Ahsoka grips her lightsabers. Exhaustion is a cold presence, its needling pain taking its toll. The pull of the Dark Side is strong here, in the Sith Temple, where there is no mercy and no forgiveness.

As she sees him in person, her words whisper in the back of her memory: to defeat your enemy, you must understand them. Once, she thinks, she had understood the one who turns to face her. Once—

#

"Anakin Skywalker," Ahsoka said. They were on Coruscant, when she was young. The skyscrapers glittered so brightly, the war not quite so present, still new, like she was. Her padawan beads brushed against her lekku. Sometimes, she still caught herself reaching back to touch them, marveling.

She had heard much about this Anakin Skywalker, her new Master. He had been older than most when he had been brought to the Temple. She smiled: he who had been deemed too old, and she who was technically still too young to be a padawan but for the war. They would work well together, she was sure.

#

Their blades sizzle. He is strong, but so is she. He knows how she fights, her style, but she's learned much since she left.

So has he.

She searches the mask for a sense of the man behind it, but it betrays nothing of him to her—except maybe a tilt of his head, a twist of his wrist, the inescapable reality of his advance.

The sith light shows her nothing but glimpses of the man within, and there is a red haze softening the white gleam of her sabers.

#

"A new lightsaber, Snips?" Anakin watched her as she practiced in the courtyard of the Jedi temple. He leaned against a fruit tree, his face dappled in green shadow as its leaves shaded him from the sun.

She paused to look at him, the length of light dying as she released her concentration and came to join him. She was thirsty, and sweat ran down her skin.

"May I see it?" He reached out his hand, and she let it drop into his palm. He held it carefully, activating the blade.

Its pale yellow light hummed patiently, singing as he wielded it through a basic form any padawan learner knew. "It's good, Snips."

She smiled, glad for his approval.

"Why'd you make another one?"

Because it had felt right. "You get into so much trouble, Master, I needed another so I can keep rescuing you."

He laughed at her as he returned her weapon. "I think it's the other way around, Snips. You're the one always getting into trouble, and I'm the one getting you out of it. You want to join me? You look like you could use some refreshment."

She told him she thought she would stay out here, and he shrugged his shoulders as he departed. There was a faint floral smell in the air, and she realized it was coming from the lightsaber handle from where he had held it. Ahsoka recognized the scent from her time on Naboo. Senator Amidala had favored the pink flowers, keeping bouquets of them at her desk to remind her of her home in the lake country.

Ahsoka snapped her saber to her belt and started after him. She could barely see him, so far down he was on the path. She took a breath to call out—

#

"Anakin?" She has not heard her name in his voice for so long, only in her dreams and in her memories and in her hopes.

No matter what he says, she knows now that Anakin is not destroyed. There is no need for vengeance. She can see him now.

But still they fight. Light flashes and sparks from their sabers. In the distance, she hears the Phantom take off towards safety. Closer, she hears the crackle-pop of a thousand electric explosions working their way towards something more, something big, and she knows she is running out of time.

Purple webs of light reflect from the shining gleam of his fractured helmet, and she can more clearly see the yellow rimmed gaze that is so familiar to her. She wonders, for a moment, if he had seen something similar in her, that one time so long ago.

#

"You died, Ahsoka." They were seated on the rounded meditation cushions in the Temple.

Ahsoka said nothing.

"You were so fierce, and so cruel, corrupted by the Dark Side. You had these yellow eyes, and I—" Anakin's voice broke in the way the other Jedi tried to hide but not him. "I couldn't let you die."

She wanted to reach for him, but she did not. She wondered what cruel things she had said, and chose not to ask.

"Do you hate it, when I call you Snips?" he asked.

"What do you think, Skyguy?" she asked back in turn.

When Anakin rose after a long moment, she followed him.

#

At first, the blast blows them apart as the explosion blossoms into a sphere of light that almost instantly collapses in on itself, pulling both Ahsoka and Anakin back to the center of the Sith temple.

They are dragged headlong into the obelisk, which is already splintering from the stress of Ezra's unfulfilled promise to unleash destruction on all living life. Their impact shatters it, and Ahsoka shields her head from the flying stone and rubble as the floor splinters and cracks beneath their feet.

They fall.

They don't fall together—not quite, as she is slightly below him, falling slightly faster.

She hears Anakin in the darkness despite the crashing of the rocks and stone around them. His respirator is damaged. He is struggling. She can hear the grunts of pain as rock ricochets against his body armor, which perhaps did not offer as much protection as one would think—at least not for him.

#

Once, it had been a matter of trust. They moved as one, a singularity of purpose that got the job done. He had taught her well, and though there were times she felt fear, she was not afraid, not truly.

