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The fall would have killed him, but he’s dead before he hits the water.
They find the body some time later, floating facedown beside what’s left of the varactyl. They get a droid to pull it to shore, then flip it over and take a picture as proof that their orders have been carried out.
As bodies go, it’s not particularly notable. The eyes are closed, the lips are tinged blue, and the skin is cold and pale from being underwater for so long. Any blood from the wound through the left side of its ribcage has been washed away. The clones have seen far worse over the course of the war.
It’s okay, something in Cody’s mind whispers as he stares down the body. You were given orders, you had to follow them, Jedi are enemies of the state. You were given orders, you had to follow them, Jedi are enemies of the state. You were given orders, you had to follow them, Jedi are enemies of the state.
Good soldiers follow orders.
There is no place in his mind for regret.
Except there is. He doesn’t know why, but he picks up a fragment of singed cloak and tucks it into his belt.
They leave the body there, lightsaber and all. Nature will take care of the rest.
Above them, the fighting slowly grinds to a halt as both sides - are there two? - call a cease-fire. The clones’ transports land to pick up stragglers, then leave alongside the Separatist ships like so many players exiting the stage.
A day later, Anakin returns from Mustafar.
When he walks into her apartment, Padmé runs over - as much as she can run - and throws her arms around him. “What happened?” she asks, clutching him desperately. “I’ve heard so many things… terrible things. I was worried about you.”
Anakin smiles down at her. “It’s over, Padmé. I’ve found a way to save you, and I’ve made sure the Jedi can’t hurt us any more.”
Something akin to fear (horror) rings through the Force and Padmé slowly pulls away, not once taking her eyes off his face. “Anakin, what have you done?” she whispers.
It echoes in his mind for years afterwards. “Anakin, what have you done?”
What have you done?
Anakin frowns and pets his hands down her arms. “Don’t you see? I’ve fixed it so we can be together. There’s no one left to stop us now.”
She pushes his hands away. “What do you mean there’s no one left, Anakin?” she says, a hint of steel in her voice.
So he explains everything he’s done for her, and watches with confusion and growing anger as she distances herself further and further the more he talks.
Can’t she see? The Jedi were corrupt! They needed to be wiped out so a new and better order could take their place. Some innocents were sacrificed, yes, but in the end they were little more than buds on a diseased tree. Best to burn it all and start from scratch.
“What about Obi-Wan?”
“Obi-Wan? What about him?" The perfect Jedi, the master who saw him as a burden, the man who saw him as nothing more than the Order’s precious Chosen One, the Councilmember who didn't want to make him a Master.
A familiar smile, patient hands braiding his hair, a cultured voice teaching him his letters, laugh lines that grow deeper with every passing year.
“I am very proud of you. You are a far greater Jedi than I could ever hope to be.”
“Dead,” he says carelessly.
The Emperor had made sure to have the clones send him a copy of the picture.
Padmé’s eyes fill with tears and she covers her mouth. He steps forward to pull her into his arms, but she shrinks back. “I can’t… I can’t do this right now, Anakin. Please just leave.” Confusion, fear, anger, anguish, and an overwhelming sense of why swirl around her in the Force.
“Leave?” he scoffs. “Padmé, we’re married . We’re supposed to live together now. No one can stop us.” He steps forward again and she shrinks back, again, but he puts his arms around her anyways. Instantly, she starts struggling.
“Let go of me! Let go!” she shouts. He only holds her tighter, even as she screams and hits him with small, ineffective fists. She digs her fingernails in wherever she can reach and leaves behind deep scratches, but he’s had worse. Eventually she sags in his grip. He pulls away, thinking the worst is over, only for her to draw back and knee him between the legs.
He releases her without thinking and bends over with a groan. When he looks back up, she is pointing a blaster between his eyes. Her face is streaked with tears and her hands are perfectly steady.
“Get out of my home now or you will no longer have a wife to come back to,” she says in the same voice she once used as Queen. Strong, deep, and brooking no disagreement.
Anakin could rip the blaster out of her hands with a thought. He could throw her to the other side of the room. He could deflect any bolts she fired back on her, he could pin her down with the Force, he could choke her and he could torture her until she agreed with him. It’s well within his abilities.
He knows it.
She knows it.
He still straightens and backs out the door.
When he returns the next morning - not to apologize, but to talk some sense into her - she’s gone.
He spends the next three years hunting down rogue Jedi and his wife and child.
He stumbles across many clone deserters on his quest, most of them half-mad from malfunctioning inhibitor chips. Sometimes they are left stuttering and broken when their chips force them to comply with orders but fail to repress their emotions, while other times the chips do the opposite and create functional sociopaths.
