The days crept closer and closer to the next visitation, but Leia had found a new battle to fight.
When Leia finally stopped arguing about the visitation, things almost went back to normal between her and Luke; they talked, they laughed, and most importantly, they conspired.
Carefully, they tiptoed around the Organas. Leia called them Mama and Dad, and Luke didn't speak to either of them at all, but he didn't yell at Leia about her decision to accept their adopted parents as their own either. It almost made her feel bad about how she had yelled at him about Anakin, but not really; Bail wasn't a murderer. It was different.
She didn't apologize, but the revelation of the existence of their biological sperm donor's letters was apology enough. Knowing without knowing, in his eerie Luke way, he'd smiled crookedly at her and all was forgiven.
They searched Padme's villa relentlessly, one distracting the adults while the other combed the rooms from top to bottom. Luke was better at distracting, easily getting himself into some trouble on the lake or stealing the speeder for joyride through the town and valley; Leia was more thorough and better at asking the help innocuous questions, so they fell into their roles naturally.
"Maybe the letters are on Naboo?" Luke had asked after a particularly long day where he'd convinced Padme to take him to the mountains while Leia had searched her vast wardrobe when she was supposed to be at her friend Winter's house. They had vague memories of weekends in Theed and Varykino, before Padme had moved to Alderaan to be closer to them.
"No," Leia had said, "She still gets them regularly. And I think they would be on flimsi-plast, so it's not just on her data-pad. It's not like convicts have access to the HoloNet."
In the end, it was Luke that found it.
"Mother went swimming today," they ate lunch under the muja tree, and the air was sweet with its overripe fruit. "And I saw she had a key on her necklace— you know, the one with the wooden pendant."
Leia frowned, knowing exactly the necklace Luke was talking about. Padme always wore it, and never took it off, not even when she went swimming or took a sanistream. A pale wooden pendant, tribal looking and completely out of her mother's fashion taste, and a delicately wrought crystal charm hung from the chain. "I thought that was a charm?"
"Nope, it's an actual key," he sighed. "It's cut too precisely. Think you can find the box it unlocks?"
In fact, Leia knew exactly what box it had to unlock. There was a box made of a strange metal built seamlessly into the desk where Padme worked; stained to be the exact same color as the rest of the plastisteel. Leia only knew it was there because she had broken a nail on the teeny keyhole feeling around for a false bottom.
"Get me the key and I'll find out."
Luke, being as reliable as the sunset, had pulled through the next day, the key tiny even in his small hand. It really did look like a charm, cut from pure blue crystal. When Leia had asked how he'd gotten it, he'd fidgeted and averted his eyes, and she knew that he had done some of his weird Jedi magic. She didn't pry.
"Don't you feel that?" Luke was entranced when he passed it over. "It feels...alive. But it wasn't a happy life, I don't think."
"It's just a key," Leia cut him off; she knew about the Force like every civilized citizen did, but the Jedi were just strange, and whenever Luke talked about it, he acted just as off. His pale eyes saw right through her, just like Anakin, and Master Kenobi, and she hated it.
"Well," Luke huffed, though he wasn't offended, "maybe. Mother's going back to Naboo for a little bit, so you've got to look quickly, okay? She's only taking a nap down in the sitting room right now."
They snuck into Padme's quarters; Luke watched the door while Leia rushed to the desk. The crystal slid in like a magnet, and the false lid of the safe rose and unfolded smoothly, and she could feel it emanating emotions and a presence. Luke was right, it wasn't happy. It was pure agony, and hatred, and rage, like nothing else Leia had ever felt—
Inside were thick stacks of sealed and unsealed flimsiplasts and a roll of negatives of pictures.
Leia should have shown Luke the letters that day, but she didn't trust that he would act rationally about it all. That's what she told herself when she grabbed the sealed letters, rolled them up, and tucked them into her garters beneath her voluminous petticoats. When she dropped her skirts, it was as if nothing was there.
A mental nudge; Luke's signal. It was time to go. Padme was waking up.