There had been a time where they had fit perfectly, side by side.

#

Ahsoka wakes slowly. Her lightsabers are distant, but not missing. And Anakin is—

He is near her, a little to her left. She struggles to her feet, ignoring the pain in her head and in her heart. She can only see the masked side of his face, for he is turned away from her. She walks slowly towards him, stepping over his legs so that she can look down upon his face.

His eyes are closed. She wonders if this is the closest he has come to peace in so many long years.

She surveys her surroundings. On one side, there is a deeper shadow, a darkness that could be a way out, or a way deeper in.

On the other, there is the broken cliff side and the ruin of the temple. They could climb from where they had fallen. Perhaps, there would be a ship from the Rebellion—or the Empire.

She struggles to keep her feet. She is tired, exhausted, from the Inquisitors, Mauls' betrayal, Anakin—

He stirs, as he too climbs to his feet, his lightsaber clutched in his gloved hand. His robe is singed and torn, his armor dented and scuffed from the falling rock.

His gaze falls on her through the broken gash of his helmet, and she meets him, steadily. His hand remains on his lightsaber but he does not activate the blade.

Then you will die, he had said.

But not today, she thinks, she is almost sure.

"Anakin," she says with such softness, such weariness, for she is so tired. "Let's not fight. There's only us now."

His eye glints.

"I won't leave you. Not this time." She says again as she holds out her hand, her fingers outstretched and open. "Come with me. Let's leave this place together."

#

At first, she had imagined it differently. Imagined not sliding her hands from Anakin when he had tried to return her padawan beads. Imagined not walking down the long flight of Temple stairs as he watched her go, as he watched her leave him behind.

Imagined wondering if he had kept her beads in case she changed her mind, in case she returned—it would have been so easy to return after the Siege of Mandalore, pretending that nothing had happened, that nothing need change ever again.

But then everything had changed. Everything had gone wrong.

#

Anakin can barely stand. He is weak and Ahsoka wonders who has done this to him, who had defeated him so violently and so cruelly that—

"There is nothing for me." His voice rasps, and its thick with emotions—some that Ahsoka recognizes, some that she does not.

"I'm here," Ahsoka says.

His look goes cold, like he's closing himself off from her, from everything that could be if things would change just one more time.

"I forgive you," Ahsoka says, desperately. "Whatever horrible things you've done, I forgive you."

He raises his hand, as he had once done when he lectured the younglings. "Don't speak of what you don't know. You can't even begin to understand what I've done."

A chill goes down Ahsoka's spine. She wonders what could be worse than what she already knows, than what she can easily imagine, the slaughter of the Jedi, of their friends, of the only family most of them had ever really known.

His voice is hard. "Why is it always me who must come or go with one of you?" His head raises, armored chin defiant. "You should come with me instead."

"As your prisoner?"

"It doesn't have to be that way."

The silence thickens between them. Anakin breathes heavily.

"You said you weren't going to leave, not like you did before."

"I did." She tilts her head up, annoyed that he should doubt her.

He steps towards her, and she does not yield her ground.

"You don't need to worry about keeping your promise."

Ahsoka's heart falls as she begins to understand that he is not coming towards her in something like reconciliation, that he's not coming towards her to fight. He's going to leave her.

He does not look down as he passes her. There is only the ripped edge of his cape fluttering against her knees.

"You can follow me if you wish. Or you can stay here, alone."

She tries again. She hopes he will turn so that she can see his face one last time. "Anakin."

He stops, for a moment, but he does not turn. "I have no choice, Ahsoka."

"There's always a choice."

He is very still when he replies. "Not always."

She follows him, at a short distance. She does not know what else there is to say so she says nothing. Her lightsabers are far away now, too far away should he decide to finish their fight after all.

He does not, but when they begin their climb back to the surface of the planet, up the rock that had once been the gleaming sides of the Sith temple, she slips and he does not catch her.

He leaves her behind.

She crawls to her feet and watches him until he is gone, truly gone.

Perhaps she cries. Perhaps she grieves and weeps for the man she had once known, her master, her friend.

But one thing is certain. They have changed so much, the both of them, and she needs to understand.

She turns deeper into the shadows gathering in the heart of the Sith Temple, towards the door she had seen before.

What need she of holycrons when the very foundations of the temple could tell her just as much, if not more? Temples housed the hearts and minds of their practitioners, they lived and breathed, carrying the words of those who had once resided within.

She would learn the secrets of this place. She would walk into the shadows and come out the other side.

Her lightsabers she leaves behind.

She will not need them.

Each step (she knows) takes her farther from the life she had once before, from the life she had since made for herself.

This is not exile, she tells herself, as she disappears into shadow.

It feels too much like hope for that.