Title: Chosen
Author: vaderincarnate
Timeframe: far future
Characters: Anakin Skywalker
Genre: AU future darkfic
Summary: And if he followed the Code, and if he left her, and if all that should have been had come to pass. What then?
Notes: I failed my ochem midterm. Here, have some artsy angsty darkfic.
I've often wondered, in the hereafter of our lives, when I owe nothing more to the future, you might come to me, and claim me as your own. And know that I am yours.
-- Arthur (Excalibur)
With the passing of the years, you lose your humanity like a leaking dam, watch it bleeding trickling dripping away until there is nothing left of what you once were at all, just a shattered soul and the pulse beat throb of pure power coursing through rotted and rotting veins.
And sometimes you wonder how long this will go on: life existence being. If one day when all your flesh has decayed around you, spent and broken and tired, if whatever remains of your spirit will hurtle off into some unnamed eternity ... or if it will continue on, aimless and wandering as you have done for all these centuries before.
You turned your back on happiness life paradise Padmé to give this damned and sorry world a chance to secure it's own salvation. And it had spurned the gift, as you should have known it would: all these years centuries millennia since then, and the condition of humanity of life has not improved in any discernable measure. They still have their petty wars and conflicts, battles bloodshed suffering. And yet you still save them, time and time again.
"I used to think," you'd confessed to her cold and broken body as you could never have told her living flesh, "that one day I could come and ask you to be my wife." Her wide and startled eyes had been staring forward, limbs sprawled at unnatural angles, tiny pieces of bone and tiny chunks of brain matter caught in her mane of dark hair. "I thought that one day when we owed nothing more to the future, we could find our own happiness. Somehow."
You'd been wrong. You would always owe something to the future, even when there was no future left. You'd been wrong a lot in those early years, and now you look back and wonder at how naïve you'd been, once, that you dared to hope or dream or pray for deliverance or happiness.
"How do I know if I made the right decision?" you'd asked Obi-Wan at her funeral. They'd cleaned up her body, made it presentable enough that her people would not retch at the sight of the bruised bloody broken remnants of their senator once-queen. "How do I know if this is the way things were meant to be, that they wouldn't have been better if I'd chosen differently?"
His face was lined and tired, even then. "You don't. You live, you hope, you try."
Obi-Wan's death had marked the beginning of the end of the Order. It took three centuries for the Order to fall, but you maintain that it had begun with the death of Obi-Wan, the death of your once-master and of the last man you could ever bear to sincerely call a Jedi Knight. And that had been an ending a beginning for you as well, because at the end of the Jedi Age, at the end of the time of the Jedi the Sith Light and the Dark, you'd been the last of either side standing.
But to be Chosen is to be alone, and to be alone is to be without hope love companionship in centuries upon centuries of pain until you can hardly even remember why you bother trying anymore. Because you know that even if you save them this time and next time and the time after that, they will need you again again again again again to save them from their enemies from each other but most of all from themselves.
You don't know how long this has gone on. Years bleed into years centuries into centuries millennia into millennia so that you can no longer tell them apart. You've watched the rise of cultures civilizations empires detachedly, clinically, knowing all the while that they would all fall victim to themselves in the end.
There are days decades at a time when you scarcely remember her name anymore, much less your own, and there are nights when you wake from your slumber and wonder if it they she was ever real at all or some hallucination you dreamt into being to make your existence more bearable, and that's always the worst nightmare of all and you bring yourself to pray to whatever deity or Force that listens that she was real.
No matter what else happened or happens, just let her have been real.
So you wander because there is nothing else for you to do see feel that you have not already done or seen or felt at some point in the centuries past. You sleep eat drink save kill create destroy live as you must, because you are the Chosen and even though everything and everyone around you has gone ashes to ashes dust to dust you are still here: living breathing Chosen alone, because no matter what you do how many you save you are always always always alone. Immortality: denied death, denied deliverance, denied peace.
Some day, there will come a time when the galaxy cries out for you to save it once again. When its peoples have once more engineered their own destruction through malice or greed or lust or simple folly, and they call for you, once and always their savior hero Chosen, to come and rescue them from this fate they have secured for themselves. And when that time comes, you will look down at them from above, see the terror shining gleaming in their eyes hear the sounds of mounting rising reigning chaos panic devastation.
You will look down, and you will answer, "No."
End.