Disclaimer: I don't own Star Wars or any of the affiliated media. Unfortunately, the corporate demon known as Disney does. (Honestly, George, what was you thinkinnn?)
Author's Note: I've been reading a lot of SW fanfic, mostly Obikin (cuz, duh?) and there's not enough fics that mostly focus on Anakin's development or introspection from his point of view. This fic was also inspired by the hate that Anakin got from the writers of the Trilogy-Which-Must-Not-Be-Named (*cough*Abrams*cough). The entire fucking saga revolves around Anakin and how his choices affect the galaxy, so this is a fic that will focus on Anakin's character development, keep the deep, emotional relationships Anakin has (even if the nature of the relationships change), while still being both tragic and a wonderful story that stays true to the spirit of Anakin. Yeah, some of it is gonna be OOC – this is an AU fanfic, the characters are going to face situations they didn't in canon, and I can't guarantee they'll react the same way you think they'd react or the same way Lucas would've written them reacting. I plan to stay as in-character as possible, but reserve the right to take creative liberties, like any good fanfic author. I can't promise regular updates (re: my other work fic which is updated haphazardly), but there is an outline with a clear direction and finalized ending point. However, even with irregular updates ahead, I do promise to put out quality writing with semi-long chapters for anyone who actually reads this hunk of junk. Stay safe out there, wear a mask, stay hydrated!
Chapter Note: I've shortened the age difference between Obi-Wan and Anakin from sixteen to nine years, with their birth years being 50 BBY and 41 BBY, respectively. Also, yes, I've given Anakin's childhood a bit of an AU makeover. I did try to realistically write what I thought a Force sensitive slave would go through during his childhood. (Edited 12/18/20 to add a line break, i might be back to fix the grammar/spelling errors, idk yet).
Song: Nightmares – All Time Low. Come bitch at me about it on Tumblr (trashpanda26).
CHAPTER ONE: ALONE IN THE DARK
Anakin awoke violently, panting into the silent night air of his room at the Temple.
He tried in vain to get his breathing under control, a voice remarkably like his Master's, recognizable in a far-off part of his tremulous mind, was reciting the Code in a familiar attempt to regain some kind of equilibrium.
All he could see, all he could focus on, was the scene taken from his dreams that replayed over and over again in his mind. His mother, his mother, tied up in a canvas tent, sand stained red at her feet, with her back torn open and Sand People surrounding her. He could faintly hear the sound of lashes coming down on flesh and the Sand People's chittering, muted as if listening to it through water.
It's just a nightmare he pleaded with himself. It's not real he desperately thought.
Except it didn't feel like a dream. No, this terrifying scene had the distinct tang, the cold bite of the force grasping the edges of it. He was familiar with these kinds of force visions but what they now showed him was both different and horrifying.
He spent the first decade of his life on Tatooine. He knew the fate that awaited those unlucky enough to be captured and not killed by the Sand People. It was always worse for women.
His mother…
He turned to the side and vomited.
After a few minutes of dry heaving, Anakin wiped his mouth and somewhat succeeded in getting his breathing under control. On autopilot, he got up and started cleaning the mess he made next to his bed, using some fabric scraps usually saved for wiping the grease off his hands to wipe the floor. After he tossed the soiled rags into the bin, he put his hands on the wall, leaning his weight on them, and let his head hang down between his shoulders in an attempt to settle his mind. He wasn't successful.
As he stood there, with his forearms braced against his bedroom wall, he still couldn't get the image of his mother, beaten and bloody out of his head. He was glad he was alone right now, no audience to see or feel the aguish that was no doubt rippling in the Force around him. He'd react violently to anyone telling him to release his feelings into the Force, no doubt.
He slowly made his way to the 'fresher, suddenly wanting a shower. Probably in a futile, subconscious attempt to scrub the images from his mind.
Tapping the hot water selection in the shower, he opted for scorching water instead of the sonic option. After the water heated up, he stepped into the cubicle, leaned against the wall and slowly slid down until he was curled around his legs on the floor, the blistering heat of the water barely anchoring him in the present.
