Full Summary: Anakin couldn't blame Padmé for wanting to be rid of him; she deserved much better than him. That didn't make it any easier to hold onto the shattered pieces of himself following their separation, or to keep Obi-Wan and the Jedi Council from noticing that he could barely control his emotions. Anakin thought that going on the covert mission to Arkanis would give him enough time alone to pull himself back together before the Council noticed that he was breaking apart. But first he would need to figure out how to begin reconstructing Anakin Skywalker without Padmé Admidala, and how to be the Chosen One when he was a hairsbreadth from falling.
Author's Note: So here I am beginning to post a new story when I already have two others I am actively working on. I can't get this one out of my head, and every time I try to write for Sirius or Tom I end up thinking up things for my Anakin story and needing to get them out before I can continue with the story I'm supposed to be working on. So here we are.
A note on Star Wars lore: I will be drawing heavily and indiscriminately from canon and legends (pre-Disney and post-Disney). Also I love the cursey words and don't need to keep this PG-13, so I will mostly be using real-life curse words instead of their Star Wars equivalents.
This story starts towards the end of The Clone Wars, "The Rise of Clovis," immediately after Padmé asked for a separation and Anakin drove away in his speeder.
It was all wrong. Everything had fallen apart. Anakin pushed his speeder easily twice the legal limit, weaving in and out of traffic almost entirely on autopilot.
Padmé had broken up with him. She had called it a separation, said they shouldn't see each other for a while, but he knew what that meant. They hardly ever saw each other as it was, between Anakin's deployments and Padmé's travels on behalf of the senate. She never wanted to see him again.
Her words repeated on a constant loop in his mind. "This marriage is not a marriage, Anakin."
The Force, ever present in his mind, pulsed in warning and he narrowly avoided sideswiping a speeder that was merging into the lane he'd just swerved into.
And all because of Rush fucking Clovis. Anakin had known from the start that there was something off about the man, and Padmé's explanation of their history had roused his suspicions even further. Not suspicions of Padmé, exactly, but rather suspicions about exactly what sort of man Clovis was if being rejected romantically caused him to go off in a snit and not speak to the woman for seven years. Not to mention the fact that he had been accused of being a Separatist spy.
Anakin hadn't been wrong. Even though Clovis and Padmé hadn't spoken for nearly a decade, the Sithspawn had immediately jumped to the conclusion that Padmé must be getting in touch with him because she had suddenly changed her mind about wanting to fuck him. He had immediately begun taking physical liberties with her, kissing her face and trying to kiss her lips.
Then, when he had realized that Padmé had been poisoned, Clovis's reaction had been to hold her life hostage in exchange for the return of the disk that would prove he was working with the Separatists.
"We said at the beginning that this could be a terrible mistake…. Other people who are married have everything that we don't."
Padmé never listened to Anakin's opinions unless they lined up perfectly with her own. He pushed his speeder into a narrow space between two others and immediately nosed into a dive to slot into a gap in the lane below, letting out a growl of frustration that was more at his wife than at the abysmal traffic. He had known two years prior that it was a bad idea for Padmé to spy on Clovis and had asked her not to say yes, but she hadn't listened to him and had done it anyway. She had almost died, and Clovis had seemed willing to let her.
He had known that it would be an even worse idea for Padmé to involve herself with Clovis again—Anakin had just had to bail her out of jail for stealing files with Clovis, for pity's sake!—but when he had tried to talk about it with her she had dismissed his concerns so easily that he'd lost his temper and tried to forbid her from working with Clovis. As if demanding things of Padmé had ever worked. If she didn't care all that much about Anakin's concerns over her safety, then she really didn't care for his demands that she not deliberately put herself in danger.
He was an idiot.
He still wasn't wrong, though.
Despite Padmé's last encounters with Clovis ending with the man threatening to let her die to save his own reputation and getting her arrested, Clovis had taken the first opportunity to try to force himself on her again.
And Anakin had just… snapped. He knew that. He shouldn't have fought Clovis in the first place, and even if he had fought him he shouldn't have let himself lose control. Even without using the Force, it could never have been anywhere near a fair fight.
