The Cost

by LuvEwan

Anakin resists his Master's orders on Geonosis, and follows Padme down into the sands. The Padawan soon discovers the consequence of his headstrong decision. AU.

The Cost

A Vignette by LuvEwan

PG

Disclaimer: Nothing belongs to me.

Okay. Here we go again. This bunny comes from the awful, terrible, tormenting beast known as Jacen200015, who devised this bunny. This is the last vig for me for a loooong time, excluding challenges. I have to focus on my fics! But I really wanted to write this, and I extend my extreme gratitude to Jacen for her generosity and creativity.

Anakin resists his Master's orders on Geonosis, and follows Padme¢ down into the sands. The Padawan soon discovers the consequence of his headstrong decision. AU.

Padme Amidala stared down at the sun-bleached coil piled in her hand, a plaited string of silk and bead. It gleamed in countless tones, blonde to buried hints of flax and bronze. A symbol of slow evolution, purity…devotion.

Her eyes sealed suddenly, and she clutched up the braid in a trembling fist.

For over a year, she had found small solace in the strands, tucked behind his ear. They had been a part of him left unchanged.

But his transformations hurdled fast, his soul was tainted in ash. The badge of a Learner no longer suited him.

Though, undeniably, he remained devoted.

Her nightgown was pastel violet, satin, and cold. She stood at the rumpled foot of her bed, flesh rising in chilled pocks, rendered a statue by her discovery.

He had known, she had known, he was no longer Jedi. That much was cemented when he chose to leap from the bucking ship, and soar downward, to his willing place of rebellion. Still, even after the uniform was pitched and hair grown out to a free falling cap, he kept the braid.

Her fingers always strayed to it, and she could read the swelling pain in his eyes then, when he laid his hand over hers, so that the braid was doubly caressed. Whenever he returned from his self-appointed missions, face scarred and soul ablaze, there would be less of the youth she had known, and more of the weathered man he had become. The laughter was gone. His voice was forever hoarse and sunk to a quivering rasp when the night came.

But he was not home often. She was beginning to think this wasn't his home at all, but the place he came to wash away the grit and start again. Their bed was cut of stone, without warmth or intimacy. She would lay in the darkness, staring at the layered shadow, and listen to his ragged breathing beside her. In those agonizingly empty moments, she would begin to yearn for the reprieve of yesterday, before their lives were narrowed to a single dismal lane.

She'd remind herself it was selfish, to lust for the solidity of a silver circle, when he was trapped in his own, traveling the same beaten paths of black, diminishing with every turn.

But sometimes, she found herself unable to overcome her sense of desolation and abandonment. She would feel a wash of bitterness in her mouth, the dust of his lips. Anger. It was her companion more than he was.

Now…now the frustration was gone. The flush of ire had faded from her heart. Padme drifted from the bed to the corridor, and could feel the air stirred by him, though it had been hours since he barreled through it.

A rueful ghost of a smile wandered over her face. She was always able to detect him, like a whisper in her mind, a tender murmur of assurance and love…

Sharpened to a shout, and the lurch of the open ship sent her toppling over the edge. A small cry tore from her before her breath was lost in the blistering winds. Padme dropped, and her vision was assaulted by a streaking blur of pale blue and brown.

The sky--and the ground.

"PADME!"

She heard it within and without, razored by shock. Anakin. She smacked down on the dunes. With a consciousness quickly retreating, she hoped he would be safe.

The fog of her fall lifted, and twin shadows slashed across her form, shading her face.

She blinked. An ache burned at her temple, and her famished lungs grappled for air. "I…"

Then, she felt it. She felt him. Padme forced her eyes completely open, and saw the familiar figure of Anakin Skywalker looming above her.

He crouched beside her. "Padme, Force…are you alright?"

She reached with an unsteady hand to wipe the sweat from her forehead. "Ani--" She swallowed, and grimaced at the strong graze of sand in her throat. "What about Dooku?"

Anakin pursed his lips, the glare from sweaty orange afternoon reflecting on his face. "Obi-Wan can take care of him." He cupped the side of her head in his hand. "Really, are you alright?"

Padme smiled weakly at his concern. "Fine." As quickly as the tenderness had surged inside her, a strident focus on the battle redirected her attention again, and the Senator started to her feet. Immediately, the effects of her fall sent her rolling back on her heels, nearly plopping down in the hot sand mounds.