Anakin was desperately trying to think around his panic without completely dissociating with reality around him. He didn't want to fall back into a coping habit that he had devoted years of his life to training himself out of in. First with his mother's help (don't think about it) and then quietly, by himself once he was taken to the Temple by Qui-Gon.
The first memories of his life were blurry, with large spans of time stitched together from a combination of the traumatic nature of being a slave owned by the Hutts and his young age.
What he did remember, he mostly wishes he didn't.
His mother later told him that it was during one of the bleaker times of their residence at Gardulla's palace that he started to "get lost in his head" as she put it. The first time that he can remember this happening was while he was in the middle of getting a particularly harsh whipping across his back due to some failing on his part that he was never able to recall. He remembered the feeling of dissociation as he fell into what he now knows was the Force, following the currents, eddies, and flows of the energy as it wove reality together around him, the violent pain in his back suddenly muted like it was already an echo of a faraway memory.
Falling into the force soon became a way to escape the physical repercussions of being a slave on Tatooine. The Hutts were cruel masters, even among slavers. Slaves were chattel to them, treated like animals, kept penned together like Bantha in unsanitary and unsafe conditions with no relief for weeks sometimes.
As an adult, Anakin had the ability, in hindsight, to realize that his age had shielded him from the true horrors of life at Gardulla's. The other children and himself were mainly tasked with cleaning up any debris that were left in the compound after events and kept in the slave quarters for the remainder of the day, usually with their mothers. Anakin could remember stealing scraps of metal and electronics when he wasn't swiping and fixing broken tools, hiding his ill-gotten gains in a small hole he dug out with his bare hands under the thin little mat he had been given to sleep on, the one allowance from his owner.
While he had been beaten more times than he could count and definitely more times than he could remember, he knew that the adults had it much worse. He never went hungry for more than a few days, yet he could remember people dying of starvation feet away from him. He remembered men being beaten so badly that he could see the whites of their bones and hear the whistle of air wheezing out of punctured lungs as they labored in vain to breath. He can distinctly remember the smell of rotting flesh. He remembered women being dragged out of their communal quarters, going without a sound, silent in their resignation.
He found out what exactly was happening when they came for his mother.
Needless to say, he found himself lost in the emotionless void that he had access to quite a lot during their last year at Gardulla's.
When Gardulla lost Anakin and his mother to Watto over a bet, Anakin was terrified. All he had known was life at Gardulla's and his anxious thoughts could only conclude that leaving what he had known would be bad, that Watto would be worse. He had heard other slaves mention that Gardulla was a far kinder master than many of their previous ones and Anakin was terrified that this Toydarian shop owner would be cut from the same cloth.
The Skywalkers' first years at Watto's were comparatively much kinder to them than their time at Gardulla's. Watto let them stay in a small hovel in the slave quarters of Tatooine, away from the shop. He fed them sufficiently. His mother was never dragged out of their sleeping quarters in the middle of the night again. Anakin was able to refine his mechanical skills by fixing the electronics and droids in Watto's shop, earning some small measure of leniency for his mother from his owner.
But they were still slaves. They didn't own their own bodies. They couldn't step foot outside of a certain radius from the shop where Watto kept the controllers for their slave chips for fear of literally being blown up.
They still got beat when they did something wrong. And Anakin, by that point, had outgrown whatever grace period most slaves had during their more vulnerable years that saved them from the more horrific beatings. Ten years later, the scars on his back were warped and ropey from growth spurts. No amount of bacta could fix that amount of damage after years of abuse.
But Anakin had endured it. He had no choice. The older he got, the more his world view expanded until he was able to understand his family's place in the universe. And He grew resentful.
During this time, he continued to cope with the more severe beatings by dissociating and letting his consciousness go blessedly blank within the hold of the Force. This happened less often than it had at Gardulla's, but as Anakin grew both in mind and body, the effects that his chosen coping mechanism had changed as well.
