_Static in the Air_
It wasn't uncommon for women to show up at the orphanage to make use of the nearby midwives and clean facilities. It was an easy reference point for the midwives to find. So no one was surprised when the pregnant woman showed up on New Year's Eve.
As one of the older children Anakin was allowed to stay awake to welcome in the new year. Each child over eight was sent to their room with a small packet of sweets (generously donated and saved from Christmas). Most of the children, Anakin suspected, had already fallen asleep waiting for the large grandfather clock in the front of the building to chime midnight.
Anakin hadn't. He felt something in the air. Something that was calling to him. Something like the edge he felt as a young man before battle. Something vibrating the air around him. It was as though the world had been painted in pale shades of gray until that moment and now some Great Artist had lifted up his paintbrush. It was a moment before something happened.
He needed to move. His legs itched to run. But there were three boys in his room and children needed sleep. He quietly paced the room, walking back and forth like a swinging pendulum. By ten, that wasn't enough and he moved on to the complicated stretches he'd learned as a padawan, in preparation for learning the lightsaber. By ten thirty, he was in the hallway, hands behind his back as he marched back and forth as he once had on the observation deck of one of his space ships. At eleven, Vader heard the grumble and bustle downstairs as the women in charge left their small party to deal with the business that had arrived on their front step.
He moved down to the stairs and watched the woman enter.
She was filthy. She was in pain. She would die. Anakin saw it as clearly as he saw her. She would die.
He ghosted into the room, ignored by the women rushing around. He watched the birth with a kind of emotional blankness that was unhealthy. (He forced dark dream images of Padme's death from his mind. He forced all emotion from his mind.) He heard the woman's last words. He watched her stop breathing.
This was when the orphanage workers noticed he was there.
"I could take the baby up to the nursery," He offered. The woman, Miss Leach, did a double take to hear him speak so loudly. But she refused on virtue of the dirty little newborn needing to be cleaned and fed.
He watched something small, pale and pink and bloody, be placed into the gray basin to wash. It cried out with strong lungs. As Anakin moved over to the basin, to get a better look, he saw small legs twisting against the tiny tub, splashing amid water.
For a moment, time did not matter. For a moment the world had stopped moving. For a moment Anakin saw a masterpiece being made, as life rose up and filled the world with color.
He persuaded the Nurse to let him help. No one really wanted to work to much that night and they had a funeral to arrange as well. And a ten year old could hold a weak newborn as well as a bed could.
By the early morning Tom Marvolo Riddle was comfortably wrapped in a soft worn blanket and resting in the small arms of Anakin Skywalker, with a warm bottle for feeding him resting near them. Anakin held the baby as close as he could in the dawn light, tracing the small features of the blotchy face, and he thought of redemption.
The half-brother he'd never known had raised Luke. His fiercest political enemy had raised Leia. He himself was brought up by Obi-Wan. And in return. . . Owen and his family home burned at the hands of Imperial soldiers (if he remembered the report right). Alderaan had been destroyed in front of Leia as he watched. And, of course, Obi-Wan . . .
He could do nothing for his children now. Nor had he found Obi-Wan's reincarnation. But he did have the force- or something like it- telling him that he needed to watch this child. He was to take care of this child. And anything that happened to Anakin because of it . . . well, it was only fair that he receive the treatment he gave wasn't it? Like a dark and broken version of the golden rule he'd been taught in this galaxy's schools and churches.
There was something dark in this child. And Vader wasn't certain if he was there to try to save him or to watch him fall. But he was certain that any failure or punishment he received would be just.
That year was a strange one, all the nurses agreed. Something in the air felt heavy, like electricity waiting to turn into lightning.
Amos, the quiet boy, had adopted the quiet new year's eve baby. Other boys tried to taunt and mock the newly ten year old boy, but it was impossible to get a reaction from him. And a few months after he turned ten, he was moved to his own room in Cole's orphanage, one near the nursery, so he could take care of the baby as much as he wanted. The Orphanage workers didn't mind Amos's care for the child. It was one more child off their to-do list after all.
All the children got tutored by the a priest from the nearest church three days a week. The classes started up again in the middle of January. Amos excelled at his lessons even while carrying the lumpy newborn baby. The priest made him sit in the back- dismissing him as simple for a few months. As the child grew larger and louder, the Priest also noted that the older boy was doing excellent work. It lead to the first of many fights between Amos and an Adult over his baby.
"See here," the priest finally said after many attempts to convince the boy to leave the Baby in the nursery. "The child is big enough to stay in the nursery alone. And you have a chance to go to a real school, Amos. Not just learn to read and write with me, but to study with some other children at a school and maybe win a scholarship to a boarding school some day."
