Chapter Text
It starts with a fall.
A tilt, a falter, a frozen instant, suspended and off axis. The fall lasts forever, panic and horror branded into the space between the foot and the ice. Then comes the crash, like a crack of lightning, and everything goes black. There is pain, a loud gasp from the crowd. Something shrivels and burns, in the bones, or in the hollow of the chest. The music does not stop. A second later, the blades are back on ice, the program continues through the red-hot pain shooting up his leg. It does not stop burning.
Part One
Tatooine — Naboo — Arkanis
Anakin wakes.
His dream fades by degrees, and he blinks himself back into the dim, still-unfamiliar room. He stares at the crack in the ceiling, and it feels like he’s lost his footing, though he’s lying in bed.
So he’s dreamed of Worlds again, months after the whole debacle, and weeks since his ankle has been pronounced healed. Anakin rolls his right foot from where it sticks out from under the cover, and imagines the long-faded strain.
It’s strange being back in Tatooine, out in the desert, worlds away from everything he’s known for the past years— nearly a decade— of his life. But it’s even stranger to look back upon that life, because now it feels like it must have happened to someone else. Like a hiker looking incredulously back at the peak he’s descended, yet unable to remember choosing the downhill path, or the journey down.
Only the fall that had happened five steps from the top.
Anakin knows that the physical fall wasn't the cause of what came after, but a symptom of what already was. There are other skaters that sustained injuries and got back up, and kept skating, but Anakin had already been falling. He had been so overwrought, and angry, and unbalanced; pushed to the limit and crumbling, and refusing to admit it. And as much as he wanted to say it was all Qui-Gon’s fault— in the end, there’s no one but himself to blame. Qui-Gon never told him to train for the most dangerous jump in the sport; Qui-Gon didn’t make the half-baked, desperate decision of changing the program components on the day of competition. Qui-Gon didn’t push for something that was doomed from the start: Anakin did. It’s like everything in the past year had been leading to that moment in his dream, his worst nightmare turned memory. The stakes couldn’t have been higher. It was the opening jump for the free skate at the World Championships. It was a quadruple axel, four and a half rotations in the air and never having been done before. It was a bad fall.
He pulled himself up on the torn ankle, and finished the skate by the skin of his teeth, but from the moment he fell, he knew that after he walked off the ice this time, he wouldn’t be getting back on anytime soon.
Even if Qui-Gon never had to tell him about his intention to retire right after Anakin’s skate, Anakin was the one who had already walked himself to the ledge. And when Qui-Gon broke the news, Anakin— who suddenly had all the time in the world and nothing to do— faltered.
Qui-Gon was as gracious as he was capable of being, offering to watch over Anakin’s recovery, and to help him find and transition to a new coach after Qui-Gon left; but it was Anakin who spitefully, ungratefully pushed him away. And as if his failure in the axel wasn’t humiliating enough, as if it had taught him exactly nothing, Anakin had to test the doctor’s warning. He was under strict orders to stay off ice and away from any training, but he took himself back to the stadium and tried to work too hard, too soon. He didn’t even make it back on the ice when he landed wrong on the half-healed ankle, and all it had achieved was to keep him away from the rink even longer. In retrospect it was nearly laughably predictable. Padmé wasn’t even surprised when he told her.
Eventually, he outlasted Qui-Gon’s patience. His coach left Naboo, and Anakin half-convinced himself he wanted him to go.
Trapped in his own body, Anakin let the months pass by in a blur, until it was no longer a question of if his body allowed him to go back, but his mind.
At the end of spring he returned to finish school— one of those things of an ordinary life he never got around to in the whirlwind of preparing his entry into the senior division. Besides the silver lining of Ahsoka’s company, there was little joy in sitting on the fringe of teenagers two years his junior. The school work kept him busy however, and mostly sane, if painfully bored. He did his exams, got good grades, and then, finally out of reasons for staying in Theed, he came home.
And refused to think about why it felt like surrendering.
He came home, meaning to Tatooine, rather than this house he’s sleeping in, which he knows nothing about. This in itself isn’t strange—mom has always moved a lot, so Anakin is used to coming home to somewhere he’s never been. But this time is different, because this time, Shmi is staying.
She got married, and Anakin missed the wedding. In the time he’s been away, she has found not just another person, but a place— a whole house, with a farm and a guesthouse attached— to call home.
