Steela’s laugh echoes across the camp. Ahsoka doesn’t look up.
She’s cleaning her lightsaber, but her hands have gone still. She tells herself it’s nothing, that she’s just tired from the day’s training. That it doesn’t matter how close Lux is sitting to Steela. That the way he leans in when he talks to her doesn’t mean anything.
But she knows better.
She can feel it, this small, twisting knot in her chest, winding tighter every time he smiles at Steela the way he used to smile at her.
Ahsoka presses her lips together and resumes working on the emitter. Focus. Discipline. Attachment leads to jealousy, and jealousy leads to anger. Anger leads to hate, and hate leads to suffering. She’s heard it a thousand times, but it’s never sounded as hollow as it does now.
Because the truth is, she doesn’t feel like a Jedi right now.
She feels like a girl who made a mistake.
Ahsoka looks up, just for a second. Lux laughs—soft, genuine—at something Steela says. He touches her shoulder. Steela doesn’t move away.
Neither does he.
𖥔 𖥔 𖥔
The kiss wasn’t supposed to mean anything.
It was a fluke. A moment of weakness, snatched in the dark silence of a half-lit corridor on a Republic cruiser months ago. He’d been angry, grieving his mother, sick of politics, of being used and discarded by the galaxy.
Ahsoka had just wanted to make him feel less alone.
They’d stood too close. Said too much. And then he kissed her, hands tentative, lips asking permission.
She gave it.
It had been warm. Desperate. His fingers brushed the curve of her jaw like he couldn’t believe she was real. And she’d let it happen, just long enough to imagine a world where it could be more than a moment. Just long enough to want it.
Then she pulled away.
“This can’t happen again,” she’d said.
“Why not?” His voice had cracked, like he already knew the answer.
“I’m a Jedi.”
That had been the end of it. Or it should have been.
𖥔 𖥔 𖥔
Steela’s scream haunts the cliffs.
Ahsoka can still hear it, cut off too suddenly, like a thread snapped mid-song.
She’d had her in the Force. She had her. Steela’s hand outstretched, her body dangling off the crumbling ledge, and Ahsoka had reached out—fingers splayed, the Force coiling through her veins, pulling her up inch by inch.
Pain.
Blaster fire seared through her back, white-hot and blinding.
She remembers collapsing, her connection to the Force breaking like glass under pressure. Remembers Steela’s wide eyes as she slipped, her scream swallowed by the canyon.
Gone.
All because Ahsoka wasn’t fast enough. Wasn’t strong enough.
And Lux saw it.
𖥔 𖥔 𖥔
Night swells heavy and quiet.
Lux is sitting near the edge of the jungle, away from the fire, silhouetted in darkness. Ahsoka shouldn’t approach—not when he hasn’t spoken to her since the battle, not when the blood is barely dry—but she does anyway.
She can’t carry this silence any longer.
“I’m sorry,” she says softly, stopping a few feet away.
He doesn’t move. “You said that already.”
“I should’ve saved her.”
“You almost did.”
“She died because I got shot. Because I wasn’t fast enough.”
“She died because we’re in a war,” Lux says flatly. “And war takes everything.”
The words sting like open flame. He finally looks up, eyes red and rimmed with exhaustion.
“She believed in me,” he says, voice hollow. “She believed in this cause. And she believed we’d both make it out.”
Ahsoka’s chest tightens. “I believed it too.”
“She loved me, Ahsoka.”
A beat.
“I know,” she says quietly.
He’s silent for a long time. “And I loved her.”
That stops her cold. Lux looks at her—really looks—and the air between them thickens with all the unspoken things.
“I loved you once,” he says. “And maybe part of me still does. But I can’t do this.”
Ahsoka’s breath catches. “I’m not asking you to.”
“But if you were—” He shakes his head. “It’s too late. Whatever we were… it died a long time ago.”
She closes her eyes. “Lux—”
“She’s not just gone,” he says. “She’s in me. I still hear her voice. I still feel her hand on mine. If I tried to love you now, I’d be chasing a ghost and betraying another.”
“I understand,” Ahsoka says, though it carves her open to say it.
He gives her a look. Soft, sad, final. “We missed our moment.”
She nods. “We did.”
Ahsoka turns to leave. But just before she disappears into the trees, she glances back one last time.
“I loved you too,” she whispers.
Then she’s gone.