What would he have done if he'd killed Clovis? What would Padmé have done?
"Like it or not, our relationship is built on lies and deception. No relationship can survive that."
Anakin sighed and let his head slump forward for just a moment, until the Force pulsed again and he jerked his head up and pushed forward on the yoke just in time to avoid slamming into the line of speeders in front of him, which had mysteriously slowed. He allowed himself to freefall for several seconds, before throwing the speeder sideways and screeching to a halt on a landing pad in front of a shop window that was brightly lit despite it being the middle of the night.
He took several deep breaths and tried to clear his thoughts, to release the worst of his feelings into the Force, but that had never really worked for him before and it certainly wasn't now.
He couldn't go back to the Temple and face the Council. If he had to deal with Obi-Wan trying to pry out of him what was wrong, he was going to scream. If Mace Windu opened his mouth, Anakin was liable to strangle him until his smug, judgmental face turned as purple as his lightsaber.
"I don't know who's in there sometimes."
Plus he already felt bad enough about himself as it was, after hearing what his wife had to say about him. The last thing he needed was to be assaulted by the Jedi Masters' distrust and dislike of him. He did not have the mental fortitude at the moment to block their feelings from his mind (not that he was ever able to shield himself completely).
Decision made, he hit the throttle and made an abrupt u-turn, navigating the wrong way through oncoming traffic until he found an opening and merged into the opposite lane that would take him to the mooring tower where his new flagship, the Integrity, was docked.
There was a skeleton crew of clone troopers guarding the ship. Most of them were suspiciously watching the small army of droids and engineers who were performing maintenance while the star destroyer was docked and didn't notice their general skulking past them in the shadows. He couldn't avoid the few clones he met in the narrow corridors of the residential quarters, but fortunately there were none that Anakin recognized by name or who required more than a stiff acknowledgment of their salutes. He gratefully slipped into his quarters without having had to talk to anyone and collapsed back against the door as soon as it slid closed.
He'd done enough talking tonight to last a lifetime.
"I'm not happy anymore," Padmé had said. "I don't feel safe."
If she had only been unhappy, Anakin would have moved planets to make her happy again. He would have done anything she wanted. But that wasn't all. She was afraid. Of him. He didn't think there was anything he could do about that. Even if he left the Jedi Order, even if he stopped fighting in the war, even if he tried not to use the Force, he would still be who he was.
Padmé deserved better. She had always deserved better than a former slave, and better than someone she couldn't be with openly. But now… the last thing she deserved was someone she didn't trust with her own safety, someone who scared her.
If she had actually been interested in Clovis, or if her only grievance had been the secrecy surrounding their relationship, or if she had given him any other external enemy that he could fight, then Anakin would have stopped at nothing to fight for her. But she had made it clear that Anakin himself was the problem, and he was at a loss to know how to fight himself.
"I think it's best if we don't see each other anymore."
Anakin's heart was shattering into pieces in his chest, but he was determined to do what Padmé had asked. He was not like Rush Clovis. He wouldn't force his attentions on her. If she didn't want to see him again, she would never have to.
Anakin had never gotten the hang of meditation. His own master, along with various other Jedi Masters, had tried everything from patient cajoling to frustrated demands that he put in more effort, but effort had never been the problem. The problem was that his presence in the Force was blinding, a supernova that burned away anything else and could not be contained, not even by Anakin himself.
He had been terrified his own power when he was younger, and even now that he had embraced it that didn't mean he could stand the blinding light of looking inward.
Other than having moved away from his mother to live with a bunch of Jedi Masters whose main objective seemed to be letting him know how problematic it was that he'd grown up knowing his mother's love, one of the most frightening aspects of beginning his Jedi training had been the things he had begun experiencing as soon as he learned how to open himself up to the Force. As a young child on Tatooine, he had occasionally had bad dreams or, in moments of particularly heightened emotion, had odd things happen around him. However, without training, his primary experiences with the Force had been the precognition that allowed him to pod race and his inexplicable genius with technology.