The Lars are friendly enough, and Anakin’s got a room, too, in the farmhouse with the rest of the family, rather than the guesthouse Shmi keeps, but he feels more than ever the stranger. The room itself is a mess and a limbo, strewn with half-unpacked luggage spilled all over the floor. A couple of cardboard boxes sat in the corner, filled with things gathered either from his childhood or school years, packed away neatly by Shmi, waiting for his return.
Besides the mess, however, the room is comfortable, and modest, with a window that looks out into the yard. Just now the curtains are drawn, and a lengthening tongue of light streaks across the floor. It’s getting late in the afternoon, but the family— Shmi’s new, well-adjusted, self-sufficient family— probably won’t be missing him much. Anakin lies back down on the bed.
Not long after, however, someone does come looking for him. There’s an urgent peal of knocks from the door, waking him, and a voice comes calling.
“Anakin!”
Anakin blinks. It’s Padmé. He didn’t know she was around. He tries to think if Shmi had mentioned Padmé being in town, for one of her field trips, perhaps.
“Anakin, I’m going to come in!”
She knocks again, and tries her hand on the doorknob. Alarmed, Anakin casts a furtive look around the horrible mess in the bare room, and finally hauls himself off the bed.
“No, wait, I’m coming!”
He pulls on a random pair of joggers, trips over the contents of his luggage on the way to the door, pauses, runs a hand roughly through his hair, before wrenching the door open.
And just like that, he stands face to face with Padmé. Still disheveled, no doubt with bags under his eyes and a pallor over his skin, blinking to adjust to the bright light in the corridor.
She looks him up and down, taking in his appearance, rumpled clothes, and what must be a breathless, half-manic look on his face. And grins wide.
“There you are,” she says, pulling him into a tight hug, and speaks quietly into his shoulder, “It’s good to see you home.”
“It’s not been that long,” Anakin grunts his reply, and buries his face into her hair anyway. “Did mom send you to get me out of the room?”
“Why, couldn’t I have just wanted to see you?”
“But did she?”
With Shmi, Anakin might get away with holing up in the room all day, claiming it’s three-days-old jet lag, but she’s not had her son back with her for years. Padmé, on the other hand, is a lot less forgiving about letting him stew in misery.
“Alright, maybe she did,” Padmé admits. “Can I come in?”
She doesn’t wait to hear his protests before pushing into the room. Her hands on her hips, she calmly, amusedly assesses the mess.
Suddenly, Padmé looks absolutely delighted.
“Are those posters of Obi-Wan Kenobi on the floor?”
Anakin jolts in alarm, and stubs a toe into the bed frame. Groaning, he limps across the room and lunges for the small stack of posters. They are sitting exposed on top of a cardboard box, the only one he’d opened before he took one look at its contents and gave up on the task altogether.
But Padmé is there before him.
“I didn’t know you kept those!”
She picks up and flicks through the various pictures of Obi-Wan’s face, Obi-Wan clad in skimpy, glittery costumes, Obi-Wan arched in stunning poses. All of which are painfully familiar to Anakin, because yes, he used to have them on his wall.
“My, he really was cute when he was younger,” Padmé continues relentlessly, and flashes him a grin. “Not that he isn’t good looking now.”
“Padmé,” Anakin says, pained.
She holds up a full-body shot of Obi-Wan on the ice, one hand reaching out towards something just out of sight, a soft, yearning look on his face. “Look at this one! It’s nearly a match for the one they have of you at the airport, isn’t it?”
It takes a moment for Anakin to shake off the stupid blush that’s found his face, then he processes Padmé’s words, and scowls.
“Oh, don’t look like that.”
“You know I hate those posters,” Anakin mutters.
“Will you hate them a little less to know they match with Obi-Wan’s?” Padmé continues to tease.
Okay, so maybe the pose does look a little like Anakin’s poster from last season. It almost soothes the discomfort of seeing his face plastered all over faded posters at the Mos Espa airport. Almost.
Then, he notices something— a familiar-looking drawstring bag on her back.
“Padmé,” he says suspiciously, “what are you carrying?”
Padmé smiles indulgently at him, like they’re sharing a secret. “I don’t know,” she says, “what do you think?”
But Anakin shakes his head. “I don’t know why you brought skates,” he tells her. “I’m not going to the rink.”
A beat. Padmé sobers up, too, then.
“Are you sure?”
Anakin shrugs.
