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Anakin is seven the first time he wants to die.
All his life he’s been surrounded by death. He’s seen slaves collapse from hunger, seen them be beaten until they could no longer move. He’s seen beautiful twi’lek women with torn clothes and glassy eyes jump off balconies and he’s seen slavers snicker as they activate transmitters to set an example. He knows (knew) many beings who planned out escapes that they knew full well would fail because of the bombs hidden within their flesh. There are days when there are more bodies on the streets than living beings, and those days Tatooine feels more like a mass shallow grave than a planet. But the slaves of Tatooine do not mourn.
For on Tatooine, death means freedom.
It is not the type of freedom Anakin ever desired for himself. His mother always says that one day in their lifetime they will be free, truly free, to leave Tatooine and walk the skies, that their last name is a promise of that. And he believes her, usually.
Right now, he does not.
All he can think about is the feeling of the gashes opening on his back as Watto beats him, of his eye still swelling and throbbing from Watto’s fist. He can’t remember what he did wrong this time, or how long it’s been since the beating started. The pain is an endless ocean, and he is drowning in it. Watto cracks his whip again and Anakin hopes, for just one moment, that this next slash will kill him.
When it’s all over, he nearly forgets that he even thought it. He stumbles home to his mother, and she tends his wounds like she always does, humming soft lullabies and blinking back tears (he hates seeing her cry, she knows this, but she cannot help it when her little boy is hurting so). She is gentle and warm in a completely different way than the scorching twin suns, and as he nestles himself in her arms he cannot help but smile. He wants to live, if only to ensure that she will one day be free. He will free her himself if he has to.
It doesn’t take long for the thoughts of death to become a constant.
They become a dull buzzing in the back of his mind after a while. Sometimes while he’s running an errand for Watto he thinks of wandering, of testing how far he can go before the transmitter is triggered. He begins to look at the rotting bodies of other slaves with a sick sort of envy, and on some days he wishes Watto’s shop had balconies like Gardulla’s palace. He doesn’t want to die on most days, but there is a comfort in thinking that he can .
When he is first taken away to the Jedi Temple, he thinks that maybe the thoughts will stop. He’s free now, after all. He desired death because death was freedom, but now he is free in the truest sense, and he no longer needs to use death as a backup plan.
(Sometimes it occurs to him, while he says master for the tenth time in a single day, that maybe he is not as free as he once thought.)
The Jedi do not mourn death either, Anakin finds. They rejoice in it, and it feels like a sick mockery of his old life. Death on Tatooine means freedom, because life there is unlivable. Here, in the comfort of the upper levels of Coruscant, death does not bring anything that the Jedi do not already have. It is something that should be feared, something that should be fought against, and yet the Jedi seem to passively accept it like it is something they desire.
(Maybe they do desire it. Maybe the comfort of the Temple is an illusion, and the Jedi crave the same freedom that the slaves on Tatooine had craved. The thought lingers in Anakin’s mind, and he finds himself wanting to walk to the Temple rooftop.)
Death becomes Anakin’s greatest rival. He fears it, not for himself (never for himself), but for his mother, and for Obi-Wan, and for the handful of friends he’s managed to make within the temple; and he is determined to conquer it. He sees his mother dying every night in his dreams, alone and in pain, and his determination only grows. He will not allow her to die without knowing true freedom, just like he promised her, like she always promised him. Death on Tatooine may mean freedom, but he promises himself (tries to promise her , through the Force) that she will not die on Tatooine.
He does not keep that promise.
The war breaks out and he soon learns that death is cruel and inviting and terrible and beautiful all at once. There are days on the battlefield where he watches too many of his men get shot down and he stops blocking the blasts aimed at him, and one will graze his side or hit his shoulder and he cannot tell if he is mocking death or if death is mocking him. There are days where he is the one doing the killing, and sometimes it eats at him like the maggots used to eat at the bodies on the streets of Mos Espa, but other times it thrills him because there is no better way to conquer death than to become it. There are days where his plans are needlessly reckless, where he ensures the survival of everyone but himself, because he could not live in a world without Obi-Wan and Ahsoka and Rex anyway. There are days where he only survives because he thinks of Padmé, of her smile and her gentle voice and the way she plays with the curls on the back of his neck, and he cannot bear to die without having her in his arms one more time.
(There are days where he still wonders if he’s free at all. There are days where he looks at Ahsoka, still a child, and he becomes vividly aware of her lack of choice in all of this, and then of his own, and he cannot help but think of when he was a teenager and would stand on the Temple roof with his toes peeking past the ledge.)
(There are days where he wonders if the clones think of death the same way the slaves on Tatooine did.)
The war continues, and Ahsoka leaves, and on his first mission without her Anakin gets shot far too close to his heart, and he isn’t sure whether he let it hit him on purpose. He continues to watch his men die and he continues to kill and he is becoming less and less merciful each time he does it because the only time he feels in control is when his lightsaber is impaling someone’s chest. When the chancellor gets kidnapped he kills again, and for the first time he cannot justify it.
He returns to Coruscant beaming and runs into Padmé’s arms because it is the only place where death cannot reach him. She’s carrying his child now, and she’s glowing, and for the first time in his life death is the furthest thing from his mind because all that matters is his wife and his family and the long lives they will live together in complete and total bliss. He kisses her, and in that moment he wishes that they could both live forever.
He dreams of her dying that night, and he makes another promise he cannot possibly keep.
(Padmé’s apartment is a penthouse, and her balcony is open most of the time, and for the first time he wonders what it would feel like to fall from it.)
The chancellor tells him he can save Padmé. The chancellor tells him that all he has to do is a simple task. The chancellor tells him that it will make him stronger.
Minutes later, Anakin is marching up the temple steps, and then he is impaling every Jedi he sees, and he is swallowing any guilt he feels because they are the enemy now and the only way he can conquer death is by becoming it.
(He realizes, as he does this, that he is not free now and has never been. Once he is finished here, he will change that. He is freeing himself of his old masters and he will free himself of his new one, and then he and Padmé and their child will be free, truly free, like his mother had dreamed for him.)
The first child to come out from behind the chairs in the council chamber couldn’t have been any older than seven, and he has blonde hair and blue eyes and looks almost exactly like Anakin once had.
If someone had struck him down at that age, it would’ve been a mercy.
On Tatooine, death means freedom.
And Anakin has always wanted to free slaves.