Ahsoka was not particularly strong in the Force, as a youngling. Headstrong, but without raw power.
She had wondered, at first, why she would have been assigned to Skywalker. If it was just as some form of punishment, or management; giving him a stone around his neck to drag on him and slow him down.
At first, she thought that he refused to properly Bond with her out of resentment, or contempt. He didn’t want to be too closely tied to the stone. Wanted to leave at least some slack.
It wasn’t long before she realised he was doing it for her.
She felt him, in the Force, from the tiny strand of Bond that he offered so they could monitor each other, and it felt like flying up to a supernova in an unarmored starfighter. She saw what the Bond did to Obi-Wan.
Half of his presence in the Force was like one big scar, like he’d been burned over and over again until the sear of it became tough leather - until the leather grew thicker and stronger and more powerful than it ever before could have dreamed.
…Maybe her metaphor was getting away from her a bit, at that point.
She slept a thin ship wall away from her Master, and it was like sleeping next to a reactor core, being sung into dreams by the hum of nuclear fusion. He was old and experienced enough to keep it tight held, and she didn’t get burned, like Obi-Wan had. Like she sometimes suspected Anakin had, himself, one big mass of scar tissue around the glowing sun of his soul, but that was… that wasn’t the point.
He held himself in, as tightly as he could, but she had that thread, and she slept by him, and she felt the Force, raw and unfiltered, slipping into her skin like golden cracks in kintsugi porcelain.
When she was away from him, she felt cold. It was like going from the double suns of Tatooine to the black of space. But when she was near him, when he let her feel that thin thread of his presence, that thread tethering her soul to the soul of an exploding star, she felt… she felt powerful.
She realised, about two years into being the Skywalker’s Padawan, that she wasn’t weak anymore.
The other Padawans didn’t fall to her because they were afraid to anger her Master; they didn’t even fall because she’d been trained by two of the best swordsmen in the galaxy. She was simply stronger than she used to be.
Anakin let her add threads to their thin Bond until it became a ribbon, then a rope, then a cable, vibrating with conduit. It didn’t burn her, anymore, didn’t sear her mind and heart from the inside out as it would have before. She glowed back at him, more than any of the other Jedi aside from Obi-Wan and, perhaps, Master Yoda, the light seeping out through the cracks in her skin, shining like a star trapped inside a girl.
She could stand beside him and glow with him, and when they slept, the hum of their fusion was dual-toned, in harmony.
When she fought against Maul, she could stand as equals.
And when she stood against Vader, it was powered by his own light.
She would never be weak again.
