Star Wars Fic: There is Another (Ahsoka/baby Leia; AU)
Title: There Is Another
Characters: Ahsoka Tano, baby!Leia Skywalker, mentions of other SW mains
Rating: G
Genre: AU/Drama/Angst
Length: ~2100 words
Summary: RotS AU; Ahsoka delivers baby Leia to the Organas on Alderaan, and reminisces.
Notes: Throughout the CW series, it’s struck me that Ahsoka seems to take very naturally to young children. So I wondered: how would she respond to the child of her fallen Master? This may or may not spark a larger AU.
Disclaimer: Just playing in GL’s sandbox. :) One line is lifted almost directly from the RotJ novelization by James Kahn, namely Anakin's brilliant death scene.
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She has his eyes.
They’re brown, yes, like Senator Amidala’s, where his had been the unmistakable deep blue of his name. But their shape, the twinkle after she’d urped on Ahsoka’s shoulder - it’s all Anakin. Well, at least he’d never thrown up on her, she amends. Somewhere deep within Ahsoka feels the impulse to smile, but her body and heart are too drained to bring it to the surface.
Considering the baby’s parentage, it’s not surprising to Ahsoka that Leia Skywalker - Organa, she corrects with a pang - is a beautiful child. On the surface, anyone who knew her parents would say Leia looks just like her mother, and there’s no denying the resemblance. The dark coloring, the delicate chin, the regal glare.
But Ahsoka sees her former master just as strongly. The eyes, the nose, the way her brow wrinkles when she's put out. The seemingly boundless energy. The smile, which had been all too rare but no less golden for it.
And of course, she and her brother are both very strong in the Force. Anakin was piloting Pods at four years old; Ahsoka won’t be surprised if either of the twins takes after him.
If Leia is the visible combination of both parents, little Luke Skywalker is the total image of his father, from the golden hair to the dimple in his chin to the way those blue eyes glared at Obi-Wan when the latter shushed his fussing. Ahsoka had felt herself nearly shatter when she’d first seen Luke, and she hadn’t known her Master for nearly as long as Obi-Wan had. She doesn’t know how he’s doing it, is going to handle spending the rest of his life watching Luke. But then, Obi-Wan was always better at keeping his emotions under control. It was a lesson Anakin himself had never completely inherited, let alone passed on to his apprentice. Both had paid dearly for that failure.
It’s horrible, but Ahsoka is grateful she didn’t have to take the boy. Oh, she’d have done it in a second if asked - there’s no way she could refuse Anakin’s child. But each moment since Order 66 and receiving that news from Master Kenobi has left her raw in every sense of the word, and she's not sure how much she could bear such a visible daily ghost of the man who’d come to mean more to her than anyone, even Master Plo. Leia at least has enough of the Senator in her that the Anakin in her does not immediately overwhelm Ahsoka.
Ahsoka waggles a finger and makes a face at Leia. The baby squawks brightly, ignoring the finger and grabbing Ahsoka’s nose instead. The contact nearly brings Ahsoka to her knees: Anakin had teasingly done that to her when visiting her in sickbed, eyes sparkling with the same mirth his daughter’s are now.
Perhaps this isn't going to be any easier than Luke after all.
It should be someone else’s nose Leia’s grabbing, someone else cradling her and making goofy baby-talk noises to her. Anakin had never disliked children - but the wars had transformed him first and foremost into a soldier, and so he’d never possessed quite the comfort level with young ones that she had. Even Ahsoka herself, a teenager at the time - not that many years younger than he - had taken time for him to get used to. But she doesn’t have the slightest doubt he and Padmé would have been the most devoted parents in the galaxy. She has never known anyone before or since her Master who loves as deeply, as thoroughly.
She has seen how easily that love could push him to the edges of his control - how he'd sometimes lost that control and threatened those who'd threatened her life, and the Senator's life. Yet doing so had always visibly taken something from him, and she will never be able to connect this man she so admired and loved, the one who - on the very planet that sealed his fate - had once helped her save Jedi children, with the one Obi-Wan had seen murdering them. The very idea of it lances raw through Ahsoka’s heart; she knows it could break her completely if she allows herself to dwell on it long enough. She’s thankful she will never see that recording. She’s not sure she could retain even the now-bittersweet fondness of their time together if she did. The - however faint - hope that one of his children might be able to reach him where his wife and brother had not.
Maybe, it occurs to her, he’d finally reached a point where there was nothing left to take from him.
“I’m so sorry,” she whispers to the infant, pressing a kiss to Leia's forehead, something inside her shifting at the clean newborn scent, the echo of her Master's own. She finds it hard to believe that even if she hadn’t been told, she wouldn't know this was his child.
For the rest of her days she will be haunted by the mistake that tore her from his side forever. It had been her error in judgment, but Anakin had taken the blame onto himself - and the Council had been all too quick to agree. Few things in the galaxy torment her more than the grief and rage etched wordlessly into his face as the shuttle ramp had closed behind her that last time, Master Windu’s words still beating inside her skull like a trapped avian's wings: it is the determination of this Council that you are to be reassigned immediately.
