married? You didn't say anything about being married!" she exclaimed, then almost immediately held up her hand in the universal signal to stop, which he could barely make out. "No, never mind that. Not important right now. What's important is that you apparently think you're some Sith Lord or something!"
Anakin wanted to comfort her. He wanted to hide the truth from her and let her go on thinking well of him. She was so dear to him…. But, honestly, she deserved to know, especially if he was going to ask her to keep associating with him. It had been a barely formed idea in his head, that now they were both free from the restrictions of the Jedi Order he could resume her training. Now, he realized with sudden clarity that it was something he needed to offer her. For his own sake as well as hers. But first, she had to know exactly who—or what—her master had become.
"I'm no Sith, but, Ahsoka… I have fallen."
"No! Master, no," she denied with a furious shake of her head. "I've already told you: You are the best person I know. I know that the Council treats you terribly sometimes, but they trusted you enough to give me to you. That has to count for something! And you have been the best master I could have asked for. I never questioned whether you were going dark because I never thought you were! You're not! You couldn't!"
Anakin heaved a great sigh.
"They gave you to me because Obi-Wan thought that I needed an apprentice to help curb the worst of my impulses," he told her plainly, though as kindly as he could. "It wasn't because the Council trusted me, little one; it was because they needed a youngling to sacrifice to the cause of taming the Chosen One. I need you to understand this, Ahsoka: My fall has nothing to do with you. I had already half fallen before we ever met, even if I hadn't realized it yet, and there was nothing you could have done to fix me."
"Stop it, Anakin!"
Her begging—her saying his given name in that pleading tone of voice, when it was such a rare occurrence for her to call him that—broke his heart. Nevertheless, he closed his eyes briefly to pull his fear and his rage back to the forefront of his mind, then he pushed himself off the wall and took a step closer to her, into the light of a nearby window.
She gasped up at him with poorly concealed horror, her big blue eyes widening in fear at the sight of his burning yellow ones.
He offered a grim smile, a simple upturn of his lips without any teeth. "If I'm the Jedi's Chosen One, then I reckon they're fucked."
Archer Mann was a career army man closing in on ten years of service; he still had five more to go to pay back the government for the cost of his medical education. He had been stationed in various places over the years, until nine months ago when he had been transferred to the palace. He spent most of his days in the bowels of the complex, far away from the upper floors where the empress or princess might be found, and most of his evenings in a pub bragging to any woman who would listen about his proximity to the royals. He ended each night by stumbling home to his shitty bachelor apartment in one of the historic neighborhoods of the capitol city.
Ahsoka had not unearthed any evidence that Mann was involved in a treasonous plot to assassinate the crown princess of the Regency Worlds. But she had only been trailing him for just shy of two days, and Anakin knew that there was a connection, even if his Padawan hadn't had time to find it yet.
Unfortunately for Mann, Anakin had run out of time to uncover the truth through good old-fashioned stalking.
The leap from the street to the third-floor balcony was difficult but doable for someone of Anakin's physical condition and power in the Force. Using the Force to unlatch the locked door was the work of but a moment. And there was his prey, wrapped up in unwashed sheets like a disgusting, cheap gift.
Anakin thumbed the switch to activate his lightsaber, taking a strange comfort in the buzz of the blade he'd used to cut down so many people. The noise wasn't enough to wake Mann, nor was the heat of the plasma blade against his skin, but the wave of unadulterated panic Anakin sent his way certainly did the trick. It was only Anakin's forethought to pin the man to his mattress using the Force that prevented him from surging upwards and slicing his own face in half on the lightsaber.
"Hello, healer," growled Anakin as he pressed the man further down, exerting pressure around his throat but not quite choking him. "Have you had a chance to decide who you fear more?"
The doctor's eyes had nearly bulged out of his head with terror, but he remained silent. Whether that was because he couldn't find his voice or because he was just very stupid, Anakin couldn't tell. It hardly mattered. He made a great show of trailing his lightsaber across the man's face, a hairsbreadth away from skimming his nose, and then downwards, where he pressed it ever that much closer to Mann's throat. That earned him a loud, wet gasp.
Anakin leaned down so that his sulfur yellow eyes glittered in the glow of his blue blade.
