Space ports were both good and bad for a runaway Jedi.

Good in the fact that they provided excellent crowd groups within which one could hide. Bad in the fact that the had the highest Imperial presence and concentration.
Today was slightly different though.

It was Empire Day.

While Corellia celebrated, Ahsoka Tano, now better know as Ashla Cietra, lamented the loss of her family and sought a discrete way off world. Even though many Corellians were attending the Empire Day, there were still a few who were required to go elsewhere in the galaxy. Had Corellia been an Outer Rim world, it probably wouldn't have been allowed, but Corellia was extremely close to the Core and of major importance to the Empire as a whole.

Hidden among the cargo hold of the leaving ship, Ahsoka sat there curled up and began to feel all the emotions from a year ago well up inside of her and they could no longer be contained.
Ahsoka began quietly sobbing as the memories of her close Padawan friend Caleb Dume came back to her.
Even though there had been almost a five year gap between their ages, Caleb Dume, though sometimes jokingly called Kanan Jarrus after a famous old Jedi war hero, had been a really close friend of hers. His Master, Depa Billaba, had been close friends with her favourite Jedi Master and her founder Plo Koon but not so much with Ahsoka's later Master Anakin Skywalker. Even so, the pair had remained close.

Until one year ago exactly to that day.

Memories of his blaster torn body still haunted her, they always did and always would. And she knew that it should have been her that lay on the ground, not Caleb.
Not her little brother.

But wishful thinking did not bring him back. It couldn't and it wouldn't, no matter how many times she thought it over and over again. Why Caleb and not her? She asked herself over and over, at every waking minutes, but it was because she already knew the answer to her very simple question.

She was the survivor, sitting alone in a broken heap as a stowaway aboard the vessel, because she had hesitated.

She had hesitated and Caleb had payed the price.