There is a built-in failsafe that prevents the clones from terminating themselves, so Anakin does it for them. It is mercy, he tells himself, not an execution. Not that he cares.
He tries to forget the one who begged for death because he couldn’t stop seeing his padawan Commander lying there and they wouldn’t stop shooting her and there was so much blood, please…
He hasn’t been very successful at getting the screams out of his head.
There aren’t as many Jedi left as there are deserting clones, but the chases are much more enjoyable. Each new Jedi he kills is like another cancer wiped from the universe, and it’s always satisfying to find one that can hold their own in combat with him for more than a few seconds.
“A Jedi does not play with his food, Anakin.” There is a hint of a laugh amid the disgust in Obi-Wan’s voice.
“Yes, Master.”
The Jedi call him many things before they die. Traitor, child-killer, murderer. They even call him Darth, as if Vader were his surname.
Anakin is Vader, but Vader is also Anakin. Anakin is the name that Padmé calls him. Even during his Darkest and most violent moments, he never allows himself to forget. He will need to be Anakin again when he gets her back.
Finally, there is a lead: One of his agents has found parts from her skiff at a shipyard on Kuat. The owner of the shipyard got the parts from a dealer based out of Corellia, who is the one who stripped the ship, and she says she bought it off some scavengers who found it scuttled and adrift near the Tyrius system.
That in itself tells them very little, but by some stroke of luck or foolish oversight, the ship’s hyperdrive was found intact.
The dealer still has it.
Anakin knows how to get information from hyperdrives about the last jump they made.
As far as Anakin is aware, the only person Padmé knows on Alderaan is the current senator, so the first place he goes when he gets there is the Aldera Royal Palace, home of the Organa family.
Senator Organa is pleasant enough. When an Imperial battalion and the Emperor’s Second appear on his front porch, all he does is blink and offer them refreshments. Anakin is reluctantly impressed.
He asks Senator Organa for a tour and gets a distinct sense of Padmé in the palace halls. It’s faint, but it’s there, and when they reach the senator’s study, Anakin corners him.
“Where is my wife?” he snarls, a hand held up in threat.
The senator swallows reflexively, but he doesn’t beg for his life and he doesn’t try to lie, unlike most. “She's dead,” he says, and Anakin hears the truth in his words.
A few moments to rein in his temper. "How?"
“They don’t know. She arrived here and within days she just… wilted away.”
Truth.
“And what of my child?”
The senator swallows again and looks Anakin in the eye. “Your child never had a chance to draw breath.”
Truth rings through the Force for a third time. Anakin roars a denial. Before he realizes what he’s doing, he’s standing over Bail Organa’s headless body with an ignited lightsaber and a bloodlust that is not nearly sated.
He goes after the senator’s family next.
If he is to be denied his family - he who did everything he could to protect them, who loved them, who reshaped the universe itself for them - then this traitor, this thief of wives and children should be denied as well. Servants and guards and cooks and handmaidens alike fall before his blade, and then he’s standing in a nursery in front of a woman he recognizes as the queen.
“Please,” she whispers. Her arms hold back two whimpering toddlers that are probably about the same age his own child would have been. A thought filters through the veil of his rage when he looks at them: Would his child have been more like the girl, with dark eyes and hair, or more like the boy, with blue eyes and hair as light as the Tatooine sand?
A swipe of his lightsaber and the queen falls. The children cry.
Another swipe - one wide slash, efficient, kinder to take them both at once - and the children fall beside their mother, and then Anakin falls to his knees and screams when he feels their deaths in the Force.
Bail Organa hadn’t lied. Not really. Anakin’s child never did have a chance to draw breath.
His children, on the other hand…
Anakin, what have you done?
Blood tests prove what he already knows.
Padmé had been pregnant with twins. A boy and a girl. It seems they were both right.
Those same twins now lie in front of him on identical slabs in the crypt under the Imperial Palace. Although they have been covered with sheets in preparation for burial, he can still tell them apart. They are both small, so small, but the girl is more so than the boy.
Padmé had been small, too, small enough to fit perfectly against his larger frame like a puzzle piece that was always meant to be there. Would this girl have had her mother’s frame someday? Would the boy have had his father’s height? Anakin doesn’t even know their names.
In a corner of his mind that isn’t overtaken with shock and disgust and fiery rage, mostly at himself, Anakin realizes that the last time he was in a crypt was five years ago at Obi-Wan’s rather impermanent funeral.
Obi-Wan. He hasn’t thought that name in a long time, hasn’t allowed himself to think it, but here in the bowels of a monstrosity that he helped create, standing alone beside what will soon be the graves of his children, he makes himself remember.