"Still nothing? Well, that's okay. This was just for fun anyway. My master always did say I have a flair for the dramatic." He snicked off the lightsaber and clipped it back to his belt in one smooth movement. "I have heard that some Force users can steal secrets from the minds of others. Of course, I've also heard that it is extremely painful for the victim and has a good chance of driving him insane, but everything has its price. I'm of a mind to see if I can do it."
"Please…" whimpered Mann.
"Is that what Sergeant Wheatley said when they brought him to you? Or when you killed him?"
The healer shook his head, dislodging some of the tears that had pooled in his eyes to run down his cheeks. "I, I didn't kill him!"
"Ah, see, now you're being useful!" Anakin chirped, flashing his white teeth in a grin.
His seeming happiness was replaced in an instant by hot, unrelenting wrath as Anakin bent closer to snarl into the healer's face. The quick shift visibly disorientated the other man, as Anakin had known it would. There were few things more frightening than volatile unpredictability.
"Please, don't," moaned the doctor.
Anakin clenched his fist to squeeze the man's windpipe just that tiny bit more, until he was teetering on the knife's edge between breathing and not.
"Tell me who it was. Who wanted the sergeant dead?"
Cailee was not the most observant person in the galaxy by far. In fact, she had been told more than once by her favorite cousin and best friend, Leeya, that she was oblivious when it came to the actions and feelings of people around her. That was probably because she had been so sheltered growing up as she did, surrounded by nannies and private tutors and being carted between the palace and one of the family's remote country estates. But even she could tell that something had happened between Anakin and Ahsoka.
She had been roused from sleep that morning by the murmur of their voices on the other side of the room, just loud enough for her to make out as she came awake.
"You're sure?" Anakin rumbled, voice deeper than usual from sleep or something else. "You don't have to, Snips."
"I'm sure. I'll be fine," returned his apprentice, though she sounded brittle, somehow, despite her assurances.
"I know you will be. But I would never ask you to do anything you don't want to do…. I mean, you know, now that I don't have the Council forcing me to do things I don't want to do and drag you along."
Cailee had no idea what they were talking about, and she supposed she never would after Anakin became aware that she was awake. She didn't know how, but there seemed to be some sort of connection between them where Cailee could always tell when her Jedi (or whatever he was now) was focusing his attention on her. It was almost like his gaze was a physical presence against her skin. She sighed as she arched her back, stretching her sleep-stiff muscles, and sat up.
"Good morning, Anakin," she beamed at him, even as she reflexively reached up to smooth her hair. She spared a quick glance at the girl sitting across from him. "Ahsoka."
"Morning, princess," replied Anakin.
Now that she was looking at him, there did seem to be something amiss. She couldn't tell what, exactly. There was nothing obviously different or out of place. It was just… an air about him. Ahsoka was alternating between looking anywhere but at Anakin and staring intently at his face. He was obviously making an effort to pretend he didn't notice.
Cailee stopped next to him on her way to the refresher and ran her fingers along the furrow between his brows, which hadn't been there the night before. His bright blue eyes locked on hers as she spread her palm across his forehead.
"Are you alright? You feel a little warm."
"I'm fine," he assured her.
His answer prompted a scoff from his apprentice, but she didn't deign to speak. Cailee turned to look at her, in case any further information was forthcoming, but it was not. The girl met her gaze with a cold stare for several seconds, then slid her eyes briefly back to Anakin, and ultimately past him as if she couldn't stand to look at him for too long.
Cailee turned her attention back to her favorite subject, a teasing smile playing across her lips. "Are you certain? If you are feeling poorly, we can delay our visit to the hangar."
He chuckled and shook his hair out of his face. "I'd have to be in a coma or missing a leg to delay this. In fact, if you don't hurry up, I might go without you."
She had never seen Anakin as excited as when he had learned that Cailee owned an entire hangar chock full of starships that had belonged to her parents. He had been almost boyish in his excitement, to the extent that Cailee had wondered for the first time how old he was—at least several years older than her, she knew. The weight of his responsibilities made him seem older, and his buoyant enthusiasm for looking at ships made him seem younger. He had immediately insisted that he needed to inspect her fleet and select the one they would use to travel to Coruscant, although that had been a poor excuse if she'd ever heard one, given that he'd have been able to decide that just by reading a list of ship specs. If it hadn't already been deep into the evening when he had found out about it, Cailee was certain that he would have dragged her to the port that very moment.