Her heart racing because of her deception, she shut the safe and yanked out the necklace, practically running from Padme's chambers.
"No dice," she said before Luke could ask, shoving the necklace and all its sorrow into her twin's hands. "We'll have to keep looking."
"Aw man," Luke pouted, "I really felt like this was it…"
"Well, it wasn't," she snapped, and Luke glared at her. Then guilt rushed up. "I'm sorry."
He smiled, then nimbly untangled the delicate chain. "It's fine, Leia. I'll go put this back before she fully wakes up." he paused, mustering the courage to speak. "I think we should just ask Mother for them. All this sneaking around and hiding…she won't tell the truth if we don't trust her."
She gulped. There would be no replacing the letters without the key, and she would be breaking the seal on them anyway; her theft would be inevitably found out. But at least this way she knew nothing would be hidden from her.
"Can you wait until after she gets back from Naboo?" Leia asked.
He hugged her, and Leia let out a sigh of relief when his arms went over her shoulders and not under them; he wouldn't feel the rolls of flimsi tucked into her waist. "Of course, Leia!"
She hugged him back, his radiating warmth striking her to the core. But it wasn't enough to make the guilt for lying to him go away.
The Jedi Temple was the oldest building on Coruscant.
The majestic façade most beings recognized was actually a late add-on from 900 years ago. Beneath it, stretching all the way down to the planet's ruined surface, was the original temple; a great tower of ancient black stone and metal. At one point, during the Sith Wars of the Old Republic, it had been repurposed as a Sith Temple before it was repossessed by the victorious Jedi.
That was when the prison was added.
Coruscant was unique from other city planets in that the surface was entirely inaccessible. The capital was suspended on the ruins of the former civilizations, and even the lower levels that never saw the sun were thousands of meters above the surface. It was why the stars were visible directly from the city. Of buildings that went all the way to the surface, only the Temple's building remained accessible, though completely unused, except for in the worst cases.
It was a kind of horror story the Initiates used to tell, the ancient prison of the Old Temple. No one knew where it was, of course. But they spoke of a kind of prison where the Force didn't exist at all.
If Anakin had ever had any friends, perhaps he would have heard the stories, and even in his Dark Side fury, he might've been afraid.
But Anakin had been held apart, then spitefully stood apart, from all his peers, and had regularly descended through the Old Temple into the underbelly of Galactic City, Coruscant.
Being marched down the familiar halls, in chains, whipped into submission with lightsabers at his back, was a very different experience from his lonely childhood adventures. The power of the Force was in life, and being trudged into the utter absence of it was torture. Nothing, not even microbial organisms, survived on Coruscant's surface. Torture he'd endured as a child when it was certain to be temporary was the only reason he didn't dissolve into instant madness, as every other Sith who'd been subject to Jedi prison had gone. The Jedi who marched him into hell had the Force with them; they were not alone. In a scramble for self-preservation when faced with the yawning emptiness, the Dark Side had drained him. As they passed cell after cell— once humble rooms in the Old Temple-he saw their ancient bones. When he closed his eyes, he could still see them.
But he would endure. He had for nine years. He had endured when he thought Padme was dead, with the knowledge that his child, no, children were out there in the cruel galaxy without their father. He had endured knowing he deserved much worse than the fate he'd been given, and that it was not his own power, or the Will of the Force that had saved him, but the tireless love of the woman who had faith in his sense of justice even on the deathbed he'd put her on.
The Force was curious in the Old Temple. Death surrounded him on all angles, and so the Force around him was silent, as if he were underwater with his ears plugged. It was so quiet he could only hear his own breathing. The lights were never dimmed, so he couldn't seem to organize day and night cycles. Coruscant had the highest density of sentient life in the galaxy, and the roar of it raged above his head. Were he anyone but Anakin Skywalker, he might've felt small, insignificant. He might have quailed before the power of the Force as he sat in the silence.
It took three years of unspeaking, unending drudgery, tormented by the ghosts of those he'd failed before he turned from the Dark Side. All his hatred was a mask.
