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Qui-Gon still measures the midichlorian levels of the slave boy who helps them after they crashed on Tattoine. They’re not abnormally high.
The boy is clearly force-sensitive, yes, enough so that if he had been born in the center of the Republic, he probably would have entered the Jedi Order as a toddler. But he’s growing up in the backwater instead, where law and order are enforced by Hutt mercenaries and pure, dumb fate, and so there’s no Jedi Order, no future, just slavery and the endless dusty victory of surviving another day.
Maybe there’s still a prophecy somewhere about a boy who will bring balance to the Force. But it’s not this one, and the idea that it could be never even enters Qui-Gon’s mind. It doesn’t matter either way.
The boy talks about podracing and there’s another truth behind the overconfidence of a ten-year-old that’s shaped by his intuitive Force-trust. Qui-Gon sees it clearly, in the ragged clothes and blistered hands: the boy is, to everyone except a few fellow slaves, utterly expendable.
The ruin of any empire always comes down to that.
“He’s a good boy,” Qui-Gon says, as he and Shmi are watching Anakin fix the ship. “A big credit to his parents.” It’s the kind of thing he sometimes tells parents of padawans when they’re coming to him in secret, asking tentatively for what he can only assume is absolution for having given up their children.
Shmi looks back evenly. “To me,” she says.
Qui-Gon knows enough about the lives of slave women to not ask. She offers it up anyway. “He is nothing like the man who sired him.”
“I’m sorry,” Qui-Gon gives back and he means so much more than an insensitive remark.
Law and order, a voice in his head says, and he’s clashed with the Jedi Council so many times, and he knows, he knows all the things about political interference and neutrality and how calmness is the only way to the Light side of the Force. He’s not calm. He’s angry.
Anakin is nothing special, he’s just a bright young boy like there are billions, trillions of bright young boys in the galaxy, the fact that he’s a slave is just bad luck. Fate. Call it whatever.
But deep down, Qui-Gon believes in the Light Side and even deeper down his belief is founded on the fact that the Force doesn’t do in expendability, that it comes just as easily and just as naturally to an Outer Rim slave boy as to a Coruscant padawan.
So if the Jedi won’t save him, then Qui-Gon will. Not because of his Force abilities, or prophecies or anything like that. Only because Anakin deserves a future. And because Qui-Gon can give him one.
He wins Anakin in a podracing bet.
“You’re free,” he says, and knows it’s a lie.
He still needs to say it.
Anakin just looks at him for a long moment and nods like it means nothing at all, and it doesn’t. And then suddenly, because he’s a ten-year-old kid and he’s excited, a smile breaks out all over his face and he cheers and shouts “Yippieeeeh!”
“Can you take him with you?” Shmi asks. She’s pulled Qui-Gon to the side and is speaking quietly to make sure Ani won’t hear.
Mothers don’t ask these kinds of questions if they ever had much hope for their children. “There’s nothing for him here, please. He’s a special boy.”
This much is the truth, there’s no place in Tattoine society for free, poor children. Everything is owned by the Hutts or their goons. If there’s no one there to ensure his freedom, Anakin will be a slave again as soon as the ship leaves. Who would be able to say otherwise?
And even if he were lucky, against all odds, Force-lucky, fate-lucky, and he got a shot at Tattooine freedom, Tattooine futures, how do they look? He has no family land to farm and no connections, so the only other way of providing for himself would be mercenary work.
The Republic’s failures aren’t because of individual choices. They’re the result of millennia-old systemic inequalities and power imbalances. You can’t just say “you’re not a slave anymore” to dissolve slavery. But what other way is there for Ani?
So Qui-Gon takes the boy with him on the ship to Coruscant, knowing full well that the Jedi Council would probably have preferred him to gamble for Tattooine moonshine rather than the freedom of a boy whose existence they’d rather ignore.
“They won’t let you train him,” Obi Wan tells him, with the kind of look in his eyes that makes it clear that anything else is out of the question, too, and Qui-Gon smiles.
“Good for you,” he answers, teasingly. “Then you don’t have to fear the competition.”
Obi Wan rolls his eyes and then he says, “But he is… he is a good boy.”
“He’s too old,” is the Jedi Council’s unanimous verdict, as Qui-Gon knew it would be. On the ship, he’d taught Ani how to defend himself against the Training Droid, and how to stack bricks with his mind power, and how to refer to all the Knights as Master, knowing full well it was a skill Ani already possessed.