The first sign Anakin realized that "getting lost" in the Force might not be harmless was when he was seven years old. He was, at that time, keenly aware of his own lack of autonomy as a slave and was in the process of systematically testing the limits of Watto's dominion over himself. He was, for lack of a better term, rebelling, as much as could as a seven-year-old slave anyway. He had refused to fix some clunker droid that a moisture farmer had dropped off and mouthed off to Watto when the Toydarian warned him to hurry up. As Watto lashed his back again and again and again, the usual accompanying berating of Anakin took a new turn. Watto had threatened to sell Shmi back to the Hutts if Anakin continued his behavior.
Anakin's mind was halfway out of his body by that point, falling into the Force had become almost instinctual by then. It also was probably the cause of the increasing frequency of beatings as he was able to escape the most awful of the pain by mentally retreating and, thus, didn't have an incentive not to be a seething ball of resentment and anger.
When Anakin heard Watto's latest threat, he, as they say, lost it.
A wave of Force energy had rippled out around Anakin, shaking the foundations of the clay building that served as Watto's junk shop. Watto himself was blasted away from Anakin and back against the wall, unable to do anything but give a shocked cry of surprise as bits of the ceiling rained down around them.
In the middle of it all was Anakin, crouched into a ball on the floor of the shop, with his hands wrapped around his legs in a vice grip as he struggled to control the explosion of unnamed energy that he could feel originate from within himself. He intuitively knew that if he lessened his mental hold on the energy, that he wouldn't survive the fallout.
That was about the time that Watto came to his senses and flew across the room to club him over the head with a hydrospanner.
Anakin woke up in his own bed, confused and missing parts of his memory, with his mother pacing next to him worriedly. After she filled him in on what happened, she warned him that Watto had threatened to split them up by selling them to owners on different planets if that ever happened again.
Understandably, Anakin was terrified.
One good thing that came out of the whole ordeal was that Watto kept his distance from Anakin now. Instead of being treated like an unwanted nuisance who wasn't particularly bright, the Toydarian was cautious around him, afraid of another outburst that might cause harm to him or his shop.
That's not to say Watto suddenly stopped beating him for his failures. He still did, with the intensity increasing each year as Watto released his contempt for his slave the only way he knew how. He beat him horribly in silence instead of taunting him, always aware that Anakin was dangerous and knowing that his threats riled him up more than his violence against him.
For the last two years of his life on Tatooine, Shmi had made it her mission to help Anakin control the power he suddenly had access to. Every time his mind would find solace in the Force, he was slowly able to manipulate the energy that surrounded him. At first, it came in uncontrolled bursts but, over time, he was able to somewhat refine his control to the point where he stopped being afraid of spontaneously blowing up the building he was in. Anakin had his mother's patience to thank for the welcome development. Shmi had taught her son a crude form of meditation that controlled his temper without causing him to slip into the Force. He probably wouldn't have survived without her guidance, overwhelmed as his mother was with trying to help him.
However, yet another side effect of his affinity for the Force made itself evident during that time. At first, Anakin thought he was just having odd dreams about random events. Weird, yes, but not anything to worry about. Until he recognized his neighbor in one of the dreams, only his neighbor looked younger, face less wrinkled and without the grey hairs at her temples. He asked her about the events in the dream, with all the guilelessness of an eight-year-old who had no idea what tact was. She had listened to him, getting progressively more terrified as he recited his dream back to her, culminating in the door being shut in his face quite suddenly.
His mother eventually explained why she had reacted that way and Anakin learned to keep quiet about the indiscriminate visions of the past the Force gave him in his sleep.
The visions continued to come with increasing frequency during the last year that he lived on Tatooine. He had dreams about his mother, about men in brown and tan robes that he didn't know, about a city that covered the land as far as his eyes could see.
Everything and nothing changed when Master Qui-Gon walked into Watto's shop.