Anakin sensed her struggle for equilibrium. He reached out to steady her with a strong forearm.

She whispered a thanks, eyes moving between the Jedi and the white armored warrior. "We have to find some kind of transport to the hangar. As much as I trust Obi-Wan's skills, we can't chance that Dooku won't elude him."

"We can flag down a ship from my brothers." The clone affirmed, behind his mask.

They set off at a run.

Anakin stole repeated glances at Padme, and the words murmured in the shadows of the Geonosis hangar seemed to echo between them. Neither had spoken lightly; the weight would be there in silence, in chaos. Finally, "I'm in trouble with my Master."

"Why?"

There was no trace of humor to his features. "Because I couldn't leave you."

She nearly skid to a stop as the new knowledge sparked and fired in her mind. I couldn't leave you. Vibrant ribbons of gold stroked over the gray uncertainty, and she thought that perhaps, for a moment, she could forget the ramifications of such dedication, could simply soak it in for what it was. I don't want you to leave me. She would have said it aloud, but feared it would be stolen on the coarse currents of the wind…or that it would be too much for either of them to digest.

The clone jogged slightly ahead of them, his movements fluid and perfectly paced.

Padme thought that, even if they didn't secure transport, they would make it to the hangar in good time.

A prediction that was ruined by the wordless, anguish-wracked wail that ripped from Anakin.

Padme and the trooper wheeled around to see him crippled on his knees, hands clutched to his temples and severe lines trembling his face.

"Anakin! What is it?" She rushed to brace his bowed shoulders with gentle hands. "What's wrong?"

He shook his head, eyes squeezed tightly shut. "We HAVE to get there." His voice was a pained quiver. "NOW."

A tiny little spot of luck granted the trio the salvation of a passing ship, and they were able to clear the last miles in the space of a breath.

But, Padme noticed with increasing trepidation, Anakin didn't appear to be breathing at all.

She tried, once, to ask him what had terrorized him so, but his only response was a terse shake of his head.

When the lip of the hangar came into sight, Anakin was at the edge of the ship, and as soon as he could risk it, leapt through the open air in a desperate somersault.

Padme was close behind, heart pounding.

The hangar was shrouded in murk, a hollowed-out cave of mottled red clay and dusty duracrete. She wondered if there had been lights before…because if there were, they had since winked out of existence.

Their steps resounded in the eerie absence of sound.

Then, she saw Anakin, bent down beside something, beside someone…

Padme narrowed her gaze to make out forms through the shadows-and she stopped, a hand clamping over mouth. Behind her, the clone soldier was barking an order into his communicator, to send assistance, but it came to her ears as a jumble of noise.

She stood paralyzed in her shock, unable to truly register the tragedy laid out before her. It couldn't be real. He couldn't be…

No, she must still be buried in the clouded ether of her fall. Or she was under the cool sheets of her bed, back on Naboo. No, none of this was happening. How could he be…

Somehow, she was able to unlock her eyes from the sprawled body, and lift them the few inches to Anakin's face.

There were no tears to dilute the flame ignited in his eyes. He stared down at the lethally still form, his mouth working to connect words.

Padme saw a small, clawed hand rest on a forehead carved from colorless wax, to offer comfort to someone beyond the realms of accepting it, beyond the reach of breath and vitalization of blood. "Suffer he did not, Anakin." The garbled inflection was soft, and vulnerable with emotion.

Anakin jerked his head to look at the ancient Master. "DON'T tell me that." He hissed. Shadow slid to flood the bones of his face. "Don't tell me he didn't suffer. I felt it. I felt him, when it…when it happened." He allowed a single respite from his rage, to run trembling fingers through limp locks of auburn, and rest his cheek against a ghost-cold temple.

Yoda's gaping eyes blinked in the darkness, welled with moisture. The stitching of wrinkles deepened. "Fought bravely, he did. Fought with all the beauty and grace of the Jedi--"

"And it wasn't enough." Anakin responded, void of tone, his eyes steadfast on the man, the guardian of his life and future for ten years, felled at his feet, "H-He couldn't take Dooku alone," And he could barely push the rest out, for his mouth had all but collapsed in paroxysm, "He said he couldn't take Dooku alone and…"

Padme's fingers were ice against her cheek, as the realization grew in them all, mutating to a twisted creature with hot venom dripping at its teeth.

'I couldn't leave you.'