He hated Obi-Wan, and Palpatine; mere beings whose wisdom he thought he could trust. They betrayed him.
He hated the Sith and the Jedi and all their codes and creeds and inane little practices, for bowing their heads before any mortal ambitions and institutions like Republics or Empires.
He hated Padme for standing against him, but he loved her for it too. Early sorrow let his love eclipse his hatred of her, until he pitifully realized there was no one he hated more than himself.
But even that was put aside, when despair finally broke his mighty back, and he was faced with the question of survival.
For he, Anakin Skywalker, in his prison cell in the Old Temple, hundreds of kilometers away from anything alive, felt the Force in its entirety, and it was terrible and awesome.
Anakin was an awful student, but the Force was a pitiless teacher. It raged above him, a firestorm above the yoked dragon in his chest, whose maw was open and receiving. He couldn't close it if he tried. Control was an illusion. Peace was an illusion. Power was an illusion. Destiny and prophecy was a lie. He was just an empty vessel, punctured and useless. But sentiment, in the form of the love he couldn't let go, kept him living. The true power of the Force raged through him, and he through it, until he realized all the lessons of the Jedi and the diseased psychopathy of the Sith were delusions, a child scrabbling for control against something so much larger and greater than it could understand. He survived because he truly yielded.
Time did not exist in the Old Temple. There were times of awareness, and unconsciousness; time for movement, from calm katas to frantic scratching at the walls, to repetitive, thoughtless exercise, and time for thought. Recrimination and self flagellation were other things he regularly spent hours on. Sustenance came in the form of loafs that were delivered via chute. They tasted awful, as they were blended and dehydrated scraps from the temple kitchens; and were very calorie dense. All the weight he lost when he was first put in solitary was quickly gained back and then some once he abandoned the Dark Side. Constant, neurotic exercise had left him at a state of fitness beyond anything he had ever been before his incarceration.
All his things-the one letter from Ahsoka, and the annual picture of his children were delivered via chute, so he was very surprised when Aayla Secura and Obi-Wan opened the door.
"It can't have been a cycle already?" Anakin asked without preamble. He remembered very well the limitations of his imprisonment; once a cycle, he was allowed out of solitary. Once a month, he was permitted an hour of supervised visitation with his children. Once a week, he was permitted to holo-call. After a year there would be another parole hearing, and if his behavior was good enough, his sentence would be commutated he would be released from prison on remand to a penal colony, where he could live relatively freely.
But Jedi didn't have time to make the journey down to the Old Temple every cycle. No one called a murderer. The long stretch of time since his last visit meant his children didn't want to see him, unless time was dilating again and it actually had only been a month. That happened sometimes.
"Get up," Aayla's voice was hard; though Jedi did not hate, she'd hated him ever since her own troops had nearly killed her during Order 66, "you have a holo-call. Fifteen minutes."
The door slid open; usually it was invisible, blended seamlessly into the wall. Anakin always knew where it was, by the grace of the Force, and so was never surprised.
"A holo-call?" he asked out loud to himself, "I wonder who."
Aayla ignored him; she never replied to his questions. Only Obi-Wan did, and the easily-agitated padawans who supervised the visitations.
They didn't lead him up; only around the maze-like Old Temple to another room, where a full size holo-receiver had been set up. The projector was wide on the floor; the hologram would be true to size.
"Time starts now," Aayla said, hand on her lightsaber as she retreated to the corner. As the only other thing alive in the dead of the Force, her presence was obtrusive nonetheless. Anakin glared at her, and she matched his gaze, but his anger was forgotten as a form flickered into view.
Anakin's eyes widened, jaw slack at the full-color vision of a woman sat before him.
And she was sitting; dressed resplendently as always, if slightly more conservatively. Neither of them were young anymore, but she looked like she'd hardly aged a day, except for the new gauntness in her cheeks and small bags under her eyes.