Intent as she was on lifting the troubles from Anakin's brow, Cailee rushed through her morning routine in record time. When she emerged, fully dressed, back into the bedroom, Ahsoka was nowhere to be found. Cailee was relieved to be rid of the weirdly oppressive atmosphere the other girl had seemed to bring with her this morning, but she was sad on Anakin's behalf that there was apparently trouble between them.
She put on the most normal, pleasant voice she could manage and asked, only half joking, "Do I have time to eat something before we go, or will you die if you have to wait another ten minutes?"
Anakin looked up from his datapad and offered a tiny quirk of his lips that she supposed was meant to be a smile.
"I've got you covered, princess."
Cailee was able to catch the small object he tossed in her direction out of instinct. (It probably also had a lot to do with the precision of his throw.) She did not try to suppress her groan when she saw that she was holding a pre-packaged protein bar.
"Really?"
"You might as well get used to it," he told her as he stood from his chair. "Food on a warship looks a lot more like that than anything they serve in the palace."
Two hours later, Cailee found herself perched on a small rolling stool that one of her ship mechanics had procured for her from somewhere in the massive hangar, watching Anakin flit back and forth between various starships. He occasionally made an exclamation or shouted something back to his astromech droid, who was rolling along behind him at a much slower pace, but for the most part it seemed more like he was communing with the ships, having silent conversations with them that nobody but himself could hear. At one point he had disappeared into her courier-class yacht, which had been a wedding gift from her grandmother to her parents, even though Cailee knew full well that they wouldn't be taking it to Coruscant. For one thing, it required a three-person crew to fly. For another, it would take up too much room on his battleship.
He was so happy that she would never have pointed that out and curtailed his fun, but her amusement was beginning to fade into exasperation by the time he finally made his way back to her. The sun was high in the sky, and he had a skip to his step and a bashful, boyish grin on his face.
"So, uh…" He ran his hand through his hair and rubbed the back of his neck. "The cruiser with the IntelStar hyperdrive, yeah?"
Cailee made an enormous production of slowly turning her head to look at the ship in question, which was situated literally right next to them.
"You mean the converted Kuat Drive Yards gunship? The first ship you looked at? That one?"
Anakin had the grace to wince. "Sorry."
"Don't be. I'm glad you enjoyed yourself," she told him, and she was even being about ninety percent sincere.
His lips parted in surprise. "Oh! Well, yes, I did. Thank you."
Cailee held out her hand, which he took and used to haul her off the rather low stool and to her feet. She glanced up at him as she smoothed out the wrinkles in her trousers, trying not to dwell too hard on how attractive this mix of youthful enthusiasm and shy contrition made him look. Of course, Cailee had long thought that his usual broody intensity and unapologetic command of every situation was a great look on him. Not that she could imagine there were many things that didn't look good on him. Even his rage, even when it was directed at her, was also a lovely sight to behold, although it was probably a good thing that his enemies didn't share her opinion. (Although, maybe not, if his enemies were to react how she did when faced with the hard expression and unrelenting glare of his anger; that is, with a desperate urge to roll over and let him have whatever he wanted.)
But while his usual demeanor made her want him—or, more accurately, made her want him to take her—this new side of him today made her want to wrap him up in silk and cotton wool and keep him like something precious.
Most likely he'd be horrified if he knew.
She wondered whether he had ever allowed anyone to take care of him in his entire life.
"Although," she continued their conversation as they walked towards the ship he had chosen, more to distract herself than anything, "maybe next time I show you my toys, remind me to bring a book."
He shook his head ruefully as he led her up the gang plank with his hand on the small of her back.
"You know, that's not a bad idea, now that you mention it. You're going to need something to keep you occupied while I'm working or out on a mission. You'll probably have to stay in your cabin a lot—I doubt the supreme chancellor's benevolence will extend to giving you access to top secret military information."
"I do have my datapad," Cailee reminded him. "It's connected to most of the archives our national library has preserved and digitized, including books, films, that sort of thing."