As soon as he had begun training and had deliberately opened himself up to the Force, he had felt like an explosion had been triggered inside him and had just never stopped going off.
It had taken years for the night terrors to subside, and he had rebelled against meditation with all the tenacity a recently freed child-slave could muster to defy authority figures that he wasn't entirely sure wouldn't beat him or starve him. (It had taken Obi-Wan ages to figure out that Anakin didn't know he wouldn't be physically punished… unless one counted mandated meditation a physical punishment.)
There were only a handful of things that gave him any relief in his waking hours—giving over his senses to the Force when he was fighting or flying, making love with Padmé, and distracting his mind with a tinkering project sufficiently complex to allow him to enter some form of moving meditation.
Fighting was out, since he didn't trust himself not to turn a simple sparring session into an actual slaughter if he let go of his tightly held reins and lost himself to instinct.
He doubted that Coruscant Air Traffic Control would let him fly around Coruscanti airspace in his starfighter without comment.
And the less said about Padmé the better….
Thus, when Obi-Wan finally found him, Anakin had already completely reworked the sensor arrays in his mechanical arm, rewired his lightsaber, and was three-fourths of the way through building a maintenance droid from scratch.
"Anakin," said Obi-Wan in the half-relieved, half-suffering tone he seemed to reserve for his former Padawan, "I have been calling your comlink all afternoon!"
The sudden intrusion yanked Anakin out of his quasi-meditative state, and he barely kept himself from crushing the half dozen delicate metal parts he was manipulating with the Force at that moment. He levitated them away from anything important and set them down on his workbench with a series of clanks, far less controlled than he would have liked. A quick glance at the clock sitting on the ledge built into the wall behind his bunk told him that it had been nearly a full day since he'd left his wife's apartment and retreated to the Integrity.
"Anakin?" Obi-wan pressed after a few long seconds of silence.
"I'm sorry, Obi-Wan," he replied, though he was not sorry at all. A quick probe with the Force did not reveal his communicator anywhere on his person or in his room. "I must have let my comlink in my speeder."
His friend did not seem impressed. Not that he ever seemed impressed by Anakin anymore. He raised a skeptical eyebrow, accentuating the faint lines that had recently started to develop on his forehead.
"You forgot."
Anakin stood and turned to face Obi-Wan, wincing at the pain in his neck, back, and shoulders from having spent countless hours hunched over his workbench. He sat back on the edge of the table so that he was looking straight ahead at Obi-Wan rather than down at him.
"Yes. I don't know what else you want me to say."
"It isn't about what I want you to say!" exclaimed the other man, then he briefly closed his eyes and his breath stilled for several moments and Anakin knew that he was trying to release his frustration into the Force. When he opened his gray-blue eyes again, his expression was more curious than angry. "Anakin, what happened with Clovis?"
"What do you mean?" It was a struggle to keep his voice level, but Anakin thought he did pretty well.
Surely Obi-Wan didn't know about him fighting with Clovis (or rather beating him to a bloody pulp)—Padmé wouldn't have told him, would she? And Obi-Wan wouldn't have spoken to Clovis himself, would he? No, if he knew then he would have immediately laid into Anakin about it. He wouldn't be asking for Anakin's side so calmly.
His former master huffed in disbelief. "I mean what happened between yesterday and today to elevate Rush Clovis from Separatist spy to head of the Intergalactic Banking Clan."
"What?" Anakin croaked before he could stop himself.
"You didn't know?" asked Obi-Wan, surprise coloring his tone. "I thought you planned to keep an eye on him."
"I—I did. I mean—" There was a terrible screeching sound, and Anakin realized that he had squeezed the edge of his workbench so tightly that he had bent it in his mechanical hand. He released his grip and stared dumbly at the twisted metal.
He felt Obi-Wan's presence directly in front of him a moment before the man's hand landed gently on his shoulder. Anakin lifted his gaze to peer into Obi-Wan's familiar face and judgmental eyes.