And all the while he’d known it wouldn’t be enough. Ani was good, and he was trying, but he was a few years behind the Jedi curriculum and it wouldn’t even have mattered if he wasn’t. Because, as it was so apparent, he was too old. It was a matter of principle.
Having concluded that unexpected little point of the agenda, the Council goes back to discussing the recent trade problems and the danger of the Sith.
“I’m not sending him back to slavery,” Qui-Gon says. He’s got enough control to keep his voice completely even, but it’s a struggle.
“You should not even have brought him here,” Mace Windu answers. “You knew this would happen. All you did was cause more pain in the boy by awakening undue hopes.”
Undue hopes.
Before Qui-Gon can answer, Yoda interjects. Mediating, as always. “Keep him, you can. But be a Jedi, he will not. Other things you must find, to teach him.”
Qui-Gon doesn’t think about all the implications of keep him, and instead tells Ani and Obi-Wan that Ani will be their assistant.
“But I won’t be a Jedi,” Ani says. He hides the disappointment in his voice well. This is, after all, what he expected.
Qui-Gon puts his hands on his shoulders. “You’ll be something better.”
So they teach him all the things they can come up with, from planetary history to navigating to how to apply bacta correctly. Anakin learns. Of course, he’s still especially fascinated by everything Force-related, though he’s not sure how much he’s allowed to learn.
“The Force is what connects everything.” Qui-Gon explains to him. “It’s a part of you like it’s a part of everything. Learning about it is not restricted to the Jedi, the same way the knowledge of water is not restricted to fish.”
Ani still is full of awed devotion for Padmé.
He still learns most of the things padawans learn, under the continued ignorance of the Jedi Order.
Qui-Gon still dies.
Qui-Gon still dies and suddenly it’s just Obi Wan and Anakin. They make Obi Wan a Knight afterwards, but he’s too young to have a padawan of his own and he does not have as much leeway with the Council as Qui-Gon had.
They tell him to get rid of Ani. Not in these terms, obviously, but there’s a job in the kitchen of the Jedi Academy they offer. Ani is almost twelve now.
Jedi get all their expenses paid for, but their lifestyle doesn’t exactly allow for dependents, so Obi Wan doesn’t really know how to provide for him. Qui-Gon only could because he was respected enough to get what he wanted.
“I can work in the kitchens,” Ani says. It’s better work than he had in the scorching Tatooine sun from the age of four. He will miss learning stuff and following Jedi around and getting better at Force stuff, but he misses Qui-Gon too. He also misses his mother. It’ll be just another of those things. “Most of the work there is done by Droids, right? I’ll upgrade them in my spare time. They’ll all be surprised at how great I’ll make the kitchen look.”
A part of him imagines watching the padawans everyday while preparing their meals and it feels like a punch in the stomach. But he’s used to it by now and who knows how it will turn out? Maybe he’ll make friends with one of them and they’ll teach him, too after work. Ani has always been an optimist. Mostly because he couldn’t afford being anything else.
“No way did I teach all that complicated math and astronavigation for you to end up a kitchen boy,” Obi Wan says and it’s only half joking.
Instead he calls Padmé.
She invites him to Naboo. It’s a wonderful place for a childhood.
Padmé organizes schooling for him that includes regular meditation at the temple. It’s not exactly Force training, but it comes close. Obi Wan also gives him assignments whenever he can and Anakin is used to making do.
He’s good at Force-lifting at things that are up to approximately half his weight now. He trains and trains.
He has less opportunity to work on his piloting here, but he also has a very keen ear for music and sometimes when he plays songs that genuinely move him on the lyra, everybody around him cries.
“Maybe it’s a Force thing”, Ani tells Padmé sheepishly as she wipes the tears off her cheeks. “Sometimes I think, when I like a song so much I want to cry, maybe I’m making everybody cry, too. Like mind control. If that’s it, then I’m sorry. It’s not on purpose.”
It’s more of a confession than he intended, but he knows how Force powers work and the thought of changing any of Padmé’s thoughts is horrible to him. He’s been suspecting it for a while now. Everybody here is friendly to him. Maybe it is manipulation.
“It’s not mind control, Ani,” she chokes out a laugh. “You’re good. That’s all.”
He blushes and looks at the floor because he’s not sure how to answer.
“Maybe you’ll be a professional player when you’re grown up.”
“Do they make good money?” Ani asks. He considers it. Anakin Skywalker, musician. It’s an option – an option. “I want to be a pilot mostly, I’ve heard if they’re as good as I already am, they’re paid very well.”