Anakin pursed his lips. "You'll probably have to download a few things at a time under supervision and otherwise stay off the net. Or maybe I could mirror your datapad onto one of my own so I can assure the chancellor that I am monitoring your browsing and communications." At her expression, which Cailee knew reflected her distaste at either idea, he added, "We can decide later."
It had all seemed so romantic and adventurous, at first, to gallivant off with the Jedi on his warship. The closer they got to departing, though, and the more logistical details Anakin revealed, the less ideal things seemed. To her immense dissatisfaction, Cailee had been led to understand that they wouldn't be doing much in the way of gallivanting.
Still, it was a price she was willing to pay to not die. Or to not ask Anakin to waste his talent as her personal bodyguard while there was a war going on.
"So… Normally I can handle a simple flight from Point A to Point B by myself…." the man in question broke into her thoughts. "But this ship is meant to be flown by two people, and Artoo doesn't have hands. I might ask you to push a button here or there."
"What? Anakin, no," Cailee rejected his suggestion out of hand. "That is not a good idea."
He ignored her as he guided her into the co-pilot's chair. She only went because her other option was to literally dig her heels in like a toddler and start grabbing at every available surface they walked past to halt their progress. And that would stop him about as effectively as it had stopped her father when she had actually been a toddler. As soon as her butt was planted in the seat, Anakin spun it around to face the control panel and leaned over her so that his chest was pressed to her shoulder.
"It's not a big deal, Cailee, seriously," he assured her as he pointed out several of the controls, although she didn't feel very assured. "See, look, everything is labeled. Truly, I will tell you exactly what I need and will only ask if it's something really simple and if I really need you to do it."
"Can't we take one of the other ships that you can fly alone?" she proposed, unable to keep the desperation out of her tone.
"No can do, blondie." His voice was too full of amusement, too aggravating, for her tastes. He didn't even try to let her down easy. "The CR70 is only equipped for short hops. The light freighter doesn't have any weapons. I guess if you could come up with a hyperdrive booster ring then I could retrofit it to work with one of your father's fighters, but not by tomorrow morning. And anyway, you don't want to spend days on end stuffed into a fighter where you can't get up to stretch your legs and have to pee in a bottle. Trust me."
She could see his point. How could she not? She would rather die than try to pee in a bottle in front of him.
Still, she craned her neck to look up at him with her most pleading expression, not even trying to hide how scared she was. "Anakin, I really don't think I can do this."
Cailee found herself being spun in her chair again, and then the great General Skywalker was crouching in front of her, taking her hands in his and peering up at her with sincere blue eyes.
"Why not?"
If there was one thing she did not like to talk about, it was her parents' deaths and those dark, unhappy years afterward. Things had gotten to the point that her longtime nanny had actually managed to convince Caliee's grandmother, who was notoriously allergic to displays of emotion and thought everybody should just pick themselves up and carry on, that Cailee needed to see someone to help her process their deaths. There had followed a succession of psychologists and child psychiatrists numerous enough that Cailee had lost count, but none of them had helped.
Primarily because she had never told any of them the truth.
But maybe she could reveal some of it to Anakin? He had already seen her at her most vulnerable, jumping at every shadow and too terrified to be alone to even allow him to close the bathroom door. Besides, he had told her about his use of the dark side of the Force; even if she thought the whole thing was silly, he clearly thought that he was revealing something worse than unflattering.
"My parents died in a ship crash," she told him before she could change her mind. "My father was a great pilot. He met my mother at a big ceremony for him to receive a medal from my grandmother for his exceptional valor during the New Attor Rebellion."
"I know," he acknowledged.
Indeed, everything she had said so far was publicly available information. The rest of what she had to reveal was not. She looked down at their hands entwined on her knees, unable to look him in the eye if she was going to get the rest of it out.
"The investigators found that some of the ship systems were not configured correctly. That's why they crashed, because he flew the ship outside of its proper configuration—him, the best pilot Arkanis has ever seen! It doesn't make any sense!"
He squeezed her hands. "Cailee—"
She cut him off by jerking her hands away from his.
"It doesn't make sense because he didn't do it! I did!"