"What happened?" Obi-Wan asked again, more softly this time.
Anakin swallowed once, twice, and finally managed to offer a truncated explanation. "When I showed up he was trying to kiss Padmé, and we argued, and she told me to leave."
"Anakin, we talked about this." Obi-Wan sighed and squeezed Anakin's shoulder. "I understand on some level how difficult it is, but you promised me that you wouldn't let your feelings for Senator Amidala affect how you carry out your duties, no matter what developed between her and Clovis."
Anakin thought it was a bit of stretch to say that he'd promised anything during their conversation a couple of days prior. It was more like Obi-Wan had talked at him about his responsibilities to the Jedi Order, and Anakin had denied that there was anything between either Padmé and himself or between Padmé and Clovis that would cause a problem. Still, what was he going to do, correct Obi-Wan's misperception? Tell the Jedi Master that actually the senator was his secret wife who had asked for a separation last night, after he'd nearly killed her friend (or whatever he was), and Anakin had let that affect him just a little bit?
No, it was much better to let Obi-Wan continue thinking that Padmé had entered into a romantic relationship with Clovis and that Anakin was jealous.
Obi-Wan must have taken Anakin's extended silence as confirmation, because he sighed and reflexively stroked his beard. "Anakin… I know that I have repeated this ad nauseum, but part of the Jedi way is not letting emotion cloud your better judgment."
Anakin clenched his jaw and gritted out, "I know."
"Clearly for you there is a difference between knowing and doing," Obi-Wan pointed out wryly. "Maybe this is for the best, Anakin. This… infatuation you have for Senator Amidala can only lead you astray."
"I don't want to talk about it," Anakin tried to break in, but Obi-Wan was on a roll at that point and didn't seem to notice—or care about—his distress.
"I worry for you, Anakin, that you still struggle so much with the most basic tenets of the Jedi Order," he continued. "The Integrity is scheduled for maintenance through the end of next week. I think it would do you a world of good to return to the Temple and use this opportunity to meditate and re-center your mind."
Anakin clenched his fists so tightly that the leather glove encasing his metal hand creaked audibly, and finally Obi-Wan seemed to notice that perhaps he had not taken the correct approach.
"Anak—" he began, but Anakin cut him off, something in his tone bringing the Jedi Master up short.
"Great idea. You always know just the thing to help me."
Obi-Wan frowned. "Anakin…"
"We better go, master," continued Anakin, spitting out the title with such venom that Obi-Wan's lips popped open in surprise. "We wouldn't want me to go astray."
He shoved his way past Obi-Wan and reached the door in a stride and a half, pausing only long enough for the door to slide open but not at all to heed Obi-Wan calling his name. By the time Anakin was stalking across the hangar Obi-Wan had caught up with him, but he had stopped trying to talk to him. Each of them got into his own speeder without speaking to the other, and Anakin didn't wait for Obi-Wan before he screeched out of the ship at a frankly reckless speed.
Life at the Temple had always been pretty awful for Anakin. Growing up, the younglings and Padawans had hated him, mostly out of jealousy and fear. The Jedi Masters had not been able to—or just had not bothered to—conceal their distrust and suspicion of him. His instructors had almost uniformly made him feel bad about himself, either because they looked down on him for not knowing how to read or write or other basic skills, or because they had such high expectations of the Chosen One that it was impossible for him to meet them.
He had learned to cope with most of those issues over the years.
What he had never learned to cope with was the sheer boredom of most of his waking hours. Other than brief hours spent training with lightsabers or Force skills, life at the Temple was exactly the kind of sedate, structured existence that left Anakin bored out of his mind.
Obviously things were a lot better now than when he had been a Padawan. Back then, whenever he and Obi-Wan weren't away on a mission, his days had been scheduled down to the hour and he had very little free time. At least now he could more or less schedule himself, most of the time. Still, the Temple had set hours for meals, for meditation, for the library, and for just about everything else.
And Anakin didn't even have Ahsoka to focus on anymore. He had spent hours teaching her and just generally spending time with her, but she was gone now and he was alone again.