The few days that the Jedi was in Mos Espa were a blur of adrenaline, elation, and fear in Anakin's memories. He had made his first friend, Padme, and learned about the Jedi. He recognized the giant of a man from one of his dreams but didn't say anything, too enraptured with the way the Force was concentrated in his new houseguest.
All too soon he was clutching his mother as hard as his nine-year-old body could, trying uselessly to stop the tears from running down his face.
He remembered meeting his future Master quite clearly, though. Obi-Wan was a beacon in the Force. Anakin's quiet fixation with Obi-Wan started in that Nubian cruiser as he watched the 18-year-old help Qui-Gon from where he was sprawled on the floor in exhaustion after facing off with the Zabrak. Obi-Wan's less-than-enthused reaction to learning about Anakin hadn't discouraged him at all.
In fact, Obi-Wan's early dismissal just set the foundations for Anakin's future habit of doing anything to gain his Master's attention even after Obi-Wan warmed up to him following Qui-Gon's death and taking him on as his own padawan.
For all that Anakin was fascinated with his new Master, he was still skittish. It took years for Anakin to really believe that he was free and that the Jedi were actually different from the slavers on Tatooine. Anakin had bonded with Obi-Wan and had tested his limits with his new Master over and over again and was incredibly relieved to find corporal punishment wasn't condoned by the Order.
However, by the time Anakin started to fully trust his Master, it was years after their meeting. Anakin had never revealed his early habit of Force immersion, a fact made easier by the lack of necessity of such a coping mechanism. Anakin had, somewhere along the way, made a decision to keep both the habit and the dream visions of the past to himself, a choice that he only somewhat changed as the years went on and Anakin told Obi-Wan about his visions in a vague, round about way. He believed he would have told his Master the entirety of his experience with them, but he could distinctly feel Obi-Wan's uneasiness with the subject of Force visions, past or present. It wasn't directed toward Anakin, more of a general foreboding feeling making small ripples in the Force surrounding his Master and in the threads of their training bond, but it was enough for Anakin to change the subject and avoid it in the future.
Meditating, though, wasn't so easily sidestepped.
Anakin had quickly learned that the way the Jedi meditated would be essentially impossible for him to replicate on a consistent basis, particularly if they didn't want the ancient Temple to collapse around them. The Jedi meditated through simultaneously keeping their consciousness within their physical bodies while also letting it wander into the force. An impractical aspiration for Anakin.
He tried to meditate for months in the privacy of his new room within the apartment he now shared with his Master, in the dead of night over and over again. No matter how hard he tried, no matter how hard he concentrated, as soon as he started to fall into a meditative state, the Force would pull on his consciousness. He was unable to resist, the Force so embedded within him. There was no way for him to achieve the halfway state that Jedi meditation was built around.
When Obi-Wan finally noticed the issue a few weeks into his apprenticeship, Anakin was at a loss to explain, unable to articulate his problem without spilling his secrets. After simply saying he just couldn't meditate, Obi-Wan had looked at him for a long time, gaze thoughtful while simultaneously examining their newly forged training bond to see if he would be more transparent in his emotions. Eventually, his Master had sat him down and had try to follow Obi-Wan's consciousness through the training bond while he meditated to make sure he had the concept down correctly.
Anakin was amazed at the difference between their experiences. Obi-Wan was able to feel the Force around him, enabling him to reach of peaceful, meditative state while still being aware of the physical world, including his body. It was completely different from the utter, and mostly jarring, separation between the physical and the ethereal that Anakin experienced up until that point. It was beautiful and peaceful and rejuvenating and so many other things that Anakin realized had been missing in his life so far.
And it was utterly unattainable for him to reach on his own.
He tried to hide the upset from his Master, though, looking back, he realizes that Obi-Wan must have realized something was going on, because he stopped pushing meditation so hard on his padawan after that. Instead, Obi-Wan would regularly have Anakin follow his own meditation, allowing him access to the tranquility of the Force without fear of damaging something or becoming lost in the flow of it. His Master became his anchor.
