Mishaps on Malachor

Chapter 11 - Family

Author's Note: I hope that y'all like the rewritten ending of this story! Enjoy! :)

Thank you all so much for reading, voting, and/or commenting on this fic! :D

~ Amina Gila

"I'm not going to ask what happened between you and Anakin," Ahsoka declares flatly, glancing at Obi-Wan again. Her former master has crashed on Kanan's bedroom floor – he hasn't left the room since. It's been hours. It's... actually been over half a day. Whether he's sleeping, meditating, or brooding, no one dares ask or interrupt him. Before she talks to Anakin again, she wants answers. "But I want him to stay with us if we have a choice."

"It would be his choice, not ours," Obi-Wan objects.

She shoots him a look, remembering how Anakin was quite literally cowering from him. "When people are ruled by fear, they do not act reasonably."

"They chose to let their fear rule them."

"And that fear is also the cause of an outside influence," she replies. "One which we have no right to enhance. He is Sidious' victim as much as the rest of the galaxy." It's just that – she can't imagine having to live without him again now that she saw him again. Even if she can't forgive him.

"He is no longer the person we once knew," Obi-Wan objects, "You must remember that, Ahsoka."

"I know." She thinks again of the darkness swirling around him on Malachor, and of every moment between them since. "But he is still Anakin. I won't make the mistake of leaving him again."

"Was it truly a mistake?"

You abandoned me! You failed me! "It couldn't have been anything less. I had a choice to look out for myself, or for Anakin, and I chose myself." She turns away from him, arms crossed. The pain of it is gnawing at her, but she made her choice. She has to live with it through to the end.

The same way Anakin will now need to.

"Maybe in some ways it feels like trying to help him now will make up for when I didn't in the past, even if I know it won't. I wonder what would have happened had I not left, but the Force brought me here for a reason. Even so, I still chose to leave him."

"Had you remained, you would have changed nothing," he assures. She wishes she could believe that. She can't stop remembering her vision on Lothal. You're making a mistake, Anakin had said to her, and it's always stuck in her mind. Maybe he was right. Maybe she was.

She still remembers with glaring clarity how his presence felt so real in her mind that day, at the Temple, when she knelt there alone. It was as if he were real, tangible. Present. She doesn't know if their communication was real, but it felt like it was.

"What about me? I believed in you. I stood by you!"

"Do you know what I have become?"

She had been selfish and shortsighted, even if it led her where she needed to go. Anakin was a better Jedi than her. She hadn't seen that Anakin hadn't wanted to do it. She didn't accept that he was choosing the Jedi over her – that he was trusting the Council over her. She was only thinking of how he was her master, and he was supposed to take care of her. She couldn't understand why he wasn't, until later, when she remembered...

Well.

Hardeen.

It had left him broken, but she couldn't see any of it – he gathered himself back together and kept moving, no matter what Obi-Wan did to him, to both of them. "It is not our place to question the Council, Snips," was what he'd said about it, looking more worn than he had in his life.