The distance from him, from Coruscant, had spared her life - but she will always wonder. If she had been there, whether she might have been able to help him, might have been able to notice and tell someone something that might have changed even one tiny course. Yoda had revealed to her and Obi-Wan that Anakin had come to him recently, troubled by visions of a loved one suffering in pain and death. There’s no doubt in Ahsoka’s mind - and Obi-Wan’s - that it was Padmé.
She wonders if Anakin had foreseen that he would be the one to bring those visions about- whether that was what had been the end for him.
When she’d learned of the love between her Master and the Naboo Senator she’d come to know as a friend in her own right, Ahsoka had never told anyone. She hadn’t thought it her place to divulge the secret - that was something Anakin and Padmé would have to do. But she knew she’d have done so in a heartbeat to save the lives he’d taken (including his own), even if it had come at the cost of his trust.
Anakin’s decisions had been his own in the end, but Ahsoka can’t help but also level some blame at the Order, regardless of whether it's right or wrong to. Can’t help but think that it was their short-sightedness, their inflexibility, that had helped push Anakin to his breaking point. For years, they’d known of his attachment issues, but had simply continued to try to squash the emotions from him. A process which, especially given Anakin’s nature, had only served to condense and intensify them.
There’re too many ifs. If they hadn’t sent her away. If Obi-Wan, who’d known him longer than anyone, had realized something. If Anakin hadn’t closed himself to everyone, and even one person had some understanding of the turmoil he was going though... but it’s too late to dwell on that now.
She’d made it very clear to Obi-Wan when he summoned her to Polis Massa that she was doing this for her Master, not for the Order, one final gift to him: ensuring his child - family to her in all but blood - made it to her new home safely. She can’t argue with Obi-Wan’s reasoning: despite the outcome of their duel, Obi-Wan senses the galaxy’s newest Sith apprentice has survived. And aside from Obi-Wan himself, there’s no other surviving Jedi (or former Jedi as the case may be) more familiar with how Anakin’s mind works - how best to stay off his radar - than Ahsoka Tano. Necessary stealth was one lesson Anakin had imparted quite well.
She feels another surge of anger at him, that if only he’d trusted her - trusted anyone - with what had so scarred him in his past, the tragedy of the last several days might never have occurred. The Republic might still be standing, and his babies might have had the chance to grow up with both their parents.
There is good in him. That’s what Padmé said on her deathbed, according to Obi-Wan. Even after Anakin - Vader - had attacked her so brutally, she had remained convinced of that enough to devote her dying breath to make sure someone else knew. That certainty still hadn’t been enough to keep her alive, though, and Ahsoka wonders if it was because of the same feeling, same possibility, that plagues her: that even her best wouldn’t have been enough to keep him with her, to save him.
Perhaps his children will fare better in reaching him, though if Anakin's own wife and brother hadn’t been enough, Ahsoka can’t exactly say she has an excess of hope. She will never be gladder to be wrong.
She looks down at the baby in her arms, this last piece of the man she knew. This child is pure, good, and had come from him - and, Ahsoka herself didn’t turn out so badly. So maybe there is something to the Senator's beliefs.
Ahsoka's not sure which is more troubling. That her Master truly is gone forever - or that there is some part of him yet remaining, willingly self-imprisoned inside the monster.
That Anakin-esque furrow wrinkles Leia’s little forehead, and before long, she’s squalling and flailing in Ahsoka’s arms. Ahsoka had let herself forget about Leia’s strength in the Force; even untrained, she certainly could pick up Ahsoka’s mood. She bobs the baby, then rests her against her chest, Leia’s head tucked over her shoulder. She pats the baby on the back, humming a silly lullaby she’d heard Anakin hum to her when she was sick just to irritate her into getting better. There’s a soft glug sound and Ahsoka sighs inwardly as a familiar warmth trickles down her shoulder. She reaches for a clean rag.
It’s actually a fitting symmetry: on her first mission with her Master, she was doing this same thing. Okay, it’d been a baby Hutt then, but still.
Already, Leia’s back to normal (well, quiet anyway). Add short - and rapidly oscillating - temper to her legacy from her father. Ahsoka wonders how much of Anakin - and Padmé - will remain in her, and how much of her will be shaped by the Organas.
Ahsoka will, like Obi-Wan, watch over her charge from close by - but not too close. Ahsoka will confine herself to the remotest mountain regions of Alderaan - near enough to aid Leia if need be, but far enough from the capital that should Vader ever visit, she should be able to shield herself from his presence... and not attract attention to Leia. Ahsoka has been instructed not to train Leia for this very reason: her potential unrealized, and with no bond in the Force between Ahsoka and the child, Leia will be that much harder to notice.
But Ahsoka prays to one day be able to tell Leia about the parents she’ll never know. For Leia to, if she is the one to face Vader someday, know there was another side - a wonderful one - to the monster who was once her father.
For the time being, she simply cradles the tiny baby in her arms, and waits. Holding Leia now is a glimpse of a world that should have been. The Republic still intact, her Master and the Senator still here, allowed to raise their babies - and of course said babies would be shunted off to the apprentice for sitting duty when mom and dad escaped for a much-needed evening out. While Ahsoka needles Anakin that of course they need her; how many other people have as much experience babysitting Skywalkers?
Her eyes sting as though slapped: she can see the smirk he tosses over his shoulder at her as he leaves.
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[end]