"What?" he questioned, although his voice was full of nothing but confusion. There was none of the disgust or condemnation she had expected. "How could you have done it? You weren't even on the ship, much less the one flying it."
"I was supposed to go with them. It was to be my first official state visit. I had just turned eight; I was so excited." She could feel her lips trembling and the burn of tears behind her eyes, but she pressed on, "My father let me sit with him during his preflight check—I got up before dawn just to go with him. I touched something I wasn't supposed to when he was almost finished, and he had to start over. He was so angry with me."
"That wouldn't have caused the crash."
"No. That didn't…." Cailee swallowed heavily, but the lump in her throat didn't move an inch. "We got into a fight later that morning, just before our departure time. I, I don't even remember what the fight was about…. But I do remember that I was so, so mad at him, and I wanted to hurt him, so I, I just started mashing buttons and pulling levers. Anything I could get my hands on in the maybe five seconds before he could react and stop me. Just to upset him. To make him have to start all over again. That's when he yelled at me—for the first time in my life—and my mother intervened and said that I was clearly not mature enough to go with them. She had me taken off the ship, crying about how unfair they were being and how much I hated them."
She let out a wet sob and hunched forward, hiding her face in her hands. "My nanny had me escorted to my rooms in the palace, and I didn't hear what had happened until hours later. They crashed during takeoff, Anakin, less than two minutes after they left the ground."
She felt Anakin's leather-clad hands begin at her elbows and make their way up her forearms, until he firmly but gently wrapped his fingers around her wrists and drew her hands away from her face.
"Hey, look at me," he coaxed. Cailee stubbornly kept her eyes squeezed shut, until he repeated, in a still-kind but much sharper tone, "Cailee, look at me."
She cracked her eyes open just enough to see his blurry form through her tears. He cupped her face in his hands and rubbed the tears away with his thumbs.
"You did not cause your parents' crash," he told her seriously, his tone inviting no argument. "Your father would have started over, like you expected him to, and he would have checked every setting of every system before he took off."
"He missed something!" she wailed. "I messed something up and he missed it and they died!"
"Then it was still his fault, not yours. It was his responsibility to check everything," Anakin insisted relentlessly.
"No! No, it was me! If I hadn't been so horrible, there wouldn't have been anything for him to miss!"
She collapsed forward, falling against him and knocking him backwards from where he had been sitting on his haunches in front of her. They ended on the floor, with Anakin resting his back against the side of the pilot's chair and Cailee half-curled in his lap. She wept ten years of pent-up guilt and self-hatred and grief into the hollow between his neck and shoulder, soaking his skin and the sturdy fabric of his tunic with her tears.
"It's not your fault, sweetheart," he murmured into her hair as he rocked her. "I promise it's not."
Cailee had never known him to lie, and she trusted him implicitly, but in this she did not believe him.
Ahsoka felt like she was in a dream. Or rather an exceptionally detailed, unwelcome nightmare. She kept waiting to wake up and find that she had dozed off while watching Doctor Mann sleep or (almost as boring) putter around his apartment. She would try to hide her failing from her master, and he would immediately know that something had happened and ferret it out of her in that unerring way he had, and he would lightly chastise her for falling asleep during a stakeout, and they would move on.
Except she never woke up, and she couldn't unsee those vivid yellow eyes.
Anakin had returned three hours before dawn with blue irises and a list of nearly a dozen soldiers and officers in the palace guard. He had not told her, while he was committing the names in his memory to paper, how exactly he had convinced the healer to cough them up. Nor had he disclosed his methods or mentioned his fall while explaining how he thought she should move forward with her investigation. Nor after it had occurred to him that she might not want to continue and he had pressed her to assure him that she didn't mind.
He hadn't killed the doctor. There had been one interminable half hour when Ahsoka thought he had, after she had left him and made her way down to the palace infirmary to check for herself, and the man hadn't been there. The harried-looking human woman who had been manning the place in his absence said that he had sent an e-mail saying he was sick. Ahsoka had been certain that meant he was dead, that Anakin was covering his tracks until he was well off the planet.
But she had found Mann in his apartment, drinking heavily and looking like a ghost but very much alive. And still with all of his limbs even.
