Chapter Text
“If all you do is fight for your own life, then your life is worth nothing.”
oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo(O0O)oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo
The aching in his heart didn’t cease with waiting, it didn’t stop with pacing, or tears, or trying again and again to convince himself that Palpatine had lied and the man who seemed to be his friend (his father) was a facade and a lie. The aching was more stubborn than he was.
Was he lying when he said he could save her?
Anakin’s pacing stopped by the window and his eyes drifted to the skyline, searching for a glimpse of the woman he would die for a thousand times over without a moment’s hesitation and he didn’t mean to let a tear slip but he couldn’t keep it in.
She’ll die. She’ll die if I don’t do something.
His little sister’s face flashed before his eyes with that cocky smile and brilliant joy and eyes the same shade of his, then a figure walking into the glowing gold and red of the setting sun, walking away from him because he’d failed her and he couldn’t keep her safe from the very people she trusted and who were meant to protect her.
He saw mother’s warm and shining smile like the sister-suns of Tatooine and felt her gentle hands holding his, her strong and steady arms around him that always made him feel like if only she never let go the whip could never touch him until the stars burned out and he could almost taste his favorite Tzai tea on the tip of his tongue. Then the same face bloodied and torn, worse than he’d ever seen it even when Gardulla beat her. He still remembered the way her body trembled and her fingers brushing his face.
I failed them.
The memories stung as they faded more than they’d burned as they came.
I lost them.
His nails bit into his skin as he clenched his fist.
I can’t lose her.
The decision didn’t even seem like his, it didn’t seem like a question, it seemed like he was looking down a tunnel with one start and one end and there was no way out of it but to go where it led. The only control he had here was when he would rush out that door, but-
When he turned to pick his all-too heavy feet off the ground and run while seconds ran out, the gaping windows and steel arches faded before his eyes and desert sand stung his heels, thrown in his face by the burning wind that shouldn’t exist in the closed-off space. He blinked to clear his vision and he was standing on the edge of a precipice with pools of shadow filling the bottom. He was inches away from falling in, it would only take one person, one push to take his feet out from under him and his breath away and send him spiralling headfirst into the river of darkness below that would drown him and everyone he loved.
The dark wrapped around him and urged him to jump, tugging at his clothes and pushing at his back, and it seemed it would be so easy to just give in and let himself fall but the panic throwing his heart to his throat froze his limbs in place when he saw Padme’s agonized face carved in the shadows below, saw exactly what he would be falling toward, only her pain.
He felt strong hands push him back and away from the gaping dark that at that point he couldn’t have stopped himself from falling into and whispered voices fill his ears, three that he recognized and many that he didn’t. The woman’s voice he heard comforting him through desert storms decades ago promised that he was still and would always be *loved* and the spirited tone of a girl that brought back memories of battles turned into games to make the pain less whispered soothingly. There was a man’s voice he barely remembered as belonging to the man who found him as a boy and believed in him when the council rejected him. There were more lost in the river that he couldn’t recognise and didn’t know, but there was one more, the last, as the whispers of the rest faded.
“Anakin,” It was a woman’s, deep and hollow and empty as the rolling dunes of his home planet and he knew it like someone who’d been by his side every moment of his life even though he couldn’t remember hearing it before. “Ekkereth. Never forget what your name means. Never forget where you came from.”
He realized he wasn’t breathing and couldn’t even if he tried until the clear blue sky faded all too fast and all too slow at the same time into the cold, steel ceiling of the council chamber again and the wind stopped throwing stinging sand in his face. He made himself shake the dizziness from his head that might or might not have had anything to do with lack of sleep and got to his feet, ignoring the way the room swayed. His breathing seemed too loud in the unnatural quiet and the sun was set now.
How long was that?
The next thing that filled his ears was screams. Loud and terror-filled and despairing that made his blood freeze even though he’d heard screaming before. Then the sound of blaster fire.
Wide and secure doors slid open to let in a gaggle of younglings, all kinds of races and ages, the eldest a boy with dirty blonde hair leading the group inside. All of them stopped when they spotted Anakin for about three seconds.
“Master!”
“Master Skywalker!”
All of them rushed forward in desparate hope to gather around and cling to him, begging to know what was going on and if they would be okay.
“They shot Whie!”
