Chapter Text
"Oh-ooh-oh, oh-ooh-oh
Be my baby
I'll look after you..."
- Look After You, the Fray
“What happened on Mortis?”
Anakin’s blood went cold at Ahsoka’s words. It had been some unspoken rule that the two of them and Obi-Wan never spoke of Mortis. It was generally agreed, after the Council’s assessment of their briefs and the fact that supposedly they’d been there - if there was a there - for days yet disappeared for only seconds, that the whole thing had been a vision in the Force. Not real. So it didn’t matter. The beings and experiences and the things Ahsoka had done he’d left out of his report didn’t matter.
On her knees before him, hands clasped in his, Anakin’s Padawan needed an answer. It seemed to matter very much to her.
“We…both have gaps in our memory-” He started. What, was he going to lie to her face?
“I know.” Ahsoka said calmly, matter of factly. She stuck to that tone as he continued. “And if you really can’t help me fill mine, I will go ask Obi-Wan. But I think you know, Master, what I don’t.”
Anakin shook his head, one short jerk like he was waking suddenly. “Why is this suddenly so important, Ahsoka?”
Ahsoka sighed. She had expected this, for him to skirt the issue. It was all they’d ever done, after all, but no more. “With our bond so much stronger now, I’ve…there have been some moments it was on your mind and I could sense it, though I don’t think you meant me to.” She answered before he could ask, “In the speeder after Obi-Wan’s fake funeral, and in the Citadel when you pulled me out of that cave. Both times the almost-memory was so thick with fear.” She looked up at him, eyes wide. “Please, Anakin, I need to know.”
Anakin wanted, so much to deny her. To insist it didn’t matter, it wasn’t real. He wanted to spare her the pain he knew this knowledge would cause. But that would be a betrayal of what they had sworn to be to each other; honesty. So instead, he squeezed her hands harder, and didn’t shy away from her intense gaze. “Are you sure?”
Ahsoka nodded slowly, solemnly.
Taking a deep breath, Anakin nodded. “I think I can show you, if we focus on keeping the bond wide open. Can you do that?”
“Yes, Master.” A task before her, Ahsoka straightened her shoulders, raised up on her knees a little. Both she and her Master had entirely forgotten their nakedness. His hands felt warm as they settled on either side of her head, and she kept herself as free to him in the Force as she could, and felt his intensity coming back at her. Then he touched his forehead to hers and his hands seemed to get warmer and then she wasn’t Ahsoka anymore but looking at Ahsoka, back to her, and -
“Are you…proud of me Master?”
Ahsoka is so closed off from you in the Force. That’s why it took awhile to find her. But she doesn't seem hurt. The question is absurd, given the context.
“What?” you almost chuckle. “Uh, course, Snips, of course I’m proud of you, now let’s get out of here.”
The Son’s temple gives you the creeps. Maybe not as much as your Padawan’s voice as she keeps talking, something about joining forces with the Son. When she turns to you her eyes are yellow.
No. No no no. No this is not happening.
“I don’t need you anymore.”
Those words may as well be daggers of ice in your heart.
“Ahsoka…Ahsoka listen to me. He has done something to you, snap out of it.” She can do that. She’s strong, you’ve made her strong. “This isn’t you Ahsoka.” This isn’t your Ahoska.
“I feel more like myself than I ever have. He asked me to give you a message. He said if you don’t join him, he will kill me.”
She laughs at that.
“I won’t let him.” Your words have no heat behind them, they are simple, matter of fact. You will not let anyone kill Ahsoka Tano.
And then you are fighting. Your Padawan swinging one of her sabers at you with all her might, kicking you in the chest. When she threatens to kill you, you joke.
“Getting ahead of yourself, aren’t you Snips?”
But it isn’t funny, not in the slightest. It's just that your options are joke or scream. She is close enough your foreheads could touch if your sabers weren’t crossed between the two of you, your weapons and your will in the Force battling each other.
“Don’t call me that! I hate it when you call me that!”
…Is that true, you wonder?
This is not happening. This cannot be happening.
“Two Jedi. Finally, a challenge.”
Your Padawan. With yellow eyes. Attacking you and your Master, who you didn’t even hear approach.
