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I.
I still feel the tremor.
Not the tremor of a ship's engines, nor the shudder of tectonic plates on some unstable world—but the metallic, rhythmic tremor of the public transport cars cutting through the guts of Coruscant. The sound echoes in his memory like a ghost of iron and sparks, long buried under layers of stardust and clone blood.
You took a train to the south side of Coruscant. No, it wasn't a train. It was an oxidized monorail, the kind that screeches on curves and smells of burnt ozone. And you showed me where the old man used to stay.
"The old man"—that was what Anakin called Master Qui-Gon in those first months. Not out of disrespect, but with a strange intimacy, as if he already knew him from another life. I remember standing beside the boy, watching his blue eyes—not yet stained by the yellow of his fall—widen before the cascade of lights in the industrial sector. He pointed to an abandoned workshop, its sign blinking in Huttese code, and said:
— That's where he found me. Not at the Temple. There. He said I had the gift of seeing what others didn't.
I didn't answer. What do you say to a boy already carrying the weight of a prophecy on his back? Perhaps I should have said something. Perhaps I should have screamed, shaken his shoulders, said "run from this, Anakin, run from me, run from destiny." But I only nodded, as a Jedi must nod, as if serenity were an armor one can never remove.
It took thirty-eight years of blood—my blood, the blood of my clone brothers, the blood of the enemies I cut down with a hum of kyber crystal—to feel something akin to love touch my chest on the day the universe exploded into flames.
On the day he was born, I held a queen's hand and promised to protect her son. On the day he fell, I held his burned face and promised I loved him. On my birthday—how many birthdays can a Jedi have, after all?—I realized I never knew what it meant to be loved back until I heard his voice echo through the channels of the Force, even after everything.
Isolated on Tatooine at thirty-eight years old.
I was four when I was taken to the Temple. The Force chose me early, but love chose me late. And when I finally let myself love, the remnant of that love was a blond-haired boy who smelled of sand and broken promises.
II.
I always felt suspended between something.
Between what I was supposed to be—the exemplary Jedi, the negotiator, the general, the hero of the Republic—and what I really was: a Padawan afraid of being alone, an older brother who never learned to say no to the person he loved most. Between the Temple of translucent crystals and the exile of double dust. Between the home I lost when fire consumed the heart of the galaxy and the place I flee to every night when I close my eyes.
Home, for me, was never a place. It was a person. And that person was on fire.
Tonight—if one can call it night in this pit of heat where the twin suns never fully set, only tilt toward the other side of the horizon—on the west side of the only city left on Tatooine, inside a dive reeking of engine oil and Jawa sweat, I saw the outline of your face.
It wasn't real.
But the Force has its whims, and he was sitting on the stool beside me, cloak torn and mechanical arm gleaming under the fluorescent light of a cantina sign. The eyes—still blue, still mine—were watery. They weren't tears, of course. A Sith doesn't cry. But something was running down the deep marks that Mustafar's fire had carved into his skin, as if even the burned face could sweat remorse.
— You shouldn't be here—I said, but my voice came out more as a whisper, more as a prayer.—You died. You... I killed you.
He laughed. A metallic sound, muffled by the respirator I knew was there, even if my eyes refused to see it.
— You never killed me, Master. You just abandoned me. And that is the worst thing you could have ever done.
III.
How lucky are we?
I repeated this to myself as the week dragged on—a week of sandstorms, of Tusken raids on the hills, of silent vigils watching little Luke's hut from across the dunes. A hell of a week, yes. But we were grown now. I was grown. He was... what was he? A memory? A warning? A punishment?
I held my lightsaber—the blue one, the same blue he used to strike down enemies and build empires—and the smoke began to seep out of his bloodied teeth, the soot that rises when a heart is incinerated by its own rage. He opened his mouth, and I saw the broken teeth, the receded gums, the wet gleam of blood running down his chin—and yet, somehow, he was home.
You're home, Anakin.
But how? How can a man be home inside the body of a monster? How can a soul find rest inside a sarcophagus of steel and hatred?
