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You are walking up a snow-covered mountain, and around you a blizzard rages. You are on a journey, but you don’t know where. You will get to your destination one day, but you don’t know when. You will travel a long time, but you don’t know how long. You only know you must keep going.
.
Anakin’s Padawan is strong and brave and fierce and he has every faith in her abilities. He’s known from the beginning that she would fight her way back to him, Trandoshans or no. He’s known from the beginning, on some level, that he would see her again.
(This isn’t, he tells himself, because he doesn’t know how to imagine life without his Padawan, because he can’t imagine all the ways he would break if she were gone. This has to do only with his faith in her abilities.)
But, regardless of that faith, seeing her walk off the ship and back into the safety of the Temple’s embrace released something deep within him. Safe, safe, safe, she’s safe .
She is also obviously hurt, even more obviously haunted by whatever she’d seen when she was in the hands of those monsters, and the rage that kindles in Anakin will scare him, later, when he thinks about it. For now, he is more focused on Ahsoka.
Force, he’d been so afraid .
They greet each other formally, because they’re in public, and she absolves him of his guilt when he tries to apologize, because she has an incredible inherent goodness and will be better than all of them one day, his good and clever Padawan—
And she is shaking slightly, and blinking hard like she expects the Temple to dissolve around her into a dream.
Over her shoulder, Master Yoda gives him a significant look, both permission and command. As if Anakin needs it.
“C’mon, Snips,” he says, carefully light, “let’s get you cleaned up and fed. Obi-Wan’s making breakfast for dinner.” He starts the guide the two of them into the Temple, and towards their rooms. Ahsoka, clearly dead on her feet, allows herself to be led.
.
On your journey, remember this; even when alone, you’re never alone. Even when there is no light, there is light. Even when the world is cold, it is never cold everywhere. Remember that, as you continue walking.
.
Ahsoka makes a drowsy sound of confusion— one of those uniquely Togrutan noises, low and trilling, vibrating in ways human vocal chords simply don’t. “Master Obi-Wan is back from the front?”
The question stabs Anakin someplace he didn’t know he could hurt. That her first thought when told her family was all in their home together was surprise — there was something wrong with that.
“Back from the front.”
Force and stars above, they need to end this war.
“Yeah, he’s waiting for us upstairs,” Anakin says instead.
Ahsoka nods. Anakin carefully knocks their shoulders together.
“Do you want to. I don’t know. Talk about it?” he asks. “About what happened?”
Ahsoka takes a long second to consider this. And she actually thinks about it, Anakin can tell. He doesn’t know where she gets that from. He would have already said no.
“Not— not right now,” Ahsoka whispers. “Later, maybe, but first I need— I need some time to—” her breath hitches, and she rakes her wrist over her eyes. “Meditate about it on my own, I think. I don’t know how to say it.”
Her voice is small and watery by the end of the sentence.
They continue walking.
“It was a long time,” Ahsoka’s cracks, painful and young, “to be away.”
Anakin stops abruptly. This can’t wait.
He steers her behind a pillar, a thin veneer of safety, and reaches up to cradle her face in his hands. Every time he does this, he moves his hands further up. She’s growing fast. She’ll be taller than him, someday soon. His good and clever and strong Padawan.
He’d been so afraid .
He says, “Tamah qa brok vaversi, ji enoah qa mikodail orhma bika,” because he hasn’t said it yet. He says it low and fierce, allowing the words to flow off his tongue as rough as they do naturally.
Anakin’s spent years hiding his accent in Dai Bendu, hating the way the curl of his voice marked him as Other — it didn’t matter if so many other members of the Order spoke with accents, his accent was Outer Rim and trash and he refused to be defined by the little slave boy on Tatooine. Obi-Wan tells him over and over that it doesn’t matter, asks him to stop, but Anakin never does.
He never considered it anything good until a night around a campfire on some faraway world, Ahsoka dozing against his shoulder and muttering that she liked hearing it over the comms. It was a way for her to be sure that it was him speaking. And if he is close enough to speak to her, she is safe.
The power in that statement, the responsibility , floored Anakin enough that his accent has tripped out of his mouth ever since.
He’d come so close to losing her.
In the present, Ahsoka’s eyes squeeze shut. Anakin watches her composure crack, like the center of a lake in very early spring. She sways forward into his hands, and rests her forehead in the center of his chest.
Her shoulders start to shake.
“I don’t feel warm,” she says, and breaks Anakin’s heart. “I feel cold, Jaieh. Tamah foh Anohrah, ji tamah foh brok.”
Anakin wraps his arms lightly around her, tucks her head under his chin — and there is something transcendent in that, placing a child you love there, the movement carrying the weight of every guardian who ever was — and rocks the two of them back and forth.
“Tamah qa brok vaversi, ji enoah qa mikodail orhma bika,” he says again, his own eyes also closing. “ Enoah qa mikodail orhma bika, Padawan, enoah qa mikodail orhma bika.”
Anakin is going to get Ahsoka back to their rooms. He is going to sit with her as his own Master putters around and makes them all tea and dinner. He is going to hand her blankets and give her all the time he can, to heal and feel warm again.
He is going to end this war as fast as possible.
.
On your journey, you reach a door. You open it, and we are all there. We are reaching out to you with open arms. We welcome you inside, not as a destination of a journey, but as a respite, as a place to to put your head down, as a place to be with us. We’re all here, and we love you, and it’s warm. It’s warm here, with us. Welcome home.