It’s hard to fight when you are trying so hard not to injure your opponent. You throw Ahsoka off, far enough it will take her a moment to charge back, her sabers digging into the ground and kriff are you wishing you’d never let her start using a second one but then who would have ever thought she would turn them on you?
“Any suggestions?” you grit out to Obi-Wan.
“Yes,” he says, like it’s obvious, and holds up an ancient-looking knife. “We cut her free.”
Like hell. You’re not slicing into or stabbing your Padawan, there has to be another way, she’s strong, she can fight this. The choice is taken out of your hands. Literally, when Ahsoka snatches the knife away and hands it over to the Son. You hear the Son demand the knife, and Ahsoka looks back at you.
“Ahsoka, no.” It’s a plea.
But she turns away, and puts the knife in the Son’s hands. Then you see her fall, feel the bright spot that is Ahsoka in the Force snuff out, and hear yourself scream.
“NOOOOOO!”
You turn Ahsoka’s body over. Her eyes are wide open, rolled back, light gone out of them. You barely hear yourself beg for a solution, insisting there is always hope. You numbly follow Father’s instructions sensing what he does not say as you touch the forehead of Daughter, and a second fingertip to that of your Padawan. As the bodies before you begin to glow, you feel something move through you from Daughter to Ahsoka. Your whole being trembles as the Force pulls itself around you, into you. The bodies float, land.
Nothing happens.
Then Ahsoka coughs.
Then she is in your arms.
She’s okay.
She’s okay.
She’s okay.
What did I just do to her?
“Hey Snips.”
She looks confused. “What’s…going on?”
You share a pointed look with Obi-Wan. Maybe it’s for the best she doesn’t remember. Being brainwashed by Son. Fighting you. Whatever else happened.
“Not much. It’s good to see you.”
- and she was Ahsoka again, breathing hard and stomach rolling and getting up to run to the ‘fresher, a roar in her ears that all but drowned out her Master calling her name behind her. She dry heaved into the gleaming sink, feeling her skin prickle all over with sweat, unable to get the image of herself falling, her blank eyes, herself sitting up again out of her head.
Dead. She was dead. No wonder Anakin didn’t want to tell her. Anakin, who brought her back, somehow. Chosen One and all that. Anakin who was padding into the bathroom now, and she met his eyes in the mirror, not bothering to ask if she was okay when she so very clearly was not.
“....I died.” Ahsoka squeaked out, her voice thin and weak, her breath slower now, but shaky.
Anakin opened his mouth a couple of times, trying to find the right words. There were none. “It was a Force vision, it didn’t -”
“I felt it. Or your memory of it, me…disappearing from the bond.” She gripped the edges of the sink, staring at her paling knuckles. “That’s why you were furious with yourself when we thought Obi-Wan was gone, because…because you know, sort of, that you can…because you did, for me…” She met his eyes again. “And in the Citadel, that cave cut me off from the Force, you must’ve thought -”
“Yes. For a moment. It was different.” Anakin’s words were clipped, spoken through a tight jaw as they talked of his most recent worst memories and his Padawan’s presence riled in the Force, sporadic and unmoored.
“And you knew that I wasn’t dead because you knew what it felt like when I did die because I did die and…and….” Her knees shook as she suddenly understood, the emptiness she had often felt since Mortis. The way she had had trouble sleeping, almost afraid to close her eyes and not knowing why. The something wrong that had only felt right in his presence. Her voice broke and tears streamed down her face bringing streaks of eye makeup with them. “If I was dead, Master, then what am I now?”
Anakin didn’t break eye contact with Ahsoka’s reflection in the mirror, and he didn’t let himself feel pity for what she was going through. She had never responded well to pity. He answered her sternly, confidently. That was what she needed right now, for him to be steady ground while she wobbled. He placed his hands over hers on the counter, letting her feel his body close. “You are Ahsoka Tano, my Padawan, and you are alive.”
Ahsoka took another shuddering breath. She heard what Anakin said, but she didn’t feel it. She wanted to though, but she couldn’t manage to get the words out. So she relied on the bond, so raw and open right now. Show me, Master. Help me. And then out loud at last, “Prove it.”
There was a challenge in Ahsoka’s words, and Anakin Skywalker had never been one to back away from a challenge. One hand - his right hand - stroked up Ahsoka’s arm, and she shuddered. When his fingers ghosted her collarbone her breath stuttered for a reason that had nothing to do with what troubled her. And when his hand settled around her throat she went still.
