Owen Lars liked Anakin Skywalker much better as a bedtime story, told to him with fond reminiscence by his stepmother: a fantasy of an ideal child. The real Skywalker was a hard and abrupt young man, with glinting eyes carved out of the shadows beneath his brows and hands possessed of all the restlessness that Owen disdained.
He dropped suddenly into their lives, asking for his mother while an exotically beautiful woman hovered at his side, and Owen stood quietly aside with Beru, representatives of the common man and woman: far plainer than the portentous Jedi and the ex-queen, but somehow still infinitely happier.
Anakin was told that his mother was lost. She was dead. There was no getting her back. After a month, Cliegg had accepted it; it had taken Owen even less time to come to terms with it.
But Anakin never did accept it. The look he gave Owen just before he left was one Owen never forgot, and in that moment, Owen had had an overwhelmingly childish desire to snap at his stepbrother. Snap at him for expecting the impossible: Owen was no prodigy, no Jedi, no Chosen One. Snap at him for thinking Owen'd just given up on his own stepmother. Snap at him for looking so accusing when there was nothing somebody like Owen could have done.
Snap at him for being right, in a way.
But it wasn't in his nature, and so he simply let Anakin go: meeting his accusatory, judgmental stare with a simple and placid gaze. It would have been childish to lose his temper.
Anakin left alone when the shadows were long, and he returned with his mother when the sun was high in the sky. From Owen's perspective, it seemed so effortless: smooth, quick, and easy, an abrupt resolution to something that'd cast a shadow over their house for a month. It was as if Anakin's sheer will had forcibly bent reality to its whims… and yet, it still failed in one aspect. Shmi didn't return alive, after all.
Anakin's mood, already brooding and edgy, took a decidedly darker turn after that. Owen didn't need an attunement to the Force to know that part of that thundercloud-silence was guilt beyond merely his mother's death.
Several days after Anakin and his companion had left, a group of young T-16 pilots returned from Beggar's Canyon with stories of a devastated Tusken camp in the Jundland Wastes. The young men were known as hotshots and braggarts, and they weren't believed when they described a scene of complete devastation: destroyed tents, disturbed terrain, and dismembered bodies, all laid out in a tableau preserved by the blasting dryness of the desert. "At first I thought a pair of krayt dragons'd hit the place-- nothing but a dragon could trash a Raider camp like that-- until I saw the cuts up close: clean even burns, like a laser'd done it," one of them insisted. "And those rocks haven't moved in centuries, not for sandstorms or dragons: but there they were, torn right out of the ground."
Owen knew better than to laugh off the stories, as most of the other listeners did, and he was one of the few present whose face actually went graver at the news. The tale became the subject of much idle chatter for the next few weeks, as bored farmers picked at the story over a few drinks, but-- as with all unsolvable questions, whose very veracity is in question in the first place-- it soon faded from discussion. In time, the story of the decimated camp was dismissed as a phenomenon none of the simple settlers could explain: and Owen, stepbrother to a Jedi, kept the explanation to himself.
Thirty men couldn't do what Anakin alone had. But on a more personal level, Owen couldn't do what Anakin had.
He hadn't even been among those thirty men. He hadn't even gone. Occupational duty had kept him from his filial duty.
Owen kept his guilt and his sense of inadequacy to himself, accepting it and coming to terms with it with the passive sensibility ingrained in his nature. When Anakin's son appeared on his doorstep, he raised the child as he would have raised his own son. He would raise Luke his way: not Anakin's way.
No darkness. No death. No falls from grace. Only stability, sensibility, and peace in life.
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Among the myriad of insignificant paperwork Lord Vader received subsequent to the capture of Princess Organa was a simple report, submitted by one of the many squads dispatched to find the missing droids. It tersely discussed the search-- and subsequent razing-- of a minor moisture farm outside Anchorhead, on the planet of Tatooine. The droids had not been found, and the owners were killed when they attempted to resist the search.
Vader crumpled the paper with a thought, and found that he had lost the desire to review the rest of the stack.