A/N: Okay, so, personally, I'm better off believing that the prequel trilogy doesn't exist (but I won't bash those who like it!), and my first Star Wars fanfic is for the main couple of the prequels? What's up with that?
Anyway, I don't think this turned out too badly. I was listening to "1000 Words" from Final Fantasy X-2, and I just thought that it was a good song for Anakin and Padme. My version of Padme is slightly AU, given the fact that she's Force-sensitive enough, because of her pregnancy, to manifest herself ever-so-slightly as a spirit upon her death. But in my defense, don't you think that there would be some repercussions from the Force while she was pregnant? Luke and Leia are Skywalkers, and Skywalkers are naturally incredibly Force-sentitive. Just a thought I had while writing this. And, by the way, I was so into this story, I was willing to watch Revenge of the Sith again, and for someone who doesn't believe the prequels exist, that's some serious dedication to this story. Anyway, enjoy!
Bold and italics - song lyrics
Italics - spirits speaking
Italics and underline - a spirit and a living person speaking
1000 Words
Oh a thousand words call out through the ages
They'll fly to you,
Even though I can't see, I know they're reaching you
Suspended on silver wings!
And a thousand words, one thousand embraces
Will cradle you,
Making all of your weary days seem far away
They'll hold you forever.
- 1000 Words from FFX-2
Anakin had been so secretive before Mustafar, Padmé now remembered. All that he would ever say to her was that he was trying to find a way to save her and their child. Well, she knew now that it was really children, but she doubted that Anakin knew that even one survived, much less that both survived.
She had known that he was not telling her exactly what he was doing, and that worried her. Only when Obi-Wan had visited her apartment did she truly realize what Anakin had been turned into. The betrayal ran further than that when the Jedi Master told the young senator that Chancellor Palpatine, her trusted friend, was in fact the very Sith Lord, Darth Sidious, whom the Jedi were trying to hunt down; and he had been manipulating her from the start! That would have been forgivable if that was his only crime against Padmé and her family, but unforgivable was the fact that Anakin's fall was Palpatine's doing!
She felt a tremor run through the Force, and she placed her hand against her womb, as if to soothe the child growing there. Instinct told her that this child was going to be incredibly Force-sensitive (what would anyone expect, they were Skywalkers!) but the repercussions of that were that Padmé also became ever-so-slightly Force-sensitive as well.
This tremor had come from Mustafar, and it warned her of a Jedi that had fallen to the dark side of the Force. At the time, Padmé feared the worst, and raced to the volcanic planet in the hopes that, if the fallen Jedi was indeed her Ani, she would be able to bring him back to the light before his fate was sealed.
She knew that she was too late. If the Force wasn't telling her that, then she could tell from the way her husband was speaking. Boasting of his new powers; powers which belonged to the Dark Side of the Force? That wasn't her Ani. Talking of how he wouldn't lose her the way he lost his mother? Now that, she could understand, but his voice sounded different, demented.
"Anakin, you're breaking my heart!" she sobbed. "You're going down a path I cannot follow!"
This most definitely wasn't working. She was on her last defenses, and they were crumbling fast. Ani was blinded by Palpatine's lies. Instead of accepting his mistake, turning back to the light side, and coming back to Coruscant with her, he blamed Obi-Wan for leading him to kill the Younglings, blamed his lifetime friend for the fact that she was even on Mustafar now. Padmé began to weep, for the Ani that she knew was lost.
"Stop! Stop now… come back… I love you!"
There. If professing her love for him didn't bring him back to the light, then she doubted that anything ever would. For a moment, Ani looked as though he had realized the truth in everything that she had said since confronting him on this hellish planet, and she even swore that she could see a small flash of blue in his eyes. But it was soon gone as he looked past her, onto her ship.
"Liar!" he accused. "You're with him! You brought him here to kill me!"
What? She had not brought anyone with her. But when she turned around she found out the truth: Obi-Wan had snuck aboard. How could he? He had known that Anakin was currently in a very volatile state of mind, one where Ani blamed Obi-Wan for everything that had been going wrong in the young Jedi's life.
She turned to Ani, and her throat constricted. Ani was choking her through the Force! Why would he do such a thing? She couldn't speak with her voice, but with her mind, she was begging him to come back to the light.
She remembered placing her hand on her son's head immediately after he was born. She knew that her son would eventually become the greatest Jedi to ever live, and that he would be a warrior who always fought for the light. Both of her children would do great things, even in her last moments, this was one of two facts of which she was absolutely certain. The other fact: The good man who was Anakin Skywalker had not been destroyed.