Unfortunately, as Anakin grew, the opportunities for such indulgences were few and far between. The older Anakin got, the more his prowess grew, in the Force and with a lightsaber, and the Council was more comfortable sending the pair of them out on mission after mission. The fact that they successfully completed almost all of their missions only exacerbated the situation, as they were constantly needed in far flung regions of the galaxy.
The frequent absences from the Temple in addition to his unusual upbringing caused Anakin to have very few friends or confidants in the Temple outside of his Master. When he was younger, he was ostracized, however unintentionally, by the other initiates and padawans due to both his young age for a padawan and recent his past outside of the Temple. As he grew older, his lack of personal connections within the Temple only served to make him apathetic towards the majority of the inhabitants, which didn't exactly encourage any new friendships to form.
As a result, Anakin was only really familiar with his Master's friends from his own padawan days. Anakin wouldn't admit it aloud but in the privacy of his own head, he acknowledged that he acted decidedly jealous anytime Obi-Wan spent any great amount of time with any of his friends instead of with him. This caused Anakin to sometimes clash with Obi-Wan's many friends in the Temple due to the poor control of his emotions that was common amongst teenagers.
Anakin didn't dislike all of Obi-Wan's friends, however. Quinlan Vos was the exception, falling into an easy rapport with the young Anakin early on due to his easy-going personality. Vos didn't berate Anakin for his un-Jedi like conduct like most of the other Masters in the Temple and he always made it a point to include Anakin in any conversations he had with Obi-Wan. Anakin noticed these actions and, in turn, made it a point to always try to be respectful of Vos in turn. The fact that it made Obi-Wan happy was a nice side effect that had nothing to do with Anakin's decision to play nice.
Altogether, Anakin was essentially isolated from Temple life in general. He had his Master who always tried to accommodate him, but Anakin knew that the last few years had resulted in a gap where there was once harmony between them. Their bond reflected the distance, the threads connecting them having a distinct melancholy tinge to them that had grown stronger over the last year.
Curled up on the floor of the shower, with the hot water pouring over him, Anakin was at a loss on what his next step should be. He desperately wished he could confide in his Master. He wanted to reach out within the bond and beg Obi-Wan for some kind of reassurance, but the act reeked of childishness and attachment.
He stayed there, unmoving, and tried not to pay attention the tears that fell down his face to mix with the water.
His master found him hours later, standing in front of the transparisteel panel that took up the majority of the back wall of their apartment in the Temple. Hands clasped behind his back, feet spread apart, and with his hair still damp from the shower, his gaze was lazily focused on the silhouette of the skyscrapers that made up the upper levels of Coruscant through the thick fog of pollution that plagued the planet.
Anakin had used his time alone to think about what he saw. He was convinced that the image his nightmare showed him wasn't the distant past. The Force held a distinct sense of urgency whenever he concentrated on the dream. However, he wasn't sure if it was the recent past or possibly even the present or, even more unlikely, the future. He had never had visions of the present or the future, but he felt that he would know, the Force would tell him, if his mother were already dead. And he wasn't deluding himself, his mother would die if she were truly abducted by the Sand People. Most people would welcome death after such an ordeal.
So, if the scene were recent or in the near future, like he suspected, he needed to figure out how to stop it.
His first thought was to just make haste for the hangar in the Temple and commandeer a light speed capable craft and head straight for Tatooine. There were several issues with that problem, however. The first, and most easily bypassed, was that the hangar was locked and only accessible to Knights and Masters with their individual clearance codes. Anakin could splice into the system and be seated in a transport within five minutes. However, living in a Temple of Force users came with a surprising number of drawbacks. One of them was the inability to sneak about anywhere. Jedi patrolled the sprawling Temple at regular intervals and were always attuned to anything that was going on in the halls when they were on duty. The hangar had its own dedicated guard on top of the regular ones in the Temple.