Whereas just a few months ago he had been desperate to get back, now… Now, Anakin is not sure he still can.
She hadn’t been there for all of it, but out of everyone, Padmé has probably witnessed the most of his coming undone. She considers him for a long moment. Something flashes past her expression then. Maybe it’s understanding, maybe pity.
“Alright,” Padmé relents. “Let’s still spend the day together. Just the two of us? I have the whole evening off, before I need to head back into town. Humor me.”
“Where’s your vegan girlfriend for stuff like that?” Anakin mutters pettily.
“Satine has a name, Anakin.” Padmé rolls her eyes, and nudges him. “She’s not here today. I’m all yours.”
Anakin bites his lips. “Fine.” He looks back around the room as if for something to do. For years and years, he’d been packing his life into a handful of suitcases, lugged all over the world, from Tatooine to Theed to wherever the next competition or training camp was. And looking at it all now, there’s scarily little you can tell about his life.
“Let’s get out of here. We’ll take the car,” he says with sudden conviction. “There’s nothing here, anyway.”
No, there’s nothing here, save for detritus from the last couple of years, and nightmares of falling.
He takes Padmé’s hand.
“Let’s go.”
Shmi kept the car from Watto’s junkyard, which Anakin had learned to drive when he was a bit too young, but then again, not much about his childhood is all that normal.
Anakin finds the key in a familiar-looking biscuit tin outside the door of the shed, he and Padmé climb inside the rusty bucket, familiar to him like an old friend.
But Padmé, who’s always known Anakin in Naboo, has never seen it.
“Does this thing even work?” she frowns skeptically.
“Sure it does,” Anakin says. And before they know it, they’re racing down the dirt roads, into the dunes.
They draw the windows all the way down, letting the wind blast into their faces. Padmé produces from her magic pouch a speaker, and presses play on songs that throws the both of them right back in time. Suddenly hit with a nostalgia he’s probably too young for, Anakin grins, wide and genuine and surprised at himself. Before long, he is singing, and laughing out loud at the pieces of lyrics and melodies that tickle his memories, be they outrageously self-indulgent, or surprisingly resonant, after all these years. Padmé is humming them under her breath with him, mouth moving around the words, but Anakin belts out the songs at the top of his lungs, his voice scrappy and off-key but he doesn’t care. His voice is falling, drifting out into the bright wind, scattered over the road like bits of home in the half-remembered lyrics, in the battered old car, in the heat of the sand. Anakin has never been on these roads before, but the dunes are the same, if half a shade lighter, without the rusty layer on top.
They stop somewhere unmarked, in the middle of the desert. And Padmé pulls them out and off the road. Anakin walks his first few steps so stiffly, that Padmé starts laughing. Eventually, however, he has to stop fighting the inevitable mini-desert from forming in his shoes.
“Just take your shoes off,” she tells him, and he does. After due grumbling.
They take the time then, to catch up, while running after each other, toes deep in golden sands, which doesn’t burn as long as you dig your feet in deep enough, or if you keep running. Time passes, the wind cools on their faces, and their shadows drag longer and longer over the dunes.
And as the light grows golden, they take the car to the foot of Jundland Range and scale up high enough to watch the sun dip into the ring of dust above the horizon.
Waiting for the sun to set, they share a couple of snacks Padmé had snuck into the bag she’s still carrying. Anakin sits, and listens to Padmé ramble about her research team, their new projects, her field work— something about poverty amongst desert communities— which was what brought her out to Tatooine. Anakin nods along, not understanding everything but feeling endlessly glad for her. Padmé pauses, when she notices Anakin staring at her.
“What?”
“I’m happy for you,” he says simply.
Padmé tilts her head. “Thank you.”
She, too, has taken the long way to where she is, even longer, arguably, than Anakin’s own stumbling around until Qui-Gon found him. Because when Anakin arrived at Palpatine’s academy, Padmé had already been there for years. Under Palpatine’s notoriously cruel hand, she’d been an international sensation by the time she was fourteen, and physically broken and on the verge of retirement by seventeen. She fought it, with Qui-Gon, but it hadn’t been enough to return her to competition. It wasn’t exactly the legacy she wanted, to be the one instrumental for bringing about Palpatine’s investigation and subsequent downfall, but she chose to be proud of it, anyway. There had even been a documentary made about Palpatine, with Padmé right at the center, the voice denouncing, exposing his barbaric training methods. But she was too smart to remain in the shadow of Palpatine’s notoriety, and decided to save the world instead. In the years when Anakin kept on skating with Qui-Gon, she retreated from the spotlight, went to college and grad school, and is now amongst all things a working developmental economist.
