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“Soulmates. Other Halves. Twin Flames.
Different words for the same phenomenon litter the galaxy, but they all translate to the same thing, Skywalker.
Each of us has a being that compliments us perfectly, even when both parts of a pairing are imperfect in every way.
Some are opposites that mesh together. Some are mirrors of each other. Some have edges that line up.
And some,” here Anakin remembers Master Windu looking at him with calm understanding for once, rather than the pinched brows and pursed lips and tired disdain Anakin was so used to from the Korun.
“Some beings burn too brightly for anyone else other than their partner to withstand their heat.”
A decade later, Anakin tucks his six-year-old daughter into her bed, pressing a kiss to her forehead and remembers Master Windu’s Philosophy of the Soul lecture for the senior padawans. Even now, Anakin doesn’t like to admit that Mace Windu had the right idea about anything, but in this case, Anakin can’t deny the rightness of the man’s words.
Because that is Anakin and Leia, twin flames, two beings burning brighter than the surfaces of all the suns in the galaxy combined. Their heat is not the gentle, life-giving warmth of his wife or his son. No, theirs is a blinding, suffocating blaze that could snuff out all sentience and sapience in its beautiful destruction.
______
Leia Naberrie-Skywalker is her mother in miniature, from her long brown hair to the planes of her face, still rounded in childhood. Padme’s bone structure peeks through even now as Leia’s face goes slack with slumber.
She should be all limbs and offset center of gravity, but Leia has somehow already figured out how to emulate her mother’s grace, leaving poor Luke to be the only one suffering childhood bruises and stubbed toes.
But it is his stubbornness Anakin sees on Leia’s face when she’s told no or not given a full explanation as to the why of something. The glint of obsession in her eyes when she finds a topic or idea she’s passionate about is so familiar it scares him.
______
Anakin thinks about his mother often these days. He wonders if Shmi ever sat there at their sand-stained table, encouraging and loving and inwardly terrified when her six-year-old spoke of freeing the galaxy’s slaves and bringing retribution down on Depur with fanatical determination rather than childish idealism.
______
Someday, Anakin is going to have to tell his children about how he almost destroyed the world.
He is going to have to hold their hands and walk them through all of his bad decisions and paranoia and fear. He’s going to have to explain this well of unquenchable anger that resides within him and has since he was born as a piece of property rather than as a person. He’s going to have to tell them about his mother and how losing her broke something in his mind that he’s never been able to fully put back together.
He’s going to have to tell them about the Tuskens and what he made himself into and hope he isn’t teaching his children to rightly fear him.
He’s going to have to explain what grooming is, and how a confluence of horrible circumstances can make monsters out of anyone, but that there are no explanations redemptive enough to excuse monstrous deeds.
He’s going to have to show them the bald patch at the back of his head.
At first it will look the same as every other time they’ve run their fingers over it while braiding his hair. Except this time, they’ll see it with different eyes since he’s going to have to tell them that his bald patch is a byproduct of Obi-Wan knocking him out with the base of his lightsaber.
He’s going to have to explain that Obi-Wan brained him so hard in his frantic need to make Anakin stop that the bottommost section of plasma scored him, burning a slice of hair and skin away in the second before Obi-Wan realized and withdrew that no amount of force healing or bacta could fully fix.
(It kills a little something more in Anakin every time Obi-Wan apologizes for that, as if he wouldn’t have deserved true disfigurement if Obi-Wan had been a little softer on his downswing.
Anakin didn’t assist in a genocide and de-stabilize the galaxy, but he could have. Would have, he believes. If Obi-Wan’s ship had been just a little slower returning to Coruscant from Saleucami . . .
Obi-Wan and Padme disagree, but they love him too much.
For two people who are so good at looking the galaxy’s ugly truths in the face, they are so very bad at seeing Anakin as he is. They see only the good, and admittedly, Anakin sees only the bad.
Or, he did, but now there is Leia.
So Anakin is teaching himself to see both the good and the bad in the face in the mirror, because one day he may need to help his little girl, the other half of his soul, find the same thing in her reflection. He hopes it won’t be needed, but he’ll be ready with his acceptance and his love if it ever is.)
He’s going to have to hope his children, once they know the truth of him, can still love him.
______
Anakin has long struggled with that fragile balance between pride in his own power and loathing how fiercely he burns, but in those months, force, in those years leading up to the twins’ birth, the self-hatred towards his tendency to combust ate at him until there was no appreciation, no respect left for his capabilities. Just condemnation and disgust.
But his daughter burns just like he does. She is brilliant and destructive, and Anakin is well aware that Leia is capable of both bolstering the galaxy to new heights and instigating the heat death of every living being within it.
And he adores her. Desperately, like he does most things, and achingly, with the knowledge that loving her despite the fearsome bite of her temper and the bright sparkle of fanaticism in her eyes likely means he too is deserving of love even with the threat of the atrocities he is capable of committing.
______
His little krayt dragon hates sitting still, but Leia has tea parties with her twin brother once a week because Luke enjoys the ceremony of it. Leia has learnt–has taught herself–to appreciate the setting out of the child-safe saucers and cups that Padme ordered, the way the matching teapot fits between two matching pairs of small hands, the half hour of peace that manages to exist in their rowdy household when all four Naberrie-Skywalkers sit around a table together, pinkies aloft and Coruscanti accents in practice.
She is soft and calm when she sits to have her hair brushed, rarely even wincing as Anakin works the snarls out of her curls. Padme is jealous that Leia requests her father be the one to comb through her tangles each night, but admits, “I can understand. You are quite good at it, after all these years of practice on me,” she says, cupping his cheek as she smiles at him softly.
Leia’s best friend, besides Luke, is her stuffed tooka, without whom she cannot find it in herself to sleep, no matter how exhausted she is.
