[He needs time. To think, to breathe - to feel the floor beneath his feet and the fabric under his fingernails long enough to remember who he is and why that matters: delving into the minds of others comes as nothing new, but this is...different. Personal, more absolute. As it was with Mara Jade he can almost sense his bond to the past knitting like grafted tissue. Surrogate ties to the Force that are as much their own as they are his.
If they'd shared this sooner— well, nothing would have changed that mattered, he realizes. Anakin would still have died, and his own grief in the wake of that loss with closeness on the table or even the potential for it would have been increased tenfold: enough to shatter the Nest, or drown it in blood.
Strange, how he can sense her regret where it pools just under her skin, a cold contrast to the echo of his broodmate, his grandfather. Not through the Force (he's reached out to him after the bombing, begged and pleaded and spit curses in the hope that it might bring him even a fragment of that hewn phantom limb) but within himself, as though he already knows exactly what his grandfather would have said, or wanted.
Then again, drunk on someone else's memories, he might only be delusional.]
You weren't responsible for what he became, Ahsoka.
[Even she has to realize that, knowing even vaguely how far he'd fallen from grace— only to transcend it entirely, cutting the galaxy down to its core.]
no subject
If they'd shared this sooner— well, nothing would have changed that mattered, he realizes. Anakin would still have died, and his own grief in the wake of that loss with closeness on the table or even the potential for it would have been increased tenfold: enough to shatter the Nest, or drown it in blood.
Strange, how he can sense her regret where it pools just under her skin, a cold contrast to the echo of his broodmate, his grandfather. Not through the Force (he's reached out to him after the bombing, begged and pleaded and spit curses in the hope that it might bring him even a fragment of that hewn phantom limb) but within himself, as though he already knows exactly what his grandfather would have said, or wanted.
Then again, drunk on someone else's memories, he might only be delusional.]
You weren't responsible for what he became, Ahsoka.
[Even she has to realize that, knowing even vaguely how far he'd fallen from grace— only to transcend it entirely, cutting the galaxy down to its core.]