To an outsider, it might seem that Anakin is at a similar junction, that he is about to turn to a wholly new chapter in his life. But dare he walk away? Doesn’t his coming home to Tatooine prove that he can’t ever walk away from some place without looking back?
“You should have told me you were coming home,” Padmé tells him. “I would have gone to meet you at the airport.”
“I enjoyed the bus ride back,” Anakin, who had tried very hard not to let anyone know when his flight was, says stubbornly.
Padmé snorts. “No you didn’t.”
They fall quiet. And Anakin knows what’s coming.
“Ani,” Padmé says, and he wants to stop her from asking, but cannot. “What are you going to do now?”
Anakin huffs, blows a stray curl from in front of his eye.
“I don’t know,” he says.
They’ve only got one shot on this world, after all. Any choice, any moment, annihilates all the other possible futures that might have followed from it.
The sun’s edges grow fuzzy with the dust, irresolute, ill-defined, there above the horizon, and not.
He can stay, or he can leave. Leaving did a lot of good for Padmé, she took the turn, and it led her to the adjacent highway. Maybe it’s about time Anakin gave up and tried something else, as well. It might even work out. But just as keenly, there’s a part of him that grows indignant, and he knows he can’t leave yet, be it the fear of change or anything else. So here he is, paralyzed by not choosing, stuck in stagnant waters— or sands, whatever.
“You’re going to get bored, soon,” Padmé says.
He is already bored. But that doesn’t mean he knows what to do about it.
“Maybe I should do what you did, and find something else to do. Get on with my life.” And he sounds unconvincing even to himself.
Padmé gives him a sideways glance. “You can’t be thinking of leaving now.”
“It’s not like I can go back.” Anakin shuffles. “It’s already too late to start training for the Grand Prix. Even if I start right now, I won’t make it.”
“Then go for the regionals then work up to the Grand Prix next year! You’re only twenty, there’s years left ahead of you.”
Anakin goes silent, and doesn’t mention that Padmé herself retired when she was barely eighteen.
“Yuhan won his first Olympics when he was nineteen,” he mutters. “This was supposed to be my year.”
He knows how he sounds. Childish, petulant. He can’t explain the knot in his throat, or the wall ahead of him with no ladders or steps. Truth is, he’s scared. He’s failed once, and what if he fails again? What if he’s just going to prove once again that he doesn’t have what it takes?
Some part of Anakin knows full well what happened. In some ways it can’t be any clearer. He wanted too much, too quickly. Dangled himself over the cliff by a branch and paid for his audacity with the fall.
“You’ve been reading the articles about you, haven’t you?” Padmé makes an impatient noise. “Oh, Ani, they’re always talking about anyone. Everyone has rumors of retiring. You know better than listening to them.”
But what they say is true.
“Wasn’t humiliating myself once enough?”
“It’s one injury, you’re so young— it’s not the end of your career!”
“Yeah well that’s rich of you to say!”
Anakin watches, moment by moment, as Padmé’s face goes still. They never talk about Padmé’s retirement, in spite of all his assumption that Padmé is fine about what happened and the circumstances that surrounded it. But having worked himself up, the words well out of him, and do not stop.
“I don’t want to wait around to see it fall apart, alright? What if I go back just to fall and break something again? What if I’m just waiting to see myself washed out by the snobbier, less injured next generation? What if I go back just to, I don’t know, wait for the injuries to pile up, because I’m already broken, while letting the whole world watch and judge as they please? I don’t want to be the zoo animal that everyone gets to watch flail about and die on the dais. Watching you do it once was enough!”
At the fall of his words, Anakin freezes.
“Fuck… I,” he scrambles, “I didn’t mean—”
“No, that’s enough.” Padmé stops him. “I didn’t know that’s what you think of me, Anakin Skywalker.”
The fear that grips him then kills the anger in an instant, and he feels himself physically cower.
“Padmé, I—”
Padmé stands, and pats down the dust, before turning back on Anakin, an unreadable expression pinning him down.
“I know you’ve been having a hard time,” she says, “that doesn’t mean you get to—”
“I know, I’m sorry,” Anakin says immediately. “Please, Padmé, you know I didn’t mean it.”