"That's nice," Amos said in the stubborn way most people didn't hear from him anymore. He had little in this life to be stubborn about. "But I don't want to go to school. I want to take care of the baby."
The adult began, again, to list the benefits of scholarship. And the potential that could come of taking care of himself first.
If Anakin had had this option when he had been a child the first time, then the baby would have grown up alone. But this wasn't Anakin's first go-around. He was going to raise him, because he could feel the call of destiny around him. Or maybe it was just his own desire for a family. Or maybe he was an old man who had no desire to go back to re-learn things in a classroom when he could raise a child for the first time. In any case, no one was going to be able to talk him into leaving the infant.
"You could grow up to be a doctor and help lots of little children. You could graduate and get a job that would help the baby or other children get ahead in life. There are lots of things you could do if you had an education. There aren't that many options for an orphan without an education."
"That's too bad," the former commander of galaxies and genocidal wife-killing vengeful cyborg said. And in his voice was heard the steal and fire of the hard soul he was. "Since I'm not going."
And nothing the head of the orphanage or the workers or the priest said could change his mind.
They did, however, paint an uncomfortable picture of Amos's future. Raising a baby wouldn't be easy in the late 1920's. Certainly not for a ten year old. And even if Anakin was calmer, happier and more at peace, he was still the same person who had given up everything he believed in and everyone he cared for in an attempt to save his wife and child (children). He wanted to be able to offer the baby who was breaking his teeth on Amos's fingers something more. He wanted to protect him. He wanted to give him everything he could, and supply him with every opportunity.
But the baby couldn't be left alone in a nursery. Every instinct and education Anakin had had in his first life told him that new children needed full human care almost constantly for healthy development. From a society that depended on robots and machines and cyborgs so heavily, Anakin knew exactly what tasks had to be given to living creatures rather than machines.
So Anakin crushed his personal ambition. He read books that the priest lent him (in an attempt to convince him to apply for scholarships) aloud to the child. He let the small one lay on top of his bed or on his floor while he practiced the math of his old life aloud. He did his chores with one eye on little Tom Riddle as he learned first to roll over, then to sit up, then to crawl.
And at night, when no one was paying any attention, Anakin snuck Tom into his room and painted the walls with those lights and colors that no one else could make. (This was not the force. This was something separate, something strange.)
Tom learned quickly for a baby. At a year old his baby sounds were shaping into short words. He was beginning to react to outsiders with enthusiasm he hadn't shown before (being a shy baby according to the orphanage workers and an apathetic one according to Anakin). Anakin was watching him with great worry as he began to walk and run faster than others of his age.
As Tom grew, Anakin began to play with the thing that was not the force. Tom never seemed happier than when Anakin used the power around him. Little things, like making a stone glow or a twig blossom, would make the baby smile. Tom's first laugh, at the old age of sixteen months, was on the day Tom first showed his own power.
Anakin had a small toy he'd made Tom out of wire (he'd found on the streets) and a piece of wood (he'd found in a closet as a discarded part of a handle). It had originally been to help Tom while he was teething, but had long since earned a name, a painted on face, and a bit of cloth (from a thrown out rag) as clothing. Tom it carried around with him and used it to hit people who didn't pay him enough attention. (The Adults thought it was cute. Anakin was sure that Tom was just too lazy to talk to people.)
One afternoon, Anakin forgot to put the wood toy thing into the bed with Tom when he put him in his own bed for a nap. Tom made a few noises of displeasure that Anakin ignored in favor of reading an adventure story that he'd borrowed. A particularly loud grunt caught his attention, though. He looked up just in time to see toy fly from where it had been lying under Anakin's jacket. He paused and looked at Tom, who had wrapped an arm around it and was yawning again.
He now understood his mother's insistence that he never do that in front of other people. It was unnerving, even though Anakin knew (sort of) what had happened.
He didn't read any more during that naptime. He was too busy wondering what he should do with a baby that didn't understand what 'stop' meant, let alone 'if you do that then they will call you a witch and kick you out of the orphanage and we will live on the streets and not have food and why did I ever think I was going to be able to be a father- It's all my fault I should never have shown you my tricks- Oh no what am I going to do, besides fail completely- because I certainly will do that.'
He still hadn't come up with a way to hide the magic besides keeping Tom away from the other children by the time June rolled around.
And it was in that June of 1928, that Amos Walker finally learned about magic.
It really didn't help as much as it should have.