The chapter title is our personal tribute to Mace and not a direct reference to Anakin.
-----
Anakin stood paralyzed by fear in the center of Palpatine's office. Around him, Saesee Tiin, Agen Kolar, and Kit Fisto already lay dead. They didn't matter. The only thing that mattered to Anakin Skywalker at that moment was his Master. Mace Windu was deep in his own darkness, channeling it to the furious, lightning fast strikes of Vaapad. More than that--he was somehow absorbing the darkness of the being he battled, a murderous, raging, fount of dark power. Mace wasn't fending that power off, he was taking it in--and then reflecting it back at Palpatine--turning darkness into a weapon of light. This was the secret of Vaapad. This was what made Vaapad so dangerous, not only for its opponents but for those who used it. Mace Windu was its only living Master, and he wielded Vaapad victoriously time and again because he had no fear of his own darkness. He had taught Anakin that it was fear which gave the darkness its power. He also had no fear of death. His only fear was the end of the Republic--and he was willing to save the Republic now at any cost.
Even the cost of his own life.
Even the cost of Palpatine's life.
Mace Windu may have had no fear of death, but Anakin Skywalker did. He needed Palpatine alive. Palpatine was his only chance at saving Padme. Yet he stood--frozen--unable to act as the amethyst blade of his Master's lightsaber cut toward the Sith and Palpatine's blood-red one fell.
"For all your power, you are no Jedi. All you are, my lord," Mace told him as he stared past his blade, "is under arrest."
"Do you see, Anakin? Do you?" Palpatine's voice was a frightened gasp. "Didn't I warn you of the Jedi and their treason?"
"Save your twisted words, my lord. There are no politicians here. The Sith will never regain control of the Republic. It's over. You've lost. You lost for the same reason the Sith always lose: defeated by your own fear."
"Fool," Palpatine spat. "Do you think the fear you feel is mine?"
Lightning surged from the Sith Lord's hands, and Mace angled his blade to shield himself from it. Palpatine screamed and snarled in pain as the lighting streaked back toward him, but his attack didn't lessen. In fact, the pain fed his anger--and his anger gave him strength--but it was not a strength that could dissuade Mace Windu, who edged closer, pushing him back even as Palpatine continued to lance him with crackling streams of pure hatred given form.
"Anakin!" Mace called. "Anakin, help me! This is your chance!"
"Anakin, I told you it would come to this!" cried Palpatine. This was never an arrest. It's an assassination! He is a traitor!"
"He is the traitor! Stop him!" Mace ordered.
"Come to your senses, boy. The Jedi are in revolt. They will betray you, just as they betrayed me. You are not one of them, Anakin. Don't let him kill me. I am your pathway to power. I have the power to save the one you love," Palpatine's words battered at Anakin's mind, shattering his senses, enflaming his fear.
His Master gave an inarticulate roar of pain and effort, pushing the Sith Lord through the window and out onto the ledge. A ledge from which there was a half-kilometer drop. Certain death, even for a Force adept.
"You must choose. You must stop him!" called Palpatine.
"Don't listen to him, Anakin!" Mace warned. He pushed further, and the Sith's lightning began to arch back on him. His eyes grew yellow, glowing like hot embers as he drew on his rage, drew on the Dark Side to intensify his power. His face contorted, twisted by his own power as the lightning scored his flesh and melted muscle and bone underneath.
He screamed. "Help me! Don't let him kill me. I can't hold on any longer. Ahhhhhhh --ahhhhhhh --ahhhhhhh--"
"Don't kill him, Master," Anakin pleaded, finally finding words. He edged closer, coming up behind Mace's shoulder.
"I can't...I give up. Help me. I am weak…I am too weak. Don't kill me. I give up. I'm dying. I can't hold on any longer…"
"You Sith disease. I know exactly what you're doing. I am going to end this once and for all--"
"Wait--" Anakin grabbed Mace's lightsaber arm with a strength born of desperation. "Don't kill him--you can't just kill him, Master--"
"Yes, I can," Mace told him with grim certainty. "I have to."
"You came to arrest him. He has to stand trial--"
"A trial would be a joke. He controls the courts. He controls the Senate--"
"So are you going to kill all them, too? Like he said you would?" demanded Anakin.
Mace yanked his arm free. "He's too dangerous to be left alive. If you could have taken Dooku alive, would you have?"