He must look so miserable that Padmé eventually gives up.
“Come on, let’s go back,” she says tiredly.
Anakin gets up, walks them back to the car, and they ride back to the farm in silence. The sun, forgotten, leaves but a warm gradient on the western sky. Padmé goes into the house to say goodbye to Shmi and pick up the rest of her things. Anakin leaves the car by the road, and stakes out at the door. When Padmé walks past the gates, he runs after her, and calls out.
“Wait! Let me drive you back to town.”
“It’s alright. I can take the bus.”
“No.” He runs up in front of her, and blocks her way. “Don't take the bus.”
“No?” She gives him an unimpressed look.
“Padmé, please.” Please don’t leave me, he wants to say. Please, please let me stay.
She suppresses a big sigh, gazes at him like she sees and knows his thoughts like clockwork, and Anakin bows his head, as if it would stop him from feeling the awful, desperate thing pawing in his chest. He just stands there, and waits for Padmé to forgive him.
She looks tired, and Anakin feels tired. But eventually, she walks to the passenger side of the unlocked car. “Alright,” she says, and lets herself in.
It’s dark now, and the stars are an illusion of stillness as they strip across open lands. Neither of them say very much; Padmé’s withdrawn into herself, thoughtful. But Anakin can tell that little by little, she forgives him. He knows she does. She always does.
Anakin turns up the radio, from which idle chatter and the occasional pop song filters out. They’re interrupted by sporadic static, customary of the roads out here, but that, too, is preferable to the silence.
As they’re closer to town, the roads grow brighter, and more winding, undulating up and down gentle slopes. They overtake the bus that follows the same route, and at some point, there’s suddenly light, two rows of lamps serpentining away. Clusters of small houses begin to cut up the horizon, and they grow denser until there’s not a single fragment of the skyline left in sight.
Before the moon rises over Harte Secur, Anakin pulls into the street in front of Padmé’s house.
“Just here is fine,” she says quietly. And he turns off the engine and the radio, Padmé unclips her safety belt, but neither moves to leave. They’re parked across from a street lamp, and the light falls sideways into the car, illuminating one half of Padmé’s face.
Out of the corner of his eye, Anakin anxiously watches her thinking expression. Whatever she wanted to say, however, is swallowed up by a sigh, and her hand moves towards the door handle, a simple ‘Goodnight, Ani’ at the tip of her tongue. There, Anakin is overcome with the need to grasp onto this moment, make it last longer— and somehow prove that he’s more than a listless, impulsive, good-for-nothing, wallowing thing.
“I’ll find a job,” he blurts, “somewhere, maybe in town. Or I’ll go back to school and do a university degree where you or Ahsoka are around. That’ll be a good idea, right?”
Padmé’s hand falls off the handle, carefully into her lap. But she doesn’t turn to him.
“Alright,” Padmé says. “You can always come join me back in Theed or at the university, I can help you apply, or find a job with one of the offices in town, if that’s what you want. But you’ve got to be sure.”
“But I just… you won’t…” Anakin can’t quite make out what it is he wants to say. Because when you’re twenty years old and lonely, all you want is for someone to tell you they’re not going to leave, but it’ll always take a hell lot more than loneliness to say that out loud.
“You don’t need to impress me,” she says— nearly accuses. Then, gentling her tone, she adds, “And— Anakin, I don’t think I’m what you need.”
Stop clinging on, she is saying, without these words. Then, she continues.
“I can’t tell you what that thing is, and if you don’t have the answer, then neither would I. But that’s okay, sometimes we don’t know what it is we need. You’re smart, you’ll figure it out. Either way, I don’t think you’ll be truly happy with staying at home, and letting your life pass by.”
Anakin fiddles with the rearview mirror, and for a moment their eyes meet across it. She doesn’t smile, but regards him steadily, piercingly. It makes Anakin look away, and stare back down at his lap.
“Well, goodnight, Ani,” she says, and Anakin hears the car door open, the rustle of her clothes as she steps out, and the too-soft click of a door that didn’t close properly.
When he leans over for the handle, however, he sees something sitting at the foot of the seat: a drawstring bag, the same one she took inside his room— the skate bag.
“Wait, Padmé, you left your stuff!” he calls out, but Padmé has already disappeared up the street.