"Padme," he breathed, and his hand lifted of its own accord as if to touch her. He'd never seen a holo like this, in such color definition, so clear that he could see every detail of her face. Her big brown eyes, full pink lips, and heart shaped cheeks. Her expression was like stone, with none of the secret affection and softness she had only ever saved for him. She looked at him as if he was worse than a stranger.
Like he was an enemy. An unknown.
"Anakin," she said, and he'd forgotten what his name sounded like when it fell from her lips; even in enmity, there was no sound more enticing. She saw him, all of him, the monstrous and the beautiful, and she desired him still. He knew it.
They looked at each other. What else was there to say?
"Padme," he gasped. He meant to sound calm, but he was aware that he completely failed. "You look good."
"No thanks to you," she said, but a slight smile belayed her harsh words. "But you know that, don't you, Anakin?"
"I'm sorry," Anakin said, though it wasn't enough, nothing he could do would ever be enough. The words burned falling from his lips.
"Is that all you have to say?" She whispered. "After everything you've done to me and our family?"
"I'm sorry," Anakin repeated, and he was mortified to find tears welling up in his eyes, "and thank you, Padme."
Her regal, smooth expression was unchanged, but he could tell his words gave her pause. He explained.
"You were right," he said, running his hands through his hair as his face flushed with the stress of his thoughts. "Every second that I wasn't drawing on the dark side, you were all I could think about. And when time passed, I realized it was my fault, all of it was my fault. If I hadn't been so stupid, so arrogant...I should have trusted you Padme. I should have trusted the Force. It was only once I trusted you did things become clear. Even now, all these years later...you keep giving me chances I don't deserve. You let my children know me, when I'm hardly a man worth knowing at all. So I won't ask for your forgiveness— I don't deserve it, but know that I am sorry, and I am grateful."
Her jaw tightened a little, and even with her stern face Anakin could see that she was fighting back strong emotion.
"All these years, and everything that you did...the things I was afraid you were going to do...Anakin I've never been more afraid of you than in that moment when I saw you at the Temple," she sighed, and her hard mask fell away, not into the soft affection he knew he would get again and was undeserving of anyway, instead falling into a slumped, exhausted expression of desperation. It was a face that sent chills down his spine, the face his mother made when she thought he wasn't looking, the look of a woman utterly trapped, and resigned to it.
"I've spent my whole life relocating innocents...I've seen the aftermath of war, genocide, mass-extinction, and wanton destruction. I thought I knew what the face of evil looked like. And I didn't see that in you. I saw an unwavering sense of goodness, and kindness, and I thought you really loved me. That's why I married you, you know, even after what you did. You took no pleasure in it. It all came from a place of hurt, and that I could forgive, though it wasn't my place to. I should've never absolved you in the first place, and ever made you think it was okay."
Anakin desperately wished that she was on Coruscant, near to him and not just a flickering vision of the holo-projector. He had spent too many of their years together loving her this way, torn apart by war, by duty, then by ego and fear, and it was all for nothing. He yearned to feel her Force presence, the panacea to all his ills, but he was also a little afraid— would he feel her disgust, her fear, her hatred brush his mind like a thousand feathery needles?
Even that would be preferable, he decided, to the lonesomeness beneath the roar of life that was Galactic City.
He wanted to hold her hands, and sooth her fears; Padme had always been as steady as a rock, unwavering but occasionally prone to fits of hopeless melancholy. He had always been happy to be the one to encourage her, uplift her, empower her to fight her nearly hopeless battles, and she could always drive away the storm, and make clear the sandstorm of thoughts and the roar of the Force in his mind. Through the makeup and the impenetrable guise, Anakin could see the fallible woman beneath the mask, and that woman, his Angel, the mother of his children, was broken.
"I didn't see it in Palpatine, either, so maybe I'm wrong. Maybe all my years of witnessing tragedy meant nothing. I was blind to the seed of evil growing in my own husband," Padme mused, and the process sent a wave of nostalgia over him; ten years since he'd heard her voice, and seen her face, and still, the core of her hadn't changed.
