Not so long ago, Not so far away

Vader saw the face of his son, filthy and exhausted. He saw the sweet spirit of Padme's last gift and felt the wonder of being free from the taint of the Dark side. The lack of anger made him feel raw and empty- like his skin after the fire melted away his flesh. The boy practically glowed in his father's eyes. A few whispered words and then Vader's eyes lost focus. And darkness returned.

He drifted.

Time passed in a blur of moments of consciousness and unconsciousness. The world had no real light but it wasn't truly dark either. Simply warm and soft. He heard voices but didn't comprehend them. He felt a voice whispering to him words of potential redemption and promises of another's fall into madness if he failed. But nothing was important. He was safe and warm. There was no danger for the first time in ages.

Then the pain and the light came. His bones bent from the fall through the too-small passage. He was cold. His skin hurt from the roughness of sensations around him. Even with his eyes closed he felt them ache from the light. He screamed in pain and fear.

Then he was placed on something soft and warm. A familiar beating sound, one he hadn't even noticed from the safe place, returned, softer than before. The sensations of touch began to make sense- they were not painful, simply overwhelming. Exhausted from his trial, he succumbed to sleep.

Rebirth was not what he was expecting. Actually, he wasn't expecting rebirth at all.

But he was nothing if not practical. . . That is to say, eventually he was practical. Well, actually he spent his first three years screaming and having temper tantrums. The anger he normally felt when he was one with the Dark side was muted and came and went. He tried to think of Luke and Leia and avoid lashing out, but the sudden powerlessness did nothing to stop fear which permeated his whole mind like the cold frosts of Hoth, making his bones ache. Usually he was able to resist the temptation to snap or break something or someone. He would think of Luke, wish he could remember Leah from their brief meetings during her interrogation, and he would keep himself to screaming as he tried to relearn how to walk. Other times, he just destroyed stuff.

He did learn quickly that while the force was accessible, it wasn't quite right in this new world. He could still use it in times of distress, but it didn't feel . . . angry, in the way the dark side had when he used it to react to irritations. This felt much more. . . clinical. It was empty of any emotion but what he had inside himself. And it was harder to access, slipping from his grasp due to lack of focus rather than lack of calm or anger.

When he began to control his body and see his surroundings he took note that his mother, Shmi, was alive, he again had no father (this time due to a war that ended just after his birth), and that the technology was really, really bad. He was on an isolated world with no communication to a single other planet. By the force, he had strange luck. A chance to live with Shmi again seemed like good luck. But terrible, terrible, mechanics seemed like bad. And the inability to contact Luke or a Jedi was . . . neither good nor bad.

Once he got over himself, he tried to help out his mother. This pleased her greatly. He had always shown her he was intelligent but he had rarely used his intelligence to help her. He began by cleaning. She carefully taught him that cleaning dishes without hands was something other people couldn't do. He learned not to do it in front of anyone. He also took to caring for her small bicycle. This was also something that a nearly four year old child was not supposed to be able to do. But this chore could still be done in front of people. He was confused to say the least. But he decided that the people on this planet had strange customs and accepted it. He was becoming more patient with other people as he realized that his mother, who he loved dearly, was one of those people who were unable to clean a bike and move things with her mind.

In this world, Shmi Skywalker was called Susan Jones Walker and he was A. S. Walker. The A was supposed to stand for Amos, his father's name. The S seemed to be for Saul. (Privately Vader felt that it was more of the . . . cause of his rebirth allowing him to call himself Anakin Sky Walker if he so desired as he grew up.) They lived in a small town outside of London. His mother worked as a seamstress for a small shop and lived in one of the rooms above the store. It was a single room with a sink and table and soft bed. Two small chairs, a dresser and a small gas oven were the only luxuries they had. His mother washed their clothing by hand and hung it to dry on a rope line that ran from the one window to the other end of the room. Food was prepared over a small fire in the oven. There was no fancy storage unit for their food- not even the icebox that some of their neighbors had. This was the reason they needed the bike. His mother took the bicycle twice a week to the grocery for tins of meat and fresh veggies and milk.

Vader, Anakin, found a type of peace in his new life. He coasted through the basic schooling that was both very simple and very strange. History was fascinating. The sciences were laughable. Children of "common age" were dull. He was noticed for his intelligence. His mother was praised for it. The schooling continued at the same dull pace.

When Anakin-Amos turned nine he began to feel a vague worry settle into his bones. He began to dream of his mother's first death and his own.

He began to follow her around. Shmi-Susan laughed and called him her little duckling. For the first time, he seemed to act his age. Anikin-Amos felt his distress grow but hid it in hugs and repeated checks of her bicycle.

Shmi-Susan died on a clear skied chilly day in August. She was riding her bike down a country road. The road curved and she followed it. She followed it straight into an oncoming truck. Her head hit something (no one could figure out what) and she was sent to the hospital for internal hemorrhaging. She never woke up.

Anikin-Amos spent the next two days watching over her at the hospital. He held her hand when her breath turned weak. He counted the seconds between breaths. He was still counting when the nurse pulled him away from her side and explained she was gone.

He stayed with her employer for the weekend as her finances were sorted and her funeral was arranged. His clothes were packed and he was sent to the orphanage. By then he was counting in days and hours and minutes and seconds.

Anakin spent the week silent, refusing to talk. He spent most of his time meditating, his father's pocket watch in his hands, listening to the tick of time. The numbers of the time were a silent song in his head. He remembered a planet far away, in another lifetime, that mourned by silence. He remembered another that mourned by singing. He had an abysmal singing voice.

He felt grief. He mourned. But through it all he remembered that moment of wonder when he woke up and saw her face with his month old eyes and realized the gift he had been given to have her in his life again. He had hope that the twice he had found her was part of a larger pattern. His hope sustained him. His grief was released in his silent counting from her last breath.

The orphanage heard that he hadn't spoken since the death of his mother. The adults seemed to think that his chosen silence meant that he was stupid or broken. He was then stuck on the floor of an over crowded nursery and left there. The children in the room were ages one and a half to five. He ignored them. Before September ended he was shipped off to another, larger, orphanage, on the edge of London.

December arrived in his new lonely home without joy. Most of the children could be divided into two categories: Those who would spend the month missing family and feeling miserable and those who had stopped mourning and were glad for the tree, music and visitors that came on these charitable times. Anakin counted each new week from the time of his mother's death.

Anakin-Amos had a reputation of being the quiet, obedient child now. That meant that, even in mourning, he was tasked with helping set up for the holidays. He spent the end of the month working his fingers to the bone to distract himself from memories of the past year. His mother had cut a branch of an evergreen tree for their home and tucked a small book under it at midnight on the twenty fourth.

Christmas passed. All of the children were disappointed. New year's approached with the adults all a panic about putting the finance books together. Numbers were easy for the young Anakin. Luckily he was still too young to help with that chore.

Then on New Year's eve, 19 weeks and four days and five hours and seventeen minutes and twenty three seconds from the time of his mother's last breath, he stopped counting.

(For those of you curious about the timing: Anakin was reborn on November 1, 1918. The Great War (WWI) ended officially on the 11th. His father died sometime in October. The news reached Susan and resulted in Anakin's birth three days ahead of schedule. He has no father in either world. Nine years later, Shmi/Susan dies on August 16th at seven in the evening. They will have little impact on the story after this. But Anakin is ten years older than the child he will meet next chapter. Whoever could it be?)