Still, Anakin's calm, almost clinical admission that he was going to torture the man for information played over and over in Ahsoka's head, and his glowing sulfur eyes were permanently etched into her mind.
He hadn't been anything like what she thought a fallen Jedi would be like. He hadn't been crazed or frothing at the mouth. He had not seemed out of control. He had just seemed like Anakin—the grouchy, broody, irritable version of himself, but still Anakin. He had even made a sex joke! And, yeah, super gross, but she couldn't imagine an evil person making a sex joke.
Anakin had sent her a message late last evening asking her to come to the princess's private airfield this morning to see them off. Ahsoka had slept fitfully, in starts and stops, agonizing over whether to go.
She arrived bright and early, just in time to observe Anakin glowering at the ground crew as they towed a smallish cruiser out of the hangar.
"Ahsoka," he greeted, not taking his hard glare (still blue) off the men who were handling his (the princess's) ship.
"Master," she returned but felt unequal to saying anything else, even if his posture had invited further conversation. (It didn't.)
She looked around curiously towards the princess, who was still sitting in the speeder Anakin must have arrived in and looking like she had not slept a wink the night before. Whatever she had done to her face that morning could not completely hide her swollen eyes. It was obvious that Cailee must have been crying for hours very recently. Ahsoka hadn't thought the older girl was that upset about leaving home—she had seemed perfectly excited about it just yesterday—but it was none of Ahsoka's business anyway.
Once Anakin had seen whatever it was he had been looking for to allow him to let the ground crew work in peace, he finally turned to face her. "I'm glad you decided to come. I wasn't sure you would."
"I thought about not coming," she admitted quietly. "But… but you've always been there for me."
He released a frustrated puff of breath. "I don't want you to feel obligated towards me, Ahsoka. If you decide to continue your training with me, or if we're going to be… friends," he settled on, after fishing about for a few seconds for a word, "then I want it to be because you want to. Freely. Not just because I used to be your master."
"You still are," Ahsoka found herself telling him before she could second guess it. At his resulting frown, she let out a sigh of her own and decided she had to elaborate. "You'll never stop being my master. Just like Master Kenobi is still yours, no matter how much he may have hurt you or disappointed you."
She hadn't meant it as a comparison or to say that Anakin had hurt or disappointed her. She may feel disappointed and scared and sick that he had fallen, but it was not something he had done to her. Anakin had never deliberately hurt her or acted with uncaring disregard for whether his actions would cause her pain, which Obi-Wan had done to him on multiple occasions. But she realized only after she had spoken that Anakin would take that implication from her words. His face fell and he dipped his head.
By the time Ahsoka realized her mistake and opened her mouth to try and fix it, he had already gathered himself back together and said, "Still, please keep what I said in mind. And please understand that this is not intended as a bribe or a way to guilt trip you into doing what I want."
Before she even had time to feel curious about what he meant, Anakin had raised his arm and Force pulled a shallow, rectangular wooden box from his speeder and into his outstretched hand.
"Master?" she wondered aloud.
He held the box out towards her with both hands. "No matter what you decide about our future together, if you're going to stay here investigating a bunch of terrorists, you'll need these."
Ahsoka's breath caught in her throat as she realized—hoped, doubted, prayed—what he meant. There was only one "these" he could be talking about. She reached out eagerly for the box, hesitating briefly before she pushed the lid open, just in case she was wrong. But no, there they were, nestled in the box lining: her lightsabers.
"I may have stolen these from Temple storage," he confessed, not sounding remotely apologetic or ashamed about it. "I repaired them and kept them safe for you."
She reached out to take them, letting her fingers trail over the cool metal hilts for a few seconds just to make sure they were real, before picking them up and igniting them. They felt exactly the same in her hands as they always had, but she was surprised to see that instead of green, the blades were now blue.
"And I may have tinkered with them," he added sheepishly. "Made some improvements."
Ahsoka rolled her eyes in exasperation, but her smile stretched from eye to eye.
Later, as she watched Anakin's ship rapidly ascend into the atmosphere, she became aware of another familiar presence in the Force. It was close enough that he must have been purposely hiding his Force signature from Anakin, which made perfect sense. He would have wanted to avoid a public confrontation. Ahsoka considered ignoring him. But if he had let himself be known now, then the chances he would just let her leave without speaking were slim to none.