Anakin stood calmly. "I have to find him.." The thunder kicked and pounded in his lungs until his chest was heaving. "And he WILL suffer."

"Not the way, young Skywalker.." Yoda gently intervened. "Pain will not ease through violence."

"I don't care about pain." The apprentice spat. "This isn't about pain."

And he turned in a sharp flourish of cape, becoming a wraith in his speed, within the confines of the nearest ship.

Padme watched the vessel power up and shoot out into the fevered Geonosis landscape.

It was several more minutes before she could find the strength to move, and reach the mourning Councilor, who leaned over the bleached, blue-lipped shell that had once been Obi-Wan Kenobi.

For several days, no one knew where Anakin had gone, only that he was in frantic pursuit of the leader of the Separatists.

And he wasn't alone in his determination, nor his fury. The defeat of one of the Order's finest swordsmen, the murder of a valued Master, sent shock waves through Coruscant, and a team of Jedi had begun to scour the Universe for his killer.

But Obi-Wan was apart from all that, spared the carnage and the bottomless wrath in his student's eyes. Wrapped in the fresh cream of a new tunic, he lay in his final cradle, surrounded by a mass of friends, family, and the burgundy tinge of unveiling night.

Padme Amidala was bewildered when asked to stand in the circle closest to the pyre, immediately battered by the decade-old memory of the last funeral she had attended. Even younger than his teacher was, Obi-Wan had been taken down by the sword that so dictated his years, and died before the first gleam of silver could mark him in age or prestige. It struck the Senator then that, on Naboo, it was an extreme rarity for any man to live so abbreviated a life.

For the Jedi, it was sewn into normalcy from birth.

But not for Anakin. And Padme wondered if Qui-Gon Jinn could have imagined the magnitude of that frailty. The enormity of its power, when both mother and father had been wrenched from his hands, in the space of a few days.

The Council was waiting, to let Anakin to recover from the initial devastation, before he was announced as a renegade. Masters Yoda and Windu were convinced the memorial would draw him back from the madness of space and his hunt. After all, it would be the last good-bye and, at its essence, the last symbol of respect he could give his mentor.

Still, Padme was surprised when she felt a stirring at her shoulder, and glanced up to see Anakin, encased in dark leather and bruised stoicism, among the taupe and ivory of his fellow Jedi. She wanted to say something, to ask where he had gone, if he was alright.

But the moment didn't belong to her or her questions. His eyes were on Obi-Wan. The molten spirits flickered and danced over fiber and flesh., with every turn taking more from the husk that had been a strong, handsome, beloved man.

Padme found herself entranced by it, how the flames could both devour and enliven, bringing a flush to pallid cheeks.

Anakin watched from beneath the shroud of his cowl, never wincing or looking away, even as the fire erupted high in the dark, a crimson tower.

When the air was powdered gray, and the pyre nearly empty, it was over.

It was customary for attendees to stop by the student of the deceased, to offer condolences and general greetings. But no one reached out to grasp Anakin's hand or whisper a famed Jedi platitude. No one even paused.

Padme stood at Anakin's side and watched the line pass, heads lowered and tear tracks shining in the moonlight. Perhaps some of them wanted to console the Padawan, but his entire form was rigid and intimidating.

Distant. He wasn't aware of the present, caught in the sands of Tatooine and Geonosis, the agony and injustice of his losses.

Shmi Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi were gone. Anakin had seen them, bleached of life with their motionless eyes of glass. The entire village of Tuskens were slaughtered in his uproar. Padme shuddered to think what fate held for the Count.

But it's different. Dooku is an ex-Jedi. He was able…She swallowed and sealed her eyes. He was able to take down Obi-Wan. A Master. What if Anakin…

She couldn't bear to finish the thought, already sickened by the depths of morbidity through which she waded.

When the congregation had shifted to the distant lights of the Temple, she turned finally to him, and saw the frozen horror fixed in his eyes. "Ani," She brushed a hand over his arm. "I'm so glad you're back."

He was looking away, out toward the banked flame and dust. "He'll never know." He whispered.

"Know what?"

"I was always complaining about him. Saying he was holding me back." A broken sigh escaped him. "And now he's not here to hold me back, is he?"

"Anakin…"

"He can't hold me back, but what was he really holding me back from?" He shook his head against his hand, as though in the grips of a skull-grinding migraine, "I went against his orders. He said he needed me and I…"

Padme lunged forward, wrapping her arms around his neck and murmuring in his ear. "I still need you, Anakin. I said I love you," She pulled back, to trace his cheekbone, nearly wishing there were tears there, some sign of emotion, "And I meant it."