Anakin sucked in a breath, cringing as if the purple blade had somehow pierced his chest. No. "That was different--"
"You can explain the difference when he's dead!" Mace declared.
"It's not the Jedi Way!" cried Anakin.
Mace raised his arm for the kill.
"He must live! I need him to save Padme!" as there had been no decision in Palatine's office, there was no decision now. His lightsaber was simply there. In his hand. Moving in a crackling blue arc that sheered off his teacher's hand and sent his lightsaber tumbling into the night below.
Palpatine leapt to his feet, his hands alive with hate--with death. The lightning struck Mace Windu with no buffer--nothing to absorb or deflect it--and in that moment, Anakin Skywalker knew only horror. He watched his Master fall. He fell to his own knees.
"What have I done?"
Palpatine's hand came to rest gently, kindly on his shoulder. "You're following your destiny, Anakin," said a familiar gentle voice. "The Jedi are traitors. You saved the Republic from their treachery. You must learn to cast off the petty restraints that the Jedi have tried to place upon your power. Anakin, it's time. I need you to help me restore order to the galaxy. Join me. Pledge yourself to the Sith. Become my apprentice."
There's nothing else left.
Anakin Skywalker planted one foot on the ground. Then he pushed himself to his feet. The room wavered around him, the floor tilting under him again. He shook off Palpatine's hand. Anger roiled in his gut, burning off the fog--the confusion--the fear. Because the Jedi may have been traitors, but so was Palpatine. Not a traitor to the Republic. The Republic mattered little to him. Palpatine was a traitor to him. He raised the blade in his hand.
"No."
The yellow eyes of the predator stared back at him in disbelief. "No?"
"I need you alive. That doesn't mean I intend to let you rule the galaxy," he said.
Palpatine cackled. "So be it."
The Sith Lord raised his hands. Lightning burst from his fingertips again, but when it struck, Anakin was no longer there. He dropped, swinging his weapon in a wide arc. Palpatine's lightsaber snapped off the ledge and lit as it spun into his hand. The two blades clashed, and the battle resumed.
Anakin's fury fueled each thrust, each parry, but his attacks met with fluid, smooth counterattack. The cackling continued, mocking, baiting him as they slashed and whirled and flipped through the room. They smashed each other with chairs--with lamps--with the desk. And he kept cackling! Anakin reached out--drawing more power into himself--drawing pn the darkness in the room--feeding it with the darkness in himself--and he slammed the cackling monster that was Lord Sidious into the wall with enough power to leave a man-shaped hole. His eyes blazed with hate--his whole body erupted with hate--and he closed the fist of his mechanical hand.
The cackling stopped.
Why should I help you now, Anakin? Sidious asked in his head. Aloud, he was gagging. Dying. Gasping for breath. Why should I help you save Padme?
He froze. And in that moment of indecision--that split second of hesitation--the Sith Lord struck out. There was no time to prepare himself. Instinctively, he brought his lightsaber up, but fear had dissipated the anger that empowered him, and he didn't know enough to be able to gather it again. His mind was too embroiled in chaos to call on the Jedi teachings of Obi Wan Kenobi and Mace Windu. He screamed in pain as the Force lightning blasted through his body, flinging him backward. It was pain and more than pain--cold that numbed and sapped his strength, darkness that crackled and oozed through his flesh, meeting the darkness within, calling to it. He lay there, some part of his mind examining the phenomenon with a strangely detached curiosity.
He felt himself pulled up again, felt his body handled like an oversized puppet. He realized that he was on his knees. His felt the hot point of Palpatine's lightsaber bare centimeters from his throat, and then he understood. Sidious had never been out of control. Everything--the entire battle--had been as calculated as the Clone Wars, because although Anakin's raw power surpassed the Sith Lord's, Palpatine's skill in the Force was beyond anything that any living Jedi had faced.
"Who will save Padme now, Anakin?" he mused lightly.
Anakin began to shake. The floor seemed to be sucking him down again, and the same terrible weight that he had felt in this room a few hours ago pressed against his body, slowly, steadily crushing him.
You don't need any more power, Uncle Anakin. You can save her from anything, all by yourself.
"Who will save her when you are dead?" asked Palpatine, gently mocking. "I know! Perhaps her son…"
"No!" Anakin tried valiantly to force himself to his feet again, but Palpatine held him immobile.