He scrambles out of his seat, and pulls open the bag to check its contents. Then he stops. Those aren’t Padmé’s skates. They’re his.
I don’t think you know what you need.
Padmé’s voice echoes in his mind. Those aren’t her words, but it’s what she means. Anakin screws his eyes shut.
He knows he has to do something, go somewhere, be anywhere but here. He wants to see himself reinvented, become anything but this shell he carries around, day after day. But how would he know what to do? What would he do, other than sit and wait for a miracle to visit?
What’s it got to be, Skywalker?
He opens his eyes, and stares at his skates, the familiar sleek black and the blades wrapped up in protective foam, the sight unseen for so long pulls at his chest. He’d left it in the suitcase downstairs back at the house, not even bothering to drag it up into his room. Padmé must have seen it for what it is, and asked Shmi for her to bring it to him. She’s packed everything for him. Water, snacks, even a rolled-up pair of clean socks. The message could not be clearer: go back, she tells him, and see what you find. Go back, when your heart knows not where else to be. There’s no reinventing yourself from scratch, but that doesn’t mean you won’t grow and change. Go. You still have so many stories to tell.
The rink is just across town. They will have closed by now, but they’ll let him in, Anakin is sure. The pull in his chest grows stronger still.
Before he second-guesses himself out of it, he restarts the car, and drives to the rink.
Harte Secur is a small town that sits on the very edge of the deserts. ‘Naboo in name but Tatooine at heart,’ as they say. It’s far from the most affluent place, but lives are comfortable enough to afford an ice rink, right outside the center of town, just off the main road that leads towards Tatooine, and Mos Eisley. This was where he first started skating as a kid, back when it all began.
Anakin hasn’t been back here for years and years. There are cracks on the asphalt ground in the parking lot now, when it used to be brand new. The building’s the same, if a bit more faded. He pushes open the same glass doors, and his eyes widen.
“Sola?”
Padmé’s sister turns around, looks up, the reprimand at the tip of her lips disappearing instantly.
“Anakin!” She smiles warmly, tilts her head, and sees the skate bag over his shoulder. “My, you’ve come back to skate.”
She ushers him inside, though she was just about to lock up. They've been closed to the public for just over an hour, but she shakes out a ring of keys to let him onto the rink.
“I didn’t know you were still here,” Anakin asks, a bit dazedly. “I mean, Padmé didn’t say anything.”
For a moment, he’s struck by how much smaller everything is compared to how he remembers them. His knees bend up when he sits down at the bench where his legs used to dangle.
“Oh, Padmé has her own life,” she waves it off. “We moved out here when they had trouble finding someone to look after the rink. Not many kids in the desert are running to the ice rink these days, you know?” She spreads her hands. “So now we live here, me and my girls— we’ve an apartment just above. Oh, speak of the little devils.”
A pair of young girls emerge from behind a door, curious eyes chasing the sound of conversation.
“These are my daughters, Ryoo and Pooja.” She gestures from the girls to Anakin. “Girls, this is Anakin.”
“Anakin…” One of them narrows her eyes, like she’s trying to work something out. Then, she exclaims, “My, you’re Anakin Skywalker!”
“Um.”
“Yes, yes you are!” the other one joins in, positively jumping up and down.
Sola looks apologetic. “Yes, well, they’re quite big fans of yours,” she admits.
“Uh,” Anakin repeats, and blinks at them. He has never known what to do with fans. Especially such small ones.
Sola takes pity on him, and stands up. “Now, girls, let Anakin skate, don’t bother him.”
“But you never let us skate after hours.”
“Yes, because Anakin doesn't spend his time digging holes into the ice. Now come on,” she ushers them away. “Go sit in the stands, let’s leave Anakin be, shall we? I’ve got to finish cleaning up out there.”
With that, Anakin is left alone. He does his usual off-ice routine— everything feels as it should, nothing out of place. He rolls his ankles around, but they, too, do not protest. Anakin sits down then, pulls on the skates, and laces up in practiced motions. It’s meditative, which nearly distracts him from the enormity of the moment. The last time he did this was the free skate at Worlds.
All laced up and skates snugly around his feet, Anakin stands up. He walks up to the boards, unlatches the door, and steps out onto the ice.