A young knight, the hair where his padawan braid had been still a little longer than the rest. The first week they’re together, Anakin finds a pair of scissors in their apartment and helps him even it out.
An older knight with golden-brown fuzz on his cheeks and chin. People never take him seriously because he’s a twenty-eight-year-old man with the face of a twelve-year-old, so he’s trying to grow a beard, but it will take a few more years before it’s passable. Until then, Anakin takes great pleasure in not telling his master that the bottom half of his face looks as soft and fluffy as a baby animal.
One of the youngest Masters in the Order, his beard a perfect balance between sophisticated and wild, his hair grown nearly to his shoulders. This is around the time Anakin starts wearing dark robes, working on his piloting with some of the Temple instructors, practicing his lightsaber forms - not Soresu - trying to distance himself from his master’s teachings.
A highly-decorated General in charge of nearly a fourth of the Republic’s forces. Beloved by superiors and subordinates alike, feared by his enemies. He’s kept the beard, but he’s cut his hair short except for a longer fringe on top. Anakin suspects he liked it like that because it made him look taller.
A blue-lipped corpse, hair limp and wet and matted with mud, lying on the shore of a sinkhole on some planet in the Outer Rim.
The last time he saw that picture, Anakin was still high on adrenaline and victory and the Dark Side. There had been no place for horror, no place to mourn the death of the man who raised him and did his best to shape him into a good person. A good Jedi.
He wonders what his old master would think of him now.
He’s almost glad Obi-Wan isn’t around to see.
Anakin fears what he is becoming - has become - but he has nothing left to anchor himself to the world.
His mother is dead, his wife is dead, his children are dead by his own hand, Obi-Wan is dead, Ahsoka is missing, Rex is gone. Everyone he ever knew or cared about or loved is lost forever in one way or another.
He reshaped the universe for love, and now he has to live with the consequences.
With a sudden movement, Anakin presses the button that will lower his children’s bodies into the crypt. He watches them disappear with tears in his eyes and wonders if he should have done something beforehand. Said goodbye, smiled, kissed their foreheads like his mother used to do when she tucked him in bed.
But the last thing his children heard was a woman who wasn’t even their mother, begging for their lives.
The last thing they saw was their father’s yellow eyes and a crimson lightsaber.
The last thing they felt…
No, he is a monster. He doesn’t deserve that chance.
The crypts close over with a final, deep rumble. Anakin turns and leaves without looking back.
For whatever reason, the Organas had hidden their existence from the world, and everyone at the Palace on Alderaan who might have known their names is dead.
The graves remain unmarked.
The bizarre feeling of little feet kicking his cheek as he lays his head on his wife’s stomach. “How about Luke if it’s a boy, Leia if it’s a girl,” she says, stroking her hand through his hair.
He hums in agreement and closes his eyes, enjoying the moment, not really listening.
In the grave on the left lies a lightsaber, clutched in hands that will never be large enough to wield it. It’s the one Obi-Wan helped Anakin make after Geonosis in one of their last acts as master and padawan. It is also one of the last relics Anakin has of his life from before.
In the grave on the right lies a japor snippet. Anakin had found it on the nursery floor beside the girl’s body, its cord cut through. Letting her keep one of the last surviving pieces of Padmé, even in death, is only right.
These are the first of a lifetime of sacrifices that he knows will never make up for the magnitude of his sins.
That doesn’t mean he can’t try.
After the incident on Alderaan, the Emperor takes great pleasure in Anakin’s turmoil.
He now seems to be under the impression that his apprentice has been renewed in the Dark Side, and as a reward (sign of trust?), he releases restrictions that Anakin hadn’t even realized were there.
Anakin isn’t sure about being “renewed,” but his sense of the Dark Side has certainly changed since Alderaan. The rage is still there and when he looks in the mirror his eyes are as yellow as they have been for years, but this rage is less all-encompassing and more focused on his end goal, which is…
...well, he isn’t quite sure what his end goal is, but he’s figuring it out.
The question now is, what is he going to do with his freedom.
It doesn’t take him long to come up with a plan. He tells the relevant people that he needs to go into isolation for a while. Let them make their own interpretations; all he means is that he wants to be alone for what he’s about to do. With that done, he sets his Tie Fighter on a course for the Outer Rim.
Utapau has bounced right back to what it was before the war: A small, isolated world of little interest to the galaxy as a whole and the Empire in particular. The natives aren’t quite sure what to do with him or his shiny, fancy ship, but he has done his research. He lands on a platform in what he knows is the right sinkhole, leaves his ship secure in the knowledge that no one would dare try to steal it, and descends to the bottom of the pit.
Easy as it was to get there, finding what he’s looking for proves to be much more difficult than he had anticipated.