“-Blue and white-”
“They have blaster-”
“-they attacking us?”
“They have-”
“-Happened for them to hate us-”
“-Be okay?”
“Master Ti told us-”
“We came here as fast-”
From the thunder of cries he was just barely able to understand that they were being attacked by someone, someone with soldiers in white and blue that moved like droids in scarily lifeless synchrony and shouted about an order numbered sixty-six. One man in blue and white had shot three younglings dead as they’d run here. A togrutan girl called Ashla told him this tearfully with a voice that shook so much he could barely tell what she was saying.
He looked down at the pleading eyes and desparate faces and thought of his own child, nestled safe in Padme’s womb, and got down on the children’s level. When he spoke he made an effort to be quiet enough not to scare them.
“Okay, okay shh. We can’t let them hear you.”
It didn’t stop a few from crying but the clamor quieted enough for his ears to stop ringing while his mind was already forming a plan (or at least trying through the fog).
There’re hidden passages that lead outside the temple, I know how to get there, then we’d need to reach Senator Organa’s apartment, he’ll help, but we need a distraction and someone to close the doors behind us-
A lump formed in his throat and dread settled in his gut, but he looked down at the children again and thought of his own, his child.
I have to. Kriff, I have to.
He couldn’t help the thought that Padme would be heartbroken and his child would never know their father.
The children’s voices cut through his thoughts again and pushed back the fog, the teary cry of the togrutan girl- Ashla, that was her name, why was it so hard to remember her name? Why did he keep replacing it with the name of another girl he knew?
“Master Skywalker, what do we do?”
He felt her little fingers tighten around a fistfull of his sleeve and offered a comforting smile that he was sure was far from convincing.
“Hey, don’t worry. We’ll make it through this I promise. Listen to me, this is important.”
He took a moment to force down the lump in his throat.
“This… this is going to be scary, but I need you all to be brave. Can you be brave for me?”
The children seemed to have heard this before but they took it as a promise and a challenge, there was hardly a question in the way they exchanged glances and small nods
“We’ll follow you, Master.” Ashla promised him, he blinked and saw Ahsoka’s face on hers, small and afraid but so endlessly trusting, and couldn’t help but feel like this girl was misplacing her trust.
I came too close to falling.
The image of the gaping precipice lingered on the edge of his vision, a taunting reminder of everything, and the whispers still echoed in his ears.
“Okay. There are ways that lead out of the temple that whoever’s attacking won’t know about. I’ll lead you there, and then you need to find Senator Bail Organa. He’s a friend to the Jedi. You all know how to get to the Senate Building?”
A series of small nods and some quiet “yes”s were his answer.
“Good. Once you enter there will be a Republic and a Jedi symbol a small ways down. Head down the passage marked by the Republic symbol and turn left when you see a streak of blue on the wall. There will be a door that opens into his apartment at the end, built into the statue of the Alderaan crest. Tell him Anakin Skywalker sent you, that the temple has been attacked, and that you need his help. Got it?”
The boy with dirty blonde hair nodded and stepped to the front of the group.
“We understand, Master.”
“Good. That’s- That’s good.” He swallowed hard in an attempt to keep his feelings down.
“But what about you?”
Ashla refused to let the subject go, her small hands each grabbing fistfulls of his tunic and her eyes wide and pleading, searching for some assurance that he would live as well.
Assurance he couldn’t give.
He plastered a smile on his lips and prayed to whatever was listening it was convincing enough and laid a hand on Ashla’s shoulder, his voice a whisper.
“Hey. I’ll be fine, okay? We all will be. We’re Jedi, got it?”
It was the easiest lie that had ever slid off his tongue, and he hated it, another emotion he had to pack down tight and pretend never existed.
When he got to his feet and led them out through winding halls and so many turns that once it would have made his head spin (very, very long ago when he was still young in body though he’d never really been a child) he winced at every footstep and froze at the sound of every shot (even more at the soft thunk that meant a body hitting the floor).
The first time they ran into their attackers his heart dropped and his mouth dried up when he recognized the white and blue of the 501st, and then came the bitter, angry, burning that was betrayal. Those were his men (his brothers) and they were turning to fire on the people they’d sworn to protect, and their signatures in the Force were blank like a droid’s and so cold. He felt the cold, empty, blankness and hated it, hated it with burning fire.