He was standing on a nearby hilltop with an unobstructed view of the airfield, just inside the tree line so that even Anakin's keen eyesight wouldn't have detected him. He looked, Ahsoka thought as she approached, like he had been wrung out rather roughly.
"Hello, Master Kenobi," she greeted, keeping her voice neutral instead of letting him hear how angry she was.
"You don't have to call me master anymore," he pointed out wryly.
"Habit," bit out Ahsoka, some of her feelings showing through now. "Did the Council send you here to spy on him?"
Obi-Wan had the good sense to look chastened at her question, but Ahsoka didn't trust that the feelings he was portraying were real.
"No, actually. The Council are perfectly happy to wait until Anakin gets to Coruscant to confront him. I wanted to see him off, for personal reasons."
Ahsoka snorted and pointed out, "Maybe you should have given into some of these personal impulses a bit sooner, and we wouldn't be in this situation. Maybe I shouldn't have tried so hard to maintain emotional distance from him either, but I was just a kid doing what I'd been taught to do."
"I was raised in the Temple, too, young one," Obi-Wan patiently reminded her.
"And then you had ten years to figure out what your Padawan needed from you, and nearly three years since then to deal with him as a friend, and you failed."
"He failed!" snapped the Jedi Master, finally losing any semblance of peace he had been trying to present to her. He took a ragged breath. When he spoke next, he managed to sound only mildly disgruntled. "Has it occurred to you that the reason he fell is because he allows himself to be a slave to his emotions? Because he refuses to let them go no matter how many times I, or any of the other masters, warned him that he was going down a dark path?"
"No," Ahsoka replied curtly, taken aback by how closely Obi-Wan's words matched what Anakin had said to her when he had explained his fall. "Has it occurred to you that he fell because you and the Council kept pushing him harder than you ever pushed anyone else? Because you all kept taking advantage of his feelings when it was convenient for you, even though the rest of the time you disregarded his feelings and concerns and made him feel like shit for daring to have them? How about it, Rako Hardeen?"
His face shuttered. His fine lines, which were normally barely noticeable, seemed to have been carved deep into his skin overnight. Ahsoka was not sorry for what she had said, nor could she muster up any sympathy for him in that moment.
Instead of responding to her accusation, Master Kenobi observed, "I felt a disturbance in the Force two nights ago."
"Yep," she acknowledged as briefly as possible.
"Mace has sensed that things have changed," he went on, as if he were unbothered by her unresponsiveness. "Some of the shatterpoints that existed before have been broken, and some have disappeared and been replaced by new ones."
"Interesting."
"We all need to prepare for what's coming. Even you, even if you are no longer part of the Order. When he finally breaks completely, it's likely that he will target you," concluded Obi-Wan, his frown making his face appear even more haggard than before. He let his gaze travel down to the lightsabers hanging from her belt. "I saw that Anakin gave those back to you."
She was sure that tone she could detect, which Obi-Wan was trying to hide behind diplomacy, was disapproval.
"He did," Ahsoka informed him proudly, straightening her posture and lifting her chin defiantly. "And I am going to prepare, but not for Anakin to hurt me. Now that he doesn't have to worry about what the stupid Council thinks, he is going to finish my training."
Kenobi's eyes widened in disbelief and his mouth dropped opened as if he had meant to say something but couldn't remember what.
Ahsoka realized that she meant every word. She was going to stick with Anakin. She was going to take him up on his offer. She just needed some time to process everything that had happened first. Finishing her investigation on Arkanis would give her the perfect opportunity to do that. And if she managed to figure out who was behind the assassination attempts, then getting him away from the snobby, judgmental princess would be an added bonus.
Author's Note: The scene and dialogue where Anakin returns Ahsoka's lightsabers is inspired by/based off the similar scene in TWC 7.09, "Old Friends Not Forgotten."
Oof. This is one of the longer chapters. I had been planning to put the last section at the beginning of the next chapter, but it really fits in much better here. So you guys had to wait an extra day for this chapter while I actually wrote that section. Next up: Coruscant!