All he has for reference is a single picture that offers little in the form of landmarks, and it doesn’t help that the topography of the sinkholes is constantly shifting as water is pumped in and out.
If he didn’t have the Force, it would be a hopeless task.
As it is, an hour later he is soaked through - he’d had to dive for some of them - sitting on a rock beside a pile of algae-covered bones and a dripping lightsaber that won’t ignite.
As hard as he looks for familiar features in the skull and separately-recovered jawbone, he can’t find any. For a moment he gives into weakness and touches his forehead to the skull’s. It has such a strong sense of Obi-Wan about it that if Anakin closes his eyes, he can almost pretend…
The chill of early morning hanging over them. Bars of warmth as sunlight filters through the window. They sit facing each other, their foreheads touching, drifting in the Force.
Quiet approval sent over the bond.
“I’m sorry, Master,” Anakin whispers, and means it more than anything he’s ever said.
Anakin places Obi-Wan’s remains in a box that he brought for just that purpose. He fully intends to put them to rest at some point, but for now he thinks they might be doing more good where they are. They are a reminder and a warning, an anchor so he doesn’t fall further.
Is there a hint of blue in his eyes?
The lightsaber is a different story entirely. He takes it apart with the Force - as Light as he can make it, it feels wrong to touch Obi-Wan’s lightsaber with the Dark - and cleans and polishes and oils each piece. Although the power cell proves to be a complete loss, Anakin is able to scavenge a new one from the Emperor’s collection.
Thousands of lightsabers and parts and crystals just sit there under the Palace in a storage room. Anakin is certain he doesn’t want to know where most of them came from.
It is the way of the Sith for the apprentice to turn on the master, but Anakin thinks that there is a certain poetic justice in running the Emperor through with Obi-Wan’s lightsaber.
Even better, he couldn’t have gotten through the Emperor’s defences without a touch of darkness, but the act itself is not born of rage but of a pure, selfless desire to fix what he’s done wrong.
It can never be fixed, not completely, but killing the last of the Sith certainly helps.
Whatever he uses is not Light, but it is not Dark, either. It is something both new and as old as the stars.
Anakin Skywalker is twenty-nine years old when he becomes leader of the Galactic Empire.
A few weeks in, when one of the former Emperor’s subordinates contacts him asking if he wants to come inspect the new superweapon that they have in the works, Anakin realizes that he’s going to have to do a very careful review of Palpatine’s ongoing projects.
It turns out that very large lasers are useful for more things than just exploding planets. Anakin has the Death Star stripped of its military capabilities and taken to the Outer Rim to use for asteroid mining.
He discovers that the Force is very useful for weeding out corruption in the Imperial military.
He liberates Palpatine's group of child soldiers.
He outlaws slavery in the Empire.
He digs a foothold into Hutt Space and outlaws slavery there, too.
He cancels the kill order on the Jedi.
He frees the wookiees.
When it becomes clear that he will not be another Palpatine, the assassination attempts die down. They never stop entirely, but… well, at least there are fewer of them.
Obi-Wan’s remains are cremated on Naboo in the same place his own master’s were so many years ago. In a fit of sentiment, Anakin doesn’t put them in a burial vault. Obi-Wan had always hated closed-in spaces and the dark. Instead, he travels to a forest and scatters them among the plants and leaves. He thinks his old master would have liked that.
About a decade into his reign, Anakin is inspecting an Imperial training facility when he sees a familiar face among many familiar faces.
“Commander Cody?” he asks.
Cody - and he’s certain it is him - is older. Much older. What remains of his hair has gone white and there are deep lines around his eyes that speak to years of stress. When Anakin addresses him, he snaps to attention and salutes, his face perfectly blank, and in that moment Anakin realizes that he will never be able to get his friend back.
He’s seen what happens when the clones’ chips are deactivated, and if Cody were able to feel the full weight of what he has done…
there was so much blood, please
“As you were, Commander,” he says quietly, and Cody walks away.
Rex joins the Rebellion, but when the Empire turns from tyranny to tentative democracy, the Rebellion fizzles out into something that is less military and more backdoor politics. Rex is a military man through and through. He books a ship to the nearest backwater planet and fights in their guerilla wars until his weakened cells can take no more.
If any of the dozens of knights and masters and padawans and younglings marked down as “unaccounted for” survived, they never come back. Anakin never sees Ahsoka again. He never finds out what happened to Yoda.
Cody keeps the scrap of cloak for the rest of his life. He always wonders why when he looks at it, it’s like there’s a hollow where his heart should be.
When Anakin is old and knows his reign is finished, he quietly turns his remaining powers over to the Senate.
The title of Emperor dies with him.
And the worlds spin on.