He barely realized he’d raised his weapon to deflect the bolts until he saw his brother’s bodies hit the floor.
He saw the rise and fall of their chests as they drew their last wheezing breath and he felt cold, and he hated the cold. He hated the bitterness of it and the way it made his fingers stiff and pushed away the tiny voices whispering guilt into his mind that might have, in another world, made him wonder if there wasn’t more to this than simple betrayal.
It didn’t matter.
It was probably a full minute before his blade returned to the hilt and he could pick his feet up off the ground again to run. The children radiated terror like six tiny suns and he could feel their hearts pounding, pushing ice through their veins. Maybe they hadn’t realized he was deadly. Maybe they hadn’t even thought about it or wanted to.
It didn’t matter.
“This way,”
He didn’t realize how icy his voice sounded until the words left his mouth and then he couldn’t take them back. He wondered if he’d ever be able to unsee the way all six children flinched at the voice and looked at him with such fear.
“We’ll be okay,”
He tried to make his voice sound warmer but it sounded tight and unsure (I shouldn’t be unsure, we’re getting out, we’ll be fine) and he hated it. So he gave up and picked his feet off the ground and tried so hard to forget it all.
The next time they ran into troopers he didn’t hesitate and made it quick, but he hated the feel of his blade burning through his brothers’ flesh more than he’d hated anything else (some traitorous voice he tried to ignore hoped he’d been quick enough that they hadn’t felt it).
He felt like he was in a rainstorm.
With some small touch of hysteria he thought that this was certainly a bitter twist to the meaning of his name.
Do you know what your name means?
For the third time that day he couldn’t make his feet move and his mouth felt dry. He wondered if there was a word in any language for something you don’t remember knowing but that feels like a part of you all the same.
Rain,
He saw raindrops on a windowpain, trickling down, slowly, carefully, until they reached an ocean.
A river…
He saw a desert, the desert, the one to which this voice belonged, the one he’d known since his birth, and he saw a river welling up from cracks in the dry earth, a stream of life.
Life. Do you know what the water brings? Do you remember, Anakin?
The river was gone and he saw the gaping precipice at his feet again, ready to swallow him whole and throw his bones to the wind, and the fear returned.
Remember…
He saw the river’s first drops fill the bottom and wash away the shadows.
Bring the rain to the desert,
The water began to flow with force, scrubbing away the pain and filling it with life.
With the river comes freedom.
He squeezed his eyes shut to keep his tears in but only pushed them out. Another memory broke to the front of his mind, his mother’s voice telling him, “*You can’t hold back a rainstorm, Ani…*”
You know what the cost is.
He was dimly aware of a child tugging at his fingers, worried pleas bouncing off his ears, and as he brought himself back from the depths of his mind he whispered,
“I know.”
Sounds filtered back in, Ashla’s voice registering first - Kriff, she sounds so much like her - and he opened his eyes only to be met with the sight of at least ten men fallen and most of the younger children staring at him from a few feet back with wide, wild eyes.
“Master?” A firmer tug at his robes accompanied Ashla’s voice. “Master we need to go!”
A small smirk was all he could manage for the girl when he looked down to see the same reckless, untamable, spunky spirit as a girl - *Woman. She’s grown now, I can’t keep thinking of her as a child* - that he called his sister. It hurt. And it hurt even more because he knew he’d been slipping on the edge of the Precipice.
These children need better.
His eyes flicked to the hall they were about to turn down. A clear run to the tunnels from here.
“Go. Keep going. You know the way. I’ll come behind to make sure no one follows and close the door behind you.”
It didn’t seem to register with the younger children what he’d just implied. An older boy with sun-bleached blonde hair that almost made Anakin think of another boy with dirty blonde locks from a planet far in the outer rim froze in place with wide eyes.
Ashla wasn’t having any of it.
“No! Not without you! I’m not going without you!”
Her eyes were wide and wild with fear and fire that refused to leave anyone behind, not even him, and he hated to think what had happened to forge such a flame.
She can’t be more than nine…
“I’m going with you,” He promised. “I’ll just come later. Trust me, okay? I’ll meet you outside.”
The promise that could so easily be a lie tasted like salt in a dry mouth.