“The best ones are, as always,” Padmé tells him. She looks beautiful and wise standing there in front of the huge palace windows overlooking the garden. “But Ani, you know there’s more important things than money.”
“When I’m grown up, I have to be rich,” Anakin answers. He’s wearing his most stubborn look. “I need to buy my mother.”
“Oh Ani,” Padmé says. But it’s all she says about it.
(A fact Anakin will never learn: The antique lyra he played on that day was worth roughly four times as much as his mother.)
Somehow, they still grow in love. Padmé is away to Coruscant for two years while Anakin stays behind and when she returns, everything is different.
Padmé is still careful about it. Anakin less so. “I love you,” he says. He’s always wanted things he could not technically have. He always got them, at least partly.
For the next two year term, he follows her to Coruscant. As her assistant.
He’s not paid much and continues his secret meditative Force studies and lives in her suite.
He still meets Palpatine.
One night he has nightmares about his mother. Three days later he gets a badly spelled message, forwarded by a disgruntled Jedi Council secretary, from stepsiblings he never met.
His mother is dead.
That night, very suddenly, Anakin starts adding up all the ways in his life he’s ever been angry.
When his mother was hit by the first owner he remembers, even though she never showed any signs of pain in his presence, just went with the punches and he couldn’t do anything.
When Ada, the first girl he ever had a crush on, was sold to a different town or maybe even planet without any warning and he couldn’t do anything.
When he lost control of his racing pod and had to watch it crash against a boulder at breakneck speed, knowing he’d be punished for it later and he couldn’t do anything.
When he stood in front of the Jedi Council, showing them Force tricks he’d put all his effort into learning, and they said he was too old and he couldn’t do anything.
When Qui-Gon died and he-
When Palpatine finds him, months later, that is what he will sense.
What Vader is made out of – powerlessness.
The truth is, there is no balance to the Force, ever. The Force is not a balanceable thing. It’s power, that’s what it is, and the right to wield it derives from its mere presence.
Slave children are dying in the Outer Rim and padawans are going to die, later, in Coruscant. These are connected.
That’s what the Force does.
Anakin and Padmé had a lot of discussions about democracy and autocracy and power. They were always fruitless and ended in make-out sessions whenever one of them wanted to change the topic. Then they’d laugh about how ironic it is that two people who want to share a future so badly can disagree so much on how it should look.
Sometimes, after the laughter, Padmé will be concerned, silently, because she knows enough history to understand where dictatorships lead. She knows Anakin is the last person to be in favor of oppression, but she also knows that ignorance can be just as deadly as maliciousness.
In the very end, they’ll realize that they’ve looking at it backwards.
Here is the reason they never quite found their lowest common denominator:
Anakin grew up in a slave hut. Padmé grew up in a palace.
He was always aware of this. She wasn’t.
He still kills those children. It will always have been wrong.
“Anakin, how could you do all this?” Padmé will ask, horrified, when the attack on the Jedi is almost over.
The truth is, Anakin never thought he actually had a choice.
“I’ll give you powers,” Palpatine will have said. “Powers the Jedi only dream of.” At this point, the Republic had already been rotting from within. At this point, Shmi was already dead.
The Force cannot be given. The Force cannot be taken. The Force is power. The Force is life. The Force is also, fundamentally, not what any of this is about.
Maybe there is a prophecy. Palpatine believes in it. He tells Anakin so time after time as he tries to lure him and on some level, it makes sense to Anakin more than anything else.
He has always known there were unbreakable rules to life, even if he hadn’t understood them. Slavery was one of them. The Force was another. He had spent his entire life skirting them, going just to the edge of where they could almost not touch him anymore. Only to be pulled back every time.
So if there’s a prophecy, then maybe there’s a prophecy. Balance to the Force. Eternal Battle of Light versus Dark Side. The Jedi and the Sith and the Republic and the Empire. Maybe there once were many futures. Maybe there’s always only been one.
Vader is made either way. Padmé dies by choice. The Republic crumbles, and so do the Jedi. Even if there’s a prophecy, then there’s still no reason that it had to be him.
He will understand this as he watches their son take on an Empire. If there’s a prophecy, he will fulfill it by the only free choice he ever made in his life – killing Palpatine, killing himself. If there’s a prophecy, then Anakin never had the privilege of making it not matter.
Even though, with all his might, he will have tried.
He dies as free as he can.