"There was nothing you could have done. It was on me; it was all on me. I let my fear lead me. I chose the Dark Side," Anakin's hand lurched, but he stopped himself. It was only a holo-call. And she wouldn't have wanted to be touched by him, maybe never again. Though his rough, dry hands were clean, he could only remember how she had recoiled from his bloody fists the night he nearly beat Rush Clovis to death in front of her. Just another instance of failure, of fear, ego, and envy guiding him, instead of love, mercy, and the Force.
"You were a coward," Padme was merciless, cold-hearted even as the back bowed and tears gathered in the corners of Anakin's eyes as he nodded in agreement. "But that's all in the past."
"Padme?" he asked. "What do you mean?"
Her lips tightened, before her whole body seemed to sag. "I...I need you," she sighed. "I need your help."
It hurt, that it sounded like it pained her, when he used to be the first person she would call. Anakin did not let that phase him. "Anything," he said, and he meant the word with everything he had to give.
"I agree that you owe our children anything you can give," Padme said, "That's why I hired Minure Saba."
"Oh?"
"You might know her better as my old handmaiden Sabe," Padme said, "With her as your legal counsel, you'll be able to be released on parole independently to a penal colony."
"The Jedi didn't approve you as custodian," Anakin remembered the process. He had no legal counsel on file, having represented himself before the Republic Court seven years prior. At every motion, his attempts to appeal for parole were obstructed.
Three years ago, he had a Force vision. In it, he saw his children in a lovely but humble manor. Alderaan, he knew. Both had potential in the Force, but neither sensed his gaze. Padme was laid on a chaise, her face thin, wan and pale.
The images burned his eyes, and the knowledge that poured into him scoured his mind. Like a brand, he was presented with a viewport into the present, far, far away, and though his family was together, they suffered.
Sitting there, her large, dark eyes bright with unshed tears that Anakin knew wouldn't fall, she clenched her jaw. "I hate that I need you. I thought I would be enough. That in this, at least, justice would finally be served. But I need you. Your children need you."
Obi-Wan had come, silent and smug as always, to witness Anakin's periodic madness and lucidity. Sometimes, he would bring him books, puzzles, or water. On the rarest of days, when Anakin was too exhausted to be wrathful, they would meditate together, and he would answer one question.
Anakin had demanded to see his children. Letters and pictures weren't enough.
"You'll see your children the day the Senate grants you parole," he had said in a kindly tone that might as well have been a sneer, because the I'll make sure that never happens was well implied.
When the next Padawan on watch came to deliver his weekly supply of flimsi and commissary, he wrote a letter to the Senate requesting an appeal to file for parole. He wrote one daily, and every letter mysteriously vanished.
Seven years ago, all Padme wanted was for him to go away, and so he had, away to the penitentiary to rot in a cell and die for his crimes.
But that vision had changed everything, and after feeling his children in the Force, feeling Padme waste away like a lake in the desert, he knew that he would accomplish nothing if he didn't get out. This time, the Force's warnings would not go unheeded. The Jedi had tried at every step to impede him, but the power of his celebrity ensured all he needed was one letter to reach the Senate's ear.
A letter written in code to Ahsoka had garnered no response, but six months later he was granted a parole hearing. It took almost two years, but in his first week on parole he'd been granted public visitation rights.
"Yes, well," Padme sighed. "I never divorced you, you know. Never annulled our marriage. Did you ever wonder why?"
"For once, I didn't think it was worth it to question a good thing." Anakin wanted to smack himself for joking. Nervous sweat beaded on his upper lip.
"I knew there was still good in you," she narrowed her eyes. "So prove me right, Anakin. Counselor Saba is going to find you someone the Jedi have to accept as a custodian, and they'll release you to a penal colony."
That look, the significant look. She wanted something from him.
"What do you mean, release? I've got fifteen more years to go."
Her eyes widened, then narrowed. "Anakin, you're on parole. You should be released into the general population. Are you telling me you're still in prison?"