Obi-Wan was no help. Anytime Anakin saw the man, the only thing he wanted to talk about was how Anakin's meditation was going. Anakin knew that he was being so persistent out of genuine worry, but he was not as convinced now as he may have been in the past that Obi-Wan's worry was over Anakin's well-being as opposed to the risk Anakin posed.
Also his meditation was not going well. Remotely. At all.
By the third day he had finished almost all of the projects he had on his list and given R2-D2 the most thorough maintenance and oil bath the droid had probably ever had, so he had spent most of the morning in the training ground mindlessly going through katas over and over in an attempt to exhaust himself enough to finally get some quality sleep. Unfortunately, his body was too well conditioned from fighting in real battles that lasted for hours or sometimes even days without much stopping. Even after several hours, all he had to show for his efforts was a sweaty tunic sticking uncomfortably to his torso.
After he finished going through Form V for the third time, he decided to call it quits. He had clipped his lightsaber onto his belt and taken a long drink of water before he noticed the eyes on him. He had been peripherally aware of the class when they had come into the training ground some time ago while he was going through Form II, but he had not focused any of his attention on them.
Now he turned to see a dozen or so younglings standing quietly about twenty meters away in two neat lines, watching him with wide eyes. Their instructor, an older Cosian man, raised an arm to hail Anakin over, and with an internal sigh he began to trudge towards them.
"Well done, Knight Skywalker!" proclaimed the Jedi Master as soon as Anakin was near enough that he didn't need to shout. "My class has benefitted greatly from watching you this morning."
"Thank you, Master Sinube," Anakin replied, a certain, small amount of pride creeping through him at the praise. He turned to scan the rows of children. "Hello, younglings."
"Hello, Knight Skywalker," they all replied in unison, as if they had practiced it.
An expression that may have been a smile twitched across Sinube's reptilian face. "The younglings have long desired to speak with you, since they witnessed your duel with Barriss Offee last month."
"Have they?" asked Anakin, and that seemed to open the flood gates. He suddenly found himself surrounded on three sides by eager little faces and bouncing bodies.
"Why did you switch from two lightsabers to one in the middle of the duel?" asked a young Duros boy.
"How come you pulled back when you were just about to break her guard?" demanded a human girl.
Anakin blinked and looked to Master Sinube for help. Yes, that was definitely amusement on the Jedi Master's face. He made no move to intervene.
"Okay, okay!" Anakin exclaimed, holding up a hand to silence them so that he could get a word in edgewise. "I switched from two lightsabers to one because I wanted to use heavy strikes to take advantage of my size and strength and exhaust her. And I pulled back instead of breaking her guard because my intention was to arrest her and make her speak at a trial. If I had injured her too badly, she wouldn't have been able to do that."
Another barrage of questions immediately followed. Anakin allowed himself to close his eyes briefly to center himself in the Force, resigned to his fate.
He spent another half an hour in the training ground answering every question imaginable, ranging from what was his favorite form to why his clothes were so dark, before Master Sinube finally corralled his younglings and herded them off for the midday meal. By the time Anakin had made his way back through the maze of corridors in the Temple to his quarters, his skin was beginning to itch beneath his still-damp tunic and his stomach was growling insistently.
He was internally debating whether it would be preferable to shower while hungry or to eat while sweaty when he noticed his comlink blinking on his bedside table. He had ignored at least six calls from Chancellor Palpatine over the last three days, because Anakin was unwilling to talk about what had happened and unable to face the idea of disappointing the man by his refusal. But he checked the comlink reflexively to make sure the call hadn't been from someone else, and he nearly dropped it in surprise.
He had missed a call from Padmé.
Anakin's heart twisted in his chest.
Why would she have called him if she didn't want to see him anymore? Maybe she had changed her mind? Maybe now, with the benefit of a few days alone to think and the knowledge that her so-called friend had been aiming to become head of the Intergalactic Banking Clan all along, she had realized that Anakin had been more right than wrong, his fight with Clovis notwithstanding? Maybe she just missed him? Oh Force, maybe she had changed her mind.