It never ceased to amaze Ahsoka, that the metal casing for her Master’s mechno arm could be as warm as flesh. But it was, and at its touch she felt her pulse race, beating against him in her jugular vein.
Pulse. She was alive.
Her Master wasn’t done with her yet.
Anakin’s other hand roamed. Up her arm, down a headtail. He held it gently in his hand and stroked the tip with a skilled thumb, going around and around in circles. He didn’t look away from Ahsoka’s face in the mirror as he rubbed, using her reactions and their bond to guide him through her desires, her needs. Needs only he could fulfill.
Briefly, Ahsoka glanced at her Master’s face in the mirror, seeing pure determination there, his expression set and his eyes intense. She was already trembling at his ministrations to her sensitive headtail, and he wouldn’t stop, she sensed, until he decided she’d had enough.She leaned - no, grinded back against him, feeling the pressure of their bodies so close.
Pressure. She was alive.
Moving from headtail to nipple, Anakin kept up his circling, fingers getting tighter and tighter. His mouth was in on the action now too, tongue tracing a hot, wet trail across the same quivering headtail his fingers had teased, down to her shoulder. Ahsoka, his Ahsoka, his Padawan, was going to feel her entire, living body, damnit. Mercilessly, he bit into the flesh there, at the same moment pinching Ahsoka’s nipple between two fingers.
“Oh!” Ahsoka would have lurched, but she was held fast by the hand on her throat, the fingers tight on her hard nipple, the teeth in her shoulder. That was going to leave a mark. Ahsoka welcomed it, the pain and the promise of a bruise later.
Pain. She was alive.
Anakin guided his hand lower still, gently parting soft lips slick with desire to make way for his cock. “Feel that Ahsoka?” He murmured as his hips pressed into her, and groaning as he felt her core shape to him. “You feel me inside of you? Do you feel how your body -” he punctuated with a thrust - “reacts to mine?”
Ahsoka did feel it, those deft fingers holding her wide, that warm piercing, that fullness and rightness as her Master took her. She needed more, yet all she could manage was a moan. But Anakin understood.
“That’s right Ahsoka, I’ve got what you need…” More thrusting, more slickness, sliding deeper and hands gripping and moaning in unison and her clit under his fingers because he wanted her to feel everything.
Ahsoka felt more caught than before, a strong arm between her breasts and that mechno arm, so powerful but so careful, around her throat. The other arm leading down, to where her clit was circled and stroked and pressed by relentless touch, and then there was everything else happening between her legs, just as powerful, just as ceaseless. Ahsoka was playing with her own breast now, the nipple her Master had left sore, a low growl bubbling up from her chest. Her Master’s name left her lips like a sacred word. “Anakin…Anakin…”
“That’s it, Ahsoka, help Master make you feel good.” Anakin had meant for Ahsoka to come first, but somehow he sensed she needed to see him, feel him, before she would be ready, and so he drove his hips harder, the mirror over the sink shaking as he pushed their bodies into the counter, and pushed himself over the edge.
“Ahsoka!” Came Anakin’s strangled cry in her ear, and she felt the flood of his essence, full of midichlorians as his blood would be, his pleasure flooding her even as her own built until she could take it no longer, but it was nothing like death, no.
Pleasure. She was ALIVE!
“ANAKIN!” Ahsoka screamed his name, knowing it would leave her throat raw and not caring, and as she gave in to the crashing wave of her pleasure, over the bond she witnessed what Anakin did; her very being white-hot with light and heat and life. When the vision faded, she was shaking, but not from horror this time. Her Master’s grip eased, and she braced herself on the counter, panting. He kept one arm around her waist, and she heard breath tearing out of him too. For a moment that was the only sound, then they calmed.
“I will always be here to give you what you need.” Anakin swore, a solemn vow. One he had proved on Mortis, and at the Citadel, and now.
Ahsoka mewled, both weary and still very, very aroused. “And if what I need is to lie down, and then to do all of that again but in bed?”
She yelped as she was swept off her feet and into Anakin’s arms, then nuzzled into him.
Anakin relished the feel of Ahsoka’s arms around his neck, her contentment and desire in the bond. “Whatever you need, my Padawan.”
And he sealed the promise with a kiss.
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