The anger welled up, pure rage that set his body alight, that opened all the little pores in his consciousness that the Dark Side yearned to rush in through. The Jedi had lied once again...and he was most angry at himself for falling for it.
"They only let me out to see the twins," he muttered, running his flesh hand through his hair. "I thought…"
She grimaced. "I...shit." Padme scrubbed her face. "Minure'll take care of this. And next ten-day—"
"I'll be seeing the children," the memory of Leia's black eyes, and Luke's bright one chased away the darkness, and gazing into the eyes of his Angel, even through a holo, buried it once more.
He was a servant of the Force, and the Dark side could never use him again. He had too much to lose to be its slave.
"And me. I'll be coming to Coruscant to see you."
Padme was out for blood, and Anakin didn't know what he'd said that had set her on the warpath, but woe betide her target, he thought warmly. The vision of her passion was the most glorious thing he'd ever beheld.
"Me? What brought this change on?"
The word stuck in her throat. "You don't understand, Anakin. Children love unconditionally. You don't have to prove yourself worthy of it to have it. To abuse it and lose it, to take advantage of a child's impressionable mind...that is pure evil. And Luke loves you, so it's not too late for you. I won't love you unconditionally anymore. I can't. But if you really consider yourself their father—"
"I am their father," Anakin shot back, "and no law nor walls, nor childish rebellion can change that. They can call themselves whatever name they like, and choose to turn away from me or choose to acknowledge the truth. They are mine either way."
"Good," she deflated, all righteous anger gone out. "Good, that's perfect. Prove it to me, then."
A feeling, like a cornerstone slightly out of place, a shaky foundation. Something was wrong, something Padme wasn't telling him. Something he didn't even know to ask.
"Why are you asking me this, Padme? What are you hiding?" Anakin murmured, probing, carefully opening up his mind to the massive storm of the Living Force and riding through, horribly aware of the feelings and spirit of every being from the dead underworld of Coruscant to the Outer Core. She was far, but not as far as Naboo, on Alderaan, and she was alone. A small villa by the water, in her chambers with the door shut and the windows closed.
She couldn't feel him, she wasn't sensitive enough, but every sentient had a perception of life, and could feel when they were being watched. He watched her twitch on the holo-call as he caught the eddies of her emotion. Fear, and a terrible, terrible rage, as terrible as any of Anakin's own.
His life belonged to the Force, and for once, it wanted what he wanted. He'd wanted to kill Obi-Wan all those years ago and the Force rebuked him. In his cell, he dreamt of killing the Padawan and the social worker and kidnapping his own children and wife; the Force stopped him. But, gladly the Force would serve him in destroying Padme's enemies, otherwise it wouldn't have shown her to him.
"Minure will arrange for a custodian for you. You're of no use to me- to them- rotting in a cell. It's...it's more than you deserve. The Republic was falling apart, everything was falling apart," she gazed at him, considering. Through the Force he pushed, but he could feel no more than the murky complexity of her emotions. "Next ten-day?"
"Next ten-day," Anakin promised, and long forgotten habit made him raise his hand, as if to touch her—
Her pale hands, flesh-colored in the new holo-style, passed through his own, an illusion.
They were quiet for a long time, just touching, and Anakin relished in the churning waves of her conflict. Like a crystal-clear signal through the communicator fuzz, he felt it; a small well of affection, dredged up by nostalgia, and there it lay, deep in her heart, a bitter, twisted love.
"I'll be seeing you, Annie," she whispered, and clicked off quickly, as if she didn't trust herself if she didn't do it right that instant.
With her image as a foci gone, Anakin lost her spirit in the Force, and doubled over, gasping, as the roar of the city-planet rushed back like a broken dam. It swept through his mind and almost took him with it, and tears welled up in the corners of his eyes at the pain.
Whatever the next ten-day brought, he was certain he wouldn't like it.
Do it for Luke, Leia chanted relentlessly to herself. It's for your brother, for your stupid, sentimental, soft-hearted older brother. Do it for Luke.