She had been Force-sensitive because of the pregnancy. Most of that sensitivity had left her when the children were born, but enough had stayed to allow her to barely manifest herself to the twins while they were sleeping. She watched as Luke, completely unaware of his family heritage, helped his aunt and uncle harvest moisture from the thick Tatooine air, and as Leia grew up as a loving, but sometimes hot-headed, princess of Alderaan. But most of all, she stood by Anakin, begging him to forget this madness and go find their children, but he was blind and deaf to her.
She sent strength to Leia when her daughter was a prisoner of the Empire. She wept along with Leia when Alderaan was destroyed. Never, not even in her wildest nightmares, did Padmé expect Darth Vader to be capable of such cruelty; she had thought that Anakin's light was still trying to battle Vader's evil.
She had been there, watching, as Luke fired the shot that destroyed the first Death Star. A wave of pride ran through her as she smiled at her son. Perhaps now Vader would realize that only a Skywalker could possibly be this strong in the Force and come back to be a father to his children.
Padmé stood by her son in the Millennium Falcon's medical bay after his fateful duel on Bespin, the duel when he learned what had really happened to Anakin Skywalker. Padmé wept for her son and she tried to send comforting thoughts to him, but he was too devastated to even notice her Force-presence.
"I love you, my son." She whispered before fading away once again.
She was there on the second Death Star as her husband and her son fought their final duel. Several times she hissed at Emperor Palpatine. Wasn't it enough that he had manipulated her and then turned her husband to the dark side of the Force? Apparently not for him, if he was trying to turn Luke the same way that he had turned her Ani!
Luke won't turn. Padmé convinced herself, watching with pride as her son spoke to his father, convinced that there was still good in him, trying to get his father to turn back to the light. His very name means light. There's no way in the Force that he'll ever accept the dark side's ways.
She gasped when Darth Vader discovered that she had been carrying twins. True to his new form, Vader threatened Luke, "If you will not turn to the dark side, then perhaps she will!"
"Ani, no!" Padmé shrieked in horror, even though she was the only one who heard her cry. It was now that she began to think that perhaps she had been wrong. Maybe everything that she had said to him, both in life and death, were nothing but empty promises, and Obi-Wan had been right all along; Anakin Skywalker was truly gone forever.
But Luke's reaction shocked her to her now non-existent core. "Never!" he screamed, igniting his lightsaber and beginning a relentless barrage of attacks, furious that Darth Vader would even dare to think about threatening Leia. Padmé was barely aware of Palpatine's malicious, gleeful laughter in the background; her mind was dominated by the horror that Luke was attacking out of pure anger – the surest way to the dark side.
Luke, you fool; what are you doing!?" Padmé screamed desperately at him. "Don't attack him; that's just what Palpatine wants you to do! You're following your father's path; don't do this!"
She waited, terrified and with bated breath, as Luke held his lightsaber in a position to take Vader's life. The Emperor laughed, telling Luke to kill Anakin and take his father's place at the Emperor's side.
Padmé gasped, hopeful once again when Luke deactivated his lightsaber and threw it away. "Never. I'll never turn to the dark side. You've failed, your highness. I am a Jedi, like my father before me." He declared, proudly accepting his heritage.
The former queen of Naboo wept tears of love and joy, and had she not been a ghost, she would have flung her arms around her son. She knew now that he would never turn to the dark side, never in a million years.
Her joy was soon broken, though, and she shrieked when Palpatine began attacking Luke with Force lightening. Vader had gotten up and retaken his position at the Emperor's side, but Padmé now could feel the small speck of light that was Anakin Skywalker begin to grow.
"He's your son!" she whispered to Anakin, encouraging that light to grow, the same way Luke had. "He's our son. Save him, please!" Anakin's light struggled against Vader's darkness, but it was just enough to give Padmé hope. "I forgive you for everything you did; you were blinded by Palpatine's lies. None of it was your fault, you were merely Palpatine's puppet that he used to start this era of darkness. Put an end to this, Ani, please. Do this for him; for me. Please, Ani."
That last plea, combined with Luke's agonized screams, was the final straw. Anakin's light burst forth, shredding Vader's darkness. Tears of love once again sprang from Padmé's eyes as Anakin picked up Palpatine and threw him down the reactor shaft, ending the evil of the empire at long last, saving their son at the cost of his own life.
When Luke helped Anakin take off the mask that Darth Vader had been identified by, Padmé couldn't help but let a gasp escape her lips at the sight of the injuries that Anakin must have received after she went unconscious on Mustafar. But even beneath those injuries, she could still see the young Anakin which she remembered and loved with all her heart.
