Curate, connect, and discover
Ahsoka Tano is six years old and she has the most scars out of everyone in her class.
She shows them off proudly when people ask. The one on her knee is from climbing the trees in the temple gardens, she says. A thin white line wraps around her forearm from a mistake in saber training. Various scrapes and cuts cover her hands, and she rolls up the sleeves of her robes to show them off. They are badges of honor.
At ten years old, she is placed in the advanced saber classes with the older students. She meets a girl named Barriss Offee, the padawan of a high Master of the Jedi Counsel. Barriss is everything Ahsoka would expect her to be. She is calm, yet stern, and a master of soresu. She is the ideal padawan, a role model for the younglings that look up to her. She is everything Ahsoka wants to be.
Ahsoka is fourteen when the war breaks out.. 212 Jedi fight in the arena on Geonosis, fighting and dying for their republic. Ahsoka attends the funerals, as do all the other padawans. She watches the pyres bearing the crest of the Jedi order burn as the bodies return to the force from which they came. She scans the crowd until she finds Barriss, one of the 30 survivors of the massacre. She has her head down, firelight glinting off of the tear tracks on her cheeks.
A month later Ahsoka is sent out, apprenticed to the newly knighted Anakin Skywalker. She wasn’t stupid. She had heard all the rumors: that Skywalker was the chosen one, that he had joined the temple at the time he became a padawan, that he would save the order from darkness, and that Anakin Skywalker would end the war. She adjusted her saber on her belt as the gunship took her down to Christophsis. She cooly walked down the ramp and introduced herself.
Anakin Skywalker was… underwhelming.
He didn’t command her to silence with his voice, or stand proud at attention. He slouched, and he whined often. If this is the Hero Without Fear, Ahsoka thinks, then he will need all the help I can give him.
Ahsoka is in battle the day she turns fifteen. They are pushing the separatists back toward the northern end of the city on an occupied planet in the outer rim. Ahsoka slashes and cuts, ducking under droids; weaving in and out of the fray. Her free arm drifts far from her body, covered in bandages from all the times she has forgotten to cover it. At the end of the day, she receives a gift: materials for a new lightsaber and a promised trip to Ilum.
She adapts to her new lightsaber quickly, like a limb she was always missing. Soon, she is spinning and slashing so quickly that it is impossible for the untrained eye to tell limb from saber. She throws herself into battle with all the ferocity of the akul whose teeth now decorate her headdress. It is a mark of honor, she reminds herself, and preens with pride.
Ahsoka Tano is sixteen years old and she has the most scars out of everyone in her class. She no longer remembers the now faded scar on her knee from climbing in the temple garden. She can’t tell you where her new scars come from either. On rare occasions between battles, she returns to the temple to study. Her classmates stare at her; revere her. She is the padawan of the Hero Without Fear, she has fought beside the great Jedi masters, and she can beat any one of her classmates in a fight.
They notice she’s changed. Where she was once unsure, there is now cool confidence in herself and her comrades. She no longer boasts or shows off to her classmates. She is extraordinarily kind to the younger padawans, who all look up to her.
She still drums her fingers on her desk, looking for all the world as she would rather be doing more important things than sitting in a classroom. She still spaces out when others are talking to her, but everyone has noticed the way she is quick to draw her sabers, always sitting on the edge of her seat, always looking past her classmates as if searching the horizon for threats. Yes, Ahsoka Tano has changed.
She is still sixteen when she thinks she loses everything.
She is seventeen when she does.
Ahsoka Tano is eighteen years old and she stands vigil for a home she will never be able to return to.