Anakin fumbled to hit the right series of buttons with suddenly nerveless fingers and called her back immediately, his heart now lodged somewhere in his throat. She picked up on the fourth chime.
"Anakin," she greeted as she came into view.
"Padmé!" he all but gasped out her name, a grin spreading across his face just a the sight of her. "I—"
He began to say how glad he was to see her, or maybe to tell her that he had been utterly miserable since they had parted, or to assure her that he would do anything she wanted to address her concerns about him and their relationship, but then he saw the grim expression on her face and the words dried up on his tongue.
She pursed her lips. "I was calling to let you know that I am leaving Coruscant tonight and will be gone for a few days."
He felt his smile, which had frozen on his face in a way that probably made him look deranged or at least very stupid, finally drop into a frown. "Leaving?"
"Yes," she answered, her tone noticeably sharper now, as if his question offended her. "Chancellor Palpatine has asked me to oversee the transfer of power on Scipio."
She was going with Clovis again. His heart dropped from his throat all the way to the bottom of his aching stomach, as desperation and hurt bubbled up in his mind.
"And you wanted to call and tell me about it to, what, rub it in my face?" he accused.
His wife was glaring at him now, the effect hardly diminished by the limitations of the blue projection coming through the comlink. "No, Anakin, I prefer to handle this like adults. I was only calling because I thought that if there is anything in my apartment you need, it would be easier on us both if you retrieve it while I'm away."
The way she said it heavily implied that he wasn't handling things like an adult, as if he hadn't fully accepted her criticisms and her decisions without trying to change her mind or even talk to her, because he wanted to put her needs above his own. And it wasn't lost on him that it was her apartment, not their apartment, as if he had only been a guest in her space—in her life, in her bed—and had now overstayed his welcome.
His desperation and the bone-deep hurt coagulated into anger, into rage even, and it was all he could do to channel his emotions into a simmering, steely sense of determination instead of something monstrous. He couldn't give her the satisfaction of proving that she was right to be afraid of him.
"How considerate," he bit out, his voice nearly a growl. "Leave C3PO when you go. I'll collect him in the morning."
She gasped. "What? But he was a wedding present…"
Anakin stared at the pile of machine parts scattered across his floor rather than look at Padmé, lest he lose control of himself.
"Yes, he was, but our marriage is not a marriage," he threw her own words back at her, "and I made him for my mother. I gave him to you because I trusted you with the only connection I have left to her, but I can't live without seeing him again."
"I… Anakin…" she trailed off, clearly struggling with how to respond to that pronouncement, to the implication that he didn't trust her anymore to keep something so important to him safe.
His rage melted away and left a hollow place inside him. He wanted to revel in her pain and confusion, but in truth he got no satisfaction from it whatsoever. It didn't relieve his own pain, and he didn't really want revenge against her or to hurt her. She was right to want to rid herself of him. He didn't—couldn't—blame her for that, not truly.
He took a deep breath and forced himself to look at her. She was beautiful, despite the pained, grieved expression on her face. He could feel his lip trembling and the harsh sting of tears gathering in his eyes, and he knew that he had to end the call.
"I want you to know that I love you more than anything," Anakin told her. He furiously wiped at his tears with his organic hand, sweeping his forefinger and thumb under both eyes as if that would stem the flow. "If I thought that there was anything in this universe that I could do to fix this, I would do it. Goodbye, Padmé."
Her sweet voice, heavy with panic, managed to call out the first syllable of his name before he severed the connection.
His communicator began ringing again immediately. He squeezed his eyes shut and used the Force to crush it until it warbled and finally went silent.
He spent an inordinate amount of time in the shower—a real shower, not a sonic shower—letting the water wash away his tears as well as the sweat. Even after all these years, showers still felt like a horrific waste of water to him, but in this case he felt it was justified. Then he went in search of Grand Master Yoda, letting his awareness stretch out over the Temple and carefully avoiding anyone else in the hallways, especially Obi-Wan.