Anakin slowly brought his arms around her waist, and laid his head in the curve of her neck.

They stood in silence, in their embrace, until the soft beat of footsteps approached.

Grief marked Mace Windu's solemn face, but, like the apprentice, his eyes were clear. He bowed. "Anakin, we're all relieved to see you here."

Anakin broke away from Padme, and the brief weakness was overtaken by his resolve. "I'm not staying. I came for him," He compressed his lips, "And now I'm going again."

"Apprehending Count Dooku is not your mission alone, Anakin. The Order shares your loss." Sorrow drifted from him as a breath. "I share it. Working solo won't accomplish anything. And it certainly isn't good for you."

"Good for me?" The younger man snorted. "The only thing that'll be good for me is to see Dooku's head on a pike."

Padme's eyes widened. "Anakin-"

But the Master commanded their attention, with the stridency of his ever-civilized voice. "I understand your anger, Padawan Skywalker. You're human, and all of this is fresh. But give yourself time. Dooku must be stopped, yes, but killing him out of anger will only harm yourself. It won't be much of a punishment to him. On the contrary, he'd delight in it."

Padme felt a churn of disgust in her stomach. "He's right, Ani. Knowing that killing Obi-Wan has killed you will give him a greater sense of victory."

Anakin was silent, staring again at the stone altar of his Master's cremation. Something seemed to flex inside him, and outside his fists tightened at his sides. "You don't understand, Master Windu. I know every lesson. Where every weakness and vice leads to. But I CAN'T just let him go. I can't live every day, knowing the person who murdered my Master is walking the Universe, free from vengeance or pain. THAT would destroy me, more than anything else."

A new presence revealed itself, as Master Yoda shuffled from the shade of the nearby willows, leaning heavily on his cane. "Forget you do, Anakin, the spirit of your Master."

Padme thought that perhaps a blaster bolt had fired out of the dark, and imbedded itself in Anakin's chest, so was the expression of shock and agony scrawled on the young face. "What are you talking about?" He balked. "I remember everything about Master Obi-Wan. That's why I must do this."

Yoda stopped before the Padawan, ears drooped, pale eyes newly polished in tears. "Then know him well, you did not." He rested a withered hand against Anakin's leg. "Want this for you, he did not. And on his behalf, definitely not."

Anakin looked down at the diminutive figure. "He wanted me to be there with him. To help him defeat that bastard. But I wasn't there. He was alone. And he DID suffer."

"Suffering now, you are, young one. From exhaustion. From grief. Stay here, you will. To find your way once more."

Padme ran a hand softly down Anakin's back. "He right, Ani." She whispered low.

He clenched his eyes closed. "For tonight. To take care of things, for him."

It wasn't what any of them wanted to hear, but it would have to be enough.

They walked the gleaming Temple halls in perfect quiet, two forms in the lamenting tones of black.

Anakin stopped at the door and was confronted by the endlessly smudged nameplate that read Kenobi/Skywalker. His entire body tensed, but he was able to key the entry code, and move past it.

The apartment was dim, in the comatose state it adopted during missions, barely changed when Padme reached out to flip on the lighting.

It was small. Smaller than she pictured in her mind, and drastically different than the rest of the massive building. The furniture was not sterile or sharp but worn, plush and faded. The tables were wooden and unevenly shaved, stained from the ringed sweat of glasses, with a few gashes. She wanted to look more, but Anakin was already straying to the dark column of the corridor.

Padme followed, hands clasped in front of her.

The room was Obi-Wan's. She knew it, instantaneously, before the glow rod was brought to an amber hush, before Anakin's gasp cut in the silence.

It was Obi-Wan's room because the air carried his scent, the atmosphere was layered in warmth and that mild humor. She could hear his laughter. She could hear him…but not as powerfully as Anakin could.

He wandered the space, as though it were foreign, and a source of confused wonder and awe. He would stop to touch something, a rumpled tunic or holo cube, and the devastation would be reborn. Soon, his hands were shaking.

Padme's eyes traveled the quarters. A big, heavily draped bed, a desk, and an armchair. There were scraps of paper framed on the walls.