She’s a nightmare when she’s cranky, but his baby girl is so soft and kind and lovely when she’s being tucked into bed. She’s tired kisses and perfect, closed-eyed smiles, and whispered ‘love you too, daddy’s. She and Luke still crawl into each other’s beds regularly, but Padme agrees with him that the sight of the twins curled into each other in the morning is too sweet to give up even if they should be encouraging sleeping separately.
Anakin is certain there is nothing better than their matching smiles side-by-side when he goes to wake them for the day.
______
Leia is contented when it rains, just like him.
Anakin is glad his children will never understand what it is like to be a slave, to be so so thirsty you would drink anything anyone gave you at any cost if it meant you could live to be thirsty tomorrow or that your child’s thirst would be quenched for the week, to be waiting endlessly for the rain when you live in an eternal desert, even if that rain may drown you when it finally does come, because the desert cannot handle an abundance of what it most desires.
Freedom was the most overwhelming, awful gift Anakin was ever given, and the first time it rained on Coruscant, he hid in a storage closet, trembling in fear for hours before Obi-Wan found him.
The Jedi Council told him he was too fearful, positively full of it, so Anakin taught himself to sit outside during a rain shower, letting the water wash away his pain and uncertainty until he felt born anew beneath the droplets. Eventually, the rain stopped being a lesson and instead became a vehicle for peace, but he never forgot why he started sitting out to soak his fear away.
Seeing Leia’s muddy bottom plopped on the ground next to him, her face lifted towards the sky as it pours down on her, her lips curling in the softest, sweetest smile, is the best balm. Those moments are the salve that must be liberally applied to the countless burns the pair of them inflict on themselves, each other, and everyone around them.
______
Anakin does not love Leia more.
He hopes Luke never thinks Anakin does, but that is a fool’s dream, and Anakin has worked hard these past few years to stop being quite so foolish. He is already trying to mentally prepare himself to hear that accusation when Luke hits his teens and his son’s emotions run over. No amount of preparation is going to make that anything but a dagger straight to the heart, but still, he tries.
He really doesn’t though. Love Leia more, that is.
He truly loves them equally, these precious beings who are composed of all the best pieces of him and Padme and manage to be greater than the sum of their parts. Leia being his soulmate doesn’t factor into the love equation.
Luke is the easier one to love, in truth. His son is a boy of bright smiles, soft words and genuine, unpracticed kindness in his every action. Luke offers warm hugs and wide eyes as Anakin guides his tiny fingers over wires and droid parts and explains the best way to reprogram a malfunctioning unit. Luke looks at Anakin like his father is the greatest thing he’s ever seen or will ever see, and he follows Anakin around like the cutest duckling to ever live.
Leia is harder, with her short temper and her stubbornness and her determination to have things go her way. His daughter is a girl of hard-won smiles, sharp words, and calculated actions. She has a heart of gold to match her brother, but Leia is not one to give her loyalty or her favor freely the way Luke is. Leia looks at Anakin like her father is a book she isn’t allowed to read yet even though she desperately wants to know what it contains, and she pouts that she’s not a baby anymore when he picks her up, even though she snuggles into his neck every time she says it.
Anakin doesn’t love Leia more, he just understands her better.
Anakin doesn’t love Luke more either, which is an accusation he anticipates hearing from his daughter, probably even before she’s a teenager, since Leia is the type to learn how to wound with words early.
Force, he isn’t looking forward to the teenage years one bit.
Anakin remembers what he was like, some of the shit he put Obi-Wan through, and shudders at the thought of the karma that’s coming his way. His twins going through puberty and being the physical (Luke) and mental/emotional (Leia) picture of his teenage self is genuine nightmare fuel, which makes Padme laugh at him and Obi-Wan smile in a self-satisfied way that always manages to piss Anakin off when he shares this fear.
He doesn’t snark at Obi-Wan for it though. Mostly because he knows he deserves it. Being arrested three times for illegal speeder racing was the least of the problems Anakin brought on his master when he was a teenager.
______
The other reason Anakin doesn’t say anything when he sees his master’s irritating smile is that Anakin knows Obi-Wan is going to be there to give him a hug and pour him a glass of Corellian whiskey on the nights where one or both of his twins finally hits him with the accusations of being loved less.
For all that Anakin misses his mother every day, it was Obi-Wan that raised him. It was Obi-Wan who weathered accusations of not caring about him, of being ashamed of his ‘slave’ padawan, of wishing he’d taken on Ferus or Dara or anyone who wasn’t Anakin.
So it’ll be Obi-Wan who can promise the twins don’t mean it when they tell Anakin “I hate you,” or “I’ll never forgive you.”
Anakin will be able to look at Obi-Wan’s grey-streaked beard and understanding blue eyes and remember that he didn’t mean it, not truly, when he was the one saying those words and breaking his pseudo-father’s heart.
He hopes he’ll be as graceful about hearing it from Luke and Leia as Obi-Wan was with him, but when has Anakin ever been as graceful as Obi-Wan about anything?
______
When the medical droid puts his newborn daughter into his arms, Anakin Skywalker feels a piece inside of himself that has long been out of alignment slide into place. He doesn’t even need her to open her eyes and look into his own to confirm it. Anakin knows at first touch that he is holding his soulmate.
His awed gasp sets off worried questions from Padme (still passing the afterbirth) and Obi-Wan (holding Luke after Anakin passed him over) alike, but Anakin is too taken with the perfect creature in his arms to answer them.
He’s not even a full week out from the day Master Windu killed the Chancellor, and he’ll need to change the bandage on his scalp in an hour or so, but with his wife resting exhausted but alive alive alive , with his son sleeping peacefully in Obi-Wan’s arms, and with his daughter blinking up at him and sealing their bond, Anakin finally feels like things might be okay.