"Oh, but she'll be dead by the time he's old enough, won't she?" said Palpatine in a tone of sudden realization. Then he became thoughtful. "Well, I will need a new apprentice, won't I? He'll be far less troublesome, I think. I'll be able to start so much younger."
I love you.
"I'll do whatever you ask," Anakin promised.
"Good," Lord Sidious sneered down at him, and the lightsaber clicked off.
Another man might have chosen that moment to act--to make one final, desperate, self-sacrificing bid for victory--but Anakin's fear held him tighter than Palpatine's Force grip. It whispered, What if I fail? Who will save her? Who will save them?
"Good," the Sith Lord said again.
In the darkness of Anakin Skywalker's mind, covered by boiling hatred and buried in self-contempt, another strategy began to form. It was a plan which he knew that Sidious would never see--would never expect. He couldn't, because a man who turned off his lightsaber with his opponent still alive was a trusting fool.
"Just promise me you'll leave Ani alone," he said.
Sidious gave a negligent shrug. "Perhaps he is too much of a Jedi already. After all, his father has been brainwashing him since the day he was born. Maybe even before that. He can die with the rest of them."
"No! You can't!" roared Anakin.
"Oh, no, my boy. But you can," Sidious actually smiled. "Do you think that killing one traitor will end treason? Do you think the Jedi will ever stop until I am dead? Every single Jedi, including your friend Obi Wan Kenobi, is now an enemy of the Republic. He must die. And his son must die with him."
"I will never hurt Anakin!" he shook his head.
"Did you not just say that you would do whatever I asked?" Sidious reminded him.
"The boy is like my own son!"
"Anakin, Anakin," Sidious sighed with the air of a parent correcting an errant child. "Do you think, if that boy had to choose, he would pick you over his own father?"
"Then I'll kill Obi Wan! I swear, I will! I'll kill every Jedi in the galaxy, but not the boy!" Anakin insisted.
"It's them or me, Anakin. Or perhaps I should put it more plainly--it's them or Padme," Sidious told him.
He hung his head. "I…"
"And when they are dead, Padme will be yours. Her unborn child will be yours. The power to save them both will be yours," went on the Sith Lord.
I love you, Uncle Anakin…you don't need any more power…you can save her from anything, all by yourself.
But what if he couldn't?
I love you.
"…can't…"
"There is a place within you, my boy, a place as briskly clean as ice on a mountaintop, cool and remote. Find that high place, and look down within yourself; breathe that clean, icy air as you regard your guilt and shame. Do not deny them; observe them. Take your horror in your hands and look at it. Examine it as a phenomenon. Smell it. Taste it. Come to know it as only you can, for it is yours, and it is precious," said Lord Sidious.
Even as he spoke, Anakin was finding that place. Whether it was forming within him or had been there all along, he did not know. He stood there inside himself and took his darkest self, his most terrifying and horrible and electrifying emotions, the basest part of what it meant to be alive, into his hands. What he found appalled him. Yet it liberated him. He shredded his own feelings, examined them, and put them together again. Then he found that they still pulsed within him--still belonged to him. They empowered him--but they were without the ability to cloud his mind. His plan took on a new aspect. It solidified. It was given a shape, and slowly that shape took on a face. He knew the beast that was Anakin Skywalker, and found that beast to be capable of treachery and deceit far beyond that of the man before him.
"Yes," he lied.
"Yes to what, my boy?"
"Yes, I want your knowledge. I want your power. I want the power to save Padme. I can't live with her! Give me the power to stop death," he entreated.
"That power only my Master truly achieved, but together we will find it. The Force is strong with you, my boy. You can do anything," Sidious told him.
"The Jedi betrayed you," Anakin said, and he absolutely meant it. "The Jedi betrayed both of us."
"As you say. Are you ready?"
"I am," he said, but even as he spoke the words, he carefully guarded his own intent. "I give myself to you. I pledge myself to the ways of the Sith. Take me as your apprentice. Teach me. Lead me. Be my Master."
"It is your will to join your destiny forever with the Order of the Sith Lords?" Sidious asked formally.
Anakin lowered his head gravely in response. "Yes."
"Then it is done. You are now one with the Order of the Dark Lords of the Sith. From this day forward, the truth of you, my apprentice, now and forevermore, will be Darth…"
A pause no longer than a heartbeat. Longer and darker than the grave. The Force itself became a fire that roared in his ears. And in the Jedi Temple, though he didn't hear it, a little boy wept for the loss of his hero.
"Vader."