Anakin was also weary of so openly defying both the Council and his Master by absconding in the night with only a maybe-vision to guide his way. He knew if he tried to explain his actions after the fact, that he very well may be kicked out of the Temple for serious violations of the Code. Obi-Wan would be upset with him and might even repudiate him as a padawan. By going after his mother to save her from a fate that she might not face, from their point of view, would constitute a breach of the Code. The act would be a shining example of attachment and its dangers.
Whatever he decided to do, Anakin knew that he had to try talking to his Master first. He was holding out hope that his Master would be lenient with him in this respect. He had known his mother's care and love for nine years before joining the Temple, it would be cruel to expect Anakin to ignore such a warning. Or so Anakin hoped Obi-Wan thought.
He could hear his Master shuffle out of his room, footsteps heavier than normal on the carpet from sleepiness. He sensed more than heard his Master take notice of him and make his way over to stand next to him. The bond, previously muted and fuzzy from drowsiness on his Master's end, slowly sharpened as his Master examined Anakin's own end of the bond and found anxiety, fear, determination, and resolution behind the façade of calm serenity he was trying to project behind his weak mental shields.
"What has you up this early, my young padawan?" his Master asked, voice quiet and hoarse.
"Dreams," Anakin replied. "I had a vision" he confided unsurely.
Obi-Wan hummed consideringly before replying, "What did you see that drove you out of bed at this hour?"
Breathing in audibly, Anakin took a chance and decided to be transparent with his Master, something that he was out of practice with, "I saw my mother," he almost whispered. "She was being tortured, in a hut, surrounded by Sand People" he confessed, voice rising uncontrollably as he revealed the scene that he couldn't get out of his head since he saw it in his nightmares.
"She was dying," he finished, voice somber.
He felt his Master's shock at what he just said through the bond. Obi-Wan raised his hand to rest it on his padawan's shoulder as he turned to face him before replying, "I'm so sorry you had to see that Anakin."
Obi-Wan looked back out of the window, falling silent for a few moments before replying, "I know you must be quite upset. I never knew my mother so I can't imagine the depth of emotion you must be feeling. But padawan, you need to release these emotions into the Force in order to gain some objectivity about this."
Anakin knew that his Master wasn't being deliberately cruel, but he couldn't help the flinch, both physically and in the Force, that Obi-Wan's words caused. His Master no doubt felt it, as he gave Anakin a concerned look before once again facing the lightening Coruscant skyline.
"I'm sorry Anakin," his Master said. "I know you've had experience with receiving Force visions in the past, what made you think that this is one of them?"
"The Force is wrapped around the edges of the images, Master. This was no regular nightmare, of that I'm sure."
"You know that the future is always in motion, Anakin. Even if what you experienced was a vision, you cannot be certain that it will come to pass, my padawan," Obi-Wan said gently. "We must all learn to let go of that we fear to lose eventually," he reminded the younger man.
Anakin knew that was his Master's way of politely closing the subject. He knew better than to push, especially if he didn't want to waste his morning being lectured, yet again, on the Jedi Code. He tried to swallow around the hurt suddenly clogging his throat while he calmed his mind.
He reinforced his mental shielding without being too noticeable about it before answering, "You're right, Master. I will try not to dwell on things I cannot change."
Seemingly happy that his padawan's issue was resolved, Obi-Wan squeezed Anakin's shoulder before letting his hand drop. His Master turned around, making his way towards their small kitchen, asking over his shoulder, "Now, how about some tea?"
Anakin turned around and nodded absently at his Master's query. As he sat down at the table, his mind was quite preoccupied, furiously turning over ways to evade his Master long enough to sneak out of the Temple and either rent a transport or pay somebody to take him to Tatooine. The more he thought about his vision, the more the Force seemed to whisper to him to hurry. He could feel it in his bones that he didn't have enough time to bring his Master around to his point of view and the longer he sat there, the less he cared about the repercussions of essentially abandoning his post here at the Temple.
As his Master set down a steaming cup of tea in front of him, Anakin thanked him quietly. Silently he grieved over the lack of support from the one person that mattered most.
He was going to Tatooine one way or another. He just hoped he had something to come back to.