I wanted to ask. I wanted to grab him by the shoulders and shake him until the pieces of his respirator fell off and he could finally speak with his own voice, that boyish Tatooine voice that called me "Master" with a mixture of adoration and rebellion. But my hands passed through the smoke, and he dissolved into particles of light, and I was left there, alone, holding the saber they gave me when I was barely fourteen.
IV.
I remember the day I built my first lightsaber.
It was at the Temple, in the Padawans' forge, hands trembling and eyes burning with tears I wasn't allowed to shed. The Master stood beside me, a gentle voice calming me, saying something about the kyber crystal choosing its owner, about focus and discipline, about the light that exists inside every Jedi.
I heard nothing. I was thinking about the missions. I was thinking about ship flights, lightsaber duels, the feeling of being too small for such a vast universe. When the crystal finally clicked into place and the blue beam erupted, cutting the air with that familiar hum, I felt for the first time that I belonged somewhere.
Now, in the mud-and-metal hut, I hold the same weapon. The same hilt, the same scratches on the surface. It has witnessed battles on Geonosis, duels on Naboo, the assassination of a Sith by a boy I swore to protect.
The saber that faced its destiny against a fallen angel who succumbed to hatred. An apprentice who turned to claim his own kingdom, his own empire.
But what is a king without a throne? What is a Jedi without a Temple? What is a father without a son?
I will go upstairs to the attic of my reverie, where I keep this relic of a dead era. There are no memories on Tatooine, but the lightsaber seems to make the same sound when I ignite it: a sad hum, a vibration that seems to sing a lullaby to the ghosts. A song the Force whispers in the hot wind, the melody of two suns that will never meet.
I lost my mind on the streets of this city. I lost my sanity on the battlefield. I lost my hope on the day I saw him fall into the fire, and realized everything we built was a brilliant lie.
It took twenty, thirty, forty years of blood pumping through me—through veins that are no longer so young, through a heart that no longer knows how to beat without guilt—to get to this night, in this hut, with the hologram of your face dissolving before my eyes.
V.
The blood still flows.
Not mine. His. The blood I saw on Mustafar's temple, streaming from open wounds, mixing with lava and hatred. I left him there. I left him burning while I boarded Padmé's ship, while I held the hand of a queen dying of heartbreak, while I listened to two hearts beat together for the last time.
What have I done?
The question echoes in my mind like a trapped scream. What did I do to the boy who called me brother? What did I do to the Chosen One, to the galaxy's hope, to the star I promised to guide?
I taught him to fight, but I didn't teach him to forgive. I taught him to win, but I didn't teach him to lose. I taught him to be a Jedi, but I forgot to teach him to be human.
Now, the smoke seeps out of your bloodied teeth. It rises in spirals, forming faces in the air—Padmé's face, Mother Shmi's face, the faces of everyone he killed and who killed him. And I watch, motionless, feeling the weight of my own uselessness.
— You're home, Anakin—I repeat, like a mantra.
But where is home for a man who burned the world? Where is home for a father who never saw his children grow? Where is home for a slave who became an emperor and then became nothing?
The Force does not answer me. It only vibrates, hot and dry, like the sand that seeps through every crack in my existence.
VI.
I should be elsewhere.
I should be on Alderaan, watching over Leia. I should be on Tatooine, protecting Luke. I should be in some corner of the universe where my presence makes a difference, where my hands are not empty, where my lightsaber is not just a reminder of everything I lost.
But I am here, sitting in the cold sand of the night, staring at the two moons that shine like the eyes of a dead giant. And before me, Anakin's specter solidifies again—more real than the air, more painful than the sun.
— I forgive you—he says.
I laugh. A bitter, hoarse laugh that seems to tear my throat.
— You can't forgive me. I haven't forgiven you.
— Then why are you here?—he asks.—Why do you keep calling me?
Because you are the only thing I have left.