Anakin found him in the Room of a Thousand Fountains, because why wouldn't that be where Yoda was at the very moment Anakin wanted to speak to him alone. Fortunately he was sitting by himself in a relatively private corner of one of the little garden areas.
"Sensed your turmoil, I have," he announced without opening his eyes, before Anakin could even greet him. "Disturbed you, something has."
Anakin dropped onto a bench opposite him. "Yes, Grand Master Yoda. I need to leave."
Yoda opened his eyes and his brows furrowed. "Leave? To where?"
"Anywhere," replied Anakin. "Not here. I can't stay in the Temple."
"Shore leave, the 501st has been promised."
"I can temporarily join another battalion, then," Anakin insisted, "or go on a solo mission."
"Most unusual, your request is," responded Yoda as he tapped his gimer stick on the ground in thought. "Special treatment, the Council cannot give you."
"You're all happy to send me on special missions all the time," Anakin said through teeth gritted so hard that he was half afraid he would break them. "The Council's complete disregard for what I have to say lost me my Padawan, and I still went without complaining when you sent me into an impossible situation—alone—not a week later. But you can't do me a favor and send me on a mission when I want to go on one?"
The Grand Master's ears had steadily lowered back against his head in distress as Anakin had made that little speech. "Spoken to your former master about this, you have not. Trust Obi-Wan, you do not."
"After he deliberately let me think he had been murdered so that my grief would be real? No, I don't trust him to look out for my best interests after that."
Yoda tilted his head and stared at Anakin with curious yellow-green eyes, as if he were a particularly difficult puzzle to solve. "Made that decision together, the entire Council did. Yet come to me, you have."
"You're the Grant Master of the Order," Anakin explained in a clipped tone, trying very hard not to address the Grand Master as if he were a particularly dim-witted youngling. "I hope that you have some mission that needs doing so I can leave under the Council's authority, but even if you don't, I still can't stay here right now. The Temple is not a place of peace for me, Master. I think you know that it never has been."
"And if by leaving without the Council's permission you are expelled from the Jedi Order," said Yoda, somehow maintaining his usual calm demeanor, "prepared to accept that outcome, you are?"
Anakin tried to swallow down the lump in his throat but was not very successful.
"I think," he whispered, finding that he couldn't manage to speak any louder, "that if the Council expels me after I came to you asking for help, then it will prove that Ahsoka was right to leave the Order."
It was clear from the way his ears were almost plastered back against his head by that point that Yoda was not pleased with that response, but he also could not seem to find any words to form a rejoinder to it. Anakin was not at all sorry for throwing it in his face, because he knew that on some level the Council and its leader had to know that they had made an egregious mistake in how they handled Ahsoka, and that there would never be an apology adequate enough for either her or Anakin. Even if they enjoyed twisting the events to claim that it was somehow Ahsoka's fault that she simply could not put her life back into their hands after they'd been so willing to see it snuffed out. And, by extension, that obviously it was Anakin's fault that he had never taught his Padawan to meekly accept being treated just as poorly and unjustly as her superiors wanted to treat her.
After a long silence between them, and just as Anakin was beginning to think that Yoda was going to deny his request anyway, he said, "Something for you, there may be. Planned to send Master Windu, we have, but willing to give his mission to you, he may be."
Anakin couldn't help the scowl that passed over his face at the thought of Windu doing him any sort of favor.
Yoda giggled in a way that likely would have made a vein pop in Windu's forehead. "Worry not, Young Skywalker. A babysitting mission, this is, and know how Master Windu feels about those, do we all."
Anakin groaned, but there was no way he was going to actually complain about the assignment, no matter what it was. Not after he had all but begged to get it.
Citations: Padmé's lines in italics are from TCW 6.06, "The Rise of Clovis."
"Part of the Jedi way is not letting emotion cloud your better judgment" is a direct Obi-Wan quote from TCW Legacy, "Crystal Crisis." He was criticizing Ahsoka's decision to leave the Order after the Council offered to reinstate her.
