AN:

Ivy – Aww don't be sad. Although I'm glad no one can predict how it'll turn out :D

Cheire – Aww I'm so glad you're so immersed in the story! That's true Anakin has not decided on palpatine's offer.

Disgal – Here's more :D

Guest – "The hero with no fear feared his wife" haha pretty much. Yeah exactly you can see where Anakin's logic comes from but he needs to realize that it hurts him in the long run.

I think this chapter will be hard for some of you, but you just have to trust me :D And I promise nobody dies.

Man At War

You're a mystery

Always running wild

Like a child without a home

You're always searching

Searching for a feeling

But it's easy come and easy go

The midday sky painted an apocalyptic work of art in colors and intensity. Even its bright fluffy clouds couldn't efface the darkness swirling in the car. Anakin, firmly grasping Sebulba's ring, felt the shedding of the self he had curated up until now as he asked her, "Why do you have this?"

"Why do you?" Padme insisted, shaken by his earthquakes of denial.

With quick, nervous fingers, Anakin shoved the ring in pocket and kept staring blindly out into the universe, as if he had thrown a kite of dreams up in the air and searched for its return by validation or chance. But all he saw ahead was where mountains dropped off and fresh greenery started like a seed sprouting, trailing, and spreading fast and vast, blooming well before his thoughts ever could.

His delayed responses made worry stalk her; she began to sob. "Tell me you had nothing to do with it, baby. Tell me you had nothing to do with Sebulba's disappearance!"

She wanted to preserve the innocence. He was too beautiful to equate with such horrific behaviors. But the memory of him coming home covered in bloody scrapes and mud and dirt after his fight with Sebulba scarred her brain.

"What did you do?" She cried with desperation. "Tell me what you did!" The intolerable pain avenged the waiting for confirmation.

His energy was heavy and restless but he kept his eyes on the road for fear that looking at her might vanish her love. His hands were frozen on the wheel. She espoused a stare oozing with a short circuit of senses pressuring his every limb, every muscle, every bone.

"He pulled a gun on me first!" Anakin snapped in a cold sweat, needing to abolish his guilt. "I did what I had to do... After what he did to you, should I really feel guilty that the world is now short a man like Sebulba?! He deserved it."

Her light diminished in great fear. "Anakin, that's not for you or I to decide! You are not God!"

At this moment she became aware of this secret illness, a crime he had held onto for months. It sprung up like a corrosive hand closing in on her windpipe to destroy her voice, her sanity, her soul.

"Oh god." She started feeling sick, incurable, as she sunk into the doom, and he wasn't going to rescue her from it. An unnamable truth was suddenly the only word in her head. "You're a – you're a murderer!"

"Padme–" Anakin whispered in an attempt to smooth things over. His eyes closed for a brief second as he felt warmth and logic deserting him.

"I can't breathe." She swallowed as if grasping for air like she was drowning. He noticed her hyperventilating and quickly offered a little brown bag that carried the muffin he bought her earlier. "I need some air." She said breathlessly.

"We're almost there." He tried to sound consoling, pressing down on the button that opened her window slightly.

"No, I need to get out of here. Stop the car." The more desperate and angry she sounded, the quicker it annihilated him.

"I can't stop the car now. We're in the middle of nowhere." He found himself answering her in a tone more defensive, less patient. And that made her tone grow more impatient and alarming.

"Stop the car."

"Padme–"

"–Anakin, stop the car!" In the height of hysteria, Padme grabbed the wheel and turned it to the right, taking them off the road. Anakin tried to stop it but it was too quick to control.

The car went speeding down the hill of greenery. It happened so fast, they couldn't see as their bodies were thrashed around in their seats. In the flashing nightmare, all that could be heard was echoes of past laughter, love, trauma, and stories of their lives as they hit a tree. It was akin to sleeping with war. You can't wake up or return to peace, your body isn't tactile, your hands can't stop the threat.

When Anakin did regain consciousness mere seconds later, riverbeds of sorrows and disoriented images overflowed in his head as he lifted it. Words and patterns slapped together to make sense of what just happened. An excruciating headache made his head feel like it weighed fifty pounds. He looked at Padme, unable to free himself of the shock of seeing her unconscious. His breaths were loud and quite suffocating in the hot, claustrophobic car. He called her name several times as he checked for injuries. He carried her vulnerable body out of the car and laid her on her side on the grass. He had to save her life; he couldn't lose the most important person in the world to him – again! He was relieved to find she had a pulse. He grabbed his phone and called for help.

You're such a secret

Misty eyed and shady

Baby, how you hold the key

Oh, you're like a candle

Your flame slowly fading

Burning out and burning me

Can't you see?

It was all a blur as Anakin sat in a busy waiting room, emotionally blind to everyone around him. His pulse heightened in the spiral of shock, which accelerated as a nurse approached him. He leaped out of his chair.

"Can you please tell me what's going on with my wife?"

"We had to do an emergency C-section." She spoke courteously to subdue his panic. "I promise I will keep you updated. Have you been checked?"

"I'm fine." Anakin lowered to his seat in helplessness. He felt misery swarm him and his lungs fill with air. "No matter how many car accidents I've been through, I'm always the one who survives."

The nurse fixed her questioning, velvet-pupiled eyes on him to decipher whether he was a suspicious or suicidal case. She shot a concerning look from the corner of her eye to another member of staff.

"Mr Skywalker?"

A voice was heard above Anakin's head as he sat in the hospital's waiting room. He looked up to find two men standing over him. A tall man who held his dark and powerful head with pride and a shorter, white-haired man who talked gently. "I'm Detective Yoda, this is Detective Mace Windu. Could we have a few words?"