Master Kenobi had said her biological father was easy to love. She didn't really believe it, but if his words proved that there was something worth saving, something that had so enraptured all the people she loved dearly…
But he was a madman, through and through. She had started with the oldest legible letter; not all of them were written in aurebesh, but rather some sprawling short-hand she couldn't decipher. The man could be awfully verbose, and sometimes Leia struggled to understand what he meant, but all of his senseless words were disturbing. Two years of nightmare-inducing nonsense, and suddenly, one mostly coherent letter, dated about three years ago.
Dear Luke and Leia,
It is a story my mother told me during our darkest days; she does not know I remember, and I have only ever told my Angel, and now I will tell you for now I understand the vision of my past tells me also your future.
I was born when a star died; a white binary star, angry and hot and pale, bending its light blue like my eyes, like your eyes. It burned, and burned, swelling and swallowing its satellites, the planets from it they had derived life, the asteroids and moons and wandering comets, in its hunger it swallowed all, and when it burned with such power that it could swallow no more, it turned on its lover in space and imploded on itself, burning out, then collapsing in, and its darkness became a yawning hole that to this day sucks dry the star it had once shared its burning with.
That light blinded my mother, and on the spaceport she was stolen from it revealed all to her, and in the wake of its destruction she saw the worlds that were and the worlds that would be. The light of that dying star had stolen from her the lies fed to her by her senses and like a parasite, invaded her; in the form of a supergiant, it would rise again, cold and dark and mortal, hungry and desiring anything that would fill it as well as the worlds it had once birthed and the stars it had eaten. Alive, but empty. Driven by desire, and inexorably pulling all precious things towards its heart, using them up and up and up until nothing more remains.
When my mother's luminous being was enslaved, wrapped in mortal form once more, she pushed from her body in a pen this monstrous being that is me. And the two suns rose on high noon, and she knew me for what I was, and she knew that to save her own life from consumption, she would let me go.
And like the star that burned out, I have held on tightly, and so destroyed everything I have loved. But I will not destroy you, my children, for your forms are like that of gods. Greater than I, or your mother, or the stars. A mortal incarnation of the Force itself. Like my mother, I have seen the light. I have been blinded, I have no senses but that which the Force gives me. I see the truth of you, dear son, the blinding light that destroys all, reveals all, the truth, the unifying wisdom of a new, ascendant age; a seeker of the mysteries of the Force of the universe. I see you, beloved daughter, a conqueror, a queen, a most righteous call to arms, the utter destruction of the unjust; a merciful and truly blind divine judge.
And you are mine; you came from me, and if I could I would pull you close, and I wonder if you would flourish or if you would suffocate under the weight of my affections. But fear not, for I would raze the galaxy and put atop a pedestal you, and remake the universe as you desired. I have the power you have not, but the Force is truly awesome, because for my wretched being it found the most lovely Angel in the galaxy and embodied perfect beings in my children.
When the time comes, surely you will face your destiny, as I face mine, but in my hands you will not suffer. I am powerful as my mother was powerless, I will destroy your enemies, I will stand steadfast behind you, and be the saber and gavel you need to mete out your justice. I will vanquish your enemies, and protect you from all harm, and obey only the will of the Force and find my glory in penitence.
Forever and always,
Your Father
How anyone could read the raving words of a madman and feel anything other than pity, Leia didn't know. It was almost relieving, even, that she was right to condemn her biological father. Knowing what thoughts laid in his head as he gazed at her, through her, only inspired a growing well of fear where before there had only been indignation.
But the days marched onward, and before she knew it, Bail was dumping them on a ship to Coruscant, where the social worker would deliver them right into the presence of Anakin Skywalker.
Long chapter is long. Anakin's POV is one of the first ones I wrote (and wow, I did not expect there to be 8 chapters between his povs lol). Also, in case a story about child custody in a space opera doesn't make it obvious, this is an AU. AU=alternate universe, which means I can do whatever the fuck I like.
If you dig it, leave a review! If not, thanks for reading this far.
YellowWomanontheBrink
06/17/2021
8:51PM
