Ahsoka

AHSOKA LOOKED DOWN at the grave, her heart a stone in her chest.

She thought about all the clone troopers she had ever served with. They had been so quick to accept her, even when she first became Anakin’s Padawan. Sure, part of that was their genetic code, but that only went so far. They respected her. They listened to her. They taught her everything they knew. And when she made mistakes, when she got some of them killed, they forgave her, and they stood beside her again when it was time to return to battle. The Jedi were gone, but what happened to the clones was almost worse. Their identities, their free will, removed with a simple voice command and the activation of a chip. If she hadn’t seen it for herself, she wouldn’t have believed it was possible.

She felt completely alone in the Force, except for the dark nothingness that stared back at her every time she tried to connect with Anakin or any of the others. More than anything, she wanted a ship to appear, for Anakin to track her down or one of the other Jedi to find her. She wanted to know where they were, if they were safe, but there was no way to do that without compromising her own position. All she could do was what she had decided to do: go to ground.

She should have been at the Temple. She should have been with Anakin. She should have helped. Instead, she’d been on Mandalore, almost entirely alone, surrounded by clones and confusion and blaster fire. Maul had escaped, of course. She’d had the opportunity to kill him, but had chosen to save Rex instead. She didn’t regret that, couldn’t regret it, but the mischief and worse that Maul might wreak in a galaxy with no Jedi to protect it gnawed at her.

Now, there was the grave. Everything about it was false, from the name listed on it to the name of the person who’d killed him. It looked very real, though. And you couldn’t tell clones apart when they were dead, especially not if they were buried in another’s set of armor.

Ahsoka held her lightsabers, her last physical connection to the Jedi and to her service in the Clone Wars. It was so hard to give them up, even though she knew she had to. It was the only way to sell the con of the false burial, and it would buy her a modicum of safety, because whoever found them would assume she was dead, too.

But Anakin had given them to her. She’d walked away from the Jedi Temple with nothing but the clothes on her back and had struggled for a long time to find a new place in the galaxy. When she had found a mission, when she had reached out to her former master for help, he had reached back and given her the Jedi weapons to do the job. He’d accepted her return, and it felt like a failure to leave the lightsabers behind a second time.

She turned them on and told herself that it was their incandescent green glow in the dark night that made her eyes water. How many Jedi were buried with their lightsabers today? How many weren’t buried at all but left behind like so much garbage, their weapons taken as trophies? The younglings, had they known what to do? Who could they ask once their teachers had been cut down? Surely, there had been some mercy for—

She knelt, extinguishing the energy, and planted the hilts of both her weapons in the freshly turned dirt.

She stood quickly and resisted the urge to call the lightsabers back into her hands. They must be left there, memorializing the man they were recorded as having killed, a trophy for the coming Imperials to find.

And they were coming. Ahsoka could feel it in her bones. She had a ship, unremarkable and well built. Rex was already gone, his false death inscribed on the marker in front of her and the false report of her death at his hands credited there as well. When they were digging the grave, they had agreed to separate and head for the Outer Rim. It was chaotic there, but it was the sort of chaos where a person could get lost. The chaos on the Core worlds was motivated by Palpatine’s new peace, and if Ahsoka tried to hide herself there, it would be only a matter of time until she was found.

She placed a hand on the grave marker and allowed herself one more moment to think about the man who was buried there and about the man who wasn’t. She thought about her master, whom she could no longer sense, and the other Jedi, whose absence was like an open airlock in her lungs. With determination, she shut it. She stopped looking for Anakin through the connection they shared. She stopped remembering the clones, alive and dead.

She turned and walked to her ship. She wondered what she would say when she got to a new planet and someone asked her who she was. She knew her name was on a list of supposed criminals. She couldn’t safely use it anymore. She couldn’t say she was a Jedi, not that she ever could have said that in good conscience anyway. She’d given up that right. Now she paid the price, doubly, for her abandonment. At least the pilot’s seat made sense. She knew what to do when she was sitting in it.

The ship hummed to life around her, and she focused on the things she knew for certain: she was Ahsoka Tano, at least for a little bit longer, and it was time to go.