Anakin stood at the desk, fingers trailing the top. He didn't speak for a few minutes, then "Did you know that he wrote?" He shook his head and laughed. "No. Now that I think of it, no one did. Maybe Qui-Gon. But Master could keep secrets." He huffed. "I don't know why he never told anyone else. He was really good."

A slight smile shied on her face. "Maybe he wanted it to be your secret." She suggested.

Anakin's grin burst and withdrew. "Maybe." He traipsed along the sleepcouch, as though debating whether to sit, then flicked his eyes over to the pale emerald armchair. "I used to sit there, when he was writing up reports and stuff like that. When I was little, he'd drag it into my room and tell bedtime stories. Every now and then, he'd tell one about a race, even though he despised them, and banned me from almost every race imaginable. But we'd race down the hall and he'd always let me win. He…"

It was the only sob that broke free from Anakin, and echoed in the emptiness of the room and his soul. He jerked down on the bed and grabbed a blanket, pressing it against his chest and face, smothering the anguish.

Tears coursed down Padme's cheeks, but they fell without notice, as she hurried to enclose the weeping man in her arms.

She drew them both down against the pillows, and he clung to her as light in the Dark, sanity in a cyclone. Neither uttered a syllable for what seemed to stretch into hours.

Padme settled against the warm solidity of his body, and was suddenly, brutally, thankful that he had been spared the cruel randomness of death. They were together. And they could, they must, move on from there.

The burnished bronze ambience pooled softly over his skin, and she studied him with an acute ache. "He knew, Ani." She looped his hair around her fingers. "He knew you loved him."

"Not enough to save him."

"No." She caressed his jaw. "It wasn't that. It was hatred, Dooku's hatred for the Jedi, for good people like Obi-Wan."

Anakin's fight for composure left his mouth quivering. "He was the best man I've ever known."

She rested her forehead against his, and closed her eyes. "And he thought the same of you. Trust me on that." A gentle kiss feathered over his brow, "I love you, Ani."

When she woke, but an hour after, the room had been stripped of every personal affect, and stood starkly in white and silver.

She sat up, squinting in the bright glare. Anakin was piling datapads, holocubes and a dozen leather-bound journals into a travel bag. Two more bags, full to bulging, were stacked at the door.

"Ani, what are you doing?" Her voice spiked in concern. She whipped the blanket away. "Yoda said--"

"I know what he said!" Anakin bellowed, then collected himself and flushed. "I'm sorry." He wiped his red-threaded eyes.

"But it doesn't matter what he said. He can sit in the Council chamber and recite his mantras and explain to himself why it's alright to leave Dooku out loose in the Universe. But it wasn't HIS Master who died. HE didn't go against Obi-Wan's command and leave him alone to fight the monster." He slammed the last tunic into the pack and cinched it up. "I can't let this go, Padme. I just can't

Padme glanced out the window at the thick, starless night. "Can't we wait until morning to--"

"No. It has to be now. I can't wait another minute." Anakin shook his head. "I can't be here another minute."

But he did wait, a few seconds, for her to take his hand.

And then they were gone from the Jedi Temple.

In a month, he was declared an outcast of the Order, an unhappy fact that was relayed to him from the Naboo government and more specifically, Supreme Chancellor Palpatine.

For a long while, she tried to follow him, as he darted from one point of the galaxy to another, chasing after any lead that presented itself. Finally, she was at the fringes of the rope, and hid away from the threats and endless inquiries from those she had once known. She remained in her small cell, the quaint cottage nestled in one of the more primitive villages on her home planet.

And there was no marriage. That hope was resigned to the gutters, and so she had different anniversaries to observe than most.

It had been three years since Anakin's severance with the Jedi Order.

Two since he returned to the cottage with the first stench of death seeped into his spirit, the first kill out of devotion to his slain teacher.

One since Padme realized she had begun to hate Obi-Wan Kenobi, who stared out at her from the dust-caked holos and framed letters, plucked from his apartment that horrible night. Obi-Wan, who had been a good man, and inspired such loyalty that it rendered an equally good, and loved, man a mere apparition. A thin shadow in the halls.

Four months since she sat on the lonely porch, wrapped in Obi-Wan's quilt, and sacrificed the vestiges of wellness in her mind, to consider what Anakin's love for her had ultimately cost them all.

And now, it was six minutes since she had grasped the Padawan braid in her hand, and felt the last remnant of the Jedi Padawan Anakin Skywalker snuff out, to be replaced by something she was too frightened to predict.

But, she knew, he would no longer be a good man.