Star Wars One-Shots

When It's Over, You're The Start

Author's Note: This fic is for Ghost_Rin on ao3.

Also, this was written for the prompt "Cooking" On the 501st Bingo. :D

~ Tirana Sorki

After dying, Ahsoka expected to fade away into the Force. She didn't expect to awaken in an Afterlife, where Anakin and Rex are waiting for her. And so are all the other clones she once knew in the 501st.

She's standing on the Temple steps on Coruscant, and it looks the same way it did the day she walked away – the last time she saw the Jedi Temple up close. Instead of the sun setting, it's rising, the golden rays of light falling across her. Everything looks too peaceful to be real, even more than it did before the war, the way she so often wished it did.

"Hey Snips," a familiar voice calls.

Ahsoka spins around to see Anakin standing a few paces ahead of her, between the columns that lead into the Temple.

The same place he was standing when she left that day.

He looks the same as he always has, all the times that he's appeared to her over the years after she ended up on Peridea. But she'd never been in person with him before, except for briefly when she was... in what looked like the World Between Worlds. This is the first time they've been on the same plane of existence and with each other since Malachor.

"Is this where you live?" she asks, approaching him.

Only then does it suddenly hit her that she's small again. Looking down, she looks young again. She feels young again – the same age she was when she left the Order. The age she was back when... things were hard during the war, but in so many ways, it was still the happiest time of her life. The time she always looked back on and remembered and longed for, when she thought about her past.

"It is," Anakin agrees, cheerfully. He looks so happy and peaceful here. "Everyone you once knew who has passed on is here."

Ahsoka's gaze darts past him, to the interior of the Temple. "Everyone is here?"

He nods. "You can go look around. Unless you would prefer to see the 501st first?"

She freezes. "They're here, too?" For some reason, she thought he just meant the Jedi.

"Everyone," Anakin confirms, "They've been waiting to see you."

She can't imagine what it would be like for the entire 501st to be together. "Then let's go."

Anakin volunteers to fly the speeder – apparently, they have speeders in the Afterlife. "Is any of this real? Or are we seeing what we want it to look like?" Ahsoka has to ask. She's desperately curious, even if she's feeling too at peace to care much.

Anakin glances at her, amused. "Reality is always as we perceive it."

Ahsoka huffs. "Don't be cryptic."

"That is what Master Qui-Gon told me when I first came here," he defends.

Right.

He's going to be here too. Ahsoka hardly knows anything about him. Just that he was her great-grandmaster and that Anakin always looked up to him.

Anakin lands their speeder on an upper-level landing platform of an apartment building. There's a decorative 501st above the door on this level – looking down to the floors below and above, she can see numbers on many of the other levels too. "This building is new," she observes dryly, climbing out of the speeder. It certainly never existed on real-Coruscant.