She had to smile at Luke's determination to bring his father out of this alive. "I'll not leave you here, I've got to save you."
"You already have." Padmé and Anakin spoke at the same time, and her smile widened when she heard those words from Anakin's mouth; that was one of the problems that had led him to the dark side: his fear of death. But now he had accepted death and was ready for it. The words that she had whispered to him throughout the ages had finally taken hold in his heart.
Anakin slumped down and drew his final breath. His wife bent down and took his hand, guiding his spirit to the next plane of existence. He was no longer clad in the black armor, but in the traditional Jedi garb of brown robes. The years melted away from him and before her stood the Ani that she remembered, the Ani that she had married. His blue eyes blinked open, but he looked away in shame when he saw her.
"I'm surprised you still want to even look at me after everything I've done." He whispered.
His angel gently turned his head so that he had to look at her again. "Every day I was begging you to come back to the light, and now you have. That's all I ever wanted. And, besides that, you just saved our son."
"But I also tortured our daughter." Ani seemed absolutely determined to blame himself for everything that had gone happened in the twenty-three years since his fall to the dark side, when it was really Palpatine who manipulated his mind and caused him to fall.
"That wasn't you – it was Vader, and it was Palpatine." Padmé reassured him. "You, I don't blame – not in the slightest."
The Death Star quaked and, even though they couldn't feel it, it shook them from their conversation. Luke hadn't seemed to notice the tremor, and he still knelt in front of his father's body with his head bowed in mourning. And from the looks of things, he didn't plan to leave.
"Luke, run!" Padmé yelled to him, and for the first time, her voice incited a reaction from Luke, for he seemed to tense, as if wondering where her voice came from.
"I didn't save you from Palpatine just so you could die five minutes later when this thing blows!" Anakin shouted to their son. "Get out of here!"
The ethereal command from his father spurned Luke into action. He leaped to his feet, but bent back down to pick up the armor that had encased Anakin; Vader's armor. At this, Padmé rolled her eyes and playfully whispered to Ani, "I wonder where he could possibly get that stubbornness from?"
They both let out sighs of relief when they saw their son expertly pilot the Imperial shuttle out of the exploding battle station. They felt the Force calling to them, and they allowed themselves to fade away into its light.
The Rebel victory celebration on Endor was just reaching full swing, and there were many who thought that the celebrations wouldn't cease until well after dawn. However, one soul was less than eager to celebrate. Even though he knew that the Rebels had finally accomplished the goal that they had been working towards since he was born, Luke Skywalker felt nothing more than an overwhelming desire to truly mourn the father that he had never known. The relief at seeing all of his closest friends alive was genuine, but his smile was faked. The first chance he got, he slipped away from the celebrating Rebels and Ewoks for a private moment.
An ethereal blue light caught his eye, and he looked up to see the spirits of his two mentors, Obi-Wan Kenobi and Yoda. Two more spirits soon joined, a young man about Luke's age, with his arm wrapped securely around a woman. Luke nearly jumped when he noticed that the woman looked identical to his sister, and he realized that these new spirits must be his parents.
Anakin and Padmé smiled proudly at the sight of their children in their prime and celebrating the height of their victory. The future for them looked brighter than could ever be described, and the proud parents of the now famous twins felt no qualms about allowing them to live out the rest of their lives in peace. As they departed, Anakin took one last look at his children and sent a mental apology to them, and to Han as well. "You'd better not get too comfortable with my daughter too quickly, buddy." Anakin thought to Han through the Force. "Treat her right, because if you don't, I'll make you regret it for the rest of your life." He may have tortured Leia when he was Darth Vader, but now, as Anakin Skywalker once again, he was going to watch over his children as best he could. But for now, Anakin was content to fade back into the Force along with his wife. As he did so, he heard again the words that she had whispered to him throughout the years and smiled. If she hadn't done so, he might still be Vader, and Luke would now be dead.
Anakin turned to his wife, but found that he lacked the proper words to thank her for her persistence. However, Padmé had other ideas. She wrapped her arms around the redeemed Jedi's neck, making sure to entangle her fingers in his hair, and gently pulled him down so that she could once again capture his lips with her own. And in that kiss, Anakin once again heard the echoes of the words she had spoken to him throughout the ages. He had never been more grateful.
Oh a thousand words have never been spoken.
They'll fly to you,
They'll carry you home and back into my arms
Suspended on silver wings!
And a thousand words call out through the ages!
They'll cradle you,
Turning all of the lonely years to lonely days.
They'll hold you forever!