The phrase gets stuck on my tongue. I don't say it. Instead, I reach out my hand, and my palm touches the hologram of his face—cold, static, dead. But for a moment, I feel the warmth of his skin. I feel the laugh of the nine-year-old boy I met in a Tatooine workshop. I feel the embrace of the brother I fought alongside in a thousand battles.
And then he dissolves, and the smoke rises, and the bloodied teeth disappear into the darkness.
How lucky are we?
We aren't. We never were. Luck is an illusion we create to bear the unbearable.
But tonight, on the west side of a city that no longer exists, in a bar that perhaps never existed, with a ghost that refuses to leave, I realize one thing:
He is home.
And somehow, that means I am too.
VII.
Tomorrow, the twin suns will tear through the horizon with that indifferent light, and I will don the skin of a hermit like one puts on armor of dry clay—creaking, heavy, useless. I slide my arms into the sleeves of the cloak, but it is the bones that creak, not the fabric.
I will walk to Owen Lars's hut with feet that no longer feel the ground, only the reminder that the ground exists. The Tuskens will howl in the hills, and I will hear each howl as if it were a question I do not know how to answer. I will look at the boy—from afar, always from afar—and I will measure the steps that separate me from him as one measures the distance between a star and its own light.
And I will not look at the horizon, because the horizon is not the place where ships disappear.
The horizon is the line where the sky learned to swallow everything I ever touched.
But tonight—as the night drags itself over Tatooine like a wounded animal, as the cold sand rises around my ankles and seeps into the cracks of my skin as if trying to occupy the place of blood—there is no mask that fits. There is no cloak that can hide what the wind already knows.
I do not cry.
My eyes merely burn, and the salt runs down the invisible scars that Mustafar's fire engraved on the reverse of my face. There are no sobs.
There is only the chest contracting in a wrong rhythm, like an engine that no longer remembers how to vibrate, and the fingers closing around nothing—because everything I held slipped through them, liquid, hot, red.
I am not a general. I am the battlefield after the war, the crater where a bomb exploded that no one defused.
I am not a master. I am the lesson no one learned, the advice I myself ignored, the outstretched hand that found only smoke.
I am not a hero. I am the man who arrived late. Always late. Three seconds too late to save Qui-Gon. One minute too late to hold Padmé. A whole lifetime too late to reach Anakin before the lava touched him.
I am the interval between the strike and the fall. The echo of a saber that no longer cuts. The silence that comes after the last breath of a clone. I am the question the Force refuses to answer, and the void that the answer would leave if it existed.
The sand covers my feet—rises slowly, like a tide of forgetting. And I let it rise. Because the sand does not ask for explanations. The sand does not expect me to be better.
The sand merely covers, and covers, and covers until the shapes are erased and the edges are lost and what remains of a man blends into the ground he treads.
And then, at the edge of audibility, when the wind shifts and the night leans over me like a mother closing her eyes to her son's death, I hear it.
It is not a voice. It is the memory of a voice. It is the ghost of a breath that no longer warms the air. It is the creak of a respirator that will never adjust again, the hiss of a burned lung that insists on calling for me.
Master...
The sound enters through my ears and lodges itself in the sternum, where the heart should be. And there is no comfort in it. There is no forgiveness. There is only the acknowledgment that the one who called me brother still exists somewhere—not in the Force, not in the galaxy, not in time—but in the fractures of my own skull, in the millimeters of madness I cultivate like a garden of thorns.
I'm home.
And I know, with a certainty that crushes my lungs, that this home is not the place where he rests.
That home is me.
That home is the chest that still beats for him, the brain that still remembers him, the soul that still waits for him at a door that will never open again. He is inside me—not as a presence, but as a wound that will not heal, an infection of light and rage, a tumor of everything I did and did not do.
And I, who swore to protect, have become his tomb.
The sand rises to my knees.
The wind howls like a lament that belongs to no one.
And inside me, the echo of a nine-year-old boy—with blond hair and blue eyes and a whole soul—repeats, repeats, repeats that he is home.
But home is where one dies.
And I am still alive.