Cold air greets him, vast and echoing with the thin crunch of his blades on ice. There’s a familiar hint of chlorine, the ice resurfacer’s diesel oil, and the whiff of hockey gear that never quite fades away. He falls into his warm up drills, taking laps around the ice, stretching, loosening his muscles, and does not think about how this is his first time skating since the fall.
There’s nothing else here, no distraction from a spectating crowd, no examining, judging eyes of a coach or fellow skaters. He didn’t bring a set of earphones, or set up the speakers, so there’s no music, though it’s usually an indispensable part of skating. Anakin simply skates, a fish returned to water, where his body is the instrument and the music is the rhythm between his feet. After the years and years, there is now only him, and the ice, as it had always been.
By the time he’s done with warmup, Anakin is buzzing, muscles loose and ready, set in anticipation. But of what? He drifts back to the center of the rink, and for a moment, he’s at a loss for what to do. The moment stretches, taut and still, and time narrows, enclosing around him.
What now? Where to go?
He knows now, that he lied to Padmé. He wants to come back with all of his being, he has to. His heart has been crying to come home, because now that he’s on ice again he wonders how he’s managed to stay away for so long. But now that he’s here, he has to go on, continue on the journey that is his alone. Where to? Only he can know the answer.
And then, he hears it.
A melody comes to him, as if from afar. A familiar tune, it drifts and settles in his mind, down his spine and to the tip of his limbs.
Anakin closes his eyes, and he knows.
The piece and the program races through his mind in its entirety. Every note, every phrase, every twist and turn of the body that accompanies the turns of piano melody. He’s watched and listened and skated to this so many times that it’s etched into his muscles and sinews and bones. As he settles into the opening pose— loose palms crossed over the middle of his chest, shoulders slightly hunched as if hugging himself— there’s a quiet gasp in the stands, but Anakin doesn’t hear it. The piece rewinds back to the beginning. It begins in his mind’s ear, and he pushes off.
Obi-Wan Kenobi was a few years older than Anakin now when he skated this, at the peak of his career. He had won hearts all over the world with it, Anakin’s included. (But of course, he’s had Anakin’s heart since the very beginning.)
Love Dream, the piece is called, the melody melancholic and riveting and sweet. It starts quiet, unassuming, but swells unsuspectingly, and catches you in its crests and cadence. It’s a love song of the abstract sort, like a story told by someone who desperately wanted to love but didn’t quite know how. It’s a painted picture, a dream, by a player that acts the part, and desperately wants to believe in it, too. A soul seeking, questioning, giving itself out. It feels vulnerable, and brittle, a shock of a world away from the bold, and loud program choices Obi-Wan had until that point been known for. (It had been surprising, that Obi-Wan should rejoin the majority of skaters using classical music, but far from obscuring him in the sea of other skaters, it had won Obi-Wan his World Champion title.) Obi-Wan’s figure flowed through it, and rather than the easy confidence and smooth chivalry (or more often than not, sensuality), he moved with studied, painstaking grace. And it was the most beautiful thing Anakin has ever seen.
Anakin skates along, pushes his limbs into the music, where the fall of every beat is known intimately to him as the beat of his own heart. Obi-Wan choreographed this himself, he knows, and Anakin imagines him at one with the composer, the pianist, the skater and the choreographer, like voices coming together in symphony. Obi-Wan had always been better at letting himself fall into the music, transporting himself to another world the moment a soundtrack starts, which Anakin knows he struggles with. But here, alone in the quiet, after he’s come to know the piece so well, he can offer an imitation.
The piece isn’t meant to be dazzling, or easy. Instead it strikes deep, and there’s the sense of something difficult being strenuously worked out, as the simple refrain folds upon itself and proliferates, grows into the technical sophistication reflected between music and choreography. Anakin doesn’t have Obi-Wan’s virtuosity, and besides he’s out of practice. He triples most of the quads, and falls on the triple axel, but he picks himself up, grits his teeth and keeps going. He follows through on the step sequence, which climbs, and climbs, until the melody cracks, and shatters, and falls.
Like a journey cut short, a quest stumped by an unanswerable question. The dream is cast away, what remains is an indecipherable note at the heart of love, immune to penetration, comprehension. Yet the music still plays on. Not an adrenaline-fuelled rush towards the conclusion, but turning quiet again, meditative, nearly unbearably soft, and sad.