While Detective Windu remained the strong, silent type ahead of them, Detective Yoda embodied a protectiveness like a shield as he walked in line with Anakin. It made no difference though, as the room they led him to felt like walking into an enemy trap.

Windu walked carefully around a large table and six chairs in a white, rectangular room before settling down beside Yoda. It had the staleness of a hospital, cold, stony, and ominous. Windu's glance hopped from the file in front of him to Anakin. "It says here you were a race car driver."

Anakin, sitting opposite the policemen, didn't feel the need to respond. He was barely paying attention, too exhausted to even nod. But Windu went on, noting the speed in which Anakin drove normally during a race far exceeded the speed he drove his car today. Windu would stop and ask Anakin for clarification about certain things – if Anakin was particularly tired earlier today or whether he had an accident before – but would appear more confused after Anakin answered him.

"How did you lose control of the car?"

"I don't know." Unable to exert much effort, Anakin slouched in his chair.

Windu gave him a long stare with extraordinary black eyes. Something didn't add up as he examined the scene as reported on his sheet of paper. Tracking the wheels indicated a calculated turn. "It would seem a driver as experienced as yourself would have been able to stop the car from going rogue."

That got Anakin's attention. He went from lazily slumped in his chair to sitting upright. "Why don't you just say what you want to say, Detective?"

Mace mentally struck him with a firmness, unfiltered and unclouded, as if accepting a challenge. "Did you deliberately crash this car?"

"You serious?" Anakin said almost mockingly. But Windu sensed a deep disturbance, an inner turmoil.

"What was going on before the crash – if you can remember." Mace asked; his attention back on his sheet of paper, seemingly returning to a neutral zone. He took his pencil to a yellow stickynote, like the most intricate act, and passed it over to his partner, which wrote: He's guilty. It's in the eyes. He then faced Anakin. "Were you and your wife talking or. . .arguing?"

Anakin felt this mist of disbelief and anger at the accusation. The sheer audacity of it. He leaned forward in his chair as if something sparred through his crimson blood and shook him. "What does that matter? Huh? If we were fighting, if we were singing songs, if we were fucking screaming at the top of our lungs?! Married couples fight! That doesn't mean I'd try to kill my wife and unborn kids!" Enslaved by acid-bitten emotions, Anakin quickly realized he had lost control of the interrogation. Windu looked at him as though he was waiting for some inevitable big confession.

"Then walk us through how it happened."

"I don't know! Okay? That's why they call it an accident!"

Yoda ran a hand through his very fine, silver sparkling hair and observed Anakin's demeanor, studying Anakin's instincts, his tension, his aloneness, as he kept shifting his position in his chair. Anakin felt smothered by guilt. In a way, it felt like trying to drag his leaden legs through swamps of danger, strenuous and dense.

Yoda then passed his own note to Mace: He didn't do it – covering up for wife.

Oh I'm sorry, but it's true

You're bringing on the heartache

Taking all the best of me

Oh, can't you see?

You got the best of me

As the interrogation seemed endless and tiresome, the three men heard the voice of security outside the door, "Ma'am you can't go in there."

In that instant, the door flew open, pushed by a woman with terror possessing her face, which passed through the room, giving Anakin chills when he recognized her and understood exactly who gave the police their information.

"He did something. I know it!" Sola screamed as she charged at him.

Anakin was already worn out and tormented by the fact that he had no idea what was going on with his wife, except that she's somewhere in this hospital, separated from him only by sound-proof walls.

Sola rushed to him on the attack of distress and desperation. There was nothing grounded about her ambush. Her hands as dramatic and irrational as she, aiming to hit him but stopped by the police. They interjected with their bodies between her and Anakin, trying to take hold of her.

"No!" She slapped their hands away. "I told you! I was on the phone with her. Something wasn't right. I wouldn't have flown down here otherwise. She was scared, I know it!" She faced Anakin with all her hatred and tears reddening the cheeks on her delicately chiseled face. "She's afraid of you!"

The police attempted to calm her down as they escorted her out the door. Anakin looked on as she left, which left the memory of change. Shadows of change which dragged him down with a speed and attitude he could not fight. It was this terrible empty feeling that removed him from the hospital's four icy white walls and injected into him an irreversible tornado. Now he looked consumptive. Mind torpedoed, love distorted, and he wasn't ready for the awaiting chaos and despair.

It felt like hours later. Anakin hadn't been able to tell time or read the room. He just watched the two big grey doors, waiting for a doctor to enter and make a beeline for these three attached stainless steel chairs where he sat that looked incredibly clinical and depressing. Maybe it was the hospital lobby that depressed him. He hated hospitals ever since his mother died in one.

The velvety-eyed nurse finally approached him. She seemed to glide over actually. Her skin almost transparent and she quite passive as she engaged him with feathery hand gestures. She informed him that he could relax. His children were healthy and he could now see his wife.

Anakin raced to Padme's room and immediately pursued her, wanting to support either side of her angelic face with his two hands. His eyes still distressed but his face eager with a smile ignited by hope. But they weren't alone. Before he could touch her, a tousled-haired Padme raised her hazy eyes in the opposite direction where the two detectives and Sola stood. Sola made sure that shame was thrown across the room. Other glances were thrown too – Windu's attentive power, Padme's hesitance, Yoda's observance.

Anakin stilled, nerves tangled in the dissonance. It felt like the eyes of the world were upon him. On one hand, it was great to see Padme alive and well. On the other, he was experiencing flights of anguish and fickleness and folding like an accordion on the ground with nothing to say, no songs to play.

And he knew in this moment that whatever he did, he must try not to sound like a man at war.

You're bringing on the heartbreak

Bringing on the heartache

Bringing On The Heartbreak - Mariah Carey