Work Text:
“Do you know what the Force is?” Qui-Gon asks, and Anakin wants to say, Of course I do, she tells me all the best secrets.
But he doesn’t think Qui-Gon would understand, so he shakes his head and lets the Jedi explain. It’s different to the way Anakin knows her, but he listens all the same. Mom always tells him to be respectful of other people, even when he doesn’t agree, so he tries to see the Force the way Qui-Gon describes it.
He’s going to bring you to a new life, the Force whispers to him.
He grins, wrapping his arms around his sides in excitement. “Am I going to be a Jedi?”
He has dreamt of it, images flitting through his sleeping mind of him standing with a lightsaber, cutting enemies down and saving those in need, travelling the galaxy and soaring among the stars, and each time he wakes, he feels a little closer to it.
She hums, running breezy fingers through his hair. My little star, you’re going to be everything.
+
“Trust in the Force, Padawan, and it will not lead you wrong,” Obi-Wan tells him one day, and Anakin thinks, She doesn’t want to lead me anywhere, she wants to follow me.
He listens to Obi-Wan’s lessons about emotions and balance, and he tries to understand but it’s hard, sometimes, when the Force is telling him to embrace the chaos, not let it slide off him. He can’t follow the things Obi-Wan teaches him, not when he knows that there is another way for him.
(Obi-Wan trusts in her, and Anakin can tell she likes his master, but he can also see the way she weighs on him. For Anakin, she is coarse but light, constantly kindling a fire within him. With Obi-Wan, though, she is morbidly curious, as if she’d like to see how much he can take before his back breaks.)
“Does it make me a bad Jedi?” he asks one day, after a failed meditation. He’s been in lots of trouble recently; his instructors watch him with trepidation, and his fellow padawans whisper as he walks by. Obi-Wan tries to protect him from it as much as he can, but Anakin’s frustrated by everything, and doesn’t understand how to make it right.
It makes you who you are, she murmurs, wrapping him up in her embrace, and there’s no one I love more than you.
+
“What does the Force feel like?” Padmé wants to know, and Anakin feels the words on the tip of his tongue, A sun feels cold beside her, and she demands everything I am.
He rises from their bed, plagued by nightmares and tormented until he wakes. Padmé lies there sleeping, her soft breaths filling the room. She’s the most beautiful star in the galaxy, and he knows he’d give up everything for her. His dreams must be wrong, they have to be. He can’t stand for anything else; he cannot bear to lose her.
(He thinks of his mother, the way her screams echoed through his mind for weeks, the way he was too late to save her. He thinks of how the Force pushed at him, urging him on as his feet stayed chained to his duty.)
His moods grow darker and the circles beneath his eyes get bigger. Padmé and Obi-Wan watch him worriedly, but he hardly notices, not with the terror of his dreams haunting him.
“Am I going to lose her?” he whispers, fear clogging his throat. “Are you going to take her from me?”
Everything that is yours is mine, she says, with the icy touch of the night. She was never yours to keep.
+
“The Force brought me here, to avenge him,” Ahsoka says, a steely edge to her voice, and Vader wonders, Why do you trust her? She is the one who made me into this.
Their sabers crash, red against blue. He doesn’t hold back, but then, neither does Ahsoka. They meet each other hit for hit, a twisted and perverted reflection of the way they once duelled, a lifetime ago.
(But this time, there is no rich hum in the air, whispering to him all her secrets, following as he moves through his forms, warming him from his head to his toes. No, this time, he is alone.)
And yet, the Apprentice hesitates, holding back from a killing blow as she tries to appeal to a man long destroyed. It catches him off guard for a moment, stunned into silence as a battle rages within. But the never-ending well of hatred in his chest goes too deep, and he strikes again, forcing the girl he once knew into action.
“Is this what you wanted?” he roars as the temple collapses behind him. His rage is a monster, his grief a beast, and he directs them at the Force, demanding answers.
The lonely wind howls across Malachor; her voice is silent.
+
“May the Force be with you, Father,” Luke whispers, tears streaming down his face, and Anakin knows, She has always been with me.
She has been with him every day, pushing him towards this moment. She has laughed and cried with him, pushed and pulled at him. Her presence has been a storm and a hushed calm, the chaos of life that soothed him to sleep.
He punished her for years, forcing her to follow him down his dark path, making her bear witness to all he became. He thought she had abandoned him, but no, it was he who abandoned her. She had no love for Vader, because he was not hers. But Anakin is hers, her little star, her everything.
With his son looking down at him, he cannot hate her anymore.
(He wonders if he ever truly did.)
He feels his life fading, and asks one last time, “Do you love me still?”
Oh my little one, she weeps, tears of joy and pain falling onto his skin, I always have, and I always will.