By the end of the skate, Anakin’s chest aches, heavy and raw. He comes to the final pose, cupped palms raised to the sky. He’s gasping for breath. Sweat rolls past his temple, and his eyes have for some reason grown misty. He stands there for long moments, listening to the rasp of his breath, and the last imaginary notes fading away, the high roof swaying a little above him.
Gradually, Anakin pulls his heart back into himself, and sighs into the empty air.
A whoop erupts from the stands, and there’s a pair of enthusiastic applause. Anakin snaps violently out of his trance. He looks in the direction of the sound, and finds that the two girls have come down right to the boards, their mother with them.
He blinks, and smiles a little awkwardly at Sola, who regards him with unabashed wonder.
“Anakin,” she says, as he skates over to them, “that was beautiful.”
His cheeks grow warm, becoming intensely self-aware for having been watched through a moment that had felt so intimate.
“Thank you,” Anakin mutters. He glances at the clock, and realizes he’s stayed past his welcome. Sola was probably coming to chase him out, but caught him in the middle of the skate instead. She doesn’t look mad, but he decides to not push his luck or her patience. “I’ll head out.” He leans over the boards to flip the latch open, and steps off the ice, picking up the hand towel to wipe his skates down. “Thanks for letting me skate.”
“Of course,” she tells him eagerly, and it makes Anakin look back in surprise. “You’re welcome to come back any time, I mean it. Just give me a heads-up, I’ll let you in.”
She speaks as if she really wants him around, and after a moment, Anakin decides to believe her.
Then, he pulls off his skates, gathers his things, thanks her again, and walks back out into the night. It’s a quiet drive home, and the melody of Liebestraum lingers on his mind. He's calmer, a feeling of peace settling over him. He hasn’t magically figured things out, it isn’t as if life has magically opened up in front of him, but maybe, he thinks, maybe this’ll all be okay.
Something happened with the performance just now, it settled, and recentered him, like a ritual and a prayer. He hasn’t skated like this in months, perhaps ever. But it’s no pity that no one got to see it. In fact, it’s just as well. This was something personal, and must be carried within himself. Yes— he becomes more and more convinced: no one will see this— no one is meant to see.
Anakin gets home, and finds Shmi still in the kitchen, dragging out the motions of closing down for the night, clearly waiting for him. At the sight, he feels a sudden rush of emotion, and calls out to her.
She looks up, and smiles.
“There you are,” she says. “Were you at the rink?” she asks, seeing the bag he drops into the chair, sounding happy for him.
“I… yeah,” Anakin says. “Sorry, Ma, you didn’t have to wait up for me.”
“Don’t worry about that. Have you eaten? I saved some soup and bread for you,” she says, reaching for the bowl and basket on the counter. When Anakin makes no response, she turns back around. “Ani?”
Anakin rushes up, and catches his mother in a tight hug. “Thank you mom.”
“Oh, my son.” She hugs him back gently, a hand on the back of his neck, as she always had.
Guilt churns at him now. He’s been so busy moping about, and had barely spent any time with mom since he came home.
“I’ll spend tomorrow with you, I promise.”
“Alright,” she smiles again, and there are lines by her eyes Anakin doesn’t remember. “I’ll see you tomorrow.” She pats him on the cheek, and leaves to rest.
Later, Anakin goes to bed as well, his chest warm and heart at ease. The messy, bare room doesn’t bother him now; there’ll be time to make it his. As he falls asleep, the melody of the Love Dream stays with him like a secret tucked between a thought and a memory, but he sleeps soundly, and dreamlessly.
Little does he know, that as he sleeps, a wildfire is spreading.
Anakin is wrong, of course, in thinking that his performance was without audience. His overlooking the two young girls, who were conspicuously absent from the end of the evening, proves detrimental indeed, for Pooja had a camera trained on him the whole time. They were just at the age when they fiddled and poked with the internet like a new toy. Add to this all the fuel of a child’s enthusiasm and indiscretion, and the unfortunate lapse in security measures to Sola’s figure skating forum and discussion board accounts where her daughters are concerned— Anakin couldn’t have stopped the world from seeing it, seeing him.
In Anakin’s misfortune, however, one person is most relevant to us. Across the world in Coruscant, in his studio apartment, Obi-Wan Kenobi sinks into his sofa, and reluctantly pulls out his phone, which had been receiving an abnormal amount of correspondence all morning. Everyone, it seems, wants to share with him some video. His initial annoyance is inevitably worn down, and conceding his piqued interest, he clicks on the link.
And he sees.